Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Memoir
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 127
Copyright: May 19, 2018
ISBN-13: 9781719149464
Price: $4.95 (eBook)
It's not about DATING exactly, but what a sixty year-old man, me, learns from his 31 year-old son about "the art of picking up women."
The SUCCESSFUL art of dating in story-form, which is not anything like the "older generation" would have a clue about. Anyway, this personal recounting ain't long/dry like most books, so take a quick tour of one man's transformational journey, not unlike the one YOU are on.
To go on a date, isn't personal growth what it's all about? To practice being YOURSELF? Because if you can't be yourself, why waste anybody's time pretending to be somebody else?
Excerpt
White Anglo-Saxon Male
On a Date
Chapter One
I was sitting at the bar once, back when I was fresh out of college, in a fishermen’s tavern on Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska. The guy sitting next to me, a rough-looking Harley Davidson kinda dude, put his hand out to me and said, “My name’s Spider.”
I got all excited inside and replied, “My name’s Spider too!”
He instantly looked me square in the eye, sternly, and said, “Your name’s not Spider.”
I nodded at him all enthusiastically to the contrary. I said: “Seriously, my name is Spider.”
He said: “I just told you, your name’s not Spider.”
I explained further: “That’s what my friends call me, because my last name is Webb. I’ll show you my driver’s license to prove it.”
He looked over and shouted: “Bartender -- shots!”
Oh my fucking God! He was gonna challenge me to that old Russian drinking game of Drink You Under The Table. Then probably he’ll pick my brain-dead corpse up off the floor, twirl me overhead, then chuck me out the bar’s front window. And THAT might hurt.
I stuttered apologetically: “Hey, I’m half-drunk. I’m already going to have a hangover in the morning. I gotta work tomorrow and I see no REASON why we both can’t be Spider.”
He said: “Bartender!”
I said: “Okay, YOU’RE SPIDER and I’m not Spider.”
Then he turned away from me and started talking to the guy sitting next to him on the other side.
I recently looked back at this little incident from my life, after I got the thing that this book is about, and fully, fully appreciated that this guy could pick up THE GIRLS, while I couldn’t. I was so dumb ass FOOL, that the next day, I informed all my co-workers NOT to call me Spider any more, because there was only one Spider on all of Kodiak Island, and it weren’t me.
PLUS, what if I was out with friends on another night, and this Spider dude, the REAL Spider, heard any of my friends call me “Spider”? I had come too far in life to get KEEL HAULED by some crazy ass drunk sailor.
My mom taught me that. She said, “Some things just aren’t worth it.” This fit into, “Live for tomorrow! Get THROUGH today!” But what she didn’t say was, “Some things ARE worth it, like right fucking now.” And this crazy drunk sailor knew that, but I didn’t.
And up until about three weeks ago, I’d pondered in my head, now and then, for my ENTIRE IDIOTIC LIFE, “Who’d that Spider asshole think he was?”
And now I know: he was a guy trying to do me a huge favor.
But that’s all in the past. The reason I bring it up, is because you should know that I possess an acute MEMORY, which is one reason why I’ve thought that I should become A WRITER. I thought that if I just went enough places, met enough people, and learned enough tricks, “I certainly could suck one brilliant novel out of that.”
That’s what they say. “Everybody has at least one novel in them,” and at some point in my life, I knew that was coming and I’ve made every preparation. I can write about the time I ran smack headlong into a crazy drunk sailor on Kodiak Island and that’s in Alaska.
“OMG! You’re lucky you survived! Was the surf crashing all around you?”
“Yup.”
Now my dad and I never once talked about what I might become. Oh, one time, he said it as if in passing: “I think you’d make a terrific lawyer,” and I do recall, there was a specific twinkle in his eye. It comes flooding back now, yes, I remember it well, my thought at the time: “He thinks I heard what he just said.”
I’ll pretend I didn’t. He thinks I’ll snatch that up, that little subliminal suggestion, and become just like him one day, a PROFESSIONAL, I mean. I wasn’t having it. I was running with THE WOLVES.
I mean, you can get calluses just from typing.
And now, I’m sixty years old at this telling, and I never did become a lawyer, just a professional philosophy major, and I blamed my dad in my heart of hearts for YEARS that I didn’t go to law school, that he didn’t get up in my FACE and shout it like an order: Go to law school my son.
Fuck subliminal. Fuck all those stumbling around years, decades, of not becoming a lawyer. Drunk in a bar like Ernest Hemingway, setting my sights on WRITING.
And that’s been my story: fuck that. And LOVE something else, like every other obscure little thing, or puppy, flower, girls.
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