Four Single Years

Around this time, four score minus three score minus sixteen years ago, Your Charles was liberated from a relationship. Of course, it was all his fault, as the primo anno of Bronx teaching rendered him manic and depressive, frustrated mess.

His naive teacher failures like trying to quell screaming children, random fistfights, and the administration from arbitrarily firing him led to a change in his constitution from idealistic college boy to blank-faced booze fiend. So when cries of "Why are you so quiet?" "Why won't you tell me?" and "I want to help." elicited only a stonewall, it was because recounting student and administration hysterics was to relive them, and when even more hysterics were as close as tomorrow, the nightly respite, where Your Charles and you spent time, had to be exactly that, a respite, completely void of the relentless moral horror of teaching at that school.

Add that to my singular desire for commiseration meetings at the hoop court, Subway, and the bars with fellow naive Bronx teachers Amerigo and Pierre, where we would, like platoonmates of war, share laughs at Fate's audacious absurdity, and Your Charles begins to recognize his culpability in increasing his emotional and physical distance. But, definitively, it was his way of coping with the Bronx that made him grow apart. It was not your fault that you weren't there in the classroom everyday, and thus couldn't understand his manifest needs that didn't explicitly include you; because if you were there, then you would have known you were helpless in the first place, and so was he, forever.

No matter. In the now gone four years past, Your Charles has found eternal wisdom in two unassailable truths.

1. If you find a girl at the bar, you can always find another girl at the bar. Probably a better one than this crazy chick lying next to you, fawning, needy, ordinary.

2. No girl is worth it who isn't at the bar.

Did you notice the paradox? Going to a bar with a chick you met at a bar is excruciating because you know the bar attracts all kinds, from the lunatic to the fembot to the vision of white. Which all appeal to you. The sense of possibility you had when meeting that girl on your arm has the potential to be usurped by a new, greater sense of possiblity perhaps with the girl in the corner or the girl behind the bar. There is an urgent desire to trade up because the girl on your arm is insecure and slightly annoying. The exalted rush you felt when you first met and got drunk and went home together has dissipated and reality has seeped into the expectations of your collective future. It will not be what you previously thought. It will be much less. So now that you are drinking again and the same scenario as before is playing out in front of you and each girl tucked between friends and into tables provides a potentially definitive opportunity for eternal happiness, why not act on that hope? Renew the sense of possibility and possibly see it fulfilled.

Of course, the drunken, tenuous expectations are sure to fail with each successive girl. But the sheer exhilaration of each new beginning is unmistakable. And it is the girls at the bar, who like to drink and dance and dress up all pretty, that provide the most exciting nascent relationships. Underneath the partygirl veneer is usually a litany of turn-offs, simply because of the laws of verisimilitude - with reckless abandon comes consequence. The same law applies to someone you meet at the library or at work, only the amplitude of the extremes in much less and therefore she is usually boring and traditional. Who wants to go on sober, awkward dates with girls who hang out at the library anyway, especially if you don't know if they can actually ROCK?

So it is an inescapable cyle, a true bachelor paradox. Each weekend, Your Charles begins anew with bargirls who are sure to disappoint, simply because they are beholden to the most thrilling potential. His high hopes are then starkly diminished by the girls' often rancid shortcomings and so he begins again, hopefully, drunkenly. Now, there are many in this readership who opt out of this cycle by surrendering to the best option to date. Those readers are doomed to alway wonder, could that skank in the corner be the endgame I've always wanted? Well, it is up to Your Charles to be the vicarious one, seeking perpetual renewal of the Platonic Ideal by finding his missing half, torn asunder by Zeus as punishment for scaling too close to heaven, so that he and she may rejoin soul and body as he/she and continue on that failed journey with beer in their hands and lust in their hearts.