On Bat-Shit Crazy…..

Hey there dear reader! It’s been awhile. No great excuses on my part, other than I feel like I’ve been on the travel merry-go-around/time warp the last few months – my various ports of call in 2018 so far have been Philadelphia, Baltimore, Phoenix, Fort Myers, Sioux Falls, New York, Wilmington, Washington DC, Salt Lake City and some other places here and there. So, whatever. I’m back, and I’ll spare you further excuses (by the way, one of my favorite Tweets lately was someone bemoaning the fact that all of his emails apologizing for the delays in his response were all starting to sound like a Civil War soldier’s letters home….)

I’m still trying to figure out where I’m going with this blog, but I really want to start writing more, so I’ll share with you a tale of woe from my dating travails. I don’t want the blog to be exclusively devoted to recounting the Greatest Hits of my dating Titanic/Hindenburg-level train wrecks, but in order to get myself back in the writing mode, this one seems like a good batting practice pitch to start timing my swing again. Ladies and germs, I present to you…Bat-Shit Crazy Girl.

Flash-back. Stunning Tuesday evening in August 2016 [side note: August 2016 was a bellwether for close encounters with loony-tunes women, including one that was dancing topless on my balcony at 2:00am to Cold War Kids’ “First,” much to my great chagrin (seriously) and then stole a bottle of gin from me….but all in due time], and I have high hopes in the back of an Uber. I’m enroute to meet a woman who I’d met on Bumble, and we’re gonna rendezvous on one of the finest patios in the land – WA Frosts. Her bona fides were strong. She was a health-care compliance lawyer, owned a condo in Saint Paul, fairly witty and seemed totally legit [narrator’s voice: she was not legit]. I had done some pharmacy health-care compliance thingys back in my early days at the ole’ Bullseye, so I’m figuring at least we have something to talk about.

I’m about five minutes out, she texts me, and said she’s seated at a table on the patio. Awesome. I arrive, and start the always awkward dance of trying to find a person who you’ve never met, while everyone on the patio smells first-date like a pack of pirañas smell blood [sidenote: I went on a first date a few weeks ago, and I accidentally sat down at a table with the wrong woman. Awkward. She handled it with the style, grace and class. Hate the game, not the playa.]. But….I can’t find her.

I take a few laps through WA Frosts ginormous (and aesthetically gorgeous) patio, and I honestly don’t see her. I start to get a bit paranoid on whether we got our signals crossed regarding date venue. Then….I see someone waving at me.

But it’s not her. But….it’s her.  I’d seen the waver during my first lap, but had immediately decisioned that it wasn’t the person I was meeting, since she looked nothing like her.  And she looks nothing, NOTHING like her pictures. She looked great, but the difference was so stark, that I had literally walked right past her without a flicker of recognition.

Yet another side note. I’ve had this happen more times than I’d like to count. What’s up with this? I understand we all want to cast ourselves in the best light. That’s just human nature. But there comes a point where you feel like you’ve been lured someplace under false pretenses, and if they can’t be honest from the start, what the hell else is lurking just beneath the surface? That’s like me posting pictures of myself with TV anchor-level, top-shelf hair, and then me showing up bald (and I’m bald). I think there should be a legal cause of action for dating fraud (for you sane people who didn’t endure the blunt-force trauma of law school, you need a legal cause of action to sue someone. We lawyers spend a lot of time figuring out whether there’s a legal cause of action. I once had an outside counsel go on a 25-minute tangent advising me that there were numerous risks of class action lawsuits with a certain course of action, and when I finally got a word in edgewise and advised I didn’t think there was a legal cause of action provided by the applicable statute, he was all like…”Oh, you’re right.” He still had the nerve to bill me for both his time and the long-distance call). But that’s another outrage for another posting.

Anyway. I sit down. She’s clearly nervous, which makes me nervous. So, both of us are nervous. Never a productive mixture.

Both of us get a glass of wine, and have a generally nice conversation (not decidedly awesome, but fine). Chemistry is a fickle, fickle thing, and it’s certainly not finding this conversation, and we’re straining for things to talk about. At this point, I’m plotting my exit strategy, and she asks whether I want to get dinner. I’m famished, and a WA Frost burger sounds pretty wicked awesome at that point, so we order dinner. She asks whether I want a second glass of wine, and I say sure (gotta have something to wash down that delightful burger, right?).

She sips the second glass of wine. Cue the metamorphoses into……. Bat-Shit Crazy.

I swear, her eyes almost turned red. Maybe her head did a 360-degree swivel that could only be detected by an infrared camera (like the ones they used in Ghost Hunters to spot paranormal activity and shit back in the day).

Her eyes lock on me as we’re eating dinner. “You’re the most attractive man I’ve dated in a long time. I only live a few blocks away from here….perhaps we could get to know each other a bit more…intimately.” The crazy beast begins to stir……

As an aside, the Brian from like 5-6 years ago probably would have been all about this tryst. However, this was the war-torn Brian, who had looked into the eyes of crazy more times than he’d care to count,  and knew absolutely nothing good came of it. I recall a quote from the FDR Memorial in DC that’s always stuck with me – “I have seen war. I hate war.” Perhaps I could shamelessly borrow that and say “I have seen crazy. I hate crazy.” That’s probably an analogy in really poor taste, but let’s totally go with it for the time being.

So, I try to be polite about all of this. I point out that we’d had just met, and let’s talk more and enjoy the perfectly pleasant evening. Then…she attempts to be entice me more….and leans in to say…

“I have a fetish. Do you want to know what it is?” That’s basically akin to saying “I have juicy gossip about [insert co-worker or frenemy here]. Do you want to know it?” Of course you want to know it! The laws of physics so dictate the result. Defiance is mathematically impossible. So…I take the bait. I want to know it!

Her fetish? She likes to model lingerie for men. Doesn’t seem like much of a fetish to me. It’s kinda like you’re on a game show, and you pick the surprise in box #3, and you find out it’s cat litter.

She invites me again back to her place, so she can model various aspects of her boudoir to me. I politely decline, indicating that I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I know what you’re thinking. I’m a fool. However, until you have someone ditch you at the bar for some writer who’s sitting next to you who notes that he writes “some fucked-up shit,” and then you head to the bar across the street to drown your sorrows, and then they enter said new bar and get kicked out by the bouncer for two of them promptly getting into a fist-fight with some rando, you don’t understand the dangers of dabbling in the dark arts of crazy. That way lies madness. Just trust me on this one. Ok?

However, she believes I’m playing hard to get, so she dials-up the noise. She then proceeds to invite herself to my place the next night so I can make her dinner, and while I’m conjuring some epicurean delight, she’ll model lingerie for me. [Ed. note: I have no idea how the hell the idea of me making her dinner took root within her. I can’t even boil water….I mean, my housekeeper ridicules me that she never has to clean my stove…she just needs to dust it. I literally think I’ve only turned on my stove twice (once by seeming accident) in my current place, and I’ve lived here nearly two years).

I politely indicate I have plans that next evening. She ain’t taking no for an answer. She wants to come over next Tuesday. I say fine, clinging to the jaws of life to extract me from this trainwreck and knowing I’ll be sending the “thanks, but no thanks” ditch text tomorrow.

But, the story doesn’t end there. Because, crazy can’t stop. Won’t stop.

We’re sitting across a square table from one another, basically 180 degrees from each other. She scoots her chair next to me, so we’re sitting next to each other. Note that when she scoots her chair, it scrapes loudly against the concrete. Did you know that the acoustics of WA Frost’s patio are such that when a chair scrapes against the concrete, it reverberates like a sudden tornado siren across the patio? So, we have all of our fellow patio patrons’ attention.

She then stands up, and proceeds to MOUNT me. Like she sits on my lap, her legs straddling mine, and commences a deep make-out session. Like, a go-in-for-the-kill make-out session. While we have everyone’s attention, of course.

I gently push her away, and gives me a pouty look. She notes in the most pouty voice possible “I thought you were into me as much as I’m into you.”  I indicate that we seemed to go from 0-90 rather quickly there. She gets up. LOUDLY scrapes her chair back to the original position, and suggest we get the check. The server must have seen this shit go down, because she magically appeared from nowhere like we had summoned her with a goddamn bat-shit crazy magic spell, with the bill. The bill never hit the table, since I had made the jump to hyperspeed to pay the bill and had my card at the ready. We paid, I walked her to her car. We awkwardly hugged, and that was that.

I walked back to my car, and ran into the couple that was sitting next to us. I apologized to them. [First time I’ve ever had to apologize to a civilian regarding a bad date. War is hell]. They laughed it off, and said they wondered “what was up there,” and noted she seemed a “bit off.” I couldn’t disagree.

She sent a very apologetic text later that evening, suggesting she shouldn’t have had that second glass of wine. I responded I understood and wished her good night. She then asked whether I wanted a picture of her in lingerie. I didn’t respond – on a parallel theory gleaned from the 80’s horror movie great “Fright Night,” which proclaimed that a vampire could only enter your house if you invited it in. I extrapolated that theory to bat-shit crazy, and that bat-shit crazy could only enter my life if I invited it in. Ergo, no response. It’s not a great theory. But, it’s a theory.

Hey, you made it this far! Let me know you that you indeed endured the entirety of this tome of a posting, and I’ll buy you a drink next time I see you.

Have a great weekend all!

-Brian