An update

Well, a lot has happened since my last post. Colostomy surgery on Feb. 10, followed by four days in the hospital. I'm back home now, trying to minimize my intake of Percocet. I have a lot I want to say about this, very little of it medical in nature. But I'm in bed, trying to blog with my iPad, and I think I'll wait until later to write more comprehensively.

Frightened?

A couple of people have asked me if I'm frightened. The answer is, no, I don't think I am. I'm disappointed, frustrated, annoyed and occasionally depressed – but not frightened. Maybe I will be later.

Oncologist

I met my oncologist yesterday. He believes my prospects are somewhat better than those presented by my surgeon. I hope he's right. But he said only about ten percent of patients in my condition make it to five years.

Surgery tomorrow. Lots to do today. This is like getting ready for a European vacation, only with laxatives.

Truly blessed

I had a lot to do today. Bought new linens for the back bedroom, along with an electric slow cooker and some pots and pans. Visited with a lawyer about estate planning and other stuff related to my illness. Had new front door keys cut to give to friends who'll be checking on me after surgery. Installed (gopod help me) Windows 7 on my Mac, along with VMWare Fusion, so I can access a single state gov't web site that's still using ten-year-old proprietary ASP widgets that work only with Internet Explorer.

Because I was so busy, I didn't have time to brood or obsess. And tonight, I feel as if I'm tired enough that I might sleep all the way through.

To add to my previous post... Quan Yin has in fact manifested herself in my life, if you can believe in such things. Maybe she isn't sitting right at my bedside, but her compassion is reflected in the supportive emails and offers of help I've received from many, many friends.

I've been truly blessed in this regard.

During these darkest hours

My biggest struggle right now is keeping depression and despair at bay. My depression has always run in a 24-hour cycle, getting suddenly worse at sunset and growing deeper as the night goes on. A couple of friends have put themselves at my disposal at this hour, so I'll have someone to talk to, but I haven't done that, yet. It's important that I not wear my friends down with my neediness. I've been on the receiving end of that, and I know that a person in even the direst of straits can drive friends away by placing constant demands on their time, patience and emotional reserves.

I seem to have two kinds of depression. One is the daily depression that sometimes feels like an old, comfortable blanket. It's been with me my whole life. Although it causes me to avoid friends and put off things that need to be done, I often sort of wrap myself up in it and settle into it.

The other depression is like a short, dark, ugly creature that opens its mouth into an impossibly wide chasm, cold and black, into which I feel I might helplessly fall, tumbling down, down, darker and darker, until there's no light left at all. The last time I felt this depression was in 1998-1999, when my whole life suddenly fell apart. I survived that, but in that case, cells of my body weren't actively trying to kill me.

It has become very important to not be alone. I try to spend time with someone every evening before I go home to bed. I have come to fear solitude because I know that when I'm alone, the creature will come tiptoeing out of the long shadows of the night and open its gaping mouth, waiting for me to fall into it.

In my fantasy, Quan Yin comes and sits at the edge of my bed, keeping me company and keeping the creature at bay. But I wish Quan Yin would manifest herself as a real person to be at my side during these darkest hours. As Paul Medina pointed out in a comment to an earlier post, I eventually have to finish this journey alone. Until that time comes, though, I wish she was here.

The simple truth

I thought I had done a rather good job over the past few years of cultivating mindfulness and being in the present moment. But I can tell you that nothing brings you into the moment like knowing you may die soon.

I've developed a new awareness and appreciation of all sorts of little things that I had previously only scarcely noticed. When I scratch the cat's ears, I notice how his fur feels between my fingertips. When I'm outdoors, colors seem more vivid and saturated. When it's not cloudy, the sun seems brighter. When someone says to me, "good morning," it seems more sincere. I had read that these things sometimes happen, but I thought the authors were speaking figuratively. They weren't.

I've written in the past about how boring many other people find my life to be, lacking passion, drama and excitement. But over the past few days, I've noticed something almost every hour that makes me think, "I don't want to lose this."

Yes, that's attachment. Attachment to small, simple pleasures, but attachment all the same.

I'm trying to be very broad-minded, equanimous and Buddhist-y about this. But the simple truth, when I look at myself honestly, is this: I don't want to die.

I don't want to die.

I don't want to die.

I don't want to die.

The latest

The doctor has told me that my cancer is incurable.

I'll go in Friday for removal of part of my bowel and colon. Chemotherapy will follow.

The median survival time following this surgery is 18 months, although some patients live up to 5 years. Without the surgery, the doctor told me, most patients live eight to ten months.

Perhaps more importantly, the surgery will save me from enduring a lot of severe pain whenever the end does come.

And that's as much as I know.

Yesterday's events, and tomorrow's

Yesterday I went in for the needle biopsy on my liver. I was in the hospital most of the day, and was finally released about 4 pm.

I have a meeting with my doctor tomorrow to discuss the next step.

I was with my father 10 years ago when he had this meeting regarding his pancreatic cancer. In that case, the doctor told him that his situation was simply hopeless, and that he should go home and put his affairs in order.

That has been weighing very much on my mind the past 48 hours. Of course, my cancer is different, and my overall health is much better than his was.

Coffee get-togethers

Many of you have expressed a desire to meet me for coffee or breakfast. I really want to do that, but my energy level seems to fluctuate significantly day-to-day, and I never know how it's going to be. It even changes from hour to hour. Yesterday, for example, was a rather normal day. But the day before, I went home and back to bed immediately after breakfast because I felt so fatigued.

Of course, my energy level has been spotty all my adult life, but it's more unpredictable now than ever.

I'm reluctant to schedule coffee get-togethers because I'm afraid I'll bottom out twenty minutes before I'm supposed to be there and have to cancel.

I try to drop by The Red Cup most mornings after breakfast, but even that is not a sure thing.

You'll see me out and about with Diane Coady from time to time because Diane has been willing and able to adjust her schedule to whatever I'm able to do during any given part of a day, usually with little or no notice.

I hope I'll have at least a little more get-up-and-go soon.

Thank you again for your support and interest.

What's Next

I let some info slip through the cracks in the process of moving my updates from Facebook to here.

So here's what's next. On February 1, I go back into the hospital for a needle biopsy of my liver. There is a very slim chance – like about 1% – that the shadows on the CT scan of my liver are something other than the cancer. The biopsy will confirm that one way or the other. This is about a six-hour procedure.

After that, but I don't when, radiation for my ass tumor, followed by surgery to remove part of my colon and I don't know what else. They'll also be moving my ass around to my stomach, since my existing ass is pretty much FUBAR. After that, chemo to attack the cancer in my liver – assuming that is, indeed, cancer.

And that's all I know.

Sunday morning part 2

I went to Jimmy's Egg for breakfast. Planned to visit the Red Cup afterward, but I was too tired. I came back home. This happened even before I became ill, so I'm not surprised. I'll sleep an hour or two, and then I'll feel better.

Sunday morning

I turned down a movie invitation last night because I didn't feel like I had the energy for it. I slept/dozed until about 11 pm, then got up for about an hour. Then I went back to bed.

Can't decide what to do this morning. I need to eat, but I don't want to leave the house.

Rollo the cat is here, hanging close by, and I'm grateful for his company.

iTunes

I've turned iTunes back on after a layoff of a few months. I've got a lot of calm, relaxing music on it. And lord knows I could use it right now.

You can see what's recently played on the last.fm widget at right.

Back Under the Covers

Went to dinner with Diane, and by the time we were done, I was almost too tired to drive home. It's now about 6:20 pm, and I'm back under the covers, ready to sleep.

In Spite of a Good Night's Sleep...

In spite of a good night's sleep, I've been pretty wiped out today. Got to Jimmy's Egg about 9 am, and the Red Cup about 10. Got home at probably 10:45 am, and slept/dozed on the sofa for about two hours.

I still don't especially like being holed up here by myself. But I don't know what else to do. I don't have the energy for the crowd at the coffee shop. I'm still an introvert, and I have largely lived a hermit's life these past few years. It's hard for me to adapt to anything else. Sleeping on Suzanne's den sofa last night, with her and John in the next room, was just the amount of human contact I needed at that moment.

I've come to rely heavily on a handful of friends, but they still have their own lives to tend to, and they can't drop everything to wait on me hand and foot.

My right knee buckled once while I was getting dressed this morning. I didn't fall or hurt myself. It just felt like my body was refusing to do what I wanted it to do. I picked up a glass of orange juice at Jimmy's Egg, and it almost slipped through my fingers.

I don't know if this is caused by the cancer, or if there's something else going on.

I'm eating pretty lightly now, because it seems like the larger a meal I eat, the more likely I'll have indigestion and bloating afterward. So I'm not eating very much, and maybe that's why I'm having these odd weakness issues.

Again, there's some discomfort associated with the indigestion, but no pain at all.

A Quick Update

The past couple of days have been up and down. I have some discomfort, mostly related to indigestion, but no pain. Last night, I went to Suzanne's with John, but I wasn't up for much. I snoozed on a sofa in the den while they watched TV in the living room.

Even though I wasn't in the room with them, it was comforting to know they were close by.

When I got home and to bed, I had the best night's sleep I've had this week.

I have a lot of email I need to answer.

An Overnight Nadir

If you didn't already know it, I get depressed sometimes.

And typically, my depression gets worse as the evening goes on. The "Sitting In A Box" post was written right before dawn, after a night of fairly restless sleep.

The solitude thing is still a problem. This is a bad time for me to spend a lot of time alone. But the previous post was written at an overnight nadir, and doesn't reflect the way I feel every minute of the day.

Sitting in a box

Solitude really sucks right now. I wondered how I would actually deal with this in a real crisis, and now I know: I don't deal with it well at all. Evenings and overnights are the worst.

I don't think I'm wanting a lover. But I am wanting Quan Yin, that bodhisattva of unlimited compassion, to come and sit with me, sleep beside me, ease me through this time.

It would take a woman of unlimited compassion to go through this experience with me 24/7. It would completely be an act of selfless charity, not something motivated by desire or attraction.

I keep telling myself I am one with everything around me, and that solitude is only an illusion. But at the basic emotional level, it feels like I'm just sitting in a box, out of everybody's way, until I die.

My (other) brilliant career

In a comment to a previous post, James Stover referred to a website I once had. I remembered it as 'The MCARP Institute of Situational Journalism Ethics," but that was actually the subtitle. It was called "My (other) brilliant career."

It was sort of a proto-blog that I created in 1999, when blogging was still in its infancy, and I was still ranting daily about the idiocy of TV news.

The original site is long gone, but another former reporter, Ike Piggott, archived it and has republished, with my permission, most of the original content at his site, Occam's Razr.

Here are some of those posts from 1999 - 2000:

Adrenalinholics Anonymous

Mt. Everest Is In Alaska

The MCARP Guide to Sweeps Series Planning

It's A Reporter's Worst Nightmare

I Was Suppose To Be An Anchor

Where There's Smoke, There's Breaking News

There are a few more there. If you'd like to read all of them, visit Occam's Razr and search for the keyword "mcarp".

Stage IV

Had the CT scan today. The cancer is Stage IV. It appears to be in both lobes of my liver, and there's a tiny spot on my lung that may or may not be it as well. The next step is a needle biopsy to confirm the liver cancer. After that, radiation, surgery and chemo. And a colostomy.

Michael Landon

I've been thinking about that last interview Michael Landon did with Johnny Carson in 1991. I remember he looked terrible; he would be dead six weeks later.

I found the interview on YouTube, and started to embed it here. Then, upon reading further about it, I discovered Landon didn't die of colon cancer, but pancreatic cancer.

So, never mind.

Strangely, I feel a little better now.

A chat with a doctor

I talked on the phone this morning with a doctor friend who lives out of state. She asked me some questions about my condition that no one else has asked, including my GP and the GI specialist who did my colonoscopy.

I don't want to go into a lot of unpleasant detail – we are talking about my colon, after all – but after I described my situation, she said, "Well, at least you don't have ________."

I replied that I did, in fact, have ________, and that seemed to give her pause.

She suggested that the next step for me will probably be a CT scan to 'stage the cancer', as she put it. In other words, to see if it's spread to other organs.

See assured me that tremendous strides have been made in colon cancer treatment in the past 30 years, and that it's "by no means a death sentence."

Cats

Starting maybe two months ago, my gregarious and affectionate black cat, M. Gastón, began spending more and more time away from the house. I would let him out, and he wouldn't come back until the next day. Then he'd stay gone for two days, then three. Sometimes I would see him sleeping on a neighbor's porch, or wandering through a front yard across the street. He's been gone four or five days this time.

In the meantime, my grumpy old ex-cat, Rollo, has come back home (with some encouragement from me), and is sleeping on the bed with me this evening. He's been living with neighbors for more than a year, and I think he left because he didn't like Gastón. He's OK with being here as long as he's the only cat.

I wonder if this has anything to do with one or both cats sensing my illness. Probably just coincidence.

Friends and sanctuary

I spent last night and the night before huddled with my friends soartstar and blogblah. I am fortunate to have many friends these days – far more than in my days as a minor local television personality – and there are a lot of places I can go.

But the safest and most comforting place right now seems to be Suzanne's dimly lit living room, with her and John close by, and something playing on the TV.

I wrote a description of my situation on Facebook early Friday morning, and fifty or more friends from all over the country have sent me messages.

At some point, I'll turn to many of them for some kind of moral support or practical help. But I don't want to wear people down with my needs and issues.

Right now

I am, as many of you have long known, prone to over-thinking and obsessing about even trivial stuff.

From a Zen perspective, the thing to do now, I think, would be to sit with this. But I doubt my ability to do that. I'm afraid I will either get so comfortable with it I'll just give up (an idea which already has some appeal, frankly) or work myself into a complete panic.

So instead of sitting with it, I'm sort of frenetically trying to keep my mind occupied with other things – anything, in fact, that will keep me from dwelling on this illness.

Later that afternoon

There's a sort of seedy little convenience store two blocks from my house. I've lived here eleven years, and I had never set foot inside it until Thursday afternoon. I was still proscribed from driving by my doctor, and I didn't feel like walking the 3/4 mile to my regular convenience store, so I went to this little store instead. I bought a quart of Diet Dr. Pepper, the first bag of Fritos I've eaten in years, and a KitKat bar.

Some of the inventory looked like it had been in the neighborhood longer than I have. I doubt I'll be back.

It's cancer.

So here it is: the doctor found colorectal cancer yesterday. I have a horseshoe-shaped tumor that covers about 65% of the inner circumference of my colon. I'll meet with another specialist in the next few days to discuss treatment options.

That's all I know.

Random Update

I go in for the endoscopy and colonoscopy Thursday, so I'm now in the zone where my diet is restricted. I have to go to the pharmacy today and get all that stuff you have to take before you go to the hospital.

One of the things that's on my mind (since I still tend to worry about things over which I have no control) is whether this will turn out to be some sort of tumor, rather than just a return of the ulcers.

I am on the fence about what I would want to do if this turns out to be something life-threatening, or something that needs expensive and invasive treatment.

I've had a pretty good five years of retirement. That's more than some of my coworkers had, since they died before they could retire.

To bankrupt myself financially just to spend another ten years sitting around the coffee shop seems kind of pointless. I could do hospice instead, let nature take its course with my body, and leave that money for a scholarship fund or something.

But I don't have to think about stuff like that until I know exactly what's wrong with me.

Random update

Just a note to talk about my health. I'm not feeling 100%, but I am about 85%, which means I'm able to get out and tend to most of my fairly sedentary daily routine.

But my search for a love life is on quasi-hold, mainly because I don't want to take someone out, get sick and then have to cut off the evening early.

I'm still getting quite a few emails from women via okcupid – and I mean emails from thoughtful, quirky women whom I would gladly take out if they lived in my area code.

Some evenings I go to bed thinking, 'Damn, I'm sick of being here alone,' but other nights I find myself thinking, 'I am so glad to have this bed and this time all to myself.'

It snowed last night. My dogs are inside, but the cat's outdoors somewhere. Couldn't get him to come in.

Trying to not feel like crap

December was a month I just sorta missed. As in, I wasn't actually here for it. Days when I was almost indescribably tired, but always completely alert. Days when I was woozy. Days when my stomach was doing weird stuff. Days when I slept all day long, and days when I barely slept at all.

My friend DianeC finally recommended a combination of over-the-counter antacid and iron supplement. After about four days of that, I was back to normal, and felt better than I had in weeks.

I still have a colonoscopy and endoscopy scheduled for later in the month.

But just as I was recovering from the month of tiredness, I got hit by some other kind of bug. I spent the whole day yesterday in bed, fighting off chills and fever, coughing, sneezing, body aches and the like. But I seem to have mostly gotten rid of it today.

No more free printing

I put new ink cartridges in my inkjet printer yesterday. I mention this because I used up the previous cartridges printing stuff for other people. I printed maybe ten sheets of paper for my personal use. All the rest was for about three people who had come to think of me as their own personal Kinko's.

When you offer to print something for someone, I've learned, their likely response is to then insist that you also provide them scanning, email service, web browsing, layout and design service and faxing. Someone actually got annoyed with me a couple of years back because I didn't have a fax machine here for her to use.

The real Kinko's (now FedEx Office) is about six blocks from my house, and not terribly expensive. I sometimes use it myself.

OKCupid update

Well, I must have pushed some magic button on OKCupid. I am now getting profiles – thoughtful, well-composed profiles – of intelligent, spiritual, age-appropriate women. Most seem so energetic and outgoing that I doubt I would ever be able to keep up with them, but even so, it's refreshing to read one quirky, unique profile after another written by fascinating women.

And of course, not a goddamn one of them lives in Oklahoma. No, once I narrow the focus back to home, I get a bunch of doughy-faced, ineptly-tattooed Southern Baptist women looking for a bible-thumping Marlboro Man in a pickup truck, or riding a Harley-Davidson.

It is just bleak out there. Completely fucking bleak.

Maybe I should live in Austin

Here's another interesting QuickMatch phenomenon. Among the profiles to which I gave four or five stars, the overwhelming majority of them turned out to belong to women who live in and around Austin, TX.

I didn't know this as I selected them. The iPhone app doesn't show you users' locations.

I don't think any of them were in my city.

Go out with me or I'll suffocate this chihuahua!

I posted an item here a few days ago regarding my concern that my online dating profile photos were too flattering. I was worried that although they were recent, they made me seem better-looking than I really am.

But I have to tell you, there are some folks out there who could work at making their photos a little more flattering.

OKCupid has a feature called QuickMatch in which the user is presented with another user's profile, lacking a name or contact information, and is asked to rate it from one to five stars. I resisted this for awhile because it seemed too much like rating people as if they were sides of beef.

I finally decided to give it a try tonight. But I didn't give anyone one, two or three stars. If I wasn't impressed with the profile, I simply skipped it. And when I did give stars, it was for quirkiness and/or originality. One profile, for example, got five stars because her favorite authors were people like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Howard Zinn.

But most of the profiles simply got a 'skip'. One that I skipped, for example, was a stunningly attractive woman who was apparently a former NFL cheerleader. Her profile was utterly conventional. There was nothing wrong with it, but it didn't convey even the slightest spark of awareness about anything other than sports and Twilight movies.

But the point I wanted to make was that I saw dozens of truly awful photos. In one, for example, the dominant object was a disembodied elbow in the near foreground that filled about a fourth of the screen. The user who posted the picture was 'way back in the background, out of focus and impossible to make out. A ShopVac and a step stool completed the scene.

Another user posted herself in a sort of flirty/sultry Marlene Dietrich pose, but using her bathroom toilet as a prop instead of a chair.

And yet another posted, as her only picture, a blurred, extreme closeup showing only a chihuahua peeking out of her frankly enormous cleavage.

There were lots and lots of pictures that were out of focus, overexposed, and occasionally underexposed. And a lot of pics in which the user made herself a secondary element of interest, ceding the primary position to an SUV, or a fountain, or some other inanimate object.

I think the bottom line here is that if you're posting pictures of yourself on a dating site, maybe you should get a friend to offer a second opinion on your choices.

The movie that chased me out of the theater

I went to a couple of movies yesterday, and for the first time in my life, I had to get up and walk out of one to avoid getting sick.

The first movie I saw was Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It was okay. Meh. The plot was a cold war scenario that could have come from the original series. Go to imdb.com if you want to know more.

But the movie that drove me out into the parking lot was Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows. The bombastic soundtrack and herky-jerky special effects had me staring at the floor and taking slow, deep breaths by about thirty minutes in. I had some earbuds for my iPhone in my pocket, and I put those on to get some relief from the noise. And by the time Holmes and the Cossack assassin were chasing each other around the whore house (that's where they were, right?), I was headed for the exit.

I felt fine once I got to the car, but I had spells of nausea the rest of the evening, and I could feel my stomach churn every time I so much as thought about the movie.

I have seen bigger, noisier movies than this one, but something about it just hit me the wrong way. And I think maybe I've hit some sort of saturation point with big-screen sturm und drang offered as a substitute for story and characterization.

I don't know how this will affect future movie nights with Blogblah! Maybe we'll have to start seeing movies that don't suck.

Oh, speaking of movies that suck... he and soartstar and I went to see The Immortals recently. It's another of those movies with people randomly running back and forth in caves, hacking at each other with swords, but holy shit. It made a similar movie, Conan the Barbarian, look like Citizen Kane.

You don't appreciate a good movie about people randomly running back and forth in caves, hacking at each other with swords, until you see a bad one.

A person I don't seem to like very much

I've noticed that when I start obsessing about relationshiponal phenomena, I turn into a person I don't seem to like very much.

Tuesday morning

The six-foot engineer and I could never seem to coordinate a time and a place for our first meeting. I finally decided she was just trying to extricate herself from the situation without hurting my feelings, so I let it drop.

I have another coffee date Friday with a friend of a friend. We've met once. I sort of half-expect her to cancel, and I guess I'll be OK with that whichever way it goes.

My doctor has increased my daily dosage of amlodipine besylate, a blood pressure medication which, in some users, increases apathy and detachment and reduces libido. Some people consider this an adverse side effect, but I am not one of them.

The Tao

The Tao is so large the universe cannot contain it,
And so small it can fit in the palm of your hand.

The Tao is the veins in a leaf,
And the galaxies expanding outward into space.

The Tao will neither save me nor condemn me,
It will neither reward me nor punish me.

The Tao demands no praise or adoration from me,
And threatens me with nothing if I do not give any.

Peace and calm are returning to my mind. It's good to have them back.

Repeat after me

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

FUCKING IDIOTS.
FUCKING FUCKING
FUCKING FUCKING
IDIOTS.

Do I believe this is true? I don't know.

Here's an msnbc.com article whose contents somewhat surprised me:

The Hotter the Woman, the Better Men Think Chances Are

The more attractive the woman was to the guy, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest in him, researchers found. And it turns out, the less attractive men (who believed they were better looking than the women rated them) were more likely to think beautiful women were hot for them. But the more attractive guys tended to have a more realistic assessment.

This certainly runs counter to my own thinking. I have always assumed that the more conventionally 'hot' a woman is, the less likely it is she will find me attractive. Even so, I've fooled myself a few times, and ended up making a play for a woman who wasn't the least bit attracted to me.

I'm trying to think of an occasion in which some other basically average-looking guy I knew was persuaded some extremely attractive woman was interested in him. I can't think of any.

Still wired, apparently

At some point I will go back and look through all my hamster wheel posts. It's too early now; I need a little more distance.

Every time this happens, I tell myself 'This is the last time,' but it always seems to happen again. I've unplugged a lot of those wires over the years, but some remain.

What I learned

I live in the Bible Belt. I know, intellectually, that I am out of step with most social and political thought in this community.

But browsing around OKCupid, with its 2000+ question survey, really brought the differences home to me. I was astonished by how many women oppose gay marriage (most). I was astonished at how many would not date someone who wasn't white (almost all). By how many think flag burning is worse than book burning (again, almost all). By how many think evolution should not be taught in school (probably about a fourth, but any at all boggles my mind).

I try to imagine what a relationship would be like with one of these women. I assume their relationships are built mostly around church and the TV set.

An experiment nears its conclusion

I 'reactivated' my OKCupid account in order to email the two women I had sort of stood up for coffee dates.

I ended up meeting with one of them, an attorney. That went OK, but I don't think either of us felt chemistry.

I'm trying to set up a meeting with the other. She seems willing, but it may take a while.

Beyond that, I've about run out of options on OKCupid. Most of the women whose profiles seem interesting to me are between about 41 and 47 years old, and most are cougars (isn't everyone, now?) looking for guys 35 to 40.

Among women my age, which is to say 55 to 60, they're mostly Aunt Bee types or leather-skinned biker mamas. Also a few heavy smokers who look like Keith Richards. And nine out of ten of them are politically and socially far to the right of me.

I emailed a half-dozen or so members; most didn't respond.

So I'm now close to viewing OKCupid as an interesting experiment nearing its conclusion.

That cranked-up libido vibe I was experiencing in August has completely run its course, and I'm frankly about as horny as a damp washcloth. My new stronger hypertension medication is probably contributing to that.

To tell the truth, it's more of a relief than an annoyance. There's something to be said for just not giving a damn.

Eating

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before.

I literally cannot eat like I used to. My appetite has been gradually dwindling for a couple of years now. I eat breakfast every morning, usually consisting of a ground sirloin patty, tomato slices and Egg Beaters and toast or maybe a biscuit.

And that pretty much holds me for the whole day. I may eat some sort of snack later in the day, or a bowl of soup. But I have to be careful what I eat after breakfast, because it's easy for me to feel bloated or weighted down.

I just ate a roast beef sandwich and a medium-sized milkshake, and I feel like I've devoured a whole holiday turkey. I may just lie down and sleep for awhile.

Just two rooms

My central heat went out a few months ago. The heater and the air conditioner work, but the fan that moves the air through the house has stopped (again). I'm sure I'll get someone out to fix it eventually, but in the meantime, I've bought two electric space heaters. One is in the master bedroom and the orher is in the den.

These two rooms are adjacent, and are the only rooms I use daily, anyway. I've got both heaters cranked up pretty high, and I'm keeping those two rooms toasty warm.

I used to like a cool house in the winter, but my knees and fingers don't handle the cold as well as they once did.

i'm guessing that cost-wise, this will work out about the same.

Sorry for the confusion

I decided that at least a couple of people were owed a direct apology, so I got back on to OKCupid long enough to write it:

I dropped out of sight rather abruptly, and I felt that a few people, including you, deserved some kind of explanation.

One thing I've learned from this experience is that a person can write a self-description that is factually correct, entirely accurate, with 90-day-old pictures, and is still in some vague way dishonest.

I did not set out to deliberately deceive anyone. But the first person I fooled was myself, and once that happened, others were bound to be pulled in as well.

The profile I started with here was fairly straightforward and vanilla. Then I tweaked, edited, cut-and-pasted, and finally realized that my profile, while entertaining, was more the man I wish I were than the man I actually am.

I know this is what everyone does. We all want to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, as the song says. But I feel like I crossed a line along the way.

Anyway, there's a guy out there who sort of resembles this zenidiot person, and that guy is me. But zenidiot himself is probably as much gloss as reality.

Sorry for the confusion.

mcarp
sort of like zenidiot, but not quite

Of course, in the spirit of my continual introspection and second- and third-guessing of myself, I have questions.

I'm happy with what I wrote. I think I hit the right note, being candid without being melodramatic or maudlin.

But I'm not sure what my motives are for doing it. Am I genuinely regretful for misrepresenting myself, or is this in itself yet another misrepresentation? Am I just playing head games with myself again?

Sometimes you just have to stop analyzing and go, and deal with the consequences as they happen.

It's all about me, dammit.

This blog is about me.

Nothing else; just me.

There are plenty of other blogs out there about politics, religion, metaphysics, social sciences and so on. I see no reason to duplicate the efforts of people who write about these things with more clarity and precision than I could offer.

When I wrote frequently about Zen and Taoism, I was writing mostly about my own experience with it. There are a lot of other blogs out there written by ordained Zen and Taoist teachers, priests and monks who are more knowledgeable than I about the general principles.

Since this blog is about me, it is going to be, for the most part, a blog about what I think day-to-day, good or bad. It's always been that. What else would it be?

If you are able to read this blog, you are able to start one of your own. Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress cost nothing. If you want a blog about international affairs, kundalini energy, volunteerism, frequencies, clouds, motor oil, whatever, feel free to start one.

In the meantime, this blog will continue to probe the fascinating mysteries of the subject I know best, and which intrigues me above all others.

And that's me.

A Coffee Date

Well, I have a coffee date Saturday. I won't offer any details, because it's very premature to speculate. I will say that she's not in my circle of immediate friends, but she does already know a bit about me. And she's met me, so I don't have to be concerned about the "OMG you're huge!" shock that I worried Carol and Olivia would experience.

(There were a few other women, btw, who wanted to meet me, but I never found out their names. It was a very ego-boosting experience, until I realized they were interested in a fictional character, and not the real me.)

The Hamster Wheel

I had dinner with Blogblah! last night (chicken fried steak at Beverly's), and I was trying to explain to him my approach to dating and romance. I hit upon this analogy:

When I meet someone in whom I'm interested, I jump into my hamster wheel. And then I run and run and run and run and run, 'round and 'round, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing but wearing myself out.

Then, when I'm exhausted, I fall out of the wheel and slump to the floor, gasping for breath. And that's the end of it for awhile.

That's pretty much what that whole online dating experience was about.

No, I don't want to date!

From mindovermary's comment in a previous post:

Arggg! Whatever. MCARP, do you WANT to date? I think that is the question.

NO, I don't want to date! Does anybody?!

What I want is to meet someone – at the coffee shop, at a party, somewhere – and hit it off right away. She's very smart and brainy, cute but not glamorous or breathtakingly beautiful, a little eccentric, a little kinky, likes peace and quiet, eastern philosophy, etc. Likes me but isn't suffocatingly devoted to me. Doesn't want to make me over. Isn't offput by my clothes or my Dan Blocker-like physique. That's what I want. I've made some friends that way, but nothing else.

I guess it has worked that way for some people, but not for me. So, I'm back to 'dating', which I consider a piss-poor marketing-driven substitute for my preferred course.

More Tuesday thoughts

When a woman tells me I'm good-looking, or clever, or funny, my immediate instinctive response is that they're just trying to be charitable, and help me boost what they see as my low self-esteem.

On the other hand, when a woman tells me I'm fat, or slow, or addicted to Moon Pies, or a wrinkled mess, or negative, or repulsive (to use a few actual observations), I tend to believe they mean it, because what other motive would a person have for saying things like that? And if they tell me I'm boring, which I've heard more than any other criticism, I'm especially inclined to believe they mean it.

And then I think I have to win them over and earn their affection. It didn't work with my mother, so god knows why I think it would work with anyone else. Too many movies, probably.

I remember one evening a few years ago when a group of us were at dinner at a BBQ place. There was a lull in the conversation, and Ms. HRP, who was sitting across the table from me, suddenly asked, "So why aren't you dating? Why don't you have a girlfriend?"

I opened my mouth to answer. I knew I shouldn't. I knew the best thing to do was deflect the questions with a noncommittal answer, but the words were already spilling out of my mouth even as I was regretting what they were.

It was exactly like those few seconds between the time your car first fishtails out of control on an icy street, and the moment it slams into the light pole twenty feet away. You know what's going to happen, and the wait seems interminable. It feels like you could read 'Atlas Shrugged' in the time it takes for your car to finally slide into the pole and stop with a bone-jarring 'wham!'

I had been through this scenario enough times to know what was next. I would offer my answer, which I was trying to extemporize as even as I was thinking this, and she would reply, "Well, I'll tell you what I think..."

And then she would offer me a list of all the shortcomings and inadequacies she saw in me – for my own good, of course.

Fortunately, someone else jumped in and cut off my answer before I could get it out, and directed the conversation elsewhere. Thank you for nudging my car away from that light pole.

But yes, I have some emotional investment in all these criticisms. Nobody has pointed out my shortcomings more frequently than I have myself. I frequently make jokes about my own image as a lazy, unmotivated slug, just the way Dean Martin used to make jokes about his boozy, carefree image.

A random thought

I don't know what made me remember this:

I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade when I had a conversation with my mother's parents about my reading habits. By this time, I had been reading science fiction for years. I was reading Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Wells, Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Sturgeon and others.

So there I was, somewhere between eleven and thirteen years old, already reading at an adult level – as I had been for years – and I made the mistake of mentioning science fiction.

And my grandmother fixed me with her frosty, one-Vulcan-eyebrow-raised stare, and said, "You should be reading hard science."

At the time, I didn't think much of it, except that I recognized it as a typical response for her. Looking back on it, I think, 'Hey, your eleven-year-old grandson was already reading at college level. A little encouragement and praise would have been appropriate.'

But the way my grandparents saw it, Mom and Dad fucked up by not having someone standing by in the delivery room at my birth with an SAT prep kit, ready to start drilling me with questions and answers as soon as my head popped out of the birth canal. Nothing I did would ever have been good enough.

God knows what it was like for my mother growing up in their house.

In which I offer a rare comment about my mother

I'll try to address all the recent comments, but let me start with this one, because it was the first posted, and because I want to talk about it.

Of course, I don't know you at all in real life. But my sense from knowing you online for as long as I have -- 15 years? -- is that in earliest, earliest childhood you learned to equate love with neglect, presumably because your mother neglected you. And this means that unless you take the time to retrain yourself psychologically, you're always going to equate the feeling of love with the feeling of being neglected. If there's a chance you won't be neglected, i.e. ignored, then you can't feel attachment.

You know, it IS pretty fun to be part of a team. Intimacy is really a wonderful thing. So I hope this is a conundrum you work through and I also apologize if I'm being presumptuous. You know me -- the angel who rushes in where fools fear to tread, etc.

Patrizia is one of my friends of many years from The Well. I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Patrizia, along with Celia, Catie, Donna, Dennis and a few other Well friends, helped keep me from going completely down the drain during the worst months of my adult life in 1998-99. I have never met any of them, but I feel they are as much my friends as anyone I know from the Red Cup. In fact, The Well was my Red Cup for many years.

What Patrizia says is absolutely correct. I know I've discussed this with a lot of you individually, and I've written about it here.

There are few things drearier than a grown man still whinging about his mother, so I'll try to keep this to a minimum. But as you know, Mom and I were never close, and we ended up parting ways when I was a teenager.

And because of the way she dealt with me, as Patrizia notes, I tend to be attracted to women who ignore me, neglect me, or treat me with mild contempt. (And I don't have a whole lot of trouble finding them.)

Patrizia didn't mention this part, but I think it's also true: women who treat me with what most would consider a normal level of affection or interest seem clinging and suffocating to me.

Similarly, large, normal families overwhelm me. I sort of had the notion in the back of my mind that if I ever had a LTR again, it would be with someone whose parents were either dead or lived clear across the country. I've had the experience of having in-laws hovering over me, and once is certainly enough.

That's it for now. More to come.

The pattern

There is a pattern that has emerged with these incidents over the years.

1) I become attracted to someone, but she's not interested. Or in this case, I find women who are interested, but it's in part because I've misrepresented myself.

2) I get feedback from my friends as to what I did wrong, and criticize myself for having repeated the same mistakes. The feedback I get from my friends varies. Men and married women are generally supportive and encourage me to keep trying; unmarried women are usually, but not always, less charitable. They criticize my appearance, personality, spiritual beliefs and hobbies, but not in that order. The single most frequent feedback I get from my unarried female friends is that I'm 'boring'. More recently, I've also heard that I'm 'too old' — even from women my own age.

3) I stress and ponder and self-examine until I'm drained by it. In the end, I know nothing more than I did at the outset. No new facts are revealed or additional wisdom received.

4) Disgusted and embarrassed by my own behavior, I just put the whole thing on a shelf and forget about it for a couple of years.

Insert definition of insanity here.

Early Monday morning

I had been viewing my online dating problem as one of fairly and honestly describing myself. But I think the problem may have been that I put myself in a position where I was required to describe myself at all. At that point, everything became about how tall I am, how much I weigh, what color my eyes and hair are, etc.

What is all that stuff? Is it anything other than trying to come up with a collection of labels to represent the sack of meat that supports the concept of the mind of mcarp — labels whose indicator of accuracy is whether other people agree with them?

Tremendous mental and emotional energy was expended trying to form a concept of myself that somehow reconciles the conflicting concepts others have of me — and in the end it's basically just electrons bouncing around in various persons' skulls.

It was better left alone right from the start.

When I was saner

Just a year and a half ago, my life was much saner than it is now. I was holed up most of the day in my back bedroom, reading Zen poetry while incense burned on a meditation altar.

Ms. HRP had left town and disappeared out of my life.

I was still wistfully remembering Ms. Willowy and Ethereal from time to time, but I wasn't obsessing about dating web site profiles and who answered or didn't answer my winks, bleeps and blips.

I had briefly transcended lust and craving and neediness.

I wish I could rewind to that point, but of course, I can't. There's no going backward, only forward.

The past week's worth of postings reads in large part like the rantings of a disturbed, dysfunctional person. If this OKCupid stuff can evoke this much angst and despair in me, maybe that in itself is sufficient evidence that I ought to stay away from it.

It seems like I was on a much steadier footing when I focused on Zen and Taoism, and left love and romance to the people who know what they're doing.

Profile vs Person redux

Another coinkydink: just moments ago, in the course of trying to find someone else on Facebook, I stumbled across the woman I described in the post Profile vs Person.

We have 31 Facebook friends in common, which sort of reinforces my original notion back in November that although I didn't recognize her, she recognized me, and that's why she didn't answer me.

Try again?

Now that I've had some time to process my crisis of conscience regarding my OKCupid profile, I'm thinking about giving it another try. This is not to say that I'm actually ready to do it, only that I'm trying to make an adult, rational decision about it.

There is a certain challenge to be considered, and that is the challenge of writing a description of myself that is both accurate and honest.

The single biggest hurdle, at least from my perspective, is conveying that while I am not a Michael Moore or John Candy-sized man, I am not slender or hipster-sized or elegantly metrosexual.

I'm thinking that maybe what I will do is include some of those older photos that show me in groups of people, and say, 'Look, these are older pics, but I'm including them because I want you to see exactly how I look in relation to most other people, and not be unpleasantly surprised if you meet me and find I'm not built like DiCaprio or Mick Jagger or whomever.'

I was thinking this evening about Charles Bukowski, a much more gifted writer and intellect than myself, but likewise inhabiting a physically unappealing body. He was, in fact, a lot uglier than I am. Of course, he didn't have to deal with online dating.

Well, I may do this and I may not. I'm undecided.

Growing up crazy

I won't presume to make myself a posthumous spokesperson for dzaster, but I will say this based upon my own experience:

When you grow up in a crazy household, you go out into the world armed with a set of responses to various situations which are themselves crazy. It's like you're taking the field with a playbook completely different from the one the other players have memorized. Of course, you don't know that. All you know is that when you do what you think you're supposed to do, everyone looks at you like you're crazy, and you get into trouble without knowing why.

If you're lucky, a teacher or other adult recognizes this behavior during your childhood and knows how to get you a copy of the correct playbook. If you're not lucky, the grownups respond the same way your classmates do, and you're ostracized at all levels.

By the time you reach adulthood, you feel like you can't trust most people. The only ones you do trust are the ones who are as crazy as your own parents were. You get some short-term comfort, because your bizarre responses to situations don't raise an eyebrow with them, but in the long term, your life remains in chaos because your most trusted friends and confidants are as crazy as you are.

It was mostly luck that I ended up getting into therapy at age 45 and discovering at long last why my life had always been so screwed up. Forty-five is pretty late in the game to start getting help, but it's better than never doing it at all.

The people you know who seem weird and eccentric mostly know, I think, that they are seen as weird and eccentric. But they may not know why. They just keep doing the only things they know to do, which are the things they were taught in childhood to do.

And even when you know, it can be difficult and painful to break the habitual patterns of a lifetime of behavior. Sometimes, the disdain of society seems preferable to the tumult of trying to adapt.

dzaster

Some of you will recall a woman who occasionally commented here under the pseudonym 'dzaster'. She also occasionally posted as 'anonymous' or 'anonymous x'. Among her many comments was her story about her airplane encounter with Stevie Nicks.

As unpleasant as my upbringing may have been, I can tell you that dzaster's was far worse. The fact that she was functional in any way, shape or form was a tribute to her own strength and tenacity. But I knew from our frequent long talks that daily living was an incredible struggle for her, and that she constantly fought the temptation to end it.

She was, in fact, obsessed with death in a way that I have never seen in any other person.

A couple of years ago, she walked away from the job she had held for years as an accountant/majordomo/fixer for a local business tycoon, moved to Arizona, and reinvented herself.

From all accounts it seemed to be a success. She frequently wrote in email about how much happier and saner her life was in the desert.

I learned last night that dzaster died in mid-July, just a few days before her 51st birthday. I don't know any specifics. I hope that she had some inner peace and happiness in those Arizona years.

An afterthought

In the post titled 'Hail, Fredonia' (scroll down a little; I'm too lazy to link), I concluded with the sentence,"There are some things worse than being alone, and [being with her] would definitely be one of them."

Which raises an interesting question: would being with me be worse than being alone?

Profile vs person

When I was doing the online dating thing, the first woman who piqued my interest was a woman who called herself 'Okieleftgirl' or something similar. I wrote something about her here.

Her profile was very close to what I would have written myself, if I could have written a profile for a woman I wanted to meet.

I winked at her, but she didn't respond. I sent her a follow-up email, and she didn't respond. Of course, that made her all the more intriguing, but I let it go after that.

She walked into the coffee shop this morning. I don't think she noticed me there, and I certainly didn't try to talk to her.

But I was struck by how different she seemed in person. In fact, it took me a couple of minutes to make the connection. Her hipsterish son, who appears in one of her profile photos, was with her. If he hadn't been there, I don't think I would have realized she was the same person.

First of all she was quite a bit shorter than I had imagined her. Secondly, she appeared older. I don't think she had deliberately used old photos in her profile; I know from my own experience that even current photos can present a misleading image.

But the main difference was that she seemed so uptight. Her posture and body language were very rigid. She seemed to have her teeth clenched whenever she talked. She looked like someone who has a very hard time relaxing, which means that she and I would have a hard time finding common ground. She looked utterly humorless.

So, I can let that fantasy image go now.

Hail, Fredonia

So when I was having my mildly manic episode and was talking about dating again, at least three different people suggested, "Why don't you ask out/hook up with Fredonia?"

'Fredonia', is, of course, a pseudonym I have employed to avoid embarrassing anyone besides myself.

'Fredonia' is a woman whom I find so obnoxious, so brassy, so self-absorbed, so completely prone to monopolizing conversations that I have actually gotten up and left the room when she has entered.

I can imagine only two reasons why anyone would suggest a mcarp/Fredonia union: either they think we're equally obnoxious, and therefore might cancel each other out or achieve some sort of obnoxiousness synergy; or they think she's so desperate to get laid she might even give a big slab of lard like me a chance.

Either way, it's not going to happen. There are some things worse than being alone, and that would definitely be one of them.

Saturday morning

There sure is a lot of stuff going on that isn't about me.

Meditation music

The meditation music is back on for the first time in four months.

I hope to be back to 'normal' soon.

Serotonin and diarrhea

From the TMI department, I suppose... but I did some Googling this evening, and there is a documented connection between serotonin release and diarrhea. So when you see that little placard that says, "I'm so happy I could just shit..." well, it's true.

Depressed again — thank god

I can look back now at that August morning when I awoke with new clarity, creative drive and libido — not to mention diarrhea — and see that I was experiencing some sort of serotonin spike that temporarily lifted my depression.

As is always the case, the episode ended. In this case, it took more than 100 days, which is unusually long for me. Normally these last one to three weeks, and I recognize them as they are happening.

One thing I will say for my depression: it prevents me from doing impulsive things I later regret. The whole regrettable OKCupid episode is very similar to the kinds of embarrassing behavior — often involving women — I've exhibited during past spells of non-depression.

And the 'zenidiot' persona was sort of a representation of me in my non-depressed state.

Still, some good came of this non-depression episode. I seem to have finally disconnected myself from Ms. Willowy and Ethereal. A couple of other unhealthy, neediness-based relationships ended as well. The online dating fiasco is the only thing that happened that I wish I could undo.

So, all in all, it could have been much worse. I have done some things in previous non-depressed states that had far-reaching consequences.

I used to view depression as being like a black cloud hanging over my head, or a heavy rock pressing down on my chest. Now, it's more like an old comfy blanket from childhood, frayed at the edges and threadbare in spots, but still safe and warm. I can cover my feet, wrap it around my shoulders, pull it up over my head and snuggle up in it. It keeps me out of trouble.

Music

Y'know, I think my emotional state was better when I was lulled into a semi-stupor by the meditation music. I'm going to turn it back on tomorrow.

Ritual self-abuse

I tried to discuss the economy with three fundamentalist Christians today.

Then I found out...

George Harrison died ten years ago today. He was 58 – the same age I am now.

Fuck.

Even still yet more stream of consciousness

Talked to my friend Diane tonight. She's a nurse. She helped talk me down from my 'certain doom' hill, and I think I can calm down enough to sleep.

Still yet more stream of consciousness

Going for a walk. Struggling to resist temptation to call someone and babble incoherently on phone for twenty minutes.

Still more stream of consciousness

By the way, do you have any idea what a colonoscopy and endoscopy cost? I can afford it, but holy shit. The stock market better be very good to me for the next 45 days.

More stream of consciousness

There's this thing. Something that happened when I was a child. I feel like I know what it is, but I can't quite pull it out of my archived brain files. But sometimes, in moments of stress, it seems to push itself forward, like it's saying, "Right here, Indiana Jones. The secret is right here. Just reach over here and grab it."

But I can't.

It was something I did. Or, actually, it feels like it was something I was supposed to do, but I didn't. It wasn't a bad thing. It was just some stupid something, like fumbling a fly ball or tripping over my shoelaces – something like that. Something my parents wanted from me, and I couldn't or didn't give it to them, and I've been doing penance for it ever since.

This is why I have to have such screwed up relationship stuff. It's why women have to find me unattractive: they know. I don't know, but they know. They can't tell me; they couldn't even put it into words. But at some instinctive, below-the-baseline level of consciousness, they all know what I did.

It's part of why I'm always depressed.

It's why I have to get sick and die young.

I'm just doing my penance.

This is actually how my brain works almost every minute of the day. As crazy as I may sound most of the time, I am actually, for the most part, keeping the craziest part to myself.

Think it's excruciating to read? You should trying being in here.

Stream of consciousness

So, of course, I'm trying to stay calm and collected. I'm a Buddhist; life and death are just illusions for me. But the 'life' illusion seems very real.

The first time I read about colorectal cancer, when I was in my twenties or thirties, I thought, "That's how I'm going to die." It seemed, and still seems, like the most undignified form of cancer imaginable. Perfect for me.

I am not entertaining any notions of seeing a shaman, mystic, kundalini healer, supreme galactic Melchizedek or whatever. Nor am I letting anyone shine colored lights up my ass. Don't even go there. You know who you are.

I've always known I was going to die. We all are. I've visualized myself dying - many times - in some sort of home hospice surroundings. I've tried to anticipate what it will be like.

I've entertained the notion that if I found out I was incurably ill, I would say my goodbyes here, then go to the Zen hospice center in Santa Fe to wait for the end. I may still do that.

I always had the goal of outliving my mother, just out of spite, because I suspected she wished me dead. Well, more than suspected. She died in 1999, and everything since then has just been cake.

If it turns out I am ill, I am not telling my stepmother, because she will kick into high gear trying to grab everything I own. I won't mention this on Facebook, because she's on Facebook, and I don't want her to find out. Dying will be annoying enough without her or her attorney on the phone every day, trying to find out if I'm dead yet.

I think it's going to be the 45 days of not knowing that will be the worst.

My doctor's concerned

As I mentioned previously, I went to the doctor for my annual checkup last week.

Blood tests are back, and the doc's concerned. Iron deficiency anemia. Possibly more ulcer problems, possibly cancer. In for more tests - endoscopy and colonoscopy - in January.

The last time I had anemia, I was just dead on my feet. Right now, I don't feel any different.

Moving on to less excruciating matters

Damn, my legs itch. This happens every winter. My skin gets dry, and the itching is maddening, especially around and behind my knees. I might as well get up now, because I can't sleep.

Another zenidiot photo

This one's a little different in that it was taken today, after I put zenidiot on hiatus.

I put my iPhone on a little snap-on tripod, set it up on a table at the Red Cup, turned on the timer, and leaned back with my coffee.

This picture isn't a half day old yet.

But it doesn't look anything like me.

If you gave this picture to a private detective and told him to track me down, he'd never find me. Because I don't look like this.

I look like this.

Well, like this, but with longer hair.

One thing I'm not is a narcissist. Even so, I have an extraordinary knack for taking misleadingly flattering iPhone pictures of myself.

That guy in the first picture is who I wish I were. But it's an act. A pose. I know that picture is misleading because when other people take pictures of me, I always look like the guy in the second picture.

Draw long hair on the second picture, give it to the P.I., and he'll find me in no time.

That's enough negative energy for today. I'm going to try to find something positive to do.

zenidiot and me

The name I used on OK Cupid and the other dating sites was 'zenidiot'. I chose that name because of my continuing interest in Zen and Taoism, and because of the Zen tenet that once you begin to think of yourself as being knowledgeable or experienced in Zen, you are headed for trouble.

'zenidiot' started out as a mostly accurate depiction of the real me. But then I made an edit here, a copy and paste there, and zenidiot morphed from being who I am to who I wish I was.

If someone had assigned me the task of making a list of things I would change about myself, I would probably have written that I would like to be thinner, tidier and better organized, and that would be it.

Zenidiot, having crept out of my subconscious a sentence at a time, is a more complete portrait than I would ever have been able to write deliberately.

Even though we were the same guy, zenidiot even looked different. Compare some of the pictures I used on my dating profiles with the 'real' me.

Finally, I realized that if I ever met face-to-face any of the dozen or so women with whom I had been in contact, they would see the man on the right, not the one on the left, and there was no way to smile or pose my way out of that.

zenidiot was not a Marlboro man or a rock star or a sophisticated playboy. He was still sarcastic, maybe less cynical, and he smiled more. He still wore berets, even though he was in Oklahoma. He was still a Zen and Taoist dabbler, and he still quoted Alan Watts.

I am almost, but not quite, him. I am him without the charisma.

I am simply who I am.

And he does not exist.

No, I didn't lie

I want to be a little more clear about what happened with these dating web sites.

I did not post twenty-year-old photos of myself, or use pictures of some other person. I didn't pose in front of an expensive car or home that wasn't mine. I didn't write anything about myself that was untrue.

I did exactly what every other member does – I accentuated my positive aspects and minimized the negative. The problem was with the extent to which I did it. The description I wrote was so idealized that had any of my friends seen it without the photos, they wouldn't have recognized it as me.

It wasn't a lie, but it was dishonest.

OK Cupid update

Someone pointed out to me this evening, quite inadvertently, that I had used these dating profiles to rather seriously mislead people about what kind of person I am. I had, in fact, used them to also mislead myself. It might even be accurate to say that the target of my deception was really me, and everyone else got pulled along for the ride.

Confronted with the reality versus the image I had created, I realized I couldn't, with any sense of fairness or honesty, continue to pretend to be this person I had invented.

I pulled all the accounts. (I say 'pulled' – in fact, as I discovered, some of these free sites have literally no way to cancel an account. You can 'disable' an account, which I did, but you can't delete it. That's why they're able to claim umpteen million members. Many or most of the members have been gone for years.)

The meetings I had tentatively set up are off. I had actually arranged for those women to meet a man who doesn't exist, and whom I could never pretend to be without the camouflage of the Internet to protect me.

This was the right thing to do – in fact, it was the only thing to do. The truth would have been evident eventually, no matter what.

Olivia and Carol, I know you will likely never see this, but I'm sorry I misled you. I played a game with you and myself, driven by loneliness, desire and selfishness. No one deserves to be treated the way I treated you. I don't think I would be morally outraged if someone had done this to me, but I would be annoyed, and you have every right to be annoyed as well.

(Would a direct apology to these women be appropriate? Yes, it would, but I didn't think about that until after I had suspended the accounts. Now I have no way to email them without reactivating, and I'm not going to do that. I have Olivia's phone number, and she has mine. If she calls, I guess I'll tell her directly. Otherwise, I think our ships have passed in the night.)

If the rest of you think you know the details of what this is about, let me assure you that you don't, nor am I going to discuss it here. I will only say that it has nothing to do with anything that has been previously posted here, either by myself or by anyone in comments.

But let's see if I can get back to seeing things clearly and honestly, instead of through the filters of my own desires, preferences and aversions.

I really feel pretty stupid about this whole thing.

Surely it's not really this bad.

This is the 'dating persona' test paying OKCupid members can take.

Which isn't to say that they should.

Your results are in! mcarp, you are...
The Last Man on Earth

Random Brutal Sex Dreamer (RBSD)

FACT: The apocalypse has come. All are dead. You never should’ve asked her out.

Shit, rejected again. You are The Last Man on Earth.

Sorry, but most women would rather see the human species wither to an end—and therefore deny the most fundamental instinct that living creatures have—than sleep with you.

We’ve learned the following: you don’t think things through. You’re haphazard. You’re dangerous. You’re somewhat inexperienced. It’s totally obvious that you’re a horny bugger, as well. Everybody knows that and steers clear.

To top things off, when you do find your way into a relationship, you tend to be a dick somewhere down the line and fuck it all up.

There’s a small, but negligible, chance we’re wrong. In any case, your friends find your shit hilarious. There’s nothing cooler than a dude reducing himself to human rubble.

Random notes for Thanksgiving Day, 2011

Back in August, I wrote this post about some changes I felt like I was experiencing. Although I can't find it now, I recall that I wrote in a later post that my libido had suddenly kicked into high gear, back to where it was in my twenties and thirties.

Here are some random notes about what's happened since then:

- I dropped by the willowy, ethereal Buddhist woman's house a few weeks ago, and visited for a couple of hours. It seems as if the last glowing coals of lust there have finally died for me. I suppose they could reignite later, but it really seemed as if there was just nothing there that day.

- As I wrote previously, I joined three online dating sites. Match.com has proven to be a complete bust for me this time around, but I'm getting a lot of responses on Plenty of Fish and OK Cupid, especially since writing my 'nothing but bad news' profiles.

Plenty of Fish has connected me with a lot of marginally literate women posing on their Harleys, but I've found some truly interesting women on OK Cupid. I've tentatively set up face-to-face meetings with two of them after Thanksgiving. One of them is six feet tall! I can't tell you how long I've wanted to date someone as tall as I am. I've seen a lot of women's scalps in my life, and most of the women I've dated have come up to somewhere between my elbow and my shoulder.

- And yet, as I develop all these contacts, I find my libido is decreasing again, and my desire for solitude is once again on the rise. I suspect that one of my blood pressure medications is partly responsible.

Another probable contributor is the stress involved in making myself 'date worthy.' I haven't dated or had the desire to date for about five years, and because of that, I've let a lot of stuff go. The house is a mess, and not particularly suited to entertaining even one person. My cars are both full of junk. There's laundry everywhere, as usual. And there are probably many other things I haven't even thought about.

- Another random note: I blacked out at the doctor's office Tuesday. They had just taken blood for tests, and I had gone to the counter to pay for the visit. I suddenly became nauseated and dizzy. The receptionist asked me if I was all right, and I mustered enough focus to reply, 'No, I'm not.'

She had me go sit in a chair in the lobby. I had been there a minute or two, with my head down, when I heard someone ask, 'How long was he unconscious?' Another voice replied, 'Just a second or two, but he convulsed before he blacked out.'

I, of course, had not even been aware I had lost consciousness. The nurse put me in a wheelchair and rolled me into an examining room, where they put me on a table. I think they took my blood pressure while I was in the lobby, but I wasn't aware of it at the time. They took it again in the examining room, where it was 85 over 20-something.

They kept me about a half hour while my BP slowly elevated to normal. My doctor told me this was a normal response to having blood drawn, and that about three patients a week experience the same thing.

I mentioned to him that I had undergone several blood tests over the years without this happening. But I forgot to mention that it was similar to the time I blacked out in my own back yard about three years ago.

Another OKCupid update

This email arrived this evening:

We just detected that you're now among the most attractive people on OkCupid.

We learned this from clicks to your profile and reactions to you in Quickmatch and Quiver. Did you get a new haircut or something?

Well, it's working!

To celebrate, we've adjusted your OkCupid experience:

You'll see more attractive people in your match results.

This won't affect your match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match's answers. But we'll recommend more attractive people to you. You'll also appear more often to other attractive people.

Sign in to see your newly-shuffled matches. Have fun, and don't let this go to your head.

And of course, I won't.

Another OKCupid story

I wrote a fairly straightforward profile for match.com, which I then copied over to plentyoffish and OKCupid.

It began something like:

I'm a retired journalist/artist. I'm something of an introvert. I do well in small groups of a half-dozen or so, but I'm not comfortable in large crowds or big gatherings.

My spiritual beliefs are centered around Buddhism and Taoism, and I'm influenced by teachers such as Huang Po, Seung Sahn and Thich Nhat Hanh. I also am influenced by Taoist masters such Chuangtze, Wentze and the Huinan Masters.

And something and something and something. I've already forgotten the details.

That stayed up for about ten days. No one contacted me, nor did anyone respond to my contacts. Finally, last Saturday, I changed my OKCupid profile to begin as follows:

Let me try a different tack here: I am probably bad news for you.

I am marginally motivated, profoundly non-Christian, eccentric, slightly (or more than slightly) perverted, and not particularly ambitious, at least by any conventional Bible belt definition of the word.

Check my pics. Do I look to you like anybody's "Outstanding Young Professional" - of any year?

I'm a liberal, fiscally and socially. I am neither a homophobe nor a racist.

Now, for the one or two percent of you who are still reading:

And I went on from there.

Three women emailed within 45 minutes. And two more over the next 24 hours.

I changed my plentyoffish profile to begin with

To tell the truth, I am probably nothing but trouble for you.

And sure enough, women began contacting me. I can't even keep track now of who I've answered and who I haven't.

And I just modified my match.com profile to begin with:

Hi... it's me. You remember: the man your mother warned you about?

How have you been?

We'll see how that goes over.

I just found out...

I've been mispronouncing outré all these years. It's oo-TRAY.

Pictures

I shouldn't presume to speak for all men, I suppose, but I don't think any of us are doing these online dating sites because we want to go out with a woman's dog or cat, or her Harley, or her Hummel figurines, or the hotel where she stayed when she went to Miami in 2009.

So why do women put pictures of all these things on their profiles? My profile(s) just has pictures of me - the guy who's less interesting than a thumb. But I don't think I'll make or break it with a woman based on what my cat looks like.

108 Days of Gratitude - Day 18

I cannot take credit for the following. It was posted on a Facebook account. But it's certainly appropriate for me:

I am thankful for forgiveness. I can't imagine a world where all of my bad choices, decisions and actions piled up like stones and stayed with me—I would have been crushed a long time ago. And I am grateful that I can forgive, not only tossing away another potential stone from my pile, but also removing it from someone else's altogether.

 Thank you, Timothy Brister, for the inspiration and guidance.

Photo test redux

I emailed a couple of women who voted for my pictures in the A/B comparison test, basically to say thanks.

They told me the same thing happened to them when they took the test. Their pictures were rejected in favor of random shots of feet, furniture, the sky, etc. And let me tell you, they were both drop dead gorgeous.

So I feel a little better about it now.

But this is all still pretty damn bleak. I feel exhausted by it.

A random thought about looks

Several years ago, I had a brief conversation with the woman I have referred to here as Ms. Home Rehab Person about being good-looking. Ms. HRP was a very attractive and sexy blonde. She never had to worry about getting dates or about whether men would like her, because they always did.

It was difficult for her to fathom a life in which a person felt anxiety about meeting new people because his or her looks were always an impediment rather than an asset.

Conversely, I – and, I think, most people – have a difficult time imagining a life in which you can always count on being liked, rely on having people buy you meals and gifts, and never ponder having to be alone.

That was also how my father lived most of his life, until the drinking ruined his looks. He always had trouble relating to me and my issues because he simply couldn't imagine what it was like for me to not be able to rely on my looks to get what I wanted.

Things did not end well between Ms. HRP and me, and I haven't talked to her in about a year and a half. Some people have asked me why I put up with that situation as long as I did.

I think part of it was that whatever else she may or may not have done, Ms. HRP never treated me with contempt or disdain simply because I'm not as good-looking a man as she is a woman.

I think I'm done with the online dating thing

They have this deal on OKCupid where users rate your photos against the randomly selected photos of other users. This is supposed to give you as a member an idea of how effective your photos are.

Given a choice of my best photos versus the photos of other users, I lost to, among others:

• a guy wearing a gas mask
• the Statue of Liberty
• a guy who put his hand over the camera
• a morbidly obese guy who cropped his photo so that only his nose, mouth and neck showed
• an empty hammock
• a closeup of a thumb with a cartoon face drawn on it

The respondents – all women – were identified by affinity groups. My photos scored fairly well among self-identified introverts. I did badly among self-identified Christians, conservatives, athletes and 'divas'. Remember, they were simply reacting to the photos with no other information about me.

The photo that got the best response was the one that I thought was least effective. It's a somewhat dark wide shot of me leaning against my Volkswagen. That picture did well among self-identified artists, but all the other pictures did badly with artists.

Across the board, only about a third of those who responded thought I was good-looking enough (or that my photos were good-looking enough) that they'd be interested in meeting me.

However, I'm grateful for the opportunity to have honest feedback.

108 Days of Gratitude - Day 17

Well, the search for love is not yielding any results. But I am grateful for the opportunity to at least try.

That sounds like I'm just trying to put a positive spin on an unpleasant situation, but I mean it.

The search continues; OKCupid

Now I'm giving OKCupid a spin. This is an interesting service in that the 'matching' questionnaire is apparently endless. Users can suggest their own questions. I've answered literally more than one thousand questions over the span of three days, and skipped some others.

Many of them are useless, from my point of view. For example, "Have you ever judged a person standing behind you in a grocery store checkout line based on the items in their cart?"

I would guess the origin of that question is someone who recently ended a relationship, and was annoyed by the ex-partner's habit of doing exactly that. But what bearing does that have on my search? I wouldn't rule someone out on an issue like that, and I don't think most other people would, either.

On the other hand, I was posed some questions that made me think about things I had never considered before. For example, "Do you want your partner to be kinkier than you are?"

I can say I had never considered that before, and faced with the question, I realized the answer was 'yes.'

I will spare you details of my personal kinks, but I'll admit I have some. I am at the point in my life where I no longer need fear the approbation of Sunday school teachers, parents, friends, employers, employers' consultants or anyone else, really, and I'm willing to consider my fetishes/kinks more openly than I once did.

So here's OKCupid asking me some rather touchy questions about bondage, master/slave roleplaying, rough sex and similar matters, and I find myself surprised by the answers I'm giving.

There were also a lot of questions about social issues like gay marriage and interracial dating. I was astonished, frankly, by the number of women with whom I was rated incompatible because they're racists or homophobes. Also some who rated monetary wealth above love, compassion and everything else. I guess, living where I live, I should not be surprised by this, but nevertheless, I am.

The lonely search continues...

Anonymous wrote the following in a comment to a previous post.

Match.com is for entertainment purposes only. It bears no relationship whatsoever to reality, relationships, sex, dating or real life social interaction. 

Go look at the profiles of men with whom you "compete" for the attention of the women on Match and remember there are dozens or hundreds of males for each woman. Just as all the women are beautiful (in their profiles), all the men are superheroes who love walks on the beach or some such. 

I was on Match for awhile and even met a few women, but there is a REASON why people are there. Often that reason is that no one who meets them in person wants anything to do with the horrible, crazy person behind the profile. Since I was on Match (in 2002-3, sometime in there), my most recent look convinces me it's become a morass. I would switch to Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid or e-Harmony.

What I noticed that seemed different about match.com this go-round, versus five years ago, is that there seem to be far fewer people now, both men and women.

I did look at the other men, and in my age bracket, at least, I ended up feeling pretty good about myself. There was one guy on there who makes a 20 million dollars a year, is proficient in three martial arts, speaks seven languages, advises the Dalai Lama, amateur atom splitter, etc., but the rest of them were pretty much Jed Clampett wannabes.

Based on a couple of recommendations, I tried Plenty of Fish. Far more women there with names like HarleyBabe4Christ and so on.

This is definitely where all the biker chicks and Aunt Bee types hang out.

I received one email within an hour of my joining from a woman who described herself as a 'conservative Christian' who was alarmed by my Buddhist beliefs. She wants to meet me for the 'intellectual challenge.'

What's a lonely Buddhist to do?

Checking my mail

I looked at my email today, and noticed the last time I had looked at it was October 28. It was entirely spam, so I didn't miss anything. But I find it's harder and harder for me to take in outside data. I also went got mail out of my mailbox today for the first time in maybe three weeks. Again, it's 90% catalogs and crap, but I probably should check it more frequently.

It could be worse.

A friend of mine walked into his place of business yesterday – the company he'd spent 16 years building from the ground up – only to be ousted in a coup d'etat orchestrated by his partners of about three months, who seem to be intent on using my friend's good reputation as a boutique supplier of a quality, high-end product to sell their own cheap commodity version at marked-up prices.

So, relatively speaking, my life doesn't look bad at all.

Bleah.

I think I have mentioned before that my depression is worse at night than it is during the day. It was certainly worse last night.

I'm not taking back what I said. I do believe that in our culture, romance and the emotions that go with it are more properly the domain of the bold and the beautiful, and not so much old lumpy dudes like me. I feel silly and embarrassed having to cope with these feelings. I feel like I am behaving inappropriately.

Browsing through match.com, I found hardly anyone that looked like someone I could get along with. I have seriously marginalized myself.

But I wouldn't change that. I am mostly comfortable being who I am. I wouldn't sit through a season of OU games to please any of the large number of women who listed OU football as part of their profile. I wouldn't buy a Harley Davidson to please any of the two or three women who included, 'must have motorcycle' as part of their profile. And I'm certainly not changing my religion to accommodate the overwhelming majority of women who want a Jesus-y boyfriend.

But I came across one woman whose profile certainly intrigued me. It was almost what I would have written myself if I could write a prospective date's profile. And she was about my age. So, I sent her an email, outlining all our similar interests - art, philosophy, quiet evenings. We even go to the same coffee shop. I even pointed out that our interests are so closely aligned, we probably have mutual friends. I suggested we meet for coffee.

But... she's really attractive. Not an Aunt Bee type at all.

She didn't answer.

In retrospect, it occurs to me that she may already know me, even though I don't know her. If she knows me, she knows me by reputation, which means what she knows is, 'weird, dumpy-looking, boring, depressed nose spray addict.' (That last part is not true, by the way.)

I'll tell ya this about match.com. When you put what you think is your absolute best foot forward, and you are greeted with absolute and utter indifference, it's kind of a letdown. Even to someone approaching it with expectations as low as mine. Winks ignored, emails ignored... it's pretty much what I expected, but even so, it's hard on the ego.

Which, from a zen perspective, is exactly what I deserve for having an ego.

More flummoxed

I feel embarrassed. This is so fucking stupid.

I wish I had a switch to turn this off. The whole thing is just pathetic, and I would give anything to not feel this.

Flummoxed

This whole thing has me flummoxed. It's been years since I've felt this noticeably alone. I used to babble on about the willowy, ethereal Buddhist woman and Stevie Nicks and so on, but those were mostly idle wanderings of the mind.

Now, it's as if I almost desperately want someone to be with me, to touch me, to let me put my arms around her, to feel her head on my shoulder.

And there's nothing sweet or charming or touching about some lumpy sack of potatoes like me feeling this way. This is the stuff pretty people do, and it feels wildly inappropriate for me to have these same desires.

Speaking of Alan Watts, he had a great suggestion for meditation. He said one should observe one's own thoughts as if they are sounds coming from the street outside. What a perfect way of describing that process of seeing one's own thinking.

And that's what I've tried to do today. I've tried to see this crazy longing as if it were something coming in from outside. What's it about?

Well, it's harder to deal with than some other things because part of it is tied to basic biological wiring. I was born with it, as we all are.

There is no fundamental right or wrong here. Things are just as they are. But I am swimming against the tide of conventional wisdom and cultural sentiment, and I don't see how this can end well.

108 Days of Gratitude - Day 16

Today I am grateful for the writings and lectures of Alan Watts.

His real gift was peeling the veneer of mysticism off eastern philosophies and explaining them in ways westerners could understand without devoting their lives to gurus of possibly dubious quality and intentions.

So, thanks again, Alan. I wish I could have known you.