The Metrosexual Caveman

Why America Needs Tim Tebow's Faith

2011-12-11T10:21:00.000-08:00

America needs Tim Tebow. In the midst of a deep recession, a national mood of cynicism, a farcical election campaign and a supposed apocalypse in 2012, Tebow inspires. Before watching his magical 20 yard touchdown run to beat the New York Jets in the last seconds of the game, I could have cared less about the Denver Broncos and their anemic season. Tebow's flagrant proclamations of his faith in the media and on field demonstrations of piety have inspired both ridicule and awe on a global level: see tebowing.com. I'm sure God doesn't care if the Broncos win or lose, but Tebow's evangelical zeal has given him unwavering faith in himself. He is neither arrogant nor egotistical and with Tebow at the helm, Denver has won 6 of its past 7 games. Sports pundits across the nation have scratched their heads in disbelief as a quarterback with terrible mechanics and a low pass completion percentage continues to win games against formidable opponents. Of course, if he were losing, he would simply be the laughingstock of the nation.
Karl Marx wrote that "Religion is the opiate of the masses." When I think of evangelicals, Ted Haggert of the New Life Church comes to mind. His relationship with a drug dealing male prostitute exposed his true hypocritical nature. I think of crazed humans speaking in tongues awaiting the rapture to save them from this earth filled with sinners. But faith in a higher power channeled into service to humanity has given us our most iconic figures. Preacher Martin Luther King catalyzed the civil rights movement; Mother Teresa served God in the form of the the most destitute human beings; Gandhi harnessed his profound faith to free India from British Colonialism. Tim Tebow merely passes a football. He's no saint, but his purity of spirit in raising the level of his team's play, despite the obvious flaws in his game, make him an inspirational leader. As the recession churns on and America's zeitgeist plummets further downward, the powerful optimism of a young quarterback is worth paying attention to.

Sports vs. Politics

2011-05-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a long winter in the mancave. The damp air and heavy grey skies have fostered this sudden introspection like so many young poets with dank body odor and unwashed dreads in Seattle coffee shops. Now that Osama bin Laden is dead and buried at sea, I now feel safe enough to express myself to the world at large. As an International Affairs student at CU for several years, I paid rapt attention to NPR, the New York Times, CNN and the BBC. I noticed that after 4 hours of piping news into my brain, I'd feel depressed and helpless. My attention these days is on the NBA playoffs and the nascent Colorado Rockies baseball season. A game offers a controlled environment with a definite outcome: someone either wins or loses. Although the same could be said about politics, the geopolitical field is so vast and complex that no one really knows what's going on. Pundits speculate, politicians prevaricate, and bloggers bloviate all to the effect of confusing the end consumer: us. Whenever I engage in political debates, the person I'm debating and I have a sense of oppositional self-importance. We have our opinions, based on myriad media sources - but in the end we have no idea what we're talking about. In sports, we are either for or against a particular team. In baseball, you have 9 men on the field, in basketball, 5. The rules are complex, but knowable. The political field is anarchic, unquantifiable and frustrating. Only elections have a satisfying sense of gamesmanship, where candidates vie for seats based on the electorate's choices (or whoever owns the Diebold voting machines).

The last time I turned on CNN our cunning Navy Seals were offing the world's most wanted man and masses of patriotic Americans were celebrating outside the White House walls. Thus the end game of the Global War on Terror initiated by George W. That game lasted 10 years. An average baseball or basketball game is less than 3 hours, commercial breaks included (or half that time on DVR). And now that bin Laden is gone, do you really think we've ended the GWOT?
The NBA playoffs, now in their 7 game format, seem endless. But in June when the finals are finally over, a victor will emerge. Sports have few real life consequences, unless you're the guy squashed under a mob of people in a soccer stadium. You pay to get in, you get entertained for a couple hours and you leave. The athletes get rich and pumped with steroids and we read about them in the daily paper or follow them in fantasy leagues. When our team loses we are momentarily sad. When they win, we're elated. When the Rockies made it to the 2007 World Series, I had a renewed sense of childhood glee unlike anything I've ever experienced.
I still listen to the news or pick up a Sunday Times on occasion. I would argue that we'd be much happier human beings without 24/7 bombardment of negativity. The kooky and brilliant astrologer Rob Brezny wrote a book "Pronoia, the Antidote to Paranoia- How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower you with Blesssings" I saw Brezny in Boulder a few years ago on his tour to promote the book; he busted out a rap-like list of all the good things happening in the world that day that one never hears about. Although it's hard to convince a holocaust survivor that "It's all good", optimism and attention to positive thoughts are powerful medicine.
Meanwhile, I'll be looking forward to Dirk Nowitzski's next 48 point performance in an NBA playoff game, or the Rockies' Carlos Gonzales, the 2010 NL batting champion, hitting another 453 ft. homerun. These athletes won't end terrorism, get us out of the recession, pay off trillions of dollars of national debt, keep China from becoming the next world hegemon, solve immigration reform or reduce crime rates, but I'll sure have fun watching them.

A Jewish Christmas to Forget

2011-01-09T09:25:00.001-08:00

I tried to make Christmas go away this holiday season. Since I’m mostly Jewish, Christmas doesn’t mean too much to me and my strategy for this season was to avoid it entirely. Most of my friends, and my girlfriend, were out of town, rendering the day nearly moot. Christ was reportedly born in the summer anyway, so December 25^th seems like historical fiction. The only bright spot on a day reserved for excessive amounts of eggnog and piles of non-recyclable wrapping paper for me was the thought of a traditional Jewish Christmas dinner: Chinese take-out. I called my favorite Chinese restaurant around the corner from my house several times during the day only to get their answering machine. The other two most popular Asian restaurants in town, one serving Chinese food, the other Vietnamese, had lines of hungry Jews literally out the door. It was worth just seeing that many kindred children of Abraham enduring an hour plus wait to chow down on the holiday. I decided to Google map the closest Chinese take-out and found Jin Chan. It had gotten rave reviews by at least one internet pundit and I was running out of options. The chef who’d been cooking up masterful cuisine for more than 35 years was lauded on the site. When I entered the dingy fluorescently lit hole in the wall, a brusque young guy at the counter took my order. 5 minutes later a balding man, stooped over came out with my bag of food – perhaps he was the master chef. He looked like he could have been an elder assassin from a Tarantino flick. My Yuletide spirit was ebbing low that evening, and I opened my paper bag full of anticipation. The Kung Pao vegetables were overcooked. Pallid broccoli without its deep forest green patina; oversteamed peanuts; brown sauce that had the consistency of watered down soy sauce; bamboo shoots as tough as Saran wrap. I ate the food trying to project a kind of optimistic Jewish faith upon it. “It’s not so bad.” In fact, I called it mediocre in my mind. We are long suffering people. We are the people who’ve always been chased out of our ancestral dwellings on forced migrations – and worse. But in paradisiacal Boulder, we are entitled to great Chinese food on Christmas Day. I wasn’t. I redeemed the evening by watching The Town. In the Christmas zeitgeist I should have watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” or something with a morally redeeming theme. But I wasn’t looking for inspiration, only entertainment. I made the day pass. It’s only one day out of the year. Next Christmas I’m going to order my meal from my favorite Chinese restaurant the day before Christmas and reheat it the next day.

A Thanksgiving Upheaval

2010-12-01T22:47:00.000-08:00

The night after a meal at my favorite Indian Restaurant in New York, the entire contents of my stomach heave onto the pillow on my childhood bed. My mom makes the bed with the same sheets and pillowcases from 1975 – the ones with the prints of the Grand Canyon on them. The mattress is still surprisingly comfortable, but my adolescent bedroom has been converted into a drab storage room. The stench of ammonia leaks from the closet where my mother stores woolens. The walls have never been painted; there are blotches of spackling paste dotting the dirty, mottled surface of the old plaster. My father’s bizarre black and white photos of a Manhattan mannequin shop decorate the room. There are file folders full of memorabilia stacked on the perimeter, which leaves a small patch of the 70s brown shag carpet, thoroughly worn and matted after 40 years. My mom refuses to throw anything out.

I have food poisoning or perhaps a stomach virus that is causing me to lose everything from both major orifices. Although my mom is 83 and wears a prosthetic leg, she fetches a plastic container from the kitchen but I’ve already puked the entire contents of my stomach onto the Grand Canyon pillowcase, the old shag carpet, the soiled rug that leads to the bathroom and all over the vintage 1950s pink tile of their bathroom. It’s total visceral carnage. My mom remains calm, concerned, and says she’ll take care of the mess but I don’t want her to clean up after me – even at her age, the maternal instinct is intact. At age 50 I’m standing in my t-shirt and undershorts, covered in puke and she cares more about me than the mess- that is, until she realizes the next morning that I’ve put the thoroughly vomit soaked 40 yr. old pillow in the washing machine. She stares at me with her nearly alien green-eyed scowl- the same look she gave me as a child that terrified me. Now it just pisses me off. I rarely am angry about anything, but mom can push the old buttons. The conversation goes somewhat like this: “You DON”T put the pillow in the washing machine, it will ruin it!” (big scowl, green-eyed stare, ugly throat noises).

“Mom, it’s a FUCKING 40-year old pillow…it’s GARBAGE. Why the FUCK do you want to keep all this old shit in your house. Especially a puked-on pillow!”

I always tease my mom that when she dies I’m going to get a 30-yard dumpster and throw all the shit out that she’s saved since 1968: stacks of National Geographics, New York Times, a plaid cotton hammock that would fall apart if anyone sat in it, a horrendously ugly sculpture of an ant I made in second grade that sits on my shelf. Even my sister has picked up her habit of never letting go of anything. She has clippings from the Mets 1986 World Series victory pasted all over her bedroom door.

The argument continues. Mom yells, “It’s MY house and I get to decide what I do with the pillow!”

I yell back, “Mom, do you realize how FUCKING stupid this argument is, how absurd it is that we are screaming about this $10 pillow!!”

“We don’t have the money to buy another pillow!!!”

The old money argument comes up again. I know now why I didn’t pay taxes for 17 years. My mom went into a catatonic state every April when taxes were due. She drilled into my mind that we never had enough money. Taxes seemed to be the worst evil in a life that a human being would have to face.

“Mom, you’re just being a bitch because you want to have control over everything and everyone!!” My dad is standing in the bedroom next door and chimes in “you can’t talk to your mother that way.” And my mom yells back, “How dare you talk to me like that!!”

He’s always been passive-aggressive. He’s always ceded to her authority. He’d fight back in their endless character assassinations of each other when I was younger, but now on a cocktail of anti-depressants, he’s more submissive. My sister is in her room about to have a meltdown because she always does when my dad is about to take her back to the group home she lives in 20 minutes away. At age 48, her emotional age is closer to 12. She was diagnosed as having a lack of oxygen to her brain when she was born and thus, mildly retarded. She’s a sweet soul and pure of heart, but still a child. She is yelling and adding to the fray and I yell back at her, “Shut the fuck up.” I don’t think I’ve ever said that to her. She breaks down and cries. My dad leaves to take her back home and I walk around the house to cool down. Five minutes later I hug my mom and tell her I’m sorry and I love her and we both laugh. She has no hard feelings. I tell her I will mail her another pillow. She doesn’t care anymore.

I would so date you.........but

2010-10-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

I've heard it in dance clubs, from a chance encounter with a professional matchmaker and a woman I fell in love with this summer: "You're just not ready yet." But my favorite line is from one 30-year old cutie who writes a dating blog who told me in a deeply inebriated state, "I'd so make-out with you and date you but you're damaged goods." I didn't even have to make the determination myself; women just tell me it's too soon after 12 years of virtual matrimony for me to be emotionally available for someone else. I've heard the formula for waiting one month for every year you're in relationship - it kind of makes sense. After rebounding from a 4-year relationship into an 8-year one, I determined this time around that I would wait some time before committing to the next one.
The fear that arises at the end of a breakup is universal: you conjure images of a life of involuntary solitude involving a lot of T.V. dinners, dateless Saturday nights and going to movies alone. You feel like you'll never be loved again, that you're too old, fat, bald (don't have that problem) or out of practice to meet someone. You feel like you'll lose the security and comfort of something so safe and familiar. Those fears kept me from leaving my last relationship for at least a couple of years before I made the commitment to end my ambivalence.

Back in March, on my first weekend of singledom, I found myself at Happy Noodle with a male friend who was determined to mentor me through my new found freedom. Like a patient who'd just gotten his tooth drilled (I have lots of experience with that) and had yet to experience the pain when the novocaine wears off, I was in a state of bliss after my breakup. Enter the New Jersey Jewess in full princess mode who had high leather ass kicking boots up to her mid-thighs, carefully cultivated eyebrows, a good dose of make-up and a voice like J-Lo. At the bar she overheard me say I’d just broken up with my girlfriend; she stared at me with her hazel eyes and demanded to know what had happened. I began the odyssey of telling her about my past 2 relationships….and she told me about her past one which she was still getting over. She is a matchmaker by trade, a Sex-In-The -Wrong–City girl with no apologies for aggressively and directly stating her point -and I loved every minute of her Jersey girlness as I have a long history of Jersey women in my life. She said that if a man breaks up with her he can just go eat shit and die because he doesn’t value her. Like me, Jackie is a Scorpio and not afraid of a 2 hour intense penetrating conversation that spanned the realms of astrology, madams, escorts, ex-lovers and most amusing, the list of men that she had to sleep with before she could get married (which hasn't happened yet). She had recently completed the list by doing a very attractive black man she’d met at a conference in Florida who unfortunately had a small cock. She demystified the notion of black men’s prowess saying “I just had to find the only black guy on the planet with a small penis.” Penis size became an important part of the conversation as she told me about donkey dong, the guy with the 10” schlong. I asked if she’d gotten her cervix split by him but she apparently handled him. Somehow, women have a desire to tell me everything. Someday maybe that can earn me some money. Then she went on to talk about the big dick swagger. Well endowed men walk into a room feeling important and secure. She feels she’s now an expert at sizing up a man before exposing the goods. As a professional matchmaker, she knew just the right woman for me. I didn't know if it was going to cost me hundreds, or thousands, to meet this supposed soulmate, but she wouldn't divulge who this potential future mate was because she thought I needed at least a year to be ready for another relationship.

I’m now almost 8 months into the void, and, well, there’s been quite a marked absence of exploring voids. I’ve stumbled through dating like an awkward zit-infested teenager with a cracking voice; as a serial monogamist, I’ve been accustomed to the next female suddenly appearing in my life and becoming a long term partner. I’ve always viewed dating as an artificial construct involving awkward blind dates, match.com dead-ends and forced conversations with women who you’ll never see again. I’ve never understood why people refer to long-term live-in relationships as “dating.” But now I’ve warmed up to the sociological meaning of dating. It’s a Darwinistic enterprise in which you check-out the opposite gender to ultimately breed and further existence on the planet. In the process, pheromones are excreted, pre-mating dances occur and a choice is made. In my previous and now shattered belief system, I just waited for karma to roll around and jettison the right person out of the ethers to shack up with.

It took about 4 months of solitude to be ready to ask someone on a date – and I went the safe route, choosing a woman I knew had been attracted to me. It went well, but a few days later I met another woman I believed to be the ONE. Our first date, a hike, was pure magic and we’d planned a whole summer together that first day. She was one of the most gorgeous, elegant women I’d ever met, and I thought I’d just been handed the keys to the golden door. I was so convinced that she was it and that we were meant to be together, that I wasn’t listening to her: that she really wasn’t ready for me and that she wasn’t sure she wanted a relationship at this point in her life. She also thought it was too soon for me coming out of a major relationship to be involved with someone so seriously. She tried to get me to lighten up, to just have fun and enjoy knowing one another. But in my serial monogamist style, I honed in on her and tried to make her my woman. I enlisted a psychic, a couple friends who were well versed in astrology and my community to affirm that I had a future with this beautiful soul. I generally trust my instincts and live intuitively – by this measure, I was 100% sure that we would come together – I felt that everything in the known universe pointed in that direction. Despite my powerful desire, and a summer of dating one another, a relationship wasn’t materializing. I had to accept the painful realization that it wasn’t going to happen despite the potential that we both acknowledged was there. I had built a glass house around her and projected its image into the world. When the brick of reality hit the house, it shattered at my feet.

So what to do with all that heartache from an unrealized dream? I unblocked my Match.com profile, and met a tall, sexy German woman in Denver. After 3 dates it’s going really well. I have no expectations of what might happen – we’re just really comfortable in one another’s presence, so much so that I find I don’t have to say much. Now all I have to do is refrain from using my faux German accent around her.

The Random Dude

2010-09-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction – or at least, the two merge when you least expect it. Last night after a Rockies game my friend Heather and I stumble upon Fado, an Irish bar in Lodo. She challenges me to a contest to see which one of us can score the phone number of someone of the opposite gender first. At least a hundred people crowd the dance floor undulating to tunes from a leather clad 80s cover band. Before I push my way into the throng of dudes with Rockies T-shirts and caps and women who try just a little too hard to look good, a bachelorette party of mostly large females clad in matching black dresses with embroidered pink closures on the back detains me. The bachelorettes have printed cards of all the night’s activities and I show up at the precise moment when their schedule dictates a photo-op with a Random Dude hugging the bride to be. Last week, I’d just defined Random Dude on Urbandictionary.com after a friend of mine going through a divorce appeared in an untagged Facebook photo with an unidentified ski bum. The almost betrothed redhead, who appears to be from solid Irish peasant stock, explains to me how she was engaged to the father of one of her bridesmaids before she met her fiancee (who showed up at the end of the night in dad jeans and a polo shirt looking like Stu from The Hangover). I scratch my head for a minute contemplating the implications of this. After the photo-op, Heather and I work our way to the edge of the stage. She notes that Denver’s fashion legacy is based on “a tradition of gold miner’s prostitutes and Cowtown bling, with all the style and grace of large farm animals branded with a Bedazzler.” Heather throws down her best go-go girl moves until a woman who's as wide as she is tall requests that we vacate our dance space. The second bachelorette party moves in, and I am pushed towards the bride-to-be by the aforementioned woman. This fiancée looks strikingly like the first one in her non-strikingness. She stares blankly at my face so I turn around and butt dance with her for a couple minutes. I then force my way through the crowd that is electrified by the Duran Duran and Billy Idol covers seeking a potential phone number from any 30-something woman with big hair and Bedazzled clothing in order to win my bet. Heather makes a last ditch effort with a tall dude in a checkered shirt, explaining to him that she’s trying to win this contest by getting his phone number. She is flatly rejected and they call her “crazy.” I’m waiting outside having fulfilled my Random Dude status with two brides already and Heather pulls me in to explain to these guys that she’s not crazy, just trying to win a bet. The checkered shirt dude and his friend are as emotionally pliable as hardened, already chewed bubble gum. Heather and I reflect on how neither of us could possibly be attracted to someone without a certain light of intelligence emanating from them. Although the brainpower at Fado’s was absent, the bride presence was uncanny.

It Feels Like the First Time

2010-08-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust – Rumi

It’s almost midnight. My date and I have consumed nearly two bottles of Argentinian wine after a 5 hour dinner and as midnight strikes she yawns and announces her desire to go home. I have one more desire and contemplate how to make my move.

In late July we met in front of the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder. I first saw her at a party last year, but I didn’t really SEE her. Seeing that is, in the Avatarian sense where the Navi with their pure primitive hearts and telepathic minds recognize one another’s souls. She stood at the entryway as I approached, as if she were waiting for me. We chatted briefly and she handed me her card. A few days later we were hiking, chatting and glowing. Two weeks later, we were reminiscing about meeting at the St. Julien. It’s an odd phenomenon that when we have an experience we are not necessarily conscious of the subtle thought forms and energies that we have perceived in that moment. But in retrospect I saw the essence of this woman then– ageless, elegant, gorgeous, radiant and proud. She appeared as a brilliant meteor that fell from the Perseid showers onto the circular pavestones where valet attendants take the keys of the well- heeled clientele.

By our second date, she’d given me a printout of the 12 stages of courtship: a road map to committed love. The stages are as follows, and are relevant throughout the duration of a committed relationship:

1. Noticing - seeing what is attractive in others and being conscious of the desirable traits in a long-term partner.

2. Attraction- curiosity and desire about the physical, emotional and intellectual traits of others.

3. Flirtation - playfulness, seductiveness and social cues that send signals of interest.

4. Demonstration – of prowess in athleticism, dressing to please the other person.

5. Romance – the ability to experience, express and receive passion.

6. Individuation – in a healthy relationship, each individual feels free to be who they are without fear of disapproval or control by the other (wow, I’d love to experience this).

7. Intimacy – the “attachment” phase in which a relationship deepens in its meaning and integrity.

8. Touching- the healing physical touch that requires trust, care and judgment.

9. Foreplay – holding, fondling, kissing and sexual play that build tension and eroticism

10. Intercourse – surrender to passion; to let go and trust yourself and your partner to be vulnerable.

11. Commitment- the ability to bond or attach to another. In contrast, addiction is the failure to bond.

12. Renewal- the capacity to sustain the above dimension in an existing relationship.

“Successful couples continue courtship, continue to show the other they are a worthy partner, continue to make efforts to attract their mate, and continue to express the value they have for each other.”

I’ve studied these two sheets of paper for some weeks, contemplating the meaning within each stage. I responded by sending her the Borat version of courtship in which his cross-country trip ends in an attempt to steal Pamela Anderson from L.A.

I don’t know what this meeting of our two souls will be – but she wants to explore it slowly. A part of me wants to dive in headfirst for the exhilaration of falling in love. As I am prone to project fantasy into the future, she grounds me in the moment. Robert Johnson wrote in his book “Owning Your Own Shadow” that falling in love is a disservice to the lover because one projects their happiness upon another person. Then when the intoxication of falling in love fades to reality, there is inevitable disappointment in the other person.

It’s midnight on my futon – the wine has made us both a bit loopy. I remember being 13, visiting my first girlfriend Jannie Israel at her day camp in Ossining, N.Y. We walked out into the woods on to a large granite rock nestled in a grove of oak and maple trees. We were talking and I kept contemplating my make-out move – but I was too afraid to do it. Decades later with my radiant date I feel the same way – like an awkward adolescent about to make his first move. She sits back down when I tell her there’s one more thing I want to do. Then I say “It’s time to kiss the Prince”. I’m an asshole. I meant to say something like “This Frog needs to become a Prince by your kiss” – either way, it’s totally cheesy. Not only that, I don’t even have a real couch to host this momentous event – it’s an old black futon with bamboo printed fabric. I left all the good furniture with my former girlfriend. I lean in, make my move, and……….

The Flight Attendant

2010-08-05T06:50:00.000-07:00

Flying the friendly skies has turned into an oxymoron the past decade or two. But today on a United puddle jumper from Denver to Sioux Falls, the flight attendant is bubbling with youthful energy – and she’s hot. It seems like graduation from Flight Attendant School ended in 1970 – thus, the preponderance of middle-aged women who’ve been in the industry far too long hiding their fatigue and displeasure behind excessive make-up; after all, serving unhappy customers peanuts and orange juice is not the glorified profession it once was Our flight attendant Lauren, a 20-something woman with an ageless 1940s movie starlet quality, is wearing a bell shaped navy blue skirt, skin-toned stockings and a staid white blouse. She emanates the button-downed sexuality that stokes male fantasies of hot school teachers and librarians. She enunciates her flight check monologue cheerily, her diction polished as if she went to a United finishing school. She struts down the aisle, touching each overhead bin deftly as if she were sorting through racks of clothing at Saks Fifth Avenue. She then straps herself in to her jump seat pulls her dark blonde hair up into a bun and sits Sphinx-like presiding over her 40 or so charges. The friendly fat guy next to me is flirting with her in the unthreatening way that only men over 250 pounds who aren’t linebackers can. He’s got big square wire rimmed glasses, a polo shirt and an accent like he should’ve been in the Coen brothers’ Fargo. He’s on a business trip that mostly involves golfing and I’m thinking to myself god bless American corporations for funding golf – a sport that costs billions of dollars in grass seed and more billions of gallons of water to maintain them, and billions of gallons of jet fuel to fly businessmen to talk about nothing consequential over excessive amounts of gin and tonics while swinging at hard white balls when they could’ve just sent a few emails while lounging around in their pajamas. My rotund seat mate is nearly pushing me into the wall of the airplane but what do I expect for a free flight? I imagine that Lauren is like Carol Merrill, that 70s era vixen who hosted Lets Make a Deal. I didn’t think women like that existed anymore. For a brief second, I imagine she comes back to my hotel, undresses, and…..then the fantasy ends. That only happens to George Clooney. My seat mate plies her with questions: since we’re sitting in the very front of the cabin she’s a captive audience. We learn that she used to work in the Badlands National Park with prairie dogs. She’s a child of nature, not a 1940s starlet. Imagining her in Carhartt overalls in braids bending over prairie dog holes calling to the little rodents is still kinda sexy but ruins my fantasy. She tells us she’s only been at the job for 7 weeks because she needed full-time work. Thus, she has to read from the manual over the PA system.

We’re about to land in Sioux Falls where I have to sit in the airport for 4 hours of torture; there’s one tiny bar that sells pre-packaged personal pizzas and a team of high tech businessmen who don’t look like they should be so low rent as to be stuck in Sioux Falls about to miss their next connection in Chicago because of an air control delay. I think I’d go insane if I had to travel for a living. A lone Hasidic Jew walks down the sterile beige colored hallway rolling his luggage over the carpet with its plaid pattern of squares that look like sprouting spring wheat. Why is a Jew stuck in the prairie of South Dakota, alone? Like me, he’s en route to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, flying the friendly skies.

The Cougrr

2010-07-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

We’re sitting at the Root Down restaurant in the Highlands neighborhood of Denver, a converted auto shop filled with art deco kitsch. There’s an entire wall hung with hard plastic desk phones from a bygone era in various bright colors. I meet my date for the first time. She’s elegantly dressed in frilly black pants and a sleeveless black top sipping a strawberry rhubarb Caprihina. We embrace like old friends.

Since me and DanceCougrr (her Match handle) started instant messaging on Match a few days before, we realized we were mental soul mates and as she wrote, MOTs (Members of the Tribe) This elegant, zaftig Jewess, a former sub-prime loan maven, has re-invented herself in a couple of new start-up ventures. She pole dances and is fluent in several dance forms. She’d emailed me photos of her on a pole with a bodybuilder/fireman for her 50^th birthday. Her sybaritic personality was that of a self-actualized woman unafraid to grasp life by the balls and fully enjoy every moment in all of its absurd glory.

The endless patois of witticisms endowed with occasional yiddish or rap phrases turns both of our minds on. If my brain had a clitoris it was being stroked every second – before our date, she left a voicemail telling me how stimulated she was by our conversations. We acknowledge that even if we never “feel the animal” for one another, we will always be BFFs.

I order another drink, a tequila infused with poblano that tickles my throat. By the time we head to the table I feel my cranium being grasped by the alcohol and tell the Cougs that my brain function is impaired, but I continue rattling off puns and spontaneous mutations on our conversation. She’s bringing out a part of me that is unique to my NYC jewish roots. My dad and I bonded by spending endless hours one-upping each other with wit. My date is across from me, her kind brown eyes lucid and receptive. She’s a profoundly good listener. She tells me about her foiled date with a guy she calls the “Avatard,” a man who communicates with extra-terrestrials who needed a ride from DIA since his car was “in the shop.” They never met but he emailed her a pornographic photo of the Avatar’s leading couple in a compromising position.

Bathroom humor and serious inquisitions into personal histories intertwine as we wax poetically about the Gnocchi and Falafel. One wouldn’t think these two would mix well, but the food is so exquisitely prepared it’s melt-in-your mouth ecstasy. I don’t remember the last time I had a meal where I wanted to eat as slowly as possible. We bid farewell to our waitress and circumnavigate the Highlands neighborhood. The buildings are a mish-mash of cold post-modern condos mixed with cute Victorian bungalows and hideous 40s era shacks with aluminum siding. She can talk architecture. We can discuss anything under the sun. It’s kind of like a middle-aged Jewish version of Before Sunrise – an entire night of magic free of sex. We end up on a park bench across from a Spanish influenced mission. She jokes that we could go over there and assume the missionary position. We chat on the bench about my trips to India, her cruises around the world, her time in Istanbul. She’s curious and asks more questions than I can answer. Intellectually, we have a rapport established in a mere few days that’s exciting, stimulating, profound and raunchy. At midnight she appears illuminated and vibrant. I’m fading. My new single life with its 2 a.m. weekend bedtimes has caught up to me. I assure her I’m not yawning because her company is boring. Au Contraire. We trace our way back to the restaurant and in front of another post-modern rectilinear apartment building we notice the brilliant full moon. I turn my back and drop trou, momentarily exposing my cheeks, mooning the moon. The Cougs, not one to approach anything in life half-assed, turns politely, and bares all to the white orb in the sky, outdoing me for commitment to the moment.

Match.com Redux

2010-07-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

A 29 year old woman, “Devka007” from Manhattan, sends me a “wink” on Match.com. Her profile reads, " I’m inventor, so my relationships with the person who is going to be my future husband will never die. I will always keep in reserve some wood to hold the fire of our love.” She’ll never have my wood, because I don’t have the cash she’s looking for. By her syntax and profile picture she could easily be Tatiana in the Bond film "From Russia With Love."

In 1996 I joined Match during its formative years when I lived in the loveless suburbs of NYC; if you were unmarried it was akin to having leprosy. So I electronically ventured out of the the NY ‘burbs and met a woman in Florida who claimed she was 44 years old. We shared a passion for astrology and developed a steady email relationship. It turns out that she was 64, had MS and was wheelchair bound. Yes, I did spent a weekend with her in a B&B in quaint Nantucket just for the adventure. I promise, it was strictly platonic and we had a wonderful time together.

Fast forward nearly 15 years and I’m back on the market. Match seems to engender the same zeitgeist as it did in the 90s – people always seeking, but rarely finding. After perusing hundreds of women’s profiles, which reminded me of browsing real estate comps in the South Boulder neighborhood where I just bought my house, I found one woman to be unique and compelling (to continue the analogy, every boring brick ranch in South Boulder under 600K is neither unique nor compelling). She emailed back to tell me how much she enjoyed my profile but that she’d already met a potential special someone. I'm hoping there's another woman out there who shares my twisted sense of humor and is wickedly playful and smart. But most are “honest, loyal, compassionate, caring” and want “long walks on the beach, kissing beneath the stars or candlelight dinners.” It seems as if each woman loves her family and friends, and is happy with herself if only the right man appeared to help them complete their lives. Some are even “baggage free.”

My profile is just as hypocritical as those of the women I’m writing about: show your game face to the world - emphasize the positives. Don’t expose your fatal flaws or wounds. I think everyone should have their ex-lover/husband/wife or therapist write an honest letter of recommendation that told you how their partner really was in relationship. Then you’d save months, maybe years of wondering what inner demons lurked inside that person and save all that heartbreak in the end. If only it were so easy.

Then there’s my non-carniverous diet; one of my close female friends informed me that she’d never date a vegetarian.Since I only know less than a handful of vegetarians including myself, the social liability is huge. One solution is to never cook at home, but order out every meal. That works in Manhattan quite well, where most refrigerators have a bottle of wine, a box of Arm and Hammer baking soda and some 3 day old Chinese food in a half opened cardboard box sitting on the middle shelf.

One woman writes a list of her negative traits: she needs 8-9 hours of sleep a night. I think she's my perfect match: I only sleep 5-6 hrs. a night and if she was dreaming peacefully in my bed I could have 3 or 4 hours of guilt-free downtime knowing my soulmate was just snoozing away. She posts that her liking hip-hop is a negative and I’d have to agree. She’d have to walk around the house with an I-pod and earbuds or I’d have to start a crash diet of Ice T and Kanye West.

And the 43 year old dog lover who “loves to get all gussied up for a night on the town as much as I love a t-shirt and jeans at a hole in the wall.” No one born after 1945 from any major metropolitan area says the word “gussied up” without sounding like someone’s great aunt from Wichita.

A 54 year old woman from Denver sends me a message inquiring about dancing at the St. Julien. Her photos reveal a classy woman - fit, confident, cosmopolitan and unselfconscious. Women over 50 often possess a magnetic beauty born of wisdom. Sadly, older women are often relegated to the post-menopausal cougar set, an unfortunate part of our culture in which wisdom and life experience is devalued for artifice and youth. However, at this late stage in the game, I'm thinking about kids, and I've already been with several women older than me.

Every woman on Match in the Denver/Boulder area is “spiritual but not religious," except for the 31 year old from Colorado Springs who loves God (like most people in the Springs). She had the appearance of a Russian mail order bride whose wardrobe needs would bankrupt me on the first shopping trip. I guess I could borrow my friend’s black Beemer and with a good slathering of Gendarme cologne, and pretend I'm rich for one date. It’s just we’d have to hook-up at her house because once she saw the futon couch in my living room it would be all over.

But then, an email from a woman in Denver, a transplanted 44 year old Jewess whose path through life mirrors my own. She wrote, empathizing with the fact that I’d just left a very long term relationship, “I've been there, and learned that it was a gift as when you are completely comfortable being single, then you are ready to meet someone.” By that metric, I'm not ready. I hate being single. When I was virtually married I was intrigued by the freedom that my single friends possessed. Now, my empty bed and all too quiet house are unnerving.

The Shangri-La to the South

2010-07-16T08:49:00.000-07:00

There's a place south of here where men act like men and women will grind you all night long. It's a place not far away, a kind of sexual Shangri-La, a place called Denver.
This is what G tells me. She's a young, half-latina model who's rubbing her leg against mine at midnight after a party. Her open marriage permits such flirtations and I don't know how far it can go since I'm getting cockblocked by an acquaintance who always seems to hover over every woman I talk to - friend or potential date. She proclaims that Boulder men are pussies and don't know how to approach a woman. My cockblocking friend then imitates the typical Boulder dude who is too busy meditating, going to men's groups, being all sensitive and conscious to act like a real man. Then it strikes me that he and I ARE that guy that he's mocking. Maybe I need lessons from my latino friends who have machismo dialed in. My amigo R seems to take at least 3 women home every week. It helps that he's got his salsa moves down. Another latino friend has a game that doesn't work so well ; he tells women that he's got a piece of fresh Chilean sea bass at home that must be cooked that night. I assume the sea bass is a metaphor for the fresh catch between his legs. He must have a lot of rotting fish at home, because none of the women I know will bite, so to speak. But he does have a point - he says women in Boulder won't allow a man to be assertive.
G is not the first woman to tell me that Boulder guys are wimps, are too superficial or too afraid to be masculine. Maybe I need to change my game from being a sensitive, compassionate quasi-New Age guy and just start grabbing women and pinning them up against the walls at dance venues. Perhaps there's another option: this place called Denver south of here where I’ve heard tales of all night parties where men get mauled by women at first sight. This Denver place sounds like descriptions I've heard of Brazil, where gorgeous women jump into your car as you drive by to make love with you. Maybe we overthink things in our little Boulder bubble: we all have therapists and long lists of what we seek in a partner. Maybe we just need to go to that Shangri-la to the south where people are more spontaneous and tear one another’s clothes off without thinking about it twice.

My Almost All-Female Mountain Bike Adventure

2010-07-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

I’m camping with 5 women and one guy in a densely wooded grove of conifers looking out into a meadow of blooming columbine in Crested Butte, Colorado – mecca for mountain biking, skiing and general escapism from urban life. In this town where the ratio of men to women is 7:1, the ratio of my trip is 2:5. These women are serious riders – most of them race for sponsored teams and they’re ready to put the hurt on me on long ascents through 12” wide singletrack that undulates through the forests and open slopes densely blanketed with wildflowers. The snow had just melted from the higher alpine trails at 11000 ft. and we are there for primetime.

I love biking. In many parts of America, hiking purists don’t want people on mechanized objects ruining their placid trails, but in CB bikes rule. I have two legs full of scars and scabs to attest to the many crashes I’ve taken this year piloting my steel horse through rock gardens and narrow trails.
My mostly female camping companions beat me up on the trails and kept up with my scatological and sexual humor by the campfire. Something about crapping in the woods and being covered in dirt, sweat and campfire smoke is a great equalizer between the genders. One evening we reached a concensus on the most appropriate female pubic shaving pattern: a complete laser job was out – it evokes pre-pubescent girls (and for me the first time I played doctor with two neighborhood girls at age 11, amazed at my first gaze into the pink conch shell depths). In "Get Him To the Greek," the outrageous send-up of rock star excess and narcissism, Jonah Hill's character finds himself in front of a girl in Vegas with her pubes shaved in the shape of a microphone. She invites him to sing "hairyoke." Classic. But as a guy, you just don’t want to go down there and get slammed in the face with a 1960s hippie jungle or have to become a licensed Alaskan bush pilot to find your way around. I did not address my recent manscaping adventures in which I attempted to create separation between my nether regions and the Jewish rug that I hide beneath my polyester bike jersey.
The conversations inevitably turned to relationships, and at one point one of my female friends noted that all of us around the campfire were single - we all looked at one another with knowing smiles and proceeded to share our war stories with each other. The topic of “what was your worst date ever” rendered one tale in which a guy showed up without his wallet and forced my friend to pay for the entire $100 meal. Apparently this was his modus operandi with all women. You’d think that would catch up with him someday. Although he promised to repay her, and even apologized to her when they ran into one another post-date, he never ponied up for his half of the meal. One woman complained that you can’t get a guy in Boulder to buy you a drink at a bar – that’s because they already spent every last dime on climbing or biking gear and their low rent crash pad. She’s just dating the wrong dudes.
As for me, it’s been since the Pleistocene era since I’ve dated, but back then in the mid-90s my worst date was with the beautiful coffee shop girl who initiated some above the waist intimacy with me - then at 4 a.m. suddenly announced that she “didn’t want to hurt me” and went home. I wanted the kind of hurting that could have followed, but apparently her self-image was of some kind of succubus who would drain my soul of all life force and leave me spiritually dead. The next week she went on to seduce one of my co-workers who descended into the depths of hell with her – I suppose I was spared. The topic of coffee shop girls arose in another conversation. Seducing a captive audience behind a bar or a café counter is uncool. Attractive young women slaving for tiny wages are easy targets for lonely guys who happen to be regular patrons at your local coffee joint.
My weekend with this posse of women ended in forging some new friendships and bonding more with an old friend on the gorgeous 5 hour drive to and from this mountain mecca. If I could get a sex change I’d probably join the Tough Girls (not these Tough Girls) racing team and qualify to race in the expert class, but as my current gender I would be low on the totem pole among male racers. Before we left town, we shared beers with a local couple who were planning their autumn wedding. The bride-to-be mentioned that in Argentina when you raise a glass to toast someone and you don’t look them in the eye, you will be relegated to having 7 years of bad sex. I was already scolded for my lack of toasting etiquette the last time I failed to meet someone’s gaze – god forbid I suffer the Argentine curse.

The Wedding

2010-06-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

At a good wedding, love radiates into the hearts and minds of everyone in attendance. This particular ceremony, with its ritual mix of Buddhist invocations beneath a Chuppah traditionally used in Jewish weddings, was sublime. I was aware that these two new friends of mine were destined to be together for a very long time.

At weddings, the synergistic mix of love and alcohol often fuels late night hook-ups for single guests. However, in this crowd of 150 people, I was one of just a handful of single folks (note that the use of the word “folks” has been popularized by our current President to dumb down his Ivy league pedigree for the average American). In this sea of married couples huddled together beneath umbrellas in the backyard of the betrothed, thunder punctuated every line of poetry exchanged between bride and groom. Me and my 3 other unattached friends formed an island of singledom, united by our knowledge that we’d be going to bed alone inebriated in the wee hours of the next day.

The most intriguing experience I had was with a 90 year old woman. She wouldn’t bust out any moves on the dance floor to “Thriller” but we had great conversations spanning two days. With her crystal clear mind and rock solid countenance, she told me of her years in New York and subsequent move to rural South Carolina.

I think it’s easier to be a single woman at a wedding: women aren’t afraid to throw down the moves with and upon (yes, one intrepid dancer rode the Bride’s lap) each other. Guys only dance together if they’re completely piss-ass drunk or spent their frat boy years together and have fond memories of making fools of themselves. Not wanting to potentially offend any husbands watching from the sidelines, I remained aloof until the vodka took effect. As extroverted as I am, I fear female rejection. I’m also no Patrick Swayze on the dance floor– I make up my moves on the fly, just like we did to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in the 70s. It’s a form of creative flailing that shows just how vanilla I am (well, I’m not as bad as some wedding dancers).

This wedding left me with questions about why I’ve never married despite having been in several long term relationships and what inner demons I must exorcise in order to enter the highest union. When the bride and groom shared their inspirations before exchanging vows, one thing the bride said stuck in my mind. She said that he had discovered her in a way that she could never see within herself. In loving her for who she is, in holding up a mirror to her soul, she could manifest her being in a way more profound and beautiful than she could have imagined.

What is the mystic calculus that enables two people to challenge one another, bring out the best and worst in one another, survive the inevitable clashing of egos, to weather the slings and arrows of matrimony and emerge greater than the sum of two parts? My grandmother, a wise woman with a twinkle in her cerulean blue eyes once told me the true triangle was two human beings joined together with God above. Although she wasn’t especially religious, her words stuck with me. It evokes the New Testament passage, “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I also.”

Being at a special wedding reaffirms my desire to take the leap into the dark, numinous state of marriage. I’m old enough now to have overcome my earlier fantasies of ending up with a woman who looks like Jennifer Connelly. Whoever the ONE is that emerges from the ethers, I want to jump into the crucible and be transformed into a greater element than I could ever be alone.

With thunder rumbling above, and rain showers blessing the ceremony, the groom read this poem “La Pregunta” by Pablo Neruda:

Love, a question
has destroyed you.

I have come back to you
from thorny uncertainty.

I want you straight as
the sword or the road.

But you insist
on keeping a nook
of shadow that I do not want.

My love,
understand me,
I love all of you,
from eyes to feet, to toenails,
inside,
all the brightness, which you kept.

It is I, my love,
who knocks at your door.
It is not the ghost, it is not
the one who once stopped
at your window.
I knock down the door:
I enter your life:
I come to live in your soul:
you cannot cope with me.

You must open door to door,
you must obey me,
you must open your eyes
so that I may search in them,
you must see how I walk
with heavy steps
along all the roads
that, blind, were waiting for me.

Do not fear,
I am yours,
but
I am not the passenger or the beggar,
I am your master,
the one you were waiting for,
and now I enter
your life,
no more to leave it,
love, love, love,
but to stay.

Sartorial Adventures

2010-06-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

Every few years my cousin from NYC, a writer, producer and former fashion model comes out to help me shop for clothing. On this day, her face lights up with glee when I mention that we have a Nordstrom Rack 15 minutes from my house. She wants me to look good to attract my future wife – I just wanted a linen suit for the 3 weddings I have to go to this summer. She’s been working on me for 2 decades to shed years of self-effacement, starting in the late 70s with my waist length hair hippie persona that evolved into the REI guy look….loose clothing suited for outdoor living. Here in Boulder , Colorado no one has to dress up – you can wear shorts and a T-shirt to all but the most high end restaurants and no one cares. Women care more. It’s common in this town to see a guy with a backwards baseball cap, shorts and an ill fitting t-shirt show up with his well dressed date to any given restaurant. At nearly 50, I’m still part savage. I work as a carpenter in clothing stained with caulk, wood sap and dirt so ingrained it can’t be laundered. But at night, particularly on the weekends, a crisp stylish shirt and good pair of jeans goes a long way in this town. The “playah” clothing my cuz helped me purchase 3 years ago, mostly at Urban Outfitters and Billabong, served to alienate my Ex as she believed I was trying to be single; well, she was right: part of me did. Now I get to do it full time and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. More on that later – back to Nordstrom’s Rack with our golf pro salesman who I’m going to call Chuck even though that’s not his real name. He looks like a Chuck – ruddy faced, red haired, middle aged with a small paunch beneath his tucked in shirt. He’s the nicest guy: a former car salesman turned golf pro turned clothing guy. Maybe in New York in the 1920s his job would be more esteemed – he be a Haberdasher- but in 2010 he’s just a guy hawking deeply discounted stuff at an outlet store. My cousin is a whiz at this. I swear she should quit all of her media ventures and hire out as a PFA – my acronym for personal fashion assistant. Her fingers move so quickly through stacks of jeans and racks of shirts I can’t keep up with her. I wasn’t able to change my jeans and shirts as fast as she brought stuff to the dressing room. I had so much shit in there they gave me the wheelchair accessible changing room. It was like renting a double wide trailer for two hours. I could have installed plumbing and a make-up mirror and felt like a rock star for a day. The problem with me shopping by myself is that I’ve bought size XL for many years. My cuz reprimanded me for trying to hide my burly torso in clothes roomy enough to have a roommate in. She’s also addressed my protruding nipple issues by insisting I wear undershirts. I told her how “east coast” that was and that most guys except for my buddy Jeff (a New Yorker) go raw skin underneath. Today I discovered nipple covers at a local pharmacy – well, for women who generally have double the nippleage as me. They should make them for men. I now know my chest size (42 L), shirt size and have my first pair of tailored pants in my life. I’m gonna look sharp for these weddings. I even have a matching straw hat and belt not to mention cuff links, handkerchiefs and new, tighter fitting undies to hide my junk from the wedding guests. I dropped $56 on a tie that I’ll probably wear once in the next 5 years. I’m o.k. with that. I’ve only worn a tie once in the past 30 years for my college graduation last year. I've had to Google diagrams on how to tie a tie. I’m the guy who didn’t learn to tie my shoelaces until I was 9 years old. My cuz told me if I’m really going to attract the right woman I need to dress my best. But then, what happens when she gets into my dusty pick- up truck and comes to see my Spartan home with my 1970s stereo components and futon couch? A buddy told me that futons scream “non-committal.” I’m new at this game. The problem with a partial makeover is that it makes the rest of your stuff look shabby. If my continually improving image doesn’t have its complement at home, am I just a poser? Well, yes, I’m terribly image conscious despite the fact I walk around with a semi-kempt shock of hair, cuts from mountain bike crashes all over my legs and remnants of salad usually stuck in my impossible to floss teeth. I’m working on it. I grew up like Greystoke or that boy who was raised by wolves. I love my folks, but I had to learn the basics of self-care as an adult. One friend admonishes me for spitting while I talk and blowing too large a volume of wind from my mouth. I swear it would be easier just to be a slob. My inner JewBu wants a woman just to love me for my soul. Why should these clothes, bits of cotton, polyester, wool and lycra that have been draped on my body make one iota of difference in who I am? Well, they don’t. But how we dress and how it makes us feel is as important as anything else in life. It simply feels good to look good.