My shrink says my problem isn’t alcohol, its women. Ali, to be forever branded ‘my shrink’, is also trying to tie together my Vietnam experience, specifically isolating my association with Angel, my use of the name Angel in all current writing, and my current fascination of Asian women in general. It’s then served back to me as a lukewarm bowl of Munedo. He has no idea what to do with me and is grasping for straws. In regard to my Asian fetish of late I told him he should ask my friend Gary for an explanation. He might tell you I’ve just run out of dating every available woman in the U.S. -- it was bound to happen after all these years.
My shrink says that my drinking escalates and becomes a serious issue after a relationship break-up. Hello? Isn’t that a bit like saying you’re more likely to bleed after falling and scraping your knee than from walking? How about the notion that I use to drink when I was depressed, which was all the time, and after a relationship breakdown I got even more depressed.
Now that life is rosy, and my prayers have been answered -- I have work for another eighteen months. I can move forward in a more positive direction. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say Vegas isn’t a healthy place for me to live. In that regard, I’m not very different from Alissa, completing rehab and going back to the same life style that got her there in the first place. I would have bogeyed eons ago if I could sell my house and walk away with enough pocket change to buy a tuna fish sandwich, but that doesn’t appear possible for the time being. The shrink and I do agree on a few things. One, that I should take more trips – get out of Vegas for long weekends. Try not to hang around town when I have no work to do, don’t let boredom sink its fangs into my soul leading me back to the casinos. Problem solved -- I’ll free load on my friends more often than I have in the past. What’s for dinner? The wagon that I’m trying not to fall off of is cranking along the super highway at a nice clip. I find myself standing at home plate protected best I can and waiting for life to throw the next curve ball.
It was a very interesting therapy session, Ali really thinks I should get out there and bat away one more time in search of that perfect women. Of course, he would never use those words or actually suggest I do anything, only consider doing things. How shrink like. He grabs his big wooden spoon and stirs up the ugly fragments of my past relationships, sends them swirling around in my brain then with a smug smile announces that our therapy hour is over. I did get to hear his unabridged version of Sigmund Freud’s defense mechanism of repression and the notion that sexual desire is the primary motivational energy of human life. I also discovered that my repressed shrink has categorized the three most common methods of cornering a woman in today’s society: The slow, accelerated, and instant techniques of finding romance. Ali uses the word romance very loosely, or as he explained, it is more commonly called the “girlfriend experience” in Thailand.
Type 1 -- The slow or normal method of heterosexual relationships: This can best be described using my first wife as an example, or my second or third wife for that matter. In fact all the female goodies that eclipsed those affairs would fall into this category as well. I had without any preconceived knowledge perfected the scenario the chance encounter to a tee.
I met my first wife, Janis, in a women’s shoe store – I was selling the shoes of course, why else would I be in a women’s shoe store? I was a college student at the time and was lucky to find a job that paid a salary plus commission and fondling girl’s feet at the same time. Not a bad part-time gig. Janis and I were pure chemistry, like nitro glycerin there were no subtleties. I believe if we would have found five square feet of privacy in the stock room at Krump & Tuffly’s we would have been going at it within the first five minutes of meeting each other.
I met Kathleen, my second wife, at the veterinarian’s office. Now that I think of it, this was all your doing Mary. I had just become the proud owner of an eight-week old Akita puppy and I needed to have her checked out and given shots. Kathleen was the receptionist. The rest is history – not too different from World War I.
I met Lydia through my work. We were both married to other people but gravitated toward each other due to the default of our partners. In all three cases the time frame from the initial meeting to actually being serious spanned from a few weeks to years. Everything was left to chance; fate would cast its shadow across the paths we walked. Providence whether directly or indirectly linked to Karma or an utterly apathetic God determined all.
Statistically, if we assume there are five thousand potential partners out there and any one of them would be perfect for us, we would still have a problem. The likelihood of actually meeting any one of them is about the same as getting struck by lightning. If we were to increase those numbers to about one hundred thousand humans of the opposite sex and assume they are attracted to us but not perfect for us then our chances of meeting any one of them increases dramatically. My past associations indicate that the almost right for each other has a descending duration in time as far as relationships go. Like a slow cooked stew, the meat, carrots, onions, and potatoes should savor over time, allowing everyone to adjust. It also allows the games to begin – the chase – the action, romance, and sexual innuendos that our species seems to hold so dear.
It’s the odds that keep throwing me. A thousand years ago there were a few hundred million less people in the world and the life span of a human hovered at forty. A marriage didn’t have to last to long and still be considered perfect. How can a team have a perfect season if they keep on upping the number of games? My shrink is right, the slow or normal method of relationships hasn’t worked for me in the past and time is getting short – it’s best to speed up the action.
To be continued . . .
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