Here’s Liz, my Cadillac and a weeping willow. I believe this photo was in western Washington or Idaho, around 1994. We traveled a lot in those days. Since we both worked for the phone company it was easy to co-ordinate our time off and head out of town for a week at a time.
Reading. My habit on buying a large quantity of books is to pre-read then, then to go back for detailed study. Today’s batch: “Database Systems” (Database Systems, Design Implementation and Management, Peter Rob and Carlos Coronel, Middle Tennessee State University, Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont CA, 1993), “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, “Russia” and “Western Civilization, Vol. 4”.[Author’s note: the following passage was not originally written for publication, so don’t take it too literally, I was probably just venting. Read the full passage, as I seem to have gone back later and explained what I meant.]
(As usual) there is a nice little lady (her name tag says Julie) at the new coffee shop who’s taken a shine to me. (As usual) she will turn out to be too young and too used. I’ve cried the blues over this before – women seem to have to get totally screwed over before they begin to appreciate things. Then they discover guys [like me] don’t pay full price for used goods. Sexist? Maybe, but it works for me. Even Denise [another waitress] has already dug her own grave, relationship-wise, by mentioning “when I quit dancing”.
It’s my experience that such women live in a dream world and make poor prospects. While never admitting it, they believe in trading sex for favors, including marriage, but this only works until youth is gone. Worse, it is a substitute for the long-term development of skills needed to function as an independent – which to me is the prerequisite for joining any group. My observation of whether exes are still on speaking terms can almost invariably be based on this measure. (I'm saying too much in short sentences here, but it's been a long day.)
This is a harsh rule (to reject women who associate with old boyfriends), to be sure, and it goes back a long way. “Used” means here any situation that cannot be reversed and normally means the outcome of bad relationships (not necessarily screwing around). Although this rule has blocked out 90% of my normal rate (of picking up women) since age 36, the other 10% have been real prizes. It [the rule] is based on the Thai concept of “eem-LAH-oh” which roughly means “old already”. The emphatic word is “already”. When asked, if I shun such women, why do I know [associate with] such women? Simple, those particular few women were not that way when I first met them. [They were not “old already”, get it? But old does not mean just age, it means bad mileage, which translates as the word "old".]
[Authors’s note: go easy on this one, most of this message refers to other concepts that modify the literal meanings as presented here. Every man has difficulty explaining the standard he sets in women, for there is always another man nearby who’ll beg for the leftovers. For example, I don’t date strippers not because they are strippers, but because they all seem to associate with the type of men I think are crude pigs. And I don't associate with crude pigs even at arm's length. Remember Florence, who introduced me to all her "friends", the exact group of men I'd been successfully avoiding for two years? When the gal above said “dancing”, you can bet she didn’t mean the Foxtrot.]
