Mostly uneventful, but I now have a better idea about some aspects of my eventual retirement, for I am now certain I can run a shop. However, I still have the same criticisms of the business, which I won’t repeat except for the major obstacle that a shop in the traditional “English” style ties you down.
It would have to be a shop where I own the land and building, no matter how small, and where I sell twenty or thirty bigger items per day. No way I had the patience even five years ago. One should factor in also that running a shop is entirely against my upbringing and it was impossible to have gotten any experience at it back then anyway. (Running a shop requires a float of money or goods stockpiled and that would never have survived my family. Putting something aside even temporarily was tantamount to destroying it around that crowd!)There was a steady flow of people, but the same sales as y’day. As long as I can get on the Internet, the time goes okay. That strange Elly was in at closing time, this is the gal who cannot adapt to me. Let’s have a show of hands who remembers her. What I mean precisely is I am beyond doubt the only man she has ever met who is not desperate to have sex with her, and her entire lifestyle is built around getting things from men who are. She is at a total, 100% complete loss when these tactics don’t work on me.
If she wants to shop more, she’ll have to come back tomorrow, she doesn’t need me to deliver anything if she really just lives a few minutes from here and, no, I don’t fix computers for free. When we met, she assumed this was all an act; that I would quickly succumb to her expert feminine wiles. Now, a year later she still has not got anything out of me for free and generally frustrates herself when she constantly finds herself trying. Like today she pats her crotch and says because she has this, she has the world. Yes, I said that must be why she came into a Thrift store to tell me about it.
She calls me “high maintenance”, which is misleading unless you gather the context. She does not mean expensive, but rather that she has to behave herself even to get me to talk [to her]. This requires effort on her part, hence maintenance. I consider that a compliment. The bizarre origin of this was because she was so used to getting her own way, she would often find herself subconciously lapsing to a secondary level of manipulation without realizing the primary level had not worked on me.
I hope at least some of you are lapping all this up, because it is really the most exciting thing that happened today. I just knew somebody was going to ask about the photo. It is a solid glass penguin sitting next to a small bowl of chopped chives on Alain’s kitchen counter. It is the smaller of a two penguin set made of amber-colored Pyrex, very hefty. Very expensive.
Like many of you, I could not guess what they were for so I had to ask. They have no purpose other than decoration. It turns out one of her brothers was married for just a few weeks. He did not return the wedding presents but could not keep them either, so this was one of them. Now all I need is one of you to tell Elly you now have proof that if you stick around long enough with your mouth shut and your mind open, there is generally an explanation for even the strangest things in my life.
There was a possibility of this Prezzo’s place tonight but my records show that Saturdays are the worst day in my life for meeting new women. In my entire life, I’ve only made it with six women I met on that day of the week, five of them before I was 25, but hey, how many guys really get that many babes in their entire lives?
Instead I made a jar of smoothies and spent the evening reading in my quiet house. This frame of mind puts me in virtually the same category as a man in his thirties who has been married fifteen years and no, I won’t explain why I know so much about that. Still, it is Saturday so I did read a bunch of the Internet dating ads today. There are truly a lot of women who place a lot of trust in that method of meeting men and I can’t say I feel sorry for them when they get what they deserve.
These women fancy themselves progressive and competitive but it is shocking to realize how fragile and emotionally vulnerable most of them are – and we are talking so-called mature women over thirty here. Something is out of whack when your life is half over and you are still trying to connect on the “what’s your sign” level. Time to settle for Mr. Better-Than-Nothing. There is a recurring theme about where all the real men are. Well, toots, one of them wasn’t at Prezzo’s tonight. Why don’t you try Sunday earlier in the evening?
Later. I am not, repeat not, saying I will ever be able to perform in front of a crowd, but when I finished reading, I picked up the bass and actually sang a song all the way through, on key, on my own. Will wonders never cease? I am nowhere near good enough, but that breaks a 46 year mental block and I am a thousand times better than I was a month ago. I’ve got to find that Brian Khe Sahn.How do you like this “postcard” photo of the street east of my house. [That photo has disappeared, here is a photo of a 1960's horoscope mirror.] Lots of palm trees but the real effect is the pastel colors. This was done by taking the picture through the lens of my sunglasses. Nice retro look.
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