All on-ramps and off-ramps ascend and descend to some level, but there is a ramp off Westheimer, leading up to the 610, heading north, that climbs like an escalator - a narrow corridor of sand-colored cement that slopes skyward at 45 degrees, marching solemnly towards Heaven past competing swirls of carnival architecture, up and out into openness and dizzying height. And at night, as you ascend, as you shudder and pull upwards like the front car on a well-worn roller coaster track, to your left the circles of textured roadway drop away and blue-lit buildings bloom like LED beanstalks, beacons of red, pulses of purple, swiveling spears of white and gold casting about like the ephemeral arms of blind ghosts.
There is no heart of Houston. There is no center. There is only light and darkness, spilling from all corners, swallowing one another whole.
Drop off the 610 to the Katy Freeway heading east and you're in the Heights. The Heights is pretty trendy, by which I mean the Heights is younger and whiter than where I live. The tormented houses of college students (current and eternal) nestle together on side streets like wooden sand castles, worn to rounded edges.
I'm here for a date. And I'm excited for the date. Which means it isn't going to work out. Because that's how it goes...
There is a part of you that will always believe that loneliness is not real. That you made it up. That it didn't need to be, but you made it be, so now it is.
Or maybe that's just me.
Denying loneliness, however, is not the same as overcoming it. And that's often been my problem. I don't want to be lonely, yes, but more, I don't want to think that I'm lonely. So I'm not.
But I am.
See? This is basically what my weekends look like.
About a year ago it got so I couldn't take it anymore. It was just me and the dog in an awful apartment with an empty second bedroom. At that time I didn't feel I had a lot to offer, but I looked around and thought I certainly could have had less. At the very least I had the terrible apartment and the wonderful dog and a job that came with paychecks of a sort.
I think a friend recommended OKCupid. I couldn't tell you on what basis...
It's a Wednesday night in Houston. It's not yet spring, so it's cold, but no one wants to admit that. No one here ever wants to admit when it's cold.
I am meeting a girl and I'm excited because I love her. Well, not her. Her profile. I love a particular combination of words and punctuation marks pressed in electronic ink over a salmon-colored background. I don't love the girl. Hell, I've never even met her.
My profile is a marvel of modern engineering designed by an artist. It is all form and no function. It is not load-bearing. It is not self-supporting. It is not even unintentionally ergonomic. It is a pretty picture hung dangling in the space between two Ikea bookshelves that have fallen onto one another. Stare at the picture, but please, keep five feet back at all times.
Honestly though, I don't know what the function is supposed to be...
Re-create myself in words and pictures?
Set a lure. Catch a girl?
No. I don't know what it is. So my profile has no function. It's an exercise in a very particular kind of art. It's an abstract self-portrait. It's basically a caricature minus the dune-buggy. A portion of my self, masquerading as the whole, stretched and warped to fill in the gaps.
It's useless, is what I'm trying to say.
It's all about the scope of your expectations, I suppose. If you interpret the purpose of online dating as meeting the love of your life, well, stranger shit has happened. If you imagine yourself simply meeting, you know, people, and leave the rest as basically an especially awkward round of cosmic Mad Libs, then you'll be just fine.
The first girl got sick of exchanging meandering messages after a while. "I'm getting a little tired of this scene. You wanna get coffee?" I did. We got coffee. We went for a walk. The next weekend we went out to dinner. I had mahi-mahi. It was really good. So good, in fact, we decided not to spoil the evening by having a third date. Which I think was big of us...
They give you percentages. "LotusAssassin84 is an 89% match, an 80% friend, and a 13% enemy." I still don't know what any of that means. It sounds good. I'd certainly prefer to spend time with an 80% friend over an 80% enemy. But even if only a tiny percentage of them is my enemy, what if it's a very important percentage? Like, a 5% enemy, but the 5% is our differing views on eating human babies?
I asked a girl out. She was a 95% match. 4% enemy! And it was terrible. Terrifically awkward. I've never wanted to escape up my own asshole more than during that 70 minute stretch of Sunday afternoon terror. Sweet girl. I just hated spending time with her. The feeling was probably mutual.
After our first date, Stacey (who I had greatly enjoyed meeting) texted me - "I'm really busy this week, so I won't be able to talk to you. Ok?"
Not okay, Stacey. Not okay.
It just rolled on. Some dates were good, some dates were bad, none of them were really right...if that makes any sense...
I'm not really interested in ragging on someone because we thought it was worth our mutual time to get together in neutral territory and have a drink and some small talk. Because that's not really on someone. We're all in the same position, because we're all living inside our little papier-mache houses, under roofs that can't hold water, supported by walls that can't repel an unsharpened pencil.
There is no approximation of real life outside of real life. I guess that's what I'm seeing. There's a part of me that can exist online, can know my favorite books, can tell jokes in my voice, can even spell out the nature of my fears and failures. But it isn't me. And the "girls" I meet in that space are all just specters. Caricatures. Incomplete interpretations of the real thing.
Which isn't anyone's fault. It's just how it is.
And the date was fine, but there won't be a second one. The real girl and the real boy weren't really compatible. Not like the self-portraits were. Not like the specters.
You can't fall in love with specters.
I closed out my profile, but not before meeting someone else.
I don't know what our match percentage was. Her salmon-colored corner of the room was basically empty. And really, I can't say that I minded.
Still, she apologized for her barren profile. "It used to be very clever."
So did mine. It used to be very pretty to look at...
