Not since the 80s

Just learned that according to www.urbandictionary.com, sss also means “shit, shower and shave,” as well as “shoot, shovel, and shut up,” and a women’s underwear fabric called “second skin satin.”

Here’s my promised guide to middle-aged online dating....

Lesson #1: if it looks too good to be true, then oh yes it is. Why do some faces just make your eyes pop—what is that?! The shot may not be glamorous or even sexy, maybe just girl-next-door sweet. But the scammers somehow got our number. This happened to me when I first tried match.com, and hit me again just last week, despite my now having seen this kind of thing before. Most recently, on Zoosk, I got several flirts in one day from a variety of pretty women, all of whom had interesting profiles, until I looked past the different hairdos, makeup, fashions, camera angles, ages, bios and locations and realized it was all the same person! I’m pretty visually attuned, and have already learned the tell-tale signs of the glamour gal who likes to fish and hunt, but I had responded to two or three of these realistic profiles before I caught on!

Lesson #2: the real potion is to love thyself. Despite being as much a bedrock of Eastern and Western religions (e.g., Mark 12:31 and Buddhist metta) as “know thyself,” it sounds so narcissistic and is so easy to tune out that it can take a lifetime to learn how true it is. The first time I was scammed was several months ago on jdate, when, after a bunch of messages back and forth, I felt a passion like I hadn’t felt in decades! What’s really strange is that even after her story about her upbringing in Birmingham UK and her French mother, and her not wanting to talk anymore about her parents (may they rest in peace), and not caring about politics while she was emailing me from a delayed beauty pageant in Cairo on the eve of Egypt’s first national election, all started to NOT add up, and I realized she was a total fiction—who knows, probably even a scruffy old toothless Arab guy—I STILL felt this incredible, almost life-changing sense of love. What a revelation: the “other” is not an essential ingredient! It was like my first glimpse or taste of enlightenment, and of all people, I can thank a scam artist for that!

Lesson #3: check references. After a long and wonderful telephone conversation with a thoughtful and attractive lady, and a time and place set for my first date since the 1980s (yeah, I’ve been married too damn long), I decided to reverse search her phone and do a little Google research, and found her conviction for passport fraud and time in federal prison where her brother tried to get her medical treatment for being abused by the guards. That might not have stopped me, because even ex-cons need love, and there might be a plausible explanation for why she absconded to Israel with her daughter and was declared an unfit mother, but then I saw the Village Voice article calling her a “serial evictee” and one of NYC’s “10 worst tenants,” and the quote of a former roommate saying she made the woman in Single White Female look like Snow White in comparison. So I called her to say that unless she had some kind of explanation, I think I’d have to cancel our date.

Lesson #4: a “no” is the next best thing to a “yes”. Shortly after the near miss with the immigration felon, my first actual date was with an immigration judge! She wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, or quite as pretty, but I wasn’t in the mood to close doors, so I texted her afterwards saying “really lovely meeting you,” “thank you for making my first date in 25 years such fun,” and “hope to see you again.” The next day she sent me an email essentially saying good luck but no thanks. What I didn’t realize at the time was how rare it is nowadays to get a “no”—that it takes the decisiveness of a judge to deliver one! I’ve decided since then to basically stop paying for dinner, because the new norm apparently is to not even respond. I mean really, how hard is it to write back: “nice to meet you, thanks for dinner, not interested”?!

Lesson #5: the three sss eliminate 90% of the ladies. So should I just lie? I asked one who said not interested after seeing “sabbatical”: how do you know I’m not able to take time off because I’m independently wealthy and own an oil well and waterfront property? No answer. I offered to take a ferry and bicycle to another on Martha’s Vineyard, but she declined after she reread my profile and saw I was separated. Hey, even my separation agreement says I can date! You’re that afraid of heartbreak that you won’t have coffee with a fellow willing to cross the ocean to see you? Mentioning screenwriting just seals the deal. The quick translation, I suppose, is: deadbeat dad.

And then there was the perfectly nice and attractive woman who had dinner with me at the perfectly nice and attractive suburban restaurant who said she liked to watch The Newsroom on Sunday nights, and I swear I tried to like it, but I get cold sweats just thinking about a show that tries to make old news sound exciting. Lesson #6: it shouldn’t feel like work.

Citizen Kane

Just watched it, and as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen it before. What a depressing movie!

 

What I learned about screenplays:

First, in trying to figure out why this is considered such a great film—if not the greatest—I found that when asked how he got the confidence as a first-time director to create such a radically different film from other movies of that time, Welles responded, "[From] ignorance...sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful."

Second, it seems like a lot of Welles’ innovations are rather technical in nature, and now primarily historical footnotes for film buffs, including camera focus and angle, special effects, makeup (especially showing Kane age), soundtrack, and, which I'm sure is why I was told to watch it, the storytelling techniques of unreliable, multiple narrators using overlapping flashbacks that cover an entire lifetime, as well as montages that collapse long periods of time into a single scene, the best of which is the breakfast scene(s) that condense the breakdown of a marriage over 16 years into 2 minutes—masterful (and such an eerie echo of my own)!

Third, its only Academy of Award, for best writing, targets the movie’s greatest strength. OMG, are there dozens and dozens of such classic, profound, and stark sound bites—what brilliant linguistic density!

Opening (and final) Image: No Trespassing (at Xanadu).

Primal Conflict: “more newsworthy than his own news,” “he had no conviction but himself,” “all he wanted out of life was love,” but in the end “my reasons satisfy me, Susan.” Absolute power corrupts absolutely….

Catalyst/Call to Adventure: At just around the appointed 12 minutes (a "beat" that Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat" says every movie makes), they start the search for Rosebud. So I guess that’s a metaphor for what prompted Kane to put power over all else: a childhood scar that set up a life-long struggle to stop rich people from manipulating his life.

Break into two: [warning, spoiler alert!] Young Kane hits Thatcher with Rosebud.

Wow, is this deconstructing exercise laborious and time consuming! I get why it’s useful for aspiring screenwriters, but I also have always followed Welles’ advice above, sticking as closely to a need-to-know-only approach to technical expertise. That approach has served me well in multiple fields. In fact, once I master something, I often lose interest and move onto the next thing. Anyway, I definitely haven’t come close to mastering this art yet. Maybe the hardest part: it feels so strange watching movies during work hours, even if this IS work for a screenwriter!

Final thought: When I read the synopsis of CK on IMDb, I can’t imagine anyone buying—or following—it either!

Atone

My “Enneathought” for today says: “The inevitable consequence of deteriorating down the Levels into being dominating and confrontational with others undermines your Basic Desire to be truly strong and ironically brings on your Basic Fear of being destroyed or violated by others.”

Today is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. My wife stopped by to take the kids to synagogue. They weren’t ready. As I was telling my youngest to put her socks in the hamper, my wife started mumbling about my giving them chores when it was time to leave. So I asked her if she could please wait outside while they finished. She went to pick up a nearby friend, and when she returned, the kids left without telling me.

I stopped myself from texting her: YOU TAUGHT THEM TO BE LATE AND TO THINK IT’S OK TO LEAVE WITHOUT EVEN GIVING THEIR FATHER A KISS GOODBYE.

As I was writing this email, the doorbell rang and Christian proselytizers were there asking if I thought something was about to happen to change the world. Normally I just say no thanks and shut the door, but today, I took a breath. I told them it was Yom Kippur and that’s a day for thinking about just that kind of thing. Their eyes brightened and they pulled out the Bible and said since “you have the Koran,” I should be able to relate to a passage in the Book of Daniel (maybe they thought Yom Kippur was a Muslim holiday?).

I said Jews wrote that Daniel stuff (and that, by the way, we all “have” the Koran). As they explained there would be a time when the heavenly kingdom would rule instead of the government of man, which they complained about along with the suffering in Italy and the Middle East and all around us today, they also made it pretty clear that they have no faith in their fellow man, only in God. I told them I was an atheist and had faith that every one of us can try to make the world a better place one day at a time. After I declined to take their literature, we wished each other a good day.

The fasting is causing me to lose my train of thought. In the shower after I woke, I decided I’d start this blog, and thought my first entry would be funny stories about internet dating as a middle-aged man. You'll have to wait for the one about the lady who turned out to be a convicted felon and listed in the Village Voice as one of NYC’s ten worst tenants....

I accepted a sweet invitation to a break-fast this evening that I received from the wife of one of my wife’s employees. I warned her I might not stay long; socializing with my wife under the circumstances is awkward to say the least.

Wish me luck!

Prompt Night

[Instructions: go round the room and each participant free-associates a word, then, with only 10-minutes to write, the prompter says, "name a song" and start writing without ever stopping your pen from moving, even if it means you just write nonsense words. Here were the group's starting words: baby girl sweet sleep thunder tired money disease spent laugh lonely raisins sun lullaby teeth bit wallaby kangaroo. And here's what I wrote....]

"Row, row, row your boat," sang the little girl after her ssssss sister fell asleep on the dock. Their parents were arguing heatedly about god knows what, so Jill jumped in. Wherever there was water, Jill got wet. Usually just her sneaks, a slip off the stones, but this time, in her raincoat, she sunk. And the birds flew off as her parents accused each other of this and that, threatening to drive off and leave the other as the silence of the pond crept up on them, and they saw Jessie sleeping so peacefully, but Jill nowhere to be found.

 

Meditate Mowing 

To be present today, I spent several hours mowing half of a four-acre field. I realize that’s how I’ve meditated since I was a boy; although, not on the same John Deere I used as a child. That burned down along with the barn and the rental car, which is another story entirely (the moral of which is don’t try to jumpstart a tractor with a rental car, unless you know what you’re doing and have multiple insurance policies; another: it’s easy to entertain people without trying, as long as you don’t mind being the butt of the joke.)

The mower I used today looks like it’s designed for golf courses, yellow with zero radius. But don’t be fooled: mowing a field is violent work. Thousands of species killed within seconds. Ragweed and Queen Anne’s Lace (the lace is long gone this time of year), Buttercups and Black-Eyed Susans, brier patches trying to establish a foothold (I hit them twice), and plants that look like dead men’s lollipops, which I especially love.

My parents would have known names for dozens of them, and to think that when their parents were kids, more than 90% of Americans lived in the rural countryside. I don’t know the names for most of what I slaughtered, and can barely get city and suburban friends even to come out here anymore, for fear of ticks and poison ivy, leaches and bears, cobwebs, peepers, bugs and bats, dirt and pollen. For good measure, Duke the dog tried to catch and kill anything that jumped from the weeds just for the fun of it: rabbits and moles, praying mantises and butterflies. I think the wasps knew how guilty I felt, they didn’t even bother chasing me after the mower trampled their nest. 

The twirling blades are my mantra, keeping me in tune with everything as I slice and grind. It’s amazing all of the emotions the mower feels. Trepidation as the thick grasses rise above my head; any second now, I could hit a rock or crash in a ground hog hole; the nostalgia of my baby girl, her sleeping warmth in my lap on a cold autumn day. She can drive it herself now, but barely appreciates the utility of following a straight line—the Zamboni mandala is a magical thing, it bestows wisdom and requires it too. I left the other half for her. 

I cleared the field early this year, so there was much more life to destroy. Usually I wait till October when the green has mostly gone, but I saw the farmer next door had already finished his, and now that my wife left and I only have half of a family half of the time, I filled the day by myself, preventing nature from taking control. Bouncing and bumping along while the monkey mind thinks of this and that, until the field is cleared and all that is left is empty spaciousness, so peaceful now, until everything grows back next year. 

After hours of rumble, when the engine is cut, it’s like the bell rings. I open my eyes, and today’s meditation is done.