I've been sitting here sucking on my electronic cigarette, sipping coffee on a ninety degree day, eating Oreos in my underwear and my Game of Thrones "My Mind is My Weapon" tee shirt, stroking my tangled beard, staring at the blinking cursor on my computer screen, and trying to figure out what to write. Sometimes I feel like I should write but there are no words. Sometimes I feel like I should talk but there are no words.
So I just sit here staring in silence, trying to figure it all out. I don't sit here wondering how to express myself but instead wondering what parts of myself are worth the risk of expressing. I know I seem slightly strange to most people and strangely enough not strange enough to other people. I know that in most of the prepackaged groups it the world, the ready made cliqs, the most I will ever fit in is partially.
Things could be different for me. I could be different. I could pretend. I write fiction sometimes. My marriage could have been different. I could have been someone that she would have been happy with instead of being the man that she married. I don't have to be single right now, either. There are a few women I could be with if I just wanted to be the type of man they want. It wouldn't even be difficult. It would be easy hiding the real me.
I have practice at hiding myself or at least parts of myself. As I said, I only ever partially fit in so I tend to keep the parts of myself that don't fit in, in a given situation, to myself. I tend to be open about many things so people think they know me but there are very few people who truly do. As I told someone the other day, just because I'm open doesn't mean I give guided tours. I didn't tell them I have no idea what that means but it just sounded like a clever thing to say.
With friends, family, and coworkers this hiding parts of me thing works well. Most of them suspect there is more but at least know me well enough to know that they probably don't want to know the more. When I'm with someone, though, it doesn't work so well. Eventually, and usually sooner rather than later, they get to know all of me because I want to know all of them. I'm not interested in falling in love with a stranger.
Not long ago I had someone advise me I'm too upfront too soon about my flaws. They said I scare women off by showing them what is wrong with me before they get a chance to see how much it is outweighed by what right with me. I gave them a reasonable and not untrue excuse. It's an excuse that will probably be the topic of a post on this blog sometime. I told them that I can't risk falling in love with a woman that wouldn't be right in my son's life so I have to find out about their flaws right away. The best way to encourage them to be open about their flaws is to be open about mine.
That's not an untrue excuse but it is still just an excuse. Mostly women see my flaws right away because I have no desire to hide them. I don't want to sell myself. I just want to be honestly and completely me. That, to me, is intimacy and it's really what I'm after. If that scares women off so be it. If I find less intimacy because of my desire for intimacy I can at least enjoy the irony.
Once I post this I'll get reassurances about how I'm a good man and I'll find someone and blah, blah, blah. It's not that I don't appreciate those messages because I do. It's just that I don't need them. That's not why I write these things. I write these things, more often than not, just because I started typing and this is what came out. I might fear being lonely forever but I don't fear being single right now and I don't need reassurances. Most likely, if I cared to examine my motivations I would find that writing things like this is my way of reassuring myself. I will happily take criticisms, though. That way I can discover more of my flaws to scare women away with. I'm quite sure stubbornness is one of them.
Since I didn't plan this, or even have the idea rolling around in my head for days like I usually do, I have no idea how to end this. So I guess I'll just tell a story on myself. In one of his standup bits Ron White talks about being naked on a beanbag chair eating Cheetos. Whenever this joke is brought up a friend of mine will usually look at me and smirk because he walked in on me once naked on my couch eating Oreos. That's me. He'll usually make some wisecrack about it and I'll just shrug. That shrug is me too. Moral of the story, you should probably be happy I didn't say I was naked as I was writing this.
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