I don't own any pets, but there's a cat in my neighborhood that I'd be willing to adopt. A beautifully-mottled gray number, he stops by to say hello about every time I camp out on my front step to catch up on my reading. He rubs against my legs, submits to some friendly stroking, and never knocks over my beer. I enjoy his visits, but they only last for a few minutes. He's got other things on his mind.
Specifically, squirrels. We got fat sassy squirrels out the hind-end.
I live in Five Points, Raleigh's grad-chick heaven, a short hop from downtown's numerous colleges (Peace, Shaw, Meredith, NCSU, etc.). The students around me own plenty of cats, evidently the preferred pet because taking off for a week-long Cuervo bender will not require coming back to a smelly dog carcass roasting in the heat.
"Domestic" cats were designed to be small-game hunters. It's hard to tell that by the bulk of the felines that hang out by me. Most are pitiful. A poorly-planned rush, a nasty look, and they're done, outwitted by nimble rats with fluffy tails.
Not this cat. Watching him work is like taking in an old "Wild Kingdom" re-run. The beast never plays the same game twice, constantly seeking out new vantage points, painstakingly stalking the little bastards. I've seen him take over fifteen minutes to low-crawl 30 feet, haunches quivering, single-mindedly focused on his prey, astoundingly wary against betraying his position.
Then he CHARGES, paws flailing, and once in a while he connects!!!
And the squirrel goes pinwheeling ass-over-teakettle through the air, lands on its back, and then clambers up the nearest tree.
Unfortunately this brute of a cat has been declawed. Brilliantly employing the techniques bred in through millions of years of evolution, he still comes up empty. "Hooking" has been turned into mere batting. If he lived with me, he'd soon be sporting stainless steel cockfighter-quality talons.
A few months ago I finally saw my pal getting scooped-up by his mid-twenties owner. She was cute but yappy, and in the midst of a rambling dissertation on kitty ownership, she informed me that he has also been "fixed". I felt like asking if she was gonna to go for the hat trick by poking his eyes out with a pencil stub.
But I didn't, because then she might have felt it necessary to stick around a bit longer and bleat some more.
There just wasn't any percentage in it. I last asked a woman out for a DATE date about three years ago. Since then I've refused to act like a monkey on a fucking stick to get laid. As a result, things have pretty much dried up, so to speak.
What sucks strategy-wise is that I'm now making a big ol' pile of bucks considering the miniscule amount of effort that I've put towards building a career. If I lived just an hour away in a rural section of the state, I'd probably be raking in the skank since most of my direct competitors for female companionship would only be earning small-dick money. But here in North Carolina's Geek Corridor, I'm pulling down what constitutes a very healthy but hardly awesome paycheck for a computer-savvy slob. Women struggle mightily to marry up, so far too many of the dudes I know who earn in the $50K to $90K range are wedding lame-ass broads who never read a book that did not feature a Fabio clone on the cover.
And they pay. Christ, do those guys pay. And pay. I gotta wonder how much getting one's bell-rope pulled on a semi-regular basis is worth, balls-wise, if there's nothing much else in the bargain other than scraping shit off the ass of some squawking whelp (even if it is purportedly their own).
I ain't ugly or fat, do make good money, and have been called -- among many other things -- "humorous." Stick a fork in me, witches, I'm baked! So I've been waiting for the ladies to start lining up. Ah-da-da-da-dahh. Hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmmmm. And waiting.
Whey is dey?
I've met numerous classic examples of women who "ask men out all the time." Sure they initiate, but their targets all just happen to be either rich, respected (or merely idolized), handsome, charismatic, or some ideal combination thereof. In other words, guys who already have their hands full. The novelty of being pursued probably tickles these fellas (I've been asked out exactly three times in the last 18 years, and on every occasion it felt damn good), so I can see them agreeing to go out with otherwise marginal women who make the first move because it promises to spare them the trouble of regurgitating lame lines and being forced to put up with hours of inane conversation before getting down to bumping uglies. The only truly bad thing is that many of the more Oprah-addicted ladies are incredulous that these seemingly "great" guys are so shallow as to expect sex on the first date, and babble about it endlessly with their even homelier friends at bars on $1 highball night while I'm sitting quietly by myself, trying to get stuporous.
THEY EXPECT IT BECAUSE THEY'RE USED TO GETTING IT, YOU COWS!
They picked the guys out because any woman (who shared their tastes and levels of self-esteem, of course) with a bit of brains would desire them, but then act surprised when asked to pay the toll. To me that sounds like a teeny-bopper complaining that while she'd be perfectly happy to do John, Paul, George, and Ringo individually, pulling a train just sounds too gross!!!
I consider these gals to be the flipside of the broads who used to live a few doors down from me around six years ago. They got regular beef injections via the loony option -- driving the sixty minutes down to Fayetteville and plunking their chubby butts down on groaning bar stools. For those of you not up on your military trivia, "Fayettenam" is the home of both Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base, where testosteronally-enhanced young men outnumber women by some freakin' scary factor. Shit, I thought that I saw some filthy hookers strolling the streets of downtown Cleveland, but apparently their mommas must've wanted to move where it's warmer.
Clean-looking pre-menopausal females can thus command just about any premium that pops into their heads. I'm sure my neighbors had their emplacements reconnoitered by more than one platoon, so I guess that's why they always had large quantities of top-quality drugs on hand, and why they shared the stuff so freely. After all, it didn't cost 'em much, considering.
Hey Bub, you got a sister? Does she like to shoot?