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Go-Time
7/13/05
by The 27

1:30 AM, at the bar, and everything is clicking.

She is looking at you and she is smiling and you cannot believe your performance. Your jokes have been charged with electricity all night. Your observations – cutting; your anecdotes – poignant; your eye contact – playful.

She's any skin tone you want – vanilla, butterscotch, cinnamon, caramel, chocolate. She really knows about football. And cooking big steaks. And her personality is whatever you like best – feisty like a kitten, explosive like a firecracker, sweet like strawberry syrup.

It's one of those nights.

How you proceed from this moment likely dictates your short-term and, perhaps, long-term happiness. Do not be seduced by her flowery aroma or hypnotized by her white teeth or dangly earrings. All pitfalls for the unwary! Later, when basking in the spoils of victory, her aesthetics can be more fully appreciated but, for now, you'd be best advised to consider them the minefields of a battlefield. The game is just beginning.

For starters, stop questioning your good fortune. Not everything has an answer, Socrates, so don't tempt the Fates with the pointless ponderings of your finite mind ("Why, me? Why, me, tonight? It's the shirt, isn't it? I knew I look big in this shirt!"). Instead simply attribute it to cosmic arbitrariness … an uncommon alignment of the stars …God was lying on his rec room floor and spinning his pinwheel and it landed on you. Analyze your situation tomorrow for, as of this instant, you still have nothing, and therefore, have nothing to analyze. Give yourself the chance to experience at least one night of how the other half lives – the half that can get away with the spiky hair and the hemp necklaces and the green athletic wristbands; the twenty-something equivalents of the short cute kids in 4 th grade that the girls chased around during "kissy-tag" while you pretended that the swing sets were cool.

There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

You have one objective and one objective alone. Keep her interested. Keep her occupied. Keep her talking. The odds are stacked against you. Your wing men have long since dispersed (now at a table getting hammered and making bets on how long it will take you to bomb) and its just you flying solo, chasing that elusive MIG over the Pacific. She enjoys riding bikes? Hell, you do too. She just got back from Denmark? You love the Danish countryside. She likes chicken parmigiana? "Oh my God! So do I!" This is neither the time nor the place for the sanctity of marriage vows. This is a bottom line business, soldier, and its go-time. We are all complex individuals living in a complex world inundated with multi-faceted realities. What may be offered as a half-truth today can serve as the basis for a fruitful relationship tomorrow. Moreover, any incongruities that are later exposed can be explained away by the loud music and clouds of smoke that were muddying your senses when any inaccurate statements were made.

Besides, she knows how the game is played. She's been to this party before. The whole arrangement is like an NFL contract, drastically lopsided in the favor of one side. You're the NFL player, fighting for everything owed to you (you have to feed your family!). She is management and can whimsically drop you with no compensation. At any point in the night – when you unintentionally insult her profession, or when you reveal that you like Star Wars, or when a taller guy walks by – ,she can offer any number of half-brained, obviously dishonest why-she-would-love to-stay-and-talk-but-can't-because-of-forces-beyond-her-control type excuses: "I told my friends I'd meet them on the dance floor," "My boyfriend is probably looking for me," "I can't stay out late because I'm cleaning my apartment tomorrow," or "I feel like if I got involved with you it would just be too intense." Nothing is guaranteed. She can cut you like a third string punter faster than you can order the next round of Lemon Drops.

So, you do what you have to do in this dog eat dog world. Bob and weave, weave and bob, parry her thrusts, thrust before she parries. Every conversation topic should last not longer than three minutes, and after every conversation topic alcohol must be consumed.

This is your chance, my friend, waste it not. Based on absolutely no formal statistical research but rather on just years of experience, nights like this – nights where you actually meet someone you can picture yourself with even when you're not wasted – happen twice, maybe, three times a year.

So, take a chance. Go for the gold. Get busy livin' or get busy dying. Carpe Diem. Fortune favors the bold.

And pray she doesn't ask you to dance. Because then you're screwed.

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