Both doomed and fucked

It was indeed a dark and stormy night. From the moment I awoke yesterday morning to the sound of pouring rain the whole thing was doomed. All day the weather raged and my anxiety grew. What kind of a woman turns her life into an experiment? This kind. The kind sitting hungover on her bed smoking cigarettes and figuring out how to report on a whole lot of nothing.

I feel empty this morning, a creeping kind of desolate as though all hope for romance has been lost. Only the foolhardy went out last night to battle the gale force winds and driving rain. At first I reveled in water water everywhere. At first I felt the retreat of burning drought but as I slogged, hood up, walking backwards into the wind between bars and pubs I lost my topsoil and any seeds of confidence sprouting there. At the first stop, my local, alcohol blazed a little trail in me and I sat on a high stool looking outwards at others for a change. My housemate The Spatula sitting perched across from me nearly bouncing in delight as six or seven men blew in through the door. The only man I vaguely liked the look of was the barman but he young, too young to even contemplate. We drank more, we moved to the other side of the bar, we drank more, we walked and walked through the storm and repeated the same process. Order drinks, scope bar, fail to do anything but the odd purposeful bump into or ask for a light.

I managed to interact with about four different men, one was just a 'Hi', one was "Have you got a light', one started giving me a massage but was dragged off by seven drunk others to find a kebab and one was an appalling man in a cycling shirt and terrible jeans who kept creeping closer and closer, feeling my breast with his elbow and upper arm whilst pointing at a woman saying "I'd fuck her, she looks like Sinead O'Connor with her hair done, I'd really fuck her". I told him she was gay to save a girl some unwelcome trouble.

The tempest continued and people wound tighter and tighter around each other embracing the familiar and ancient need to draw tight the ones they love against natural disaster. I became a pinball wizard bouncing off clusters of people. I became a flaneur. After 2am upstairs on the covered balcony at the front of the Townie I rolled a joint and blew empty smoke over the empty streets and declared the entire experiment a complete failure.

I rediscovered something I already knew. My friend Dave has this theory about drinking wine. He calls the first sip the horror. He maintains that he finds the first sip of any wine to be vile, he lets it wash around in his mouth while he pulls faces and stands on his left foot. But then he takes a second sip and it is better, by the fourth all horror dissipates for him and the true full flavour of the wine makes itself known. I'm like Dave's wine. I see it in other people as they first take a step back and look with worried eyes at the tall woman with crazy hair talking academic nonsense and unfiltered inappropriate natter at their stunned selves. But if they talk with me again, and again, they unfold and connect with me. This is what's important, to me, arcs of ideas and connecting of emotional existence, its a shame that its almost completely incompatible with getting random sex from strangers. I better think about this a little.