AIM Therapy

Did you know there was an alternate version of A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario" with De La Soul and Black Sleep? Well there is. Take a listen

But anyway, I have to thank Facebook for helping to me to get to know some folks I've known for more than a decade better than I ever have before. In particular is one such person, a now happily married online homie who I was pretty certain hated me in college. But as it turns out she was just being a moody, somewhat xenophobic Capricorn who didn't like the idea of guys being in her women's studies class.

What started out as a series of comments based upon her Facebook status messages has grown into an AIM homiedom where we discuss everything from Klymaxx and LOST to our respective writing careers to her thoughts on marriage and my own on singledom. So when I posed my most recent and annoying personal dilemma to her I was relieved to find that she came to the same conclusions that I had, a Catch-22 of sorts, but one that I was certain was the sole result of me overthinking things. But it's not.

It's a lot easier to talk about these things to someone you don't have to look in the eye. The words on the screen don't judge or inspire insecurity in the same way as a human face looking back at you.

"It sounds to me like you've been dating crap women," was the ultimate prognosis, one that I did my best to defend against as embracing it would means embracing my own piss-poor (or at least short-sighted) decision-making. But then again, being only 32, it's not like I had so many years of wisdom to lean on. I think it's the effects of a lifetime of trailblazing and overachieving that has made these particular hurdles, the ones that I had only half the control of at best, more crushing for me. And as I go about a new day-to-day life without a number of elements that had been mainstays before, it's the pain of the brand new shoes of actually trusting my own instincts and facing the facts of the changes in finance, career and social life
swirling above my head like gnats that have kept me from being the happiest person all day everyday in the near three years since I started this blog.

"And just because they're out there dating or married doesn't mean that they're quality situations."

What they do or don't do now is in no way a reflection on me. I've made peace with most of my exs and wish them the best. The others are dead to me. As it is I and only I who can remake the terrain of my world comparing me to then is apples to oranges. What worked and didn't work all dovetailed into a plan that wasn't completely written by my own hand, or any of theirs.

When my "therapist" read the excerpt of Nightshift on my site she was feeling it. She was even more interested when I told her how it came to be. Then I told her a secret that will be what binds us together as writers of fiction, something I can't reveal to anyone else until a certain dream comes true.

Lately I've been thinking about something my boy Bobo said to me back in the 7th grade again, that when I grew up I'd marry "a fine ass broad" that "everybody would sweat". In my life as a boy that was the epitome of manhood. As a man I know that the finest of women are the ones that can be the most trouble.

My boy Cooper and I have spoken over the years about the almost identical statements our fathers once told us: There will come a time in your life when you won't want to be bothered with women at all. We didn't believe it when we heard it. We didn't accept it when we first knew it. But now, as the years roll on, it's become
a fact that can't be denied like that jolly good fellow. You can't stop what's coming. You can only prep for it as best as you can. Out.