Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning

Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.

I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.

Additionally, and this shocks me, I drank too much. I don't know how pronounced the visible effects were, but it was no more enjoyable for me during or after than I imagine it was for my companion while I went on about whatever it was I was going on about. I suspect I know why I drank: nerves. And I know why I got loaded from it: I weigh ninety pounds or under and normally don't consume any alcohol, I had nothing in my stomach prior, and there is a reason drunks go for fish and chips and burgers and fries rather than sautéed clams when the bar closes... That is, if they hope to find their way home.

So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.

And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.

We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.

But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.

Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.

But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.

And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...

So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.