I realize now what I’ve always dreaded. I’m addicted to chaos and I hate schedules. It’s not that I can’t act civil or that I’m a difficult person to be with because I’m really not. But as soon as things start going well or if they’re too casual or easy-going, (and I’m a pretty easy-going guy) I get bored. I don’t sabotage myself, I just enjoy it more when there’s a little drama. I have no problems with commitment for all of you women out there that think that’s the problem. But I love drama.
Not the kind of drama that involves drunken shouting and pounding on a darkened doorway at 3:00am. Not the kind that ends with tire screeching and engine revving but the kind that involves rainy kissing under the heavy glow of a deserted streetlights or running through a crowded airport to stop a plane. That’s what I mean by drama.
And by chaos, I mean that I like passion. Foreverything. It’s a word that I made up to describe what I think it should feel like. I want that storybook, cinema romance without the poignant moral or busting up of a wedding. Although, secretly I’ve always wanted to do something like that but it would involve a wild abandon that no one I ever date seems to be interested in.
That’s when I run into the schedule conflicts.
But that’s what I want and that’s what I look for. Someone who will call in sick just to lay in bed all day. Never really showering or getting ready but never really going back to sleep. Someone who will start a bottle of wine at noon and go for an afternoon walk all warm and inebriated, stopping to stare at the reflection of the city’s lights in a suburban lake. Someone who doesn’t run inside because of the rain and will ruin some clothes rolling in the muddy grass of a deserted park.
Is that too much to ask? Maybe it is but it doesn’t seem like too much to me. It’s not like I’m requiring an impossible standard of breast size or some bizarre, swinger attitude that would still allow me the option of boning a stripper. These few fantasies allow any hair or eye color. Any job or musical taste will do but you do have to be willing to sacrifice that precious schedule.
It’s become the new religion – schedules. No one is willing to give up a lunch for a lunchbreak of conversation and people watching on the bench of some corporate courtyard. No one is willing to sacrifice a night’s sleep for a night of kissing under the moon, waiting for the sunrise and a shared cigarette. We give up this kind of stuff so that our schedules aren’t disrupted.
The reasoning is that we don’t know these people well enough to rock the boat of our daily routine. In a few weeks, they might be gone but we’ll always be here to go running after work and we’ll always have our Darjeeling tea before we go to bed. Why bother with foreverything when we don’t know if it’s real. I think that we outthink ourselves and because of that, we deny ourselves millions of possibilities.
I’m addicted to this kind of lifestyle - if you can call it that. It’s more of an absence a lifestyle but an overabundance of life. But not the kind of life that has a style or a label, it’s one that involves a little chaos and a little desperation (and no schedules!) Maybe that’s why, when on first dates, I feel like I have to swallow my impulses and go with something a little more tame. I don’t want to frighten this poor girl over our drinks and surface level conversation with some Peter Pan manifesto.
I know what I feel like saying and doing but I also know better than to say or do it. It seems like the girls I go out with are part of the CosmoArmy and not accustomed to running around in the sunshine, climbing trees and looking at clouds. They want a J. Crew guy that will get them front row tickets to the Pink concert and meet them at Starbucks. They don’t want to hear talk of a revolution or the new art movement. My cowboy shirts and stories of Savannah bore them but their bulimia and fake boobs bother me.
Something’s got to give and, so far, it’s always been me.