Eric rolled over. He was tangled up in his eggplant 1000 count Egyptian sheets. His ex had insisted he upgrade. He wasn’t that involved in linens. She was picky, though. If she was going to stay over, he had to upgrade. She hadn’t been over, though, in 11 months. Almost a year.
Eric picked up his laptop from the floor and logged into Socializer. He used to log directly into MySpace to keep up on his exes, then toggle over to Last.FM, stumbleupon, maybe flickr or Yelp. Now he just went to this aggregate thingie. It gave him the hard details on where they were going to be. Better than upcoming.org. Wish he had invested in these guys. He was getting old. The competition was getting younger. He was bitter, but knew that at some point something would call out to him, like OpenMike.com had. Just sitting in a cafe, bullshitting with friends, and like mannah from heaven, it would descend and make him fucking wealthy rich.
According to Socializr, his ex was going to be out tomorrow night, and that girl Jane was going too. He hoped the male-female ratio was better than the opera thing. God, he hated being one of many. He didn’t like looking around the room and realizing that everyone did what he did, was who he was. Made him feel insignificant, like that part of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where your punishment is to see your relative importance in the universe. He was a slow burn kinda guy, and he needed a woman’s attention and time. But they kept making these snap judgments and passing him over.
It wasn’t their fault. These slick guys – who in all respects look exactly like him! – keep on charming the pants off these girls then leaving them with a “I’ll call you.” They were just notching their belt. Running a numbers game. He wasn’t like that. His fault was that he couldn’t get rid of the memory of them once he did get them into bed. He wanted to be with them constantly, have them listen to every formative story of his life. He knew he had to work on that.
Next –> 2 Degrees