Back Pocket

My parents came to town this weekend to help me clean out my garage and took measurements to come back and fix the beam I accidentally smashed my car into while I was wiping my dog’s drool off the back seat.

My parents celebrated 48 years of marriage this week. It’s remarkable. Even if life extension really kicks us up a couple of decades, I don’t have that type of intertwining in me.

After my last relationship ended, I put my punani up on a shelf to help me process the last twenty years of my life. That was three years ago. I know that’s how long it’s been because I have an equation: my cat’s age minus four years. I guess I am a born-again virgin, or in harsher terms, I’m an Incel. 

There were clues I’m an Incel. I’ve googled “What are lizard people,” and I believed an Instagram post about cats being interdimensional beings who are protecting us energetically. When I told my son, he told me I was wrong, and he seemed very sure of that.

I want to change my celibacy equation, and it won’t be because the cat dies. To make sure my dust-covered punani doesn’t get chucked out in the next haul to the dump, I’m back on a dating app. This one is the best yet, Hinge.

Even though I don’t see a long-term relationship in my near future, I’m going out on dates. There are good guys on there. The ones who are back-pocket-boys make it pretty clear. Here’s how it’s done: we both mention our custody agreements and how busy we are, then find a time to meet for coffee to get an IRL read on them.

There are the ones who like to get right into text innuendo. They start “want to get textual,” but it gets old pretty quickly. I mean, it’s got to be backed up, or there is a total loss of interest. Like real sex, an hour of texting innuendo is too long. Keeping that up for days, it’s coming across as a sex addict.

One guy came out of the gate hot. He was right to the innuendo, then cancelled on two meetups in a row. I told him after the second cancel, I’m taking this as a sign from God, and don't want to meet up anymore. He wrote again the next day, some sexy nonsense. I had to just delete it before I felt the urge to write back - you can’t orgasm from a text.

It won't hurt to have a back-pocket-boy until I find a guy I actually click with. So that’s where I’m at. There is the fear of the back-pocket-boy being a psycho. I’ve watched enough true crime to know things can go left real quick. 

I figured out the draw with True Crime. The interviews aren’t with the bad guys; they are with the police detectives and prosecutors – people who don’t have any aspirations of wealth and fame, but dedicate their lives to making the world safe.

I’m amazed by them. And every middle-aged woman who watches true crime is reminded of the army of light workers establishing order in this crazy world. They’re like cats, but working in our dimension.

They remind me of my daughter. She is so kind. Many years ago I made a vision board with her. Her board included making friends and world peace; the most selfish thing she asked for was to learn fashion design. I was embarrassed when I showed mine; it was something Scrooge McDuck would create.

My daughter started high school this week. I heard someone say they’re amazed by parenting because it allows them to go back in their life and understand their younger self.

When I was my daughter’s age, I was already regularly smoking weed, cigarettes, and getting shit faced. I see her innocence, and I wonder what the hell went wrong. But I can’t blame my parents. It was just a different time. My parents had five kids back-to-back. For a three-month window, my parents had five teenagers. 

My parents have PTSD from when we were in high school, and I pray that my kids just stay away from all that shit. My daughter has social anxiety rooted in her changing schools. She went from an idyllic Catholic school where kindness was as generous as a PBS cartoon to a new school that was five times its size. My daughter was excited to start at her new school and walked onto campus that first day with the same attitude as Ralph arriving on the island in Lord of the Flies: “This will be fun.”

The school, like the island, had a diabolical definition of fun. This tarnished her rosy disposition of the world. 

Since I grew up in a huge family and we always lived in neighborhoods with a bunch of kids, there was never the disillusionment of living in a PBS cartoon. It is reasonable to imagine running around with the neighborhood kids in the nineties, and for someone to turn on me and call me a fat, gay, retard. Then, they’d make the group of kids laugh by doing an act-out: puffing up their cheeks with air, slapping their left wrist against their chest, and swinging their hips side-to-side with the right wrist hanging limp at their side.

If I ran home crying to my mom, she’d hand me a Pinwheel cookie, and I’d join her on the couch to read Mary Higgins Clark. My only revenge would be announcing that, regardless of how desperate they are for more players, I refuse to play smear the queer with them that night.

I know, it’s hardly the war zone from Boyz in the Hood, but maybe I had social anxiety too, and leaned into substances as a way to self-medicate. I will never know, and it doesn’t change anything, so it doesn’t matter. 

My daughter started high school, so I think the rosy disposition could come back. She made it through all the social chaos of middle school. I was not my finest self on the first day back to school, and we were almost late to drop off. That afternoon, when I drove my son to practice, I said, “I’m so sorry for saying the f-word so much. Let's get a swear jar. I’ll put a dollar in every time I say it.”

We both laughed after he said, “Don’t do it. You’ll be broke by the end of the week.”

I think I’ll ask my cat to help me be better.