Rules of Engagment (part 1)

Was going through a piece I wrote about 6 years ago which I submitted to Maxim magazine but was denied (or at least never heard from them again).   kind of an interesting piece I wrote before I started to date Mrs. Righetti..

all names and places have been changed to protect the innocent

It was a three piece article entitled "rules of engagement" about being a single dude in NYC.

this is part 1

Let me tell you something, I went out with this other chick a few weeks back and listening to our conversation was like Craig Killborn interviewing Darva Konger. You’re not really sure Darva Konger has anything of value to say and you’re not real comfortable having Craig Killborn dictating the conversation. We hang out for a couple of hours and it was like a game of table tennis without the Chinese guy slapping down a “riser” or a “slurve” to mix up the fun. Back and forth, forth and back, it was exhausting, we kind of got into this rhythm where I would tell a funny anecdote about my dog and she would respond with “oh my dog did this and that…..blah blah”. Then it was my turn “oh that’s funny because my buddy once took a shit in the bathtub” and she would come back with “my brother peed in the bathtub when we were young” and I would say that “I once held my piss in for 8 straight hours and then it hurt for 2 weeks every time I urinated” to which she told me about her urinary tract infection which she thought was just bad Jalepenos.

I’m not saying what I had to say had any value but this ping-pong conversation is awful to read about and worse to have been a part of. Its like we signed up for a Haiku class, you can’t ever say anything more than three lines and it has to have perfect iambic pentameter. It was understood that neither party could at any time take control of the conversation, just because we were trying to feel each other out. We had made an unconscious decision to piece-meal this conversation together without either one taking more than 50% of the conversation, its like playing Risk with yourself, you’ll never really win, you’ll never really lose but you’ll spend a whole lot time wondering if you could be doing something better at that time.