What A Racket! - Part One

Good morning Tuesday,

And what a day yesterday was! At noon Central Europe Time (CET) the Interim Mayor of my home city was arrested at his home while in the shower for fraud and conspiracy following the ongoing scandal that forced the Former Mayor to resign in November last year. This makes a total of two mayors in about half a year who have been accused of a racketeering scheme that has tied in the highest levels of provincial government with organized crime. (The former Premiere of the province lost his re-election due to his involvement in this scandal, exposed in a commission that has seen the heads of the local Sicilian Mafia brought in to testify.) It is a huge pallor hanging over the city that used to brag it was a “City of Champions” but I have seen this it coming for 37 years. That was the last year the city really had the financial backbone to claim such a lofty title, and the year the psychology of our provincial government started to breakdown….

But that was not what I had planned to write about today. Here’s the music for the post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=01GgtZN8L1A&NR=1

I am new to this site, so it is natural I have thoughts about myself being 46 and unmarried. I suppose I am not alone in these thoughts, regardless of the age. So I guess it is natural I start my blog with the thoughts that first brought me here.

Now being unmarried is not a problem if I am a happy go lucky charmer with women happy to go from one to another like a pinball lighting up my face with electric lights and racking up high score. But I have never been that, and I tend to think most of us here are not like that. If you were, you would be a pretty sad case needing a place like this from which to find dates. I think most of us would like a little validation we’re just not getting from the real world – that space of oxygen around us.

My story is simple. I was the guy that delivered flowers to a girl who was sick from school but had them handed back to me as a dozen dried black roses she had kept in her school locker until we met a week later in class. I was the guy they made a stage play about because all the girls my age laughed at my advances – this was the period when John Hughes films were popular. And my advances were along the line of watching an opera or an orchestral concert and enjoying dinner afterwards. We’re not talking about a groping outside a McDonald’s or at a wild party. And paying for dinner for two, a taxi and a concert is a feat for a working class family kid who saved up nickels. So I have always been a marrying man and I have been interested in improving myself with a complement. You might say I was precocious, but that was how I was raised.

Until I came to Europe at 22 and met a beautiful professor and her young daughter, I had only two dating experiences. A couple of pre-Internet letters that never received a reply and I ruefully decided to move on. I decided to dated older women from there forward.

So I turned my attention to women 15 – 25 years my senior, hoping that the maturity of my dates would lead to matrimony. This was a more natural demographic for me than it looks because I was meeting these older women through work. I was working for myself as a communications consultant because my City of Champions was already going downhill economically, affecting the employment of unilingual English speakers in a place where the law makes hiring such persons a finable offense. I never found the right woman, and I was never taken serious. And I was serious as a heart attack.

The following errors occurred:
[Blog Post] may contain up to 4000 characters, you entered 5168
Heh. I am still learning…