Too late or still too soon to make lots of bad love and there’s no time for sorrow…

…run around, run around with a hole in your head ’till tomorrow.

I ran into a slacker at a different karaoke place the other day. Like me, he was flying solo.  For purposes of this blog post, I will call him “Slacker.” We compared notes.

When you run stag, you need a defensive mechanism to compensate for a lack of a wingman. Ideally, you pick a gimmicky defensive mechanism that also has the potential to attract wingmen (feasible), or possibly women (less so).

Slacker’s gimmick was that he solved the crossword puzzle from the local paper.

I had developed a gimmick over the winter.  I had been carrying around a notebook into which I would jot down ideas, as if I was going to do something with those ideas. As lame as that sounds, the notebook gimmick was possible because I had a woolen winter coat that was the perfect size for the notebook.

Now that summer is here, the intensely sad nature of being a guy walking around writing crazy things into a notebook was painfully clear. So I just stopped bringing it. But it meant that I would walk into a place, just me and no defensive mechanisms at all. When you have no defensive mechanisms and are all by yourself, you end up just eyeballing people in the crowd.

The term for guys who do this is “creeper.” Its a fair criticism. When you are on your own, stop being on your own. The key is to step up as soon as possible. Make a human connection or bail. This sometimes means jumping on the wing of another dude flying stag.

Hey, man. S’up? That word there? 36 down… “arsenal.” A-R-S-E-N-A-L

For real, bro? Whoah… yeah it is! That’s awe-some, bro. Awesome.

And just like that, my new name is “bro” and he and I are hangin’ out.

Anyhow, Slacker and I, compared notes about on-line dating. While we did that, I was his wingman. He tried to pick up the waitress for whom he had feelings. After a drink or two, it became clear that they had a history and that it wasn’t a good one. I kept my thoughts about this to myself, but started to think about leaving.

At least, we compared notes.

So what did I learn from these notes? Turns out, neither of us like online dating. This wasn’t exactly a profound revelation.