[Points to dead monkey] "Bad dates."

Last week I had the sort of bad date that makes me angry. Not at the young man; he was just being himself - it wasn't his fault that he was completely unattractive to me and a bit creepy to boot.

I didn't even realize that it had made me angry until I was standing in the jam-packed hallway of an overcrowded party last night wishing fervently that I'd stayed home and finished watching that movie instead.

I have a friend who's also single and not having any better dating luck than I am, and she was trying to cheer me up. She said something like, well maybe your guy just isn't at these kinds of parties. And I said, oh, I never look for that at parties. And anyway, I'm not looking for the guy. I don't want the guy right now. Just a guy. You know, someone nice and fun to hang around with and have sex with.

The trouble is, I'm beginning to think there isn't even a guy for me in this city. Someone was telling me about another city that's got reverse proportions: lots of cute, nice, outdoorsy, straight men, and not enough cute, nice, outdoorsy, straight women.

It seems silly to move to another state just to get laid, but I moved to another borough for that, and it briefly seemed like it might pan out, before it petered out instead. Yes, there's a literary pun in there (also a sexual one, but I'm more fond of the literary one, so let's leave it there).

I remember talking to an editor I was working with shortly after Boywich and I had split up. She always seemed so down about men and dating. She was hopeless about the prospect of "finding someone at her age" (she was 40-something). I thought at the time that it was a poor attitude to have, that her very hopelessness about it would be a deterrent, because she'd project that.

I also thought, well, that won't affect me because I'm -er- me. People always think I'm ten or fifteen years younger than I am, and in many ways I look better than many younger women do. Plus, I'm all delightful and stuff.

Now I'm not so sure. I don't think all those good things matter as much as they ought to, at least in this specific dating culture, in this time/place/online/offline space.

Sure, I meet a fair number of people, and young men flirt with me, and so on. But it never amounts to anything, not even anything casual. And of course, I'm generally disinclined toward meaningless sex, because, well, it's meaningless, and I'm not.

It may be a matter of culture. The dating culture in this city leans toward high gloss - spit, polish, and heavy waxing. High heels, taxicabs, little black dresses, tittering, cleavage, false fronts, padded pushups, and above all, youth.

Women in this city are disposable, by and large. There are so many, and they are all so perfect-looking, that I suppose men are tempted to think of them as interchangeable.

I am not perfect-looking, nor do I have much of a desire to be. It's not that I'm a cosmetics-free zone (as I used to be when I was younger); I'll wear a little of that mineral stuff, and a little of this because it's the same color as my cheeks naturally are when I've just stepped off the bike.

But I'm not going to lay down my grocery money to have some girl yank out my body hair. And I have scars. And. Well, you get the picture.

I want to work in a think-tank. I want to make a lot of art and a lot of creative pieces that defy categorization. I want to tell improvised stories for an adult audience. I want to make dirty versions of Dr. Seuss stories.

I want to have the kind of sex that is a learning experience, an in- and out-of-body experience, that partakes of both the tangible and the divine. The kind that feels like a William Blake illustration.

Where do I belong? In a tent, with light coming through the walls. On a forest floor of moss. On a mountaintop, and in the ocean, floating, floating, waiting for dolphins.

In an apartment looking down on a dirty wet street with a barbed-wire fence across the way?