Trying to Throw My Arms Around a Girl

I spent some of the day listening to U2 like I've said in a post before. The thing is, I really haven't listened to it in years, till today. There are some songs on it that never did get airplay but were personal favorites of mine. One was “Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World” off of Achtung Baby.

That song I used to play all the time then and hearing it again today, I managed to see that younger self I once was. I've find now that with the intervening years, and I mean YEARS since I used to listen to that song, is the perspective I own now. That's no epiphany really. I was 27 then and I had the brain, blood and dearth of real life experience of a 20 something.

At that age, I was up to my neck in testosterone, hope and naivete. There were many girls I was trying to thrown my arms around. Many of whom outright rejected me for whatever reason and I too tossed aside those I wasn't the least bit sparked by. You throw away a lot of coal to find the diamond. A lot of coal. This applies to girls and the boys alike. We both are picky as hell. A basic egg-headed biologist calls this “mate selection.”

What a difference decades make! At 27, I was keenly aware of what I looked like, dressed, how I sounded and how I may come off as a possible prospect for a pretty girl I took an interest in. Now at my age, I couldn't care! Ha! That's what the piling up of experience upon experience can do for you. That's what getting older does too. I am no longer in the market of finding a mate to produce a family. There's no need to preen myself like a peacock. I have been freed! The song reminded me of all the efforts a guy will put into making himself a great “pick.” A climbing career, a late model car that works, the occasional expense of an Izod golf shirt and breath mints.

Did it work? Nope.

For a zillion reasons, many I couldn't control, I never married and created a baby. For many of my friends, they wished they hadn't married at all...or had that little rug rat!

I sat here and calculated the percentage of “successful, happy” marriages of the people I grew up with. Here's the data. 20%. That's it. Out of everyone I know, those who divorced and those who I know are who actively cheating on one another, 80% of their marriages fell apart or are secretly just shams. Yikes!

But, success rates aren't what I was tuned into today.

How different I am now and how the same I am too. It's amazing with the reams of maturity and sophistication how one can, in a fairly short time, size someone up. People wear their true personalities on their sleeves most of the time and if they don't, that just sets off alarm bells in me that conclude “professional liar!”  Now, it's no longer, “I hope she likes me,” but “I am who I am and take it or leave it.” I sure as shit didn't think this when I was much younger! In 1991, I'd badly size up a girl and ignore the SCREAMING sirens that she may be a ton of trouble. Now? I can smell low self esteem from a mile away.

Confidence scares others who don't possess it. In fact, you can see them fall into an insecurity spiral the longer they stay around someone who is sure of themselves. I'm not saying I'm sure all the time, hell, I'm not. I panicked limping my car home on just battery power from Mansfield once, slapping the steering wheel like a pilot slapping the yoke of a shot to shit B-17 flying home from Germany. “C'mon baby! C'mon!”

What I mean is that at my age, when talking to someone much younger, the confidence you attain from just plain living life naturally shimmers from you. If it spooks them, so be it. I am what I am now. You can't help it.

Well, that was my lesson for today, listening to U2 and realizing I have matured, matured and matured some more. So, time to grow my hair long like a grizzled ol' sea captain with the Civil War sideburns...where I can look like I have some experience under my belt?