play off

I was set up on a sort of blind date last Thursday. The victim in question is a retired hockey player. I thought, perfect, I'll finally learn something about hockey.

The date Thursday got off to a bad start when I went to the wrong bar (do you know how many bars are called the Tavern in Denver? a lot). But all seemed to be forgiven when I finally showed up at the right bar. We made a plan to meet at his house Friday for thai food and then the hockey playoffs.

Friday morning he texted me that he was going to play golf. I had gotten to work super early so I could leave at a decent hour (it's hard having an hour commute after all these years of plane commuting). Traffic heading home was horrible and took an hour. That left me 20 minutes to make myself look decent enough to go on a second date. As I was rushing around trying to figure out what to wear and do something with my hair he called.

date: What do you want to eat?
me: What thai restaurant is it, I'll look up the menu.
d: I'll just order chicken.

A few minutes later he called me back:

d: It's going to take them 25 minutes for carry out and I don't want to wait, so can you pick the food up? I'll pay for it.

Now, think about that for a second. I spent 2 hours of my day commuting and 8 hours working. He was playing golf. And he picked a restaurant on Colfax where parking is, to put it mildly, a big fucking challenge (I ended up parking illegally and luckily did not get a ticket). The restaurant was a mile from his house but out of the way for me. But like an idiot, I agreed to pick up the food. The evening kind of went downhill from there.

1. When I arrived with the food, he served himself, then licked the spoon, then put the food on the floor and used the same spoon to dish some of the food into his dog's bowl. Then he handed me the spoon so I could get some food. I used my fork. Dogs eat feces and lick their ass. I am not going to use a utensil that touched their food bowl.

2. He talked to his dog more than he did to me.

3. Minutes into the hockey game he complained about his hurt wrist (truth told, his wrist is really fucked up, as is the hand attached to the wrist, it was his "fighting hand" when he played hockey) so I gave him a wrist massage and he fell asleep.

4. The only thing I learned about hockey is "icing" and when I told my mom she said "that's the first thing I learned about hockey, everyone knows that". Wait, that's not true, I learned something else. When I finally decided to ask a question, which was "why aren't the guys hitting each other in the ass with their hockey sticks" I was told "this is the play offs, you don't do stuff like that in the playoffs".

I may have also made a faux pas when I first walked into his TV room because he had a number of signed footballs and I said "oh, they were all signed by quarterbacks" (full disclosure, I knew two of the signatures were quarterbacks and extrapolated that all of the balls were signed by quarterbacks). He looked at me and said "of course". But it's not like quarterbacks are the only dudes that touch the ball. So why wouldn't a running back or what ever sign a football? Was that really such a stupid comment?

Oh well. The joys of dating.

I had told some people at work about my date so today everyone wanted to know how it went. I told them the story and they were all laughing at me and then this kid that I am going to be a mentor to regarding architecture said "how could any guy not like you?" And he seemed sincere. That was sweet, though he's young and naive (and funny - today he came in late and I called him a slacker and he said "I had to go to the dentist" and then he said "did they have dentists back when you were my age?"). And my friend Jess said "oh funny, the dog went on his first date".

Guess you have to laugh.