Dates, Figs and Various Other Types of Fruit

So I know that you have all been waiting with baited breath - I can't use that phrase without picturing a tiny, shocked worm desperately clinging to a teensy weensy hook, hanging from a minute piercing on the upper lip, while suspended over the gaping maw of someone's oesophagus: presumably someone did that once I 'd like to think unless there's a more prosaic reason for the phrase's evolution which would frankly be a bit disappointing - to see how my date went. Well so have I really! I am still waiting for a phonecall or email two weeks after the second date, which I was asked out on about 3/4 of the way through the firs date, which went exceptionally well. We met at a trendy cafe in Newtown, a funky inner city Sydney suburb, inside the Dendy arthouse cinema complex, and to my delight (I delight easily it seems) the man in question, Phillip, turned up in his work suit, looking suitably well dressed and handsome. So far so good. Thankfully there was a minimum of syllable-barren awkwardness, and we soon fell into a wide ranging discussion of our upbringings, backgrounds, families and the deteriorating geo-political situation in the Abkhazia region of the old USSR. Just kidding about the last bit but that would have been an interesting twist in the conversation. So engaging was the conversation, and so well did we get on that he asked me for a second date, even settling on the Thursday two days later.....

So fast forwarding to the Thursday, we agreed to meet at a funky (there's that word again but hey this is Newtown, and besides its a very cool word, right up with there with 'plethora' and 'soporific') Thai restaurant at 7 p.m. Only we didn't quite make it there, or in actual fact to anything resembling a real restaurant. He called me when I was already driving to the funky eatery (see you just can't use that word enough!) and proposed a switch of venue to the Taxi Club, which is just off Taylor Square, right in the heart of the gay heartland. All well and good, but City traffic is a bi-artch, and finding a parking spot recalls the search for the Yeti, Loch Ness Monster and Elvis all rolled into one gloriously frustrating quest, testing even the most half glass full of people (which would be me). As all sorts of funkiness slipped from my mind, replaced instead with 300-400 circuits of the roads around the Taxi Club, a lovely drive if you like construction work and bitumen, I had the vague feeling that this date was slipping into a coma even before it got going. But rallying my optimism (ya gotta love a Sagitarrian's ability to cultivate optimism), I persisted till dizziness (one too many circuits of the same block) and a dying wanderlust for discovering new and unknown neighbourhoods, forced me to call Phillip and propose another change of venue to Fox Studios, near where he lives. He didn't sound too thrilled but agreed and so being the nice guy that I am, proposed parking at Fox, and driving in his car - he has free parking - to the Taxi Club.

Happy to do this, we rocked up to the Taxi Club, and I wandered into something akin to a rundown RSL full of cross dressers (not an issue) and old carpet and ambience from a forgotten decade with bad decor. In its defense, I had one of the best salmon fillets EVER there and the French waiter, camp as an entire tent factory, was a lot of fun, and made ordering a vaudeville experience....and Phillip and I talked non stop....so mostly all good right? Well on paper yes, but something niggled at me as we drove back to Fox. Phillip had lost some sort of spark, and having not admitted to a yearning to marry him immediately (absent I can assure you), sympathies for right wing dictatorships (past or present), or a love of clog dancing to polka music at midnight while nude, I couldn't think of anything I could have said to put him off. There was much talk of keeping in touch via email and SMS over the next week, when he would be busy fixing up his rental house, and couldn't see me, and after a half-hearted hug that put human embraces back a few thousand years in terms of warmth and intimacy, he walked off, and though I tried to stay upbeat and positive, had a funny feeling that was it.....and it seems it has been. I am not entirely sure why gay man cut and run, and never even call you to say 'thanks but no thanks', but I find it faintly amusing that he thinks his rejection of me, when he didn't even know me, would send me into some sort of Cecil B deMille-esque melodramatic rant involving much crying, gnashing teeth and copious amounts of ash flung over hastily stitched together sackcloth. He would have actually got more of a mildy ambivalent shrug but let him run with his ridiculously over-inflated sense of his own magnetic attraction!

At least I found out he had great claim to flake status before he sucked me dry of money, hope or the will to live which some previous boyfriends have done. OK not the will to live, which I am rather fond of, but you get the idea. The upside to all this is that another man who said hello via the online personals at about the same time, had quietly snuck up the inside and he and I are well on the way to becoming brilliantly good friends, with the very real promise of more substantial things to come. Yes, happiness isn't as funny as dating disasters but I am happy to put aside witty barbs if it means I find true love...or as close you get to it in this life.....