Jack Kerouac said it was a shame how boys and girls in America have such a sad time together nowadays…and that was in 1949. I think if Jack Kerouac got into a time machine and arrived in 2024, and happened to be shown a smart phone with Tinder and Bumble on it, he would jump off the nearest bridge or walk in front of a bus. Or, to really drive home the point, in front of a self-driving car.

Answer me this question: when was the last time you slow danced? Who’s wedding was it, and did the venue reopen after COVID? Or was is it your prom?

If you are under 40, you might not realize that slow dancing was a common occurrence for a hundred prior years, until about 15 years ago. If you don’t believe me, watch a rom-com from the 90s like When Harry Met Sally. Or Harvey, from the 1950s. Or talk to me and I can tell you about the halcyon days of 10, 20 years ago when, if there was a live band at a bar or gala, there would be 4-5 slow dances, and that was part of the whole evening…figuring out which girls were single and asking them to dance when a slow song came on. For me the last time was the gala for the Boys and Girls Club of Albany in 2018 and the girl’s name was Christina and I didn’t know her that night and we never hung out after that (her choice, but that’s the point, you could just ask a girl to dance and it wasn’t super high pressure because it was common).

Slow dancing was the ultimate euphemism. You were as close as you could be in public, feeling if your partner had rhythm, smelling their pheromones, feeling the texture of their skin, smelling their hair, looking into the irises of their soul.

When you slow danced, you knew whether you wanted to go further. It was Practice.

You can’t dance over a dating app. But you also can’t dance at a bar anymore, because slow dance music isn’t played at bars. And you can’t dance at a dance, because there aren’t dances anymore.

There isn’t much that is romantic anymore.

Statements like “there isn’t much that is romantic anymore” get me in trouble with the women I would be dating.

Even though it cuts both ways and men are equally, if not more to blame…nonetheless if I say “nobody is romantic anymore” women tend to hear “oh here is this asshole getting mad because women don’t want to have it as their life’s goal to be barefoot and pregnant while the man goes to the office and sleeps with the secretary.”

I think this might stem from a narrow view of the meaning of the word “romantic.” Words change over time and I think if you were to ask a young single person what romantic means, they might say “oh like candles and going out on a date where the music is low and the guy pulls out a chair and it’s all old fashioned.”

They might add, “it’s a whole vibe.”

Which, I guess, it can be a whole vibe, but really, “romantic” need not be an all or nothing characteristic, and it certainly doesn’t need to be limited to dating.

Here are three examples of things I consider romantic that aren’t about sex:

1) I like to boil a kettle of water and pour it into a tea pot I’ve owned for 9 years with two black tea bags and one lavender tea bag, and float an orange slice, and then lay out a red paisley place mat and drink the pot in small cupfuls over the course of three hours while I read at my dining room table.

2) I like to bathe, then shave and iron a three-piece suit, and go to a bar with jazz with a Moleskinne notebook with a black pen and order an Old Fashioned with Seagrams V.O. and a splash of club soda and mix the cocktail with a the stirrer-straw and then let it sit for one minute to “age” before I take a sip.

3) Even if I’m working remotely, or working on writing rather than salaried work, I like to shave and don slacks and a button-up shirt, play jazz, and make a cocktail to “get into character” before I begin a cerebral task.

What makes these things “romantic?” I think part of it is that none of the little things I do preparatory to whatever the task I have before me are necessary. They are all superfluous. I could read without 8 minutes of tea making and then supping. I could go to a bar without bathing and shaving and then writing in a notebook. I could fill in my spreadsheets and read my work reports without donning slacks and a button up shirt.

But what would that leave? Reading, going to a bar, and working. Like a robot would do those things. Because robots are efficient to a fault. I imagine Data from Star Trek asking Geordi LaForge:

”Commander, why do humans find it necessary to ask about weather, or to observe details of a room’s architecture, when they are within close proximity of another human? Would it not be more efficient to save one’s breath and simply state that one would like their interlocutor to hand them a wrench, or to copulate?”

Yes, it would be more efficient. But efficiency is not the measure of Good Living. I’d go so far as to say that efficiency is a measure of how quickly one is Racing Toward Death. Efficiency is robotic. Efficiency is what one employs when they are competing against time.

I would prefer not to constantly compete against time. For one thing, time will always win against an organic creature like me, whose existence is very much defined by time from the moment I am born until the moment I die.

Romance is a protest against time. Romance slows time, or our perception of it. You light a candle, you eat a meal that it took time to cook but which provides only marginally more nutrients than a frozen/microwaved meal, you lay out placemats and make a cocktail, you play music that you don’t need to hear to digest. You do these things, and they make you different than your dog or your cat that consumes the food placed in front of them like an automaton sucking up sustenance without pleasure. Because you are capable of controlling your environment; you are capable of controlling your perception of time, while a cat or a dog is not.

Romantic gestures are signals of interpersonal respect, because one person acts in an inefficient way to prolong their time with another person in a superfluous way, and the other person accepts the prolongation of the experience superfluously because they enjoy spending time with the first person.

First-date dinners, slow dancing, telephone conversations…these increasingly rare experiences are indicative of a general aversion to romance. Because romance is “a whole vibe” and “I ain’t got time for that.”

And yet, it seems like people do crave human connections and regret that they can’t experience them. Dating does still exist, and lots of single people still envy other people who are in relationships. Dating apps are a dime a dozen and thousands of people are on them for every 10-mile radius superimposed over any particular portion of a google map. It is still a general “goal of two Ones who share proximity on the physical plane to gain a double Oneness on the metaphysical plane,” as Johnny 5 told Benjamin in Short Circuit 2.

The problem is, most people are Doing It Wrong!

I mentioned as a Facebook update the other day that I went out on Saturday to Ryan’s Wake in Troy, and it was like having a martini at a mannequin factory. That’s not a dig at Ryan’s Wake, or the people there. There is a higher concentration, and a larger number, of good looking people at Ryan’s Wake than any bar in Troy. It’s just that all of those people just Stand There, I don’t think they play any music, and there is no cultural common ground like slow dances to bring any of the single people together.

And it does NOT seem to me that most of the people at a place like Ryan’s Wake are out because they want to be left alone. It doesn’t seem like they are out to blow off steam either. If you want to blow off steam there are cheaper places to get drunk and be loud. You go to Ryan’s Wake because you want to look your best and be in the place where other people are looking their best and you hope maybe you might meet some of those people. And then you will be someone who looks their best talking to someone who you think looks good. And then maybe you will talk to them and Do A Shot and then one of you might Ask The Other One For Their Cell Phone Number and later you might text each other and decide to get a drink on a Wednesday night and then you might have a couple of drinks and Have Sex With Each Other and then you are Dating.

Guys and gals have such a sad time together these days.

I think the problem is technology. Guys and gals are both competing against it.

It wasn’t that long ago that women were competing, dating wise, against air-brushed Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition models. And then they were competing against porn actresses. And now even porn actresses are competing against AI girlfriends that you can program to look however you want and say whatever you want them to say…but you can’t touch them or feel their presence. And men have been competing against machines since the time of John Henry and the steam engine minimizing their productive value, and now there are sex machines for women to go along with the porn for men, and nobody needs the other sex to get off. And there are Instagram and Facebook to highlight the best parts of your “friend”s lives, like they are existential successes and you existentially suck. And there are Tinder and Bumble and Hinge matches so you can have a “connection” if you scroll through one or two thousand people…so you don’t feel isolated.

But it turns out a “match” on a dating site isn’t really a connection, in the way that two people in close proximity can feel that they share a connection (like, for example, if they slow dance). And it is hard to remember that all of those Facebook and Instagram people are only showing you the best parts of their lives. So people feel isolated and not doing as well as other people, and their  electronic “connections” are bullshit, and they go to the bar to be physically close to other human beings.

But then, at the bar (remember there is no such thing as a dance anymore, and certainly not slow dances) there are no “conventions” or situations to bring people together, because of the general suspicion of romance.

I was struck, on Saturday at Ryan’s Wake, by the way that so many girls and guys in their groups just stood there, arms kind of wrapped around their own chests like cold birds protecting themselves, yet with longing looks on their faces, making eye contact with other people in other groups, and then quickly looking down at the floor.

Probably I should have gotten up and walked over and inserted myself into a group of young women standing alone for hours and made up some conversation and suffered the slings and arrows of derision by their friends, because I was out there to meet girls like them and didn’t do anything to make that happen either.

But that’s a pretty tough “ask,” especially when I’ve done that before and been scowled at by the girl and all her friends, and seen friends try to do that and get scowled at by the group.

If only there were some place where there was music, and every now and then a slow song. Because then I would just ask a girl to dance. It is much easier to talk to a girl when you are dancing than when you are surrounded by scowling friends. And then, I could ask for her phone number, and maybe talk to her on the phone, and see if she wanted to get dinner at an Italian restaurant with candles, before which  we might both bathe and wear Nice Clothes, implicitly acknowledging that we enjoy passing time together, rather than speeding through it as efficiently as possible.

“Dream on, Johnny,” as Johnny 5 said, in Short Circuit 2.

No, there is almost no room for slow dancing and first-date candles and meeting-in-person in the modern dating scene. And that is why boys and girls in America have such a sad time together, today. Continue reading Dating— (Hint: It’s Supposed To Be Pleasant) →

Written at the bar of Emry’s Garden, 2 King Street in Troy, New York; Brian Bartending, April 10th, 2024.

It has been a goal of mine for the lat 19 years to take a raft down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. It goes back to 2005, when I was 21, and my friends and I were trying to build a raft and float down the Hudson River to Manhattan. That particular endeavor took me 5 years, saw 7 iterations of increasingly complex vessels constructed, and cost me about $20,000. Since the Hudson from Albany to NYC is around 150 miles, and the Ohio and Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans is roughly 2,000 miles, logically, “the Mississippi Trip” should take me 66.3 years, require 93.3 different vessels, and cost me $266,666.

I jest, of course. Luckily, we rational animals learn from our mistakes and each time we approach a challenge we do a better job at execution.

[It is funny to me that “execution” means both “to follow through on a task” and “to kill someone.” For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to construct this joke, but I haven’t gotten it yet. It would be like, “What did one Roman say to the other Roman when they got done crucifying Spartacus? …. You really nailed the execution. Wacka wacka wacka. Too soon? Geeze I didn’t realize there were so many Spartacus fans in the crowd…”]

I did try, and fail, rather spectacularly, to go 2,000 miles from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 2018. If you are one of those rare few people who have Facebook, I had a Facebook page called Float of the Phoenix if you care to see pictures and see some video with top of the line cinematography [the best you can get with an iPhone leaning against a cooler on a sinking vessel.] There are cobwebbed posts on this site about the construction.

It was made from two pontoons made from 55 gallon drums, procured from a car wash [they’d contained soap] and duck-taped into pontoon-shapes and fiberglassed. The pontoons worked very very well, but I built and tested the boat here in New York, then had to take it apart and transport it to Pittsburgh in a 20 foot Uhaul, and while I was in the process of re-constructing it with my ship-mate Sam on a boat ramp at Silky’s Crows’ Nest Marina in Sharpsburgh (just up the Allegheny from Pittsburgh Point), the area got hit with Hurricane Florence, which totally flooded the entire region and valley such that for the next 45 days we only saw one other pleasure boat on the river, the rest having been wrecked or taken out of the river for the season. Towns were flooded up to their Main Streets. We had to jettison weight after our center hull ruptured and pulled our boat under the water. We spent two weeks marooned on Davis Island [including Sam’s 30th birthday] until someone from Pittsburgh NORML saw us on Facebook, got a boat and crew, and pulled us against the current back into the center of the river so we could proceed through the first Ohio River lock. Unfortunately our fourth-hand motor died, and our second, second-hand motor also died, and after 45 days we had only made it to Portsmouth, Ohio, at the confluence of the Scioto River, 365 out of 2,000 miles downstream, by mid-October, when it fell below freezing at night, the boat had no propulsion, was sinking, and I was so broke I had to ask my mother to put $600 into my checking account at KeyBank in Ravena so I could afford an Enterprise Rent-a-Car to drive me, Sam, and some of our belongings back to New York. Later that winter I got a call from a nice officer from the Shawneetown Marina who told me that my boat had completely sunk, and a few months later, a woman Facebook Messaged me that she had salvaged pieces of my boat from the river bottom and it was now functioning as a faux-sunken boat flower bed near the pond in her front yard.

That was October of 2018, and I was broke and, at 34, had to move back into my parent’s basement. I called the manager at El Loco, the Mexican restaurant in Albany where I’d worked, and got a shift the next day. A month and a half later I started working as Insurance Analyst for the central staff of the New York State Assembly, where I had worked as an analyst 2007-12 and 2014-16. But I realized I needed to have some sort of passive income if I was going to try to do a months-long trip again. So I read some real estate books, worked three jobs, and bought a two-family in Troy to subsidize my rent and to sublet when I was away.

I was promoted so that I had 5 Legislative Committees under my jurisdiction (Corporations, Labor, Governmental Employees, Real Property Tax, Science and Technology and later Insurance) and then COVID happened. Between March 6, 2020 and June of 2021 I ended up working every single day, including weekends and holidays, except for 8 days.  No remote opportunities. A “leadership position” that paid substantially less than $100,000. My money went into house repairs and my time went into doing those repairs, because it costs 1/10th of what a contractor charges if you do the work yourself, and thanks to boatbuilding I had lots of tools and some experience doing construction work (plus a healthy appreciation of the fact that there is no “right way” to do something, and if you mess it up you just re-do it and it is still less expensive than using a contractor.)

By the end of 2022 I was burned out from 4 years of 80-120 hour weeks with almost no time off. I want to observe that some employers view “burned out” as a temporary state that you recover from after a couple days of rest. No, burned out is a permanent state. If you burn out a circuit, it will not work, no matter how long you let it sit there. You have to replace at least one electronic component because it has been physically destroyed. I got an offer to work for an Executive Agency with a substantially better salary, 9-5 hours, and remote work opportunities and I took it. Combined with 2-family home-ownership, that was the final piece of the puzzle to enable me to start thinking about a trip down the Mississippi again.

One pre-requisite for taking a vessel 2,000 miles is to actually possess, or better yet to own,  a vessel.

On the one hand, there is a substantial price difference in second hand boats (and I only want second, third or fourth hand boats, because I like to ram them and beach them and screw things into them and not worry because they are new and pretty) in Albany versus in rural PA or OH. So it would make sense to go overland to Pittsburgh and buy a boat there. But then I would miss out on the part that I like, which is designing some contraption after drawing sketches on cocktail napkins, hearing people say that the design is inefficient and unwarranted, and being motivated out of spite to figure out a way to put the pieces together so that I can say “I told you so” for a day or two until it breaks.

My first attempt at procuring a “kernel” of a vessel—something to serve as a center hull and power plant— was a 1973 yellow used fire-boat from Saratoga county, which I named Daphne.

What I liked is that Daphne was a center-hull boat, essentially a work boat. I had transitioned from wanting to take a “raft” down the rivers. I pictured putting a crane and lift to bring cargo onto the boat, and to retrieve artifacts off the bottom of the river along the way. I took Daphne out magnet fishing on the Hudson and the Schodack Creek. But after three times on the Hudson, the motor stopped working and she’s now been at my mechanic’s for 3 years. They don’t make the outboard  brand that’s on Daphne anymore, and the motor is the most expensive part of a boat. She went into the shop in 2021 and that was when I was working 120 hour weeks and I kind of forgot about her until a couple of months ago. My mechanic thinks he can get her running again with spare parts, but I am wary of how much money to pour into a boat if I can find another with a better engine. And worried about her breaking down on the Ohio and not being able to find replacement parts.

So last year I found a boat on Facebook Marketplace which has a 1959 Lyman hull and a 1965 Mercury 50 HP outboard. When I went up to Saratoga to look at her, the owner opened up the engine cowling and it was the cleanest second hand engine I’ve ever seen. I bought her and brought her home and she started and ran like a horse who’d eaten two dozen oysters, no problems at all. If I pushed her up to 20 mph I might as well have poured gas over the gunwales into the water, but she moved, man, she moved.

She was the best boat I’ve ever owned, and I’ve build or bought 11 boats not counting kayaks and canoes. I planned to use her for a center hull and to make a second boat which floated on two pontoons, which this boat could park underneath for protection, but also move, like a tug boat that fit at the back and also within a barge.

It’s a great idea. But the best laid plans of mice and men….

I was doing great at the beginning of January. Took the month off of drinking. On the 9th I have a journal entry about how great I was feeling, and how I had a clear mind and clean house and that allowed me to wake up at 6:30 am and take a bath and read and then leave for work early and therefore not get late to work because of an accident on the highway. And I had a full fridge and I was going to the gym three days a week.

And on January 10th there was a big wind storm and a tree fell on my Jeep, on my garage, on my pergola, on the canopy over my boat, and on my boat itself.

Trees company…

That was January 10th. Today is April 10th and my Jeep is still in the shop. Luckily my parents live nearby and have an extra truck I’ve been able to use, or I’d have had to spend thousands of dollars to Uber to work since my rental ran out after 30 days. I lease my Jeep so that’s $630 a month that I give to Chrysler Capital for nothing. I’ll never lease again. But the boat is salvageable.

It has been a long, dreary, sunless winter here in upstate New York. In January my dad, 67, cut the tree up, and I split it by hand, but its resin wood, which is no good for firewood. By March my yard was clear and I was able to untangle the mangled aluminum poles of the canopy that I’d put over the boat, twisted and tied like dinosaur bones doing yoga.

I extricated the boat and trailer from the yard. It had been impressed down into the mud by the tree, and towed her into the driveway so I could assess the damage.

The trailer is twisted such that I don’t think I can take her on the road. The hull has a hole where the tree forced her down onto the trailer which punctured the bottom. The bow is damaged, the dash and driving mechanism has been smashed, and the windshield has been transformed into myriad smithereens.

But she is salvageable! I can fix her below-waterline hole, and honestly I don’t care that much how she looks above the waterline as long as she floats.

It is now getting to be nice weather, with sunshine that continues after I finish my day job work for the day. I’ll have this baby floating by May 15th. And now I have a Hobie Cat catamaran to deconstruct and turn this into a “trimaran” or three-hulled boat. That will be the subject of my next post.