I have to ask why sometimes

I have to ask why I do what I do.

Why do I go out alone?
Simply because I enjoy the control I have over myself, alone. Roaming in crowds across a cityscape cloaked in night requires coordination, friends, and concessions to others' needs/desires/schedules. When you go out alone, you time everything perfectly, kairos perfected.

Why do I chase young women?
You chase young women because you think you can. You think you're hot. You think you have a chance. You are easily duped by a 20-something smile and think that your whole life has just come to a head and "This is your opportunity kid. Go get her, champ."

Why do I fail miserably at meeting anyone?
As the above indicate you crave control and one of the ways you can ensure a consistent single guy's experience out on the scene is to ensure you go for low-probability encounters with young women. Game, set, match.

Granted I can ensure that I am not a creep. I would never take advantage of a young woman who was too drunk. In fact, I make a point to never ever try to bed a drunk woman I've just met. That's the stuff that leads to rape accusations televised from within high offices across the land. The fact that men get into this kind of trouble speaks to the kinds of men who become leaders and the behaviors they possess, which are parlayed into aspirations toward leadership positions.

I am soft. I am scared. I play this kind of sheepish man child out and about, always alone, never leaving with anyone, almost never. I'm a wild card. Women want knowledge. They want control. I came to this conclusion before I heard psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson confirm it: women prefer to date men they find less intelligent than them so that they can exercise a modicum of control.

I recall one evening in the early months of 2017. The conversation of my past emerged at this bar I frequent, and the one gal I've had my eyes on since we laid eyes on each other heard about my doctoral education and she audibly said "Fuck." This is the same girl who, that same night, responded to a story retold by my friend about my being play-raped because I had to play Daisy when me and my brother and his friend played 'Dukes of Hazzard' with the comment. "I love that story."

These things speak to women, the children they raise into men, and the kind of world that shapes what will become their conscientious decision making regime, their identity, their notion of what a man should be, a woman's, and their roles in tandem, together forever and ever amen.

That will not be my conclusion because the feminist in me suggests that I am blaming women. Well I am blaming them no more than I am blaming the supervisory slaves who would whip, train, and abuse their kind in order to reproduce an existent social system in the antebellum South of the United States.

I enjoy clarity, but it's a clarity of one, and so far as I try to share that clarity with others it comes off as solitary delusion. Facts, alternative factions, fiction, myth, legend such pocks the road of life that I try to navigate by character-revealing deeds, not words.

And on that note. I fail at attracting anyone outside of a smile, some dimples, a well-shaped skull, a fit body, and some blue eyes. Once those dimples crease and words begin to spill out, I am done, utterly fucking done. The whole facade reveals an ant lion's den a seemingly innocuous oval of sand under which a larval creature awaits to ambush whatever arthropod may cross.

I am not a creep. I am not a predator. I undo everything with an obsessively overwrought self-obsession with the finger-chewing personal audit. In a sense, I am stuck in pause, and the complete lack of confidence revealed by my self-abusive audition undoes any attractive features I once possessed.