Male Feelings
I had an amazing date today. We managed to talk for 2.5 hours before even realizing we’ve been sitting there that long. She had to leave to meet up with a friend driving in from out of town, otherwise we could have easily done another hour or longer and had a great time. I’m hoping she sees me as a dating candidate, because she’s insanely attractive, kind, and intelligent.
One of my drummers and I have loosely agreed to get together from time to time and play some songs that are on the more difficult side. He and I share a love for proggy heavy metal so it is kind of a perfect match to have a musical “gym buddy” to learn these harder song with and be better musicians. Since our band’s practice was cancelled, I was on cloud 20 from my date earlier, I wanted to continue having a few drinks and laughs. I wasn’t ready to quit.
While waiting between work and for my drummer to get done with his job, I spend some time prepping food for my Cinco De Mayo party and talking with my youngest child. He divulged some of the tawdry details of his recent breakup. And me being a little buzzed, I shared some of mine. Nothing surprising to anyone that scans through this blog, however a lot of it was shocking to him. Something I learned way too late in life is that I expected that when I was an adult, that I’d have some shit figured out. Turns out I don’t have fucking anything figured out and that shit never changes. I’m terrible in completely new ways at relationships, but terrible nonetheless.
Eventually my bandmate is ready and I go down to meet him. We wind up talking, having a couple beers, playing through a few songs, and we come to realize that our bandmate that cancelled is under some duress. Despite it being our other bandmate’s birthday, we wind up heading to go meet the canceller. We stop and grab some beer on our way and drink in the front yard with him and his kid. He’s legitimately going through a really shitty time. His partner broke up with him, but they’re still living together. She gets fucked up and doesn’t come home for a long time, doesn’t communicate, falls asleep in the bathtub drunk, and generally is not reliable to be a parent. The shitty thing is that my bandmate was very much in love with her. So watching the self destruction, feeling the rejection, and having to be basically a single parent cannot be an easy cocktail to swig.
We managed to talk about what was going on. It wasn’t surface level, there was deep and painful shit coming up which is different from most of my male friends. What was the same was the veil of laughing it off together. I’m pretty sure women would be bawling together and hugging each other. We were drinking, laughing, and making jokes about hard, mean, cruel shit. It’s better than nothing, but seems like it’s just cracking the surface. It ended up helping out our bandmate a lot in feeling less lonely, but we didn’t really resolve anything. It’s just a band aid for now. but knowing the fallacy that “being an adult would mean I have answers,” what the hell is the point of demanding some permanent fix as a viable solution? Fuck, I’d be fine just getting by as a stack of bandaids.