The World According To Anne Arky

I am continuing to read our hometown newspaper, along with my other hometown newspapers, and continuing to make comments where I feel so moved. On at least two occasions, Mike has replied directly to my comments, once even addressing me, “Ms. Arky, blah blah blah.” All very nice and cordial, once even telling me about his mother’s death in 1993 and his children’s ages (all of which I already knew through prior sleuthing).

Yesterday, when I went in to read replies to articles, I noticed an article to which I was sure Mike had replied, and yet I didn’t see his reply. I went to his profile, where you can click on “comments” and see all comments made by that person, just to see if I had dreamed his reply to this article (not an article to which I had replied or planned to do so). Surprise – when I went to his profile, it was no longer there – gone were his posts and his photos of his kids and himself that he had posted previously. However, I later went back and recalled having seen some posts that had no name or identity of any kind on them, only the posting date and time, and lo and behold, they were him – or he were they, or whatever. The one post I went looking for is actually gone, but others previously made are there, including the one that he addresses to Ms. Arky, but anonymously.

I haven’t decided whether he has gone stealth or been suspended for making some kind of no-no remark. Watch and wait, I guess. I just couldn’t believe he would leave without saying “goodbye”. I mean, what kind of piece of shit would do that? O, but wait – he already did that. Been there, done that and got the t-shirt – 25 years ago in November, to be exact. This adventure has been amazing and, frankly, amusing as hell. I just can’t wait to see what happens next!

You knew I would return to the scene of the crime eventually, right? It’s been a strange – but not altogether bad – day today. I’ve had two vastly different internet connections today. The first one left me feeling like I’d been kicked in the teeth. For a history on the subject of the fate of the men in my past, see “Killer Queen 3/24/06” in Anne Arky Ology (someday I’ll learn to hyperlink, but not today). I just found out I have another victim to my credit: a guy I dated when I lived in Washington, DC, named John. I know I have expressed my passion for red-haired men, but I can’t remember if I’ve noted that I am also a fool for very tall men. John was 6’7”, with red hair, and he was best friends with the guy who was the manager of the bookstore where I worked part-time in DC (as opposed to the one where I work now). He also was a manager of another store in that same chain. Now let’s see – red-haired, excessively tall, manages a bookstore – a PERFECT MATCH, wouldn’t you say? Well, I certainly thought so. I was quite smitten, even though some of the other people in my store warned me that he was hopelessly geeky. But I LIKE geeky! He was also a science fiction fan, and I have always been surrounded by sci-fi people, although not because I are one. As a matter of fact, I aren’t one. I have no interest in science fiction whatsoever, and never have had, but I have always attracted people who are – friends AND lovers – and the only thing I could figured was that either I’m a latent sci-fi freak and getting everything else out of the way first before I start reading that genre, or the science fiction people are the only ones freaky enough to appreciate someone who is as far outside the universe as I am, and I’m so far-out that only the science fiction people can even believe I exist!

Anyway, this morning I was talking to a friend of mine and telling her about John and how in 2001, at the bookstore where I now work, I found his name in the inventory data base of our bookstore as an author. I hunted him down then on the internet and found an email address, wrote and asked if it was him. He wrote back and said yes, it was him, and with a name like his (John is one of his names, but not the one he goes by or publishes under), it isn’t likely it would be anyone BUT him. I wrote back and told him about the day I found someone with my name in the obituary column locally – same first name, middle initial AND last name, and only three years younger than me, so a lot of people thought it WAS me. Anyway, we wrote back and forth a few times, and then it kind of dropped off. After I hung up this morning with my friend, I went in search of John’s email address and thought I’d drop him a “catch-up” email, which I did, and it immediately came back “invalid email address”. So I googled him. (See? I’m shameless – I go and track down everybody I’ve ever known at some point or another.) I found him in Wikipedia…dead! No, he didn’t die in Wikipedia – but he himself had written the first part of the Wikipedia entry about him, as evidenced by the fact that it is fraught with his crazy brand of humor. When I got to the part about his having died, I thought maybe that was just some of his macabre sense of humor coming right to the surface, but several other sites that came up under his name also showed death notices and eulogies. He was only 51 years old, and died of a massive heart attack in 2006.

Damn!

John and I didn’t date very much or for very long, for which I was really sorry, but I always felt a certain fondness for him. Our first date was a Joan Jett concert, and he really got into the music, rocking out. So much so that he tore the stadium seats from their welded-in concrete slab they were attached to! When we talked that night, he prefaced a dozen or more sentences with “Until three years ago, I had never…” fill in the blank with “gone to a concert”, “gone to a movie”, or whatever your imagination can compose. I forget whether he told me or someone else had told me, but until “three years ago”, John had apparently been a humongous force with which to be reckoned – fucking enormous, from all accounts – and had pretty much been that way all of his life and been devoid of any kind of social life, for the most part.

In writing about my mother’s death and subsequent funeral, I mentioned that I am a “weird” magnet, which is true. I am also a virgin magnet (men only, please), which is not only true, but VERY weird, especially at my advanced age of 51. I vowed when Mike and I split up that I was done dealing in virgins, as I had been a virgin magnet for my entire love life up to that point, and I was tired of being stuck with the dubious task of teaching males how to behave on dates – not to fart or pick their noses, etc. – and how to treat a girl right, and then either watching them go off and be model boyfriends to some other girl or getting stuck with them interminably for remedial training (see “Marriage – Mike”). God, I hate that! Nothing worse than a man on training wheels, for Christ’s sake! So while the virgins I have magnetized may not necessarily be virgins in the strictest sense of the word, they have almost never had a real relationship with a woman, or whatever, and I decided at the tender age of 27 that I was only going to date men who were no fewer than five years older than me, figuring that if he isn’t deflowered by the age of 32, he never would be, so he wouldn’t be bothering with me anyway. WRONG!

John was exactly 32 when we started dating, and I can only swear to two dates that we had. If we had a third one, I can’t remember it, which is really sad. Anyway, he was 32 and I was 30, and at no time did he ever hold my hand, put his arm around me or anything at all other than escort me and pay my way. It was a refreshing cry from the “I bought you dinner, now you owe me”, but a girl likes some skin now and again, don’cha know. (My prudish aunt featured in “Fine Lace and Dirty Linen” on 5/9/07 told me so herself.) Every time we went out, when he took me home, he slowed down to 35 MPH and tossed me out at the door, and I referred to our dating as “drive-by dating”. That’s pretty much what it felt like. I couldn’t decide whether he just really wasn’t interested, or he just didn’t know how to proceed beyond asking me out, escorting me and paying my way. I always had a feeling that his “Until three years ago I had never…” could very well have included “…gone on a date” or beyond. For that matter, I wasn’t sure if he EVER beyonded, three years ago or otherwise. I guess because I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt of being insecure and not just another asshole in a long list of many (as much because I was generous to him as to assuage my own ego), I always remained fond of him in spite of the fact that our relationship was on a slow (but brief) track to nowhere. The last time I can remember seeing him was in my bookstore, where his best friend was my boss, and the only thing I can remember him saying was something about how he guessed I wore a lot of jewelry EVERYWHERE. Guess he figured out that all my jewelry wasn’t just for show for him. (It’s all costume, mostly cloisonné.) For some reason, he deemed that significant. Maybe he thought I was some big city vamp (see “I Love Lucy” episode of Cousin Ernie’s visit) out to snare him with my baubles and bangles. Yeah, right. Anyway, at some later time, I will discuss the 42-year-old guy who crossed my path in the 1990s and became known as the Cincinnati Virgin. But that’s another story.

None of John’s obituaries or post-mortems listed a wife as a survivor, and no kids were listed, so I don’t know if he never had a wife or just no longer had one. He didn’t mention it in his emails to me, and I never could figure out how to broach the subject with him in our emails.

The second internet connection was the result of my emailing a guy who writes for my hometown paper, about an article he’d written. I complimented his article, and gave him a couple of additional facts and a correction (Miss Know-It-All here). He wrote me back today and asked if I was the person who had written such-and-such a book and if I still lived in Georgia. I wrote him back and said yes, I am, and yes, I do. (Yes, I did have a book published in 1997.) He wrote back and said he LOVES that book – his wife gave it to him for Christmas some years ago, and he even has it in the bibliography of HIS book, and gave me the title. WOW! That was a big ego boost! I’ve been bibliographied, and I never even knew it! I know that paper mentioned my book in an article they published on a local subject (the book itself is nonfiction and written about the local area), and that was an ego kick; my mother sent me the article; now I may have to go find it to see if HE wrote THAT article, too! My book, which is out of print now, was the second one of its type to be written about that area, and several more of the same type have been written and published about it (same publisher, too – thanks a heap!), so for anyone even to remember mine, much less with such enthusiasm, is quite flattering. We’ve exchanged several emails today, and my ego is so boosted, I may not come down for days! Yippee!