I made the fatal mistake of going on a date at a wine bar a few days ago. It's always a terrible idea to go somewhere you don't normally like going on a first date. It's bad enough meeting someone for drinks, as if the presence of alcohol can somehow counterbalance the fact that neither of you could come up with something more amusing than sitting at a table to interview one another. Wine bars are the absolute worst possible location for a date this formal and uninspired.
Wine bars are corrupt temples of conspicuous consumption. They're about appreciating the arcana of labels and the security of assimilating with the dictums of some higher authority's assurances of "quality." The fundamental snobbery of only serving wine is a kind of passive-aggressive apologia for even having to stoop so low as to serve alcohol in the first place. I enjoy drinking wine, but I don't think it needs to be its own exclusionary activity, taking place in metropolitan back alleys with names that invariably involve the word "hotel."
I like drinking. It can taste nice and be refreshing. I like the wastefulness of buying expensive champagne and booze that comes with illegible family crests on the label. But I wouldn't do it if I didn't get drunk. I also like buying libations that come with bright orange stickers that say "$2.25" of "$1.79."Being drunk feels good, and this makes drinking a perfect social activity. Who wouldn't want to spend as much time as possible feeling good in the company of other people? So why make that process of getting drunk and socializing an affair that celebrates social stratification? Is that a hint of cantaloupe? Indeed. Most unusual for a Shiraz. Here's fourteen dollars.
So but anyway, there I was drinking something bubbly and Spanish, chatting with a cute marine biologist with an Audrey Hepburn haircut and a teal sundress draped loosely over her browned skin. I was attracted to this woman, but I kept zoning out as she explained her job. It wasn't long before we were talking about Jeffrey Sachs and how everyone in international development is doing it wrong. When I sensed a long monologue coming on, I'd let my mind wander a little bit. "Is this a bad date?" I kept wondering.
I was with someone I was attracted to; enough at least. We seemed to have similar interests, and played well together, alternately bloviating about how to fix Congo and cure AIDS. I might as well have been talking to a long-lost uncle at some distant relative's wake. I kept thinking that I should kiss her. "Maybe that will snuff out these long strings of baseless anecdotes," I thought. We saw an opening on a couch across the bar and moved from our barstools. As I walked behind her I noticed what a big and rounded ass was hiding underneath her loose fighting cotton dress. It occurred to me that she had a grandmother's ass, though I don't really know where that idea came from aside from some vague associations with plumpness. This got me started thinking about sex.
Thinking about sex with your date after an hour of dry conversation is probably a bad sign, especially when you're not listening very carefully to anything they say. Attraction is easy, and generally beyond our control. Feeling that kind of vague attraction to my date while still managing to be totally bored by her was awkward and surprising, like getting an erection in the middle of a meeting at work. I realized we were bullshitting each other. Running our mouths about stuff that seemed like it fit in the formal equation of our first date, in the same way that asking the bartender for an "earthy" Italian red seemed appropriate. It wasn't actually this woman that I was attracted to, it was the insinuation of something underneath her wispy clothes that had launched my imagination. I wasn't thinking about her at all.
After another hour of limpid conversation I started yawning. She did too. "Do you want to go somewhere else?" she asked. "I got up pretty early this morning, but I will if you want to," I said.
"No, I'm pretty tired too."
And with that things came to an end with a hug and a kiss on the cheek at her car. We should have taken forties to the park and played Stranger Chicken (in which you dare each other to approach random strangers to complete an invented task) into the waxy hours of the night. I'm never going on another first date at a wine bar again.
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