Killin' time with three strange cats

Since I have a bit of time to kill, I thought I might start going back in time and visiting those lovely little blips on the radar about whom I've yet to pontificate.

PoPo

In his ad, PoPo detailed three not-so-lovely dates he’d had with women he met on CL. Though these women differed from one another greatly (based on his descriptions of them, of course), they had one thing in common: they completely misrepresented themselves to PoPo before meeting him. I was highly amused by his ad and responded with (very) abbreviated versions some of my “favorite” CL stories of guys who turned out to be something other than what they said (Ice Cream Guy and Frank).

PoPo responded to my message almost immediately and asked me out after a couple of witty exchanges. He wanted to meet that evening. I told him that was a bit too fast for me. We hadn’t even exchanged the most basic of information. He apologized, saying he only asked me out because he was about to head into a meeting and wasn’t sure when we would catch each other again, and he told me a bit about himself. The only thing I remember about him now is that he said he was a cop.

Great. Fantastic. All I need is a cop! My best friend from high school is married to a cop. He's an asshole. Most cops are. I happen to believe most cops are overgrown bullies. With guns. And legal backing. I’m not a fan.

I wrote him back, the main bit of information in this message being something along the lines of, “Since you’re in law enforcement, you should know that I occasionally participate in activities deemed illegal in our fine, fine country.”

I never heard from him again.

Lurch

This guy. He’s everywhere. I responded to one of his ads many, many months ago. After going out with shorty after shorty, Lurch’s main selling point for me was his height. He’s tall. Really tall. Lurch tall. We exchanged some instant messages. There was nothing great about him, and contact eventually stopped. After that, he responded to every ad I posted (the one I posted for Roommate… more on that later). When I opened the message and recognized his photos, I told him we’d talked before and it wasn’t going to work. He wanted to know why, said he didn’t remember talking to me, etc., so we had several exchanges. There was nothing flirtatious about them, but we sometimes chatted after that. I viewed him as another dater who occasionally popped up in my buddy window. Just as before, our occasional IMing eventually tapered off, and I removed him from my contacts.

When he responded to Roommate’s ad, I told her to stay away, primarily because he seems to respond indiscriminately to every single ad in Women Seeking Men. When he responded to the next ad I posted for myself, I wrote back to tell him that he’d responded to every single ad I’d posted. This started another round between us, ending when he finally said he didn’t remember what I looked like and asked for my photo. I sent him one I had handy, which was primarily of my face. He asked for my height, weight, and measurements. Something like this transpired next:

Belle: Seriously?
Lurch: Yes
Belle: You get girls to tell you that?
Lurch: Yeah. Unless they have a picture in a bikini.
Belle: Yeah. I’ll get right on that.

Um, so, yeah. I know I could be more fit. I’m doing everyone a favor by not getting in a bikini and doing myself a favor by having no pictures of me in a bikini floating around. But this guy… while his photos depict a reasonably well-proportioned guy, they also depict a freakishly tall guy with features that seem somewhat alien and distorted. I say good luck to him in his quest, but leave me the fuck out of it.

The Blind Guy

Totally bored one afternoon, I responded to a one-liner in the “Strictly Platonic” section of CL requesting an IM buddy. Pretty much immediately, The Blind Guy started grilling me. While I was really just looking for someone to pass time talking with, he seemed to be interviewing me for the very vacant position of Wife. (Or at least Serious Girlfriend.) In no time at all, he was detailing his last relationship and asking me about my dating history.

He told me he was about an hour outside Boston, which made me question why he posted on the D.C. site. (I would’ve also asked why he posted in Strictly Platonic, but by that time I’d seen where he posted in Men Seeking Women, too.) This led to him revealing that he’s been completely blind since birth* and asking if I could handle something like that. I answered honestly; I don’t know if I could handle something like that. I’ve never dated a blind person. Hell, I don’t even know any blind people. To know if I could handle it, I’d have to at least have some exposure to the situation.

What I did know was that I wasn’t in a dating mood that day (which is why I was in Strictly Platonic to begin with) and that when he said he wasn’t even in the area, I wasn’t interested in dating him. Long-distance, from what I gather, is hard enough when it’s between two people who’ve been living and dating in the same place. But going into a relationship with a geographical barrier is even more complicated. And expensive. Besides, it would necessarily lack several of the main things I was looking for in a relationship… having someone to go out with or stay in with, cuddling, kissing, sex more often than not.

We continued to chat, and somehow something about homosexuality came up. He made a statement along the lines of, “I don’t care if people are gay as long as they aren’t flaunting it in your face.” Without touching what I thought to be an odd choice of cliché for this particular person, I told him that it was very important to me that the person I date not have bigoted ideas about homosexuality. He started telling me about the one gay guy he knew, who, you know, was cool about it and all, and how he didn’t mind that the guy was gay because he didn’t flaunt it in his face (that cliché again!).

I was pretty firm in my stance that he wasn’t for me, but he said he didn’t think he was explaining himself well and asked if he could call me. When he called, I said hello then couldn’t get a word in edgewise for the next half hour or so. I probably smoked half a pack of cigarettes while chasing my unreliable cell signal around in the parking lot of my apartment complex. He stressed me out. Even when he asked me a question, he tended to cut me off before I got to deliver my answer. (And, by the way, he did nothing to redeem himself on the whole gay flaunting issue.)

Because of the crap cell service, he mandated that I should call him back when we got our land line in a day or two. The next day when he messaged me, I told him I was infatuated with someone else. He wished me well, and we’ve never spoken again.

* The Blind Guy uses a program that reads Web pages and IM dialogues to him. I can only imagine how annoying that is if you get a person who uses IM speak or can’t spell. He talks into a microphone, and the computer types out what he’s said. Occasionally I got some very strange IMs, which I attributed to computer error and his Boston accent.