Blunt Wit

There is only the barest discernible audible trace when a heart breaks. It’s not like a badly breaking bone. Crunch. Snap.

You cannot help but notice when that happens and you wince when you hear it. No, the breaking heart, from the perspective of the hapless bystanders hearing on, just beats near imperceptibly faster. And the faintest of tears registers, picked up possibly only by acute dogs without the capacity or reason to fathom what they have just heard.

Let us assume you are the breakee. For you it is a much different story. For you it is like death warmed over. The tiniest of fissures grows with the gravitational force a black hole. For a split second all the world’s light and love and beauty get sucked through to nothingness. The vacuum left in that wake creates an ache of devastating loss. It ranges from pit of your stomach to the nadir of your soul. That chasm grows ever wider and deeper.

You blame, you curse, but no one hears. You poke, you punch, but no one hurts. You seek solace. You seek that whole feeling again. Instead you find anguish. Instead you fall into that pit and wallow in your own sorrow.

Now let us assume for a moment that you are the breaker. For you it is easy. For you it is like a sunny walk in the park. You go about your life as if nothing happened. Like a molting snake you squeeze out of the skin that had been constricting your freedom. You come out all shiny and new and fresh. Your leavings draped across you ex-lovers lap.

You dance on their grave. You leap with joy. Little do you realize in those flush first few moments that a part of you died as well. That you, too, were fundamentally shaken to your core. Your recovery time is faster, but your scars will tell a far different story.

You see when two hearts come together and keep time they synchronize. Their fluids mix. They take on an auricle familiarity. So any separation process is bound to cause trauma, leakage, and pain. The leading cause of this separation is an imbalance in pumping power. This has to do with a mismatch in timing more than anything else. One heart invariably beats faster, stronger for the other.

As a result even the minutest of tears can lead to a painful rendering that produces the faintest of faint audible sounds, the sound of a heart breaking.

What is the sound of heart break to you?
Have you had your heart broken and how would you describe the experience?

She had a pretty face that spelled trouble.

What I noticed first were her high, proud cheekbones. Rosy to match her cascade of crackling red hair and bright eyes that beckoned me to come over. I’ll stay above the neckline as I’m happily married and from experience know that to peer down below there only invites trouble. Let’s just say if she were a gun, she’d be loaded.

I had my son in tow and we had a simple mission. Deliver my old friend visiting from Tokyo at the A and F store to my wife at the appointed time. Anyway, because I’m not fond of malls this was a precision strike: in then out. Quick. Enjoyable in fact. No money to be exchanged. No needless items to be purchased. At least by me.

We were almost home free when she appeared all red hair a flamin, smilin, in her cute little black get up in front of a stall in front of the mall side Macy’s entrance, selling … salt.

“Come here and let me wash your hands,” she cooed.
“Do you know the Dead Sea.”

She practically grabbed my budding teenage son but he was only too willing to sidle up to her. I had to follow. I could tell immediately she was Israeli. The lilting accent, the hard body … typical of young Israeli women who compulsively join and train hard in the IDF.

“Face, JD, focus on the face, above the neck line,” I screamed at myself in my head. Ack, I was breaking my own ironclad rule!

Anyway, she captured both mine and my son’s attention and the next thing we knew we were rubbing salt on our hands and listening to her list all of its therapeutic properties of Dead Sea salt. She took my hands gently into hers and poured water over them and presto, they actually began to feel considerably softer and suppler with a strangely pleasant smell.

“Ma shalom ha,” I said jovially in my broken Hebrew. She immediately corrected me, “Ma shalom mesh” since I am a girl and you are addressing me.
“You speak good Hebrew,” she lieingly complimented me.

“No, I once ran an Israeli company and thus I spent the equivalent of several months in Israel.”
“Ah then you have you been to the Dead Sea. It is some 1300 feet below sea level … yadda yadda yadda.” She switched back into sales pitch mode.

I interrupted her mid-pitch and deadpanned, “My brother was there last year and floated in the Dead Sea. He was looking for some scrolls but never found them.”

She didn’t even blink. Israeli’s with their sense of humor

She sweetened her offer. “A free body lotion to go along with a years supply of Dead Sea salt to exfoliate and cleanse not just the body but the soul all for the low price of $50.”

Having been (a rather poor) salesman myself in the past I clearly recognized her tactics and attempted to repulse her entreaties.

“You seem very special,” she said to me in a sultry voice.
“Well I’m starting a company and all of my money has gone into it. So while I have enjoyed washing my hands with you, alas, I cannot afford your wonderful sea salt.”

“So I give you $10 off along with the free lotion.”
So I asked my son, “Do you think Mommy would like this?” clearly hoping he would play along and say ‘no’.

She had him smell the lavender lotion placing her hand gingerly on his shoulder as he leaned forward.

“Technical foul!” I thought.

“Yeah, I think she would,” he said.
Damn!
Sensing my weakness she moved in for the kill.
“I’ll give it to you for half price. It will make your wife so happy.”

Betrayed by my own gullibility I had no fight left in me and acquiesced.

I walked away with a jar of Dead Sea salt and lotion from the Israeli woman with the pretty face.

Have you … ever succumbed to the charms of a pretty face? Please give us some details.
Have you ever bought something you didn’t need due to a salesperson’s flair?

So in the foggy past my son and I were playing golf at the local 9-hole short course and happened to get paired with a Frenchman and his 14 year old son. On the seventh hole young Benjie fired his approach shot into the butt of one of the many geese who were rutting and strutting on the course, it being the mating season and all.

Gerrard, his loquacious father, said in a toasty French accent, “Nice birdie!”

I winced (while chuckling inside). Jokes that bad should come with a money back guarantee. I missed my subsequent real birdie putt. Damn lame joke!

But this is all digression.

My story begins a few minutes later on the tee box of the 9th hole as I sized up my many options. A sneaky little hole.

Meandering stream to the left where vagabonds straight out of a Mad Max movie hung out on the banks and prayed for you pull your tee shot so they could collect your ball out of the creek and sell it to the Pro shop (for you to buy it back the following week).

Fairway for Hole One on your right where you risk bodily harm and a lawsuit if you slam your tee shot into any one of the approaching unsuspecting golfers. No, the only play on this hole was right up the middle. The arguably weakest point of my game!

Thus lost in my Tiger Woods moment, without warning, I felt something hit me on my back, just under my right shoulder, hard. I spun around half expecting to see that I had been hit by a ball but to just catch out of the corner of my eye three geese flying overhead.

My back/shoulder suddenly felt … warm. So I pulled my shirt around and lo and behold I had been pelted with goose shit! Dive bombed! Seriously, I didn’t know geese could do that. Be that resourceful. Be that vengeful (as I think his or her load was meant for Benjie’s head and I, an innocent bystander, was caught in the goose shit crossfire). Most of it, greenish in color, still clung to my yellow shirt.

My son laughed up a storm as he helped me scrape it off. Needless to say that night at the dinner table my son reported the entire incident to the rest of the family who laughed uproariously.

I was still pissed I missed that birdie putt.

Have you ever been shit upon – either literally (like me in this case) or figuratively?

I thought this an appropriate NEW YEARS POST. Here’s too everyone’s health and happiness in the upcoming year!!!

I might be considered a late bloomer as I did not find alcohol all that appealing until my early twenties. In my teens I think maybe I held myself in too high moral regard. While she cavorted with my friends, I smugly watched them fall under her spell. Or maybe it was sheer indifference. Either way she eventually caught up with me and extracted a painful retribution for my youthful insolence.

Not in my twenties though. Those were the halcyon days when our relationship thrived. I developed a penchant for sultry foreign beers that tickled my tongue and went down smooth. I was a promiscuous little jack-o-nanny. I experimented with luscious reds and soft liqueurs. The kinkiest I ever got was mixing Kahlua and vodka in a fit of frenzy. But I always came back to the warm embrace of beer. In those days we enjoyed each others company in relative moderation.

Then came my thirties and China. Things got a bit out of hand. I suffered abuse and bear wounds that still plague me to this day. I got caught up in the vortex of China’s rush to modernize its wireless infrastructure. Growth in the business was akin to shooting Koi in a barrel (I know that’s Japanese, just testing your oriental knowledge).

The key moment in any business negotiation came down to ‘The Dinner’. After long, tedious negotiations it always distilled into two or three sticking points that ‘the bosses’ had to resolve over a meal. Thus I would sit at these grand banquet tables and engage in a sadist ritual: see who could get the other drunk thus impairing his or her judgment and winning better terms.

The weapon of choice … Laojiu or a clear liquid that makes rot gut whiskey seem like bottled water. I think the old lady doubled as rocket fuel in the budding Chinese Space industry. She smelled of trouble. Older, experienced, with a harsh acidic burn as she went down. You didn’t drink her as much as inhale her. Small glasses. Large thimbles. They seemed harmless at first. But with each ‘ganbei’ or bottoms up, the thimble got heavier, the room swirled faster, and I lost my steadying grip on reality.

Eventually my morning sickness signaled something had gestated in me. I visited the doctor to find my stomach lining had just about been eaten away by her lavish attention. An ulcer just months away from birth. I took medicine to control it. But my job required the dance. So I improvised (but that’s a story for another day). In the end she had her way with me. My stomach has never fully recovered.

I’m now to the point where I can drink a beer or wine or two. If I let myself go to that third, however, I begin to sense that gnawing feeling again. So I live under a kind of a forced peace. A balance restored in the relationship by fiat at last.

How about you? What is your relationship with alcohol?

So I’ve driven up to San Fran from waaaay down on the Peninsula like a million times. Some days you zip up there in the veritable blink of an eye. Other times it seems to take days. Predicting the traffic patterns is akin to anticipating a woman’s (or read here significant other’s) behavior: erratic (note: I did not say erotic) on a good day.

So the other day I headed up to one of those high power VC soirees on the Pier by invitation of a friend, the Philmeister. Wouldn’t you know that on this day like some latter day Moses parting the red sea of traffic, I somewhat miraculously sailed through and arrived a full twenty minutes early.

So I parked my car on a side street near some restaurants and apartments and….shhhhhh…tried to ‘borrow’ a loose wifi signal to hook in to the net. Alas, nothing. So I wandered into a super market just as a tall, well-dressed African American male (model type) was completing his purchase. I thought his shoes might crawl off his feet, the alligator skin looked that fresh.

I asked the gruff looking Pakistani cashier if there was a nearby café with wifi –in my best Pashtun. Ok, in truth, maybe I just imagined I was speaking Pashtun. The attractive customer (ok, yes I admit he was handsome) chimed in to suggest a café a few blocks down. I thanked him and hit the road.

I found the café, went in, ordered an iced tea, fired up my connection and hunkered down to get some work done. I had just gotten comfy when out of the corner of my eye I spotted, Mr. GQ walking in. He ordered his half-calf/half-decaf skinny mochachino and then sashayed over to make sure I was “OK” and began to chat me up.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t gay since he was so damn hospitable. And truth be known, I was trying to get up the nerve to ask where he got his shoes.

So after some polite conversation, I begged out to go to my event which was just across the street at a nautical-themed home décor wharf. A place where you normally buy scented biodegradable soaps, Alpaca handtowels, kayaks and I’m pretty sure, whale blubber. The VC, who has an office one wharf over had rented it for the evening.

You see these days the Web 2.0 conference was lighting up the San Francisco conference center. Eight thousand people applied and a lucky 1000 were actually invited. This was one of those fabled “after parties” for all the technogliterati. I figure Norad must have picked it up on their radar due to the concentration of high power electronic devices.

I got a florescent blue nautically- themed drink with rum in it (the drink was a manly skipper’s drink since it came sans umbrella) and started to mingle. There were hundreds of professor types triangulating on moneyed Mr. Howell VC types. I met the guy who writes a top 50 blog (worldwide and yes it’s techy), a hulking 6′7″ guy who used to write for Forbes and now drives mini’s cause they’re easy to park in SF (I know I had a hard time imagining it myself), and a famous VC in a wolf’s costume. Or again maybe that was my imagination getting the best of me.

Just then two booth babes, kind of hot Ginger types distinguished by their stunning looks and vacuous demeanor, sauntered up and diverted his attention away from moi.

Anyway, I digress. Sorry, it’s the rum. I swear. Gin might make you sin but rum makes you dum.

Eventually I struck up a conversation with the event organizer. She had a quaint Mary-Ann quality about her until I asked her if I might not be able to get some whale blubber to go. She screamed, “You’re such a Gilligan!” and chased me out.

And I spent the next two hours in a traffic jam driving home.