-When I banged a really hot chick over Memorial Day weekend, I thought it would portend good things to come this summer.  The women would surely flow like wine.  But what followed instead was a series of missteps, poor timing, and just plain bad luck that has left me – with few exceptions – high and dry.  Regular dudes, like professional athletes, sometimes suffer inexplicable slumps.  Whether its tinkering with our technique or trying to grow facial hair, nothing seems to work.  Our only solace is the knowledge that one night, when we least expect it, we’ll hit a home run and get right back on track.  But that doesn’t make striking out any less painful.  This is the anatomy of a cold streak.

-One of my buddies is currently hooking up with four chicks simultaneously – none of whom know of the others’ existence.  This doesn’t appeal to me at all.  I just don’t have the patience or the follow-through to keep the game going.  Before I tackle dating four girls, I should probably try hooking up with the same girl four times and see how that goes.

-The theory that it’s easy to get laid at weddings only holds true if there are actually any available girls there.  As I get older, each wedding I attend seems to have a smaller population of eligible bachelorettes.  And you know the pickings are slim when even the singles table has fucking couples at it!

-If the situation is dire, sometimes I’ll drop a line to a one-night stand from a year or two ago.  If they don’t respond after one week or two pings, I know they’re engaged.  The worst is when they finally message me back and write something like, “Yeah, I was just tired of going to the same shitty bars and getting drunk every night like an idiot.  So what are you up to?”  And I sheepishly put my BlackBerry down and order another pitcher.

-One of my fraternity brothers wanted to set me up with this chick he used to sleep with.  Normally I wouldn’t mind, but he’s particularly dirty, so I passed.

-You know a buddy is on a pretty bad cold streak when he says to you, “Hey, you know that girl I hooked up with on that business trip last year?  Yeah, I’m thinking about flying her in.”  It’s never a good sign when you’ve given up on the millions of women in your own city and resorted to importing ass.

-In cities like New York, Chicago, or Miami, where last call is late, scoring is less about attraction and more about attrition.  Once it gets past 3am, the girls who are left have essentially identified themselves as available to take home.  I don’t have that luxury in Los Angeles.  I’m still not used to the bars being packed when last call arrives at 1:30am.  I start to pat myself on the back for shutting down the bar once again, before realizing all the chicks are leaving with guys who were paying attention.

-The truest and most frustrating observation ever made about hooking up is that it’s all about confidence.  Every guy has contemplated how much damage he could do if he could just go back ten years knowing what he knows now.  But we’re stuck with what we’ve got.  Unfortunately, the most debilitating aspect of a cold streak is its tendency to attack and diminish confidence, which in turn makes it difficult to snap the dry spell.  It’s a vicious cycle that can only be broken by raising a pitcher, lowering your standards, and swinging for the fences.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-The bathroom of every twentysomething guy I’ve ever been in has had a liquid soap dispenser with only half a milliliter left in it.

-The phrase “I’ll call you later” can either mean “I’ll get back to you in a few hours” or “I’ll talk to you in a few months.”

-The pain and suffering caused by an airline losing your luggage upon returning from vacation does not increase in proportion to how long you were away.  It doesn’t matter if I travel for two days or two weeks, I always take my three “best” boxers and thrift store t-shirts.  They can never be replaced.

-Have you noticed that Obama, McCain, and that T. Boone Pickens dude are all using the same exact stock footage of wind turbines in their ads?  And therein lies the problem with America’s energy policy: there’s apparently only one wind farm in the whole fucking country.

-Dear Future Wife: the most important job you will ever have is to kill spiders for me.

-Saw a hot chick at the gym.  Later in the day, I did laundry.  (OK, my cleaning woman did the laundry.)  The next day, I went back to the gym, and happened to be wearing the same exact shirt – though now clean – as I did the day before.  Luckily, the hot chick wasn’t there.

-A few weeks ago, I called my buddy Jesse and wished him Happy Birthday a day late.  I joked that I didn’t feel bad because he hadn’t called me on my birthday at all.  He replied, “Yeah, I never remember to call anyone on their birthday.”  And that was that.  Later, I thought to myself, how liberating must it be to just not give a shit?

-My favorite sport at the Olympics was women’s beach volleyball because I could look directly at their asses and then say, “What?  I just wanted to see what play they were calling!”

-And, finally, the longest cold streak I’ve ever had began on the night I became sexually active.  That’s because I lost my virginity and then didn’t have sex again for almost a year.  This is of course the opposite of what usually happens – once you lose your v-card all bets are off.  But not for me.  For ten long months I was stuck at one.  Not one girl – one time.  It was essentially the equivalent of being called up to the majors, hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, and then being sent down to the minors again the next day.  What I remember most about that period is that as much pressure as there is to have sex for the first time, there’s even more pressure to keep having it.  And since then I’ve realized that the more sex you have, the more it just falls into your lap (so to speak).  So in a way, hot streaks and cold streaks are similar: once you build momentum in either direction, it’s hard to stop.  Sometimes you end up like my buddy who’s banging four chicks at once and, alas, sometimes you end up like yours truly, begging, “Fuck me.”

HOME