I’m Sorry, Colin

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So, I feel like the biggest dope in the world. The biggest. For the last year plus, I’ve been writing all this stuff about Scarlett Johansson on this blog and I had no idea until two nights ago that she was engaged. How I managed to miss this, I have no idea. It is certainly evidence of what I’ve said, that I don’t sit around Googling Scarlett Johansson and I don’t read celebrity rags. But I do read the entertainment news online and given that this engagement was announced about a year ago, while I was working feverishly on my book about my Scarlett sighting in Vegas, I truly don’t know how I didn’t hear. I feel so stupid. 

I must say, Scarlett’s publicists do a great job of keeping her relationships out of the news. Flipping through my media library in my head, I can’t recall seeing a single picture of her and Ryan Reynolds together, and I’ve never seen a picture of Romain Dauriac at all. These last two years during which every news story Scarlett Johansson-related has caught my eye, I’m just blown away that I could manage to not know that she’s been in a relationship for YEARS!

There are just no words to describe how big a dumbass I feel like, having been sitting here for the last year letting myself imagine it might be possible...possible that Scarlett might be the girl for me when she’s had a boyfriend/fiancee for three years. If I had known that, I never would have said most of what I have said, because I consider it disrespectful and inappropriate. Hey, I’ve said before that guys married to these girls have to be secure enough to not be worried about other guys. Certainly not me. I’m sure there are dudes in Hollywood who will walk up and hit on Scarlett right in front of Colin. But that doesn’t mean I have to be that guy.

It would be different if I was truly a random person in the internet with no connection to their industry. But I’m a middle-sider. Hell, a good friend of mine hosted Colin’s show recently! So, in my book, it’s uncool for me to be hitting on Colin’s fiancee. One of the things that I loved most about Scarlett was that she is SINGLE, or so I thought. But I should have known better—smoking hot girls are NEVER single. I thought Scarlett was that unique. Maybe I was indulging in the fantasy that she was waiting for someone like me. But that’s stupid. What, should I want Scarlett Johansson to be sitting around lonely? Of course not!  

I’ve written here about how the girls in entertainment that I really like all seem to be married to guys I really like. I’m sure if Scarlett likes him, Colin’s a pretty good guy. So, sorry Colin. I wouldn’t have said everything I’ve said if I knew that was your girl. (“Hey, I’m my own girl!” Scarlett might say. We’ll get back to that.). But anyway, nice work, Colin. You’d BETTER be nice to her!  

I think what all artists want, writers especially, is to be understood. The great frustration of my life has been the feeling that girls didn’t understand me, or else there would have been more interest in me as a partner. The alternative—that they did understand me but didn’t care—was too terrible to contemplate. One of the things I felt girls never understood about me was my unwillingness to engage in competition with other men over girls. Girls seemed to measure how much a man liked her by the level of his willingness to do unscrupulous things in the pursuit of her. But I wasn’t willing to be unscrupulous in the pursuit of anything. That’s what integrity meant to me, and hence it seemed that, when it came to relationship partners, women preferred men WITHOUT integrity to men with it. 

But this aversion to competition went beyond just my dealings with girls. It was part of my general worldview, that while competition had been helpful to the advancement of the species in the past, we had reached a point where it had become toxic, and we needed to shift and become a cooperative society. I thought girls would get this, but they seemed not to. The competition over girls was what led directly to all the toxic things men do in the world—men seek to oppress other men economically because they believe it gives them an advantage in dating. Men lie and scheme in the competition over girls. A lot of the violence that men direct toward women is with the aim of keeping them away from other men. Wars are fought over girls. I believe the entire toxic competitive structure of our world starts with competition over women. And that’s why I refuse to engage in it. And if you take that view, Scarlett’s right, monogamy becomes impractical in a truly cooperative rather than competitive society. I was hoping to one day meet a girl for me who grasped all this and I thought that Scarlett might be her. Sad day. 

The truth is, I was always looking for people to COOPERATE with in life (in doing positive things of course). I found plenty of people willing to enter nefarious conspiracies. But none willing to engage in conspiracies of good. 

But my having a cooperative mindset in a competitive world wrecked just about every area of my life. Men assumed that I avoided competition because I was afraid of losing, when in reality I knew that if I put my mind to something (AND put my principles on the shelf), it was very rare that I would lose at anything. Hell, I’ve lost so many trivial competitions in life on purpose just because I feel bad about beating people when I can see winning means more to them than to me. 

So in my life, when I was interested in a girl, and there was another man she seemed to be interested in, I would just step aside. I’m sure there has been at least once in my life that the girl’s expectation was that mentioning another guy would make me try harder, because that’s how most guys are, but that’s not how I am. If I made a honest assessment that a girl liked another guy more than me, not only would I get out of the way, I would try to help her get him if I could. 

As a young adult, I developed the view that while women matured faster than men in most areas, dating and relationships were not one, contrary to the popular myths. The girls I loved that went for guys with better abs, more money, or whiter skin, I felt like they’d come around sooner or later, and I was patient. I remember hearing over and over that women decide whether they have romantic interest in a man in the first few seconds, and after that you go in the “no chance” zone.

People call it the friend zone but I recognized in my reflections during my time in prison that none of the girls who rejected me as a lover really treated me as a friend either. But I told myself, that’s how immature high school and college girls are, chasing after the nicest set of abs, or the most charismatic personality, or the guy with the BMW. But surely, truly grown-up girls aren’t this way. But they seemed to be. And the cynical man standing next to me would say, “Girls only start caring about a man’s character and values when they are no longer smoking hot enough to get the guys they want.”. But I just refused to believe this could really be true, or at least I refused to believe that there weren’t a whole lot of girls out there who were different. 

The MAT Girls are different.  They seem to like good guys. Which is why I’m inclined to like Colin even though he stole my wife!  Maybe she can still hire me, and I will join him in the conspiracy of looking out for Scarlett Johansson. I’m sure Colin won’t mind if I help his wife win Oscars and help his household make the billionaires’ list. During my recent 30-day stint in jail, I came up with a great script for Scarlett. I could finish it in three weeks if I was hired to write it. 

But the theme of this blog being absolute honesty, I have to admit that when I found out Scarlett was engaged, I felt heartbroken. But I also felt stupid about feeling heartbroken. Afterall, I’ve never met Scarlett. I don’t actually know her. But I’ve always known that the various unusual traits that I possess make me a difficult match, and I’d done enough math to make myself think that maybe it could actually be true that the answer to the question, “Who’s weird enough to love Michael?” could be Scarlett Johansson. She is a left-handed, red-haired Jewish girl with a twin who has been a millionaire since she was a teenager. That’s pretty unusual. And then there’s that weird birthday thing with her and Alanis and Ryan Reynolds.  Oh well, I was saying that I was just waiting for Scarlett to tell me no. There is no louder way of saying no than marrying someone else. So, back to the drawing board, I guess. 

There is that one other thing...Scarlett’s ancient claim that she doesn’t believe in monogamy.  I’ve mentioned that several times on this blog, but if I had to go the Vegas betting window, I doubt she believes that anymore. That is a common thing for girls to think when they are in their twenties and smoking hot and have a buffet of hot guys to choose from who are just happy with any little bit of attention they can get. But when women get into their thirties and have children and see a wrinkle here and there and start to contemplate the inevitable ending of their smoking hotness, they want to find the perfect guy and tie him down forever. Or it’s just that they finally meet the guy who makes them believe in monogamy when no man impressed her that much before. 

I really should be happy for Scarlett that she has Colin. She certainly looks thrilled in the pictures of them together. She’s giving him that look like he’s the only guy in the world to her.  But yet, yesterday, I found myself walking down the street feeling that awful, all too familiar emotional and physical sensation of heartbreak. The not wanting to eat, the semi-nauseous feeling in the pit of the stomach, the lack of a desire to take another forward step because there’s nothing out there, the overwhelming desire to cry but you can’t do it out here in public. 

I stopped and told myself that I needed to examine this emotion more. It couldn’t just be about Scarlett, because like I said, I don’t know her.  There is this girl named Olivia who works at the grocery store where I shop sometimes. She’s so cute. One night about a year and a half ago, I was going through her checkout line and she asked me about the vegan sausage I was buying. She was giving me a smoking hot look, and if not for my legal predicament (this was back when I was humbly and dutifully wearing the stupid ankle monitor around my leg before I decided to rip it off and protest that bullshit under penalty of...whatever).  If I had been a free human being without that baggage to have to try to explain, I’d have certainly asked her if she wanted to get together. I’ve seen her several times since, and she looks when she sees me, but now I’m homeless and going in and out of jail until I can win my legal fight, and I couldn’t ask a girl to sign up for all that. Someone like Scarlett could call one of her lawyers, and have my legal problems ironed out in about 48 hours. I just sent a stern letter to the District Attorney. Maybe I’ll have them ironed out myself soon (I’m crossing my fingers and my toes!). 

But anyway, I realized that if I’d run into Olivia on the street while feeling shitty about the feeling of losing my chance at Scarlett, and she had stopped to talk to me, and she asked if I wanted to hang out, and I took a deep breath and took the leap of explaining my situation to her, and she said she didn’t care about that, pretty soon it would have been “Scarlett who?”. Well, I’ll never forget that Scarlett’s a great actress and an incredible person but she is NOT the only girl in the world to me. I realized that the heartbreak feeling I’ve experienced so much has never been about any particular girl I lost, even though I loved them. They are all happily married (or in Scarlett’s case happily engaged). Their lives appear to be going great. I should be happy for them...and I am. The heartbreak feeling is the fear that there is actually no girl for me, that I’ll never find a girl I like who actually loves me. That I’ll always be the guy on the outside looking in, watching the girl I love laughing holding on to the arm of another man. I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that they are men I like. It’s better because I don’t have to worry about them. But not by that much. 

Hell, today I took a walk for maybe an hour around downtown San Diego, and I saw a few dozens girls that were smoking hot PERFECT. What that means is that I find that girl so attractive that if she liked me, I’d never give a thought to any other girl. Not all the girls I feel this way about would necessarily be beautiful to other men. But there is something about certain girls to me. A lot of the girls I consider smoking hot perfect are obvious nerds who are slightly athletic and have a few pimples. I love that. A lot of Jewish girls answer to that description. There are still a few girls from my past that if they called and said they wanted to give it a shot, I would (Hi, Jessie Stewart...Christy Marsh...). And in any case, if I started a relationship, and it was good, and Scarlett called the next day, I’d say, “Sorry, Scarlett! You’re smoking hot LATE...but I do still want to work for you, if my wife says it’s okay!”. 

My greatest frustration in not being understood is that I don’t think anybody, even Scarlett Johansson, will ever understand that she’s not Scarlett Johansson to me. Everything that I’ve written here, as far as wanting to marry her, is about the girl I saw in Las Vegas. Until I saw her, I’d have never said anything of these things, never have thought them. In fact, I’ve said in the past that I’d never want to go out with Scarlett and that I didn’t think she was all that hot, but that she seemed like she would make an awesome BFF. I had announced on my public Facebook page that I was going to Vegas, and I’ve chuckled to myself wondering if one of the people I know who work in Hollywood said something to her about what I said, and she showed up in the Aria lobby just so I could see how smoking hot she is. I doubt it but some rich people do stuff like that when they get bored. 

But the fact is, the way I feel about Scarlett is no different from the way I felt about girls I loved before whose names you don’t know. The last girl I loved before Scarlett was an aesthetician at a hotel spa. She wasn’t famous, she didn’t have any money. But she’s AWESOME...and just about as smoking hot as Scarlett. It’s really close.  These other girls, I got to know them before I loved them. I never believed in love at first sight until it happened to me. That girl I saw walking through the Aria and didn’t know who she was, I was all-in whether she was a waitress or a queen. The fact that she turned out to be Scarlett Johansson just proves that I was absolutely right when I felt that I KNEW I was looking at a special person. You can ask the girl I had a crush on in second grade. When it comes to girls, I’ve been picking winners from the beginning. I’m just waiting for one of those winners to pick me. 

Of course, maybe Scarlett’s non-belief in monogamy hasn’t changed, but I’m not interested in being Scarlett Johansson’s second or third or fourth guy. I want a girl to marry ME and even though I’m fine if she wants to be free to do other things, I need a life partner that is all-in with ME. One day a month on Scarlett’s calendar is not enough. Now if I find my life partner, and she doesn’t care, and Scarlett still has that one day a month available...maybe. But honestly, I’d probably get a bigger thrill out of holding up my phone when it starts ringing and letting my wife see that it says “SCARLETT JOHANSSON” and hitting “Decline”. But I’d call her back in case it’s about work. 

But the balance of how special Scarlett is and is not to me is difficult to understand, and to that end, it’s funny how I found out about her engagement. So I did a Google image search of Amanda Seyfried a few nights ago. And if that isn’t the most amazing collection of beauty there is!  And in looking through these pics, I saw an article that said she takes meds because she is so OCD, which makes her like ten times smoking hotter to me than she already was. It’s not just that Amanda is supernaturally beautiful. She is capable of being so many different types of beautiful. There are so many pictures of Amanda looking so many different flavors of beautiful, you could open a museum with just pictures of her (I would in fact love to open a museum dedicated to beautiful girls). She’s got to be the most photogenic person in the world. Even compared to other hot actresses and models, you never see a bad picture of her. 

Scarlett on the other hand is not at all still-photo photogenic. She looks better on video. But part of the mystical shock of seeing Scarlett is that she is so much more dramatically beautiful in person than on screen. It’s hard to imagine any woman being able to equal what I saw, but yet I look at pictures of Amanda and I wonder what she looks like in real life.  There is this one picture of Amanda from Allure magazine...OMG. I look at that picture and think, there’s just no way any girl has ever been more beautiful than that!  So I decide that I’m going to Google image search Scarlett and see if I can find ONE picture of her looking that beautiful. And in so searching, one of the first pictures that came up was the picture of her and Colin from the story about their engagement from May of last year.  Nas keeps telling me, but I never listen: “Stop trying, before you find what you’re looking for and get to crying...”

But the funny thing here is, as smoking extraterrestrial hot as Amanda Seyfried is, and also like Scarlett very talented, and Jewish, and extremely successful in her career, and probably worth close to half a billion dollars, and she makes better movies than Scarlett, and she just makes me melt when I look at her, and she shares my OCD, and there are things that I suspect to be true about her which would mean she is a WHOLE LOT of fun, given all that, still, if Thomas Sadoski lost his mind and decided to divorce her, and she liked me, I would definitely say yes and I believe I would be blissfully happy. But it would be unfair to her if I didn’t tell her that there would always be a little piece of me that was sad that my perfect Scarlett destiny fairy tale didn’t work out.

But then, I’ve never metAmanda. Maybe that first meeting would feel like a BETTER fairy tale than Scarlett. But it just felt for a minute like Scarlett was my destiny. And now I’m reminded why I don’t believe in that. Things never work out. It’s always some guy named Colin that gets the girls you want. I should dye my hair blue—I’ll always feel like Milhouse on the Simpsons, chasing an endless procession of Lisas who will never love me. 

You know, having the destiny of a loveless life wouldn’t be so bad if the world had been fair to me professionally and economically. I could handle the life of a lonely bachelor millionaire with a job I liked. I could turn out a (good) movie script once a month and in my spare time, I’d traverse the world staying in luxury hotels, eating in fine restaurants, and crashing exotic sports cars at high speed until I find out whether it is possible for me to die or not. Hey, I could also handle a loveless life in a world where there were no guys around. Like if I could live in an all-lesbian city, that’d be great. Or just live in an isolated house in Gig Harbor, go hiking every day, watch movies, listen to music, write, and take late-night drives through Seattle. But I just have no interest in boy-world. It’s either girls or solitude. And I’ve realized, love to me is kind of like an antidote to having to deal with men. If I have to be in a world where men are around, it is mandatory that I have a wife or girlfriend or I’ll go insane (some might tell you that I already have!). 

Perhaps one day, I’ll pass a girl on the street who is smoking hot perfect to me, and she’ll see me and feel just like I felt when I saw Scarlett in Vegas, and she won’t be a dumbass like me and keep walking to a date with someone else (Honestly, I probably deserve to lose out on Scarlett for that historically awful decision alone!). But this girl will be smarter than me, as I suspect most of the MAT Girls are, and she’ll be a modern enough woman to come up and talk to me, and next thing you know, I’ll be standing in my own wedding pictures instead of seeing the wedding pictures of girls I love on the internet. 

But maybe Scarlett is a more modern girl than I think. In truth, I think I started to doubt that there is any such thing as a truly modern girl.  I used to say to my guy friends back when I had guy friends, “There’s a little Snow White in every woman, waiting for Prince Charming to take over and sweep her away.”. But maybe Scarlett is a real 21st century girl, firmly in charge of her relationship life, not a helpless girl looking for her prince, but a queen looking for her prince-consort. Maybe she sat Colin down and read him the rules of her queendom and he’s totally on board with her freedom to do whatever she wants. Maybe Colin is like me, and if I was with Scarlett, and some other guy came along, I’d tell him, “Pull up a chair and take your shot. Scarlett, I’m going to go get a drink. If you decide to leave with him, pay the check.”.  It’s 2020 afterall, and Scarlett did say she doesn’t believe in monogamy, so I guess there is no harm in my saying this:

Scarlett, you guys have been engaged for over a year. I know this whole coronavirus thing has been going on and probably cancelled a lot of wedding plans, but still, the length of this relationship + engagement suggests that one of the two of you isn’t on fire to do it. If you’re the one who wants to get married, and him not so much, you could always marry me instead. And I trust your judgment and embrace your views on the non-practicality of monogamy, so if you like Colin, you can keep him!  And he doesn’t have to be dragged down the aisle if he doesn’t want to be. Win-win-win for everybody! That is if, you know, you like me at all. 

Or if you’re the one who’s feeling like maybe Colin isn’t the right answer for you...It’s interesting back in 2012 I had started but never finished an essay entitled “Love As College” where I proposed that rather than making permanent relationship commitments, we should sign up for four years at a time and that a marriage should expire after four years unless you renew it. Looking at your history, it seems like you might be practicing this idea, in which case, Colin’s time is almost up!  Hey, I was hoping I could try to keep you forever, but forever’s a long time, and I’d definitely be happy with four years as opposed to no years!

But if Colin is your “I believe in monogamy NOW!” guy, and there’s no one else in the world, certainly not me, I understand. I hope that you are very happy. I do still need a job, though. But while I hope you’re happy, I can’t hope that whatever faint chance I may have had is over. Thus, I will continue the content of this blog as it has been until you actually marry him or ask me to cease and desist. Maybe you need a way to light a fire under him, and if I have value to you for that purpose, I invite you to use me!  But hey, maybe if you run into any of your Jewish MAT Girl friends that might like me, I’m available. But you’re still number one on my list. Not just number one of the girls right now. Number one of all time. 

As for Colin, he’s rich, famous, handsome and funny. If a guy like that loses his movie star fiancée, it is possible for him to get another. But for me there is only one SCARLETT JOHANSSON!

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