An Invoice For Your 2 Cents

In response to an unexpected request via PayPal for me to send him $572.93 for "Mental trsuma and rehab", my response to SXXXX SXXXXXXXX's ridiculousness was going to read as follows:

To: XXXXXX_691@yahoo.com

Amount: $0.02

The people of Seattle have spoken: The days of HXXXXX CXXX charming his way into the hearts and minds of decent people are at an end. Between the thefts, the squatting, and the narcissistic use of them, you burned through every good person available to you in the Puget Sound region. 

Now your reward is an uncomfortable slab of Seattle's summertime sidewalk upon which to stretch out your new titanium leg and rest your drug-addled head. Maybe you'll dream of your glory days when I opened my home to you, your cat, and that bitter little troll you used to carry around with you who is so awful even cancer couldn't kill it. 

Remember how you rewarded that kindness and generosity? My reward for keeping a roof over your head was lies, gaslighting, and a citywide smear campaign that trumped even your previous attempts to villainize me in social circles. Those sweet dreams of memories gone by are all that I can offer you now.   

Despite your and MXXXX's campaign to disparage my name and ensure that people thought the worst of me by fabricating vicious rumors which you helped spread through our mutual social circles, (Pssst! It didn't work), I have a comfortable home, a great new job, and a growing number of friends with whom I enjoy outstanding benefits. I've grown quite fond of my life without you in it, so kindly go back to ignoring me the way you used to when I actually wanted you to talk to me. You had your chances - TWO of them - to benefit from my care and support, and you threw them away.

Now, as a ridiculous man with a big mouth and a high opinion of himself once said to me, "I don't want anything from you, I just want to be rid of you." Shush. Be gone. Go fall in love with everyone you meet, preferably on the other side of the Cascades. And please don't take this as an invitation to engage in debate. For your reference, this invoice is what it will look like when somebody asks for your two cents.

However, knowing that he expected to provoke such a tirade from me, perhaps even craved it in his current state of mind, I opted to deprive him of one and offered nothing in reply to his pathetic and pitiful plea for money that is not owed to him for trauma he self-inflicted and rehabilitation he will never actually pursue. 

I feel sorry for him in a way because he will never be able to understand how many people he has hurt or why his misuse of them was a terrible thing. And because of this flaw in his thinking, he will continue to alienate those unfortunate men onto whom he seizes an opportunity to latch. 

Beware, men of Seattle, Portland, all points in between! There's a hungry hooker named Holden on the loose, and he's desperate to fall in love with you.

* I have redacted all names to preserve the privacy of the people mentioned in this post, even though I guarantee were the tables turned they would offer no such grace toward me.

Ridiculous Men of the PNW

 Who Raised the Gay Men of Seattle?

Because I would really like to have a word with them about some of the choices that were made about teaching them manners, respect, directness, and honesty. I've lived in cities across the United States from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco, and nowhere in all my travels have I encountered a population of men so ill equipped to participate in normal adult interactions without any care for the impact their actions have on the people around them. 

Case in point: There is a frequent practice here in Seattle of using the various gay hookup apps as time sucking prank machines. Men will engage in conversation, being flirtatious and giving the impression that they have an interest in meeting in person to get better acquainted with someone. They flatter and talk dirty and brag about all the things they're going to do when they get there, or conversely, solicit a litany of naughty things that will be done to them when they arrive. But they have absolutely no intention of ever arriving! 

They produce excuses and keep the flame burning again and again with the promise that they are on their way. They offer just enough information about their whereabouts to keep a guy on the hook for the meet up they have planned, and after hours have passed without any sign of them on the doorstep, they either block the guy whose time they wasted or delete their account and evaporate into the sea of anonymous profiles without pictures or useful information about themselves. I have been ghosted so often here in Seattle; I've begun to think my asshole is haunted.

Some of them do it just for dirty talk. They get off on the fantasy and have no intention whatsoever of meeting the other person face-to-face for sex. They are easy enough to spot, because if the dirty talk stops, they move on to the next potential source of spank bank material. 

Nefarious Example 1

Others have more nefarious motives behind their performance of this ritual. They get enjoyment out of the frustration and emotional distress that a series of such fruitless encounters can cause in a man. In fact, there are more verifiably malevolent men living in Seattle than I have ever experienced anywhere in the world. The plots and subterfuge that goes into their long games of manipulation and deceit rivals any intelligence agency's bag of tricks. These monsters live off the honest work of others, always on the lookout for opportunities to take. They scheme and grift to pocket what they want from the trusting men they target, and ghosting is just a means of making a clean getaway after they've fleeced their marks completely.

Delicate Soul Example 1

And finally, there are the hypersensitive conflict avoiders who will go to absurd lengths and deliver passive-aggressive signals that are meant to inform someone that they would appreciate it if he would dismiss himself on their behalf, because they are simply too nice a person to be so rude or direct about such a possible feelings-hurty subject. Directness, in fact seems to be something these men find sus. They will delete conversations instead of blocking an unwanted fellow's advances permanently, presumably because to block someone is a microaggression and is therefore tantamount to physical violence as far as these delicate do-gooders are concerned. 

It begs the question why they are on these apps and sites at all. One would think that such a minefield of potential conflict would tend to wear on their pious little souls enough to dissuade them from using them. But I suppose enough of them find enough of the type they are into that it's worth it for them to endure running into a mouthy old codger like me occasionally. 

Hot Guy Sex Example 1

I suppose one might also ask why, with all the aggravation these guys generate do I continue to use the various hookup apps and sites. It's a question I ask myself regularly. I guess it's because I do find enough sex with hot guys to make the frustrating ones worth the effort, as long as I get to brag about the hot ones I get and berate the fragile time-wasting ones publicly here in my blog.

Can Grindr Help You Manifest Your Vision Of The Future?

If you are like me, you spend an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through the faceless torsos photoshopped faces of the men around you on Grindr (and/or Scruff). Walking to the store? Open up Grindr and see who's on nearby. Waiting in line at the post office? Scroll through Grindr and check out that hot guy 300 feet away. Headed to bed? Just check out Grindr one more time to see if anyone replied to your messages. 

How many hours a day or in a week do you spend staring at those guys' profile pictures? Be honest! It's a lot, right? All that time adds up, and in a week's time, you may have spent literally hours daydreaming about these gorgeous men, mentally making inventory of the guys in your vicinity. And if you tend to block the fellows with whom there just isn't any vibe, then you have boiled down your screen to an elite set of attractive (to you) men whose faces you commit to memory through repeated viewing day after day on Grindr.

Now think of a vision board and how it helps you to manifest your dreams. Some people claim that vision boards are a critical step on the road to success. Putting images of your dreams in front of you so they are right in front of you every day is supposed to help drive your thoughts toward achieving those goals. 

You could be using Grindr the same way, only you might be setting yourself up for one disappointment after another. You're subconsciously trying to manifest these men into your sex life, but what about their goals? What if you don't meet their criteria for sexual attraction? You could be setting your dreams on a bunch of shallow men who are never going to hook up with you no matter how charming you are. 

Just be careful and mindful of the images you fill your mind with each day. Set your sights on attainable goals and don't pin your hopes on those pretty torsos on a hookup app. Don't let yourself become disappointed by repeated rejection. Create a real vision board with pictures of the things you want to manifest for yourself and use that to replace the burned in images you've scrolled through so often.