600 Hours of Edward

of line.”
    “I was just being honest about what I was thinking of, because you asked me.”
    “I don’t know. I’m really uncomfortable. I think I’m going to go.”
    Joy flags down the server and asks for a box for her lobster mac ’n’ cheese and for separate checks. When they arrive, she puts cash on the table to cover her check, and then she stands up.
    “Well, it’s a long drive back to Broadview,” she says. “I’ll talk to you soon.” And she pivots and walks out.
    I reach into the breast pocket of my suit jacket to fish out my wallet, and I realize that I never gave her the mix CD.
    – • –
    By the time I get home, I have replayed the whole scene in my head, and I am frantic. Joy thought I wanted to have sex with her, and she wigged out. I didn’t want to have sex with her. I told her that. She didn’t understand what I was saying.
    And then there was that last line: “I’ll talk to you soon.”
    She’s just not that into me.
    – • –
    I make a bold decision: I am not going to watch
Dragnet
tonight. I don’t have the energy for it.
    It’s too bad, too, because the fourth episode of the first season, “The Interrogation,” is not just one of my favorites, it is my favorite. Kent McCord plays a rookie cop named Paul Culver who is mistaken for a liquor store robber while on undercover duty, and Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon, now working in internal affairs, try to wring the truth out of him: Did he rob that liquor store or not?
    In this episode, which originally aired on February 9, 1967, Sergeant Joe Friday gives a speech that I think should be printed out and passed out to anyone who wants to be a policeman. It goes on for several minutes, and it never gets boring. Paul Culver sits rapt (I love the word “rapt”) as Sergeant Joe Friday tells him that being a cop is hard work, that people don’t treat cops very well, that he will never make very much money, that his uniform will get torn up by bad guys, and that he will write as many words in his career as there are in a library. He tells Paul Culver that he will see things that break his heart and that bad people will try to do bad things to him.
    None of it sounds very appealing, but Sergeant Joe Friday says he is proud to be a cop, and in the end, Paul Culver is proud to be a cop, too. Sergeant Joe Friday convinced him that he ought to stick with it, even though Culver got agitated when he was falsely accused of a crime.
    Sergeant Joe Friday always says exactly what he wants to say. I wish I were he tonight.
    – • –
    I also take a pass on writing my letter of complaint. I don’t know who the target should be.
    Is it I for chasing Joy away? Is it the vintner of the Gewurztraminer for making me burp? Is it Joy for showing up late and overreacting? Is it I for thinking that she overreacted?
    I lack the clarity for a letter of complaint.
    Internet dating has wrecked all of the things that I rely on.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25
    Here are today’s numbers:
    Woke up: 7:37 (seventeenth time this year out of 299 days, because it’s a leap year).
    Yesterday’s high temperature: forty-four degrees.
    Yesterday’s low temperature: twenty-four degrees.
    Today’s forecasted high temperature: forty-eight degrees.
    But forecasts, as you know by now, are notoriously off base. I shall wait for the facts, which I prefer.
    Here’s a fact: I hate online dating.
    – • –
    After breakfast, I log on to Montana Personal Connect one last time to wipe out my account, and I see this:
    Inbox (1).
    I click the link.
    Edward:
    I wanted you to know that I am not feeling “the click” factor with you. I dont really know how to explain it but I feelas though we would not be compatable because I felt at Bin 119 that you were not interested in learning anything about me. When I was telling you about my uncle adopting me you said “I burped” and then didn’t follow up on anything about what I was saying regarding just getting to know me. I guess I feel shut down with you and I dont enjoy feeling that way. I am not saying I wouldn’t want to be friends but I dont want to date. Its a different level and I dont feel it with you.
    I can’t really put my finger on it and this is just a lame example of what I am trying to say but I am a very intuitive, sensitive (clearly), sensual and “musical” kind of person and you are more a “TV guy” and not as much of those things…and I have met men who are and I am looking more for that