I can’t tell if dating in your thirties sucks or if dating in Los Angeles sucks.

Or if dating in your thirties in Los Angeles sucks. Or if dating in your thirties in Los Angeles with a facebook account sucks. Or dating just sucks.

Whatever the case may be, elements in my love life seem to be galvanizing into a perfect storm of Hoover-vac suckiness.

When I was in New York in my twenties (in retrospect) my love life was at least interesting. Sometimes, said love life may have bordered on the bipolar, perhaps even psychopathic, but at least there was a modicum of passion.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a whole heap o’ drama to be had dating girls in LA, but it tends to border on the boring.

In short, dating here in La is “dratarded.” It’s dramatic… but retarded. Girls here get hyper-pissed over things like facebook updates and the fact that you didn’t respond properly or enough to a text.

Here’s an ACTUAL STRING OF TEXTS between me and someone I dated briefly:

“Why didn’t u text me back?”

“Uh… because u just texted me that u were going swimming at the beach.”

“Pls just acknowledge my text next time! :(”

“Okay. Next time, when u go swimming, please go out deeper. :)”

What? I wanted to see if she could break her record!

Maybe my memory is sweetened and water-logged with Red Bull/Vodka from those nostalgic New York 9/11 years, but I seem to recall my love life in NYC as active and fun and fertile (oops!) and, dare I say, romantic. It was akin to a 1930’s Errol Flynn swashbuckler, compared to the 1950’s French foreign film marathon of ennui that is ‘Dating in Los Angeles.’

After many dates and near misses, I think I finally figured out the problem. And here it is: women.

Let me explain…

It seems that women in LA fall into only 3 categories. These categories represent the spectrum of dating options; or the types of women that a man such as myself (look who got upgraded from man-boy!) comes across or, rather, comes all over in Los Angeles (forgive me, that last bit was corny and nasty, but it was hovering there like a fluttering toss from a Raiders’ quarterback, I had to knock it down!).

The first type of woman in LA is the one who is in total denial. Over everything, particularly her age.

She shops at FOREVER 21, buys cremes and antioxidants by the wholesale crate, and when the mere subject of age comes up, she says something like, “Age is nothing but a number? Who cares? What difference does my age make? I hate all mention of time and numbers and even clocks!”

Hmmmm…. I feel like I’ve heard that before. Who else I’ve heard that from? Oh yeah, every woman in LA over thirty ever.

I like older women, so I went out with a 38 year old woman who was very beautiful …online.

When she showed up at the sushi restaurant, it appeared as if she had declared JIHAD on facial expression. I can’t say what combo of corrective surgeries she had, but her face began to assume that leonine “THUNDERCATS HO!” countenance that seems to be stuck on the visages of so many of the Hollywood enhanced.

Anyway, this girl was LA fit and tall, but I can’t say she had a “Butterface.” She had a “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER face.”

Everything was tucked and stapled and peeled. Her face looked like a newborn baby trying to squeeze out of the womb. “Waaaaaaaah!!!! Hey, I’m 29!!! Wahhhhh! I can’t blink, do you have eye drops? Wahhhhh!!!”

She couldn’t even fully close her mouth because her lips were so inflated and stretched back. She had this little roadrunner tongue flicking out every once in a while keeping her lips moist. And then she had these fake, physics-defying cartoon balloon boobies — or, as I call them, BALLOOBIES. These monstrosities would take 2 seconds to follow her. Every time she turned a corner, they would wallop around and seem to chase after her. “MEEP MEEP!”

So I’m putting it in her, right….

Come on, I can’t be too picky — I just moved here!

Anybang, I wasn’t really into it but I was giving it a College try. At one point, I realized her face kind of looked like one of those rubber sex dolls. I couldn’t really tell if she was enjoying herself at all because her expression never changed.

“Is that sound a good “Ooooo”or a bad “Ooooo?” Blink twice for good….”

Every once in a while, just to be safe, I had to put my fingers on her aorta to make sure there was a pulse. (There was.)

The second option for dating are the women who are painfully aware of their age and feel that their biological clock is ticking louder than an egg timer. They are keeping a lid on their obsession (kind of like the Natasha Beddingfield song “Babies”…. so what, I own it on iTUNES, that shit is catchy!), but they are officially, and unequivocally, freaking out about getting older.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had my best girl friend Cali (www.calinorton.com) set me up on a blind date. This woman was in her mid-thirties. She was talented and smart and sexy and we hit it off right away. We went to a party, had some drinks, did some dancing. I rocked the ‘Robot.’ So far, so good.

After a break in the music and after one too many cocktails on her part, she said “I have to tell you: I wanna be pregnant by the end of the year!”

First date!?

I took a sip of my drink and said, “Can’t we just enjoy this Christmas party?”

Okay, that last bit was a joke. It was last February, but it may as well have been New Year’s!

Honestly, what did she think my reaction was gonna be?

“What are we doing drinking Appletinis getting to know each other? Let’s go back to your place, take off those granny panties and try to fertilize that dried up egg, Betty White! … what’s your last name again?”

In reality, what I said was, “That’s a beautiful thing.” That’s all my mouth could muster.

Unfortunately my penis heard what she said too. He took that as a cue to retract backwards into my intestines.

He was like, “What the hell did she say? Dude, I’m outta here…. I’ll be hanging out with the colon if you need me - come with me testicles - I’ll see you later on Chatroulette, Bill!” And then he disappeared in a puff of baby powder.

The THIRD option is dating women/girls in their 20’s.

I used to see guys in their thirties dating girls in their early twenties and think “What a ….CREEP!” Now I’m in my thirties, I see it, and I think “What a… GOOD IDEA!”

Young girls are just so easy to please! You can drive ‘em to Tijuana and they’re like “Wow, I’ve never been overseas before!”

Older women are impossible to please.

“Hey, Sally, I really want to make you cum.”

“You do? Well here’s the instruction manual, if you refer to page 347 in the chapter on clitoral stimulation, it will show you the proper rotation and psi needed to please me….”

Plus, young girls can teach me things like how to use a computer and webchat. “Baby, can you help me change my Facebook settings?” And, according to a new book, a ‘blow job is the new good night kiss” with the current generation of young girls. Dr. Phil has a problem with this because, apparently, he isn’t a fan of awesomeness.

Plus, younger women are game for anything. “Hey, Jenna, wanna put on X-MEN outfits and bang in the park tonight?”

“Sure why not? I’ve never done THAT before. Can I be STORM? Just make sure I’m back in time for homeroom!”

Okay, the truth is, despite everything I say and write, I want love and nothing is cooler to me than a long, beautiful relationship like the one my parents, Dave and Suzy Dawes, have. They’ve been together for over 40 years and my mom still looks at my dad and says things like “Isn’t your dad cute?” Awwww.

They have shared everything. And that is love. And that is life.

Honestly, I don’t want to be one of those Hollywood stereotypes. I don’t want to be 60 and marry a 40 year old. That’s so cliche!

No… I wanna be 40 and marry a 20 year old.

That’s much better.

Right?

Am I white trash?

And if so, am I proud?

When you grow up poor and go to public schools, you don’t consider the possibility that you might be white trash.  Mostly because there is always someone white trashier than you.  

I’d like to think I’m NOT actually white trash. I’m mixed: half-white, half-trash — my mom is from the South and my dad has teeth. But looking back at my childhood, I realize much of it had some dubious trash trappings.

Yes, I dipped occasionally, but I never had the worn white denim ring on the outside of my back jeans pocket from the perpetual Skoal can.

Yes, it was public school, but it was also very PROGRESSIVE — we were mainlining retards in my high school by the meaty fistful.

As a matter of fact, Virginia public schools were teeming with retards when I was there. Listen: I know “retards” isn’t PC, but I’m talking “Down’s Syndrome” kids — if anyone can truly capture the comic essence of the word “retard,” it’s these drooling, straight-banged bastards (why do they ALWAYS have the same haircut?).

Like most Down’s Syndrome kids, I never once got my hair cut by a ‘professional’ until my senior year of high school (in this case, a ‘Supercuts’ technician). Up until then, my dad cut my hair. “Bowl cut” isn’t a figure of speech, people– a “bowl cut” is when someone puts a bowl on the head and cuts the hair around it.

Unfortunately for me, my dad would put the bowl on my head facing up, so all I’d have would be a little tuft of hair sticking out the top of my skull like a “Freaks” pinhead. (That last bit was a joke).

Shopping with my dad was another cue that perhaps I was trash or at least trash-adjacent. Department stores were the worst — not because dad was poor, but because he was poor AND tried to play it off like he was ‘frugal.’ I literally thought that there was a brand name called “SLIGHTLY IRREGULAR.” My dad would buy my SI underpants (we called them SI’s for short) by the bulk. And then I’d have to wear imitation corduroy jeans called TUFFSKINS that felt like polyester cardboard which was being continually lit on fire right in the vicinity of the scrotal sac.

Between the TS’s (as I called them) and the slightly irregular undies, I’d spend the entire day doing the “work the wedgie out” walk. People at school thought I had scoliosis. Or spina bifida, if the TS’s were freshly out of the laundry.

ALL I wanted in life was to be rich — and that meant having a real designer shirt! Like Izod or Polo. I’d get polo-’style’ shirts instead — which would be shit like a horse with no one on it. My mom got the clever idea to sew Alligators on Izod-style shirts. The first time I donned one, I went to school all arrogant until someone pointed out that the Alligator was facing the wrong way. I tried to convince people it was their new “greater than” line, but it was actually “equal to” beatings on the playground.

Remarkably, despite this, my parents successfully tricked me and my two brothers into thinking that we were middle class.   When your high school experience involves — at least bi-weekly — watching big black ballers get in fistfights with “Joey the Retard” in the cafeteria and LOSE (DS kids are as strong as PCP-addled Orangutans), it’s easy to forget about mundane things like exactly what rung you are on the socioeconomic ladder.

One day, I finally saved up enough money to buy my own designer piece and I got a “members only” jacket. It was like summer and hot, but I still wore that thing to class every day for a week. I would hear things like: “Dude, that style is so dead,” “More like ‘Only Member’” and “Fag.” I cried and cried. I’m telling you, kids can be so mean in college. 
 
As it turns out, it wasn’t until I became ensconced in the Ivory towers of Princeton University that I learned I was, in fact, poor white trash from Virginia.  
 
My freshman year at Princeton is when I first found out how completely uncouth, unfashionable, uncultured, and unPRINCETONy I actually was.  At first, I was angry at my parents for not teaching me how to be refined and shit — like what a hand towel is; which are the proper utensils to use for eatin’; and what ‘manners’ are.

But after 4 years of going there and after 3 subsequent years of dating a trust fund girl from the LIPPER financial family,  I finally got my chance to be RICH… by proxy, at least.

And I realized something profound that changed my life: rich people, in general, suck enormous amounts of cock — figuratively speaking, of course. Specifically, the East-Hampton-wall-street-posing-$5000-worth-of-makeup-nose-job-for-their-sweet-sixteen-having-to-cover-up-their-genetic-inbreeding-spoiled-acting-Prozac-gulping-therapist-obsessing-breakfast nook-eating-deluded-wrongly-entitled-group-of-talentless-and-stupid-bratty-fucknut TYPES.

Wow, did I type that out loud? I seem bitter, huh? Well, for the record, I dumped her. White trash - 1. Legacy family - 0.

So I guess maybe in retrospect, I am White Trash and Proud.

When I was a kid, I would bug my dad relentlessly about the possibility of going to “summer camp.”

I would tell him that all my cool friends went to overnight camp during the summer… on account of the fact that THEIR dads actually loved them. Because two of the defining aspects of my dad’s personality are his Scottish frugality and his emotional Asperger’s, he never budged a bit.

One day, without any reason given, he submitted, and told me that he was going to send me off to “CAMP HIGHROAD” in the mountains of western Virginia. For a full week! I was so excited, I almost pee’d my hand me-down Garanimals.

Inside this trojan horse of summer water sports was a bunch of Bible-wielding rednecks itching for a Holy war.

Because “CAMP HIGHROAD” was, in fact, Jesus Camp.

See, the THIRD defining aspect of my dad’s personality is his religious fundamentalism. I guess he figured that if he was going to waste his hard earned government employee money on a camp, his children better get some eternal salvation in the process.

I’m not sure why, at age 8, my dad thought I needed to be saved. Perhaps he was aware of my FUN DIP addiction. Perhaps he knew that I was up to 6 Oreos a day and dangerously beginning to move into Doublestuff. Or possibly, since I had a terrible and lateral lisp that no speech therapist could seem to lick, he suspected something more Satanically systemic….

The logo of ‘Camp Highroad’ was a black cross with a serpentine red flame curling perilously close to it…. Hmmmm, wooden cross… about to be on fire… hills of Virginia?… In retrospect, the calculus was pretty easy.

The camp (like my dad) Trojan-horsed their religious agenda inside a zippity-do-dah “ADVENTURELAND.” We did the same outdoorsy activities that everybody else did everywhere else. The only difference was that we did every camp activity for the glory of Jesus: canoeing, ziplines, and, often, atomic wedgies, for Jesus.

The highlight of camp had to be the campfire. Every night, we sat around a huge bonfire, read sermons, and sang terrifying songs about the second coming of Jesus Christ in the imminent “rapture” as we roasted marshmallows — or as the counselors jokingly called them, “Sinners.” It was a regular Jesus Jamboree with splashes of fear and xenophobia thrown in.

I imagine Camp Highroad had the same type of kids as a regular sleepaway camp. The only difference, I later realized, was that a lot of the kids at Highroad were clearly there to learn how to let Jesus, the Son of God, enter into their young hearts so that they wouldn’t be tempted to let Hay-soos, the Poolboy, enter into their young buttholes. Maybe my lazy and sloppy “esses” had made my father wonder about my sexuality because it seemed that an unspoken mission of Camp Highroad was to exorcise “faggotry” whenever it reared its ugly head…. or whenever a kid’s head was on rears.

Any institution THAT anti-gay was, not surprisingly, chockful o’ gay. But enough about the Republican Party.

It shouldn’t shock you then that my second strongest memory from Camp Highroad involves being constantly exposed to peni. After daily swimming classes, all the kids AND counselors would hop in the communal showers together. The adults would casually walk around the changing room naked like it was some ancient Greek mentorship program. Some of the counselors even did the overtly homosexual maneuver (as seen at “CRUNCH” fitness) of putting on every single bit of clothing, even socks and watch, before finally, and begrudgingly, shimmying into their tight briefs.

Even at that young age, I knew something was fucked up about that. Tube socks, a wristwatch, and a cock should never, ever be seen at the exact same time. I think that is actually a subset of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I also knew there was something VERY wrong about the sight of a 12 year-old kid with a two inch hairless acorn standing next to a 25 year-old counselor lathering his hair — arms up in a Calvin Klein billboard pose — as shampoo froth funneled down through his butt cheeks. I seemed to be the only person who was freaked out by the “openness” of it all. I never showered once. I would just sit there, mouth agape, looking at all the different dicks like bizarre fish in an aquarium, feeling like Darwin probably did after his first trip to the Galapagos.

Having only seen my own kit and caboodle previously, I was shell-shocked. I remember, at one point, staring at this southern kid Jake’s penis. He was a pale kid and his penis looked painfully purple and diminutive. It was like someone had sewn a maroon button into the seam of his crotch. I gazed, slack-jawed in astonishment. All of a sudden, he shouted across the locker room in a squeaky Huckleberry Hound accent: “Hey, what are you lookin’ at? We all got one!”

I wanted to say, “Yeah, but not a purple one like THAT, E.T.! It looks like it got burned in a space fire!”

The worst part about class with the NAMBLA synchronized swim team was the fact that I was a crappy swimmer. To get around the swim test towards the end of week, I gave myself “the flu” by asking to see the nurse and putting the thermometer against a desk lamp bulb when she wasn’t looking. My temperature came out to 120 degrees. I exclaimed, “Wow, I didn’t realize I was that sick!” The nurse gave me a knowing smirk and wrote a pass to excuse me.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to do the backstroke for Jesus.

I did, however, have my first fight for Jesus.

I don’t remember exactly why I got into a fight with this particular kid. I just remember that he baby talked a lot. Many of the kids there baby talked about the Bible, and it irked the everliving fuck out of me. I would look around when the kid was doing it, like “Is it just me!?” I felt like the protagonist in one of those Michael Bay films where you have to convince the President’s cabinet that the world is going to end unless they do something immediately, and they just look at you like you’re smoking a crack pipe.

Much like this President and his Cabinet, I found a lousy pretense other than the truth (the baby talk) to attack, and I preemptively pushed the kid. I don’t think punches were thrown. I just remember him pinning my head against the dusty wood slats of the cabin floor and saying, in the baby talkiest of baby talk patois: “Okay, aw you weady to quit now? Can’t we be fwiends?” He won. I guess God was on his side. It was beyond humiliating.

I will say this about Camp Highroad: that place works!

First of all, by the end of camp, any latent gay I might have had in me was wiped completely out thanks to baby talking quasi-fags and ugly purple cocks burning indelible scars into the parts of my brain responsible for shame, sexual gratification, and long-term memory.

Second of all, I DID have a born-again moment at that camp where I asked Jesus to enter into my heart.

I vividly remember when it happened, and it was also probably the FIRST time I sincerely prayed to Jesus. After the fight, I was uncertain of who to turn to, or where to go to share my pain, I humblydropped to my knees by my short-sheeted cot and prayed:

“Dear Jesus. . . . Please get me the fuck out of Jesus Camp . . . in Jesus’ name I pray. . . . Amen. ”

The next day, I called my dad at the camp office and told him to pick me up. Two days early.

I thought he would be furious with me for not finishing the program, but, as he has my entire life, he surprised me with his kind and gentle nature. He didn’t tell me I was a disappointment to him or say one stern word. He even took me to Arby’s, my favorite restaurant, for lunch. He didn’t ask me about God, and he didn’t make me talk about the fight, the forfeited swim test, or the purple-penised fag and Jew haters.

Despite his Republican fundamentalism, I think he knew that, more than a soul that needed saving, I was his confused and scared son.

So . . . we just sat there, father and son, eating America’s roast beef in silent communion.