dmd-love-story.txt

THE GREAT LOVE HUNT OF DMD
(A Cautionary Tale in Six Disasters)
By Hunter T., with apologies to everyone involved

There are men born to love, and there are men born to be loved, and then there is DmD, who was born on a Tuesday during a thunderstorm and has been striking out ever since. God looked at DmD and said, "I have given this man the sexual charisma of a damp dishrag, and I shall watch him suffer for my amusement." And lo, it was so.

DISASTER NUMBER ONE: THE BAR

It started, as all great tragedies do, in a dive bar that smelled of spilled PBR and broken dreams. DmD, emboldened by two-and-a-half Bud Lights and a sudden surge of what he mistook for confidence, approached a woman at the bar. She had eyes like the sea and a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail on her forearm, which should have been his first warning sign.

"Excuse me," DmD said, leaning in with the smoothness of a man falling down a flight of stairs. "Do you come here often?"

The woman looked at him the way one looks at a particularly confusing puddle of vomit. "I work here," she said. "I'm the bartender. You just ordered from me, like, four minutes ago."

DmD, refusing to acknowledge defeat, pressed on. "Then you must know," he said, "what a man like me — a man of depth, of passion, of —" here he paused to check a cheat sheet he'd written on his forearm, which was sadly visible and readable, saying "— of gentle humor and good listening skills —" The bartender watched him read his own arm with the flat, dead expression of a woman who has seen a man eat a cigarette filter.

"Sir," she said, "I have a boyfriend. He's a firefighter. He's here. He's the one pointing at you from the pool table."

DmD turned. The firefighter was, indeed, pointing. He was also, based on the size of his forearms, capable of folding DmD into a beach chair. DmD left the bar with the speed of a man who has just remembered he left his stove on, except the stove was his dignity and it was already fully engulfed.

DISASTER NUMBER TWO: THE DATING APP

Undeterred — because DmD's capacity for self-delusion was the only thing about him that was truly world-class — he downloaded a dating app. He spent three days crafting a profile. His bio read: "I'm a nice guy. I like long walks on the beach (my grandma's beach house, which is TOTALLY still in the family, the paperwork is just pending). I'm looking for a real connection, none of that hookup culture garbage. Also I'm very tall." He was 5'6" and his grandmother lived in a condo in Tampa with a view of a parking lot.

He swiped right on 847 women. He got four matches. Three of them were bots selling crypto. The fourth was a woman named Brenda who, in the second message, asked if he'd ever been to Peru.

"I have not," DmD typed, thrilled to finally be conversing with a real human woman, "but I've always wanted to! What's it like?"

"It's great," Brenda replied. "My uncle has a compound there. Very private. Lots of generators. He can teach you how to make money fast. Just bring $5,000 in cash and don't tell anyone."

DmD, a man with the survival instincts of a lemming, was halfway to booking a flight before his internet went out and he never heard from Brenda again. To this day he tells people he "dodged a bullet." The bullet was a cartel, and he did not dodge it so much as it lost interest and wandered off to find a more promising target.

DISASTER NUMBER THREE: THE WEDDING

A mutual friend got married. DmD attended alone, wearing a tuxedo he'd rented for his own prom in 2007 and had been keeping in a garment bag ever since, on the theory that it "still fits." It did not. The pants ended at mid-shin. He looked like a penguin that had been through a terrible divorce.

At the reception, he spotted a woman at the bar (his natural habitat, the bar, the place where dreams go to get roofied). She was laughing with friends, tossing her hair, radiant. DmD resolved to speak to her. He rehearsed a line in his head. It was: "So, do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk by again?"

He did not say this. What he actually said, when he opened his mouth, was: "So, do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk by again?" — except his voice cracked on the word "sight" and it came out as a sort of strangled screech, like a car alarm with a stutter.

The woman, to her eternal credit, smiled. "That's cute," she said. "What's your name?"

"I'm DmD," he said. "It's short for something. I don't remember what. I had a fever as a child."

The conversation went downhill from there. He told her about his grandma's beach house (Tampa, parking lot view). He told her about his collection of limited edition Mountain Dew bottles. He told her about his theory that the moon landing was faked because "the flag doesn't ripple correctly, and I've done the math." By the end of the night she was gone, having left via a fire exit, and DmD was alone on the dance floor, doing a dance he called "the Worm" which was less a worm and more a man having a seizure while lying down.

DISASTER NUMBER FOUR: THE COWORKER

At his job — a data entry position where he typed numbers into spreadsheets with the enthusiasm of a man stamping out a fire — DmD developed a crush on a coworker named Angela. She was kind to him, which he mistook for romantic interest. She once said "good morning" to him and he spent the rest of the day planning their wedding in his head. The venue was the beach house in Tampa. The caterer was a local pizzeria. The first dance was to "Closing Time," which he thought was romantic because it had the word "time" in it.

He decided to confess his feelings at the office holiday party. He bought a new shirt. He practiced his speech in the mirror for three hours. The speech was: "Angela, from the moment I saw you, I knew you were the one. Not 'the one' like a destiny thing, but like... the one. You know? The one. Anyway, do you want to go get a coffee sometime, or maybe a pizza, or maybe we could just get married, I have a venue lined up."

He never delivered this speech. At the party, he approached Angela just as she was introducing him to her wife. The wife's name was also Angela. There were two Angelas. They were both women. They were both wearing wedding rings. They both looked at DmD with the gentle pity of people who have just watched a man discover that water is wet.

DmD said, "Oh," and then, "Oh, no," and then he walked into the coat closet and stayed there until the party ended. Someone found him at 11 PM asleep on a pile of winter coats, clutching a gift bag he'd brought for the white elephant exchange. He'd wrapped it himself. It was a framed photo of himself, taken at a Renaissance Faire in 2015, holding a turkey leg.

DISASTER NUMBER FIVE: THE NEW AGE EXPERIMENT

In a desperate gambit, DmD decided that his problem was "energetic" and that he needed to "realign his chakras." He spent $400 on a weekend retreat called "Awaken the Lover Within," held in a barn in rural Ohio that smelled strongly of patchouli and despair. The retreat leader was a man named Dr. Starlight, who was actually a former car salesman named Gary who'd had a spiritual awakening during a particularly intense audit.

The retreat had seven attendees. Six of them were women. DmD's heart sang. Finally, a place where his true self could shine! He was assigned to a "twin flame circle" with a woman named Raven, who wore feathers in her hair and spoke about her past lives. DmD told her about his past life — he claimed he'd been a pirate captain named Bartholomew "Thunderbeard" McGee, which was a lie; in his actual past life he'd been a mid-level accountant in 1970s Cleveland who'd died of a heart attack while filing a TPS report.

Raven was enchanted. For one glorious evening, they held hands around a fire and chanted. DmD felt something he'd never felt before: hope. He leaned in to kiss her.

She leaned back. "I'm sorry," she said. "I should have said something sooner. I'm actually here with my girlfriend. She's the one in the green poncho. We're in an open relationship but only with other women. It's a whole thing. You understand."

DmD did not understand. DmD understood nothing. He drove home that night in silence, stopping only once, at a gas station, where he bought a bag of beef jerky and ate the entire thing while staring at the pump, a man at the absolute end of his rope.

DISASTER NUMBER SIX: THE FINAL STRAW

The last one broke him. A woman at the grocery store. She dropped a jar of pickles. DmD, in a fit of chivalry he'd been saving up for a special occasion, dove to catch it. He caught it. It was the single most athletic thing he'd ever done. The woman laughed, delighted. "Nice catch!" she said.

"Pickles," DmD said, holding the jar aloft like a trophy, "are the unsung heroes of the condiment world. People think of ketchup, mustard, mayo. But the pickle? The pickle is the one condiment that can stand alone. The pickle is a leader. The pickle is —"

"Okay," the woman said, backing away slowly. "Well, thanks for the... help."

"Wait!" DmD called after her. "What's your name? Can I get your number? I'm a nice guy! I have a beach house! Well, my grandma does, and she's very old, and —"

She was gone. DmD stood in the pickle aisle, holding the jar, and for the first time in his life, he understood something fundamental about the universe: he was alone. Not lonely in the way everyone gets lonely sometimes, but alone in the way a lighthouse is alone, or a moon is alone, or a man who has just delivered a six-minute monologue about pickles to a stranger is alone.

He bought the pickles. He ate them that night, straight from the jar, watching TV. The jar was the closest thing to a companion he'd ever had that didn't run away screaming.

THE AFTERMATH

Today, DmD lives in a studio apartment with a cat named Mr. Business, whom he has trained to sit on his lap and pretend to listen when he practices his wedding vows. The vows are to an imaginary woman named "Samantha" who he describes as "blonde, into classic rock, doesn't mind that I still live with my grandma sometimes." He has 14 dating apps on his phone and 0 matches. He once paid a psychic $80 to tell him he'd meet someone "by the next full moon," and when he didn't, he went back and the psychic told him the moon "wasn't the right moon" and charged him another $80.

There is no happy ending. There is no redemption arc. There is no "and then one day he met someone who saw past his awkwardness and loved him for who he was." This is not that story. This is the story of DmD, a man who once tried to flirt with a woman by telling her that his grandmother's condo association was "really cracking down on unauthorized grill usage," and who will die alone in that studio apartment, surrounded by Mountain Dew bottles and framed Renaissance Faire photos, his last words being either "I should have led with the pickles" or a question mark, depending on how the autopsy goes.

The cat will outlive him. The cat will mourn him, briefly, and then the cat will move on, because cats understand what DmD never could: sometimes the best thing to do is walk away, and never, ever look back.

THE END

(For real this time. No sequel. There's only so much suffering one man can document before even the documenter needs a drink. And I need several.)