Me.

It would have been nice to have started at the very beginning. There I was...a little, greasy haired, horn-rimmed trifocal wearing, socially inept, wilted wallflower before discovering the glorious land of pick up--and look at me now! Getting laid 60 times a night by no less than 12 hot models at any one given time...and all from a £500 boot camp and a kit of 12 openers, 20 negs and the ol' stand by "Evolution Phase Shift Routine!"

Thanks, Game!!

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er...no. I can't start at the beginning because there was none--and I can't see the finish because I am unable to distinguish the perceived "End Game" touted by PUA marketing juggernauts from my own personal finish line. I can't blog from the beginning and trace my development to the end because I have lived the beginning my entire life and I still don't trust that the end is real. I see progress, but I don't know what progress is...I digress. This whole blog begins with a digression.

I'll begin with the middle, then. I am a player of the Game. I am not a good player--I am not a bad player--I simply have been absolutely terrified to pick up the goddamn dice. Perhaps this is because no one ever really told me there were dice in the first place...somehow I was supposed to know this. Other people knew this. Why didn't they tell me? Oh, they did...in disguised jargon..."it'll just happen." "when it's on it's on" "read the signals" "It just hasn't happened yet".

This whole host of people--tall ones, short ones, socially inept ones...drunk ones...everyone showed up to their adolescent years with an instruction manual and a pair of dice...they went about their business, and that was it. They may not have been "good" at it, per se...but somehow, something worked out just fine.

Then there was me. And while the rest of the world, while perhaps not marvelouslly successful with women, went about their business and rolled their dice enough to eventually chill out and get married, I became a misogynist. A misanthrope. An ever-increasing ball of piano-wire tension that never, EVER, relaxed. And my brain pretty much cracked. I became pretty disturbed--although no one ever noticed a thing. Memory started to fail...thoughts stopped connecting...processing became next to impossible. Reading, one of my most enjoyable pastimes, became extraordinarily difficult. And this all during graduate school...

Things were quite traumatic.

See, this wasn't about women...this was about negativity---this incredible degree of self-sabotage that for some reason shot far past any reasonable levels.

Why? I had a stable childhood...close family....great friends....nothing, really, that would warrant the psychological damage I had been doing to myself since a teenager.

What was so hellish....and just reinforced the whole notion of self-sabotage--was that I'd had success. The hottest (well, maybe second hottest :) ) girl in my master's program was basically straddling me at a graduate school party in 2003 while 10 members of the class hurled condoms at us. In 1999, I lured an insanely cute artist, 5 years older than me, away from her asshole boyfriend right under his nose in a sauna and sent him back to Albany New York--a 6 hour drive--within 10 minutes.

But these accomplishments--the ones on my terms--were extraordinarily rare. The rest of my life was negative thinking...negative thinking...95-99% of the time.

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Reading "The Game" could have been dangerous for me. Seeing what was possible, while it should have been inspiring--actually ratcheted the negativity up--negativity that was already at an insane level. Why couldn't I open? I couldn't even say "Hi"! To my knowledge I had never received freakin' eye contact--let alone been opened. "The Game" threatened to do to me what it seemed like all women had done--slide themselves in incredibly, incredibly--seductively close--only to lay bare, at point blank range--exactly what it was I could never have.

That is the way I have always seen women, and that is the way I have experienced myself for the past 10 years.

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"The game, gentlemen, is about to change." And next time, I'll talk a bit about how.