Ok, the reality of living in our modern-day world really is that there is an app for everything.

Want to know where to avoid speed traps?  Done!  Meet Waze.

Want to NOT cook?  Done!  Take your pick of the Take-Out apps out there:  Grubhub, Eat24, yada-yada-yada.

Speaking of yada-yada-yada…want to get done?  Done!  Scruff, Grindr, Daddyhunt, Radar, et al have the boys who like boys covered.  I understand there’s even an app or two for the straight folk and girls who like girls out there, so anyone can – almost literally – get anything they want through an app.

Check out more potentially nifty apps here:  10 apps that will make your life infinitely easier.

But can they?  Are we getting what we want or what’s good for us as a people with these modern conveniences?  Do they make our lives infinitely easier or better?  Look how Betty Crocker and TV Dinners turned out for us.  Seemed like good ideas at the time.

So, in an entry titled “The Biscuit”, surely I’m going to talk about some of the food options mentioned above and how they impact our culture, right?  Wrong.  I decided that – despite my friends’ ability to take an educated guess as to whatever past love interest I might be whining about – I’m going to use code names for people instead of risking alienating or embarrassing them.  I don’t mind embarrassing myself on my blog, but I’m not one to drag others down with me.  If they really deserve humiliation, I’ve already probably removed them from the situation I call my life, but still…the whole two wrongs thing.  Math.  Oy.

That’s right, The Biscuit is a boy.

So, as a single guy there are certain aspects of the heart and occasionally simply a biological imperative or need to be met.  There.  Is.  An.  App.  For.  That.

I’m not all that in favor of Hook Up apps, but that seems to be how the world works now.  When I was a kid, I went to bars and picked someone up.  Not today.  Open an app and start chatting.  The issue for me is that I’m really not looking for yet another one night stand.  I’ve been there, done it and it’s out of my system for the most part.  I get that some others are going to follow the same steps I did before becoming ready to settle down – although I’m not a big fan of the guys who seem to wallow in that phase.  Anyway, I’m one of those guys who actually puts data in my app profile and include some variant of the phrase “looking to date”.  Surprisingly, I find other guys who are looking for the same thing.  Take that.

Like The Biscuit.

Allegedly.

The Biscuit chatted me up on not one, but two different apps over the course of about five months.  When he came back to the well in mid-January of this year, I got over myself and decided to talk to this incredibly hot guy.

He was nice.  Funny.  Almost age appropriate at 31.  Seemed responsible.  He’s an ER Nurse.  Liberally shared pics – not my thing, but I’m gonna look if someone bombards me with them.  Trust me…it’s not always a good thing.  However, in this instance…va-va-va-voom.

Sidebar:  when I was a kid picking up guys in bars, I never led with showing off my privates.  It just would not have gone over well in public.  In today’s world, I know what someone’s junk looks like before I’ve seen their face pic or know their name.  How fucked up is that?

He liked that I wasn’t into hooking up.  He wasn’t either, ideally, but admitted to having gotten sucked into the game and was stuck in a cycle.  Ok, that’s a pretty earnest disclosure.  I appreciated that.  We traded cell numbers so we could text instead of chat on an app.  Apparently, this guy takes a lot of selfie-porn.  But in between those photographic humble-brags, he was truly engaging and seemingly open.

We became friends on the Facebook.  <gasp>

I discussed him with the Silver Fox.  Of course, although he didn’t know him personally, he knew exactly who he was.  He told me that The Biscuit went to our gym and he and his ex had been such a cute couple.

Of course, I asked.  I’m pretty weak sometimes.

He thought The Biscuit had cheated on his ex with a mutual friend of ours who lived in the same building as them, at the time.  Of course, this gave the Silver Fox tons of insight into The Biscuit’s sexual proclivities.  Gurls talk, ok?  Apparently, we were a pretty good match.  😉

I’m weak for frivolous reasons.  Entertainment, mostly.  In more serious matters, I tend to be pretty good about being mature, so I committed to myself and the Silver Fox to not judge The Biscuit on past behaviors, rather on how he behaved toward me.

Back to textapalooza, which was the sum total of our relationship at this point…more math.  Who knew?

We talked about fitness and how it was/is hard for me to remain as active as I want to since I had to give up running.

He shared a story about how he likes to unwind after a day at work with a glass of wine and laments not cooking dinner because it’s just for one and not as fun as cooking for friends or family.  That he needs to only have one glass because when he drinks too much he gets overly emotional.

We actually made a date.  Set a date and time and everything.  He asked what I thought we should do, and – liking activity dates – I suggested we take a cooking class since it seemed like something we’d both enjoy.  He was pretty excited about that, but I suggested we wait until after Valentine’s Day to avoid the crush of lovey-dovey barftastic couples.  He agreed so we decided to keep it simple (for me) and make it his choice of activities.  I warned him that if he failed to choose, we would be going bowling.  Ha.

Well, date and time established, he never showed up.  He never called or texted, either.

I was pretty disappointed.  How hard is it to make up an excuse?  In our prior off-and-on conversations, we had never gotten to the point of pulling the trigger on meeting, even though our orbits were pretty tight in the Pearl District neighborhood in Portland.  It’s a small town, particularly in the Pearl.  But months of off-and-on chat to develop a familiarity with one another only to not show up?  I know hook up sites are notoriously NOT for making dates and getting to know another person, but I thought we had managed to sidestep that technicality by moving to texts.

I sent him a text and got no response.

I saw him a week or so later on…that damned app again.  I told him he’d make a good biscuit because he was both hot AND flaky.  That earned me this response:

😦

Which I have zero empathy for.  I’m big on words and actions aligning.  When that doesn’t happen, I look at the collateral damage.  When your failure to deliver on your commitments negatively impacts someone else…I’m not that forgiving.  I told him that I felt the same way about his actions, but his actions were his responsibility, not mine.  He gave me a simple, “I’m sorry” .

I let it lie at that, signing off by telling him that I appreciated his words, but I was interpreting is strictly as an apology and not a request for another try at becoming friends or – worst case – deciding we could date.  Leaving the ball in his court.

To my surprise, he messaged back a couple days later saying that he did want a second chance.  Apologizing again for his behavior and explaining that he’d been casually dating  this other guy that treated him poorly and behaved like a total dick.  His words.  He didn’t know why he was prioritizing time with him.

I get that.  I do stuff all the time that I don’t “think” about because on the surface, it seems like a reasonable enough course of action.  The lightest scratch can get right past that surface veneer that looks reasonable and show the crappy reality.  So, we don’t scratch, because, then what would we do?  Risk-aversion, right?

Feeling optimistic that he provided this insight, I began chatting with him again.

That week the Silver Fox took me along to dinner with a friend of his.  An older gentleman that I had heard a lot about but never met, even though he – again – shared the same orbit around the Pearl that I did.  He even worked out at the same gym as the SF and I.

Well, he shows up just so excited.  He’d been at the gym and – not knowing what came over him – said hi to this cute guy and ended up chatting and making a date with him for that weekend.  Going on about him, sharing what little he knows, past seeing him around and their one conversation.

Turns out, 2 + 2 = The Biscuit.  Ugh.  Math, again.

The Silver Fox, being one smooth motherfucker, puts it together a beat or two later and blurts out, “Hey, that’s The Biscuit!”

Heads turned.

Personally, I would have rather just sat there in quiet humiliation, but now the can of worms was open, so I just told him that I’d been stood up by him a couple of times and hoped he had better results than I had.

So, that’s The Biscuit story.  Or IS it?  Remember how I’m weak for entertainment purposes?  Well, the other day, I logged into one of my dating (cr)apps and there was The Biscuit, 63 feet away.  That’s really a feat.  It’s freakishly close.

Of course, I said “hi”.  Three days later.  From a safe distance, after leaving Portland for a week in Seattle.

Stay tuned.  What could possibly go wrong?

This obviously has a strong theme for dating overall running through it, maybe I can put together something about that sad state of affairs at some later date.  Probably not just the implications of dating or hook-up apps on our society’s morality, but even the aforementioned Maze app.  Really, do you need an app to enable poor behavior?  If you’re speeding – which I think is breaking a law – do you deserve protections for those behaviors?  When I jaywalk, I have only my eyes to protect me from injury or citation.  No app for that…yet.

Y’know, if I keep this going.