All You See Is Where Else You Could Be

Because I am a dinosaur, dating is not much different for me than it was when I was in my twenties. Old habits apparently do die hard for my people.

But I also concede that my experiences have almost nothing in common with those born after John and Yoko's "Double Fantasy" came out. Eating dinner with a millennial recently, he mentioned an article entitled, "This Is How We Date Now," lamenting that the dating world I know doesn't exist for him.

Reading the article, I was reminded of the new normal for that generation. Why commit when there are so many choices available via Tinder, OK Cupid, Grindr and the like? Endless possibilities mean there could always be someone better on a different app or platform. Not to mention the endless stream of friends' posts touting their picture-perfect relationships because people live out loud now, endlessly Instagramming or tweeting so everyone can see how enviable their lives are.

Why would you want to settle when your friend's life is so fabulous? The missing piece of the puzzle is that few people post about the arguments, the frustrations of trying to make a relationship work, so what you're envying isn't reality. It's a glossy facade, and completely unattainable.

Truthfully, the article was overly facile, purposefully glib and, in many ways, an ideal metaphor for the kind of shallow introspection that passes for deep thought. As guitarist John Mayer observed all the way back in 2003, "Numb is the new deep."

If that prediction was merely darkly amusing then, it's full-on depressing now.

That said, Death Cab for Cutie's 2005 album "Plans" contained the hauntingly beautiful "Your Heart Is an Empty Room," a song about a guy who can't quite commit because of (what else?) possibility.

Spring blooms and you find the love that's true
But you don't know what now to do
'Cause the chase is all you know
And she stopped running months ago
And all you see is where else you could be
When you're at home
Out on the street are so many possibilities 
To not be alone

Choice has always been there, obviously, but at least you used to have to leave your house to find it. Now dating options are as easy to order up as Chinese food.

All of this was in the back of my mind when I attended a show recently at Strange Matter. Because the band had originally been active from 1981 through 1989, the crowd skewed older, but with some millennials scattered throughout.

Taking up my usual position, I tried chatting up the very tall younger man standing next to me. I was curious how deep his interest in the band went, so I asked, apropos of nothing.

He looked nothing short of fully shocked that I'd instigated a conversation, but shared his enthusiasm for the band. After some face to face conversation, he kindly inquired if I could see well enough given the sold-out crowd in front of us. Explaining that at 5'5" I can never really get a great view, he moved behind me and gestured for me to stand in front of him.

I was terribly impressed with his thoughtfulness.

But from there, my evening unfolded like it was 1989 again, and not just because I was dancing for the next two hours. Because I was alone, several guys born while John Lennon was still in the Beatles decided to engage with me, talking about how good the band was, making jokes about people in the crowd, offering to buy me drinks, trying to make me laugh.

Hitting on me, plain and simple.

Which wasn't why I was at the show. But it occurred to me right then and there that they hadn't hesitated to come talk to me in an effort to try to connect with me. They were working it old-school style.

I go to Gallery 5 for shows all the time and I never see this happen. I'm the consummate observer when I'm out, but I just don't see 20-somethings making the effort to hit on each other at a show. You already have a band in common, so why the hell not?

What I do see is a lot of people on their phones - checking Facebook, filming or taking pictures and Instagramming, checking texts - while a band is singing and playing their hearts out right in front of them.

But not talking to strangers they're attracted to.

True, not everyone sees a person who catches their eye at a show, but surely it's a generational statement that it can happen to a dinosaur like me and not to the manic pixie dream girl types I'm surrounded by at these shows.

Is it because they're on Tinder and swiping their way to meeting yet another someone? As the writer of the article put it, "Maybe romance is still there, we just don't know what it looks like now."

Yeesh, at the risk of sounding like Yoko Ono ("The regret of my life is that I have not said 'I love you' often enough"), I think I'd find out about romance by talking to people's faces and not waste time swiping in search of someone to say it to.

I know, I know, how utterly prehistoric of me.

Hard Labor, Easy Day

The thought of staying in town for Labor Day held not one whit of appeal.

It was perfectly clear nothing was happening here.

Fortunately for me, I was plenty welcome at a holiday celebration outside the city.

It's the first time in memory that I was away for all three summer holidays and while there's a certain charm to being one of the remaining few over a long weekend, I've done that plenty.

It wasn't a big party, but those who did attend were superior conversationalists and I even lucked into a willing companion who accompanied me down gravel roads and on nature trails in a nearby park when I needed my walking fix.

You can take the girl out of the city, but she's going to want to get in her miles no matter where she is.

I was the last to arrive and just in time for the opening of some Graham Beck bubbly, the absolute best way to kick off a holiday.

My affection for South African wine is common knowledge in this group, although I didn't see anyone else turning it down, either.

Once the sparkling had everyone in a thoroughly festive mood, we took a field trip to the local Italian joint for, what else, pizza and Italian hoagies.

The only hiccup there was when the 2007 Bella Sera Pinot Grigio arrived long past its prime, smelling suspect and tasting downright disgusting.

Our server handled it with aplomb, going downstairs and, as she said, "crawling through the bottles" to find a more recent vintage.

The 2011 did far more justice to the onion rings and garnered her a bigger tip for the effort.

I'd like to say we were ambitious enough to play croquet or badminton when we returned, but the super-saturated air did little to encourage movement.

Truth be told, some people even napped.

Once everyone was vertical again, we moved directly to happy hour and the traditional lighting of the grill for the holiday meal.

My skill set wasn't required for cooking lamb but I was consulted about the music mix for the evening.

Between Pandora and me, I think we created several stellar playlists using my chosen starting points: Small Black, The Love Language and Twin Shadow.

The oh-so-'80s synth-pop based first set was (in my humble opinion) as good a holiday night soundtrack as anyone could have hoped for.

Tell the story how you want to
Make up all the details
Tell me what feels good
I don't care
You're no stranger
To me

True, everyone was sitting rather than actually dancing, but I did see some feet doing the horizontal mambo on a chaise lounge.

Okay, they were mine, but the point is, if it hadn't been so humid and if the wine hadn't been so free-flowing, it would have been a Labor Day dance party by the time the evening wound down.

As it was, it ended reluctantly, so we found one last activity before calling it a (labor) day.

Because we were beyond the worst of the city lights, our fine holiday celebration ended with star-gazing and perhaps even a little silent wishing on a star for those who were so inclined.

Don't look at me. I state my wishes outright and out loud.

Principessa Valve

Sometimes you just gotta let it out.

Like the other night, a friend was telling me that she'd watched "The Impossible" and cried her eyes out during it.

I questioned why she'd even watched the movie, since I knew after merely seeing its preview, that it would have destroyed me.

Personally, I need movies for a lot of reasons, but that's not one of them.

Her response was that sometimes she liked to have an excuse to let it all out, so to speak, to cry for the sake of crying.

She likened it to a release valve and then I got it.

Tonight was like that for me without the wetness.

I had a lot on my mind and I needed a release for it.

So I called up a girlfriend and asked if we could get together and blather so I could let my valve off.

Naturally we couldn't jump right into that heaviness, so we started in the Devil's Triangle at Ariana's for pizza and wine.

My last trip to Ariana's had been Fall 2009 after Holmes and I had gone to the Historical Society to see the Declaration of Independence.

We'd sat at a corner table and watched a thunderstorm roll in over the rooftops and catch people unprepared.

Tonight we had a gentle rain just beginning.

With a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a Mediterranean salad and a Principessa (sausage, spinach, mushroom) white pizza, we started by focusing more on food and drink than life and woe.

As a devotee of white pizza, I loved how the menu said that if you wanted to switch a white pizza to red, there was a $2 surcharge.

That's right, penalize the red lovers instead of us for a change.

As puddles formed outside, we talked about art in all kinds of ways - a show I'd regretfully missed at the National Gallery, a stolen Renoir that's now been found in the collection of a Maryland woman, an article we'd both seen about visiting Paris to focus solely on food, not art.

But you can only delay the inevitable for so long, so once our meal was over, we headed back to her apartment for valve release.

That required another bottle, this time an Alsatian white, to accompany the abundance of conversation.

Everyone needs a friend who'll listen when you need to rant, someone who'll nod when you ask, "Right?" and support you when you're down.

She was that and more and when she brought me home, I thanked her profusely for being a much-needed ear tonight.

Like the friend who'd sobbed through a sad movie, I felt so much better for having let off a little steam.

And it didn't even take that long, a good thing because all that wine was suddenly making my bed the priority.

When I woke up a few hours later, it was because I heard thunder, meaning my visit to Ariana's had once again conjured up a storm.

Or maybe I wasn't the only one that needed a release tonight.

Beach House Chatter

That beach nap I was counting on so much never quite happened.

Oh, I made it here just fine and spent the afternoon on the beach with my sister and brother-in-law and their seven guy friends (why they have nothing but guy friends is a sociological study in and of itself), but things were too social to sleep.

If I'm only here for 48 hours, it's too tempting to talk rather than catch up on sleep.

Like in RVA, storms had blown through yesterday, resulting in a very breezy afternoon on the beach, with a choppy surf perfect for windsurfing.

The ocean was dotted with brave souls hanging on to their "kites."

We're staying almost on top of the Nags Head pier, so it was fascinating/terrifying to watch the windsurfers maneuver around the pier without slamming into it.

By the time we got cleaned up (and while I was happy they had an outside shower, it's under the house, so there was no sky view, much less sound of surf) and ready to go out, it was after 8.

We took two cabs to the Red Drum for dinner and gradually took up the entire bar, stool by stool.

I ended up next to a tipsy local who shared the very sad story of the love of his life dying unexpectedly from a heart attack six years ago.

He has a new girlfriend, but she's not the one.

Asking about my love life, he gave me all kinds of advice about how to proceed.

We decided to make Lucky 12 our last stop because it's a block from the cottage.

The music was decent, the drinks reasonable and I had seven new housemates to talk to.

Highlight: one of the guys telling me, "You'd never know you two are sisters" and he wasn't talking about our looks.

I feel obligated to get some sleep tonight since tomorrow is a full day and my last day here, so one of the guys walked me back.

Sitting here on the deck with the ocean two houses and a road away, it feels a world way from last night.

The music isn't nearly as good, but I have loads more company, some new to me, some familiar and all talkative.

And I do love to talk.