Well Bottom Blues

I finished my Mardi Gras Day with a Buffa Burger, and stepped outside to order a car and vape while I waited. It was a busy day and my wait 25+ minutes, so I stood on the corner and considered the crowd around me. There was a young woman sitting alone at an outside table, clearly drunk. and two guys with not a bit of Carnival about them stopped to talk to her. This situation looked rather rapey to me, so I walked up and asked her if I could sit at her table while waiting for my car. She immediately assented and introduced herself: Mary Catherine. What a perfect Catholic girl name, I replied.

The creepy guys moved on, as intended, so i introduced myself as well. We talked about the day a bit, and how she’d broken off from (been dumped by?) her room mates. She didn’t say friends. At one break in the conversation she leaned in close and said, “I want to rape you.” OK, then. I explained why that was not a terribly good idea even as my Interior Lizard flashed his dewlap from my amygdala to my crotch. I’m in a deeply loving, long-haul partnership but my partner is has medical issues, and we shelved sex several year ago. The more advanced parts of my brain are OK with this, but not the Strange Interior Lizard.

What I should have done was offer to call her a car and send her home, lest her own booze-infused Lizard Brain sent her home with the wrong person. I didn’t. My phone said my car was now five minutes away. I stood up and said no (again) but said I’d take a kiss instead. This immediately turned into the beast with 10 limbs (counting tongues) for a very long minute. Then I stepped back. This is when my better angels should have stepped in and offered to send her home, but she became stand offish since I wasn’t going to be tonight’s boy toy.

So I left.

I struggle with my lizard brain, but at least I had the sense not to take her up on her (wildly impractical if nothing else) offer. I thought a good bit about this and how I reacted that night and the next morning. And obviously I’m still thinking about it. I know what I would have done a decade a go at the peak of my Bi-Polar mania, and I’m glad I didn’t, but I didn’t do what a proper, older gent knight in shining armor should have done, and I didn’t.

I am glad, if not proud, that I didn’t listen to my own, rather intoxicated lizard brain. He’s apparently not going anywhere anytime soon and I need to keep him on a leash.

I just hope Mary Catherine got home safely with or without a bed mate.