Blind Dates are Terrible

 This is a selection from the newest selection, Blind Dates are Terrible

Steven despised blind dates.  They were anathema to him.  They were the haunts of the lowest common denominator, those who had truly given up hope of ever finding love through conventional, sane methods.  Besides, Steven did not need to help.  He was perfectly capable of finding a mate on his own.  He just busied himself with other, more useful endeavors.  His life was miserable enough; he did not desire to drag another being into his ever spiraling existence. 

            His best friend Greg, whom he hated, set him up.  He was always attempting things like this.  He would attempt to apply bandages to the various cracks in Steven’s life like a field medic.  Greg always told Steven to have an open mind, to trust that the universe would work itself out for him.  Steven hated Greg.  It was easy for him to exude such joy; he did not have Steven’s life.

            But Greg was persuasive, and persistent.  And so Steven found himself on a bus with a slip of paper in his hand.  The slip of paper contained an address and a time; 1440 S. Clark, 7 pm.  This did not fill Steven with much optimism.  This was a scavenger hunt for the damned.  The prize at the end could only be disappointment and boredom.  Steven had done this before.  Every month or so, Greg would give him a slip of paper and send him into the world, like a child on the world’s worst Easter egg hunt.  They always ended the same way, with an awkward hug and vague promises of future contact.  Except for that one time; the time when Steven found himself squeezing through an open bathroom window like Andy Dufresne escaping his cell.

            Steven shuddered to think of that moment as he know sat here now in this squalid Sushi bar and waited for his punishment to arrive.  Upon leaving the bus, he had stepped into a puddle that driver must have purposely stopped in front of.  Now his paint leg dripped with dirty street water as he tried to keep it from soaking into his socks.  This was not a good way to start, but this was perhaps better.  This way there was no way to get his hoped up.    Perhaps this is what Greg meant when he said that the universe would work itself out.  It just so happened that Steven’s universe hated him.