Barry's Life in Napa Blog

The chart above shows that this post has a serious, quasi-academic quality Way back in 1984, in the Pleistocene era, there was a movie called "The Lonely Guy." I always remember it as an Albert Brooks movie, but it was Charles Grodin who actually played the title character. Sometimes hard to separate one sad sack from another I guess. This was in Grodin's BBSBWCTS (Before Becoming a Smug Bore With a Cable Talk Show) period, when he was funny on screen, and I remember having some laughs and feeling the pathos of the story. Steve Martin was in it, too, so there's that. Grodin plays Warren Evans, a man who finds his wife in flagrante with another man, gets divorced, becomes lonely and despondent, chokes on a toothpaste tube cap and dies, and is eaten by his cats before his body is discovered. Wait a minute, that's not right - this is a comedy with a Neil Simon screenplay - I think I was imagining it as a Coen Brothers movie or something. Sorry. The actual story has ...

I've made a couple hundred posts on this blog since I started it, and I think the post about online dating got the most reaction. Did I hit a nerve there? Was I the most honest at that moment 6 months ago, and as a result sparked a lot of replies? Yeah, I think so. Since then I had a few dates that originated from one of the popular online sites, and I did my share of cruising around the lake casting my bait to see who I might catch. Can't say that I landed any keepers, but it was - interesting. And like a lot of other people I've talked to, eventually you realize you're seeing the same faces on the screen and you're thinking "is she still on here? Must be something really wrong with her" and it's likely they're seeing you the same way - "is that guy still on here? Must be something really wrong with him!" - and so the whole thing stops being interesting real quick, and then it feels kind of desperate and sad and unhealthy, and so you can...

One of the most profound changes that occurs when you end a long term relationship is the sudden discovery that you are alone in the bed. This is assuming, naturally, that you slept in the same bed in the first place, and didn't have separate rooms, Rob and Laura Petrie twin beds, bunk beds, hammocks, or some other crazy arrangement (because married or otherwise partnered people who don't sleep together is just really weird to me.) And it assumes that you or your partner wasn't always on the road, passed out on the couch downstairs, or in jail most of the time. In other words, that you are used to having your SO (male, female, canine, feline, amphibian, whatever) in the bed with you a lot. And then suddenly you don't. Early in a relationship there's nothing better than slipping between the sheets with that wonderful person of apparently questionable judgement who wants to share the bed with you. Nothing better than whispering under the covers, a little tickling, thr...