Forty years old and still single. Jeez.
It had become a goal by age 25, thereafter festering into an obsession that defied rhyme, reason, biblical interpretation or grad-school quantification. Bachelor pals his own age had fallen years ago along life's rutted trail. Since then many a younger trailmate had likewise gone face-down into the trendy grime of a meaningful relationship. He winced at their fall from grace yet pressed ever-forward in his juking, elusive run from love.
The lure of a distant goal plus his byzantine maze of defenses ensured that few knife-fighting women would get near enough to rope Wily Desperado. He'd weathered Vietnam's monsoons and Japan's typhoons, LA freeways and Texas blue laws, 12 years of Franciscan nuns and a literate lifetime of vile puns. Not to mention endless Saturdays queued outside whispering confessionals where he sought forgiveness for having developed premarital wisdom teeth.
He'd survived to tell of deep postings in Little League leftfields followed by Marine Corps assignments amid haywired minefields. Indeed, he'd run a gauntlet of life's higher hurdles:
- Search-and-destroy missions through dank, orc-infested caverns;
- Cross-desert caravans into the land of prune-strewn suburban sprawl ruled by peroxide gila monsters;
- Balls-to-the-wall vertical assaults on the doped slopes of hippydom where day-glow earth mothers feed, breed and bleed flower children and where only the lewd die young;
- One-on-one brawls with towering Asian slinksters;
- Midnight parachute drops into pits punjied with ancient samurai swords dipped in steaming Cheese Whiz.
Thus it was that, by the summer of 1985, El Hombre Singulare was within a few lethal miles of reaching The Big Four Zero on 5 September.
Nobility of Failure
