Eating the unicorn.

'Tis said that an active fantasy life is a portal to escapism and a nice little acceptable break from reality for people.  It keeps us sane during the hard times and keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously during the good times.  Never has this been more on display than in recent weeks.

By allowing myself the luxury of keeping real-life girls safely tucked away in my "if only" state of mind, the same recess by which I either vented natural masculine energies or "cheated in spirit" during my married years, it keeps me from succumbing to the temptation to get a girlfriend just to have a warm body around and not be alone...and in the process lets me stay blissfully single at a time in my life when I really need to be single in order to keep proper focus on my goals.

By way of example, there's a girl who works at a convenience store up the street at which I'm a regular customer.  She's young (but not TOO young---stop looking at me like that), short, sandy blonde, too busty for her frame, in other words EXACTLY the kind of girl who inspires the most pornographic parts of my imagination into a massive fit of "come to Butt-head".  There's something very Jim Morrison "hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name" about a girl like that, y'know?  But I'm not ready for a girl in my life, not since the divorce was still only a month ago, much less having the audacity to ask a girl who sees dozens of people on every work shift to go on a date with a guy about whom the only thing she knows is that I live in the neighborhood and buy a lot of Gatorade.  Anyone who thinks that's a recipe for happily-ever-after has seen too many movies.

So I'm left to occasionally collide with her world, putting her astoundingly attractive self firmly in the place in my head that pulls characters for the night's dreams, which always star me as a heroic adventurer type, kind of an odd cross between Casanova, Robin Hood, and some sort of Japanese video game character gone horribly wrong.  It's a nice placeholder until I meet the real girl of my dreams.