Regrets, I’ve had a few

Yesterday was Richard’s (my brother-in-law) birthday and while we all reveled (me included, and for my own selfish reasons) in his joy at getting a Scaletric Racing set (a real big boy’s toy) it did set my mind to thinking of the past, unfortunately it’s where those of us with questionable futures tend to spend a lot of time.

There’s not a lot I regret from my past, much I am sorry for, but not a lot of regrets. The way I see it, all of my experiences have culminated in developing the person I am today and though I do not stack up even-steven with the likes of  Superman, Batman, Spiderman or even Obama, I do think that I am an OK guy.

The mistakes I’ve made, and boy have I made mistakes, have gained me the experience to be a better man and hopefully a better person today than I was at any other time in my past.

That’s not to say I do not have regrets, I, as the immortal Frank Sinatra sings, “have had a few.” My biggest regret though was destroying a relationship with of one of the few women I could have, or should have married. Hindsight is a bitch!

This incredible woman worked with me for a while and was not only beautifully sexy but also intelligent with an amazing capacity to experience new things all the time, a quality I find very attractive in women, mind you I’m probably overly romanticizing, like any good fisherman, the attributes of the one that got away.

My regret was not that I let her get away, sorry my male ego got in the way here; I do understand that a relationship is based on two people and not just what I want, and the fact, might be, that she, if I had given her the chance, would have turned me down anyway. The regret is actually that I took away the opportunity for her to make that decision. My actions drove her away and practically demanded that she hate me for the rest of her life, or mine depending on which of us crosses the pearly gates first.

Relationships are the bane to my existence, my Asperger's becomes a disability in this aspect of my life.

I do not intuitively understand the nuances of human verbal and non verbal interaction. At the best of times I use references from novels I’ve read and TV shows or movies I’ve seen, as well as past experience, compare the millions of scenes I’ve seen play out to the one I’m presently in and pattern my response to suit. This is not an automatic knee-jerk response that most people seem to be able to do but a calculated and determined action that I have to be actively engaged in, much like any work task you have been given to do.

Since no conversation flows exactly as the references I’m pulling from I have to constantly review each individual instance of my conversation, with all those stored in my head and pattern what I think is an appropriate response, verbally, non-verbally or both. This process takes intense concentration, specially when you have to keep the fact of what you are doing from your companion. It taxes me physically and mentally and after a while, from just pure exhaustion, I have to seek sanctuary and pull back and hide, as best I can.

You would think that after 53 years I would be more adept at this but that’s not the case and with my recent divorce, my ring finger still has the absent ring’s indent, I have once again been thrust into, at least for me, the black hole of female/male interaction.

Case in point, I met a woman last year at a rally event, with whom I had an immediate attraction, but with only one week to work with and her at opposite ends of the event to me meant we only interacted two or three times and only in an official capacity…if this were a movie I would have flirted with her at each occasion to let her know I was interested but I just did not know how too. A lost chance for me.

And again last night, on my way back home with Richard and Giselle, we were out with a few friends continuing Richard’s birthday celebrations, I was told that our waitress was flirting with a friend sitting but one seat away from me. What I thought was a waitress just being friendly, maybe angling for a bigger tip, was in fact flirting. I was shocked, not so much that she was flirting with my friend but at the now possible thousands of times that I had been flirted with and had not known about it.