It's that time of year again, when I start to yawn and stretch, and wake up from my winter nap — wake up, but not get up. Not yet. This is that time of the year when you're still sort of half awake, feeling good and cozy under your blankets, dreading setting foot on the cold hardwood floor, hitting the snooze button again and again.

This has been a mild winter, as for weather and discontent. I knew in autumn I would spend it alone — as Rilke writes in his "Autumn Day" (which I never tire of quoting): "Whoever has no house now, will never have one./Whoever is alone will stay alone,/will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,/and wander the boulevards, up and down,/restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing."

So I had prepared for it. Had lined up some good movies and had a stack of books waiting on the nightstand for those long, lonely nights, in lieu of lovers. But it's harder to prepare for spring, innit? Now with spring stirring in me I can feel hope gnawing again, like the rumblings of an empty stomach. I'm not that picky an eater, but I do have a minimum of nutritional standards a beau should meet. Unfortunately the most important single ingredient is je ne sais quoi. Which makes the search a little like a snipe hunt.

My last foray into dating was, as some of you might recall, a little disappointing. I thought after a two-year jag with Mr. Wrong I was ready to resume my search for Mr. Right around this time last year. In those innocent times, I still believed he was a mouse-click away, just like the ad says...


Click-click-click went my little mouse! And despite a parade of red flags the likes of which have not been seen since the last great Tribute Parade to Mao Tse Tung, I started dating a wretched little person I met online.

Of all the red flags, the creepiest by far was the movie he rented for us to watch cuddled up on the couch together on, like, our third date. It was a flick called Wolf Creek. Torture porn that he had actually seen before, with his ex, no less. And still chose for a third date with his new squeeze.

(I get excited to show potential paramours Yuri Norstein's ten-minute animated masterpiece Hedgehog in the Fog, which no one seems to love as much as I do, or even, frankly, at all. The guys I've shown it to have been a little bewildered by my enthusiasm for it. Mr. Wrong left the room when I was showing it, saying, "give me a shout when the movie starts!" Which is how I knew he was Mr. Wrong from the get-go. See, Hedgehog in the Fog is my glass slipper. We've all got one. The guy who gets it, who chuckles on cue and gasps in genuine wonder at just the right moment — he's The One.)

When I went online afterwards looking for reviews of Wolf Creek, Third Date's glass slipper, to see if I was missing some part of its appeal as a date movie, I came across Roger Ebert's warning: "If anyone you know says this is the [movie] they want to see, my advice is: Don't know that person no more."

Of course, I chose to ignore Ebert (it would not be the first time, or the last), but looking back it seems like Wolf Creek was a pretty accurate vision of Mr. Third Date's inner life: basically a pit full of shit, slime, and screaming abductees drowning in bloody body parts. I prefer rainbows and unicorns, myself, but he should actually have no trouble finding a like mind out there, and I wish them well.

So that was the last guy I met online. That's been a good year or so ago now, like I said. I didn't have much better luck in the real world, though, to tell you the truth. I had a Latin lover for a few weeks last summer I met through a, um, now ex-friend (ooops). That was very, very stressful for everyone.

And there were some stirrings of romance with a writer whose ex had hooked us up last fall, but two writers observing one another and waiting for the other to make the first move so they could run home and scribble about it in their journals — worse than two bottoms on crystal meth trapped in an elevator on their way to a circuit party.

It's not that I've been the innocent in any of these scenarios, or that I've been too terribly hurt to venture out again. It's just a lot of work, is all. And if someone was paying me for it, I'd at least be getting compensated for the time. As it is it's more like the lottery — or maybe losing at slots: not that expensive (but it does add up), pretty monotonous, and I'm getting tennis elbow.

Some friends have tried playing matchmaker, which has resulted in a few awkward moments. Unless your friends are real Yentas, they'll consider one or two misses the extent of their duties. Thank God. But then that means you're more or less on your own.

I used to think that your life could change in a moment, your fate could turn on a dime. And maybe I still believe it, but with this addendum: You might be waiting for the bus when your moment comes. You may have overslept. You may have taken a left instead of a right at the intersection. Your moment waited for half an hour, but finally gave up on you. You have to be on time for your moment. It's not gonna hang around.

If you miss your moment, there's always the internet.  And so it is that I ended up back online recently. It's not like I've never met anybody worth meeting that way. I've met some great guys that way. I have. I've had on the whole pretty good hook-up karma.  None of them were marriage material. Most were already married themselves. But that's their business, innit? 

Still, to use a culinary metaphor, the best of hook-ups is an amuse bouche.  You might get as far as the hors d'œuvre with a FB, but you're always hungry. The tapenade is divine, but you can't live on a diet of pureed olives and capers. Love is not Nouvelle Cuisine. The soul needs a banquet. The soul should eat as much as it wants, it can afford to be fat.

I'm more in a marrying mood these days.  I'd like to do some serious dating.  Well, not gravely serious, but I'd like to embark on an intimate relationship that potentially lasts more than twenty minutes.  I'm open to forty-five minutes to an hour (travel time included).

So, hey, hit me up!  I'm sure we'll have a hell of a time!