Good-bye Confidence Road.

I went out to dinner at the bar the other night and was feeling pretty good about myself. Women were checking me out and I have to admit my confidence was pretty high. I decided to make it an early night though, because I needed to go to the library the next morning and also had to clean my place. Still feeling pretty good, the next morning when I got to the library, I held the door open for a nice elderly lady. While sitting in the library, I noticed an attractive mid thirty something woman looking my way. So now I'm like, I may have a few more wrinkles and a lot less follicles, but I still got it. The whole day, I was strutting. When I got home, I did some cleaning and decided to go food shopping.

The lady next door to me is dog sitting for her kids, so on my way out to my car, the dog begins to bark at me. It's a small black poodle looking thing, so I do what everyone does when they see a small dog, I talk to it like I'm five years old. I lean over and start saying, “It's OK... I'm not going to hurt you... you don't have to bark at me...  I'm the friendly neighbor.”. The dog wasn't buying it and continued to bark. I usually keep dog biscuits in my pocket for just such an occasion, but I'll tell you about the dog biscuit, dog park incident some other time.

Watch this, this is where my overinflated confidence gets flattened like a supermodel in bed with a sumo wrestler. The lady next door looks over and starts calling the barking dog. I tell her, “It's OK, the four foot fence is enough to hold back his scourge.”, My neighbor, who is very sweet smiles and yells back, “Do you know who you look like?”. When I was younger people would say Keefer Sutherland, so I thought, this should be good. She says, “Elton John!”. Craaaaash! Somehow I went from feeling like Casanova, to being told I looked like an over the hill gay rock star, whose waiting for death. Now don't get me wrong, I like Elton John as much as any other heterosexual man, but to look like him is completely different. I shout back to my neighbor, “I don't know if that's a good thing?”. She replies, “Oh, it is.”.

Now I start thinking, the ladies who have been checking me out, have they been scanning thinking they could find a new gay friend? I don't have anything wrong with gay people. Even have some friends who are gay. The neighbor three doors down is flaming. Never met him, but during the summer, he had some friends over and the neighborhood reeked of gaydom. All you heard coming from his back yard was what sounded like a group of low pitched chicks who kept getting their tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

So now as I'm driving to the store with wounded confidence, I start thinking, 'Hey, at least she didn't say I looked like the Village people or that crazy dude that dated Ellen and is now with James Tupper.'