The concrete flower has poisonous charms, of the sort for madness

Numero uno on the bad list.
I'm going to keep the details light here for the sake of those who read this, but first and foremost on the "bad" list has to be dating. The very first woman I went on a date with in NYC warned me that dating here is, in her word, "brutal." She could not have been more right. Frankly I'm tired of it. It's so easy to get exhausted by the you-can-be-my-self-confidence types, the I'll-dress-up-like-snow-white-and-leave-the-shades-open-so-the neighbors-can-watch (and they will), the i-really-just-want-to-date-my-not-so-dear-old-dad. The requests and demands for physical violence, emotional abuse, verbal degradation, for a relationship that improves status at the office or fits into a gym schedule; they pile up with the phone numbers of women I won't be seeing again. As the woman who loved to fantasize about actually torturing her cheating ex used to tell me, "dating is kind of intense here." And by all accounts from some of the more normal women I know, this insanity is not contained simply to the female gender - it's everywhere. And it's horribly disheartening. "We are all just big, wounded, walking responses," says playwright Carol Churchill. Nowhere more so than in the dating world of New York City.