so, about your dating profile ... .

Hey there, prospective person. I'm honestly glad you're interested enough to decide to make an effort to homework me and it took you here.

So if you're hoping for me to mutually swipe you right/superstar you/heart/smile/wink/message back or any of the other possible digital approvements, I'm going to address the following all-too-common facets found on most dating profiles:

All those emoticons & icons. Maybe emoji are the modern shorthand hieroglyphics of the texty new millennium, but fuck that girl, use your words. Words are sexy like a silk smooth sonnet or fun as freeverse. Seduce us with your personal expression.

Filtered photos are like wearing a stocking mask to rob a convenience store for its fountain drinks of sugar love. Nobody wants to get robbed this way. If honesty is your foundation, then mushy/blurry high-impact filters are no way to start a relationship.

Sooooo much makeup. If it all goes well, you're going to be seen in the morning. If the moment of judgment comes after the business, then odds are you're not going to get a repeat customer. Have confidence & security enough to post something with you not wearing a whole five pounds of slap on your face. Less is more.

That duck face. Cut it out. This relic of late aughties emo/scene selfies somehow still endures, and it is not cute, nor winning, nor transmissive of how anyone really looks. The duck face isn't used IRL outside of this one single dated cyberconvention to express reactions in any context, so unless you're actually an emo/scene gal, just stop, delete, and please exit your bathroom or car to go take a for-real picture.

Those GIF-y Instafilters. On Instagram you've got an endless roll to selfie-indulge in, but on your dating profile, you don't. There's this limited and bullet focus chance you've got to attract a person (which is why you're there, yes?), so choosing to overlay yourself as an animated dog, or with Harry Potter spex, or Wayfarers you can't afford, or rainbows passing straight through your ears, all tries to indicate fun but ultimately works against you. Anyone can use those, it's hardly original. Either compose/find a photo that shows you're for-true fun, or hey, even better, write about how exactly you are fun-fun which will be far more attractive than detractive.

Your theme of Lil Mosey's Blueberry Faygo. This begs the question if Spotify selects this track as a default, or if there's some SEO-boosted digital dating advice article that states most people swipe right to that, but it's baffling that like 1 out of 5 people have this as their profile's anthem. It's not a good song. And my observation that it's somehow a pop cultural lowest-common-denominator shows anyone's lack of individual merit in selecting it. Same for anything by The Weeknd, or most of Post Malones' tracks (excepting that Spiderverse soundtrack one, but still that's not really reaching for something distinctive). There's an endless jukebox of choices, go find the one song that is you and not everyone else.

Your "I'm an open book" isn't an open book, and you probably couldn't write much less be a book if you tried, which you haven't. I've written a book and that's no task for anyone who can't even adequately form three paragraphs about themselves. And if there's not enough inside of you to compile those few paragraphs then it's not a relationship you need, it's self-improvement.

If you want a partner in crime, I want plans for a scheme that will set us up for life. Show me your flawless criminal genius, and I will drive the getaway car. Let our togetherness raid the world like Vikings and beat this system for good.

The body shot. Where in your carousel of photos is it? While I'm sooooo definitely a face person, that fine face is attached to a whole being, a complete package, and you can't make a fair physical chemistry judgment about anyone without that full body picture. If it's because you have a weight problem, then maybe you should ease off on the weekly pizza. Not saying curvy girls can't look good, but you have to give us a look to begin with.

Remember that hiking was used to get place to place, not as a fun activity. While connecting with the majesty of nature's a redemptive & renewing thing, it tends to happen on a meditatively personal & individual level inside oneself. If I'm going to get sweaty with you, there are far better options.

And for people who all say they love to travel so much, somehow I bet that's more wishful thinking than your actual life recreation. None of that's cheap, believe me, I know. Pick your destinations wisely because odds are you'll never be able to afford nor see it all. And destinations never stand still, like a postcard, they change while you're away, so factor that into your unrealistic pie-in-the-sky travel budget.

"Netflix & Chill" is lame. I would probably sit on the Chesterfield with you to watch something, but we'd have to make out a little somewhere in there. But hey, fucking like to read. Books are sexy, they make you sexy. With each page you turn, you earn. It's a mentally proactive neural activity. New ideas, new ways of thinking, the gift of experiences/histories/possible futures -- it's the most rewarding of mediums, and if you like that, then you're already brilliant.

What I really, really, really find dismaying about the broad cyberavenues of online dating is that there's so much no, which I suppose is a large part of the reason behind this piece. It's like this whole universe of no you never knew existed. You'd think that in increasing the dating pool to a potentially global amount of people than you'd normally never run across in local meatspace would then give you tons more worthy candidates to choose from, but this is so not the case that I've encountered. Even moreso, I wish there were even finer granulations of criteria to scythe down this huge haystack of mega-chaff as it seems the few delimiters that influence the algorithms still sling all this time-consuming non-harvest of no at you.

This unforeseen dearth should just reinforce my self-worth, letting me know that my selectivity & relationship experience only confirms that I'm emotionally intelligent enough to know what I want. But it also lets me know how incredibly lucky I've been so far to date way, way, way more than my fair share of wicked smart, exceptionally beautiful, and joyously compatible women, given how very, very few are actually out there, at least ones that can convey that in the above context of a dating app/site. I sincerely hope dear reader that you are one of these brilliant exceptions, and that you

find me here.

[hardly the best Lichtenstein-styled homage, but you're artistically literate enough to see that, right? Right.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

all the red rings.

The new car's bluetooth digitally grabs my phone, pulling a random track out of the playlist a thousand deep:

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning ...





Like a spell, the surprise blindsides me, and I'm in a kitchen I remembered from long ago. The redhead is uncorking her two-buck chuck like it's the finest. She climbs up an uncertain stepstool to get her fancy plated goblets with the relief of grapes on them for us, her well-proportioned Italian posterior centering the balance of her fae Irish form, barely keeping her from falling down like a beautiful disaster. The reels on the tape player turn slowly, the white teeth in the spools grinding forward toward a foregone end as we smile at each other. Nick Cave continues rasping out his ballads of murder & seduction, the listener uncomfortably attracted to the ouroboros of the idea that both those things swim in the same dark, warm water.

[she looked something like model Laura Schuller {photo by Marc Laroche}.]

All the red rings of hair my eyes cannot help but follow around and down, and I am lost, so lost in their warp & weft woven to crown this actress, a sketch group comedienne, this woman of talent who decided to come to a holiday party with me. And then there we were, at her place.


The stained livingroom couch has a gypsy fringe throw, and she drops into my lap like a gift. Our mouths are sour with her cheap wine. We walk the goblets into the bedroom. The fancy party clothes drop away in slow rounds of lingering movements.


Three hours later she tells me, "You fuck like the Devil." I whisper, "And you love like a pale, beautiful angel." The hours continue.



Somewhere during a breather, this important life changing moment happens, where she says, "'Bill'?!? Guillermo is soooo much better. You should take it back. Be Guillermo."


After, we lay there and talk of magick, and talk of curses, and talk of dreams, and talk of secrets, until the birds of dawn join our conversation, their song finally letting us drop into sleep.



I would call her later, asking if she wanted to watch Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, thinking our shared love of literature and her stagecraft could coo together over the spectacle. Many voicemails, but she would never answer. I saw it with someone else, who didn't appreciate it at all.



She would later go join her boyfriend in California, her future husband. I would get an email a few years after, with a subtle admission that perhaps her marriage was an ill fit. I never answered.


Between that unrequited pair of communications but before her intended move, I starred in a friend's poetry reading performance trio onstage at Club Congress, The Drunken Poet's Highball Hour, where 60 people I knew showed up just to hear my two poems. I'd mailed her a flyer. A heart milagro pinned to my jacket's lapel buttonhole, the emotional boutonniere that I would've unpinned to gift her in the audience during my reading. She doesn't show up to hear me speak the words to everyone:


"I would have gone.

I would have gone." 


Years later, at an unexpected nightclub encounter, she tells me between tears of regret that she scripted a character based on me in a play she wrote.



Somewhere outside of time, there's a version of me on a stage, my hand pressed to the small of her back, my fingers wedded in the red rings in the curls of another her, and we are together, still kissing.

[For Kimberly, who gave me the gift of my name.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

a monday kind of love.

Maybe it's like George Sand & Chopin, or Henry Miller & Anais Nin. There's these bright shining passages of transcendent passion, but even if things don't work out, it's the achieving of those highs for a time if you're lucky enough to receive them that will live on in glory in your heart and within the hearts of others, in the story that hopefully gets told of your life.



In my desire for peak experiences maybe that's what I manifest for myself, instead of a long-lasting mediocrity, or hanging onto a faded shadow of what was once a past joy, but unsustainable, as most do.



Still, I miss my marriage, or I miss the ideal of marriage, the construct of permanence, an inviolate safety & sanctuary I'd thought I'd had and have lost through no fault of my own. I bet my emotional bank on my wife, a person who'd oathed by the Gods to keep troth with me, and it didn't work out. It was fucking crushing at a level I'd never experienced before. If after that a divorcé never lost hesitancy, or remained boundaried, or stayed emotionally guarded for the rest of their life, no one could blame them from learning those safeties from their deeply hurtful experience.



What is enough? What is needed? Are those wants just larger fears and shortcomings of self that actually have nothing to do with the other person, or are those needs real? And is my happiness with who I am a strength, or does my self-satisfaction rob me of the ability to change? It's not that I don't change, but my whole life I've changed so glacially, with consideration & care at such a slowly studied degree that my self-love will allow. If that change doesn't come at a rate or time that another person wants me to change, then what does that cost me or protect me from? But if I change for someone else, do I then become someone better or worse, or just someone different, someone less recognizable, a face in the mirror that has kept another's love but in a sacrificial ratio lost self-love, and possibly one's own center?



My writer's logic allows me to understand, to frame it in a way that gives it context, but my unquenchable romanticism, the feelings themselves, break my heart.



Again.



And again.



And I write about it, again, like an eternal return, a fire that never dies, a burning ship, a battle that is instead a brutally wanted kiss.

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[for K and the 68 Mondays.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.