Post #32211 by midnite on Wed, Apr 30, 2003 5:07 PM

All's fair in Love and War...and bargain-hunting.

On that note, I once fancied this girl. Totally in love with her, she worked at a shoe store. I'd go there and buy shoelaces, just as a pretext to talk with her ended up with like 17 pair...useless. All summer long, I am trying to get to know her, spending much needed discretionary income (I was seventeen, mind you) on assorted, and unecessary shoe products. Laces, shines, polishes, trees, the lot.

Gradually, I got to be friendly with her, small talk and the like. You know, "how's work" and "do you like...". Really hitting it off in a platonic, but not happy about it, way. Figured I was just laying the foundation, setting up the chance to get a date. Foaming the runway as they say. Hey, I was seventeen, and not a smooth seventeen either, so cut me some slack. Anyway, the small talk stuff lasted a while and a real friendship bloomed.

Wouldn't you know it, lucky me finally got the nuggets up to ask her out on a real date. She accepted, the effort paid off, handsomely. One date turned into three, soon we were going sort of steady. To say I was happy is to belittle the sheer joy and excitement I experienced. What was a troubled time, you all been there you know what I am saying, became life as I thought it should be lived.

Weeks and months went by as love bloomed bewtwen us. Thoughts of a life together entered my mind. I know, we were very young, but when it feels right you just know it, and I knew it. My life was taking shape, the right college, then law school, marriage, three toe-haired kids. The American Dream. My dream, man.

Alas, all was not wonderful and meant to be, or at least as wonderful as I presumed it was meant to be. No, trouble was on the horizon and I was too blind in love to see it, although perhaps I should have, hindsight and all. My young happiness and optimism for a bright future were soon dashed on the rocks of heartbreak. The visions of joy and familial success quickly replaced with an unending avalanche of despair and confusion.

She dumped me for a guy with a Camaro, and not even a Z-28.

My existence torn to shreds, my reason for being snuffed out like so many Camel unfiltereds. Months of courtship, not to mention nearly $200 in uneeded footwear items, cast away as if yesterday's newspaper. Alone in my misery, one thought repeated in my mind. It as something my Dad, a former Marine Drill Instructor, told me years before, "All's fair in love and war, son. All's fair".

So, with those words of wisdom from my combat experienced father I took out to find this college-aged, fop-haired, gigolo that stole my sweetheart. Searched and searched for this ruiner of all things good and right, finding him by his apartment waxing that Camaro. Then I shot him.

"All's fair in love and war, son. All's fair. Oh, and aim for the gut."

Thanks, Dad.