Strange Night

Last night was strange; a little sad at first and then kind of wonderful.

If you've been following my blog you know that I started casually hanging out with a girl a couple months ago and it kind of developed into something. It's a little hard to define it, basically a friendship with benefits I guess, but that doesn't really sound right. It's definitely not a "relationship" because technically she's already got one of those, but neither of us can deny that we have developed feelings for each other. Anyway, things came to a head between her and her other guy last night and she's freaking out about it and needs space to sort it all out. I really like her, but one of my goals is a drama-free life and I just don't get what's going on with her and the decisions she's making and not making. So that kind of sucked. We had plans to go to a wedding together this weekend but I think I might be going solo.

Then there's Annie, the girl I met on the plane a little more than two weeks ago. We'd only been out once if you don't count the six hours we spent on the plane together and I was eager to see her again, so when I found myself at 'In Vino' having the meatballs (really, really good) and a beautiful glass of Barbaresco, I decided to see if she was free. She walked her dog over to meet me and then we made our way over to a small bar on sixth street. Even though the place was empty, they wouldn't let her dog inside. Our plan was just to have one glass of wine and hang out for a few minutes, so she tied him up outside and we went in. At this point I should describe her dog. He's a big, beautiful, jet-black Mastiff. One of the sweetest dogs I've ever met, really gentle and totally devoted to her; he's also 130lbs. So... before we even sat down to have our wine, he (the dog) was nervous about being tied up, and she (Annie) was nervous about him being nervous. We took a table by the window and Annie decided to move him closer to the window so she could keep an eye on him. The only thing to tie him too on that side was the smoker's bucket. For those of you who don't know, NYC is smoke-free and so bars often put a metal pail filled with sand outside for their patrons who smoke. I don't know what happened next, but somehow the dog got FREAKED out and bolted down the street at full speed with the bucket tied to his leash. It was horrible, the sound of the bucket hitting the pavement kept freaking him out and he was in full-panic mode. He ran into the street and around the block and it's a miracle that he wasn't hit by a car. Annie was in shock, so I took off and tried to catch up to him. It was dark and he was so far ahead of me and out of control that I quickly lost sight of him but the neighborhood people were all helpful, shouting out, "he turned left" or, "he's on 7th St". By some miracle I was able to catch up to him and he, confused and scared, let me take his leash. The happy ending is that he's ok, and once Annie calmed down we had our wine and actually wound up having a really good time.

So I guess all my running finally paid off in a way. I was a hero, and she was suitably impressed.