Another funny/disastrous date

Last night I went out with this guy from a few blocks away whom I met on facebook.

When he picked me up I had to go back and turn off the radio and I made the mistake of mentioning it was Obama's press conference. He was ranting about socialism in the stimulus bill within 1 minute, but also about the lack of sufficient infrastructure funding (isn't that contradictory?), and continued for the next few minutes even as I tried to at least ground the subject in facts ("Which economists back that up? Did you see the Congressional Budget Office report on stimulus multipliers?", His reply: "I don't need economists. I'm a capitalist. Obama has all these socialist economists who want the government to take over the economy."), so I knew before even getting into his car that it was pretty much a write-off date.

He thought similarly because he changed our plans, and instead of going to the nice area to walk around and have coffee at a Barnes and Noble, he decided we should go to a B&N in a strip mall. He didn't order anything. I paid for my own tea.

When I mentioned that I go to a hip neighborhood sometimes, he said something about how he hopes a homophobe would have a fit there. He had been raised pretty conservative, so I was curious whether he was anti-homophobia (= possibly gay) or just neutral about it, but when I asked him to elaborate he would only say, "There are gay people there, but they don't hurt anyone. They're totally harmless. You can walk around there and it's not like they do anything to you. It's not like they attack you like in boys' dormitories at single-sex schools. You didn't know that they attack each other in boys' dormitories?"

Shortly after, I told him that the guy I dated this summer had recently come out to me. He stopped the car (we were in a parking lot) and said, "There is no way THIS (gesturing at the length of my seated body still wrapped in my coat I'd been wearing the entire time) turned someone gay. You could turn Elton John straight!" somehow managing to make me feel simultaneously objectified and flattered. And I definitely did not want to take off my coat.

On the way home, I told him the story of the religious adulterer (posted about earlier) and he got so angry ranting about pretend religious people that I thought he was going to crash us into the median. I thought about which skeletons he might have in his closet, and I did get him to reveal a past engagement he'd gotten into after a month of dating and she broke off after 2 weeks.

I have to admit it: I kind-of like disasterous dates as long as they are not the only dates in my life.