Draft 1 of OK Stupid The Book is done. My editors have it in their inboxes. In between ads for 80% off Viiagra(sic) and shipments updates from Amazon it waits for their grubby, ink stained hands.

Want to know how it starts? Settle down. Here, are the opening paragraphs. Enjoy.

Dating blows. Those that do it well collect their toenail clippings in a jar and they steam clean their recyclables. They organize office get-togethers. The rest of us suck at it. I suck at it.

My friends and Oprah all give the same advice: Just be yourself. This book is what happened when I was “just myself”. I was my real self. To strangers. On the Internet. The lesson, if there is one, is don’t be yourself. Find someone nice and spend the rest of your life hiding your real self from them at all costs. Face it, if someone that had sex with you really knew who you were they’d never want again.

I had to learn how to date as a 34 year old man. A long-term relationship had ended and according to my mother, I needed to “find” someone. “Who will take care of you if you die?” She meant well.

One day I will be old and will need someone to take care of me. I should get this person soon. How is that going to happen? My tangential experience with dating was that I would hang out with a girl, have sex with her and then I’d be in a relationship. Those relationships were location based. They started in college or at the office. College was over a decade behind me and I worked from home.

“Dude, you’ve got to try online dating,” my friend Jack said. We do everything online – shop, connect with friends, work, pay bills, watch movies so of course we should use the Internet to find our soulmate. The Internet makes our lives clean and antiseptic. Why go to the grocery store and be surrounded by heathens shopping for fat free mayonnaise? Fire up a browser and order your organic Oreo’s online.

And so on…