I looked down to check the messages on my phone. I had spent the last week texting on and off with a guy from tinder, Mark. We'd tossed some playful banter back and forth and he was quick to want to set something up.

From his pictures and description Mark seemed kind of bland, but we arranged to meet tonight at my favorite restaurant, so I figured I'd at least get a good dinner out of it. Who knows, maybe he'd be a catch, it was worth a shot at least to try to kill two birds with one stone.

I arrived driving on the highway of route I-91 towards Northampton a few minutes after we'd arranged to meet. Just fashionably late.

I had suggested we grab dinner at my favorite place to eat out with my family when I was little which actually made for a nice spot. Joe's Cafe- a small, smoky Italian restaurant, with an American name, covered in brilliant warm murals of rural northern Mexico painted in the '50s. Common folklore would hold that it was Antonio's on pleasant street in Amherst that had the best pizza in the valley, but anyone who believed that was a rube.

I found Mark already sitting at a booth with an aimless grin on his face. He greeted me as I plopped myself down in the red leather booth.

"Hey! How's the week been." he asked.

I took a long sigh. "Agony. And yours?"

He laughed. "It's been a good week on my end. The exchange rate is up so I'm doing pretty well this week!"

"Ah." I said. Did he say that to impress me?

Mark was a few inches taller than me, with light brown hair and wore a red polo. I'd been hoping he was a little more magnetic in person than in his pictures, but erring towards the optimistic about such things was almost always the wrong guess.

"Your makeup looks nice." He said.

"Oh. Thanks." I said.

The waitress came to our table. "Heeey! Nice to see you again!" she greeted me. "What are you guys having."

I smiled. "Well, you know me, I'll just have a glass of the cheapest red and the usual."

The waitress looked to Mark who continued to nervously scan the menu "I'll have... uhhh... I'll have... I guess I'll just have the spaghetti bolognese." he stammered.

The waitress smiled and took our menus, leaving me to fend for myself, adrift in a choppy sea of awkwardness.

After a few moments of staring and deafening quiet I decided I needed to try to move things forward. I had a routine for trying to talk to boys. Politics was a dead end. Work was always tedius at best, corrosive at worst. Ideally, if I had my drothers, I'd try to talk about science or history or philosophy, but I was seldom out with a conversationalist who could keep up with my academic fetishes. Failing those, there was always one topic, the great human universal pleasure and the sport of kings, to fall back on.

After the waitress returned to leave us our drinks, I broke the silence. "So have you seen any good movies lately, or...?"

"Oh yeah, well I've been rewatching a lot of the superhero movies before they do the big team up next month."

'oh god, abort, abort.' "So have you seen any bad movies lately?" I asked, dousing the fear of inanity with a swig of the wine.

"Uhhh, well like..." he took a few moments to dredge something up. "There was this awful zombie movie on streaming I ended up putting on the other weekend called Hell of the Living Dead. It was really old, but it had a photoshopped cover that made it look new and I had no idea it was made in like 1997 or something. That was pretty shitty."

"Oh yeah, ! I've seen that one! It's one of those Italian ripoff movies from the '70s and 80's. That one's great because, like, for some reason, the zombie outbreak is in Papua New Guinea and they just splice in all this stock footage from nature documentaries and like, B-roll from Cannibal Holocaust or something.

There are a bunch of those like, fake rip-off movies. Like the same guy who made Hell of the Living Dead also made like, two fake sequels to Jaws, and basically like a dozen ripoffs of Rambo which were basically just 90% shots of buff shirtless dudes running around a jungle, and a movie called Terminator 2, which is actually a shitty ripoff of Aliens and has nothing to do with The Terminator.

Of course the director, Bruno Mattei, he also made this movie I really love called Rats: Night of Terror. It's strangely kind of original, because like, It's about this biker gang that's roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and they end up finding this empty bunker full of food and supplies, only they find out too late that it's been infested by swarms of mutant super-intelligent rats. Basically the whole movie was a ploy to just shower half-naked Italian actresses in buckets of really cute looking rats, but it's also got this hilarious pretentious and barely coherent heavy-handed moral message, something about the dangers of trifling in God's domain, etc.

Those movies are really funny, because, like, despite being sleazy and stupid as shit, they have the best soundtracks. They used Goblin, who are the prog rock band who did all the Suspiria-"

I was embarassingly interrupted as the waitress returned with our food.

"Ahh, thank you! Can I get another glass of wine?" I asked. She smiled and nodded as she returned to her rounds through the rows of tables.