Dog Legs and Hot Dawgs

I began writing my blog in 2004, because my work as an investigative journalist on Wall Street had consumed me. I was desperate for a creative outlet. I was writing elsewhere – morning journaling, a couple of essays on Medium: ode to my truck, the challenge of parenting my son. But it just seemed each time I would come back to my blog.

Entries in a blog have a feeling of smoke and mirrors to me. It’s easy to believe no one is reading my writing especially if no one says they are reading it, and fanfare does not accompany each entry. Then what? If a tree falls in the forest? The sound of one hand clapping? I remember when my ex husband, Steve, designed my first blog under dangermond.org, and I sent out an email to my friend group that I had started a blog! Big news for me! Crickets from them. No one really knew what to think about my personal life getting distilled into words on a screen.

No matter – I kept writing – I wrote about wanting a child and miscarrying. I wrote about love and loss. I wrote about wanting to go home to New Orleans, and then I wrote about losing home in New Orleans. And loss. And loss. I have written about love and loss so much – it seemed that I had nothing else to write about but those topics. And then one day I wrote about my son, but I switched to a new blog – Transracial Parenting – which I have since taken down.

Today, I wrote about dog legs in The Writing Room at 100 Men Hall, which meets the second Saturday of each month and warned my essay may or may not go on my blog. But I am posting it because I have made a commitment to vulnerability this year. And nothing I wrote is something I haven’t told those involved. So there is no mystery unraveling here on the pages. Ellen Morris Prewitt – our fearless writer in residency at the Hall gave us our first prompt, which was Write about difficult things I do or did? And this is what I wrote:

How not to have sex with a man while leaning deeper into a relationship with him

I had made up my mind before I walked in his house and saw the flyer on the refrigerator. I told G-man (this is obviously a pseudonym) that I wanted to have a pre-game talk before I would go out of town with him. He wanted to go to Nashville that weekend and take me to music venues along the way and back. I couldn’t go that weekend because I had several events at the Hall. So he asked me to have dinner with him before he left. 

When he picked me up, he asked if I’d mind driving his car so he could get his truck out of the shop because he needed it for his trip. That is why I was walking in his house and that is why I said, “Holy Shit!” as loud as I did when I saw the flyer on the refrigerator. Don’t get me wrong, I felt safe there in his house with him even though I had turned him down eight months earlier when he asked me to look at all the equipment he had in containers on his property. “Anything you want or could use, it’s yours.” He had been a restaurant owner, owned bars, and was a disaster chef, and he had equipment. 

We had started the pre-game talk on the way to the car repair place, I could tell he wanted to know what I was going to tell him. He said, “Do you want to talk about it now or over dinner?” I said, “I could tell you now. I want you to know I’m not having sex with you. You have made it clear that you don’t want a relationship, and just want casual sex, and I am very clear that I won’t have sex with someone without my feelings being involved.” 

I could tell this flustered him, but keep in mind at this point, I hadn’t seen the flyer! Holy Shit! I said when I saw Trump on his refrigerator. My back was to him because I had entered the house first. He said, “You don’t think I knew you were a flaming liberal before I even saw you? I knew when I heard you speak.” Well, I wasn’t expecting this was all I could think, and I turned to him and said, “Let’s put a pin in this for right now.” 

I had been attracted to G-man before he even turned around in the office shop. His back was to me, and my arms felt like they were made of energy and they wanted to wrap around him. Him being the stranger who was in line in front of me. I had just come from a TV promo, I was dressed up and not in my usual dog and cat hair covered work clothes. He turned around and after one second said, “I like your haircut.” I smiled, men are always commenting at how smooth my head is especially men who shave their head. I responded with my usual retort – all you men are jealous of this and I ran my hands over my smooth head. The clerk abruptly announced: Ms. Rachel, here is your stack. And she handed me all of the posters and flyers and signs I had come to pick up. 

I had people waiting for me everywhere, Booker Fest was starting the next day and so I turned and left. But the feeling lingered. Who was that man? I called the shop when I was back at my desk and asked. She said I don’t know, he came in to make copies, but let me see his name on the receipt. She came back to the phone and said, G-man and gave me his last name, which I Googled – because after all I was an investigative reporter for more than two decades. He was married and owned a restaurant and venue in California. What was he doing here in Bay Saint Louis? Didn’t matter, more important than he didn’t live here, he was married. 

I let it go. 

But he didn’t go.

Three weeks later, I walked into a meeting group I had just joined, and I sat next to a man and had a strange feeling but most everyone in the room was a stranger so I didn’t connect any dots. When the meeting ended, the man turned to me and said, “We’ve met before.” Really, I said. “At the office shop.” What in the world are you doing here, G-man, I thought, and didn’t say, and thought again as I walked out of that house and into the night and into my car. The next morning the host called and said the man I was sitting next to had asked for my number because he had a ton of equipment I might be able to use at my business, 100 Men Hall. 

I called him, we talked, he invited me to come look at what he had, and I made a plan to go on Friday morning of that week. Then I changed my mind. I sensed a yellowish flag, one that was about safety, as in I don’t really know this man, he’s big, and so I’m not driving out to the Kiln to go into containers with him to look at his (and I’m going to put solid gold quotes around this word) “equipment.” 

This was only the beginning of what brought me to walk in his house and notice the Trump poster and be able to hold that in abeyance until I was ready to discuss all that this meant to me. We spent an evening together and discussed all the ways we are different and what came out of this long-winded discovery was pretty much all the ways we are similar – absent maybe just our political beliefs. 

So much so that the very next day when I was about to say something really nasty about a person with a MAGA hat on, I stopped myself because I thought, what if G-man was wearing that hat, and I had a very complicated reaction to my pause and redirection. All of this thinking and new information caused such an eruption in my central nervous system, which started reverberating throughout other areas of my life. Let me stop right here and say this in case you don’t know me – I have not been in a relationship for 12 years, and I am a person who lived inside a relationship all my life – I was a serial monogamist, and I am attracted to G-man, and I am repulsed by the cult of Trump, and now I was in a very complicated way about all that I thought I knew. It got me to thinking and feeling, and I started walking into rooms in my mind that I didn’t even know existed. 

In 2021, when Black people were dying on the news on the daily, the pandemic was raging, and everyone was out of their minds with rage and disgust, the Hall’s membership organization marched under the banner Women 4 Progress. Over 250 people came to march with us. Now in 2025, we have been mulling over marching again, joining the throngs across the country who are protesting and resisting the changes happening. One of the rooms I walked in was to approach all of this from a radically different point of view, why not do something that would bring us all together instead of furthering our divide? I spoke to G-man about this idea, and he was game to co-host an event with me – an event that sets out to accomplish a loaded task – how to get everyone to play together for one day so we drop the pretenses that we are so different from each other.

It turns out that G-man and I are on the same wave length. He feels divinely sent to do this work – to bring opposing sides together. He is firm about not wanting a relationship, yet he is open to a friendship. I do want a relationship, not necessarily with G-man, but it is something I would welcome in my life. But more than any of it, I seek connection, I think we all do, and we all need more of it not less, and let me tell you, G-man and I are connected – I told Adam point blank – I have met the Other and guess what, I kinda like him.

People come into your life for a reason or a season. G-man slipped into my life for a reason – already he has stirred up my closed mind and heart, and I want to remain open, and as always, more will be revealed.

The second prompt Ellen gave us was to flip it – and write about a happy, quirky, unexpected thing that took you to a good place:

How to relate to a self proclaimed (hot) dawg

G-man was an unexpected dog leg when I met him. From the energy that propelled me to get closer to him in that first meeting to the months we have spent together meeting weekly and exposing our personal stories in a group setting, he was unexpected. 

Before he came along, I had finally risen above a series of unfortunate events that had led me to be single for 12 years. I had adopted my child the year I turned 50, the year my mother died, and from that moment forward, everything that happened to me was unexpected and created moments of confusion that required creative solutions on the fly. I lost my job, I lost my hair, I lost my house, the series of losses were all that I wrote about and all that I dwelled on. 

I rose to each occasion, albeit none of it was easy.

And then one day in 2024, I told my beloved therapist, Adam, that I was ready to open my heart. I think I took him by surprise because he said, “Really?” instead of “Finally!” And I just replied, Uh huh, pretty confidently. So Adam laid out a plan for me to write a bio on this proposed person. Only, I couldn’t at first. When I would think about what a potential relationship would look like I only knew about partners I had known, and I have changed so much in these last twelve years that a prototype from the past was not going to be a good fit for me anymore. So what would a hypothetical person look like, be like, feel like, act like in real life? I didn’t even know what love and a relationship looked like, was like, smelled like, felt like in real life. I’m not even sure I know what real life is either.

So let me tell you, hands down, G-man on the surface was not part of the bio I finally wrote with Adam’s help. Adam told me to think of qualities that I wanted in a partner – top of my list was kindness, which mattered more to me than smartness, which used to top my list. While I wrote this list of qualities I would seek in a person, I held onto a shadow list in my mind: This person’s entire family would be dead so that I would not have any in-laws to deal with. This person would be financially self-sufficient, but not have to work, but have something to do so they were not just hanging around doing nothing all day. This person would have their own house and their kids – if they had any – which would be better if they did not – would be grown and live in a foreign country. This person would have a dependable car. This person would be healthy. This person would not require a purse or a nurse – something that when you get to my age men seek (I have come to find out). 

Of course, G-man, who I am most definitely attracted to, is messy. He is a self-admitted dawg when it comes to women. He has been married three times (ahem, like me) – and he has a young son (ahem, like me). His health is questionable as he has upper respiratory complication from Covid that gives him chronic hiccups. He is also at a crossroads in his life – he is too young to not work, and he has made fortunes and lost them several times, and he is now trying to figure out what his work will be that will take him through this next chapter of his life. 

Months into our meeting, I couldn’t understand why he was always so hot and cold with me, but then I learned he was seeing someone. I actually received this news with a sense of relief, because G-man no longer had to be viewed as potential relationship material, he could just be G-man. And I could finally now go look at that promised equipment without any fear of anything happening to me or between us. 

Months later, his relationship ended, and he asked me out to dinner. So I was back to thinking about him. Then he went on a trip and returned with a renewed commitment to having no relationship goals other than sport fucking. Back to my list, I thought – I wouldn’t say that G-man leads with kindness, but one day he told me he parked a certain way so that I could always have room to park at our meetings and I thought – okay, I’ll give you that G-man, that’s kind. G-man came over and burned a big trash pile at the Hall even though he is adamant about not wanting to be part of my Hall Husbands. He taught me how to back up Wild Thing, my newly acquired vintage Shasta camper. Still I found that I was sizing him up – sizing him up against my list and noticing how many entries he had on my shadow list as well. 

Every time I chalk up enough shadow points to dismiss him, G-man surprises me. The fact is that G-man has entered Rachel’s life at a very interesting inflection point. (Go ahead and allow me to refer to myself in 3rd person since I’m calling this man G-man – anything goes here.) I had decided that in 2025 my task was to allow myself to become uber vulnerable. I would tell people what I was feeling at the risk of seeming weak or stupid. I would take improv. I would start writing my blog again. I would open my heart to potential love in a way I never had before.

I would raise my flag on the hill of love with this one goal – I am going to meet someone I could be intimate with because I believe intimacy is the final frontier – and I would die on this hill, with a partner, or alone with my desires.

And so G-man was unexpected, but not really – he is a hot dawg of a dog leg of dog legs and it just so happens that this year, I put a sticker on my 2025 calendar that says THAT DOG’LL HUNT.