Free A Change of Needs by Nate Allen

remedy, but another source of woe, and trouble would find him frequently as a teenager and young man. He developed a reputation, and ironically was all at once the boy your mom warned you about, and yet the one she hoped you’d meet.
    Labels were applied as is typical, but sometimes labeling individuals and behavior is inappropriate and ill-advised, as they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it seemed the associations and negative connotations were ascribed to him by others so they could make sense of it in a safe, convenient way, when the truth was he was just a young man who came to the realization he had made some bad decisions as a kid, and decided it was not in his best interest to do so anymore. It worked for him. What more can you ask for? His relationship with his girlfriend was an unfortunate casualty of the period, and he left for Raleigh because he needed a place where people didn’t have preconceived notions about him, and he could discover, if not reinvent himself.
    At about the same time his ego and confidence would be slowly catching up to the strength and physical aspects of the man, the inside not yet matching the now handsome exterior, but he had begun to have some success romantically, and by the time he moved to Raleigh at the age of twenty-three, he didn’t need to be too damn confident, women were beginning to present their intentions, and like a sisterhood of the falling pants, or pussy-mafia, they would make him offers “he could not refuse,” and he didn’t, like a malnourished dog prone to gorging when the opportunity presented itself and making up for lost time. In the scheme of things his game so to speak was that he was not a player, intelligence, a clever sense of humor, gentleness, and chameleon-like ability to adapt to the situation, his informal teammates. The shy self-conscious kid grew into the ultimate boy-next-door experience and an unassuming panty-dropping rainmaker, but as was to be expected the journey would be characterized by potholes, self-inflicted wounds, peaks and valleys, floods and droughts and long stretches of nothing in between, except his ever present passenger and companion …the static .
    There are probably two main reasons people undertake the study of psychology, first because they wish to diagnose and understand the things they don’t like about themselves and rid themselves of them. Secondly, because they have a natural inclination towards it, the ability to read people and understand and recognize patterns of behavior and want to learn how to help people who need it, and he had done so for both reasons, but he had found at the conclusion of it that knowing where the stressors of his childhood had originated, didn’t represent a solution. Knowing how you had gotten some place didn’t change the fact you were still there, you need an exit strategy, or self-acceptance, and he would have to come to an agreement with himself, that he was who he was, and call it a truce …start looking down the road, and not in the rearview.
    By the time he had gotten to be forty-five he had slept with more women than he could recall, literally, he hadn’t kept a running total, and to be honest their were periods in his life that he didn’t remember all too well. But he had only had two committed relationships in his life, his first love, and his second, Rene. Beyond that, if you take a single man, and allow him to have sex with a different woman every 2-3 months over a twenty year period, well there you have it, they start to accumulate. And while he had long periods without any interaction, he was a hard worker of the grasshopper variety …not the ant, accomplishing his feats in leaps and bounds, by the bushel and the peck, and simple as that it’s not difficult to imagine, many just “last call” beauty queens …but it had to be close to a hundred or more.
    So many that the faces and recollections of the experiences were floating around loosely in the sexual