"YOU KNOW"

Shakey Jake was a long time Ann Arbor personality, strumming his reverse air guitar (his left hand was twitching off in space while his right hand strummed the totally out of tune strings!) on street corners in Salvation Army dapper while spinning his down to earth advice. Gravely voice barely intelligible, he was most famous for his reason for living… “On the Move!” he would say.

We’d often pick him up and give him rides around town, always entertaining. One day my buddy G and I spotted him hitching and pulled over. G jumped out, opened the door for Shakey, and then jumped in next to him. G was always searching, and what was often the case, he was searching for the answer to relationships with women that day.

“Shakey” G says, “I’m always picking the wrong women. No matter what I do, I end up with the wrong women. How do I know if a women is right for me??” Shakey looked at him, and with his aged-curved hand doing an almost epiletic pointing at G, said “You KNOW. YOU Know. You Know. YOU know…” He must have said it 7 or 8 times. Just repeating it over and over, as if he was drilling it into my friend.

It was a long time before I really knew what he meant. Men, myself included (I can’t speak for women obviously), often only focus on the good aspects of a new relationship. Somehow we ignore/rationalize/disguise/gloss over the obvious problems. But really, we know. If we are honest with ourselves, look at how we are looking at the relationship, we could allow the problems to be recognized sooner, because...

We KNOW.