Strategy

This is a patterned writing I did a while back.  Tell me if you catch the pattern.

Another rejection and Bob turned around and hopped down off of the bar stool. Bob could see Carl sitting across the room, alone at a booth and waiting to hear Bob’s story. Calmly, Bob sat across the table and picked up the beer that Carl had ordered for him.

“Don’t even say it,” he said to Carl, before Carl could comment on another one who got away.

Every weekend that two of them had come to the same restaurant, sat at the same bar, used the same pick-up lines and got the same rejections. For two years, they had waited for Miss Right to see them for the great guys they were, but apparently no women in their world could appreciate them for who they really were.

“Go figure,” said Carl. “How do we break through to some of these mannequins?”

“I'm a great catch, Carl. Just the fact that I have a job, a car and a house should say something about my character,” answered Bob.

Kings have queens, but Bob and Carl had none, and not because they hadn’t been

trying. Love and romance just didn’t seem to be in their stars.

“Maybe we should change our approaches,” Bob thought out loud.

“Never!” answered Carl with conviction. “One man, one plan,” he said like he’d probably said a million times before. Persistence was definitely Carl’s long suit.

Quietly, Bob thought about what all of his rejections had in common, and there was only one thing he could think of: Lies.

“Reality check,” one girl had said to Bob as she stood up and left the bar, following Bob’s story about how he had killed a shark that was trying to snack on him at the beach. She was right because the whole story was straight out of Bob’s imagination.

“The truth is the answer,” Bob said to Carl. “Unless there's no choice, I plan to be honest, and the women will have to respect me for the strait-forward kind of man I am deep inside.”

“Very believable,” Carl chimed in.

“Well, it better be,” Bob continued, “because I’m not just some shallow red-neck with a loaded gun rack in my pick-up and no brain of my own.”

“Xerox that speech for me,” said Carl. “You know, it might come in handy as a pick-up line someday.”

“Zip the lip, Carl,” Bob said with a deflated look on his face, slumped back in his seat and ordered another beer.