I woke up this morning thinking about what I wrote yesterday and thinking, hm, I wouldn’t be surprised if that generates some heat. And, sure enough, right there in my inbox there’s an email on the subject from a long time mutual friend of Shane’s and mine, though more his.
O-oh, I think, I’m gonna get a telling off, and face my own shortcomings, and probably take the whole thing down at first available opportunity, and regret it. Except…
Except, it’s not like that. It’s support and recognition that the things I felt have been felt by another, and another who knows him well. There’s relief in that. Not that it makes me feel good about it – no one wants to feel good denigrating another human being – but what it does do is negate the sense of craziness that comes when you feel something and it seems like no one in the world gets where you’re coming from. You know, like the cheated-on spouse who just knows in their bones that something’s not right, but all they get is denial. I don’t know what’s worse – the cheating, or the sense of craziness when your feelings and intuitions are painted as nuts. So…
I shall continue with my story. I’ve got two hours before a game of squash with young Simon. Simon who I called in on the other day and ended up spending three hours with – him and his roommate Harry, who I also play squash with – and an enjoyable three hours it was. They’d just had a drunken party. They’re twenty and talk lots about girls. But it’s interesting and real and there’s no pretending to be anything other than what they actually are. And they seem to sort of dig my company too, being as I’m older but also still kind of young, and different. Harry’s got spiritual inquisitions. They’re both into thinking about life. A lot of it revolves around relationships and sex – but that’s okay: a lot of my thinking revolves around relationships and sex too. And it’s interesting to see what the younger generation are like. Changed, I think. Looser. More free. They talk dirty and sleep around and the girls are as aggressive and promiscuous as the guys and I’ve got my theories as to why that is. Different generations grow up with different ideas. Ours was all AIDS terror and pregnancy fears and STDs and also the feminism glow of women wanting careers and lording it over men after all those centuries of oppression and even wanting to put guys down. Then things changed and the next generation realised that AIDS wasn’t the dead-cert thing people like me grew up thinking it to be, instant contraction after the merest sniff of unprotected sex. Porn and vibrators becoming the norm. And the rise of the ladette and girls going wild getting as pissed up and debauched as the guys. Plus, feminism dies down and integrates and the whole thing about the female being able to have whatever life she wants – as long as it isn’t the life of the housewife and mother – is forgotten and something more natural is settled into wherein they really can have whatever they want, including the traditional thing – which many younger girls, I think, now given total freedom seem to want by choice in any case.
Total freedom: I guess that’s the key. Not necessarily the free love of a pre-AIDS sixties – but probably something not far off. And mobile phones and text messages and drunken late night booty calls have probably all changed things too. One student girl I know told me she once got a late night text message from a guy asking if she was up for some action – and there you are, eleven p.m. and flicking around bored on facebook and how easy is it to just tap out “sure, come on over” on your mobile and much better than doing nothing, right? Only she checked his phone for some reason while he was off in the bathroom and saw that the message was a multiple-recipient one and she just happened to be the one that replied.
But what to think of that? Bad? Wrong? Or probably she just shrugged and thought, meh, I’d’a done the same thing in his shoes anyways.
Things are different, I feel. Unless it’s just me, who grew up pretty shy anyways, much more romantic and traditional than I ever gave my self credit for. Always monogamous. Not sleeping around. Only going for people that I genuinely liked. Maybe people have always been wild and free and I just never noticed it. Though it’s really only with the younger generation of guys that I’ve had frank and open sexual discussions. They just don’t seem to mind. There’s no boundaries when it comes to talking about what they get up to, dicks and arseholes and the whole shebang. I theorised a few years back that guys didn’t talk about sex with each other ‘cos it was too uncomfortably homoerotic – you know, some guy tells you what he was doing in bed with a girl, and to think of it you’ve got to visualise it, and next thing you know you’re thinking about your best mate’s naked cock and balls moving in and out of some woman, and to my mind that’s a bit gay. And realising that I’d never really talked with guys in intimate detail about sex that was the theory that I came up with to explain it. But I may be totally wrong. It may just be me, and that I don’t like talking about it because it would make me think of men in a way that I find uncomfortable. Same way the idea of having a threesome with two guys and one girl – even if the guys, in classic porno situation, were never to interact with one another – that just turns me off. I don’t want my erect penis near another man’s erect penis. I don’t know how they do it. Or those bukkake videos where they all stand around masturbating together. Really strange. Really kind of homo, in my eyes – which of course leaves me wide-open to accusations of repressed homosexual urges, which I’m fine with, it don’t make no difference. Bit high school-ish, that theory anyways. Though probably true…
Point is, we have a number of possibilities: 1. that the younger generation are different, and that the males of this generation are more free and less inhibited when talking with each other; 2. that things have always been the same and it’s just me who was never comfortable with sharing intimate sexual details with members of my own gender; 3. something else, which usually turns out to be the case.
And where did I start on all this? Oh yeah, musing about Simon and Harry and just trying to slide into this blog some indication that I do actually associate with people in the real world, beyond kicking balls, and that I’m not just some lonesome typer who sits in his apartment looking out disgruntled on shoppers and smokers and wondering where the fuck I belong. Only ninety percent of the time, I reckon. ;-)
We ended up going down to Popina’s on Brudenell Road
And, yes, I do mean species, not gender.
In any case, we made it in style and we’re all now the proud owners of Popina “I ate the Mega!” key rings. I’ve wanted one of those for years.
I’m such a boy! lol
And talk, and women, and sex, and fun. A walk around the park out in the first true sunshine of spring and a bit of a play on the swings. Listening to the guys and getting some insights into what their lives are like, and feeling how mine is different now what with the passing of years, but still mostly the same. Thirty-six but not so out of place to feel it – just as it always was with the grooviest people I knew in my youth, good old Stevie Jay and Lindsay, still older then than I am now when they first inspired me in my own early-twenties – and still they go on living their groovy lives, having their fun, though now into their fifties and lighting the way for those of us who are to follow tem there, and who fear less at the spectre of getting old because of their good example. An example which I am perhaps passing on too, to poor indebted students who look all around them and see materialism and a world build on jobs – and yet here is this guy who doesn’t have much, yet seems happy, having a good time, enjoying the life, beating them on the squash court, running faster than them, getting taken for twenty-six, talking about all things young and yet also outlining the possibilities in experiences lived in his own outlandish youth, and with more experiences to come. Only when the talk comes to booze and to clubs – to the incomprehensibility of my getting involved with that – do I feel the passing of my years, our differences. I don’t even remember what that’s like. I ask Simon what goes on in them, is it still dark and noisy like it was when I was young? and he laughs and says I sound like his dad. I only see them in the day, when fresh-faced and sporty on the whole – but there’s a whole other life they’re living, which makes entertaining stories, but which I’m not sure I want to see with my own eyes. They did invite me to a party they just had and I almost thought to go and check it out, even if just for five or twenty minutes, but I’m glad I didn’t. Sounded awful: girls getting wasted and puking and having mad arguments with each other. Harry says he’d proposed to a friend of theirs that she should get with me if I turned up – but when I look at her picture on facebook later, pretty though she was, I swear she only looked about fifteen. The madness of getting older! These girls who are no doubt fine in the eyes of their peers – thought of as women – seen to be fully-grown – and yet the older I get, the more they look like the children they probably are. Hell, at twenty-three I was with an eighteen-year-old and I felt no wrong in that. And yet, now at thirty-six I’m thinking twenty-year-olds as mere adolescents, jailbait, out of bounds. The idea’s as ridiculous and seedy as when Kevin Spacey finally gets his mitts on Mena Suvari in American Beauty and he looms over her at least twice the size like some King Kong monster holding a pre-pubescent Faye Wray in his arms.
Some things stay the same as the years progress, and thankfully so – but others change in ways you can never imagine.
And it’s all good.
Oops. I’ve gone off on one. Well that’s okay, I’ve not really the time to get into more crazy mad Mexican recollections anyways. It was ten thousand words yesterday and if it’s going to be more of the same today I don’t want to have to stop halfway through. So…any other real world things to talk about?
Hm. I think I mentioned that Nicky and I seemed back on track, despite certain weirdnesses. Funny old relationship: easily the most functional and smooth and troubleless of my life, which is something I’ve always wanted – but also the one that seems most like it could disappear at a moment’s notice. Nicky's never really been here in Leeds – and what I mean by that is, she’s spent the last three and a half years overseas, with good weather, digging new things, and settling here, in one place, in the winter, has been a real chore for her. She’s dreamed much of getting away. Wants to go travelling in Morocco or South America again. Started talking a few months back about taking a three month bike trip down the Continental Divide in America France and Spain
I wonder why she likes it? I wonder what she sees in me? The sex and the fact that I’m easy-going and good-looking and don’t give her many hassles nor drink nor smoke nor immerse myself in bad habits? Is that all? I got this other theory…that in general, these days, relationships begin before we ever really get to know a person and we basically make our choices based on the fraction that we know of them and we fill in the blanks. The fraction that we know of them, we decide we like – and the rest we just take on unspoken trust that it’ll all be there. You know, like the daft promises and insinuations we make when we’re first getting to know someone, wanting to impress them and being interested in what they’re interested in and therefore giving the impression of, I don’t know, a life of cross-country skiing and book discussion together. Or walks in the country and growing herbs. Or taking salsa classes and weekend breaks. All the stuff you’ll never get to experience with a guy like me.
But, anyways, that’s not the theory: the theory is that that initial thing that gets two people together – the spark, the connection that births the idea that this one-day or one-week or one-month interaction could work in the long-term – is basically what comes to define the relationship as a whole. For instance, with Perlilly and I, it was basically a kind of lust-sex-chemical magnet kind of thing and a mutual interest in music – and we always had that, but really nothing more. And when the lust and the sex died down – and more specifically the music – it was really my turning my back on wanting to perform with her anymore that precipitated the end of that relationship – well there just wasn’t enough of the other stuff to sustain it.
With Nicky, our relationship began because we both saw that the other person liked travel, and was chilled out, and didn’t give hassles, and, more tangibly, because we watched a movie together in bed and then had some pretty wicked love-making. Now, two years later, the watching movies and the pretty wicked love-making remains – amazing how it’s been such a constant, right from day one – but problems have arisen because our actual personalities have entered the situation – things which we really had no prior awareness of, given that we didn’t really know each other at all – and I suppose they’ve taken us by surprise. She’d assumed, of course, that I’d be the type of guy who would want to have dinner with her friends and interact with them in the way that she interacts with them. Cosy foursomes and all that laughter and small-talk discussion over candles and wine, etc. But what she’s actually discovered is I’m more content hermitting and keeping everyone who doesn’t fascinate me at arm’s length. That I much prefer my own company. And that I find most other people kind of dull. It’s not her fault, of course, that I’ve entered this stage where I just feel like I’ve heard everything anyone says a million times before and I suddenly can’t take it anymore. But it is her fault – my fault – everybody’s fault – that we enter into relationships without even getting to know the other person and making all these assumptions about what our lives will be like.
Me, for my part, I’m a pain in the arse because I’m easily satisfied. My main criteria is that my woman doesn’t hassle me and gives me the minimum of troubles. I get my satisfaction in life through playing sports and typing – and whatever else I happen to be into that year – and I guess I’ve reached a stage where I wouldn’t look to another person to provide my satisfaction for me, even though I do like being with another. I’m not even that bothered about making sexual demands, having seemingly started to reach this age where the whole thing is falling away from me. I don’t even wank more than once every six months. I could go weeks sleeping next to a shapely, curvy, soft naked body – and knowing she’s up for it, and wants it – and not even get a hard-on. Interesting times in Rory’s sexual progression. Osho reckons sex desire, if properly fulfilled, really ought to be sated by about forty-two. My feeling is that Osho talks a lot of crap but also talks a lot of sense and, who knows? maybe he’s onto something here. In any case, one does what one feels is right – and at the moment not being very interested in sex feels pretty much right to me.
Of course, it don’t help when your girlfriend’s only twenty-six and is far from sated. Among the few troubles I do get – and there ain’t many, to be fair: she’s absolutely remarkable and head and shoulders above any woman I’ve ever known in that regard – a sometimes exasperated burst of “when was the last time we had sex?” is about the extent of it.
That, and the issue of “togetherness.” I don’t know what to say about that. Probably I’m just no good at it. I is what I is and it’s a shame that there’s no time in this world for people to find that out. I should be more honest next time – if there is a next time – and lay my cards on the table in full. Or better still, write up some sort of menu. Like, this is me. The main problem is, because of my colourful past, people tend to think that I’ll have an equally colourful future. Except being in a relationship makes me happy and settles me – and all ideas of mad adventures feel a little bit silly. Wanting to get away is what discontent people do, what I’ve always done when I’ve been discontent myself. But take now, for example: I live in Leeds and I feel perfectly content and even tell myself I’m happier than I have been in years. And yet all my life is is sitting in bed typing – as I’m doing now – and then playing a bit of squash and football, and refereeing a couple of games for my income, and eating meals and sharing a bed with a nice woman who doesn’t give me hassles. Sounds kind of boring. And yet I love it! And I wouldn’t change it for the world. And I certainly wouldn’t change it – not right now – for a life back on the dusty, lonely road not knowing where I was going.
Although, I may one day in the future, depending on what I feel. That’s the difficulty: I could just change my mind completely…
Another thing that perhaps brought Nicky and I together – this was after we’d slept together a few times, and decided we liked that, but before we became a couple – was that we connected over ideas of bringing up children. In fact, that was a big part of what got me to fall for her – expressing my ideas and seeing that hers mirrored those almost precisely. And rare ideas they were too. Though what I didn’t know at the time was that she kind of mirrors everyone’s ideas anyways, being a nice and polite and somewhat inhibited young woman when it comes to social interaction: a bit of a “yes girl” in my twisted opinion. And that’s me not getting to know her properly before throwing in my lot. Not that I doubt her on this subject – cool ideas, hippy ideas, non-materialistic ideas: the kind of ideas that allow for babies running free on Mexican beaches and who gives a fuck about the whole lame-ass English school system anyways? – which is how she genuinely is – but…well, I doubt myself, and she should doubt me too. Because I’ve changed my mind…
Kids. Two years ago I thought it was about time I got into that. I have these notions that I need to learn love and what better way to do that? That I want to be part of a unit. That I should stop fannying around with all this Peter Pan gallivanting and actually settle down to some kind of ‘adult life’. Six months ago I was back to investigating mortgages. One year ago, when Nicky and I got together proper, we were making love and saying, what if we get pregnant? and just laughing in our derangedness ‘cos it all seemed fine and groovy. And now…
Now I look at babies and hear them squawking and contemplate the work they take and I think, no fuckin’ way. Now I look at children and watch them misbehaving and throwing their tantrums and I think, not for me. Now I look at teenagers and think of the stereotypical ways in which they hate their parents and go off getting drunk and taking drugs and shagging around – my own dear sweet daughter! – and I think, I couldn’t handle that. Even friends with kids, when I get to spending time with them, and experience the noise and the chaos and the hassles and the tiredness first hand…well, you know what I think.
The closer it gets, the more I go off it. Thirty-six and I’m still flip-flopping over this. And yet, being thirty-six, and still feeling pretty strongly the old “no fuckin’ way” I should perhaps listen to that and honour it a bit more and…
A few days back I was saying to Nicky, maybe I should get a vasectomy. I mean, look at me, I’m thirty-six and I’m still not sure I want kids, mostly think I don’t, so perhaps I should just get it over with and stop all this fannying about with precaution and worries and pregnancy tests and ejaculating and then saying, o-oh, I don’t think I should have done that, when do you think you might be ovulating? Such a pain.
But was I serious? Am I serious about anything? Or was I just testing the water, giving her a get-out clause, seeing if I could push her away?
Your man don’t want kids and you do: whatcha gonna do about it? That sort of thing.
Kids. Pah! But then, is there ever a man who really wants kids? Why would he? What’s in it for him? Except hassles and work and a diminishment of freedom. It’s women who want children – and back when I was with Sophie I figured that given that I liked her so much, and could see myself being with her until we were old and in rocking chairs, kids were an inevitability and, not that I’d know when the time was, but that I knew that if the day ever came and she turned around and said, I wanna make one, I’d be like, sure, I’m down with that. Basically, I figured that when she was ready I’d go along with it. Funny thing is, when she decided she was ready and wanted to get on it, we broke up.
Anyways, blah blah blah and I don’t know what I’m saying now: I’s a been writing nearly ninety minutes – nearly four and a half thousand words – and I guess that’s enough given that it was just a filler and nothing to do with the subject I wanted to write about anyways. You might think I’m exaggerating when I say, I swear, you stick me in a room with a computer and I don’t think I’ll ever run out of things to type, but I really think it’s true. How many words? Must be well over a million by now – and we ain’t even got started.
The depths of the shite in this brain are endless.
Poor old Nicky having to live with a madman like me! lol
“Having to”?
Yes. Good point. No wonder she’s plotting round-the-world bike trips and in the meantime she’s got her own secret little agendas too: live with this guy in easy lifestyle and he’s okay and funny and makes her laugh with farts and though the sex ain’t as much as she’d like it’s good when she gets it and that just about compensates – and in the meantime live cheap and save up a whole massive fuckin’ stack of money and then one day – poof! She’s gone. She’s like the female version of me.
Well, we’ll see. In the meantime…it’s A-Okay and given that the I Ching says “proceed” and the I Ching’s never wrong, proceed we do. Evenings of food and pleasant chatter and cuddles in bed. Weekends of fry-ups and me being out reffing and her tending her garden and seeing friends. It ain’t a bad life. It’s a kind of adult, normal life. But is it a sustainable, relationship kind of life?
It might have to be, if I’m not a bit more careful in where and when I release my gunk.
How ridiculous that sex goes to making babies! How bizarre that a thing we do purely for pleasure should also be the thing that creates a life and changes your own more dramatically than anything else. Nothing else we do for pleasure has such drastic effects. Some squash games I’ve had of late I’d describe as “better than sex” – but there’s no lasting repercussions from them, no lifelong ties and responsibilities created and dreams and plans all of a sudden absolutely transformed or killed. Madness. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: God done right-royally screw up when She combined fucking and procreation. I mean, sure, it’s nice way to make babies – but I’m not sure it’s the most sensible one. At least there should be some kind of button you have to push – or even better some code to be entered – wherein fertility could be switched on and off. If I was God I’d make it so we were all sterile unless, I dunno, the man had eaten half a pound of grapes and the woman had been standing on her head for thirteen minutes. That would trigger the system and then we’d only have babies when they were wanted. No more drunken shags birthing poor innocent perfect-souled infants to incompatible and rubbishly unprepared parents doomed to load them with traumas and fuckedupnesses.
Man, I really think I hit on something there. Let’s do it! And even if girls decided they wanted to sneakily get impregnated and so were off in bathrooms pretending to powder their vaginas but were instead standing on their heads – it wouldn’t matter if the man hadn’t eaten his grapes. And what man would?
No, instead we’d have sensible, sober conferences where people sat down and said, okay, let’s do it, I’ll get started on the grapes, you go stand on your head, and in nine months time we’ll have a beautiful baby child and all because we want one, and we’re ready for it and – even better – we’ve also taken our courses and passed our tests and got our licenses and government approval.
What a totally different world it would be.
One, probably, whose population would dive into massive decline - for what man, even, beyond the rich man or the rare man, would eat those grapes when all he really wants is get his end away? Would I? Looking around my one-bedroom flat and contemplating the freedom of my life – of Mexico and America dreams to come – and then contemplating just at the end of the bed I now lie in some box or cot with a little squawking bawling crying human being in it?
That’s the problem: no man, surely, wants a baby: what he wants, if he wants anything, is a child. A being you can talk to. Teach things. Take hunting in the woods.
But a baby? No. Why would you? No appeal there.
I guess that’s why nature makes them attractive to women. You know, lots of women even think they’re cute and adorable. Whereas guys just think they look weird, alien, shrivelled.
Nature’s pretty clever.
But She ain’t yet outsmarted me…
Time for squash! Adios!
No comments:
Post a Comment