Over the table of half glasses of wine and some eighteen dollar entrée which sits half eaten but they daren’t reach for a bit under the weight of reprehension or guilt because she is crying and he is trying damn hard to stick to his last sentence which, lets face it, was a bit brutishly simplistic in so much as it basically called her useless and perhaps you could interpret it as saying she is unattractive or bad in bed or similar. He gulps at his wine, only appreciating it as it sinks down the back of the throat, again the thought ‘fuck this is costing me hundreds of dollars to sit here and have a god dammed fight’ and it’s just that exact thing in his eyes, enough for her to think ‘why am I bothering?’ which, as you can imagine only exacerbates things. It’s always the way, the blind leading the blind or worse the awake falling all over themselves to play roles, roles in which they hate or at least said at the start of the relationship they hate and oh god what about all those other couples who fall into these traps and how crap are they and this will NEVER happen to us because we are too smart and so they sit there knowing that bit each time they try to, somehow, introduce this or break the moment there is always another crushing true statement to reel back in all the old woes and hurts that accumulate like dust into every relationship (or so they, maybe we were wrong and naïve and anything but inevitability is futile but I don’t want to believe that (their hearts say). He takes some bread in, takes a spoon and fork and places the last crumbed artichoke onto her plate, she is too far gone at this point to car, it just sits there and he mops up some of the sweet reduced balsamic sauce with the bread and finishes it, another swallow of wine, refills his glass.
‘Okay…’ and then what? … ‘Okay, okay so lets just, eat this delicious food okay?’ She looks back at him, pricks the artichoke with a fork and eats half of it, putting the fork back down with the crumbed vegetable thing stuck on the end
‘Yeah’ she says, finishing her wine too.
>> We’ve had enough of this story, right? Same old thing again and again. You get to thinking it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy? The ins and outs, the repetitive up and down, the long winded you-just-get-sick-of-each-other motif…….this modern romance where we give it a few years and then passes. Well, it been happening for years and as so relationship after relationship just dies. Is that right? Is that what’s supposed to happen? Our references are:
(i) Parents (and their generation) who we saw struggled through marriage, mostly with cancer causing burdens and repentant betrayals or role-playing idiosyncratic belittlements of Father and Mother and HOME stuff where resentment bred hate and cold hearted jibes where ‘me wife’ is that and ‘my husband the idiot’ is this and ‘what can I do’ kind of jokes around BBQs or inside with salad (you know the drill)
(ii) Grandparents who (even worse!) suffered male dominated abuse and denials of privileges or thought and the burgeoning debt to be paid to children and the bricks and motor house where you are supposed to just have things done (humanity-less, emotion-less, desire-less).
(iii) Modernity, free sprit, carnal exploration, all encompassing mass market love that means look good feel good be happy at all costs stuff which is also hollow in the end and leaves us begging for the kind of warm home-as-hearth thing we imagine somewhat romantically through the mire that we have directly seen, somehow still imagining a better way or even a pure way that our pathetic human parents/grandparent didn’t really find, OR were actually unable to find because they weren’t equipped with what we know now…and what is it that we know now besides that marriage isn’t forever, that one plain path isn’t possible and that we want what we want and being able to kill that is a (luxury) skill we both don’t have and don’t want and to try to regain (regain? No, it was never real, besides as a socially typical class system thing from mega-yesteryear). Okay so let’s hear about how they have children:
The babysitter has been picked up by her father and they gave her $60 or so and they sit on the lounge, him in his quasi-suit and her in a semi-formal dress (backless!) and they take of their $600 shoes and they lie dead there on the carpet amidst bunny rabbits, pieces of lego and Disney DVDs, the romance, any of it what was there, is just miserable in the face of such blatant realism; the house the smell of children who don’t wash properly and fart freely and don’t wear eau de toilette…this instead of the chatter of adults spending hundreds on fine food and wine out in the dimly lit world of the night where children are either absent or annoying baggage. The rich food they choked down between terse comments sits in their stomachs, reminding them how far away from that life they are and how cheating the moment means long term morose bowel related symptoms, endemic conditions of the dying bourgeoisie ideals that you need to cheat in order to pretend to be amongst. They don’t look at each other, turn on the TV, he light s a cigarette and she hates it but he just keeps doing it and she’s had too much wine and food and arguments already to say anything this time but it makes the bile swirl and rise anyway and the cancer she thinks grows, prays for cancer in a moment then feels bad for thinking and wishing for it, instead that woman thing inside kicks in where she loves her sleeping daughters and the next time the sun will come up and seeing him eyes closed exhaling smoke into the family room is a mixture of hate, disgust, annoyance an envy. She slides her stocking off, takes a moment to admire her own skin, her legs twice daily covered in a regenerist cream that costs over a hundred a jar but its worth it and she just leaves for the shower without saying anything and its like he was waiting for it because as she is halfway up the stairs she hears him put some of his old music on and open the fridge, not finished drinking yet.
>> How many clichés can we handle, or, more importantly, how many clichés can we actually allow ourselves to perpetuate by actually living them? I’ve seen even the most liberal of us fall pregnant and then say thing like ‘at least when they leave the house I’ll still be forty’ or ‘its so rewarding, I know you want kids’ or ‘it’s not so bad, I mean, you think it is but we love it’ or fill in the blanks. Clichés, right, that’s what we’re talking about. I’m not writing from a song book that is invented by the clouds or meditating on commonalities and trying to write in platitudes that transcend reality and make you think otherwise, these are experts from reality, and worse, a reality we at once know and have tried so hard always to avoid OR OWRWISE are not aware of and accidently fall into and THEN posthumously HATE for reasons unknown to us! Argh god I hate that last one and in as much hate anyone STUPID enough to ‘accidently’ fall into anything of such a grand magnitude. Imagine dealing with that life? Well I can and I have seen it and I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here about that but you can because those kinds of people will never read this (lets face it NEVER read anyway). Ah don’t be so polite.
Of course I don’t mean it, it’s more an abstract representation of how YES class exists in so much as we think we are better than someone/thing else. Its an easy way to understand your place in the world, an easy way to justify ludicrous spending on oysters and shoes and such whereby you can afford it and are no beholden to an old fashioned ideal where just because you were born means you have to bear. So instead you can lie in the sunlight in $300 pants and sip a $3 coffee and just, you know, waste time alone. Yeah, make more money for no reason other than to spend and/or keep it. Do nothing but for the pleasure or for the simple reason it was intended for i.e. consume for the sake of consuming without regard (that’s the key word here) for the masses or any entity, group or obligation. Ah I am breathing freely and possibly too deeply or through the nose with too much force (getting carried away with my own sense of non-achievement (comparatively!)). Okay so they start a new day….oh god lets see:
She is in the shower, able to get up so much more efficiently than him (responsibility she tells herself, lazy fuck? No! He has a good job…bills paid, house over head etc stuff that tempers the ill sentiments and allows her to wash her body every day, lingering on the weight gain on her hips and belly and hold her breasts up even though she pretends she is just washing her body) and he wakes up with a pain in the forehead, wine it is again and he has a hard cock and its both there and a reminder that he is still, well, a living breathing fucking man so he is pulling on it and playing with the end and he feels stupid but of course doesn’t stop and is thinking about fucking his wife from behind but his boss pops in because he has a meeting gin like two hours and now even still playing with the blood filled end of his thing is rehearsing his lines and making sure he knows what he has to say and quote unquote bring to the table and it so abstract now because he thought too much about the meeting and still the hand working on the end and it feels good and strange and is just pleasure after all and now so far removed from actual sex its just about playing and giving the little electric feeling to himself. He hears the shower stop so he rolls on to his front to press the thing into the mattress and pulls her pillow over his head to pass out for five more minutes or more accurately wait until she comes back into the room to get dressed and ignore it for as long as it takes for her to pull on the basics of her apparel.
‘Good morning’ he says, in a way pretending last night didn’t happen an simultaneously knowing she doesn’t care anymore about what happened it’s been so many times and she just says ‘good morning back’ like he knows she will so he feels vilified and gets up, half erect thing dangling there, too much hair on his body he thinks, moves out of the room to the shower, all covered in her moist evaporation and smelling the same as it does everyday: powder. Downstairs she is cooking toast and some scrambled eggs and coffee and juice in three glasses and the young one is sitting half naked (top) so she says go put your top on and why are you not in your uniform yet and the older one is trying to read the paper to be cool, an adult and Mother says ‘can you get your brother ready?…here’s your cereal’ and she says ‘Mom!’ but it’s the same as everyday it seems and the ‘Mum’ ignores her and drinks her coffee and puts cold toast in her own mouth and he comes down the stairs feeling sick and still dirty even after the shower (it was too quick and the hot water turned lukewarm after two minutes) and his hair is wet so it feels like sweat. He has a coffee too but its old and just warm and the paper is half played and he read maybe one article and the kids are saying stuff which he answers and she is hunched over the cat dish pushing cold meat into the plastic receptacle with a butter knife.
>> So I’m missing something here, surely. There is a sense of love in the duty, of the building of a family, the pure essence of being a human (read: procreating. Urgh, sorry, I digress), the basis for humanity, the evolution or continuing with humanity…basically the utopian goal of contributing to ‘tomorrow’. Is this everyone though, because, if not, then you are surely labouring under false pretences, I mean, we all have to get on Noah’s boat or drown. Its not for the faint hearted this obligation. But I wonder if we think as such…some would rather be the bastion of hope rather than those-who-musty-be-saved…again we’re talking about the desire to be the elitist few reigning over the weakened (by mind or status or facility) masses. By now you’re probably hating me and feeling some kind of compassion to this beautiful little family trying to make ends meet, hell, you are probably yourself feeding a baby or cleaning up after a toddler and are acutely aware of the self sacrifice necessary for such a calling (ha, cling…sorry, well, its not religious but usual…and that’s the craziest part! It must make you feel deflated to think it usual, right? That EVERY household has the same trouble, struggle, routine. Oh). ‘What I was trying to say was HOW WONDERFUL, really, I mean, this is sacrifice par excellence, yet, an expected sacrifice (which somewhat waters down the offering).
And in the end what I hope is that this is not the end or the ending or the raison d’être or purpose for all our life/living/libre -goals -dreams –ideals. Sorry for so many openings, ending and appendages, but you can see how complex simple such things can be. Okay so its logic time [ smiley face ]:
(a) There are those predisposed to procreate (caveat: want to! Regardless of motif, goal, humanity’s interest or altruism)
(b) There are those who should procreate
(c) There are those who should not procreate
(d) Adoption (read: at the mercy of (a), (b) and (c))
SIMPLISTIC MATHEMATICS WHEREBY THINGS ARE WHAT THEY SEEM:
When (c) falls into (a) there is trouble and also the burgeoning of the dull masses.
Those who must be governed
When (b) can be (b), the blessed purity of life can breathe freely with love and support
Or else we are left with preachers who are insular and breed ignoramuses.
When (c) are left to run free the world balloons and it is not safe for the ageing community
And now we turn to government and, reciprocally, the public education system. Oh fuck hell no
When (a) becomes (c) through their own investigation of outcomes and personal desires for success
Perhaps the best children needn’t be born or perhaps you should shut up and write a book. Do both! How dare you! Etc.
When (a) falls into (d), benefactors, benevolent souls, the future of humanity is secured!
Love is all we have, and all we want to give. We want you to have all the advantages of this world that we can give.
The purity of humanity as preached by religion is when (a) IS (b)
We have you! You were born right and were told the right (!) things. All of God’s blessings to you!
