July 11, 2007 - Wednesday

July 11, 2007 - Wednesday

wanton notes on being single around here

The pressure to be in a relationship is strong around here.

It seems the older you get the more of a pariah you become for being alone. I blame this on a variety of reasons:

There is nowhere a single person can go that's remotely interesting. All the pubs are carbon copies of each other. The majority have two words in their name which you might associate with Merry Olde Britaine –if you read too much Dickens and enjoyed Marmite. For example: The Lieutenant's Pump (pronounced "left-tenant's" for reasons that are beyond me and too annoying to contemplate right now), The Clock Tower, The Royal Britannia, etc. Other places have tacked on an '&' sign and involve two distinctly British sounding, but wholly random nouns: The Heart & Crown, The Fox & Feather, The Cock & Lion. Still other places have embarrassing names that no self-respecting Brit would have without killing themselves at the age of six; D'arcy McGee's, Grace O'Malley's, Biddy Mulligan's. In a weird twist one place is even called The Cock 'N Bull.

My feeling is that if they called all these British pubs, which are all exactly alike, "Cock 'N Bull" it would spare the limited imaginations of their owners, and conveniently summarize what's going on in the place.

Here they don't even bother trying to create a delineation between a pub being Irish, Scottish, or English, aside from the name. You will always get the following: wooden chairs, wooden tables, wooden bar, wood veneer that goes half-way up puke coloured walls, brass fittings, music that jack-asses like to sing along to, and the irresistible urge to ignite tear gas in order to get one fucking drink.

The thing is, I've been to British pubs in Britain and they don't have British sounding names. Maybe they used to, but they have moved on. Why can't we? Why can't Canada just stop sucking on the teat of Mother Britain? There is nothing remotely cool, or particularly dynamic about the place except for the fact that there is actually stuff to do over there… aside from going to pubs with British sounding names, that is.

Anyway.

The bars here close at two in the morning. Many of you (North Americans) that are reading this think that this is normal. Some of you (Ottawans) are grateful that it's not 1AM as it used to be. This is severely abnormal. Especially when you couple it with the fact that you can get served food 24 hours a day. This, to me, speaks volumes. Or kilos depending how you look at it…
Essentially, what happens is that at 2AM, when you are abruptly cut off from tying on a good drunk –enough of a drunk to actually meet someone amongst all the Cock 'N Bull in the place– you are kicked out. You are then faced with either going home and fucking your girlfriend (which you don't have), going and stuffing your face with enough grease to slide a dead elephant down an airport runway, or, depending on your state, going home and fucking a dead elephant, then sliding your greasy girlfriend (which you don't have) down an airport runway.
And, people around here go out young. Most places you go to, that have any kind of sociable ambience (and the rare few without British sounding names), are filled with awkward early-twenty-year-olds, new to the drink, and so hopped up on their own hormones they get 'Hyuk-hyuk!' Goofy when they see another human of the opposite (sometimes) sex.

One might think that this is prime picking ground for young unwitting nubile female flesh, but One would be sadly mistaken. These girls are witting. They are made so by the relentless snorting and stamping of the afore mentioned sticks of hormonal dynamite which are one touch away from exploding in a shower of sputum and pointless babble. It's a terrible, terrible cycle because these girls, who all too often look like plucked turkeys, carry on like they're supermodels. Like they're owed an ogling while they clatter about in their slut-wear, their noses held high, determined to snub you even when you haven't spared them a glance.

Faced with this kind of abject horror who can blame most of my friends here for being in the latter stages of a Very Long Relationship, complete with impending or moderately-formed lumps of wriggling, noisy, wet, pink, flesh that they have entitled 'The Baby'? But that's a whole other thing.

Yes, single people here are looked upon with fear and terror at worst, and mistrust and pity at best. There is a schematic of life firmly in place here, and if you stray from it you become the focus of 'setting-up', blind-dates', and the source of vicarious living for your friends who wish they were single, occasionally, and will egg you on for greater detail about the most mundane encounter:

"So she smiled at you?"
"I think so."
"Did you touch her breast?"
"Well, I didn't really talk to her."
"You didn't talk to her?"
"No."
"So… Did you touch her breast?"

These same people will offer idiotic and pointless advice by way of 'assistance'. Because long ago, when they were single, and they spotted two attractive strangers in the room, of course they proposed a threesome to them.

Suddenly you are plunged back into high school; receiving third-hand information that someone might 'like' you. You keep your mouth sealed when you find someone remotely interesting or risk setting in a motion an inexorable machine designed to 'hook you up' so that the awkward silence between you and that person can be occasionally punctuated by the mutual realization that you have absolutely nothing in common, and probably don't like each other very much anyway.

I have actually banned all my friends from trying to set me up with someone, because in terms of organizing a fresh relationships, as with many other things, a third party will only fuck things up.

Interestingly the only people that attempt to 'set me up' tend to be my female friends, especially those friends which are partners with my male friends. Their motivation, thinly disguised behind the veneer of altruism, is based mostly on two other parts: one small part pity, and one large part the fact that, in my singelhood, I'm conjectured to be a severely bad influence on their man. I might lead their docile and sheep-like significant-other astray with my Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ways. The pervading logic here seems to be that by being in a relationship I am safely neutered and can then engage in the comfortable couple-type things that couples do; like playing charades, talking about being a couple, and talking about other couples.

The impression in North America about the lifestyle of the adult single person is on the far side of the river Lethe. Being single is akin to being a horny sex-starved sycophant whose relentless drive for gratuitous shagging is barely outweighed by their desperation and depression at being alone.

As a certified adult single person, allow me to set those worried minds at ease and illustrate the goings on of a single person via a weekly schedule of my life:

Monday: Walk along lonely stretches of highway, drunk on absinthe, and try to wave down passing female motorists to offer a little 'Road-Side Beaver-Scouting'.

Tuesday: Wake up at 3PM and not call back anybody I Beaver-Scouted yesterday. Instead, eat a pound of raw oyster, head to nearest brothel, and have wild condom-free sex with eight hookers and a tranny named 'Lulu'.

Wednesday: Wake up at 6PM, stuff my nose full of raw ground Columbian, and vigorously masturbate for six hours. At 12AM head downtown, lean against a wall outside of a populated bar, and holler lewd comments about "chicken poo-nanny" at passing women.

Thursday: Wake up Friday.

Friday: After carefully extracting a cork shaped lump of less-raw ground Columbian from my nostril I then re-mold it and re-insert as a suppository. Shakiness causes this to take hours. Now it's time to go out. Barge into a high-end bar with my dong blatantly hanging out of my trousers. Walk up to the nearest girl, grab her by the breast and demand a blow-job. After being slapped –and now chagrined into being more coy– gently place my dong on another girls' lap and tell her how amazing I am. Bathroom stall sex ensues.

Saturday: Orgy Day! Head to the nearest Orgy House (location secret –known only to single people, but usually located in the richest housing estate of any city) at about 5PM. Stop along the way to meet Ricky who sells me three tablets of ecstasy, six grams of cocaine, and a satchel of Viagra. Head to the basement of the Orgy House where everyone listens to the relentless Nazi-beats of Scooter and have loopy jungle sex (unprotected) with up to thirty partners in a room with black walls and floors covered with silken duvets.

Sunday (day of rest): Hidden Dragon, Beaten Monkey

Or maybe not.

Maybe it's just being single. Maybe it's just doing the things that are available to do here (such as watching idiot television, or ublinkingly trying to identify the piece of something on your fingernail) alone, without the benefit of regular copulation and the inherent safety and security of being in a relationship. Copulation, by the way, that notoriously comes rarely to people in long-term relationships.

Some people are afraid of being single. I am not. I pity those that have the fear. These people are far more dangerous to me than I am to them, because they are so afraid of being alone they have defaulted to a relationship that will inevitably implode. And when it does, they seek out people like me who, although secure in my singelhood, am gullible to the aggressive wiles of newly lonely people. These folk can take up an awful lot of your time.

Yes, it's a lone wolf kind of life, but fuck it. What's the big deal? If you can't learn how to entertain yourself and be an individual, without constantly having to think for two, or relying on someone else to do half of the thinking for you, what good are you? It's this thing about a good relationship being two whole people overlapping. Not two halves making a whole.

Indeed, I've spent much of my life in one long-term relationship or another. This is largely due to my inability to have a one-night stand. I don't have the stomach to go through all the transparent and dubious motions of picking-up someone at a venue. All the simian chest-beating ducking and weaving and verbal acrobatics involved with getting someone from the bar to the boudoir is not to my taste. I don't chase, and it's worked out so far.

Also, I'm not very good at games, including sociological ones.

And, after all, judging by retrospective pervading patterns, I'm going to be single for a while. My first relationship lasted four years. The next, three years. The next two –all the way down to my last, which was six months. All of these with three-week smatterings in between. Where does it go from here? Three months? One-and-a-half? Come off it. All of these have been pretty rocky ordeals at the end for both parties, making me twisted psychologically and turning me into the arin I don't want to be. The arin I never want to be again.

And so be it. I'm not going to get into a relationship out of boredom, and I'm not going to get into a relationship to fit in with my coupled friends. I actually don't mind hanging around couples. I like being on the other side of the coin for a change. And I sure as hell am no going to settle for someone I half-way like, either by default or loneliness, in the hopes that eventually it'll be glorious. Let's face it, if you listen to an album you half-way like repeatedly you come to like it more. It doesn't change the fact that it's a mediocre album, and more importantly, that there might be better music out there.

I'm just going to wait this one out. I have faith, you see, that the right person –the one– will come along… or come around.

So let your voices ring out Adult Single People. Do not live in fear or shame at your state. Don't let those many happy (or miserable) couples pressure you into a relationship. Treat the thousands of romantic movies and songs as what they are: crap. If you want to be in a relationship, fine. Don't force it. Bend like a reed. Stay firm in your will and your conviction. Remember that every day that you are alone is another day you grow stronger, more self-sufficient, and increasingly independent. You are an individual. And, although the pervading wind demands procreation, this is the age of science… and there are laboratories for such things.

You have yourself for the rest.