Romantic Rights

Romance isn’t the same as it used to be. Romance used to be ticking boxes on a ridiculous list of stereotypes; flowers, girl, jukebox, picking people up in your car, going for milkshakes, all very Pleasantville, or if the whole event were hilarious rather than a grey and white tragedy, all very Happy Days. In 2007, this doesn’t happen. If you dateline the romantic gestures back even further before televised romanticism, you’ve got your poetry, serenading, and the raping and pillaging of petty villages to impress fair maidens. Obviously, this is all baloney right here right now; the audacity of writing poetry is reserved now exclusively for people so fucked up out of their skulls on narcotics and egotism that they can legitimately get away with it, or people aged 15 who post it on their chat room profiles and exists largely around the theme of World of Warcraft and/or how they’re too preoccupied with blood and witches to play World of Warcraft to the best of their abilities. Anyone else who offers poetry as a reason to like them is almost a dead cert to get laughed into the nearest singles bar with a post-it note saying “avoid”. Which is a shame. It takes a certain someone to write a poem, and these people deserve girlfriends, not least to centre their odes of undying love to one person in particular, and putting several others out of danger.
There isn’t even a nature of ‘courting’ anymore. Admittedly, not even I would say I was ‘courting’ anyone, but the connotations of such an innocent dating activity are so far out of most people’s window that it’s a distant blot on the cityscape. At best, people nowadays are “seeing” somebody, which bares no relevance to opening their eyes and enjoying what they have before them; quite clearly ‘seeing’ somebody is a mutant hybrid emotion derived by a series of almost-emotions experienced after giving somebody a good ‘seeing’ to on more than one occasion. Later, it becomes “this girl I’m with”, and then you can coast into fifth gear with “my boyfriend/girlfriend” which is pretty much good enough to last until you both drive off the nearest overpass. I refer to it as ‘coasting’ because, call my cynical, it’s all downhill from there. Of course, you can make the alarmingly unnecessary task of stepping up to ‘fiancee’, but speaking from the ludicrous position of being somebody’s ‘fiancee’, you regularly forget you’re in that position, thus rendering the act entirely pointless. Which isn’t to say at all that I didn’t enjoy and experience entirely the full emotional range that comes with getting engaged, but it never went further than still saying ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’. It was, and I say this with a cross between a cracked smile and a watery grimace, only after the disintegration of the relationship that the word ‘fiancee’ even got bandied around. As any fool who has craved sympathy from every passer by knows, it’s easier and more fulfilling to elicit sympathy if you’ve been ditched by your finacee than if your girlfriends left you.
I think I’m romantic, but then actually, I’m not really. Rarely do I anything about it. Romantic feelings, for me, often happen entirely on my own when I’m in the garden and I think “oooh, look at the way the outside light of next-door-but-one’s house makes the shadows of that bush which is probably a weed reflect against their whitewashed wall” and then before the thought has had any remote danger of inspiring me to do anything except dribble, I’ve finished my cigarette and returned to the harsh unromantic existence of drinking Strongbow and watching Lil’ Chris cuts a karaoke managers hair for Children in Need. I find boring things romantic; things like imaginary small towns in America with picket fences and innocence, places where ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ means a cute girl with an alcoholic father, rather than a haven of pure evil where being beaten to a bloody pulp is a good result of a wrong turn, and then getting run over by a train. In this town, there is nothing to do but chew grass, watch the sun rise, and be in a country band that people say are “going places” because you’ve loaded your hear in a van and played the next town over that three houses bigger than your own, and your next door neighbour jokes that you’re playing “all the big places now” and that girl from the wrong side of the tracks says “think of me when you’re away” even though you’re only playing 15 minutes away but she’s got so wasted on the whiskey her dad hides in the toilet cistern that she can’t even breathe though her nose without slurring. There’s a dog barking fifteen blocks away, but there’s no noise during the day apart from fifteen people all mowing their lawns on dive-thru mowers, that they’ve had to dig out their ‘mowing’ hat from the cupboard under the stairs. It’s a perfectly imperfect place, but simultaneously, imperfectly perfect. The sort of two-horse town where people in Raymond Carver stories elope to uniformly fuck up their lives. The wind blows through a bird scarer planted in the centre of a corn field when I’m out walking. Then my imagination runs out of juice, and I open my eyes and I’m waiting for a bus on a Saturday night outside a nightclub where 21st century romance is happening right infront of me. And through the kaleidoscope of vomit and brylcreem, there’s a flicker of passion. Then I remember it isn’t mine, and I crawl into the bus. There are songs about falling in love on the last bus home, but let’s be honest, they make the plot of Dragonforce songs look like they’re scripted by Ken Loach. I don’t believe romance is a dead art, it’s just in a zombie-like state, and plodding down a high street near you today.
When you’re 16, everything and everyone exits in a pigeonholing wet dream of swots, trendies, townies and yourself and the person you sit next to in English. This is obviously hilarious looking back, because it’s precisely this kind act of assumption that results in people aged 24 who don’t have any life skills because they hate townies, and don’t have any intelligence because they hate swots, and have no social skills or ability to impress anybody because they spent their formative years criticising people for not having heard of Idlewild, instead of going to parties and making their friends drink piss. Over time, these boundaries have blurred to the point of Magic Eye paintings (thanks, in no small part, to Zara and Brian from Hollyoaks) and the people who lived through quadratic glasses for five years are left gog-eyed with their utter lack of understanding. “Uhh, but she likes Sufjan Stevens and the Dresden Dolls, so she must be a rational human being like me, but oh wait, she’s dancing with that guy with the Le Tigre t shirt and he’s buying her a drink, and now they’re going home in a cab together, and he didn’t even have to buy any condoms in the toilet because they both already had them because that’s what they do. Or ‘wait, that girl has impeccably fashionable clothes and a coat with a fur lined hood, so why is she at this Decemberists concert?” It’s because in your mid twenties, pigeonholing doesn’t exist anymore. Or at least, there are so many holes to slot people that fuck-headed people like myself comprehend anything apart from who’s a wanker. Which, the last time I checked, is just about everyone, especially myself. Now that’s romantic.