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.

Gone

There’s an infinite amount of competition, but probably the worst thing about hating every last fibre of your own being, is that nothing in life is ever anyone else’s fault. This is the perfect relationship of course, for anyone who knows you, because it basically gives them a 007/Monolopoly card ‘privilege’ to do whatever they want in relation to your life and not have to worry, because when it comes to the crunch situation, they don’t have to worry too much because I’ll blame myself every single time, and the thought that someone else is at fault won’t cross my mind. It is a solid gold, nugget-in-an-Enid Blyton adventure fact above all facts, an indelible truth, a certifiable statement of certainty, that you, yourself is in some way wholly to blame for the circumstances. For example, for every break up or kick-into-touch I’ve been on the receiving end of, and there have been enough now to count on both my hands, it has in some way been laid on the shoulders or myself. Brilliant! This has mistakenly led me to believe that in every relationship that grinds to a staggering halt like a runaway train diving over a cliff into the ocean, it’s not the fault of the protagonist of the break-up (which it obviously is!) but the fault of the the person who loss the toss and elected to receive. This is of course, because of the break-up speech. The break-up speech is a hilarious facet of the modern world. In ancient times, or at least, BBC adaptations of ancient times, the speech takes the form of a well crafted quill-and-ink paen to lost love “oh my darling sweetheart, you’ll always have a place in my soul, but I fear I must leave. The war is calling, my sweet, and should I not return, be sure that the whisper of your heart will always be on the wind blowing through the trenches, and I will find you, my love” and so forth. These days it’s like “Oh I really want to be your friend to ease my guilt, but seriously, I just really need to be on my own for a while” or “it’s just not working”. Both of these obviously translate into plain speaking English as “I need to be on my own because I really fancy someone else, and obviously I can’t go and persue them with you still being my boyfriend and all” or “it’s not working because I’ve been knobbing someone else and it’s caused a malfunction in my ability to two-time people, and I’m really a one-man girl”. Basically, nobody in the 21st century, it seems, breaks up with someone for legitimate reasons. I’m holding out for my next failed relationship, just because I’m now prepossessed with a function to fill in the words for them person in question. Like when you’re typing in your email address on a computer with all your settings saved, and it fills in the rest of the words for you. The next one had better be well crafted and romantic, otherwise I won’t be amused. I won’t be amused anyway, but at least I’ll admire your creativity.

Ordinary People

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not all roses being chronically depressed all the time. For one thing, it makes you sick of the sight of the animated paperclip that appears on ‘Word’ the first time you use it in ages. The animated paperclip has done no wrong, but I can’t be doing hanging around with vibrant animated metal shapes with googally eyes, when I’ve got some hard graft text to be laying down. It’s not his fault, and I’ll probably be needing his help later, but if I spend another twenty seconds looking at his chirpy ‘head’ then I’ll end up drawing parallels between him, and chirpy people I know in real life, and fantasise about how much I’d like to delete them within the first twenty seconds of talking to them, which is potentially a bad thing. But a pixellised stationary manifestation of The Friday Night Project with Justin Lee Collins and Alan Carr is. For the same reason, I hated the Highland-talking suited man who used to appear in the bottom left hand corner of the screen on Theme Park. It was only when my bouncy castle had steam coming out of it like the socks in the Calamity James Beano cartoon, and all my shark men and chicken men were forming picket lines outside the gates that it dawned on me that without the wisecracking fucker voiced by either Ewan McGregor or Alan Cumming on an off day talking about bushes and toilets and broken bouncy castles, you couldn’t actually play the game. I think he only appears in the PC version though, on the Amiga all you had was a slappable impersonation of Willy Wonka. The Amiga version was brilliant. Your landscapes almost entirely consisted of grey concrete, with the only special feature to these being one-way arrows which served absolutely no purpose whatsoever, apart from wasting hours creating huge diversions for the chicken men and paying customers to get lost in. I hated thinking too much about Theme Park as well, because once you’ve followed a customer and realised they’ve been in the park for seventeen days, you stop thinking of them as individuals, and then you find yourself wanting to fall off the rollercoaster anyway. That was the other neat trick in the Amiga version – if you built the rollercoaster, and had a loop or a corkscrew without having a drop first, then the carts would only go half around the loop, and then career backward down the lift hill and back in the station, and everyone would be really hacked off afterwards and not buy a balloon. You still got the steak restaurant that looked like the roof of The Flintstone’s car.

So yes, contrary to popular belief, it’s not all roses being chronically depressed. I’ve spent the last day and a half hanging around in my parent’s house in Winchester. What I like about Winchester, is that every time I come back, I know less and less about the place, and know less and less people who actually live here anymore. People from Winchester are too ambitious, which explains why almost everybody I know has upped sticks and moved out, despite knowing full well that as far as prosperity goes, it’s the best place to live in England. I don’t think I’m too ambitious. In fact, I wouldn’t argue the case at all that I have any major ambitions whatsoever. Ambitions tend to be mostly for people who know they’re not going to fail them, and only their own capabilities are going to stop them anyway. It’s like “my ambition is to pass my driving test and then drive across America”, isn’t an ambition that many people can’t do. If I had ambitions, then they’d be to work somewhere I like, live somewhere I like, and to be with someone that I love. But I don’t call them ambitions, because ambitions have a failure rate, and I’m quite sure at some point I’ve had all three simultaneously and lost them, so I’ll call them ‘desires’ because you can lose a desire at any point and pretend it’s just ‘how it is’. I moved out of Winchester for the benefit of one of these desires. If I add that I moved to Cardiff into literally a crack house full of wasters and mentalists, with no job, you can point your finger at which part of the Holy Trinity of desire I fucked up on. But to go back to my original point, every time I come back to Winchester, I have less and less to offer Winchester, and it has less and less to offer back. It’s still the most beautiful place to me in the world; for example, I didn’t get ID-ed in Threshers, even though I had my hood up, and said ‘Thank God you didn’t ask me for ID, because I left it in the house’. AND then talked about how I needed to buy mints because my parents didn’t know I smoked. How many people aged 24 have to do that? I don’t even have to do that! Why did I even say it. But that happened, and there was a farmers market even though it was pissing down rain, and WHSmith still looked appalling, and I saw someone licking the handle of their umbrella as they walked down Parchment Street, and everything was all right. The chances of seeing somebody I recognise on the streets of Winchester is so minimal now that I don’t mind going out and spending hours sitting around, even in the rain. The only thing to worry about, is the internal combustion caused by ever corner providing me with memories of happy innocent times, when drinking alcohol was a rare treat only provided if Tom Cootes half-brother, or Rik Neilson were in the Cathedral Grounds, or that psychopathic bed-hopping sex-obsessed fuckfaces only existed in circles other than mine. I think if both of these illusions that alcoholism and nymphomania were fictional past times hadn’t been completely ruined by talking to more than three people end of my second week at university, everything would have been alright. When I was 16, I used to think that someone I’d spoken to twice, and had asked to go and see Mogwai with me, but she changed her mind to go to the cinema with someone else was the worst fate ever bestowed on humanity. That’s not to say that anything else that I’ve put myself through on a world-wide scale offers any more of a blip, but with an 8-year hindsight, these things really are small town nothings. It’s only when you’ve tasted the world and realised it tastes like Gulliver’s turd that you pray for a few small town nothings to neutralise the acid in your heart. It’s only when you’re a teenager living through a series of small town nothings that you can read The Bell Jar or Prozac Nation and have it speak to you, and then you have to write someone a letter in the back of Sociology class telling them how much The Bell Jar spoke to you even though it didn’t. If you did THAT past the age of 20, it’s like, a 65 year old buying a Mary Kate and Ashley DVD for themselves. (“aww bless him, he’s got the mind of a teenager!”). The only people who took Sociology at my college anyway, were a) people who thought themselves as socially competent figureheads of their respective social circles and thus, figured they knew enough about ‘society’ to ace their A level, and b) shrinking violets who wanted to know in textbook terms exactly why they hated everybody, and also to learn how society ticks so they can underline quotes in Michael Haralambos’ ‘Themes and Perspectives’ and quote them at the bottom of glitter-penned notebooks of Manic Street Preacher lyrics and reading lists. Obviously, I was the latter.

So anyway, Winchester right now is almost certain void of any kind of danger. Danger for me is running into somebody from my past that might ask ‘so what have you been up to since I last met you, and what are you doing now?’ It’s a delicious combination of being a place you know like the back of your hand, and also being a place that you know you aren’t going to meet anyone unpleasant. It’s like a 100,000 populated city-sized version of my bedroom, only with more weeping willows and less need for Febreze. Every time I come here, my life situation is either complete and utter crap and I need to come home to rejuvenate and/or go quietly mad away from the bright lights / big city of Cardiff, or I feel sufficiently at calm with the proceedings, and can afford to take two days out in the confidence everything will be just as cool when I get back. The last time was in August, and that was strictly the latter, this time the former, to a tee. The time before that, a funeral. The time before that; a long few days off work watching bands in successive weeks, with my girlfriend. I’m hoping the next time, which will probably be Christmas, that everything is so dramatically improved that this trip home could be considered a ‘small town nothing’ but we’ll wait and see. So far this ‘rejuvenation’ has done little more than to rattle me even further.

Today I had two relatively long phone calls with people, which I instigated. Given my general lack of motivation of even starting conversations, let alone of the phone when the potential for wasting people’s time is wholeheartedly inherent, this was an achievement. Admittedly, I didn’t end up making either call, but both proved to me at least, that I’m not fully ready to shut everything out just yet, and for that I thank the people involved. One of the reasons it’s not all roses about being chronically depressed is the permanent feeling that you’re wasting people’s time, and no matter how much “you can talk to me anytime” or “you’re not a burden” you hear, I still tend to feel like the same headless chicken I felt all those years ago as a 17 year old, clucking thoughtlessly towards each person after person, mistakenly thinking that outpouring a deluge of psychosensational nonsense would be just what our doctors ordered. All wrong, of course. It’s also trying to distinguish yourself as someone who is in genuine need of talking to someone, rather than absorbing compliments as a sensation of utter self obsession and reiterance of their own self worth. Which is sadly what it looks like, but incredibly, not what it is. It’s the people who open themselves up as a place to let out your woes and your world, that make a difference. And I thank them.