"I had a wife once who divorced me because more in essence than in reality I would never say I loved her. How could I say this without dragging in Hollywood and my next door neighbour and patriotism and the barber's cough and the cat's ass?"
- Charles Bukowski
Telling someone you love them. What is this about? I can’t make up my mind. You know I just sat there reading that hypothetical question aloud in an infuriatingly saccharine voice as I typed it.
A friend of mine, let’s call him Tom*, had the following discussion with his girlfriend. The girlfriend complained that Tom did not declare his love for her enough. Tom wondered aloud if she wouldn’t prefer him only to voice his sentiments when he actually felt them, so as not to devalue them through over-use. The girlfriend said no, she wouldn’t prefer that, and now he tells her he loves her constantly. I’m not saying he doesn’t love her, quite the opposite. It’s just that when you become accustomed to it, ‘I love you’ becomes so easy to say, like opening up to let out a mouthful of water. The words themselves are as easily dried up as water, run from a tap, spilt on the carpet, drunk and passed through the body.
I’m going to use Friends as an example. It’s the first show that jumps to mind, possibly because personally I feel it’s mostly what’s wrong with the world today. I hate that show. Not for what it is, (it’s mildly amusing in places, and you don’t need to work hard to understand it, you always know hwat’s going on) but for what it endorses. Millions upon millions of adolescents copied their emotional behaviour from this show and its kin, hell, not just romantic behaviours but personalities and all. I once knew a girl who was an amalgam of all the characters from Friends: which is not hard in itself because, as I always say to anyone who’ll listen, they’re the same person six times over.
At the end of its last season, the only character who was not either married or in a committed relationship was Joey, who subsequently got his own show where I imagine he is still looking for a heterosexual relationship with a white middle-class woman of roughly his own age. Friends flirted with the unorthodox – lesbian mothers, divorce, temporary unemployment, even, once, a prominent black cast member! – but when the curtain came down, everyone was still white, middle-class, and heterosexual.
I’d love to quote Germaine Greer at this point, all the brilliant things from The Female Eunuch about “The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage”, but there’s too many. All I can recommend is that you read the book yourself. Who knows, someone like Joe might even be around to provide you with a cheap laugh – he was turning over my copy in his hands, and when he saw the picture of Greer inside the jacket, he came out with “Oh, she’s not that bad-looking actually, is she? I was expecting a real beast.” Darren and I pissed ourselves to say the least.
In Friends, the declaration of love was always a huge deal.
The other thing that bothered me was ‘having feelings’. Everyone had feelings at some point, for him, for her, for whoever. I was watching the pilot episode of The L Word with Kate a few weeks ago, and there was a scene in which Art School Confidential told some adolescent punk “you have a lot of feelings.” I don’t know if Kate got why I laughed so much, I think I made an effort to explain. Who has feelings? I’ve never had feelings. You want someone, or you don’t, or you enjoy their company, or you think they’re sexy but annoying, or just repulsive, or they intrigue you and you want to learn them inside out . . . and a whole huge spectrum of grey all around, but feelings . . . feelings I never got.
Because I am a robot, with all the expressiveness of The Pie Maker from Pushing Daisies. I’m capable of liking people though, I mean, yes I dislike 95% of the population, but that’s just until I meet them. Maybe this is just me being a sourpuss. Or maybe it is the manifestation of my belive in science and rejection of almost anything metaphysical. Show me, stick it on a plate with a little flag in like the burgers at Nando’s.
The Many Faces of The Pie Maker.
I need to invent something that means more than ‘I love you’, that can’t get tainted by popular culture. The only way I can think of to do this is to be literal with my thoughts, to reject metaphor in favour of stating everything exactly as it is. Or making examples of everything. But then that drags relationships into the realms of the material – all you can do with emotion is to be literal.
So? In drunken times of affection, instead of slurring ‘I love you’ to my friends, from now on I’ll be the one stammering ‘I enjoy your company even though sometimes you bother me because you’re so melodramatic, but I can overlook this because we have good conversations about books’ or something.
“So . . . Jesus & I . . . go out to dinner . . . and everyone keeps nailing themselves to things . . . kinda trying to impress him . . . ya know . . . like even the waiters and my friends even . . . I was so embarrassed for us all . . .”
- Adam ‘Doseone’ Drucker, Circle
Bristol I will wring you out like a wet rag
Bristol I will break you like a wild stallion[1]
On Germaine Greer: A lot of shit has gone down about her, but I still think she's fucking brilliant. Flawed, yes, but she's human. There's been some controversy. Still, she reminds me of Anton Newcombe - one of those people who, every time they're quoted in the press, make you laugh and wince simultaneously. Still, The Female Eunuch started it all off for me, and for a lot of other people besides. Fuck what she says about Steve Irwin or Liverpudlians (no, wait, that was Boris), that book was sound.
"People talk about Eric Clapton. What has he ever done except throw his baby off a fucking ledge and write a song about it?"
- Anton Newcombe
* Because that’s his name.
[1] from 'Fear And Madness' by Charles Bukowski
Posts
