The company you keep
Onomatoplop!
Picking yourself up and looking around, you notice immediately that the coconut hairs, here in the shade of the letterbox, form thickets around you. Houses always look like that, purifying and punifying and much too big, when you've just been posted into them: thing is to get off the welcome mat, always a dead giveaway. People are standing around, there down the hall. Finding yourself to be much, much smaller than any of them feels like nakedness: but hastily hitching your shame onto your shoulder, for a makeshift parrot, you mingle anyway, all foot of you.
"Sorry, that was my makeshift parrot interrumping. You were saying?"
You had just attempted a joke. It would have gurgled down well enough out there, in the street, among accustomed slops: but a moment ago's cool rebuffeting, now five fathoms deep beneath the rim of a wineglass, reveals you are no longer among slops, which is sort of what you wanted. Isn't it? You who sort-of would not be among slops have a sheepish cardboardness about you, as if yesterday's you was a stand-in for the real one. There's something bracing about not being among slops, something you're unsure you're meant to like. Maybe the street is more your thing. At least it's easier than this standing around, taking timed sips, trying not to be accidentally trodden on, or in. And what exactly is wrong with a joke "that Jay Leno would've cracked" (exit pursued by a sniff)? Note to self: find out who Jay Leno is or was. S/he is obviously someone you ought to be a knowing allusion or two above, pissing down.
Tony, a desert of tony, an Ascot of perfectly ironed ironies. And then you chance upon, holding forth in a dense cloud of smug, well I never, Hadley Freeman, a fellow oxturd. What's she doing here?
"Hi Had. Do you remember the Queen's Lane Cof-"
"Anyone who has been living under a rock for the past 36 hours, of course, had occasion to discuss Trump's genitals, adorably. The world now laughing at Roe vs Wade - breasts, butts, legs etc., shaped like Luigi - needs a reminder from the ostensibly good guys. A tune played by the world's smallest violin - and why not, damn it? - can grab women 'by the pussy'. Only men with penises, as the Margaret Atwood quote goes, have been horrible to women in high school for oh, several millennia. When you're a star, damn it, it's totally fine to enjoy your third-stage gum disease. Daniels knows how to hurt Trump - write a musical about that, O Henry."
"Those cheeseca - "
No good: she sails onward, arms flailing, eyes akimbo, mouth ajabber. You are too statureless to intersect her line of sight, which is doggedly raised toward her personal excelsior, a hovering heavenly host still drunk on yesterday's cutesy cliches, of word as of deed, snowblinded by categories. Pity, you think: at last there goes someone comfortably as unoriginal, as pathetic, as trying hard and never quite getting it right as me - but there's no honour among thieves (they call honour "intimacy" these days, and dig trenches, and build fortifications). You interject wanly: "¿Try a vegetable samo-"
Silence.
Networking, networking all around: people cluster and uncluster like febrile bacteria, working towards what at the time seemed like a conclusion but turns out to be just a fleeting pattern in an endless procession of patterns, a snapshot of temporary alignments (spouses, sandinismos, summers), a split-second semolina. Oh, what a lovely père. I thought maybe - the Dining Room?
"I'm too tired and too autistic for this," you wearily conclude. Can't reach the door handle, but someone's opened it - is pausing on the threshold to snort a cherry - and you slip out. At last, relief! Relief from the miasma of other people's opinions. Back among the slops again: the snotclean, the scrotumdismissing slops, and the nettles, and the unromantic sameness of bustling cheesebugs. At last.
Except that opinions, you find to your chagrin, cling to you, like bad smells, like cigar smoke. The company you keep (the Guardian, e,g.) bites back when you are alone. It's not as if you agreed with any of what Had had had to say - you certainly did not (see appendix) - but just the reacting to it, the aligning of yourself against it, the wasting your time with it, deforms you in ways you cannot see at the time, drags you into the compass points of a map you never wanted to be part of. There's a price to be paid for slumming on Park Avenue. This is why I'm beginning to think success (if you want success: me, I'm twenty years past my succeed-by date) has a lot more to do with roce than the successful let on (or know). Show me a great, a canonical poet or writer or I dunno, comedian who wasn't taught by or friends with or married to another of the same species, and I'll maybe reconsider. You have to rub those shoulders, even if all you see on them at the time is dandruff.
That's why I'm mystical about places, and despair of ever properly describing any of 'em in the time left to me.
Appendix:
1. "Is it right that the world is now laughing at his penis?" I hope not. I hope the world has a more developed sense of humour than that (there's chuckles to be had, right enough, but more at the fancied incredulity of the original beholder than the thing in itself). My suspicion is that, rather than "the world", the ripple of forced and propagandistic laughter is the province of a raucous subset of the lumpenradfeminariat, if even that. Could be wrong, of course.
2. "You want to control women's vaginas, Donald?" That - as far as I can tell - is an odd way of saying "You want to control government spending, Donald?" I suspect he does, and that this was partly what he was elected to do. I don't have a problem with this personally: most countries get by fine without a Title X. Actual vaginas, of course, would be another matter.
3. "a gender that has spent the past, oh, several millennia, explicitly discussing the appearance of women's breasts, butts, legs, etc". Sorry, Had, but genders don't discuss things. People do that. And I think you'll find that people of both genders have spent the past, oh, several millennia, explicitly discussing the appearance of not only all the aforementioned, but pretty much anything and everything else that's visible to the human eye - except, of course, when dangerously within the earshot of censorious prudes, such as you herein make claim to be.
4. "where the sun does not shine": bile reaches for wit, finds only cliche. Suggest examine source of bilious reaction. Suspect secretly aware that #notallmen, #notallwomen and #notallbuildings are actually sensible strictures (the latter applicable to zones of intense seismic activity and poor standards of construction).
5. The Margaret Atwood quote. I crossed Handmaid's Tale off my reading list after learning, in the Guardian, that she thinks penises can be "flexed" - a forgivable error in a discalced Carmelite, but not in a writer. As for the quotation itself, it merely intensifies the aforementioned impression of otherworldly ignorance. For the record, and in defence of quantifiable data:
6. "where we are at now", "totally fine", "is it right?", "crown for you", "accolade", "the world", "so zeitgeisty, me", "how women,.. are treated", "ostensibly good guys", "we", "you", "much has been written", "humiliated", "the married one", "when you're a star", "shame", "we can indulge" - see a thread? This grovelling at the feet of the qu'en dira-t-on, this pitting of imaginary collectives against each other, this deified dinnertable is the sort of thing that sleepwalks girls into anorexia, or worse, into the pages of Vogue. Grow up? Take control of society, by making your own, by deciding for yourself what company you actually want to keep.
Picking yourself up and looking around, you notice immediately that the coconut hairs, here in the shade of the letterbox, form thickets around you. Houses always look like that, purifying and punifying and much too big, when you've just been posted into them: thing is to get off the welcome mat, always a dead giveaway. People are standing around, there down the hall. Finding yourself to be much, much smaller than any of them feels like nakedness: but hastily hitching your shame onto your shoulder, for a makeshift parrot, you mingle anyway, all foot of you.
"Sorry, that was my makeshift parrot interrumping. You were saying?"
You had just attempted a joke. It would have gurgled down well enough out there, in the street, among accustomed slops: but a moment ago's cool rebuffeting, now five fathoms deep beneath the rim of a wineglass, reveals you are no longer among slops, which is sort of what you wanted. Isn't it? You who sort-of would not be among slops have a sheepish cardboardness about you, as if yesterday's you was a stand-in for the real one. There's something bracing about not being among slops, something you're unsure you're meant to like. Maybe the street is more your thing. At least it's easier than this standing around, taking timed sips, trying not to be accidentally trodden on, or in. And what exactly is wrong with a joke "that Jay Leno would've cracked" (exit pursued by a sniff)? Note to self: find out who Jay Leno is or was. S/he is obviously someone you ought to be a knowing allusion or two above, pissing down.
Tony, a desert of tony, an Ascot of perfectly ironed ironies. And then you chance upon, holding forth in a dense cloud of smug, well I never, Hadley Freeman, a fellow oxturd. What's she doing here?
"Hi Had. Do you remember the Queen's Lane Cof-"
"Anyone who has been living under a rock for the past 36 hours, of course, had occasion to discuss Trump's genitals, adorably. The world now laughing at Roe vs Wade - breasts, butts, legs etc., shaped like Luigi - needs a reminder from the ostensibly good guys. A tune played by the world's smallest violin - and why not, damn it? - can grab women 'by the pussy'. Only men with penises, as the Margaret Atwood quote goes, have been horrible to women in high school for oh, several millennia. When you're a star, damn it, it's totally fine to enjoy your third-stage gum disease. Daniels knows how to hurt Trump - write a musical about that, O Henry."
"Those cheeseca - "
No good: she sails onward, arms flailing, eyes akimbo, mouth ajabber. You are too statureless to intersect her line of sight, which is doggedly raised toward her personal excelsior, a hovering heavenly host still drunk on yesterday's cutesy cliches, of word as of deed, snowblinded by categories. Pity, you think: at last there goes someone comfortably as unoriginal, as pathetic, as trying hard and never quite getting it right as me - but there's no honour among thieves (they call honour "intimacy" these days, and dig trenches, and build fortifications). You interject wanly: "¿Try a vegetable samo-"
Silence.
Networking, networking all around: people cluster and uncluster like febrile bacteria, working towards what at the time seemed like a conclusion but turns out to be just a fleeting pattern in an endless procession of patterns, a snapshot of temporary alignments (spouses, sandinismos, summers), a split-second semolina. Oh, what a lovely père. I thought maybe - the Dining Room?
"I'm too tired and too autistic for this," you wearily conclude. Can't reach the door handle, but someone's opened it - is pausing on the threshold to snort a cherry - and you slip out. At last, relief! Relief from the miasma of other people's opinions. Back among the slops again: the snotclean, the scrotumdismissing slops, and the nettles, and the unromantic sameness of bustling cheesebugs. At last.
Except that opinions, you find to your chagrin, cling to you, like bad smells, like cigar smoke. The company you keep (the Guardian, e,g.) bites back when you are alone. It's not as if you agreed with any of what Had had had to say - you certainly did not (see appendix) - but just the reacting to it, the aligning of yourself against it, the wasting your time with it, deforms you in ways you cannot see at the time, drags you into the compass points of a map you never wanted to be part of. There's a price to be paid for slumming on Park Avenue. This is why I'm beginning to think success (if you want success: me, I'm twenty years past my succeed-by date) has a lot more to do with roce than the successful let on (or know). Show me a great, a canonical poet or writer or I dunno, comedian who wasn't taught by or friends with or married to another of the same species, and I'll maybe reconsider. You have to rub those shoulders, even if all you see on them at the time is dandruff.
That's why I'm mystical about places, and despair of ever properly describing any of 'em in the time left to me.
Appendix:
1. "Is it right that the world is now laughing at his penis?" I hope not. I hope the world has a more developed sense of humour than that (there's chuckles to be had, right enough, but more at the fancied incredulity of the original beholder than the thing in itself). My suspicion is that, rather than "the world", the ripple of forced and propagandistic laughter is the province of a raucous subset of the lumpenradfeminariat, if even that. Could be wrong, of course.
2. "You want to control women's vaginas, Donald?" That - as far as I can tell - is an odd way of saying "You want to control government spending, Donald?" I suspect he does, and that this was partly what he was elected to do. I don't have a problem with this personally: most countries get by fine without a Title X. Actual vaginas, of course, would be another matter.
3. "a gender that has spent the past, oh, several millennia, explicitly discussing the appearance of women's breasts, butts, legs, etc". Sorry, Had, but genders don't discuss things. People do that. And I think you'll find that people of both genders have spent the past, oh, several millennia, explicitly discussing the appearance of not only all the aforementioned, but pretty much anything and everything else that's visible to the human eye - except, of course, when dangerously within the earshot of censorious prudes, such as you herein make claim to be.
4. "where the sun does not shine": bile reaches for wit, finds only cliche. Suggest examine source of bilious reaction. Suspect secretly aware that #notallmen, #notallwomen and #notallbuildings are actually sensible strictures (the latter applicable to zones of intense seismic activity and poor standards of construction).
5. The Margaret Atwood quote. I crossed Handmaid's Tale off my reading list after learning, in the Guardian, that she thinks penises can be "flexed" - a forgivable error in a discalced Carmelite, but not in a writer. As for the quotation itself, it merely intensifies the aforementioned impression of otherworldly ignorance. For the record, and in defence of quantifiable data:
6. "where we are at now", "totally fine", "is it right?", "crown for you", "accolade", "the world", "so zeitgeisty, me", "how women,.. are treated", "ostensibly good guys", "we", "you", "much has been written", "humiliated", "the married one", "when you're a star", "shame", "we can indulge" - see a thread? This grovelling at the feet of the qu'en dira-t-on, this pitting of imaginary collectives against each other, this deified dinnertable is the sort of thing that sleepwalks girls into anorexia, or worse, into the pages of Vogue. Grow up? Take control of society, by making your own, by deciding for yourself what company you actually want to keep.
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