» My Biggest Disappointment

Humanity.
I realise that's a bit of a big subject to be trying to cover, but I'm going to give it a crack anyway. I've just spent last night in the pub with a bunch of people younger than me, and their enthusiasm was a depressing foil for my own miserable cynicism. I've just posted this to my ever-so-typical 'blog' thing, but I'm going to rewrite it here for you lovely people, as it seems very appropriate. That and it's quarter past 7 in the morning, I'm now stone cold sober and I still can't sleep.

I hate people younger than me. They have absolutely no idea how to interact in a social setting. Or, rather, they do, and they do it far too fucking well, which is the crux of the issue. I was happy spending a quiet evening in the pub yesterday watching the football, only for one of my regular drinking companions to bring along his 'mate from work', a curious entity who is almost guaranteed to be some sort of cunt. This 'mate from work' swiftly found his 'mates from college' and proceeded to get them all drinking with us as some sort of scheme to him chatting one of them up. He worked his short-arsed effeminate charm and copped off with her while I missed most of the football and the closest I got to anything all evening was a very pretty woman telling me I have a Jewish nose, which I'm not sure is either a back-handed compliment or a precursor to genocide.

Then someone was sick on a table and it was all over.

It may have dawned on people who regularly interact with me that I don't like people very much. Drinking and football, yes, but people tend to rile me up a bit. I wouldn't disagree with that assumption, but I have to admit that I reserve a special, gilt-edged place of carefully-selected loathing for this precocious little shit and the sheer joy in the world view that is "People around the world are getting killed. We should end the violence and strive for world peace".

Here's the thing: There won't ever be world peace, because people enjoy being shits to each other. Like it or not, there will always, always be some cunt wanting to bomb some other cunt for some stupid cunty reason. It has been going on since the first time one primordial hunter-gatherer whacked another primordial hunter-gatherer around the head with a bone for stealing his fire, and so it has progressed down the ages through rocks, spears, crossbows, trebuchets, flintlocks, muskets, cannons, machine guns, howitzers, tanks and tactical smart bombs. Deep down, on the same prehistoric level that tells us who to fuck and when to shit, there is something that loathes all other human life, because, well, they might steal our mate, or our food source, or might run faster than us next time the sabre-toothed tiger popped in for another round of toast and spleen. When resources are plentiful we can mostly behave ourselves, but we still fight over religion, we fight over territory, and we'll even fight wars over football matches if we really run short of things to have a scrap about. When resources aren't, like with oil at the moment, we fight over every last drop until it all runs out, and then we'll probably fight over who wasted the most.

See, this is the reason humans are the dominant species and not guinea pigs - guinea pigs are happy to live in the jungle making little burrows with their tiny front paws and eating flowers with their giant heads, and they squeak and they jump and they're happy little bundles of fluff and wonder, and then a snake eats them. We're ugly sinewy polluting little shits, but snakes don't eat us, because we've got knives, and we'd kill the fuckers. Then we'd go back to killing each other, probably now using the snake as some sort of makeshift flail to beat back the enemy until he goes right ahead and invents the Glock semi-automatic and shoots us in the tits. I'm not saying it's good, I'm just saying that it Never. Fucking. Ends. The only way you could stop war, stop shootings, stop stabbings, etc is if you took everyone's arms off at the shoulder, and even then there'd only be a lull in the fighting long enough for one side to work out how to fire a machine gun with your tongue or beat a man to death with your eyebrows.

This goes all the way from continent fighting continent, right the way down to two blokes having a punch-up in a pub. It will go right up to planet fighting planet if we ever find anyone out there ready to have a barney with us. It's just in our nature. It's what we're good at. Some precocious little cock organizing a few thousand people on YouTube to declare that world peace might just be a good idea means absolutely shit-all, because everybody wants world peace on their own fucking terms. There are people out there who will only accept world peace when we've all converted to their particular brand of Islam, there are people out there who will only accept world peace if we all just stop eating meat, there are people out there that will only accept world peace when we're all fundamentalist Mormons living fifteen to a room in Salt Lake City, and there are people out there that just won't accept world peace at all. As great an idea as it is in theory, the first country that lays down it's arms in a declaration of world peace will promptly be invaded by every other country on the planet, will probably get it's population killed for being so stupid, and will deserve it for being the first country to ever be conquered by Vanuatu. It might be a nice concept, but like many nice concepts, it is one that is ultimately, forever, doomed to fail.

Admittedly the boy is 16, so he probably doesn't realise this. Also, all my concerns at the fact that when I was 16 all I could think about was where I could sneak off to have my next wank rather than trying to organize world peace can be left for another post. At 16, you really don't have the mental faculties to rationalise the idea that the only reason we're not all still cavemen clutching rocks and leading charges at the next tribe over is because we've made the tribes bigger and now call them countries, or religions, or football teams, and have delegated the charging and the killing to what we now like to call 'armies'. At that age, world peace still seems like an attainable in-our-lifetime goal.

In many ways, I'm jealous. In many other ways, this entire post is about that jealousy. Jealousy of the teenager in the pub, for whom everything is attainable and nothing is impossible. For whom life is but a constant roundabout of the proverbial wine, women and song, where the sun is always shining and there is no sign of the great yawning chasm that is the daily grind, the Black Dog that can and will slowly consume us all. Jealousy, too, of Trevor Dougherty, the boy from the Youtube story, for whom the same thing applies on a much larger scale. For whom the impossible dream of world peace can be attained if enough people can just see that we don't need to kill each other.

For whom the sad but inescapable truth hasn't yet dawned: We don't need to, we just seem to really fucking like to.

We're all bastards.
(Mon 30th Jun 2008, 7:15, More)

» Faking it

I faked a happy relationship.
CAUTION: NOT-VERY-FUNNY CLOUD OF MELANCHOLY AHEAD.

Those who are familiar with my QOTW answers will know that I am disastrous at relationships. It's not that I can't get into them, it's the fact that they always seem to fall apart in hugely spectacular ways; from the woman who got her calendar muddled up and had another bloke turn up for her while I was still staying with her to 'open-minded' girl with whom I ended it after she suggested she would quite like to fuck me up the arse with a strap-on, all my relationships tend to fuck up in quite extraordinary fashion.

However, there is one that completely dwarfs all the others. One that fell apart so slowly and agonizingly that it almost dragged me down for good, and through it all, I faked to everyone - friends, family, the lot - that everything was completely OK.

The story is thus. It began, tragically, with my girlfriend of the time getting pregnant. It was unplanned, the pill hadn't worked, and we were teenagers and bricking it. My parents would have thrown me out and her father would have probably killed her and then me, and we didn't even know how to tell anyone about it let alone consider raising a child. As is the usual thing in these situations, an abortion was decided on. We lied to ourselves that it would be easy "in, out, problem solved, right?". It's never that simple, and it was the start of eight months of tears, blame and recriminations that came so very close to taking two people to the very end.

First, there was the lies to the families that we were "just going away for a few days for a holiday", when really we spent the entire time drinking ourselves into stupor and crying. Late nights of screaming and her calling me a murderer for letting her go through with it, even though I was inescapably 300 miles away at the time, and would have given anything to be there with her. Over the course of the next eight months, she veered wildly between taking photographs of herself wearing her aunt's engagement ring and telling all our friends I'd proposed to being taken to hospital after stabbing herself in the stomach in a bid to end it all, all under the cover of her father's work meaning he was away for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, I tore myself between desperately trying to keep her from hurting herself, trying to get her to get help and trying to drown my own guilt in a drinking problem which had become so serious it would eventually grow to cause me to fail my degree. Still we kept up the pretence of being a happy couple to everyone else, even though the facade must have been beginning to slip.

By the end, we had become a terrible shadow of what we were at the beginning. We had had a year of wonderful teenage romance, where the sun always shines and the days go on forever, but now I was in a tiny one-room flat, drinking from the moment I woke up until the moment I passed out again, and spending my waking hours desperately trying to 'save' a girl who by now had now become anorexic and was swinging violently between drinking and suicide, and still the only people who knew about any of this were us and her doctor - If they ever informed her dad then he didn't care, but I don't think they did.

She was cheating on me and I had long since stopped finding her physically attractive, but we would get together and either have sex or simply lay on the bed crying and wishing the whole sorry mess away. She went away for a few days to Slough and cheated on me again, and I found myself in my flat, having not eaten in days, drinking a bottle of whisky and trying to cut her name into my arm with a razor blade I'd stomped on specifically for the purpose.

Something - probably common sense, or survival instinct - grabbed me and, right then, I stopped pretending. I picked up the phone and spilled my guts out. I told my mother everything - the abortion, the drinking, everything. I wanted out, out of that place, out of that situation, out of that city, even. Within a month I was gone. I had failed my degree and was back living with my mother as I was a complete emotional wreck, but I was out. Just over 18 months later, with lots of counselling, some understanding and some great friends, I'm now the man you see before you. As far as I've heard through a few mutual friends, she's happy as well now, shacked up with a new bloke and having a kid by him, not making the same mistake twice. Some people are just mutually destructive together, and I hold no grudges and couldn't be more happy for her. I'm glad she made it out too.

The moral of this story is, if you are in trouble, don't fake like you aren't. Your friends, your family, your co-workers, all of them want to help you, and no good can come from not letting them. I very nearly became a victim of thinking I could fix everything by myself, and fuck me, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

If you need help, for fuck's sake, tell someone.

Oh, and if you're reading this, honey, I'm so happy for you. I hope you've got all you ever wanted.
(Tue 15th Jul 2008, 5:55, More)

» That's when I knew it was over...

Where do I find these people? (Part Deux)
Local girl this time, gothic-model type, very very sexy, all the fun of the fair. Two minor problems are apparent, though, 1) she's got scars all over her arms from self-harming 2) she's a bloody junkie. Fun and games still ensue. Now, over the next few months, here is what occurs:

- I discover that far from being over her self-harming problem, she has a blood/pain/demeanance fetish. She does this stuff for FUN.
- Is one discovered self-harm away from being sectioned as she's a danger to herself, and her schizophrenic mother is in no position to care for her.
- Her drug problem is only getting worse and;
- Her sexual fantasies involved barbed wire, psuedo-rape and enough other nastiness to make a hardcore BDSM'er blush.

However, I didn't quite know it was over until she ran back off with a chav, got engaged, and claims her life is horrible but refuses to do anything about it. She's still going to marry the cunt, despite the fact im constantly bombarded with txts saying she misses me and how her life is awful. That's when I'll know it's over.

Though the time in mid-particularly intimate session she pulled out a pair of scissors and slashed her own arm in an attempt to turn me on may have been a clue, too.

Bloody chavs.
(Fri 22nd Jul 2005, 7:40, More)

» Karma

Cheating, Cars and Paedophiles, Part 2
This story is more recent and relates to the 18-month relationship I got out of just over a year ago. One half of it, with her being a modded-car obsessed chav who I have no idea why I was involved with in the first place, was her cheating on me with some bloke she knew who had invested £65,000 in a 'drift car' at the height of the 'Tokyo Drift' craze and would regularly 'take her for spins' in it to get her excited. One night when he was showing off, without her in it, he wrapped the thing around a lamp post, forgetting that when you try to steer a car modded for drifting, it carries on in pretty much the same direction it was previously travelling, only sideways. He was, sadly, completely unharmed, but the car was a complete write off, and, as a result of not exactly being road legal, was completely uninsured. £65,000 down the drain, massive debts to pay off on it, and not nearly as cool and sexy without his exotic car.

I don't know why I took her back after that, being someone who can't be arsed with cars or bothering to stick bits of fiberglass to one so I can pretend I'm doing the Paris to Dakar rally on the way to the shops, but I did, but it's worth it for the second part of the story. When she did exactly the same thing again.

This time she left me for a bloke who had a reputation for shagging around all the impressionable women who were impressed by his Subaru somethingorother, so off she went to meet him, jumped on his cock the minute she got out of his car, and instantly fell head over heels in love with him, while he instantly told her to piss off and moved on to his next conquest. Cue her going through exactly what I went through when she left me initially, and me laughing my absolute arse off.

Now she's dropped out of her course, has no job, and lives on a council estate somewhere with a bloke in his mid-30s, who doesn't even have a precious car, that uses her as a free live-in babysitter for his kids by another woman, and every time she gets drunk (which is often), I get a text or an email from her asking what I'm up to and telling me how shit her life is. I don't reply, because it'd be unfair to kick her while she's down. Or would it?
(Wed 27th Feb 2008, 22:19, More)

» Stalked

Scary Scary Kent Lady
As this QOTW is rapidly turning into a psycho ex's competition, I reckon I ought to wade in with my own tale of love-turned-to-fucking-batshit-mentalism. Twas the spring of '05, I think, and Melissa (because that is a close enough approximation of her name) was 16 and I was just a month short of the same, we used to frequent the same forum, I didn't talk to her that often but when we did we got on pretty well, she dated some other guy on the board who I was pretty good mates with and got to know her better through him, all was well and I didn't really have any interest in her 'that way'. Everything was going quite swimmingly in Shegetz's life.

Then, one day, she pops up on my MSN crying and weeping that my mate has dumped her and he's such an evil bastard and how could anyone do this to her and life was so terrible for her and I'm such a good listener and she's always liked me and oh look what happened we're in some sort of internet relationship. Whoops. A couple of weeks later my mate comes back on the boards - fuck knows where he'd gone, I hadn't seen him on or offline for the previous fortnight, but I digress - and I give him a proper bollocking for being such a twat to Melissa, and he promptly gives me one back for nicking his girlfriend, as he never dumped her at all and as far as he knew everything was going swimmingly between them. Alarm bells started to ring, but were drowned out by the possibility of some real actual fanny, so I go ahead and book the train tickets down to Kent anyway, but the earliest I can get away - school commitments, etc - is in a month's time. Oh well.

In the intervening month, I get the sob story. Apparently a member of her family molested her when she was a little girl and her dad and brother used to repeatedly beat the shit out of her until her mum threw them out. OK, that's pretty messed up, says I. She also says that her best mate was run over by a drunk driver, who she then stabbed, and was thus placed under house arrest, amongst other slightly outlandish stories, all of which I accepted, blinded to her nutterage by the sacred glowing fanny looming on my mind's horizon.

Fast forward to getting down there, we meet up, we hold hands everywhere, take walks in the park, and apart from her having a blazing row with one of her friends for 'trying to chat me up' (she wasn't - alarm bells VERY FUCKING LOUD now), everything's wonderful. Young Shegetz gets his first taste of fanny and decides he's completely in love. She evidently feels the same way, as she begs and pleads with Young Shegetz to stay for another week, over 16th birthday. What better way to celebrate one of the milestones to proper manhood than with your new-found love, thinks I?

A lot of ways, as it turns out.

Turns out, in case she didn't like Young Shegetz as much as she does, Melissa has arranged for another man from a different forum on which she is a regular to meet her the week after Young Shegetz goes home. Yes, readers, the same week she has just begged Young Shegetz to stay for. Did I mention she wasn't particularly bright? Anyway, she panics, and tries to explain away that this man is her mother's 'friend', not hers, despite not knowing her mother's name or phone number - he texted Melissa to announce his arrival - and spending all his time talking to Melissa and being surprisingly ignorant of his supposed girlfriend, Melissa's mother. Who resembled a walrus and was about 30 years older than this bloke. Young Shegetz had it sussed out, and contained himself well enough not to punch the geeky little cunthorse in his face - it wasn't his fault she was a slag, after all.

Huge row, recriminations, Young Shegetz takes to sleeping on the sofa, other bloke - who for the first night at least had the decency to take the other sofa - gives in after about five seconds of the second day and takes to Melissa's room. Sexy sexy time for them yay. Shegetz gets a ticket home and fucks off back to the Smog with his 16th birthday in tatters.

That, dear readers, was only the start of it.

As any big, tough, manly man would do in this situation, I spent a good ten days or so crying into my Hooch (I was 16 remember) and generally avoiding all human contact because I could not be with my gaping-fannied love. After a while, I decided that was enough self pity, and it was time to get on with my life by... going back on the internet. I was wild, me. Anyway, back I go, to find everyone I knew shouting at me for being such a bastard, telling me I tried to force myself on her and beat her up, which is apparently what she's been telling everyone - not just my mutual friends, she's searched my nicknames on Google and told everyone on every forum I knew that I was some sort of sadistic rapist, as well as getting into my MSN account and telling all my real-life friends the same thing. What followed was two years of every time I talked to anyone new on any of the forums she knew I went on, particuarly the one where I met her, her telling them that I was a sadistic rapist freak, her sending me letters to my home address telling me that she was going to get her new boyfriend to come and 'do me over' (he was a skinny wannabe Goth with a drape coat and a dangly earring, I'm a 6' 3" metalhead who used to play rugby for his school, and not a very happy one - I was looking forward to a bit of violence and he never turned up. Shame).

She repeatedly added me on MSN under differently named accounts, and quite openly stalked me across the internet for nigh on two years. My mate Paul, who I'd known since school, got it as well, with her always adding him under different aliases and asking about me, what I was up to, if I was with anyone, etc. Nobody would believe a word of it as they all believed the sun shone out of her arse - amazing the head start two weeks of bitching with no response can get you - and the only reason I ever got a shred of my reputation back was when she dated some other bloke from the same place and accused him of raping her and beating her up as well. Nobody's that unlucky.

The amusing ending to this story was that, after the end of my last relationship, which went tits up for an entirely different reason, I ventured back to all my old haunts under a different name, not wishing to start the whole cycle up again. She tried chatting me up again, not knowing who I was, and I had the great pleasure of telling her to fuck off and stop being such a fucking nutter.

Anyone else dated this loony? I think she's been raped and beaten by about half the internet now. Someone I know once made a list of all the people from that one forum that she's slept with, and the total came out at something like 13. I like to think that all this time she's been looking for someone to match up to my length, but I doubt it - she told everyone it was 3".

Happy endings and all that.
(Thu 31st Jan 2008, 23:52, More)