I’d say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen.
I don’t do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.
Laura is wearing an expression I have come to know well in recent months, a look that denotes both infinite patience and hopeless frustration.
Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had to buy vegetarian cookery books as the first small step on the road to getting inside someone’s knickers?
We have the Durex conversation
“She said that your little Ian outbursts showed her how … sour was the word she used … how sour you’ve become. She said that she loved you for your enthusiasm and your warmth, and it was all draining away. You stopped making her laugh and you started depressing the hell out of her. And now you’re scaring her as well. She could call the police, you know, if she wanted.”
I’ve spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any? Has it fuck.
The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t (they didn’t split up with Charlie and I did); as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists.
It’s like you can never do the right thing by someone if you’ve stopped sleeping with them. You can’t see a way back, or through, or round, however hard you try.
I have thought about the stuff I want played at my funeral, although I could never list it to anyone, because they’d die laughing. ‘One Love’ by Bob Marley; ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ by Jimmy Cliff; ‘Angel’ by Aretha Franklin.
Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
We let the ’s’ hang in the air
“Do you know that expression, ‘Time on his hands and himself on his mind’? That’s you.”
If I can get her to concede that there is a chance we’ll patch things up, that makes things easier for me: if I don’t have to go around feeling hurt, and powerless, and miserable, I can cope without her. In other words, I’m unhappy because she doesn’t want me; if I can convince myself that she does want me a bit, then I’ll be OK again, because then I won’t want her, and I can get on with looking for someone else.