About God, Women, and the Tedious Bits in between
How I learned to stop worrying and love being celibate again
I have hitherto refrained from publishing personal rants on Medium (what with discretion being the better part of common sense & all), but now that my Inner Viking has channelled his way through to the surface, I sense that it is perhaps time to bare my hobnailed soul to the 3 or so people who will ever read this blog, and — in so doing — briefly step away from the monotony of writing about my travels, to focus instead on one of the key dilemmas I have repeatedly faced throughout what passes for my Life.
How not to do True Love
The woman I used to love (but whom I went off quite suddenly this morning, whilst I was in the shower), actually once said she envied what she referred to as my “Life”. “It must be lovely”, she said, “Not having to answer to anyone, doing whatever you want, whenever you want”.
Silly tart. What does she know about anything (least of all me?)? I sense that she spends her waking hours being psychotically and viciously indifferent to people she believes like and adore her, and then dreams all night about ever more outrageous ways to belittle and humiliate them. (Or me, as the case may be).
Yesterday was ridiculously tedious, with everything going wrong — obstreperous tenants, incompetent Estate Agents, overbooked car repair workshops, awkward travel schedules to get back to my lonely boat, and now my trusty Peugeot has started coughing and spluttering. (It may die and go to the Great Peugeot Boneyard in the Sky).
And that will be it — “The Last Thing” will be gone. I suppose that something had to go wrong in the end; death, taxes, my boat, estate agents in polyester suits, my laptop — there were just too many unconstrained variables in my life, and something had to give sooner or later.
If you look carefully, women aren’t on that list, but then, women aren’t really Last Things. (Well, I never found one who lasted, anyhow — in my experience, they tend to be more Penultimate Things, really, and they know it: they just keep men coming back for more (or in my case, less).
The Spiritual Dimension of Romance
I suppose that this is also the reason why — Eve and the Virgin Mary aside — women don’t feature all that much in mainstream theology, because they compete head-on with God for attention. We delude ourselves into believing that one day we will meet a woman who truly loves us, and that God loves us all the time anyway, but it’s utter nonsense and totally irrelevant to boot because all the empirical evidence indicates that neither of these mythical entities actually exists.
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What we really want is for some woman to welcome and repay our affection and be glad that it’s offered, and when they say things like “I have attachment issues / I can’t give you what you want / I really don’t want to lose you / but on the other hand I really don’t give a flying fuck how you feel” we reflexively invent God, just so that there is someone pleading away for us to love and worship Him. (That much really ought to be carved in stone, IMHO).
The Incident in the Shower
The only reason I had my Epiphany in The Shower was that this particular evening I was supposed to be going out with God to celebrate his birthday. Or it may have been a woman.
It wasn’t a surprise event or anything daft like that, and I had it all nicely arranged— a long 3-hour drive to get to the absurdly remote little seaside town she calls home (or, more accurately, “дом”), a table booked in her favourite restaurant 30 metres from the seedy hovel in which she claims to live, and all neatly prepped for one of those cosy 2-bottle soirees which inevitably end up either in bed or in tears (and often both). Except that she forgot that I was coming, and, when I WhatsApped her to confirm when & where, she went straight for the jugular. “You are pathetic. You are trying to manipulate me. I warned you at the beginning, I am emotionally unavailable. I really don’t want to lose you, but…”
The Inner Viking emerges
At this point, I suppose I should feel miserable and apathetic, but I cannot seem to work up the enthusiasm. The exhilarating sense of relief at no longer needing to impress the Princess is astounding; after all, the women in my life who are worth impressing are the ones who wouldn’t be impressed even if I accidentally impressed them, and once you can come to terms with this sordid fact, the blinkers fall away and the path to celibate bliss opens up before you like a big openy-uppy thing.
Take away the Y-chromosome, free yourself from the nagging obsessive/compulsive testosterone disorder, and the chains of enslavement miraculously disappear. So, that’s all in the past now! From here on, anyone who needs to be impressed before they will go to bed with me will simply have to deal with the lingering FOMO and forego one of the most emotionally intense yet hypnotically terrifying experiences any woman, goat or (on occasion) inanimate object could ever imagine (even in their most lurid fantasies).
And my plan from here onwards? Once the World finally wakes up and tunes in to the alien distress signals I shall broadcast through the medium of Medium, then the profane income I will one day receive from the Partner Programme (currently flat-lining at $0.84) will make me insanely rich.
And then the first thing I am going to do is go right back out there and impress the pants off another God (for such was ever The Viking Way)!
