Report #345 from The Planet of Sad Lonely Old Men

A friend was trying to set me up with a girl back at home recently. Someone to grow old with, she was thinking presumably, for each of us.

What would I do with a girlfriend, apart from the obvious? Me, the quintessential lonely bachelor, fated for an alcoholic expiration round a flaming rubbish-bin under a bridge somewhere decayed and post-urban, with someone? Ya gotta be joking!

Sure, I occasionally get those maudlin flushes of regret whenever I get in that mood where everyone I see is coupled up.

Pairs of ideal lovers shopping for their Ikea (self-constructed, temporary, half-arsed furniture symbolic of the relationship according to ex-blogger in HK, Hemlock), ordering complex frappuccinos together, pushing their spawn around in perambulators that cost more than any car I have ever owned. Grandma and Grandad sitting silently in the restaurant as all unnecessary words have been spoken. I see laughing school-kids holding hands and though I know there is nothing coming except the serial disappointment of adulthood, I smile for their wicked innocence. I watch ironically mismatched couples departing from Nana Plaza at 2am and wonder who judges me. I kick at dogs fucking on the sidewalk, smash the gnats/flies copulating on the food scraps on my desk.

Everyone is paired up. Love is on the streets. In the stars, futility and self-deception, but shit to all that, I'd be nice to see someone smiling at me in a special way. (Someone like Sookie Stackhouse preferably. If you could read my mind, not get caught up the negatives of the external me, oh Sookie, ever since you were playing piano on the misty New Zealand beaches... OK enough fantasy.)

Everyone has someone to fuck, except me, I sometimes feel. Someone they are itching to get away from, no doubt and at the same time, that they can't bear to be away from in case they start fucking somebody else. But even that sensation of clinging/pushing away, of hatred/possession, of jealousy/forgiveness - the glorious ambiguity that is love... I sort of miss it sometimes, wonder if I am still capable of interesting someone in the correct way, fooling them and myself into a hope it could work for a while, long enough to call it something. The R word. The L word.

I guess it's because the decade is coming to a close, and the noughties has been a girlfriend-free timezone. No-one special in E@L's life for coming up to 10 years. Yes, I had several interesting and complex relationships in the 1990s... about which, more never. And there are people who have been interested in me over the years, one or two probably reading this blog, but I have not had the required reciprocal interest in them, nice people though they may be. And I have never been prepared to have a relationship just so I could fuck someone. Am I Robinson Crusoe on this?

I have had heaps of great sex in C21, mind you. Just check my credit card receipts for the details.

E@L