by Helen Razer
I was edgy, but bad edgy. The words and the message, which was, in this case, myself, just didn’t coincide.
Maddie, who had socially useful places to be, finally allowed me to publish ‘Baffling old woman with reasonable cans seeks more-or-less sober life-form who genuinely dislikes Coldplay.’ Which was as daytime TV as I was ever going to get. She also let me keep the stupid screen name of MidLifeISIS, which I found hilarious.
She wiped my face of sick and replaced this with a little powder. She took a few snaps, filtered and uploaded them and cheered as I hit ‘publish’. She said that she was off to the, I don’t know, Women in Exceptionally Bad Circumstances steering committee, but that she’d call to check on me in a few hours, when I would be preparing for the assignations she felt confident I could make in that time.
‘You’ll be stuffed with penis,’ she said as she sped off in her Honda Civic to sort out gender inequality.
That day, baffling old woman with reasonable cans sought a more-or-less sober life-form who genuinely dislikes Coldplay.
7
Forty-five hours and one dating profile since she left
‘Fuck u, Coldplay is awesome.’
Things really hadn’t started out well.
As it turns out, a declared contempt for Coldplay can be cause for a great deal of rage. ‘Fuck u, Coldplay is awesome’ was typical of the rejoinders to my profile. I knew that the supermarkets had done their work.
If you have not noticed before, you certainly will now: the contemporary mid-range supermarket plays the music of Coldplay, or music much like Coldplay’s, almost constantly. At well-known, middle-market supermarkets, we can hear moderately sad songs of the type at all hours. Discount supermarkets play energetic pop. High-end gourmet supermarkets play jazz or children’s choirs murdering age-inappropriate popular songs at dawdling tempo and terrifying pitch. But the big brand stores elect to play music in this Coldplay key of tolerable desperation. They really do. Listen.
I know from my horrid work that it is consumer research that leads Western retailers to broadcast this refined white misery. Somewhere, a focus group has answered the question ‘What music makes you feel sad enough to want a chocolate but not to actually kill yourself?’ with ‘Coldplay’. Marketing experts have learned that bands like Coldplay, REM and U2 make many of us crave a cure to an undefined pain. We become certain of the remedy but forget the nature of the ill. (Bono is a dick.)
When we hear this stuff in a supermarket, we are inclined to believe that the thing that it makes us crave is available on the shelves. I know that I have purchased napkin rings as the direct result of hearing U2’s ‘With or Without You’. Bono is a dick.
This is a very particular kind of music. It’s a slow, emotional drone that evokes a hint of our everyday pain. But it also fails to describe this pain so adequately that we might actually pause to investigate its source. Coldplay makes pain seem beautiful and manageable. Coldplay means we never stare pain in the face. We experience it briefly, then we are wont to shop our way out of it.
Pain-relief shopping is not always a terrible idea, by the by. If I’d had a little extra money during my break-up, I would have done well to throw it at my pain. I do not consider ‘retail therapy’ a particularly immoral pursuit in a world so impossibly predicated on shite, and, certainly, it can be a remedy for distress, even if it is also the poison. Buy some stuff. It’s no big deal. Sometimes when I am anxious, I stare at online kitchenware stores for hours and bring myself to happiness with napkin rings.
But I was broke, Brynlee-free and temporarily unable to write any profitable sentence. I did not have the means to afford any mollifying tableware, so I wrote copy on the internet for no wages about how much I loathed Coldplay. Coldplay and the devious marketing strategies upon which their treacly whine was slathered.
I thought I was being rather funny. I kept adding to my profile on the theme of Coldplay-hate, and, after a few edits, I had ruined all of Maddie’s good supervision. In the section that asked, ‘What do you dream of?’, I said, ‘Coldplay dying in a freak aromatherapy spa accident.’ This made me laugh, but apparently failed to tickle a man in the 39–45 age range who asked, ‘Whats ur problem with coldplay ugly Dyke??’
(Again, with the forcefully redundant capitalisation.)
I tried to parse this difficult sentence. The proximity of Coldplay to a slur that was both sexist and homophobic and made by a straight man who liked Coldplay suggested either (a) that it was unfeminine not to enjoy this music, or (b) that the band was somehow very butch. Which is clearly untrue. Coldplay is as convincingly masculine as I was effortlessly stunning.
This message was one of many pro-Coldplay assaults whose basis I found difficult to identify and, therefore, fairly fascinating. The passionate love for Coldplay was both unfathomable and unexpected. In an effort to understand it, I kept adding to my profile vignettes about the grisly, alternative therapy-related murders of the band. I left the drummer for dead in a float tank and the bass player brutally finished off in a bee-sting therapy session gone awry. I did it because, of course, I hate Coldplay. Even more than I hate U2, who are so obviously naïve it’s almost endearing—but, shit, Bono is a dick.
In any case, it wasn’t just because I hate Coldplay. I also wanted to see how much one’s taste could affect one’s emotional future.
People, including myself, can be very touchy when it comes to their favourite things. Taste, as Maddie had counselled, is really quite important. The preferences and aversions detailed on these dating profiles meant much more to me, even a person quite aware that taste functioned to reveal nothing nobler about its bearer than social class, than they should.
For example, in performing a ‘female seeking female’ search, I saw a cruelly beautiful brunette of my approximate age. Goodness, she was gorgeous—she looked quite a bit like Ines, the saucy sleepwear designer. Her mildly censored naked profile picture showed the sort of unfeasible infinity figure otherwise seen only in the notebooks of masturbating sci-fi teen cartoonists, very rarely here on earth in three dimensions. Hers was the kind of geometry that could start Lord Byron on a curvilinear tear. Poetry. It was a public service to show it. It should be a summary offence to conceal it. I reconsidered this whole yawning need for cock thing and prepared to message the author of the undulating vision.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only if none of those words gather to form such sentences as: ‘I hate talking about issues, zzz, YOLO!’ Or, ‘Nicolas Cage 4 LYF.’ I like issues and I dislike being forced to think about Nicolas Cage—or, for that matter, the meaning of internet acronyms. Taste would not permit me to message the woman with the infinity figure and the careless abbreviations. Taste was some important bullshit.
Several people had messaged me on the matter of taste, though. Chiefly to tell me ‘You blow’. I was so captivated by how a mildly comic reference to a mediocre band could provoke so much real ire from so many middle-aged people. I mean, honestly, you pussies.
Eventually, I was no longer amused by this Coldplay-related butt-hurt. The joke had become unfunny, even to MidLifeISIS.
Two hours in and I had no prospects. This, as I had been led to suppose, was a long interval for a female internet dater to endure alone. And yes, I know that it was all my fault.
I resolved once more to follow the pointers from Dr Over-55’s study and Maddie’s frank counsel. I would erase my nastiness. I would write measured sentences about myself and my hopes. I would be considerate but frank, needful but self-assured. I would earn this date, and I would appreciate it, based on a plain advertisement of the self.
I revised the stories about Coldplay and their deaths by acupressure massage. I began to replace them with candid and simple accounts of my state and my need for company. I felt sorry that my mean and derisive mood, which had been brewing for two days, or ten years, was now giving others cause for pain. Even if it was dumb pain acquired at supermarkets. Who was I to judge others for their ignorance?
I had recently managed to overlook months of my faithless spouse’s hand-jobs in the shed. Talk about ignorance.
I began to type into the profile field:
It has been almost forty-eight hours three months four weeks since my partner left me with the words ‘I need to grow’ and since then I have had little to do but masturbate weep into matte-finish floorboards think.
And I think that what I want is to move from the floor solitude to genuine and accommodating interest in my fellows.
Also, I would really like to get banged.
To this end, I have decided to date, and to do this with an attitude of minimum expectation and of maximum respect.
Please bang me.
If you are neither biologically old enough to be my parent nor young enough to be my issue, I cordially invite all comers to my muff a casual assignation.
I am ready to embrace all sorts of people. However. I should say that I have, ahem, an ‘issue’ with addiction. Particularly alcoholism. I can’t be around it. And I’ve an issue with those to whom it has not yet occurred that the material conditions of existence determine, in large part, the shape of any person’s life.
Yes, I know. I am looking for a moderate drinker from the material left.
Good luck with that unicorn, MidLifeISIS.
Anyhow. If you are a racist, an essentialist, or have ever uttered the sentence, ‘You know, that David Icke really makes a lot of sense’, please do not respond.
And, please do not respond if you are looking for a wife. I do not believe I can cohabit again. I do not think I could live with the fear that someone so close to me could hate me so much. Also, I don’t want to reproduce; and I’m 43 41 so my eggs are probably powdered, anyhow.
I don’t want to consume you whole. But I would like to to get banged you to buy me a decent dinner as I am fucking broke having recently quit my job see where things lead.
Of course, you should know before accepting my invitation that I am really—despite a genuine desire to be better—quite a tit. And I’m not just saying that as a sort of coy double-bluff that will have you refusing with a ‘No, no! You are clearly lovely.’ I’m not. I’m awful. And if we are to have any hope of a second date, it’s probably pretty important that you are a bit awful, too.
This is who I am. I am a sometimes needy, often overweening, wildly affectionate harridan. I can’t hold my tongue, but I will keep your confidence. I can’t suspend judgement, but I can excuse your sin. I often think that I am right, but I will be thrilled when you can prove me wrong. I am full of love. I am full of revulsion. I am leaking with compassion. I am the world’s worst snob.
Oh, and I can’t eat barbecue chicken in company.
Anyhow. If you’re up for a meeting in flattering light, as I am 43 42 41, then do be in touch.
Before I had published these changes, I noticed a few more message alerts. The subjects indicated more of the ‘Fuck u Coldplay’ type. But then I saw one titled ‘Workers to Power! Death to Coldplay’ and this amused and buoyed me greatly.
Without pausing to publish the extended mix of my cri de cœur, I clicked on to the note. It was from Anticathexis, a 41-year-old man of athletic build seeking women less than ten kilometres from MidLifeISIS, a woman of indeterminate age looking for cock and in possession of a newly slender silhouette.
Anticathexis: Hello, MidLifeISIS. While it is normally true that I find that the declaration of cultural likes and dislikes has no work other than to filter social class, I also hate Coldplay. I hate Coldplay so much that I am powerless not to admire your revulsion. I am also powerless not to admire your photograph which, to be very clear, I do not hate but rather fancy. Who, after all, can say they do not appreciate the thought of a cantankerous blonde preaching reasonable hate from her threadbare—was it blue?—sleep attire? Perhaps if you are not moved to Coldplay-level disgust by my own series of bashfully artistic photographs, we can meet and plot to assassinate Chris Martin? I suggest that we poison his urine health tonic and/or feed him some lunch rich in gluten. In solidarity, Anticathexis, more plainly known as John. I would include a smiling emoticon but suspect you’d disapprove.
I read this glory seven times just to be certain it was real and not the product of secret collaboration between my ego and my id.
8
Forty-six hours and one single moment of hope since she left
The novice online dater is likely to face many obstacles in her attempts to secure an actual offline date. It may be that chief among these is the impediment of herself.
As soon as the conversation with Anticathexis had started, I did all that I could to forestall its end. I just wanted to write to him forever. Such a blithe, left-wing and mutually congratulatory exchange as I anticipated we’d have, could never be bettered, I felt, by any physical meeting. All I wanted was the pleasure of this preamble and none of the pain of interrupting it with an actual date.
MidLifeISIS: Good afternoon, John, and warm thanks for the invitation to view your gallery of moody self-portraits. These, despite their debt to the miserablist work of Dorothea Lange, seem to reveal a fanciable man. That this miserable but fanciable man has selected a Freudian term as his screen name (I promise, I didn’t need to Google it! Okay, I did, but not much) and answered the profile question of ‘What are you usually doing on a Friday night?’ with ‘Hating self’, ‘Attending a live reading of Ulysses’ or ‘Huffing paint down the car park with me bruvs’ only amplifies my interest. I am currently a great fan of bathos and I have long been very interested in good-looking men who despise themselves a bit. It always saves me the trouble. My thanks again for your note. Helen. Semi-colon with parenthesis used to suggest the wink of future familiarity.
I waited somewhere between an hour and seventeen years for a response.
Anticathexis: Helen. I also send gratitude that is as warm as this very warm day. A day so warm, I am currently driving to the beach to escape it. J. Slightly crazy emoticon represented by a colon followed by a lower-case ‘p’.
After such a reasonable rush of words and our shared declaration of probable desire, this last short and busy and late message was one I found difficult to take. Then again, I found food, the need to urinate and breathing hard to take, so my sensitivity threshold may have been a little lower than usual.
I am driving to the beach. Well, la-di-da, ‘John’. Did he mean that I should not contact him again soon? Was the advice of his excursion meant to convey unconcern and/or a full schedule, and outdoorsy ways? And how in blazes could he choose an afternoon of sun over online badinage with me? I am very fucking special.
I drafted some replies about my revulsion for the beach and for the men who preferred an entire ocean to feminine harbour, but they all reeked of self-importance and hurt. As I knew that I had effectively managed to reek of nothing but self-importance and hurt for about fifty hours (probably for many thousands of hours before these), I deleted my draft responses. After ten minutes or so, I sent:
Enjoy all of nature’s remaining charm and the best of our city’s hypodermic needles.
Five minutes. He did not reply. Fifteen minutes. His presence was registered as ‘online’, but he did not reply.
I pictured this stranger, whom I had so quickly come to worship and resent, at the beach. This was fairly trying, as all I really had to work with was a few low-resolution photographs, and the knowledge that he was qualified to the postgraduate level and physically ‘athletic’.
Public Service Announcement: ‘Athletic’, I have found, is an online-dating category applied to the bodies of men that can mean anything. From critically manorexic to quite chubby, ‘athletic’ may represent any type of adult male body, so long as it once performed or still performs or, perhaps, sometimes just views some kind of sport. Possibly including darts.
Look. I know the guy was probably driving and unable to pick up his phone. I also know that there are people who genuinely love the beach and, somehow, find it useful on hot days. Still. Fuck him. Fuck him
in his holes. How could he do this to me, who is special? And I became, again, quite potty.
I pottily imagined John’s eyes falling upon other women at the beach, possibly from the top of a Freud Penguin Classic. What a wanker. He was reading Civilisation and Its Discontents. His superego was drawn to the long, olive limbs of Arty Sandra, which were set against the soft blue Tasman Sea. Therein, Stellan and Junyper were cavorting like immune-compromised flathead and, between their fits of salt allergy, she was tending to their skin with all-natural, all-useless sunscreen.
Such a man, one who photographs himself in dramatic, depression-era light that reveals so little about his actual appearance and everything about his need to be Taken Seriously, is just the sort who would love an artsy mother. Fuck this brief messenger. Fuck you, John. I hope this mild afternoon of genital misconduct with Arty Sandra brings you an embarrassing virus. I hope that you will never know the feel of a vagina like mine, unravished by reusable moon cups and two home births in a spa bath, John.
I know, John, that when you give Sandra her next and most geriatric pregnancy, you will confront immediate regret and fall despondently in love with her midwife. You will move from one woman to another, as you always do. You change the scenery, John. But you never change the script.
Your life will now be lived in a nightmare of complementary medicine and every breath you take will be contorted by rose geranium oil and your complicity with ignorance. Life with Sandra was fetid enough, but now you know, John, just how bad it can really smell. Arachnia uses no deodorant. This doula shuns soap as the evil work of Big Pharma. She tells you each day that there are things They Don’t Want You To Know.
Your anti-civilisation life has become a daguerreotype nightmare of conspiracy theory and Paleo eating, John! She doesn’t swallow because she says she’s semen intolerant. I swallow, John. Well, I have not been previously tested on the matter, but I imagine that I might. Nonetheless, Arachnia has never swallowed nor shaved her legs and, for all your declared feminist principles, you know you want a woman who bothers to observe such conventions. A woman, like me, who swallows. Probably. A woman who removes the hair from her legs. Even if only to show that she cares to receive you. As I did once. But do no longer, John. John, I fucking hate you.