The Latest Excuse.

I was going to make a stream of consciousness post late last night, but it all became so jumbled in my head that I think I would have typed the words backwards. So I didn’t bother. I watched the first half of a Japanese horror film instead.

They make very good horror films, the Japanese. It’s a universally accepted fact even by the people in Hollywood who pay homage to them by producing substandard remakes, thereby demonstrating the superior quality of the original. I suppose that’s one example of life working out right.

But at the moment I’m too full of troublesome cars, troublesome plumbing, troublesome weather, the ghostly allure of a woman who isn’t dead, the anticipation of an unwelcome deed which has to be done, and the discomfort of having a living space which prevents me from being who I am… But mostly, I think, I’m becoming ever more acutely aware of that black hole, the one I’ve spoken about which should have something in it but I don’t know what. It’s getting bigger.

So should I just mention, in passing, the two women who came into my house recently (for perfectly respectable reasons, you understand)? I heard one of them say quietly to the other: ‘Isn’t it clean?’

I assume it was an example of gender stereotyping. Men who live on their own are supposed to be slobs incapable of noticing that they’re living in squalor. Their rooms are expected to have cobwebbed corners, littered floors, shelves mired in greasy dust, and sundry surfaces kept from their intended purpose by the incongruous presence of ill-matched receptacles blighted by the festering remains of mostly-eaten ready meals. And their bathrooms are known to be places which no woman with feminine sensibilities could bring herself to enter even in an emergency. Mine isn’t, even though I’m the only one who ever enters it.

I think this must be another failure of mine: dishonouring my gender. But I do write some quite long sentences.