Posts tagged: comedy
I’m not exclusively hetero or homo. I call myself bi, but I wouldn’t really. I hate the word, for a start. “Oh, I’m bi.” Or is it “Oh, I’m Bi”? Does it get itself a capital letter? Is it a proper noun, does it even need a proper noun? Do I want it to have a proper noun? I just hate it, all the implications it puts on you. Like the assumption you’re just greedy. People always say it and I know it’s a joke, but it pisses me off because jokes like that are so widespread they set the tone for how people perceive you. And surely by saying I’m greedy, meaning I have “intense or selfish desire for something”, means you want it too, but you can’t have it? I’ve tried pointing this out to my straight friends, it usually shuts them up.
I guess I normally would just go for a girl, but occasionally you see that kind of cute guy and I just can’t help myself. I’m much more interested. It’s illicit, forbidden fruit. Some boys are just really fuckable, I guess.
A lot of people say they don’t like feminine guys, they want the masculine hetero types. Normal guys. But I like the feminine types. The flaming homos, the queens, the Lady Gaga fans.
Another thing thing I hate is the assumption that you can’t be into both men and women, you’ve always got to be more into one. Girls always want you to be a gay best friend, guys actually seem to care a hell of a lot less. I never say bisexual, just bi. I have this fear that if I say the word bisexual, people will try and pigeon-hole my preference from the extent to which I lisp on “sexual”.
You can never really tell a girl you’re hitting on. They find it massively off-putting. It seems to have the same effect as “let’s just be friends”. I was watching a TV show at my friend’s house the other day – one of those model reality TV shows, like “London’s Next Top Anorexic Slut” or something. These two girls were talking about how one of them had hooked up with this guy finally that she really liked. It all seemed like normal, boring semi-scripted reality TV conversation until the other one said “I would never want to hook up with a bisexual guy, I’d always just have this visualisation of them sucking cock.” What a wonderfully enlightened twenty first century attitude you have there sweetheart!
That’s the shit I put up with if I tell a girl about my variety in sexual preference. It’s beginning to grind on me. The last two girls I was with, I could never tell them about it even though the conversation topic literally came up. I distinctly remember them describing bisexual guys as “weird” or some other adjective with negative connotations. So I never said anything.
Imagine that, not being able to open and honest with someone. No wonder neither of those worked out.
And if I don’t tell people, they never work it out. There’s no obvious sign hanging around my neck singling out my sexuality. I’m glad girls don’t notice, otherwise it’d put them off. And guys never realise, ergo I never get hit on. That’s my fault as well though If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from The Game, it takes two to tango and you’ve got to lead.
The Game has changed my life. It really has revolutionised the way I hit on girls, and the success I have with them. At the very basic level, it’s made me so much more sociable in just a few months.
The sociability is such that I was at this party tonight, I started a conversation with two random strangers, a guy and a girl. The girl was pretty, pretty. Eye-liner, fine features and good dress sense. You could tell she did art, but she wasn’t a complete art type, which was a shame. I like the crazy ones. The guy was skinny, cute and laughed easily. It seems silly to point out he was gay, no one uses the word cute to describe heterosexual men.
I was more interested in the girl. I’d been looking for a chance to try and talk to her properly since I’d borrowed some smoking paraphernalia off her earlier – I’d noticed how striking her eyes were over the heavy marijuana smoke. I hadn’t been able to start a conversation in the garden, this other guy was just dominating the whole scene, and the girl and her friends were all tucked away in a corner. A party full of guys and none of them are talking to the three cute girls in the corner on their own? Maybe there are more gay guys out there than I realise.
I’d been too constrained by shyness and awkward friends clamouring for my attention to really open that set. Too nervous too, there was a lot of people there and I didn’t want to be shot down in front of twenty odd acquaintances and friends. In a way, being yourself around a group of people you know is harder because there’s so many expectations and to a certain extent you care what they think. I need to stop giving a fuck what my friends think.
I was sitting outside, the thick smell of weed still hanging over the garden from the numerous joints passing around, locked in conversation with a soft spoken South African. We barely took a second look at a gargantuan twelve inch bundle of hashish being delicately passed around. He was telling me all about the beaches of Durban in a voice so low it would’ve been too quiet for a whisper. Something told me I needed to get away from this static drug-addled monotony and find somewhere else to go. I walk through the house, looking for a good conversation with someone I don’t know at all. I pass into the living room, to see the girl with the eyes and the cute boy. They don’t notice me. Numbly, I ask where the toilet is. I’ve been here at least a dozen times before.
Outside the toilet, I berate myself silently for fucking up a chance to open that set. I hear voices from the toilet. Not exactly hushed tones, but voices lowered to the level that implies casual and proud drug usage but behind closed doors. Wonderful. I have messed up two good chances to start a conversation with a pretty girl and now I can’t even take a piss.
I wonder back downstairs and mumble a joke about someone being in the toilet and slump onto an office chair opposite their sofas. Finally, I begin to talk. Just me for the first little while but they open up soon enough and then I’m telling the odd joke. We go out to the quiet front for a cigarette, but I’m out of papers. She says she’ll wait for me and puts out the cigarette she’s just lit, which I immediately note as a indicator of interest.
I go out back.
“Hey man, you got a rizla I can borrow?” A long pause ensues. I tap a beat of four on my thigh.
“What?”
“You got a rizla mate?” Another pause ensues.
“Uhhh… yeah man, check the… the t-table.” I dutifully check. I have already checked before, but I don’t want him to feel I am presumptuous, so I make a show of looking quickly.
“None here man.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Any of you guys got a rizla I can borrow?” An even longer, aching pause ensues. The tension builds dramatically, like a black and white film. The smoke even gives us greyscale.
“What?” The charade repeats for a few minutes before someone volunteers and provides me with a silver king skin. I thank him, and promptly return to the front door. I rip it in half and roll a cigarette that I don’t even want to smoke, for the twentieth time tonight.
I notice the guy more now. He’s really cute. I am feeling that feeling I get about guys sometimes. He has soft skin, he’s skinny and has good hair. Often times, gay guys seem to have ugly faces. It’s a real sticking point for me. He doesn’t, though. He is handsome and I want to kiss him. He is fuckable.
At this point, I decide I want him more. My lift is leaving now. I note my bad luck. I can at least get a number or a kiss. Not to spoil the ending, but I get neither in the end.
Despite having decided my target, I am running game on the girl. Good quality game, better than I have in weeks. Given more time, I could’ve had her that night. What’s going on? I’m doing the exact opposite of what I want to do. She playfully disagrees with me about something, I laugh and tell her we wouldn’t get on. She laughs, showing a smile I like the look of. A dirty smile that shows off rows of perfectly white teeth set against a subdued lipstick and a tan skin tone.
This goes on for minutes, for some bizarre reason all my chatter is directed at the girl. I even turn my body away from the girl and towards the guy, but in a real life application of sod’s law, this only makes her more interested. Normally I try this, and people just think I’m rude.
I am warmed up now, I know I could make one of them tonight given enough time. I am excited, the blood is flowing in me.
Then my phone rings. My dad is at the pub up the road. Fuck, why the hell does my car have to be in the garage today? I hate the arbitrary nature of having to rely on someone else for lifts. The lack of control you have.
I leave, not asking either for their numbers or names. In the car, my dad regales me with stories about visiting South Africa in the midst of apartheid whilst the mist rises in the glow of suburban streets, like some crazy dream.
It is past midnight on a Sunday evening. The house is quiet, the road is quiet, the birds are quiet. Everything is quiet apart from the noisy hum of my computer. Without further ado, I proceed into ritual masturbation.
I’ve never been one of those shower types. It’s seemingly impossible to do standing up. I’ve tried, and every time I end up orgasming completely bent over in order to achieve perpendicularity and I fall, grimacing like some wet, masturbating Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Or in the bath. It seems creepy and unhygienic, with the mental image of my seed spilling out into water like the blossoming of some sinister flower in a Darren Aronofsky film. Not to mention I can’t seem to cum with my dick underwater. The neurotic in me insists this does not bode well for future intercourse. If I ever make it that far.
Or even in bed. Masturbating in bed seems silly when the computer is on and you have the full array of erotic tools within your grasp. The internet must’ve completely revolutionised masturbation and eroticism, I think to myself whilst browsing Youporn. A sort of Industrial Revolution for porn. Prick Spring. Erection Rising. The Wanker Rebellion. Whilst insensitively making crude puns out of notable uprisings is fun, it’s not getting me any closer to orgasm.
Eventually I settle on a video. There’s always the few false starts, where you flick through the 33 minute clip (why are they always that long? Not only do I not want to spend that long masturbating, but 20 minutes of scene setting and foreplay followed by an orgasm to which I have grown indifferent to is the pornographic equivalent of the movie Vanilla Sky) looking for your particular penetration fetish and find yourself disappointed. Work needs to be done upon introducing a sensible tagging system on porn sites. Once again I find myself the most discerning viewer of porn and no closer to orgasm.
Moving forward, I finally find a video. Well rated (meaningless though that rating is, as it’s only the producers who rate their own stuff), sufficient in length (though not so long that I either get bored or start from the middle, in which case I wonder about what I’ve missed so far. It takes me a while to get out of post-modern cinema analysis mode) and involving a busty though not fat blonde. The video begins, I momentarily consider listening to the opening dialogue. Immediately I regret this choice and jump a couple minutes ahead. Our chosen seraph is still clothed, albeit skimpily. The baritone of the cameraman-cum-actor asks a question, followed by the hollow voice of our blonde star. 3 minutes in, and they are still discussing her life. She is a poor college student, he is a man with money. He is supposedly coaxing this woman into sexual favours for cash, which is an inherently disgusting premise and I feel guilty, despite her being at least mid-30s and clearly not under duress.
Things proceed in this manner for several minutes, and I feel my resolve begin to sag slightly. I jump even further ahead to the action. Blondie is performing vigorous fellatio. She is enjoying this. I perceive this from the loud moaning and affirmative noises she makes everytime she is asked. The cameraman-cum-actor repeatedly grunts. I turn the sound down slightly. This grunting is not what I am here to listen to. You would think that after some 30 years of porn, some ground rules would be established. Not too much male grunting and less chatter from him in general would be an obvious one. Evidently, this unwritten rule of erotica has been disregarded for this particular performance. How avant-garde. He is making more noises. More and more. So is she. She attempts to go louder, but he drowns her out, the camera begins to slightly lose focus. His acting talents are superb. I think he is what they call a real “scene stealer”, because despite his entire physical presence on stage being concealed in the depths of an oracular orifice he is overbearing and completely impossible to ignore. All the same, I am enjoying myself.
My enjoyment continues for the next couple minutes. I watch avidly, stretching out my session in what I tell myself is practice for the real deal, but I really know is prolonging the return of boredom and emptiness. I am close, I can feel it. In a particularly loud moment, I flicker slightly and look away from the strings of spittle hanging from her temporarily empty mouth. I notice the carpet. The carpet is a particularly ill-advised shade of puce. I gasp. Coincidentally, so does our heroine. A diet of coke and cock probably leaves one short of breath often. I am sickened with the horror of an interior designer. Even the word puce fills me with a sense of dread. I pause my film and consult Wikipedia on this important matter. Wikipedia confirms my fears, it is definitely puce and not a malign shade of lavender.
Back to my film and I am disgusted and put off by the inclusion of puce. It is more than just a background carpet. It is a supporting character. Puce leches from the sidelines, saying to me “this is real porn, boy. I’m a dirty ’80s carpet hanging around, just getting fucked on. Know how many whores I’ve seen in my time?” Puce offends me, an ominous hangover of a future in which I nervously and impotently sleep with uncaring hookers in motels. Puce is the colour equivalent of that seedy fat man with a moustache. Or a rapist in a bar.
No. I have come too far to change videos. My Will be Cum. I block out the puce. It creeps back in from the left corner. I concentrate my eyes on the right cheek of the blonde girl. Things pick up again, and I am enjoying myself. I am breathing heavily, possibly grunting too. I empathise with the cameraman-cum-actor breaking my cherished rule of porn. It is hard not to make noise. Next time, I will bite a pencil. Eventually, things come to a head and I finish myself off, letting out a long sigh.
Like a well trained reflex, my fingers flick to close the tab the moment I finish. I have cum all over hand, and I am left holding my dripping dick, looking at the Wikipedia page on puce.
My name is Edmund. and I have, like many others, bad acne. I’m nineteen years old, and I live in England. I remember getting my first spots in Year 7 – that’s age twelve or so, I think.
It first started with the odd spot, mainly in that well-known breakout region the chin. I remember the experience of an early, if not my first, spot. I remember accidentally squeezing it in school and that was most probably the beginning of my emotional scarring from acne, not to mention physically. I remember that horrible feeling that is now far too common to most sufferers – the self-consciousness, the anxiety, the depression – welling up inside of me, and me not having the resources to explain and understand or even comfort myself.
Over the next few years, my acne got worse, probably reaching its peak when I was around fourteen or fifteen, then gracefully plateuing for a few years. I remember one of my most memorable encounters with the gargantuan mammoths that lurk under the skin. I was fourteen and had just broken up with my very first girlfriend, a confusing and all-together fruitless relationship that lasted the gauntlet of a fortnight. Of course, I was devastasted and life had no meaning except for that found in obscure Joy Division lyrics. Anyway, as I slowly clambered out of my first brush with the black dog, fate saw fit to throw that most horrible of fates my way: a triumvirate of giant papules on the end of my nose. Red, swollen and with no determinable weakspots (or “heads”) to speak of. I distinctly remember the name “Rudolf” being bandied around, and I distinctly remember being unimpressed at the lack of creativity amongst my classmates. However, it is probably worth noting that I like the name Rudolf, and hold no particular ill will against those many illustrious and noble Bavarians who have held that grand name. Except Hess. In fact, I later named my treasured gerbil “Rudolf”. Freud, eat your heart out.
This unwelcome trio proceeded to make my life more miserable than it had been before, particularly as no one else really had acne at this point and children are especially cruel to those who stand out and are a bit different. I attempted dozens of different strategies in vain attempts to fit in, none of which are worth mentioning. Except the one of “being a dick because people will think you’re funny and overlook your faults”. I remember lightly making fun of a girl in school, an occasional friend of mine, who on one particular occasion took my jests the wrong way and snapped at me, yelling “well at least I don’t have a giant fucking spot on my face, you spotty dick!” I didn’t in fact have a “giant fucking spot” on my face; it was three. However, this acerbic comeback only graces me with the benefit of hindsight. I remember being immediately taken aback and mumbling something about it being a boil, not a spot, as if this venerated me of my enforced title of “spotty dick”. Why I thought a boil would be preferable to acne, I don’t know. Needless to say, the flame of friendship never really fanned in the same way again.
Other choice moments over the years include someone seeing my shoulder acne in the changing rooms and eliciting a loud “eurgh, what is that?” and thus drawing much unwanted attention (if you have ever been in secondary school changing rooms, you’ll be aware this inevitably leads to some form of assault) and an eloquent group of youths walking past me in the hallowed lanes of my fair town and proclaiming the sight of a “spotty cunt!” to much merriment. Try as might, I could not see a blemished womb in my field of vision, though I must grant that this event happened before I wore glasses.
Like many other sufferers of acne, I have at times allowed acne to get the best of me; allowed it to determine what I can and cannot do. At times, I wouldn’t go out because I felt I looked horrible. I wouldn’t pursue rare and brilliant opportunities with girls because I felt uncomfortable (if there were any, my memory now ominously draws a blank). I ended up judging myself and assessing my worth against the attractiveness of other people, in short. A really super philosophy, if your aim is to feel hollow, depressed and lonely.
In conjunction with all the other stresses that blight a teenage existence, acne, severe or moderate, is a horrible fate I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone. That said, it’s taught me a lot about life. It forced me to develop a set of social skills in order to compete with my unblemished bretheren. A strong sense of humour and a certain sense of self have propelled me out of the vast abyss numerous times (the worry is that one day gravity will win, however). I guess what I’m saying now is I don’t regret my acne – all the unneccessary suffering, the absolute pain it was to me when I was younger. It’s made me into a stronger person. It is only recently I realised how little other people care about your looks – much like you, they are far too preoccupied with their own.
I sit here now, eyes heavy, gazing upon my Prom photograph from three or four years ago. My skin looks peculiarly good, and I wonder if my acne has slowly gotten worse since then, without my noticing. I force myself back to reality with the fact that it is very good lighting (my teeth look exceptionally white) and I was probably wearing make-up. I regret wearing make-up, or doing anything to hide my acne. These spots and scars are as an essential part of my external tapestry as anything else. Embrace yourself. Inner balance creates that outer balance we all crave in our lives – the wealth, the lover, the friends. Having clear skin is not an ends in itself – it is a means. Do not let your journey end there.
My friends are on the way to pick me up in 10 minutes, and I am not even slightly ready. I am undressed with a giant bowl of ice cream in front of me.
My first priority is nutrition and nourishment. With this in mind, I wolf down chunks of cookie dough, chocolate, brownies and nuts held together by frozen dairy. Despite my being lactose intollerant, I am usually very partial to ice cream. Today is so exception. The Dairy Deity will later punish this abject sinning with absolute purging. I wince at the thought, but it is a small price to pay for such a delicious treat.
Whilst breaking my dairy excommunication, I am reminded of the forcefed and chemically pregnant cows from where my ice cream began its journey. I pause momentarily, in comtemplation. I press on.
In the panic of getting ready, I struggle to find my belt and shoes. They are both leather. I wonder what symbolism I am communicating to the Dairy Deity by dressing myself in dead cow carcass. I pause momentarily, in contemplation. I press on.
My jeans are stained but this is okay, I tell myself. I am Mr. Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll proceeds to remove his nasal hair with an expensive electrical item. He wonders whether the Rolling Stones ever tackled this sensitive and no doubt typical rockstar issue in a musical format. Suddenly, he realises a gap in the market to be exploited, and considers whether he can fit this into his economics essay. A moment’s deliberation tells him this does not fit into the topic of “Foreign Direct Investment as the best way to stimulate growth in developing economies”. He is disheartened, the slow tumbling of shaved nasal hair into the abyss of the sink a perfect metaphor for his crumbling dreams.
After of a minute of stream of consciousness narrative in which I refer to myself in the third person, my ego is sufficiently built up enough to face the wild world of lawless and primitive human behaviour that is That Club on a Thursday.
Just a few last minute touches – aftershave (“no spray, no lay!” sager advice is rarely spoken by toilet attendants with a weak yet profound grasp of English), flossing and just a touch more hairspray.
I am ready, with seemingly moments to spare. A straw hat momentarily doubles as the leather fedora of Indiana Jones snatched out from the jaws of death or worse yet, exposure of hat hair. The headband crunches over elegantly coiffed hair.
Five minutes later and my sense of urgency and high-octance lifestyle have dissipated somewhat. I am picking detritus from under my keyboard. I ascertain my friends are somewhat late this evening.
Five more minutes pass. I am considering doing some reading in these vital moments, perhaps I could find that one realisation that has been missing all my life.
Ten minutes pass. I am paralysed by my indecision. Then, a knock at the door liberates me from the tyrannical yoke of choice.
I dash across to the door, opening it onto those vaccous and warm greetings that always proceed a night out. Big smiles, handshakes and raucous laughter fill my hall.
“So what’s the plan?”
“I think we’re just going to stay and watch a film. Something funny,” says Friend #1. Friend #2 nods in agreement.
“Oh right.” My excitement leaks away like air from a balloon. “How about In Bruges?”
