Posted in: Short 'n Curlies by Si Spurrier | Tagged: short and curlies, si spurrier

Short 'n Curlies #42 by Si Spurrier

Published Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:13:52 -0500

Last updated Fri, 13 Mar 2020 11:34:27 -0500

This Week I Have Been Mostly Hating:

…Having the cruel wobbly knife of gender inequality rammed-home with a corkscrew twist.

During a recent visit to a Businessman-Gravitating, Baby-Squealing, Fuckwit-Attracting Noisegasm (cf: "Starbucks") — about which I believe I may have Vented previously — my sixteenth cup of coffee finally worked its way through my Herculean bladder and demanded attention. I duly lurked outside the excitingly monosexual toilet to wait — as London-Based-Starbucksian routine demands — for whatever vile colonically-diseased builder/tramp/student was inside to finish blasting their muddy guts all over the pan. To my secret delight what emerged, with an Oh-So-British "sorry-to-keep-you-waiting" smile, was a thirtysomething businesswoman in an expensive suit and daggy neckscarf.

Aha! quoth my Inner Voice, no gross arsevomit to negotiate today! No resilient unflushables nor bloody needles to stare-at while pointing the Pego at the Pot! How novel!

Alas, alas.

Somehow, and the mechanics of this violation still elude my imagination, this prim little accountancy she-drone had managed to piss all over the seat and the floor, and had even thoughtfully dumped the entire supply of arsewipe into a damp corner of the mess.

Now. It's not her fault. Or, rather, it is, but I can't exactly complain. Like all male primates I can't say with total conviction that I've never made a mess myself… although admittedly I normally have the added mitigation of Alcoholic Fuckedupness, Being On A Jiggly Train, or similar excusebait; none of which our present subject could boast.

No: what engorged my Hhhhhate was not the woman's crime, but the Smirking Revenge her simple Widdlebomb inflicted on my Man-Certainty. Abruptly I was forced to confront every ill-tidied sprinkle I'd ever left, every quick nip-behind-a-tree-while-nearby-lasses-cross-their-legs-and-panic, and every time I'd ever done that trick — you know the one — where you've left the room reeking like a Swamp Disaster and deliberately lift the seat before leaving, so that whoever comes-in next assumes you're Just Another Inconsiderate Male Who Took A Piss And Didn't Put The Lid Down, and that the demonic odour is therefore lingering from a visit by some earlier, unknown miscreant. Manpiss Doublebluff, I expose thee.

Anyway: the mechanics of bodily waste, as if it's any surprise, are clearly heavily stacked in Male-kind's favour. And so — to work this guilty Hhhhating through to its natural conclusion — I have vowed to spend a month eschewing the ability to Stand'N'Go, rebuffing the practicalities of the Urinal, and instead to bare my pale cheeks to the porcelain ring wherever and whenever I am, regardless of the specific Front-End/Back-End requirements of the moment.

Early results suggest that women enjoy far more opportunities to Take A Moment To Read Books And Magazines than we blokes ever suspected, but that any such benefits are instantly negated by the eternal fear of Getting Someone Else's Sweaty Pubes Stuck To Your Buttocks. The experiment continues.

BrainFart:

To paraphrase the Greatest Comedian Who Ever Lived™, what do you say we lighten things up and talk about abortion? Ahahaha. Uh-oh.

I don't know where you stand on the subject. It's decisive, inflammatory, Not Discussed In Polite Company, and And Of Course Yes We Must Mention Mustn't We That It's A Serious Topic Regardless Of Which Side Of The Debate You're On And Not The Sort Of Thing To Take Lightly No.

No trouble. What I bring to you, oh plucky readers, is merely An Interesting And Worthy Axiomatic Discussion which I tend to raise whenever the thorny subject arises in my company. Brace yourself.

See, besides the whole "Yes/No" debate, there's a heap of finer arguments regarding How Late Into A Pregnancy It's Viable To Abort A Fetus. They tend to revolve around scientific (or otherwise) theories on when an embryo starts feeling Pain, how deeply sedated/unconscious it is in the womb, and overall how far into the gestation process it is that an abortion stops being akin to Amputation, and starts being Murder.

Heavy stuff, Si — tread lightly.

What all these debates are basically looking for is a way of defining at what stage a Being begins to have a meaningful existence. Now that's a bit of a wider issue in itself — we can start lobbing around notions of Self-Awareness, Social Interactivity, language and so on — but a lot of Philosophers will tell you that memory plays a major part.

Bear with me here.

Listen: to we Beings incapable of moving within the 4^th dimension, memory is the only mental evidence we each have for our own existence — and the existence of people, things and places around us — and more importantly memories are the only genuine imprint that Time inflicts upon our conscious minds. Without memories we're merely creatures which are constantly discovering themselves and their world: like that old gag about the goldfish, with the added complication of sentience.

"Ooh, I exist!… Ooh, I exist!… Ooh, I exist!"

Memories do for self awareness what galleries, frames, display-cases and picturehooks do for Art. Consider: you — whilst alone in a dark room — might one day create the world's most astonishingly beautiful artwork out of the smoke from a cigarette… but no other fucker'll see it, and when it dissolves half-a-second later you'll have no right to complain or demand a billion bucks from M.O.M.A. It'll be as if the masterpiece never existed, and — as far as the World is concerned — it didn't. It's all getting a bit quantum, this, so let's level it out: the only place that bloody artwork does exist now is in your memory, which just brings us back to our point:

Being able to Remember That We're Human is what legitimizes our belief that We Are Human. Right?

Right.

…which is why I propose that it should be perfectly legimitate to abort a child up to the age of 2 years old, which is approximately when it starts generating long-term memories which it'll recall for the rest of its life.

I see it as a sort of "try before you buy" policy — give the little turd-machine a year or two on Warranty before it starts having any sort of existential impact on the world — like a "Master The Controls Tutorial" at the front-end of a videogame. Then, if it's just not Working-Out? Off to the clinic we go.

…

Okay, okay, I'm being distasteful. And not remotely serious, for the record. This is just a rambly and (at the front end, at least) vaguely salient argument I pull out of the bag whenever I find myself chatting to a Pro-Lifer in serious need of a Sense-Of-Humour-Bypass. Take it from me: there's nothing as rewarding as the look of outrage you get from a sour-faced Baby-Bibler when you advocate casual infanticide.

Buuuut, ohoho, let's not dismiss this quite so fast…

Y'see, something pretty interesting came to my attention today. In the course of a rather humdrum news story about the excavation of a Roman Villa here in the UK, our chums at the BBC helpfully mentioned the discovery of several dozen skeletons — all from babies — around the site. The dirt-fingered historybuffs were on-hand to excitedly conclude the building was at one time a Brothel, and these poor sprogs were therefore the Unwanted Biproducts Of That Oldest Trade… Then casually added that in Roman Culture a child wasn't considered "properly" human until the age of 1 or 2. In fact Emperor Nero, he of the famous pants-on-head lunacy, owes at least part of his reputation for Bollock-Nibbling Insanity to the fact that he dared to get a bit weepy and maudlin when his son died before reaching 1 year old.

So either my revolting and not-in-the-slightest-bit-funny ahahaha infanticide Theory is a couple of thousand years out of date, or — as I choose to conclude — it stands as proof that you Can't Keep A Good Idea Down.

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