3
this is horse-shit, my father said, also known as Mozart. I’d been working on a classical piece—violin, cello, and piano—but I don’t think he was talking about that. I think he was talking about my country and how everybody was forced to spend so much time separated from their families because they had to work all the time. Now, you know what you want, Ursula said, and, indeed, I still wanted her. I had my fingers crossed that I’d get my sexual dysfunction fixed, and, when I did, I was sure that my confidence would get a boost, and, then, well, I’d be ready for whoever the real person behind Ursula the politician was: (It was becoming increasingly apparent that I’d never be with Ursula the politician, but I intended to stick with her). So what did the person behind Ursula look like? Given my hatred for random blond idiots, she was probably blond—since we’re often attracted to what we have a beef with.
But how was I going to feel when I discovered that this blond version of Ursula stank up the bathroom as bad or worse than I did? You think, when you’re hateful, like me, that your sweetheart—especially if she’s a blond—doesn’t stink up the bathroom; but they do, and, when they do, they don’t seem so special anymore, do they? So how did I intend to solve this problem? The answer was simple: I’d give it a minute before I went in there, wouldn’t I? I hope you don’t think that I stink, Ursula said. Somehow it seemed like women should never stink—and that men can get away with it. But maybe women could, too, if you read between the lines, such that, well, “I guess they tried to hide it.”
But I think the whole allure of a blond woman that you wanted to date was that you wanted to probe—and prove to her that, yes, she stank like everybody. Then you could move on to the next one; that’s how this worked—unless you got them pregnant, upon which, you got married, and, well, everything worked out as our blond friends planned. So, what, you hate blonds for trying to trick you into marrying them, right? And then, when you marry them, they relax, and put on weight. Suddenly, then, it was time to retire, and your life came to an end. Successful, in one sense, because you never lost your mind (or, at least, most of us never lost our minds: we obeyed the program). But do you realize you spent so much of your life hoping that the weekdays didn’t exist because, well, life was supposed to be fun—or at least interesting, wasn’t it?
Now, I was wise, and I hated women that tried to trick me into getting them pregnant; and, what’s more, I hated women that saw themselves as a trophy meant for some tall and handsome man of means. Because you could always find somebody better, couldn’t you? I don’t know. My understanding of love was that you couldn’t imagine yourself doing better, and, even if you could, you didn’t want to—you wanted to stick with what worked. You wanted to get a return on your investment, which got bigger and bigger as time went on. If you changed to someone else, then, yes, all your jokes would be funny again (because they hadn’t heard them) but you’d have to start over; you’d have to go through years of doubt and worry that, in fact, you were all too easy to cheat on or figure out, as the case may be. Was I too easy to figure out? Lucky for me, I think I was one of the most complicated people that ever lived.
As such, it was highly unlikely that some random blond idiot was going to figure me out; but whereas a normal person that (perhaps) doesn’t dye their hair, would see my situation as a challenge, and, in some sense, come to understand me, possibly, without ever thinking that they had me figured out, some random blond idiot would try their best to break me, when, that is, they couldn’t understand me, and then, when that happened, they’d go back to lying on their back—and that could happen before I even knew things had ended. They weren’t trustworthy, then, as, clearly, I imagined them to be, at least not with me, anyhow. I’d say if someone isn’t trustworthy with me they weren’t trustworthy in general, but once you turn forty and you no longer have your looks to rely on, probability would suggest that for all intents and purposes, you were trustworthy, if, for example, you’d both put on the pounds and managed, in that state, to get “screwed.” Was Ursula the politician trustworthy? I think so; but it should be made clear that just because someone seems trustworthy when it comes to their career and what they do, they might, when they feel like it, completely and totally ignore you. And what about me? Would I completely and totally ignore someone? Not if they were the love of my life—obviously not. It might seem that way, looking back, after getting kicked to the curb and discovering that you’ve changed, or things have changed, circumstances have changed, and you can’t get anybody, much less somebody that was, on average, just as attractive as every other woman you dated—when you dated them. You get older and women approach menopause, and suddenly nobody has any hope of looking young again; maybe you gain a little when it comes to being understood, but, with understanding comes resistance, when, that is, you try to get away with something that, no matter how important it seems to you, turns out, in their eyes, anyhow, to be ridiculous