Absinthe Makes the Heart go Wander.

Have been lying low as kicked in the kidneys (literally) by a vile disease which makes me grunt a lot and also prevents me from walking upright, having drinks, signing in online or performing any other task which would help you differentiate between me and a Neanderthal. (And it's a tough riddle at the best of times, I know.)

But, as Plath writes so insightfully, the box is only temporary. And, as the pithy Schwarzenegger added just a moment later, I'll be back.

Holy Moley.

I think I might finally be getting over the fact that I actually have a blog; that is, enough to take a breath and temporarily move onto matters of real importance, namely Christian vampire fiction and anti-masturbation propaganda from the 1950s.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The theme of this post is really my extreme gratitude that I am not a teenager, mostly because I don’t have to do tiresome things like crystal meth or dressing like Kristen Stewart, but also because I can finally, categorically, and with authority state that being a teenager is not the best time of one’s life. I always suspected it was true, and now I know. Being a teenager is crap. And most of the benefits of adolescence still apply when you are an adult, with the possible exception of being able to leer at youths in the school pool* or spend hours puzzling over why one gets seasick when you try and focus on Miley Cyrus’ lips. (But even these are negotiable, provided you are okay with being the neighbourhood creep. Which really isn’t so bad once you’re used to it; plus I know a great game called Offer-Them-Milk-and-Cookies-and-See-How-They-Run. Come over and I’ll teach you sometime.)

Anyway.

Even teenage fiction is better when you are an adult. And, for that matter, teenage non-fiction. One of my more eccentric habits is collecting vintage coming-of-age manuals, including one ominously-titled It’s Time You Knew (for girls) and my personal favourite, the religiously-themed On Becoming a Man (for boys). The latter is by Dr. Harold Shyrock and was published in the 1950s. Gems include a number of technicolour plates featuring wholesome youths doing manly things like letting their mums measure their height or photograph their first attempts at shaving.

One of the captions actually reads: “What youth has not experienced the pride and delight of discovering the first downy fuzz on his upper lip?”

What youth, indeed.

But my favourite parts of On Becoming a Man are the passages on homosexuality and masturbation. Dr. Shyrock writes:

"A young man who follows a wholesome, ideal pattern of living does not experience ejaculation except as nature provides. Such a young man keeps his reproductive organs in trust, as it were, until the time of his marriage.
When masturbation becomes a habit, it tends to rob a young person of his incentive for accomplishment. He loses interest in worth-while enterprises, largely because his supply of nervous energy has been depleted, and he does not feel equal to the demands for honest effort. Being thus deprived of the satisfactions that a healthy young person should experience by way of the rewards of work well done, he loses interest in the lofty things of life. Masturbation can become a tyrant that robs its victim of the incentives for worthy accomplishments.
The young person who has been so unfortunate as to develop the habit of masturbation feels constantly let down and fatigued. He adopts an attitude of stupidity simply because he cannot muster sufficient energy to remain alert. Study no longer appeals to him, thus his mental development lags. Whenever two possibilities present themselves, he chooses the easier way."

And in case he hadn’t yet frightened all nerve out of any would-be deviants, Shyrock adds:

"There is a freakish manifestation of human friendship regarding which I should take this occasion to warn you. I refer to those relationships between members of the same sex that are included in the term homosexuality. This term is often surrounded with a bit of mystery. And properly so, for normal people with wholesome personalities find it difficult to understand how a bond of sentimental affection can develop between two men or two women.
It is only necessary that you be on guard against the early advances of some individual who, unbeknown to you, may have homosexual tendencies.
The first approach of a person with homosexual tendencies is usually in the nature of some manifestation of personal regard or even mild affection. He may write notes to his younger friend, and if this practice continues, the notes may actually take on a sentimental tone, so that he writes almost as though he were in love with the other person.
Other such manifestations include evidence of jealousy when anyone else seems to 'rate' with the friend of his choice.
You ask, 'Why the arrest in the development of a personality?' There is no accurate answer to this question, but our best information indicates that the homosexual tendency is but one of several evidences that the personality has not developed symmetrically."

Ah, yes. If we could only rid the world of those pesky homosexuals and masturbators!

I always love the wonderfully unscientific moral backlash that strikes teenage literature whenever some left-of-centre sexual trend threatens to become acceptable; as though the world’s moralists realise there is only one sensible course of action, and that is to catch the youth before the gawd-daym competition does.

The latest manifestation of emergency adolescent re-socialisation is Christian vampire fiction (yes it’s true), which is presumably a response to the phenomenal success of Twilight. Despite PublishersWeekly.com claiming it is the result of Rose Fox’s random genre generator, it is in fact catching on fast and is – allegedly – extremely marketable.

As a matter of fact, I think the Twilight series is already sheer genius when it comes to moral positioning. Unlike Sweet Valley and Sweet Dreams, the protagonists here are pure not simply by virtue of being thin, blonde and disapproving of smoking**. Twilight offers no such sanitised beach babes. Cunningly, it manages to combine equal measures of chastity and deviance in a suitably angst-ridden, sex-laden and wonderfully plain-Jane package, without once allowing the characters to do anything even remotely risqué. There’s all that appealing bad-boy sexual hunger, hidden beneath a layer of innocence so thick it would take Belle du Jour ten years to get to the bottom. Your sexual urges are perfectly normal, children, it says. But if you act on them, you’ll DIE.

And then, because a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down: Here, have some sparkles.

This, apparently, isn’t enough for our intrepid moral army, witness the rise of hardcore Christian vamp romances designed to wipe out the tainted alter ego in one bloody, metaphor-loaded battle. I quote Jezebel.com:

“[T]he vampires here apparently represent ‘demons anyone must overcome’. Thirsty, a Christian vampire tale from Tracey Bateman, will hit shelves in February, and will feature a vampire named Markus and his target of obsession, Nina, ‘a divorced alcoholic dealing with addiction.’ Oh, lord help us and save us said Mrs. Davis, as my mother would say. Somehow, Markus the vampire and Nina the drunk divorcee will lead the reader towards redemption and the idea that any demons, even those with fangs, can be overcome. Or at least that's what editor Shannon Marchese wants you to believe, saying: ‘These are themes that work in the Christian life. You have to fight to say, ‘Am I going to choose unconditional love and redemption or a life of following obsessions, a life with holes in it?’”

Well, I for one pick the holey over the holy. Partly because dinner with a drunk, divorced, homosexual masturbator sounds like a helluva night out. Partly because Jesus hung out with crooks and hookers all the time, and didn’t point fingers, and what’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me. But lastly – and mostly – because if there were nothing for puritans to get hysterical about, the rest of us would have nothing to read.

Viva!

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* Unless you are Alistair
** Fnarr, fnarr.

Dumbstruck.

“One night a woman had a dream. She dreamed she was walking along the beach with a laptop. Across the sky flashed scenes from her life. For each scene, there were two sets of wanky livejournal entries; one on her blog and one on Twitter…”

I did in fact dream about blogging last night, and, while I did not actually quote Footprints at myself, I do recall a particularly horrifying scene where Pan Pipe Pete was warbling an encouraging little ditty and I opened a self-help book adorned with daisies as a soothing woman’s voice read the words: “If someone rains on your blog, to whom do the flowers belong?”

Horror => choking => paralysis =>

That's all.

28 Hours Later

Oh, Lordy. The disease has taken only 24 hours to spread so far that I have already emailed all my friends to tell them to read this, and put my blog address in my gmail status bar.

Worse, the world has now been painted with the indelible strokes of the Great Fat Blog Brush, which means everything – everything – is now potential blog material. I started my day thinking: “Oh look, there are no effing spoons in the kitchen again. Perhaps I should blog about it. On the other hand, I also got caught at three robots on the way to work, perhaps I should blog about THAT." And then – THEN – I started thinking of friends I hadn't yet emailed the link to, wondering if there was some innocent pretext I could use to contact them. It's downhill from here, I'm afraid.

Serve you right for being such a self-righteous wanger, I hear you say. And you’d be right. But then, as if I needed a further shove down the slippery slope, my horoscope this morning read: “You might have discovered a previously untapped talent; a creative gift. This could be rather thrilling for you. Your efforts at first might be tentative and uncertain, but don't grow discouraged just because you don't feel like a genius. Give it time.”

Dark times, my friends. Dark times. And the astrologer is quite right, despite probably being just another disillusioned copywriter who dreamed of The New Yorker but woke up to Pasqualina Online; I feel as far from genius as Obama from the mini-bar (that is: pretty damn far, but hoping for the best). And yet, being the wonderful friend that she is, Bean has pointed out the stupendous postmodern potential of writing a blog about why one hates writing a blog, and led me to a wonderful site entitled Social Media Douchebag. (Which is like self-help for web nerds; something along the lines of I’m Okay, Because You’re a Douchebag Too.) Of course, it grabbed me like a mugger grabs a short skirt in a dark alleyway, and that was that: I sat down to write about it immediately.

But before I become so PoMo it hurts, I feel I should get back to what I really wanted to do today. And that is to state the other side of the story; to pay homage to those rare and wonderful blogs without which the rest of us would have to spend our days, I don’t know, working or something.

Here they are, and here’s why you should read them.

1. Because we’ve all secretly wondered how the heck Goths wear that stuff in summer, and because I always wanted to use the phrase “Sandcastle of Mordor” but never found a way:
www.gothsinhotweather.blogspot.com

2. Because I am to these girls what Stan is to Eminem; that is, they don’t know I exist, but our friendship is real. REAL. We drink cocktails and swap girly stories and they laugh at my jokes and we admire each other’s hair and wear each other’s equally adorable shoes:
www.gofugyourself.celebuzz.com

3. Because she is just so damn funny:
http://becs-plan-b.blogspot.com/

4. Because you don’t need to resort to eating Bob Martins to put hair on your chest, head, or any other body part:
http://notabaldy.wordpress.com/

5. Because they’re awesome, and because they love me back:
http://www.laughitoff.co.za/
(and if you want proof that they love me back, click here.)

6. Because you should never start Monday without seeing the mullet of the week:
http://www.classicrockthebear.com/gallery/Mullet-of-the-Week-Gallery

7. Because everyone has secrets, and most of them are worse than yours:
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

8. Because it’s so random it’s subversive (my favourite kind):
http://mahendras-ties.blogspot.com/

9. Because we’re very bovvered by not having her in the country:
http://cleverblogs.wordpress.com/

10. Because she has that talent I don’t have, of keeping her entries razor-sharp and post-Goethe pithy:
http://trinklebean.wordpress.com/

11. Because she’s a deeply cool South African émigré who doesn’t diss her home country:
http://www.geraldinemeliot.blogspot.com

12. Because they offer GHOST BLOGGING (so, if you’re too embarrassed to go down the rabbit-hole like me, you can get someone else to do it for you):
http://www.meerkatcommunications.ca/

And yes, many of these are my friends. But I never said I wouldn’t namedrop. Did I?

And So It Began.

I was chatting to my friend Rebecca this morning, when she uttered these immortal words:

“Blogs are like swine flu. The cool kids get it.”

Of course, having had it put in perspective so beautifully, there wasn’t really anything I could do other than abandon all protests, and start typing this post immediately. Which, in a last-ditch attempt to prove my point, is nonetheless a post about why I’ve never yet had a blog, and why I might never post on this one again.

The reasons in a nutshell:

1. Facebook is already too much damn hard work; in fact these days I feel almost obliged to spend as much time avoiding work as I do working, which means that technically speaking, if time is money, I should be earning double my salary, but the world doesn’t work like that, and I’m just too inert to make the whole business any more labour-intensive;
2. Whenever I think about starting a blog, I think about chucking back some gin and eating cereal out of the box while watching Kath and Kim reruns instead;
3. I am technologically impaired (severely). Example: my friend Anna forwarded me a mail today to say that a friend of hers is selling his Cooper S, and I read the specs with interest, stopping only to ask her why anyone would want a built-in seat warmer for his laptop*;
4. And here comes the real reason – despite being an avid reader of all my friends’ blogs, I think blogs in general are a bit…embarrassing.

There. It’s out.

Now, before we go any further, I should clarify that I have reason to read my friends' blogs:

• My friends are a decidedly B.A. crowd, which means they write extremely well; and
• They are my friends and I love them, which means that even if they didn’t write well, which they do, they could vomit out 20 pages of drivel on why they favour 2-ply, and I’d still read it with interest.

But seriously. I really can’t for the life of me comprehend the level of narcissism that would drive all the average Joes out there to post daily on the real, mundane details of their lives, and expect (virtual) strangers to care. I have one distant acquaintance (conveniently nameless) who is horribly guilty of this, and not only feels the need to update his blog every time he decides to have tuna for lunch instead of egg mayo, but actually looks up the IP addresses of his friends-and-relations every day, and if he notices that one of them hasn’t been visiting his blog lately, writes them a personal email to ask why they haven’t been reading it. (Or, worse – that Facebook disease – to ask why they have not yet become his fan.)

Which brings us back to Rebecca’s original question of why I have never had a blog.

Because the sorry truth of it is this: like my acquaintance (who, unfortunately, hasn’t realised it yet) I am just not that interesting. If I were to post the real details of my life daily, my blog would look something like this:

Day 1:

Today I didn't blog. Sorry

Day 2:

Go home

Day 3:

Seriously why are you reading this?

Day 4:

Ok you asked for it. Had bath

Day 5:

Gin

Day 6:

What?

Day 7:

Mmm. TV.

Day 8:

Day 8 already? Mmm. TV.

Day 9:

This TV thing is really catching on. Someone should advertise it.

Day 10:

Someone has already identified market potential of TV. Fuckit. Gin

Actually, all that stuff about digging TV is a lie, because in fact I don’t have a TV, so I only get the chance to dig TV when I periodically visit my parents and become too inert to leave for the next three months. Mind you, the stuff about not having a TV is a lie too, because to be precise I have two, but they are both unplugged until further notice, because I once, in a spasmodic fit of reform, scrubbed and rearranged my lounge; but in the shock of it all forgot how to plug the TV back in, and then I stopped to eat some cereal out of the box, and that was two years ago, and I didn’t really miss it, because like I said I have Kath and Kim and Buffy and Harry Potter on disc, and who needs anything else anyway.

And lastly, I haven’t had a blog because I have a very real fear that it will become a narcissistic addiction, and that I will, like so many before me, forget the social norms I grew up with, and begin to behave in a way that has for generations been cringeworthy in all mainstream circles but has – bizarrely – become the norm online lately, thanks to social networking sites. I am speaking, of course, of obsessive self-marketing, which to me is about as masturbatory – and Not Done – as taking photographs of yourself pouting in the shower and displaying them on the coffee table before your friends come round for tea.

Bottom line: I don’t think the influence of social networking sites should blind us to what we actually know, deep down, is antisocial behaviour. If we really want to write, shouldn’t we make like Real Authors and have the grace to let the experts, i.e. the editors of actual publications we submit to, decide whether our work is good enough to broadcast? Shouldn’t we keep our efforts professional, and shut up about it in public?

And if we are as presumptuous to self-publish, shouldn’t we just keep it on the down-low and leave the marketing at the door, the way we would at any normal social gathering? I mean, we’ve all had to ward off the dodgy Amway cousin banging on about his new pyramid scheme over Sunday lunch, and in an online context, how is blog-flogging to your friends any different?

I suppose a part of me just thinks: So you write. Bully for you. Now pass the potatoes.

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* A Cooper S is allegedly a car. Clearly not much has changed since I was in Grade 2, when a classmate told us in Show and Tell that her father had bought a Porsche, and I thought she meant a breed of brightly-coloured chicken.