In November of 2010, on my previous blog, I wrote a post with the title ‘”A” is for “Apathy”?’, ostensibly spurred on by a comment by Sean of Bookonaut (née Blogonaut) fame. However, I didn’t disclose at the time that I’d already been mulling over commentary on much the same topic, made on Facebook, by a much-loved atheist who went by the name of Candy Hogan. This is what she posted, earlier in November 2010;
“when i go to read my newsfeed often want to scream. I understand the proud atheist thing, but WHY does EVERYTHING have to be about RELIGION? dammit, its boring! u might as well be practicing these religions u claim u hate cuz theyre ALL U TALK ABOUT!! in depth studies of inconsistancies… why isnt it enough to just not believe? new subject PLEASE???”
(Candy Hogan, November 18th, 2010)
I originally considered dedicating my post to her, however, given that I opened by quoting Sean (and that a dedication seemed potentially too familiar), I opted not to. A few weeks later, in early January 2011, after a bout of viral pneumonia, Candy Hogan’s life came to an end.
I’m periodically reminded of Candy every now and then (as I have been again, now) – she was witty, occasionally a little caustic (while still being witty), and thoroughly irreverent. Nobody, including atheists, could be guaranteed immunity from her sense of humour. Discussion, with Candy as a participant, was never allowed to stagnate for long, if at all, and even while for the most part I sat on the sidelines, I considered Candy’s thoughts worthy of attention.
So with the exception of a little spit-and-polish here and there, the following is ‘”A” is for “Apathy”?’ as it appeared in November of 2010, now re-dedicated to Candy. Vale Candy Hogan.
This dog may appear forlorn, sad, lonely and abandoned, but often things are not as they first appear. Dogs are wonderful creatures, and man’s best friend, so you would think that nothing good that they do would be cause for amazement.
“Selflessness and love? That just what dogs do!”
But this “sad” pooch was only moments away from a revelation that would change his life forever, melt hearts across the world and show that dogs really do have a whole heap of surprises up their sleeves to teach us cynical humans.
A few weeks ago on my birthday, after watching Godzilla with a friend, downing a few drinks and engaging in critique of the movie’s gender politics, discussion turned to the assumptions underlying, or inferred by, a number of terms. Specifically we discussed the terms “real men”, “toxic masculinity” and “hyper-masculinity” (all while my friend’s copy of “Demonic Males” slowly emerged from her handbag). First, I’ll briefly address the “Real Men Do/Don’t…” meme that’s recently been going around.
***
Don’t get me wrong, “buying girls” is shitty behaviour of a high order, and should be strongly campaigned against even if only because people are not objects to be bought or sold. View just technically, before suffering gets taken into consideration, this is a compelling justice concern.
My objection isn’t with this side of the equation at all, rather my problem comes from the part that ascribes the relevant agency to “real men”. What the fuck is a “real man”? (That’s a rhetorical question).
It’s pretty obvious that most people using the term “real men” aren’t arguing that the concept of “men” is more than just a useful fiction in the philosophical sense, nor, obviously, are they arguing that men who buy girls don’t have existence. What they are implying, if not plainly stating, is that objectively “this (not buying girls) is an essential criteria for being a man”.
This is more or less true for all the other instances of the “real men” meme. You can perform a Google image search to find that other essential criteria of “Man” are argued to be the ability to grow their own scarves, to be able to shave with chainsaws, to abstain from quiche, and other such nonsense. Adelaide band The Beards, performs a line in pseudo-ironic, hipster sexism along much the same lines…
Because it’s original and edgy, because sexism hasn’t been around since… the dawn of history… (3:49)
***
You can see how this kind of terminology is a problem with only a little thought experimentation.
Say you have before you, an adult randomly selected from the population of people who have been arrested, charged and sentenced for buying one or more girls. Picture them in your mind. Is it conceivably possible that their sex is “male”? Is it conceivably possible that they self-identify, gender-wise, as a man?
If it’s even logically possible for the answer to these questions to be “yes” (and it’s pretty obvious that this is highly likely to be the case in the “real world”), then we have problems when it comes to the wording of the campaign in question. The statement “real men don’t buy girls” is in contradiction with the evidence presented by these scenarios; here you have men who buy girls.
Either we are in error about the offender’s gender and sex, or we are wrong in assigning certain characteristics to the class “Men”; i.e. either “real men” do on occasion, buy girls, beat wives, and so on and so forth, or they don’t, and the people who do these things are… who or what exactly? If they aren’t Men, then what are they?
More importantly, how do you decide, in a non-arbitrary manner, what constitutes an essential gender criteria, or do you instead, like some folk, avoid trying to objectively define other people’s gender all-together?
Speaking practically, this issue can be side-stepped if different rhetoric is chosen by the people designing these campaigns… “Men who buy girls should be policed more aggressively” or “children should not have to live with the threat of being bought by men”, for example.
The fact that all this mess can be side-stepped with so little effort on the part of campaigners, all without compromising on the message of the campaign, means that there’s really no excuse for getting it wrong.
Admittedly, not all men may find this language comforting, unequivocal as it is about the acts of particularly rotten men. But I’m not in the business of consolations. If you want that, I’m sure Alain de Botton probably has a bromide of one sort or another to sell you.
***
(Now if at this point, you’re complaining that this is all just an exercise in semantics, it’s possibly because you’re bigot, or at the very least, the kind of person who doesn’t like to consider the consequences of what they communicate to the world around them. Why you’d even be reading this post in the first place then, is a bit of a mystery.)
***
The problems associated with essentialism and gender don’t stop there though. Earlier, I mentioned the “Real Men Grow Their Own Scarves” iteration of the meme.
Taken only a little bit seriously, this is clearly ridiculous. Are you really going to suggest, that because someone cannot grow a beard sufficient to function as a scarf, that this, and this alone, disqualifies them from being a man?
No, you wouldn’t? Perhaps it’s just a harmless joke, right?
Allow me to extend this further with another small thought experiment.
You encounter someone who identifies as a trans-gendered male, who may or may not have been designated the sex of female at birth, and they are unable or unwilling to grow a beard sufficient, by your standards, to act as a scarf. Are you going to acknowledge and treat them as a man?
If your answer is “no”, you’re a transphobe. Congratulations.
Of course, being precisely this kind of asshole to transgendered folk isn’t the worst kind of bigotry they are subjected to, and somewhat less so is naively enjoying Internet memes about “real men” and beards. However, you’d be hard pressed to find an instance of harsher forms of transphobia that aren’t also based on gender essentialism, whether that essentialism takes the form of tropes about “real men” or “real women”, or not.
By using the language and logic of gender essentialism, the “Real Men don’t buy girls” campaign feeds into transphobia. Indirectly, perhaps, but almost inevitably once the logic and language of essentialism takes a hold of the way we talk about gender.
***
This brings us back to the matter of “toxic” and “ultra” masculinity.
Given events like the recent Isla Vista shootings, back to the less-recent serial killings of the Hillside Stranglers, or the all-too-familiar skews in statistics like those for domestic violence, and all the chest-beating, pigeon-strutting, violence-signalling, late-night-posturing bullshit that goes along with it, it’s hard not to view the terms “toxic masculinity” and “ultra-masculinity” as pointing to substantive cultural phenomena. And without entirely discounting the role of the biological, I don’t have any great problem in acknowledging that these phenomena exist as cultural phenomena, and that they, as cultural phenomena, present obviously serious social problems.
However, both of these terms do more than just point to the phenomena they are primarily intended to. They carry other inferences, and baggage, in much the way “real men” conveys more than anti-child-exploitation campaigners may intend.
The concept of toxicity is one where something specific, at a certain level or concentration, becomes harmful – what then, about masculinity, is specifically the part that becomes toxic?
Similarly, “ultra-masculinity” implies the ability to measure a quality, or qualities of masculinity, such that their exaggeration can be noticed above and beyond “normal” levels. What exactly are these qualities, and what makes them a part of masculinity, such that masculinity in general, necessarily infers them? Or put more succinctly, why are these qualities essential to masculinity?
“Toxic” and “ultra” masculinity don’t come out and say it, quite as much as does “real men”, but gender essentialism is implied by the choice of words.
If you’re not a person who has a problem with gender essentialism, the problems posed by its logic, or the consequences of its ideological offshoots, then you’re obviously not going to have a problem with these terms. Again, one wonders why such a person would even be reading this.
And I guess that in addition to this, if you’re also feminist, that having these words in your lexicon still isn’t going to be an issue. In this matter at least, you perhaps count yourself as being ideologically in the company of the likes of Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer. It’s not my place to tell you who or with what ideas you must affiliate, but I can make observations.
***
I’m not asserting that the phenomena that “toxic” and “ultra” masculinity point to entail gender essentialism, but rather that through baggage and inference, the language does. If you’re the kind of person who seeks to avoid gender essentialism (i.e. not a “TERF”), while criticising misogynistic culture, then I think you’d possibly be the kind of person who’d want to keep the concepts, but ditch the language.
Examples of how the rhetoric of “toxic masculinity” could contribute to transphobia don’t immediately come to mind, but the logic would seem to leave it open to such a possibility. The idea of “ultra masculinity” on the other hand, through the simple idea of men being able to be more objectively belonging to the class “Men” than others, present obvious exclusionary potential I don’t even want to speculate about.
(It shouldn’t need pointing out that the logic in all of this sets a precedent for/necessarily implies essentialism along the lines of “toxic” and “ultra” femininity, and “real women”, with all the potential for re-enforcement of archaic gender roles and trans-misogyny that comes with it).
Stated outright, “toxic” and “ultra” masculinity, like “real men”, despite what people’s intentions may be, are still rooted to varying extents in patriarchal language*. How much of a problem you take this to be is up to you, but for my part, I’m not ambivalent about it.
As of yet, I don’t really have a handle on any neologisms that could act as substitutes for “toxic” or “ultra” masculinity that wouldn’t also generate a good deal of fruitless confusion. I’m stuck with expending extra words each time I want to talk about “harmful interpretations of masculinity” or “patriarchal culture” or “misogynistic ideations” or “rape culture”.
Usually this entails just being clear, at length, about the matter at hand, but the loss of useful-if-problematic terminology isn’t something to be overlooked either; conversations can get bogged down or driven into rhetorical side-alleys without specific technical language. The word-smithing continues.
~ Bruce
* Patriarchies, and patriarchal cultures, being essentialist themselves.
It’s been just over a month since the loveable, cuddly, Shrek-like-grump otherwise known as Joe Hockey, apparently outed himself as an elitist jerk through the simple act of smoking a cigar. Apparently, cigars are the hallmark of fat cats, investment bankers and the like.
This narrative isn’t particularly convincing, and seems to me, more like a facile inversion of former Prime Minister John Howard’s out-of-touch remarks about lattes and chardonnay. I found it just about as convincing when Republicans in the US too, speculated about the dining habits of Al Gore and John Kerry.
In order to be petty enough to both appreciate, and to find confirmation in these kinds of damnation-by-commodity associations, people have to first be pretty well polarised for one reason or another. Welded-on party loyalists, haters, the politically humiliated, the desperate and the short-term-angered.
Which is to say, once you can sell this kind of thing to an electorate, you’ve already got them. At best, this stuff’s for shits and giggles, or for preaching to the choir.
At worst, which is often the case, its abject foolishness. (I include in this category, marketing-driven “analysis” that merely capitalises on the political resentment of a target audience in order to sell subscriptions and draw advertisers).
***
Now the budget that Hockey has delivered; that’s doing a lot of the left’s campaigning for it. If there’s anything that screams “Elitist Bastard” louder than cigars, lattes, chardonnay and Perrier ever could, it’s fiscally pummelling the stuffings out of the poor and the aspirational.
This, rightly, has pissed people off. Parents don’t want their kids living with them until thirty, much less are they happy to continue feeding them if fairly paid work isn’t available. Few Australians are willing to be targeted to take the brunt of the current account deficit, much less the many who can’t, or are less likely to be able to afford being weathered by austerity measures.
This is before considering education cuts, and fee hikes, and repayment scams, which a cynical elitist government could conceivably pass off to some extent, as Making Those Educated Folk Pay Their Way. A good raft of the fiscal restraints of the current budget are like this; potentially passable with old-school conservative guile. But a good few also, are clearly not.
At the time of Hockey’s supposed cigar transgression, Australians’ rage over the budget was starting to boil. A month later and it’s now spilling over. But the cigar had nothing to do with this.
***
Policy points are squidgy things. Ordinary folk don’t always vote on them, because they often don’t keep the details in working memory for long before something else in their busy lives comes along to distract them.
This budget of Hockey’s may be an exception though, much as was the Work Choices legislation during the last Howard Government. But if we’re talking about signs of elitism, other than in pure policy terms, and if we’re not talking about whether politicians prefer Iced VoVos over Biscuits Roses de Reims, what else can we turn to for a diagnosis?
***
On Wednesday, Treasurer Joe Hockey told The Sydney Institute that “…criticism of our strategy has been political in nature and has drifted to 1970s class warfare lines, claiming the budget is ‘unfair’ or that the ‘rich don’t contribute enough”, and that “…only in a closed economy, based on old style socialism, can a government hope to deliver uniform equality of outcomes”.
There’s a lot you could say about this purely on the basis of policy points; a mixed economy has been part-and-parcel of the New Left since there was a New Left; the Hawke-Keating government opened the Australian economy to the world more than any other, and few-to-none of Hockey’s mainstream critics actually seek to reverse this, or, one could point out that there is a vast multitude of possible fiscal platforms more equitable than Hockey’s that don’t even approach being socialist.
In short, in terms of policy points, you could point out that what Hockey is saying is unequivocally false; that it’s horseshit.
But being tricksy or false hardly signifies that he’s being an elitist dirtbag. Rather, what it does show us is that he’s either or both foolish, or dishonest. This wouldn’t be telling us anything that we don’t already know.
Currently, opposition leader Bill Shorten is hounding Hockey for his dividing Australians into a cynical dichotomy of ‘lifters’ and ‘leaners’. With little doubt this is something worthy of criticism, the banal outrage element amongst consumer-reader markets not withstanding. Indeed, if only Shorten could be more the media darling on this, that he was during the Beaconsfield Mine collapse in 2006.
What this particular language doesn’t do though, is highlight the very real division between Joe Hockey, and “Average Joe”; that he is not one ofus. Hockey’s divisiveness, in this case, is pure demagoguery of the Alan Jones, or 1990s Current Affair variety, and like the politically dishonest and the foolish, the political demagogue experiences little difficulty blending in with us commoners.
Indeed, wealthy demagogues are particularly adept at passing themselves off as battlers or hard workers; it’s a good part of what makes them so politically dangerous.
***
No, it’s Hockey’s remark about 1970s socialism that does the trick, more than cigars, foodstuffs or demagogic bloviation ever could. Outside of the sheer wide-ranging cruelty of this latest budget, it’s this arcane and somewhat abstract point that Hockey makes that best signifies that he is alien to us little people.
Labor could almost be forgiven for not realising it. Almost.
Oh Labor…
Despite the achievements of the Hawke and Keating governments, there’s still a fiscal insecurity lurking at the back of the minds of many an ALP member; The Spectre of Gough. Beating back the Global Financial Crisis under Rudd may have exorcised this anxiety to some degree, but I’m sure it’s still there in no insignificant measure.
So when the Liberals concoct an imaginary “Budget Crisis”, and the Australian public reject a perfectly fiscally competent government, you can expect that folk in the Labor party are going to worry about their party’s (allegedly) long-standing reputation for these things.
Only, outside of the political classes, nobody really gives a rat’s posterior about this anymore. The public’s interest for political history isn’t as great as the average party wonk, and is easily subsumed by urgency and practicality. The “Budget Crisis” was such an urgency, and the in-fighting that made Labor appear impractical, was clear, apparent and immediate.
This had nothing to do with the hauntings of The Spectre of Gough.
Similarly, and to my point, aside from the party faithful, and the welded-on, the Australian electorate couldn’t give two farts about Hockey’s venture into the shortcomings of “1970s socialism”. Aside from being factually dubious, which many a wonk will be tempted to address, and aside from alluding to fiscal ghosts, which many a Labor-type may be baiting into defending, it’s just too alien.
Talk of historically closed economies, and the alleged unattainability of attempts at absolute and uniform equality, are at least for the time being, too far removed from the electorate’s immediate concerns, which thanks to Hockey’s callousness, are now many.
If Labor want to take full advantage of the way Hockey has alienated the Australian public, it needs to jump on the arcane and abstruse qualities of his ideations, and use them to portray him for what he is; out of touch with most Australians, and utterly unconcerned with their welfare.
Hockey is far too busy chasing ideological spectres of his own imagining to be worried about us plebs.
A stark, alternative approach, would be for the ALP to continue overlooking openings like these, instead remaining distracted by their own flirtations with the abstract and the tenebrous, thereby opening themselves up to fair speculation that they too, are too busy with other things to care about the little folk. It shouldn’t need saying that I don’t think this is a good idea.
Shake off the fog, the ghosts and the long shadows, Labor. A strong opposition is needed.
(I) The idea, inferred or stated clearly, that the truth of a proposition rests upon its utility to an adored or politically useful individual.
(II) The practice of distributing charity in interpreting arguments on the basis of a potential interlocutor’s utility, or relationship, to one’s self.
Another young, middle-to-upper class man has allegedly gone out in a blaze of indignation, taking a crowd of innocents along with him. And already, we have the interested parties, sifting through the news, trying to find something that disconfirms their enemies’ claims, or to dismiss, without much in the way of reason, inconvenient facts about politically charged violence.
This, seemingly without regard for either the victims, or future, potential victims of the same phenomena.
***
Like other alleged, young, middle-to-upper class killers, Elliot Rodger has left behind a manifesto.
According to reports, Rodger wrote a 137-page tome, presented by email to his own mother. And Rodger was quite clear and candid in expressing his motivations, in the now infamous ‘Elliot Rodger’s Retribution’.
He’s the true “Alpha Male”; it’s women’s fault they didn’t find him attractive; “it’s an injustice [his not getting fucked]”; he’s the “supreme gentleman” (aka Nice Guy); women are things to be possessed… and if we fail to recognise these ideations as truths, Rodger will annihilate us, for we would surely have had more sex than him, or been an unpliable member of the wrong gender…
This is what Rodger flatly and plainly tells us, and it is littered with precisely the kinds of misogynistic ideations we see time and time again, online; the kinds that feminists have been warning us about for years.
And the responses from the usual quarters?
There are other factors the feminists are excluding – This is the stub, the base from which the other deflections grow. Yet you’d be hard pressed to get hold of a representative sample of feminists claiming that misogynistic ideations in isolation are the sole cause of misogynistic violence.
Also, we don’t always disregard manifestos in other instances of violence; are we for example, now to treat Anders Breivik’s manifesto as entirely irrelevant to his terrorism? I’m sure this would suit Pat Condell and Geert Wilders fans just a treat, but what about the rest of us? Are we going to measure the significance of a manifesto, or just ignore it?
What he needed was a therapist – Therapy and mental health care in general, are great things, but supporting them doesn’t oblige you to view all incidents of violence as preventable by therapy. Case in point; Rodger had a therapist.
He was probably just autistic or an Aspie – Autism doesn’t necessarily lead to violence, and often doesn’t even coincide with it. If you’re going to go down this road, then please demonstrate how autism is a reliable predictor of killing sprees, or at least save the speculative pseudo-science for another audience. Aspies and Auties have enough crap to put up with without the generation of even more stereotypes. Also; Rodger wasn’t autistic.
“Mr Astaire said Elliot had not been diagnosed with Asperger’s but the family suspected he was on the spectrum, and had been in therapy for years. He said he knew of no other mental illnesses, but Elliot truly had no friends, as he said in his videos and writings.” – Emphasis added.
It’s the general Zeitgeist of the thing… 1984…Orwell! TAKE THE RED PILL!!1! – Please, I’ve had enough.
***
I almost forgot that particularly vile meta-criticism: Feminists are only pointing out the misogyny of Rodger’s manifesto to drive page hits! Outrage bloggers!*
Allow me to reply in kind…
Online misogyny is the stuff of loyal readers – provided you keep online misogynists wanting to like you. If you manage this, without giving enough of your contradictions to wedge them, you’ll have a loyal base, albeit an insular one, quite possibly with a limited future.
Every now and then, you’ll have to throw them a bone, and it will help if you accompany this with cries of victimhood when you’re inevitably criticised for it. In the case of Rodgers, the task is to deflect from the content of his manifesto so that MRAs, and associated haters-of-women, don’t have to relate too strongly with his alleged killings. Because let’s face it; politically, the points of the MRAs and of Rodger are very, very similar.
These are people who deny hating women while simultaneously blaming women for being raped, so you can imagine the cognitive dissonance caused when someone who is essentially one of their number allegedly puts political thought into action through murder.
My own turf, for this particular phenomena of apologetics, is among secular/atheist/humanist types, where people are generally happy to ascribe religious-ideological motivations to the 9/11 hijackers. These are also circles where there is a misogyny problem, and an MRA contingent, and a number of self-serving individuals willing to throw bones.
Now, if you’ve ever considered the manifesto of the 9/11 hijackers, or that of (again) Anders Breivik, or Timothy McVeigh, or a Papal encyclical, or any other political document, as being in any way motivating, you’re rather obligating yourself not to dismiss the content of Rodger’s manifesto out-of-hand. This I think is essentially a good way of spotting which ‘side’ is peddling the bullshit in this matter.
If you were to on the one hand, criticise a Papal decree, or a fatwa calling for violence, and yet on the other, dismiss the misogyny of Elliot Roger’s ‘Retribution’ as immaterial, then you’d be outing yourself as a hypocrite. You’d invite queries into your motivations, if not provide evidence for conclusions to be made.
Sure, it’s highly unlikely that any of the manifestos we’re talking about, in isolation, are entirely responsible for the actions of their proponents, but this isn’t what we’re talking about. What we are talking about is the categorical denial of the role of the manifesto, and in select cases (i.e. where politically convenient).
My assertion is that if not out of pure fear of being attacked by misogynists, then people are dismissing the idea of misogyny as being in any way causal, in order to appeal to misogynists, or to undermine the critics of misogynists for other political or personal purposes. While it may be intellectually dishonest, it is, it has to be confessed, probably a good way for crummy public speakers, and writers, to get gigs.
Some people love that shit.
~ Bruce
* As it happens, my blog posts on the topic have almost always been failures if judged in terms of internet traffic. If I’m supposed to get hits from “outrage blogging”, they are yet to manifest.
I first felt the tidal forces wrought by being flung out of social orbit two or three years ago, when silently, both other persons and myself, went our own ways. Their trajectory sent them in professional directions I can’t say I’d endorse 100%, while I may or may not have been relegated to the status of ‘crazy guy they knew on the Internet’.
For my own part in this, I was getting tired. Tired of passive-aggression, of in-jokes (some poorly veiled), and tired of a few people being too egocentric to realise that no, they weren’t dealing with someone who was gullible, they were dealing with someone who was being charitable; someone who was humouring them, not the other way around.
If I regret anything from this particular period, it’s my lame participation in what passed for some of the humour – which often involved my riffing off of someone else’s bad joke.
All the same, while we were friends, I did get something out of some of them, during what was a difficult time for me, mentally. I don’t know if this admission would injure their egos, or comfort them, and I can’t say I’m particularly worried either way.
If there’s anything I’d be concerned about with them, if I hadn’t put them behind me, it’d be the prejudicial assumptions and leading questions; annoying for me, worse for them if it insinuates its way into their journalism.
The greatest imposture in all of this though, comes from my own faculties – particularly my relative inability to forget things, even small things I don’t much care about. Inevitably something comes along to remind me… like goings on over the past few weeks.
At the very least I wouldn’t be recalling all of these details if I hadn’t been reminded.
It’s been almost two weeks since I mailed this essay off to Ophelia Benson, but I’ve been on holiday in Melbourne sans notebook and passwords for most of the time. You’ll have to forgive me for my tardiness.
There seems to be a trend of late, of people lecturing jurisprudence at people who it is reasonable to assume, have been victims of rape or sexual assault. Notably, it’s often not just “Skeptics”, but “Skeptics” with friends accused of acting up and pestering people sexually (or worse), who engage in this practice.
It’s not that the presumption of innocence is to be suspended, it’s just that the presumption of innocence is often irrelevant to the context these discussions are taking place in, with potentially harmful consequences. I spend 2600 words (including quotes) on the matter over here…
You’ll not likely see him, but he’s there, out the corner of eye during dawn and dusk. He dodges nine-to-five commuters, keeping to gutters and shadow.
You rarely catch Snow in Australia, though he’s present all year ‘round. He gusts through alleyways where litter abounds, He lives under tiles and in cracks in the pavement.
Outside the lamplight at twilight, he watches you, wondering about friends, daylight, and things you take for granted. Mr Snow is hungry for company, for food, for life. Most of all, he just wants what you already have.
Nobody knows how Snow got lost in the grey. So few could, because so few care to think. The prospect is horrible; nobody knows who’s next. Except Mr Snow. He’s seen it before and he sees through you.
Beware shadow-hands reaching from back-alleys. Beware the tendrils of black teasing your brow. Keep an eye on the cracks in the pavement, and don’t write off what Mr Snow can not.
You too could turn grey, white and numb. You too could eat from a bin. The winds that harrow Mr Snow can blow through you, leaving only twilight, garbage and dust.
Creeper makes too much eye contact
He’s a bit too eager to talk to women.
He sits alone in his seat, waving to strangers,
mooching off of common courtesy.
Leaning over he pesters a French couple…
”Are you tourists?”
It’s asked bluntly, with dismissive tone.
Yes, they’re tourists. No, they don’t want to talk to him.
Creeper’s advances are unsolicited.
Creeper’s interests are boring.
Creeper won’t take a hint.
Creeper doesn’t respect boundaries.
Bordertown; ironic waypoint signifying boundaries.
Creeper gets a passenger to sit with;
a captive audience for his indulgence;
a sounding board for the self-centred, banal and inane.
Creeper questions the senior woman’s ethnicity.
Proceeds to lecture her on her heritage.
Explains he’s studied war at University.
Tells his captive he’s a writer.
Creeper paws her shoulder.
Creeper asks about vampires.
Creeper hints at undead conspiracies.
Creeper lectures about “girls” and life decisions.
Sweating and writhing, he looks like Gollum on a bad day,
and as wise as the lovechild of Ed Wood and Alain de Botton.
Senior woman asks “how do you know?”
Creeper doesn’t like the questions of philosophers.
Creeper affects chivalry towards service staff,
lunges at senior woman’s neck for a joke;
calls her beautiful with hands lingering over her chest.
She doesn’t terribly mind.
Creeper got the encouragement he craves.
Creeper will do it all again…
Circling The Abyss 