I have found myself enlisted in that international army of darkness known as Facebook.
My main impetus for doing this was to promote my live performances; but a side effect is that I’ve been tracked down by a large number of people with whom I attended High School.
I suspected this would happen, of course, but each message from these former companions is received with quite a jolt when I see their greying hair and their line-strewn faces and the special devices to compensate for their ailing bladders.
Some of these people are now married and have children. Again my reaction is one of surprise. How that pimply idiot Graham Kerr can have kids is beyond me: he’s only fifteen years old if I remember correctly.
My friends with children seem happy if their Facebook profiles can be believed. I, on the other hand, am the most miserable bastard on the planet so perhaps I should contemplate putting my gametes to good use instead of flushing them down the toilet every single night.
But alas I don’t see myself being the child-rearing type. I can barely look after my cat let alone a living, thinking, talking child; especially one which consists of a fair proportion of Wringham DNA. It’s bad enough having Wringham DNA inside my body without some of it breaking off and declaring independence.
Thanks to a skin condition and a recently diagnosed latent homosexuality, I don’t actually see myself ever having sex with a woman again before I die. I don’t see it happening post-mortem either if I’m honest. I just don’t think I’m the necrophile’s type.
I think my problem with people who have children, especially all of those Facebookers who apparently couldn’t wait to leave High School in order to start sprogging off, is the unimaginative use of Eros.
That’s exactly it. Unimaginative use of Eros. A human being has a certain amount of creative energy invested in him/her by Nature or God or Whatever. Admittedly, the purpose of this Eros is probably for us to find reproduction appealing but some people also use this energy to paint or to write or to compose beautiful music or to collect and catalogue Kinder Egg toys originating between 1980 and 1990.
Using your eros simply to have children is an unimaginable waste. It’s the sort of behaviour you expect from field mice or haddock or rhesus monkeys. Not from sentient human beings. They’re so proud of it too aren’t they, these parents? “I’ve spawned,” they shriek, “I’m a daddy!”. Big deal, buddy, you’ve accomplished something a bacterium is capable of and unlike a bacterium, you needed to get someone to help you.
They cram their wallets full of photographs and decoupage their office desks with childish scribble. If I, the childless, did either of these things I’d probably be taken to jail.
Having said this, perhaps there is something to be said for expending eros in this unimaginably conventional way. I ran out to the shop today in order to buy chocolate biscuits and all I could find were astonishingly expensive chocolate biscuits packaged in a tube. “Re-sealable!” shrieked the package.
Someone’s eros was responsible for this innovation. I had no interest in resealing anything. I want to eat the entire packet like the biscuit-eating fatty that I am. But because of someone’s astonishing idea I now had to pay £1.50 for the exact same biscuits which last week cost £0.80.
I can’t help but think that if some marketing guy out there had only done what God had intended and put his penis unsheathed into a lady’s vagina and made a baby, this whole resealable tube fiasco could have been avoided.
The moral of this story? If you’re the sort of person who has ideas along the lines of resealable biscuit tubes, have yourself a baby and save the world from your rampant and useless eros. If you’re the sort of person likely to create an artistic masterpiece, tie a knot in it.