One that got away

Not just every so often, but often enough that it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore, articles get commissioned and then never printed. This piece was below was supposed to go in Electronic Beats ‘Back to the Future’ issue. They were looking for “thought-provoking” articles that reflected the decade we’re just about to leave. I gave them this. “This” wasn’t quite what they were looking for. They told me they’d illustrate it with some lovely rabbits. That would have been nice and probably a lot better than what I came up with.

Conor Creighton asks if the greatest development of the last decade has been our increased talent for solo sex, does this mean the beginning of the end for mankind?

Generation Masturbation

If you’re uncertain about your future as a human, take a train out to the countryside and spend an afternoon listening to the rabbits. The average rabbit conversation goes a little something like this:

Rabbit 1: Hey, have I seen you round the warren before?

Rabbit 2: No, I just got in today. It’s a really swell place you’ve got here.

Rabbit 1: Indeed, that it is… so, hmm, do you want to have sex?

Rabbit 2: Super! Just give me a second to put my bags somewhere.

Rabbits, like humans, are passionate creatures. Put a bunch of long ears together in the morning and by teatime their number will have trebled. It’s what rabbits do. They breed until there’s more rabbit than pasture, then some nasty manmade virus comes along, and quicker than you can say ‘rabbit stew’, they’re back down to just one cottontail sat in a field practising pick-up lines on the sheep. The sheep don’t fall for charm, and just bleat away in ignorance

Just like rabbits after a couple of warm days in the sun, we humans have also been overbreeding. In 1940 there were a little more than 2 billion of us; by 2050, our population is set to pip 11 billion. We’re simply way too many, and it’s getting cramped in here. The ecosystem is getting tired of our noise and our griping. Something needs to give but it won’t be some nasty, gut wrenching disease that finally does us in, it’ll be our expectations and our serious habit for wanking.

Love, in the classical romantic sense, is the search for our self. To fall in love with a stranger is entirely based upon falling in love with yourself. Keats described it as, “two souls with a single thought”. That single thought being, ‘me’. This kind of relationship’s a new thing. The idea of selecting a life partner who you actually loved hit Europe about 250 years ago. Before that, mama and pappi selected your other half based on economic considerations and hard proof that they weren’t a first cousin. That proof often wasn’t verified until an unfortunate and extremely ugly child arrived into the home.

The logical next step in the development of human relationships, now of course that we’ve mastered the art of falling in love with ourselves through others, is to do away with the shared element. It’s time to just fall in love with ourselves on our own. Which in a nutshell, means people masturbating more, not producing babies and the human race snuffing it in a couple of hundred years or less. And the ecosystem can just sit back and watch it happen.

On top of our masturbatory habits, we’re not helping ourselves with our expectations. We’re the pickiest generation yet. If you think about it, most people who live in cities are too busy for relationships. We can’t take Berlin as exemplary because well, it bucks most social trends and most of you probably only know rush hour in reverse, on your way home from a club falling asleep on the poor commuters. But London, now that’s a city. In London there are more registered dating site members than actual Londoners. You might see that as a sign of the enduring power of love, but I’d look on it more as symbolic of a city chasing its own tail, hopping from one half-assed fling to another in the hope of finding the answer to all their dreams inside two lunch dates. People are too independent to compromise. And that’s the gift our generation has given the world.

Our parents were all about moulding. ‘Your father was an itinerant drunk when I met him and, yes, after twenty-years he’s still a drunk, but at least he’s housebound.’ We just don’t have that kind of time to invest in someone if they don’t meet expectations by date two. And with all this lack of compromise spreading like wildfire, it leads us back to masturbation and the eventual extinction of our species. We won’t give up on reproducing because we get turned off sex, rather we’ll give up on reproducing because we’ve no time for ‘tell me about yourself’ conversations.

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian thinker. He’s to conventional philosophy what Peaches is to politesse. In time he’ll be remembered for remarks he made about Hitler not being violent enough, but he might also be remembered as the man who asked, “What if sex is only masturbation with a partner?” Doesn’t that mean the person you share your bed or backseat with is little more than a surrogate fist or finger?

The greatest change in sexual mores over the last decade has been the gradual acceptance of masturbation. It’s become as legitimate an after-work activity as hitting the gym or attending a life-drawing workshop. People can talk about it and do it free from shame in a way that’s never existed before. It’s a product of our own progress. The final step to complete self-sufficiency and the final solution for the human race.

We’ll no longer have a need for each other when, at heart, we know that we do things best on our own. And it’s only a matter of time before sex, involving someone other than yourself, will be about as old fashioned as using leeches in surgery.

We’re like little islands. A society of selfish wankers, and that’s the legacy this generation will leave behind. To think that our path would differentiate from animals is the greatest deception humans ever sold. We’ve no more reason than them to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. In the same way that Myxomotosis wipes out rabbits the masturbation epidemic will eventually cull our numbers too. And one day, not so far into the distant future, all that’s left of the human race will be a few lonely souls in the grey corners of cities holding on tight to their computer screens whispering ‘I love you’ into the gloom.

Solitary Confinement

This is a piece about the Aran Islands I did for Electronic Beats. They’re based in Berlin but the Bernard Shaw pub in Dublin somehow manages to get copies distributed to them. As ever, Steve Ryan on the photos.

Dogs and cats have an important role to play in the formation of society on an island with less than 180 inhabitants.They swell the numbers and fill gossip gaps when the two-legged animals run out of conversation. Inis Meain is the least populated of the Aran Island archipelago on the West Coast of Ireland, and right now all talk is of a cat called Obama who is pitch black and has a propensity for running away.

Obama is Michael’s cat. The locals gave it to him, because he’s North American and the cat appeared during the US elections, but also as a round about way of saying well done for toughing it out over winter. Michael’s been on the island eight months. The house he rents is famous for being a draught trap. Over Christmas he slept on the couch in front of a blazing fire and four “useless heaters”. But Michael knew exactly what he was getting himself in for when he relocated; so too did Niamh who swapped redbrick suburban Dublin for a smoke-damaged trailer and Lizzy who gave up Stockholm for a cottage that only gets a break from the wind when a tsunami passes through. Dropping clean off the face of the planet is a comfortable decision but you could think of a hundred more hospitable places to do it than on Inis Meain.

The island is sectioned into tiny, stonewalled fields, each with their own name. When it rains – every time you look up – the water polishes the stones and the island looks like an upturned whale belly rather than the place a person might call home. There is one shop and one pub on the island. When open, the pub doesn’t close until you decide, but if it’s just you drinking with only the beer mats and the ashtrays for company that won’t be too late.

“When I arrived I was determined to get to know people by going to the pub every night,” says Michael, “The owner has opened up just for me, served me a drink, locked up and then dropped me home on a few occasions.” You come for the solitude and stay for the service, I guess. Micheal was, and still is, a stockbroker. He replaced the trading room floor in Toronto for a linoleum kitchen on the island. When his boss agreed to his request to work from home for a while, Michael asked if the location of that “home” mattered. His boss said no. Michael sold up, packed a bag and was gone. Niamh is in a different world to Michael.

While Michael is a mild curiosity to locals who don’t understand how twenty hours at a computer could constitute a day’s work, Niamh is an absolute enigma. A middle-aged, eloquent woman who occupies a wreck of a caravan and drifts around the island surviving on rolling tobacco and giving precious few clues away. Niamh has worked as a ship’s cook in the Caribbean, Spain and off the coast of Africa. She gets by in Spanish, German and the island language, Irish, but all the locals get out of her are mumbles.

On an island no bigger than an airport the goings on in your day-to-day life is everyone’s business but your past is yours to bury. Lizzy makes movies. She’s been living on the island two years but has been coming there on and off since 1996. “I decided to live in heaven but go to hell,” she says summing up her decision to run her film company from her kitchen and make the odd dart into Europe to drum up business. “Life is very present here, existential.” Lizzy put her neck on the line by documenting the locals in documentaries but rather than exclude her the depictions endeared her to locals who know call her an islander.

They don’t like blow-ins on Inis Meain is what the ferrymen will tell you before you land. And up until quite recently they never spoke English to the daytrippers or the botanists who came ashore to annoy them with questions about the lack of doctors and trained professionals on the island. ‘What do you do if someone has a heart attack?’ ‘Sure we give them a whack on the head.’ The funny thing about a life of solitude on a small island is that the isolation only exists beyond the threshold, once you step over that small beam, you’re on show in front of the toughest audiences you’ll ever meet, who will coddle you for your honesty and shun you for any malevolence. Or to put it in the language of the animal-friendly islanders, “A dog is only allowed to bite someone once.”