Two is too few. More? Too many.

You want the plums. You know you want the plums. I have nothing more to offer you than the plums. Because you’re an evil, life-sucking Cleopatra and you want me to help you spawn your similarly evil maggots. You know in Denmark a father is legally obliged to take 6 months paternal leave for each child born. Six months out of a productive career for each parasite he sires. A man can spend the better part of his life engaged in the creative act, far removed from a conscious appreciation of his biological imperative, despite acting towards it. Women, women lay in wait, with full mercenary knowledge of what they’re about to do and then, unawares, you enter the Moebius strip, Venus fly-trap at the other end of which you are standing in a tuxedo, holding onto your gonads and wondering what to do with your, now essentially useless, cock. Mortgage, kids, family, “the whole catastrophe” as my father would say to Zorba the Greek if they happened to meet. This whole monogamy caper arises from the misperception that children need rearing… I can say, as a scientist in the field, that this is rubbish. Children need fearing, your fear that one day they will grow up to kill you and supplant your authority. Kronos was well aware of this and his solution though inelegantly and incompletely executed was probably the wisest. Old father time knew one thing about time; you don’t get any more. Now I have long thought myself more than a self-replicating automaton. It’s an indulgent delusion, but I indulge all the same. How am I supposed to maintain this fixed-false-belief in the face of babbling, shitting evidence to the contrary? How can I go about writing on the topic of love and lust when I will have the final evidence of the pure utilitarianism of these concepts? I’m not about to say these concepts aren’t well accepted, but it stands to reason that, engaged in tortuous double-speak, I shouldn’t like to disturb my hermetic, self-absorption. That two are too few is a concept of equivocal meaning between the sexes. Cold rationale exposes me as the idiot that I am, with the feminine assertion that as sexual coupling serves the end of reproduction, that sexual coupling is pointless without its end. While my belief that the pleasure of the sex itself is end enough is an idiotic fallacy and proof that I have handed over my masculine intelligence to the passive machinations of ecology. To be outwitted by an insentient natural process is a blow indeed to the side-of-the-argument that believes it is not part of that natural process at all. Tell me this ecology: Why did you not make women with two vaginas joined as a double-ended tube, so that if I had a three kilometre long cock I could penetrate 6000 of the fuckers at once? To return to science, let us consider Charlie Parker. A man who reinvented jazz in his own image, who subscribed to the notion that ”the creative act is our one protection against the ruin of the world” and who injected so much heroin you could have amputated his right leg with a wood-saw and grafted his saxophone to his balls before he realised someone was in the room. I know you’ll agree that this man, a timeless genius, a man who tore out the kidneys of life and fed them to his own asshole, would deserve at least a small harem and to not worry himself with children. Why need he leave a genetic legacy when only one generation later I have no idea who is his progeny but I can hum even his worst recordings, even the ones with symphony orchestras? Listen here: This man was exploited by two women, dual heads of a familiar chimera, who wanted the same thing, expressed it differently and killed him all the same. If you won’t agree that marriage is a purely feminine device, then at least grant me that pneumonia is one. Doris Sydnor, a doting paragon of wifedom, offering support, warmth and a stable home to which a jazzman could return. Chan Richardson, a fiery, whoring, ball of passion and damage, offering inspiration to an unhinged genius. I want you to tell me that you would have been better off had he not been engaged to both. I want any of you fuckers to tell me that his creative endeavours, against which we retain the soil of the end of the world, might have been worth risking at the hands of a malicious homemaker. I have a flowchart for all this, genius is at its centre and death at its bottom, two parallel streams converge on death but commitment to one stream bypasses the central outcome.  I know you want to breed, I just don’t know why. I tried to communicate with a 26 year old girl once and all I could hear was the system of levers and pulleys in her head tipping her off to the inescapability of the shrivelling of her (and my) favourite organs. It was like talking to a beagle that’s seen a chorizo in your hand. You and I know full well that as soon as you go to sleep the beagle is plotting the heist, and even where this escapes him, his loyalty to you is really loyalty to the sausage. He doesn’t care that you were saving that sausage for later either, or that it was going to form part of an elaborate Italian dish. I, and many other men, wish we could forget about lust and concentrate on the important stuff, you know, art and science. But I go not out on a limb to say that these are expressions of the same. And all I needed to know, was that Charlie Parker was not a natural talent, but through persistence produced works of genius, is true. Yet he was harried to the grave by a pair of banshees scrabbling for his plums. And under the exhausting weight of potential I labour with limited time, yet look to a deadline far in advance of my death, when simply writing a witty phrase will not suffice as a reason to miss a family dinner or avoid nappy-changing and instead of labouring patiently I work urgently trying to squeeze my own life into its first quarter. Darwin had a family; did he have to worry about this shit? Casanova certainly did not and now we consider the life he led a work of genius of its own. The creative act is the sexual act sublime and with a pencil. Listen, if the cost of one orgasm is an inescapable and time-consuming obligation that will eventually produce my impatient replacement, count me the fuck out. But then I will be a Darwin with a forgotten Casanova’s past or only the latter.