Tag: Hikkikomori

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So Happy Together

So Happy Together

Come all you fair and tender maidens
Take care with how you court young men
They’re like a star on a cloudy morning
First they’ll appear, and then they’re gone

Have you ever watched those late-night dating shows, with the sleazy host who dances and leers at all these dancing women and urges you to call this number to meet them? The girls take turns preening in front of the camera and saying stuff like, “Hi, I’m Carmen, and I like hang-gliding and scuba, and I’m looking for a guy who can be sensitive but also has a great sense of humor.” And makes a lot of money.

Crass and demeaning, and depressing, isn’t it? They say that 17% of all newlyweds had sex on their first date. Well, here they all are, the 17%, giggling and wiggling and flexing their abs, just begging you to call. They want to meet people. They want to have fun. They are all employed.

They’ll tell to you some loving story
They’ll tell to you that they love you best
Straight away they’ll go, and they’ll court another
That’s the love they have for you.

I don’t mean to be sarcastic with that last remark. These women hold jobs. Good jobs. They get paid well. They can afford nice clothes and makeup. They work hard all day, and they want to party all night. One day, they probably want to settle down and have 1.2 children. They want that child to grow up quickly, with privilege and ambition, so they can get right back to hang-gliding. As soon as the baby can walk, their mothers are back on the run, taking part-time work, exercising, taking classes. Before you know it, the child’s in day-care and mom is back on the daily commute, along with dad. Whoever gets home first makes dinner.

Presuming it works out…. if the guy they’re doing this with turns out to be annoying or stupid or unfaithful, they won’t hesitate to divorce him.

How far we are from “fair and tender maidens”, a mournful, nostalgic song if I ever heard one. Fair and tender: pretty and sensitive. The tragic tone of this song could only be due to the fact that the rejected girl’s entire life was doomed because of the infidelity of her boyfriend. He’s off courting another—she gets to grow old in dire poverty, or move to London and become a prostitute. He doesn’t care if it’s her or some other girl: they’re all alike to him. He doesn’t need her. He’ll go join the army, get a new job, or run off and fend for himself.

Update that song to the 1940’s and you get the girl who gets pregnant out of wedlock. Update it to the 1950’s and you get the devoted secretary who finally realizes that her boss is never going to leave his wife. But update it to the 1960’s or 70’s and the song no longer makes sense. Though it will be a long time before she can make as much money as he does, she can move around, find a job, enroll in a different university, whatever. She won’t be pregnant because, maybe, she was smart enough to get on the pill before she started having sex with him. Maybe she’s experimented a little, with drugs, or alternative lifestyles.

And the 1990’s? Girrrrls. Tattoos. Attitude. Self-defense training. Articles in Harper’s called “Who Needs Men?”.

Some people find it tempting to think that those “fair and tender maidens” had it a lot better than our “girrrls”. In our own nostalgic fantasies, she did get married, and her husband provided for her and never strayed, and they grew old and happy together and went to church twice every Sunday and never questioned authority because God appointed governments and magistrates to restrain the evil-doers.

On the other hand, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the adult female population of London in the late 19th century consisted largely of prostitutes—women who, for various reasons, didn’t fit into our nostalgic fantasy, and had to go fend for themselves, and because they were denied access to any meaningful employment, fell into the only vocation left available to them. And as for all those “faithful” husbands and fathers… there has to be a big population of customers to sustain that many prostitutes.

Some progressive social thinkers nowadays question whether men even have a role in our society anymore. Women don’t really need them. They can go to university, get jobs, buy homes and cars, and raise children by themselves. They can decide not to have children at all. In Japan and Europe this process is already accelerating with bewildering speed—more than 50% of adults live alone in some communities. In Iceland, 65% of all children are born out of wedlock. In Japan, more and more women are refusing to marry. Many industrialized western nations have a negative birth rate.

Tonight the light of love is in your eyes
But will you love me tomorrow?

If these thinkers are right, and the social and economic forces in our culture are driving men and women into greater and greater independence, it seems likely that more and more people are going to be spending more and more time alone in the future. I think of that guy in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, living in some weird all-white apartment, eating his breakfast, watching the time warp, growing old, and dying, and being reborn as a cosmic fetus. You should see it if you get a chance. It may well be our destiny.

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Bad Kitty. Bad, Bad Kitty

I just read in the Toronto Star that an elderly man who was missing for four and half years was finally found. Just think– missing for four years! His family must have been absolutely thrilled to find him.

Except that, well, he wasn’t feeling very well when they found him. In fact, he was sicker than a dog. He was so sick, there wasn’t much of a pulse. A long time between beats. They’re still waiting for one.

When he went missing, they must have hunted high and low for, well, at least fifteen minutes. Actually, there was no “they”. Nobody looked for him, because if anyone had looked for him, they would have found him right where he could almost always be found. He died in his own home.

In his bedroom.

No one noticed. For four years. No one missed him. No one wondered why he didn’t answer the phone anymore. No one checked to see why they didn’t get their usual Christmas card or anniversary phone call. No one, so it appears, even wondered why he hadn’t paid his heating bills.

I guess he must have lived in some isolated cabin somewhere, deep in the woods, far from any cell phone service.

Somewhere about two blocks from his wife and daughter. In the same town. Just down the street.

The body was not– how shall we put this delicately?– “pristine”. In fact, the body wasn’t there at all, which leads you to wonder what the police meant when they said they found “a body”. What they found were pieces of bones and stuff. Actually, the stuff was all gone. But they did find the bones. And the skeletons of a few cats. I don’t know if they used carbon dating or what, but it has been established that the cats died after the man did, of starvation, but not, as it were, before exhausting all the protein available in the house. Bad kitty.

Of course, some things are better left unspoken. And I’m sure the RCMP forensics laboratory has better things to do with their time, but I really think we ought to investigate the shady activities of those cats. Consider this: a few years ago, a man in London, Ontario, was given a fine for trying to drown some puppies in a creek. Now, if we are going to regard humans killing animals as criminal activity, why shouldn’t the reverse be true as well? And seeing as there is fairly compelling evidence here that those cats may have exceeded the bounds of feline decency, I think there ought at least to be an investigation. No one is advocating the death penalty here– but I think that at least a hefty fine is in order, if only as a deterrence.

Mostly, I am moved by the fact that a man can lay dead in his home for four years. He was a baby once, crying for his mama’s tit, gurgling and giggling at his grandpa’s faces. He was a toddler, exploring and playing and stretching and dreaming of noises and flashes, and a young boy on a tire swing seeking adventure, and a youth impatiently wishing he could be grown up, and a man going off to war because it seemed honorable, and an apprentice learning his craft, hoping to be a success. He met a girl, was charmed, and he courted and maybe even loved, and in the first flush of marriage was possibly an attentive, caring husband whose arrival home from work everyday brought laughter and joy into the house. He had children whom he bounced on his knee and sang little nonsense songs to. Maybe he changed jobs, moved to different places, tried to learn new trades, to provide for his family, to pay for the rare pleasure of a trip to the lake and an ice cream cone for everyone. He bought his first car, got cheated, smashed his fist on the hood in anger and learned painful lessons of commerce. He must have had friends, and relatives, with some of whom he was not on speaking terms. He probably had some disappointments, some bitter defeats. Perhaps he started drinking, and grew sullen and unpleasant. His friends died, moved away, disappeared, argued with him, and stopped coming to visit, and stopped inviting him to join them for a drink or two and checkers down at the Legion. His own former wife and daughter lived two blocks away and never came to see him, not once, in four years, not at Christmas, not on his birthday. He must have spent a long time in his room, watching the world go by on a blue glass tube, hearing the noises of the outside world, and believing that his life had completely unwound itself and the only thing to wait for was hiding for him, behind the grimace of a cat.