Saturday 6 May 2017

Pretty Boys in Frocks / Boys in Suits at the Races.

       So, if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck and it looks like a duck...it's not (a Duck)
                                                                                                        
"So, yes, that's him! No, not her!, he's prettier than her! there, that's him, I mean they. Thats they!"
The beautiful one is giggling hard, her phone wobbling  in her hand so that I am looking at a dancing image of a very pretty young women with a placard around her neck, "My body my choice" the placard  says. He/she is surrounded by women, in the middle of the Repeal the Eight march in Dublin.
"Ah" I say, sagely "so,  right, that's him"
"Not him,  they, he says he's they. Told you! he hangs out with the non binary... lesbians, gay boys and like former girls who don't identify as either sex and ...sometimes, traditional girls?"'
She rolls her eyes,
"Yeah, and, he ends up having sex with all the girls anyway."
"Right. The ah dress, darling, wouldn't it kinda put you off. Lovely and all as he is. Speaking as a girl I mean"
"They mummy, they. And no, and even though they is a plural, he has his way with them anyway."
Hmm.
Beauty takes a breath, swells with disdain, incredulity.
"I mean, like, what about the actual gay people, transgender,  transvestite. He, they, wears their clothes, steals their struggle, it's like a game. And we all have have to play.  Or, I mean,  you are judged?"
"Like the emperors new clothes, darling girl. You can't say what you see?"
"Yeah. And besides, he hasn't actually got a womb?  He doesn't seem to know he doesn't have a womb?"

She walks away, swaying like models, like royalty,  in the way she does. She has said all she has to on the subject of they.


                                                      Only Women Bleed....Period.


"And anyway, they were all also, everyone I know, on that march to Repeal the Eight. You have to do that too?"

She turns as she speaks, swivels to face me. Not quite done then.

"It's ridiculous, you're not allowed to say, you don't agree. I don't agree. I don't agree!"


                               And a Working Womb is Required for this Argument....

Yeah, the Beautiful one and her sister don't agree. Abortion is either in or its out. No
half measures for them. A baby is a baby is a baby. No featus, no abortion, no exceptions.
They like to pin me to the wall on this one.  When I'm trying not to think. About that or anything at all.

I am and always have been of the the view that Abortion is a woman's right to choose. Has to be. Full stop, end of story. But the thing is that they are oppositional. They will not be told how to think. Oh, I've told them that they haven't got the remotest notion on this subject.
Not, I intone, until they have undergone the business of carrying a child can they understood why that has to be a conscious choice.
They go at me hot and heavy then about my inconsistency, my illogic,  the shaky ground of my thinking (allegedly).  Oh yeah.
Well darlings, I say, I've said my piece, and them's my words, and we must agree to differ?

Anyway, as a race, we need opposition to counteract our sheeplike tendencies. It may save us even, from aborting babies at twenty weeks, or forcing women to carry the rapists child. Opposition .

                             
                          They doesn't identify with the Human Species (so they doesn't)

I think how hard it is to know what you are, when you're young.  How you should feel in your core as a woman, a man. How you adapt yourself hopefully to the norm. Is fluidity good? Deciding you are they? For the charismatic maybe, the grandstanders, but for the rest of shaky struggling humanity, not so much. We need our boundaries, and there it is.   We are sheep. Once rigidly binary, now agreeing we are they.  How derailing is that? Ho/hum.


                                 
                                             Put down your job and find my....shoes


I am at work before a meeting, lost in a knotty labyrinthine dilemma I must take a position on, go in and answer. The phone flashes briefly. I have switched off the sound, permanently, but its no good.  I'm wired now for the most fleeting flash of a call. Unable to ignore it. I decide to ignore it, but I see it's the boy. It's the boy on his third attempt and I always answer his third attempt. If he troubles himself to persist then it's trouble.

"Yes...what..." My mind so elsewhere.
"Um, yeah, mother, d'ye know... can't find em anywhere, do you know where my shoes are."              
"Huh?"
I can hear rousing male voices in the background, a gang of 'em obviously. In the house.
"Why...what..."
"The Races! I told you we're going to the Races.  And I have my suit on, like, my waistcoat, but my shoes...my shoes aren't anywhere"
I see him standing there in his socks, his version of a suit, grey trousers and waistcoat, as I ponder on the question of the shoes. The boys in the background banter against banging rap music on the sound system, urge him to hurry.
"Um well, so , when did you last have them, I mean on, darling"
"Well, so, last year?  At the Races, last year? With this suit for the Races last year?"
He doesn't clothe himself in anything formal, constraining, for the rest of the year, or submit his feet to shoes.  But by God you have to have them for the Races.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Anyway I have a brain wave then, a recollection.
"The dog darling, didn't the dog eat the shoe? The right shoe, if memory serves. (I'm on fire now)"
"The dog?"
"You must recall how he eat it, and slept with the sole 'til I binned it. He slept on your soul. Hah"
The dog missed the boy very badly when he moved out to college. The shoe seemed to help.
"It's the leather " the boy said back then when I told him. "Not me, it's the leather!"
"No, no darling, it's your sweat infused personal leather he keeps about him. Until you come home."

Anyway, we decide that he should wear his darkest runners, and I hang on listening to them hunting                                                                                                      for the runners, urging him out and away. I have lost my train of thought down the knotty labyrinth. Utterly.

                                             I saw you that day at the Punchestown Races
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
I saw them later on, a gang of boys from the same tribe, as I drove home through Naas, my mind again grappling with the complexity of the question I had not been able to answer. They plucked me out of the brooding mind, tall, bright eyed, the air charged around them as they marched to the Races. Swaggering, open faced boys, ready for anything: girls in thin dresses/high heels, thundering horse hooves, the roar from the tannoy,  the smell of meat frying, trampled grass, horse shit, testosterone.

Oh sweet! sweetest sweet, animal essence of swarming humanity at play at the Races.


1 comment: