trials and tribulations...

The upshot of the trial separation was that I was charged ‘in absentia’ with being the same complete cunt she suspected I was from the very beginning. I was vigorously prosecuted without ever being allowed to take the stand in my defence, found guilty by a judge/jury of one, summarily convicted…and subsequently sentenced to an indeterminate period of singleness. I was not even present when the sentence was carried out, though in all honesty, even had I known about the trial and its inevitable outcome, I doubt whether I’d have been able to mount much of an argument against the complaint anyway. I was a complete cunt; guilty as charged…no question of it.
From my perspective, while the secret trial was going on, I wouldn’t say things were any better or worse as such. We hadn’t had sex, either deliciously passionate with anger or even anaesthetically dull with duty for over a century, so sleeping in separate bedrooms was hardly going to make a difference. Absence and abstinence certainly did not appear to make our distant hearts grow fonder or our respective pink bits itchier. About the only lesson we learned from sleeping apart was that we definitely got a better night’s sleep. It turned out to be a case of he/she who sleeps alone may be alone…but at least they slept.
I was snoozing so well in fact, I’d already decided that at the conclusion of the trial separation, assuming things went smoothly and my wife stopped being insane, I would suggest either continuing to sleep in different bedrooms or at the very least get twin Queen-sized beds. That way we could have perfectly obligatory sex whenever one of us could be bothered going over to the other person’s bed then scuttle back to our own bed for a well-earned rest. I’d even promised myself I would go over to her bed for sex a lot more often than I would ask her to come to my bed for sex too, though of course any decision to visit my wife’s bed for carnal relations was based less on any notion of gentlemanly good-manners by committing to the extensive travel and more on the practical advantages of letting her sleep on the wet spot.
Hey, I said I was a complete cunt; didn’t you believe me?
Just why our sex life had withered on the marital vine so markedly has always been a matter of fierce academic debate. I claim that my wife’s horrendously complex and multi-layered issues of self-loathing, poor body-image and low self-esteem had created a metaphorical lasagne of neuroses through which it was impossible for me to cut. She would probably say I was a lazy asshole with a blunt, rusty knife; both arguments have equal merit.
Now, before I go on I’d just like to say that my wife was utterly gorgeous and I was physically attracted to her from the first moment I laid eyes on her. She was a clone of Sarah Jessica Parker, you know, Carrie from ‘Sex and the City’. And I mean the good Carrie too, the one with the lustrous straight hair and stylish shades, not the tired-looking hippy Carrie with the frizzy hair and windscreen-sized sunglasses. My wife had Carrie’s wonderfully expressive face, she had her fabulous toned legs, her sexily tapered waist and her overly generous breasts…she even had the long, aquiline nose.
When we went out in Tokyo where we lived for a time, schoolgirls would come up to us in the street and ask her excitedly for an autograph. They’d giggle hysterically while my wife signed their ‘Hello Kitty’ diaries, jabbering away in Japanese, oblivious to the fact I could understand what they were saying, most of which centred on how fabulous Carrie looked and how apparently disappointing Matthew Broderick (me) was in real life…

one down...four hundred and ninety-nine to go...

It was perhaps a fitting, final tribute to the under whelming strength and passion of our dying marriage that it took almost nine days before I realised my wife HAD actually left me and moved out.



And I want you to remember this next snippet of information for the moment; she often came home drunk/drug-fucked at 4am, marching into the bedroom holding a garbage bin she’d found somewhere, on which she used to climb and stand unsteadily before yelling “I’m trashed” (which I actually used to think was awfully clever/cute) before falling asleep and wetting the bed (full story later). The reason I want you to remember this salient fact is because SHE LEFT ME !!! And with good reason too; which gives you a glimmer of insight into what sort of special cunt I am.
Now whilst I might not have been the most attentive partner/husband in the world, you’d think that her vanishing entirely without my noticing, the makeover equivalent of her shaving her head and my asking if she’d done something with her hair, showed either a total lack of interest or a total presence of indifference on my part…but to be fair there were excuses.
We had both apparently taken our marital vow to spend the rest of eternity boring each other senseless and systematically extracting the very life-marrow from each other’s being so seriously, that what should have taken fifty years of applied apathy and contemptible familiarity to accomplish…had in fact been done in a mere three-and-a-bit.
And I wish I could look back at the mangled wreckage and say that we just drifted apart, as often happens in marriage, but the fact is we were wrong for each other from the very beginning.
I still remember my wife’s first private spoken words; she poodled up to me at the pub after listening to a terribly clever argument I was having with the small crowd we were in…and when they had all left she leaned in and whispered, ‘You’re a complete cunt,’ after which we went home and fucked up a storm. Initially, the opposition created a delicious attraction, like two magnets obeying some bizarre law of electrosexual-magnetism. Then, not long after the thrill of angrily rubbing ourselves together in the mindless pursuit of orgasm subsided, we got our first reality check. We weren’t magnets…nor even ships eventually destined to pass in the night; I was ‘Titanic’…elegant, stately, and unsinkable…and she was the iceberg…cold, hard and immovable.
Well, not really…but I had fun writing the analogy so I'll go with it for the moment.
A more truthful version might be that from my point of view I was fun personified, a clown on nitrous…and she was the antidote. Of course my wife might remember it differently; however until she writes her own fucking book the world can just take my word for what happened.
You see we’d been having a trial separation for the previous three months, although we were still living under the same roof. She had moved out of the Master Fun Room into the guest bedroom and taken her belongings with.
Now, when I say trial separation, I assumed it was a trial in the sense of it being an experiment; as in a clinical trial where we would compare the respective quality of our lives with and without each other.
My wife on the other hand decided that it was a trial in the sense of it being a jurisprudential ambush; as in a legal trial where I would be accused of a litany of crimes against matrimony…

And for posterity...and perhaps entering in The Buller-Lytton Fiction Contest...

Unquestionably the key to our dramatic success in failing was the almost metronomic consistency with which we were diametrically opposed throughout the course of our relationship. Initially that opposition made for a veritable smorgasbord of personal attraction served with lashings of spirited debate and deliciously angry, passionate sex. I still remember my wife’s first private spoken words; she poodled up to me at the pub after listening to a terribly clever argument I was having with the small crowd we were in…and after they had all drifted away she leaned in and whispered, ‘You’re a complete cunt,’ after which we went home and fucked up a storm.
Of course some time later, upon discovering we were not in fact metal objects rubbing together violently in the mindless pursuit of achieving predestined orgasms in accordance with the immutable laws of electro-sexual-magnetism…but frail human beings looking for just the barest thread of mutual connection…the opposition began to cancel out the previous benefit of our respective personal polarities, so that when added together their sum was eventually zero.

They say everyone has a book inside them; they’re wrong.
Well, maybe everyone does have a book inside them but that doesn’t mean it’s a good book. It’s just something they say; like telling someone who’s just had a bird shit on them that it’s a sign of great prosperity to come.
It’s not; it’s just bird shit.
It’s just what they say to cheer the person covered in bird shit up and prevent them from cutting their own fucking head off.
Anyway, I’ve decided to try and write the book inside me…right here…on TWG…five-hundred words at a time…post by excruciating post…and I’d like you all to critique it for me as I go because I want to know if I’m going to be prosperous or simply covered in my own bird shit, so be honest, forthright…and above all clever with your comments.
And I promise to reward the cleverest comments by plagiarizing them shamelessly, without any credit whatsoever and using them in the book…
Now, from an operational standpoint, the book is in no particular order…except for the words…and I’m not even guaranteeing that.
What this slavering pre(r)amble amounts to is a warning that should you choose to keep reading you’d be wise to bear the following in mind. Although this is not meant to be an historically accurate record of events, I certainly haven't just made it all up…just some; although I can’t remember which exactly.
This story is based on facts, just not the sort of facts you’d be inclined to swear to under oath in court. And the characters are very real, except that they don't actually exist.
Most of the scenarios which follow possess a reasonable probability of having occurred (well…greater than fifty percent...) however they may have been embellished slightly; purely for entertainment…mostly yours…but occasionally just for my own. As the idiom goes, I won’t let a few facts stand in the way of a good story!!
As for the cast of characters, few of them have ever really existed in the normal sense of the word. Many of the characters are an amalgamation of several other people I've met, rather than a complete person in their own right. I have several excellent reasons for using this mechanism, although I’m not particularly convinced about any of them.
Firstly, by practicing this form of human concision, the storyline will be simpler for you to follow; less convoluted, less strewn with unnecessary distractions such as names. By attributing a cluster of real-life personalities, traits and experiences to just one character, I should be able to shed some cumbersome structure from the plot, thereby making this book easier for you to read. Fuck-knows it will be easier for me to write, which is a reward in itself.
Secondly, I have it on good advice, that in the event of any legal action arising from the book, it will be much harder for potential plaintiffs to identify themselves accurately enough to prove a libel has taken place. Actually, it wasn’t so much good advice as it was free advice, from a lawyer friend of mine who specializes in personal injury claims against publicity-shy, multi-national, fast-food chains. Charming man; works out of his car most of the day and sleeps in it the rest of the time.
And lastly but by no means least, I've never actually had the good social fortune to meet anyone in real life whom I consider even remotely interesting enough to stand alone as a character in a book. And that most certainly includes me.
So there you have it. I've tried to be as truthful as possible concerning the pack of lies I'm about to tell you, so don't say you weren't warned.
Right, now that's all been cleared up, I can get back to my book…
Where was I? Oh yes...