Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
You have to wonder, don’t you? Who the fuck finds Tony Abbott desirable? Who? Not my nan, not my friends, no-one I know or am even related to. But then there are very few politicians whom I could honestly say I find desirable. I get the pull / inspiration that some leaders have but Tone is so thick light bends around him.
Ah-ha! My desire is led by an admiration of intelligence, and I guess that’s why I still find Barry Jones so appealing. Stephen Fry is up there too, Van Badham and Leonardo Da Vinci, Nelson Mandela. God, even Russell Brand (though the Booky Wooky title was a definite low point). I don’t necessarily want to bonk all these people (Da Vinci is definitely out! I have standards.) but I desire their company.
I guess it explains my romance with Spider, the Anarchist from my second shared house. Now Spider was a Maths geek (Maths PhD student) and general control freak (weird for an Anarchist but there you go). Sex became a wrestle with a textbook he had in his head…”No, you go there and I do this…” FFS it got really dull really quickly. The final nail in the coffin (or spray of Mortein) was Spider’s need to have conversations while he was on the loo. No, just NO.
But I like the smarts. You know that hypothetical who-would-you-have-at-a-dinner-party, I’d have Desire. Who wouldn’t love Desire, right? People do funny things and sometimes go to extraordinary lengths in the name of Desire – heroic gestures like midnight (and out-of-tune) serenades, through to contorting themselves to fit in to get that approval and sate Desire, to paying for IVF cycles in the hope of having a child, to finding a home, a tribe, to self –harm in a desire for the pain to stop.
The desire for a partner and kids brought me a bucketload of sadness and confusion and some points, including crippling anxiety about choosing the right partner, loads of fun exploring and being in relationships, and some difficult decisions to terminate relationships and pregnancies. I haven’t forgotten to have kids. I have chosen not to have them in circumstances where I’m not happy. My choice, my decisions, my desire and ultimately I live with the consequences (and at times, the what-ifs). Then again I think of Spider, and thank my lucky stars!
Desire’s a weird fucking beastie. For 10 years I chased and saved and scrimped and worked to get a deposit for a house. It was like all my problems and those of the world too (yep even world poverty) would be solved if I could just buy a house. Then I’d find a partner immediately (or maybe he came with the house), and would start producing a tribe of kidlets and then I’d be living the dream happy and all that. Full stop. Forever and ever.
And then, ten years later and I buy a house, right? And it’s this gorgeous old 1930’s weatherboard house that’s been moved and renovated…polished floorboards, gorgeous plasterwork, wood-panelled walls in the foyer…just gorgeous and awesome and perfect and no more for me to do but establish a garden, right? It was relocated to the old Drive-In site in the small country town I lived in then. So half the town had been conceived there (so the tribe of kids was looking good), though the soil was compacted (garden-speak for hard as rock) with flecks of asphalt. And so I spent all my spare time planting trees, trying to compost, building raised veggie gardens, and automatic watering systems, putting in a water tank, and getting it going. After a couple of years of this I realised bloody dreams are very different up close. And they morph.
So now I had the house, I needed half of Bunnings too, and the furniture, and the tools, and, and, and…. and 3 years later I felt like I woke up in the Talking Heads song…”and I say to myself, where is my (fill in the gap)”. I’d chosen this bloody dream and it wasn’t panning out as I had expected it to. Bugger! I had a fat mortgage and was no happier than before. So perhaps I needed a different dream….
So charge your glasses and let me propose a toast. To Desire – that fire in the belly, that impetus to do something, be someone, live something wonderful, who is also a tricky bugger, and a wily dodger. You minx, Desire, you siren, you harbinger of passion and purpose, you’re the one I’ll get off the couch to pursue, the one I’ll get out of bed for, the one I’ll stalk Barry Jones on Facebook for.