It's been done

You would have thought (he said) that after several decades of such self-defeating nonsense I would, by this time, have wised up.
I don’t like the wised up, she said, I don’t think anyone says wise up.

He conceded that she had a point, and felt a brief but very definite stab of self-loathing at having used the phrase. Had he ever said Wise up before? He couldn’t recall it. But maybe he had. Maybe he’d gone through life spraying out wise up’s willy-nilly. Did he say willy-nilly a lot too?

Oh for God’s sake, she said. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask yourself, you keep coming back to this circular argument you have with yourself about whether your thinking is, as you so often say, old hat.

(Did he?)

The fact remains that middle aged men worrying about their neuroses are, as you so often say, a dime a dozen, and there were far too many yous and yours’s in that last sentence for my liking. You’re infecting me with your self-obsession. I don’t like it.

(surely not, he’d never said old hat, had he? And a dime a dozen? )

And (she continued) middle aged writers self- deprecatingly fronting their neuroses up for all to see and then, what’s worse, writing about it as if they expect a pat on the back and a review in the Observer that praises them for their “lacerating honesty” are commoner still. Come on, give me five hundred words on how you want your youth back, maybe a few lascivious phrases describing the waitress. How your vitality’s ebbing away.

This was a fair point. Only yesterday he’d written five hundred words of thinly disguised nostalgic nonsense about his school days. This was awful.

And, what’s worst of all, what really grinds my gears (you got that from Family Guy, by the way, nobody says grinds my gears, just…nobody does) are the middle aged male writers who invent a female interlocutor as if they are shrugging and saying, but of course, I’m male, I’m probably a bit past it. It’s only right that I should tear myself to pieces this way. God forbid I should understand this myself, I have to do it via some proxy, and that proxy has to be female because ooh unattainable female, ripping apart your masculine myths. It’s tedious, it bores me, as you would say to tears.

(a fair cop, he probably did say that, a fair cop too, for that matter).

Right, so, you’ve all the answers. As one would expect under the circumstances. So, genius woman, and, by the way, can you give me some credit for imagining up a scathing intelligent woman? I mean, blokes my age are supposed to go mooning after under-graduates, are we not? what do I do?

He wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, but there may have been a tinge of sympathy in her imaginary expression.

There’s not a lot you can do, I’m afraid. The stories of men like you have been told a thousand thousand times over.

You mean a million.

It’s dramatic emphasis, moron, if you ever got out of your bloody arch middle class mannerisms you’d know that. The fact remains is that you are, have always been, and will always be, deeply unoriginal. Third rate. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You had a couple of good ideas once and did precious little with them. It’s only your monstrous sense of entitlement that’s got you this far. You have nothing new to say, and the sooner you accept that and go and take up, oh, I don’t know, what is it you lot do when you have a mid-life crisis? Have an affair?

That’s a bit of a cliché.

Says the man who’s publically interrogating himself. It’s been done, that’s the truly annoying part. What makes you think you’re so special that when you do it, it’s somehow interesting?

I don’t know (he was beginning to feel a little more confident now) maybe do it whilst driving in a speeding car, over a cliff, whilst being chased by gangsters? I don’t think that too many people have combined scouring of the soul with action sequences. Outside of films that is. Or you could tell me how rubbish I am whilst we have a kung fu fight over a bomb I’m trying to defuse which will, if it goes off, destroy the long-lost children I’ve only recently been reunited with.

What children?

No idea, but it’s certainly something.

If you could cut out the exploration of the soul part then you might be on to a winner. But (she said, not unkindly) I think it would probably be for the best if you gave the whole thing up as a bad job. You are, essentially, applying glitter to a shit. The whole premise is flawed, it was a bad idea from the start. You knew when you started this though, didn’t you?

I did.

So what do you get out of it? You know it’s terrible.

It may be, but it’s something, but thanks, this has clarified things a little, I think. It’s helped me (he paused, and said, with relish) get my ducks in a row. I mean, I really feel I’ve (oh god, this felt good) achieved closure.

Closure? Are you shitting me? I’ve barely begun telling you what a failure you are, wait a minute, what are you doing, are you pressing publish? What do you think you’re doing pressing publish? Do you think you’re being clever or something? We’ve established that you’re not. We’ve established that you’re