DEAD FLY (SQUASHED), AND SOME ACCIDENTAL DOGGING

Or: How I’m not wasting time; I’m curating a much needed cultural experience in the form of a Museum of Terrible First Dates

Hello my lovely subscribers! I’m still in the wilds making art with a bunch of crazy people so here’s a post from deep in the archives. It’s about being a single person in a world made for couples… Hope you enjoy it!

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A couple of years ago, while I was wandering around Zagreb with an atrociously bad haircut, I happened upon the Museum of Broken Relationships.

Finally, I thought. A cultural experience I can relate to.

The museum houses a varied collection of artefacts, all of them relics of failed love affairs. There’s a toaster that a man stole from his ex-wife. An axe with which a woman turned her ex-lover’s furniture into firewood. Letters, postcards, records, a house key, a collection of sex toys, a door, a bicycle, a doll, a wig, a mousetrap. Each displayed with its accompanying tale of confounded romance and blighted ardour. Stories of intense, deep, and passionate love that should have lasted forever, but ultimately died in a storm of rage, recrimination and regret.

I spent a very long time in this museum. Partly because the exhibits were interesting, but mainly so I could watch the horror unfolding on the faces of all those people who were visiting the museum with their beloved life partners.

“Love dies,” is this museum’s message. “But it does not simply die. It breaks, it shatters, it explodes into a million painful shards that you can never fully extricate from under your skin. The love you’re feeling now will one day transmogrify into rageful contempt and bitter despair. So enjoy it while it lasts! And buy a t-shirt in the gift shop on your way out. Or at least a pencil. You’ll want some small souvenir of the day you destroyed your relationship with your insistence on doing absolutely fucking everything together.”

As a deeply single person, who at the time of my visit was sporting a haircut that made me look like a retired Soviet javelin thrower, and therefore likely to remain single for a long while yet, this experience entertained me immensely. I loitered near a voodoo doll that had been stabbed in the face with long silver hatpins. And I watched as close, loving couples slowly realised they had made a terrible mistake.

I raised an eyebrow as spouses awkwardly disentangled their fingers from one another’s grasp. I smiled as they stopped making eye contact, and worry clouded their individual brows. I chuckled as they drifted apart, each turning down a different hallway. Alone.

It’s not that I wish a devastating break-up on anyone. Well, not on everyone. It’s just that it’s such a terrible idea to visit this museum with a person you’ve promised to love forever. It’s very difficult to maintain your belief in endless devotion and felicity when you’re standing in front of a giant dented dildo and reading a story about how some man was secretly fucking everyone in his fiancée’s book group and she only found out when he spoiled the ending of The Time Traveller’s Wife for her.

Stupid place to take your partner. But even so, there they all were. The couples. I pictured them in their matching hotel bathrobes earlier that morning, googling ‘things to do in Zagreb’ and deciding that a museum commemorating the annihilation of love’s hopes and dreams would be super fun and romantic.

It’s not entirely their fault. Virtually every tourist attraction is designed to be super fun and romantic for couples. Still, the clue’s in the name, you silly smug bastards.

And what about the rest of us? What about those of us who don’t wander the world with our hands constantly clasped in someone else’s sweaty paws? Where’s our quirky sightseeing attraction?

That’s when it occurred to me that what the world really needs is a museum of terrible first dates.

And I am just the person to curate such a museum.

It wouldn’t even be any trouble to source items to display. I could simply scrounge around in my handbag.

The inaugural exhibit (and quite possibly the worst date anyone has ever been on) would be FLYER FOR OPEN MIC POETRY NIGHT, AT WHICH MY DATE WAS PERFORMING. There is really nothing worse than having some unwashed man rant at you in a silly voice for half an hour about his lactose intolerance and how the cisheteropatriarchy makes it impossible for him to get an erection.

I wouldn’t mind so much if any of it fucking rhymed. It’s enough to make your vagina clamp shut forever.

Still. Lesson learned. I would certainly never knowingly date a poet again, partly because of the poetry, (and partly because of the erections,) but mainly because I’m a great believer in my dates buying me a drink once in a while. A poet will never buy you a drink. But he will lecture you for hours about how the reason he won’t buy you a drink is that he’s such a great feminist. Really, you should be grateful that he’s dismantling the patriarchy by letting you buy your own Merlot while he sneaks around the pub draining the dregs out of glasses abandoned on tables by all the smart people who left before the poetry started.

Further notable exhibits on display in my museum would include: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FRIDGE MAGNET, BAG OF DOG POO, MAN’S SHOE (WITH CAT SICK), TUBE OF VEET HAIR REMOVAL CREAM, and ACCOUNT OF SOME ACCIDENTAL DOGGING. And maybe there would be room to also include DEAD FLY (SQUASHED), with its accompanying text describing the scene in a trendy gastropub where I used a menu to violently kill a large bluebottle that had landed on the wall right next to my date’s voluble head. My date stopped talking about motor sports long enough to scream and leap out of his seat in a panic. I laughed maniacally, and unattractively. The fly perished beneath a description of the spicy Cajun potato wedges. As dead as our future hopes and dreams.

To be honest, even seeing these pieces collected together would probably not be enough to put me off dating. It might even encourage me to do it more. Because what’s the alternative? That I sit down and get to work on the Greatest Novel of the Century (working title)? Ah-hahaha. Ahhh-hahahahaha. No. Let’s invent a museum instead.

Exhibit 10,101: Dead Fly, Squashed.