Sex and the Single Writer

So I’m home alone and about to go into the self-indulgent, self-pitying pre-cathartic isolation that I resort to from time to time and – having finished all my “House” and “Two and a Half Men” DVDs – I have decided to try a new series, “Californication”, because I read somewhere that it involves a writer.

It’s Season One and before the pilot episode is finished it feels like the Universe is playing some sick joke and someone thinly disguised my life and made a series out of it – I’m now officially hooked. The thing with being a writer is that you spend so much time summing people up, categorising them, essentially type-casting them for storage and future use that there is little time for any continuous self-assessment. You spend a career dedicated to creating characters and assessing people as character types, that you begin to think that you are as, one young woman (or several, in fact) put it to me, some sort of “god”, someone above definition or characterisation.

There are moments however, and they usually occur – as is perhaps poetically just – through some encounter with creative work undertaken by someone else, that you see yourself and how fucked up you are and these are infinitely humbling. I’ve come to realise that I like the three shows listed above because I see something of myself in Gregory House, Charlie Harper and Hank Moody, the latter in particular. Were I to undertake a comparative review of the three characters, I would title it something in the vein of “The Return of the Byronic Hero”, which means in a non-fancy way that all three are colossal fuck-ups, as I am wont to be from time to time.

Of course within that ‘recognition’ there is the tacit acceptance that I am increasingly subjecting myself to categorisation as a type, and it doesn’t matter that is it is this lofty, darkly, romantic type, it is still a damn type and as a creator you shudder at the thought of you being typecast in somebody else’s work. Check out the Wikipedia definition of Byronic Hero and you see stuff like “high level of intelligence and perception”, “criminal tendencies”, “sophisticated and educated”, “self-critical and introspective”, “struggling with integrity”, “power of seduction and sexual attraction”, “a distaste for social institutions and norms”, “cynicism”, “arrogance”, “self-destructive behaviour”...all of which describe me to some greater or lesser degree.

So I’m watching Season One of “Californication” and I realise that I am a type. The basic premise of the show is that this blocked up writer with the potential to be brilliant, having produced a brilliant book or two in the past, is going through a shitty phase in his life where he drinks a lot and has sex with far too many women and is alternatively broke or flush with cash, while trying to win back the love of his ex and be a good father at the same time – Moody even has a predilection for black shirts and t-shirts matched with blue jeans. The most heartbreakingly poignant and beautiful line in the show for me is when at the end of one episode, Hank says “My family goes on without me while I drown in a sea of pointless pussy”, because it resonates with me. Not that I’m any fucking Don Juan drowning in a sea of pussy, pointless or otherwise, but from the moment you find yourself sipping on a rum and coke watching two hot women making out on your couch, you’ve got to admit that you’re at least knee-deep in it.

Abstinence is of course out of the question. Writing and sex are intertwined; “creation” and “procreation” possess the same etymological root; the existential statement of the permanence, the reality of creative writing, “the pen is” (the pen exists, is real, is present, a force) is an anagram for “the penis”, and ink (or its latest avatar, pixels) is nothing but a sort of symbolic jism on the white womb of the blank page.

Not that I haven’t tried it, the abstinence thing, because I have and genuinely, but then it becomes a thing and I have to express it and this somehow becomes an appeal for punani, perhaps even on a subconscious level, and then I get some and it feels empty and soulless afterwards and the cycle begins again. And I know why. Sex, the instinct towards it, is a biological imperative, the animal within us but we are not animal, or at least not all animal, and there is a stronger imperative which exists, “a crazy little thing called love”, and while I appreciate and can identify with the enormous amount of amazing T&A that is presented in “Californication” the moment in the show I ‘inhabit’ most completely is Hank reminiscing about time spent with his family and “Rocket Man” comes on, and I realise that I do in fact miss my earth, my wife – despite the tremendous shit we’ve put each other through – and that as utterly bacchanalian as my sex life has been over the past two years I would trade it all for one night spent tracing with my finger the curve of her spine.