Bi guy, 62, very open-minded dog

I saw this dating ad on TV and I thought, how nice, a fellow creature who won’t look down on you.  Pets can be picky, but one dog at least won’t snarl.  Then I was disappointed.  On the next line, the word lover was waiting to pounce.  The bi guy, 62, was an open-minded dog lover. 

It was meant to be reassuring.  You can trust someone who keeps a pet.  Daters, like everybody else, are looking for people they can trust.  They often specify genuine.  I’ve even seen Status no problem, just be genuine.  It doesn’t matter if your intended mate is married, as long as you can trust them.  But however genuine another man’s wife turns out to be with you, she is not being very genuine with him.

Lover and love are two words that don’t often appear on dating sites, unless they relate to a pet.  You don’t want to put people off, especially if you’re looking for love.  Of course, it’s usually more to do with fun.  It’s also pretty mercenary.  I like Must have own house and car.  It does make physical meetings easier, so it’s partly practical, but whoever posts this could sound like a money-grubber.  To tell the truth, on-line daters count pennies as much as penises.  They don’t write own house and car.  They put ohac instead.  And gen, not genuine.  No tws = don’t reply if you don’t want sex.  They abbreviate to save the credits on their account.   Think about it, though.  If you have your ohac and want to impress an f, m, cd, xd, tv, tg or ts, too many abbreviations might just look stingy. 

There must be people out there who are looking for love.  OK, it was just a thought. But there are people, apparently, who believe in ‘forever.’  What else can ltr mbm mean?  I saw this the other day.  Usually, the ad will run: text chat mbm (maybe more).  That’s where the ohac come in.  But what more is there after an ltr (long-term relationship)?  Marriage?  Exchanging smutty videos till we die?  One day, hopefully quite soon, I will stop having thoughts.

Before I leave you – no, I’m not dumping you today, or dying – a final word on pets.  There are people who let their dog, or hamster, watch them make love.  Watch, not join in.  Perhaps some people insist.  Sit!  I expect a dog would show more interest than a hamster.  A pet could also help if things went wrong.   I read in the news that a couple got stuck during sex.  

Offending your fan base

Offending your fan base presupposes fans.  Once you’ve got them, don’t let them go.

In Adelaide, there was a well-known journalist on a leading daily paper. This is a long time ago.  He had his own column where he commented on all sorts of things.  He could do what he liked.  He’d been popular for decades, especially with middle-aged women.  To tell the truth, what he wrote seemed pretty bland to me.  Maybe that was why he was popular.   

His admirers tended to be the old girls along the foothills, where the polite people lived.  In their letters to the paper, they regularly agreed that he wrote beautiful prose.  Whether he did or not is beside the point.  They said he did.  Most of what he wrote had some resonance with the older generation.  This was natural.  He was getting on himself.  He wasn’t just courting the older reader.  He wasn’t 19, flirting with Aunt. 

Still, I’m not sure why the old girls liked him so much.  Perhaps he reassured them.  They thought someone understood them.  Perhaps they just liked him because everyone else did.  He was very easy to read.  Anyway, his articles were the main reason they opened their newspaper in the morning.

For me, the most interesting thing about him was the manner in which he folded.  It was a kind of literary suicide, if not a conscious one.  He may have been complacent.  He didn’t see it coming. 

The old girls of Adelaide were picking up their paper, as they usually did, from the driveway or the garden, where the lad had thrown it; they were looking at the headlines, as they usually did, before turning to their favourite column.  What was it about today?  The shape of women’s bodies.  

He hadn’t done that before.  Something didn’t feel right.  Again, it all seemed pretty bland to me.  He had just set down, in his beautiful prose, the opinion that women of a certain age should not wear jeans, in particular the tight sort that teenagers wear.  They should show a bit of leg.  The naked leg, or even one in stockings, was better for an older woman.  He himself preferred the actual leg.

We will never know what triggered that article.  He probably saw an old girl in tight jeans on the bus into town or just popping around to the shops, and then wished he hadn’t.  We’ve all done that.  It’s not something you would imagine, is it, like a poet?  His mistake was to put his thoughts down in print.  He never said that middle-aged women have lumpy bodies.  He didn’t need to.  And now ladies knew that he looked at their legs.  He was suddenly a kind of pervert or at least someone who had grown a bit senile, a writer who had gone on writing too long.  None of his old fans were flattered that he noticed what they wore, at least not the ones who wrote in to complain.  No one defended him.

He retired, or the paper pushed him.