The injur'd Lover's Hell
I took the train home from work and met a colleague. He's not a disagreeable man by any means, though a Don Juan with his prettier students. He started talking about L, how clever she is, how attractive and so on. I was lost for words. I couldn't work out whether he knew about my love for her and was baiting me or if he was hinting he was contemplating, or indeed already having, an affair with her.
Oddly, I have rarely felt jealous of her boyfriend, only for example when they have gone away together. I've met him on a few social occasions, he seems amiable, probably rather clever, though with the unattractive yobbish streak endemic in young men. He's short, shorter than L, and slightly chubby, (I on the other hand am tall and skinny, perhaps this may explain her lack of interest in me).
On the other hand, our workplace is well-supplied with attractive young men of her age and I have only to see her chatting gaily to one of them at a party to be overcome by the most murderous feelings. I even think this about men of my age and older; there was one in particular she used to meet for lunch, short, balding, bad at his job and even more pompous than me.
One day you will see me in the English newspapers, which will carry the story of the hideously brutal murder of one of these fools. I shall give myself up to the police, but shall refuse to recognise the bourgeois courts and shall identify myself only as the Swain.
While I'm in splenetic mood, the curses of all the gods on the CEOs and boards of directors of Nokia, Vodafone and O2; between them they have lost me the archive texts from the earliest days of this business, the ones where she used to express real feelings for me. May the scorpion-whipped Erinyes chase them, their whores, catamites and their bastard children for the rest of time.
Oddly, I have rarely felt jealous of her boyfriend, only for example when they have gone away together. I've met him on a few social occasions, he seems amiable, probably rather clever, though with the unattractive yobbish streak endemic in young men. He's short, shorter than L, and slightly chubby, (I on the other hand am tall and skinny, perhaps this may explain her lack of interest in me).
On the other hand, our workplace is well-supplied with attractive young men of her age and I have only to see her chatting gaily to one of them at a party to be overcome by the most murderous feelings. I even think this about men of my age and older; there was one in particular she used to meet for lunch, short, balding, bad at his job and even more pompous than me.
One day you will see me in the English newspapers, which will carry the story of the hideously brutal murder of one of these fools. I shall give myself up to the police, but shall refuse to recognise the bourgeois courts and shall identify myself only as the Swain.
While I'm in splenetic mood, the curses of all the gods on the CEOs and boards of directors of Nokia, Vodafone and O2; between them they have lost me the archive texts from the earliest days of this business, the ones where she used to express real feelings for me. May the scorpion-whipped Erinyes chase them, their whores, catamites and their bastard children for the rest of time.
posted by Lovelorn Swain | 8:33 am
Truly cunti-lic-ous
may yur heart be rotted to its plasmic pulp.
Two things made this post for me: the image of you defiantly identifying yourself in court only as The Swain, and the use of the wondrous word 'catamite'. Genius!
Thank you: see the OED which gives the following marvellous examples:
1593 DRAYTON Moon-Calf Wks. 1753 II. 484 His smooth-chin'd..catamite.
1601 HOLLAND Pliny I. 111 Called Cinedopolis, by reason of certain Catamites and shamefull baggages that king Alexander the Great left there.
1699 BENTLEY Phal. 417 Agatho himself..was a Catamite. 1795
T. TAYLOR Apuleius VIII. (1822) 185 A certain young man..a common catamite.
I think my favourite is the Holland translation of Pliny: these "shameful baggages" seem to have been written out of the script of Mr Stone's recent film. A pity, I think the more shameful baggages the better.