Did you ever go on a date with someone you were totally enamoured with and thought through the whole date, “what’s the ONE THING I can say to convince this person that I am Relationship Material”? I did. And inevitably, I ended up saying something like “Fascism is really, like, bad, right? Because they make everyone wear, like, brown, and stuff. Not like bad fashion is the worst thing fascism has going for it, or anything, because there’s at least a dozen things wrong with fascism, but I wouldn’t want to live under a totalitarian dictator. I don’t mean, like *literally* under a totalitarian dictator; I mean *figuratively*. But now that I think about it, it *would* be kind of cool to be the person who rents the basement suite under Stalin’s apartment, or the first-floor tenant in Mussolini’s two-storey building, you know? You’d be walking to the laundry room thinking, ‘PLEASE don’t let anyone else be doing laundry’, and there Stalin would be, in his skivvies and his sock-suspenders, reading some manifesto and waiting for his shirts to be dry. And you’d have this awkward laundry-room moment, and then he’d lower his manifesto and stare at you with those black-button eyes, and you’d be all, ‘prick’. That would actually be kind of sweet.”
And then your date stares at you like you have just held up a sign that says: “I am a carrier of the bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and herpes”, and you realise that you should just never try to be clever. Or at least, you should never try to be more clever than you really are. Which is just a terribly long-winded way of saying don’t be a dildo; just be who you are.
i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.