How Nasty Can She Be?

I am coming to the conclusion that to write an adult blog without acknowledging the darkness inside every one of us is to miss out a huge part of the human psyche and therefore create something that is hollow and almost dishonest.

Take my last story. It was about two things, the situations we find ourselves in through circumstance and a chain of events rather than choice, and the different ways in which we choose to deal with those circumstances.

Shelley can’t leave her husband without huge upheaval for her children, but at the same time is driven to plot her husband’s murder because of his violent outbursts. The fact that he’s more happy to believe she has a gambling problem, than the fact that she wants a loving relationship says a lot much about his dark side. Perhaps more than her attempts to end his life by poisoning him with taxin says about hers.

Unlike the westerns my grandfather used to love you can’t tell the difference between the good cowboys and the bad ones by the colour of the hats they wear. We all wear different hats at different times and most of them are simply different shades of grey.

That may all sound a bit morbid, but believe me it isn’t. If we didn’t all have a darker side then our lives would be dull and featureless. Dark doesn’t mean evil, embracing the self-interested side of us is what we need to do if we need to protect ourselves. Dark and light are two sides of the same whole, one cannot exist without the other.

If Van Gough hadn’t had his daemons we wouldn’t have had his wonderful art. The same is true of Picasso’s Guernica, it is a piece of art that sprang out of an act of terrible callousness. It simultaneously commemorates the dead of the bombing, forces you to contemplate the depths to which humans can descend and yet celebrates the Spanish love of life.

Is Shelley Nasty? Or is she trying to find escape from her growing hatred of men as personified by her emotionally crippled husband through the degradation of other men? Even if ultimately she feels the only release is to kill him?

For an adult blog to deny that such situations could arise (or choose to ignore them) is to write an adult blog as if it were written by a child. A child who uses words like fuck and cunt, but a child nonetheless because a child is innocent and unaware that things don’t just happen. Every event has a series of others leading to it and not all of them are chocolate boxes and roses.