Idiot Joy Showland

The Person-Guy comes in many forms. Sometimes he’s just you, and all the things you like to do, reified into something that is at once a general social type and a Platonic model from which lesser beings can learn such valuable lessons as ‘it is good to have at least one daughter’ and ‘pronounce the word “helicopter” correctly, you utter cretin.’ But most of the time the Person-Guy is someone you don’t like. The Person-Guy is either very stupid, or not entirely stupid, but the wrong kind of not entirely stupid. The Person-Guy is all the vain and shallow women that ever rejected you. The Person-Guy supports a politician you have reservations about, wore a toga to a frat party, and is mysteriously close to the levers of power. The Person-Guy is absolutely real.

It’s the other one, the Person-Guy, that things happen to. The Person-Guy exists in short, declarative sentences, generally structured around some form of the verb ‘to be’, and arranged in no particular order. The Person-Guy is the cause of every evil and frustration in your life. The Person-Guy only wears odd socks, because he thinks that wasting our limited lifespan sorting them into matching pairs is indicative of a potentially authoritarian neurosis. The Person-Guy has a minor vocal tic, and it sends you into strange daylight fantasies; tearing out his throat with your bare hands, feeling the frantic little pulses of blood as they spurt and froth around your claws and then go cold. The Person-Guy likes all the same things you like, which is why you hate him. The Person-Guy is not reading this article. Only you are reading this article.

The Person-Guy tells you that he’s getting really ‘into’ candles. He spends most of his day lighting candles with a specialist Egyptian cotton taper, and then extinguishing them with the tips of his fingers. He goes to trendy candle clubs to hang out with other Person-Guys. He subscribes to Candle Lighter’s Monthly. You visit his loft apartment in Brooklondon or Berlyn, and every flat surface is covered with candles. A few of them are lit, scattered randomly around the room; tealights drooping precariously by the inevitable stacks of yellowing old books, elegant purple ones dribbling hot streams of wax to pool in the mason jars and espresso cups they’ve been unceremoniously jammed into, one big spluttering log of a candle that sits under a soot-smeared stain on the ceiling. He doesn’t offer you a seat; the Person-Guy doesn’t believe in outmoded notions of chivalry, and besides, all the chairs bristle with rare candles. You try to make small-talk with the Person-Guy – you’re not friends, exactly, and you’re certainly not into him, but you’ve known each other a long while – but he looks distracted; there’s a fluttering gleam in his eyes, and his fingers keep twitching; he’s only pretending to listen, he’s waiting for you to leave so he can start lighting candles and then putting them out again. You’re almost mesmerised by the quick and impulsive movements of his forefinger and thumb, their snap and tremble, and it takes you a while before you notice, with a start, just how scarred and calloused they are, skin clinkered like the surface of a lava flow, blocks of darkened leathery flesh torn between weeping chasms. You make your hurried excuses, and the Person-Guy lets you leave with an almost catatonic indifference, but one you’re out of there you can’t resist the temptation to look over your shoulder, and through his window you see the soft, undulating light of lots of different candles being lit and then put out. You know someone like the Person-Guy. Everyone knows someone like the Person-Guy. How can they not realise what they’re like?

The Person-Guy is always at the top of your Facebook feed. He has some opinion about something you don’t care about, and insists that all his friends be endlessly subjected to it. The Person-Guy takes hundreds of selfies every time he goes out and posts them all online, endless iterations of the Person-Guy and his girlfriends bending over to make kissy-faces at the camera so their tits are almost popping out the top of their skimpy dresses, and if you don’t like and comment on enough of them he’ll stop talking to you. The Person-Guy keeps inviting you to play some stupid browser game. The Person-Guy publicly wishes you happy birthday every year, and then doesn’t even message you once in the intervening three hundred and sixty-four days. The Person-Guy writes long letters to the world at large, packed with banal pseudo-philosophical insights about how you need to believe in yourself and why other people’s opinions don’t matter, limp gutless phrases crammed like worms in a shoebox, and then hashtags it ‘#gym #workout #hatersgonnahate’. The Person-Guy continually writes ‘too’ instead of ‘to’, and it appears to be deliberate, but you have no idea why.

You slept with the Person-Guy once, and you’re still ashamed of it, but afterwards you decided to learn some self-respect and in a weird way that experience kinda made you the person you are today.

You are fine. The Person-Guy is everything objectionable. The Person-Guy is the grim truth of all social relations: that the human being is a burden, that to talk to someone is labour, that everything you do in the company of another is only the absence of everything else you could be doing instead. The Person-Guy has clammy hands. The Person-Guy claims to like classical music, but only knows the pieces that have been in films. The Person-Guy makes a big show of every nice thing he does, as if it’s not just basic human decency. Every attempt the Person-Guy makes at kindness only justifies your hatred. The Person-Guy is responsible for the melting of the ice caps, the lack of decent affordable housing, the expropriation of surplus value, the ivory trade, the fact that all living things must one day die, the absence of an interventionist God, the short shelf-life of organic groceries, the traffic jams on the M4, the weird smell in underpasses, the heat death of the Universe, the mole on your chin, the little accusing voice that keeps you up all night, the fat balding creature that squints at you from the mirror, and the Syrian civil war. The Person-Guy turns his soft, doughy, witless head to look you in the eyes, and his face is nowhere to be seen. It is not illegal to kill the Person-Guy.

As soon as he is named, the Person-Guy vanishes. He has no mass or motion. He is the type, abstract and globe-girdling, pressed into shape for unknown purposes by an unknown god. He exists only as a cloud of attributes; individually insubstantial, in combination each point is the tip of spear that rips through his hideous body. To describe something is to annihilate it, and the Person-Guy has been annihilated. His entrails litter the streets. But still he shambles on, a formless form, all spit and tendons, grasping against the grit of the paving-slabs inch by laboured inch, as if he doesn’t know that he ought to be dead.