Vanity Project

"Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved" - Philip Roth, 'The Dying Animal'

I read a nice little interview/questionnaire with a very good poker player yesterday, but the line about his new young son bugged me. It was along the lines of ‘A bad day at the office and bad beats in poker are put in perspective’.

Now, I hate to come over all misanthropic, but does anyone really need to embark on the vanity project of bringing yet another life into the world, in order to ‘put things in perspective’? I find it quite easy to put things in perspective just by opening my eyes and taking a look at the fucking world. I don’t know about you, but I live in an over-crowded city in an over-crowded country in an over-crowded (with humans anyway) world. I think there should be a moratorium on any new births for a calendar year.

I know I sound like a miserable bastard, but something about that shining-eyes ‘my little boy’ crap you get from new fathers really makes me want to puke.

Of course, it could be that I’ll reach my fifties and suddenly tire of the meaningless life of unattached self-gratification, and feel really stupid.