Shitfishing

Brandon was a connoisseur of bad dates. Not to say, simply, that he had a lot of them – no, Brandon actively sought out those terrible, terrible dates. If some people used their online profiles for catfishing, or sadfishing, well, Brandon used his for shitfishing, and he did it like a pro. Brandon, in fact, had multiple dating profiles, each pitching to a different horrendous stereotype. There was Gun-Nut Brandon, posing topless and sweaty in a MAGA hat and a cigarette-dangling scowl, a borrowed gun in each hand and the words ‘DON’T LIKE IT? GET OUT OF MY COUNTRY!’ scrawled across his six-pack in black marker pen. Then there was Cocky Bastard Brandon, posing in front of his father’s Mercedes in a suit and sunglasses, his profile stats proudly revealing his whopping – and wholly fictitious – salary. There was Homophobic Brandon, and Pickup Artist Brandon, Bible-Bashing Brandon, and…well – you get the picture. Brandon took great pride in developing his myriad shitfishing personas, no matter how demented his friends found this bizarre and somewhat offensive crusade.

“But…why?” they would ask, again and again, often with their arms wrapped around the shoulder of their girlfriend-then fiancée-then wife – “Don’t you want to be happy, like us?”

“I am,” Brandon replied, “Or I will be, when this is finished.”

His friends despaired. Brandon just carried on shitfishing.

After all, he had his reasons.

Perfectly logical reasons, in fact, or at least, perfectly logical for the utterly illogical career path Brandon walked. Because Brandon, you see, was a writer – quite a good one, at times. But he’d come to find that contentment bred apathy; it sapped motivation – worse, it sapped inspiration. Brandon loathed and despised with a fiery fucking hatred all those queasy poems about wandering the countryside gazing at fluffy clouds and yellow daffodils, finding peace amongst babbling brooks and still waters and…well, you know. That shit. Because that steaming shit, Brandon felt, had no place outside of a goddamn nursery rhyme, and since he wasn’t presently wearing a diaper, it was not the sort of shit he was going to write.

…but that unfortunately meant, that if Brandon did positive sorts of things with his life, like going to the gym, going on ok-to-goodish dates and having alright-to-mindblowing sex, well, when he sat down to write, the process was rather akin to shitting with constipation: brow furrowed with concentration, he would squeeeeeeeeeeze out the first sentence, only for it to sort of disappear back into the devouring rectum of that critical cursor, and once a few more sentences had landed with small miserable plops in the gaping bowl of the Word file, he would find his mind drifting away; wondering what to eat for dinner, or just quickly checking Facebook for…shit – four hours. And night after night, he went to bed with the nagging discomfort of a man who has not taken a really good, productive, mental dump in weeks.

But all that changed, after Brandon’s first truly awful date.

It was an accident, the first time – a total fluke. Just a drunken night, out in a club, with a friend from his day job who happened to have brought along two grams of coke – by the time they stumbled out at 4am, Brandon had chatted up a pouty blonde with long sharp nails going clicketty-click all over her iPhone as she took endless selfies of them together, and three days later, he took her out for dinner.

At dinner, Brandon was bereft of cocaine, and without that fiery Colombian wingman, he found himself way, way out of his depth. Had this woman always talked so fast? Her brain was like a misfiring robot, topics leaping epileptically all over the place, until he began to feel that he was facing down a rather aggressive Chihuahua; small, blonde, high pitched, and yapyapyapyapYAPPING at him about high school and college and parties and her ex husband and her social media career and the beauty gurus who were sooooo cancelled this year and she called it first like the leader she was, and then yapyapyap she was away again, onto veganism and ethical shopping, and how those people were sooooooo hypocritical, because everyone SHOPS, yah, and everyone travels by plane OHHKAY, and the sharp pointy nails were flipping the glossy hair and the bright light of the flash blinded every plate of food placed on the table, and Brandon’s head spun with confusion, then boredom, then exasperation, and by the time he finally escaped that godforsaken place and that intolerable yapping woman, he went straight home, and downed a beer…and then the strangest thing happened.

Brandon was dragged from the sofa and toward his computer by the invisible force of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, that was unspooling inside his mind like a rebellious cassette tape – he had to get it down, get it down before his entire brain turned into ‘80s spaghetti! At the computer his fingers flew – the tape unspooled, on and on, into scalding, fiery, biting satire, and even though he had no idea where the words were taking him, or how, when they were done they were brilliant, and they were legion – words upon words, more than he’d written in weeks put together, and that night, Brandon slept like a baby. A baby with a head full of ideas, ideas wrapped in dreams, until he fell out of bed and back onto the computer, to pour them all out in another torrential flood.

Brandon’s mental bowels had finally been given the great big reeking colonic they so desperately needed, and after that, well – he was hooked. That sarcastic inner monologue, the throw-your-head-back-and-growl exasperation, the rectum-itching boredom of bad dates and ghastly people became the drug that Brandon’s writing couldn’t do without – it fired him up like nothing on Earth, and after that, his path was clear: Brandon became a shitfishing prodigy. How could he not? It was a vital career move, wasn’t it? Shitfishing was going to make Brandon every bit as rich as any writer can realistically hope to be.

…which, naturally, isn’t very rich at all, but nonetheless, Brandon shitfished his way into a three book contract, and after that, he made his fifteenth online dating profile. This one was for Brandon The Writer; a more or less sane guy, seeking a fun-loving woman with a taste for scalding satire, and an open mind towards unusual motivational methods.

And surely, Brandon felt, surely the right woman wouldn’t mind him still dating other people, when they were people he could barely tolerate for a single hour? After all, by this point, Brandon had enough bad date anecdote-material to keep the right woman laughing for years, and he was a published author now – all in all, he was a pretty good catch, wasn’t he?

…but when the dating starting, somehow, it wasn’t as easy as he’d expected. The hitch was – and it was a bloody big hitch – that Brandon barely remembered how to actually behave on a date, when he wasn’t with a man or woman he was mentally distilling into his next literary villain. He was so fluent in being Racist Brandon or Obnoxious Cash-Flashing Brandon, or Religious To The Point Of Nausea Brandon, that four perfectly decent women left restaurants with expressions like startled rabbits and the disturbing impression that they’d just dated six people, or possibly even demons, each trapped in the same body, in the space of a surreal hour that left them slightly concerned they might have been recorded on some kind of Candid Camera show. Finally, just as Brandon began to despair that his toxic personas had wholly devoured his actual personality, along came the fifth woman.

She entered the arena, sat down across the table from Writer Brandon and his slew of barely-suppressed and deeply repugnant alter-egos…and as they talked, it turned out that she was a writer too. A writer of ironic chick-lit. And over the top of her chicken-salad-and-a-Cosmo, she saw a guy with the great hair, sea-green eyes and dimpled chin of every chick-lit hero. As the conversation flowed, she discovered that he had personally spent the last five years deliberately courting horrifyingly bad dates. And out they spilled, one upon the other, tales and tales of these unspeakable dates, often acted out as Brandon let himself slip from one bizarre alter-ego to the next, until her mascara was running with tears of hilarity, and her notebook was out of her purse, her pink glittery pen scrawling notes that wobbled with the shuddering of her laughter, and when he asked her, almost nervously, whether she’d mind seeing him again, and more than that, whether she’d mind him going on more awful dates…

…she told him her next book depended on it.