Shut in and shut up

They say feminism`s the way to go, but why bother when there's one born every minute? Take my mum's friend Lisbet, an alcoholic artist who's never worked a day in her life. All she did was pop out two illegitimate kids, and then the dad, a famous married Austrian artist, supported Lisbet and the kids for the next twenty-five years!

On the downside, the kids are fucked up. Years of seeing their mother shagging strangers in the front room has taken its toll. For a long time the twenty-five year old daughter, Nancy, had a huge marijuana farm in her room. I don't care how liberal you are, you don't let your daughter grow that stuff in the house, because, you know what, one day you're going to get busted by the cops. And of course, they did get busted. In any case, Nancy's now moved out into her own place. She's also moved on from marijuana onto Class A's.

But what I really want to talk about is the twenty-three year old son, 'Nigel'. The guy's basically a shut in.

I guess he doesn't find his mum as amusing as the rest of us. Like the other day she told us that she took a small Italian home with her and demanded oral sex. I said, "Was it any good?" And she said, "No idea, I passed out drunk in the middle of it."

Which is quite funny. Unless it's your mother.

Anyway, Nigel never finished school. Plays video games all night. Sleeps until five pm. Then has 'breakfast'. Then a spot of Internet surfing. At midnight, his mum brings his food into his room. He usually says, "What's this? This Schnitzel is underdone!" or criticizes the food in some fashion.

Well, I must say I find it fascinating that he rarely goes out, has no friends or interests or anything. I said to him yesterday, "I've got to film you for my blog. Your life is incredible." And so I started to film him. He was sitting in his semi-dark bedroom, blinking at me like a mole who's just come up out of its hole.

"There is nothing very unusual about my situation," he said. "And anyone who would want to watch a film of my life is stupid."

"Stupid, maybe, but did you know that at this moment there are people watching 24 Hour Big Brother? That there are people out there watching people sleeping?"

"Well, those people are crazy."

"Maybe, but I bet someone would be interested in you. What about if people could contact you through your blog? Maybe you could even meet some girls?" I waded through the foot deep piles of comic magazines on the floor. "I notice you have no porn. Strange."

"I am not interested in meeting girls. Also, if I had some porn I would hardly leave it lying about."

"Fair enough. Now then, what about this?" I said, opening a small wooden box he had by the bed. I panned onto it with my camera. "Will we discover that this box is full of weed?" I flipped open the lid of the box. "Alas no, it is full of those little toys you get inside Kindersurprise Eggs."

As he watched me with distaste, I couldn't help being fascinated by him, by the fact that instead of cracking up due to having an alcoholic mother, he had just shut down and was going to hole up for the rest of his life. But I'm not going to post the film, because he obviously doesn't want to make any contact with the outside world, however tenuous.

Sometimes I feel like shutting myself in, shutting up and that's it. But I couldn't do it for more a few days, unless, maybe, I was in bed with someone smoking hot, and even then ....

How long could you hole up for without going nuts?