Sleep Your Way Around Summer

By Amil Niazi

Friday April 1, 2005

Spring Pinks

With the pink of spring exciting rosy flushes in the flesh of all citizens, fresh breezes are carrying the scent of romance through the city. Everyone’s inner beauty seems particularly radiant and that tender love affair you’ve been languishing for seems just around the corner. But it’s the fool who cashes in this early, for the thigh trap of spring is subtle, yet maintains its grip well into fall. The bronzed carnality of summer stands like a mirage at the end of an innocent April courtship. If you tie down now you’ll have imprisoned genitals for months to come, a plethora of semi-nude encounters dashed by coquettish pecks under a dripping umbrella. For the wise man and woman, I offer the following tips on avoiding the cells of commitment in order to bathe in the freedom of fruitless fornication.

1. Limit your alcoholic consumption to half that of everyone around you.
In this regard you are able to maintain a semblance of common sense in usually compromising situations. Viewing the desperation of vodka-moist eyes seeking you out in a dark room through the knowing goggles of sobriety allows you ample escape time and a head start.

2. Consummate affairs on neutral ground.
Domesticity breeds domesticity. Once you’re physically limited by the confines of someone’s bedroom you might as well give in to the banal structures of monogamy. The two of you will inevitably make your way to a mandatory sex-fast at Café deux Soleils, discuss plans for the rest of the day and hell, why not pick up a romantic comedy on your way back home? So do it in the park and that way you have to leave legally before sun down.

3. Live openly.
At the beginning of most relationships you hold back on uncomfortable truths like mental history, current substance abuse and general psychosis. By the time your willing partner discovers the breadth of insecurity and undesirable habits, their emotional entropy is beyond break-up. But if you unburden yourself in the first five minutes, they’ll be horrified enough to avoid long-term planning, but attracted enough to indulge in some back alley touching.

4. Practice extensive social incest.
Sleeping with all of your friends and their friends is a great way to stay close to your community. It also makes you entirely unappealing in the end, allowing you to hunt openly outside your neighbourhood. When your friends ask you why you’ve been spending so much time in Kits, you can tell them this city’s getting too small and you need to find yourself again.

5. Develop unusual hobbies that involve hours of isolation.
This step can also be satisfied by taking the graveyard shift at Fantasy Factory in New West. Fairly self-explanatory, the premise suggests that by limiting your availability and indulging in perverse occupations, you can drive away suitors simply by being a busy creep.

6. Use dream metaphors to explain your disgust.
Example: “I had a dream last night that an octopus – with your head – entangled me with sickly pale tentacles, only the tentacles were your hands and so you, no the octopus, engulfed my entire face with its human-y flesh and you kept screaming the words “Relationship” so I had to kill you and then I woke up crying. It was really weird.”

7. Turn those deadly moments of intimacy into casual hangouts.
Just when you feel like your lover might be basking too strongly in the glow of after-love, turn the pillow talk to lighter subjects. Like your favourite meats, really great names for pets, awesome cloud formations, why trees are so tall, what kind of dinosaur would you eat first, name this rash…

8. Explore polyamoury – together.
Invite all current and potential flames to a private dinner and propose a communal game of Jenga. Incite jealousy, create awkward physical dynamics and refuse to make eye contact with anyone. At the peak of weirdness, tell everyone you have a date and leave. By simultaneously smothering and alienating your conquests, you keep confusion high and leave everyone wanting more.