by RAF KATIGBAK

Being single in September sucks. Of course, as someone in a relationship I wouldn’t know completely, but seeing as my significant other lives in an apartment approximately 6,065 blocks away, you could say I’m still feeling the fearful foreboding of fall’s forlorned finger-bang.

As memories of summer’s flippant festivity quickly fade, the harsh, sub-zero reality that is Montreal’s winter slowly creeps back into our consciousness. As lovey-dovey couples spoon a little closer, hold hands a little tighter and stare a little deeper into each other’s eyes with a burning passionate desire, the rest of us are staring at those same couples with a similar burning desire. A desire that these snuggly-wuggly twosomes spontaneously combust in a blaze of their own cutesy-tootsie-ness.

Am I bitter? Maybe. But being in a long-distance relationship is almost worse than being single. It’s like being committed without all the perks. You have a special someone, but that person won’t be there when you need them the most, like when you’re sick or in pain. And they won’t be there for those special tender moments, like holding your hand as you jointly clothesline fruit-booters rollerblading down Ste-Catherine in tribal tattoo muscle-tees and short shorts.

But I’m not complaining. My heart goes out to those who have yet to find true love. Actually, fuck true love. With a Montreal winter steadily approaching—when Jack Frost doesn’t so much “nip at your nose” as “suck out your eyes, then skull-humps you”—finding a special someone to keep you warm is now a matter of survival.

You can smell the desperation every time you go out for a drink. Suddenly the term “last call” takes on a whole new meaning as legions of lonely souls scan the drunken dregs of their local watering hole, anxious to hook up, desperately clinging to the hope that they won’t have to spend the next few months picking the corn chip particles out of their keyboards as they surf the Web for a sensibly priced and reasonably diverse adult site that offers both foot and felching fetish options (can you believe www.hoofnmouth.com has not been taken?!).

Of course this desperation doesn’t only apply to men. As much as most males hate to have to self-service their pump-action yogurt rifle for months on end, for women the prospect of an entire season greasin’ the ol’ peanut is just as unappetizing.

Unfortunately girls don’t have the convenient option of paying a modest sum to a qualified stranger for a discrete Sunday afternoon rub ’n’ tug in the cubicle of a sterile upper St-Laurent massage parlour.

This problem is further compounded by the fact that—according to my sources (i.e. most of my 20- to 30-something girlfriends)—finding a good single man in Montreal is like trying to find a Montreal shoe store with a decent selection and really great sales (apparently, very hard). “All the hot guys in this town are either taken, gay or are so metrosexual that their genitals have actually retracted into their body cavity and they might as well be gay,” said one particularly frustrated friend of mine.

“You guys have it easy,” she continued. “You can’t throw a brick without hitting a cute girl in this city. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

While it’s true the female hottie quotient in Montreal has reached almost dangerous proportions (a friend who recently returned from living abroad has had a total of 16 girl-gawk-enduced bicycle accidents in the three weeks since arriving), I still have trouble believing that a good Montreal man is so hard to find.

Is it really a sheer numbers game? Or is it a question of higher standards? Could it be that my girlfriends aren’t looking hard enough? Or have all the good guys skipped town in favour of warmer climates with all the Canadian geese and Québécois septuagenarians? Do all good-looking guys in Montreal suddenly become, as my friend says, “total self-serving pricks because they know that if they treat a girl badly they can just walk two metres, pick up another available hottie and move on?”

Perhaps my female friends will never know, but one thing I know for sure is that, if and when they do hook up, I and all the other single-ish people will be hatin’ on them too.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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