Administrative abortions #1

Charles Dickens was a great writer. He wrote the Pickwick Papers, of which it was often said that if in case things came to nuclear head and the West had to save one piece of written art that would define the Occident's contribution to the literary domain, then Pickwick Papers it would be.

The previous sentence's construction would make Dickens stifle in his grave. Can't be injurious to his health no more.

He also wrote an entertaining novel called A Tale of Two Cities, a morally uplifting yarn of how a noble but ultimately stupid man gives up life for the unrequited love of an idiotic hag who doesn't know a good deal when it ups and smacks her in her adam's apple. In the end the poor chap caters to the French's craving of freshly cut meat. Food was a little tight in those days.

Anyway, I can't retell A Tale of Two Cities, so I will entertain you instead by A Tale of Two Seats.

The first one tells the tale of an inflated beurocrat who set himself down on a Western style toilet seat designed to cope with less weightier issues. The poor contraption broke. Showing far-sightedness the Public Works Department decided not to take chances with a burgeoning civil service, and to henceforth cement in all toilets. Think of burying a toilet in a rectangular cement grave, but at the last moment leaving the receptacle open, thereby allowing it to breath, and receive.

The other one relates the sad plight of a District Collector who digusted with what he saw ordered the Public Works Department to re-paint his toilet seat. However, urgent demands on his system made him forget about this directive. He sat. He stuck. The seat then pulled a Mary's little lamb on him, so that when he got up, the seat made sure to go.

An ode to Marv

So I wrote a poem. I am rather proud of it. And how did this happen? Fifty pages of bedtime Chandler on an empty stomach, followed by a dawn awakening. Obviously, it had to be,

---
The death of a moll

You see honey, the problem is:

I have things to say,
Ideas smarter than shots.

I have painted pictures,
Not all dried in red.

I will have music left to play,
Cantos softer than farewells.

I have time on my hands,
But you have slipped through my fingers.

Good bye.
---

An obvious question is as there is so much poetic garbage strewn around, cloggin' the literary alleyways, why pollute more?

Well, it is much more fun to with poems pretend, than to work attend.

The ka-ching of love

I am sitting in this pub abstractedly watching a lad chat up this lass. And he is doing a good job. She is all taken in by his self-deprecating self-aggrandization. Or, maybe she is just a smart actor at a loose end that night. But I wish he would do it in voice with less treble and more bass. The squeakyness is distracting me from my daily dose of Sundarkand. This ritual may finally purify the Issac Newton pub. It is my life's mission. You may choose to discover a cure for cancer instead.

Finally, the clock punches eleven, the barkeep thumps out the last call for beers, the would-be lovers nod at each other. The guy follows me into the toilet, but doesn't head for the stall. Instead I see him cursing himself standing in front of the contraceptive vending machine.

At life's toll-booth, he had run out of change.

Missed calling

I am writing this in the dead of the night to tell y'all that I think I missed my calling. I think I should have been a surgeon. Happiest when rooting about in some poor slob's large intestine.

The reason I say this is not because I believe I empathise better with my fellow man's suffering, or that I am possessor of great dexterity when manipulating sharp tools to be employed in far more delicate tasks than peeling potatoes. No, I say this because I think I am the owner of a cast-iron stomach. Not muscularly, but mentally. Before you go away shaking your head, let me tell you, long before they find out whether a wannabe surgeon can differentiate between a man's head and his arse - not that there is much difference in most cases, stuck usually as the former is in the latter - they see whether he can stand the sight of blood. It would seriously botch an appendicitis operation if the operating doctor after splicing the guy open immediately chucks up Chicken McNuggets right into the poor man's exposed guts. And you wouldn't like your surgeon to start complaining of cramps while in the middle of your vasectomy, would you? You really need to hold on to your food when all these unappetising visuals keep popping up while you are really just "doing your job", and while engineering is great, screwing yet another oily rivet into that girder doesn't really churn the internal storage facilities.

How do I know that I got the stomach? Seven years ago I could have simply said, " 'Cause when you carry a big round moneybelt of lard 24/7 you sure as hell know you got a stomach, Dumbkoff." Thankfully, I prefer the alternate simple and elegant proof that I ate my dinner while watching Sin City. I champed merrily through the main course while Kevin's dog chomped and salivated though Kevin's torso that was missing a few arms and legs owing to recent close contact with Marv. I ate my dessert of strawberries and cream while Miho creamed and disembowled Jackie Boy and his troopers, skillfully employing several samurai swords to various soft and fleshy parts of their bodies. At the end of this gore-fest, all I could say was,

"Burp."

I think that is proof enough