The Red Dragon tells a non-PC parable

Last night the F-word had a friend over for dinner and to take my mind off of the monstrous situation at work, I decided to make us some muffins a little late in the evening. So off to the small Turkish shop at the top of the kitty corner street.

A little background. Halfway up the kitty corner street, there's a residence for retarded adults. Sorry if 'retarded' is a bad word now wherever you live. The residents have a spectrum of conditions - a few people with Downs' and lots of others with problems that are quite physically obvious but not quite so obviously diagnosable during a casual stroll down the street. The one unifiying factor, as far as I can tell, is that they're all dealing with physically obvious brain problems.

One of them, an older lady wearing pyjamas and drooling ever so slightly, pushed into the store in front of me muttering a bit. She zipped off to the soda section, carefully counted out four large bottles of Fanta, and zipped up to the single cash register, pushing in front of the small line that had formed there, to pay with the exact change that she was clutching. All of this was fine with me despite me, at that point, standing in said line, indeed being the next person in it that was pushed to one side. Good for her, I thought. She's on a mission for the Fanta and she's carrying it out. Everybody's relying on her and she's coming through for them. It reminded me of my maiden solo drive to the beer store in Canada a few months ago, when I had parked like a retard, so preoccupied was I with safely getting the plank of Molson back to Magnum and his buddies.

What wasn't so fine with me is that seconds after she pushed up to the cash, a second line suddenly materialized behind her. In fact I even think a couple of people lining up in my queue dropped out of it to queue behind her. She even had to push past them on her way out of the shop with the precious Fanta.

Now, there was little enough practical annoyance for me in this. I'm half guinea, I've spent years of my life in the rudest cities in Italy, the fucking international capital of illicit line-cutting, and I've done years of jeet kune do; nobody buds in front of me without my fucking consent, and I simply manouvered my elbow in front of the solar plexus of the man who'd started the second queue to hand my money to the rather bemused cashier.

But as I walked home afterwards it dawned on me: that was Belgium. That was a parable of what Belgium is. Belgium is a place where people will queue up behind a retarded lady who's drooling a little bit who pushes her way past an existing queue to pay for four large bottles of Fanta with exact change if they think it will shave 30 fucking seconds off their trip to the corner store, and then they'll act surprised and wounded when you gently but firmly elbow them in the gut to get them out of your way.

This is a very silly place.

The Red Dragon has a serious question . . .

Do you think Martin Amis ever gets tired of sucking? Or do you think he has any idea?

Jesus. At least that fucking blight on the face of the English-language 'literary' establishment is punching in his own weight class. His novels are to the contemporary canon what the words "healthful" and "orientate" are to the English language; ungainly, redundant, pretentious and lacking any excuse to exist. But to be fair, healthful and orientate's fathers weren't Kingsley Amis so it's more on their own merits I have to keep fucking seeing them in print.

The Red Dragon begs for help

Relative to my last post. We are having an emergency situation from work, and not in terms of deadlines but in terms of an actual emergency. In terms of life: one of my colleagues, who has gone missing whilst on vacation.

Rack your minds, pets, rack them hard, and if you can come up with any contact information for helpful businesses or organizations, or any advice pertinent to an Anglo going missing in Central America, please send to mllelaspliffe@gmail.com.

We are clutching at straws. Throw them if you can.

Concentrating on anger

Hey, you know what I've just figured out about the Kübler-Ross model? There are five stages of grief because the fifth stage is so shitty. Anger, denial and bargaining, especially, are way better than acceptance.

On the anger side of that equation, I may have an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness, something beyond their normal such retardation altogether, something entering the realms of Eichmann herself, a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil. But I hope with all my heart I don't, because the man concerned, who would be the victim, is someone I and many other people hold very dear indeed. With all my heart, with all my heart, I hope all I have to tell you will be an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness with the potential to have been a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil.

I do know this already though: if ever I get in trouble abroad, I would like you, please, to appeal to my beaver-beater embassies, not my fucking inselaffen embassies. Because put any fucking inselaffen into a public service and they become incompetent, responsibility-dodging fucktards and I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. They are like lobotomized Germans with no fucking zest for life and a fucking case of the paranoias. I hate the inselaffen administration so much. They cut corners here and there and still manage to devote more and more money to harassing their own citizens, and then when you need them the most they fuck you up the ass and apologize the whole fucking time they're doing it, but they don't stop, because inselaffen shitheels don't have any balls, and I hate them. Fuck, may they rot in a receptacle where where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored.

There's a massive fashion there of police blogging, by the way, in which dozens of anonymous cops with huge followings and, often, book deals, bitch about how the public hates them and the government keeps giving them dumb, unreasonable shit to do. Well, news flash, porkers: the two phenomena are not mutually independent. No matter how often you tell the public you're being put upon by the government, poor fucking you, it doesn't change the fact that that putting-uponness tells on the public, and while the government may be the asshole stepping on the public's neck, despite your whining you've chosen to become and remain the boot. Congratu-fucking-lations, everybody'll fucking love you now.

The first days of SAD

Ugh. SAD. Ugh. Stupid short days and painfully finite mortal lifetime. Ugh.

That having been said, I'm reading Daniel Deronda and it's fucking ace. Don't tell me how it ends, I like to not know that with George Eliot books. Love her writing so much - such characterization, such dialogue, combined with such an aesthetic sense - unique perhaps - that I'm starting to seriously question the hitherto fundamentally unquestioned superiority of my shmancy undergrad degree: why the fuck didn't we read any George Eliot? Maybe they did in the lit concentration. Anyways. Water under the bridge. I'm reading it now and it's good reading material for a thirty year old; perhaps I wouldn't have liked it in my late teens and infant twenties.

We watched The Caine Mutiny last night. Not a waste of time despite that sort of dated direction that patronizes the audience so awfully and makes American movies so distasteful, because Humphrey Bogart was impossible to stop looking at. Also Jose Ferrer, was, well, Jose Ferrer. I didn't think much of the script and even less of his speech at the end to the crew, but when he trotted out the line 'I'm a lot drunker than you are so it'll be a fair fight' it made the whole thing worth it. Most people would have made that line stupid. Not him.