Published as Neal’s Belch no. 181, in December 2004, using a previous Belch combined with the contents of a MatchstickCats.com newsetter, apparently.
A number of years ago a man came to my front door and knocked and knocked and knocked until I gradually came to the realisation that he needed me to open it. So I slowly lifted myself up off the sofa, where I had been watching Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and dragged myself all the way across the sitting room and the hall and the porch, where I pressed my nose up against the window and laughed my ass off until the sun went down.
I stopped laughing then because I am incurably terrified of darkness. My entire house is made of glass, and is itself a giant light bulb. You may think that I would feel safe there, but I live in constant fear of the day when the bulb needs changing. It takes weeks and weeks to get a mortgage approved and what the hell am I going to do in the meantime? I suppose I could climb into a tent and light a few candles, but they don’t light up the whole room. I need every inch of my living space to be drenched in light. Otherwise I won’t notice if the bogeyman is hiding in the shadows.
Not that I’m afraid of the bogeyman. It’s just that I was a little rude to him in a pub once, and I’d rather not have to explain myself to him now that I’ve sobered up. I know he’d forgive me instantly but it would be tremendously embarrassing and we’d have to hug or something at the end of it, and us males just don’t do hugging, unless it’s with a cute girl or a cute cat or something. Or a teddy bear of course, but we usually stop that after around age twenty two, because you have to grow up sometime don’t you. I myself have only eight teddy bears left, and almost all of them live in my mummy’s house miles and miles away and I only get to see them when I go home at the weekend. And when I do, they’re usually too tired to do anything, because she drags them around the shops all day and brings them to picnics and Santa’s grotto and the North Pole and the Zoo and the Toothpaste Factory and the horizon in a little green boat.
You know, I remember a time when the North Pole was considered to be too far away to visit on a day trip. Then people realised that the days are longer at the Artic. Or the Antarctic. I can never remember which. So they just set their watches to North Pole time before they left, and kept them on that time for the rest of their lives so that they never ever had to deal with the six days that they had lost somewhere during their journey. If you see somebody running for a bus because they haven’t arrived on time, the chances are that it’s a former Artic / Antarctic explorer.
Arctic Cats are lovely, by the way. They’re all hairy and, unlike Huskies, they don’t fart much because they’re all vegetarians. There’s no point being a Carnivore if you live at the North Pole, because you can’t get any salt there. Ironically, all of the salt water has been frozen to make ice for the Camels to put in their water in the Sahara Desert . Camels prefer ice to water, because it doesn’t swirl about in their humps. It stays still. Anyway where was I?
Apparently you’re not supposed to drink sea-water. The reason they give is that the salt will only make you thirsty, and want to drink more sea-water. What’s the problem? There’s a whole ocean available to you. And if you do manage to drink the whole lot, you will eventually replenish the supply through the body’s natural functions.
We as a society really must stop unquestioningly accepting these so-called old wisdoms. If the wind changes, your face may well stay like that, but maybe you like it that way. After all, that was why you pulled that face in the first place, wasn’t it?
The early bird does indeed catch the worm, but personally I prefer toast and marmalade, so I can live with that.
And as for “Cast ne’er a clout, before spring is out”, I’ll do my clout-casting in whichever season suits me, thank you very much. They don’t even give a reason why you shouldn’t cast your clout before spring is out. You’re supposed to just accept it because it rhymes and because it sounds sort of clever and cultural and Gaelic.
And then there’s the one that goes “A watched pot never boils”. I hope I don’t have to explain to you why that is simply factually inaccurate.
And besides, a pot doesn’t boil. The liquid inside it does. If the pot itself boils, you are an employee of a steel-works, and you have confused your place of work with your kitchen. And if I were you I wouldn’t touch that pot for a while, either. Not unless you want to get burnt to death.
Of course, if you do want to get burnt to death, go ahead, knock yourself out. Or get someone else to knock you out, which might be easier. You could even turn it into some sort of clown act, if you wanted to.
I like clowns.