Chapter 25: It's a girl

This is the conclusive chapter of this "blog-book". It would be a shame to start from the end. Like watching Doctor Who from the last series backwards. Please go to chapter one, and start as you should start any book and have some self respect. Thank you for visiting.

Chapter @% (25): It's a girl

Mr BooHoo sat on the toilet and took a long wizz, looking between his thighs at the rising steam caused by the difference of temperature. We keep calling him a "he", not because we are following some silly stereotype about the superiority of our dick-owning fellow humans but because at the beginning of our little narrative it made much more sense to have a character named "Mr" than "Mrs", or "Miss", or "mademoiselle" and also so as to avoid some stupid stereotypes associating moodiness with vaginas. Truth is he is most probably a penis-loving little lady. Not that he does not instinctively follow with his gaze the first round bum or a nice pair of jiggling titties when they pass in front of him but he became aroused more easily with the feel of a firm "disco stick" (namingschemes.com says it is a valid synonym for penis). So "he" was going through a semi-violent attack of pms that made him want to organize everything in nice, square shapes and separate things by color and function. He also felt he was a very confused girl. Career-wise things were "undefined", monetary things averted him, no good jobs as somebody's employe were available and sometimes he thought he might want a baby. Perhaps this thought might have been planted by his gynecologist. Perhaps there really is a stupid-clock-thing about maternity.
 He knew, with certainty, he wanted to eat a banana and chocolate spread sandwich. He thought this was a sign of clouded judgement.
 Mr BooHoo sometimes dreamt he had a baby. In every dream something absurd went wrong. When he thought well about it he considered all the things he wanted to do before he became a mother. You already know his mother issues from a previous chapter. But he took rather good care of his dog, his little house and his partner. And things were going slow anyway. Yet, he did not really have any free time to himself and if  he made a baby he would have to sacrifice some of his important occupations. This, he found scary. And still he thought about it more than he would like to. The thought was there and as if this was not enough he was in the middle of a baby boom. Some of the people who were having children were actually nice. They had potential of bringing nice people to this world. The world of motherhood had a strange charm for him. Raising a child should have some very nice moments too. But what about adolescence? How the fuck do you get by with a child during puberty? He or she should disagree with you so that you know it is starting to think for itself but what would you be prepared to argue about and still tolerate, love and admire the other person? And what about him? Sometimes mothers stop being themselves and become somebody's mothers. Why did he want it so much?
 So there you go. I'll leave you there, dick in hand, because this story has huge resemblances with reality, even though all characters and incidents are fictional. You have it : a story of unsuccessful living.     

24th chapter: comic relief

Chapter@$ (24): Why you shouldn't eat fruit and drink milky coffee before a job interview

    Mr BooHoo was neatly dressed. He had on nice green pants and a yellow shirt and was sitting quietly on a yellow chair by a red table, on the porch of an art-studio. It was a mild, although somewhat windy evening of the last week of August. Mr BooHoo was patiently waiting for a possible employer to arrive  and he was experiencing a rather embarrassing and droll situation.
    He had been there for the first time in June of the same year, for an interview about the position of an art-tutor at the previously mentioned studio, that is situated in one of the most posh suburbs of the capital city. That time, in order to get there, he had taken a bus, got off at the last stop and then walked. It had been a poor choice because it had taken him almost two hours to arrive and was therefor a quarter of an hour late for his appointment. He did not get the job but was offered a position as a teacher of knitting instead.
   This time he started earlier and took the subway and then a bus that left him much closer to his destination and thus he was half an hour early, which is how his unfortunate adventure begun.
   Due to various reasons he found himself deprived from proper sleep for four days. As a consequence coffee was his best friend, so as to cope with his hectic schedule. After lunch he had three hours until he would start coming here and he knew that a nap would be more harmful than helpful, as he would wake up with a heavy head. Instead he decided to watch a film and relax. He also had a cup of coffee. He watched "Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are dead" and he liked it so much he felt optimistic. He put on the clothes mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, grabbed his backpack, a map of the district where he was heading and then made a mistake. Mr BooHoo ate a peach.
   All was well until he got into the subway but whilst in there he felt an ominous movement of his stomach. He thought it was stressed induced and that it would go away. Alas, it didn't and when he got on the bus it became acute and spread to his lower abdomen. Now, he could say with certainty that the fruit and the coffee were having a violent disagreement in his bowels. By the time he got off the bus he really had to use the toilet.
   Having to poop before a job interview is a  fearsome state of affairs. Since he arrived so much earlier he thought he could ask to go to the loo and hope it would not be too close to the employer's office. When he got there, there was no one to open the door for him! He was all alone in this ugly neighborhood with similar, big houses and meticulously shaped bushes, with his tummy aching and hopeless. We are talking about bad luck. He decided to take a walk and search for a coffee-house.
   Eventually, not very far he came across a commercial street with shops, restaurants and cafeterias. Now he had to choose carefully. It had to be a not crowded place, that served coffee so that he could get something cheap and small and use the lavatory. Not an easy thing to find among these overpriced, sassy joints. He could not afford to pay a fiver just for a dump. Finally he found a cute little cafe, ordered a hazelnut-flavored latte and went to the wc. It was all-right and after he did a dirty-trick in there, took his coffee and headed back for his interview. The time passed, he was still alone and his belly started hurting again. He was getting furious! A little longer and he would think of going to the back yard and leave a nasty surprise for them, among their carefully groomed bushes.
   This is where we found him at the outset of our story.
   After a while the directress of the establishment showed up from the back yard, looking for him. She had changed the location of her office and had failed to inform him. The idiot!


 

23rd chapter

chapter @£ (23): the Era of the Ogres

    Despite a common claim, Mr BooHoo was a real humanist in principle. His misanthropic feelings derived from human stupidity, malice, egoism, loose morality and disrespect towards other humans, animals and natural laws. Attitudes that most religions would classify as inhuman. Furthermore Mr BooHoo experienced all the above in a personal level and it saddened him. It was not life that was full of pain and suffering but living among other people. I shall repeat that his hate was not general, he would never kill for example, he would rather take all idiots and all bad people and let them live in a small island somewhere, so that they eventually exterminate each other. He would also be happy if it could go the other way; all the nice and bright people could form a country of their own and "live long and prosper" there happily ever after. And off course the place would be called Utopia. (sigh) Some individuals were worst than others and we are not talking about gangsters here, we are talking about everyday people that will do anything to bring you to their level and make you as miserable as possible. Whenever Mr BooHoo complained about the unfair, stupid and harmful behavior of people he met, to his mother as a child, she always said that he should be patient because the world was full of jack-asses and that he would encounter plenty more in the years to come. This made no sense. If a person was an evil jack-ass, in Mr BooHoo's mind, the victim should make the experience public, so that other people could know that this person was a bad jack-ass and avoid him or her, for their own sake. Nobody wants a thief or a rapist in their house so why should assholes be tolerated? We should he shut-up and accept such people in his life?
   When Mr BooHoo reached adulthood (old enough to vote and drink legally) he left his home-town and went to a bigger city to study. There, he managed well-enough to keep asses out of his life as much as possible. At least the really harmful ones. Years passed and he finished studding and he changed jobs and he fell in and out of love and then he fell in love again and moved in with a partner and then, ass-hole wise the shit hit the fan. The partner was a great human being but there were Ogres in the family. This is how he got involved in the following story.
 
   The head-Ogre was talking non-stop [it was a town Ogre, one of the kind that has learnt to use a fork and a knife and a computer to browse the internet, although it has failed to discriminate between truth and lies. The previously mentioned abilities have made it feel so confident of its wit that, as a greek saying goes, it thought it had caught the priest by the balls (nomizee oti ehei  piasei ton papa ap' t' arhidia- a phrase full of sarcasm that describes an overconfident person with an inferiority complex that thinks he or she has an advantage or a good deal or understanding of something)]. Mr BooHoo was feeling that he was reaching the limit of bullshit he could hear being repeated without puking blood  that would run out of his brain. Instead of putting on a set of head-phones and manifesting in this way that the speaker might as well be farting through its mouth, responded with a question. He hoped that it would make the Ogre shut up and reflect for a moment. The talk was about politics. The question was "How can you claim that it is different to vote according to your consciousness and according to what you believe is the best for the society?". Apparently the Ogres morality extended only to protecting primarily its own ass, its house and perhaps its children and the rest of the world can go fuck them selves and suffer slow and dreadful deaths. Not very ethical or good, is it?
   The Ogre kept saying that public well-fare should be considered first but it did seam to have a quirky idea of what public well-fare meant. Further on, Mr BooHoo knew for a fact that the Ogre had been supporting the dominant conservative party because they helped it acquire an important position as a public servant. Instead of fighting a corrupt and unreasonable system it tried to be safe from it by being part of it. If anything, it had no right to tell other people what to vote and get aggravated when they didn't. In addition to the above the Ogre was older than Mr BooHoo so it was completely unfair to judge other young people for the current situation because it had contributed for long to the things being as they were. It even had the nerve to say that it was left wing at heart but that personal beliefs meant nothing when it came to electing a government. It had also said that it was alright to take advantage of unfair laws if there was profit in it, that women were the ones that should take care of the house, do the dishes and bring up kids but that it was ok to have a job to bring money to the house too, that (other) people should stay in their own countries and that there would be a world-war that would extinguish
all but a privileged ten percent of the current population of the planet and this was why it was important to finance a great army.
   Apparently Mr BooHoo's ability to express an opposition to the things it said seriously bummed it, because it became offensive. It said that Mr BooHoo did not watch enough television or read enough newspapers to have an opinion, that he was a victim of left-wing propaganda (except that it never bothered to actually ask him what his political views were and what he thought of existing political parties) and that no person was educated enough to be able to align individual and public well-fare. Truth was that Mr BooHoo was a real book-worm and although the Ogre had visited the house where Mr BooHoo lived with his partner it never took the trouble to go through the titles and thus see that Mr BooHoo was interested in ideas and eventually politics and culture. Then it started misquoting ancient Ogre and false appeals to authority. Mr BooHoo was dumbfounded. He hadn't got involved to a conversation where one of the participants had so limited skills and so little respect for the fellow speaker, probably never before. The Ogre  concluded its monologue by informing him that he spoke as the dumb people it met at the cafe where it spent its afternoons and that he was a bad conversationist because he did not lay out enough arguments. Mr BooHoo had almost reached the spot where his grief for humanity made him feel suicidal.
   There was nothing he could do about this family. When he expressed a different opinion he was accused of being too much of a rebel, when he kept his opinion for himself he was accused of being dumb. They were everything he stood against of. Violent, short-sighted, miserable, small-hearted, arrogant, egocentric twats! And they understood shit because they wanted to understand shit. If Mr BooHoo said for example "A", they would not just say "B" because then there would be a common ground  to argue that would potentially benefit both sides. They would just say "not A, I believe in 897(random number). Worst part was that in order to respect his partner's wish to see the family he would have to see them again and again. They made him feel as if the world was full of Ogres and that this time he would have to tolerate and do this in contradiction to his beliefs and this sucked.
 

Chapter 22

Will you be so kind and start from chapter 1 if you are a first time visitor? Atta boy/girl!

Chapter @@ (22) : Gypsies

Summer was there for good and the thermometer showed constantly above 35 celcious degrees, the occasional wind felt as if somebody was blow-drying you and Mr BooHoo was suffocating. Why is it that people find it hard to breath in heat-waves? Once, on a train he had met a woman that had lived for a few years in Egypt and she said that when she first got off the airplane she felt that she was suffocating. Then she got used to it.

The heat was intolerable. He tried to start his day as earlier as possible but it seamed pretty futile as it was terribly hot even at dawn. Especially during the early afternoon hours, when the sun splashed on the tiny apartment it required some effort to stay awake. Mr BooHoo was very similar to animals when it got so hot. He felt drowsy and lifeless. Staying by the sea and swimming all the time was the only way he could tolerate summer. Now he only worked once per week outside the house but he would feel guilty to take money from their limited budget, leave his partner and dog behind and go on vacation. Thus they only went swimming on weekends, a thing he had always considered a not so good idea because, well, everyone went swimming on weekends.

Living in the capital of the country meant that at the majority of beaches even putting your feet in the water was too risky. Pollution was a huge issue. One beach that was almost decent was the one near his hometown. It has already been mentioned that Mr BooHoo went very sheldon to swim as a youngster. This was because this beach was considered to be polluted as well until a few years back. (This would be the time to go through a few conspiracy theories but I will avoid it). Now that shore had a blue flag that confirmed the suitability for swimming and also it supported wild life, urchins, seaweed, small fish, jellyfish (one attacked his partner the previous week and made his left wrist full of tiny blisters) etc. It also smelled all right and looked ok. The water was clear unless it blew towards the wrong direction because then the sand rose form the bottom and made it less transparent. Further on, it took only an hour to get there, so in general it was a good choice for a small swimming excursion.

So, I.the dog, the partner and Mr BooHoo got into their nice old car that, unlike the contemporary car design that has an uncanny resemblance to toy cars found in chocolate eggs, was big and angular an they set off for the sea. Everything looked fine, they had small sandwiches and fruit, water and books, bathing suits and towels (Mr BooHoo belonged to a sci-fi sect, the members of which are unaware of each other, with a general belief that one should always have a towel handy and that, also, one's life could be less unsuccessful if he knew his or her towel's whereabouts). All they needed was a nice thick shade.

They arrived at the beach earlier than usually but no shade was available. Mr BooHoo started cursing at the idiotic aspiring fishermen that instead of going a few kilometres further on to do their fishing they kept spreading wild hooks on the beach, where the only thing they would probably catch was somebody's bottom. The water was too shallow for fish, there, anyway. Bloody buggers! Eventually they found a nice not so crowded and hook-free spot under a tree and they declared it theirs. I.the dog seemed to take it up on her to keep intruders away and the rest of the people that were already there to behave. Next to them was a charming little family of gypsies. They never got a good look at the purple-clad mother's face, as she was constantly taking a nap on a thin carpet. The father was dark and bearded and he was obviously enjoying life as he was playing with his three pre-school rascals in the water, making a very good impression to Mr BooHoo who wondered if his father had ever had such a good time with him and his sister. When they got out of the water he dried his sons' heads with a thick towel. He seemed to have a perfect mixture of concern and recklessness so as to raise perfectly healthy children.

More gypsies arrived, calling each-other cousins, with more children of various ages. They spread another thin carpet behind Mr BooHoo and with a couple of pillows they formed a nice impromptu outdoor living room. Although from that point on it became much less interesting for the dog, that turned into a rather pissed-off bitch with the new arrivals and had to be restrained, it became considerably more interested for our little hero.

Mr BooHoo always felt all right around gypsies, except for one time and even then it was his fault. Of course he had avoided having his palm read a few times and refused to buy stolen flowers a few more, but this doesn't really count, does it now? At primary school he had a few gypsy classmates but they dropped out after a couple years. He remembered that he got along fine with them. They did not hung around together during recess, but then again no one hanged around with him either. They even stood on his side a couple of times when he was being bullied. Once he had been the accidental receiver of a large spit from one of them. The real target ducked just in time but the spitter seemed sincerely sorry for having spitted on the little Mr. Mr BooHoo did not mind it that much. He was mostly sorry that the actual offender had not been spit upon. 


The people on the beach were just as kind. Women were a little reserved at first but then they also talked to him. One of the men said that the dog would be great for hunting hedgehogs and then a woman said that they tasted great and gave an extended description of  how to cook them. You skin them with a knife and remove their intestines, then add your spices and then cook them on a stick on a fire. All other manners of cooking are also ok. Another said she thought this food was disgusting. Their friendliness made Mr BooHoo feel like a dork. He felt he did not know how to behave and that he was pretentious. Although generalizing is wrong, he felt that he had never before seen such an immediate reaction to kindness. What a smile these people have! He was reading so much literature on social disobedience and had been thinking for so long of himself as a well-mannered Parias and suddenly he was among people that had always been living in the margins of the western society, that he felt it caused all his troubles and confusion, and still they survived without it, assimilated some of its parts and kept their own ways for others. Could he ever fit in such a community? Being a weirdo there would be different from being a weirdo in his own environment? Was he such a big idiot so as not to understand that he was a true breed of the civilization he was trying to reject (a very lukewarm rejection that is). These people knew how to survive. He liked hedgehogs and was against hunting. Well, they did not seem to get all their food from the supermarket. They ate hedgehogs, too. Thoreau claimed to have eaten a rat. He supposed that when it comes down to your food, killing it is a vary respectable choice. And he kept thinking. Another time on another train he had become acquainted with another very charming gypsy. They talked and eventually that person suggested that he cancelled all other pre-fixed plans about his life and that he went on to sell watermelons in an open truck. Mr BooHoo never forgot about this alternative and often wondered about this life-style. 


His day was turning out pretty awesome. He got into the sea again and swam for some time. Then he lied backwards and let himself float with his ears in the water. All he could see was the bright blue atmosphere and hear almost nothing. Is there a kind of yoga or meditation one can practice in the sea? If not they should make one. Le-vi-ta-tion. He hoped that this could be a day that he could look back to when feeling sad. And he hoped than when he did that he would not think of himself as merely "easily amused".             

Chapter 21

I would like to inform the unimaginative that the fact that this the 21st chapters signifies the existence of 20 previous chapters. Also, the story is sort of linear, so, I would advice you to go back to chapter 1 if this is your first time here. 

Chapter !@ (21) : The beginning of the 28th summer of our anti-hero

Summer had arrived at the land were Mr BooHoo dwelled. It was hot and as definite as it could. At that particular part of the planet summer was rather unpleasant unless one had the privilege of living near the sea. Mr BooHoo was an inhabitant of the biggest city of this country. In addition to this unfortunate fact , the climate change had altered the texture of the Sun, making any attempt to go out for the biggest part of the day a very bad idea. Mr BooHoo recalled that when he was a toddler and until he finished high-school the warmth of the Sun was pleasant in the morning and tolerable even  for someone as fair-skinned as he was during the noon. He was never a summer-person but being under the sun was never such a big issue. Now from noon until a couple of hours before dusk the Sun was sizzling. He felt as if his skin was torched. The heat and the mosquitoes made a descent night's sleep rare and he got up fairly early in the morning, about a couple of hours after the sun-rise. To battle sleep-deprivation he had started taking cat-naps during the warmest hours, when he was good for nothing anyway. The down-side of this was that he had vivid, not always pleasant, dreams and small incidents of sleep-paralysis. 

Our story takes place in a morning that followed a pitiful, four-hours night slumber. The day was not extremely hot due to strong winds, that would totally spoil any attempt to go swimming. Luckily, he did not plan to go to the beach. He would go to the mountain, or to be more precise he would take the dog for a walk up the nearest hill. 

On they went, Mr BooHoo and his half-breed pitbull, making an occasional stop for the dog to explore.         Mr BooHoo observed his surroundings. The warm smell of pines was sort of pleasant and the few weeds that survived in the heat were interesting. Yet, soon he realized that he was walking in a landscape of decay. The limited period of spring had resulted in limited bloom. The soil was dry. The grass and susceptible greenery  were yellow and dead. The dominant colours were the grey of the stone, the brownish of dirt, the yellow of dead leaves and the dull green of the thirsty pines. The dog was panting and trying to walk in the shade. Mr BooHoo found himself pondering on the endlessness of human stupidity and malice. So many things were simply wrong! It was as if idiocy had declared war against reason, progress, health and truthfulness. And people were outgoing as usual because it was "summer" and "healthy, open people enjoy summer". He felt certain that the moron who came upon that theory had serious issues of perception, or lived in an alternate universe. 

He took a large sip of the freshest air available in the city and headed back home. After all, the dog must have gotten thirsty and it was an innocent creature, that followed him around and showed affection. Mind you, he was not one of those idiots that prefer animals to humans, he would go for a nice chat with an intelligent being at any time, it's just that really intelligent people were hard to come across, especially if one tries to avoid the rest. He would just have to tolerate another day. After all, time passed, the rest of his life would just happen with or without his consent and his lifetime would pass as well, just like the summer.   

Chapter 20

This is the twentieth chapter. This means that there are nineteen more. It might be alright to read just this one but bear in mind that your experience will be fragmented and this is not a good thing. It will be like when I started watching the new Dr Who episodes in a random order and it made my Dr-Who-fan-friends want to pull my hair. Or like when my friend made me watch the 330th episode of Bleach when I was at the 220th. It was an annoying spoiler.

Chapter @) (20): On Sadness and what followed the first Age of Reason

Mr BooHoo was sitting on the toilet observing the shapes formed in the tiles on the walls and the floor while pondering on the fact that he was a sad person. A year before, when he was suffering from some physical health issues, he had promised himself that in the year to come he would try to be happy. He put  great effort to make happy thoughts. He even left himself small motivational notes, that only helped for a splinter of a second. He was not catatonic, nor was his face constantly grim, but his happiness appeared to be rather fragile. What could he do? He consumed herbal infusions and a lot of sardines but none of these helped. He was happy with his partner and his dog but they did not help either. Could he be chemically unbalanced? Did he need to play more? Maybe it was the water or he might have made a habit of it.

He remembered his childhood as a sad period. Especially the summers. Not a bleeping happy memory. He remembered sitting in their living room (an ironic use of the name as in most houses during that period people spent more time in their kitchens and the living room was solemnly used for entertaining guests), with the blinds closed to keep the heat outside (as if this could be possible), reading old Communist books (both his parents had had the illusion of being communists and rebels when they were young, thus this was the subject of the biggest part of the available literature in their home) melting away on the blue, velvet couches. Books and sleep to avoid the dull reality. They seldom went swimming and less often on vacation. They had sent him a couple of times with his uncle to his aunt's summer house, a place filled with people, none of which had the same age as him. Furthermore, they always forgot to give him something. If he remembered well, because it might have been on an other occasion, once he had arrived there without a swimsuit and once without any money. He could not swim properly, he burnt easily and he preferred to spend his time reading there as well. Reading had two good aspects. It provided with a relief form boredom and it kept people away. See, reader? Not a single fucking happy memory. Unless you want to talk about books and naps.  

Mr BooHoo was always sort of jealous of other people's vacation, happiness and frivolity. But now that he was a grown-up and went for vacation when and where he pleased (well, almost, because a failure of the system had sinked the continent in debt, his country's economy and government was in a hideous shape, the situation was chaotic and in effect, like many others, he had not been payed adequately for almost two years) he could not put his finger on the source of his unhappiness. And the bloody thing suffocated him. It sat on his chest and blocked his throat and made big unreasonable tears run down his chicks.

The other thing that troubled him was a loss of faith in humanity. The majority of the people that surrounded him were complete morons. Something, somewhere had gone extremely wrong. Evolution had not made the right steps. The world must have been getting stupider,  otherwise his previous view of it had been terribly optimistic. He was loosing hope and he was afraid that if it kept going like that he would have to become one of these distrustful,  hateful hermits. He was not a genius but the level of stupidity was, well, "over 9000". He was thinking more and more of a small house, on a top of a hill, in the country, with trees, flowers and internet, and stuff to make stuff, with lots of antisocial dogs and perhaps a crossbow for the unwanted visitors. He would not kill them although he believed that some people should be deprived from the ability of spreading their hateful white-power genes and making stupid little children that would eventually dominate the world.

Right now Mr BooHoo felt like a hermit in the city. His ability to communicate verbally was overridden by all the above. Perhaps it was just the water, or the things they sprayed in the sky.    

Chapter 19

Mr BooHoo is a character with miserable linear adventures, so you'ld better start from chapter one if it is your first time here. Go!Go!Go!

 Chapter !( (19): The smell of blood in springtime

Mr BooHoo was no big fun of religions but it was Easter and some customs were, well, interesting. For example he enjoyed the Holly Friday night, when people got out on the street and followed a box decorated with fragrant flowers, holding yellowy candles and the local band plays a lovely, crooning tune. And the following day their Lord and Saviour rises from the grave and they celebrate it at midnight at church-yards. And they light their candles, that are colourful and fancy, with a fire that never goes out in the Holly grave or another place of that sort. So, Mr BooHoo felt that on a night like this, when you have absolutely  nothing better to do you might as well go mingle with the locals and observe their odd, pagan habits adjusted to the new religion (if one can claim that a 2000 year old religion in new).

There he was, little mr BooHoo, at the church yard feeling oddly alone, candle in hand, observing. It was a strange thing that he saw. A shit-load of people trying to carry the flame at their houses, the female of the species on extreme high-heals, through miniature explosions caused by irresponsible adults that gave children small amounts of dynamite. Then they would all go home and start an after midnight meat-fest. This would continue the following day, and the one after that because they always cooked way to much food so they ate left-overs for the rest of the week and maybe even more.

Mr BooHoo had a very frightening memory from his childhood, of the Easter period. His grandfather would buy a very large animal, enough to feed for a week or so all of his kids and some of their husbands, wives and children, because Mr BooHoo's dad had three siblings, all married or engaged to be married. That animal cadaver (it was lamb most of the times) was hanging from the ceiling inside the living room, covered with a heavy shroud to protect it from flies and other minimal flying predators. It was particularly creepy, dead, covered and smelling of blood. Hidden under the off-white sheets could be anything. Images of zomby-sheep haunted him. Not only that but it seemed kind of fair to get consumed by your food. This year there would not be a whole carcass of an animal but smaller portions had the exact same stench of blood.

Thank goodness for booze, and it was one of these days when one was allowed to start drinking at noon. This is exactly how Mr BooHoo hoped to survive that hideous day, the day that made him think that perhaps vegetarianism was not such a bad idea. But then again, there was bacon, a serious argument against the latter eating habit.

Let the spring-fests begin.             

Chapter 18

Chapter !* (18): the perils of living with a hoarder.

It was at the last days of January that this story took place in Mr BooHoo's small apartment. The living room was the warmest room and Mr BooHoo and his partner were sleeping there. It had all started one night when the partner fell asleep on the couch. Mr BooHoo brought all the bed covers and he slept there as well. It was nice sleeping under the Christmas tree, for a change. They agreed that it was as if they were on vacation. The Christmas tree was there for almost a month and so were they. The bedroom had slowly turned into a cold storage/guest room and they avoided it. But then one morning Mr BooHoo's partner woke up rather pissed-off and announced it, saying that there were trees and bottles everywhere and that they should throw some things away.

There was only one tree and Mr BooHoo planned to remove the decorations and store it for next year the following Sunday. There were also a couple of bottles in the room that had been left there since the previous night because they had had guests. None of this things belonged exclusively to him. From his point of view non of his cherished belongings created a mess in the house. They were all neatly packed in small boxes, stored under, over and at the sides of his desk, his bed, in his closet, on selves in the bedroom and under the kitchen sink. All right. Mr BooHoo had a lot of things. To be more precise he had a lot of materials waiting to be transformed into things. He also liked clean rooms but he desperately needed storage space. From the partner's point of view they were a lot of junk neatly stalked but creating an over-all chaotic impression.

At this point it should be mentioned that the partner was not less of a collector, as in the other closet and the other desk and in the bathroom and under the kitchen sink one could find multiple computers and computer-related stuff like hard-drives, mother-boards, wires and lots of other stuff for which Mr BooHoo did not have a name. Most of these things were also collected from the street and waited patiently to be brought to life.

So, the main dispute was whose junk was real junk. Of course, you don't classify as rubbish something for which you have a use. But they had rather different stand-points on what was useful and what wasn't.

The other great difference was that Mr BooHoo absolutely refused to throw things away unless they were really useless and ugly, but his partner occasionally threw everything away. This resulted in constantly buying things and Mr BooHoo was against consumerism. His partner on the other hand did not consider his behaviour consumeristic.

On that special morning Mr BooHoo did not respond to his partner's arguments. Instead, he got out of bed and made coffee. When they woke up properly the dispute was no longer there. Mr BooHoo's small fortune was still safe. The disagreement was not over, simply postponed. Mr BooHoo promised to himself that he would try to collect less and work faster. Maybe a re-arrangement would help to make them look less. And after-all, his partner was a nice person, he would not start secretly throwing his things away, would he? The worst was that even if he did, Mr BooHoo was not sure that he would observe the losses right on.

To stop collecting for some time was a great idea, but once a hoarder, always a hoarder.         

Chapter 17

Chapter !&(17): The Mother

"How often does the resemblance between the words "smother" and "mother" come into your mind?" Mr BooHoo found himself asking himself.

Mr BooHoo had a mother...sigh...or if you prefer it would be better to say that if Mr BooHoo exists, well, he has a mother. At the time when this story takes place the mother is alive, therefor it is not her absence that causes the sigh but her very existence. Mr BooHoo thought very dearly about his mother. He could not even grasp the notion of a universe without her. No matter, though, (or is it due to) how much he loved her she could also be a source of great distress. She came from a generation of luke-warm rebellions, people that praised actions and not words but were all words and minimum action. These people were so much into words that they had developed a totally unnecessary colour of voice to speak of big things they did not really understand. To be perfectly honest, some of them might have understood what they meant but Mr BooHoo would say that the base-subject was not exactly basic. Actually Mr BooHoo believed that the world was a pretty much shitty place because people were taught to be shitty and not really think adequately on their own. But that is besides the point here and anyway, there are people that can speak so much better about politics, so we'ld better talk about the issue of the mother.

Mr BooHoo's mother had provided him with a bunch of good qualities. She had raised him not to be a thief or a cheater or a sneak and care about other people. She had also informed him that most people would treat him badly, that he would have to meet a lot of assholes during his lifetime and to fear men in blue uniforms (the last one unintentionally). In addition to the above, he was led to believe that it was very difficult to make decisions, that the great majority would probably be more successful than him when pursuing something he was actually good at, that he would never have enough (that was a good thing sometimes, not actually having less but feeling less as enough) and that the sky would eventually fall on his head if he dared to be happy for prolonged periods of time.

She could be such a grim figure. More often sad than happy and it is admitted that even her happiness was somewhat miserable if scrutinized upon.

Once they had a big fight because Mr BooHoo got fed up with her destroying his very much achievable dreams, by adding implausible details to them. For example if he wondered, say, how it would be to go on vacation his mom would say that he deserved to go around the world seven times, someday. Then she would fill him with guilt for thinking about vacation by mentioning that she had started to forget what this word meant.

The situation was tragelaphic when she spoke about how her mother used this sort of tricks and promised that she would never try to manipulate her children in this manner. And she didn't do it intentionally. She never said "do that or else you will be a bad boy", but "do that and then I will be so proud of you, me, your dearly beloved mother that gave you life, my life, and now that I have no life left for myself you are my only source of happiness". Yeap, this is how it went.

And then Mr BooHoo grew up and stopped living with his mother (they still spoke once per day, everyday, on the phone). And small aspects of his life seemed to be improving. As a student for example he did not have much but going to the supermarket was somewhat fun. And then he stopped being a student and then things went downhill for lots of people and Mr BooHoo that had being raised as a real looser found it really hard to cope. And his mother was as miserable as ever. There were times he wished he could not pick up the phone but his guilt-fed consciousness always did, only to start the same dialogue again and again.

Now, Mr BooHoo was a rather reasonable person (with a lot of peculiarities but this is besides the point) and he knew that blaming your parents does not really solve much. Still, he kept thinking of how his life would be had he been a bit more daring and confident. This is what his english teacher always suggested to all of her students. She said "chouldren, be confident". Best advice ever. As a target, on the other hand, it kept getting further and further with the passage of time and the by now familiar big imaginary L (see previous chapter) kept increasing in size on Mr BooHoo's forehead.

Well, that's the story. Sad but true.

  

Chapter 16

Note to the reader: see the note on the previous chapter, I can't be bother to compose a new one.

Chapter !^ (16): old pajamas

It was Tuesday and water was dripping from the sky, and it was following a Monday during which it was also pouring with rain. Monday was spent in bed, with a massive head-ache caused by extreme consumption of alcoholic drinks. Mr BooHoo's head hurt occasionally on that Tuesday although he had avoided drinking anything wrong the previous day. It was that particular, ominous, stress-induced head-ache that was hunting him during his adult life. Every day that passed he hated being an adult more than he had done on the previous one. The perks of being able to have ice-cream instead of a proper meal or buy his own air-plane tickets were not enough any more to appease his reluctance for unnecessary processes that signified adulthood.

It was the beginning of the month and therefor he had to go to the bank and pay the rent. There he was served by a clerk that Mr BooHoo was sure that had never been a child. The sort of anal bureaucrat that had slipped out of a mother's ass with spectacles, a tie and premature hair-loss. They had met before and Mr BooHoo was sure that the bureaucrat's  feelings towards him were equally negative and strong. It took ages to get to the cashier, despite the fact that there were only two people standing in the line in front of him, and that period of waiting aimlessly was enough to make his little heart pound. He had been experiencing miniature panic attacks whenever he found himself in that kind of environment.

After that he postponed a couple more things that he should have done, did his weekly shopping from the super-market and returned home. As he was preparing a delicious spinach-tart his phone rung. Thus he was obliged to leave his dog alone and visit an acquaintance that claimed to be in need of mental support and spend a couple of hours in a dingy shop talking about pointless crap.

Mr BooHoo had been avoiding looking at the newspapers or watching television for some time but still the news kept finding their way to him. This time the unfortunate bearer of bad news was his sister. Bla-dy-bla the government was sold-out and bla-dy-bla the salaries would be further reduced and bla-dy-bla life is suffering. The last part was not announced directly through the media, nor was it his sister's exact words but Mr BooHoo's general belief. In direct response to this his logic suggested "why bother, then" but his abnormal sense of morality forced him to care a lot actually. For everything. And almost constantly. His sister was kind enough to say after multiple minutes of silence from his side of the line "I am freaking out and freaking you out as well and this gets us nowhere" or something like that and finished the call.

What followed was a feeling of increasing stress and discomfort. A big L sign, for looser, was starting to burn on Mr BooHoo's forehead. It was just too much. Mr BooHoo filled for himself the largest cup of a concoction of sedative herbal infusions and started looking for a second and perhaps a third job. You see, the tricky part was that Mr BooHoo had this tendency to mix business with pleasure and was never sure how many jobs he was doing. He was sure he had a part-time teaching job for which he hadn't been paid for a year and some volunteer but interesting obligations on the side, he was also taking care of his house, dog and partner and he was constantly making things, when he did not have a head-ache or other important engagements.

And as he was doing this he realized that the reason why he did not have a more specific job was because he did not really want one. To be totally honest if he would start getting his salary he would probably not need one so badly. Now, it should be mentioned that among other things, Mr BooHoo was also a person that thought many steps into the future and the prospect of being extra busy made him feel more energetic, more alive and instead of a looser he thought himself as a winner! What a relief! That herbal tea was miraculous! No social stress at all! With two telephones written down in his big brown notebook he could go to bed breathing normally,with a normal heart-beat and no stomach-ache. He put on his orange pajamas with the snowman and the penguin (a 1990's relic of his childhood he had recently retrieved from his mother's house). Who knows? He might even dream of nice places and open fields and that the world had actually followed his advice and has gone fuck itself.      

chapter 15

Note to the new-comer: don't be a dork and start from chapter one otherwise I will ask my friends to tell you off and make fun of you until you cry. Then we can have a beer.

Chapter !% (15):inner piece

Mr BooHoo  stuck his teeth in the second-greasiest piece of pizza he could lay his hands on, took a bite and thought about the merits of making enemies. Earlier he had felt an urge for his favourite type of comfort food, that being the greasiest pizza he remembered from his childhood. It was the sort of pizza that would make any Italian go blind from disgrace. Its dough was thin, crunchy and oily and reminded more of pasty. It was small and round and it was sold among various sorts of cheese-pie and sausage rolls, suggested only for people with very low cholesterol. He had to beg his mom to buy him one of these and he could never eat more than a third of it without puking. Thus his mother's reluctance was perfectly justified and he does not hold it against her.

It was a Thursday and we have already been through how Mr BooHoo liked to spend his Thursdays. Unfortunately his fate brought it that way and he had to leave the house and face the world. In the morning it was bright and sunny and Mr BooHoo had slept for almost nine hours. By the time he had to go out though the sky had taken some weight, to put it nicely. Large, greyscale clouds were hanging low.  He went to the place where he was supposed to go. When he left it to go back home the sky matched his mood. It was also spitting slowly on everything. Mr BooHoo felt sympathetic towards it.

Let me tell you the in between story:

Mr BooHoo had a professional appointment with a pretentious cunt and he was well aware of it. Yet, for one more time he realized that when it came to measuring human stupidity and malice his imagination was soooo limited! He went on foot from his house to where he was going to because he hated public transport and the walk was not so bad. He would have to pass by the meat market and the china town (if such a thing existed) and eventually he would arrive at a district that used to have a lovely local colour given by antique and whole-sale shops. Lately it had transformed partly into a hipster colony but even that was not so bad. You could get a tattoo, nice overpriced clothes, a mainstream cutting edge haircut or a cup of coffee in a nice environment and be photographed as a foreign rock-star. Not so bad.

He located the exact address and rung the bell. The first thing he disliked was that he had to take off his shoes. Although he liked walking barefoot he always considered it a great insult to be asked to take off his shoes when he had not been previously notified. He did not even take it personally, it just characterized the people who asked for it as donkeys. No one in the western world should have to show their bare feet, socks or holes on socks if they did not want to. It was simply rude. He unzipped his boots and went inside. The space was nice but it was one of the occasions when the decorator has tried really hard to create a feeling of warmth and "positive energy"-as they themselves put it- that the end-result is the complete opposite. For the love of supreme beings! A very few people feel well in white open spaces with white rugs all over the place! In addition to this there was a recording of some sort of Hinduistic chant in an overpowering volume that made his mind go numb. It was the equivalent of free jazz for the drone listener or of heavy metal for your grand-grand-father. The introductory conversation moved around new-age crap. He did say a couple of wrong things himself, of which he was rather proud subsequently. For example he was introduced to a girl with an odd fashion sense whose name started with the same letter of the alphabet as his. The cunt who did the introduction said "you two have something in common" and before he got to finish his sentence Mr BooHoo said about the previously mentioned letter. Non of them appreciated his sense of humor and the only common thing was that they both knit. He also said that he was no longer a vegetarian and had never been a vegan, a remark that made them exchange a curious look with each other.

Another thing that made a really bad impression was the fact that they seemed to think that hand-washing second hand clothes was a good thing. Ummmm, Mr BooHoo felt rather certain that hand-washing does not sterilize things, which is why they usually clean second hand things with hot, very hot, steam. Hand washing them in mild temperatures in his mind should have been illegal. further more they did not offer him anything to drink which is against every idea of hospitality. The cunt also said "let me keep you no further"which can also be translated as "all right, go away now". Something was very fishy. He never made good friends with New Age creaps but these people where rude, negative, bloody fucking vampires (Mr BooHoo had a half-new-age friend who believed in the existence of energy-vampires. He did not exactly follow her thought but if there is such a thing, these people where exactly that).

He got up, put on his coat and got ready to leave when he heard them say "good meditation". A part of his brain sizzled. He could understand meditation as a need and partly as a process but to think that everybody should and do practice it was plainly preposterous. Bloody fascists they were! He needed good comfort food rich in protein. Ergo the pizza. Now he would do  the job that was assigned to him. His moral self asked him to stay away, but the robin hood in him suggested that he took advantage of them first. He would make up his mind in the future. Thursday was still there and he had plenty of knitting to do. Knitting gave him "inner piece".           

chapter 14

Note to reader: The narrative of the adventures of Mr BooHoo is linear, despite the fact that each chapter is an individual story, so I would advice you-in order to make justice to this character- to start from chapter one. I would also like to mention that the thirteenth chapter has been temporarily hidden, not because I am some sort of superstitious freak but due to its spiteful content. Therefor I choose to keep it in place for my personal archive but make it unavailable to the general public.

Chapter!$ (14): science fiction

Mr BooHoo could not stop feeling disappointment for the world in which he was living in. The place was crowded with idiotic, immoral and bad people. Refusing to let himself "grow up"(or what was generally accepted as such, some characteristics of which state were a hardening of heart and lose of taste), he did not accept the disillusionment that this was just the way things were and there was nothing to be done about it. He did not want to kill anyone, although he wouldn't mind giving a good fright and maybe a better spanking to a few people, but the chances of him building up the proper musculature were lame. Thus he often fondled in the following idea:

Somebody, somewhere, would do something silly and release a toxin or a substance of some sort that would infect the majority of the human population, reducing their intelligence somehow. This "element" would have a strange side-effect to another population as well, that of the rabbits. Yes, we are referring to the popular small furry creatures, most often white with red eyes, famous for their dexterity with magic tricks, fond of lettuce and unfortunately considered a culinary delicacy. Now, rabbits have two great advantages in comparison to other species; they can jump really high in analogy to their size and they copulate and multiply in extreme rhythms. Rabbits would start growing until they reached human height.   Then they would jump to the upper floors of buildings and they would also adopt  human speech for the sole purpose of saying "Who's cute now?" while demonstrating their glistening, blade-sharp teeth...       

chapter 12

If this is the first time you are visiting, please do your self a favour and start from chapter one. If you are mentally challenged and don't understand how, find the list of posts and from there go to the oldest one.

charter !@(12): the days of the week

Mr BooHoo decided that the weekend was too short. Thus he took another decision, to add a second Saturday to each week and a special extra Sunday whenever he thought he needed one. He was not a bourgeois, to be able to do this. Just...problematic and since he worked mostly from home it was no biggy  to rearrange time. You see during the weekends public services and most shops were closed and this gave him a sense of freedom as if there were no obligations or consequencies. To name a weekday Saturday meant that he could go shopping etc in the morning but that he would go nowhere unpleasant and on his spare Sundays he would not leave the house at all. This way he could afford a three-day weekend every week and a day-in every now and then. Saturdays were to be on Mondays or Thursdays because he was working at a school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Fridays were usually tranquil enough as they were.

We can picture Mr BooHoo on a nice gloomy Monday morning, that he had just renamed Saturday, thinking of a past Thursday that had been transformed from a silly fourth into a lovely sixth day of the week.

He had opened his eyes at half past eleven. Outside a bright, sunny day was taking place, exactly a month before Christmas. He felt glad to have survived another week and that it was only two more days to the weekend truce.

In Mr BooHoo's perception to wake up after ten o'clock was late. He felt clearer during the day-time and therefor he tried to prolong it as much as possible. He liked sleep as much, though, and there was a conflict.

The previous day, Wednesday it was, he had decided that he would postpone every disagreeable errand until the following week. Specifically, he had to go to a public health institute for the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, the junkies and the artists, with two photographs (eventually they only needed one), his i.d. and a photocopy of a protocol form that was given to him the first time he went there, three months earlier, to collect his health benefits booklet. He did not really want that because he did not really plan to use it. He was terrified of public hospitals, despised queues and furthermore, when ever he went to one he was worried he would catch some new strange and maybe even lethal disease. In addition to the above he would have to go to a massive, ugly public building, wait in line for hours among the previously mentioned miserable social groups, get into a dingy room crowded with desks and talk to a despondent public servant that would hate his or her job along with the rest of the humanity and be in a constant search of an opportunity to spit his or her moodiness to the face of an innocent by-stander. The last time he was there a large, deranged blond woman who looked and acted like a pimp and might have been a prostitute had been blocking his way in for almost half an hour, until one of the people that worked there took pity of him and invited him in to get his last stamp and leave. The whole experience was rather unpleasant and he was not looking forward to repeating it.

Avoiding pain, both physical and mental, was instinctive for all living organisms. Mr BooHoo could tolerate physical pain but was very sensitive when it came to insults. As some would say, he tended to take everything way too personally. For example he would repeat random dialogues with total strangers that had been rude to him (and apparently had forgotten of him the very next second) for days on end, as if they had slapped him in the face and he had done nothing to avoid it, but in the meantime he was boiling inside. Not only he felt helpless and stunned at the moment when the incident took place but it haunted him for the rest of his life, like a misplaced scar. ( Well-placed physical scars can be sexy). He was also unlucky enough to live in a city where people were edgy and loud. This situation made his life difficult. An acquaintance had suggested that he managed his errands by doing one obligatory unpleasant thing every week. On that particular week he had gone to the bank to pay the rent and had made two unpleasant phone-calls. Enough is enough, he thought, and took the decision in question. He had been good enough to go to work, take care of the house, walk the dog two to three times per day (the night-walk was his partner's responsibility), so on that ex-Thursday, now Saturday, he could do nice stuff.

He combined the dog's walk with a cup of coffee by him self. He had found a nice cafe on a nice location, under a record-store. From his table he could see the passers-by and a dirty old building. The coffee was all right and cheap. The radio was playing"Heroes" by David Bowie. Then he went back home to make Christmas ornaments and experimented on a chicken-pie recipe (eventually it came out too dry but his next attempt was a success) Somedays, life could be all-right for anyone.    

chapter 11

Post Scriptum at the top of the page: Towards the bottom of the page there is a link-button to older posts. Feel free to start reading from chapter no 1. 

Chapter: !! (11): difference and public acceptance


Mr BooHoo was terribly off-put by another type of person (apart from bureaucrats, fascists, know-it-alls and all the other types mentioned in previous chapters). He was terribly annoyed by people who did not accept the fact that not all of us think the same, like the same or have the same aspirations and ambitions. Lucky for him he had been raised in  a tolerant family that had taught him that he shouldn't expect from others to have the same taste as him, neither should he try to force acceptance. To have an individual personality was more important than being part of a pact.

Being poor and closed as a person did not make him popular at primary school. His clothes were different from these of his classmates and he spent more time reading than socializing. If he had the money and the right influences (there was no internet back then) he would have been a first class traditional geek. Yet, he never wore braces (his teeth were everything but straight, still, as I said before he couldn't afford most things, let alone cosmetic procedures), his eyesight was perfect and he used too much foul language for a toddler. Of course back then he desperately wanted to fit in, to have friends and not to have the popular children of the school treat him like shit. This had as a result a lot of embarrassing memories because on occasion he did buy uninteresting magazines, wore the wrong clothes, sang ugly songs and watched silly sitcoms. When he went to high-school he made real friends and figured out that he was not an alien, he just happened to be in a really idiotic environment. He also thought that all this judgement upon the fact that he seemed to think in a different manner than the mass was a thing of the past. He knew that there would always be people whose narrow-mindedness would form the general opinion and the contemporary notion of "ordinariness" but he also thought that being considered different would not be an alienating factor because mature individuals know that diversity is not a synonym of wrongness.

Thus, for a few years, the world was a happy place where he could go round with his hair really long or really short, handmade clothes and odd make-up and not only have friends and partners but actually earn people's respect with his good manners and ethical behaviour. It always hurt him whenever he came across someone who rushed into conclusions or who considered that being odd was illicit.
Trying to find a job suggested to him that maybe he should work a bit more on making a good first impression. Yet, most restrictions included nudity and extreme make up and Mr BooHoo understood that and accepted it without boohooing.
The god of odd luck brought things that way, once, that he had to work with two nuns! This came as a shock initially but he rather enjoyed it as an opportunity for sociological research and again, his good manners and intense sense of morality helped him manage adequately.

And after all that he came upon a small group of people, a family to be more precise, that after knowing him for a few years still refused to accept him. Not only did they take advantage of every opportunity given to tell him off and alienate him but they also tried so hard to impose their lifestyle on him, repeating directly and indirectly that most of his decisions and manners were immature, inviting him again and again to do the same things they liked and making a huge fuss when he declined some of these suggestions.

To sum up, Mr BooHoo felt anger for another type of person: the ordinary one. The sort of people that will give you things regardless whether you like them or need them or not. The sort of people that believe that all boys should have nicely combed short hair and all the girls long, that all girls should like the color pink and take care of the house, while the boys should be out working in their properly ironed fashionable uniforms, that homosexuals should stay hidden in the cellars and that being part of a pact is the most important thing. The people that judge you from your clothes and not from your manners, the people that take a step back when you reach your hand out to them saying "my name is (your name here), nice to meet you" just because you happen to have a part of your hair shaved (this is a true story, an actual fact. It really did happen). The very same sort that slows the world down and for whom imagination is an admirable quality only when it belongs to someone from another country.  Such a sad affair...     

Chapter 10

Note to the uninitiated reader: See the number above? It says 10 (ten). This means two things: a) it is not chapter no 1(one). See the difference? It has an extra oval shape like this: 0. b) if there is a chapter no 10 there must also be nine more chapters.  Now scroll down and locate chapter no 1 like a good scholar.

Chapter @) (10): the fridge

Mr BooHoo was given a brand new fridge as a present from the parents of his partner. He gave away the old fridge, that he had since he was a student, that was somehow dysfunctional, mercilessly dirty and possibly infested by cockroaches and now he had one that was almost twice as high. He had to admit the new icebox was a beauty. It had two separate doors for the frizzer and the fridge compartments and multiple selves and drawers. It was fabricated so as to consume less energy and oh, so clean. It was so big Mr BooHoo never managed to fill it. As it has already been mentioned, a beauty for a fridge.

Yet, Mr BooHoo could not help feeling melancholic when he thought about it. The thing is that by having so big an object, and expensive and all, it became a symbol of stability. Now, Mr BooHoo liked the idea of stability. After moving around for almost ten years and changing houses almost every year he fondled with the idea of settling down. But he wanted it to be his own choice. He seriously disliked the idea of being chained by a fridge. And it was not only that! He new that soon the fridge would be followed by a nice library and a couch and even a new mattress was on its way (he was not happy about this because it felt evasive and further-on the previous mattress was just fine and he would have to find a place to store it).

 At this point a subject should be clarified: Mr BooHoo was clearly a "homo-collector". He hesitated a great deal to throw away stuff. He accumulated objects and materials for future use. His family, flatmates and partners found this to be a reason of distress from time to time. He was working on it, by forcing himself to leave things on the pavement when they were in a really bad shape, or to find "foster-homes" if he thought that they might get love from someone else, and by not acquiring new ones unless it was absolutely necessary. By transforming them frantically into new charming, and useful when possible, objects was his way of getting scolded less and gain the acceptance (not be considered mentally unstable or even worse an idiot  of the previously mentioned people.

It was not the same with living organisms. Someone could think that he would experience the dog as a more serious burden, and occasionally it was. It made moving around and travelling much more complicated. Yet he did not have that strong a psychologic reaction to it. Perhaps it was because stuff that breath have an apparent autonomy. Anyway, this subject will not be analysed neither here nor now.

Returning to the fridge, he hated the fact that he felt it as a ball and chain. He was not that fond of his apartment, he had become terribly bored of his neighbourhood, the city in which he lived made him unhappy and the country, well, he was never very glad of having been born and raised there. He had left it once but returned after a year with the perspective, though, of leaving again after a period of rest. The acquisition of the fridge made things seam oddly permanent.  And the word permanent was associated directly with the word stale in his mind, on the occasions that he felt low. How would he take the decision to move if he could not take the fridge with him? Generally, he hesitated to have things he could not carry on his own, or with a little bit of help. He had lots of things but they could all be put in small boxes he could handle by himself. The large, beautiful, expensive, new fridge was plainly over-whelming.

How jolly nice, another bloody issue he would have to solve.          

the bath

Mr BooHoo got out of the bathroom in his heavy brown bathrobe and walked, barefoot on the ice-cold floor, to the living room, where he found his silk, green slippers. On his way to the bedroom he saw the mist flowing slowly into the corridor and dissolving into the air. The light was still on. He walked through the steam. It smelled nice. He felt animated as he took a couple of steps in the bathroom this second time. The warmth and the cute smell of shampoo made him feel dreamy, as if walking into another persons private life, from a safe spot. He grinned.

chapter 9 : not for the squimish

In every post I suggest to the unaware reader to start from chapter (post) no 1. I also mention that it is all fictional, just to be on the safe side. I began writing this story last night on a notebook I found on the pavement outside of my house, in which I also wrote my shopping list for the supermarket. In this particular post I would like to say a couple more stuff: A) if you don't feel comfortable reading about blood, needles, hospitals and patients then please avoid this chapter and B) if you get sad easily, just keep in mind while reading this that Mr BooHoo does not have cancer and he is not going to die, at least not from that, at least not for now. Cheers! Share and enjoy!!!

Chapter ( (9): celebrating life

Mr BooHoo is a birthday person. This means that all year long he looks forward to his birthday. This is partly a result of arrogance, vanity and a deep-set belief that he is a gift to this world that is plainly too stupid to appreciate him- a theory that is greatly supported by his mother- and partly because he always aspires to fresh starts and the idea that his life might become less crappy. He also like new year's Eves, the first day of each month and most mornings (but not Mondays). These times fill him with optimism; they make him think that maybe he could draw a line on time and leave yesterdays jinxes and mistakes behind, perhaps even get new opportunities. Once he made an object he named "day-reboot pill: to be taken before midnight on a particularly bad day and provide your self with a second chance". No matter how great this idea was, Mr BooHoo is a craftsman and not a pharmaceutical genius, thus, the pill was not really functional. As a matter of fact it was neither made of chemicals nor time particles but a pink and a white sock, sewn together and stuffed with polystyrene balls. Further on, it was almost 30 cm wide, a thing that made it hardly swallow-able. To be perfectly honest, one could argue that the pill in question is just a representation and should have been named "a cuddly representation of the day-reboot pill" but this is not the subject of this text. Mr BooHoo's 28th birthday is.

Mr BooHoo likes to spend his birthday alone. No badly organized surprise parties and hastily bought presents (for Heaven's sake if you don't know what to get a person just buy flowers.They are nice, they make the place colorful and fresh and after a while they wilt and can be disposed off without guilt). The previously mentioned ordeals were the cases of his 23nd and 23rd birthdays, when after having spent a lovely day undisturbed he was invited to a house and had to act surprised and pretend he liked his presents etc. His 24th birthday must have been nice because he has photographs in which he doesn't look bored. Some of the presents were very much to his taste! The year after that he was abroad and he blew a single candle on a cupcake after having cooked musaka for a bunch of foreigners. Some of the presents were very nice and some  were totally bulky and useless and he had so many pints at the local pub! That day has a thumbs up in his mind. A day before his 26th birthday he came back home and met with his special friend. This way it became a double anniversary. He blew ample candles on a huge cake that his aunt, who is a pastry chef, made especially for him and a huge candle that looked and smelled like a cake made by his mother and reserved for the occasion. On the morning of the first day of his 27nth year he wrote a note to himself describing how bad the previous night had gone and that is was probably the worst birthday ever with the most unwelcome and annoying visitors. No friends were around but one, the same life-saver that had provided the cupcake two years before that. This account leads to the subject of this text: Mr BooHoo's 28th birthday.

He had let his 28th birthday pass almost unnoticed. He had received 28 (funny coincidence) wishes on an on-line social network, a few telephones, two more personal messages, a very nice specially made video that had touched his heart and no presents at all. (Candy and panacota don't count as birthday presents, not if the receiver get to consume less than a third). He had let it go like this because within a week he would go through another experience, after which he would celebrate being alive. So, a week after his birthday he filled a small suitcase with pajamas, towels and underwear, left the house very early in the morning and went to a hospital just a few metres from the one where he was born. After an x-ray, a urine sample and a blood sample he went into the operating room. There, nurses installed small tubes with cannulas inside his veins and he was laid spread eagle on the surgical table. His doctor was a very, very tall old man with thick spectacles who seamed to know well what he was doing. He helped Mr BooHoo feel safe. He could not stop shaking, in part because he was so afraid and up to a certain  point because it was freaking cold in there and he was naked. Soon he sunk into anesthesia.

Five hours later he woke up in the intensive care room. The door was open and there was a sign that said "first isolation room". Various cables were connected to patches stuck on his chest and various tubes directed liquids and blood into his veins. His blood pressure was measured every quarter of the hour. He could not breath well, so they installed another set of thin tubes to his nostrils. He was visited by his mother, his father, his sister and his friend. All were wearing silly transparent green robes. They were not allowed to stay there for long and he was soon left alone. Nurses would drop by quite often to check his vitals and change the little bags of liquids that went in and out of his body. They told him they had used a kind of anesthesia that would not allow him to feel any pain from the incision. His lower abdomen was covered with thick bandages. He got an allergic reaction from synthetics, but it soon went away, when they changed them with fabrics and paper. Towards dawn -he knew because he could see the clock of the central room from his bed- they informed him that they would help him get up and transfer him to his room. A nurse helped him but it hurt. As soon as he was standing he felt nauseous. A nurse held a tray under his chin and he puked green stuff.

They let him sit on a large hospital armchair and covered him with a sheet. From there he could see outside his room, as far as his post-surgical blurry vision allowed him. He saw a very old patient, with a complicated set of tubes around the face and shoulders. He could not understand if it was a man or a woman. Soon a male nurse helped him sit on a wheelchair and took him to an ordinary hospital room. He still had small cannulas attached to his veins but he was alive. In pain but alive. A metaphorical weight had left his chest and a literal weight had left his abdomen. Luckily there were pills, injections and suppositories to take away physical pain. He knew that within 20 days all this would be just a memory and who knows? perhaps his 28th year might turn out to be a little less harsh. Whatever he had left at the hospital should better stay there and he had ticked off one of his worries from the list. Soon he would even be able to sleep on his tummy, again.

chapter 8

In order to get properly acquainted to Mr BooHoo, I would suggest that you start from the beginning, in case you haven't been through the previous seven, plus a paragraph, chapters. Never you mind, none of them is too big. Don't be a lazy donkey, if you don't begin at the start you will not get the whole picture. Just scroll down and find chapter one. If, on the other hand, you are a familiar visitor, well then, cheers. Sorry for the spelling mistakes.

Chapter *(8): anger

Mr BooHoo was feeling angry. He filled his bathtub with hot water, added a handful of colourful plastic ducks and a clockwork turtle, of whom his friend was to get particularly fond of, and got inside. His bathtub was neither antique nor beautiful. In fact it did not even have a bathtub plug and he had to use the lid of a glass jar instead. still, as long as the lid fitted and stayed put it was no skin off his nose. The ducks kept flowing up-side-down with their heads in the water. No matter what he tried they seemed due to stay like this. He did not mind this either. He left some gas and watched it go up in bubbles. The smell reminded him faintly of cooked beetroot, not to mention cabbage or cauliflower. He occasionally took small sips from a rather small glass filled with a rather translucent liquid. He looked at an old envelope he had used as scrap paper and noticed that there were some funny stuff printed in a small square at the bottom right side of it, titled "return (in his language)/retour". Under this there were options with smaller boxes on their right side so as to tick in case you would like it unopened to the post office. One of these words, in his native language, meant "unacceptable", although the sense in which it was used there might be "unaccepted". It sounded rude and evasive and it almost amused him.

After he was half the way through his drink he felt the anger subsiding and numbness spreading from the back of his head to the rest of his body. His mind became misty- as the opposite of clear- that was a good thing because at that point, clarity of thought combined with the negative feelings invoked by dusk and tiresomeness would probably make him angrier and stressed. He thought shortly on another option from the small square; it said that the letter was undelivered because the person to whom it was addressed to had "left without leaving a forward address". Most likely, he would not become this person for multiple reasons, cowardice among them.

His mind returned to the feeling of anger. To the biggest part, it was other people's attitude that made him angry. Trusting people with jobs that never got done in time, having to ask people for favours, people that would only do him favours so as to ask for something in return, being in the need of people, loosing control over things and in the end he was the only one who got hurt. Perhaps he paid too much attention to what people thought of him. The worst part was to have to ask twice. Also, people who were loud and cocky made him vexed and people who thought they were brilliant just because they had once succeeded in academia but were bloody morons in real life situations, big people who took his turn in lines and the list could go on and on and on. (Bosses that refused to pay their employes, arrogant school-teachers, violent boyfriends and girlfriends, manipulators, spoiled single children,  political figures, narrow-minded people, new-hippies, new age religious freaks, in one word idiots. Bad guys).

Once, trying to asses his psychological drama, he read about a behavioral disorder that pretty much matched his then current condition. A specialist was giving some oversimplified examples of people who, on certain occasions, sunk into self-pity, where-as anger would have been a more appropriate and "normal" feeling. He remember thinking that it was a pile of literary dung he had come across, because self-pity can be a more dignified state of mind than anger. Definitely safer for the rest of the world. The feelings of self-pity and self-loathing can be irksome but in an explosion of anger there are bound to be innocent victims of violence. In addition, he could not figure out how he could ever look at himself in the mirror if he knew he had hurt somebody so much, physically or mentally. Not that he was a saint, he had sent plenty of people to s"d off, but this was as far as it went and it still bothered him from time to time. He was further annoyed when he thought of all the times he must have insulted or hurt people that had not brought it upon themselves and had forgotten all about it. At that period Mr BooHoo was sinking into crisis of self pity, during which he disliked himself so much that he almost turned to religion. He still carried fragments of this and always expected a new outburst.

As it has been mentioned, though, lately, he was getting angry. Of course, he would restrain from expressing himself verbally, but he spent so much time in his time re-fighting lost battles and telling people off. So much that he started finding it silly and mocking himself for transforming into a vengeful super hero, with abilities similar to Hulk's, in his imagination, while remaining a (not always so) silent mouse in real life.

Squick.

The small people shall rise (again).

After three miniature glasses of transparent liquid he was not angry at all. Slightly numb, perhaps, and ready to go hide under his new handmade quilt. He had made it almost 950 fabrics short to be enchanted and thus did not expect anything he would dream under it to come true. This was a soothing thought, especially since not all his dreams were soothing.            

Chapter 7

This is the seventh adventure of Mr BooHoo. I would suggest to any reader that is unfamiliar with his issues to start from chapter !(1). Scroll down, then!

Mr BooHoo, chapter&(7)

Mr BooHoo got up at half past eight. It was nice. The sky had the lovely blue colour it has sometimes after it has rained the previous night, and the day before it had rained for the first time after almost a month. Autumn had arrived, officially. He decided to watch television while having his morning cup of coffee. Television lately felt like a bearer of bad news, so he avoided it. The only safe programme was a telemarketing show about sneakers with curved soles that could lift your breasts and help you loose 2 kg per week. After looking at it numbly for approximatelly 20 minutes he realised it was playing on a loop and that he had already watched it two and a half times. Still, there was nothing better to watch, apart from a pre-school show with an ugly panda.

The rest of the channels had early morning talk shows, on which they debated if the country had been bankrupt and this was not being announced to the public, or if the economy would smash within a month. He pondered on the idea of finding imunity outside the economic system by moving to the countryside, as people do in case of war, and if there were the potential for dignified survival under the circumstances. First things first, though, and the first thing that Mr BooHoo needed to have done was to solve his physical health issues (the psycological would have to wait). Since he had had a couple of negative experiences from the public health system, he had resolved into going to a private clynic.

He thought that politicians should be forsed to go to local public hospitals. This should be their punishment for not providing the people with decent  public health care. It didn't feel right to need a loan so as to get well.

If he managed to get through all these he might reconsider leaving the city. There was warfair anyway. It just hadn't been "announced to the public", yet people were pushed to poverty and starvation. The funds on education and the arts were constantly dimimished. There was strong propaganda and people's mental safety was in peril.

Back from his thoughts on current affairs, he decided it was time to go to the loo. He brushed his teath, kissed his friend and dog goodbye and left for the bus station. He would go to the enemy's lair; the tax offices at his hometown. He would have to face the beast and get his things done. It was a bright, sunny day. He was feeling uncomfortable but he had started getting used to the feeling. 

Mr BooHoo, chapter 6

Mr BooHoo is an imaginary character and this is his imaginary diary, so if you are not familliar with him you'd better start from the start. Scroll down to find previous posts.

Chapter ^ (6): sleeping and baking

The alarm clock started making the usual, unfriendly, beeping sounds at half past eight in the morning. Mr BooHoo pressed down the snooze button. The sound would stop for just five minutes, a joke of a time that would be enough for a joke of a slumber. It went off again and Mr BooHoo thought of pushing the button again. He knew he was able to do this for a couple of hours, until he would have slept for approximately eight hours.

After having carefully observed pattern behaviors in canines, he had come to the conclusion that the only animals that liked to get up early in the morning are the ones that have to go to work. Further more, since the human kind had been given the gift of electricity and artificial light, it was nothing more than a silly, nasty, habit to have to get up so early in the morning. It also made him miserable and angry to be forced to wake up after less than eight hours of sleep, especially when the climate was not extremely dry.

As it has been mentioned before, Mr BooHoo is a day-person. Or, to be more accurate, he felt much better in his daily self. This doesn't mean that he didn't enjoy as much sleeping in the morning as well. It felt so good, to let the outside world happen and stay inside his safe, cosy bed.

Thus, on this particular morning he decided to do the small extra gesture that would ensure the alarm-clock's silence and he went back to sleep for another one and a half hour. He opened his eyes again at ten o'clock. It looked like a fairly nice autumn day, probably the first day of autumn, despite the fact that it was already the 20th of September. The sky had a bright white color and it looked gloomy. Mr BooHoo liked this sort of weather. He wished for a cup of coffee. His friend was in the loo already.

Mr BooHoo walked into the kitchen hoping that his coffee had not gone lukewarm yet. Alas, there was none. Just a half-cup of watery lukewarm cocoa. He put some water to boil and started doing the dishes. His friend was still in the loo, a place that Mr BooHoo was becoming desperate to visit, too, for he had drunk almost 750 ml of water before he had gone to bed and now it wanted to come out. For a little while he even flirted with the idea of urinating in the kitchen sink, but thought twice and decided against it.

The morning was going well. He had spent the last four days making a stupid (and somewhat ridiculous subject-matter-wise) painting with oil-colors that looked better than it did the previous night and therefor he declared it finished. As far as a work of art- to speak of-can be declared finished; to be honest it was more a "to hell with it" definition of finished than completed. He would not occupy himself with it any more, at least for now. He took his medium cup of steaming coffee and sat on the couch to doodle around the internet. After spending some unnervingly futile time on social networks he decided to do something more worthwhile. He had some cooked beetroot from the previous day in the fridge. He would make some cake!

At this point it should be mentioned that Mr BooHoo was a fairly good cook, but a not so proud pastry-chef. Unfortunately this was about to be confirmed. A friend of his that was an excellent cake-maker had explained to him once that the issue was the incompatibility between the intention to make something healthy and sweets that tasted good. In other words, that he should not expect to make a nice cake without thin all-purpose flour, sugar and lots of butter. He seemed a bit narrow-minded though and tried a healthy recipe with whole-grain flour and honey. He also did a mistake and put only one cup of honey instead of one and a half as indicated in the recipe.

All the ingredients were mixed, the baking trays were put in the preheated oven and he took the dog for a walk. It was remarkably hot outside for the gloominess of the day. This was a bad thing, for Mr BooHoo was fond of chilly weather. When he returned to his house he smelled burnt cake. His friend had forgot to check on it. It was not so badly burned though. The cooking was almost all right but the recipe sucked so badly! It was not sweet at all. It had a bread-like taste, almost salty. His friend told him it had too much soda or/and baking powder. Further more, it had a rather ordinary orangy colour while he had expected it to be pink. What a turn-off.

The bad results of his baking brought to his mind more thoughts about his unsuccessful living. He could not get a proper job or put his life in a straight line, totally unable to take decisions and feeling like the biggest talented looser in the world. His birthday was approaching. ""ollocks. He would wait for a little longer, so as to get the results for jobs he had applied for and then he would apply for some more. Wednesday, the day to come, would be a big day. He had lots of things to do. So, he might just as well take Tuesday easily. Anyway, there was still a meal to be prepared and it would go much better. Mushrooms was something he could control.  And the day was still gloomy. It made him sleepy but he liked it non-the less. Perhaps things would work out and someday, he might even bake a cake that would make his friends proud!