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.