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.