memories of bob

all lit up and no place to go

It’s only human doncha know?

Dear reader, it’s only human for others to drip their turds of existence on their interpretations of our experiences.

This is perhap why I find humans both so damn fascinating and so fucking tiresome.

Take for example a story I’ve often related about my Dad’s dad - Bob - you know, the taxi stand poker loser.

I have few remaining memories of Bob. But there’s one that I can picture still as I type this. He’s got smokes going - cigarettes. There are five in his mouth, two in each nostril and one sticking out of each ear.

He managed to puff them all at once - even his ears!

I can’t remember where, nor whom - hell it may have been one of you dear readers who referred to this as a traumatic memory.

Though, given how I’ve purged my readership of woke flakes, it likely wasn’t one of you, more than likely it was one of the rancid control freak turds I encountered in therapy school.

Traumatic memory?

I have a message to anyone who considers this to be a traumatic memory:

Go find a short pier. Load your pockets with a lot of lead weights. Put on a diving belt.

Then?

Go for a long fucking walk and say hello to Jacques Cousteau because it was fucking funny.

Bob was trying to be funny by puffing on all of those smokes at the same time. He struggled getting them all lit. I laughed with delight as he did it.

Now a days, some parenting schmuck on Expertgrazim would likely create a tickety tock demonstrating that if you’re the right kind of millennial it would be necessary to find my grandfather’s actions problematic.

The good people dedicated to progress and social justice shield their children from the terrors of big tobacco doncha know.

Their post would contain black lungs and cancer facts and some cocksucking neo Victorian bullshit about ‘setting and good example’ and not corrupting the youth.

Dear reader please excuse me while I barf down the back of an activist’s shirt.

My Grandfather’s maniacal smoking clown routine didn’t make me want to smoke when I was younger. Making out with chicks who smoked made me want to smoke.

Why?

Well dear reader, what’s the taste of two ashtrays kissing?

Exactly.

We would counter each other on the disgusting factor.

Once I stopped dating ladies who smoked, I stopped smoking.

Pretty simple eh?

But like me, my grandfather didn’t give two loose farts from a diarrhetic cow about the opinions of the more refined folk.

He was a bootlegger who lost his taxi stand in a poker game.

He was also a navy guy.

While in the navy, he served on the Canadian aircraft carrier the Maggie.

It was there he learned to make teeth.

Once out, he opened up a denture business.

At the time it was illegal for denturists to make partial plates.

Why?

The dentists considered themselves better trained, controlled the market and had denturists do the work for them but then quadrupled the price they paid denturists for their work.

It was illegal for denturists to make a partial plate and sell direct to the consumer.

Much like the meddling bougie pearl clutching mom’s who would protect their precious little ones from the sight of (gasp!) a man smoking cigarettes, the dentists believed that in charging the public four times the cost of a partial plate, they were protecting the public from terrible opportunistic scum bags like my granddad.

In reality?

They just wanted a cut.

But that’s how things go.

Whether the cut is one of financial or cultural capital or just another pincer of shame based social control, those bougie bastards, those middle class middle men won’t let a thing slide past them without getting their cut.

Same goes for the urban planning pedants and their over designed pathways of normative social control.

The petite bourgeoise make the rules and as such try to appear as though they don’t.

Because if the rest of us woke up and started playing games of class instead of games of race and gender?

Those middling little fuckers would no longer have to pretend they’re victims.

Remember, if you’re surrounded by whiny people pissing and moaning about how unfair life is?

Fart in their general direction.

Give them something real to cry about.