Oh, my dearest readers... I tried so hard to write you a dispatch from my ancestral manse in P*ttsb*rgh, but somehow the flabbiness of that land sank into me, and I couldn't put two words together without both of them sounding wrong. My muse was in a snit; she's forgiven me now (I got off the plane and had a drink and a smoke as offerings, and her bosom has once again warmed to me.
What a lot of trouble it is to get in touch with me! I am like a great badger: I am happiest in my hole at the end of the garden; calling up the badger on his cell phone or leaving a half dozen emails in his inbox will only waste your time and annoy the badger. More and more (in my old age) I am identifying with Kenneth Grahame's Badger. I used to be a Toad/Ratty alternator, but am slowly slipping into stodgy cantankerosity, with occasional flashes of stunning nobility.
P*ttsb*rgh was like this: two seconds after I got off the plane, I took note of the importance football seemed to have in that town. (Reliable sources inform me that there was a championship game between B*st*n and P*ttsb*rgh the next day; many assumed, quite wrongly, that I gave a flying crap about the outcome, even to the point of elbowing me out of a mid-air nap to ascertain my opinions on the St**l*r's Offensive Line. I should be grateful for the gradual way in which I was immersed (albeit steadily) into the frigid, beery waters. By twenty hours after disembarking, I was in a Christian Church, being asked if I had a girlfriend. (Me: "No." I never lie.) And two hours after that, I was in a shopping mall, which was by far the least awful thing for miles.
You see, my mother can always be relied upon to say, at the right moment, "Let's go shoe shopping.". Any moment, of course, is appropriate for shoe shopping. But Riatsamum, for all her faults, has an unerring sense of eu-prattein when it comes to footwear. Moreover, she paid for them. My parents, Calvinist to their toenails, show love through expenditure. For the last three days they have loved me greatly, and I loved them back, in my way. It is a fair exchange, and it lacks the rude sentimentalism of hugging or asking how I feel. When my mother says, "How are you?", she expects a report on my bank account, no more. And there is a crisp beauty to her raw quantitativity.
Riatsadad is getting old. Scares the crap out of me, but least said about that the better. Insofar as his diabetes has progressed too far for him to be really comfortable. Also, he's not working, and he and The Mum share the not-unconsiderable space in the ancestral pile like two Siamese fighting hamsters sharing a fishbowl full of cotton balls. This time, I sat back and watched them fight. You used not to be able to percieve the fighting; it operated silently, like undertow, like rival wizards locked in mystic battle from their respective castles. Now they just out and pick at one another. This time, I say, I sat back, watched them, and kept my hands clean of the whole thing.
The Riatsadad gave me his college blazer, blue and heraldically embossed. It fits me -- odd, since he was a six-foot stick insect in 1962, but the sleeves are too short on me. "I think they were too short on me, too," he says. "Look," he says, "Fart flaps." For lo: blazers with two slits have a "fart flap." Those with one have a "Sh*t slit". Other parental gifts include a load of Riatsagrandfather's sketchbooks and drawings. This was the slave of the civil service. When he went up the palace to collect his MBE, he turned to Riatsagrandmotherbattleaxe on the train, saying, "I wonder if she'd just give me the money instead of a medal..." Riatsagrandmother, who was already composing victory odes for her social success and ultimate ennoblement, put her foot down. "I'll go and get it myself, if you don't."
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Current music: Now, Handel violin sonatas, again. But ten minutes ago it was The hairstyle of the Devil.Current victory: rescuing my collection of pornographic gay poster art from my parents' house without arousing comment.
Current gripe: I wish I could pay all my bills this month.