Happy
Holidays, Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan!
by
Robert LaFrance
I hope everyone has a joyeux Noel
and all that stuff, and I wish I could get this shoe polish off my good pants –
trousers, whatever they’re called these days.
Enough on that subject for now; I
will surely find a way. Shoe polish is an organic product, right? So…
“Bob, shoe polish as about as
organic as an aluminium car bumper. Why don’t you just face the fact that your
only pair of pants is ruined and go buy another pair just like them? She may
not notice.”
Flug, being single, had just spoken
the four words that husbands the world over have uttered since Adam said: “She
may not notice that it’s from the tree of forbidden fruit”. Wives notice
everything that we husbands don’t want them to notice and I have the rolling
pin scars to prove it. It’s a phrase like: “I know a shortcut”. Watch out!
Some readers might be asking if I
really have only one pair of pants – trousers, etc. – but it’s true. One pair
of pants that, until yesterday, weren’t stained, torn or otherwise mutilated.
Now I have an entire wardrobe that’s ready for the ragman, until I remember
that a ragman is someone from a by-gone era. He won’t be by to help me out, but
I will soon need the services of a good bandager.
(I just remembered why I thought
about ragmen. About a month ago I read a book called “The Ragman’s Son” by the
actor Kirk Douglas, who was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky, the son of an
illiterate immigrant Russian-Jewish ragpicker and junkman.)
Back to my dilemma about my pants:
what am I to do? Flug offered to lend me a pair, but since he’s about half my
size and much taller, that might not work to perfection. By the way, I am not
going to explain how I got shoe polish on my only good pair of pants, so don’t
bother trying to find out. Let’s just say lemonade was involved.
*****************************
Still on the subject of clothes, I
wonder who came up with the idea of ties for men?
I have thought about this for
several seconds and cannot come up with any reason why a human being should be
required to take a piece of narrow cloth and tie it around his neck in a
certain way, then appear in public like this. It doesn’t meet the requirements
of my ideas for fun.
Indeed, I would cheerfully throw my
tie into the river or burn it, but Environment Canada has issued strict
guidelines for that sort of thing. Seriously though, are men’s ties just
something the ‘clothing industry’ came up with so they could sell them and make
big money? I remember when I was a kid I would usually buy my father a tie for
Christmas – or maybe some after-shave lotion – because it’s all I could think
of. By the time I was 25, he took all the ties in his dresser and made a warm
blanket for his horse King. As to the after-shave lotion, he used dump that,
three bottles at a time, into the tank of our 1957 Chevvy. True stories.
I often think about the uselessness
of things like neckties, and the vast sums of money spent on other useless items,
like high-end pet food. Whether this is high-end food for pets or food for
high-end pets, I can’t even guess, but I do know that some people spend a lot
of money on their dogs and cats under the impression that they’re human. These
same people don’t have any qualms about buying a chicken at the grocery store,
or chowing down on a hamburger, but I suppose hens and cows aren’t human. It’s
all part of the giant con jobs we live with, like bottled water.
*****************************
Along the same line of useless
items, or at least items that, once purchased, do not get used, I include
treadmills and other exercise equipment. We had an exercise bicycle AND a
treadmill here at our estate for years, until finally someone noticed that
nobody here likes bicycles and when we walk we actually do it on the road. We
own raincoats and snowcoats.
If you don’t believe that everyone
in New Brunswick already owns a treadmill, put an ad in the paper for the one
behind your basement door. You can start out at $100 and go down to a dollar
seventy three and you ain’t gonna sell it. Everyone else has one they want to
sell you.
Here’s how I know for sure: I wanted
to GIVE AWAY our treadmill, so I put it on several Facebook sites for two
weeks. I am not joking, I received not one call even though all they had to do
was drive here and pick it up. Finally I gave it to an itinerant ragman and
junk picker. I believe he said his name was Demsky.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment