Pooparder Anti-Clockwise

Christmas is breathing down our necks like an African in a queue at the passport application office.  As is customary at this time of year a trip to the local church is in order, so off I went.  Due to the fact that my local parish church has yet to be built mass was to be held in the local Catholic school’s gymnasium. 

In I go and sit down in this rather large box of a room.  It was pretty tough to think of this building as a place of worship. On the one wall was an enormous, and I do mean enormous, mural of a knight in shining armor straddling a large white horse. The horse had flowing locks that Claudia Schiffer would have been jealous of.   Above the mounted horse was a grandiose painted banner with the school’s name emblazoned across it. I then turn my neck and bend it backwards, careful not to hit the pot bellied man sitting behind me in the stomach, and I look up at the ceiling.  To my alarm I see that way above my head, and very directly above my head, is the basketball net, hoop, backboard and stand, all suspended from the ceiling.  This made me very nervous. This month may be the month with the highest rate of suicides, but I certainly did not want to add to that statistic. I moved.

Once mass was underway I noticed across on the far wall was the basketball scoreboard.  I kept imagining that any minute now a kid was going to find the switch to turn the scoreboard on and in the middle of the priest’s homily the shot clock would start counting down.

Having checked out the building, the next phase was to check out the audience, or the congregation as we Christians like to call ourselves.  Have you ever seen that strange phenomenon where you might have what seems like a perfectly normal Caucasian couple, but they produce a black baby and after much screaming and shouting at parents and grandparents it turns out that some distant, great great grandfather was of African descent and the black skin gene decided to appear again much to the surprise of everyone?  Well here seated not far from me was a family of five.  At first I thought it was Mom, Dad, two sons (who looked a lot alike) and a daughter. I later realized the one “son” was actually a daughter. I think. It was wearing a skirt. It was too ugly to look any closer to determine if it was just a cross dresser or not. But the interesting part of it all was that although the family all seemed to have falling close to the ugly tree the other daughter was amazingly attractive.  Did Mom get lucky one night with a drunken Brad Pitt, or did Dad fall on Heidi Klum by accident one wet and rainy afternoon? I guess we will never know and probably don’t care.

And then we have the Smith family. I am calling them this as they looked so plain and ordinary they just have to have had an ordinary name. Not that there is anything wrong with the name, it is a perfectly good, solid name.  Here we have Mr. Smith, all suited up with a tie, but still looking like he just walked through a jungle in Vietnam and is ready to shoot anything that moves, which was generally his kids. Mrs. Smith spent most of mass keeping an eye on the three boys they had brought along and trying her best to prevent Mr. Smith from beating the hell out of the boys in public.  Three boys. Three very young boys. Three very young boys that all can walk. They were all over the place like rabbits dodging bullets during hunting season. Now you would think that with three boys, the oldest no more than 5 years old, the oven would have been dismantled and put away and Mr. Smith would have given up his moonlighting job as a baker, but no! Mrs. Smith had fresh bread in the oven and was looking like the dough was rising fast and would be ready soon. 

It is Christmas Eve so of course a stop by the store is required. I must be mad.  Cereal, Bath Paper (the fancy term for toilet paper, similar to calling a janitor an environmental hygienist) and a tile mop. Isn’t this what everyone out shopping on Christmas Eve is buying? It seems Christmas is a time when ugly girls try and get some attention by wearing Santa Claus hats in public.  I’m afraid ladies it isn’t going to work. You are only going to get attention from other women and kids.  I have now dodged all the Santa Claus hat wearers and made my way to the checkout. Of course it is busy, despite there being around a dozen checkouts open. It is after all Christmas Eve and everyone needs that last minute pasta sauce stocking filler. But which checkout do you choose? We all know that according to Murphy’s Law no matter which one you pick your bread will land butter side down. What if like me you don’t butter your bread? Will, the bread never land? Or just before it hits the ground will it panic as it can’t find the butter to land on (like a plane missing wheels when coming into land) and just explode into a thousand bread crumbs?

 Well I have come up with a solution to the question “which checkout line should I choose?”  It is remarkably simple and subconsciously you have probably been doing it all along. First you go in search of the hottest check out girl. After all you are checking out so you may as well check her out while you stand in line. And you never know she may just slip you her number.  Secondly if there are no hot checkout girls then you find the line with the hottest customers and check them out. You are less likely to get a number from them as you have no reason to speak to them, but it is always fun to window shop. Thirdly if one and two above are a wash out then I would put down all your items you are intending buying and leave the store. If there are no hot checkout assistants and no hot customers you need to find somewhere new to shop.

It seems I have finally succumbed to the pressure and established my first ever blog. Okay there was no pressure just an occasional hint that my writing skills were being lost to the world.  I have shied away from blogging for a number of reasons. One of the main ones being that the word ‘blog’ reminds me of the word ‘bog’.  Now the word ‘bog‘  means different things to different people. Many would associate it with a boggy mire in Wales and a blog is a bit like that, a smelly pit of mud with no real purpose and after experiencing it you feel as if you have had the life sucked out of you. Then there are others that associate the word ‘bog’ with that place in the home or restaurant or office or department store where we seem to spend almost as much time as we do sleeping, but all we are doing is ridding our system of our last meal. All we seem to do is eat and poop…..in the bog. 

Now the bog and blogging have many things in common.  Use of the bog can provide a great release of pressure in the lower abdomen and such is the nature of many blogs, used to release the pressure of anger or outrage by rambling away endlessly about nothing in particular.  I guess a lot like what you have just been reading.  A bog can also be a place of great pain and suffering. Remember that week you suffered from the chocolate hostages that refused to be rescued. Or how about that day it was like Niagara Falls back there. Well reading a blog can be just as painful. Pointless, going no where, saying nothing and just poorly written.

But here I am giving it a go and probably doing all of the above, but who are you to judge me wearing your cut off shorts to a Wolgang Puck restaurant.

Where’s Pat? He’s in the bog, probably blogging.