The Sheep, The Bird and The New Hope

Another visitor had come to the house. This time it was in the form of a white overweight poodle. From a distance you would be prone to believe that it was in fact a sheep rather than a dog. I was told that the dog came from a Posh family, and the obesity and disobedience were proof of how it had been overindulged throughout the years of its life. It now spent its visit here sleeping most of the day in the living room. This of course meant that I was deprived of the pleasure of chasing out Devil Cat, but at the same time I was content with the fact that none of the felines tried to invade my new so-called domain. I was definitely more a dog person than a cat person.

The sheep of course was also obligated to help the swampland spread. Piles of dog crap were mounting up as far as the human eye could see. I had this misfortune of witnessing Princess drag her body like a steamroller over a freshly dislodged excrement. There was no way in hell that I would ever share a sofa with that cat again. I was sure that she had done something similar before, but it was different now. You could compare it to shaking hands with people and knowing that they might have picked their nose or scratched their ass at some point in their life, and it wouldn't bother you. However, if you caught anyone doing this, you would be reluctant to shake their hand. You would simply wave your hand and say “Hey” while standing out of an arms distance. This morning I also saw two small puddles of what appeared to be dog vomit. Of course like every time I decided to cower elsewhere in the house and patiently awaited for someone to discover these two minor incidents and remove them. It seems that every additional inhabitant of this dwelling has an urge to make life more difficult for me.

Not too long ago I was dragged along to this remote pub in the middle of a semi-rural society. I had left the house unshaven and with bad fashion. I expected the place to be filled with old village drunkards that spoke of the older days. It turned out to be completely different though. The atmosphere was calm and charming in its own very unique way, and didn't take us long to find a table and discuss, who would be the first to order a round.

It was at this point that I saw her, the bird. She was elegant in both movement and voice. I could convince myself that she was probably not the perfect template, but my lust wouldn't hear of it. I cursed my self-indulgence. I should have shaved and dressed up. My decision was to wait till next week and prepare myself to chat her up.

I went there the following week, but my plans were disrupted by two elements. The first element was a ring on her finger. Had I not learned my lesson yet? The hands were important to observe in the game of lust and love. The second element was a surprise. She was obviously very into flirting with her male colleague, who was young gentleman in his mid-twenties. I couldn't help but feeling like a retard. Birds just can't be kept in pages.

My landlady had announced that a new girl would move into the house by the end of October. I felt content upon hearing these news. This house needed a bit of social pep up. My relationship with my current room mate had not developed and stayed very superficial. I didn't feel motivated to socialise with her. We were on completely different wave lengths. She was a more simple and superficial being with no real interest anything apart from cats and soap operas. Personally, I thought that she was complete waste of semen to start with. Had I been her father, I would have inserted her into a mother and repeated the whole intercourse to make sure that I would get it right this time. I was hoping that this new room mate would be my new hope of feeling more at home. Of course this could also backfire on me. I could risk the two room mates ganging on up on me and making my life even more miserable by unanimously agreeing on walking on all fours and crapping in the garden with the dogs. Only time could tell.

Edward T. Shufflebottom

The Perfect Template

Like many men I have had long discussions with my male friends on the topic of the ideal woman. Everything from her physical features down to the very neurotic compulsive behaviours were open for discussion. My ideal woman was always described as being of South American origin with amazing looks, modest, exceptionally intelligent and passion for gastronomy. This combination was commonly liked by my friends, but rejected as a real living example. You are asking way too much, they said. In the beginning I thought that I was being reasonable with my criteria, however, my friends were persistent on the fact that I was delusional. With repetition, truths can become lies, and lies can become truths, and my ideal woman became a fiction of my imagination.

I started joining chat rooms to cope with my boredom. I ended up talking to this Brazilian female, who studied biomedicine. Inevitably she sent me her picture, and what I saw surprised me. I was expecting something that looked like the swamp thing or a female version of Freddie Krueger, but the woman was absolutely breathtaking. It was at that point that I had a flashback of my discussions with my friends. Had they been wrong all this time? I extracted more information from her, and again I was amazed. She had a passion for cooking and was single. I could not help but feeling dubious about this engineered perfectionism. Was she telling the truth? Or was this in fact a guy, who enjoyed taking the piss? I asked her, if she wasn't a guy, to which she responded that she wasn't and that I would be more than welcome to call her to verify this. I froze. This was it. This was the perfect template. My friends had always stated that this perfect template of mine was as real as the Sasquatsh or the Loch Ness monster. But here it was, not physically in front of me, but some text on my screen suggested that my prototype actually existed.

I believed it to be a personal revelation of how perfection could sometimes cross over from the world of imagination and manifest itself in our world. This woman was the tip of an iceberg, and I was certain that this type of woman was in production, but on a small scale like the Koenigsegg and the Lamborghini. At this point I knew that 99.99% of the production at the women's factory was flawed. It was my mission to figure out where that last percentage of women resided. That percentage was my niche, my perfect template.

Edward T. Shufflebottom

Phantom Lemonade

Today I embarked on a journey down culture lane. Numerous of different attractions and shops invaded my senses with different odours, lights and gimmicks. Members of the opposite gender occupied the streets with their physical features to demote the idea of human extinction. I was in the centre of the known universe and had become a part of this cultural cosmos. I felt home.

My journey led my companions and I to a restaurant which housed ambassadors of the Brazilian barbecue culture, churrascaria. The waiters kept passing our table with different types of meats and cuts which only lingered the food orgy. I had also ordered several Caipirinhas. Caipirinhas, yes, how I remembered. This drink was Phantom Lemonade. The taste of this sweet and inconspicuously intoxicating beverage made me reminisce of my trip to Brazil. It had been in Brazil that I had discovered new sides of myself. I had found an inner peace that a lot of people spend a lifetime looking for. It felt like the warm embrace of a loving mother mixed with taking your dream world back to reality. Unfortunately this unique feeling was not abundant for eternity. Since then it hadn't been possible to recapture this untamed and uncommon state of being.

I had also been keeping an eye on the waitresses. Their friendly smiles and exotic way of speaking was a rogue aphrodisiac. In particular there was one, who caught my attention. She was quiet and discrete compared to her other colleagues, yet there was something about her that I couldn't put my finger on. I knew that I had to get in contact with her. As she was very busy and always moving around I took the opportunity to talk to one of her colleagues and ask about her. I expected her colleague to be reluctant to tell me anything about her due to professional issues or that she was already in a relationship.

Reality struck me when the waitress revealed that her colleague was in fact married and had a child. I was surprised. The girl didn't look to have the age of someone who would be married and have a child as well. But looks could be deceiving. Faintly disappointed I suggested to my colleagues that we left the place.

On my way back I kept thinking about the Phantom Lemonade. It was a torrent of memories and feelings that had passed through me, while I had consumed these Brazilian tokens of gastronomy. Would I ever experience this inner peace again? Or had I been touched by the hand of God for a short time to compensate for the difficult times I was going through now?

Some people tell me that each one of us possess the power to find happiness, but I disagree. We, homo sapiens, possess the power to find temporary happiness. True happiness finds us, because we are unable to define, what we truly want. It's when we stumble upon this ecstatic sensation of inner harmony that we realize the meaning of many things. As for myself, I was privileged for a short amount of time to feel true happiness. I see now that many things have changed since then. Happiness has been forgotten and instead I have allowed myself to mentally decompose. I am like everybody else, an average neurotic product of our time remembering the bad things in life, even when they are long gone. It is time for me to let myself be found by true happiness and remember a simple lesson in life: The quality of the good times surpass the quantity of the bad times.

Edward T. Shufflebottom

Retribution

I had been gullible enough to believe that my situation could not possibly get any worse, but I was surprised again. As usual I was doing my walk-abouts in the house, while my food was cooking. I went down to the back door to look at the transforming terrain, but I felt something was wrong. For some odd reason I decided to look down on the floor right in front of the door, I spotted a foreign object of some sort. The object was approximately 2 centimetres wide and had a dark and what seemed to be a solid texture. I exhaled lightly and continued to investigate the floor. My worst fears were now a reality. Numerous of alien objects similar to the one I had spotted only seconds ago were piled up randomly like some abstract new-age art piece. Like those you saw on television, where some rich closet homosexual was willing to pay an insane amount of money to own and bragged about at his cocktail parties. It was dog crap. The culprit was likely the new dog, and I could only imagine that it was lying now in its basket chuckling at me and my new discovery. This was the dog's retribution. Its payback for having been harassed by me. Who knows, perhaps I deserved it. The battle between man and beast should be a two-way street. One thing was for sure though. I couldn't go downstairs no more. The seed that the dog had planted would only encourage the swampland to spread into the house. It wouldn't be long before it would be risky and somewhat hazardous get out of bed, because inside there were not enough flies to help you. For now I had to leave the premises, or I would risk being asked to clean it up, like with the incident of the cat crap in the living room. I had to cover my tracks thoroughly.
My plan was to turn off the lights, tiptoe away from the scene of the crime and quickly think of a solid alibi. I needed to think of something coherent and plausible. Another clash with the room mate would undoubtedly unleash my bottled up frustration upon her, and she would not comprehend this, because unlike me she doesn't mind living in an animal cesspool. No, It was to a mutual benefit that things remained calm as possible
Tables had shifted for sure. This blow, this attack, this comeback from that little dog had been swift and subtle. It had come out from the shadows and crapped with ninja-like stealth and disappeared. Something had to be done. I needed to mentally regroup and lay out a new strategy. I wasn't about to let that son of a bitch win this war. No four-legged creature should have the pleasure of pushing Edward T. Shufflebottom over the edge. It would not and could not happen. Soon enough I would know how to deal with that miniature bastard.

My food was finally ready, and I decided to eat my dinner in the living room. It had become a haven since the cats and dogs weren't allowed in there anymore. As I sat down, I instinctively investigated the floor. My experience earlier had made me a bit paranoid. Animals were full of surprises, I couldn't be too careful now. I noticed something else. It was pool of some substance. I suspected it at first to be feline urine, but as I investigated further, the pool appeared to be way too big to have been left there by a man even. Also the texture appeared to be more solid, like some sort of glue. It looked like a horse had jerked off and left in hurry to catch its next race. Panic seized me, and I took my food to the dinning room. I ate quietly while trying to think of an alibi that would unlink me from being the first to discover the dog crap and the mysterious pool in the living room.

Good God, here I was in this house that was slowly into an animal cesspool, an unknown substance with horse semen characteristics and a rogue dog with desires of revenge. Things were definitely not improving. I could only pray that I would make it through this phase in my life in one piece and not become mentally crippled. For now things were a bit calmer than usual, but danger was still out there. What would happen next?

Edward T. Shufflebottom

Never was a rainy day

I have had the feeling that it would rain today, and my intuition has been right. Again, I sit by my open window enjoying the aroma of a rainy day, while I can hear the ice cream van playing its idiotic jingle. It's the “La Cucaracha”-theme with a high tempo sadistic twist of infants gone berserk on xylophones. The more I listen to it, the more I imagine the van being a mobile circus with a driver that's dressed up like some clown, who behind his infinite layers of make up loathes his job.

Today I had decided to eat my lunch at Burger King. Something very embarrassing had taken place. The guy who attended me was a black African male in his late twenties. I had already decided what I wanted to order, while waiting in the queue. However, this guy spoke in a completely incomprehensible English. It was worse than the cabin crews on international flights, where they always seem to pick the worst English-speaking individual to provide the details of the trip to the passengers over the speaker “Ledzajentelmen velcome aboard za flight to Lala-land”. This guy spoke with a terrible accent, and because he had asked the same generic questions to all customers hundreds of times throughout the day, he was able to repeat them at speeds that were only contemplative in a nerdy Sci-Fi universe. If I had to mimic this guy, I would have to speak some unknown tribal language, like the ones you see on the Discovery channel, when they are broadcasting documentaries about Indians in the Brazilian rainforest . The queue behind me had piled up very badly, and I had already used my quota of sorry-could-you-repeat-that-please on this guy. My embarrassment was a hair from being surfacing, which made me decide to improvise and stick to repeating the keywords that I could understand. Somehow I managed to get through it, and I had successfully placed an order ...on something. Obliviously I stood and waited for the guy to bring the food to the counter. I felt a bit like back in primary school, where I would open up my lunch box and be surprised with what sandwiches my mother had made for me. It turns out, I had ordered a cheeseburger meal. I confess that I was disappointed by the outcome of the short discourse, however, I was not brave enough to initiate a new conversation with him with the intention of altering the order. My main concern was to get the hell out of there rather than eating my food.

My mood is not as dull and pale as the sky today. I'm a bit indecisive whether I should be happy or sad today. A lot like that theatrical mask that both represents the smiling and the frowning face. It's a state that lingers until a new a day commences and only then will I be able to make a choice. Now it's raining again.

Edward T. Shufflebottom

Secret ingredients and geologic transformations

The experience from yesterday is still affecting me today. I am experiencing a terrible mental jolt, and confusion is roaming my head like a hurricane. I am slowly realising that things are going to be a lot more difficult than previously expected. So many things that I must unlearn, so I can relearn them in this new environment.
The sunshine success stories that I hear about others makes me wonder, if there is some essential lesson that I did not attend early in life. A lesson that explains how to make the cocktail of success. It must have been on one of those days, where you pretend that your tummy hurts so that your parents reluctantly let you stay home, because after all school is very important. Too late for that now. I have obviously not attended that cursed class, and here I am years later paying the price.
Face the facts I must, I will never know the secret ingredients that go into the drink that will grant me glorifying success and prosperity. These ingredients are like those in the KFC chicken recipe. They create a unique and distinctive flavour, but still esoteric to those who eat the chicken.
Fact of matter is none of these privileged sunshine bastards will ever reveal these ingredients to me. Not even if I expose them to physical and mental torture, will they even remotely consider to surrender their precious knowledge to me. No, the secret stays within the circles of this cult of success.

It seems that we have yet another dog in this house that needs taking care of for some time. Unfortunately this dog has a similar type of aura that surrounds Devil Cat. Its appearance and actions stirs this urge in me to either provoke it or slap it around for a bit. I've done the keen observation that by moving my legs restlessly and speaking with in a deep voice, the dog will enter into of a state of despair. Its paws will be scratching and sliding on the wooden floor in its attempt to run from me. When it finally starts moving it turns its head to see, if I'm still hot on its trail. Occasionally it reaches to a location in the house, where it's confused of where to go next and starts barking uncontrollably, as if saying “I give up! Terminate me now, but do it quick and painless”.
A few nights ago he would not stop barking, because random persons would be passing by the house. I was desperately trying to get some shut-eye, but the dog didn't seem to care much for that. I remember feeling rage, and I had got up to go silence him. When I was actually walking down the stairs, I could hear his paws moving in hast across the wooden floor back to his basket. It obviously knew that it should be quiet, which only ticked me off more. I felt like hitting him on the head with a crystal ball, or wheel spinning with a steamroller before I ran over him.
Why can't dogs hold the barking until someone is actually trying to break into the house, or already has broken into the house?

With this new addition to the dog family, a geologic transformation is taking place in the garden. There's an alarmingly increasing amount of dog excrements threatening to suffocate the rich flora.
When I go out there now, I move cautiously to avoid stepping into something that I would regret. Luckily the flies come to my aid by circulating the designated perimeters. I am coming to the conclusion that this garden is slowly turning into swampland. One might have thought that this process starts due to other circumstances, yet I am pretty much convinced that the presence of dog and cat crap is the catalyst to this geological phenomenon. What was once green and soothing to the human eye has now become the anus of Mother Nature.

My situation has not improved. It's frustrating enough having to share the dwelling with animals that lick their own anus as a sign of good hygiene, but with the transformation of the garden, the late night barking and the job hunt, I feel mentally sodomized. However, I take out fractions of my frustration upon the animals. You are probably thinking “You sadistic bastard.”, and that I am. I feel obligated to annoy them in order to suffocate my own frustration. State of beast should never be superior to that of man.

Edward T. Shufflebottom

Cat Incidents Encore

About a week ago there had been two special incidents. They were actually identical, but I had only been witness to one of them. It seems that one of the cats had taken a crap on the living room floor, and just left it there as if saying, “Get bent, Edward!”. Of course, my room mate expected me to clean it up, as I was the first to make this rather uncommon observation. However, I'm allergic to the small critters, and if I don't pet them, feed them or even get the near them, I will not be the one to scoop their crap off the floors. I had spoken this attitude to my room mate, and she was not pleased with what she had heard. Though, it's safe to assume that she could see the logic in what I had said still with a lot of tension in the air. The day after the same incident had apparently repeated itself, but I had not been around, thank God, and I had been asked to keep the living room door shut to keep the cats out of there.

Yesterday, I had chased Devil Cat out of the living room, with some feeling of satisfaction I might add. It had snuck in again moments later and hid behind the sofa. But of course, I am not tolerant nor slightly flexible, when it comes to that diabolic cat. Its actions only seem to fuel my irritation and compel me into making its life even more miserable. I had simply lifted the sofa to let it know that I could not be outsmarted by a defective model from the feline production factory. The cat's face had frozen, and I could almost hear it screaming “Daram yoo!” in a thick Romanian accent, before it ran out of the living room. I recall observing that because of it's short thick legs and wooden floor, it was slipping and was nowhere as fast as non-mutated cats. Again, I felt tempted to tackle the beast and subsequently get out a long-range weapon of some sort, preferably a sniper-rifle or a crossbow, and bullseye the cat's rectum. A fitting end for that malformed beast.
It's very likely that it was not this cat that had taken a crap on the floor. To be honest I think it was the crippled cat. It practically drags her ass across the floor, and it is only easy and convenient for her just to take a dump while she is on the move. Though, deep down in my caveman heart , I wish it to be Devil Cat. Only that way can I mildly justify my cruel and violent emotions for it.

I have noticed that the neighbours have a cat named Dennis. Whenever I sit here by the window, I can always hear one of them calling for it. The mother uses a high-pitched voice, which makes her sound like Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances, “Hiiiier Kiiiiiiettty Kiiiiettty. Diiiinnniiiis. Kiiiietkiiiietkiiietkiiietty”. I don't fully understand, why anyone would need to distort their voice in an attempt to communicate with their pet. People do the same when they talk to infants or younger children. It's rather retarded. Indulge me for a moment here. If I walked up to you and started speaking like a bad imitation of Mickey or Minnie Mouse, wouldn't you think that I was severely brain-damaged? What's even more funny, is the daughter. She also calls for the cat. I reckon that she's around 6 or 7 years old, and with her thick British accent she calls for the cat, “Dennis!!! Here Ketketketkettey”.

This neighbourhood is obviously dedicated to some sort of odd depraved feline creed. Their lives revolve around these damn cats. Wherever I turn, they just seem to be there. Why do people find cats so adorable? They are disloyal, egocentric and careless beasts. They do have the advantage of being able to take care of themselves, but then again when we get a pet, isn't our intention to care and nurture it?

Edward T. ShuffleBottom

The Mona Lisa-syndrome

It is one of those crude and vicious realities that dawn on you, when you can do nothing but stand idly by and watch your mind getting beat into submission. Boredom is officially my new master.
Fact of matter is, I can't recollect ever having been this bored. There has always been something to do or someone to call. No, this time around is something unique. If boredom was art, then I would be suffering from the Mona Lisa-syndrome.

I have become the victim of my new lifestyle. How could I have been so gullible to believe that the transition from old to new would be so smooth? But one thing is for certain, this is a test of endurance. Good things will never come easy. That is something that I have to keep in mind. Something to sponsor my patience and my endurance. Hopefully in a not so distant future, everything will turn around completely, and my terrible boredom will be nothing more but a vague and suppressed experience. However, the situation now is nowhere near bliss. It is in fact one of those horror stories that you will tell friends and acquaintances about on your first encounter with them.

Unfortunately my boredom has me confined to this place that I'm currently calling my new home. I share this home with a dog, a horde of cats, and a room mate. Despite my efforts I have been unable to establish any significant social bond with her. I have tried on numerous occasions to suggest that we do something more social in a desperate attempt to relieve my boredom, but it's all in vain.
I suppose that she's the introverted type of character, which prefers to mentally idle alone rather in the company of others, or perhaps it's simply bad chemistry between the two us. The last suggestion seems to be the most accurate.

As I mentioned before there are also cats wandering around the house. These cats have somehow contributed to my frustration. I think it's either anger that's spawned from my bored state of mind or envy. “Envy?”, you ask. Yes, being a cat must be incredibly simple. Your life has very little or no worries. You sleep pretty much twenty hours a day, eat, sleep and crap, and at a certain time of year, you get this uncontrollable urge to shag or get shagged.
There's one of those cats though that really makes my doors blow. There's something about this cat that I am unable to put my finger on. The body suggest some odd form of feline dwarfism. Nothing on that cat's body seems to be proportional. In fact I would say that the cat looks like Dr. Frankenstein's early experiments; A predecessor to his monster. Its fur looks like a desert camouflaged uniform worn by American soldiers during the Gulf war. Not only does it look hideous, it also behaves very strangely compared to the other cats in this house. It's this combination that triggers a primal instinct in me, which tempts me to reek terrible acts of violence upon this cat. Truth be told, I would never harm the beast, but the temptation still lurks beneath the surface. Fortunately, this cat comprehends that I hold no love for it, and always disappears like a streak of back alley cat-DNA residue, when it sees me approaching. But indeed the cat provokes a torrent of malicious thoughts through my head. This cat is the devil.
The cat that I dislike the least is definitely the crippled cat, Princess. She can't walk on her back legs and drags the back of her body around like a feline broomstick sweeping the floor for whatever dirt it may come across. Seeing her walk around in the beginning is very disturbing, but after while you get used to it. I did see her running once. It was admirable but also rather humoristic at the same time. She looked like steam powered miniature locomotive that was using the paralysed back legs like an engineered pump that boosts velocity. Particularly this cat for some reason seems much less annoying. It may be sympathy for her physical condition.

It is imperative that I find a way to cure this overwhelming boredom, before I succumb to it. At this point I'm out of ideas of what to do exactly. Perhaps I'm looking for an answer at all the wrong places, when the obvious answer is right in front of me. In my experience that's how it tends to be quite oftenly.

Edward T. Shufflebottom