Just a touch of MALARKEY

[Lautremont]

Just a touch of MALARKEY
by Dr. Precloud Jónsson

It’s days like these, friends, that you want to pull at your beard in frustration. The wine store is closed (it’s Sunday as I write), there’s a fresh ding in the truck which nobody will admit to causing, the damn mariachi music is driving you crazy and your boots are really muddy again and you have no idea why. It’s dry and dusty in the compound this month, which is unusual for B.C. (Nota bene: solution for cleaning boots revealed in last column.)

But we can’t let that stop us from working. If I’ve learned anything in this life it’s that you’ve got to be working all the time if you want to get by. Personal feelings of ennui can’t be allowed to stand in the way, no matter how high the slurried waves of MALARKEY are getting outside your front door.

You’re going to say, Precloud, it’s those damn comptrollers again isn’t it? No, surprise surprise, I haven’t heard much from them lately. But all the other malarkey artists in the world seem to be working hard to pick up the slack. Bank managers, traffic cops and restaurant employees have been really getting up in there over the past couple of weeks, and I have to give a special nod to lawyers. Thank you all so much!

On the home front it’s not much better – the ‘spirit of independence’ seems to have infected the compound, and these days it seems if I so much as forget to put the toilet seat back down I risk ending up in the beanfield with a rebozo around my neck. I’m starting to get nervous in my own home and I don’t like it one bit.

But I’m not going to dwell on the negative things today. It’s too fine a day for that. I know from my visits to Iceland that a fine day is something not to be squandered. Everyone gets outside when the weather is warm and the sun is shining bright, and they eat their special Icelandic hot-dogs and drink flavoured coffees. Ah, life in Iceland can be grand!

I sometimes think about Icelandic monks and how they really must have it made. Sometimes – well, I confess, most of the time – it seems like it would be the perfect life. You’d wake every morning to the crashing of the waves, and not a wife or child to be seen! Don’t get me wrong of course – I love my whole family, even the ones who can barely speak English. As I tell them, everything I do is out of love, because life is too short for hate.

I’ve worked hard to pass my wisdom on to my family, as they do in Iceland. I’ve lived a long time now, it seems, and I’ve come to realize a few things. I don’t think you can really know, until you’ve experienced it, how well a mixture of boric acid and de-icing solution can work at cleaning ash marks off a tapestry, for instance. And an admixture of lemon juice and heavily diluted bleach can be applied with a Q-tip to get wine stains out of a beard. More on this next column.