A More Innocent Time…

It’s a Sunday afternoon in late August and I’m sitting outside The Post-Coital Beetle watching the traffic on Broadway. At the table next to me, four bearded guys wearing flat caps and plaid shirts, looking like the bastard sons of Mumford, are downing pints of over-hopped pale ale. At the traffic lights, an eighteen year old Asian kid checks his hair in the rear view mirror while his Lamborghini growls like a panther on a leash. And who is this slouching along Broadway his bald head shining in the sun? No, it is not an image out of Spiritus Mundi, it’s not one of the boys of summer, it’s Slim, a man with all the charm of a pit bull with distemper; his remaining hair is scrunched into an angry man-bun and he’s carrying a magazine which he slams down on the table in front of me and says:

“Look at this bullshit!”

For some reason, Slim is wearing a Bernie Saunders tee-shirt. The magazine is called “Windows 10 for Seniors”, inside a couple straight out of a Cialis ad, stare blissfully at a PC screen like they’ve never seen one before, which is a bit strange because they are well dressed and obviously middle class. So, it’s hard to believe that they have not encountered a PC sometime in the last 20 years. The magazine answers questions like ”what is the Internet?” I say to Slim:

“When are you going to admit you are not a medium?”

Slim’s gut pushes Bernie’s face forward. Bernie has that look of his that says “I need to fix the world, and I’m running out of time”.

Slim is silent, so I say:

“What’s your problem, you’re not a senior so why should it bother you that Microsoft assumes anyone over 60 is a complete idiot and where did you get the tee shirt?”

“Seattle, it was on sale and you’re missing the point. I wanted Windows 10 for Dummies and this is all they had, so the cashier assumed I was a senior, she called me ‘sir’!”

“You are wearing the face of a seventy four year old on your tee shirt, and you do not want to be associated with seniors, see this is the problem, people have recently acquired the ability to house two completely contradictory thoughts inside their heads. For example, Donald Trump doesn’t always mean what he says, Donald Trump tells it like it is”

Slim smiles smugly like a man who has just spotted the finishing line at the end of a long wank.

“Did you have to study to become an asshole or does it come naturally?”

“A bit of both, nachos?”

“Why not”

“Guacamole?’

“Knock yourself out”

And as the sun goes down over Point Grey and automatic timers turn the lights on in empty Styrofoam mansions, we settle in to a plate of nachos and one pitcher follows another until we find ourselves face to face trading lines like Lennon and McCartney  (well, not quite) and two poems emerge which with election day approaching now seem like whistling past the graveyard and if that’s not a run on sentence I don’t know what is.

Here they are:

Ivanka (a slimverse)

Ivanka

you seem fine

but your dad’s

a wanka.

Melania

 Melania

his megalomania

don’t let it stain ya

don’t let it restrain ya

and if he should fail ya

remember this:

you know the size

of his hands

and

his genitalia.

Boom! Everyone a winner! Not a dry seat in the house! Laugh? I nearly cried!