Several months had passed, during which many, many
interesting things had happened. The kind of things that Dail felt someone
might consider interesting and worthy of mention should they be writing a book
about him. But this, of course, was preposterous. Outrageously absurd. Nobody
was documenting the everyday happenings of Dail’s life; the ins and outs.
Hopefully not the ins as they were too boring and personal. And the outs were
only exciting when juxtaposed by the ins. Many people probably went to South
America to do some travelling; trying to recreate the fun of a long past
journey. Most people learnt how to just about juggle, spent days painting,
bought a hamster, lost a hamster, learnt that hamsters aren’t the kind of
animals that you should take for walks in the park (the tiny wheel was
evidently in the cage for a reason). Any thoughts about the book had taken a
temporary hiatus, but they would be back soon; ready to pounce unexpectedly,
like a child hiding in a cupboard.
It was now
June and the weather had taken a turn for the better, so Dail had been sitting
in his garden, noodling around on his guitar until two bees had briefly
distracted him by circling around his head; the different pitch of each buzz
momentarily harmonising the other at roughly a major third. This set off a
chain of thoughts that led to the pondering of how well evolution had set up
the bee for suicide. Should things get far too depressing for the bee and it
wished to take its own life, it could potentially sting itself with a lethal
dose. But then again, bees are probably impervious to their own particular
brand of venom. Snakes must bite their tongues all the time and don’t die (the
ability of creatures to bite themselves was one of the things that cemented
Dail’s belief that there was no god). So, should this fail to work, it has a
back up plan - an ace in the hole. When a bee uses its sting, it dies.
Brilliant. The animal equivalent of a cyanide capsule. Right, tangent over. Get
a drink. From the…sink. I think. Dinosaurs are extinc…t. Nachos.
The
niceness of the day then led Dail to cycle to Yosh’s house, whereupon they set
about banishing boredom to the nether-regions of sanity, leading to the kind of
discussion that would give a psychiatrist a stroke if they were to stumble
drunkenly into the room in half-way through.
“We need
more Babybel’s…”
“That’s
your answer to everything!”
Yosh, to
an extent, is right. Recently, ‘We need more Babybel’s has indeed been my
answer to the past three situations. Yes, we put one in Yosh’s microwave whilst
it was still in its waxy cocoon just to see what would happen (an odd shaped,
gloopy mess that looks like a fried egg gone wrong, as it turns out). Yes we
then made Babybel and Nutella cakes (essentially, Nutella spread on a Babybel)
with the last two and, thus, the tiny cheese purveyors of madness ran out. So
the idea of a red, stop-motion Pac Man video never quite came to fruition, but
how we managed to get from there to trying to throw a small bouncy ball into a
glass cup on a worktop from opposite sides of the room, I’m not sure I want to
know.
“So”
throw…miss, “book still on hold then?”
“Yup.” New
approach, bounce it off the floor. Miss.
“How
come?”. Same technique. Worse miss.
“Still
don’t have any ideas. Bugger!”. Almost broke the glass.
A few
minutes of uninterrupted ball throwing (unless you count the Ooh’s and Aah’s
and Eee’s as the ball came perilously close to either entering the cup or
destroying it) and conversation had turned to other psychiatrist slaying
topics.
“Dail…”
“Yes…?”
“If you
tried to clone cheese…could…could you end up with…a cow?”
“Yosh?”
“Ye-e-e-es?”
“I have no
idea. Your throw.”
Later that day, Dail had gotten quite
introspective, as quite often happened when he had consumed an odd number of
Babybel’s. He had never been a religious person and saw god more as an
adjective than a basis for a belief system. On paper he was Jewish, but on the
ground and in planes and on chairs and everywhere else he was an atheist. True
he’d had a bar-mitzvah, but in all honestly this was more because the prospect
of a large injection of cash (which, he repeatedly insisted, probably made him
more Jewish than anyone who might have done it for reasons aspiring to being
religious) would have been tempting to any thirteen year old. But for the most
part, something about religion had never quite sat well with Dail. He
remembered doodling in a bible at school and subsequently being reprimanded by
the teacher. But then he also remembered thinking that if god was so concerned
about a doodle in a book whilst all the other evil in the world was going on,
Dail wouldn’t want to spend an eternity in his ‘glorious presence’ anyway. It’s
the equivalent of discovering that your house is on fire and, when the fire
brigade does finally turn up, rather than putting out the fire they just
berate you on why exactly you chose that colour for the walls. Bastards.
Maybe it
was the way that the god that people had suggested existed appeared to be a bit
of a needy and pathetic creature. Nobody likes it when someone passes something
off as being theirs and then demands to be praised and thanked for all the hard
work they put into it. Yes, we get it, you think you made some stuff. Now take
these pills, they’ll help calm you down and then someone will show you back to
your room. Tha-a-at’s it. Feeling better? Good.
