Those Sinister Dinner Deals, Those Alleged Mysterious Ways

We -- that's Roufa and Mimi -- have reached an age where we can finally enjoy our being intelligent. We can't complain. There was some trouble coming to terms with it during the Age of Ignorance, but no more. For one, it's great to hear our teenage nephew say he's proud to have “two professors” in his family. (We are not professors.) When he had to interview someone important for school and realized that athletes, singers, actors and actresses were not very reachable, he came to us. We explained nuclear physics to him in two neat paragraphs, made him happy and his teacher very impressed. This is what we are intelligent for.

No matter what your IQ, you will not make sense of life and death and love and evil in a million words. Maybe in a few of them. If you are any lucky, you will produce the Purest Nugget of Green. Sell it to the locals for Gold. Tomorrow you may die. Your words still lingering to spook your family and friends, like a vacant pair of slippers next to your bed; an orphaned package of cigarettes, dirty laundry – will they wash them?

While we are writing this, the white noise of the Internet is consuming itself, a multiverse of flaming lips bellow at the firmament:

Fire! I am fire! I am on fire!

A million babies push their way out to the world, girls and women become mothers, mothers become mothers again, mothers lose their children, mothers reject their children, childless mothers stall in confusion, their cradles still unfilled. A nun is dead.

Someone out there is dealing his world for some change. And would you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

Of course you would.

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We are not going to die tomorrow. What are the chances anyway. Sven will sting us a million times, on many days to come. We will buy a French Bulldog, preferably black with a white stripe across the muzzle. We will give her a funny name.

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The first reader to guess right the names of everybody famous or rather famous that we have quoted in this post wins a FREE! subscription to our blog. And a FREE! visit from us.

Angels stole your missing socks

Good day, our dear readers! We hope you had at least half as lovely a weekend as we did. And that you've aired yourselves sufficiently. Always important. We'll keep on telling you until you have to run out for air.

We had a visitor in the weekend, our friend Biko Azinuth. He's quite a character. And Belgian, which is how we got hooked, see previous post. Biko is an aspiring writer, and full of stories. But he wasn't there to impose on us with the characters in his fiction, he's not the obsessive-neurotic type of author. (Not that we would mind. Those guys maintain very popular blogs about how they cannot sit down and write. Traffic guaranteed.) What he talked about was his childhood pets! Dogs, cats, turtles. As a result, it's impossible for us to post anything sharp today.

We started talking about dogs, because we are planning to have one. Biko is a fan of boxers and has had almost half a dozen of them up to now. Sweet, playful, funny creatures – we are enchanted ourselves. One of his boxers would get so melty when he cuddled her, that she fainted. Another one was extremely stubborn, impossible to train, a very strong personality, but still sweet. She wouldn't let him pack for a trip – she would poke into the suitcase and steal his socks all the time. All boxers were fascinated with the birds in the garden. They would watch them attentively as they chirped around the bird house.

Biko has also owned a cat, Prutz. A crazy creature, really crazy. She would attack you out of the blue, while (you thought she was) napping in your lap. When she died, the doctor discovered her brain was full of sugar crystalls. She had been a diabetic nut. Prutz was a merciless hunter too. She would give the family a scare by bringing in a bug or a mouse, proudly laying them dead or half-dead at their feet. She'd take a nap on Kika the boxer, planting her claws in her skin so as not to slip off. Kika did not mind.

He's also had a German Shepherd, Tina, when he was a very small boy. He used to lay on her in the garden and watch the sky. At the same time he owned a turtle, Piet. Piet would listen to his name. You could call him and there he would set off slowly to nibble on his tomato. Later he would take a stroll in the garden, dumping his excess all along, so that next thing you knew, tomato plants would sprout all over the place. They didn't know what to do with all the tomatoes.

Piet was not afraid of coming down the stairs. He would go for it. Jump he'd go, land on his back, and then wait for Tina to arrive and turn him over, back on his feet. Time and again.

In the winter it was hibernation time for Piet. He would lay in the basement, inside a box cushioned with leaves.

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Our brains soothed by these stories, we slept like babies. And that's the best way to sleep. I, Mimi, dreamed of a heaven, where all our thought-to-be-dead pets and animals of all sorts played happily together, sniffed and cuddled, jumped in ponds, examined the cacti over the hill; skipped around poking toys, chasing one another, some waiting for their owners, some already spoiling theirs. Biko's joyful boxers ran after tennis balls and wild birds and chickens, and funny heavenly creatures I could not quite make out, then rested in their nests full of his missing socks and underwear. That's where all your missing socks have gone! The heaven of boxers.

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Our new landlord does not allow big dogs – heaven knows why he should prefer us to have a handbag-sized, neurotic bundle of barking hell -- so instead of a boxer we will settle for a French Bulldog. Aren't they, after all, “a big dog in a small package”? Looking forward to it! We'll let you know!