Cheese Eating Surrender Wombat

Bureaucracy sucks.  It really does.  I am a lawyer, used to life in a big firm, where the only (and I really mean only) advantage of billing more hours than heartbeats in a year is that you can slash through red tape like a fucking samurai.  For example:  

“Excuse me Ms. Office Manager, I would really like to smoke crack at my large mahogany desk.”

“I’m sorry Wombat Esq., but that’s against the firm’s policy on drug use during working hours”.

“What if I bill it?”

“Well, nobody really reads that policy booklet bullshit anyway. Go on, go ahead.”

See? Awesome.  Nothing is worse than being surrounded by raging red tape merchants, bureaucrats and dangerously militant naysayers.  The guy that designed bureaucracy was clearly a crack-smoking employee seeking to do as little as possible.  He certainly achieved that, since major daily milestones around here include going for coffee, reading the newspaper, and filling in Form 347859-9: Request for Militant Naysaying Confirmation of Lunch Subsidy.   What that drug-addled individual didn’t realise, however, was that the “bureaucracy sucks” model allows you to smoke as much crack as you like on the job, provided you can justify it with the dollars. 

Sitting across from me is a French woman who epitomises this horrendous inefficiency, with none of the clean, Ikea-loving benefits of bureaucracy.  She resembles a very large, ugly mouse.  She has a big nose and otherwise mousey features, including small dark eyes, pointy ears and sharp teeth.  To top it off, she has mousey-brown hair that she pulls into a bun.  

Unfortunately, her behaviour is anything but mousey.  She blows her nose like a truckdriver.  She chews gum like she is jackhammering concrete, and in the process salivates and slobbers like a bulldog in heat.  She is probably the most obnoxious person I have met (this month) and swears in English and French constantly.  It is actually quite offensive…Oh, there she goes again, as I sit here looking at her: “putain de merde”.

She does no work.  Ever.  What’s more, she abuses the nice Bangladeshi cleaning lady who comes by each morning to change the bins, with a kind of superiority that makes my stomach turn.  She is not even qualified yet.  Yesterday I asked her to lay off the cleaning lady and pick on somebody else.  She responded contemptuously: “OK, perhaps I pick on you then”.

Charming.  Anyway, all of this is completely beside the point; I just needed to rant a bit. 

I decided to visit Amsterdam with my sister and my usual Cheese Eating partner in crime, Régis, as well as two of his friends.  We shall speak of one of them later.

As much as I enjoy the  place, Amsterdam isn’t my favourite big city.  It is chaotic, there are Dutch people on bikes zooming all over the place with calamitous Dutch indifference, and it is packed to the gills with Easyjet English guys looking to get as baked as possible.  I much prefer the outskirts of the centre, where life is more relaxed, real people live and where the yobbos don’t bother to go.

I have probably commented on this before, but I am amazed by Mother England’s persisting failure to add some more chlorine to her gene pool.  Someone has unloaded a large, steaming, British turd into it and there it is, floating gloriously along the surface, with little chunks of porridge and carrot in it.  Yet nobody seems to mind.  Why is it that so many English males are so ugly?  Why is their skin so poxy, their teeth so bad, their stomachs so fat, and why do they have heads shaped like potatoes?  You really can spot a troupe of Pommy males in Amsterdam a mile away.  They’re the extremely ugly ones, gaffawing at the prostitutes, ordering Old Speckled Hen from Belgian beer cafés and eating hashcakes for lunch like they’ll never have another meal in their life.  Why are they there? Don’t they have a coalmine to dig, or something?  I’m told that these packs of bellowing, smelly buffoons often cross The Channel for bucks parties, but that in itself alerts me to another of life’s mysteries:  what non-blind woman without a fourth nipple and a mullet would marry one of these guys?

Here I was, wandering around Amsterdam with my sister and three Cheese Eating Stoner Monkeys, one of whom seemed to be on a higher mission to get as demolished as humanly possible.  For the sake of anonymity, I will call this fellow Pierre.  He was a little on the chubby side, most likely as a result of getting stoned and devouring entire packets of chips on a regular basis.  He had a blond beard that would have worked, but for the fact that half of it didn’t exist.  The mangy remainder made him look like a burns victim.

Sitting in a coffee shop, I saw Pierre destroy, in effect, 2 large joints, as well as a hash muffin and a cookie.    He then devoured a massive piece of hash-infused chocolate cake with chocolate icing and green sprinkles.  More than a little stoned myself, I sat bemused, watching this marijuana-consuming force of nature make passionate love to the god of green.  When I asked whether it might have been a good idea to slow down a tad, chill out a little, he responded bluntly, “nothing is working”, and continued to blaze and munch like a madman.  Rather baked philosophically, I began to ponder the utility in expanding an empty mind.  Moreover, what is the meaning of…huh?…what?…I forgot.  Régis looked at me wistfully.  He knew what was coming.

Within an hour it was all over.

Pierre, this Frenchman of supreme arrogance and stoner fortitude, was reduced to a quivering, tripping mess.  As we walked towards the station, I asked him if he was okay. 

“Il y a une vache sur mon dos.”

“I’m sorry.  Can I just clarify, did you just say that there is a cow on your back?”

“Yes.  But I cannot move my head.  I cannot turn to look at you.  There is a cow on my back.  The cow will not stay on my back if I turn to look at you.”

“OK, well, isn’t that a good thing?”

“No.  I am balanced.”

“Balanced?”

“Balanced.”

In this state of bovine equilibrium, we parted ways for the evening.  I saw him the next morning where he fell asleep at MacDonalds, then went off to smoke more joints and drive back to Paris, baked as a cake and no doubt an even fatter, mangier stoner than when we first met.

Outrageous!

Love,

Wombat