American Fez

Buffoon In Leather Trousers

Jean Paul Sartre was quite wrong. Hell is not just other people, as he famously claimed, but other people's rock bands performing in public. Unfortunately, there are enough of them that one or two are probably even good friends of yours. Bipolar singers; waxen bassists; aimless drummers; balding guitarists wearing funky hats; amateur, aging musicians who lacked the confidence or talent to quit their day jobs in their twenties. If only they didn't demand your presence when their wretched ensembles go through the motions in dingy bars or out-of-the-way lofts every third weekend.
This was a tolerable Hell, of course, when you were young and bored of sitting at home; a reasonably comfortable Inferno into which Dante might cast those who are merely mean to small animals or use their fingers at salad bars. But as you get older you sink further and further into the fiery pit of unacceptable inconvenience. The music grows ever more cacophonous and unbearable until eventually you're rubbing shoulders with murderers, rapists and heavy-metal guitarists in the lowest circle of Hell, and the torments of the damned don't stop until the amplifiers are packed away. Wouldn't you much rather be at home, curled up with a mug of cocoa and a decent book?
Consequently, one of the great consolations of having bypass surgery has been the instant excuse it provides to avoid seeing a friend of mine's talentless band. I thank heaven for the unassailable alibi afforded by my residual aches and pains, even if they are somewhat fabricated rather than real in this case. "I'm sorry but I'm feeling particularly weak this evening and can't be there," the malingerer croaks in his best sick-note voice. "But definitely let me know next time you guys have a gig. I'm sure I'll be feeling better then."
No doubt such subterfuge practiced upon a friend seems both rude and deceitful, even a little white lie like that. However, the ends unequivocally justify the means when you're standing in a pool of spilled beer all night, watching sweaty middle-aged men play unsuitable teenage songs to an audience of their equally geriatric acquaintances.
In my more eldritch moments, I often wonder if I subconsciously made a Faustian pact with the Devil regarding attendance at my friend's wretched concerts: a high-stakes, diabolical deal to undergo heart surgery and receive a free pass to never go again in exchange. If so, it was an unbeatable bargain and I encourage everyone to contact the Devil immediately about their own friends' bands. You know it makes sense.
These days you will only find me at the bandstand in my local park, well wrapped up in an Astrakhan coat and homburg hat, slouching in my rolling chaise, listening to an afternoon concert of light orchestral music and beating time with my blackthorn stick. I happen to know Norman, the third trombonist. We met in hospital while waiting for our stress tests. Soon I hope to say truthfully to him: "Sorry, Norman, but I won't be at the bandstand today because I'm feeling so much better, so I'm taking endurance cycling classes instead. I've just bought a new bike with a zillion gears and a lycra tank top." And then I'll pedal off into the sunset with the wind in my armpit hair.

Breakfast of Runners-Up

As everybody knows, any reasonable expectation of a breakfast should include at least two fried eggs draped over buttered toast, three plump sausages, several strands of streaky bacon, some sort of tomato presentation and a puddle of baked beans. Adventurous gourmands often substitute a pair of kippered herrings for the sausages, possibly adding the odd hexagon of pineapple if morning finds them in a tropical mood. Blood pudding, greasy mushrooms, hash brown rubble and a demolished onion are also viable supplements and alternatives in any acceptable breakfast: a cavalcade of proteins and vitamins to begin our long day's journey into dinner.
Both Napoleon and Alexander regularly awoke to the mouthwatering aromas of such hearty feasts cooking upon their encampment stoves at reveille. In antiquity, the mathematician Archimedes discovered his famous principle, that a floating object displaces its own weight of fluid, only after preparing an enormous breakfast of seven feta cheese omelets, twenty-four slices of Phoenician bacon and nine pancakes soaked with his own homemade maple syrup (which is the reason why he was taking a bath in the first place). Time after time, from Paleolithic griddlers daubed on Lascaux cave walls to footage of Neil Armstrong slathering cream cheese on his bagel in zero gravity, the frying pan of history provides sizzling proof that breakfast is without doubt the most important meal of the day, just as Franz Kafka claims in his novel Metamorphosis.
Consequently, the heart sinks and the stomach groans upon learning that cardiological orders have limited my breakfast to a mere dollop of non-fat yogurt strewn with a few anemic berries. There is little hope of me conquering my bowel movements, never mind the world, after starting the day with a mouthful of such pitiful gruel. Little Miss Muffet enjoyed heartier breakfasts than mine. Even her intrusive spider wouldn't bother to sit down beside me if I were sat on a tuffet, wearily dragging my spoon around a small bowl of boiled oatmeal in search of that last shriveled raisin. There is absolutely zero incentive to arise from one's slumbers when only tasteless brown sludge and senile prunes await, cowering in a gloomy breakfast nook, ashamed to show themselves to the sun. The early bird is completely humiliated by the worm's swift turn of pace in such conditions.
My breakfast is not the fabled, yawn-conquering Breakfast of Champions; mine is the Breakfast of Runners Up; the uninspiring and unappetizing Breakfast of Bad Luck But Thanks For Playing. My breakfast does not snap, crackle and pop while bathed in morning's golden light. It coughs, splutters and then scratches its pale, mushy backside and staggers off to the bathroom, wherein it squats on a cold lavatory seat to dwell upon its weaknesses and inadequacies. Perhaps we'd all be better off if my breakfast just flushed itself down the toilet?
Thank God, then, for the coffee bean; that brown diamond of the dawn. Roasted, ground and then percolated, coffee provides the necessary energy that breakfast foods fail to supply. Were it not for this munificent bean's rich nectar I doubt I could gird my brain to write these words. Blogs do not write themselves, you know, even though, admittedly, that may sometimes seem to be the case.

Why Is A Raven Like A Writing Desk?

Like the proverbial Cretans, all bloggers are liars. I apologize unreservedly for confronting you with such a paradox in my first sentence, but I feel it's important to lay my cards out on the table from the beginning, so to speak. They are, if anyone cares, the seven of clubs, the six of hearts, the four of diamonds, the jack of diamonds and, last but obviously not least, the ace of spades. I realize, of course, that until that happy occasion arrives when my computer is equipped with a live webcam (a distinctly unlikely possibility at this stage, I'm afraid) that nobody can see these cards, so you'll just have to take my word for it - caveat lector - and I refer you back to my opening sentence. The enigmatic nature of that statement being duly noted, I feel we can move forward to the next paragraph. (Except for a brief moment to consider that the six of hearts might actually be from a different pack, even though the Bicycle brand 'Blue Rider' design on the back appears to be the same as that on the others).
Most blogs, to extend an already protracted metaphor, are nothing but houses made of cards. Perhaps, to risk over-reaching with our metaphor altogether, we might conclude that blogs are really more like Towers of Babel made of cards, and not very good cards at that, but flimsy ones manufactured using only the cheapest paper and the weakest ink, not even plastic-coated for protection. These are cards that have been dealt many times before, inexpertly shuffled, in the loneliest and most depressing games of Solitaire imaginable. Some of the corners of the cars are also, dare I say it, a trifle dog-eared and finger-stained. Blogs, suffice it to say, are always a losing hand.
Except mine, of course. The seven of clubs, the six of hearts, the four of diamonds, the jack of diamonds and the ace of spades, one of them possibly from a different pack, may not seem like elements of a Poker player's dream to most people, obviously, but who knows what unexpected trumps might lurk along the length of my inner sleeve? Or I could just be bluffing and really have absolutely nothing at all. How can anyone know for sure on the Internet? And it is at this juncture in proceeding that I'm keen to draw your attention to an amusing irony: the table that my aforementioned cards are lain upon is itself infinitely more fascinating than the actual cards that it supports. In fact, the table appears not entirely dissimilar to the table that appears in M C Escher's lithograph known as Relativity, although mine is much nicer than his, and probably a lot more expensive. (Escher was notoriously parsimonious when it came to furniture for his designs. Indeed, many of his imaginary structures feature no furniture at all).
I purchased the table many years ago, at a fire sale of effects from a defunct Swiss sanitarium near the town of Bingen-Bongen, in the shadow of the Alps. At the time I was seeking, tediously and  unsuccessfully, cheap apparatus for distilling my own iron tonic, but an ancient edition of the Almanach de Gotha suddenly caught my weary eye, which then became further captivated by the example of dusty yet exquisite chestnut craftsmanship upon which the book was resting. There were cobwebs clinging to each leg, several scratches and nicks, yet the table completely won me over. "This will be ideal for laying my cards out on," I thought to myself. The iron tonic apparatus was quickly forgotten as I calculated the combined cost of the table and shipping it to America.
So exactly what makes the table so interesting? Well, the humorist Robert Benchley once claimed that there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those that don't. This divisive dualism would also be true of tables if tables were anthropomorphically capable of discriminating thought, and my table would be the first kind of table. In other words, my table is a rather snobbish table; sneering down its elegant drop-leaf at those sorts of grubby tables with grape-flavored gum stuck underneath their surfaces or juvenile delinquent's initials carved into their veneers. My table, no doubt, if it could speak, would dispute my assertion that it resembles the table in Escher's Relativity, drawing your attention instead to its similarity to a table featuring in Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's painting Still Life With Attributes of the Arts (although the table in that picture is largely obscured, almost invisible, so I have absolutely no idea how my pompous table can be confident enough to make such a comparison.)
Even back in that cold, Swiss salesroom I had sensed the table's aloof and supercilious manner, but, like the proud new owner of a Persian cat, had dismissed these character flaws in favor of acquiring a beautiful object. And now I often feel that the table considers being in my house as beneath its dignity; that it cringes with horror whenever I wipe it down with a generic brand of polish, as if it were an ethereal sensualist forced to wear a cheap and industrial-strength type of sickly-sweet perfume. I sometimes even think that I can feel the table rock with rage every time I deal my worthless cards out upon its surface, trying to slide them off onto the floor, where, perhaps rightly, it believes they ultimately belong. My table, after all, is not a great reader of blogs; not that I have an answer to its criticisms anyway.