Extremist (Anti-Casualist) Bastards

Smokers, as opposed to people who smoke, contain amongst their number an extremist group who only respect other smokers who are addicted to nicotine and do at least 20 a day; and they consider anyone who casually smokes - on occasion and through choice - as inferior apostates who deserve to burn (or smolder) in Hell.  These people are Anti-Casualist Bastards.

There is an attitude rife in our society that mirrors the violently prejudiced intolerance of religious extremists, but is applied to some of the most mundane lifestyle choices that people make.  These extremists refuse to entertain the idea that something for which they nurse a deep passion or addiction can be enjoyed by non-zealots.  Smoking has always been one.  I was a smoker for a time as a young man, because I enjoyed it (and I believed I looked fucking awesomely cool), but I was the recipient of generously deployed disdain from proper smoker friends.  The fact that I smelt less bad than they did, squandered less money on fags and could never compete with the sheer amount of shit in their lungs and capillaries made me a pariah and isolated me from their closed-shop collective.  They “owned” smoking and I was a casual thief.

Football is the same.  Until I recently fell out of love with the game, I moved in the midst of arrogant fans who cursed – with a joviality totally concealed by animosity – anyone who claimed to be a supporter, but didn’t go to every possible match.  Should anyone care even less about a team, should they dare to “quite support Arsenal” by keeping an eye on most results and merely preferring them to other teams, then these extremist bastards would seek to arm these casual fans with bells, campaign to have them deported to a leper colony and refuse them the right to even mention the sacred name of their team.

There are charity-shop users who scowl at the rest of us for buying anything new, when there is so much barely soiled clothing available  cheaply (albeit not really much cheaper than the sweat-shop-produced cheap-as-cheap-labour clothing that lines the aisles of the major supermarkets).

There are vegetarians who would tear with their teeth at the flesh of casual vegetarians.

There are commuters who can detect casual train-users by their bewildered looks, inability to dart to the correct area of a platform where the train doors line up and by their propensity for politeness.  This weaker species is in danger of being stared at in an aggressive manner by extremist commuters, just for turning up and stealing the precious little amounts of oxygen available within a carriage.

If we’re going to speculate on the psychological compunctions behind such anti-casualism, then perhaps it is part of our natural territorial instincts; that desire that no one should piss on your piss; in which case the only solution for us casualists is simply that.  If you don’t commute but have to travel in rush hour, just piss yourself a space on the platform; and if you fancy a casual fag outside a pub one day, piss a ring around yourself to ward off the smokers.

Bastard Dog

We’ve got a bloody dog now.

 

I’ve never had a dog before, never wanted one; and I’d effectively stonewalled all attempts by my family to talk me into getting one.  Until this summer.  Now we’ve got one, a rescue dog from the local RSPCA and they all love him to bits.

 

But I don’t.

 

It’s been a total culture shock allowing an animal of significant size to inhabit my living space and it is this learning experience that I would like to share with you now, so that you can either laugh with me or at me, depending on where you stand on the Dog-Love Spectrum.  Personally, I’m somewhere in between “indifferent” and “irritated”.

 

His name is Harry and this is one of three words that he definitely understands, the others being “sit” (which he is capable of complying with if he isn’t distracted by another dog or a leaf moving in the wind) and “paw” (which prompts his only trick as such, that of lifting a paw.)  My family believe that he also understands all of our names, “dinner”, “walk” and “do you want to go outside for poos and wees”.  I’m not convinced.  Nothing in his expression or reaction to these words suggests to me that his brain capacity is coping with that amount of data.  What I do know is that he certainly does not understand the words “Bad dog”, “Piss off” or “Don’t lick the fucking carpet!”

 

Nursing an expression of limited cerebral processing ability, Harry’s main hobby is standing or lying in doorways when people are moving around.  That is, once he has recovered from the excitement of human movement.  I’ve stopped talking to him as I walk around, as this tends to induce an erroneous assumption that (a) I like him and (b) I’m going to play with him.  I don’t want to let him down, so I even avoid eye-contact. No, I tell a lie – it’s not about letting him down, It’s just that I can’t stand the stupid and needy look on his face as he starts to breathe heavily and blocks my passage with his fat knuckle head, his tail beating against the walls and doors in unrequited adoration. (As a nice aside, he actually injured his tail within a week of living with us, because he was so unused to wagging it so much.  We laughed about how we’d “broke the dog by making him too happy”, but then I discovered the £100 excess we had to pay the vet and the tale lost some of its charm.)

 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I completely neglect him, though.  Now and again he gets my attention in an affectionate way for a minute or two; and I do walk him.  Picking up dog poo is obviously new to me (well, not totally new, as I used to pick it up as a kid – on the end of a stick, of course – and throw it at friends) but I haven’t found the experience as distasteful as I’d feared.  In cold weather, there’s something comforting about handling a freshly delivered hot one.  In cold weather, the ones he leaves in the garden solidify and subsequently become a joy to pick up.  The only times that this job becomes truly distasteful is when he does a soft one in long grass.  That takes a bit of effort.  So, no, overall I don’t mind picking up his poo, but I think I might need to start doing so using a plastic bag in future, like everyone else does.

 

Here’s a dog-characteristic that I’ll never get used to:  I have a deep-seated personal problem with the noise that people make while eating.  I’m sure I’ve moaned before about noisy bastards in the cinema, slurping their 2-litre cokes and chewing open-mouthed through their bin-bag sized packets of crisps.  Those sounds are like aural water-boarding to me.  So you can imagine how I react to the dog.  For my own sanity I stay clear of the kitchen when he’s eating in there, but then he’ll come into the lounge and spend five minutes licking his jowls, while I tear at the wallpaper until my fingernails bleed and make howling noises in a desperate attempt to escape – something you’d expect the dog to do, but never does.

 

On first getting him, someone quoted one of those meaningless and absurd nuggets of statistical nonsense which purported to claim that owning a dog makes people “70%” happier”.  Well, Harry has had that effect on the rest of the family – or approximately at least, given that I don’t have a fucking “Happiness thermometer” to measure it.  But as far as I’m concerned, the bloody mutt has given me just one thing of significance:  a reason to write a blog again after all this time.