Bob can hope

There once was a strange little man that lived on the far side of town, and on Mondays, he liked to call himself Burgess. On Tuesdays, if it rained for any time more than five minutes and thirteen seconds, he liked to call himself Perry. However, if that rain was
blowing fairly hard from a forty degree angle and if the sun was beating down rather hard and aggressively for any less than twenty two minutes and forty-five seconds with the addition of the sky having a sort of green or pinky-orange tinge in the right hand corner of wherever the strange little man who would now be calling himself Perry was pointing, and if his body decided to hiccup at any time, he would call himself Perry. Wednesday was a very special day, a day when he would allow himself to be called any name that just so happened to sound like a suitable name for having on a Wednesday, and as of yet it had always been Tomkin. On Thursdays he preferred to believe he was a lemon, and he usually felt that he was sane enough to understand that lemons rarely get to do much more than get eaten or cut or squeezed and have not a reason to be called by a name, unless on that day circumstance led him to feel rather insane, or feeling as if he was a lemon that for a reason had been given a name by an unstable or eccentric person whose name would be irrelevant, or Henry. In those cases he would call himself either Wallace, Unwin, or Wilfred; whichever one of the three decided to come earliest in the alphabet on the referred day.

This man had many strange preferences that had not a thing to do with his name, these went on and on, so far in fact that he had to keep a tremendous fat book with him that had them all written down. In the morning he would pull it out from beneath his pillow to find the days name, how to eat or not eat his eggs (this including whether he should over salt them or add a pinch of pepper), which children of the neighborhood to study sneakily from the highest window as they walked to school in the mornings and on and on and on. But all this took long enough that by the time he was finished, the evening had arrived and he was too tired to do anything but lie in his bed and read.

His true name was Bob. Bob was unhappy, anxiety controlled his every move. Bobs life was a great big lie, and he knew that all too well. It was indeed mundane and quite pathetic and he intended to intend to change that. Deeply, he wished to go places, see things. But he didn't really want to go to Niagara falls; he'd seen water, it was water, that's all. What about China? Had he seen the Great Wall? To Bob, all walls were great if the roof didn't fall, and the Great Wall held no roof, it did however hold lots and lots of tourists. He hated tourists, not because they were camera laden, pointy fingered, and more often than not smelled of mothballs, but because they were people.



Bob was unhappy and Bob was anxious. Bob did live on the far side of some yet
unnamed town. Bob did expire with a final, ragged, gasp of stale air, alone in the dark corner of his bathroom of a nasty case of “what’s the point?”, stewed with the cold, deep grip of helpless loneliness. Now Bob can go places, see things, and no one ever waves to him or waves him off like a bothersome fly. Nobody even looks at him, for what’s to see? He should be happy now that he can drift through the universe and see all there is to behold, from Orion’s Belt to the Cliffs of Dover, but now that his body has been chewed from the inside out by tiny white maggots and now that his dried little eyeballs have fallen into the back of his hollow skull, now that he is not so much more than beef jerky clinging to milky bone, now that he is but a tortured soul moving languidly through the dubiousness of existence, held together loosely by a daze of broken memory and lost dreams, he hasn’t a gland or a single hormone to be happy or at least content with. Bob wasted his life and intends to have a good one if he ever gets another. Maybe settle down, marry. Build a house. Children playing in the yard. Yeah.