Totenkopf

Recently The Geek has been declared the new black. The inter-tubes are awash with articles extolling The Geek. Geeks are good at this, excellent at that. Geeks are usually identified by their glasses and a T-shirt displaying a witticism like: Bacon is a Vegetable.

September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In my earlier days I would have been all over that, and this post would have been very salty indeed. It is the sort of thing that Geeks do, and I would like to be one of these. Sadly I have a job now, and consequently have been very busy lately and although I could alter the date of this post, I choose not to*. So this post is 5 days late.

Pirates, as you are all aware, are Geeks. And they have a certain familiar style about them. Peg legs, tricornes, eye patches, cutlasses. Those colourful shoulder-mounted talking chickens. Depicted in glorious Technicolor movies which have all been rated ARRR! But the icon which has represented every pirate and a good deal of all the Geeks that have ever been is of course the skull and cross-bones.

This emblem was taken by the Prussians, and then the Nazis and then the USA for use as a kind of military insignia or badge. Its use in this way was characterised by the skull occluding the crossed bones, a distinction that might appear superficially specious. This conformation is also the contemporary warning for poison. This kind is bad. The jolly roger represents those original Hell's Angels of the sea, and is a skull suspended above crossed bones. This kind is good (supra).

In any case, this is a blog about my shitty fucking flatmates, not some ossuarine iconographic instruction.

Until recently the mild mannered Englishman has not really said a bloody word to me. He appears to have a rather debilitating addiction to World of Warcraft, judging by his TeamSpeak bandwith whoring. (This game may have pirates in. I'm not sure.) So I don't really see him much. He surely represents the Geek.

But like most people he eats food. And if you don't eat, you don't shit. And if you don't shit, you die. So he shits.

Yesterday he shat. Rather a significant beastie too. I went in to the bathroom this morning to complete the usual ablutions and was confronted by a turd the size of Conan the Destroyer's forearm. It appeared to have been marinating overnight. There have been babies born smaller who have gone on to have lucrative careers in the NFL as linebackers. It was a stunning and persuasive sight. I danced my little dance of squeamishness and rage, transfixed by this creature, as I tried to flush it, and then ran back out, squealing. There was a chunk the size of a cricket ball poking above the water. For a while I was too scared to go back in there to see if it was gone. The fucker might escape, and try to bite me, like a carnivorous Hankey the Christmas Poo. Or mate with me.

All other thoughts were banished from my mind as I tried satisfy myself with a theory of how this abomination was produced. Jeebus. It must have been aliens. Or a collaborative effort. Mebbe siamese triplets born with one arsehole, like a coaxial Shiva. Or Satan. It was Satan who did that. The thought of Satan climbing silently in through the kitchen window at dawn, with a cutlass in his teeth, for the express purpose of destructively defecating in our toilet didn't seem very plausible, and was rejected.

It wasn't the Cypriot. He was doing his oily bear impression, entertaining a pair of horny Polish women at their house. The South African was also away. Something to do with Rugby and Jagermeister.

That left only one suspect. The Silent Englishman. Although given the extraordinary diameter involved in his exertions last night, I imagine that this was a very uncomfortable silence indeed. The sort of strained agony that could erupt into full blown ululation and catastrophic prolapse at the slightest mistimed contraction of the sphincter.

Today's reason I hate my Flatmates?** The unholy fucking miasma left after the disintegration of the Ultra-Turd, which took about 5 fucking flushes to be rid of, the stench abiding. The Silent Englishman, apart from laying the kind of egg from which a stone monkey could hatch at any moment, being a member, at least until recently, of a superior caste, nay breed, of homo sapien, to wit: the Geek; betrays his emblem, the jolly roger, and earns instead the Totenkopf. Stay out of my bathroom, you poisonous bastard.



*The time however, surrenders to my Geek.
** Oh, and someone moved my soap. I hate that.