What Really Irritates Me In Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night, Part 6

Here we go again. Blame it on the insomnia and the appeal of the late-summer, rosy-fingered dawn. Blame it also on the vanity of this pigsty of a world, on my compatriots' chlorinated confusion. The will to prove one's existence never has paved a clearer path to ridicule than now, making the happy sarcastic few even more sarcastic...inevitably making this series long-winded ad absurdum. I'm not sure one can run out of stuff to rant about when one looks long enough at the thriving state of worldly affairs, but I'm certain that one needs a hand, every now and again. Tonight, baboons will lock hands with us in a firm, brotherly handshake across the Sacred Order of the Primates to show us The Way To Go.

One disclaimer before I start: as indeed the title so titularily stipulates, it is very late at night – so late at night it is that it's actually the same night as two nights ago – ergo I shall be eternally indebted to your disregard of the syntactical, punctuational and logical lack of substance my barbarous sentences will doubtless show.

I have addressed this issue before, but I am still dumbfounded by the very-short-term memory of some men who dry their hands after “el numero uno” – those who have completely forgotten to wash their hands in the first place. Yes, those one. Sure the wetness is there, and needs to be addressed...but this...is beyond my capacity to respond rationally. Keeping toilets clean doesn't amount to how much detergent and efforts one puts into its cleaning, but how one incites – dare I say 'tricks' – its users into washing their hands: automatic taps, automatic soap dispenser, automatic hand-dryer. Seeing how some still fail at shifting their hands vectorially in the (obvious) designated spots to soap up, clean and dry would baffle a two-week-into-training baboon. The non-automatic door spells 'death by germs' on its handle.

On the podium of (literally) stupendous stupidity might undeniably stand the morning-after-pubescence-hit vacuous missus recently beheld at my local bar (there's no way she could have been 18, but hey, it'll all make sense in a couple sentences) pole-dancing (complete with ass-rubbing lasciviousness) against every man in the joint, regardless of their being with someone. Her make-up wasn't as grotesque as one might have expected, but her dress was stupidly short, and by stupidly I mean that one could almost see her buttocks when she stood up – it's actually an unsolved sartorial feat to me that it didn't pull all the way up to her waist when she danced. One understood why she was even allowed to get in when one discovered that the testosterone-bursting males – obviously the single ones and one of the bouncers – were actually queueing up (I kid you not) to serve as a pole-dancing bar. It wasn't a pretty sight: one could see glassy eyes, drooling chins and bulging zippers; one could hear coarse, ruttish laughters that only seemed to spur her on. I mean, even the women in there were fascinated by the girl's boldness, the awkwardness of the moment because she was a frigging awesome dancer, I'll give her that. Her dance was sensual and enticing and boner-inducing (even I had to look up once in a while), in keeping with the rhythm of the music. It all lasted about thirty, perhaps forty-five minutes, and then she was gone (not from some people's memory, of course).

Quick side note: I was sitting on my own with a beer-and-book combo (I know it sounds weird, but I like reading in that bar on an early Friday evening because the music is chill and the crowd usually super-friendly, so feck off) and she did glance at me, but she perhaps didn't feel up for a challenge, or perhaps thought she had enough males for one night. Or perhaps the raised eyebrow deterred her altogether. The mandrill baboon in me was touched, but not aroused...perhaps I'm really a cul-de-sac in the chain, but the girl's forlorn eyes dug deeper than I cared to admit back then. The loneliness in people is something I highly respect, not something I take advantage of.

Speaking of baboons, one never fails to recognise modern primates for what they really are in a crowd. I was attending a Celtic event this summer in a reconstructed Viking village in a small town. It was Sunday, the day was hot and the sun had this buttery quality which I like. There were workshops with metalsmiths, woodworkers, tailors. The whole modern-day Viking she-bang. Archery and thatchers. Dancers. At some point there was a call in a loudspeaker saying that some children in period costume were thrust onto a stage to perform a rather fancy interpretation of a Morris dance to the springy tune of drums, oboes, lutes and flageolets. OK, perhaps the call just mentioned that some dance was about to take place and the rest is my own interpretation. Perhaps. Doubtful Viking-y costumes at best, but a ridiculous parody of Morris dance (come on, it's a 15^th Century English thing) and an even more ridiculous choice of instruments. Flageolet, for Pete's sake. I know that organisers try their best to emulate and entertain...but that's just the grumpy me. Anyway, so these kiddos are on stage and hold hands and parents see their offspring in cute attires smiling and dancing cutely so their first instinct is – of course – to just come as close as they can to the stage and record the whole darn thing, mayhap trampling some other parent in the process but hey, that's social Darwinism. A hungry troop of baboons (or a shrewdness of apes, for that matter) would be more orderly at lunch-time in your local zoo.

Essentially, they were blocking the view of the parent behind, who was blocking the view of the one behind, and the one behind. From where I stood, at a safe distance, I could see a mobile phone screen recording another mobile phone screen recording another mobile phone screen recording another recording some fuzzy dance in the distance...a perfect “mise en abyme” that was comically farcical, because even the first parent, who obviously had a clear view, was pressed to the point of suffocation against the protective railings. Perhaps they all meant well, in some dimension yet unknown to science, but the fact that they cannot argue their case convincingly when asked not to push which pulls the WTF trigger. They either give one another the same look as a rabbit caught in the headlights' glare, or that of the driver looking at the lifeless body of the half rabbit protruding from under the tyre.

I plead guilty, on this rather hot and cloudless day, of schadenfreude watching all of this unfold.

Talking about misery and joy, let's turn to one of my favourite species which is their perfect epitome: the poodle. Of course I have to have a go at them, or the raison d'être of this rant would proverbially be thrown at them. My liebestod towards them is legendary, but this passionate hatred is well-founded, believe me. I recently learnt that their hair-do actually had a purpose back then (not the rather personal, dubiously aesthetic one it's supposed to have in our modern era): as they were used as water dogs (even though they don't have palmed paws...go figure), their self-conscious owners would shear their curly mane in strategic places so that the dogs wouldn't be weighted down by too much soaked fur...because you see: the shining coat of the poodle doesn't stop growing. It doesn't shed excess fur. Sure, you could contend that they don't smell and are non-allergy-inducive, to which I will respond that somewhere in that matted fur of theirs, in these dread-locks and impossible-to-comb knots, given enough time, there must be some bacteria or some germ snugly proliferating in silence.

I have to hit the sack now, as I sense my sagacious sarcastic side might keep me awake for longer than is reasonable, especially after two sleepless nights in a row. Sometimes, it's also good to let some things go. Alternatively, we all have other fish to fry, and baboons to feed.