Pops was the kind of guy, who, if he heard of something bad happening to someone else, he'd feel a little better, in general, with his own life. You could say he'd get a bit of 'bounce' from bad news. We are all like this in some ways -- the Germans even have a word for it: Schadenfreude.
But Pops was an example of this tendency run riot. He constructed a cat's-cradle like context of days, months, and sometimes years, based off the misfortunes of his friends, associates, and family. 2001 would be remembered by Pops as "Bob's Cancerous Car Accident" May 11th 2011 was marked in Pops' mind as "Mary's Epic Spring Ladder Fall into the Glass Bottles". June 2013 was known simply as "Unlucky Bob Gets the Shits in Church".
Pops saw all. He kept calendars of the faults and accidents of the people around him, with a simple coded scoring shorthand, much like this:
FP = face plant
LI = lost item
AD = arrested drunk
AD2 = arrested drunk again
1, 2, 3, 4.. = the number of venereal diseases
F = fired
S = stabbed
K = killed
And it was all going well until he accidentally donated one of his annotated calendars to the thrift-shop around the corner, and Bob found it inside the sleeve of a scratched album of The Velvet Underground. Bob was sorting the new things that were donated, and he recognized Pops' tidy writing on a stickum note on the album, "Music to Enjoy".
Ironically, the vinyl album had been scratched in Pops' ecstasy of finding out Bob had deadly cancer ('DC') and a car accident ('CA') after finding out about the diagnosis on the way home. Bob let everyone know about Pops, and there wasn't much to explain.
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