HAPPY AND SINGLE - AND FILLED WITH ZESTY PICKLES

My apartment mate, the legendary and fabulous miss Savage Kitten, lives with a man. That being me. It may not be how she imagined life when she was growing up, as men are somewhat notorious for not being fit company for females.

I certainly am not. My present relationship status proves that.
And I'm obviously rather full of myself.
Not at all repentant.
Unfit.

Men, as is well known, have peculiar tastes in food and entertainment. We like thokku and kasondi pickle, strong tobacco, and books by Russian authors. We take long walks around the Nob and Telegraph Hill neighborhoods with our pipes in our mouths, clearly deeply in thought or growling at pigeons. We remember the words to several bawdy songs and backroom ballads, as well as the odd bit of Shakespeare.

No mother wants to see her daughter associating with people like that, ever. It would ruin her reputation among all the people who count: women.

Women should have dogs instead.

Men are cat-people.

Feral.

I'm fine with that.

My most recent meal involved chili peppers, and I'm currently smoking a bowlful of Rattray's Brown Clunee, manufactured in this day and age by Kohlhase & Kopp in Germany instead of on the High Street in Perth. I may have associated with numerous other pipe-smokers in the last several hours or weeks; they were fun, their company was cheerful and stimulating. Quite a few of them probably ate something with chilies or hot sauce before or after our conversations.

Remarkably, some of them were married. Are. Not were. Present tense. Nevertheless very strange. Marriage is not the natural state for normal people. One cannot quote Shakespeare or bawdy verses at individuals of the opposite gender.

Or smoke something like Brown Clunee in their presence.


"A man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle"
-------Brett Collins


Some women -- a small and valiant minority -- are remarkably good company, and a joy to be around. They'll graciously put up with males, betraying not an iota of the effort and stress that entails. But their number is so slight that it is quite pointless to search for them.
Your chances of winning the lottery are greater by far.

Most women, however, can't stand thokku or kasondi.

Brown Clunee is a concept that utterly baffles them.


I'm fine with that, too.


I'll always have thokku and kasondi, at present there's an open tin of Brown Clunee on my desk, life is quite good and very enjoyable, and I'm probably too old and stubborn to be domesticated. Courting is a behavioural pattern more suited to the immature, and while most men and women do at some point associate overmuch with their opposite genders, eventually they will come to their senses, and acquire a cat or a dog, and several bottles of Indian pickles and hot sauce.

And, if they're men, tins of tobacco.

Men quote bawdy songs and Shakespeare.

Women cite Hello Kitty and Kim Kardasian.


And they say we're weird.


I am beginning to relish my unsuitability. My apartment mate, the saintly and patient aforementioned miss Savage Kitten, gave up on educating me several years ago, and has as yet utterly failed to realize that her companion (i.e. 'Boyfriend') Wheelie Boy -- whom I have no intention of ever meeting -- contains similar undomesticatable compounds underneath that veneer of loveability or whatever it is he possesses. Both of them insist that something is in the air, and that men and women are sympatico.

Heh.

They're young.

I am older than either of them.

I know.


No, I'm not bitter, I'm fluffy. And I'm enjoying life.
I get to look at women from a safe distance, without being required to adapt in any way. My pipes (and the Indian pickles) keep me company, the pigeons on Nob and Telegraph Hill fear me, and when I am old and eighty and in a retirement home, I thoroughly intend to torment the young and restless Philippina nurses.
"Come here, little girl" I will say, "would you like some adobo?"
Then I shall wave a crispy lumpia at them.
And hook them with my cane.




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