A BADGER WITH A PIPE AND SPECTACLES

Three years ago I first placed a self-portrait as a badger on this blog. It was in a Friday afternoon post in which I wondered what I would do on Saturday. Until the middle of summer 2010 my Saturdays were quite predictable, then Savage Kitten and I broke up after a long wonderful relationship of over twenty years, and weekends lost all balance.
We stayed friends, and continued to live together. But we no longer involved ourselves in each others' lives very much. Within a few months she started seeing someone new, and I was still counting the wreckage. I have not dated anyone since then, primarily because I'm a bit peculiar about whom I associate with.

Savage Kitten was someone whom I loved being with. She entered my life after a romance-drought that had lasted nearly a decade.
I still like her company, but there is far less of it now.

This new drought has been three and a half years already.

You may have heard me say it before, but I'll say it again: life is too short to drink Starbucks.

There is NO point in dating someone if the two of you aren't well-matched to begin with. There ain't no such thing as "practice makes perfect" in love, and all real romances can only start off if there is enough there to form a solid friendship.

I'm hopeful that I'll meet someone like that.
But I am not unrealistically optimistic.
Lightening may not hit twice.



LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO DRINK STARBUCKS

The self-portrait as Mr. Badger represented a version of me that was developing at the time. Not so much a loner as an amiable and not particularly sociable fellow, comfortable with himself and a few other people. Goofy about food, and stable in his personal likes and dislikes.

[Source: facing the weekend like a man ... or not ]


Yes, the glasses are a relatively new thing. I did not need reading specs till 2004, when I smacked myself in the jaw with a rice bowl. Gotta see what's in the last crucial foot before the face. Since then I've also nearly brained myself with a filled coffee cup -- several times -- and almost poked out an eye with a pipe stem. I now put the glasses on the very moment I get up in the morning.

The pipe, however, has always been part of the person.
I bought my first briar when I was thirteen.
Mr. Badger is a beast without it.


The mental image of myself as a badger is in a large part due to my admiration for the stalwart mustelid in Kenneth Grahame's book 'Wind in the Willows', but also in a small way because there are streaks of white in my hair. To me, at the time, this expanded the badger-like visual.

Mr. Badger is a solitary person. 

I'm still not seeing anyone. And, given that nice young ladies usually do not fall for middle-aged coots, it isn't very likely that I ever will. Entirely aside from which, there has to be plenty of evidence that she reads, and I fear that reading itself has become a lost art today. So many people do not venture past the textbooks they read in college, and the text and twitter messages that they receive on their cell phones.

Texting and twittering are au courant.
Essential to modern "communication".

And, if someone texts and twitters, the chances are that they don't talk. How many times has someone with whom you were speaking paused to thumb-dance over their keypad, or said "hold on, I gotta take this call"? In the latter case, despite only hearing one side of the conversation, you grasped that they really didn't gotta, and you also gained perspective about their speech-habits.
"Yeah, uh huh, I know, like, totes-maggoats!"
"Dude, a blast, hella, yeh-huh!"
"Ahcatchalayta."

Chances are that if you recognize any of the above, at some point you've realized that there was an idiot in the room.


Mr. Badger does not have a cell-phone.
None of this essay was "texted".
My thumbs are normal.



As important as reading is the ability to shut up. Someone who can read peacefully for hours is a pleasure to be with while one also reads for hours. How splendid if neither person brakes the silence, except to eventually ask whether the other one is hungry yet!

Whereupon food may be discussed at length. As well as the reading matter, on the way to the food, during the food, and after the food.

It sounds like a perfect Saturday to me.

And Sunday. Or any day.


For badgers.



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