KNOWN FOR OUR CLEAN EARS

Naturally I'm thinking about my doctors appointment early tomorrow morning. Specifically which pipes to pack in my pocket for smoking afterwards. The tobacco is a given; a blend of flue-cured leaves with a touch of Perique. What we'll probably discuss will be the usual round of tests and samples for the yearly health check, all to be completed before I toddle off to my cardiologist sometime in September. Where we'll do the running on the inclined treadmill and swearing in Dutch, to check heart rate and oxygen levels or sumpin'.

It is polite to swear in unintelligible languages, like Dutch. It keeps the ears of other people who might hear one doing so clean. As a man with a slight hearing defect I am all about clean ears.

Of course, if I were living in the Netherlands swearing in Dutch would be out of the question, and I might have to do so in Esperanto instead. They understand English and French there, have experience with the Germans, and some of them still speak Indonesian (Malay), so there would be limits. The Dutch, as you can tell, are remarkably clean-tongued. Yes.

The Dutch are gentle artistic souls.

We would have never raped the colonies we never had for pepper, cloves, and nutmeg, or brutally expelled the Portuguese from Ambon, Ceylon, or Formosa.

The worst thing to which we'll plead guilty is sending crazy painter dudes to the south of France. We were just being helful. And spreading civilization.

Famous peaceniks like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were profoundly influenced by our example. Well, they would have been, if they had ever heard of it.


Anyhow, that swearing in Dutch bit is traditional when you're doing the stress test on that treadmill. They keep increasing the speed and the incline, in stages, while the machine spits out reams of paper with wiggly lines. Because naturally it's a pain in the softer areas, what with stiff joints in the lower corpus and circulatory issues.
I am physically at my best in early morning half an hour after getting up, hepped on coffee, and outside smoking my pipe while sidestepping sleeping bums, strewn garbage, and dog turds. Manfully I stride through the mist-shrouded streets near the cathedral, happily puffing, and not swearing in the slightest despite quite thoroughly loathing and despising people.
What are these other damned early risers doing on my hill? Mine! I was here first!
I am sweet-tempered and avuncular. A veritable Gandhi among men.
Not a word in Dutch crosses my lips.


The rest of the day is all downhill from there.



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