Gummo and Him

The other one, the anonymous one, is the one things should happen to. He likes genuinely useless things, miniature scores, the taste of cardamom and the music of Krystof Penderecki; a dilettante's tastes he is quite complacent about inflicting on me. The only genuinely useless thing he ever owned was a 1/4 inch female BSP to 1/4 inch male BSP hose fitting adaptor. He's never found anything since that matches its almost Platonically ideal uselessness - objects that are designed for a non-existent purpose are hard to come by. He's probably lost the bloody thing anyway. It never occurred to him to use it as a paperweight.

He resents any accusation that using me as his on-line mouthpiece is gutless or spineless - a refusal to take responsibility for his own words. What about Grumpy of Vermont, Appalled of Box Hill and Disgusted of Balwyn in The Hun, he'll ask. Or all the other pseudonymous bloggers and commenters. He'll tell you he has a lot of very good reasons for staying in the background while I flap my little wooden jaw from the dubious comfort of his lap. What reasons, you ask. Private ones, of course.

Oddly, those precious "private reasons" don't stop him from using this blog to bitch about his messed up personal life. Not so oddly, they don't stop him from introducing himself as "Gummo Trotsky" at blog meets when his own name draws a complete blank, leaving me to carry his weight in the conversation. When we go home, he bitches about how I take all the funny lines, as if somehow they were his to begin with.

Still he has his uses. For one thing, he was the one who finally ferreted out the book with that Borges essay I wanted. Now, if he can just do the same with the little essay on Don Quixote ...

(And now, back to the vapours)