hey say bad things come in threes. That means they either don’t know what they are talking about or have not had to field balls from fate as I have.
I'm very good with company, have excellent social and interpersonal skills, and very good anti-social skills too. That means when I'm in the mood, I am the best company one can have but catch me at the wrong time and you will wish the world had more dodos than human beings.
I live alone, mostly as a consequence of people not knowing how to behave towards and around me. When I don’t want company, you best shut up and do your best to blend in with the furniture otherwise I could decide we shouldn’t see each other for a few weeks, just so I get to return to normal.
But I'm digressing as it is. I want to talk about the bad things happening to me and how they came in a bundle, albeit at different, well regulated intervals. First I received a water bill that cost me a hundred pounds extra, yet I live alone most of the time, don’t waste water and previous bills always came in at between five and fifteen pounds a month.
As returned the Water Authority serve, things started to become funny, and not in a 'ha ha' way. They couldn’t let me look at my statement for several weeks and when they finally did, before I could get to the middle of the bloody thing they sent someone to my house to cut off my water supply. Because they yap about the 'Water is life' slogan so much, many of us have come to believe it so I rushed to the bank and settled the bill, then went 9/11 on them on every website I could find.
As a good human being, I waited for the last two bad things. The second thing was that a long time friend of mine, on learning I had bought grass cutters and that every person I tried to work with just stole from me, came up with a sterling-at-first-look idea: hand her the three grass cutters, she pays half the money upfront and the rest within two weeks. To cut this one very short, it's been six long months and I am still waiting for my money.
The third (and I was hoping last thing) to happen was a kid dying in my favorite swimming pool. The pool belongs to a hotel belonging to an investor of Asian origin, and trust them to stint on salary so he did not have a professional or trained life-guard. To make matters worse, they let kids dive into both the deep and shallow ends, even against advice from those of us who always foresaw disaster and recognized its gender at ovum stage.
I normally use this pool for my swimming lessons and so it happened that when I next went there with a client, the pool had closed because a kid had dived into the bottom of it. That meant I couldn’t make any more money as an instructor because the next best pool was tens of miles away and cost a little more, too.
Then my sister came home with a bag and I realized this was Bad Thing No. 4! Apparently, her husband had infected her with an STD and he was denying it, saying he had not had extra-marital sex in six months. My sister, a devote, faithful and honest ob-gyn, declined that particular explanation and gave him the option of wearing a rubber until he went for treatment, or forgetting sex.
My brother-in-law, always the 'do' in libido, tried a different tact; he tried to rape her and she bit him so he beat her. Seeing my older sister with a black eye and puffy lips tore something out of me and weeks later I realized what had been torn out was my sanity and common sense.
I made her comfortable, kicked a girlfriend out of the guest bedroom and began pampering her. Two days later, Bad Thing No. 4 led me to No. 5. I paid my BIL a visit and tore up his mouth, re-arranged one rib and re-aligned his left jaw.
This led to Bad Thing No. 6. I ended up in jail and my sister had to bail me out after two weeks in which she scuttled between her soon-to-be ex-husband in hospital and her convict brother in jail.
My being in jail led to Bad Thing No. 7. My ex turned up before she became that and demanded a separation. We were not married or anything, just that we had been staying together on and off for more than five years and she had contributed to purchasing some of the stuff in the house. She said she wanted some of it and gallant as I always am, told her to pick what tickled her fancy and that little statement made my living room start to look like an empty car showroom.
Bad Thing No.8 is that now I don’t like people, my sister still blames me for busting her marriage (I keep telling her to thank me instead as AIDS was real), and girls wonder why I live alone with an older sister at age fifty. Bad Thing No. 9 is that I tell them the truth. Which brings us to Bad Thing No. 10: I don’t care what anybody thinks—except I put it in such words as to make the most liberal sheik shrink back in horror.
