Nothingness

Nothing happened last week. Nothing. I wish I could say otherwise, but that’s just the plain truth -nothing occurred. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I also have it on excellent authority that nothing will happen next week either.

Now, as you might imagine, this puts me in rather an awkward position. As a current events/news kind of guy, an on-the-spot reporter, if you will (or, at least right near the spot), a person who basically makes his living exclusively from observing other people’s lives and activities (rather than having them myself); a leech, a parasite (two! two! two scourges in one!) who reduces their fragile, complex realities to tawdry caricatures and sleazy innuendo, like a vulture hovering over carrion, I have always been that rare kind of guy that just loves his job. Heck, when I was a little kid I used to dream about having a life like this, and now that I do, it’s even better than I thought it would be.

A slow news week, though, is one thing; I mean, if necessary I’m completely capable of blabbing on for pages and pages about very little, you know, the slightest little item. I once did a three part series on a bongo player who almost put in his own kitchen cabinets; and I’m always happy to review albums that are two or three years old. I’ll print gigantic pictures I just found in someone else’s office of someone I don’t know, just to take up space sometimes (I do it pretty subtly, so hopefully you can’t really tell.)

What we’re hitting here lately, though, is not a slow news week, but actually a non-news week, and there’s not much even I can do with that. Give me the slightest table scrap, and I’ll gum it to death; but I’m not a magician, and I can’t (though would) lie to you: there’s absolutely nothing going on.

As you know, my usual strategy at a time like this is to check in on the rather willowy and beguiling Mrs. Kelp for her take on the situation, which is usually witty and unpredictable and full of fun. Unfortunately, though, right now there really is no situation, and at any rate Mrs. K is napping, a state no one who knows her would dare interrupt.

Many years ago, we had an old golden retriever named Ben, whose hips eventually gave out completely, to the point that he couldn’t walk at all. Mrs. Kelp (radiant in her diaphanous kimono with matching beret and cigarette holder) were forced to load him onto an old rug and clumsily drag him outdoors for his constitutionals. You’d think a beautiful, athletic fellow like Ben would be shattered by such a handicap, but, to the contrary, he seemed to love this whole process.

Getting so old and out of it apparently sort of cracked him up, and in general he was happy as a clam in his declining years. Though he had been a bit of a Casanova in his youth, always seen with the finest looking bitches in the neighborhood, he had no trouble relaxing his standards when it came to dating in his dotage. The fact that he couldn’t go anywhere really gave his field a clearer delineation than it had ever had before, and being a practical type, he cheerfully consented to hump absolutely anyone that got close enough -the male/female issue had completely passed by the wayside.

Strangely, at point that his bark became both higher pitched and more consistent, but he was so obviously pleased with himself that we really couldn’t kill him, so we just changed his name to Queenie and installed one of those wheelchairs that go down the banister carrying Barbara Stanwyck, and they eventually both died and that was that.