March 8, 2003

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  Cave Uxor
  
  
  Every Friday I go out for a drink. It's my once a week get together with some gaijin friends and it's also my one chance a week to speak English with people who, while they may not always understand everything I say, at least they can understand the English perfectly.
  
  I do this every week. Unless I'm doing something else. I go to the same bar. I'm known for it. They call me kinyoubi no otoko; Friday Man. I always go there. Call me a creature of habit. And every Saturday morning mrs bln asks me where I went and every Saturday morning I tell her the same answer. We hold on to what we know. We revel in our monotony. I know that she's going to ask me and she knows what answer she's going to get. It may not be much but it's what passes for conversation in my house.
  
  However. This morning I decided not to play that game. Call me obstreperous if you will, but I did. This morning, when she asked me where I'd gone last night, something wicked took ahold of me and impelled me to say:
  
  Really, you know, it's best not to ask me about that. Then I won't have to lie to you. I was out last night doing all kinds of bad things and obviously I can't tell you about them, so if you don't ask me, I won't have to lie, so it's best if you don't ask me about that.
  
  Now, before we go any further, I want you to ask yourself a question. If your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever said to you "I was out all night doing bad things that it's best you don't ask about" (and you'd been together for nearly 10 years and were fully au fait with that partner's sense of humour) would you immediately believe that what you'd just heard must, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be true?
  
  OK, now cut to an hour and a half later and I'm sitting in my smoking room (I call it that but what it actually is is a closet with a window that serves as a general dumping ground for anything that doesn't have any other home and the computer room and book storage room and rice storeroom which also happens to be the only room in the house where I can smoke without being subjected to long and uninteresting tirades about why I should quit. So it's my smoking room. And I'm sitting in it and simultaneously trying to rouse myself into some kind of mid morning sense of purpose, shake the previous night's cobwebs from my head and enjoy a quiet smoke when I hear the front door open and mrs bln comes back early. Oh, didn't I tell you about that? She goes out to teach an English class on Saturday mornings; leaves the house at 9:45 and comes back at about 11:30.
  
  But it's only 10:30. Why's she back so early?
  I call out, "Why're you back so early?" but no answer comes, so I put out my smoke and go to find out what's going on. She's standing in the entrance, an odd look on her face. I ask her what's wrong. She tells me that she crashed her car on her way to class. I ask her if she's ok and she says she is. I ask if the other driver is ok and she says she is. I ask her how it happened and she tells me a long and complicated story about trying a different road which she didn't think had a right side but it did and when she came out there was another car and she wasn't expecting to find it there so she hit it, but it wasn't as bad as she'd thought and in fact there were only some nasty scratches to the paintwork...
  
  Actually, as you can see, it wasn't really so long as stories go, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for with its ability to confuse me and while I'm standing there trying to understand what exactly it was that happened, she says:
  
  But it's your fault because you said that you did bad things last night and I was thinking about that and I couldn't concentrate on the road...
  
  So I'm putting this up as a warning to any of you guys out there who might be waking up this morning and thinking about indulging in a little bit of flippancy during the day. Don't do it. It's just not worth it. It'll only end in tears...
  

  • 2:34 am
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