(bagpipe solo but everyone plays and kids scream)

"Meaning is doing! It's a language game! Words are content! Nonsense! Nonsense! Words are content! Yahoo!"

What do you do, I ask my lizard, who functions as a sort of sounding board for various ideas and musings, if a sounding board could also blink and eat bugs and take a shit (sometimes simultaneously), when you're in the grip of an obvious depression?

Naturally, I am not asking Brian what he would do, as he is incapable of feeling depression because he lives a life of abject luxury completely free from any responsibilities save body temperature regulation, which can be done simply by repositioning himself to various points inside his opulent reptile mansion. Outwith that small burden he is free to eat fresh salad or calcium-enriched locusts to his fat heart's content, taking day-long naps on his binkies or even with his hemipenal bulge plopped right smack dab in the middle of his salad bowl as whimsy would have it.

It is I, his manservant, who must exist in the outside world and use FirstBus, which is about as enjoyable an experience as passing a gallstone while being forced to watch Mrs. Brown's Boys.

I used to take taxis frequently, being willing to pay the premium to avoid supporting the most fucking useless excuse for public transportation I have ever seen in fourteen cities, six countries, and two continents, but ever since the pandemic and the consolidation of the remaining cab companies under GlasGo Cabs I have been left standing in parking lots for over an hour on so many occasions, watching the restaurant supplies I purchase spoil in the sun. Even the extremely expensive but usually dependable Black Cabs left me at the Rouken Glen Garden Center for two hours yesterday after accepting a booking without having any cars available then cancelling it without telling me, after three separate phone calls to the operator trying to figure out when I could expect to get home and eat, since I did not have breakfast nor lunch.

The fact that I have four days off per month causes me to be distressingly efficient with my time, so standing at bus stops or in parking lots for huge chunks of my day(s) is enough to make me literally weep (happened yesterday), but depending on how much I have purchased I can't carry it onto the bus, even if the bus were going to show up when the sign/screen says (a laughable joke; they run about 30% as often as they are scheduled to, and at whatever pace they feel like it) so I must rely on cabs, which means that any errands I have to run on my one day off per week usually take well over an hour and a half per errand, even if it's something as simple as getting groceries in Shawlands and taking them back to Eglington Toll. I could literally walk it faster if it were not for the burden of the purchased items. So quite often I am paying extortionate cab fares but not experiencing the speed and efficiency that using a cab should provide, or destroying my eternally-pained elbow dragging supplies and bags of rice to the bus stops just to sit there so long I have to hail a passing cab anyhow.

None of this is interesting to Brian nor you, I know, but the resulting misery that kind of curdles into a deeper lethargic depression where I don't get out of bed at all unless I absolutely have to is somewhat more relevant to our respective interactions. And I am not asking for a solution to the transit crisis because it is just a matter of de-privatising what should never have been made private in the first place, which is PUBLIC transit. And the cabs should obviously not be able to confirm bookings if no car has actually accepted the pickup because that is ... I don't know ... fucking stupid? Probably illegal? Remarkably similar to that thing that airlines started doing where they sell more tickets for a flight than the plane has seats like people aren't planning whole fucking holidays with accomodation, etc? A repugnant cash-grab that fucks over the end user, who is completely innocent of any wrongdoing and just trying to live? Yeah, that. It's like that.

And that is just trying to get groceries and some new soil for repotting a plant or two. We should probably avoid discussing running one business and watching another just sit there and deplete your life savings while you work seventy hours per week for nothing. That would not improve the horizontal nature of one's "spare" time at all.

No, what I am asking Brian is really just to look at me with his big, black, nub-rimmed eyes and sort of tilt his dumb, shovel-shaped head to one side in a gesture of ... camaraderie? Understanding? An if-you-die-I-also-die-so-don't die-and-also-my-pak-choi-is-kind-of-wilty sort of look that both soothes and comforts, and reminds me that the calathea which I have already (miraculously) saved from TWO spider mite infestations now has another, and requires my attention, so I should probably do that. Wouldn't want to have brought it back from the brink of death so often just to let it go now.

Which is, of course, the metaphor Brian was trying to convey. My life is enriched greatly by sharing a house with such a powerhouse of pure, mute intellect.





It should be noted that I do not technically "share a house" with Brian. He has his own house, which is inside my house, so while we are ostensibly flatmates it is not in the common interpretation where one of us might have to ask the other to scoot over on the couch or to turn the channel on the TV (neither of us actually own a TV, but you get the idea) because he does not wish to spend any time outside of his domicile and I don't fit inside it.