Let the forgotten leper out of the slumber room of consciousness

Let's pick up where we left off: a leper with halitosis. Of course, the major downside to being a leper would not be bad breath, as much as the inability to hold on to your body parts. I laugh at those emo kids, with their cultivated dysfunctionality and overindulgent sensitivity; when you have leprosy, you literally fall to pieces.
One of the good things about a post on leprosy is that you're very unlikely to offend anyone. According to Wikipedia, the disease is practically non-existent in contemporary Europe.

Now, as is often the case with unpleasant things we leave behind, leprosy is no longer a popular subject of conversation among educated, well-bread people. We'd rather talk about  the Yen exchange rate or the bailout plan to save the fattest banker in the world from having to give up one or two of his 127 mansions in a fiscal paradise as yet uncharted and unknown to the rabble. We are losing the enormous comic and narrative potential of leprosy.

Now, I don't think any child in the western world has grown up without watching, at least once but more probably several times, The Wizard of Oz. We loved and sympathised with the scarecrow in need of a brain, the tin man who would not resign to living without a heart, and the lion man who finally found his courage through comradeship. What was missing from the mix was clearly a leper.

Just picture it: the poor fellow would scatter bits of skin, fingernails and a few phalanxes all along the Yelllow Brick Road, happily sauntering and singing along with Dorothy and the others. The particular reason he's travelling to the Emerald City is that he needs some glue, for obvious reasons. "Mr Leper!" the tin man would call out "you dropped your left pinky! Pick it up at once, before the Wicked Witch of the West swoops down on her broom and gets away with it!" Yeah, I'd like to see the ugly old bitch get within a twenty meter radius of a leper. Of course Dorothy and her friends would be exposed to contagion themselves, but the Wizard is bound to have a cure. So, with Mr Leper by her side, Dorothy's journey would be a walk in the park. Obviously, the revolting man would have a song of his own. I think I know what the lyrics might be. If you remember the tune to "If I only had a brain" you can give it a go:

Well, I hate to be imposing,
but I am decomposing,
that's why my heart is blue...
it would be so much better
if I stopped being a shedder
if I only had some glue.

All the limbs you take for granted
I struggle to keep planted
I'm rotting through and through
life could be so fantastic
with a few drops of Bostik
if I only had some glue...

A word of introduction

Let's get one thing straight, right from the start: this is a place for me to rant. If you expect me to make sense and stick to any one subject thoughout an entire post, or indeed an entire paragraph, you'll be sorely disappointed. Who am I? An oddity. An outcast. A religious fundamentalist who was supposed to bomb the American Embassy and ended up in a strip club by mistake. Now, before you jump the gun and report me to the FBI or something, that was a metaphor.

I was born in Naples - also known as Nipples after being thus dubbed on an infamous balcony overlooking it - thirty-eight years ago. Fate could not have been more wrong. If there's something I'm ill-suited for is being an Italian. That and holding on to a job. Or a woman. But I digress (oh, how I love that phrase!). I was saying I'm not cut out for the unrewarding task of being an Italian. If it were up to me, I'd be born again in Sheffield, at the start of the XIX century. I'd be the son of an extremely progressive industrialist and his feminist wife. I would invest my time and money into one of those socialist experiments where you would take a thousand or so people and put them on a remote island, telling them to co-exist in harmony and shit. I would prove the world that I'm right, and reap my well-deserved harvest of accolades and admiration. In the evenings, I would drink absynth and smoke opium, or have hashish jam doughnuts especially made for me, and dunk them in absynth. I would then drift into a light, troubled sleep, and upon rousing from it I would write obscure poems in French, for which people would call me a genius. Then, just before I get too far down the road to perdition and die of syphilis in a mental asylum, I would collect a handkerchief dropped by a fair damsel, and after an adequately long period of courtship marry her and have her children. If she has no children to give me, we could even make some. I'd give up the opium and the funny doughnuts, but treat myself to the odd glass of absynth when my artist friends came round.

Right, so much for reveries. This, alas, is not the ninteenth century, and I'm not in Sheffield. Now that I think of it, London would probably have been better. Anyway, here I am in Nipples, in the godforsaken 21st century, in a dead-end job with no prospects, and the social life of a leper with halitosis. Someone's got to pay for that. If you still want to read this, you are walking into trouble.

Now, you may ask, why the rear window? Because the future, as I see it, is always coming through the back. A bit like a burglar. It sneaks up on you. Partly, this is due to the fact that most change is bad, and is thrust upon you by other people, who had much rather you didn't realise what they're doing to you. And also because of our inability, or reluctance, to face up to change. That's why you need to watch the back entrance. I'm very much in tune with myself. Not that it's done me much good, mind you. I just don't see why people spend good money on therapy. It's like taking your car to a garage and being told exactly what is wrong with it, but that ufortunately it can't be fixed. You gain wisdom, maybe you function slightly better, but you don't get any happier. There's only one thing that makes me happier, or at least less miserable: ranting. That and drinking like there's no tomorrow. But I'm getting old, like that old Canadian singer who went looking for a heart of gold, and I fear my days of carousing glory might be behind me. So, rant shall I.

Now, if you're still reading this unbelievable tripe, and if your bottom is still attached to your spinal cord and has not come off out of sheer boredom, you may also ask: why rant in English? 2 reasons:

1) Escapism. I'm the son of an industrialist from the nineteenth century, remember?

2) I need to perfect my English, at your expense. I need to be really good at something, while the rest of my life is mired in mediocrity and wasted on trivial pursuits and cheap thrills.

3) It's not two reasons, it's actually three. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our weapons are fear and suprise... fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency etc.
If you didn't get that, don't you dare continue reading. Go and revise right now. Now, the third reason is that English speakers need to get a different perspective on what's going on in this part of the world. We're not a bunch of lazy defaulters, overdependent on the public sector and hopelessly corrupt. Not all of us, anyway. So when the Panzers start rolling in because we can't pay off our national debt, please don't turn the other way. We'll repay you, one way or another. Just not in euros, maybe. But anyway, you'll have our gratitude. And maybe a few thousand tons of free mozzarella. So it's me against virtually the entirety ef English language media and a mountain range of prejudice. Talk about an uphill struggle.

There's one more reason why I decided to write in English, but it's not listed because I couldn't be arsed to go back and edit this bastard again. There are some English words I just love. "Bollocks" springs to mind. I like the sound of it, how it fills up your mouth when you say it. I could never use it during my classes or examinations. So bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. There should be a student's book called "Bollocks to your First Certificate" or something like that. "Advanced bollocks in English". "Certificate of Proficiency in bollocks". Cambridge examiners should be sporting a shamelessly hairy, majestic pair of testicles at all times during assessments, in celebration of this beautiful lexeme. As for myself, I've already started to celebrate.I challenge anyone to maintain that this was not a truckload of sweaty, smelly, sweltering bollocks.