I’m always hearing amazing conversations. Other people say they don’t overhear any great conversations at all, so the only logical explanation is that my threatening presence makes everyone put in a bit of extra effort. It’s certainly true that spikes of conversational excellence occur at that precise time I shake my fist, drop my trousers, and make huge snarling whoops. Take this conversation, that I overheard on the bus, this very morning.
Son: I hope this bus does a loop the loop
Mother: If it does, I’ll park a tit on your leg
Bouyed by this warm cross-generational interchange, I disembarked and entered my regular morning newsagent. It is here, that I always cast my eye over the Pork Farms pasties. I imagine them in my mouth, and try to work out whether that would be a thing I’d be happy paying £1.79 for.
This is my benchmark of acceptability: every day that I decide not to buy and eat a Pork Farms pasty at 8:30am, is another day I have passed the human test. Imagine my surprise when I overheard this!
Customer: My hand’s stuck in this bag of Monster Munch.
Shopkeeper: Have you tried taking it out?
Customer: Tried for a while, but now I quite like it. It’s like a crunchy mitten.
Shopkeeper: A mitten… of monsters!
Customer: Yes!
Cheered immeasurably by this stolen banter, I wandered out of the shop, where I overheard a homeless gentleman trading bon mots with his carrier bag.
Man: Did I tell you about my time at the Danish Embassy?
The carrier bag billows out an unearthly gasp, and paisley swirls envelop the man.
Man: It was the grooviest year of my life.
The bag catches a gust of wind, and rockets into the stratosphere, where it is struck by lightning
Man: And I haven’t stopped dancing yet!
The man snakes himself around a lamp-post, where he remains perfectly still, but for the wild muddling of a lazy, prehensile erection.
Even at work, the people around me have incredible conversations, which I overhear with overstated reaction shots. Cupping my hand to my ear, blinking six times and saying “whu-uuu?”, or simply hooting like a maniac: everyone knows when I’ve overheard something, because I’m standing up, and repeating it word for word. This is a conversation that I’m overhearing right now. I’m piping directly from my ears to my fingers. It’s coursing through me like cake batter, and you are my ovens.
Gelatinous Cube: Man, HR are being such dicks about this tribunal hearing.
Halfling: Dude, I heard about that. You shat out a skeleton soldier in the atrium lift?
Gelatinous Cube: Fuck, when you put it like that, of course it sounds bad. He came out as he went in. Undead.
Halfling: He says you shat the helmet into his face. He says you did it with such deft comic timing that it could only have been deliberate.
Gelatinous Cube: Haha! I totally did that. I thought “he’s just done a double take and collected his thoughts, long enough has passed for everyone to think it’s over, now’s the time for a strong visual punchline”. The Beholder cracked up, it was awesome.
Halfling: Don’t come out with this shit at the tribunal, man.
Gelatinous Cube: You worry too much.
Halfling: You know what, I’ve always wondered why skeleton soldiers carry gold around. Why do the undead need money?
Gelatinous Cube: You still working on that open mic set?
Halfling: Fuck you.
That’s all I’ve overheard today. If I hear anyone saying anything else, I promise you, you’ll be the joint second to know.
Amazing. Now do some more Playground Law you bastard.
OK! By which I mean “god, I want to, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how the fuck the site works, as it was coded by someone who knows what he’s doing, and not me”.
Can you hunt him down, grasp him by the neck, and squeal in his ear until he makes you a powerpoint presentation on how to do it?