Envy is such an ugly sentiment
#35 | Posted by vernon
"Envy is such an ugly sentiment," Vermin mumbled sentimentally, his mouth twisted in its customary grimace, eyes beady as a bat flying through a battery of antiaircraft lights as he surveyed the comings and goings from his vantage point atop "Dumbo," the baby elephant painted not unlike the van he'd stolen from those hippies back in the day; suspiciously surveyed the world from atop the little critter in front of Kitty Kitty's Kit Kat Kat House just off Sukhumvit Road, roughly midway between the BTS Skytrain's Ashok Station and Bangkok Metro's Sukhumvit Station yet still within spitting distance which triggered an involuntary reaction in Vermin as he spontaneously hoiked one of his verminous loogies into the shallow gutter that inexorably moved a lugubriously liquid cargo of regurgitated oyster sauce, the mixings of dog-and-monkey satay, and shredded fish and noodle-limp chips to gawd only knew where yes, almost literally within spitting distance of some of Bangkok's finer hot-sheet joints that catered mostly to tourist and expat losers like himself, except only those he could envy because of their appearance, envy because of their touch of class, envy because of their money, envy because of their possessions, envy because of their lack of homeskooling, envy just because...
Bastards! he shrieked silently inside his noggin, which he'd tastelessly decorated with the rakish black-and-white checkered beanie (a la mode d' Pincus Leff) to which the plucky pachyderm (obviously a circus veteran like himself) almost mechanically and without even a mild poke of the bull-hook with which Vermin absently tapped the little beast, fastened a drooping orchid it fetched out of the shallow gutter with its Sargasso Sea of regurgitated oyster sauce, the mixings of dog-and-monkey stay, and shredded fish and noddle-limp chips and the occasional orchid
And so, envious of the elephant for its ability to actually conceive of and execute a plan, he opened up the Good Book he'd liberated from a born sucker, a blind man he recalled, who actually had the temerity to attempt to eke out the most meager of livings by selling Bibles via the honor system (take one and drop money in the jar) at the entrance to Manila's Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception (it seemed like ages ago), and who Vermin ran across with his red-and-yellow cycle rickshaw (and from whom he took the bible, saying, "Remember the words of Jeebus: From each according to his ability to each according to his need") while en route to peddle a handful of rusty nails, two slightly used crowns of thorns, and a particularly nasty whip to the penitentes, crazy Kristos, and frenzied flagellants over in Kapitangan town that Good Friday morning back in '08, in the days before he rather unwisely invested his modest nest egg in that Malaysian 100% rayon plantation...
Why, he wondered enviously, did some succeed with such ease while I am required to werk so hard to make a hash of it>?
Then, after thumbing through the volume's greasy pages, Vermin simply shut his eyes, closed and then flipped open the tome, and stabbed a pudgy finger into the page where its long yellow nail pointed to Job 5:2: "Resentment," he resentfully read, "kills a fool, and envy" -- he intoned enviously -- "slays the simple."
