James Bond never picks his nose in public

Nose-picking in progress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is just the beginning.Comprende?
This is just the fuckin’ beginning.
He had heard his boss say all the time.

It was just the beginning…his skin had turned reddish,his nostrils were clogged and his eyes teary all the time.

Lazily he dug deep.Deep assosiations being triggered off in his brain.
His pinky finger was buried down to it’s first knuckle – gently probing and prodding…and then- Ah! Found it!

The last of the sunken treasure.

More twisting and probing and gentle manoeuvering of the pinkie finger yeilded a glob,small-grain sized but soft,pliant and resilient  piece of chewed up and spat beef jerky…The sunken treasure, the snot globule finally extricated from the depths of his right nostril shone a reddish rusty shine in the light.

This is just the beginning.Comprende?
This is just the fuckin’beginning.
How long has it been?Only three days?In the coming days,weeks,months and years the colour will spread,the glint will spread and metastasize like a malignant tumour.At first your snot,then your spit, to a lesser extent of detection-your blood,and with time your shit, your pre-cum,your cum-your everything will be reddish rust and it will glint.That’s what working in an iron ore refinery does to you.His boss told him that as a part of his induction briefing.

Iron Disulphide.Iron Pyrite.Fool’s Gold.

                            Shiny little glittering bastards ,almost impossible to remove once they get on the body or a piece of clothing.His teachers used to catch him in the act of picking his nose and say”What are you trying to do…trying to find gold?”.

The snot globule sparkled.

Real gold did not sparkle.Real gold did not dazzle.Real gold did not impress.
Real gold only shone a dull yellow shine.
On the wrong person,real gold looked cheap.On the wrong person, real gold looked vulgar.But on some unlucky sods, it looked both cheap and vulgar, and on some really unlucky bastards it also looked tacky.If it wasn’t for real golds rarity,Fool’s gold would have won hands down.Such was the irony in life.Rarity took precedence over common beauty.

               While his pinkie finger was deep inside of him his neurons fired at a rapid rate and made millions of odd connections per second and retrieved and recreated a part of his memories and associations that lay dormant until then.A scientist won the Ignoble Award for a doctoral dissertation on the prevalence of nose picking amongst Teenagers.It had a highly technical name that he had almost immediately forgotten.The thesis stated that nose picking was commonly indulged as a stress reduction mechanism by teenagers,but it also induced guilt due to deep social and parental conditioning.

Guilt and relaxation went hand in hand with nose picking, just as in many other forms of cheap thrills and other amusements.

He could only vaguely remember that the scientist had an Indian name and had actually shown up to accept the Ignoble Award.

               His habit had some unexpected consequences though.A consumate nose picker,he usually  used his pinkie, but at stressful moments he resorted to his thumb – driving it up so that it made contact with the bone and not just cartilage.He never inserted anything else up his nostrils.As a child, he had heard the story of  a kid who died when the pencil shoved up his nostril went through the skull spilling gooey grey matterall over.This scared him straight enough not to experiment with foreign insertions.In his recurring nightmares,the grey matter had a gummy  liquid like quality resembling dripping mercury chewing gum toothpaste.In his dreams it was his brain that was speared with a freshly sharpened 2B pencil that he so much liked to use while drawing his gun battles and dinosaur-monsters.As his brains spilled out, or rather oozed out – unable to comprehend or formulate the next step he would hold the dripping grey matter between his fingers and pull on it and his grey matter – now a silver glob would simply stretch and get entangled with his fingers and he would try to shake it off until violently being jarred awake.To calm himself he would resort to thumb-picking his nose,which gave his nostrils a widened stretched look and at certain angles and certain lighting conditions,especially when the diffused light of the setting sun caught his front profile or his mug shot,he resembled  an angry gorilla with flared nostrils.Monkeyshine.
That’s what the other kids used to call him at school.
Also George of the Jungle not realizing that in that movie ,the talking gorrilla was named Ape.

              More wheels clicked and whirred inside his head and many more neurons were busy firing up inside his brain(two very different places) and he was taken to a different place , a different time-to  a memory in which he was cold,wet and stark naked.His mom was giving him a bath.No that wasn’t right.He never allowed anyone to see him naked since he was five years old.Then this must’ve been when he was before he was five years old,after which he was too shy and self conscious to be comfortable in his own skin around others.

So when his mom was giving him a bath,maybe when he was four or possibly three but not five or two,because he had no memories of being two or any younger because of the ‘Falling off the swing in 1986’ incident, she talked about etiquette.The ages before five are the formative years where the brains learning capacity is supposedly ten thousand times greater than that of an average adults.Why was there such a drastic reduction in the learning capacity of an average adult?The adult simply grew up and abandoned the age of wonder and intrigue.Nothing seemed new anymore.Titanium alloy disc brakes were applied hard to the accelration of brain and then abandoned at the sidewalk.

                        His mother might have learnt this technique from Spock,the definitive guide for child rearing which she turned a blind eye to when it advised her to let her kids sleep in their own bedrooms right from childhood so that they got acclimatised to it.He slept with his parents until he was twelve and found out that he was the only one amongst his friends to do so.He refused to sleep with his parents after that ,and consequently broke his mom’s heart.

Spock spoke about identifying role models and inculcating wholesome values by attributing these values to those rolemodels.

                        Popeye was his favourite cartoon character and rolemodel.He didn’t really know why.He could have chosen Superman,Spiderman,Porky Pig,Donald Duck,but instead he chose a bald one eyed sailor with disproportionate limbs,a smoking addiction and a speech impediment.His choice of girls was no great feat to be emulated either.

His mom told him that if he wanted to be big and strong like popeye (his violent streak was not discussed back then) ,then he must eat spinach.
And other veggies.

Fine.

He had no problems with that.Unlike other kids ,he loved his veggies.He heaped veggies on his plate-raw,cooked,peeled,skinned,blanched,cored,sliced,diced,cubed,sauteed,skewered,barbequed,baked, tinned,pickled and other.

                                   He used to get cranky if he didn’t get his daily quota of veggies,and this was a special requirement like lactose intolerance or peanut allergy that had to be told in advance if his family were to visit their friends or relatives for dinner.

“Give the kid his fuckin’ veggies…and don’t forget the fruits.All that roughage he eats can bring about world peace”

He was the model kid,made and example and praises showered upon in front of other kids with veggie induced loss of appetite so that they could follow suit.

Not that it ever worked.

Monkeyshine,George of the Jungle was simply not cool enough to shepherd the sheep.

But in retrospect,James Bond was a mistake for a four year old or a three year old.

                                       After a brief and embarrassing instruction on how to pull on the foreskin and clean the white fishy  gunk (his mom said it was called smegma) and clean his penis (his mom always insisted on the proper terminology,not wee wee,pee pee,dick,boner or prick) and how to sprinkle cold water on the scrotum (not balls…never balls),gleaned from a book called The Housewive’s Almanac,she proceeded to give him the basics of etiquette – atleast the basics that applied to a four or three year old.

She said ” James Bond never picks his nose in the public,nor does he scratch his crotch.What he does is after his bath he cleans his nose and his penis and then carefully washes his hands”

He remembered James Bond.Pussy Galore made his spine tingle.Octupussy fantasies threw him into a fit of frenzy.

                                  He asked his mother,years later , as to why she chose James Bond – a cold blooded  limey womanizer with scant respect for other peoples lives.

He was never his rolemodel,but his dad was a great fan of Bond, crazy enough to splurge family savings on the collectors set.

His mom sat there stunned and silent.She said she had no idea why she chose James Bond.She could neither remember nor construct a logical premise for her choice.