BOB JOHNSON RIDES AGAIN! 266

266. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

266. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Bob has always enjoyed his life in San Luis Obispo but it’s starting to look like it may be time to leave. It used to be the sort of place where a useless person could forget where he worked, and sleep in the garage on a fold out aluminum cot, and nobody made rude judgements about him, or offered him lots of pointless advice about how to do things differently. It had also been a place which lacked the presence of all those people in the world who Bob didn’t understand and who didn’t understand Bob, but every day there seemed to be more and more of those self-same people coming to San Luis Obispo and bringing their various accoutrements with them. For example, the self-driving Elon Musk had brought his cool T-shirts. Alex Jones had brought his protein shakes. Hilary Clinton had brought her bongos for playing punk rock in various Los Osos garage clubs with her accompanist, John Bolton, who had brought his lead guitar, and a whole lot of emotional baggage about his failures as a war criminal which, of course were just silly. “You were a perfectly fine war criminal–in your day,” his fellow punkers, Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger, tried to comfort him on many occasions. “These young Pete Hegseth types have got nothing on you! Especially when it comes to a high paying gig on CNN!”

“I’m thinking of San Francisco,” Bob told his old drinking buddy, Dewboy Fairchild, at McClatchey’s on a long hot winter’s day before the Super Bowl. (Bob was a big football fan just so long as he didn’t have to watch the stupid game on TV or read about it in the newspapers he never bought.) “Those gay real estate agents are just so polite and well dressed, and they’re never judgmental about the fact I have so many jobs I forgot I had, such as delivering THC-infused substances for Wacky Peepers, or delivering disciplinary lectures at C.L. Smith. What do you think, Dewboy? Is it time for me to leave San Luis Obispo or is it time for San Luis Obispo to kick me out? Please consider the question carefully, since either way it means packing my stuff in boxes and then, inevitably, forgetting where I put them.”

But of course Dewboy has fallen asleep into a tidy, somewhat soiled pillow comprised of bar napkins. And if you can think of a better place for falling asleep–please don’t tell Bob!