The Tour Leader's Wailing Wall

It all began SO VERY long, long ago.......

Pansy was at her first ever bicycle club meeting. This particular bicycle club fell victim to being the Club of Choice for the Pansys simply because the club's meeting night was the ONLY night of the week/month that was still open and available in the Pansys' lives for consorting. The OTHER bicycle club is forever and ever grateful beyond measure at how closely their fates could have turned in another direction. Over time, however, the OTHER club's fate did indeed go down a bad road since the Pansys eventually joined both clubs. Pansy is still a bit miffed/mystified (not sure which) that at the end of the OTHER club's recent holiday party several members yelled "Mr. Pansy we are SO glad that YOU are married to her." Like he threw himself on some sword of death that they don't have to endure. In their dreams.

So, at this very first meeting there is some guy who is a dentist in the back of the room. Pansy is, as always anywhere, up Front and Center. Discussion is about a woman who had been on the recent club tour. Pansy recalls only this part of the discussion:

Club Member: She had a tough time on the tour possibly because she is a new rider. And she is in her 50s.
Some Guy Dentist: (very scoffing tone of voice) Oh, she is MUCH older than that!
Pansy: Now how would you know that? What did you do? Count her teeth or something?
Room of People: raucous laughter directed at Some Guy Dentist (Pansy, not knowing at that time what kind of landmine she had just stepped on, does recall thinking the laughter had a kind of nervous edge to it.)
Some Guy Dentist: Makes a "confused, kinda hurt feelings puppy face". An expression Pansy has been delighted to make happen on his face many times since and will continue to do so for the rest of her natural born life. As Some Guy Dentist has aged, his face more resembles a "hang dog look." hahahahhahahaha! Pansy learned during the meeting that Some Guy Dentist is also Tour Leader. And he called the woman "old" to rationalize away any complaints that the tour route had been perhaps less than ideal. We will explore those tour routes in other stories.

Thus, began the long, strange, trippy relationship between Tour Leader and Pansy. Tour Leader Wife and Mr. Pansy just stand back, shake their heads and say "Kids! What are we going to do with those two?"

Pansy is the first to admit she is a high energy person. But she is also a total slacker when given half the opportunity to slack. She is "bossy" but in a really fake way. She does not think she is always right, even though she is. She is very flexible, to the point of being a contortionist. She can really go with the flow. And she has the very, very uncanny ability/skill to pick up on other people's vulnerable and tender psychological "weaknesses". Not that those people are weak, but Pansy does have her own kind of Vulcan Power Grip that fortunately she chooses to use Only For Good...FUN.

Tour Leader is your classic Recovering Horrifically Guilt Riddled Catholic Hyperactive Kid, grown up. He USED TO be very convinced he had somehow been secretly elected Boss Of The World For Life. Until he met Pansy. His one Saving Grace is that he instinctively and possibly immediately realized Pansy was fun and that she would not harm him. Too much. This was like a Revelation Of The Greatest Order to all who knew Tour Leader BP (Before Pansy). Even Tour Leader's Wife said "you changed his personality."

Tour Leader is a disaster combo of guilt and industry. So he's always fidgeting around: building decks around his house, painting the house, remodeling the house, doing all the mechanical repairs on all his cars and appliances, making a "mountain stream" in his backyard, playing farmer with a barn, goats and sheep, just busy busy busy. And then doing it All Over Again! Plus riding his bicycle to Ireland, New Zealand, Germany...many, many places. Yes, I said riding his bicycle TO those places. He might as well have. He is at his Especially Busiest Best in making the rest of us fools look like slugs. It would be very easy to just hate him. Except we are all too exhausted from watching him and his busybee-ness. It's like "calm down already"! Don't they have Ritalin available in adult dosages?

There is one aspect to Tour Leader that you most definitely Do NOT want to get Pansy started on: that would be Tour Leader's gawdawful fucking MURAL on Tour Leader's front hall! Oops! Too Fucking Late! hahahahhahahahaha!

Pansy cannot adequately describe this MURAL. It started out as a plain, but happy and even functional, white wall. Before the Pansys met Tour Leader, his wife (the MURAL is all HER goddamned fault by the fucking way) said one day "I sure would like it if that hallway weren't so plain. Maybe some wallpaper with a pattern, like trees or something naturelike." That's like throwing a match into a can of gasoline aka setting Tour Leader's "imagination" on fire and this particular suggestion unleased a hitherto unknown trait of Tour Leader: that of INNER ARTISTE. Oh fucking christ save us all. No one can seem to get through to Tour Leader that his Inner Artiste has been extensively examined and medically declared to be: STILLBORN. DEAD. DOES NOT EXIST. NEVER FUCKING EXISTED. WILL NEVER EXIST GODDAMMIT.

Tour Leader freehand paints abstract, leafless, branchless, ugly brown "trees" all over the poor innocent hall walls. And that's how the hallway existed....in an ugly odd brown stick hell....for lord knows how many years before Pansy ever first saw it. It couldn't have been TOO many years since we all know that Tour Leader does things All Over Again on a very frequent basis. Then the Pansys show up and Pansy mocks the MURAL. Tour Leader gets that stupid whipped puppy ass look on his face. Pansy is then informed by Tour Leader Wife that said MURAL is Tour Leader's pride and joy. Pansy says "He must have a very low threshhold for pride and joy." You would have thought Pansy had insulted Tour Leader's penis size or said his children were ugly--which they so fucking were Ugly Mutts until THANKYOUGOD Tour Leader Wife's genes kicked in and saved their homely asses. Which fact Pansy repeatedly explains over and over to the dense and stupid Tour Leader. So he won't forget it.

Evidently the Pansy MURAL mocking severely wounded Tour Leader (we were early in our relationship) and as a direct result the MURAL FROM HELL began to emerge. Yes, now it is all Pansy's goddamned fucking fault and Tour Leader's wife is very grateful to have had the Mural Burden lifted from her shoulders. If those walls could only talk. Well, they wouldn't talk they would just start screaming and never, never, never be able to stop.

The MURAL FROM HELL aka Wailing Wall began as a whitewashing of the ugly odd brown stick hell mural. Then the entire wall is painted with some fugly green in a shade not to be found in nature, this galaxy or this universe. I mean it was GREEN with a capital FUCK. Worse, it wasn't "left over" or even "accident" paint that was on sale. Noooo! Tour Leader proudly declares it to be the Best Bright Green Paint Money Can Buy. Who would have ever guessed that all of us now bleeding-eyed mural viewing victims would rue the loss of the ugly odd brown stick hell mural? Oh, rue we did and still do.

Originally Tour Leader was planning to "create" just a grassy meadow. But that was quickly deemed too small a concept for his Giant Imagination. Every freaking week (why we kept going over there to torture ourselves we will never know but it's too fucking late now so we can't quit) there would be a new gawdawful "element" added to the Nightmare on Hope Doesn't Live Here Anymore Street or whatever the fuck is the name of the street Tour Leader's Wife and The Mad Artist live on.

First came the "sky" (Best Bright Blue Paint Money Can Buy!). Then the "mountain range". It was almost okay. It was a very monotone dark gray (it, too, was the Best Money Could Buy but even Tour Leader can't fuck up GRAY too much) in an undulating line across the wall in sort of, kind of, maybe, almost, just about the right place for a mountain range to be, in its own horrid lack of perspective way. After all, technically speaking, it was between the BLUE and the GREEN "parts". But only if it is possible for Really Green grass, Really Gray mountains and Really Blue sky to occupy EXACTLY the precise same amount of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 of all occupiable space available.

Now is as good a time as any for Pansy to mention that Tour Leader's Inner Artiste is evidently Very Rigid in all ways possible. And regimented. And very, very obsessed with Exactly The Sameness. For Tour Leader's Wife's sake ONLY, Pansy actually dearly hopes another part of Tour Leader is reliably rigid.

Then the "snow capped mountain peaks" were created with a Precisely Rectangular (Pansy suspects a leftover chalkboard eraser from Tour Leader's Catholic schooling) dipped into SNOW GLARING WHITE ENOUGH TO BLIND YOU paint (The Best Money Can Buy!) and stamped across the wall like marching rigid soldiers in caskets. It was so bad even Mr. Pansy couldn't hold back his laughter. However, the laughter elicited a particularly fetching rendition of that stupid whipped puppy ass look on Tour Leader's face that Pansy so loves, so THAT particular Mural Viewing was worth it. And Tour Leader's Wife finally felt not so terribly alone anymore in her aghastness over the Wall.

Next came the "forest" of Extremely Natural Trees that curiously resembled a Christmas Tree Cookie Cutter dipped in yet another shade of GREEN FROM RADIOACTIVE OUTER SPACE. But Tour Leader had learned his lesson from the snow capped peaks and cleverly used Different Sizes of cookie cutters so the trees would have "perspective". Uh, no.

Never one to be deterred by naysaying nabobs of negativity, Tour Leader assessed the Wall and determined it needed a house.....like......the cute Chateaus he saw in Germany on a bicycle tour (even though chateaus are Fucking French, dodohead) and then.....EUREKA! VOILA!! HIS INNER ARTISTE'S SPECIAL PURPOSE WAS BIRTHED! The Wall would incorporate all "special memories" from all his bike tours from everywhere. Now he was cooking with gas! The rest of us fought viciously over who got to put their head in the gas oven first. In our frenzy we failed to realize that putting Tour Leader's head in the oven first would solve all our problems, bring about world peace and etc.

Tour Leader feverishly painted for days, weeks, months on end. During this time Portugese Washer Woman developed a toothache. But she's afraid of dentists. I called Tour Leader's dental office, told them what was up, transferred the call to Portugese. She fell for the ruse and now had a dental appointment. I begged her, BEGGED HER, to chit chat with Tour Leader and insert this phrase "So. How's your mural doing?" She was all set to do so but when push came to shove she realized he had her life in his hands. And sharp tools in her vulnerable mouth. She said nothing. I will never ever really trust that woman again. However, upon telling Tour Leader later on what I had tried to make Portugese say to him the look on his face was almost as good as if Portugese had followed through. Because it was then that he realized the Wall Mockery was very likely nationwide. But he was wrong. It had long gone international. Starting with weekly discussions of the Mural during my office's Monday Meetings. Boy did my attorney's wife LIVE for those Mural Updates.

The wall developed hives (strange botanical things that don't exist in nature); cess pools (low lying "foothills" that don't exist in nature); a floating and undoubtedly haunted "chateau" which floating Tour Leader tried (and always failed right to this moment in time) to anchor with shadowing, then bushes, then a fence. There was a fissure that scarred the landscape from top to bottom. It is the Very Best Rendition of an Ass Fissure Pansy has ever seen even though she has never seen an Ass Fissure--which she would gladly volunteer to view Many Ass Fissures if doing so would destroy this Mural. Tour Leader claims it is a "country road". At least now Pansy knows what the road that leads to Hell looks like.

Then, one day, the Low Lying Rock Wall began to take form. It was actually in the "right place". It looked "good" even with its just a bit too precise rocks that curiously resembled identical books standing on end. But the rock colors were, like, real-ish. In that they varied in shading. A first for Tour Leader...to vary the shading. Pansy has seen real live rocks in most of those colors. Could it be that Tour Leader is improving? No. We were all just so battle weary we couldn't go on. No mas, we cried. No mas. Is it possible Tour Leader has won the Mural Battle To The Death? We will never know. What we do know is that he was probably getting tired, too. Naw. Because the next thing we all knew he was Out Back fixing the "mountain stream" AGAIN and looking at extending a flagstone path down to the barn. But first, this deck has Got To Go!