Forest leeches and the other kind

So it's been a while since I last had something to laugh about. The laugh we aim for here is the hollow laugh, so let me be clear on that. Hollow. With a hint of desperation. Let's see, this column used to appear weekly on The Mirror the Sunday magazine of Herald. I know for a fact that roughly 20 people read it every Sunday because I used to get feedback on my columns. So for someone to go and tell the owner of Herald that NO ONE was reading The Mirror was a dirty black lie. The owner of the paper harkened unto the person who told him no one reads Herald's Mirror and he shut it down quick as a steel trap shutting down on a wild boar's tail. He replaced Mirror with Heartbeats that wrote about the size and girth of penises and the importance of length. Mirror could never compete with that.

One was torn, I can tell ya. There was the relief of one finally not having two deadlines to meet, week after week. I used to whine and complain like nobody's business for every week of those more than five years. So when it stopped yes, it was nice not to turn one's nose up at looming deadlines.

On the other hand. There was the absence of an adrenalin rush when the phone rang. No one wanted to dismember or otherwise maim my person and that was sad, because adrenaline they say is a great cosmetic. With no one angry with me, it tells on my face. And I'm not liking what I see. Am I missing the whoosh of deadlines flying by? If I have to be honest I have to say yes. Because in my infinite wisdom, I have set far worse deadlines for myself with my new venture. I wind up for the day, or night, at 5 in the morning and that's not good.

Mirror had turned into a rabble rouser's gallery with Lionel Messias' red hot RTI produced column showing us idiots whose pockets our money was filling. I miss Lionel Messias' column. He even wrote it for my website www.targetgoa.com and if you haven't read it yet, shame on you. My website, not his column. Well okay, his column too. But then Herald with its huge number of avid readers and my website with its two and a half netizens checking it out did not seem a proper vehicle for all that effort. A pity. Goa needs to know how our leeches are sucking us dry.

At least leeches have limits, when they are full to bursting they drop off the host body. Our two-legged-Constitution-swearing variety along with their bureaucratic underlings seem to have unlimited capacity. Regular forest grown leeches sneak up on you without your knowledge. You feel nothing - no pain no trauma, except if you mash them by mistake. Then it is quite disgusting. Your life flashes before your eyes and you think you're gonna be so dead. Some idiot invariably mashes the repulsive thing filled with your good blue blood and it looks like Jack the Ripper has just done his thing. That's the forest leech.

The other kind and their bureaucrat underlings dipping their suckers in our till, do it openly and laugh at our agony. The only similarity between both species is that they both grow fat on our blood.

A sickle, or salt can get rid of forest grown leeches immediately, but our elected leeches can only let go of you if they die or when we dye our fingers with the purple-black ink once in four years. Or three, or two, or less. We hardly ever have any group lasting full term.