Because humor is funnier when you know it's true.
It doesn't get any better
I recently get back in touch with an old school-mate, and we have been swapping stories. I remembered this story, for the first time in many years, so I wrote it out.
It's a good story, so I'm sharing it with anyone that I think might appreciate it.
Many years ago my wife and I were bumming around India and we went to Darjeeling. It's a lovely place in the Himalayas. It is a lot cooler than the plains so it was the summer Capital when India was governed from Calcutta.
There is a big Tibetan refugee population living there. The day we arrived a big party of French people turned up who had paid a lot of money to do a course in Bhuddism so my wife just tagged along and pretended that she was part of the group.
So I was on my own in Darjeeling for two weeks while she did the course. I bought a book on the history and symbology of Tibetan Bhuddism.
It was quite a serious, scholarly book. One thing it said was that a lot of monasteries would have a human skull lined with silver that was used in ceremonies involving semen, menstrual blood and alcohol.
At the end of the two weeks it was Tibetan New Year and so we went to a ceremony at the monastery. I was at the back with the riff-raff and my wife was at the front with the in-crowd.
Sure enough, somebody came round with a human skull, lined with silver, full of brandy. It just looked like an old, white bowl lined with silver. If I hadn't read the book I wouldn't have realised that it was the top half of a human skull.
He poured a little bit into everyone's palm and they licked it off.
Not normally one to pass up a drink, I feigned ignorance and wiped it on my head.
My wife got her drink and licked it up as though it was magic potion.
One of the truly magical experiences in a relationship is getting the chance to tell your wife that she'd just drunk brandy out of a human skull that monks had wanked into.
It doesn't get any better than that.
-Spade Braithwaite
Spade Braithwaite was born, and lived an idyllic early life, in Oxford, England. In Britain, he worked a variety of jobs including the very first, ever, pizza delivery man in Britain (for Britain’s first pizza delivery company - Harry's Pizza Factory), a highway surveyor, bartender, Italian restaurant cook, fork truck driver, mason laborer, compost shoveler, and manager of a big, very busy pub/hotel/restaurant. He also studied to be a Cessna pilot (but was too terrified of flying to get a license), studied civil engineering at Oxford to become a construction manager, and studied motorcycles at college to become a qualified mechanic. At twenty nine he moved to Pennsylvania and worked as a lumberjack for fifteen years. Since then, his life has been a bit chaotic, working in every appalling industry on four continents.
His novel, Herbert Brewer's Dirty Little Secret (Amsarnie Book 1) is the first is a series of very funny stories set in his imaginary island nation of Amsarnie. His website is Amsarnie.com.