A.F. Bradley, New York, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that based on the keeper’s life-long experience, he advises the Russian oligarchs who own the billion- dollar yachts, that killing themselves, as several have reportedly done, is an overreaction to a boating problem.
From the earliest history of a leaky rowboat to the contrary classic “Dunphy” that came within a fraction of an inch of neutering the keeper when he fell on the ice under its dropped trailer hitch, on to the pontoon boat stranded on dry land, all of this and more has endorsed the axiom for the keeper that the two happiest days in a boater’s life are the day he acquires the boat and the day he gets rid of it.
As for engineering your own end–if that’s what it was in the “boating” oligarchs’ situation, the keeper does not dwell on such subject matter; and notes that April 21 marks the day that 74-year-old boater and writer Mark Twain died peacefully in bed of heart problems after reportedly struggling to get a heavy tome into reading position.
Life’s lessons keep coming for the keeper: do not get involved in any more boats; and see to it that bedtime reading is as light as possible.
