Digging self into a hole

From our Life is a Catch 22 series.

The past week at the K-Landnews has been centered on holes. Once you start thinking about holes, believe me, there is no telling where you end up. This is true even if you make a deliberate effort to exclude the famous rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland.

Wielding a heavy pickax, our sturdiest associate soon got lost in the regular movements of dig, dig, dig, shovel, shovel, shovel.

Digging away at a rectangular-ish hole in the ground, Sturdy Associate drifted off into musings about Ex-PFC Wintergreen from the novel Catch 22 and the easy all-purpose metaphor which employees around the world find in Ex-PFC Wintergreen digging holes only to fill them in again.

If I dig a rectangular hole, I have to call it a trench, if the same thing opens up all by itself, it is a sink hole. From there, the mental pathways opened to serious pondering on potholes, both the physical dents in road surfaces as well as people.

What a pothole!

If there was a shortage of insults for politicians, pothole would be a good one.

Wouldn't this make a nice invective, yet not as crude as the other ever present hole, that of the letter a?

Meandering on to the blowhole past the black hole and from there - with only a single search on the web - to the c-hole. Sturdy Associate had never heard it but had been certain that there is a hole for almost every letter of the English alphabet, if not every single letter.

If there isn't any for the letter z, just imagine our standby German English speaker informing us about "ze hole" - we are not above contortions to claim we are right.

Copious amounts of sweat soaking the previously white t-shirt in late summer 90 F heat, Sturdy Associate desperately wished to have the portable roll-up hole from countless comics. Just spread it, pour the concrete, done.

The deeper the trench gets, the darker the imagery becomes.

It is not even 2014 yet, but the World War I references are creeping up already. So, next year, we will read a lot about trenches, those holes of imperialist slaughter on which the guys back in the various capital cities got off so gloriously.

The urge to vomit Sturdy Associate experienced right then might have been due to minor heat exhaustion or to the dark visceral imagery, but the trench was done.

Sturdy Associate dedicated the last shovel of concrete to Ex-PFC Wintergreen.