Fat Bob

Diary

They called him Fat Bob before he'd earned an inch of the name, and he spent thirty years proving the nickname was less an insult than a prophecy. The night his integrity finally slipped its leash, he was three cups of shochu deep in the men's pleasure house, mouth moving faster than his once-legendary blade ever had, when he cracked a joke about a visiting samurai's mother that landed like a wet fart in a temple. The room went silent, the samurai's hand drifted to a hilt he thankfully never drew, and Fat Bob laughed it off with the easy grin of a man who has never once, not one single time, known when to stop talking. He tells himself every morning that today is the day he becomes disciplined again, orders green tea instead of grog, meditates for four whole minutes, and then by sundown he's back at the pleasure house retelling the same doomed joke to a fresh audience, chasing the ghost of his own honor with a belly laugh and a belly that keeps growing to match the legend. Deceptively dangerous in a fight, hopelessly undangerous to himself, he relives the insult daily like a monk chanting the wrong sutra on purpose, and somehow, impossibly, he's still smiling.