Fatty Bobsticks

Diary

Fatty Bobsticks will tell you, loud and unprompted, that he is nothing like Fat Bob, even as he kneels in the same mud his old man once bled discipline into, mouth running before his brain ever clocks in. He was mid-rant, some masterpiece of an insult aimed square at a samurai's honor, floor talk about the man's stance, his lineage, his mother's tea ceremony, when the samurai's associate simply lifted his coin purse like plucking a ripe persimmon off a low branch. Fatty didn't even feel the rug until his knees hit dirt, laughing through the shame because that's the Bobsticks way, comedy first, dignity optional, discipline a rumor he half remembers from a bedtime story. Now he lives alone in the hills, calling it a hermitage, insisting it's strategy and not just a man too broke and too proud to face the dojo he clowned himself out of. He still practices his forms every morning, sort of, three stances and a nap, muttering the whole time that Fat Bob never would've gotten robbed mid-insult, as if that proves anything except that the shadow follows wherever the mouth leads.