Proverbial

The scarab was in a world of shit. He took to it like a horse to water. “You can lead a fish to water, but you can’t make him blink,” he was fond of saying. He was happy as a pig in mud.

The scarab put his best face backward in order to keep a running tally of his progress, which was a matter of degrees – especially since he was in graduate school. Shit doesn’t just happen; you have to work at it. He covered all the bases, so typically he never got beyond the first date. All work and no play makes Johnny a very inept lover, the female beetles decided. Especially if he cares more about his stinkin’ piece-of-shit job than he does about you.

So he gradually backed himself into a corner, and that’s where the Egyptian priest found him. He said something cryptic and walled the scarab in with a few gold bricks. Ah, the irony! He had the balls of a brass monkey, and offered them to the scarab, but all the scarab wanted was to keep his shit together. He didn’t give a you-know-what about old world charm.

The gods must be crazy; that is their chief qualification. Whenever clients come seeking answers to life’s little dilemmas, the priest will place two steaming piles of dung in front of the scarab and study his reaction. “Holy shit!” the scarab invariably mutters to himself. “Holy shit!”