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How Big Bob Met His Maker


If Big Bob Stiff had a weakness it was cheese. He loved the stuff. All kinds. Even blue cheese. If Bob had a second weakness it was fish. All kinds. But particularly sole. He loved it. The one drawback from eating all this cheese was that Bob was in a state of near constant constipation. But he didn't let it deter him. As a result Bob ballooned to 400 lbs. His wife left him. He got fired from his job. He was shunned by his friends.

One day, while surfing the internet, (Do we still say that?) Bob came across an ad for a tourist destination. It was a small, until now secret, island chain called Gouda and Filet. He read on. He was  enamoured by this perfectly named place in the Pacific Ocean and learned the spot was abundant in cheese and fish. Bob wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. For him it was a match made in heaven. After all, while cheese was available in Denver, it wasn't exactly a hotspot for fresh fish.

There was only one thing for Bob to do. He sold his home, his car and his prized CD collection (which I'd never do If I was Bob) and booked the first flight he could to Gouda and Filet where he bought a house on the beach and quickly settled in as an American expatriate. He ate cheese and fished to his heart's content. Soon the chest of drawers in his kitchen was full of cheese and his freezer overflowed with fish, largely sole.

Within two month's time Bob had gained another 100 lbs. But he had no wife or friends to advise him to cut back or else he would encounter some serious health problems. He loved to fish even though he should have scaled back (pun intended) and he loved his cheese because it was so damn gouda (ditto).

But his weaknesses soon were his undoing. Not having seen Bob for several days, his neighbour wandered over to see if he was okay. He found poor Bob dead as a doornail on the john. Bob had given things the old college try but his grunting and groaning did him in.

His neighbour made the burial arrangements and short on cash decided on a short engraving on Bob's tombstone. He thought about what he knew of his neighbour,. An expatriate from the United States.  Loved cheese. Loved fish. Born in 1986. The engraving he decided on read like this:

Here lies John
Stiff
1986-2016
Ex-expat
The good cheeses took him from US
God rest his sole.


The prompt from my friends at Studio30+ was expatriate/emigrant this week. Click the link to see what the rest of the gang came up with.



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