Canterbury Fails

Celebrating a Deathday™: The Canterbury chronicler — overpraised English scribe Geoffrey Chaucer — took his final, overwrit pilgrimage — up to the heavens or down to the fiery pits of hell, you bloody decide — on this day, October 25, 1400. Considered by many — but not Yours Truly Dooley® — to be the father of English literature, Chaucer was a medieval ink slinger of pomp and tiresome circumstance whose biography is as confounding as his endless and awful signature tale that I attempted to read in hopes of impressing a university lass in my youth. Though little is known of his early life, Chaucer enjoyed adult rank and privilege as an esquire, a courtier, a diplomat, a bureaucrat, an author, a philosopher and a poet. He is thought to have studied law, married a woman named Phillipa, sired an unnecessarily oversized brood of children who weaseled their way into society and all the rest of it. Blah-ba-dee-bloodee-blah-blah. Today, the Canterbury he immortalized — an enchanting cathedral city in southeast England — has been bastardized in name by an endless parade of insignificant parks, mediocre condominium complexes and lackluster golf courses. For that we can thank Geoff Chaucer. Dead and buried on this day, a thousand years ago. Good riddance to bad rubbish.