Other people’s shoes
Reading a biography gives you the spurious feeling of life as being structured, ordered, logical, rational. Unlike, of course, your own life filled with chance, happenstance, chaos, randomness.
Other people’s shoes Read More »
cancer
Oh, all right, just a peek, now and then
When you are born you should be presented with a 70-year-diary, every day already filled in, a bright red ribbon tied around the cover. Then, as you work your way through life, you could constantly check where you were up to and what lay ahead. Or perhaps it would be best to leave it closed,
Oh, all right, just a peek, now and then Read More »
Dead Sea
Old age finds you sailing the Sargasso, through scattered “In Memoriam’ notices littering the surface like seaweed.
Count down
In old age, save me from counting down towards death from cancer, one spoon of morphine at a time, in an aged total care facility.
Cross words
In old age, save me from counting down towards death, one crossword at a time, in an old people’s home.
We have an announcement to make
A cancer diagnosis isn’t an “intimation of mortality”. Instead it announces, with the blast of trumpets, the roar of jet engines, the explosion of dynamite, that your life has changed in a big way, and that your mortality is no longer a given.
We have an announcement to make Read More »
Fever
Diseases like malaria, lymphoma, shingles, can lay dormant in a healthy body for years until some weakness emerges in the immune system and they erupt to damage the unfortunate human. Much like fascism can lie dormant in the body politic.
Sick room
Watching America suffering from Trump is like watching an old friend stricken with cancer or a virulent bacterial disease.
Eye of the storm
My childhood home had a “lounge room”, a room in the centre of the house almost never used, but with the best furniture, rarely sat upon, the piano, not played, fallen silent, since my grandfather died, too young, too young, and the record player. It was, in theory, the place where important visitors could be
Out of the blue
Chickens keep their eyes on the ground as they work the soil scratch scratch scratch peck peck peck. Eagles keep their eyes on the ground watching the chickens as they work the soil oblivious to death from the sky. As are we.