Suffering is one of humanity's great questions. The larger shifts in our thinking have often been inspired by periods of great anxiety, an excellent example being the great defining of Jewish spirituality by the Hebrews exiled in Babylon.
For some time i have been wondering about whether or not individuals in today's western societies are as emotionally robust as they used to be. i suspect our attitude to suffering is of interest here. We often start by denying and avoiding suffering. It is natural and adaptive to avoid suffering but i wonder if we go nuts with that. We seem to think that suffering is somehow wrong. We should never suffer, we have a right to be perpetually happy, our lives must improve over time, and if we do suffer we must blame soneone else and seek to fix it so that the suffering stops. We forget that disaster is all around us and that we walk through the valley of the dhadow of death. Only a hundred years ago we kept a special baby outfit for the baby that died. We expected our environment and and workplaces to kill us. We knew our young men were expendable; they died taking the big risks for us. We understood famine and disease.
In between times we have been driven to make life better for ourselves and we have in part succeeded. The demand to stop suffering has led to better health care and to a rightful expansion of human and civil rights. But we may also have left ourselves more emotionally vulnerable.
One worrying sign is an inability to tolerate any bad feelings. People have always felt suicidal over the more unusual life crises - financial failure, terminal illness, being caught for a major crime. But people attempt suicide in the wake of transient stress - exams, relationship breakups, feeling insulted. They do not have the insight that tells us we will get over it. Signs posted on the Golden Gate Bridge (where about 30 people a year still jump) say 'Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem'. Will i ever get over it? Will i still feel like this tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? Well, for now, i feel bad and i can't tolerate it, not at all, i never thought i would feel like this and i can't stand it. Nothing prepared me for this. It is incomprehensible and impossible.
We conflate mental illness and suffering. Maybe we don't have a mood disorder, we are just miserable and reactive. Maybe it is OK to grieve and rail and sulk for a bit. We might not need fixing. We might be best leaning into our suffering, talking back to it, asking it what message it has for us, learning and caring for ourselves. Thinking of ourselves as mentally ill denigrates our suffering and distances ourself from it. It is also moncultural, not taking into account forms of suffering that clearly don't spring from mental illness, or mental illness where people aren't suffering but just living their lives and maybe damn well enjoying them. Let us have some discernment and some practical care.
Of ourse we do not want to blame victims of adverse circumstances or discriminate against people who have mental illnesses. i don't think we unconsciously cause all of our suffering or that everything bad that happens to us is somehow our fault. If anything, i want to emphasise the sheer random weirdness and universality of suffering. Stuff happens. It's how we respond that counts. We are all in this life, all doing our best with what we've got. At times in our big history, suffering has united us. The suicide rate declined during the London blitz. We have undergone great shifts in our thinking about ourselves and our world when we have been challenged by social and environmental shifts. Maybe it is time to think about suffering again, if it helps teach us about our place in our world.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
The revolution will, like, be totally televised
Two recent events interested me. The first was the revolution that occurred on 19 June. You noticed, right? No, it was not that revolution, that old thing where the proletariat overthrow the ruling classes who are then strung up by the thumbs next to the creators of the Game of Life. This was a po-mo version where individuals acting only on their own behalf used social media to gather in a creative fashion, to shout out in many different ways. This is nuts for the traditional media. A good example comes from the big London demos in March this year, where Lucy Annson of the UK Uncut group protesting about government cuts made the great statement to a journalist:
'We are a network of people who self-organise. We don't have a position on things. It's about empowering the individual to go out there and be creative'. She then said 'I am a spokesperson for myself'.*
Take the Square is a Twitter-based network inspired by the Arab Spring. They have been involved in the big protests in Madrid and Greece. Their idea is that a protest can start small, as it did in Egypt, but by the time it becomes so big it swamps a public space it is unassailable. (Not sure if these guys have heard of Tianamen Square). They planned a a world wide take-the-square revolution on 19 June. Hard to find out what happened. Here in Christchurch if you tried to Take the Square you would have to bust through the cordon, piss off the army and risk having earthquake debris fall on you. Big public spaces are a bit rare here.
Thing is, if we act for ourselves and speak for ourselves in protest, we can do lots of things. We can be flexible, creative, and inclusive. We can even have fun. Take the Critical Mass cycling jams for example. But can we change the world? Can we handle power? Would be becme victims of success if the system actually changed and some of us gained a seat at the table?
The other recent event that names this post is the death of the gorgeous Gil Scott-Heron. He was the father of rap among other things, a bluesman and a poet. He died in May. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is his most famous piece of spoken jazz. The revolution will not kill the germs that cause bad breath. CBS will not predict the results at 8.32. The revolution will not go better with Coke. It's all edge, all hope and despair, back in the early 1970's. Love it. Mean it.
Thing is, even back then i thought he was wrong. Back then i thought that for a start there was no point in having a revolution if it wasn't televised, you wave your placard for the cameras after all. i also thought, rather dimly in my youth, that the media already had it all sussed, and i was right. Consumerism is endlessly adaptive. The language of revolution and anarchy has been appropriated by hundreds of commerical images, from the poster of Omar Sharif as Che on the wall of the student flat, to the poster ad for the clothing shop that has women wearing the shop's clothes, posing para-military style in a jungle and Spanish viva! slogans in the background. The revolution meme is televised all the time.
My daughter once asked me if i was one of the first feminists. i laughed and said no, i was one of the last. What has happened to feminism? It is not finished, it has been hijacked. We feel like we've won when we can drink alcohol like men and fight like men and even have our own porn. When pop culture disses men as being childlike and impractical we can feel superior. But that's just the market, just how they want to sell shit to us, not how reality is for women or men, and not how women become themselves.
Of course everything is being televised all the time anyway, so the revolution is bound to be televised by default. Someone will catch even the tiniest revolution on CCTV or a cell camera. It is interesting that revolutionaries try so hard to be anonymous; a guide to living through the revolution has a large section on how to disguise yourself, especially online. Think of the Anonymous group. It's as if we think we are real people and not just faces on Zuckerberg's book. Somehow there is a need to be famous and private at the same time.
Gil Scott-Heron talks about the song, and i realise i am taking him too literally. He has had many years to think about it. He thinks that 'not be televised' means getting our heads right first, adjusting our attitudes, learning for ourselves. Yeah, can't argue with that.
'We are a network of people who self-organise. We don't have a position on things. It's about empowering the individual to go out there and be creative'. She then said 'I am a spokesperson for myself'.*
Take the Square is a Twitter-based network inspired by the Arab Spring. They have been involved in the big protests in Madrid and Greece. Their idea is that a protest can start small, as it did in Egypt, but by the time it becomes so big it swamps a public space it is unassailable. (Not sure if these guys have heard of Tianamen Square). They planned a a world wide take-the-square revolution on 19 June. Hard to find out what happened. Here in Christchurch if you tried to Take the Square you would have to bust through the cordon, piss off the army and risk having earthquake debris fall on you. Big public spaces are a bit rare here.
Thing is, if we act for ourselves and speak for ourselves in protest, we can do lots of things. We can be flexible, creative, and inclusive. We can even have fun. Take the Critical Mass cycling jams for example. But can we change the world? Can we handle power? Would be becme victims of success if the system actually changed and some of us gained a seat at the table?
The other recent event that names this post is the death of the gorgeous Gil Scott-Heron. He was the father of rap among other things, a bluesman and a poet. He died in May. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is his most famous piece of spoken jazz. The revolution will not kill the germs that cause bad breath. CBS will not predict the results at 8.32. The revolution will not go better with Coke. It's all edge, all hope and despair, back in the early 1970's. Love it. Mean it.
Thing is, even back then i thought he was wrong. Back then i thought that for a start there was no point in having a revolution if it wasn't televised, you wave your placard for the cameras after all. i also thought, rather dimly in my youth, that the media already had it all sussed, and i was right. Consumerism is endlessly adaptive. The language of revolution and anarchy has been appropriated by hundreds of commerical images, from the poster of Omar Sharif as Che on the wall of the student flat, to the poster ad for the clothing shop that has women wearing the shop's clothes, posing para-military style in a jungle and Spanish viva! slogans in the background. The revolution meme is televised all the time.
My daughter once asked me if i was one of the first feminists. i laughed and said no, i was one of the last. What has happened to feminism? It is not finished, it has been hijacked. We feel like we've won when we can drink alcohol like men and fight like men and even have our own porn. When pop culture disses men as being childlike and impractical we can feel superior. But that's just the market, just how they want to sell shit to us, not how reality is for women or men, and not how women become themselves.
Of course everything is being televised all the time anyway, so the revolution is bound to be televised by default. Someone will catch even the tiniest revolution on CCTV or a cell camera. It is interesting that revolutionaries try so hard to be anonymous; a guide to living through the revolution has a large section on how to disguise yourself, especially online. Think of the Anonymous group. It's as if we think we are real people and not just faces on Zuckerberg's book. Somehow there is a need to be famous and private at the same time.
Gil Scott-Heron talks about the song, and i realise i am taking him too literally. He has had many years to think about it. He thinks that 'not be televised' means getting our heads right first, adjusting our attitudes, learning for ourselves. Yeah, can't argue with that.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Chch EQ poem
Earth, she is restless in her sleep.
Half-dreams a million tiny hurts,
and some very big ones.
Sobbing shakes her -
Frightened and frightening
she bursts into muddy tears.
Half-dreams a million tiny hurts,
and some very big ones.
Sobbing shakes her -
Frightened and frightening
she bursts into muddy tears.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Painful weight loss diaries
On Thursday i had lap band surgery. A silicon band like a cable tie was put around the top of my stomach, with a wire and a port placed underneath my skin. In about five weeks the will be inflated with saline. It will be adjusted over and over again until it leaves me able to eat half a cup of food three times a day without feeling hungry or interested in food. For another ten days or so i will be on liquids only, and then for two weeks i will be able to eat only mush. The last two days have been water only.
For the last three weeks i took some stuff called Optifast, a weight loss supplement, along with two cups a day of light vegetables. Nothing else. i lost 5 kilos. i kinda got the hang of it and didn't suffer too much. Two days before the surgery i cheated - i ate two and a half slices of luncheon sausage and afterwards i has visions of the surgeon finding the horrible things, completely undigested, still flattish and slightly curled at the edges, in my stomach, and he would be scathing. But that was my only cheat. i turned down fudge brownies and chocolates and fish and chips and actually felt the better for not eating them.
Before that i was seen by a dietician, an exercise consultant and a psychologist for assessments. I also saw the surgeon. All of this was under the private system, so it was in pleasant rooms with National Geographics, where i bet no one threw up in the water coolers. It's a a different world where you pay for stuff. And i paid all up about $20,000.
The operation was at a private hospital. i had an ensuite room to myself and the wards were named after the First Four Ships*. There was blonded wood panelling and rosy pink carpet. i have always been suspicious of luxury. It seemed to go well however, and i came out with five interesting incisions in my stomach, as if i had been in a sword fight.
Two days later i was wracked with pain, just trying to ride through each minute of the pain, bent over with it, and eventually i rang the surgeon. He arranged for my admission to the public hospital. i spent the next night in a ward that seemed to be for medical mysteries and seriously dying people. The surgeon saw to me even though it was the weekend, and ensured i got the best stuff - even a CT scan. But it was the public system all right - tatty, grubby, noisy. It struck me as ironic that i had paid all that money and then when it went wrong, it was the public system that bailed me out.
It was gas all along. They put CO2 in my stomach for the op, and i was constipated, and it was all just gas and shit. If i may quote Timon: 'With you, Pumbaa, it's all gas'.
Home one night and then yesterday we had a 5.5 earthquake. Things fell over and i felt a bit vulnerable being post-op and still sore and very gassy. Then the lactulose began to kick in. i was on the loo when the 6.0 earthquake struck. i was dethroned, and ended up on the floor, and the cistern lid came off and splashed water all over me and the room. i pulled my pants on and made my way through the laundry to the computer room, where i crouched behind a couch. The earth rocked on all that time.
The filing cabinet had fallen over and blocked my way out. My husband had to shift it single handed. We had intermittant power and no water for a while. The rest of the day we saw neighbours, and he picked things up, and i couldn't help much. It was deja vu all over again. The quake, the screaming, the sirens, then the liquefaction comes up from under next door's porch, and the traffic jam begins. There has been a lot more damage in the city. Again, we are lucky as hell.
So why have surgery for weight loss? i have had a BMI of 37. i have been unable to fix my head and shoulder pain through osteopathy and exercise. i have high blood pressure and the next thing will be cholesterol and so on. i come from a long line of little round people, but they often live a long time. If i live till 90, i need to be healthy enough to look after myself and to continue to be responsible. i have commitments to others, and it is important to me to be useful. Service and diligence are core virtues for me, despite their unfashionable status. So that is why.
There are some mental changes already. i think much less about food and if you gave me something large i don't think i could even consider it. i have had several dreams about not eating specific foods. i had one dream where i was at a feast, and was carrying food to be served. i ate 6 snow pea shoots. In the dream i chose the snow pea shoots. Weird as.
i figure the blogosphere is full of weight loss diaries so i will not add to them in any regular way. But it was for me a remarkable decision, and worthy of a post.
* The ships that brought the first main contingents of Pakeha settlers to Christchurch. Descent from these people still carries some weight here.
For the last three weeks i took some stuff called Optifast, a weight loss supplement, along with two cups a day of light vegetables. Nothing else. i lost 5 kilos. i kinda got the hang of it and didn't suffer too much. Two days before the surgery i cheated - i ate two and a half slices of luncheon sausage and afterwards i has visions of the surgeon finding the horrible things, completely undigested, still flattish and slightly curled at the edges, in my stomach, and he would be scathing. But that was my only cheat. i turned down fudge brownies and chocolates and fish and chips and actually felt the better for not eating them.
Before that i was seen by a dietician, an exercise consultant and a psychologist for assessments. I also saw the surgeon. All of this was under the private system, so it was in pleasant rooms with National Geographics, where i bet no one threw up in the water coolers. It's a a different world where you pay for stuff. And i paid all up about $20,000.
The operation was at a private hospital. i had an ensuite room to myself and the wards were named after the First Four Ships*. There was blonded wood panelling and rosy pink carpet. i have always been suspicious of luxury. It seemed to go well however, and i came out with five interesting incisions in my stomach, as if i had been in a sword fight.
Two days later i was wracked with pain, just trying to ride through each minute of the pain, bent over with it, and eventually i rang the surgeon. He arranged for my admission to the public hospital. i spent the next night in a ward that seemed to be for medical mysteries and seriously dying people. The surgeon saw to me even though it was the weekend, and ensured i got the best stuff - even a CT scan. But it was the public system all right - tatty, grubby, noisy. It struck me as ironic that i had paid all that money and then when it went wrong, it was the public system that bailed me out.
It was gas all along. They put CO2 in my stomach for the op, and i was constipated, and it was all just gas and shit. If i may quote Timon: 'With you, Pumbaa, it's all gas'.
Home one night and then yesterday we had a 5.5 earthquake. Things fell over and i felt a bit vulnerable being post-op and still sore and very gassy. Then the lactulose began to kick in. i was on the loo when the 6.0 earthquake struck. i was dethroned, and ended up on the floor, and the cistern lid came off and splashed water all over me and the room. i pulled my pants on and made my way through the laundry to the computer room, where i crouched behind a couch. The earth rocked on all that time.
The filing cabinet had fallen over and blocked my way out. My husband had to shift it single handed. We had intermittant power and no water for a while. The rest of the day we saw neighbours, and he picked things up, and i couldn't help much. It was deja vu all over again. The quake, the screaming, the sirens, then the liquefaction comes up from under next door's porch, and the traffic jam begins. There has been a lot more damage in the city. Again, we are lucky as hell.
So why have surgery for weight loss? i have had a BMI of 37. i have been unable to fix my head and shoulder pain through osteopathy and exercise. i have high blood pressure and the next thing will be cholesterol and so on. i come from a long line of little round people, but they often live a long time. If i live till 90, i need to be healthy enough to look after myself and to continue to be responsible. i have commitments to others, and it is important to me to be useful. Service and diligence are core virtues for me, despite their unfashionable status. So that is why.
There are some mental changes already. i think much less about food and if you gave me something large i don't think i could even consider it. i have had several dreams about not eating specific foods. i had one dream where i was at a feast, and was carrying food to be served. i ate 6 snow pea shoots. In the dream i chose the snow pea shoots. Weird as.
i figure the blogosphere is full of weight loss diaries so i will not add to them in any regular way. But it was for me a remarkable decision, and worthy of a post.
* The ships that brought the first main contingents of Pakeha settlers to Christchurch. Descent from these people still carries some weight here.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Destroying Leibniz
On books, or even Books.
Here are some truisms: that writing down our thoughts changes them by making them permanent, that the written word has at times been too sacred to entrust to the non-cognoscenti, that some books are considered holy, that the invention of the printing press made mass social and political movements more accessible, that a literate population is a more involved one.
And some more: that knowledge moves faster than ever, that the wisdom of the ages weighs the same on line as Lindsay Lohan's driving record, that literacy involves more than than the written word, that major social movements erupt as fast as flashmobs.
People buy fewer physical books than they did. But the physicality of books is still appealing. i still own books from way back, even daft old things like the one that predicts that before the end of the twentieth century computers will make us rich and give us more leisure time. Many were bought second hand. Our dear old Smiths book shop is gone now of curse, but it really did have dusty shelves that reached to the ceiling, and triangular ladders, and tiny rooms on the third floor.
My daughter had an art project where she needed to juxtapose two unrelated themes, in her case books and rabbits. When she got a bit multi media she wanted her rabbit to leap out of the pages of a book, rip up the pages and go free. She needed a book.
We went through the most obscure shelves, and found book after book that we thought was too precious to rip up. We had almost decided that every book was in some way sacred, a talisman, a special expression of the ideas of a person, maybe from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. It seemed sacrilege. She was more reticent than i was - i have always been a bit of an iconoclast and i am defintely not a hoarder. But the deliberate destruction of a book is a serious matter. It is redolent of bad times for civil rights and freedom of thought. Remeber your Ray Bradbury. It took moral effort to choose a book. It was a little sacrifice - old art for new, the old permanence for the new ephemera. In the end we kinda took pot luck, and chose a pocket introduction to the work and life of Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz was a 17th century philosopher and mathematician who among many things worked out the binary number system and was a pioneer of rationalism. i had had the book for decades and, i am ashamed to say, never read it.
She ripped up the book and the rabbit romped through it and out of it, and little traces of Liebniz's life and thought were spead around the art page. The rest of the book went in the recycling.
And, the thing is, if you want to know more aboout Liebniz you can just wiki him in thirty seconds.
Some minor updates - no more mice, Isis Fang was given some catnip versions to enourage her but she ignores those too. And today we had a 5.5 earthquake.
Here are some truisms: that writing down our thoughts changes them by making them permanent, that the written word has at times been too sacred to entrust to the non-cognoscenti, that some books are considered holy, that the invention of the printing press made mass social and political movements more accessible, that a literate population is a more involved one.
And some more: that knowledge moves faster than ever, that the wisdom of the ages weighs the same on line as Lindsay Lohan's driving record, that literacy involves more than than the written word, that major social movements erupt as fast as flashmobs.
People buy fewer physical books than they did. But the physicality of books is still appealing. i still own books from way back, even daft old things like the one that predicts that before the end of the twentieth century computers will make us rich and give us more leisure time. Many were bought second hand. Our dear old Smiths book shop is gone now of curse, but it really did have dusty shelves that reached to the ceiling, and triangular ladders, and tiny rooms on the third floor.
My daughter had an art project where she needed to juxtapose two unrelated themes, in her case books and rabbits. When she got a bit multi media she wanted her rabbit to leap out of the pages of a book, rip up the pages and go free. She needed a book.
We went through the most obscure shelves, and found book after book that we thought was too precious to rip up. We had almost decided that every book was in some way sacred, a talisman, a special expression of the ideas of a person, maybe from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. It seemed sacrilege. She was more reticent than i was - i have always been a bit of an iconoclast and i am defintely not a hoarder. But the deliberate destruction of a book is a serious matter. It is redolent of bad times for civil rights and freedom of thought. Remeber your Ray Bradbury. It took moral effort to choose a book. It was a little sacrifice - old art for new, the old permanence for the new ephemera. In the end we kinda took pot luck, and chose a pocket introduction to the work and life of Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz was a 17th century philosopher and mathematician who among many things worked out the binary number system and was a pioneer of rationalism. i had had the book for decades and, i am ashamed to say, never read it.
She ripped up the book and the rabbit romped through it and out of it, and little traces of Liebniz's life and thought were spead around the art page. The rest of the book went in the recycling.
And, the thing is, if you want to know more aboout Liebniz you can just wiki him in thirty seconds.
Some minor updates - no more mice, Isis Fang was given some catnip versions to enourage her but she ignores those too. And today we had a 5.5 earthquake.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Of mice
By late autumn the mice have usually set up camp in our house. In the past they have been one of the Great Plagues of Linwood, that at times have included fleas, head lice, street racers and golf balls (yep!).
i have always had mixed views on the mice. i quite like them. They have collapsible skeletons and when they are born they are so transparent you can see the milk travel into their tiny stomachs. i have been known to catch one in an ice cream container and let it loose across the road - where it probably comes staight back in again. i put bait out some winters, and hope they don't eat it. The label says it's painless. i shut my eyes as i put it down and i say a little prayer for their small speedy souls.
My daughter has claimed that mice are employed by cats. When cats want to live in a certain house with certain people, they send mice. After a while the humans give in and decide to get a cat. The cats are monitoring the household for just this very moment. When the last person to be convinced (usually the man) says wearily, OK, we will get a damn cat if you insist, they scan the statement for sarcasm. Scanning....scanning....statement free of sarcasm! They mean it! They will get one of us! The cats and mice together cheer and high five each others' paws. The mice then move on... maybe to your house?
This year we had evidence of mice. Well, actually my husband opened the linen cupboard and there was a mouse bouncing around on the towels. We investigated. The mice had burrowed right into the towels and made nests in little cavities. While i washed our entire stock of linen my husband attempted to mouse proof the cupboard. Soon the air was blue with words as he hammered and sawed and banged. Blokey fixing things always requires Words.
Meanwhile, i had a word with Isis Fang.
i invoked the ancient covenant between cat and human. i told her about how her ancestors had come to live with humans, to protect their granaries and kitchens from vermin, in exchange for food and warmth and care. As a result, cats have conquered the world, from the North African sahel to the sub-Antarctic islands, there are cats. It's been a good deal for cats.
i also reminded her of her own past. How she came to us from the animal shelter, and how we had tolerated her ripping up the lino and spraying on visitors' trousers, and how we had looked afer her expensive and complicated medical conditions. How when we got her, we were told that she was a good mouser and that she was affectionate and how both have turned out to be untrue. Thus, she lied on her CV*, and we are unimpressed, but nevertheless and against our better judgment we have forgiven her.
The point being, i told Isis Fang, it is time for her to honour her end of the bargain.
This is Isis:**
A middle aged brindled tortoise shell moggy, very neat and small, plump, lies in from of the heater like a small Uluru on the outback of our carpet, and when she speaks it is with the voice of Renee Zellwegger in Bridget Jones' Diary.
She says, in her adorable Bridget Jones voice:
Your job is to feed me and my job is to eat. It can be hours before my bowl is filled. Hours! And so what if all the exercise I get is rolling away from the heater when it gets too warm? The heater should roll away from me at my command! I know you say I'm overweight but I consider myself to be merely plumptious. Uluru is sacred after all. And there is barely enough room on the bed for both of us. I never get to sit on the hot water bottle because you've got it, and of course I have to bite your feet to stop you pushing me off it. You make me jump through that idiotic cat door and you wait ages to let me back out again. Living with you guys is not easy. You are lucky I stay here at all. I am the amazing Isis Fang. I am like a chief executive. I don't get paid for what I do, I get paid for what I might do. Or in this case, I might not do.
She was unmoved. So we bought wood and plastic containers for linen and my husband will work on lining the cupboard, and we bought a supposedly painless mouse trap, and the winter is setting in nicely. I wonder why the cats are sending us more mice? Perhaps another cat wants to live with us? That would be our revenge on Isis Fang!
* Humans never do that.
**That was a weird sentence to type!
i have always had mixed views on the mice. i quite like them. They have collapsible skeletons and when they are born they are so transparent you can see the milk travel into their tiny stomachs. i have been known to catch one in an ice cream container and let it loose across the road - where it probably comes staight back in again. i put bait out some winters, and hope they don't eat it. The label says it's painless. i shut my eyes as i put it down and i say a little prayer for their small speedy souls.
My daughter has claimed that mice are employed by cats. When cats want to live in a certain house with certain people, they send mice. After a while the humans give in and decide to get a cat. The cats are monitoring the household for just this very moment. When the last person to be convinced (usually the man) says wearily, OK, we will get a damn cat if you insist, they scan the statement for sarcasm. Scanning....scanning....statement free of sarcasm! They mean it! They will get one of us! The cats and mice together cheer and high five each others' paws. The mice then move on... maybe to your house?
This year we had evidence of mice. Well, actually my husband opened the linen cupboard and there was a mouse bouncing around on the towels. We investigated. The mice had burrowed right into the towels and made nests in little cavities. While i washed our entire stock of linen my husband attempted to mouse proof the cupboard. Soon the air was blue with words as he hammered and sawed and banged. Blokey fixing things always requires Words.
Meanwhile, i had a word with Isis Fang.
i invoked the ancient covenant between cat and human. i told her about how her ancestors had come to live with humans, to protect their granaries and kitchens from vermin, in exchange for food and warmth and care. As a result, cats have conquered the world, from the North African sahel to the sub-Antarctic islands, there are cats. It's been a good deal for cats.
i also reminded her of her own past. How she came to us from the animal shelter, and how we had tolerated her ripping up the lino and spraying on visitors' trousers, and how we had looked afer her expensive and complicated medical conditions. How when we got her, we were told that she was a good mouser and that she was affectionate and how both have turned out to be untrue. Thus, she lied on her CV*, and we are unimpressed, but nevertheless and against our better judgment we have forgiven her.
The point being, i told Isis Fang, it is time for her to honour her end of the bargain.
This is Isis:**
A middle aged brindled tortoise shell moggy, very neat and small, plump, lies in from of the heater like a small Uluru on the outback of our carpet, and when she speaks it is with the voice of Renee Zellwegger in Bridget Jones' Diary.
She says, in her adorable Bridget Jones voice:
Your job is to feed me and my job is to eat. It can be hours before my bowl is filled. Hours! And so what if all the exercise I get is rolling away from the heater when it gets too warm? The heater should roll away from me at my command! I know you say I'm overweight but I consider myself to be merely plumptious. Uluru is sacred after all. And there is barely enough room on the bed for both of us. I never get to sit on the hot water bottle because you've got it, and of course I have to bite your feet to stop you pushing me off it. You make me jump through that idiotic cat door and you wait ages to let me back out again. Living with you guys is not easy. You are lucky I stay here at all. I am the amazing Isis Fang. I am like a chief executive. I don't get paid for what I do, I get paid for what I might do. Or in this case, I might not do.
She was unmoved. So we bought wood and plastic containers for linen and my husband will work on lining the cupboard, and we bought a supposedly painless mouse trap, and the winter is setting in nicely. I wonder why the cats are sending us more mice? Perhaps another cat wants to live with us? That would be our revenge on Isis Fang!
* Humans never do that.
**That was a weird sentence to type!
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Sacred Morgue's Last Gig - a RocknRoll Epiphany
If i ever made a short film it would be about Sacred Morgue's last gig. It would be in the loose documentary style fashionable in the 1990's, more Dazed and Confused than The Runaways. There would be no particular plot, just a series of linked experiences with some characters looking for some character development.
i was raised in a smallish town in New Zealand and Sacred Morgue was its only heavy metal band. Sacred Morge was its real name, and i would use it in the film because, well, you can't improve on it. So guys, if you ever read this, you know who you are.
Their lead guitarist was my only teenage crush. It's called a crush because that's how you feel - crushed. We did a summer job together, in a group of young people. Naturally i kept my poor bruised feelings to myself and naturally he began going out with a girl with silver blonde hair, translucent skin and huge violet eyes. She was also very sweet, and she did not know her Fender from her Stratocastor. i didn't have the heart to hate her.
Fast forward a bit and Sacred Morgue is breaking up, because the bass player is going to London to make his fortune in the new indie scene there. And he could do it too, because he is better than anyone i've ever heard. So they plan their last gig. By this time the lead guitarist and i are friends and i am living out of town, so my beating heart got stilled after a time. The guy i am going out with is a friend of the band, and they plan a rock art show they like of which the town has never seen. An only slightly naive tribute to Big Dumb Rock as it was back in the day.
The hired church hall had a small stage, with the band and my guy on it, and he sat in a chair wearing suit and reading a newspaper. Also on stage was Wendy the shop mannequin, whom i will name by her real name because she is dead. Wendy was an old skool porcelain mannequin with some hair left, and she had been nicked from the basement of the shop where one of the band members worked. She wore a guitar.
The night was the usual shambles when you are young and earnest and Almost Having Fun. i did a lot of that. Like the driving round in cars thing that today is called 'boy racing'. Back then they drove around streets that they named after the parts of women. i remember thinking, shit this, i could be killed at any minute and i'm still bored. Fun is the direst thing. So the Last Gig was Almost Fun. A male friend and i decided to dance in between the songs, dancing with no music. What we didn't know was the band was in between sets. We had fifteen minutes of recorded music and a deafening din of silence. On we danced. After fifteen minutes we were knackered and we had copped our share of abuse from drunken onlookers. My friend was called a homo and some idiot even kicked him in the mouth as he was sitting outside. At the time he didn't mind. He decided he had transcended pain. This was his own rocknroll epiphany, as we were on the night, characters in search of our own development, our own special night when Something Happens, and our lives will never be the same again.
But it shows that not much has changed. Gosh, we had homophobia back in the 70's! And for a small town guy, dancing without music was definitely a homosexual act, along with laughing when sober, talking to girls, having a party on a Friday night (instead of the good straight Saturday), and, uh, sodomy i guess.
Funny, i remember nothing about the music. But presumably there was some, and if i did make a film it would be great to write music for it. So finally Sacred Morgue reached its musical climax and performed its last song. And my guy on stage got up from his chair, folded up his newspaper, flung off rather a lot of his clothes and began to dance wildly in a manner beyond even homosexuality. He grabbed Wendy's guitar and mimed fabulous air guitar frenzy. Poor Wendy fell over into the band space and broke. My guy on stage smashed the guitar and some of the stage as well. It was a moment. You could say, Well, that happened. 'Cos it did.
And the bass player went to London and was back in six months and began playing in a vaguely new agey band called Moonglow or some bloody thing, and the lead guitarist got married and had a bunch of kids and went to work in the mines in Australia, and the singer, who did this amazing sub-Robert Plant thing, stayed in the town and ran a lot, and i don't know what happened to Wendy.
i was raised in a smallish town in New Zealand and Sacred Morgue was its only heavy metal band. Sacred Morge was its real name, and i would use it in the film because, well, you can't improve on it. So guys, if you ever read this, you know who you are.
Their lead guitarist was my only teenage crush. It's called a crush because that's how you feel - crushed. We did a summer job together, in a group of young people. Naturally i kept my poor bruised feelings to myself and naturally he began going out with a girl with silver blonde hair, translucent skin and huge violet eyes. She was also very sweet, and she did not know her Fender from her Stratocastor. i didn't have the heart to hate her.
Fast forward a bit and Sacred Morgue is breaking up, because the bass player is going to London to make his fortune in the new indie scene there. And he could do it too, because he is better than anyone i've ever heard. So they plan their last gig. By this time the lead guitarist and i are friends and i am living out of town, so my beating heart got stilled after a time. The guy i am going out with is a friend of the band, and they plan a rock art show they like of which the town has never seen. An only slightly naive tribute to Big Dumb Rock as it was back in the day.
The hired church hall had a small stage, with the band and my guy on it, and he sat in a chair wearing suit and reading a newspaper. Also on stage was Wendy the shop mannequin, whom i will name by her real name because she is dead. Wendy was an old skool porcelain mannequin with some hair left, and she had been nicked from the basement of the shop where one of the band members worked. She wore a guitar.
The night was the usual shambles when you are young and earnest and Almost Having Fun. i did a lot of that. Like the driving round in cars thing that today is called 'boy racing'. Back then they drove around streets that they named after the parts of women. i remember thinking, shit this, i could be killed at any minute and i'm still bored. Fun is the direst thing. So the Last Gig was Almost Fun. A male friend and i decided to dance in between the songs, dancing with no music. What we didn't know was the band was in between sets. We had fifteen minutes of recorded music and a deafening din of silence. On we danced. After fifteen minutes we were knackered and we had copped our share of abuse from drunken onlookers. My friend was called a homo and some idiot even kicked him in the mouth as he was sitting outside. At the time he didn't mind. He decided he had transcended pain. This was his own rocknroll epiphany, as we were on the night, characters in search of our own development, our own special night when Something Happens, and our lives will never be the same again.
But it shows that not much has changed. Gosh, we had homophobia back in the 70's! And for a small town guy, dancing without music was definitely a homosexual act, along with laughing when sober, talking to girls, having a party on a Friday night (instead of the good straight Saturday), and, uh, sodomy i guess.
Funny, i remember nothing about the music. But presumably there was some, and if i did make a film it would be great to write music for it. So finally Sacred Morgue reached its musical climax and performed its last song. And my guy on stage got up from his chair, folded up his newspaper, flung off rather a lot of his clothes and began to dance wildly in a manner beyond even homosexuality. He grabbed Wendy's guitar and mimed fabulous air guitar frenzy. Poor Wendy fell over into the band space and broke. My guy on stage smashed the guitar and some of the stage as well. It was a moment. You could say, Well, that happened. 'Cos it did.
And the bass player went to London and was back in six months and began playing in a vaguely new agey band called Moonglow or some bloody thing, and the lead guitarist got married and had a bunch of kids and went to work in the mines in Australia, and the singer, who did this amazing sub-Robert Plant thing, stayed in the town and ran a lot, and i don't know what happened to Wendy.
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