Anywhere But Here Is Better

Whatever will be

The little boy was very pleased with his bicycling prowess. He begged and begged his mom to come outside so he could show her his skills on his brand new purple two-wheeled rocketship that Bill had sent money for a couple of weeks ago. Mom sighed as she put down the dish cloth but patiently followed Jonny out the front door. "Watch me Mom! Watch me!" He jumped back on his bike that he had propped up by the fence and pedalled furiously out of sight around the corner of the quiet residential street. 

    Mom waited placidly, noting that Mary's bedroom curtains opposite were still closed, and it was past 10am. She also noticed an unusual car parked in front of Mary's, not the husband’s who usually drove off to work at 8 o’clock on the button.

Further thoughts of Mary and her regular morning visitors were driven away as Jonny reappeared around the other corner. As he sped past the front of the house, he gleefully shouted, "Look Mom! Look how fast I’m going!" And he was moving fast, faster maybe than was safe. But he seemed quite adept as he angled left and rounded the corner and cycled out of sight.

Mom glanced at the other houses to each side of Mary's. All looked normal and quiet, drapes neatly drawn back and cars gone from the short driveways. I'll need a better job soon, Mom thought. Two hours three times a week at the library was barely enough to buy peanut butter and jelly for Jonny's lunchbox. Couldn't assume Bill would keep sending money. Maybe they'd need to move to a cheaper area downtown.

Jonny's joyful exclamations brought her out of her reverie. "Look Mom, no feet!" And his feet were off the pedals as his momentum carried him swiftly around the corner again. Mom looked at her nails, which could do with a little attention. A couple were broken, and all badly needed a fresh coat of polish. Her eyes flicked back to Mary's bedroom and she wondered what might be happening behind the curtains. Her thoughts made her flush a tinge darker and she unconsciously bit down gently on her lower lip, glazed eyes fixed on the upstairs window opposite.

Suddenly, Jonny was back. He was even more elated. "Look Mom, no hands!" She was slightly more concerned as she followed Jonny's motion, his arms stretched out wide as he sped past the house, still pedalling without a care. She grimaced as he wobbled when he reached the corner, but her face relaxed a little as he grabbed at the handlebars just in time and turned left successfully.

Mary's curtains seemed to twitch, she was sure of it. But no amount of looking would open them. Mom's thoughts returned to Bill, who had left last year to find himself. And she hadn't had any physical contact since, not with anyone. Mom sighed, absently running her hands through her unbrushed dark hair. I must look a state she thought.

"Look Mom!" Jonny's shout brought her back to reality with a bang. "No hands and no feet!" Mom's liquid brown eyes followed his movement anxiously as Jonny made an X shape with his outstretched arms and legs. She gasped as the bicycle careered crazily towards the middle of the road and then lurched back again towards the sidewalk, but Jonny managed to regain control and she could hear his "wheeeee..!" as he disappeared around the corner in a blur.

Mom smiled for a moment, a shade nervously, then her musings turned to Jonny's future without a dad. I'll do my best, she thought. I don't know much about baseball and soccer, but I can learn and then I'll play with him. What else can I do? Her eyes alighted on the interesting old car parked opposite. Expensive, she thought. Wonder what he does.

 

   When Jonny didn't reappear as quickly as before, Mom got worried. She strode to the sidewalk and looked nervously up and down the roadway. Then she walked to the right, towards the corner where Jonny was expected to come around any minute. She hadn't gone ten feet when Jonny turned up, wheeling his bike on the sidewalk. Her relief turned quickly to alarm as she saw the red streaming down Jonny's chin, and she gave out an anguished cry when she also saw the rip on his trouser leg and a darkening gash over his knee.

"Oh Jonny what happened?" Mom knelt down in front of him, placing her hands on his shoulders as her eyes darted all over his face to see what was bleeding. He wasn't crying, please god he wasn't badly cut. And then Jonny grinned, almost in triumph it seemed. His gums were all red and for a moment it was hard to see any white. Her heart leapt like a tiger as her mind raced. Doctor, ambulance, hospital, dentist, Bill's anger...  catastrophe piled on catastrophe.

The boy was a picture of dignity and defiance, a little man determined not to admit defeat. "Look Mom," he blurted. "No teeth." For a moment, the world stopped as Mom stared into his face for an eternity of mere seconds. Then she saw the gaps where his two front teeth had been a month earlier. Then she pushed a finger into his mouth and exhaled with loud relief as she felt all the other teeth that should be there. And the sense of what Jonny had just said hit her like a brick, and she burst into a fit of laughter that had everything mixed in, jangling nerves, release, heartache, amusement and a mother's fierce pride.

Jonny grinned and grinned. He wasn’t in big trouble. Mom wasn’t yelling at him, she was laughing. He let her wipe his mouth and face with a tissue, he even let her wet the tissue with her tongue to clean off a dried bit of blood from the end of his nose. He calmly accepted Mom’s hand as she stood up and led him back to the house, her other hand hauling his bike for him before dropping it down on the small patch of rough grass near the front door.

“We better get Mister Bob to have a look at your mouth anyway, after I clean up your knee,” she said. “It sure is a good thing your grown-up teeth haven’t come down yet, or you’d look like this for life.” Mom peered down at her son, seeing that a bath was in order to get the dirt out of his ears and hair as well as his knee. As she closed the front door, her head was turned so she didn’t spot her neighbour Mary come down her driveway alongside a very well dressed woman, climb into the beautiful old car beside her and drive off together.

 

It's official - humanity goes full circle!

According to fossil records, the earliest living animal we can find is the sponge. I particularly like the idea that sponges are the most primitive living animals. Hold that thought just for now.

I've met Princeton University geologist Professor Adam Maloof and he is characteristically enthusiastic about the fossils his team found in Australia that date back 640-650 million years. This makes them about 90 million years older than the next oldest animal fossils discovered.

Alas, I am not a scientist - poor me had a torrid time not only with physics, chemistry and biology at school, but also with the esteemed teachers of these revered subjects. Another story for another time. However, who can fail to be mightily impressed with the enormous brainpower and stamina applied in the intensive search for knowledge about our origins. In my opinion, the best programmes on television are those on natural history, closely followed by astronomy. The abominations known as 'X-Factor' and 'The Apprentice' don't even make the Top 10,000.

I was thinking about all this as I scanned the news services these past days. Like all of us trying to clutch order from the straws of chaos, I was wondering whether there was any common denominator that might go some way towards explaining the terrible woes being reported - pointless slaying of innocent children (France and Afghanistan), militarised oppression of dissatisfied civilians (Syria and USA), bandit behaviour by thuggish numbskulls (Somalia and Zimbabwe), tax cuts for the super-rich (UK) and continued decimation of citizens' standard of living through legalised theft by bankers and their government stooges (worldwide). To name just a few woes.

And then it hit me like... a wet one.

Animalia, Parazoa, Phylum Porifera 

 

Sponge, yes! These perpetrators are all sponges on society! A little further research brings forth this consensus definition.

 

Sponge (noun) - a leech or parasite who hangs around a host, without benefit to the host, in hope of gain or advantage

 

Now, who dares disagree with the scientists? Sponges certainly are the most primitive living animals, and I've realised that in an extraordinary rendition of a fully circular argument, they still are in 2012. With the emphasis on "primitive" and "animal".

 

Astonishing similarities

 

If only all human brains, not just some, could be harnessed in the service of the common good, where it finally gets through the skulls of the primitive specimens who claim to lead us that what serves others serves ourselves. I will be as nauseated as a TV host if I hear another politician claim they are prepared to make an ever so big personal sacrifice for the sake of public service - and then continue to green light the evil primeval beanfest currently underway that robs from the poor and hands over everything to the grasping already rich.

 

 

Once upon a thyme, said the sage

Everyone's a writer, even if they are merely able to scratch an 'X' at the bottom of a pre-filled application form for a teaching job. Maybe I should rephrase this. Everyone thinks they're a writer. At least that's my observation, after working in marketing communications for several aeons.

No matter how carefully and sapiently I craft my words to produce the desired effect - normally to encourage the reader to take some kind of action - the "client" who ultimately foots the bill for my labour almost always starts messing around with that vicious red pen.

 

Take that, damn copywriter

 

I wouldn't mind if they improved on my words. I'm no prima donna, not when there are plenty of prima donnas around already. I will even go on record about this. There is no room on dry land for any more prima donnas!

If a paying client has a better idea how to motivate people to buy, to visit, to learn or to undertake any other licit action, I'm all ears. The problem is, ninety nine point nine nine recurring per cent of the time, the request for amendments comes with nonsensical changes. I wish I had kept a list of all the inanities I've experienced over the years. One I do remember was from a rotund Chief Executive of a large corporation, who flatly refused to have any italics used for emphasis in his corporate literature. Sit down and I'll reveal why. "We won the war!" he stressed. Then he gurgled, "I don't want to see anything Italian."

I'm not often stunned, but I think several gnats took the opportunity to investigate my gaping oral cavern.

Another time, after I had as usual exhaustively checked my entire draft for appropriate grammar and perfect punctuation, I received the document back with handwritten scrawls requiring me to insert erroneous apostrophes. Now, we all know about Apostrophe Catastrophe. There is an entire ward in state psychiatric units reserved for foaming-at-the-mouth Defenders of God's Language, who are finally pushed over the edge when they witness a single rogue punctuation mark in The Times newspaper - or the absence of one.

In this instance, I politely and gently responded to the client that my use of punctuation was correct, expecting peace to break out again in my heart. I was sadly mistaken. The client forcefully replied that she was right, it was what she was taught at school, and there was to be no further discussion. At this stage, having arrived at a barrier entitled 'Ignoramus In Charge', further adorned by a sign declaring 'I Am Right Because I Pay The Bill', I baled out of the project, sent across my invoice and washed my hands and my mind of this matter.

 

Steady

 

Visual artists and photographers have an easier time of it, surely. Can you imagine a painter who is told that his almost-dry canvas is lovely, but could he look again at the shade of blue he's used for the sky. Oh and please add a few more boats to the harbour, because it looks kind of lonely over there.

I thought that my escape route was to become my own client, gravitating away from business communication into "real writing" and with luck, getting published. Another silly misconception on my part. Apparently what I write isn't interesting because it isn't commercial, the definition of commercial being whatever is considered by the dull-witted to be the flavour of the day. Not being an addled celebrity with an unwarranted massive ego to flaunt, I have as much chance of seeing my works in print (or kindlised) as "Tony Blair's people" not telling us how wonderful his existence is for the world.

Not long ago, after experiencing another surge of enthusiasm for communicating ideas and enjoying life while doing so, I completed a film script with my co-writing partner. It took one whole year to finalise. We used the right formatting, we triple-checked the 180 pages of scene setting and dialogue. We did the research about how to get the script "out there", we learned how to sidle up to the right agents and production companies in the right way. We printed out and posted paper versions, we emailed digital files, as per the requirements of the recipients.

We are not naive. We know that a story that centres on the search for meaning, navigating mid-life issues, adventure, heartache, comic moments, friendship, sex and life affirmation, is not the standard (yawn) action movie glorifying violence and celebrating death and destruction. So it's already pushing water uphill for us to approach producers and agents who have as limited an attention span as the Playstation generation making up the audience for mind-numbing blood-and-guts fare.

If I see another piece of footage showing famous actors miraculously escaping death by jumping towards the camera in front of a huge explosion, I shall… I shall… I shall probably raise my voice.

Then again, The Artist and The Descendants have made it into films this past year. So maybe it wouldn't be an utter miracle to have our script accepted and eventually churned into a movie. All we're asking is for someone somewhere with some clout to read the script and tell us if it has legs. So far, silence. Not even the courtesy of a rejection. Ho hum, as Kurt Vonnegut would put it.

I guess I ought to keep my day job, or rather my freelance writing gig. As I gaze out the window on England's finest grey cloudscape, I am grateful for small mercies. I can write. I mean, I can really write. In complete sentences. With italics and all.

News media alert: Warning! Warning!

Listen up all of you responsible for news broadcasts. Some words of warning are required. I have it on good advice, following a recent brief encounter of universal proportions. Let me elaborate.

The alien was three-headed, although he* did explain that two of those heads were redundant. I made the mistake of quipping about this, referring to the current economic slump across the cosmos, but this went in one ear and out the five others. All three faces remained equally stony. Thereafter ensued a rather awkward five minute lecture on the Biophysical Mechanical requirement for redundancy systems in advanced species. I successfully concealed nearly all my puzzlement and my oxygen-seeking yawns.

 

Take me! Take me!

 

The reason I’m telling you this by way of preamble is because the umm... this odd being appeared to enunciate good English. Without his impressive linguistic talent, gained who knows how, you would be excused for thinking I’ve simply invented what follows. I wouldn’t like you to think I was making all this up, because he asked me a very important question. This is a question we all need to ask ourselves at this juncture in human history, and it’s no particular surprise that my encounter has coincided with an interesting date in humanity’s diary. 2012.

 

Question: “Are you able to categorise the key aspects of life on this planet in terms of both positive and negative?”

 

This was clearly not a question that could be properly addressed at the drop of a hat, or three. I mean, I could have answered Yes or No and left it at that, but I surmised that his enquiry required more than the cursory response I ordinarily reserve for strangers accosting me in the street.

By the steely look on his sole functioning visage, he obviously wanted me to start listing the Good and the Bad about our world. So I obliged, all the while wondering why he would select me for this exercise, when there were far cleverer people in the university city just a few miles down the road. I soon realised, however, that I was possibly the first human he had come upon so far, and he was assuming I was of sufficiently basic intelligence to commence an interspecial interaction.

My mental processing powers being what they are, I knew I’d need to find something to write on, where I could draw up two separate columns in which to record my opinions of what was Right and what was Wrong about life on earth. So I invited him through my garden gate and we seated ourselves on the two seaside-style deckchairs I keep stored in the shed for occasional use when the clouds part enough in Britain’s latitudes to permit the sun to emit a little warmth upon exposed skin. And from the hook on the back of the shed door I seized last year’s gardening calendar sporting a melee of nearly-nude lovelies from the South-East Wessex fire and rescue service, on the reverse of which I found a reasonably sized blank canvas for my scribblings.

 

Nice setting for an existential chat

   I was temporarily distracted by the way he furled and twirled his three lower limbs into a kind of cushion to support what I suspected was his posterior. But ever the considerate host, I averted my eyes as quickly as was polite and focused on the writing surface before me. I was just about to jot something down using the pencil stub attached by string to the ring-bound calendar when I realised that I hadn’t even offered my guest a drink. My hospitality was met with silence, however, his main face remaining as inscrutable as his other two. I mentally filed the proposition that recently brewed liquid refreshment may not be all it’s cracked up to be in the Anglofied regions of the multiverse.

So this is what I thought of first. Birds. It may have been because one particularly plump specimen was perched on a telephone wire almost above my visitor’s heads, and I silently prayed that now was not the time to be dropping off a small wet chalky-white present.

He asked me to verbalise what I was writing, and I almost said Avian Creatures in an attempt to sound scholarly, but I decided just to keep it simple. “Birds,” I said. “Everyone likes birds, so I’d say they were positive things.”

He intimated that he understood, and waited for me to continue my listing. In a jumbled outpouring of random items, I offered United Nations, classical music, medicine, love, chocolate fudge cake, rainforests, painting, scientific discovery, children laughing, ocean sunsets and Nelson Mandela. I was stupefied for a moment when he asked in which column I was putting them. “Positive!” I positively gushed. Whether he nodded or it was just my imagination, I’ll never know. I let my eyes rest on the words I had added to the right-hand column, as if to verify that they indeed all belonged among the positives.

“Pollution is bad, and so is war,” I then blurted. “Global warming, murders, racial hatred... (I looked up for an instant to consider the exact hue of his translucent metallic outer membrane) ...nuclear bombs, torture, government corruption, terrorism, street violence, stealing...” I paused for breath, and ruminated some more as I transferred these concepts from brain to cardboard surface. I could feel his gaze on me, unblinking. I can’t now recall if he actually had such things as eyelids. And what was his actual eye colour? I just don’t know. I’d make a useless witness at an identity parade.

“We have people who are considered especially beautiful, so I think I could add them to the positives.” Even as I said this, I realised the folly of my statement. One man’s lust is another man’s disinterest, so I stopped spelling out “B-E-Y-O-N...” and neatly crossed her out. It wasn’t so easy to stop thinking of this luscious peach. But then she did play a part by inspiring me to inscribe in her place tropical fruit.

Then I thought about religion, and I hesitated, hand poised in midair. I contemplated all the wars ostensibly fought because of people’s clashing faiths. I also considered that it wasn’t actually religion but power-obsessed religious institutions that usually caused the bloody conflicts, or 'God' was used as a convenient smokescreen by despots, psychopaths, control freaks and similar hoodwinkers. In the end, I wrote down religion in both columns.

 

By God I'm in the right

 

Some other ideas popped into consciousness, so I pencilled in diamonds, marriage, grilled prawns, money, investment bankers, born-again fundamentalists, free speech, wild horses, injustice, literature, tsunamis, farming, reality TV, millionaire footballers, education, sculpture, media owners and bedbugs in the appropriate columns. You can doubtless guess which went in each. I carefully double-circled investment bankers for emphasis.

When I looked up again, all three heads seemed asleep. I was therefore quite startled when triplicated pairs of orbs abruptly glowed in their sockets like fiery red suns, and my special out-of-this-world guest made to extricate himself from our own world’s silliest chair design. Especially for incumbents with three legs.

I didn’t dare assist him - physical touch seemed out of the question - although I felt a negligent host. But soon enough he was on his... feet, and towering over me again.

“Many gratitudes for your contributed data,” he single-mouthed, now sounding a little off-beam with his syntax. I tried to say you’re welcome, but my voice came out weedy and feeble. He said a few more things to me which I’ll come to in a moment. I didn’t immediately know how to respond, so as to conclude our dealings on a good note. Basically, I wasn’t the best advertisement for our species.

When he stopped all speech and his stubby upper limbs stilled completely, I wasn’t sure what to do next, usher him to the gate or run inside and tell my girlfriend I’d just been granted my life’s wish to meet Mork**. He took the decision out of my hands by bounding over the gate and away into the far distance at a rate of considerable kph.

I don’t know how long I stood there, watching where he had gone. My girlfriend tells me she found me in the kitchen, away with the fairies while I intently scrubbed and scrubbed a frying-pan that I had badly burnt cooking pancakes the previous day.

My alien tête-à-têtes now seems just a blur. An almost dreamlike quality. But what I remember clear as a gong is the final part of our conversation, before he tripodded off to parts unknown. “We come here with preparation for your biological cleansing (I gave a little shudder at this phrase) after monitoring of your planetary auditory and visual broadcast. Conversely it is presently evident that it is not comprehensively negative on your world. You are sapient six-hundred-fifty-two we survey and you are in conformance with common findings. We record there is probability of positive outcome in addition to negative. In accordance we will return in one (what sounded like) dy-ah-kwark for supplementary examination.”

I could have pressed him about what would happen to us humans if the positives were ultimately swamped by all the negatives, but I didn’t really want to know the answer. What I did want to do is start hollering at all the media broadcasters around the world who dish out that constant diet of overwhelmingly negative “news”, as if there’s no tomorrow. No tomorrow indeed. If they keep up the usual pattern of these doom-laden outward bound transmissions, they’ll do more than generate increasing levels of depression among us earthly inhabitants. We could be marked out for deletion by evolved species who wish to retain an orderly universe and have the means and the will to fix us for good.

* Gender issues seemed to be of lesser importance to my alien acquaintance. While I presumed he was male, as judged from the timbre of his voice and the manner in which he stood erect on his tripedal appendages, he did tell me something about the way his kind reproduced and this gave me much food for thought on whether he was in fact more accurately a she. With any luck, I will go on to publish a whole new galactic edition of the Kama Sutra.

** Or Robin Williams.

Down in the dumps? Here's a cheap cure!

It's a truism that life is full of ups and downs, and it's hard to imagine that anyone could possibly get through an entire lifetime without feeling the blues sometimes.

 

'Depression' is the catch-all term used when people describe the state of being that is characterised by low spirits - which may include loss of interest in living, low self-esteem, guilty feelings, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite, lethargy and dulled concentration.

According to the World Health Organisation, depression affects around 121 million people worldwide (presumably they mean 121 million at any one time). They also report that fewer than 25% of those affected have access to effective treatments. These two facts are surely astounding.

As a perennial student of all things philosophic, I have a fair interest in the nature of this elusive thing called 'happiness'. By gosh, we could have a year-long debate simply on the key differences between happiness and contentment. So permit me to proffer a new remedy for those of us (i.e. all of us) who drop into that bottomless abyss every so often and writhe all alone in the dark for a time.

This is a new remedy that I discovered quite by chance. In my experience, it actually works - and here's the wonderful part. It doesn't involve prescription tablets, illicit drugs, alcohol, cognitive behaviour therapy, psychiatric counselling, hypnosis, chanting, funny farm retreats, ashrams, electric shocks, brain surgery or even falling in love (the latter is reserved for the Very Lucky in this world). Not least, it's quite inexpensive as remedies go. Less than £10 ($15) for the whole treatment - or even 100% free depending on your access to a public service that is rapidly losing government support.

It's time to give the game away.

 

Masterwork

 

I recommend you get hold of a copy of this 650-page masterpiece, at a library if you want to try before you buy. I'm fairly confident that buy it you will, if this book has anything like the reaction inside your soul that it had in mine.

Don't be put off by the "650 pages" thing. All you need to do is read a few pages, once in a full blue moon or every night at bedtime or at any odd moment of the day or night. It really doesn't matter how much you read or how often, but starting from the beginning is best in my opinion. You'll know why after you open the cover.

Before you get wondering, I can tell you that I have no connection with the brilliant writer who is Bill Bryson, I have no commercial interest in his or anyone else's book sales, and I am receiving no financial benefit from recommending this remedy for when we're feeling out of sorts. I'm writing about it because I have not been the same person since I first started reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I feel like a never-say-die goldminer who has finally stumbled upon a vein of ore so pure and deep, there's enough for everyone on earth to get rich and have fun.

I don't want to give too much more away. I well remember rushing excitedly to my sister about Santana's new album called 'Caravanserai' that had blown my mind, and still does. She, a music aficianado, brushed it off with some disdain, describing it as "too spacey" for her liking. So I won't attempt to tell you how to react to Bill Bryson's words. I'll just say that I am in awe of the things he writes about, and every time I read some more, my awe grows.

The thing is, the awe is the cure. It's all around us and Bill's genius is to point it out to us, simply. This is the kind of Bill I like. Beats the one-per-month-forever one from the inscrutable shrink.

It's International Women's Day, did you know?

March 8 every year is International Women's Day but isn't it strange that nothing much is made of this in the UK and USA? In some countries, it's a fixed national holiday. Women of all ages are given gifts and made to feel special, which I'm guessing makes a change. But where I am, there's barely a mention. Instead, the usual fare of death and desolation on the news. Hmmm...

 

"Give us a W, an O..."

 

Not far from here, Suffragettes campaigned and died for women's right to vote. The first women's day was marked 101 years ago.  A million things have happened since, on the road towards equality. It's nonsensical that anyone would not want women to contribute fully to the betterment of our world.

If there were only males stomping the planet, even if we could somehow reproduce without female assistance, I'm fairly sure there'd be no one left within a few years. We're pretty poor at settling disputes without the use of fists, or worse. When good guys like Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr come along every so often, we tend to generate their early departure - and ignore their sapience.

We ought to mark March 8 better. And be nice to each other all the other days too.

ARREST JOSEPH KONY!

Watch the video and decide yourself what should be done about Joseph Kony, already indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

 

Arrest him before other children's lives are destroyed

 

♫ I got dem old PSA blues ♪

Some time ago I got to the age where it’s extremely annoying to get twinges and creaks and strains that hint at a future life lesser lived.

Let me explain a little something. I’m Captain Sensible regarding my health. I’ve been relatively prudent about my diet since I was an Afro-hairy teenager, resulting in a relatively flat stomach for my years of earthly passage. I’ve never smoked cigarettes, to the sadness and disappointment of tobacco companies that to this day have got away with mass murder verging on deliberate genocide. I only dabbled with that pathetic weed a couple of times and I’ve never wanted to again, let alone swallow some suspect back-street chemical concoction. I’ve been very moderate with the booze, never drinking every day and rarely falling off my perch with intoxication. Not necessarily by choice, I’ve had a mere handful of sexual partners, who sure were enough of a handful. Most importantly in my book, I’ve avoided doctors like… the plague. That means I’ve hardly ever played ball with the fiendish global pharmaceutical companies and their master plan to get us all hooked for “life” on their expensive drugs misleadingly claimed as “clinically proven”– their wish being that we are never well enough to come off their highly profitable tablets, but never dead enough to result in a costly class action law suit.

So excuse me for a moment while I moan that I am extremely annoyed to be currently under investigation for a dysfunction of that little thing lurking and shirking near the male bladder called the prostate.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in…  Ok, now I shall continue. (Stop reading now if you’re turned off by medical krappola, or even more so if you’re bored already.)

 

Enough said

 

A big part of the rigmarole attached to this medical investigation is that I must have my blood tested. I must attend the Department of Phlebotomy at the local hospital. (Try practising saying that without spitting on the mirror.) Au hôpital, after some joyous queuing-up based on an early morning scramble for a black number printed on a white plastic card, they take the blood with all the glee of a vampiress just awoken from her succulent slumbers by the cathedral bells tolling midnight. The blood is then sent off to an Orwellian sounding place called the PathLab. Here, they do some kind of magical analysis where they endeavour to ascertain the level of Prostate Specific Antigen riding the waves in your red stuff. The results are sent to your Mister Consultant, whose airless waiting room you are cordially invited to frequent some weeks after your blood test, wherein there is eventually a hushed tête-à-tête entailing a discussion of the Now and the Then, specific to the stage you’ve reached in the whole process.

The first couple of times I had said tests, having been warned about nothing in particular, I just strolled along with no particular planning or preparation. Then I read online that the test result can be skewed by: [a] food ingested before the test, especially sugary things; [b] orgasmic activity that enlists the assistance of Private First Class Prostate; and [c] riding a bicycle that similarly exercises this gland. (Any male cyclist knows what I’m talking about.)

I asked the doc about this and he said, yes, best leave off said activities prior to the blood test. Yet he didn’t seem at all perturbed about the effects of such activities on the test results he had already assessed, on the basis of which he decided to keep my case under observation. That’s another story, filed under “Doctors know a lot less than we think about most conditions, even if they know a lot more than we do.”

Incidentally, another story is yet another “fact” I dug up, namely that the PSA test is so unreliable, some doctors in the world are no longer taking it seriously. My consultant however believes it’s the best indicator we’ve got, and he would happily proceed to performing a biopsy if I’d rather know something more precise. After hearing what the biopsy entails (needles, scrapes and such-like incursions), I said I’d rather not unless he insists. He said, no, it’s not essential at this point. We talked some more about the possibilities laying in wait ahead. And I’ll tell you now what hit me like a tidal wave constructed of the finest titanium.

The worst words he said to me weren’t that the PSA test can be an early forewarning of the Big C. I’ve long understood that if we live long enough, cancer is a real possibility for all of us at some point. When we homo sapiens used to die by the age of 40, perhaps fighting the poor misunderstood Neanderthals, we often didn’t have enough time alive to develop a whole host of diseases now prevalent in our “healthier” era. In any case, I’m not scared of dying. Living is preoccupying enough for me.

Life sure has changed

 

The worst words he said to me weren’t that ALL the various treatments for the prostate can result in sexual dysfunction – even the exploratory perusal of the gland can mess things up for still-red-blooded males – horrific though that prospect is*.

No, the worst words that I watched slowly snake their way out from the esteemed doc’s mouth along with his peppermint breath were as follows. “You are young to be under consideration for this condition.”

I don’t remember what he said next. I was too busy trying to find my heart, which had fallen somewhere subterranean and dark without waiting for permission.

When I came to, luckily before I fully exited the munificently over-priced hospital car park, I started to rumble deep in my gut. Re-read the second paragraph for a summary of my furious tumbling thoughts as I steered the car towards the place I called home for the moment. It wasn’t so much “Why me, God?!” as “Why was I so [deleted] sensible all those [deleted] years, for all the [deleted] good it did me!”

Well, time has passed, though I haven’t. I’m still here. (No thanks to BBC Breakfast News, which is seriously trying to send me to an early urn.) Relatively speaking, things have settled down. My tests results are stable, albeit higher than “normal”. Of course, at some time in the future, I’d dearly love to find out what exactly is normal on this rock of coalesced cosmic dust, but I’ll pass for now. For the present – a nice Buddhist expression – I’m told I need to have regular tests, to stay alert for any alarm bells as indicated by the state of my blood.

And so to today’s (mis)adventure. I’ve just returned from my six-monthly jaunt to the Phlebotomists’ Parlour. I turned up an hour before kick-off, so as to obtain a low number in the line-up of old duffers plus “young me” waiting to be pricked by the lady in white clutching the needle and the vial. I actually acquired Number 2 without a fight. I waited diligently for Number 2 to be called out, pacing the hospital grounds in near-zero air for as long as possible so as not to completely share everyone else’s lively bacteria in the misty waiting room. When summoned, I entered the prick-room with a jaunty step, pulled off my jacket, peeled off my sweater and rolled up my sleeve like a very good boy. The exchange of pleasantries with Madam Venal ended abruptly when she said she couldn’t find my sheet. This sheet tells her what type of blood test to undertake. No sheet, no test.

This is the sheet that the consultant’s secretary told me by phone days earlier that she was leaving with Phlebotomy prior to my attendance. Much lifting of lids and delving into boxes did not elicit my sheet, so I was politely requested to vacate the premises. Thereupon I reassembled my attire and egressed through the waiting room, avoiding the urgent pleading looks of those still awaiting their moment of vein-glory.

On returning to my place of abode, before embarking on my real business of the day, I telephoned the doc’s sec to enquire whither my sheet. She was furious with “them”, saying she HAD left the sheet and “they” should never have sent me away without doing the test. I therefore agreed to return to the den of hospitality.

Everything then went swimmingly. I had my blood duly sucked out and I was out of there as fast as my legs could find the car again.

As I write these words and think about blood and PSA and prostate and crazy world, I am at least grateful for one small mercy. Just imagine if I had enacted Morning Plan B after returning the first time after my aborted test. I can’t think what a hearty breakfast, sex and a bike ride would have done to my test results.

 

* I was aghast, flabbergasted and gobsmacked – almost prostrate – to hear a 25 year old woman, phoning in to a radio programme discussing side effects of prostate problems, asking why was there such a fuss about men aged 45+ losing sexual function. Surely, she posited, they’ve finished with sex by this age! I fervently wish she chokes on her porridge when she attains the grand age of 45 and her partner takes her up on her astonishingly brainy suggestion.

Thanks for everything all ye psychopaths of greed

On learning the desolate news that reporter Marie Colvin and photographer Remi Ochlik have been killed in a Syrian army ethnic cleansing operation in the city of Homs, a bombardment of civilians which also injured a number of other journalists who had to be clandestinely rescued, our concern must extend to the thousands of uncelebrated Syrians who have also died or been maimed in this latest scourge of bestial violence that demeans our species.

I am thoroughly ashamed to apparently “belong” to the same genetic lineage as the psychopathic thugs who “run” the world so pathetically badly, from brutal dictators including Assad and Mugabe to bloodsucking warmongers such as Dick Cheney and Tony B Liar right through to those more sophisticated though equally cold-blooded highway robbing banksters (attribution Max Keiser at: rt.com/programs/keiser-report) who are persistently fleecing the vast majority of human inhabitants of this planet.

Humanity's finest hour

Although I am 100% certain that each and every one of these humanity-lacking beings will receive their just desserts one way or another – I estimate sooner rather than later – I find I cannot sit on my hands. I need to use them. As an abhorrer of violence, except in the act of true self-defence or the protection of children under immediate threat, I have no truck with those who think the solution to tyranny is wide-angled violent response, harming innocent bystanders. If we can’t nullify the orchestrators of despotism, there’s no justice in hitting out at the second oboe player sitting near the timpanist, humans who are just going about their business and trying to scratch a living.

So I will use my hands on this keyboard to bear witness to the disastrous way of life we have created in this neck of the universe. Someone way off in the future – perchance a descendant of homo sapiens sapiens who happens to survive the coming crunch-point – may be able to access these words via some form of data reconstruction (perhaps after electricity has been restored). If there are still such people as historians, they will no doubt puzzle over why we slept-walked into near oblivion, when the writing was so very large and clear on the wall.

The culprit is GREED. The certifiably insane urge to seize and hoard ever more resources, way beyond that which are required to live in splendour for a lifetime, is the one common denominator uniting genocidal tyrant-butchers, Federal Reserve board members, investment banking market manipulators and sundry other money-fixated psychopaths.

I recognised this greed-lust motivation in discovering that the Bush family – the one that brought us not one but two nutbar US presidents – were busy buying up water rights in South America. It’s already clear that fresh water will be the next flashpoint for conflict, as oil begins to ebb and lose its lustre as the barter weapon of choice for the power wielders.

Ever vigilant for another way to squeeze the poor so as to fraudulently enrich themselves and their half-wit progeny, “investors” will go to any lengths to succeed in their dark plans. Including conjuring up “enemies” out of thin air, provoking the capitalist-military-industrial cabal otherwise known as the “government” to incite wars that enable precious natural resources to be seized at general taxpayers’ expense, and then divided up among the super-rich string-pullers with no faces.

 

Get yer karma here

 

What they don’t appear to understand is the karma-like Newtonian law that governs far more than the physical world. What they are doing with their colossal greed is building up an equal and opposite reaction among the rapidly growing number of have-nots. There aren’t enough police or private security personnel in the world to hold back the waves of reactors who are right now beginning to swell and foam and surge into a tsunami that will wipe the merchants of greed off the face of the globe. Especially when even the police are being rationalised and impoverished via the austerity cuts implemented with breathtakingly idiotic short-sightedness by the very governments that shelter the puppet-masters of the universe.

With Greece already squeezed to a pip and annexed by anti-democratic forces loyal to the greed-meisters, using the bogus superstructure of the International Monetary Fund inter alia, other nations are now being singled out for “special treatment” that will increase the ranks of the poverty-stricken by millions at a time.

All because enough is never enough for the psychopaths of greed.

There are enough resources on planet earth to feed everyone, shelter everyone and give everyone the prospect of reasonable reward for effort and contribution to the global society. But no. We are instead earmarked for failure as a species because we have allowed the psychopathic few to reign supreme over the innocent many, for too many generations.