The Looking Glass

King Tut

He entombed himself and now sat beneath the air-conditioning unit, nothing could get at him now.

The morning jaunt to the shops to procure a tin of corned beef and a sugar free cola all but forgotten.

The a/c unit now cooling his heat jaundiced forearm gently, mercifully so.

He had been here almost a decade and suffered through many a forgettable summer and early autumn at complete mercy of the sun.

Now he had the power to restore his heat addled sanity at the depression of a button.

He’d probably have to sell a kidney to pay the electricity bill but it was worth it.

This he thought was how ‘normal’ people dealt with the heat.

They were talking about the disruption to the cricket on the radio and the players were lamenting the disruption to their livelihood.

Personally he thought sports players in general were recompensed too well for their efforts.

After all they just played games albeit at elite levels but still, all that money could probably feed the world.

A helicopter slowly passed over, probably Polair the Queensland Police helicopter on its daily patrol.

He did like Police people he thought they did a wonderful job keeping the peace,

Although he didn’t necessarily agree with some of the laws but that’s the trade off, some form of order or total lawlessness.

They were necessary.

He was cool now.

It is a Saturday in an Australian Autumn, late morning and by the time I finish this it will be past noon. Last I heard on the ABC News radio DAB+ channel there were one hundred and eighty four COVID-19 cases in Queensland.

I find generally that the radio is an indispensable aid during times of uncertainty like this and the message is instantaneously sent and received on AM-FM or if you can get it DAB+.

It’s pretty quiet around these parts and I’m home alone.

I used to play rugby union and rugby league (badly) during my younger years and I follow it occasionally on free to air television but I have yet to watch a match without any spectators as happened last night and the night before I think.

To explain the National Rugby League is playing televised matches at stadiums and sporting grounds without any spectators in the stands due to COVID-19,

I’m curious how the lack of an audience will change the dynamics of play and will get around to it at some point this weekend.

I don’t normally differentiate the days be it week day or weekend but it oddly feels like a Saturday, should play De La Soul’s ” A roller skating jam named Saturday” and Generation X get on down.

Is this the quiet before the storm?,

On one hand part of me is saying this could be the precursor to a modern day version of the Great Depression which followed the stock market crash in the United States in nineteen twenty nine and lasted worldwide until nineteen thirty nine, around about the beginning of the second world war.

During high school one of the required readings was John Steinbeck’s novel ‘Of Mice and Men’ which was set in the Great Depression and the other was an Australian play called ‘A Hard God’ written by Peter Kenna about an religious Irish Australian family and their struggles in nineteen forty six.

Both inspiring reading for young high school students at the time which unfortunately I barely read because I was too busy chasing chicks and uncontrolled substances.

Egg all over my face!

Beautiful Day

He went on to the balcony and sat down the chair closest to the air-conditioning unit.

It was he decided a beautiful day and he was on the way to being happy. Tiny white clouds in the distance of an azure blue sky.

Various birds in full throated offerings to the sun god in all his magnificence. This is probably why people move to Australia.

There was one downside to all this glorious abundance… The glare deflected by the dance of the sun, he’d better put on his glasses that tinted in the sunlight.

So this is what a happy person might feel at some point, not a chemical high but a subtle nuance of emotion, delicate.

It probably won’t last he knew but it’s nice to know it while he could.

It seems everyone is chasing a fantastic high but the reality is far more grounded,

That saying attributed to the Taliban came to mind, something like, –

“You may have the watches but we have the time.”

It’s true about a lot of things,

A lawnmower coughed to life in the distance.

Covid-19, Sanctuary

He just read in the Brisbane Times online edition that the country ie Australia was now in lock down meaning all international travel had ceased, he purposely hadn’t been watching the news on television preferring to read his news instead.

The main vexation was panic buying in the country and around the world and that’s what he’d been doing these past two days,

not necessarily panic buying as making sure he had enough emergency medication as the clinic had advised him to do so.

So he was all set to ride out doomsday for an extra month, sixty litres of potable water, saved from storm season and a portable butane stove with extra cartridges, sweet.

They did lack rice and meat as the hoarders had already ransacked the local supermarkets of anything essential from personal hygiene through to, oddly enough, table salt.

He did wonder if the whole world was suffering from an extreme case of anxiety, it was what insurers called “An act of God” this Covid 19 and it seemed more sensible to stay composed rather than being anxious .

You have to live but at the same time take sensible precautions he thought, he was deeply skeptical about the face mask thing, people just looked like fools wearing them as they weren’t the right ones.

What did cheer him though was that he was noticing more people in his immediate neighborhood, people staying home and using their houses for what they were intended for like actually living in and as a sanctuary.

It’s like that Frank Sinatra song,-“It’s nice to go traveling.”

Definition of a Life.

A particular set of circumstances may influence you but they do not define you as a person.

Too often I see people, myself included, settle for their allotted pigeon hole in society.

It’s comfortable, you know the material off by heart, you don’t have to do much.

You end up playing the stereotype, it’s been done before, you fit in and so do your friends.

Just another member of society trying to make it in this world and you live your life to those confines.

It’s sad but to have no purpose is worse, the grim reality of life these days.

Everywhere you look a caricature of what was a person,

some more exaggerated than the rest.

Stereotype after stereotype, day after day.

What did happen to honesty? Did it ever exist? Maybe it went the way of originality, chivalry and principles

Deemed archaic in this first world ‘feminist’, anti-social media, politically correct apocalypse.

L7 described it perfectly in their song ‘Pretend that we’re dead’ and remember “Just say no to individuality.”

COVID-19

There, I’ve said it! The elephant in the room.

I spoke to my General Practitioner (GP) yesterday about it and I asked if there was any advice he could give on it and he told me that pretty much everyone would get it in varying degrees.

He added that the government was hoping that a lot of people wouldn’t be infected at once as there was only two thousand Intensive Care Unit ( ICU) beds in the whole country.

Sobering.

Who knows, as we all type our blogs someone somewhere who is is infected with COVID – 19 will read what we have written at some point.

Not meaning to be a vulture but we should post more content as there will be more people staying at home to read them. Consider it to be your civic duty.

COVID – 19 Has resuscitated many a journalists career, there is wall to wall coverage on the news channels, almost lurid, COVID-19 From every conceivable angle

More scrutiny than Kim Kardashian’s posterior.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel!

And other exercises in futility..

My friends father used to say that to him, often times I will object to what someone has said or written.

Then clouded by emotion I respond in a verbose fashion and then when the clouds have cleared I realise that what they have said or written is true.

It is this emotional reaction that one has to be wary of, if one is not careful it can lead to negative actions and outcomes that one will regret.

‘Don’t Reinvent the Wheel!’

It has been invented, you will find that that is true about a lot of things and blogs as well.

I would say that most of what I have written in my blog posts has most probably been written before.

Back to the Wheel, I object to a lot of things and willingly allow myself to react emotionally. That is my weakness, who I am.

You too can make that error in judgement and I think we all should exercise care when it comes to emotional responses.

Well, the day beckons so I bid you all adieu, later..

Change

Human beings don’t change, they adapt or maladapt to changes in the environments in which they find themselves in just as neanderthals didn’t suddenly change into homo sapiens,

Rather it was an evolution over a significant amount of time.

Human beings don’t change, they evolve incrementally over time.

Some modify their behaviors quickly, others slowly according to the situation.

Some choose not to.

Life is Suffering, or is It!?

I, inspired by The Bipolar Writer feel I should say a few words about mental illness and people with several afflictions of such.

I’ve been around a lot of people with multiple diagnosis’s in hospital , clinics and daily life.

The first thing I just want to say to someone refusing to surrender is this, you are more than your diagnosis, be it a son or daughter, father or mother, grandpa or grandmother or just like any other person on on this tiny, lonely planet.

I also endure other manifestations of mental illness and the thing that I find most distressing about all of them is the deep regret.

I shouldn’t have done this, I should have done that, the guilt, remorse, constant rumination and self examinations.

One can quite easily spend a lot of time or lifetimes this way.

One of my favorite mantras from doing CBT with my psychologist is this re frame, ‘You could have’ and my addition is this ‘-but you didn’t’.

He also explained that it’s quite healthy to experience remorse for ones actions but not guilt.

He stated that guilt is a useless emotion it doesn’t do anything for who or what you are feeling it for and all it does is make you feel really awful and could go on for a lifetime if you are not careful.

It can also be used as a weapon against you and personally speaking I don’t really trust someone who is trying to make one feel guilt for direct or indirect consequence of a mental affliction,

‘You could have’,-‘but you didn’t’,

” Sometimes I go about pitying myself, as I am carried by the wind,across the sky” (Native American Chippewa Song).

In other words life goes on with or without you.

It’s not meant to be fatalistic but rather a realization that the world still turns, the sun still shines every day, the birds still sing every morning, people still go to work every day and night, the miracle of life goes on.

This I find is a reality check, the resilience of life on earth and other people, your family and you find that,once you start recovering, that in fact you are very grateful for even the most apparently insignificant of things like living a whole day, week and so on.

The thing I find is trying to come out of ones negative dialogue loop and start actually listening to, lets say your family, and once you start listening, even if its difficult, you start to empathize and more often than not realize that even the most ‘normal’ person in your life or lives has had trials and tribulations just like you.

I find a certain strength from knowing this its empowering and humbling knowing that the world doesn’t stop turning because of your diagnosis’s rather it’s waiting for you to be you.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Or the literal translation “Who will guard the guards themselves?” attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal in his Satires.

It was originally used in the context of female fidelity in a marriage but I prefer the literal translation.

I interpret it this way, who is guarding the guard when there are no guards around take for example a returned soldier or one on leave from a conflict past or present.

Who guards them from extremists from all sides?

What about a solitary guard in action, who is guarding him?

For me it highlights the Achilles heel of war and the answer I have come to is that society is supposed to be the guard who guards the guard alone.

War is not just for the elite without society playing a part in the instigation and prosecution of a conflict or war.

I hazard to say the United States military strategy of interconnected fire bases is fundamentally flawed.

I claim this because it doesn’t actively involve the society in whose country the war or conflict is occurring, or ‘hearts and minds’ as they call it.

They just appear, essentially attempt to industrially neutralize the ‘enemy’ and then leave.

So who guards them when they are not on base or return home?

That is the role of society in the conflict zone, at home and the Police, but what if even a quarter of society were against the conflict in the first place?

The returned guards must then try to blend back into society denying a part of themselves in the process.

I argue that wars will be and have been lost through the lack of information provided to societies and the lack of involvement of them in the decision making process and support roles.

Democracy ain’t pretty!