Saturday morning, January 2022. Life Goes On,

I woke from pleasant dreams of family past and friends in a sea side villa. It was good to wake to Madigan my dog beside me. I scooped him up to me and rough housed in the bed for a bit. He’s still a puppy at a year and a half and could do this all morning.  Play.

I’ve a day before.  It’s 7:30 am and dark outside. Low clouds and some fog.  Warm though. The arctic cold front has passed and we’re having some air flow from the tropics.  I listen to the weather and feel the changes reminiscent of my sailing solo days in the Pacific.  Now the weather isn’t life or death but speaks more to my comfort. Each morning I’ve enjoyed inhaling. That first deep breath of air that tastes of the weather and the near by forest.  I remember the smell of tropical landfall a day or more before i could see island mass in binoculars. The scent of life.

The TB meds I had to take for a year cost me so much of my sense of smell.  Now it may be coming back or it’s still just that capacity for musky smells, smoke and sense I retained when the floral scents were mostly lost.  Now I just enjoy that deep breath in the morning. It’s something I ‘remember” to do, like giving thanks to God.  This creation is his.  Perhaps some over self of my own .I’m a child god. Creation a family affair.  I don’t know. It’s the mystery I’ve explored all my life. Time to write books considering how many I’ve read.  

I still work.  It’s safe and known. I serve. What I do is useful in the day to day. It’s belittled by the powers that be.  Overseers and agents think little of the services I provide.   I feel the heavy weight ageism and the young Turks. Christophobia rules.  I speak the holy name many times daily.  

Now I’m preparing to go overseas again. Another adventure.  The risk and uncertainties imposed by Covid and politics and threat of war all make the experience more poignant. Like love in the time of cholera. Even now I nap some days on the couch after reading a history of Scotland or art of the Louvre, waking to check the military news to see if the chinese barbarians have invaded more territory together.  The cries of Tibet still sing round the world.  The enslavement of Hong Kong is reminiscent of the Japanese incursion.  Taiwan is like Gibraltar, a beacon of light in the darkness of Asia.  Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Singapore all watch with concern as the behemoth’s aetheist eyes turn on them , it’s gaping salivating mouth moving over the whole of the pacific as its head swings from side to side looking for weakness.  

Canada meanwhile is wearing bell bottoms. The PM’s mother was a stoner sexaholic hippy who raised her son without any knowledge of reality. This silly sock boy vacuous as drug addicts saying the ‘budget will balance itself’ while his friends enjoy the party and orgies at my expense. They call these food and wine and sex fests ‘climate change conferences’. All the private jets gather to produce more private jets. I miss when the celebrities created Canns and the politicians with taste for art joined them there.  Now the cartoon moguls attend these pseudoscientific talk fests and self congratulate their pompous selves.

I’m outside myself. There’s this core of love and piece, That divine within. The namaste me and this other.  The hurt and wounded and fearful.  Jesus commanded ‘Do not be afraid’. I create a new horror to tease my thoughts each day. One day it’s poverty, next its disease, then it’s dementia,. My back hurts with the psychosomatic work of carrying my self created burdens of the world.  Who made me sheriff. Get down off the cross we can use the wood.  My mind flits here and there seeking cause for self pity or self aggrandizement. This cellular computer so battered with Trojans and worms. 

I am a gift child.  

There is too much anger. There is still too much fear.

I meditate each day and go to that safe place within where God or the anonymous one meets me.  Like Adam touching God on the Cristine chapel ceiling, I raise my finger.  Energy.  The Big Bang.

There is growing light in the sky The stick fingers of trees reaching for the sky have separated from the earlier blobs of darkness,  With the effort to get up and come this far, even drink a coffee I’m tempted to lie down again

Madigan is searching his array of food containers for breakfast. I opened cans and he prefers to eat them a day later,  I am bunkered down with Covid and lockdowns and isolation and contentment in my Hobbit cave.  I would flow with creativity and complete any one of the half done books I’ve made inroads on  Yet the idea of lying down on the couch and hoping for some inspiration and energy to rise to the day.  I normally walk during the week this time. It’s a good way to begin but it’s Saturday and the darkness delayed me.Now I’d like to have a nap.  This is the way with age,  

I’m considering taking three ibuprofens or nsaids.  It stems the pains that interfere with upward flight. I’m grounded by my suffering,   My immortality is challenged by the body finally forcing me to listen. A nap calls,  It’s that or another Ethiopian expresso coffee to flogg the mind and body on through the day.  

I began an Aberdeen detective novel, I could write my own place in a local clime, Yet like the pizza I had from Me and Ed’s why bother when I can have one ready made or off the rack A story for the day.  

I could cry too,  She said she sobbed on her birthday.  I knew how she felt.  This war of work and life continues. When I look back I see the demeaning humiliating pompous pontificating leaders so full of themselves, so safe in their identification with the aggressors, so deeply afraid , pointing guns at our backs as they send us out into the abyss to keep the enemy from themselves our deaths a sacrifice for their hedonistic parasitic existence.  I am weary with fighting disease before me and these free loaders behind me.  

Jesus, the perfect man or God, was crucified by government and church,  What hope have I an imperfect private, not general high born, or billionaire or wiseman.  I am just a little guy.  It’s been a good run I thought so many times I’d fail or die and yet I’ve got back up and carried on so today I can blow my own horn and the beasts of the jungle know me.  I’ve survived dinosaurs.

Another cup of coffee and a hand full of anti infllamatories,  Joints that are flexible and move smoothly are better companions. It’s all about the lubricants.

Dawn is definitely upon us. The sky is white with overcast but I can hope for blue.  I will walk the dog soon. Perhaps after a nap or a wee lie down.  I could read the social media and be inspired by the young who climb the mountains and the old that dance.  The pictures of breakfast activities will be pouring in. There is so much hope in the group.  Faces of recovery. Old friends.  Wrinkles of laughter.  We look at each other through time and photographs. Digital spaces.  The dog has eaten a little caesar. I’m slave to his bowels. I fear he’ll get fed up with me not walking him outside somewhere. I hope he poops but more often than not it’s just an excursion for social dog communication of sex and aggression.  I’m fixated on ensuring faeces and urine remain outside. There are still accidents, rarely, but my own fault. Messages of, “i tried to hold it’.   You disrupted my schedule. He’s a creature of habit and today I’ve stopped the week day routine to wait for the light that is now upon us.  But a nap calls.