Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 2

Chem trails

I don’t really know what they are (that’s how apathetic I am). Planes spraying mind-altering, or climate-altering, stuff into the air for nefarious purposes, I gather. My disbelief in them is based pretty much solely on my trusting disposition and the fact that I think the world’s rulers are too thick to implement a proper conspiracy. But I could be wrong.

According to the guy who installed my sprinkler system (and did an excellent job!) it’s all true. He’d rather believe that the deep state burnt half of Hawaii down with some kind of energy weapon, in order to inflate land prices, than that climate change and a hot summer did the trick. In fact, he doesn’t believe in climate change. It was hotter, he says, in the fifteenth century (or something).

Why do we believe what we believe? I mean, I believe in climate change because most relevant experts seem to agree on it – but I don’t go and look up the weather charts myself or, as the conspiracists put it, ‘do my own research’. I haven’t looked into the detailed evidence for the use of road-melting energy weapons. I’m lazy. But he isn’t – he looks! He finds! Which makes me wonder if maybe sometimes it’s better to be apathetic, much as people bag it.

What is it that drives some people to look for a reason BEHIND the reason? The REAL truth? Maybe the same impulse that motivates me to wonder if there really is a meaning to life, and motivates millions of people to wonder if – appearances to the contrary – God really is organising things for the best – motivates Fred (as I’ll call him) to scour the internet for the secret scat of the World Economic Forum. If we didn’t have that drive, maybe we’d never have had Watergate, and Erin Brockovich.

Maybe we should love our conspiracy theorists!

Philosophers are totes boring

How come people whose sole job it is to think deeply about stuff are absolutely incapable of expressing themselves properly? Is there some kind of hidden connection between philosophical genius and literary retardation?

I mean, philosophy’s not boring. I’ve recently established a philosophical discussion group in my neck of the (almost literally) woods, and only now – after the first two sessions – am I thinking, well, what exactly is philosophy? Technically, the love of wisdom, which can be anything, right? Any subject, if you think hard enough about it, will make you wiser.

So this week we’re talking about pop culture, and in particular reality TV. Most of my middle class friends only admit (reluctantly and blushing) to watching Master Chef. Maybe Alone. It would be a severe blow to your status to confess to liking Married at First Sight or Cops. Proceeding on the principle that philosophy is anything that philosophers have aired a view about, I canvassed Plato through to Foucault on pop culture and found – surprise surprise – that they all hated it. At best, it rots your mind; at worst, it turns you into an obedient slave of the System. Apparently.

Gotta say to me, it’s just boring. Bring back the gladiatorial games, I say. Although…it’s noticeable to me that working class Australians (and plenty of middle class Australians for that matter) don’t think very hard about anything. They used to. I read that in the 1930s there used to be these Working Mens’ Institutes where hard-handed lads would turn up and listen to Bernard Shaw or whatever. Now they watch Sky News. What happened?

Reality TV?

Mute

There is a dying.

Hard to say exactly what’s wrong but Divya could feel it when she came up into the hills and lay against their deep heavy sides palm flat hair spread like a blanket of dead leaves. Secretive and slumbering they were, the scrub grey hills, settled into the earth, each atom in its place, comfortable and quiet against the next. They felt the roots searching and reaching beneath their skin, the rain burrowing down between them, light-fingered, inquisitive, the digestive movements of molten innards far below, the tickling of the wind like a insect’s murmur, and they just were as always, but less than before and less all the time now, dwindling somehow.

She climbed the fire trail followed the flattened paths made by roos and wombats scrambled through scree up to the edge of the escarpment high over the valley and sitting on the rocky ribcage of the land heard the air shimmering above the trees the soft high singing of the wind the earth’s grumbling patience the crumbling surrender of forest mulch caress of sky over feathers haste and hunger and the ambition of ants. Heard also the quiet dark underneath boulders set far into the earth, the lazy spreading sunlight, the termites in their proud mounds and the yellow clay nestling about them. Heard the beetles chewing in the fallen bark, butterflies landing on wattle and bluebell, the lace flowers and the drooping gold mingling, the shards and the monoliths, a million voices, a multiphonic competing hum things knowing themselves amid their atomic bonds.

Later at home in the blocky brick house at the end of the row beside the village’s cemetery she felt confined and enclosed touching the walls sensing the uneasiness of sand and clay forced close to hissing within them. Things built, made, had not settled into who they were, buzzed and muttered like a nest disturbed. Worse at the printing shop, the sour sickness of plastic, the anger of electricity trapped and directed, the air suffocating in its stillness. You had to resist to try not to absorb the anxiety of things, you got tired quickly and so she only went two days each week even though they told Mum they would gladly take her on for three if she wanted.

Home at least knew her, a little stretch and buzz of recognition and always, always and even still the lingering smell of Aarav running in the hall banging on the bedroom door bouncing off door frames and windows pulling things out and knocking things over, Aarav curled on his side with covers kicked off in his room dreaming of supermen while she crept in smiling to see this brother of hers so bursting by day and now so sweet and quiet peaceful as a peach. Only now Aarav is asleep still and pale and distant never dreaming and will never wake and play again at least that’s what everyone thinks even Mum though she pretends not to.

In the kitchen now her hands on the table among specks of flour and garlic and sugar Mum’s cooking and memories of Aarav like a thick layer of dust, Aarav eating stolen sugar cubes digging his knife in to make scratches when no one was looking spilling spaghetti sauce like leaked blood insisting cajoling sulking can I this? Can I that? Look at me! Why can’t I? I want! Sly gazing sideways with his creased boy’s eyes Divya made me it wasn’t me it was Divya did it and daring her to deny it because he knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t even if she could. Yes even his wickedness was lovely…used to be.

What are you doing Mum asked pouring a Coke for her not expecting an answer because Divya could not speak at all. She could understand words and the thoughts they sprang from but having been born wrong she couldn’t bring them out into the world somehow, could not write, could not speak, no one knew quite why.

So it wasn’t possible to answer, to explain what exactly she was doing which was wrapping herself in remembering like a blanket like a tent against the grief and if she could tell her mother it would hurt them both, all the signs and scars Aarav had left in them and in this place like a horrible drumbeat beating he’s not here, he’s not here. Anyway knowing that Mum was already torn to breaking by the accident the struggle to believe month by long month since and by Dad, the way he liked to twist them all into shape like welded metal you have to melt before you can use it.

 She turned her head from drinking her Coke and looked at Mum chopping carrots with her knife slip smack and her thoughts like brown dirty water tumbling over rocks, how can I bear it with Aarav like he is no sign not even a twitch a smile a glance to give us hope not since it happened and Mike angry always angry as if it’s my fault and maybe it is too, my punishment for the heavy sins I have committed. And then there’s Divya – what will happen to this girl who isn’t like any daughter I ever expected or wanted, what will happen when I’m not here to take care of her and there’s only Mike, how did I come to have such a child was it something I did was it something I deserved for marrying an Australian man against my parents’ wishes yes perhaps they did say it would end badly. The children shall inherit the sins of the fathers and probably the mothers too and there she is now fingers stroking the pine table as if it’s a pet perhaps we should have got her one but Mike wouldn’t have it…anyway it doesn’t matter nothing else matters without Aarav how can I live how can I go through each day foot after foot hand over hand like climbing an endless cliff to nowhere how can I go on living without my son?

Divya standing took her glass to the sink and washed it, then wound her arms around the mother her cheek against the twisted plait of rough and fraying hair. If she could have, she could have said that it’s only a change from one kind of thing to another like rock to sand tree food to food tree air to water and water to air re-purposed, like the old saucepans Mum used as flower pots. And this thought might have been comforting but wasn’t because Aarav was an important kind of thing and they both loved him as Aarav not as the parts of him that could soon be part of anything or everything.

Your father’ll be home soon said Mum getting up to put the carrots in the spiced stew she was making, on top of the chicken pieces. Set the table for me will you?

Divya set the table quickly and quietly then went to her own room smelling under the easy words the stink of fear wired in and ready. The thoughts leaking out into the room and the cooking, of when he comes it will all start over even though I try not to give him an excuse and I don’t want to go through it again the why didn’t you and that’s why he and it’s your fault Aarav’s like he is now yes your fault and what am I supposed to do in all this don’t I count for anything in this family?  The arguments which tangled themselves in each night’s dreams and waited with their poison truths ready when the mother woke to another day of sorrow.

Of course she knew but it didn’t help that Aarav was not in pain, the pain was all theirs. His darkness was the darkness of far beyond and far below, a restful emptiness. Trapped in that dry breathing shell that neither ate nor spoke nor heard was Aarav and so only the father was furious at fate undeserved, he had a right to a viable, football-kicking son and now look what he had got. And only the mother bereft as if her baby died as it left the womb but still hanging there by its cord not knowing when or whether to cut.

Not the same she, who had seen Aarav at minutes old but already knew him deeply and wholly from a seed blossoming in his mother’s belly curled in the womb stretching his toes in its dark waters listening to the murmur of the outside that yet had nothing to do with him and just beginning to become himself. Already before he first came into the world she had shared his thoughts listened to the heartbeat felt warmth on new skin touched boundaries that after a while defined themselves at the limits of hands and feet stretching out to find them. Already she had promised the promises of sisters to adore to endure to worship and sometimes hate but always love because how could you help it?

 In her own room she took out her sketch book and drew the shapes that came out of her head and fingers but then threw it down because you couldn’t put the feelings down there on white paper the ones about Aarav or about Mum or Dad or even the ones about the mountains dying, not that it was only the mountain no it was everything at least everything here in Whipstick, the forests the grass the soil the rock and the spaces in between and the creatures moving about in them and maybe the people too. Maybe even Divya herself. Could she feel it inside, the fading? She imagined she could. Aarav drifting away and her and Mum with him, leaving Dad raging and oblivious behind.

Because whatever song they were all singing and together, it was growing fainter as if further away and thinner somehow like strained soup.  The last notes of something beautiful, falling to indifference.

Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash

Everything happens for a reason?

“What do you tell the fawn being eaten alive by wolves? What do you tell the child born into a house of abuse? The people digging mass graves when droughts caused famine and a whole community starved? The hurting and the ruined, tell them everyone you meet has something to teach you, that they were a bad person in a past life and whatever other lives. No…life can be hard and not for a reason. Sometimes it’s hard because it’s hard. Sometimes it’s hard a person’s whole life and that life is short and then they die just like plants die and maybe that’s it.” From Immortal North by Tom Stewart.

Do you believe in a reason? That someone (or some force) is operating on our lives to teach us lessons, achieve a greater good or a lesser harm, etc? That suffering is a planned intervention?

Me, I believe in causes, not reasons. That said, sometimes causes can be reasons. God leans down and pushes you off a cliff (or cures your cancer) because he feels like it. Karma from your previous life fucks you up in this one, like a case of bad genes. An intentional universe could have an intention for you, as you have an intention for the pig you’re lovingly feeding in its stye.

Anyway for hauntingly beautiful prose and heart-aching story telling, head to The Selective Bookworm and look for Immortal North by Tom Stewart. a novel about a widowed trapper and his beloved son living alone in the Canadian wilderness. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I can’t recommend it too highly. FREE for the whole of July – along with twenty other high quality, original curated reads.

Islamic hair

It’s The Future. North America’s split into the Patriot States and the United States of Virtue. In the US of V, Alma Willingsby visits Births, Deaths & Marriages to register herself, officially, as (23%) Black. She’s finally free of the burden of White Guilt! But things take a nasty turn when, prostrating herself in her new flowery sundress in front of a recently unearthed slave burial site, she’s filmed by the Hate Hunters crew. And so begins the Flower Butt incident…

I Hate Hate by Mari Georgeson is a gentle satyrical skit on the woke world view. I probably shouldn’t have read this book. I’m getting old and cranky enough as it is about the various assertions of the liberal left and really, it’s just playing into my prejudices (or opinions, as I like to call them). In short, I Hate Hate is the kind of book that will have certain people thumping the table and going ‘Yes!’, ‘Too right!’ and ‘About time!’ and other people slamming it shut with a snap after half a page. It’s a bit of a polemic. It’s witty, fun (though a little over-iced with sarcasm) and the writing is beautifully warm in its refusal, ultimately, to caricature people. I particularly love this amusing extended thought-gag from a stand-up comic who just happens to be sitting on the subway opposite a woman in a niqab…

“Man, their hair must be really fabulous….I’m telling you, that must be some really gorgeous hair they have under there. I mean, how gorgeous must it be that they have to keep it covered up to prevent men from going mad… Maybe those women are very wise to cover it up….maybe they’ve been saving civilisation itself! Maybe if they all uncovered their hair at the same moment mayhem would ensue, society as we know it would cease to exist, because all the men would be writhing around on the floor having fits!”

I could go on an extended rant about white privilege, diversity, oppression, identity politics, Islam and so on. My views being broadly yeah, nah, as we say in Oz. But that would piss off my friends, so I won’t. And indeed, why bother, when I Hate Hate does it so much more amusingly? Not only that, but it has a surprisingly sweet ending, which (without dropping any spoilers) will I think warm the cockles of curmudgeons and bleeding heart liberals alike.

If you’re interested, you can take a look at I Hate Hate here on Amazon.

Once loved

This day you’re turning fifty four,

Another year less, to know you more.

I am not you. I sometimes think that I recall,

The way it was, when I was you, just like we all

Say we were Cleopatra in another life.

Perhaps I made it up.

If I remembered, then couldn’t I control

The million flashing buttons on your soul?

I can’t, and so, you still frustrate

My feeble efforts to manipulate!

I can’t find where the pedals are,

I swear I’ll never get to drive your crazy car!

Cruising on empty, driving up all those wrong way streets

That you’re convinced are right, they feel so sweet,

Your GPS in Germany, for all I know!

You sit there stalled, the chicks still stop and stare,

That’s one amazing pimped up ride that you’ve got there.

And then, you are not me. But would you want to be?

To feel life with such intensity,

Just for a moment, to burn with happiness, to explode

Your tank so full of life you feel you own the road,

And yet, nowhere to go, nowhere to flow but into you,

And can I?

In any case, the next moment, it’s all gone,

And I’m back down where I belong.

What are we learning, through this love and hate?

If we’re in school, when do we graduate?

Only change will do it, only when we comprehend

The pattern, will this struggle end.

We learn painfully, by rote and by ruler

It’s meant to hurt.

And yes you’re fifty four, and I am forty eight

And yes, our hearts are sore, and yes, it’s kind of late,

But there’s still time to work it out, to find the key.

Hey you, yes you up there, we’ll say – that’s you and me.

You can stop teaching us these bitter truths

We never asked for nor wanted.

We get it now.

Photo by Rene Böhmer on Unsplash

My life as a pot plant

You know when people call you on the phone and say, so what’s happening with you then? and there’s this paaaause…

Because basically the answer is ‘nothing’. That is, nothing that you’re gonna want to hear about. I newspaper mulched a fruit tree. I triumphantly tipped a bag of chicken shit into the – finally full – compost bin. I planted – with a sense of well-founded doom – two cauliflowers. The man who is building my chicken shed just hammered a nail in (then went away for a rest). I read something or other. I watched something or other.

And I wrote something or other. But who wants to hear a writer banging on about their latest unfinished novel?

It struck me that most of the stuff that happens to me, happens in my head, and that it’s actually kinda thrilling in there, if only to me. That’s probably why I don’t mind living alone on a farm. I’m not alone: I’ve got the cast of Succession & House of the Dragon, a daily parade of novelists who either can’t hold a candle to me or make me look like a burnt match, faces glimpsed in supermarkets, my entire history of friends, acquaintances and incidents to dissect and revise. Thoughts circulate dozily like doped up clubbers. What really goes on in the heads of mass murderers? What’s the point of me, or anyone? Why don’t bricklayers read War and Peace in their spare time? How come transmen never hold demonstrations demanding to participate in men’s footie? And the recurring theme: why doesn’t everyone see that the solution to any problem you care to name is really very simple! Just ask me!

So…meandering a little further along this winding mental byway…I recently realised that although I have somewhat wobbly moral credentials in some respects, I do have one outstanding virtue. Which is, that when I’m pontificating on some subject like a twat or boasting of my exploits in some field or other or laying on what I think of as ‘charm’ and everyone else probably thinks of as ‘oh for god’s sake don’t you ever shut up!’ – I do at least have some sense of myself. I know that I’m doing it, which is more than a lot of people do. I can laugh, right? (Right after I’ve flounced out in a huff.)

I also know what a fool I am. That was Socrates’ idea of the peak of wisdom. Ok so at public gatherings I’m apt to show off the tattered rags of my learning, well why not, but I do know I’m awesomely ignorant. (Just not as ignorant as YOU. ha ha.)

I used to dream of writing opinion pieces for a national newspaper (because…I’ve got them). But – and this is how viciously self-aware I am – I know that even were such a publication interested in my views, I can’t be arsed with research. I’d rather just throw my sound bites out there like inconvenient witnesses into a mafia piggery. Here, get your teeth into this one! Bored already? There’s more where that came from.

I just haven’t found the right pigs yet. Anyway that’s enough about me, what about you?

Are your principles at all wobbly? Which ones?Do you have any ridiculous – preferably grandiose – dreams you’d like to share?Do you have trouble thinking of stuff to say when people ask ‘what’s happening with you then?’Was Socrates right when he said that the wisest, ahem, man, knows that he knows nothing? (Mind you maybe he was just talking about men.)

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

The Fat Man

I am the fat man whose sinful rolls stop the trolley

Eviscerated for the young and attractively thin.

I am the ferret who died of COVID so you wouldn’t,

The mouse given cancer so you won’t be.

I am the lab-bred beagle, the man who marches for the bald eagle,

The old woman set aside like a mine from which all gold has been extracted,

The son of God given freely by a father who never asked.

I am the eternal short straw,

The lesser good, the lesser number.

Because nobody likes a fat man

Except at Christmas.

I’ve been reading Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, and this poem is, I guess, a critique of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is he philosophy of mathematicians, holding that morality consists of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. I hate maths. Anyway.

Singer reckons that any discretionary expenditure (think doughnuts, movies, new clothes and definitely new mansions) is unethical if not spent on reducing suffering (and by suffering he doesn’t mean yours). If you accept that therefore you’re morally obliged to spend all your spare cash on the poor and stuff, you’re then confronted by the question of bang for your buck; how can you, with your widow’s mite, mitigate the MOST suffering for the MOST people. This then leads to complicated discussions along the lines of ‘Should charity begin at home?’ (answer, poor people of the west, stop your fucking whingeing!), ‘Would I prevent more suffering by curing five hundred cases of sciatica than one case of terminal starvation?’ and ‘If I’m an international aid donor and I see a kid drowning in a pond, wouldn’t I save more people by spending the ten minutes donating aid rather than fishing the kid out?’

Well look, here’s the thing. The only reason any of us bother about suffering in any case (and many of us don’t) is because we have empathy. We care. Utilitarians (ie the people who engage in these greatest good/greatest number debates) apparently have less empathy than your average person, in other words they care not more, but less. It may be a better use of your time and money to save ten starving third worlders than to buy the woebegone kid next door an ice cream, but our humanity (in the best sense) depends on our feelings, not our reason. We don’t number crunch our ethics; we’d be monsters if we did.

So I’ve decided to stick up for the fat guy. The one who – in the famous utilitarian ‘trolley’ thought experiment, gets shoved on to a train track to divert a trolley which would otherwise run over a bunch of innocent kids, real housewives, or whatever. I like fat men better than I like kids, I think that’s it basically. And who’s to say it wasn’t their destiny to get run over that day: they may have grown up into a bunch of Nazis and Trump supporters!

Should the west try to ‘save’ the third world?

And other questions of a politically incorrect nature.

So, I’ve been reading The Rainmaker, by Michael Martin. In the book, a young, brilliant female engineer (the aptly named JC) is invited to implement an ambitious irrigation project in the fictitious African country of Adi Baran. In the arid eastern area of the country, the starving populace live and starve in squatters’ camps, surviving more or less on aid deliveries. JC, accompanied by her love-struck best friend MJ, sets out to bring a sustainable solution, supported by cashed-up international donors. However, JC’s instability and the conflicting values of local politicians spell trouble for the fledgling project.

Which made me think about the whole deal of Western aid projects and such.

You could, for instance, take the view that Western donors shouldn’t be marching into African countries building dams and so on, and whatever ensues is a result of Western hubris. One thinks of World Bank projects gone awry and suchlike.

Or you could argue that these things are inevitably fucked up by the endemic corruption of African government and society, and that this – in its turn – is the result of colonial imperialism. If we hadn’t they wouldn’t be and so on and so forth.

Or you could say, no, it’s just that ‘Western’ notions of progress don’t fit into African nations’ ideas about what matters and who matters. And who doesn’t. Mind you anyone who has watched politicians almost openly bribing their electorate with promised carparks and sporting facilities, etc (here in Australia we call it pork barrelling) or giving their friends coveted posts in the diplomatic service would have to admit that African politicians don’t have dibs on tribalism and corruption.

It is a funny (well no, tragic) thing that intervention in Africa, for good or ill, rarely seems to work out well. Assassinating democratically elected presidents (Patrick Lumumba in Congo) aside, there’s patented seeds and other agricultural products of dependence, dams that screw up river systems, deforestation, the generous contributions of our arms industries to African conflicts, blah blah blah. And no matter how much food we donate, some part of Africa seems perpetually starving and/or fleeing. Is it the nature of Africa to be how Africa is (due to the influence of geography, culture or, more dangerous to argue, genetics) or a result/continuation of Western exploitation? Or a combination of both? Recall that there was a time when Romans must have said to themselves of the British, ‘Doesn’t matter what you do for these bloody northern barbarians, they’ll still piss in the balnearium and paint themselves blue. We give them roads, laws, public toilets,’ such a Roman might have said, ‘And are they grateful? The fuck they are!’

I’ve never been to Africa, but it’s seemed to me, on visiting India, that the average Indian is pretty annoyed by the power structures that keep the poor in their mud huts and the rich in their nightclubs. Most of us, everywhere, are, but find ourselves unable to do much about it. But the more glaring the distinction is, the more ignorant the deprived masses and the more complacent the one percent, the more that country will start to fall into moral decay – at both ends. People are inclined to the good but when millionnaires wallow, the upper middle class congratulates itself on its well-earned good fortune and beggars lie down to die in the street, people learn to care less about each other. Or so my theory goes.

Anyway, The Rainmaker is an interesting exploration, not only (or even mainly) for the questions it raises about attempts to ‘do good’ in third world countries, but of the relationship between the gifted but troubled JC and her friend MJ, with her self-destructive crush on the heroine of the hour. I found the novel well written and thought provoking. You can download it free here.

Another day, another clanger…

“What do you say when the old person you’re visiting says to you, ‘All my family and friends are dead, I can’t walk, see, hear or get out of bed to pee, and frankly I don’t see the point of being here?”

This morning I went to a conclave of community visitors, whose (volunteer) job it is to go see some lonely old person and cheer them up. Or something like that, although the gist of the morning’s pep talk was that it was ‘to help them find spiritual meaning in their lives’. Afterwards we went to lunch together and were discussing the sometimes difficult task of getting your visitee to talk. Understandably, stuck in an old person’s home, there’s often either nothing to talk about, or the person has dementia, or, because they’re depressed, they have nothing to say. Except…that. So anyway, one of the ladies at my table made the above remark.

So I said – pursuing a line of thought I’ve had for quite some time – “Well the problem is our lack of control over death, isn’t it? We’re basically saying to old people, we can’t kill you, and you can’t kill yourself, so no matter how bad it gets, you just have to put up with it.”

At which point my friend sitting next to me started to wave frantically – basically a signal to shut up – so I added, “Not that I’d say that, of course,” and let the subject drop. It is perhaps true though that there are two choices for the unhappy elderly, and one of them isn’t. To stay on the merry go round and make the best of it (find spiritual meaning, cheer up, stay drunk all the time…) or to get off. Personally I’d really like to have a pill in a locked cabinet so if I felt like it at any point I could just quietly leave the cinema. Maybe I’d have to have a brief interview with ChatGPT first, to confirm that my decision wasn’t simply the result of a bad day (‘Oh bugger it the dog’s peed on the rug again and my herpes has flared up!’). Also, personally, if I said something like the above to my community visitor, I’d like him or her to reply something like “Yeah, I hear you. It sucks.” Not, “Well there’s always God…or bingo on Wednesdays?”

The lady who was giving the pep talk was an Anglican priest and so she kept dropping in stuff like, “And I think religion is hard wired into all of us, isn’t it, even though we may not believe…”, or “We are all spiritual beings…” Being an argumentative atheist, I got quite cross about this and later said to my lunch companion, “What IS spirituality? How do you define it?”

Is it believing in something supernatural above and beyond humankind? Is it having a higher purpose, the ‘we’re all here for a reason’ thing? Is it just finding meaning in whatever it is one finds meaning in – the delightfulness of dogs, the joy of slamming down a winning point at the dinner table, being able to laugh at your siblings’ expense because you love them? Or – and this is completely irrelevant – should there be more hallucinogenic drugs handed out in nursing homes?

For what it’s worth, my lunch companion didn’t seem to know what spirituality actually consists of, but seemed quite attached to the concept anyway.

Here are some free books, among them my new short story collection City of Stone. I recommend Michael Martin’s The Rainmaker in particular – I’ll be posting a review/rant about that soon. It’s about a brilliant young female engineer’s attempt to save the starving masses of a fictional African country through irrigation, and female friendship and…well, like I said, I’ll write about it soon.

Photo by Nate on Unsplash