Life Is Too Short, No, Really, It Is

Life Is Too Short, No, Really, It Is

Sam gets up and gets ready for work, and I sit up in bed and switch on my laptop.

Buddy comes and gets into bed with me in the mornings. He arrives not long after Sam has gone downstairs. First of all I here huffing and puffing, then I hear clip, clip, clip of his claws on the floorboards. Then he appears through the door, smiling, bulldogs always look as though they are smiling. Then he makes a herumph sound as he jumps up onto the bed. Then he sits right next to me, kind of against me. He looks around, exhales and then slides down onto the covers and goes to sleep. Pretty soon he is snoring.

I piss around on social media for a while. I write my journal. Then I read. I have given up on 1984, it was a nice idea for a while, but just too bleak and kind of passed its day really. If I wanted to read about the world, I'd open a newspaper, you know. This is now a post-1984 world.

My new Ripley novel arrived at Dymocks, Ripley Under Water, and I am already hooked. Why didn't she write more?

I'm going to spend the rest of my life reading. Oh, and writing. Wouldn't that be lovely. One can dream. Well, they say you have to have a goal.

I'm currently working on my Census response. You know this year, that your details are no longer confidential and are available to the govt, at will.

So I am thinking the fine of $180 a day is for not completing the census at all? So you just have to complete it. I’m a fiction writer, I think I am going to enjoy this.

Ada Ardvarkian, 69 year old Serbian, atheist pension who is visiting from the Balkans. She’d been out with her knitting nana buddies at the Swish & Scull Arms celebrating the last days of their bus and truck tour of the Western Suburbs of Melbourne, supporting “their boys back in the homeland” continuing fight against oppression. The last thing she remembers was downing her second glass of peach schnapps. She’d come to on her own in the front yard of a strange house in Fitzroy. She was convinced that Igor, one of the ageing members of the over 70’s barbershop quartet, “The Srecans,” that entertained the "girls" during the evening, had spiked her drink. Igor said he had a bedsit in the commission flats, a box of claret and a packet of blue pills that made him feel like it was 1961 all over again, wink wink, nudge nudge, or at least that is what Ada thought he said. Stupid man, Ada thought. He just wouldn't take no for an answer. The census booklet was still in the letterbox, and there were several pens amongst the bags on the front veranda ready to be taken to The Brotherhood. Ada has always been a civic minded lass, ever since her childhood on the goat farm back in Telecka, so she thought she might as well give it a go. She was suffering from amnesia, she had a nasty bump to the side of her head, but she would do her best to answer the questions, understanding that English is her second language.

I think we should put as much integrity into the census as the government puts into election promises. Small tyrannies? Or people power reclaimed?

Funny how politicians can lie to us, wholesale, about anything and everything and we are just supposed to accept it as politics, but when we don't supply them with the truth we get fined, arrested, put in jail even.

Politics tends to favour politicians now a days. The political system is run to gain power, not so much to create harmony. The problems in the world are not generally religion, despite what the likes of conservative politicians, or Rupert, might tell you, the problems tend to be political, and man's quest for power. Look at what Tony Abbott did to the Muslim community and how he used terrorism to boost his own political outcomes. Politicians have vested interests in making people fearful so those people look to governments to look after them, to solve the problems that were first suggested by politicians themselves, it is the way politicians get power.

Power now needs to be taken out of the politician's hands, because they aren't doing such a great job. Watch their fat stubby fingers do their best twinkle twinkle as they try to grasp at it, as it is whisked away from them, like so many balloons floating away at a children’s birthday party. Watch all of them stretching up onto their toes, possibly for the first time in years, as they make a last grab for it. (Would that be a partisan wave?) Blue wool and polyester stretched to its limit, soft, white cotton (possibly lycra for Wyatt Roy, oh, except his constituents kicked him out of office, of course) stretched across their chubby, hairy pale arses, which you never really see, (Josh Frydenberg in his scanties is my fantasy de jour) as they rise up trying to snatch it back. White cotton shirts stretched across their overfed egos, blue ties flapping over their bloated, entitled, attitudes of self importance.

Power needs to be put back into the people's hands. I'm not exactly sure how you do that, of course. What people? I know, I know, who? Which ones do we pick? Who picks? Who is left standing who is up for it? Who is so selfless that they think in world terms?

It is all too exhausting, to think about, mentally tiring. Unless  your career depends on it, only if your income is reliant on it, perhaps even your self worth, who can be arsed, I ask you?