While making breakfast (Rooibos vanilla tea with apricot, peach and avocado fruit salad... brekkie epicurean orgasm doesnt get any better than that) i switched on the damn telly only to be greeted by doom and gloom of the shite world that we inhabit and consequently pollute, rape and destroy.
1: Cairns train wreck.. a truck was sliced in half when it collided with a train, which derailed. Yeah, ok so someone stuffed up the traffic signals along the bruce highway and a couple of people kicked the bucket while several others had to be hospitalised. but thats not even the worst news of the day.
2: Bangkok on lockdown! Protestors take to two major airports in Bangkok as a move to pressure the PM to step down. its funny, it was only last year i was in thailand and the pm seemed to be like a popular person,with an almost royal stature on the streets. The protesters seem to be a peaceful lot though...
and heres the kicker
3: Mumbai terrorist attack by yes, you guessed it: 'islamist jihadists'. they targeted british, american and jewish tourists. no surprise there. there were hostages, grenades, fires, injuries, emergency squads, deaths, a haggard kevin rudd, the whole nine yards... so, yeah, the usual.
in a way, im quite glad that i vetoed the suggestion for a summer holiday in india, its a rather violatile place to be right now. bloody hell...first it was bali, at the end of last year it was pakistan, now its india... am i the only one sensing that the illustrious list of places that are 'best avoided or proceed with extreme caution' is getting longer?
perhaps by witnessing all these violence and destruction on tv is desensitising me to the reality of the horror due to the sense of isolation and detachment i get from being physically distant from the events, as well as the frequency of these ultra tragic occurrences. if it aint freak weather, its a bomb. if someone didnt get mauled by a crocodile, its an oil spill. if it aint a tragic car crash, some young boy got sodomised by a pastor. it never stops and nothing that tragic has ever happened to me or anyone close so i get a false sense of security and naive optimism that i am protected from all the shit in the world and the worst case scenarios that could happen. this leads me to write about such atrocities in an offhand, even sarcastic manner because i find it hard to be heartfelt and honest if i wrote about it using proses that articulate tangibly the extreme human emotions and conditions.
i do however like to be happy.
every thursday we get catalogues, promotions, circulars and every sort of junk mail and crap you can imagine from various business trying to shove their wares in our faces and they even got kids struggling to pay bills to ride around on bikes with neatly packed parcels full of spam and secretly impregnate mailboxes of the neighbourhood in the silence of wednesday nights. i have friends who have done this kind of work, and i must say i was secretly disdainful of their choice of part time job. I hate, detest, abhor junk mail because they advertise bullshit that i dont need (i dont bloody care that your salon offers 20% off hair straighteners!), use up a lot of natural resources and contributes to so much litter, they're rude, impersonal invaders of my property... i own that mailbox and i do not welcome unsolicited mail and they give me false expectations that i have a nice parcel sitting in the mailbox. usually i would take the junk and dump them in the recycling bin with a very satisfactory 'fuck you'. but recently the attack of mailbox invaders got worse as more and more shit came in that dreaded thursday morning parcel that the slot on my mailbox through which you drop letters in are stuffed with this stupid, pointless garbage to the point where i cant even pull them out. So sick of it all, i stuck two strips of masking tape that says
"No junk mail, please" and "save the trees!" The junk mail has stopped coming, but the weekly newspaper still gets sent in their plastic wrapper and rubber band. ill take care of that soon.
This morning when i came home from my run, i checked my mail and found this lovely note:
I do know the figs that were mentioned, i ran past them the other day. Its cool to make unexpected connections, connecting little dots during the course of a day. That note made me extra happy on top of the natural endorphin induced high after the run. of course watching morning telly was a bit of a downer but i have exciting plans for the day, bring on that storm and terrorists can shove their grenades up their arses...fark yeah!:D
