6th February, 2006

06/02/2006

I wake, exhausted and depressed after a night of disturbing dreams, alone in my narrow bed (standard issue – leather straps optional), and wonder if I will ever share my bed again.

I imagine myself on ‘Trisha’ or ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and people coming on, one after the other, telling me what I have done wrong. How I have hurt them, let them down. Telling me why I am in this situation. And I want to explain to them how it is not my fault, how it is nobody’s fault. How nothing is anybody’s fault and that that is the great tragedy we are unable to face. So we invent blame: it’s God, the government, YOU.

How we talk about ‘mother nature’. Why do we have to personalise, maternalise even, a force that is as blindly indifferent to us humans as it is to the animals in the wild. Nature is impersonal , so why the ‘mother’ bit? I wonder if there is any connection with the way we personalise God. Do we have to put things in a human terms so that we can understand – or think we can understand – them?
Mother and Father sound so cosy, so caring. But what’s so cosy and caring about a TSUNAMI?

But I don’t say any of this. Instead I shout and scream at them – tell them to fuck-off. Tell them they know nothing of what it is like inside my head. And a big security guard comes and puts me back in my chair.

Outside, it is another dull morning - neither one thing or the other. It is not raining, not especially cold, just dull. And I sit and stare out at the dullness. And it matches the dullness inside me.

And the great ‘aging bird’ flaps his wings above me.