This is a song about Tony.

Just a cold is what I told myself. Just ride it out. Your system could do with a little bit of a workout. It is just influenza because it’s the right time of year in the southern hemisphere. From the glass shards it feels like I’m swallowing though you would swear it was something else. A deadly stranglehold at the hands of a criminal. Using the weight of his body to subdue another victim in the…

Now, to be clear, I am in no position to speculate. For context what follows are initial impressions, which I do not doubt will evolve as time goes by, and in the event that I bother to gather more information about Tolstoy and what he has written. With a bit of luck I will eventually arrive at a more positive conclusion because as it is right now, the conclusion is… Unflattering. At the very…

I was a well established reader and famous book critic. After school I studied the classics and earned a doctorate in literature. Needless to say, I had earned the respect of my peers and the general public had learned that when I wrote a review, it was best for them that they drop whatever it was that they were doing and pay careful attention. All of that is a lie. The real situation is that…

Yes I do wonder sometimes at what seems to be the defeatist in me. The pessimistic. The negative. The misanthropic. Is it a mental thing, psychological, is it an age thing, a midlife crisis or biological, something to do with my thyroid, maybe even dietary – me being vegan. Deprived of the necessary stuff that might turn into more hope, more optimism. Did something break in my head, when I fell…

So if not at one hundred years, at what age would it seem like a good time to pull the plug. Wait what… Is that where I was meant to start. I thought there was a lengthy section before that about how I think I will die… How I won’t need to kill myself because I’m sure I will get cancer first. The thing I need to build up the courage for doesn’t involve overdosing on sleeping pills, it just…

Daily writing promptWrite a letter to your 100-year-old self.View all responses Dear Tony, it’s been a while, how have you been? What does the world look like since your light got snuffed out, did taking the exit turn out to be a good thing. Are you finally at peace, is it true that when you die you are reunited with dead pets, dead friends, dead family. Are you still here somewhere, trying to…

It occurs to me I never got to the bit in the previous post that might have made it seem like I was being petty. The thing that kicked off my nine-hundred and fifty word rant, although rant feels like too strong a word to use for whatever that was. It was a small thing, I left a comment on the post of the blogger which I feel like I worded sensitively enough to not cause upset. Her angle was…

Nothing continues to happen. Well, at least on the personal front. On the world stage it is another story, story after story. The story of how one man persuaded everyone that he isn’t such a bad guy, by publicly confronting another bad guy, even killing him. That will show the world whose god really is legitimate, who really acts as a conduit for divinity. As though the wealth they’ve…

Things were going quite well. B and I did have a small run in but it blew over quickly enough, figuring out it probably had more to do with eating dark chocolate than it had to do with disrespect. We hardly ever eat sweets. Rubbish in is rubbish out, even if what it looks like is a bad mood, impatience, irritability. Or maybe it didn’t escalate because B was in a good space, looking forward to…

First, thank you for the birthday wishes. There is normal person inside of all of this, normal enough to appreciate normal things – people doing the right thing. I’m not sure the impression I create here of what my life looks like resembles reality very closely. I don’t type out how I spent a moment in bliss, just watching small birds playing in the garden. If that’s something that happened. If…

Nothing helps things feel more pointless and depressing than my annual birthday. Each year these feelings just get increasingly compounded. I turned fifty-three on Thursday 20 February, the day ex-prince Andrew got arrested. There is nothing in particular I plan to do and there is nothing in particular I can spend the next few minutes unpacking, exploring or describing here. Events wise nothing…

A calcium stone is all it was. Showed up on an x-ray at the dentist who tried to pry it out of a salivary gland duct underneath my tongue. She was using one of those hellish dental instruments to try do it but was unsuccessful. I mean, how successful was it going to be using something like a needle to do the job of tweezers. At home I tried to follow her advice, try squeeze it out using my…

The electricity went out, about a week ago, came back on yesterday. While it was out it was like sampling the apocalypse. And that’s probably how it will unfold in the end, like a gradual unraveling. I guess as we acclimatize to the pockets of instability they get increasingly serious, and recovering from them gets harder and harder until one day, nothing. What caused the power outage? The…

B started to volunteer at an animal shelter after a pet dog we had died. The death of Breeze at fourteen years was absolutely devastating. It blew a hole right through our souls. We picked her up at an SPCA when she was about ten weeks old. We had been tentatively doing the rounds trying to get a feel for whether we were ready for a dog. After a few weeks of that I wasn’t so sure, but when we saw…

In a dream last night I was among the last of a peace loving race well acquainted with the inner workings of our anatomy, to the extent that I could show a more primitive people how to dispose of us in a kinder way. It involved puncturing the carotid artery with the sharp teeth still embedded in the skull of some unknown animal. They did as I demonstrated, standing clear of me as instructed, as…

The arm wrestling match between the me that wants to kill this blog and the me that doesn’t is reaching a feverish pitch. The pores on my skin give birth to beads of sweat, they unite in protest and storm the gates. Nothing can stop the mindless thing they have become, any resistance is just watered over, joins the sand and sediment at the bottom of a flooded river. The blog was part of a larger…

Yes I do feel like an imbecile. I read the blogs of other people and the hope, the good wishes, the fond memories being shared seem so concentrated as you might expect them to be a week before Christmas. In the meantime it feels like I am in labor, way past the late stages of pregnancy and confined in a room that amplifies my moans and groans progressively getting louder, trying to give birth, to…