Poor Piggy

Proof, if any were needed, that the obesity crisis is a grave health issue.

Here we see the consequences of being overweight. Not only are you vulnerable to psychopaths levering massive rocks down at you, but you don't even get a decent death scene.

The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch
exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy,
saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air
sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded
twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his
back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff
came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a
pig’s after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow
sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went,
sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.

"twitched a bit"?
"stuff came out"?
"like a pig's after it has been killed"?
"no time for even a grunt"?

Where is the dignity? The sense of a life lost? The utter senseless waste? The deep tragedy of the death of civilisation?

No - "stuff came out".

Piggy's death is made comical by the shape and bearing of his bloated body. Had Piggy been slim, like Simon, there'd have been real emotion in his death.

My students yesterday laughed at the death of Piggy.

Laughed.

Kids - don't eat that pie. It's not worth it -

Do you want a comical death?

Heart and Art

It seems odd, and overtly narcisstic, to announce one's own continued existence: I still am.

It wasn't an easy 2009, and I had to seek help to carry on. I don't pretend to be free of the tendency to darkness and soil, but I stopped taking medication some time ago and have found someone who wants to knit themselves to me in perpetuity, and more, to carry my issue. You'd think such a violation of nature would bring pestilence, hatred, famine and disease - but apparently not: someone is out there who thinks that TTD could help make good people. Together, we intend to perform this act of bestial art.

This is more powerful than I could have imagined. It means that in such darkness as we now find ourselves naturally in, I look up rather than down - and that I find myself softening towards my previous life. If there were an eagle-eyed reader of this blog, they'd find that I've only ever deleted one post. All of my other hatreds are still here for the amateur psychologist to peruse. I don't regret those hatreds. It's a weird tendency of our world to shout "hate! hate!" when someone says something they don't like. We want to censor and stop. We want to prevent. All must be seen to be well.

And I proved one of the conjectures of my teenage years: hate and love really are very, very similar things. They switch and turn on a heartbeat.

You can really love someone with all your body, and feel the knot in your stomach at all hours of the day and night: then you can hate them the same way: then you can love them again.

All the reasons are the same, only inverted, or shifted either side of the equality sign.

You really can stand, leaning on the broom, contemplating the wreckage of your heart, and you really can pick it all up and glue it with pritt-stick. When you've done it, and you've wiped your hands, and you've scraped off the bits of glue that squeezed out the sides, and you've thoughtfully and carefully held the pieces still for far longer than is necessary, then you can say "I mended my broken heart".

People will never tell the difference. Honestly - they won't. There is no difference between a heart naturally malformed and a heart carefully put together with glue.

You really can walk into the sunset together, even though you have a limp and she has a club foot.

That - that's what life is really about.