hobby

When I was a child I used to play with model trains. I remember fondly building railway stations out of lego and placing the little lego men and women on the platform to await their dreary nine-to-fives that approached with every tic-toc. I would set time-tables and interconnecting train and bus services and build customer service desks and little franchised coffee stands that sold overpriced lattes (50 cents extra for soy). Then there would be delays and cancellations that made these unhappy little passengers miss their connections and I would have to make the following announcements that would always come too late to be any use to anyone, raising tempers and blood pressures but I would always be apologetic, yes and understanding without accepting fault or liability.

tirade of self flagellation

I saw a woman on my way back from lunch today finishing off my last handroll from that sushi bar just around the corner from the Winsor Hotel. She was maybe Papuan, western pacific and walked with this haphazard gait from underneath her denim skirt almost touching the ground. A walk that suggested some sort of deformity or injury, perhaps polio paralysis or some other preventable disease of the third world that I suppose I should feel more passionate or at least more informed about. As I past her in the street I couldn't help seeing myself through her eyes or at least my objectified sense of how I thought she should see me or maybe more correctly projecting my own white guilt and self loathing onto another person based on poorly informed racial stereotyping. Geez!! This all makes me dizzy.

What a stupid world we live in where one of the leading causes of death in this country is obesity and its various related illnesses. When access to a nutritious diet, clean drinking water and adequate healthcare is no longer a problem we find disease and death in plenty. Just to walk around, just for a second, and see through the eyes of someone else and look upon the absurdity of it all.

Well that feels a little better. Thank you for humouring me in this little tirade of self flagellation I hope I haven't offended too many of you.

cigarettes

I started smoking the other week frustrated at a particularly awful day at work, it seemed like a good thing to do satisfied that what I was doing was slowly killing me. All very noir. Smoking a lazy three cigarettes a day I was on my second pack - Marlborough Lights with a ghastly grin of someone with mouth cancer, ulcerated and teeth a rotting green-yellow- until I was forced to stop. I had been revelling in displaying the pack to work colleagues, holding the pack centremetres from my ear, smiling wide showing my teeth in comparison. At lunch I caught up with a group of fellow smokers, conscious of their siege-like comradery that I was hoping to be part of when I was told by the heaviest and most nicotined stained smoker of them all "You do know you're not even doing it right. Smoking, I mean you're not even breathing it in."

I was heart-broken, publicly humiliated before my peers as a hack, an interloper. Running, almost in tears, back to the office I left the pack in the top drawer of my desk with the remaining cigarettes unsmoked.

Fuck-em I say and today I joined the gym.