lowdown

a president looks down at his flan,
cosy,
nestled amongst bitter leaves,
unthreatening,
the only one at the table unlikely to ask something he can't answer,
even if he understands the question.

a friend of mine, a graffiti artist, fell off a drainpipe this week and broke both his legs, not despoiling the property of hardworking tax payers, but trying to go home to bed without any keys, wearing slippery shoes not suitable for scaling buildings.
this isn't a morality tale, there is no come uppance coming, it just started me thinking about the messages we leave, who we are leaving them for, and how civilisations are remembered by the messages left for perpituity, as much as the artifacts left behind by the day to day means of existence.
no, this isn't a cue to slide off down the 'we're all doomed' ladder, we maybe brutal, selfish and vain in equal measure, but someone somewhere will no doubt be clinging to this rock as the sun goes cold in the sky, whatever natural or man-made calamities befall us on the way there and it is quite a way.
but what will future people, discover from the burgeoning media we are piling up ready for archeologists of tomorrow.
maybe that our lives were largely made up of mundane, but necesssary grind, as i'm sure theirs will be, those flying cars aren't going to be cheap you know, but possibly that these were fat times, easy times, plenty of fuel, plenty of space, breathable air, drinkable water, some of it still in rivers, and leisure time, lots of leisure time.
or could humans, a few millennia down the line, see us as comically primitive, struggling to get by with clunky technology, and a barely functional short-sighted vision of the future we wanted to arrive in.
i don't have any answers, i'm not a politician or economist, but somehow i think it maybe the former.

lucky b*rstards us.

the days have started to blur together. groundhog day of falling asleep at 6 or 7 in the morning and waking again at lunchtime. the last few months have been passed playing online scrabble and pretending to look for a car on ebay. how can you pretend to look for a car? window shopping, but with no real intention of buying...or maybe unable to make the rudimentary decision to buy one...possibly not believing any longer that i'll be able to summon up the energy or interest to get in a car and go anywhere if i do get one.
there is, of course, always the excuse that the money could be put towards the 'escape' fund. this, however, also becomes increasingly fantastic as time slopes by, as the reality of moving to a different town or city let alone another country seems less and less likely. these days the prospect of inclement weather and the onset of winter are what i most look forward to, as unavoidable trips outside can be made with the lowest likelyhood of having to stop and talk to anyone.