Trying to second-guess what people want to hear can lead one into a morass which grows ever deeper and murkier. Unfortunately, politicians and bureaucrats are doing this more and more and we are all the worse for it, including the politicians.
My human has left me out here, tied to a tree, while he is inside drinking coffee. I don’t like coffee – I tried some when he spilled it on the floor. Yuck! I do like tea when it’s cold, and milk and water.
Glass of red wine in hand, in a cosy café corner, I watch the rugged-up pedestrians scurry to their next distractions, where they can thaw out their ears and mop up their nasal exudations.
The interplanetary transit authority is lazy. For instance, it organises only two Venusian transits every 100 years or so. If you miss both, that’s it for the duration of the rest of your expected earthly existence this time around.
Littoral perambulations punctuate my literary journeys. Sauntering along the beach allows me to cogitate, dream and kick seashells at squawking gulls. The water-sand interface reminds me of all that is ephemeral, whether rearranged gently by the lapping water or washed clean by huge, wind-driven waves. Tomorrow a new arrangement of flotsam will paint the beach with another temporary frieze.
What if …
Humans are not the first intelligent species to dwell on this planet. Until about one billion years ago, there was another species which left no trace. Or did it?
Three years ago I heard of a project being launched to put poets into cafés. It was limited to city cafés and was called something like Poets in Residence. The organisation initiating the program was not interested in branching out fifty kilometres south, so I went to my favourite Mount Eliza coffee establishment, ‘In the Kitchen’, and told the owners that henceforth I would be their Writer in Residence every Wednesday afternoon. How could they resist?
In my dreams …
My glasses are coated with a surface that generates electricity from light and charges batteries built into the arms and small LEDs in the corners of the frames. Now, when I am writing, I tap the bridge and I have light on my page.
Listening to a talk by Gunter Pauli1 in which he admonishes us – almost everyone – for our cramped thinking, I realised, again, how frightened we are, as a society, probably as a species, of the possible consequences of the changes we need to implement to save ourselves. We seem even more frightened of this than the likely consequences of doing nothing effective or in time. Even talking of needing change is probably less than useful, as it implies doing things in incremental steps rather than engaging in very different ways of thinking and behaving.
Just as most humans have a personality and a sense of identity, so do most countries. Australia struggles to work out precisely what its identity is.