On Togetherness

If I had it my way, people would die in groups. Families. Friends. Coworkers who like each other. Or even those who hate each other so they wouldn't have to feel guilty. Whole communities would be wiped out. Neatly. At one go.

It makes more sense that way. Like group sittings at weddings. You feed a whole lot of people. They get up and go. You feed the next lot. No one gets left behind wondering why the guy sitting next to them got up before they could eat their banana.

The way it is right now, people die and then you're all crying and thinking who's going to tell me stories now, what am I going to do for the rest of my life now, dude, where do I store all your stuff that you collected over 89 years.

Personally I think it's very bad organisation.

What strikes me is that the whole world keeps moving on even though someone is dying. People are watching TV, buying playstations, cooking, crying, leaping, weeping, watching porn, somersaulting and planning. Planning to be in love, to love, to hang around. But would they plan to have the courtesy to stick around so all hundred or so people connected to them could leave together? Oh no. Finances they can do. But talk about dying and everyone clams up.

Manners are terrible these days.

It's like that W.H Auden poem where he's telling everyone to wear white gloves and all the dogs to stop barking because the man he loved just died. And he's being pretty polite about it. I mean, if a policeman was wearing magenta gloves and doing break dance at the signal near my grandmother's house, I wouldn't go home and write a poem about it. I'd damn near wring his neck.

And that is exactly why my father is so proud of a daughter like me. Because if there are murders to be committed, he can be sure I'm up to it. And if there's law to be run from, you know I'd take a break to blog about it.

My grandmother, I think is beginning to enjoy the drama of being on her deathbed. She keeps promising to tell me something that she must do before she dies. At first I thought she'd tell me I am actually the daughter of a Mexican slave who ate tamarind and then, overcome by lust, raped my mother. But those are kind of things my grandmother doesn't tell people.

After four days of having me kneel at her bedside and teaspoon-feed her juice, she's going to lean close and in her feeble, shaking voice, tell me to lose weight. And I'll be like DUDE. YOU DIDN'T NEED TO DIE TO TELL ME THAT.