Dividing up their money…

I am still working and surviving the experience. It is miserable. The small players are scrambling to gain power and garner all material rewards for themselves alone. In my opinion they have been pitted against one another, inspired by a plastic carrot. The higher ups are scheming to “mine” the situation till the vein runs dry. The highest up is living in some kind of distant fantasy that does not include the welfare of those lower on the hierarchy. Anarchy reins, the hounds of hell are scouring that landscape.

I just keep working, doing as good a job as I can because doing a good job is the only thing left to me, and it keeps me busy. The pain in my head comes and goes, it has stopped getting worse.

In the meantime it is the weekend, the sun is shining and I have Attila’s excellent company. Bits and Bobs, this and that, we are puttering around the property. The weather is cool enough that we still require one firing a day in the masonry fireplace. This means there are still wood chips on the floors and ash dust coating all surfaces. There is also an endless supply of fluffy soft cat hair, mixed with ash dust. Every cleaning job is a temporary reprieve.

Attila and I will head into the distance today to hear live music played. We pay a pittance to attend small venues with mixed entertainment. These venues offer some of the worst stage entertainment I’ve ever been exposed to; which is always tolerated graciously by the audience. It also offers some of the best stage entertainment I’ve ever been exposed to. It is a package deal, and I love the energy of tolerance and sharing.

I am reading poetry more regularly now, but not writing anything these days. I wonder if I will ever write a poem again. My sensitivities lie deeply buried these days, as I navigate the working world of greed, manipulation and partial-truths. It is my hope that once I have been ejected from this environment, no matter how violently, I will recover myself. It could happen.

And so I read the poems I have written in more hopeful times. And I play my bodhran, which is a joy. Measurable wavelengths of joy, received and given.

The 1998 Tercel is on the road again, quiet as a mouse, with working brakes, and sound tires. Attila is now able to work overtime when asked, and so am I. Turning down overtime goes badly for workers in the long run, we avoid saying no whenever we can.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

4 °C
Condition: Sunny
Pressure: 101.8 kPa
Visibility: 16 km
Temperature: 3.5°C
Dewpoint: -3.4°C
Humidity: 61 %
Wind: NE 11 gust 28 km/h

Quote

“If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn’t be enough to go around.”
Christina Stead
1903 – 1983

Note

Christina Stead

“…an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations…

Her father was the marine biologist and pioneer conservationist David George Stead. Stead was a committed Marxist, although she was never a member of the Communist Party.Although her birth and death were both in Sydney, Stead lived many years abroad in England and the United States. She first departed Australia in 1928, and worked in a Parisian bank from 1930 to 1935. Stead also became involved with the writer, broker and Marxist political economist William J. Blake, with whom she travelled to Spain (leaving at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War) and to the USA. They married in 1952, once Blake was able to obtain a divorce from his previous wife. It was after his death from stomach cancer in 1968 that she returned to Australia.Indeed, Stead only returned to Australia after she was denied the Britannica-Australia prize on the grounds that she had “ceased to be an Australian…”