Kelly and I have just been downtown in the ’52 Bug. It’s pouring with rain, and ordinarily we don’t take any of my Volkswagens out in wet weather.
The bug ran out of gas, and we had to crawl to a gas station to fill it up. With a 6-volt ignition, it doesn’t pay to have the lights and wipers on as well as the fog lights. The ’52 bug doesn’t have a fuel gauge, which can be difficult at times.
I had to go to my pharmacy and pick up some Prednisone and antibiotics. I’ve not been breathing well. In fact, I have some kind of shadow on my lung, the same as I did when I was eight years old.
When I was eight, my mother told me the doctors were going to try to keep me alive until I was ten years old and then take a lung out. No one seems to know what this meant. My mother was very much in awe of doctors, so it’s possible she misinterpreted everything.
When I was ten, they put me into hospital and the shadow had gone. I never got sick again for years.
Nowadays, we often talk about “Healthy Homes.” I was brought up in a house that had rotten floorboards and a room (a second living room) that was dedicated to coal for the coal range. We lived right by the bush in Dunedin, and it was always damp.
But I’ve always been good at (if I do say so myself) overcoming obstacles in my way. I’ve always gone against the tide.
I often ask Kelly what I should write about in my next blog. This time she said “Coldplay.”
I had to change my clothing.
My chemist is a 45-year-old Mormon, and he took his daughter to see Coldplay over the weekend. This was the very first concert he had ever been to in his whole life, and he loved it.
That’s good enough for me.
Coldplay brings happiness to millions of people, and I can’t criticize that.
I’ve never seen a Mormon dance.
I often write about freedom and the importance of having one’s own views. Bob Dylan once said that no one was free and that even the birds were chained to the sky.
Mao Tse-tung, when he sent Chinese troops to help North Korea in the Korean War, said, “Without the lips the teeth are cold.”
There is nothing worse in this life than to be alone. Solitude has no friends. That is my view.
Yet it is easy enough to feel that one is on one’s own. My mother went to work when I was a kid. There I was all day, lonesome and unable to breathe properly. That is being alone.
My friend “Mad Dog” was alone. He died of a morphine overdose on Christmas Day many years ago. I have not yet stopped crying for him, for his solitude and what he could have been.
In my terror, I surround myself with people. We help each other.
Yesterday a very good friend got in touch with me after several years.
I glowed all day.
That’s what friendship does. It warms the heart.
