Hanging out the laundry

A blog. How personal to be? I’ve resisted the laundry option but somehow a blog needs to be a picture of the whole and the intimate. I shall briefly focus on the intimate.

First, something trite. Technology and I are not bedfellows. This site might look a lot better if I was, and odd things like a picture of a live parrot and a dog with feet of clay might not hover between a headline and copy. But, so be it.

Less trite. I was talking to a friend. I said I felt that my identity was being eroded. In fact, like a well-skied slope I feel almost featureless. Signing on, subjecting myself to the little indignities, the powerlessness, the development of brown-envelope phobia, the gloom, the penny pinching have seriously reduced my sense of being someone. I feel I am no one. No one going nowhere. Shuffling not striding.

Once upon a time I met a man in San Francisco. In the 1960s he had changed his name to Nobody and ran as a candidate in a US presidential election with the slogan: ‘Nobody for President’. He received lots of votes, but not enough. Say what you like about the value of absurdism (which my spell check reckons to be an error) but it can redeem us. The very memory of meeting Nobody has given me a chuckle. And if you can laugh, you know the bastards haven’t quite got you.