Can't give them away with a pound of tea

I've been trying intermittently to become an official organ donor for nigh on twenty years. Anyone who watched the 7.30 Report last night won't be surprised to hear how difficult and frustrating this has been. Twenty years ago some of my organs might have been worth something, but I doubt it now, although I bet my lungs are in better shape after nearly 21 years off the nicotine.

But apparently now you really can do it online. That is, if you're prepared to register in order to use their online services and wait while they post you your password by snail mail. Which might entail ringing them up to make sure the postal address they have for you is current.

Also, whoever organised that segment managed to time the running of it so that it coincided with a period of maintenance at the Medicare site.

But if you're still interested after all that, the website is here.

Apparently Australia has an unusually low number of organ donors, but my guess is because it's been so hard to register as one. Every time I filled in a card for my wallet or opted to have 'Organ Donor' put on my driver's licence, someone would immediately assure me that it didn't mean a thing. My family has discussed this kind of stuff many times and we are all in furious agreement about the virtues of organ donation, but that decision is one burden I would like them not to have to carry if it came down to it. Hence the online registration.

But I'm wondering if there are other reasons. So by way of novelty I'm going to use Blogger's poll gadget to actually do something useful and get some information on reasons. Do feel free to play.

A mighty hunter before the Lord

The more forthright of the two tortoiseshells has just fatally impaled a small, airborne fly with one claw.

Every now and then one of them reminds me that I live in a house with two wild animals. They're only fairly small wild animals, of course, but so are stoats and wolverines.

Shining your shoes for the Fat Lady

This isn't the first time I've had cause to consider the uses of literature in thinking about how to live one's life and manage one's nasty moments. But when I saw this morning that J.D. Salinger had died, I gave a bit of thought to what I might have learned from him, and this bit from near the end of Franny and Zooey is what came to mind. All my adult life I've been spared the tortures of stage fright, and having read this at sixteen is one of the reasons why.

The voice at the other end came through again. 'I remember about the fifth time I ever went on "Wise Child". I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast -- remember when he was in that cast? -- anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again ...

This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and -- I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddamned clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.'

Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. 'He told me, too,' she said into the phone. 'He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once ... I didn't ever picture her on the porch, but with very -- you know -- very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!'

'Yes ... But I'll tell you a terrible secret -- Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.'

Arithmetic, or is it algebra, in chronological order

1 horrible old neck injury (high-speed highway rollover, 1986: C4 and C5) x too much housework and gardening (yesterday) x general stress (ongoing) = shoulder, neck and scalp muscles in spasm = extreme nausea + plenty of hyoscine hydrobromide + too much codeine + 1 moving, upsetting funeral of a 60-year-old woman you've known since you were born + several hours with your father & sisters + far too many brandies (today) + 2 x really crucial deadlines that matter a lot to a lot of other people (imminent) = X, where X is how you'll feel at 8 am when the alarm goes off.

On the other hand, it's 20 years today (3.30 am, November 26th 1989) since I had my last cigarette: cold turkey from 40-50 a day. CP, if you're reading this, thanks from the heart.

Michael Jackson Youtube of the Day ...

... says it all.

David Eagleman

This bloke was in Sydney last week for the Luminous festival, in a collaborative show with Brian Eno at the Opera House; did anyone see him?

I don't know how well his little book Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives would work as a performance, but qua book it is pretty damned dazzling. As a neuroscientist, albeit a freakishly young-looking one, he has probably spent a fair amount of time thinking about (a) how the brain orders information, (b) what constitutes a human being ('Sum' here is a Latin pun), and (c) death. The fruit of said thought is here, in forty hypothetical scenarios about what might happen when we die.

Clearly he's also a poet. Look at that word 'covey', suggestive as it is of birds and (with one change of letter) witches, which some would say are the two creatures that might produce an angel if they bred.


Some highlights:

In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn't take long for Her to realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and mean-spirited in other ways ... Might it not be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men's lives?

*

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.

After some questioning, you discover that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in His mighty hands ... Like Victor Frankenstein, God considers Himself a medical doctor, a biologist without parallel, and He has a deep, painful relationship with any story about the creation of life ... reading again and again how Dr. Victor Frankenstein is taunted by his merciless monster across the Arctic ice. And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

*

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second in when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, some time in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Don't like what they're saying? Hack them to death with sharp objects!

I love blogging. I do. But as someone who's been reading blogs of various stripes for over four years now and therefore knows more than she used to about the depths of misogyny and hatred that can be plumbed when women speak fearlessly of what they know, I have to say that this surprises me less than it would have in 2005.

And today I expect to hear of a marriage

Last night the final email check before bed turned up two messages from friends, sent less than an hour apart.

One was a sad message from A. in Austria to say that his (very elderly) mother had died. The other was from P. at home in Adders to say that his first grandchild had been safely delivered into the world.

On the subjective nature of literary criticism

You know that six days of intermittent yet shriek-making back spasm have really started to get to you when you read, in an innocuous piece of chick lit, a passing reference to the lyrics of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and it hits you with a blinding flash that that song is nothing more than the simple expression of a death wish.

Which reminds me of one of my all-time favourite jokes. A man's singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow in a seedy nightclub for a living and one night he simply forgets how the middle eight goes. He can remember the words -- 'Some day I'll wish upon a star / and wake up where the clouds are far / behiiiiiind meeeee' -- but the tune's gone right out of his head.

So he signals to the band leader to start again. All's well till he gets to the middle eight again, but nope, he still can't remember it.

This happens a couple more times until finally (it wasn't called the Depression for nothing) he thinks that if he can't even sing his signature song any more in this crummy gig in this dingy room then he might as well end it all, so he flings himself out of the nearest window.

And as he lies dying on the footpath, suddenly a beatific smile steals over his tragically smashed-up features. Because someone has called the ambulance, and in the distance he can hear it coming: 'Da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA ...'

They don't make 'em like that any more

'It's never a tragedy when an old man dies. Forgive him for his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care.'

-- A Prairie Home Companion