Books and Death
It's been a while since I've lost myself in a book. I read a bit every day, but these days it takes something else for me to be captivated to the point where I can't put it down. I know that sounds a bit hokey and cliche but ever since I was a kid I could pick up a book on just about anything and find it interesting. Somewhere in my late teens I became picky and some books I could start but never finish and other books I couldn't even start (there was one book, the presence of which made me feel physically ill, but that whole episode was just odd. It wasn't the Bible either. Heh. My mum *still* thinks I'm a Satanist and no longer presses me about religion).

It still happens that I can pick up a book and lose time. A bad thing if you work in a bookshop maybe, but it doesn't seem to have done me much harm so far. I was just sorting out the store room, found a book on Leonardo da Vince lying about out of place so I picked it up. It opened at a page showing detailed sections from the Mona Lisa alongside sketches or pieces from other works that influenced or went into the finished piece. The world around me darkened and went away. I was distantly aware of the people outside the store room and when I looked up I was dizzy and five minutes had just gone away.

I can still be transported by literature. God help me when I can't. And those of you who just don't get it, who don't read or whatever, well I hope you're aware that you're missing something. I have a great uncle who's stroke three years ago removed his ability to read. Deleted. Gone. I only ever see him when I'm at work because he and his wife just don't seem to visit the grandparents anymore. The first few minutes of the meeting are great; filled with how are yous and how are they doings and how's everyones. But then Flo goes off to look for something (last time she was obsessed with joke books) and I'm left with Simon and he just looks kind of lost and I shuffle and fidget and try to think of something to say that will take his mind away from this world that he has lost. And he always mentions it. Always with this look in his eyes, a look of torment and loss.

I went to see my Grandparents yesterday. First time since Christmas. I am a bad Grandson. I had a day free so I paid my internet bill and got a lift with my mum to my aunt's place. Nanna had a heart attack a year and a half ago. They fitted a pace maker but they wired it up wrong so it was losing its charge and it caused a whole mess up. They had to reoperate while she was still recovering, barely a week after discharge. Nannu is getting on a bit, his hearing has really deteriorated. He's still sneaky. Real sneaky. He could put a room full of ninjas to shame. He's got a diabetic lesion on his left big toe that's gone gangrenous so it has to be treated by a nurse. My (second) cousin Mario is a ward nurse at the new hospital so he's been cleaning the wound in betadine solution every two days and changing the gauze once a week (it's some special kind of bandage impregnated with chemical agents to stimulate skin growth). The nails on his other foot have succumbed to fungus (the wonders of old age) and the nail on the big toe has caused an infection in the skin around it. Again, it's being soaked in betadine. Anna, my aunt, gave me the medical background in between towelling down my grandpa's foot. The toe nail on his right foot (I didn't see the left since it was swaddled with gauze) is twisted up like the horn of some kind of savage green beetle. The skin of his foot has been peeled away (pared down by cousin Mario to get rid of the dead skin) so that it was white and pink and red. Danger colours.
Anna then massaged both of Nannu's feet because they get stiff sometimes.

Nanna's still filled with ennui, but at least she keeps her mind active. She didn't seem as depressed as the last two or three times I visited. Last Christmas she was especially down. I know that severe depression and schizophrenia owe as much to family dynamic and environment as they do to genetic predisposition (obviously you can develop depression and schizophrenia even without a family history, just as it is possible to have a family history and never develop the diseases) but if I need to look anywhere for the root of my own depression it's there on my mother's side. It doesn't bother me, I'm not writing this out of bitterness or cruelty. It's a statement of fact.

The whole visit yesterday put me in a foul mood. I just thought about my aunt and how she is just so brave. I saw my dad die in front of my eyes. I was there in the hospital with my mum and my brother when he slipped away from us. Despite that it took five months for him to die it all happened so fast. In contrast, living in the same house as your aging and ailing parents, dealing with them every day, helping them, calling in doctors when they need them and standing by them for years I don't think I am capable of that kind of love. I just don't think I am.

Wow. From books to death. Good going.

The rest of the day was me waiting for 4 o'clock. Toby had a vet's appointment for his annual booster. The last time we wrestled him into his carrier it took half an hour solid of catch and release. It was a game for him at first but in the end I got out of it with a seven inch scratch on my left arm, a slash across my wrist that bled like a bitch and a bite that went septic. Not fun. Not fun at all. When he's in the carrier he is the biggest baby, he cries the whole way to the vet and when we get him on the table he doesn't want to come out of the carrier. Half an hour to get him into the fucking thing and he won't get out. The sounds he makes when he cries are heartrending. This is a cat my brother found yowling under a car two and a half years ago. A three week old kitten, separated from his mum and fed on scraps from a hotel kitchen. He's still half stray. He begs for food and fights like a bastard, but when he gets into the carrier he's three weeks old again.

This time it took much less effort. He was very subdued (mental note, next year get jabs done late april when he's not so feisty) and it was easy to grab him and pour him into the upended carrier. The worst part was waiting to be seen, all the other animals were so well behaved and there's Toby crying like a two year old who dropped his ice-cream.

This week I finished reading two books by Douglas Coupland. If you've never read anything I recommend him if you like disjointed stories about urban decay and bullshit of modern existence. His seminal books are Micro-serfs, about a group of disaffected Microsoft employees who realise they will never be as rich as Bill; and Generation X, which is about a group of 20somethings living in Texas in dead end jobs in a world where the threat of Armageddon has crawled off somewhere and gotten lost. I haven't read either of those, the shop stocks J-Pods, recently made into a TV series, about a group of programmers working in the dungeons of a software company on a video game that morphs every time the production manager gets fired. It started off as a generic sports game but since the new manager Steve got onboard he's moved added an endearing character for the kids and made it educational. In order to stave off the boredom and insanity the programmers have decided to sabotage the project. And then Steve gets kidnapped...

J-Pods is great, but that's not one of the two books I read this week. I got Miss Wyoming and All Families Are Psychotic out of the public library in Floriana. Miss Wyoming is about a big shot Hollywood producer who goes insane and drops out of existence after he has a vision of some z-list ex-soap actress telling him to turn away from the light. While he's on his journey of self discovery he realises that what he'd been seeing was a re-run of the 80s tv soap she'd been appearing in coupled with a near death experience. Then he meets her and she reciprocates his feelings. Susan Colgate, teen star of an 80s soap sensation, sole survivor of a plane crash, then goes missing herself...

I enjoyed it. I thought the ending was fairly good, though as is usual for Coupland things just sort of trailed off. I didn't feel, as some reviewers have said, that the narrative becomes less personal in the latter third of the book. Certainly the pace picks up, but I don't think it becomes distant at all. I didn't feel that it was as good as J-Pods but it definitely had a different mood. J-Pods was a statement about fractured relationships in an internet age. Nobody connects except in bizarre ways through their interests. The main character's mom hooks up with a chinese mafia boss while selling pot out of her basement. Miss Wyoming in contrast is about disillusionment and comes across as the more mature book.

All Families is at least as good as J-Pods. It has a couple of surprises and a few twists and that keeps the story rumbling along. It has a similar vibe to J-Pods although obviously focuses more on the relationships between the family members and how even the head of a billion dollar drugs mega-corporation can still miss his mother. The story revolves around Janet, the matriarch of the Drummond family. Estranged from her husband (now divorced) she has come to realise that her whole life, if not wasted, has been too pedestrian, too plodding. Without knowing it she had always yearned to be the wild one, to just say "to hell with it" and do something mad, but she never realised that she could or even that she wanted to. Now, in her 60s her children are grown up and the youngest, Sarah, is about to go into space with NASA and all of her family meet in Florida for the first time in a decade.

If you like clever books that don't patronise, have quirky characters and fucked up situations then these books are as funny as they are clever.

I'm about to pick up Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. I recently read Siddharta and it may not have changed me but it did move me. I remember a friend warning me off Steppenwolf. This from a person who knows me, and knows my moods. She said;

"Kris, this book is brilliant, you should read it."
Then she stopped and turned to look at me.
"Hmm, maybe you shouldn't."
"Why not?"
"It's beautiful and dark. But mostly it's about acceptance and humanity. I think it might be too much for you. You're dark enough. You'd probably kill yourself after reading it. I know I felt depressed for a while after I finished it."

Not uplifting then.
Ah well. If you don't hear from me, you'll know why.