Reprieve
It is spring, this far up in the northern hemisphere, or at least, that is what the calendar indicates. I am in receipt of a letter (not written to me) from on old friend, now somewhere in southern Siam, judging from the attached photo. I remember him as a young Ottawa boy, a spectacle of youth and energy and artistic talent (utterly unappreciated up here).
Now he is hiding under white hair, and a Bermuda shirt. He isn’t coming home soon, and reports that the word “snow” gives him post-traumatic stress disorder. His present philosophy is that one should not die, leaving any money in a bank, and he declares his joy in travel.
For it has been a hard winter, in terms of death, which is only sought by ancient Romans and Japanese and Muslims of the Palestinian persuasion. The rest of us take no joy in it, and will be content to get the pain of it over with; rather we look hopefully to the life thereafter. Or perhaps I should mention the Canadian “assisted suicide” regime, which accounts for a growing proportion of our killings, and is an important addition to our deaths by bureaucracy. As I and many others have come to see, these deaths are not necessarily “institutional.” The bureaucracy of death exists within individual human minds, unreachable by anything resembling joy, and interested chiefly in numbers and power: murderous kill-joys, as I think of them, who enforce all of our “safety legislation.”
However, spring has arrived, and I turn away from my most recent encounter with official government thieves, and think instead of old friends who have been lost through the winter, including two of my very closest, and most beloved, whose passing still has not been assimilated; and of previous winters when many friends joined the procession of planetary flight. Indeed, I was expecting to depart, myself, this winter, but it seems that I have been reprieved.