Feeble Synchronicity

Mike’s
Pith & Wind cont.
..winner taking home both tubes in triumph.
There are endless examples of feeble synchronicity that we all experience daily
– we just have to keep our senses alert to the possiblities. I’m
not sure what it proves, but cumulatively it can have a pretty disconcerting
effect, which might have something to do with our brains ticking off these degrees
of bugger-all separation and concluding that it’s actually responsible
for creating our reality: i.e. my fave ‘life is but a dream’
scenario. And it’s got to get worse as we get older, because we literally
have seen it all before – maybe this phenomenon is a contributing factor to
memory loss as we approach our dotage – too much sychronicity, even feeble synchronicity,
and our brains simply buckle under the pressure.
Which brings me to euthanasia, an issue I was discussing with my friend Helen
over a coffee at Gusto this morning. Helen’s one of those people that
manages to draw the serious older insect out of me and we cover subjects –
like euthanasia – that wouldn’t normally occur to a bloke and blokess
over coffee on a spring morning; more like after several red wines and a joint
at 2.00am.
Anyway, later this afternoon I idly switched on the telly as I was waiting for
my recalcitrant PC to arc up, and landed on an episode of Silent Witness, which
if you’ve never seen it, is the encapsulated adventures of a joyless (female)
police forensic pathologist, and bugger me, you’ve guessed already, it
was a typically joyless episode all about sick, young, joyless gay blokes with
AIDS and their mysterious deaths or ‘assisted suicides’ –
in short, a dramatised euthanasia debate!
Is there a message here? It’s a question that we can’t resist asking
as we drift towards the single point of light at the end of Life’s tunnel,
but ultimately we’re always looking for meaning in the objectively meaningless
jumble of events that constitute our lives.
A week later, and I haven’t really got much to add to this one-way discussion
on feeble synchronicity, so I might finish off with an intemperate outburst
as is the brothers’ wont this month apparently. It’s to do with
garlic. My tastes were so bland as a child as to exclude the possibility of
such a powerful herb being in the same room as I was, let alone in my food.
My first encounter with it was on the receiving end so to speak, courtesy of
Bretherton Minor, who was delivering a message to our master from his master.
Maybe it was just a ploy to get him out of the room and into ours, because this
obnoxious foreign odour filled our room in direct proportion to Bretherton opening
his gob, so we decided it must’ve been something he’d eaten the
night before. Why anyone, even Bretherton, would put something so evil smelling
in his mouth on purpose was beyond all ken, and so we told him as we threw him
into the College pool to cleanse him – and his clothes.
Since then I have learnt that garlic can be a force for good in the preparation
of food, but all too often my senses are bludgeoned by its casual and routine
overuse in restaurants and cafés. Sometimes I suspect it’s malicious,
such is its massive effect on me, and thence on people, animals and even inanimate
objects within my breath’s range.
Mushrooms and the whole range of fishy products are routinely doused in garlic,
to the point that any inherent taste (and I admit Australian champignons in
particular are pretty near tasteless) is utterly obliterated. I suspect with
the fishy products that garlic is used to disguise the fact that the fish in
question might be, or actually is on the turn, but if the fish is off, I want
the presence of taste to send it back to the runty, pierced nerd that cooked
it with undue care and attention and then passed it on to me – I don’t
want to unwittingly eat it and be cursed with a foul stench emerging from every
orifice for days afterwards.
There, I feel better now. And if you’ve had this same thought recently
or read a rant about this very subject in the last day or so, you can put it
down to feeble synchronicity