Thursday, 21 May 2020

Planning For the Future.

I just watched a video accompanying some Chinese ambi music and decided I would quite like to spend my next life as the man who walks behind the ox in a Chinese paddy field. And then I changed my mind. Can you imagine how boring it would be spending all of every day up to your knees in water following an ox? I daresay you’d be able to have all the rice you could eat and I quite like rice, just not that much.

Ah, but I suppose I could combine it with being a Zen master and then it would be OK. I don’t suppose Zen masters ever get bored.

(I watched a TV documentary once about a man who spends his whole life tending the Shinto shrines on a Japanese hillside. That struck me as pretty cool, too, but I think I’d have to learn the bamboo flute to keep myself amused in cold weather.)

Oh well, back to the old favourite – deep space astronaut with Kate Beckinsale as co-pilot. As long as she never aged beyond 28, of course.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

So true. Everyone knows that at the moment they turn 29, women instantly dissolve into a pile of lizards and snails.

Unknown said...

That was me, by the way. My mother is concerned that you will think it was her comment.

-Madeline K. R.

JJ said...

You mean I'm right? Still, at least I'd only have to put up with her for twelve years, which is nothing in deep space. I'm reliably informed that women disappear altogether when they hit 40.

JJ said...

Incidentally, I meant to say that I have been a little concerned about you upon reading of New York's elevated position in the Covid stakes. (I gather you're probably in Massachusetts now, but still.) Hope you young whipper snappers are taking care of the more advanced generation. Good wishes to all.

Unknown said...

It's true, women do become invisible at 40, but they continue to exist and inconspicuously wreak havoc. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthing babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five."

My parents are OK. They are in the middle of a hot spot, but it's dying down.

JJ said...

I read Slaughterhouse 5 a few years ago and I don't remember this bit. I imagine my inadequate mind failed to see the deeper meaning and blocked it out as too traumatic.