Black Doggerel

No, not that kind of dirt. Sorry darlings. But I've just plugged my keyboard back in after taking it apart - keys pried off and everything - and removing the incredible crapglomeration of coffee-soaked cigarette ash, dog hair and tobacco shreds wedged between keys and board. I had to; there was a particularly solid wedge stopping me from using J, K and L, and I think it was on the verge of developing sentience.

It feels like a completely different keyboard now. Wow.

I knew three people whose birthday was today; my mother's two sisters, Marian Junior (Auntie Juni) and Susan Jennifer (Auntie Sue). They were twins, and (I think) two years younger than my mother, so they would have been sixty-two today. Auntie Juni was fortyish when she died, Auntie Sue was (I think) fifty.

the third was my best friend Mike Swann. he would have been thirty-four now.

some days, all the dead people that I love give me strength. love doesn't die, after all. it stays with you forever and sustains you.

but everyone who's died that you love takes a piece of you with them. and on some days there's so much of me on the other side that I feel like a ghost myself; weak, thin, insubstantial and clinging stubbornly to a world I no longer have the right to walk in.

this is what made my mother lose the will to live. her troubles started after her best friend Carol died, at the end of a year in which she'd also lost her own mother and her last living sister, Auntie Jean.

but my mother's alive now. she's walking strong and living in love again, and I got my stubbornness from her. so will I. Keep saying that.