At most deaths I have not noticed the faces

preferring the distraction of tubes and signs and CPR,

focusing on small detail

not the unclinical tableau of this man

found stretched on his back

over gravel and tarmac

near the high pass

on this bluest of leisure Sundays

We cut off his leathers

the district nurse, the off-duty paramedic

the mountain rescuer and I

while a kayaker kept his neck in line

His stove chest was gasping

His carotid pulse a fading stammer – stop.

And we kept him going ten, fifteen

rib-crunching minutes until an ambulance

came with proper kit

and I could taste the tar of his last cigarette

as I upped the technology, slipped

a clearly futile tube in his trachea

and we kept on, spurred by distant rotors

and Helimed sets down in shallow bracken,

how suddenly strange, my city colleagues are

Thirty-plus now and no pulse, the outcome set.

Congent, I look around –

and all our faces are that absent metaphor

for how it feels to try and fail to save a life.

Sore-kneed, I look down –

and see on his, a day’s stubble

and the keenest blue

around his fixed, dilated pupils

~Colin Begg @ The British Journal of Psychiatry

Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint….I’m a long-term kind of person. I have been trained to think in units of time that are measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.

~ Steve Jobs

Did this bother us? Did it cause pain? Think carefully dear writer. My very slow very considered answer: almost never. In my own case, for these reasons that I can think of . First, except for one or two shaky intervals I believed straight through my childhood.

~ Author unknown , found it scribbled on a sticky in my writing. Perhaps at least two to three years old, may be I transcribed, may I was the writer. No idea.

131 Mount Vernon St.,
Boston

July 28th

My dear Grace,

Before the sufferings of others I am always utterly powerless, and the letter you gave me reveals such depths of suffering that I hardly know what to say to you. This indeed is not my last word—but it must be my first. You are not isolated, verily, in such states of feeling as this—that is, in the sense that you appear to make all the misery of all mankind your own; only I have a terrible sense that you give all and receive nothing—that there is no reciprocity in your sympathy—that you have all the affliction of it and none of the returns. However—I am determined not to speak to you except with the voice of stoicism. I don’t know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don’t know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one’s place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see. My dear Grace, you are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don’t think, don’t feel, any more than you can help, don’t conclude or decide—don’t do anything but wait. Everything will pass, and serenity and accepted mysteries and disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain. You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile. I insist upon the necessity of a sort of mechanical condensation—so that however fast the horse may run away there will, when he pulls up, be a somewhat agitated but perfectly identical G. N. left in the saddle. Try not to be ill—that is all; for in that there is a future. You are marked out for success, and you must not fail. You have my tenderest affection and all my confidence.

Ever your faithful friend
Henry James

The great direction which Burton has left to men disordered like you, is this, Be not solitary; be not idle, which I would thus modify;—If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

~ Samuel Johnson

George Bernhard Shaw on the three demands of the British Shipwreck

The typical British shipwreck, Shaw wrote, had three “romantic demands” in particular: that the cry “Women and children first” should be heard, that all men aboard (“except the foreigners”) should be heroes, and the captain a superhero, and that “everybody should face death without a tremor”.

~ from the guardian, apropos Costa Concordia

When you were here before
Couldn’t look you in the eye
You’re just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You’re so fuckin’ special

But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

I don’t care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice when I’m not around
You’re so fuckin’ special
I wish I was special

But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell I’m doing here?
I don’t belong here

She’s running out the door
She’s running out
She runs runs runs

Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You’re so fuckin special
I wish I was special

But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong here

~ Creep, Radiohead

Those visits home, the way the young
come back and still follow you around
or find you on the bed reading
or writing, to lie down at an angle or

sit cross-legged. No secret between you,
not even trouble quite though
it isn’t ordinary, the way the world unravels
through them: what he said, what she

never, who traveled where, that things—
how exactly—splinter and break
and cut. It trails off then. Both of you,
which one to speak but thinking

better of it. And the book is just a prop,
what you were writing perfectly weightless
in this silence. Child, oh fully no longer,
out there tangling, untangling.

~Marianne Boruch

Fitter, happier, more productive
Comfortable, not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym 3 days a week
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries

At ease, eating well
No more microwave dinners and saturated fats
A patient better driver, a safer car, baby smiling in back seat
Sleeping well, no bad dreams, no paranoia
Careful to all animals, never washing spiders down the plughole

Keep in contact with old friends, enjoy a drink now and then
Will frequently check credit at Moral Bank hole in wall
Favors for favors, fond but not in love
Charity, standing orders, on Sundays ring road supermarket

No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants
Car wash also on Sundays
No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish

At a better pace, slower and more calculated
No chance of escape, now self-employed
Concerned but powerless
An empowered and informed member of society

Pragmatism, not idealism
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tires that grip in the wet
Shot of baby strapped in back seat
A good memory

Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat tied to a stick
That’s driven into frozen winter shit

The ability to laugh at weakness
Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig in a cage on antibiotics

~Fitter Happier, OK Computer, Radiohead

1) “Learn from the mistakes of others… you can’t live long enough to make them all yourselves!!”

2)”A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and Honest people are screwed first.”

3)”Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous.”

4)”There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.”

5)” Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.”

6)”As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.”

7)”The world’s biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.”

8)”Once you start a working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.”

9)”The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all direction.”

10)”God is not present in idols. Your feelings are your god. The soul is your temple.”

11) “A man is great by deeds, not by birth.”

12) “Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.”

13) “Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.”

14) “Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.”

15) “Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.”

~ Chanakya