090 - nOT dEAD yET

090 - nOT dEAD yET, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I really am concerned about the slow decline into death, partly because after getting arthritus in my thirties and learning how difficult it can be to simply move around when you are old, it set me to wondering what we are all doing here.

The older I get the more I become aware of people doing things because they believe that their age demands it of them. Why? Women chop their hair shorter and shorter as they get older because, they say, it makes them look younger. No, young women chop their hair short to make them look older - more to the point of women cutting their hair shorter is to help with hot flushes.

Most men always have a problem with clothes, and as they get older and less likely to go into the kind of store that offers something of interest, the more like a unifiorm their t-shirt+jeans or suit becomes.

I might look like a silly old fool to some people, but that is because too many silly old men wear the uniform of their age, and I am more of a surprise because I do not conform. Why should I conform here, I am not at work.

More importantly, my wife does not want an old fogey on her arm, she choses fun over conformaity.

029-Love is Living

029-Love is Living, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a conjunction of some song comparing love as a fact to another fact of nine million bicycles in Beijing, with the table-culture of Poland - and elsewhere.

It's Easter, say, and the family come together and spend the whole day sitting around a table, eating non-stop throughout the day, ignoring the children in a huge adult-fest that at some point includes some discussion on why some family members currently sitting around a different table in someone else's house or flat are failing to bring up their children properly. You know the kind of thing. The problem I can see is that the children present are not being brought up particularly well either - they are bored, desperate for attention and not being encouraged to discover their own thing. They are being trained by boredom into eventually taking part in the same custom in the future.

Why won't they play with the children, why is it only I that can make paper aeroplanes, take them for walks, teach them how to step from sawn log to sawn log, or be invited to inspect theit toys or drawings.

Because I notice them. Because I respect them. Because I have not become a boring fart adult who desires only gossip, porking, look-what-I-own and aren't-I-hard-done-by.

Love is not saying 'i love you' or simply being there, you have to move and hold them, follow them, take them by the hand, and notice them when things are going wrong. I asked Ania when she last hugged her sister, and she couldn't remember, whereas I could.

Love survives in contact, and since we are always moving, contact is a changing action.