may 28

Today is Joe's birthday, which he is probably spending with his own dying mother in her final rest stop in Picton. She won't know who he is, and if she does is incapable of saying so since she has recently had another stroke and can't even swallow. The four of them have decided to stop feeding her by force, but still it can take a long time to starve to death and in the meantime he is camped out in the southern highlands remembering- too late - mother's gifts of Ravel and Omar Khayyam, long interred beneath mother's curses of god and self-righteousness. As for us, it doesn't mean very much and I'm ashamed and somehow resentful of him for pushing us away from both him and her so that we don't know what to do except make flippant comments. We are as straitened by callousness as we would have been by grief, only instead of beating our breasts we mock because that's the only thing we can do without feeling like hypocrites. I'm horrified by the realisation that we've all colluded in a process of emotional cauterisation in order to please father: he has bestowed on us an immunity he really wanted for himself, and now we can't help him. Talking about it makes me uncomfortable so I am going to stop.

Having spent the better part of the last month inside staring at a computer screen, I had the revelation yesterday that it's no way to live, and I'm longing as I haven't for months to be off on my bike, smelling the road kill and eating the amoeba(s?ae?) of a foreign land. Currently sitting in the library trying to get a start on my grammar assignment, a text comparison of a prevaricating press release from Amanda Vanstones office and a slap on the wrist from Human Rights Watch officially condemning the detention of children- both involve manipulations of language that make my brain boil and I'm inclined to go home and vacuum the floor and think about it another time.