There are two doves that come to the chimney stack outside my window every day. Sometimes they look wet and cold othertimes they look contented and bask in the sunlight. They watch me as I type. What on earth do they see of my world? How strange I must look sitting alone inside staring at an illuminated box.
Utilitarian Calculations
“It is possible to argue, using (Peter Singer’s) utilitarian calculations, that the deaths of thousands of people (in the World Trade Center) whose trivial consumer satisfactions included the imposition of fundamental misery and death on hundreds of thousands of chickens reduced the amount of pain and suffering in the world.”
– Karen Davis, UPC
Sounds perfectly logical to me… Kevin Atkinson is attempting to persuade me of his anti-animal rights views and has directed me towards https://www.animalrights.net/ (site no longer exists). This is one of their daily quotes which I assume designed to prove the folly of animal rights logic and morality. Needlesstosay it has had no such affect on me so far!
Mediteranian Canal Dream
I’ve just found this dream scribbled on a piece of paper shoved in a notebook. It clearly displays the date as: 15 July 2004, 12:58:32. I have therefore included it in Ringpull for that date although today, the day of adding is 10th of February 2006.
I leave our room and walk out onto the hot street. I know in advance what I am going to do. This is a canal dream. Although here, here in the mediteranian the heat and dust raising from the stone beneath my feet at every footfall will be in direct contrast to the cool murky water. I dive in and break the surface. Flipping through the looking glass I open my eyes expecting to be blinded by the water. I am suprised by how clear the water is from this side. I swim along the bottom for awhile before catching sight of the light above, I rise, gulping air as my head breaks the surface. I swim along the canal for some distance, and it is only when I consider getting out and attempt to make for the canal’s stone edge that I realise that there is a flowing current and that it might be stronger than me, that I might not make the shore. It isn’t that the current has just crept up like some mischievious water spirit, but because I wasn’t travelling against the current it hadn’t become aparent til now. As I reach my leg, dripping and splashing over the hot dry stone I climb from the canal. I walk along the street. There is a father and son working on a dusty building site, they watch my progress and the human slug trail I leave as I march down the street in my soaking clothes.
Kathryn is at the bureau de change. The gentleman behind the counter is plesant enough. Kathryn is explaining how much money she is passing to him. She points to some assorted change and tells him that “they are equal” or “it is equal” but equal to what I cannot fathom. The situation turns. She is rude to me, and the gentleman behind the counter is embarrassed, I am angered. I walk away. She does not go back for the money and declares that she too will walk away. I see that she means it. She says she wishes she was back at work. I know then that something is very wrong. She doesn’t need me anymore I can see it. I know that there is going to be some truth. Some truth that I am not going to like to hear. I am angered not that the situation is as it is, that being, it transpires, that Kathryn is in love with and having a relationship with someone she works with, but that she hasn’t told me the truth before now. She’s wasted my time, and time is precious. I ask who he is and am corrected but not answered, “she” she says and leaves it at that.
How can I not be enough? I just don’t see it. I would do anything, but it wouldn’t be enough. I storm away. Thunder clounds roll across my face with the knotting of my brows and the darkening of my countanance. I come to a strange room. Half indoor half out, it’s floor consists of some boards over water connected on axes, so that so long as you stand in the center they do not tip. Each square board contains one smaller than the last with it’s own axes. Paul Daniels is stood in the bottom right of the room. He is transfering gravel from something to a wheelbarrow. As the gravel disappears it reveals behind where it was quite lethal looking spikes concealed beneath the surface. Paul occasionally takes a handful of gravel and sticks it down his trousers. All the while he mutters as a gimp or a submissive. I assist him in his task with transfering the gravel. I don’t believe it was Paul Daniels. I think I just thought it was. Maybe it was, I don’t know. Certainly once I had decided it was that was whom I saw.