Oh poor little me. What a terrible time I've had. Pity party, pity party pity party.

I don't suffer self-indulgence much. And I am pretty intolerant of others' whinging about trivial stuff (though I don't show it). Am I a hypocrite, or just diplomatic? Can't stand old people.

And that is what this is all about. No, I'm not ageist. I believe old (and I mean ancient kind of old) people should have equality etc etc. I just don't like them.

Every time I see an old person I feel irritated and angry. And I can pin point the very first occasion I felt like this: It was the day after my Dad died. He had had a work accident and ended up as a quadriplegic for over thirteen years from a botched operation. Eventually he chose to live in a nursing home to relieve the burden on my mother (she has always been prone to "do silly things" when under great stress). Anyway, I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room for an ultrasound (I was 20 weeks pregnant) and I remember staring at this old codger thinking,
"Why aren't you dead?"

Then I found out baby was a boy. My mum had only ever had girls and Dad was raised in the British Royal Navy tradition, and so he always secretly wanted a boy. My sister only had a daughter. I wish I had made that appointment 24 hours earlier.

So now Mum is in a nursing home too, because of a stroke. She's not overly old. There are heaps more fogey people there. They stare at you with faded wet eyes, and you can feel the resentment they have of your youth. Every time I go there it is like entering a nightmare, you know, those ones with the corridors and grisly spectres ...

I've smelled worse places. This one only reeks of old people-type vegetables and plug-in air fresheners. But the air is not fresh. It is old and stale like them.

My sister once commented how angry and bitter I was. But she works as an occupational therapist in aged care so she is trained, basically, in making it remote and impersonal.

There is so much more that impacts me about this that I won't bore you with. I remember doing a sketch once, when I was out and about, of a senior citizen enjoying his cappucino at a seaside cafe. I scribbled next to it "Old person not in a wheelchair or in a nursing home or dead". I planned a painting of a skull on top of an amplifier (a practice amp) and I was going to call it "Practice for the real thing" or "Really Still Life". It tends to all come out in my art. My paintings are miserable things.

There is only so much levity that you can try and manipulate your own self with. At some point blackness and darkness turns inwards so others are not inflicted with it. My apologies.

Loss and death and mess. What can you do without any power? It haunts, it follows. I am looking through my sketch book now and it even disturbs me.
"The old cling to life with every urine-stained fibre of their fabric
while young men are swaddled in their grave clothes."

I'm so tired now.

My apologies, again.