An Elephant of One's Own

(Nah, not "soportando". I don't do false friends.) The newsgroup asl (alt.support.loneliness) was my first port of call on the Net: believe or not, I was there before I even discovered e-porn. On careful reflection, I'm somewhat glad that Google coprophagised the first few terabytes of Dejanews when it assumed custody. Only somewhat, though. I'm almost certain that somewhere in the frozen wastes of drear - the intense, earnest discussions about whether it was right for an Italian maths professor to use words like "cunt" and "giggle" in his posts ( I thought it was, but what did I know?) - there must have been something of merit, or at least something capable of inspiring a little harmless nostalgia years later: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.support.loneliness/OJpJOzbYrF4/M0CpdcQ6mZ0J Or perhaps I deceive myself. Perhaps I did only ever write shyte. This reflection comes to you after I find myself attacked in the comments section of someo...

Mi estado físico ya no es para ponerme a escribir una comedia, sea para la tele, sea para la gran pantalla, y ponerme a buscar agentes y todo el intríngulis. Pero alguien tiene que hacerlo: es un regalo. La historia arranca cuando algún joven o alguna jovencita (poco importa) de movimientos torpes, piel oleaginosa y discretas perspectivas sociales se levanta bostezando, mira el reloj de la cocina y se da cuenta de que llegará tarde a su clase universitaria de Fisica Cuántica con Enfoque de Género ( ¡Enfoque! ¡Enfoque! ¡Enfoquitifoque! ). Baja la escalera de dos en dos, llega a la calle, se pone a buscar taxi. Delante de él/ella, una señora mayor ya se está aprestando para subir al único taxi disponible. Nuestro héroe se lanza por delante: "Perdón, señora, pero soy ateo ." La vieja dama y el taxista se miran asombrados, y espetan al unísono: "Bueno, ¿y qué?" En cuestión de segundos, el taxi se está perdiendo entre el denso tránsito matutino, y el ateo, ...

A quick glance at this blog and you'll see that these days I scarcely do blog posts any more. No one seems to want them. Instead, I do tweets. No one wants those either, but at least they take up less time. Here's my latest one: I understand not going gently into that good night. But that's no reason to kick the nurse. This post is intended to be a footnote to the above, just in case it's not clear enough. Shouldn't take long, but you never know with me. Sometimes I need to say quite a lot to know what I think. The Dylan Thomas reference: it was his dying father he was on about. Now I don't know what sort of a Dad Dylan had: maybe he was the sweetest and wisest of souls, maybe he was a bit of a plonker, maybe he was a dispenser of frequent beatings like the one I had. Point is, he was (we gather from the poem) on his deathbed, and he was Dylan's dad. And the thing about when Dad is on his deathbed is, it doesn't seem to matter whether he was a bit of a...