clinging to the wreckage

  At the moment, my life feels like that scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which Luke Skywalker is out exploring Planet Hoth on his Tauntaun and gets attacked by a Wampa. When he fails to return to the base, Han Solo is in a complete panic, realizing that Luke may freeze to death out in the cold. I am Han Solo. It is currently hovering around -10 Celsius with a ‘feels like’ much lower, and I keep staring out of the door looking for the feral cat that I feed and talk to every day. She has been around for years and has coped with a lot, but I fear for her in this temperature. She refuses to come inside or to lose her independence. So, the cat is out in the cold, my soccer team sucks, the president destroying my mental health, work is very high pressure at the moment, my friends are sick or sad or both, and there seems to be no reprieve.  

  What a terrifying time we live in, what a terrifying world. Not only are we led by greed, we actually voted for it. When I say ‘we’, I mean the majority. I have never been a part of the majority, so I don’t know what that feels like, but I see a lot of idiots looking very happy. Their focus? Not environment and climate. Not healthcare. Not peace and collaboration. They care about blocking rights for the LGBTQ community. They care about revenge on people who did their jobs in trying to protect us from election deniers. It’s a time when so many people are filled with jealousy, hatred, and insecurity. Parents look upon childless individuals with despair and envy. Boomers look at remote workers with utter hate and bitterness. Uneducated racists look at immigrants, and fear for their jobs… and they hate anything they don’t understand. All of them look at a changing society and long for a time long-gone to return… so they vote for the right wing, they fall for slogans like ‘make Americ...

  One sentence to replace all happiness: I miss the connection we had before you disappeared. We woke up that one Saturday morning and you said, ‘I feel like getting drunk.’ I suggested that you have a beer while I make breakfast. So, in that bright early morning Madrid sunshine, we had breakfast and got drunk. We laughed and joked, listened to music, kissed, had sex, watched BBC’s Sherlock Holmes.  It’s the crazy moments that I remember. The trip to Casablanca, the trip to London, the cocktail afternoons in Madrid during which we’d take hilarious selfies of ourselves with some character in the background… we’d try to create an optical illusion to make it look like it was a tiny person sitting between and we were putting a finger on their head. In the end, you said you wanted to party, not be in love.  I respected your honesty, and watched you walk away.  

Sometimes it is essential to get very drunk and suffer a terrible hangover so that you are able to appreciate it when you are sober again. There have been times that I have gone through many days with hangovers, and I envied those people who said they had given up drinking and felt great. Recently, I have been sober a lot and, yes, it often feels great, but, like anything, it becomes very boring at times.   A few times in my life I have decided to lose weight, too… I do this moderately, not by going on a diet for 6 months during which you eat no carbs, drink no alcohol, have no fun and no excitement. Instead, I eat small portions of food (any kind of food) during the week; I have fruit for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and any meal for dinner… but always small portions. I don’t eat crisps (chips) between meals, and I don’t have chocolate or ice cream… I don’t drink alcohol. When the weekend comes around, I drink and eat pretty much what I want. Of course, this does not mean that...

  I want to do good; to contribute to society as a whole, to do good work and bring value to my team and my company. I want to help my community, my country, the world, to become better places where people can thrive and not just survive… but there are heavy weights dragging down my hopes and optimisms. When I see a society in which people are being asked to commute in heavy traffic to go to an office just so that office space is filled to please real estate moguls and shareholders that all is well, and I see thousands of people around the world losing their jobs simply to try to bolster profits and stock prices, I struggle to withhold hope. I see a world that we can make better, where we can strive for happiness and make the lives of most people better… but, instead, we try to stick with everything that failed in the past simply because ‘that is the way it has always been.’ People have suffered and, for some reason, that does not make them want to help future generations to avoid ...

  Only two have been the one.   In 1999, in South Africa, I met the first… she departed and moved to California, where I later visited her. Unfortunately, we became so close that we destroyed everything.   In 2013, in Madrid, I met the second. She already had a child and a life partner… and later I moved to the USA.   I now know, those two were ‘the one’. I have no contact with, or knowledge of, the first, but I am still in touch with the second… even if communicating with her is like trying to extract water from a rock. She has two sons now and is married.   Just a fleeting thought to be recorded for posterity. Others have come very close and have been loved deeply… but those two were the one.