notes from the week that was..

THE ACTUAL DATE IS FRIDAY JULY 11TH,NOT WHAT YOU SEE ON THE LINE ABOVE HERE...!


Had one of the most surreal moments of my life today. It kinda started two days ago, when I was reading a local newspaper, and saw of one the tiny articles, in the inside column, about a plane crash in the Sudan. It said that 118 people had died in it, leaving a two-year-old boy the only survivor. I immediately thought of Miss Wyoming, the Douglas Coupland book about a girl who is the sole survivor of a plane crash. I also thought shit how do you explain to that boy the horror, and yet the strange responsibility of being the only one to withstand the thing that has parents could not, that so many others could only give in to. The scene the book describes meticulously the feelings of the woman that survives, and narrates her response like this: she goes to the nearest town, not sticking around for the emergency services, just getting away as fast as she can. She goes to a house in the town, choosing it because its occupants are obviously on holiday. She lives there for a while, studies their lives, wearing their clothes, washing in their bath, eating their food. Then she cleans everything and leaves before they arrive home. I guess I could only pray that that boy will find a similar refuge from the attention, the imposition, inquisition and jealousy of others.

Today I read a story about a boy who, at 20 (or thereabouts) went into a coma after being in a car crash. Yesterday he woke up. After 19 years. Karen, in Girlfriend was in hers for 17. Then she woke up to find that time has moved on, she had been sleeping, she had given birth to a daughter, and her friends and families lives had hung in suspension, waiting, barely daring to blink in case they missed something. This boy woke up to find that it was no longer 1984, that he had a baby daughter (of 19), and that Mom, Pepsi and Milk were the first words that made it from his head to his mouth.

Man, if I was Douglas Coupland, I’d be cacking it just now