Spin Cycle

Every nation seems to be struggling with national debt.  "The rich get richer, the poor get poorer." If I had a penny for every time somebody said that to me over the years, I'd be able to buy a fancy car.  But I don't drive these days.

Advertising works.  And it's everywhere: on the TV, on billboards, on the walls of public lavatories, in the newspapers, in glossy magazines ... it's everywhere.

There's something powerful in adverts that triggers desire.  The ad men are pros.  We buy things as a result and then we leave them to gather dust.  But it's good for the economy ... whatever that really is.  Sometimes, it just seems like a mechanism which transfers money from the masses to a club of elite billionaires.

Governments come and go, as do periods of boom and bust.  The cycle continues.  But eventually, the wheels might wear out.   The tyres will go bald and the wheel bearings will fail.

What happens after that is anybody's guess. 

What a State to Be In

It was like one of those old American movies where somebody got a communication and they had to travel to a house in distant and long forgotten state.

I arrived.  And, just like in the films, there were cobwebs on top of cobwebs and the dust sheets.

But, underneath it all, it was just how it had been the last time I visited.

Things have changed a lot for me, so it was comforting to come here.  Some years ago, I left my dream job in Environmental Services to take a brief secondment and entered the weird world of local taxation.  

The transition became permanent. I wish I could go back.  But I don't remember anything.

It's like the drive partition is full and the stuff I want to download won't fit unless I delete some other stuff.

Everything seems like a struggle.  I start one job, and it creates another.

I thought I had nothing left to say here. And then two things happened: a communication, and a broken peg.

And here I am, in a distant state.