When We Die We Become Secrets

           

            My cat, Amarillo, is afraid of my motorcycle jacket. Whenever I walk into the room while wearing it he runs away.

On Monday I went out and did my laundry. The nasty guy I had to deal with on the Saturday two weeks before was not there. Mondays belong to the Korean couple who seem to work quite happily together. He greeted me when I came in.  Everyone was friendlier on this day for some reason, other than the angry voice of the swearing shouting guy that could be heard later from my window as he stormed along Queen Street in his baseball cap shouting, “Fuck!”.

            I finished my second reading of and making notes on Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals” and I did the same for Gabrielle Roy’s story, “My Almighty Grandmother”. For Nietzsche it was the ingenious renaming by Christian priests of the bad conscience as “sin” that served to enslave humanity. In reading Gabrielle Roy and in trying to draw connections between secrets, openness, exile and belonging, I thought of death as an exile. Death is a disappearance that turns the one it exiles into a secret.

            I finished watching the few episodes of Dragnet that I’d downloaded. Though some of the stories were interesting, they weren’t consistently compelling enough to bother viewing any more of them. Life is too short to waste time watching actors pretending to be cops pretending to be people.