A Wet Week!

Not outside. Outside was warm, some days hot, London sitting under sifting air redolent with fried viruses, some still kicking and looking for a home. A nice cosy home within which to breed. Idiots! If they get into the wrong human, say a used one which is on the point of biodegrading and returning to carbon atoms, they destroy their own refuge. A bit like humans – ! Casually destroying poor old Gaia.

Or as M constantly reminds me Gaia will go on once we, the virus which has infected it for a couple of million years suffocate ourselves. God, viruses are stupid! (Are viruses proof God is stupid?) (It all seems a bit pointless.)

Week unpack: it all started with my submission of my beautiful novel to Galley Beggar Press, bursting with hope. What a lovely thing it is. Of course, once I pressed send I saw how the first paragraph should have been written. I shrugged. Gone is gone. Fate has been triggered.

Then I got the extortion email. ‘We have identified copyright infringement on your website…..pay £hundreds.’. A picture of Trump. Of TRUMP! That bastard! I knew somehow he would get vengeance. One thing he can’t stand is ridicule. All demagogues can’t stand ridicule. See http://jonelkon.com/report-from-earth/ If you read all 4 you could die laughing, saving the virus the trouble. Hopefully the only pictures you will now see were made by me. Because, dear reader, I had the cheek to cut the Trump head out of a Reuters picture and put it on a frog. So these piucrights predators in their algorithmic crawls over the web had found my tiny infraction and decided to punish me for it.

I paid. And crawled all over every post I had ever made and deleted every damn picture I couldn’t remember taking with my camera or received from a friend. OBVIOUSLY Prickrights, there were NO copyright pictures there whatsoever.

THEN underneath that email I spotted another from them! This time they had spotted a tiny cityscape I had inserted from the web. Tiny! And wanted to charge me over £1k for it! I phoned. I moaned. I fumed. I foamed. Eventually Jason agreed to a 40% discount. Bastards! My blogs live in the tiniest lost disregarded outer rim of the web galaxy. Extorting money from me is cruelty and bullying.

So that buggered my mood just a bit.

So then came the notice of a Bus Lane Violation from some obscure Council in the Midlands, demanding £55 because, following my satnav on my visit to Shropshire, I had been guided straight through a pedestrian precinct – about 50 yrds long, signposted with the tiniest signs any cash-strapped Council could possibly get a kid to write with pencil on a piece of recycled toilet paper.

None of that is even slightly important.

Or rather, it disappeared completely when Sis phoned to tell me my mom was dying.

Mom at her 91st birthday

After almost ten years of one of the cruellest diseases ever invented by ngkj, Alzheimer’s. Next to Cancer, the final proof of the non-existence of ngkj. Along with war, famine, earthquakes and tsunamis, racism, guns, persecution, necrotising fasciitis, and Trump.

So mum was on the last stages of this horrible journey.

Sis facetimed me from San Diego where she lives with Mum and has been caring for her. ‘Listen’, she said ‘the Nurse says we must talk to her. Even though she seems completely gone mentally. She’s transitioning – ‘ American for dying – ‘The Nurse says, tell her it’s ok to go, tell her to let go, that we’ll be fine and we love her.’

She held the phone up to Mama’s transitioning face and I did that. I said that. I also told her I am Johneeeee! which she always called me. I called her Mutti, which I always called her. Then, frustrated and almost shattered by tears I said, ‘If you can hear me, if you can understand me, try to smile. Come on, smile! Show me – ‘

And she did.

I swear her open mouth shaped itself into as close to a smile as her ravaged face could manage.

How do we know how much mentality remains at the end of an Alzheimer’s patient’s life? What if it’s far more than we could imagine?

….anyway, so a wet week. Funeral’s tonight. So many lovely wishes from my beloved friends, virtual and physical. All her old friends have vanished, but for a couple. People do scoot off when someone gets Alzheimer’s. The funeral will be on Zoom, of course. I dread it.

So I have joined the ranks of the orphans. I have been incredibly lucky to have had a mother until my old age, to have had a sister and brother-in law to look after her, to have had a wonderful brother to help.

So I’ll dry up now. After the funeral.

I naturally, of course, goes without saying, love you all.