Raking muck in the factory farm of Life

Having another blue day, sat here unraveling the various issues that may, or may not, be to blame for the blue. Let's make a list:

Democracy Now last night on Face TV (true TV) - Obama on his stance on Israel called out by a classic muckraking journalist for London's "Independent" paper for using worn-out empty cliche's to justify Israel's use of force against Syria - yet another middle-eastern country in the firing line, fighting for their feelings. Dark bearded men running, guns, bombs, missiles, dead people lying still, as if relieved. A young boy with elegant Arabic words on an A4 sheet pinned to his chest. Incomprehensible to me in terms other than cliche, the whole lot of it. As Jack Nicholson famously shouted in a movie once: "You can't handle the truth!"  How true, Jack. I can't. I need my simplifying cliches.

Looking after 'teaching' preschoolers for slave wages yesterday in work I'd hoped would be apolitical and easy enough to allow me to write and think my own, creative, positive, hopeful thoughts. Two days in a row of this and I'm noticing the cracks in the system of commercial child-care and being distracted and weighed down by them.

Capitalist child-care: A relatively new money-spinner latched onto by the blokes, who invariably own these 'learning centres', so called, that are run by woman 'teachers', so called, who enjoy upholding the rules that make child-care simple - on the surface - with easy aims and basic rules: safety; 'healthy' food; routine; getting out and about; making 'good' choices. No drugs, kids! No spilling your water, either.

Children aren't to snuggle too much or become dependent, least of all on the temp! Bottoms are there for sitting on, please use them for that purpose, don't climb all over Sally (even if she welcomes it). Mat-time is reading time. No feet on the table. Food is to be eaten, all the same, at fixed times, from matching plates, cups and spoon, on matching, regularly disinfected, round white tables, sat on all-green chairs, turns taken with the tongs to get ONE PIECE OF ORANGE, ONE APPLE.

Factory farmed childhood. I'm too free-range for my own good, daresay. I'm not going to survive, any more than the sensitive kids will.

No response from Australia to my article. Hope they will publish it is all but dashed after a week of no news. Should I ring them? Should I send it elsewhere? Should I abandoned it and write something quite different? Focus on the memoirs? Send an essay to Dance Australia about the ballet years? Send an American story to an American paper? Blog or not blog? Start a second dance class at another community centre? Who knows.

Reading Kafka right now doesn't exactly help, feels like his K is tunneling into a parallel abyss. Maybe I need some simple rules to make sense of it all on the surface, leave the depths and the tunneling to the moles and other creatures who see better in the dark, or better still, don't see at all.

The cat peed on our bed again.

The drip from the roof in the rain needs fixing - again.

The garage door is swollen stuck in the damp, that's a first at least.

ONE THING AT A TIME! But which one, teacher...?

For the real teachers!
And the real caregivers (and muckrakers) too.

Seriously (much),
Sacha