Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands, feet, eyes, ears, a working nervous system. Not being paralysed. Not being bombed. No-one I love died while I was asleep. Water at the turn of a tap, a five second walk from here. This water won't make me sick. It has no shit in it, no fracking chemicals, nothing radioactive enough to worry about. I can't set it on fire. Connected to those taps are reservoirs with water in them; it's years since the last drought.
No gas or oil or coal underneath my home. No coal trains in breathing distance. No nuclear power anywhere nearby either.
A fridge full of food. A cupboard full of food. Discovering, thanks to Charlie Wood, a sweetener that doesn't give me hellish despairing mood swings, and which therefore grants me the ability to eat cake mm cake. I went twenty years pretty much without eating cake, so I appreciate it. Cake is fucking good. So is hot chocolate.
= excuse me a moment while I go and make a cup of hot chocolate =
A window from which I can see the sky. The sky itself, huger than thought, huger than the huge clouds in it. The sun poking through those clouds. Life. LIFE. Billions of years of ancestors successfully cheating death and fucking each other and giving birth to each other and then to me. Thanks guys!
Having lived in places full of mice or flies or ants or cockroaches, I am grateful that right now I do not. I'm also grateful that snakes don't come in unannounced.
Having been taught to read. Having been taught not to believe the first thing I think. Having been taught to write. Having been taught to play drums in a world where everyone's looking for a drummer, and therefore finding a path out of the weird loneliness of high school. High school. Primary school. Kindergarten, even though there was that weird girl who said her dad was a cop and he'd shoot me. There were pieces of fruit cut up bite-size and we got to have naps on the floor.
Having experienced loneliness, anxiety, despair, depression, confusion, directionlessness, heartbreak: suffering. It makes you less arrogant, and it's so easy to be arrogant. Suffering is the bridge that lets the world in over your weird walls. I'm grateful though not to have so much of it that I can't think.
My lovely daughters Mei and Alaska Drenth. My lovely partner Hanna Tai, who puts up with me. Friends and family, without whom I'd have, and be, nothing.
People who try. The gloomier the news gets, the more grateful I am to the people who try anyway. The labor movement. The women's movement. The peace movement. The environment movement. Thanks to the love and sacrifice of these good people I get to have a decent life and so do many of the people I love. Thanks to these people I can imagine something other than destruction and despoilation.
OK there is much more but this is long already. The rest can wait for other days. X
