How has disability shaped my outlook? Someone asked me this, suggested I ponder the matter. Splendid. Except that it's a bit like living inside a hurricane. With so much to experience, who has time to ponder?Let us deconstruct a representative, albeit intense, moment in disabled time.Bedtime.  Accompanied by fatigue. The latter known to induce pilot error. Wheelchairs included. Which explains why in the course of readying myself for bed last night, whipping the chair around to head for the bathroom, Read more [...]

Why the day begins at 4:45 AM is anyone's guess, but certain anxieties have already begun creeping through the darkness, so what the hell. Some staring into space until the central heating kicks in at 5:30 AM, followed by more space staring, then dropping one leg, then the other, off the side of the bed, abdominals kicking into their muscular max, and I am sedentary. Notwithstanding, of course, standing. That is to follow, and it is a slow and delicate matter, the extension of the right paralyzed Read more [...]

Rolling down El Camino Real, there is nothing royal in the distance, except a royal pain in the arse. Orange worksite bunting is signaling me that some part of the way ahead is closed. Which it had better not be, not entirely, because I am not taking any shit when it comes to wheelchair access, not today. Which is a good thing. For me, definitely, and for the greater world, possibly. As for the latter, I could not care less at this moment. Out of my way. And if I do have to go out of my way for the Read more [...]

In A Passage to India, Forster's young Indian doctor hero...if we can call him that...goes to one particularly extraordinary length in his efforts to socialize with the British. He sets up an outing at some nearby caves, involving a short train ride. The party is to assemble at the local railway station one morning, ride to the place, see the caves, return. It couldn't be simpler. But this is India, after all, and things are not simple. The doctor arrives with his retinue of servants the evening Read more [...]

Tom the landlord will be most distressed by the morning's developments. They are spilling over, developments, leaving a trail of refuse upon the earth. Trashy, one word what's happening. Which amounts to this. Menchu, of Team Filipina, emptied my rubbish and recycling, and now one of the bins is full. More than full, actually. Overflowing. Menchu, in fact, left a bag of rubbish next to one of the bins, positively adjacent. Tom most likely will take care of it. Although not without some amusement. Read more [...]

If I can't quite believe it, that is because it's not quite believable, how Martin and I and his wife Pang could have been staring through the cold winter glass of a Brighton restaurant, discussing things like the burnt out pier...just weeks ago, weeks that number in the single digits...and now one of us is dead.  Presenting the facts, logically it is the person with the leukemia, the one with the chemotherapy tube dangling from his neck, who should be dead.  And, yes, this is the case.  Read more [...]