Gazette No 82

Last year has been left in the dust. Tomorrow we make dreams. Are you getting older? No! I’m sure that you are not. We all live forever until that last breath.

Tim Heath (who won our Burnie Gold Cup last year) has gone to Queensland droving, well not droving, writing. I find him stimulating and we will keep featuring him.

Did you make New Year’s resolutions and have forgotten what they were? I watched Collateral last night. Tom Cruise’s character says that we procrastinate by watching too much daytime television and thereby miss our vocation and our goals. Of course his goal and success was to be a hit man who runs out of ammunition in the end. I could have been a hit man but for the fact that I can’t shoot straight. There is a lesson in this for all of us.

Burnie, I see, is now heavily into the arts. Think about it.

I’m writing on my Sonnets Of Religion. It is amazing how cunning are the neurons that seem powerful and all knowing and have software in each cell to build a thousand human beings and replicate all this knowledge in each cell and because they have built themselves this marvellous structure around a bone skeleton that keeps moving about freely, influencing the environment to the latter’s detriment. I read in New Scientist that the young ones, in this generation, will live for a thousand years - plus. Good luck to them. One can play uncountable inane computer games in that time; or listen to unchallenging pop songs and have lots of internet sex, and chop down the trees and kill whales, cows and the chickens... and pretend their sages’ poetry comes from God.

I have seen seagulls infected by lice;

I have seen the Tasmanian Devils with virus;

I have seen road kill;

I have seen sewage spilled;

I have seen forests murdered;

I have seen girls cry;

I have seen women beaten;

I have seen teachers persecuted;

I have seen police challenged;

I have seen old people abandoned;

I have seen impulsiveness everywhere.

© Joe Lake