an excerpt from a book im reading
bits of me are falling apart by William leith
humourous, but i have no idea why im reading it
since its abt some middle age guys crisis

I stride on, holding today's baton. It contains the woes of the world, stories about guns, about young people with guns, about the nervous market, about this year's good exam results, which are the result of a con, a Ponzi scheme, and which, therefore, are not good exam results. They are bad exam results. The baton tells me about the death of love and the end of sport and the baton asks why.

The baton does not know.

The baton does not really want to know.

The coffee has made me waspish and edgy. But the endorphins from walking are making me loose and relaxed. A perfect combination you may think. It's like speedball, the heroine to make you loose and the cocaine to perk you up- I was going to say poor man's speedball, but thats not what i mean.

I dont do drugs now.

Now i do my 15000 steps every day.

Now im marching along, towards the river and supermarket, with its Alpine cupola, passing the specialist underwear outlet, holding the baton that contains the woes of the world.

'Why?' says the baton.

But the baton does not want to know. Everything falling apart, kids with guns, banks not able to explain where their money's gone, house price's crazy, monogamy on its last legs, levels of unhappiness soaring, levels of clinical depression off the scale, graffiti everywhere, perverts looming, children missing. What was it Joan Didion said? The centre is not holding, that's right- the centre is not holding, a quote from somebody, Yeats i think, not sure but I tinhk it's Yeats, Didion writing about the San Franscisco of 1967, telling us about the coldness and alienation that went along with the sex and drugs, and now things are the same apart from oen detail, which is that the coldness and alientation have a corporate feel, and my instinct here is to say things should be fine, but they're not, things should be fine, but we're not happy, really not happy at all, when you think about the fact that we're so incredibly comfortable it seems weird that we're not happy, but our comfort comes at a price, it comes at a high price. There's something murky and wrong about our way of life, something shifty and treacherous, and we can feel it, can't we, and it's beginning to tell, things are starting to give, things are starting to run out. We're eating away at the seed capital. We're using up the telomeres. We cant' go on doing things the way we're doing them, can't borrow any more, can't write anymore cheques. These are the woes of the world.

'Why?' says the baton.

But the baton does not really want to know.

And as i march along, approaching Bobby who is a heroine addict-turned-alcoholic sitting on a bench, sunning his wide red face - as i march along, I toss the baton into a bin, it spins satisfyingly and lands on the pile of dog shit the riverside dog walers have been considerate enought ot put into plastic bags. Shit in plastic - a greater environmental headache, I would have thought, than shit per se. Tell me I'm wrong.