Medium Delirium

Last weekend, while traversing the short distance between the parked car and the pavement, I stepped squarely on a nail that speared through the soles of my sandals and sunk a little way into my big toe. It was pretty small and skinny, and the thickness of the sole thankfully absorbed most of its length, so the wound was shallow. Still, it seems like an extraordinary case of a small misfortune, since in ‘Clean and Green’ Singapore it’s not common to find construction debris littered in heavily populated areas. What’s more, the nail must have been sitting straight up – how unusual. And unfortunate.

Being as superficial as it was, the wound didn’t hurt beyond the initial 3 seconds of penetration. The tetanus jab I got the next morning, though, left me with an achy arm and neck for 3 days straight, and set me back 65 bucks. A small cost for 10 years of coverage, I guess, but no help to the sense of affliction.

I’m currently embarking on the quest to get a driving license, about 15 years later than when I should have, with dragged feet and great reluctance. For 15 years I’ve managed to get away with the excuse that I didn’t have a car anyway, so learning to drive would be for naught. That has changed, so my excuse now falls flat. It has become apparent why I should have learnt this at 18, when I would have had an open schedule and a youthful tolerance for discomfort and inconvenience. Getting to the driving school involves a 10 minute walk from the MRT station, which is perfectly fine in good weather, the kind of weather Singapore is geographically predisposed to never, ever have. It’s either raining, which is a bother, or diabolically hot, which is hell. Drenched in either rain or my own sweat, I then reach to find myself bobbing in a sea of 18 year olds, which makes me feel positively ancient. On top of which, demand is so high and supply is so low that it’s nearly impossible to book a practical lesson. Which is how, despite registering with the school 3 months ago, I have yet to touch a single steering wheel.

Between watching The Odyssey (brilliant) last night and multiple videos of the massive flash flood in Nepal today (devastating), I’m quite certain that my dreams tonight will feature some kind of deluge. The footage of the flood brings a lump to my throat. In this age of rampant A.I. intervention, it’s almost unbelievable that a natural disaster of such scale playing out in 20 seconds on a screen is actually real. To imagine the extent of its destruction is a depressing enterprise. Watch as buildings crumble and are swept away, and imagine being in one of those rooms, sitting at the kitchen table, or on the bed, or the sofa, wondering what in the world that ungodly, guttural growl of a noise is – thunder? To not know, while you sit scrolling absently through your dashboard, or stir a cup of tea, or water a pot of flowers, that these are the last moments of your life, and this is how you will spend it. For the ‘I love yous’ and ‘I’m sorrys’ and ‘I wish I could’ves’ to remain hidden away in that special deep place in your heart, biding the time they thought they would have.

Does the contemplation of death make any footprints on the lives we live? Perhaps if nothing else, it reminds us that the shore is finite.