The Red Dragon and Peter Sellers

I bet the BBC wouldn't have bothered covering this at all if they hadn't made the person on the card look so bitchy. Look at him. Hands on hips, big angry Charlie Brown mouth. Insisting on his right to die. The sort of person who'd join a demonstration in that spirit, except obviously once the card becomes relevant, he can't anymore. So he gets a bitchy-looking card to do it for him. Neat. I don't want one. I pay taxes and an inhumane amount of money for insurance; no health system, whether public or private, is going to cut corners on my interventionist resuscitation with my complicity. No matter how neat and bitchy the card looks.

I'm in a mood - worked myself into an exhausted stupor yesterday and today promises to be more of the same. Because of all the interviewing and the trying-to-make-people-tell-me-things-they-aren't-supposed-to-tell-me, my job is emotionally exhausting. Although I'm aware what a blessing it is that I'm not a 'real' journalist who has to try to interview the relatives of murder victims or Austrians who have been rescued from their batshit crazy father's basement prison. Nonetheless work exhaustion makes me feel like my life is being pulled out from under me. Which I think is combining with some elements of modern public discourse to contribute to my apocalyptic-ish angst. I really understand Christian Survivalist nutjobs a lot of the time. When your life is slipping away from you in an absolutely artificial societal contract where you need to do long hours of busy work to keep your families in the toys, when your politicians behave like monkeys and when human life is overtly not at a premium anymore, then the apocalypse really starts looking like an attractive direction for your life to take.

This is me in a room full of Peter Sellers in Bonn which somehow captures my mood at this particular moment. You can only just make out the Peter Sellerses on the wallpaper, holding a briefcase and sticking out an arm. At the moment, you could nicely encapsulate my angst by saying I feel like I'm living in a world full of Peter Sellerses, who aren't being funny.