On a Shaky Planet.

I don't feel to write anything as nothing I've got to say is important compared to what's happening around the world. My beloved girlfriend, Nicorette, who I have had many adventures with and have written much about, most recently when we were in India, is in Kathmandu at the moment. Thankfully she survived the city's earthquake downfall but for many days she has been living under a plastic sheet, with food and water in short supply.

Now I read the Nepalis are semi-rioting over relief supplies as the govt. hasn't got it's act together in relief organization and distribution. She is a very hardy woman and a survivor, and one of the most caring humanitarians I've ever met. I know she will not allow herself to be evacuated but will stay to help the populace in any way she can. In the five months she's been living there she has forged many very close friendships and she will not leave them for her own comfort and safety. Thus we who love her worry and wait patiently for more news and her eventual coming home, when she decides the time is right. There has always been a bed in my flat for her.

Nic in Delhi.

Finally the cyber cafes opened and she wrote to tell me her boyfriend's aunties collected scraps of food from the shattered market-place and they cooked it under the plastic-sheet shelter. And water-trucks have delivered water to most survivors in the city. She had moved to a sturdy building the day before the quake and it didn't topple upon her. She's pleading for tourists to come back as the local economy depends upon it, it's one big way to help, maybe I'll go there later in the year.

The other night I watched a current affairs bulletin on Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State in northern Iraq and felt great admiration, support and kinship with them. I am not ashamed I wrote my Blog, "In Defense of the Warrior Spirit", for all that I'm basically a peacenik, as sometimes, in this shaky, clashing world one has to fight, for one's ideals, one's country, one's very survival, and it's honorable to do so. I don't mean stumbling into wars of imperialism or religious hatred for the sheer blind money-grubbing joy of doing it. Sometimes in history there are just fights to support and the Kurds etc fighting against the Islamic State, in my heart, is one of them.

Readers of my Blog come in waves, for weeks nobody reads me, then for weeks hundreds per day jump on the ghost train. I don't give a fuck. I enjoy the creativity, it gets me high. I practice my craft, much of the writing is crap, it's just me practicing my poetic prose and through-lines, one has to sift among the hundreds of stories and hopefully find a gem, like hunting for something interesting in a chaotic psycho-labyrinth. It's also a diary where I record events and get the hairs out of my cake-hole. And I get to stash my writing here in this Blog, like a safety deposit box, all in one place, out of harms way. (If no nuclear war wipes the digital world.)

 As I've related, over and over, in my sordid tales, I am broke and semi-desperate, living in a dumpster of a State Housing known as Suicide Towers with bill collectors ever at my door caterwauling for payment. It's like out of some Russian folk-tale of two hundred years ago, the starving artist who can't sell his work and dies in an ash-heap. I need to make money, somehow, and so I'm going to try to earn something from this writing. There's a lot worse writing than this out there and I've just got to try something, otherwise I'm dead in the water.

 I have to warn any reader that soon I'm going to delete the numbered stories, starting from 1) to 34) as I'm then going to shift those stories over to Kindle Books on Amazon, the first book with the title "Vagabond Freak " in a series that will be named "The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat"." While the first book will be up soon, the rest will take me the next two years but once I learn how to format and template it I'll be off and running. I've got 7 books stashed here with The Punk Poofy Cat and it will be a labor of love to collate, edit, improve and publish them.

So read this guff for free while you can then go to Kindle Books and buy my work all put together as a holistic art-form, from yours sincerely, and help keep this poor ragged poofy cat alive.  Boo hoo hoo, Me-YOW!

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.