Author: Seraphim Placebo

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While We Wait

While we await our own end, we spend our time as though we were in a never-ending holiday. We do our daily walk, drinking in the impossible beauty of the pre-dawn city, breathing the crisp morning air to the bottom of our lungs… yes, we can still do that! The human did 15 years of formal karate training; karate teaches you how to breathe properly, and years of practise teach you how to use your whole lung capacity. We are certain that this is why, despite our lungs slowly filling with repulsive tumours, we are still able to breathe properly, and enjoy the smell of winter dawn to its utmost…

… we walk through areas that are almost totally different to how they were when we were young, which reminds us that we have at least lived long enough to appreciate these changes. Of course, it’s sad we will never see the changes that will occur, even in the next few years, but even thinking that re-doubles our delight at, currently, being alive…

… we spend about an hour a day, often more, in our garden. We are sure this, too, is good for us. If you are a gardener, you will know that a garden is a lot of work, there’s a lot of forward planning involved, not to mention all the digging/planting/feeding/watering, and weeding. We love seeing our plant babies grow, and bare fruit, whether it’s flowers or Brussels sprouts. We can’t help it, but we are even thinking of putting in another crop of potatoes, even though were aren’t supposed to be going to live long enough to harvest them… it’s just the joy of working the soil, planting the plants, it makes us happy, and we are pleased we have always been into gardening, we’ve gotten pretty good at it in the last 50 years, or so.

We spend hours a day reading, another of our life-long interests. We are working on a large painting. We spend the evenings, if not reading, watching movies, documentaries, and tv series. We recently discovered the entire 12 seasons of ‘Stargate’ were on Netflix… so we watched it from start to finish, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s wonderful to be able to just kick back and wait to die, confident we have taken care of all the important things, and now we can just relax, and enjoy being alive… and we certainly do enjoy it (:

Still Alive

We are still alive!

We have spent the last few months getting ready to die. This has meant, among many other things, totally abandoning our whole SL world. It literally took us a couple of years to do that, it was such a big part of our lives… now it’s gone.

We gave up our addiction to AI-generated art about a year ago. For the last year, it has been almost impossible for us to sit comfortably, long enough, to blog, and that got doubly hard a few months ago, so we just have not been doing so. However…

In the last few months, things have stabilised dramatically for us, that too-good-to-be-true kind of dramatic improvement in living quality. We have spent it frantically setting our affairs in order, re-writing our will, and sending most of our treasures to our sons, who live in the South Island, which, due to government monopolies, is a very expensive place to be sending large paintings and a chainsaw, not to mention boxes and boxes of books… it is usually cheaper to fly, or post things, to Australia than it is to send them from the North Island, to the South. We have largely accomplished all those goals, have got on board with all the organisations available to support the terminally ill… in New Zealand, if you are terminally ill, you hook up with the ‘Hospice’ organisation, and all your medication/doctor visits/general nursing help, with them, is free, which is very nice, because when you are dying of cancer, you can spend a shit-ton of money on those things.

The thing is, all the crappy things that have happened to our body have all been either directly caused by chemo/radiation treatment, or are side-effects of those nasty things. They are all the things that have, miraculously, settled down, recently, and become manageable horrors, lurking in the wings. The thing that is supposed to kill us within the next 3 months, bowel cancer metastasised in our lungs, is barely even noticeable, yet. We bought a cheap ‘kneeling chair’, which has made it possible for us to sit at the computer for far longer than we’ve been able to, in the last few years. So, here we are, blogging again, literally waiting to die.

Every day, since our recently improved life condition, we go for a fifty minute, pre-dawn walk, which is very good for our soul. Above is a picture from this morning’s walk (:

Colorfull

We recently visited the Colorfull Gallery, an exhibition of the private collection of Manoji Yachvili…

… those of you who have known us a long time will remember the huge private collection we used to exhibit in the vast spaces we would build, ever expanding, to house that hungry beast…

… we found this collection to have very much the same aesthetic that our one had… we would happily have included almost every work here. Wonderfully, for us, we had never seen any of these excellent works, so we really enjoyed perusing them. We also really liked this kiwi setup… the human being a Kiwi (from New Zealand), we are always drawn to kiwi’s and Kiwiana in SL, mainly because we so seldom see it…

… we know what it is like to curate and display a collection of this size…

… and we think Manoji Yachvili has done a wonderful job…

… we very much enjoyed our visit (: