It’s never-ending. All the Things that have ever died from start to finish. And still they keep on coming…
So. I’ve been left out in the rain. Put out. Abandoned. There’s no easy way to say it, is there? No honey coating the obvious truth here. And I know what you’re thinking, so don’t pretend otherwise. You’re wondering how I could have been so gullible as to hope for a different outcome. Doesn’t it […]
Of the dead futon it can be said that it lies slumped like no other discard. It is the most bodily of laneway deaths, short of finding an actual body. When the time comes and I’m lying in the gutter breathing my last as Life’s Great Garbage Truck rumbles towards me, this is how I […]
There’s been an epidemic of dead mops in the neighbourhood recently. Perhaps they are victims of a particularly vigorous and brutal season of Spring cleaning, but it got me wondering as to why mops need die at all. When I was at school, the caretaker had a mop as ancient as the head of Medusa […]
In years to come, on cold winter nights when folk gather around their fires to warm frozen fingers and swap stories, somebody will inevitably ask, ‘Does anybody remember the Great Grass Catcher Cull of 2011? Spring, I think it was.’ Indeed it was, for I was there on that crisp, clear morning as the first […]
I like this one a lot because, in the words of the great Homer Simpson, it works on so many levels. Consider the set-up. There is the broken statue, or at least the bulk of what remains of it and then, alongside it, placed deliberately and neatly in a blue milk crate as if commenting […]
I found these dead balls sitting in a polystyrene box like so much wizened fruit. What to do with old balls? Look, I’m trying to be serious here. Straight face. This is a real problem. It’s not unusual, over the course of a lifetime, for a person to collect a number of balls of different […]
Every oil heater knows – as only an oil heater can know – that winter is the dying season. All summer long, these elegant columns lie dormant, their oil still and silent, waiting for that first downward shift in air temperatures which signifies they will soon be called into service. Sadly, not every oil heater […]
Upside down and facing a blank wall. Is there a more ignominious death for a television? It’s not uncommon to see televisions smashed to pieces in their disposal, as if subjected to an explosive, deranged act of vengeance for everything they have delivered to our lounge rooms – they are the instruments of the devil, […]
Everybody has experienced a ‘dead’ battery from time to time, but this is a dead ‘dead’ battery – squashed, mangled and corroded. Not a pretty sight at all. Once upon a time, the humble AA battery epitomised convenience and freedom. The battery liberated light, sound, communication, time itself, making them all portable and instantly available […]
What’s going on here? I was mildly shocked to discover a cache of dumped teddies not so long ago and now here’s another one, a lone lost teddy left out in the laneway. Is this a new social phenomenon, like granny dumping, a response to the pressures of living with too many teddies and the […]