The moment you try to define infinity you lose it in essence

This morning I came across a scrap piece of paper on which I had written We somehow come to believe that we will understand the infinite by expanding the finite. Instead, expanding the finite adds more filters.

So. You are warned. We are back to that one topic which can only be answered with a question.

On the same piece of paper, I had also written There is no easy way to talk about personal mystical experiences. It's not (just) that people question them or go sceptical on them. It goes beyond (that, in that) language (itself) is the language of the sceptic.

Infinity. When I was a kid, when I was taught to count, the impression was left that infinity is somehow just 1 digit beyond the last number known to man. But, it's not that at all. If you write down LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN PLUS ONE, you are still firmly in the realm of the finite and you can continue to push back the boundary with LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN PLUS TWO and so on, all the way to LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN PLUS LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN and so on .... Infinity only happens when you finally get tired and stop the count ....

Oops... did you see that happening? I've just sneaked in a definition of the infinite, which is, sigh, as helpful as it is problematic.

The moment you try to define infinity, is the moment where you lose it in essence.

You'll see corporate zombies in a whole different light....

... once you're about 50 pages or so into Walking Stiff, the first of Rachel Caine's Revivalist novels. The first thing you'll learn about Brynn Davis, the leading lady is that her career choices are... shall we say unusual? Following a four year spell in the military in Iraq, we meet her as she is about to begin Day One as a funeral director at Fairview Mortuary. It is expected that her job will involve a dead body or two, but no one warned her how easy it is to land up on a cold slab herself. It seems that someone accidentally invented a drug that brings back the dead and Brynn's new boss has cornered a lucrative black market trade in resurrection.

But that's not the end of it. Once Brynn gets involved with the mysterious (but handsome) Patrick McAllister of Pharmadene, the company responsible for the wonder drug, she is way out of her league, and it's not going to get better any time soon.

Walking Stiff combines a fairly fast page-turning pace with a wonderful cast of characters that you actually want to get to know.

Tales from an African Vet by Roy Aronson - a review (and a perspective)

I finished reading this book a few weeks ago and had I written my review then, it might have been just that. A review. Unfortunately, the book has in my consciousness become entangled in my response to a number of recent news stories, so I will now introduce it to you as a looking glass that exerts a considerable influence on my views on several other issues. I suppose I don't need to tell anyone who Cecil the Lion was, but I doubt whether too many of you are familiar with "King Gamka", the subject and target of the Great Karoo Lion Hunt, but more about him later....

Let's begin with the book, shall we? Tales of an African Vet is a charming collection of writings collected by Dr Roy Aronson over several years chronicling his personal experience in the practice of veterinary science. Dr Aronson is himself the founder of group of veterinary clinics in the Cape Town area. Although I have been taking my cats to the same group for a number of years, it is to a different branch. I do not know him personally. To those unfamiliar with South Africa, I had better add that whole country has only one veterinary training facility, the one at Onderstepoort which is affiliated to the University of Pretoria. Thus, through contacts, colleagues and alma mater, the good doctor had access to a number of veterinary doctors practicing their craft in more exotic fields, allowing him to sit in and participate in the treatment of animals ranging from crocodiles, lions, snakes, cheetahs, elephants, parrots and even the odd dog or two. The book is embellished with a collection of beautiful line drawings as well as photographs. For anyone interested in the management of wildlife or conservation, the book is a fascinating eye opener. We are introduced to vets who treat patients that could seriously injure or even kill them, without meaning to. A mere drop of the drug used to anaesthesize an elephant is toxic enough to kill the person administering it. A baby elephant can affectionately put his handler in hospital. In two instances, venomous snakes are treated. In another case, vets and trackers come face to face with a pride of lions. But the treatments are life changing. A lioness facing potential blindness through a congenital eye condition is successfully treated and a delinquent young elephant is given a lesson in manners. In several cases, the lives of young wild animals are saved through the intervention of veterinary science. I'm sure I already mentioned already that these brave doctors, handlers and doctors often risk personal injury in the performance of their duties, but the overriding objective remains to first do no harm.

And that is the overriding theme of my response to the events currently in the news now. The individuals who went to Hwange National Park, did so with the specific intent to do harm.

In my opening paragraph I referred to an event dubbed the Great Karoo Hunt. Here are the details. Early in June 2015, a three-year-old lion managed to escape from the Karoo National Park. This is an area where lions have only recently been reintroduced after the last wild lion in the area was shot and killed in 1842. Park officials stated that the escapee must have used the opportunity presented by a piece of fence damaged by heavy rain, but, as Dr Aronson mentions in his book, lions are members of the cat family and cats have no problem jumping. For almost three weeks, the Karoo lion evaded skilled trackers and lived on the sheep of nearby farmers. Even so, the overriding objective of this hunt for a lion that the Afrikaans speaking locals began to call Koning Gamka (or "King Gamka") remained to bring him back alive. And this they did. You can go to this link to read more about how they finally found their quarry on a mountain side and had to dart the lion without endangering him and without damaging the rotor blades of the helicopter used to track him in that confined space. Hair-raising stuff. Again, this news story has also increased my respect for Dr Aronson and his colleagues.

Above all, Dr Aronson's Tales of an African Vet providing fascinating insight into some of the valuable work being done at Hoedspruit's Endangered Species Center. I began to take an interest in this facility about a little more than a year ago, as this was the home of Gertjie (and now also Mathimba) a duo of orphaned rhinos who were being cared for at this facility. Dr Aronson's book, however, singles out a breeding program also at Hoedspruit, that is slowly helping the cheetah, the world's fastest land mammal charge back from the threat of extinction.

A general misconception is that, if we simply give wild animals enough space and leave them alone, it will be good enough. Unfortunately, I don't think we can afford the luxury of letting nature take its course anymore. We've left it too late for that. Thousands of miles to the north, in Kenya, 42 year old Sudan is the very last male Northern While Rhino alive. He is a returning emigree from a zoo in Czechoslovakia and if the Northern White Rhino survives at all, there is a high likelihood that it will be through artificial insemination and through the use of surrogacy with another species of rhino. Speaking of Czechoslovakia, it is thanks to a breeding program initiated at Prague Zoo that Przewalski's Horse, the last wild horses of Central Asia were brought back from the brink of extinction and re-introduced to the Steppes.

Letting an animal die of natural causes may have been acceptable, back in the day when most humans faced similar odds when sick or injured, but today, with all of the available technology, doing so now only comes across as cruel and voyeuristic. As Dr Aronson argues, if we can record and document an animal's suffering, then why not intervene...?

Angel at the Bottom of the Well

To the guy who sat on the sidewalk opposite my apartment yesterday afternoon and spent four hours fishing around for something that must have fell into the gutter and down the drainhole...

I hope the wire hanger helped.

I hope you found what you were looking for.

You reminded me of a song I wrote over a year ago, for a girl caught in a desperate situation. I hope the past year brought her healing and happiness, but here's the song:

It's a long way down
From a princess
to a clown
It's a long way down
from a churchyard
to a shanty town
It's a long way down

I'll be your angel
At the bottom of the well
I'll be your angel
in the sooty, smokey pits of hell
I'll be your angel
But who can tell?

(Chords 1st verse: Am-G-Am-G-Am; 2nd verse: F/D-G/D-F/D-G/D-F/D-Am)

Or I hope you woke up in an alternate reality where nothing is lost or missing or missed. (I hope that for the girl too) Go well.

Introducing my new project - Blue Skunk's Dream Shack

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read some of my previous posts or fiction, that I have been fascinated by the malleable nature of reality and perception for some time. What we see, what we experience is so individual. To the exasperation of at least one of my (more) rational writer friends, I believe strongly in the power of subjective realities and inner worlds.

Apparently time and place seem to be the two things that keep humans confined to a matrix like physical reality, that only allows movement in certain directions, in certain ways. But how would our minds behave and react to the sudden removal of such restrictions. What if time is not linear but random... what if we lived an existence where we are continuously and concurrently aware of other versions of ourselves and our worlds and could shift back and forth between those worlds in the same way as we shift from three o'clock to four o'clock, from Monday to Tuesday.

Time locks us to cycles of beginnings and endings, births and deaths. We think of heaven and infinity as something that happens AFTER life, but what if it is merely our addiction to logic, to timelines that forces us to observe a cycle that can only end in one possible way, with our demise. There are various philosophers who allege that the universe is born within the moment of now. That both past and future are a figment of our imaginations. That we can change our lives by changing our memories. Blue Skunk's Dream Shack is my attempt to play with that. To break the attachment to one world, and release as many probable worlds as I can imagine. Above all, the idea is to teach me (and any possible readers) how to stop thinking in lines and to start thinking in all the colors and shades of feelings instead. To create a life that navigates a dreamlike path from one moment to the next, without necessarily adhering to the co ordinates of past or present.

Therefore, Blue Skunk's Dream Shack poses the question: What if you were continuously and concurrently aware of more than one reality, more than one version of yourself. What if you don't know where the next moment will find you. The first instalment, was uploaded earlier today and can be found at this link. It is meant to loosely follow the format of a #tuesdayserial, although I'm not sure what the #tuesdayserial people will make of it.

Not quite #fridayflash fiction - Alice in Sepia

She's an uncaptioned portrait in sepia. Wild eyes. Beautiful wild hair. The type of woman you could imagine riding stags in fairy tale forests. A forgotten scandal. Except, she left the boy, who was me. A secret so well hushed up, a tale so often rewritten that nothing true clings to it anymore.

Who was Alice? In a dream, she gave me a key. Upon waking, I found the missing lock, but here is the riddle. How do I open what is in this realm, with something left behind in that realm.

"I am both sides of the door," said Alice.

"I know," I replied. "That is why I cannot see you at all."

I am an uncaptioned portrait in sepia. I have my mother's wild eyes and hair. Alice separates the film from the page to look down at me, but I cannot make myself smile or talk.

"I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh"

This is an encounter that takes place in the realm of the subjective. My imaginary friend (IF) and I were visited by a large brown bear. It was very amiable, but when the bear licked my face, I flinched, thinking This is a wild creature, it could eat my flesh. The bear was surprised by my reaction and IF pointed out that this should not be a problem in a supernatural realm. We experimented. I let the bear eat my hand and grew a new one. But I discovered that it was harder to let it eat my face. I seem to indentify stronger with the brain and the face as "me" than with the hand. We tested this, by giving the bear my brain as a meal. IF said that, if the astral body left the physical body, I would still be intact and the bear would have a meal. The real me, it seems, is the energy of the astral body. At this point, the bear said. "I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh." Those were his exact words.

The above incident "took place" about a month and a half ago and I am writing it pretty much as I experienced it, but I've been paging through old journal entries of lake and discovered something equally dark. This was something IF said early in the year, "If the mouse connects to the snake, it's never a happy ending." He was reminding me that there is a darker side to the universe.

One such story can be found at this link.

Interestingly, though, the universe did kick up one exception to the rule.


The video clip is about seven years old and the best I could track about what happened afterwards it seems that the snake and the hamster were later separated and the facility where they were housed later went out of business.

Edit: discontinued video clip removed - 21 June 2026