25.04.08

Left the old gym in the dying light last week, as usual for this time of year mist was present, swirling around just hard enough for me to need to blink it away.

Mist suits old prisons, so does fading light, so do the sometimes on sometimes off again lights decorating the rock walls, and so does the hundreds of pallets stacked outback by the dilapidated gym, it’s like a elephant graveyard though no ivory to tinkle and everyone knows they’re there.

They’re there alright, stacked next to a newly dumped diesel fuel container, probably used to hold about 30 000 gallons, and underneath this was a 9kg LPG gas bottle.

Not many things make me stop in my tracks these days but this did, in fact the gravel and dust formed a little dervish and I had to wipe the grime from my face to be sure I was actually seeing what an arsonist would get a boner over.

Yep.

Must have been decided and arranged by a committee.

Naturally many thoughts went through my head though the one that appeared strongest and clearest was an episode of MacGyver where in one scene he proved that an empty fuel container was actually more dangerous and explosive than a full tank.

HHhhhmmmmmmm.

More thoughts went through my head, like how all my education appears to have been through TV, especially the 80’s (The A-Team, Knight Rider, Magnum PI, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles {Hero’s in a half shell, turtle power}, Charlie’s Angel’s, Mr. and Mrs. King, Hart to Hart, Grizzly Adams, The Bionic Man, The Bionic Woman, oh the very lexicon of knowledge that has been lost to most though Richard Dean Anderson holds regular secret sessions in the Alaskan Wilderness to continue the magic and maintain the strike forces potency).

Also the thought that I have a combination of arsonist ‘food groups’ which would make such a spectacular conflagration it would close the Southern Motorway for some time, depending on wind speed and shift.

Though some part of my mangled brain appeared to try and reality orientate me,

It reminded me I have a position in a prison (coming to the end of its life) and that I am allowed to wander the ancient halls with freedom and scope that would make an iconoclast proud and that although MacGyver would be proud of my retention of the lesion he taught perhaps it would be wiser to live in a different part of my head for the time being.

It was a struggle however.

As I am able to type this to you from prison (on the right side of the bars, though that is a mater of perspective) and newscast of Mt Eden Prison exploding has not come to your senses then I guess I have chosen the side of the light as opposed to the side of the lighter.


Decisions to ride the edge and pull back instead of tickling your throat with the razor for that second longer are hard to make,


Though the combustibles are still there,


And now I carry matches.




Because for everything there is a season,





Burn, burn, burn.








The Grey Madness