TIGER

I went out for my daily walk. I walk about five kilometres. That’s enough for me. I walked past a couple of major intersections and there’s a lot of noisy traffic. I especially hate motor bikes and people with tiny cars that have had huge exhausts attached to them that make an enormous amount of noise. I don’t know how those people feel about all the noise they make maybe they can’t hear it from inside the car they just want all the rest of us to have to suffer it. I sometimes think I should move out to the country somewhere, somewhere where there are no noisy cars and no major intersections and no motorbikes.

That would be just me and the sky and the land, and I think that could be pretty good but then again if it was kilometres to the nearest supermarket that would constitute a major inconvenience. But maybe it would still be worth it. Selling my house would be a major problem of course packing everything into cardboard boxes and saying goodbye to my own front door. That’s something I have not done for decades and I’m sure there would be a certain degree of sorrow involved in doing that again.

But just to be rid of the traffic noise it could be worth it. To be able to sit outside and look at the sky in the night time unpolluted by street lights. Yes that could be worth the move. Then of course I would not know anyone but maybe I don’t need to. Maybe I could become a hermit. I don’t know what hermits eat or what they do in their spare time but I imagine I could find out. Is there a course you can do on being a hermit? There’s a course for pretty much anything else isn’t there? I wouldn’t have to worry about how I dressed or how often I showered. Nobody would care because they would be exactly nobody. I would have to buy a house that has some fields around it and maybe a creek running along the bottom of the hill. Then I could walk down by the side of the creek and listen to the water babbling over the rocks. And then I could go back home and sit on my Veranda and watch the sun go down. It all sounds too idyllic to be possible so I will probably still be here on site tomorrow listening to the motorbikes. I was thinking all of this while I was walking, and then I saw the tiger. It looked like a real tiger. I stopped because I was scared, but then I realised it was just a very large cushion shaped and coloured exactly like a tiger. It was very convincing but obviously they had thrown it out for collection on garbage night. I thought if I was in the country there would be no tigers.