Home truths

You've put on weight.

Yes mother.

What have I told you?

Over the years, a lot, though, to be sure, a lot of it was repetition.

And do - did - you listen?

Well …

That was a rhetorical question. Don't be smart. If only there was someone like me to tell, when I was a younger, someone like you who is me: “Don't put on weight. You'll regret it in later life”. There would have been no strife. Regrets are no good when you're dead. Do you want to die young? Do you want to die before your mother and break her heart? Is that what you want?

That wasn't my intention, though, now you mention it, it must have been lurking there in my subconscious, a thin proto concept, waiting to be fed like a famine victim, but I wouldn't place too much weight on Freudian analysis.

So you think you're smart. Drinking and smoking. Is that clever?

If you look at it from the broader perspective of evolution and our place within the animal kingdom, I guess it could be considered as an advanced use of tools. When's the last time you saw monkeys rolling their own cigarettes, let alone securing gainful employment in order to subsidise such vices? Apart from that chimp in Tarzan.

I see it all now.

The sea? The sun? The stars? God's plan for creation?

Not only are you going to dig yourself into an early grave, you're going to take me as your hostage. Your own mother.

You got me. I confess.

So what are we going to do about it?

Do? We?

Do you want to share a grave with your mother?

When you put it like that. No. What the hell, I'll change.

But haven't we heard this all before?

It'll be different this time.

“Different” he says.

At least different in the sense that no two events are exactly alike unless they are the same.