Wild animals are now approaching humans, desperate for water. Magpies are mimicking sirens. It’s so catastrophic we need a new word for catastrophic. And next year, and the year after that, those who are left will need a new word again. Heart is boiling with rage and grief. We saw this coming for so long. Now here it is.
Blog
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Tisch.
My little Tisch is dying really fast. It seems her body is already cooling and her gait is all wobbly and drunk. Her kidneys are three-quarters shut down and the surfeit of unprocessed toxins has spaced out her brain. She’s in the netherworld. But she cuddles herself against me, and against him with whom she fell so deeply in love four months ago when he arrived from Africa. If I call her she turns and tries to focus. I have thanked her for all the beautiful companionship she’s given, for caring for me when I couldn’t look after myself. So tiny. So soft. So narrow and wise. She was lost for a lifetime – five months – on the hectic streets of inner-city Melbourne, and came back to me. She kept guard over my father while he was dying of cancer and sat curled in a little loaf watching over his body, by his head while he cooled to that stone. She is my love. My best family. Every morning she always comes in to keep me company in the bathroom, if I take a bath she wants to sit on the bathroom scales and gaze rapt into the smoking clear water. The teenaged cat with bilby ears who came up as I was inspecting the cute kittens and sank her pointed face into the hinge of my hip. She’s lived with me in Adelaide, in Melbourne, in Brisbane and I will bury her secretly somewhere in Berlin. She will spend half her afterlife frozen. When she got off the plane forty hours from Brisbane via Sydney bewildered and stinking in her own juice the Persian taxi driver said, let her out, and she instantly lay down along the length of my thigh and wrapped her long arms around me and stopped yowling. That was a scant year ago and soon she will be a tiny furry corpse. My little girl. My love.
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bike for Berlin
I bought my bike second hand and we went all the way to Leipzig to get it. Leipzig is the new Berlin now that Berlin is the new Seattle. I took my new bike to the bicycle repairman on the corner. Oh no, he said: this bike has a rusted frame. You’d better throw it away entirely.
Whut? I took my new second-hand bike to the swanky bike repair place on the park. Oh no, they said: this bike’s frame is rusted out. If you try to ride it, everything’s going to be fine until one day it collapses under you and you’ll end up with a broken back.
Whut! I took my new second-hand bike with the rusted frame to the Dutch bicycle place near where they sell excellent ice cream. Their pistachio ice cream is so good and so green that the first time I tried it, I actually gasped. The man who makes and sells the ice cream is tall and dark with dreamy eyes. He feeds me little samples across the counter on a spoon. No, no, said the Dutch place: with a rusted frame there is no point in repairs. You can try to fix it, sure. Then one day it’s just going to crack in half like a wafer. And down you’ll go.
Gosh. I wheeled my new second-hand rejected bike with its rusted frame home across the park. On a noticeboard outside the anarchist society library (“Shhhh! This is a library!”) someone had pinned a handwritten notice. Hej Berlin! Fahrradreparatur. Hey Berlin! Bicycle repairs. Call Maisie. (Let’s call her Maisie). I did.
Sure, she said, komm einfach mal vorbei, just bring it round. Maisie lived in a large, organised squat. The bell was answered by two giant punks on their way to walk their dog in the park, by the looks. Oh no, they said. There’s no bike repair here. Maisie said, I began, and the smaller punk stepped back and opened the door. Oh, then – it’s right down the hall behind the girls’ toilets.
Their squat had been a school. I went past the girl’s toilets and found Maisie in her well-oiled workshop. She was tiny and fearlessly tattooed. She welded a cross-brace to the frame and in three days I came back and paid her and rode my new second-hand rusted-out bicycle with its clever repair back to the Dutch bicycle shop. I bought it one of those festive Dutch bike baskets people thread with wreaths of flowers, which I had craved since I was a little girl riding a bike with green streamers. This was two years ago now and I have turned my whole life inside out. Better boyfriend, better apartment, better business, better income. I ride my bike everywhere and its sunny basket greets me when I come down out of the house in the morning, always ready for adventure. Every day we are building a Berlin life together, evading the potholes and skimming under all the trees, the one musketeer and her bicycle.
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defender of the vulnerable
I had a beautiful friendship once, with a woman who is also a writer. We read each other’s works in a kind of ecstasy of communion, making notes at every page. Our conversation was easy and delving, muscular and gracious, exploratory and frank. Then men who wore make up began appearing on the covers of magazines, complaining of oppression. Soon it was a lesser crime to rape than to call the rapist ‘he.’ My friend, who is older and perhaps old-fashioned, seemed terrified of falling out of grace. Her support of these men was tireless. She began following me into strangers’ conversation, making public denouncements: “I wish to publicly dissociate myself from Cathoel’s hateful views.” I am sad at the loss of this intelligent friendship and last week, after a lag of two years, I wrote to her. She wrote back still angry, and this is my answer.
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Ach. I’m sad to see your salty wit and elasticity walled up in this frigid, pious convent.
What interests me about these eagerly conformist cries of Hatred! Hatred! is this: do people imagine their gender-critical former friends are too dishonest to recognise the magma of long-suppressed hatred that now finally has an excuse to pour out? too cowardly to name it? or too stupid to see it? Must be one or the other.
What an aching relief it must be for such people – finally to have found an outlet for the loathing of humanity we have been carrying around in secret for so long. Finally an escape valve for this pressing desire to bully and persecute some tiny, ultra-vulnerable minority. Orgasmic! You can almost taste it.
It’s a cult. A well-funded, white-privileged, male supremacist cult. You have been brainwashed and you sound increasingly ridiculous.
I hoped you might have read more widely since we last spoke, and evolved your thinking. I hoped to reach your better nature and that perhaps you might have had the generosity to tell me, I miss you, too, although we disagree. It’s sad you have simply seized on this opportunity to finger-waggle with such schoolgirl piety, trying to condescend to me about my supposed hatred when in fact even the mainstream conversation on this issue has now moved on and your recited certainties sound dated and ill-read.
You don’t see yourself as the brainwashed handmaiden of a privileged patriarchal cult. You are a defender of the world’s most vulnerable: misunderstood narcissist white men.
It’s a noble position. If somewhat replete with the blinding intoxication of self-righteousness.
What if some men are so privileged they experience being told there is anything they can’t have (the capacity to be a lesbian, for example) as hatred?
Every cell in our body is sexed and this does not determine who we are. This statement of reality is not hatred. I don’t have much hatred in me. Don’t have much capacity for it, being very much occupied with its opposites: attraction and curiosity, humility and devotion. But it’s interesting that in your defence of other people’s right to assert as reality how they feel, you feel entitled to tell me how I feel. Pippa Bunce, for example, the Credit Suisse banker, feels like a woman on 3 days of the week. I say he’s a man, an over-entitled, spoilt, middle aged wealthy man who rose through the ranks on male privilege and does not now offer to take the usual 28% pay cut (or get asked to make the tea) on the few days of the week he feels female. I say he should be free, as should everyone, to wear what he likes and express himself as he wishes, because men can be anything.
You say that’s hate.
So Pippa Bunce is the authority on his own feelings, but you are the authority on mine.
You seem to have no interest in reading or conversing widely in this intricate, complex, and evolving social conversation – you have your slogans and you just know they’re right. You don’t need to make friends or make peace with diverse genderqueer, gender fluid, trans, and gnc acquaintance, as every Berliner does in this most transgressive city. You don’t witness the pleading of confused baby lesbians trying to excuse themselves for the unforgivable transphobia of not wanting penile intimacy, the scorn and scolding they are subjected to. Within the echo chamber of this prissy, shockable, powerfully vocal cadre you are safe from thought.
These last two years I have been spending months at a time in Ghana. Ghanaians’ polite bafflement when I try to explain to them what is going on in the West is mortifying and edifying. What does it mean to be transgender? or demisexual, or any other label brewed in this rage of frothing narcissist fervour (a round hundred of them are listed below – not by me). To my African friends, it means – white people stole everything from us and they’re still not happy.
Have you not wondered why the world’s most violently homophobic nations have women’s football teams filled with trans-identified males? Have you ever asked yourself why in the West, all the most famous transgender people are men? Why almost all of the prominent spokestranswomen are white?
Telling a child they were born in the wrong body is abusive. I can’t see how anyone’s body is ‘wrong.’ It seems to me mutilating and medicating our bodies in search of the authentic self makes no sense. It is the outmoded and conformist gender roles, which fit no one, that have to change – not individual people who cannot fit them. Sterilising children (often gay, lesbian, and a large proportion autistic) seems to me a savage punishment for non conformity. Poor Jazz Jennings, the trans poster child now an adult and taking a year off before Harvard to wrestle with his misery, has ‘remembered’ under hypnosis (filmed and broadcast, because even in therapy he doesn’t deserve privacy) his alter ego as a lost young gay man terrified of not being accepted. Now his gametes will never mature and he will never experience libido or orgasm. He is cut off forever from some of the dearest intimacies human beings can share – and all because he liked boys and wanted to wear sparkly dresses. So insidious is our culture’s corrective homophobia that we’d rather a straight girl than a gay boy. Meanwhile, lesbians are being dragged away by police from Pride parades for daring to express sexual preference. Their dating sites are infested with sexual predators displaying ladybulge. For as soon as we say Trans Women Are Women, sexual rejection of them (ie sexual orientation) becomes transphobic. Lesbians have been told forever that they just need a good fucking and this is the latest manifestation of that creepy male sexual entitlement. It’s corrective rape.
No one has a gender. People have individuality, and to me that is precious. There is no such thing as trans. No one is cis. What woman would identify with the passive, demeaning, pornified gender role thrust on us. The singer Sam Smith now thinks he is a woman because he likes to dance. It’s so insulting. If you can’t see the awful sexism of this whole idea: that women are like this, men are like that, so if you are like that you must really be a woman – I don’t know what to say. For the sake of your public dignity and our friendship I would like to suggest you do some reading. Try Lily Maynard, whose daughter was trans, and Miranda Yardley, who is himself trans. I will hope for the reassertion of the kindly, salty, witty, sceptical, and generous soul I fell in love with which made me want to get close to you and be your friend. You are an idiot and I miss you. Goodnight.
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Portugold
I am in Faro and the moon has been full for days. Everywhere we walk he carries my bag. It is heavy with notebooks and sketchpads and he carries it without complaint. The old town is shaped like an egg. Or a zero. What was the most important thing the Arabs brought to us? asks the jingoistic guide, who has been jousting with my companion about who has the better football players. ‘That’s right! The zero!’
Well and that’s important, I say, deadpan: for the football results. He smiles into the stony ground. Our feet ache from days of walking. It is wonderful at night. We have found our way past the startlingly chic frameless glass cafes to smaller, darker, local places filled with families, trying bread porridge stuffed with shellfish and a raw egg stirred in at the table, fig and almond flatcake, pears in wine. ‘It is two pears,’ the friendly girl explains, with difficulty. ‘On his plate with sauce.’ I watch her ladling out the ruby syrup and she starts towards our papered table and then stops. She goes back to the big glass bowl in the cabinet with lavender octopi and anguished looking mackerels and carefully spoons out a third half of the fruit. Proudly she sets it before us. ‘Beers in wine!’
We love the shabby side-street bar broadcasting either football or fado where the hosts spend the afternoon getting drunk and then the entire evening singing. We explore for days before it is time for the tour, a looping walk tour conducted by a tiny local man. He guides us round the blue hour as the steep treasure roofs grow first golden then dark, under the bougainvillea, under the arch. Christopher Columbus is also called Christopher Colon. Christopher Scent-of-Spices, Christopher Arse. Standing squarely on the cobbles he declares, we are the first, we were the greatest, we are the best. ‘Portugal gave them Brazil and in exchange Spain gave us Cape Verde,’ or was it Indonesia and Madeira, Sri Lanka and Japan. Bravely my companion speaks up. As an African man it doesn’t feel good to hear this. You should find a more sensitive way to talk about it. ‘Oh, I’m not proud of it,’ says the proud guide who has described as an innovation Portugal’s decision ‘not to work the slaves, only to sell them.’ ‘You are proud,’ I say. ‘And you should be ashamed. Shame is the only way we can tell this story honestly.’
When a black man tries to speak, white people eagerly talk over him. I point this out. ‘You didn’t let him finish one sentence.’ ‘Ernesto is telling this story in his second language,’ the Canadian guest says, excusing the bristling little guide, and I say, indicating my companion, ‘It’s his sixth.’
Africans often have more courtesy. Racism relies on that gap between our entitlement and their courtesy. But later he tells me in private, I could have punched him. After the tour I say to the guide very quietly, Ernesto we like you. Your tour was great. I have a little suggestion. Next time you describe how Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, you can put air quotes. There were plenty of people already living there with rich and complex civilizations. ‘But it’s just history.’ cries Ernesto, ‘it’s fact! We didn’t have America in our maps! We didn’t know!’ We didn’t know, I say — but they did. Put it in air quotes and that way you get to keep the same text, but it’s more accurate. My companion has picked up a feather from the ground and he tucks it in my hair. Above our heads two storks in their stork nest are making more storks, she will lay an egg shaped like a zero, like the old town. The nun at the Franciscan chapel shows us a donation box marked Pao, bread, for every Tuesday they make a soup and serve it to ‘the drug people.’ A restaurant tout promises a garden ‘in the backside’ and then thanks me over and over after I explain why he could consider saying merely, ‘in the back.’ We are laughing with joy. He’s not an arse. Our guide Ernesto has pointed out how the church and the government built their roofs next to each other and it seems to me if churches had been better governed in the first place, if governments had been more pious, there would not exist so many Drug People and so many displaced and struggling people who work three jobs and can’t afford health care, who always need feeding.
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love of all things
When we eat too much ~ what we really want is love. When we cling too hard to money ~ what we really want is love. When “he’s just looking for attention” ~ attention is a form of love. When we become addicted to work and success: success is approval & praise from others. What we’re really after is love.
Love is the meaning of life. What else can it be? I don’t know why people keep asking.
Another way to frame this: life is the result of an unending chain of meaningless coincidence. It has only the meaning we give it. The meaning we give it is, the things we love. Most of which ain’t things.
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supermerch
In the supermarket I queued for the African check out dude who’s always calm in the midst of all the Germanness. A blonde woman behind me set down, emphatically, a bagful of fresh pak choy and then behind it, all in a heap, several packets of cream-filled biscuits, a jar of chocolate pudding, some plump filled fresh pasta and a tray of chocolates. I said, indicating the leafy greens, “This seems cute to me. Because one buys that – one gets to buy all of this.”
She burst out laughing. “Stimmt.” True. I looked at my own pile and felt concerned its greenery might seem chiding. “I’m the same,” I said, showing her the huge bag of green grapes. “These are really a sweet treat but they look like vegetables.”
“Very wise,” she said, still laughing, “it’s perfectly balanced.” We were chortling. The man at the register bade good evening to the person in front and picked up my Toblerone, the excuse for all the grapes. “Guten Abend,” he said, and I said, “Guten Abend.” Every sly glance sideways between me and the blonde girl started us both spluttering mirthfully. I stashed the grapes in my thousand-use bag and took the bar of chocolate from his brown hand, saying, “Beautiful Celebration-Evening!” which is how Germans tell each other, I am glad for your sake it’s nearly knocking-off time. Heading out to my bike parked under the trees I was thinking for the hundredth time that some poet among Germans has decided the wooden divider separating my groceries from hers shall be called a cashier’s Toblerone: Kassentoblerone.
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to the friend who couldn’t quit
I still spend an hour every morning coughing earnestly and can’t laugh without coughing. I thought I was trapped for life. So I hear you and I just want to say: nicotine cravings last four minutes in the body. The rest is mindgame. If you can ‘delay, drink water, do something else’ for four minutes at a time…
Well it feels like you’d be losing your closest companion and beloved/loathed best friend, but what I found: that forest fire I dreading walking into turned out to be a wall of flame like in Hollywood and I walked through it so much faster than I could have believed. And: I have literally never missed it. Not once.
You can. If you ever really want to – you will. Think of all those years you never missed it before you started and… I hope you might feel ready one day, so that the rest of us can treasure and enjoy you, for longer.
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Make Africa Great Again
We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers in brands no one drinks in Europe. We sit there for hours eating chicken and fish with our fingers. Last week a white girl got up and went over to the bar, carrying her phone. She persuaded the barkeep, who is a rapper, to link up her tunes to his speaker. Within seconds this wholly fresh and salty sound bathed the scene, and at their work and in their seats everyone was dancing.
Tonight a man sitting against the wall behind us had on a MAGA hat. A black man. I looked closer. MAKE AFRICA GREAT AGAIN. I got up and went over. Close up his red baseball cap read MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN.
I crouched beside his table to say hi as I do occasionally when a table of visitors have stiffed the boy dancers. “We can’t afford to give money every day,” they say, reasonably, demonstrating they can afford to eat out every day and I spread my hands, “I know, me too,” and persuade them that it’s ok not to give, it’s not ok to turn your stiffened faces away and keep eating while someone is standing there, sweating with performance, holding out an upturned cap. He is standing there. Treat him like a human. You are not greater nor less. Make whiteness great again.
Since so much of our cruelty comes from diffidence, I offer scripts. “I say, I’m so sorry, I cannot help you this time.”
“But then they don’t go away!”
“Just be direct. It’s courteous. ‘I’ve said no three times, you have to leave now. Bye.’” I tell them the dancer who stuffed fire down his pants but was yet to bloom in puberty “came to our table after you, and he just looked so wounded.”
Poverty is all around us like jackrabbits in the grass. Poverty, hard work, resourcefulness and struggle. We are like big birds of prayer gliding like clouds across the sun, idle on the air and wondering which one next we will swoop on to assist or exploit. Building our bullshit churches, insulting sufferers with thoughts & prayers in place of action, rendering free men into slaves, free woman into sex slaves. Calling the children they raise from rape ‘half caste’, as though only that portion of their humanity fell into any class we recognised.
Next morning four boys came to the low wall around our house which keeps the goats out. Their upturned faces were lower than the wall and I had to go and peer over, to hear. “Please, we want you go buy us four bicycles.”
Oho! I said. Well I would love to buy you four bicycles. I wish I could. I explained that I would love to have a bicycle, myself. But of course, I meant a second bicycle, here in my second home at which I arrive by jet plane.
The spokesboy suggested, “Or maybe a ball.”
My heart flooded with regret and shame, yearning and heat. Why shouldn’t these smiling, reasonable, kindly, and well spoken courteous boys have a ball? A ball to play with. A boy standing behind him said, “Bicycles!” and got cuffed for spoiling the deal. I asked, “Ee gon be how much?”
They reasoned. “Well, ee cost 25 cedis.” Five dollars. The spokesboy explained, you can get them for 18 cedis, but… “They get spoilt?” I suggested, using a word that in the wealth world we use to describe unhappy children but which here means, I had a phone once, second hand from the markets, and now it doesn’t work.
I tried to respond to this adventurous, eminently reasonable, and brave request the best way. I didn’t want them to feel that if this ball got spoilt they could just come ask the white lady for another, that a ball was nothing to me. I didn’t want them to feel I gave something which was nothing, it seemed insulting. I explained I had little money right now. All Africans know little money. It’s the most usual form of money. “But I will try. I’m going to try to find some money for you so we can buy a ball. I can’t promise you,” I said. “But I will do my best. Do you get me?”
Of course I’m going to buy them a ball. I just want them to have a week of looking forward to it. I see school children carrying their homework under the awning of a shop which has a light. I see people eating yam for breakfast, just boiled yam. If you have a sauce on your rice, the sauce is a couple of spoonfuls of garnish; in Europe garnish is the main dish. The man in the MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN cap made me at home at his table and we spoke for some few minutes. Neither of us mentioned Trump. We exchanged our numbers, as Europe and Africa should do. We are so few and have so much. They are many, and have little. We, they. We spoke about the music. The rapper who brings beers played his own song again. Coming back to our table I was dancing, a little. In Ghana I always want to give everyone everything and as I build my tiny business I am finding out a way we might be able to do that, one transaction at a time. It’s not giving everything: it’s not giving at all. It’s giving up what we can afford of what we stole. It’s giving part of everything back.
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mud road
We are walking down the road in the middle of the night. The road is made of mud. Our new home is in a village and it has no address. An urban village, lapped on all sides with villages that make up to capitol, one storey high and crowded with tiny chickens and little soon to be eaten goats as far as I can see.
Should I look nicer, I said, tonight on our way out, rumpled in my unironed skirt. Oh no, he said, Cathoel you are a white lady – you always look dressed up automatically.
Every time he remarks, casually at the door when I have loaded him with parcels, “My loads are plenty,” or, when after a cross cross-cultural fight we start really finally hearing each other, or when he pronounces ‘automatically’ with its six distinct syllables as indeed it deserves, or when I say ‘hippopotamus’ and reduce him to peels of crying laughter — each time I fall a little bit deeper into love as though it were a big bowl of soup.
Here is a church. Already they are moaning and they’re wringing their hands. One lady paces foot to foot, waiting for transportation to start and eulogy to have set in. The whole road will have to listen to their dismal rejoicing. Further along, a few shops are still open. One is called Reggae Spot, selling tins of condensed milk and mosquito coils, though Ghanaians laugh at malaria.
On the weekend we rode nearly ten hours north on bad roads festooned with craters in a tiny bus leaking dust from its frayed with rust underside. Under my mother in law’s mango tree I asked her when she offered tea, do you have any condensed milk? No, she said, I only have normal milk – producing a tiny costly can of condensed Carnation milk, as normal as canned be.
In our village house the water is piped in from a truck to a large polytank on a concrete stand. A chicken is roosting on her nine eggs in one of the pots I have planted and I greet her every morning, “Good morning, Lady Chicken, still working hard I see.” I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert, another white lady dressed up in her handknit white life who took an entire year away from work and spent it in Italy (eating), in India (praying), and on Bali (falling in love). Her book Eat, Pray, Love became such a sensation and attracted so many privileged rich seekers to the island that Balinese took to wearing t shirts which said Eat, Pray, Leave.
In her ashram Gilbert riffs through two pages of the startling innocence that characterises unearnt privilege. Americans don’t know how the rest of the world sees them; men don’t know that women understand them all too well. When she writes of her friendship with her fellow floor scrubber Tulsi, she describes the girl as ‘cute.’ Tulsi is far cuter now that her glasses have smashed, and due to poverty she cannot afford to replace them. “Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw,” Gilbert writes, calling up one of a wardrobe of Indian tropes she has prepared earlier, “even cuter since one lens of her ‘specs’ (as she calls her eyeglasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them.”
It doesn’t seem to occur to the author who is scrubbing floors voluntarily as part of her search into herself that looking out from inside that webbed lens might not be pleasant. That being unable to do without the glasses now smashed and damaged is not the same as a cute, manga-kid stubbornness refusing to give up a favourite garment which has torn.
Tulsi describes her prospects: she will turn eighteen soon and will be married off to some boy she dislikes, or is indifferent to. A “teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family,” she loves hiphop and lists for her oblivious interlocuter, oh, so interlocutely, the flaws which can prevent a girl from marrying. Her skin is too dark. She is old, 28 for example. Her horoscope is wrong. Not one of these flaws is anything a girl can do anything about, except that she must not be too educated, or have had an affair with someone.
We’re left wondering if in the conversation itself Gilbert found the time to commiserate with her feisty, spirited, trapped companion or whether she just floated directly from this listing of someone else’s sufferings – so many someones – into fresh contemplation of her own inner self. “I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society… At least my skin is fair,” she concludes, innocently. “I have only this in my favour.”
Meanwhile in this village house, which we intend to rent out as a kind of guesthouse so that other privileged oblivious whites can come here with their cameras and render all our neighbours objects in the background of their own selfies, I am scouring and cleaning too. When I bought this broom the woman who had made it asked, “But do you know how to use it, though?” By turning it upside down and stabbing the dirt I made her laugh. “Like this, right?” I am too shy some days to leave the house. I feel like an intruder. Daughter and grand daughter of intruders. We have stolen so much. Africa produces 75% of the cocoa that fuels the world’s $75 billion chocolate industry, and earns 2% of the profits. Like an American in her ashram I am doing what I can, so lazily, so slowly, to clear away the cobwebs and look out on this bold world more plainly. I am trying to become aware of the crazy-making stain of sharp edges that my Ghanaian boyfriend has to see past every time he tries to achieve anything at all. I am perceived as being well dressed without putting in any effort. I am addicted to my own comfort. And as I weigh my prospects I try to imagine how that effort spared in grooming and combing can best be spent.