Organ Donor Kebab

You will be gratified to hear, learned and winsome reader, that I am, and for some time have been, an organ donor. Well, I don’t suppose that I can really describe myself as and organ donor until I have actually donated an organ, and at the moment I don’t have any spares but I have had my driver’s licence endorsed ( or should that be indorsed? I think either one will work) to the effect that, upon my demise, any of the less shop-soiled bits of me that might still be useful to anyone may be harvested and used.

Were I so minded, there are many jokes I could make at this point about the state of my organs, but they have all been made at other times and places too numerous to enumerate. But there is, I believe, a serious side to the issue of organ donation and I would like to deal with that here.

I speak of course of the issue the transfer of characteristics from the donor to the donee.

For example someone goes into hospital for, say, a new kidney and comes out liking blue vein cheese and Gilbert and Sullivan, which were never to their taste before. Invariably, upon checking up they find out that the kidney donor was prominent in his support of operetta and liked nothing more than to settle back with the latest recording and half a block of Blue Castello on water crackers.

It isn’t always cheese and musical comedy. It could be marmalade and orienteering or bicycling and “The Railway Children”. There is no restriction. It isn’t even always two things. It could be something as simple as a slight aversion to pigeons, or as all encompassing as a commitment to the Collingwood Football Club.

As unlikely as this seems, it has been well documented in the scientific sections of any number of women’s magazines and even, on particularly slow news days, in the daily press.

So we need not concern ourselves further with the question of whether this dubious sounding occurrence is a fact.

This being the case, those of us who are public spirited enough to have offered our bodies for the good of others presumably have an obligation to ensure that our tastes do not cause problems for anyone who may need to avail themselves of that offer.

What a cruel trick it would be to pass your yearning for bacon to someone whose religion forbids them to eat it? How ironic if one were to transfer a liking for Dom Perignon to a lifelong teetotaller along with one’s liver?

So it is not good enough smugly to sign up as an organ donor and enjoy the warm glow of having rendered a public service. We need to ensure that our tastes are identifiable so that they don’t get passed on to someone for whom they would not be appropriate.

As I see it, there are 2 main problems with this. The first is identifying our “tastes”. It could be that you have a predilection for Cow’s Hoof Jelly but were not aware of it because you had never encountered the substance. After the transplant of your heart and lungs into an apprentice butcher, he finds that he cannot keep employment as he keeps dipping into the profits. There is no way that you could have known this beforehand.

In addition, what qualifies as a “taste”? Is it restricted to preferences and leanings or does it encompass phobias and pathological states? I don’t know.

The other problem is that of notifying the health authorities of our tastes so that they get a chance to discuss them with the recipient. Given that most of the organs appropriate for donation become available after a quick and often violent demise, the donor would really need his or her tastes marked on his or her person somewhere.

In my case, I suppose a small tattoo somewhere discreet such as the cleft of the buttocks would be fair, but not everyone is in favour of ink.

Anyway, should I be taken and you receive my gall bladder or something, be prepared to develop a taste for Cooper’s Sparkling Ale and professional darts. Perhaps it would be fun to include the Cooper’s Ale logo in my cleft tattoo. Possibly not.

Convenient Truths

WARNING: this item contains references to water closets and may not be suitable for readers of delicate disposition. I’m sorry, but there it is. Best that you know and all that.

I wish to direct your consideration, benign and gracious reader, to a paradox that I have noticed in relation to – and I cannot put this more delicately without harming the lucidity of the text- public conveniences.

There. I have said it. Take a moment or two to gather yourself should you need to.

The paradox I have noticed is in the signs on the doors.

The facilities in private houses sometimes have signs on the doors. Something jolly to ease the embarrassment, like “Here ‘Tis”. In public areas, however, there is the need to distinguish between those meant for women and those meant for men.

This is where the paradox lies.

In my experience, the greater the promise of sophistication made by the sign on the door, the worse the state of the actual bathroom itself.

Generally, if one is at, say, a good restaurant the door has a discreet “M” or “L” on it. On entering (well, in relation to the M door, anyway) there is a pleasant, clean smell, the urinal is liberally stocked with deodorant lozenges, the mirrors are large and clean, the pan unsmirched and the paper soft and plentiful. There are paper (or sometimes even cloth) towels for one’s hands and should one require hot water, it gushes immediately and copiously from the tap.

All of this luxury is heralded by a simple “M”.

On the other hand, I have been to low taverns (slumming) or to decrepit shopping or commercial buildings which have door signs suggesting oriental luxury.

One I recall was an hotel near my place of work. The lavatory door sign depicted a top hat, a cane, a pair of gloves and, I think, opera glasses. Pushing open the door one was presented with the airlock door hanging off its hinges, a smell so unpleasant that it brought tears to the eyes and strips of crumpled lavatory paper lying ominously on the floor.

On pressing deeper one found cracked tiles, stained porcelain, a badly corrupted mirror and taps that either leaked or did not work at all. The urinal was blocked with paper and cigarette butts and did not flush, so the stale urine that was lapping against the sole deodorant lozenge was pure and pungent. The urinal itself was pock marked with strange half moon shaped dents suggesting that someone had attacked it with a blunt instrument. How or why anyone would have done so are mysteries, but I have noted these marks in other urinals.

If one pushed open the cubicle, there was of course a liberal spattering of organic matter upon which it is best not to dwell. The seat was not sitting quite squarely on the pan, which may explain how some of the organic matter… well enough of that.

The paper, if any, was of the hard shiny type that is dispensed in small individual sheets and is so ill suited to its intended purpose that one wonders whether it may have been designed by aliens. Aliens that differ widely in their physiology from us. The final depressing touch was added by a “sharps” box on the wall that was so full that infected syringes were protruding from the top.

Returning to the handbasin one felt the need to wash one’s hands, whether or not one had voided. Vigorous manipulation of the lever on the soap dispenser resulted in a small deposit of pinkish pearly sludge suggestive of nothing so much as the ejaculate of an elderly and unwell mouse.

It goes without saying that, having washed one’s hands, the only option for drying them was to wipe them on one’s trousers. The whole process was a waste of time anyway because there was no way of getting out of the hell-hole without grasping the doorhandle. It would have been far safer and more pleasurable to pet a plague rat.

So there you go. Simple understated Lavatory door sign, lovely facilities. Deduct 15% for every suggestion of opulence or luxury on the sign and you have a reasonably accurate idea of what to expect inside.

Unfortunately this does not work for “humorous” signs as seen in some places. You know the sort of thing, “buoys” and “gulls” in a seafood restaurant or “guys” and “dolls” in a cinema. These are generally OK but rarely luxurious.

I do not speak of women’s lavatories which I understand to be uniformly clean, comfortable and well maintained. Having said that I have noted a wide range of door signs and am confident that, for example, a silhouette of a lipstick, a cigarette holder and a ballerina does not bode as well as a simple “Ladies”. Possibly someone can help.

Icy Concentration

I am sure that you will remember, perceptive and thoughtful reader, the discovery of a so-called “Ice Man” some years ago.

Without trying to give a lot of technical detail he was found sort of stuck in a glacier and had been frozen since prehistoric times complete with some hunting equipment and other bits and pieces. Because he had been frozen for so long he was pretty well preserved. You will perhaps remember that some Russian scientists once found a wooly mammoth carcass that had been similarly preserved but due to some bungling at head office their baked beans didn’t get to camp in time and they had to consume the whole thing. I too have been on camps and know how they feel. I understand that one of them has been reported as saying that it tasted like chicken.

The scientific world was all excited by the iceman because it gave a chance to do slightly unlikely things like study the markings on his teeth to determine his diet. What fun! Long scrapes – he has been eating a diet rich in grit. Hmmm. Cavities. Too many lollies. That sort of thing. Rather useful for those who really need to know what people ate before baked beans or frozen mammoth were available.

There was one thing that struck me as a bit odd, though. Archaeologists also wanted to study the contents of his stomach.

Now, I am not queasy and as interested in hard science as the next man, but really, what is the point of looking in the bloke’s stomach?
Let me put it this way.

The fellow was a hunter. He tracked and killed game for a living. He had a bow and arrows and some sort of axe with him. He got an important part of his diet from chasing down red deer or pterodactyls and things and killing and eating them.

I know that the whole thing smacks a bit of “nature, red in tooth and claw” but you need to remember that there were no kings in the land of men at the time, so you can’t expect our ice bloke to have had a lot of guidance in what was and was not acceptable in polite society.

He probably slurped his soup, too.

Anyway, what I am getting at is that he relied on his cunning and agility to get food. But he was so cunning and agile that he got trapped in a glacier. A glacier. A big chunk of ice that moves about three metres a year.

He got outrun by a glacier. The chance of him having been able to catch a deer or anything else tasty is remote. At best he might have had a bit of one of those giant sloths which are difficult to digest and couldn’t really tell much about the life and times of our prehistoric iceman.

In reality I don’t think he would even have that in him. The most likely contents of a stomach attached to such a slow hunter would contain some sedges and a bit of moss. All probably a little bit stale. This is not going to help anyone.

I say Hey, Science, Leave The Iceman Alone.

I know that I will be accused of being a troglodyte, perhaps fairly, but what about human, and thereby iceman, dignity.

Ex Libris

When last I wrote, discerning and admired reader, I advised that I had been unwell and in the throes of some sort of delirium, referred to my “foetid sickbed”. On reflection that was probably not tasteful or necessary and to the extent that it caused distress I apologise.

Without wishing to compound my offence by focussing attention on sweaty bedsheets and mysterious smells emanating from forgotten corners of the sickroom, there are one or two issues that have bubbled to the surface by reason of the enforced confinement.

Lying around in bed gives one the chance to catch up on a bit of reading and there is no better opportunity to attack that nice big pile of library books that one would normally have no hope of getting through.

Yum Yum Yum. Library books.

I am all in favour of the whole idea of the local library and have been an enthusiastic borrower since early childhood. Generally my record with library books has been pretty good. I am careful not to put my mug of cocoa on them or to hold on to them for long after the due date.

I like the great trust that the library places in you and I think it is worth repaying. I mean to say, when you walk out of there with your enviro bag full of hardbacks, it doesn’t usually occur to you that they probably cost five or six hundred dollars to buy and you are being allowed to take them away and do with them pretty much as you will.

Just try that on if you were, for example, hiring a dinner suit or a motorised post hole digger. You practically have to pay the whole value of the item just to get a day’s go of it and if you go a few hours overtime they not only charge you a big penalty, but you risk being reported to the police for conversion or detinue or something. Soccage in fief perhaps.

Anyway, another thrill of reading a library book is that every one is a mystery. And I don’t mean just the ones with the little picture of a deerstalker and a magnifying glass stuck to the spine for ease of identification. I mean every library book contains a number of clues as to the identity and personal habits of previous borrowers.

What is this smudge here? It has a brownish colour but that doesn’t mean much other than that it is likely to be some sort of organic material. It would have been practically any colour when a previous reader thought that chapter 17 “in which our hero discovers that he has been played false by his uncle” would make a good place to wipe a finger soiled with…God knows what.

What about that rather more crusty excrescence on page 93? Did it drop out of an eager reader’s sandwich? Was it scratched from his scalp during a moment of distraction? And these grease spots that seem to start on about page 15 and seep through to page 21 or so? Snacking on hot chips while reading, or could it be verruca ointment? Surely the blemishes through chapter 6 suggest a nosebleed. If they go on through chapters 7 and 8 one could reasonably diagnose anaemia.

The fun and mental stimulation afforded by public library books goes way beyond their printed contents. Consideration of the document itself will always reward the enquiring mind. I am happy to say that from the dank confines of my sickbed I changed each of the books I read from a simple volume of literature to a rich “scratch’n’sniff” experience.

Another great pleasure is when people feel driven to mark books with grammatical corrections. What a wonderful service is thus rendered to the reading public.

To think that, rather than allowing themselves to be annoyed by proof reading errors, these folk are prepared to have a biro standing by with which to add punctuation and to correct spelling errors. I must say that corrections made in this way have far more impact than if the author had just got it right in the first place.

Recently I was reading a book by David Lodge in which he had chosen to start several sentences with the word “and”. Each time this appeared, the “And” was carefully struck out and the next word had its first letter changed to an upper case. To be fair, at one point, when it became clear that he had done it for every word in a sentence for some sort of “artistic” reason, the amateur editing faltered about half way through, but bravely reappeared a couple of pages later with a stiffened resolve.

Should the author ever visit Australia and for some reason join the Burnside Library and then decide to take out one of his own books, he will presumably be delighted to see that some doddering nonagenarian has seen fit to pit their grade seven English against his PhD. And win.

The last fascinating fact about library books is not something I have heard discussed elsewhere. Could it be that I am breaking new ground?

Some people mark their library books so that they don’t accidentally read them twice. They put a ring around, say, the page number on page 20 so when they get there they know that they have already read it and don’t waste their time reading it again.

Others put their initials on the back page (facing the inside back cover where the little pocket with the card in it is) or do one of those vastly amusing “foo” scribbles. Thus, rather than going to all the trouble of reading the title or checking the cover for a familiar design, they can simply check and see if the volume has already been effaced by them.

Now, surely if you don’t remember reading a book it would probably not hurt to read it again, would it? Call me intolerant, but should these people be allowed a library card? Couldn’t they just be given a book each and allowed to re-read it for the rest of their lives or until the pages become so soaked with drool as to be illegible?

Of course, that may mean that other readers don’t get the benefit of the range of Life Experience that may be transferred to the pages or the grammatical assistance that would otherwise be spread across a range of volumes.