I’m thinking it might be time to get another tattoo. I know tats have become cliché, especially among the under 30-set, but this isn’t some kind of creaking old hipster yearning for bygone days. I have one tat that I designed myself, and had it done before every adolescent had one. I designed it based on a traditional sailor’s tattoo, in addition to Scottish motifs referencing part of my ancestry. At the time it meant a great deal to me, and still does. I don’t notice it all that often, even though it’s a large one (4 hours on the table) as it’s generally covered by shirtsleeves. Locating it where I did proved fortuitous because I don’t see it all that often and it’s still fresh when I do.

I wonder about the explosion of tats; is it yet another case of cultural monkey see, monkey do, or has the notoriety worn off to the point that we are now able to indulge in a need to express and decorate ourselves in a manner once forbidden? I suppose some people choose trivial reasons to get inked, but given the pain involved I suspect for most there’s a deeper meaning in it.  There’s likely as many motivations as there are individuals bearing them, although I must confess to feeling a little let down when I see a young man with yet another skull or a girl with a butterfly, and don’t even start me on the young girl I saw the other day with a guy’s's name inked across her chest.

For me, tats are markers of life transitions. I had my first done a year before we sold everything and moved aboard Fainleog; it was a marker of a new stage in my life and a new identity I was embracing. And it feels like change is in the air again.

So here it is: the tat I’m thinking of is yet another traditional sailor’s tattoo where the sailor has the text HOLD FAST written across his knuckles. I’m not at all a fan of textual tats, but this is how it’s done, and the meaning is inextricably linked to the tradition and the signifier of the words. HOLD FAST was a good-luck omen written on a sailor’s knuckles to help ensure he did not slip while climbing high aloft in the rigging of a square-rigged ship. He often worked hundreds of feet above a pitching deck, and losing a grip meant falling to one’s death.

There’s not much chance I’ll ever find myself climbing the ratlines of a 19^th century man-of-war so what’s the thinking? Over the last couple of years I’ve mused a lot on the importance of letting go, of not clinging to what we desire and hope for. My stint in Buddhism especially taught me the foolishness of thinking we control anything, and that clinging just increases human suffering. Experience has shown me that life is a constant stream of surrendering, releasing and letting things pass away.

But here’s the paradox. While it is utterly necessary to acknowledge or frailty, our helplessness, and our lack of control over that which we desire and love, at the same time, we must never let go. I can never let go of my dearest wife and children, and yet it is the absolute truth that one day I must lose them. I must never release my hold on my life’s spirit, my craving for one more day, one more moment of this extraordinary, wondrous life, and yet one day it will be gone.

Every woman I have ever loved I still carry in my heart, and I will never let go of them.  Many of my dreams will never come to fruition, but I will never surrender them. In a way, HOLD FAST is a profound manifestation of what it means to be human: to love knowing you must lose the beloved, to have faith in the new day knowing that one day there will not be another.

In the mid-20th century the American Field Painters tried to grapple with the existential problem of existing in the face of oblivion, creating works that tried to represent the void and the human struggle for being in the face of it. I’m not sure how successful they were nor how successful HOLD FAST will be, but as I continue on in years, I would like a reminder that despite the accumulated loss of so many important and worthwhile things, to never, ever, quit clinging to that which is meaningful, to that which I love.

Every one of us stands in the face of oblivion, and it’s important to concede that reality with grace and humility, rather than fear. Acknowledge it, accept it as our collective fate, and return to HOLD FAST as the best we can do.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

Bear with me; I’ve got a few technical points to make and I’m going to try to do so without being too pedantic. Recently there’s a lot of doomsday talk in the media; the environment and the economy especially seem to be deteriorating, at an increasingly rapid rate. There are many reasons offered for these two great concerns: the Occupy movement blames systemic income inequality, and David Suzuki blames environmental degradation on lackadaisical regulation by governments and large, insufficiently regulated corporations. What’s interesting is how closely tied these two Great Problems facing our world actually are. And the source of these has little to do with us as individuals and much more to do with what we call nature.

We tend to believe that human beings are distinct and removed from nature. Yet if by Nature we mean the natural world, there is nothing that is in fact not nature, because everything around us arose from some natural source or other, whether we are talking about species or condominiums. Even the oxygen we breathe had its synthesis in long-dead stars. Any delineation between us and Nature is simply the result of hundreds of years of Renaissance and colonial thought, heavily influenced by the Christian church, which saw nature as embodying humanity’s dark impulses.

But aside from how we choose to view nature, a good model for understanding ourselves and our place in the natural world is ecology. Both rigorous and elegant, ecology attempts to describe the complex relationships between life forms and all the myriad aspects of the environment that they experience. When viewed through this lens, much of the world’s troubles start making sense.

There are a few core principles of ecology worth looking at. The first is ecological exclusion, in which no two organisms can occupy the exact same niche, niche meaning all the aspects of the environment that the organism interacts with in some fashion. What this means is that if species A needs exactly the same things as species B, the two organisms with compete with each other, and the “superior” species will outcompete the other and eventually force it into extinction. So for any two species you care to observe, there has to be something different about their needs for both to share the same habitat.

Another principle involves the grow of species in the absence of controlling factors (i.e. predation, lack of food, breeding habitat). When not controlled, population numbers will climb at an exponential rate (x²) until it reaches the carrying capacity of the environment, after which there will be a precipitous falloff due to all resources being consumed or disease infecting the population, or both.

In a healthy ecological system, factors such as predation tends to keep population below the maximum carrying capacity provided by the physical environment. Dramatic exceptions occur when species are introduced in areas where they have no natural predators, and their numbers explode. Think cane toads in Australia.

As human beings have no natural predators other than themselves, their numbers have historically been limited by the carrying capacity of the land, war and disease. Advancements in technology have greatly increased carrying capacity and decreased the impact of disease, and so numbers have exploded according to well-known ecological principles.

What we call habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity is simply the principle of ecological exclusion operating. Part of human habitat need is for fallow soil, so we compete with amphibians such as frogs for fertile lowlands. We drain the swamp and wipe out the frogs. A lot of arguments can be made about waste and whether or not the swamp needs to be drained (the human notion of choice), but you cannot get past the principle that humans can adapt to any environment and so we will necessarily compete with other life forms in that environment. And the greater our numbers the more we will exclude other species as we compete for the resources that they too need to survive.

Given that the factors limiting our population have been greatly thwarted, ecological principles suggest that we will compete with other organisms for resources and force them into extinction. This principle has been shown in many population studies involving many other species, and we can see it happening as a result of human activities all over the world. We cannot avoid it because we are part of this global ecological system.

Some will say that such biodeterministic arguments don’t take into account our ability to choose, that we have agency and can decide our fate. The problem with this viewpoint it assumes that human beings have rational minds with instinctive tendencies, rather than the reverse.

There are many examples of our inability to regulate ourselves according to rational needs. The explosion of obesity across the world is an example of our inability to overcome a natural tendency to overconsume and regulate ourselves rationally. Having evolved in a world with a scarcity of natural resources, it makes sense that when we have access to essentially unlimited calories we would not be able to restrict ourselves – we are fighting our natures.

I think that innate need is also part of the consumerist impulse. To crave and desire is part of being human, and is the impulse that keeps us striving, moving, and exploring. If as a species we were easily satiated, we would still be living in the trees. This impulse keeps us acquiring, and explains the little thrill we feel whenever we purchase something: it’s like bringing home a boar to feed the family.

This impulse knows no natural bounds. Given a surfeit of resources, we have seen how many other species will overconsume and degrade their environment until their numbers are checked by some natural process. The explosion of the mountain pine beetle’s population in BC and Alberta, with the resultant loss of millions of hectares of forest, is an example of this phenomenon.

Only human beings know to preserve something for the next day or the next generation, and that idea flies straight in the face of millions of years of evolved instinct to live now, consume now, because there may be nothing tomorrow. The problem of course is that human consumption is more than just overgrazing or species exclusion; the instinct has been hijacked by commerce, and consumerism’s long reach is enormously and disproportionately destructive.

These kinds of ideas have been around for a long time and I’ve not seen a good refutation of them. There has been much theorising about the absolute carrying capacity of the planet, but these tend to ignore the consumerist/consumption impulse that degrades so much for so little return. The carrying capacity of a planet filled with agrarian peasants is very different from one filled with North American consumers, and we’ve probably all seen the estimates that suggest it would take a number of planet’s worth of resources to have everyone live like Western consumers.

If we accept the notion that it is a deeply ingrained human instinct to hoard and accumulate, the idea that we can use our individual will power to limit our environmental impact is hopelessly doomed. We simply have too many examples where human beings cannot easily control themselves, especially over the long term.

So what is to be done?

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we throw in the towel and all go out and buy a Hummer. Whether we want to admit it or not, those ecological laws apply to us as much as they apply to lemmings, and the predicted results will be the same.  But simply applying a moral argument will not redeem the species; something else is required.

It is my belief that only spiritual evolution will allow us to overcome these innate tendencies. Moral and rational arguments evoke the power of will for change, while spiritual practice allows us to transcend both will and our natural impulses.

To be very clear I’m not speaking of a religious proscription; since time immemorial we have witnessed the failure of religious edicts to prevent human beings from acting according to their basic drives. But true spiritual practice strives not to control or prescribe, but to acknowledge and let go, ultimately achieving a transcendence over the limiting aspects of being human.

People often have an idea of Buddhism as a kind of mysticism and a complex religion, and indeed it is; there are a variety of schools and practices all over the world. But from what I’ve learned, most of these are cultures overlaid atop a non-religious essential practice. When you strip away the religion (culture) at it’s essence Buddhism is a practice that teaches us how not to be ruled by our evolved reptilian brain. It does not use morals or threats of punishment and reward; it simply trains us to no longer be driven by instinctive impulse. The locus of motivation shifts from the archaic brain, that simple yet powerful engine that we share with all vertebrates, to the sublime neocortex, which is ours alone.

The transcendent human being no longer is controlled by his desire to consume and horde, but is free to live an abundant life regardless of how simple it might be. When we turn off the driving pressure of instinct, peace takes it’s place, and one’s footprint becomes soft indeed. One does not have to prescribe to a strongly ascetic tradition or practice to overcome excessive consumption; simply recognising our impulses, where they come from and where they lead us, will probably suffice.

Some would say that such a path is invalid because it’s ultimately a selfish one, and why should you be at peace in a suffering world? But the actual survival of our species is at stake, and the more of us who adopt an inward journey the better it is for those around us, and for the very planet itself.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

Oh, my poor neglected blog; this is what happens when a writer (or a blogger) tries to get a real life. The results are predictable: The writing sucks or vanishes and the real life doesn’t work either.

Being a writer really is a curse. For parents of young, prospective writers out there, I recommend the old medieval trick used to cure left-handedness and tie hands behind backs, but in this case both hands. It also has the advantage of doing away with that other scourge, self-pollution.

I have a lot on my plate today, but I’m determined to update this thing.

As readers may have noticed, Tracy and I have relisted Fainleog for sale, but this time on our own. I think we’ll have a better chance selling for less (which is what we would have got before, minus the brokerage fees.) Given the traffic I get on my blog, arguably the coverage will be greater anyway, not that most of you are in the market.

We are getting quite a bit of interest, and honestly, it has me in a bit of a funk. I find myself sniping at my wife more often, and suppressing an urge to wring her neck. Fortunately she is so lovely to me that I melt at the sight of her, so I’m reduced to passive-aggressive cheap shots.

It would be easy to blame her for my angst because after almost 5 yrs aboard she is the one wanting to move ashore, although she has in fact suggested some alternatives like renting a place for 4 months in the winter. But when I really examine my inner motivations and feelings, I know the problem is my own.

I’m getting old.

The thing is, I’ve reinvented myself so many times in this life, trying on different hats, different lifestyles, different ways of being. In part looking for something, in part simply because that’s part of living a full and meaningful life. But now, at the hale age of almost 51, I’m getting weary of it. After all I found something that really, truly works for me: living aboard a sailboat as a writer, making some money here and there, and cruising a few months of the year. What’s not to love?

I’ve been doing this since 2007 and these years have been the happiest in my adult life, fitting me so well on so many levels.

Of course it’s easy to blame Tracy for taking it away from me, but that blame hides a deeper truth. No matter what we have, no matter how good something is, we have to be willing to let go. Part of being truly alive is change and embracing change. No matter how good things are, we don’t have the option of grabbing onto it in an effort to keep it. When we find something wonderful we need to enjoy it, but if we decide to seize it everything fails. Life stops. Oh sure, the days carry on, but what you find is a kind is stasis, a suspended animation.

I would argue that’s the biggest mistake most of us make: finding our comfort place and staying there. We dismiss it as a “rut”, but it’s much deeper than that. Life means change and confronting the new that change brings with it. With each challenge we grow a little bit and deepen our wisdom. But as we get older, this becomes more difficult. We start to seek comfort over challenge, familiarity over the new. And we start digging our graves long before we enter them.

For myself, I have to admit I’m afraid of what change will bring and see only loss. I’m afraid of going back to that unsatisfying landlubber life I’ve known before. I’m afraid of being unhappy. And I’m afraid of the challenge of reinventing a new life yet one more time.

Living aboard or not living aboard is so much more than changing an address or housing style. These things are deeply symbolic and I don’t think just for me. Culturally, there is a great significance to whether you live in a car, a basement suite or a 6,000 square foot house on the ocean. I can’t begin to recall the number of times people have told us how impressed and admiring they were about our lifestyle.

And aside from that kind of meaning, the experience will be vastly different. I won’t deny the fact that living aboard can be challenging and living ashore is much more comfortable, hence Tracy’s desire to live ashore. But to me, that’s just the point: I want a lifestyle that by it’s very nature is a bit of a challenge, where every day there are some small things to overcome.

But in the end moving ashore is in fact an even greater challenge, because the paradox is that I’m most comfortable living aboard, and starting to get into my own rut. I’m like a lizard on a sun-baked rock, happily soaking in the rays; the problem is I’ve been sitting there for 5 years. If I truly want to embrace adventure in deed and not just according to the mythology of being a live-aboard writer, I have to push myself into places where I’m less comfortable, where I will be challenged by more than small spaces, inadequate heating and occasionally navigating shoally waters.

I have to confront that fact that I’m starting to be afraid of change. And that’s nobody’s problem but my own.

Here’s this month’s Pacific Yachting with my article From Calm to Calamity as the main article. The photo in the table of contents is also mine. It’s a good read; I highly recommend it.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

Despite the recent Occupy protests, I’m concerned that democracy in Canada is in trouble. Evidence for this is in each election we have recently experienced, and there have been plenty lately. Every time we are called to the polls the numbers decline, even though as an aging society we should see those trends reverse (older people tend to vote more). There is a lot of hand wringing among the pundits about what to do about it, and I think we need to start with the quality of existing governments.

Over the last 30 years, an increasingly hardened right-wing has replaced progressive governments in North America, culminating in the Harper American-style neoconservativism.

One consequence of this right is a more extremist public politic where decency and respect for others and other ideas has gone by the board. What was once unspeakable is now spoken, and voices once silent become loud and unashamedly shrill. Too often those voices are angry and at times hateful and prejudicial. We saw this in the last federal election when a reporter was questioning Mr. Harper, and a mob formed and started threatening him. Even simple questioning of his positions was seen by his supporters as intolerable.

The response to this by more thoughtful and moderate minds has been far, far too weak. Perturbed and even appalled by the deterioration of politics (given that participation is truly voluntary), many simply have chosen to not participate.

The problem is that that response, although understandable, is akin to pretending to not see the homeless man begging on the street; we fool ourselves that if we ignore it, maybe it will go away.

Statistics on both side of the border show that the gains of the right in the last US and Canadian elections was not due to a sudden upswell of preference for right-wing politics, but a staying away of more moderate voters from the polls.

More and more young people are choosing not to get involved in politics or participate in democracy. Given that the older one is the more likely you are to vote, the preference for far-right politicians represents a demographic trend, not a society-wide endorsement of their policies and beliefs. What it says about older people in society is unfortunate, as it supports the stereotype of the crabby, out-of-touch senior railing against the world and his diminished power in it.

The results however, speak for themselves: what we see now are the political choices of most people’s parents and grandparents, which is hardly the best choice to lead us through the 21^st century. What we have seen this last year is that angry, hateful and ignorant politics has alienated so many moderate citizens that angry, hateful and ignorant people have voted as a majority and delivered their choices to power.

You can argue the merits of disbanding the Canadian Wheat Board, but the omnibus crime bill? Crime in Canada is the lowest in 40 years, and yet we have a government toughening laws to punish rather then rehabilitate. We know that incarceration does nothing to improve crime stats or outcomes, yet we will now have minimum mandatory sentences, even for petty crimes such as pot possession. Prison guards no longer have to choose the least violent means to quell problems in prisons. Judges can no longer look at mitigating circumstances when deliberating sentences.

This kind of hang-‘em-high mentality arises in fear and hate, the belief being that once you cross a certain social line you are deemed dispensable as a citizen, having no intrinsic value.

I could go on with examples – there are a great many of them to choose from, especially in the areas of environment and climate change – but the point is made. Edmund Burke said all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, and recent events in Canada has borne this out. Human suffering will increase due to the complacency of decent people, and such is the road to hell paved.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is the way that my own experience seems so much less significant than it once was. I suppose that we all feel that way as we age. When we are young we believe so fervently in the rightness of our experience, the utter truth in it. Which is why young people tend to be the most driven in their beliefs, even at the cost of a mouthful of pepper spray.

It’s not that us old bastards are worn out, passive, or merely complacent, its just that we have been proven wrong so many times that we doubt ourselves much more. We know our fallibility much more than when we were young and untested.

And not only does fallibility enter the equation, but simple scepticism of what our minds tell us. When I was younger, my emotions were so strong and all encompassing they would not, could not, be ignored; their veracity could not be doubted

But after this many miles on the tires, not only have the emotions themselves subsided, I recognise them for what they really are  – constructs of a biological mind based on genetics and personal history. They are part of how I interpret the universe, but I’ve come to see them as having quite limited utility.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any of my Buddhist practice, but the effects are still with me, and that includes deep scepticism of my experience. That training was a perfect storm for me; so many pieces came together and reality suddenly made a lot more sense: psychology, biology, and Secular Buddhism all appeared to agree, and the self that was once so precious was shown to be a great fraud.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it now: it is so liberating when you can let go of self. What once was the end-all and be-all of life becomes suddenly irrelevant and so much that creates anxiety is dismissed. When there is nothing here, there is nothing to be afraid of.

That doesn’t mean that I’ve got it figured out, however. Life is still a mystery.  Having dispensed with self doesn’t mean that there is nothing, but that whatever else there is I cannot know it through this simple, biological mind. Buddhism denies the presence of soul, and I see no evidence of one, but who knows? The original Buddhist theology said nothing about God, but again, who knows?

When one is no longer devoted to one’s experience, when one no longer believes in a supreme or essential self, the mystery becomes deeper, far deeper than we ever thought. Everything in my life has lead me to the place of not knowing, and having little faith in ever knowing, which is the supreme paradox. Still, dispensing with the common spiritual and metaphysical beliefs is not the same as a nihilistic abandonment of everything, which is actually an incredible arrogant and certain epistemology.  I’m still a firm believer in the creed, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

I do look for evidence, however. In my day-to-day living I try to find the little gems scattered about that might possibly give evidence for something unseen. They are rare and subtle but I do think clues exist. Of course we can only interpret according the mind and feeling, both of which are grossly imperfect and suspect, but it’s all we have.

One little piece arrived without warning while I was in a discussion with a friend a few weeks ago. We were talking about meaning, and how to define a meaningful life. It occurred to me that the answer lay in imagining yourself on your deathbed and contemplating your life. Shadows are gathering and consciousness is about to leave you, and amid all the conflicting emotions and thoughts that must occur in such a place, how would one answer the question, “Did I live my life properly?”

It’s a very complex question, but we all get the gist of what it means: I came, I saw, and I’m now finished, and was it all worthwhile, not just for me but also for the world?

This is an intuitive thing, not a rational one. You don’t want to put yourself in this place and try and figure out what the world wants from you, what would make others proud, how to achieve the most, and so forth. It’s about knowing in your deepest heart that it was worth it all and that you did the very best you could.

The trick is knowing, the best of what? For my friend he realised it was about service. To die with peace he would need to know he did his best to help others. A very stunning realisation, because not much of his life to this point has been in that direction. This shows that the big questions can be inconvenient, though you ignore the answers at your peril.

For myself, what emerged was the absurdly simple notion of living life fully. I’m not sure where this comes from or what it signifies, but it means taking the very most of life’s experiences, as many experiences as possible, and throwing myself into them.  A very simple solution to a problem that has confounded me my entire life.

This is another piece of letting go. Rather than fretting about money or status or life’s myriad, banal worries, my biggest concern – should be my only real concern – is to grab life and shake the stuffing out of it.  The opposite of passivity.  And I understand that it’s not for me, for my own selfish benefit, but to have the experiences flow through me, in the way that artists often talk about having creativity flow through them and do the art using their hands.

What could possibly want to experience life through me is yet another mystery. But it’s a relief to at last understand why my life has been filled with so much conflict: our society has a plan and a path devised for us, and yet I’ve always instinctively balked. The stable, predictable career path is not why I am here, and no matter how hard I try it can never be.

So in this great big sea of uncertainty and unknown, there is one guiding light, one beacon to steer my ship. Perhaps that’s the very best we can ever hope for in this life.

Assume you will be dead in ten minutes. Looking back, did you live the life you were supposed to? Do you know what that is?

And now for something completely different, a short story I whipped up. Not exactly seasonal, but if Tim Burton can do Nightmare Before Christmas…

Dancing with the Dead

A God-awful siren ripped through the stillness of the House.

“Which is it?” Frederick asked.

“Number twelve. I told you. He was bloated like a dead pig this morning. Knew he would go off. You better grab the bucket.”

“I did it last time. Why do I always have to clean up the mess?”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Two weeks, but…”

“There you go. Get to it. I’ll send a message to the Grundherrshaft’s family; it’ll be a relief to get the stinking oaf out of here.” Grumbling, Frederick grabbed the bucket and mop, stepped down from the observation room.

Below, on the floor of the House, the bodies were lined in rows, resting on white marble tables lit by sunlight descending from overhead windows. Great bouquets of pure, white peonies were laid on and around the corpses, a patina of beauty and peace masking the fetor of decomposition. A cat’s-cradle of alarm wires hung from the ceiling, attached to the limbs of the silent residents.

Erik watched Frederick clean the mess left by number twelve, the man’s last dramatic act on earth. In contrast to the floral opulence below, the observation arena was cold and stark, without chairs or a place to sit or be comfortable. Just a bucket to piss in; four grey walls. A large sheet of plate glass overlooked the Leichenhäus, the House of the Dead.

“How was it?”

“Awful. I was almost sick. The stench!”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I doubt it.”

“Trust me, you will. I’ve been here almost two years; I’ve seen it all.”

“Two years! Why on earth would anyone want to work in – in such a place for so long?”

“I don’t have much choice. Owe a lot of money to the owner of the place. Gambling debts. It was either work here – or prison.”

Frederick whistled, looked out over the rows.

“You know, the boss was here this morning. I told him you were away arranging a delivery.”

Erik grinned ruefully. “Thanks. I was up late last night. Too much beer. Munich beer is the best in the world.”

“That’s the third time this week. You’re going to get into trouble.”

“Who’s gonna tell? You? I’d beat you senseless. Them…? They’ve got nothing to say. Look at them, Frederick; have you ever seen anything more pathetic? All lined up among the flowers, happily rotting away.”

“I can understand their fear, Erik, when they were alive. After all, who wants to risk being buried alive? What a horror it must be, to awaken in a coffin.”

“You’re a fool, Frederick; you’ve read too much Poe. This whole thing is ridiculous. Put me in a box and stick me in the ground, I say.”

“People have been buried alive, you know; doctors do make mistakes.”

“Leichenhäuses have been around for a hundred years, and I’ve never heard of anyone waking up. That’s why this is the last one in Europe; people got tired of spending money to watch their loved ones rot. Only fanatics get sent here these days.”

“Maybe so, but that alarm sure scared the hell out of me. Thought maybe we had a live one.”

“You’ll get used to that too, though it’s the fresh ones that make most of the racket: they twitch and jump a lot, triggering the mechanism. We get new arrivals, the alarms go off almost every day.

“So what were you up to last night?” Asked Frederick, as Eric walked into the observation room chased by beer fumes.

“Celebrating my last few days of freedom. I’m getting married soon, you know, so I’m making the best of it; I’ve visited just about every bierstube in Munich.”

“And your fiancée, she agrees with this?”

“Hermione? Not on your life. I told her I would be out of town, visiting a sick aunt.”

“You’re clever, that’s for sure.”

“Not clever enough,” said Erik, shaking his head, his vision swimming. “Verdammt! This is the part you never get used to, Frederick: standing all day watching these dead fools, this congregation of the damned. I would gladly shake the Devil’s hand if he were to release me from here.”

“There must be something we can do to break the monotony of this – this still dance of death.”

“Dance of death? By God…Erik approached the nearest table. The sign at the corpse’s foot declared Ernst Bäcker. He looked down at the emaciated figure, the fine, black suit like a beetle’s carapace, hands the colour of boiled fish crossed in prayer over the chest.

Erik swept the mountain of flowers onto the floor with a hideous crash. To Frederick’s horror, he took the corpse in his arms and began a jerking, macabre waltz across the floor, the alarm wires trailing, like a marionette’s strings, the horrible bell announcing with a cold, brassy clatter.

“Come, Frederick! Dance with us! There are many here. Come dance with the dead!” Frederick stood frozen. After a few minutes of maniacal whirling, Erik tripped and fell, sending more vases flying and knocking another body onto the floor.

“You missed a great dance, my friend,” he said with a hiccup, returning to the observation room. “Though the fellow I had was somewhat a clod; just couldn’t get his feet right.”

“How could you do that? Have you no respect for the dead?!”

“Very little, I’m afraid. I’m a pragmatist you know; once you’re gone, it matters little what happens to the leftovers. Besides, you have to have fun or you go mad. The last fellow that worked here went mad. I even caught him doing indignities to the ladies, if you get what I mean.”

“Mein Gott, that’s – that’s horrible. What did you do?”

“Do? I didn’t do anything. Had nothing to do with me, although I agree with you that it was quite disgusting. Can you imagine? Anyway, he threw himself into the Rhine.”

***

“Please Eric, we must go.“

“Pah, what is this “must? I will tell you what must be, Hermione. And tonight I will stay home.”

“But my love, we rarely entertain and this is important. We should make an entrance, if only for appearances.”

“The back of my hand to appearances.”

Hermione bit her lower lip. “The Count and his wife will surely be there and they have great interest in the city. I’m sure he could find you a position.”

“What kind of position?”

“I do not know, but he has great influence, and my father knows him well. Anything would be better than that wretched Leichenhäus. You cannot stay there, Eric.”

“I don’t know…” Eric said with a frown.

“Please? And it has been so long since we had some fun. It would be so terribly gay to dance. I cannot remember last we attended a ball, you know. I do love a grand dance…”

“Oh, ho, so that’s your game is it? You go on about prospects but it is really the debauchery that is on your mind? Strumpet! I should bend you over my knee!”

“Oh, do not go on so, it is terribly wearying. If you refuse to escort me, I will find another who will! We are not yet married after all…”

“Absolutely not! I forbid it.  Ah, Your father comes; I will have word with him and he will lock you in your room for the night. And once we are married, we will hear no more of cotillions!”

***

“So there you are. I thought you had left already.”

“I was speaking with the supervisor. Schwein! I hate that man.”

“There was somebody here, looking for you. Name of Schmidt.”

“Schmidt? My darling Hermione?”

“A man. Said it was very important you contact him, as soon as you return.”

“Damn. I wonder what he wanted.”

“Here, he left his card.”

“Aha, it is Hermione’s Uncle.”

“If you leave now, you might catch him.”

“I best not, the old man is on a rampage this morning.” Erik paced the floor of the Leichenhäus, the younger man fluttering behind him like a fledgling sparrow chasing after its mother. “Say, what’s all that? Did we get a new one?”

“Yes, a few moments ago. A buggy accident, the undertaker said. I will set him up with the freshest flowers.”

“Not that it’ll do him any good. He’ll be as foul as the rest of them, soon enough. And we get to watch, poor us.”

“What about him? Have you no pity?”

“Pity for the dead? Don’t be a fool. The dead are beyond suffering, and for that we must envy, not pity them. Look around, what pain do you see? These wretches are beyond any concern. This is an abattoir, laid with mute slabs of beef, waiting impatiently for the earth.”

“That sounds so cold.”

“Not to worry, Lucifer’s whips are keeping them warm enough. So, who is this imbecile; perhaps he too would care to dance?” He snatched away the sheet and seeing a woman’s face, he let out a great cry, falling to his knees. Frederick rushed to him.

Hermione Schmidt lay on the table, resting in a bed of pure, white peonies.