in Ikea on the weekend I thought of God's production line:

Christ died for your sins. Which is to say that Christ, all the Christs, died and continue to die in order to facilitate your sins, the ongoing commission of your sins. Not to atone for them but to enable them. Or if he (they) do not die, they endure for your sins that quality of life which is the very (ine)quality of life that makes possible the quality of life which you enjoy without realising or appreciating it.

this neighbour of ours - Dennis - was obsessed with the garbage bins. i suspect i've written about it here before. he was obsessed with tending them, guarding them. he also seemed terrified of us in some paranoiac way. like, if his car pulled into the street while we were leaving ours (which it did alarmingly often) he would sit there behind the wheel while we unloaded everything, apparently not daring to leave the car til we were safely inside. he had a neighbourhood watch sticker on his house. and he had a grey beard, the kind of grey beard that indicates, to me, some sort of relationship with mother's teacosy oedipal seclusiveness and silence. because he was so obsessed with the bin, we used to joke about him quite a lot, and one time we filled his brand new bin which he had obsessively numbered with beautiful bright balloons just to inaugurate it, which we later found all over the street. but of late, i had stopped joking about him. he kept coming home in the car exactly as we were getting in, which we used to joke was that he was having us trailed, but a couple of months ago I stopped joking and said to my mother "actually he looks really sick. he looks like he's dying." which was taken as a joke, because of his usual pale creepy beardlook, but i actually sort of meant it. and in the subsequent weeks I kept saying it, "he's obviously dying, look at him, look at his thin stick legs. he has CANCER. CANCER I tell you. he's obviously dying." ETC. To everyone's amusement. Anyway I got home from orchestra yesterday (where the hairs had sprung out of my bow) and I was in the bathroom and kit knocked on the door as i was washing my hands and opened it and she said "you killed dennis," then added, "tod," which is what she always says when someone in a tv show dies. And I said, "What?" She said, "You killed Dennis." I said, "He's dead?" She said, "Tod." I said, "Why, how?" Out in the kitchen my mother explained: "Cancer." Crunch. Diagnosis correct. Gutcrunch. And there was dinner being served. Kit said, "It wasn't your fault." I said, "I told you he had cancer. I knew it. I told you he was dying." The weird thing was, just the previous evening we'd seen him skulking about as usual with the bins, driving in at the same time he always did. Crunchgap.