Late onset fallibility

This is a poem about dementia, which isn't something which has badly impacted me in my life.  Yet...

(My Nan had it, but I wasn't that old and we lived quite a long way away...)

It's going to touch me at some point however.  It's bound to.  About 1/6 of people over 80 are affected, and I know many more than 6 people.

Some see Alzheimer's as the worst tragedy of the modern age.  I am not sure I entirely agree, it's certainly one of the most painful for the victim's family—possibly worse even than having them in a persistent vegetative state, at least in that case the wreckage of the person you loved isn't still trying to talk to you.


However, to my mind dementia, horrible as it is, is a subset of the big tragedy, which is that people die.  I have written about this before: the inevitability of death, how it gets a little more evitable every year, and how that in itself brings interesting, new, social problems.  Those are good problems to have, however.  People living too long is infinitely preferable to them not living long enough.  The increase in diseases we can't yet fix: dementia, cancer, diseases of senescence in general—is the direct effect of taking out all those lesser deaths who were more vulnerable to our sorcery.

None of which makes the failure of a beloved mind any more bearable.


I have been asked why this is late onset, when early onset is even more tragic.  The answer is because early onset dementia is more like a horrible disease, striking down only a subset of us; however the diseases of old age, of which dementia is the one example, get everybody who lives long enough...

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Ian Badcoe · Late onset fallibility

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Late onset fallibility


He returns from walking the dog
no longer quite your father.
It's nearly your dog.

He returns from walking the dog;
he's only been gone two days,
which admits no ready explanation.

He returns from walking the dog
with a jaunty stride
and somebody else's shoes.

He returns from walking the dog:
your mother leaves without a word--
she has been dead for five years.

He returns from walking the dog
smiling strangely to himself;
scowling at you, your brother, the front room paper.

He returns from walking the dog;
seems like he's acting younger
and looking frailer than when he left.

He returns from walking the dog;
wants to speak to your sister, oblivious
that she lives in Queensland now.

He returns from his walk
with a cat on a piece of string
and seven tins of the wrong dog food.

Going forward

I had an evening out with some people I used to work with...

...who are all still mostly more embroiled with large corporations than I am...

...so I promised one of them I would post this.

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Going forward

The corporation cannot plan
its way out of a paper bag
which—note—is not to say
it doesn't have extensive PowerPoints
to socialise the vision
for the new, division-wide, bag-exit mission
get buy-in from the stakeholders at levels
from CFO to tea lady
and distribute cheap beer and pizza
at revels
that celebrate the dragging of one thousand hapless
employees, kicking and screaming,
into progress, status, overview, coordination,
planning, steering, post-mortem, and kick-off, meetings
at cost of fifty thousand person-hours
or half a million dollars [OpEx]
which is money so well spent
for staying in a paper bag.  Meanwhile

Team Lunchpack—who were spun,
you will recall, from Project Dune and tasked
with building an organisation-wide
flexible container collocation strategy—
have been thinking outside the box,
and now are standing
a touch despondently
outside a cardboard shipping carton,
and wondering where everybody went.

Boy/Girl/Thing

This may be the newest poem I have ever posted, I was editing it as recently as August 7th...  although, as is common for me, it had its origin some years ago and had to sit around in my subconscious/backlog until I was ready, willing and able to complete it.

This is also one of the hardest pieces of text that I've written for some time and the explanation for that is chock full of *spoilers* so stop here and go to the poem first if you want to experience it without preconceptions...



Ready now?  OK, so this is my attempt to get beyond gender.  Gender has been one of the major social battle grounds of the late 20th and and early 21st centuries, and great progress has been made — at least in some parts of the World.

So in this poem I'm attempting to look ahead to a time when gender is completely sorted out, and I'm using the trick of writing in the voices of two intelligent machines that don't have gender.  This way they can look, as it were, from the outside.  I've also added (off stage) some sort of do-gooders who are trying to "give" gender to the two machines — presumably on the basis that it is their (human?) right — but missing the point that the machines may be happier as they are...

...which of course echoes various historical cases of people thinking they know what's best for other people...

...I've even attempted to suggest that wiping over with a lint-free cloth is something of a sex act for these machines (I don't see that sex without gender is at all contradictory...) and finally, just for kicks and characterisation, one machine has a crush on the other (which again doesn't absolutely require gender.)

So why was that hard to write?  Just because English isn't designed to portray conversations between sapients without gender.  We only have the one ungendered pronoun: "it" which is far too loaded to sprinkle around unexplained.  So I had to resort to a certain amount of syntactic trickery (like assuming the person now speaking is the one whom we just just watched acting) and also repeating the two names more often than is common for casual writing.


And as it happens the whole exercise is a complete failure, because having gone to all that trouble: used gender-neutral names, avoided gendered pronouns and generally twisted the text...  I still think of one character as more male and the other as more female—damn!

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Boy/Girl/Thing


This whole damn gender thing  fucks me, says Viv,
so many different ways.  A tiny nod,
a shrug, sets sensor clusters all asway—
and Chris has always been in love
and Chris will never say

one word to the machine called Vivian.
Working together now, they pull
a rusty barrel, probe the casing.
Viv tastes, grimacing; throws the tongue away.
Phenols again, we're broadly screwed
to sell this crap.  A sigh—we'll have to crack
it down to short-chain feed.
A wiggle in the nether parts and Chris
has never seen a sight so fine
as hydrocarbon plant deploys.  Meanwhile, Viv

still ranting on the need for sex:
You see the bit that gets to me...
remember how they showed that vid:
two squirming pink things on a bed.
It bites an alloy thumb.  For me
the only sexy bit was how they'd come:
their car I thought was someone I'd enjoy.

And all the while poor Chris,
while not unhappy being an "it",
feels some appeal in girls and boys,
and beds; and is content to rub a cloth
across his best friend's heat exchanger grills,
but wonders if there's something more.  So asks,
and instantly feels shy: Tonight
maybe let's try again...
but this time both be boys?