Mistakes were made

 In a class I run, I teach students about passive language. If you can finish a sentence with 'BY ZOMBIES, then it it is passive sentence. Steven King in On Writing goes to town on passive language. Kathy Bates would be hobbling her writerly students but I'm quite nice about it really. 

I write BY ZOMBIES on the whiteboard. "It's at its most insidious when it comes to police statements. They want to cover their arses right? They don't want to say if the perp is male or female so they just say 'the body was carried to the river.'" Then I point to the whiteboard. BY ZOMBIES. "The most insidious reason for passive language when it comes to cops is when they talk about sexual violence against women. By using this language, for example: 'A woman was attacked in Como last night', they are placing the word woman as the actor in that sentence, not the perpetrator." Dismay ripples across my class as this sinks in.

This post has started quite serious when I had funny in mind.  Yes, mistakes were made BY ZOMBIES. 

A handsome cyclist stopped outside my local supermarket. I was at the checkout when he got off his bike outside and stared at me through the window. He looked straight at me. I was buying wine and broccoli and a newspaper and his look was quite intense. Then he smiled at me, this beautiful huge smile. I could see that he knew me, saw me, recognised me. I smiled back. It was a bit weird because I wasn't sure if I even knew this fit, blonde-haired, genetically blessed human. Then he kind of did this thing with his hair, smoothing it down and then ruffling it. He smiled again and pushed his fingers through his hair and I thought, with my broccoli and wine and newspaper at the checkout: Jesus, he's checking out his own reflection in the window.

There are times in life where we think oh dear I think I got that one completely fucking wrong.We can cover it for a little while with the beautiful prevarications of passive language: mistakes were made.

I hadn't seen Brownie for a few weeks.He's been fishing at the inlet for the whole time I've lived here and then I read his funeral notice in the local paper. It was the last few weeks of the commercial season and I hadn't seen him for a while, so when I saw the funeral notice I thought he's died. Brownie has actually died! He'd had a heart attack at my place a few years ago. Maybe that had happened again?

So I logged onto the streaming service of his funeral and watched family members go back and forth like goldfish on the screen: welcoming friends, family, people sitting down in the chapel. Music played, the whole service going forward. Images of Brownie went up on the screen as the celebrant began to talk. 

It was then that I realised I was at someone else's funeral. This was not Brownie. The photographs on the screen showed a complete stranger to me. The ease of being at an online funeral is so weird. I was at the wrong funeral and watching a different family process their grief.

 This felt pretty fucking weird to tell you the truth. It was like I'd crashed a wedding as a bad actor in a romance. I slapped down the lap top lid and took a few breaths. I felt quite creepy. Does that make sense?