Maori Party-Nats-UF-Act-NZF? Speaking of surreal coalitions, what were Graham Henry and Ahmed Zaoui doing watching Graham Brazier declare himself a narcotics user in front of a huge packed churchful of community scions on Saturday? And what was I doing there? Hallucinating?
'Who's Graham Henry?' I asked Mike Treen.
The funeral/memorial service was taking on epic dreamlike proportions, and it wasn't even an allegory for post-election coalition-negotiations.
So. Farewell
then
David Wakim.
"My homeland
isn't a
suitcase"
Darwish said,
but God packed
you well,
as an
elaborate joke
on The Man:
a dozen Epsom
dadsworth, five days
of 'drug dealers'
three golfers
a man of rugby,
cricket,
faith, and
questions,
an Aussie,
a Kiwi, a
real live
Arab
and an
army
of revolutionary
shit-kickers
in one
David; the catch
burst the lot
all over
St Benedicts.
The Funeral Directors' Association just put out a handy book on dealing with death in different cultures. The bloody thing isn't on the internet though, so I have no actual information to impart.
As it happens, a friend of mine who works on a *coughmedicalsoapoperacough* was asked not long ago by the scriptwriters about Mainland Chinese traditions around death and funerals for *splutterplotpurposesahem*. How the hell is she supposed to know? She only plays a Mainland Chinese on TV - she's NZ-born Southeast Asian Chinese, she don't know jack. So she asked me, and I was like 'dude, I'm NZ-born Southeast Asian Chinese too, I don't know jack either.' We both guessed that the answer was something along the lines of: Pretend nothing happened, laugh in painful embarrassment a lot, lock yourself in your office and work extremely hard for a few weeks, not even pausing to blog.