Reasons to be cheerful.

I’ll be under the knife when you read this, but it’s all good. December is the cutting season for me, the summer harvest when my dermatologist, Godfrey, comes for the fine crop of skin cancers I have prepared for him the winter past.

We meet in the weeks before Christmas because that works for me. My jujitsu club is winding down for the year, and my book deadlines are mostly done, or so hopelessly undone that there is no point in worrying about them.

That wonderful lost week between Christmas and the New Year looms as an opportunity to recover not just from a round of minor surgery, but twelve months of major shitfuckery.

Of which we shall say nothing because this is a happy time.

Happy? Why? With my own dermis plotting to end me and sharpened steel in the offing?

Well, happy, because I live here, not there, and I can look forward to a simple procedure followed by a relatively modest bill and another year of being with those I love.

We all know, those of us here and not there, how lucky we are.

A good friend of mine who lives there, told me of a six thousand dollar bill that arrived with his name on it after he consulted an emergency room doctor about a stomach cramp. A severe cramp to be sure, but still. Six thousand dollars? Real dollars too. Theirs, not ours.

For a ten-minute consultation and a packet of pills.

Luckily, he was a soldier once, so the bill went to the Veterans Administration.

But still.

We are lucky here.

It doesn’t mean our luck will last, but I’m resolved to remain cheerful while it does.

That’s not easy at the moment, is it? The best lack all conviction while the worst are right up in our fucking grill.

I don't know about you but I’m not quite ready to dive back into the worst timeline. The sick fascination is tempting, I’ll admit to that. Especially the slow-mo self-destruction of Anthony Albanese. But this is a happy time, damn it, so for now we shall say nothing.

Instead, today I’ll take a breath and practise a little gratitude because to let you in on a shameful secret, I’m kind of shit at being grateful. I’m not sure why, but I suspect if I really drilled down into it, the reasons would not reflect well on me, a lucky fucking middle-aged white guy who keeps falling arse-backwards into good things.

Each day provides its own good things, and how we find them is more often a choice than we realise, coming to each as being something ‘gratefully better or bitterly worse’, according only to our judgment.

I’m borrowing from Marcus Aurelius for that. His Meditations, which I’m reading currently, are basically a couple of hundred pages of reassuring self-talk for Roman emperors, but no less instructive or useful because of that.

I’ll go now because I’m bussing myself to Godfrey, having nobody to drive me home after the cut. But again, I’m grateful. I find myself alone today simply because everyone I might have called upon is busy living their best lives and this gives me a chance to enjoy a fifty-cent ride on the ferry. Which I do love.

When I come back next week, full of stitches, but short a few grams of cancerous cell growth, we might finally enjoy ourselves with Book Club.

I’m reading half a dozen titles at the moment because going cold turkey from the news feed has opened up hours every day to spend in my library. I’ll be discussing Elana Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, and whatever the hell takes my fancy.

You can read whatever you want. We don’t tell people what to do in JB’s Book Club.