This evening my Dad, Stepmom and I drove over to Ikea (by way of a British pub in Burbank named the Buchanan Arms, which was quite nice despite the fish not quite meeting the standards set by the Robin Hood) where I bought myself a shelving unit for my ever-growing collection of DVDs, books and vidjagames. I was fast running out of space on my current shelving unit, which is more or less the size of a termite’s intestinal tract, so I decided I shell out the dosh on a fairly non-crap sized thing to put my shit on.
I could talk to you about how much of a pain in the arse it was to put the unit together (in short: surprisingly easy, although I had to move it out of my room and into the kitchen to slide the back on… hang on, that wasn’t quite as short as I was aiming for) but instead I’m going to talk to you about Bob Marley. “My,” I hear you say, “That’s quite a tangent even for you, Ben.” But stay with me, because it is loosely connected to our excursion to Ikea.
Whilst in Ikea looking at lighting (because the desk in the office isn’t quite as well-lit as it could be, and in the interest of not causing our retinas to dissolve into a fine paste we were on the look-out for some nice desk lamps) I spotted a guy with dreadlocks. I was ill and my brain wasn’t quite functioning properly and so mentally I made a rather childish observation - “Hey, that guy looks like Bob Marley.” I spent the rest of the walk through Ikea with “No Woman No Cry” stuck in my head, and rather oddly it was (I think) playing on the in-store PA system as I was going through the Check Out. So, not twelve minutes ago, I bought “Legend” on iTunes. I also looked up the guy on Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit) and discovered he died of Toe Cancer.
I’m not kidding. The guy had melanoma on the big toe on his right foot, and chose not to have the thing amputated because it was against his religious beliefs as a Rasta. The cancer spread throughout his body until it reached the terminal stage, and even then he refused to draw up a will because to do so would bely the Rastafari belief that death is not an inevitability*. I’d spent a long time believing that Bob Marley had been shot at a concert for being too much of a hippie or some such thing. But refusal to let someone lop his toe off? Seems a little silly to me. The guy could still be knocking out cracking tunes today if he was willing to part ways with the big spud on his right meatslab.
Oh well. Not much that can be done about it now, is there?
*a belief no doubt concocted to ease the process of tax evasion. Actually that was a joke.