Days without alcohol 38.
I was looking at my organ donor card today. It has been in my various wallets since he 8th November 1994 and to be honest, it looks like it. Even though it has just been sitting in a compartment in a wallet for its entire life it has still got so worn down that it might not immediately be recognisable as a donor card. In fact only the "nor" of donor is still properly legible and the "card" bit has worn away completely At some point in the intervening 13 years I have had to go over the written details on the back with firmer pen, as they too had disappeared from sight, though reassuringly, some things don't change and my dad remains the person to contact in event of my death and his number is still the same.
But apart from that the piece of card has shockingly degenerated, furry at the the edges, slightly ripped and only scarcely functional. Much like the organs that I agreed to donate all those years ago. Back then I was 27 and relatively fit and my organs might have been of some use to somebody, had I been unlucky enough to die. Now, I am not sure that even the most organ needy person in the world would really want to have any of my organs deep inside them. At least that has been my experience when prowling hospitals at night, looking for ill people to accommodate my organ. Luckily they are weak and can't really complain. Yes, I am making a joke about raping the infirm. I am proud of myself. But seriously, even though my liver must be in slightly better shape than it was two months ago, if I was waiting for an unfortunate death I'd really be wanting someone with a newer and less fucked up donor card. My donor card seems to work as a sort of metaphorical endoscope, showing the state of my insides by its own appearance. There is something both comforting and deeply upsetting about that. I sense some kind of "Donor Card of Dorian Grey" style short story forming in my head.
I am sure some unfortunate soul might still find my old and battered organs are better than their own, so I will keep the card in my wallet and hope it is recognised for what it is by any doctor declaring me dead and not just thrown away as a piece of mouldy and unpleasant card. Just in case I have also just signed up to
the NHS Organ Donor Register which should hopefully clear up any confusion. That presumably won't degrade, though I think it would be a nice touch if it included cartoon drawings of your organs alongside your details, and they slowly shrivelled and turned green as you got older. It would help doctor in selecting the best donor out of two possible ones, I suppose. After today's entry it might not be the only register I am asked to sign up to.
And given that my bodily parts are mainly useless I would like to encourage all of you to sign up too. There's a couple of thousand of you at least and many of you hae young, fresh organs and statistically one or two of you are bound to die young. And whilst I can not really afford to lose any of the select band of followers that I am clinging on to, it would still be better that by dying you helped someone else live. As long as they weren't a Peter Kay fan.
Maybe you can all train your organs to have a memory of enjoying my work, so that if they are transplanted into someone else then they will instinctively begin to like me too. In fact, given that your organs will be shared around to several people, this might be a way of making eight or nine fans out of one dead body - so when one of you is struck down, a dozen others may jump up to replace you, like those skellingtons in Jason and the Argonauts. If this plan comes off then I might actually go round the country bumping you off one by one and in a couple of years I will be bigger than Jesus! It's a brilliant idea.
But the first step is for you to sign on to the register. So please do that. And leave the rest to me.
