Me and Kim Kardashian, tottering towards the solving emptiness
Wednesday, 25 March 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: Kim Kardashian and I have much in common. We’re both partial to oxygen, we’ve both piled it on a bit around the hips and we both nearly came a cropper last week.
I was driving in Lyttelton with stirring music on the radio, a bit of Tchaikovsky, perhaps, the sort of music that makes you wish you did heroic deeds. I stopped at a stop sign and looked right up Dublin St. Nothing. I look left down Dublin St. Something. I waited while the something passed, then I set out. Straight into the path of a small grey car approaching from my right. If the woman driving it were to keep straight on she would wipe me out.
She swerved, bless her, and the front of my car just clipped the rear of hers. We both stopped and got out. Tchaikovsky was still hard at it.
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“I’m sorry,” I said. “Entirely my fault.”
She said, “Hello Joe.” There are advantages to having lived four decades in one small town.
We found a chip in the paint on her left rear wheel arch. I said to get it repaired and to send me the bill. We then had a brief discussion about real estate. It turned out that we’d both put our houses on the market before deciding that we still liked them. Traffic, meanwhile, was treating us as a roundabout.
Back in my car I found that I was shaken. It was the jolt of vulnerability. One moment I was being stirred by Tchaikovsky; the next by thoughts of mortality. How had I failed to see the other car. A blind spot on the retina? A momentary failure of the eye to link with the mind? These days I find myself looking for signs of decline. As I got home the Tchaikovsky ended. It had been Beethoven.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world it was the Oscars, where Hollywood makes love to itself. And no such orgy is complete without Kim Kardashian, queen of the shallow, a woman whose absence of talent for anything but self-promotion has brought her a $2 billion fortune.
Beauticians had fussed over her all day. Her lashes were half an inch long. Her nails an inch. Her hair was a confection. She wore a dress that held no warmth but hugged those hips. And she was perched atop a pair of blocks that didn’t deserve the name of shoes. To run in them was unthinkable. To walk in them was a balancing act. In a practical world they were a handicap. In Oscarland they were a statement. They stated that here was a world of appearances only, where the realities of want and hunger, cold and danger, had been nullified by money, bought out by money, booted from the tent.
Kardashian was a walking artefact, a canvas. Her work for that evening was to embody the contrivance of her image. But then, as she tottered along the path to the party, escorted by flunkies, fawned on by cameras, she stumbled. One of the blocks on which she was perched tilted. Gravity got a grip on her. Her knees gave. She squealed, a non-performative squeal, and if a flunkey had not put her arms around her waist she would have sprawled amid the unthinkable dirt.
And in that fraction of a second, as she felt the pull of the earth, as the veneer shattered, as the truth loomed, as she went to ground, did she, as I did when I saw the car bearing down on me,
sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole
So permanent and blank and true?
No, I don’t think so either.