On not being put to death, hell, a rhetorical question and the pleasure of uselessness

1. The important bit
WE* MADE IT into Indonesia without being put to death or locked up for anything: awesome!


2. A brief descent into hell

All Halloween orange and chimney red.
- Tom Waits, Frank’s Wild Years

AFTER NOT BEING put to death we spent a wee short while in Kuta Beach, a deeply unpleasant place. It all seems to be built on a compact where Indonesians accept money to ignore behaviour they’d otherwise find offensive. They didn’t look happy about it though. I felt embarrassed to be a part of it and couldn’t see how not to be involved, given I knew jack about Indonesian culture or language myself. All I could rely on was emanating nice-guy vibes. It wasn’t enough. We left.


3. Yesterday a moth landed on my radiant foot
(FAR AWAY OVER waves when the weather is right I can see a volcano, rising proud and triangular like Mount Doom from the mist, Mount Doom in Mordor where sinfulness is made and where it can be destroyed if returned by a hobbit pure of heart and cast into the radiant fire. I saw it from the café where we sat last night, the café with the poster that says ‘Everybody can surf, so do you’. Later I looked up and saw two lizards crawling like hobbits toward the cold fire of an oblong energy-saving bulb fluorescing in the night. Maybe they mistook it for Mount Doom and carried some evil thing they wanted removed from creation. There were no moths around the bulb but yesterday a moth landed on my radiant foot. Maybe it mistook it for the fiery sun?)


4. That was a rhetorical question, and so is this:
IS ANYTHING MORE mournful, gentle reader, more sorrowful and full of woe, more provocative of lamentations than the moment when cheap toilet paper gives way and one’s middle finger slides unstoppably up one’s arse and into one’s own shit?


5. The now moment
ANYWAY: THAT WAS then. This is now, otherwise known as The Now Moment. Now we** are surfing in West Java. It’s beautiful. Sometimes a hundred tiny fish jump from the mother ocean like laughs from the mouths of tiny children – hahahahahaha! - just like that and then they bounce on the mother ocean - once!twice!thrice! - and are gone - kapow! - into the opalescent water which bears us forth when we get the timing right.

Other times when the waves are higher we go by the limestone headland. There are trees growing out from the top, shading the water, with garbage trapped in their roots. Swallows describe parabolas and hyperbolas and curves with no straightforward names. A grasshopper landed on my board somehow, too.


6. There will now be a brief intermission















7. Uselessness
Before coming to Indonesia I’d been busy as several motherfuckers, making myself useful. Anyway, yesterday I felt relaxed and realised it was because here I’m pretty much useless. It’s a good feeling. I’m not good for much more just now than exchanging money for entertainments various like food and accommodation and surfboard hire, which suits me fine. I walked through a shady gate and felt useless like music: music might be good for something other than just being music but we’d like it even if it wasn’t.

(Susanne Langer argues that music gets its power from being shaped like our emotional life: tension then resolution, tension then resolution. Which is true enough of a lot of music but also true of weather, the Dow Jones index and the waves my friends are riding while I hide temporarily from the fiery sun, the sun radiant like my foot, hiding from moths in the vastness of the sky.)


8. Other
TODAY WE DRANK tea beneath a café umbrella which looked like an abstract tree and I guess that’s what umbrellas are, no? Portable trees whose boughs you can spread and shelter beneath at whim. Anyway: there was a tiny lizard on the umbrella’s trunk. Its eye was the colour of amber and looked like a single drop of sap.


9. Tomorrow
MAYBE I OFFENDED the sun by hiding, because later today and tomorrow morning it hid itself behind rain, the rain of a god wrathful with the sinfulness of His creation, a biblical rain wherein the water cycle was short-circuited. Usually water is coaxed from the sanctuary of the mother ocean by the fiery sun into masses of vapour who make themselves useful by moving shade and water elsewhere and supplying metaphors for sadness and confusion. Here, though, it’s the rainy season and the prodigal water is impatient for union. There’s no horizon anymore and the surfers look so much further away through two tricks of perspective painters know:

a) atmospheric perspective, wherein things look further away the hazier they are. Here this is effected by a shitload of drops. And

b) some other kind whose name escapes me, wherein small things look further away because larger things are in front of them. Here the rain makes the waves between the surfers and me look like a succession of rolling grey hills and the surfers like hypothetical beings dancing on those misty hills miles away.

The absence of horizon underscores the simple verticality of everything: there’s a cloud doing its best to become ocean again through the agency of descent. It takes a while because protocol demands it happen drop by drop, even though the eye is convinced they’re already fused into non-duality over there where the horizon used to be. Wouldn't it be easier for everyone though if the cloud just sank gently onto and into the water without having to go through the bother of transforming itself into drops? I have had many good ideas about how weather could be made more efficient and have penned numerous letters to the Bureau of Meteorology but nothing seems to come of it: fools!

(Later we went surfing in the rain ourselves and I saw the process up close. Each second numberless drops hit the ocean fast and seemed to bounce on its surface like tiny fish. Spherical drops jumped up at the moment of impact like this: hahahahaha!)


10. Wait! I forgot!
Yesterday morning I walked out the gate useless like music to look at the grey waves. There were two lithe dogs trotting purposefully along the dark sand. They looked like they knew what they were about. Now and then they would dig and snout around in the sand for something. One was black and the other was amber. The amber one chased a tiny tiny crab in the limpid morning light.

xx Mike


~~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~~
* Me and Hanna. Hanna is very happy: there is tofu and tempeh, there are cats and mangoes and beaches and it's warm and humid. She is in her Element and has also turned out to be a natural at surfing.

** Me and Hanna and Kate and Tristan. Kate, she of the famous iron stomach, is sick today but has been otherwise well. We got her on a surfboard after four days of her screwing up her nose and changing the subject whenever surfing was mentioned. She liked it! Tristan, who Kate used to call 'pansy guts', is not sick at all, has finished his studies and is happy and relaxed.

an internet of toilets

a brief survey, which, while not altogether tedious, may be neglected by the reader impatient with facts.
- jack vance, lyonesse

WHEN I WAS young we had something called pub rock. sweaty men in tight trousers and leather jackets played it to rooms full of drunk people. i liked it a lot even though i didn't have a leather jacket or particularly tight trousers. i went out to see pub rock as often as i could afford, about once a week.

back then the university bars were some of the best places to see pub rock. they had bigger rooms and better sound systems than a lot of the pubs, and the good bands tended to play there. i started going to uni bars when i was 16 maybe. i usually had just enough money to get in so i usually didn't drink. i still had to go to the toilet though and i was struck, gentle reader, by the quality of the writing on the toilet walls. there were political screeds, knowing cultural references, all kinds of wordplay and always at least one point-of-view ballpoint drawing of a woman waiting to be penetrated. it all seemed so smart and worldly, some kind of adult commentary on the machinations of the day.

a few years later i started hitchhiking a lot and so i got to read a lot of toilet walls in tiny country towns. the thing that struck me there was that someone else had made the same journey and had written long narratives on dozens of the walls i looked at, bulging single-spaced unpunctuated paragraphs of the stuff, always with some kind of transgressive element, always with an undercurrent of anger. one time the author had walked out of his room when his uncle was out and seen his uncle's girlfriend getting undressed through a window and she was a real slut and he could see her cunt when she bent over and he knew she could tell he was watching and he knew she liked it the dirty little slut: that kind of thing. she'd go on to have sex with someone, sometimes the author, sometimes a different family member while the author watched in hiding. the secret was always safe at the end of the story: no-one ever got caught but i guess the story had to be told and so here it was poured out for all to see while they voided their bowels of shit.

anyway. we have the internet for all these things now but back then we didn't. men still wanted to talk about politics and art and sluts who wanted it though, still wanted to draw pictures of cocks and cunts, still wanted to keep alive the ancient tradition of jokes about arts degrees so they made the best internet they could from toilet walls. the nodes of this network were connected by two things: the shared cultural understanding outlined in the last sentence, and the sewerage system. and both of those were connected by the mother ocean, one way or another, in that a very small part of the water cycle takes place in our bodies, including the bits we think with.

since we've had a real internet the fire's gone out of the toilet wall internet and the prose has fallen off a long way, both in quantity and quality. perhaps you'd think this would be different in university toilets but it isn't, really. hardly any of the university-educated graffitists can spell any more and none of them have anything political to say that isn't talkback hate or green left weekly headline or just incredibly stupid in some other way.

despite this, there is occasional kindness and generosity of spirit, like the 19-year-old writing on the wall of the toilet closest to the recording studio where i study, the 19-year-old with a big black cock who kindly left a note offering to stick it in my arse if i want. well, the note's not addressed to me personally, but i figure i'm included. what a nice young man! it's heartening to know that in this day and age there's someone offering to stick his big black cock in the arse of a total stranger, without even being asked. it warms the heart.

it's a generous offer, to be sure, but here's the thing: he's offering to insert into my arse something of roughly the size, shape and colour as what i've gone to the toilet to remove from my arse. we're at cross-purposes, see. it'd violate some kind of conservation of mass to take him up on it.

on which note:

love to all
xxx