no no no no no no NO NO NO!
- queen, bohemian rhapsody
- queen, bohemian rhapsody
prologue
I WAS SITTING on a train today reading a book about music. i read the word 'parliament' and then looked up and saw the word 'parliament' out the window because it just so happened the train was passing through parliament station. it was kind of a waste, because i don't really appreciate these kinds of coincidences as much as some. my friend gordon trenorden, for example, is a connoisseur of coincidences. he savours them like wines and will diligently assemble them into meanings. he has built up an impressive cellar over the years.
we used to live together there for a little bit. in the evening he would come home and tell me about the day's coincidences: things he'd heard on the radio at work in the morning and then t-shirts he'd seen people wearing in the afternoon and how it all fit together and what he suspected he had to do in consequence. what he mostly suspected was he that he was being toyed with. it kind of made sense. why else, after all, were all these coincidences lining up around him, flinging themselves at his feet?
i wasn't sure. the only thing that was clear to me was we had different amounts of meaning in our lives. i found GT's meaning-threshold a bit rich for my tastes but, y'know, it takes diff'rent strokes to rule the world.. or something..
actually this is all kind of irrelevant to today's story, except that gordon trenorden is one of the three characters in it. i'm your invisible narrator for today so i don't really count.
1. gordon trenorden
SO ANYWAY GORDON trenorden went to germany recently. he sent a story back. here's the start:
ON THE REMOVAL OF FOUL ODOURS
Today marks aroundabouts a week since I have arrived in Germany. I know this to be the case because despite having observed some timezone changes which have resulted in confusion as to which day it is, I brought approximately seven pairs of socks with me, one for each day of the week, and this morning I was faced with using my last pair of socks. It is about this time when one should consider washing one's clothes. I have developed a new thought on the problem of old-clothes-odour and it goes a little like this.
When we smell something, what is happening is that tiny molecules of odour are spreading from the object in question and dissipating through space and ending up in one's nostrils. As it emits, the number of emittable molecules decreases, and so there must come a point when it runs out of smell. So an alternative to clothes washing is to simply wait for one's clothes to run out
of odour.
Today marks aroundabouts a week since I have arrived in Germany. I know this to be the case because despite having observed some timezone changes which have resulted in confusion as to which day it is, I brought approximately seven pairs of socks with me, one for each day of the week, and this morning I was faced with using my last pair of socks. It is about this time when one should consider washing one's clothes. I have developed a new thought on the problem of old-clothes-odour and it goes a little like this.
When we smell something, what is happening is that tiny molecules of odour are spreading from the object in question and dissipating through space and ending up in one's nostrils. As it emits, the number of emittable molecules decreases, and so there must come a point when it runs out of smell. So an alternative to clothes washing is to simply wait for one's clothes to run out
of odour.
nice.
what could we call this? a theory of filth, i guess. ah, it takes me back. i was blessed to spend my late teenage years hanging out with bohemians and every so often someone would develop a theory of filth that involved minimal effort on their part.
oooh mike can you tell us about a couple pleaaaaase? we sooo want to hear about the filthy friends of your bohemian adolescence and we ain't doing nothing that important right now, no sir nothing nohow, nothing that can't wait just a wee lil bit while you tell us a story or maybe in fact a couple stories i hear you say and me i say wow: it just so happens that i was fixing to do that very thing!
ZOMFG WE HAVE SOOOOOO MUCH IN COMMON! MAYBE WANNA GO OUT WITH ME? ON, LIKE, KIND OF A DATE? WHERE WE CAN TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH WE HAVE IN COMMON AND THEN MAYBE FIND SOME STARS TO KISS UNDER COS KISSING UNDER STARS IS SOOOOOO ROMANTIC? AND I CAN TELL BY THE WAY YOU'RE LOOKING AT ME JUST NOW THAT YOU THINK I'M BEING ALL TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY IRONIC AND ALL BUT REALLY I'M NOT REALLY I LOVE THE STARS?
ahem.. oops.. i got a lil swept away, then, in all the excitement.. wow.. let's move on:
2. matt the magic dog
I LIVED WITH matt the magic dog too, but he wasn't really a dog. he was a young man. we just called him matt the magic dog even though he wasn't a dog. i had a great bedroom in that house. it was the biggest bedroom i have ever seen, even now. we lived above a discount furniture place in the very centre of adelaide. the house was part of a larger building which had once been a home for wayward boys and kind of still was when i lived there. we were all pretty wayward in our way.
when i moved in i only brought a mattress and my drumkit and a bunch of ties and a few other clothes. for furniture we stole clothes racks from the driveway of a clothes shop across the road. i got my light from there too: i found a big spotlight there and dragged it over to my house and up the stairs. the room shone.
sadly, my parents turned up one day with the rest of my clutter and junk.
'we don't want this shit!' they said. neither did i but i'm not good at throwing things out so there it sat for a long time.
anyway: matt the magic dog: matt the magic dog had two tests he would apply in deciding which socks to wear next.
the first was the drop test. he would collect all his socks together and drop them one by one on the floor. the two socks which retained their shape the least upon impact were the two socks he'd put on.
the second was the flick test. he'd collect all his socks together and flick the sole of each with his fingernail. the two socks which made the least noise were the two he'd put on.
simple and kind of elegant, no?
3. baterz
OK I'VE TALKED about baterz a lil before. baterz was a genius. he was also haemophiliac. when he was about 15 he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. he ended up living til he was in his thirties but when i met him he was eighteen and didn't expect to live more than another couple of years. back then no-one had, really.
i only mention it because it gave him, amongst other things, a cavalier approach to rental property. him and his mates lived in a big old house in west hindmarsh, the semi-industrial adelaide suburb where i grew up. one of the rooms was locked, and they weren't supposed to go in there.
naturally, like bluebeard's bride, they were curious, so they started digging a tunnel. the tunnel started in baterz's bedroom and went straight down into the earth's mantle a ways before turning in the direction of the forbidden room. it went on that way a few metres and then they all got too scared to keep digging. fair enough: a cave-in would be a bad way to die and an unnecessary one for a teenage bohemian which is what we all were, more or less. i kind of said that already, didn't i? the bohemian thing? oops.
next to the hole in his floor baterz had a pile of clothes. when he'd finished wearing something he'd put it atop the pile. when he wanted something fresh to put on, he'd take something from the bottom of the pile. his reasoning was that a pile of filthy clothes generates heat through a kind of composting process which would, given a little time, kill the germs and suchlike that were causing the smell. the clothes at the bottom were in the hottest part and had been undergoing the process for the longest so they were the cleanest by now and they were the ones he put on.
like i said: genius.
love to all
xxxx
