Behold! The Theatre of Comets

Hämeenkyrö

2010-08-03T21:24:00.001-07:00

I flew from Riga to Tampere, a city in the centre of the southern half of Finland. Tampere airport is about the size of a Virgin Megastore: bigger than a McDonalds but smaller than an Ikea. It was clean and empty. I was coming to Finland to do an artist residency. On the plane from Riga to Tampere I sat next to the nicest lady in the world. Her name was Mervii, she was sixty years old and dressed entirely in purple except for her shoes, which were gold. She had dots drawn on her face with makeup and looked like a happy roly-poly Vali Myers. She told me all kinds of useful things, which made me like her, and then bought me a beer which made me like her even more.

One useful thing she told me was how to pronounce the name of the place we were flying to. No-one I knew had even heard of it so we had no idea and as it turns out we were all saying it wrong. You should say TOM-pe-re, not tam-PEER. Pretend you're Italian and you'll get most Finnish pronunciation right; they even roll their Rs in exactly the same way. (The one place this rule doesn't work is with Cs. Italians pronounce them like the ch in chop. Finns say them like the k in Karma Chameleon. I found this out later when I went to see a play in Helsinki about Cicciolina, the Italian politician who used to make erotic films. All through the entire play they kept saying her name kikkiolina. Which is wrong, but kind of funny.

Another handy hint: if you want to make erotic films and be a politician it's probably better to do it in that order, or at least do one of those things at a time. Some politicians try to make erotic films while they're still politicians and it doesn't work out so well. Politicians are kind of surrogate parents - they get to make all the decisions and spend all the money, after all - and few people want to watch their parents having sex.)

But I digress.

I didn't know who was meeting me but it turned out to be a guy whose head was shaved like mine, which put me at ease. His name was Teemu. We had to drive about half an hour to get to the residency place, near the small town of Hämeenkyrö. It gave me time to see pretty much every kind of inland landscape I'd see for the rest of the month: forest lake field forest lake field forest lake field forest lake field pretty much forever until you get to Lapland, where the trees get smaller. There's a lot of bloody lakes, something like 190,000, and about 180,000 islands. The lakes all point in the direction the local glaciers retreated to at the end of the last ice age, because that's how they were made: gouged out of rock by glacial fingernails. The first time I saw a map of Finland my mind couldn't even register what was going on. Where I was used to seeing slabs of land with roads on them and the occasional river - which in Australia means a line of trees or slightly greener grass across an otherwise barren landscape covered with the skulls of sheep who have died of thirst - the Finnish map was all interpenetrating slivers of water and land, on pretty much every scale. The roads looked like they were leaping from stone to stone across a stream.

I'd been in the car about ten minutes when Teemu said, 'And will you have sauna tonight?' This, too, would set a pattern for the following days. We got to the residency place, ate, and had sauna. I met the other two people who run the residency, Pekka and Inga. They were both lovely. The sauna was small and fired by a furnace which burned wood. Well, I say furnace but they got uneasy when I said the word 'furnace'. The word 'furnace' reminded them of the Holocaust. Whatever it was, it also heated a big urn of water. The way it works is you go in to a kind of changing area and take off your clothes, go into a second room where the urn is, put some water from the urn in a bucket, put a bit of cold in it too if you want and then tip it over your head. Then you go into the actual sauna bit and sweat and chat and throw water on the stones and hit yourself with leaves if you want and drink beer if anyone's remembered to bring any. Then, here anyway, you sit outside in the forest and cool off for a bit and drink more beer and then go back where it's hot and chat and sweat and drink more beer.

A third pattern seems to be emerging here, which is beer. We were drinking Karhu, which means 'bear'. The billboard which advertises Karhu just says 'Karhu', with the bear logo, superimposed over what I first thought was a black background but which turned out to be an eerie, shadowy image of a forest in late twilight. I'll be honest: it freaked me out when I suddenly made out the ghostly trees. Who the fuck advertises beer like that? The answer is: people who spend a decent portion of the year in a shadowy forested landscape, that's who. What the billboard says, beautifully and economically, is 'You're in Finland. So are we. So are bears. So we made you some beer which is kind of like bears. Please, enjoy some delicious beer.'

Later in the trip I would drink all manner of other things. One was sahti, which Pekka would translate as 'spiritual drink'. Strawberry farmers nearby brewed it illegally from weeds. It cost 2 euro a litre. We bought 8 litres of the stuff, in a rectangular plastic container which looked like it had once held agricultural chemicals. Reader: it was awful. Well actually, when we first bought it it was just drinkable and I may perhaps have had quite a bit of it. Two weeks later, though, the container was produced again and the spiritual drink had turned even awfuller. It was like ale someone had left on a plate in a forest for a few days, to lose all the bubbles and get a bit stronger and sourer and have a few bugs drown in it. I managed a sip or two and then realised I had nothing I really wanted to proved by drinking that shit and so I stopped. Later still, in Helsinki, I had tastier weird drinks: terva (shnapps flavoured with pine tar), fisu (vodka infused with Fishermen's Friends) and salmari (the same kind of thing but infused with salty liquorice candy).

Anyway: back in time. The morning after my first sauna I got to have a proper look around. It never gets completely dark here in summer because of the latitude, but it certainly gets darker. Now I could see better. The landscape seemed kind of familiar: all the trees were pines or birches or spruce and all the colours made sense. It didn't seem so different after all. Then I noticed a metal fence at the back of the property. I went and looked at it. Inside the fence was a thin layer of fine gravel.

'What's this?' I asked.

'An ice-skating rink,' they said, which destroyed the sense of easy familiarity I'd been building up over the morning. Around here all the lakes and rivers freeze in winter. When they're in the way cars just take shortcuts straight over the top of them. In Helsinki the ocean freezes and last summer flamingos in the zoo, which is on an island, were killed by foxes which just walked over the ice from the mainland.

Later in Helsinki a friend I was staying with would question my choice to wear jeans by saying, 'It's plus thirty outside!' The 'plus' bit was relevant, because the temperatures here range from about plus to minus thirty-five degrees centigrade. It has a nice symmetry, I guess. Given the extremes they were used to I was surprised what pussies they were when the temperature dropped even just a bit. Sometimes after a day of thirty it'd drop to fifteen, and the Finns would emerge in the morning all rugged up and complaining about the cold: 'It's fucking freezing!'

'Freezing? You guys are used to minus thirty! Woddafokk?' I'd say back. I'd say 'woddafokk' because that's how they say 'what the fuck?', kind of like the whole thing is one word. It's a translation of the Finnish mitä vittua. Mitä means 'what' and vittua literally means 'cunt' but in practice gets used like 'fuck'. They don't have the word 'the' in Finnish, or any of the indefinite articles like 'a' or 'an'. They just say the equivalent of 'what fuck?!', and everyone knows which fuck they're asking about, so I guess it works out.

It turned out the answer to my woddafokk? is that they don't like changes in temperature. Thirty is ok, negative thirty is ok, but any sudden changes of temperature turn them into big pussies. So much for that.

Ok: back in time. It was Saturday. We went to a tango hall. Here in rural Finland they have wooden halls on hilltops where they dance tango on Saturday nights in summer. Travelling musicians brought tango music to Finland early in the twentieth century and it caught on in a big way. Here all the tangos have a Baltic feel, all minor chords and melancholy themes, some from old folklore. The tango halls are where the country people used to court, and this one was full of guys with big moustaches and the women who loved them, ambling around the hall arm in arm. Their tango was way more casual than Argentine tango and looked to my eye more like a waltz. The whole affair looked like a country dance, because it was, and there were little kids dancing with each other and their parents. I went to buy a beer but they only had children's beer, which isn't very alcoholic.

Moustaches? Yeah, moustaches. Here you decide when you're a young teenager whether you want to go to university or learn a trade. The uni-bound go to high school and the trade-bound go to moustache school, where they grow moustaches and mullets and get given trucker caps and learn to paint rally cars. The houses on the back roads around here have old muscle cars and beetles painted in rally colours sitting in the front yards or rusting on blocks next to red barns.

We stayed at the dance for a bit and then went to the local pub, miles away over the pretty backroads full of red barns and muscle cars and fields and lakes and forests and fields and lakes. It was a tiny wooden room by the main road. Pekka backed the car into the car park in case we needed to get away quickly.

'Sometimes.. it gets violent here,' he said.

We went in. There were more guys who'd been to moustache school, drinking shots. They outnumbered the women by three to one, which I guess could explain at least some of the fights. The imbalance was there because Finland is subject to the same rural female brain drain as everywhere else. Women go to the city to get better education and better jobs, and the men stay behind to look after the land. They have the same 'Farmer Finds A Wife' reality TV shows as everywhere else, too.

On stage was an acoustic three-piece band, playing Irish songs they'd translated into Finnish. They had penny-whistles and everything. The songs were about drinking and fucking, and they went down a treat with the drunk lonely guys from moustache school. The band finished their set with something I instantly half-recognised, even though it was in Finnish. I knew I'd heard it a lot but I couldn't place it. I had a sensation I've written about before, where the feeling of knowing a song accompanies the inability to remember what it is. Eventually I worked it out. It was weirdly out of place here on the other side of the world and yet perfect, speaking equally to travellers far from home like me and the farmers who'd stayed home but whose teenage sweethearts had split for the big city. It went like this:

So it's-a lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night we'll hear the wild dingoes call
But there's-a nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer
- Slim Dusty, 'A Pub With No Beer'

Love to all xxx

Riga, errata, oil, OK!

2010-08-02T23:18:00.001-07:00

1. Riga

I TRAVELLED ALONE from Amsterdam to Tampere in Finland, of which more some other time. On the way to Finland I spent a wee short while in Riga, in Latvia, a former Soviet city which is now establishing itself as a regional hub for air travel. I had an hour or two before my connecting flight so I did what everyone else in my position was doing, which was ambling along with the vacant and confused look of the recently activated undead.

I went to the toilet. It seemed like something to do. A sign there said:

'Gentlemen! Welcome! Please respect property of Riga airport! Also please observe the commonly followed standards and conventions of decent behaviour! Thank you! And enjoy your stay!'

Must have been quite a party once, in the men's toilets of Riga airport. Just near the toilet was The Old Country, a duty-free shop done up to look like.. actually, I'm not sure exactly what they were going for. The entrance looked like the trees you see in high-school musicals. Inside, the pillars were plastered with political posters that I'm pretty sure meant nothing. There was expensive crap and cheap horilka, in easy-to-carry sizes for the international traveller.

I bought a sandwich from a bar called Buffet. The waitresses had huge breasts and tiny eyebrows, which looked weird but I guess was better than the other way around. I was behind a queue of people. Everyone in the queue was holding a bottle of water and walking back and forth between the sandwich stand and the register, trying to get their change right. For some reason the bar would take Euros but only notes, and they'd give you change in Euros, but only notes. If you didn't get the change just right you ended up with Latvian coins, which were expensive and useless everywhere else.

Eventually I got to the front of the queue. I bought a sandwich. The waitress plonked it down unwrapped on the counter. I looked around for a plate but perhaps there was a separate queue somewhere for plates. There were stacks of glasses and taps behind the bar so I said 'Can I get a glass of water with that?'

'Only bottled,' said the waitress.

'Really?' I said.

'Sorry!' said the waitress, and smirked, as did everyone else in the line. They held their bottles of water and loved them with their hearts and smirked with their faces.

'Really?' I said again with my own face, and then I used the same face, which now had a confused expression, to look at the glasses some more.

'Well.. I can give you a glass of hot water with ice in it,' she said.

'Yes!' I said and then everyone around me looked at their bottles of water and muttered regretful things at their bottles of water and those bottles of water suddenly didn't feel so special anymore. The waitress came back with a glass of hot water with ice in it, and a little smile like I'd managed to beat the system somehow. The system which I guess was set up to make sure travellers don't get what they want unless they manage to combine options they don't want - but which are at hand - in some kind of alchemical manner to produce the thing they were after in the first place. Everyone needs a hobby I guess! Gotta have a hobby.

There were what looked like prostitutes walking around the departure lounge, which seemed pretty considerate of whoever thought of it. What better way to fill an otherwise dreary hour in a former-Soviet airport? I didn't see anyone taking advantage of this service, though. Perhaps they were discouraged by the prospect of buggering up their change after all the mucking around getting it right while they were buying sandwiches? Or maybe they just couldn't work out how to ask for the prostitution equivalent of a cup of hot water with ice. As for me: I watched TV instead. On TV the European economy was collapsing and a German octopus was predicting who would win the soccer.

2. Errata

OK, TODAY AT the Theatre Of Comets we have some letters from readers. Some of these letters are just lovely replies, which always make me happy, and for which: thanks! Other letters bear upon claims I have made recently. Let's take a look at the latter, shall we?

The first is from Mathew, who tells me the toilet style that so confused me in Amsterdam is standard-issue throughout the Germanic bit of the world. I'm going to Berlin soon so I'll be able to at least dip my toe in the water of that proposition, as it were, and report back then.

The second is from Robyn, who says: said toilet style is about avoiding splashback. In Australia, see, you have the pleasure each time you shit of taking a little bath in a dilute solution of your own shit and piss. The Germans, Gott knows why, aren't so keen on this, hence the mechanism to separate said wastes. I guess the option to examine your shit more closely is just an added bonus. One of many things to thank the Germans for!

The third isn't actually a letter, but was Hanna's comment on my analysis of Amsterdam traffic. I left Amsterdam before the World Cup and went to Finland, but she stayed for the carnage. She said I was basically right until the Dutch lost the World Cup, and then the system which had worked so beautifully just went to shit. The system relies on equanimity and mutual respect, see, so when a country loses all self-respect and will to live the system doesn't work out so good. Makes sense.

3. Oil

ON THE PLANE on the way to Riga I sat next to a very nice man who inspects offshore oil wells. We talked about disasters, since at the time there was a high-profile oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico which showed no signs of getting any better. His take on the matter:

a) governments who refuse to regulate industry safety properly and then blame an individual oil company when something goes wrong are cunts. (Well, he didn't say they were cunts, because he was too nice. I said it for him, because I'm not.) And

b) there might be just one or two teensy unexpected consequences when a huge old oil company goes out of business, such as less experienced operators doing the same job in the same regulatory environment.

By some coincidence the New Orleans musician Dr John was on the flight too. He had a gnarly walking stick. It looked kind of voodoo. He sat in business class with his gnarly stick and his band sat in economy. I only knew what he looked like because I'd seen a video three days before about the big oil leak, and he was a prominent speaker in it. His take on the matter:

c) 'Why are the criminals still in control of the crime scene?'

I thought about introducing Dr John to the nice man who inspects offshore oil wells and sitting back to see what would happen. Perhaps he would end up using his gnarly stick on the nice man who inspects offshore oil wells? There were all kinds of dramatic possibilities, heightened by us all being on an international flight. Because whatever you think about oil it's pretty tough for any individual human being to use more of it - and in more of a hurry - than by flying in an air-plane to the other side of the world. Unfortunately I was in economy and Dr John was in business class and anyway we hadn't been introduced ourselves except in that weird mediated way where I knew who he was because I'd seen his image somewhere.

4. OK!

OK THAT'S ENOUGH for today.

Love to all xx

Amsterdam: shit, bicycles, video art, Deleuze

2010-07-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

1. Shit

IT MUST BE so you can examine your shit properly before you flush it, that's what I'm thinking. Nothing else really makes sense.

Oh hi! I didn't see you there. I'm just looking at this weird toilet in an art gallery in Amsterdam. What are you doing? Can't you wait til I leave the toilet before you come in? What the fuck is going on?

The thing that's weird about this toilet, since you're here anyway, is that the bowl is divided into two sections. The front bit, the bit which is under your urethra if you're sitting down, is deep. The back bit, directly under your arse, is a broad flat pan. I have not shat, but if I had my shit would be sitting on a kind of plate, separated from a deep well of my piss. Which would make sense if I wanted to examine the colour and consistency of each before I consigned them lo! to the watery underworld which lies beneath urban life, the veins which carry waste back to the oceanic heart whence came all. Otherwise it's a bit of a fucking mystery, that's what I'm thinking.

Me and Hanna are in this gallery looking at some video art. The art is good, which is a relief: until now our gallery visits here have only turned up pretentious fashion-inspired photography, the kind that was so exciting back in 1985 and now, perhaps, not so much. We opened the gallery door and walked in and saw about 15 screens, all turned off, and a stereotypical Amsterdam art person sitting at a stereotypical Amsterdam art Mac. He had product in his hair and horn-rimmed glasses and a shirt with tiny blue checks.

'Are you open?' we said.

'Oh!' he said. 'I'll just turn it on.' He seemed surprised, like he wasn't really expecting anyone to come and see any video art. Reader: this is often a safe attitude to have, but perhaps it's a little strange in a gallery attendant, is it not? Or perhaps he had learnt from experience and decided to save electricity until it was really necessary. Frugal, the Dutch.

2. Besties
APART FROM PRETENTIOUS photography, Amsterdam is like the best city ever. Everyone gets around on bicycles, from kids to students to businesspeople to old people. Perhaps because everyone rides everywhere, bikes don't seem to be status symbols at all, and everyone gets around on these solid granny bikes that look like they were built for service - and, in some cases, might have seen it - in World War II. There's no fixies. A million bikes and no fixies; a million people and only nine hipsters, at least as far as I can make out. Like I said: best city ever.

Since everyone rides, there are dedicated bike lanes everywhere. Since there are dedicated bike lanes everywhere, no-one needs a helmet. And since the basic unit of traffic is the bicycle, the traffic is driven by the logic of bicycle riders. Bicycle riders in many places are defensive and oppositional because they're consigned to the margins of dangerous roads and have to assert themselves to avoid injury and death. But here they're the majority, so they're relaxed. Bicycles weave easily around obstacles, so there's no reason to get too upset by anything. The city is flat, so no-one is precious about their momentum. Traffic - I know I've said this before, but anyway - gets annoying when traffickers get precious about their momentum, once starting and stopping start to seem like a big deal. But here you stop if you need to and start when you can and there's no need to get upset.

Reader: Australian traffic sucks balls by comparison. It's not that it's all that dense or busy or anything, compared to anywhere else. It's more that we've developed a bullshit attitude from building our cities around cars. We sit in traffic forever and when something blocks our path we shake our heads and swear and frown and really it's pretty much all bullshit. We sit at lights for minute after minute and if someone delays us even by seconds we curse them and get vexed. It's a bullshit attitude, and it makes us unhappy. And what a city like Amsterdam demonstrates is that traffic really doesn't have to be such a cunty fucking pain in the balls, to coin a phrase.

3. The Nile in Ancient Egypt

IT'S PARTLY TO do with how things are organised here and a lot to do with attitude and character, but a lot of what we think of as national character traits come from geography. Europeans who settled in America, for example, started at the eastern edge, so for the first century or two whenever anyone got too annoyed with how society was shaping up they could just head West, and eventually they'd find fertile land they could claim as their own and set up a little homestead. Since most of the continent was fertile they ended up with a nation of small landholders, self-reliant and independent, suspicious of external influence, occasionally insular and selfish. Australia, by contrast, was arid and relatively barren except on the coastal fringes, a geography which interacted with European farming practices to produce massive sheep and cattle stations, owned by a rich few and worked by itinerants. Australian workers, at least for a while, ended up ripe for socialism and unionism, suspicious of property owners and used to considering themselves as a working class.

In Ancient Egypt the Nile flooded predictably and reliably and always in the same place, and the Ancient Egyptian attitude to life emphasised eternal cycles where everyone's status was known. In nearby Mesopotamia the riverbeds were shallower and rivers changed course often, sometimes washing away entire settlements in the process, and Mesopotamian cosmology emphasised uncertainty and doubt and cruel gods you could propitiate but whose response was always unpredictable.

The Netherlands contain a lot of reclaimed land, land which was seabed when settlers first found it, and much of the country is below sea level. It started out as a country in constant danger of being washed away unless everyone cooperated, so everyone did. They're used to getting along without being told, and it shows in the traffic. Amsterdam, also, is a planned city, more or less: a kind of half-hexagonal grid of alternating canals and streets, and it just kind of works.

(London, by contrast, where we were a few days ago, is an ancient mass of villages which have grown into each other. I liked it a lot. It reminded me of Delhi and Bangkok, to be honest, but that's probably just cos I'm not very travelled and so the only really big old chaotic cities I know are in Asia. Also because London was warm and humid while we were there. It was fun. I recommend it.)

4. Excuse me while I pontificate

TODAY I WENT with Hanna and looked at more art. We saw some shit video art and some decent video art. Shit video art is worse than shit still art because video is a temporal art and you have to watch the whole thing to feel like you've given it a proper chance. With a painting you can decide you hate it in a second and get on with your life but shit video art makes you wait for the right to move on, wait like you wait at a long boring embarrassing wedding or a long boring embarrassing motivational seminar. You feel the seconds of your life tick by and turn into minutes and you know you'll never get them back, so the pain of shit video art contains the pain of mortality in a way few other shit art forms can really manage (except of course for shit theatre). It's like shit music, but at least with shit music your eyes are free to wander where they will. Shit video art captures the eyes too, turning the audiovisual experience to torture.

This particular shit video art was particularly shit because it was deliberately obscure. Deliberate obscurity is a sign of insecurity. People do it when they're scared to express themselves simply, but anyone who knows what they think doesn't mind expressing themselves simply and straightforwardly. Ok, that's a sweeping statement, and actually I can think of four exceptions to straightforward clarity which aren't deliberate obscurity, which I'll call the poetic, the professional, the political and the philosophical:

a. The poetic exception means poets are allowed to fuck with your head by fucking with language. It's their job.

b. The professional exception means it's ok sometimes to only want to communicate to someone you share some kind of common knowledge with already. Doctors talking to other doctors are allowed to use language only other doctors will understand. This is true of artists too, who sometimes want to say something which will only make sense to people familiar with some facet or other of art history. Outsiders get annoyed by this but everyone does it, so they shouldn't. This kind of prior knowledge is a big part of what makes watching sport fun, for instance, and no-one gives sport any shit for it. Watching any given football game, say, is fun if you know the rules of the game, the recent and longer-term history of the individual players and each team, and so on. Otherwise it's just abstract. I get the same pleasure from watching sport as I get from watching modern dance, which is to say: only a tiny bit, because I don't know the relevant history of either.

When we hear people talk about sport we don't demand that they explain themselves in terms anyone can understand; even if we did they'd just tell us to fuck off and learn a bit about the game. And if sports is allowed to only make sense to people who care enough to know some background, so is art. But even with this kind of art, someone is trying to communicate something. Deliberate obscurity, on the other hand, is bullshit, and we don't need it.

c. The political exception means you can speak in codes when it's too dangerous to speak simply. No-one in Amsterdam gets to use this as an excuse though, because it's too nice here.

d. The philosophical exception means sometimes the words everyone's familiar with lead to thinking about things in the ways everyone's familiar with. Since it's the job of philosophy to come up with new ways of thinking about things, sometimes philosophers needs to invent new terms. The best example of this is Deleuze, one of those philosophers no-one really understands but whose language is evocative enough that people want to use it even if they're not sure what it means. No reason why not, I guess.

5. Speaking of Deleuze:

SPEAKING OF DELEUZE: we caught a ferry across the river to look at some art that was supposed to be Deleuzean. I didn't understand any of it but it looked like they were at least trying, so I didn't mind. I looked at the art for a little while and then I had to shit. The toilet in the gallery, as it happened, was exactly the same as the toilet I was talking about before, so I got to test my theory.

It turns out I was right. After shitting my shit sat there on display like fois gras on a broad white plate in a fancy restaurant. I looked at it for a while. The situation seemed to call for it. We sat there for a little while, me and the plate of shit, looking at each other. Unlike shit video art my shit demanded nothing from me, it just sat there silent like a painting. It was out of my body now so our necessary relationship was over, and I was happy to spend a little while communing with it. We shared a peaceful moment. The moment passed into history and then so did my shit.

Love to all,
xx Mike

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

2009-12-11T12:42:00.001-08:00

Why, in fact, do chickens ever cross roads? Roads are dangerous places full of cars and trucks and motorbikes: wheeled vehicles unkind to chickens when they travel at speed. On the face of it chickens would have to be fucked in the head even to attempt it. Why do they do it, Mike? Whyyy?

A: Chickens are, indeed, fucked in the head.

That's how it seems to me now, anyway: traveling at speed by motorbike through the verdant steamy island of Karimunjawa. Chickens keep launching themselves across the road and therefore into my path and I hafta say it seems about the stupidest thing they could possibly do while I hurtle along, threatening their skinny necks with the moving interface between my wheels and the holey road. Like I said: fucked in the head.

As for us: we are following a bearded Dutchman with the radiant eyes and friendly smile of a crazy person. He has a sea-cucumber farm. We are following him to it.

Q: So you're riding a motorbike? How is it you're managing to type, then? Do you have some kind of crazy fancy mobile interface thing? An iPhone or some hipster shit like that?

A: Good question! I am not actually speeding along just now, I am sitting at home with a cup of tea. The whole present-tense thing is just a literary device designed to create drama and excitement.

Anyway, we met the Dutchman like this: we'd been riding around on the holey roads looking for a white sandy beach with palm trees like they have on postcards. We'd seen this beach the day before from the deck of a wee boat and we nearly went there too but Tristan started vomiting: blech! and so we didn't. The beach has become a tiny grail for the day: we know it's there but we don't know where. If we are valiant and pure of heart maybe we can find it and drink the blood of Christ while we laze on its glowing shores.

So we're riding along and this bearded guy with glowing eyes overtakes us. He's riding pillion on a motorbike being driven by a 12-year-old.

Q: A 12-year-old? For realz?

A: For realz. One of the great things about Indonesia is the basic unit of traffic is the motorbike. Motorbikes go around things easily and they don't have as much momentum as cars so they can swerve and brake without anyone getting too upset. When the basic unit of traffic is motorbikes the traffic takes on a fluid quality: everything flows around whatever's slower. Since everything is in constant flux, and since, like Bob Dylan, no-one ever looks back, drivers are alert. I felt so much safer there on a bicycle or as a pedestrian than I ever do in Australia. In Australia the basic unit of traffic is the car, which needs a lot of space and makes the driver impatient of obstacles and interruptions to the inexorable pull of historical destiny, i.e. getting to one's final destination. Just getting into a car makes me want to annex Poland and herd the Jews and homosexuals into freight cars. Put another way: in a car in Australia I feel like I have a right to my momentum. If anything makes me lose momentum - say a traffic light, or someone pulling out in front of me - I feel personally affronted, because some motherfucker is trying to fuck with my rights.

Another good thing about Indonesian traffic is every kind of person rides motorbikes, from 10-year-old girls to mothers with babies to oldish people and whole families. It undercuts the machismo of motorbike riding and keeps everyone careful. There are of course hopped-up attitude-heavy young men shooting about the roads like angry spermatozoa, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule.

Anyway: the upshot is that here we are, speeding along behind the radiant-eyed Dutchman and his 12-year-old driver, on the way to the Dutchman's sea-cucumber farm. We don't know it yet but there is in fact a very nice beach there with water the temperature of Christ's blood and we will float in its mirrory shallows as the sun goes down. After that a fisherman with a small boy and a big machete will come up and stare at us and ask us questions but we don't know that yet either and are just doing our best not to kill any chickens on the roads of Karimunjawa.

Q: Wait, what is this Karimunjawa of which you speak?

A: Good question! It's actually a group of islands off the north coast of Java. You get there by boat. The fast boat was full so we caught the slow one. We were inexecutif class which meant we had life jackets and a small unit sprayed a foul synthetic mist over us every so often so we couldn't smell each others' farts. The door nearest us was locked and the windows were tied shut with orange nylon twine, though, so the lifejackets seemed a tad hopeful. An attendant stood up the front and said "Please note the nearest available emergency exit, bearing in mind it may be locked and under several feet of water." They didn't really, we just made that bit up.

Later we found an unlocked door and went up on deck and sat in the sun. I was sitting with Hanna. Two Indonesian teenagers came up.

"Excuse me! Could we have a photo with you," they said, pointing at me, and then at Hanna, "but not you?"

Q: WTF?

A: Well, Hanna is half Chinese and the Chinese have a funny position in Indonesian society. As far as I can make it out it goes: they have a lot of money but no-one likes them that much.

"We're the Jews of Asia, baby," said Hanna later.

"True. You do," I said, "however, have quite an extensive homeland."

There's another thing going on though, weirder than just ordinary racism like this, and it's a kind of valorisation of paleness. In Australia the people on TV look like people from the cultural majority, just better-looking sometimes. Here in Indonesia they don't look like anyone you'd see, say, walking down the street. The actors and models are incredibly pale skinned and often of no identifiable race at all: they could be half-Indonesian or third-Indian or quarter-Japanese or one-eighth-Navaho or something. I can tell you don't believe me so check out the first Indonesian ad I can find on YouTube. Who are these weird pale people and where do they come from? The media seems to be saturated with paleness.

Anyway, I'm from Australia and when I meet someone with an American accent I feel like I'm talking to someone from TV because that's how a big chunk of people on TV talk. Same when I meet someone incredibly good-looking. I feel like if I stand close enough or talk to them long enough maybe I'll enter the radiant world of TV myself by association, that charmed world where everything seems so much more real than my humdrum life. And I wonder if the same thing happens here with meeting the pale-skinned, if I seem to glow like a famous person just cos I'm pale. And if Hanna doesn't quite make the cut even though, ironically, she has that beautiful mixed-race thing going on that'd probably qualify her way better than me for a job in Indonesian TV.

Q: Wow, that is pretty weird.

A: That's not really a question, is it?

Anyway: we went snorkelling when we got to Karimunjawa. I've only snorkelled a few times, so it always blows my mind. It's about as close as you get to being a disembodied eye floating through a world that pretty much disregards you. I feel like Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera or a flâneur. A flâneur - they told me at art school - walks around experiencing the visual pleasure of the modern world with all its funny conjunctions. Some people think tourists are the most extreme flâneurs, and I think snorkellers are the most extreme tourists: pure eyes drifting through a world we can never belong to, and drifting solely for the purpose of seeing.

The other weird thing about the underwater world is how many things have agreed not to eat each other. I saw dozens of kinds of fish, all swimming around ignoring each other, happy as Larry (for those values of Larry where Larry = being a fish).

Q: How can that many things not be trying to eat each other?

A: I guess because there's coral. Most of them eat coral. You can hear a snapcrackle sound when you snorkel around coral reefs kind of like you're in a giant bowl of rice bubbles, and it's the combined sound of dozens of fish chewing on coral.

Anyway: I recommend it. If you haven't done it, get into it now rather than waiting til retirement. Current projections give the world's coral reefs about another 40 or 50 years before they're gone. Enjoy them while you can.

Later we sat on beaches and ate things. The first beach we sat on had a fluorescent tube sitting in the other jetsam. (An aside: when I was a kid my dad started writing a dictionary. It had two entries:

Flotsam: see jetsam
Jetsam: see flotsam

I thought that was pretty funny.)

There was also an incandescent bulb sitting in a halved coconut. The filament was intact, too. I guess if power ever comes to that wee skinny unpopulated atoll they'll have some deciding to do: incandescent, for the warmth of its light, or fluorescent, for its power saving qualities? It's a toughie.

The second island was owned by some rich people, but they weren't there. While we'd been swimming around looking at tropical fish our guides had been catching a couple of them and when we got to the second island they hacked them open and grilled them over a fire of coconut husks. I ate a yellow fish with red spots. It reminded me of the three-eyed fish that caused such a furore in Springfield that Mr Burns offered to eat it. Mr Burns spat his out without swallowing it but mine tasted pretty good. I felt weird eating a tropical fish but I guess when you're in the tropics the only fish to eat are tropical, non?

Later we got back to the main island of Karimunjawa. There were fruit trees in the harbour town with black plastic bags hanging from the branches.

Q. Maybe to protect them from bats or something?

A: Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It made the bags look like strange wispy black fruit. Speaking of bats, sometimes they fall asleep in the powerlines here and when the powerlines sway the bats complete the circuit between two of them: zap! and their muscles seize up with the charge and the bats hang there forevermore, still gripping on with the grip of mortis. They hang there on the high-voltage vines like the strange wispy black fruit of electricity.

Appendix: Bees
In other news, we also went to Borobodur, the ruins of an old Buddhist monument. It's an hour and a half from Yogyakarta. The whole thing is a giant three-dimensional stone mandala, representing the journey toward enlightenment. It was full of stupas: vaguely conic stone statues which represent the enlightened mind, and inside many of them were statues of seated Buddhas. I pretended the whole thing was the Buddha's skull and I walked around it seeing what was what.

You're meant to walk clockwise around a stupa but no-one else really seemed to give a shit. Clockwise motion keeps the thing you're walking around on your right, which is an old way of showing respect.

I walked around it clockwise and it seemed beautiful but dead. The tourists climbing on the Buddha statues didn't help. Then I saw bees living in corners and wondered what honey from the Buddha's skull would taste like.

love to all
xx Mike

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

2009-11-25T01:40:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-14T16:28:00.001-08:00

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

made with obsessiveness stolen from songs

2008-10-26T17:32:00.001-07:00

when one cuts into any part of the human body, the same thing always comes out - blood.
- arnold schoenberg, the relationship to the text

prescience, felicity, urbanity, hauteur, surfeit, magniloquence, enravishment, execration, abnegation, riot, debauch, hope, joy, grief, effluent life, and a lot more.
- harry partch, genesis of a music

1. i don't
I DON'T WRITE much at the moment because i only have so much obsessiveness and i need it for music right now. i wake up thinking about something and whatever that thing is gets the most care. for a while it was these stories. i woke up and thought about how to say something better or how to say it at all.

i liked it but it sucked the obsessiveness out of my music and my music needs it at the moment. writing is easier than music: you don't need any special equipment: just the stuff we all pour out of our mouths and around our bodies all day. of course, this makes everything more naked but that's good.

all i'm saying is right now i want to wake up with sounds in my head instead of sentences. maybe deep down, if there is such a place, sounds and sentences aren't different and i'm just being silly. but i'm a little bit groggy when i wake up and it seems to me it's one or the other at the moment. i'm writing this now because i said these little stories are some kind of love letter to you all and they are and i don't want you to feel like my love is diminished because it isn't.

2. anyway, i just wanted to say:
I WALKED. THE world unfolded around me and enfolded me. i looked like a thing but i was just a fold in the stuff of the world, like origami. the earth seemed to turn beneath my feet to accommodate me. thanks world! you're the best!

tree stumps loo(something else had looked at me earlier. it was a dandelion orb, a halation of seeds. halation is a fancy word i learned the other day which means 'the spreading of light beyond its proper boundary in a photographic image'.)ked at me. my breath had settled in my body, down the bottom somewhere. all the bad breath was down there. i needed to stir it up so the bad bit could come out of my mouth and quit poisoning me.

i climbed a hill. something was green. there were deciduous trees filling with fresh green too young to be holy. deciduous trees go through a year-long menstruation of leaves, collecting them like blood and then letting them go: whoosh.

the poison breath had settled in my body because before walking i'd been staring at a screen for a few days, trying to write something about noise. it's hard. noise is what you get when you ask a representational system, like for instance a guitar amplifier, to do too many things at once. noise is what representation systems do with excess. it's how they represent what they can't represent.

i'd been staring at a screen and staring at a screen is a kind of sensory deprivation, like being in a flotation tank. when you come out the world seems so real.

anyway: i walked. there was some kind of light in the sky shining on everything. trees got in the way of the light and made dark patches on the ground. there were wires above my head carrying electricity from one place to another because this all happened at a time when we used electricity to make something we called privacy. privacy was a kind of drug we were experimenting with. it meant you could do things like cook and learn and laugh at stories even if no-one else was nearby, but you needed electricity to be able to do it.

3. what i was trying to say before about noise relates to writing, somehow. for me, writing is something that demands itself when i'm trying to represent too many things at once. so this writing is noise, a kind of by-product of excess, the noise the world makes when i try to swallow it whole, the noise i make because i want to take the whole world into me at once instead of dividing it up and eating it one piece at a time. i'm like this because the world is like this: the world eats itself all day every day. of course, the world is bigger than me and can get away with it but it doesn't stop me trying. i want to make myself in the world's image because the world knows everything and i only know a few things. re which, i'll tell you four:

4. tenets
IF YOU GREW up bookish and awkward like me these might help you. they're keys to locks that can form around your neck.

1. if you can't accept a feeling you can make up something called 'the self who feels this' and accept that, whatever the feeling is. try it. it's a kind of sneaky back-door path to acceptance when the feelings seem impossible.

2. have a fun life whatever the ladies do, if you're a heterosexual male. ladies are other people and other people do all kinds of things. don't rely on them doing what you want. make sure you have a fun life even if they don't do what you want them to, like adore you, or say the things you want to hear. it's a pity not getting what you want but no reason not to have fun.

3. have a sense of humour. it'll help. if you don't have one make one up. if you can't make one up then just smile to yourself and think how nice it would be to have a sense of humour: yeah, that'd be sweet. you know you can't have a sense of humour but at least you can enjoy the idea of one. try that.

4. find something in the present moment to enjoy. it doesn't matter what it is. the thing that matters is that you don't have to wait for things to be different to feel pleasure. i've tried this lots of times and there always turns out to be something available to enjoy.

5. i was drunk on the world
I WAS DRUNK on the world. it kept looking at me and holding me up so i could walk on it. i was a fold in the world. i said that already. it was knotted into my heart. my heart was a knot in the world and dragged the world with it. everything was still because everything is always still. everything seemed so real. i wore the sky like a crown.

love to all
xxx

where everyone is made of butter

2008-06-12T07:04:00.001-07:00

touch (if you will) my stomach
- prince, when doves cry

I WOKE UP with a spider near my head. the spider was in a web spun where the ceiling meets the wall. i was close to the spider anyway because my bed is so high. my bed is so high because i made it so. i made it so high because of a bed i once saw when i was nineteen and impressionable. it was about two metres high and made from stolen scaffolding.

the spider is so high because the flying insects sleep on the ceiling and this spider catches flying insects. i know the spider catches flying insects because the other day i could hear a fly buzzbuzzing lo! without cease or respite and i looked for it and i found it far above my head. it was snarled in a web and the spider was watching it. the spider was patient and the fly wasn't. the fly was struggling and wearing itself out and the spider knew it and waited.

i know the flying insects sleep on the ceiling because my bed is high. when i'm in it my face is only a few feet from the ceiling. i built the bed over my doorway. i wanted a kind of entrance hall to my bedroom. i made it high enough to walk under but low enough that a friend can sit on me when i lie in it. (sometimes when two friends feel strongly for one another they want to get very very close and sometimes they sit on each other. we call these kinds of friends special friends.) maybe you didn't want to know that detail about my bed construction. too bad! now you do.

when i watched the spider the other day it was far above my head because i was sitting on the floor and it was up where the ceiling meets the wall. when i woke up today the spider had moved to the other side of the room and so it was right near my head.

it's a daddy long-legs. it looks happy and well-fed. it has a large thorax for a daddy long-legs.

there's a story going around about daddy long-legses. the story is that a) they are more poisonous than other spiders but that 2) we don't hafta worry cos their fangs are too wee to penetrate our skin. both a and 2 are untrue.

anyway: i was wondering if i looked like food to the daddy long-legs or it i was too big to think of as edible. like if you landed on a butter planet and it was so big it didn't occur to you it might be food.

re which: someone told me once about a planet where everyone was made of butter.

'you think that's pretty funny,' he said. 'but they think it's funny that you're made of meat.'

love to all
xxx

i stepped out into the sky

2008-06-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

I STEPPED OUT into the sky, the sky radiant with fog, fog radiant with citylights and fairylights and headlights, passing cars like slow and hungry deep-sea fish, fish hunting in the ocean of the night.

love to all,
xxxx
mike

sequoias

2008-01-22T04:34:00.001-08:00

in the night we were happy with our own knowledge we already had and other new knowledge we had acquired in the mountains.
- ernest hemingway, a movable feast

do you understand?
- the bangles, eternal flame

jesus, where are my manners? i keep starting stories and not finishing them. i've been busy but more on that some other time. for now, the sequoia story i started three weeks ago.

1. sweet
ON THE MORNING of new year's eve we piled into a car and drove and drove and drove and drove. by 'we' i mean me and tigger pony and gus and dave and que. who? say you and me i can see i must needs get all dramatis personae on your asses: behold!

- DRAMATIS PERSONAE -

DAVE AND QUE: one of those attractive and talented couples everyone likes, including me
GUS: a fucking champ
TIGGER PONY: a small dog
ME: your host and narrator. hi everybody! hiiiiiiiiii!

we were going to a state park, not a national park, so tigger pony was allowed to come. he climbed around the car as i drove it. he looked worried, but that's just the way his face is shaped. he always looks worried, even when his tail is wagging. sweet lil tigger pony.

2. mayonnaise
THE DAY BEFORE new year's eve i'd gone to a barbecue. i met a man there who argued that mayonnaise goes with everything. i decided to test both the theory and his willingness to argue it, like so: i went and poured a glass of beer and spooned a dollop of mayonnaise into it and took it to him. he looked worried but he drank it anyway. his face was big and it creased with the force of his curiosities. he angled it at me.

'actually.. it's not bad,' he said. he opened his eyes wide while i looked at him. 'i mean, i wouldn't drink it out of choice, but it doesn't taste bad. you couldn't say it doesn't go,' he said.

i was annoyed and so i went and made a small bowl of toasted muesli and dolloped mayonnaise on that, too. i took it to him and he ate that as well.

'you know, that's even better than the beer,' he said. 'it's kind of like yoghurt.'

at the time i was even more annoyed but now this rhetorical yoghurt was far behind me in time and space. things had moved on since then and there was no yoghurt anymore.

3. we drove through geelong, home of the gordon institute: a one-stop shop for all your gordon needs.

4.
WE DROVE ROADS that wired up and down the mountains and finally we got to the place and we got out and walked around. it was very hot. hot.

we walked around and we walked around but we couldn't find our friends. they were somewhere we couldn't see. there was a grove of sequoias though, so we went in there.

reader: we were instantly transformed into elves. hard to believe, i know, but it's true. the sequoia grove was enchanted somehow with the magic of the ancient and noble faerie races who are not always kind and the air was cool and still and everything was quiet. everyone we saw looked serene and happy. they were under enchantment too. outside the faerie grove time moved at a different rate. maybe when we went back everyone we knew would have passed into history and the bright world beyond life, passed centuries ago while we feasted with the faerie kings, aging slowly like those who travel near light's holy speed.

the ground was soft with fallen fronds. everything sounded different. there were ferns. the trees were so tall. everything was ancient and jurassic and had found its final template longlongago.

5.
WE FOUND OUR friends encamped about two silent dry tributaries to a winter-cold stream. the air was quiet. sometimes it moved but it always moved quietly so as not to activate the wrath of the faerie who can be capricious and cruel. the faerie are constituted differently from us and our morality is not theirs. their morality is more like that of the wind or the sea: they move irresistibly to shape the world and they care not what they crush. the sea just moves upon the world: that's all.

6.
FUCK WE HAD a good time! while the world around baked and sweated we were cool and gamboled about those jurassic ferny grades. the light was just so and everything was beautiful.

tigger pony found some older dogs. he was happy to see them and spent as much time as he could licking their penises. the older dogs stood and withstood his eager fellatios with stoic looks.

7. interesting sugar
A CERTAIN TIME arrived. there were about 12 of us camped around there altogether and one of us had a professorial look and he pulled out a little box and we looked at the box.

'in this box is some interesting sugar,' he said. 'it's just like regular sugar but it's been treated with a substance to make it more interesting. a friend of mine knows a guy who knows a guy who is obsessed with making sugar more interesting. he said he could make it interesting like 1967 for the purists or he could make it interesting like 1968 for those who like things a little bit different from the purists.'

'which kind is this?' i said.

'this sugar is the 1967 kind. it's interesting like 1967 sugar. now who wants to try some of this interesting sugar? i'm going to try a little of this interesting sugar to see what happens,' he said and opened the box. lo! there was sugar inside, thoughtfully arranged into cubes. they looked pretty interesting and we ate them to see what would happen: weee! i took extensive notes and can confidently report that god is love: whew-that-was-close! i'd started to wonder if god might be something else but apparently everything is made out of love and god is the name for the whole vast assembly of it all, in case you was wondering.

mike
xxxx

we walked home a different way

2007-12-24T20:11:00.001-08:00

as the spirit wanes the form appears
- charles bukowski

I TOOK TIGGER to the park. he skittered on the way and shat drizzlingly on other people's nature strips.

he shat drizzlingly and i'd forgotten to bring anything to clean shit up with and while he was drooling shit out of his arse a car pulled up and i thought it was the owner of the land on which he was drooling shit and i felt bad and skulked off with my skittering dog. if i'd been wearing a coat with a collar i would have turned it up but i wasn't so i didn't.

we got to the park and walked. signs told us to keep dogs away from kangaroos. i was surprised. i've never in my life seen a kangaroo in the suburbs.

we walked home a different way. i didn't want to walk past the house of drooling shit again so we walked to the end of a low path by the creek and then scambered and crampled up a steep bank to a railway bridge. once i slid. i slid and grabbed at fennel. the grass separated from the earth but i did not fall. whew.

we got up higher and walked along the tracks and then across them and there was a fox splayed goldenbrown between the tracks, eyes cataracted pale pale blue by death and staring in two different directions at nothing. a little further along was what was left of a snake after something had eaten half of it. the slope was filigreed with fennel. the lowering sun shone through it and embered the paling day with tiny comets: waving on slow green cords like a multitude of tiny kites.

we walked back the next day and fuck me there was a kangaroo, tall and grey and looking at us carefully. i called tigger over. the kangaroo loped off and we followed as polite as we could. we followed it and it loped and was gone. later we climbed mt issues and looked down and it was back: a magical being come to collapse the bound between city and wildness, between this thing over here and that thing over there. the grass felt hallowed thereafter and the shadows of things had been exchanged for magic shadows and everything seemed slightly unfixed on its axis. i was reminded i didn't know the full extent of what was possible.

i wondered what tigger made of the kangaroo. to me the kangaroo looked like an envoy between the human and canine domains: tailed and furred like dogs, largely bipedal and upright like humans when still.

xxxx

rock rabbit bald living things

2007-12-13T17:53:00.001-08:00

yellow leaves
- cormac mccarthy, the road

1. in which the existence of god is proved
'LOOK! HE'S BREATHING,' said hanna.

i looked. he didn't look like he was breathing to me and i said so. we were in a small concavity in the side of a rocky promontory. the rocks atop the promontory were granitic and rainstriped. one of them had a hole in it that made it look from afar like a giant nostril: 'hey! that rock looks like a giant nostril!'

i looked again. no, the rabbit was definitely not breathing. we were in the small concavity because it offered shade and i burn easily. we'd been walking to the end of the promontory but now we were sharing a small concavity with a dead rabbit. the rabbit was a perfect grey rabbit. i don't need to describe him because he looks exactly like the rabbit that appeared in your mind when i said 'grey rabbit' a few centimeters ago.

'no. he's definitely breathing,' said hanna and i looked again and saw the faintest movement in his perfect belly. he was more perfect now because a perfect rabbit is alive and now he was alive. he reminded me of god because there's a mediaeval proof of god's existence that goes like this:

1. god is perfect
2. that which doesn't exist is not perfect
3. therefore god can't not-exist, because that would make Him not perfect
4. therefore god exists

now the rabbit was perfect like a living god. a perfect rabbit hops though and this rabbit was perfectly still except for the faintest upanddown of his perfect grey belly. he was ceasing to be and i was keeping him company. we were quiet. the rabbit lay still as still on the still sand. little bugs were starting to walk all over him but he wasn't dead. he was close to death though and lay completely still while we sat there. sometimes he would blink but that was it. i wondered if he had fallen from the high rock above. maybe his back was broken.

we sat with the rabbit. the rabbit breathed in and out and was otherwise still.

i tried to remember some blessings for the dying i'd been taught once. i could only remember about half of one of them so i just tried to think nice thoughts for the rabbit. i figured if i was dying i wouldn't mind someone sitting beside me and thinking nice thoughts and maybe deterring things from coming to nibble at me before i was properly dead. maybe the rabbit didn't feel that way. i won't ever know.

maybe the rabbit was thirsty? we looked around for something to give it water with. in the end i carved a tiny spoon from cuttlefish bone and offered the rabbit some water. it ran over the rabbit's unmoving mouth. i guess the rabbit either wasn't thirsty or was too far gone to drink. i won't ever know that, either.

2. in which the author has only known a couple of people well who've died of natural causes
I'VE ONLY KNOWN a couple of people well who've died of natural causes. the rest have killed themselves. is that natural? i don't know. the two i've known well were my good friend baterz and my grandmother bronte. they both died under assumed names. baterz was born barnaby ward but we called him baterz. baterz was short for baterzby baelzebub: there's a nickname with panache, no? bronte was born margaret joan bronte. she didn't like either of her first two names so she went by the third.

they were both bald when they died. baterz had a brain tumour. when you have a brain tumour your head gets opened up sometimes so doctors can look inside it and sometimes you get chemicals and rays applied to the tumour and all three of these things can make you bald. bronte was bald because her teeth were bad when she was little. she got her head x-rayed a lot by dentists and all her hair fell out.

i sat with bronte while she died. i remembered the blessing that time and sang it quietly in the hospital and stroked her bald head while she stopped breathing.

3. in which the author breaks the narrative flow, such as it is, to editorialise
THESE THINGS HAPPENED a while ago. i'm writing about them now because when i went to sit in the backyard beneath the darkening greens of the fruit trees and think about washing my clothes i could hear one of my housemates whipping her boyfriend with what sounded like a leather strap. i stood just outside the back door for a few seconds: whack.. whack.. whack.. and then i turned around and came in here and started typing.

4. in which we stopped waiting for the rabbit to die
WE'D BEEN SITTING there for a while. there's only so much you can do with a rabbit teetering on the edge of death and we'd done most of it so we got up and continued our walk. on our way back we visited the rabbit again. the rabbit looked just the same except his body was oriented north-south instead of east-west. i looked at the sand behind his back legs. it was scraped smooth of stuff but i couldn't work out if he'd moved himself or been moved.

the rabbit breathed, and blinked every so often, and so did i.

5. in which a rock looks like a hippo
'HEY, THAT ROCK looks like a hippo!'

6. the last time i saw baterz
THE LAST TIME i saw baterz he was lying in an open coffin in the front room of his house. he was wearing the grotty antique military uniform he used to wear sometimes. it had epaullettes. he was bald and his body was cold. it's odd stroking the hand or cheek of someone who's been dead for a while because they look so much like they looked when they were a living thing but now they are not a living thing. the flesh is not animated.

life came from the sea and things like us carry around an analog of it inside our skin in the form of our warm and salty blood. matter in these parts came from the sun and things like us carry some heat around inside us while we are alive like a tiny analog of the sun.

dead flesh is not like this. it resists the touch differently and has no tiny sun inside it. it draws heat from the air like everything else and from you if you touch it and so it feels cold.

7. what hanna said when we started packing up the tent
'DID YOU SEE the crow? it had an egg in its beak and it was flying and a bunch of other birds were chasing it and it flew off to a spot and pecked the egg and drank it in gulps. its arse stuck out and moved up and down as it drank.'

8. eleven
WHEN I WENT to pack up the stove i found eleven tiny tiny snails had attached themselves to the metal overnight.

love to all
xxx

it may be that i have too much time on my hands

2007-12-03T15:59:00.001-08:00

why? because.

a magical journey through my dick

2007-11-27T19:18:00.001-08:00

welcome to the magical land of stories, everybody. today we are going on a journey through time and memory. it goes something just a little bit like this:

1.
I GOT ON the train. i sat down. i had a guitar. after a while i looked up. there's a little screen that tells you where the train will stop next. i looked at it. i wanted to know where we were.

it said this:

10145001G 220CC
CLOCK CHIP
32K RAM
SUN 9.39 AM
SPECIAL ADDRESS = 00

i was surprised. i'd thought we were somewhere in the melbourne CBD but apparently we were going to an address in the clock chip. the only address i could think of inside a clock chip is a memory address so i guessed we were going on some kind of journey through memory. this could have been 'problematic', as they teach you to say at uni*: i was meant to be hanging out with my daughter alaska that afternoon. i looked outside. everything was black but we were being circled by bright white lights.

'so this is memory,' i thought.

i looked over to my right. there was a guy looking at me. actually, he looked like he'd recently been looking at me but had just then stopped. his eyes looked like they'd just slid off my face. he had an absinthe-green bottle of sprite on his lap where his dick should be. was he trying to tell me something with the absinthe-green bottle of sprite?

whatever it was, i didn't get it. besides, i had a guitar sitting on my lap. much bigger than the bottle of sprite.

i looked up at the sign again. apparently we were still travelling through memory. i looked out the window. there were languid willows, just like i remembered from my last train journey. there were magical pines. i remembered the magical pines too.

i looked at the guy again. his eyes slid off again. again, again, i won: his dick was still a bottle of sprite and mine was still a guitar.

2.
EARLIER I'D BEEN sitting in a thai cafe. i eat there a lot. while i'd been ordering a little mouse ran across the floor, skittering from side to side like a streaker. the woman who ran the cafe went and put on a rubber glove and then went and caught the mouse by a table and carried it out. i went and sat at the table the mouse had hidden under. it seemed only fitting.

i was reading philip k dick and listening to soft-rock because that's what they listen to in the cafe.

philip k dick was saying something about morality. the music was saying

and i never touched somebody
like the way i touched your body
and i never wanna let your body
go

3.
LATER I WALKED home. i saw gum nuts on the ground like tiny bombs. i guess i was still on a journey through memory because i remembered being about seven and noticing this for the first time, that gum nuts were shaped like cartoon bombs. me and my friend jason code got together in the playground and schemed a plot: we'd bring matches to school the next day and see if we could blow up the school with a couple of these bombs.

it wasn't that we disliked school, especially. i think it was just the opportunity to blow up a building. it seemed too good to miss.

we met the next day. i had the matches. we collected a few gum nuts and sauntered casually to behind the main building and started trying to light the fuses. it didn't work very well but we persisted and in fact we were quite absorbed in the challenge which might explain why we didn't notice the approach of mrs munn. mrs munn was a horrible witch, four thousand years old. she materialised from nowhere and grabbed the matches.

she looked at us with her face which was four thousand years old, from after the fall but before the flood. then she opened her mouth which i guess was also four thousand years old.

'what were you trying to do? burn down the school?' she said, fixing us with her ancient stare. reader: this may have started as a rhetorical question but we both looked pretty guilty when she said this so i guess she divined our true purpose pretty smartish. her mouth set hard and horizontal and she lit one of the matches and grabbed my little hand in a grip like the iron cage of weberian rationality.

'very well: how about if i burnt you, would you like that?' she said, and started drawing the flame closer to my finger.

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry!' i said. jesus! this wasn't in the plan! whose fucking idea was it to burn down the fucking school anyway? not mine, that was becoming very fucking clear.

'oh? you're sorry are you?' she said. she pronounced 'sorry' like it tasted bad in her mouth and drew my little finger even closer.

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!' i said, with as much dignity as i could muster (none, as it happens).

the gum nuts meanwhile sat silently on the ground. i guess they are all grown up now with families of their own.

love to all
xxx

* narelle walker pointed this out to me. hi narelle! i am in yr computer, arrangin yr wordz! LOLZ!!!!111!!!

a reunion

2007-11-26T22:14:00.001-08:00

she goes with me to a blossom world
- the beach boys, 'good vibrations'

SOME DAYS AGO i found a message on my phone from the police.

'we've found your car,' they said. 'call us,' they said and so i did.

they told me where she was. it sounded like a half-hour bike ride away. i had a shower. i wanted to smell nice. i looked up the address and realised it was only a few blocks away, on a little side street i have no good reason to ride down usually.

i hopped on my bike and rode along in the evening air. my feelings were mixed: since my car left me i'd spent a lot of time with my bike. i'd gotten to know my bike a lot better and we'd had some good times. we'd gotten pretty close and i may even have told my bike i loved her. now my ex-form-of-transport had gotten back in touch and so all these old feelings were being stirred up.

would i feel the same? could i keep things going with my bike? would i get seduced by the comfort of the familiar? why had i had a shower? what was that all about?

reader: one thing was for sure and that was that i'd find out soon enough because it wasn't far away. my bike nestled loyally between my thighs. i felt a little bit guilty. i'd promised my bike a new coat of paint and some oil and now here i was going to see my car. the sky was darkly orange around the edges with the just-set sun.

i found the street and my car was there, beneath a tree. she'd gone native, as colonists used to say, and was becoming tree, was thickly spread with leaves and blossoms. the earth was gradually reclaiming her, invoking the car cycle which is like the water cycle but involves cars instead of water: metal is mined and smelted and turned into cars which are driven around and then abandoned and return to the earth slowly as new ores and are maybe one day mined again and turned back into cars. ah, she looked so different and yet underneath it all i could see the old car i used to know.

i opened the boot and put my bike inside.

i walked over to the driver's side door and opened it and climbed in myself. she cradled me in velour. i tried to start her but it didn't quite work. there was a spark of something there, but it wasn't quite enough. i tried again and then again but each time she responded more weakly.

i guessed she needed something more from me. she was out of petrol, after all. the thieves had taken her and drained her and left her here and now here i was trying to start things up again as though nothing had happened: fool! i would have to do something.

the thieves had been thoughtful enough to abandon her just round the corner from a 24-hour petrol station. there was a jerry-can in the back and i grabbed it. i walked to the petrol station, which took maybe 25 seconds. i couldn't help thinking that abandoning an out-of-fuel car with a jerry-can in the back just 25 seconds from a 24-hour petrol station showed a DISTINCT LACK OF INITIATIVE on the part of the thieves. nonetheless: they'd made it easy for me: nice of them.

people kept looking at me funny. was this because i was unshaven and wearing a t-shirt with a snake crawling through a skull's eyesockets? i guess we'll never know. i got petrol and walked back and poured it in the tank and climbed in again and tried to start my car again. it didn't work. i tried and tried and then gave up and decided to try a roll start. i was on a faint incline.

i pushed and pushed and pushed and got a little momentum and then jumped in and tried to start and wrrrrrrrrrr the car shuddered to a stop.

i pushed and pushed again and got a little momentum again and then jumped in again and wrrrrrrrrrrrrrr exactly the same thing happened.

i was worried now because i was near the bottom of the hill. would i hafta abandon my car again? now that we'd been through so much?

i pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and jumped in but we were going too slowly for it to work. fuck it: i tried anyway and she shuddered and shuddered and spat and hacked and sucked in air and came to life again and i drove her home. we haven't talked too much since then. there'll be time for that later. she's resting in the driveway now.

xxxx
mike

butter-knife love

2007-10-07T14:39:00.001-07:00

it's a funny car to steal, that's all i can say. the registration expired last month, there was hardly any petrol in it and it's hard to put in gear. the resale value is close to negative: it costs more to repair a 25-year-old european car than anyone wants to spend. the thieves, i guess, are not too bright. on the other hand, you can start it with a butter-knife so i guess it was easy to steal if not necessarily a great investment.

in any case: it's definitely not there. i can see right across to the other side of the street now. the car i owned for a while no longer blocks the view. the thieves left the persimmon tree though and this is nice of them cos while i've been distracted leaves have been crawling quietly out of it and into the sky. they are a delicious colour somewhere between yellow and green and the blue of the sky sets them off to fine effect. good old persimmon tree! you won't abandon me, surely! no, the car is definitely not there.

anyway: fuck the car: have i told you lately that i love you, dear reader? thinking on it, i guess i have: these little stories are love-letters to whomever is willing to read them: my love made legible and poured out into the world.

xxxx

revenge

2007-09-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

this one a long time have i watched. all his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. never his mind on where! he! was! hmm? what! he! was doing!
- yoda

..i have only to wear black socks to be stigmatised as the demon overlord
- andrew eldritch

i checked my horoscope with a kind of foreboding today. i had this feeling it was going to say 'you can run but you can't hide, motherfucker! today's the day the shit's gonna hit the motherfucking fan'. well, that'd be the gist, anyways. horoscopes don't talk like that, after all. maybe this instead:

pisces
the moon in your sign today exerts a powerful force toward resolution. if there's something you've been avoiding facing, the time may have come to pay the piper, you evil snake-owning motherfucker.

it didn't say that though. it said 'instead of using your imagination as an escape, create an inner landscape that matches your goals. these intentions can then pave the road for your journey.'

i stared at it. it seemed like pretty good advice. and apart from that i was pleased and gladdened and humbled that my horoscope had not taken the chance to kick me when i was expecting to be kicked. instead it offered an olive branch of peace and reconciliation and i was pleased and gladdened etc.

i am not entirely sure why i have this feeling of foreboding. well, actually, i have one or two ideas. here's one of them:

i took accidental revenge on the puppy for pissing and shitting everywhere by accidentally abandoning him. it happened like this: i'd finished mopping up all the piss and shit and was going to the post office to pay bills and rent. the puppy darted between my legs as i set my feet on the ground and lifted them again, one after the other: walking. seemed like he needed a walk. he had the vitamin b at the moment: i was moving slowly, partly cos i was tired from cleaning up piss and shit and partly so i wouldn't kick him by accident.

i got his lead and put it on him and we walked to the post office, him darting this way and that, me lifting one foot at a time off the ground and replacing it a little way down the road.

the post office is on a busy busy road and there was nowhere to tie him up nearby that wouldn't have let him run on to the road and he's too little to know why this is a bad idea. so i tied him up around the corner out the front of the sisters of mercy. which sisters of mercy? i'll tell you later. oh hi, steve. what's up? i'm a little busy-

STEVE: i'm enjoying the stories but there is one literary device you're using a lot which i'm getting sick of. can i tell you which one?

ME: (aside) god, i use so many potentially-annoying literary devices..

1) saying 'i said that already' all the time.
2) saying something untrue and then saying 'i didn't really. i just made that bit up', which i stole from bill bryson.
3) mixing teenage language like 'hafta' and 'probly' and 'lil' with unnecessary erudtion, which i stole from fafblog, along with the very long sentences that go all over the shop.
4) writing stories that are almost entirely digression, which i stole from.. can't remember. but cryptonomicon by neal stephenson uses it very entertainingly.
5) writing about everything: herman melville, salman rushdie, tom robbins.
6) very short sentences. thanks don delillo! chapters the length of other people's paragraphs. thanks richard brautigan!
7) hyperlinks all over the place: bloggers in general, but especially boingboing.
8) explaining the obvious: douglas adams and fafblog again. and maybe neal stephenson too.
9) gratuitous swearing mixed with erudition: get your war on and deadwood.
10) writing in lower case all the time. no-one to blame for that but myself.
11) treating the group email as a storytelling form. ditto.
12) long lists. blame annie proulx in the shipping news and accordion crimes .
13) using the flimsiest of delaying tactics to create suspense.
14) treating a group email as a tiny novel with chapters and quotes etc.
15) over-use of quotes: i was doing this already but meeting the quote generator certainly encouraged me to do it a lot more.

(to STEVE) sure, go ahead!

STEVE: the one where you blame the reader for YOUR digressions.

ME: (aside) oops, forgot one:

16) blaming the reader for one's OWN digression.. fafblog again. you guys should really read fafblog if you like this kind of thing. guy's a genius.

(to STEVE) aaaaah i don't think i'll be giving that up any time soon, sorry.

STEVE: but..

ME: anyway, quit interrupting, steve! i'm trying to tell a story!

i walked into the post office. everything was different. everything that used to be there was gone except the scales and they were somewhere else now. the room was a different shape too. there was also a TAB counter in the corner and this threw me most of all. it seemed wrong somehow that there should be a TAB counter in the post office. i felt like the separation of church and state had been violated.

the guy with a hook for a hand wasn't there either. there was only the quiet guy with a beard who used to stand quietly off to the side sorting mail. maybe there'd been some kind of coup and the quiet guy had deposed the hook-handed leader of the post office and begun at once to re-organise his domain to his liking.

it was very confusing and it took us a long time to do the bills and rent thing. he ended up getting me to a) withdraw money, which he handed to me, and then b) give almost all of it back to him. it was like a dance or some funny exchange system such as marcel mauss described in 'the gift'. or perhaps the clumsiness of the transaction was a clue that he is an impostor and the true king of the post office is languishing in a cell somewhere, plotting his return.

eventually we were done and i went home. i frolicked about putting words next to one another for a while and putting sounds next to each other and putting letters next to each other. when i got tired of this i went and lay on the couch with alaska and watched cartoons for an hour or so. georgia came in.

'have you seen tigger?' she said. tigger is what we call the puppy. tigger pony, that's his full name, though i call him 'lil puppy pup-pup' most of the time. anyway, i hadn't seen him. we thought about it for a little while.

'did you bring him back from the post office?' she said. i had to admit that i couldn't remember doing that.

'AAAAAAAH! QUICK QUICK LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO!' she said and we ran out to the car. i only had socks on my feet. 'QUICKLY QUICKLY!' they were special socks called tabi. ninjas wear them. 'OMIGOD I HOPE HE'S ALRIGHT!' they have a separate little bit for your big toe to go in. they make sense if you're wearing ninja boots, which are also thus divided, but i wasn't. 'OOOO POOR TIGGER PONY!' it had been raining and my socks got wet.

we drove there. georgia wrung her hands the whole way. we got there and jumped out and he was nowhere to be seen. we ran around looking for people to ask. there was a guy in the post office. he had a beard but he wasn't the guy i'd seen earlier. maybe he was a bearded minion of the new leader or maybe there'd been yet ANOTHER coup while i was moving words around and watching cartoons. i knocked on the door but the post office was shut and it took a while to convince the guy to open the door. turned out the sisters of mercy had come in asking whose dog it was. not that sisters of mercy. the other sisters of mercy.

we went to the sisters of mercy but they were shut. religious orders have business hours now. christ would spin in his grave if He hadn't already bailed from it like a zombie. a car pulled out of the driveway as we stood there. i ran over and tapped on their window. my socks squelched on the asphalt.

turns out they found tigger and asked around and then decided he'd been dumped because no-one knew whose he was and he was so cold. he feels the cold, tigger pony. he's only little and he feels the cold. i tried to not look like a bad person. i explained that when i finally realised what had happened i'd run out of the house without stopping to put shoes on. i lifted up my foot so the sisters of mercy could see my wet ninja socks. i'm not sure if it helped that much, standing on one leg with my wet ninja sock in the air, smiling winningly in a way i hoped no evil puppy-dumping motherfucker could pull off convincingly. the sisters of mercy looked at me doubtfully, that's for damn sure.

anyway: the upshot was that i drove over to the lost dogs' home this morning. it was a little bit of a drive. i got there and answered questions about things. while the nice lady at the desk was typing something in i looked down at tigger's file. under 'euthanasia?' it said 'no'. under 'why?' it said 'owner located'. i was glad about that. i was disturbed that the lil puppy had come so close to the word 'euthanasia?'. he's so little!

we went out the back to get tigger. i walked out amongst cages and cages and cages. on my right was a very big cage indeed, full of blankets. the warm essence of dog moved out in every direction from this pile at the speed of smell. it was like the benevolent sun, emanating its rays in all directions.

we walked past other cages. the dogs in them looked out at me forlornly and i looked back at them. i found tigger and he jumped all over me and licked me again and again while i carried him past the dog-blanket sun and said i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry!

we drove home. he sat on my lap. he's only little so i let him. on the way i saw a police car stopped on the side of the street. as we approached it started moving and drove along beside us for a bit.

is it legal to drive around with a puppy on your lap? i'm not sure but neither the car nor the puppy were registered so i didn't want to find out. i sang a little song.

i am invisible to police, it went. (or uninteresting at the very least).

xxxx

invisibility

2007-09-26T18:21:00.001-07:00

1. invisible
i grew up in west hindmarsh. i've said this before. west hindmarsh is a semi-industrial suburb in adelaide. when i was little there was no library there. there was a bookmobile, though. it came around about once a fortnight. eventually we got a real library: the hindmarsh library. it got built in the row of buildings that held the roller-skating rink. years later the roller-skating rink would get turned into an asian-language cinema. howabout that.

i read a lot in those days. it was safer. when i was about six the big kid from the house behind ours told me, through the fence, that he'd shoot me with his bow and arrow if he ever saw me outside again, so i started coming straight home from school and going inside. we didn't have a tv so there wasn't much to do except read.

the hindmarsh library was great. after i'd read what i thought was interesting in the kids' section, i started wandering through the bit for grownups. i found a bunch of cool stuff there but there were two books that set me on fire and not just any fire but fire as pronounced by ian astbury: fi-yaaaaaaah! i kept borrowing them again and again.

the first was called how to build a flying saucer. this started off by showing you how to build the pyramids and raise the statues of easter island with neolithic technology. neat. chapter 4 was, as promised, how to build a flying saucer ('after so many amateurs have failed '). the other book i really liked was called levitation: what it is - how it works - how to do it. it went through a bunch of methods for levitating oneself. i only remember a couple. one involved kind of rocking in the full-lotus position and then launching yourself into the air for a fraction of a second. i agreed with the book's author that this was kind of lame.

another one involved learning to hold your breath for longer and longer times. somehow this made you lighter.. eventually.. i can't remember the details. according to the book, adepts could slow down their breathing and extend the pause between in-breath and out- to 45 minutes. i had a little go at this but didn't persist, didn't persist even though i had a genetic head-start: my dad and my grandfather could both hold their (my grandparent's house had two wings and from above looked like a giant v: like a wake of birds rippling through the sky's surface.. there was a swimming pool there too, reflecting the sky.. my dad and my grandfather would sit on its bottom connected to the rest of the atmosphere only by a tiny umbilicus of bubbles from their noses..) breath for about 5 minutes.

2. demons, shit, shinola
my grandmother on the other hand was a psychiatrist who liked old-school sci-fi. she had a lot of books on transactional analysis and neuro-linguistic programming, which i enjoyed, and a whole lot of asimov and heinlen and arthur c.clarke.

lewis: w-what about ray bradbury?
martin (dismissively): i'm familiar with his work!

what she liked most of all, though, was books written by people without bodies. you know, archangels or beings from other dimensions who'd speak through ordinary everyday folks, say through automatic writing or something like that. she was not alone in this: lots of folks enjoy this kind of thing. but as it was pointed out to me years later, just cos someone doesn't have a body doesn't mean they know shit from shinola. this is good to remember if you ever get possessed by a demon.

demons talk tough like wwf wrestlers do and they act like they know everything and sometimes we give their words a little too much weight cos they don't have bodies. it's a lil spooky, see. they speak without being visible all the time and the only people we know like that are consciences and people on the other end of the phone. but: still: they may very well not know shit from shinola. sure they may have travelled through all kinds of dimensions and whatnot but don't let them fool you into thinking they know shit from shinola. why does it matter? well, the differences between shit and shinola are important. one is a by-product of the body's industry and the other is for shining your shoes. if you shine your shoes with shit they will smell bad and people will look at you funny. and if you pour shinola into the toilet it'll stick to the bowl and your housemates will be dark at you. if you've let a demon talk its way into your body and it blinds you to this crucial distinction, like, for instance, so:

YOU and THE DEMON are walking through a busy city. there is a SHOE-SHINE BOY perched on the kerb like a dirty bird.

SHOE-SHINE BOY: shine your shoes?

YOU: uh..

THE DEMON: yeah get 'em shined. you'll never get anywhere in life with dirty shoes.

YOU: uh.. ok.. but what's that he's shining them with?

THE DEMON: shinola.

YOU: are you sure? it smells funny..

THE DEMON: i know everything, remember? and that is definitely shinola.

..you are very likely to regret it: shit all over your shoes and a very dirty toilet and dark-at-you housemates. not a recipe for fun times. so, y'know, be aware.

wait! i was meant to be talking about levitation!

anyway, the levitation book was by one steve richards. he had another one called invisibility: mastering the art of vanishing. o how i lusted after this book! one day i finally got to read it but it seemed kind of light-on after the levitation one which seemed waaay more authoritative. (i notice on amazon that steve richards has a new book. it's called everything you will ever need to know to start driving a big truck. or maybe that's a different steve richards. i hope not.)

the upshot was, unfortunately, that i never learned invisibility from a book. i had to make up a spell instead. it only occurred to me after my friend steve said something. not steve richards. another steve.

3. the other, cooler, steve
i have a friend steve. when i met him he was called cool steve. he used to ride a motor scooter around drunk: kapow! you get the picture. later he gave the scooter away, but he didn't want to decide who was going to get it. instead, he asked friends if they wanted a scooter until he had a list of 20 people. when he had a list of 20 people he assigned each one a number and then rolled a 20-sided die. as it happened, baterz got the scooter, and immediately sold it.

this lil anecdote shows one of the things that was distinctive about steve for a few years there: exercising great control over process so as not to control outcomes. he was like the john cage of social engineering.

i wrote a song back then about cool steve. it was called 'cool steve'. it went like this:

cool steve.. when will you ever learn?

it was sung to the music for 'blue moon'. you repeated it until steve got embarrassed. later steve changed his name to 'snaky dancer'. i wrote a song about this, too:

i had a friend.. who changed his name.. who changed his name to 'snaky dancer'..

in between these names, steve changed his name to skysten. one time me and skysten were talking about having to ride somewhere without a helmet, or maybe without lights. i was saying i'd found the ride stressful. i'd been worried about getting stopped by police for riding without a helmet. (this kind of thing happens in australia. the one time i went to jail was directly related to riding a bike without a helmet. that's another story, though. quit trying to distract me!)

'well, in these situations i always make sure i don my cloak of invisibility-to-police,' said steve.

i thought on this for a bit. such a cloak seemed like a very good idea. why didn't i have a cloak like this? i was jealous and eventually ended up making up a little spell. it went like this:

i am invisible to police (or uninteresting at the very least)

my reasoning was this: all of us get distracted a whole bunch of times during the day, police officers included. all i was trying to organise with my little spell was for one of these moments to line up with the moment when i passed in front of a police officer's field of vision. i didn't much mind how. you know, they could just vague out for a second and think about what they wanted for dinner or something. it didn't seem like much to arrange. there are more important things in the world than cyclists without helmets, and that was a consideration in my favour too.

4. how well did it work?
i'm glad you asked. reader: it worked remarkably well. almost ridiculously well. police cars would drive straight past me all the time when i was riding without a helmet on. i'd look at them and they'd just be sailing by, their minds on something more important. it happened over and over and over. i began, in fact, to worry about what would happen if i had some kind of accident and wanted police assistance. would they notice me then? bleeding and/or broken?

anyway: paranoia aside: one time i was riding down a narrow laneway and noticed a police car behind me. the lane was so narrow they couldn't pass me. i was the only vehicle in front of them. if i kept riding they'd be trapped behind me all the way to the end of the street. i should have been obvious to them, in other words.

'uh oh,' i thought, 'this isn't going well.'

i figured the polite thing to do was hop off my bike and wander over to the police car sheepishly but i decided: fuck it: i'm not gonna just concede defeat. i'll wait for them to stop me. and they didn't: i rode all the way to the end of the lane while they crawled along behind me. would have taken about a minute. we got to the end of the laneway and then i turned left and they turned right and drove off into the rest of the world without me, thinking about something else.

xxxx

parabolas

2007-09-25T17:27:00.001-07:00

this morning i got up. i felt pretty good. maybe i am finally getting enough vitamin b.

i walked down the hall. i looked back at the puppy. he was still curled up on his lil blanket near the front door.

'interesting,' i thought. 'i have more energy than the puppy.'

i looked at the puppy some more. one of his eyes was open. he looked back at me with said eye.

'very interesting indeed,' i thought. 'could it be,' i thought, 'that we are symbiotically linked like homonculi? that maybe we form some kind of closed system where the amount of energy stays constant but passes between us through some mechanism which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye and the details of which would certainly hafta be worked out in somewhat more detail? but that anyway in layperson's terms one of us has the energy at any given time t while the other reposes or struggles to walk without tripping over? and that right now the lil puppy is as montgomery burns would say the cool yin to my raging yang?'

i looked at the puppy again. one of his eyes was still open. there was, gentle reader, a subtle gleam in said eye.

'is it just my imagination,' i thought, 'which is, admittedly, quite active,' i continued thinking, 'or does that lil puppy look just the tiniest bit guilty?'

i stepped over a gentle shiny parabola of puppy piss on the hallway floor. i guess the puppy had pissed against one of the walls sometime earlier and the earth's intelligence had moved it downhill and it had dried, nearly, in a gentle shiny parabola.

i continued down the hallway absorbed, gentle reader, in these reflections. actually to be quite honest i'd moved on from my psycho-physical musings and was absorbed in picking words out to describe what i saw. i'd settled on 'parabola' and was just forming the word 'gentle' with my interior voice and then i said a very very rude word indeed and looked at my heel with the melancholy eye of a poet.

the puppy groweth in cunning, i can say that much. he had artfully left the parabola right outside my door where i'd see it and be distracted and not notice the limpid pool he'd left just next to the bathroom. he'd found one of the natural basins formed by the geological activity in our linoleum and filled it with piss. my heel was sitting in it.

my sock was wet. i took it off. later i would add it to the pile of piss-wet socks in my laundry basket but for now i was interested to see that the pool of puppy piss was a much fainter yellow than usual: the pale yellow of the sun through train windows: the pale yellow of unsalted butter.

'interesting,' i thought. 'maybe the mechanism of it all has something to do with vitamin b.'

on which note:
love to all
xxxx

carp libraries

2007-09-18T16:27:00.001-07:00

she said 'you look different'
i said 'well, i guess'
- bob dylan

1. carp
I WAS AT university. i walked to the library. the floor just outside the library was some kind of shiny linoleum. it reflected the fluorescent lights above it, turning them into hazy white carp somewhere far underfoot.

university libraries like this one are information ecologies. there are supplies of information of different kinds and different species which have learned to feed on them.

2. sorry, did you say 'information ecologies'?
YEAH.. SOME FOLKS use the term 'information ecology' as a nicer, more touchy-feely term than 'information economy'. they forget that in ecologies things actually eat each other quite a lot of the time.* an ecology, while it may be prettier than an economy, is no friendlier a place to be. there are far fewer ways to interact in an ecology without eating other occupants or being eaten by them than there are in an economy. in an ecology you either ignore other occupants, eat them, or try and stop them eating you. in an economy it's possible to sit down over coffee.

ok: it's time to go back to the library, if that's quite fucking alright with you.

what most folks are looking for here are not specific pieces of information but rather flows of information they can direct at will. this means not books but internet connections. the library is a bitch like this, a bitch with many teats. there are always more puppies here than teats though, puppies wandering around looking for somewhere to latch on to the flow, the milk of late modernity.

if you can find one of these you can direct it to supply you with whatever you want, pretty much. it's like a genie or a very capable butler:

'i wish to look upon angelina jolie! this instant, i say!'

'very good, sir.'

(enter ANGELINA JOLIE. she has enormous lips.)

..if you can find a terminal, that is. it's hard. but if you have a laptop you can just feed on the wireless signal suffusing the air: it's the tesla-esque alternative to the supply of information along wires.

anyway:

3. love, maybe
I SAW A young woman. she was sitting in a quiet corner, feeding on the wireless signal. she was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, talking and laughing quietly in what sounded like french. her laptop sat on the floor in front of her. from it came a voice and maybe pictures too, i couldn't see: the voice of some kind of love who was not nearby, maybe.

maybe love and the marks we know it by - words and smiles and tones of voice - were being translated into more mobile kinds of information and sent great distances and then turned back into the marks of love.

she looked a little wistful but more than this she was smiling. there was a gold ring or a red flower sitting on the mousepad too and i can't remember which. i've tried the memory both ways and each way makes sense and outside the hazy white carp still swam slow and ghostly: untouchable behind the floor's shiny interface.

xxxx

* fools!

blogger play: like flickr-meets-twitter

2007-09-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

blogger launched blogger play a few days ago.

i recommend checking it out: it's a strangely beautiful and hypnotic way to watch the blogosphere in real-time. every second there's a new picture: something someone's uploaded to a blog somewhere: babies you don't know, sports teams you don't know, sci-fi drawings by teenagers you don't know.

it reads like a kind of cross between flickr and twitter.

http://play.blogger.com/

i was later i look! pepper-trees!

2007-09-13T12:43:00.001-07:00

o my heart which i have from my mother!
o my heart which i have from my being!
do not rise against me as a witness!
do not turn against me in the tribunal!
do not tip the scales against me in front of the keeper of the scales!
- the book of going forth by day

1. i was
I WAS TIRED this morning. maybe i'm not getting enough vitamin b. maybe the puppy is getting it all. i think the puppy is getting enough vitamin b because when i walked into the kitchen this morning he was looking at me and i looked at him and then i saw behind him a small pool of puppy piss, cartoon-sun yellow. it was a hallucinatory yellow in fact and the world's intelligence was moving it downhill. it was becoming a slow stream because our floors are not flat.

i cleaned up the piss. i do this a lot at the moment. i'm also home a lot just now working on music and so is the puppy. home, i mean. the puppy is not working on any music. stop trying to confuse me with your suggestions and, frankly, innuendos. thanks.

when i walk he spins like a satellite around the planet of whichever leg just hit the ground. he twines around my legs like bolas . i hafta be alert lest i fall.

2. later i
LATER I WAS on the train. a woman and a little boy came and sat across from me. the boy's hair was the colour of burning butter. by this i mean that some of it was a pale yellow and some of it was darker.

the boy was excited to sit by the window and gaze out at the world: the world always new and surprising. i'd guess he was four. to be that young is to know you don't have the measure of the world: you want to keep looking at it out the window because it's full of surprises: look! a truck! look! a helicopter! look! a horse!

we didn't actually see a helicopter or a horse. i am just giving an example.

none of the rest of us have the measure of the world either but we forget, maybe, and instead of looking out the window we think about other things but the world is always new. it's always being put together just in time for us to look at it. the woman wasn't looking out the window. she was yawning and rubbing her eyes.

some people can get fucked. no, wait.. that came out wrong.. i meant to say some people think it's funny the way kids have more energy than the adults who look after them.

'isn't it amazing,' they say, 'how much energy kids have! and look how boring their parents are!'

but see, the parents would have more energy if someone else was cooking them food and paying their rent and cleaning up after them and so on. kids are like rock stars. other people attend to their needs and they get to throw tantrums and jump on the furniture and look out the window at the world always new: look! the sun pale behind clouds! the sun paler than my butter hair!

i don't mean to imply that the little boy across from me was some kind of prima donna. i was just making a more general point. he seemed in fact like a total sweetie and he was happy to snuggle up to the woman when he got tired so i guess they knew each other from before the train.

there were things lying around on the banks by the train tracks. everything had an air of magical decay.

3. look! pepper-trees!
WE PASSED BY pepper-trees. look! pepper-trees! something pale and generous was flowering the pines, too.

xxxx

rules for trees and grass, my people, the moon out of focus, the possibility of a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth.

2007-09-03T23:43:00.001-07:00

hello
- lionel richie

why hello, lionel. how's the kids?

this is a funny little story. i'm not sure about it but i get the feeling it's time to let it go and find its fortune, out there in the kingdoms and prince-bishoprics and so on. it can cross streams and talk to magical beasts like for example unicorns and cicatrices and griffins and the enigmatic sphinx, the sphinx who knows all but speaketh in riddles &c &c. i'm not sure about it cos i sewed it up from the corpses of other things. dr frankenstein did this and look where it got him: running for his life across the icy tundras and floes of the arctic circle and if nothing else enters into the matter we should at least consider that the arctic circle isn't quite what it used to be back then.

nonetheless: i hafta let it go cos it's distracting me from the story i really want to write (which is about invisibility and has a spell in it and everything). hopefully it'll be ok out there in the world, the world all bright and radiant, radiant with the light from various motherfucking celestial bodies, bodies all burning far from the earth we wander and people will be nice to it. one thing in its favour is it's made of fragments, just like everything else in the world.

you: f-fragments?
me: yes! fragments!

(pause)

you: w-what about trees?
me: yeah! trees too! which reminds me:

1. rules for trees and grass
i've been looking at trees recently, at the way they extend through space and feed on what passes through that space. it's neat: they apply the same rules over and over, trees do: go this far (where 'this far' is a proportion of the distance between where you are now and your total height, like say 2/5ths of it or maybe 3/7ths) and then split into this many pieces (give or take 2) at around about this angle and then keep doing it again until you turn into leaves.

what ends up happening is that trees control a field, roughly barbell-shaped, around a central vertical axis. they leave a gap in the middle for the horizon to pass through.

grass, on the other hand, is all about occupying a plane. if grass has a rule it's 'go about this far and tie yourself in a little knot through the horizon. repeat until you run out of planar space.'

what ends up happening here is that grass has no trunk to cut: it's got no central point to attack: howabout that.

you: ok, but w-what about people?
me: wait, i thought we were talking about trees?
you: we were! but now i want to know about people!
me: well... howabout this:

2. my people

it is the right of every traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. expect long descriptions of everything.
- jonathan strange, in jonathan strange & mr norrell, susanna clarke.

i went to the writers' festival the other day. i got there just in time. i was going to hear a talk about the creative commons. it was in a theatre. i walked in and sat down.

something felt funny and then i realised what it was and it was this: i had, gentle reader, the distinct sensation that i'd suddenly come home, somehow, that i'd found my people. i was.. uncomfortable. i wasn't sure i wanted to be having that sensation at exactly that time, surrounded by exactly those people. everyone was, well, bookish.. a little uncool perhaps. and surely, surely waaay less cool than me. surely. i was a little disturbed so i took a water bottle out of my bag to have a drink and then noticed everyone around me already had their water bottles out. my people carry their own water, apparently. i drank anyway. i wasn't going to be put off. i sat there for a bit. the speakers weren't there yet so i took a book out of my bag so as to pass the time and then realised of course everyone around me already had their books out. damn. however, women were wearing shawls and sensible jeans. i wasn't wearing a shawl. that was one point of distinction i could hold onto. i was dreaming when i wrote this. what?

3. the moon out of focus

i was dreaming when i wrote this
- prince

the other night i kept walking out of the house to look at the moon. there was a lunar eclipse and i wanted to see it. the first time i went out it was cloudy and so the moon was hazy. eventually the cloud cleared but the moon still looked hazy. it was weird. it reminded me of the actor who was always out of focus, a character in woody allen's deconstructing harry. one web site summarised the plot of deconstructing harry like this:

"..revolves around the problems of a new york writer's creative and erotic life."

gee, i thought. now that narrows it down a lot. doesn't it? hacks down the allen canon a tad, wouldn't you say? excludes one or two films, hm? or maybe not? perhaps? maybe i have my sarcastic voice on, hmm? maybe it's actually a pretty fucking succinct precis of the old man's entire motherfucking corpus, hmm?

but i am being unfair! it excludes all the films by woody allen which aren't about woody allen! which by a shocking coincidence are probably also my favourite of his films, like sweet and lowdown, or purple rose of cairo.

by the way: these emails are best viewed in html, if you have the option. if you wonder why i keep fucking up my formatting with <str> and </em> and shit like that, it's cos you're looking at them in plain text.

and you know what i hate? not much, actually: i ain't a playa hater. still, i hate comedians who feel the need to link all their gags somehow: "and another thing about squirrels..", say. steven wright is the perfect example of a comedian who doesn't do this and is very funny. why do the others bother? maybe they are distracted by the possibility of a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth.

4. tunnels
what was i talking about? i can't remember but it's possible there is a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth. underground cities and everything.

i wrote the other day about a hole baterz and some other people dug. i got some of the details wrong and benjow wrote to correct me. his story contains these words:

the smoke got thicker and thicker. they started to freak out and called the firemen (or maybe they arrived on their own accord), but anyway they turned up with some police, to help look for the fire. and they were all wandering around our house in their gear going 'wow you guys are really BUMS'. at the time we were all vaguely moving out and most of the rooms were full of piles of rubbish...it must have been a bit like one of those tenants from hell ACA exposes. anyway, eventually they kicked down the door to baterz's old room (or maybe they just unlocked it, who knows) and discovered the source of the smoke--the hole, which was now billowing blissfully.

..among others. it's very funny: go and read it .

xxxx

a shaft going down into the earth's mantle

2007-09-03T01:41:00.000-07:00

i wrote the other day about a hole baterz and some other people dug. i got some of the details wrong and benjow wrote to correct me:

in regards to the hole, i think it was actually IN the room we weren't supposed to go into. its planned destination was dml's [dml = david martin lewis.. ed] shack out the back.

it was begun by baterz and andy and some other people maybe me and dml but we got down about 5 feet and then vagued out because it was, after all, hard work. then one day the guy me and baterz were trying to write a computer game for came over and he was walking around going 'wow you guys are really BUMS' and when we told him about the hole he got extremely excited and went down to the shop to buy some proper digging implements, came back and went beserk in that hole. he was a strange man. very neat and he used to be in the army and thin and white and when he ate the wrong food (he was on some full on pritiken diet or something) he would get really hyperactive. he used to lend me and baterz his car and let us hangout at his weird flat on anzac highway while we played his computer games as 'research'. his girlfriend always shook her head wearily when she saw us coming along, or when we'd ring her up and say '___ (I can't remember his name--we just used to call him monkey boy) has gone a bit strange' and she'd say 'you haven't given him sultanas or alcohol have you?' then she'd drive over and pick him up. anyway, the point of introducing him is that it was he who i credit with getting the hole past the awkward uninspiring period that is the curse of all grand schemes. he got it deep enough so when you stood in the hole, it was over your head. after that, there was no goddam well stopping us. we were at it day and night because suddenly it was no longer a hole, it was a SHAFT. until the candles started going out in at the bend at the bottom. then we got scared and stopped.

years later when it was just me and dml and sharon and maybe marky mark living there, my sister came to visit from newcastle and she wanted to see this legendary hole so we went into baterz's room, or at least what used to be baterz's room--i think he was at Marion street by then, and showed her the hole. there was no light in the room with the hole in it, which kind of abutted baterz's room, and the light from his room didn't really show off the hole to its greatest glory, so i lit a piece of paper and threw it down so she could see how impressively deep it was. the paper went right down to the bottom, briefly illuminating some old bits of carpet and clothes baterz must have thrown down there before he left, and then went out. it looked very impressively far indeed. wow, said my sister and we left, locking baterz's door behind us and went to the pub.

meanwhile, dml and sharon came home and started making dinner and sitting around doing whatever they normally do when they noticed smoke near the ceiling. the went all around the house looking for whatever was on fire, then up into the roof where there seemed to be a lot of smoke but no fire. they stood around chewing their lips and frowning, but of course they didn't think of going into baterz's room because no one had been in their for months. The smoke got thicker and thicker. they started to freak out and called the firemen (or maybe they arrived on their own accord), but anyway they turned up with some police, to help look for the fire. and they were all wandering around our house in their gear going 'wow you guys are really BUMS'. at the time we were all vaguely moving out and most of the rooms were full of piles of rubbish...it must have been a bit like one of those tenants from hell ACA exposes. anyway, eventually they kicked down the door to baterz's old room (or maybe they just unlocked it, who knows) and discovered the source of the smoke--the hole, which was now billowing blissfully. the carpet and clothes and caught on fire from my shred of paper i thought had gone out. dave freaked out because he had had this kind of recurring nightmare about having to explain what the hole was for...how it got there, etc. to figures of authority (landlords, landagents, etc.) and suddenly here he was, standing around said hole with a bunch of policemen and firemen watching it inexplicably belch forth smoke with the police going 'why is there a hole here and why is it on fire?' pure nightmare. i almost didn't have the heart later that night to tell him it was all my fault. even when i did he didn't seem to fully appreciate the surreal moment of existential angst my actions had allowed him to endure. some people are
never happy.

one time i was living with dave wiffler at orsmond street and it was right near the time when we were about to be evicted again and we had no furniture because we were going through a hard-core opium eating minimalist eat only what we can steal from the servo kind of lifestyle and i came home from some ridiculous tour of melbourne with my death metal band to discover dave in the loungeroom. actually it didn't realy qualify as a loungeroom, because we had no lounges or chairs, more a heater room because that's what was all that was in there. and a big piece of parachute material that was slung up under the ceiling. anyway, when i left said heater room had been completely empty, but when i returned, a long weekend later, it wasn't. dave had been paid or something so he had plenty of pot and lots of junk food. his ritual was to sit in front of his bong and smoke it (making all the requisite little piles of screwed up tissue paper with lumps of foul smelling tar on the tips, burnt matchsticks, little carved bits of carrots (dave didn't believe in metal cones, so had to carve them out of carrots), etc), stare at the floor in front of him and eat junk food. when the clutter became too much, he simply shuffled back on his bum a few feet and started anew. by the time i got home, he had spiralled backwards around the room several times, leaving an unbelievable trail of rubbish behind him like a snail and had come to a rest right in front of the heater, at which point the parachute came down, creating a little tent around him and the heater, so he was trapped in there and couldn't do any of the backwards shuffling around the room, so all the rubbish just kind of piled up around him inside the tent. when i lifted the edge of the parachute to look in, it actually tumbled out, like it wanted to get out of there. i should have taken a photo. there is nothing quite like the meticulous mess a hard-core pot smoker makes. its not a random mess...it's very systematic and modular...one empty packet of tim tams, one screwed up packet of peter stuyvesent, several cigarettes emptied of tobacco with their ends screwed up and lined neatly on the floor, some screwed up cones of tissue paper balanced carefully, an orchy bottle with a little bit of juice in the bottom, an ashtray made out of the lid of the orchy juice bottle that has hence melted, an empty packet of tim tams--you get the drift...Richard Serra eat your heart out.

there seemed to be only one of me and

2007-08-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

i got up. it was cold. i was vibrating with the cold.

i walked to the post office. it was still cold. the sky was clear. it was blue, because there were no clouds overhead. the only clouds in the sky were contrails from my jet mouth.

in the post office a man with a hook for a hand served a man with only one arm. i know the one-armed man. his name is joe. he runs the organic shop down the road. he has a sign on the wall:

DON'T BLAME JOE
HE SAYS WHAT HE DOES
BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU

'you don't want to lick the stamps,' joe was saying. 'they're full of toxins'. joe's eyes shine with the radiant loving light of someone who either (a) eats a lot of organic food or (b) is crazy.

outside the shadows were clean. they had clear, calm edges because there were no clouds between me and the sun. i walked on some of them. i walked on the shadows of some poles and some wires. the grass stood up straight.

i saw a tree. it had no leaves but it still had a lot of seed-pods dangling from the branches. i felt kind of embarrassed. it looked like the tree had let itself go some(naked)how and i felt bad for it. still: i couldn't look away.

i had contracted to a single point because it was cold. it was interesting. it made my identity easier to manage. there seemed to be only one of me and my body seemed to occupy a well-defined area, quite small.

xxxx

three theories of filth and the three filthy bastards who lived by them

2007-08-09T23:08:00.001-07:00

no no no no no no NO NO NO!
- 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.

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

the pressure, the present, the past and the sun

2007-07-30T02:07:00.001-07:00

to name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
- susan sontag, notes on camp

uh..
- kanye west, golddigger

1. the pressure
SO JUST IN case you were wondering i was in a supermarket a couple days ago. i was standing in line for the checkout. there was an old lady in front of me. she had a lot of stuff sitting on the little conveyor belt that conveys stuff to the cashier. she was making conversation with the cashier. she'd left her trolley so it blocked my way. i looked at it for a while and started putting things on the conveyor belt.

i got a pressure-cooker for my birthday last year but i didn't use it until recently. now i like it a lot. lots of the things i was putting on the conveyor belt are things which work well in pressure cookers. i had turnips and swedes, for example. i am trying to learn to cook more like a peasant. this is part of me trying to unlearn my assumption that i will one day be rich. i may be rich one day, true, but (a) i'm not rich yet and (b) i'm more likely to be rich one day if i stop living like someone who is already rich.

just in case you were wondering.

the old lady wandered up to the trolley and grabbed it.

'oh here i am getting in everybody's way again,' she said. 'i'm really very clumsy, you know.'

what a sweet old lady, i thought to myself. i stopped putting stuff on the conveyor belt because there was no room for it. i was so hungry. the old lady was back with the cashier, still making conversation.

'so we're just waiting for the dog to hurry up and die, really,' she said. 'we want to go on holiday but we can't go until the dog dies. we've been waiting and waiting!'

i was waiting and waiting too. i was really very very hungry. i looked at the old lady's stuff. a lot of it was food but i didn't eat any of it even though i was hungry. i looked at my stuff. a lot of it was food but i didn't eat it cos i hadn't paid for it yet. that's how capitalism works: it doesn't matter how hungry you are, what matters is who owns the food. the supermarket still owned the food i was looking at so i didn't eat it.

2. the present
THE OLD LADY wandered back and looked at the conveyor belt.

'oh here's my stuff getting in everybody's way, too!' she said. she looked at it for a little bit and i looked at her. i didn't see what she could do, except for one of those movements that are all subtitles. you know, like when you're in an elevator and someone gets in and you sway very slightly back. you're not actually giving them any more room in real terms, but there are subtitles that say 'i acknowledge that another human being has entered a space i once occupied alone'. it's a funny kind of politeness cos it achieves nothing other than politeness, unlike, say, giving someone a seat you were sitting in.

anyway: be quiet! i'm trying to tell a story!

the old lady looked at things a little more and then slid half her stuff so it was closer to the cashier. the side effect of this was to make it impossible for the cashier to move the conveyor belt for a while.

what an annoying old lady, i thought. i'm glad i don't live with her. i started thinking about writing a story (this one, as it happens) and then i felt just like harvey pekar in american splendor [sic]. harvey pekar was stuck in a supermarket queue behind a little old lady one time and he got so frustrated he went home and turned it into art. he pulled out some paper and wrote a script for a comic about being stuck behind a little old lady in a supermarket queue. he couldn't draw for shit so he just drew stick figures.

there's a lesson in that, or there was a lesson in it for me, anyways, which is this: your life doesn't have to be anything other than what it is right now to be turned into art. that's a lesson about the present: the present, whatever it is, can be transformed into art.

3. the past
ANYWAY, I LEARNT something similar once about the past. but first: we have a new puppy at our house.

he is very small and very cute. i fought against it but it seems that now his name is going to be woobah poonie. it's a pity. he is too small to take for walks outside so i take him for walks inside instead. i walk to the kitchen and he bumbles along beside me. i walk back and he bumbles back.

he has a little mat to shit and piss on. it's impregnated with pheromones to encourage little dogs to shit and piss on it. he has managed to shit and piss in almost every room of the house now. once he even shat up against a cupboard, leaving tiny shits drooling from the panelling. he's never yet even once shat or pissed on the little mat of pheromones.

despite this, ZOMFG HE IS SOOOOOO CUTE!!1!! LOLLZ!!11!

anyway: the past: so when i was younger i used to play in bands in adelaide a lot and so did this guy ben winch. he stopped playing in bands and started writing novels. i read the second one. it was called 'my boyfriend's father'. i admired it because it was about the kind of life i had as a late teen: listening to the cure and living in the suburbs of adelaide and not doing much else except rocking out a lil bit sometimes.

maybe i am kind of slow but it had never occurred to me before that you could just write a novel set in the world i grew up in. it seemed too ordinary. i felt like a fish reading a novel about water.

unfortunately there was a suicide in the book. fictional suicides are kind of like real suicides, i reckon: more likely than not a failure of imagination. it's an easy way to invest a book with the inexplicable and its power: the power of silence, of not talking to anyone who loves you anymore, the power of not letting yourself be understood.

anyway: the lesson: whatever past you have is ok. you can make it into art too. you don't need to be from anywhere exotic. and everywhere exotic is boringly familiar to at least some of the folks who live there.

4. the sun
SO HOW ARE you guys going at being happy when you can't see the sun? i'm still learning how to do that trick. i haven't seen the sun much recently and i haven't been very happy either. it's a pity not being happy cos life is fleeting and all.

nonetheless: i hope all of you are happy. and for those of you who aren't: remember: the sun will be back soon. maybe til then we can carry a tiny version of it somewhere behind our ribs. just for a little tiny while until we can see the big sun again.

love and kisses to all
xxxx

16 names for shit

2007-07-25T00:40:00.001-07:00

he cheated on his ass and shat through his mouth
- slovakian proverb

aw, you guys.. you respond sooo well to the stories about shit, don't you? it's very encouraging. well, it's encouraging me to tell more stories about shit. reader: gentle reader: you may live to regret this, once you realise just how many of these stories i have. this is the story where i shit through my mouth.

1. 16
I WAS 16. wait! flashback music! ok! i was 16. i had funny friends. we had a language we all spoke to each other. it was called lursdie. it was like all the languages of 16-year-olds in that it existed so we could talk about sex and drugs without our parents knowing.

lursdie started in canberra, i think. there must be a dictionary somewhere. i remember there was a dictionary at the time. it was three or four pages of single-spaced computer printout. i'll wager it was drafted on an apple II. we had words for hello and everything. hello was 'haliots!'

so we didn't say 'hello,' we said 'haliots!' instead. and we didn't say 'fucking', we said 'sasquatch'. and we didn't say we had heaps of something, or a lot of it, we said we had 8. or something times 8.

2. names
NOT ONLY THAT, but we each had a silly name. my best friend's name was salamanda. his best friend's name was baterzby beelzebub, but everyone called him baterz. he was a genius and now he is dead. i miss him.

me and salamanda wrote a novel together for fun when we were 16. i showed it to my mum when we finished it. she said it was 'highly derivative'. i told salamanda this and he got cross. she was right, though. it was so much like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: we had aliens and drug dealers and we had mick jagger in it too. whenever one of us got stuck we'd swap and the other one would write for a bit. if we got really stuck we'd make up a new subplot. this happened often.

i forgot about this for years, that we wrote a novel just for the hell of it. during those years novel-writing took on hallowed and ominous proportions. i capitalised the first letters in my mind.

Novel Writing seemed like a massive undertaking and only for the worthy, kind of like a grail quest. you know, you hafta have something to say, and all that.. and to have read a lot so you know you're not doing what's already been done and prepare to devote a few lonely years to it blah blah advice blah blah.

or, as i remembered with a start a few years ago, you could just knock something out with a friend because telling stories is fun and you can do whatever the fuck you want because it's yours. aliens? sure! time travel? be my guest! necrophilia? i thought you'd never ask!

but i digress.

3. for
SO ANYWAY, ME and my friends, we had a word 'tocculmans'. if you were a tocculmans you were good at physical activity and didn't mind if people saw you doing it. it wasn't a compliment.

but mike! i hear you say. what has this, any of it, got to do with shit? i hear you say.
shhh, i say. be still thy beating mouth, i say. i'm setting a scene here. if - and only if - that's quite fucking alright with you. hmm?

the scene goes like this:

EXT. DAY - THE POOL

ok, it's the year 11 swimming carnival. i'm sitting in the stands with my friends and our silly names. none of us are going to swim. we're going to sit in the stands and get drunk. here's how: we've bought some 2-litre containers of orange juice. hey! i'm writing in present tense! is this some kind of a joke? jokes are told in present tense, after all!

where was i? orange juice.. orange juice.. ok, so we have these 2-litre containers of orange juice. before the event we've each poured out half of the orange juice from our containers and replaced it with vodka. the rest writes itself, i guess. i got drunk. we all did, us with our silly names.

reader: i drank my vodka-and-orange. i didn't understand vodka then. i'd probably never had it before. what i decided sometime around that time is that vodka is dangerous because if you keep drinking it steadily until you feel drunk, you've still got quite a bit waiting to enter your bloodstream. and if, like me, you drank until you felt a little unwell, there was probably a world of pain waiting just about 25 minutes away.

anyway, that's what i did. i drank. eventually i started to feel unwell. i stopped. things started spinning. after a time i decided to go home. i lived near there. i got home. i lay on the bed. everything kept moving clockwise. i hung on to the bed. it didn't help.

eventually i realised i needed to vomit. i lurched up and made my way to the toilet, and threw up violently.

'whew,' i thought to myself. 'glad that's over with.'

then i threw up violently again, and then again. and again. each time i vomited the vomit was less liquid and seemed to have come from further down in my digestive tract. you can see where this is leading, i think.

4. shit
FINALLY THERE WAS nothing else in my digestive tract. and yet the awful truth was i still needed to vomit. something started making its way up. i didn't feel very good at all. i opened my mouth and what came out.. i don't know if this is actually physiologically possible, but what came out seemed very, very much like shit.

'oh god,' i said. i hung my face over the toilet and opened my mouth wide, trying to make a straight line between the water and the end of my oesophagus. i was trying to keep my tongue out of the way so i didn't have to taste the shit. my success was limited.

and on that note:

love to all

xxx

slumbering cthulhu shit and vomit

2007-07-16T00:28:00.001-07:00

this morning i got up. i was in the country. i was camped atop a ridge in thin forest. last night i looked through the trees up at the stars. there were a lot of stars. i tried to decide if there were unnecessarily many stars. i decided that there weren't: they all needed to be there or the orbits of things would be different.

this morning i got up. it was cold. i packed my bag. i was coming home. i'd lied to my friends about what time the bus came and so i got there on time. i ate three hard-boiled eggs for breakfast and some toast with peanut butter on it.

i got to the bus early but i didn't have time to shit. waiting for the bus i realised i really needed to shit. my friends were waiting with me. they were happy at first and then i told them about my lie and they realised just how long they'd be waiting for. they looked less pleased.

as for me, by this time, i'd decided i really really needed to shit. i looked to the left and to the right and to the left again but nowhere was open. good thing interstate buses have toilets on them.

the bus came. it was the same driver who'd ferried me out to the country a few days before. i got on.

i scampered up the back of the bus as fast as i could. there was a light on near the toilet door. the little disc that had once said 'engaged' in red or 'vacant' in green had been gouged with a compass or something til it was blind white plastic and mute too and told me nothing. i pushed on the door. it wouldn't open.

i walked up to the front of the bus.

'does the light on by the toilet mean someone's in there?' i asked the driver. his name was eddie. still is, i imagine.

'nah mate,' said eddie, 'that light's always on, it's on as soon as i put the key in the ignition.' he threw the bus from side to side as he said this. i hung on to something and looked at him til he said this:

'anyway, the toilet's stuffed. you can't use it.'

ah, i thought.

'and anyway, it's only a local bus. you don't really need a toilet on a local bus,' said eddie.

reader: eddie's first sentence is strictly true but this bus journey goes for ten hours. ten hours is a long time.

'ah,' i said. the shit, meanwhile, was trying to crawl out my arse. it was keen to be born out into the world and borne to the mother ocean. it was tired of being separate. it wanted union with the mother ocean. my guts griped. it was as though my shit was many-tentacled like cthulhu and as though, like cthulhu, it tired of slumbering in my depths and wanted to seize control of the daylit world.

'are we stopping anywhere where i can use a toilet?' i said.

'merimbula,' he said. 'not long now.'

reader: merimbula was 77 kilometres away.

an hour passed.

somehow, amazingly, my shit retracted. instead i started feeling like i needed to vomit. i tried to look out the front window of the bus as much as possible. i've seen my sister do this. she gets travel sick all the time but i don't really so i'm always surprised when it happens.

we got to merimbula. i stood up to get off the bus and immediately vomited. i had to swallow my vomit, though, cos there was nowhere for it to go. trust me, i'd looked around a little bit for something innocuous to vomit into. i got off the bus and immediately vomited on the footpath, right next to a young couple in conversation. they moved away discreetly as i did this. for some reason i tried to vomit into my hand so it wouldn't go everywhere but it went everywhere anyway, including my hand.

'god,' i said. 'that's disgusting.'

i had vomit dripping from my lips and fingers and tiny specks of it on my clothes. over the road was an umbrella palm and a blue wooden bench. there was a metal plaque attached to the blue bench but no-one was sitting on it.

i went to the toilet to wash up and evacuate cthulhu from my arse. he journeys underground now.

it was a men's toilet so of course there was no soap. in men's toilets there's never any soap. there's usually graffiti telling you who to call to get your cock sucked, but no soap. sometimes if you're lucky there's a few yellow cubes in the urinal, fighting valiantly with the smell of piss. but: no soap. anyway, i emerged from the toilet much as i was when i entered it, at least as far as my vomited-on state was concerned. goody, i thought. only nine hours to go.

i sat on the bus. no-one sat next to me. out the window i saw muscular trees and triangular dams.

we stopped in cann river for lunch. i bought a hamburger and went outside to eat it. i sat on plastic furniture, still redolent with vomit.

'ahem!' proclaimed a squeaky voice from behind me. i turned around. i saw two perfect yellow circles, each with a perfect black circle in its centre, each animated by the same intelligence. it was a magpie. it seemed to want food so i gave it some. instantly another magpie came to try and take food from the first. i looked up. when i looked down there were ten magpies, panhandling like gulls and all aiming their perfect discs at me. the economy of scavenger birds relies on the tourist dollar.

i looked over at the bus. it was parked next to a massive cylinder full of liquified petroleum gas under pressure. between the cylinder and the bus a woman stood, smoking.

i walked back to the bus. eddie was holding a packet of holidays: possibly the worst cigarettes in the world. smoke was coming out of him too.

xxxx

grin

2007-07-16T00:16:00.001-07:00

and what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
- bob dylan

1. power
I SAW DUCKS with tiny eyes, beer-bottle brown.  the water combed the reeds that sat beside it in simple friendship.

(on the way home i saw an avenue of trees.  the central boughs had been cut out so they wouldn't interfere with the power lines overhead.  they looked like an avenue of open hands passing the power along like life-savers do.)

2. grief
I SAW MODERNIST buildings streaked with grief, the grief of grieving weather.

3. thick
IN THE MORNING the mist was thick with light.  later on the train i saw ghost gums like plaintive hands reaching out of the earth.

4. four
FOUR NIGHTS LATER i stepped out of the caravan. there was a cheshire moon just above the horizon: a tilted grin shrinking with the days until saturday.

xxx

flying v

2007-07-11T22:21:00.001-07:00

in the evening i looked up and saw a tiny flock: five pelicans in formation: a lower-case v like a wake in the sky: the sky reflected everywhere.

xxx

bespin

2007-07-08T14:36:00.001-07:00

oh the snot has caked against my pants; it has turned into crystal.
- love

this morning out the window the bare-branched trees were jewelled with dew.

i stood outside. everything looked real. there were things on the ends of some of the branches in the persimmon tree in the front yard. i felt like they were looking at me. i looked back at them. we passed the time that way a little, the things and me.

next to the persimmon tree a pink clotheshanger hung from a trellis.

when i was younger i tried to write stories. i wanted to make them skeletal: stripped of everything unnecessary and then once they were skeletons i wanted to decorate them. i wanted to put new unnecessary things where the old unnecessary things had been.

the clotheshanger reminded me of this. it was just a pink bit of wire hanging from a trellis, dangling a dozen diamond dewdrops. the dewdrops were unnecessary and very beautiful.

later, driving across town i saw the city in the distance: it rose roseate and faintly golden from the clouds like bespin.

love to all
xxxx

atop and about mt issues

2007-07-05T22:50:00.001-07:00

i say keep writing them but if they start getting like lonely planet descriptions of alphington then stop.
- jason flaherty

near where i live there's a park. park is too short a word for it, really. it's glorious. really what happens is there's a fissure in the city. the city goes along and then it stops and there's a river and almost wildness and then the city starts again.

there are two installations there. one's deliberate and i don't think the other one is. i'll treat them in order.

1. the deliberate installation.
WELL, MAYBE IT'S not actually an installation. really it's more like public art. what someone's done is make up a path through the park with little spots to stop and do things. it's called a spiritual healing path. it's great. you walk along and then you stop and there's a little metal plaque that tells you how to think about the place where you are and what you might want to do there.

for instance, there's a lovely little spot where you can sit by the stream. the plaque says 'let go of everything you can't control'. nice.

anyway, in the park there's a tiny mountain. you might think it's a hill but it's shaped like a mountain, just small. on top of the mountain is a plaque that says 'READY TO GO! you're on top of the world and on top of your issues.'

so in my house we call this mountain mount issues.

i climbed mt issues the other day. it didn't take long because it's so small but even so: you can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miiiiiiiiiiles, as the who say. then i walked around a little more.

2. early and bright
THIS MORNING I rode my bike there. it was cold. i'd been in the house too much lo these last few days. it was good to be out in the colours of things again: the crisp colours of a cold morning. each thing looked rained-on and clean and potentially bright. they weren't bright yet, these things, because the sun was still low but they looked like they could be bright when the sun got a little higher and that was the main thing.

3. the unintentional installation
NEAR MOUNT ISSUES is a large pond. the water is green and streaked with tiny bubbles that won't burst.

in the middle of the pond is a pile of stones. on top of the pile is a little tower: a cage on legs, full of what look like spare parts for cars with engines made of metal flowers.

one of the legs of the tower has a pipe bolted to it. water flows up the pipe. it's filtered through the metal engine flowers and then it rains gently out the bottom and onto the stones.

the pile of stones is graduated: the top is dark dark brown, where all the water lands. further down it's lighter brown and then near the pond's surface it's grey.

i stared at it for a little while.

4. elegant
NEAR THAT WAS another pond. ducks were floating on the sky's reflection. they left wakes behind them, v-shaped like flying flocks. maybe these wakes describe imaginary friends, the flocks who aren't here but who people our minds and hearts, migrating along with us, migrating through time: from the country of the past where we were born to the country of the future where we have to live from now on and where we don't quite speak the language.

i rode around. my wheels wrote dark cursive on the pale paper of frosty grass.

the sun was coming up but still low. my shadow was elegant and long on the ground.

xxxx

scientists

2007-06-25T22:01:00.001-07:00

i am a scientist
- guided by voices

john is a scientist and exotic dancer. he has the compasses. he looks like this: all dark eyes and long hair and stubble. he is wearing leather pants.

he has the compasses. i said that already. the captain has given him the black spot. this means he can be voted off the ship. what?

greetings, salutations.

i'm watching pirate master with alaska. alaska is my daughter. you knew that already. pirate master is a reality tv show on a pirate ship.

there are two kinds of reality tv shows. there's the ones where the situation is artificial but the action must be real cos it's kind of dull. big brother is like this and so is the biggest loser.

the second kind is where the situation is artificial and the action seems that way too. everything looks like it's too deliberately lit, like we're watching the bold and the beautiful or something. survivor is like this and so is pirate master. the boat in pirate master, for example, seems not to rock. i don't know much about ocean-going boats but i'm pretty sure they rock. hey! ocean-going boats! you guys rock!

john has the compasses. he's making a speech.

'i have the compasses,' he says. 'you wil be lost without me. how will you find your way?'

reader: it's a good question. the shipmates look at the captain. the captain's jaw is set.

'at night the north star points north,' says the captain. he is eloquent in his simplicity. 'by day we can put a stick in the ground and draw a line from somewhere to somewhere else. this will give us east. then we can draw another line blah blah blah. if we draw another line halfway between the two lines then we will have north.' i may have lost concentration somewhere during this speech.

the crewmates look back at john. john is a scientist and exotic dancer. i said that already. it's a good combination. mind and body. i only know one scientist. his name is nick kallincos. actually he's a lapsed scientist. now i can't help wondering if he is also an exotic dancer. the first time i wrote his name, i accidently called him kick kallincos. nick, if you are an exotic dancer, you could do worse, you know, if you don't, you know, have your exotic dancer name sorted already.

jon looks back at the captain. it's night. the sky is cloudy.

'which way is north?' asks jon.

the captain looks up and so does the camera. it's night. the sky is cloudy. i said that already. the captain looks back at jon.

'well, i can't tell. maybe we're a little further south than we thought. but when the sun comes up we'll be fine.'

i look over at alaska. alaska must be in heaven: reality tv and pirates, together.

'do you, like, totally love this show already?' i ask her.

she looks at the tv. she is weighing her words carefully. she looks at me.

'it's pretty good,' she says. her little brow is furrowed. she is obviously impressed.

on which note:
love to all
xxxx

riding shotgun with jesus

2007-06-25T00:32:00.003-07:00

i am large. i contain multitudes.
- walt whitman

and did i say i was a time bomb?
- public enemy

1. byron bay
I USED TO live in lismore in northern new south wales. towns in that part of the world are odd. why? i'm glad you asked.

towns there are odd because there's an odd emulsion of cultures there, holding one another in suspension but never quite mixing. why? i'm glad you asked!

because:

about thirty-five years ago there was a big hippy festival in nimbin called the aquarius festival. before the festival, nimbin was dairy and banana country. anyway: a bunch of the hippies stayed. some of them pooled money and bought up land, big chunks of it sometimes, along the creeked valleys around there which are, frankly, fucking gorgeous: all densely twisted hills like the hills in my imagination of scotland. and everything grows on everything cos it's subtropical. odd.

but why is that odd? i'm.. well, i'm still glad you asked. gladdish, anyways. but don't push your fucking luck, mmkay?

well, i was born in adelaide, in the south bit of mainland australia. south australia is mostly desert but for a tiny strip of fertile land along the coast, that's where everyone in south australia lives, pretty much. even though it's wetter than the desert there it's still a bit of work getting things to grow, so it makes my brain go all funny when i'm somewhere where you hafta try and stop things growing on top of each other. i don't just mean trees, either, cos there are fungi that want to grow on your armpits and they're trying to get into your pants, too.

anyway, there i was up in northern new south wales. kids up there change their names for fun, like kids down here change their hair. they have names like 'fraggle' or 'sprinkle' or 'orryelle' or 'crow' or 'red john'. well, red john's not that odd a name i guess. he wrote a funny song about the whole phenomenon. it was to the tune of 'walk on the wild side' it was all like:

'hey sunlight, didn't you used to be called.. sharon?
hey bluetongue, didn't you used to be called.. darren?'

heh.

anyway: i'm distracted.

start again:

1. byron bay
ONE TIME I was in byron bay hitchhiking back to lismore where i lived. byron bay has nice beaches but it's expensive. lismore's cheaper but it's weird. it floods there, because they built it on a floodplain and cut down all the trees.

this van pulled up. it was like a mini-bus. there were about five guys in there. they had beards.

i hopped in. i was in the back. there was a man on either side of me. one put his arm around my shoulder.

'uh oh,' i thought.

'so, what you guys been up to?' i said. i was making a connection. i figured maybe if i made a connection they wouldn't sodomise me and then cut me up and leave me in a shallow grave somewhere.

'oh, we've just been in byron bay trying to convert people to christianity,' they said.

'hahaha!' i said.

'hahaha!' they said back. actually, they didn't. actually, i was the only one saying 'hahaha!' actually, they were looking at me kindly and with a lil concern. i believe they were noticing the god-shaped hole in the centre of my chest. they got to work.

'now,' said the one with his arm around my shoulders, 'life's pretty hard, wouldn't you say?"

'aw, i don't know about that,' i said. 'i think it depends.'

they weren't expecting this response. they shifted in their seats.

reader: we went back and forth for a little bit there. finally i said. 'hey! this is my turn-off!' i wasn't being all playmate of the month (turn-offs: beards, conversion to christianity) but was instead pointing out that our paths were lo! about to diverge. they were going one way and i was about to go another. the fork, in short, had been reached.

our time together ended with them calling out the door, 'anyway, two thousand years ago a man called jesus christ talked about why life is so hard! read the bible!'

'kthxbye!' i called back as they drove off bearded but disappointed into the rest of creation. i had three things: a little bag, a stick, and a bedroll. i stood by the turn-off and waited.

2. fifteen feet high
THIS OTHER TIME, years before that actually, i was hitchhiking with my sister. sheesh we were young! i would have been 19 probably.

this car pulled up. the driver opened the door. he had a beard. seemed friendly enough so we jumped in. it was a ute, and there was a bunch of stuff in the back.

'where you headed?' i said.

'oh, i'm going in to adelaide to give a talk about carnivorous plants,' he said. i looked at him for a little while.

'i grow carnivorous plants, see,' he said. 'that's what's in the back. actually, i've just realised i left some stuff at my place. do you mind if we detour?'

'not at all,' i said. 'it is, after all, your car.'

so off we went, driving toward the home he shared with, gentle reader, an awful lot of carnivorous plants. he didn't live too far from there, maybe a quarter of an hour away. one thing about hitchhiking is you hafta be patient. that was part of the appeal for me in those days, actually. i liked it that i had no real control over how long it would take me to get somewhere, and that i was utterly dependent on the kindness of others to do so. it stops you being arrogant and trash-talking about humanity like it's so easy to do.

you know: you think twice about saying what a stupid pack of cunts the australian people are when they've ferried you across the country. that's what i liked about it. plus it was just so obvious that getting all het up wouldn't speed the process any. if anything, it slows you down.

has it been fifteen minutes yet? i guess not but this is story time, not lived time. as long as i've made some time pass it can stand in for the longer time that actually passed in the journey i'm describing, the time it takes to drive a little ute over cloud-shadows and through cuts made in hills, hills where things fight each other for the chance to grow. it's a kind of metaphor for real time, a bit like they use in cooking shows.

we pulled up at his place. i got out to straighten my legs. on the roof was painted 'JESUS SAVES': in capitals just like that and in letters fifteen feet high.

there were shadows on the letters from the same clouds that shadowed the road. i guess these letters were a road leading somewhere.

she looked like she wouldn't live all that many more years

2007-06-25T00:32:00.001-07:00

i walked blue collared through the royal melbourne hospital and all of a sudden there she was. i had my trolley: i was working. she was lying in bed, fast asleep, seventy-five if she was a day, fast asleep and she'd spilt her hair too: grey and white and long it lay on the pillow, lay like spilt hair because it was. her face was caved in from sleep and toothlessness. next to it was a purple plush toy, snug in her crooked arm.

the toy was sleeping too: sleeping like a log in that both are inanimate, safe in her grip.

she looked like she wouldn't live all that many more years but she had a toy to cuddle and so i smiled. i was disarmed.

vows: poverty, chastity and irony

2007-06-25T00:31:00.001-07:00

cunnilingus and psychiatry have brought us to this
- tony soprano

electric word, 'life' - it means forever
- prince

1. irony
OK, SO WE'VE been doing ironic distance for a while now. how's it working out for y'all? me, i'm bored with it. i'd like to propose an ironic engagement to replace ironic distance.

engagement? well, doing stuff intensely and wholeheartedly even though everything is ironic.

ironic? you know: what you believe is kind of arbitrary - it comes down to accidents of birth and history and it could have been otherwise. i like democracy, for example. if i'd been born long enough ago there'd be no democracy for me to like. i might have liked equity or fairness, and argued for those things in my little life, but there'd be no democracy.

richard rorty calls this irony: realising that your beliefs don't transcend history but instead come from history.. but he argues that they're no less important for being historical accidents, because everything is a historical accident.

anyway. i have an ironic relationship with astrology. or maybe a pragmatic one. that is: i can easily see how astrology could be meaningless. however, i happen to fit embarrassingly well the profile for someone born when i was: smack bang in the middle of pisces. and advice for pisceans often turns out to be pretty fucking appropriate for me.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

2. horoscopes
EXCUSE ME. JUST hadta let off a lil steam. where was i?

anyway: i read my horoscope. i take the advice seriously, even though i know it was probably written by some witless mooncalf. i don't care. i like my little paragraph of advice.

the other day it said something like 'don't wait too long to organise some quiet time today!'
'ok!' i said. 'if it seems like i need some quiet time, which quite frankly i don't! but thanks for thinking of me, automated horoscope robot!'

may as well be polite to the robots, that's my feeling on the matter. one day they may rule the world.

anyway, later in the day i was exhausted and sitting on a step at uni holding a cup of coffee and feeling overwhelmed and a lil melancholy.
'fuck this!' i thought and then i thought 'hey! better follow the robot's advice! one day they may rule the world, after all!'

also, in movies you should always follow the advice of horoscopes and crazy people and gypsies and tarot cards which are always death. movies are highly superstitious. i got up to follow the advice, and wandered along to the university spiritual centre. spiritual centre?

spiritual centres have replaced chapels in public spaces, the way 7/11s have replaced mum-and-dad delicatessens. that is, they're pretty much exactly the same thing but with less personality cos they try to cater for a wider audience. in the hospitals i wander through on weekends they have them too: all non-denominational stained glass and things made of wood and chairs arranged to face an emptiness that once stood for god.

at RMIT, the university i go to, there's a hall with wooden floors and a pump organ. i went and played it one day for fun. mmm.

if you walk upstairs like i did, there's a little balcony with a little buddhist altar. i sat there for a while. it made me happy. i looked at the altar. it was festooned with paper daisies and burnt matchsticks and the husks of tealights. i didn't think that was so great. i went to go and talk to the chaplain.

actually i couldn't find a chaplain but i found a baby chaplain. she was kind of cute, actually. i ended up telling her this story:

3. a parable on poverty
ONE TIME I was up near mount warning in south queensland. i was hitchhiking: i stood by the road and waited for cars and when they came i stuck out my thumb and tried to look, y'know, inoffensive. it went like it usually does which is like this: there weren't any cars and then there were cars and then there weren't any cars and then there were cars and then there weren't any cars and then there was a car and it stopped and lo! there was a man inside, looking friendly.

he had a beard. my bearded-driver alarm bells started going off but what to do? no-one else was stopping and he had a nice smile. i got in.

we talked and it turned out he was a jesuit monk.

'pretty nice car you've got for a monk,' i said. if i'd been a detective i would have worn a suit while i said this. my partner would have worn a suit too and would have leafed through the monk's mail while the monk tried to look calm.

'how do you reckon he does it, dave?' i would have said to my partner. 'i mean, i make more than a monk, don't i dave?'

dave would nod without looking at me. he'd be looking at the return addresses on the envelopes instead of at me. i wouldn't be offended though being as how i'd know it was all part of an elaborate game of cat and mouse. so i wouldn't say 'dave! look at me when i'm talking to you!'

instead i'd say 'and how would you describe my car, dave?' i wouldn't look at dave while i said this. i'd look at the monk.

'it's a shitbox,' dave would say, and now he'd look at the monk too.

'a shitbox. so how does frere jacques here afford a nice car like this? maybe the brother can give me a few pointers on how i'm managing my fucking finances.'

but anyway what am i thinking! that would be soooo rude and the nice bearded man was giving me a lift and anyway he had the perfect comeback which was this:
'it's not mine. we take a vow of poverty but we get to use stuff like this if we need to.'

i thought on this for a while. it seemed kind of tricky, the way he could ostensibly own nothing and yet still get to drive around in a fancy car.

something was fishy.

4. chastity
anyway, i told that story to the baby chaplain but i didn't put in the bit about the detectives. i just made that bit up now.

she said 'yeah, the nuns where i study keep telling me i should sign up and be a nun. i say "fine, if i can do chastity the way you guys do poverty."'

'yeah, like: "there's plenty of men around, but i don't own any of them,"' i said.

'"i just get to use them if i need to,"' she said.

'i like the way your mind works!' i said and then i said 'okbye!' and walked outside.

outside there were vines thick as fists knotted into the wall. the sky made all the light indirect so everything seemed to glow from the inside.

love to all
mike
xxxx

tears

2007-06-25T00:30:00.003-07:00

this morning deep in thought i walked out the front door and turned left to the 7-11 and there they were, hanging like giants in the ocean of the the sky: seven balloons: silent and still and there against the quiet grey of morning, brightly coloured like the tears of a clown.

they look like tears but they are upside down like a satanic cross. i guess this means they stand for happiness and not sadness and so i grinned. i was disarmed.

xxx

adelaide

2007-06-25T00:30:00.001-07:00

adelaide, adelaide
- paul kelly

i went to adelaide the other day. adelaide's where i was born. some of youse are from adelaide and some of youse aren't and some of youse are from other countries so i'll explain adelaide for a lil bit.

1. adelaide
ADELAIDE IS LIKE the australia of australia. what? say you. what you mean? say you. me i say this:

well, adelaide is to australia like australia is to the rest of the world. it has a little cultural cringe, like it's not a real place. to discover if it's a real place, it looks at the rest of australia to see if anyone is looking at it. australia does this too, but it looks at the rest of the world.

i understand this because i do the same thing sometimes. some days i wake up and i'm not sure if i exist. when this happens i wait for

CHRISSIE HYNDE: attention, give it to me!

someone to call or text or email or smile at me on the street. the longer this takes the less sure i am that i exist. weird.

i think.. i think this is a legacy of colonialism. when you're a colony all the people with power are acutely aware that the real decisions are made elsewhere.. that this isn't a real country and that the people here are somehow second-rate.. that the real world is somewhere else.. that we are at the periphery, the antipodes, and that home is on the other side of the world.

if you want to be successful in adelaide or australia, therefore, it's a good idea to go somewhere else for awhile. when you come back you glow with the light of authenticity: you've been to the real world, the world that makes it onto tv, the radiant world, glowing with the cathode rays of the real.

2. community
MY SISTER LIVES in adelaide. i went to visit her. she's just moved to a pretty splendid house up in the hills. there are two creeks and every kind of fruit tree (me: hey! is that a lychee tree? her: probably, there's every other kind of fruit tree here) and there are sheep too: nice sheep.

i walked up the hill and into her house, and met 5 people i didn't know. one was marni, my sister's housemate. one was marni's daughter. one was fraser, a friendly hairy young man. the other two were two women and i've forgotten their names.

do you guys try to work out who's shagging whom when you walk into a new environment? i do. this is i guess because i am a) kind of flirtatious and b) convinced that a broken nose will do nothing for my appearance.

anyway, i was finding fraser and marni and the two other women hard to work out. eventually the two women Who Shall Not Be Named left and i went and talked to fraser. i was wondering if he was the father of marni's child.

'don't say that!' he said, looking alarmed.
'sorry!' i said. fraser looked at me a lil while.

'well, i look after marni's daughter sometimes. and me and marni are hanging out..'

'hanging out? so that's what the youngsters call it nowadays..' i said. he looked sheepish but happy.

'..aaand i hang out with the two other girls who were just here.' he said. i looked at him for a lil while.

'nice work!' i said. 'they all seem to get along, too..'

'well,' he said, 'i like community..'

'ha!' i said. 'with that sentence, you've just made it into the story i write about adelaide..' i said it on the inside though, in the place where dreams and wonderings and schemes happen.

3. postcards
ON SUNDAY NIGHT in adelaide i went to see richard buckner play. sheesh. it was glorious.

while i was there i saw gordon trenordon. gordon trenordon is quite possibly a genius and quite possibly a paranoid schizophrenic and is in any case a lovely bloke. i recommend him.

he said nice things about my little stories and so i was pleased. shall we have an aside now?

- here beginneth the aside -

so some of you have noticed that i've been a quiet little storyteller of late. some of you haven't because you're still getting stories from india and some of you haven't because you're too busy and some of you haven't because you only check your email every six months. maybe you are amish or something.

this quietness is because my adelaide visit was, amongst other things, an unexpected feedback session re the virtues and failings of my little narratives, and i've been digesting the same.

that is: folks kept telling me what they'd liked about them, or what they didn't like, or what bits they liked more than other bits. this all added up to a confusing picture for me, because everyone wanted something different.

the most confusing one was annemarie, who said 'i didn't read anything that started with niggers or bitches and i really wished you'd written more about lola and tenzin, cos it was the whole purpose of the trip.'

and me i went sheesh! lindy knew where the email was as well, and it wasn't my place to talk about that stuff. lindy's words on the subject, more or less, were 'it isn't anybody's business unless i choose to tell them'. and i thought i'd explained that, but i guess it was in an email that started with 'niggaz' or 'bitches'.

i tried to explain that i was writing for a whooole bunch of people, many of whom have never met lindy or lola. i dunno. the whole project of writing stories and sending them out to people who may or may not like them seems kind of arrogant when people don't like them. when i realise someone's not into it i prune them from the list but it takes a while to realise it sometimes.

gordon trenordon, on the other hand, said they'd inspired him to write lots of travelogues when he next travels, and that made me very happy.

- here endeth the aside -

gordon trenordon is saving up to go overseas again. he's a sculptor so he's been sculpting a lot but he also has a job sorting mail at the post office.

'i make less money in the mail room than i do sculpting,' he says, 'so really it's a bit of a waste of time. the only reason i stay there is so i can read postcards.'
max was there too, and he said 'what, you read other people's postcards?'

'well,' said gordon, 'i could not read other people's postcards. but that would just be silly.'
i was there too, and i said 'ha! with that sentence you've just made it into the story i write about adelaide.'

xxxx

notes on a blue collar: flirting, demons, skin

2007-06-25T00:29:00.001-07:00

When I said I wanted to be your dog
I wasn't coming on to you
I just wanted to lick your face
- jens lekman

SO ON THE weekends i'm a blue-collar worker. wearing a blue-collar in a hospital is interesting.

how? you say and i say like this:

part 1: flirting with, or at least in the presence of, death
FOR ONE THING, you get to flirt as much as you like. no-one's surprised when a blue-collar worker starts being flirtatious. indeeed, it's almost expected of you. this is fine with me. when i was 19, i took up flirting as a hobby. which reminds me, i wrote a song the other day. it goes like this:

you gotta have a hobby gotta have a hobby so get yourself a hobby, before you start gunning down passers-by

i walk around the house singing it. if i am being bugged the evidence against me is mounting daily. where was i again?

PAUL HARDCASTLE: Nininininininininin Nineteen, 19, Ni-nineteen 19

ah, that's right. thanks paul. anyway, i decided i needed a hobby and that it was gonna be flirting. i found it easy since back then i was both afraid of sex and naturally tactless. since i was afraid of sex i wasn't trying to get any, which frees one up remarkably when it comes to flirting i find. that is, since you're not trying to get someone into bed you're less worried about saying the wrong thing and you're more playful.

since i was naturally tactless, i just started wandering up to women in the pub, either those on their own or whole tablefuls of them at once and saying 'hi, my hobby is flirting. can i flirt with you?'

somehow, miraculously, it seemed to work pretty much every time. however, my memory of those days is just a little hazy. there may have been alcohol involved. also: by 'worked' i mean i had a fine old time. i didn't get any sex out of it but that was ok cos sex was scary back then.

this led to a funny experience once. i was flirting with this girl and all was going well and then she said, 'so, flirting's just a hobby for you, huh?'
'yeah,' i said. 'why?'
'well, cos i was thinking i could take you home and we could take our clothes off and, y'know, see what happens,' she said. reader: i was totally unprepared for this and just kind of stammered something and ran away.

what was going on? i'd been having sex for a couple of years but it'd always been weird and so i wasn't that attached to it. also, in those days i found female desire intimidating, to the degree that i couldn't control it. i liked it when it was in response to something i'd done, but when it was clearly part of someone else's agenda it freaked me out. i liked feeling in control of the situation back then. now i don't really give a fuck. i recommend the latter attitude: it's more fun.

also: back then i was waaay more interested in being an object of desire than in actually having sex. being an object of desire seemed to be about control and manipulating surfaces: clothes and hair and posture and conversation. actually having sex involved deeper forces that i just didn't trust. i felt like my skin was a cage for demons and i had to stay in control or they'd take over my body and wreak havoc on the world and i'd be locked away.

ah, demons. i think the fear of demons is itself demonic. that is, the fear of deep forces acted to control me, and to recruit me into controlling myself and trying to control the people around me, though never with all that much success. now i feel more like a planet: i have oceans and lava and atmospheres and vegetation and species and societies. the oceans are full of flows of measurable speed and intensity and so are the volcanoes and so are the atmospheres. the oceans are also full of fish, fish all the colours of the rainbow.

part 2: you said interesting 'things'. is there anything else?
THE OTHER INTERESTING thing is that it makes you look like you work for the hospital, even though i don't. as a consequence people in beds keep asking me to help them, like this: 'heeeeeeeelp!'

what to do? or they ask me if they can go to the toilet. 'it's ok with me,' i say. or they tell me they've shat themselves: 'i've shat meself!' what to do? what to do?

sometimes in dementia wards patients think i'm someone else altogether. and sometimes this happens with odd men in the toilets. but that, as jack palance says, is another story.

love
xxx

sex, lies and work

2007-06-25T00:28:00.001-07:00

work is the curse of the drinking classes
- oscar wilde

22. no matter how tempted i am with the prospect of unlimited power, i will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
- from top 100 things i'd do if i ever became an evil overlord

the air pockets, the alkali wastes, the crumbling monuments, the putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance..
- anais nin

prologue

OK, I LIED about the housemate stories. well, i wrote them. that much i did do. wrote two episodes worth. then i showed them to georgia, my other housemate. she said 'they're very funny. but don't send them.' and she was right, curse her.

i feel a lil bad about leading youse on, though, so i hunted through both the episodes i wrote, hunted for something i could publish with a clean conscience. i found one paragraph in each episode. here they are:

(have you ever noticed - this is a digression - i say, have you ever noticed the relative amounts of shelf real-estate taken up by different kinds of magazines in sex shops? i have. if a sex shop was a new-internationalist-style map showing unequal distribution of libidinal energy, then shaved anal teens from holland are the .001% of the world's population who own at least 50% of the world's sex shop magazine rack real estate. that surely ain't right. anyway, back to the story, mmkay?)

'nah, it's really not, babe.' said simon. 'after having amoebic dysentary in india and shitting out half my body weight, my anus has lost all erotic potential for me.'

i guess you'll just hafta imagine the rest. anyway, let's move on. the past, gentle reader, is behind us now.

1. emil
TODAY I WORKED and ran into emil. i'd forgotten about emil. emil is slim-hipped and has piercing eyes: the eyes of a date-rapist. whenever i see him he comes up and talks to me and leans in close, talking quietly. i have the strong feeling he wants to put his penis inside me. i have the strong feeling he doesn't care too much which part of me he sticks it in. what a nice man.

of course, i could be wrong. maybe he wants me to put my penis inside him. god willing, neither of these things will ever happen.

kurt vonnegut just died. i was so in love with kurt vonnegut when i was a teenager. he was like the king of ludicrous deadpan writing. i'll miss him. today i read some advice by kurt on writing short stories. there were 8 points. here's number 4:

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

i'll have a go at the former:

emil told me a story once about a male friend of his who was married. his friend's wife fucked him around or fucked around on him or something, and he went out and got drunk, real drunk, and woke up in the morning to discover he'd gone home with a man.

'he says to me,' says emil, leaning in close, 'he got the best head of his life. he says, the pleasure a man can give another man, how a woman can ever compare?'
'nice,' i say, and go somewhere else.

2. you say goatse, i say mike
today i saw emil with another guy. they walked up to say hi.
'hi, my name's goatse,' said the other guy.
'goatse? mike.' i said, and offered my hand.
'no, goce,' he said, shaking it.
'no, my name is mike,' i said. he kept shaking my hand.
'goce. you said it wrong,' he said.
'welcome to australia, motherfucker,' i said. 'sayin your fuckin name wrong is a national fuckin hobby here'. i didn't really. sheesh! the very idea!

goce wandered off. emil leaned in close and his voice got low. uh-oh, i thought.
'what a fuckin idiot. his dick is bigger than his head,' said emil. wow, i thought. goce had a pretty big head, though admittedly most of it was hair.
'i mean his head is bigger than his dick. what a fuckin idiot.'

we were standing in an equipment room in the royal melbourne hospital. i was there because i work weekends as a delivery driver for a medical supplies company. it's a menial job, but it has its charms. for instance, you hear some pretty interesting conversations, walking around hospitals a lot. like this one: 'aaaaaaaaaaaa!'
or this: 'aaaa! aaaa! aaaa!'
or this: 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!'

of course, it's not all screaming. (nice comedian-style segue, non?) sometimes there are words, too. for example:

'we're going to slide this tube up your nose. it's going to be very uncomfortable.'
'aaaaaaaaaaa!'
'you're doing really well. try swallowing. it helps the tube go down faster.'
'aaaa! aaaa! aaaa!'
'you're doing great. nearly there!'
'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!'

goce, whose dick is either bigger or smaller than his head, came back. what a fuckin idiot.

and on that note,

muah muah

xxxx

hell, centrelink, bozack, bricklayer

2007-06-25T00:26:00.001-07:00

my, how time flies when you're a sentient being.

what were we talking about again? i think it was hell. hell! hell! hell!

so much for hell. i'm changing the subject, like so:

1. I LIVE WITH my daughter's mother, georgia, as of about a little while ago when i returned to this fine and wide brown land girt by sea. we're living together and we had a child together 11 years ago but apart from that we're just housemates. we don't shag each other and we have no shared possessions. i understand this is a lil unusual. i understood even better when i tried to explain it to centrelink.

(centrelink, for those of you who aren't australian, is a social security service. i get a parenting pension from them. this is nice and means i can afford to go to university.)

'so..' they said, 'you're living with the mother of your child but you're telling us you're not in a relationship?'

'uh.. yeah' i said.

'nope.' they said. 'we don't buy it.'

we went back and forth for a while. result: they'll give me 6 months leeway. after that if i'm still there it must be because we're in a relationship, far as they're concerned.

driving home, it occurred to me that at some point i might hafta explain the same situation to a lady, and i wondered how it'd go. as luck would have it, i found out that night, riding along on my bike.

'so..' she said, 'you're taking me back to where you live with your kid and her mother.. and that's all cool?'

'uh.. yeah' i said.

'cool.' she said.

if only centrelink was run by the kinds of ladies you meet at parties. how much easier would things be then?

* * *

2. WHEN I GOT back to australia i quit smoking, and thank fucking christ for that. i replaced it with swimming. i swim most days now. it suits my body and personality somehow: my body in that i have long arms and big hands and my personality in that i like to pay attention to technique.

i used to try and do yoga at home, but i'd vague out and start thinking about other stuff. good thing about swimming is if i start to vague out i start to sink.

i've gone to most of the pools around here now. usually i go to the fitzroy pool: it's 50 metres long, outdoors, and heated. i went one morning when it was still dark and swam beneath the brightening sky, the sky filling slowly with birds and light and hot-air balloons like inverted tears, tears falling away from the earth like the earth's own grief, grief falling into space all brightly coloured, hanging in the sky all silent, grief interrupted by gravity.

today that wasn't gonna work so i went to the northcote pool instead. they have a 50 metre outdoor pool but it's not heated. as a matter of fact it was pretty fucking cold. my hands were purple when i wriggled under the lane-dividers to the pool's edge and climbed out.

one thing about swimming is you get to see a lot of penises before and after you swim. it's like a kind of aperitif. today i was drying myself in the change room and so was a man who looked both forlorn and chinese. he had no arse. his penis was nothing unusual but he had the biggest scrotum i believe i have ever seen, hanging mighty and pendulous between his skinny legs. he looked kind of tired, actually. maybe all the nutrients in his body are consumed by his bozack.. like carrying a fetus or a tapeworm, and he gets what's left after his cojones have drunk their fill.. maybe he has to eat for three, like an expectant mother of twins or a host to two homonculi. and maybe, just maybe, maybe his bozack ate his arse, too.

* * *

3. THE OTHER DAY i walked over to the 7-11 on the corner. two men were shouting at each other out the front.

'NO. NO NO NO. I'D DO IT LIKE THIS!' said one of them, pacing on the concrete and waving his arms like peter garrett back in the day.

'BUT-' said the other.

'NAH! NAH! LIKE THIS!' said the first, violently.

i went in and did whatever i had to do. i could hear them from within: such was their force and ardour, gentle reader. i walked out. they were still shouting at each other and waving their arms and staring at the concrete. i felt a sudden surge of affection for them, such as you might drunkenly feel on seeing your pubic hair waving cheerfully out at the world from over the waist of your jeans. i smiled and walked along.

they noticed me smiling and became silent and watched me as i approached. when i got close, the first guy said 'ARE YOU A BRICKLAYER, MATE?'

'nope.' i said, and smiled more and walked off into the rest of my life without them and they started shouting again behind me.

xxxx

orcs

2007-06-24T18:48:00.001-07:00

last night driving home i looked in the rear-vision mirror.

i was on a hill. behind me all was black. on the last and smaller hill a swarming hundred headlights loomed, ice-white and massing uphill like an army of orcs.

hell

2007-06-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

the other day i drove past the hell's angels headquarters on heidelberg road. a man with a long beard and a leather vest on was mowing the nature strip out the front.

the quote generator; spirulina; venture capital

2007-06-12T16:47:00.001-07:00

1. the quote generator
on the way to the miracle of the possum christ i went to an exhibition opening. it was fun! while i was there que and ana said 'see that girl over there? she talks entirely in quotes.'
'wow.' i said. 'i'm gonna go talk to her.'

reader: i confess to bein a lil drunk. also: my pants were a lil loose and kept migrating south. my pubic hair kept waving over the top like a red rag to a bull, bein as how my pubic hair is red and all. i didn't really mind. i was happy to see it again. i felt a surge of familiarity and affection for my red pubic hair, such as you might feel for an old friend who turns up unexpectedly. this isn't really relevant to the action, i'm just setting the scene.

i wandered around for a while til i found her. she was wearing a skeleton costume: a black one-piece with bones painted on it in white.
'hey!' i said. 'i heard you talk entirely in quotes. is it true?'
'sometimes..' she said. '(husbands and wives, 1992)'.

an aside: have you ever noticed how raymond off everybody loves raymond sounds just like oscar the grouch?

back to the conversation: we talked for a while. i hafta say i enjoyed it a great deal. she didn't talk entirely in quotes though, and i told her so: 'you don't talk entirely in quotes!' i was pointing out that she was speaking in quotes AND attributions (you know, the bibliographic part - the bit in brackets) and that the attributions weren't part of the original and were therefore not quotes. she looked pained.
'give me a break!' she said. '(beavis and butthead, 1996).'

wow. i was impressed.
'do you have like multiple sources for this kind of small-talk chit-chat?' i asked.
'yes (yoko ono, 1966)' she said, and then she said 'yes (optus, 2006)'

eventually i asked her her name. i was wondering how she was gonna deal with that one. she said 'http://www.thequotegenerator.com '. now i was thoroughly charmed. i'd never met anyone else who spoke in hypertext before. i decided that if she liked wwf wrestling i'd propose marriage, right then and there. borrow a ring from somewhere. recite the vows with my pubic hair waving gently in the breeze that announced this to be the last night of summer, waving like hungry kelp in the languid waters of the carribbean, reaching out to the air and saying: will you dance with me, you devilish breeze? dance with me instead of snatching away the minutes of summer like the grinch? instead of cooling the ardour of the air with your cool uh.. absence of heat?

unfortunately she'd never given the matter of wwf wrestling much thought. i am still a bachelor, therefore: damn! always a bridgegroom, never a bride. no, wait, that came out wrong. always a best man, never the groom? doesn't exactly slip off the tongue, does it? hmm. i can tell i will hafta ruminate on this further: pass the cud of marital status through all four stomachs of my mind until it makes sense like simple cellulose.

2. spirulina
friday was my birthday. i didn't organise anything in particular, partly cos of the shortness of february of which i have spoken before, and partly cos i had many other things to organise such as the stuff of my life which is snarled into a snarl. also: partly cos i couldn't be bothered wondering if anyone was going to turn up if i did, a form of paranoia to which i am suspect. nonetheless: i had a grand old time.

eventually i ended up at an exhibition opening, different from the pre-possum-christian one. how did that happen? beats me but i was there so it happened somehow.

barcelona is pronounced bartheLAWna. howabout that. that's cos catalan spanish lisps the letter c. i was thinking about this the other day in the context of lisping. it seems to have vanished a bit, but there used to be a pretty strong association between homosexuality and lisping in the popular imagination. and i wondered if this, and the jibes that used to go with it, were actually xenophobic in origin rather than strictly homophobic: 'we hate youse gay cunts not cos you're gay but cos you talk like FUCKING SPANIARDS' - that kind of thing.

fucking spaniards. where was i? penny: that's right. this short woman with red hair walks in. i remember her name is penny. this is funny, cos i only met her briefly about 15 years ago, and then once a few years later. nevertheless i remember her name. weird. why can't i remember the names of people i see more often and actually interact with from time to time? it'd be just a tad more fucking useful, methinks.

penny wants to move to barcelona. why? because they like her there and they treat her good. she feels beautiful there. fair enough, too. i'd probably do the same if i discovered a place like that. melbourne's pretty good though. i got no complaints except sometimes about the weather. people say nice things about me often enough to keep me happy and here. thanks people. you guys are the best!

my attention kept wandering. this was partly a defense mechanism. penny seemed just a bit too impressed that i'd remembered her name lo these many years, and i was getting the sense she was reading something more into it than the mere freak of neurochemical architecture i reckon it was. (i'm using 'impressed' here in the sense that you'd use it of soap impressed with a cell-key as part of a noble but ultimately doomed escape attempt. that is, it seemed to have made an imprint that wasn't gonna fade in a hurry.)

anyway, she's tried to live in barcelona twice before but couldn't work out how to make money there. now she's studying natural therapies.
'barcelona's like ten years behind australia when it comes to natural healing!' she says. 'all these things i take for granted, they've never even heard of. they've never heard of spirulina!'

note to self: hmm..

spirulina, by the way, is a mexican algae that grows in highly alkaline high-altitude ponds. it's a vegetarian source of vitamin b12 and a whole bunch of other stuff your body likes having around. and true, it is algae, but once it's dried and powdered it tastes better than you'd expect. actually, it doesn't. it tastes just like you'd expect dried algae powder to taste. it fucking tastes like shit, that's what i'm getting at here. the aztecs called it tecuitlatl, meaning 'stone's excrement', so i'm not making this shit up.

question: will barcelona be improved by the importation of dried mexican algae that evokes stone-shit in the tongue of the aztecs? i guess there's only one way to find out.. to the venture capital, without a moment to lose!

3. at the venture capital
ok, does everyone know what venture capital is? just in case:

let's say you've got an idea that will make a shitload of money. actually, an arseload of money. the distinction is important, for reasons which will become clear shortly.

however, in order to put this idea into practice, you'll need to spend a bunch of money. not as much money as you're gonna make, but maybe quite a bit. let's call it a shitload of money, on the principle that a shitload must always logically be less than an arseload.

what you do then is you go to the pile of venture capital you have sitting in the vault, because venture capital is the money you hafta spend to be able to make money somehow. when people say 'you hafta spend money to make money', venture capital is the first kind of money.

unfortunately, you may not have a big pile of money in a vault. maybe that's why you're spending your time dreaming up schemes to ship algae to barcelona instead of, y'know, guzzling gin and juice in the benz with voluptuous, scantily clad members of the sex of your choice.

what you do then is you go find a venture capitalist and explain to them how much money you'll both make if they give you a smaller but maybe quite substantial amount of money first.

all these thoughts are weighing on my mind because i'm staring at where my pile of venture capital used to be and i can't see it anywhere. hello? he-lloooooooo? maybe it's hiding somewhere.. wait a sec..

..no, it's definitely gone. damn! now i hafta go find someone to lend me a shitload of money on the premise that shipping dried shitful mexican algae to barcelona will make us both an arseload of money.

sheesh. you see the kind of shit i hafta put up with? i may hafta ask you to excuse me for a while because a while is how long i reckon it's all gonna take..

sincerely yours,
mike
xxxx

the possum christ

2007-06-12T16:45:00.001-07:00

riding home last night i saw a dray of squirrels thronged about a tree and by the tree a man was feeding them to the sound of some classic hit from the late sixties. i listened and listened and the sound shifted as i rode past. what was that song? there were so many squirrels. wait! they weren't squirrels! this isn't thailand! speaking of which:

the word for today is hypnopompic. hypnopompic means to do with waking up. a hypnopompic experience therefore is one you have while waking. here's one:

waking up i looked up; looking up i saw a picture: the kiss, by klimt. there's a buffy episode where vampires are stalking on campus. when they've drunk their fill of undergrad blood they grab a trophy and come back to the nest. the trophies go on the wall, like trophies should. that's how you know they're trophies. for trophies the vampires grab posters from their victims' walls. they've got a whooole lot of klimt going on back there in the lair but behold! i digress! back to the story:

i'm staring at the picture, thinking this: 'wow, here in this malaysian backpacker joint they got the same klimt picture on the wall as georgia has on her wall in her loungeroom back in melbourne.' i stare at it a lil more. 'wow.. what are the chances?' i think.

pretty fucking slim, by my reckoning. pretty.. fucking.. slim. georgia by the way is my daughter's mother, for those of youse who don't know her. i've been staying at her house since me and my daughter alaska got back from overseas a couple weeks ago.

is there a punchline? yes: here: i wake up a bit more and realise that i'm in georgia's loungeroom, not in a malaysian backpacker joint. i'm in australia. therefore these are not squirrels but possums. the collective noun for possums, apparently, is passel: a passel of possums. me, i like posse better.

there's quite the posse of possums thronged about this tree. it's a park at night: there are floodlights. the light and the possums and the shadows they make together, possums and shadows thronged together in the night, thronged about the twin poles of the tree and the man, the possums with worshipful bodies and cagey eyes, the man throwing out food: all these things combine in a religious assemblage and the man is christ feeding a multitude and the tree is the tree of life or maybe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. the possum christ has a beard and everything. fuck! this light throws everything into high contrast and the possums are eerie, eerie in the night looking back from their christ at me, me riding through the park at night, drunk on exhibition wine and this vision and the blood of the lamb who taketh away the sins of the possum world. it's christian but some kind of syncretic christianity, christianity mixed with something else. voodoo?

who so loved the possums that he gave his only begotten son that they might be saved? it's a very good question but i hightailed it out of there. i had beheld the other and it blew my gourd.

the next morning i walked by the river and lo! beheld a snag: a submerged branch rising from the water like a bird's foot. sitting on the snag was a grey duck. the duck had turned its head completely back so it could tuck its beak into its feathers and stay warm.

it was shaped like a giant gunmetal teardrop and was completely still.

mike

dear fairfield i am sorry i had to shit on you sorry

2007-06-12T16:43:00.001-07:00

dear fairfield

i'm sorry. i didn't set out planning to shit on you. please don't think that. it wasn't a hate crime. i'm not a hater.

you hafta understand that i'm back in australia after a few months away, staring at chains: chains of tasks. it's like untangling ropes: trace back and back and back and the end seems always to be in the middle of a snarl. to do A i need to have done B, for which i'll need C. where is C? somewhere in the shed. the shed is the snarl whereof i spoke.

ropes snarl when you chuck them all in the same place without regard for their ropy identities. they get maudlin and ferocious and curl around each other for comfort. the stuff of my life is like this just now because three months ago i was tired and heartsick and packing up my house and i packed it up good for awhile and then i was too too tired and grievous, listening to 'back in black' loud over and over and over, cleaning up angrily and then sadly and then happily and then angrily again. and at the end i just started throwing things in boxes, uncaring what they were.

now they are snarled together in a snarl. it snarls at me when i go close. 'nice snarl!' i say but it can smell my fear as i approach looking for a screwdriver or a birth certificate or an overdue library book.

it's like in the life of pi where piscine patel is fourteen or so and is sharing a lifeboat with a tiger. the lifeboat is the boat of my life and i am fourteen and the snarl is the tiger. poetic, no? very fucking poetic but the trouble is the snarl would like to eat me. i can hear the voice behind its eyes and i know what it's thinking: it's thinking 'you left us here all tangled together and now we are tangled and you went away for months! for months and we are hungry and why don't you come just a lil closer lil boy? because the screwdriver you seek is just here, come just a lil closer, that's it, cloooser, come to papa, come to papa, OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE HE'S PISSED OFF AGAIN!'

it sings to me when i go away. it sings a bit of that tim buckley song called song to the siren but it sings the bit when the siren sings back: sail to me, sail to me, let me enfold you. and the thing is, it knows that it has what i most want and need, tangled and snarled in its tiger heart and ropy arteries. screwdrivers. birth certificates. clean clothes. i plug my ears with wax therefore and i get the tiger to lash me like odysseus to the mast of the lifeboat.. wait.. something is very wrong.. the tiger and the snarl and the siren are all metaphors for each other! i've just commanded the snarl to tie me up! i can see it salivating like the alien in alien as all three sets of nested jaws open up and reach for my liver! fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!

after a while of living with a tiger you get to wanting a lil fresh air, that's been my experence anyways. it took me a while to leave the house though because i had so much stuff i thought i should be doing but eventually i made it out.

fuck it was a nice day! everything had shape and colour, just like it should. there was air and sunlight and no-one had stolen my shoes: i was very happy. i saw what looked like a ring on the ground and i picked it up and it was a ring: howabout that. i laid it atop a pile of bricks and remembered being younger and walking through parklands and arranging stones in concentric circles for fun. thirty paces later i saw a single square of chocolate sitting in the middle of the footpath, sunning itself. it couldn't have been there for long because the day was warm and the chocolate hadn't melted. next to it was a tree. the tree had done something funny with its hair, a bit like when princess leia was jabba the hut's bitch for awhile and she did that funny bun/ringlet thing. the tree pretended it didn't know i was checking it out.

i'd been walking downhill. i figured if i walked downhill i'd get to water eventually. fortunately it only took about ten minutes and i found a river in a park. the park was dry because there are water restrictions in melbourne. melbourne after a couple of years of water restrictions looks remarkably like adelaide, the city of my birth, so that was nice. a kind of home away from home, kind of.

i turned left and walked and there were some horses. cool. i kept walking and then the road ended and there were little paths like ropes leading into a snarl of bush. i walked in. it all reminded me of something.. what? this:

one time i went for a drive with alaska to an art gallery in the hills. she refused to get out of the car when we got there, so i didn't stay for long. bitch. on the way back we bought pasties with sauce and went to this nice park to eat them. we ate our pasties and then went for a walk. it was a cool park! there were little paths leading like ropes into a snarl of bush and they twisted and turned and met up in surprising places. a great place to walk. quite possibly a great place to get fucked up the arse, too: we kept running into people walking along the twisty paths and smiling and saying hello to them. none of them looked that pleased to see us and in fact some of them looked a lil shocked and dismayed.

after awhile i said to alaska 'there aren't a lot of women in this park, are there?'
'no' she said. 'none, in fact.'
'hmmm.' i said.
'it's a pretty gay park, dad' she said and i was forced to agree.

the path i was walking in now was remarkably similar and i wondered if i was going to arrive in the gay park. i didn't want anyone to fuck me up the arse though because i was starting to realise that i really needed to shit. i came to a sign which said 'don't come any further unless you're looking forward to a golf-ball-shaped indentation in your head. and by the way you're being watched on a security camera right now.'

'bullshit.' i said. 'there are no cameras here.' i couldn't see any, anyway, but just in case there were i kept walking for a little while just to annoy anyone who might be watching. it did look like a golf course though, so i turned and walked the other way.

now the thing about the parkland by the river in this bit of fairfield is that it's private land. you're allowed to walk through it as long as you're nice about it and you watch out for the tiger snakes and you don't expect too much, like say a public toilet every now and then. i kept walking, though. hope springs eternal in an arseful of shit, that's been my experience anyways. the problem was.. actually there were a few problems, viz:

1. needing to shit.
2. no toilets.
3. a distinct lack of cover for a stealth-shit.
4. a distinct lack of anything to wipe my arse with.

i kept walking. i figured it'd get better after a little while. strangely, it got worse instead. the landscape opened out and there was nothing to hide behind. i was hanging on by a thread. i knew there was no way i could make it home in time. i contemplated knocking on the door of one of the palatial houses by the river and asking if i could shit there. i contemplated myself. i was unshaven and wearing dark sunglasses and thongs with skulls on them and a t-shirt with a snake crawling through a skull's eyesockets. 'hmm.' i thought. 'maybe not.'

finally the landscape opened out completely. back from the river there were broad flat houses, modernist houses with lots of glass and horizontal planes. between the houses and the river were trees, mostly scattered and straggly but a few were arranged in lil copses. i looked at the copses. i looked at the path. there was no-one around. the problem was that the copses would shield me either from the houses or from the path, but not both. who was i less worried would be watching me shit? i tried to work it out. it was too hard.

there was another problem which is that if i lived in one of these houses and walked down to the river and stepped in a human shit on the way i might feel like there was something personal in it. it's just one of those things. shit is kind of charged, like infidelity is.. you know, even if you know it's not really anything to do with you, it can still encourage you to feel pretty crap. i didn't want anyone to feel bad. i left, walking sadly.. well, as sadly as you can while trying not to shit yourself. i looked longingly at the copses. maybe if i left a note next to my shit: 'dear fairfield i am sorry i shat in you on the ground. it's not personal. i was just caught short'. (could i say 'it just happened'? people say that for infidelity.. does it ever work? maybe it does, i dunno. i think it wouldn't work for shit though. another problem: i had nothing to write with, except shit.)

i started walking back the way i'd come. my reasoning was that if everything had gotten worse by walking south, it'd hafta get better if i walked north. then this guy started following me. fuck! how was i going to shit now?

eventually he turned off the path and i found a spot and shat. that's how it happened. so you see, fairfield, there was nothing personal in it.. it wasn't about you, it was just what i needed to do.. and i'm sorry if you got hurt and i hope we can still be friends.

sincerely yours,
mike
xxxx

welcome to behold! the theatre of comets

2007-06-12T15:55:00.000-07:00

welcome to behold! the theatre of comets. it's a blog. i named it after an old manuscript i heard about via boingboing, who heard about it via biblioddyssey.

the manuscript is just called 'the theatre of comets'. i added the behold! bit. i am customising the name to express my individuality. think of the behold! as the mag wheels and spoilers on the muscle car that is my blog.

i wanted to have a place to put the stories i write. i think i also want a place to think, especially about stuff i find online. i do a bunch of my thinking online.

you know, whenever i start something creative and new i go through a bunch of questions about boundaries. you know, what to include and what not. i'm not so much talking about personal information, just that, well, my mind goes in all kinds of directions.

part of me likes focus. this is why the album i'm making will probably include my romantic guitar songs and probably no electronic music or gag tracks or musique concrete, even though i do all that stuff too.

and on the other hand, i like stuff that shows a wide-ranging interest in the world. the best example i can think of like this just now is those novelists i call the 'everything novelists': those folks who seem to want to talk about everything, and who use a novel as an excuse to do so. i'm thinking of salman rushdie, herman melville, tom robbins; i'm sure there are many others.

i think.. i think for now i'll try putting everything in and see how i like it. maybe i'll just tinker with it til i'm happy with it and only tell folks about it then.