a reunion

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

revenge

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

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

a shaft going down into the earth's mantle

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.