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

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

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

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

riding shotgun with jesus

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.

adelaide

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

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

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