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

there seemed to be only one of me and

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

slumbering cthulhu shit and vomit

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

atop and about mt issues

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

hell, centrelink, bozack, bricklayer

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