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

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