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

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

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

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

vows: poverty, chastity and irony

cunnilingus and psychiatry have brought us to this
- tony soprano

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

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

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

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

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

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

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

something was fishy.


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

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

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

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

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

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

love to all
mike
xxxx

notes on a blue collar: flirting, demons, skin

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

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

how? you say and i say like this:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

love
xxx

sex, lies and work

work is the curse of the drinking classes
- oscar wilde

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

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

prologue

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

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

A

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

B

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

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

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

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

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

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

i'll have a go at the former:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and on that note,

muah muah

xxxx