a magical journey through my dick

welcome to the magical land of stories, everybody. today we are going on a journey through time and memory. it goes something just a little bit like this:


1.
I GOT ON the train. i sat down. i had a guitar. after a while i looked up. there's a little screen that tells you where the train will stop next. i looked at it. i wanted to know where we were.

it said this:

10145001G 220CC
CLOCK CHIP
32K RAM
SUN 9.39 AM
SPECIAL ADDRESS = 00

i was surprised. i'd thought we were somewhere in the melbourne CBD but apparently we were going to an address in the clock chip. the only address i could think of inside a clock chip is a memory address so i guessed we were going on some kind of journey through memory. this could have been 'problematic', as they teach you to say at uni*: i was meant to be hanging out with my daughter alaska that afternoon. i looked outside. everything was black but we were being circled by bright white lights.

'so this is memory,' i thought.

i looked over to my right. there was a guy looking at me. actually, he looked like he'd recently been looking at me but had just then stopped. his eyes looked like they'd just slid off my face. he had an absinthe-green bottle of sprite on his lap where his dick should be. was he trying to tell me something with the absinthe-green bottle of sprite?

whatever it was, i didn't get it. besides, i had a guitar sitting on my lap. much bigger than the bottle of sprite.

i looked up at the sign again. apparently we were still travelling through memory. i looked out the window. there were languid willows, just like i remembered from my last train journey. there were magical pines. i remembered the magical pines too.

i looked at the guy again. his eyes slid off again. again, again, i won: his dick was still a bottle of sprite and mine was still a guitar.


2.
EARLIER I'D BEEN sitting in a thai cafe. i eat there a lot. while i'd been ordering a little mouse ran across the floor, skittering from side to side like a streaker. the woman who ran the cafe went and put on a rubber glove and then went and caught the mouse by a table and carried it out. i went and sat at the table the mouse had hidden under. it seemed only fitting.

i was reading philip k dick and listening to soft-rock because that's what they listen to in the cafe.

philip k dick was saying something about morality. the music was saying

and i never touched somebody
like the way i touched your body
and i never wanna let your body
go

3.
LATER I WALKED home. i saw gum nuts on the ground like tiny bombs. i guess i was still on a journey through memory because i remembered being about seven and noticing this for the first time, that gum nuts were shaped like cartoon bombs. me and my friend jason code got together in the playground and schemed a plot: we'd bring matches to school the next day and see if we could blow up the school with a couple of these bombs.

it wasn't that we disliked school, especially. i think it was just the opportunity to blow up a building. it seemed too good to miss.

we met the next day. i had the matches. we collected a few gum nuts and sauntered casually to behind the main building and started trying to light the fuses. it didn't work very well but we persisted and in fact we were quite absorbed in the challenge which might explain why we didn't notice the approach of mrs munn. mrs munn was a horrible witch, four thousand years old. she materialised from nowhere and grabbed the matches.

she looked at us with her face which was four thousand years old, from after the fall but before the flood. then she opened her mouth which i guess was also four thousand years old.

'what were you trying to do? burn down the school?' she said, fixing us with her ancient stare. reader: this may have started as a rhetorical question but we both looked pretty guilty when she said this so i guess she divined our true purpose pretty smartish. her mouth set hard and horizontal and she lit one of the matches and grabbed my little hand in a grip like the iron cage of weberian rationality.

'very well: how about if i burnt you, would you like that?' she said, and started drawing the flame closer to my finger.

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry!' i said. jesus! this wasn't in the plan! whose fucking idea was it to burn down the fucking school anyway? not mine, that was becoming very fucking clear.

'oh? you're sorry are you?' she said. she pronounced 'sorry' like it tasted bad in her mouth and drew my little finger even closer.

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!' i said, with as much dignity as i could muster (none, as it happens).

the gum nuts meanwhile sat silently on the ground. i guess they are all grown up now with families of their own.

love to all
xxx


* narelle walker pointed this out to me. hi narelle! i am in yr computer, arrangin yr wordz! LOLZ!!!!111!!!

carp libraries

she said 'you look different'
i said 'well, i guess'
- bob dylan

1. carp
I WAS AT university. i walked to the library. the floor just outside the library was some kind of shiny linoleum. it reflected the fluorescent lights above it, turning them into hazy white carp somewhere far underfoot.

university libraries like this one are information ecologies. there are supplies of information of different kinds and different species which have learned to feed on them.


2. sorry, did you say 'information ecologies'?
YEAH.. SOME FOLKS use the term 'information ecology' as a nicer, more touchy-feely term than 'information economy'. they forget that in ecologies things actually eat each other quite a lot of the time.* an ecology, while it may be prettier than an economy, is no friendlier a place to be. there are far fewer ways to interact in an ecology without eating other occupants or being eaten by them than there are in an economy. in an ecology you either ignore other occupants, eat them, or try and stop them eating you. in an economy it's possible to sit down over coffee.

ok: it's time to go back to the library, if that's quite fucking alright with you.

what most folks are looking for here are not specific pieces of information but rather flows of information they can direct at will. this means not books but internet connections. the library is a bitch like this, a bitch with many teats. there are always more puppies here than teats though, puppies wandering around looking for somewhere to latch on to the flow, the milk of late modernity.

if you can find one of these you can direct it to supply you with whatever you want, pretty much. it's like a genie or a very capable butler:

'i wish to look upon angelina jolie! this instant, i say!'

'very good, sir.'

(enter ANGELINA JOLIE. she has enormous lips.)

..if you can find a terminal, that is. it's hard. but if you have a laptop you can just feed on the wireless signal suffusing the air: it's the tesla-esque alternative to the supply of information along wires.

anyway:


3. love, maybe
I SAW A young woman. she was sitting in a quiet corner, feeding on the wireless signal. she was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, talking and laughing quietly in what sounded like french. her laptop sat on the floor in front of her. from it came a voice and maybe pictures too, i couldn't see: the voice of some kind of love who was not nearby, maybe.

maybe love and the marks we know it by - words and smiles and tones of voice - were being translated into more mobile kinds of information and sent great distances and then turned back into the marks of love.

she looked a little wistful but more than this she was smiling. there was a gold ring or a red flower sitting on the mousepad too and i can't remember which. i've tried the memory both ways and each way makes sense and outside the hazy white carp still swam slow and ghostly: untouchable behind the floor's shiny interface.

xxxx

* fools!

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