a shaft going down into the earth's mantle

i wrote the other day about a hole baterz and some other people dug. i got some of the details wrong and benjow wrote to correct me:

in regards to the hole, i think it was actually IN the room we weren't supposed to go into. its planned destination was dml's [dml = david martin lewis.. ed] shack out the back.

it was begun by baterz and andy and some other people maybe me and dml but we got down about 5 feet and then vagued out because it was, after all, hard work. then one day the guy me and baterz were trying to write a computer game for came over and he was walking around going 'wow you guys are really BUMS' and when we told him about the hole he got extremely excited and went down to the shop to buy some proper digging implements, came back and went beserk in that hole. he was a strange man. very neat and he used to be in the army and thin and white and when he ate the wrong food (he was on some full on pritiken diet or something) he would get really hyperactive. he used to lend me and baterz his car and let us hangout at his weird flat on anzac highway while we played his computer games as 'research'. his girlfriend always shook her head wearily when she saw us coming along, or when we'd ring her up and say '___ (I can't remember his name--we just used to call him monkey boy) has gone a bit strange' and she'd say 'you haven't given him sultanas or alcohol have you?' then she'd drive over and pick him up. anyway, the point of introducing him is that it was he who i credit with getting the hole past the awkward uninspiring period that is the curse of all grand schemes. he got it deep enough so when you stood in the hole, it was over your head. after that, there was no goddam well stopping us. we were at it day and night because suddenly it was no longer a hole, it was a SHAFT. until the candles started going out in at the bend at the bottom. then we got scared and stopped.

years later when it was just me and dml and sharon and maybe marky mark living there, my sister came to visit from newcastle and she wanted to see this legendary hole so we went into baterz's room, or at least what used to be baterz's room--i think he was at Marion street by then, and showed her the hole. there was no light in the room with the hole in it, which kind of abutted baterz's room, and the light from his room didn't really show off the hole to its greatest glory, so i lit a piece of paper and threw it down so she could see how impressively deep it was. the paper went right down to the bottom, briefly illuminating some old bits of carpet and clothes baterz must have thrown down there before he left, and then went out. it looked very impressively far indeed. wow, said my sister and we left, locking baterz's door behind us and went to the pub.

meanwhile, dml and sharon came home and started making dinner and sitting around doing whatever they normally do when they noticed smoke near the ceiling. the went all around the house looking for whatever was on fire, then up into the roof where there seemed to be a lot of smoke but no fire. they stood around chewing their lips and frowning, but of course they didn't think of going into baterz's room because no one had been in their for months. The smoke got thicker and thicker. they started to freak out and called the firemen (or maybe they arrived on their own accord), but anyway they turned up with some police, to help look for the fire. and they were all wandering around our house in their gear going 'wow you guys are really BUMS'. at the time we were all vaguely moving out and most of the rooms were full of piles of rubbish...it must have been a bit like one of those tenants from hell ACA exposes. anyway, eventually they kicked down the door to baterz's old room (or maybe they just unlocked it, who knows) and discovered the source of the smoke--the hole, which was now billowing blissfully. the carpet and clothes and caught on fire from my shred of paper i thought had gone out. dave freaked out because he had had this kind of recurring nightmare about having to explain what the hole was for...how it got there, etc. to figures of authority (landlords, landagents, etc.) and suddenly here he was, standing around said hole with a bunch of policemen and firemen watching it inexplicably belch forth smoke with the police going 'why is there a hole here and why is it on fire?' pure nightmare. i almost didn't have the heart later that night to tell him it was all my fault. even when i did he didn't seem to fully appreciate the surreal moment of existential angst my actions had allowed him to endure. some people are
never happy.

one time i was living with dave wiffler at orsmond street and it was right near the time when we were about to be evicted again and we had no furniture because we were going through a hard-core opium eating minimalist eat only what we can steal from the servo kind of lifestyle and i came home from some ridiculous tour of melbourne with my death metal band to discover dave in the loungeroom. actually it didn't realy qualify as a loungeroom, because we had no lounges or chairs, more a heater room because that's what was all that was in there. and a big piece of parachute material that was slung up under the ceiling. anyway, when i left said heater room had been completely empty, but when i returned, a long weekend later, it wasn't. dave had been paid or something so he had plenty of pot and lots of junk food. his ritual was to sit in front of his bong and smoke it (making all the requisite little piles of screwed up tissue paper with lumps of foul smelling tar on the tips, burnt matchsticks, little carved bits of carrots (dave didn't believe in metal cones, so had to carve them out of carrots), etc), stare at the floor in front of him and eat junk food. when the clutter became too much, he simply shuffled back on his bum a few feet and started anew. by the time i got home, he had spiralled backwards around the room several times, leaving an unbelievable trail of rubbish behind him like a snail and had come to a rest right in front of the heater, at which point the parachute came down, creating a little tent around him and the heater, so he was trapped in there and couldn't do any of the backwards shuffling around the room, so all the rubbish just kind of piled up around him inside the tent. when i lifted the edge of the parachute to look in, it actually tumbled out, like it wanted to get out of there. i should have taken a photo. there is nothing quite like the meticulous mess a hard-core pot smoker makes. its not a random mess...it's very systematic and modular...one empty packet of tim tams, one screwed up packet of peter stuyvesent, several cigarettes emptied of tobacco with their ends screwed up and lined neatly on the floor, some screwed up cones of tissue paper balanced carefully, an orchy bottle with a little bit of juice in the bottom, an ashtray made out of the lid of the orchy juice bottle that has hence melted, an empty packet of tim tams--you get the drift...Richard Serra eat your heart out.

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

16 names for shit

he cheated on his ass and shat through his mouth
- slovakian proverb

aw, you guys.. you respond sooo well to the stories about shit, don't you? it's very encouraging. well, it's encouraging me to tell more stories about shit. reader: gentle reader: you may live to regret this, once you realise just how many of these stories i have. this is the story where i shit through my mouth.


1. 16
I WAS 16. wait! flashback music! ok! i was 16. i had funny friends. we had a language we all spoke to each other. it was called lursdie. it was like all the languages of 16-year-olds in that it existed so we could talk about sex and drugs without our parents knowing.

lursdie started in canberra, i think. there must be a dictionary somewhere. i remember there was a dictionary at the time. it was three or four pages of single-spaced computer printout. i'll wager it was drafted on an apple II. we had words for hello and everything. hello was 'haliots!'

so we didn't say 'hello,' we said 'haliots!' instead. and we didn't say 'fucking', we said 'sasquatch'. and we didn't say we had heaps of something, or a lot of it, we said we had 8. or something times 8.


2. names
NOT ONLY THAT, but we each had a silly name. my best friend's name was salamanda. his best friend's name was baterzby beelzebub, but everyone called him baterz. he was a genius and now he is dead. i miss him.

me and salamanda wrote a novel together for fun when we were 16. i showed it to my mum when we finished it. she said it was 'highly derivative'. i told salamanda this and he got cross. she was right, though. it was so much like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: we had aliens and drug dealers and we had mick jagger in it too. whenever one of us got stuck we'd swap and the other one would write for a bit. if we got really stuck we'd make up a new subplot. this happened often.

i forgot about this for years, that we wrote a novel just for the hell of it. during those years novel-writing took on hallowed and ominous proportions. i capitalised the first letters in my mind.

Novel Writing seemed like a massive undertaking and only for the worthy, kind of like a grail quest. you know, you hafta have something to say, and all that.. and to have read a lot so you know you're not doing what's already been done and prepare to devote a few lonely years to it blah blah advice blah blah.

or, as i remembered with a start a few years ago, you could just knock something out with a friend because telling stories is fun and you can do whatever the fuck you want because it's yours. aliens? sure! time travel? be my guest! necrophilia? i thought you'd never ask!

but i digress.


3. for
SO ANYWAY, ME and my friends, we had a word 'tocculmans'. if you were a tocculmans you were good at physical activity and didn't mind if people saw you doing it. it wasn't a compliment.

but mike! i hear you say. what has this, any of it, got to do with shit? i hear you say.
shhh, i say. be still thy beating mouth, i say. i'm setting a scene here. if - and only if - that's quite fucking alright with you. hmm?

the scene goes like this:

EXT. DAY - THE POOL

ok, it's the year 11 swimming carnival. i'm sitting in the stands with my friends and our silly names. none of us are going to swim. we're going to sit in the stands and get drunk. here's how: we've bought some 2-litre containers of orange juice. hey! i'm writing in present tense! is this some kind of a joke? jokes are told in present tense, after all!

where was i? orange juice.. orange juice.. ok, so we have these 2-litre containers of orange juice. before the event we've each poured out half of the orange juice from our containers and replaced it with vodka. the rest writes itself, i guess. i got drunk. we all did, us with our silly names.

reader: i drank my vodka-and-orange. i didn't understand vodka then. i'd probably never had it before. what i decided sometime around that time is that vodka is dangerous because if you keep drinking it steadily until you feel drunk, you've still got quite a bit waiting to enter your bloodstream. and if, like me, you drank until you felt a little unwell, there was probably a world of pain waiting just about 25 minutes away.

anyway, that's what i did. i drank. eventually i started to feel unwell. i stopped. things started spinning. after a time i decided to go home. i lived near there. i got home. i lay on the bed. everything kept moving clockwise. i hung on to the bed. it didn't help.

eventually i realised i needed to vomit. i lurched up and made my way to the toilet, and threw up violently.

'whew,' i thought to myself. 'glad that's over with.'

then i threw up violently again, and then again. and again. each time i vomited the vomit was less liquid and seemed to have come from further down in my digestive tract. you can see where this is leading, i think.


4. shit
FINALLY THERE WAS nothing else in my digestive tract. and yet the awful truth was i still needed to vomit. something started making its way up. i didn't feel very good at all. i opened my mouth and what came out.. i don't know if this is actually physiologically possible, but what came out seemed very, very much like shit.

'oh god,' i said. i hung my face over the toilet and opened my mouth wide, trying to make a straight line between the water and the end of my oesophagus. i was trying to keep my tongue out of the way so i didn't have to taste the shit. my success was limited.

and on that note:

love to all

xxx