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

invisibility

1. invisible
i grew up in west hindmarsh. i've said this before. west hindmarsh is a semi-industrial suburb in adelaide. when i was little there was no library there. there was a bookmobile, though. it came around about once a fortnight. eventually we got a real library: the hindmarsh library. it got built in the row of buildings that held the roller-skating rink. years later the roller-skating rink would get turned into an asian-language cinema. howabout that.

i read a lot in those days. it was safer. when i was about six the big kid from the house behind ours told me, through the fence, that he'd shoot me with his bow and arrow if he ever saw me outside again, so i started coming straight home from school and going inside. we didn't have a tv so there wasn't much to do except read.

the hindmarsh library was great. after i'd read what i thought was interesting in the kids' section, i started wandering through the bit for grownups. i found a bunch of cool stuff there but there were two books that set me on fire and not just any fire but fire as pronounced by ian astbury: fi-yaaaaaaah! i kept borrowing them again and again.

the first was called how to build a flying saucer. this started off by showing you how to build the pyramids and raise the statues of easter island with neolithic technology. neat. chapter 4 was, as promised, how to build a flying saucer ('after so many amateurs have failed '). the other book i really liked was called levitation: what it is - how it works - how to do it. it went through a bunch of methods for levitating oneself. i only remember a couple. one involved kind of rocking in the full-lotus position and then launching yourself into the air for a fraction of a second. i agreed with the book's author that this was kind of lame.

another one involved learning to hold your breath for longer and longer times. somehow this made you lighter.. eventually.. i can't remember the details. according to the book, adepts could slow down their breathing and extend the pause between in-breath and out- to 45 minutes. i had a little go at this but didn't persist, didn't persist even though i had a genetic head-start: my dad and my grandfather could both hold their (my grandparent's house had two wings and from above looked like a giant v: like a wake of birds rippling through the sky's surface.. there was a swimming pool there too, reflecting the sky.. my dad and my grandfather would sit on its bottom connected to the rest of the atmosphere only by a tiny umbilicus of bubbles from their noses..) breath for about 5 minutes.

2. demons, shit, shinola
my grandmother on the other hand was a psychiatrist who liked old-school sci-fi. she had a lot of books on transactional analysis and neuro-linguistic programming, which i enjoyed, and a whole lot of asimov and heinlen and arthur c.clarke.

lewis: w-what about ray bradbury?
martin (dismissively): i'm familiar with his work!

what she liked most of all, though, was books written by people without bodies. you know, archangels or beings from other dimensions who'd speak through ordinary everyday folks, say through automatic writing or something like that. she was not alone in this: lots of folks enjoy this kind of thing. but as it was pointed out to me years later, just cos someone doesn't have a body doesn't mean they know shit from shinola. this is good to remember if you ever get possessed by a demon.

demons talk tough like wwf wrestlers do and they act like they know everything and sometimes we give their words a little too much weight cos they don't have bodies. it's a lil spooky, see. they speak without being visible all the time and the only people we know like that are consciences and people on the other end of the phone. but: still: they may very well not know shit from shinola. sure they may have travelled through all kinds of dimensions and whatnot but don't let them fool you into thinking they know shit from shinola. why does it matter? well, the differences between shit and shinola are important. one is a by-product of the body's industry and the other is for shining your shoes. if you shine your shoes with shit they will smell bad and people will look at you funny. and if you pour shinola into the toilet it'll stick to the bowl and your housemates will be dark at you. if you've let a demon talk its way into your body and it blinds you to this crucial distinction, like, for instance, so:

YOU and THE DEMON are walking through a busy city. there is a SHOE-SHINE BOY perched on the kerb like a dirty bird.


SHOE-SHINE BOY: shine your shoes?

YOU: uh..

THE DEMON: yeah get 'em shined. you'll never get anywhere in life with dirty shoes.

YOU: uh.. ok.. but what's that he's shining them with?

THE DEMON: shinola.

YOU: are you sure? it smells funny..

THE DEMON: i know everything, remember? and that is definitely shinola.

..you are very likely to regret it: shit all over your shoes and a very dirty toilet and dark-at-you housemates. not a recipe for fun times. so, y'know, be aware.

wait! i was meant to be talking about levitation!

anyway, the levitation book was by one steve richards. he had another one called invisibility: mastering the art of vanishing. o how i lusted after this book! one day i finally got to read it but it seemed kind of light-on after the levitation one which seemed waaay more authoritative. (i notice on amazon that steve richards has a new book. it's called everything you will ever need to know to start driving a big truck. or maybe that's a different steve richards. i hope not.)

the upshot was, unfortunately, that i never learned invisibility from a book. i had to make up a spell instead. it only occurred to me after my friend steve said something. not steve richards. another steve.


3. the other, cooler, steve
i have a friend steve. when i met him he was called cool steve. he used to ride a motor scooter around drunk: kapow! you get the picture. later he gave the scooter away, but he didn't want to decide who was going to get it. instead, he asked friends if they wanted a scooter until he had a list of 20 people. when he had a list of 20 people he assigned each one a number and then rolled a 20-sided die. as it happened, baterz got the scooter, and immediately sold it.

this lil anecdote shows one of the things that was distinctive about steve for a few years there: exercising great control over process so as not to control outcomes. he was like the john cage of social engineering.

i wrote a song back then about cool steve. it was called 'cool steve'. it went like this:

cool steve.. when will you ever learn?

it was sung to the music for 'blue moon'. you repeated it until steve got embarrassed. later steve changed his name to 'snaky dancer'. i wrote a song about this, too:

i had a friend.. who changed his name.. who changed his name to 'snaky dancer'..

in between these names, steve changed his name to skysten. one time me and skysten were talking about having to ride somewhere without a helmet, or maybe without lights. i was saying i'd found the ride stressful. i'd been worried about getting stopped by police for riding without a helmet. (this kind of thing happens in australia. the one time i went to jail was directly related to riding a bike without a helmet. that's another story, though. quit trying to distract me!)

'well, in these situations i always make sure i don my cloak of invisibility-to-police,' said steve.

i thought on this for a bit. such a cloak seemed like a very good idea. why didn't i have a cloak like this? i was jealous and eventually ended up making up a little spell. it went like this:

i am invisible to police (or uninteresting at the very least)

my reasoning was this: all of us get distracted a whole bunch of times during the day, police officers included. all i was trying to organise with my little spell was for one of these moments to line up with the moment when i passed in front of a police officer's field of vision. i didn't much mind how. you know, they could just vague out for a second and think about what they wanted for dinner or something. it didn't seem like much to arrange. there are more important things in the world than cyclists without helmets, and that was a consideration in my favour too.


4. how well did it work?
i'm glad you asked. reader: it worked remarkably well. almost ridiculously well. police cars would drive straight past me all the time when i was riding without a helmet on. i'd look at them and they'd just be sailing by, their minds on something more important. it happened over and over and over. i began, in fact, to worry about what would happen if i had some kind of accident and wanted police assistance. would they notice me then? bleeding and/or broken?

anyway: paranoia aside: one time i was riding down a narrow laneway and noticed a police car behind me. the lane was so narrow they couldn't pass me. i was the only vehicle in front of them. if i kept riding they'd be trapped behind me all the way to the end of the street. i should have been obvious to them, in other words.

'uh oh,' i thought, 'this isn't going well.'

i figured the polite thing to do was hop off my bike and wander over to the police car sheepishly but i decided: fuck it: i'm not gonna just concede defeat. i'll wait for them to stop me. and they didn't: i rode all the way to the end of the lane while they crawled along behind me. would have taken about a minute. we got to the end of the laneway and then i turned left and they turned right and drove off into the rest of the world without me, thinking about something else.

xxxx

rules for trees and grass, my people, the moon out of focus, the possibility of a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth.

hello
- lionel richie

why hello, lionel. how's the kids?

this is a funny little story. i'm not sure about it but i get the feeling it's time to let it go and find its fortune, out there in the kingdoms and prince-bishoprics and so on. it can cross streams and talk to magical beasts like for example unicorns and cicatrices and griffins and the enigmatic sphinx, the sphinx who knows all but speaketh in riddles &c &c. i'm not sure about it cos i sewed it up from the corpses of other things. dr frankenstein did this and look where it got him: running for his life across the icy tundras and floes of the arctic circle and if nothing else enters into the matter we should at least consider that the arctic circle isn't quite what it used to be back then.

nonetheless: i hafta let it go cos it's distracting me from the story i really want to write (which is about invisibility and has a spell in it and everything). hopefully it'll be ok out there in the world, the world all bright and radiant, radiant with the light from various motherfucking celestial bodies, bodies all burning far from the earth we wander and people will be nice to it. one thing in its favour is it's made of fragments, just like everything else in the world.

you: f-fragments?
me: yes! fragments!

(pause)

you: w-what about trees?
me: yeah! trees too! which reminds me:


1. rules for trees and grass
i've been looking at trees recently, at the way they extend through space and feed on what passes through that space. it's neat: they apply the same rules over and over, trees do: go this far (where 'this far' is a proportion of the distance between where you are now and your total height, like say 2/5ths of it or maybe 3/7ths) and then split into this many pieces (give or take 2) at around about this angle and then keep doing it again until you turn into leaves.

what ends up happening is that trees control a field, roughly barbell-shaped, around a central vertical axis. they leave a gap in the middle for the horizon to pass through.

grass, on the other hand, is all about occupying a plane. if grass has a rule it's 'go about this far and tie yourself in a little knot through the horizon. repeat until you run out of planar space.'

what ends up happening here is that grass has no trunk to cut: it's got no central point to attack: howabout that.

you: ok, but w-what about people?
me: wait, i thought we were talking about trees?
you: we were! but now i want to know about people!
me: well... howabout this:


2. my people

it is the right of every traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. expect long descriptions of everything.
- jonathan strange, in jonathan strange & mr norrell, susanna clarke.

i went to the writers' festival the other day. i got there just in time. i was going to hear a talk about the creative commons. it was in a theatre. i walked in and sat down.

something felt funny and then i realised what it was and it was this: i had, gentle reader, the distinct sensation that i'd suddenly come home, somehow, that i'd found my people. i was.. uncomfortable. i wasn't sure i wanted to be having that sensation at exactly that time, surrounded by exactly those people. everyone was, well, bookish.. a little uncool perhaps. and surely, surely waaay less cool than me. surely. i was a little disturbed so i took a water bottle out of my bag to have a drink and then noticed everyone around me already had their water bottles out. my people carry their own water, apparently. i drank anyway. i wasn't going to be put off. i sat there for a bit. the speakers weren't there yet so i took a book out of my bag so as to pass the time and then realised of course everyone around me already had their books out. damn. however, women were wearing shawls and sensible jeans. i wasn't wearing a shawl. that was one point of distinction i could hold onto. i was dreaming when i wrote this. what?


3. the moon out of focus

i was dreaming when i wrote this
- prince

the other night i kept walking out of the house to look at the moon. there was a lunar eclipse and i wanted to see it. the first time i went out it was cloudy and so the moon was hazy. eventually the cloud cleared but the moon still looked hazy. it was weird. it reminded me of the actor who was always out of focus, a character in woody allen's deconstructing harry. one web site summarised the plot of deconstructing harry like this:

"..revolves around the problems of a new york writer's creative and erotic life."

gee, i thought. now that narrows it down a lot. doesn't it? hacks down the allen canon a tad, wouldn't you say? excludes one or two films, hm? or maybe not? perhaps? maybe i have my sarcastic voice on, hmm? maybe it's actually a pretty fucking succinct precis of the old man's entire motherfucking corpus, hmm?

but i am being unfair! it excludes all the films by woody allen which aren't about woody allen! which by a shocking coincidence are probably also my favourite of his films, like sweet and lowdown, or purple rose of cairo.

by the way: these emails are best viewed in html, if you have the option. if you wonder why i keep fucking up my formatting with <str> and </em> and shit like that, it's cos you're looking at them in plain text.

and you know what i hate? not much, actually: i ain't a playa hater. still, i hate comedians who feel the need to link all their gags somehow: "and another thing about squirrels..", say. steven wright is the perfect example of a comedian who doesn't do this and is very funny. why do the others bother? maybe they are distracted by the possibility of a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth.


4. tunnels
what was i talking about? i can't remember but it's possible there is a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth. underground cities and everything.

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. his story contains these words:

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.

..among others. it's very funny: go and read it .

xxxx

grin

and what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
- bob dylan

1. power
I SAW DUCKS with tiny eyes, beer-bottle brown.  the water combed the reeds that sat beside it in simple friendship.

(on the way home i saw an avenue of trees.  the central boughs had been cut out so they wouldn't interfere with the power lines overhead.  they looked like an avenue of open hands passing the power along like life-savers do.)


2. grief
I SAW MODERNIST buildings streaked with grief, the grief of grieving weather.


3. thick
IN THE MORNING the mist was thick with light.  later on the train i saw ghost gums like plaintive hands reaching out of the earth.


4. four
FOUR NIGHTS LATER i stepped out of the caravan.  there was a cheshire moon just above the horizon: a tilted grin shrinking with the days until saturday.

xxx