the pressure, the present, the past and the sun

to name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
- susan sontag, notes on camp

uh..
- kanye west, golddigger

1. the pressure
SO JUST IN case you were wondering i was in a supermarket a couple days ago. i was standing in line for the checkout. there was an old lady in front of me. she had a lot of stuff sitting on the little conveyor belt that conveys stuff to the cashier. she was making conversation with the cashier. she'd left her trolley so it blocked my way. i looked at it for a while and started putting things on the conveyor belt.

i got a pressure-cooker for my birthday last year but i didn't use it until recently. now i like it a lot. lots of the things i was putting on the conveyor belt are things which work well in pressure cookers. i had turnips and swedes, for example. i am trying to learn to cook more like a peasant. this is part of me trying to unlearn my assumption that i will one day be rich. i may be rich one day, true, but (a) i'm not rich yet and (b) i'm more likely to be rich one day if i stop living like someone who is already rich.

just in case you were wondering.

the old lady wandered up to the trolley and grabbed it.

'oh here i am getting in everybody's way again,' she said. 'i'm really very clumsy, you know.'

what a sweet old lady, i thought to myself. i stopped putting stuff on the conveyor belt because there was no room for it. i was so hungry. the old lady was back with the cashier, still making conversation.

'so we're just waiting for the dog to hurry up and die, really,' she said. 'we want to go on holiday but we can't go until the dog dies. we've been waiting and waiting!'

i was waiting and waiting too. i was really very very hungry. i looked at the old lady's stuff. a lot of it was food but i didn't eat any of it even though i was hungry. i looked at my stuff. a lot of it was food but i didn't eat it cos i hadn't paid for it yet. that's how capitalism works: it doesn't matter how hungry you are, what matters is who owns the food. the supermarket still owned the food i was looking at so i didn't eat it.

2. the present
THE OLD LADY wandered back and looked at the conveyor belt.

'oh here's my stuff getting in everybody's way, too!' she said. she looked at it for a little bit and i looked at her. i didn't see what she could do, except for one of those movements that are all subtitles. you know, like when you're in an elevator and someone gets in and you sway very slightly back. you're not actually giving them any more room in real terms, but there are subtitles that say 'i acknowledge that another human being has entered a space i once occupied alone'. it's a funny kind of politeness cos it achieves nothing other than politeness, unlike, say, giving someone a seat you were sitting in.

anyway: be quiet! i'm trying to tell a story!

the old lady looked at things a little more and then slid half her stuff so it was closer to the cashier. the side effect of this was to make it impossible for the cashier to move the conveyor belt for a while.

what an annoying old lady, i thought. i'm glad i don't live with her. i started thinking about writing a story (this one, as it happens) and then i felt just like harvey pekar in american splendor [sic]. harvey pekar was stuck in a supermarket queue behind a little old lady one time and he got so frustrated he went home and turned it into art. he pulled out some paper and wrote a script for a comic about being stuck behind a little old lady in a supermarket queue. he couldn't draw for shit so he just drew stick figures.

there's a lesson in that, or there was a lesson in it for me, anyways, which is this: your life doesn't have to be anything other than what it is right now to be turned into art. that's a lesson about the present: the present, whatever it is, can be transformed into art.

3. the past
ANYWAY, I LEARNT something similar once about the past. but first: we have a new puppy at our house.

he is very small and very cute. i fought against it but it seems that now his name is going to be woobah poonie. it's a pity. he is too small to take for walks outside so i take him for walks inside instead. i walk to the kitchen and he bumbles along beside me. i walk back and he bumbles back.

he has a little mat to shit and piss on. it's impregnated with pheromones to encourage little dogs to shit and piss on it. he has managed to shit and piss in almost every room of the house now. once he even shat up against a cupboard, leaving tiny shits drooling from the panelling. he's never yet even once shat or pissed on the little mat of pheromones.

despite this, ZOMFG HE IS SOOOOOO CUTE!!1!! LOLLZ!!11!

anyway: the past: so when i was younger i used to play in bands in adelaide a lot and so did this guy ben winch. he stopped playing in bands and started writing novels. i read the second one. it was called 'my boyfriend's father'. i admired it because it was about the kind of life i had as a late teen: listening to the cure and living in the suburbs of adelaide and not doing much else except rocking out a lil bit sometimes.

maybe i am kind of slow but it had never occurred to me before that you could just write a novel set in the world i grew up in. it seemed too ordinary. i felt like a fish reading a novel about water.

unfortunately there was a suicide in the book. fictional suicides are kind of like real suicides, i reckon: more likely than not a failure of imagination. it's an easy way to invest a book with the inexplicable and its power: the power of silence, of not talking to anyone who loves you anymore, the power of not letting yourself be understood.

anyway: the lesson: whatever past you have is ok. you can make it into art too. you don't need to be from anywhere exotic. and everywhere exotic is boringly familiar to at least some of the folks who live there.

4. the sun
SO HOW ARE you guys going at being happy when you can't see the sun? i'm still learning how to do that trick. i haven't seen the sun much recently and i haven't been very happy either. it's a pity not being happy cos life is fleeting and all.

nonetheless: i hope all of you are happy. and for those of you who aren't: remember: the sun will be back soon. maybe til then we can carry a tiny version of it somewhere behind our ribs. just for a little tiny while until we can see the big sun again.

love and kisses 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