Riga, errata, oil, OK!

1. Riga

I TRAVELLED ALONE from Amsterdam to Tampere in Finland, of which more some other time.  On the way to Finland I spent a wee short while in Riga, in Latvia, a former Soviet city which is now establishing itself as a regional hub for air travel.  I had an hour or two before my connecting flight so I did what everyone else in my position was doing, which was ambling along with the vacant and confused look of the recently activated undead.

I went to the toilet.  It seemed like something to do.  A sign there said:

'Gentlemen!  Welcome!  Please respect property of Riga airport!  Also please observe the commonly followed standards and conventions of decent behaviour!  Thank you!  And enjoy your stay!'

Must have been quite a party once, in the men's toilets of Riga airport.  Just near the toilet was The Old Country, a duty-free shop done up to look like.. actually, I'm not sure exactly what they were going for.  The entrance looked like the trees you see in high-school musicals.  Inside, the pillars were plastered with political posters that I'm pretty sure meant nothing.  There was expensive crap and cheap horilka, in easy-to-carry sizes for the international traveller.

I bought a sandwich from a bar called Buffet.  The waitresses had huge breasts and tiny eyebrows, which looked weird but I guess was better than the other way around.  I was behind a queue of people.  Everyone in the queue was holding a bottle of water and walking back and forth between the sandwich stand and the register, trying to get their change right.  For some reason the bar would take Euros but only notes, and they'd give you change in Euros, but only notes.  If you didn't get the change just right you ended up with Latvian coins, which were expensive and useless everywhere else.

Eventually I got to the front of the queue.  I bought a sandwich.  The waitress plonked it down unwrapped on the counter.  I looked around for a plate but perhaps there was a separate queue somewhere for plates.  There were stacks of glasses and taps behind the bar so I said 'Can I get a glass of water with that?'

'Only bottled,' said the waitress.

'Really?' I said.

'Sorry!' said the waitress, and smirked, as did everyone else in the line.  They held their bottles of water and loved them with their hearts and smirked with their faces.

'Really?' I said again with my own face, and then I used the same face, which now had a confused expression, to look at the glasses some more.

'Well.. I can give you a glass of hot water with ice in it,' she said.

'Yes!' I said and then everyone around me looked at their bottles of water and muttered regretful things at their bottles of water and those bottles of water suddenly didn't feel so special anymore.  The waitress came back with a glass of hot water with ice in it, and a little smile like I'd managed to beat the system somehow.  The system which I guess was set up to make sure travellers don't get what they want unless they manage to combine options they don't want - but which are at hand - in some kind of alchemical manner to produce the thing they were after in the first place.  Everyone needs a hobby I guess!  Gotta have a hobby.

There were what looked like prostitutes walking around the departure lounge, which seemed pretty considerate of whoever thought of it.  What better way to fill an otherwise dreary hour in a former-Soviet airport?  I didn't see anyone taking advantage of this service, though.  Perhaps they were discouraged by the prospect of buggering up their change after all the mucking around getting it right while they were buying sandwiches?  Or maybe they just couldn't work out how to ask for the prostitution equivalent of a cup of hot water with ice.  As for me: I watched TV instead.  On TV the European economy was collapsing and a German octopus was predicting who would win the soccer.

2. Errata

OK, TODAY AT the Theatre Of Comets we have some letters from readers.  Some of these letters are just lovely replies, which always make me happy, and for which: thanks!  Other letters bear upon claims I have made recently.  Let's take a look at the latter, shall we?

The first is from Mathew, who tells me the toilet style that so confused me in Amsterdam is standard-issue throughout the Germanic bit of the world.  I'm going to Berlin soon so I'll be able to at least dip my toe in the water of that proposition, as it were, and report back then.

The second is from Robyn, who says: said toilet style is about avoiding splashback.  In Australia, see, you have the pleasure each time you shit of taking a little bath in a dilute solution of your own shit and piss.  The Germans, Gott knows why, aren't so keen on this, hence the mechanism to separate said wastes.  I guess the option to examine your shit more closely is just an added bonus.  One of many things to thank the Germans for!

The third isn't actually a letter, but was Hanna's comment on my analysis of Amsterdam traffic.  I left Amsterdam before the World Cup and went to Finland,  but she stayed for the carnage.  She said I was basically right until the Dutch lost the World Cup, and then the system which had worked so beautifully just went to shit.  The system relies on equanimity and mutual respect, see, so when a country loses all self-respect and will to live the system doesn't work out so good.  Makes sense.

3. Oil

ON THE PLANE on the way to Riga I sat next to a very nice man who inspects offshore oil wells.  We talked about disasters, since at the time there was a high-profile oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico which showed no signs of getting any better.  His take on the matter: 

a) governments who refuse to regulate industry safety properly and then blame an individual oil company when something goes wrong are cunts.  (Well, he didn't say they were cunts, because he was too nice.  I said it for him, because I'm not.)  And

b) there might be just one or two teensy unexpected consequences when a huge old oil company goes out of business, such as less experienced operators doing the same job in the same regulatory environment.

By some coincidence the New Orleans musician Dr John was on the flight too.  He had a gnarly walking stick.  It looked kind of voodoo.  He sat in business class with his gnarly stick and his band sat in economy.  I only knew what he looked like because I'd seen a video three days before about the big oil leak, and he was a prominent speaker in it.  His take on the matter:

c) 'Why are the criminals still in control of the crime scene?'

I thought about introducing Dr John to the nice man who inspects offshore oil wells and sitting back to see what would happen.  Perhaps he would end up using his gnarly stick on the nice man who inspects offshore oil wells?  There were all kinds of dramatic possibilities, heightened by us all being on an international flight.  Because whatever you think about oil it's pretty tough for any individual human being to use more of it - and in more of a hurry - than by flying in an air-plane to the other side of the world.  Unfortunately I was in economy and Dr John was in business class and anyway we hadn't been introduced ourselves except in that weird mediated way where I knew who he was because I'd seen his image somewhere.

4. OK!

OK THAT'S ENOUGH for today.  

Love to all xx

an internet of toilets

a brief survey, which, while not altogether tedious, may be neglected by the reader impatient with facts.
- jack vance, lyonesse

WHEN I WAS young we had something called pub rock. sweaty men in tight trousers and leather jackets played it to rooms full of drunk people. i liked it a lot even though i didn't have a leather jacket or particularly tight trousers. i went out to see pub rock as often as i could afford, about once a week.

back then the university bars were some of the best places to see pub rock. they had bigger rooms and better sound systems than a lot of the pubs, and the good bands tended to play there. i started going to uni bars when i was 16 maybe. i usually had just enough money to get in so i usually didn't drink. i still had to go to the toilet though and i was struck, gentle reader, by the quality of the writing on the toilet walls. there were political screeds, knowing cultural references, all kinds of wordplay and always at least one point-of-view ballpoint drawing of a woman waiting to be penetrated. it all seemed so smart and worldly, some kind of adult commentary on the machinations of the day.

a few years later i started hitchhiking a lot and so i got to read a lot of toilet walls in tiny country towns. the thing that struck me there was that someone else had made the same journey and had written long narratives on dozens of the walls i looked at, bulging single-spaced unpunctuated paragraphs of the stuff, always with some kind of transgressive element, always with an undercurrent of anger. one time the author had walked out of his room when his uncle was out and seen his uncle's girlfriend getting undressed through a window and she was a real slut and he could see her cunt when she bent over and he knew she could tell he was watching and he knew she liked it the dirty little slut: that kind of thing. she'd go on to have sex with someone, sometimes the author, sometimes a different family member while the author watched in hiding. the secret was always safe at the end of the story: no-one ever got caught but i guess the story had to be told and so here it was poured out for all to see while they voided their bowels of shit.

anyway. we have the internet for all these things now but back then we didn't. men still wanted to talk about politics and art and sluts who wanted it though, still wanted to draw pictures of cocks and cunts, still wanted to keep alive the ancient tradition of jokes about arts degrees so they made the best internet they could from toilet walls. the nodes of this network were connected by two things: the shared cultural understanding outlined in the last sentence, and the sewerage system. and both of those were connected by the mother ocean, one way or another, in that a very small part of the water cycle takes place in our bodies, including the bits we think with.

since we've had a real internet the fire's gone out of the toilet wall internet and the prose has fallen off a long way, both in quantity and quality. perhaps you'd think this would be different in university toilets but it isn't, really. hardly any of the university-educated graffitists can spell any more and none of them have anything political to say that isn't talkback hate or green left weekly headline or just incredibly stupid in some other way.

despite this, there is occasional kindness and generosity of spirit, like the 19-year-old writing on the wall of the toilet closest to the recording studio where i study, the 19-year-old with a big black cock who kindly left a note offering to stick it in my arse if i want. well, the note's not addressed to me personally, but i figure i'm included. what a nice young man! it's heartening to know that in this day and age there's someone offering to stick his big black cock in the arse of a total stranger, without even being asked. it warms the heart.

it's a generous offer, to be sure, but here's the thing: he's offering to insert into my arse something of roughly the size, shape and colour as what i've gone to the toilet to remove from my arse. we're at cross-purposes, see. it'd violate some kind of conservation of mass to take him up on it.

on which note:

love to all
xxx

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

parabolas

this morning i got up. i felt pretty good. maybe i am finally getting enough vitamin b.

i walked down the hall. i looked back at the puppy. he was still curled up on his lil blanket near the front door.

'interesting,' i thought. 'i have more energy than the puppy.'

i looked at the puppy some more. one of his eyes was open. he looked back at me with said eye.

'very interesting indeed,' i thought. 'could it be,' i thought, 'that we are symbiotically linked like homonculi? that maybe we form some kind of closed system where the amount of energy stays constant but passes between us through some mechanism which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye and the details of which would certainly hafta be worked out in somewhat more detail? but that anyway in layperson's terms one of us has the energy at any given time t while the other reposes or struggles to walk without tripping over? and that right now the lil puppy is as montgomery burns would say the cool yin to my raging yang?'

i looked at the puppy again. one of his eyes was still open. there was, gentle reader, a subtle gleam in said eye.

'is it just my imagination,' i thought, 'which is, admittedly, quite active,' i continued thinking, 'or does that lil puppy look just the tiniest bit guilty?'

i stepped over a gentle shiny parabola of puppy piss on the hallway floor. i guess the puppy had pissed against one of the walls sometime earlier and the earth's intelligence had moved it downhill and it had dried, nearly, in a gentle shiny parabola.

i continued down the hallway absorbed, gentle reader, in these reflections. actually to be quite honest i'd moved on from my psycho-physical musings and was absorbed in picking words out to describe what i saw. i'd settled on 'parabola' and was just forming the word 'gentle' with my interior voice and then i said a very very rude word indeed and looked at my heel with the melancholy eye of a poet.

the puppy groweth in cunning, i can say that much. he had artfully left the parabola right outside my door where i'd see it and be distracted and not notice the limpid pool he'd left just next to the bathroom. he'd found one of the natural basins formed by the geological activity in our linoleum and filled it with piss. my heel was sitting in it.

my sock was wet. i took it off. later i would add it to the pile of piss-wet socks in my laundry basket but for now i was interested to see that the pool of puppy piss was a much fainter yellow than usual: the pale yellow of the sun through train windows: the pale yellow of unsalted butter.

'interesting,' i thought. 'maybe the mechanism of it all has something to do with vitamin b.'

on which note:
love to all
xxxx

i was later i look! pepper-trees!

o my heart which i have from my mother!
o my heart which i have from my being!
do not rise against me as a witness!
do not turn against me in the tribunal!
do not tip the scales against me in front of the keeper of the scales!
- the book of going forth by day

1. i was
I WAS TIRED this morning. maybe i'm not getting enough vitamin b. maybe the puppy is getting it all. i think the puppy is getting enough vitamin b because when i walked into the kitchen this morning he was looking at me and i looked at him and then i saw behind him a small pool of puppy piss, cartoon-sun yellow. it was a hallucinatory yellow in fact and the world's intelligence was moving it downhill. it was becoming a slow stream because our floors are not flat.

i cleaned up the piss. i do this a lot at the moment. i'm also home a lot just now working on music and so is the puppy. home, i mean. the puppy is not working on any music. stop trying to confuse me with your suggestions and, frankly, innuendos. thanks.

when i walk he spins like a satellite around the planet of whichever leg just hit the ground. he twines around my legs like bolas . i hafta be alert lest i fall.


2. later i
LATER I WAS on the train. a woman and a little boy came and sat across from me. the boy's hair was the colour of burning butter. by this i mean that some of it was a pale yellow and some of it was darker.

the boy was excited to sit by the window and gaze out at the world: the world always new and surprising. i'd guess he was four. to be that young is to know you don't have the measure of the world: you want to keep looking at it out the window because it's full of surprises: look! a truck! look! a helicopter! look! a horse!

we didn't actually see a helicopter or a horse. i am just giving an example.

none of the rest of us have the measure of the world either but we forget, maybe, and instead of looking out the window we think about other things but the world is always new. it's always being put together just in time for us to look at it. the woman wasn't looking out the window. she was yawning and rubbing her eyes.

some people can get fucked. no, wait.. that came out wrong.. i meant to say some people think it's funny the way kids have more energy than the adults who look after them.

'isn't it amazing,' they say, 'how much energy kids have! and look how boring their parents are!'

but see, the parents would have more energy if someone else was cooking them food and paying their rent and cleaning up after them and so on. kids are like rock stars. other people attend to their needs and they get to throw tantrums and jump on the furniture and look out the window at the world always new: look! the sun pale behind clouds! the sun paler than my butter hair!

i don't mean to imply that the little boy across from me was some kind of prima donna. i was just making a more general point. he seemed in fact like a total sweetie and he was happy to snuggle up to the woman when he got tired so i guess they knew each other from before the train.

there were things lying around on the banks by the train tracks. everything had an air of magical decay.


3. look! pepper-trees!
WE PASSED BY pepper-trees. look! pepper-trees! something pale and generous was flowering the pines, too.

xxxx

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

slumbering cthulhu shit and vomit

this morning i got up. i was in the country. i was camped atop a ridge in thin forest. last night i looked through the trees up at the stars. there were a lot of stars. i tried to decide if there were unnecessarily many stars. i decided that there weren't: they all needed to be there or the orbits of things would be different.

this morning i got up. it was cold. i packed my bag. i was coming home. i'd lied to my friends about what time the bus came and so i got there on time. i ate three hard-boiled eggs for breakfast and some toast with peanut butter on it.

i got to the bus early but i didn't have time to shit. waiting for the bus i realised i really needed to shit. my friends were waiting with me. they were happy at first and then i told them about my lie and they realised just how long they'd be waiting for. they looked less pleased.

as for me, by this time, i'd decided i really really needed to shit. i looked to the left and to the right and to the left again but nowhere was open. good thing interstate buses have toilets on them.

the bus came. it was the same driver who'd ferried me out to the country a few days before. i got on.

i scampered up the back of the bus as fast as i could. there was a light on near the toilet door. the little disc that had once said 'engaged' in red or 'vacant' in green had been gouged with a compass or something til it was blind white plastic and mute too and told me nothing. i pushed on the door. it wouldn't open.

i walked up to the front of the bus.

'does the light on by the toilet mean someone's in there?' i asked the driver. his name was eddie. still is, i imagine.

'nah mate,' said eddie, 'that light's always on, it's on as soon as i put the key in the ignition.' he threw the bus from side to side as he said this. i hung on to something and looked at him til he said this:

'anyway, the toilet's stuffed. you can't use it.'

ah, i thought.

'and anyway, it's only a local bus. you don't really need a toilet on a local bus,' said eddie.

reader: eddie's first sentence is strictly true but this bus journey goes for ten hours. ten hours is a long time.

'ah,' i said. the shit, meanwhile, was trying to crawl out my arse. it was keen to be born out into the world and borne to the mother ocean. it was tired of being separate. it wanted union with the mother ocean. my guts griped. it was as though my shit was many-tentacled like cthulhu and as though, like cthulhu, it tired of slumbering in my depths and wanted to seize control of the daylit world.

'are we stopping anywhere where i can use a toilet?' i said.

'merimbula,' he said. 'not long now.'

reader: merimbula was 77 kilometres away.

an hour passed.

somehow, amazingly, my shit retracted. instead i started feeling like i needed to vomit. i tried to look out the front window of the bus as much as possible. i've seen my sister do this. she gets travel sick all the time but i don't really so i'm always surprised when it happens.

we got to merimbula. i stood up to get off the bus and immediately vomited. i had to swallow my vomit, though, cos there was nowhere for it to go. trust me, i'd looked around a little bit for something innocuous to vomit into. i got off the bus and immediately vomited on the footpath, right next to a young couple in conversation. they moved away discreetly as i did this. for some reason i tried to vomit into my hand so it wouldn't go everywhere but it went everywhere anyway, including my hand.

'god,' i said. 'that's disgusting.'

i had vomit dripping from my lips and fingers and tiny specks of it on my clothes. over the road was an umbrella palm and a blue wooden bench. there was a metal plaque attached to the blue bench but no-one was sitting on it.

i went to the toilet to wash up and evacuate cthulhu from my arse. he journeys underground now.

it was a men's toilet so of course there was no soap. in men's toilets there's never any soap. there's usually graffiti telling you who to call to get your cock sucked, but no soap. sometimes if you're lucky there's a few yellow cubes in the urinal, fighting valiantly with the smell of piss. but: no soap. anyway, i emerged from the toilet much as i was when i entered it, at least as far as my vomited-on state was concerned. goody, i thought. only nine hours to go.

i sat on the bus. no-one sat next to me. out the window i saw muscular trees and triangular dams.

we stopped in cann river for lunch. i bought a hamburger and went outside to eat it. i sat on plastic furniture, still redolent with vomit.

'ahem!' proclaimed a squeaky voice from behind me. i turned around. i saw two perfect yellow circles, each with a perfect black circle in its centre, each animated by the same intelligence. it was a magpie. it seemed to want food so i gave it some. instantly another magpie came to try and take food from the first. i looked up. when i looked down there were ten magpies, panhandling like gulls and all aiming their perfect discs at me. the economy of scavenger birds relies on the tourist dollar.

i looked over at the bus. it was parked next to a massive cylinder full of liquified petroleum gas under pressure. between the cylinder and the bus a woman stood, smoking.

i walked back to the bus. eddie was holding a packet of holidays: possibly the worst cigarettes in the world. smoke was coming out of him too.

xxxx