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

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

adelaide

adelaide, adelaide
- paul kelly

i went to adelaide the other day. adelaide's where i was born. some of youse are from adelaide and some of youse aren't and some of youse are from other countries so i'll explain adelaide for a lil bit.


1. adelaide
ADELAIDE IS LIKE the australia of australia. what? say you. what you mean? say you. me i say this:

well, adelaide is to australia like australia is to the rest of the world. it has a little cultural cringe, like it's not a real place. to discover if it's a real place, it looks at the rest of australia to see if anyone is looking at it. australia does this too, but it looks at the rest of the world.

i understand this because i do the same thing sometimes. some days i wake up and i'm not sure if i exist. when this happens i wait for

CHRISSIE HYNDE: attention, give it to me!

someone to call or text or email or smile at me on the street. the longer this takes the less sure i am that i exist. weird.

i think.. i think this is a legacy of colonialism. when you're a colony all the people with power are acutely aware that the real decisions are made elsewhere.. that this isn't a real country and that the people here are somehow second-rate.. that the real world is somewhere else.. that we are at the periphery, the antipodes, and that home is on the other side of the world.

if you want to be successful in adelaide or australia, therefore, it's a good idea to go somewhere else for awhile. when you come back you glow with the light of authenticity: you've been to the real world, the world that makes it onto tv, the radiant world, glowing with the cathode rays of the real.


2. community
MY SISTER LIVES in adelaide. i went to visit her. she's just moved to a pretty splendid house up in the hills. there are two creeks and every kind of fruit tree (me: hey! is that a lychee tree? her: probably, there's every other kind of fruit tree here) and there are sheep too: nice sheep.

i walked up the hill and into her house, and met 5 people i didn't know. one was marni, my sister's housemate. one was marni's daughter. one was fraser, a friendly hairy young man. the other two were two women and i've forgotten their names.

do you guys try to work out who's shagging whom when you walk into a new environment? i do. this is i guess because i am a) kind of flirtatious and b) convinced that a broken nose will do nothing for my appearance.

anyway, i was finding fraser and marni and the two other women hard to work out. eventually the two women Who Shall Not Be Named left and i went and talked to fraser. i was wondering if he was the father of marni's child.

'don't say that!' he said, looking alarmed.
'sorry!' i said. fraser looked at me a lil while.

'well, i look after marni's daughter sometimes. and me and marni are hanging out..'

'hanging out? so that's what the youngsters call it nowadays..' i said. he looked sheepish but happy.

'..aaand i hang out with the two other girls who were just here.' he said. i looked at him for a lil while.

'nice work!' i said. 'they all seem to get along, too..'

'well,' he said, 'i like community..'

'ha!' i said. 'with that sentence, you've just made it into the story i write about adelaide..' i said it on the inside though, in the place where dreams and wonderings and schemes happen.

3. postcards
ON SUNDAY NIGHT in adelaide i went to see richard buckner play. sheesh. it was glorious.

while i was there i saw gordon trenordon. gordon trenordon is quite possibly a genius and quite possibly a paranoid schizophrenic and is in any case a lovely bloke. i recommend him.

he said nice things about my little stories and so i was pleased. shall we have an aside now?

- here beginneth the aside -

so some of you have noticed that i've been a quiet little storyteller of late. some of you haven't because you're still getting stories from india and some of you haven't because you're too busy and some of you haven't because you only check your email every six months. maybe you are amish or something.

this quietness is because my adelaide visit was, amongst other things, an unexpected feedback session re the virtues and failings of my little narratives, and i've been digesting the same.

that is: folks kept telling me what they'd liked about them, or what they didn't like, or what bits they liked more than other bits. this all added up to a confusing picture for me, because everyone wanted something different.

the most confusing one was annemarie, who said 'i didn't read anything that started with niggers or bitches and i really wished you'd written more about lola and tenzin, cos it was the whole purpose of the trip.'

and me i went sheesh! lindy knew where the email was as well, and it wasn't my place to talk about that stuff. lindy's words on the subject, more or less, were 'it isn't anybody's business unless i choose to tell them'. and i thought i'd explained that, but i guess it was in an email that started with 'niggaz' or 'bitches'.

i tried to explain that i was writing for a whooole bunch of people, many of whom have never met lindy or lola. i dunno. the whole project of writing stories and sending them out to people who may or may not like them seems kind of arrogant when people don't like them. when i realise someone's not into it i prune them from the list but it takes a while to realise it sometimes.

gordon trenordon, on the other hand, said they'd inspired him to write lots of travelogues when he next travels, and that made me very happy.

- here endeth the aside -

gordon trenordon is saving up to go overseas again. he's a sculptor so he's been sculpting a lot but he also has a job sorting mail at the post office.

'i make less money in the mail room than i do sculpting,' he says, 'so really it's a bit of a waste of time. the only reason i stay there is so i can read postcards.'
max was there too, and he said 'what, you read other people's postcards?'

'well,' said gordon, 'i could not read other people's postcards. but that would just be silly.'
i was there too, and i said 'ha! with that sentence you've just made it into the story i write about adelaide.'

xxxx

sex, lies and work

work is the curse of the drinking classes
- oscar wilde

22. no matter how tempted i am with the prospect of unlimited power, i will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
- from top 100 things i'd do if i ever became an evil overlord

the air pockets, the alkali wastes, the crumbling monuments, the putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance..
- anais nin

prologue

OK, I LIED about the housemate stories. well, i wrote them. that much i did do. wrote two episodes worth. then i showed them to georgia, my other housemate. she said 'they're very funny. but don't send them.' and she was right, curse her.

i feel a lil bad about leading youse on, though, so i hunted through both the episodes i wrote, hunted for something i could publish with a clean conscience. i found one paragraph in each episode. here they are:

A

(have you ever noticed - this is a digression - i say, have you ever noticed the relative amounts of shelf real-estate taken up by different kinds of magazines in sex shops? i have. if a sex shop was a new-internationalist-style map showing unequal distribution of libidinal energy, then shaved anal teens from holland are the .001% of the world's population who own at least 50% of the world's sex shop magazine rack real estate. that surely ain't right. anyway, back to the story, mmkay?)

B

'nah, it's really not, babe.' said simon. 'after having amoebic dysentary in india and shitting out half my body weight, my anus has lost all erotic potential for me.'

i guess you'll just hafta imagine the rest. anyway, let's move on. the past, gentle reader, is behind us now.

1. emil
TODAY I WORKED and ran into emil. i'd forgotten about emil. emil is slim-hipped and has piercing eyes: the eyes of a date-rapist. whenever i see him he comes up and talks to me and leans in close, talking quietly. i have the strong feeling he wants to put his penis inside me. i have the strong feeling he doesn't care too much which part of me he sticks it in. what a nice man.

of course, i could be wrong. maybe he wants me to put my penis inside him. god willing, neither of these things will ever happen.

kurt vonnegut just died. i was so in love with kurt vonnegut when i was a teenager. he was like the king of ludicrous deadpan writing. i'll miss him. today i read some advice by kurt on writing short stories. there were 8 points. here's number 4:

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

i'll have a go at the former:

emil told me a story once about a male friend of his who was married. his friend's wife fucked him around or fucked around on him or something, and he went out and got drunk, real drunk, and woke up in the morning to discover he'd gone home with a man.

'he says to me,' says emil, leaning in close, 'he got the best head of his life. he says, the pleasure a man can give another man, how a woman can ever compare?'
'nice,' i say, and go somewhere else.

2. you say goatse, i say mike
today i saw emil with another guy. they walked up to say hi.
'hi, my name's goatse,' said the other guy.
'goatse? mike.' i said, and offered my hand.
'no, goce,' he said, shaking it.
'no, my name is mike,' i said. he kept shaking my hand.
'goce. you said it wrong,' he said.
'welcome to australia, motherfucker,' i said. 'sayin your fuckin name wrong is a national fuckin hobby here'. i didn't really. sheesh! the very idea!

goce wandered off. emil leaned in close and his voice got low. uh-oh, i thought.
'what a fuckin idiot. his dick is bigger than his head,' said emil. wow, i thought. goce had a pretty big head, though admittedly most of it was hair.
'i mean his head is bigger than his dick. what a fuckin idiot.'

we were standing in an equipment room in the royal melbourne hospital. i was there because i work weekends as a delivery driver for a medical supplies company. it's a menial job, but it has its charms. for instance, you hear some pretty interesting conversations, walking around hospitals a lot. like this one: 'aaaaaaaaaaaa!'
or this: 'aaaa! aaaa! aaaa!'
or this: 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!'

of course, it's not all screaming. (nice comedian-style segue, non?) sometimes there are words, too. for example:

'we're going to slide this tube up your nose. it's going to be very uncomfortable.'
'aaaaaaaaaaa!'
'you're doing really well. try swallowing. it helps the tube go down faster.'
'aaaa! aaaa! aaaa!'
'you're doing great. nearly there!'
'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!'

goce, whose dick is either bigger or smaller than his head, came back. what a fuckin idiot.

and on that note,

muah muah

xxxx