Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too

Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too and so I was, for a little bit, a river on a bicycle, running through the streets. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. I poured myself downhill into the world.

Then yesterday in the hall I got bored of not being a mountain: "Fuck this not being a mountain shit, I'm gonna be a mountain!"

And so I was a mountain. I liked it. Time was different. Birds flew around me and found little holes in me and laid their eggs and raised their young and shat on me. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. The wind was just so: whoosh. It was pretty cool. You should have been there.

 Then today I was in the mall. This little red-headed kid was just staring upward, face all screwed up, looking amazed. I looked up to see what all the amaze was about and there was the sky: huge as a motherfucker, just there. I was like fuck yeah kid, I know how you feel. Look at it all full of clouds and such. That's where the oceans go when they get hot or when they just need a holiday. Whole oceans just hanging up there, taking in the view. X

13 thoughts on the so-called environment

1. We have this word we use, 'environment'. I think we shouldn't use it, or at least that we should put ironic quotes around it when we do, like I just did.

2. The word divides the world into two parts. All 'environment' means is the bit that isn't you, or us.

3. Once you use the word, you think of yourself and your 'environment' like they're things, as a couple of options amongst all the things there can be. And you regard this 'environment' like you regard other things, as a potential object of interest or not. “John is interested in cakes. Miranda is interested in cars. Ralph is interested in the environment.”

4. Once you've decided there's these two things in the world, us and our 'environment', the only way you could look after this so-called environment is by being a good person, by being altruistic. Rather than just looking after yourself, you will be a good person and look after this thing that is not you.

5. The Deep Ecology movement calls the altruistic ecology, the one that divides the world into us and not-us and then says we should be nice people and look after the not-us bit, 'shallow ecology'. They also regard it as doomed, because most of us can't sustain selflessness for long.

6. They say what we need is not a more altruistic way to be a self, but a more realistic sense of what a self is.

7. Because the self that's created when we believe in words like 'environment' in anything other than an ironic or pragmatic sense is pretty much bullshit. There is no environment, and there is no us. All there is is an ecology, a mesh of stuff interacting, eating each other and shitting each other and fucking each other and giving birth to each other. We're just the bit of it that has the capacity for abstraction, and therefore the capacity for forgetting.

8. We're like almond blossoms forgetting we're part of the tree, or people on TV thinking they'll persist when the screen is turned off. All they are is a pattern, a configuration of the screen's radiance. When the radiance fades, so do they.

9. How to remember? They say logical argument won't work. That to remember what you are, that you're a fold, a twist, a knot in a sticky inescapable web, a knot with the capacity to forget but still just a local tying-together of much longer threads, takes something else, something that operates on your little heart-of-hearts. Because in your little heart-of-hearts you think you're something else. But your little heart-of-hearts is full of shit on this one and so is mine.

10. Woundedness is part of it, I think. To remember your knottedness in a world that forgets is to walk through a world of people who keep self-harming, punching themselves in the face and hacking at their limbs and putting out their eyes. It's an experience full of tenderness.

11. It's also to be part of a vast lineage: the lineage of life and of survival. We are the direct descendents of everyone and everything in history that managed to stay alive. Did you know that millenia ago the dominant form of life on earth shat oxygen? That's why we have so much of it. But they were so good at it that they threatened to wipe themselves out, to drown the world and themselves in their own shit.

12. What happened? They - our ancestors - evolved into something that ate oxygen. We are here because our ancestors learned to eat their own shit.

13. That's funny and disgusting and mysterious, and that might be the third thing. Our embeddedness and knottedness runs deeper than logic or language. We're made of it and it's hard to talk about. But one thing we can say about it is survival is fundamental to this funny mysterious disgusting lineage. Our ancestors are the survivors, the ones who didn't get voted off the island and so, potentially, are we. If we can remember who we are.

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

Amsterdam: shit, bicycles, video art, Deleuze

1. Shit

IT MUST BE so you can examine your shit properly before you flush it, that's what I'm thinking.  Nothing else really makes sense.

Oh hi!  I didn't see you there.  I'm just looking at this weird toilet in an art gallery in Amsterdam.  What are you doing?  Can't you wait til I leave the toilet before you come in?  What the fuck is going on?

The thing that's weird about this toilet, since you're here anyway, is that the bowl is divided into two sections.  The front bit, the bit which is under your urethra if you're sitting down, is deep.  The back bit, directly under your arse, is a broad flat pan.  I have not shat, but if I had my shit would be sitting on a kind of plate, separated from a deep well of my piss.  Which would make sense if I wanted to examine the colour and consistency of each before I consigned them lo! to the watery underworld which lies beneath urban life, the veins which carry waste back to the oceanic heart whence came all.  Otherwise it's a bit of a fucking mystery, that's what I'm thinking.

Me and Hanna are in this gallery looking at some video art.  The art is good, which is a relief: until now our gallery visits here have only turned up pretentious fashion-inspired photography, the kind that was so exciting back in 1985 and now, perhaps, not so much.  We opened the gallery door and walked in and saw about 15 screens, all turned off, and a stereotypical Amsterdam art person sitting at a stereotypical Amsterdam art Mac.  He had product in his hair and horn-rimmed glasses and a shirt with tiny blue checks.

'Are you open?' we said.

'Oh!' he said.  'I'll just turn it on.'  He seemed surprised, like he wasn't really expecting anyone to come and see any video art.  Reader: this is often a safe attitude to have, but perhaps it's a little strange in a gallery attendant, is it not?  Or perhaps he had learnt from experience and decided to save electricity until it was really necessary.  Frugal, the Dutch.

2. Besties
APART FROM PRETENTIOUS photography, Amsterdam is like the best city ever.  Everyone gets around on bicycles, from kids to students to businesspeople to old people.  Perhaps because everyone rides everywhere, bikes don't seem to be status symbols at all, and everyone gets around on these solid granny bikes that look like they were built for service - and, in some cases, might have seen it - in World War II.  There's no fixies.  A million bikes and no fixies; a million people and only nine hipsters, at least as far as I can make out.  Like I said: best city ever.

Since everyone rides, there are dedicated bike lanes everywhere.  Since there are dedicated bike lanes everywhere, no-one needs a helmet.  And since the basic unit of traffic is the bicycle, the traffic is driven by the logic of bicycle riders.  Bicycle riders in many places are defensive and oppositional because they're consigned to the margins of dangerous roads and have to assert themselves to avoid injury and death.  But here they're the majority, so they're relaxed.  Bicycles weave easily around obstacles, so there's no reason to get too upset by anything.  The city is flat, so no-one is precious about their momentum.  Traffic - I know I've said this before, but anyway - gets annoying when traffickers get precious about their momentum, once starting and stopping start to seem like a big deal.  But here you stop if you need to and start when you can and there's no need to get upset.

Reader: Australian traffic sucks balls by comparison.  It's not that it's all that dense or busy or anything, compared to anywhere else.  It's more that we've developed a bullshit attitude from building our cities around cars.  We sit in traffic forever and when something blocks our path we shake our heads and swear and frown and really it's pretty much all bullshit.  We sit at lights for minute after minute and if someone delays us even by seconds we curse them and get vexed.  It's a bullshit attitude, and it makes us unhappy.  And what a city like Amsterdam demonstrates is that traffic really doesn't have to be such a cunty fucking pain in the balls, to coin a phrase.

3. The Nile in Ancient Egypt

IT'S PARTLY TO do with how things are organised here and a lot to do with attitude and character, but a lot of what we think of as national character traits come from geography.  Europeans who settled in America, for example, started at the eastern edge, so for the first century or two whenever anyone got too annoyed with how society was shaping up they could just head West, and eventually they'd find fertile land they could claim as their own and set up a little homestead.  Since most of the continent was fertile they ended up with a nation of small landholders, self-reliant and independent, suspicious of external influence, occasionally insular and selfish.  Australia, by contrast, was arid and relatively barren except on the coastal fringes, a geography which interacted with European farming practices to produce massive sheep and cattle stations, owned by a rich few and worked by itinerants.  Australian workers, at least for a while, ended up ripe for socialism and unionism, suspicious of property owners and used to considering themselves as a working class.

In Ancient Egypt the Nile flooded predictably and reliably and always in the same place, and the Ancient Egyptian attitude to life emphasised eternal cycles where everyone's status was known.  In nearby Mesopotamia the riverbeds were shallower and rivers changed course often, sometimes washing away entire settlements in the process, and Mesopotamian cosmology emphasised uncertainty and doubt and cruel gods you could propitiate but whose response was always unpredictable.

The Netherlands contain a lot of reclaimed land, land which was seabed when settlers first found it, and much of the country is below sea level.  It started out as a country in constant danger of being washed away unless everyone cooperated, so everyone did.  They're used to getting along without being told, and it shows in the traffic.  Amsterdam, also, is a planned city, more or less: a kind of half-hexagonal grid of alternating canals and streets, and it just kind of works.

(London, by contrast, where we were a few days ago, is an ancient mass of villages which have grown into each other.  I liked it a lot.  It reminded me of Delhi and Bangkok, to be honest, but that's probably just cos I'm not very travelled and so the only really big old chaotic cities I know are in Asia.  Also because London was warm and humid while we were there.  It was fun.  I recommend it.)

4. Excuse me while I pontificate

TODAY I WENT with Hanna and looked at more art.  We saw some shit video art and some decent video art.  Shit video art is worse than shit still art because video is a temporal art and you have to watch the whole thing to feel like you've given it a proper chance.  With a painting you can decide you hate it in a second and get on with your life but shit video art makes you wait for the right to move on, wait like you wait at a long boring embarrassing wedding or a long boring embarrassing motivational seminar.  You feel the seconds of your life tick by and turn into minutes and you know you'll never get them back, so the pain of shit video art contains the pain of mortality in a way few other shit art forms can really manage (except of course for shit theatre).  It's like shit music, but at least with shit music your eyes are free to wander where they will.  Shit video art captures the eyes too, turning the audiovisual experience to torture.

This particular shit video art was particularly shit because it was deliberately obscure.  Deliberate obscurity is a sign of insecurity.  People do it when they're scared to express themselves simply, but anyone who knows what they think doesn't mind expressing themselves simply and straightforwardly.  Ok, that's a sweeping statement, and actually I can think of four exceptions to straightforward clarity which aren't deliberate obscurity, which I'll call the poetic, the professional, the political and the philosophical:

a. The poetic exception means poets are allowed to fuck with your head by fucking with language.  It's their job.

b. The professional exception means it's ok sometimes to only want to communicate to someone you share some kind of common knowledge with already.  Doctors talking to other doctors are allowed to use language only other doctors will understand.  This is true of artists too, who sometimes want to say something which will only make sense to people familiar with some facet or other of art history.  Outsiders get annoyed by this but everyone does it, so they shouldn't.  This kind of prior knowledge is a big part of what makes watching sport fun, for instance, and no-one gives sport any shit for it.  Watching any given football game, say, is fun if you know the rules of the game, the recent and longer-term history of the individual players and each team, and so on.  Otherwise it's just abstract.  I get the same pleasure from watching sport as I get from watching modern dance, which is to say: only a tiny bit, because I don't know the relevant history of either.

When we hear people talk about sport we don't demand that they explain themselves in terms anyone can understand; even if we did they'd just tell us to fuck off and learn a bit about the game.  And if sports is allowed to only make sense to people who care enough to know some background, so is art.  But even with this kind of art, someone is trying to communicate something.  Deliberate obscurity, on the other hand, is bullshit, and we don't need it.

c. The political exception means you can speak in codes when it's too dangerous to speak simply.  No-one in Amsterdam gets to use this as an excuse though, because it's too nice here.

d. The philosophical exception means sometimes the words everyone's familiar with lead to thinking about things in the ways everyone's familiar with.  Since it's the job of philosophy to come up with new ways of thinking about things, sometimes philosophers needs to invent new terms.  The best example of this is Deleuze, one of those philosophers no-one really understands but whose language is evocative enough that people want to use it even if they're not sure what it means.  No reason why not, I guess.

5. Speaking of Deleuze:

SPEAKING OF DELEUZE: we caught a ferry across the river to look at some art that was supposed to be Deleuzean.  I didn't understand any of it but it looked like they were at least trying, so I didn't mind.  I looked at the art for a little while and then I had to shit.  The toilet in the gallery, as it happened, was exactly the same as the toilet I was talking about before, so I got to test my theory.

It turns out I was right.  After shitting my shit sat there on display like fois gras on a broad white plate in a fancy restaurant.  I looked at it for a while.  The situation seemed to call for it.  We sat there for a little while, me and the plate of shit, looking at each other.  Unlike shit video art my shit demanded nothing from me, it just sat there silent like a painting.  It was out of my body now so our necessary relationship was over, and I was happy to spend a little while communing with it.  We shared a peaceful moment.  The moment passed into history and then so did my shit.

Love to all,
xx Mike

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

we walked home a different way

as the spirit wanes the form appears
- charles bukowski

I TOOK TIGGER to the park. he skittered on the way and shat drizzlingly on other people's nature strips.

he shat drizzlingly and i'd forgotten to bring anything to clean shit up with and while he was drooling shit out of his arse a car pulled up and i thought it was the owner of the land on which he was drooling shit and i felt bad and skulked off with my skittering dog. if i'd been wearing a coat with a collar i would have turned it up but i wasn't so i didn't.

we got to the park and walked. signs told us to keep dogs away from kangaroos. i was surprised. i've never in my life seen a kangaroo in the suburbs.

we walked home a different way. i didn't want to walk past the house of drooling shit again so we walked to the end of a low path by the creek and then scambered and crampled up a steep bank to a railway bridge. once i slid. i slid and grabbed at fennel. the grass separated from the earth but i did not fall. whew.

we got up higher and walked along the tracks and then across them and there was a fox splayed goldenbrown between the tracks, eyes cataracted pale pale blue by death and staring in two different directions at nothing. a little further along was what was left of a snake after something had eaten half of it. the slope was filigreed with fennel. the lowering sun shone through it and embered the paling day with tiny comets: waving on slow green cords like a multitude of tiny kites.

we walked back the next day and fuck me there was a kangaroo, tall and grey and looking at us carefully. i called tigger over. the kangaroo loped off and we followed as polite as we could. we followed it and it loped and was gone. later we climbed mt issues and looked down and it was back: a magical being come to collapse the bound between city and wildness, between this thing over here and that thing over there. the grass felt hallowed thereafter and the shadows of things had been exchanged for magic shadows and everything seemed slightly unfixed on its axis. i was reminded i didn't know the full extent of what was possible.

i wondered what tigger made of the kangaroo. to me the kangaroo looked like an envoy between the human and canine domains: tailed and furred like dogs, largely bipedal and upright like humans when still.

xxxx

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

three theories of filth and the three filthy bastards who lived by them

no no no no no no NO NO NO!
- queen, bohemian rhapsody

prologue
I WAS SITTING on a train today reading a book about music. i read the word 'parliament' and then looked up and saw the word 'parliament' out the window because it just so happened the train was passing through parliament station. it was kind of a waste, because i don't really appreciate these kinds of coincidences as much as some. my friend gordon trenorden, for example, is a connoisseur of coincidences. he savours them like wines and will diligently assemble them into meanings. he has built up an impressive cellar over the years.

we used to live together there for a little bit. in the evening he would come home and tell me about the day's coincidences: things he'd heard on the radio at work in the morning and then t-shirts he'd seen people wearing in the afternoon and how it all fit together and what he suspected he had to do in consequence. what he mostly suspected was he that he was being toyed with. it kind of made sense. why else, after all, were all these coincidences lining up around him, flinging themselves at his feet?

i wasn't sure. the only thing that was clear to me was we had different amounts of meaning in our lives. i found GT's meaning-threshold a bit rich for my tastes but, y'know, it takes diff'rent strokes to rule the world.. or something..

actually this is all kind of irrelevant to today's story, except that gordon trenorden is one of the three characters in it. i'm your invisible narrator for today so i don't really count.


1. gordon trenorden
SO ANYWAY GORDON trenorden went to germany recently. he sent a story back. here's the start:

ON THE REMOVAL OF FOUL ODOURS
Today marks aroundabouts a week since I have arrived in Germany. I know this to be the case because despite having observed some timezone changes which have resulted in confusion as to which day it is, I brought approximately seven pairs of socks with me, one for each day of the week, and this morning I was faced with using my last pair of socks. It is about this time when one should consider washing one's clothes. I have developed a new thought on the problem of old-clothes-odour and it goes a little like this.

When we smell something, what is happening is that tiny molecules of odour are spreading from the object in question and dissipating through space and ending up in one's nostrils. As it emits, the number of emittable molecules decreases, and so there must come a point when it runs out of smell. So an alternative to clothes washing is to simply wait for one's clothes to run out
of odour.

nice.

what could we call this? a theory of filth, i guess. ah, it takes me back. i was blessed to spend my late teenage years hanging out with bohemians and every so often someone would develop a theory of filth that involved minimal effort on their part.

oooh mike can you tell us about a couple pleaaaaase? we sooo want to hear about the filthy friends of your bohemian adolescence and we ain't doing nothing that important right now, no sir nothing nohow, nothing that can't wait just a wee lil bit while you tell us a story or maybe in fact a couple stories i hear you say and me i say wow: it just so happens that i was fixing to do that very thing!

ZOMFG WE HAVE SOOOOOO MUCH IN COMMON! MAYBE WANNA GO OUT WITH ME? ON, LIKE, KIND OF A DATE? WHERE WE CAN TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH WE HAVE IN COMMON AND THEN MAYBE FIND SOME STARS TO KISS UNDER COS KISSING UNDER STARS IS SOOOOOO ROMANTIC? AND I CAN TELL BY THE WAY YOU'RE LOOKING AT ME JUST NOW THAT YOU THINK I'M BEING ALL TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY IRONIC AND ALL BUT REALLY I'M NOT REALLY I LOVE THE STARS?

ahem.. oops.. i got a lil swept away, then, in all the excitement.. wow.. let's move on:


2. matt the magic dog
I LIVED WITH matt the magic dog too, but he wasn't really a dog. he was a young man. we just called him matt the magic dog even though he wasn't a dog. i had a great bedroom in that house. it was the biggest bedroom i have ever seen, even now. we lived above a discount furniture place in the very centre of adelaide. the house was part of a larger building which had once been a home for wayward boys and kind of still was when i lived there. we were all pretty wayward in our way.

when i moved in i only brought a mattress and my drumkit and a bunch of ties and a few other clothes. for furniture we stole clothes racks from the driveway of a clothes shop across the road. i got my light from there too: i found a big spotlight there and dragged it over to my house and up the stairs. the room shone.

sadly, my parents turned up one day with the rest of my clutter and junk.

'we don't want this shit!' they said. neither did i but i'm not good at throwing things out so there it sat for a long time.

anyway: matt the magic dog: matt the magic dog had two tests he would apply in deciding which socks to wear next.

the first was the drop test. he would collect all his socks together and drop them one by one on the floor. the two socks which retained their shape the least upon impact were the two socks he'd put on.

the second was the flick test. he'd collect all his socks together and flick the sole of each with his fingernail. the two socks which made the least noise were the two he'd put on.

simple and kind of elegant, no?


3. baterz
OK I'VE TALKED about baterz a lil before. baterz was a genius. he was also haemophiliac. when he was about 15 he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. he ended up living til he was in his thirties but when i met him he was eighteen and didn't expect to live more than another couple of years. back then no-one had, really.

i only mention it because it gave him, amongst other things, a cavalier approach to rental property. him and his mates lived in a big old house in west hindmarsh, the semi-industrial adelaide suburb where i grew up. one of the rooms was locked, and they weren't supposed to go in there.

naturally, like bluebeard's bride, they were curious, so they started digging a tunnel. the tunnel started in baterz's bedroom and went straight down into the earth's mantle a ways before turning in the direction of the forbidden room. it went on that way a few metres and then they all got too scared to keep digging. fair enough: a cave-in would be a bad way to die and an unnecessary one for a teenage bohemian which is what we all were, more or less. i kind of said that already, didn't i? the bohemian thing? oops.

next to the hole in his floor baterz had a pile of clothes. when he'd finished wearing something he'd put it atop the pile. when he wanted something fresh to put on, he'd take something from the bottom of the pile. his reasoning was that a pile of filthy clothes generates heat through a kind of composting process which would, given a little time, kill the germs and suchlike that were causing the smell. the clothes at the bottom were in the hottest part and had been undergoing the process for the longest so they were the cleanest by now and they were the ones he put on.

like i said: genius.

love to all
xxxx

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

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

the quote generator; spirulina; venture capital

1. the quote generator
on the way to the miracle of the possum christ i went to an exhibition opening. it was fun! while i was there que and ana said 'see that girl over there? she talks entirely in quotes.'
'wow.' i said. 'i'm gonna go talk to her.'

reader: i confess to bein a lil drunk. also: my pants were a lil loose and kept migrating south. my pubic hair kept waving over the top like a red rag to a bull, bein as how my pubic hair is red and all. i didn't really mind. i was happy to see it again. i felt a surge of familiarity and affection for my red pubic hair, such as you might feel for an old friend who turns up unexpectedly. this isn't really relevant to the action, i'm just setting the scene.

i wandered around for a while til i found her. she was wearing a skeleton costume: a black one-piece with bones painted on it in white.
'hey!' i said. 'i heard you talk entirely in quotes. is it true?'
'sometimes..' she said. '(husbands and wives, 1992)'.

an aside: have you ever noticed how raymond off everybody loves raymond sounds just like oscar the grouch?

back to the conversation: we talked for a while. i hafta say i enjoyed it a great deal. she didn't talk entirely in quotes though, and i told her so: 'you don't talk entirely in quotes!' i was pointing out that she was speaking in quotes AND attributions (you know, the bibliographic part - the bit in brackets) and that the attributions weren't part of the original and were therefore not quotes. she looked pained.
'give me a break!' she said. '(beavis and butthead, 1996).'

wow. i was impressed.
'do you have like multiple sources for this kind of small-talk chit-chat?' i asked.
'yes (yoko ono, 1966)' she said, and then she said 'yes (optus, 2006)'

eventually i asked her her name. i was wondering how she was gonna deal with that one. she said 'http://www.thequotegenerator.com '. now i was thoroughly charmed. i'd never met anyone else who spoke in hypertext before. i decided that if she liked wwf wrestling i'd propose marriage, right then and there. borrow a ring from somewhere. recite the vows with my pubic hair waving gently in the breeze that announced this to be the last night of summer, waving like hungry kelp in the languid waters of the carribbean, reaching out to the air and saying: will you dance with me, you devilish breeze? dance with me instead of snatching away the minutes of summer like the grinch? instead of cooling the ardour of the air with your cool uh.. absence of heat?

unfortunately she'd never given the matter of wwf wrestling much thought. i am still a bachelor, therefore: damn! always a bridgegroom, never a bride. no, wait, that came out wrong. always a best man, never the groom? doesn't exactly slip off the tongue, does it? hmm. i can tell i will hafta ruminate on this further: pass the cud of marital status through all four stomachs of my mind until it makes sense like simple cellulose.


2. spirulina
friday was my birthday. i didn't organise anything in particular, partly cos of the shortness of february of which i have spoken before, and partly cos i had many other things to organise such as the stuff of my life which is snarled into a snarl. also: partly cos i couldn't be bothered wondering if anyone was going to turn up if i did, a form of paranoia to which i am suspect. nonetheless: i had a grand old time.

eventually i ended up at an exhibition opening, different from the pre-possum-christian one. how did that happen? beats me but i was there so it happened somehow.

barcelona is pronounced bartheLAWna. howabout that. that's cos catalan spanish lisps the letter c. i was thinking about this the other day in the context of lisping. it seems to have vanished a bit, but there used to be a pretty strong association between homosexuality and lisping in the popular imagination. and i wondered if this, and the jibes that used to go with it, were actually xenophobic in origin rather than strictly homophobic: 'we hate youse gay cunts not cos you're gay but cos you talk like FUCKING SPANIARDS' - that kind of thing.

fucking spaniards. where was i? penny: that's right. this short woman with red hair walks in. i remember her name is penny. this is funny, cos i only met her briefly about 15 years ago, and then once a few years later. nevertheless i remember her name. weird. why can't i remember the names of people i see more often and actually interact with from time to time? it'd be just a tad more fucking useful, methinks.

penny wants to move to barcelona. why? because they like her there and they treat her good. she feels beautiful there. fair enough, too. i'd probably do the same if i discovered a place like that. melbourne's pretty good though. i got no complaints except sometimes about the weather. people say nice things about me often enough to keep me happy and here. thanks people. you guys are the best!

my attention kept wandering. this was partly a defense mechanism. penny seemed just a bit too impressed that i'd remembered her name lo these many years, and i was getting the sense she was reading something more into it than the mere freak of neurochemical architecture i reckon it was. (i'm using 'impressed' here in the sense that you'd use it of soap impressed with a cell-key as part of a noble but ultimately doomed escape attempt. that is, it seemed to have made an imprint that wasn't gonna fade in a hurry.)

anyway, she's tried to live in barcelona twice before but couldn't work out how to make money there. now she's studying natural therapies.
'barcelona's like ten years behind australia when it comes to natural healing!' she says. 'all these things i take for granted, they've never even heard of. they've never heard of spirulina!'

note to self: hmm..

spirulina, by the way, is a mexican algae that grows in highly alkaline high-altitude ponds. it's a vegetarian source of vitamin b12 and a whole bunch of other stuff your body likes having around. and true, it is algae, but once it's dried and powdered it tastes better than you'd expect. actually, it doesn't. it tastes just like you'd expect dried algae powder to taste. it fucking tastes like shit, that's what i'm getting at here. the aztecs called it tecuitlatl, meaning 'stone's excrement', so i'm not making this shit up.

question: will barcelona be improved by the importation of dried mexican algae that evokes stone-shit in the tongue of the aztecs? i guess there's only one way to find out.. to the venture capital, without a moment to lose!


3. at the venture capital
ok, does everyone know what venture capital is? just in case:

let's say you've got an idea that will make a shitload of money. actually, an arseload of money. the distinction is important, for reasons which will become clear shortly.

however, in order to put this idea into practice, you'll need to spend a bunch of money. not as much money as you're gonna make, but maybe quite a bit. let's call it a shitload of money, on the principle that a shitload must always logically be less than an arseload.

what you do then is you go to the pile of venture capital you have sitting in the vault, because venture capital is the money you hafta spend to be able to make money somehow. when people say 'you hafta spend money to make money', venture capital is the first kind of money.

unfortunately, you may not have a big pile of money in a vault. maybe that's why you're spending your time dreaming up schemes to ship algae to barcelona instead of, y'know, guzzling gin and juice in the benz with voluptuous, scantily clad members of the sex of your choice.

what you do then is you go find a venture capitalist and explain to them how much money you'll both make if they give you a smaller but maybe quite substantial amount of money first.

all these thoughts are weighing on my mind because i'm staring at where my pile of venture capital used to be and i can't see it anywhere. hello? he-lloooooooo? maybe it's hiding somewhere.. wait a sec..

















..no, it's definitely gone. damn! now i hafta go find someone to lend me a shitload of money on the premise that shipping dried shitful mexican algae to barcelona will make us both an arseload of money.

sheesh. you see the kind of shit i hafta put up with? i may hafta ask you to excuse me for a while because a while is how long i reckon it's all gonna take..

sincerely yours,
mike
xxxx