The sky and modernity

Days ago I got home early from work. There was still daylight so I took my new daughter Mei out to introduce her to the infinite sky. It's easy to do at her age, on account of she's too young to sit up in the pram and so she lies on her back looking up at everything.

Everything, on this particular day, translated into the infinite sky, cloudless, that dense radiant blue.

We walked north on streets. There were hills with houses on them. Whenever there was a chance to go higher I took it, and we ended up on curves traced high through that blue: long arching curves like the path of a flat stone thrown across a river, arcs in that ocean.

Mei's eyes, coincidentally, are the colour of an ocean in winter and she was taking everything in through them.

The sun was doing that thing it does where it explodes for billions of years and makes everything. It was hot on me but the air wasn't. We walked up a longlong alley, one of those alleys the nightmen used to travel. It went on and on. It was dry and bare and fig trees hung over fences like toughs leaning out car windows. They were green. Seemed fair enough to me.

I found a spring garlic just sitting there all by itself in the middle of the alley like a talisman against demons from the old country so I put it in the pram: you never know when you might need garlic.

We turned eventually back onto the street and headed downhill toward the creek. We passed a gap in the houses, a long mown swathe dozens of kilometers long. It had electricity pylons in it. We were in the highest part of those hills. Once upon a time that would have been reserved for a church but all this happened back in 2014 and electricity was the holiest thing to us back then and so instead we had those giant spires devoted to it and to passing it along. They watched over us while we walked to the creek and down the path that runs along it.

Mei wanted to sleep and so she did. The thing I appreciate about babies is they don't give a shit about modernity. They don't care the enclosure movement created a vast population of landless peasants with nothing to sell but their labour, that those labourers congregated in cities and were mechanised by the factory, what that did to time and space and how we understand ourselves. They don't care that at 9am you might have to be somewhere without vomit on your clothes, they just wake up and want milk and holding, because they're mammals.

There's a whole literature dedicated to getting babies to fit in to the same rhythms of eating and sleeping we moderns have been disciplined into, but I reckon fuck that. Babies let you see the world outside modernity and we should thank them for it. They invite you into deep time, and also into the rhythms the body found before all this foolishness with clocks, the rhythms of love and wanting and hunger and holding. Plenty of folks can give you a critique of modernity, but babies teach you how to just blithely ignore it like it isn't even there. It's good practise. One day it won't be there any more. And the babies, unperturbed, will still gaze up at the infinite sky and drink it all in like they always have. X

Lik

14 loosely-connected thoughts on how that KONY2012 strawman is full of shit

1. So a few times this last week I noticed one person or another casting aspersions on online campaigning with some smug variation or another of a line like 'Hey, online campaigning slash clicktivism is cool. We got Kony, right? KONY2012!'.

2. Maybe it's been going on longer than that but a) I am not that perceptive and b) I keep getting distracted by the majesty of the fucking sky. Seriously, that thing is amazing. I just stare at it like a fool.

3. If you don't know what KONY2012 was, it was an online campaign based on lies. The lies got found out and so it failed. What I am calling the KONY2012 strawman is the notion that because that campaign failed, online campaigns are necessarily a waste of time.

4. No-one actually puts it as bluntly as that, because if they did you might realise they are full of shit, but I will and you should and they are. Because here's the thing: the magic ingredient that causes a campaign based on lies to fail when the lies are found out is that it is based on lies and those lies are found out. It being online or offline makes not the tiniest fucking whit of difference to that.

5. I have noticed that some of the people making that argument - such as it is, since it's not spelled out - are people skeptical of the ability of anyone to do anything useful about anything. Some of those people, like Helen Razer, make a living by eloquently expressing that skepticism in print. Others are seduced by the combination of said eloquence and their own paranoia into repeating the argument. It's still a bad argument.

6. By paranoia I mean - and I'll go into detail about this another time - if you're alive now in a rich country you simultaneously suspect a) you're not doing all you could to help keep alive the thing-of-all-things that gave and gives you life, and b) that maybe there's nothing you can do OMIGODWE'REALLDOOMED.

7. re a), you're probably right. My humble suggestion is that repeating bullshit is not the way to deal with that. My humble suggestion is that instead you walk outside and gaze up into the infinite sky and ask the thing-of-all-things if it could use a fucking hand not bleeding to death and if so what it suggests and then see what it says and then go and do it. That will bring you as much peace as you can reasonably expect from this life.

8. re b) this is an old argument. It's half right. Our salvation lies in the other half. The half that's right is that there are forces larger than us and we don't have perfect freedom - all our choices are constrained by history &c &c - and many of those forces are dire.

9. The other half is fuck you, don't try and wriggle your rich-country way out of doing what you can with what freedom you have. It's 2014. You have so much power. DON'T FUCKING WASTE IT.

10. The thing-of-all-things is saying this through me. I asked it to speak through me and now I just say whatever shit comes out of my mouth. It's also saying it loves you very much: I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. BUT SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP AND QUIT WASTING TIME.

11. I have been blessed this last 12 months to get to hang out with campaigners who don't care whether you're skeptical and who are getting on with doing what they can to save what ecological and social furniture they can as the flood of late capitalism sweeps lo! across this earth. All of these people use online campaigns as part of what they do.

12. Since those people are overworked and operating on the scent of a coaly rag, partly because you have not yet had that conversation with the thing-of-all-things have you and so they are doing it without you, trust me when I say they would not bother a second with online campaigning if it wasn't useful. Seriously. Think it through for more than a few seconds: why would they waste those precious minutes otherwise?

13. Sure there's all kinds of useful questions to ask about efficacy, especially around turning online actions into offline ones. But when it comes to thinking about those questions I trust the people who are actually using online tools to try and do something useful more than I trust the people who make a living out of putting hopelessness into fancy words.

14. Whatever your other views on online life, it's clearly a big chunk of how we are social, now, or you wouldn't be reading this. It's not a magic space somewhere else. So the fancy hopelessness people should quit trying to pretend we should cordon it off from how we work to keep the thing-of-all-things from bleeding to death. Because a) if we did that they'd just criticise us for that, because their schtick is critique, not efficacy; and b) their KONY2012 strawman is full of shit. X

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

Fuck yeah language

I did this thing today where I gave away the chance to have an interesting day. I swapped it for money. This was 2014, it was a thing back then. We called it 'work'. I had three jobs of work. Today I was a four billion year old technician in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a giant cavern on the side of an ancient river. The wind blows past it and it sings, it can't help it. It's like a giant termite mound just there, all shot through with tunnels and secrets.

I was walking around at work, four billion years old and then I got bored and decided to be a system of rivers and oceans, walking around the convention centre. As luck would have it I had an ocean inside me. Some time before LIFE had done this thing where it wrapped bits of ocean in membranes and sent them off onto land to see what was what. I was one of those. My veins were rivers, rushing around. My bones marine fossils or somesuch.

This was back in 2014 and we had this thing called language

o man
It was so fine
you could do almost anything with it
ah it's hard to explain and maybe you had to be there but man
it was really something

FUCK Y
            E
                 A
                         H L A N G U A G E
it was so good

I was drunk on it, which had its dangers. One time I got too drunk and I vomited a whole bunch of it up, letters and syllables blergh! all over the floor like
aft me i a the whe is is is an t y u i o p

Outside there was some giant explosion going on. I could see it through the window. It hung in the sky and made things warm. You could see by the light of it. It felt dangerous and daring, navigating by the light of an explosion. I liked it. X

Electricity

1. I GOT UP and opened the door. The world outside seemed real, so I stepped into it. The resolution was amazing, the framerate too. I took a few steps - the ground held. 

2. THERE WAS ELECTRICITY inside the house, which pulled on me like gravity. Why leave the house, when all the stories in the world are available to you through the magic of electricity? I left anyway. Gravity is addictive but so is escape velocity.

3. THE SKY WAS radiant grey with a jagged white smirk, probably because from the looks of things it had pissed all over everything while I was asleep. Pretty childish really, but what can you say to the sky? Anyway, sky-piss cleans the dust off everything and if you drink it it cleanses you too. Some places it was traditional that the local visionary would eat something hallucinogenic and everyone else would drink their piss and partake of their visions, and the sky is the ultimate visionary, no? She sees everything. So it follows that drinking that stuff lets you in on what the sky sees.

4. I WALKED TO the creek and then ran up the path beside it. Everything was wet there too, everything drunk on sky-piss. The trees swayed gently side-to-side like Woodstock hippies. The grass lay on the ground in a wet stupor. We let each other be.

5. THERE WERE TALL electricity pylons running up the creek like me. They looked like wire-frame drawings of church spires, which made sense: this all happened in 2014 when electricity was some kind of religion. Because why leave the house? Why not stay home and commune with electricity &c &c.

6. THE CLOCK HAD fallen off one of these spires and turned into a football field. I could tell it was a clock because when I ran past it the other day there was a runner turning slow regular circles around it like a second-hand. The hours and minutes had turned into seven humans and seven dogs. The humans chatted and swayed affably like trees drunk on sky-piss. The dogs ran happily around like quantum weirdness. Today time had apparently stopped-

7.

8. -BECAUSE THE FIELD was just ecstatic grass, staring wetly up at the sky. Anyway it was fine with me if time stopped a bit, because this was 2014. In 2014 we'd invented this demon called climate change, and it was freaking me out. It was like a fist around the throat of my unborn daughter. I wanted to unclench that fist even a little but I had to talk other people into it too. This was a problem because I'd woken up in a death-cult: everyone had agreed secretly that we were going to kill ourselves and now no-one wanted to talk about it. They just kept smiling like amusement park clowns. It was creeping me out.

(I kept running.)

9. AND SINCE IT was all a trajectory, a certain movement through time, time stopping suited me just fine. It gave me a moment to think. I had this inkling there were gaps in how the death cult operated, a thermal exhaust port on the death star a skywalker could fly down, and that language had something to do with it. I thought if you could just find the right words they'd be like a bomb thrown down to the heart of the death star and the whole thing could be blown open.

10. THE HOLY SKY got cheeky and started pissing on me. I took it like a benediction, wet drops blatting on my red rainjacket. The trick was to cast a spell, that's what it was. There were demons all through us, they'd colonised us, turned us against ourselves. The trick was to shake the demons up but it was delicate. We had the guilt of an occupied people. If you said things wrong people thought you were attacking them, trying to make them feel bad, and they hardened against you and defended their right to die and the spell was wasted.

11. I TURNED FOR home, back where the electricity was, where I am now, typing. Electricity is good but it's good to remember your family name, and that's easier outside. Your family name is LIFE and so is mine. Our family is four billion years old. It made us. Thanks LIFE! You're the best. I am too small to find the spell but you are not. I am your sometimes-humble servant, drunk on the glowing world. Speak through me. X

The sky

The sky, netted inefficiently by clouds, clouds set to catch the sun's largesse but leaking it all over the place, the sky striped white here and there with leaking light, radiant like a dying CRT, blotched white and grey like diseased snow: the sky.

made with obsessiveness stolen from songs

when one cuts into any part of the human body, the same thing always comes out - blood.
- arnold schoenberg, the relationship to the text

prescience, felicity, urbanity, hauteur, surfeit, magniloquence, enravishment, execration, abnegation, riot, debauch, hope, joy, grief, effluent life, and a lot more.
- harry partch, genesis of a music

1. i don't
I DON'T WRITE much at the moment because i only have so much obsessiveness and i need it for music right now. i wake up thinking about something and whatever that thing is gets the most care. for a while it was these stories. i woke up and thought about how to say something better or how to say it at all.

i liked it but it sucked the obsessiveness out of my music and my music needs it at the moment. writing is easier than music: you don't need any special equipment: just the stuff we all pour out of our mouths and around our bodies all day. of course, this makes everything more naked but that's good.

all i'm saying is right now i want to wake up with sounds in my head instead of sentences. maybe deep down, if there is such a place, sounds and sentences aren't different and i'm just being silly. but i'm a little bit groggy when i wake up and it seems to me it's one or the other at the moment. i'm writing this now because i said these little stories are some kind of love letter to you all and they are and i don't want you to feel like my love is diminished because it isn't.


2. anyway, i just wanted to say:
I WALKED. THE world unfolded around me and enfolded me. i looked like a thing but i was just a fold in the stuff of the world, like origami. the earth seemed to turn beneath my feet to accommodate me. thanks world! you're the best!

tree stumps loo(something else had looked at me earlier. it was a dandelion orb, a halation of seeds. halation is a fancy word i learned the other day which means 'the spreading of light beyond its proper boundary in a photographic image'.)ked at me. my breath had settled in my body, down the bottom somewhere. all the bad breath was down there. i needed to stir it up so the bad bit could come out of my mouth and quit poisoning me.

i climbed a hill. something was green. there were deciduous trees filling with fresh green too young to be holy. deciduous trees go through a year-long menstruation of leaves, collecting them like blood and then letting them go: whoosh.

the poison breath had settled in my body because before walking i'd been staring at a screen for a few days, trying to write something about noise. it's hard. noise is what you get when you ask a representational system, like for instance a guitar amplifier, to do too many things at once. noise is what representation systems do with excess. it's how they represent what they can't represent.

i'd been staring at a screen and staring at a screen is a kind of sensory deprivation, like being in a flotation tank. when you come out the world seems so real.

anyway: i walked. there was some kind of light in the sky shining on everything. trees got in the way of the light and made dark patches on the ground. there were wires above my head carrying electricity from one place to another because this all happened at a time when we used electricity to make something we called privacy. privacy was a kind of drug we were experimenting with. it meant you could do things like cook and learn and laugh at stories even if no-one else was nearby, but you needed electricity to be able to do it.


3. what i was trying to say before about noise relates to writing, somehow. for me, writing is something that demands itself when i'm trying to represent too many things at once. so this writing is noise, a kind of by-product of excess, the noise the world makes when i try to swallow it whole, the noise i make because i want to take the whole world into me at once instead of dividing it up and eating it one piece at a time. i'm like this because the world is like this: the world eats itself all day every day. of course, the world is bigger than me and can get away with it but it doesn't stop me trying. i want to make myself in the world's image because the world knows everything and i only know a few things. re which, i'll tell you four:


4. tenets
IF YOU GREW up bookish and awkward like me these might help you. they're keys to locks that can form around your neck.

1. if you can't accept a feeling you can make up something called 'the self who feels this' and accept that, whatever the feeling is. try it. it's a kind of sneaky back-door path to acceptance when the feelings seem impossible.

2. have a fun life whatever the ladies do, if you're a heterosexual male. ladies are other people and other people do all kinds of things. don't rely on them doing what you want. make sure you have a fun life even if they don't do what you want them to, like adore you, or say the things you want to hear. it's a pity not getting what you want but no reason not to have fun.

3. have a sense of humour. it'll help. if you don't have one make one up. if you can't make one up then just smile to yourself and think how nice it would be to have a sense of humour: yeah, that'd be sweet. you know you can't have a sense of humour but at least you can enjoy the idea of one. try that.

4. find something in the present moment to enjoy. it doesn't matter what it is. the thing that matters is that you don't have to wait for things to be different to feel pleasure. i've tried this lots of times and there always turns out to be something available to enjoy.

5. i was drunk on the world
I WAS DRUNK on the world. it kept looking at me and holding me up so i could walk on it. i was a fold in the world. i said that already. it was knotted into my heart. my heart was a knot in the world and dragged the world with it. everything was still because everything is always still. everything seemed so real. i wore the sky like a crown.

love to all
xxx

i stepped out into the sky

I STEPPED OUT into the sky, the sky radiant with fog, fog radiant with citylights and fairylights and headlights, passing cars like slow and hungry deep-sea fish, fish hunting in the ocean of the night.

love to all,
xxxx
mike

a reunion

she goes with me to a blossom world
- the beach boys, 'good vibrations'

SOME DAYS AGO i found a message on my phone from the police.

'we've found your car,' they said. 'call us,' they said and so i did.

they told me where she was. it sounded like a half-hour bike ride away. i had a shower. i wanted to smell nice. i looked up the address and realised it was only a few blocks away, on a little side street i have no good reason to ride down usually.

i hopped on my bike and rode along in the evening air. my feelings were mixed: since my car left me i'd spent a lot of time with my bike. i'd gotten to know my bike a lot better and we'd had some good times. we'd gotten pretty close and i may even have told my bike i loved her. now my ex-form-of-transport had gotten back in touch and so all these old feelings were being stirred up.

would i feel the same? could i keep things going with my bike? would i get seduced by the comfort of the familiar? why had i had a shower? what was that all about?

reader: one thing was for sure and that was that i'd find out soon enough because it wasn't far away. my bike nestled loyally between my thighs. i felt a little bit guilty. i'd promised my bike a new coat of paint and some oil and now here i was going to see my car. the sky was darkly orange around the edges with the just-set sun.

i found the street and my car was there, beneath a tree. she'd gone native, as colonists used to say, and was becoming tree, was thickly spread with leaves and blossoms. the earth was gradually reclaiming her, invoking the car cycle which is like the water cycle but involves cars instead of water: metal is mined and smelted and turned into cars which are driven around and then abandoned and return to the earth slowly as new ores and are maybe one day mined again and turned back into cars. ah, she looked so different and yet underneath it all i could see the old car i used to know.

i opened the boot and put my bike inside.

i walked over to the driver's side door and opened it and climbed in myself. she cradled me in velour. i tried to start her but it didn't quite work. there was a spark of something there, but it wasn't quite enough. i tried again and then again but each time she responded more weakly.

i guessed she needed something more from me. she was out of petrol, after all. the thieves had taken her and drained her and left her here and now here i was trying to start things up again as though nothing had happened: fool! i would have to do something.

the thieves had been thoughtful enough to abandon her just round the corner from a 24-hour petrol station. there was a jerry-can in the back and i grabbed it. i walked to the petrol station, which took maybe 25 seconds. i couldn't help thinking that abandoning an out-of-fuel car with a jerry-can in the back just 25 seconds from a 24-hour petrol station showed a DISTINCT LACK OF INITIATIVE on the part of the thieves. nonetheless: they'd made it easy for me: nice of them.

people kept looking at me funny. was this because i was unshaven and wearing a t-shirt with a snake crawling through a skull's eyesockets? i guess we'll never know. i got petrol and walked back and poured it in the tank and climbed in again and tried to start my car again. it didn't work. i tried and tried and then gave up and decided to try a roll start. i was on a faint incline.

i pushed and pushed and pushed and got a little momentum and then jumped in and tried to start and wrrrrrrrrrr the car shuddered to a stop.

i pushed and pushed again and got a little momentum again and then jumped in again and wrrrrrrrrrrrrrr exactly the same thing happened.

i was worried now because i was near the bottom of the hill. would i hafta abandon my car again? now that we'd been through so much?

i pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and jumped in but we were going too slowly for it to work. fuck it: i tried anyway and she shuddered and shuddered and spat and hacked and sucked in air and came to life again and i drove her home. we haven't talked too much since then. there'll be time for that later. she's resting in the driveway now.

xxxx
mike

butter-knife love

it's a funny car to steal, that's all i can say. the registration expired last month, there was hardly any petrol in it and it's hard to put in gear. the resale value is close to negative: it costs more to repair a 25-year-old european car than anyone wants to spend. the thieves, i guess, are not too bright. on the other hand, you can start it with a butter-knife so i guess it was easy to steal if not necessarily a great investment.

in any case: it's definitely not there. i can see right across to the other side of the street now. the car i owned for a while no longer blocks the view. the thieves left the persimmon tree though and this is nice of them cos while i've been distracted leaves have been crawling quietly out of it and into the sky. they are a delicious colour somewhere between yellow and green and the blue of the sky sets them off to fine effect. good old persimmon tree! you won't abandon me, surely! no, the car is definitely not there.

anyway: fuck the car: have i told you lately that i love you, dear reader? thinking on it, i guess i have: these little stories are love-letters to whomever is willing to read them: my love made legible and poured out into the world.

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

there seemed to be only one of me and

i got up. it was cold. i was vibrating with the cold.

i walked to the post office. it was still cold. the sky was clear. it was blue, because there were no clouds overhead. the only clouds in the sky were contrails from my jet mouth.

in the post office a man with a hook for a hand served a man with only one arm. i know the one-armed man. his name is joe. he runs the organic shop down the road. he has a sign on the wall:

DON'T BLAME JOE
HE SAYS WHAT HE DOES
BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU

'you don't want to lick the stamps,' joe was saying. 'they're full of toxins'. joe's eyes shine with the radiant loving light of someone who either (a) eats a lot of organic food or (b) is crazy.

outside the shadows were clean. they had clear, calm edges because there were no clouds between me and the sun. i walked on some of them. i walked on the shadows of some poles and some wires. the grass stood up straight.

i saw a tree. it had no leaves but it still had a lot of seed-pods dangling from the branches. i felt kind of embarrassed. it looked like the tree had let itself go some(naked)how and i felt bad for it. still: i couldn't look away.

i had contracted to a single point because it was cold. it was interesting. it made my identity easier to manage. there seemed to be only one of me and my body seemed to occupy a well-defined area, quite small.


xxxx

flying v

in the evening i looked up and saw a tiny flock: five pelicans in formation: a lower-case v like a wake in the sky: the sky reflected everywhere.

xxx

atop and about mt issues

i say keep writing them but if they start getting like lonely planet descriptions of alphington then stop.
- jason flaherty

near where i live there's a park. park is too short a word for it, really. it's glorious. really what happens is there's a fissure in the city. the city goes along and then it stops and there's a river and almost wildness and then the city starts again.

there are two installations there. one's deliberate and i don't think the other one is. i'll treat them in order.


1. the deliberate installation.
WELL, MAYBE IT'S not actually an installation. really it's more like public art. what someone's done is make up a path through the park with little spots to stop and do things. it's called a spiritual healing path. it's great. you walk along and then you stop and there's a little metal plaque that tells you how to think about the place where you are and what you might want to do there.

for instance, there's a lovely little spot where you can sit by the stream. the plaque says 'let go of everything you can't control'. nice.

anyway, in the park there's a tiny mountain. you might think it's a hill but it's shaped like a mountain, just small. on top of the mountain is a plaque that says 'READY TO GO!  you're on top of the world and on top of your issues.'

so in my house we call this mountain mount issues.

i climbed mt issues the other day. it didn't take long because it's so small but even so: you can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miiiiiiiiiiles, as the who say. then i walked around a little more.


2. early and bright
THIS MORNING I rode my bike there.  it was cold.  i'd been in the house too much lo these last few days.  it was good to be out in the colours of things again: the crisp colours of a cold morning.  each thing looked rained-on and clean and potentially bright.  they weren't bright yet, these things, because the sun was still low but they looked like they could be bright when the sun got a little higher and that was the main thing.


3. the unintentional installation
NEAR MOUNT ISSUES is a large pond. the water is green and streaked with tiny bubbles that won't burst.

in the middle of the pond is a pile of stones. on top of the pile is a little tower: a cage on legs, full of what look like spare parts for cars with engines made of metal flowers.

one of the legs of the tower has a pipe bolted to it. water flows up the pipe. it's filtered through the metal engine flowers and then it rains gently out the bottom and onto the stones.

the pile of stones is graduated: the top is dark dark brown, where all the water lands. further down it's lighter brown and then near the pond's surface it's grey.

i stared at it for a little while.


4. elegant
NEAR THAT WAS another pond.  ducks were floating on the sky's reflection.  they left wakes behind them, v-shaped like flying flocks.  maybe these wakes describe imaginary friends, the flocks who aren't here but who people our minds and hearts, migrating along with us, migrating through time: from the country of the past where we were born to the country of the future where we have to live from now on and where we don't quite speak the language.

i rode around.  my wheels wrote dark cursive on the pale paper of frosty grass.

the sun was coming up but still low.  my shadow was elegant and long on the ground.

xxxx

scientists

i am a scientist
- guided by voices

john is a scientist and exotic dancer. he has the compasses. he looks like this: all dark eyes and long hair and stubble. he is wearing leather pants.

he has the compasses. i said that already. the captain has given him the black spot. this means he can be voted off the ship. what?

greetings, salutations.

i'm watching pirate master with alaska. alaska is my daughter. you knew that already. pirate master is a reality tv show on a pirate ship.

there are two kinds of reality tv shows. there's the ones where the situation is artificial but the action must be real cos it's kind of dull. big brother is like this and so is the biggest loser.

the second kind is where the situation is artificial and the action seems that way too. everything looks like it's too deliberately lit, like we're watching the bold and the beautiful or something. survivor is like this and so is pirate master. the boat in pirate master, for example, seems not to rock. i don't know much about ocean-going boats but i'm pretty sure they rock. hey! ocean-going boats! you guys rock!

john has the compasses. he's making a speech.

'i have the compasses,' he says. 'you wil be lost without me. how will you find your way?'

reader: it's a good question. the shipmates look at the captain. the captain's jaw is set.

'at night the north star points north,' says the captain. he is eloquent in his simplicity. 'by day we can put a stick in the ground and draw a line from somewhere to somewhere else. this will give us east. then we can draw another line blah blah blah. if we draw another line halfway between the two lines then we will have north.' i may have lost concentration somewhere during this speech.

the crewmates look back at john. john is a scientist and exotic dancer. i said that already. it's a good combination. mind and body. i only know one scientist. his name is nick kallincos. actually he's a lapsed scientist. now i can't help wondering if he is also an exotic dancer. the first time i wrote his name, i accidently called him kick kallincos. nick, if you are an exotic dancer, you could do worse, you know, if you don't, you know, have your exotic dancer name sorted already.

jon looks back at the captain. it's night. the sky is cloudy.

'which way is north?' asks jon.

the captain looks up and so does the camera. it's night. the sky is cloudy. i said that already. the captain looks back at jon.

'well, i can't tell. maybe we're a little further south than we thought. but when the sun comes up we'll be fine.'

i look over at alaska. alaska must be in heaven: reality tv and pirates, together.

'do you, like, totally love this show already?' i ask her.

she looks at the tv. she is weighing her words carefully. she looks at me.

'it's pretty good,' she says. her little brow is furrowed. she is obviously impressed.

on which note:
love to all
xxxx

vows: poverty, chastity and irony

cunnilingus and psychiatry have brought us to this
- tony soprano

electric word, 'life' - it means forever
- prince

1. irony
OK, SO WE'VE been doing ironic distance for a while now. how's it working out for y'all? me, i'm bored with it. i'd like to propose an ironic engagement to replace ironic distance.

engagement? well, doing stuff intensely and wholeheartedly even though everything is ironic.

ironic? you know: what you believe is kind of arbitrary - it comes down to accidents of birth and history and it could have been otherwise. i like democracy, for example. if i'd been born long enough ago there'd be no democracy for me to like. i might have liked equity or fairness, and argued for those things in my little life, but there'd be no democracy.

richard rorty calls this irony: realising that your beliefs don't transcend history but instead come from history.. but he argues that they're no less important for being historical accidents, because everything is a historical accident.

anyway. i have an ironic relationship with astrology. or maybe a pragmatic one. that is: i can easily see how astrology could be meaningless. however, i happen to fit embarrassingly well the profile for someone born when i was: smack bang in the middle of pisces. and advice for pisceans often turns out to be pretty fucking appropriate for me.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!


2. horoscopes
EXCUSE ME. JUST hadta let off a lil steam. where was i?

anyway: i read my horoscope. i take the advice seriously, even though i know it was probably written by some witless mooncalf. i don't care. i like my little paragraph of advice.

the other day it said something like 'don't wait too long to organise some quiet time today!'
'ok!' i said. 'if it seems like i need some quiet time, which quite frankly i don't! but thanks for thinking of me, automated horoscope robot!'

may as well be polite to the robots, that's my feeling on the matter. one day they may rule the world.

anyway, later in the day i was exhausted and sitting on a step at uni holding a cup of coffee and feeling overwhelmed and a lil melancholy.
'fuck this!' i thought and then i thought 'hey! better follow the robot's advice! one day they may rule the world, after all!'

also, in movies you should always follow the advice of horoscopes and crazy people and gypsies and tarot cards which are always death. movies are highly superstitious. i got up to follow the advice, and wandered along to the university spiritual centre. spiritual centre?

spiritual centres have replaced chapels in public spaces, the way 7/11s have replaced mum-and-dad delicatessens. that is, they're pretty much exactly the same thing but with less personality cos they try to cater for a wider audience. in the hospitals i wander through on weekends they have them too: all non-denominational stained glass and things made of wood and chairs arranged to face an emptiness that once stood for god.

at RMIT, the university i go to, there's a hall with wooden floors and a pump organ. i went and played it one day for fun. mmm.

if you walk upstairs like i did, there's a little balcony with a little buddhist altar. i sat there for a while. it made me happy. i looked at the altar. it was festooned with paper daisies and burnt matchsticks and the husks of tealights. i didn't think that was so great. i went to go and talk to the chaplain.

actually i couldn't find a chaplain but i found a baby chaplain. she was kind of cute, actually. i ended up telling her this story:


3. a parable on poverty
ONE TIME I was up near mount warning in south queensland. i was hitchhiking: i stood by the road and waited for cars and when they came i stuck out my thumb and tried to look, y'know, inoffensive. it went like it usually does which is like this: there weren't any cars and then there were cars and then there weren't any cars and then there were cars and then there weren't any cars and then there was a car and it stopped and lo! there was a man inside, looking friendly.

he had a beard. my bearded-driver alarm bells started going off but what to do? no-one else was stopping and he had a nice smile. i got in.

we talked and it turned out he was a jesuit monk.

'pretty nice car you've got for a monk,' i said. if i'd been a detective i would have worn a suit while i said this. my partner would have worn a suit too and would have leafed through the monk's mail while the monk tried to look calm.

'how do you reckon he does it, dave?' i would have said to my partner. 'i mean, i make more than a monk, don't i dave?'

dave would nod without looking at me. he'd be looking at the return addresses on the envelopes instead of at me. i wouldn't be offended though being as how i'd know it was all part of an elaborate game of cat and mouse. so i wouldn't say 'dave! look at me when i'm talking to you!'

instead i'd say 'and how would you describe my car, dave?' i wouldn't look at dave while i said this. i'd look at the monk.

'it's a shitbox,' dave would say, and now he'd look at the monk too.

'a shitbox. so how does frere jacques here afford a nice car like this? maybe the brother can give me a few pointers on how i'm managing my fucking finances.'

but anyway what am i thinking! that would be soooo rude and the nice bearded man was giving me a lift and anyway he had the perfect comeback which was this:
'it's not mine. we take a vow of poverty but we get to use stuff like this if we need to.'

i thought on this for a while. it seemed kind of tricky, the way he could ostensibly own nothing and yet still get to drive around in a fancy car.

something was fishy.


4. chastity
anyway, i told that story to the baby chaplain but i didn't put in the bit about the detectives. i just made that bit up now.

she said 'yeah, the nuns where i study keep telling me i should sign up and be a nun. i say "fine, if i can do chastity the way you guys do poverty."'

'yeah, like: "there's plenty of men around, but i don't own any of them,"' i said.

'"i just get to use them if i need to,"' she said.

'i like the way your mind works!' i said and then i said 'okbye!' and walked outside.

outside there were vines thick as fists knotted into the wall. the sky made all the light indirect so everything seemed to glow from the inside.

love to all
mike
xxxx

tears

this morning deep in thought i walked out the front door and turned left to the 7-11 and there they were, hanging like giants in the ocean of the the sky: seven balloons: silent and still and there against the quiet grey of morning, brightly coloured like the tears of a clown.

they look like tears but they are upside down like a satanic cross.  i guess this means they stand for happiness and not sadness and so i grinned.  i was disarmed.

xxx

hell, centrelink, bozack, bricklayer

my, how time flies when you're a sentient being.

what were we talking about again? i think it was hell. hell! hell! hell!

so much for hell. i'm changing the subject, like so:

1. I LIVE WITH my daughter's mother, georgia, as of about a little while ago when i returned to this fine and wide brown land girt by sea. we're living together and we had a child together 11 years ago but apart from that we're just housemates. we don't shag each other and we have no shared possessions. i understand this is a lil unusual. i understood even better when i tried to explain it to centrelink.

(centrelink, for those of you who aren't australian, is a social security service. i get a parenting pension from them. this is nice and means i can afford to go to university.)

'so..' they said, 'you're living with the mother of your child but you're telling us you're not in a relationship?'

'uh.. yeah' i said.

'nope.' they said. 'we don't buy it.'

we went back and forth for a while. result: they'll give me 6 months leeway. after that if i'm still there it must be because we're in a relationship, far as they're concerned.

driving home, it occurred to me that at some point i might hafta explain the same situation to a lady, and i wondered how it'd go. as luck would have it, i found out that night, riding along on my bike.

'so..' she said, 'you're taking me back to where you live with your kid and her mother.. and that's all cool?'

'uh.. yeah' i said.

'cool.' she said.

if only centrelink was run by the kinds of ladies you meet at parties. how much easier would things be then?

* * *

2. WHEN I GOT back to australia i quit smoking, and thank fucking christ for that. i replaced it with swimming. i swim most days now. it suits my body and personality somehow: my body in that i have long arms and big hands and my personality in that i like to pay attention to technique.

i used to try and do yoga at home, but i'd vague out and start thinking about other stuff. good thing about swimming is if i start to vague out i start to sink.

i've gone to most of the pools around here now. usually i go to the fitzroy pool: it's 50 metres long, outdoors, and heated. i went one morning when it was still dark and swam beneath the brightening sky, the sky filling slowly with birds and light and hot-air balloons like inverted tears, tears falling away from the earth like the earth's own grief, grief falling into space all brightly coloured, hanging in the sky all silent, grief interrupted by gravity.

today that wasn't gonna work so i went to the northcote pool instead. they have a 50 metre outdoor pool but it's not heated. as a matter of fact it was pretty fucking cold. my hands were purple when i wriggled under the lane-dividers to the pool's edge and climbed out.

one thing about swimming is you get to see a lot of penises before and after you swim. it's like a kind of aperitif. today i was drying myself in the change room and so was a man who looked both forlorn and chinese. he had no arse. his penis was nothing unusual but he had the biggest scrotum i believe i have ever seen, hanging mighty and pendulous between his skinny legs. he looked kind of tired, actually. maybe all the nutrients in his body are consumed by his bozack.. like carrying a fetus or a tapeworm, and he gets what's left after his cojones have drunk their fill.. maybe he has to eat for three, like an expectant mother of twins or a host to two homonculi. and maybe, just maybe, maybe his bozack ate his arse, too.

* * *

3. THE OTHER DAY i walked over to the 7-11 on the corner. two men were shouting at each other out the front.

'NO. NO NO NO. I'D DO IT LIKE THIS!' said one of them, pacing on the concrete and waving his arms like peter garrett back in the day.

'BUT-' said the other.

'NAH! NAH! LIKE THIS!' said the first, violently.

i went in and did whatever i had to do. i could hear them from within: such was their force and ardour, gentle reader. i walked out. they were still shouting at each other and waving their arms and staring at the concrete. i felt a sudden surge of affection for them, such as you might drunkenly feel on seeing your pubic hair waving cheerfully out at the world from over the waist of your jeans. i smiled and walked along.

they noticed me smiling and became silent and watched me as i approached. when i got close, the first guy said 'ARE YOU A BRICKLAYER, MATE?'

'nope.' i said, and smiled more and walked off into the rest of my life without them and they started shouting again behind me.

xxxx