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

i was later i look! pepper-trees!

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

xxxx

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

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