a magical journey through my dick

welcome to the magical land of stories, everybody. today we are going on a journey through time and memory. it goes something just a little bit like this:


1.
I GOT ON the train. i sat down. i had a guitar. after a while i looked up. there's a little screen that tells you where the train will stop next. i looked at it. i wanted to know where we were.

it said this:

10145001G 220CC
CLOCK CHIP
32K RAM
SUN 9.39 AM
SPECIAL ADDRESS = 00

i was surprised. i'd thought we were somewhere in the melbourne CBD but apparently we were going to an address in the clock chip. the only address i could think of inside a clock chip is a memory address so i guessed we were going on some kind of journey through memory. this could have been 'problematic', as they teach you to say at uni*: i was meant to be hanging out with my daughter alaska that afternoon. i looked outside. everything was black but we were being circled by bright white lights.

'so this is memory,' i thought.

i looked over to my right. there was a guy looking at me. actually, he looked like he'd recently been looking at me but had just then stopped. his eyes looked like they'd just slid off my face. he had an absinthe-green bottle of sprite on his lap where his dick should be. was he trying to tell me something with the absinthe-green bottle of sprite?

whatever it was, i didn't get it. besides, i had a guitar sitting on my lap. much bigger than the bottle of sprite.

i looked up at the sign again. apparently we were still travelling through memory. i looked out the window. there were languid willows, just like i remembered from my last train journey. there were magical pines. i remembered the magical pines too.

i looked at the guy again. his eyes slid off again. again, again, i won: his dick was still a bottle of sprite and mine was still a guitar.


2.
EARLIER I'D BEEN sitting in a thai cafe. i eat there a lot. while i'd been ordering a little mouse ran across the floor, skittering from side to side like a streaker. the woman who ran the cafe went and put on a rubber glove and then went and caught the mouse by a table and carried it out. i went and sat at the table the mouse had hidden under. it seemed only fitting.

i was reading philip k dick and listening to soft-rock because that's what they listen to in the cafe.

philip k dick was saying something about morality. the music was saying

and i never touched somebody
like the way i touched your body
and i never wanna let your body
go

3.
LATER I WALKED home. i saw gum nuts on the ground like tiny bombs. i guess i was still on a journey through memory because i remembered being about seven and noticing this for the first time, that gum nuts were shaped like cartoon bombs. me and my friend jason code got together in the playground and schemed a plot: we'd bring matches to school the next day and see if we could blow up the school with a couple of these bombs.

it wasn't that we disliked school, especially. i think it was just the opportunity to blow up a building. it seemed too good to miss.

we met the next day. i had the matches. we collected a few gum nuts and sauntered casually to behind the main building and started trying to light the fuses. it didn't work very well but we persisted and in fact we were quite absorbed in the challenge which might explain why we didn't notice the approach of mrs munn. mrs munn was a horrible witch, four thousand years old. she materialised from nowhere and grabbed the matches.

she looked at us with her face which was four thousand years old, from after the fall but before the flood. then she opened her mouth which i guess was also four thousand years old.

'what were you trying to do? burn down the school?' she said, fixing us with her ancient stare. reader: this may have started as a rhetorical question but we both looked pretty guilty when she said this so i guess she divined our true purpose pretty smartish. her mouth set hard and horizontal and she lit one of the matches and grabbed my little hand in a grip like the iron cage of weberian rationality.

'very well: how about if i burnt you, would you like that?' she said, and started drawing the flame closer to my finger.

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry!' i said. jesus! this wasn't in the plan! whose fucking idea was it to burn down the fucking school anyway? not mine, that was becoming very fucking clear.

'oh? you're sorry are you?' she said. she pronounced 'sorry' like it tasted bad in her mouth and drew my little finger even closer.

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!' i said, with as much dignity as i could muster (none, as it happens).

the gum nuts meanwhile sat silently on the ground. i guess they are all grown up now with families of their own.

love to all
xxx


* narelle walker pointed this out to me. hi narelle! i am in yr computer, arrangin yr wordz! LOLZ!!!!111!!!

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

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

grin

and what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
- bob dylan

1. power
I SAW DUCKS with tiny eyes, beer-bottle brown.  the water combed the reeds that sat beside it in simple friendship.

(on the way home i saw an avenue of trees.  the central boughs had been cut out so they wouldn't interfere with the power lines overhead.  they looked like an avenue of open hands passing the power along like life-savers do.)


2. grief
I SAW MODERNIST buildings streaked with grief, the grief of grieving weather.


3. thick
IN THE MORNING the mist was thick with light.  later on the train i saw ghost gums like plaintive hands reaching out of the earth.


4. four
FOUR NIGHTS LATER i stepped out of the caravan.  there was a cheshire moon just above the horizon: a tilted grin shrinking with the days until saturday.

xxx