As long as...

As long as you're going nowhere, I'm going nowhere
AND WHERE'S THE FUCKING PHONE CHARGER!
What's the matter, babe?
I'M LOOKING FOR THE FUCKING PHONE - Doesn't matter.  Found it.
And we need teabags.
And it's back
To Fallout 4
To Age of Empires II
To Sudoku
To Facebook
To news updates
And it's hot out and besides.  The streets are filled with hate and ignorance that I won't dignify and all the celebrities are dying this Christmas.
"I'm just gonna play Sam Fisher with Shazzmobe."
Cool, my love.
And she writes the days away.
Forgetting all else.
Lost in her arguments, her narratives, her research.
And as long as she's going nowhere, I'm going nowhere
And it's alright.
Somewhere is an ad.
Somewhere is something someone is selling you.
It doesn't fit well sliding inside your mouth and you can't bite it off in desperation or disgust or even delight once it's in.
Somewhere is beyond the feats of Pyrrhus.
Because there's always a somewhere after it
That they'll try and foist upon you.
Somewhere is for the ones who made it
And now no longer know why they're there.
So they go on making money and buying fine and expensive things to be elsewhere
And if they can't find it, they quietly scrabble and claw and yammer for the somewhere they can't have.
But nowhere's right here.
With her lips.
Her full breasts beneath the black tank top.
Her pale knees.
Her laughter that can wake the dead and make the blind see.
The small, fine hairs on her forearm.
Her flashing green eyes.
WE NEED STUFF FOR TONIGHT'S SALAD.
I'll go up.
NO, I'LL COME WITH.
As if I'm a block or more away.
But I'm not.
I'm nowhere.
Where so many of us live with impossible ease and assuredness before the new year rolls around again.

Watching the wheels...

Simon Crane - 27th July 1965 - 9th December 2015

I wrote this song for him some months back. He liked it and that's all that matters.

"We ruled the roost: the eighty nine flats.
We ruled them fair. We ruled them just
And everyone knew when the party started
We'd all be there. We'd all be there.
And who bought the wine and who bought the beer
And who brought the smiles to everyone's faces
And who brought the talk of the town to dance
When we were kings.
When everything closed at 12 o'clock
The streets were dead. The streets were ours
We sat on the grass on. The hill down the park
We watched them play. We watched them play.
And deep in the night, we'd track down the milkman
He must have been scared. He must have been scared
When
We
Were
Kings.
And after the Dalmane and pale white skin
You saw the world. You went beyond
And took to the road like a bird on the wing
You told me so. You told me so.
And I sat rapt with the globe you weaved
I wanted in. I wanted in.
We took on the world and sometimes won
When we were kings.
What's it all coming to running like we did
Just snot-nosed, smart-arsed brainiac kids
With rage in our eyes. Our hearts on our sleeves.
What's it all come to?
With you in Verona and me in the gutter
You pulled me up. You held me high.
And all of the things that we never said
Adventures we would never share
You lent me a guitar and five free chords
I won't look back. I won't look back.
And swam beneath the beautiful waves
Your beautiful fingers.
And you stopped playing, found it too easy
And I was shit so I pressed on.
Strange rhythms and their melodies
In both our lives.
Locked in a room playing pointless games
Who would be the first to speak.
Spitting off the treacherous headland
When
we
were
kings.
What's it all coming to running like we did
Just snot-nosed, smart-arsed brainiac kids
With rage in our eyes . Our hearts on our sleeves.
What's it all come to?
Stick around.
What's it all coming to running like we did
Just snot-nosed, smart-arsed brainiac kids
With rage in our eyes . Our hearts on our sleeves.
What's it all come to?
Just stick around.
What's it all coming to running like we did
Just snot-nosed, smart-arsed brainiac kids
With rage in our eyes . Our hearts on our sleeves.
What's it all come to?
Stick around.
What's it all come to?
Your long beautiful fingers.
Long beautiful fingers."

Crane

Good.

And the day was filled with confusion and things
That didn't work.
Not the way I'd planned.
Not the way I hoped.
And people, though not memorably mean,
Could only do what they could to help.
And I respect that.
I try occasionally to be just like them.
Miss as often as I hit.
And at one point I felt a throbbing up in my neck on the left hand side
And thought, "Uh oh."
But I didn't die today.
Not in body, leastwise.
And everywhere I turned, there was work to be done with barely the strength, skill or inclination to do it.
But some things got done.
Not the way I'd planned.
Not the way I hoped.
But they got done.
And it rained.
Not enough to complain about
And not enough to rejoice about.
But it rained.
And there was work
And that was that.
But tonight, babe.
Tonight was a lobster tail filled with cherry flavoured custard and there was a half consumed pecan pie from Brunetti.
And some chocolates from Hawaii and from Belgium.
And I type still licking the chocolate and custard from my fingers.
Just the way I'd planned.
Just the way I'd hoped.

Unfinished sweet.

Poem for a friend.

So I gets home...

And immediately ripped off my kit and dived into the clearest of blue water and swam with dolphins and sharks (but they didn't bite me) and fish the colours of the rainbow.

And fought off marauders and pirates and capitalists and communists and people who waggle fingers, thinking they're the moral arbiters of our lives.

And once I got out of the water and dried off, I realised that someone had not only stolen my passport but they'd also stolen my 1962 Ferrari Super-America. So I ran, baby. I ran and tracked those cunts down.

And I caught them in their villa and beat them to within an inch of their lives.

And then I drank their wine, their vodka, their finest Calvados brandy.

And I made love to every woman in that place.  Even the servants.

And then, without looking back, I picked up the car keys and drove home.

Where I settled in to watch a couple of HBO shows, eat some turkey breast on toast and finally drifted off to sleep.

Monday done.

Piss Factory

The working body.

Fall out of bed, Put on the kettle.
Stumble to the shower. Soap, lather, rinse. 

Repeat.

Spray on deodorant. Put on the trousers, put on the after shave.

Put on the shirt.

Make a cup of tea. Head to the computer.

Check out the news. Check out the Facebook.

Never drink more than half the cup of tea.

Look at the time.

Kiss your love goodbye.

Reach for the jacket. Walk out to the car.

Take all the backstreets, pull up in the carpark.

Check your ID. Head in to the office.

Make another cuppa.

Shuffle to the carpark. Drink the cup of tea.

Contemplate the weather.

Head back to the cubicle, go through all the emails.

Reply to what you can. Think about the problems.

Think about the day. Think about the problems.

Open up some screens, see the cup is empty.

Head out to the kitchen and make another cuppa.

Slink off to the toilet. The silence there is massive.

Let the body do what the body has to do.

Wash. Your. Hands.

Grab the cup of tea and go and sit back down.

Look at all these problems.  Head out to the elevator.

Go to the departments giving you these problems.

Maybe it's too early.  Maybe they're not in yet.

Head back to your area.

Check out the news (that you looked at half an hour ago).

Look again at Facebook (that you looked at half an hour ago).

Lean back and stare at the flouro lights.

Thing. Of. Nothing.

Check to see if anyone's come in and logged on Skype.

Nobody. Look at the problems and think about solutions.

Greet some people coming in and genuinely smile.

Though you don't want to smile. Must be a human thing.

And now it's nine o'clock and everybody's rolling in.

Go back to stage one: "Grab the cup of tea."

Repeat.

This is what the body does. Your body.

My body.

This is what the brain in the body does.

Your brain.

My brain.

Repeat.

Ad.

Nauseum.

Be guarded.

These proscriptions are not meant to be carried back into the real world.

Bodies.

Petrol

  I had a service to do.  A Mazda 626.  The newest cars in the Mazda line. The first of the rear wheel drives. The car itself was in for its ten thousand kay service - an easy job by any means.  Plugs, points clean, check the brakes, the auto trans, oil and filter change, ensure there are no squeaks and rattles. The usual.  Save for a fuel leak somewhere which we quickly ascertained to be the fuel tank's central seal.  It would entail a replacement.  For some ungodly reason, our Stores department just happened to have one in stock, so under went the jack, up came the rear end, in went the jack stands, off came the rear tyres and I set to work.

  By loosening the retainer strap bolts a little, I could hear that there was still a substantial amount of fuel in the tank.  Ordinarily, I could undo the main fuel and breather lines and let the contents out with a slow bleed but the customer wanted the car back that same afternoon so I stuck an old bit of hose down the filler pipe, grabbed a clean, empty drum and started sucking.  After a few attempts the vapours started to make me feel light headed, so I sat on one of the tyres by the rear brakes and continued sucking until I could get a solid flow.

  Unfortunately - or fortunately, if interpreted in a certain light - the fuel was a little more resistant to my efforts than I'd expected.

  I watched my hands shimmer and fade in and out. I felt the morning breeze on my prickling skin, more gentle and urgent than the caress of any lover. The sunlight started to make small sounds. I breathed deeply between sucks until finally the fuel started to pour into the small drum. But by then the damage was done...

  I was a teenaged girl. I knew this somehow because of a pain deep in my tummy.  The coming of a period, I felt. Or perhaps hunger. A rural place.  Unidentifiable, as was the tongue I was speaking.  As was the language of those around me. Shabby, practical and ageless clothing.  European probably. Laughter and colour and dirt in every pore from my strong forearms down to my fingertips.  The smell of cut wheat from fields nearby. A large house off in the distance. Save for the hard, skin-shredding labour we were toiling through, I could never have imagined a place to be so surrendered to dreamy languor. My heart pounding, I started to cough as I laughed. A chemical cough. Nondescript faces, old before their time, laughing at me, with me. I turned my head slightly and there was green on a nearby hill. -

  "Mal?  Are you okay?"

  It was Viv. the company's old accountant. A no-nonsense soul but I loved his self-deprecating, wry wit.

  "You okay, mate?"

  "I'm fine.  I think I siphoned the stuff wrong."

  A barely audible laugh. "Just take your time, mate. You look pale.  Breathe deep.  We've all done it."

  "Is he alright?" This from the foreman a couple of bays down - head buried deep in the guts of a rotting Capella, fat arse stuck up over the front guard.

  "He's taken to putting down a tipple prior to lunch", Viv smiled at no one in particular as he walked back down the path to the front office.

  And immediately I was sucked back into the vortex.  One second I'm sitting in a workshop stinking of fuel and rubber and brake dust and engine oil and the next I'm a soldier.  Again all details a blur of terrifying sights, inhuman sounds and terrible smells. It could have been the Kaiser, it could have been Genghis Khan, Alexander of Macedon or Navarre at Dien Bien Phu, for all I knew.  All I could say with any certainty was that I was a soldier. And I was terrified. I could feel a small spurt of urine trickle into my uniform. And there was screaming off in the near distance. I knew this with suprahuman assuredness. A certainty that transcended all history and every known logic. I held no weapon and this  worried me. I scrabbled about for something, anything, and could find nothing.  I wanted to scream. Or die a quick death. Right then, in that moment, either would have helped immensely. Because I had been here forever.

  Something hard struck me and I flew painlessly above myself. Further and further from that blazing field of death. Through the chilling wind and onwards. Looking down even as the clouds swallowed the vista I wanted with every fiber of my being to forget. Rapidly out into the perfect cold of space until even the planet was nothing but a memory of a pin head.

  And somewhere out there, in some uncharted eyrie of the infinite, a pattern began to emerge.

  Triangle upon triangle. Each a living cameo trapped in every colour and hue known to the eye and some colours besides. Every sex and every age.  Every conceivable tongue and every way of life. Some images cut short, as if from an early death and some playing out within its triangular confines for time beyond my attention span. Every backdrop and landscape. Every cruelty and I'm confident now, every kindness.

  Somewhere an engine roared to life bringing me back to this shaking husk sitting on a tyre siphoning petrol in a workshop in Top Ryde.

  But I was  gone again.  I wanted to be gone again.  In that moment I wanted to be gone so badly I could have killed or died.  An abyss of sickness, the likes of which I'd never experienced and likely will never experience again.

  And now I'm a boy.  Again, the completeness of my knowledge because I was fearless and running across sand.  Scared of nothing and therefore so utterly alien to the real life I had just left behind. A storm was not too far off in the high sky and a handful of people in the distance were making celebratory and positive noises about its coming. Everything was astir and I could taste the coming water in my mouth and smell it keenly in my nose. And I was running carefree and faultless towards it. And as the first large drop splatted on my face -

  "What are you doing, goober?"  It was Wocko, the senior apprentice.

  It took me some moments to answer as the boundless pyramid of existence gently placed the me that I had been firmly back in the here and now - pale sweating skin, halting breath and uncontrollable shaking hands.

  "...I'm alright."

  "Need a hand?

  "I'm alright."

  I sat a while longer to make sure that I wasn't suddenly going to be whisked off, sucked up into another lifetime. And as the trembling subsided, I saw that the tank was now empty.  I loosened the remaining bolts but the tank was heavier than it looked.  It slipped in my petrol-soaked hands and it was only after I had put it to one side, that I noticed that a sharp burr had sliced the joint in my thumb to the bone. Still I continued to work, unpacking the new tank and removing the travel seals, unconcerned about this slightly grisly development.

  "What's that on the ground?!", Wocko again.

  " 'N dunno."

 "Is that blood?  Jesus, Connell.  It's pissing out.  What the fuck happened?"

  "The tank slipped?"

  "Greggy, where's the First Aid stuff?  Connell's cut his hand open."

  "Give us a look." The disinterested foreman.  "Well, that's a fine one.  Take him 'round to the Doc's next door.  Looks like stitches. Keep holding your hand up.  That's it."

...

  I'm looking at the small scar from that week of bleeding. Barely discernible now. But it's there yet. And I remember the small piss stain in my overalls that morning.

  I'm not spiritual (although I do think the day is coming when we need to reinvigorate that word with substance rather than the gentrified and empty meme it has become). I'm not an irresponsible advocate for petrol sniffing.  Like everyone else I've done my share of drugs.  Boasted about more substance and alcohol abuse than I've really experienced and in this respect I'm completely normal. But even though I've been straight for much longer than I care to remember, that singular experience was one I never could recreate through any means - chemically enhanced or otherwise.  And nor did I nor would I really try.

  Once in a lifetime...

It's Alright Ma (I'm only bleeding).

That whole acting at work schtick.

You're all working, I take it. Or you've all held down jobs...
Did you ever have to sit through the orientation process?  Maybe a video or a Powerpoint presentation on how to deal with your optimal working self.  Did it include any footage or slides on 'acting' out your roles?  Preparing, like a professional actor for your day behind the counter, the screen, the stall, the used cars, the podium or lectern?

Think, then, on this.

It's crap, isn't it?  It's rubbish.

You pysch yourself for Monday morning.  You do some deep breaths.  Maybe get in a jog or some gym or even weights at home before you head out into the working week traffic.

And you're... Just there again.  No significant role change. Neither good, bad, bit-part, lead, comic, straight or otherwise.  You're just you.  And you look down at your feet at some point and it may occur to you that minutes or hours ago those feet were planted in your kitchen, outside the shower stall, naked in the bedroom,.  Perhaps you do the same with your hands. They were helping you eat not so long ago in a place far more conducive to eating.  They were scrubbing off the night dust.  They were feeling the warmth of your lover.  They were embracing a child.

And now they're working.

It's not much of an act is it?  By this, I don't mean that the performance itself isn't sterling. I'm merely saying that if this is acting, why the fuck do we hold fast to celebritydom?

The fact remains that any actor worth their salt gets a lot of time to prepare for a role.  Often months. Often years, if the paycheque allows. And then, after a run of weeks or months, the role is gone, unless reprised or serialised or syndicated.  And they move on to the next one. Often with a lot of time to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

We don't get to move on.  Not in such a dramatic and exhilerating fashion, leastwise.

At the end of today's performance, we'll wake up again in our own Trumanesque worlds, with our own Trumanesque doubts or blithe ignorance. And we'll repeat and rinse ad nauseum.

We aren't actors.  These aren't acts.  When the slides or video footage rolls, turn your head away.

Breathe deep.  Make the most of it. And live, as we do, in the hope that one day, we too will enjoy time to prepare more thoroughly for the lives we want to lead. Perhaps even get time out to genuinely enjoy the snoozer moments. The sunlight.  The rain.  The vista.  The relaxed gatherings. The coming of Spring.  The middle of Autumn...

And as you close your eyes and turn away, tell the What Colour Is My Parachute crowd to go to hell.

Alright. I've gotta get back to work now.

A song before I leave then,...

The Good Thing.

New tracks up on Reverb Nation.

Hey All,

  I hate to spruik. I really do. But when I'm not writing shit up here or taking pretty pics of nature to throw up on Facebook, I record my songs.  I started playing because I didn't like what I heard on the radio way back when.  I frequently still don't.  Hence I make up my own rubbish instead of just complaining about everyone else's.

  Anyway, over the past few months I've been recording some new tracks; New Man's Eyes, Sheen and as of last night, Crane.

  I hope you get along to the site and give them a spin. I like 'em.  I hope you do too.

Cheers,

mal

Malcolm Ian Connell - Reverb Nation.

 

Dreamscope and me.

And now for something completely yaddayaddayadda...

  I love taking photos and I love the new buzz about Google's Deep Dreams.  The online app Dreamscope (Google it) makes it simple to convert pics into some seriously righteous headfucks.

Here are some of my rather poor efforts so far. Some photos I took myself.  Others are heroes of yore brazenly lifted directly from the 'net.

Alice Cooper. Age: Nuclear.

Dali and friend.

A glasshouse in the winter of its life.

Talking Heads.

A Magpie apres le deluge etc.

Jayne Mansfield and friends.

A spider flower out in the yard.

A truck I saw in central NSW.

Rubbish from the neighbour's front yard.

Zappa on a good hair day.

And of course, the usual eater egg song to round things out.

People take pictures...

Roquefixade.

I'd been ambling my way up through the Pyrenees with the vague intention of running with the bulls at Pamplona. I was well up in the mountains in the early morning light when a young guy in a souped up Peugeot stopped and picked me up on a precariously winding road with sheer drops along one side.  And even though it couldn't have been much after eight in the morning, he was already stoned.  The smell of really fragrant hashish lingered in the car. 

  He asked me where I was bound for in broken English and I told him that I needed to initiate myself into the world of men via getting stupidly drunk and traumatising and torturing animals that I'd never seen and would never care for again.  I was, in effect, playing the tourist. He laughed maniacally as the stoned so often do and went on to explain that he was a DJ at a local radio station.  He made slight overtures about getting me in to play a song or two but we mooted the idea for one reason or another.  Instead we got talking about the music we knew and loved and I mentioned Midnight Oil (this is the mid eighties, remember).  His whole body exploded with frantic animality. He couldn't keep his hands on the steering wheel, which caused me some small anxieties, and he gave up any attempt at speaking English. And since my French was absolutely pitiable as it still is, I couldn't determine whether he wanted to kill us both by going over the cliff or whether I'd triggered some functional form of epilepsy.

  Finally the squealing and the jazz hands and the laughter settled down and he asked me if I had any of their stuff or could I play it at the station.  I wasn't at all sure of my skills back then so I played it safe by producing my worn out cassette of 10 to 1 that I'd taped off vinyl back in England and he grabbed it out of my hands.  From what I could make out, he'd been following the Oils since Koala Sprint and had been giving Power and the Passion a lot of airplay. Alas, to deaf ears in that far flung corner of rural France. He must have cranked the volume to maximum as he pulled a crumpled jay from breast pocket and lit it.  I was the messiah for those terrifying kilometres.  All efforts at conversation ceased and he flung the little car through corner after corner, entranced in the monstrous sound and at one with his personal universe. 

  It was some time after that that I realised he was taking me the wrong way and by the time I hopped out of that quivering vehicle, I realised I was closer to Toulouse than to Andorra.

  In exchange for the cassette, he gave me a block of Afghan that - without word of a lie - could have covered the Venus mount on my palm. And no matter how eloquently I tried to explain that I couldn't take it since the border guards in Spain don't take kindly to this sort of product, especially given that it was only marginally smaller than, say, a Matchbox car, he wouldn't dream of reneging on such an honourable and equitable trade.

  So here I was - drug laden and marginally annoyed on the outskirts of Toulouse. With the July heat well up by now, I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my waist, picked up the backpack and guitar and started walking towards the mountains again.

  And then the adventure began.

  By and by a car stopped to pick me up.  A guy in his late twenties who asked me in near-accentless English where I was heading. I could only mumble something like, "Well, you may not believe this but...". He said he wasn't heading up to the border but he lived in a town not far from Foix and would give me a lift as far as that idyllic little place. From the moment I hopped in, I liked this guy.  He started talking about his time in the States doing pretty much what I was doing.  Just drifting from place to place in search of no great thing in particular. He'd loved living in New York for a year but felt compelled to head out on the byroads to see what else made that country tick.  After three years he wearied of the road and came back to Toulouse where he got a job with Airbus as an electrical engineer.

  He told me that he thought I was tricking, what with the shirtlessness and all and that's why he stopped. But once he heard my accent, he told me he'd met enough Australians to know that we were inclined to do crazy things such as walk through miles of farmland semi-naked just because we can. An amazingly easy human being.  Wise and funny and not without his darkness - he was in an abusive relationship with a dancer at the Toulouse Metro. A real, wonderful, fractured human being like the rest of us. He told stories not unlike my own but with a mature writer's charm for weaving spells with tales of more roads and places not yet explored by me.  And I listened, grateful for the good company, the sunshine, the rolling land but most of all grateful that I hadn't died in a crumpled burning wreck at the bottom of a cliff with Peter Garrett's polemic of Maralinga on an echoing, supranatural loop.

  I spoke of life in Australia, of being a mechanic and of wanting to be a great musician one day.  We spoke excitedly about Dylan's lyrics, Hesse's pastorals and meditations on Buddhism, of the cruel and stupid life in Thatcher's England, of the Cold War and cruise missiles, of protests and rock stars, of geology and astronomy.  I must admit I felt a certain sorrow as we approached Foix but Dominic turned to me and said, "Frank is touring with the dance troupe at the moment so my place at Roquefixade is pretty much empty, if you want a place to hang out for a couple of weeks."

  I jumped at the chance.

 Roquefixade couldn't have more than a couple of hundred people living in it. Basically a few ancient houses nestled at the foot of a mountain set in verdant farmland and foothills. A nothing place with woods and creeks and even wild bears around the way, if that was to be believed. A place devoid of even a local store and an anticlimax to any story.

  But every night, after Dominic came home from work laden with local Pyrenees cheese and the famous Toulouse bread as well as gin and vodka purchased in town, we would walk up the old goat track to the ruined castle overlooking the town.  The castle was almost a thousand years old and for some reason, the way we went took us over a meter-wide precipice that dropped about seventy metres. It was an easy leap when we went up to drink our vodka and gin and smoke that block of hashish.  But coming back - stoned, drunk, in the dark - was an altogether different business. Still, the gods must have been on our side because I'm still here. We'd just rest against the stone walls in the cool night air staring up at the glittering dome above us and laughing as if we were the oldest of friends. Singing bad harmonies on sixties pop songs.  Discussing the merits of Syd Barrett vs Pink Floyd. Working through what the whole Punk and Mod resurgence scenes were all about. Heated but friendly back and forths as to whether there was a god or life after death. Life. The Universe. And our place or lack of a place in it.

  Throughout the days, I'd go off walking through the woods and saying hello to the few people I met. No one thought it odd that a young man should be staying with an openly gay man in a very small farming community. A place well ahead of the curve in every respect in terms of sheer heart. No condescension, no sidewards glances, no innuendo.  Mind, this may all have been borne by the fact that only one or two people there spoke anything other than a thick agrarian dialect of the area.

  One weekend, Dominic opened up the garage downstairs to reveal a Citroen 2CV that he'd stripped down to a mere chassis - not hard to do, as he explained, given that the whole body was simply held on by Phillips head screws. We spent the rest of the weekend doing some four wheel erosion along the creeks and through some of the animal tracks.  We even thoughtfully created a few so that the local wildlife wouldn't have to work so hard in our wake.  At one point we hit something at the bottom of a creek bed that made the Citroen roll onto its side in the middle of the stream. No harm done, other than being soaked through but I marveled at how durable and light that sucker was. We practically carried it back out of the creek.

  On another occasion, Dominic lent me a fishing rod to try my hand at catching trout up in the streams. He took me to a farm that supplied grubs and in a display of kinship so often found outside cities the world over, both Dom and the farmer studied every nuance of my face as I plunged my arm up to the elbow into a fish tank full of writhing maggots bred for just such an occasion. To ensure I passed the test with flying colours, I did it a couple of times - more for their approbation than for any need of bait.  I've never been a good fisherman. In fact, I don't think I caught a damned thing on the two or three occasions I tried it up there.

  The other event that will always stay with me was 'going veggie shopping',  Dom wanted to get some veggies and  eggs in.  I assumed that we were driving to Foix - a mere half hour away - but he said he bought pretty much all his groceries from the local farms around the way. On route to the place, he cautioned me with dramatic gravitas not to freak out at what I was going to see.  Just be cool and it would be okay.  This, of course, made me freak out wildly.  At least on the inside.
  
  We pulled up at the end of a long driveway, in front of a ramshackle house built by generations that must have gone back many hundreds of years. The farmer's wife came out, all smiles and hugs and grabbed Dom in a vice-like grip that looked bone breaking from where I stood.  These people really knew how to hug.  The farmer emerged, every bit the surly counterpart, with a large crate brim full of vegetables and fresh, shit encrusted eggs. Large clumps of fennel, onions, garlic cloves and stalks, peas and string beans, pale golden green pumpkin and much more besides. I caught the gist of the conversation.  Local talk.  Friend talk.  Somebody was thinking of selling up.  How could they ever think of doing such a thing? Someone had bought a new tractor but wasn't too happy with it. There was noise about a co-operative being formed but it wouldn't come to much. Local talk.  Friend talk.

  A noise down past a cattle paddock and the parents waved.  Six or seven young men started making their way towards us through the cows.  I caught Dom's cautioning look and assumed that this was the 'now' moment. The men weren't overly agile and all walked with an unmistakable shamble as they closed the gate and came directly towards us with questioning open looks. They all bore features of in-breeding with one of them showing severe signs of Down Syndrome. Each of them carried a large Opinel knife - what the rest of the world would call a  Bowie knife . And I was a stranger. And strangers were an unknown element. What I assumed were the two eldest sons took the knives from their belts and stabbed them into the large, nearly destroyed trestle table that they clearly used for target practice when they weren't eating off it. One turned and asked his Ma if I was English. Dominic shook his head hastily.

  The knife went deep and as the son twisted and wriggled it from the thick wood, he looked me in the eye.
  
  "...Ça va?"

  I couldn't stop the catch in my throat. "Oui!  Bien, merci! Et vous?" Which was the full extent of my French. Everyone went silent for what seemed a slow, painful lifetime. The son looked at the parents and Dominic and said something rapidfire and everyone - the sons, the mother, the father and Dominic - burst into the loudest laughter.

 "He said you can't speak the tongue for shit.", Dominic said good-naturedly.

  After that, of course, the home-made poison came out and after that I don't remember a thing other than the vertiginous, hurdy-gurdy drive home and the four day hangover.

  And I never did get to run with those bulls.

Wish you were here...
  

A year on, Jake.

We were doing just under ninety miles an hour down Beecroft Road.
I remember because I was looking at the speedo, at your stupid smile, at the smartarse in the Mercedes dogfighting us through a run of three orange lights, then back at the speedo. Consistently hovering around ninety.
You could never stand losing and I was ever the gutless bastard.
But I wasn't scared of the dying.
I was only scared of dying on somewhere as unworthy as Beecroft Road.
I had grand and morbid designs. Going off a cliff outside Ventimiglia or disappearing on the outskirts of Roquefixade. At a pinch, stone cold sober and without a deity in sight somewhere and nowhere on the Nullarbor. At least that would have been the way I would have liked to have gone, brandishing a tattered copy of Dos Passos' USA in one hand and a Rickenbacker 360 in the other. And just vanishing.
But no. You were determined to make it here and now under a blue dome devoid of any clouds to give perspective.
On Beecroft fucking Road.
We beat the yuppie fuck,of course.
And we didn't get pinched.
But that stupid forced laugh you always gave, playing victor over a battle you were never sure you should have won. Never quite convinced even of how you had won it.
Afterwards we all hooked up at the local and everyone said, "Where the fuck did you two get to?"
They wouldn't have believed me if I said I'd just glimpsed hell. And suburban heaven.

Remember me.

"You are the only censor..."

(I realised I hadn't posted for some time but being as lazy as I am, I couldn't think of anything new.  Here's an old Facebook word-squiggle that I posted a year or so ago...)

I burst through the door to the tiny flat.  Since I only had visiting rights to see my Mum every third weekend, bursting through the door was both the meta- and the pre-language of those fear and laughter soaked years.

The view from the balcony took in the Friday night snarl of Devlin Street and the westering sun falling immense and slow beyond the ridge of the black and purple valley of West Ryde.  Before the incurable virus of developers.  Before the apartment blocks came.

Peter had run away from the Old Man two years earlier just prior to his fourteenth birthday.

With a deft manner, he stole up behind me and put me in a headlock - entirely devoid of malice - that only big brothers the world over seem to know how to achieve with any degree of mastery. Dragged me, wriggling and fumbling, into the room that had belonged to our eldest, John, for a time.  But John was back in jail now or off roustabouting with a circus somewhere, dusty and far away.  

And since one of our strongest family assizes was that of finders keepers, Peter had wasted no time in putting up Easy Rider and Willy and the Poor Boys posters and claiming the small bedroom for his own. I was still rubbing my neck with a drama and affected injured pride belying my full seven years when Peter clamped a large set of headphones over my ears, gently placed needle to vinyl and a heavily flanged voice informed me that I was the only censor.  If i did not like what I heard, I had a choice.  I could turn the voice off.

And Alice Cooper proceeded to write home to mother.

That afternoon sun set as countless others have done.

But I remember that one clearest.

Lay down and die, goodbye.

Of teachers, of mothers, of fathers, of monsters.

There may yet be truth in the fact that when we remember something, we're actually only remembering the last time we remembered that event.
I'm not sure who's alive and who's dead now but as the years move on, I can no longer be certain that it happened.  Yet it did.
My teacher in fourth class was a wizened old Lithuanian man who was respected, if not revered, by at least two generations of my siblings before me. He called me Professor Malco. More than likely because I was a smartarse know-it-all a lot of the time. And though his moniker for me implied some small exaltation, he wasn't above giving me four or even six with the cane because he thought I was talking out of turn. Which was almost never true.
One day Teacher X had no sooner walked into the filled classroom than he said without his usual gold-toothed smile, "Professor Malco, would you please follow me?". Our classroom was in the same ancient brick building as the Principal's office - a matter of a few yards, really - but the cloud of uncertainty that hung in the air like death itself made it one of the longest walks of my life. Had I so monstrously done wrong?  Broken or stolen one too many toys?  It was bad enough that the year before I'd had to forfeit a spelling bee prize because the day I was to accept the prize was also the day I was to get the cuts - "six in all" as he liked to call 'em - from Deserthead; the most feared teacher in the whole school because of his soldierly grip when he shook your shoulders and his lead weighted canes. All of this left me with but one choice.  Wag school. And so a precedent was set.
But I digress.
Teacher X ushered me into the Principal's office and to my surprise, I saw my mother standing there, together with my old third class, second class and first class teachers. With so much erudition in that small office, there wasn't a lot of standing room. I had no idea what this was all for. I remember how good it looked outside beyond the window where some kids were weaving cane baskets in the sunlight beneath the large Tannoy poles.
"Mac, the Principal and these teachers want to ask you a few questions and you don't have to say anything you don't want to."  I nodded. Mum worked up around the corner at the local Funny Farm as it was locally known.  She'd been a Domestic there for a few years.  And would remain so for the next two decades.
The Principal began. "Your dad wants to take you off to Perth to live.  Is that true?" I bit my lower lip and nodded. "And you don't want to go?"
I didn't know what to say.
"Malcolm?".
"My friends are here and Mum is here. And Pete and Helen and everyone is here."
"You told Teacher X that your dad had taken you to the police.  Why did he do that?  Were you naughty?".
"I keep walking away to Mum's. But he always finds out and sends the twins to pick me up or gets me along the way."
"And what did the police do?".
"They showed me where the drunk people live at night and told me I'd live there if I didn't stop running away."  There was much slow and deliberate bobbing of heads to all of this.  Keen attention from their faces. I still didn't know what I had done wrong. The Principal felt satisfied with the answers I supplied but the lines on his face only seemed to etch themselves deeper as I spoke.
The Principal nodded to Miss Y, my third class teacher who we all wanted to be hugged by because she was beautiful. And we all wanted to be kissed by her because she smelled nice and was warm all the time.
"Malcolm, would you like to stay here with us?  At this school?"
I nodded slowly, still expecting a trap of some kind.
She continued, "How would you like it if you came to live with me and everyone here except your Mum. Only for a few weeks until your dad went away and the police weren't coming around."
"Why?"
"Because then you could eventually live with your Mum and you wouldn't have your classes disrupted because we could do them with you at home. But you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it.  Not for a long time. Could you do that, do you think?".
It was then that I saw my Mother's tears. She didn't encourage an answer one way or the other.  She just let the tears slowly build and fall. I looked from face to grave face.
I saw immediately that I would no longer have to wait three weekends of every month just to spend time with Mum and my siblings and friends for forty eight short hours.  I saw a secure place for my pushbike up in Mum's flats, in my mind's eye. I saw days spent with creeks, waterfalls, eels and wolf spiders, skateboards, office blocks and new construction sites with sand piles with buried brick shards.
I saw bus rides into town for five cents and low drifting nimbus clouds of cigarette smoke in front of the Friday night telly as we all shushed each other trying to watch the movie in that tiny flat. I saw everyone laughing in the flat. In all the flats.  Friends from Hungary, Iran, Finland, Belgium, Canada, Texas, England, Germany, Kenya, Norway. I saw all of my friends and all of their parents. I saw records on the carpet and kettle elements in need of minor repair.  I saw days spent in the library playing chasings and annoying people who foolishly wanted to read. I saw fish and chips and drinking milk from the carton. I saw flattened cardboard boxes and steep grass hills behind the car dealership on Saturday afternoons.
I saw paradise.
But something started in my head.  A place of indistinction where words and pictures swarm but never resolve. A place below the waterline of day to day life. Insect thoughts. And the swarm grew even though I was not outwardly panicked. Funneling out of some dark recess in sharp slivers that prevented me from forming even the simplest of  sentences. Until finally a handful of words rose up.
"What would he do to her? More?"
I saw so many beautiful things in those long moments. So many things rightfully mine for the taking. And I saw him.  And words such as Magistrate and Desk Sergeant and images of the local pub where they all drank.
And I looked at each of the faces in the Principal's tiny office and I shook my head almost imperceptibly.
No longer being able to stop the wrack that was breaking over me.
Mother

I keep thinking of that photo of Grant.

I get fixated on things that burst with importance one moment only to be of no consequence an hour, a day, a week or lifetime later...
I've spent days - weeks and months, in fact -  idly thinking of a picture of Ulysses Grant.  One of his last. Crowned by a slightly worn top hat, with a scarf wrapped 'round his throat hiding the scars of the unsuccessful operations for the disease that would soon enough kill him.
What a life. An indifferent soldier at Westpoint up on the Hudson. A poor entrepreneur, reduced to selling tinder on the streets of St Louis by his early thirties.  By all accounts a strange and shambolic man. A failure in the eyes of everyone except his long suffering wife Julia. An occasional dauber in oils and charcoals. Quite fine at it too. Proud, in fact, only of his occasional painting and horsemanship.
And then the war broke out and he slowly set about putting down the rebellion. Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Shiloh of course. Savagely fighting Longstreet, who many years before had been best man at his wedding. Heartbreaking success after success until the desperate, brilliant Lee brought him to a standstill outside Petersburg where hubris got the better of Grant for which his army paid a terrible cost in that protracted south/left flank slide. A strange and shocking conflict.
He did all of this often very drunk.
"Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.", Sherman was to say at the height (or rather one of the Union nadirs) of the war.
And Grant sits on that porch, looking up from the newspaper.  All of this past, I imagine, playing like a thread-worn home movie over again and again in his head.
And later, how he became a two term President after the war. Posterity according his Administration small praises but for the corruption, cronyism and whiskey-for-all approach. But some good... Some good... So he might have thought in that photo.
And after the Presidency, a world tour - feted by kings and queens the world over. A fine home in Manhattan bought for him by friends upon his return. But seemingly all for nought as yet again bad investment left him and his family destitute by his early sixties.
And there he is, reading the scandal sheets between bouts of memoir writing. His whole life played out somewhere beneath that damned knitted beanie and the top hat.
But it doesn't end there, does it?  The memoirs restored the family fortune for generations to come.
I look at the photo and I think sometimes life is a mood. An illness or disorder. Cyclothymia. And people are thrown up and down on the waves of its caprice - ever bashing their heads on the ceiling of beauty, ever being dashed upon the rock and sand of heartache and uncertainty.
Masters and mistresses of nothing.
Swan, swan, hummingbird.

Dial Connecticut

Going through a stack of old backup CDs and rifling through lyrics from christ knows when.  This one must have been mid-90s. I got hung up on the name of the state for some reason. I may yet get around to recording some music for it, just to annoy myself and everyone around me.
"Dial Connecticut.
Lay me down and hope to keep
Some small madness in my sleep
For to guide these days of victory
Knock me out and pour me fire
In a cheap shot at desire
And a way to make more flyer points.
Kick the crap out of the dream
Watch your hopes melt like ice cream
In a puddle called reality
Winding all the way and back
Over seas and rocks of crack
To the land of full lipped smiles.
In a heartbeat you abrade
Everything that you once saved
By the gun beneath the bar
Slap the pussy magnets down
Exiled to another town
Till you turn into the minotaur.
Type the bat piss on the screen
Where it clearly looks obscene
Call your parents ‘round to read it all.
You have broken all your clothes
You’ve got nowhere else to go
And you’re eating off the sidewalk.
Wield your tiny plastic sword
Fill the stab wounds with your words
As you waltz upon the funeral pyre
Rate the incest of your thoughts
Give out everything you’ve bought
To the old rockstar’s retirement home.
If it isn’t you it’s me
Check your bank account for free
With the drug-free village racketeer.
All the sets are white and pure
But you’re standing there unsure
If you’ll ever see the sun again.
Tell your loved one’s you’re insane
They can help you take the blame
When you bring home your first million.
Live the gilt-edged, glad-wrapped life
Take your neighbour for a wife
And we’ll see how well it suits our needs.
Scratch that nineteen year old itch
While you lay there getting rich
And remember who your friends are
When you’re down beside the pool
Filled with alcohol and fuel
Keep the matches near for safety’s sake.
Over dialogue and dance
This recycled, tired romance
All the travel agents want your fame.
Soft of voice and heart of mould
Swimming endless rooms of gold
With the hired assassins at the door.
Old Bugattis in the garage
As you take on the barrage
Of the flatt’ry & photographers.
With this new song in your head.
There’s a library left unread
In a house built by contented slaves.
You don’t need to run no more
While you’re stretched out on the floor
As your loved ones dial Connecticut."

April 25th, 2015.

Anyone who read my little Facebook blurb the other day on Georg - the former Hitler Youth member, must surely see that I have a complex view of who and what we are. As living, historical entities. As nations. As tribes and as individuals.
I tend to exercise my passive aggression each year around this time by maintaining the beer palace mantra of 'Lest we forget? We already fucking have!". I promise not to trot that one out today for the sake of retaining at least a few friendships.
I grew up steeped in the vestiges of war - from the exalted and sublime to the laughingly tragic. Together with a number of friends, my whole youth was geared towards joining the army after I left school, so that I might not only follow in the footsteps of the family heroes but more importantly remove the tarnish of my own kin who were not so very self-sacrificing. All of this, however, was not to be. It was on that fateful day at the army medical I learned something hitherto unknown to me or anyone else in my family which was, I was born profoundly deaf in my right ear. My world collapsed in those moments on Castlereagh Street.
My father was acknowledged by the the people of Leichhardt and the wider community as a coward and opportunist (albeit a very charismatic one, it appears) throughout WW2. His brothers, by contrast, were volunteers in the 9th which served so famously at Tobruk and elsewhere. My mother's brother was a coast watcher who was later captured by the Japanese army in New Guinea and subjected to horrific and inhuman depredation. Yet another uncle would put away more dexamphetamine as a navigator on PBY Catalinas out of Rathmines and forward bases, than any drug pig I've known on Civvy Street. Bear in mind that they were all no older than the age of twenty three by war's end. Jesus fuck, I was still trying to get laid and wasted at twenty three. Weren't you?
So... This day... It was Winston's idea and to all intents and purposes it should have worked. It was bold, it was a potential war-shortener. You know what? I want to digress for a minute. I hear people call it the Battle of Gallipoli. It was a fucking campaign. It wasn't over in a day. It was over eight fucking months in a hell that not even the devil's own could have devised. Eight months.
Why am I writing this? I suppose I want to know - need to know - what it is we must not forget? Were Ypres and Passchendaele more significant to the fundament of being the nation we are today? I believe the answer is yes. And I believe that I could win that argument hand's down.
Gallipoli was as much bloodloss and heartache for every British boy as son of Australia who fought for those scant miles too. It seems to me that the only thing that we must not forget is that Australian should hate the British. And the British should hate their own. And nobody should take combat orders from anyone who hasn't fired a shot in the last three decades which was so often the case on that shoreline. But if hate is the salient legacy, then I'm in favour of forgetting. Our involvement with seemingly every conflict after Korea (50-53) belies all good intent that had gone before and makes a mockery of those hallowed words that burn beneath the flame that should never go out.
Is this my advocacy for war? Don't be fucking daft. All sentient things war. I don't like it. You don't like it. But all living things war. I have unbound and open respect for friends who have served and serve yet in the ADF. I think they didn't 'join to kill'. Not most of the peers my age anyway. Perhaps they too did it for the most unfathomable yet meaningful of reasons. Is all this sour grapes from a failed wannabe solider? No. Almost all my ex-mil friends immediately became hippies, waxheads and tree-huggers of one kind or another. I got there first without the terror of the parade grounds tedium. Win.
Do I think we can rise above our base natures? For the most part, yes. Something infinitely better, more vibrant and alive - and life affirming, holding more and deeper promise invariably comes out of working together with the swords to ploughshares approach. Something that transcends flags and borders, commercialised memories and worn-down memes.
Uncle Bob, I'd raise a glass to your ghost. But you gave the bottle away. And so did I. So let the bullshit stop here.
For the rest of you, thanks for coming to amateur hour.

History.

He had the gentlest smile. And the saddest eyes.
Between mouthfuls of food in a picture-postcard cafe somewhere off the Konig Boudewijnlaan in a picture-postcard forgotten corner of the world he told me he had been a butcher since he was a boy.
His pride and joys were his Mercedes Benz and his son.
I was eating some kind of salad and pomme frites with mayonnaise from a large paper cone and he was relishing every mouthful of a cutlet. I hadn't had a bath in days. Maybe weeks. And he spoke English with a soft but unmistakable German accent.
The sky that day was kind. To us and everyone else in western Belgium and the waitress sat with us, fascinated by our respective stories. He turned on the charm in a way I've seldom seen even to this day. He could have had her on a plate as he regaled us with tales of life in Germany through the wild sixties and the austerity days that felt like lifetimes following the second world war.
And now, here he was, thinning hair and deep lines of a man who had seen much of life. He was impressed by my accentless German and my cheap rendition of Heine's Die Lorelei. I apologised for only ever having learned the first two verses but both he and the waitress were delighted beyond knowing. And we laughed into the afternoon.
Back then, in that place, the drink drive laws were very different and we must have knocked off two bottles of fine wine, to say nothing of the beers before the meal. My guitar was missing two strings so that ruled out a singalong and serenade of Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand. But the laughter was enough. The food, the laughter, her flashing hazel eyes, his soft voice. These things were enough for me.
The waitress (what was her name?!) was called back inside when the holidaying families started rolling in. But Georg and I took all the time in the world, saying nothing with profound and lasting ease.
By and by, Georg rose from the rough-hewn wooden bench and with a notable Teutonic grace belying the flood of alcohol we'd just put away, walked in and paid the bill.
Back in the quiet car we were wending our way north through the heart of Antwerp when he looked at me in a way that frankly weirded me out, then smiled straight ahead at the road in front of him.
"Is it a strange thing for a man to say to someone he has not long known that it has been a pleasure travelling with him, if only for a short while?"
"I guess not." The guitar fell to one side in the back seat with a muffled, hollow sound.
The traffic wasn't too bad but I could tell he was erring on the side of caution in case the city cops were about with their clumsy breath testers.
"I was in the Hitler Youth. Did I mention this?"
I looked at him.
"Yes. I was thirteen or a little bit older and they gave me a Mauser gun and put me together with a few other boys and old men I'd never known. It's funny because the town I grew up in was not very large but I always remember thinking, "Who are you people? I have never seen you before." But I never fired a single shot in anger. The Americans came not very long after and that was my illustrious life as a soldier come to an end. You are how old?"
"Twenty one. You should have given that woman your phone number." This made him laugh loudly. He laughed the length of a city block.
"And what would I have done with her at my age?"
I couldn't answer for him but from a twenty one year old's perspective, I was thinking the list would be endless.
"I will have to leave you up here at the start of the Bredabahn, my young friend. Where did you say you were heading?"
"Groningen."
"Yes. Up in Friesland. With some luck you will get a lift pretty much the full length. It's not that far." And added with a wink. "Even when one says it's just a country away, in kilometers, it doesn't work out so very far."
Then that long sideways look again.
"My son was around twenty one when he died. You look so much like him. You must forgive me. He died serving his conscription. Hit by a car on the base where he was stationed. Ah, here we are! You take care, Malcolm. Thank you for the finest day I've enjoyed in years."
"You too Georg. And the thanks are very much mine." I caught one last look at his sad and soulful face as I reached for the guitar.

Fortress