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