This strange attraction.

  
  Like everyone else, these past few years have seen me acting increasingly wierded out about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis - or as we all love to call it, the zombie fungus. We've pored over the pictures of ants and spiders after this insidious little sweetheart has wended its way through the viscera and nervous system of its unfortunate host. We've all made the right eeeurgh-type sounds and had those little alarm bells going off all over our limbic systems and corpus callosums, sending a macabre frisson to every fiber of our beings.

  And I suspect that for the first time we are starting to appreciate God and how and why he died.  By dint of necessity, we forcibly ripped the veil of anthropomorphism away from our collective face and gingerly placed what was left under the microscope.  Us humans get the toxoplasmosis gondii from our pet cats and everything else down the pyramid gets entomopathogens such as ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  It reminds me of Julian Barrett's performance in Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (see link below).  It's just so absurd to me that we have the posturing of autarchs and demagogues around the world destroying by seemingly fair means or foul all the good that democracy has brought us and I, like most others, appear only to be able to sit around gnashing my teeth and renting my garments.

  But the real threat is not the Scylla of the flag wavers and the fascists, the patriots and jingoists, the zealots and the firebrands, the tinpot would-be world leaders such as Trump and Putin and Kim Jong Un and Netanyahu and May and Assad and Maduro and... The well seems bottomless at the moment, doesn't it?  No. The threat that increasingly gets me thinking, is the Charybdis of Ophy and its entomo family. And lover, I ain't talkin' about what awaits us in the winter years when our infirm bones cannae move so very fast.  

  I'm talking about my personal morbid fear that perhaps we've already been compelled by these microscopic horrors since before we climbed out of the slimy pond. Perhaps, in my whimsical musings, we'll one day discover the answer to the eternal accusation, "Why do you always have to act like a...?!".  For many, a shocking epiphany that we are of the world, not on it. 

  I'm going to start intravenous infusions of spirulina and filtered warm water immediately because I, for one, do not relish the prospect of our fungal overlord invasion, in order to get my symbiotic thrills.


  In any case, I bet you won't look at mushrooms quite the same way anymore.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways...

Sword.

We couldn't have been six or seven and we had to stay awake through scripture lessons with Mister Towel.
I kid you not. That was his name.  Or was it Trowel?  Either way it was a silly name and it matched his bald Ibis-wrinkle pate and neck to perfection.
And none of us could follow his quavering, vehement logic so instead we all copied Greg Quigley's lead and cut our double ended erasers in half and drew the outlines of a sports car along the side of the half-rubbers.
Towel/Trowel was lost in his rapture.  He never much noticed all the kids pushing eraser hotrods all over their desks - the more adventurous ones even making soft, farty exhaust notes through their lips.
Looking back, it may just have been an age thing. If I had to take a stab at it now, I'd say he was approaching seventy and his high, reedy voice was just starting to lose any sonorous command it may have once held.
Now he was just an old scripture teacher who talked about moneylenders ("Is that like the Bank of New South Wales, Sir? Did they need bank books, Mister Towel/Trowel?") or the parting of the Red Sea ("Can we try that next time our parents take us up to Woy Woy, Sir?  Do you need a special tool or weapon like a ray gun?").
Week in, week out he would talk about this desiccated, dusty world, seemingly dreamed up by an individual or individuals in the throes of heat stroke or delirium long since cured by the new sciences, and read a book out loud about the people who inhabited it. But we were a lost cause before it began.
We were the age of plastic, Mattel, Milton Bradley, Mousetrap, Green Ghost (those radium plastic ghosts!), The Herculoids, Action Man, Big Jim, Barbie, Matchbox, Airfix, Hotwheels, Gilligan's Island, The Champions, George Reeves as Superman, Cool McCool (My pop the cop), The Phantom Agents, SSP racers, Get Smart, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Friday Night Creature Feature, Scanlens Bubblegum Cards, Columbines and triple bill matinees on Saturday, Tommy Leonetti, White City Saturday Roller Derby, Castlereigh Drag Strip for those with older brothers and sisters, 45s on scratchy portable record players ("Double trouble, I don't know what to do...").
And yes, cigarettes.
I forget who it was but someone suggested you stare at the evenly perforated classroom ceiling until your eyes crossed just a little bit. Et voila! A 3D ceiling would appear as an endless array of small holes started to overlap and swirl around each other. What passed for magic eye pictures in the late nineteen sixties.
And then one day everything changed.
Greg Quigley had somehow managed to separate the chassis from the body on his Red Line Paddy Wagon.  Not only that, he'd somehow acquired a pair of sidecutter pliers and cut the axles on the Hotwheels car with perfect equidistance.
And Towel/Trowel was softly speaking with his maker and hero who always seemed to hover a good two or three feet above his eye line (and Mister Towel/Trowel was nothing, if not very tall) and passionately inveigling us to join in a rousing verse or two of 'Draw your sword!  Raise your sword!  In the name of our great Lord!...".  What person or institution in their right mind would inculcate children of six to sing battle hymns so filled with blood and misery?  We are never so near the Crusades as when we're too young to understand them.
And Towel/Trowel hardly noticed the children barely moving their lips.
All eyes were now on Greg Quigley as, with immense concentration, he gently pressed the red lined Hotwheels axles into what, just yesterday, had been but a poor facsimile of a beautiful rubber sports car.
As the fourth wheel was pressed in with a showman's flourish, Greg smiled a wry smile and nodded, more to himself than anyone in that room.
He set it down for the first cautious test run across the desk and we realised - every last one of us -  with a slow, dawning clarity that a new age of rapture was upon us.

Hot Wheels.

The other woman.

Hello, is this Mr Connell?
Holy hell!  It's YOU!
I'm sorry, sir?
I've been waiting for your call, you glorious, glorious slice of womanhood, you.
(At this stage, I thought the pause - the distance between us - was too dramatic, and don't get me started about the babel in the background, but finally she spoke.)
Yes sir. I'm ringing you about the automobile accident you were involved in last year -
- Oh come on.
What, sir?!
Come on! Let's not pretend.  What are you wearing?
... I'm sorry, sir?!
You must be so beautiful.  Are you wearing silk? I'm not normally a fan but -
- Yes sir. You were in a bad accident last year and you have to pay -
- Oh look. I don't give a good god fuck if you ARE a scam caller. What coloured bra, woman! What coloured undies?! Is there filigree in the -
Sir. You need to send us -
- I need you, babe. (At this point I start breathing overly heavy because a) I'm not sure how good the connection is at their end, and b) I don't want them to think I'm an asthmatic.)
...
I need to know, lover, are you waxed?
JUST GO, SIR!
<click>
And she is gone.
Too easily they waltz in and out of my life, these ones.
Too damned easily, I sigh to myself.

Je t'aime, mais vraiment moi non plus!

To the girl who worked at Franklins.

I used to sing a popular song.
Not well, not badly
but I'd sing it a lot around the house and when I got to the refrain you would join in, slightly out of sync.
Like a poorly rehearsed music hall routine.
But you would sing those eight or nine words with such laughter, such light in your eyes.
And my fucking god it made me smile to see you smile.
Between the substantial clouds
the paranoid silences
the tears welling but never falling
the laconic accusations - questions for which I had no answers, not that you were after any.
We crippled each other;
You with my levity
Me with your clinging philosophies.
But that's what young people do.
And if they survive the ordeal
They grow old and stupid and needlessly proud.
Maybe like you.
Definitely like me.