The horror of the mirror.

"Willie Stark: This much I swear to you. These things you shall have: I'm going to build a hospital. The biggest that money can buy. And it will belong to you. That any man, woman, and child who is sick or in pain can go through those doors and know that everything will be done for them that man can do to heal sickness, to ease pain. Free. Not as a charity. But as a right. And it is your right. Do you hear me? It is your right. And it is your right that every child should have a complete education. That any man who produce us anything can take it to market without paying toll. And no poor man's land or farm can be taxed or taken away from him. And it is the right of the people that they shall not be deprived of hope.
Anne Stanton: Does he mean it, Jack?
Adam Stanton: That's his bribe."
Like everyone else I've been poli-gawping with the U.S. primaries and like everyone else I've been scratching my head about the rise of Trump. I suspect that unlike many, though, I've been scratching my head since the days of Reagan. There must be something to this whole head-scratching thing though because I still have a full mop of hair. Brain cells, on the other hand...
"All the King's Men" from 1949 charts the slow and brutal rise of a dirt-poor idealist through his brief but brutal administration to his equally brutal demise. It's based loosely on the real life of Huey P. Long and that's as far as I could be arsed reading up on it in Wikipedia. And just like the current primaries, it has some Oscar winning performances and some utterly cringeworthy ones but the timeless narrative and tracts of dialogue remain fascinating.
The upshot being that very little has changed since the days (Four score and seven years ago, anyone?) when Lincoln was out stumping in the state of Illinois or Long canvassing for the state of Louisiana. The people of America so early on became intoxicated, enamoured with the whole panem et circenses routine that it's in the marrow now, together with the lead and blood of the innocents. To a certain extent, just as it is here in Oz with our ongoing whispers of, "It can't happen here." But worry not, that scream you hear is only me plummeting from my high and ever-skittish horse.
Plus ça change. Plus ça change...

Concentration Moon

Tonight's weather is brought to you by -

It's still warm out.
And it is said, "Bloody Melbourne." Or, "Welcome to Australia,"
But we all know the world has turned upside down now.  And March will be hot and April will be hot and June will be hot.
And records will be set and we'll...
So we adopt a soothing tone as we expound with reason worthy of TV lawyers, "We're fucked.  We've wrought it upon ourselves. We are indeed a virus!"
And we will do nothing with that mellifluous, enlightened path of complaint and compliance other than preen and fret,
Or conversely take to revealing all that is ugly and abrasive and useless about ourselves. We will too loudly use time-honoured, hackneyed barbs:
sheeple
lefty
commy
pinko
homo
bleeding
fucking
heart
what
the
hell?
why
do
you
even
LIVE
in
this
country?
bring
back
the
death
penalty!
bludger
naif
You
didn't
fight
in
the
frigging
war
like
I
did!
Or,
more
realistically,
(which
is
what
I
meant
to
say
after
all,
smartarse)
my
old
man
did.
And
so
the
march
of
the
weary
battle
hymn
goes
on
and
on
and
on.
And it's warm out.
Maybe even hot out.
I've eaten too much and I'm all talked out so like hell I'm going outside at this late hour just to appease the whiners or knuckle draggers.
And we will pack our hideous neologisms and best and useless intentions in the worn out handbasket we have carried so valiantly and so long.
And we will find the arch guarded now only by the dusty bones of Cerberus.
And we will witness the ash that remains of what was once hell.
And we will then - and only then - realise we have nowhere else to go.

World Party

The Ibises

I whistle when I hear birdsong.
I whistle and sing a lot by most people's standards, I suppose.
Especially guitar solos.
But I whistle in the warm fug of self-delusion that I'm somehow intimately conveying to the birds that I am one of them.
Larger, flightless, bulkier and for the most part not nearly as beautiful.
I say for the MOST part not nearly as beautiful because I find Ibises unusually ugly.
Wrinkly, unkempt and singularly unattractive. And needy to the point of fawning as anyone who has strolled through the Botanic Gardens can testify.
There's hope though - for both the Ibises and myself.
I used to find Plovers (Masked Lapwings to you pedants) ugly as fuck as well.  But I see them as an unusually pretty little avian now, and admirable in their gormless courage.
One day the imperious and singularly unattractive Ibis may do something to redeem itself.  Invent something useful, perhaps.  Learn a language that humans can understand, thus solving the age old dilemma of just how much birds really do take the piss out of us with their incessant chattering.
And so on.
I'm not holding my breath on miracles, mind you.
But life is,
after all,
about potential.
My feeling is, however, that even in death I'll be better looking than Ibises.

Fly

The odyssey and ecstasy of waste.

I had a friend.
We went back decades.
Throughout most of those years we would have laid down our lives for each other.
But, as with most things of this nature, the courses of our days diverged from time to time.
No longer producing the mirror image that good friendship affords but rather the stark contrast that marks all things individual and individualist above the genetic baseline.
And he went on to some small financial success and failure and I?
I remain the hopeless dreamer and schlepper.  Experiential baggage, detritus perhaps, the desperate and pitiful wanna-be, the farcical travesty of the noble savage. Enkidu to his Gilgamesh.
I never could acquire a passion for learning one brand of clothing from the next.
Or dining at restaurants where the famous and the celebrated eat.
I never could get my head around gambling or sports or even simple economics.
And the thought of going out drinking with wealthy people "I really should get to know" seemed anathema to me.  When such rare opportunities arose, I would run home, crawl under the blanket and pick up another history book - of which details I would promptly forget or, at best, recall with maximum hyperbole and apocryphal abandon.
In the final years of our friendship, he was given to interjecting when I spoke.
"Irrelevant."
"But-."
"-Yeah I  know what you're going to say but it's irrelevant."
This barb, this fiery arrow, wend its way into almost every half conversation we shared towards the end.
The vacuum left in the wake of these moments allowed his beautiful and sonorous bluster and increasingly conservative views to flourish and my vague, yet arguably considered, frame of reasoning to barely draw breath in those stifling diatribes masquerading as conversations.
Irrelevant.
And I'm here and he is not.
WHY am I still here?
After all, he had something to contribute
To this life.
To this world
To you and me and the present and future and just possibly
To past generations.
He was fantastical in oratory and in action
And I am ordinary with nothing to offer anyone.
No offspring.
No sage and assured words
No deeds or actions worthy of note, let alone posterity.
The slowly eroding paragon of a life of devout selfishness.
I will not be remembered.
But I am here and he is not.
In my irrelevance I have a place.
So if you too are irrelevant, then faultless and flawless logic dictates that you too have a place.
In this life.
In this world.
In your own eyes.
And in the eyes of others.
And perhaps like me, you're too lazy to actually make a freak flag,
let alone hold it high with pride.
But if you're reading this
then know that for a second, a synaptic fraction, a lifetime, this irrelevant non-entity is glad that you are in the world.

Mirror man.

Trumbo

"Frank King rises, holding a baseball bat.
FRANK KING (CONT’D)
...I don’t think you and me are gonna be pals.

King swings viciously and SMASHES a lamp.
Brewer covers up,
SCREAMS
and goes for the door. Locked. Frank comes at him.

FRANK KING (CONT’D)
You gonna stop me hiring union? I’ll
go downtown, grab some winos and
hookers, there’s my next cast ’n’
crew! It doesn’t matter! I make
garbage!

He swings and SHATTERS a poster.

FRANK KING (CONT’D)
Wanna call me a pinko in all the papers?
Do it! Nobody who goes to my movies
can fuckin’ read!

Another tight swing and he BLASTS a second poster.

FRANK KING (CONT’D)
I’m in this for the money and the pussy
and they’re both fallin’ off the trees. Take
that away from me."

No matter how I slice it, on the surface Trumbo has little to recommend itself to the big screen. Another in a long line of love grenades to Hollywood, a gabfest that struggles to clamber from beneath the weight of its own introspective self-congratulations, and smart in that knowing way we've all come to deplore.

Yet I will go and see this riches to rags to respect movie again with an excitement I haven't felt in a couple of decades. I loved Cranston and Mirren, Stuhlbarg and Tudyk and Goodman and Lane. I loved this film from the moment the lights dimmed in the little theatre up the road. But for the life of me, I can't even begin to fathom why I see it as more than a parochial hand shandy and back rub.

But I do.  I see it as a a whole lot more.

I just love it. A lot. Which means you'll probably hate it.

But go see it anyway.

Trumbo

It's my birthday...

So I'll walk into a toy store and say I want THAT 1/24th scale Hawker Hurricane to the owner of the store.
And I will pay with buttons and some two cent pieces I found on the footpath.
And they will accept my payment with good grace
because it is my birthday.
And all the way home I will hold the large box under my arm, making Browning .303 ackackacakackack noises and humming the theme song to the Battle of Britain.
And I will walk up to strangers.
Aged and respectable looking men and women.
And I will tug at their sleeve and glare up at them (kneel to do so if I must, on account of me being six feet tall)
And I will say, "My old man's a bastard cunt."
Something I wish I'd screamed more often while he was alive.
And watch like a silent, twisted dictator as the carefully constructed looks of dignity crumble like cities about me.
And for those who would disagree in my imaginary suburban rampage, I will serve a bop on the nose.
Unless, of course, they intimidate my six foot frame into silence the way that my three foot frame so easily could be, so many birthdays ago.
And I'll sit in the park eating chips and drinking coke from a small glass bottle.
NO!
I'll hang upside down from the rusted, unsafe-looking monkey bars.
Maybe fall from small heights and lay there - winded but triumphant.
For all the falls that didn't kill me.
And I will yell out my love and reverence to my sisters and brothers and heroes and heroines who are always and all so much older than me and always and all so much better looking and funnier and wiser than I could hope to be in a million lifetimes.
And I will walk around - with friends if I can, alone and strange if needs be - on patches of dirt, with two small bottles of water and a twig.
And when I find the trapdoor, I will gingerly lift it with the twig and I will pour the tepid water down the hole and wait for the angry wolf spider or trapdoor spider to come charging out and rearing up
And for that one tense moment its life will be inextricably linked to my own manifest caprice.
Because it is quite dangerous but I am far more dangerous.
Moreso on this birthday than on any other that has gone before.
But you need not worry.
I will not harm or steal, the way we used to.
I'll take nothing
other than your time.
For I have fewer presents now.
Fewer friends and fewer kind words to give or receive.
But too.
I have far less crippling and unwarranted envy of all around.
And this is the birthday present I most desired.

To life.

Dream #whogivesarats.

Had that dream again.
You know the one.
You have 'em all the time as well.
You're going about your life doing your lifely things on a perfect lifely day
And you're chatting with acquaintances and neighbours and you stop to pass a while with a good friend.  A friend of some years' standing.
And their sentences start to trail and hang. Falter.
"Are you okay?", you ask.
They shake their head slightly. Only slightly.
And without as much as an "Excuse me" they fix their eyes on a distant point and beeline shuffle towards it.
Pretty soon the surge is up as they enter this place or that and you stand there thinking you're hearing the same thing as everyone else but you know you're not.
Thinking you're seeing the same thing as everyone else but you know you're not.
And you prided yourself on the fact that everyone didn't think like everyone else and you took great delight that those nearest and dearest to you thought very much for themselves.
But there they all go, congregating here.  Shuffling over there...
And a stranger says, "Do you not hear it too?"
But you can't answer.  You can't even shake your head.
"You need to come with me."
But I don't.  I run.  Every time.
Jumping fences, climbing fire escapes (testimony to the power of US TV and film as I don't think I've ever actually seen a fire escape in this country).
At one point I climbed some multi-story balconies while someone shot a pistol at me.
I found myself in the most luxurious yet beautifully spartan apartment.
Gingerly trying each door hoping not to get caught.
I interrupted some guy on the crapper but his needs offset his ire at a stranger in his flat so he didn't pursue me.
Eventually I settled on some high place.
And imagined I saw every last one of 'em trapped by evanescent geometrically simple shapes surrounding their heads, suffocating them, nurturing them, taking care of their every last need.
And they were happy.
And I was happy.
And how much did you say these sessions were going to cost me, Doctor?

Hideaway.