9/11/16

And the afternoon rolled slowly on
and I saw but didn't want to see but knew I must.
And Cam cooked up some fish we bought and washed it down with a red wine
While I made myself another interminable cup of tea in the dirty, oversized mug.
All the comforts of home and hearth
but somehow the whole world has changed
And we could almost hear the tears from the one corner. Almost smell the smug from the other.
And we played a card game in which the rules are constantly changing and the heroes are fatefully disempowered or outright discarded before a winner can be declared
And so many evil things can win
in so many evil ways.
The only difference is that here, in this house in this little corner of the world that is not far enough from everywhere,
we laughed.
We laughed loudly
because the fiddle is packed away
And the fire department won't touch this one.

Something that is gone...

Reverence.

I often dream of this strange little chapel. We'd pass it daily when we were working out at Blayney a couple of years ago. We had to stand in the fields around it for hours on end ensuring the bovines, ovines and equines didn't chew our transmission lines.

I would look at this shed and try to imagine the local farmers and miners who might worship here in all manner of weather. And the pastor who might have been tasked to tend the disparate flock, with their irreconcilable differences, generally resolved by a punch up at the Saturday night pissups in Orange or Bathurst and sheepishly absolved the next morning in this small sanctum.

I know nothing of worship outside my own selfish pursuits but this rusting corrugated shed took me back to possibly the only time I got 'it'. A mud brick and lime affair in Azille in France. I was staying with a friend who insisted on showing me what Catholicism meant to him. From the outside, that strange church looked like another of any one of hundreds of buildings in the fortress town that had been partially destroyed and mostly rebuilt for generation after generation through over a millennium of conflict.

Yet inside, you could look at the cracked walls and the hand-hewn pews and the rafters above, blackened by over a thousand years of locally crafted thuribles and you could SEE the hopes and desires and prayers - both answered and unanswered - of those remarkably ordinary and courageous people.

Later we walked to the outskirts of the town where my friend showed me the earthen remains of the wide moat and looked at me and said with a smile, "Now we'll let any barbarian in."

Who needs friends.

Of worship...

Starfucker dream #20371.

I was at a Talking Heads gig and it was cold and grey and I was naked as the day I was born. The security guards were pursuing me but not for indecency or anything like that but because they disagreed with a quip I'd made about turtles at the turnstiles.
Talking Heads only played bluegrass throughout the set which left everyone in a bit of a culturally disconnected fug but everyone remained respectful, if a little stilted on the applause, nonetheless.
After the set I sat between Harrison and Byrne discussing many things but as it is with most dreams, it felt as though three very distinct and altogether unrelated conversations were taking place simultaneously. In one of the many awkwardly quiet moments, I asked if I could try out Jerry Harrison's Roland guitar synth. And he said, "Not dressed like that, you fucking can't."
I was disappointed, to say the least.
After the feast, someone kindly lent me a paisley shift they happened to have spare in their backpack. They'd sown a strange little pocket into an awkward point over the right shoulder blade. I managed to extricate what looked like tens of thousands of dollars from it and offered to hand it back but they simply replied, "Keep it. You look as though you'll buy some nice things."

I believe, some day we'll live in a world without love.

Scribbles on a strangely normal liar's past.

There weren't many daisies outside the encyclopedia. We had dandelions and clovers, come spring and summer. Eastview Avenue kids down at Kent Road creek made ropes of 'em because we felt necklaces were pointless.
Leeches were perfectly safe to handle, as long as they were turned inside out on twigs the right way to ward off other kids in our patch of the creek.
The penny bunger should never be held in one's hand at detonation point. The tuppenny bunger was generally kept in the same category until Kerry and I stole one from my brother, lit it and threw it into the reeds. When it didn't go off, I went and fetched the cracker and held it aloft, proclaiming, "Here it - BANG!!!" So no. The penny bunger would take one's hand off. The tuppenny would simply leave your hand numb for a week.
Cigarettes were only to be enjoyed at the ghost pipes in Santa Rosa park, as the chances of being busted by someone's parents definitely diminished the satisfaction quotient.
Chalcedony was a word and a semi-precious stone you definitely did not share with your school friends. This is true of Galena, the mention of Moh's Scale, Toluene, igneous formations and Obsidian. The one time it was tried over in my primary school in Perth led to blood between an English or Scots kid - Stewart - and myself. Equal amounts of blood.
The Eastwood Odeon took twenty five minutes to walk to from my old man's girlfriend's house in the Dundas valley. My Sis and I timed it on her new watch when we went and saw the Batman film. The one with Bat Shark repellent. That stuff must've been deadly on an unparalleled scale because to this day I've never heard of an extant bat shark.
Sneaking in to see American Graffiti eight times at the Picadilly in Perth garnered me much awe and respect amongst my peers at ten years of age.
The ticket for the Temeraire Ferry to Rottnest Island was $11.60 return when I was eleven. I ran away from Knutsford Ave. Slept under the old Thompson's Wharf for the night, got very cold and very hungry. Caught the ferry back the next day. No-one noticed I'd gone which saved me a hiding. I still wonder why I didn't simply purchase a one way ticket.
Girl's perfume burned beautifully. I demonstrated this when I stole some from my sister and set fire to a puddle on the lino of her bedroom floor.
Metho took care of centipedes, funnel webs and from what the adults whispered, Billy Argue up the road.
My primary school in Sydney was a block away from 'the nuthouse' where my Ma worked. The proximity of these two places had me thinking for years that they were all fundamentally part of the same thing.
Catching Echidnas in garbage bins was immeasurably more fun than doing a 5k run in the hinterland of Cloverdale Public School.
Growing up was, still is and - I suspect - always will be a lot more elusive than most people would have us believe.

We knee skinned it you and me we knee skinned that river red

Clinton.

One for the choir in the echo chamber...
I've had a couple of mates contact me in private, of late, ranting about Clinton. So I'll put this out there, hopefully for the last time, to ward off any further ulcer-inducing, headfucking dialogues. Why are we concerned from twelve thousand miles away? It's simple. All politics is compromise because no two people are alike, let alone any two families, households, streets, suburbs, states, nations... You get the picture. Everyone is fighting with one hand tied behind their back. So what happens in the States affects everyone in the west, the east, the north and the south.
Clinton? I like her. I want her in. I loved Gillard and I have deep respect for Clinton that may grow or it may not. But she will get in. The avalanche of anti-Clinton stuff is for the most part veiled sexism of the most derisive and populist order. Seriously, you look at your partners and think shit like that? Fuck off. "No, I'm not! I wouldn't care if she WAS a man! She's the antichrist and her track record parallels that of Elizabeth Bathory, Genghis Khan and Alan Greenspan combined!'"
You're awfully focused exclusively on her in ways that I've never known you to be in all our years of friendship - even for the (war) criminals, lackeys and Wall Street flunkies we've had here in Oz over recent decades. Are you sure you're not just a little, teeny-weeny bit scared of some healthy and long overdue pussy-power? "But she's a criminal and a Wall Street drudge." So are you if you trace your paycheque and leisure time activities back far enough. So am I. Show me a better way. An historical entity where we are free to ride our high horses and live in our unblemished glass houses? But I must warn you, if any fucker mentions Auroville or any of its lath and plaster analogues, please kill me now.
Trump. He's a despicable prick. Possibly with a coke addiction if the debate was anything to run with. As with Abbott, you're not betting against Labor, you're betting for Abbott. The same goes for the whole Clinton/Trump thing. And if that's your bag, then so be it but if it's not...?
And finally, "But I thought you were a Sanders man!"
No sooner would Sanders be in than every daft, whiney twat would be pegging stones at him too because skeletons. Because that nasty word compromise again. And because- Well? Because real world. Sanders is an idea. The best of Sanders is the best of us. The best of Clinton. The best, perhaps, even of Trump. And Sanders may yet see the light of day. But if not him, the idea is good and robust and will break through eventually.
So again, I ask, don't. Please. Just don't. Not with me, leastwise. You're better than that. Fuck it, we all are.
Time for a cup of tea and a lay down.

Stop your sobbing.

The Facebook Years #3 - The Dove

Watched a dove holding its own today
Pecking and scrabbling on the footpath
A couple of common mynahs swooped and gangstered the bird.
It ignored 'em at first but suddenly switched tactics and started charging them - hell for leather.
Only time I've ever felt sorry for mynah birds. They shit me.
Then, for round two, a big raven came down to see what the ruckus was about.
The adrenaline must've been up because the dove just went that as well.
Helluva free for all.
Then the cops arrived, spoiling everything. The avians all scattered when they saw the flashing lights.
The law asked me if I'd seen anything but as in the past when these things occurred, I told 'em nothing.

Tough love

The Facebook years #2 - The bath.

My last post may have alarmed many of you but I can say without an iota of doubt that the bath was jolly good. Much better than many FB food pics I've seen, in fact. Although why anyone would want to bathe in food is beyond me. Still and all, I do have many fine friends who are into that sort of thing... But that's for another time. Onwards with 'Tales from the bathtub', then!
So I was seven eighths submerged in the bath just now, surreptitiously appreciating the magnificent fifty year old form before my eyes. Well, the knees anyway. And frankly they were indistinguishable from the Radox suds. So we'll meet halfway and say that I was admiring with no small amount of cordial and critical eye the lithe, muscular, vaguely humanoid form of Adonis before me when (for no other reason that I'd been inadvertently sniffing petrol from the mower earlier in the day) it occurred to me that Anthony Robbins and his dream mongering clones may well be onto something.
Peut-être there is a cosmic determinism at work. My curiosity piqued, I ebbed until my ears were well below the suds and water line to hear only my murmuring heart and sibilating breath. It was in that instant - with the ghost of Basho upon me - I realised that I was womb-wrapped once again and that when I emerged newborn, the world would be fresh and new! Correlative and contingent to this and still abusing the Robbins logic, as it were, I would also mysteriously have won the Lotto to the tune of forty three million dollars and simultaneously find myself having to turn away any number of celebrities and sirens because, 'Scorcese is screaming for the screenplay I promised him and I'm already two weeks overdue and when am I going to find time in my jet-setting life to star in his remake of 'Night of the Hunter'.
Well I needn't tell you, dear reader, that I emerged from that bath with my mind overflowing with all manner of earthly delights and wrinkled like my grandmother (my body -not my mind). Mention too should be made of the unmentionable matter covering me from chiseled head to cutesy little toe that deserves no further attention in these august and manly circles. So newborn I surely was! Could it all be true?!
Alas, however, that is as far as the cosmic joke played out because here I sit once again. A beloved mock turtle to the many, an idiot to most, typing my foolish and whimsical daydreams and laying my twisted DNA bare to the masses.
Let me simply end by uttering the wise words of somebody or other (possibly a doppleganger who, like me, also happened to escape the pathetic clutches of of the Scientologists in Castlereigh Street);
Fuck Anthony Robbins. Fuck him, fuck him and fuck him.
Or to put it more civilly, determinism schmismism.
Yours in modest sincerity,
No Relation (No relation)

Far away...