Madame Tussaud

Last modified on 2012-02-20 00:50:52 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Madame Tussaud, no relation, is at the forefront of spiritual divinity. Her technique, her nuance, is a refreshing acceptance of everything, good and bad, not like the shysters or movie-themed-gypsy-attire-wearing-fakers that are all up and down Figaro streetselling you fortune and hope. The modestly lit gold neon in her window, on a low wattage setting, is simply spelt “clairvoyant” with a subtle lower case ‘c’, hopes to attract less of the ‘my mother just died and I am grieving, should I?’ or the ‘I am about to get married, should !?’ or the ‘I don’t know what to do with me life TELL ME!’ crowd and instead garner the more resolute, disbelieving and genuinely (as far as going to a ‘magical’ perhaps bullshit artist can be genuine) truth-in-death seeking individual. The reward is in the larger fee, Madame Tussaud reasons. (“I am not McDonalds” is one of her catch-phrases). If she could add in small neon italics underneath the sign it would read “not a mind reader” but that was apparently impossible to do for the neon manufacturer (they couldn’t elegantly join the separate words and letters and so quoted a ridiculous price so as to preclude them from possibly getting the gig, a project Madame Tussaud foresaw was technically possible). Never mind. More than thirty nine months of steady clients befitting the exact desired market kept her door open, her cat, bird, and bat fed and the landlord from telling her to stop burning all that stinky crap in the lounge room.

Simon Finkel was prospective client number 27 (and ominous number for numerologists; 9 times 3, or spookily, 3 times 3 times 3…”and by the power of 3 shall ye be bound”, “the curse shall return upon you three-fold”, the “holy trinity” and all that) who, this night walked down the steps towards Madame’s door casually, as in not overly deliberately, as in thinking himself quite smart and right-of-mind in choosing the most modest and undazzling premise on the street, finding in himself greater validity in discovering a hidden, secretive, more earnest seer. So not only does the sign work, it also fills the intended client with a certain sense of self aggrandizement. Madame Tussaud wanted that too, it helped her peer directly into the soul whilst the subject is dazed under a cloudy gauze of ego. It also helped of course make her fee, when she announced it fifteen minutes into the ceremony, that much more justified. She had been fearing receiving client number 27. She had had nightmares for 5 nights (another vexatious number, half of the sum of the total base ten decimal currency that ruled the earth, the devils simplicity to rule them all) and awoke startled at the face of a soft, youngish man with drawn cheeks, deep socketed dark rimmed eyes and a weak smile, perhaps the most horrific feature of the dream; a half thin-lipped semi-tooth-showing quivering smile that made her almost physically sick. Luckily for her when the door opened on a brisk August eve and a tanned, filling-out-his-shirt-in-all-the-right-places man walked in with a quaff of yellow-brown hair wind swept back from a sturdy brow over to the crown of his skull caused the little chimes she hangs nailed above the door to jingle ever so softly (the one cliché she allowed herself, sometimes clients want “the package they expect”) she was momentarily relieved. Relieved because it wasn’t the horrific man from her dreams, then instantly unrelieved because; wasn’t she supposed to be psychic? She calmed herself by recounting the Protection Spell of Ib-el-Rahim three times and reminded herself that it was client number 27 so all bets were off. She lit a red candle and laid one of her cut fingernails into the wax and went out to greet him. For the opening gambit, and a little trick she personally loves, she walks into the antechamber, extending a well ringed left hand and says
“Welcome Andreas, or is it, Simon you go by now?” and naturally there is that moment of shock-fear followed by an awkward and weird-feeling wrong-handed shake and a half step backward until she says
“Please, sit down first then we’ll talk” to reassure them that ‘yes, that was fucking weird but also yes, things can go on from here in the proper way you expect, say, from a Doctor’. Simon sits and hunches forward, matter of fact, hands clasped, came for business, didn’t the sign say clairvoyant? etc. Madame sits opposite. It’s a normal room. Two lounges on either side, a thin coffee table between them with a plain clean ashtray in the centre, a small bookcase with the usual books on it (nothing occult), a vase with dried flowers on top of that. The only give away that this is not your spinster Aunt’s house is that there is a painting of Mary (Jesus’ mother from the bible) hung upside down on the wall with a piece of burnt white cloth hung from one of the corners. That and the smell.
“So, Simon. What brings you in tonight?” Madame asks, lighting  long clove cigarette.
“I can smoke in here?”
“You an have one of these” she replies, handing him her cigarettes, loose in a satin pouch.
“What are they?”
“Herbal, produced by hand at a small tribe in the Andes”
He takes one and lights it, the smoke is thicker than usual, feels like some sticky tar paints the inside of his lungs when he draws in.
“Thanks”
“You’re welcome. So, you were saying?”
“Yes, yes why I’m here. Well…well you know Falcon street, right!” he chuckles, expectantly, she waits. “Yeah Falcon street. I grew up around here, down a few blocks, on The Parade. So you know, I know, I know what you all do here and, I’ve known since I was a boy and I never really, you know I never believed in all this.”
“I know. There’s really nothing to believe in.”
“Right…right. Well, lately I’ve been, well I’ve been thinking you know and, I’m not a Christian or anything like that. I’ve been to church right for weddings and funerals and stuff, Italian friends, and it was like, like not real or anything to me. But my Grandfather…”
“Stop” Madame says, looking away and breathing in and out of her cigarette, “just smoke your cigarette for a minute, ok?”
And they sit and smoke. Madame Tussaud takes her rings off and lays them on the table, moves them around and ashes her cigarette. Simon ashes his too right after, smokes some more but starts to feel sick. They taste like bad pot and berries and burnt bark.
“You do not want to know about your Grandfather” she says finally, after half their cigarettes are gone and they have sat there for at least three minutes inhaling and exhaling in silence.
“What? Why not?” Simon asks.
“I just have to say that. I have seen what you want and I have to say that.”
“Okay…”
“So if you want to continue I must tell you how I work. Firstly, this session will be the only one you need, and it will cost you three hundred dollars. Secondly, I tell you the truth. I know this is what you want, but not everyone really wants the truth, if you understand me. They think they do, but they are usually much happier not knowing the truth. You can understand what I mean.”|
“Yes I do.”
“Good. And now then, do you want me to tell you the truth about your Grandfather, about why you came into my home to see me?”
“I do, yes.”
“Ok then. If I put these rings back on, we can start. We will go into the back room down that hallway there and begin. Do you have three hundred dollars?”
“No I…don’t have that on me…”
“That’s ok. Go and get three hundred dollars and come back, I will be ready for you then”
They put their cigarettes out and sit there for a moment, Simon looking Madame Tussaud up and down, or once over as you may call it. As he is leaving he knows he will not come back.

Three hundred dollars really! Not a chance. There are plenty of these women up and down this street, most charge fifty bucks for a…and then he stops, standing in front of a cash machine. Enters his card, punches in his code and withdraws three hundred dollars, then stands back from the machine, the cash in his hand. What am I doing? Flash in his mind of his kind Grandfather’s face, another deep menacing feeling in his gut: something is wrong. He knows something is wrong. He turns around and heads back to Madame Tussaud’s. When he returns the neon sign is out and the door is open. He walks down the stairs into a darkened lounge room, sees candle lights at the end of the hall and shuts the door behind himself.
“Madame?” he calls out (pronouncing it Mad-am instead of Ma-darm), no answer. He walk down the hallway, past things only his imagination can create hanging on the wall and along the floor, little ingots and creatures seemingly dancing in the flickering candle light. “Madame?” he calls again, hears a faint high-voiced whisper return to his ear. At the end of the hall a room opens up like a womb, open and lit, a round table in the centre with Madame Tussuad with her back to him presiding over an altar of sorts with bottles of alcohol, candles, trinkets, idols and statues. She is spreading a thin ash over the pieces and chanting something in a quiet deep breathy voice, every now and then spitting mouthfuls of alcohol out on one of the statues. Simon takes a seat and puts the money on the table.
“Pleassssse…put that money on the floorrrrrr” seethes Madame Tussuad, “get it offffff…the table” she slurs, exhaling deeply afterwards. Simon quickly picks up the bundle of twenty’s and puts it on the carpet.
“Sorry…” he whispers.
“Ssssimon listennnnn….” she releases, turning around to reveal her face. Simon instantly notices she has changed, her face, her posture, her hair, everything different. He waits, transfixed.
“Jack, jacky boy, your old jack issssss…wasssss in the great war, yes?”
“Uhm yeah, yeah he was in world war two actually”
“Aaaahhh yessss, hahaahahaaa, I can see him now…..wuh!” stopping as she lets out a throttled gasp.
“What is it?!”
“Simon…I…” Madame says, putting both hands on the table and lowering her head.
“Simon I told you…I told you…”
“What? What is it tell me?!” he says, quickly desperate, reacting to what he is seeing.
“Okay, okay that’s enough” she says, slowly walking over to the wall and flicking on a light switch. The room is instantly flooded with a bright light, a normal overhead bulb changing the entire feeling of the room to one of normality and now absurdity.
“Jesus what the hell?” Simon says, feeling tricked.
“Simon, Simon, it’s ok, it’s ok. I have just, just seen what you wanted to know. It came so fast, I didn’t, I didn’t get a chance to, tell you….I mean, I know that it was….something you…wanted but should not have…pick up that money and I’ll let you decide.”
Simon gets the twenties off the floor and puts them back on the table, pushing them over toward Madame Tussuad.
“Tell me!”
“Simon, in the war, your Grandfather…your Grandfather was a paedophile…a rapist…he raped so many young girls all across Europe, again and again, village after village. He was beaten repeatedly by his captain and fellow infantrymen. But he didn’t stop. He kept raping and laughing and killing children the whole war. Simon, this is what I tell you. This is why I am here. This is why you came to me”
“It can’t be…can’t…”
“Simon, this is the truth”
Simon, sick, stands up, looks at this half witch half alive woman and turns and walks to the front door, leaving the money, leaving the candles and that smell and opening the door rushing up the stairs into the world. Feeling better when he sees the street, pavement, lights, trees in their little dirt patches, parked cars and some other people walking around laughing and holding each other up and they walk home from a hotel singing together. Yes! This, this life. In his mind flashes young girls in dresses. NO! In his mind the flash of a young girl smiling then the flash of tits and shaved pussies he’d seen on the internet. NO! Not again nonono NO! Fuck. He starts walking, head down, gets a cigarette out, lights it and draws down hard, hard so it hurts the throat and lung, hard so he feels something going in and out, to focus on. Breathes out a thick plume into the night, flash on his cousin sitting on his lap and then some woman on screen bouncing up and down on a man’s dick going in and out of her ass. No!! Fuck shut up stop it. Too much porn he tells himself. That’s it too much porn. Can’t even go to his nephews party fuck fuck. Those six year old girls playing in the small inflatable pool and by reflex it is he was looking at their asses but he didn’t want to fuck them, god no! come on! but he did go home and toss off to asses, teenagers, he googled teenagers and tossed off into his own t-shirt. Fuck Christ! Should never have gone to Madame Tussaud’s tonight, no. NO! Simon walking home, mind racing, flashing, chain smoking.

Imagine if love wasn’t the main reason for existence?

Last modified on 2012-01-09 09:09:07 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

We’d wake up every day, wouldn’t we, we’d lie there looking at the wall or looking at the closely weaved cotton of the sheet. We’d look through the little crack in the blind to see what kind of day it is and that one by three centimetre view we’d judge our entire day. If it was all blue we’d think it was a lovely day. If it was grey we’d think it is a different kind of lovely day. The colour checks to see if it matches with what we are feeling. If we are ashamed and depressed then the little piece of bright light blue is cajoling, mocking. If we are ashamed and fearful and depressed the grey is a blessing, it says “go on, stay in, stay in and read. Don’t bother talking to anyone”. We’d do different things you and I but we’d eat something. We’d eventually go and let the piss stream out of us, eventually. The smell of our own urine comes stronger in the morning,  we are like doctors, we are checking ourselves, we are looking at our tongues together, pink is good. If we are scared and sick our tongues are white and our piss is dark and our face is sullen and your eyes are crying out to remember something, looking at someone in the mirror trying to remember to want. It’s not the same every morning, no! It is mostly the same every morning, some mornings you are not alone and you cannot smell anything but the coffee that someone else has made and that they have opened the blinds too early and it all feels different and fresh and alive and you piss quickly to get rid of it like an animal does, cover it up. Brush your teeth the same way still staring at yourself, your worried look, your rushed worried look, your purposeful look. Body Maintenance: Not Dead. It doesn’t matter about the ‘sky’. We’re just sitting together with hot coffee and talking about, oh, what was it? I think I said I have to brush my teeth again and you smiled, sorry, they smiled, but not for any reason, but something happened the night before, something…we don’t know anymore because it is not something we want to remember. Just the morning, that different morning where everything was more than usual, and fast and light. We don’t always start like this. In the morning. It’s very much in the afternoon at our desks too when we are sitting there, looking at all the little things on the desk surrounding a luminous flat screen. We are still checking the sky to see what it wants us to do, we are still letting the day go on, we are still pissing in the afternoon, clear, clean, empty urine. There’s nothing we forgot. We wouldn’t be able to work right away, not for a little while. Oh I guess other people would talk to us, wouldn’t they? Asking mainly. We’d have to look at them together and smile perhaps and talk. Answer mainly. Answer them right away. I would even last three days like that sometimes. Three whole days of waking up and answering questions and looking at my eyes and pissing and eating like that. Looking at the sky to see what it was supposed to be like today. Sometimes we’d listen out especially well, there’d been a time together and we heard so well, so clear. We weren’t alone then, in a small room, the sky was bright blue and then sun was the lightest clean white on the carpet, on my leg. Like a perfect day. We’ll be out of there soon, outside, alone. We’d wake up like that again, with coffee and the blinds drawn to wake me up so I can have a shower in time to get the train you’d say. Mostly you’d get up first like that and make the coffee. I remember. I didn’t forget you. Sometimes five days goes by like this.

Jonah and the Whale

Last modified on 2011-11-24 13:57:35 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Jonah’s older brother was mean. Mean like when they were kids, Jonah eight, Mark ten, they had baths together still and even though Jonah would cry and cry and yell ‘no’ their would put them in the bath and close the door to the bathroom. Now, as we know bathrooms echo a lot. They are probably the only room in the house that shouldn’t echo, really, but there we have it, we’ve made the most embarrassing, bodily function-centric, gross room the most cacophonous vestibule for us poor we-don’t-want-to-be-animals-animals[1]. So locked in that chamber Mark would begin at first pushing the bathwater back and forth in a tidal wave, just for fun at first but greater and greater until the water caused Jonah to move about and for great amounts of water to be displaced. Jonah hated both aspects, the mess and the fact he was not in control of his small body rocking back and forth in the bathwater[2]. Tossed about with Mark laughing, he felt sick and alone and his crying out was over-shouted by Marks fun yells, as if the two brothers were having fun together, playing, having bath-time fun with games and splashing and all of that. After some of this, and not every night but often enough, mark would stand up and start pissing on Jonah, in his face as much as possible and Jonah would try to avoid it under the little water left in the bathtub. Coming up for air like a whale he would just get the rest of the piss stream in his mouth, tasting his brothers piss and trying to breathe, not really drowning properly but no really able to breathe properly either. When Mark had finished pissing on his bother, and had nothing left like that, he’d soap himself all over, throw Jonah the soap and fill the tub up with more water. Just hot water. Jonah would try and turn it off but Mark would hold his hand under the hot water coming out and Jonah would cry out and Mark would yell “Muuum…..Muuuuum” and she’d come in and see the mess, the water, the hot water pouring out and set it all right, as in, get Mark out and hand him his towel so he’d leave and close the door and the mother would wash Jonah properly in the small amount of three inch hot as hell water and Jonah would give up, his legs as he knelt there burning in the hot hot water and his mouth full of salty tasting piss his brother pissed into his mouth almost three or more times a week, more and more as time went on.

Sitting in his room drawing a lot, Jonah, 11 years old, drew scenes from the bible, Exodus, Job, New Testament Mathew Mark Luke and John stuff (it’s all the same). Drawing Moses with his staff commanding the Israelites, commanding God’s punishment upon the Egyptians. Drawing the boils on the skin, drawing the fire coming down on them, drawing really drawing with a red pen a lot the fires and the burning dead of those who opposed God’s chosen. In Jonah’s class he heard the story of Jonah and the Whale, imagining himself getting stuck in the belly of a whale, praying in there, waiting in there.  His teacher put on an animated video of Jonah in the whale; making a little room for himself and staying in there, talking to the whale and the whale answering back apologetically and eventually releasing him. Mark is like the pestilence, coming in, pushing all his work to the floor, pulling him over onto his back and hurting him really bad by twisting his arms and legs together and saying things like “you love god now?” and “mum doesn’t love you because you are so weak” and as Jonah calls to his mum and nothing happens Jonah starts praying like he has been told and actually says the words of the lord’s prayer out of his mouth which makes Mark hurt him more trying to get him to stop saying that stuff.

In the family home there now lived Jonah, his Mother and Father. Mark was gone, living by himself in some house with a few friends. No one had heard or seen Mark in over a year. Jonah was happy and free and not scared for the first time in his whole life. He heard his mother worry about Mark and his Father console her but he was happy that this person was gone.

The local church was, not really a church thing per se that he had been brought in, more like a hall thing with a whole bunch of people that seemed normal and cool and happy and god-loving. Jonah liked these people, their openness, their honesty, their acceptance of the words he said and the other words they had that added to what he said. He said “yes!,…,yes!” a lot at the end of their sentences, sat listening to the preachers talking about a god they believed in and he cross-referenced what they were saying with all the stuff he had read. It didn’t make sense a lot of the time, sometimes they were talking about things that did not match with what he read written in the bible. A few times he said to them things like “but really do you believe that?” and they always pretty much said ‘yes’ and he quoted other bits; “passages” they corrected him and “um yes” he said and went on and told them the other ‘passages’ and they were solemn faced and said things like “that was the old testament” and “that is not really god” but Jonah knew it was, that was god, that was really god, in the bible and they were talking about the things that sounded good, just good and that was when he didn’t go back anymore[3].

Working was, of course, unreal at all times. No one knew of the soul inside, they were all smiling and busy and talking in words like “fiscal year” and “debt recovery” and “final transaction”. Jonah, surrounded n these concepts and words was sick, at lunch he rode his bike far away from the office where he was working in customer service at age 22 to a lake, on the edge of the lake he would cry, for himself mainly and he felt bad about that and then praying, started crying then for the human faces he saw every day. The sales reps, the older lady desperate to keep her job, the sexual young women smiling and flirting for money, the male managers gross, tucked into their business suits and moving about with papers in their hands, half smiling, going in rooms, small rooms, talking and laughing and not doing anything, just talking and laughing and staying late doing it. Jonah’s life was empty in purpose but he prayed every night for his brother Mark; that he would come back and be redeemed[4].

Uncomfortable place, but of course, they had expected that, Jonah and his girlfriend. Jonah had wanted to impress her by going to what he thought was a fancy restaurant. She said “wow, this is amazing” and they had only sat down and had napkins placed on their laps. Jonah looked at the prices on the menu and felt  a lump in his throat because it was really expensive and it seemed sacrilegious and he didn’t want her to think he was shallow like this, like he bought food so expensively. “You now, this is….this is..”
“I know” she says “this is too much. Let’s just hare an entre and a main, really, it’s ok”
“No, no it’s not the money it’s the…waste…oh, sorry…not a good date thing to say” and he is blushing and shy and trying to laugh and express how he really feels, who his is.
“I agree Jonah, its to much.”
“It’s ….oh god, it’s…”
“Shhhh. It’s ok Jonah, really” and they sit and order one entre and one dish and she orders a glass of wine and he smiles at this and orders a coke.

“What the fuck you been up to?” Mark says, Christmas lunch, getting there late, bringing his wife and three kids in the door while the rest of the extended family are already on the lounges and around the place, on the floor. Mark’s father stands up and says “Mark, don’t you talk like that today” and Mark says “Calm down old man, we’re all adults here and these kids, Christ, they wouldn’t know what the hell is going on anyway, would you, you little cockheads?”. The kids don’t even look at him, everyone else looks at everyone else in some way or another. Jonah gets up and walk over to his brother. “Mark, how are you?”. “Good as shit mate. Fuck look at you, you been working out?” ‘Yeah I have been a bit Mark. Good to see you”. “Shit yeah man you look fucking good. Hey, you met my latest bird? Hey, Stacey, check this shit out, my little bother is cut as fuck…hey Mum, get me a beer, huh”. “Mark, hey, come on now, this is Christmas, you can’t keep going on like that?”. “Huh. Jonah come on, what the fuck are you talking about?” “Mark, come on…there’s kids here, man:”. ‘Kids? Whose kids? Oh shit look at them. Dumb little cunts haha. Fucking cunts haha right?” “Mark!” his mother says, shuts him up. There’re all sort of sit downs in various spaces and getting drinks in their hands, sip them. Jonah looks at Mark like he’s waiting. “You want to say something Jon-ah? Huh?”. “No Mark”.

In ward E4, bed 103 Jonah lies watching TV, has three channels to pick because two stations haven’t signed the proper copyright agreements that allow patients in hospitals to watch TV shows. The ultimate copyright law that comes down to affect people that have absolutely no intention of breaking mere copyright laws. But here in an establishment it applies en masse. Been there two weeks, had his blood cleaned four times, had his head scanned by fMri three times, had his pancreas and a kidney removed, the fucking thing cancer it is, moving around being a prick and taking bits and pieces here and there. Jonah has told his wife to keep the kids way until he is looking better. Jonah’s Dad came by out of nowhere and was crying too much about losing a son before he was dead himself. Jonah couldn’t say anything because that was right. You shouldn’t die before your father. What could he say. Another week, he spoke to his wife on his iPhone she bought him. He mainly payed games on his iPhone really, a good thing to have when you are dying of a cancer doctors can’t find. In the pieces they cutting away, Jonah imagines himself a half human which is living with almost half his organs and big chunks of flesh missing. He imagines a leg or arm or both missing. One morning when he wakes up Mark is there, sitting there reading a newspaper. Jonah closes his eyes and Mark doesn’t see him wake up. He holds his eyes closed for a few minutes, starts counting up from one, gets to two hundred, keeps counting, trying hard to count higher and higher and, even though this is the last days of his life, would rather count up and up the numerical scale rather than talk to Mark. Seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty seven he gets to.

Love Teaching Living Devil Science

Last modified on 2011-11-17 13:24:45 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Go along with it:

I hold your hand and you thrilled with conviction you are, so long before I knew that any true urge was basically false or pretend, and I didn’t know then you were pretending, I thought you were magical and amazing and holding your hand was as if I was learning and getting to know something, getting let in on something which really is what we all want and I know now that is what your power is and after all these years I still think you have this power and at any time can come and take my hand again.

The point of living:

There are those of us chosen, born, made to teach (gross, as if there is any way we can actually talk or in any other way effect all these people oh dear god, really! They don’t listen, they all do their own thing and they love ‘their own thing’ and we have to get into their ‘thing’ thing and from the inside turn them over and over and tell them the truth and oh god my god it’s so hard and long and getting worse over time, I mean, these days sure I am still loved but the window is closing and pretty soon I’m going to have to scream “fuck you, kill people, fuck school” in order to have any kind of coherent respect influence) so you have to get your ass equipped like angels to get these morons smarter, right, that’s the goal. So we can’t fake it, we can’t wear the clothes and ‘blend in’ because these kids sniff that shit pile from a mile away…they know more about psychographic marketing then anyone…they could analyse how shit house the latest campaign is top to bottom. They like what they like. Full fucking stop.

Didn’t you know:

The time comes for your body to be put into the ground or burnt and displaced hence forth in verdant fields of green or else in concrete holes, wherever in which you wish to be desecrated/consecrated. That other time when you, so troubled, so selfish, so self-fucking-centred you…you decide you have to do it for yourself, you have to do it from nothing. It is open and clear, there is no reason to do anything, you have to have a reason, you have to make it up, you have to make it up and believe it and then you have to do it and go on doing it as if you actually really believe it and then say “this is who I am” and that voice inside then says “this is bullshit!”, “this is all an act!”, “I am not this thing!”, “I am not this person”…but you have created this person, you are the only one, you are alone and you have created this person and when you look around all you see is yourself reflected in the eyes and minds of others and how they treat you and you hate them as much as you hate yourself for having/letting them see you like this and the bottom of the pit stuff is where you think you can’t get out, escape, change yourself that you hate and so after fifteen fucking years you are, you really are that external thing, that created acting false thing. By god how hard and disgusting is it to keep living like this: alone, alone on the inside with all these smiling faces who ‘know’ you or at least have learned how to know you in the way you have wanted to be known, because what, because it was easier for you to navigate life being this invented digestible version? This handle-able product, this known entity…this…thing that you are, this shell, this approachable malleable, understood, talkative all-round proper clear cohesive unit thing that you are now?

What devils want:

They give you something, its what you want, it’s a certain kind of, I don’t know, power? No too much (because hey look at you, you are still wearing clothes); but it’s the people. The people: Smiling when they meet you, wanting to be around you, wanting you tell that story or do this thing. And of course you aren’t stupid enough to not realise you are being either a clown or an entertainer, but what it gets you is far more than an entertainer or clown would get. You get; people, money, security, trust, sex, desire, tears and so many other human things. It just comes and sits on your lap and you think ‘why is this happening?’ and then you remember. And then it’s ‘oh, fuck…did I make a deal…did I say the word ‘yes’? Did I say it by not saying it? What then now what do I owe, if anything? If I was so flippant to not care then what happens now?’. Stuff like that. You become scared. And then it’s The Oath to Love.

The scientist speaks:

The room was too small, the walls were so close, making it hard to breath in or out. In was fine, he could fill his lungs and hold it, feeling large, and then after holding his breathe for thirty seconds breathe it out and feel empty, feel as though there is a space available. Then again, looking around the walls, there and there and the roof just there again. He isn’t a tall man, isn’t an obese man, he is a small man sitting in a room feeling trapped and finding it very hard or at least finding the only thing he can do is breathe. Deeply in and slowly out. Closing his eyes and doing this over and over. Seeing the stars and the bright fireworks behind those closed eyes and feeling the chest expand and contract. Feeling the human body taking in air and letting out air. Sitting and breathing trapped in the room he lives in. A glass of water with ice next to him. The ice making popping sounds as it changes. He breathes in again because in this world you live in you breathe and live and drink water like life like breathing. He lets it our feeling the lungs like bags empty out, the body emptying and closing. He drinks cold iced water. The ice slinks and makes a life affirming sound as it pushes its way towards his lips and then slinks back down n the glass. His breathe is shorter and the cold water cools his throat and gut and the lungs now take in more air and they fill up. His legs are short, his arms are short, he breathe deeply and holds the breathe again, arches his back to push the lungs to capacity, spits out a little air as he forces the engorged lungs to their limit and spits out the sir bit by bit through his nose and then mouth. Hunching over the expel all of the air the man is not a large man, he is on a holiday. The room is small and has the essence of ;life. The things you must need. An empty fridge he wanted to put food in but of course he has been sitting in this room watching television and breathing. His legs are skinny and his arms are short and his neck hurts a lot and this time he strains his neck back over the bed waiting for it to crack, thrashes his head left and right and opens and closes his jaw full of effort. Tomorrow he has to talk about stem cell research and how we need to create these blastocysts in order to cure cancer and spinal cord injury. He will say things that will be argued against on the newspaper. The bar fridge has three beers, a mini bottle of wine, a bottle of water and a juice. He drinks a beer and writes it down on the card that you write down what you had from the mini bar on. He opens the nuts on the table and writes it down. He stands up straight and tries to touch the ceiling and breathes in hard and hold his breathe reaching up with his toes to try and touch the roof and collapse on the bed exhaling and sore. The beer is cold, he takes out his phone, looks at it, drinks more beer. The presenter takes out his notes and lies them on the bed, looking at the room, a movie, he is a man in a room preparing for a presentation. He is a man in a room who is trying to breathe. He is a man in a room who will drink the mini bar. He is a man in a room who now walks back and forth in only ten steps saying

“Today we discover a truth, a truth we all know but have been unable to voice, I want to voice this now. And I will tell you there is something deep inside of me that comes from, it comes from perhaps my upbringing. And I can tell you that it makes me feel sick, in some ways, to create, to play with these forms, these little forms of a life. I have experimented on rats, lab rats, I have seen  them squirm in fear or thrash in pain. I have attached electrodes to the exposed brains of primates, I have dissected dead or dying bodies of every living animal including human. I have seen them twitch, I have seen them react. But today I am talking to you about the ideal subject. The immoral yet moral subject. The unformed human, the small creature we want to get our hands on”

He sips the rest of the beer and throws this draft into the hotel room’s provided small waste paper basket. He lies face down on the bed and pulls his arms up over his body and interlaces the fingers and stretches. There is a space enough to live in, it is paid for by the university. He pulls his socks off and throws them over near his bags. He has to pack it all up in the morning. Tomorrow he will leave and take all his bags and check out and take his bags to a small room annexed to an auditorium and tell all those people what he thinks. What he has been paid to say. He is paid to say what he thinks. He draws in a another long breathe and tries to hold it as long as he can. In his mind the medical reasons, the spiritual reasons, the kind on personal in-the-body sense stuff of self healing. The feeling that making unborn-not-really-babies-yet things to dissect, the feeling that making embryos to extract dna from, the feeling inside that tells him he is wrong, he is evil, he is disgusting. His chest is full of air, quitting smoking three years ago is working, the air coming in pure and full.

Shopping Excursion, bus 120.

Last modified on 2011-11-14 12:46:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I am perhaps forty five or nearly fifty. You know I don’t remember? I know what it is generally but ever since my wife left me about five (eight?) years ago it has never been something I need to keep track of. Funny that. How life is marked by birthdays and father’s days and christmas and children’s birthdays. How they make you acknowledge it, another year, cards that tell you, pictures. I tell you one thing is that in the morning I see a face I know, hair getting wispier and wispier, man, and I smoke cigarettes again, now the god damned bathroom mirror; me and my face, my old whispering hair flying out from my head like a madman. Ha! And that cigarette on my lips man, I feel like a kid again, looking like death though really. God the mornings, the same mornings. Take a shower, iron my clothes, smoke a cigarette, feed the cat, put on my pants and slip my shirt on and do this dip thing to get my shirt into my pants, move around a bit, feeling so alone when I do this though, really, like a dance move, like a little doot da doot to get into my normal attire. Pull the belt closed, adjust the shirt, raise my arms up to pull a bit of the shirt out, look in the mirror to see how its looks and of course it’s the same every time. I fill my pockets up with wallet keys lighter cigarettes handkerchief coins phone and this little piece of coloured paper my daughter made me and she said “dad keep it with you” so I do. Now it’s barely held together, the folds on the corners have been worn away so that when I unfold it there are holes in the places where the corners are but I can still read it and see the picture she drew which, you know, is enough for me. At least for now and for the last three months since I’ve seen her. Yeah I know I know she’ll be around again soon, in a few weeks but man it’s been a while and this little thing, you know, it keeps me going. I know I know. Today, no, recently, though I’ve met this woman and she’s invited me on a shopping junket, it’s on a bus with a whole lot of other people and we’re going to hit all the warehouse sales and factory outlets and stuff for twenty bucks each but really I am going to see her and hang out with her and there’s a lunch in there somewhere so we are going to have lunch at Birkenhead Point which is like a place over the water near Balmain so we are going there with a bunch of her friends to shop and have lunch. It starts at eight am so that’s why, you know, I am getting ready on a Saturday to go out, just get out of my place. I need to put a load of food in my dog’s tray and some in my cat’s tray and put some seed out the back for the birds and half a handful in the dish under my budgie’s tray and there’s enough water there so I can get back later tonight. I’ve been running around so much my emphysema is playing up, man, so I have to stand over the sink and cough cough it out, fuck, breathe in…out…in, you know how it feels? And suck in that air and spit out that lung shit, man, at least I did this before I left and fucking hell why did I run around like that? Stupid really when you’re about to go out on a date, but shit it’s hot out there. I light another cigarette after that because, because, I can do that, I can smoke a cigarette and it helps. Um… that’s what helps because soon I have to walk down to get on the bus. She said eight thirty onParramattaroad. So early! I leave then, closing the door with the click of one lock and then turning the deadlock only my key will close.

Standing on the pavement smoking a cigarette, an old woman who I see almost everyday sitting there. She usually sits as a bus comes, people get in it and it leaves and she sits there. There is no differently destined bus coming, there is no other bus for this stop. I am never sure what she is doing there, perhaps she is hours early for some other pick up and she prefers waiting. Or worse perhaps she has nowhere to go and she sits there, sits there watching the cars and buses whiz by. It’s not a glamorous or lovely piece of road, this bus stop. It is very bad, very polluted, un-picturesque. Still, her in her make up, with her bag, newish clothes, she is there waiting every morning. The bus coming showing it’s purpose not so openly, so partially in fact that even Roe (that’s her name) stands up and take  few feeble steps forward towards the edge of the bus shelter.
“Are you going on the shopping trip?” I ask, normally, bending over to appear polite.
“Huh? No no no. I’m off to the city”
“Ok well, this is the shopping bus. We’re…never mind. Not your bus ok?”
“uh, ok” she says, slinking off in a shuffling side step, pulling her dress and bags closer together to get away from me. I step away from her and up the stairs onto the coach, the cold air conditioning immediately confronting. I scan the faces, half faces, people behind their seat and see the half-head of Justine I have known for the last few months. I walk down the aisle as the bus hisses the door closes, lifts and groans off along Parramattaroad. It helps me move down the aisle closer to Justine. “Wow you made it” she says, smiling at me and then to the woman sitting beside her. I feel young straight away, these woman are fat and wearing casual thin cotton clothes, comfort wear, I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-how-I-look wear. Justine too, a thin t-shirt with way too obvious underneath brazier. I am overdressed, shirt and pants, but, it seems they like this, they are all smiling, bad yellow teeth, big cheap prescription glasses, no make up, no pizzazz, just showered fat eternal housewife women wearing the most comfortable clothes they have. “Yep here I am. Good to see you Justine.” She gestures for me to sit down opposite her in the aisle. It means squeezing in next to some other woman who is staring out the window and already clutching a plastic bag full of clothes. She shifts her bag over and continues looking out the window. Justine lets me in with “that’s Margret, she just spent fifty dollars on bras, we were just at the Berlei factory this morning”. “Oh ok” I say, not sure how this makes her rudeness acceptable. “Thanks for coming” she says, leaning over and touching my hand. “No, I look forward to it. There’s men’s stuff coming up right? Not just bags of bras…” and she laughs and we sit there as the bus moves on and on. She talks to her friend and the woman next to me looks out her window.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the third stop on our shopping excursion today, the Slazenger, Bonds andRiofactory outlet, in Sydenham. I’ve got you down for a thirty five minutes stop over so please, if you could alight I’ll be moving on in approximately forty minutes to the next stop in Alexandria. Don’t spend too much ladies it’s along day ahead, alright?”. They all stand up, I get up early to help Justine, she hasn’t bought anything yet so she is ok and turns back to her friends to say something and they laugh. Instantly I regret coming along. I walk slowly down the aisle with the rest of them, all talking and chattering and telling about what they want to buy and for whom. It’s as if their life has no other purpose than to feed and clothe those they are now obliged to care about and me, being basically alone except for seeing my daughter once or twice a month, am some kind of playboy spendthrift tight-ass weirdo (if that make sense) for tagging along or even being here. “Justine” I say, outside of the bus now, waiting for them all to get each other down I think of course that I should be doing that but the driver is and so it must be a part of his day to day, this bus driving shopping trip type of thing; paid for it. “Justine” I say again for no reason, looking about at the twenty or so women mingling around waiting to go in to the outlet. “Go in ladies!” I say, like herding sheep really. The driver says “this is it” and that seems to be enough to get them moving, all wearing individual name tag lanyards written in blue marker. Why would they need to know each others’ names? Inside, the all disperse in their familiar friend groups or two or threes, sizing up clothes, telling stories about who would suit certain things, barely shopping for themselves, instead clothing unknown families and nephews and nieces, each time its another story about who needs what more and how they should’ve talked to so and so to get some clothes hand-me-down but really they do need new ‘x’ or whatever thing they are holding to tell the story in the first place. The sales people are sitting there behind the counter talking too, not caring, this may be the second or third bus of a day of multiple buses they’ll have to process. I wander around, look at the measly men’s section, find a few t-shirts that I may want, decide I don’t need, look over to see Justine talking loudly and laughing with her friends in the bra section. Best to not go over there. Not into the bra and panties section just yet. What am I going to say, that I like something? I’d like her naked, that’s what I can say. That I haven’t seen a woman naked in five years? Hat they don’t want to hear. I am alone, down the aisles, at the end of the rows of men’s is the kids section. I turn away, look back at the reams of men underwear and t-shirts and sports wear. Justine appears and pits her hand on my shoulder with “anything you like?”.
“Uh, no, not really, yet…” and we walk into the kids section, she slips her hand in mine.
“Wow look at this” I say, pulling a small one-piece bodice from the shelf “do you remember?” I ask, holding the small thirty centimetre top to toe thing in on the coat hanger. “What? Do I remember having kids…Ron of course I do” “Yeah, remember how little they were” and I am smiling, probably too much. Justine turns and pulls an even smaller pair or socks from the rack “oooohh those feet, those tiny feet!” “Yeah…wow” and I bring another small piece over with me and we compare sizes, touching the places where our little children’s feet and hands would’ve gone, remembering together what it feels like when they are like that, those little things that we had once. “You know my daughter, she’s, well she’s fourteen now and, I’m going to take her to the gold coast in a few months…she, she wants to go with me. Just her and me. A holiday together after, ha well…it’s going to be great”. “That’s great Ron really, really great for you” “Yeah, I know…and…what I mean is that, it would be ok, I mean, realty great as well if you wanted to come as well, and, you could bring Jeremy too, I mean, they are about the same age and they could, you know, go and have fun and we could just, well, have a holiday and…I don’t know… I was just thinking about it that’s all”. “Ron! Really?! Oh wow, I mean, no really that would be great it’s just that, um, it’s…it’s not that easy to just say ‘ok, I’ll go toQueensland’ or wherever it is, you know. But hey, hey, look at me. Ron, I am going to say yes to you, okay? I am going to say I want to do that with you, ok? So, yes! That would be wonderful!” “Wow ok, really? Wow! OK, um, guess what…I’m going to go and book all that now ok? You don’t have to worry about anything. Consider it booked. Ha-ha! No, seriously, tell me if you don’t want to though ok? But cool. Hey, I’m glad I came on this shopping thing!”

It’s different back on the bus, sitting next to Justine, holding her hand, smelling her perfume, listening to all the other women talking and talking and mentioning name after name of their cousins and children and their children’s friends and children of children…it all fades away into a blur of names and crap and repetitive wishes for marriage. I lean over to Justine and kiss her on the cheek, she turns back smiling and says “what was that for” and I say “nothing” and she smiles, goes back to looking out the window, still has her hand in mine. She is so beautiful, a lost mother broken by her man. I am getting older and have the same problem. We can talk about that but not on this bus. This bus is taking us to three more places where we will all get off and go on shopping and talking and breathing and eating. A bus full of pigs getting pointed at troughs. I don’t tell Justine that, I just get off each stop, smoke a cigarette, find a coffee and go to the toilet. We do this over and over, at least three more times. Later on, after all this in and out and shopping, the bus drops me off near me home, I tell Justine I’ll call her, tell her I’ll see her and her son for lunch like I promised. She smiles, kisses me and says “You should have bought something you tight ass” and I say something bad about spending it on her or similar and slink off the bus, light a cigarette and walk away, hoping that feeling last as long as possible.

I finish a bottle of wine, open another one, drink a new glass. It’s late, I know, I have to work in the morning, Christ why do I do it like this. The day was so lovely. Justine, so lovely, her hair, her face. She actually wants to see me, she wants to go to diner with me and my daughter and her son. Man can you imagine that? I light another cigarette, blow it out in to roof, watch the light swing a little bit under the breathe of the smoke. My daughter isn’t here. I am here. Justine isn’t here, her son is tucked up in bed in her house. She got the house, of course. Like my ex-wife the bitch got the god damned fucking house. And here I sit, dreaming of Justine, in her house, probably fucked some other guy over to get that fucking place, right? Fucking hell man. I pour the rest of the bottle into my glass, it gets almost near the top. Good. Good! Fucking hell man here I am right, no daughter anymore, my beautiful girl, no woman, she’s off in her house she raped from some man. No nobody. Just me and my day and my drink and cigarettes. Oh god damn. I light a cigarette and do the thing I hate. I call her:
ring ring
ring ring
ring ring
ring ring
ring ring
ring reing
“Yello?”
“Kate? It’s your dad”
“Dad! Jesus how are you?”
“Kate, come on, Kate. You know how I am”
“What? Dad…are you drunk?”
“Drunk? No. Me? Your dad? Come on….”
“Yeah right, so, you are just, calling me at, what, one in the morning for no reason right”
“No reason! No really Kate, really, the reason is, that, I wanted to invite you for lunch….yes…with my new girlfriend…”
“Really? Wow cool dad, well, yeah sure I’ll go to lunch….you’re paying right,….hahahaa”
“Of course I’m paying what did I say? Lunch, with you and me and my new girlfriend”
“OK dad sure whatever you say. You tell me where to be ok? Love you Dad”
“Yeah ok…love you too darling”

MENTAL HYPERTENSION: IN WHICH YOU ARE YOU AS MUCH AS YOU WANT TO BE YOU OR CAN BE YOU OR ARE ACTUALLY REALLY YOU

Last modified on 2011-11-11 01:04:58 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

No one likes You. They like the You you present to them. Hell, even You don’t like you[1].

This is not going to be a depressing diatribe trying to state “no one understands me” or “if only they knew” or anything Sylvia Plath-ish at all. Really what it is is that these days there is a need to create an ‘other’ to deal with the day in day out of life, to handle the horrific falsities, transgressions and incongruence of modern life that would otherwise forbid you (the actual real You) from making any kind if nine to five money at all. These shadow monstrosities are perpetrated by humans (who are also pretending, acting, behaving) along with your own ‘other’ self and then, much more problematically, your ‘other’ self is to then go on and re-perpetrate atrocities onto other (hopefully also pretending) non-human ‘other’ types. The major problem with relying on us all to be on the same page with this terrible falsity is that not everyone is on the same page, some of us are actually really real (Them) humans and they are taking these blows quite personally and doing these horrible acts quite honestly. They are not pretending, this is their real actual self. They really think and feel the things they say out of their mouth and behind their eyes when you see them crushed a little or sad or depressed or worried about their position or the light in their eyes when they are rewarded for a mediocre achievement. All real. Sometimes the ‘you’ that they present is actually their real Them. The problem is that their reality is derived from the expectations of society, from role and behaviour. Yet, and here’s where it gets weird, that even though there are these precepts, and one could say clearly observable, recognisable and understood observable clichés, the majority actually strive to mimic and what’s more become these expected invented paid for humans, and even try hard to achieve the fulfilment of this goal by ticking every box that would make the, admittedly, poor assumption truer and truer as time goes on. Yet they continue in their endeavour to achieve the fulfilment of a ridiculed socio economic version of greatness that in their mind was assigned to them (and that they deserve). Class structure not withstanding, this self-perpetuating phenomena means that if you are within it you cannot see it, and, if you are criticised for being ‘within’ it, your innate sense of protection of it makes you forcibly sink deeper within as if the mere, actual honest helpful observation of the fact could make it worse (an affront/attack). I could say for example “do you really think you should give your four year old coca cola?” and they would say “fuck off cunt” which would actually in some twisted way in their minds confirm that giving coca cola to their kid is good because they would never want their kid to turn into a ‘cunt’ like I am for pointing that out. Here’s the conundrum, do they really think that or are they innately jealous of my schooling and advantages in life and, in being violently aggressive, show that they want their son/daughter to get out of the “shit” life they have?

Conundrum 1: do they think they have a shit life even thought they say all the time “out life is shit”?
Conundrum 2: do they want their child to have better schooling than they did i.e. do they admit that their schooling was bad?
Conundrum 3: do they admit that they do not have the means to raise a child ‘ideally’
Conundrum 4: do children who haven’t been to kindergarten understand ‘cunt’ ‘shit’ ‘fuck’ ‘asshole’?

What we have now is people striving to achieve the fulfilment of the false Them, mainly in order to gain financial rewards or any mix of power, responsibility or control (money basically, let’s face it). Trying to make it work, assembling a demi-god to aspire to, an epitome of what they know (at the start of this process) to be a false version of themselves or that this created person should want to be (outside of their own instinctive and initial values and beliefs, or worse, it then of course becomes their values and beliefs, replaces the original ingénue). Then, of course, judging themselves against this created-for-the-sake-of-getting-SOMETHING ‘straw man’ persona; am I behaving in accordance to the purposed entity I have created, and, how much of my real self, my reflection, my emotional response, is hindering my progression…that is, how much of my humanity (remember before the You you) is willing to die, be left behind or never existed in the first place. Now you may think this whole concept of You is laughable. When, for instance I ask; what about you? The only answer possible can be from the created You.

How do we now go with dualism? Namely: paid persona vs real persona. Mostly it’s fine, no one has a purpose, they post on facebook and twitter and everywhere because they are really the person they say they are, they really are one dimensional normal good proper society based controlled part-of-the-system types. Pejoratively there is a different kind of existent. Sure we are on the networks, sure we have jobs. Sure we are participating (because otherwise oh my god the world would be horrified or scared or curious to the degree that we may be reported for incongruent behaviour or more simply be de-integrated from the system! Luckily there is still a cultivation of admiration for outsiders as interesting or independent…) but the ways in which we do so are careful, sickeningly careful, even straight out false. In noticing the manufacture of a human and their instantaneous willingness to give away all semblance of ‘self’ to a process and procedure with real basic checks and follow ups and stalking and cross-checking, some have become naturally, um, suspicious? Jesus, yes! Suspicious. In the age of hyped schizophrenia and pervasive social media, we have forced well-thought, balance and aware humans to persist with a dual humanism. To create a hated twin. To live as that hated twin for certain times and in certain spaces.

Complete transparency is ok for those who are willing to be entirely, utterly and wholly (tautology aside) one dimensional. The breadth required for a working ‘person’ (remember, not really You) has grown to include all social engagements, all relationships, all family ties, all social movements full stop. Laying it all out, ‘becoming’ we will call it. It is known by many names within the world of laundered professionalism: achieving, progressing, promotion, growing etc[2]. The become the thing you are instructed to be, or, to become the thing that most benefits you financially, is to become a thing you have created, is to become the ideal that you have been paid to be externally. The ideal Person for the Job. Imagine spending hours honing your outwardly available persona in order to maximise the positive flow on effect that colleagues reading this so called ‘truth’ of your actual life just to get paid more or at least get more lee way in your nine to five day. The worse part is when you stop pretending or manipulating your supposed online persona, you start actually really being that. Another type of suicide, paid for this time, but worse than losing a real friend.

Modern Couple

Last modified on 2011-11-06 11:36:31 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

She bumps her can of coke into the back of a thin guy getting on to the train. Pushing against the people who are dressed and smell like they are ready to work eight hours, her and him, they don’t look like they are plausibly together, perhaps they think it too but there they are stuck together like that. Bound by an unseen thing, dependencies, clutching at each other for the very simple things that are needs. Is this so different from a successful neat clean union, is this more romantic, is this base need a proper strange strong reason to keep entwined? They smell like cigarettes already, wet clothes and stale cigarettes, the smell of old clothes that already smell like cigarettes and that usual smell of people who just have to smoke the cigarette right down to the butt seconds before getting on pubic transport. The threat of being imprisoned within public transport with its smoking restrictions is so hard to bear that in the outside world they must take every last type of freedom left and get that detested illegal cigarette in and out. When you have nothing these simple freedoms become everything. Your rights, your ability to choose, do what thou whilst. They sit there, staring, just staring at nothing and no one, open mouths. They have a backpack they seem to depend on. The guy goes straight to opening it and pulling out a jumper and reshuffling the contents and says something she doesn’t hear and she says “what” loudly, too loudly, open mouth and leans in and he says it right into her ear and she responds loudly again and he says something else right into her ear and goes back to the back. She says “yeah but that because we needed two fives remember that was the ten we had” and he ignores her and she says “remember?” then goes back to staring at nothing, mouth open. They are on a journey, they are starting a journey, they are together and going somewhere, he is still trying to be a man in control, panicked like a man on a mission, with tasks and responsibilities, she is trying to be damsel in distress with the crutch of a good man. They are lost souls struggling to regain the sentiment of the classic male female role of safety and purpose and life.

Two hours ago they woke up next to each other on a mattress in a corner of a room with two other mattresses one empty, the other with a half naked thin man covered in contusions with shoes on and a bunch of clothes next to his bed. They woke up again at the same time and looked at each other sober and waking up, the pains coming on straight away, the reality of their day flooding back. The child-like innocence of waking lasting only twenty seconds. Get up get dressed get out get money get back to Tom get some H. Get up first. He says something to her this morning that is new, not that he hasn’t said that type of thing every morning, or that she has cried at night saying the same thing but this morning he says it differently, he says “no more” and that’s all he says and he says something else “get dressed we are done. You know. We are done. Ok. Let’s get the fuck out of here” and she may be smiling but she doesn’t know because it hurts in her gut in her arms in her bones in her veins and her head and she may be smiling but she says ‘ok’ but she says it like a scream, like “yes!” but she can’t say that word. He is on his hands and knees pulling things from the floor into a backpack and she is trying to get her clothes on and the thin man with bruises doesn’t move. He goes over to the pile next to the half naked not moving bruised man and goes through his stuff and it is nothing but clothes and underwear and pieces of paper and nothing. “Fuck” he says for no reason or mainly because there is no money there and she is dressed now in jeans and a hoodie and sneakers with no socks and she is smoking half a cigarette she found there next to the bed. That’s all they do they have that and they walk down the stairs and out into the street and it’s daylight, around six in the morning and there are people and life and they are sick and in pain. They stand there a minute and he takes the cigarette from her and takes the last few drags. “Let’s go upstairs” he says and they do go back upstairs and sit back on the mattress. “Ok, let’s do this one last hit and we’ll go ok?” and she has heard it before but she doesn’t hear the promise of the plan, she just wants that shot now in the morning, the fact that they have something to shoot makes her fall in love with this guy straight away, just like that, this man who can manage things like two people. He pours the rest of the H into a blackened spoon (next to the mattress), puts a drop of water from a nearby bottle in and heats it up, drops a small piece of filter from a cigarette in, draws it all up into a fix and gets it ready. She holds his arm tight and he pumps his fist, pricks in the needle and starts injecting the light brown liquid. “Hey hey hey, stop” she says. He does and pulls it out, says “quick” and holds her bicep with his hand, “quick” he says again. She pumps her first twice and pricks the needle in “oh baby yess…come on” and she pulls the plunger back, the flash of blood, pushes it all the way in fast. “Damn baby you’re….haaaa…” and they relax and let it work in their body, no more headache.

They wake up too fast. It’s not enough, or not good enough. It’s all they have and it will do for now. He gets up slowly and kicks her and she rolls over and he says “get up lets go” and she does, after a while, after a few minutes after saying incoherent things and saying she wants a cigarette and a coke and he says  “I’ll get you a coke”. Back down the stairs again, a backpack, a cigarette lit, in the street, maybe seven am this time, same types of people, less pain, more people. They are walking, trudging really, sliding their feet together, holding onto one another. Walking it’s called. Walking. “Hey, hold this” he says, giving her the bag. “Where you going?” she yells too loudly, he swings around and says shhhh also too loudly. People look and keep moving, used to it, seen it or even them before. Same two, in the morning, will they ask me for money again? She sits down on the street, opens the bag and gets the cigarettes out, lights one, picks at her face and the black stuff under her nails. Spits. Feels bad about it, feels like she should be in a hole. Feels safe in the hole, starts dreaming about being away in a hole and alone, feels her eyes shutting and her body falling back, resting on the stone wall behind her, a shop front. She open her eyes to hear him yelling and pulling her arm, pulling her onto her feet and swinging the backpack over his shoulder. “Lets go Christ come on man lets get the fuck to the station we gotta go” “huh?” “come on babe I just got money from that newsagent there come on we gotta go come on” and they are running sort of now, he has his arm under her and he is like a hero with his heroine, running and bumping through the people and getting them out of there, getting them away from the police sounds and the yelling and that bad feeling inside. Getting them down the stairs to the train station, being proper and buying tickets, real full priced tickets, getting her under his arm again and down to the train. Standing there and giving her another cigarette and lighting one for each. Smoking and watching and holding each other up and he is telling her to be quiet and all the other people, moral people, working people are looking at them and he is resisting the urge to yell at them like he normally would because his heart is beating fast and she is staring at the train tracks.

No one is following, no one is calling out to stop them. He has about eight hundred bucks in his pocket, a backpack full of clothes, half a packet of cigarettes, no more H and a girl he needs to take care of. He leaves here there and buys two cans of coke from the machine. He opens one for her and she takes it and drinks. They both do. Breakfast. He lets himself breath and relax, drinks a lot more. The train comes at last. The longest two minutes. She has forgotten what she is doing, she has started to think about getting the next fix. She is staring at nothing. He is starting to think about the next fix. Where the hell can you get it from? Immediately the list of places comes in his mind. He wants to kill those places, kill that knowledge. She looks at him and the train pulls up and the workers gather closer to the doors getting their position. The workers pile in, they finish their cigarettes and flick them in between the train carriage onto the tracks, pushing in against the other passengers and make their way downstairs. They sit for a moment not doing anything. The train tries to take them away.

Neverending

Last modified on 2012-02-22 22:37:59 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The days are long and hot and sick and drawn out now. The days are long and dull and hot and sunny so that you have to squint in glasses or take your glasses off and close your eyes for a while and feel that heat, that dry heat on your face, on your eyelids so that when you open your eyes you can feel the heat wrapped up above your eyes in the compressed skin of your eyelids. The days are longer and hotter and your sweat is hot and salty and as annoying as flies so that when the flies do come and hit at your face not wanting to land just hit and tap at your cheek and forehead you wish that all you had were those little drops of sweat. The days are so hot you sit there waiting for that one drop of sweat to roll down and feel all the nerve endings cheer as that drop passes over them and carry that drop down to your chin where you wipe it off. When you wipe it off you look at your hand and then out over the plains, over the fields, over into the next lot where a small family sits, still, as still as you, wiping sweat and swatting flies. Nothing is moving these days; the heat; the death; the three dead cows out in the next field. Sitting under your carport, sitting in the shade while the sun heats up the ground, sitting watching the rest of the earth’s surface baking and dying, sitting watching the three dead cows you own that are dead and the other family watching you watching your cows watching their dog come out from the shade and go back in to the shade. The days are longer than ever, they days now are so long because there is nothing you can do, there is noting anyone can do but sit and watch their cows die or wait until a fly comes or a drop of sweat forms and travels down, tickling your face and neck and being absorbed into the neck of your shirt. There is nothing in this heat but a small family, a husband and wife and two children and their dog, the little boy still alive enough to run around, pick things up and put them down and try to get the dog to move around but they are just like flies moving around. There is nothing but the flies and the heat and sitting there looking at the sun keeping coming and staying and the dust bowls and the dust storms and the yellow grass and the dead livestock and the other livestock not dead yet and something like a heart or a soul urging those claves, silently urging them to get under a tree, go down to the creek and drink. The heat in your joints, under your arms, under your nails, in your hair, as you run the sweat through your hair with your hot nails it’s as if it thins your hair and you look at your fingers to see if any hair is caught in there. The long hot days of death and loose hair and nothing else to help this, this…coming after three months or six months or so a year. The sickness in the throat in the community in the day every day; another dead cow or calf or sheep or whatever animal it is this time. Just the cool night to keep the foxes coming to eat the free flesh of these newly dead meat bags, these unsaleable thin cattle, these leather bags with air and bone, these things that stand there like troopers in the sun, not moving, shallow breathing, eating weeds, prickly weeds that poison them, sickly small white flower buds that the bees don’t touch. The hot days with no pollen and no water and no livestock and no respite, no shade, just under a house, under a half leaved tree roots exposed through the drying dirt, under ground. My youngest boy, now a teenager, has the long drawn face of an old cattle man although he has never drawn cattle or mustered a single beast or killed a calf for food because instead he has dragged a newly dead mutton sheep up from the bottom field and we have skinned it and cooked it. My youngest boy has stopped being a boy because his father told him he must go down and drag that dead sheep up from the paddock and so he went and as he dragged that heavy sixty kilo dead body through the dust, the sound of the dead thing dragging in the dirt, that’s what did it, that’s what did that to this face. My youngest boy dragging a dead body up for us to eat because we couldn’t eat anything else and he knew he had to do it because his father asked him to do it son so he just went and did it and that is how it happens, when you do it like that, when you do it because your father tells you and in your heart it is that you have to do it so you do it and that is how it happens, that type of face. The heart aches to get up and go down and take those young cattle by the nose and lead them down to the creek, the heart doesn’t want to see them, when you are here and they have trodden like that, hard step after hard step, half fumbling like you never want big beasts to do, their stumbling hurts you in the most human way, so that when you get them there you want to see them drink it in, drink something but to have them meander around wondering why you bothered to lead them down this steep incline that used to be a river to nothing, then you can see that they are dead and you put them in a grave they can’t easily walk back out of. What we did was take that old trailer full of half a shed down to the quarry and tip that out into the pit and go back and get the other half but there was more and go and dump that in the quarry and go back and get the rest, fill the rest up into the trailer and have a beer and drive back down to the quarry twenty minutes drive and dump all that there into the pit too and in the end you couldn’t really see what we’d dumped and the birds came anyway, optimistic birds to go through the shed looking for something but there was nothing other than wood and rusted corrugated iron and nails. We drove back and Mike handed me a lit cigarette and I took one puff and let the rest just burn down.

A type of social

Last modified on 2011-10-27 04:51:15 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

It’s not a nice a place. I don’t believe a single word you say. I see your life. I see you living it. I see you write about it on facebook or on twitter or on your blog. It seems to be your life. It looks like a life. Your family is on it, your friends are on it. You reference things that happen. You reference them with nothing more than a reference. Everything, even the cancer that riddles your loved one’s body, pointed out, you are four squared at the hospital. You are sad. I don’t believe you are sad. I know you know you are supposed to be sad. I know you took a second to post that you are sad. I saw your friends comment on this post saying things that sound like condolences. It made your life seem more real. It made you feel better that your expected emotion and tags were responded to in yet another expected social networking way. Someone liked your post. You didn’t know how to feel about that oh wait yes you did, you thought because they liked that you were visiting your cancer ridden uncle that they were feeling compassion towards you, not that they liked that your uncle had cancer in his lung, kidney and liver and was most probably dying and that instead of calling or talking to you or even bothering to write a facebook message they did the thing where they click once to ‘like’ your “at the hospital visiting my dying uncle” status that meant they had sympathy for you. When he dies you can create a group event for the funeral. You can set the date and time and the text field what are you planning, because of course facebook thinks that all of life is a god damned party right, but this time, no, this time you want to invite people to a fucking funeral but hey, they don’t want this kind of morose shit on there, or else they think this kind of morose shit is best left off facebook, best left off this 600 million whatever people place…we don’t want this kind of “real life” people shit on here. We want parties and sluts and friends and university sluts and stuff right? For Christ sake why are you trying to use this site to organise a god damned funeral? Huh?
Well because you know we are all on here now. My mother is on here…my uncles are on here. We are all fucking on here and I need to tell them that uncle Tom has died and I saw him die and now I need to have everyone who loved him come and pay their respects and I want to tell them about it and I have been on here, sharing photos, sharing my life and now I want to share this and you make me fill out a form that says “what are you planning?”. OK, ok well I’ll fill it out. I’ll tell you what I am planning and it’s a fucking funeral, ok? A wake, ok?
I clicked ok after seeing that. The next thing: Select guests. Guests. Ok. Sure “Guests” it is. Christ.

There is a child that’s born. They call it Sebastian. They love their child, a boy. They take pictures and they make a profile for the boy. It is www.facebook.com/sebastian.fenwick and also www.twitter.com/sebfenwick. They want the rest of the family to see this loved child take his first steps, eat and spit and smile and sleep. They post everything on there. First words, the first time the little thing sits up. Inoculations. They write messages to their son, like “I love you so much my son” and “this is when I played with you in the backyard” and “daddy has to go to work and you didn’t want him to go” and tag all sorts of stuff on photos and videos they took on their phones. There is so much on there. So much love, so much for the grandparents and extended family (some overseas) and friends to see. So many comments and even the godparents are saying things like “hope to see you soon” and “bless you little one” and “wow so good to see you growing up” and the like. The boy grows, they post pictures and love and messages flow through. This boy unaware, growing under the microscope, other friends of friends commenting, the parents feeling that their child is loved and watched over. The boy grows more, in school, a child, learning, alphabet, colours, maths. More pictures, more videos. He is now facebook slash Sebastian. He has been tweeted for for six years. His parents let him tweet a little bit. He just tells the world things he likes. Things he ate. He even comments on photos of people he knows. His parents type for him. There is nothing that the world does not know, will not know about this young boy, growing up in this new world.

Do you have a membership card?
No.
Do you now about the benefits?
No.
Well you get 5% off every purchase after you spend $500 or more.
Ok.
Do you want a membership card?
No.

Oh wow darling wow, I mean wow. You are, like wow. I have seen pretty girls before but wow. You could be, like I mean, come on. OK, wow. Stop where are you going. Haha I know I sound stupid crazy, like lalalalalal crazy hahaha but no…no. Hey, are these your friends, stop wait! Hey! Guess what, I am serious here…but guess what. I want to give you five hundred dollars. Yes! I do. Uh huh yes you. God. This is not some weird ass gross thing. Look where we are! Ok? Calm down. Hey, your parents let you girls come out shopping huh? Good for them because guess what! You, maybe not just you, hey come here sweetheart, you both maybe, yeah, you two ok? And what’s your name? Sophie. Ok Hi Sophie I’m Mark, Anyway ok what we want is a few girls to be the kind of, face, no, just, ok, do you girls want to be on video? Huh? Mac’s makeup that’s who. Come on. Ok for starters, you. are. gorgeous. You know that though right, and I’m not even supposed to say that! What are you fourteen. God! Really? Thirteen ok. Wow. OK. So, we’re cool. You want to do this? Great ok. So, what we need to do is get you three, sorry love not you, you three sitting over there, we’re going to give you a proper New York make over, ha, yeah I know right! Ok sweetie here’s ten bucks go get some juices or food or whatever, you know, here’s twenty, go crazy, go get whatever you want ok, your friends are gonna be a bit busy for an hour, so…yes great um what’s your name? Kate! Ok Kate great what the hell you look almost twenty shit damn ok. So wait, you girls got phones right? What’s that iPhones? Perfect, ok, what we want you to do is start filming, ok? Just now just shoot whatever you want. Me, you, them, the people looking, anything. Whatever, I got to take this call so go crazy.
“Phil yeah no great great…I got like three chicks ready to roll…huh?…oh yeah yeah no worries…hahaha yeah they’re shooting now. Fuck they’re even recoding me talking to you (waving at the girls)……what?…….I’m sorry what?……….yeah of course, of course, what you think this is my first time?……..yeah yeah of course……….well there’s one………yeah I know…….Phil they are doing it right now……..I don’t know, iPhones it looks like……..huh?………yeah yeah, well one is……..ok cool call back in…(looks at watch)…half hour ok?…..ciao”
So girls! We ready to start shooting?

Trent:
I hate you. I hate your face, I hate your friends. I hate seeing you in those fucking disgusting poses. Do you even care about me anymore? You fucking slut. You fucking bitch. I fucking loved you and now look at you. Why the fuck do you tag yourself with all these guys. Just to fuck with me? Just to make me look like fucking idiot. Well guess what! I’m not going to post this stuff anymore, you cunt. I did it. I told everyone that I wanted you back and now I see you running around looking like a fucking slut loser. Who the fuck is Tommy? What the fuck is he doing posting on his wall about you and him getting it on last week? I thought we could work it out but now I know you are just another fucking whore out there looking to get the next idiot to give you all his money and time and stuff. Fuck off.
Sandy:
Stop posting on my wall you loser small dick asshole. You are BANNED from my friends list I thought we could be cool and stuff and still be fb friends but you are such a jealous douche that no way can we do this, I hope you told all your friends you are a drunk tool who can’t even get it up after a few beers which was every time btw so yeah. Fuck off and stop tailing me every where. I can hang out with who ever I want. Get a life. Get a girl but you never will get one as good as me. Oh and fuck your body, your steroid ugly chest is so gross and we all think that. Ha ha peace out x

Footnote:
None of this actually exists. This disgusting hinterworld of fake realities, online selves, masked falsities, creations, imaginary existences created for others to see, judge, assess…comment on and worse, feel a part of. Our real true connections are never there. They are in the holding of a hand, they are in the quivering voice of a friend who just can’t do it anymore, and you say to them I know, I know, I can’t do it anymore either. And you sit on the phone with them, finishing another bottle of wine together and asking each other why can’t we go on, we will not kill ourselves yet will we? No we won’t and we smile at saying that, at finally saying that out loud. The triumph is in saying it. In saying “I drink too much” and hearing their steady, person voice. In talking to your mother or father on the phone and thinking “I don’t see my parents enough”. That deep feeling in the gut where you want to see them more because you remember you felt a strange despair when your grandparents died but you didn’t know why and now you can see how your parents felt. Their mother or father died. They lost their parent. And now you won’t let that happen. But you do. And you update facebook.

MENTAL HYPERTENSION FURTHER EXTENDED; IN WHICH NOTHING SAID IS POSSSIBLE OR IN ANY WAY SURFACE TRUE

Last modified on 2011-09-02 11:12:33 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Take any given sentence at all, given I mean as in gave to you; delivered, directed, offered to ‘convey a message’ (stay with me)[1]. There is always a purpose in someone telling you something, there is always something behind the words. Think of words as ancillary mechanisms that deliver what is already known, expected, understood and is deemed to be acceptable. We encapsulate speech so well now that we have unconsciously made this the raison d’être of language: to package[2] and deliver phrases in terse unequivocal terms that allude to truthfulness, and, in deliberately delivering such undebatable antonyms, we seek to hide a meaning within a message that is supposed to be the real honest one, the reason, the purpose.
Ok, listen to this:
I am aware that you are listening to me so with the next thing I say to you I expect a certain response (because I know you in some ways) BUT NOW, say, I want you to have the response I want (from you, based on knowing who you are and what motivates you etc) so I edit my sentence in order to facilitate the desired response from you and so after delivering that sentence I watch for your reaction and if it is the expected one then, okay, I can go on progressing my story but if it is unexpected then I know that either (a) my telling hasn’t worked or (b) I have misinterpreted or misunderstood you and so I need to factor that into the next sentence if I am to get you BACK on my planned trajectory and feel comfortable enough to appreciate and interpret your responses, whether fictional or otherwise.
And so then now:
Imagine all one-on-one interactions have this undercurrent. You can quickly see how malevolent and insane most simple back and forth’s are, not withstanding the huge political and social economic demographic/psychographic stuff that exists in society, and then how not straightforward life is or worse how those who are presenting to you that it all really is straightforward are pretending to operate on a very basic level, and essentially are insulting you, are whole-heartedly knowing that they are insulting you, and have assumed you are a stage 1 type of person who believes barefacedly that all of this back and forth stuff is true and real and honest and direct and real and in-the-now and that the things that come out of mouths are real and honest and are actually the things that humans who allow these words to escape their lips really believe and think exactly the same way as their clearly practised, written responses suggest.
Not enough, not enough, let’s go:
Keep in mind that every sentence you hear is charged with purpose, is in some (maybe poorly) way designed, invented, brought to life in order to make you think, respond, feel, react or otherwise process in some desired way, and in the format, delivery[3], circumstance, situation, moment is always[4] trying to make you do the next thing, urging, persuading, directing you to do the next thing, and, if you are feeble or uncaring or unaware then you will then, yes, go along and do that next thing that you were directed, told, in most ways, forced or expected, assumed to do, and you will smile and feel good because they will accept that response instantly, welcomingly, and you will have thought that you are individually, honestly and of your own volition done the very thing you are meant to now, what you set out to do. The fact is that you would not have responded as was directed or else you don’t care that you were directed or else you truly were correct and expected and all of this in now meaningless because you have been triggered and your response mechanism is on and true and actually happening because…because…because you trust the person who told you what they presented as actually happening alive and real.
But that’s…that’s not normal, stuff:
I want to tell you something, but I know that if I do it will change everything about our relationship. So I want to (a) make it clear that by telling you I am letting you in on a thing that would make you incredibly more close to me and (b) say that if I tell you this thing it will change how you feel about me because it is so crazy and strange and unimaginably horrible.
In then getting though these words, these words that make sentences that describe events you are being told things, a life, that is coming into existence with all the careful trips and triggers allayed for your benefit. And even though you seek a full and human disclosure, the very purpose of this purported openness is based on a precept of becoming closer, becoming more open and together but this care and love is impossible under this grand scheme of transparency because if it was to be all said and done then there would be a new slant, a slant that would kill your love because you would always and forever be horrified every time you saw their eyes or every time you touched them or every time you saw them crying because you would always think “is it related to that thing they told me that was so horrible” or else you would be smug and think “well, at least what I did was no where near as horrible as what other things happened to them” and the result is that you would be incredibly caring but also incredibly curious as to the pain threshold of this person and the niggling desire to ‘try that stuff’ because your understanding of them now would urge you to at least want to ‘go there’ in order to experience at least what they had already experienced and worse the urge to go further, the urge to be the one who did the ‘most’, who made the mark, who was the one or is the one “on top” of it all.

Adam and Eve (no escape)

Last modified on 2011-08-30 14:54:53 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The snake curled it’s tail in a way that it flicked just the tip on her clit and she felt that laser shoot up inside her a little bit and she squirmed back away from it and the snake curled up into a ring and, sleeping, let the sun bathe on its skin. She closed her eyes and laid back, wanting to sleep or just at least dazed off and let her hand come down and gently touch on the hood of the clit and move over the soft flesh there up and down and it felt good and pure and the sun was just like a soft warm blanket that meant she could feel happy there. God killed a lamb and it was horrific, it was screaming and half dead and it’s stomach was open and her and the snake stood up and looked at that fluffy body writhing and crying and they had never seen that before and it wasn’t horrific because they hadn’t seen it before and it was just strange and confusing. The young naked man came back then at this time to see it all and saw the snake and stepped on the snake’s back and the snake flipped around and curled up and extended and bit the man on the leg but the man just watched it happen and looked over at the half-blood half-white wool mess that God had made and pressed down harder on the snake’s back, raising his other foot and really pushing down in a  half jumping way on the snake until the snake stopped squirming and the lamb was still and not crying and the woman looked up at the man and saw him changed, different, but the man was as blank as ever, smiling, holding out his hand to her.

In the afternoon he sat in the office kitchen, drinking his coffee, eating a biscuit and she comes in and she is wearing a tight skirt and an even tighter blouse, makes a green tea and looks over at him. He watches her eat the biscuit, watched her lipsticked lips close over the cookie and all but suck off the edge of the biscuit she takes into her mouth and then her closed small lips moving up and down slightly as her small teeth chew the small piece of hard biscuit she’s managed to pry of with those succulent, decorated lips. She almost looks over and he averts his eyes back to the table, finds a magazine there and pulls it closer, flicks it open and almost as quickly looks back at her body, the outline of her figure simplistically available, imagining her naked isn’t hard, her ass and legs, her waist, her breasts and neck and face all stand there and he looks back to the page again, mainly looking at words and reading them over and over. She finishing dipping the tea bag in the hot water, takes it and drops the finished tea bag in the bin, then a smile at him and leaves. He sips his coffee, tastes bad, looks back at the page, reads that line, over and over.

She was washing away the blood between her legs, she hadn’t ever had this happen before and she thought she was dying. For three days she washed away the blood, in the stream and each time he came close she told him to go away. She lay on the grass beside the stream and waiting for more blood to come, closing her eyes and listening to the water to soothe her mind. On the fifth day the blood stopped, she finished washing herself and cried out to God to save her life. God said that now that you have had the pleasure of the flesh, you will now know the changing of the season, and every month you will know this, like the changing of the seasons, you are now unto the Earth. She was happy because she felt closer to the world she loved, the dirt the grass the sun and the animals, she collapsed sighing and feeling all of nature now inside her and without. God became furious, and so condemned her to feel an unnatural pain in childbirth.

Her father comes home, closes the door, hasn’t seen them all sitting there together on the lounge room floor yet, her and her sisters and her mother, playing a card game and they were laughing and playing. They all watch him walk over to the table they have near the door and empty his pockets like he does every night and the mother says “your turn” to her little sister and they all look back at the game and are aware that they are pretending now, not playing like they were but playing now as an exhibition, as a way of telling the father that they are happy and have a life too. He walks over and kisses the mother and they all savour that smell, the smell of their father coming home, like wood and smoke and old clothes, sweat they don’t know about yet but it is his sweat and the three beers he had after work with his co-workers. They try not to stare too long at him kiss their mother’s cheek but they love seeing it and he smiles at them and silently disappears into the kitchen and the younger one throws down a card that matches the one underneath and the mother looks back from her husband and says “Snap!”.

In the beginning Lucifer Morning Star was the first Angel, with the unwitting power of a true God, and as such the ever loving God who created him became scared of his creation and cast him down to the world of the mortals and so then Lucifer taught the mortals fire, life, love and companionship and told them that one day they would be like God himself and when he was finished instructing them God in his anger made Lucifer King of Hell where he was told to punish all those who did not heed The Word and when hell was overwhelmed God came down himself in the flesh of a man named Yeshua and felt the painful sting of humanity and hence forth changed what it was to be saved or condemned and so Lucifer, now righteous, holds his place by Gods side as a saviour of human souls.

Around the table in this meeting we talked about how having these poor sales performance figures was most likely related to how our sales people were getting old and they kept having things happen to them like heart attacks or hip replacements or sick children and how we could directly see their ailments reflected in our figures and we decided really quickly that we needed newer younger sales people and we discussed how that having the younger ones coming in would yeah sure take them a while to catch up to the expertise and capability of the older ones that in the ling run we would as a company be better off by having these fumbling, learning, need-to-be-hand-held new ones come on would actually in the long run be way better to the bottom line because, hell, surely these older ones would get worse and worse, right, I mean, this is symptomatic of having an ageing sales team, I mean like what’s next, you know: cancer, Alzheimer’s, liver failure, you know, what else kinds of old age stuff would we have to deal with, I mean, they need to use a computer at least and Christ like osteoporosis would mean soon we’d need to give them , what, aides and things to help them do their job and we’re not a charity I mean we need to let them go right? A young bright executive discovered a good way we could legally pay them out.

Adam was so in love that he cut off all his hair and, crying, told God that he hated him and thought he was an insane lunatic who didn’t care for anything other than to be blindly worshipped. God asked Adam where he got his ideas from and Adam said “from you, you heartless monster!”. God knew it was the snake who had filled his mind with sick thoughts and so madeEdena horrible place to live which of course only made Adam hate him even more. God was confused and asked Adam after a thousand years why he did not hate the snake instead and Adam replied “what snake?” and God told him the story and Adam knew then it was hopeless: God created the snake.

He had her head in his hands, lying on top of her with both his hands under her head and she was crying and they hadn’t finished making love and he said “what’s wrong?” and she said nothing in that half true way women say it and she had her eyes shut tight from the crying and he let his penis slip out of her, losing the erection anyway. He stayed there like that holding her and kissing her cheek, feeling with his lips how hot her cheeks were and looking at her clenched eyes. He started massaging her hair and kissing her cheeks more but she shook her head to brush him off so he moves off her and lays beside her, both naked and she rolled into a ball and cried harder and harder. “What’s wrong?” he asked but she didn’t say anything, just lay there sobbing. He stood up and put his pants back on, walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His face seemed wrong, not his. He wondered if he had raped that girl or did something wrong. He smiled at himself in the mirror, just to see if his own face was still there. He washed his hands and went back into the room. She had a blanket pulled over her and wasn’t moving.

WHAT DOES THE TRUTH TASTE LIKE? WHAT DOES THE TRUTH FEEL LIKE?

Last modified on 2011-08-25 12:37:58 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

It is the hope inside that wants a child, maybe not the birth or the responsibility, but the end that is something grand. The flavour of mud, or sickness or human saliva breath in the morning is truth. What it wants to tell you really are things you will hate instantly. There is no sense but the sun still shines and you all live together.

There is a deep unfulfilled sadness that, through being ignored, manifests (festers) as malice, complacency, indiscretion, blandness, moroseness, suicide, false-happiness, acceptance, malignancy and that thing where you can just go on living and living until you die no matter what happens or what sickness comes or how alone you are or how much you are missing and how removed you are from what you yourself consider life based on your dreams and how you see others your age living those (or even other fantasy now) dreams and your wishing that everything could be different and it’s not actually regret because you never did anything in the first place to deserve or even expect that outcome but it’s more that you never could have had those things you wanted in the first place because now that you are ‘getting on’ it has become clear that you are not one of ‘them’ or are even going to be that thing you imagined ever so now it’s set in that your life is this, just this, no more dreams, no more hope, and now it’s also no more lying to yourself that you can still achieve this.[1]

The ability (propensity?) to behave given any number of social situations that, including any hardcore punk or other such anti-normality types, force us to act in a desired expected manner. Mainly the ‘big ones’ Funerals, Weddings (they can get avant-garde but even then there is a certain ‘respect’ for the bride/groom/widow/children’s wishes…their aesthetic permeates), but also even just waiting on line at the supermarket. We all look forward or around, we shuffle, we look at our groceries, we know how to act/behave/appear. We know what to do at any given social moment. Is the goal of truth then a separation from the norm into a kind of laissez-faire democracy type thing whereby our instantaneous feelings come to bear or is there supposed to be  such a thing as deserved communal reverence, respect, appropriateness and all the trappings of the (essentially) class system? Do I want some young idiot wrecking my mother’s funeral with his boom box and his lack of shutting-the-fuck-up-about-how-we-all-gotta-die?[2]

Seeing something that’s wrong (not actually wrong wrong, like evil or unjust or against love or anything) and deliberately not doing anything about it because, in the grand-scheme of things, it is very unimportant (usual) and pointless and basically just seeing the way in which you could fix something that doesn’t actually benefit you but it would, in some respects, make the world a better place or at least resolve this issue at hand and perhaps advance this or that person or company policy or deal or whatever. Now, the next level is telling the truth in this scenario to your personal detriment. What does that feel like, or, what are the reasons anyone does this? Social altruism, for an inner sense of peace (resolution, victim is no longer a victim (and remember, not a real victim, just a made-up work-based life-scenario type of victim), a general want for the right thing (in your assessment) to prevail, a real urge to contribute where you see you can contribute), or perhaps a dream that you will be rewarded (eventually). In place of this, for the majority they play by the rules we created in this western (and eastern too, so) culture where shutting up and doing nothing are lauded in place of controversy, individualism, contesting, questioning. In fact, the better you perfect those abhorrent servile traits to more likely you will succeed. So in this sense any act of dissention or suggestion of personal motif for the ‘right’ is punished in one way or another.

The ability to deliberately hold information, important information no less, in your head, conceptually ‘away’ from someone you actually care about because (a) it would hurt them (simple and honest enough) (b) it would destroy what they think of you for no real-world purpose or reason that needs to be considered for the moment as it were; out of context; theoretically (c) you do not want them to hold this in their head as well, you like seeing them not knowing it whilst you do (perverse but like a serial killer who cherishes the sweet moments of freedom following his murderous act up until they are discovered) (d) there is no conceivable reason to tell them because I has nothing to do with anything yet it bears down on you for not telling it for no other reason than the desire for complete transparent honest i.e. unburdening or the fact that you have tried to build your relationship on the precept of pure honesty (in that as you get older and have many many failed long term serious relationships the prospect of transparent honesty becomes for you the thing that really is the only thing that is important anymore, to the point that saying “I want to fuck someone else” is allowed because it was spoken truthfully out in the open and so then when you do it although it hurts the honesty aspect is revered above this carnal act thing that happened as a result.[3]

Now we’ve cultivated the insane idea of ‘personal truth’…”what’s right for me” etc. This concept allows you to consciously exist inside someone else’s truth and, understanding them as such, where they are in a  fantasy that has no real walls, which through using careful analysis and understanding are able to be moved, in and out, their fears heightened, their perceptions sharpened closer to the devils they have invented as inhabitants; the backstabber; the cheat; the false-prophet; the supposed friend etc until of course their own truth (which they think is real don’t forget, really real) is nothing but a fragmented strange and externally incoherent mess of half-truths, phantoms and unstructured feelings based observations made under misinformation that are tentatively held together under the one notion: that because they have created it it must be true. Such a feeble instance of reality, and such a scary prospect for the person trapped inside this prism where any one sentence from an imagined trusted source can dispel and enhance so many other aspects of their ‘truth’.[4]

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Goldilocks and the three Bears

Last modified on 2012-02-01 05:54:51 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Her parents didn’t believe in schooling, proper schooling, because they knew that all those teachers and priests were rapist sodomites and when they read and reread those passages in Ezekiel they got so angry and started yelling at their eight year old child about how they wanted to put their penis in her asshole she got scared and cried and so during the day they told her to go out and live, and learn from the world, from nature and they let her run off and they went back into their field and toiled to make vegetables and feed cattle to slaughter.
She ran through the forest, testing what hurts her skin or tastes bad, poking sticks into dead poisoned fox carcasses and shitting into holes and wiping her ass with leaves and running along and drinking from creeks. This day she ran over a large hill and down into a valley and saw a house she’d never seen before and approached it like a curious dog, circling this way and that to see if anything was moving before inching closer, the learning her parents wanted taking hold, the natural curiosity and fear of anyone other than her parents.
She eventually made it to the window and looked in, no one inside, just a small house sitting there so still and empty. She tried the door but it was locked, she tried a window but it was locked and in her rampant enthusiasm took a rock and smashed in a window pane, opened the latch and climbed in. The house was empty except for a large chest of drawers, a dining table and a few wooden chairs arranged in a semi circle around a large metal pot. She smelt burnt hair and burnt wood, and looked around but saw nothing but for a pot sitting on the ground behind the chairs. She walked over, quietly, and peered into the pot, seeing a thick grey mash in there. She dipped her finger in and tasted the mixture, a warm if not too hot porridge that tasted like sugar and grain, the kind she has for breakfast but with a strong acidic aftertaste. She thought it was wonderful but needed to wait until it cooled a bit so she looked in the drawers first, thinking because of the hot food that whoever lives there must have just left and won’t be back for a while.
In the first drawer were a load of papers and candles, nothing in order just stacked in there, so she opened the second drawer and it was full of knives and tools and bits of rubber and leather and stuff like that. The third drawer had baby clothes and bonnets and little containers of powder and soaps and she stuffed some soap into her pocket and closed the drawer, not wanting to open the fourth one. She walked around the house, getting used to the dead smell of hair and wood and opened the door connected to these living areas to see a room with three single beds in it. She jumped onto the first one but it was as though it’s just a blanket covering wood panels and then the second one was like a pile of feathers lumped under a thin sheet but the last bed felt like her own so she ran back into the main room, piled a load of the grey meal into a bowl and took it back into the bedroom with her, eating it with her fingers and letting her body relax on the bed, trying to imagine what the people who live here look like or if she has seen them before in town and remembering how strange all the people in town look and how strange it would be to know any of them at all and the thoughts like this and eating the thick porridge and praying to god to bless her mother and father and keep her safe in his arms like she’s been taught sent her to sleep.

 
She woke to the sound of a door slamming shut, remembering where she was and that she was alone in someone’s house. She sat straight up in the bed and pulled the blankets up, panicking.

“Someone’s smashed in the window!” Mr Bear yells out.

“Someone’s had their gut full from the lunch pot” cries Mrs Bear.

“Someone gone and got in our house Pa” says kid Bear, going over his chest and flinging it open to see what’s missing. “They ain’t taken any of my stuff Pa!”

“Ma! Go check the bedroom will ya. I’m gonna get me rifle, go on now”

Goldilocks hears them moving about, hears what they say and hides herself under the bed, seeing there’s no windows in the room and the only way out is the door she came in. The door to the bedroom swings open and she hears the feet coming across the room.

“Pa! Someone’s been messin’ with Junior’s bed, look” and the Bears all pile into the room, walking over to the bed she was sleeping in. Pa Bear puts his hand on the mattress and feels it’s warm.

“Go damn there’s been someone in this bed” and his face appears under the bed, looking Goldilocks straight in the face.

“Well well, look at what we have here” and she squirms away but Ma Bear is on her, pulling her out from under the bed by her thin wrist and dragging her over into the corner of the room.

“What you doin’ in here little girl?” asks Pa Bear

“Nothing, I..I…I was just, exploring, ’cause, my mumma says, to…to, go out and…”

“You exploring in our house cutie pie?” says Ma Bear.

“I saw, that…no one was in her so I”

“You busted by damn wind-a that’s what” says Pa bear, resting the rifle on his hip.

“She’s pretty” says Junior, walking over to her.

“Now. Don’t you go touching her son, that there’s a devil woman” says Pa Bear, holding his son by the arm “see, we gotta get that devil outta her”

“Oh no Pa, nah we ain’t. She just a little thing with, look at her Pa, that golden hair, like, like an angel”

“Ain’t no angel son, you’ll see. Ma, pick her up”

And Ma Bear picks the girl up and places her on the bed, Pa Bear takes his pants off and moves over to her, Goldilocks stares at the man, stares at the boy and waits, terrified.

“See son, she just a lil rabbit, ain’t cha?” and Pa moves closer, gets to her, pulls her shorts down and opens her legs. Goldilocks, crying, thrashing, Ma holding her wrists down, Junior tugging at his father undershirt to let her go, crying too but Pa heaves into her and Ma laughs revealing her teeth and Pa grunting like a bear; “urgh urgh urgh eee-urgh” and Junior crying now and Goldilocks screaming out but soon Junior comes and puts his hand over Goldilocks’ mouth saying “sssshhhhh” and trying to get her to relax, soothing back her hair and she locks her eyes onto his and he says softly “it’s ok…it’s ok” and they stay like that her moving in that jolting way as Junior looks into her eyes and keeps saying “it’s okay it’s okay” and when it’s done they put her dress back on and she is crying and running into the forest hearing their laughter getting softer and softer.

Red Riding Hood

Last modified on 2012-02-01 05:57:28 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

She was on her way somewhere, had a bag stuffed with bread and cheese and these cliché elements of French/Italian life are enough to see you live through all kinds of atrocities; starvation, sudden snow, and when the moon comes out and you are barely clothed in the forest. The food of both world wars in your pack, the smell of the earth rising up between the curling ferns, the young ferns, growing now just months after the Great Fire, their soft furry brown tendrils barely unravelled, pornographic, easy to touch and she forces them to unravel, teases them out to fulfil their plan, ‘come on’ she teases, but they aren’t ready and curl back. Her fingers have the moist dew on them and some of the red-brown hairs. She brushes them off and runs deeper into the forest, letting the leaves touch her bare arms with their collected water. Fresh and cold but with a warm torso, she breathes out into the empty quiet space in a two metre by two metre clearing, her breath steam filling up the air. Sitting down there she takes the loaf of bread she stole from the middle of her family table and bites right into it, her favourite part, the hard crust on the end, no actual bread just the taste of vinegar and coal and then the crunch of the hard crust. She is smiling and she can feel it. She puts the bread back into her bag and takes out some cheese. It’s a hard block of parmesan, the wrong kind of cheese, her favourite. She takes a bite, half cheese half rind. Her father will be furious when he notices it’s gone. It costs him half a day’s wages to buy it. It tastes better than she remembers, sitting there on old firm pine needles and feeling the ants nosing under her skirt. She gets up and runs, blandly, into the bushes, leaping over rocks and trunks, falling at times, sometimes breaking her knees or hands open on the crisp bare naked elements, letting the dirt in, rubbing it into herself – the mix of blood and dew and earth – and running some more, feeling those open wounds sting but stinging properly, like she is alive and cold and warm all at once. It isn’t long until she sees the house over in the next clearing. Out of the woods now, running through plain soft grass to her grandmother’s house. She can see the delicious thick grey smoke pouring from the chimney, which means it will be warm and sweet inside, knowing there will be a cake or some pancakes ready when she gets though the door. The field is long and sloping, about twenty metres down and another thirteen metres back up again, she does it so swiftly that the animals barely notice her passing, the cows have their faces down and the old pony she used to ride is standing still, looking out across the field remembering what it was like to be young and playful and be ridden by little girls. She lets herself in with no announcement, and indeed the house is warm and fragrant, but it smells more of meat and potato stew and a harsh burnt wood she hasn’t smelt before. Her grandmother is under a pile of blankets in her bed, her body only moving with the in and out of her breath. ‘Grandmamma, I’ve brought you some bread and cheese’ she says, throwing her bag on the ground and opening the lid of the pot on the hearth ‘what is this you are cooking?’. She looks over and the heap still heaves in and out. ‘Grandmamma can I have some?’ Her grandma makes a sound like ‘eeee?…oohhrr’ and she thinks that the poor old lady is so exhausted today, like she can get, so she takes her bread from her bag and dips it in the stew. It is a dark red-brown gravy, and there are little vegetables in it, just large chucks of meat that haven’t really been cooked properly for a goulash ‘grandmamma is it ready yet?’ but no answer, so she tastes the gravy from the bread and finds it bitter and very much too salty. ‘Grandmamma this is terrible! What are you cooking?’. Again no answer from the breathing pile. ‘Grandmamma what is it? Are you ok? Are you happy to see me?’ ‘Yessssss’ she hears ‘oh grandmamma…’ says the girl, kicking of her dirty boots and climbing into bed, burying under the many covers until she reaches the warm centre. Her grandmother is covered in a soft fur, warm and beating with a strong heart, the girl cuddles in and begins talking about how she escaped from her house and took some delicious bread and parmesan cheese and wants to share it and as she is talking the furry mass turns over, pushing the girl over onto her back and envelopes her, now they are one warm mess and breathing together, her grandmother smelling unusually of meat and earth. ‘Grandmamma are you ok?” asks the girl, but she gets no answer, only a fur covered arm over the top that pulls her in closer. ‘Hurrmmmm’ says the furry pile and holds the girl tighter, moving all of its force closer and closer to the girl. Now she feels it rubbing between her legs, lifting her dress up slowly as it begins to caress her body with that warm moist fur, starting to drift off to sleep under the power of the soft slow movements, the fur caressing her legs and back and buttocks, the girl relaxing and pressing her body back into it, moving as one as the girl feels the pleasure roll over her, spreading her legs to let more fur touch her skin. Soon they are rocking together and she can hear a soft growl-like ‘huurrrmmmhurrrm’ from the pile, and with her eyes closed she forgets everything, why she is hear, the bread, the goulash and lets her mind wander. Soon she feels a sharp pain in her vagina, something is trying to get inside and she tries to close her legs but it keeps pushing and pushing and she feels her arms pinned down and the fun surrounding her head and she is pressed down into her face and the thing is pushing deeper into her and she tries to scream but she is covered in the furry rug and the thing pushes in and out in and out inside of her and after a while she feels a hot stream fill her inside and she is crying and the thing gets out of her and she struggles away, tangled in the fur and blankets and after she throws them all off sees a man standing near the fire, opening the lid and dipping some bread into the stew. ‘Wh-wh-who are you?” “No one. I hunt around here, that’s all. I came across this cabin this morning and I thought, I thought I’d stop in and say hello” “Where’s my grandma?” “Your grandma? Well, darling, your grandma is…” and he laughs and takes some of the bread and gravy into his mouth, the juice staying on most of his thick beard “your grandma is right here in this pot”.

There is only a viscousness left

Last modified on 2011-06-30 14:59:16 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I had her by the cunt you could say because we didn’t fuck anymore but she wouldn’t leave me because I got the money, I went out at 8 ah em and I came back there 7 pee em and that suited her just fine. I come home to her half pissed, half naked in clothes as impossible as that sounds:

“Did you leave the house today” I yell, first thing, spitting.

“No I didn’t fucking leave the house why the fuck would I leave the house, nothing out there nothing in her it’s all shit”

“You wouldn’t leave the house because where the fuck would you go. There is no place for you to go. Where you gonna go?”

“I’m not going anywhere. You get some smokes?”

And I did and I throw them at her and I take a cigarette from my own pack and we are in the place we live moving around smoking and not talking. I get a beer from the fridge, the last one and I open it a drink half of it and I open the fridge looking for another one that isn’t there.

“You can’t keep some fucking beer in here at least!” I yell across our home.

“What?” she yells back.

I walk back into the room, she is exhaling a plume into the open space.

“You are fucking useless”

“And who the fuck are you, huh? You walk in, throw my some cigarettes at me, now you’re gonna call me a piece of shit. Go get your own fucking beer you piece of shit”

“And what the fuck have you been drinking huh? You’re pissed already”

“Yeah well I’ve been drinking with Tommy today”

“Tommy is another fucking loser. You fuckers know how to get your hands on alcohol, right. You know what? Fuck this. Get the fuck out of there. Get your skanky ass clothes, shove them in a bunch of plastic bags and fuck off!”

“Yeah? Yeah? You want me to go? I will go if you want me to go”

“Get the fuck out!”

 

x                              x                              x

 

He was trying to get some work done after work, you know, real work. The stuff that keeps him going; to know He is still a person who has something beautiful to give that’s not bought and paid for by a bunch of moronic assholes (etc etc). Staring at the computer screen and the keyboard, screaming at him to create, make something, do something. The fucking world wide web has all of this shit on there come on and add to it. And then he added to it and it’s just some more shit into the pool.

 

x                              x                              x

 

There is no advertisement that can persuade you to purchase anything anymore. They all have the evil stink of self-interest. Worse; the advertising industry know this and have employed teams to get you to recommend products to your real-true-friends so that they buy what you have been convinced (by some means) to buy already. The fact that you genuinely tell someone about a product or service these days has been carefully calculated by ad agencies so that you are equipped to deliver the one line benefits straight to your nearest and dearest so that they too become purchasers (read: lifelong customers) of a particular brand or product (synonymous).

 

x                              x                              x

 

“Ah fuck you know I’m sixty now, sixty! and you know what I did love this girl, this one girl and she married my best friend, you know, what forty, fuck, forty years ago and, christ I was their first born’s godfather. And I still loved her. And I went there and did the thing in the church and I helped them paint their first house and still, still I loved her and I just wanted to be near her so I said ‘yes’ to being their kids godfather and I bought him presents and I was there on his birthdays and, and when he was a child they put him to bed so we stayed up drinking and it was always so close, the more I got drunk, so close to me telling her I loved her but that husband, my best friend, was there and it was so strange because I loved them both and I didn’t know how to say it and after more drinks it went away and it came to that thing again where I just talked about my life and how shit it was and they laughed because it was funny, really, and I made it all a joke but what I was really saying was how bad my life is because I was in love with a woman who was married and had kids and how fucking strange it is that I am one of those kids’ godfather, I mean go damn what the fuck happened to my life that this kind of shit would happen?”

 

x                              x                              x

 

I shouldn’t have given her my number, fuck, so I hang the phone up thinking thank fuck I have a phone you can hang up hard a proper with a handle not just a button. It rings again, so lovely to know someone wants you, or wants to tell you something that they have burning in their belly. I do it, I do, I pick it up.

“Fuck you don’t you fucking hang up on me”

“Sorry, ok? Sorry. But man you were talking all kings of made up imaginary bullshit there”

“What?! Yeah because you’ve worked it all out right, you already now what I’m gong to say”

“No, no I don’t but guess what I can probably work out why you’re bothering to say it”

“Oh fuck you”

“And, so, what’s up then? Hm?”

“I can’t event talk to you anymore”

“Really…really? And here we are on the phone. You know what I’m doing? Hm? I’m staring at a plain white wall, a cigarette in hand waiting to go outside and smoke it. That’s all. That’s what I can see and feel and I have a voice, you, on this thing. Okay? Too literal?”

“Christ you’re annoying”

“And you still aren’t saying anything interesting”

“I…I don’t want to see you this weekend. And…” long pause, me sitting there staring, holding back the urge to say anything, impatient, sure, “and I don’t want….this, anymore, this, thing we do, over the phone, this bullshit, text and call and…” and she exhales in an ‘urgh’ like that

“I get it ok, I get it. Guess what? That’s why we don’t talk. What are you bothering for?”

“Goodnight then”

“Okay”

And I hang up and get to feel horrible and cruel for the rest of the evening.

 

x                              x                              x

 

We, I, well we, I mean. Okay. It was one in the night and there was only that orange light that the council set up two weeks ago to stop all those junkies breaking into cars but what it did was give them all night to work and bathe our apartment in a sick glow that made us mad and crazy and awake too long. The baby was crying. We had a baby, we did that. We had a baby and it was weird. We didn’t really want a baby but we wanted a kid and we talked about how good it would be to have a good one, like, have a good kid that would grow up and be better than what we were and could be the best person ever and we talked about it and talked about what type and all of that and started having sex where I’d have to come inside of her to make a kid. It was funny because I’d say “what if I didn’t like it” or she’d say “what if it didn’t like us” and in these ways we’d laugh but now she was full of the thing and it was six months going and you could see it kicking and see its footprints pushing against her stomach skin and it’s like ‘whoa’ and I go back to my job and miss all those things and come home and want to watch TV but she wants a back rub and holy fuck of course there’s a thing inside you. I need to stop talking about it sooner or later. Can I skip ahead? We had the baby out of her and into our life and we did so well for so long, I mean we had a room next to ours, fuck the ‘lounge room” we never had a lounge anyway.

 

Reunion Voices Sing

Last modified on 2011-06-30 14:14:47 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I can tell you that I didn’t ever think I’d see her again and if I did I would have to talk to her instantly, away, by ourselves and tell her who I am and how sorry I am for what I did even though it wasn’t so bad and evil and all of that but still so wrong and stupid and that I know it now and that I am so very sorry and I would want her to talk, say whatever, say everything she thinks. I mean, Christ I have no idea who she is now or what she’d say or anything or even if she thinks the same or even needs me to say all of it out loud like I want to but as soon as I saw her, dressed in a nice proper dress and with her combed back and held back hair, walking into that room with a man on her arm I can tell you all of that and more came straight though me and I was transfixed and heard someone talking to me right next to me and that was the only thing that snapped my out of it and I answered and slurped down some beer and looked back at her but she was talking to someone and I thought “later”.

 

Look if I tell you now it’s going to sound…no, really, I wasn’t there for the high school reunion, and, as bullshity and improbable as it sounds YES I was there seeing a friend, yes also from high school, but it was coincidentally the time when he was moving interstate ok? So we had lunch and oh god what a bunch of unknown weirdos were congregated there that I had to sit near and because I was late I was at the crap ass end of the table where all the loser people who got pity invites were sat so I knew I was in for a bad hour or so but luckily being late meant lunch stuff was over and these morons where leaving. I only had to endure a few conversations like “what do you do” and I lied and they told me what they did and I said “that must be so boring” and like that until me and my friend and his now ex-girlfriend (thank god) were alone-ish to do the goodbye stuff you do but the real story lies ahead in that I was the same damn town that my high school reunion was in and for fucks sake the same old people I went to school with filed into the pub I was meeting my friend at so there we all were, me from the city back where I grew up and all of them touching me and drinking and being friendly so yeah sure I got caught up in it and yeah sure so I agreed to follow them down the road to the reunion.

 

High school reunions have all those people who come from your misty history and have maybe appeared as weird representations in your dreams where you forgot a whole bunch of information and you thought “I should have prepared, god damn it!” but of course you wake up and think fuck that I am glad I am not there anymore. That’s a reunion, being awake inside a dream and seeing pretty much the worst apparitions or reflections of your past because they are real and more horrific than you could have imagined. I walk around in the fog and every person I bump into has a big smile and so do I I feel and we say three lines and each one I can feel makes me seem so callous and theirs are so honest as if they are real people who actually live lives and believe the things they say. It happens so often that I end up sitting with those I have known for long time/were friends with in high school and they say “what’s wrong” and I answer “what the fuck is going on” and we laugh together.

It’s bad, straight away it’s bad, I mean the venue is bad to begin with, as if the pensioners have left because bingo is finished and there’s one middle aged woman behind the bar not knowing what the fuck is going on because there are people there after seven pee em and we want drinks. Oh god do we want drinks and after I’ve had maybe five glasses of wine she shows up. Oh man fuck I say in my head and I knew her and I can see what she looks like now and I think oh fuck that better not be my fault. She walks over and we see each other but she is hugged by some massively overweight ‘friend’ who I sort of remember but I guess they know each other since those days and I finish my drink and finish talking to this muscle bound moron who I used to know was ridiculed by everyone for being basically feeble and ugly so he pretty much found hid place bulking up and joining the army and I can only say over and over “you’re fucking HUGE” to my detriment.

 

She comes and sits with us because we are from the same clique, that’s how we met and in the most natural of implanted-in-our-psyche way we end up sitting next to each other, not listening to anyone else and talking. It is so lovely and we are smiling and it is as if the decade meant nothing. She had three kids and I have none. This doesn’t matter, I touch her knee and tell her she is so thin (we used to like being incredibly thin) and she says my face is chubby and I say ‘hey, I am healthy…fat and happy!’ but she reassures me in her way that I am not chubby and we laugh at ourselves now and how we used to be so incredibly insensitive to fat people. And we look over together at a fat woman we went to school with grotesquely kissing a much older beared male she brought with her and we screw up our faces and like “ewww gross” or similar and laugh and I light a cigarette and when she says ‘oh you still smoke’ I feel stupid. I try to make her see me as independent (i.e. different to her) so I say “Yeah” casually, blow out smoke and take another sip of wine.

 

Making my way though the idiots, trying to reminisce over things I could hardly care about anymore and some are really trying to sell me the idea of moving back and I can only say “Back? Doesn’t that sound bad to you? ‘Back’?” but they laugh because I have always been strange to them. I am next to her and she eventually finishes up the jargon to some other stranger and I say “Hey” and she says “Wow, you’re here. I didn’t think you’d come” “Why? Because I’ve always said reunions are stupid and weird and that I’d never come to my own?” “Well pretty much and also because why would you bother?” “Well that’s pretty complimentary, I mean, thinking I’d have way better things to do or even that I would b so occupied with my life that I wouldn’t even know about it or something” and she laughs dismissively remembering she knows what I’m like and all that so it goes on. I tell her I think about her every day and I can tell my her reaction that I need to finish off the sentiment by telling her “no not like that I mean you come up, you pass through, you are a thing that happens and, here’s the funny thing, as soon as you pop in I am forced to think of all the others, so funny, like a conga line, ha ha…her and then her and her, you know…it’s funny”.

 

It’s a weird moment, the end. We’re all getting up, finished reminiscing, finished watching and looking one another over. I am just looking at her. To girl I first loved. She is looking at me and we are smiling. I tell her I want to talk to her again and she promises me we will. I get an email address and I giver her my mobile phone number. It’s so terrible because we both know I will never write and she will never call. She has her family and her life and I have so much to write. I compose hundreds of emails every day, but to write her is something different. In the age of paperless transmissions, where we can communicate every five minutes or less, still there is something powerful in writing to someone who you used to love, and have seen them again, and have had that ting again where you remember what you had, and the beauty in knowing that you had to exchange something in order to let yourself go again, this time to a fate much different when you stupidly broke up over childish reasons twelve years before.

 

I get four more glasses of wine from the bar because I don’t want to go back there and I am sitting with them in front of me and she takes one and says “thanks” and I say “they’re all yours…”. She drinks half the glass down and says “Don’t worry. It’s ok.” “What?” “What you did to me” “Christ fuck, yes I know. That’s just so, oh man so fucking gross you know, I don’t mean you I mean me like, what the fuck kind of asshole juvenile dick was I?…thank you, thank you though for understanding…Christ I mean what has it been like, twelve years? Oh god its so,…I think about it every day. Really…every…day. I can’t even kiss a woman without thinking about it. And I wasn’t even drunk or anything!” “Okay okay calm down, geez. You’re acting all crazy” “Yeah? Ffff God okay I’m sorry. I guess, I’ve just been thinking about it, you know, in isolation, like, just my ideas and stuff. Can I say…I am so sorry for that, I mean, it was stupid and weird and wrong and…” “I get it, okay?…I was there you know, I was…pffft well, we were kids right, stupid little kids. I know, no.. I mean, I’ve been with a bunch of guys and you know, it’s always fucking weird, you know? It’s a fucking rape game this sex shit I tell you” and we laugh and chink glasses (plastic cups at this shit place) and we are smiling so it’s all good and I just needed to day it all out loud to her and it fades away; this sick feelings I’ve had.

 

The War

Last modified on 2011-06-23 06:39:28 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The witch lifted up her gown to reveal a horrid stench the likes of which I’d never smelt and it wasn’t what was under her skirt, she released a little creature hunched over, like a half baby thing with a thin white skin and she said “so now you see what there is” and I had my hand to my mouth, or more, I had my shirt over my mouth and nose. “I wanted you to give me what I wanted not give me this, thing”. The thing as it was fell over and hugged itself, like it was dying and I moved over to it but the witch hissed at me and said “don’t you dare touch it!” and I stopped there and asked “what is it?” and she said “This thing came from me because of you”. I moved back, put my clothes back in place, looked at the thing and then back to the witch. “Do I need to do anything with it?”. “No” she answered. “You gave me nothing”. “I can only give you what they give”. “They?” There is nothing for me here, only waste and disease. I give her the five hundred dollars, collect the little dying thing in my arms, against her screams for me to leave it alone, I push her over onto her bed and get the hell out of there.
 

Antoine calls and tells me a name. I barely get to say anything back, really, I say ‘ok’ and that’s it. The thing squirms next to me in the passenger seat. I don’t know whether to clothe it or kill it. It has the face of a man but the body of an infant platypus, that’s the best way to describe it. It has the essence of wings and the legs of a chicken. Perhaps it is a child angel? Who knows what she is capable of producing. She brought Angela back to life, her rotten corpse giving me a few more lines from her dead carcass, her jaw barely able to make the sounds needed to tell me who her killer was. She was yelling for most part, screaming about how the afterlife is so horrible and all that hate inside coming out in a gross guttural blathering until she gave up a name and we could let her soul rest and her body went limp as soon as I called it off and snuffed the blood candles. Fucking witchcraft.

 

I don’t know why but I wake up and have to vomit. I can only get as far as the sink and it comes out, it’s yellow and black and blood. Christ what the fuck is happening, these black magic arseholes getting inside me. I go back to bed and the thing is there, already bigger, about two feet now, its wings growing and its face more beautiful than you could imagine, I start crying and holding my stomach, something is wrong. I move it over and there is mucus or whatever it is on the mattress. I try to pick it up but it starts to beat around like a wounded bird so I leave it. I get my phone and call the witch that gave it to me but she doesn’t pick up so I call Damien instead. He answers straight away and I tell him what I’ve got. He laughs and tells me to feed it fruit and I ask him what to do and he tells me to wait until it’s bigger and moving and I ask “then what” and he says “just call me”.

 

Days pass, I leave strawberries near its face and watch it grow and shed its soft early feathers and grow proper limbs and more and more it smells of flowers and not the gross death smell the witch had. I decide to leave it in my apartment and go out. It’s not five minutes after I get a coffee that an old man in a brown suit stops me and says “Do you know of the Christ Saviour” and I tell him I do and he says “He knows about you too” and I say “I know” and he holds my arm and says “He wants to love you” and I let him go and know that he is both right and assuredly has no idea what he is talking about. I have a new born angel of god in my bed. If I told him that he would try and give it to a priest or someone or else he’d have a half alive child thing in his hands and he would be killed by a demon as soon as he left his domicile. The people do not know about the war but some of them can feel it.

 

It’s a child now, what looks like a ten year old boy but it’s not a boy, it has large wings and thin legs and a face that looks like a Botticelli painting and makes a soft lyrical sound like a woodwind instrument coming from a soprano. It hums a faint melody that makes me cry again. I cry as I make a pot of coffee and roll a cigarette and finish my coffee and pour myself a scotch and want it to stop this crying/singing/soulful lament thing but I go back in the room and see it’s even bigger and I put a few apples and half a watermelon near its face and it looks at me and I cry harder. I leave and smoke my cigarette in the kitchen. As I finish my cigarette, dousing it under the tap and throwing it into the trash it appears in the door frame, full, glowing, looking right at me with its soft wings loosely spread. “Hello” I say and it sings again and I can do nothing but cry.

 

“It’s here” I tell Antoine and he tells me “Ok good. Did you call Damien?” “Yes I called him, maybe two weeks ago”. “And?” “And? What do you mean…um, yeah, he told me to feed it fruit”. “Ok good. And you did and now you need to call him again”. “Christ Antoine, this thing, I…I can’t fucking look at it….every time it’s like…fuck”. “Ok ok calm down. Call Damien right now ok?”. “Sure”. I call Damien of course and he tells me to wait, that it’s not the time yet and that he doesn’t know what he wants to do yet. I tell him “Great! What the fuck do I do in the meantime?” and he tells me to put handcuffs on it and I explain there are no hands anymore and he says “well lock it the fuck up somehow” and I say I will. I walk into the room and it is perched on my lounge and I gesture for it to move but it actually speaks now and says “you are a child of Yeshua” and I know what it is saying and I rush over to it but it moves so softly and quietly that I am crying again as if its movements sung to me and it says “Your soul wants love, not this” and it moves again, this time next to me and it lets me know it is okay for me to lock it in the basement so it follows me down and lets me close the door on it.

 

It is the morning and I open the door to the basement and bring Damien down with me and his eyes roll back and his fingers become like daggers and his voice, deeper than always tells me “is this the place Jeremy” and I am scared and say “yes” and he moves past me into the darkness and I scramble back up the stairs and turn on the lights and he is on the bird creature and they are struggling and its feathers are coming off and Damien’s claws are going into it but it looks like the white creature moving under him rises over him and it’s singing a soft song and now it has its feet on Damien’s neck and is standing over him and breaking his body into two pieces and when it is done it rushes up from the basement and past me and out through the front door and as it does it changes into something I have never seen and it disappears so fast, leaving me with a warmth I’ve never felt and the heat becomes hotter and hotter and in my chest I feel it hard until I can’t stand up anymore.

 

Westbury Academy Boy’s School Murders

Last modified on 2011-06-22 15:12:01 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The Westbury Academy Boys School (or WABS as it’s known) is like Hogwarts if you replaced wizards with cunts and it’s where I teach English to a bunch of boyishly haircutted, ugly smirking, future banker types whose fathers are all assholes and whose mothers are all whores. There is no exception, there is no scholarship student with redeeming qualities who over the years gains the respect and admiration of his peers. Just a school full of lucky pricks with huge flat screen HD LCD TVs in their rooms. Perhaps the worst subject to teach is the one I’m paid ridiculously large amounts to teach to these seething pubescent furious masturbators because deep within their brainwashed mind they have come to understand that ‘English’; words, poems, or more accurately made up fiction is (a) beneath them (b) of no consequence and (c) cannot possible make you ‘big’ money. While they may be right in all three cases, i.e. (a) not accessible to them (b) philosophically arguable but not in the context they mean and (c) 100% true, and that this explains their general moronic behaviour when attending my lectures, it still does not excuse them from inciting me to slit each and every one of their throats during the night and in doing so know that I have made the future I plan on living in marginally better. The first ‘house boy’ I killed was a fifteen your old podge-faced red head, a crown to sole freckled little asshole. Nothing worse than an ugly chubby ginger scoffing at Kafka, so naturally I made the clever, life affirming move to mix in some/a lot of granulated sulfuric acid in with his white sugar the fat fuck heaped liberally on his wheat bix every morning. He actually managed to get through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday like that, coughing and spluttering and otherwise woofing those bix down, not really caring that his insides were disintegrating and, god be praised, was too ashamed to tell anyone about the blood he was shitting out. Thursday was different, he didn’t feel like eating but, you know, the combination of peer pressure and general gluttony made him take that fourth and final bowl. Oh he got through it, sure, but lets just say I didn’t see him in fourth period English.
 

I just realised how horrible and animalistic and simple I must sound. Instead of going back and editing and perhaps all together deleting all of that I think it more pertinent to describe my situation more clearly. And again, no, I wasn’t harassed or had eggs thrown at me or whatever other horribly devastating things these low-level leaders of tomorrow could imagine would actually hurt a person, no, nothing like that. This is more of a…a…correction, to the world. I would be remiss in my duties as a teacher, a leader, a guide to these young men if I was to simply release these creatures into the world unschooled, unaware, unwittingly free to become the people we despise tens of years on throughout existence. And lets face it, if WABS, given its heritage, is in fact the breeding ground for future Ministers and Kings and CEOs then, yes, there should be some kind of test, some kind of conditions in which they are allowed to progress to such integral positions that affect all of everyone else. Right?

 

The term super hero has been, I mean, really misused and pretty much claimed by both the comic book kingdom and Neitzsche. Oh and god no I am not pretending I am a super hero, a regular hero? No not even. Let’s forget I opened with that. What I want you to understand is that, okay, imagine if there was a way to prevent the horrors of tomorrow’s bad decisions from every happening? Okay? And that’s what I’m doing. I’m stopping the worst people from progressing to their falsely pre-ordained if-the-shoe-fits roles that, ultimately, will end in the destruction of everyone/thing. Some part inside of you is agreeing I know, I know. I don’t like it either, hell, I strangled a thirteen year old down in the laundry room! How do you think I feel! It’s not about that though and I know, all you have to do is nod a tiny little bit and we can move on. Can I get a little nod? Not to killing children god no. I’m not about that at all. I just think you and I can agree that, hey, perhaps some of these undeserving close minded ‘borne to be leaders’ types, perhaps, maybe, actually don’t deserve to and worse shouldn’t ever be leaders.

 

Examples. Of course. Bradley McPherson (no relation to Elle). Oh my god you should have seen him (yes dead now). He looked forty five already, a nice round paunch, receding hairline, double chin! Really, a more suitable candidate for General Manager I have never seen. And he was sixteen! And this appearance, this sluggish gait and general under-qualified-but-a-prick-anyway demeanour wasn’t scolded, it was respected and (get ready to vomit) celebrated! He was awarded ‘most likely to succeed’, ‘leader of the debating team’, ‘executive on the student council’, ‘advisor to the bursar on excessive spending’ (after his year eleven ‘thesis’ on profitable school management). I mean, he cut off about 65% off gratuitous spending for students and was applauded. Now I mean, these are the people I am dealing with here, knowingly serving the body corporate, instinctually forgoing services in aid of revenue, approving negligent cut backs for the sake of shareholder (namely, their parents’) investments. I mean, to deliberately cut off your own amusement for the good of the insular economy of one (namely WABS) is existentially insane. He had to go.

 

Now as a teacher this one students’ contributions to the school did not disadvantage me at all, in fact, they actually heightened the luxury spending for the faculty because of the un-forecasted profits returned to the school. We have the most comfortable staff room in the country, replate with leather bound armoires, fully stocked libraries with many first editions, state of the art technology and 18 hour access to a fully stocked kitchen with a full time staff of eight. No, the exorbitance is not (or never) the problem in such regimes. It’s the complex balance between haves and have nots, the blatant disregard for your fellow man which results in a gluttonous over compensation for the ‘overlords’ coupled with the fact that this ingenious thinking is welcomed by those meagre individuals who (a) have been deprived and (b) see there depravation as directly enhancing their superiors, and worst (c) applaud and respect this outcome because in their mind they are working their way up to become the fat pigs in the upper echelons who will be rewarded in the end from cutting off and depriving the ‘lower class’ from receiving what they deserve or even what they had as a necessity.

 

Can I let you in on a secret? I really enjoyed this one way I dispatched this little bucktoothed capitalist prim-and-proper kid. I know it’s horrible to say but hear me out. In my position I was able to use the god-tool of grades to persuade this Bradley (no, it was not abbreviated to Brad for his friends, well, no one really had friends here, associates…yes they say that) that he needed help to up his English grade so that he could get into Harvard Business School. Almost instantly and without questioning (even though several of his housemates have died mysteriously) he agreed to meet me at seven pm in my office to negotiate a way to increase his grade. He arrived at seven on the dot, plonked a briefcase on my desk and opened it, clearly having watched too many movies, unclasped the locks and revealed, I don’t know maybe twenty or thirty thousand dollars in cash (all fifties…what the fuck is wrong with these kids?).

“Ah Brad., that’s…”

“Bradley”

“Yes, Brad, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. You know that you, and several of your classmates, aren’t really doing well in my class and…”

“Who else?”

“Brad, it’s not about that”

“Bradley. And maybe you’re a shit teacher then? Maybe I should report you to the board?”

“The board? There’s no board Brad. It’s the faculty. You’re not in business yet son”

“I’m not your…”

“Shut up I knew you’d say that, that’s way I said ‘son’. That’s why I keep saying Brad. Do you get it?”

“No…I…”

“Of course not. I’ll tell you why, Brad. Subtlety. Subtlety. One word, very simple, but completely lost on all of you. You see Brad, you don’t care what you look or sound like, you just want results, is that true?”

“Well…yes…I came here with, this bag and…”

“Yes I know, and this the point Brad. Ahhhh let me think”

And after that I went to my drawer, and pulled out a long knife and was trying to pretend to explain something about life and fear and culture but was really just trying to get closer to him and when I was close enough I just sank it into his heart. Funny really, it just goes in. He actually looked up at me and then looked down at the knife and then died. There was blood everywhere and I rolled him up in the rug and dragged him into my en-suite. I didn’t know what to do so I went back to my room. Here’s the good part, the very god damned next day the police came and I, naturally was panicked out of my mind, I mean, there was a dead fat boy in my bathroom but what happened next was they shut down the school, all the boys returned to their rooms and the announcement was made to staff that Henry Thompson, Religious Instructor and Pastor, was being arrested for child sex offences and that he was responsible for the missing boys of late and that investigations were ongoing. Yay!

 

MENTAL HYPERTENSION EXTENSION, IN WHICH YOU GET MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

Last modified on 2011-06-29 13:09:29 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

MENTAL HYPERTENSION EXTENSION, IN WHICH YOU GET MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

I am finding it hard to believe anyone anymore. The starving musician, the penniless artist, the aspiring writer, the greedy capitalist…anyone. What they have in common is they recreate a stereotype, an assigned and played out role that is apparent in an instant and yet still desired as real and a goal[1]. As if there is no other way to live other than to align yourself with a preconceived desire to become something that already exists, yet in achieving this formulaic pre-existing ‘truthfulness’ they have already failed because deep down they know they are choosing something, they are choosing this or that theme/appearance, choosing this or that aesthetic, and then the worst part is choosing ‘this or that stuff’ to think and feel[2], and the resultant choosing ‘this or that’ thing to say[3]. Self censoring with a gauge that is self-referentially checking whether or not ‘this or that’ feeling/sentiment/sentence fits in with the overall goal of the persona they love so much (admire) that they want to create[4]. It can become easy over the years to believe that you really are what you wanted (chose) to be, the more you cultivate and edit and asses your ‘output’ (clothing, speech, sentiment, opinion, musical tastes, themes, furniture, behaviour et al), the closer (you assume) you will be to achieving a sense of honesty in your persona because surely over the years of telling and demonstrating to that many people you are this and representing yourself as such will ergo make you ‘such’[5].

GROUPS CAN DEFINE THE INDIVIDUAL, WHICH COMPICATES THINGS

People know, by preconceived assumption, what they think is authentic. We are aware of truthfulness straight away. From this, there is a mental checklist, prerequisites, that need to be ticked off in order for like-minded associates to accept another as being authentic. This is the horror of reality. We can all smell a fake a mile off. How? Because they do not pass the ‘rules’ we’ve created in our insular, checklist-based ‘pass or fail’ test we force people to undergo in order to assume an inclusion in an invented, imagined and created-based-on-precedent reality. The better you are at concealing this, or more, the less aware you are of this, the better. Now, as a huge aside, there is nothing sinister and calculating and exclusive about any group that exists, you can pretty much ‘get in’ by simply knowing one person (ergo nothing is exclusive)[6]. But hilariously the hierarchy and the way ‘members’ are valued or exalted is remarkable, i.e. those who attain the highest ideals of the whole are the (oh god) leaders, or…what do I say…best of us[7]?

THE DESIRE TO BE AN INDIVIDUAL IS NOW COUNTER POST-CULTURE

We now hate everything that is manufactured, obvious, already done, conceived, born[8] and so the only option is to revert to the pre-aware days of tribe based living; community; circles; bands of like minded people you can shun the world together amongst etc. There is an amazing beauty in this, yet alongside this a fear in progress, as if the hands that reached out for something else where cauterised by the fear of not knowing what else there could possibly be[9]. By reverting in disgust to what has already been our sickness creates an inherently twisted new sense of both self-aware post-irony boredom coupled with a futuristic Hellenistic desire to re-emerge as better than any other ‘version’ of this sense of impossible commune honesty[10]. So now then what is the individual, but one of a group of individuals, unable to exist without some type of ‘banding’, hopelessly lost in the void between not wanting to exist in a band but inadvertently being in one per se. This new horrible world has rules, and in breaking the rules you are a rule. You say things that are expected, you think things that are expected (of you), you try so hard to say something unexpected, but you are trying, and we can see that. There is nothing between heaven and hell we have not foreseen. That is our new mantra and we are sticking to it[11].

THE WAY TO HAPPINESS EMERGES IN WAYS YOU DIDN’T ENVISION

I hope. But lately I’ve become attracted to transsexuals who look really really like women.

 

Belief is only inside of you (four related parts of one life where belief is elusive)

Last modified on 2011-05-16 14:24:42 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Dying because he loves her and she loves her god

When I went to visit Henry, when I was asked to go with Jane to visit Henry I thought ‘how funny: “Jane asked Alan to visit Henry”‘. His leg (her uncle’s leg, like she owns some of it!) had grown to the size of three legs and he would not get an operation because his new wife (of less than a year) was a Jehovah’s witness and those idiots think medical intervention is against god’s will whilst simultaneously believing that all events happen due to god’s will so that this god that they believe in wants him to have aggressive (reversible and curable also within god’s world) cancer that will kill him very painfully soon. He even shows it to us and it’s huge and lumpy and strange (the growth has made the leg look different, like a twisted muscle with patches of hair) and he is smiling for some reason so I smile too and ignore the fact that his leg is huge and clearly he will not be alive much longer and Jane is really upset, visibly upset but Henry’s wife is by his side smiling as emphatically as he is and all I can think of is that (a) they are happy and (b) they are fucking stupid as hell as we are in a hospital and maybe fifteen doctors pass by in less minutes and probably every one of them can (or could have) saved his life. She loves him so much but not as much as she loves her moronic faith so this love sick and cancer-sick fool will die painfully (no medicine) because (a) he loves this idiot woman (who is quite pretty lets face it) and (b) out of her love for him (and her basic pathetic religious beliefs) she thinks this is right and good and proper and loves him even more for sticking to her-version-of-a-god’s plans.

 

Thou shalt love no other god but me

She left me sitting there in my house and we never had kids because we wanted money and style and taste and holidays and she told me she was leaving because she wanted to have children and she found a man she knew would be a good father and she didn’t want it to be too late (she was 36) and I said ‘wait, you never wanted to have kids’ but I only said that in my own head, sitting there now on the lounge (part of the suite) looking around at our wonderful stuff that looks so good really and I laugh because it all looks so good but it is sitting there, not moving, sitting there being good to look at, being designed well, being perfect and I hate it all. It is not perfect it is disgusting, it is in place of a child. Did I want children? Did she trick me into not wanting children when in fact she did? The worst pain is that she did want children but not with me. I pour myself a drink at the bar and only now realise ‘I have a bar’. I am not me anymore. I became not me. I liked not being me because I was filled up to the point of emptiness and finishing another drink (of which there will be plenty more to come) I knew then why she left.

 

There is nothing left in this world without your god

Carpet. Feet. Drink. Cigarette. Walking to the window, looking outside. Sitting on the bed. Drink. Turning on the TV. Watching it empty inside. Hating them on the TV because they are dead and like corpses stink like decay and remind me. Drink. Drinking and walking. Carpet under my toes. Dirty feet. Dirty carpet. A picture on the wall of a bunch of flowers in a vase. Motel room picture, motel room bed, motel room sink that I vomit in. I didn’t need to vomit, I wanted to vomit. It hurts and I smoke again. Drink. I call for a prostitute to come and its going to be eight hundred dollars. Eight hundred dollars to not shower and get my dick sucked in a condom. I laugh and wait. Drink. Cigarette. Turn the TV on again. Its worse. Hang out the window and its midday. Cars and people moving about. I don’t wish I was them anymore. I fart. I drink. I smoke a cigarette and the knock at he door. I open the door and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen is standing there fresh and clean and so pretty. I finish my drink and ask he if she wants a drunk and she says no and I say ‘I’m going to take a shower. I go and take a shower. ‘What does she think, sitting there in my room, clothes and broken glasses and some cigarette butts on the flor. What does she think is going to happen. Is she repulsed? Do I care if she is repulsed?’ and I know, standing there with water running on my head, I realise I have changed, I do not care what she thinks. I will get her to suck my cock while I drink and I may not even cum but I will get this stranger, this young stranger maybe fifteen or more years younger than me to suck my cock in five minutes time and not care at all about her and perhaps even like not caring. That is how far away I am. That is what happens after all. After all that has happened.

 

Alone because you love your god and no one knows that god

You should come down. It’s speakers corner! It’s as old as the city itself. My great uncle used to come down because he hated the japs but of course you can’t hate the japs anymore and my grandfather said he was fighting in Turkey he had nothing to do with the japs but my great uncle, who didn’t actually go to war, was here when we might have had to give Queensland to the japs and they bombed Darwin and that’s why he hated the japs but he had another theory about what was wrong with them and his theory was that they were perverse and wrong because they didn’t believe in anything and anything could happen, ‘you just never know with those japs’ he’d say and that really scared him so anyway that was the type of stuff he’d go on about at the old speaker’s corner in Hyde Park. You should come down, is on the weekend, the best day is Saturday because old Bill, really that is his name, Bill! Old Bill he’s on about this energy thing with…and I listened to him a few times don’t get me wrong but it’s like, he says that we can all feel energy and some of us ignore it or whatever or know it and can feel it and I get what he means but he isn’t that good at explaining it but one time this chick all in tattoos was saying ‘yeah yeah’ with him and she wasn’t laughing and she was alone so I don’t know what she was doing or if she liked him or anything. But my idea is that, it’s the same as before you were born when you are dead and when you think about before you are born its all white and nice and soft and asleep and when you think about after you are dead it all dark and bloody and nothing so I think we need to change that and so I have this thing that I always say and its ‘when you die you will remember what it was like to not be alive’.

There is something wrong with the world but I don’t know what it is yet.

Last modified on 2011-05-15 15:15:49 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Wake

 

I had her hand in mine, I could see she was crying and I knew that she was upset but in my head I was thinking “how long until I can go for a cigarette, really, and if I go for a cigarette, and even if I make it last, maybe six minutes maximum, then I’ll have to come back in and I will have lost my place here with her because some family member will ‘fill in’ and so then I’ll be lost in a way and have to, fuck, talk to some of her family and that will be, just, hell” so I sit there still thinking of the cigarette because its probably some nicotine biology thing and not that I am an asshole and really I am not because what I want to do is say (yell) “HEY!” out really loud and then go on to yell (say) “this woman was absolutely beautiful and loving and caring and she only met me twice and each time she was so loving and beautiful and happy that I for one wish to go on celebrating how lovely and soft she was, not just think ‘oh no I’ll never see her again, oh poor me, I’LL never see her again’”. I drop her hand and take out my cigarettes and gesture that I am going ‘around the back’ for a cigarette. I disappear down the side of the house and sigh (what, for the cameras or was this a real sigh, like sighs actually exist?) and two little, maybe ten and eight year olds roll up on a scooter and skateboards respectively (what ages and what vehicles who cares) and I light my cigarette, blow out the smoke and realise they think I am cool (because I used to think that was cool and their faces tell me they think I am cool, so I don’t say anything and take another long pull on the cigarette then say) “how you kids doing today?” realising instantly that they just attended their grandmother’s funeral and that my fonzie-esque stance crumbled in about ten seconds but I am saved because the older one says “okay” and I say “your grandma was pretty cool, huh?” breathing out a huge plume of smoke. “Grandma? She was alright” he says, bashful, cute. And now I do my part with “Nah man, she was really cool. I talked to her once out on the back deck and I was like whoa man you know what you’re talking about. She was like was out there. Never met anyone like her”. They smile I think and turn their vehicles around and go. Can’t hang out with this bad ass smoking weirdo they’ve never met any longer. It’s not right because they are children and they have been taught their place and it’s not right because they are not worthy (they think).

 

Wedding

We kept making eye contact and it was strange and I didn’t know what to do about it because she was wearing a wedding dress and I was a guest (of the bride). She was making the rounds and I thought “oh my god she’s just making the rounds” and I said something horrible so she could hear and she got to me at some point and it was just me and she said “what’s wrong with you” and I said “nothing. What’s wrong with you?” and she smiled at someone else who came towards her and then she was gone.

 

Party

They look at you like you need to do something when you walk in to any party and this one was different because fuck you I have known them for ten years you weird-ass-looking-getting-there-early-probably-married-losers who have no depth or reason to look at me like that “hey Amelia how are you, wow fuck looking hot” I say and we kiss twice and I introduce Sandra and she is all shy because she doesn’t know anyone and I mistakenly do that thing where I don’t care about that and have to remember after about one painful (for her) minute to introduce her and make her feel comfortable but then of course that shit thing happens where she needs me way more than I want to be needed so we are (after pleasantries) in some corner sipping drinks and discussing how fucking retarded everyone is and I am telling her stories about each person I know there and it feels really bad and terrible to be there then and we have become the douchebags sitting and staring and judging people as they pour in.

 

Funeral

 

“Tell me you won’t let mine be like this”

“No way! I mean, look at all this, really. That song, yeah right like we need to hear that! No. I can honestly say your funeral won’t be like this”

“Thank you”

“I’ll tell you what the problem is though. The problem is people want this, expect this, like there’s no other way for this thing to happen. No other possible way. They need the usual step by step process, and then this happens where we do this and this happens and we cry now etcetera”

“Exactly. Oh please don’t do this for me”

“Mum, please, who are you talking to? My only problem is, by the time you, ha, need one of these, Ilm going to be…I’m going to, I don’t know, go too crazy, go too different”

“But that’s what I want”

“Yeah I know but like, no format, you know? And it will be real. Heartfelt and honest and none of this bullshit sentiment that means nothing. None of this selfish, blah blah she would’ve wanted this crap. Fake mind reading bullshit stuff, that’s, that’s designed to make you cry, as in, ‘I wrote this trite garbage to cause you to cry’ because that’s what you’re supposed to do i.e. you’ll feel better if you cry i.e. you will achieve the role in playing a funeral guest…complete the act! You must cry at that moment otherwise you didn’t love that person, right? You get what I mean. Fuck I have no way of knowing how to circumvent this”

“Okay, okay honey. How funny, they’re looking at us know”

“Ha yeah, like we can’t plan a funeral at a funeral. I’ve been to too many, like weddings, all the same. We all end up in the car park talking about our jobs, some of us smoking cigarettes. They’re ok at funerals though. You noticed that? No one complains.”

 

Relationship

 

“Really? Really? Really? Really?” the boyfriend exclaims, at last at the end finally not knowing her anymore than he thought he did, thinking her an insane woman, thinking that she has no idea about life or him or the words she says out of her mouth and he is hot and has tears forming on the edges of his eyes and if anything isn’t clenched he doesn’t know about it and for once his dick is flaccid and he can only see a strange person in front of him and trying to see if she can possibly say something that makes any sense by repeating the word ‘really’ over and over trying inside himself too to understand that this may actually be reality and something he is missing, struggling to come to terms with what is happening, with what she is saying and what she wants from him and what he has said to her before and none of it coming together.

 

Writing

 

All the letters on the keyboard, sitting there, making little three letter words, on the right there is p o l i in a weird pattern to inspire you to write p-o-l-i-c-e and then some story with police in it; I could write a story with police in it and drama and a crime and some (this will be clichéd) dumb police in it and then things will happen and one of the police officers will have an epiphany. There is too much cop drama available on TV, every episode they have an epiphany or realise their place in the greater scheme via betrayal, questions of right and wrong, corruption, role vs reality. It’s even already been written how a cop is stupid and simple and black and white and then has heart which is why they got into this thing in the first place: to protect (Magnolia). I would write about a police officer who is pregnant but hasn’t told anyone yet because it is only six weeks and can’t bear the thought of getting hurt because of the baby so actively ignores calls and knows she is letting violence/crime happen but has chosen her baby over her (what she things it is now just a) job.

 

Nightlife

 

The bar is about three people deep, we’re all drunk and it’s fun because some are posing badly, I am posing (in a posture I assume is ‘I don’t want to be here but I’ll entertain this place for a while longer because I am buying drinks for others who do want to be here, for now’) too but its far less complimentary than these guys with their shirts down and sunglasses on their head. I girl next to me says ‘hey’ and smiles and I say ‘hey’. In my mind I can tell she is stupid so I turn away and look around over their heads because I am tall and can only think ‘what is the neatest way for me to leave tonight? Seeing as I have to pretend I like this and like going out and like everyone and am a fun person and am entertaining etc’. I get to the bar buy the drinks (blah) and head back to the table, putting the drinks down and maybe some girl kisses me on the cheek “thanks!”. So I sit down and some other person says “what’s wrong” and I sigh and say loudly “nothing. Hey! Oh my god this dude at the bar was so lame! He glasses on his head like that Alex Perry dick! And there were these three losers just like standing there trying to get chicks, obviously never been here before and like, no idea about style. Shaved chests? Open shirts? What year is it 1990?” and they laugh and I keep going on and on with banter and get drunk like this with them.

 

Divorce

 

It’s a bright, they say perfect, day, the ex-lover sits in a lounge chair looking through eight centimetre gap in the curtain out to see grass and a clear blue sky. The ex-lover is wearing pyjamas, old pyjamas, flannel pyjamas. The ex-lover sits on the lounge looking though the gap in the curtain and imagines or sees birds flash by. The ex-lover sits and feels his fat stomach on his chest and thinks that’s something she didn’t like. The ex-lover feels his face and its unshaven and he feels sick and gross and needs to brush his teeth. The ex-lover is alone and can hear children playing next door and thinks of his children (of course), his son in the city, his daughter in the country married to a man he’s met twice with three kids and she’s fucked it up he thinks, not happy or sad just…she fucked it up. His son. Call his son. The ex-lover sits on the lounge in his pyjamas looking at the pyjamas thinking I don’t like these pyjamas, she probably didn’t like these pyjamas either. The ex-lover thinks of his ex-wife having a good day. It’s a good day, he knows it is a good day but instead he takes up the bottle of whisky that is left there on the lounge with about a third of it left and drinks it for no reason and it tastes good and he thinks this is not good by the ex-lover knows what he is now or wants to be this now. He wanted to be this for a long time and now she is gone so he can be this. He will finish the bottle, shower, dress, walk about ten minutes to buy two more bottles, drink some of one on the way back, sit back on the lounge, finish the bottle and call his son but his son doesn’t want to talk to him because he is drunk and makes no sense and keeps talking about the son’s mother which is not right.

 

Love

 

How do you know it’s not love? Because I know this is not what I want. But you have made that up, you have made it all up! But I will know when it happens. When what happens? Love. But you don’t know what it is! But I will know when it happens. But I love you, I love you now. With all your heart? With all my….no, not with all my heart. Then that is not it then. No, that is not it, it is what I have now. And I want more. So do I.

 

–

 

They all seem so real to me, but I know they are not. They can’t be, or else the world is nothing and we are nothing.

One night

Last modified on 2011-05-05 14:03:28 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Waking up guilty, waking up hurt, waking up with a pain inside her vagina she never new could exist, waking up with flashes of the dark clothed in tracksuit thing over her, waking up with the bottom half of his face, hard and dark and still and gritting it’s teeth, waking up and feeling down to see if her skirt is on and it is and then feeling her shoes on the bed still on and trying to kick out of them but ending up having to reach down and undo them and then lying back with the covers on feeling hot and dirty and strange under her covers away from the night and the rape from some guy and he was grunting and grunting in a half breathe half yes sounding way like uuuuhhh ssssss uuh-uuhhh ssss again and again until he came and she was pretty out of it but he came at some point she guesses and feels down to her vagina but it’s dry and she doesn’t know but needs to go to the toilet so gets up and takes off her ‘party’ clothes and wraps a blanket around her and goes down the hall to the toilet.

What she does remember sitting there on the toilet was that she came, was that she had an orgasm, was that she reached up and grabbed it by it’s back and pulled it into her as she came really hard and good and it was a moment out of nowhere from terror and disgust to a really hard orgasm and she puts her head in her hands and concentrates on peeing and it feels like she is getting rid of stuff from inside her but can’t forget that feeling, that thing on top of her shoving in and out and her drunk and out of it fighting but taking it all and then the orgasm was…was…?

“Sissy I need to go you done yet?” calls her housemate. She’s stopped peeing and is staring at the tiles.
“Yeah yeah Kate. One minute” and gets up, wipes, flushes, stand over the sink washing her hands looking at her shitty messed up make up and into her blue-green eyes, looking for something, looking for hate or anger but seeing confusion. Flash-backs to her quasi-psychology class, the things she’d heard form drugged out hippies…basically the conclusion: you, somewhere deep inside of you, you like that shit. This feeling is disgusting and she wants to throw up, this is against everything she knows, loves and believes and all that. That she could want to get raped, that she should just burst out now, in tears, and confess to her roommates…that she doubts herself in doing that, that she wants to go back to her bed and lie there. That she needs to think, that the idea of thinking is ridiculous…all of this in the time it takes to splash some water on your face and let Kate in.
“You ok, Sis?”
“Yeah, yeah, ok. Fucking crazy night” hehe laughs like that
“Yeah right…what were you home like 3 or something?”
“Something” and walks off, and does what she thought she wanted, lies on her bed and stares at the wall. A poster of a young dépêche mode, looks away because they are cool and judging, finds a nice crevice where two walls meets and there’s nothing else but a limitless beige intersection. Stares at that for a while, trying to let the thoughts do their thing where they battle and win and lose.

Brakes

Last modified on 2011-05-01 05:34:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

What they say about breaking up is just not true.
Breaking up is easy to do.
You know I break up every time
I break up with you.
- Violent Femmes “Breaking Up”

 

On January fifteenth which they were painfully aware was only two weeks after the false magic of the new year both her and him talked about and decided to split, break up, part ways, separate or whatever the words are you are told that you are post event. The event itself is insanely long and incredible and both proper and impossible, with tears and a type of hugging they didn’t know was possible or that they were even capable of. It’s at these moments they realised they do care or that they do actually really want the best for the other person even though all the months leading up to this they were in their ways coercively just saying they want to the best for each other or things in the vein of “it’s for the best” just so that there can be a modicum of pleasantness in the final final decision. The final final decision was natural, thought out and rang true but also almost stupid in its insulting unknowing baseness.

 

At 2am she crept into her twelve year old daughter’s room and gently woke her and when her eyes were open she said “come on, we’ve got to pack our bags” and she guided her towards her chest of drawers and said “put your stuff into your bag ok sweetie” and crept back out. The young girl started putting her clothes into her bag until it was full but there as more to take. She sat next to her bag and looked about her room that she had only just got used to with three posters on the wall, one she stole from her brother. It was maybe ten or twenty minutes until her mother reappeared and gestured for her to come with her so she got up and dragged her bag behind her and the mother gestured ‘shhh’. The left through the front door and the mother quietly closed to door and put their bags into the car. “It’s ok darling, we’re just going to leave for a while ok. We just need to get out of here tonight”

 

The first barbeque of November when it was warm enough to get everyone around we had a nice big fire going and some steaks and sausages and lamb cutlets going and I was talking to the guys and the girls were all sitting on their fat asses, no really they have fat asses, but we have kids and when they have kids mother fucking hell they get big asses, fucking hell. Some guys like big asses? Yeah fucking rappers, heh heh. Big asses are gross and I told her she’s gotta lose some of that ass meat and I keep slapping her ass telling her that and she knows it and wants to lose it but fuck me if she’s doing anything about it. The little one she had from her last bloke comes over trying to poke a stick in the fire and I tell him to fuck off you little pyro and his mother says to me don’t talk to him like that and I say fuck off he’s a little pyro and Mike laughs and I get another beer and the meat is pretty much done and Johnno’s wife is a hot little Asian slut and he says she’s as tight as a condom.

 

After three years of living together it was hard because her father died when we pretty much just got started living together and she was really messed up and spoke to her mother maybe three of five times a day and she talked to me pretty little. I was working a new job and luckily got to know a couple of pretty cool people a thirty year old guy and a twenty something chick who had epilepsy but she took medication and pretty much only talked about it after a couple of beers she said she probably shouldn’t have. She had a shit job with a shit boss who was basically a pervert cunt, had porn bookmarked in his desktop and made her use his computer as if he wanted her to see all the shit on there but we didn’t know for sure whether he was stupid or gross as hell. We got up enough money to take a holiday, she felt guilty she was using her father’s inheritance to pay for it but I convinced her (fucking finally) that he would have wanted it and she didn’t suspect the cliché. We went to a Queensland rainforest lodge retreat and it was good to get away. I told her how lovely this is and how she needed this and she said what do you mean and I said well, to get away from all the stress and she yelled at me that her dad dying isn’t stress it was that her dad is dead and she is only twenty two and I said but yeah I mean its good to get away from the reminders and…she cut me off to call me an asshole and it took three days which cost about eighteen hundred dollars until she spoke to me again and it was hard to imagine going on with her anymore. I know how that sounds.

 

My name is Tom but guess what the fucked thing is I get called TJ because my last name is Jameson and I have a picture of a rabbit (from Alice in Wonderland) tattooed on my arm which the guys in prison call ‘Jack Rabbit’ and I don’t know if it’s an insult or not but I don’t care and even though I hate TJ because it sounds like an American sitcom character I don’t want to fuck with these guys. I’m in the wing for murder and these guys think I am just like them, some fucked up hard ass insane killer guy but really I drowned my daughter in her little bath when my wife was out shopping and what happened was I didn’t want her anymore so I was giving her a bath and I just held her little body under the water for I don’t know like only two minutes and she drowned. My wife, or ex-wife, yeah, still visits me. She still comes once every two months or so to tell me how much she hates me and curses me and wishes I was dead and she bothers to come and cries and yells and I sit there because I know I have to see that and cry myself and I don’t give a fuck if the other guys see me crying. I am being punished and I deserve every second of whatever pain I get.

Eight more short stories

Last modified on 2011-04-30 15:18:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Her right hand was bent inward in a way in which she couldn’t use it, like a permanent lame half fist but the fingers were straight. She could use it by shaping it, like, to hold the sponge she used to wash her body in the shower or masturbate with it. Her fingers were basically numb so as she rubbed it back and forth over her vagina she could really let go as the only thing that told her in her head that she was doing it was the motion she felt in her arm. She hated her hand.

 

His left foot was like a worm as in he didn’t have any toes and the foot tapered off into a point but he could move it at will like a foot, or more like a foot with one large toe so it could basically squirm which even to himself looking at it was gross. He could wear socks and shoes and appear normal, he could walk around and no one needed to know it looked or acted like that. He had sports days in high school and instead of making an elaborate story to excuse himself he tried to quickly change shoes in the change room so as to get away with it and it worked for over a year until one boy saw the foot. Then he was lost amongst the crowd.

 

It was a malnutrition thing from his parents that left him with a tongue that looked like it had huge gashes out of it, basically if he poked his tongue out it would look like it had chunks missing from the sides. He ignored it when eating or denied himself the temptation to chew the bits that were exposed until when he met a girl and she kissed him for the first time he kept his shameful thing inside his mouth and after a few weeks of this she actually asked “what’s wrong” and he said “nothing, I just don’t like kissing like that” and she thought “ok” but it was weird from there on. They stayed together and after a while (as it turns out) he went down on her and she didn’t notice and he felt good to be using his tongue and was also eating properly now and wanted it to go away like his doctor said it could. The damage was irreversible.

 

She trained a lot, her natural talent for gymnastics meant she could maybe be in the Olympics and over the years she got so good and thin and flexible that as her friends all got their periods she didn’t and after a two years of this she asked her mother what was happening and her mother said “it’s because you are training so hard” and she thought that she was elite and different and so grew further and further apart from her friends who she now thought of as animals and so progressed closer towards gymnastic perfection. At fourteen she fell pregnant and her mother was crying and her father was yelling and she didn’t know how it could happen. Her parents aborted the child with a signature.

 

In the bathroom he kept masturbating using the wash cloth over and over and over in his teenage years so before he was fifteen he developed a hard callous growth under the head of his penis and even though he saw it growing and knowing he had to scrub harder he kept going until the day he felt regret at growing such a thing. It was when he met a girl and kissed her for the first time and felt his penis grow in his pants that he realised he would have to reveal this hard growth to someone at some point. Three evenings later he tried to cut the hard callous off.

 

I wanted to kill my mother because she had cheated on my father and I was now living with her and her lover and I felt sick and alone and was crying a lot for my Dad who I could only see on weekends in some clichéd modern sharing court based ruling. I took a kitchen knife out of the drawer and practised and imagined how I would plunge it into her chest or belly and took it with me down the hallway and opened my parents’ bedroom door and saw her on top of the guy she was cheating with moving up and down and really fucking him. I closed the door before they knew it was opened.

 

In her hand she held a letter that professed a type of undying love spelt out in a very basic kind of poetry but because he had written it for her it felt real and pure and better than anything else ever written. She went to bed with it next to her having read it ten or twenty times, imagining his face as he wrote it, remembering his face after they’d kissed with his doe-eyed love and blank expression. She started to drift towards sleep and her phone buzzed twice with an SMS. It said: omg Clive is pashing some slut at Empire bar! Where are you?. She read the poem again and cried herself to sleep.

 

Her grandfather was dying in the next room and there were so many family members everywhere that it seemed so strange to know that he was dying and she had to smile or nod or do things in acknowledgment of the situation like it was an event. She stood up and walked towards the room he was dying in and was stopped so many times by people crying or talking to her or hugging her and maybe it was ten minutes from one side of the room to the door. She pushed her way between her aunts and was at the foot of the bed and by that time he was not breathing and had died. She felt that she had been held back and denied the final goodbye she wanted by selfish role-playing family members who didn’t care as much as she did.

Wet, cold and dying.

Last modified on 2011-04-24 01:59:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Walking along the street in a dark old town, overgrown trees, winding paved streets, broken sandstone spewing old earth as wet mud with moss and some small blue-violet flowers that look nice and menacing like how death is romantic. It was dark so I couldn’t tell what it was so far away from a streetlight but it was whiter than anything else, not a piece of bark, was it? I thought but coming closer to it it was a shivering little thing that was flesh with a curved back and a head with some type of hair on its head. I stood there looking at it for a while, horrified, disgusted, confused. Is it dying, what the fuck is it? It was wet, could be from the rain an hour ago. It’s really more like a shaved lamb or a small horse-thing with a half-human head/face…it’s, I can’t describe it really but it is curled up in foetal position like a human baby, shivering and crying in a weird “heeeee heeeee hee hi hi hip” kind of sound which really does sound like a child thing and I reach my hand out and touch it and it’s cold and wet and smooth like a human and it reacts to my touch with a quick flinch and I thought it was just a piece of bark before this and now it’s maybe dying a little thing lying there in the dirt, naked (I guess) and cold and crying. I look around and there’s some headlights coming but that’s it, dark and winding up towards some houses with lights on but not many. “Hee hi hip heeee” it says, crying and shivering and curdled in a ball. Fuck. I pick it up and hold it close to me, like I know what to do with a baby. I look at its face, large eyes under closed lids, extended jaw and teeth, small nose shrunk into the skull, curly white hair on its head in one small patch, long neck into a thick small body with equal sized limbs, hands and feet one and the same, tucked up in half fists like baboon hands. But no hair expect for that tuft on the head. White skin, wet, cold, goose pimples, soft and young, like a baby born of a sheep, human and snake. Out from the night I am carrying a crying naked thing that is maybe hours or days or weeks old, dumped naked and scared in the night, a bastard child of rape or incest or something unholy.

 

I woke up and immediately thought of the thing next to me. I have a double bed and had wrapped it in some jumpers and placed it in the bed next to me. It seemed to calm down and sleep and now warm was not shivering so I let myself sleep. Now in the morning I looked at it and it was asleep, breathing heavily through its long nose. I took a shower and came back and it was gone. I looked over the bed and couldn’t see it but found it under the bed, alive and looking around, making a small “teet teet” sound. I put my hand under and it shifted away. I said ‘shhh shhh’ and reached over slowly, trying to get it’s limb or something or have it trust me enough to relax. It looked confused and scared, of course, making “tsch tsch tsch” sounds and I reached further towards it. It let me catch a limb, its back leg and slowly drag it closer, only just struggling and making a “eeeaaarr eeeaarrr” sound, slightly distressed. I had it pulled out and in the light, it looked right at me and I picked it up and put it on the bed, wrapped it in last nights jumpers and tried to quiet it’s nerves. It’s ears darted and the small body tried to pulse away from me but soon it relaxed, wether tired or content.  I knew I couldn’t let it go again so tried to dress with it sort of in my arms and eventually got everything done and didn’t know what clothes to put on it so left it wrapped in the jumpers. I took it down with me to my car and got in, placing it on the passenger seat before changing my mind and putting it on my lap. It curled up and relaxed, I started the engine soon after that.

 

Waiting at the medical centre with it in my arms, sleeping, hopefully ok and not hypothermic or pneumonic or something. After forty-five minutes they call my name and I take it in with me. The doctor says “so what can I do for you today” and I just give the thing over to him.
“This is…this is…your…baby?”
“My baby? No. No, this…I found this last night and I…”
“Found?”
“Yes, I was…I was walking and I came across this…this…thing and I…”
“Thing? This is…your baby”
“What? No this…this is not my baby, it’s…”
“Sir, um, Mr Michelson, this…your child is very sick, she’s”
“She?!”
“Mr Michelson…your child has sever hypothermia. Okay we need to get her into protective care ASAP”
“Oh my god”
The doctor turns away, the child-thing in his arms and makes a call, a nurse comes in a takes it away, all so quick and he turns to me with
“Mister…John. Can I call you John”
“Ah, yeah sure, I mean, what’s”
“John, listen. We’ve, we’re going to help your daughter but you must realise what is happening here. I mean, she’s very ill and you’ve…you’ve clearly been neglecting her and by law we have to report it.”
“This is crazy I mean, I was trying to save it and I…I wrapped it up and I slept with it and I brought it right here, I mean…I…”
“John. I don’t know what to tell you. This, this child is your daughter. I can see it right here. Madeline. Her name is Madeline, John.”
“What? I…I found this…thing…last night, and I…”

 

Looking forward at the ground is just plain grey concrete and looking up is plain grey shiny metal bars and looking left and right is strange men I really don’t want to be near and its all clean and cold and hard and maybe half the people look away and they are going to call me soon for an interview and two people are pacing and one is cleaning dirt from under his nails, uncaring. I don’t feel so bad because there are lots of security freedoms, open windows, lights, minimal guards so I don’t feel too detained, well, not prison detained. I don’t care so much because this is so stupid. It’s maybe twenty or maybe forty minutes until a guy in a suit with a cop next to him says my name and I get up and they let me out and follow them unrestrained which makes me feel good. We walk along the corridors, many varying entrapments of people in different states of interrogation or processing and we get to a door and they open it and we go in. They gesture for me to sit and when I approach a chair they tell me to sit in the other one. There is a glass of water on the table and a tape recorder. The suited man and the police officer sit opposite me and say
“we’re going to start the recording, okay?”
“okay” I say.
And the officer presses the button down. In an obligatory gesture I sip the water. The officer starts
“My Michelson, we have detained you for gross neglect of your child, do you understand this”
“Yes, I have heard but”
“Good. Okay. This is Doctor George Kindle. He will be talking to you for most of this first session, “Doctor”
“Yes thank you officer. Okay Mr Michelson, John if I may?”
“John is fine”
“Great, okay, John.” pause “John, do you know that you have a daughter?”
“A daughter? No I don’t have a daughter!”
The doctor talks to the officer, I hear him say something but I can’t be sure if it’s ‘stress case cause’ or ‘stress crazed kill’ or ‘strained child kiss’ but none sound right.
“Your daughter, John, is dead. And we think you killed her. It’s called ‘Post Traumatic Stress disorder, and in women we call it post natal stress syndrome, but it differs between genders and timelines and situations, do you understand?”
“No I found… this…this…thing and I brought it in to the doctor and I … I don’t know, I wrapped it up and then, then I brought it in, I”
“Yes, we know what you did, John. Ok. I think I’ve heard enough. Officer, you can take him back to the holding cell.”
“Ok, what’s going on here, I mean really. What the fuck is going on?”
The officer gets up and stands behind me, guides me up and pulls my hands behind my back, putting cuffs back on me and leading me out. The doctor is sitting at the desk finishing writing a few lines on his clipboard.
“Doctor, what the hell is going on?”
“John I’ll be with you soon. We just need to look into this, okay”
“Yeah…yeah okay” And they lead me back down the corridors and I see a woman I think I know but I can’t be sure.

 

They tell me I have post natal depression. They tell me I killed my child, left her naked and alone outside. Took her for a walk with me and left her in a patch of wet grass, moss and mud in a dark corner of the neighbourhood. Not wanting to kill her, just to leave her there and let her go. But then, they say, I went back for her, and found her right where I’d left her, and picked her up and taken her home. Washed the mud off her and put her in bed with me. That I had hated her because her mother had left and I felt alone and trapped, that I hated her and wanted her to go away so I took her and left her naked and alone. That I had given her pneumonia and hypothermia and all that and then gone and picked her up and tried to take care of her and then the next day not knowing who she was took her to the doctor to bring her back to life but that it was too late. That I had killed her and that I was a murderer. That I had killed my child because my wife left me and I couldn’t handle it. That I was insane and crazy and would kill my child. But I know I was walking and saw a half-dead strange human thing dying in the mud and I tried to help the thing to live.

Death and Life

Last modified on 2011-04-16 15:32:10 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

After the funeral we sat in the garden near the crematorium where inside arguably her father was being burnt to ash and we looked out over the flowers and manicured plots and saw the breeze working. She asked me

“Do you believe in heaven?”

“Well, yes in a certain way. Probably not the way you think”

“In what way?”

“Well, okay, so, you’re asking because you hope that your father is still somewhere right?”

“…”

“Okay can I ask you this then, do you believe in the soul?”

“Yes”

“Okay then, so we have that. We feel there is something such as a soul. OK, so then lets imagine that the soul really exists and is outside of what we think of as body”

“Okay”

“So you believe in this”

“Yes, I do”

“Okay. So, the soul then, has no relation to this meaty living life thing we thing is happening here. Look around, all of this, the soft sun, the way it’s so quiet, all those people who were talking to you up there…all of that, has nothing to do with the soul”

“But…”

“Well I mean they all have souls yes but I mean, the way in which we all work is so…so, meaty and human, right? That stuff has nothing to do with the soul”

“…okay…”

“Okay so what I mean is, if there is a soul, it is way beyond what we can understand, WAY beyond what we know and think and feel, so, I think, it’s amazing and immense and important that we think like this, that we think of this as something out of our grasp, an impossible thing to, just, imagine“

“Yeah”

“Yeah and so, your father, what is essentially your father is is, somewhere. I mean, I’m not going to lie to you and say, ‘you’ll meet up again in some wonderful place where, lets face it, sounds pretty stupid, right, like, ‘where all souls meet up’, BUT, and here’s the cool thing, if you are a soul, I mean, why not meet up? Why NOT get together in some way, right? And, in getting together, maybe THAT is heaven. Maybe all the souls noticing one another, being together in this other this world thing we can’t possibly imagine…maybe that is heaven”

“Wow”

“Well why not. Maybe your dad is just, you now, getting there now, getting into this huge crazy unknowable thing just now”

“Imagine…”

“Yeah and knowing him he’d be all like ‘hey, what the fuck is all this!”

And she laughs and I hold her hand and we look at the bees moving from flower to flower.

 

- – -

 

In the waiting room while my sister is in labour for the tenth hour, had maybe eight bad coffees and am talking too much to a guy who is waiting for his wife to give birth. I offer for fun and to break the tension in the room:

“Fucking hell how long does this take?”

“No idea. It’s my first”

“Well good for you. I’m not even having a kid. It’s my sister”

“Ah ok. Well cool, you’ll be an uncle”

“Ha, yeah, I didn’t even think about that. I was just thinking ‘fucking hell there’s a baby in my sister’. That was freaky enough for me”

“Where’s the father?”

“In there. Hey, why aren’t you in there with your…wife?”

“Girlfriend. Yeah I have been in. Been over 30 hours now. This is just…fuck this is just…”

“Hey, you wanna go grab a cigarette, I mean christ, 30 hours. You been up that long?”

“Fuck of course I have. Man, this is…this is. Yeah fuck lets go out for a ciggie. I’ll just check with the nurse”

And he gets up and walks into a room. Poor bastard, covered in sweat, smells like onions. He comes back and nods for me to get up. We walk along and get into the lift. In there is an old man in a wheelchair that looks dead, standing next to him is a middle aged woman in a full suit playing with her iPhone. We get out on the ground floor and go out the front to the car park. I hand him a cigarette and we light up.

“Fucking weird to smoke outside a hospital, feels wrong”

“Yeah. Hey, check out the nurses over there”

And there are three nurses in tight blue uniforms smoking.

“Crazy”

We finish our cigarettes, quickly and in silence really and go back inside. Walking past the others who look either upset or happy. Hospitals are for the many dying and for the few who are born. That’s it. We get out on our floor and soon a nurse runs over the my smoking buddy and pulls him but the arm and is talking quickly. I go and sit down and my see my dad talking to a nurse. He sees me and comes over with

“When are gonna quit that shit? Anyway, forget it, your sister had a boy”

“No way! Cool! Can we see him?”

“Not yet, give them a chance”

And I sit back down and feel weird. My sister had a boy. Fucking hell. I feel proud and pathetic at the same time, thinking ‘there’s no way me and Christina are having a kid’. Saw my father’s face, he was stoic and exalted at once. Became a grandad in a minute. I see the other guy, having his first kid, come back out of a room and walk slowly over to the waiting area seats, slumps down, looks exhausted. I decide to go over and talk to him

“Hey. My sis just had her kid. I’m a freaking uncle!”

“Huh? Yeah yeah…”

“What’s up?”

“The baby…is dead”

 

- – -

 

 

Three knocks on my door. Sturdy ones. One two three. I opened the dor and it was the police, a man and a woman

“Yes?”

“Mr Bernstein”

“Yes”

“I’m constable Peters and this is constable Hedrick. We are her to inform you that your daughter, Imelda Turner, has been murdered”

“Imelda…? Fuck. Imelda…I…I haven’t seen or heard from her in…thirty years”

“Sir I know this is tough news to hear”

“Tough? Yeah it’s….” blow air out of my mouth “tough, sure”

“Sir if you can we need you t identify the body”

“Me…? I…um. Well, I frankly wouldn’t…I mean, I don’t know what she looks like”

“Well, sir, you are the closest living relative and”

“What about Jane…uh that’s, her mother”

“Jane is living on Norway sir”

“Norway? Jesus Christ. She’s in Norway? Fucking hell”

“Yes Mr…can I call you…”

“Jack”

“Jack, okay. Jack can you come with us to indentify the”

“The body yes. Sure. Okay, um, let me, let me get some things”

And I close the door trying to remember her face but can only see the two year old and her mother in that house that I left and it seems so long ago and strange and not even part of my life or thoughts and those two or three years try to flood back but they are just snippets like photos and I grab my jacket, keys, cigarettes and lighter and head out the door with the police officers. We drive for a while and they lead me into the morgue, signing in where we need to and talking to me

“She was involved in a robbery”

“A man is in custody for shooting your daughter and the shop owner”

“We don’t know the details but we think she may have been an accomplice”

“Did you know your daughter whereabouts recently?”

“Are you in contact with her mother?”

I can only say “No” to everything. I have not seen or heard from them since I left in 1983. I don’t feel comfortable saying this. I feel ashamed for not being a proper father. We walk along the cold concrete hallway towards a grey metal double door and there is guy sitting there and the police says a name, he gets out a clipboard and they sing in, hand it over to me and I look at it not knowing what they want and the attendant puts his finger to a blank rectangle and I scribble my name. We go in and the attendant gestures to us to come to a table and there is a body with a sheet over it. I know it is my daughter and I am surrounded by strangers and a sheet covering my thirty or so year old daughter and I don’t want them to take the sheet off.

“Sir if you could tell us if this is your daughter?”

“I…I’ll…” little cough “I’ll try”

And the attendant removes the sheet to reveal her face and I cannot see the little girl I knew but I cry anyway, proper tears because my only daughter is dead and the woman police officer puts her arm on my shoulder and I say “I’m sorry”.

 

- – -

 

Waiting for my daughter come home, it is one am but I told her midnight. Twenty minutes later she opens the door and I get up and say

“Where the hell have you been? I told you MIDNIGHT!”

“Oh dad”

She says, running over to me, throwing herself in to me and crying. I hug her back and say

“It’s ok honey, I just want you to be safe that’s all”

And she wouldn’t stop crying, really sobbing into my chest so I say

“It’s ok honey. I’m not angry at you. It’s just if I say to be home at…”

“Daddy….daddy…I…” and she wails loudly, hardly able to breathe, loud crying and I now some thing is wring by the way she is pulling at my back.

“Honey, what is it, what’s wrong?”

“Daddy…….I….daddy I was raped”

I pull her face away from me and ask “What!”

“Daddy” she says, eyes blood shot and only now do I notice how bad she looks.

“You were…raped? Who? Who did this?”

“Some guy, some guys at this…this party”

“What! Where? Who? I’ll fucking kill them!”

“Daddy…” she says, falling back into my chest and crying harder than I’ve ever heard

“Shhhh darling shhhh. Where was it. You were at Cindy’s party, right?”

“Yesss”

“OK. Are they there?”

“I don’t know…”

“Honey, go and talk to your mother ok. I’m going to…I’m going to Cindy’s”

“Dad-eeee” she creams, crying and scratching at my back and my face is hot and I’m trying not to cry. I take her up to my bedroom and put her into bed with my wife. I leave her there, go down to the garage and put my golf clubs in the car, open the garage door and drive out. I feel sick, imagine smashing in the face of the young cunts who raped her. Imagine them now drinking their beers and laughing and telling everyone. It takes fifteen minutes to drive across the suburb to Cindy’s house. The party is dying down and I take my nine iron inside with me. A few kids stare and I start asking for Cindy. I eventually find her in the kitchen doing shots with some other girls. I tell her what happened and she tells me ‘Scott’. I go around looking for Scott and find him out in the backyard by the pool. I tell him I am Sarah’s father and he says “So what” and I hit him on the side of the heat with the nine iron and he falls off the deck chair and onto the small pebbles around the pool. I bring the club down onto his young face over and over until someone grabs my arm and asks

“what the fuck are you doing man?”

And I say “this kid raped my daughter” and they say

“this is Sarah’s boyfriend! What the hell are you doing”

And I say

“Which one of you mother fuckers raped my daughter?”

And none of them move and I ask it again but nothing happens.

I left and couldn’t leave

Last modified on 2011-04-13 12:20:18 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I came across a town settled down within a three sixty degree hill range, within a hole sort of but the hole wasn’t caused by earthquakes or tectonic plates or volcanoes, it was dug out by humans mining the rich minerals and slate stone from the hills and when they were done the mining companies left leaving behind a hole and a town. I got there in a bus that had to drive at forty kilometres an hour spiralling down and down and it made me feel good to be in such an inescapable place even though I should have had the opposite feeling. This time in my life I wanted inescapable, not stable just forced. I had just been killed in the heart by a beautiful girl, too beautiful for me, and I always expected it but when it finally happened I was in ways worse than I could imagine. In the bad times I always invented ways out of it, or at least there were easy ways out. There was no bad time just the end time, there is no chance or reprisal, there is no sentence or sentiment that can do anything, the idea that words can not work, the thought that no matter how heart-felt or honest or base-soul truthful and yearning you are nothing will change or be resolved for you to feel good or normal again…so, in a nice coach with curtains over the windows I chose this place that I visited when I was about ten and even then I knew this place was horrible and strange and insular and hidden which, absurdly and deliberately, made me choose it now, the challenge of trying to live here in this unearthed place, in this hole that people dug and now people actually try to live in. I can do a hell of a lot of things and one of them I will be able to do here. I’m reading The Iliad hardly, the jerking and long leaning angles inside the bus make it hard to dive into the story, but there is a beauty in reading one of the Earth’s classics knowing I won’t get any kind of beauty in this place, soon or later or ever. We’ve been riding for about eight hours, my eyes stop looking and slide closed even though I know we’re almost there.

The bus halts to a stop and I jerk awake with the momentum. Good. Look around, up and over the seats, there’s maybe three people that make their way up and off. I check my seat and pocket and get up too, pulling my bag from overhead in a just awake panic. Of course its all ok, the bus will sit here for a while as the underneath storage is opened. I pull my bag down the aisle and get off the bus, it’s cold and crisp and there is no one around at all except the three or four of us who got off and the driver opening the storage and its quiet and in the worst way like hearing every little thing makes you realise you are noisy or occupy a space in the world that is noticeable and real. The driver is pulling bags out and none of them are anyone’s and we start to laugh (or they do and I pretend to) until he digs our bags out from being three bag layers deep and he says “it’s always the way, huh” and they laugh more and I can see my bag so I go over and get it and take maybe ten steps away from the bus and realise I don’t know where I’m going because…I am not actually going anywhere and in my head who to call, her, a friend, my mother? None of that is going to happen, I turn around and look to see where the best place to go is, where to stay, where is a pub, I want a pie, where do I get a pie?

In town, the one straight street that is the town, there is a lot of stuff I can get my head around; clothes shop; hotel; restaurant; café; shoe shop; Chinese restaurant (!); souvenir type touristic shop…ok, I realise this is a tourist destination and I love and hate it. Did I want to escape, but did I know this was a ‘place to go’? Did I expect some type of innocence, if I did I would have gone to a completely random place I’ve never heard of by just pointing my finger to the map and now that that idea is in it’s going to make an attempt to exist. On the other had the potential to have a half okay coffee and some spring rolls is pretty comforting, I mean, at least I can pretend I have some kind of access to the things I am used to. I want them to be bad because it is a cliché, if it was good my sentiment of arrogantly ‘finding a good place’ will come back, luckily this is impossible because every place here is the only kind of place that is here, that is, you cannot ‘find’ something, it is already solely there.

It’s called “Stanley Hotel” and it looks okay to me, as in low lights and an understated facade that is really a large square concrete block and that will do until I find something else and decide that I am living here for months or years or and it’s not above a pub so I want to go in and put my bags into a corner of a room and soon I have given the lazy middle aged man behind the bar all the ID and credit card stuff his protocol wants, get a key, go upstairs and do just that; drop my bags off, look around the room, turn the hot water on in the shower, feel the heat, turn it off and leave. In the lobby (if you cold call it that, it’s four old wooden chairs around a circular Formica table) there are three men sitting with bottles of beer over a card game they are not really playing. I look at them, why not, I live here. They look back and I stand there deliberately waiting for something. One of the old men says ‘hey there boy’ and I say ‘hey there to you. You guys ok, need another player?’ and they look away and one of them flips a card onto a pile and its no game I’ve ever seen.

Early, seven thirty, dark here, looking up towards the dead hills there’s nothing, there is a dark rim all around, the stars don’t start appearing until about sixty degrees up in the air. It’s black until then, the street lights are yellow as if powered by the ground under foot, like an energy source owned only by this town keeps the place alive, a glow that makes all the dark patches behind everything a deep impenetrable black. There is a bright light source down the road, obviously a pub. I walk slowly towards it, checking my box of cigarettes are in my pocket and of course they are but you know, you check, especially when you can see that there is nothing open. Two old men shuffle past me, eyes down, holding each other up, I feel like I’m back in the city again except for the intense silence and the cold and the yellow glow that makes everything feel sick and old and alien. I’m feeling sick, I have her face in my mind and I know how far away I am. I smile thinking devilish things like ‘good, I hope she knows I am gone and am not coming back and am going to die’. These type of things make the sickness go away, make my face become hard and I am going to order whiskey and whiskey and whiskey.

Ten, ten thirty, I’ve been listening to hokey music that is basically Australian country music and they seem to love Kasey Chambers or anyone that sounds like Kasey Chambers or anyone that sounds like an old young man who has grown up on a farm and likes clichés, basically anything from young men who pretend to have lived in a farm or have come to know anything by living a few weeks outdoors. It’s such a shame that these lost lonely stuck men feel something towards these false soothsayers and sip their beers far too slowly for my liking which makes me know that the steady drinking of scotch and the desire to rip their faces off is the reason I should be here. Slow it down. Slow it down. You don’t always have to…
‘Hey, mate, you ok?’ says a large tall man in a Stetson hat.
‘Nice hat…it’s not… Akubra at least” and I laugh, talking fashion to town folk.
‘Yeah, Akubra.’ He says coming over and sitting opposite me. ‘You ok mate?’ he asks.
‘Me? Okay? Ummm, no. I’ll be honest. No I’m not ok’ I answer, drunk.
‘What’s up mate?’
‘Up…up?…well, um, up….ok. OK, I’ll say: I don’t want to live. OK? Yeah…that’s…’
‘You want to die?’
‘Nah….nooo…don’t listen to me’
‘what’s your name mate?’
‘Name? My name is…’ laugh ‘Fuck Off’ laughing again…looking at his honest hard dumb face. He just looks back at me trying to be serious, trying to actually talk to me, probably was born here, probably thinks I am a real fucking asshole, probably wants to beat me up, for fun.
‘What’s that mate?’
‘Ah fucking hell…I’m sorry ok. I’ve been on a bus all day…I just got here and I just want some scotch. The bottle shop’s closed, everything’s closed, this is the only place open. And I didn’t even get dinner! Fucking hell…you guys need to have your shit sorted before seven if you want dinner…’ and again I laugh ‘seven!…how do you do it…?’, I know I look stupid but I like it. I need another drink.
‘Yeah mate…yeah.’

At about one a em there are three of us left, two guys and the bartender. I’ve played pool with both the guys and won and lost in equal measures, gained their respect, things I’d heard like ‘I didn’t know you could play pool’ and I said ‘fuck you for stereotyping’ and they laughed and we were touching a lot because we’d had a lot of drinks and the bar owner shuts the front door and turns the main lights off and we’re sitting there inside the pub, empty, closed, and I’ve been in town about seven hours or so. The bar owner pours me a full glass of his cheap scotch, throws two cubes of ice in and says ‘how’s that’ and I say ‘perfect…on the house’. The guy next to me laughs and I wash a third of the glass down, sway a little on the stool. He fills me back up to the top and says ‘come out here’ and the other two stand up straight away and I say ‘where are we going?’ taking up my glass and sipping is slowly this time, noticing I can’t talk properly and feeling good about it. ‘Come out here’ and the guy to my right puts his hand on my shoulder and pushes me with them out through the back and we walk though the kitchen and I’m trying to tell them something funny but notice my words are really bad, I mean really bad and I can’t speak properly at all. I fumble in my pocket for my cigarettes and try to keep the scotch in my glass and one of the others shoves a cigarette in my face and I take it smiling drunk and I say ‘thanksh’ and then try for my lighter but another one has a flame ready for me…’thanksh…’ I say, puffing on the cigarette, ‘you guys are…you guys are…man…fuck…I’m drunk’ and they laugh and I laugh and I haven’t spilt a drop. The bar owner opens a back door, flicks a light switch and there is someone in the corner of the back room, the person turns and I can’t tell if it’s a girl or a boy but I can tell they have down syndrome and are wearing a kind of one piece cotton nightie. The owner goes over to the person and kisses their forehead. The two guys go over and one pulls my free arm towards the others. I stand there and take another sip. One guy unzips his pants and moves towards the corner and I say ‘whoah whoah’ and someone I can’t see says ‘what’s the matter?’ and I don’t know what I say but I feel like I am falling backwards and end up with my back against the wall, glass in hand as the guys take her/his clothes off and I can hear laughing and some strange guttural sounds and I slide onto the floor not seeing much and put the glass to my lips and sip to taste it and in a blur see them all over her/him fucking the mouth and the body and saying and gesturing for me to come over.

I wake up the next morning in my room, got my jeans on and my shirt off, a headache, my boots on the side table under the alighted lamp. The problem is I don’t leave that town.

Nightmares and Wine

Last modified on 2011-04-04 14:01:41 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Walking at night, it takes you like a victim. The demon natures comes out, can’t hide it because it doesn’t want to hide anymore. I’m one of them, got my face open and got my teeth out. It looks like a smile. Some of them who come along haven’t played with the devil so well, they lost. They are under the drink or the drug. They may have lost their mind. I sat outside at a bar and ordered a red wine, lit a cigarette. The warmth of the moon, the silence of the night broken by humans with their words full of ssss. Their hissing annoys me: “SSShe sssaid there’ssss sssstill a chan-sss”. There are two devils next to me and the hair on the back of my neck bristles, I appear relaxed but am wary of their presence.

 

Across from me this couple look at me and I can’t catch them but I know they are whispering about me and wondering about me. My pale skin, my dark eyes. They have black eyes too, they are playful little imps. I shoot them a smile and they go about pretending they are lost in their own world again. The veil comes down. Good for them. Us beasts need to stay the fuck away from each other. I decide to observe them openly, seeing as they don’t want to play tonight. They appear as though they are talking and enjoying the conversation. Luckily for them it is the end of their meal and they can go without any discomfort. The male looks over and catches my eye as they are leaving.

 

Another male, much older than me sits on the table next to mine. I instantly feel his presence and decide not to look at him. He feels old. He has about him a darkness that makes me feel uneasy. His hands are a little unsure so I relax, allow myself to study him: he is wearing a black suit, white shirt and a black tie, and long thin shiny black leather shoes, too formal for this area, a little out of place. I am wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt, got a thin grey leather jacket hung over my chair and tight silver boots. After a few moments of him acting nonchalant he leans over, looks directly at me and them down to my possessions on the table and asks “got a light?”

 

I slide my lighter over to him, his bony hand takes it away and I know I won’t get it back so easily. He breathes out the smoke in a great purple plume that smells like cloves, honey and death. “I am Frederic. what is your name?” he says in an accent I can not classify, except by guessing it is an ancient combination of Slavic, French and English. “Emmanuel” I answer, hearing my voice sound sweet.
“Ah Emmanuel, I knew someone with that name once”.

“I didn’t know it was so common”

“It’s not”.

 

We talk, he flirts with me too much, I am buying him wine after wine. He pulls my lighter back from his pocket and places it on the table. I instantly take it and light a cigarette. He knows I wanted it but I wanted him to know I wanted it yet did not push him for it. I want him to fall in love with me. I want him to think I am falling in love with him. His lips are smooth and fixed in a slight grin. I don’t know what my face is doing but I know my eyes are visible to him. There is a thing inside of us that wants to destroy the other one. His face has the sick grey pallor of death and he speaks in a way that makes me think he is either dying or already dead.

 

He tells me “I have something you will want to see” and I tell him I have seen enough already. He sits back, staring at me in a new way, its horrific, like I have insulted him or as if I was incredibly stupid for saying what I said.

“I’m sorry” I offer, “I was playing”.

“Don’t play with me. We have been talking haven’t we?”

“Yes, we have”

“Ok then. I want to show you something. I live just…” and he turns and extends his arm and points, “just over there”

“On the docks?”

“Docks? No.”

 

The young imps have gone, holding on to each other and closing the night around themselves. They become invisible after about ten paces, succumb. I am walking with my new friend, he is looking ahead with his thin face downwards. I walk alongside closely watching his face. It seems to hold together in the moonlight, fades and reforms into a face, melts and sets. I can tell he is sick of it.

“Shall we say a prayer?” I ask.

“Why?” he says, challenging me back.

“Our father, who art in heaven…”

“Stop it”

We walk some more, the cats on the periphery, standing and staring them moving behind us to form a posse.

“Where are we going?”

 

He asks me to walk down a black corridor between buildings leading down to the shipping yard. I refuse. He shrugs and says it’s ok. I don’t know whether I have failed a test or missed an opportunity that he had no intention of giving me anyway. All of these things perhaps but I have started to feel sick and annoyed and distracted and safe so the illusion was wearing off.
“Goodnight” I say, casually. He says something that sounds like ‘yes’ but I can’t be sure because he has turned and five steps into the shadow has disappeared. I can hear his shuffling feet so I am relieved he is a real thing after all. I look back and seven black cats are staring at me and there is a bright green light in the eyes of three of them and it’s perfect.

 

I slowly walk home, savouring the fresh quiet cold night, passing by those who are lost and taken, passing by the bright fresh ones who are still living, coming back from their bright happy places to bright clean homes with carefully placed objects and a softness to all their possessions. Everything encased in a certain kind of manufactured comfort. They don’t notice anything because they are simply navigating streets, not knowing who they pass, it’s just a road and there are trees and houses and people. Not monsters and demons and angels and choices that affect your soul. Just a street.

Five very short stories

Last modified on 2011-04-01 00:58:25 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

One man sitting alone in a room, when he tried to kiss the woman he loves she smiled at it but said don’t touch me you smell bad, like wine and cigarettes. He drinks his wine and rolls another cigarette. Raymond Carver died of drinking and every book he wrote de dedicated to Tess. One writer is losing his eyesight sitting there drinking and going to work and hating himself and saying words that he doesn’t mean and he is not dying from the body so he can still keep it up/get it up. One person or all of us really screaming though our eyes what we love and what we want, hence tragedy, hence suicide, hence hollow husks of people mingling together much closer in peak hour, much closer at lunchtime, much closer at all the times we are released from our own personal hell. A nation believing they are free and negotiating their terms of freedom whilst willingly chaining themselves to a system and way of life that makes them repeat everything over and over (TV shows are made like this. We made TV shows like this. To live week after week but of course the word ‘week’ is made up). There is no One.

A large mass of animals came together and started living so close together that it was hard to distinguish any one animal from another and then systems were made to make it easier for this herd to function together, properly, so then classifications between the animals evolved that made movement easier and from their position situation became an important measure of classification and structures were built for the varying positions. Opportunities arose for the varying classifications based on structures and potential movements and the order in which we ate stemmed from these substructures of movements so that we defaulted to the origin of the reliance on systems that we made in order to defuse confusion and tell us which classifications could exist in proximity to situations and in doing so made the word exclusivity exist which is what made them able to kill for and not realise that what they are killing or murdering for is to live amongst other animals.

In the street a young boy fell from his scooter and hurt his knee. He started crying a helpless, truthful, pain inspired cry. Several (well thirty) people passed by, of those thirty or more eleven people actually looked at the child. Of those eleven four felt empathy for the child. Of those four only one stopped and asked if the child was all right.

There was a birthday party and because the birthday boy didn’t have any friends from school yet as they had just moved to this place the mother invited all the children from the street they moved to to come. The boy was overwhelmed with the people who were strangers and at all the attention he got from the opportune moments like the giving of gifts or the blowing out of the candles made him feel happy but after that no one talked to him so he sat next to his grandmother and she was talking about how they should never have moved there and she gave him her present and it was a small box of three handkerchiefs and a puzzle that he ended up giving to his little sister. His mother, busy with the party, came over and said Happy Birthday and kissed him on the cheek and he loved her.

Her pimp actually slashed her arm with his knife and told her that’s not all you’ll get as she was dressing to entice men to want to fuck her. She will go through five or ten guys in ne night, douching out her vagina with a saline solution and spraying perfume on the small amount of pubic hair she has each time. She is starting to doubt whether bothering to create any kind of purity illusion means anything, she is starting to think that these guys don’t care or are not thinking on this level and they just want to see her face for a few minutes and in their head know they are fucking hard the pussy of a young early twenties girl who is fairly pretty. One time she was getting fucked pretty hard but could only look at the slight crack in the paint on the wall and think about how she was in her English class in high school and there was this guy who when he read out aloud from the book they were studying would make her wet.

And then you can die

Last modified on 2011-03-29 12:33:55 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I might take another few dozine, finish the bottle of jack, with few more mersyndol. I might not get up. I might watch the dark sky get slowly light, in and out of strange dreams where it is like I am living and do things that you are supposed to do in the daylight, like play with my kids, like watch TV, like do things and smile and see other people smiling and we are all smiling. It’s just a dream. I swallow eight more pills together. It hurts to do it like that but it’s a dull hurt. Just has to feel like that, a lump of small rocks going down your throat that you wash down with the hard grain alcohol.  Sweet it is now, tastes like sugar. I light a cigarette, pull long and deep on it, let the smoke come out slow and long so it takes up the whole room. My body lets me know it is happy and relaxed. My organs and chest sink in to the lounge. I feel sick but can’t move. A vision comes that I am on a street, a street in the city and it’s bright and my wife is smiling at me and pulling me along and I feel myself smiling and looking at the bright street and then I let myself go with it…

I wake up on the lounge because my girls are in the lounge room, and they are touching me and maybe they’ve been touching me for a while and they saw there dad basically dead or as an entombed version of their living father and they probably kept touching me as a game like I am some beast that can be played with and awoken, there small hands tugging on my large nose and them daring to tough my eyes and kips. I wake up with headphones on still looping that music I was listening to over and over, Junior Kimbrough, an old blues man who tells you he is sick and dying and alone and in the morning you realise he is really dying and alone, not like you thought you were last night when you were trying to be alone and dying. I get up and they run to me and I hug them and kiss them and I feel useless and stupid and happy and I kiss them until they squirm away like the most perfect things in the world and the house seems strong and safe and filled with life. I go to the bathroom and vomit when brushing my teeth and look up to se red eyes and winkles and dry skin and think ‘fuck’…

In the car I sit staring out the front window to the backyard, wanting to mow it, wanting to do something in it, I don’t what it is, there are blurry images of renovation and improvement, trying to apply a different kind of life I don’t have. It turns to be an advertisement I hate so I look down to the mechanics of the car and push and pull the levers and buttons to make the thing move. In the street, leaving the street, it feels both proper and abhorrent, every urge to stop the car, to burn the car, to start the car and drive away, to curl up back in bed and finish my box of pills because when they are in it will be so true that nothing will matter. The mobile phone next to me rings and I think for the hundredth or thousandth time ‘change that fucking ring tone’ and I press the green button and let them speak by saying ‘yeah’ and listen to what they want and think ‘shit’ and prepare to drive for forty five or more minutes to this place they told me to go to to fix whatever it is problem that suddenly exists for me…

There’s nothing for me left to do at two thirty. There is no more work. The only way to put it. Standing on the side of the road next to my car, processing the horrors I have seen, wanting to wash my hands but not wanting to go to a McDonalds or KFC so I throw the cigarette away and drive towards civilisation, which is going to mean driving for a while to get away from the cesspit of bad mothers and disgusting unfit fathers, closer to any kind of sentiment amongst the community that values human life as important. The urge to drink a  beer and take a piss and wash my hands overrules this humanist plight so after about twenty minutes driving though the flat lifeless streets in these connected by nothing communities I find myself in a local pub with purple-black carpet, bright lights even though its daytime, filled with locals that should be in nursing homes because their long thin necks and wrists that have lived more than seventy years on this planet to exist now to slowly end their life through schooners they drink like babies sip juice when they have leaned how to drink for themselves. I order a beer and put five dollars on the counter and find the bathroom…

Outside in the street, cement, the road, the hot sun unfiltered through no clouds, no one to be seen, houses standing like graves, you understand why those who live here are so filled with hate and are so wiling to share that hate with you. The urge to have another beer, to stay there forever drinking cold beer until you can only stagger home drunk enough to ignore all of this death and hate and dull repetition whereby you will do this and see this and think this every day of your life. But this is not my town. These are not my people. A warmth can come into my chest juts thinking about not being here and having my family all tucked up at home, the older ones finished school and getting home, staying in their uniforms until their mum tells them to change, running around showing their teeth with their smiles. When I walk in they’ll rush to show me something the did, some beautiful thing the created from nothing…

Four thirty three and I am driving homeward, they worst of the days shit fading as fast as the car moves, a thin veil of garbage that tears away from me as I leave the pit of terrible humans behind. They live there, the stay there, I drive away. Like a bad smell of a nightmare that you wake from and instantly feel better about it not being real. Little bits and tendrils get stuck in and you have that pity thing of course but you can shake it by returning the next day and the shroud comes back an your eyes dull over and you become what you hate: a robot that does the job that interacts with people you tragically don’t think of as people. The idea at this time, thought everyday; pull into Blacktown, get a hit. Twelve minutes away. Ten minutes; pull into Blacktown, get a hit. Eight minutes, you try and listen to a song on the radio to pass through it. You listen and tap the wheel and pretend to sing and miss the exit so you feel safe. Three minutes; get a hit its early. One minute and there is another exit and as you drive up into it you knew was there you hate yourself for trying to pretend you were better or smart or free or good…

Driving with heroin in your blood is smooth and easy and normal. Cars flick by on your right hand side and the sun comes through the visor like a friend and the easy highway bends slowly as you see the ton come and go and the over head bridges flow over head in an instant and you forget you a re driving sometimes and wake up from the dream with your hands still in two places on the steering wheel, steady behind the car in front you’ve been slowly following for a long time. No more, don’t want any more so you throw the syringe and the rest of the junk out the window, turn back to the road and try to stop yourself dreaming too much and feeling too good but the warmth in your arms, on your face and up your spine is so soft and lovely and the sky is blue and the day is perfect. You are away and you are moving away more and more…

It wears off, especially when you turn into the street where your house is that has your wife and children in it, more, it wears off because you want it to wear off, just that glow left where you are calm and can be the person they want and in a way you want too. That could be the drugs talking r making you talk but no, deep down you know you want to love and care for them and have you be the person they know lives and cares for them. Christ it sounds so 1950s but it’s a beautiful thing to have in this age of computers and mental torment and doubt and insecurity as the last turn comes where it is pulling into the driveway, turning off the engine and sitting there for a moment simply deciding whether a cigarette is a good idea or not and basically knowing it’s a question of ‘maybe my body/mind would like a cigarette’ and ‘maybe my children don’t want to smell the fresh cigarette from their dad’ so I get out of the car and don’t have a cigarette and walk in…

Opening the door you expect children like dogs but it doesn’t happen all there is is their toys around the place and a dead house. Some part of me thinks ‘perfect’ but the other part that was dreaming and feeling good about my life for once is let down and I take the four or so paces into the lounge room and it feels so cold and dead and sitting on the lounge, pulling a teddy from under me I feel stupid. The sun outside drawing me out again, calling me a worthless man. Getting back up feels better, looking around for something I should do, a task, I walk down the hall to the bedroom, looking for my wife or a note or something. Hell, its early and she could be anywhere with them. I open the bedroom door and see her naked on top of some guy, riding him and I see his cock coming out of her glistening with her juices, I just stare not knowing what I am seeing really and look at her back as she turns around, look at her spine and back muscles twist as she turns on top of him and look at me with a blank sacred strange face I have never seen and I stand there looking and looking and only after it comes into my gut, a sick twisted pain do I turn away and walk two steps then turn back fast and go back and yell ‘what the fuck! Honey what they fuck is this?!’ and she is already off him lying there and he is sitting up naked and I can’t see anymore…

Driving away, not even looking at road, not wanting to die just not really able to look at the road, it’s a black thing to drive on and you need to grip the wheel and now not caring whether my hands grip the wheel, the faces of my children, the road, the car, my wife’s face, his naked body, who the fuck was he? Eventually it’s a highway to drive on, hitting the accelerator and feeling the car, makes me feel good to just have the car going faster and faster, to scare me, to force me to focus on the car and so when the tears come into my eyes its not from a place I know about they just come and I pull over and just listen to the cars pass by so fast…

The chemist believes my story about insomnia and back pain, the chemist does what they should and gets me a box of dozine and mersyndol. The chemist is lovely and nice and the pain on my face tells him that he is doing the right thing. It is a new chemist because you can’t play the same tricks on all of them, they get to know you after a while and tell you to get the hell out of my store. Over the counter drugs pack more whollop then the ones you can get right off the shelves. We all know this, The trick is knowing the brands and the ways in which you need to access these ‘behind the counter’ medicines. I take them back to the car stopping off at the bottle shop, buying cigarettes and a bottle of cheap as hell scotch and get back in the car. In my mind my naked wife. In my mind wondering where are my kids? Are they playing at  a friends house…are they…are they…lose track. I turn the engine on and drive, drinking from the bottle, turning the radio up. I end up at a look out about half an hour from my house, I can feel my house, I can feel what is happening. The scurrying, like rats, the frantic mess. The phone calls. I haven’t heard my phone ring because my phone is not on. I put pill after pill into my nothing, I drink the scotch. I take more pills in. I start to feel myself passing out, my legs first go numb, my arms feel strange and unattached. I put some more pills into my mouth, flush them down with the scotch. I light a cigarette and turn the radio up more. I don’t like this song. My eyes are heavy and my body is falling way. I am smiling for some reason. I put the rest of the pills into my mouth. It’s light and I am laughing sort of through the pills and think of myself as like the cookie monster from sesame street. I laugh enough for a few pills to fall out of my mouth. I drink the ones left in my mouth down and it hurts with the scotch and the cigarette and the fact that I can still see her like that and I wanted to see my kids and hug them again…

Life is not such a trickery, as far as you know.

Last modified on 2011-03-25 14:21:21 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I grew up without a father from the age of 8. I you know what that is like then you will know what happens is that you instantly love any male slightly older than you. I started taking heroin because one time when I was fourteen I was in the front of a ute with a couple of guys in their early twenties who took me to Cabramatta to score because we had smoked all the pot I had and they thought this is a good idea and also to take me along. I sat there on the left side while they talked about their past and music they liked looking out the window and the streets as they turned from rural to city stuff and let the breeze wash on me because I was pretty stoned. We got there and it was night and dark and as far as I remember started walking away from the car down dead looking streets and pretty soon some Asian guy popped right out and said to me “want a cap” and I said “what” but my companion were quick to jump and said like “yeah yeah” and went down into the alley with him while I stood on the street and maybe smoked a cigarette and they came back and we were gone. Back in the front of that ute they shot up and one of them said “I’m sorry” and I said “is there any for me?” but there wasn’t that time.

I finally was able to convince her to take me up to her room. We walked through the pitch black house and up the stairs and she didn’t care that I was trailing her because years before I had lived there in her parents house for several weeks and maybe it was a few months so I knew my way. We took our clothes off and got into bed and the thing that happens is you remember how each others bodies feel against each other and the ways in which you fit together so its easy and in some human way perfect and beautiful and in the kissing you realise from each other that it is perfect and generally a good feeling, the way your bodies seem to know and appreciate it more than your heads that spoke over and over outside smoking cigarettes and drinking baileys. She guided my hard penis into her wet vagina and it was a wetness I wasn’t used to with my fiancé, the kind you can only experience with a new lover. I started moving it in and out and getting it deeper and deeper and she flipped my on to my back and started rising me in a pornish sexy way and I thought ‘she must be doing this deliberately to make me think she is far superior in bed than ‘her”.

I loved her in a way that made me feel inadequate because she was so well known and well liked and I had a hidden group of people that never intersected with the world I lived in and I liked it like that. I met her as she alighted the train at around 6pm everyday and she wore these high boots and smelt of officiality and we went back to her house to have sex after work and feeling her white cotton shirts made me think of high school sex. This one time I couldn’t get it up and she said ‘what’s wrong’ and I didn’t say anything, instead I slid down and started licking her pussy and it was too hairy but I tried to get hard by rubbing my flaccid penis on the edge of her bed and she started grinding her hips into my face liking the attention and I wasn’t changed so I started to tug on my penis like masturbating but nothing was happening so I tried to make her come with my mouth and fingers but she kept pushing my hand away and saying ‘fuck me now’ and I knew I couldn’t so I stood up and said ‘I can’t’ and I put my clothes on while she sat there trying to talk to me and I left and maybe said goodbye or an apology.

I add, you add, we all scream for iAd

Last modified on 2011-03-23 11:47:27 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

See see see the problem is you want to do too much too soon. As if one sentence can make it, can make someone stand up and change their whole life. Their whole way of being who they have become after, what, forty years! If that sentence exists and you can just read it then its too powerful and scary. Its not even contained in any bible type thing (although sometimes proponents of written religious works think it is). So now the new advertising is a message that is spoken to you by you and can change you:

 

“Michael. Michael. Mi—chael…we know. We have been listening. Keep walking, it’s ok, we’re with you. Down this same old street. There’s something you need just down the way. Down the, no Michael not there. That’s not for you. That’s an adult theatre. You can walk past it this time. See? And we’re right here with you. What you want its to see this bedding. It’s soft, thick. Everything you need to be comfortable. Can you imagine being that comfortable, on a rainy day? Michael? Have a look here”

 

Slater & Slater were the first to invent “I” advertising. Not like radio, not like TV, hell, not even like Back To The Future II holographic stuff. This was the real future, the kind of real future you at first feel sick about and think is incredibly wrong but after only a few months accept and move on from. Basically what it is is everyone with an ‘i’ device or pretty much any other “smart” thing is automatically hooked up via either a wifi, 3G or Bluetooth connection to neighbouring users and so can be pinpointed by location and targeted thusly. Google were reluctant to get on board but in a meeting they persuaded them that it would yield more ad impressions and clicks on said keyword ads, warranting a new touch-what-you-want-wherever-you-are kind of point and click and so, they aren’t idiots…

 

Ok, here’s how it works:
You, with your iThing, walk around, plugged in like you normally are. Bing! a message comes in; a voice message. Through the speakers or right into your headphones. What? You didn’t sign up for this (and sure you can opt out but it’s hard because we’ve built it in to your plan. If you want to get rid of it you need to move to a different plan, a ‘free’ plan that will likely cost more (freedom is not cheap). So, a few discrete messages that you actually want based on who all of your accounts say you are OR anonymity at a price? You can choose of course but by default (check your contract) it’s ON. The outrage is subsided by relevance. Its almost like a friend cajoling you towards a destination. We don’t even like our friends, most of the time, making us go places and do things, so we can tolerate this. After all, it’s your own openly available, personally contributed to social identity talking to you. And who created that? You did, and you kind of respect yourself for being so careful about your online identity. Etcetera.

 

Read: it’s only your responsibility to ensure these invasions are not invasions so you must maintain a high level of connectivity and online presence to exclude you from unwarranted messages, i.e. the better you are at existing within this landscape the better we are at not bothering you i.e. delivering you what you actually want (and you agree that it is what you want).

Red Dragon

Last modified on 2011-03-22 12:41:07 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I could use her fingers for a spoon or the little things that they are, chopsticks. But she’s not dead yet she is little and breathing and sleeping. It’s her face I can’t stand. How it’s so pretty and small and all the things she says during the day, things that are directed into my heart. I realised today that I massage myself, you know, I give myself affection. What affection I get is in the fucking. And when I don’t get ‘the fucking’ I get to masturbate. Hard and raw and it hardly works or it’s hard to work because it takes so long and if I stop it goes soft really fast so I have to keep at it but there’s so little to be aroused about anymore. I’m on to cheap wine now because all my money goes to things that are supposed to be fun and they are, you know, for the time they last, but it’s all food and drink and things that go into you. In your eyes, in your ears, in your mouth and out, out and when it comes out it is supposed to be…collected but lots of it is shit…it can’t all be alchemists’ gold. I apologise of course, it’s not pleasant to be around me for 24 hours. I imagine it as acts in a play, how its broken up, how you can bare just enough and then there’s an interlude, a change, something has changed, you expect a difference, a learning, an evolution…and I know I am not talking to an idiot but, life is way longer than that and it goes through lunch, afternoon, dinner and then night and sleep. There are so many god damned opportunities for it all to turn to shit in an instant and that’s really what it’s like; at any moment it can all fall apart. Because I don’t know what its like to be a true human. I love them. I talk to them and try to get them to talk.

They say things that they believe things and want things. They don’t know about purpose or the devil or god or right and wrong or good and evil and how there is an eternal battle between the Lord and Satan and how all of their actions are part of the war so they still say such stupid things and I try, sort of, to help them correct themselves but its hard, or worse the devil loving ones who are killing and hate or are basically lost (that is, living and dying for no purpose…that’s the devil that no one knows about) and for them it’s a different prescription, for them it’s a dream, a reason, a…basically a sense of love. To fall in love. With anything. Not to just be and die. Your soul is a thing that is so rare, with so much potential for beauty but so easily mislaid or disregarded or lost, the worst word you can possibly imagine.

My day is a dream. It is meaningless. The people are phantoms. The situations are empty. The trials are unimportant. I thought the one I loved knew me. When I found she didn’t…I turned to my friends and I saw them shining, shining more than ever. I can only tell the stories from the day as if they are performed, as if they are so far from my own self as to be bearable, as in, only bearable under the shelter of falsity. If these things were true tests then we all have failed. But they are not. They are recompensed illusions. Only the choices we made as an audience caused vexation.

Son, there are some things in this world, that you aren’t going to like. There’s going to be a lot of people you meet that have their own way of seeing things. And you know there are all going to seem interesting and true, but you know of course son there are only a few things you need to get by. You listening? Get yourself a good job, a good paying job, and you do that job right, you hear me. You get your money and you get out of there. And then you use that money to get yourself a good place to stay. And then son, well, then, as long as you have your belly full or god damned near at least half full well then son, well then no one can touch you. You hear me. You understand me?

I am still so simple and innocent. I still believe what people say. I still think that I am the only one capable of any kind of face-to-face dishonesty, at least at the level that I am capable of dishonesty, meaning, a level that is not in any way hurting or callous or causing any confusing pain. The truth is what I get to experience as an acute pain over and over is that not only am I not the only one capable of such ‘feats’ but that I am incapable of the kind of ‘feats’ that others are capable of. For that I am accused of being a devil, perhaps because I am so unskilled as to be basically transparent or simplistically pure and humble and unaware of the real depth of betrayal and cover up and under handed under-the-table dealings that most are actually capable of that I feel it so deeply and sincerely and think it so hard to do whereas actually I am basically so simple that (a) I could never imagine it was already happening around me and (b) could never perpetrate that kind of complex betrayal/justified reality stuff to myself. Or can I?

I took a cigarette out in the car park. There is a peace in knowing yourself. Breathing. Knowing what you are, what you have done. There is a peace in being alone for a moment, in getting to be alone in the night, in the quiet alones of the car park. I am repeating myself but that is of course what you do when there are so many other voices in your head that are telling you the wrong thing.

Youth and not-Youth

Last modified on 2011-03-17 14:18:10 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

In the morning the daylight warms you in a way that feels nice but there’s the hint that it doesn’t want to warm you, it’s warning you that it will not warm you but hurt you later and it’s trying to hurt you now and it’s annoyed that you are enjoying being warmed which makes you enjoy it more because there is a suffering in it. The soft blue of the blank sky like a poorly drawn comic book is music to your eyes, angels sing, herald the new day with it’s romantic barely-recognisable-as-reality vista, there is a sweetness in the air, it tastes like flowers and pollen and those many times you’ve snapped the end off a honeysuckle, pulled out the stamen, plucked the base from it and sucked out the nectar. Having once tasted this sweet drop you went ahead and sucked twenty or fifty of them, but not enough to wipe the entire shrub of flowers because you are not an animal or evil or whatever that is and as a child sucking sweet drops from flowers realised then that you are not anti-environment or a destructor and taking that to school with you is enlightening. You are too young to imagine that others are not as capable, too young to know that not everyone is so delicate and inspired. You see them do brutal things, say brutish things that are against your nature, but in sucking that sweetness freely from nature you gained an appreciation for nature, which includes your fellow humans. As such you were able to understand and appreciate them, in all their brutality and animal honesty, how they did things and how they moved, sweating and touching each other. So when they are doing this you are telling them about things or ways to think about things and they smile, wide smiles and pat you on the back and tell you they like you but they don’t know why and you smile at them and they smile back. But it’s not children anymore its adults and they are hideous and now powerful and they have cars and money and are doing things sexually and playing with other people’s love in ways that make you sick and suicidal and even more resilient because you can still taste that sweetness in your mouth only now you know about bees and honey and pollination and how important bees are for the ecosystem and that bees then also know about sweetness. The main thing bees do is produce a sweetness that cannot be replicated by science, a sweetness that sustains the world, taken from beautiful flowers, a system which is the basis for all life. When you overheard this teenager in school talking about how he raped this girl, well not really raped but fucked her when she was virtually passed-out drunk at a party and he said he couldn’t be sure she was into it but she sort of was, sort of was asleep kind of thing but they fucked (and he lost his virginity in this way aged fifteen) and he was smiling and telling us (you were there) about it in ways that make it sound so terrible but you looked around and lots of ‘boys’ were smiling and laughing and touching each other, like patting each other and grabbing arms at what not. Later when you had left that town but came back to visit a friend you saw them all together in the local pub they were still talking the same and patting each other all over their bodies and smiling with their back teeth with two telling a story about how they had both fucked a girl at the same time and high fived each other during it.

&

At your desk you stare at a screen and look to the right and see a cityscape but it’s not enough so you respond to an email and press send then get up and take your coffee mug to the kitchen and make a tea. The time it takes and the smell you get from the tea bag you try to savour and get transported by them and it works for mere seconds because either you hear something directly referenced to your job or else someone talk to you about their life. You talk to them, mainly, respond to them because these things are basically questions to be answered, dull faced inquiries that have no purpose but in being a fellow human require a response. Back at your desk you overhear a boss or manager talking to a fellow employee and he is asking her to do things that are noticeably (in her face) against her morals but she wants to keep her job and impress so she is agreeing and talking about the ways in which she will go about subjugating herself and you can see her swallowing hard and having to stammer her words in order to get them out and standing up with a weak smile and leave with this heavy task on her shoulders, trying to take a deep breathe and justify what she is about to do to herself. What she is about to do is kill her soul a little bit, what she has done is sold her soul for an amount not really worth the true soul so what she does is do what she is asked and then call her boyfriend crying and saying ‘I can’t do this anymore’ and he is saying back to her ‘it’s ok, it’s ok you can do this one thing and we’ll be home together in a few hours’. What she was asked to do is threaten to fire a young employee in customer service who is having an exorbitant amount of leave because her grandmother is dying, even though she knows that both this employee’s parents died when she was 5 and 6 respectively and that her grandmother brought her and her sister up since then and it is basically her mother dying for the second time and that the insane amount of grief, obligation and confusion inside this twenty year old is unfathomable.

&

You don’t even realise you are a person walking around the schoolyard, you are just moving from one thing to the next with time irrelevant, controlled by the sounds of bells and even really unaware of waiting for a bell or knowing the time, relying purely on cues from teachers or just that bell-type sound. You mind is involved in menial thoughts, mainly this one where you want to be liked so you tell people what they want to hear and find joy in seeing their happy and warm reaction to you so you keep at it and when you are first caught out telling these fifty percent fabrications you are able to twist it so that the person questioning you starts doubting the validity of their question and in the end just settles on being confused.  It doesn’t make sense to fall in love but you do for reasons that sound incredibly simple and ordinary like ‘they make me feel confident’ or ‘I like the way they do things’ or ‘they make me feel like I am a better person”. They seem to be other worldly and different to everyone else and it makes you behave in a new way you have to think about and basically it is that you have let yourself down in some way because you were not being yourself, as in, not the charming, lie telling, crowd pleasing self but, you were trying to be honest or at least closer to honesty in the face of what you considered to be some type of ethereal being and the question of authenticity and what authenticity actually gets you when five minutes after interacting with your secret admiree you can go back to having the adoration and attention of the meagre crowd you have amassed. When you repeat this pattern into your twenties, thirties, forties and beyond it becomes less about being an adolescent and more about being the kind of person that desires unconditional love, or a desire to receive unconditional love based on certain conditions, namely, that you can continue to output the kind of things that make you confident enough to continue outputting in a desire-inducing level that is enough to get someone to love you unconditionally and that the awareness of such cyclical conditional precludes you from actually feeling “true love”.

&

The streets are filled with people and it’s strange how when you close your eyes you can imagine the faces of so many people who do not exist, an old man, a woman, a young boy, a group of Asian teens etc until your mind is filled with thousands of them all coming at you as if down a busy street and you are moving through them without walking, all these imaginary people, their faces do not live or may have lived n this earth. Is it so unfathomable that they have existed, these worn in faces, these faces that exist as solid, wrinkled, expressionless faces like you bump against on the way to and from work at some point in the history of the world? That they have had bodies an souls and lives just in the same way you imagine the people you really have seen, the children you have played with, the parents and teachers you have known looking up at as a child wondering why they are so slow and solemn and have a thing about them where you know they are not like you. Now the way that you interact with people as if they are mere apparitions, forms in a body that is filed up with the media of the time, saying things they have learnt from TV or whomever they consider to be inspirational or sources of truth as if you are interacting not with people but with the time and with the media itself, trying to get the media to change and collude to transcend the rote insertions that are formed as a response to any input. Then you see them bare children and talk to the children in a graphically disconnected yet expected way and it is the way in which they have been taught to behave and the more they act like this the less you feel they are solid, the apparitions from your mind are in your awake eyes and they are building houses and having cars and wearing clothes for the very same reasons they yell at their children to “shut the fuck up mummy is busy”.

&

We came across about four or five kids who were around the same age but they were strangers, that is, from a different school to us but of course growing up in the exact same area as we did and our first response was fear, like one pack of animals meeting anther pack and both being too afraid to make any sudden movements, happy for the moment to stare and circumnavigate one another in a stand off situation. You are staring at one kid who is noticeably taller than the rest and it males you feel uneasy because you have to experienced hanging out with an older person and it makes you feel even more estranged from these other local kids who are now even more different from you which gives you a horror insight into these strangers, namely that they allow some older person to hang out with them but for what purpose? They instantly seem so much stranger and more threatening than your troop in their bizarreness, yet this doesn’t stop you from staring at this older kid who is basically ignoring everything and throwing large rocks into the lake. The dinner party where you go too drunk and told the people there who you barely knew expect of course for your connection to them via your partner and told them that they are all grossly misinformed about reality because they were living basically closeted lives hat revolved around trivialities that are dependent upon the age they are living in and not the real essence of existence made you, when in the toilet washing your face, flash onto those kids and the strange way in which they were different sized and colours and your group of white like minded fellows at the time made you feel safe and now you realise is a misrepresentation of the world at large and you fear at the time has over the years been replaced by a repugnancy that allows you now to be hyperaware of acceptance and of course the possibility that you are overcompensating and have lost the crux of what it is to have any kind of identity vis a vis a group or a connection to your culture at all. Back at the table you go on to talk about how “we” have no culture and shortly thereafter your partner begins making to necessary social niceties to leave.

&

That morning you felt sick and on the train it was as if you could pass out from dizziness and walking down the stairs on the carriage you thought you would fall and hurt yourself badly because if you were to fall you would completely allow yourself to fall and the thought of you breaking bones or opening your skull on the metal railing that are everywhere overtook you all the way down the five stars to the bottom and the swaying and slow stopping of the train made you feel worse, as if there as something tugging at your guts. Every morning there are the same type of people with you, surrounding you but you only ever notice those three same people and you want to say something to them, to share this with them but of course they have their own three people they feel this connection with so you would end up being a stranger appearing from the mess as one talking to them and it could go no further than an obvious momentary observational pleasantry, something we have all experienced as so unexpected. On the street we are more diluted and it becomes a game where you walk in a direction with them all, each one with their lives and dreams and goals, in this most concentrated and close way we exist each deeply caring about our individual things, alone, preparing to pretend we do not really care about these things for the next eight hours or begin justifying to ourselves that the next eight hours contribute to achieving those hopes and dreams. You hear a voice inside of you screaming to stop walking in that direction, turn around and walk away to where you want to go because you are a human and you can do it and the fear you have takes over and you think about the ways in which you are trapped and each step closer kills something inside of you that used to think you could do whatever you wanted. You can’t see it at your desk but you can imagine that small child that you were in that photo that is stuck in your memory where you have a smile on your face that is wide and even in a way acting for the camera.

&

A sweetness in the bush where there are tendrils and vines and exposed veins of trees that seem to be struggling to get back inside the earth and you touch them and they feel vulnerable even though you can scratch a little bit of bark off under your fingernails and pick that bark out from under your fingernails so easily. The earth is black and sweet and wet and it takes a lot to not put a clump of it into your mouth, sometimes because there are about four or five boys running around near you with sticks taped together to look like guns and the boy’s bush backyard you are in now has the best gun because he lives here and has had the time to make a really good looking stick-gun and you and the others party guests have had to make one in a few minutes and so they are misshapen and have minimal tape to accentuate their gun-like features. You are alone on the bottom of a very small valley with a stagnate creek looking back up to the house wishing you could be in the house where there is carpet and a sweet smell that is not like your house. One boy yells out “bang bang bang I got you” so you have to sit down on the ground because he got you and you instead touch the soft leaf of a water-plant that is plump with water. Now you see banner ads and ads on TV about recruitment into the army or navy and they are modelled on video game aesthetics like first person shooters and the ability to control a group of blood thirsty courageous men through war torn now yellow coloured environments when it used to be grey for the Nazis and then green for Vietnamese and now its yellow for the Arabic people which sells video games these days like Nazis sold games and movies and other propaganda yesterday.

The Genius and Our Cynicism of Homeless Marketing OR Sorry, I’ve got no change

Last modified on 2011-11-22 10:59:33 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I’ll start with a few examples;

(a) The Sign: this is when they[1] write maybe twenty words on a pathetic[2] piece of brown cardboard pleading their case in a way-too-aware-that-brief-words-have-meaning kind of way that alludes to an understanding of advertising principles.

(b) The Prayer: this one is brilliant[3], they kneel on the hard pavement and put their hands out in a pose reminiscent of a ‘true’ beggar from history.[4]

(c) The Engager: talks to you, words, voice, clever quips to either endear you or at least urge you in some way to give some coins.[5]

(d) The Asker: straight up confronts you, in your face, some are more committed than others. For example some are brief as in they try and give you the ‘sound bite’ pitch that will or will not catch you and others are hanger-on who actually walk along with you and break down your initial ‘no’ into a more and more ‘well, yeah sure’ so you give money. Pestilence par excellence.

(e) (oh no) The Truthful: they don’t even really beg. Basically they have stopped using any of the tactics and are just there. They don’t even have a receptacle or method in which to receive donations.

So here we go in talking about these strategies and how successful they are and if even success of these methods is desired by the perpetrators/performers and if in fact these analytics are observed, discussed and improved upon or simply are an aggregate function of our society[6]:

(a) The Sign

One example I encountered that I found particularly bad:

PLEASE HELP, WHAT YOU CAN. NEED MONEY FOR FOOD AND SHELTER. I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE.

Well of course they all start with please help, that is something that needs to be there. And in being there so commonly we as consumers (huh?) now pretty much ignore. Help is expected, understood. If I was to give advice I would leave that opening out of the intro. Imagine actually squatting next to them[7] and giving advice on this level: “I think this would work better if you…”. I mean that is worth way more than the fifty or so cents you’d throw into the hat or onto the rag or piece of paper or whatever they have in front of them, yet it’s incredibly insulting. Another noteworthy aspect is the choice of cardboard. It has to appear as though it is found or in some way scavenged. Not too perfect, yet not too beat up so that the message is illegible. And as far a illegibility goes that is another nuance of the sign writer, the text cannot be too well written so as to give the impression that the author is capable, that is able to perform the handwriting task so well that they are actually suitable for employment, and again not too illegible as to render the text ineffective. So it being created somewhat knowingly somewhere in between (I doubt we see a third of fourth draft version), a cynic gets the impression that it is deliberately slightly poorly written, in the same way an adult tying to mimic a child’s handwriting does the obligatory reversing of the letter e to effect some type of emotional or sense-memory response. A homeless sign writer uses grossly disproportionate font sizing, obligatory random capitalisation and a quick three or four word syntax. All these techniques when imagined how they are put into practice seems impossible for it is an organic process, whereby there are incremental improvements in the message over time. Do they take a break in their daily routine to wander the streets noting each others signs and resulting monetary success, and then use the good ideas they discover to alter their message for their next sign (research)? Is there a forum at which they discuss way in which to improve their messages (meeting)? What connectivity if any is there and, perhaps even more cynically now is there an ‘agency’ (I imagine organised crime) that is profiteering from these beggars, offering coaching, managing their physical placement, appearance, techniques and resultant monetary success (business)? Surely the percentage taking would be miniscule and not worthy of such effort. And lastly on the choice of receptacle for coins, it seems the smaller the better. Of course we all know they remove their takings every so often so that it seems like they have been given a small amount which is supposed to compel you to contribute, I mean they think that if they are sitting in front of twenty dollars worth of coins we are going to be less likely to contribute? This is how they see us. As stupid, as uncaring, as if we are able to dp the quick maths of adding up a bunch of silver coins and think: they don’t need my dollar.

(b) The Prayer

This one really hurts, so you could say, it’s effective. Perhaps it’s just because of the physicality of it, or the Judeo-Christian biblical implications that pose possesses. I’ve seen this used in the greatest and probably truest of senses in Rome where gypsy women actually lay kneeling and face down with their cupped hands out over their heads. There is real suffering in their body, you can see it. Their knees hurt, it is hard to stay upright, they tremble and sway, they look up to a god in the sky, all hallmarks of the classical artworks of the great masters. Seeing such wanton, pure hope and pain is confronting, and an affront to our own sensibilities, mainly because we see this whilst shopping for new clothes or looking for bottled water because we are slightly thirsty (and cranky now because why can’t I find a god damned bottle of water in this piece of shit city and when I do it’ll be three bucks, fuck!). As you know, they have possessions, bedding, excess clothes, other basic necessities so in order to perform this tactic these items must be safely secured. So we can guess that they have either a secure place or a community that is watching over their kit. In this sense then the desire to get money rapidly is important, therefore the extremity in which they ask for money is heightened, as they must appear bereft of any kind of support structure and in being so are vulnerable and/or constantly worried about theft and the real possibility of ‘losing it all’ to an insanely finetuned heightened degree . In summary this deception is designed to bring in income quickly, for as we all know high risk ventures are more lucrative.

(c) The Engager

The first thing you love about this approach is how charming, unthreatening and basically ‘like us’ they are who employ it. Well spoken, clean, jovial and seemingly upwardly mobile, they represent the version of homelessness that we, in our darker moments, can envisage ourselves embracing. The line I heard that made me give many gold coins was “ah here comes a potential source of income!”. Clever. I walked past him every day for a further two weeks until he came up with “spare some change for a man who shares the DNA of a leech”. Wow. So many post-modern hip meta references in that one line. That equals money (which I happily gave). The urge to give money transcends pity, it becomes fellowship, genuine friendship help, you no longer care that it may or may not be used for alcohol, you want to buy him a drink. As far as marketing is concerned, this is the way to go. That being said, it takes a lot of resources to achieve this, possibly even resources which rival a lowly paid factory worker, like a bed indoors, access to a kitchen, laundry and bathroom facilities. So in that sense, giving money to this type of ‘homeless’ person is probably not the best use of charity. There’s the twist, that we have the capacity to judge levels of worthiness based on degrees of comfort. They are one and all worse off than you clearly because your lunch and bottle of wine that night will cost approximately what they make, yet because they have a pleasant disposition you (a) want to give them money (b) don’t feel compelled to give them money.

(d) The Asker

Insofar as I hate hate hate this it works the best, mainly for that very reason. To equate it to marketing or life terms it’s the most annoying ad on TV or the most annoying person you know. And isn’t it funny and bizarre and counterintuitive that these ads and people you know actually succeed (in anything). Why? Because there are always (a) people so stupid they believe the hype (b) people so dull they find it exciting (c) people who are unable to deal with such an affront that they yield. (oh and of course (d) the people unafraid enough to scream FUCK OFF). That a 75% chance of success, or, actually higher seeing as those in group (d) represent maybe 2-3% of the population, so we’re talking a huge 97% success rate. No wonder flashing, yelling and manipulate advertising and fucking loud annoying-ass people are still around, and, not only that, inexplicably getting results. Bottom line stuff. Money. The Asker attaches themselves to you and doesn’t let go, they have a story, more a diatribe, an unchanging repetitive messages, full of supposedly catchy sympathetic scenarios, pithy situational diagrams and brief easy solutions that YOU can provide repeated ad infinitum until you do something about it (which as I illustrated in 97% of cases if give some coins). There are two major things going on here, (1) being that they basically do not respect you, in that they know you can be beaten, you are not clever or forceful enough to do anything other than eventually succumb to their will and (2) they know you do not like them, do not want to spend any time engaging with them or seen to be engaging with them so your natural flight-or-fight instinct will kick in and, well, its easier to pay them off then start a fight. This approach is most commonly used in major public thoroughfares that are not monitored or controlled by security, shop fronts, or places that have a concerted desire to keep such succubi at bay. Essentially city parks, major connecting pedestrian roadways and outside large shipping complexes (note: outside the golden place of air-conditioned luxury that represents a haven for those with a disposable income or loose credit morals).

The counter to this definition is seen when desperation forces this type of charity seeker to approach customers seated at the outdoor tables of restaurants and cafes. This is a very ineffectual way to solicit funds for you are basically shooed away like a stray cat by the proprietors who shrug their shoulders at their customers in an effort towards an apology that makes me feel sick at seeing the person I am about to give fifty dollars to for a couple of coffees and two toasted foccacias treat another human being so indifferently. No tip for you.

(e) The Truthful

There is no ulterior motive here, mainly because they are not trying to gain anything. The truly homeless, the truly decrepit, the truly lost in the world are not trying to get your money in any way. They rely purely on the world and any one’s common human decency to assist them in not dying for another day. This is why we give money to charities so that they may help these people by providing soup and blankets and such. If I was to insinuate that this kind of lifestyle is in any way calculating then you have my permission to find out where I live of work and throw rotten fruit and vegetables at me. My only comment on this reality is: how amazing it is in this day and age and in this society that I live in these people can exist and live and breathe.

LASTLY: the phenomenon of being ridiculed for giving too little!

---

[1]Okay I do realise the use of the word ‘they’ is terribly incorrect and (what I would say terrible atypical of ) sociological analysis is critically wrong. Can I also offer that this is just common usage and, by way of a footnote apology go on to use the term they but have you know that I m not so callous and crass and classist to think that it is an okay term. If you want to discuss the ways in which this is wrong or debate the ways in which I could possibly go about correcting this misdemeanour in society’s mind then please email me. I won’t bore the rest of you with this suffice to say we will probably agree so, hold your horses.

[2] I’ll explain later why I use this word

[3] I know, I mean it in a sense of…well, please read on

[4] Oh god now I am sure to be labelled a horrible person now. Look, bare with me, this is the beginning and you can be assured that by the end either you will like me, agree with me or at the very least understand what I am writing is not an arrogant diatribe of a wealthy capitalist trying to understand the ‘trouble’ we are having with the ‘dirty underlings’. Okay?

[5] My favourite

[6] Brief example: how would one at first realise that a sign is the best method to facilitate monies and also how would one know how to optimise a sign to maximise incoming coin AND THEN ALSO how would one know that one’s sign was at first effective and then became less so because of the emergence of another’s more successful sign leading to a decline in your signs ‘heart string’ approval rating thereby leading you to adjust your sign to measure up to the new appropriate ‘heart string index’.

[7] Again…I know. Did you read the other footnotes? What do you want me to use in play of ‘them’?

Billy Evans Pies

Last modified on 2011-03-04 00:36:42 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Homeless writer – I paid 20c for this piece which means he has officially made more money from publishing fiction than I have.

His technique is to stand with a vaudeville-esque hat on the ground (the brim slightly tilted in an homage to Chaplin), pointing at the hat to illuminate it. It works. It is amazing the simple marketing tactics of homeless people (more on that soon).

The syntax of this piece is amazing:

Last modified on GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Lost in the harbour

Last modified on 2011-02-07 13:11:53 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

It’s ten thirty but the clock on the dashboard here says its three thirty. But it’s not, it’s, I believe it because I remember back when it was eleven, so yeah, it makes sense. Some time as gone, must be about four hours. The worst thing is the bugs, they give you a nice uniform but it…there’s bugs in here. And so I scratch at my arm all the time and its red and hot and it’s hard to pull the sleeve up and I dip my finger into my water bottle and spread the water on my forearm and it feels good, good so I put more and more water on and the lights of the next station come so I press the button and slowly move the brake handle up to slow and press the other button that tells them…ah you know. Stuff like that.

There is a little girl between Central and City Square. She lives in the tunnels with I think her mother but I’ve only seen the mother three times. She is so cute and small, like a dream, always in the same dress. I like that she is in a dress. That her mother perhaps makes her wear a dress like it’s possible she will be married. I saw the movie ‘Emily’, Jane Austin it was. It’s like that. She watches me drive by and I think about her, and the rats, and that she is standing there, watching the lights come, the loud noise come, the train come and she stares into my eyes it seems but it’s only a second I see her and only those black things for eyes.

I’ve circled the subway twelve times, its four thirty it says but I can’t be sure after twelve hours under here. I thought four thirty am maybe but when I asked a station guard he laughed and blew a whistle and I thought he was the devil. He had teeth missing, the two either side of his front teeth. Not the devil, a rat, another rat in here with white skin and a shrieking whistle. He laughed and looked away, he laughed without looking at me as if I was so much of an object or wanted him to laugh and again blew on his whistle and held up the white flag. I can’t remember if it was him again or someone else at a different station. Some other rat. They spend so much time down here.

Slowing into the station you see the difference in mankind. You see the scum, the fake rich, the idiots, the partiers, the children, the homeless, the regulars, the weirdos, the old people, the pathetic, the unusual, the dead, the living. You let them in. They come in. They get on, ‘aboard’ it used to be called. All aboard. Like an adventure, like something meaningful. Going somewhere. Not just there to fall off and go on and get back on and move around and circulate. Rats. I see them because I have the lights on up front, see them scurry every time. What do they eat? Toes and nibble on scum, the thick scum that comes down from above. Through the sewer, out through the old pipes.

Its getting to midnight. The clock tells me eight thirty. I don’t know what eight means. Morning? The people are dressed well. Night? They look stupid all together like that. They should go home to their wife who has a nice meal ready. My wife used to cook meals. Proper meals with meat and gravy and potatoes and corn. God. I used to pray every night. Knelt beside my bed and felt small because the bed was so high. Like a child I would pray in slippers and flannel pyjamas and like a boy sometimes my penis would slip out of the slit while I was praying and my mind was distracted by this which made me think of God more fully.

The radio, hard to hear it say “Barry (?)….<unheard>…night…<unheard>…city will…to…station for…<unheard>…under…for there can issa (maybe?)…when issh…<unheard>…” and like this and it stops after a while and I pick up the receiver and talk to the guard who says something in not really English and I say “did you get that?” and he says “what?” and I hang up. The lights are coming again.

My arm, again. Keep scratching at it, along the forearm, look at it, nothing there but a redness. Still aches to be scratched. I try to ignore it, got a sudoku magazine that was left on the train, half finished but they made mistakes.  I turn to a new one, write a few numbers and throw it back onto the seat. It’s infinite. Infinite with no point. There are bugs in here but they are too small to see. They are around and in here. There aren’t any scientist here to take them and say “you poor man”. Is it Museum station already? The girl with the dress will be coming soon. But like an old man I get my hopes up and quickly kill them down. She will not still be there.

I move the handle up a notch. From stop to run. My reflection in the mirror, in my uniform, catch myself pinching my arm. The itch is being killed by self inflicted violence. Violence. I see the tunnel coming, the shape of the internal void forming as a curl, a black, charcoal curl coming and coming in an ever developing arc. Seen it half an hour ago, the same thing. This time the girl comes and she is bright and alive, moving, dancing, she is…wait, move, little girl. Get off the tracks little girl. And it’s so fast. The train moves along, pushes along like a silver smooth beast, moves so fast and along that it crushes her and she falls away, as brief as a moth and quick and fragile as a tissue. Hit and gone and no sound and only I saw it.

No no no. And the time says nine thirty six pee em. I am on the train that is stopped at Central station. I need to go. I open the door and come out onto the platform. This one is outside, with air and people and the bits of sky out from under the awnings. There are lights and stars in the sky. It is night, I thought it was night, did I? A hand on my shoulder, turns me around, has a whistle in her lips, a flag down by her side, saying words. Words that sounds like “what .(and). you .(and). doing .(and)…” and I hear that and I push her hands off me and she catches up and I sit down on the ground.

My wife died three years ago. At home I put a frozen pie in the microwave and press ten minutes. It goes on with the sound and that light. I walk away from it, sit down on the lounge and turn the TV on. Its people talking of course. I stare at their mouths. They are loud and saying things. They have their hair done. The scene changes so fast all the time I don’t know what’s going on. I see her face, in the tunnel. Her little face with black eyes. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t there really. The clock says midnight now. It’s not midnight. The microwave finishes.

The Writer

Last modified on 2011-01-30 12:28:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The Writer mainly sits at the computer thinking and waiting and then goes outside to process their ten or so ideas and create opening line after opening line smoking a cigarette:

She came in out of the rain and her hair was wet and her clothes were wet and she stood there for a second soaked and smiling and he thought ‘I love you, I love her’.

And you want The Writer to write about love like that and tell you a story like that and that’s what they want to do too. They write the line they made up, the one they liked whilst sitting outside on the stairs looking around at the same stuff, coming back to the laptop all confident with that line and feelings and goals. The Writer writes the line and then sits there for a second, looks at the clock and it’s been a few minutes and The Writer thinks ‘I better fill up my glass to get this going’ so does and sits back down and thinks ‘should I delete that? Where will it go?’ and adds:

She starts taking off her clothes in that haphazard I Don’t Care About Clothes way that makes her so exquisite. We normally spend hours of life yearning for women to take off their clothes and when they do its like God himself is appearing in the room. Like a gift.

The Writer saves the document and it’s called ‘The Writer’ at the moment because it’s nothing yet.

Of course it’s perfunctory and unsexual and even though she does a little shimmy thing with her ass to get her pants off it’s still just part of the “you’re watching me” kind of exhibition which is both nice and also “men are pathetic”. I turn back to my magazine and keep reading this article about how artists have changed since ‘September eleven’ and how it’s getting more and more acceptable to manipulate the images we saw that day.

Actually I am not American and I have that back-of-the-mind thought that either it was actually orchestrated by the American government or at least they are to blame based on past actions…you know what I’m talking about (the whole Middle East/CIA support in the past, “what did they expect from such direct interference” type of stuff).

“Baby come here and kiss me” she says and so I get up and go to her and hold her naked cold damp body and it’s so little and fragile and her skin is that clammy cold it gets when you come out of that weather and I massage her ribs and kiss her lips and run my hand through her wet hair and can only say “you’re so wet” and in my mind it’s like she is a little bird and I should have said that instead. “Go for a shower” I say and she is putting things away and I say “hey don’t do that now. I’ll do it, go!” and she kisses me again all little and naked and I watch her ass jiggle as she skips down the hallway to the bathroom.

There’s something in this piece. It’s so nice to be in love, isn’t it? How the simple things like, for example, coming home and going for a shower are so beautiful and inspiring. The Writer, now, starts thinking terrible things will happen. Nothing is so serene or simple. There is always something else. But he doesn’t want that to be true.

The shower is on, steam is coming out into the room and swirling up and quickly dispersing. She loves hot showers. The magazine article has gone the wrong way, too shallow. I flick forward to the writer’s profile and I see it’s part of a thesis written by some early-twenties student. A university assignment. It’s been somewhat interesting (if not obvious) up until now so that’s the end. My phone rings and I see it’s Christine (an ex-girlfriend, ‘ex’ as in maybe three months ago).

Hand on the brow, The Writer thinks things like “no, this is stupid”. And so what she causes problems? Or so there is no problem? And so there is a weird jealousy thing or so The Writer doesn’t react to the proposed jealousy thing or whatever. No thanks.

I cancel the call, write a text saying Hey there. Can’t talk now, ok? I’ll call tomorrow. Hope you’re ok. Catch up soon. I feel bad, I want to talk to her, just not as much as she wants me to talk to her. I mean really I can’t just go through the everyday of her life…every day. I mean that’s not the way forward. I turn on the TV to see what’s on. Seven thirty has all kinds of crap on it, it has the stuff you watch where you can turn the channel every minute or less and still follow the story. Some presenter talks to me like I’m eight so I say fuck you and switch off. Ok, basically waiting for her to get out of the shower.

Outside (another cigarette) The Writer finally gets the idea…it’s writing about love! About real love and that’s what was happening in a way, so now it’s going to be told right, the story will have what happens! And then it’s going to get all blurred because what is the story? This real stuff or the ‘story’ parts?

She has a cotton bud in her ear, left in, sticking out of her ear, wrapped in a towel her skin lobster pink from the heat and the steam pours off her like a burnt angel and he leaves his ended article, ended TV and follows her around, taking the towel off and dries her body, sucking some of the droplets off her shoulder and back with his lips. “What are you doing with that ear thing?” he asks, and she says “I’m soaking up the water” and he says “that’s not good for you, let me get a tissue” and he sits her down on the bed and dries her off and pulls out a tissue and works it in her ear and she lies down eyes closed so he starts working on her body, rubbing and massaging, her now hot flesh under his hands like a soft fresh virgin.

She is sleeping right over there in their small studio, writing for her now, or, at least about her, using this love feeling to write something beautiful. The Writer goes over and kisses her for reasons she doesn’t know, like it’s a little bit extraction or inspiration or real-world feelings. The Writer is in love and wants to keep being in love. To write about love.

“Mmmm that’s nice” she says, keeps him rubbing her body. She rolls on to her front so he rubs her front, hand over her stomach, legs and brushing over her breasts. He kisses her belly button and down to her thighs and knees and down her shins to her feet. Starts kissing them and then sits up and rubs her feet and she closes her eyes and another ‘mmmm’ sound makes him feel good. He can’t resist any more and kisses her lips, knows he should stop but can’t stop kissing her lips.

It’s not really working, the story, but something lovely is happening. The Writer looks over to his muse and she is beautifully sleeping and he wants to kiss her again but it’s late, well, midnight late. The Writer is alone and yet loves being alone at 12:00am. It’s almost that she is the only one who will/should read this.

“I’m going to bed darling” she says, “are you going to write?” “Of course I am!” he answers, just wanting to be with her while she is awake and put her to bed and touch that delicious body. “I’m writing about…well, I think it’s pretty beautiful” he says and she smiles and says “good…come and kiss me” and he does, a little tipsy from the wine but still sitting there with her. Makes writing the story so much easier.

Pleased that it is progressing in this way, how anything that’s really beautiful happens like that. And even though The Writer has to be aware of things there is still room for a relaxed type of happiness or feeling that something is good. Looking at the clock the minute hand is the devil.

I sit at the keyboard under the glow of the laptop light. Don’t want to wake her so it’s just me and this dull glow where I squint at the keys and think about the first sentence. What I want to write is how I feel right now. This content ‘happy in love’ thing. How she said ‘are you going to write?’ and how I am here now. There is some kind of warm feeling about that. My hand punches out something but I’m not ready yet. It’s basic stuff and I delete it. Imagine being able to write straight away about this feeling. Or what it is to be in love. As brief as it can be, or as simple. Instead I get up, pour a pretty large glass of wine and go and kiss her probably too much on her face and neck. I take the wine outside for a cigarette.

Three poor people OR Three people

Last modified on 2011-01-26 12:09:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

He had a way of walking which told everyone: hey, look at me, I have a thing where I sort of half step/slide my left foot and then whip my right foot around and in front and continue on like that but it’s not really a disability more like just the way I walk…as in it’s too slight to say: “don’t look” so it’s like a thing he has that is looked at and puzzled over and, sure, made fun of (when he was in school and sometimes even now) and there is no treatment for it, as in, no free health care type treatment, politeness in gratuity, it’s a way of walking that’s not, you know, common, or usual, yet to fix it would be thousands of dollars in therapy-type treatment with hour long massages and reformative braces and osteopathy which, given that the pre-existing condition is even more than you can imagine in paid health cover, and being as he walks in like that and the assessors see it and think “well hell he has to pay a premium if he thinks he can start claiming on that pre-existing ailment in the first twelve months”, so much so that it has forbid him from signing the contracts on numerous health cover contracts over the years because, what, three hundred bucks a month to wait twelve of them to begin getting ‘help’ seems, well it seems impossible and even then seeking out help from professionals, getting one hundred and eighty dollar consultations through for them to say “it’s going to be many visits like this until we can fix you”…the maths of it, the monetary mathematics of it in comparison to the (minimal) ridicule, spectacle and discomfort (on all counts little at best) make the decision for him.

It’s not the largest of moles but it sits just under her right eye, big enough though that she is acutely aware that when people talk to her instead of looking her in the eye they look her in the mole so to speak and she is sick of seeing that look, that just below the inner eye contact she wants so much, that they think she doesn’t know or care or is used to it or god forbid expects it, no, she doesn’t think that she forgives them one and all for looking and talking like that, even those who she works with who she’s known for several years, those she forgives because, well, not because she is a saint or some evolved human who has experienced such treatment over and over enough to absolve other humans of their behaviour, no, it’s because it is all the time, merely that, merely that she is resigned to engaging people whilst they stare at her fifty cent piece sized 5mm elevated mole and that she knows in herself that she stares at things, an invalid drooling in a wheelchair, a man with a blatantly large birthmark over half his face, she knows and stares and doesn’t imagine them staring back, feels apart from that visual anomaly world when she herself can partake, be the gawker, think (even her think!) “oh god imagine having that” and then it is maybe one of two breathes when she thinks again that ‘I do have that’, either because she thinks it or catches a child looking up with his or her mouth open.

In the mirror was a monster, ugly, deformed, he tried to pull his form into all kinds of positions to make the fat suck in or lift up or move around but inevitably he relaxed fully and worse bent forward and only saw the hideous round belly hanging underneath, legs below it, slumped shoulders and a skull that barely escaped from being pulled into the wholly round body, chin lost in there so he lifts his head to see the jaw bone and when he sees the shape of the jaw feels relieved because it is there, firm and real and part of his body and straightening up again there is pride coming again, shoulders back, legs slightly apart, a big breath that heaves the chest upwards and open, turns away from the mirror, leans down to touch the toes and come up, down and up, down and up, starting to breathe a bit more heavily now, good he thinks, good, down and up down and up, getting more and more furious, quicker, sweat starting to form under his arms and forehead, good, down and up, a simple move he knows but he can feel his stomach muscles singing, saying look at me look at me, stops mid move, looks back to the mirror, sees the same fat man, a glow on his cheeks, a smile quickly or instantly disappearing, takes his hands and holds the gut, holds it hard and harder, it hurts, he is pinching it hard, harder, sees that his hands are fat, slaps himself on the chest, sick of doing this everyday, every time after a shower, the same routine, up and down, hate and pain, holding his fat belly in his hands and telling himself over and over “you are a fat disgusting fuck”, a mantra before leaving the house for another day.

The soul screams at you from inside the meat

Last modified on 2011-01-31 10:46:02 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

The soul screams at you from inside the meat. It says “I hate you” it says “You are right” it says “Look at how beautiful this is” it says “I love being alone”. It says “What the fuck is wrong with you” and “You know what those others have done?”. I am living with a girl and she told me that one of my characteristics was fear, or more being a coward. I don’t like hearing that but how I process it is “I’m scared to give away all the money I get every two weeks”. The thing is I have that thing inside me where I respect those who have character. That I am going to share their pain, that I am their comrade.

The soul screams at you from inside the meat. It yells at you because it’s dying. You hear it every time you keep those feet moving towards the life that’s not meant for you. How funny that I am still dealing with this. Who am I writing this for (besides myself)? It’s for those who hate how they are living. For me and them. I’m about to choose poor. Okay so can I do it? Back to that thing where I was called a coward. It’s cowardice to take the $1200 a week I get right now. Not hard at all.

The soul screams at you from inside the meat. I says you love her and you love loving her. You hate knowing that you are in love. You love love. You hate loving. You are confused so sit there late at night wondering if you love or worship. You wonder what is the difference. You don’t care and kiss her body five hundred times.

The soul screams at you from inside the meat. It tastes bad. It hurts because you realise how far away from yourself you are. You realise that you like things that are too expensive. You laugh and condescend those who are poorer than you and at the same time admire them for the very in depth soul things you want. But you hate people. Now what? It sounds like a board game.

The soul screams at you from inside the meat. How can you keep going doing the same things and liking them over and over. Dinner. Lunch. A bar. A cocktail. A first kiss. Yeah okay the kiss keeps you alive. But, another view. Going to move. What, all the time? For the rest of my life? I sat with her in the beautiful city of Sydney, on the water. She wanted me to tell her how I am planning to be rich. How she can be happy like this. I told her she doesn’t know who I am. She didn’t know.

Boy becomes Man with Boy

Last modified on 2011-02-14 12:07:55 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

BOY
Every night before bed he took a small box from beside his bed and opened it and inside was some hair, a ring, a small blurred headshot type photograph, a few rose petals and a post it note with a cryptic message written in red ink with a drawing of a girl vomiting blood (or something, he didn’t quite know) and he touched them a bit and held the hair in his fingers and whispered or dreamt a silent prayer for the girl who gave him all these things, something like “Lord please protect her…I give her all my allotted protection and more…I love her so much I want her to be safe and happy”.

YOUNG ADULT
The veins in his hand are thick and blue. The heat from his forehead seeps thought the body. A dull pain under the skull. He slapped her in the face tonight. She is sitting there watching TV now and he is sitting there at the table. They’re not talking. She tried to put some clothes into a bag but stopped at pushing t-shirts and underwear in. Lost interest. There’s no real way to sleep. There’s no place to go tonight. Its already after midnight. Only tomorrow will have anything to do in it. He is on the web, looking at various crap, pictures of women with big tits in string bikinis. After a while she turns the TV off, rolls over as in sleeping. No one is sleeping. It’s too hot. He imagines what it would be like to rewind to that point in his life her he first realises what he is doing is wrong. It was his first real job type job. He walked out for lunch, walked the neighbourhood and found a café that sold sandwiches. Bought one, a good one, pesto, feta, char grilled vegetables and everything on good thick sourdough. He took it to the closest park and had a bite. Delicious. The thought: “why the fuck am I doing this?”. That moment repeats. For eight years.

ADULT
Junk, its all junk really but it’s all around me the shit and I kick it away and don’t really care about hurting or breaking it and sometimes it’s a thing or a person. Okay it’s a thing this time, my old wooden guitar, fucking thing I didn’t learn to love or play. Ha, no, I’m not trying to draw parallels, there’s no blackboard here where I’m trying to draw a diagram and I’m going to tell you what all these intersecting lines mean but I can say one thing, it’s that, you now, so based on what I’ve said already, you can see the direction or the parallels. No wait, shit that was in my head. How long can you go on saying nothing and seeming interesting? It’s as long as you make it out like you’re tying to say something, as in the thing will come where you’re revealing the purpose for, what, speaking in the first place. I feel hot and bothered. Not bothered.

FAMILY
It’s the high road, the long road, called the Princes highway, and they’re bolted into their car, he’s at the wheel listening to and FM station no one wants to hear; 101.7 FM, it’s the golden oldies channel playing billy idol (rarely), credence, buddy holly, beetles, eagles (a lot), Bruce Springsteen and that kind of stuff. He’s singing along now, singing three words every live or so; ‘and she said……leave you now……not again baby……love you love yooooo’. They pas a car puling a caravan and everyone looks. There’s a family crammed into the front if a ute and he says “see that kids” and they smile because they now he knows that he’s saying they are better than them, and they like that for a brief moment until he says “they don’t have anything like what we have…they are, well, they’re poor. Do you see me pulling a caravan? Huh?” and they don’t now what he means which makes him angry and he says out loud to no one “well do you? Do you know what I have to do to get this going huh? Ah ha ha forget it, forget it. What do you have to say?!” he half yells/spits at his wife in the passenger seat, who says “Ha yeah Jake, we get it okay. We get it. Just drive this thing ok?” “This ‘thing’? Hey, it cost me like thirty seven grand, this ‘thing’. Jesus honey ” and they drive in, a few more things that sounds like ‘ungrateful’ and ‘fucking bitch’ and ‘oh fucking god’ things but its not audible enough for anyone but Jake so, really, what is his point other than there is no point and what is going on inside can not be masked by what is happening outside.

At home with her now

Last modified on 2010-12-06 12:25:48 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

It’s hot again today. He doesn’t want to keep smoking his cigarette, especially since it’s at the same time every day. In the same place, looking out from the veranda down across the sloping front yard, half an acre to the road. No cars pass. Six or seven cows in the next property, heads down. The neighbour lives in a junk yard of dead cars, buses and tractors. Sometimes comes out, looks around, goes back in. Strange. He’s lived there five years and he’s never at the pub or in town. Of course if he was in town they wouldn’t recognise each other. He finishes the cigarette, didn’t smoke but half of it. The heat. Feels good to finish it. The sound of his feet moving from where he stands scrapes the air, each step again and again. He slides the door open and finds himself standing in the lounge room. Lets a sigh out, thinks about it, urges himself to move forward but stays in place, staring at a dining table chair. Looks at his feet, a big toe with black cotton under the nail from a sock, the others slightly curled under, a nail missing from the pinkie of the left foot, his steel capped boot pushed it off. Looks strange, the small curled up thing, trying to tuck under the other toes. He takes his hand and rubs his cock. It gets half hard after a while. Another sigh, doesn’t want to do it anymore.  A few images flash, tits, her, some porn bodies with legs open, their stupid young faces, acting. He goes into the kitchen, puts some stale bread in the toaster, presses them down and turns the jug on. A dry breathing sound come from the kettle, he takes it and puts water in. Stands there looking at the toaster and listening to the kettle. After half a minute he takes vegemite out of the cupboard and sets it on the counter. The toast pops up, soon the kettle boils. It doesn’t squeal like it should, it just turns off. He forgot to put a teabag into a mug, he takes the toast out and puts it on the table. In the fridge is the heart smart cholesterol reducing margarine that is too white. He doesn’t want it today. His heart hurts anyway. Puts vegemite on the toast and takes it to the lounge chair, sits and takes a bite. It’s bitter and strong and dry in the mouth. Hard to chew, small shards of toasts stick into his gums and the vegemite stings. He throws what’s left of the second piece into the fireplace, goes back to the kitchen to make the tea. The water boils fast and he pours it into the mug, waits not long enough for infusion and dumps a splash of milk in there. Soy milk. She left him with half a case of long life soy milk. ‘For your heart’ she said. He loved her for that, even though he didn’t want soy milk. Drinks it now because that’s what there is but every time he pours it, gets one out of the box or opens a new carton he has to suffer her caring face. Caring about his health. Caring about his belly, making sure he only has three ‘lite’ beers at night. He only realise he didn’t really care about drinking when she was around. How three lite beers even became too much. Pointless he said. She was happy to take care of him, to bring him back from the edge of alcoholism. She had met him after his divorce, six years after.

He had been drinking every day back then. Drinking until he was drunk. His children were old enough to not care. Old enough to not be affected. They left him to drink, saw him drunk, went away and smoked pot or went out or had sex or anything else teenagers do while he came home from the pub at 10 or 11 at night, sat in front of the TV sort of talking to someone. Someone who wasn’t there anymore. He was used to someone being there so he talked. It was only the TV that was on and anyway soon he fell asleep. A few times he tried to be a father. Show interest or say ‘I love you’ or just talk about what had happened. His kids were not interested. They thought ‘what is wrong with you?’ because they didn’t know about life or love. Or they thought they did and he was so far away from it. He gave them fifty dollars here and there. Love. He put more than that into poker machines. Sometimes getting a few hundred dollar wins. Sometimes drinking it back down again. There were friends at the bar. Other men who didn’t want to finish up their nights at home either. One guy told him how he watched porn and then when his dick was hard went in and fucked ‘his missus’. Laughing and slapping him on the back. Offered to give over some ‘porno tapes’ but he refused. There were old divorced women who had seen him around and came to the house for a couple of weeks. His children saw them, ignored them. Maybe once or twice had to suffer through a dinner or two. The teenagers one after the other left at different moments, the idea of the family home pretty soon became nothing. There were only memories and polaroids, hundreds of polaroids in a large black plastic bag. The sharp edges of polaroids ripping little holes all through the bag. A hard thing to keep. His ex-wife called and said she wanted the polaroids. He said he wanted some too. They didn’t want to sit together and go through them so it was roughly divided in two. They didn’t want each tiny snippet of life in their hands. They just knew they wanted them. Soon the house was sold and he disappeared. When the teenagers, his children, saw him again he was different. His eyes were different. He no longer wanted to die. It was because he met a new woman to live his life with. He wasn’t happy but he wasn’t drinking. He was their father.

He lived with a new family. Other kids had problems and he dealt with them with a new vigour. An external vigour. A type of blasé iron-fist he never had with his own children. It was the detachment that made it easier, perspective. He didn’t really care. That’s what it was. Instead the old dream of living away from the world, on a farm, in the country, on some land. That kept him going, pushing through a new job, waiting, his new wife telling him ‘soon’ and him able to persist on that word. It wasn’t that long. Five years until they bought the place. A small cottage, two bedrooms, a living area with a fireplace. Four acres of land, enough to grow trees and a vegetable garden. She just wanted the back part of the property for a flower garden. He thought about how nice it would be, she out the back planting beautiful flowers, him out the front picking fresh beans off a vine and eating them, Sun warmed produce from stem to mouth. He used to have a small patch in the backyard. Used to call his son and daughter over to let them taste a strawberry or open a pea pod to eat a real pea. They were sweeter than the frozen ones his son said. He was proud and thought of his father. Acres of land, too many vegetables that they gave to other families. Now instead he talks to his son who suggests they sell their tomatoes on the side of the road. His son having taken a job in marketing only now talks of making of money. Telling them that he pays tens of dollars for vine ripened tomatoes in the city and how they can sell these ‘admittedly non-certified but still amazing’ tomatoes to other suckers like him. He is proud of his son, asks questions about the idea, asks how much he can sell them for. They are talking again. His son has visited maybe three times in two years. He asks him to come but he says he is busy. He remembers how he said the same thing to his father. Even knowing that he will die, even knowing that that is what happens in life, he said and hears the words ‘I Am Busy’. But he has a place to live the way he wanted. He lives there alone during the week while his wife works in the city. She visits on the weekend and they spend time together in a new way. He is not lonely during the week. He is alive and well. He limits his drinking. Two or three glasses of wine at night now.

Four years pass, the same thing every week. He tends to the gardens, works casual shifts as a landscape gardener at local properties, she works her day job and comes for the weekend. Friday night until Sunday night. They make love in the mornings. They take a walk around the area, but, after three years she grows tired of the routine. He doesn’t understand, kept waiting for her to join him there full time. She tells him I don’t want to live there, ‘I now I told you I did but I don’t want to now’. Her oldest son just got married, they are planning a child. Her father died and her mother lives near her. Her only daughter is involved with a man who is abusing her. She has so many things she can’t escape from right now. He says it’s ok, he can wait. She says she can never move all the way out to the country. He says she can drive in and out whenever she wants. It is a fight and there is no compromise. He wants to be there. She wants to be near her kids. They are not his kids. They stop fighting about this. Sixteen months later she says she is not coming out to see him anymore. His children are ok, call from time to time to tell him how ok they are. He thinks ‘if only her fucking deadbeat children were as capable as mine’, thinks of his ex-wife. What did they do right? He asks himself, kind of a half joke. Doesn’t say this out loud to his new wife. They sleep together but don’t have sex in the morning. The routine.

On the veranda, sipping tea, the breeze coming up. It’s nice he thinks, nice to have her here. Sip some more tea. She says “I am not coming back out here anymore”. He stares out across the valley. “Eileen is having a baby, I want to be near her now”. He finishes his tea and tries not to feel that thing inside coming up to his throat. The second time. “I will come and see you then” he says, looks at her. She is older now, what he sees doesn’t match what he thought he’d see. “You…I don’t think it’s…going to work…”. “Why not? What’s wrong?”. “I don’t…I don’t want to…do this anymore…you are…not…I don’t know what do you want me today?”. “What do I want you to say? I want you to say ok. I want you to say ‘see you next week’”. “Yeah…yeah ok, see you next week then”. “Jesus. Am I that bad?”. “No no…it’s not that its just…I feel like we’re just so alone out here. I know its nice and I know you always wanted to live like this but…but I’ve got. My mum by herself now and my kids are starting families. I can’t, I don’t want to just let it all go right now”. “OK, well, lets just see what happens then, okay? I’m not stuck here or anything”. “Yes you are though! How long since you’ve been back to see anyone? Hm? A year, maybe sixteen moths? You’re just….here. And that’s fine if you want to but I can’t just keep living like this”. “Ok ok. I get it. Your kids. I know. I know what it’s like”. “Really? Because you never see them either. When did you last talk to Jenna? It’s like you’ve checked out”. “No…no I haven’t. I just don’t get to talk to them that’s all”. “And why not hm? Maybe because you’re all alone out here. Maybe because you’re absent? Maybe because you’ve got yourself so squirreled away and alone and happy that none of that other stuff even matters anymore”. “Of course it does”. “But you don’t care enough to change it, right?” Oh god god, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t talk about this now. I’ve go to go soon anyway.” “I’ve put your bags in the car”. “Thanks Jake, thanks.” “It’s ok”.

He doesn’t go anywhere. He tries to go, even goes to that station. Waits twenty minutes. The train station is a small cement block that rarely has an attendee. The tracks are rusty with a thing sliver of exposed metal where the twice a day passenger train and several times a day freight train runs through. Weeds grow all over the rails. It’s as if a train will never come, couldn’t come. There is an old wooden seat with enough pieces missing so you can’t sit down. He has a backpack on the seat. Not enough stuff packed he thinks. What doe she even need? Been too long sine he left the house. Ten more minutes pass, he takes the back and walk the forty seconds to the pub. Sits out the back and smokes a cigarette. Goes inside and gets a beer telling himself ‘ will hear the train coming a mile off. Then I’ll shoot down’. The train does come, he hears it mid way through a draught of beer. Hears the sound of it slowing and stopping. The air brakes hiss at the same time he puts the glass down. Shit he thinks. ‘Shit. What have I done? I have three hours to tell her I am not coming’. She will be waiting, she will have made plans, she would have told people, her family. She would have made dinner. She would have looked forward to seeing him back at their old house where they used to live together and be in the new type of love they had. The start of relationship, the familiar magnets on the fridge, the familiar soap in the bathroom, the way that the kitchen is laid out. His mind wanders over all those things. Things he is trying to care about but he is caring about them though her eyes. He goes inside and gets another beer. The second beer helps, all that stuff starts fading away. He knows it’s the beer but that doesn’t matter. Another cigarette, a few more long gulps, then another beer. Pretty soon he is up and walking back home. Looking around at the small town as if he was a visitor. The small old sandstone church which is now a bed and breakfast. The property owned by a young family who are finding it hard to travel one and a half hours to work each way and raise a kid. The drunk next door who he has to hear scream and beat his wife. Going home is a blessing, closing the door to all that is paradise. He picks up the phone, holds it in his hand, puts it back down. There’s time.

There’s a letter today with a hand written address. He recognises her hand writing with a kind of excitement and indifference. One part wants a love letter but its not his birthday for a month and the other doesn’t want to hear her voice in a letter. It’s not thick so its not a bank statement. He open it and takes out the folded sheet, lies it on the table. Stops being stupid and opens it and reads it;

Jake,

This is hard to write I want you to know. I just want to say I love you and care about you. I want you to know that what I am about to say is not about you. It’s about me and my life. I know who you are, you have never pretended or lied or anything. I know what you want. I know you love where you are. I know all this and that’s why I need to tell you that we can’t be together anymore. I can’t do this anymore. I want to be near my children. You can probably understand that. I don’t want to be away from them. I don’t want what you want right now. I’m sorry to write all this like this and tell you like this but I just can’t say this to you on the phone or in person. I’m sorry Jake. I do love you and I know you love me and even though we’re old now I just can’t do it. I can’t live there with you. And all these years waiting and trying just can’t make it for me anymore. I wanted to tell you like this. I want you to read it. I want you to know that we should both be happy and that I love you but can’t do what you want. Give my love to Alice and John. I loved knowing your children, they are really something special. I hope you can reconnect with them.

All my Love,

Katherine

Days go on. They keep coming, he keeps standing and moving around. He doesn’t call her, or at least, he only calls her and hangs up after two rings. One day she will pick up after one ring. He is not challenging her, he can only last two rings. He goes to his job, his boss tells him things and he does them or his boss tells him he is shit and he says fuck you and goes home. Returns the next day and says ‘let’s forget that and get to work’. He is sixty one now. No room for blasé ass kissing. Just time for getting on with life. He exchanges cigarettes for small cigars, doesn’t inhale. The night is cold and crisp and there are more stars than you could imagine, out there where there is no other light. He stands naked before the fire place sipping brandy. Looks down at his body, some things grey, some things sagging, but strong legs and arms. Strong breathe in and out. Another long sip from the snifter. A deep breath in and out. The heat in the nostrils feels good, the warmth in the belly feels good. The only lights is the twitching orange from the fire. The home is really a home, he is alone and content, the way a Buddhist monk is content with nothing. She left him. She left him. She left him. He could go back and live with her. She left him. He could sell this little property and go back and live with her. Her family, her children having children. He can only see her face and all the rest is a blur. After half a bottle or brandy he is swaying and telling himself  ‘fuck her kids, fuck her mum, fuck her grand kids’ and he knows it is finished. And drinking again.

Hard to work in winter. The ground is frozen. The leaves are everywhere. Half the day is racking them up and burning them. Nice smell leaves burning. He stands back with his hot tea and smokes a small cigar. Wee Willem are his favourite. Ten in a box for ten dollars. Lasts a few days. Clint Eastwood would be proud he thinks, remembering the ‘man with no name’ from The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Spaghetti westerns. Stories from when men were men. His father was a man. Got shot in world war two, a fireman and then a mayor. A hell of a man. The fire dies down, all smoke and flavour. He stubs the cigar out half way, puts it in his pocket. Walks around the garden, nothing to do. Walks down to the back paddock to check the fence. One of the cows has made a dent in the fence, trying to get it’s head through and eat the dandelions from the garden. Dumb things, just push and push as the metal fence both cuts into their neck and every now and then sends an electric pulse into their muscles. They mustn’t care anymore. They just take the shock now. Worth it to get to the sweet flowers they think. He looks into their eyes trying to see something. His daughter, a vegan or vegetarian always tells him to stop eating meat. He tries to work out what she is saying. They look back blankly, turn away and put their head back into a patch of clover. No way, he thinks, that you care about anything. He takes a shovel and tries to dig into the ground near the post. Wants to reset it and make the fence tighter. A few thrusts and he begins to cough, a few more thrusts and he needs to cough again. Puts the shovel down, wants to get this cough through. Damn winter. So cold. Only the brief intense heat of fire lately. He coughs hard until his face is hot and his. pulse is pumping into his head He looks down at the ground to see blood. Blood from his hard cough. He didn’t remember spitting. He didn’t spit. This is from the lungs.

A few more days pass. He works a bit lighter. He breathes deeply and stops smoking cigars. He goes back to a few lite beers a day. Feels better. Getting up is easier, getting through the day is easier, getting through the night is the problem. He tells himself to call a doctor. He tells himself he doesn’t need a doctor. He tells himself he is all alone now and needs to know that’s wrong. The alones wins. He call his doctor who is three hours away. “Hi there Doctor, how are you?’. Fine fine Mr Burnham. How are you?. “Good as always. I’m on the lite beer like you said”. “Good, good. Ok tell me, what’s the problem?”. “It’s well, ok, the other day I was out trying to dig a ditch for a fencepost and…I’ll tell you it was only 2 degrees out there…anyway so I was trying to clear some earth and then all of a sudden I had a coughing fit”. “You’re not still smoking are you?’. “No no no, just cigars now…but I don’t inhale”. “Good good. Okay, so why are we hear?”. “Ok doctor, ok, well, you see, halfway through the job, it was hard I mean getting a stump out of frozen earth might…anyway…I was doing it and then I just had to…cough, like, any normal guy. I had something in my chest and so I began coughing but couldn’t stop and when I was finished I spat blood out on the ground. My blood, right where I was digging”. “Ok so go ahead and take your shirt off for me. I want to listen to your chest”. He takes his top off, nervous, feels it himself, how hard it is to breathe, how sometimes he gets light headed and dizzy. Has to stand in the field sucking oxygen deep into his lungs. It takes about five minutes of this breathing to stop the dizziness. It takes a while to get the oxygen into the blood and then into the brain. He doesn’t tell the doctor this, he just breathes in and out like he was asked, the stethoscope touching lots of places in the front and back of his chest. Even he can feel the air catching on closed or dead mucus sacks, folded alveoli, limited lungs. He breaths through it, pretending that he can’t feel the bits and pieces stuck and opening places. “A deeper breathe for me please”. He breathes through it like he can pretend to a guy with a hearing device against his chest. “Ok Jake. We’re going to need some tests done ok. I can hear a lot of mucus in your lungs, I can hear how hard it is for you to take a breathe in. I want to rule out cancer or anything else. I want to know what’s it in there. When I get the tests back we can take it from there ok?”. “Okay”. ‘You think it could be cancer’ he thinks but doesn’t ask.

When the doctor calls he is outside working on the garden. The flowers in the back part of the house are dying. He waters them but that’s all. Sitting there on his knees is not for him. The idea of her doing that. Half of them are dead, the other half stand up so proud. They look like little defiant angels. He wants to keep those ones. Feels something for those ones. Like they are on his side. ‘What did he do so wrong?’ he thinks. He knows what it is. It is not wanting to live life. Not wanting to get involved with her kids. Doesn’t really care. He doesn’t even talk to his own kids, so he is supposed to care about these strangers? Not really strangers. He feels like calling and apologising. But why do it? Just so he can see her again. Have someone to hold his hand in front of the fire. That’s all it is. That’s why he doesn’t call. He comes back from outside, sees the red message light flashing on the phone. He forgets how to get the message. Used to have her to do that. His time he does call her. The phone only rings twice and his step daughter answers, cold says “I’ll get mum” and he is left waiting. She comes on the phone. “Hello Jake. How are you going?”. “Good, yeah, good, I’m okay. Listen I know this is, I know this is, um, oh god okay okay, I have a message here on the phone and…”. “You want to know how to hear it?”. “Yeah…”. “Ok when you hang up you press the message button, its labelled M S G. Then you’ll hear options. Its 1 to hear the message”. “Ok Kathy, thanks… thanks”. “It’s ok. Are you ok Jake, really?”. “Am I okay? Hah, well…I don’t know. I don’t think so”. “Oh Jake, you know you can call me whenever you want. Why don’t you come for dinner. Stay a few days?”. “Yeah. That would be god. I’m going to check the message. I’ll call you back okay?”. “OK Jake. We’re all okay over here too.”. “That’s good Kathy. Sorry. I…sorry”. “Talk to you soon Jake”. He hangs up, didn’t realise she would say things like that. He really just wanted to know how to get the message. Thoughts stir in his head but they seem so apart from him now. He looks back to the blinking red light. Presses the MSG button but nothing happens. Picks up the receiver, puts it to his ear and presses it again. A computer woman voice starts to talk and he presses 1:

Hi Jake, its Martin. Okay well I got your test results back and I wanted to talk about them with you. Look I don’t know when you’re going to be in next do I better let you know now. Okay so first you need to come back in, that’s the first thing. We need to talk about your results here and what we need to do next. I…uh…I should tell you of course that this is serious Jake. Okay…call me back as soon as you get this. I’m here until about seven tonight so. Call back. Okay, the number here is <rustling> its <rustling> okay it’s 5659 4341. Call me back.

It’s four thirteen so he can call. He doesn’t want to call. He doesn’t want to know right now. He gets a beer from the fridge, opens it, lights a small cigar and starts walking away from the house down the hill on the grass.

Six thirteen. Four beers finished. He had put the bottles in the recycling bin. Clean. Picks up the phone and dials 5 6 5 9 4 3 4 1. Its ringing and he swallows. Thinking about his body. Breathing in deep. Trying to feel what is wrong inside. Pre-empt the doctor. His lungs are heavy like always. His guts feel thick like always. Everything else feels normal. Its lungs and guts. That’s where any problems are. The ringing stops, a girl on the end saying “West Plains medical, how can I help you?”. “Hi, I ‘m returning a call to martin…um…doctor Alvarez?”. “And who shall I say is calling?”. “It’s Jake…uh Jake Burnham”. “Ok let me see”….waiting…”ok Mr Burnham, just hold a second, the doctor is with a patient”. He doesn’t get to say okay, the word is spoken to a sound of an electronic piano. He looks around the kitchen, over the sink and over the small surface his wife (ex-wife now?) used to cook on, the oven she used to bake quiches in, over to the lounge room, at night they’d sit, not talking, sit and watch the fire. Too many nights like that. He thinks what was so wrong with that? She wants to be with her children, okay, he understands but this nice quiet life. This is what they want. He relaxes thinking that he can wait for her. It won’t be long and he feels himself smile. “Jake! Hello Jake it’s Martin. You got my message then?.” “Yes I did…”. “Ok good. So Jake okay do you want to come in and discuss these results or…”. “Can you tell me now?”. “Yes, sure I can, yeah, sure. Okay. Jake, it’s not good, okay, you should know that”. “Ok, so what’s not good?”. “Ok so, you know we were checking for a lot of things. It’s a broad spectrum test but you know, you probably know what’s wrong, I mean, you can feel it already”. “Sort of. I mean, my lungs aren’t too good lately”. “No, no they’re not Jake. You’re right. You’re right it’s your lungs. It’s juts, it’s what happens you know, You smoked for what thirty or more years, I mean, you know what happens”. “Cancer?”. “It is cancer Jake. Yes. You have cancer. It’s in your left lung”. A few moments. He is waiting for the doctor to say something. He is waiting for himself inside to react. He is waiting for something that doesn’t come. “Jake?”. “I’m here”. “Ok Jake so what we need to do is get you to a specialist straight away, okay”. “Sure. Sure. How bad is it?”. “I don’t know right now. All I know is that it’s in your lungs. I don’t know how long you’ve had it, if it’s spread, how aggressive it is…all of that. We need to get you to a specialist as soon as possible”. “OK, so where do I go?”. “You don’t need to worry about that, Jake, don’t worry for now ok. We don’t know anything right now. Your tests showed positive for cancer cells, that’s all we know. I’m going to send you details of someone to talk to. I’m going to set up an appointment for you okay?”. “Okay”. “Stephanie will call you with details soon okay, tomorrow okay?”. “Ok…ok. I don’t…don’t know what to say…I mean…what do I do?”. “Nothing right now. We need to get the results over to the cancer ward at the hospital and you need to get over there to start talking treatment. Its early stages. Hopefully we can catch this quick. Okay? I don’t know what’s going to happen but if we act fast we can—” “It’s ok. I get it. I’m not a kid. Call me when you want me to do something. I’m hanging up now”. “Okay Jake o—”.

The local publican is an asshole. He doesn’t like what he does for a living, namely, serving beer to locals. He grew up and then worked in the city, he bought the quasi-country pub thinking he could build it up to be a real attraction. That failed because he is such an unlikeable human. Every small country pub needs character. Character is shaped by the owner and the way the locals feel. In this pub, it’s a prick and disgruntled patrons. Jake is sitting in the pool room with his sixth schooner. Half way though. Already played five games of pool. Won four lost one. He is drinking it down fast. Finishes it without anyone wanting another game. He is at the bar waiting or a beer. The asshole behind the bar pretends not to see him, continues talking to a couple of real country guys down the other end. Real country guys, hats, denim shirts, big and slow moving. Jake waits a while, the idea that he is dying swells up. “Hey, can I get a beer or what?!”. “Yeah ok Jake, coming okay” says the bartender. Shaking his head. “You don’t like money huh?” says Jake as the asshole walks over and starts pouring a Resches. “No I like money. I was just chatting to those gents down there”. “Gents?” That’ generous”. “Hey what did you say?” one of the ‘cowboys’ says. “Me? I said you’re not exactly high class gentlemen. I just want a fucking beer that’s all. Okay?”. “We’re not what?”. “Oh fuck off okay. I’m just getting a beer”. “Who the fuck you think you are!” the other country guy says, Jake ignores them, waits for his beer, gets it, hands over the four dollars twenty, walks outside to have a cigar. Cold air, no sound, just the low murmur from inside the pub. The thick smoke coming out, expanding across the night sky. Smelling an tasting lovely. He quickly thinks about how this made him get cancer. Looks down at the brown thing between his fingers, on fore. Fucking thing. Fucking asshole thing. Fuck you as he draws his hand up to his mouth, pulls in the smoke, lets it slip out though his lips. He didn’t in hale, he didn’t kill himself. Back in the bar there’s fifteen people in there. Mostly guys. One or two have their fat ugly wife’s with them. “Hey cowboy, want to play pool?” says Jake, “I’ll pay”. “Okay old man” he says getting up, his friend following like a sheep. They start the game. “Wow you’re really shit” Jake says, having fun, a bit drunk. “Oh yeah…watch this” the country guy says, misses. “Oh wow, okay so watch this. I’m going to teach you something. For free” says Jake, sinking a ball, then another, “this is for free” and sinks another one. “Want to bet who’s gonna win, huh. Two young guys kike you can beat me for sure”. “Ok old man, Fifty bucks we win”. “Fifty. How about a hundred, We’re even right now, We’ve both got three balls left. Huh? How about it?”. “Yeah ok. Get ready to pay up though, We live out at Banrock Station. We’re gonna get paid tonight right?”. “Yeah yeah sure, Your shot”. He tries again and misses. Jake plays the balls well. Sinks two and sets up the third. The big guy gets one in, is close with the second one. Jake taps their ball across onto the black ball and it slowly falls into the corner pocket. “What the fuck was that old man?”. “What do you mean? Pub rules”. “What the fuck you can; hit my ball”. “Yes I can. Pub rules too bad mate.”. “No no fuck pub rules. You can’t hit my ball”. “Yes I can. I can hit any ball on the table. Read the board.”. “Fuck the board you cheating cunt”. “Hey calm down mate, calm down. Now you know you lost so…give it up”. “Give up what you old cunt. I’m not giving you shit”. “Hey. Hey, We had a bet”. “Fuck we did. Fuck you and you’re fucking house rules”. “Okay if you want to be a little bitch about it…”. “What!?”. “If you want to be a pussy and not pay then….it’s up to you…but you know, don’t bother coming back in here because everyone will know you’re a little girl that’s all”. “Ah fuck off”. “No you fuck off. Can’t handle losing huh”. “Fuck off” And Jake doesn’t care anymore, swallows the rest of his beer, takes the glass over to this big guy and smashes it over his head. Blood comes out from his forehead and around his eye but he doesn’t feel it yet so the big guy hits Jake in the face hard and Jake goes down and then there are two of them kicking him in the face and chest and stomach saying ‘fuck you old man’ stuff and something inside makes them stop after a while because he has grey hair and is not moving, just taking the beating. “HEY JAKE! Get the fuck out of my bar!” the owner says. Jake starts to crawl away from them. The bar owner sort of helps by grabbing under his arms and when he is outside closes the door.

Outside it’s cool and fresh and quiet. He props himself up against the wall. Hard to breathe. Spits some blood out of his mouth. Feels his face. Swollen eye, fat lip. He starts coughing, really coughing hard, his lungs contracting an hurting, blood comes into his mouth, spits it out. It’s thick and looks black at night. Keeps coughing, can’t stop. There’s a fire in his chest, there’s a pain in his stomach. Someone comes out, “Are you ok?” he asks, lighting a cigarette. “I’ll be okay. Those fucking jerks….those fucking assholes” he says. “Yeah. Place isn’t the same anymore”. “Yeah”. He offers Jake a cigarette which he takes, still coughing, blood on his fingers and now on the cigarette. He tries to reach in his pocket but it hurts. The other guy leans down and turns his lighter on. Jake leans in and lights the cigarette. “Thanks” he says but starts coughing straight away, a deep chest cough, tastes a load of blood in his mouth. “Jesus” says the other guy, “are you ok?”. “No…no… I’m not” says Jake, inhaling and breathing out a plume. “I’m dying. My lungs. I don’t know.”. “Shit and you let those guys beat you”. “Fuck those guys. They kill an old man and so what. I’ve been here too long anyway”. “Well I live down the road. I’ve seen you around”. “Yeah?”. “Yeah”. And they just are there together, Jake takes one more pull of the cigarette, it hurts so he puts it out on the ground next to him. “I’ve got to go. Can you help me up?”. Jake walks away, the sound of the bar chatter, the sound of the guy who gave him a cigarette shuffling on the spot, the sound of his own feet scraping across the ground. The night is quiet, reverent. He is dying and he has made it worse.

It’ hard but he opens the front door, falls over his feet and lies in the landing. Laughs, it’s pathetic. Rolls onto his back, catches his breathe, feels the liquid in his lungs. Oh god, oh god, closes his eyes and prays. Please god please god don’t let me die like this. I love her, I love her so much. I need her. Please keep her safe and happy. I want her to be happy. I want her to come here and take care of me now. And he is trying not to cry and his can feel all the pain in his body and feel how old that body is. His face is swollen and his head hurts. They kicked him pretty good those young guys. Those stupid young guys. He breathes a few more breathes, reaches up and pulls the keys from the doorknob. Lies back down and waits for his chest to stop heaving. Coughs a few liquid things out over his body, doesn’t care if they make it outsole. He rolls over and kicks the door closed, knows her need to get up. A few more breathes, a few more closed eyed prayers to help him. Pleading. Never talked to god like this before. It seems to only thing to do. Help. Help he asks for. He gets up, first on hands and knees, he thinks ‘of course, of course this is how it should work’. And then gets up. His back and chest is on fire. His stomach  is bruised and his face feels like a bee stung pillow. Can’t go back now. Can’t o anywhere. He will go to the shower and stay there for a long tine and call her in the morning and ask her if he can come hone. Tell her everything.

Home. A type of home. In a large bed with fresh sheets and big soft pillows. Like a dying man should have. Bare feet under the covers. He stretches his body out and tries to take in the pleasure of being clean and under fresh sheets tucked in so meticulously. She comes in with a cup of tea and some toast with jam. She is the best nurse because she has both the attitude of a cold official caretaker thing and an underlying love and caring motif. “How are you feeling?” she asks. “Better”. “You know you don’t have to.,..”. “I want to. I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I was just….I don’t know what to say…I didn’t want…”. “Oh right. What did you think I would do? Just leave you out there?”.  “No…no. Come over here and lay down with me. I miss you”. So she comes and lies next to him but he feels her bristled tension, not relaxed. “What’s wrong?” he asks and she says “nothing….what do you want?”. “Nothing…I…I want you to…”. “Yes? Say it Jake. You never say it”. “I want you to…love…me”. “I do love you. But you never let me. You just wanted…oh god I don’t want to talk about it…you know, you know”. “Yes. I wanted to. I wanted to….” And he starts crying and he loves feeling it. Coming out, overwhelming him, the first time in a while he has been free, not stuck in his body, not worried about dying. “Oh Jake dear, oh my god why why why!….what is wrong with you?”. “I don’t know” he says, trying to stop crying but it gets harder and harder. “Oh god I don’t want to die like this I don’t want to die. I don’t care anymore I want to do it all…my children, oh god my beautiful children! And you , you, oh god what…what did I do.?”. “It’s okay Jake, it’s okay. Bill is coming over soon okay? He’s on his way he’ll be here Soon”. “Aaahh ok, ok. <breathes in and out> Ok that will be good. Sorry dear, sorry”. “Stop saying that. It’s ok”. “I love you. I thought about you every second”. “Oh Jake, oh god…I…I love you too…okay….stop this now, I can’t handle it okay” she says as her lip trembles and tears come. “I want you to know how much I love you right now. I never told you but I love you so much. I can’t do it without you, I can’t do this”. And he lets the tears come. They are pure and fulfilling. If he died now he would be happy, he told her how he feels. He had never properly told anyone that before.

CLICHÉS AND WHAT THEY MEAN

Last modified on 2010-11-08 13:36:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Jewish

She put a ring on his finger. Well, he put a ring on her finger but that’s just semantics. Fleischbaum and Muir wedding, three o’clock. Well, ceremony at three. Three to four. We’ll break the glass and then we (well, those of you invited post-ceremony) will meet at the Eastern Beaches Rowers Club where Gefilte fish, Gebratenes and hot Kneidlach soup…okay sorry for being a schmuk…matzo ball soup will be served to one and all (well, those who are contributing to my, sorry again, OUR wedding coffers). We know you’ll have a great time and hope to see you there (you know who you are)!

What it means

Jewish people are mainly portrayed to us westerners by American TV shows as being irksome, troubled and basically neurotic people. Their women? Oy Vey! Yentas one and all. Sorry; overtly talkative, troublesome and essentially overbearing women. Wow, where do I sign up? Hang on shegetz, I know that all appears lovely. You can’t just join in on decades of persecution! You need to earn it.

Buddhist

That’s ok, really.

…

No no, don’t bother.

…

That bowl? No, no, I don’t need it. As you say. ‘Need’. Ha. Just leave it like that. That’s how it is meant to be. That bowl was always going to be like that.

…

Hm?

…

Oh I’m sure I’ll be able to find food to eat. They can put in here in my hand. I will get what is provided, that is the truth.

…

No of course not, I will do something. I will get up. I will go to where I need to go. Sometimes I will need sustenance and I will have it. If not, I will not have it. You see?

…

Well, you are not a monk.

…

No I don’t think its that simple. It actually takes years of training.

…

Yes, really.

What it means

At the base is the precept “all suffering is caused by desire”. NO SHIT. Fucking hell it takes severe abstinence and inhuman tolerance to adhere to this common sense epithet? How then to live without any kind of need, except of course the razor to shave your head, the garment maker, and the builder. What? You do all that yourself? You hand craft metal and polish it down to a razor sharp edge with which to cleanly remove all head hair? Namaste.

Also: is seems to me you can just all of a sudden lie in a heap and do absolutely nothing and be the best Buddhist in the world.

Catholic (excluding evangelicals and other right wing (mainly American) nut job factions, ok?)

So, so many things are wrong with you/the world. Oh God don’t get me started. Ok, sex before marriage, one, condoms, two, embryo research…well, pretty much anything to do with sperm, ovum and what happens when sperm touches ovum, three. Can we make this any clearer?! Pretty much all of our shit revolves around the whole sperm ova combo. Homosexuals, right! Not even an ovum! So, yeah it gets kind of weird but we don’t even like sperm on sperm. Okay? I’ve got it. Pretty much anything that comes out of your “yoo hoos” is what we’re against, or all about. I don’t know…um…read the bible. It’s pretty much in there. But yeah bodily fluids, pretty gross. God hates wasting that stuff. Did I mention priests can’t have sex? Yeah, they can’t That’s pretty important to know. Soooooooo, yeah. Praise Jesus.

What it means

No sex. Well, no sex before marriage. And even then you mustn’t ‘waste’ what is essentially the seeds of life. But there is a way brethren! A way to cheat God’s rule! Yay! What us good catholic law abiding followers have been waiting for: an honest way to say ‘fuck you!’ to God! Ha, he wasn’t looking too carefully when he let this one through. Sucker. It’s the magic of The Rhythm Method. The only catholic sanctioned way to have an orgasm and get away with it. It’s easy! The woman needs to keep a diary of her cycle, record her body temperature, note when and for how long she is ovulating and BANG, in that two or three days when there is almost (yes almost) no chance of her getting pregnant…GO FOR IT. Oh bless you dogmatic restrictive religion. You have blessed us with two (or three, maybe) days of sexual freedom. Get married first though.

Now it’s just two people

Last modified on 2010-10-21 01:05:05 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Soothing back her wet hair. Sweat and heat and that strain you can feel at your fingertips. She has to get up again to change her tampon and pad. The doctor said there’d be a lot of blood. He didn’t say it would mean changing every hour or so. Miscarriage after three months. We named the baby ‘Grace’ even though we didn’t know what it was. I get up to pour more scotch in my glass. I’m not going to sleep until she is asleep. It’s 2am and she’ll pass out soon. Her clenched brow, red and wet, I wipe the tears that just keep searing out from the edges of her tight eyes. She breathes in in that staccato rapid one two three four five six way, breathes out sloppily through her lips like it’s therapy. Poor thing, got the sheets all bunched up so I pull them out from under her and from amongst her arms and let the fresh air come back in as I lay them back across her. I keep kissing her hot cheek and telling her how much I love her. She is not here with me, somewhere else between life and sleep and the future. I sip the scotch and the slinking of the ice is the only thing soothing me. It’s hard for the man. I have to just sit here. Next to her as she squirms and cries, it’s hard because she’s so quite. Scary, really. I tell her that she shouldn’t go to work tomorrow. She probably hears me. I’m sure she won’t go. I don’t think I should leave her either. The soft woody scotch, small cold sips, seems to make me able to do this, pull her hair back, wet, so wet. I kiss her burning ear, suck some tears off her face, “Salty” I say. I get a towel out and put it under her hips. She lets me do it moving slightly so I push it under one side, then pull it further under from the other side. I hold her hand and she squeezes it tight. I kiss her hand and leave her there for a moment…taking my scotch and a cigarette out into the night. The air is so still and dead. The sound of my fingers rummaging in the near empty pack is all scratches and pathetic. I light the thing and it feels good, selfishly good like I only have this one responsibility for the next few minutes. Smoking, sipping, blowing smoke out. Can I just think of this, the dead baby where, in a bin? In a pile of bloody white bandages? Other clichés that are too sick to let in. So I lasted three breaths. Three. And she is in there I can feel, body clenched. And we told everybody. We had so many smiles and congratulations and conversations about “I can’t believe you’re going to be a dad/mum!” stuff and I even allowed myself to admit “you know, I’d be a good dad”. Actually admitted it, thought about it, realised it. Fucking god damned fucking life. What the fuck? Why the fuck do we have to deal with this? Ahhhh, so a deep breath, swallow some of that cheap scotch, it hurts, it’s good, pull on that cigarette, it hurts, it feels harsh. The smoke comes out and I play with it through my lips. Blow. Blow out. Suck another one in. That’s all I can do. Two minutes. It is only two minutes. I open the door to the dark room. The bed is over in the corner and the streetlight through the venetians is all I need to be able to see. Kick my shoes off, undo my jeans and pull them off, throw my socks and t-shirt into the hamper and lie next to her. She seems to be asleep, at least, she seems to be actually breathing in and out. I rub her shoulders and back softly, trying to give her my love through whatever kind of spirituality exists in this world between bodies. Urging my love through my arms and muscles, trying to make the trembling and intensity communicate, push it all into her,  so she can have some peace and know that I am here and that I will always be here. I kiss her neck but don’t want to disturb her so lie away from her way over on my side of the bed, hands massaging my stomach so I can sleep. Pushing the pains and movements through my organs. I see her face, her small face. I say a prayer, like I did last night. Like I did only since we found out our baby dies inside of her. What a disgusting thing to hear. That your baby is dead inside you. Now it’s my turn to cry and I know that I will fall asleep like this. Like her. We lie there apart, and I hope she is sleeping.

*                              *                              *

Sun is soft and the sky is blue. I pull the venetians away from the window and look at what I can of such a nice day. She is already up and the towel on the bed is bloody. I did fall asleep. I check my mobile phone and it’s 7:11. “Honey?” I call out and I hear the sink turn on and she says “Ye-eah”. “Are you ok, honey?” I ask. “I’m ok” she calls back, washing something in the bathroom.
“I love you” I call back and she is just washing her face or hands or something. There’s something missing. I turn the TV on and someone from a morning show is saying something so stupid and I turn it off again. “Turn it on” she says, poking her head out of the bathroom, so I do. I lie there watching these two idiot presenters talking about something but I can’t pay attention, I’m just waiting for her to do something and she comes out looking beautiful. “What are you doing?” I ask wondering why she is dressed and has her hair and make up done.

“Let’s go out” she says.

“Okay…let me…get dressed” I say, throwing back the sheets and moving to get up.

“Wait” she says, smiling and holding up a hand as to say ‘halt’, “Do you want a coffee and some, I don’t know, toast?”

“Toast? Ummm, well, I’ll have coffee”

“OK…stay there…I’m going to make you a coffee”

And so I sit back, turn the volume down a bit and watch her in the kitchen, her back to me, beautiful hair moving left to right with her swift movements making coffee and some breakfast stuff. I even check out her ass in those tight jeans. Is that okay? I guess it is. I mean, for me to think she is hot. I feel my cock getting hard, you know like it can in the morning, but I’m not sure where it’s coming from or what she’s going to think seeing my lie in here waiting for coffee with a hard on. I push it down and sit up so my bent knees cover the lump in the sheets.

“What do you want to do today? It’s a gorgeous day” she asks, flashing her smile over her shoulder at me.

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“I want to go to the beach, I want to walk on the beach”

“Ok, sounds good. I’m going to call work” and I do, use my mobile to send a text to my boss (which I have to rewrite three times. Eventually I put something like ‘personal problems’ and fuck them if they have an issue with that). I grab up the towel because it’s the only thing out of place for this new day she is trying to make and throw it into the hamper before she turns around.

“How are you feeling today honey?” I ask… after a minute (or probably less) of domestic silence.

“I’m ok…I’m ok. I have a huge tampon in and a nighttimes pad…I’m, well…we’ll see. We’re going to have to take a whole pack of them with us. God, it’s like I’m sixty”

“Sixty? What you mean like with an incontinence problem?” I laugh. It’s good to laugh.

“Ha. Yeah. Well, I guess it’s older these days. Older than sixty….ok, coffee’s coming”

“Lovely. Oh god a hot fresh coffee in bed on a nice free day off. What is better? Nothing”

“There you go my dear” and we kiss and it’s simple and even though we are both pretending and we know it, it is really nice. It’s hard to look each others in the eyes. Breaks the spell of what she’s doing. I love her so much. She can do this, she can make this happen. I sip my coffee, pretend to watch the TV, maybe comment on something and she responds. She gets back into bed with me with her coffee and jam on toast and eats it and I don’t care about the crumbs or that she might spill coffee and for fucks sake I hope she does because I’ll love her even more and we sit and sip and say nothing and watch absolute crap and it’s wonderful.

*                              *                              *

The bus has so many people we watch. So many other lifes make us feel normal, part of the world. There’s the older people who I tell her must have gone through so much and she puts her hand on my leg and I can tell it makes her upset and I put her head on my shoulder and kiss her head and tell her we are one of them and she closes her eyes. I don’t want to pretend we are so unaffected but I want us to talk about it and feel it and be together. “I love you” I tell her again and she gives me her other hand and we are as close as two people can be on a bus seat. I rub her back and look out onto the street and this time think how pathetic they all are, just going on, working and driving with there petty shit and here we are. Ah but none of this, this is not good. The bus jerks and throbs and I close my eyes and sway with her, let us coalesce in the way this transport can do. Rocking in a womb. No don’t think that, I tell myself. Breathe in, out. Ok, look around again. God it’s hard. Can’t go five seconds. She looks up at me, sensing something, I smile and kiss her forehead, say something pointless like “there soon” and she closes her eyes and lies back on my chest. I like that, like her there. A few more blocks and I get up and help her off the bus. We walk down the street, not so many people on a Wednesday. The ocean sprawls out, a flat blue line to lock onto and we head towards it. We’re walking in slow, hard, plodding steps, no energy, just human necessity of moving, I feel so close to her and so apart from the rest of them. Down the long stairs, take our shoes off and I take them in my hand and lead her out onto the sand. She smiles again and it makes me feel so much better. Smile! I say in my head. Smile my beautiful one! We walk hand in hand out onto the beach, fall to the same and she shuffles in front of me, not caring anymore about her blood or pain of body. Moving, like a free happy child in the sand, lies quickly back on my lap and I adjust to accommodate her head. She lies down eyes closed and I lie back on my elbows and let the sun burn my face. The sun and the sound of the sea. Fade away. Fade away. Please.

▲Malleus Maleficarum

Last modified on 2010-10-21 06:19:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Section I:
Three elements are necessary for witchcraft: the witch, the help of the Devil, and the Permission of God.

She closes her eyes and the face comes. Staring at her, a visage floating in the darkness, not floating, just there. It’s a face you don’t want to open the door to see, like, if you did you would slam the door but it would be too late the thing would have its arm in the door and everything would start happening really fast. It scares her and delights her, so she stays eyes closed. Daytime, normally ‘out there’ and she in her room silent with closed eyes and feeling the worst kind of menace. She opens her eyes, bed, pillows, teddy bears, desk, posters. She closes her eyes again but it’s gone. She grabs a bottle of water and leaves the house.

Now alone in the forest down from her house and across the railroad tracks, it slopes down to the gorge. She takes her shoes off, hides them under a rock and ferns. The soft dark earth gets between her toes, the crush of worms and bugs mixing with that putrid dirt aroma. Once there is no sign of the street she sits on the damp leaves and sticks of the undergrowth…the sound of running water and only a faint hum of the suburbs. She pulls her skirt up exposing her vagina to nature. It’s a hairy little thing, she thinks, looks good with this brown muck underneath it. She pushes her fingers into the ground, then rubs it on her thighs and sometimes brushes her opening (a thrill). More dirt on the fingers and more of it getting rubbed into herself, feeling the grains mashing between her fingers and soft lips. She hears something move in the ferns, pulls her skirt back down and feels watched, also, stupid to get lost in the moment like that. Noone is there but she gets up anyway. A bird sings the whip-like song it does, another one responds.

Back in her room she lights a candle and tries to stare at it without blinking. Looking for the face of Jesus to emerge or the brilliance of God to beam from this too bright naked white flame. Her eyes begin to water but she doesn’t waver and as the tears (but not really tears) come she feels something like God there and tries to keep that in her mind over and over until someone, a sibling, moves about upstairs and the creaking of the footsteps snaps her out of the trance. Closing her eyes again now and there is only the burnt retina sting of the flame bursting through the darkness and the face cannot appear and she takes some tissues and cleans under her skirt.

Section II:
The powers of witches, and how they recruit.

She takes his hand and leads him away from the town. It strangely not far, next to a highway but she makes it an escape anyway, her calm demeanour. The boy is under her trance, doing what she wants, following really. She asks him to lie down and he does. ‘Close your eyes’ she says and he does. He lies there, blind, waiting, tingling with anticipation. He open his eyes to see her crouched just a few paces away from him, examining different branches. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks. ‘Looking for a wand….this one is good. See? One branch points to the Earth and the other to the Heavens’. He says nothing, somewhat in awe and also trying to calculate this sentiment. ‘I thought I told you to close your eyes’ she says, and he obeys. Another few beats of dark bliss for the boy until he feels a spindly branch tip on his face, tracing his skull and then the line in the middle, from his brow down the nose to his chin. This happens a few times, each more delicate that the last, he doesn’t smile, there is a reverence to be maintained: be a perfect subject. She leans over him, he can feel it, then gently kisses his mouth, he doesn’t dare react. More soft kisses and she says things like ‘you are mine’ and ‘beautiful boy’ and other strange sweet things, kissing every now and then so that he can swoon and not care and start to fall in love. He opens his eyes to look at her, she isn’t smiling, instead looking at him like he’s an object. He smiles and then she does. She starts again with the branch, gently touching his bare arms (t-shirt) and letting him look this time. Her scent is a mixture of human-type smells and a strange herb he’s never smelt before, but herbal yes. He wants more kisses but that part of the ritual is finished.

The walk back to town, he brushes the grass off his back and she looks forward, as if dreaming. They stop to do the departures and they kiss properly, with tongues and a normal human passion. It’s not once but a few times where their inexperienced mouths clash teeth and they giggle and keep going anyway. When they have finished the boy realises he has a lot of saliva in his mouth but he wants to hang on to it but has to swallow to talk and says ‘sorry…my big teeth’. She smiles and says ‘it was lovely’ and it’s really a goodbye.

He watches her go and tries to remember every detail of the last half an hour and replays each tiny heart jumping moment over and over, catches himself smiling uncontrollably, still trying to taste her on his tongue and lips but it’s fading.

Section III:
The trial, interrogation, torture, and the formal charging of the accused.

The train from her station is on the hour so it’s really easy for her to negotiate hygiene and dressing etc all the time because how easy is it to synchronise to the hour, it’s like a natural thing we’ve programmed ourselves to live by. And she leaves in that same mist of elderflower, nag champa incense from her bedroom, a crystal used as a deodorant, so, in ten minutes she’s going to smell like herself, at that time of the month her pheromones are all sweet and full of that stuff that men pick up without knowing they are still animals. The breeze is fresh and each step away from the house feels good, in fact, just twenty paces have completely excommunicated her from the home life, it’s now the trees and the keep-on-going city and the cars and her alone body mixing in with the rest of everything. The fear, the hope, the potential, stuff like that for a teenager. The station has the same mix of old people, families, weird loner guys sitting outside of the usual established protocol of sitting and waiting, smoking or spitting or else crouching weirdly with a hooded jumper as a mask or uniform. When they get on the train it’s almost a prerogative to split apart as much as possible… she ends up on the bottom level with two other teens at the back, and older man in front and her in the middle, a few seats down from a guy who is clearly in the army with his full camouflage outfit and mild-green duffel bag. The doors close, the train pulls away, there’s a good ten minutes until the next stop, the train has to wind down the mountain and enter the plains leading to the next town. There is about twenty or so breaths until the army guy gets up, walks down the aisle and stands over her, a smile on his lips, says ‘hey…how are you?’ and she hasn’t had this before and it’s weird and politely says ‘hi’ and he asks ‘can I sit here for a sec’ and she, not knowing what/why says ‘ok’ and he does and leans over and says ‘you’re very pretty’ and she smiles. Blushes, squirms, all that and he laughs and outs his hand on her lag and she moves back and he says ‘what’s wrong?’ and she says ‘nothing’ and he says ‘okay’ leaving his hand there and says ‘is everything ok?’ and she says ‘no’ thinking then that the old guy will get up and do something or that the world will help her but of course the train keeps moving. He slides his hand up her leg a little and says ‘you know I’m in the army… (slides hands further, under her skirt)… and I don’t…(further)… get to see many weird girls like you… what is this in your hair?’ he says, sliding his hand back off her bare skinned leg and sits back, asking about the metallic bead encrusted thing she has used to tie half her hair into kind of side pony tail. “oh…oh, it’s…just a…’ ‘ Hey, what’s wrong’ he says, making her feel even more closed in. She tries to get up but he stands over her and she moves closer to the window, this guy in green khaki now next to her, in the aisle. ‘You look so cute’ he says, now putting his hand straight up her leg under her dress, pushing a finger against her underwear and leaning over her. ‘Stop’ she says, squirming down into the seat. ‘Why?’ he says, looking her in the eyes and rubbing his fat fingers roughly over her vagina. ‘What are you doing?’ she says…’what?…’ and he’s really leaning in and pushing away her underwear and kind of over the top of her, moving the cotton away and trying to force a finger into her vagina and saying ‘it’s okay it’s okay’ and just doing it and she says ‘hey!’ and what the fuck are the rest of the passengers doing and as he gets most of a finger into her, she only thinks the next station is coming, the next station is coming and he keeps moving his finger(s) in and out and saying stuff but she’s not listening anymore and how the fuck did this happen and what the fuck is happening!

Assessment:
She did not cry out therefore she is not a witch so we have delivered a good soul to heaven.

Healthy children. They have the same red hair as their mother. They have a father who has never known that his wife was once alive and was hurt. And I can see in her face is that thing that the survivor human has where they say it with their face. Behind you, like when you leave a place, how distant it seems, in time, even if you live right there, right next to it still, you do that thing where you pretend that that wasn’t you or more accurately isn’t you. Anymore. The little girl you have borne comes running to you and you pick her up with her full toothed smile that makes it easy to never ever remember or regret or be even reminded of. Each night going to bed there is a prayer where you say help my father, help my mother, protect my children.

Poor Henry

Last modified on 2010-11-02 09:27:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Grease, again. The clock hangs on three. It’s always three when he thinks about his wife. At home, he imagines, just sitting there with the television. He wipes some grease off on his rag, it doesn’t come off. Drinks from a can of coke through a straw, makes the drink come through all foam. Tastes good, mixed with the smell of oil and petrol and cigarettes. A smell of home, a smell of purpose, a thick good reality. ‘What am I doing?’ he asks himself again, looking at his hands. It’s the hands that tell you, or, look like they tell you. Something about working on machines with your hands. Making a machine live. Turning pieces of metal into a breathing thing. That no one sees. ‘Under the hood’ they call it. Forget about it. He coughs hard and spits some black and blood stuff into a bin. It’s getting worse.

There’s something wrong. He finds it hard to believe in God. That his life is this. That he is in this body. Still. His father was a fireman, a soldier, a mayor. His children, in their twenties now, don’t call him and when he calls them it’s about what they are doing and he asks if they’ve done their taxes and what their friends who he remembers the names of are doing. He says ‘I love you’ at then end of the call. There is a silence when he hangs up the phone. Like a ringing in the ears that lasts until he looks away from the phone. To the still room with still seats and other things. His wife is in the kitchen and it smells of butter and garlic. It is a delicious smell, a promise. He wants a cigarette but that was years ago. Damn them.

Deep dark in the bedroom. Lying on his back he attaches the snore-eeze™ tape to his nose. Doesn’t want the operation like his friends have had. All their wives swear by it, a ‘marriage saver’ they say. That a marriage can end from snoring, that his wife falls asleep so fast now. On his back he knows the next thing to do is close his eyes. It’s been so hard lately. ‘Close your eyes’, he says, ‘close your eyes’. The blankness of the dark starts. There is nothing surrounding them in their bed. The house mocking him, all their things waiting to be used. On benches, in drawers, the culmination of all the cars and trucks he’s felt under his fingers. He rolls onto his side, feels like a child again, curls his legs up. Fifty now, feels his body but it’s not what he thought. His belly is too big, his hands are too fat. He rubs his belly with his hands, breathes in and can feel the fluid in there move away to let some air in. Medical problems only make him think of his children. His wife sleeps softly and sweetly. He remembers her young, when they had sex at night.

The headache when he wakes up reminds him that he should stop drinking so many beers before bed. His doctor told him to cut down so he switched to lite beers. He has three lite beers and then when his wife goes to bed he has three regular beers. A shower helps, he pulls on his suit, a white, well, grease stained white overalls. The young guys wear blue or some wear black ones now. He sees them and without talking to them wants to say ‘don’t do it, this is not a good idea’ but they are stupid. They drink a couple of beers at lunch, put new engine parts in their car, smoke too many cigarettes and are laughing all the time. They look at him he knows and laugh. He gets paid well so it’s not a problem. They don’t ask him questions about engines, they talk to each other and look up things in the internet.

Another cold darkness crept inside. He doesn’t want this again. The last time it almost cost him his children. He remembers what the therapist told him. It works. In the therapist’s office at first felt so wrong. He sat wringing his hands and looking at the carpet. A light green carpet with small flowers. He had so much time to get the pattern worked out, the same three rings of mini roses. They talked for weeks about his what they called ‘violent tendencies’. He knew who he was and what he did. It isn’t supposed to take a court to rule against you. But he is glad they did. Now seeing her once a week is something to look forward to. She says things to him that make him feel like a human. Not a body or a dead husk taking breath and then eating. It’s the silent meals he talks about. How the sounds of the knives and forks on the plates makes him feel sick. The therapist told him when this happens to look at your wife. She is also alive.

“Henry!” his boss yells. He walks over. “Henry, this is Malcolm Auld, he’s in the Bentley”

“That’s a nice car” he says, honestly.

“It’s yours Henry”

“Okay. So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know” the owner says, not looking at Henry, waiting for an answer to nothing.

“Okay. I’ll take a look”

“Henry’s the best”, the boss offers, smiling, “you’ll see”

“Well, my friends told me ‘don’t take it to the Bentley place, take it to O’Donnell’s'”

“And they’re right, aren’t they Henry?”

“Yeah. So, okay, so I’ll take a look. Ummm, Wednesday?”

“Uh, well, I was thinking, today”

“Henry, take a look at it today, okay?”

“Yeah, okay”

“Perfect. Ok so, call you later okay Malcolm?”

“Thanks. Hey, Henry, thanks a lot”

“No problem”

Work. His head over a beautiful clean engine. He looks at it for a long time. Studies the intricate connections. In his mind, working out the way it lives, feeds, breathes. How are you? He asks. Sits in the driver’s seat. Waits for a moment, the leather, hands on the wheel, feels it like a stranger, foreign. His hands are too big, swollen and dirty. Shameful hands, not supposed to touch this beauty. He turns the key and the engine starts. Yes something is wrong, he can hear it. This poor thing is choking on something. It sounds sick. When his boy was five he had a fever. He was vomiting and has terrible diarrhoea. He remembered what his grandmother did for him and did it again for his son. He cleaned him up, wrapped him in a bed sheet and carried him in his arms out into the night. They walked three or four blocks like that. Getting the fever down, the young boy holding close to his dad. Sweating and shivering.

Witches

Last modified on 2010-10-22 00:50:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

It’s what happens when you stare into the thick branches, because they’re in there looking back at you. I took a step back and squashed a slug under my sneaker. There shouldn’t be a slug there. I know. It’s half body moves for a second, the rest of it flattened goo. Damn them. They’re out tonight and they want you to know it. Not everyone. I told my sleeping girlfriend and she told me to shut up. Not because she hated me but because she felt it too. She just wanted to sleep but she was too hot. Too hot on this cold night. I pulled the blankets back and ran my fingers gently over her naked body, telling her that the heat was leaving, telling her the tingling feeling my gentle fingertips gave were like ice, that she could sleep. I went outside to connect. My body shivering for no reason, my eyes confused about what I was seeing, nothing. The edge of something, the darkness between the gaps, looking over my shoulder at the edge of a hedge, waiting for them to come out. They followed behind and back in, I closed doors but they are just metal or wood doors. Even now I’m waiting and feeling them behind me. I don’t want to look, I’ll tell you what it is like to be tormented by these things. They are perched or are curiously watching over my shoulder, I used to think they informed my writing or feelings but it is really just a morbid fear respect thing I have (and the continued ignorance (read: ignore-ance) keeps me going).

They found me again, I was lost for a while, in my own bubble. The confusing voices and sounds all came back in an avalanche. Every house a home to those chaotic witches we pretend don’t exist. They’re in the trees tonight, perched as such things do. I imagine they have crows feet or bare feet with thick nails. Sick vomit breath, they like to vomit, it reminds them they are human. I read today: we are not humans having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. Yeah, I get it.

Ha, yeah, a full moon. My mother always told me about how she felt during a full moon and I used to pretend I didn’t feel the same. When all the water in the world is most strongly pulled, or settled. Not pulled. That could be worse, as in not connected to the Earth, suspended, our bodies floating like at that moment when you’re at the top of  a swing. That’s the power of the full moon, you are not grounded, you are at that stage where that feeling in your gut says ‘fuck! I could die I am at the mercy of NATURE’. And then the spells work and when they vomited blood and your semen and other things you don’t know about into their cauldron (yes they have cauldrons) it is only now that it begins to work, that the thing witches have designed for you, can work their magic.

I remember now, she sat next to me on a bus. Eighty or older she was and she leaned down, slowly, decrepit, to sit there and I moved what couldn’t have been more than a centimetre and she thanked me right in my face and I was made to breathe in her essence (breath) which immediately threw up images of decay and death and rotting flesh and I wasn’t too ashamed to cross myself and expel any demons this old witch was trying to seed in me. We sat together pleasantly enough for the rest of the ride and I thought ‘did she notice my response/protection ritual?’ Did she care? Was she trying to take a portion of my youthfulness or was trying to destroy a small part of it enough of a challenge for her? She did not prolong her own death through me that day.

What a target I am. Why? Because I am both saint and sinner. I have this ethos whereby I let others choose their actions. I have been called the devil so many times it’s not funny. And what is further funnier is that I see myself as an angel. I have NEVER forced anyone to make a decision. It has been their choice under the beautiful construct that is free will[1].

THE GOAL OF THE DARK

This is very simple and easily researchable. It is: the ability to influence/control others through your own will. Further, the idea that YOU are the centre of the universe.

THE GOAL OF THE LIGHT

This is very simple and easily researchable. It is: the ability to help others regardless of your own self. Further, the idea that we are all ONE.

I give my heart and they look at it like it’s a nice shiny thing. Chanel thing. Another thing. They don’t know what it is because it’s not real to them. This is magic.

They’re on my shoulders. I have to hunch and chew at my own cheek. I am spurred on as they send a coldness down my spine and I do prayer type things to keep them away form the beautiful girl sleeping nearby. She’ll hopefully have only nightmares. What has she let into her home but a succulent vessel that fends off attacks from little devils? My two radiant strong guardian angels are the best things created. Two of them! Left and Right. Soldiers who know who I am. We all laugh together when people call me the devil. Everyone who has ever met me has called me the devil. And I have NEVER done ANYTNING that would hurt or harm anyone. This is the strange battle I live within. Alone. With my two beautiful guardian angels. I feel like crying right now. There is a light, and I can feel it. I can feel it and I can keep going.

Two stories:

(1)     ‘Come on Christopher we’re late for church!’

The boy struggles, pulling on a shirt and feeling uncomfortable.

The family (Husband, Wife and Christopher) get there, take their seats on the hard wood. The room is filled with all the mixed perfume of the middle aged woman. Christopher feels sick. He sits there listening to the same things he hears every week, looks up high at his parents’ blank faces who are singing something about god. Then the smell of their collective breath mixed with that perfume. A rotten mouth smell that is thick, sour and sweet. The adults leave the children in the pews to line up for the bread. They come back. His mother holds his hands while they shake hands with those near them saying “peace be with you” and smiling. They sing again, this time their breath has the sick smell of the weird bread they eat. It’s a long time before they go home he knows at this stage of the ritual.

(2)     He put down a large mounted poster from the Lord of the Rings he took from his parents room (they said he could have it). The intricate designs and depictions of strange characters were enough for him to dream and imagine and in his own head make up a far stranger and richer reality than could be told through the actual book series itself. But still he used it as a lock. Behind the ‘lock’ he had a girlfriend. The most beautiful and perfect girl in the world (he thought). He at once worshipped her yet defiled her through his sexual extravaganza. He loved her so much but his outlet became the verbose human dirt sex thing that usually happens to the bored middle aged. He had no constraint, he had nothing to compare restraint to. These urges to give love fully and want lustfully were everything. His way of worshipping was through being naked and loving. His spirituality manifested in carnality. He was an animal. He was a god.

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[1] I understand that by saying ‘construct’ I sound like a little imp, but, I really don’t want to change that word because (a) I like the way it sounds, I mean, it’s kind of insulting on quite a few levels and also (b) I cannot be scientifically sure that free will really does exist, okay? That’s in no way a scapegoat answer…if you do any scientific reading you’ll notice that consciousness and free will are the number one top priority MAJOR concept in psychology, philosophy, neurology etc etc. And of course you can understand why (i.e. religious, spiritual and paranormal implications et al). SIDE NOTE: the chief scientific advisor to the pope would baptise an alien if (quote) “it asked to be”.

The Book Of Wisdom

Last modified on 2010-09-14 23:13:59 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

BIBLE: Wisdom book 1: For inquisition shall be made into the thoughts of the ungodly, and the hearing of his words shall come to God, to the chastising of his iniquities.

You know when you are really in-the-gut yearning for just, just a kind look, a reassurance that this horrible shit that you are in is actually temporary, that this too shall pass (as they say), and you know that other thing inside that says “fuck it, who gives a shit” and so the look on your face transforms into some type of serenity which (when seeing it) is just when you get that reassuring look or hand squeeze? That, for eons, has been the dichotomy of good and evil, god and the devil, life and suicide etc. Which is which?[1]

BIBLE: Wisdom book 2: For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man has been known to have returned from hell. For we are born of nothing, and after this we shall be as if we had not been.

Jeremy was burning. He was one of them that thought that hell couldn’t exist. He came back, born as we call it. A sickly child, almost died choking on the umbilical cord. His first breaths were strangled, pain and the threat of death straight away. I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, when he was in pre-school. trying to touch the little girls cunts, trying to gouge out the boys’ eyes, trying to get the teacher to kiss him on the lips, trying to get his mother to play with his cock. He killed his rabbit by shutting its neck in the escape hole and leaving it there o’ernight.[2]

BIBLE: Wisdom book 3: As for the children of adulterers, they shall not come to their perfection, and the seed of an unrighteous bed shall be rooted out. For though they live long, yet shall they be nothing regarded: and their last age shall be without honour. Or, if they die quickly, they have no hope, neither comfort in the day of trial. For horrible is the end of the unrighteous generation.

“Jay-den, git dahn orf thair” (sic) of such dialect she spoke, a high-pitched command followed by five or six hoarse coughs “fuckin’ bronchitis” followed by another long drag on her menthol cigarette. I got up, left the ‘ladies’ there to talk of how much (read: little) their husbands were earning in this or that trade. I sat with the ‘men’ and tried to join into their conversation.

“He’s a little poofter” says the father of his wife’s child from a previous marriage.

“Really?” I ask, “how do you know?”

“He fuckin’ runs around in hi sown little world, dancing around hur hur hur hur hur” (that’s a laugh).[3]

“Ok. He’s, what, ten?”

“Fucked if I know hur hur hur hur” drinks his beer, head fully back, deftly changing the topic to how he fucked a barmaid from his local pub.[4]

BIBLE: Wisdom book 4: Better it is to have no children, and to have virtue: for the memorial thereof is immortal: because it is known with God, and with men.

11:30  The nurse again not saying anything, it’s like, fucking hell what the hell is going on I mean fuck

11:34  I went to the desk again and that same dark haired girl is sitting there on the computer so I’m tapping my fingernails in a repeating pattern and it’s like minutes until she looks over and just smile and I say ‘can I see my wife?’ and she asks again ‘which room’ and I tell her and she says ‘go over there and see the nurse and I say ‘I did that and she said to wait out here’ and she looks back at the screen, sees nothing and says ‘you can go and try again’ and I don’t know what I say but I walk the twenty paces over to the door and knock and knock.

11:43  The door opens and the nurse comes out and walks past me and I actually grab her. ‘Yes’ she says and I say ‘what’s going on can I see my wife what’s happening?’ and she says ‘you can go in’ and it’s like what the fuck was she just going to walk pat me?

11:44   ‘Hey what’s happening?!’ and she is white and there are tubes on her nose and out of her arms and I take her hand in mine and hold it but not too tightly and kiss her face so much I don’t want to stop. She has her eyes closed and says things like ‘I dolt know’ and I’m crying I don’t know why and kissing her wet forehead and then wiping her forehead with my shirt

11:58  Trying to get her to drink some water and it feels like I’m nursing a dying soldier and the doctor walks over with his clean hair and waits for us, looks at us and it’s scary

12:02  I don’t know, I don’t know, what the fuck fuck and the tears are not like any tears I’ve ever had and I’m helpless and dying and trying to breathe and the doctor is telling me he wants to give me something in my arm and my wife is trying to get up and I’m trying to hold her down and its all crazy and turning around and where are we and what the fuck is going on![5]

---

[1] What I mean is; is the way in which your life seems horrid the quote unquote work of the devil and your resultant action somehow angelic (i.e. abhorrent to such a downfall) or is the unfortunate situation a test to be overcome by the goodness in your (able to be) perfect soul, and so then is the “who cares” flash-realisation, then, either the devil coercing you into giving up and being selfish or your guardian angel whispering in your soul-ear to protect yourself and become, as it were, a pillar of righteousness that shall not be toppled by Stan’s minions et al. Plus, is the transformation on your face a saintly wholesomeness whereby you have transcended mortality and become (cough) god-like or is it an impish self-serving grin whereby you know the how and why of things and have already planned your escape. And lastly, is the final comfort you feel in seeing the reassuring gesture succuss and gratification speaking directly to your soul’s goodness or a relaxation at the defeat of demonic influence (or a bit of both in this case). Etc.

---

[2] Cliché really, that a child torturing animals is inherently evil (or from evil per se). That a child can torture an animal should be questioned, that it is only a child that has the inhuman capability of animal torture…a child, who, granted, hasn’t leant the breadth and depth of humanity, the essence of soul, or, are we to believe it is innate and, then, if so, soldiers, shooting stabbing and choking fellow living humans. What of them, then, trained to do it, to do it for the good of the rest us? That god can be inside the adult male and then be overridden for humanities sake and that god can be overridden in a child’s mind only because he has not been taught yet. How to reconcile?

---

[3] Okay so the whole religious mandate that ‘homosexuals are wrong’ thing versus how they are treated as a result. I do (should) not need to point this out or talk about it at all.

---

[4] This actually happened to me. At once I was listening to a belligerent father who was scorning his wife’s child (who he is now the father of and then the very next story was how he fucked a barmaid. And what did he expect that (a) I would think him a ‘great man’ for doing this and (b) not care that he had just mentioned he was a married father and (c) also not care that I was by de facto the step-brother of the wife he had just mentioned had a gay son he hated and cheated on? There were too many layers there and it was the only human thing I could do to walk away and NEVER see him again (thinking things like ‘if I murdered you in your sleep the world would be easily better).

---

[5] There is a baby born every second. We spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid pregnancy. There is a strange sickness in this ebb and flow, period, abortion, sex, birth control, late periods, blood, semen, everything. We’re trying so hard to do it all at once like science hates nature and nature hates us. Then a child is born and we love or hate it. Straight away love or hate. THEN: the exaltation or condemnation of ‘parenting’. Into the fire.

YOU WILL HOPEFULLY BE CHANGED AFTER THIS

Last modified on 2010-09-08 00:50:33 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“You will hopefully be changed after this”
“After what?”
“What we discuss”
“Just, words?”
“Well, words with meaning”

–

The arbitrator said to the proletariat: how can you question what is right when you have barely spent the time to understand how complex it is to comprehend your gross menial dreams and encompass them into my plans! You brutal sycophant of a child! I can see what you want in each heartbeat and its medical care and a safe home and food and to drink until you’re drunk. I know! Now, you’re going to sit back down and let me tell you, okay?

–

I forgot to tell you
How much I love you
Because that other man
Was there and loved you
What I thought was less than me.

–

We came upon this discourse, would have been 500 or 600 AD, and you can forget Socrates or Plato or whatever (it’s the same guy anyway. Oh stop pretending you historian hybrids). Here’s how it went:

“And so the good man won’t perpetrate the natural desire?”
“Let’s first define what we mean by good”

And so it goes on and on as we know from Plato about good and bad etc until:

“So, we’ve defined what good is and what bad is as an intrinsic reason for making decisions and perpetrating acts as outlined by our highly elaborate and admittedly intrinsically insular personification, and now, the doubts you have are…?”
“And so the good man won’t perpetrate the natural desire?”

–

This time she pretended not to care but that’s what I love and every time she didn’t look at me (every time it was) it let me stare at her more and more, the dark eyeliner and thick blood red lipstick, the fucking sexy bitch she was, all in black like I was and eventually the rest of the Goths left and we talked, hard talk with all the drugs in our system, second guessing, faking, laughing, but we said together ‘dark crystal’ and knew we didn’t really care enough to like it seriously in any meaningful way but the family thing, the kid watching TV thing we had (even though it wasn’t particularly special or unique or anything) we had it and there wasn’t anyone there like I said and we just smiled and what came of that is another story.

–

So again the night and what I did to myself again. I promised so hard in the morning and in the day that I wouldn’t but the long draughts of wine and cigarettes into me made sense, they make sense, ok? Yeah and those little bodies downstairs, I imagine them writhing, squirming in their little outfits, like they have wet skin already, the soft skin they have and grins and everything. Last night I got one of them down on the ground and her friends were down the alley and she had finished pissing so her panties were down and got to rub my hand on her little pussy and it was so small between my fingers and it made me think how old I was but I left her there and she ran away and I was gone like anybody.

–

“So you wanted to talk about what happened”
“No…not really…I just said, you know…”
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“I just want you to think….um…that………”
“That what”
“That there’s…something….more to me…but not….a pretending thing…a….um…like a…um…”
“…”

–

My mother said:

You like the beautiful ones.
As if I don’t deserve it,
Or I should light a candle.
But I worshipped enough
To realise what beauty is worth.

–

The pieces of life we have, I just sit here and my testicle area stinks when I sniff it because its been days between showers and holy fuck how did that happen and does it get worse? I didn’t want to end up like this, I knew guys like this, saw them and got the fuck away (or secretly admired their conviction to getting ulcers from the drink and still making their way to see people and lend them money and what not). Fuck that, I’ve even now seen the early thirties version of that and its terrible: these benevolent humans giving and giving because they can right now at the detriment to their very life souls…did they give up on something, is that it? Lost love. A love that they had and let go? Unreturned love (the worst)?

–

“So this time there’s something different, okay, tell me”
“I’m the worst…there’s really something wrong with me”
“Okay…so, you say now that there’s something wrong with you”
“Yeah”
“And, what makes you say that?”
“Well…okay…so….you know how you’re just sitting there?”
“Yes”

–

She doesn’t want love,
She wants life.
The best man,
Not the bride groom dead thing.
There it is, dying on the altar.
I will go away.

–

The next thing we discovered, oh boy!, was the artefacts of a Pythagorean discourse, it said (after thorough translation through the highest of authorities):

“Did we give too much, I mean, to the ages. This simple back and forth of the earth and its pieces of objects, like we’ve seen in the tides or in our hands?”
“No master, these things are precious!”
“But can you see them making sumptuous arguments on the basis of our symbolist reasonings?”
“Never!” they scream, in ancient Greek (trust me).
“If we were to tell them the truth, that all of mankind are beholden to the bareness of the stone and the orbit, would they not strap us to the nearest tree and thrash out our wounds with the harshest of instruments?”
“Never?” they scream….but not the true scream they had inside. That would be later, as prophesised.

–

Oh fuck yes, even though I’ve got a ‘barely there’ condom on I can still feel the head of my cock sliding in and out of the whore’s mouth…expensive too, she is. I thought ‘why the fuck not’ and went to one of those classy places. Class! Ha, I love that…better looking bitches that’s for sure. Some fat fuck was at the bar talking to some hot blonde chick and she knew I wanted her and I can if I want so I just walked over and grabbed her arm and she pulled it back (but she’s not supposed to) and the fat fuck in a suit guy looked at me and I fell over him and I don’t know what happened but the hot blonde girl was up against me and we left out into a corridor and I thought ‘this is better’.

–

They made you say those things, right, because for one thing you are beholden to them for your certain kind of reality and for another thing you just want that pay packet every week. The week, the day after day stuff that forms seven…again seven, like it’s a prophesy or a dia-traumatic existential cacophony that you can only dream of escaping from. I tell you, even in the barest of pseudo-philosophic realms can you even hope to exclude yourself from the inevitability of this age. Go on! Press on! Keep going! I want to see you up over the hill, again and again in new roles yet hopefully not new personas.

–

“OK, so the thing that you say, is so wrong”
“Yes”
“What is it?”
“Okay, well, because you caught me early today, I mean, this time”
“Go on”
“Everything I say is….designed”

–

Today we felt a new reality.
One without our togetherness.
And so she kissed me
On the cheek
So many times
It made the death sweet.

–

The cunt didn’t even give a fuck when I put three cubes of ice in her drink, spilled it anyway onto the floor, wood floors but it came up onto my rug and I thought “well, we’re going to fuck anyway” and she drank it down like I did and I got her pants off and her stupid top, hell, it can stay on, gross spandex thing with all kings of ringlets and gold plating (fake). Leave it on I say, already got her pants of anyway, my clothes are off cause its my house and what do I care? She half naked on my bed and I’ve got my body over her, stinking drunk but we’re not kissing and we make it I think.

–

In the tomb of Ramses there was an inexplicable piece that outdated cuneiform literature and made us all rethink social integration. After examination from both Judaeo-Christian theologians and Arabic historians they came to the conclusion that the translation erred somewhere thusly:

In the careful consideration of the intrinsic differences beholden towards the races, it shall be observed that those who hold juxtapositions in beliefs shall be hereby amalgamated into a singular group of purity that shall transcend all mankind and unify the divisions seen throughout the barbaric lands to unify these somewhat beguiled and incongruous races into acknowledging a central human deity that shall supersede any esoteric and injunctioned party so as to allude to the pure sense of a greater entity that shall hence forth be perceived in a wholeness that will eviscerate any division that could lead to war, death, famine, puerile bigotry or otherwise confusion.

–

“Ok, so I know what you think hearing this so it’s like I’m seeing myself telling you and so I already know what you’re going to say and so what I actually say is, ok, beyond that”
“I see”
“Yeah right……ok, can I say…I already know what you think, its not a mystery, you’re going to say ‘he has a hyper-real reality that he believes he is in control of but he’s so aware of this that he can’t open up to other people’. Am I right, I mean, is that close to your one-visit assessment?”
“Sure…you’re very aware of this process I’ll admit”

–

The avatar, the dead face:
The old men and women, stoic in photographs.
In their tombs or rebirth we feel
Loss or sadness
Because what was done
Keeps being done.

–

Six fifteen, not even dark and those office girl clothes, holy fuck, tight skirts like they bought on the weekend they did. And they just walk in them and like a fucking disgusting fool I’ll follow them and some of them meet you for drinks, but away they go! And this one now walks home, changes from her high heels into some type of white cheap “joggin shiwzs” every day right near the parkway turn off she does, those white shoes, three months later they aren’t so white and then down there by the underpass I do this thing one day where I grab her and knock her head onto the cement a few times until she is quiet and then, well, and then, right.

–

In the journal of mankind we are told things, some of which are basic like: do unto others as they would do you, or, the truth shall set you free. Instead in this modern world we are coerced into behaving so inhumanly, instructed to be so monstrous and then ridiculed and even fired upon revealing any sense of our lingering humanity or sensibility so until the end we will love raping and torturing and we do it all under the sweeping proviso that nature (we interpreted) set forth: the survival of the fittest, which now is the survival of the willing: willing to lie, willing to cheat, willing to forsake another’s trust to benefit your own tiny piece of sustenance. And when do I stand up and protest or proclaim this idiocy. When? Fuck you now = no money for you.

–

“Go on”
“Yeah, go on….ok, well, I remember when I was kid…and I…well, I didn’t really know that all the other people were around me, my family I mean.”
“You felt alone?”
“No. Christ no, not like that. I mean…I felt, enabled, free…um…and I’m not trying to self-analyse here, but, um…like…you know, um, real? Um, like, true, I mean…when it rained, ok, when it rained…sometimes, I mean like, once or twice, really, I just….and no one was home, ok, so, like…these two times, I, like…took off all my clothes and just ran around, naked ok, in the backyard, feet on grass, naked, in the rain. I mean, I can’t remember now but, where the fuck was everybody? Right, in my memory, I mean, they were somewhere but I was just there alone and naked and did like laps of the backyard and just came back to my room naked and wet all over with rain and it was like so clean and pure and I just thought, man, that was the most free I’ve been in like fifteen years! Fuck! What do you have to say about that, I mean, really? Beat that!”

The Passenger (part 1)

Last modified on 2010-09-06 13:14:18 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The last cigarette, as soon as he threw it, exhaling, he thought, fuck. One last drag. He goes to the side of the road, picks up the butt and inhales, pulls it out to see the orange filer darkened. Yep, one last drag. The road is curved, badly made, barely enough for two cars let alone the trucks. Throws his bag over his shoulder again, thinks about getting rid of some stuff that’s in it. Jacket? Won’t need that for a few months. Ah fuck keep it anyway. Walks about twenty paces, stops, listens, nothing, walks again, the only sound is the wind and his footsteps, the crunch of the dirt underfoot, his breath in and out, sounds forced, too loud. Stops again, this time a mummer on the airwaves. A vehicle. Puts the bag down, sticks out his hand, this time just a finger pointing to the road, tries to stand upright, proud, trustworthy. The car emerges, comes slowly, slowly driving from god knows where to god knows where. Could have taken the last ride into a town but the guy was just too fucking weird. ‘How many rabbits I killed this month?’ the driver asked. Apparently fifty is a laughable guess. It’s a blue car…Holden. It drives past fast, the driver with a full beard and no shirt on. Probably a good thing. He slings the bag back over and starts walking again, a song in his head, well, one line over and over ‘go ahead and get going, gonna see her soon, my son and my wife, my good old life’ – nothing to do with anything, starts singing out loud until he sees another car. Puts the bag down, finger out. The car passes, this time he gets eye contact. Some middle aged man like him, this time wearing a suit (driving a Mitsubishi station wagon), it passes and he reads the ‘magic happens’ bumper sticker as the car pulls to one side and puts the hazard lights on. ‘Christ’ he thinks to himself. He picks up his bag and goes to the car. The driver leans his head out the window and calls back

“Where you going?”

“Next town, or, wherever you’re going that’s further than that” he yells back.

“I’m going to Bishop”

“Bishop?” getting softer now, close enough to read the licence plate (CHR15T).

“It’s about…wait get in” and he does, puling the bag onto his lap.

“You want to put that in the backseat.”

“Yeah ok” so he gets back out and puts the bag in the backseat, sits back in the passenger seat.

“My name’s Trent” says the driver

“Mark” and they shake hands.

“Bishop is just near the border, its about an hour from here”

“An hour. The border…right. How close to the coast is it?”

“Well”, he says, puling back on to the road, “the coast is about, well, a good three and a half hours drive from Bishop, maybe more”

“Ok”

“You want to go to the coast?”

“Not really…just, you know, getting my bearings”

“Well I have to ask first off, do you believe in Jesus?”

“Depends on what you mean by believe”

“Believe? I mean believe. Jesus Christ, is our, lord and saviour”

“Yeah but, believe is like, a choice. I’d like it to be not a choice, just a, you know, reality. A thing like that”

“It is like that”

“Not really”

They drive on, maybe five hundred metres, the driver has composed a new way to start the conversion:

“You ever felt like you were special?”

“Special? Sure”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, okay, so, like there’s these things that happen in life, right, and it always felt like this doesn’t concern me, like, like I don’t have to bother with this you know and all the people seem so far away, and all the things that happen to them just happen, over there. You know? So yeah, like that kind of special”

“And so you think you are spared?”

“Spared? No, not spared”

“But you think there’s something there. Something happening?”

“Yeah. Can I smoke in you car, I mean, do you smoke?”

“No I don’t”

Laughs “I don’t have any cigarettes anyway!”

“Do you want to stop for some?”

“No…no, its okay”

The conversation drops, its clear that the driver wants to talk about his religion and the passenger wants to pass off comments in a quasi-truthful way so any real progression is impossible. Nevertheless the morose visuals that a kilometre or two makes starts them up again with

“Do you ever think about how the landscape just slides by, like its nothing, just, peripheral, in our eyes, a thick piece of life that just exists in a pointless stuck there way”

A few more metres, the driver lets the passengers question just exist for a moment, the passenger both not caring what the driver thinks and expecting some altruistic humanist catholic religion based answer and so, in anticipation of this its

“Of course, of course that’s what it is. But why would you want it to be that?”

“I don’t…that’s what it is though”

“Yeah right. Like the earth is a thin crust full of empty air, like we dance on the surface like scrawling ants digging our graves, like we eat what pops up and dies and bury ourselves into the .05% of topsoil we can actually get at. Is that it? Does that make sense?”

“I don’t think like that. I think like…like, everyone has or can see this, every person who’s been down this road, seen the same things, been the same places. What’s the difference? I mean yeah, this time I’m here, but what, my eyes? My brain? This place is just here and that all. No matter who sees it, you know”

“So simple. Imagine how simple and beautiful its”

“Stop it. I get it. It’s all planned, fate, purpose…god’s plan, right?”

“Well naturally, you said it yourself”

“Hardly. I meant it exists besides us. Without us…watching or whatever we do. Observe and analyse. Feel.”

“Feel, that’s an interesting one. So why do we have to feel, or, okay another way, why do we feel?”

“Okay yeah right, I like that. Not only are you saying how strange it is that we should feel, you’re saying how insane is it that we should wonder why we feel! Ha! Nice. Okay I get it. Yeah right give me a sec. We may need to stop for cigarettes after all”

“I don’t know where the next place will be…”

“It doesn’t matter”

“OK”

“So what, ok, so we feel. And, and this is how I’m thinking, it’s from evolution right? We developed quote unique feelings because of societal structures in our living behaviour, chimps and such. Okay so, empathy, sharing, nurturing young, protection etc…sustainability and general hoard mentality stuff, okay, I understand that, it makes sense. And so, what we’re asking now is is that the dawn of feelings per se. That the reasoning behind living as we do stems from a benefit in having these quote unquote feelings. Right, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not really, but, well, that’s kind of, well, the science version. I’m saying it’s the inner soul that’s yelling out at you. I’m…I’m saying that its god telling you something, you know”

“Fate destiny stuff?”

“No no , I mean, where your feelings come from”

“Right ok, but, I mean, so…animals?”

“Animals….animals, are, animals”

“Ha! ok, lets not talk about that…I think we’ve identified the…echidna!”(there was an echidna on the road) “like differences in what we think, but, you know like I like what you’re saying. Not that I haven’t thought about it but the whole feelings thing is pretty cool. I mean, and tell me to shut up if its, I don’t know, offensive or something, but, but from where I sit it’s like we developed these feelings that we cherish so much now out of a strange cohabitation that made us empathise and now so over the years it has become so complex and abstract as to encompass the whole, I mean, sick bizarre fetish shit and porn and stuff that now its like, wow ANYTHING is possible and what I’m going to get around to agreeing with you about religion and stuff is that fuck its gone REALLY far now and like sick gross depraved shit is REAL and we’ve kind of allowed it through exploring this whole ‘feelings’ thing and allowing it all and understanding. Ha! Understanding! That’s got to be the biggest debaucher of them all right. I mean, like people now are like ‘yes, I understand your homosexual mother with a transvestite ex-women father wants to adopt but I find that morally reprehensible’ etcetera etcetera…you know. I mean fuck, you being the whole Christian and stuff, what do you say?”

“I…uh…”

A moment goes by, the passenger has a heartbeat now, thinking do I get to stay in this car and am I the weirdo one now that the driver wants to be rid of. Is the challenge of Christian conversion too great?

“I can tell you a story” the driver continues “of a man, yes it’s from the bible, but I’m sure you’ve guessed that’s what I’ll be doing so…anyway the story…”

“Man I could use some cigarettes”

“We’ll get some okay, next time I fill up. But there’s this story…you’ll like it. Ok so, there’s a guy called Job”

“Job?”

“well, ‘Jobe’ in the proper pronunciation ”

“Jobe”

“Yeah. Okay so, what happens is this guy Job is so in love with god, praying everyday, family praying, giving thanks, leading the best possible life under god right”

“Okay”

“Yeah right okay so what happens is the devil, Satan or whatever you want comes to god and says ‘hey, this guy is SO faithful to you ONLY because is his so well off’, because you know he has a family and loads of money a big house and everything, lots of kids and the like”

“Yeah, yeah”

“And so the devil says ‘Let’s see how faithful he is this servant of god’ and this is how it gets worse, god says to the devil ‘what did you have in mind’ and this is where it gets really perverse, I mean, even hard for me…its like god and the devil are chatting, I mean, still working it out the whole humanity thing. And then, not only that, god is willing to play along”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean like he takes the devil up on his dare, you know, gives in to the challenge!”

“So what like, humans are shit and they’re the playground for proving either god or the devil right and like, the bible talks about them as equals…or what?”

“Yeah exactly! I mean how trying is that?!”

“Very weird…or, maybe, it makes sense, I mean, wasn’t the devil the first and best angel?”

“I don’t know about that…all I know is that god punished job for really no reason. To test his faith under the watch of the devil. I mean that’s, that’s just weird to me”

“I get it, I get it…is that a petrol station?”

“Maybe…you hungry? ”

“No…I just want a cigarette…”

What happens is that they roll along, each understanding each, a perfect kind of silence between them. The road keeps coming, the trees and shrubs and the dirt keeps on flipping past, the passenger leans his head onto the glass and looks out, mesmerised by the way the edge of the roads is a formless mass, the gravel makes a wave he sees, or a mathematical blur of ons and offs, too quick to have any meaning, just the workmanship of a group of guys who are probably now in their sixties, seventies or eighties. A lot of them dead who made this road, their job, purpose. He hesitates to think of any an-convict things. And at night what did those workers do out here? Sit by their campfires and try to frighten each other with tales of malevolent bravado? Sex stories, sucking young nipples or fucking friend’s’ wives in far away towns. What were they doing out here, the men who laid this road? How long until the next ridge yields a place to stay? It’s these thoughts that are a precursor of sleep, rambling wonderings, quick thoughts. His eyes start to hang down, he tries to keep the light coming in, letting them drop feels so good so it’s a

“Goodnight friend…you don’t mind…for a while”

“Sleep, it’s about twenty minutes now”

And the passenger sleeps, took twenty minutes or so to establish a sense of safety, can close his eyes with this guy, can let the kilometres come…for twenty minutes.

SLATER AND SLATER

Last modified on 2010-10-31 10:54:04 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Frederick had a good idea. Jelly wrestling, three girls, then, five or six big pig dogs come in and just jump in there and start, ripping at their flesh but the girls, they’re like laughing and trying to play with them even as the dogs are sinking their teeth into their legs, bellies and breasts, and their hair is mixed with jelly and blood and the dogs are like pure muscle and going crazy like devils and the girls are sort of screaming laughing and almost like fucking the dogs and squirming, you know. How to film that though? Johnno thought of lots of spliced close ups and then Fred was all like real dogs but tame and real girls and like fake blood but is that enough? and then James, you know, the boss, just kept asking how does this sell beer and we’re like it’s a joke, you know, like how guys like jelly wrestling and dogs and it’s like, overkill, you know…all those other ads with girls and cars and beer but he didn’t get it he just wanted jelly wrestling and like loud rock music or something and we were saying that’s not interesting and back and forth and so we had to go and come up with some more concepts but instead we were so pissed off we just went on an early lunch down at Henry’s. What a shit hole really but the damn place is right next to the office and it’s like four bucks a beer so we just bought beer and Tom bought some wedges and that was that.

“Fucking hell I thought James would go for that, man!”

“We didn’t pitch it right, I mean, we didn’t have the images right”

“Yeah, we need some photo outfit to get some glam shots of that shit”

“Yeah yeah like, some stills of some hot models covered in like jelly and blood and stuff”

“Got to be blondes…GOT to be blondes”

“I’m getting another round”

And we had rounds, four rounds or something because what faggot wouldn’t buy a round? Normally Tom but we made him get a round, trying to get out of it buying some wedges, fuck that, get some beers AND some wedges Tom you asshole. Nancy at the front desk, sexy bitch, was all smiles and giggling because she could tell we were all half pissed and Johnno was like ‘what you doing tonight’ like he always does and she says something like ‘nothing with you’ the playful little thing and we get in the lift and Fred lights a cigarette and we’re telling him to put it the fuck out and he does one floor from the office and the doors open and we pour out all smoke and loose suits but you know that’s what we do and who the fuck is going to say anything…come up with better work and then we’ll talk. There’s a new girl in the office and she’s all open eyes and saying nothing so, you know, screw her she doesn’t know who we are and it’s back in our office and Fred rips down the cards with the dogs and shit on them and says ‘next!’ and we get out our pads and phones and I say ‘what next? That’s the fucking idea. Lets pitch it to the client!’ and Johnno says we can’t because of James and as much as we all think fuck him it’s not how it’s done, asshole got his hands so tight around the clients scrotums they’d never go with anything he wasn’t sitting there smiling about with his big shit-eating endorsement. Whatever, got to make this sex and death thing more appealing…how the fuck can you advertise some beer with the slogan ‘Get it down your throat’ I mean, that’s aggressive right I mean what else do they want? Their last piece of thirty second garbage was some Swedish skiers malarkey and it’s all about blow jobs and snow and swallowing frozen sperm or piss or something and like THAT’S okay?  Tom closes the blinds and Fred lights another cigarette, Johnno gets the small bottles of scotch out of his drawer and sets them on the table, I take one and pour it onto a glass ‘ice?’ but no one filled up the bar fridge

“Fucking hell! How hard is it to fill it up the fucking sink is right there, or wait no, there’s a jug of water in the fucking fridge right there, jesus’

“Shut up Sash it was probably you”

“Yeah right, like I’m a cunt huh?”

“Just drink it neat you baby, or splash some of your ‘fridge water’ in it”

“That’s not a bad idea, Johnno, pass me the jug”

And so I tip some of the water in and we can get on with it…a new idea to sell this piss tasting beer.

“Beer bongs?”

“Nah…too teen”

“Too obvious”

“Well, they did go with cock sucking Swedish chicks…”

“All right fine…what about a DUDE wrestling with the chicks?”

“And what is he getting down his throat”

“Like, like a freeze frame at the last second of some chick with half her hand down his throat, and his eyes are all bulging and he’s all red and about to throw up, you know, like, gagging, and it’s like freeze frame in the moment and then: Greigsons…Get it down your throat…BANG”

“Right and then we do like, five of them with shit getting stuffed down throats right, like, choking on a pie or like, sword swallowers or…”

“Porn chick”

“Fuck imagine…that would be cool…yeah…okay…not bad”

“Ha! That’s hilarious!”

“Ok ok, Tom, draw something up…lets see how it’ll looks for a pitch”

“Fucking geniuses again…what was that like, five minutes”

“No way Fred, we were talking about that all lunch remember”

“Oh yeah…expense account!”

“Fucking A”

The afternoon wears on but we’re done here really so we wait until Tom has finished mocking up the stills and they look pretty good and the little bottles are gone so I email Nancy to fill it up for tomorrow and we have a few more cigarettes and grab out jackets and leave. James is n the hall and he stops Johnno and they go into his office but the rest of us get in the lift. Me and Fred get out at the lobby but Tom takes it down to the basement. Typical Tom.

*                              *                              *

The morning sun makes the office look all yellow and like we’re still in the 1960s. Doesn’t help that the office was actually built in the 1960s and the tiny windows that were so cool back then just make this air conditioned hell hole even seedier, pinholes of light blasting in on otherwise dark cubicles. The account managers bashing away in their cells trying to place pissy little ads in magazines or newspapers or, fuck! The end of the industry…online advertising. Like anyone buys shit from a ugly banner ad. These kids have no idea, all fresh-faced, fancy designer clothes, nice university degrees that say ‘digital communications’ or ‘social media’ bullshit. You want money? Get your shit onto TV period. Thirty seconds to get some sitting-at-home-on-their-useless-fat-ass idiot to bother to get out their credit card the next time they’re in some shitville store and buy some useless crap they think they need just because we told them to. That’s it. You want to know what stuff we’ve sold? Okay, toothpaste, okay? Oraldent. Used to be some ugly all-white too-minty paste that no one would ever consider buying…tucked down there at the bottom of the shelf with the crappy ‘we contain no fluoride’ shit for weirdos and hippies…and especially not when the ‘family trusted’ brands like Colgate and Macleans have such a duopoly. What we did? Oral dent. Dent. Oral. Do the maths. We had every fucking male teen from the age of fourteen to THIRTY buying that paste. Why? Because why the fuck would you want to raise a family when your could get a blow job every morning, or even the idea of a blow job every morning. Even if it’s a joke. Even if you don’t even think you’ll ever get a blow job in the morning, it doesn’t matter. Now they’re the number two selling toothpaste in this country because we know what makes dumb fucks tick. Tick. Ha, that’s a joke. We need to get some more god damn titis in here. Fucking bosses keep hiring these faux-beard ‘Gen X’ in touch with the skaters douchebags…we’ve got more semen piling up in here than a fucking sperm bank. Sorry, crap line but you get my meaning. Everyone’s twittering like the world’s gonna end…fucking hundred years time the world’s hard drives are gonna be full of useless puke about people’s ‘day-to-day’. Day to day? Since when did anyone care about day to day? We have entertainment, books, movies, art, music and god knows how many things specifically designed for us to forget about the annoying morose day-to-day! God, these kids…they could use a drink, and just as soon as I stop flirting with the girls in the café that’s exactly what I’m going to do: The blondes getting their herbal teas and wheat free muffins are all cute and stuff but they must look at me like I’m some hard skinned monster but, you know, it’s cool to play with the whole they-have-to-worship-me-because-I’m-senior-partner stuff and they just say whatever nice thing pops in their empty suck-cock-to-get-ahead brains, about my tie or my shoes or (god) my cologne, which, by the way, is just good scotch and maybe a few squirts of Ralph Lauren whatever is new. Didn’t even mention the watch…wouldn’t even know it’s an Omega.

“Long black darling and don’t you dare out any sugar in it”

“Of course not mister Bernstein”

“You been here long?”

“You ask that every day”

“Do I? And what do you say?”

“I’ve been here three weeks Mr…”

“Sash, okay…did I ever tell you to call me that before? Seeing as you’ve been here three weeks I must’ve told you to call me Sash before”

“Yes…you did…but…”

“But what?”

“The other partners they….I call them…like mister and…”

“Okay okay, so…you’re thinking ‘this up-his-ass prick’ is, what, just like all the other up-their-ass pricks so even though he is saying ‘don’t call me mister’ he actually means please keep treating me like a fucking up-his-ass prick is that right?”

“Oh, (laugh) oh no…it’s (laugh/giggle thing) no…”

“Okay, okay so…from now on…okay…from now on you’re going to call me…what?”

“Um…Sash”

“Perfect…Sash, okay…and we’re not going to do this again, right?”

“No Sash”

“Excellent…and it’s a long black you’re making?”

“Yes Sash”

“Great”

So I have to deal with this fucking idiot just to get a coffee, right? So instead I can pay two dollars fifty downstairs or deal with this? Okay okay…’thanks’ I say and take my coffee out of there and remember that I can just buzz Katy to get me a coffee and why the hell not, it’s her job and I wouldn’t have to talk to that three-week idiot again but then of course those insipid yet easy ‘account manager’ girls are there, but, you know like not worth it. In the office Tom and Johnno are already doing something and I don’t really want tog get involved right now and Fred’s on the phone talking some bank stuff so I tip some scotch into my coffee and wait for us to start the meeting.

*                              *                              *

Tom’s got another bruise on his cheek he’s covered in foundation, like we can’t tell, the idiot, get carried away doesn’t he and forgets who’s in charge or actually likes it (!). So, SHOES   ARE   FOR   FEET, that’s what we’re dealing with today and Johnno’s on to all these ideas like ‘crushing’ and ‘soul destroying’ and other weird stuff but it sounds good. We’re going to kill the whole ‘shoes give you freedom’ clichéd crap pouring from other agencies (for Nike) or the ‘shoes make the man’ boredom (from Boss) or the ‘women love shoes’ idiom (from Sex and the City type stuff). Fred’s got a pair of the things on the table and they look okay, kind of like half-sneaker half-dress shoe type of things like you can wear them with a suit or at least good dress pants like these rappers do, rappers ha! more like fucking millionaires trying to ‘keep it real’ by wearing these things with suits, okay, so you’ve got the picture. They’re, what, like three hundred retail. Okay so we’ve got like six boxes of them and they’re all pretty much the same: leather, laces, clan lines, fine sticking, not too much stupid swirls and crap, kind of low key and shined up, like a good leather jacket but a shoe.

“Okay so it’s like don’t take shit”

“Shit. What shit?”

“Like the whole shoes in a club, shoes in a fuck-off restaurant stuff”

“Okay”

“Okay so, like, fuck the convention, wear these”

“Yeah okay…what’s the hook?”

“Who makes these anyway?”

“Ah it’s some Paris Hilton type brand…they cal themselves Billionaire’s club…it’s Pharell. From The Neptunes”

“Yeah yeah, they’re the guys that have basically remade Justin Timberlake and Brittney and co.”

“And who are we selling to?”

“Fucking hell Tom do your research. It’s basically for fucking trend-heads who have no money but are BURSTING to piss away their McDonald earned cash for these ultra cool shoes, right? So they can dance like mother fuckers and get laid while looking all ‘I don’t give a fuck’ shabby. Got it?”

“Yeah yeah I know…Christ I was up until like three or some shit…give me a sec guys”

“Yeah right and that smack to the face isn’t helping”

“Shut the fuck up Fred…this…this is something else”

“Been spending too much time in the basement huh? You’re gonna get AIDS at this rate”

“Yeah those girls have AIDs, like they don’t check that shit”

“Ha yeah, you’re right. Anyway fuck, we’ve got like three hors to nail this all right? They’re here this afternoon”

“Are we taking them for drinks? What girls are we getting? Not Stacey again because she is a fucking annoying lightweight. Almost cost us the Christal account”

“Um not Stacey…she’s fired Sash”

“Makes sense”

“Of course we’re taking them for drinks!”

“Yeah I mean we just need a basic outline, some shit they’re going to think is like ‘whoa’”

“Okay so…back o the basics…what do these rich kids want, huh? Sales…but…why the idiot no-money-hip-hop-douchebags? Can we, I don’t know, get the cashed up white folk buying these?”

“Yeah right like ‘be as cool as an African American’! So what, we need some big asses or what?”

“Yeah, we need hip-hop beats, oiled up asses and just at the end the shoes. Fuck it, that’s easy”

“Christ, too easy. Keep thinking”

“No wait, how we gonna pitch with Tom all banged up wearing his sister’s make up?”

“Fuck off Johnno”

“No seriously Tom…what the fuck were you thinking?”

“I got carried away you know….you know what it’s like”

“Um yeah I do, but I don’t get them to hit me in the fucking face! Ah fuck it whatever, it’s done. You can just make the mock ups and go home to get your shit sorted”

“Okay okay…lets just get something up on the cards”

“I’ve got it! Dominatrix. Tom, rub that makeup off your face. Johnno, all that weird stuff you were saying about ‘crushing’. Here it is; hot chicks, leathered up, I mean make up, hair, all that. Wailing on guy’s with these shoes on…like fucking loving it, right, like, sexy cool, like, fuck you I can do what the fuck I want. But before that it’s all suits and style and all that Jay-Z classy stuff, but like in the end their like getting whipped and fucking these hot dominatrix bitches, right?”

“Sash you are a fucking genius”

“Yeah yeah and Tom is all like, ‘I get it, I love it’”

“Fuck off”

“No seriously, you can be presenting this shit with your whole bruised face thing wearing the shoes, I mean, you’re not an ugly fuck, hell, you’re probably the best looking guy here. We need to get you a better suit…call Katy”

We celebrate, Tom makes the cards, Johnno on the phone again and me and Fred finishing some scotch telling each other we need to make sure they buy better stuff next time. Johnny Walker black label, what the hell is that crap? It’s only eleven and we have to wait two hours for lunch.

*                              *                              *

We get back from lunch and Rick is in James’ office, throwing his arms around like he does, got James smiling his wide smile, getting his cock sucked always makes him look like that. Fucking little ass crawling shitbag…last ad he did was for a magazine, some up-herself stick figure blonde chick dressed like a god awful princess gracefully receiving a diamond ring from some homosexual male model, yeah right, fucking beautiful. Did we keep the account? Yes we did. How did we keep that account? Because James the moron promised them a BIG TV AD…and who’s doing the ad? Not fucking us I can tell you that. Now Rick is all shit scared and trying to get in with us. Yeah keep buying us drinks, yeah send us your pathetic emails. Get ready to burn in hell you little piece of shit. Good luck affording your new apartment and suits. Fucking hotheads, you know, they land one job and start spending all their cash like it’s gonna last forever. Doesn’t matter how long you been doing this, you fuck up, you lose the client’s money, and you can kiss your life goodbye. I mean it. You mess up with half a mil of someone else‘s money, just try and get a job in this country again.

“Ricks in with James gain”

“That little shitbag”

“Tell me about it”

“Got his fucking tongue right up his ass huh?”

“You know it”

“Got a taste for ass that little ugly cunt”

“Ah fuck him, he’s out of here in one month, tops”

“Not the way he gets that cock down his throat he won’t be”

“Forget that shitbag, lets go over the pitch”

“Fuck the pitch lets go downstairs”

“Henry’s?”

“No dumbass, downstairs”

“Why not? We got a couple-a-hours”

“I’m in”

“All right lets go…grab some bottles Tom”

And we’re leave that mess behind, got it all down anyway: Shoes + Bondage = Sex Sells. How hard is that? Those rap douches are going to go ape shit for it. We’ll tell them about oiled up shaved muscled black guy chests, gold chains, sexy big assed chicks, whips and leather and crap and BANG their shoes in the frame, all fresh and edgy. They’ll be hard as rocks when we’re done…bus ads, billboards, magazines, TV, music videos, soft-core porn micro sites, everything. Sign up for some barely covered tits spanking some other barely covered tits. Cut to Shoes. Done. We get in the lift and press the big red ‘B’.

There’s only one spotlight on, hard to see if there’s anyone here today. The chains and cuffs are open and I can maybe make out a bucket. Tom turns the lights on and there’s two girls over in the corner sort of half sitting on each other, some light sheer nighties on and pink fluffy slippers. It’s not cold in here, it’s maybe like 30 degrees, they look scared.

“What the fuck did you do last night Tom?”

“Nothing…I mean, this one chick, this one chick, she…she fucking…like hit me so, like…you know…”

“Oh not again…you’re a sick bastard you know! Now we gotta go over there and be all nice and shit. Fuck you’re a moron. Luckily you can do mock ups like no one’s business. Urgh, get the keys”

Tom gets the keys off the wall, one of the girls get up, yelling something and we tell her to shut up we’re coming in and she’s struggling against the ankle chain like some dog and it’s pathetic really and she’s saying we’re all pigs and Fred’s laughing and Johnno is already talking his clothes off. Tom opens the cage and we go in, the other girl is just sitting there all quiet and the other one is standing there, nice tits, firm and pointy. She must be like, twenty, maybe twenty one, jesus the assholes upstairs know how to keep us going that’s for sure. Johnno walks over to her and pulls her hair back, she tries to kick him but he’s not weak and just moves her back and turns her around, pushing her against the wall and playing with her ass, she’s trying to push back but he’s got his other hand on her wrist and he’s twisting her arm hard against her back and pushing her face into the cement. He’s got her nightie up and is pushing his fingers into her holes hard and dry and she’s crying out and he asks for a gag. There’s a rag on the floor which I give to him and he wraps it around her mouth and ties it so she can only sort of whimper and it’s better that way, still, her hands are all over the place so he takes her over to the rack and eventually get’s her hands cuffed in. The other one is watching us and it’s like she’s curious or waiting or something so I go over and sit next to her.

“You like this?” I ask and she doesn’t say anything, “Huh? You like watching her getting raped? Lets watch then”.

Tom comes over to me but I gesture for him to go away, he goes and sits on a bench and lights a cigarette, he had enough last night the pervert so he’ll wait his turn. Fred’s got a big dildo and he’s rubbing in between the girls legs, she trying to kick back but Johnno hits her in the ribs and she calms down. Fred spits onto the thing and shives it into her pussy but it’s not working so he takes it out, spits on his fingers and starts working her open that way. Johnno rips her nightie off and starts sucking on her nipples while Fred works the dildo into her pussy. She kind of struggles but the two guys are pretty much just doing whatever now and Fred’s got his face buried in her ass. The girl next to me is motionless, I open her legs and she doesn’t do anything, I start playing with her pussy and still nothing, it’s like, what the fuck is wrong with her or more likely, something really is wrong with her. Not very erection inspiring, or maybe that’s her game? I pull a blanket out and lay her down face first and start to take my pants off. The other guys are really going for it now I mean, Johnno’s slapping the hell out of her ass and Fred’s driving the thing in and out in and out and she’s got her head forward and trying to scream but it just sounds like a really soft cat meow or a howling dog or something and Johnno pushes Fred away and throws the dildo into a corner and starts really fucking her, I mean like really like he can’t possibly even enjoy it himself and he’s pulling her hair and spitting on her face and all kinds of shit and Fred joins Tom on the bench, pulls out a mini-scotch and smokes a cigarette. I’ve got two fingers in this girls ass and it’s tight and warm and smells like shit but it’s a sweet kind of thing, it does dawn on me ‘when did these girls last take a shower’ but it was probably this morning so they should be pretty clean and my fingers come out okay so not too bad and I keep working at her asshole with fingers and spit until it feels ready and my cock is hard. Johnno is done and he’s turned her around and her arms are crossed and her face is red and covered in loose hair and his spit and now he’s got his whole hands up there just ramming at her and her tits are jumping up and down so fast you can barely make them out and he gestures for someone to come over and Tom gets up and goes over and Johnno tells him to undo her cuffs and she falls onto the floor and then they’re just fucking whatever now, face, pussy, ass, and I can’t watch anymore because it’s so abstract, these two guys just moving about shoving their cocks here and there while this girl is like, like, a rubber doll of something. And I’m like up to my waist in this girls ass and she’s just making this ‘uh uh uh’ sound which is really tuning me on and hell even I start doing it, thrusting and saying ‘urgh’ like louder than her so it’s all so intense and she’s like a quiet lamb just taking it and I’m having actual nice thoughts about this one which is rare and I don’t like that any more so I put my hands around her throat to you know like stop the sound, just squeezing her neck and pulling her head up and she’s got her mouth and eyes shut tight now which feels good and I cum in her ass after about one more minute of this and I’m done. Johnno is done too and just like he always does it getting his suit back on, over by the sink with the mirror smoothing out his hair with water and watching himself smoke a cigarette. Almost a too cool but too crazy a thing that ritual. Tom the psycho is hitting her in the back of the head and calling her ‘slut’ ‘cunt’ ‘whore’ and all kinds of stuff, really taking it out on her. Poor guy, must be how we treat him, right? Comes down here, goes fucking ape shit. Terrible.

“How’re things Fred?”

“Yeah fine…not really into it today”

“Throw me a bottle huh?

He throws me a vodka and I throw it back, then he throws me a scotch.

“Fuck what the hell, they’re still giving us this shit. I got to talk to Katy.” I open the bottle and finish it one go, “hurry the fuck up Tom, jesus. We got a pitch in like half an hour!”

Tom’s banging away, got that look in his eye like he’ll never stop so we just leave him there and I throw a roll of toilet paper over to the girl I came inside.

“See you upstairs Tom…don’t be late…two thirty okay” and he kind of says okay but it’s like o-o-o-k-k-k type thing with breathing and now we’re done it’s just plain gross to see Tom like that.

*