I am a sucklord contd

Walking down the street I ran into this guy. I was dreaming and walking awkwardly slow. My shoes had taken their floral motif seriously and wrapped invisible tendrils underfoot. I saw him out of the corner of my eye but dismissed it as preposterous. That morning, rummaging around in my bedroom I fished out a ring I haven't worn since that night. The ring is ridiculous, a caricature of a ring, skull-shaped and bulbous. Heavy enough to drag my knuckles down and cause mysterious travelling aches across all fingers. I couldn't remember when I wore it last until I saw that man out of the corner of my eye.

I thought he was a phantasm, a holographic memory projected by end-of-day fatigue and wondered why I was suddenly thinking of him. But he smiled and walked right up to me. I tried not to take a step backwards. He was friendly and seemed open but then he detected my awkwardness. He said "You nearly didn't recognise me. I apologised, said I was elsewhere and waved one arm vaguely in the air. He said "Distracted" and I nodded because that was close enough.  He looked at me earnestly and told me I looked humble just walking down the street.

Humble. How does he think I ordinarily travel? I thought immediately of gold-plated helicopters and a barouche boxes. I didn't notice he was still talking so I asked him how he has been, at the exact same time he asked me. We continued to stand face to face on Enmore Rd and ask each other the same questions at the same time while the traffic smoked past and people swarmed around us and the light went yellow and started to fade.

He was holding a camera, said he was working, taking photos of his most recent art. He kept talking but I was shrinking and my ears starting ringing and then he said farewell and swaggered away. He was older than I remember, his dark hair now salt and pepper, his crows feet more pronounced. I waited for him to diminish but he grew taller as he walked away.

I split entirely in two. Both observing and experiencing my reaction as I blathered around inside the adjacent supermarket buying toothpaste and panadol and a kind of chocolate I do not like. I kept thinking I don't need these things but I gathered random objects into my arms and lapped the tiny two aisle shop again and again. I was hyperbolic on all trajectories and run through with fifteen full-force emotions.

It seemed stupid, even at the time, to be experiencing anything at all at such a small encounter where nothing harmful was said or done. The effect faded as I cooked and ordinary tasks came and went under my unconscious hands but I took the ring off and threw it in a drawer underneath a tumble of half used candles, broken wallets and a box of drawing inks, just in case.

Dig

I should be one of those tortured writers sitting at my desk groaning and swearing at the noise coming through the floor. My ears covered with impromptu muffs like scarves wound around my head or tissues stuffed in hard. There should be a montage of me working despite the jackhammer and concrete saw at work underneath The Peach.

But I'm not. I've been smiling fondly at the noise, mildly regretting not attempting to work but mostly reading the newspaper in bed with a cup of coffee on hand.

I almost like the noise, the knowledge of underground excavation wheeling out the structure beneath my feet one barrow at a time. I like the idea of living in a house floating above a dig. I feel sure that at any moment something important will be discovered about my life.

Uphill battles can be won quite easily if you tip the world over a little

I really thought Spencer would demand some kind of Spencer Awesome Test but he didn't. Shows what I know. He did suggest some kind of negative test, a sort of unawesome test but I'll leave that kind of thing for the haters who hate. Everyone needs a hobby. 

Today was one of those stupid days where facts and tasks roller coaster around I point at them and laugh. There'll be time enough tomorrow to take the ride and do the screaming but for now I'm pondering out some early plans for something new. One of those side projects to a main project, like Tim Sinclair's

Re: Reading the Dictionary. In my fake interview with Tim I discovered that this remarkable project first came about as a distraction, a little project done on the side of a big one. Today it struck just how grand of an idea that is.

Writing a whole novel is sometimes boring, often trying and takes a long fucking time. Unless you are Ian Fleming who once wrote an entire James Bond novel in three weeks. It is a shame I'm not writing about spies, or in the 1950's when it was more acceptable to make loud typing noises on typewriters and fill entire houses with second-hand smoke. But back to the part where it takes a really long time. It takes a really long time and long deliberate hours of sustained effort and right now I'm finding this more exhausting than anything else, like the world has tilted and every direction is now uphill. But fuck that for a way of being, I'm going to take on a smaller project as well. One with a short deadline. A project that can be commenced and completed inside of a month. If that doesn't level out the tipping a little then fuck this I'm buying skis.

My new distraction project has the tentative working title of Remembering The Horse. It will be variable in content, crammed with the overly-sentimental, starkness, spareness and good raw bones. It will be what any anguished moments in April turn into. And then it will be an ebook. And then it will be done.

To help things along a little I'm going ghost protocol for all of April. This will be a combination of minimal electronic communication and blogging, pots of tea, a brand new notebook and possibly pen, and long stupid dresses worn inside the house. I might even be looking forward to it.

Everywhere man or The Adam Lewis Awesome Test

Adam Lewis is a young man who is everywhere that is good or interesting or brave or new. He might even be the young man who booked, organised or curated it. For a while now I've been thinking of Adam Lewis as a human everywhere dog. He seems to be everywhere, all the time, all at once. Unless he is secretly identical triplets (could happen) or can travel through time (could happen) or is actually a personal delusional of mine and friends are just being nice and pretending he exists (could happen).

Yesterday I was sitting peaceably in a pub with some friends when Adam Lewis walked in. Straight away I knew that meant I was about to accidentally have a good time because a busy man like Adam doesn't just show up in a pub for no reason.

After I had an accidentally excellent time I started thinking about deciding whether or not I really liked it or if   the fact that I was covered in paint pigments, and a bit high and three beers in, were unduly influencing my decision towards the positive. At first it was kind of hard to tell but then I glanced over at Adam, who waved cheerily, and I had an idea.

Adam Lewis likes things that are awesome. He is a good judge of what is awesome because he sees everything all the time all at once. Once you see everything all the time all at once you can pick something shit a mile away. Here is an example of something that was shit.

Deciding whether something is good, or if I like it, is boring now that I have hung up my reviewing pen. One horrible side effect of being an ex-reviewer is automatically adding complicated layers of questions and filters on top of instinct before making a proclamation. The long deciding process bores me so I have invented something amazing. I give you The Adam Lewis Awesome Test for working whether or not something is good.


The Adam Lewis Awesome Test


1. Is Adam Lewis here? If yes continue to question two, if no then GO HOME RIGHT NOW because you are somewhere BAD.


2. Is Adam Lewis smiling and nodding his head in a joyful and benevolent way? If yes stay where you are and pay attention to what Adam Lewis is looking at. If no continue to next question.


3. Is it a break between bands or performers or similar? If yes get a drink or talk to friends or Adam Lewis or both and proceed to question four. If no GO HOME CAUSE IF ADAM HATES IT YOU SHOULD TOO, if it is not something with performances proceed to question four.


4. Ask Adam Lewis if he thinks it is awesome. Listen to his answer.If he thinks it is awesome then it is AWESOME, if he does not think it awesome then it SUX AND YOU SHOULD GO HOME RIGHT NOW AND HAVE A NICE CUP OF TEA AND A LITTLE SIT DOWN.


See how much easier my whole life is now?










PS. Hate mail bores the fuck out of me so in case you are confused, or from Finland, let this be your 'takeaway', I like Adam Lewis and think he is pretty great and one day, if he keeps this up, he will be the Captain of Sydney or similar because he is a talented young man with great instincts and popular social graces. I also like his glasses.

PPS. Adam Lewis - the bio by Dale Slamma:
Radiant on FBI
Those millions of gigs he organises
That other thing
Oh and his day job
And all those tweets and facebooks
OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT AND GOOD
might be best to ask Adam Lewis for his more official bio.

Killah

Today I will mostly be wishing 'ghost protocol' was an actual thing and not, as it turns out, the name of a film.

In my head going 'ghost protocol' means wearing a long wispy sort of greyish dress and having a teapot full of tea and sugar cubes instead of no sugar at all. There should be mist with a little fine rain and a definite chill in the air but not so cold the windows are all closed. The curtains breathe in and out and the record player is on low in the next room, something timeless winding slowly through song. There are no digital interruptions and the front gate is locked, maybe the last light of the day is glowing through the heavy heads of full roses in the garden. It should mean solitude and freedom to think and wander through rooms. That's what it should mean.

But now am

I was lost. In my own unfinished manuscript and it was fucking awful. More crying than was strictly necessary forced me into an unusual manoeuvre. I sat down with one piece of paper and a pen and asked myself one question. What is the story of this novel? One hour and one sentence later and there are no more tears, no more frustrated screaming at the walls and halls of The Peach.

It seems so simple. Why did it take me three quarters of a day, in an emotional state closer to crazy than I care to admit, to figure out all I had to do was ask myself one little question? I must be a lot stupider than I thought I was. Either that or I truly am some kind of sucklord.

In other news I have thought of a project for April. No title yet but it involves leather straps and steaming breath before dawn.

The important thing about today

Is precisely nothing. Not one thing. Another dull day in Slammatown. Might be time to elect a new Captain or maybe the problem isn't me but everyone else. All I want is to see the face of some god or other, I don't mind which, trace elements of the transcendental. It's like the problem with toast, once you put butter on it everything is transformed from the bearable to the divine. That's all I want, every day, just one thing transformed.

Dead

So of course I was hoping there would be a minor acceleration through time and she would bear a hybrid zombie child just loaded with antibodies and everyone would be saved all over again by the child doomed to suffer and die. And my hope was sterile and regurgitated. Christ.

New resolution

Intermittently semi-intellectual existential loneliness.

Plash

Without joy, mild merriment sure but no joy no redemption. I hate those kinds of weekends where newspapers keep time and coffee making keeps time and the socks just stay wherever you put them and people come and go and open their pipes and pour words out. I might watch them make puddles on the ground and walk around wishing for some other course of action or maybe I'll pour a puddle of my own half-hoping somebody steps in it and feels a cold rush in one foot, maybe looks up or around or behind or down or asks "What is this doing here?".

Obviously I am a sucklord

I've been spending a fair amount of time with a friend lately and mostly it is quite enjoyable but this weekend it dawned on me that he might have got me all wrong. It feels like he has decided which boxes I tick on a list, writer, not stupid, careless with fashion, rebellious in some ways, good listener, but that is all.

It feels like a major failure of communication on my part. How can it be that someone I spend so much time with doesn't know who I am?  I know quite a few things about him, intimate things, broad things, daily habit things, but this knowledge is not reciprocated because he never asks and I don't offer. Ordinarily I am a font of information, about myself, but with him I don't ever feel the urge to tell, only the urge to listen and observe.

On reflection the failure feels more fundamental than just a lapse in communication. It feels like I let myself become unimportant in his presence, overwhelmed by the oddness of wanting to listen and listen and not speak in return. Obviously I am some kind of sucklord.

Horrible horrible horrible

My pancreas, or similar organ located in middle of self, feels odd due to beer or similar. It seems clear, to me right now, that I am drunk and this is probably the main reason for feeling like shit. The other contenders in the "reasons for feeling like shit contest" are as follows:

No. Not going to make list of reasons, that is shit idea. Better idea take shoes off.

A new kind of sponge

I can't stop listening. From the moment I leave the house in the morning until I come home in the afternoon, and sometimes again after that in the evening. It's not music. I've gone off music. These are words. Podcasts and audiobooks. Interviews and recordings of long dead poets, children's books, even American radio programs, anything I can get my hands on.

I think I've become a new kind of sponge. I haven't been this excited about anything since I learned to read my own bedtime story, all by myself, and spent the next ten years reading every book* in the house, even the dictionaries. I remember my mother looking horrified when she came in to tell me to turn off the light and there I was, propped up in bed, reading my Junior Macquarie Dictionary like it was a story. She asked me what I was doing and I replied "reading the dictionary". She left it at that and didn't mention it again until years later, when she used it as an example of my excessive reading habits. I think this is a good example of my mother's storytelling habits. Maybe I'll make a podcast about it...

*It might have taken longer to read all the books in the house, there were so many and new ones kept appearing all the time.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if I'm lying or if isolating only one corner of a thought gives a solidly incorrect impression

There is an elderly couple I greet on the street from time to time. I wave or nod or say hello as I walk by them because they are always stationary. She sits in an old plastic chair and he either stands near her or props himself against a tree or a fence or a building. I see them in the same general area but not usually in precisely the same place. I have never seen them walking either to or from their spot. They vary their placement, either sun or shade, depending on the weather.

They speak with thick accents and appear shrivelled and worn like elderly like The Potato Eaters but with less hats. This afternoon on the way home from work the woman asked me a question, she has never done this before. Our conversation was small and stilted but it has left me thinking. Here's the conversation as I remember it:

Woman: Work?

DS: Yes, I am coming home now.

Woman: Work?

DS: Yes. Work.

Woman: Factory?

DS: No. University.

Woman: Good job.

I waved farewell and kept on walking. Factory? I don't know anyone that works in a factory. I don't even know where the nearest factory would be. Alexandria? Mascot? Somewhere out West a little? The first thing I think of when someone says factory is warehouse apartment, or party, or sad, dark and looming space with holes in the roof and rain leaking in. I don't think 'work'.

I wonder what she thinks I do at the university? Maybe she thinks I am a secretary, that I have a big wooden desk and a typewriter. I hope that is what she thinks I do. She would never have guessed my actual job.*

I was friendly to the woman as she spoke with me, smiled at her, genuinely wished her a pleasant afternoon soaking up the sun but I still felt a little guilty as I walked away. I felt like my life should have rushed into sharp focus and perspective, that I should have immediately felt some stark difference between what might have been her working life in a factory and mine which has exactly nothing to do with factories, but I didn't. I felt nothing of the sort, nothing but mildly interrupted because I had to fish out my phone and rewind the podcast I was listening to so I didn't miss anything. But then fresh guilt emerged at my lack of perspective and the huge black hole where I should have been thinking about the woman's life instead of my own.

This sense of guilt has persisted, through the end of the podcast, three rounds of Drawsome, one wee break and the eating of one spoon of peanut butter directly from the jar. Why don't I feel a sense of perspective? Could it be that I have become so fixated on the inner workings of my mind and my life that I am no longer able to be changed by a small chance encounter on a street corner?

I hope so.

I would like nothing more than to be largely unchanged by the world as it bumps into me, like a character from a Woody Allen film. I have always wanted to be like a character from a Woody Allen film who goes through something big, like a failed romance, and comes out the other end just exactly as they were before, maybe more so. Maybe they use the experience to write a book or a play but manage to avoid any personal growth or change. I admire those characters, how they distil themselves into becoming an even more interesting and dense version of who they were to begin with.

And so now the guilt is changing into hope. The sun is still out and the couple is still likely to be sat, weirdly without any cups of tea, in their afternoon spot, unmoving, not talking, just taking in the day. I have half a mind to go back there and talk to them about this, ask them what they think it means but I won't because that's closer to crazy than I want to go this afternoon so for now I'll go and make a cup of tea and think about something else.

*Not just the woman might have a hard time guessing but everybody, there is an extra layer of trickiness in that I am not employed by the university but that my employer has free and exclusive use of a building on campus.

Is it too late?

Is it too late?
Really?
No?

Brilliant.

Sunday Sunday

A Sunday resolution. Just because Grizelda is still away does not mean I am allowed to eat ice cream for breakfast. Beans. Beans and toast, this is my Sunday resolution and may it be as boring for you as it was for me.

In other news have a read of this unbelievably awful and biased review of a book of poetry. I admit it might not be his best work but I have never read another review where the personal life of the poet was so transparently judged and attacked. I would have been much more interested in a straight review that examined only the work itself and leaves aside any question of the man's integrity for a different article. 

My opinion on the matter of the Poet and his private life is still being formed, I predict it will be another ten years before it arrives fully formed and ready for dispatch.

First song

The melody came like a wave. The sound heightens and melds all experienced incidents from the shock and slap of a forward moving foot taking the full weight of a man to the lurch and swing of a shoulder joint as an arm travels forwards, loose fingers wanting always to be the first extremities to move into a new space. Breath and lung-bottoms contrive to engineer the whole chest to receive and reject and receive and reject nothing tangible to the naked eye. The sky wheels up and pulls down above everything like a hood and there is the wind. The unnamed wind of London St, Enmore New South Wales, rilling up and down the false dawn hill for reasons not one of the residents properly understands, except him.

False dawn was transformed for two minutes. All parts of him moved together in symphony, fingers, heels, heart, thought, breath and he crested the hill before the song wound down. He turned the corner into shadows under shop-awnings and gained momentum as his body understood he was no longer climbing but walking on flat ground.

The song concluded in one golden burst of resolution and he found his parts disconnecting their psychic union and resuming ordinary operations of holding coins for the bus, manufacturing saliva and planning out the first work tasks of the morning. He more clearly remembers coming back into himself, the dissolving and dissolution of a golden two minute experience than the walking moment itself.

What kind of magic spell to use?

One that completes all work in automated fast motion, similar to the dancing mops but with a successful outcome. Now, if you will excuse me I shall begin.

Lessons in architecture

I have made here another fort of pillows and sea-green bedsheets and that hand stitched quilt from my mother. Volumes of poetry scattered like driftwood. Outside all is ocean and my newspaper on the doorstep pulped in the deluge. I have forgone tea for hot chocolate and the low echo of Maria Callas on the record player. The kitchen floor is a vast and saltless ocean so desperate is the rain to be warm in here with me it has found ways to begin. The dining room ceiling, the bathroom window, underneath doors and windows cold wet fingers clamour for the bare soles of my feet but I am here in my fortress warm and dry.

Soon I will forage for eggs and toast. First I will imagine room by room by the empty house with its echoing arias and the cat perched in the library windowsill noting the rising water and the pale weak sun. Room by room my mind will wander in silence in front of my feet. All the hung curtains breathe and flare making that one long day up ladders worthwhile. This house instructs me in ways of being.

Taking care of

Clattering out of the exit of a fifty floor office tower after 7pm I found myself on the receiving end of a few sympathetic smiles. I was weighed down with folders and documents*, just like the besuited sympathetic smilers. I felt a small burst of collegiate warmth and kinship as I struggled to the nearest bus stop.

I stared up at the endless rows of office towers and listened to the small concrete echo of traffic and hard-soled shoes. I wondered if I could do this every day. So powerful was the feeling of kinship and collaborative human struggle I got carried away in a fantasy of owning a wardrobe full of business dresses, of rising early every day to brush my hair and travel clean and groomed right into the heart of the city. Then I realised I was at the wrong bus stop and my red shoes were old and scuffed and my anchor broach was ridiculously out of place and my office was not in one of those towers but in an almost condemned building in the back corner of a university.

I achieved a new limbo in that moment. I felt simultaneously part of the churning machinations of the city but also free. It was probably just a case of geography.



*Almost all of them were legitimate work documents and books, only two of the books were poetry and only read one of them during the meeting.