Walking around the supermarket in Marrickville Metro I thought of five efficient yet whimsical forms of shopping suicide when Spencer telephoned for no reason and said he was coming around. I put down the umbrella I was planning on opening inside my heart and started doing what I was supposed to be doing, helping Grizelda choose waffles.
In-supermarket whimsical suicide is not a unique phenomenon. I strongly suspect every second person picking out a package of pasta is secretly wondering whether they could stab themselves right through the eye and into the brain. Or perhaps if it is possible the stolen almond they are eating tastes not like almond because it is one but like cyanide because it is laced with it. That would be an accidental suicide I suppose, if you inadvertently ate a cyanide-almond in the fresh produce section of a supermarket.
Spencer appeared ten minutes after I did at The Peach. Grizelda made us deliciously repulsive hotdogs followed by an enormous communal plate of waffles with berries, ice cream and real chocolate melted into sauce. Spencer mentioned something about me needing to be a pebble, rubbed along in company, and not a solitary rock all jagged and alone. I guess that explains the supermarket umbrella-opening-in-heart idea.
Spencer and I did nothing much last night. We sat at the kitchen table and drew idly with coloured pencils, drank cider and schnapps and whiskey to use up the tiny bits left in bottles. We talked about nothing and everything and nothing again until three o'clock in the morning. I had chocolate smeared on my face the whole time. Spencer drank cider from tall bottles and preferred to use the lone lead pencil over all the other colours. I crosshatched colours into meaningless colour blobs surrounded by words like 'bonp', a word that sounds as well as any other.
If you thought there was a point to this post you would be right. It is in there, quite obviously floating around from the very first sentence but I'm not going to sum it up. I'm going back to just past the beginning, before the middle. Spencer came striding up the hallway in a long winter coat carrying two big bottles of cider and two identical copies of Kinky Friedman's autobiography. We've done that before, sat somewhere reading the same book at the same time. Everyone has a different way of being a pebble.
The real beginning was the day before. Friday night I sat at the kitchen table watching my housemates bake separate cakes simultaneously. I was drinking butterscotch schnapps out of a Moroccan tea glass, smoking cigarettes and uttering depressing asides to any baker who would listen. Leaning my elbows on a pile of Hemingway's borrowed from Marrickville library. The Hemingways were a result of an email from Abdullah.
You see narratives are interesting things. You can lay out first this, then that, then this is what I was thinking or what it might mean but all readers are just guessing really and I like it that way. I wouldn't want anyone to know just how much my friendship with Spencer or Abdullah or Grizelda really means. It would be like baking a cake using the pumping valves of my real heart then watching the knife slice through the iced and decorated thing. That would be a fine way to end the last story, no conclusion necessary.
Stupid problems are still problems
Sunlight is visible through windows. It looks warm. I suppose everything is going on out there like it always is but I'm not going out into the light. Not today.
I've been interviewed too many times, become confused by many be-suited versions of myself held up for inspection. There comes a point in every job interview where the interviewers say one thing that sparks a ripple of alarm. One point that makes it clear that I don't want to work there. Couldn't possibly stomach the day-to-day swallowing of that brand of shit and they know it. The atmosphere shifts subtly, my interview-mask stays firmly stapled but everybody in the room understands that I'm not the best person for the job.
This is the stupidest problem to have. Can it not simply be understood that I will not like it but that does not matter?
I've been interviewed too many times, become confused by many be-suited versions of myself held up for inspection. There comes a point in every job interview where the interviewers say one thing that sparks a ripple of alarm. One point that makes it clear that I don't want to work there. Couldn't possibly stomach the day-to-day swallowing of that brand of shit and they know it. The atmosphere shifts subtly, my interview-mask stays firmly stapled but everybody in the room understands that I'm not the best person for the job.
This is the stupidest problem to have. Can it not simply be understood that I will not like it but that does not matter?
A small portion of two cents
Like most people I know I've been watching Go Back To Where You Came From on SBS. I have a tremendous problem with Raquel. Like Geoff Lemon said she's a 'bandsaw-voiced tracksuit mannequin whose casual racism and innate sense of privilege has made her the anti-matter star of the show'. Geoff raises some interesting points in his post but I'd like to depart from his reasoned and informed opinion and go my own way, just for a minute.
Raquel was crying because she was not able to bring herself to use the toilets in the refugee camp. I sympathise with her plight, as a woman who never mastered the art of squatting to wee without weeing on my shoes, down my legs or on my pushed down trousers I get why she was upset. What I don't understand is how she failed to understand that weeing in those circumstances might be upsetting for other people as well as for her. If there is a personal yet universal act it is surely the act of doing a wee. Everybody wees.
It seems to me there must be a malfunction with Raquel's humanity. I admire her sense of self, her sure as shit everyone else can get fucked attitude, but I don't understand how it hasn't been dented by her experiences. It seems to me that she has wound her sheltered suburban lifestyle around herself tighter than a flak jacket.
I was waiting for her to arrive at a compassionate thought but I've given up on that now. I don't have a point, not yet. Unlike Raquel I'm trying as hard as I can to be compassionate, to attempt an understanding of her point of view and how she might have arrived there.
Raquel was crying because she was not able to bring herself to use the toilets in the refugee camp. I sympathise with her plight, as a woman who never mastered the art of squatting to wee without weeing on my shoes, down my legs or on my pushed down trousers I get why she was upset. What I don't understand is how she failed to understand that weeing in those circumstances might be upsetting for other people as well as for her. If there is a personal yet universal act it is surely the act of doing a wee. Everybody wees.
It seems to me there must be a malfunction with Raquel's humanity. I admire her sense of self, her sure as shit everyone else can get fucked attitude, but I don't understand how it hasn't been dented by her experiences. It seems to me that she has wound her sheltered suburban lifestyle around herself tighter than a flak jacket.
I was waiting for her to arrive at a compassionate thought but I've given up on that now. I don't have a point, not yet. Unlike Raquel I'm trying as hard as I can to be compassionate, to attempt an understanding of her point of view and how she might have arrived there.
Public alphabet causes mild humiliation in shopping centre
Grizelda was standing next to the display shelf right near the front of the shop, which isn't very interesting until you learn the next part, the part where I tell you what she was saying. She held up a pink sparkly pencil and very clearly and loudly explained to me how to hold a pen. I attempted to emulate her but apparently I got it very wrong. She went on to give another demonstration before grabbing my fingers and making me practice writing letters all the while giving loud instructions and corrections.
You see Grizelda has recently discovered that I hold my pen 'incorrectly'. I think it all began when I asked her to correct my chopstick technique to minimise soup splashes on my white shirt. What makes it worse is that Spencer agrees with her. He also thinks I hold my pen incorrectly, which is how I wound up in Smiggle receiving a public lesson on writing letters of the alphabet then purchasing a triangular pen-grip holder to 'help' me. I don't think Grizelda would have run so publicly wild if she hadn't have had Spencer's support on the matter.
I can not even begin to describe the intense feeling of embarrassment I felt standing near the display shelf at right near the front of the shop while Grizelda waved around an over-sized pink sparkly pencil. I wanted to yell, 'I am only being docile about this because I am writing my manuscript by hand and it hurts. My hand hurts!'. But a quick scan of the sniggering twelve-year olds in the shop kept me quiet.
I don't know if the shop incident was merely a coincidence but today I began to type. Before today any effort made towards writing the damn thing on the computer was thwarted by an insistent inner voice that said, 'you must first write this by hand'. Today the voice was absent so I went digital and began the work of typing it all out. It is depressing how reams of handwritten pages shrink down when they are typed out, like mushrooms in a hot pan. I never cook enough mushrooms but fortunately the manuscript is not finished. I have no idea how the whole thing goes which is almost the loveliest part. There aren't too many things left where I get to discover something brand new every step of the way. Don't vomit yet, I'm not turning into Anne of Green Gables I'm just saying that not all art feels bad to birth. That part of it, the pain part, is at least partially a myth. If it didn't feel good, apart from the unexpected public alphabet humiliations and the odd day of horrifying slow-progress torture, I'm quite sure we wouldn't all be doing it.
You see Grizelda has recently discovered that I hold my pen 'incorrectly'. I think it all began when I asked her to correct my chopstick technique to minimise soup splashes on my white shirt. What makes it worse is that Spencer agrees with her. He also thinks I hold my pen incorrectly, which is how I wound up in Smiggle receiving a public lesson on writing letters of the alphabet then purchasing a triangular pen-grip holder to 'help' me. I don't think Grizelda would have run so publicly wild if she hadn't have had Spencer's support on the matter.
I can not even begin to describe the intense feeling of embarrassment I felt standing near the display shelf at right near the front of the shop while Grizelda waved around an over-sized pink sparkly pencil. I wanted to yell, 'I am only being docile about this because I am writing my manuscript by hand and it hurts. My hand hurts!'. But a quick scan of the sniggering twelve-year olds in the shop kept me quiet.
I don't know if the shop incident was merely a coincidence but today I began to type. Before today any effort made towards writing the damn thing on the computer was thwarted by an insistent inner voice that said, 'you must first write this by hand'. Today the voice was absent so I went digital and began the work of typing it all out. It is depressing how reams of handwritten pages shrink down when they are typed out, like mushrooms in a hot pan. I never cook enough mushrooms but fortunately the manuscript is not finished. I have no idea how the whole thing goes which is almost the loveliest part. There aren't too many things left where I get to discover something brand new every step of the way. Don't vomit yet, I'm not turning into Anne of Green Gables I'm just saying that not all art feels bad to birth. That part of it, the pain part, is at least partially a myth. If it didn't feel good, apart from the unexpected public alphabet humiliations and the odd day of horrifying slow-progress torture, I'm quite sure we wouldn't all be doing it.
The last time I read this it was compulsory to pit my mind against it
This time part of it rose up as if in a dream and I longed for nothing more than to turn around, run back to the harbour, witness it for myself.
An excerpt from Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor.
'Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.'
An excerpt from Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor.
'Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.'
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