Domesticette
06 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Every Melbourne spring there’s a run of wet weekends with the rain clearing up just in time for the workweek.
It rained all last Saturday. The rain gauge in the back yard later said 65 mm. I was bottled up inside, slumped on the leather couch, watching children’s TV, hoping at least the roof would leak so I would have something to do.
In a perverse twist I spent the day sitting down but the night standing up watching a band play. I thought a patron was throwing beer across the band room, but it ended up being water leaking from the roof and I could do nothing about it.
*********
Sunday afternoon the sun finally came out so I went to the soccer with my brother and friends.
I was picked up in a small hatchback and, being the shortest, I sat in the back on a cheap material seat covered in dog hair.
We parked a few kilometres away from the stadium and walked. I begged to stop at a pub for a drink because we were early but I had no takers. Our seats were up the back in the shade and were made of a bendy green plastic.
The game was a good one and the home side kicked the winner at the 80-minute mark. The forward angled away from goal, dribbled towards the corner, spun around and chipped a gentle cross to his teammate who headed the ball home. I leaped from my seat shaking my fists and screaming, feeling something other than latent frustration for the first time in days.
We were all talk as we wandered back to the car. I thought about suggesting we go for dinner. As if reading my mind someone jokes, “If we weren’t all tied down, we’d go for dinner or a drink now.”
I sit on dog hair again.
*********
Tonight I put the kids to bed. It was quite warm in the house so I turned on the fan for our ducted cooling system.
My wife was out at boxing training. I thought it’d be nice to cook her dinner, and a veggie tofu stir-fry seemed doable, so I raided the fridge.
It occurred to me that my climbing beans would need picking and that there may be a zucchini or two also, so I wandered out back in the evening sun to gather.
And I heard a gentle click as the cooling system blew the back door shut.
Locked out. I ran to the front door. Locked out.
I’d had exchanged manly nods with the guy from across the street the morning before so I knocked on his door. He answered, I explained my predicament and he let me use their phone.
With help a few minutes away I stood on our front verandah feeling impotent, listening to one of my boys crying inside.
When I got back in all was quiet. The boys were asleep and I wondered if I had imagined the crying.
*********
It’s meant to fucking rain again on Saturday, and it’s not even spring any more.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/makelessnoise
Story lines sell
30 Oct 2011 1 Comment
My brain is exhausted and aching. I’ve been sold to for two days straight. I’m at the 21st Century Financial Education Summit in Melbourne. I’m here because my brother and I have plans to start a business and because I want to hear Tim Ferriss and Richard Branson speak.
Just a kilometre away our diminutive Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is setting the police on non-violent protesters. Once upon a time I would have been there protesting. Somehow I’ve missed the whole “Occupy” thing. Whilst lefties are videoed allegedly being punched by police, I’m at a finance summit. How is this so?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakka/2996186507/
Back at the summit, when a presenter yells out an obvious question such as: “Do you want to make money while you holiday?”, I snidely refuse to join the chorus of “Yes!”. When they tell me a product usually goes for <ridiculous number> but today it goes for <ridiculous number divided by two> I smirk. When they tell us to stand out from the herd but give out free Herald Sun newspapers I enjoy the irony.
But I admire their sales craft. And I admire the people attending, from all walks of life, who have a desire to start a new life, a new story line. I love the hacking of systems and strategies, and I recognise that today the means of production, of marketing, the means of hell everything are open to… well anyone…
As the joke goes, “I’m unique… just like everyone else”. I was researching cold reading recently and realised that apart from being used by palm readers and the like it is also a sales tool. Cold reading is based on the fact that we like to hear good things about ourselves and discount bad things, that we fall into only a few personality types, and that our lives follow predictable trajectories. If you’re in your late teens, you are trying to find a role, in you twenties you can get caught up in what you should be doing, and in you 30s you question earlier choices, and in your late 30s (where I am) you…
Wow. Sounds like me! But probably also sounds like most men approaching 40. So where am I? Am I on the clichéd arc from teenage idealist to hard-nosed pragmatist? Am I on the verge of middle age re-invention or decay?
Are these story lines natural like gravity and the tides, El Nino and La Nina, erosion and eruptions?
People sometimes feel they are stuck in the middle of a story that never changes but this of course, like all things in nature, isn’t true. Other people are addicted to beginnings. A bartender told me last night about her one-way ticket to Kathmandu! Geez it sounded like a good beginning!
Where are you on your storyline? Can you accept it and use it to your advantage, or will it be used against you? Are you ready to buy a one-way ticket?
Inspired by Venkatesh Rao
“Whatever goes wrong goes wrong any how”
Super 8
10 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbparrott/4556667870/
I was handed an old cardboard box after his funeral. It was full of Super-8 and Standard-8 film canisters.
The wax cardboard had started to go soft and there was grit and dust settled throughout.
Some of the small reels were in orange Kodak envelopes. Others were loose. Some were unravelling. The handwriting so recognizable and messy. A numbering scheme, but no key to decipher the numbers.
Super-8 is film. You can hold it up to the light and see the frames. It does not diminish like later day magnetic-based Video formats.
With trepidation I asked the family for contributions to the cost of converting the collection. Trepidation that asking family members for money is fraught, but also trepidation for what I might find on the tapes.
I’m assured when I pick up the DVD conversions that there is 4.5 hours of “excellent” footage. The cardboard box is gone though. Apparently it was full of little bugs and had been banished.
Dad’s camera did not record audio. Sitting in silence, I felt like some time traveling voyeur. The constantly changing focus and quality of the images made my eyes work hard.
All the gardens look so neat. Dead relatives appear restored to youth, smiling and limber. Wedding dresses. Flared pants. Vinyl. Children everywhere. Happy young faces.
And it’s seeing the guy who was not in frame but who did the filming.
You see the reactions of the people who are looking at him. You see that that your parents’ relationship wasn’t always beaten down by life and unrealised expectations. You see his attention to strange details, like two dogs fighting on a hotel balcony. You understand when the camera lingers slightly as a pretty, young woman enters frame. You see his commitment to recording birthdays, weddings and births.
You see a collection that runs some 15-20 years and you take it in in a few hours.
You see that he was fastidious and constant with his camera work, disciplined and learned. Something you’ve never seen before.
You wonder why some things only get revealed after death.
And you feel shame for how you let your own adolescent aloofness and your parent’s failed marriage diminish your father like a cheap VHS cassette.
But you also take pride in seeing that he was like you, he endured, left a legacy, and that he was great behind a camera but for too short a time.
DNA on holiday
03 Sep 2011 1 Comment
Things have tendencies.
I can grab some crystal ware, and if I manage to sing at the right pitch, it will harmonise with me. If I sing loud enough it will shatter into pieces. Or I could pour myself a glass of wine…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardsharp/29575191/
Remember the story of the scorpion and the frog? The frog and the scorpion are standing at the bank of a flooded river. The scorpion asks the frog for a dink across the river. Surely not says the frog, you’ll sting me. Why would I do that the scorpion retorts, then we’d both die? Good point says froggy, jump on and let’s swim. Out they head into the torrent, when froggy feels the sting of the scorpion’s tail in his back. Hey! Dickhead! Why did you do that? Because it’s my nature, claims the scorpion.
Everything has dangerous tendencies. A passion fruit vine grows exponentially and destroys the fence that supports it. One person’s loving self-sacrifice ends up with them being taken for granted and sacrificed. Another person’s anxiety protects them from all danger but destroys their happiness and their life. Another person’s laid back attitude begets disengagement and atrophy.
Even relationships have their own nature. I read this EM Forster twitter this morning: “No human relationship is constant. If it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit.”
But we think in constants and interpolations and act with habits. We don’t think in rhythms and cycles. It’s like me standing up from this table on Grant St in Port Douglas and heading north to Main St, and drawing the conclusion that I’m destined for New Guinea. Our way of thinking is bunk.
The way we are, our nature, our souls, our DNA, holds the key to our potential (go grab a self help book to read more) but it also holds keys to our self destruction.
Our habits, tendencies and nature, if left unchecked can become vicious storms where we are the oblivious eye.
My Qigong master tells me that you have to break up your energy and let it rebuild in a better form, a natural form. Sometimes you have to prune the tree, you have to cut off a bad friend, you have to end a bad relationship, or maybe just quit a job or take a holiday. You have to exit the storm and you have to do it with no real planned outcome.
Then you wait. Do you have faith that your true nature will eventually reveal itself and it will be good, at least for a while, before renewal is again required?
The first time in black and white
13 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
You only lose your virginity once. However sordid the planning and execution, a truth is present at that moment.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/reece/2539867244/
It was November 1990 at the National Tennis Centre. It was my first concert and I still remember the kick drum thumping my rib cage as I entered. My heart was in danger.
I’d been accumulating albums, two to each D90 cassette. The D90 had been a bridge to new friendships; A way of sharing the musical experience.
The night started with the support act playing in front of a drawn curtain. I’d never heard of him, or his band, but lots of people seems to like the one about standing up and being counted.
They eventually finished, the lights came up, then down again and a chant began. The chant would become a cliché but not this first time
The curtain drew back. Cheering. A camera flash. No. It’s a strobe. A slow, pulsing strobe. White, Black… White!
Five people frozen. Black… White. They’re walking onto the stage. I can see the singer, his stalking gait unmistakable. Black… White. Black…..
An explosion of sound and light and motion. He spins and juts, hands splayed out and shaking, all parts moving seemingly, streaking across the stage. I don’t even recognise the song yet. I’m on the edge. People stand up and rush.
Ten minutes late my voice is shot. I’m dancing like I don’t give a shit. I’m sweating. I’ve been taken in.
As I age, new truths emerge, subtle and rare. Cynicism is easy. And there’s never that “first time” again.
I hadn’t felt truth in music for a while. Then this morning, “The Man in Black” made me feel like crying.
Real truth, unlike trivial facts, is never black or white, and it arrives and then departs in a moment. So pay attention.
I lost my actual virginity a little later and it’s not worth writing about.
Sparkles and Dust
09 Jul 2011 1 Comment
I live in the suburbs, the homes jammed between the sky and earth, the floor and the ceiling.
The town where my father grew up is now an open cut coalmine. The school where he taught is sold off to pay state debt and then ploughed back into real estate.
In our hearts we’re not sure we belong. The next bulldozer, the next drought, the next bushfire… we’re dust.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68782857@N00
Last month we had a horrid stench. A rodent had scurried in from the southern winter to be warm as it died. It had been heard under the floor, in the walls and ceiling.
In the ceiling all I found was a flaky insulation and dust.
Under the floor, through the still and lifeless dust, I found a ducted heating pipe that had come away from a vent. I shone my torch into the tube but found no smelly carcass.
I now needed duct tape to re-attach the pipe.
At the hardware store I asked the attendant where I could find what I need. Aisle 28. Rush. Rush.
I passed a clown. A clown in a hardware store! She was entertaining some kids with balloon tricks. I joined the queue with the cutest checkout chick.
A flicker of recognition.
I had recently been trawling through old family photos and found one of dad at a company Christmas party. A long forgotten memory that only a photo can bring back. My father, a quiet and dignified man, was never one to stand in front of a crowd and draw attention to himself but at this party he was having his face painted by a clown. The clown had picked him out of the audience. I remember being embarrassed for him and admiring that he did it without being embarrassed, even though I knew he was hating it.
The same clown. Not only that, I had the photo on my iPad stowed in my man-bag. The conversation went…
“Excuse me”.
“The father I take it”
“No these aren’t my kids. I was just wondering, is this you?”
“I’ll need my glasses…. that must have been the early 80s. I remember that. Is he still with us?”
“No, he passed away. Anyway I’m happy to see you still doing it.”
“Yeah I’m in the Yellow Pages under Sparkles.”
“I work for the Yellow Pages mob now.”
She frowns.
“Anyway, thank you”.
I returned home and climbed beneath the floor again. The mouse still eluded me. The wife found it later on.
I needed Sparkles the Clown to connect me to the past when everything else seemingly had turned to dust.
Duct tape, dust and sparkles.
I’m having a Hank Moody morning
27 May 2011 Leave a Comment
One thing about being a first time dad. You don’t know what you’re doing. But you try your best. This week one of mine has been crying at breakfast. Is it a sore mouth? Sore belly? Over tired? Weetbix too crunchy? The start of the terrible toddler years? WTF! So this morning I stay home a little longer to help out… he sits in my lap and eats whilst soggy Weetbix falls on my leg.
Now I’m on a later train now so I have a seat. I bring up the latest filler TV series on my iPad. I’m starting to hate the commute and TV shows are the best distraction. Somebody recently suggested I watch Californication. I found the idea of watching raunchy TV in a public place kinda naughty and a bit anti-social and it fits my relationship to “fuck you” public transport.
I’m up to episode 8 in season 1, and Hank’s father has just died. He doesn’t want to go to the funeral. He never liked his dad. Towards the end of the episode his ex opens a letter from his dad and reads it too him:
Oh my fuckin’ goodness…
Why was this show suggested to me!? I thought it was all sex and frivolity. My own dad’s death is all too raw still.
The girl opposite me on the train has big pretty green eyes. We made eye contact a while back and I got a smile. Now she looks uncomfortable; like she can’t wait for her stop. Probably because the guy opposite her is crying…
I wish there was a secret letter from my father hiding somewhere, so I could know these things, but I doubt it. Only Americans rabbit on like that.
In any case, I forgive him for not telling me these things that I yearned for.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrijbulba/1485291537/
Dreams
11 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fauxto_dkp/3198218232/
Last night I dreamed I was on a night train.
It was an old train with compartments that seat six on deep leather bench seats; three facing three. I was walking down the passage, the silver, white moon flickering shapes through the windows on my left, the darkened compartment doors passing on my right. I opened a door and stared into darkness. I stretched my arms out in front. I decided to sit in the seat closest on my right, but it was so dark I couldn’t make out if someone was sitting there. I felt entitled to this seat. I think I felt I had given over the “better seats” to others in my past. I turned and lowered my posterior towards the spring seat. The seat was so deep it felt like I was descending for an eternity. I did not feel anyone seated behind me, which was good, but then just as my backside was about to touch leather I felt the thin wispiness of another soul.
The body had a form that was soft and thin. It rolled out of my way and moved along two seats away from me. I stammered an apology about not being able to see. I sat in my seat. Time and distance passed. Still feeling guilty about my imposition I reached across with my right arm to touch my fellow passenger, with kindness, to make up. My right arm was grabbed with force and then a dark, (now) heavy body crossed mine and grabbed my left. The body pulled itself over me trying to roll me out of my seat, cloaking and suffocating me at the same time. I felt a great weight pressing on me. An aggressive force. I got angry. I fought. No! The force subsided.
I never remember fighting back in dreams.
***
I wake early. Lots on my mind so “tap tap” at the keyboard. Autumn in Melbourne. A time of dying.
***
It’s after lunch now. I feel loose. Unwound. Almost like I don’t care; that I won’t think too hard before acting; Riding a line just this side of recklessness.
I’ve just been at the gym. I didn’t care about form or injury or puking or passing out. I felt powerful.
The Gap
20 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
There was until recently a giant photo of bikini model Jessica Hart in the shopping centre near my work. The image flaunted her amazing physique and the giant gap between her front teeth. It looked contrived and confronting at the same time.
I walked past this enormous poster every day and became obsessed by the flawed smile.
Jessica Hart is apparently the perfect poster girl for the new model trend casting directors are calling “characters”… models with unique characteristics including tattoos, piercings, scars and even albino colouring.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago
The poster reminded me of Belladonna, a successful porn star, also famous for her gap-teeth. On her blog she once wrote: “Did you know a lot of people did not want to shoot me in the beginning because of my looks, tattoos and what not?“
Now I see gap-teeth everywhere.
I’m not sure how this all ties together.
Is flawed beauty more satisfying than pure beauty?
Am I looking for authenticity in the right places?
Red Eyes
10 Nov 2010 Leave a Comment
I awoke with red eyes this morning and it occurred to me that the same thing happened exactly two years ago…
On that morning my eyes were red because I’d balled like a baby the day before. I’d taken Abbey, our silky black labrador, to the vet to be put down. I remember walking through the car park with tears streaming down my face, leash in hand, back to my brother’s car. I went home and slept alone that night. My wife was in hospital in labour. And that was why I awoke with red eyes.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flickrohit/3206570218/
Three minutes after noon on that same day I became a father of beautiful twin boys.
Today is their second birthday and I celebrate with red eyes again, this time due to the relentless joy, sleeplessness and shared conjunctivitis.
Good times always.
My beautiful boys.
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