Beauty & The Beak

~

He’s a clumsy bugger. Vigorous, but awkward, tossing meat and cheese everywhere when he rummages for the right piece to eat. Ungainly is a good word for him. I’m not precisely sure what gainly looks like, but he certainly ain’t it. But he’s alive. Very much so and against all the odds.

When I got back to Brisbane after Easter in Canberra he was there, and the growth over his eye seemed to have broken away, or been scraped off. The scales having fallen he could see both sides, but the lump on his beak limited his forward vision, so he couldn’t give me that meaningful look that Crookfoot does when she fixes me square on. A look Catherine would have described as ‘old-fashioned’. Then a week or two later the horrible growths on his feet were gone, and he’d slimmed down and was more mobile, if not more graceful. Then, this week, the lump on his beak has dried out and gone, leaving just a scarred patch.

The Beak is Back!

He’s now a ferociously driven young bird, full of testosterone and noise, doing very nicely thank you. Which is very touching, and a miracle unexpected.

Oh, and I’m engaged by the way.

To be married.

Which is quite a surprise.

It’s a very Harry met Sally tale. We’ve known each other twenty-two years, and met when we were both married. Since then we’ve both been divorced, remarried and divorced again. Or in my case, widowed. And we’ve been closer in the last year or two again, but not expecting much more. Until about three months ago. When we were together ‘unchaperoned’ as my fiancée put it. Which apparently was the magic word. Because it was clear that that was what it took for the scales to fall from our eyes. Although, no doubt, Ellen was more aware of things than I. I am a man, after all.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and love and lust rekindled.

So this last weekend, after weeks of phone calls and tentative exploring of possible futures, including, perhaps, the likelihood of living ‘contiguously’ being discussed, we met again. And I proposed. And she accepted. Which is where the Beauty part comes in. Because she is very beautiful, and very wonderful, and I am madly in love with her. Green eyes and soft skin, dark hair and quite the figure.

And she smells wonderful.

And tastes even better.

And the whole world is changing very fast around us. My daughter, Ellen, will be 21 in three months, and will be setting up a home of her own. She announced to me that she has no desire to leave Brisbane, and won’t come to Canberra to live with us. Which, while obviously heartbreaking for a loving father such as myself, does mean that Ellen S, my intended, betrothed, soon-to-be-wife, and significant other and I will be able to live like newlyweds. So I’ll be moving to Canberra before the end of the year, to live happily ever after, and write and write and write.

By the way, did I mention I’m in love?

By the other way, in case you’re wondering, my daughter Ellen was in part named after Ellen S, my affianced. But this won’t cause as much confusion as you might think. Because I usually call Ellen (daughter of mine) Nell. Which, coincidentally is Ellen (my affianced’s) grown-up daughter’s name. But my daughter Nell spells it as Ellen backwards, that is, as Nelle. And Nell (my soon-to-be-daughter by marriage) is currently answering to Nellie. Which I haven’t called my (daughter) Nell in weeks.

So, couldn’t be simpler.

Except for my father, whose mother’s name was Ellen.

But he’s deaf in one ear.

Did I mention the ‘I’m in love’ thing?

~

Merlin's father.

Catherine's father.

The first time I ever laid eyes on the bastard was in a painting that was done not long after his funeral. I attended a meeting of the Labor Left faction one night in the winter of ’86. It was held in a long, concrete-walled conference room on the ground floor of the Allied’s union headquarters building in Red Hill. At one end of the room the entire wall was taken up with a mural showing all the wonders that unity of labour and trade-unionism could achieve, with particular emphasis on the Queensland that Bill Parris and the Allied had helped to build. It was, no doubt, one of those ‘art-in-working-life’ projects paid for by the Hawke Labor Government in the full flush of the high-spending years.

The mural was done in that peculiar ‘South-American revolutionary-naïve’ style that always makes me feel that the pre-schoolers have taken the nursery by storm with plastic bayonets and sickles, fresh from toil in the finger-painting fields and the plasticine mines. In the centre was a single figure, larger by far than all the rest, a tall, solidly built man with horn-rimmed glasses, iron grey hair and a dark, pointed beard, his hands raised in a gesture that was part liberation-theology Christ-like, part melodramatic music-hall magician. I had no idea who it was. I didn’t meet Catherine for another four years or so.

But the image stayed with me. It was so intensely religious, so genuinely iconic, yet at the same time without a real centre. He wasn’t a figure that held things together, or poured forth bounty from a cornucopia. He was the strange pseudo-Christ at the epicentre of a whirling chaos, and not the good kind that has beauty and underlying order and majesty. This was scattered and scatter-gunned. This was an explosion, destruction masquerading as creation. The figure in the centre sucked in power from all that appeared to come from him, undermining the meaning that was presumably intended.

It’s only in writing this that I’ve come to realise that the mural inspired a satirical character for a series of short stories I wrote later, during the time in the mid ‘90’s I worked for the Queensland Government, after Colleen had bent my head out of shape, and before Catherine and I moved in together.

The character was Shane Guevara, the artistic son of leftist South-American refugees who’d moved to Brisbane, and in particular to Logan City, a satellite town without an orbit, a cultural wasteland and economic sink-hole famous only for teenage pregnancy, petty crime and half-assed hot rods. Shane was a spray-painter with a strong ideological streak and a gift for the airbrush. A series of his best custom paint-jobs which larded the barebones plot were actually a series of extravagantly crafted in-jokes for those who had to suffer as a socially aware teenage boy during the 1970s in the land of Oz. They included the following:

"1976 Holden Monara, ‘Fall of Saigon’, 350 Chev, red and black, chrome sidepipes."

“Defeat of the Kuomintang” Mazda Bongo van, pale blue acrylic, 12 coats.

"William Morris Minor, 1100 cc, Paddy Hopkirk roll cage. Doilies everywhere."

1966 Ford Cortina, `Andreas Bader's Suicide', Holley 45, with extractors.

“Jane Fonda visits Hanoi as Barbarella”, 1972 Chrysler Valiant wagon, 245 hemi, bench seats, beige with matching trim.

Shane’s love interest was one Emily Wilding, a.k.a Em. A thin, passionate left-wing activist and vegetarian. Untidy dark hair, in a gamin 'Audrey Hepburn' cut that's grown out into a shoulder length straggle. Early 20's with green eyes, Em was a caricature of my own taste in women.

Em “rides a Vespa of indeterminate horsepower, and has an irrational fear of TAB outlets and bran mash. Is prone (sic) to throwing herself in front of things, police vans, local government. flunkies, lasagne.” All of which was an obscurantist clue as to the origins of her name. Emily Wilding Davison was the suffragette who famously threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, and died of her wounds four days later.

Part of Shane’s genesis came from my own time in some really terrible garage bands as a teenager. A good mate and rhythm guitarist was Andy Ball, a red-haired spray painter who had a mural of the Meatloaf ‘Bat out of Hell’ album cover painted on a dodgy Ford Escort panel van in which the gearstick would come out of the gearbox while you were driving. He later bought and painted a black Ford Falcon identical to the Mel Gibson ‘Mad Max’ car.

The creative process is a strange thing. I sometimes wonder if the mural is still there. In the past I’ve fantasised about visiting and defacing it, with paint stripper or just some heavy black enamel. I try not to think about it too much. Better to bury the bastard in words than to get busted for civil disobedience.

Beijing Rules

For those who want to know where they stand in Beijing:

You don't stand, you kneel.




Smile, wave, murder millions.

Book Review: Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t read Fight Club.

It’s crap.
Rhythmic crap.
Nihilistic rhythmic crap.

But it has a punchy rhythm and short sentences. Short sentences tied together with longer apparently lyrical descriptions. Descriptions tied together by repeating the last word of each as the beginning of the next.

Some times two.
Sometimes two words to tie together, with brand names.

Iconic brand names like Impala, Armalite and whale stuff, that stuff they use to make perfume that costs so much. And pissing in the soup. But not Ellis. Not Havelock or even Brett Easton. And he’s never heard of Bob Ellis who maunders in that beautiful sad way about things lost and melancholia and being drunk.

Bob Ellis gets all his injuries from falling over drunk, while Palahniuk gets his from violence given and received, that isn’t a subtext for homosexual father-fixated longing at all. ‘Cos that would be gay. And not helplessly, hopelessly human and needing love but being too afraid to give, and not having anything worth anything to give ‘cos we’re too lazy to do the work.

Homosexual. Not homo-erotic.
Not auto-erotic. That’s wanking.
Wanking is a town in China.
Wake-up at the airport.

Wanking on a sadistic fantasy.
Fantasy that’s not sadism ‘cos I have a get-out. I get hurt too.

The door doesn’t lock. The lock’s broken.
Broken with a cordless penis, but I called it dick. Dad laughed at me.
Mum might catch me. In a town. In China.

Do the work. Make something of ourselves.
Did I mention the brand names. Corniche.
Vichyssoise. I beat myself up because I’m in inner turmoil.

More than you can know.
More than anything you can know. About me. And bullets.
Bullets are great, Marla.

Rain. Easton Ellis wrote a nasty book. But it wasn’t lazy.
Who’ll play Edward Norton in the movie? Me, and Brad.

The first rule about spell-making is that you don’t talk about lazy writing.

Nihilism. God.
Did I mention the Nihilism.
There are no questions in this book.

Because we have all the answers. Sure we do. Hit something. Hit me. I’m tough, dangerous. I have an inner Tyler that doesn’t fix the roof. The roof leaks. Everything swells. Nails stick out and snag and rust. Decay is cool. You should see the mould in my room. It’s fungus, fun fungus. It has a dangerous alter-ego with a fantasy.

A fantasy that I’m doing this
Fantasy that I’m doing anything.
And doesn’t take too long to read.

No Shirt. No shoes.
No shirt, no shoes, no service.
The service in here is terrible.

Lye. It burns.
I like lye burns. Burns like lies.
Sodomy. Fellatio. Cunilingus. Bondage.

It’s called ambergris. That whale stuff that gets blood all over you in the toilet. Piss in the toilet. Bum. Blood. Blood, teeth and aching. Pain that’s fake. Pain that’s just descriptions of bodily functions and made-up damage. Damage that’s just repetition, repetition that’s just painful. Painful and boring. Boring with a drill.

Freeze their locks off.
And boring.
Change the reels, Tyler.
Don’t eat the soup.

The third rule of fight club is you don’t talk about how bad the book is.

The Hunchbeak - (II)

Some days I feel very old, but not today. I’ve just seen something I’ve never seen before. A wild bird, Gymnorhina tibicens, the Australian Magpie, the only true Magpies in the world, not a pied crow, is asleep on the steps. The tibicens comes from the Latin word for piper or flute-player. If you’ve ever heard an Australian Magpie you’ll get the reference.

It’s the Beak, and he’s sleeping on the second-top step to the house, beak tucked under his wing, blind-eye to the world. In daylight, at three in the afternoon. He’s been there for hours. He was there when I opened the door this morning at eleven, hopped to the top step, asking for food, for meat in particular. I filled the cheese bowl, but he ignored it. I found the minced beef in the fridge and fed him, four or five good-sized pieces until he was full, until he couldn’t fit any more in.

And then he did something I’ve never seen before. He wiped his bill on the steps, and stayed. Picked a step, one from the top and got comfortable. Then settled in. He’s in pain, I know. Today it’s hard on him, and he’s tired, very tired. I made coffee and started my day, came out to watch the noon news bulletin, and he was there. I fed him again an hour or so later, and then again later still. What he doesn’t eat the ants clean up. But I’ve never seen a bird sleeping like that, and particularly not on the ground.

He feels safe here. Knows I’m thinking about him, that there’s no danger from this quarter, that I have his back. The occasional noise from the builders down the road wakes him, but I talk to him softly, tell him it’s safe, that he’s safe here. I drop my mind into my chest and open my heart, open the heart chakra, and reach out to contain him, to give him warmth and protection. And he relaxes, tucks his head under his wing again, and sleeps. It seems I’m finally getting the hang of it, the Green Ray that is. Attracting what you want and need by staying open to being called on, being part of the world. My beloved would be pleased. It’s taken years.

We live with the front door open, always have. When Cath and I met we both had the habit, a working class thing, English. We’ve always had birds, possums, the odd stray cat and on one occasion a huge black cockerel that had escaped from a neighbours yard, coming into the house. In part it’s about living with an open heart, although that sounds incredibly pompous. But it’s hard to explain any better than that.

A bird in the house can mean an impending death, but not here, they’re just part of the extended family, and since Cath died they’re more important than ever. I don’t have pets, and I stopped acquiring familiars years ago. Too many of them died as a result of my untidy process. Which is what familiars are for, it’s true, as insurance against magic rebounding on you. But it’s hardly fair to them. You befriend them, invite them in, make them part of your personal world, give them a name. When they respond, get close to you, become familiar, they become a familiar. Then, when your magic goes wrong and you overreach yourself they take the hit when it rebounds on you. And they die, if they’re lucky. So I don’t do that any more. I have friends with wings instead, which is much better all round. And the door stays open.

We don’t live in fear of wandering malice, of random robbery and criminal malcontents. We don’t attract them, and I always maintain an awareness of the immediate neighbourhood, keep a weather eye on the mood, the season, the prevailing wind. And I still follow her old maxim: Nothing to be scared of if you’re the scariest thing out there.

We did it together.
I’m doing it for both of us now.

He’s down in the garden now, after four hours just standing, hanging out, sleeping in fits and starts. The three o’clock crocodile of Catholic schoolgirls is streaming down from Lourdes Hill School, which brings a lot of high-pitched chatter and clumping of school shoes that he can’t ignore. But he hasn’t gone far. Just down the stairs. Which means I can collect the mail without disturbing him.

I know he’s struggling. I’ve thought of ringing a vet, getting advice, but I know I can’t end it for him. I’m not the type, and I’ll always favour hope over death as a solution, or even just a stop-gap. So I’ll stay awake, keep an eye on him, do some laundry and drink some coffee. It’s what there is to do.

The Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street.

~
It’s killing him, the poor little bugger. He’s only five months old, but I can’t see him making it through the winter. One month, maybe two at best. But he doesn’t complain. Birds don’t. They put up with what they can’t change and suffer in silence.

He’s the oldest of the two chicks from this years brood. The fourteenth of fifteen that Crookfoot has produced since we moved in here eight years ago. And he’s male. That you can tell from the attitude, the volume, the cheerfully loutish behaviour around the cheese dish on the front steps. Crookfoot lost her last two in a rush late last year. The younger one, a slender female with a delightful disposition and endlessly chatty was chased out of the territory, as is the usual practice.

That left Mother and J.R, her one-eyed, seven year-old son, in residence. There have been more than a dozen others over the years, raised from squawking fluffy bundles until they’re able to look after themselves, then evicted, sent out to try their luck, and risk their lives in the big wild world.

J.R wasn’t thrown out. Not for him the savage pecking and ruthless methods of magpie eviction. His monocular disposition made him too vulnerable, and he stayed, an overgrown baby at first but growing over the years into a loyal support and handsome son, always ready to help feed each year’s new brood, long after Crookfoot had given up on the endless round of stuffing squawking beaks with beef, cheese and whatever else turns up. He was a big lad at the end, strong, broad-shouldered, a solid and respectable citizen, with a powerful neck due to his endless need to scan for danger with his one good eye.

He was hit by a car in the last week of April ‘07. Blind-sided one last time in Goulbourn Street by one of the endless supply of utes and vans that swarm around the endless supply of ghastly townhouses being built there. He didn’t get much of a send-off. I saved him from the ants, but wrapped him in newspaper and put his body, a good weight too, in a council rubbish bin. I didn’t have anything better in me. I’d used up all my ability to do funerals and grieving when Catherine died in November 2006, and by the end of April, two weeks after her birthday, I was just too heart-sore, too cried-out to cope with another parting. Even for a magpie I’d known all his life, had fed since he was a skinny squawker at the bottom of the pecking order.

I marked his passing by breaking the bowl he’d fed from all these years. Slid it off the top step with my foot and watched it crack into three pieces. I shed a few tears. A week or two later I went down to Goulbourn Street at three in the morning and spray-painted a memorial to him in the middle of the road; his name, the date, twelve feet high. It’s almost gone now, a year later. I’ll go down some night soon and redo it for him. I don’t sleep at all any more during the dark hours so I’ll have plenty of opportunity.

He was replaced a week or two later by a blow-in. A yearling male magpie chased out from a clan somewhere else. This is too rich a territory to go to waste, and too big to be defended by Crookfoot alone. It took a month or so for her to establish that she was top bird. The males are aggressive, and slow enough learners that it takes a while, and several quick, vicious pecks in the side-ribs to get the message. He’s called Boofhead, Boofy-Boy, or just Boof for short. They get the names that seem to fit, and he was a very boofy boy to start with, all wild eyes, and noise, and beak, and attitude.

Since then he’s put on some weight, learned his place, acquired adult plumage and, since this years brood was born, taken up where J.R left off as primary child-care, beak-stuffer and all-around aero-dynamic role-model. A year is a long time for a young magpie, and he’s much smarter, more capable, more able to keep up his end of a conversation now.

Crookfoot loses interest in the endless feeding they require fairly quickly. Once they can fly she spends as much time alone as possible, delegating the on-going care and feeding to whoever’s number-one bird after her. Given that she builds the nest, mates, lays the eggs, sits on them in all weathers and feeds them once they hatch in November she’s usually had a gut-full by February. She has a look that’s incredibly eloquent at this time of year when they all turn up for food around five o’clock.

She’ll watch Boofhead running back and forth, endlessly feeding one noisy beak after another, and look at me with the eye of a mother who’s done this too many years to count, and would just as soon have a quiet chat, a cup of tea, and close the door to the nursery. There’s a genuine, parent-to-parent connection. I feel it especially when I rush off to pick up Nell from work when she’s had a lousy day, and can I drop everything and pick her up right now? After all, what could I possibly be doing that’s of any consequence?

Nothing, nothing at all.
What indeed?

This years pair were fairly typical. A loud, solidly-built, bombastic, aggressively shouting male, and a slender, quieter, more intelligent and thoughtful female. The female is doing fine. There’s plenty of food, plenty of minced beef and grated cheese available from me, and the recent rain has pushed plenty of edible species up out of the wet ground. She’s injured a foot, and is limping, but it doesn’t look permanent so she’ll be fine, I think. But the boy is in trouble.

I noticed it first about six weeks ago, mid January. He had a misshapen upper beak. It was fine on one side but had a bulbous swelling on the other. It didn’t bother him so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Nell and I even joked about him being the Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street. But now it’s getting worse by the day. The swollen beak started to get larger about three weeks ago. Then I noticed a similar dark clumping of growth on his left foot. It didn’t slow him down any, and it doesn’t appear to cause him pain, just made it look lumpy and inelegant.

Now the growth on the beak has spread with some similar growths around one eye. In the last two days it’s obscured his eye and he’s now blind on one side. I’ve spotted more growths on his left leg around the ankle joint, up near the body, not big, but growing. And he’s getting a little thick in the neck, so something may be happening under the feathers. He’s still got thick fluffy down around his head and shoulders. I don’t think that he’ll live long enough to grow new plumage.

I have no idea what it is. If it spreads to his other eye he’ll be finished. A blind bird doesn’t last very long. Either way I don’t think he’s got much time left. It’s growing faster than he is, poor little sod. Poor noisy, aggressive, hungry, determined, full-of-life, little sod.

I hope it’s clean, at the end. Quick, merciful.

We had a baby butcher-bird a few years back who had an obstruction in his throat that killed him. He couldn’t swallow. We gave him food ground extra fine, but in the end he couldn’t swallow anything, though he kept trying.

One night he came in and perched on an arm-chair an hour before dark. He couldn’t eat, but we sat and talked to him, Nell and I, and he stayed quite late, well after dusk. He drew comfort from our company, felt loved, cared for. He knew we were with him, knew that our lives overlapped, that he meant a full life’s-worth of being, and dying, and memory. His name was Ralph.

A little human warmth goes a long way, on very small wings sometimes. The next morning the neighbour found him, under a bush next to the fence. She handed him to me and we gave a him a burial in the backyard under the fig-tree.

.

Lawyers, Sex and Money

 
Je suis consumé par chagrin.

A few days ago I got the most recent letter from a solicitor in Gympie, who’s doing his best to blackmail me into giving money to Catherine’s former husband. A nasty little man, pickled in beer and marijuana; dull, unappetising and obsessed with fish. The husband that is, I don’t know about the lawyer. It plunged me into depression again. Real depression, not just a black mood or moment; sleeping all day and awake all night, clothes and bedding scattered around the room, clean laundry under the heap, subsisting on a diet of chocolate bars and double strength coffees. Most unhealthy. It’s hard to tell what’s causing the gloom, the husband or the lawyers.

On the one hand Catherine’s ex is still trying to gouge money from her, long after she’s left him and long after she’s dead. He’s like a louse that doesn’t know when to stop, doesn’t realise that the warmth has fled the flesh, that the host is no longer a banquet for this unquiet parasite’s pleasure. Have we have a plan for him? Let's say no more now, but wait until all knots are tied and all deals sealed. Then we’ll see what may be done to bring him undone.

“First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
– Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 2: Act 4. Scene II

On the other hand we have lawyers, enough to make you slap that hand hard against a wall. I loathe lawyers. Not hate, not despise, just a cordial loathing for a necessary evil. I’ve never had anything to do with them that hasn’t cost me in spades: emotional capital as well as simple lucre. They wear upon the soul, grate upon the nerves, abrade the self-respect and strength I carry with me.

The last one I hired was clean enough. Top end of town and glass-faced high-rise, sharp-faced blonde and efficient with the work, which was done by a middle-aged brunette, but billed for the blonde. They were a front for me, representing my good self to the Supreme Court, arranging the grant of Letters Of Administration over Catherine's estate. Clean, simple, efficient enough, money for new old-rope.

The one before that cost me $8,000, failed to represent me in court, reduced me to tears for failing to deal with the magistrate on my own, bullied me over the phone and gouged me for work that didn’t address the issue. In the end I solved the problem myself. Inveigled a written confession from the slimy bastard in question, held it over his head, that of my disgusting first wife, and made them shift to my tune. Justice was acquired, I suppose, sufficient unto the day. Then, after it was all over, I went to the police station and got my guns back in person.

The lawyer in question was an ugly old boot, with a Latin inscription over her door which translated as ‘Old dogs for hard roads’. I should perhaps have spotted that I didn’t need an old dog chasing me along a hard road when I had problems enough in the first place. They say if you’re innocent you have nothing to fear. They lie. Being innocent doesn’t prevent you from being involved in the shit of others, and it almost guarantees that you’ll wind up paying in some form or other. Pounds sterling, pounds of flesh, a shit-load of grief, a wagon-load of someone else’s shit.

This evening I went to see a free lawyer, the Caxton Street Legal Service, which, naturally, is in Heal Street, New Farm. You turn up, fill out the form and then wait until a ‘pro-bono’ brief calls your name. I had the reply to the Gympie swine ready with me. I’ve spent the last four days writing and re-writing it. I just needed a legal eagle-eye to weed out any weaknesses and let me see it clear. It was quick, and done with good-natured good humour by a brace of well-educated ladies. Once I saw it through their eyes we were done in minutes. It helps that I’ve enough practice now to craft a fissile missive. But that wasn’t the interesting part.

L’exigence de guerre, l’exigence d’amour.

I’d dragged the carcass out of bed at the crack of three pm, drained bleary-eyed cups of coffee while watching an excellent French film about torture during the war in Algeria. Showered and scraped with razor, steam-ironed a black shirt and got myself in the car and there with sufficient alacrity to be at the head of the queue. Then filled in the form and sat to wait with a H.H. Kirst novel which quickly palled.

And then it happened. I began to write. And not just any writing. I’ve been working on a chapter about Colleen, my Eurydice that was. And I’d hit the wall. Stopped cold when it came to a hot point about lust and the mechanics of seduction. And there in the lawyers office, sitting among the dim and destitute, the divorced and despairing, I began to write about sex. Just a sentence or two at first as an idea struck me that needed recording, but then it began to flow.

Soon I was writing as fast as my blue biro would scrawl. Hot, wet, steam-powered legatos of lubricious lust. Clauses dripping desire onto taut fabric. Long, hard sentences about long, hard thoughts. Moments of sublime sensuality and sheer stockings topped by black-lace bands. Scotch and ice, and sex for the sophisticate. Wicked, wilful sins held in check by the bondage of anticipation. Every so often I’d pause, searching for the mot mauvais, but it didn’t take long. Soon it was on again, on for young and old, novice and necrophile, wench and wanton..

I waited for almost two hours to be seen by a lawyer. But it didn’t matter a damn, because I filled six A4 pages with a wealth of fabulous, luminous sex-magic. The man sitting in the plastic chair to my right was reading it over my shoulder when they called his name. I was still writing it when they called mine. Tomorrow I’ll transcribe it, edit and add to it. And edit the legal letter. Right now it’s 3.52 am and after dining rather late I think I’ll hit the sack for a few hours of well-earned.

I think Pan is starting to talk to me again.
It’s been quite a while but I’m glad to hear his pipes.
 

The Trip-Thud Theory

 
We had our own theory that explained the creation of the universe, Catherine and I. The Big Bang theory always seemed so, well, boringly masculine in it's thinking. It's the sort of theory that pale physicists (and even paler magicians), who’ve spent far too much of their adolescence indoors picking at acne and dreaming of the hugeness of the cosmos and the rarity of sex, would come up with. So, in the course of an evening of quiet contemplation we came up with this:

The Trip-Thud Theory of Creation

It's pretty straightforward, and goes like this: Creating a universe is a pretty demanding sort of job, and a Creator who's going to have to pack a whole lot of everything into a very small singularity to kick things off is likely to find the planning stage a bit of a trial. So it’s fair to expect He’ll need the odd evening off for a drink and a fairly speculative session of “Woss-it-all-gonna be about, I mean really, when you get right down to it, eh? Woss-the-point gonna be?”.

And having slaved away at the plans all week He’ll no doubt find himself at closing time staggering out of the snug bar of the Bacchus Arms Hotel with a right skinful and will head for the nearest all-hours (figuratively-speaking) Indian take-away, (putting some serious grunt into archetypal patterns of future human behaviour incidentally) and half an hour later will be groping in the primordial trouser-pocket for his keys at the front gate of Chez Tout.

In the meantime - not that time exists yet, a-priori, or even post-priori, now that I think of it - the paper-bag containing the Cosmic Vindaloo, the Korma of Heavenly Bounty and a Prawn & Seafood Biriani with all the trimmings, will be reaching the point at which the sogginess at the bottom is rapidly approaching the minimum degree of tensile strength required to hold things together under the weight of the aromatic product of God's late night alcoholic yearning for sustenance.

Fumbling at the door with the keys will take critical seconds (of unreal time) that cause the cosmic combination of tiredness, inebriation, sogginess, clumsiness and buggerment (some of the most fundamental principles underlying the whole of creation) to coalesce at the un-moment when God leans after the retreating door as it swings open.

At that moment occurs the Trip. When God catches his boot on the front step, and in accordance with the newly-minted Laws of Physics and the Guidelines of Self-Preservation, his enormous body falls forward into the hallway and his arms swing wildly out in front of him.

Then comes the Thud. And as the shock of carpeted floor resonates through His holy frame, the star-strained and soggy paper gives way and the contents of the universe, spicy, hot, majestic and infinite in it's variety burst forth from the torn and flapping bag and fly in an ever expanding interstellar spray of loose firmament and little bits of coconut.

The time the mighty spray of creation takes to expand and unfurl is all the time in our universe. Mighty, meaty nebula, shot through with an incandescent assortment of rare spices (and not a little dust swept up from the spice factory floor) give rise to all the infinite variety of life, the universe and everything. Look up at the night sky and you will see the ever-expanding spiral of the Milky Way (Coconut milk and a Goats milk Lassi actually) as it hurtles ever outward on it's trip through the dark hallway of space/time in God's bijou, des-res, ‘two-up and an-infinite-number-down’ heaven.

The Crab Nebula is simply the succulent, doomed Friday night special danced into being by the many whirling arms at the Shiva Nataraj late night celestial kitchen. The mighty gas-clouds that illumine the heavens for those with the best telescopes were originally intended to gurgle through the digestive system of the Creator, causing him no end of remorse late on a Saturday morning.

The stars are just the heat-signatures of cooling pieces of the celestial take-away as it expands ever-outwards. Black holes are simply tiny pieces of the soggy paper bag, observable to us now only as mysterious inverse gaps in the fabric that once held all of creation in check. We are merely insignificant passengers on the lost left-overs of God’s Sunday fry-up. In the world’s before us monkeys Primal Chaos rained down along the hallway.

It’s a theory, anyway, and a pretty good one for explaining the observable facts too, I think. The complex interplay of the various Gods necessary for our tiny existence can be glimpsed behind the veil of myth. Many, many Gods were involved in the universal creative process. Probably not many Goddesses though. They would have cooked something wholesome and satisfying at home, possibly using parts of some of the Gods. Although it’s probably safest to assume that they’re involved somewhere in the back-story and to give them credit for the bits in life that make some kind of sense.

The theory also gives some shape to the issue of what happens at the end of everything. When the still sweet but rapidly cooling universe hit's the carpet it's a pretty fair bet that most of us will be in for a whole lot of trouble. The First Bounce may send huge lumps of the universe crashing back through itself, spinning whole galaxies off course, causing calamitous chain-reactions more powerful than all the atom bombs ever made. Let’s see Bruce Willis stop the clock on that little lot. Lumps of the less spicy lamb bits may be snaffled by the dog (God’s always struck me as a dog-person) and condemned to wander the infinite until, well, what dogs do.

What can be salvaged will be little more than the odd broken pappadum and any of the sauce left in the plastic containers, and perhaps a very small tub of cucumber raita or sweet chilli dipping sauce. And a hairy garlic naan, there’s always one, and always hairier than it should be. In fact most of creation is destined to be sworn at and then scrubbed out of the carpet over a very long period of space/time, and eventually trodden in to the background radiation of the hall runner. Our own tiny solar system may be doomed to fall between the fibres of the carpet, only to be vacuumed up next week by the Dust-Buster of the Divine Being.

Which won't leave much for making the next universe, will it?

Coffee, Chance & Quasimodo

I’m depressed. A black mood, too heavy for the blues, while my guitar gently creeps into the shadows behind me. I can’t play today. Usually an hour or two of soaring, deafening guitar-playing will lift me out of this, invading every cell in my body with interstitial minor keys and effortless improvised solos, but not today. It’s already three o’clock and I’ve yet to taste my first coffee. The day is practically over. If I want to go out it’ll be four o’clock at least before I’m ready.

My circadian rhythm is so far out of whack now that I don’t start writing until midnight, with the first rush of words taking me through to the very small hours, and I’m only beginning to review and edit at three. I’ve become nocturnal, feeding the possums more than I do the magpies at my door. Outside it’s a warm, muggy Brisbane day. Overcast and loud with cicadas running their engines all day, just like yesterday and tomorrow.

I finished ‘CHESED’, a complete chapter last week, 11,000 words. Now I’m tinkering and tidying, but at three in the morning it’s not like your judgement is at it’s best. As usual it’s the latter part that needs work. I always finish in a rush, wanting to get to completion, orgasm, the safety of the printed page, final and resolute. Once it’s able to stand on it’s own, each piece supports me, makes me more complete, more confident in my vision; a pit prop, a flying buttress holding up the crippled hunchback, the emptied author. Once I built cathedrals of light and magic with my sword, now I’m the quasi-human wretch seeking sanctuary. Part gargoyle, part green man, and part plaster angel, with clay feet all the way up to the neck.

An old joke we shared, Catherine and I. The Modo Brothers: Quasi, Crypto and Pseudo, and little baby Neo, characters for comic novels that we laughed into being, that we neglected to write down.

After seven years of drought it’s been raining for seven weeks in Queensland. Grass burnt flat for years is growing so fast the motor-mowers can’t keep up. Dams that were down to 15% capacity produced tap water that was orange or grey, but never clear. Even so, television pundits still mocked those who bought bottled water as effete, middle-class, bourgeois fools. It’s very satisfying to enter such exalted company just by choosing to drink clean water. Now the dams are filling again.

And among the floods, washed out bridges and soggy disasters the mosquitoes are spreading faster than a rumour. Mosquitoes are marvellous machines. Light, beautifully streamlined, able to hover like helicopters and dive like jet-fighters. Equipped with an avionics package that keeps them moving in unpredictable patterns, protecting them from surface to air attack, able to refuel anywhere warm blood flows.

Their multi-point landing gear is cantilevered and so sensitive they can land between two bundles of nerve-endings on the average mammal. The only indication that they’ve fuelled up is the sting that comes when the pipe is drawn out, not pushed in. if it weren’t for the slight lag in the flight system adjusting to fully-laden weight they’d get away un-scathed every time. The Lilienthals and Sikorskys, the Bleriots and Fokkers would have done well to model their designs on this brilliant aviation marvel.

This doesn’t stop me killing them of course. I take a great deal of violent pleasure in slapping them into my skin, back-handing them against a wall, leaving the grey outline of their elegant architecture on skin, or wall or wallpaper.

“Got you, you bastard!”

Killing things is so out of fashion these days that a man must take his pleasures where he can.

Time for coffee number two.

I use artificial sweetener rather than sugar, a concession to diabetes and weight-loss. And every cup of coffee takes me closer to the end of a complex mathematical equation. The box contained 500 pills when it arrived, or so says the label. For each coffee I use half a pill and put the unused half back in the little plastic dispenser. Sometimes a previously divided half-pill will come out and I’ll use that one for the coffee of the moment. What are the odds that the last pill out of the dispenser will be a whole pill, or a half-pill?

• Factor in the odd accident which causes me to drop a whole pill or two, or even a half pill or two, or one or more of each.
• Factor in the number of times I drop the box, re-arranging the layered arrangement of pills.
• Factor in the shape of the box: tall, upright, wide enough for a label, and thin enough to slide between two coffee-jars. Will this keep the lighter half-pills near the top? Is there a mathematical constant, or changing ratio at work here?
• Factor in the effects of friction. Whole pills are smooth. Half-pills have a rough split-edge. How does this affect their movement relative to each other?
• Factor in the changing ratio of whole to half-pills in the box as the numbers decrease. What is the probable ratio? What factors determine the ratio? What effect will this have on the larger mathematical process?
• Factor in the specific tipping motion necessary to have the pills drop through a slot carefully calculated to dispense a very few pills at each action, preventing a wasteful cascade of pills every time it’s used. Does this favour the whole, or the half-pill? Or a sub-ratio of the two? Does this change over time as the numbers of pills and half-pills left in the box changes?
• Factor in a child using the box as a percussion instrument, causing an uneven Brownian motion to sort and sift halves and wholes. What effect does the rhythm the child uses have on the distribution? What if an adult with a better sense of rhythm and rhythmic imagination (me) does this? Will a samba have a different effect to a tango? Will it be different if I tap on the box with my fingers or shake it like a maraca?
• Factor in the effect of each of these sub-factors on each other.
• In the end does it come down to either/or? What factors determine that?

This is the sort of (disturbingly obsessive) calculation that leads me to favour willed action over random chance as the major determinant in what happens to us. The mathematics of chance are so damned complex that the willed application of personal energy seems to have the advantage in terms of Occham’s razor. The simplicity of thinking in a straight line pushes a lot of mathematics to the kerb. Focussing all of your personal power, physical, mental and psychic, cuts through a lot of crap.

Magic works. It doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t work all the time, but it works. Just like everything else, that is. Knowledge, skill, aptitude, practice and circumstance have a large thumb on the scales. The chances of me potting a three-point dunker in an NBA play-off aren’t nearly as good as the chances for someone who actually plays basketball, for instance.

Time for coffee number three.

I shook the box.

Randomly, in a non-random kind of way.

Feeling better already.

Everybody wants to go to heaven..

..but nobody wants to die.

I’ve never been afraid of dying, never been afraid of death.
As I understand it, it’s a perfectly safe procedure with three steps.
You’re living. You’re dying. You’re dead.

Then on you go. At least, I do.
And now that she does, and she’ll be there, I’m entirely happy.
I try not to sound eager, it upsets the kids.
Upsets my parents too. But then, they think they’re closer to it than I am. They forget that I’ve been up close several times and had a good long look at it.

When Catherine died they had nothing to say, not really. It was all much too much in their minds that they’re aging; graying hair and slipping memories; ‘senior moments’ my mother calls them. And they both dread the imminent parting. Who goes first? Who’s left bereft and alone to struggle with two people’s worth of grief after sixty years and more? They miss the immanence in the imminent, the Jewel in the Lotus.

Nothing dies really. Everything changes, but the only important thing is whether that particular multi-dimensional point of reference in the universe; your personal, individual consciousness, the You that you are without your clothes on, disappears.

And it doesn’t have to.

That’s what the whole ‘and thou shall have eternal life’ bit in the Christ stuff is all about. I mean, the whole cloud-walking, ‘Hey, St Peter,’ pearly gates and harp-playing thing is pretty average marketing by twenty-first century standards. But the basic point is this. If you connect yourself to the big eternal consciousness of God, you don’t die anymore than it does. The tricky thing is remembering who you are and not just dissolving in the bliss; not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m sure.

But if you do want You to survive after you’ve dropped the dust-suit you have to make the effort while you’re still in it. Personality won’t do it. You’ll have to do better than that. Individuation, the full technical meaning, is the very least you’ll need just to make a start. Unique is the watchword. You have to be absolutely unique. A clear and perfect lens through which the universe observes itself unfolding. And remembers which pants you left your keys in.

And there’s been a whole lotta people done a whole lotta things before you.
So you’re going to have work hard for Unique.

Luckily it’s a niche market. Idiosyncrasies are encouraged. As are individual contracts. That’s the point of this particular millennium. You can work your own passage to the hereafter, if you know what you’re doing. And you do have to know what you’re doing, oh yes. The big flooding tide of the millennium has washed up all sorts of lunatics and laptop-messiahs who think that they’re Christ, or the Paraclete, or this years Holy Joe with a direct line to the stars. You are advised to avoid these people. If they really know what they are doing they should be spending their time doing it, not trying to convince the gullible and giddy to join in some sad little go-nowhere scheme. Starting a new church isn’t necessary, although building a good library never hurts.

Avoid cults. Can’t put it any plainer than that.
Would you trust Amway to sell your soul to God?

Presumably there’s an infinite number of ways to cement the deal in an infinitely varied universe. I’ll let the physicists do the math on that, it’s never been my strong suit. But immortality is available. You can get it wholesale through a number of large religious organisations if that’s what works for you. Check that they promote peace, let women hog the remote, and have been around for at least a thousand years without becoming decadent to the point of pederasty. Anything less you can regard as unproven. And remember that religion is theory. Magic, even if it’s as simple as prayer or meditation, is practice. And only practice makes the perfecti.

But bespoke tailored immortality is the new model, coined fresh for this millennium. All it costs is everything you’ve got and a bit more. Which is why I work with Catherine. Between the two of us we have room for us all, my Merlin and I. But then, we’re playing for keeps. For always and ever, worlds without end. And we have a lotta laughs and plant some trees along the way.

Why is it harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a dromedary to hem trousers? Because the rich man isn’t working on the stuff that immortality is made of. Fame and a big bankroll won’t do it. And God isn’t there to give you what you want. Unless what you want is what he’s got to give. But God, as the saying goes, is a broad church. Which is where Aristeas came in. And where he goes out.

Regards, Aristeas.