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.