my houndstooth universe

So last night I wrote a grand total of 305 Frankie words. Tonight I was going to do the same — maybe I still will (unleash myself on an unsuspecting world 305 words at a time… look out) — but then I got caught up colouring in my houndstooth universe [figure A] and listening to old old Radiohead and drinking wine (if you look very closely you can see one or two watery sav patches… entirely deliberate and added purely for the sake of authenticity, of course… sort of like newly ancient tea stains).

The other half of this back-of-last-year’s-diary map is all decked out in polkadots (my polkadot planet — too twee?). Part two isn’t pictured here because a) my pen ran out, and b) such fripperies as these actually take a fucking long time — it takes more than just an evening of ad-breaks to fashion a houndstooth universe, in case you’re wondering.

(Really my pen running out is the main reason for me being here right now. Once I get started on my globe-crosshatching quest it’s quite hard to stop. It’s extremely peaceful, even if my inner calm does come as a direct result of me systematically wiping out entire villages — whole countries — with an ink pen.)

Speaking of peaceful, today I realised something quite important. I don’t really want to use my head any more. My head and I have reached a bit of a stalemate (supposing for a minute that I can be detached from my head… but let’s not get so granular about it). At the moment my head hurts a lot. It’s not like a headache; it’s more like dragging a tired old mule to a trough of brackish water and wondering why it keeps on saying nuh-uh with its legs locked rigid and its hooves clinging for dear life in the dirt.

I’m putting it down to end-of-year-itis. But if 2011 rolls around and nothing’s changed, I’m thinking maybe I’ll work in a map shop or sell slightly modified atlases door-to-door.

my heart of silk, etc

This evening has not been a good evening. It has been a decidedly bad evening. So I made this. To get away from the belly-upness of everything just for a bit.

I must not make this my Place of Ranting. No, this is a place of calm and reflection, home to only the mildest of gripes and sulks. All I will say is there is an ocean of difference between SAVE and SAVE AS, discoverable in the merest of split seconds.

And I especially hate it all being my own stupid fault. So much better when I can hang blame on the world’s idiocy or the ineptitude of others or something. But no, ineptitude and idiocy all mine (as Portishead might say).

What a waste of a stupid blinkered boring evening. I’m so riled I’m feeling the urge to use CAPS LOCK. That can’t be good. (Mind you, it’s probably about as violent as I get… unless of course you count a bit of passive aggression amongst loved ones.)

Anyway, some other stuff.

Auckland twice in a week. I think I like Auckland more now than I ever did. Or maybe I like myself more in it. If that makes sense. I do find the humidity profoundly bad for my soul, though. And my hair. Especially my hair.

Supermarket checkout philanthropy (or my lack thereof). I think I just failed a bit as a human being. I witnessed myself failing as I was failing — right in the very throes of my failure — and still was powerless to do anything about it. The guy in front of me was short of cash by about five dollars or so and had to keep subtracting things from his groceries. First the bananas, then the bread (and then something else after that but by then I was too busy pretend-transfixed by displays of condoms and chewing gum to know what).

I just wanted to give him the money. But I think I thought it would be patronising or something. Or just strange and inappropriate. Or that he’d find the gesture humiliating. So I didn’t do anything and then I felt stink about him going home with no bananas or bread and whatever else it was he was forced to sacrifice at the checkout. And I have been thinking about it ever since.

The concept of oddness (specifically with regard to socks). I paired up a shitload of orphaned socks last night, most of them black but each pair ever so slightly varied in blackness, rib, knit and what-have-you. It was immensely satisfying. It felt constructive in a way that most things don’t. Like putting the world back together, each small thing in its rightful place, one sock at a time. 

And speaking of putting things back together, I should probably go and reattempt to claw back the four hours of painstaking work I just lost at the fucking stupid click of a button. What a moron. Or maybe I will just play biro hockey with Sylvie for a bit…

panic on the streets of Thorndon

Exactly a year ago (in a few hours’ time) we were in New Plymouth A & E following a very bloody dancefloor accident. Fastforward a year and I am sitting at the kitchen table in a state of mid-grade panic, books and papers everywhere, incapable of finding the impetus I need to see my way through to that mythical wee light at the end of the mythical chasmic tunnel. Whinge whinge. (Oh, and one day I might stop taking photos of the cats, too, but what else do you do when you’re seized by mid-grade panic on a rainy Sunday evening?)

Almost exactly a year ago Simon had to get his eye stitched up following an unfortunate wedding mishap involving a non-slip dancefloor and a penguin-impersonating idiot. In the wedding season of 2008 – 2009, one of Simon’s party tricks was taking a run up to the dancefloor and, um, bellyflopping himself at speed, human torpedo style, all flapping shirt tails and wine-stained lips, in the direction of the booty shaking wedding guests, usually with the groom as the intended target. A few startled grooms along the way – all of whom have gone on to great things (and to father children) despite some heavy landings from some pretty swift and brutal ankle tackles – but All’s Fair at Drunken Weddings. Until August 1 2009, that is.

Assuming the dance floor tiles to be of the polished variety, conducive to penguin slides and dancefloor skittles, Simon limbered up, untucked himself (oh but who am I kidding… I doubt he was ever properly tucked in the first place), warming up and propelling himself in true fast-bowler fashion.

Obviously dancers are a little more safety conscious in the Naki, though, and the tiles were of the grippy non-bounce sort you might find at public pools. And to cut a painful story short, the tiles altogether thwarted him… he faceplanted and his glasses shattered, the frames embedding in his eye sockets. (Once we stanched the blood I remember being a bit pissed off that this was the second pair of glasses he’d wrecked through drunken misadventure in a short space of time… the first time I think it was late-night carpet wrestling that did it.)

So, that was a year ago. Someone else cracked their head open that same night and I know of at least two of us who had to make pale-faced emergency kerbside stops the next day as we wended our sorry ways back to our homes around the island. 

A&E was sort of romantic though. It made me think of Maudlin Street (I had sixteen stitches all around my head, etc). Ever helpful, I tried to fill out the form for Simon but couldn’t get past the surname field because I had to stop and ask how many strokes were in an E. The Es in SWEETMAN looked like centipedes, or combs. Plus I had lost my phone and had had people looking all around the venue for it as the night went on… only to find it buried safely inside my bra at the end of the evening.

And now I am here, obsessively diarising and Post-It noting, lamenting the dearth of hours in the day and the dicky girly-swat optimism that gets me in these situations. Contemplating tangled statements on rhetoric (strangely rhetorical in themselves) such as:

The world it builds [‘Rhetoric B’ – don’t ask, or Google if it if you must… but I am not going to link to it because your time is much too precious for that], left on its own, is a world of a free market of atomized persons and ideas, each privately seeking victory and hoping that in the melee a public good will be produced by some invisible hand.

That was the nicest bit I could find. Mind you, I have always been a bit partial to grand-sounding language.

Plus I need to rewrite a certain swathe of civic information on a certain website within six weeks and also at least outwardly appear to be keeping the cogs of the dayjob in motion. But that’s boring. I have a thing about the I’m so busy gripe, but here I am doing it. Who cares. I think the end-of-tunnel light might make itself known sometime around late September. And we’ll be moving out and hopefully we will have found a house by then and be Moving Right Along. And then summer will kick in and all this will be distant and laughable and not at all distressing. Ha! The mountains we make…

I just went and found one of my two copies of Bird by Bird (Some Instructions on Writing and Life) by Anne Lamott, and now I feel a little bit more reassured.  Plus Simon (looking a little bit frightened at my agitated paper shuffling) has dimmed the lights and lined up music like The Prayer Cycle and Michael Nyman. A few hours of work now, some chamomile tea and a hot bath and then, calm as anything, this, right here, will be the only reminder of me ever being out of sorts. I hope.

tadaima!

Well well. I have spent the last ten minutes or so transfixed by pictures of unicorns. Only because I couldn’t find the photos of the rainbow I took from the Harbour Bridge this afternoon from a moving taxi. Stupid phone camera. I think there might have been one good photo in there too – the great syringe of Sky Tower momentarily radiant with rainbow light. I saw at least three rainbows today. It only occurred to me to photograph the third. Although I shouldn’t have bothered, as it turned out. Anyway, this is by far the best unicorn I have seen tonight.

Maybe it’s actually impossible to capture a rainbow on film. Like singling Bigfoot out for a mugshot or catching a mirage in a bucket or… I know it’s actually not impossible but at the time it did feel like a pretty elusive and unoutsmartable thing to be attempting to apprehend.

Solitary non-leisure travel is a funny thing. I like it, so long as I don’t have to be upright or civil in the red-eye hours. I won’t do that for anyone. (Unless, like this morning, they’re two years old and they sneak into my room and blindside me with their bamboozling cuteness before I am awake enough to understand what I have blearily agreed to.)   

It’s weird and kind of nice being alone for such long stretches of time. Unless it’s bumpy upon landing and I have no one’s hand to hold. That always feels a bit strange. It’s also weird finding something stupidly funny and having no outlet for it outside my own head. No one to validate the thing’s funniness. Which might mean that it’s not funny at all.

Like yesterday at the Auckland baggage carousel there was a taxi man waiting with his little blackboard thingy. He was waiting to pick up someone called A CHIU. Not particularly funny to most, maybe, but it felt like a bit of a missed opportunity to me, all on my own. And, what’s more, laughing uproariously all on your own = crazy.

Some things I will never learn, no matter how much I travel. Like: to cut down on items of hand luggage so as not to get tangled up in them with no sympathetic person beside me to share the burden of my overpacking habit. And to remember to keep a pen on my person at all times.

I don’t know what, exactly, I was planning to do on the flight home tonight. But I accidentally boarded the plane with no pen on my person, and began to get a quite antsy about it. The thing that’s ridiculous though was that even if I had had a pen on my person, all I would have done was sit there and watch hopefully as the drinks trolley advanced slowly down the aisle towards me. Or maybe eavesdrop a little. Or sleep. And it’s not like I was going to write anything of note on a 50-minute flight with about 5cm elbow room on either side of me. Maybe it’s a security blanket thing. Maybe it goes some way to explaining why I have such a giant personal collection of writing instruments.

 Today I thought a bit about how I really quite like Auckland. After all this time, I actually do. I pretty much spent most of my years as a minor there. Now I mostly just pass through. Yesterday the taxi stopped at the Ranfurly Road traffic lights and I looked in at the dairy where we used to sneak away from boarding school to buy 10-packs of cigarettes, back in the day when there was such a thing as 10-packs of cigarettes. Now it’s just strange snatches of memory, usually triggered from the backseat of a moving car, in transit between here and there.

In between meetings this morning I sat editing a Very Serious Document at a cafe down by the water. I thought back to younger me in the Auckland days. I wondered what younger me would have thought of older me. Older me, sitting with a fucked back with too many bags around me. Trying to stare at the words in front of me instead of the sunshowers out on the water. Checking the time. Checking emails without really even reading them. Mentally preparing for the day of glass-walled meetings ahead. Letting my tea go cold.  

the sky in postcards

It didn’t look anything like this today. I am about to drink brandy and warm my feet. Baxo is huddled behind the warm awning of my laptop screen. I am listening to Boomin’ Granny. I used to put it on repeat and let it go all night, just that one song. If you can call it a song? There was something calming about it. I saw you in the check out line – you dropped your coupons – and you were looking fine.

Just before, woefully underclothed at the bus stop, I had time to think about the Blog Explosion. (Funny how when you put capital letters on something it looks that much more noteworthy and like a Real Thing.) It wasn’t really a lofty or particularly probing train of thought. I started by thinking about myself. Which is a hard thing to help. I wish I could. I would like not to think about myself. It would be so much easier if I didn’t wake up with myself every morning. Not that I’m making excuses or anything.

So, an approximation of my bus stop thinking process:

ME: I should write that media release when I get home.

ME: But I should probably write a blog. I haven’t had the inclination to write anything whatsoever in ages.

ME: I’ve got nothing to say. God I’m boring.

ME: Or is it that everything else is boring?

ME: But I have to write something. 

(Picture me now squinting, straining for subject matter, coming up with nothing. A man carrying plastic bags sits down a bit too close to me. The bus at the corner honks louder and longer than is strictly necessary at the daydreaming driver in front, chastising them for their green-turning-arrow-oblivion. Plus it’s cold. It’s getting late. It’s nothing like anything you might see on a postcard.)

From there I wondered about our compulsion to blog. Not just to blog but to digitally proliferate with such fervour that the big ball of matter that is the internet doubles its volume every 11 hours.* 

I get it, most of the time. I get being online. I get why it’s good. I know what I like about it. I stay away from the dumb stuff. The web delights me. It is such a strange monstrous nebulously spongy thing. It’s one big bottomless cyber maw, rejecting nothing. It is revolutionary in big and small ways. It is also a bit revolting.

But the web is just a thing. We put it there, filled it up and made it what it is today (and a mere half of what it will be 11 hours from now). It’s just a macabre over-inflated warped hall-of-mirrors reflection of ourselves. The world’s newest biggest dumping ground, twinkling inside the lit-up husks of our computer screens.

In part the web interests me in the same way garage sales do. The casual but grubby voyeurism. The sheer boundaryless democracy of it. The bargains to be had and the pathos to be felt. Bobbing-headed car-dogs and posies of scented plastic flowers and desiderata plaques mixed in with pristine children’s encyclopedias, unchipped Crown Lynn and art heirlooms that haven’t seen the light outside the hicktown shed for decades.

But going back to me thinking about blogs as I waited for the bus, what I ended up thinking was: why do we do it? What is this human need… This need to chatter away about nothing?

Sometimes in the dark of night I like to personify the web. Metaphoricise it, if that’s even a word. It’s a game I play now that I’ve stopped putting Boomin’ Granny on repeat all night long.

Like: a giant driftnet catching flotsam and jetsam and stuff like the plastic shit you pull off six packs of beer.   

Or a big lucky dip barrel.

 

Or. Actually I’m out of ideas now. You could give me some more, if you felt like it. I would like that. There’s a comments thingy down below which allows you to do that sort of thing.

Now it is brandy time. On that, Lord Byron was enbalmed in a vat of brandy. I am the picture of restraint by comparison.

* A few years ago IBM predicted that by the year 2010 the web would double in size every 11 hours. I’m not sure if it worked out bang on prediction. Someone told me the other day the web now doubles in size every week. But who are you supposed to believe in this day and age? [And, whatever you do, don’t take it from me.] Someone also told me that 1500000000000000000 bytes of new information was posted to the web last year. Well, true or not – and I’m sure it’s probably staggering – a number that big means absolutely nothing to me. It’s like saying infinity plus one. 

separate in a shared space again

So it has been a while. Some things don’t get any easier. Some things get better with time. Perspective is all. Trouble is, sometimes you’ve got to go somewhere far, far away to get it.

Woke up in my own bed again this morning, smiling. It was not the blissful blacked out sleep-of-the-dead I had in the hotel room bed over the weekend, waking like a stunned mullet amidst skyscrapers, remembering almost nothing at all.

I think autumn is coming. Everything feels different, but it’s not just the weather. It must be the season for merciless mouse slaughter. We ate cheerios for dinner.

Whatever you have in front of you is what you make it. Funny how we grow into the cliches. They are comfortable and true. But give me an aphorism over an aneurysm any day.

Laughter is good, and so is the kind of love that gets bigger and bigger as time goes on.

Today I wondered if it was normal for grown ups to have the impulse to just up and run away, just like we did back then (whether or not we acted on the urge). And you know what, I think it is completely normal.

I have a place I think about running away to, and I take my buddy with me. It’s like the desert island thing. I have a picture of it in my head. It is a real place. But for some reason I can’t get there. All the barriers are mental, in all senses of the word.

Anyway, this wasn’t what I was going to write about. In my absence the blog traffic spiked dramatically and it didn’t even have anything to do with mentions of s*x as I had naively anticipated. In my absence the cats got on with their sadistic business and the bills kept coming in the mail.

I made the thing above partly in the Auckland Koru lounge yesterday (the words came from a magazine there, and I happened to have pens on me) and partly the other night when I took a photo of a light in the Town Hall. And tonight I muddled them all together into this. Bungling Photoshop/wrangling with borrowed words is the perfect Monday night distraction. And now I might go right ahead and watch some TV.

night excursions

This is a picture I took on my phone this evening in Martinborough. It’s a little wooden church with the lights on inside, at the very end of sunset.

I just went through my camera photos and discovered a lot of wobbly photos I have taken recently on night excursions. Some of which I will share here, some I will relegate to the recycle bin where they belong. Actually, many of the ones I will share most likely belong in the recycle bin too, but there is something charming about their wobbliness, or I want to keep them as a mental note of the evening.

I like night a lot. I am a night person. Night is weird, though. Everything changes. Perspective changes. In the dead of night things mushroom or snowball or balloon – whatever the word is. Things take on eerie shapes, quite divorced from their innocent daytime form.

Things look nice at night. Lights are nice. Candlelight is nice. Dim rooms are nice. Light against dark is nice. I think partly I take night excursion photos because I like the way things look when I cannot see them properly, and really for no other reason than that. I like things lit up. I like walking when it’s nearly night time and seeing people’s lights come on.  [On that, Ali Smith wrote a really good story about that – the feeling you get when you see the lights in other people’s houses. I did try and find the story, but it’s buried somewhere three-deep and I gave up. I think the story is in the collection called Hotel World.]

I have an old favourite book called Night, by A. Alvarez. It’s really just a study of what night – and darkness – is. I might read it again, now that I have pulled it out, right after I finish reading my field study of melancholy.

I like this quote, from Don DeLillo’s Americana: I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between the beginning and the end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence.

Dark is a bit of a clusterfuck, when you think about it. Maybe it pays not to, most of the time [see earlier post on overthinking].

I didn’t take the No Exit photo. It is a (bad) photo of a photo by Leigh Mitchell Anyon from his Night Series. I had to get the camera on an angle where the light wouldn’t reflect in the glass, so there are a few foreign objects (namely circular black object above right hand barrel) that aren’t in the original.

This is Oriental Parade on a still night.

This is a pretty lightshow at a concert.

This is some kind of fairground attraction.

These are fireworks that look like jellyfish.

This is a full moon.

And these are apartment lights that nearly look like cats’ eyes.

I am not wise

I’m not.

Sometimes I think I am, and then something happens and I realise that I most categorically, definitively, am not.

Sometimes I think I have got it all going on. I surprise myself with supreme grown-upness, just sometimes. And sometimes for months on end I am a picture of profundity and calm.

When actually, all along, I am not wise.

I know a lot of things, but the more I know the more I know I don’t know, as my mother would say, and as my mother’s mother said before her.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I had major deja vu upon cutting my hand open a short while back. How I was teleported back through the years – exactly the same person, doing exactly the same thing, thinking in exactly the same way. I was not wise then, and I am not wise now.

I read something today. Writing is the urge to communicate and be alone at the same time. That has nothing to do with wisdom, as such, but it seemed to go some way towards explaining the strange mental quandary that writing creates.

Today I had a conversation with a friend about his impervious waistcoat. We threw some words around. Like invincible. We could have also gone further and used words like infallible and impregnable, but we had work to get back to.

I wish I had an impervious waistcoat. But I am not impervious, or infallible, or wise.

Don’t think I am being self-deprecating, or fishing for a compliment to make myself feel better. For starters, I don’t feel particularly bad about it (just a fraction contemplative in a wan, shadowy-eyed, Monday-eveningish kind of way). 

And, more to the point, may I be so blunt as to point out that you are not impervious, or infallible or wise either. Oh, unless you are Plato, or Confucius, or some kind of figment of your own imagination. Which – may I also bring to your attention – you are truly not.

So that makes us more or less the same, you and me (give or take all the oceans of difference and strangeness and whatever else that may come between us, should we ever actually come together in the first place).

Now I have consumed a touch too much Tiramisu and we are hoping for rain. It could go either way (the rain, I mean), so we’re not holding our breaths or anything.

There were some other things from the past week… I can’t remember them all now. I was in Auckland. I had a notebook with me, but all I wrote in it was I am not wise. Hence the title of this entry.

Thing # 1:

I cling to books because I cling to life.

We have the upstairs book collection and the downstairs book collection. Bedroom books are the ones that threaten to topple over on me and smother me as I sleep. I live to tell the tale, though.

At any given time I will always have about 22 x more books in my bedside pile than I could possibly read. I will attempt to read somewhere between three and five books simultaneously, poorly, and with the attention span of a sugar-rushing kid, and I will invariably fail (just as I am not wise) to see the finish line with approximately 66.6% of them.

The other day, Simon finished with a book I had also finished with (or dipped in and out of). He said shall I take this downstairs? And a sense of panic and finality came over me.

I should point out that our downstairs bookshelves are stacked three deep (I blame Simon’s vinyl collection for spreading) and I cant find anything any more.

The exact thought that came to me was: I may die and never have a chance to read this book again. This is the last time I will ever read – or even lay my hands on – this book.

I’m not sure where the thought came from, but it knocked me for six, as my father might say. And then I regained my composure and went to bed, clinging to a new book (for as long as it will have me).

The book was Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore, in case you were wondering.

I also just finished reading Paul Auster’s Invisible. I even got up before work one day to finish it. I never get up before anything to finish anything, so let that be an indication of how much I enjoyed it.

I had some other thoughts, over the last week, but they’ll keep (as my father would also say… actually that’s not true – he usually says you’ll keep as a response to some impertinence).

Frankie now has eyes on her (even if they are sympathetic ones) and all of a sudden she has become a different beast, and so have I. More scrutinised, less free.

I need an impervious waistcoat. I need some pearls of wisdom.

here we are again

The day before school starts. Up past my bedtime and have been doing everything but go to bed.

Leaving your everyday life for a spell and then coming back is a funny thing. A good thing, but a funny one.

This is not a photo of today. Just as yesterday’s photo was not a photo of real sheep. We drove back to Wellington today. It wasn’t an aerial view. It was cold and I fell asleep accidentally on the final leg of our journey and then felt too lethargic to unpack the car, but did anyway. 

Funny how the frenzy comes back to you, post holiday. I have started making lists, too long to be achievable but still not long enough to be satisfying. And now I’m hoping wafty soundtrack music will send me the way of the sandman. One dead leg. One over-the-moon cat clambering all over me. More washing than a laundromat. Other cat buried in a clean pile of bed linen. Here we are again.

a tropical facsimile (tricks!)

This is what I do when I get bored on aeroplanes – take photos of magazine ads and try to pass them off as holiday snaps. Actually I have never done it before this. But – tell me – if I hadn’t written all over this – would you accept it as the real thing?