sometimes some strange shit happens

I didn’t really think about it too much at the time. It was momentarily strange and then the day kicked in and it was nothing at all.

Also, I have been dreaming so much lately it feels like I have a sort of underwordly/hall-of-mirrors/phantasmic other life thing going on. It sounds all very exotic when I describe it, but really it’s just a bit weird. Dream déjà vu is dumb because there’s no way of getting to the bottom of it.  

But none of this dream stuff has anything to do with the strange shit. Because the strange shit has been corroborated and dreams really can’t be. They’re just dreams, whatever you care to make of them.

Back in the days when I first started Frankie, I mapped out the plot for maximum melodrama (because I figure if you suck at plot then you can inject a few crescendoes — a showy surface ripple on dead water, if you like — with some carefully placed swooning and a few doses of possibly ironic emotion-overkill).

And let me get one thing straight, just quickly. It wasn’t autobiographical. Well, not particularly autobiographical. But no sooner had I got the plot more or less in order…… it started to resemble, well, life. It was quite disconcerting. I was deliberately outlandish in my imaginings and life still had a way of trumping and belittling my tale. All that stuff about the truth being stranger than fiction and life imitating art I’d hitherto taken for rhetorical cuteness.

To be honest, in my own skewed way I was a bit fucked off at life for doing that to me. Making me look all hackneyed when I thought of it first! (oh, but who’s really going to believe me… and what does it matter now, so many years on…) and a bit callously magpie-ish, ghoulish, even, stealing storylines from the misfortunes of those closest to me (when – honestly – Frankie had nothing whatsoever to do with them in the first place). 

But while all this may have seemed strange and unfair to me once upon a time, this isn’t the strange shit, either.

So, enough. The strange shit, then.

Last Thursday morning it was my birthday. (Actually it was my birthday all day Thursday but it’s the morning we’re concerned with here.) I woke some time around 7 in the morning to a mechanical-sounding rendition of happy birthday. In my semi-somnolent state I thought Simon was holding one of those singing birthday cards over me. (Not an unreasonable thought — those cards are quite popular amongst the seniors in my family — last year my grandparents gave me one that serenaded me with a breathy and somewhat surprising rendition of happy birthday, Mr President… )

But Simon wasn’t holding anything over me. He was as surprised as I was. It was coming from my radio alarm clock.

But even that would only be a mild coincidence if my radio alarm clock had actually ever been tuned to an actual station. It’s not, though, and pretty much never has been. Every morning I wake deliberately to high volume static (some days with a tinge of Polynesia wafting in and out).

I have found the most noxious noise that exists on the airwaves and I have made it my morning birdsong. I don’t think I would ever make it out of bed otherwise.

But on my birthday my radio played happy birthday. A tinny, robotic kind of happy birthday. But it was unmistakeably happy birthday.

Every morning since I have waited for another sign, some more evidence of strange shit afoot. But nothing. Just dream-shaking noise interspersed with fragments of a language I can’t make out.

watching the rain from very far away

Sometimes there are things you think about saying, but it’s best for all concerned that you don’t.

On Monday morning I got up and looked out my window. I was in a state of undress, but that’s beside the point. I could see the rain breaking – a circumscribed, lit-up ladder of it – from far away.

In my state of undress (although that is still beside the point) I thought to myself: all I want to do is write about how the rain looks. A bright long ribbon of a sun shower in the middle of the harbour. So out of sorts with the rest of the greyasgrey sky. The rain moved in a seamless stream of light, striated, a million delicate particles, slightly wind-borne. An ephemeral, milkyish curtain.

But anyway. Then I put my clothes on and got the fuck to work. There’s not much time in life to ruminate on the way a contained outbreak of rain appears, out of nowhere, on the water, of a morning. Ruminating on that sort of shit is not the sort of thing your career counsellor talks about to you when you’re about to sling your rucksack over your shoulder and brave your way in the world.

Sort of like how the cautionary tale as a wet-behind-the-ears arts student back in the day was that all the best philosophy students made the best milkmen&women.

Tonight I have been thinking about commerce and the written word. Because I have to. It makes me wretched in a lot of ways. But, still, like I said, I have to.

Some other things I thought about on this funny old rollercoaster of a funny old week:

How the meek shall not inherit the earth. [But only in an abstract way. I wasn’t thinking about the plight of shy aliens overtaking our watery planet or anything.]

How staying at home and doing nothing is the new chicken soup for the soul. [Ugh. It felt a bit gross even writing that, the chicken soup/soul part, but you know what I mean. Or you don’t.]

How I have an overwhelming desire to live outlandishly outside my means. [Why is that? And why is it that I’m so convinced that I would be (and sort of am) completely brilliant at it.]

How I am not a good dancer. Maybe because I hardly ever do it any more. Maybe you just become shit at the things you forget about.

How I shouldn’t drunk poetry-write. Sort of like obsessed jilted lovers shouldn’t drunk-dial. [Oh well, at least I’ve only got myself and some typed babble to deal with in the morning – it’s not like a restraining order or anything.]

Tomorrow is Friday. Fridays never lose their sweet, sweet charm.

I am looking forward to Waiting for Godot in June or July or whenever it is. One day I am going to memorise the entire script, just because I can. I am going to sit inside a window with a view of the water, waiting for the delicate, passing magic of sun showers, and commit Godot to memory.

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.

make it okay, II

Part 2 of the dredged up make it okay files. Not exactly what you’d call immensely readable, layout wise.

At times like these a bit of copy/paste comes works a treat. The non-squinty version bunged below:

my eyes are bright with tears & runway lights
I was a child bride, the little fish you should have thrown back. 
But I begged you to keep me. So you watched over me like an old sage, 
saw my hips fill out, my eyes bulge at the slippery oyster that was the world.
I adored you; you taught me everything I knew. You are wise & beautiful 
like an ancient axolotl. 
Your skin has worn more days than I could ever imagine. 
You showed me a person I could become, pointed her out & said: 
   the world is but a succession of tomorrows. 
   this could be you. 
   do you like the look of her?
    & I said yes, yes. I liked the look of her, 
    this unformed mannequin 
    giddy with potential’s aphrodisiac.
I am old now. Well, older. Those were heady days. 
After the day of the runway lights, we never met again. I saw your name 
on the divorce papers. Our lawyers met over boozy lunches 
& orchestrated our undoing. Our hearts filled with red tape.
I was a slip of a thing, your protégée. You saw something in me. 
I was unschooled in the ways of love & you were patient with me. 
I grew hungry for your gaze. & somewhere in it all I became a woman.
I lay beside you every night & thanked the Lord for the gift 
of your gnarled body.
I loved every one of your deformities, touched upon your sores lightly. 
I blossomed. 
You took me to the end of the pier & made me look at the ocean.
You said:  it is time.
   I do not have the right to keep you. 
   the future is bright; it beckons you.
 This was news to me. We passed through the fairground. I threw balls 
  into the stunned open mouths of painted clowns & did my best 
  to understand your meaning. I won a stuffed donkey 
  & gave it your name.
 My tears could have filled many thimbles; they were the ocean in miniature.

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?

sky backdrop poem [aka untitled]

Funny stuff starts to happen in my head when committing to longer pieces of writing after a significant hiatus. Sort of like my brain retraining or entering a different mode.

Tonight’s example. I find it odd when characters of my own making turn into casual poets, and then sometimes I forget which character is responsible for the poem* (for example they could be characters that don’t even know each other or even exist within the same piece of writing). Or maybe I’m just writing the poem for some respite from them, half in character, half me. It’s kind of like research (at least that’s what I tell myself) or character scoping, all this stuff that doesn’t actually make it to the page.

That sounds totally schizophrenic, probably.

*eg:

my pulverised, dirty, plastic-bagged aorta

So, in my last post I talked about the thing in the gutter that reminded me of an aorta every morning on my way to work.

Today, being the Saturday of a long weekend, we went for a walk and I picked up the aorta thing. This is it. It actually looks quite revolting. It’s some sort of rock, reddish, sort of the texture and colour of some median strips. Or maybe I am making that up.

I stuck it in my bag as we made our way around town. It broke a bit. Which means it’s a friable kind of rock.

We did all sorts of stuff in town, and if it wasn’t time for my afternoon nap right now I would go into some detail. We listened to bells playing, wandered around, bought books, walked and walked, caught the bus, chatted about Cuba, got underwhelmed by some art. It was fun. I haven’t had a weekend town excursion in a while. It almost made me forget the A- minus I just received on my final assignment.

Admittedly, on closer inspection and in captivity, my aorta looks more like dogshit. Some things just don’t stand up to scrutiny. Some things probably aren’t best represented inside a plastic bag.

Seeing something in nothing and nothing in something and then sometimes seeing nothing at all

3.11am and I can’t sleep. And now I’m up I’m going through my list of things to do (as you do at 3.11 in the morning) and I can’t decide where to start. I can (and do) sit (cross-legged) staring at a mostly blank browser for minutes at a time, immobilised by enormity of The List, achieving nothing at all. For example, it is now 3.17am. And I can’t tell you what went on in the last six minutes, apart from this.

And then there are considerations like do I start the day early? Or do I do something sleep-inducing, like read from my textbook? Most of the time I end up doing something that isn’t on The List, like this, or contemplating turning on the television but not actually getting around to it. It’d mostly be home shopping at this hour, anyway.

What I was going to write about was this: seeing things, or thinking that you do. Or the tricks the mind can play. Or the power of the imagination. Or all of the above, interchangeably, not to put too fine a point on it…

I can’t say I have ever seen the Virgin Mary in the window of a passing car or a piece of burnt toast. There are often times when, from far away, my eyes misread things and then the image corrects itself, assumes its true form, upon closer inspection. I’m trying to think of an example. Well, like a mirage, or the shimmer in the distance on a country road on a hot day. The problem with those examples though is that, upon closer inspection, there’s nothing actually there.

The morning of the tsunami I read this article about the apparition of the Virgin Mary on a church wall in Samoa (see image, far right), shaped like a Coca Cola bottle. They had been praying en masse for a safe switch to driving on the LHS of the road, and Mother Mary came to them. Some would say it’s nothing more than rust and dirty rainwater (especially if you see Mary of the Dirty Rainwater through a wider lens, like here). I don’t mean to sound skeptical; that’s not my main aim here.

What I’m interested in is the meaning we invest in things. The things we see when others see nothing at all, and vice versa. We attempt to find meaning in the world around us (although whether we actually find it or not is another matter). And we have to start somewhere. The meaning has to be constructed somehow. Sometimes it’s the littlest things we embue with the greatest meaning. Sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees. Sometimes we see nothing at all in the biggest things and miss the big picture entirely.

I probably shouldn’t make such sweeping generalisations so early in the morning. When I say we, what I should really say is I.

Shit. It is now 4.01.

Figure 2 (above) is a picture of the Virgin Mary on a bridge. It looks more like a giant coffee bean, if you ask me. Although, granted, its outline does bear some resemblance to Our Lady of Guadalupe (below).

What I see in things like the Samoan Mary of the Rust Stain is living examples of life’s twisted little ironies. There they were praying for road safety, Mary shows up and next thing they’re hit by a tidal wave.

I wonder what kind of meaning people will invest in her sudden appearance in the aftermath of it all. Did she reveal herself as a warning of what was to come, perhaps?

Speaking of the tsunami and things assuming meaning (and also things altering meaning, over time, given that meaning in many things is in no way fixed)… A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post and a sort-of-poem (also in the middle of the night) while looking out my bedroom window at the harbour. It started out: There will not be a tsunami… And there wasn’t, not here. Although there were warnings that there might be. No one ran for the hills, though, and at 10.41am that morning nothing happened.

Of course, my writing that and then an actual tsunami taking place somewhere in the world is purely coincidental, or just downright unrelated. Although I do often find some, um, amusement (for want of a better word) in instances where life seems to imitate (or even just momentarily reference) art, where truth is stranger or more interesting than fiction.

Within reason, and as long as we’re not hurting anyone in doing it, I guess we’re free to make the world around us mean whatever we want it to. The trouble starts when we suppose that the meanings that we (mostly subjectively) derive are absolute or universal, or when we are so at a variance with the world around us, so solipsistic, that we create meaning for the world at large and assume it to be unequivocally true. 

Like when (and I’m tempted to wake Si here to get the details, although I won’t) Brian Wilson was writing Smile and there was some sort of fire song, and then there was a fire in the town, and he was wracked with guilt because his song was the reason for the fire. That’s not a very good explanation of how things went, but it’s late (or early).

Or, when (and again I don’t have full details available to me without waking Simon) a frightened Elton John made a trans-Atlantic phone call in the middle of the night to his manager, asking him to stop the storm that raged outside his hotel room.

Imagine having that kind of power. Just think. The imagination is powerful. And now my head hurts from thinking when I should have just been doing something peaceful like folding the laundry.

Jesus (or should I say Mary?) it’s 4.54 and the frickin birds are up.

Speaking of Brian Wilson and the fire story, and to finish, here’s a drawing of Brian Wilson the fireman, by Matt Couper (given to Simon for his 33rd birthday. Which reminds me, I really must get around to getting it framed).

strange dreams

I don’t remember too much about learning to write stories as a kid, but what I do remember is being told on several occasions not to write about dreams. Especially not to end a story and then I woke up and realised it was all a dream.

Seems like a bit of a shame, really, when that’s where all the good stuff happens.

Another piece of writing advice I recall (not as a kid, though – by this point I was still giving the whole storywriting caper a crack well into adulthood) is you can’t introduce a gun and not fire it.

Which seems to be the opposite of real life, where you’re not supposed to have a gun in the first place, but if you do you’re probably best not to fire it. Or something like that. Unless it’s the season for preying upon small animals, of course.

In the course of my working day today, I spoke – actually spoke – twice. Sure, I did a lot of electronic liaising. But I saw no one and spoke twice. Not counting talking to the cats. I never even left the house, and now that I look down and see what I am wearing, I realise that I am actually still in my pyjamas, with a glass of wine in hand, at 8.56pm on a Thursday.

My point is – when I finally get to it – that I know why I leave the house. All day today last night’s dreams hounded me. There were so many of them, and they were all intricate and drawn out. There was nothing particularly sinister about this batch of nocturnal defragmentations, but they were still sort of oppressive. Hard to shake off and sticky, like those biddybid things that get caught in your clothes and the cats’ underbellies when they’ve been out roving in long grasses.

I dreamed I fucked up the work project I am currently working on (an understandable dream, because it could easily happen in real life); I dreamed I went on a factory tour; I dreamed I babysat a bunch of kids in a swampy garden and wore the mother’s purple feather earrings and watched TV; I dreamed I went into an antique store and there was all this stuff I wanted to buy, including a rough painting of a pear, which was $1000, and by the time I went back to buy it someone else had bought it.

I dreamed Si&I lived in Petone and it was like a bubble where no one ever needed to leave Petone. Even the ads on TV (in my dream) were about Petone. Petone was all there was. I’m pretty sure the antique store with the pear painting was also in Petone.

I dreamed I was sitting at a board table and the girl opposite me kept fawning over her giant blingy engagement ring. Some of the stones had fallen out and it looked like it had come out of a Christmas cracker. Actually it looked a bit like my real life engagement ring, only the cheap-arse cartoon version of it.

I dreamed they were playing Muzak really loud at work. It was pristine with lots of metal room dividers and they’d implemented a clear desk policy/paperless office scenario which was making me highly uncomfortable. Come to think of it, it was like a really upmarket call centre. I might have even had a headset.

And there is no real conclusion to any of this, other than and then I woke up and realised it was a dream. But then the dreams went and seeped into everything and have got me all disoriented.

Sweet Mary of the Coast

I loved her from the minute I laid eyes on her, always fleetingly, but I never understood her. I think that’s why I loved her. She never seemed to fit quite right. I never knew how she got there.

But sure enough there she always is – still – demure, forever the suppliant, every time we hit the road out of town. Either with her  halo aglow in the rush-hour gloaming or otherwise radiating that supreme whiteness, stark against whatever seasonal sky.

(And what is she made out off to be so radiatingly white, anyway – the stuff boats are made out of? rock? soap? alabaster? pumice or limestone? mdf?)

Today I tried to get a bit closer to her. I was doing some consulting work up the coast and figured I wouldn’t rush immediately back to my office in the big smoke. I was going to find her. For some reason I even thought about smoking a cigarette. Although I didn’t (mainly because I don’t smoke).

I found the faded green heritage sign that said STATUE OF OUR LADY and thought I was on the right track. I drove up a hill and paused at the crude PRIVATE DRIVEWAY sign halfway up. But why would they have a public sign pointing to a private driveway, I thought to myself, and drove on undeterred. Past a housebus with its own awning/porch sort of set-up, up a windy gravel road. Feeling somewhat intrepid and even a little like a detective (I don’t get out of the city much).

The dead end I came upon featured a house, a tethered pitbull (or something equally ferocious-looking but actually quite cute) and a squealy fuck-off alarm (and I know this because I set it off).

I didn’t even get a good look at Mary, although I could see the promising flicker of her glorious whiteness beyond a thicket of trees. The dog looked at me like it was actually quite pleased to see me. Either that or it was just thinking here we go again.

Anyway, the story doesn’t go much further than this. I drove away, back into town, even more hellbent on my own personal myth of Mary, elusive as ever.

(It turns out that she can only be visited via a walking track. I’ll be back.

Also, and by the way, she has been there since 1958, in case you were wondering.)