my new old piano

This is my new old piano. I am worse at it now than I ever was. I played some Eastenders and The Incredible Hulk theme song tonight. And a little bit of Tiffany. It sounded bad but felt quite good.

It’s unlikely I’ll report much here right now. Listening to Enigma and the weather with the doors open. It’s all very atmospheric. Picture diaphanous curtains flapping, a lot of lamplight and some whispering in sham Latin/pre-coital French and you get the picture. Finishing my glass of wine before bed on a Monday night. This evening’s to-do list never got done.

This all goes out to LP and Mr America. I’ve been promising them photos from afar for ages.

New old things are awesome. I guess it’s all about the making new. Maybe Enigma is starting to addle my brain.

 

this strung-out dinosaur

This dinosaur came to me all the way from a paper tablecloth in New Hampshire this week. It was in my inbox on Monday morning when I got to work, along with this message:

I'm in New Hampshire at a restaurant waiting for my food to come
and LP and I discovered you can draw on the tablecloths,
so I drew you a picture of a T-Rex in a top hat
looking strung out giving someone flowers.
We have pizza and nachos coming.
I'm hungry.
Happy Monday my dear sister,
Love,
James xoxoxo
[Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry]

Line breaks my own (for some reason the lines wouldn’t recognise the right margin or wrap). James turns 26 tomorrow. This strung-out dinosaur is now my wallpaper.

Today I worked from home. It was highly productive. Then I cooked and watched TV. I just finished studying for the year. This evening I thought vaguely about two writing starting points. One is a sort of fable called the unfortunate snowball and the other is a (slightly epic) narrative poem about a photocopier (and a girl, but the photocopier is pretty much the central character).

But it’s quite nice not doing anything about anything. It’s quite nice just wandering from room to room going: shit, I live here. I even have my own pantry now. I’ve never had my own pantry before. Or two dish drawers.

All day today I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene from The Great Gatsby where Gatsby throws his shirts everywhere for Daisy’s benefit.

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

I thought of this today as I fought the urge to go on Trade Me and buy shit just because. And again as I deleted today’s 1-Day Special email, half afraid that if I opened it I’d end up with some new thing. I think I pretty much bought a painting online in my sleep once. I was quite strung out, and it was very late, and I didn’t remember it in the morning.

I find it hard to want less rather than more. It’s like I’m just wired to want the next thing. Like there’s always something more that I need. Like I think I would be happier if I had a bunch of new shirts I could fling around the room just because.

But no, no new shirts. I just did the new-house budget and new shirts are off-limits. Good thing I have more shirts than a human being could ever need (and when I say shirts I don’t actually mean shirts, I’m just using them as a stand-in — metaphorically, like — for pretty much everything in the world there is to acquire… apart from boats and jacuzzis and stuff).

I’m listening to the tail end of last night’s playlist from the Blog on the Tracks Ladies’ Night at Bats. In the last half hour or so I’ve had Peaches, Patti Smith, Madonna, Liz Phair, Grace Jones, Headless Chickens, Aimee Mann… and some others. I can’t remember now.

Bed.

my desk

Getting started is the hardest part. I find that with pretty much everything.

I have finally set up my desk. This is it. I haven’t sat at this desk for seven or so years. It has been lovingly kept, though. And it’s in a much better state now than it was in the Mt Vic days when it took up a third of my bedroom.

In the Mt Vic room there was a bed and a desk and a wardrobe and a passage as wide as a 30 cm ruler in between the desk and the bed and the door, and most of the 30 cm gap was stacked with books, so I sort of had to leapfrog my way out into the hallway using whatever clear floor space I could find.

And I slept with the one sash window wide open in most weather and all seasons. I piled an igloo of duvets on top of me to stay warm with the open window right by my head as I slept. Funny times. Strange funny, I mean.

It feels good to have everything set up now, desk-wise. I feel more like myself or something. Now I just need to conquer my new supermarket disorientation and time the walk to work a bit better and I’ll be just fine. Just fine.

safety, danger and a muse in slippers

It’s been a while. I probably wouldn’t make a very good correspondent in times of upheaval, disharmony or even minor crisis. 

If I had a muse (s)he would probably be wearing slippers and drinking peppermint tea. And we’d probably contemplate things like paint charts and lamb shank slowcooking techniques more than we would actually do anything actually worthy of having a muse in the first place. I would probably want her/him to massage my feet for a bit and then I would play Bejeweled whilst lamenting to her/him about my mental congestion and floating sense of psychic displacement.

I need everything to be just so in the lead-up to non-work writing. Just so in my head, I mean. Which sometimes necessitates a strategically arranged outward state, and sometimes not. My comfort zone needs to be clearly demarcated. I need to be able to see the floor. Ideally, Venus will be in the house of Mars and it will also be raining, but only slightly. Just the merest drizzle. A hint of of mist, and preferably around nightfall.

I always did want to be a spy though. Not a correspondent, so much (the idea of journalism soured for me in about 1994, round about the time the then Herald Tribune published my first, um, news story — a few lines on a major weekend heist in the heart of Hastings — two plastic chairs and a length of hose stolen from outside a state house on Heretaunga Street). But apparently I wouldn’t be very good at being a spy, either. 

This (above) is what our books looked like a couple of days ago. I estimate we have jettisoned about 7% of the whole lot. It was a start. I can mostly see the floor now. In most rooms, at least.

Speaking of comfort zones, on the bus home tonight I was reading an article about Technology and Distraction. Long story (well, not the story itself but where I ended up going with it in my head… all the strange little cul-de-sacs of thought I kept tripping into/snagging my brain on), but it got me thinking about humans as downy pink creatures perpetually stuck between states of danger and reward, barricading themselves against one and clambering after the other. And I thought about how that really sums everything up. How that’s us. The pleasure and pain thing. The need for shelter and ringfencing and cups of (peppermint) tea, etc.

My house moving disorientation is not quite so alarming now. It might have something to do with finally having all those fucking books out of the way. It’s sort of exposed and sickmaking when you strip your shell away and stand back and take in all the rubble of your life strewn in contextless piles. I don’t really like it. It makes me feel pink and downy, a bit startled and bung and King Lear-ish. I don’t plan to move again anytime soon. 

There were all sorts of things I was going to write about between then and now. Like the boy on the bus drawing with his finger in the condensation, and how the toes of my stockings were wet all day. And some other stuff. But part of the reason I’d make a shit spy is that I have a slippery-at-best grasp on my short term memory. And so I don’t remember any of that stuff now. I used to write things down as I thought of them but now that’s too much like hard work and another thing to always be carrying on my person.

After I thought about safety/danger/pleasure/pain/damage/repair/shelter/exposure on my way home, I got this stuck in my head, from The Two Fires by Margaret Atwood:

Two fires in-
formed me,
(each refuge fails
us; each danger
becomes a haven)
left charred marks
now around which I
try to grow

That’s [part of] one of my all-time favourite poems. I wanted to have that bit at the start of The Linoleum Room but we figured it was worth more than every paltry royalty cheque scraped together. Also I didn’t know how to go about asking. I did try. That was back in the days before Twitter, though, and now Margaret Atwood is my Twitter mate. So if I had my time again, in 2010, I could just go: @MargaretAtwood can you hook me up?

sweet lady breakneck

I’m starting to miss my notebooks and scrapbooks. Even though through the years I have toyed with the idea of torching them in a very melodramatic fashion, maybe dancing barefoot in their ashes at sundown.  Or maybe shredding them with my bare hands and flinging them off very high buildings so that the confetti of my wrenched/wretched soul rained down in a million scattered spider-written particles upon the city far far below.

Ha. How’s that for dramatic. I’m just kidding though, sort of. If I did away with them I wouldn’t have stuff like this, or even this, to look back on with a sense of mystification or to question my sanity over. And how much fun would that be. (I’d say not much at all, probably, if I’m allowed to answer my own rhetorical question.)

I fossicked about for a bit tonight to try and find anything at all that might assuage my sudden scrapbook-longing. Just some random scribbles or notes, or anything, really. I did find a pencil drawing of Simon that I did about eight years ago. It doesn’t really look anything like him. Not because he has changed dramatically in appearance in that time, I’m guessing, but because it never looked anything like him. 

I found part of a, um, I don’t know – noncommittal vignette? – called HERO SLAYS NINJA (don’t ask), some work notes, a mean half-poem entitled I liked you better when you hated yourself (don’t ask), a very long and quite accurate description of one of my cats, some bills, a $100 voucher (bonus) and some promotional fridge magnets.

I still felt a bit sad, even after finding all these aforementioned treasures. It’s not the same as my giant stack of ancient cloth-bound notebooks. One day soon, hopefully, I will be reunited with them. And then my sporadic journal-excerpt plunderings/exhumations/postings may resume.

But rather than dwell on my absent paper collection this evening I set about and made sweet Lady Breakneck.

*.*.*.*.*

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.

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. 

thirteen images from the dark land

Today it felt like winter. I haven’t felt much like writing. I think about Frankie every morning. I think about what to wear and whether to bother with makeup. I think about not much. I get downstairs, unmade up but presentable enough. Sylvie is usually sleeping on the newspaper on the kitchen table, curled up like a tiny woodland creature.

I consult my phone to work out my appointments for the day. A clear-ish schedule bodes well lately. It’s the season for tucking my feet under my desk. Big meetings make me a bit wide-eyed at the moment. They make me feel like maybe I should have bothered with makeup (if only I’d consulted my phone for my daily schedule before making the sometimes arbitrary call on facepaint).

In the weekend we biffed my broken 12 year-old filing cabinet. It had been sitting in our garden shed since forever, its runners buckled and awry, all the drop-files behaving badly, like malfunctioning coathangers or tipsy partygoers, impersonating vertical.

I rescued a lot of notes. I don’t even mean halfway practical lecture notes or cutesy school exercise books. I mean mind-boggling stuff like this.

I mean notes as old as – or older than – the filing cabinet itself. Maybe they should have been given up over the edge of the mucky Happy Valley precipice along with the warped beige husk of my old office storage system. There’s got to be some sort of catharsis in that, surely. (Like burning love letters in a metal drum at dusk once it’s become clear that the paper has outlived — for one person, at least — the very emotion that once upon a time brought the paper to life).

But they wouldn’t make such a satisfying metallic smacking sound as they hit rock bottom. They’d probably waft away halfheartedly on a putrid breeze. They’d snag themselves limply on the wire fence barricades, ensnared along with all the city’s forgotten grocery bags, just as pitifully diaphanous and flappy.

So, no, I didn’t sacrifice my bundle of notes to a new life of decomposition, unlikely bedfellows of whiteware and disposable nappies and hopelessly three-dimensional television sets. Instead I sat cross-legged in bed in the very early hours of the morning some days ago and attempted to type them out. It wasn’t that I wanted to preserve them. I just wanted to maybe get a handle on what the fuck they might have meant. To cut a long story short, I didn’t work out what the fuck they meant. I actually called it quits about halfway through the task (because I wanted to preserve myself).

But I did find some interesting stuff. Like this. Not some Rorschach experiment but my first forays down the Girl Cat path.

And some oblique things that may or may not have been intended as poems, like this:

  

dumb

you say words are over as soon
as we say them
& when we write them
the words are dead
before we even begin

you say
look at the pause
at the end of the line
it is the end of the line
you say
look at the way the dark print
swims
in spaces
all around it there are spaces
that it cannot fill

we spill over
into the drumless beat
of sleep
& silence

I keep a box of words
under my pillow    you
keep a burr of quiet
on the tip of my tongue

you say
a page is
a cage that catches
nothing but itself
in its own hook
of letters

you say
this room
is hollow but
for our bodies
which will soon
be in some other room

& that none of the rooms
will remember us

but i only know this language

it is a driftnet
catching fireflies
sometimes

it is an umbrella of
echoes & reflections

it stands between
me &
the sky

you have made
it into an origami heart
you have made
the surgery 2dimensional
& painless

& now we do not feel
anything we say
to each other we
don’t say
anything we feel
to each other

we live in the same city     one day

we will live in different cities
& the cities will not remember us

I imagine one day
we will live in different languages
rendered dumb
with this

whatever this is
so unsummupable, so enduringly papery
 

sulk music & excavations

I was going to take a photo of every Bic and Zippo lighter I have uncovered in this latest anthropological box-and-dust experiment.

I found a lighter for just about every colour of the rainbow (and there were also some in colours that aren’t even in the rainbow). I think I must have packed them all, sensibly, having no use for them. Apart from the giant one I use to light the gas oven, I mean, which doesn’t count due to the fact that it serves an almost daily purpose.

Now we’re living leanly and the floorboards gleam. The other night, excavating, sitting in slippers amongst boxes of crap, I remembered walking around Pompeii years ago and marvelling at perished villages and artefacts. The moulded facsimiles of freaked-looking, open-mouthed people, filled in from the spaces they left in the lava when their bodies disintegrated.

As charmingly or yawn-inducingly morbid as this may be, I sat there, deciding whether to hold onto a card from someone whose face I can no longer strainingly conjure, and who I would probably fail to recognise now even if I got stuck with them in an elevator. I imagined being entombed right there where I sat, with the bitsy carnage of our lives strewn around us, all disrepair (and no will or succession plan to speak of). It wasn’t a distressing thought or anything. It was actually quite perfunctory [our street is superimposed cleverly on a faultline, so I guess I always keep the crumbling house possibility tucked somewhere at the back of my mind; it’s a fairly practical consideration].

All I thought was: I wonder what all this (junk) would say about me if I was discovered like this in years to come. I didn’t get much further than that. It’s a pretty impossible question to answer, to be fair.

Then I got distracted by how many pens and pencils and writing and drawing instruments we have. I tested them all and threw out about 30.

This is what remains of my savage pen culling. I took lots of photos because I was trying to find the best angle and setting to convey just how many pens we have. To get across what pen hedonists we are. 

Who on earth needs this many writing instruments?? [My hand cramps up when I write more than a shopping list, FFS.] But still I can’t bring myself to throw them out. What if one day there is a shortage of pens? What if one day I regretted throwing away perfectly good pens and pencils with reckless abandon? The shame of it.

Oh and by the way, now I am listening to sulk music. I’m not even going to tell you what. It’s sulk music of the for no particular reason just because variety. I don’t know if it makes things better or worse. Self-indulgence is sort of like emotional mildew or dry rot, but it’s so fleetingly, temptingly, achingly bittersweet. I’ll only give it until the end of the album. Then my socks are up and my ideas bucked up. 

something tells me you would’ve taken off without me

Another thing I found the other day in the papery region of our house: some of the comic cards I used to make. Hopefully you can read the captions from here.

If not:

All right, all right. I love you kid.

Television… That and a booster shot of HOPE. Everything’s going to be fine.

Something tells me you would’ve taken off without me.

That was graceful… honey? Are you all right?

I felt your pain through our psychic rapport and —

I have kept these quite a long time. They’re a combination of card, cut-up comics, Duraseal and Scandinavian textile design, transported in cardboard boxes all the way from Stockholm and kept all this time.

I’m listening to the new National album, just back from Regina Spektor. My hair is so straight and sleek and unboofy I’m struggling to recognise it as my own (picture Marge Simpson morphing into Jessica Simpson and trying to logically explain to herself the physical transformation, not to mention account for the sudden lack of follicular volume…). 

I mentioned the kumara thing last time. Here’s what I meant:

I had today off. I don’t want to go to bed, because as soon as I do, my day off is no longer. Like I imagined the whole thing. I didn’t, though. I really didn’t. As pointless as it all might have been (magazines and Maltesers in bed), I wouldn’t change a thing.