Ngawi

On Saturday we drove to Martinborough to see the B52s and ended up in Ngawi. We didn’t get lost, but gale force winds put the kaibosh on the concert. I’d never been to Ngawi before. I’d never even heard of Ngawi before. I was actually probably more excited about seeing Ngawi than I was about the concert.

Some stuff I learnt about Ngawi tonight (thank you, internet):

Its claim to fame is that it has more bulldozers per head of population (population unknown, at least by Wikipedia) than anywhere else in the universe. It is remote, foreboding, exposed and its weather can be fairly gross. It is home to fur seals, a shitload of fish and paua. There is a bach called The Hilton and a Shetland pony I meant to photograph but couldn’t find on the return trip.

The Tucka Box sells double D batteries, packets of Maggi onion soup, fishing tackle, Freddos (although Simon ate mine, even though I hadn’t given him permission), cans of pear halves, reduced cream, mini fishing rods, Trumpets, $1 mixtures (the contents of which would have come to at least $1.40 in the city), and that was only the stuff we could see behind the Perspex counter at eye level.

Good times all round. Nothing like an impromptu adventure.

Nothing like getting out of the city and chortling disdainfully to yourself at the sheer patheticness of your big city problems. And then you get back over the Rimutakas, some time around nightfall, and your big city problems come bounding back to you, needy and huge and slobbery, with wide guilt-inducing eyes, like hungry puppies left in kennels for the weekend.

remembering old views

This is the cabbage tree outside my bedroom when I was a teenager. I found it – and the poem – today when I was tidying up. I say tidying up but really I was just rummaging, because nothing got tidied.

I was pretty obsessed with this cabbage tree. It was my adolescent talisman for a while there. I like this poem a lot, too. My scanner cut off some of the final letters on the words…

perfection

dusk (or maybe it’s day and I just haven’t joined up my a properly)

God, we smoked a lot of cigarettes sitting out on that concrete verandah (underneath a boys’ domitory) looking out at that cabbage tree.

When I opened up the notebooks today they smelt old, all shut up and cupboardy. Which is because they are old. A lot of time has passed, I guess. That’s probably what happened.

I’m not so much interested in going back through the notebooks and journals and reading over what I have written. When I do, usually by accident (i.e. when my eyes connect inadvertently with a line and before I know it they are being pulled along against their/my will), I’m taken over by a sort of yucky vertigo and have to snap myself out of it.

I’m more interested in the process now. In the doodles and the general themes/tenor of my preoccupations… not in the actual words themselves.

This is a photo from my bedroom window in England in 1996 (also rescued from a notebook this afternoon).

I saw a lot of snow from this window. It was often dark. I remember I was quite often lonely (but tolerably so) when I looked out of this window. But then again we also spent a lot of time drinking gin and jumping on the bed (directly underneath the window) and crawling on the roof (directly outside the window) and listening to jazz, loudly, so it was not all loneliness.

a room with a view

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I always made the excuse that I needed a room with a view in order to be able to write.

A view of water would score top points and amount to the best possible writing. I couldn’t not be a genius writer if I was penning something while looking out on the sea/an expanse of water, preferably not man-made (although man-made still got more points than no water at all). An elevated vantage point got extra points. Easier to do eye of god closer to the heavens, surely. Easier to be wise and witty looking down.

One of my other impossible stipulations was that I needed a writing space. Not just a desk. It had to be a desk with a view. But not only that. It had to be an undefiled area used for no other purpose than the higher purpose of writing. A virgin realm, used by nothing and no one else. No paying of bills. No sharing. A writing shrine.

(Fuck……. I did it again. This post went on, sort of a then and now picture, and then culminated in a poem, written about the view from my bedroom window, featured above. Fuck it all. Next time I will hit save compulsively. Or not type straight into a blog tool and hope for the best. But maybe I learn something about myself every time I write a mini essay and inadvertently delete it.)

The poem doesn’t mean much without my preamble. But I guess poems shouldn’t really have preamble, or vague apologies preceding them. I’m sorry but, I’m sorry but I will type it out once more.

16.09.09

There will not be a tsunami,

not with the harbour.

I can see the broken ribbon of shorelights

from the bedroom window

& flat chunks of blue in the daytime.

I can see the planes fly in,

depending on the chosen descent,

depending on the weather.

 

There may be an earthquake;

there will be many.

We live on a faultline in an old wooden house.

Even a spincycle vibrates in the piles

& from within the mattress.

 

We live in convenience with headphones and blinds

& I have blutacked freestanding objects to their surfaces

in vain, as a gesture

to our domestic god,

as an empty precaution,

as a mindful civilian.

 

Sometimes things smash & paintings twist

in the night. Some nights

the harbour lights

are hidden.

pretty windows (part II)

I love these windows. They only reveal their true loveliness at night. They remind me of port holes on a ship.

My father used to stay two doors down when he worked in Wellington for a while, and it’s just down the road from my brother and his girlfriend’s place, and it’s a short stroll from my work. So, lots of landmarks, but that’s not the point.

Last night on the way back from town I had to pull over the car on yellow lines to take this photo. Unfortunately it’s taken with my phone, so it’s pretty shit. Sometimes I take the long way home (the scenic window tour) just to catch a glimpse of them.

My passenger didn’t think too much of this, although he quietly humoured me, after saying something about me being a freak.

I can’t help it: I like windows.

Windows

This is the building down a door or so down from my work. I pass it every school day. It’s one of the things I remark upon to myself about quite often, usually as I’m standing at the pedestrian crossing, usually running late.

If it’s sunny the windows gleam; if it’s not they don’t.