Have I left my home just to whine in this microphone?

The sound of the alarm hammering my ears in, the morning comes into focus and there is a pain in my side starting at my left shoulder, my breath rasps painfully with the rise and fall of my chest and my eyes sting. I roll over onto my left side and the pain builds to bursting point.


Cancer?


Stroke?


Am I having a heart attack?


At 6.30 in the morning the thought of serious illness makes me smile, it brings to mind the image of a swimming pool filled with medical certificates, dates stretching from here to eternity and I'm doing backstroke Scrooge McDuck style.

Happy... like a pig in shit.

urbs: both sub and ex+b

I have an upset stomach... they should never have made throat lozenges with ibuprofen in them... please only use as directed or you may upset your stomach... the last thing you want to get on the wrong side of is your guts because as they say:

"Hell hath no fury like a stomach scorned"


seriously

Ain't it the truth?

If I were the thinking man's Brittany Spears things would be very different around here let me tell you!

A head full of white light behind the wheel... everyone needs to go a little nuts every once in a while.

Twilight... the last time I'd looked at the clock it was midday, only minutes ago (or so I thought)... my head humming, my limbs like distilled water running hot with electrical charge... the world in my laptop, the organised grid pattern of reports, a wire frame tunnel like something out of Tron... burning hot, my fingers dancing over the keys, flying through the pile of reports untouched... and then it happened.


I spaced... how long have I been sitting here? What time was it? Did I have any cigarettes left? Links in the chain of questions pulling taut as the draw-bridge drew closed behind my eyes severing continuity... time pulling in all directions at once and I can't lay the day out in sequence. There is no coffee on the stove. I eat another pill, crushing it up on my back teeth and sucking it down with water straight from the tap... I'm lost, floating and the colours of my kitchen pulse neon.


A phone rings somewhere in the distance... The Stooges snake waves of feedback guitar out of my stereo speakers and mix with the strangeness in my head. My body clock is driving into the future at warp speed with the hour hand swinging dangerously fast in arcs of lost time round and round and round and round and... I am behind the wheel of my car driving up the hill.


Stop to get some smokes and a bottle of orange juice.


A magpie on the road in front of me... a flash of white hot hatred and the chase is on... I am in no state to question my motives, I can barely catch hold of my thoughts long enough to understand what I am saying... the magpie is staring at me, not moving... FUCKER... I speed up, the bird won't budge... shift gear... CUNT BIRD... seconds from impact and the bird takes off, I swing the wheel to catch it on my grill as it passes across the front of the car mid-flight and then it is gone... SHITFUCKER... I am going with it into the sky and any sense that I am still behind the wheel of my car gone... gone and I am going after the bird with bile in my heart; up, up and...


crash.


The car mounts the curb and starts its way up the grassy slop of the embankment and I snap back into myself, slam on the brakes and skid back down onto the road.


Back at home... the laptop's keys under my fingertips and I am safe in familiar territory... Iggy howls over a wall of distortion and I sip my coffee, good and hot... everone hates writing reports but I like the chaos of being lost in a deadline which looms too near... push yourself and see what happens, going a little mad sometimes is tonic for the soul... my head shifts gears and we are off, lost in the task... climbing the mountain of paper work, racing onwards and upwards.

Trade secrets revealed

Writing reports is the bane of every teaching professional, however, I have been told that it is something I am particularly good at... although my methods are somewhat unorthodox. The art to writing reports is to find some way to key into the rigid process of box ticking and standardised phrasing by cutting through the background noise of the big interesting world that exists beyond the screen of your laptop.


I do this by using drugs!


Initially I found alcohol to be of some use because it slows you down and makes it virtually impossible to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Perfect in theory except that the implicit sloppiness and lack of care or co-ordination that comes with drunkeness means that the morning after involves wading through a sea of incomprehensible typos with a bad hangover, plus there is always the risk that overindulging will leave you passed out on the keyboard.


No, downers are never the answer... but caffeine and psuedoephedrine, now there are two very useful drugs!


Before I sit down to write reports I brew a pot of strong turkish coffee and buy a packet of slow release pseudoephedrine based decongestant tablets. I pop two of the pills in my mouth and chew releasing 48 hours of runny nose relief in the one hit and then its time to pour myself a cup of thick brown Turkish muck and get down to business. There is something about the synaptic crackle of amphetamines, a kind of ultra-single-minded-ness that comes from feeling so fast you've got to grab onto anything you can to ground yourself in the moment, a simple process like writing reports becomes an all consuming reality, a world of limitless possibility. There is a logic to the process which makes it hypnotic, combine this trace with synthetic stimulation and it becomes a rhythm your mind can dance to... palpable... physical... visceral


There is no need to eat.


There is no need to sleep


There is only the hum of the laptop and the music pouring out of the stereo and the next cup of coffee on the stove. I have written my reports straight in one hit waking up Friday morning and bashing away at the keys until Sunday afternoon stopping only to urinate or light a fresh cigarette... it is in the grips of this frenzy that I see my job not as a weekly meal ticket but as a way of life.

A forgotten comment from a deleted post.

"if you see me I'll be joking... the last of the angry clowns."

Welcome to 'the rest of us'.

Tune in, tune out. Change Channels

My neighbourhood is so suburban it feels like a dream or a symbol, like a place that could only exist as an ideal. It calms me to walk through the prozac streets, a holiday from my own tangled instability, watching the sun set as I replay my day, all jumbled and jump cut, through the projector in my head.


Today someone I worked with asked me why I haven't bought my own house yet.
I shrugged and walked away, feeling like I must have fallen asleep on the bus and woke up a long long way from home.


Nervous, jangled by a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes. Hemmed in by looming work deadlines, overdue house inspections, physical distance, routine... the alarm goes off, coffee, breakfast radio, coffee, work, drive time radio, beer. How did my life turn me into the sort of person that listens to breakfast radio every weekday morning whilst driving to work sipping on a styrofoam cup of takeaway coffee? Another bad dream perhaps? A symbol? An ideal? No, it's my life as it becomes a growing repertoire of cliches, a cancer that is strangling my time, a cancer running backwards forcing order onto chaos by rote.


Listening to a conversation between two students in class I overhead one of them say:

"If Aboriginals get money from the government just for being Aboriginal and spastics get money just for being spastic then do we give gays money because they're gay?"
No one seemed to be sure of the answer but they all thought her logic was reasonable.


Tune in, tune out. Change channels.


In two months I will be living in a trailer park, renting a $60/week cabin in the worst bad part of town... it's only temporary ( but how many times have I had to tell myself that?!!?!)... the inevitability of something so ridiculous makes everything that happens around me seem like a big joke.


Our school band playing a Beatles medley... badly... another fucking cliche, a brutal reminder of...


Tune in, tune out.

Switch off.

inprogress=true

I am having difficulty walking the walk so I guess it's time for PLAN B... talking the walk (and hope no one is paying too much attention).


A lady just came to the door asking about a catalogue of homewares she left in our letter box.
She was coming around and collecting them back.
When I found it on the weekend I threw it straight in the bin.
I lied and said someone else who lives here must have brought it in.
She said she'd be back later tonight.
The rubbish was collected this morning... it's gone for good.
I feel a bit bad about it... but not really.


I may get sick soon... there was a frying pan that had been sitting in our kitchen for days with chicken stir-fry in it.
The chicken went rotten because of the warm weather and stunk out the whole house.
It was my stand-off, my message to Mark that he should do the dishes once in a while.
My stand-off failed.
Today I was hungry and there was nothing else to cook with so I washed it and used it.
I don't trust homebrand detergent.


When I get frustrated I tend to tuck my thumbs into my fist and squeeze till the joint cracks.
I have been doing this a lot lately.

The power of symbols

Today during lunch break Sam said:

"Do you ever feel like the world is talking to you in symbols. This morning when I went to open my classroom for first period I found that someone had broken into the room and taken a huge shit in the middle of one of the front tables. Before any of the kids could see I pulled the back cover off a spare exercise book, scooped it up and threw it away in the bushes. Afterwards I couldn't stop laughing. It was like one of those 'this is your life' moments."


I have had a similar moment of symbolic revelation. Years ago I used to work for Crown Casino and on valentines day as I was walking through the complex to my division office I found a bunch of roses that had been discarded, then vomited on and trampled into the floor. When I found them the flowers had been walked completely flat and the congealed puddle of yellow puke had dried leaving the imprint of a large work boot right in the middle of the mess.

Trash is my life.

One of my best work friends has a schizophrenic son who himself is also quite likeable... one day sitting at a computer work station next to her son he turned and said, "The only thing you have control over in the world is what you choose to see when you look, the problem with people like you and me is that we can't help but see the litter, even if it's lying next to the most beautiful flower in existence."


Since he said that he has been institutionalised again and converted to Islam... one morning recently on my way to work I saw him walking along the side of the road about 20 kilometres from home, he looked so calm and happy walking in the morning sun. It was about 7:20 am, he must have been walking all night.

signs

#1 The secret life of public toilets

'The school boy with the Stussy backpack. I watched you blow three guys at once, you did an awesome job for a sixteen year old? When are you back? That was an huge load you left all over the floor, next time you can leave it on my face'


#2 The small world experience

'To the man who stole our sign, people have seen you and we know who you are! If you do not return it in 48 hours we will get the police involved'


#3 Political theory (Thug life style)

'Vandalism is better than a brick in a pig's face!'

non sequiturzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..!

I have to keep moving, through the rain-soaked streets of another Saturday night, weave past guys with their hair spiked and their collars up inspecting each others' car stereos... somewhere in the distance a fight is breaking out and a small boy in a three piece suit and bright red rubber gumboots is playing on the busy street corner next to me: pressing in the pedestrian lights to stop the traffic and giggling at his new found powers.


My head is a muddle; floating through days on a headache cloud... the little yellow pills with the muscle relaxant and the codeine... claws of jagged pain working their way up the back of my neck to take hold of the wet rope of muscle behind my left eye and sqeeze till I feel my stomach flip and bile rise up into my throat... the little blue and white pills, a strong anti-inflammatory... I can always tell a migraine, it always manifests itself as a hard little knot of pressure in the centre of my forehead and spreads out around my eyes, spilling into my temples. When the throbbing reaches my temples, that's when the world gets greyed out... the oval shaped off-white pills, the ones that dilate the blood vessels in your brain and make you feel very dizzy, swirling.


Sitting smoking on my lunch break at work talking to Sam, it is one of those maudlin conversations which always makes it difficult to step back into the classroom and dodge the shit-slinging with a smile. There is a small uncomfortable pause and she offers me a valium to take the edge off. Everywhere I look at work I see people leaning on sedatives and anti-depressants. I like my coffee strong, black, no sugar and sometimes when the pain in my head won't quit I chew three or four paracetamol tablets into a acrid bitter pulp and wash it down with hot expresso... on occasion the gag reflex kicks in and I nearly choke forcing it down; the last thing I would want is to spit up hot coffee on the staff room floor.


Almost every car in my street has a Christian bumper sticker on their car... 'God created Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve'


Some headaches are barely even there, you only feel it when interacting with others... some kind of dislocated internalised hum fed through you in waves of dull throbbing sealing you off from the rest of the world... sitting at an outside table in the only cafe open after-hours in Boxhill watching the small-time drug dealers outside the video game arcade strutting. Sip of coffee, sucking on a cigarette and reading a trashy book about L.A.P.D officers on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Arabs!

Sitting on the livingroom couch at my parents house watching television with them I realised I truly was my fathers son. Whilst we were watching a documentary on the history of Islamic suicide bombers Dad decided it would be fun to teach his dog to bark on command. Normal enough you'd say, except that he decided command cues like 'talk' were far too commonplace and opted instead to teach Lucy (short for Lucifer) to bark and run around when he said 'Arabs! Kill Lucy kill!'


It is no longer a mystery why the general public finds my sense of humour inappropriate.

So lame it hurts.

There is a poster at work that really bothers me, it shows some kids sitting on a graffiti covered bridge next to their skateboards reading books and it says 'Bored? Read a book' under it. Why is it that 'The Powers That Be' (or TPTB) always feel the need to dress up their messages to children in baggy cargo pants and a hooded jumper, slap a cap on it and set it rolling across the page on a skateboard? It is just so lame that every time I walk past it I feel the almost uncontrollable urge to rip the poster down, tear it into a million pieces and stomp it into the mud. Is this really how TPTB plan to get to the kids, we are going to patronise them into submission... it's just like when you were sixteen and your Dad did an awful "I'm just hangin' with my homies" routine to embarrass you every time you tried to bring friends home, but at least when Dad's are do that they are trying to be embarrassing (that's how they get their kicks). I'm sorry but the only kids I've met in my two years as a teacher dumb enough to buy into a routine like 'Yo dudes read a book they're radical!" would not have the mental capabilities to do so.

On the road again.

Last Friday night I went out... not just outside but all the way out. I started to notice things, things that did not fit and I decided to write them down just in case... here is what I noticed:


1. There was a man at East Ringwood station, very clean-cut in appearance hugging the small fluffy dog to his chest.


2. Why is Boxhill Central full of extremely overweight people in wheelchairs at 8:00pm on a Saturday night?


3. It is never appropriate to sing along to Throbbing Gristle in public:

"There's a hundred ways I could persuade you,
I could do it with money, I could just look at you,
and if I do, I've got a little biscuit tin to keep your panties in"


4. Why do goths of all ages feel the need to wear a backpack with Sesame Street/The Wiggles/Power Rangers characters on it for ironic counterpoint?


5. The sign at the counter in Clay Pot House said: Homade Chilly Sauce.


6. The Carpenters really do sound better when sung in some South-East Asian dialect over a kareoke backing track!


7. Oh my God, the woman at the counter in the Asian grocery store across the road from Clay Pot House is an exact replica of the restaurant owner.


8. Whilst waiting for a city-bound train at Boxhill train station I become a acutely aware that the girl standing next to me who looked like your typical indie-rock hipster was not what she seemed... attached to her belt was a utility pouch containing a pair of worn electrical pliers.


9. The junkie at Richmond Train Station (yet another changeover!!!!) does not look friendly. He is carrying a component hi-fi radio tuner looking suspicious and his girlfriend has very tattooed calves. Everyone on the train platform seems very anxious to be on the move and this restless vibe is causing me to pace and write very messily.


10. Still at Richmond waiting for a service on the Sandringham line and... GODDAMN IT... why are the clocks and the next available train monitors never in synch? How can it be 15 minutes to the next train if it is currently 9:17 and the next train is coming at 9:28?!!!!!!


11. Graffiti writers trying to look very 'tough' and 'street' should avoid spraying their tag in bright pink paint.


12. If you are a girl there is a fine art to getting shit-faced and trying to vomit whilst wearing tall stilettos and a short skirt. Bend over too far one way and everyone can see up your skirt but but bend over too little and you risk your party dress being covered in vomit chunks.


13. There is something indicative about white trash... they are always the ones trying to scam a free ride on the bus at the end of the night like it is their birthright to be there!

Think I'm gonna eat some worms!

Last night I had a dream that I woke up one morning with a brain tumour and no one believed me... I tried to tell everyone: my family, friends, work colleagues, even the students but they just laughed at me. I could read the thoughts of the people who I talked to, no one believed I was dying they just assumed it was a ploy to get some attention.

Saved?

She'd hand me the pamphlet and I hadn't turned and walked away so I suppose that I was asking for it. She talked about God and I nodded forcing down my smile which I knew would turn into a giggle if I'd let myself relax into it. She was trying to save me and it felt nice... I've been so lost lately.


It didn't bother me that she looked psychotic staring with robot reptilian eyes lost religious reverie because she was telling me what I wanted to hear, she was saying that it was not my fault. "Let the Lord into your heart and you will be happy, the angels will fly down from the heavens to walk with you and keep the Devil at bay." She put her hand on my head and I wanted it there, she closed her eyes and I did the same. "Don't you want to be a good person? Don't you want to feel that you've made the right choices? All you have to do is acknowledge your sins; the sins you were born with and the ones you've collected along the way. You'll have to let it go, let it all go."


She was praying so that I may be saved, praying so that I may have the Lord reveal himself to me. Praying for my happiness, my safety and health. I didn't believe it for a second but I liked that feeling that someone was trying so hard. I could feel the people walking by so I shut my eyes tighter trying to retreat further into the warmth of her delusions.


She stopped talking and I opened my eyes. She was smiling. "I felt a power flow through us. Did you feel the energy?" I smiled but kept my mouth shut. "Of course you did, look at you, your overwhelmed."


We shook hands and I disappeared, retreating down the steps of a subterranian Korean Internet Cafe where all the seats hang off bolts in the ceiling like the love swings in the front yard of the idealised American family home. I listened to old punk rock albums on my discman, watched crazy game shows, drank overly sweet milk ice tea and felt calm. The Cramps were singing 'Fever' when I looked up to find a forty something bald man dressed as Michael Jackson grab his crotch; The Fall was playing as frenzied contestants fought for fish in a tank pulling them out with their mouths... (and Mark E. Smith sang) I think I am going bonkers in Phoenix.


Walking the city streets some time later on a sugar rush, alone but not lonely I watched the world walk by in the opposite direction. It was a big weekend in Melbourne town and down around the casino the race crowds were out in full force. Women in their best dresses with their faces painted on, wearing impossibly silly hats, carrying their heels in one hand and tiny designer handbags in the other. I was walked the hoochie momma gauntlet: a corridor in the casino shopping complex lined with display windows full of porn queen lingerie. The whole spectacle a clutter of shiny fabric and bright colours clinging to headless mannequin bodies in suggestive poses. There were men in wide lapelled pimp suits wearing fedora hats with basketball sneakers. An old man looked lost in a cheap sports coat two sizes too big hugging a Playstation. He and I were adrift in the crowd, the odd ones out and I still had my punk rock thundering in my ears. The Go-Betweens, X Ray Spex, Television... lost under a Marquee Moon. It'd been hours since I had left the house, the static in my head eased off, the sugar cutting through my lethargy.


Outside on the banks of the Yarra river I watch sea gulls attack abandoned paper plates for scraps of congealed Chinese food, smiling as I light another cigarette.