A sixty second love affair at 'The Great Wall of Tuna".

I had a moment in a supermarket.
It was in a big supermarket. The biggest in the valley.


I was standing at the 'Great Wall of Tuna' trying to decide what sort I required.
It's not that simple.
There sure is a lot of variety.
I just wanted tuna.


There was a woman standing next to me.
She looked confused... I was confused... I just wanted tuna.
Why did there need to be so many different varieties when it just made life difficult?
Overcomplicated.


We reached for the same tin at the same time, it was just like a Hollywood romance.


I pulled back first, it made me think to myself "Is that really the tuna for me?"
She looked deep in the same dilemma.
If we hadn't been there to get in each others way we would have had our tuna tins and been somewhere else by now.


She smiled... I smiled.
I said "There sure is a stupid amount of choice."
She nodded in agreement and suggested I get tuna with a chilli pepper "It's just got a pepper there in the tin. You can take it out and have normal tuna or leave it in if you like spicy."


I smiled, considered this option and bought sardines instead.
Plain sardines in olive oil.


True story.

sexxx is weird (a set of two)

ONE.

A few years back after making a whirlwind mess off leaving home I landed back there with a thud. During this time I was smoking a lot of pot and eating a lot of codeine. Instead of sleeping at night I would prowl the nether regions of the internet looking for that one piece of internet porn that would go far enough to make me feel physically sick... I saw all kinds of BDSM, shit eating, water sports. role playing, midget sex, vomit extreme dildo action but nothing that could make me feel sufficiently enough ashamed to be human. Surprisingly in addition to hiding my rather unpleasant and unacceptable codeine habit I was also at this time able to maintain some semblance of normalcy by being engaged in a relationship with a real live human female. Anyway, one morning as the sun came up I was in my room trying to catch a couple of hours sleep before I had to be ready for work when I had the most horrible dream:


I dreamt that I was kissing my significant other when all of a sudden my mouth started to fill with semen which was leaking out from her lips. I tried to ignore it but there was so much it filled my mouth. I'd swallow but it would just keep coming and eventually I felt as if I was drowning in the jism.


Ay some point i woke up, vomited all over myself and passed out again only to wake late for work and glued to my pillow with stale puke.



TWO.

Last night Andre called me inside to show me pictures of genital herpes he has to study for work... his company is launching a new treatment for the virus. Most of the pictures looked like the people had attempted unsuccessfully to remove their sex organs with a cheese grater, a pot of boiling water and a sharpened spoon.


I felt quite unwell afterwards.

Taking stock of the new situation.

This new life of mine, the house and my live in landlord/pseudo-housemate are a creepy kind of wholesome. It feels very strange but not the kind of strange I am used to or comfortable with. Gone is the 'I-haven't-slept-for-days-everyone-is-against-me-methamphetamine-I-can-smell-your-thoughts-vicious' kind of crazy I feel at home in and in it's place a low key sort of Twin Peaks hum is left to bug me.


So lets line up the facts and see what kind of picture it paints:

1>He never asks me for my rent and doesn't seem to care when I don't front up with the cash. Then on the odd occasion I remember to pay he looks all surprised as if to say 'Why are you doing this for me?'

2>He cooks for me every night out of his groceries without being asked or asking me if I want him to.

3>He plies me with expensive chocolate and imported beer every time he sees me lumped in front of the television set.

4>He has a huge over protective dog called Mitch. They share his double bed. When he sleeps in till lunch time on a Saturday he says it's because he looked at Mitch's peaceful, sleeping face and couldn't bring himself to disturb him by leaving the bed.

5>He is traveling salesman who represents a huge pharmaceuticals company hawking prescription drugs all up and down the east coast to retail chemists.

6>He takes Mitch along for his sales trips in the back of the car... even if he is going to be gone for weeks.

7>He is a passionate Volvo driver.

8>He used to be an officer for the Federal Police but quit because it was too boring... he says his new job is much more to his tastes, and far more exciting(?)

9>He has a television off to the side of his home office which seems to play terrible Hollywood formula comedy movies on an endless loop. This week I have seen various parts of 'The Guru' at least ten times (and I am not even the one who has to sit in there for hours a day!). I asked him if he liked the movie and he told me he hadn't really been paying much attention.

10> He has a floor to ceiling cupboard filled with brand new Nike shoes still in their boxes. Each box is spaced the exact same distance from its neighbours.


This shit just don't add up!

Eat my dust

This is the point of departure...

holding pen

There is something unsettling about the place where I work, I think there is something wrong with everyone who works there...


One woman is physically incapable of listening to anyone, she is an expert at looking like she is listening but there'll be a break in the conversation and she'll look you square in the eyes and say something completely random like:

"You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to get a worm farm toilet approved by our shire council"


Another lady suffers from chronic asthma, fainting spells, hay fever, migraines, she is also deaf, dyslexic and immensely short sighted. She is almost never at work but when she is at work I find it almost impossible to comprehend how she can be a teacher.


There is this other one who survived decades of spousal abuse only to become a person who finds a way to insert her traumatising experiences into every conversation.
HER: How was your weekend?
ME: Not great. Yours?
HER: Better than spending my Sundays sitting in an emergency room with a smashed in face pissing blood on the floor. Did I ever tell you about...
She gives of this reek of desperation that could only be generated through a lifetime of being a complete and utter victim.


Everyone is so fucking paranoid, they'll strike out at any signs of weakness in others to mask their own insecurities.

Our staff room is a psychic land-fill for ugly thoughts and nasty sideways glances.

I just do my best to remain invisible.


Whenever you ask anyone in their late 40's early 50's how they're going at the beginning of the work day they will usually reply by telling you how many school days stand between themselves and retirement.

It is like the holding pen for a slaughterhouse.

flashforward...flashback

flashforward


I'm being dragged out from under drugged sleep by the throb of pain in my side. I am in the backseat of a car. I cannot open my eyes but with clarity I can make out the coarse rope binding my wrists and ankles. My mouth is so dry I fear choking on the scaly bloat of my tongue which lies dead in my mouth... my head hurts. I can make out the low rumble of highway as it slides away under car tires beneath me and into the past. The hiss and crackle of a badly tuned radio at pains to broadcast late night jazz standards. Whoever it is in the drivers seat exhales loudly and the air in the cabin fills with the bitter wooden smell of tobacco smoke.


I have no idea how I got here.

I have no idea where here is or where we are headed.

I can't focus on anything outside of myself for more than a second.

I can't will my eyes to open

but

I don't need to see or think to know that I am in trouble.

Big fucking trouble!


I wish I knew how long I've been gone. How many curtain calls have I missed? Could the show really go on without me?


Whoever it was that said that all the world's a stage didn't think their metaphore through too clearly if you ask me... I try to shift off my side but the throb grows louder till my guts flip and I am left semi-conscious spitting up bile onto the floor of the car... I mean, how can there even be a stage without the darkness of a backstage? The place a shadows behind the scenes where the nameless ghosts of power push the buttons and pull the levers which create the predictable little routine that is our lives.

The people who make the world tic.

No, the person who said that all the world's a stage didn't account for the ease with which someone could accidentally wander off too far into the wings and get lost in the shadows forever... lost amongst the pulleys, switches, levers, weights and sandbags.

If only they'd warned us just how fucking hard it is to wander back on stage, back into the lime light. I am in trouble. It is not safe here. It is too close to the truth to be anything but dangerous.

wherever here is.


flashback





(to the begining)

gone fishing

Everything you've heard is true I've scored the motherload... a big-ass piece of cardboard (and I know how to use it). I is gonna build me a one huge cubby house and on it's side I'll write:

kidexxxile? A vicious rumour... and nothing more.


Then I'll disappear from view giving y'all the middle finger salute

viva

Built in escape clause

The curtain raises to reveal a projector screen, the stage itself obscured by darkness. We are going to get a glimpse of the old me. Flashbacks and old home movies, there is silence in the auditorium as the projector whirrs to life and we see light wash over the flat of the screen, the scene flickers to life and there it is...

The bright light of morning, a white coffee cup soiled inside with soggy grounds atop a gleaming marble counter. I am there sitting by the cup... motionless, my hands resting on the counter. I appear calm; calm and healthy. Gone is the sunken pallor of before, in it's place there is eerie quiet.

The time is 6.30am and for once I am awake before my alarm. This is the me who wore collared shirts and brushed his teeth twice daily. This person I hardly remember who went to bed every evening before midnight to be fresh for work the next day. I used to be the kind of guy who worried about quitting smoking, eating well and getting enough exercise. I was going to live forever, or so I liked to think. It was my trade off for wasting the present, I'd collect my bonus on the other end after I'd ironed out all the kinks.

A large empty room piled with boxes I've never unpacked. My room; minimalism with a built in escape clause. My borrowed sofa bed in the far corner, a digital alarm clock sitting on the armrest closest to the wall. The time is 6.58; there are two minutes to go. Two minutes till we split the sound and vision seamlessly. The sound of my alarm clock playing over a shot of me, my back to the camera as I walk out the front door into the overexposed unknown flare of the outside world disappearing from view. In this final shot I am wearing the all too familiar fluffy bunny slippers, those checked flannels and an army coat.

It could be that you are supposed to interpret this sequence as my nervous breakdown, or maybe my moment of profound enlightenment but then again, it's probably nothing. I could just be checking to see if the mail arrived, maybe I wander back in seconds later clutching a bundle of department store catalogues, unpaid bills and plain envelopes addressed to current tenant... maybe I wander back in empty handed, unfortunately you'll never know, the films finished, left flapping violently against the side of the projector shocking you back into your own skins before the lights fade to black leaving you alone in the muddle of your own thoughts.

I hope your taking notes. I don't want any one of you getting lost or falling behind and giving up on this, this experience could change your life but you've got to pay attention because you'll need to pass the test to prove you understand before we let you in on our little secret.

Nowhere

I'm sitting at some suburban train station... waiting. This is not really where the story begins but it's where we come in; when they raise the curtain you can see me on stage, sitting, minding my own business... waiting. You should notice at this point that I look sick, sick the way you'd imagine a terminal cancer patient looks sick, these details are important, it will come up again later and you'll probably need to know this for the exam so lean in and get a good look. My face has that hollowed out feel, the greasy grey stained skin which coats my skull is sucked in around my cheeks and eyes. My eyes, red rimmed, sunken by puffy olive bruised bags sit deep in my sockets sliced through with jagged veins like so much broken glass. Double points for anyone who noticed my twitching left eyelid or my shaky hands.

To put you in my shoes, which at this point in time are fluffy bunny slippers: faded pink and worn through at the soles but stuffed with cardboard and tissue paper to prolong their usefulness, this bench bolted down at this station platform which connects this suburb to the city is the kind of place people call the end of the line. That nowhere that exists between wherever you are and somewhere else, this place is a place born by accident, stinking of failure and populated by people who are either stuck or passing through.

It is a late afternoon in summer and the lazy breeze sits heavy with the odour of spray paint; a group of sullen teenagers in dirty tracksuit tops emblazoned with the stage names of dead rappers sit sullen, cross-legged in a circle on the cracked asphalt passing a shopping bag which drips with metallic blue in one direction and a wine cask bladder in the other. Between huffs of paint and swigs of wine they drag on cheap cigarettes, scratch their graffiti tags into the ground with loose stones and shoot menacing glances in the direction of anyone who looks like they're trying too hard not to notice.

I slip the hood of my heavy army surplus jacket up over my head to hide my face, close my eyes and dream of cigarettes and codeine. My head is starting to pop and fizzle... fill with static; I feel the red rubber balloon of another crippling headache inflate inside me, my brain swelling up against the inside of my skull. Beads of sweat being pushed to the surface along the ridge of my brow and my temples pulse with every heartbeat.

I feel something hot and wet spreading over my right thigh, the burning sensation growing, spreading with every tremor that ripples down my arms... distracting me. My hand! That's when I remember that I'm holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The lid has come loose and every twitch sends a new wave of steaming black liquid to break against the shore of my flannel pyjama clad leg. The brown stain spreading, eating up every blue and red check in its path. The pain in my leg is caught up in a feedback loop, causing my hands to shake more violently until the whole cup comes crashing to the ground in a tidal wave of black muck which washes up against the briefcase of a young executive type with whom I'm sharing this bench. He looks me over before picking up his soggy case and relocating his sharp suit and crisp white shirt to the other side of the platform. Out here people may be willing to accept that a man in flannel pyjamas and an army jacket is waiting for the 4:45pm city bound but they're rarely willing to acknowledge the existence of any such strangeness.

As the lights begin to fade and curtain comes crashing back down to the ground I'm taking my nicotine stained fingers to my mouth to rip the crud out from under my yellowed nails with my teeth. It tastes bitter and gritty and the smell of stale smoke renews my desire for cigarettes.

honest.

Let's cut the crap... I am lonely and bored and restless and sick of making mistakes and I am even sicker of boring anyone who reads this to death filling up this space with incomprehensible emotional vomit... but most of all I am sick of waiting. Waiting... for things to make sense... for her to reply to my e mail... for someone to discover me and make me famous because let's face it, I am brilliant... for the next step in this derailed farce I call my life to become apparent... for anyone to find me and like me and let me know so I don't have to spend all my free time inside hiding reading depressing books about depressing people and listening to depressing music and wondering what my life would be like if I was into Jackie Collins and Kylie Minogue (well, I'd probably be gay, but maybe I could be both happy and into sex with boys).


I am sorry that I have been so over-indulgent and boring... I'm going to kick this whole misery addiction I seem to have plugged into... Jane says!

obligation free

It's so quiet out here... living here is like needing to sneeze right in the middle of a funeral service, there is never a 'right moment' to interrupt. I have been feeling very strange lately, maybe it is this place but that feeling you get when you are standing out the front of a class who are ignoring you has spilled over into my everyday life... every time I speak, move or do anything I feel like I am cutting in. It is almost as if my every gesture is some kind of hostile take-over and so I stay in doors and recreate myself... the apology incarnate.


People at work keep asking me if I need any help... they want to know if I am going okay with my class load... 'How's the year started out for you?' they ask, ready for me to confide in them... I wonder how they would react to me if I said that turning up to work every day is the easy part? Everyone seems so eager to help... but with what? Have I slipped that far? Am I only deluded into thinking I am holding my shit together? Does my deodorant no longer cover over that stench of desperation?


(Maybe it's time to switch brands?!)


The days out here feel so BLANK, they just disappear and me along with them... rolling like waves of radiation or ghosts... things that never really were... dreams... time moves too quickly out here and nothing happens... it's a desert, uninhabitable space... a hostile land and yet I find it difficult to imagine being elsewhere.


I suppose it is like unrequited love... that dream of a better place just out of reach.


Obligation free, no self improvement necessary.

hugs

Whilst walking down the highway which cuts my town in two a complete stranger who was taking his garbage out at the time hugged me for no seemingly good reason... it was a little odd. I was taken completely by surprise, arms extended, smiling with his gap toothed mouth... he just came out of nowhere and when it was all over he said:

"I really like hugging folk, blokes or ladies it don't really matter to me, except that you know I'm not gay. I just like giving hugs"


This happened four days ago.

Welcome to the road movie of my life

It's just me and her... on the road again. I'm at the wheel, and Janis, sits perched invisible bleeding song.
[summertime, and the li-ving in ea-sy"]

Welcome to the road movie of my life.


After two years on the edge of the world I fell out the other side drawing bigger circles between nowhere and somewhere, between me and you. Leaving... only to find myself back at square one... again, but square one is always different. A new house, I am a new person, a clean slate and I can be whoever I want to be. The tonic of distance, that feeling that you are moving somewhere, the cauldron of smoke and mirrors that says 'further is infinite' until you've gone too far... in a theoretical world if you travel far enough in a straight line, you'll end up back where you started however the schizophrenia of movement keeps me reinvented, for now... I feel good.


The moments inbetween, all those things one forgets to see even if one is looking, they are the substance of novelty... watching a mother and son at a local coffee shop, both of them sporting dreadlocks and bare feet, a boy no older than eight drinking espresso and talking like a mini adult to his mother who is totally absorbed in his every word.


[fish are jumpin, and the cotton, lord the cotton's high]
in the late afternoon sun, even the drab expanse of outer suburbia looks like some lost work of expressionist art bathed in a deep impenetrable orange... my foot to the floor as we stream forward, as the years pile up behind me and although I am not yet old, I can feel myself being over taken but if I can keep this up maybe I'll find the formula to cheat time itself. Time makes me feel like a sex doll with a slow leak, I am safe, for now, but it is only a matter of time before they throw me stained and limp on the scrap heap, the stink of being used, the strain of being used up... safe for now but how long?


The day I moved... sitting with my father in the hotel listening to a jazz trio in the midst of a 90th birthday celebration. The birthday boy approaches my father and holds out a platter to offer us a piece of birthday cake.

BIRTHDAY BOY (to my father): "Cake for you young man?"

I suppose it's all relative but next to this smiling dinosaur my father, 23 years his junior looks tired and fed up like he's waiting for the final curtain call.

DAD: "So what's the secret?"
B BOY: "Plenty of good food, women, not too much to drink and learning not to worry so much."


I suppose the air is leaking out of everyone's skin but that doesn't mean you have sit there straining to keep it in till the tension building up tears to hole open bigger. By the time Janis was the age I am now she was well on her way to being dead and buried but she's singing her song to me now as we slide off the edge of the map and into a place where I can start again because your never to old to stop getting it wrong.

Random moments from a strange place (PART ONE)

The land of the free... drunk in Vegas with a Swedish socialist and a U.S Military officer arguing the definition of a successful society, while outside families of illegal Mexicans stood out along the neon strip in the desert's night cold handing out prostitute's business cards. There is something horrible about being given a wallet sized glossy of a naked woman lying spread eagled by a seven year old boy. My first image of this strange new land was Gary Coleman, now in his 40's, frozen smiling... selling property insurance, nailed to the side of a warehouse just outside of LAX.


My headaches... gone... I feel... AWAKE!


Watching myself being watched... the bus trip was long and uncomfortable... sitting at a cafe enjoying the feeling of being outside. Around his neck, the sign read 'Adopt a Jewish Nigger'. He was smiling with a toothless mouth holding a Walgreens bag full of scavenged pizza crusts.

JEWISH NIGGER: "You've gotta smile, I mean look at me. I got nothing but I can still laugh. What's the problem with all these people? How can they enjoy life, if it's all so fucking serious and important? I mean shit man."

We talk and from the third floor of the apartment building across the street a woman sat and her window videotaping the street... filming us... I can never sure if the people are performing in vain, watching themselves in that video screen in their heads and praying for the sideways glance of a stranger or if the camera is are actually rolling.


Is there anybody out there? Brainfried by bus travel and junkfood... too much coffee, too many cigarettes and no sleep (some habits die hard). A new city deserted at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. I have nowhere to sleep and no plan, I'm wandering with my pack on my back and suddenly I am gripped by drunken hands and pulled into the familiar warmth of a city bar.

DEB: 'What's wrong honey?'
ME: 'Um... nothing.'
DEB: 'Don't be shy darl.'
ME: 'I just got here. I've got no place to stay and I need a map.'
DEB: 'Got here? Houston, why would you ever want to come here?'
ME: 'I don't know. I don't know what's here yet.'
Deb: 'Wait here!'

Enter Sherrie... trapped with a 42 year old alcoholic somewhere in the suburbs near a poor black neighbourhood. Barrelling through the morning streets, Sherrie behind the wheel with a 12 pack of Bud Lite under her belt and it's only 9:30 am. It started badly and got worse, in her house I learned to fake being asleep, to ignore the naked, drunk mess pawing at me. Call it prostitution, call it whatever you want. She looked after her great uncle who never left the house and carried a handgun into the toilet, just in case

SHERRIE: 'Look, I've gotta go out, I'll be an hour. Don't leave the room, I haven't told him about you and he'll shoot, I mean he is Texan. Born and raised.'

Paranoia 101

What happens to a nobody headcase to make them feel that their life is important enough to warrant a silent number as insulation for them against us?

ME: Hello, it this Sam's mother?

HER: Excuse me? How did you get this silent number?

ME: Um... do you have a child at **** High School?

HER: What?! How did you get my number?!!!!!

ME: Um, so this isn't 9292

HER: No I'm sorry you got it backwards.

ME: Oh, so I dialled 2929

HER: I'm not going to tell you, you know my number is private!

[CLICK... beep-beep-beep-beep]