September 2006 Archives
Wait is a cruel country,
an island between the flight paths
of other people's itineraries
where sleep has cut its feet again
on scree memories -
the spill of detritus and extrapolations
becomes an anxious bed
to be lying in
wait
ing.
post postscript: personal terror alert subsiding, post frequency to expected calm soon with a general reduction in what could possibly be personal indulgence. honto ni gomenasai
dont ask for reasons
mind tastes what heart cant swallow
wait for leaves to fall
please.
i take a bus screaming with teenagers in the morning.
i have to teach in the first period.
please
Summer means rain, typhoons, chlorophyll on steroids, being super slippy all the time and prehistoric sized insects. The humidity has been falling, the backyard has been shorn, the rain less frequent, but the typhoons and insects are still shading in the last corners of summer. Ah hell, since when could seasons colour in between the lines of months anyway. In the classroom I usually use, I keep the windows open to channel whatever wind hasn't been absorbed by the other school buildings. This makes the room a quiet thoroughfare for wandering winged things, and the other day I had an enormous dragonfly crash land at the back of the class.
Out the window you can see the tightly wooded sides of the Rokko "mountain" Range (as my brother put it, they're too big to be hills yet they seem too small to be mountains), where the wild boars that raid my school at night live and where, even from a fair distance, you can see these dragonflys engaging in aerobatic tussles. This poor specimen on my floor couldn't seem to pick the open window to fly through. Occasionally it would buzz itself off the floor, smack into the glass, then try to hide behind the curtains. After class I tried opening another window (its favorite for self punishment) and it still managed to maroon itself on the floor. It would try to fly up, hit something, then land on its back, its legs not even kicking in some attempt to right itself.
This dragonfly must have thought that it was pinned to the roof, flying with no beat of its wings. How could it know up? There was no sky in the room, only carpet, ceiling. The obvious escape eluded it, even with all of my assistance. Where did the sky go mister dragonfly? The only thing left to do was scoop it up in some paper and fling it out the window. It took a few tries, but when it had a blue and bright ceiling above it, it knew exactly what it was doing. It veered off to the fleets of it comrades, diving from out of the sun on their positions.
It never even answered me. Where did the sky go mister dragonfly? Which way is the sunlight?
hey mister flying breathing living
thing for who things are working out
quite well: there is delicious light and, of course,
your agility with which
you can outwit these loud clapping predators
yes sir this evening was quite low,
the streetlights so few and high
but what blessings are open windows -
bright watt globes and even
perhaps if you stop to inspect
something on those tiles
something that big fleshy warm heathens
can't see
worth more attention than those fickle lights
so who could be blamed for ignoring
a five limbed shade wandering above
...tasty...darker...wind...
dust.
A nine hour flight with a small collection of stitches along a shoulder blade wasn't the most pleasant sensation. My neighbor maybe have been unimpressed, but he attempted to sleep through my squirming anyway. After one more week of irritation, I could finally get the bloody things removed, oh what relief, though the teachers at my school who I enlisted for the task were absolutely freaked out.
So I've come back from holiday with a chunk out of my back. The whole affair was a bit of a shrug; I'm sure the old "better get that questionable spot removed" routine is a common one. I had been warned about this particular spot before, but I'm pretty hopeless when it comes to seeing doctors. It was on my holiday that I was finally pushed to getting it checked out. The doctor I saw apparently had had a melanoma extracted from his own flesh, so he wasn't going to fart about - later that afternoon he was carving a decent hole in my back. The wound is now a pink bullet hole on the edge my leftshoulder blade, if you want to go looking.
A few weeks later my parents remembered getting the report back from the doctor and gave me a call. Turns out that if I had kept up my usual head in the sand routine towards personal health, I may not have been respiring the next time I got home. That little smudge was about to hit the Mr Hyde switch and start maligning cells all along my circulatory system. Now, the select combination of alleles or culmination of developmental experiences that result in apparently self-destructive habits (ok, Iconcede that they are just that), leads me to a quiet "Shit, eh".
It was a pretty simple death to avert; a few swipes of a scalpel and you're back amongst the slighty-more-numbered-days society of the living. Still, it's always entertaining to have a ponder. It seems an existing genetic legacy means even the lilliest patch of skin will get pissed at me. As days roll only forward into some conglomerate worthy of yet another geek Katamari comparison, everything wants to take a stab at your vital signs. I've amused myself before with the fact that somehow, every material object in the world has the potential to kill you. Alright, try compounding that with Resistentialism - "Les choses sont contre nous", or, "Things are against us". Yup, the inanimate really is out to fuck me. But as for the cliched Katamari comparison, when does that ball of aging get big enough for one to care? I know I've been given a nudge now, time to pay attention. Still, it's almost a chore I can't be bothered with (are my alleles becoming more pronounced?) Time for spot spotting before I overindulge with self-reflexivity.
When I was younger and a bit more diligent about my writing, i happened to turn my back on my bag for a few minutes. I think i was being considerate and getting an ashtray for my cafe table. In the backpack were a few packets of cigarettes, a book I had borrowed from work, 2 notebooks with about 7 months of writing in them (see "more diligent about my writing") and a bunch of small inconsequential things... rollie papers, receipts, gum, et cetera. returning to my table with my ashtray, the despicable population of Perth had decided to adopt my bag. Of course nobody had seen anything. I ran around the city malls, checking bins and the dodgier nooks, my face torn between a scowl and weeping. 7 months of writing. Mr or Ms Clever-Hands was making off with a bunch of paper, and was going to be sorely disappointed. Couldn't they just have rifled through the backpack and grabbed the cigarettes? No, of course not. I got home and promptly fell apart. 7 months of writing. For along time afterward I'd half remember some lines I had written, but these things can't be reconstructed. The obvious lesson is never turn your back, but I recently had to pull some more wisdom from that experience.
I was just watching something else leave my life. Yes, my back was turned. There was no theft involved this time though. Getting home I noticed a strange grinding noise that wasn't there before. Was the fridge door left open? Were the air-con filters in need of a wash? No, just the spinning metal disc of a hard drive that was worked itself askew. The fat dentist drill cacophony was the final message of a dying computer. It wasn't one of my finer days. I took it in for repairs, which and extended warranty reduced the cost to zero, but then came the moment to sign the hard drive death certificate. It was easier for the repairmen to toss the old one in the recycling bin and slot a fresh drive in, and no amount of cajoling would change that.
So a few years of accumulated data has been trashed, maybe even used as a rather thick and shiny coaster. Yes, I'm foolish for not backing up. Yes Aesop, I've learnt the moral of the story. Still, even without my younger diligence, there are a few folders of creative efforts now permanently missing. The interesting bit is googling my own name to see what traces there are online (a few complete scribbles, surprisingly). I guess I'm taking it pretty calmly. Loss seems to be a recurring motif, maybe too frequently recurring for comfort, but I'm getting used to everything being stuck in "Play" mode and that the "What If" function is mostly unproductive. Now I have to wait until I fly home again for a few important papers (I hope the ATO don't want to check my ABN) and unfortunately re-write my CV (joy) and see if I can salvage my writing from various sources.
Still, I'm becoming more preoccupied with Loss. Too many things are re-written with too many zeros. Bad sectors happen whenever they like, but somewhere there must be a protection tab, like the little switch on 3ΒΌ floppies that prevented user stupidity. I'd like one of those.
