3 a.m. World.

I have that 3 a.m. feeling again, where you're wide awake and in the darkness everything loses form and everything around you looks like a cubist painting - Shapes. Lines. Circles. Squares. Octogons. Just shapes - no depth, no dimension.

It's a strange time to be awake.
You are the only one on this alien planet. You are the only one alive.
This is not the time for conventions. You are the convention.
You can reinvent the world.
You can rewrite histories. Rearrange gravity.
Erase time, invalidate space.
Slither down the ceiling, crawl up the walls.

Feel the cold stone floor under you back while your feet hold up the sky. Fit your body into this concrete crevice and look for an alternate universe in the cracks in the wall.

Sense does not exist. There isn't much need for it.
3a.m. world is an alternate reality.
You are not you. You can be better or worse or nothing at all.
Nothing exists outside of it so the need for definitions and comparisons does not arise.

I am and that is all that I need to be.
I have nothing.
I am nothing.
I peel my skin away. I pulse. Throb.
I am nothing.
I am everything.
In 3a.m. world I am free to acknowledge everything I am and all that I am not.
Angry. Apathetic. Scared. Hopeful. Fulfilled. Fucked. Finished. Undone.

Had I hoped to be better than this.

Oh, baby!

The problem with being a serial procrastinator and congenital escapist is that your brain is hardwired to wander aimlessly, wrangling with issues and visualizing bizzarre scenarios that have ZERO productive value to you, personally...just so you can avoid doing any real work.

So in that vein, lately, owing to the fact that many people I know have had/are having babies, I've been ruminating upon this whole 'Miracle of Birth' business. Of course, being intrinsically perverse I've just gone ahead and built a whole operetta in my head featuring the exact moment that the people who've just had the babies first come to terms with the reality of the situation, hallmark-tinted glasses slipping for just that one moment.

Tinkly merry-go-round music forms the soundtrack of the scene, as they try to wrap their heads around this bundle of wrinkles: Oooh, look honey - ten fingers, ten toes, mom's eyes, dad's schlong, brain still in it's original shrink wrap packaging - perfect. blank. unbroken. Tra-lala-lala-la...

SCEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeCH!!! Craaaaashhh!
The tinkling Mozart baby music comes to a screaming halt inside their heads as the thought slams into them: Is this Mother Theresa,Jr. or Charles Manson, version.07 they're cradling here?

Freeze frame.

See that moment right there...that's pure, uncut, I-want-my-mommmmieeee(or-enough-horse-tranquilizer-to-kill-a-small-rhino,) blind, undistilled TERROR we're talking about.

That's the moment when the realization of the hopelessly wide chasm of possibilities between Option#1 and Option#2 knocks them on their asses, and then hyperventilating (and possibly dropping off into a catatonic stupor lasting 19 years or so) they attempt to come to terms with the invariable certainty that before the fat lady sings, they will have taken this bundle of pure, untapped potential and FUCKED IT UP in so complete and unique and irrevocable a fashion, as to warrant a lucky psychiatrist somewhere a very tidy beach house on the Cote D'Azure.

Welcome to parenthood, suckers. Your life as you knew it just ended.
The requiem mass has been cancelled because you'll be needing the cash...y'know - for formula, and diapers, and G.I.Joe toys, and yes, also all the beer and drugs they'll buy after raiding your unsuspecting wallet the minute they hit 15.
Have fun, good luck. You're gonna need it!

(Hey, I warned you I was a twisted fuck!)

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So it goes

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is dead. Aged 84. The semi colon has been replaced by a period. Full stop. So it goes.

Here's the thing - I never took Lit. in college. I never learned how to read the classics or anything that would qualify as 'Literature'.
Consequently, most of 'Literature' scares me. And what doesn't, it bores me.
What is the underlying motivation of the protagonist, what are the central themes, the symbolism - why is the moon like a siren's gaping maw and what does that have to do with the asscrack of eternity?
Fuck that shit, I don't know.
Kudos to my mongrel education, I barely learned to spell.

So, I stayed well away from the 'Important' writers. Writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway and Mailer and Vonnegut etc. They seemed too clever for me, too abstruse. (To my credit, I dreamed that word up...plucked it out of the ether. Thank god it actually exists and means exactly what I need it to mean.)
Funnily enough, I was right. They were clever. Sneaky, even. Because, somehow (I don't know if it was the smell and feel of ancient books bought on sun-warmed pavements or the fact that secondhand was all I could afford to buy at the time) I got hoodwinked into reading the things I had initially dismissed as 'The Classics'.

And I was surprised when in a lot of the writing I found echoes of my own thoughts. Notions that had vaguely occurred to me, only set down with such clarity and economy and wit as to give me pause and make me wonder if, perhaps, I hadn't thought those thoughts independently, but had stolen them from the author by some form of pre-osmosis.

Vonnegut was one of those. At the first reading, it was like expecting to find a dour college professor or sanctimonious, old-fart, elderly relative and instead finding an ageing beatnik who maybe listened to Greenday and had a weakness for fart jokes. I mean, the guy said Fuck...A LOT! How scary could he be?
Surely, this couldn't be 'Literature'! It didn't seem painful enough. The writing wasn't flowery or long-winded. There weren't even any 'thees and thous and thys.' And wait: he was actually funny, and irreverent, and poignant, and absurd, and ironic and gentle. And hip! And he MADE UP WORDS!!!

The first one I read was 'Cat's cradle.'

It was unexpected. It was funny and weird and profound and it took me a while to wrap my head around it.

So now the thing is, I never know if I ought to recommend Vonnegut to just anyone. Because if you come into one of his books with a defined notion of what a novel is supposed to be, then you're going to wonder about my taste and maybe even my sanity. So, the best I can do is tell you that he's weird, but in the best possible way.

Look, this guy says things like "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." and "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." and "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool"

His characters travel back and forth in time...and no they don't save the world (though they try.) And maybe their only super power may be a slightly heightened ability to see their own specific strand in the cosmic cobweb of reality. His Heroes aren't tights and cape wearing Pin-up idols for the gay community, just worn and wearied versions of himself and his villains are time and tide and the dogma of mercenary modernism. But he manages to amass so many potent features of life and living and pack them all so diabolically into a device as simple as a few hundred ink-stained pages, bound together by string and glue.

So wait, to simplify - here's what I think his books have been about: truth and simplicity, and absurdity and seriousness and frivolity and gentleness and dystopia and hope and the past and futures and nihilism and idealism and science fiction and family and war and politics and ethics and tequila and peace and forgiveness...in short, EVERYTHING.
Go read one now.

Gratuitous yet occasion-appropriate Vonnegut quote:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." - Slaughterhouse Five.

I contain multitudes.

The chief problem in living with the schizophrenia of me is that I never know which avatar is going to be in the driver's seat at any given point.

There's obssessive compulsive mimi, paranoid delusional mimi, chocolate fueled degenerate mimi, endorphin laced earth mother mimi, ass-whuppin' tank grrrl mimi, whingeing wimp mimi, nasty crunchy PMS mimi, weeping willow PMS mimi, super efficient professional powerhouse mimi, temperamental prima donna artist mimi, mother of confusion mimi, super slick rockstar mimi, nobody loves me mimi, couldn't give a fuck mimi, hypersensitive wuss mimi, insensitive bitch mimi, oddball goof mimi, stoic buddha mimi, queen of chaos and melodrama mimi, rational pragmatist mimi, juvenile delinquint mimi, aging singleton mimi, infantile passive aggressive mimi, firebreathing dragon mimi, peace corps pacificst mimi, social butterfly mimi, complete social retard mimi, sanctimonious purist mimi, raving alcoholic mimi...

and on and on and on...and on.

And if you thought listening to these whinging wierdos was a pain in the ass, think about when it's time to buy them shoes!

The Anatomy of Revolution

Heaven and hell are not features of the after life.
The gore and the glory, it's all played out on this earthly plane.
Revolutions abound.
Ideology is to Physiology As Bullet is to Bone.
A million people kill and a million more die.
For the cause, against the cause.
At the heart of the struggle there's only that. Always that. The Cause - informing the process, validating the madness.

And then eventually one day, when rhetoric has buried rhetoric and more blood than is merely tragic or obscene has been shed, one side wins - generally the oppressed.

Utopia is born. The footsoldiers of the revolution dare to dream of life, pure and plentiful, bought and paid for in blood.
But they forget - the balance of power may shift. It's nature doesn't.
Like a see-saw there are only two possibilities, and only one equation: up or down, oppressor and oppressed.

And sure as every new day is born, only to crust over and then ignobly die, the shine on the brand new republic quickly fades.

Strife sends up heroes and martyrs. Peace buries them and places a fat guard at their tomb to collect an admittance fee.

And The Cause...under whose tattered awning the throng once huddled to ward off a common enemy; The Cause is wrapped in parchment and mothballed away along with words like nobility, honour, duty, glory.
Words like development, progress, efficiency and bottom-line take their place.
'We' becomes 'me'.

And the dispossessed remain dispossessed...only under new management.

And then the vague realization hits you - Life really is only about 'Business as usual' and a Revolution is just a Hostile take-over.


Go read 'Animal Farm' now.

New Year Blues

Another year gone and still no sign.
I waited and waited for the epiphany to come. It didn't. Second year in a row.

Last year, the wine and weed addled euphoria coaxed me into believing that the lack of an epiphany meant I was going to be ok. 2006 was going to be a good year...the year we had all been waiting for. It had to be! Things HAD to be better this year, we could all just feel it.
And see!! No pesky epiphany. No word from the void. No freaky, unsettling prediction about the state of being for the coming year. Surely, that was a good sign.

Turned out, not so much. It wasn't the year we thought it would be. Far from it. Instead of being a year for healing and having and forgiving and forging on to bigger, better things, it was about growth. The painful kind. The kind that involves fear and hurt and relinquishing and being pushed further out into the unknown without a safety net and no respite.

Betrayals, evictions, ejections, rejections and too many goodbyes. Bad choices, stupid mistakes, reality checks and human let downs.

I suppose it is a necessary thing and I should be glad for it, but that may happen later, as a feature of hindsight. Right now, I'm smarting with the petulant indignation of a child that's been slapped in the face and wonders if, perhaps, there wasn't a gentler way to teach the lessons that needed learning.

And now, another year has turned without a sign. I suppose that's just the Universe saying, "Beware! Different year, same shit. Don't break out your dancing shoes just yet."

Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.

Instruction Manual Humour

IMHO (I have learned that that's geekspeek for 'According to the only opinion that truly matters, i.e. - MINE'), a genre of literature that hasn't yet been given it's due is User Instruction Manuals for cheap electronic goods made in places like Taiwan or Malaysia or Timbuktoo.

When you think about it there's many reasons to reccomend them:

* They're generally always good for a laugh.
* They're informative enough to be almost useful.
* Sometimes they're even weirdly profound. (Most sound like they were written by Yoda.)
* Best of all...they're free!(well, you've already shelled out cash worth three times your entire paycheck for the widescreen t.v./dishwasher/ ice-cream maker/completely-useless-and-doomed-to-spend-the-rest-of-it's-life-as-a-receptacle-for-dirty-laundry-but-you-just-had-to-have-it-at-the-store-thingamajig that they came with!!)

So here's a little sampler. Enjoy.

INSTRUCTIONS: For results that can be the finest, it is our advising
that: NEVER to hold these buttons two times!! Except the battery.
Next taking the (something) earth section may cause a large
occurrence! However. If this is not a trouble, such rotation is a
very maintainence action, as a kindly (something) virepoint from
Drawing B.

Tower of Babble

This is a Protest. This is a Rant.
A railing, flailing, hissing, pissing, flipping-you-off-with-all-10-digits-while-spitting-in-your-eye RANT.
What we're protesting here is the sheer, incomprehensible ABSURDITY that is corporate jargon.

Who thinks this shit up for chrissake!!

Tell me, corporate world? Do you have a guy -a thin bony nervous guy, someone who's always feared his ears were too big for his face and his voice too damp for his paper mouth; sitting in a drafty little cubbyhole in a spike-jonze-being-john-malkovich inspired half-cap stunted ceilinged attic somewhere, squished between mountainous stacks of yellow legal pads, pencils sharpened to deathly gleaming points, channeling the angst and humiliation of so many brown bag lunches stolen and stomped on by schoolyard bullies into vague, incoherent, self-inflating phrases designed to set the average human being's teeth on edge?

I mean, come on! When did it become normal to talk like this - verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives or god alone knows what and of course, the arbitrary stringing together of random alphabets that makes it sound like the entire corporate world suddenly, unanimously decided to speak Czech.

Now if you buy that whole 'the geeks shall inherit the earth', then I suppose you've got to believe that this is the devil's pay-off and in that respect, somewhat overdue. Allow me to illustrate by means of this shining example of the savage little ironies and bipolar belly-flops of fortune's favour.

See, I imagine that on a battlefield of another kind i.e. the schoolyard, spouting phrases like, 'interface systems architecture' or 'synergize intuitive paradigms' would have guaranteed you an ass whuppin' of major proportions. Now say stuff like that in a board room full of hypercaffienated, hypoglycemic, middle aged, middle management types in too tight neckties and there's a pretty good chance they're going to see you as some kind of business Demi-God.
And get this...pay you a buttload of money to churn out more crap like that!

So, since you're the only one who actually understands what you're saying...for once in your life, YOU'RE COOL. You are THE MAN.
Sure enough, before long, you're hooked. You're actually believing that bullshit you're spouting.

Welcome to the Danger Zone.

Because where does it end?

Or imagine this - IT DOESN'T!!!

It crosses over into civilian life. Soon it'll be an epidemic - girlfriends all over will want to have 'THE INTERFACE'

The Sunday morning drone of ESPN will be shattered by wives intoning "Honey, you need to reprioritise your KRA's and deploy real-time deliverables"

And meet the future of sexual harassment: street corner studs hooting,"Baby, I'd like to mesh synergistic architectures with you"

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.

Monsoon Memory

This is one of those days: reality is a blur and the portal to that magic rain life can briefly be traversed.

Everything is pregnant with moistness; swollen with rain.
Outside is a tropical rainforest.
Dripping. Oozing. Bursting.
Emerald sparkles on winter gray sky.
Inside is a papery forest hut, dry and cool and clean.
My feet in dry socks. But the wet is already in my bones.
Birds twittering and squawking and fluttering, and
the fat wet wind whistling past.
Snatches of songs I long forgot tuning in to my frequency on the moist crackling air.
Songs about perfect days and a distant past life I probably never lived. Or maybe I did.

Who knows the lives I've lived in that alternate universe of my monsoon memory.
Maybe, in another life, I was a leaf riding the swell of the Amazon.
Maybe I was a stone skipped on the surface of a pond in Kerela, or a paper boat rushing out of the Suez canal, eager to meet the sea.

They say the magnetism of the Moon makes people crazy, the way it pulls and pushes the tides and harnesses the ebb and flow of blood in the vein.
If you ask me, the Moon has nothing on the Rain.

If I Had A Boat...

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean.

And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat.

But if I had a BIG FAT LEAR JET,
I wouldn't need a Pony or a Boat.


OK - no, this post was not meant to be a paean to materialism. I just like this picture for the composition and the nostalgia value. The ditty came along cause my mind is frequently out to lunch.

Situation Normal - ALL FUCKED UP!!!

So here we go again...the city's exploding...again. All I can think of to say is, FUCKERS, You're killing the wrong people!!! If you are going to systematically target groups of people for random extermination in the name of terrorism, can you at least be fair about it and allow the common people to send up viable candidates...people we'd actually like to see killed.

I mean that's win-win. You get cannon fodder and an upgrade in your international terrorist profile, we get rid of people that make our time on earth particularly unpleasant.

Par example, I'd like to nominate, as my first candidates, the people that promised but never quite managed to bring to book the people responsible for the first serial bombings in '93.

Next, I'd like to nominate the politicians that went around hugging the widows and holding the babies of victims and vowing never to forget the carnage...at least not until 7 p.m. that evening when it was time for drinks at the club.

Finally, I'd like to nominate the idiot who, come tomorrow, will shake his head with practised bemusement, marvelling at the Takes-a-Lickin-Keeps-on-Tickin 'spirit' of Bombay and will then, with ill-concealed smugness, actually applaud the dysfunction and apathy...wait hold on, I think I'd like him to go first.

BTW, this just occured to me...they'll be calling this one 7/11, won't they? Perfect! The Americans have a terror incident, the date is numeric code for 'emergency'. The Indians have a terror incident, the date is numeric code for 'convenience store'...go figure!

Hard Talk : The Universe and Me. Part I.

The universe has some explaining to do.

Seriously...I would like some answers.
The way I figure it: as rational, sentient beings, creation has deprived human beings of the pleasures of an insensible, uncomplicated, rationale-free existence. So I'm here with my 'Right to Information' form filled out in triplicate and duly notarised because Goddamn it, I have questions and I WANT answers!!

What I'd like is for the universe to explain if not account for certain realities. There are big questions of course, such as the need for the holocaust,
the purpose of global warming, the mechanics of Donald Trump's Hairdo, etc., but there are smaller, more personal queries also.
So come on in universe. Take your shoes off. Smoke a cigarette. Make a sandwich. Get comfortable....this may take a while.

Now in no particular order, here goes:

*Explain how it is that I, as a common individual not related by blood or bond to anybody vaguely powerful or popular or influential or even remotely good-looking, can hope to get a fair shot anywhwere in this cosmos...where can I, an unaffiliated nobody, get my redressal? Where can I get justice? Where can I get my lunch money back?

*Explain to me why the government thinks that somehow by cosmetically altering the name of a city, they will have given all the inherent problems of that city a facelift too...like "Ooh ze crap et ze crud on ze streets of Mumbai, she ees charmant, n'est pas? Bombay?? Mias non...she ees ugly"

*Explain to me how it is that my watch, my microwave, my airconditioner, my dvd player... basically every piece of electronic equipment ever owned by me manages to break down precisely a day and a half after the stipulated warranty expires. I sense an electromagnetic conspiracy...

*Explain the need for cellulite again....like seriously, who thought that was a good idea.

*Explain why Creed?(the rock band, not the ideological construct.) Pearl Jam and Live weren't enough for you?? Ok given, Live were a little karma-obsessed and Ed Kowalczyk wasn't nearly as cute as Eddie Vedder. Still,we forgave...kinda. But Creed?? Scott Stapp?? Seriously!!

*Explain to me how Religion, this universally accepted conduit meant to teleport humanity straight into the bosom of divinity, has been and continues to be the reason for 90% of the goriest, most savage, most pointless bloodletting to have occured through the ages.

*Explain this Japanese hair straightening epidemic that has struck not just vain, upper middle class housefraus and frauleins(oh woe, if that were all) but oddly, an alarming majority of testosterone-heavy muscle monkeys. All of a sudden, there's a rash of people, male and female, running around wearing what can only be described as a bad throwback to the glam rock frightwigs of the 80's. What next? Crimping?

*Explain how it is that my sexlife consists entirely of being screwed over - by my phone company, my bank, my landlord, tax collectors, creditcard companies, my clients, expensive chain restaurants, evil cabbies, freebies with fine print, murphy's law,basically anyone that figures they have an appetite for fresh sucker today...HOW, Universe HOW?

*Explain the teeth of the English...how is it that this pea-sized nation, which colonised nearly half the globe, couldn't get itself a half-decent dental plan? Unless of course, dental-envy was their primary motivation for conquest: the subjugation of aboriginal peoples possessing healthy, aesthetically pleasant teeth. Hmmm...now that you think about it: India - originally a nation of good strong shiny white teeth, Africa - good strong shiny white teeth, The Americas - good strong shiny white teeth.

Ok, now in the name of bandwidth and brevity, we shall adjourn. But by no means am I through with you, Universe. So unless you're sending another monster asteroid my way, this is 'To be continued...'

I came. I saw. I procrastinated.

I figure I'm just the laziest motherfucker on this planet.

That's what brings me here at 3:45 a.m. on a Thursday morning gwaping at a computer screen while subjecting my neighbours to my most recent John Mayer compilation. (Ironically featuring 'Midnight' a track dedicated to insomnia and urban alienation. Good theme.)Now the thought swirling around in my brain, mystifying the fuck out of me is: Where do all my good intentions go?

Today was supposed to be about creative exploration. Today I was supposed to turn a slowly moulting mountain of gateway paper representing 8 years worth of doodles and ideas and rough drafts into at least one actual artwork.

Instead I took a nap that lasted 6 hours.

The narcolepsy is just a reaction. The real problem is writer's block, or my version of it, anyway. This is an abject, paralysing fear of commencing, of committing, of eventually fucking up SO badly in SO many ways that they'd need a whole new decimal system to quantify it.
It's like stepping off a cliff...once you 're airborne, you don't know how far you're going to drop and what shape you'll be in when you land. The average person tends to put it off for as long as he or she can.

The good news (I'm guessing)is that I'm not alone! We are a generation of procrastinators and lazy motherfuckers!!(how else do you explain the grammar in text messages and the tomaguchi phenomenon?) To avoid doing any real work we have all perfected a whole host of ingenious evasive strategy.

I know people who, everytime they need to begin a new project, will defer the inevitable by attempting to re-organize their entire CD collection - alphabetically, or chronologically, or based on favourites, or based on which bands had members who had maternal aunts named Gertie.

Spending an hour plucking your eyebrows(with toe-nail clippers),scraping the grunge off the grouting in the kitchen tiles with a toothpick, trying to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes (even though you don't smoke), volunteering to make absurd market runs (you've just discovered that there are no spark plugs in the house - horror of horrors), meditating upon the whorls and lines on the soles of your feet to see if you can find any hidden alphabets spelling 'Paul is dead', these are all acceptable evasion tactics.

Now the question is, has Humanity always been such a bunch of putter-offers, of procrastinators, of slackers or is it just our generation?
Like, I wonder if Plato had to play 249 games of solitaire before he sat himself down to write the Republic.
Or if Einstein would spend an hour combing his facial hiar into animal shapes to add to his bag of party tricks before he went to work on the theory of relativity.
Can you imagine Jesus before the Sermon on the Mount: "Water. Wine. Water. Wine...no, water. hic!! hee hee no, th-hass wine."
It's a wonder anything got done!

Notice by the way, how in true diabolical fashion, I have managed to defer my start up problems by making them yours...What? do you see any finished artwork lying around the place?

soy un perdidor

Currently, Beck Hansen is God...ok so i took my time discovering the dysfunction, but hey, discover it i did!! The prince of post modern punk, the lord of lo-fi,the king of hill-billy hip-hop swing; call him what you will, the dude can get it on!! And in case you think the boy's just about gibberish lyric pelted thru a prefab drum machine beat laid under a twisted harmonica, i have two words for you...'Sea Change'

Reader's Digest is evil..

TGIF!!!(I'm always tempted to say gesundhiet whenever someone says that, don't know why.)
Anyway...iiit's Friiiiday!!! And Halleluia, I have managed after many a moon to finish up the work week on a friday. Yay! long weekend!! I know I'll regret it cause I'll have to find twice as many things to do to fill it up and give it some semblance of debauchery! Will probably just end up comatose on the couch trying to exorcise this kink that's gathering like a voodoo cloud in my spine, just beneath my shoulder blades.

Other than that, Reader's Digest is trying to tempt me with offers of free cars and the chance to win a gazillion bucks in their sweepstakes thingie...it's just bait, they have no intention of making me flush!

They just want to trick me into buying their crap books.They make it seem like by refusing their 'Very Special Offer' of buying a 'Very Crap Book', you'll be taken out of the running for their 'Very Special Lottery'.
But be not fooled, weary pilgrim, for they do have a 'No, I don't want your crap book, but I still want all that cash and the free car' envelope...only you have to pay the postage on that one yourself.

Now I don't particularly need a book titled '50 Secrets To Make Your Garden Bloom'(and stink like a stampede of horses just went in your gardenias.)But a book called 'How To Grow High Grade Pot In Your Kitty litter Box'-that, I could use.

Also, would someone please tell them I'm not really interested in learing how to rewire my entire house using dental floss and a dry cell or who the real inventor of the shoe horn was, so could they please stop using what remains of the earth's natural forest cover to make annoying little sticker thingies that you have to stick in the appropriate and equally annoying little spots on their annoying little sweepstakes entry booklets, while rejecting the annoying crap book offer they insist on dangling in front of your nose every time!!
Now don't get me wrong..send me the offer to join the sweepstakes, cause I'd kill for that free Hyundai but don't strip an entire forest of sycamores or whatever to do it!!

I is for Idiot

Words fail me.
No really, they fail me. My brain fails me. I am devoid of coherent thought. As I sit here, I turn progressively into an idiot...with not even enough savant to back that up.

I think I probably peaked at the age of 9. At 10, I must have been a fucking genius brimming over; All pop-corn pop pop popping with thoughts and plans and ideas and notions. Bigger and better and more aerodynamic and packed to the sundecks with the protein enriched goodness of freshly squeezed possibility.

But i guess it's been downhill ever since. The vaunted balloon of my virtuosity hit a low pressure zone just short of the finish line and snagged itself on the jagged edge of mediocrity.

And now my intelligence works in fits and spurts, like a broken juicer or something...the blade keeps turning but the trough's jammed.
All I know is the shine's definitely off the old noggin. I'm not as razor sharp and puking possibility as i once was.

Who knows, at this rate I should be drooling into a sippy cup in about 7.5 years, give or take a few.

Dubious Epiphany # 136

Sometimes the only way Out...
is Through

Raaaaiiin Oonn Mmyyyy PAAaaaRaaaaade!!

AAAhhhh RAAAAIIINNNN.....rain....goooooood!So I'm actually thinking of lashing together a couple of planks of driftwod and teaching myself to row to work...it may be an improvement on ricks and cabs. And think of the money I'll save!

Weirdly enough for most people, wading to work would qualify as a definitive bitch...but I'm actually enjoying it.

But then it figures, doesn't it? I dress down for work; anything that gets wet or ruined...well it already is. Plus it's cooler when it rains so sites without the electricals in place aren't sweltering dutch ovens. Working without decent lighting is a bit of a challenge though and the damp means it takes longer for paint to dry...(I sometimes still get a kick out of telling people I get paid to watch paint dry...literally! (oh well..some people get to stare at computer screens)

Anyway, all in all...I love this whole coming of the flood spectacle. Rainy days always feel like a kind of universally accepted time out. Strangers or friends, people are nicer...we catch each other's eye; we pretend to grumble about the weather; we shake our heads feigning bemusement at the heavens pouring down on us...and sometimes we even cut each other some slack. in essence, we make contact. It's nice.

And then there's the amazing way that the rain brings out the contours of things into such intense relief...be it the colours of the fresh washed leaves, or the regrettable depth of the potholes on the roads or just the shapes and smells of memories lost in time.
I realize I remember things past more vividly if rain formed part of the backdrop or soundtrack of the scene...like somehow your monsoon memory is like a parallel life running alonside your real life, but you can only access it when it rains. Ok weird...sue me.

And to think of all those countries out West where they liken rainy days with gloom and sadness...and here in our sun strafed country we sing songs to the rain about how it brings us back to life...there's a lesson in perspectives for ya!

So anyway I'm praying for more rain....I'm feeling invincible and I think I can blame it on the rain.

Sanctuary

The work week, the work life, is spent in people's houses trying to turn flat boring whitewashed walls into the gateways to some exotic other realm using colour and my meagre imagination. Part of the job becomes about blending unobtrusively into their environment, their intimate life spaces, their homes.

It's a kind of involuntary voyeurism...outside, looking in through the plastic wrap of professional distance. Like second nature I read their lives from the encrypted code of their possessions and professions; their habits and their humours.

Amazing. like fingerprints and faces, no two are the same...each room coloured by the distinct aura of it's inhabitants.

The happily married, the hopelessly single, the bitter divorced.

The tiny rented apartments and the sprawling manor homes.

Homes warm and frenetic with light and laughter and love and homes barren and screaming with the trapped silence of mausoleums.

Catalog perfect homes and spiraling mess homes.

Homes that let you borrow their sunsoaked peace and homes that feed you hollow disquiet.

Homes rich and pungent with the smells of cooking and homes rank with the odour of wealth.

Homes with pictures of friends and lovers and pets and mothers taped to walls and refrigerator doors and homes spartan as monasteries.


And in the homes, the people...
The sweet apologetic ones that can't quite make up their minds.
The exuberant ones that talk a mile a minute.
The narrow fault finding ones.
The sneaky ones you know are going to try and work you over.
The quiet ones with the guarded eyes that you want to please the most because when you do their wonder is the purest.
The terminally design challenged ones who couldn't possibly trust you or their own sense of style...not without a signed affidavit from their mighty interior designers.
The arrogant patronizing ones who think they could do your job in their sleep.
The adventurous ones who let you go the distance...and come along for the ride.
The bewildered ones who don't understand any of it, but know you'll somehow magically figure out what they like.
They all let you in...and you stay a while...a tourist in a borrowed sanctuary.

Shared space is a shared life; it's inevitable that they'll talk to you and tell you things...sometimes just because you're there. Sometimes because no one else is.
And you'll see them as they are...in the inner sanctum...ceos and society heiresses, accountants and movie stars, mothers and lovers and newlyweds, rich men's wives and single working girls.

And you'll learn a lot...about style and wealth. And grace.
And you'll see that sometimes a blessing may be a curse...
and maybe a curse isn't necessarily so.