Lost in the Mist

The city is gone, a ghost horizon.
Pale rain falls on the balding trees - misty drops wanting to be cold enough to be snow, but not quite making it.
Honking horns of panicked drivers, steady dribble in the downpipe, and a cold that crawls in seeking bones and the stealth theft of warmth.
I guess it's winter.

Pale Moon Rises

A pale moon rises.
The sunset is dusty like Martian earth.
Parrots scream of the end of day, from trees changing their faces to autumn colours.
The air chills windows and skin.
Lacklustre night descending.
Collar up and huddled in.
I have to work soon and don't want to.
So I'll keep watching the sky, and waiting for this nothing.

All That Glimmers

The wind hits my skin.
It's not icy, but cold enough to make me shiver.
The skinny cigarette rises to my lips, flares red, and I blow the plume out, watching it quickly merge into the panorama of rooves made black and grey by night.
Streetlights glow like hopeful gems, but they don't look magical today. All I can think when I see them is that those simple shining lamps are the only thing stopping humans turning back into animals.
And that is terrifying - probably why people don't gaze at streetlights and think about them.
Our other natures are best left unknown.

I scan the footpaths, I listen. Taggers love this time of night.
But even the roads are close to empty, like everyone has a secret, of why it's not a good night to be out in the world - a secret everyone knows but me.
I wish for more cars, I wish for none. A mind trying to distract itself from itself.

At least the city looks pretty. Almost bulging with sleek fat towers, red lights dancing ominously atop. From here the skyscrapers look like dark poles of LEDs. The cloud cover sits aloft, leaving a darkness below to contrast one version of night from another, to hug around the inky monoliths like bats wings.

There is no peace here. Just night.

Cacophony on Blue

Hundreds of white wings and open beaks, a sky of shrieks, like a gaggle of middle-age women spilling out of a restaurant with a bottle of wine in their bellies: a cockatoo panorama - a sky of glittering white, circling, and all landing on one small apartment building - concrete turned white-washed, not just by feathers, but no doubt, a flock of birdshit like pale, festive baubles hanging off a grey, bald Christmas pine.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Larceny

Burned rubber fills my nostrils, and the dark night fills my eyes.
Stars. There are stars up there.
Same as in Melbourne, but crisper, more dominant in the night sky.
I'm walking, and I don't know if it's safe, even though it's not that late.
I like being out of the streetlights on a rare evening stroll - away from eyes and intentions.
Just the sound of crickets rubbing their crickety legs together in their eternal plea for sex.
They're brown and small, and at first I thought they were cockroaches.
Recognising their legs and heads, I relaxed, and even felt affection for the blighters scuttling about the lit verandah.
They were pillaging the Salvos donations.
Scumbags.
I spotted two black PVC boots - my size.
Hrmm.
"I'm glad you aren't grabbing the whipper-snipper, Miss."
It was the guy in the white cap with the backpack.
I had sensed he was dodgy when he'd walked past before, but he'd disappeared and I thought my radar was off.
But I lived in Wodonga a long time.
And here he was again, scraping the edge of some pre-smoked cigarette on a bin lip.
"You're 'right," he said, seeing he'd startled me.
"Was just looking at the whipper-snipper."
Short of his words, he reminded me of an old Yorkship pauper, meaning yeh no harrm, Miss, just eyein' my ol' eye on that whipper-snipper there...
I hadn't even spotted the garden implement - just lots of drool-encrusted kids stuff and 1990s CD racks. A selection too sad to keep, and too sad to steal.
I bid him a good evening, because we were, after all, both thieves in the night.

Have You Seen My Sausage?

I was unsuccessful in my search for my son.
I typed in "sausage dog". I typed in "mini sausage dog". I typed in "miniature dachshund". And still none of the pictures sprayed before me portrayed my son - my dream doggy.
I miss him - my four-legged little frankfurter. My cuddly, cute, borderline-stolen dog.
Where are you? I need a picture to put as the wallpaper on my phone.
The best moments of my life were holding you... the worst was waking to see you were a pillow.
I know you're somewhere out there in Google image search... my son... my furry little sausage son.

If you see the dog from my dream, please call this number:

Christmas Cont'd

The miniature plastic Christmas tree droops in the hall. 

Tinsel and baubles glint distant daylight. Dust dims its foliage.
A 40-year-old Santa clings for his life to the very peak, as if a lumberjack has just called TIMBERRRR!

If I leave it there long enough, maybe it'll merge into the tub it sits on, the boots around it - the pile of miscellaneous CBF. 

Only one person can make me put it back in its drycleaning bag, back in its box, and try to make space in the spaceless closet for it again. 
A hero. A superhuman demi-god.

Marie Kondo.

 

Opium Papa

In the chair next to me with a vitamin C drip in his arm sat John from Macedonia. 78, looking good for his age, but worn out by cancer and surgeries.

He was telling me about growing up in a small town in the mountains, about life after the war, about moving to Australia.
He said they grew a lot of cannabis in Macedonia, and used the female plants for medicine, ropes, more.
There were also opium poppies everywhere, and he told me how to tap them. He said they used them for medicine.
When he was a little kid he'd play with a big bud of opium, throwing it against walls, and his grandfather would wallop him.

His wife died of cancer a few years ago and it wrecked him. She was only 68. He really loved her. Still holding hands in public kinda love. He'd internalised all the pain, keeping it from family, not wanting them to see him weak, sad or sick - and I chastised him for that. Told him I talk to so many men in their 30s and up who are ruined by stuffing all their feelings inside in a toxic little ball.

And all that internalising equalled belatedly finding out his immune system was collapsing, liver failing, and pancreatic cancer blooming.
He doesn't want chemo. He watched it eat away the last of his love's life. Hence vitamin C infusions. Rebuilding the immune system. Getting quality of life back - much more important to him now than quantity.

He said when he moved to Australia in 1954, he had heard that black people eat white people's babies.
He's a smart guy, so he didn't take it at face value, but was still wary.
His first occasion of seeing an Aborigine was one being thrown out of a pub by 4 white men.
"I thought - oh, the black people attack the whites - and here I see, it's the other way around!"

50% Off Christmas Cheer

Landfill county - and if you collect enough bags, you become queen.

Melbourne Central Boxing Day sale - 30th December.

Racks clustered with treacle clothes to be retired to forever bins or op-shops by next Christmas.

Idle minds in slow-moving bodies.

That looks nice.

That doesn't look nice but I'll buy it anyway - it is half-off, after all.

What is a 50% discount on something vastly overpriced?

Just... overpriced?

"Excuse me, miss, do you think I could have some change?" a native face drawls.

"Sorry man, I don't have money."

He slurs his pupils towards the two plump grocery bags beside me.

"Well, do you think I can borrow a lighter?"

I'm jotting in a notebook while waiting for a tram - a smoker would be getting in final puffs.

"Don't smoke."

He drifts on, ghost eyes already elsewhere.

Nowhere.

Across the road a man sleeps in diagonal - blue and grey sleeping bag cocoon with no beautiful butterfly coming.

Other men wear grizzled grins on their muzzles as they hold their dogs - 80c of coins starving the inside of a stained hat. One with a starry-inked face ponders his next marketing attempt - permanent marker poised over cardboard in his lap.

Still, the shoppers and tourists and well-to-do students, walk slow, clotting every street - often displeased that one person would need to slip by their 5-berth meander. How very dare I?

I walk fast. No patience for noise, litter, begging and lacklustre hedonism. But I stop to watch the dancing, the shouting, the cry for help from the dark bodies in bright clothes on the State Library's steps. Chants echo the sound-off on a megaphone. Banners scream their plea: No more rape as a weapon of war. No more. No more. Freedom now. Freedom now.

I want to sob. Instead I smile. People should know about this stuff. I know so little, but enough to be hurt by it. And I'm happy to see as many tall, determined men as round women in headscarves. They've fled dictatorships. Unspeakable horrors. And now someone in tepid Gucci accoutrement pauses to video the scene. How quaint!

I'm glad my tram comes, or I may go up and ask one of the protestors about their fight.

And if I do, I'll cry. My safe street filters will come off and empathy will render me socially unacceptable.

Much more de jour to pop your boutique bags down and record without expression.

And still, it's just another day in a city.

No-one's getting saved - they're getting spending.

Little Friends

The puppy toddled on the strip of grass - body light and feet small. A piece of KFC with shiny dark eyes - it ran at me, on its fabric leash.
It sniffed and licked my hand gently but with enthusiasm, and I greeted it before acknowledging its human.

And for 30 seconds, I felt all the cracks in my soul fill, and I was whole - vetted by a cavadoodle fried chicken angel.

Wooing Dreams

I dreamed all about being wooed and adored, and it felt like being a teenager, though I was never treated that way as a teen. I woke with a feeling maybe I am someone still worth chasing, and keeping once caught - and treating even better once caught. Known. Held. Embraced.

But then, it was just a dream. Those things fade - like the nocturnal sagas of murderous hands seeking you through an abandoned city, or panic nothing dreams of sleeping through your alarm. Dreams are just stories unconscious us tells waking us. Amusements or tortures.

But it was nice to wake and not feel born back into the world another day another unevenly-weighted thing upon it. Not waking sad feels like a challenge won, but it doesn't last long. The ways of the day change the narrative, and mood, and the dream is gone and you're the jiggly human meat man making decisions, worrying and seeking pleasure and relief from pain. Until these things tire you so much, and the hours later, you tumble horizontal, and dream again.

Tick the Box or Scan Invalid

Do you ever feel like there are 8 checkboxes for worthiness, and if you tick zero, you have no value?
You draw your own squares below, in purple pen, swirls and stars to dot the i's - other options, more values, rarer, wonderful things, but the computer can't read them.
So you break yourself to tick all 8, or even half, or even one, and if you succeed, you're depressed, anxious, lost, or burned out. And then the computer reminds you that you need to keep at least one neatly ticked to be valid.

But you can't. So you have no value. And then it's just you and the purple pen and the swirls and the stars.

Closed Mic

9th March, 2016 

I won the open mic competition!
Nah, I actually got snubbed. Fucking hard.
Harrrrrrrrrrd.
I never gave a shit about that silly competition, but I give a shit about being insulted.
Daddy didn't raise no fool, but clearly Mother did.

I say I won because of what happened.
I got up and started singing and every single pair of eyes in that room were on me. Every pair of eyes in the beer garden. That's rare. Everyone fell quieter. That was near impossible when I started last year. This time they were locked on me. And I let my voice soar out of my body like a winged thing, an old creature stretching wings, taking the air away from those below, rupturing and rapturing and roaring. I let myself feel the words. I let myself pause and breathe. I sang QUIET last - a dark, personal, tortured string of sounds and feelings, and everyone was with me. The applause was hard and sharp. I was where I was supposed to be.
The bitchfaces have melted.
The pub chatter has faded.
I finally have the voice I always wanted, and now I can give to other people, in loving little brutal doses.
A year ago, I couldn't hold up the falling sky. Tonight, I made it fall.

Thank you to my beautiful friends who came along. To have that little army of silent support there to the right of my vision was wonderful to me. You really can't know what it means.

x

Lady Cakes & Eat It

International Women's Day. Year 9. Lunchtime, double classroom booked out. Only Girls Allowed. And teachers of both genders. Two male teachers attend. They stand, jovially eat free cakes, and stare in decadent hunger at teenage girl legs.

This is my only knowledge of Women's Day.

Creeping Beauty

Nightmare girl

You're perfect to me
I wouldn't change a hair
On my pretty little head
So please
Don't do it to me
While I'm sleeping
Don't walk right through me
Creeping Beauty
Creeping Beauty

Queen of the night.

THE LEGS THAT TWITCHED

My leg muscles have been ravenously twitching for over 12 hours and it's official - I need to go in a bin.
I probably need thorough testing by a good specialist, but seeing as I haven't found one in a decade, I must go in a bin now.
Sleep may help, but you can't sleep when your legs are stockings filled with electronic pinballs and a huge cramp is only half a second's warning away.
I know I'm meant to be grateful for a lot of things. I should be happy to be alive and in a first world and have cool hair. But try enjoying a roadtrip in a car with the engine scraping the road. Try even getting from A to B. Try not panicking that mechanics shrug even though the car is filled with fumes that make you dizzy and sick.
I've mixed my metaphors again.

Anyway, come cut off my legs so I can sleep,  because you can feed them to your rescue dog as soon as the spasms stop - which could be after the first bite, who knows.

Algorithm Method - get fucked & die

What the hell is wrong with all the platforms?

YouTube removes your monetisation if you have fewer than 1000 subscribers or fewer than 4000 watch hours in a year.

The newer Instagram algorithms make you invisible unless you boost ($).

Facebook does the same.

Freelancing platforms now send harrassing emails every month saying they've stripped ANOTHER seller level status due to lack of sales (outside your control), making you lower on searches/directories, or even literally INVISIBLE.

This is like when there is a competition and the entries on the front page get seen most so they get voted highest and win.

No-one looks at page 7 of anything.

People rely on being seen, BY THEIR FOLLOWERS - PEOPLE WHO CHOOSE TO FOLLOW THEM. We are BOMBARDED by ads by the platforms, and they are mining our info, AND we are creating the content (that's not how entertainment platforms ever used to work). So none of it is free at all.

You can't even study SEO or learn how to do this stuff better. Hustle and clickbait and bullshit will become final tools of survival. Outside broadcast TV, and brick & mortar stores, this is how people's businesses are seen.

And what do the algorithms want?

These binary code beasts are demanding something but no-one is telling us what the fuck that is. You go from trying not to please people at the sacrifice of integrity and quality, to trying to please a fucking mathematical code invented by people trying to extract more money from toothless mouths.

If these platforms supported their freelancers and artists and business owners, hey, everyone would make money. Then the aforementioneds would HAVE income. You boost a post, do you know how many sales that converts to?

Shit, they lie and say you'll get 1400 views and then the report says it reached 728, would you like to boost again?

Oh, want to be seen on page 2 of Google? Better pay for that, motherfucker. Too bad if you make stuff to make people happy. To not be some slime-coated, tooth-whitened, collar-popping entrepreneur scumfuck out there pyramid-scheming innocents into soul death.

These algorithms decide who and what we see, and therefore who and what we care about, and our lives. Our life experiences. 
You didn't see that your friend's dad died. But you sure do know that that place has a watch sale on because you clicked an ad once a few years ago.

We are being trained to be hypervigilant over nothing. If it beeps, it needs feeding, of our attention. Phones are parasites - cleverly designed to prey on our evolution. We're not dumb for it. But we have to set a lot of tools and systems in place to fight it. 

Because in all these disruptive changes, that all these CEOs are smiling over and saying will make the platforms more individualised and user-friendly, not only are real people essentially having supermarkets built right in their shop entryway, but we are being told who we are and how to continue being like that.

It's death to some, and the stunting of growth to the rest.

You won't discover new. You'll just be forever faced with a snapshot of you a you you've long-since outgrown.

Ocka Musica

I had a terrible thought yesterday.

I woke up with one of my pop songs in my head, and it was playing in there all day, and at some point I was singing it while pulling clothes out of the washing machine, and I wondered... 'What if I sang it in an Australian accent?'

I know. Disgusting. It worked, but I felt so dirty. Courtney Barnett is like calcified duck poo gold-panning on my eardrums. I am happy to enunciate a lot of words Aus way inside my tracks, without thinking, but not okay with sounding like someone clangin' on at Centrelink about how the baby bonus ain't what it used to be.

Film pitch: 'Killing for Two'

A serial killer must seriously rethink her career and life-or-death choices when she finds out she's pregnant.

Carried by the Fever

I was thinking today about how we let perfectionism stop us from doing things, 'cos we're waiting until things are in a state that we can be proud of and we make something that can follow us around a long time. But then I looked at bands like The Mavis's - and they post photos of themselves from the nineties, like, oh my god, look at us, we were babies, look at our strange haircuts and clothes, and they went through many eras but they didn't let it stop them, that, you know, in 20 years time they were going to look back and go isn't that weird. They just went through with it anyway. Carried by the fever.