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.