Don't drink the water, but feel free to use the WiFi

I rearranged my room today. I remembered someone once related to me this idea about "The Potential Energy of Stuff", the crux of her idea was that cleaning your room, decorating, fixing or otherwise rearranging your living space infuses it with potential energy and in turn makes you feel more energised. I normally hate bastardised physics and other pseudo-science, but I like this analogy, indeed you do get a good feeling and an energy boost from fixing, cleaning, even moving your bed to a different spot in your room. It is something I don't do often enough, as any of my housemates will attest.

I'm sleeping in the loungeroom at the office at Kathmandu. Much more like a house than an office, perhaps 5 other volunteers are staying here, we get fed Dhal Baat twice a day except for Sundays. In a week or so I will move to Godawari, out in the hills. I can't wait. That last entry, typed in an airport, started off quite broad, but became more and more direct as my batteries ran down to nothing. Where was I up to?

Yes, volcanic ash cloud. I was at the airport, and saw all of the virgin blue flights were getting canceled all over the place. I went to the information counter, and the smartly-dressed lady pre-empted my request with a look that said "Hey, you think you've got problems?". She told me that she couldn't help me, I had to contact the other airline, or the travel agent. My housemate, being the solid-gold diamond that he is, had telepathically sensed that something had gone wrong, and taken a wrong turn on the highway, so that by the time I called him, he was only 5 minutes away. He dutifully waited for me while I plied and pleaded with the travel agent. After a while, the travel agent sent me home, telling me that the best thing I could do was contact China Southern airline in the morning.

So I came back home, promising my housemates that I was back for the night, but would be gone again before long. The next night I still had no idea how long I would be stuck in Brisbane. My housemates being champions of the highest order, bought me dinner at their friend's going away thing, at the Nepalese restaurant in Paddington. The Everest soup that night was bittersweet.

I became a ghost in Brisbane for two days. I was just starting to really worry that I might be stuck there for weeks, with no job and no room, dwindling away my last bit of money, and then the Good Agent called back. In my endless phone calls, I dealt with 4 travel agents, and in the middle was one who promised she could help, who had all kinds of ideas, who right there on the phone held seats on the parts of my flight she could get then, so confident was she that she could get the rest sorted. This resourcefulness, and her good phone voice, and that she genuinely gave a damn about what I was doing in Nepal, why I needed to get there so urgently, this made her stand out from the other three agents. And I began to fall helplessly in love with her. At my housemate's friend's dinner I was relating my story to another travel agent, and he told me that she was in fact the top travel agent in Brisbane, or Australia, or something. And, after two days of being a ghost in Brisbane, she called back and told me that there was a flight for me if I could get to the airport in the next few hours. Done, gone, whoosh

The only problem with the flight was that I had to spend the night in Sydney. Now I don't have a problem with Sydney any more. I discarded my innate Melbourne-based hatred of Sydney a while ago, it's just the cost of the place. As things stood, I had $100, just enough money to get my tourist visa at Nepal airport. There was transport from and back to the airport, $30 right there. All of my requests to friends for somewhere to stay were either declined or ignored. So I went to Surry Hills, for my friend there never answered his phone anyway, and he would no doubt have somewhere for me to sleep. Just to complicate matters, he was an alcoholic party animal. I arrived at his house, and he was on top form, drinking with several of his friends and fixing to go to a gig. He has a deep cavernous voice that is completely at odds with his pale, youthful face, and people find him intoxicating for his warmth, his honesty, and his deep melancholy. Every time I see him I forget to stop asking him how he is, so I do, and the answer is always depressing. Yet I feel hopeful for him, for some reason.

I wrote off my last bit of money, effortlessly gave it up for the love of the experience, and just prayed that some of the money that I was owed or otherwise promised would come through before I arrived in Kathmandu. We arrived at the bar, FBI something. There were some great bands I'd never heard of, Halal Hawaii and Tropical Punch. The floor was slippery and covered in broken glass, but no-one seemed to mind as they moshed away. When in Rome, I thought, and threw myself into that mass of flailing limbs. It was one of those mosh pits where there is something really loving in amongst all of that pushing and shoving. I saw a girl get elbowed in the face, and holding a tissue to her bleeding nose, jumped right back in there. This, I thought, is something that I'm not likely to experience for the next few months. Two hours sleep, give or take, and I woke up next to that same girl who had been elbowed in the face but kept dancing anyway. Bidding her goodbye, I made my way to the airport.

For the next 20 hours or so, airports and aeroplanes intermingled, altitudes and countries were blurred by the wash of flourescent light. Sydney Guangzhou Kathmandu movies flavourless food name passport number stamp wait in line sit down stand up, hey presto. During that time, one of my little ships had come in, O relief, and I could afford the three-month visa, the passport photo, the taxi from the airport, and still enough of a buffer zone, for here in the 14th poorest country in the world, your dollars go a long way. This house is quite Westernised, and staying in this loungeroom, I could believe that I'm still in Australia. That is, if it weren't for the noise of dogs, street vendors, temple bells and car horns. The city comes to life at about 6 in the morning as the sun rises, and settles down again as it sets. Within this of course, people follow many other rhythms. The gregarious South African man who I share this room with got home at 4:30 in the morning. He and I were equally relieved that the other did not find this to be improper behaviour.

Natural disasters

Day two in Limbo. I should be in Nepal by now, but instead I wait. For how long, nobody knows. The travel agents and airlines promise again and again that they will call me back, but they never do. I try to make myself the squeaky wheel, to hassle them until they relent and work out how to get me on a plane, but they have a lot of people like me to deal with. I joke to my friends that I'm a ghost in Brisbane, stuck here because of Unfinished Business. I try and find loose ends to tie up. That letter I'd been meaning to send for the longest time, that library card, that birth certificate. Nothing seems to help, because still I wait. I've made lengthy, meaningful goodbyes to my dear friends, and now I'm afraid that they'll see me walking down the street.

 The last few weeks have been jammed with purpose and urgency. I returned from Bali just in time to see the end of an era. The house known as Ill Manor was being sold, and we were required to have an epic party to see it off. Ill Manor, a house that Esher would have loved. It was three-storeys high, or more accurately, three-storeys low, the ground floor being the top floor, the other floors sloping down the side of the formidable hill. One year ago, this house awoke me to Brisbane's charms, 6 months later I was to chase a girl to this city, and find myself living in her room in that same chaotic house. Brisbane remembers you, Ill Manor, so does Melbourne for that matter. That party was just as you imagined it, bands in the lounge room obscured behind a sea of dancing people. Here, someone else smashing a hole in the wall, there, someone spraying a tag on another wall. Over there, a housemate trying to explain to everyone that it's not a demolition party, his voice lost in the hubbub.

The food poisoning I had avoided in Bali caught up with me at last, after that party. Ill once more. Better again in a few days, just in time to pick up my old friend Skye from the airport. He landed on my couch, and we each spent a few days recovering, I from sickness and work, Skye from an international misadventure which left him penniless and a little worn down. Those first few days before we moved into the theatre space were strange and hard to recall, we got the internet connected in our house, how did we live without it? I drew a face on a balloon and shaved it with a cut-throat razor. It popped, with a little cloud of shaving cream in its wake. They gave us the key to the Sue Benner theatre, and we set out to make a show, from scratch, in one week. That week blurred into one long, long day. Sleep brought no respite, only the most vivid and bizarre dreams, in one of these I hung out with cousin Henry in some Aztec ruins. Towards the end of the dream I recalled his tragic death, and woke up crying. Skye was dreaming vividly as well, but was not sleeping as easily. I would be up and pottering about in the kitchen of a morning, while he was still lying half-awake in his couch-cocoon.
"Skye, it's time to get up!"
"Mmnnh... Play me Bill Withers!"
I loaded up YouTube, found Bill Withers' song, "Lovely Day". It worked like magic, like a snake-charmer's flute, and we walked into town, singing. Those half-hour walks to and from the theatre gave us time to talk and think, and as our shoes slapped purposefully down those same paths, the show explained itself to us. Skye told me about his problems with the term 'audience participation'. He explained that an audience is always participating, by the very fact that they are an audience. We talked about comfort zones, and why he avoided using narrative in his shows. We talked about form and content, about stories and emotional manipulation, and I told him a certain story from the voyages of Sinbad. We talked about so many things, and they all made their mark on our show in some way. I remember after our first show talking to two people who were very interested in the way the show explored masculinity, and I thought to myself "Wow, that's about the only thing that we didn't discuss". We made a show where the audience had to engage and think and act from the very moment they walked into the space. A show that sabotaged itself, a show that we were both proud of. And then, the next day, we packed it all up, filled up a skip with old newspaper, loaded up my dear Eye-van with old abandoned clothing, and went on our way. No time to pause, for that evening I had a fundraiser for my flight to Nepal.

I felt despair set in as I went to the venue, no time, no mental capacity to do this. My body screamed, "I just want to have a day off!" No chance, no escape, off to the outskirts of Brisbane. Rocketing down the road, allaying my despair by shoveling salt & vinegar chips into my mouth as I drove. Crumbs everywhere, who cares? There, in a place called Cooper's Plains, was a little warehouse space that seemed to be a bakery. I still have no idea what that place was, who that man was and why he gave me 10kg of Sourdough for the pizza bases, but it did not seem to matter. His zeal when he talked about the dough was inspiring. He leaned in close, and in a low, conspiratorial voice, murmured "It's alive, man!" That is who I want to be baking my bread.

The fundraiser was a success, pizza was delicious, my friends did a wonderful job putting it all together, playing great music, doing great performance. Even though there wasn't a huge turn out, we managed to raise almost enough money for me to pay back the fund for my plane ticket. All that was left was to pack up my room, say my goodbyes, get some circus skills booklets from Flipside, and then get to the airport. The sense of achievement was immense, putting on that show, then fundraiser, and then flying to Nepal, all in such a short time. But then as I got to the airport's check-in counters, and i saw a constellation of cancelled flights on the departure boards, disbelief, despair!. I remembered things I'd vaguely heard about a volcanic ash cloud.

the word of the day is

Oboe

Brunswick Blues, part 4. GOJIRA

I wish I could transform into

Godzilla

And smash everything.

You all flee from me in panic, but

I don’t care

Because I’m too busy smashing

Everything

And also, because of the question

I wish I was the exploding man

From that TV series, “Heroes”

I would explode right now, and I

Hopefully wouldn’t hurt anyone,

Just make a nice big explosion,

Maybe collapse some walls

Because I could,

And because of the question

If I know that I’m going to feel ok again soon, then what’s the point of feeling like this right now?

                        ?

“I’m gonna hurl myself against a wall,

because it’s better to feel bad, than feel nothing at all”

[a quote from a song by Warren Zevon]

I will fill this area of the page with words, so as not to waste paper. As predicted, the Godzilla-exploding man mood passed overnight. And the question, what is the point, echoed through time. All things pass after All. Then we come back to the paradox of absolutes, that beautiful paradox: if nothing is, then all is.

If nothing is original, then everything is original.

If nothing has an ultimate purpose, then everything has an ultimate purpose

What, then?

Just so that it could happen, so that event could come to life.

Flee, fly! Responsibility is coming! Abandon everything, yes, there’s no time. Too late, it caught you, lured you in with shiny dreams.

But it’s not so bad, after a while you will forget why you were running.

The pay is bad, but the hours are long.

And somebody’s got to do it.

                        Apparently

 

No-one home

Just me and the noises

Just me and the objects

The air is coloured by Shankar Shankar

Just Just Just Just Just

Peril… boredom

Peril… solitude

Sure there are things I could be doing. But for now I will sit and taste the stillness. Like fine wine.

I haven’t had a fine wine

For the longest time

Just when I get to enjoy it, I will get joined by the people.

It already happened

‘tis grand, ok,

I can keep writing on

I don’t know George, but I know people

 

Spending more than too much time looking for a pen that works, so that I can put words on this page.

We were drunk on the power of glue guns, leather offcuts, curly pipes, and something else. That’s all I’ve written sofa

My mind has a mind of its own, so the song tells me. Today I discovered that time flies, even when you’re not having fun.

Really I just don’t want to go back to the cardboard, the papier mash-up, the prawns.

White floor, white ceilings,

Squashed in between the whiteness, uncountable logos. The brands are fishing for eyeballs, they use tricky lures, this is a good fishing hole. These eyeballs are easily caught. I wandered through K-mart, that store that gives me such an urge to steal something. They sensed it, checked my bag on the way out. Just props. They only checked my front pocket, damn, I could have. I see a product called shameze, or ShamEze, or SHAMEze

Spring is here, what a thing.

The brilliant sun vies for attention with the raging storm. Apollo and Thor doing their party tricks just for us. All around me is Brunswickness. Brunswicked, there is no rest for us. No respite, no smoko. We are busy giving our piece of life, liveliness to these concrete surfaces. Like mice running in wheels, we all work to create this place, this community, the kind of place we would like to live. Word to the nonnas, the mammas, the relentless drive of coffee, the paste-ups, the people with nowhere else to go. We choose to be here, for this reason we can consider ourselves lucky. That word calls forth that old memory, wisdom from the unlikeliest places.

“There’s no such thing as luck. It’s just opportunity meets motivation.”

This of course doesn’t account for bad luck. Opportunities are everywhere, you just have to know how to look. Misfortune is everywhere too, but you don’t have to look for it. It finds you.

Getting to the end of the book now, time to start filling the empty pages that are, like this one, stuck between much earlier pages. When I lost this book, I struggled to know what to call it. “I can’t find my book.” Too ambiguous. “Diary” no, I have one of those and it’s boring. “Journal”, so serious, who am I, Hemingway? Going back to these pages brings a realization, that everything you do is a diary entry, and everything you make. Be

Do you think I use too many adjectives?

Dear I,
I wrote a reply to your email. It was full of witticisms, philosophical revelations, heartbreak, and important information that You Need to Know! The email told a story that stretched across many generations, within that story were many other little stories, each one different and fascinating in itself. In the end, all of the threads tied themselves together in a dramatic yet uplifting conclusion.

I was about to hit send, but I thought "I'll just rewrite one sentence" At that point, my laptop screen went blank. No more batteries. I looked frantically for somewhere to plug my laptop in, and saw that my plug wouldn't fit in a Bali power socket. "Never mind," thought I, "I have an Australian plug adapter in the bottom of my bag!" After digging around for sometime, I discovered the thing; it was a cheap, plastic, white lump, covered in slits for all kinds of plugs. I pondered for a moment about all these little slits, if there might be some more streamline design for an adapter, and then I noticed the electrician fiddling with the wires outside my guest-room.

What a sight, this tanned, wiry little man, perched upon this well-used ladder, behind him a landscape of rice-paddies carved into the side of a mountain, a jigsaw puzzle of leaf-shaped fields falling down towards jungle. The electrician did his job in a ritualistic way, a way that seemed perfectly harmonious with the ancient surroundings. No bumcracks or tribal tattoos to be seen anywhere near this quiet man. Any other sparky I know would have seemed utterly out of place, as the farmers and their children were busy preparing offerings for this special day. Today, so I'm told, is some kind of festival where, like our Halloween, the skin between the spirit world and our world is a bit thinner.

I did not want to risk plugging my laptop into the wall whilst this little man was busily plying the electricity gods, not on a day like today. So I reluctantly gave up, hoping that the email might still be up on the screen when I eventually found myself in more conventional surroundings. The guest room itself was in a farm in the hills near Ubud, a welcome cure to the streets of Sanur and other places I'd been to in Bali so far. No street hawkers here, only real people who smiled at me because they were happy, who had better things to do than offer me a massage. As I left that place, I felt such a weight lift from me. A smile found its way onto my face as Gde (pronounced "G'day") and his scooter took me a-winding along big roads and smaller and smaller roads. Here, a van with exhaust and muffler dangling on a piece of old string, sending clouds of unhealthy smoke into our faces. There, a couple of street dogs playing, seeming to mock the trivial affairs of humans. Here an immaculate cow, perhaps the most beautiful I have ever seen, standing so motionless on the side of the road. There, a lady so old, so small, walking up the mountain path with an impossibly large container of water balanced on her head. I came to that place to visit my friend G, the mother of my friend E, of socktopus fame. G lives up there, in a house built recently in the traditional way. We laughed about the fact that they have wireless internet but not hot water. Staying in that place made me feel more strongly than ever what a strange period in history it is.

Now I am in an opulent hotel by the airport. They brought us here because my flight back to Brisbane has been delayed by about 6 hours. After a swim in the enormous pool, complete with bar, water-polo nets and who knows what else, I took this opportunity to use the desktop computers in the 'business centre'. After using my tiny laptop all the time it's nice to use these old-fashioned keyboards, with keys that you can really sink your fingers into, that make a thunderous clashing rumble when you type a long passage quickly. While I'm here, I thought, I should reply to your email. So here it is, "the other reply". It has none of the wisdom, wit, sadness, joy or Important Information of the previous email, but I did, at least, just remember to give you my postal address:

50 Daventry st,
Highgate Hill 4101 QLD

Could you send me yours? I will be flying to Kathmandu on the 22nd of June, but you can still send stuff there. I plan to hold on to that house, the lovely housemates, the chickens. It will be nice to get back to Brisbane, and have conversations that don't revolve around how much I don't want to buy anything, or how much the locals must despise us. As much as I like to complain about my week in the touristy parts of Bali, it's been great to see my parents and the rest of the family. As strange as they all are, it's the one club of which I'm proud to call myself a member.