And another old one: Crash landing

Eyes wired open. Too many energy drinks, that one didn’t seem to work, let’s try another shall we? How many now? There was a man who was made up of rubber bands, high tensile wire and other such things. Essentially, a ticking time-bomb of potential energy. He spoke like a machine gun, but that’s enough about him for now, I don’t want to paint a bad picture of such a good egg.

We were asked, and we said yes. It seemed ridiculous, as naked bodies flailed through uneven, scrubby bush-filled ground, in the middle of the night. Be careful though not to smile on camera, as our Corinthian helmets, bandaged heads, ex-military parachutes and towering wigs were holding us hostage. We agreed to this, I laughed to myself, as flies crammed into gaps in my bandages, Myer Christmas sale, to get to the syrupy fake-blood that cakes my face. Later I discovered that they like real blood even more, as I scratched at the welts and rashes that covered my legs. Never really thought about the whole hayfever thing.

We arrived at midnight, and left as the sun was high over the trees. They in the other car, they awoke just in time to narrowly avoid a crash, life and death can be such frivolous things. Nothing so dire in our car, just the endless traffic jam, the enraged driver, the heat and the sticky itchy feeling.

We are making a story about freedom, escape from ennui, empowerment through choice, namely the choice to throw oneself off a building.

Today we lie on couches, catching precious moments of sleep before the next ridiculous misadventure. We sleep, we recover. This old house is now an infirmary for heart, mind, ankle. I will go in there, try my hand at sleeping, along with the rest of them. I will surely need strength for the next leg.

All just a memory now, that itchy sticky feeling, now just the dull pain of over-scratched ankles. Why do they love to bite into my ankles? Is the blood nicer there? So many more misadventures crammed into two days, one-and-a-half, three, numbers melt in the hot sun.

We were all naked together, midnight and we couldn’t see anything, so it didn’t matter, it was just normal. Natural. Then we came home, beaten. It was still Thursday. How? Off to Laverton, a drive under fire as a barrage of shock revelations rained down.

 - Our convoy was stretched as fast-in-front slow-behind style

 - They took the wrong turn

 - Giant mats came loose and fell out of our ute, somewhere back there

 - We can’t go back for them, Colby doesn’t have a license

 - Now we’re on the wrong road

 - What if someone had an accident?

 - We’ve got to go back there, but in a different car

 - We’re lost

 - What if someone got hurt?

 - Driving without a license, I’d better take over

We never found the mats, no sign of an accident, either. Weary limbs landed at Laverton, an abandoned traffic control tower. Two crash mats left, no time to worry, we’re losing sunlight. At last, we arrived at the crucial moment. Jump. Naked. Our rubber-band man was in top gear. Giant Scotch thistles, we were asked to jump over them (naked), but by this point we knew how to handle our directors. Since that moment when the giant silent Adonis sat hidden in the canola field, lobbing big rocks like mortar shells at startled cameramen. Now it was fun, and what’s more, we were almost there. The last shoot of the long long Thursday.

Old journal entry: Income, Outcome

Income, Outcome

Dental adventure. Here I sit in a waiting room, a sound reminiscent of power tools carries through the walls. My teeth have always been good to me, but I have not always been so good to them. I can’t remember how long ago it was when I last had my teeth checked. 17 years? I remember being told that my teeth were very good. I was surprised at the time, since I hadn’t been taking very good care of them. At that time I decided that my teeth must be indestructible, and I would not ever need to return to one of those places. Power tools. Will they renovate my face?

Income. Outcome. Words rain down like monsoon. Exterminator? I don’t even know ‘er!

And there I was, flailing in the grips of wordlessness, making noise on paper. It felt like the end, like I would never write again. And then, later that night, as I lay in bed, I realized that in fact I contain all stories. All I had to do was think about the story, rather than the words, and everything else gets taken care of.

A window frame is a fine thing. The glass inside it is made of sand.

Everything

Well it’s only a paper moon, hanging over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you just fucking believed in me

I was on my way home, as usual. But… when I passed that store called “ Parties, Balloons, Anything”, I noticed something I had never seen before. Under the street sandwich-board sign, the one with all of the helium balloons hanging upwards from it, there was a hole in the ground. I approached cautiously. When I was right up close to it, I noticed a faint light coming from it. Going down on all fours, I looked into the hole. It seemed to stretch on forever and what’s more, there was a faint music coming from in. Carnival music “Oom-pa-pa Oom-pa-pa Oom-pa-pa” The hole, which was really more of a tunnel, was bedecked with fairy lights, which of course explained the faint light.

As I looked closer, my head crept further into the tunnel. The smell of party poppers. Suddenly, I felt my head being pulled, as if it were a champagne cork.

POP!

My head whooshed through the hole, my body flapping along behind it like a streamer. As I slowed I tumbled tumble tumbled to a stop, to find myself sitting in a barber’s chair. Not your usual average kind of barber’s chair, this one stretched way up high. This of course meant that the barber had to stand on stilts. As he cut his own hair, mine grew longer.

Why I suck at auditions.

“The idea for this commercial is that you are a busker, doing amazing tricks on the street, but everyone is watching someone nearby, who is eating a hamburger,” Said the agent.

“So I’ve basically got to be less interesting than a hamburger”

The casting lady responded to this with awkward silence.

“You’ll be engaging children at the tennis, wearing a ballboy costume. The most important thing is that you are good with children.”

“Oh, I love kids. Couldn’t eat a whole one.”

A stifled giggle from the other auditionee. Silence from the casting lady.

Ivan, this is you from the future!

Yes, I have a red pencil now. Otherwise, despite several minor epiphanies, I’m pretty much the same. Do you want some advice? Hmm. Be brave, say what you feel. Don’t hang around somewhere when it’s time to go. Oh and, er, I love you.

Another day, much like the others before it. Drink the coffee, catch the train, feel good, feel bad, dream of things, wait for that thing, that gold-plated opportunity.

Rude awakenings

It is perfectly dark now. This is load shedding. Perfectly dark of except for the laptop screen, which has been recently replaced, giving my cracked old laptop a certain phoenix quality, giving hope that old wounds can certainly be healed, and that eventually I will get off my arse and do those simple things which I had been meaning to do for the longest time. Load shedding. Reliable information is hard to come by, but what I’m told is that Nepal is powered exclusively by hydro-electricity, hence the ample power during monsoon season, and the escalating regime of power cuts which last year went up to 18 hours per day without power during the end of Winter. What I also heard is that Nepal sells power to India, but then miscalculates and has to buy part of it back at an inflated price. Hard to believe, but not impossible. After all, this is Nepal. 

Here we are in Winter time, those who can afford it have generators, which burn petrol, or inverters, which charge great batteries so that when the power goes out, they can still watch tv and use their laptops. What this means is that they use at least twice as much power while it’s on, or they use petrol and create power in a much crappier way, making the whole idea of load shedding sort of redundant. For the people who can afford it, that is, and for those who cannot afford it then load shedding is very effective indeed. I find myself without an inverter, partly because I don’t know if I’ll be staying in this house for much longer. 

Nepal has made me really appreciate the ingenuity of the humble head-torch. I bought a cheap one from a shop the other day, but unfortunately you need to hold the button down to keep it on, making it even more annoying than a regular torch. Determined not to be defeated, I rifled through the darkness and found some sticky tape. Managing at last to wedge something inside the button and cause it to stay on, I triumphantly settled into bed, to read a book which I didn’t particularly like. But then holding the book meant leaving arms exposed to the spitefully cold air, and after continuous attempts at finding a comfortable, warm position, with head torch at correct angle, with book, I finally opted for the release of sleep instead, sleep and dreams. I don’t know what happened to that head-torch, it could be that I flung it from my rooftop in a fit of rage at 4a.m.

Shame, I’d quite like to get back to that book.

I am trying to deal with the cold as best as I can, but it is quite a pain. A stiff upper lip only gets you so far, and when your arms begin to go numb, you begin to feel a little vulnerable, like maybe the problem is a bit bigger than you and your lips. Two weeks ago, I was at the other end of the spectrum, dangerously hot. There, at Woodford folk festival, in a donated tent, my own little solar oven. My initial attempts to move the tent into the shade were kind of shouted down by an ageing hippy. I didn’t even know how to argue with him about it, because I didn’t even know where he came from. I was offered a tent at my friend’s campsite, but no-one said that there would be an ageing hippy with an English accent, turning up a few days into the festival and being absolutely intractable on the matter of tent location. I woke up at 6a.m. to feel myself stewing in my own juices, just like in those old Warner bros. cartoons, where bugs bunny thinks that he’s having a nice hot bath, and then suddenly says, “Mmm, smells delicious, smells like, like… Rabbit stew!!?”

I threw the door of the tent open, blessed relief, I would live another day. I had been back to sleep for perhaps 15 minutes when I felt myself being shaken.

“Hey, mate!” Shake, shake, “Hey, come have a beer!”

 Just then, in that waking-dream state, it was hard to appreciate just how unusual this was. A complete stranger walking past at 6:15a.m. reaching into my tent and physically shaking me awake, so that I would come and have a drink with him. All I knew was that I had absolutely no inclination to follow him.

“Ok mate, I’m right behind you.”

That worked, he stumbled off, and moments later I heard him, from further into the campsite, trying to get someone else to come and drink, someone to keep him from stopping. Luckily, I didn’t have to stay in that tent ever again. That’s another story.

Two weeks later, there I was in Delhi airport, on a 15 hour overnight stopover, stuck in one of my least favourite transit lounges of all time.

I went looking for one of those long comfortable chairs to sleep on. They are highly sought after, prime real estate, but I eventually found a vacant one. It would have been ideal, except for the fact that every twenty minutes, an announcement would come over the speaker system, warning me not to leave my bags unattended. My sleep was broken and harrowed, and I experienced what felt like one non-stop announcement loop which played upon my existing bag-paranoia. This was Delhi, after all, a city that rivals London for the quantity of untrustworthy characters who lurk about. Eventually, I think I must have gotten used to it, for I had been on a fairly good run of sleep when a noisy man came and sat on the bed next to me. When he sensed that I was awake, he smiled congenially,

“Sleepy time, eh?” He laughed.

“Yes. Sleep time,” I said, flatly.

“Everyone is sleepy,” He laughed again.

Who is this guy? I thought. I was too tired for pleasantries, as I ignored him he started talking noisily to his friend sitting nearby. Eventually I got up, picked up my bag and threw them both acid glances. They seemed unfazed.

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

The man’s friend quickly jumped into my seat, and they both promptly went to sleep. I couldn’t help but appreciate that jerk.

The concept of home

Although I haven't read it yet, my auntie gave me a book about the concept of home. For Christmas. This is the nutshell within which my recent weeks have swirled and danced. Tomorrow I will fly to Nepal, after one month, more or less, back in Australia. Home to Brisbane, home to Melbourne, then home to Kathmandu. With many homes I never knew along the way. The traveller's greatest asset is an invisible snail's shell, a comfortable space which folds up into his pocket. A home built out of movement, and lightness.

In a few hours I will go back to that airport. I was trying to write about my month in Australia, a month dotted with hilarious misadventures and unnecessary complications. Good material in there, police encounters, whirlwind romances, mythical creatures, and oh such dancing, if you could only have seen it! Last night I tried for hours to write about these and other things, but the world kept intruding, and besides,  I just don't write travel-journals. Suffice to say that these kinds of stories have been told many times before.

I met someone in Delhi, a theatre-director, who told me that he loved the name Ivan. When he was little, the only books he could afford were Russian folk-tales. And the hero's name was always Ivan, and my eyes widened as he told me that the hero was always the third son, and that this Ivan was always finding himself in some kind of mess, as some kind of simple situation would spiral out of control. There, at the darkest moment, a lady would come to him, and say something like "You should get some sleep, these are daytime troubles. Never deal with the daytime's problems at night". And so young Ivan would sleep, and little did he know that the lady was actually a good witch, and in the morning she would give him some objects, like a piece of string, a fish, that sort of thing. And she would tell him that he would know what to do with them when the time was right. And sure enough, everything would work out in the end. I thanked my director friend and told him that I was indeed the third son, and would look out for my witch.

That's more or less how it went down, except that nothing ever really ends. There are still loose ends untied, but they are manageable. And the good witch was not a crone, but a hauntingly beautiful woman with incisive, piercing eyes that appear to take in the darkness and beauty of the world all at once. And even though she gave me no fish or pieces of string, and offered no such advice about the daytime's troubles, she showed me the way forward, and as I left she picked up a rock from the ground and threw it. "Go!"