Fire and Oxygen.

Time to put up the last journal entry from those Brunswick warehouse times. It's really difficult to put up this stuff without editing. But that is sort of the point, and besides, I don't like forewords.

FUCK! Driving me fucking mental and you’re not even doing anything! Anger mixed in with embarrassment.

Ah, a last touch of high-drama, to do with my favourite journal star. Looking back to that night, last night, it feels like I was possessed, that was not me. And yet, those feelings were so clear, I can still taste them. Without punctuation, this is what happened inside my head.

She’s fallen asleep I can barely keep my eyes open maybe if I announce that I’m going to bed she will follow no that didn’t work never mind I’ll get an early night and do some good training tomorrow go to sleep go to sleep how long have I been lying here surely the movie has finished by now she must be sleeping in Y’s bed I bet he’s stoked about that I saw the way he turned when I walked into the kitchen the way he had been holding her go away nasty thoughts fuck right off Y and X are good friends my friends they would never but I saw what I saw oh troubled mind just let me sleep I just want to sleep why do I need her next to me just to sleep she doesn’t need me at all for nothing I don’t want her to need me I don’t want to stop being crazy about her either Fuck surely the film’s over now maybe if I get some water then I can go past and look into the room put my mind at ease oh I’m so angry I just want to sleep now will I achieve anything if I live my life according to the patterns of a girl like that I can’t believe I would think that Y would what is wrong with my head there they are both asleep don’t worry about me guys have a nice sleep over I’ll just wander around awake all night waiting for insanity to set in what if this chair accidentally fell over oops too hard felt good though how do I get her out of my head I gotta get myself outta her bed oh now they’re awake I’m going to sleep in my own bed I’m so sick of this shit now everyone’s all worried and I know the more I try to explain the worse it will get

 

I would like to throw this book in the ocean, or set fire to it, or both. I could seal it in a large watertight container, so that it could burn and sink at the same time. How long could it burn for before it ran out of oxygen? She is my oxygen, what a shame I’m on fire

I miss her, the possum that scratches and scratches up in my roof. That makes those unbelievably strange noises. Fur so soft, inviting, but get too close and you’ll get scratched to bits by those tree-faring claws. Dark eyes, like someone has taken to reality with a hole-puncher. I tried to talk to her sometimes, thoughts and feelings, but she just looked in silence, a look that would make Shakespeare stutter. She wasn’t concerned with the affairs of humans. Not this human at least.

Is this how the book ends, with a fizzling dramatic climax, and no tangible conclusion? Perfect really, in a couple of weeks I’ll be walking down Newcastle streets with X, see page 1. The only difference will be the position of the Earth in relation to the sun. And of course, 6 months worth of bizarre memories from a particularly turbulent year. 2009. Year of babies, break-ups, art, music, love, pain, savings, inspiration, business, festivals, devising, dividing, and writing. Mostly writing about, or to, one special strange young powerful girl. So here’s to you, all of the other people who make up my world and barely get a mention. I could never have hoped to meet and/or make friends with so many amazing people. I’m learning.

The end

Writer's block.

Here in Kathmandu I bounce from room to room, one month here, one weekend there, another month somewhere else. This month, I am staying at Sattya, a media arts collective. They have poetry slams, they show documentaries on their rooftop cinema, and they have workshops in multimedia sorts of things, like photography and stop-motion animation. It's close to living the dream, staying here, except that I am an impostor. I don't do multimedia art. I used to play with 3D animations when I was a teenager, but it was my brother who had the flair, and the patience. In those days, we had talked about making an animated TV series, my brother and I. First it was going to be inspired by those things which we saw in our mind's eye: robots and castles and knights upon flying ostriches, you know. It was a wonderful abstract story, from what I remember. And then we talked about making Musashi, based on that book by Yoshikawa, the classic tale of self-mastery. I liked to make my brother's 3D creatures move, dance around, but whenever I found an obstacle that seemed unnecessarily difficult to overcome, of which there were so many in that program, I would give up. And then there was my brother, staring intensely into the computer. All of those little polygons, thousands of them joined together just so, I would see him day after day going through, finding the polygons that had gotten twisted up, untwisting them, tesselating them where necessary, zooming in in in, and then after a week of this I would see that he had made one... really... nice... hand. I am a performance artist with my foundation in circus training and puppetry, whose best work is always improvised, never to be seen again. I am someone who avoids taking photos because everyone else's photos are so much better. What am I doing in a multimedia arts collective?

Aah! It's all falling apart! What is that intangible thing that holds it all together? That glue beyond grammar and syntax? How does anyone even write anything? It has no purpose, it's just noise, noise in your head! Noise in my head which I translate into writing and then you read it and it becomes noise in your head! What is this thing, this so-called writing? It's not like I don't have anything to write about! Being in love with someone who is far away, being in a foreign country which is itself bound up in mystery, magic, and violence, living in a community arts collective, teaching circus to freakin' human-trafficking rescuees, for crying out loud! But these words, what do they do? Will they make me stronger, you wiser? No. Are they new, original? No - Yes, insofar as every moment and action is in someway unique - but no. I write and write, I have written so many things in here, what has come of it? I can feel my muscles tensing and untensing while I type. I am uncomfortable here, for some reason. Settling in, perhaps, or it could be to do with the fact that I'm not really able to settle, always moving on, chased off by the dogs of my own invention. I feel so out of place all the time! Triceps twitching, tired from pushups, from lifting people, spotting their backflips, in movement at least I feel comfortable, at home.

I just finished a great book, actually the transcript of a great lecture, called "The concept of home". In it the writer/speaker stated that having been a journalist for so many years has allowed her now to write without being precious. To paraphrase, she said something like "I believe in writer's block no more than I believe in hairdresser's block". One of my goals when I came back here was to write for at least one hour every day. An interesting challenge during load-shedding times, where the power cuts are currently up to 14-hours per day and rumoured to rise before the Winter's out. Writing with a pen, in the cold, by candle-light seems unnecessarily difficult when I can wait until a later time, sit in comfort, let words pour from ten fingers dancing, spider-like. Now I'm beginning to think I need to get a writing job to cure this sporadic writer's block. File or Fail. At any rate, it would be a funny story, writing for some magazine in Nepal, in English, for the bizarre ex-pat community (they look so formal, normal, they drink so much!). I have just heard that they are looking for writers at ECS, I might go and apply. The only problem is that I've already got too many jobs, each of which comes with its own impudent demands on my free-time: lesson-plan, do the stretches, write a god-damned report about the things I already said every week for five months! 

But, at least I have this good old blog, which perhaps 20-30 people read, some regularly, a cozy cabaret audience, enough people for me to try and craft each post into something vaguely noteworthy - vaguely coherent at least - but not too many that I have to worry too much about it. At one time I'd thought it would be lovely if I got heaps of followers, random comments from parking inspectors in Estonia, etc. but now I'm glad that no-one makes too much of a fuss. Thank you, dear readers, for reading these uncertain acts of word-arranging.

Gorkhaland

I don't have those famous naked-dreams, maybe because nakedness doesn't bother me overly much. Instead I get stabbed. It has happened twice in my memory, both times by Nepali men. The first time, when I was here last, I was dreaming that a one-eyed man caught me stowed away in the back of his truck. Earlier that day, I had seen a one-eyed man on the street corner, no patch or fake eye, just a strange fleshy pocket, mesmerising in its grotesqueness and simplicity. In the dream, whilst I was trying to explain, in a light-hearted way, why I was hiding amidst his tarped cargo, he rudely stabbed me mid-sentence, expressionlessly, like he wasn't even listening. This time, in one of last night's dreams, I was merely waiting for a meal at a restaurant, and a mullet-haired man came upstairs and stabbed me without warning or explanation. I woke up, not shaken, nor frightened, but irritated, because I'd seen it coming but hadn't been able to get out of the way, for all the people milling around. "People!" I thought, "Always milling about, completely oblivious to the fact that I'm in a rush to get somewhere!"

Maybe it's the Gurkha-mythology that is so abundant here, the famous Gurkha soldiers and their curved khukuri knives, there is not a day that does not contain some mention of them. The circus company I train has been asked to perform at the Gurkha ball, and so I was trying to find out the dates, and instead I found an article about Bishnu Shrestha.

It happened about 5 months ago. Bishnu was a Gurkha who was returning to India, on voluntary retirement, when his train was hijacked by 40 thieves (I kid you not). The whole thing played out in true action movie style, he sat quietly by while the robbers - armed with swords, knives and guns - took his wallet and belongings, along with the other passengers. But then they began to strip an 18-year-old girl nearby, in front of her parents, their intentions unmistakable. She called for help, and Bishnu the Gurkha stood up, and pulled out his khukuri. Apparently, "taking control of the leader", presumably using him as a shield, he killed 3 robbers and injured another 8 before the remainder fled. According to one article, he himself was surprised that so many of them fled, commenting that maybe they thought he had more Gurkha friends on the train. Maybe it was the force of mythology, and the curved knife so renowned for decapitation.

I asked an ex-Gurkha officer once, why it is that the Gurkhas have this reputation, that precedes them, mythologises them? He told me that it was something about Nepali people, that they are by and large the most lovely, patient, and friendly people you could hope to come across. But there is this thing, what I now call the bubbling pool of rage. I have seen it quite often, the snap, from the calm exterior, someone will just, without warning, completely lose their shit. I've never seen it directed at me, or at any sober foreigner for that matter, and I've never witnessed a stabbing. But it is scary. Is it insensitive to write this? I don't mean to portray Nepali people in a negative light, especially when I have had such a positive experience here, and of course generalisations are by nature massively flawed, but for the sake of the story, and the myth, let us imagine that beneath everyone's calm, collected surface, lies a seething pool of violent rage. Is it thinner for some, less structurally sound?

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!"