14th Street

So I just finished reading 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics', by Marisha Pessl, which makes you feel like you've just finished reading the whole bloody English canon, and then a whole other canon that doesn't even exist GOD DAMN POSTMODERNISM. You should go and read it too.

I've been juggling work this week with uni, rehearsals for this comedy I'm in, a mess of a home life, rufus wainwright's Want 1 & 2, Dylan my muddy guitar, Calamity physics and trying to get fit. I bought a punching bag.

"Take five, Geoff, that was excellent!"
He wiped the creases of his face with the leather of his arm. Looking around, Geoff sat down on the long wooden bench up against the gym's left wall. He wanted a long and cold beer and a beautiful child to abuse. Sadly, the break in training was just that, and the locomotive rolls on, regardless of the shine on the tracks.
On of the things his mother had written to him - in the lengthy and fragmented 8x10 foot poster that she left stapled to her hanging body like some satanic proclamatory scroll - was that if you had to be a mindless slave to emotion, to 'love' or to 'anger' or to 'grief', then at the very least you should balance these tendancies by reciting poetry as you spiralled.
Returning to the gym floor, renewed by two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen and one part Yeats, Geoff tried to to dredge up what drove him to such ambition.

And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.

Long days, hot nights, good people, warm dregs, soft shoes and hard fucking. This is the existence of the athlete, the man whose endless search in the world ended in himself, in the fruitless pursuit of confirmation in the eyes of man. Confirmation by the games and challenges man invented himself. To ignore the pull and pall of the problems, and to train the given corpus into an elite unit of the useless. Hunters and Collecters is just a band, now.
But Geoff was alive, and that's what matters. No amount of Sarah Kane or Lou Reed could take that away from him, just like no amount of anablic steroids could cure the knowledge he was climbing a hill that lead like an Escher, to the bottom of a hill. But he was climbing it! A mountain climber, oh gorgeous human pursuit.
Now I've made you feel bad. But why? I said Geoff was happy! Is it because you say you're happy, when in fact you're drugging yourself out of the hills? I'm happy, I'm better than happy, I'm fine.

In a Permanent State

You’re the one girl in town I’d marry, I’d marry you now if I were free.

So Ryan was being inundated by the usual feelings and opinions down at what we’ll ironically call the mall the other day, and he felt empty. He was sitting eating cake/doughnut shit from a paper bag which he thought would make everything better, and begging the escalator to impart some kind of beautiful lonely message. It just went around in useful circles though, even though no one was riding it, and that was exactly the kind of beautiful lonely message Ryan didn’t need. So he rode it up and down a few times because he felt obliged to use; it’s fucking sad to see a good thing go to waste.
Ryan took a bus out to the shitty pretty part of the city for much the same reason. Busses go places all the time that people don’t need to go. He couldn’t eat crap from a paper bag because you’re not supposed to on the bus, but his eyes gave the same effective message. He thought maybe he should turn right around and go do something worthwhile, go talk to someone who loved him or who he felt he could long to love for long enough to make it all ok. But he wasn’t in control of the bus, and in truth, neither was the driver, or the bus. The bus just goes where the boss tells it to go, and they choose where busses go depending on the will of the people in the area. So Ryan was supposed to choose where the bus went, but as we’ve established, he wanted to turn around. He walked off onto a slab of concrete that looked like a big grey slab of concrete and sniffed air that smelt like it was sitting on a fat slab of concrete. Does wonders for a man’s countenance to forget that pretty much everything stinks like it’s been stuck on a dirty concrete slab at one time or another, even sweet old people, kittens and vaginas.
Ry walked the whole way back home, because he couldn’t stand the thought of getting on another bus. Besides, he was hoping to run into somebody he knew so he could explain why he was walking 25 kilometers home. They’d get some fucking insight into his mindset, and he’d feel a lot better about everything. Hell, even if they totally missed the point and thought he was mad, at least that’s its own kind of victory. Everyone knows it’s more beautiful if no one gets it. No one would read Bukowski if they thought everyone got him. What’s the fucking point? It’s a club people want to belong to, like owning a diamond, because it’s not worth shit unless they know how great it is other people are ‘sadly’ missing out on this awesome heart-satisfying poop on stick. Anyway, what does it matter – Ryan didn’t meet anyone, and went unappreciated and unclubbed.
Home was just like always, which is probably the point, and everything rolled into a ball as Ryan did much the same. It always hurts less if you keep the body fucking drugs close by. It doesn’t make up for a good body fucking though, but since nothing really does you have to take what you can lay your bitter hands on these days. These days. All days are these days. Makes you wanna throw up on your best friend. Then shoot them in the face to save them the trouble. Course you gotta have a best friend first. Ryan figured the whole shooting/vomit idea was probably the best way not to have a best friend. Be he had one anyway, somewhere. No one even begins to believe the things they say. Unless they’re stupid or uncreative. Yeah, that’s right. You. You’re stupid and uncreative.
So Ryan tucked down with a good journal and suddenly it meant a whole lot more that Africans had guns, and a whole lot less that he’d probably never see one. Or never even see Africa for that matter. And not even notice: Ryan was planning to give in and let life hide the firearms from him. Most people do. Don’t.
And the moral of the story is: Don’t. never give up. Giving up is for the weak. For the stupid. For you and your slut of a life.

Notes:
1. Go and see Thank You For Smoking, it’s worth it.
2. Augie March, Sarah Blasko, Tex Perkins and the Panda Band are playing Kings Park in November for the Escape festival. I can personally vouch for the staggeringly good performances of Tex and Sarah, and the music of Augie March and the Panda Band. I mean, that’s 4/4. Hope to see you all there.
3. My eyes hate you, they feel like they’re on fire. I have this adrenelin insomnia… ugh.
4. Yeats has some great poems hidden among the dross. Every 5th one or so is great. Anything not classically influenced.
5. I’m trying to finish A Fringe of Leaves for Bec in a deluded attempt to make it seem even more like I care. I’ll tell you how that works out if I hadn’t already. Anyway, it took 280 pages to get good, and it did that by killing my favourite character. Goddamn confused feminist/sexist patty white.