Machine Music

Music from the poker machines is a disgusting
Hideous siren's song to the desperate
Crawling around on the floor searching for coins
To put in the slot so they can watch the colours spin.
Continuous clicking.
Click, click, ding and a merry tinkle;
There is no sound more evil
Heard or devised in the history of man
Than the hypnotic, rhythmic jingle - the signal
That yet another decrepit soul
Has been laid out on the rack
Pockets heavy, eyes full of hope
Waiting... Eager...
And ready to be fucked.

Review of Charles Bukowski's 'Women' [SPOILER ALERT]

I just finished reading Charles Bukowski's 'Women'. Like, just finished it. Just now. For most of the book I had no idea where he was going with the whole thing... it just seemed like one graphic, semi-pornographic sexual encounter after another. I mean, obviously I knew he was going somewhere, because I've read 'Ham on Rye', and 'Post Office', but I had no idea where, or whether it would be anywhere truly interesting, and I had absolutely no inclination whatsoever to begin guessing.

I think 'Women' is by far the best of the three Bukowski books that I've read though, and it definitely resonated with me much more than the other two... the language, he is so detached. Every sexual encounter starts with his eyes roaming up some girl's legs – they're not even girls though, really, just bodies with names on them. Then she undresses and submits to him completely; “I mounted, stuck it in, and then...” is a fair summation of the end of every other chapter in this book, and there are one-hundred and four of them. He jumps from woman to woman to woman to woman, never growing attached to them, or even seeming to care when they walk out on him. At one point around the halfway mark he muses that all of his women leave him, but it is clear that this is only the case because he will take sex wherever he can get it. Only on his terms though. Only ever the way he wants it... he knows how he is, and for most of the book he is aware that he is selfish, and a bastard, and he understands why they all leave. He is seemingly at peace.

The morning hangovers and physical sickness barely seem to drain him, and the paid poetry readings that sustain his lifestyle somehow keep popping up out of nowhere, along with groupies, and fan-mail from easy women. He dismisses the men. But he hardly talks of love – he was married once, but had been in love four times. Now a dirty old man of around sixty, he dreams of the day when he is “an eighty year old fucking an eighteen year old.” Life-long dreams of a professional pervert.

This chauvinistic, evil womaniser has his run of the town for most of the book, and the thing is... and I don't know whether this thing is scary, or sobering, or humbling, or maybe just deliciously tempting in its realism... the thing is, it speaks to me. I don't stand for all men, and I'm sure there are saints out there somewhere among us, but the way Henry Chinaski (Bukowski's literary alter-ego) laps up woman after eager, fawning woman should have most straight men salivating. It's not pretty, and it's not nice, and it sure is pretty fucking uncomfortable, but he gets right to the core of it, at least for me. No wonder there is no mention of his mother... no family, no moral compass or ties to a possibly innocent past. Just a dirty old man, “sucking beer”, puking up blood through three-hundred hangovers a year.

Towards the end though, maybe the last seventy or so pages (out of three-hundred) things start to get a little clouded for Henry Chinaski. The sex is still good – in fact the whores and sluts that he so adores only become more and more sumptuous, their young flesh more and more tempting... but he has also met a girl, Sara, who touches something else in him. He doesn't say he loves her, and I trust him, he is a very honest narrator, and is frank and blunt about his feelings, both to his women, and to the reader. He doesn't love Sara, but he knows that she is 'a good woman', and this is a phrase he uses sparingly only once before. But the difference with Sara as well, is that she won't fuck him. She knows about his continuing conquests, and she suffers through his ongoing selfishness, but she always comes back, and there is something in that that strikes a chord with old, dirty Henry Chinaski. His last few sexual encounters span the whole range of women possibly conceivable: a young, nubile belly-dancer from Canada who gives him the time of his life, and gives it to him again and again; an old, haggard, sagging woman whom he loathes even before she is between his sheets, and infinitely more afterwards; a black hooker who sucks his dick terribly five minutes after meeting him in the car park of a liquor store; a ninety-pound, eighteen year old – at last. He has seen everything. Fondled every part, fucked every crevice. Still Sara waits, over Thanksgiving, Christmas, then she gives herself to him, without his asking and says, “Happy New Years Henry”; they fall asleep together.

After he accepts terrible head from the black hooker for twenty dollars, and then drives her to an intersection where she continues to hitchhike and no doubt solicit more of the same, he makes one last attempt – and there have been many beforehand – to steel his mind against any more fucking around.

“Sara was a good woman. I had to get myself straightened out. The only time a man needed a lot of women was when none of them were any good. A man could lose his identity fucking around too much. Sara deserved much better than I was giving her. It was up to me now.”

This is his final challenge to himself... three-hundred and four pages in and barely one more to go, he convinces himself that he needs to give this good woman a proper chance, because if he lets her slip away, then he will be doomed. Then another girl calls, another admirer, and this is where I was scared. Charles Bukowski was about to offer his opinion, in this last page, in one last conversation between a dirty old man and a juicy, delicious, groaning and spread-legged nineteen-year-old temptress. In the final lines of 'Woman' Charles Bukowski would decree whether, in his humble opinion, it was at all possible for a flawed man to accept the love of a good woman.

Anyone who says that Bukowski is a sexist, chauvinistic pig is probably right... but anyone who says that this is all he is is a single-minded, blind fucking moron. 'Women' is a book that is not afraid to delve past the scared facades that we put in front of ourselves to mask our true desires in our attempts to play the role of the good guy. I'm still not sure if Henry Chinaski is a good guy or not, but I am sure that he is a real guy, about as real a guy as there could possibly ever be in my eyes, and when his time came to decide whether he could be loved in the final pages of this book, my heart was in my mouth, as I felt my fate too, rested in his decision.

He sent her back. And still, there is hope yet.

Peace, Taco.

On the Road and Other Medications

Reading Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' the first time was a bit of a blur for me to be honest, I was in Bolivia, and I read the entire thing on my HTC Desire HD screen (that's a phone, if you were unsure) in less than twenty-four hours. Most of those hours were spent on a bus, sitting next to a Bolivian kid who was sixteen or seventeen if I remember correctly. I read the book for hour-long stints at a time, and then would turn to the kid and continue the conversation we'd been having before I had dipped off into my reading and he back into the 'cincuenta centavo' (50 Cent) playing on his iPod. I don't think I rushed through it, but the book has a real habit of lifting you out of whatever you are doing and taking you away on the journey, the road, off into the distance with it... so I definitely read it quicker than I would have a normal book. I'm reading it for the second time now though – I'm typing it out actually, word-for-word on my laptop – and this time I'm taking it much slower.

I've just reached the start of part two, and I'm only going about four or five pages each sitting, because to type about that many pages takes around forty minutes to an hour, depending on how good a day my fingers are having. But I'm loving the fact that it's so slow. I almost forget about this ongoing project every few days, but it sits there – the Penguin-Paperback copy of 'On the Road', the clothes-peg I use to hold the pages open, and the hardcover children's 'The Fun-To-Learn Picture Dictionary' that I use as a board to peg the pages of the book onto – it all sits there on the back corner of my desk, waiting to be opened whenever I feel a little desperate. Typing out books is something that I've grown to really depend on in the past year; first it was Orwell's '1984', and now this. It's a great way to immerse myself in someone else's words and thoughts, forcibly and directly, and take my busy mind off of whatever frantic problems are troubling me. The idea came from Hunter S. Thompson and my former obsession with his wild, drug-addled life and persona, but now that I've appropriated his activity as my own I can see benefits completely separate from what he described – or what were described on his behalf. He did it to “see what it felt like to write a great novel”, if I remember correctly – he typed out F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' – but his motivation is of much lesser concern to me. My aims are much more simple, but much more immediate, and vital as well.

I just passed over a part in 'On the Road' where Dean Moriarty has left his second wife, Camille, with their child to go back to his first wife, Marylou, and beg on his knees for her to take him back. She does, and in Kerouac's own words;

“She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad.”

More reassuring words have never been written, and upon typing them out as my eyes flitted over the page I felt a wave of understanding and hope wash over me. I recently watched a video of Neal Cassady, upon whom Moriarty is famously based, when he was on the bus with the Merry Pransters in the early-mid sixties and to be perfectly honest, he looks and sounds like a complete lunatic. A madman. But sometimes it's hard not to feel, in the furious changing tides of life, that I am mad as well. Although maybe not as outwardly eccentric as Cassady/Moriarty, I'm sure every one of us feels at some point as if they are the exception to some sane rule of the world, an outlier on the bell curve of acceptable normalcy. “Am. I. Insane?”

Well maybe you are, and maybe I am, but Jack Kerouac, in a surely unplanned but far from accidental stroke-of-genius example here, shows that no matter how crazy you think you are, or how crazy you are by everyone else's admission, you still have a place in this world, and you can still find someone to love you. Dean Moriarty, with his head in the hands of his sweetheart, is proof enough of that.

Sometimes I wonder when I'll get tired of the violent up-and-down cycle of my mood and of my life and of the world that I constantly create around myself. I find myself hoping that that day will come soon; “soon, surely, soon I'll find it within myself to settle down and find a level of balance in my life, soon I'll be able to relax.” But every time I find myself repeating this tired inner dialogue, I am tempted, once again, by the promise of a higher tomorrow, and the irresistible, surging rise of a brand new peak. For as long as I am tempted by these peaks though, there will be a frightening low waiting in the trough, and that's where Jack Kerouac and his famous tale of freedom come in. Whenever I feel like I need something else to hold onto, to support me while I ride out the lows and confront the fear, I turn to the pages of this book – and when it's done, the pages of another classic that I'll start typing out – to escape to the open spaces of someone else's words, and leave the dark churnings of my own mind behind for a while. In this way, I remind myself that a new high is coming, and peace is a comfort that, for the moment, I do not need. Not just yet, Tugzy. Not today.

Peace, Taco.

Living on my Birthday

Yesterday I met the most ridiculous person I have met in a long time... jesus shit! I went to some writing club meeting in South Melbourne with little expectations considering the previous meeting in December wasn't so much a 'writing club' as it was a bunch of people who share writing in common meeting up for a drink. I mean, that could be called a writing club, I guess, but it wasn't really what I had in mind... it can't have been all that terrible though, because I went back, albeit half an hour late.

So when I walked in some lady – who I later discovered was a 'writing guru' (someone else's words, but not difficult to believe) – was talking about journalism and a writers' group/course thingo she'd set up and I sat at a stool on the far end of the table and proceeded to crackle in a violent ray of sun that was beaming through the front door of the bar. A sun-tan indoors – well life is just full of surprises? Tee-hee-hee. Anyway, Mrs Guru (Valerie, her name was) was interesting and she had some cool stuff to say, but the ridiculous person that I met wasn't our speaker, no no, she was a lady by the name of Samantha.

Samantha was a early/mid-thirties (I hope that guess is accurate) writer who had been sending off a few bits and pieces of comedy writing to competitions and doing quite well, but what grabbed me was when she said to the group that her preferred method of writing was sitting down with a bottle of red wine and headphones full of hip hop. YES! My People! She told me about her writing, and then her life before her writing, which had consisted of about a decade all around the world (Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, South America) as a tour guide for a travel company. She had been taught how to play backgammon by Sean Connery and serenaded by Alanis Morissette, and received a donkey from native people in some far flung corner of the world... the details elude me at this point, friends, as I stand in awe of a person who has truly stepped up to life and nutted the beast between it's piercing eyes. She said that at twenty-three she was engaged and stuck in a dead end job, but one day she woke up, looked at her fiance and said, “I really don't like you”, and within two weeks she was off. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. These are the people that we all need to know, my friends. This is the person that everyone should be.

And then, a few days before that, there was another lady, this time someone I met on a tour, who was originally from Adelaide (of all the promising beginnings) but had lived in South Africa for twenty-five years including the apartheid era and Nelson Mandela's release from prison. She told me about how many households, including her own, had had black slaves during the era of segregation. One day, after a law had passed which would have nullified the black/white segregation of beaches within six months, she and her kid went to a whites only beach. They also took their slave's (I think she used a different word, but I heard slave) kid along, and the kid would have been no more than ten years old at this point. So while the segregation law was due to be repealed in six months – the decision had already been made and passed – for the time being the beach was still 'whites only', so when they got there a police officer saw the young kid and told the mother that she had to take him off of the beach or they would all be arrested. That's right, that shit happened. Imagine the kid – how confused. Imagine the mother, and the looks, and imagine people actually abiding by these laws and legitimately believing in their righteousness to the point where they knew they were going to be defunct soon, but until then the plan was racism as usual.

She talked about Nelson Mandela and the rugby game depicted in that movie Invictus and she talked about the feeling of national pride and togetherness when Mandela walked out onto the field wearing the national team's jersey. She told me about his ex-wife, who was apparently a part of some underground group and used to send her harems of male entourage on assassination missions. Mandela had to leave her and distance himself from the warring clans – the divides between different groups of black people in South Africa were apparently just as pervasive as the one that we heard about on the news. She lived through that, she saw it first hand. What have I seen? Maybe I've been a part of something important already, I just don't know it yet... maybe the eyes of history will look back and see Melbourne, 2013 as a strange pocket of human existence... maybe. Maybe not.

Crazy, disjointed thoughts on this sunny February day, this day that happens to be my twenty-second birthday. Samantha, this outlandish specimen of a person, has forced me to look at what I am doing and make absolutely certain that what I am doing with my life is exactly what I want to be doing. How can I possibly spend one single day doing anything other than that, when there are people out there in the dankest pockets of existence being given donkeys by villagers and playing board games with James Bond. Not a single second, my friends, not a solitary fucking moment can we afford to waste. Wring with all your strength, and drain this life for every drop. Be sure, it can be done.

Peace, Taco.

Daydreams

Today I was eating a banana and daydreaming on the tram on my way down to lunch with a bunch of comedians. I had already finished my first banana and chucked the peel in the bin before I got on the tram, but I was about to be faced with the problem of what to do with the second peel: there are no bins on the tram, and it was looking like a solid ten minute wait between my projected banana finish-time and my stop, where I could get out and find a bin. Ten minutes holding a banana peel? Pffft... not likely, so I thought about throwing it out the window.

The tram coasted past the police station on the corner of Church St and Bridge Rd and I imagined throwing the peel out the half-open window and it landing on the bonnet of one of the three police cruisers parked on the side of the road. Glorious, I could see it there. To throw it out of the window accurately and make sure it landed on the car I would probably have had to stand up, turn around and aim my throw carefully, but if I did it deliberately then I'd run the risk of someone seeing – it was broad daylight and the tram was stopping at the lights and opening its doors. If someone – a police officer maybe? – saw me throw the peel intentionally onto their shiny police car, then I'd be in trouble. They probably couldn't pin me with much, maybe a fine for littering or at worst some trumped-up vandalism charge, but regardless, I don't need that right now. The fine for littering is probably over a hundred dollars, and I need to pay rent god DAMN it.

I imagined the police officer, just walking out to his car after grabbing a coffee or whatever police do in the station, when he sees a young, dark-haired, olive-skinned youth wearing a red Adidas jacket intentionally throw a banana peel out of a tram window at his vehicle. He would yell, “OI!”, drop his coffee on the ground and give chase. “Stop the tram! OI! YOU!”
At this point I'd be sitting in the tram, fretting and trying to think of how to get out of my fine, the cute couple sitting across from me would be smirking at me, having seen what I'd done, and now knowing they were about to see me get caught. I would run up to the front of the tram and beg the tram driver to keep going; “Pretend you didn't hear him! Please dude, just go!”

And he probably would go, because he's cool. He doesn't like cops either, and it's perfectly plausible that he didn't see or hear the police officer, who is now just an angry, but receding figure in his side-mirror, yell 'stop'. After another couple stops though, the tram driver would tell me that I had to get out, I couldn't stay in the tram – he'd be remembering his responsibility here, plus what if the cop called in another car to intercept the tram? He wouldn't want to get involved in this thing. But all the while I'd be reassuring myself that it was only a banana on a police car – how could he possibly care that much about a little, frivolous act of trivial civil disobedience. I'm sure police get that shit all the time...

I get out of the tram, and wonder where I'm going to walk now, because I still need to get to lunch, but before I can really do anything I hear more shouting, and see the angry, yelling figure running up the slight hill on Church St. Running right towards me. WHAT THE FUCK?! Overzealous motherfucker... so I run. Bolt down a side street and into the suburbs, but I know he saw where I was running, so I know I have to get away. I need to hide somewhere, I need to blend in. I stumble upon a sunny park at the end of the street with a playground and two single mums playing with their kids. Some guy in skins is doing laps of the oval before lunch and a girl is sitting on the hill reading a book with the midday sun on her back. I run, panting, up to her and sit down, still looking over my shoulder.
“We've been talking all morning.” I try to run her through my alibi.
“What? Who are you?
“It doesn't matter, look, we've been talking all morning, okay? I've been here with you all morning.”
The shouting comes from behind us and the cop charges over the little hill and runs down it, straight at me and dives, arms out and face red with fury. Tackle. He lands on top of me and we both go flying a good couple metres along the grass before he pins me to the ground and shouts something about a little prick. My ribs feel broken, I can't move, everything hurts.
“What the fuck?!” the girl jumps up and screams, looking accusingly at the officer.
“This young man is under arrest for wilfully vandalising police property! THE CHASE IS OVER BUD!”
“What chase, what are you talking about? We've been sitting here all morning!” She sticks to the script perfectly, and at that precise moment, I fall in love.

During the lengthy court proceedings that draw out over many long and arduous months, I learn her name, and her birthday, and her likes and dislikes and all her favourite things as we fight in the halls of justice against police brutality. I even remember the colour of her eyes: green. She is my witness and with her help I win a victory worth millions in compensation for the injuries I sustained, I was an innocent bystander randomly attacked by a deranged agent of the law. My injuries keep me from work and I lay a spurious claim to a life-long disability pension. Me and my beautiful witness kiss outside the courtroom, and then go off to spend our millions on eating, drinking, and being merry. I propose to her in the park where we met and for the rest of our lives we are happy, and in love.

I imagine this all, while I am sitting on the tram holding the now-finished banana peel in my hand. I imagine it, but it never happens, because I am way too scared of getting caught and fined for littering. Instead the peel goes under the seat, and I brush my hands clean, before pulling out my notebook and writing the story I am not yet brave enough to live.

Peace, Taco.

I Don't Care

My eyes are heavy and my shirt is on the floor, it's hot tonight in Richmond. I'm listening to this album called 'Poor Boy/Lucky Man' by some guy called Asaf Avidan and his band, The Mojos. I had never heard of these strange people before today, and I never would have if I hadn't met a couple of people on my tour today, had lunch with them, and then told them to add me on Facebook. The guy added me first, and then the girl. I checked both of their about sections, (god, this is getting a bit to 'twentyfirst century social interaction' isn't it? Ugh) noticing in the girl's, whose name I refuse to write because I cannot pronounce it, that she keeps a blog. So I went onto this blog, and saw a few quotes – some really nice stuff actually, but the thing that really caught my attention was a song called 'Your Anchor' by the crew I'm listening to right now.

So I downloaded their album, and I'm listening to it, and because the only torrent (jargon, jargon, jargon) I could find of theirs was their discography, I have their other two albums as well. Maybe I'll give them a listen. This music, this vaguely folky, rocky, guitary kind of thing... oh look, a horn has started playing, lonely over an acoustic guitar riff. That's quite nice. I feel that this music is passionate and impressively raw – someone cried over this I think. Someone at least shed some bodily fluid. Someone cares a lot about the sound that is coming out of my speakers right now, and I'm really making an effort to be that person that cares as well.

Fuck I wish I could find something to be passionate about, I really feel like I have all this pent up energy inside of me, but nothing to throw it onto... and I can't just 'use it up' – it doesn't work like that. I'm sitting here, listening to this undoubtedly beautiful music, but I'm finding it really hard to relate it to anything real. What are these people singing about? What machine are they raging against? I feel like I'm almost at the point where Winston ends up at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four when he has fought all his life against the creeping tendrils of the party and their mind-controlling propaganda machine, but then just as his final opportunity for redemption is at hand – when the party finally has him killed – he finds it within himself to submit to them and become one with his meaningless, lobotomized contentment. I feel like I am so close to saying, “well, that's it, who cares if things are bad for some people, who cares if I'm being marketed to, who cares if I have designer products thrown at me every day – what if I like it like that?”

I feel like I have to get angry at things, or be upset about something, in order to 'find a voice' in comedy – but what if I don't see the world like that? Fuck, I know this is even wrong to think, but what if I see the world as an inherently happy place? That is such a confusing statement to have just made – look at what I just said. Look at what you just said Aidan. “This is wrong, but I think things are good.” WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THAT? But apparently everything really is fucked, and as an intelligent, rational, observant human being, I'm supposed to notice that and be angry about it. And if I don't, then I'm naïve. Stupid. I'm enjoying my life, but I know that there are so many people out there that aren't – they don't even have the opportunity to enjoy anything. The vast majority of the people in this world are born, feel hungry, and then they die – that's a Louis CK joke, and it's so terribly true. But I'm having a good time though... fuck... what am I supposed to do about that? Do I stop having a good time? Should I be angry about the fact that I'm having a good time? Or should I just be happy with the fact that I've drawn the lucky number in life's ridiculous lottery and continue on with my easy life and simple pleasures, trying not to think about the writhing hell that continues to burn daily in most of the rest of the world?

I want to end this by just deferring to another one of my, 'oh well this is too hard to think about now, let's all have doughnuts' punchline/endings. The ones I'm so good at writing that tie everything up in a little bow... but I shouldn't. I can't. Fuck. This stuff really doesn't work like that. I just don't know what else to do... I can't offer myself a solution, I want to care about the bad things that are happening in the world, but every day as I wake up and find myself feeling good about everything, I am stared in the face by the harsh truth of the matter – I really don't care. I just really don't. What am I supposed to do about that? I hate my indifference, but it's mine, and I'm so indifferent that I don't even care. Catch 22. The ultimate trap. Staring truth in the face, it hurts, or at least, I know it should. Help me, someone, I am stuck in a paradox.

Peace, Taco.

3121 Hangs

Yesterday I had only one person on my tour, an Indonesian girl called Neysha, and so instead of packing my bags and going back home in a huff, I decided to take her on a quick tour in exchange for her buying me lunch (atlantic salmon... I get my money's worth). We were going to go check out Ballarat after lunch which would have been nice but in the end we couldn't because it got a bit late in the day, so we went our separate ways. It was a lovely afternoon all in all, and I'd like to thank the lovely Neysha for lunch, although … (I pondered long and hard over which conjunction to use here because it seems that the use of either 'and' or 'but' to preface the information I'm about to deliver would set the tone for the rest of this bit and betray my feelings towards the events I intend to describe... I have definitely over-thought this... hurry up Taco, people are getting bored) … there was something else that was far more interesting than salmon.

We were sitting at the tram stop in Richmond waiting for the tram to head back into the city to Southern Cross Station. I sat on the end of the bench on the corner of Church and Victoria streets and Neysha sat in the middle, to my right. To her right again there sat an old man, probably around sixty-five or seventy years old, dressed as most old men usually dress and waiting for the tram like we were. Neysha and I talked for a while about Richmond and why I love living in this suburb – to paraphrase my housemate Brodie, “it's that 3121 real shit” – there's a real grittiness about Richmond and I told her I enjoyed that. While we were talking, as if on cue, a local smackhead approached the bench. I've seen this girl before, wandering aimlessly around Victoria street in the middle of the day, stumbling, glazed eyes, riding the tram with a lost look on her face. She's one of many sad characters that populate the streets in this shitty inner-city suburb of Melbourne, and I'd always had my suspicions.

She approached from the right – from the other side of Church St – and looked first at me, but must have assumed that the girl I was with, being as she was roughly the same age as me, was my girlfriend. Her eyes then fixed on the old man, and she stopped herself just in front of him and squatted on the footpath in a submissive, prostrate position before looking up at him and engaging in conversation. Her voice was thin and high-pitched, and she was clearly drifting in and out of lucid consciousness, never fully in control of herself, but she grabbed the reins for long enough to look into his eyes and ask, “you looking for a good time?” As she said it she made a motion with her right hand to imitate the way she would suck his tired, sixty-five-year-old dick to a climax for some pithy sum of money that I didn't quite manage to overhear. I was paying as much attention as I could at this point while still trying not to be too obvious... it was hard to maintain an air of normality and Neysha and I had stopped talking as soon as the afternoon's twisted courtship had commenced. I wanted desperately to hear what he was saying, but I couldn't grasp much of anything. Maybe he said something to her that I didn't hear, or maybe he didn't even reply to her, but whatever his voice did or didn't tell her, I could understand everything from his uncomfortable body language... he tacitly refused her subsequent urges and offers to give him her phone number. “Do you want to call me later?” She asked. “I just need some money for food and a packet of smokes.” She was getting a little more forceful, sensing, surely, that there was no relief to be had here.

All this time I said nothing, and Neysha said nothing, and we both allowed what was definitely the saddest, most enthralling spectacle we were likely to see for quite a while, to play out. The woman with the thin voice stood up after about thirty seconds, having obtained neither business nor money from her client, and walked away in the direction that she had come. Once she was out of earshot I resumed talking to Neysha and told her about how I'd seen this woman before. I saw her with a bunch of other broken, drug types across the road from Woolies a month or so ago; one of the guys she was with was trying to sell a gold necklace to some fresh looking Asian kid with a hoodie and trackies. He was talking with quick, dirty slang about how he'd stolen the necklace off of some guy he'd bashed the night before, and was using words like 'bruz', which made my skin crawl. It reminded me of the way some of my friends back in Adelaide talk, and it scared me to think that people I know are constantly only three bad decisions away from staring this life in the face too. They had left the hooded Asian with the promise to be back in half an hour – they were “going off to hit the hammer” (inject heroin). I told Neysha this other story to go with what we had just seen, but I left out the part about it reminding me of people I knew because I didn't want to start down that depressing conversational path, only having met this person five or six hours ago.

Both times I've seen glimpses of the course underside of Victoria Street, 3121, I have laughed to myself. I don't really know why, I don't know what about seeing a drug addict solicit prostitution or overhearing another try to sell stolen jewellery is funny – actually I don't think anything about it is funny, not at its core. At the very base of it, it's fucking sad. It's terrible, but it's also surprising – not that it exists at all, but that it exists right there, right in front of me. It's kind of scary, but also kind of exhilarating too, although the naivete required to believe that makes me want to rethink myself a little... nevertheless though, the sheer shock of the whole situation is where the laughter comes from. When the heroin lady walked away from us after failing to pick up her lonely, uncomfortable target, Neysha and I both laughed to eachother with raised eyebrows and twisted faces. We weren't laughing out of amusement, we were just shocked... so fucking shocked... we knew what we'd seen, and as much as we were laughing, we both knew that neither of us was making a joke.

“When the heroin lady walked away...” that's how I started that sentence. That's how I described her. “The heroin lady.” That's all she is to me, that is her only distinguishing characteristic. Not her face, not her eyes, not her hair or her voice or her clothes or her views on China. Heroin... that's who she is, and that's what she does. Jesus Christ... where do I even begin?

Peace, Taco.

She Was Fucked, Basically

She was fucked, basically; two days to go and not a single inch closer to Newport. She hated that she thought in inches – the old, archaic measurements of the past had been long outdated by the metric system and she well knew that and had grown up favouring decimals – but she couldn't help it. Something about the inch, an inch, the word itself, sounded poetic and subtle, as if the simple act of saying she wasn't a single inch closer made real her predicament, and would somehow inspire motivation in her to move. She repeated it over to herself again, “not a single inch closer, not a single inch closer, I'm no closer, not one single inch... fucked, fucked, absolutely fucked...” She was muttering.

The road stretched out ahead of her, and no helpful vehicles were approaching up its long, narrow length, this final semi was definitely her last chance. Time to wait a second, maybe two, before approaching, but any hesitation would be sniffed out immediately so it was imperative – completely and without question – that she act fast, act now. She picked up her bag.

“Excuse me!” her voice was sucked up by the dusty air and soon drowned out by the silence around her, so she began to walk forwards, but still tentative and careful in her approach.
“Excuse me! Sir! Excuse me?” no trace of her anxiety could be allowed to seep into the next sentence or the whole thing would be finished and she might as well turn around and walk back to the city that dwindled in the distance behind her. His head turned, not a pretty head, or even a welcoming one, and two startled flies flew off his cap and zipped off above the tin roof. Here it was, “Here it is.” – her internal monologue shoving one last jolt of encouragement up her spine before finally delivering the five words she'd been storing up and preparing for this one crucial moment. The time for backing out had passed, and she welled up all of the air inside her lungs before measuring out six even syllables in about two and a half seconds of pure terror:

“Mind if I ride along?”

“Sure love, jump on up there with me.” He said it, and she stood there for a second while the sound passed between them as if she'd been struck by a brick. The flies were about to land down on her bag as she jolted out of her trance and quickly sealed their official agreement, “uuuuh... thanks.” And without waiting for his final nod, she started scaling the stairs and threw her bag at her feet in the cabin of the dirty machine.

She settled down and waited for him to finish his pit-stop; now she finally had time to calm herself in silence. Looking around for the first time at her surroundings, she saw all that there was to see – and it wasn't very much to begin with – was covered in tiny red particles. The desert sand was all-encompassing, pervasive, and seemed to swallow any object past the middle distance except the long, thin road that stretched out in front. The sky was an angry yellow-white with the sun still setting in the west and the world was deathly still and silent. Winds were blowing sand around the floor. The petrol station where she had been sitting for the last day and a half was already like a foreign world painted onto the window, rather than the unfortunate outpost of civilization that served as a refuelling depot to interstate travellers. She did not recognize a single detail, and hoped soon to forget even the location of this hopeless little point, with its lifeless tin roof and its shade bereft of shelter. “Finally, we're away,” she said, again to herself, and she picked her bag up from the spot she had put it at first and clutched it to her chest, drawing it closer and waiting for her driver to join them. A day and a half – the unhappy stagnation.

She heard a sound like quick rattling coming from around the back of the cab, the tank was full and he was shaking the last drops of petrol from the metal hose – the last drops we all shake out, whenever we are given the opportunity. “Cost effective,” she mused, “is it cheating the system to milk those last droplets, or is the system cheating you if you don't?” She didn't have time to pursue the idle thought any further, because the driver's side door opened, and the cabin filled momentarily with wind and chill before once again sealing them off from the world. He started the engine. The truck roared to life. The ground started to move and the giant beast lurched forwards. Two days left, and finally, just an inch closer to Newport.

***

Her eyes opened up sharp as she snapped out of her dream like a child's hand recoiling from a flame. The world flooded back.

“What's the time?” the words came scrambled out of her mouth. She wasn't sure who she was saying them to.

“Just past four in the morning”, he said – the truckdriver. He didn't turn his head from the wheel, but every now and then his eyes were glancing up at the rear-view mirror which was tilted in her direction. It struck her that the centre mirror in a truck is superfluous, as the trailer would always obscure the view from behind, even if there was a good-sized window in the back. The thought struck her from side on, and it seemed somehow important, so she held on to it as a piece of trivia for the future. She remembered her conversation with the driver before she had fallen asleep, although she was unsure at what point she had trailed off.

His name was D... or 'Dee'? That was all he had said; she was definitely not mistaken in the pronunciation as she had made sure to memorise it the first time it had been told to her, mostly out of politeness.

“Dee”, she muttered to herself. “It's Dee.” She was always muttering.

“That's the one.” He replied, eyes darting up to the mirror for a second.
She began to recall their conversation in detail, the six or seven minutes of it before she had fallen away into sleep, and she remembered that he had made a good impression on her. He was gruff and brisk with his words, but not angry or reserved, just efficient. The truck had been like a cradle, slowly rocking her back and forth as it shuddered with the bumpy road and churned under its own weight and momentum. Back and forth. Back and forth. One way with the wind. The other way with the slope of the road. She had realized so suddenly that she was unbearably tired, and while it would have been nicer to stay awake and keep this man company while he drove – and truly, he was her saving grace – she could not bear it. Sleep.

The truck had ploughed on, past the sunset, and on into the night. She had told him she was going to Newport and he didn't ask why, he didn't need to, she needn't have even told him that much – he could have guessed. She was asleep by the time the sun was down, and the time in the cabin had passed quicker without the sun beating on the road in front of them. Dee had been silent with his hands on the wheel and allowed her all the rest she needed. Now she was awake, and she spoke, not to herself this time, but directly to him;

“Did I sleep for long?”

“Around eight hours”, he replied briskly, his voice was immediately clear and crisp and stood out amongst the other noises coming from the engine and the mass of metal behind them.

“Eight hours...” she repeated to herself, “I'm sorry for not staying awake to keep you company”, she looked over to him as she apologised, and waited for him to say something back. He just smiled, and flashed his eyes up to the mirror while she looked at him directly. They were looking at eachother, although because of this triangular arrangement, their eyes never actually met.

“How long were you waiting at that petrol station?” he asked her later.

“A day and a night or thereabouts, I caught the bus out from town.”
“And which town would that be?” Dee asked this fair enough question abruptly but it seemed odd to her that as she ventured out of Hampstead her safe, cosy identity could be left at home with her old life behind her.

“I came from Hampstead”, she answered, smiling to herself as she realised her potential for anonymity.
“Me too,” Dee replied, “stayed there 'till I was old enough to read a map.” His eyes stayed steady on the road as he said this, the cab was quiet for a second – was that a joke? She thought quickly to herself that if he had meant what he'd said to be funny, then he might have laughed at it himself to indicate so... but then again he had a way of talking that seemed as if he might be one to let something like that slip by as if it were an accident that he had ever said it at all. A wry smile appeared at the corner of his lips as he saw her mind ticking over; “laugh if you want, it's only the truth.” He had seen through her uneasiness instantly, and that set her back in her seat and made her comfortable.

“Do you pick up many travellers on the road?” she asked him after another break.

“Every now and then – if a person asks, I'll take them as far as I can.”

“Not many people I've met would have the heart to pick up a traveller off the road like this. Someone they've never met before, never even laid eyes on – most people I know would be pretty afraid of that.”

“Maybe you just haven't met many people yet.” he offered back to her, his eyes lazily drifting back up to the mirror to look at her, it definitely wasn't a question, he was telling her plainly. “The way I see it, if someone's asking for a lift, then they're always gonna give someone who comes to them asking something the same courtesy they asked for.”

“Well yeah, maybe that's...”

“Maybe they're asking out of humility, or maybe out of desperation, but either way, if someone's asking for help, then you can be sure that they'd never turn their back on someone they found in a similar position.” This time his words hung on the cabin for a while, she wanted to let him finish his answer properly and felt sorry for interrupting the first time.
“...and I guess everyone needs help from somebody at some point...” she chimed in after she judged that enough time had passed.
“Exactly,” he nodded. “It'd be a dead, unfeeling wretch who could accept help with one hand, and refuse it to his fellow man with the other – I've never met anyone that cold inside.”
“Maybe you just haven't met many people yet.” she said with a wry smile creeping across her dry lips. She saw the corner of Dee's mouth rise a little too, and she smiled more at seeing this. She liked the way his face looked, and she was proud of having made him smile for a second. The truck and it's heavy wheels pulled the road underneath them like a conveyor belt. The sky stood still and the sun burned overhead while the two companions sat comfortably in eachother's company.

***

After another long while and a pit stop and a small flock of birds in the distance they came to the place where the desert meets the sea. The sun was setting, and the truck turned North and followed the coast up towards the apex of the peninsula; Dee would be leaving her there while he headed inland, Newport lay to the West, just one more day across the desert. She looked back over to him and cocked her head to the side before asking him another question.
“When was the last time you picked someone up in your truck?” She wished she could have phrased it better after it came out, she thought it had sounded clumsy and stupid.

“A few weeks ago I had two boys, a couple brothers, sitting where you are now. They talked and talked about their plans for Newport, the summer and the women they were looking for. I set them off by the train station because they said they wanted to try and jump a freighter going across East. Funny boys, but stupid, I'd say they made it over alright though. Then there was another lady a few days before that, heading back East after losing herself. She'd been over in Newport but she said she'd grown tired of it all... I can't say whether she was telling the truth or not, but she wasn't staying gone for good, no way. She was going back, I could feel it. Everyone goes back. No one can ever stay away.”

“What's it like?” She asked him.
“You'll see.” He smiled again, the same smile as before, and nodded his head to the mirror. “I'll be back there myself before long no doubt... just for now though I like to live through the people I meet on the road, out here in the desert. It's nice to put your life on hold for a second, and appreciate the joy in someone else's eyes as they head out and search for their own happiness.”

“I imagine it is, but I can't say I'm...”

“The part of your story that you share here with me, you'll carry that with you now, for as far as your journey takes you I'll be there as a tiny character. I have no way of knowing where all the people I meet end up, and maybe some of them don't end up too well, who knows what happens to you as soon as you get out of this truck... but it's nice to think that out there in the world there are a few people who can remember the guy who picked them up when they needed a hand, held them a while and then set them loose, back into the empty world.”

“I guess that means you're not so selfless then.” She quipped straight away and eyed him from the side again. She felt his eyes looking at her in the mirror like they had been for most of their conversation, and this time finally brought up the courage to peel her eyes away from the side of his face and meet his gaze in the reflection. They stared for a second. Two seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Thirty-five. Someone blinked, and then the moment was broken.

She retreated back into herself after this, and although the mood in the cabin was still good-natured and pleasant, the unsteady suspicion rose within her that this man was not as calm, as perfect, as simple as he had initially seemed. 'Why should he get to ride the glory of other people's accomplishments?' she questioned. 'Why should I suffer and toil to reach my pinnacle when he can simply offer lifts and stand there with me for free?' She felt cheated somehow, she knew she shouldn't be feeling resentful, but something about his peaceful solitude threatened her. She had steeled herself with tough resolve to be ready for every trial that she knew her new life would have ready for her, and she was prepared to face each challenge head on. Greatness only comes through hardship, and yet this man expected to share in others' greatness, without also bearing a share of their pain. The idea repulsed her and seemed parasitic, but she resolved to put it out of her mind. She softened, and then, after realising her harshness, almost pitied him. He would never know the glory of truly achieving a goal, of suffering through the greatest ordeals only to come out the other side and beat them. To be crowned lord of everything, and rise above impossibility. To live. In her mind it was inevitable – the sky was where she was headed.

***

When they pulled in to the train station she slowly stirred from where she had been, propped up against the door half sleeping. Grabbing her bag from between her legs where it had lay in the shade, away from the burning sun, she checked it once to make sure nothing had fallen out. It hadn't, she was ready to go.
“Thankyou again.” she smiled, and looked up at the mirror to meet his gaze, only this time he had ventured to look directly at her as the need to keep his eyes on the road had vanished. She looked at his eyes in the mirror, and he saw the side of her face in profile, once again their gazes never met, and only after she turned away did he return her farewell.
“Good luck.” the last words he offered her. By the time they reached her ears she was already halfway out the door and jumping down the ladder, the train she wanted to jump onto was getting ready to leave. She had to make it, she refused to be caught waiting.

He looked through the glass as she gathered speed and jogged, then ran towards the depot, jumping the fence between the parking lot and the track. She was impatient, but impatience was good, useful, he started the engine again and turned the big hunk of metal around and back out onto the road. Another story he could hold on to, he was part of another victory. Or maybe another defeat, but either way, he had played his part.

She ran fast for the train, panting, pressing on. The weight of her bag was not significant, but it swayed from side to side with her movement as she swung her shoulders to steady herself while running. She held onto the straps and tried to keep the swinging mass still. Full pelt, maximum speed. The train shuddered first from the front way up ahead but she saw it even as far as she was, as she ran she tried to pick out a carriage to jump on to. Something covered but open where she would be sheltered but not cramped. She couldn't sit on an exposed flatbed, she would freeze to death – she needed an open container. She could hear the clicking of the connectors between each carriage get closer and closer together as the front end of the train edged forward and each successive section was picked up. Clang, Clang, Clang. They sounded out across the yards like a row of steel dominoes. She spotted an open door and knew that this was her chance. It was a little towards the back of the train, but if she kept on her current trajectory, even if it was some way behind her when she reached the tracks, she would easily be able to jump on.

She reached the tracks, the open door drew up close until it was almost level with her. She slowed her pace to draw even. Unhooked her bag from around her shoulders and whipped over with her left arm, it landed with a thud inside the dark, empty space. Something inside there smelled and she winced internally, this was going to be a long night devoid of sleep. She would reek of fertilizer on her first night in Newport. Her right hand stretched out to grab onto something, the edge of the train, her fingers reached around quickly for a steady hold but none was there to grab on to. She stopped looking at the ground, she couldn't, she had to watch her hand, to look for something. Something to grab on to. She looked, but there was nothing. Her left foot slipped on a loose rock, 'why are train tracks always built on mounds of rocks?' she thought, infuriated, muttering it to herself. She slipped again, but her hand grabbed something. Yes! She could feel it! And the train was going faster now, faster than she could run, and her feet were completely away from the ground. Off the ground. Moving! Her left hand struggled to join her right and her feet swung around to the inside, in towards the spinning wheels and slowly accelerating machinery. She clung on as the train kept speeding up, speeding up. Much faster and faster and faster. Her legs lurched inwards again and caught something. She swung her hand, another time, wildly, frantically, desperately. Too late. Too slow. Too much ambition.

As she was pulled under, her feet first before her body, the train kept accelerating. It chewed her up indifferently and left her on the tracks, remorseless. She never made it to Newport.

Insecure Ramblings of the Fearfully Conscious Mind

I am walking down the road wearing clothes, experiencing the weather, and thinking about nothing in particular. I am always reliably secure in my thoughts and free of worry when I am alone, and alone I am right now. Two guys turn around the corner in the middle distance – fifty metres – and they're walking towards me. The sidewalk is narrow, just wide enough for two people to walk abreast, although not comfortably. It is always the way on these sorts of narrow sidewalks that groups of three are awkwardly split into two walking abreast, and one walking in front or behind, straining to listen and participate in the conversation of the other two. “These are treacherous walkways”, are the words that I think to myself as the two strangers pace towards me, and I towards them. Strange words, they are odd, and so I trace over them several times in my mind. “These are treacherous walkways”, “treacherous walkways be these”.

A car whizzes past on my right from behind me, and swishes off into the distance, stopping abruptly at the spoon-drain that marks the intersection of the road the two guys just turned off of – they are getting closer now. Almost within earshot. The one on my left is talking, with his left hand – the one closest to his partner – gesturing slowly and making circles in the space in front of them. Who are they, what are they talking about? What do they do here and why this street? Why now? They both look up together, simultaneously, and spot me as I had spotted them just before. The tone of the speaker dips slightly as they approach me, surely an unconscious reflex, but I wonder to myself though, what is it that they were talking about, and why am I not permitted to listen? Even by accident, even by complete chance. Surely their conversation is not relevant to me. Surely not? Surely. Surely.

I furtively throw my gaze up from the pavement for one last time before we pass and resume our previous roles of complete strangers – never having met, or even exchanged pleasantries. Their gazes haunt me though, as the distance between our backs grows at the same rate as before. My walk speeds up slightly, and my brain races along with the determined stride of my feet that carry my along the thin footpath. What if they were talking about me? They had every opportunity to look me up and down as soon as they rounded the corner; as soon as I could judge them, so they could judge me in turn. What anomaly could be so obvious in my appearance that they would have discussed it at length, before secretively hushing their judgement as we crossed paths? What did they see? What is wrong with my clothes? My face? My hair or the way that I walk? Why do they hate me, these strangers, two men who I have never met?

Maybe their stares were ones of pity, or sadness, as they saw my pathetic figure approaching them, alone and depressed, with my hands hanging down my sides like limp appendages, swinging without purpose. Maybe they could see in me what I have not yet identified myself, some awful predisposition to failure, or unhappiness. They could tell more about me from one quick glance, than I could possibly have discovered in all my life, after all my wanderings, and searchings, and introspective thoughts. Maybe that is the very reason they could see it... because I have searched so long for imperfections within myself that the truth of my complete inadequacy has eluded me... glaringly obvious as it is, sitting right in front of my nose. I think these thoughts, and I trace them over several times in my mind. “Complete inadequacy”, “obvious, complete inadequacy”.

I think of turning around. I twist my head. They are far behind me... almost far enough to shout? To call out to them? “WHAT IS IT? WHAT DID YOU SEE?” I consider screaming, for a second, consider running, consider finding out. But it would be no use. I march on, slowly rationalizing things and coming back to myself. Of course they didn't see anything, they were just two people, the same sort of people as me. They were talking to eachother, as friends often do, and they maybe glanced up at me as we passed and saw some menace in my eyes. Some judgement that maybe provoked fear in the scared corners of their hearts as well... maybe not, but they surely weren't judging me. I make these things up, these frantic, fretfully insecure worryings... and as I walk down the road, I realize this, and laugh to myself. “They were just the same as me, repeat it Taco.” I say that to myself as I walk on, slowing down slightly and again becoming comfortable. “Everyone is just the same as me.”

Peace, Taco.

A Message For You

When is it time to let go?

In recent years (like pretty much, this one) I have gained a deep respect and admiration for my mother for allowing me to do what I did in the years after I finished school. I won't bore you with the OUTRAGEOUSLY INTERESTING details, but I definitely took life by the horns. (note: replace 'life by the horns' with 'quite a lot of drugs') I was eighteen, and then nineteen, and then even twenty for a while, and the train kept speeding up and gaining momentum, and from the outside it must have looked pretty out of control. I always knew I was going to be fine, but I guess I can only say that confidently now having fairly emerged from the clouded mist of loud, thumping bass music and Monday morning blood-vomit... I always knew I was going to be fine – that's what everyone says when they reach the other side.

So for those three-ish years of steadily increasing drinking and two, three, four day benders, my mum (and my dad too, but really he was always chillin' so my mum mostly) was probably scared shitless that her son was going to end up a defective homeless man, scrounging through the gutters of some third-world slum, trying to find algae to cook into a stew... and I guess that fear was well justified. The party lifestyle is an alluring temptress, and there is a very real chance for anyone who is drawn in by it to come out the other side ravaged and broken, their life withered away to nothing. That's why I have such admiration for the courage that I now recognize in the way that she allowed me to go off and do my own thing for those first years of semi-adulthood and independence. If she had reigned me in and tried to stifle me – and doubtless she could have, and would have been acting only out of love – I probably would have rejected those attempts and no doubt run further away. She didn't though, she let me do what I had to do, and now I'm better for it. Good on YOU mum. Well done. Champion effort; here is your first-prize colouring in book.

Thing is though, how far do you let them slip? How long would it have been before ol' mum dawgz had said 'enough' (and she would have said it just like that too... “WOMEN” – amirite?) and told me that I had gone too far. We all know the saying, 'if you love them, let them go'. The implication there, is that if they love you back, then they'll return after realizing themselves the error of their ways, and that that self-induced revelation will be far more lasting and profound than anything that can be taught or imparted second-hand. Well I assume there would have been a point – and maybe I was audacious/stupid/lucky/wary enough to just tickle that point myself in my most self-destructive days, but my exploits in the field of drugs and alcohol really never even approached the levels of those around me. Those for whom drugs were not just simply a recreation, but an escape. Those who possessed an incurable itch which could be momentarily scratched by the familiar, overpowering calm of one or another addictive substance... from what I'm told it's a bleak world out there. I could never see it, but for those who can, I'm told any escape will do.

So they keep falling, or maybe driving themselves downwards. Burning a trail down and down and down into the abyss, happy to be rid of the light and the brutal pains of a world they are increasingly unable to relate to. To understand. What a luxury. I am only assuming here based either on my own extrapolations, or careful observations from half remembered weekends – only those who have crossed over the edge fully understand what is on the other side, but by that time most if not all could not care less about spreading the word. The edge is not a goal to shoot for. This is not a field trip, you can't just stare in, you fall all at once, and you fall all the way.

And this person who keeps pressing on, passing the point of no return, only to have others around them revise that point, and revise it again and again... a glimmer of hope, a moment of possibility. They give up all hope, only to have hope restored to them, almost against their will... and then dashed again. And again and again and again. You think I'm talking about a specific person here, but I'm not. This story is a generic one, fit to be told in generalities. The people who are reading this story are not living it, and those living it are definitely not reading. Not this. Not now. But what would a mother do for this person? This being who admits themselves to being without hope, and has all but consigned themselves to oblivion. What can a mother do? Or a brother? Or a friend? Can we let them keep falling, knowing that they don't even want to be picked back up? Is that a grave injustice? Or are there some who should be allowed to fade away, just as they have always wanted... these are the most painful thoughts my friends, the decisions that no one should ever have to make.

I've tried searching out the blameworthy parties. Doctors. Teachers. Parents. Friends. The government. The clubs. The party people. The scene. The dealer who sold that first bag of weed – marijuana: the gateway drug. The drugs themselves. Some other force, surely something outside of us can carry the blame. God? The Devil? No one is there. No one is listening. No one is going to answer... I don't know what to do anymore... and how selfish of me to make this about myself, I'm not even living it. I'm safe in my perched position, far far away from the edge. Never looking down.

All I have left to say is that if you can hold on, and even the smallest part of you wants to, then please do. We don't want to lose you. Not now, not yet, not ever. I could never hold someone responsible for giving up when their task seems too hard, there is no blame to be found there either. I wish I could do it for you, but I can't... but if you can hold on...

Don't do it. I love you.

Peace, Taco.

Calling Out from a Good Place

Rising sounds, and the beat keeps rising. The time is ten twenty-one and it's Sunday evening, I'm sitting in the living room with Brodesh (that's Brodie and Desh – PICK IT UP!) and everything is happening. Where are the parents? Where are the law enforcers? Where is the landlord when we are skateboarding up and down her wooden passageway like a bunch of lecherous louts? “Who cares?” should be your immediate answer to all of those three questions, today is the day for answers, discovery, and simple solutions.

I'm not trying to say that we're somehow pioneering some new way of life – we're clearly not – and the phrase 'out front, breaking boundaries' has become so overused that applying it to a person now seems to imply a level of mundaneness completely separate from the original intention. But we're doing the do out here... something just feels right. Something happened by accident when I moved over here that has made life that much simpler, like the unintended triple-syllable rhyme at the end of a sentence you said to the cashier when you were down at Coles buying your groceries. I was doing absolutely nothing in Adelaide... for the last two and a half weeks I had a shitty, terrible MENIAL joke of a fucking 'job' selling electricity to people door-to-door. Not even selling, just convincing – I was a door to door convincer – trying to persuade people that their current electricity companies, whatever they were (it was irrelevant really) were somehow screwing them out of money and that the company I worked for could save them cash. (we couldn't... AT ALL) But even when I wasn't taken up with this worthless existence, when I had free time, I wasn't in the right place within myself to do anything with it. And before those deathly last two point five weeks when I had NO job, it was even worse. I couldn't bring myself to do anything, but coming over here just changed everything.

I don't even know what it was, but from the first day that I was in this city my life and my mind just felt different; as if a change of scenery was the permission slip I needed to get out and do something every day. Sitting in and watching movies and pretending to work no longer enough.

So now I'm sitting here with a tie wrapped around my head and fastened in a crude granny-knot with the two ends hanging down over my left temple like a cheap ponytail-wig and everything in my universe feels right. Of course I can't leave you here, how could I that would be like leaving myself. But I just want you all to know that from where I stand right now, things couldn't get much better. It reminds me of what Bill Hicks once said, that “evolution didn't end with us growing thumbs you know... now it's time we started to evolve ideas.” It's a stretch to tie in, but you know I'm up to it... I feel like I've gone about as far as I can in the happiness direction, being happy isn't even a goal any more, it's done. It's still happening, but I don't have to try any more. I have to find some new direction to progress in now, and that's where the idea of evolving ideas comes in... whereas for as long as I can remember since I emerged from the mist of adolescent emotional entrapment I've just been trying to find and maintain pockets of happiness in a chaotic life, I now know that regardless of the good days and the bad days and the dips and highs and swooping changes in my mood, I don't have to worry about that any longer. Now it is time to grow in another direction. In the last two months that search has begun, and it continues today. I just thought I'd report back for a second, and maybe rest on my laurels just that tiny bit.

So this is me, calling out. Aidan Jones, for one night at peace with the world, before the search resumes tomorrow.

Peace, Taco.

The Day I Woke Up

I woke up that morning with a heavy taste in my mouth and crust over my eyes, I knew the time was late, and I knew I had to get out of there. It was 5:45am I think. Looking around in this place I loved once, a pang of sadness crept into me, the first muffled rays of dawn shone through drawn blinds and hit the thick curtains. I think it was a Monday... I think that not because I remember the exact day or date, but because that seems a fair day for the sort of scene I am recalling right now to have happened. Monday comes after Sunday, and Sunday is the last day of the weekend where desperate souls try in futility to hang on to the high and ride the wave all the way in to the shore. For as long as you are prepared to wait until the next, surely bigger wave, you are doomed to be forever swimming back out, away from the shallows, and never making it all the way in.

The last few weeks had been different from what I had expected, the clubbing scene was not how I remembered it. In place of smiling faces and nods and handshakes and expectant conversations I had found numbness. The repetition of it all seemed so much clearer now, even the drugs seemed dirty. When first started going clubbing I remembered the highs coming on like uncontrollable frenzies, welling up inside you and taking over your mind first, only for your body to follow helplessly. I remembered sitting on a chair in Garage one Thursday night in 2009 and looking around with that last, deep breath, knowing that this was the beginning of something special. I remembered these things, but I began to question myself... had it really happened like that? We are all guilty of romanticising the past – each and every one of us holds on to sepia memories and foggy, glimmer-lit scenes of a childhood that no one can verify. Was it really that beautiful back then? Or was I just longing for a time that I knew for certain did not exist right now... maybe it hadn't existed back then either, but more likely then than now... more likely I was happy then, than happy with this. Waking up on a sullied, stringy couch at 5:45am on a Monday morning, back sore, head still muddy.

Even up until I had gone away, the scene seemed happier. I lay under the blanket and tried to roll back over and face the floor – 5:50, still no signs of life. I remembered that spring in 2010 when every Sunday was a sun-filled scene of mayhem. Cashed up and ready to go we were, and the city was our playground... that's what we used to call Friday nights at Red Square: 'Playground Fridays feat. Bollocks DJs and Neverland's Lost Boys'. Saturdays spent drinking and screaming in fits of laughter, Sundays spent jumping around in the grass and arguing about who was going to the bottle shop. Whose turn was it to go buy food. “You lit the Red Square fire Tugzy, I've got that shit on tape!!” Noonahs and nills and lawishi and a million other nonsensical rambling strings of words that couldn't make sense to anyone that wasn't there. They just couldn't, you had to be there for the ride, for the weekend. There were no passengers.

I knew I wasn't just imagining these times, those nights and mornings and frantic afternoons, I know I hadn't just imagined the last three years... so what was so different now? I'd woken up in someone else's house, on someone else's couch, with someone else's clothes on many more times than this... why did this feel different? I'd just gotten back from a four month trip overseas, and in those four months, things seemed to have somehow changed. But looking back from this uniquely privileged perch on Monday morning, nothing seemed to have changed at all. The weekend was still the same, and the clubs and the music and the drinking... maybe the drugs were slightly diluted and gritty, but that shouldn't really have mattered. The whole reason we had been comfortable living this life was because we knew, deep down, that we didn't need the drugs. Drugs are just a tool, they just keep you awake for longer so that you have more time to enjoy the things in the scene that you're really there for: friends, music, dancing, talking shit down Rosina Street and laughing at the kids with their fake IDs. Then selling drugs was just a tool too – everyone wanted them already, no one was pulling kids out of church and forcing the shit down their throats, they were just supplying an ever-present demand and funding their weekend in the process. Funding the life that they loved, that we all loved.

I sat up on the couch and threw the blanket lazily off of my body, only then realizing that there was another body lying one couch down from me – my feet must have been in his face I think. I rubbed my eyes, finally committing to something, and walked out the back to see if anyone was still awake. No signs of life. Six o'clock now and the sun starting to flood the open areas of this cramped back yard. Rouse had a garden for pissing in, and a tree for hanging lights off – little fairy lights that I assume he liked because of the 'Tinkerbell from Peter Pan' connotation. Never grow up. The couches were a bit wet, but I didn't bother to sit down, I was just out here grabbing my lighter and seeing if I'd left anything, I was quickly decided and it was definitely time to go. There was still time to salvage the day and fit in a bit of something normal. Time to write a poem, or maybe start readings for the new semester of uni. The difference between me and my brothers-in-arms – and that's what we were; brothers – was that I had found a life outside of the town scene. I had university, and I had pretended for so long that that was my passion that slowly it had started to become true... I got really, really lucky.

I padded in my bare feet around the house almost slipping on something slippery, almost stepping on something sharp. Bare feet turned to socks, and socks turned into one shoe, then the other as my body started to get it's bearings. Dishes in the sink, shove them out of the way just to get a glass of water. I grabbed what I hoped was the last of my stuff and shoved it in my backpack, then, offering my hand in front of Plummy's face as he stirred on the couch, I waited for a farewell handshake... these were always the sloppiest. Monday morning, who has the energy to do anything?

I never said goodbye to Rouse, it's just not what we did... he was asleep in his room anyway – hidden away and fragile, not to be disturbed. He knew anyway, no one ever left for good, it was just until next time. And we were all coming back, we needed it for ourselves... well that's what it had always felt like. Something was different this morning though, something about wallowing in the pit that we had made for ourselves didn't seem so glorious and appealing to me on that hazy day in the suburbs. I had come back from overseas, and something just didn't feel right any more. I felt like I wanted to purge my system, the thoughts hadn't organized themselves in my head yet though. All I knew was it was time to get moving.

I would come back, of course, many more times. And many more times I would wake up in the same situation, but I was only there to visit after this day, never to take part. From the moment I walked out of the front door to Neverland on that briskly cold Monday morning and stepped into the world, I would be merely a passenger on the ride I had helped to create. Never again to be lost in the high-speed blur of the night, caught up in the drug scene. I remember the cold and the ice on my skin. I remember taking deep breaths of fresh air that burned my lungs and ate at the tips of my fingers. That was the day I woke up.

Peace, Taco.

My New Room

I'm sitting at my computer right now in a black, fold-up chair that I stole from the back yard and wiped clean with the new(ish) towel I bought from the Salvos yesterday for like three dollars or some shit. My computer is sitting on top of one of my two speakers – also purchased from the Salvos, but the Adelaide one this time... the pair cost four bucks (YES!!). I've got my copy of George Orwell's 1984 open to my right and the left set of pages are held open with a peg that is fastened to a hard-cover children's book that I brought to Melbourne for this very purpose. I was typing it out before and have been every now and then since March, I find it really helps me clear my mind to completely fill my brain with someone else's thoughts... granted I got the idea from the Hunter S. Thompson documentary where it says that he typed out The Great Gatsby a bunch of times, but I like to think that I've found merit in the activity other than imitation of my literary idol.

On the floor, further to my right past the already burgeoning mess of cables plugged into a five socket powerboard that I'm sure Dad is pissed about me having (even though I know for a fact that he would have no use for it back home... motherfucker doesn't even own a cellular telephone-machine) is my second monitor. It's a 17inch flatscreen that I bought for three-hundred badboys when I was like fifteen or some shit. In the corner are some sheets that will never be used because really I have never understood the usefulness of sheets. Like yeah sure I get the ones that you cover your mattress with, and we'll get to my bedding situation later, but the other ones... that thin layer of superfluous cotton that is supposed to line the people-sandwich between person and quilt cover... they are bullshit. If someone is using those sheets then they are clearly too afraid of something.

Past that along the wall to my right are a few books including the English-Spanish dictionary given to my upon my departure from Bolivia in February by my formerly estranged, now slightly-less-estranged ex-lady Melanie. She wrote a nice note in it for me when we left and I plan on holding on to that guy because, as it says in 'Everyone Has the Right to Wear Sunscreen': “keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.” There are no bank statements in this room... you can do that shit online now. Then more books and a fat pile of clothes, most of which I don't really like any more but I know will eventually be worn out of sheer laziness and aversion to trips to the laundromat. I only have one laundry bag and while it is a hefty piece of bagery, I really can't see myself making that trip any more than once a fortnight... that's fine, I needed to buy new socks and underpants anyway. (On that note, just quickly, the list of stuff that I lost that I ended up losing to the hostel tax grew by three pairs of socks, two undies, and another tube of toothpaste along with countless food items in the final weeks... I've come to terms with the fact that those losses are largely my own fault)

Behind me, after the door and the appropriate amount of empty floor-space to account for that, are my shoes, and some of Phil's shit that he left here like a the lowly drifter that he is – also mate your jacket is hanging on my door, come get it back or I will spit in the pockets. Then there's my bed; a single mattress with the fitted sheet-cover ON (ladies) and five pillows arranged in the optimum arrangement to avoid floor-touchies and the dreaded midnight head-roll. (trust me, I've done tests) Now we're on the wall to my left, just over my left shoulder and if you have a good ability to spatially visualise what I'm writing about you will have noticed (do the sums guys, it all adds up **gasp**) that my bed is on an angle with the wall and actually forms a nice little right-angled triangle between the short end and the two sides of the corner over my left shoulder for those of you playing at home. There's my big bag – the one with the 'Troop 712' tag still on from my heady junior days at the Australian Jamboree – and a few hoodies and shoes and then directly to my left are the sheets that will, god and Hubbard willing, be going on my queen size bed when it arrives from Adelaide. (it's on the list, you can't rush art, dickhead)

Finally, the most important item in this room, and the one that has allowed me to begin reclaiming my sense of normalcy and begin to make this bare, languid pit my new home: my Dad's old stereo amp. He told me that it didn't work when I brought home the two speakers from the Salvos a few months ago in Adelaide but I took it out of the shed in Naldera Street and plugged it in anyway and, well long story short... it did. It works fine mate, thank you nineteen-eighties. This badboy has already done about ten solid hours of work in the five days that I've been living here... actually make that twenty... and don't you people let anyone say that I let a hard slog go unappreciated. On top of that are my wallet, keys, and oh yeah to my right my phone is on charge. Piece of shit is always on charge. Feels like my life is on charge every time I walk into a room and I see a power point to plug that bastard tool into. Okay... time to stop, I think things are about to get a little too serious.

Peace, Taco.

(29/10/12 EDIT: For the sequel to this post, click here)

A Million Reasons Why Ebay Can Get FUCKED, and the Beautiful Busker I Saw on Swanston

So I bought this MacBook Pro from a guy in my hostel (Jordan) the other day for three-hundred and fifty ding-dongs after he had asked me to take it down to Cash Converters and sell it for him. They had offered that much and I said I'd match it and he could keep the money he was going to give me for running his errand. The whole point behind buying it was that me and my best mate Phil (who spotted me the money and came up with the idea) were going to give Jordan the money he was going to get anyway – money that he needed right now for a plane back to Perth – and we would sell it online at a higher price, but without any time limit. It seemed like a good idea at the time... and really, it still seems like a good idea right now. There's one hitch though – and it only takes one – that has brought our operation close to failure and placed my shuddering nerves on the precipice of complete collapse: Ebay... go fuck yourself.

We first listed the item with an instant buy price of $950 and a starting auction price of $700 over five days... seems simple enough right? WRONG. After about two days we got a bid for the full nine-fifty and we were ready to hi-5 and dance the funky chicken, but the buyer turned out to be a fake account from Nigeria and the person behind the keyboard came out with some “I'm just on holiday at the moment can you send it to my home account” bullshit. Fuck off, I'd rather my money remain un-grifted thanks. After the item was bid at the full price though, Ebay took the listing down assuming that we had completed the transaction and all was fine... even though it clearly was not fine, and any cursory glance from the Ebay staff towards the status of the transaction would have revealed this. No money changed hands, and no sale was made. Nevertheless nine-hundred and fifty chattleford noo-nahs were deducted from our Ebay account's selling limit for the month (which starts at $2500 and can only be increased by a rigorous proof-of-identity process which... well let's just say we can't increase it) even though... ahem... NO SALE HAD BEEN MADE.

I relisted the item (short note, I have noticed that I've been using that word – 'relisted' – an awful lot during this saga; on my phone, in gmail, in word etc. and nowhere is it recognized as a word... I keep getting the little squiggly red line telling me to hyphenate but GUESS WHAT – I DON'T WANT TO FUCKING HYPHENATE!)... Ok I relisted the item a few days later and surprise surprise the same thing happened. Dodgy lady paying the full price of nine-hundred and fifty imaginary moneys and then running her imaginary mouth about some imaginary story of how she's on holiday and needs the money into an overseas account and... well whatever. Of course, being the oracle of foresight that I am I had thought to list my phone number in the description of the item this time so that real potential buyers could contact me directly and we could fuck off the worthless middle-man that is Ebay and get this thing done right. So I got a text from someone in Sydney asking about the MacBook and I feel like we have developed some level of mutual trust in the concept that we are both real people and not darkness, West African confidence tricksters... but this (calm down Aidan, caaaaaalm... breathe) this person still wants to complete the transaction over Ebay. I'm assuming this is to ensure that his money is not made off with by me, an untrustworthy foreign entity, and as far as he knows, a shady West African confidence trickster.

Well here la-di-FUCKING-da buddy. I'm SORRY I don't have FIVE GOLD STARS next to my name when it comes up in your phone and my pleas for a PHONE CALL are met with stunned silence and RETARDED REQUESTS FOR PICTURES OF THE LAPTOP WHICH I AGREE TO SEND YOU AND THEN WHEN I DO YOU STILL STUTTER AND STAMMER AND SIT ON YOUR FUCKING HANDS LIKE A LITTLE BITCH NOT EVEN RESPONDING TO MY SUGGESTIONS OF HOW WE CAN FINALLY END THIS DISGUSTING FARCE OF A DEAL FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKING FUCK KILL EVERYONE...

Can you tell I'm upset?

Earlier today I was walking down Swanston St in the middle of town and reciting the speech for my new job as a walking-tour guide in my head. I was about to cross over Collins St when I heard a lovely, clean guitar chord amplified by a small, portable speaker that the girl playing the guitar had mounted in her case. She started singing, and I forgot all about crossing the road and turned back to watch her – the only person in a sea of faces with nowhere in particular to be and nothing in particular to worry about missing. I sat down on a seemingly superfluous white, wooden block that I could only imagine was fixed to the pavement four-hundred years ago with the sole purpose of giving me somewhere to sit while this beautiful siren sang her songs out into the world on this windy Thursday afternoon. She played smooth and sweet as I rummaged around in the bottom of my bag for the silver coins I knew rattled around in some obscure pocket... I knew it wouldn't be as much as she deserved, but it would have to do.

I don't normally give money to buskers – mainly because I don't normally stop and watch. This girl though, and that moment, there was something about the five or ten minutes that passed as I sat on my lonely chair in the middle of the footpath... it was one of those perfect silences that come around very rarely in life and must be savoured when they do, no matter the surroundings. I knew the storm that was brewing in the cables and hollow wires of cyberspace at that very moment when I sat down and stopped my life for the girl with the guitar. I knew it was there, but when I sat down I decided that for now, just for a second, it could disappear. In these quiet moments when life stands still, only a smile can intrude on my peaceful meditation. No troubles. No worry. No scathing insults or fiery torment that grinds inside my brain and threatens to boil over violently at any moment. No jittery unease... just me, and the music.

I dropped the coins in her guitar case, and she quickly said “thanks” in the middle of singing. I smiled at her one last time, and walked off down Swanston street, ready to swear at people some more and curse the stupidity of creation. The MacBook is a long way from sold, but I feel that the blood clots inside my brain have begun to slowly repair themselves and I've stopped thinking about different ways of killing people.

Smile.

Peace, Taco.

Musings on Immoral Behaviour

This morning I woke up at 9:30am, had and went downstairs to the kitchen where I found that my milk had been stolen and the walls had been written on. There you go... that's a perfectly straightforward English story right there. No frills, no bows, very little difficult language. For those of you with shit to do today – the dishes, bathing, religious ceremony – you can stop right there safe in the knowledge that what you have just read fairly and concisely sums up the first hour of my day today. For those of you with a few more stones in your belly, continue on. Let's make an afternoon of it, shall we?

The last couple weeks there has been a string of seemingly random food thefts perpetrated by a shadowy, anonymous stranger lurking within the annals of the hostel... last week I lost two tupperware containers of lovely chicken-vegetable something that I had cooked and saved for myself. Jean lost one as well, and a few other random items of condiment or whatever have been reported missing from different people's food stashes in the freezer or pantry. Needless to say this behaviour is looked upon fairly unwelcomingly by the community and before long people had started leaving long, sometimes eloquent notes on their food to discourage the thief - my particular words were along the lines of “don't touch my food faggot, go buy your own... actually before you do that, kill yourself”. (I would like to say that I have been the spearhead of this movement and maybe in the eloquence department I fairly could, but plenty of other people have had some rather colourful words attached to their shit – it's not just me) Anyway... considering the recent string of mooch-crime it sadly came as little surprise to me this morning when I trekked downstairs after a shower (not in my favourite shower this morning – it was occupied by a couple of Germans AKGH – but that's neither here nor there) and found that my two litre milk was nowhere to be found... wait that's no good. My milk, that I had found... wasn't... find? Found. I couldn't find it... even when someone hadn't founded.... ugh

Some dick had stolen my milk... is basically what I'm trying to say here.

I've talked to Bobby, the night manager, about checking the cameras in the kitchen to try and pinpoint who the thief is and while there's been words and times floated around the place, I was sure from the beginning that no action would be taken in this crisis. Yeah sure there are cameras and it's not so hard to switch on a TV and check them from particular dates and times, but knowing the calibre of staff that operate this place, even work which basically involves watching an extended version of Big Brother until you see the bad guy is going to be put off for as long as possible. Bobby ain't a bad dude... he's great in fact. But he's never going to do it.

So then at around 10:10am when one of the other managers came out and said something to the effect of, “yep, that's it, we've got em all on camera” in a serious, big boy tone, my mind did backflips. “WHO IS THE MOTHERFUCKER THAT STOLE MY FOOD? WHEN CAN HE BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE? HOW MANY PUNCHES TO THE FACE DO WE GET EACH?” Real forgiving shit... So that was at 10:10am, but before I go any further I need to take you guys back to last night. Just real quick. Because it's fun. It breaks up the main narrative. And adds dramatic effect.

Last night I went and saw a couple comedy shows including one at Pugg Mahone's (interestingly enough, 'pug mahone' apparently means 'kiss my ass' in Irish soooo... there you go?) where Myrthe – a Dutch girl from the hostel – works. Apparently I left without saying goodbye – a faux pas that I was later chastised heavily for, especially because I managed to squeeze a free drink (a squash though, let's be fair) out of the lovely lady while I was there. I got back to the hostel around eleven and found Ollie, the lanky German with the brilliant laugh, back amongst the living after a week in Thailand. This is the guy who suggested to Jean (who has hilariously small eyes) that we should “have a competition to see who can open his eyes the widest and the loser has to buy everybody pizza” so yeah... he's alright. Ollie had bought a litre of Smirnoff back from the duty free store, and Myrthe and Hannah (black English girl... sassy etc.) were down for a drink. Simeon (looks 26, is 21) and Kieran (looks 26, is) joined as well... and the next few hours writes itself really.

After a few hours of these guys slamming down vodka and getting loud with me vicariously enjoying their antics we turned our eyes to the wall behind us which is covered in photos of people who have stayed at the hostel at various times in the last few years partying and having fun. The main problem that we could see with these pictures was that they were not of us, and as such were ripe for alteration... so ripe... top ten ripest. We set to work with a permanent texta rating the people in the pictures out of ten: top angle looking down on blonde girl – six. Fat girl hooking up with other guy – 2. Sexy girl with black hair who is hot in three separate photos – 9. Passed out dude with wack face – MONG. Etc... The real vandalism started when Dutchy and Hannah got on their bitchy-soapbox tip and started ranting about some guy they had both slept with who apparently was “too slow” and “gave no orgasm” and “had a lot 2 learn private lessons could have been 4 free bad personality X”. They wrote it on the wall in thick, blue permanent and faced the cameras blatantly. I'm on camera writing on the photos, which can just be pulled down, but their hateful mural will have to be painted over... silly silly... nothing good ever happens after 2am.

So anyway, that happened last night, and to bring us back to 10:10am this morning, the manager from the hostel had just rolled out the big guns, “yep, that's it, we've got em all on camera”. I realized though, after my initial hopeful fancy that it had been about catching the food thief, that he was talking about the writing on the walls, and that my ass could very well be on the line here. This was only a second after vicious, bloodthirsty images of a lowly, broken bastard, tied to the stake and gnashing his teeth, breath still smelling of my chicken-vegetable something and staring down the barrel of an open, running sewage pipe that was about to be blasted into his face. Guilty as fuck and fucked for sure...

...and now that was me. I was the one staring down the pipe and the sewage was coming straight for me. I am, and it is. And as much as that sucks, I brought it on myself. I did the stupid thing on camera, and even if they caught my thief, his crime is really no worse than mine... well marginally, but they are both shitty things. The photos that I drew on can be taken down, and so too can my food be replaced... the base transgression at the core of both actions is disrespect. I didn't ask to draw on the photos, fagboy didn't ask to take my food. In both instances, I'm sure the answers to the request would have been yes – “can I have some food?” 'yes'; “can I draw on these pictures of mongs?” 'yes' – but the question was never asked. After last night I have been forced, as I seem to be on about a weekly basis, to re-evaluate my position and rethink some of the hasty thoughts that have sprung into my head. Simply reacting to situations is only the clumsiest way of getting through the day and I really have to stay vigilant on my snappy, self-indulgent thoughts if I am ever going to make change. Ultimately, I guess I just have to start making my food a little less obvious. I'm never going to find the thief – sinful bandit fucker that he is – but at least I can make my stuff a little less appetising for his grubby little thief-fingers. Maybe then he will disappear forever, and I can forgive him for his sins, and those two serves of chicken-vegetable something that I miss so, so much.

Peace, Taco.