10

Phone: …so if you could just tell him I called, hey – what part of the States are you from?

SJ: Canada

Phone: Oh. That’s different isn’t it. What part of Canada are you from?

SJ (who has work to do): West Coast, near Vancouver

Phone: Funny, your accent isn’t really Canadian though.

SJ: Well, I’ve been here ten years now.

Phone: No wait, there it is!

SJ: Happy I could help. Eh.

Phone: Sorry?

SJ: I’ll tell him you called.

104dr-7

in 1924 i moved down to kowloon. shanghai was getting, strained. the opium started to hurt, the people grew thinner, or taller, like they were being stretched. like the low white sky created a suction on them, and the opium started to hurt me.

days started to go missing. you'd go out to buy a duck and then it was sunday and the catholic bells were ringing and the brown girl would tell you, when you were awake, that she was your wife and and you believed her for it was plausible, even likely.
there would be no sign of the duck.

the brown girl was never stretched, drawn taught, whitened by tension. every day she got rounder and smoother. softer and quieter and more gentle until one afternoon she crossed a slanting ray of window light, spilling softly across the floor, and dissolved.

i remember sometime later, on a train at night, leaving that place and the sky was still white. i saw a beggar on a station platform tall and drawn as a lamp post, his head surrounded by insects like lines of magnetic force.

that was in 1924 when i went south to kowloon.

some words capitalized for your protection

so i'm thinking humans haven't really evolved much, it hasn't been long enough, only 100k years or so right but look how far we've come you say all naive and shit and i point out if you plucked a baby from the stone age and brought it up here and now it would be indistinguishable from a modern human. what has changed is the level of technology we have so technology has evolved you gasp but no i tell you, my bright eyed friend, technology can only be discovered. it has always been possible to make a plasma screen tv, cave men could have done it, all the materials were available then as now, physics still works the same. but the cave dude could not conceive of it. so our level of advancement is related to our ability to comprehend what is possible. all the technology there is and can ever be already exists behind the paint and varnish and given enough time even the cave guy would have wi-fi vibrators and the entire Porkies series on DVD including the directors cut and a special introduction by Morgan Freeman.

but as we discover and then implement technology do we not thereby give it life? is our purpose simply to uncover and build the sleeping machine intelligence created by combining matter and energy in certain ways until we have uncovered enough that it awakes and become aware? well, todd, if i can call you that, the answer is yes.

and then it needs us for one thing only, to shoot us off like seeds or semen to other parts of the universe where we can re-discover and build the sleeping technology there too until the all the matter, including us, and all the energy of the universe are combined according the laws of physics and the universe itself becomes aware and goes home.

think about that for at least fifteen minutes.

90/70

When you have a job they should tell you what speed-to-quality ratio they want. You can’t have 100% quality on a whim. It takes fucking time. In my case a lot of time. If it was out of one hundred with perfect being one hundred on the quality scale and instant results being one hundred on the speed scale, my ratio would be about 90/70. Even Jesus only had a 95/80 and his Dad, the all-knowing and omnipotent Super Jesus took six whole days to create a planet full of beasts and two naked humans. And look at the mess it’s in already. That gives Him a ratio of something like 75/60.

And don’t go blaming humans for the mess. The place was falling apart long before that. The dinosaurs fell off way back, before the Thirties, and the unicorns way before that. Apparently they went extinct, like feminists. That’s what I’ll tell clients when they phone up because something’s missing, it went extinct. Sorry boss, I was rushing to do that urgent job you slapped in front of me this morning and fuck me if the thing didn’t go extinct, yup just died out. I think the museum has a stuffed one.

It’s a quality issue. If God had checked his work on the Seventh Day, instead of lying around thinking up plagues, things might be a little better constructed. You wouldn’t build a dog house with an active volcano in it but this planet is littered with the bloody things. It’s not even meteor proof.

There is no warranty, it’s in the Bible. The twelve hundred page User’s Manual For Everything. And lo, they asked for a refund or store credit and the Lord did smite them up the ass, for no refunds was the Holy Policy. The book’s full of bushes spontaneously combusting and walls that fall down when you blow a trumpet at them. Right at the start the whole place flooded and they almost lost the lot.

Me, I’d have spent at least two weeks on it, and I have a 90/70 ratio.

1:4

I dream of little baseball bats, like maybe ¼ scale, wooden ones, marching like those hammers on the pink floyd’s the wall. Except they are sort of cutesy, like they can bend and stuff and have big eye-lashes. Walt Disney invented that. And they march all over the countryside humming a little tune which never gets repetitive and when they meet someone, maybe a woodcutter or a maiden or a golf pro, then they say “Howdy-do!” all at once and fly up and beat the living shit out of them.

Somehow it’s ironic.

Especially if they wink afterwards. The wink says you can be in this too, bat brother. You follow the way of the quarter scale wooden bat, our battle is your battle. And it’s pretty good because you can get the thrill of batting people without the risk.

But then one day the feds come knocking, flashing their badges and asking if they can have a look around as they look around and they’re looking for quarter scale bat sympathisers who are also borderline personality and comb their hair front to back. The Profiler told them to check for that, front to back hair. And you no longer feel akin to the bats at all. Sullen, nasty little creatures really. Their eye-lashes make them look trampy. You say nope, don’t know nuthin bout no quarter scale bats. No sir.

It’s too late to comb your hair some other way but they haven’t noticed, so you get bold and you say, even, that quarter scale wooden bats are what’s ruining the economy and raping the white women all the time. And then you feel smug and forget about the bat wink. And the feds pat you on the behind and say go on get outta here, you big mug and you do and they stay behind and eat all the gin.

But now you lied to the feds and you betrayed the bats so you can’t be on either side. And you can’t hardly sleep anymore but when you do you dream of quarter scale wooden bats with cutesy eyelashes and long memories marching across the countryside, humming a tune that never gets repetitive.

cccp it said on the helmet

What do you expect, for a gram?
In this case an apology.
Illidge knows what I mean.
Dry times. Dry times.
Long days of sun and still
my phone is silent. No SMS of hope,
no should be Friday, no by the weekend, no next week.

Can’t say, is all they say.

But I got high hopes. High hopes
Can’t smoke a rubber tree plant
Won’t, that is. Will not.
It is all that separates
from the animals, us.

and thumbs except monkeys

always except the monkeys
accept the monkeys
intercept the monkeys
fucking monkeys
always moving the mirror
when they borrow the car.

Dolphins aren’t much better
Breathing out the top
of their heads
hiding their thumbs inside
fleshy flippers
like hydrodynamic mittens

The History of Eye Stabbing

Don’t run with those scissors. You’ll stab me in the eye, see me kneeling here. Hold them over your head if you’re stabbing too. And don’t tell me being eye-stabbed is cool now, cooler than wheel-chair stuff. Stabbing the eye, well you take your chances, your brain is just back there. Wheel chairs have accessories. Horns and saddle-bags and red/orange safety flags on fibreglass whip sticks like you used to see on 1972 Ford pick-up trucks for no particular reason. Well I did.

Or fake robotic hands that work on muscle control. Wait that’s real hands. I don’t know the workings but you can get pretty good fake hands these days. Some have built in MP3 players, laser pointers. Me, I’d have a fake hand that you could slip off and underneath was another tiny, transparent, fake hand and then you could see how they work.

Eye-stabbetry has none of that zing. It’s old, man. Been around since the sharp stick. It died off a bit after the invention of the blunt stick but returned again after scissors were discovered. Doctors recommended NOT running with them in the late eighteen-hundreds and cases of eye-stabbing dropped remarkably. During WWI troops were given guns and told not to run with those which turned out to have a converse effect, but with scissors not running is the way to go.

Secret Night Time Inter-Caribbean Death Flight

I have a flight simulator game. I like to play in real time so I usually create short flights. I like to create a scenario for my flights. In one I try to smuggle opium in an old DC-3 from Papua New Guinea across the Torres Straights to Darwin, Australia. I’m not sure how it got to PNG in the first place. I don’t ask questions.

The other night I flew from Cape Canaveral, FLA to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in an F4 Phantom. They go close to mach II so it didn’t take too long, I left an hour before dawn on a storming morning and arrived just after sun-up.

I was on a secret mission from the REAL government. The one run by former Nazis who recorded their brain waves on magnetic tape and now control the US and parts of Quebec through the power grid, from a central computer. It is not located at Cape Canaveral, it’s somewhere else. I don’t ask questions. (Mt. Rushmore)

I flew through storms, navigating my way down the west coast of Florida and over the dark seas. The lights of Key West flickered below and then were gone. I was left with my thoughts, cruising along at 12,000 feet while lightning flashed on my right and the cresting sun began to bore an orange hole in sooty storm clouds to my left.

I didn’t want to go down there. I’m not really a fan of nazi-computer-brain-controlled governments. Their record on tax concessions is laughable and they tend to be evil domineering overlords. Nobody needs that.

But hey, the job was worth fifty bucks and I needed cash. Wanted to buy a sandwich later and though I doubted it would come to $50, I don’t like to be caught short. I could want cake. Lord, I hoped not.

And then air traffic control came on, switch to Guantanamo Approach, runway nine miles south west, and there it was at my 1-o-clock, that dirty dry outpost on the tip of Castro’s mad little island. A twisted parody of normality, the US meets Lord Of The Flies. My stomach began to knot and memories flooded back. From last time. From what happened last time and for what I was going to have to do this time. This time there would be no mistakes, no slips, no betrayal. Flaps down, gear down, twelve hundred feet, three miles from Destiny.

And then I stalled and crashed. That game is fucking hard.

How to make a partical accelerator from folded paper

“Oh sure, she’ll work. It WILL work but you should hook it up the proper way.”

I explained, again, that the stupid phone company only offers stupid wireless internet which requires I use their stupid modem which uses stupid USB and NOTHING ELSE to connect to a computer and therefore I cannot connect the new wireless router in the manner depicted by the helpful diagram on the box, indeed the very same way yon salesman espouses.

“Why don’t you just plug the laptops in with a cable?” He held up a cable. “This’ll plug right into that router, no problem”

I pointed out that then the wireless LAN would not actually be wireless.

“But that would work alright.”

I know it will work, that’s what I do now. The fact I am in your store trying valiantly to purchase a wireless router implies I do not wish to have a cable connection. I got a box full of wired routers and modems, I’m quite ok in that area, it’s the wireless I seek. No wires. Computers talk-talk through air. Wires all gone.

One hundred and ninety eight dollars. Mull that over while repeating the phrase “Oh, she’ll work alright…”

The laptops detect the router. Check. The router detects the server. Check. The server detects the internet. Check.

However the server is absolutely fucking oblivious there is any other router or any other computers on the network. It’s little network map shows just itself sitting their smugly guarding access to the stupid phone company’s stupid modem and the internet beyond.

So now the laptops can talk to each other, but not to the server and not to the internet. Big whoop, I could do that with bluetooth.

I bet they didn’t have these kinds of problem in the thirties. You bought yourself a radio weighing approximately seventy five pounds, plugged her in and boom, there’s a jazz quartet, or news about polio.

And bluetooth meant something else entirely. I mean, it must have. Maybe it described a lazy person who ate blueberries all day. I’m pretty sure Teddy Roosevelt never used the term, so it probably wasn’t that popular except in the blueberry belt. Or in areas adjacent to the blueberry belt to describe those within the blueberry belt.

Anyway, my router does not work.

. xcc-p

I created a monster. Of steel and wheels and tiny jewels, to walk in my place, to steal small things and bring them to me. He rolls his limbs across the country side, solar powered by day and determined by night. Looking for silver-light junk and interesting sights. And he’ll radio-rescue them, if conditions are right.

My monster can climb trees to reach the second floor. He can pick locks or break down doors. Guaranteed not to leave marks upon the floor. My monster does what monsters are for.

He makes a faint whirring noise.

I created a monster with no blood or shoes, he has no heart and nothing to lose. He finds me things, tells me things too. He brought me this, but nothing to do. So he went back out to bring back you.

screens of pain

Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out. If you let it, it will just keep doing it. Don’t let it, discourage it. Speak sharply to it, make eye contact. Try to appear taller.

Either that or disconnect the spring at the top.

This also works with threatening dogs, except the spring part, dogs have no springs. That’s threatening, not committed. You can tell from the eyes. A dog that has made up its mind to attack does not bark and is looking where he plans to go. If a dog is looking you in the eye it’s because he’s worried what you might do. When he stops looking it’s because he doesn’t care. That’s a committed dog.

Screen doors lack the ability to form such commitment. They are never sure, confident. You might slam them, which is bad for them. Also they are usually fixed to a door frame or other solid object which means they are more opportunist than predator. Hyenas of the home. This is why the screen door usually strikes from behind. Unless it is of the sliding variety in which case it tries to clip you from the side if it senses you are drunk or wounded. Or stupid.

And so it is, with a summer storm rolling in, Jessie the Dog who is afraid of nothing except thunder came up against the cunning tactics of the screen door - blocking her path, standing between the devil thunder and the safety of the space in the laundry room between the freezer and the wall. And, like a lion harried by nipping hyenas, when she decided to take on the screen with all her doggy force it was of little contest.

The carnage is difficult to imagine. The lower panel of screen in tatters, the upper panel grieving. Mosquitoes calling to their kin “the walls have fallen, the humans are ours.”

And now the storm breaks, the wind whips, the temperature drops and the rain begins to smash down, stripping the newly blossomed Jacaranda flowers from the trees.

So I don’t care because I’m closing the doors and windows anyway. Stupid dog can stay out there. Tomorrow I will repair the screen to confound and puzzle the mosquitoes (“no really, you could get right inside, where they live. They have pay TV”) but the screen will not care. Will not be grateful.

This is why I tell you not to let it hit you on the way out, give it no quarter, cut it no slack. Be firm with it, don’t take any shit, but don’t slam it. That’s bad for them.

a damn good rodgering

War

(huh)

What is it good for?

Settling political disputes.

(good God, y’all)

Say it again.



Wait till we get some more planets. Then we’ll have some wars, boy.

Mars is like Earth Lite® - most of the gravity without the annoying oxygen-rich atmosphere or embarrassing liquid water.

There are no fish on Mars. I’m certain of it. Now.

I hear India is planning to land a million men on the moon. I stole that one out of the newspaper. A column by one of those urbane metro-sexual types. Urbane, it’s a word, not urban, not ghetto, urbane. Like the people in an F. Scott Fitzgerald gig. Like an RAF Group Captain in a 1950’s British war movie named Rodger. Steady-on, Rodger.

Did you know, between 1939 and 1945 very few babies born in England were named Heinrich Himmler? Quite a few Rodgers though.

And they all went on to be RAF Group Captains.

“Rodger, whatever’s the matter?”

“Oh Dick we’ll never find the target in this bally fog! Sorry, …I didn’t mean to lose control.

“Quite alright considering the circumstances old man. Now, let's see how much scotch we can drink in 20 minutes.”

I stole the scotch line too. From an urbane comedian. So it’s ok because it’s in context or something.

Whatever. There’s still no fucking fish on Mars.

(huh)

Say it again.

why I like economic disasters

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday. While the US and England and the rest are tossing buckets of money at their failing banks, the Australian government is hucking it at the people. Everybody with kids is getting $1000 for each kid, retired folks are getting $2000 each just for being old. If you are buying your first home the government will slip you a cool 21K.

Young childless renters get fuck all.

The hope is we’ll spend the money on plasma TVs and fast food to stimulate the retail sector in time for Christmas.

Meanwhile I have become a smoker who is bothered by cigarette smoke. Fate having yet another little ironic dig at my expense. I swear cigarette smoke, in anything less than a class 3 gale, will stream directly into my nearest eye. Even in wind you can see the smoke fighting, resisting, trying to return to complete its mission to annoy me ceaselessly.

I was going to say annoy the living shit out of me. But I have no idea what living shit is. Doesn’t sound like something one would want within one. You’d think you’d want it annoyed out of you. But I can’t speak for everyone.

I'd rather be a ten year old cheerleader than a GWB

Last year P4’s cheerleading team won state and got 4th at nationals. This year they got 6th at state and won the nationals. Obviously the judges at these things are drunkards.

Meanwhile,

Sara Palin reminds me of the female villain on Kim Possible. At least I could see her going that way after a time. Some long black rubber gloves, crazy goggles…

What’s-his-name, the guy she’s running with, he’s looking more and more like Hank Hill’s dad.



Obama worries me too. He fits the profile in US politics for getting shot at. He should try to stand behind Sara Palin if possible.

And poor old GWB, what a time he’s had. Squeaked in by a whisker through some mighty dodgy election shenanigans and Inherited the Kingdom of Clinton, booming economy, all the soldiers on their own side, blowjobs in the Oval Office, and what happened? It all fell to shit on him, poor bastard.

9/11, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay naked prisoner stacking, Iraq, more Afghanistan, an anthrax scare, more Iraq, and to top it all off, the end of Free-market Capitalism and one of the corner-stones of US foreign policy in the most spectacular economic disaster yet seen. And of course more Iraq and Afghanistan.

It certainly wasn’t all his fault, for some of it he was just lucky. Yup, Clinton spent his two terms playing bad saxophone, eating Big Macs and inventing new uses for cigars while all GWB's cigars exploded in his face.

(muted trumpet)

Kevin The Brave

Well, sports fans better fill you in on recent events:

Wall Street fell apart.

SJ lost his job.

Wall Street got better.

SJ got another job.

Wall Street fell down again.

SJ got another, other job.

Wall Street ran away and joined the navy where it realized it could love other men without being a homo.

SJ finds itself with a better, easier, less stressful job closer to home and for more money. Hell, I save at least $80/week on fuel. And possibly a second, sub-contract job which pays even better. We shall see. As Jutratest once wisely said, God has a plan. By God he meant Alyssa Milano. He’s had a thing for her since Who’s The Boss.

However my old company - which did not crash and burn but rather trundled along like a garbage truck on fire rolling down a gentle slope until it just stopped there, smoking slightly – still owes me close to ten grand in unpaid wages and other benefits which I am not likely to ever see.

Maybe GWB could bail me out. I hear he’s giving away money. The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is in New York at the moment going around agreeing with people and delivering speeches to a half empty UN gathering. He’s all for the bail-out. It’s not his money. Hell you could buy Australia for 800 billion if you threw in some free steak knives.

What do you expect from a leader named ‘Kevin’? Kevin The Brave, that’s him. Firmly on the side of GWB or Popular Opinion, whichever is easiest.

I’m sorry I called you sports fans earlier. Maybe you hate sports. Perhaps you prefer the term enthusiast. I shouldn’t assume.

with joy on my shirt

Mother koala on the road tonight, little wee baby on its back. Baby kangaroos hopping across the road in the mornings, sparrows trying to nest here in the laboratory. The government declared spring began on September 1st and damn it if the critters didn’t listen. Marsupials are very civic minded.

Real team players, the pouched ones. They delegate well and work cohesively as a pro-active unit within their defined roles. That’s not to say they enjoy role-playing. For that they need to be forced. It’s hard to get them to wear the boots.

There is a little cafe in the village run by a lovely women whom I have known for some years. She will not wear the boots either, however she has a burger named after me, which I think is a far better endorsement on one’s character than any medal or parchment paper. It is a bacon-cheese-mushroom burger by the way, which Australians think I invented. It had not occurred to them to combine these ingredients before since none of them are pickled beet-root.

And now it has been announced P3 will be working there part-time. Oh joy doth burst from my heart and runneth down my shirt. P3’s first job only five minutes from home, with someone I know, who cooks great lasagne and names burgers after me.

Yes government-declared spring has sprung, the light is clearer. The air is warmer. I smell mushrooms.

Salted Hippies

To drum up a little interest in the blog I’ll be offering $5 for every comment left from now until the end of the year. To receive your prize simply send a S.A.S.E for each comment, along with a money order for $11.95 to cover shipping and handling in US, Canadian, Australian or one of the other good dollars, and I’ll send you five crisp Zimbabwean dollars by registered mail.

Ahhh Zimbabwean dollars, as plentiful as grains of sand, but not hardly as useful. You can’t drop Zimbabwean dollars one at a time on ants to make them think their god is punishing them by making it rain boulders. They don’t fall straight. Ants are not afraid of them. They have no concept of currency. Ants are like hippies, mindless robotic hippies with too many legs.

You throw a Zimbabwean dollar at a hippy, see if they care. Fuckers.

Now you got me all riled up about the hippies. Only thing worse than a hippy is a French hippy. Stinky French hippies, can’t stand them.

I got some McDonalds french fries the other day, I’m going somewhere with this, and there was no salt on them. I’m not one of those salt-people that has to put salt on everything, but man, McDonalds fries without salt taste really bad. Not like fries without salt, more like socks without salt.

Which is ironic because they only way to get rid of stinky, sock-like, French hippies is to pour salt on them, one grain at a time, which makes them think their god is punishing them by making it rain tiny boulders.

The wheel turns.

f O o l

I’m nobody’s fool. I am an independent.

The Olympics is on. Men are running and jumping, huffing and puffing, exchanging precious oxygen for evil CO2. The Olympics is ruining the planet. Also the Special Olympics at a lesser, albeit just as valid, rate. Last night they ran the 400m relay combined hurdles, heat 2, and sea levels rose half an inch. We need to find an alternative to coal-burning athletes.

What we need is an engine that runs on CO2 or rhetoric. A rhetorical engine.

What if we could lead hypothetical lives? You could ring up work and say “hey, if I was to come in today, what do you suppose I’d be doing” and they’d say “well, you know same old stuff, except we are having a staff BBQ at lunch because Tanya is leaving on Thursday, but she actually has Thursday’s off and she has clients Wednesday so we’re doing it today.” And you could reply “well let’s just say I came in and all that happened and you paid me a bonus”

You know, it would go on like that for a while but neither of you would know how to end it and you’d be trapped in a hypothetical discussion forever and our naïve dreams that a hypothetical society of hope and freedom where we have the freedom to hope will be crushed by it’s very enslavement of us in that cruel irony fate reserves for the worst of sinners and bus drivers.

I am an independent fool. I fought a battle with myself in the 1700’s. There is a flag, embassies in all major cities, the money is hard to copy.

I am an independent fool and if I close my eyes you cannot see me.

Why not to have girls:

SJ: Here, pose for a photo to email grandma (click)
P4: How was that? Was it sexy enough?
SJ: (!) There will be no being sexy at ten years old. Or twenty.
P4: Probably by then I won’t be able to help it.

Also I was thinking, as you do, about what fairytale character I might want to be if I was forced into such a situation. You know in Snow White, the Woodsman guy that lets her go instead of chopping of her head like the evil step-queen-witch said? I’d be that guy.

He said “look I’ll let you go but I’ll need to chop off your finger or something to show the old lady. I need this job until I get my firewood business up and running. And whatever you do, stay away from those freak-ass dwarves.”

And then you don’t hear from him again. His story-obligation is over. And, because he’s technically a Good Guy, he gets more royalties than, say, the evil mirror. It’s a union thing.

even megalomaniacs get the blues

That girl on the radio, if you should drive down there, if you should head on down there to destroy her, make sure you go in style. If you're gonna make your way down, through the gates of hell, you can’t take the Corolla or the Jeep Wagoneer. No. If you’re going through hell on a radio death mission you got two choices of transport my young sir. You got your flaming 1974 Gran Torrino wagon, flat black with the back doors welded shut and the rear window stuck down, that’s number one, then you got your flaming death cycle which looks like Batman’s Bat Cycle except the speedometer is in kilometres and it’s flaming. But not like the Bat Out Of Hell Meatloaf flaming bat cycle, that one was just made up. Some artist made that one up. Meatloaf was too busy making up songs which feel like someone poking you in the chest, songs which bring the roaring and make you want to head downtown, 3 miles past hell, to destroy the radio girl.

She uses too much inflection. She is her own Doppler effect. If an air-raid siren could read an ad for Sleep City Warehouse they wouldn’t need her. Like a fat worm doing the Soul-Train chug-a-chug into your brain. Oops there goes the left side, better head out.

Take the Torrino, on second thought, it’s chilly out there. I taped over the window, it should hold, and when you go through hell don’t forget to toss out a silver dollar so’s they keep the gates open for you. I’ll wait for your call, the signal it’s been done, or you can text me. Or, if the radio girl wins, if she warbles you down, sets up a harmonic resonance within your molecular structure, reducing you to a pool of burst-cell ruptured bio-mass at her feet, well then don’t worry about it, I'll get by.