Meh.
Haven't updated in a few days, due to a combination of avoiding responsibility (yes, I know it's just a blog, but in my mind I've set it as a "task I have to do, so it falls prey to my bullshitting habits) and being unfocused from this new Kosmic Kola crap that syringavulgaris that seems to make me genuinely happy and strangely subdued yet hyper... I get lost doing time-consuming nothing like collecting comic book art or reading silly online articles. I think I'm going to need to go a day or two without this shit, because I still think caffeine is the worst of the legal drugs. Yes, worse than cigarettes. And I'm doing fairly well without the cigarettes (although my lips and fingertips are a mess).
Things with the girlfriend are really good. I had to disassemble my bedframe, because our sex has destroyed it. I love that. "Yeah, my bed's broken. How? MY GIRLFRIEND AND I HAVE THE BEST SEX EVER, THAT'S WHY!" AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWyeah. On Halloween, we watched The Exorcist III (my choice, she didn't dig it though) and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (her choice, and much better than I recall it being!). Good stuff. Jason Lives in particular was a lot of fun, considering it has one of the highest on-screen body counts of the series (the colliding spaceship crap from Jason X doesn't count) and the dialogue and cinematography was done with genuine affection. Plus, Horshack gets killed and buried in Jason's grave. Films where Sweathogs die on screen (killed by reanimated serial killers, no less) are a delicacy.
My Daredevil story has been put on hold, like seemingly every other responsibility. Goddamn it. I can't even come up with anything other than a bare-bones spec for it. Writing something original seems to be a Herculean effort, has been for so long. I have hundreds of Superman story ideas (including dialogue bits and whatnot) stored on several documents on my computer... I think I should just do something with them. I don't know.
Saw my father and sister this weekend. I really can't talk about it. I'm in too good of a mood. There's a rather long and melodramatic (it runs in our family) LJ entry inside me about them and their whole situation and myself... writing it is like passing a kidney stone roughly the size of a beer bottle.
I keep thinking about films. About making them. I have an idea.
Wish I had more to talk about.
Hell, wish I would do more, so that I had more to talk about.
That's the problem.
He Died With a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham is a stream-of-consciousness memoir of housemates in Australia in the late '70s or so. I'm almost done with it. Let me give you a taste.
In this excerpt, John explains his latest household, and one housemate in particular... with a common problem. Let's join his monologue in progress...
Duke Street's standards had slipped in the intervening years. There were about ten of us living there. Another house full of fuck-offs and misfits and perennial students. We had neighbours on all sides. Complaining neighbours, not good ones. Like the horny London babes. They hassled us constantly. So constantly in fact that we kept a Complaint Scoreboard on the fridge door. When we got to ten complaints, we'd have a party. You'd think they'd learn, but they never did. The morning after the party, they'd give us a head start on the next one with a fresh round of complaints. We were mostly living off welfare and student grants at the time, and Social Security had the place on the area map, flagged with a skull and crossbones. Dole fascists regularly descended upon the place in human waves. They'd given up trying to pick us off individually - the house was so disorganized that even at six in the morning their chances of catching the right person at home were less than zero. So they sent a couple of blanket sweeps through the place, kicked down the door at five in the morning, sprayed capsicum gas in our eyes and beat us on the soles of our feet with big sticks, said we were all beign reviewed and the whole house would have to attend a compulsory seminar. It was a horrible joke. A fat Christian told us to keep our spirits up, showed us a motivational video and made us tell each other we were valuable human beings. Somebody got caught trying to make off with the powdered coffee.
Anyway, this Thunderbird I mention, his name was Ron. Thunderbird Ron. We called him that because he'd gotten into body building, and I mean really gotten into it. He'd grown so huge and monstrous that he moved around like a badly strung puppet, the way those guys do, like they've got so much muscle and bulk on them that their arms stick out from their sides and they don't seem able to bend their knees when they walk. His personality was sort of stiff and wooden too and he had a stilted way of talking, as though he had to bench press his own weight to squeeze out the words. He was a bit of a fuck-up and I took a real shine to him. He was studying sports science when he moved into a sleepout round the back of this big house. He knocked back about ten litres of this really foul wheat germ and egg-based yoghurt drink every day and watched an unhealthy number of early Schwarzenegger vids but he was all right. He could pick up a lounge chair with his teeth, which was useful sometimes. He also had a problem with women. They terrified him. This came home one day - literally - when I was sitting in the lounge room, playing some prehistoric video game, the last remnant of another long-departed flatmate.
The Thunderbird waddled in, really agitated. I think I was the only one home at that stage. For once the whole house had managed to work up some enthusiasm for whatever lectures or part time jobs or welfare scams were on the agenda for that day. I glanced up and noticed right off that Ron had this big white bandage wrapped around his hand but I didn't pay it much heed. Figured he must have crushed it between some dumbbells down at the gym or something. I said howdy and turned back to the game. Thing was though, I just couldn't concentrate because Ron was looming over me putting out these psychic waves of borderline panic. I blew off the game, leaned back from the console and asked what the trouble was. He wanted to know if I could give him advice on night clubbing clothes, which is a laugh if you know me. I've got like one pair of jeans, another pair of King Gee's and a couple of rotting tee shirts with advertising slogans on them. But the Thunderbird ploughed on regardless, explained in this tortured passage of dialogue that he wanted to go to a night club "to... meet... some... women... who... he... might... be... able... to... havesomesexwith." He ran that last bit together really quickly.
I thought, No way man! Never happen. I explained that those sorts of places, they weren't for him. They were terrible places, a bit like black holes, except they'd collapsed in on themselves under the weight of their own bad vibes. They were full of guys with attitude problems and chicks like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, or Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, the last one that is, the one where she shaves her head and dresses in a grey sack. The idea of Ron in one of those places, it just didn't sit right. I tried to talk him out of the idea but it was a thousand miles of hard road. He was locked in and tracking. He was hot guns on the whole thing. He'd gone and got this Mr. Universe physique, worked hard for it, suffered for it and now it was time to go out and get some sex because women, "they... wouldn't... have had... a... chance... to... have sex... with... a... a... man... like... me... before."
I thought, Thunderbird, you speak the truth.
I was getting a little keen to change the topic so I said he didn't look like he was up to much at the moment on account of the bandage he was sporting. Asked whether he'd broken his wrist at the gym, knowing that if I could get him onto the gym he'd talk for hours about carbo loading and steroid abuse and reps and sets and all that shit, perhaps even forgetting about sex altogether. At least that's what I thought. But when I mentioned the bandage he became even more cramped and down shifted than before. Explained that he'd broken all these bones in his hand the other day when the blonde pommy girl across the road, the barefoot, gum-chewing, space alien beauty queen had smiled at him in the street. And he'd wanted to talk to her. He'd been burning to talk to her, in fact he wanted to ask her out to a night club, but he couldn't, he just couldn't, she'd smiled at him, and said hello, and he'd... and she'd... and... and... So he'd scuttled inside, made a fist and punched out the wall in the hallway.
Okay. That was cool. There had been some talk about that mysterious giant cavity.
And, also, I figured, who was I to criticise? I mean I'm the guy was swept away by a bout of homicidal malice for Ben Elton the comedian because once, after some tour show he did no campus, he spoke to Joanne, this girl I was keen on. Sadly, while I might have been keen on her, it was a one-way street and there was nothing coming back my way. I had a method for dealing with it though. I'd drink a carton of beer and smoke some shit and drink some more beer, or maybe some cheap whiskey and then I'd roll around in the mud screeching like a madman and trying to rip my heart out through my rib-cage till I felt a little better about the situation.
On this particular night, I'd tagged along to Elton's show with Joanne and her friends just in case she came to her senses. She didn't and I guess I was about eighteen, maybe nineteen beers into the cure when I saw Elton and her chatting away. I'm older and wiser now, or maybe just tired, and I know they were just bullshitting. The way you do. But back then, unmanned by rejection, spastic with alcohol and hash and unrequited lust I twisted and wrenched these few meaningless seconds of polite schmooze around to the point where I lay awake at four in the morning imagining them in the throes of wild cheap motel room sex. I lay there, spinning out, grinding my teeth and clenching my fists until I'd cut bloody half-moons into my palms like some deranged character from a Stephen King novel. So I had some sympathy with this poor bastard standing in front of me, sweating and squirming and generally looking like all of his vital bodily fluids had backed up and he was maybe three seconds away from rolling his eyes, sprouting thick, matted clumps of fur on his palms, and punching into the nearest warm hole he could find. But better than sympathy. I had information.
You see I knew all about the barefoot one. I myself had been smiled at on the street, and just one day previous. But unlike the T-Bird I had bounded over like a horny little pup and made ready to do the naughty right then and there, in broad daylight, in the middle of the street. She had smiled at me after all. But when I got there, after usual hellos and so on, she'd said with the smirk of arch conspirator, "Your friend, the gym guy, he's a big boy isn't he." She had one of those university accents, the sort that go straight to the groin of we unwashed convict types.
"Oh yeah," I smiled, slightly deflated, but not wanting to show it. "All natural too, won't have a bar of them 'roids."
"You know, you chaps should come over," she said. "We're having a house-warming on Saturday."
"You sure? All of us?" I asked.
"Whatever," she said. "Just be sure and bring He-Man with you."
You betcha, I'd said, and wandered off, mental cogs spinning and whirring at full speed. The thing was, when word got out that the English babes were throwing a party there would be no question of non-attendance. The house in fact go ballistic. Come the first rustle of a chip packet or the pop of a Spumante bottle there'd be a stampede, a thunderous phalanx of lusty, beer-crazed antipodean youths spilling down the front steps of our house and charging up the road like one of those angry cartoon clouds with a riot of arms and legs and bolts of lightning exploding from it.
I love that last paragraph. So anyway, the hot London chicks up the street were having a party. But John and his house were going to have a party as well. That wasn't the plan, but it just sort of happened. Let's join that magical night, already in progress...
I awoke hours later, on the brown couch boxed in by hundreds of people. The house was roaring. My chest and shook and pounded to a 15,000 watt blast of "God save the queen and her fascist regime." I was still stoned, but it wasn't the trippy, free-falling pleasant sort of stone which had rushed on after my third cone in the kitchen that afternoon. It was a heavy, sludgy, turn your brain to treacle sort of stone. I pushed through the crowd, making my way to the kitchen, hoping to toke up and take off again. But when I got there the table was bare. I shook my head. I remembered there'd been so muc hshit to get through that we had stopped bothering to mull it up. People were just ripping handfuls of ganga out of the pile and stuffing them into improvised cones and joints and corn cob pipes. I remembered being so wasted that my vision had started to come apart, the colours and lines melting into each other. I remembered some friendly gay boy called Tarquin trying to tempt a skeptical T-Bird into a little snifter of amyl under the house. And then I woke up on the couch. There was still a pile of beer chilling in the kitchen sink so I took one and wandered around to try to find out what had happened.
People were hanging out of the windows and partying in the mango trees out the front. There were cars all over the lawn. Punters kept rolling in, and I was swept along by the roiling, thunderous, clamouring mob this sweating seething tide of unwashed dreads and shiny domes, of torn jeans, yellow teeth, Apache girls with Zulu spears, biro tatts and Celtic runes, of bare feet and boyver boots; this savage caterwauling crush of human flux and flow which pressed in hard upon the mind until the vision blurred and time itself broke up and swirled around in little lost jigsaw moments of disintegrated coninuity. I saw the T-Bird pressed up against a wall outside the bathroom but had trouble getting to him as I was pushed and dragged off balance, buffeted by the confluence of riptides and sucking currents which coursed through the dark press of the party. I saw him squeezed from his minor vantage point, rudely hustled past the throng who were also waiting at the bathroom, ("Take it on the road, Arnold"), emerging at last from the hot fug and crashing din to stand, briefly, atop the back steps. Someone elbowed him in the spleen and he stumbled down the stairs. I did not see him for three days after that.
A voice screamed in my ear, "Get on the end of this one!"
It was Mick, with a spliff the size of a Cuban cigar, wrapped in bright pink paper. I shouted thanks and toked up, drawing the rich acrid smoke down, letting it smooth my jagged edges and take me deep. I asked Mick what had happened. He misunderstood, I think, and tried to tell me some story in his impenetrable Liverpool accent about feeding some young Catholic schoolgirl a trip. He'd found her at the terminal point of completely self-indulgent nihilistic drunkenness, swaying and drinking and talking to herself about how nasty the world was. Mick thought a tab might make her a little more receptive to his dubious charms, but she'd just greedily gobbled it down and disappeared. Hours later Brainthrust Leonard, Colin and Stephan had found her standing in front of a full-length window on a patio, holding the hem of her skirt out and twirling from side to side like a little girl. As they were watching, her face turned feral and she punched the window, left a big spider web of latticework cracks in it, then turned around, saw them and freaked. They tried putting the soothers on her but she escaped by grabbing onto a small piece of rubber tubing sticking down from the gutter and trying to swing away like Catwoman. It broke and she fell to the driveway with a big sick thud, but jumped right up and ran away. Damnedest thing ever, said Leonard. Must have been a good three metre drop. Nobody saw her again but the phone kept ringing all night. It was her, but all she ever said was, "No way out no way out no way out." Then she'd hang up.
"C-o-o-l," I drawled.
By the time Mick had finished his story I was starting to fly again. MacGyver appeared beside us with half a bottle of overproof rum and Coke and stupid satisfaction smeared all over his face. We bellowed like vikings and passed the bottle and drank each other's backwash till it was gone. The angles were really singing for me by then, a high, sweet, loony tune that jammed out anything even approaching rational thought. We pushed our shiny, sweating faces close together, screaming at each other that it was just a damn shame about the destruction of the dope mountain until Mick let go a strangled little shriek and laucnhed himself unsteadily off towards the kitchen. MacGyver and I lurched through the heaving crowd, coming upon the shaven-headed loon a few seconds later waving quickly gathered fistfuls of Old El Gringo and cackling like a fiend bent on certain self-destruction.
"Ah loov this fookin coontry," he bellowed.
Even in my advanced stage of moral decay I shuddered inwardly at the prospect of hopping into this evil looking toxic waste. It had a greasy, pissy colour, vaguely remeniscent of the ancient dusty jars lining the cabinets of my old high schoool science lab, jars of dark yellow saline in which floated the flaky, slightly rotten bodies of long dead tiger snakes and miscarried kitten fetuses. My stomach rolled over slowly at the thought, Tequila and I did not have a good history. The last time our paths had crossed - an ugly, senseless binge to celebrate Mexico's national day - I'd been forced to spend thirty-three hours spread-eagled on a polished wooden floor, convinced that I'd been nailed there, so great was the pain whcih spiked through all my joints and organs. The host of that party, now the curator of a major New York art gallery, had kneeled by me a number of times the next day to press a wet cloth against my cracked and ruined lips. He ignored my croaks and groans of 'Oh you filthy bastard,' putting them down to the horrors of delirium tremens.
Still and all, a drink's a drink, so we fetched some Lucozade from the fridge and three plastic Ronald McDonald glasses from the dish rack and set about lining up and knocking down a full set of Old El Gringo slammers. And an awful, terrible fucking business it was too. Apart from Mekong Delta whiskey and some obscure brands of Ukranian cabbage vodka, tequila is the only drink I know of which acts as a genuine stimulant. Bang bang bang went the slammers, sending frothy eruptiosn of alcoholic Lucozade over the rim of our glasses before exploding like sickly sweet tangerine hand grenades behind the thin dome of bone holding our sorry, fucked-up brains in place.
Then Mick remembered that we had another party to go to.
THE BABES!
I roared so loud at the memory that I hurt my lungs and had to lean against a wall for a little while. Then I was off, fucked, hysterical, crashing up the hallway towards my room with my jeans down around my ankles, intent on changing for their party. The tequila, the smoke and the lust all combined and sparked in a high octane, dangerously unstable mix which licked like fire at the base of my brain stem and seemed to cause a distant, fearful roar. I fell through the door, hitting the wall and leaving a huge dent in the fibre board. A couple of backpackers were thrashing around in my bed but I ignored them and they me. I was so completely unco' I couldn't get my jeans on or off. I simply rolled around on the floor, hysterical and spinning out.
Mick and MacGyver stuck their heads in to yell that they were taking the van and going as "the fookin peppers." I had no idea what they were talking about but I didn't want them getting there first so I shucked my pants up as best I could and staggered out after them, barrelling through half a dozen strangers sitting on our front steps. I caught a flash of Mick's naked buttock climbing into MacGyver's mushroom van, before the headlights blinded me. I ran. They drove.
The babes' place was only two or three doors up but I beat them because they crashed into our mailbox on the way. I hit the babes' door at full title and, like I said, crashed to the floor with my pants around my ankles. The horrified party-goers - there were a few dozen of them, very intense looking folk, looked like opera buffs with martini glasses and little nibbly things held between their pinkies and thumbs - well, they had no time to react to my grand entrance, because my flatmates were bringing up the rear.
Mick and MacGyver careened across the lawn like suicide bombers with the van's headlights on high beam and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers cranked up to the max on MacGyver's boombox. The Peppers had been in town just the week before and Mick had seen them do their socks on cocks routine. They had also worn space helmets with flames coming out. Mick and Mac, morons that they were, had been laying plans to emulate them ever since. That afternoon they had pinched a couple of plastic witch's hats from some nearby roadworks. They'd soaked rolled-up newspapers in petrol, jammed them into the hole at the top and left the whole lot sitting in MacGuyver's van for a few hours. Then, as I was rolling around on the floor of my room, they'd both stripped naked, grabbed a sock each, and attached them to their willies with rubber bands before charging out to the van.
They mounted the gutter, kicking the spotties to full beam and smashed through a picket fence. They jumped out and lit up their hats, forgetting that the van was full of petrol fumes. There was a massive flash explosion - WHOOF! - and then Mick and Mac weren't the arse-kicking Chilli Peppers no more. They were just a couple of fools running around with socks on their cocks and their heads on fire. I was trampled as the guests ran to put them out.
They weren't allowed to stay at the housewarming and neither was I so we all went home. The party kicked on until four or five. I had a few more spliffs and remember becoming convinced that I could diffuse my atoms through the structure of the house by sheer will-power. I don't remember spending the better part of the night on my hands and knees butting my head against the lounge room wall until I passed out. But people tell me I did.
His prose is great, he's got a specific voice. I think that's why my prose is shit - I'm still finding my voice, so to speak.