conspiracy theories

Tuesday august 31st 

Den is my conduit to mainstream media (he watches telly after dinner  while I prowl the blogosphere) Last night  he saw a program -’ Q&A’? - with a panel of people talking about  Australia’s woeful ‘political’ situation and the post-election stalemate. Apparently dear old Malcolm Fraser  (The same man  we marched in the streets against in 1975, now a voice of reason) said  that there were clearly some kind of dark forces at work behind the whole getting-rid-of-Rudd thing. Mal pointed out that ex-P.M. Rudd steered the ship pretty competently through very difficult times. Global financial Crisis etc. Must say I felt sorry for Kev myself when he got stabbed in the back, even though he’d been so wimpy on climate change.  

Hey, when Malcolm Fraser starts talking conspiracy theories...There is something   fishy going on, isn’t there? 

The CIA freely admitted, some years after the act that they’d been behind the ousting of Gough Whitlam in 1975. In 2010 we get a much slicker operation - the Forces Of Greed don’t need to cause such a big drama. Just a bit of behind the scenes powerbroking & a  cold, clean assassination. Then they give us, the citizens, the charade of a federal  election to make us feel like we still live in a democracy and have some choice. 

Den said  someone on the panel pointed out that we really no longer have  two distinct major political  parties. And that the only real choice is between pro - ‘Big Business as usual’ Lib/ALP; and The Greens. Yup, that's why I vote Green. Den also told me that there's been a bit of bagging the Greens eg even by The Chaser guys portraying them as the party of the not-very-sophisticated hippy types etc. Personally I reckon the electorate of my old home town of Melb, who voted in a Green candidate showed  themselves to be progressive, forward-thinking people. Yay!

I wasn’t going to talk about politics.  Just one last word though, about that awful right wing propaganda  newspaper, ‘The Australian’  We’ve totally stopped buying it, even though it means sacrificing the Saturday morning pleasures of  Mystic Medusa, Phillip Adams and Susan Maushart.

All this discussed in the car with Den at 5.30 a.m. this morn when I drove him to the intersection to catch the airport bus. It was 10 degrees, and there was mist rising from the cow paddocks. He’ll be in down in Melbournia for three weeks. He’ll miss the School Fair, and his birthday. and Fathers Day. 

It was good to be up early,  with the first  kookaburras. 

talk about labile

Up-and -down.  Like a yo-yo. This day of hiding in my lair &  keeping depression at bay...ends with joy. For no particular reason.  F and I wash the dinner dishes together and sing and groove along to F’s compilation  CD -Jack Johnstons Bubbley Toes and Isaac’s Somewhere over the Rainbow and Marvin Gaye... I’m completely in love with my son at such moments. lime green rubber gloves and all. Have to restrain myself from giving him the ‘adoring’ look., which causes him to scowl and roll his eyes and become suddenly less adorable. 

Always that little tinge of bittersweetness, the knowledge of impermanence, that he must grow up, move away. Speaking of impermanence, both our moods change like the weather. He was grumpy and anti-school when I picked him up from the bus stop this arvo.  By dinner time, dancing around the lounge room whooping. Later we improvised together on the marimbas. There’s nothing sweeter than this. Meanwhile D. was busy packing for his 3 weeks in Melbourne.

No matter how crap I feel I can always access some good, sane part of myself for him. And for therapy clients too. Thank God.

Denis got  takeaway lunch  from the health food shop and brought it home to share with me. He knew I was feeling a bit pathetic. Told me he had heard Steve Biddulph talking on the radio, on the subject of boys becoming men, initiation/rites of passage etc. apparently when Richard Adie asked him what essentially is the difference between a boy and a man, Steve B said something like ,” A boy thinks he is the centre of the world; a man understands he is here to serve - his community, family, other people ” 

                                                                                **************************

It is August 30th which means my mother died eighteen years ago today. I can hardly believe it. She died on a sunday  night  in a country hospital in Queensland, with a view of a white weatherboard church out the window. Bells ringing, people going in & out  on the morning of  that long harrowing day. The descision was finally made to give her the morphine shot, after hours of watching her writhe about , as if unable to get free from her cancer-ridden body. 

Later that night, when she was gone, her lifeless head resting on the pillow looked to me like a marble angel. Back at her beloved  beach house we all -even the most cynical among us - felt as if her spirit was intensely present, so loving and harmonious - and free at last. We stayed up all night, drinking and weeping, and watched the sun rise over the ocean. Why am I revisiting all of this? She is long gone but I still miss her. Sometimes I worry that I dwell too much with the dead. 

takes all types

Monday

I am chipping away at the piece about Central Australia, that I’m going to enter into the nature writing competition. Trying not to think about winning and losing. I know I won’t win. I know I’m not a fabulous writer. Possibly not even a very good writer. Not hopelessly incompetent either. Just hovering somewhere around average. Good enough to know I’m not that good, goddammit.

Trying not to think about all that. Trying not to buy into an unkind  picture of myself as a deluded wannabe with fading middle-aged stars in her eyes. Poor old me. Dear old me. I just write because I have to. Because there are times when nothing else will hold the demons at bay. 

So I’ve spent half the day here at the computer, twiddling with syntax, twaddling with metaphor, lost in my own little world. Indulging in my reclusive tendencies. Allowing myself to be the hermit crab that I  am on days like this,  when even going in to town to pick up milk and eggs feels like over-exposure.  I guess for some people it’s like this every day.

I got so lost out under the desert sky on the Larapinta Trail today  that I completely forgot to go to the new Feldenkreis class. Even though I was looking forward to it. Didn’t realise till hours later, when it was time to go and pick up F from school bus.

I downloaded a piece by acclaimed  nature writer, Barry Lopez, called ‘An Intimate Geography’ . It flows - so smoothly - from vast Alaskan valley to Yangtze River to Australian desert and beyond. Speaks of deep connection with land, without ever sounding mawkish. I reckon it’s bloody hard to write well about what is most sacred to you. I’m going to read it again, try to figure out how he does it. 

                                       ======================

I still haven’t emailed anyone to say I have a blog. I’ve had a terrible, all-too-familiar attack of self consciousness. As usual, I am just hoping to be found.

What a wonderful thing is the internet: a sense of connection without having to actually  talk to anyone. 

Late at night while my family is asleep I continue, with only slightly diminuished enthusiasm, to comb the back alleys of the blogosphere in search of obscure treasures. 

In the rarely visited outer reaches of Cyberbia, just before it turns into old cyber-paddocks and infinite black space,  I find abandoned sites where no-one has been  for years. There are other sites which  look as shiny and new as a Gold Coast Dream Home but have clearly never been lived in or visited at all, even by their owners. Not a single post. Some of them have fine, promising sounding names (which I wish I had written down)

Some got off to an energetic start  with childhood tales and granny’s recipes and good resolutions;  others were half-hearted from the word go  ( “I don’t know why I’m doing this” etc.) Did the bloggers die, or just lose interest? Maybe they got distracted by Real Life?  Will there one day be entire cyber- ghost towns?  

I searched people who listed The Beatles among 'favourite music' and discovered there are 249,000 of us. Zillions for leonard Cohen too.

Then I searched Toumani Djabate fans and discovered that  it’s just me and Tristan’s Pet.  Her picture  is of a pale bare breasted torso in a black corset. Tristans's Pet  lists her  interests as My master, his pleasure, passion, bdsm, love.  

I guess bdsm does not stand for ‘Buddhism’ 

As well as Toumani Djabate ( how come no-one else likes him? Or did we both miss-spell his name?), she (his slave, his pain slut) also likes films and writers that I like ( Amelie, La Belle et La Bete, Jane Austen, the Brontes,  Phillip Pullman, ‘Perfume’ by Patrick Suskind)

Tristan loves her as no other ever has before, she says. 

Am I going to make some jolly comment like ‘Takes all types’? 

Yep. 

sabbath

29th August

sunday day of rest 

Actually, day of appalling self doubt. 

story with moral

28th August.

Saturday

F. too sick to go to soccer. None of us seem to mind too much. In fact all three of us are still in bed reading at 9 a.m. F: Deltora Quest, for the umpteenth time. D: the newspaper (about to dash into town for today’s papers with fresh supply of Suduko, crosswords), Me: a poetry book I bought at the Byron Writers Fest, ‘The Green Fuse’. It’s a modest little publication, Australian anthology edited by someone called Carmel Williams, who’s done a fabulous job (published by Picaro Press) 

Well-crafted, unpretentious, intellegent... I’ve been reading poems in bed every night,  A few cool mouthfuls of fresh sorbet after the evening binge of scratchy-eyed blog-gluttony .

  

small story with moral:

ON my morning walk, one of the variations, I go up the dead-end road behind our house. I like looking at the houses and imagining what sort of people live there.

There’s an overgrown rainbow-flags-out-the-front, handpainted hippy place ; there’s a cruise-y kid-city  place with  basketball ring nailed to tree, bicycles flung on the lawn, soccerball lying  the road. There’s the anal-retentives’ place with everything in the garden trimmed to within an inch of its life. 

And then there is the place I think of as The Drug Dealers'. At the Drug Dealers’ place, there are two or three big black dogs who go into a barking frenzy from behind the wire fence whenever I walk past. As well as ‘No Trespassing’ and  ‘Guard dogs on duty’ signs, there is a sliding metal grille gate which warns of ‘injury or death’ if opened. I reckon they probably have a huge crop of hydroponic mariuana growing in the sheds out the back. A stash of firearms. Maybe a dead  body or two buried in the yard. 

Sometimes I walk in the other direction - down the hill, to where our road meets the slightly larger road along the valley. There is a cluster of letterboxes on the corner. I’m down there, early Saturday morning. Golden light through the long grass, cows moo-ing, swamp hens squawking in the swamp etc. The swamp is extra swampy because it’s been raining heavily.  Because the ground is so wet, my rickkety old letterbox has keeled over. 

I’m trying inneffectually to jam the pole back into the muddy ground, when a ute pulls up and a bloke in an old cow cockie hat says, ’Need a hand there love?’ Before I know it, he’s whipped a star picket out of the back of the ute, whacked it into the ground and attatched everything with fencing wire, all neatly clipped and upright.

I gush gratitude and rattle on about how wonderful it is to encounter good old fashioned country neighbourly-ness etc. We swap names, shake hands, He tells me he used to have a farm out west, but now they’ve moved closer to town, just up the hill actually - ‘Y’know, the house with the dogs?’

One of the big black dogs (Boots, Blossom?) is grinning aimiably from the back of the ute.

When I get home I tell Den. ‘Yeh’, he says, unsurprised, glancing up from his Suduko, ’His wife’s really nice too. She works in the bank in town’

as opposed to

AUGUST 27 

F home from school sick. Red cheeks, fever, listless. He lay about  all day yesterday, dozing and flicking through Simpsons comics. Last night when his dad was out, he snuggled into bed with me for the first time in ages. He’s twelve, and I keep expecting him to metamorphise any minute into a grunting hairy omnivore. But for now, he’s happy for me to stroke his forhead and fuss.

(a memory: Aboriginal community in Arnhemland,1980’s. The women trudging along the beach together, barefooted, wailing and grieving for their boys. Their adolescent sons  had been snatched away in the night by uncles and carried off for mens business, for growing up. There had been days of nervous anticipation among the boys beforehand, then their seats empty in the classroom) 

Today: I go for a virtuous early morning walk up the hill.  Do not turn on computer, do not check emails, do not rouse the iMac from her midnight blankness. 

Its good to feel my heart pump, and the cold dry air in my throat. Though to be honest, I only vaguely note these physical phenomena. Mentally I am off with the pixies. I barely remember to even see the early morning light on  the high blue range, or to pause in my usual pausing spot to look down on the luminous green paddocks with the toffee-coloured cows. 

There is a bright perky bird with a topknot and a striped chest like a French sailor sitting in some bamboo when I’m almost back down the hill. Brings me to my senses.I look it up in the book at home: A Pacific Bazza. 

After my walk I eat a virtuous (as opposed to virtual) breakfast of eggs and tomatoes and mushrooms, then go to buy my vegetables at the local farmers market. It’s  colourful & homespun. I buy organic avocadoes and custard apples and chat to various people & feel mildly snubbed by someone who probably doesn’t even recognise me seeing as we’ve only met briefly. Then I catch myself  being the snubber ( as opposed to the snubbed)  waving an airy hello and moving on briskly from a person who made recent friendly overtures to me. Aaaach. All this reaching out and risking and rejecting, so wearying.  Much easier in cyberspace, through The  Looking Glass.

Apple crumble and  cup of tea sitting in the sun with T after the market in her yard full of vegetables and purple flowers. She gazes at a  clump of greenery and says  ‘Growing those potatoes gives me inordinate pleasure’ 

late afternoon Grumpy grumpy grumpy after too long on the phone to robots and robotic humans, trying to change the billing address, forgotten the password, but it’s a different password, a telephone password as opposed to an online password, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, account number, punch it into your keypad. Telstra and Energex phone calls: I put them off  because I know I’m going to end up in a rage...and I do. I wish the whole system would collapse and  there would be no more pin numbers to remember ever again, or Bpay biller codes , or robots at the end of phone lines  with their phoney robot cheerfulness. 

I don’t  turn the iMac on until  after the Telstra phone call, which has left me feeling drained of all inspiration. At least there is a  vase of daffodils on the kitchen table,  and the dishes are all washed and back in the cupboard.

Just noticed I have said  'as opposed to' three times

cybertribes

August 26 2010

There are so many things to be addicted to nowadays. But I didn’t start this blog intending to bang on about ‘addiction’. Why does it seem to keep surfacing? The woman who stands next to me at choir each week said this morning, ‘I think I need treatment, I can’t stop doing crossword puzzles’. My friend D has a similar compulsive relationship with SuDuko. Leaves a wake behind him: the room littered with pens & newspapers folded to the puzzle page, a pen always at the ready in his shirt pocket.

And me, well there’s chocolate (a whole block today, Lindt Mint Intense, followed by intense remorse). And of course  there’s also the new cyber-distraction. Yes, I know all its all pretty harmless c/w shooting up, or blowing the family food budget at the casino etc. But it’s still about hiding out/compulsion/avoidance of certain dreary chores/emotions that require attention. (pay accountant, change light globes, get a career etc)

Last night i went trawling through other peoples blogs, now that I’ve figured out how to do it. Click on one of the items in your profile, e.g. “Mary Oliver Poems” or “black humour”, and zap! there are the all the other bloggers who’ve got Mary Oliver or black humour (or Chinese medecine or opera or aerobics)  listed as their interests. All those faces, mine too now, jostling among the cyber-throngs. All those lists of favorite books and films and music, all that offering up of  cultural artifacts in an attempt to say ‘ See, This is the Sort Of Person I Am’. It’s strangely touching.  (But I can’t help feeling it’s very little of who we really are....)

In my cyber-quest to find witty/inspiring/literary writers and poets among the bloggers, I reject almost everyone. I get sidetracked by occasional  grandmas with the quilt they’ve sewn for their new grandchild, and by arty-crafty types showing me how to make colourful felt oven mitts. And by ‘Here we are on holidays with the kids’-type blogs. There’s something so reassuring about them. I dip into the blog-world of psychotherapy and find a lot of  earnestness and wankery and dodgey ‘spirituality’. (Or maybe ‘real’ spirituality, how can I tell?) 

Seems like hardly any of us bloggers have any ‘followers’. Though I am a unclear about the distinction between  a ‘public’ and an ‘anonymous’ follower...hmm. The ones with heaps of followers - the  ‘Blogs Of Note’  - don’t appeal to me, none of them... sigh...

Think it is time I went and planted those seedlings.

prickley subject

Wednesday 25th August 2010

My client just phoned to cancel and I, like a true addict, thought Great! Now I can get back to cyberspace. I haven’t washed the breakfast dishes, or dealt with the mail. Haven’t even planted those ground covers. I’m on the first rush of this new drug. Telling myself I will soon drop it - bingeing has always been my style. So I’ll probably blog furiously for a while then abandon it. Or get some moderation.

I’m working up the courage to email everyone I know and say’I started a blog’ Why does my mind immediately hear that sentence - ‘I started a blog’  - to the tune of a awful old BeeGees song “ I Started A Joke”?

Anyway. So I wrote my first entry last night and off it went hurtling into outer space like a teensy message in a bottle. What will become of it, my little squeak out there among the clamouring cacophony of the ever-swelling cyberspace hordes? It’s like a giant party out there with everyone talking at once.

Meanwhile, in the real world, F and I spotted an echidna on the steps going down to under the verandah, where Den has set up the ping pong table. A scrunched up little ball of prickles, burying its head in the sand and flinching at the sound of our footsteps. ('Sshhh, Mum!') Later, we paused from ping pong to silently watch it lumber up the stairs and waddle off behind the geraniums. 

and also thismorning:

draped over bouganvillea

above the studio door

- a perfect snakeskin

left overnight by our local carpet snake, which must have been warm from yesterdays sun. She’d be too cold to move today, curled up somewhere in her bright new diamond-patterned skin.

It is so cold today I am hobbling around the house wrapped up in the purple blanket and over the top of it the  wooly-wombat thermal ski thing. Ugg boots, beanie. Glamourous? Down the hill below my office, someone is brushcutting RRRRRRrrrrrrrrr. 

This weather feels like Melbourne not the subtropics. The day has that broody, moody, nothing-interesting-is-ever-going-to-happen-again sort of feeling about it. Implacable, grey. 

At the Writers Fest I heard prof Ian Lowe and Clive Hamilton both explaining eloquently, & with a touch of wry humour, why we are, collectively f***ked, planet-wise, climate-wise. It’s all too late, scientists agree. We’ve blown it guys! We’re stuffed! was their basic message. (Meanwhile Witchface and MonkeyEars squabble about who gets to re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, and nobody mentions climate change. But I am not gonna mention politics)

So what is the best response as Moscow burns, Pakistan is under water, and  our precious little planet heads straight for the iceberg? Go down dancing? Brace ourselves for the worst? Greive? Pray? Pretend it isn’t happening? At the very least get solar panels and water tanks & grow some vegs, I guess. A good idea, come apocalypse or not. 

After  D’s recent guilt-inducing carbon-footprint lecture, I have  been trying to ration my radiator-use. Just ten minutes morning and night, getting in and out of bed. that’s the theory anyway. But it’s a bit of a joke really, seeing as I just flew to Europe and back last month, gobbling up god knows how many hundred times the amount of fossil fuel I’d be entitled to if it was all equitably divided up between all the humans on Earth. Living with hypocrisy seems the only option...

dharma, chocolate, cyber-addiction

last week i was at a silent buddhist meditation retreat. this week I am suddenly addicted to chocolate and  Facebook, all the while having 'isn't it awful' conversations about how everyone nowadays is glued to a screen and teenagers don't know how to have face-to-face conversations any more.

I just read Susan Maushart's book "The Winter Of Our Disconnect' about what happened when she and her three teenagers unplugged from all their devices for six months. Predicatably, after various withdrawal symptoms, they rediscover the sweet joys of  cooking, conversation, musical instruments etc. Read it  because she's funny. I laughed out loud (LOL) even though its serious stuff too, to do with addiction basically.

I was so glad to be totally away from all that endless bloody chatter,  at the  retreat last week.

tho its funny I sort of love and hate it in equal measure: On the one hand it is the loveliest thing in the world to dwell in silence for a while, don't have to make small talk, or big talk, or respond to emails, don't have to hear about the tedious old  election, don't even have to think about what to cook for dinner.

Being No-one, Going Nowhere - what a relief. I watch the bees gathering pollen in the wattle next to my tent. I study ants. I sit in the winter sun.

On the other hand, this whole meditation biz is so bloody hard and uncompromising. There's nowhere to hide. I sit in the meditation hall, struggling with all the idiotic thoughts prattling in my brain. Its like commercial radio i can't turn off. It's like mentally wrestling with alligators. I focus on my breath for a nano-second or two then realise my mind is off eating an icecream in Rome last month, regretting that handbag i didn't buy - what did it look like again? Or rehearsing a conversation I'll never have with someone I haven't seen in years or...bla bla bla

Our thoughts think us, not the reverse. We are all addicted to thinking, says the meditation teacher. That's hen he's not busy reminding us  about the fact that we could all be dead any time and will certainly be dead sooner or later, and most of what we fill our lives with is meaningless, fleeting baubles and bubbles and distractions.

As soon as I get home, I go into a distraction feeding-frenzy. Onto Facebook for the first time in months, I  figure out how to upload my photos from Italy, then waste hours sort of sniffing and scrabbling about, looking up people I haven't seen for decades and probably don't really want to see ever again.

At the retreat I got up at 5.30 every morning and did yoga and felt like my life was sort of in control and I was a more-or-less sane person. On the first day after getting home I meditated for about five minutes. then boof! back to my old chocolate-eating, sleeping in, procrastinating old familiar ways.

In my journal at the retreat i remind myself: 'Be Spacious'

...chocolate, meditation, sleeping in, yoga, blobbing out. all okay.