Temporarily childless

I spent my weekend in a little graceland on the banks of the Macdonald River. A place usually reserved for the quiet pleasures of the local Aboriginal mob that own and care for the land, but momentarily transformed by freaks, festies and a strange breed of workaholics into a music festival wonderland for the weekend.

(I say workaholics because I spent a large proportion of time contemplating how hard this strange folk had worked at something as surreal as decorating bush and lugging large scale music equipment into the middle of no where).

The extreme heat and continuing bizarre weather conditions were also hard at work, transforming this little piece of paradise into 40 degree dust bowl – It was slap in the forehead hot, and clothes layered in a thin film of dirt dusty.

When we arrived there were hundreds of cars lined up in rows, parked outside in the baking heat. Scouting for a spot to park our van while I uncontrollably and repeatedly chanted ‘its fucking hot’ almost sent us around the bend and we very near made the fatal mistake of parking next to a bunch of P platers in a ute. Luckily we found a place to shove our van under some poor saplings try to pass as trees before we melted off down to the river for a swim.

We sat rooted by the little stage on the waters edge all afternoon. The Yang was booked to play that day, and managed to make a crowd of very hot people do some very slow dance movements. I was impressed at his ability to rouse people from out under the heavy cloak of heat to dance, even if it was on the head nodding scale of movement. And so I thought it was only fair that I should venture into the festival heartland i.e a place not on the river side, to get us some food.

It was a strange encounter of a mysterious kind. It was like walking through the desert at high noon. The sun was high in the sky, casting a gruelling glare on the open fields below, and despite all the hundreds of cars we passed on the way in, there was not a soul in sight. It was a deserted, desert ghost town save for the outside rim of stall holders, markets holders and stage hands looking silently on, which despite being strangely eerie, did have the added plus of the Golzeme stall miraculously being free from the usual mile long queue.

But surprisingly, all this wasn’t the most interesting aspect of my weekend, nor was the remarkable cactus growing, chemical producing mushroom man that plied my friend with horse sized tablets and lead him on the trip of his life, saying, ‘when you get there, you will find me, looking back at you’. No, what was most noteworthy, was the childless status of my partner and I for a 24 hour period.

For the first time in over 12 months we would spend a night away from our boy wonder. The first time we would be together, but alone, for longer than a few hour stretch, in over a year. A year! And the first time since pre-pregnancy, we would get sufficiently smashed (which for light weights like us, basically meant having a few beers and staying up till 11pm).

Yes, it was noteworthy.

Because it meant spontaneously stopping the car in the middle of a windy dirt road that ran along the river, clambering down the steep bank through shrub and reeds, and splashing freely in. It meant swimming out to its middle depths, lightly stoned, and having the sweet caress of that cool river water, and the eagle soaring high above, and the peace and magic of that river that had not another soul in sight, all come into sharp focus. With my friend on one side, and my lover on another, we wore ear-splitting grins as we made joking caricatures of ‘this is the life’ enthusiasts.

And once we arrived at the festival it meant lazing about on the banks of a much more crowded river, covered in dirt and dust, enjoying the hard earnt reward of a day that had finally cooled after forcing you to first survive its sweltering intensity. Kicking back, watching little clusters of people bobbing away in the water, sitting next to a slightly crazed man whose piecing blue eyes screamed at you from the blood shot haze of red that surrounded them – and not worrying about sand getting into the baby bag, or the baby food, not worrying about meal time, and being far too intoxicated to administer it, not worrying about a thing but continuous dips in the river and crawling back up the sandy bank to the ice cold beer my lover had fetched me and the sweet little toke that my friend had rolled me.

And it meant watching other couples trying in vein to shelter their young from the gruelling heat, or battle with them over eating their lunch, or incessantly following after them as they wondered off, and turning to smile smugly and with huge relief at my partner.

And it meant finding our other childless-for-24-hours friends under a starry night with dirty feet and hip hop beats and having them extract a bottle of Peruvian wonder juice that we all took hits from, giving cheers to our childless state and the wonder and awesomeness of grandparents.

And it meant joining my lover arm in arm and wondering off into the fields to pee under trees and then wondering full circle back into the heart of festival land where we fetched our dinner and ate it under the open night sky without a second thought of that well worn couch we usually ate on in spitting distance of The Boy should he cry out or need us.

Yes, all of that was very noteworthy indeed.

Like visiting the well worn paths of a former life that you thought long lost, and realising that its all still there. But its better now, because the next day you wake up, drive home full of anticipation for the shrieking delight and loving grin that your little boy wonder will lavish on you, only to get there and have him scream and cry his head off while you laugh and grin and love like a lunatic.

Letter of Complaint

When I first concocted the idea of birthing this here little blog, something I thought I would feature is the Letter of Complaint.

I have a conflicted relationship with the Letter of Complaint; I despise them, and the boring, petty assed people that bother writing them, and then I sit around penning them my head.

All day long I sit and compose. Letters to the editor, letters to bureaucratic establishments, letters to the outlandishly over priced op shop, letter to the Midwife Bitch at the hospital, letter to the waitress that served me coffee, letters, letters, letters. I even invent Letters of Complaint in response to peoples actual Letters of Complaint.

But I would never dare actually write them, or worse, send them. Except for here, the place where my letters of complaint have come to die…..

 

Dear Roads and Traffic Authority,

Your bureaucratic incompetence astounds me. In this, I refer to two matters. Firstly, the failure of your administration system to send me monthly copies of my account, well, monthly.

Instead, long after my e-toll account has ran dry and I’ve traipsed all over the city racking up toll debts as long as my arm, you send me letters stating that my account in so far in the black that I must not only cough up the cash, but I must cover the cost your administration incurred writing up my notice and popping it in the post.

Upon calling your ‘helpline’ to investigate I am immediately informed, via a robot, that September account statements  – the one no doubt informing me of my cash strapped account status – will not be sent out until November and that if we wish to know of our account status in the meantime then we can always try employing mental telepathy or some Jason Bourne type covert case cracking investigation.

As a result I now have to pay you the ‘administration’ cost you incurred when you failed to practice any, you know, administration. What exactly are my funds to be used for I wonder, the annual Christmas party you plan to hold inside the M4 toll booth?

The second matter I wish to discuss – so long as my aforementioned funds have covered the cost of your attention so far, is the staggering ineptness of your online services.

Actually, for that matter, your services in general -  I mean leats face it, customer service is simply not your strong point, you really should stick to those catchy little driving slogans, you have got that shit sorted. Why ‘Stop. Revive. Survive’ is the kind of genius I couldn’t even match with a rhyming dictionary.

But your website? Your call centre? Absolute shambles.

Because, being the quick leaner that I am (and the utter tight ass that refuses to incur any further administration costs) this time I did in fact indeed practice some stealth like Bourne investigations and by the power Hollywood invested in me, I discovered, one lone and rainy Friday night, that my account had once again hit zero.

In a bid to quickly rectify the situation before further weekend traipsing around the city side, I logged on to top up my account. Ba –Baam. No can do. Because even with my Bourne like skills helping me navigate the muddled mess that is your website, I was still unable to crack that wily ‘enter your details here’ code, as your system repeatedly informed me that I didn’t exist.

Exasperated I called your robot, only to be told that he doesn’t work on the weekends. What was I to do? There was no way of giving you more money until Monday, but surely I couldn’t be expected to sit in my driveway until then? Wrong. Surely I could. Because after driving around, racking up some debts that come hell or high water you would not let me pay, I received another notice from you citing my failure to pay my debts!

Agghhh, no amount of therapy could help me, I screamed and pulled my hair out and kicked the table with my shin causing me to repeat the whole process all over again before sitting down to compose you this nice little letter, in my head.

Thanks a fucking lot.

 

Yours in Disgust,

RTS

Feeling hot, hot, hot

Sometimes, when you don’t have a life the envy of millions, or the skill at masquerading the mundane as miraculous, there is not much to say.

I am not currently travelling the globe posting jaw dropping pictures of Amsterdam at night or of the croc I wrestled to death in Africa, or talking about the amazing sex life I have with lovers from the capital city of every god damn country in the globe…or whatever the fuck it is that all these genius’ on other blogs are out there writing about.

And given that I don’t have the same gift as some for concocting posts out of every day scenarios, like driving to the shops, and making it funny, then there really is very little chance of turning a week of diarrhoea and then a weekend of 40 degree heat into anything all that entertaining.

It was so fucking hot here yesterday that we spent the entire day indoors. I could give a detailed account of that because I know exactly what every wall looks like, every nook, every cranny, every speck of dust sand dirt that can be seen from laying flat on the floor in a desperate bid to cool down while your one year old son climbs dangerously up the side of the bookshelf but you are too ass buggered by the sinfully hot heat to even tell him to get down, instead saying, “wow, good climbing mate, see if you can get to the top” because you are so mind numbingly bored and tired and hot that you can’t even think of any fruitless child friendly banter anymore.

But I figured that would just reveal how my life pales in comparison to the exotic and erotic genius of the blogging world and that would be a pain too brutal for me to bear, so in a futile attempt to avoid the catastrophe of being ordinary I thought I would list all the places I have ever been really, really fucking hot:

 

1. Kibbutz Afikim, Isreal. Because I am really interesting like that, I go live on kibbutz in the middle of Israel when I am 19yrs old then I come home and write Sociology papers citing them as interesting case studies of failed experiments in socialism. This earns me a pithy little fucking Pass mark, perhaps because I fail to comment on the whole ‘religious’ aspect of the community (religious? Israel?…c’mon…) given I was so obsessed with radical politics and hippy communes at the time…

But anyway, point is – hottest fucking place on earth. It would be, like, 40 degrees all day long, and then drop to a cool 38 degrees at night. Being pesky little Western volunteers we were given little relief from the heat, expected to rise from our fan forced oven sleeping quarters at 6am and work till 5pm – you don’t get something for nothing in those parts, and by something I mean a small bit of foam to sleep on and a oil drenched salad leaf to munch on – without working your ass off for it first.

But lucky for me I was there because of my Israeli boyfriend, so on those hots nights I would sneak out of the servants, I mean volunteer, quarters, and go sleep in his nice cool apartment (yes, he had his own apartment. On a kibbutz. Like I said, failed experiment in communal living).

There was a 50 metre swimming pool on this particular kibbutz and one afternoon after working in the banana fields all day we all rushed down the pool, not even stopping at the edge to peel our clothes off before plonking straight in, only to find that the water was warm! Warm water. In a 50 metre pool. That’s how fucking hot it gets in those desert countries. Here we were, dripping in sweat, seeking some sweet, fresh relief from the prickling hot humidity that was strangling our throats, only to find that the water was fucking warm. Suffice to say, there were no Israelis down at the pool that day.

 

2. Pula, Croatia. Living out the back of an artist’s co-op on the fabulous Adriatic Croatian coast. Because I’m cool like that. You know, interesting, glamorous. The life of a well heeled traveller and all that. (Look, it hasn’t all been a suburban nightmare. I mean, it may have started off that way, and I may be back in one now, but I’ll have you know, through some ostentatious and conspicuous flaunting of it, that I have been to some very, very cool, I mean hot, places).

And the coast of Croatia was certainly one of them.

It was so hot we wouldn’t leave the house to go for a swim until 9pm at night. We would have melted into the sidewalk if we had of tried to walk to the beach any earlier. so hot that we would wake up, have a shot of grappa in our coffee, get stoned and then sit around in our underpants all day – did I say glamorous? Well, I meant something else.

And while it might sound like the life of a junkie, really it wasn’t, we only lived like sloths in that week long fucking heat wave that had people dying, literally dying, in some parts of the country.

And as for drinking alcohol first thing in the morning, well the bloody Croats do that shit all the time. All day long in fact, sneaky, sneaky little shots of grappa –one for good health, one to keep a cold away, one for the sore tooth, one for lunch time, one for the old mate Miho that died in the war – there’s always a reason for grappa and its never frowned upon, the stuff is seen as the all purpose magic elixir of life.

 

3. Cessnock, NSW. See its not all glamour. Sometimes your roots pull down hard. This is where I spent Christmas of 2002 at my Bro’s place.

Cessnock is basically considered the redneck wonderland of the Hunter Valley region. But to be fair to my Bro, who is not a redneck, we were out on his little subdivided property block and so technically out of bounds of the ‘racist’ dragnet that cloaked the town centre.

But this little block in the country had not a tree in sight and the heat that day was off the scale. We had both sides of the family present at this little Christmas shindig, so things were already awkward and uncomfortable enough without having to scurry and scramble amongst ourselves for any speck of shade we could find. Man, we would have beat the dogs out of their kennels if we could have fit in them ourselves.

Instead most of us settled for pulling our plastic chairs into the shade cast from the wall of the house. Come midday things got pretty grim, and with the sun directly above us, and our chairs pressed flush against the wall, we were forced to take shelter in the measly few inches of shadow that fell.

There was only tank water on the property, and my parents had already drilled us, with depression era mentality, that it. must. not. be. wasted. So water fights were out too, not that anyone had the energy. In the end I had to lay down on the tiles of the bathroom floor with a wet cloth on my face. I couldn’t even drink beer. No beer! At a dysfunctional Australian family gathering! That’s how hot it was.

 

Ok, so it’s a short list. I guess I haven’t been that hot in that many places others than the vast, expansive, flat, flat plains of Sydney’s western suburbs. Where childhood days were spent in that dry, crackling, cook an egg on the radiator of a car kind of heat. Heat that could curl the corner of a sheet of metal. Heat that had hot air breath that would blow brittle leaves over cracked dirt and dust.

And that deserted kind of feeling, with not a soul in sight save for a dog under an awning, and no sign of life save for the slow drip, drip, drip of water from the air conditioner that has been jammed into the window fixture falling onto the concrete below.

And while there’s no doubting that place was hot, it just wasn’t that exciting, well, not exciting enough for an erotic, exotic, genius blog anyway…

 

On a boat

I was highly sceptical about the ‘harbour funk party’ to begin with; a boat cruise does elicit thoughts akin to being trapped in a Gold Coast nightclub during schoolies week. But the line up for the music was strong, and the intention seemed good – pure funk, reggae and hip hop on a boat as it cruised around the harbour in the sun.

I convinced the best friend and free form dancer extraordinaire to come with me, but she too was sceptical, admitting that she nearly packed a thermos of chai in case she need a quick downer and the illusion she was on a family friendly picnic and not a floating prison cell employing techno music torture.

But our fears were thankfully unfounded.

As we waited on the wharf it was clear we weren’t the only ones sporting a grey hair or two, and I don’t mean we could have been mistaken for thinking we were lining up for the local nursing home’s community boating day, I just meant they didn’t seem to be too many, if any, 18yr olds floating about.

It was also clear that it wasn’t going to be a case of hundreds of people squeezing in to a rickety old leaking boat like a desperate hoard of fleeing refugees, because, well for one, we all looked really, really funky, not like penniless fashion free foreigners. and two, as the lovely Lady Rose pulled into dock she impressed us with her size and grandeur (look we hail from the Western suburbs, anything bigger than a dingy impresses us).

We were a just right healthy number of people for generating a friendly party feeling, but still leaving plenty of room to dance freely in fresh air as opposed to elbow jabbing your way through a crowd to escape the arm pit air you were forced to consume on the dancefloor.

And so in our proportionate numbers we boarded the boat, giving nods of approval to the cleared out carpeted space of the bottom two decks, and tsk tsk’ing the bolted down rows of school-yard aluminium seats on the open air reggae deck.

It was exciting as we first cruised off into the harbour, passing under the Bridge, turning into the industrial bay, rounding Cockatoo Island. But then, after the fourth, then fifth, then sixth lap, excitement kind of gave way to bemusement. It must have been the most shit boring drive of that Captain’s life. But the crowd never let that dampen their spirits, and they cheered and waved each and every time we passed that huge tanker boat with the sad ass dudes working on a Sunday.

(even Stringer Bell gave them a nod, the cool cat that managed to bump and grind to the tunes all day long, without ever once letting go of the handrail. Like, ever. He could turn to the right, turn to the left, twist to the front, grind to the floor, and still keep at least one hand firmly planted on that rail).

The only real sour puss of the day was Surly the Security Guard. I mean, tough job, cruising around on a boat with a tame, happy crowd enjoying some fine music, but work’s work right, and as if that’s not reason enough to spend the day looking like you swallowed shit… But I wouldn’t have even passed this judgement had he not acted like an ape and virtually shut down the sound at one point. (Although to be fair this was apparently under instruction of the Water Police from the Observation Tower…??!)

The fact that we were on a boat, in the middle of the day, with no neighbours in sight, had somehow passed them by. But perhaps it wasn’t really the noises levels that concerned them so much as the threat of the wild mob that would have to be dealt with when we hit the shores (it should be mentioned that there was a sizeable number of black people on this boat, and they were having a good time).

On the inside decks things were a little tamer. both the lower decks had a bevvy of live acts, but at one point this is where I found one the least vibrant and most motionless crowd of the day, causing me to briefly burst a brain cell trying to think upon, whislt drunk, the lure and love of DJs versus live music.

It was some mind mumbling about how while we all love, adore and applaud live music, something always pulls us back to DJs too, proving they are not a dying breed, or the dog balls licking scum that some purists suggest they are.

A point well proved by Mike Who, a DJ who was the hands down brightest delight of my day. Having never heard of this guy before I only discovered him while drunkenly stumbling up the steps and pausing to catch my breath before being lured in by some sexy, sexy groove. And once inside I just couldn’t leave, his skilful mix of early hip hop, funkin’ delights, and sexy groove, including the wondrous Sequence and Cody Chestnutt, had me dancing all the way till we docked back at the shore.

At which point Surly the Security Guard reared his sad head again to screech at his minions to ‘get us the fuck up off the wharf’. “C’mon”, he roared “get em’ out of here”, proving what a deft hand he would have been had he not missed his true calling of herding cattle on a farm.

And the best thing was, it was all over by 5pm. There was still plenty of time to get home, kiss The Boy goodnight (well, almost, it was more of a kiss while he was off in ‘night nights’) slump on the couch in front of the TV and miraculously still get enough sleep that I could wake up the next day virtually hang over free….

 

Giving suburbia the slip

I dearly wanted to write a music post today, but the sad reality is, I haven’t seen any music lately. So instead I am at the local café, where I am so swamped by suburban life that it isn’t any wonder I haven’t got much to say about the music scene.

It is late in the morning and the thin scraggle of people that haven’t gone off to work in an office are trailing in and out of the café, and up and down the street, past the row of six shops plonked in amongst the streets and streets of houses. Time is ticking along slowly, and the heat is bending the trees.

It’s a beautiful, bright sunny day outside, but the café is tucked inside a dark arcade (you have to be grateful enough for drinkable coffee around these parts, so there is no point complaining about the setting or lack of atmosphere).

And while this suburban life has kept me out of the dirty arms of the local music scene, I did manage to break free for a night out recently, but it wasn’t dirty and it wasn’t all that musical either. It was the launch of the Sydney festival.

Although equal to the burbs in its impact of making me feel like I was in a foreign world in which I didn’t belong, the launch was of an entirely different class. More like being in a Northern Shore suburb where things are prim, proper, and clean.

It was such an insular and deluded world that I couldn’t help but let a few scoffs slip as everyone else respectfully listened to the unveiling of the program by a festival that ‘prided it self on accessibility and reach’. Ha! I couldn’t believe they could say that in all seriousness. I mean the festival can be a gas, sure, but accessibility and reach? Well, that’s a bit of a stretch now isn’t it?!

But because it was an invitation only launch, they were only really talking amongst themselves anyway, a bit of an insiders chin wag, like a dinner party, only bigger (it was in the glorious and rather fitting State Theatre). It was all darling and delicious and pats on the back all round as we were treated to what was essentially an AV version of the printed program.

Then the champagne and the canapés started flowing, and for a moment I forgot myself as I raced back upstairs, after lingering around the toilets too long chatting, to grab myself another glass of bubbly before it ran out. Ran out! Ha Ha Ha. Where did I think I was, at a student art opening?!

And while there really are some great things about the festival (‘festival moments’ I believe this insider bunch called them) and I have loved seeing some awesome acts over the years, that has usually been when I was writing about them or being some industry person’s hoe bag plus one (hey, how they hell do you think I got into this gig?!) and thus seeing them all for free.

But now I sit with the everyday folk out in the far-flung burbs, I am duly outraged at the cost of the shows. And to add insult to injury, these festival insiders claim that it is accessible and within reach.

I mean, yeah, there is that ONE free concert in Parramatta. That should shut all us Westies up. Thousands of people can push and shove and wrangle for a place in the park for the one show that is meant to satisfy their cultural cravings. God bless the festival. I wonder how many of them are going to turn up to experience that elbow jab and gorge.

And then there is the Next to Nix tickets. Wonderful. If you get up at 5am in the morning you might just get a chance to grab an affordable ticket. Maybe. The line is usually hundreds of metres long, even in the god-awful hours of the early morning, and by the time you reach the counter tickets to the show you wanted are long gone.

(Does the ever-increasing length of the lines ever indicate that lots of people might not find the festival all that ‘accessible’? Or do they just think we are major tight asses that don’t want to shell out the full cost?)

There is also the ‘about an hour’ shows, they are so cheap, like around 30 dollars, that Festival Director, Lindy Hume, when presenting this part of the program said we would probably want to go to three of them in one night! What world are these people living in? One with higher disposable incomes than me I suppose.

But whatever world it is they are pretty happy there because when Lindy Hume announced they had secured the mighty Al Green for the festival they politely cheered and clapped as happy people would. Hume was so happy and proud herself that I was certain that she somehow felt she had a hand in the man’s greatness herself.

But for all my whinging and whining I’ll probably race out and get myself a ticket so I can be there to welcome the wonderful Mr Green on his virgin visit to our golden shores, because if nothing else, it will give me something musical to write about…

No more hairy scary

Yesterday in the shower I did something I haven’t done in a very long time – I shaved my legs. It took a whole pack of razors. The newly detached hair that gathered above the razor as it tore down trees in the forest was so thick and bushy it looked like I had grown a beard just below my knees

It was like being a teenager all over again. I felt slightly clueless trying to recall a long lost, rather pointless skill – stand or sit, water on or off, lather and what with….?

And because I was pretty much a teenager when I stopped shaving my legs, I felt like I had been caught in a bit of a time warp – while the rest of the world had moved on to things like waxing and lasers, I was still sitting in my bathroom with a packet of cheap razors.

But most perplexing of all is why, after 10 long years, I even wanted to do this at all.

I think it has been building up for some time because I noticed that I had been daydreaming about wearing mini skirts in summer sun and prancing about sunning my fresh, smooth legs for all the world to see. Waving and wiggling them right under people’s noses, and like a uncorked vintage wine being whiffed for the first time by a patient connoisseur, they would invoke both glee and delight. Look, it was just a daydream.

But what really got me thinking was that when I went to playgroup the other week, and the weather had finally turned warm, I found myself choosing a dress that fell right down to my toes thereby covering my hairy, scary legs.

Here I was actively choosing not to shave my legs, as opposed to, say, being so insanely busy that I never got around to it, or whatever reason it is that horrified women exclaim when they have been caught committing this leg hair sin, and then I went about covering them up so no one would see.

I just wasn’t sure where I stood on this anymore.

All I know is that a long, long time ago I moved into a share house full of radical, feral student activists and one day my chin came crashing to the floor as my female flattie emerged from the shower with hair, down there. Not, down there, down there, but on her legs. I was gobsmacked, but I quickly covered that up, because it was all about being cooler than a polar ice cap. “Right on sister”, I probably said while giving a nod of approval to the hair, down there·.

And then I quickly took myself off to a few gender studies classes and women’s groups meetings, and got to thinking about things like this notion of ‘beauty is pain’, and modern standards of beauty, and the body’s natural state and blah blah. And then I got to wondering why women groom themselves in certain ways when the natural tendency of the body is to sprout hair, and why should we go against that just so we can have cracked, dry skin and prickly regrowth? Why can’t our bodies be considered beautiful and attractive with hair, down there?

And anyway, such were the thoughts that got me onto my a-la-natural look back in the day (That, and the cool female flatmate emerging from the shower).

But these days it was far less about being political and thoughtful and far more about simplicity, comfort and ease. That, and the fact that The Yang loves my hairy legs and protests every time I threaten to shave them (I didn’t tell him this time).

So finding myself purposefully wearing a long dress to conceal my staunch, feminist take on female leg hair that I am no longer staunch enough to make in public, is what first got the brain ticking and the razor hand twitching.

And then at a baby shower recently I found myself sitting next to a long admired feminist friend and we got to talking about the hairy scary. Just what was it that made her go in for body hair removal after all these years I wondered. And after staring off into the distance in what I imagined to be a deep meditation on this philosophical conundrum, her face lit up – “my sisters wedding” she exclaimed. But then she thought about it some more and added that she was sick of the stares and glares and exclamations of “yuk” every time that ghastly growth of underarm hair would spew out as she raised her arm to steady herself on public transport.

Hmmm, yes I said. I too am getting a little weary of the stares and glares. Why just the other day I went for a swim at the beach and found myself cowering as I walked down the sand to the water, trying in vain to hide my hairy scary self behind the measly bundle of clothes that I had clutched to my body.

And I thought, I am sick of cowering. And instead of standing tall, and loud and proudly flaunting my body hair for all, I shaved it off. All the way from my ankle to my knee. Gone.

It feels strange and naked and prickly and tingly.

And all I keep thinking of is a long ago lover that I still hold in that romantic kind of regard (you know the one that’s all bright lights and bombshells because you never got close enough, or spent long enough together, for the sheen to wear off and so they stand in constant ‘romantic’ contrast to the more muted tones of reality, even though the real love of your life outshines them hands down because, its, well, you know, real).

Anyway, I keep thinking of him on the streets of that romantic, i.e, foreign, city, looking at my hairy scary legs when I voiced my concerns that women kept staring at them, and him saying in that romantic, i.e, foreign, voice “meeecheeele, they are fashion victom”, and neurotically wondering if I too now fall into this ill regarded fashion victom category.

But I take comfort in that seeing as though body hair is a naturally occurring process, I don’t really have to do a thing to return to my previous hairy scary state, and in the meantime I’ll don on that mini skirt and slink about in the sun, making a complete fashion victom of myself.

• ·It is highly unlikely that I ever said such a thing

9.22am

At 9.22am it’s going to be a single year since you tore through my flesh.

The midwife gave a perfunctory glance at the clock before handing you to me, slippery and wet. And I don’t care what anyone says, there was no melt away moments to savior. I was delirious and wrecked and exhausted and overcome. We didn’t lock eyes and we didn’t stare lovingly into each other’s souls.

We just climbed clumsily out of that bath together, your tiny body almost cowering in my arms, maybe it was as excruciating for you coming down that birth canal as it was for me. Your eyes were jammed shut and your pointy chin, covered in taunt, white skin, nuzzled around my boob immediately, instinctively, seeking nourishment  – (now that’s amazing. Nine months in a womb and no need to be shown where the boob is or what to do with it).

And I knew, as I lay on that bed, with blood oozing out of my fanny, you in my arms and a placenta still running between us, that despite all the waves of erratic emotion and joy, that it was a load of bullshit that you forget the pain and agony of birth once you have your baby in your arms.

I lay motionless. I couldn’t wiggle or adjust myself because I feared that the inside of my body was broken into tiny pieces, and I just looked sternly at your father and said “I will never, ever fucking forget, and if by some miracle I do, you must never, ever let me do this again”. He just laughed, and even though it wasn’t that funny, I joined in.

We were laughing because we had that feeling of coming out the end of a horrible, blood splattering battle, and we were savoring that first sweet taste of relief that it was over. It was all smiles and tittering giggles. You don’t know that feeling yet. But you will one day. It’s a very distinctive kind of happiness, filled with gratitude.

And I will always remember the howls of the woman through the wall from the other room. I knew in my heart that as loud and ferocious was her noise, that mine was louder and wilder. In the tiny seconds between those final contractions, I slumped forward (I was kneeling in the water when you came. That’s right, on my knees. From day one.) and squeezed in some self deprecating self consciousness by letting out a wretched sob and  telling the midwife that I felt like an animal. You are, she casually corrected.

And then, moments later, you plopped out. One year ago today. It was a Wednesday then, but it’s a Thursday now. A year in time takes us a day ahead in the week. There is something fitting about that time warp. How so much has happened and so much has changed, and all of it like slow underwater movements that have passed with the blink of an eye.

One minute we were in a god awful hospital ward with the sound of screaming babies coming in from every angle, and our door swinging open and closed like a tent flap in the wind – its time for you hearing tests, how are things in here, are you getting any rest, you have some visitors, would you like to sign up for a physio class, I’ve come back for your hearing test, Photos! Photos! Would you like some photos, how is everything going, getting any rest….

And all the while you lay quiet in your bassinet, and I lay on the bed with a frozen condom that had been filled with water tucked between my legs to help with the swelling. (there was a whole freezer full of them in the common room. You just had to shuffle past people’s friends and family sitting in there watching TV, reach into the deep freeze and grab yourself a condom).

I couldn’t sleep, I was charged with emotion and exhaustion, and like a post traumatic stress victim, every time I closed my eyes scenes of the awful labour, and sensations of the wracking pain would play over, and over, and over in my mind.

Then the next minute we were home and the screaming started and the nipples cracked and our world fell to shit for a few hazy weeks there.

You would only sleep when being held in one of our arms, so we would have to do shifts where one of us tried to sleep while the other one nursed you. We would cradle you in our arms, propped up on pillows with our legs stretched out in front and try and steal some precious moments of sleep ourselves.

There was beauty in the fact that in your virgin moments in this crazy world you held on tight. But fuck it was awful. Your father would lay with you for hours like that, trying to give me some rest. I was mostly too neurotic to take much advantage of it, quickly discovering that it’s hard to sleep with your jaw clenched shut like a metal trap.

In those first days you slept so little that we saw no point in going upstairs to our bedroom, besides, we scared shitless of this crazy new life we had on our hands and we tried to bring the world in tight around us, reducing it to a few simple square metres.

I remember going upstairs to get fresh clothes and how surreal that felt, like visiting the newly deserted ghost world of our former lives.

And even though you tended to favour screaming yourself to sleep and then waking up a very short time later, I respected what I imagined to be your discomfort with this crazy world, and your fierce and passionate reaction to it.

Yep, those were tough times. I would see pregnant people on the street and feel sorry for them. I would want to run up like a crazy person, grab hold of their shoulders and cry “its too late now! You don’t know what’s coming! What have you done?!”

But all that changed as watched you go from laying like a skinned rabbit in the centre of the floor, unable to make any deliberate movements, your scrawny arms flailing indiscriminately, to somehow reaching a point where you sit up in your highchair and use both hands to shovel food into your mouth.

Sometimes all four of us stand on, gapping at your ravishing hunger that never seems to slow. You even seem to think ahead, gathering food in both hands, drawing them close to your mouth before swiftly chomping on one, and then the other, in quick succession.

I say four of us because we live with your grandparents now. You days began in a trendy inner city neighbourhood, but now you live in the suburbs in a big house that is really two little houses joined together. We live in the front and your Nan and Pop live out the back.

We ferry you in and out, back and forth, passing you around a set of people that have craved out an abundance of time to lavish on you – your father does a few gigs a week at night time when you are sleeping, I quit my job and your Pop is retired. Your Nan works like a dog, 63 and still getting up at 4.30am, but she is home by 3 and spends all afternoon with you.

You are a wildcat now with a devilish grin. You gather yourself upright and take uncertain steps around the house, your bow legged cowboy strut fused with the outstretched arms of a zombie lurch. You race headlong into the floor length mirrors and share what must be very funny jokes with yourself.

Every time you walk you have to strive for balance, falling forward, pulling back, wobbling, finding your centre. You are like a little man on a tightrope in a one-man circus, commanding our attention, and entertaining us endlessly.

All of our days are filled with watching you. We somehow have to divide you up between four hungry adults that want to devour every aspect of your life. We pull up chairs around the sand pit, or we sit near by on the grass, eight eager eyes watching from a respectful distance.

And at 9.22am it will have been a whole year now.

 

Blog anxiety

A blog was always going to be a bit of an interesting option for me, the semi- computer literate, social networking nobody that until recently hadn’t even read a blog. But like all young hopefuls, I just turned to Google for answers and guidance. I read all sorts of advice and top-10-tips for starting blogs, and when they bellowed loudly that you must have a topic, you must know what you are talking about, I just shrugged my shoulders and thought, easy, I’ll be talking about me.

But I was wrong. It’s not easy. Because the world of blog is not all it seems.

Its not self indulgent self publishing. It’s reading and research and lots of fluffing and puffing and ass kissing and prancing, and its serious social networking and self promotion.

And sure, maybe its only those things if you have a certain agenda, like having someone who is not your boyfriend read your blog. But being young and impressionable, I tend to get caught up in agendas that are not necessarily mine. And in being conflicted in nature, I tend to say agendas are not mine when perhaps, on some level, there are.

And so I began to fret and feel the pressure of it all, because this is one of my finely honed responses to life – feel the weight of it.

I found myself checking and rechecking, like someone with a compulsive twitch, to see if anyone, anywhere, had left any comments. And it soon became clear that somewhere along the way my desire to document the life and times of me would only have any value if it was being consumed by others.

So when my boyfriend explained that the whole premise is built on this ‘networking’ idea and that I should comment on other people’s blogs, I busily set off into the blogsphere.

I followed links here there and everywhere and felt like I had walked the virtual world fifty times over. I had 20 screens open, watery eyes, and a kind of shell shocked exhaustion that could be liken to flying straight into Mexico for 2 days, before hitting the Amazon, flying out to New York, then rural American, then back to suburban Australia. You would no sooner adjust to the tone and language and nuances of one country before you clicked yourself away into another dimension. The world is a big place, and on the internet you can travel around it far, far too quickly.

The cacophony of differing voices swallows you whole, and your spinning around trying to find an exit, trying to turn the volume down. Or at least find someone you actually want to genuinely talk to.

But like a young kid trying to learn the ropes of a new school playground, I hung back and watched. (Oh, and I joined twitter. I have one follower).

Some people wrote sickeningly sycophantic fan mail comments, some stayed in character constantly, never failing to crack a witticism, others seemed genuinely interested and full of praise – all of them were diligent. And not just the commentators. The bloggers were quick to reply back to each and every comment with humble thanks and praise in return. When I mentioned on one site that this was my first visit, I soon found a personal email in my inbox thanking me for stopping by.

I even somewhat serendipitously, but not for good, stumbled on a blog entry from a ‘popular’ blogger about the evolution and agonies of this blogging world. A more eloquent account from the perspective of someone who knows what they are talking about on the crisis of writing for yourself but putting it in a public domain, riding the treacherous wave of rising and falling self esteem, obsessing over stats and traffic, and oh-my-god-the-stress-and-weight-of-it-all, and shit that was great timing reading that one. She had 15543 billion comments, yet she still found time to respond to my ‘holy shit that’s encouraging’ remarks with a little motherly reassurance.

It was like customer service in overdrive. I am shit at customer service. I have been fired from countless jobs, walked out on just as many and had letters of complaint written about me. How was I ever going to get my head around this virtual world of marketing, client based relations and social networking?!

So after a long and detailed week long conversation with myself, I decided, unconvincingly and after much deliberation, that, its not supposed to matter, and I should get back to the task at hand of documenting myself.

But not for the general public, or my unfound virtual friends, but for the future anthropologist that unearths cyberspace and seeks to find answers to our failed existence. Because its not all just ass-wiping mums, wisecracking wise guys, and overly earnest care bears. There are anxiety ridden, sometimes insecure and mostly neurotic, uncertain people out there too, and they, more than anyone, are more likely to hold the key to our downfall.

So I figure I best get back to it so that they might know of my view from the gutter, cuz like that old wino said, not all of us are looking at the stars, some of us are staring at all that pigeon shit and worrying what the hell to do about it.

Bottoms up!

How is this for Australiana. At an event where lots of blokes turn up, pitch tents in the dirt and watch cars go around really, really fast in circles, police are planning on keeping fans on the ‘straight and narrow’ with a strict alcohol limit of 4 litres of wine, or 24 cans of beer per person, per day.

This is quite possibly the loosest definition of ‘limit’ that has ever been employed by a nation’s law enforcement department. In keeping with Australia’s strict moral code – drink till you drop or die trying – the police are doing a proud job of upholding great Aussie traditions.

I thought I had heard wrong on last night’s ABC news report, until they cut to a tubby bloke in a black beanie saying, “if you’re gonna drink more than 24 cans of beer a day you’ve got a problem, eh”. Um…Do ya think?

The police have made very clear of their commitment to maintaining peace and order, with Assistant Commissioner Alan Clarke saying police will not tolerate alcohol-fuelled violence. In attempt to magically remove alcohol from this equation (rather than the conventional tactic of imposing a sensible limit) the police have gone experimental, investing in bush-mechanic-like training that can extract copious amounts of alcohol from possible offender’s bloodstream, using just a pair of scissors, a piece of garden hose and the officer’s mouth, should the threat of violence occur post 42^nd beer on the 48^th hour. Tax payer money well spent.

And leaving no stone unturned in this quest for alcoholic peace and quiet, police checkpoints will be set up to confiscate any “excess alcohol” (once again using the term in the loosest possible sense, I mean, we’re an easy going country that just likes to paint our faces black with shoe polish and ‘have a laugh’) before it will be stored away in a safe place and made available for collection the following day.

For next years event police are looking into the possibility of doubling up as bartenders, putting to use a still in the pipelines invention that can funnel alcohol directly from a tube in a keg straight down a punters throat.

The Bastard Boys in Blue

It gave me great perspective to read an article about police abuse of power on the same day I had my own run in with the Boys in Blue. The little power play they engaged me in over a minor traffic offence was nothing compared to the treatment this woman encountered

First was their school-yard like assertion of power,”Don’t take my photo. If you take my photo I will put you on your arse so fast it will not be funny,” a junior officer told her.

This kind of talk would have just left them looking pathetic if not for the infuriating fact that they are, you know, in a position of power, and not just some big kid that wants to take your lunch.

They then moved on to the downright insulting, saying to her “you are obviously a bloke”, before following up with a threat of violence. Read to the end of the article and you will see that it doesn’t stop there.

For me it’s not uncommon to hear of these dastardly police stories. Recently my friend had to borrow a pair of nice pants from my boyfriend to wear to court because he was drunk out the front of an anarchist bookstore. He cant even spell anarchy let alone practice any, his only crime was being drunk, which, I believe, hasn’t quite been a crime since the end of prohibition and all. The police just lacked any kind of discretion and judgement.

Another friend was hauled off a railway station by police because he was there waiting for someone and so didn’t have a ticket. As in, he didn’t have a ticket to stand on the platform. Because we all know what a nasty crime that one is. It was pure police harassment, and I think it’s safe to say it was based on his appearance and lifestyle; a quasi bum with unkempt hair and clothes, who was a ‘known offender’ because he ‘illegally’ sold poetry on a street corner.

But these are just the recent run ins. Back when I was all hard core about saving the earth and shit – these days I drive my car to the corner shops where I mindlessly consume bucket loads of CocaCola and Unfair-Trade coffee, before chucking my rubbish down a direct-to-the-ocean drain, driving off, farting methane all the way home, and running down a few kittens for good measure – police horror stories were a dime a dozen.

Friends were hospitalised after taking part in WEF protests at Melbourne crown casino, back when the acronym ‘S11’ had real street cred. Mounted police were sent in over the top of a small group of seated protestors, and bringing up the rear were riot police that had been whipped into a frenzy (by fellow officers) before being let loose into the crowd, like beasts that had been teased by going for days without meat.

As my friend eloquently penned in his song about those experiences: The stakes were high, their minds were full of lies that they’d been fed > I’d rather have had a helmet on when kicked about the head.

And on a far, far, more extreme level of police violence there is the heartbreaking case of Tyler Cassidy. Police were called after he was seen raging in a shopping mall, brandishing two knifes. Within minutes of the police arriving on the scene he was shot dead from 6 of the 10 bullets fired at him by three police officers. He was 15 years old, and is the youngest person to ever be shot by Australian Police. (see The Weekend Australian Magazine article, ‘Did they have to shoot my boy’ by Chris Griffith, published Aug 8-9, 2009).

Incomparable, but related to this tendency of excess, is in the story about Andrea Turner in the Herald, three police officers were called in as back-up before she was escorted off the platform. Another five – including two detectives – also arrived on the scene.

It seems the police are hell bent on earning their colloquial title of thugs in uniform. Far too often what the police really show us is that they have no skills in dealing with people. And what always seems to be the common denominator in police power fuck ups is the fear factor. It’s like they want to give a walking demonstration of the root meaning of xenophobia- fear of what you don’t know, and I guess, what you can’t control.

For me, its hard to shake the unfounded rumour that there are really are low IQ requirements for being a police officer – note again in the Herald story that “Despite several phone calls to their superiors, none of them (the officers) knew which offence, if any, Ms Turner had committed”.

When I read stories like the one in yesterdays Herald, and I think of my first hand experiences with police, I can’t help but see them as power hungry desperados. So desperate for a piece of action that they will take it from a drunk guy on the street, a protestor sitting down, a woman with a camera on a train.

It’s like they are all dressed up with nowhere to go, soldiers with no war to wage, police with no terrorists to catch. But they hungry, and they are on the hunt. Oh, and not to benchmark systems that require them to fulfil infringement quotas.

The only problem is that we are not all criminal lawyers, as is Andrea Turner, we are not all aware of our rights, and we are not all able to get a great expose piece published in the Herald every time a beef head Boy in Blue tries to pull a swiftie, or worse, on us…

 

Apologies for the sweeping generalisations. Yes, there are ‘good’ cops too. Not that it explains why they went and got themselves such a shit job…