The plan was to catch a train to Le Puy-en-Velay to begin the walk.
That was the plan.
I got the train to Gare de Lyon without any problems, but then found out that the only long distance train going to Le Puy was full. I was told to come back tomorrow and, dejected, I went and found a cheap(ish) motel. After a while of moping about I felt a strong urge to go back and ask someone else. I did this and found out that, due to the massive strikes in Paris at the moment, no more trains wpuld be going to Le Puy until at least the end of the week. I decided to hire a car instead.
Europcar was first, they were out of cars. Hertz was next (and I think last), and here I was very lucky. The girl at the counter said that she couldn't help me, so she called Head Office and got me to speak to them. Because my French is non-existent and her English was not very good, she thought I wanted to pick up a car in Le Puy, instead of driving it to Le Puy. If she had have known that she would have told me they had no more cars. Instead, I straightened this out with Head Office, who didn't seem to know about the lack of cars, and they booked one in for me for the following morning.
As I hung up, I heard another girl explaining (in English) to someone that all cars were booked out. I waited until she was finished and asked about my car. She checked the computer, then said, "Wow, you're lucky. We don't have any cars left - but since Head Office have booked you in, we'll just have to find one."
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel feeling miserable. I had come here to escape the stress and lack of alone time, and instead was in a very crowded city that I couldn't seem to get out of, and where any kind of communication bordered on impossible. The last two days have really highlighted just how much importance I place on needing to be understood, and just how much I take it for granted.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Gay Paris
It's strange but even though I've spent somewhere in the vicinity of 26 hours on planes and in airports since yesterday morning, and despite the fact that I spent the rest of the time until this point surrounded by people whose language I can't understand for the life of me, I still don't think the whole concept of what I'm doing has actually sunk in yet.
The flights were pretty non-eventful. The jar of Vegemite I had in my bag as a requested present for my Parisian hosts was confiscated first thing by a Qantas girl. She seemed incredulous that somebody would dare, or simply dream, to bring something like that on board with them. I had nothing else confiscated then, or in the second Qantas check, or in the check in Singapore, but then in London on the final plane switch, they took my expensive bed bug repellent because there was an extra 25ml than allowed in the bottle: It was probably for the best - spending the other flights knowing I had gotten away with this gross breach of international security had got me thinking, and if it hadn't been confiscated, I would have come up with a plan so heinous and infernal those 45 minutes between London and Paris would have gone down in the history books.
But I have enjoyed my day in Paris. My host, Patrick, handed me a helmet, leather jacket and pair of gloves when we got home from the airport, and offered to take me on his infamous motorcycle tour of Paris.
We alternated between short tourist stops where I sometimes remembered that I had a camera with me, and crazed, high-speed races mere inches between buses, cars and other motorcycles. I couldn't help recalling the now broken promise to my travel insurer that I would not be on a motorcycle, and I managed to break that one in less than 24 hours of my trip.
It did give me a chance to observe the rules of Parisian traffic, however. Rule One is that you drive in your lane on the right-hand side of the road. Rule Two states that if it's too hard to stay in your lane, don't worry about it and drive in whatever lane (or number of lanes at any one time) that you feel like. Rule three is that if you can't easily stay on your side of the road due to slow cars, too many cars, or not enough lanes for your liking, don't worry about it and feel free to drive on the wrong side of the road so long as there's nothing coming. (This was clearly amended some time in the late 1990s to add, "and if you really think it will be fun to zip between a bus, two cars and two motorcycles [none of whom are staying in any kind of lane at all, pursuant to Rule Two] when they're on the wrong side of the road, nearly upon you, and everyone's doing fifty over the speed limit in a pedestrian zone where traffic technically shouldn't even be anyway, then we're behind you all the way.") I was pretending I was in some movie, probably as someone like Matt Damon in the Bourne series, getting chased by cops. The real cops don't seem to do anything much actually; it's as if they acknowledge the traffic is much larger, stronger and way crazier than they are, and their solution to it is to close their eyes and pretend they can't see it and that, using the same logic as Douglas Adams's Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, simply deny there even is any traffic.
Anyway, here are some really boring touristy photos. Some are blurry because I took them wearing motorcycle gloves and a full face helmet from the back of a running and impatient motorcycle. Others are that way because I'm really not a very good photographer.
This is a photo of Paris from the highest point. Apparently the building in the background on the far right was the first - and only - really tall office building to have been allowed to be built so high.
This is a photo of the Montmarte Cathedral from the outside. You should have seen the inside. Even with a couple of hundred thousand tourists trying to meander their way through the cathedral, there were those who were just there to pray. I saw one woman throw herself at the velvet rope cordening off a shining, polished metal statue of the Virgin Mary and start weeping.
This is where Opera happens. Note bus, motorcycle and herd of cars just waiting for their moment to leap onto the wrong side of the road and make the pedestrians run for the their lives.
Um, this is one of the gates, can't recall which one. They all kinda look the same to me anyway.
And no Parisian photo journal would be complete without a photo of the Eiffel Tower. It looks smaller in real life.
Okay that's it for me, I've already (quite literally, might I say) fallen asleep about five times while typing this up. Tomorrow - I try to get a train or bus or convince Patrick's cats to saddle up for Le Puy because I am aching to get started on the walk.
The flights were pretty non-eventful. The jar of Vegemite I had in my bag as a requested present for my Parisian hosts was confiscated first thing by a Qantas girl. She seemed incredulous that somebody would dare, or simply dream, to bring something like that on board with them. I had nothing else confiscated then, or in the second Qantas check, or in the check in Singapore, but then in London on the final plane switch, they took my expensive bed bug repellent because there was an extra 25ml than allowed in the bottle: It was probably for the best - spending the other flights knowing I had gotten away with this gross breach of international security had got me thinking, and if it hadn't been confiscated, I would have come up with a plan so heinous and infernal those 45 minutes between London and Paris would have gone down in the history books.
But I have enjoyed my day in Paris. My host, Patrick, handed me a helmet, leather jacket and pair of gloves when we got home from the airport, and offered to take me on his infamous motorcycle tour of Paris.
We alternated between short tourist stops where I sometimes remembered that I had a camera with me, and crazed, high-speed races mere inches between buses, cars and other motorcycles. I couldn't help recalling the now broken promise to my travel insurer that I would not be on a motorcycle, and I managed to break that one in less than 24 hours of my trip.
It did give me a chance to observe the rules of Parisian traffic, however. Rule One is that you drive in your lane on the right-hand side of the road. Rule Two states that if it's too hard to stay in your lane, don't worry about it and drive in whatever lane (or number of lanes at any one time) that you feel like. Rule three is that if you can't easily stay on your side of the road due to slow cars, too many cars, or not enough lanes for your liking, don't worry about it and feel free to drive on the wrong side of the road so long as there's nothing coming. (This was clearly amended some time in the late 1990s to add, "and if you really think it will be fun to zip between a bus, two cars and two motorcycles [none of whom are staying in any kind of lane at all, pursuant to Rule Two] when they're on the wrong side of the road, nearly upon you, and everyone's doing fifty over the speed limit in a pedestrian zone where traffic technically shouldn't even be anyway, then we're behind you all the way.") I was pretending I was in some movie, probably as someone like Matt Damon in the Bourne series, getting chased by cops. The real cops don't seem to do anything much actually; it's as if they acknowledge the traffic is much larger, stronger and way crazier than they are, and their solution to it is to close their eyes and pretend they can't see it and that, using the same logic as Douglas Adams's Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, simply deny there even is any traffic.
Anyway, here are some really boring touristy photos. Some are blurry because I took them wearing motorcycle gloves and a full face helmet from the back of a running and impatient motorcycle. Others are that way because I'm really not a very good photographer.
This is a photo of Paris from the highest point. Apparently the building in the background on the far right was the first - and only - really tall office building to have been allowed to be built so high.
This is a photo of the Montmarte Cathedral from the outside. You should have seen the inside. Even with a couple of hundred thousand tourists trying to meander their way through the cathedral, there were those who were just there to pray. I saw one woman throw herself at the velvet rope cordening off a shining, polished metal statue of the Virgin Mary and start weeping.
This is where Opera happens. Note bus, motorcycle and herd of cars just waiting for their moment to leap onto the wrong side of the road and make the pedestrians run for the their lives.
Um, this is one of the gates, can't recall which one. They all kinda look the same to me anyway.
And no Parisian photo journal would be complete without a photo of the Eiffel Tower. It looks smaller in real life.
Okay that's it for me, I've already (quite literally, might I say) fallen asleep about five times while typing this up. Tomorrow - I try to get a train or bus or convince Patrick's cats to saddle up for Le Puy because I am aching to get started on the walk.
Friday, October 15, 2010
The long walk
I'm slack on the blog writing, aren't I? Well, I'm going to give it another go, this time to document a walk I'm taking from Le Puy in France to Finisterre in Spain. It's known as the Camino Trail, or the Road to Santiago, or the Way of St James, or an insane bloody thing to be doing, depending on who you talk to.
My walk is starting in Le Puy, which is around 4 hours train south east of Paris. Right at the moment there are public transport strikes all over the place, so I'm either going to be starting a little later than expected, or walking a little earlier than expected, or hitch hiking for the first time in my life. From Le Puy I walk roughly south west for around 800km until I reach a town called St Jean Pied de Port, which is the most common starting point for this long pilgrimage, then a more westerly direction for just under 800km more to get to Santiago de Compostela, the official finishing point. I'll then, providing my legs are still holding me up, walk the extra three or four days to Finisterre on the coast, which was once considered to be the edge of the world. I can't go all that way and not go to the edge of the world, right?
After that it'll be a hopscotch across to Barcelona to see a friend and fly out, and a quick detour through Frankfurt so I can spend my layover hours seeing just how much German I've learnt. I find it funny that I've been learning German for a little while, then decide to go to France and Spain - two languages I can barely even say hello in. Fortunately I have phrase books with me and a good sense of humour that may see me through.
I'm hoping to keep this blog fairly regularly, partly because it will be a good way to keep track of what I'm doing, partly because my friend Kate McAwesome is going to Thailand and some other places and promised to keep one if I did. I like her blogs, so this will be the only way for me to read what she's up to as well.
I haven't ever posted a photo in here, nor have I ever used my sister-in-law's camera, so here's an experiment to see if it works. I present to you, Dear Reader, the only bag I'm taking on this three month journey overseas:
Well, that seemed to work okay. Good, this means I should be able to post photos on my travels then, available computers and internet connections pending.
I head to the airport in a couple of hours, and just need to figure out how to fit one extra little bag of kindle/iPod/journal goodness into this very tight pack. Hmm, it seems that it doesn't fit very nicely. Can you believe that the bag (sans little bag with kindle et al) only weighs just under 7kg? This means that unless I get a jerk at the check in, I'll only have carry on luggage - whoo hoo!
Okay, time to finish off the chocolate Matt & Tab gave me for the flight, then I'm ready to go. Wish me Buen Camino!
My walk is starting in Le Puy, which is around 4 hours train south east of Paris. Right at the moment there are public transport strikes all over the place, so I'm either going to be starting a little later than expected, or walking a little earlier than expected, or hitch hiking for the first time in my life. From Le Puy I walk roughly south west for around 800km until I reach a town called St Jean Pied de Port, which is the most common starting point for this long pilgrimage, then a more westerly direction for just under 800km more to get to Santiago de Compostela, the official finishing point. I'll then, providing my legs are still holding me up, walk the extra three or four days to Finisterre on the coast, which was once considered to be the edge of the world. I can't go all that way and not go to the edge of the world, right?
After that it'll be a hopscotch across to Barcelona to see a friend and fly out, and a quick detour through Frankfurt so I can spend my layover hours seeing just how much German I've learnt. I find it funny that I've been learning German for a little while, then decide to go to France and Spain - two languages I can barely even say hello in. Fortunately I have phrase books with me and a good sense of humour that may see me through.
I'm hoping to keep this blog fairly regularly, partly because it will be a good way to keep track of what I'm doing, partly because my friend Kate McAwesome is going to Thailand and some other places and promised to keep one if I did. I like her blogs, so this will be the only way for me to read what she's up to as well.
I haven't ever posted a photo in here, nor have I ever used my sister-in-law's camera, so here's an experiment to see if it works. I present to you, Dear Reader, the only bag I'm taking on this three month journey overseas:
Well, that seemed to work okay. Good, this means I should be able to post photos on my travels then, available computers and internet connections pending.
I head to the airport in a couple of hours, and just need to figure out how to fit one extra little bag of kindle/iPod/journal goodness into this very tight pack. Hmm, it seems that it doesn't fit very nicely. Can you believe that the bag (sans little bag with kindle et al) only weighs just under 7kg? This means that unless I get a jerk at the check in, I'll only have carry on luggage - whoo hoo!
Okay, time to finish off the chocolate Matt & Tab gave me for the flight, then I'm ready to go. Wish me Buen Camino!
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The writing challenge
Sometimes (by which I mean, most times) I find it difficult to motivate myself to write. It's not that I don't enjoy writing, it's just that it seems to be one of those areas of my life that is smothered by an incomprehensible, suffocating phobia with no fixed dimension or form. It's like being afraid not of the dark, but of an absence of light. Or something.
So.
Living within a community of intelligent and creative folks who usually enjoy nothing more than assisting a casual experimentalist in his fun, I have started getting everyone to give me a list of words or sentences or things that I have to write a short story or poem about. These get left in my pigeonhole in an envelope sometime during the day, and I retrieve and read them about 5pm each day. I then have until dinner (which equates to roughly an hour) to put together some kind of narrative. I don't edit the stories, and upon reading them back, even the ones I like, I invariably discover flaws and typos and holes, but that's okay.
Sometimes this works out reasonably well and I write like a man possessed and don't look up until I smell dinner nearby. Sometimes I sit there writing and deleting and writing and deleting until I'm left with half a sentence, and then I close the computer down and pretend it never happened. However it works, I am greatly enjoying the inspiration and the practicality of writing like this each day, if anything it keeps my mind ticking over.
Here's the first story I wrote (a week or two ago) that I was happy with.
My parameters were:
1. A fishtank
2. A rich snob
3. The interior of the earth
The House Inspection
The doorbell rang and I leapt to my feet. It had to be her, nobody ever used the doorbell except her. My friends would always either knock (usually to the beat of whatever was playing through their headphones) or just walk right in. The door was rarely locked.
No, only Susan Rapperport rang the doorbell, and she probably did so with a gloved finger and a tissue on hand to clean the glove. She was fastidious, tedious and immeasurably odious. She was also my landlord.
I scanned the lounge room and found it satisfactory. Not pristine, but even pristine was never good enough for Slapperport, as I liked to call her (never to her face, naturally). No matter how spotless the room she would walk in and sigh in a way that suggested someone had just broken her heart, usually before she’d even looked at anything. A satisfactory state would at least save me a lecture.
The doorbell rang again and I called out, “Coming!” adding quietly to myself, “A word you probably don’t say very often, you frigid…Hi!” I finished up, opening the door and grinning like I was expecting a strip-o-gram. “Mrs. Rapperport, how lovely to see you again. Twice in one month, I feel very honoured.”
She looked down her nose at me, which I had to admit was a difficult thing for her to refrain from doing. Her aquiline honker reared out from between her eyes like a ship’s hull lurching from port, sharp and gleaming. It almost seemed to be smiling itself, probably trying to balance the fact that the bloodless pursed lips below it never did. Her eyes shrunk back from the head of her nose, burrowing their way down into their sockets as if to escape from the light. Her dyed-red hair was pulled back in a bun so tight I wouldn’t be surprised to see the skin around her cheeks tearing apart.
I offered her a hand in greeting. She pulled her own (gloved, of course) to her chest and pointedly ignored it. “I’m here for the house inspection,” she intoned superfluously, like I had taken leave of my senses and thought she might have shown up for a game of Twister. “May I come in?”
Before I could answer she swept her lilac silk scarf across one shoulder and pushed past me. She was a large woman, Mrs. Rapperport, and her shoulder sent me into the door frame like a football tackle. Wincing, I closed the door and followed her wobbling buttocks down the hall.
Mrs. Rapperport owned many houses in my suburb, and so far as I could gather she bullied every single tenant like this. It would almost have made me feel special to think I was her personal bug bear, but she seemed to thrive on constant inspections and harrowing lectures. I figured it was a class thing – her husband (may he rest in peace, although I harboured a morbid yet unrelenting fantasy that she had him stuffed in the freezer and was slowly disposing of the carcass one burger at a time) had pulled her from white collar servitude after a chance meeting in Darling Harbour, and his untimely death (heart attack on the stock market floor when a typo made him think he’d lost his entire fortune) and generous will left her set for life. Perhaps her constant needling of low-income tenants such as myself was her way of putting her past to bed. Of course, she may just have been the biggest bitch I’ve ever met.
“Gerald, there’s a stain on the ceiling in here,” she called loudly, even though I was right behind her. My name is actually Jerry, and it’s certainly not short for Gerald.
“That’s right Mrs. Rapperport, remember I told you about that last time? It’s got to do with that mould issue I was hoping you might…”
“Why is the carpet darker here?” she interjected. With Slapperport, you were to be seen but not heard. Every question was rhetorical, every conversation a monologue. You were nothing but a faceless audience.
“I, I don’t know,” I spluttered in disbelief. “It’s always been darker there, ever since I moved in.”
She was already in the kitchen though – she could sure as hell move fast for such a big girl.
“What. Is. This?” she growled, and that’s when I knew I was in trouble.
“Oh, that,” I laughed feebly, easing my way around her waist to fit into the small kitchen as well. “That’s, uh, that’s Oscar.”
I’m an animal lover, which doesn’t tend to go down too well in rental properties. There are always clauses about no cats, no dogs, no cause in any way, shape or form for fur or faeces to be left lying around to devalue the house. But so far as I could tell, I had never seen a clause outlawing fish.
The reason Slapperport’s jaw was swinging loosely from its joints, however, was that what I had wasn’t really just a fish. I’ve never been one to fit in with the crowd, and a cute little orange goldfish in a bowl isn’t really my style.
Last week, when I knew I had won the bid on Oscar (eBay is truly a market place to be reckoned with), I installed an eight foot tank into the kitchen. My kitchen’s not actually eight foot, so the tank extends out the door and into the backyard a little way. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only place I could fit the damn thing in the house, and Oscar needs to be kept out of direct light. I don’t really want to go into it here but he’s one of those deep sea things that have teeth bigger than its body and glow. He needs room to breathe, really, and the grass snakes he likes to eat tend to thrash about when I drop them in the water.
“I got him last week, isn’t he something?” I realised I was speaking a little too fast. “I’ve always been very careful with pets around here Mrs. Rapperport, I’m a believer in sticking to the rules, but I couldn’t help but notice there was nothing in the rental agreement about not keeping fish…”
“THAT,” she boomed, shooting a finely-manicured finger at the tank, “is not a FISH. THAT,” she continued directly into my face, possibly the first time she’d ever looked directly at me, “is a MONSTROCITY.”
Oscar glowed and gnashed his teeth a little, but then again, he always did that, so I wasn’t too concerned he’d been offended.
“No really, Mrs. Rapperport, he’s definitely a fish. I can pull out a marine encyclopaedia if you want to…”
She held up a hand as if to cast a curse upon me, and paced alongside the tank. Oscar followed her, his little eyes (well, he didn’t actually have eyes, having evolved in a place with no light, but I liked to think of the little black baubles above the fangs as being eyes. It made him a little easier to hang out with) tracing her every move. She turned her back on the tank to squish herself between it and the back door, and thankfully didn’t hear the thud of the glass as Oscar threw himself against it, fang-first.
This wasn’t so good. I was pretty sure I could talk her around with Oscar, but she’d never been to the backyard before and I hadn’t been entirely honest when I said I believed in sticking to the rules. I could only hope Rex stayed hidden in the ferns.
“I will be taking this up with the Tenancy Tribunal,” she snarled. “But first I want to see what else you’re hiding from me. You’ve probably a dog in your shed.” She turned and walked toward it, the ferns to her right.
I turned back to Oscar, making sure he hadn’t snapped a tooth in his futile attack, when I heard her scream.
Screams can be funny things, they rarely sound like the person they come from. Mrs. Rapperport’s scream was thick and curdled, almost like gargling salt water just as it slips down into your throat, despite your best intentions to keep it out of there. I spun around and there was Rex, one claw on her foot and a big, shit-eating grin on his face. I’m not being crude, he had almost certainly been eating shit.
I should probably let you in on something now, which is that when I say I like animals, I mean I like exotic animals. You would have picked that up from Oscar, but he’s probably one of my more conservative pets. Rex is…well, to be honest I don’t really know what Rex is. I won him in a drunken poker game one night in a friend of a friend’s place out in Prestons. Man, you want to see a creepy suburb, that’s Prestons. I call it “Deprestons”, but like I said, I was drunk. Anyway, Rex looks kinda like a komodo dragon, except a little smaller, and with two heads. He’s also jet black and has these little leathery wings folded up along his back, although I can’t say I’ve ever seen him use them. I suppose he’s probably a dragon of some description, but I also can’t say I’ve ever seen him belch out fire or anything. Usually he just likes sitting in the sun and eating shit. Just like a dog I had when I was a kid.
Mrs. Rapperport screamed again, and I reached down to collect Rex before he got scared and did something I’d regret, like bite her foot off.
“Um, this is awkward,” I began. “You see, I’m pretty sure whatever Rex might be is also not specifically banned on my rental agreement…”
Mrs. Rapperport was beyond reasoning though. She ran toward the shed, tears smudging her no doubt animal-tested make up as she went. This was most definitely not a good move.
“Mrs. Rapperport!” I yelled, “Can’t we talk about this?”
But I was too late. Her pudgy hand connected with the shed door with all the force of a battering ram and the old lock (which I really had been intending on fixing, later this week probably) bust apart like confetti at a parade. For a second I thought her bulk might be stopped by the narrow entrance but after a brief struggle she popped through (and now I think back on it the actual “pop” sound, like a cork, was probably only in my head) and disappeared into the dark.
There was no comical banging and clanging from inside, I keep my shed very clean. So clean, in fact, that there’s actually nothing really in there. Except for the hole.
I dropped Rex down (he wandered off to the kitchen to hiss at Oscar, they still hadn’t really become friends yet) and grabbed the hefty torch I kept on a chain outside the shed. I walked through the open door and shone the light down.
I’ve got to say I’m pretty proud of the hole. My parents used to tell me I was the laziest kid they had (and they should know, they had six), but I really worked hard on that hole. It took me four months of digging, and I spent at least a couple of hours nearly every single day on it. I had to do it by hand too, because you can’t just go boring down to the interior of the Earth with heavy machinery on a rental property, someone’s going to complain and then I’d have Slapperport on my back. Although I guess this is probably a moot point now.
I shone the torch down and let it play out on the large well that burrowed down, past where the light could reach. It was the most powerful torch I could find on the market, and it still didn’t reach all the way down. Didn’t I tell you it was some hole?
I don’t know why I looked, there was no chance I was going to see Slapperport again. I think I was just looking for anything left behind, maybe a gouge mark in the wall or something like that. A horrible image came to me then of the round Slapperport falling perfectly down that round hole like a golf ball into its home. I didn’t think that was very charitable of me, even if she was such a bitch.
Seeing nothing, I edged around the well and opened the large freezer on the back wall. I pulled out a frozen hunk of meat (okay, yes, it was a dog, but I prefer to just think of it as “meat”, it makes it easier to kill them) and threw it down. I’m pretty sure I heard a belching, but I can’t be sure. Coco likes to keep to herself down there.
So.
Living within a community of intelligent and creative folks who usually enjoy nothing more than assisting a casual experimentalist in his fun, I have started getting everyone to give me a list of words or sentences or things that I have to write a short story or poem about. These get left in my pigeonhole in an envelope sometime during the day, and I retrieve and read them about 5pm each day. I then have until dinner (which equates to roughly an hour) to put together some kind of narrative. I don't edit the stories, and upon reading them back, even the ones I like, I invariably discover flaws and typos and holes, but that's okay.
Sometimes this works out reasonably well and I write like a man possessed and don't look up until I smell dinner nearby. Sometimes I sit there writing and deleting and writing and deleting until I'm left with half a sentence, and then I close the computer down and pretend it never happened. However it works, I am greatly enjoying the inspiration and the practicality of writing like this each day, if anything it keeps my mind ticking over.
Here's the first story I wrote (a week or two ago) that I was happy with.
My parameters were:
1. A fishtank
2. A rich snob
3. The interior of the earth
The House Inspection
The doorbell rang and I leapt to my feet. It had to be her, nobody ever used the doorbell except her. My friends would always either knock (usually to the beat of whatever was playing through their headphones) or just walk right in. The door was rarely locked.
No, only Susan Rapperport rang the doorbell, and she probably did so with a gloved finger and a tissue on hand to clean the glove. She was fastidious, tedious and immeasurably odious. She was also my landlord.
I scanned the lounge room and found it satisfactory. Not pristine, but even pristine was never good enough for Slapperport, as I liked to call her (never to her face, naturally). No matter how spotless the room she would walk in and sigh in a way that suggested someone had just broken her heart, usually before she’d even looked at anything. A satisfactory state would at least save me a lecture.
The doorbell rang again and I called out, “Coming!” adding quietly to myself, “A word you probably don’t say very often, you frigid…Hi!” I finished up, opening the door and grinning like I was expecting a strip-o-gram. “Mrs. Rapperport, how lovely to see you again. Twice in one month, I feel very honoured.”
She looked down her nose at me, which I had to admit was a difficult thing for her to refrain from doing. Her aquiline honker reared out from between her eyes like a ship’s hull lurching from port, sharp and gleaming. It almost seemed to be smiling itself, probably trying to balance the fact that the bloodless pursed lips below it never did. Her eyes shrunk back from the head of her nose, burrowing their way down into their sockets as if to escape from the light. Her dyed-red hair was pulled back in a bun so tight I wouldn’t be surprised to see the skin around her cheeks tearing apart.
I offered her a hand in greeting. She pulled her own (gloved, of course) to her chest and pointedly ignored it. “I’m here for the house inspection,” she intoned superfluously, like I had taken leave of my senses and thought she might have shown up for a game of Twister. “May I come in?”
Before I could answer she swept her lilac silk scarf across one shoulder and pushed past me. She was a large woman, Mrs. Rapperport, and her shoulder sent me into the door frame like a football tackle. Wincing, I closed the door and followed her wobbling buttocks down the hall.
Mrs. Rapperport owned many houses in my suburb, and so far as I could gather she bullied every single tenant like this. It would almost have made me feel special to think I was her personal bug bear, but she seemed to thrive on constant inspections and harrowing lectures. I figured it was a class thing – her husband (may he rest in peace, although I harboured a morbid yet unrelenting fantasy that she had him stuffed in the freezer and was slowly disposing of the carcass one burger at a time) had pulled her from white collar servitude after a chance meeting in Darling Harbour, and his untimely death (heart attack on the stock market floor when a typo made him think he’d lost his entire fortune) and generous will left her set for life. Perhaps her constant needling of low-income tenants such as myself was her way of putting her past to bed. Of course, she may just have been the biggest bitch I’ve ever met.
“Gerald, there’s a stain on the ceiling in here,” she called loudly, even though I was right behind her. My name is actually Jerry, and it’s certainly not short for Gerald.
“That’s right Mrs. Rapperport, remember I told you about that last time? It’s got to do with that mould issue I was hoping you might…”
“Why is the carpet darker here?” she interjected. With Slapperport, you were to be seen but not heard. Every question was rhetorical, every conversation a monologue. You were nothing but a faceless audience.
“I, I don’t know,” I spluttered in disbelief. “It’s always been darker there, ever since I moved in.”
She was already in the kitchen though – she could sure as hell move fast for such a big girl.
“What. Is. This?” she growled, and that’s when I knew I was in trouble.
“Oh, that,” I laughed feebly, easing my way around her waist to fit into the small kitchen as well. “That’s, uh, that’s Oscar.”
I’m an animal lover, which doesn’t tend to go down too well in rental properties. There are always clauses about no cats, no dogs, no cause in any way, shape or form for fur or faeces to be left lying around to devalue the house. But so far as I could tell, I had never seen a clause outlawing fish.
The reason Slapperport’s jaw was swinging loosely from its joints, however, was that what I had wasn’t really just a fish. I’ve never been one to fit in with the crowd, and a cute little orange goldfish in a bowl isn’t really my style.
Last week, when I knew I had won the bid on Oscar (eBay is truly a market place to be reckoned with), I installed an eight foot tank into the kitchen. My kitchen’s not actually eight foot, so the tank extends out the door and into the backyard a little way. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only place I could fit the damn thing in the house, and Oscar needs to be kept out of direct light. I don’t really want to go into it here but he’s one of those deep sea things that have teeth bigger than its body and glow. He needs room to breathe, really, and the grass snakes he likes to eat tend to thrash about when I drop them in the water.
“I got him last week, isn’t he something?” I realised I was speaking a little too fast. “I’ve always been very careful with pets around here Mrs. Rapperport, I’m a believer in sticking to the rules, but I couldn’t help but notice there was nothing in the rental agreement about not keeping fish…”
“THAT,” she boomed, shooting a finely-manicured finger at the tank, “is not a FISH. THAT,” she continued directly into my face, possibly the first time she’d ever looked directly at me, “is a MONSTROCITY.”
Oscar glowed and gnashed his teeth a little, but then again, he always did that, so I wasn’t too concerned he’d been offended.
“No really, Mrs. Rapperport, he’s definitely a fish. I can pull out a marine encyclopaedia if you want to…”
She held up a hand as if to cast a curse upon me, and paced alongside the tank. Oscar followed her, his little eyes (well, he didn’t actually have eyes, having evolved in a place with no light, but I liked to think of the little black baubles above the fangs as being eyes. It made him a little easier to hang out with) tracing her every move. She turned her back on the tank to squish herself between it and the back door, and thankfully didn’t hear the thud of the glass as Oscar threw himself against it, fang-first.
This wasn’t so good. I was pretty sure I could talk her around with Oscar, but she’d never been to the backyard before and I hadn’t been entirely honest when I said I believed in sticking to the rules. I could only hope Rex stayed hidden in the ferns.
“I will be taking this up with the Tenancy Tribunal,” she snarled. “But first I want to see what else you’re hiding from me. You’ve probably a dog in your shed.” She turned and walked toward it, the ferns to her right.
I turned back to Oscar, making sure he hadn’t snapped a tooth in his futile attack, when I heard her scream.
Screams can be funny things, they rarely sound like the person they come from. Mrs. Rapperport’s scream was thick and curdled, almost like gargling salt water just as it slips down into your throat, despite your best intentions to keep it out of there. I spun around and there was Rex, one claw on her foot and a big, shit-eating grin on his face. I’m not being crude, he had almost certainly been eating shit.
I should probably let you in on something now, which is that when I say I like animals, I mean I like exotic animals. You would have picked that up from Oscar, but he’s probably one of my more conservative pets. Rex is…well, to be honest I don’t really know what Rex is. I won him in a drunken poker game one night in a friend of a friend’s place out in Prestons. Man, you want to see a creepy suburb, that’s Prestons. I call it “Deprestons”, but like I said, I was drunk. Anyway, Rex looks kinda like a komodo dragon, except a little smaller, and with two heads. He’s also jet black and has these little leathery wings folded up along his back, although I can’t say I’ve ever seen him use them. I suppose he’s probably a dragon of some description, but I also can’t say I’ve ever seen him belch out fire or anything. Usually he just likes sitting in the sun and eating shit. Just like a dog I had when I was a kid.
Mrs. Rapperport screamed again, and I reached down to collect Rex before he got scared and did something I’d regret, like bite her foot off.
“Um, this is awkward,” I began. “You see, I’m pretty sure whatever Rex might be is also not specifically banned on my rental agreement…”
Mrs. Rapperport was beyond reasoning though. She ran toward the shed, tears smudging her no doubt animal-tested make up as she went. This was most definitely not a good move.
“Mrs. Rapperport!” I yelled, “Can’t we talk about this?”
But I was too late. Her pudgy hand connected with the shed door with all the force of a battering ram and the old lock (which I really had been intending on fixing, later this week probably) bust apart like confetti at a parade. For a second I thought her bulk might be stopped by the narrow entrance but after a brief struggle she popped through (and now I think back on it the actual “pop” sound, like a cork, was probably only in my head) and disappeared into the dark.
There was no comical banging and clanging from inside, I keep my shed very clean. So clean, in fact, that there’s actually nothing really in there. Except for the hole.
I dropped Rex down (he wandered off to the kitchen to hiss at Oscar, they still hadn’t really become friends yet) and grabbed the hefty torch I kept on a chain outside the shed. I walked through the open door and shone the light down.
I’ve got to say I’m pretty proud of the hole. My parents used to tell me I was the laziest kid they had (and they should know, they had six), but I really worked hard on that hole. It took me four months of digging, and I spent at least a couple of hours nearly every single day on it. I had to do it by hand too, because you can’t just go boring down to the interior of the Earth with heavy machinery on a rental property, someone’s going to complain and then I’d have Slapperport on my back. Although I guess this is probably a moot point now.
I shone the torch down and let it play out on the large well that burrowed down, past where the light could reach. It was the most powerful torch I could find on the market, and it still didn’t reach all the way down. Didn’t I tell you it was some hole?
I don’t know why I looked, there was no chance I was going to see Slapperport again. I think I was just looking for anything left behind, maybe a gouge mark in the wall or something like that. A horrible image came to me then of the round Slapperport falling perfectly down that round hole like a golf ball into its home. I didn’t think that was very charitable of me, even if she was such a bitch.
Seeing nothing, I edged around the well and opened the large freezer on the back wall. I pulled out a frozen hunk of meat (okay, yes, it was a dog, but I prefer to just think of it as “meat”, it makes it easier to kill them) and threw it down. I’m pretty sure I heard a belching, but I can’t be sure. Coco likes to keep to herself down there.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
On the road again
I absolutely love walking up to the highway at night.
At the moment it's really cold, really overcast and really, really dark. If I switch the torch off and press pause on whatever SlowTV lecture I'm listening to, I could almost believe I was walled up in a tomb somewhere. It's silent, chilly and calm as death. Every so often a low and menacing rumble can be heard, and it's not until you can discern the tiny red flashing lights way up high or the weak reflections of the headlights that you can tell whether it's from a plane or a truck.
Tonight the moon smiled out at me like a Cheshire cat, wide grin and no substance. It shimmered through the cloud, seeming to dance around in the sky, peeking out from behind tree branches. As I climbed the steep hill I could feel its laughter upon my back. Looking out halfway up the hill it was the only visible light, even the resort's luminescence was swallowed up by the thick night. The sparkle from the moon's teeth eerily highlighted some menacing clouds moving in, and I imagined myself treading water in the middle of the ocean, the waters calm and ever so dangerous.
Coming back down those clouds rolled up and into the road like a tidal wave in slow motion. I was patiently surrounded, wrapped up and dumped in an exhilarating tackle and then suddenly, they were all behind me, floating off like a dream upon waking.
Some had stayed behind to finish off the cat, and it was all I could do to refrain from constantly looking back over my shoulder, expecting to see that knowing grin right behind me at every step.
Finally I crossed the bridge and the resort held fast against the dark, lit up like a cruise ship in port. Sometimes I can't think of anything better than living here.
At the moment it's really cold, really overcast and really, really dark. If I switch the torch off and press pause on whatever SlowTV lecture I'm listening to, I could almost believe I was walled up in a tomb somewhere. It's silent, chilly and calm as death. Every so often a low and menacing rumble can be heard, and it's not until you can discern the tiny red flashing lights way up high or the weak reflections of the headlights that you can tell whether it's from a plane or a truck.
Tonight the moon smiled out at me like a Cheshire cat, wide grin and no substance. It shimmered through the cloud, seeming to dance around in the sky, peeking out from behind tree branches. As I climbed the steep hill I could feel its laughter upon my back. Looking out halfway up the hill it was the only visible light, even the resort's luminescence was swallowed up by the thick night. The sparkle from the moon's teeth eerily highlighted some menacing clouds moving in, and I imagined myself treading water in the middle of the ocean, the waters calm and ever so dangerous.
Coming back down those clouds rolled up and into the road like a tidal wave in slow motion. I was patiently surrounded, wrapped up and dumped in an exhilarating tackle and then suddenly, they were all behind me, floating off like a dream upon waking.
Some had stayed behind to finish off the cat, and it was all I could do to refrain from constantly looking back over my shoulder, expecting to see that knowing grin right behind me at every step.
Finally I crossed the bridge and the resort held fast against the dark, lit up like a cruise ship in port. Sometimes I can't think of anything better than living here.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Stumblin' in the darkness
Sometimes the only thing you can do is leave everything behind and hit the road. The boy made his way through the darkness, reluctantly lighting his way with a torch for fear he might come off the road. It was a long and empty stretch that cut through the hill like the wind cut through the boy's thin shirt. The moon was nothing but a whispered promise in a cloud too far away to make out any shape.
As he walked he felt a vehicle coming up from behind. He couldn't hear it, because he had music playing in his ears, and he couldn't see it, because the lights were obfuscated by the hillside. But he felt it, and moved to the side of the road. Ten minutes later it came up, a red four wheel drive towing a trailer. The boy felt it slow down, nearly to a walking pace. Much slower than caution passing a pedestrian would dictate. The boy stared at the ground, continued to walk and adopted the face he had perfected when he used to wander around the city late at night. The don't fuck with me face. Whether it was the look or the stride, the four wheel drive picked up its speed and disappeared around a bend. By the time the boy reached the top of the hill, it was nowhere in sight.
A little bit further down on his return journey, the boy stopped and lay down on the road. He felt the cold fingers of the tarmac slide through his shirt, arguing with the sharp stones as to who had strongest claim on his soft flesh. While they debated the boy stared up at the stars.
Sometimes the night sky looked just like a ceiling with lots of fake glow-in-the-dark stickers patched up carelessly. When he craned his neck back the ceiling stretched on, and he could fancy that it was slowly descending upon him, a black sky trying to meet the black road, with him caught in the middle. Sometimes it looked so big that he felt it existed solely for himself. Something so big couldn't have any other purpose than to serve the person looking through it.
The boy glanced sideways and saw the moon, now bloated and yellow, not so much floating up into the sky as being reluctantly pulled. Its colour made him think of the sun, and he thought of the moon as simply the sun sliding back from its track, slipping down an unseen slope to another life. If that happened, the boy thought, would we all develop night vision, or would we just create more lights?
After maybe an hour the cold part of the road finished its argument with the sharp part. The boy rose, teeth chattering, and was unsure as to whether he was the shivering figure standing upright or the black shadow stretched out down the hill. There's something about a shadow cast by the moon that is infinitely more life-like than one cast by the sun. As the boy walked he tried to tell the difference, but had little luck. This time he left the torch off and both he and his shadow, whichever was which, slowly made their way back down the hill as the moon watched on, thinking its own thoughts.
As he walked he felt a vehicle coming up from behind. He couldn't hear it, because he had music playing in his ears, and he couldn't see it, because the lights were obfuscated by the hillside. But he felt it, and moved to the side of the road. Ten minutes later it came up, a red four wheel drive towing a trailer. The boy felt it slow down, nearly to a walking pace. Much slower than caution passing a pedestrian would dictate. The boy stared at the ground, continued to walk and adopted the face he had perfected when he used to wander around the city late at night. The don't fuck with me face. Whether it was the look or the stride, the four wheel drive picked up its speed and disappeared around a bend. By the time the boy reached the top of the hill, it was nowhere in sight.
A little bit further down on his return journey, the boy stopped and lay down on the road. He felt the cold fingers of the tarmac slide through his shirt, arguing with the sharp stones as to who had strongest claim on his soft flesh. While they debated the boy stared up at the stars.
Sometimes the night sky looked just like a ceiling with lots of fake glow-in-the-dark stickers patched up carelessly. When he craned his neck back the ceiling stretched on, and he could fancy that it was slowly descending upon him, a black sky trying to meet the black road, with him caught in the middle. Sometimes it looked so big that he felt it existed solely for himself. Something so big couldn't have any other purpose than to serve the person looking through it.
The boy glanced sideways and saw the moon, now bloated and yellow, not so much floating up into the sky as being reluctantly pulled. Its colour made him think of the sun, and he thought of the moon as simply the sun sliding back from its track, slipping down an unseen slope to another life. If that happened, the boy thought, would we all develop night vision, or would we just create more lights?
After maybe an hour the cold part of the road finished its argument with the sharp part. The boy rose, teeth chattering, and was unsure as to whether he was the shivering figure standing upright or the black shadow stretched out down the hill. There's something about a shadow cast by the moon that is infinitely more life-like than one cast by the sun. As the boy walked he tried to tell the difference, but had little luck. This time he left the torch off and both he and his shadow, whichever was which, slowly made their way back down the hill as the moon watched on, thinking its own thoughts.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Things that have happened over the past few weeks
1. I watched a foal get shot in the head after breaking his leg.
2. I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, found a little inspiration to write, then came home to utter bedlam and have barely even read anything, let alone started writing.
3. I've been missing Angie who is over in Perth for four months.
4. I've been incredibly tempted to tweet horrible things about guests and staff on our official resort twitter site and somehow, thankfully, resisted.
5. I rode my bike approximately 60km in one day and found out the hard way I'm not as fit as I thought I was.
6. I just remembered now I need to put the chickens to bed. Not a huge thing that's happened, but very current.
7. I finally received a book of short stories that I was published in. When I say book, it's more like a zine. But the publishers call it a book, so who am I to argue?
2. I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, found a little inspiration to write, then came home to utter bedlam and have barely even read anything, let alone started writing.
3. I've been missing Angie who is over in Perth for four months.
4. I've been incredibly tempted to tweet horrible things about guests and staff on our official resort twitter site and somehow, thankfully, resisted.
5. I rode my bike approximately 60km in one day and found out the hard way I'm not as fit as I thought I was.
6. I just remembered now I need to put the chickens to bed. Not a huge thing that's happened, but very current.
7. I finally received a book of short stories that I was published in. When I say book, it's more like a zine. But the publishers call it a book, so who am I to argue?
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Still getting wet
I should try to write in here more often.
I just read back through the last post and am happy to report that I've tossed the food books in the recycling. Well, not entirely, but after reading through a few different books at once and finding that not only did they contradict each other but contradicted themselves, sometimes within a couple of pages, I decided that I was probably the best authority on what food I should put into my body. I came to the conclusion that if I like it and I don't eat my own weight in it each day (like I used to down chocolate), then I'm probably going to keep waking up in the morning.
So far I feel exactly the same as I did when I was spending an extra two hours a day trying to prepare something that was supposedly ideal for my blood, body, brain, personality, sense of humour type. I still have enough energy to spend 12 hours a day working in the office (hmm, that I need to work on) and I'm sleeping just fine (no long term effects from my polyphasic experiment so far.)
My only relatively new personal development news is that in September I'm going to embark on a month long yoga teacher training. I worked out that the three yoga teachers here are more often than not unable to take the classes we advertise as being available every day, so I thought I might be able to take at least beginner classes. It's also going to be a nice education for me, and it's happening less than a minute's walk from my door, so how could I refuse? Living with the teacher has its advantages, so I'm already reading one of the highly recommended books for the course, The Heart Of Yoga by T.K.V. Desikachar. I'm enjoying it a lot, it seems to make a lot of sense. There's a lot of talk in there about not just Äsanas but working on the mind and perspective.
I got to thinking about this, and noticed how so many people I seem to come into contact with now are so focussed on becoming an alpha human, a creature who can drop all earthly vices and negativity and abide as the most calm, spiritual and positive being imaginable. And yet, they have just as many or more issues than the drunken moron I used to sell merch to, who thought dribbling his warm beer over himself was about as spiritual as life got. Somehow, all this inner work is just not translating from the serene reading in bed at night to the hard reality of actually living life. To my mind it's like we're all spending a lot of time drying ourselves furiously with a large, fluffy towel in the comforts of our house before walking out in the rain thinking we're going to stay dry. The best we can hope for is that we remember to keep hold of that towel so at least we have a piece of damp material to hold over our heads when the downpour begins.
It's not an analogy that I think serves as an excuse to forget it all and start shooting smack, but it's an interesting thing that I try to keep in mind when I find myself swearing at the computer or losing my temper with someone who works with me. As Desikachar observes in his book, personal development is not something designed for our age of haste, it's something that will take a lifetime. Not even can, but will. Anyone who thinks otherwise, as far as I can gather, is probably only setting themselves back further.
I just read back through the last post and am happy to report that I've tossed the food books in the recycling. Well, not entirely, but after reading through a few different books at once and finding that not only did they contradict each other but contradicted themselves, sometimes within a couple of pages, I decided that I was probably the best authority on what food I should put into my body. I came to the conclusion that if I like it and I don't eat my own weight in it each day (like I used to down chocolate), then I'm probably going to keep waking up in the morning.
So far I feel exactly the same as I did when I was spending an extra two hours a day trying to prepare something that was supposedly ideal for my blood, body, brain, personality, sense of humour type. I still have enough energy to spend 12 hours a day working in the office (hmm, that I need to work on) and I'm sleeping just fine (no long term effects from my polyphasic experiment so far.)
My only relatively new personal development news is that in September I'm going to embark on a month long yoga teacher training. I worked out that the three yoga teachers here are more often than not unable to take the classes we advertise as being available every day, so I thought I might be able to take at least beginner classes. It's also going to be a nice education for me, and it's happening less than a minute's walk from my door, so how could I refuse? Living with the teacher has its advantages, so I'm already reading one of the highly recommended books for the course, The Heart Of Yoga by T.K.V. Desikachar. I'm enjoying it a lot, it seems to make a lot of sense. There's a lot of talk in there about not just Äsanas but working on the mind and perspective.
I got to thinking about this, and noticed how so many people I seem to come into contact with now are so focussed on becoming an alpha human, a creature who can drop all earthly vices and negativity and abide as the most calm, spiritual and positive being imaginable. And yet, they have just as many or more issues than the drunken moron I used to sell merch to, who thought dribbling his warm beer over himself was about as spiritual as life got. Somehow, all this inner work is just not translating from the serene reading in bed at night to the hard reality of actually living life. To my mind it's like we're all spending a lot of time drying ourselves furiously with a large, fluffy towel in the comforts of our house before walking out in the rain thinking we're going to stay dry. The best we can hope for is that we remember to keep hold of that towel so at least we have a piece of damp material to hold over our heads when the downpour begins.
It's not an analogy that I think serves as an excuse to forget it all and start shooting smack, but it's an interesting thing that I try to keep in mind when I find myself swearing at the computer or losing my temper with someone who works with me. As Desikachar observes in his book, personal development is not something designed for our age of haste, it's something that will take a lifetime. Not even can, but will. Anyone who thinks otherwise, as far as I can gather, is probably only setting themselves back further.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
My Bloody Diet
In my ongoing search for various experiments to inflict upon my unsuspecting body, last week I started a blood type diet. There is one train of thought, so far as I can tell originating from a couple of American naturopaths (a father and son team at that), that suggests that your perfect diet can be completely dictated by your blood type.
I should note that when I talk about diet I am talking about overall strategies for eating and health, not some ridiculous plan to get thin. I don't need to get thinner. If I got any thinner I could fit into the fax machine and send myself around the world for almost nothing.
So I started thinking about this after a visit to the local Port Macquarie kinesiologist, acupuncturist, masseuse, naturopath and all round health conscious person Jacqualine O'Brien. Most of the people living here have suddenly developed an addiction to seeing her, to the point where she's talking about making day trips out here to save all of us coming in so often. For my part, she's been helping to realign my skeleton and musculature system that seems hellbent on slowly turning me into a human variety of Angothra. It's working well.
But after one visit Pam, who was also there, was getting a blood test. I have never known what blood type I am, so I asked to be pricked as well. Turns out I'm an A. I don't know whether I'm positive or negative. From what I've read this has little to do with anything of any use, so I don't really care.
After Mark told me I was an A (and oohed and aahed over my exquisite blood specimen that did exactly what an A type blood specimen should), he gave me a few pages that talked about the best diet for my blood type. As these things tend to happen, a couple of days earlier Angie's aunt who had been visiting had left us a book called Eat Right For Your Type. Funnily enough, it was written by the same two dudes I mentioned above, and was where this short summary that Mark handed over came from.
The most interesting and relieving thing I noticed was that for an A blood type, the best possible diet you can have is vegetarian. They recommend that if you're an A blood type and not vegetarian, you should seriously contemplate it. Meat for you is like glue for horses. You don't want to go there.
It was actually nice to see that a lot of foods I like eating (lemons, ginger, apples, grains, lentils, even chocolate - that's right, chocolate!) are good for me. It even recommends I have half a lemon in a glass of water every morning (I've just been downing the juice of a whole one straight - that's how I roll). The downsides were that I'm not supposed to eat cheese, which is something I've always consumed in almost as large quantities as chocolate. I'm "allowed" goat's cheese, feta, ricotta and mozarella, but only in small amounts. It was also saddening to find that oranges and bananas, my two favourite fruits, and well and truly in the avoid camp. So much so that the book talks about oranges for a whole paragraph, explaining how they know how much us A types like them but for the love of God, leave them alone because they'll turn our stomach linings into something the Toxic Avenger might blow out of his nose.
Like most of these kinds of things I'm reserving a healthy amount of skepticism, but an eager and open mind to see what happens. I've been keeping almost religiously to the diet for the past week, and haven't yet noticed any specific health improvements except perhaps for slightly more energy. Now, I normally have more energy than most people (or has Henry Rollins has offered in regards to his own cynicism, more than the average stadium of people). But Jacqualine told me that she feels my body is almost constantly in fight or flight mode, ready to punch on or run every second I'm awake. This might also explain why I can nap so well - at the mere hint of sleep, my body instantly shuts down in an attempt to make the most of the rest period. She believes the extra energy I'm feeling could well be a more normal kind of energy, meaning I'm using real energy instead of working off reserves all the time that are meant to be just that - reserved for something special (like facing down a charging bull, which nearly happened yesterday, but that's another story).
So I figure I'll stick to this for a few weeks, or at least for as long as I can go without cheddar, and see what happens. If I can become a super healthy machine, then perhaps I'll keep with it. If not, I'll go back to normal, which isn't that far from the diet anyway. It just has more cheese.
I should note that when I talk about diet I am talking about overall strategies for eating and health, not some ridiculous plan to get thin. I don't need to get thinner. If I got any thinner I could fit into the fax machine and send myself around the world for almost nothing.
So I started thinking about this after a visit to the local Port Macquarie kinesiologist, acupuncturist, masseuse, naturopath and all round health conscious person Jacqualine O'Brien. Most of the people living here have suddenly developed an addiction to seeing her, to the point where she's talking about making day trips out here to save all of us coming in so often. For my part, she's been helping to realign my skeleton and musculature system that seems hellbent on slowly turning me into a human variety of Angothra. It's working well.
But after one visit Pam, who was also there, was getting a blood test. I have never known what blood type I am, so I asked to be pricked as well. Turns out I'm an A. I don't know whether I'm positive or negative. From what I've read this has little to do with anything of any use, so I don't really care.
After Mark told me I was an A (and oohed and aahed over my exquisite blood specimen that did exactly what an A type blood specimen should), he gave me a few pages that talked about the best diet for my blood type. As these things tend to happen, a couple of days earlier Angie's aunt who had been visiting had left us a book called Eat Right For Your Type. Funnily enough, it was written by the same two dudes I mentioned above, and was where this short summary that Mark handed over came from.
The most interesting and relieving thing I noticed was that for an A blood type, the best possible diet you can have is vegetarian. They recommend that if you're an A blood type and not vegetarian, you should seriously contemplate it. Meat for you is like glue for horses. You don't want to go there.
It was actually nice to see that a lot of foods I like eating (lemons, ginger, apples, grains, lentils, even chocolate - that's right, chocolate!) are good for me. It even recommends I have half a lemon in a glass of water every morning (I've just been downing the juice of a whole one straight - that's how I roll). The downsides were that I'm not supposed to eat cheese, which is something I've always consumed in almost as large quantities as chocolate. I'm "allowed" goat's cheese, feta, ricotta and mozarella, but only in small amounts. It was also saddening to find that oranges and bananas, my two favourite fruits, and well and truly in the avoid camp. So much so that the book talks about oranges for a whole paragraph, explaining how they know how much us A types like them but for the love of God, leave them alone because they'll turn our stomach linings into something the Toxic Avenger might blow out of his nose.
Like most of these kinds of things I'm reserving a healthy amount of skepticism, but an eager and open mind to see what happens. I've been keeping almost religiously to the diet for the past week, and haven't yet noticed any specific health improvements except perhaps for slightly more energy. Now, I normally have more energy than most people (or has Henry Rollins has offered in regards to his own cynicism, more than the average stadium of people). But Jacqualine told me that she feels my body is almost constantly in fight or flight mode, ready to punch on or run every second I'm awake. This might also explain why I can nap so well - at the mere hint of sleep, my body instantly shuts down in an attempt to make the most of the rest period. She believes the extra energy I'm feeling could well be a more normal kind of energy, meaning I'm using real energy instead of working off reserves all the time that are meant to be just that - reserved for something special (like facing down a charging bull, which nearly happened yesterday, but that's another story).
So I figure I'll stick to this for a few weeks, or at least for as long as I can go without cheddar, and see what happens. If I can become a super healthy machine, then perhaps I'll keep with it. If not, I'll go back to normal, which isn't that far from the diet anyway. It just has more cheese.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Star struck
I've really got to find some motivation to write in here more often now that I don't have the at-hand inspiration of sleep deprivation and the amusing things it does to the body to analyse. Perhaps I just don't lead a very interesting life out here in the country.
The resort here set up its own Twitter account quite a few months ago. I tried to get the other staff interested in tweeting but nobody, and I mean nobody at all, has any interest in being involved. They don't see the point. In fact, we were talking about deleting the account until someone driving past one day set their phone to collect tweets from people in the area. He was surprised to find someone tweeting near him when he was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and pulled in to visit. As a result we had a decent sized church reunion held here with a much bigger one planned for next year. So Twitter became an accepted, however grudgingly, form of promotion.
I'm not the most technically capable nor knowledgable person you will ever find. I resisted Facebook for ages, and I don't have my own Twitter account because I just don't enjoy people's company enough to want to interact with them 24 hours per day. I enjoy Craig time, I love having space to hide away to myself, reading books that don't need to be charged, listening to albums I need to physically place on a turntable or in a CD player. I'm not about to argue that the world shouldn't be speeding along its technological path, and I'm not about to start marching in the streets to prevent the mass slaughter of CDs, but I'm also not going to deny I love kicking it old school.
But I've been listening to some lectures from SlowTV that discuss Twitter, and I've slowly been learning what it's supposed to be about. (Phil here tried to tell me yesterday that it was about whatever anyone wanted it to be about, but I disagree, I think that if the majority think it's about something then that's what it's about. You can disagree but you're not going to be communicating with the rest of the Twitter world who don't agree with you.) To date I've just been updating with the most banal and esoterical snippets you could imagine. I mean, I try to post interesting things but for god's sake, we live in a place where the highlights of some days are that we got eight eggs from the chickens instead of seven.
But apparently it's all about sharing and caring. Posting lots of interesting links and retweeting lots of interesting tweets. I've been contemplating spending more time on there so that our resort personna attracts more friends and hence more promotion. It just makes sense.
So I added a couple more people, namely the journalists Leigh Sales and John Birmingham. I read both their work in The Monthly regularly, and like the cut of their jib, so to say. (On a side note, Phil told me that Leigh Sales is a regular at the Bodymindlife Yoga Studio he runs in Surry Hills - small world.) The next morning I logged on to find, much to my shock, John Birmingham was following us in return.
I love the guy's writing. He Died With A Felafel In His Hand is the obvious hit, however I absolutely adore his "unauthorised biography" of Sydney, the vast Leviathon. In terms of research and information it's as compact as Robert Hughe's The Fatal Shore, but with a much sharper sense of humour. Okay, so Hughes's tome has no sense of humour. Birmingham has the attitude of an illiterate larrikan except he can actually write. It's a wonderful mix, especially when you're reading his fascinating political articles.
I noticed him following us and double checked to make sure it was the real Birmingham (links to his articles, notes on his drunken escapades - yep, definitely him). I then started thinking, "How can I continue to tweet the tweets of the past with John Birmingham reading them?" Suddenly it's not just a throw away comment to bust out before signing in a group booking, it's a literary creation that has to be good enough for the eyes of a revered and respected (if only by me, I think only one other person here knows who he is) author.
I now plan on working on my tweets for at least two hours per missive, and send it off to Jude who lives here and is an editor in her own right for checking. I'll attempt to keep character, plot and a thematic brilliance that not only enlightens on life here at Jasper's, but consists of clever societal undertones and comments on the wider world we live in.
Christ, and I thought writing stories was a challenge.
The resort here set up its own Twitter account quite a few months ago. I tried to get the other staff interested in tweeting but nobody, and I mean nobody at all, has any interest in being involved. They don't see the point. In fact, we were talking about deleting the account until someone driving past one day set their phone to collect tweets from people in the area. He was surprised to find someone tweeting near him when he was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and pulled in to visit. As a result we had a decent sized church reunion held here with a much bigger one planned for next year. So Twitter became an accepted, however grudgingly, form of promotion.
I'm not the most technically capable nor knowledgable person you will ever find. I resisted Facebook for ages, and I don't have my own Twitter account because I just don't enjoy people's company enough to want to interact with them 24 hours per day. I enjoy Craig time, I love having space to hide away to myself, reading books that don't need to be charged, listening to albums I need to physically place on a turntable or in a CD player. I'm not about to argue that the world shouldn't be speeding along its technological path, and I'm not about to start marching in the streets to prevent the mass slaughter of CDs, but I'm also not going to deny I love kicking it old school.
But I've been listening to some lectures from SlowTV that discuss Twitter, and I've slowly been learning what it's supposed to be about. (Phil here tried to tell me yesterday that it was about whatever anyone wanted it to be about, but I disagree, I think that if the majority think it's about something then that's what it's about. You can disagree but you're not going to be communicating with the rest of the Twitter world who don't agree with you.) To date I've just been updating with the most banal and esoterical snippets you could imagine. I mean, I try to post interesting things but for god's sake, we live in a place where the highlights of some days are that we got eight eggs from the chickens instead of seven.
But apparently it's all about sharing and caring. Posting lots of interesting links and retweeting lots of interesting tweets. I've been contemplating spending more time on there so that our resort personna attracts more friends and hence more promotion. It just makes sense.
So I added a couple more people, namely the journalists Leigh Sales and John Birmingham. I read both their work in The Monthly regularly, and like the cut of their jib, so to say. (On a side note, Phil told me that Leigh Sales is a regular at the Bodymindlife Yoga Studio he runs in Surry Hills - small world.) The next morning I logged on to find, much to my shock, John Birmingham was following us in return.
I love the guy's writing. He Died With A Felafel In His Hand is the obvious hit, however I absolutely adore his "unauthorised biography" of Sydney, the vast Leviathon. In terms of research and information it's as compact as Robert Hughe's The Fatal Shore, but with a much sharper sense of humour. Okay, so Hughes's tome has no sense of humour. Birmingham has the attitude of an illiterate larrikan except he can actually write. It's a wonderful mix, especially when you're reading his fascinating political articles.
I noticed him following us and double checked to make sure it was the real Birmingham (links to his articles, notes on his drunken escapades - yep, definitely him). I then started thinking, "How can I continue to tweet the tweets of the past with John Birmingham reading them?" Suddenly it's not just a throw away comment to bust out before signing in a group booking, it's a literary creation that has to be good enough for the eyes of a revered and respected (if only by me, I think only one other person here knows who he is) author.
I now plan on working on my tweets for at least two hours per missive, and send it off to Jude who lives here and is an editor in her own right for checking. I'll attempt to keep character, plot and a thematic brilliance that not only enlightens on life here at Jasper's, but consists of clever societal undertones and comments on the wider world we live in.
Christ, and I thought writing stories was a challenge.
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