Good evening you Pashas of passion,
Love.
What is it? Where do I get it? How much will it cost me and can I take it back if I keep the receipt?
It seems to me that the world in general bandies about the whole term love as if it were as concrete a term as concrete tern (on display at Apollo Bay's "Sea life In Building Materials" exhibition". Unmissable stuff.).
But, in fact, Love is one of those ephemeral ideas like a slippery Eel made from Teflon steam.
It's in fact a concept that really does belong with all those other concept albums, like Rick Wakeman's journey to the Centre of a busy Shopping Centre or Led Zeppelins famous "Chip" album recorded inside a frying potato so they didn't have to wait for Bonzo to snort his bag of crisps every five feckin' minutes and he could just chew on the walls between takes.
Love.
It's the emotional blouse that goes with everything else in out existence wardrobes. The little black dress of the soul. The comfy trakky daks of meaning.
We crave it like some magic shampoo that washes, dries and irons our sins away and gets the most stubborn regret build up off out eternal ovens.
We gussy ourselves up for it. We flog our balls senseless at gyms in order to look good for it.
We culture pearls in our brains with witty grit so we can splash out a giggly pendant of nous when it arrives.
We yak onto to our mates about it, sagely stroking our beards or adjusting our bras (or if it's love in the Circus, both).
We scoria up the driveway to our heart so the love can smirk on up in the big black cadillac of joy (that it reputedly gets around in) and we lay the table of our pink bits with luscious temptations, hoping love will drop by after the gig and dial up a big bowl of rooty snacks.
But what the fuck is this love? What is this shizzle that we all seem hell bent on smothering ourselves with?
In my darker, perhaps more cape wearing attitudes to love, I would make the pointy headed point that if love were a snuffling white powder it would be treated as a dangerous narcotic and you'd get 20 years in the slammer if it was found in your dandruff.
I'm giving a big honk on the sincerity horn here when I can honestly say I've seen more people lose there sweet muffined minds over-dosing on love than i have on any other drug/drink/ frog lick combined.
I would even go so far as to say that as you are reading this, you're getting that strange pang right behind your left tit that says "Yup, I once was so cactus on love I couldn't tell Cola from moose poop."
Face it. We've all been there.
Sitting there in some busted up dive with our droopy britches full of cheap bourbon, black and gold budget regret, strung out on love.
You end up such a basket case that every friend you have is faking death so they don't have to put up with your maudlin bunkum.
You're whole life has been ground down to the point where you're bin licking in the cancer ward, cursing he fact you're your own dealer and you've forgotten your own phone number.
You're going through the bad old heebie jeebies. You've had a hurtin' put on you.
You end up being in the horrible, desperate mind maze where all you wanna do is go back to that dark doorway, just get one more taste of that sweet, sweet blissful passion.......... but deep down in your Holy Soul socks you know you'll wake up the next day all bug eyed and goo goo brained with sticky regret, scratching your fanny balls in a beaded sweat and dreading going through it all again.
You might last that awful week we're your all strung out and your tongue is full of that mouse shit and burnt cardboard tasting pain that occurs when we walk away from loving some freak ,who wanted to "eat our livers together as sign of fidelity".
That monstrous body punching fortnight where the pink elephants of love piss hot detergent in your ears and you'd do anything to stop the pain, anything to feel that sweet needless euphoria, anything to become a blind ghost made from fairy floss at a family BBQ.
But is this love?
Some of you more stubborn types go down the old Hard Line Communist Road to Love, singing your encouraging songs until you end up snaring some character who's easy on the eyes and twitterpates your daphne sprizted heart.
You goose around for a bit, try each other on, wash the material a couple of times to see if it shrinks and if your not already pregnant by then, you shack up or go and ask some Guy in a Dress to ask God about the catering.
You do stuff and climb mountains and root in hot tubs. Then, if you haven't already had four kids, you have a kid. And another.
And it's all Love that's cranked you along to this point.
It's held you together when you had than barney in Prague where you rooted the crazy cat or kitten (or then cat first and then kitten. Then kitten on top and cat underneath. Then kitten with cat) after you to saw her posing naked for the Duke who was smearing assorted boobs with charcoal and money.
It held you together when even the letterbox smelt like baby shit and you ran away and slept on the roof just to have five minutes to your self.
But what is this love stuff that allows us to suffer such madness? Have a look out the window. You don't see stray dogs wearing baggy pants to get the girls nor do you see songbirds having breakdowns over nest rental.
They seem to do ok.
So let's get in the lab, fire up a beaker or two and poke a pipette up the meaning of love shall we?
One could look at love as a kind of toffee that glues together the working souls of people who end up have no further dreams in life other than to have someone to yell at over tea bag choice.
Perhaps this whole sticky Love mummery stems from when we were busy taming this planet, living in a bark huts made from dead fish and you simply needed someone to stick around for ages (or until you popped yer clogs) to collect the shit that dropped out of the arse of the domesticated plough animal so you could roll it into balls to sell at the highly lucrative shit market.
Maybe love is just a clever economic choice- One ploughs the fields. The other collects the shit. (Sounds like most double incomes I know. Except in the old scheme tax time meant pleurisy).
Was "love" then perhaps something our greedy brains started secreting so we could til the soil and the oblongata could stuff it's energising guts with double the pig sausage and flaked corn toast?
A sweet smelling collection of delightful chemical sluicings, luscious endorphins that stopped us from throwing rocks a each other and allowed us to to work together to create the majesty of the Pontiac potato and the plug in kettle?
Nothing more than a chemical bond our mammalian cerebellums conjured up when realised that in fact the insects were onto something and no matter how sexy you looked being a lone lynx , the only way we as a species was going to smash it's way to the top was to hook up in long lasting chemical chains of connections, nullify every primal urge we had to run away from the thing that was shitting us to tears and to stick together, forever, in order to leave our lawnmower collection to the kids?
Maybe Love is just a bunch of slick little excretions that Life (with a big L) started to put together once it realised that this Planet shits itself every million years or so and It really needed to somehow get the monkeys to pal up in order to build a fucking huge disco in space and get the funk out of here before the Sun goes Nova?
Are we just all taking out home loans and pretending to like each others televisions programs because Life (with a capital L) has gone back to the lab and smothered us with a Mecano of febrile pheromones so it can get the hell outta dodge and, for better or worse, richer or poorer, Fonzy or Potsy, it needs a bunch of crazy apes (that usually would be too busy throwing rocks and arse debris at each other) to get the hell outta the solar system pool before it all turns to a steamy piss jelly when the asteroid hits?
Is Life (with a large L) simply banging us together in order to complete it's evolutionary thesis? Are we the tools of Crazy Ol' Man Time who likes programs about things arguing and rooting? Is love the slim precipice between endless compromise and nuclear explosions?
I don't know. But I have my suspicions.............
Til next time
Mick "Loveknuckles" Dog.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Replace the GDP with a Funk index.
Good evening my beery breathed brethren,
I've been looking around lately and I can't help but notice that flared trousers are pretty thin on the ground and there seems to be a lot of squares who are having trouble getting their groove on.
In fact I went down to the town hall funk gauge to check out our storage levels.
Low, baby, really low. I don't want to freak you lil' chickens out here but I'm telling you we are in the middle of a serious groove drought.
Now I'm hep to the fact were in 2010.
For sure we've got electric face straighteners and every child can translate the bible into wing dings a the touch of a monogrammed button.
But what grounds have we gained in genuine cool research?
For all our ability to order coffee off the television and meet red hot Russian dishwashers who are standing by to fold our tea towels, what steps have we made toward a hipper more laid back society of truly hep and beautiful cats?
If I'm to be frank, you can keep your space programs and your insistent billion dollar research whether or not poverty makes people grumpy.
To my mind it's just a ribald fact. The biggest threat to the World right now is not volcanos blasting cheap flights into our stratosphere or fish suddenly evolving guns in their eyes.
It's that humanity (or the bits of it I have to deal with) is seriously un-fucking-cool and way too fuckin' heavy.
Think about it cats.
When was the last time you came roaring down the street on some sort of hotted up custom painted motorbike, with your macramé top on and an Ankh around your gusset, to fall in the front door of your lush pot plant happy pad and be immediately handed a reefer while Doug Parkinson made a casserole that out fuzzed the band?
When was the last time some really way out cat came up to you with an independent newspaper printed on silken Egyptian trousers and explained in matter of a fact (yet strangely mellifluous tones) that you were being bent over a pickle barrel by some heavy jokers who were really bumming the Planet out?
And when was the last time that cat said "You got to fight the power man!" and then proceeded to crash down (in your bean bag full of tropical fish) and suggest the best way to deal with this bad scene was to drop some acid with pictures of Fruit Tingles on them?
Upon producing some excellent vintage speckledy acid and dropping it in the Pegasus room, when was the last time a really good looking sort then popped out from behind your faux wood bar with a bottle of Haigs whiskey and suggested you should both go and get cosmic in the spa?
Upon reaching the spa when was the last time you fell out of your clothes and writhed about in beautiful freaky jazz passion with some crazy bird or bloke (not a bird bloke unless that's your thing, man) and you just made beautiful deep surround sound love while your skull smashed laughing paint cans of ecstasy on and around your personal signed copy of Margaret Fultan's "Astrology. The Australian way"?
When was the last time you just sat there watching the tap drip into infinite time and space, getting sparkling head off some instant soul mate whose name was irrelevant and whose eyes kept writhing around you like serpents from Saturn, until your eight fingered hand reached out into the Orgone scented night and wrapped their mascara around your oblongata like a llama scarf from Love's own Op shop?
When was the last time you really boiled some lava in the lamp and told gravity that it would be a stone cold gas for it to have the night off, while the rest of the house lazily frugged to some wigged out guitar player who wrote the names of the Tibetan dead in feed back and the good old World just chugged along like a really big cool elephant that kept an amazing bar and told piss funny jokes?
When was the last time your best mate then stumbled into the room, where the sandalwood spa and the Galaga taps and the stunning head we're all just grooving along like a motorbike made out of kung fu and hamburgers, then leaned over the fuming waters of uterine bliss and handed you a hash joint that smelt like childhood Christmas?
A reefer so blissed out that when you drew back on it your muscles became some sort of litmus jelly that turned you blue, then pink, then orange, then gold so you could wander around the party like a crazy mood ring that gave of clear signals as to who was tripping balls?
And as you were lying there being frolicked and steamed and turned a delicate shade of peacock blue by some beautiful cat who learnt to play electric Mellotron while he was part of Australia's Wah pedal rescue squad in Morocco, when was the last time the Sun came as brilliant and magnificent as God's own footy team and you looked out over the field of 50 watt speaker grass and glistening snow globe sands and answered the ancient and timeless call to go back to where it all began baby?
So you just finned your way back to the Ocean, where the water smelt like salt and vinegar chips and there were Unicorn Dolphins that knew all the bass lines to the Best of Fat Albert.
And when you got back to the house shivering and reborn, covered with minute star boiled crystals that made you shine like Disco Jesus, there was some real grounded chick or bloke with her boobs out or his buttocks brazen as snuggly steel and you were given a big plate of bacon and eggs and you had a top feed before you went to rub the last of traces of Celestial funk off on someone else crazy and cool, because all the previous pairings got mixed up during the swim 'cause everyone was a bit off their heads?
When? Huh?
Go over to your IDiary and iDial up the IApp you use to iRemeber what it was like to be truly mellowed out and bursting with hopeful love and give me a date.
5 years ago? 10? 20? Just as I thought......
Your IPhone is just a small square of square so unhip it's a rectangle.
Every time you look at the prick of a thing it sucks a little more funk from your groove gland and turns you into a heavy uptight cat who freaks out coz you can't get freaky anymore.
Throw it away. I defy you to find a passage in the Bible or the Koran or Lau Tzu's celebrity cook book that says "And Lo the lord said unto the people "I'll txt u on Thrsdy".
Our country is in a groove drought so bad we are about to elect to the position of Prime Minister a man so filled with anti-funk he's liable to suggest the word "man" be replaced with "tax payer".
Our reserves of hip are so low our children will be born going straight from belly button to knee cap within the next to two generations.
Our cosmic love balance is so low we'll probably hit Zimbabwe up for a few new Christmas cracker gags just to get through it all.
I implore you all.
Don't save your funk in buckets and carefully tip it over electric daffodils to watch the sparks rip worm holes in the void twice a year.
Start splashing your funk. Just start lading that good shit all over the place.
Sell your shares in cancer and acne and buy something embroidered with stars and moons. Put some fringes on your chairs. Reclaim the casserole. Grow your hair or shave it into imaginary animal patterns.
Say to your boss "Man, I'm just a crazy cat trying to keep it real. Y'all can sit on it and sign language your bowels if you don't dig who I am."
Till next time kittens,
Mick " Damn your white goods to hell" Dog.
I've been looking around lately and I can't help but notice that flared trousers are pretty thin on the ground and there seems to be a lot of squares who are having trouble getting their groove on.
In fact I went down to the town hall funk gauge to check out our storage levels.
Low, baby, really low. I don't want to freak you lil' chickens out here but I'm telling you we are in the middle of a serious groove drought.
Now I'm hep to the fact were in 2010.
For sure we've got electric face straighteners and every child can translate the bible into wing dings a the touch of a monogrammed button.
But what grounds have we gained in genuine cool research?
For all our ability to order coffee off the television and meet red hot Russian dishwashers who are standing by to fold our tea towels, what steps have we made toward a hipper more laid back society of truly hep and beautiful cats?
If I'm to be frank, you can keep your space programs and your insistent billion dollar research whether or not poverty makes people grumpy.
To my mind it's just a ribald fact. The biggest threat to the World right now is not volcanos blasting cheap flights into our stratosphere or fish suddenly evolving guns in their eyes.
It's that humanity (or the bits of it I have to deal with) is seriously un-fucking-cool and way too fuckin' heavy.
Think about it cats.
When was the last time you came roaring down the street on some sort of hotted up custom painted motorbike, with your macramé top on and an Ankh around your gusset, to fall in the front door of your lush pot plant happy pad and be immediately handed a reefer while Doug Parkinson made a casserole that out fuzzed the band?
When was the last time some really way out cat came up to you with an independent newspaper printed on silken Egyptian trousers and explained in matter of a fact (yet strangely mellifluous tones) that you were being bent over a pickle barrel by some heavy jokers who were really bumming the Planet out?
And when was the last time that cat said "You got to fight the power man!" and then proceeded to crash down (in your bean bag full of tropical fish) and suggest the best way to deal with this bad scene was to drop some acid with pictures of Fruit Tingles on them?
Upon producing some excellent vintage speckledy acid and dropping it in the Pegasus room, when was the last time a really good looking sort then popped out from behind your faux wood bar with a bottle of Haigs whiskey and suggested you should both go and get cosmic in the spa?
Upon reaching the spa when was the last time you fell out of your clothes and writhed about in beautiful freaky jazz passion with some crazy bird or bloke (not a bird bloke unless that's your thing, man) and you just made beautiful deep surround sound love while your skull smashed laughing paint cans of ecstasy on and around your personal signed copy of Margaret Fultan's "Astrology. The Australian way"?
When was the last time you just sat there watching the tap drip into infinite time and space, getting sparkling head off some instant soul mate whose name was irrelevant and whose eyes kept writhing around you like serpents from Saturn, until your eight fingered hand reached out into the Orgone scented night and wrapped their mascara around your oblongata like a llama scarf from Love's own Op shop?
When was the last time you really boiled some lava in the lamp and told gravity that it would be a stone cold gas for it to have the night off, while the rest of the house lazily frugged to some wigged out guitar player who wrote the names of the Tibetan dead in feed back and the good old World just chugged along like a really big cool elephant that kept an amazing bar and told piss funny jokes?
When was the last time your best mate then stumbled into the room, where the sandalwood spa and the Galaga taps and the stunning head we're all just grooving along like a motorbike made out of kung fu and hamburgers, then leaned over the fuming waters of uterine bliss and handed you a hash joint that smelt like childhood Christmas?
A reefer so blissed out that when you drew back on it your muscles became some sort of litmus jelly that turned you blue, then pink, then orange, then gold so you could wander around the party like a crazy mood ring that gave of clear signals as to who was tripping balls?
And as you were lying there being frolicked and steamed and turned a delicate shade of peacock blue by some beautiful cat who learnt to play electric Mellotron while he was part of Australia's Wah pedal rescue squad in Morocco, when was the last time the Sun came as brilliant and magnificent as God's own footy team and you looked out over the field of 50 watt speaker grass and glistening snow globe sands and answered the ancient and timeless call to go back to where it all began baby?
So you just finned your way back to the Ocean, where the water smelt like salt and vinegar chips and there were Unicorn Dolphins that knew all the bass lines to the Best of Fat Albert.
And when you got back to the house shivering and reborn, covered with minute star boiled crystals that made you shine like Disco Jesus, there was some real grounded chick or bloke with her boobs out or his buttocks brazen as snuggly steel and you were given a big plate of bacon and eggs and you had a top feed before you went to rub the last of traces of Celestial funk off on someone else crazy and cool, because all the previous pairings got mixed up during the swim 'cause everyone was a bit off their heads?
When? Huh?
Go over to your IDiary and iDial up the IApp you use to iRemeber what it was like to be truly mellowed out and bursting with hopeful love and give me a date.
5 years ago? 10? 20? Just as I thought......
Your IPhone is just a small square of square so unhip it's a rectangle.
Every time you look at the prick of a thing it sucks a little more funk from your groove gland and turns you into a heavy uptight cat who freaks out coz you can't get freaky anymore.
Throw it away. I defy you to find a passage in the Bible or the Koran or Lau Tzu's celebrity cook book that says "And Lo the lord said unto the people "I'll txt u on Thrsdy".
Our country is in a groove drought so bad we are about to elect to the position of Prime Minister a man so filled with anti-funk he's liable to suggest the word "man" be replaced with "tax payer".
Our reserves of hip are so low our children will be born going straight from belly button to knee cap within the next to two generations.
Our cosmic love balance is so low we'll probably hit Zimbabwe up for a few new Christmas cracker gags just to get through it all.
I implore you all.
Don't save your funk in buckets and carefully tip it over electric daffodils to watch the sparks rip worm holes in the void twice a year.
Start splashing your funk. Just start lading that good shit all over the place.
Sell your shares in cancer and acne and buy something embroidered with stars and moons. Put some fringes on your chairs. Reclaim the casserole. Grow your hair or shave it into imaginary animal patterns.
Say to your boss "Man, I'm just a crazy cat trying to keep it real. Y'all can sit on it and sign language your bowels if you don't dig who I am."
Till next time kittens,
Mick " Damn your white goods to hell" Dog.
Monday, May 31, 2010
My heart needs a valve grind
Hello folks,
I've been a bit crook lately.
It seems my heart is wanting to go on long service but as the very small business I am it's hard to give the poor bugger time off.
My heart keeps coming to me with catalogues with glossy pictures of paddocks where you can pat friendly horses or float along striped beach in solar hammocks.
I often wake to find little cut out pictures of setting sun's in Sicily or spring mornings, crisp with croissants from Croatia, sticky taped over my ribs.
I see my heart with his ear lodged in spiral shells listening to the swishing sound of loved ones on long distance lines.
He still (God Bless) video tapes Getaway and sings along with the jingle.
Sometimes I'll spot him with little grass skirt cut from discount flight coupons tied around his beating waist, having a little dance to old hula albums during coffee breaks.
Even we have have knock off beers on Friday my heart always manages to turn the conversation, in a very amusing and genial way, to topics of tropics.
We fill our glasses and talk of plane tickets, the strange customs of customs and how you can happily ignore a stranger for a 20 hr flight and excuse yourself for the professional rudeness of it all. (My heart says that the worse way to start a friendship is to be forced on each other. He reckons real friends always know when to piss off. I, it seems, am a lucky exception).
We will both laugh, look off into the pokie playing distance and speak a few words of our crap German that we learnt while sipping wine on the Rhine (way back in 1999) to our local Austrian born bar maid Esther.
Esther (who says that Australians would gladly give you the shirt off their backs and beam happily at you as they peeled off a cotton blend garment stinking of armpit and daytime telly. Germans, she says, would just buy you a new shirt) smiles at the two idiots trying to Lego together a foreign language for fun and tell us that as long as we only want to say "Attention! I beer! Sausage? Yes! Thanks sausage for you!" we will live like Prussian kings in the land of the well made train time table.
My heart and I laugh at such efficient humour and wish we were younger, that the bar maid's fella was brighter and nicer to her, then we both look at the Haig Whiskey clock and decide it's time for dinner and for another week to be documented under "over" in the ever expanding file of time and space.
My heart and I will then shake hands and thank each for another week of working together, another week of being baffled by brutal efficiency and mad octopus drum style therapies toted by leaders to fix up the messes made by the last crazy octopus we voted in.
Then he goes back to his chesty flat and I wander back to mine, sniffing at whatever flowers are having a quiet busk to the bees.
My heart is a good bloke. A real mate.
Whenever the chips have been down and the poop has been flung into the fan of destiny, my heart has always been there looking for the good things in life, lighting little kindling fires of compassion. (Especially after we've both had the Love Gas cut off by some character who slammed the door and clacked off in a high heeled huff to God knows where).
Lord knows I've taken my heart for granted for more years than I can remember.
I've put that poor bugger through some terrible stuff, things that laid the poor bastard on his back so he could only breath in small unbelieving gasps and barely cycle around his plasma route on the red cell bicycle we found in the paper.
I've put in him in some positions where all he could do was hang on to my ribcage with one hearty hand, dangling over an abyss of bad moves like some mad parody of Indiana Jones in that great Hollywood love story "Idiot goes bung again".
We both had times where we sat around bus stops, sipping at puddles in order not to pass out and offered to dance, sing, tell jokes what ever it took for the bus driver to cram us in amongst the crumpled luggage and get us the hell out of Dodge City before the Sheriff finds out we were sleeping with the Deputy.
But I've never heard a word of complaint from him.
He just smiles and says things like "Ahhh well mate. We live and learn don't we?" and puts on old blues music.
It seems as long as he has an old black dead dude having a electric whinge at him he's back on top by the third "My baby gone" lamentation. Amazing.
Good God...I've nearly choked the poor bastard with cheese, nearly snapped him in half trying to get fit, nearly made him explode with chemical dabblings.
I've taken him completely for granted, growled at him when he missed a beat, kept him in conditions that you wouldn't let a dog fart in.
Yet he's always there, pumping away, morning noon and night, adjusting the valves and regulating the curly tubes to keep me going, ever diligent, not asking for much other than an occasional affection, a funny movie and a chance to do his best.
I've even looked into going on life support so the poor bugger can have a bit of time away but my heart always smiles like a workaday Saint and says "I'll go next year when we can go together, mate. I'd miss you too much".
To be honest I think my heart is at the stage in his life where he has to share things in order to enjoy them.
We used to be able to do separate things. I used to just hand the reigns over to him and say "Go hard son!".
My Lord....you could write a million dollar book filled with our shenanigans, a marvellous film about the times when I'd just let my heart take me where he wanted to go.
We had some crazy times allright. Waking up in married in Italy. Dancing with our balls out in France. Hitchhiking to S.A in 1990 to see if you could falls asleep in the trees for a living. Sleeping in the car in Melbourne because we'd forgotten to get a house. Wandering up backwater creek systems and not daring to breath while a platypus Mum made her scurrying burrow three feet from us.
Great fun. I'm not sure if he missies it as much as I do. I suspect so. He's careful with his words my heart.
"Actions are the thing mate" he'll often say when caught in a fix "If you can't do it, ya mustn't really mean it".
I'd love to be able to shout my heart a Summer in Europe.
I'd love to buy him a flash velvet suit and let him wander up and down the canals, doing little show off drum solos for girls, being caught in wide eyed wonder as the people of foreign lands welcomed him in and made small nests of happiness for him to turn around and lie down in.
I'd love to be able to take him to some strange place, where language is long staccato music and music has no singing.
I'd love to row him out on the moon spotted lakes of some countries where people think thinking is better than drinking and dancing is nicer than drugs.
Maybe I will.
He's a hard bugger to surprise but, if I can one day at knock off drinks, I'll just slip him a couple tix for front row seats to life and let him go like a terrier after a tennis ball.
Mean while.....well.... we just need to sort of this gas bill and get our cholesterol down so we don't need to sit down and wait for the spinning got stop on our way back from the letter box.
Ahhhh.....Summer............
Mick "My heart goes boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom boom boom" Dog.
I've been a bit crook lately.
It seems my heart is wanting to go on long service but as the very small business I am it's hard to give the poor bugger time off.
My heart keeps coming to me with catalogues with glossy pictures of paddocks where you can pat friendly horses or float along striped beach in solar hammocks.
I often wake to find little cut out pictures of setting sun's in Sicily or spring mornings, crisp with croissants from Croatia, sticky taped over my ribs.
I see my heart with his ear lodged in spiral shells listening to the swishing sound of loved ones on long distance lines.
He still (God Bless) video tapes Getaway and sings along with the jingle.
Sometimes I'll spot him with little grass skirt cut from discount flight coupons tied around his beating waist, having a little dance to old hula albums during coffee breaks.
Even we have have knock off beers on Friday my heart always manages to turn the conversation, in a very amusing and genial way, to topics of tropics.
We fill our glasses and talk of plane tickets, the strange customs of customs and how you can happily ignore a stranger for a 20 hr flight and excuse yourself for the professional rudeness of it all. (My heart says that the worse way to start a friendship is to be forced on each other. He reckons real friends always know when to piss off. I, it seems, am a lucky exception).
We will both laugh, look off into the pokie playing distance and speak a few words of our crap German that we learnt while sipping wine on the Rhine (way back in 1999) to our local Austrian born bar maid Esther.
Esther (who says that Australians would gladly give you the shirt off their backs and beam happily at you as they peeled off a cotton blend garment stinking of armpit and daytime telly. Germans, she says, would just buy you a new shirt) smiles at the two idiots trying to Lego together a foreign language for fun and tell us that as long as we only want to say "Attention! I beer! Sausage? Yes! Thanks sausage for you!" we will live like Prussian kings in the land of the well made train time table.
My heart and I laugh at such efficient humour and wish we were younger, that the bar maid's fella was brighter and nicer to her, then we both look at the Haig Whiskey clock and decide it's time for dinner and for another week to be documented under "over" in the ever expanding file of time and space.
My heart and I will then shake hands and thank each for another week of working together, another week of being baffled by brutal efficiency and mad octopus drum style therapies toted by leaders to fix up the messes made by the last crazy octopus we voted in.
Then he goes back to his chesty flat and I wander back to mine, sniffing at whatever flowers are having a quiet busk to the bees.
My heart is a good bloke. A real mate.
Whenever the chips have been down and the poop has been flung into the fan of destiny, my heart has always been there looking for the good things in life, lighting little kindling fires of compassion. (Especially after we've both had the Love Gas cut off by some character who slammed the door and clacked off in a high heeled huff to God knows where).
Lord knows I've taken my heart for granted for more years than I can remember.
I've put that poor bugger through some terrible stuff, things that laid the poor bastard on his back so he could only breath in small unbelieving gasps and barely cycle around his plasma route on the red cell bicycle we found in the paper.
I've put in him in some positions where all he could do was hang on to my ribcage with one hearty hand, dangling over an abyss of bad moves like some mad parody of Indiana Jones in that great Hollywood love story "Idiot goes bung again".
We both had times where we sat around bus stops, sipping at puddles in order not to pass out and offered to dance, sing, tell jokes what ever it took for the bus driver to cram us in amongst the crumpled luggage and get us the hell out of Dodge City before the Sheriff finds out we were sleeping with the Deputy.
But I've never heard a word of complaint from him.
He just smiles and says things like "Ahhh well mate. We live and learn don't we?" and puts on old blues music.
It seems as long as he has an old black dead dude having a electric whinge at him he's back on top by the third "My baby gone" lamentation. Amazing.
Good God...I've nearly choked the poor bastard with cheese, nearly snapped him in half trying to get fit, nearly made him explode with chemical dabblings.
I've taken him completely for granted, growled at him when he missed a beat, kept him in conditions that you wouldn't let a dog fart in.
Yet he's always there, pumping away, morning noon and night, adjusting the valves and regulating the curly tubes to keep me going, ever diligent, not asking for much other than an occasional affection, a funny movie and a chance to do his best.
I've even looked into going on life support so the poor bugger can have a bit of time away but my heart always smiles like a workaday Saint and says "I'll go next year when we can go together, mate. I'd miss you too much".
To be honest I think my heart is at the stage in his life where he has to share things in order to enjoy them.
We used to be able to do separate things. I used to just hand the reigns over to him and say "Go hard son!".
My Lord....you could write a million dollar book filled with our shenanigans, a marvellous film about the times when I'd just let my heart take me where he wanted to go.
We had some crazy times allright. Waking up in married in Italy. Dancing with our balls out in France. Hitchhiking to S.A in 1990 to see if you could falls asleep in the trees for a living. Sleeping in the car in Melbourne because we'd forgotten to get a house. Wandering up backwater creek systems and not daring to breath while a platypus Mum made her scurrying burrow three feet from us.
Great fun. I'm not sure if he missies it as much as I do. I suspect so. He's careful with his words my heart.
"Actions are the thing mate" he'll often say when caught in a fix "If you can't do it, ya mustn't really mean it".
I'd love to be able to shout my heart a Summer in Europe.
I'd love to buy him a flash velvet suit and let him wander up and down the canals, doing little show off drum solos for girls, being caught in wide eyed wonder as the people of foreign lands welcomed him in and made small nests of happiness for him to turn around and lie down in.
I'd love to be able to take him to some strange place, where language is long staccato music and music has no singing.
I'd love to row him out on the moon spotted lakes of some countries where people think thinking is better than drinking and dancing is nicer than drugs.
Maybe I will.
He's a hard bugger to surprise but, if I can one day at knock off drinks, I'll just slip him a couple tix for front row seats to life and let him go like a terrier after a tennis ball.
Mean while.....well.... we just need to sort of this gas bill and get our cholesterol down so we don't need to sit down and wait for the spinning got stop on our way back from the letter box.
Ahhhh.....Summer............
Mick "My heart goes boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom boom boom" Dog.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Is it wrong to brew tea in a moccasin?
Hello friends,
I'm sitting here at Dog central watching the elves having a fairy bong, trying not to breathe in the heady brew of mushrooms and tinsel that they pack in their tiny silver cones.
I don't really mind that its a bit cramped in the smokey, curly booted office where I work or that the place is lit with glow worms (although replacing them with those curly, energy efficient worms was a bit of a pain in the arse) as the elves are generally a good hearted bunch who refuse to carry mobile phones.
There is just one phone here, quietly resting in the corner. It is a large thing with a proper dial and no hash key.
If there's someone here when it bo-jangles, it gets answered. If not, it just rings it's tin tits off to the sky.
No answering machine either.
"Just another pain in the arse " say the elves .
And they are right.
Mobile phones turn you into a horrible parasitic creature that lives on miscommunication and suckles on battery life.
To add insult to insolvency you then work twenty-eleven hours a day to pay for the inconvenience of being harassed by every ning nong who forgets which end of the pencil makes the writing happen and rings you up to ask where the gear box on the kettle is.
It now takes 14 finger draining calls to meet with someone to have a cup of coffee.
You pay $104.50 a minute to say nothings like "I'm at the tram stop wearing a hat" and "I'll be ten minutes late. Order me a Foamachino and a slice of Lo Fat treacle spam".
"Humans are dickheads too stupid to realise it" say the elves "They love shooting themselves in the foot and then complaining about uncomfortable shoes". Once again, can't argue.
But they seem to think I'm ok and treat me with the same respect circus audiences treat Orang-utans who can ride a small motorbike and blow insouciant raspberries on cue.
I looked at the calendar the other day and realised that before too long I'll be cranking over the big 40.
It's that time of life where your body starts to give you the shits and you are in the free floating zone where young people's taste in everything is still ear blisteringly awful and yet you still can't quite admit to yourself you've become a conservative, multi chinned curmudgeon who thinks people with loud motor cars should be beaten to death with their own missing mufflers.
I think they call it middle age because everything seems to be in the philosophical mid ground.
Your passions have been tempered by insistent hangovers, you shop at IKEA for your dreams because they are easier to assemble and love becomes a dog that was cute as a puppy but now tends to wheeze a bit when it's on the job and unfailingly drops it's romantic guts at the dinner table.
You suddenly become your own micro barometer, able to detect draughts four rooms away and scurry about like a mad Breeze Goblin to stuff towels up things, marvelling at your own ingenuity but fretting about extra washing.
You see adds for full length wedding scarves and admire the forethought, chucking to yourself about how many chilly receptions you been privy to.
Spacious underpants become a small oasis of calm after years of squeezing your gooligans into censorious pants designed to take a foot hopping hour to get out of when you finally manage to wrangle a live one back to your flat.
( How many years off my life have I spend ruining the "Vibe, man..." by trying to unlace a sneaker, remove a pair of Houdini designed trap daks and take my jocks off over my head all at the same time? That bizarre, frugging barn dance you do when you try to get naked at the speed of sound. The way everything in your room can be smashed to erotic smithereens by a falling horny idiot because you decided that lace up chaps would pull the chicks and, now they have, they have left you springing around the broken room, tugging at buckles and braces as your nads turns blue and she reads a book. I wonder....)
You see, not so long ago I was a vibrant and brassy young bastard I could live in denuded tree and piss on my own foot to keep warm.
I seemed to be like a marvellous ape who could live on pan scrapings and still dance all night like a jigging Ferris wheel.
I remember one Summer where I walked nude through the Simpson desert because i thought some chick on the other side would give up her charming groceries when I arrived, even if I was burnt to a heroic crisp and my doodle was aflame with butane desire.
I lived in share houses in the 90's where the roof was often optional.
I remember one place where it blew off completely during a Liberal Government induced hurricane and we were too stoned to notice.
I was rained on repeatedly and all I did was shout out that God was a pussy and if that's all He had in store for me He could go suck a fart.
One year on the dole I think I lived on beer and lawn clippings. I also made a garish humpy out of floorboards and steam and lived there, happy as a millionaire clam.
Now, as I approach my trenchant 4th decade, I find I desperately own an electric blanket made from synthetic kitten fur and often get buzzing cramps in my ear holes if I hop in the shower too soon.
My knees mangle at me like bruised accordions. My neck will suddenly lock if I look to the left too quickly on frigid mornings when I ramble to the coffee shop.
The kind and beautiful girls there take pity on me and pour frothed milk on my head until my vertebrae thaws.
This means I don't have to spend the day walking around like a jazz crab that shuffles sideways and makes be-bop screams when It trips over things.
I look at old photos of myself, practically living in the bins and yodelling with joy.
I found an old snapshot the other day where I'd burnt my hair off with a toaster to protest the high price of hair cuts.
Another showed me doing a wheelie on a motorbike down the dairy aisle in Coles because I thought the cheese looked lonely.
I find old curled bits of news paper with "Local artist does Macbeth with dick" and "Man eats cloud" adorned with black and white shots of me, my wing wang pushed through a Scottish castle drawn in texta or hanging upside down from a biplane with my mouth open wearing a provocative t-shirt reading "Fuck you gravity!"
"Who was this screaming rascal?" I think as I measure my Milo-lite into my "Yay for Talk Back Radio! " cup, with the free teaspoon I won after being able to name all the characters in Dad's Army during an ABC lunchtime quiz.
Where has this mad beast of a man gone? What's on television? Did I put the bins out? Maybe I should turn the heater up? Who are you people and what are doing in my house???????
"I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled".
T.S Elliot wrote that and it's still a beaut line.
I do like the idea there's some dude who looks in the mirror one day realises he's now officially an elder citizen and says "Bugger it! I'm bringing the ankles out!" and so he does, rolling up the breeches until his knobbly shanks pop out like really budget fireworks.
I imagine him strutting down to the post office the day he realises that it's all over, the terrible pressure that evolution puts on you to root and achieve and go like the clappers and have moderns opinions and to dress in fashions you didn't make yourself out of curtains, all of that vibrant nonsense passed on to somebody else.
I like to see him walking past pretty girls and just being happy such lovely things exist, his ankles gleaming in the morning sun, dogs sniffing them in furry headed amiability as if his whole legs were dandy newspapers.
I see this venerable cat, a body replete with much panel beating and re-sprays, his joints needing regular WD40'ing, his eyes on permanent low beam, rolling through the day like a stately old Kingswood, scratching his arse at will and parking for long periods of time in warm spots where the grass has perfumed itself with mower fumes, while birds conduct their trilling choruses about rooting and bees, wondering how he got here and thinking about making soup for lunch.
Til next time
Mick "Get that helicopter off my lawn you goddamn kids!" Dog
I'm sitting here at Dog central watching the elves having a fairy bong, trying not to breathe in the heady brew of mushrooms and tinsel that they pack in their tiny silver cones.
I don't really mind that its a bit cramped in the smokey, curly booted office where I work or that the place is lit with glow worms (although replacing them with those curly, energy efficient worms was a bit of a pain in the arse) as the elves are generally a good hearted bunch who refuse to carry mobile phones.
There is just one phone here, quietly resting in the corner. It is a large thing with a proper dial and no hash key.
If there's someone here when it bo-jangles, it gets answered. If not, it just rings it's tin tits off to the sky.
No answering machine either.
"Just another pain in the arse " say the elves .
And they are right.
Mobile phones turn you into a horrible parasitic creature that lives on miscommunication and suckles on battery life.
To add insult to insolvency you then work twenty-eleven hours a day to pay for the inconvenience of being harassed by every ning nong who forgets which end of the pencil makes the writing happen and rings you up to ask where the gear box on the kettle is.
It now takes 14 finger draining calls to meet with someone to have a cup of coffee.
You pay $104.50 a minute to say nothings like "I'm at the tram stop wearing a hat" and "I'll be ten minutes late. Order me a Foamachino and a slice of Lo Fat treacle spam".
"Humans are dickheads too stupid to realise it" say the elves "They love shooting themselves in the foot and then complaining about uncomfortable shoes". Once again, can't argue.
But they seem to think I'm ok and treat me with the same respect circus audiences treat Orang-utans who can ride a small motorbike and blow insouciant raspberries on cue.
I looked at the calendar the other day and realised that before too long I'll be cranking over the big 40.
It's that time of life where your body starts to give you the shits and you are in the free floating zone where young people's taste in everything is still ear blisteringly awful and yet you still can't quite admit to yourself you've become a conservative, multi chinned curmudgeon who thinks people with loud motor cars should be beaten to death with their own missing mufflers.
I think they call it middle age because everything seems to be in the philosophical mid ground.
Your passions have been tempered by insistent hangovers, you shop at IKEA for your dreams because they are easier to assemble and love becomes a dog that was cute as a puppy but now tends to wheeze a bit when it's on the job and unfailingly drops it's romantic guts at the dinner table.
You suddenly become your own micro barometer, able to detect draughts four rooms away and scurry about like a mad Breeze Goblin to stuff towels up things, marvelling at your own ingenuity but fretting about extra washing.
You see adds for full length wedding scarves and admire the forethought, chucking to yourself about how many chilly receptions you been privy to.
Spacious underpants become a small oasis of calm after years of squeezing your gooligans into censorious pants designed to take a foot hopping hour to get out of when you finally manage to wrangle a live one back to your flat.
( How many years off my life have I spend ruining the "Vibe, man..." by trying to unlace a sneaker, remove a pair of Houdini designed trap daks and take my jocks off over my head all at the same time? That bizarre, frugging barn dance you do when you try to get naked at the speed of sound. The way everything in your room can be smashed to erotic smithereens by a falling horny idiot because you decided that lace up chaps would pull the chicks and, now they have, they have left you springing around the broken room, tugging at buckles and braces as your nads turns blue and she reads a book. I wonder....)
You see, not so long ago I was a vibrant and brassy young bastard I could live in denuded tree and piss on my own foot to keep warm.
I seemed to be like a marvellous ape who could live on pan scrapings and still dance all night like a jigging Ferris wheel.
I remember one Summer where I walked nude through the Simpson desert because i thought some chick on the other side would give up her charming groceries when I arrived, even if I was burnt to a heroic crisp and my doodle was aflame with butane desire.
I lived in share houses in the 90's where the roof was often optional.
I remember one place where it blew off completely during a Liberal Government induced hurricane and we were too stoned to notice.
I was rained on repeatedly and all I did was shout out that God was a pussy and if that's all He had in store for me He could go suck a fart.
One year on the dole I think I lived on beer and lawn clippings. I also made a garish humpy out of floorboards and steam and lived there, happy as a millionaire clam.
Now, as I approach my trenchant 4th decade, I find I desperately own an electric blanket made from synthetic kitten fur and often get buzzing cramps in my ear holes if I hop in the shower too soon.
My knees mangle at me like bruised accordions. My neck will suddenly lock if I look to the left too quickly on frigid mornings when I ramble to the coffee shop.
The kind and beautiful girls there take pity on me and pour frothed milk on my head until my vertebrae thaws.
This means I don't have to spend the day walking around like a jazz crab that shuffles sideways and makes be-bop screams when It trips over things.
I look at old photos of myself, practically living in the bins and yodelling with joy.
I found an old snapshot the other day where I'd burnt my hair off with a toaster to protest the high price of hair cuts.
Another showed me doing a wheelie on a motorbike down the dairy aisle in Coles because I thought the cheese looked lonely.
I find old curled bits of news paper with "Local artist does Macbeth with dick" and "Man eats cloud" adorned with black and white shots of me, my wing wang pushed through a Scottish castle drawn in texta or hanging upside down from a biplane with my mouth open wearing a provocative t-shirt reading "Fuck you gravity!"
"Who was this screaming rascal?" I think as I measure my Milo-lite into my "Yay for Talk Back Radio! " cup, with the free teaspoon I won after being able to name all the characters in Dad's Army during an ABC lunchtime quiz.
Where has this mad beast of a man gone? What's on television? Did I put the bins out? Maybe I should turn the heater up? Who are you people and what are doing in my house???????
"I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled".
T.S Elliot wrote that and it's still a beaut line.
I do like the idea there's some dude who looks in the mirror one day realises he's now officially an elder citizen and says "Bugger it! I'm bringing the ankles out!" and so he does, rolling up the breeches until his knobbly shanks pop out like really budget fireworks.
I imagine him strutting down to the post office the day he realises that it's all over, the terrible pressure that evolution puts on you to root and achieve and go like the clappers and have moderns opinions and to dress in fashions you didn't make yourself out of curtains, all of that vibrant nonsense passed on to somebody else.
I like to see him walking past pretty girls and just being happy such lovely things exist, his ankles gleaming in the morning sun, dogs sniffing them in furry headed amiability as if his whole legs were dandy newspapers.
I see this venerable cat, a body replete with much panel beating and re-sprays, his joints needing regular WD40'ing, his eyes on permanent low beam, rolling through the day like a stately old Kingswood, scratching his arse at will and parking for long periods of time in warm spots where the grass has perfumed itself with mower fumes, while birds conduct their trilling choruses about rooting and bees, wondering how he got here and thinking about making soup for lunch.
Til next time
Mick "Get that helicopter off my lawn you goddamn kids!" Dog
Monday, May 17, 2010
Why doesn't money have a better sense of humour?
Let me start this blog by saying I am the World's most perpetually broke human being.
It seems like I have some sort of lactose intolerance for cash and when ever I get a sniff of the folding stuff I start dry heaving like a fat wrestler with a turpentine hangover and my skin breaks out in oily exploding hives.
i don't know what it is. I quite like money. I find it quite useful. I like it's jingly sound and the lovely way it stops you freezing to death in Winter.
I like the color scheme, the size is quite carry friendly and The Bank doesn't seems to ring me up at odd hours of the night to say Big Herbert is coming round for my liver when my account is in the black.
I don't seem to have anything against money, other than it avoids me like bald ducks in Peking avoid those bird baths full of orange basting sauce restaurants put out in order to cut down on prep time.
It's not even like I'm a hopeless muggins who can't do anything worth exchanging currency for (stop that sniggering up the back).
I can teach, play guitar, write, remove thistles, say comforting things to loved ones, organise shin digs and be generally quite helpful.
I've had a number of very interesting jobs in which I did quite well at. (Except for that burning restaurant thing. Oh well......)
But it does seem like my Mother told some Gypsy midwife to "put out that stinking fuckin' incense and stop playing yer fucking horrible guitar" during my birth and thus caused me to be cursed with some sort of Romanian evil eye that causes money to cross the road whenever it sees me.
All of my friends seem to be cashed up the yin yang. I really don't know what they do or how they do it to be honest.
Most of them seem to sit at computers and push buttons.
I picture then like some sort of Russian submarine person with a rubber tune that bellows orders out in a digital language that only computer people understand.
Stuff like "Full steam to Java! Hoist the upload to full micro dot! All motherboards on deck! Set Mp3's to propellor!" and stuff like that.
I don't know what that means in proper words. I suppose that's the point. If everyone could "RAM something up a gigabyte" they'd all be out of jobs.
A friend of mine told me recently that his job is to make the space in the non existent world where people put up web sites.
From what I gathered, there is a giant computer turtle floating through the endless phone lines on which four elephants stand and on the back of these elephants is the Internet.
My friend apparently goes there in a magic boat made out of old keyboards, fights off indigenous 1's and 0's with a flat screen six gun, then plants a flag where web designers can go and form a covered wagon train.
These wagon trains eventually get turned into houses where you can digitally nail up posters selling anything from real turtles to frozen sperm and people pay him thousands and thousands of real people's dollars to do this.
He has enormous amounts of cash. He is ten years younger than me and could buy my spine without my permission if he wanted.
Another friend of mine has a job where he makes dick heads sound plausible. It works like this:
People apparently buy things now to simply stop you annoying them so the people with crap to sell go to radio stations where they keep all the truly annoying dick heads in a box.
The man at the radio station then shows the person with crap to sell all the boxes with dick heads in them and tells them that the more annoying the dickhead, the more money it will cost to get the dickhead out of the box and poke it with a stick to make it say things.
They agree on a price (and a dickhead) and then they poke the dickhead with a microphone until it says the most annoying things it can about the crap needed to be sold.
The dickhead will rave about anything. Cheap hats, exploding bedspreads, festive jam. The dickhead doesn't care. It just opens up it's dickhead yap and starts yabbering on like a terrier with a clothes peg on it's balls.
My friend is the person who pushes the brightly colored button on the magic tape recorder at the other end of the microphoned dickhead.
My friend has told me the secret to dickheads successfully selling crap is that (as part of a American Presidential campaign in the 50s) scientists invented a fabulous button which they named "Credibility X" .
This button changed the world due to the fact that it can make dick heads sound very important.
The recorded music industry, radio and television would explode like a balloon having a heart attack if they didn't have this button.
I am led to believe this happens all over the World now. This button manipulation involves a finger to depress it and then the sprightly removal of the finger.
My friend gets paid a lot of money for doing this job.
A third friend has the oddest job I've ever heard of. Her job is to complicate things until people give up. It works like this-
People who do cool things like paint pictures or write plays or sing songs about fuzzy felt boyfriends in the wide eyed hope of making the world a generally nicer, shinier experience go to her and ask her advice.
She then nods politely and hands them a huge pile of paper written in a language that was made up by one of those Russian monkeys that came back from space in the 60's.
It asks questions like "Will mad people get better when they see your painting?" or "What do you think a complete stranger from another Planet might get out of your play?" or even "If we give you money will you spend it on hiring spoons? If so, what type of spoons? Does your spoon hire take into account people with no fingers? What do you think a finger-less person would get out of a spoon encounter?"
This sort of gibberish makes people who just wanted to paint a picture of a horse with an umbrella enjoying itself at the beach or write a play about a happy pepper grinder who becomes a disco king give up wanting to do these marvellous things..
They stop being creative people because this pile of crazy paper seems a grim and forbidding Matron of horrible rules and pointy finger pokery that drills at your brain belly.
The people who make creative things leaf through these piles of rustling nonsense and then give up, as they are baffled by this answerless paper interrogation, just as an elderly Clydesdale would be if you asked him to play Abyssinian scrabble.
Some little spark snuffs out in their sparkley souls.
They get drunk and go on the internet to see if they can't trade themselves in for something useful, like mowing goat lawns or bringing fat people more dinner.
My friend, whose job is to confuse and dispirit people with bad fonts, gets paid a huge amount of money for doing this from the Government.
They think she is tremendous because they are convinced that beautiful things make people wonder why tax doesn't come with better lyrics, causing difficult questions for all involved.
I do things like play relaxing music and say funny things to cheer people up.
Apparently, even though my jars of home made funny are very good and my macaroni and glue concerts do make people feel better, I am often chortled at by racy types for my humble road side stand operation where my marketing strategy is to give stuff away to people I like.
I even went so far as to rectify this by doing a 8 week course in how to make a proper business.
I had brightly colored cards with my name on it made and everything. I bought folders and a lamp.
I paid some invisible notice board $80 dollars so I could be called "Mr Awesome's Rag Time Coolness Business Groove o-Mart" and then watched as about $3000 of bits of paper arrived in the mailbox explaining the more money I paid, the more legitimate I would be.
It was baffling.
In truth I'd be quite happy to cut out the cash thing all together and just go around and play concerts for the people at the Gas Company.
I figure that as I'm quite good at playing the guitar I could just knock out a gig every three months and we'd be cool.
In fact I think it would switch things around so I would start looking forward to my gas bill. I'd get to see old friends. I could bake something.
The people at the gas company could stop typing out notices to various court officials and just sit back and listen to lovely music.
I wouldn't mind if they wanted to dance. Or even had a little snooze.
We could exchange gossip and miss each other during the not-gas-bill-paying times.
I could even go in and do a gig just to say thanks. Maybe they would just be happy to have some nice music in the tea room.
I wouldn't mind. Gas is cool.
Or write maybe I could write a funny story in exchange for toast. Surely bakers must like to be amused.
Or maybe pay my rego in listening to people. Give out positive advice.
Maybe I could be the guy who helps single women in Insurance agencies decide if their bottom looks big in things.
I I could have a go at that.
It's actually a very tricky job because if if you say "Yes" in the wrong way you could end up in casualty.
(I talked to an old guy once who said he went back to blowing up things in Chinese mines deep underground rather than endure another freeziod stare from a big bottomed lady whose bottom, unfortunately, did look big in everything. "It was a big bum" he said.)
There should be a form you can fill out when you leave school that says "Are you very good at making money out of jobs?" and if you tick "No" you should be able to do something else.
Honesty I'd be happy just sit on a street corner and play snappy tunes. In fact that's my dream job.
I'm no good at money. I spend it all on lollies and fun.
'Til next time
Mick "Happy to be adopted by rich relatives" Dog
It seems like I have some sort of lactose intolerance for cash and when ever I get a sniff of the folding stuff I start dry heaving like a fat wrestler with a turpentine hangover and my skin breaks out in oily exploding hives.
i don't know what it is. I quite like money. I find it quite useful. I like it's jingly sound and the lovely way it stops you freezing to death in Winter.
I like the color scheme, the size is quite carry friendly and The Bank doesn't seems to ring me up at odd hours of the night to say Big Herbert is coming round for my liver when my account is in the black.
I don't seem to have anything against money, other than it avoids me like bald ducks in Peking avoid those bird baths full of orange basting sauce restaurants put out in order to cut down on prep time.
It's not even like I'm a hopeless muggins who can't do anything worth exchanging currency for (stop that sniggering up the back).
I can teach, play guitar, write, remove thistles, say comforting things to loved ones, organise shin digs and be generally quite helpful.
I've had a number of very interesting jobs in which I did quite well at. (Except for that burning restaurant thing. Oh well......)
But it does seem like my Mother told some Gypsy midwife to "put out that stinking fuckin' incense and stop playing yer fucking horrible guitar" during my birth and thus caused me to be cursed with some sort of Romanian evil eye that causes money to cross the road whenever it sees me.
All of my friends seem to be cashed up the yin yang. I really don't know what they do or how they do it to be honest.
Most of them seem to sit at computers and push buttons.
I picture then like some sort of Russian submarine person with a rubber tune that bellows orders out in a digital language that only computer people understand.
Stuff like "Full steam to Java! Hoist the upload to full micro dot! All motherboards on deck! Set Mp3's to propellor!" and stuff like that.
I don't know what that means in proper words. I suppose that's the point. If everyone could "RAM something up a gigabyte" they'd all be out of jobs.
A friend of mine told me recently that his job is to make the space in the non existent world where people put up web sites.
From what I gathered, there is a giant computer turtle floating through the endless phone lines on which four elephants stand and on the back of these elephants is the Internet.
My friend apparently goes there in a magic boat made out of old keyboards, fights off indigenous 1's and 0's with a flat screen six gun, then plants a flag where web designers can go and form a covered wagon train.
These wagon trains eventually get turned into houses where you can digitally nail up posters selling anything from real turtles to frozen sperm and people pay him thousands and thousands of real people's dollars to do this.
He has enormous amounts of cash. He is ten years younger than me and could buy my spine without my permission if he wanted.
Another friend of mine has a job where he makes dick heads sound plausible. It works like this:
People apparently buy things now to simply stop you annoying them so the people with crap to sell go to radio stations where they keep all the truly annoying dick heads in a box.
The man at the radio station then shows the person with crap to sell all the boxes with dick heads in them and tells them that the more annoying the dickhead, the more money it will cost to get the dickhead out of the box and poke it with a stick to make it say things.
They agree on a price (and a dickhead) and then they poke the dickhead with a microphone until it says the most annoying things it can about the crap needed to be sold.
The dickhead will rave about anything. Cheap hats, exploding bedspreads, festive jam. The dickhead doesn't care. It just opens up it's dickhead yap and starts yabbering on like a terrier with a clothes peg on it's balls.
My friend is the person who pushes the brightly colored button on the magic tape recorder at the other end of the microphoned dickhead.
My friend has told me the secret to dickheads successfully selling crap is that (as part of a American Presidential campaign in the 50s) scientists invented a fabulous button which they named "Credibility X" .
This button changed the world due to the fact that it can make dick heads sound very important.
The recorded music industry, radio and television would explode like a balloon having a heart attack if they didn't have this button.
I am led to believe this happens all over the World now. This button manipulation involves a finger to depress it and then the sprightly removal of the finger.
My friend gets paid a lot of money for doing this job.
A third friend has the oddest job I've ever heard of. Her job is to complicate things until people give up. It works like this-
People who do cool things like paint pictures or write plays or sing songs about fuzzy felt boyfriends in the wide eyed hope of making the world a generally nicer, shinier experience go to her and ask her advice.
She then nods politely and hands them a huge pile of paper written in a language that was made up by one of those Russian monkeys that came back from space in the 60's.
It asks questions like "Will mad people get better when they see your painting?" or "What do you think a complete stranger from another Planet might get out of your play?" or even "If we give you money will you spend it on hiring spoons? If so, what type of spoons? Does your spoon hire take into account people with no fingers? What do you think a finger-less person would get out of a spoon encounter?"
This sort of gibberish makes people who just wanted to paint a picture of a horse with an umbrella enjoying itself at the beach or write a play about a happy pepper grinder who becomes a disco king give up wanting to do these marvellous things..
They stop being creative people because this pile of crazy paper seems a grim and forbidding Matron of horrible rules and pointy finger pokery that drills at your brain belly.
The people who make creative things leaf through these piles of rustling nonsense and then give up, as they are baffled by this answerless paper interrogation, just as an elderly Clydesdale would be if you asked him to play Abyssinian scrabble.
Some little spark snuffs out in their sparkley souls.
They get drunk and go on the internet to see if they can't trade themselves in for something useful, like mowing goat lawns or bringing fat people more dinner.
My friend, whose job is to confuse and dispirit people with bad fonts, gets paid a huge amount of money for doing this from the Government.
They think she is tremendous because they are convinced that beautiful things make people wonder why tax doesn't come with better lyrics, causing difficult questions for all involved.
I do things like play relaxing music and say funny things to cheer people up.
Apparently, even though my jars of home made funny are very good and my macaroni and glue concerts do make people feel better, I am often chortled at by racy types for my humble road side stand operation where my marketing strategy is to give stuff away to people I like.
I even went so far as to rectify this by doing a 8 week course in how to make a proper business.
I had brightly colored cards with my name on it made and everything. I bought folders and a lamp.
I paid some invisible notice board $80 dollars so I could be called "Mr Awesome's Rag Time Coolness Business Groove o-Mart" and then watched as about $3000 of bits of paper arrived in the mailbox explaining the more money I paid, the more legitimate I would be.
It was baffling.
In truth I'd be quite happy to cut out the cash thing all together and just go around and play concerts for the people at the Gas Company.
I figure that as I'm quite good at playing the guitar I could just knock out a gig every three months and we'd be cool.
In fact I think it would switch things around so I would start looking forward to my gas bill. I'd get to see old friends. I could bake something.
The people at the gas company could stop typing out notices to various court officials and just sit back and listen to lovely music.
I wouldn't mind if they wanted to dance. Or even had a little snooze.
We could exchange gossip and miss each other during the not-gas-bill-paying times.
I could even go in and do a gig just to say thanks. Maybe they would just be happy to have some nice music in the tea room.
I wouldn't mind. Gas is cool.
Or write maybe I could write a funny story in exchange for toast. Surely bakers must like to be amused.
Or maybe pay my rego in listening to people. Give out positive advice.
Maybe I could be the guy who helps single women in Insurance agencies decide if their bottom looks big in things.
I I could have a go at that.
It's actually a very tricky job because if if you say "Yes" in the wrong way you could end up in casualty.
(I talked to an old guy once who said he went back to blowing up things in Chinese mines deep underground rather than endure another freeziod stare from a big bottomed lady whose bottom, unfortunately, did look big in everything. "It was a big bum" he said.)
There should be a form you can fill out when you leave school that says "Are you very good at making money out of jobs?" and if you tick "No" you should be able to do something else.
Honesty I'd be happy just sit on a street corner and play snappy tunes. In fact that's my dream job.
I'm no good at money. I spend it all on lollies and fun.
'Til next time
Mick "Happy to be adopted by rich relatives" Dog
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Now is the Winter of our discount tent.
Hello and howdy, pull up a chaise lounge, help yourself to the muffins etc.
Winter!
Yup...there's no escaping it. Sure..... we're technically in Autumn and yes... I know the skidoo doesn't crank over until the 1st of June but I'm just not the sort that says a blow job isn't cheating and that Gorillas shouldn't get the dole on a technicality.
As far as I'm concerned Winter starts when you wake up in the morning and run series of brainiac ruses and strategies worthy of The Great Escape that would allow you to stay in bed all day without losing your job or being carted to crematorium when your bladder explodes.
Winter is here when the day starts with 15 to 20 minutes of eyebrow smouldering schemes, involving Hawking like calculations where Y= sick days x gas bills + needing to do a wee and you make small sketches on the pillow case deviously connecting a name change in Thailand and a hose that could possibly drain out of the window before it becomes horribly apparent that you will have to take part in the day and thus leave your magnificently warm bed.
You girdle your loins (or line up your girdles) and leap into action, sprinting like a fat panther with a pace maker to the bathroom.
A heater is smashed on with a desperate fist and razzed up to the point where you could smelt copper.
You then perform the legendary Nudie Doodle Dance (or the Crispy Nipple Strut as other's would have it) as you shamelessly (some would say indulgently) expose frosted body parts to to the heater (which is pumping out so much blast furnace warmth scientists in Madrid are tapping on barometers and making phone calls to Presidents) as you hop from foot to foot like a naked, desperate line dancing Gibbon with hot sauce on it's doobries, while the shower performs whatever mad magic is involved to heat water.
You leap in, your skin jazzed and fried by the delightful drops. You are Mawson on Elephant Island.
You perform ablutions worthy of a Hindu Priest with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Every part of you is burnished with five flavours of unguent and defoliant.
Dark thoughts of drought cross your mind as the midday news comes on and your are scaldingly reminded you've been in the shower for some five hours.
You don't care. So what if the water bill is equivalent to the national debt? It's sooooo nice in here.
You wash your arse again for the 26th time. One can't be too careful.........
You steel yourself again and contemplate going back to bed.
You think of St Caffeine and the miracle of the Big Cup.
A burst of heroic joy comes over you and you stand in the shower for another half hour congratulating yourself on what a wonderful person you are. Evolution was on fire that day it came up with you allright!
You turn the shower off and try not to electrocute yourself on the heater which is now causing atoms to split near the medicine cupboard.
A towels fluffs hope into you.
The ghost of Herb Elliot spurs you on as you run around the house, the furniture waving brightly colored pennants at your buttocks and watching you with cushion-like joy, as you try to get as many warm clothes on as you possibly can before your desperate cotton layering makes you look like an opp shop golliwog.
(Or in my case a sort of Bedouin hobo drawn by a crayon wielding Gorilla trying to fill in it's dole from).
This is the true start of Winter I tells ya.
Stuff your gilded leafery, pungent marsupials rooting around the clock and your smug isobar pointing weather folk.
Winter starts for me when you look around (with your fuzzy sloping brow and animal hide tea towels) for some cave to crawl into.
(Assuming of course you can afford a three chambered cave for $560 a week with cold and colder running water and a delightful creaking noise that suggests you could be crushed into a squeaking paste by 20,000 tonnes of unstable rock just as you've got the coat hanger antenna in the right spot to watch the spatula gannets on Masterchef make Anzac bikkies and Turkish delight on National Cross Demographic Day.)
Winter is here when you emerge from your domicile with your padded pantery tucked into your Velcro dungarees, your personal person carefully sealed up like a snappy Tupperware bowl of downy fashion, only to be thwarted by trenchant Wind of the Antichrist which still manages to find the gap between your sleeved doona and your thermo-reactic pinafore and blows, with NASA like accuracy, straight up the crack of your arse, leaving you gasping in crystallised ring horror, bleating for mercy at the bus stop and performing a strange (yet very amusing) Shamanic dance that implores the eternal spirits of the Blue Sky to pour hot coffee over your harassed Siberian crack.
(While we are on the subject of dressing up to leave the house, why do people working at home dress up for work? What is it about snapping on bright new elastic underpants and a crisp lettuce pressed shirt that makes us feel as if we can go like the wonderful clappers? Is there a correlation between trakky daks and interest rates? Would the Dow Jones collapse if we just showed up in a saggy T-shirt with some Milo stains on the front? What part does ironing play in world commerce? Maybe we should organise World Shithouse Outfit day where you just show up at work in baggy comfortable flannels, drink cuppa soups all day and politely lose the remote to see if a Volcano explodes or if the Sea turns purple)
Anyway.....I've lived here in Ballafornia, home of the impertinent and impotent alike, enduring the long slow Senate session of Winter more times than I can remember.
Although far from the World's most icy eyeball popping Hell , Ballarat's Winter just sinks your soul (like an old cowboy's even older horse) into a quicksandy mire of grey, uncomfortable mither where the town's inhabitants become clag goldfish in a gelatinous tank of lethargy and beanies.
Thoughts become long exhalations of smoggy repetition, movement becomes a dire, muscle grinding imposition, joy gets put in a tinder box full of shredded Christmas cracker gags with stalwart families appointing someone (usually a gifted child or a ribald uncle) to gently blow on the smouldering embers of happiness through the long dark months, listening tensely to the wet creaking of the heathens who burn cheap scotch in lonely underpants fires by the letter box, until their souls can afford sunny kindling again and we can light the bonfires of giggle again.
We (The Ballafornians) become penniless, gout ridden, rubes huddling around bank accounts, people at the End of the Days, building our strange Mad Max 2 style relationships in our skidding deserts of Blue Bland ice, pumping the precious bill paying cash juice from our snake eating jobs at the Gyrocopter factories, painting "Ohm's not Bombs" on our battered buses of love and pretending that activity will save us from the Humungous and his Dainty Ice Wolves who now have one of those annoyingly catchy Top Ten hits out that gets flogged to death after it wins the "Are you Gunna Be My Girl?" award for most overplayed song in history.
We sprint hopelessly around, workaday squirrels in a nut barren muesli town, fluffily hopping hither and thither, planning, crafting, not talking to much in fear of our words will freeze like cheap cochineal colored icing and drop from out lips in snarly gobs to shatter like pungent gossip and thus stain the parquetry with petty allegations that no spraying or wiping can ever remove.
Those horrible monsters of the Anglophile Boomer People (often in the form of sexless lesbian Aunty types or elder Gents who seem to eat tweed and expel model airplanes) start strutting about in shorts, loudly decrying the joys of having your tits shatter of a morning, talking about "best time of year" and the like, dragging fat Labrador dogs (whose hearts are full of happy panting and whose bowels full of terrible Pal) down frost smattered nature strips, both of them snuffling around and laying steaming piles of modern art about the place with both their hardy opinions and shaggy bums alike.
(Not being a violent man, I would gladly do hard time in order to ram their cheery, cold loving bespectacled heads through a Mr Whippy van window and choke them with amusing ice creams. Their horrible Winterphile opinions grind at my Summery soul. It's like being sprayed with a snow maker that squirts cold nylon casseroles in your face)
I despise Winter.
My arse aches, my opinions rust and my slim reserve of tolerance evaporates like an asthmatic child's breath on the eyeballs of a rat.
I have three to four filthy months in which I turn from an ebullient bon vivant and glittering raconteur into a sour monster who shamelessly dry humps heaters and skulks about looking for chocatley treats in order to make the damnable cold go away.
I adore Summer. I'm always sad when she sets off on the Northern hemisphere tour with her warm woodeny guitar and her songs about thongs.
I miss her. I miss my raggedy shorts and swimming in Pine smelling lakes. I miss intravenous beer. I miss being unthoughtfully warm.
Goddamn Norwegians. Goddamn Hemispheres. Goddamn Cycle of Life. You'll all pay.
Till next time,
Mick "I wish they made electric plug in trousers" Dog.
Winter!
Yup...there's no escaping it. Sure..... we're technically in Autumn and yes... I know the skidoo doesn't crank over until the 1st of June but I'm just not the sort that says a blow job isn't cheating and that Gorillas shouldn't get the dole on a technicality.
As far as I'm concerned Winter starts when you wake up in the morning and run series of brainiac ruses and strategies worthy of The Great Escape that would allow you to stay in bed all day without losing your job or being carted to crematorium when your bladder explodes.
Winter is here when the day starts with 15 to 20 minutes of eyebrow smouldering schemes, involving Hawking like calculations where Y= sick days x gas bills + needing to do a wee and you make small sketches on the pillow case deviously connecting a name change in Thailand and a hose that could possibly drain out of the window before it becomes horribly apparent that you will have to take part in the day and thus leave your magnificently warm bed.
You girdle your loins (or line up your girdles) and leap into action, sprinting like a fat panther with a pace maker to the bathroom.
A heater is smashed on with a desperate fist and razzed up to the point where you could smelt copper.
You then perform the legendary Nudie Doodle Dance (or the Crispy Nipple Strut as other's would have it) as you shamelessly (some would say indulgently) expose frosted body parts to to the heater (which is pumping out so much blast furnace warmth scientists in Madrid are tapping on barometers and making phone calls to Presidents) as you hop from foot to foot like a naked, desperate line dancing Gibbon with hot sauce on it's doobries, while the shower performs whatever mad magic is involved to heat water.
You leap in, your skin jazzed and fried by the delightful drops. You are Mawson on Elephant Island.
You perform ablutions worthy of a Hindu Priest with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Every part of you is burnished with five flavours of unguent and defoliant.
Dark thoughts of drought cross your mind as the midday news comes on and your are scaldingly reminded you've been in the shower for some five hours.
You don't care. So what if the water bill is equivalent to the national debt? It's sooooo nice in here.
You wash your arse again for the 26th time. One can't be too careful.........
You steel yourself again and contemplate going back to bed.
You think of St Caffeine and the miracle of the Big Cup.
A burst of heroic joy comes over you and you stand in the shower for another half hour congratulating yourself on what a wonderful person you are. Evolution was on fire that day it came up with you allright!
You turn the shower off and try not to electrocute yourself on the heater which is now causing atoms to split near the medicine cupboard.
A towels fluffs hope into you.
The ghost of Herb Elliot spurs you on as you run around the house, the furniture waving brightly colored pennants at your buttocks and watching you with cushion-like joy, as you try to get as many warm clothes on as you possibly can before your desperate cotton layering makes you look like an opp shop golliwog.
(Or in my case a sort of Bedouin hobo drawn by a crayon wielding Gorilla trying to fill in it's dole from).
This is the true start of Winter I tells ya.
Stuff your gilded leafery, pungent marsupials rooting around the clock and your smug isobar pointing weather folk.
Winter starts for me when you look around (with your fuzzy sloping brow and animal hide tea towels) for some cave to crawl into.
(Assuming of course you can afford a three chambered cave for $560 a week with cold and colder running water and a delightful creaking noise that suggests you could be crushed into a squeaking paste by 20,000 tonnes of unstable rock just as you've got the coat hanger antenna in the right spot to watch the spatula gannets on Masterchef make Anzac bikkies and Turkish delight on National Cross Demographic Day.)
Winter is here when you emerge from your domicile with your padded pantery tucked into your Velcro dungarees, your personal person carefully sealed up like a snappy Tupperware bowl of downy fashion, only to be thwarted by trenchant Wind of the Antichrist which still manages to find the gap between your sleeved doona and your thermo-reactic pinafore and blows, with NASA like accuracy, straight up the crack of your arse, leaving you gasping in crystallised ring horror, bleating for mercy at the bus stop and performing a strange (yet very amusing) Shamanic dance that implores the eternal spirits of the Blue Sky to pour hot coffee over your harassed Siberian crack.
(While we are on the subject of dressing up to leave the house, why do people working at home dress up for work? What is it about snapping on bright new elastic underpants and a crisp lettuce pressed shirt that makes us feel as if we can go like the wonderful clappers? Is there a correlation between trakky daks and interest rates? Would the Dow Jones collapse if we just showed up in a saggy T-shirt with some Milo stains on the front? What part does ironing play in world commerce? Maybe we should organise World Shithouse Outfit day where you just show up at work in baggy comfortable flannels, drink cuppa soups all day and politely lose the remote to see if a Volcano explodes or if the Sea turns purple)
Anyway.....I've lived here in Ballafornia, home of the impertinent and impotent alike, enduring the long slow Senate session of Winter more times than I can remember.
Although far from the World's most icy eyeball popping Hell , Ballarat's Winter just sinks your soul (like an old cowboy's even older horse) into a quicksandy mire of grey, uncomfortable mither where the town's inhabitants become clag goldfish in a gelatinous tank of lethargy and beanies.
Thoughts become long exhalations of smoggy repetition, movement becomes a dire, muscle grinding imposition, joy gets put in a tinder box full of shredded Christmas cracker gags with stalwart families appointing someone (usually a gifted child or a ribald uncle) to gently blow on the smouldering embers of happiness through the long dark months, listening tensely to the wet creaking of the heathens who burn cheap scotch in lonely underpants fires by the letter box, until their souls can afford sunny kindling again and we can light the bonfires of giggle again.
We (The Ballafornians) become penniless, gout ridden, rubes huddling around bank accounts, people at the End of the Days, building our strange Mad Max 2 style relationships in our skidding deserts of Blue Bland ice, pumping the precious bill paying cash juice from our snake eating jobs at the Gyrocopter factories, painting "Ohm's not Bombs" on our battered buses of love and pretending that activity will save us from the Humungous and his Dainty Ice Wolves who now have one of those annoyingly catchy Top Ten hits out that gets flogged to death after it wins the "Are you Gunna Be My Girl?" award for most overplayed song in history.
We sprint hopelessly around, workaday squirrels in a nut barren muesli town, fluffily hopping hither and thither, planning, crafting, not talking to much in fear of our words will freeze like cheap cochineal colored icing and drop from out lips in snarly gobs to shatter like pungent gossip and thus stain the parquetry with petty allegations that no spraying or wiping can ever remove.
Those horrible monsters of the Anglophile Boomer People (often in the form of sexless lesbian Aunty types or elder Gents who seem to eat tweed and expel model airplanes) start strutting about in shorts, loudly decrying the joys of having your tits shatter of a morning, talking about "best time of year" and the like, dragging fat Labrador dogs (whose hearts are full of happy panting and whose bowels full of terrible Pal) down frost smattered nature strips, both of them snuffling around and laying steaming piles of modern art about the place with both their hardy opinions and shaggy bums alike.
(Not being a violent man, I would gladly do hard time in order to ram their cheery, cold loving bespectacled heads through a Mr Whippy van window and choke them with amusing ice creams. Their horrible Winterphile opinions grind at my Summery soul. It's like being sprayed with a snow maker that squirts cold nylon casseroles in your face)
I despise Winter.
My arse aches, my opinions rust and my slim reserve of tolerance evaporates like an asthmatic child's breath on the eyeballs of a rat.
I have three to four filthy months in which I turn from an ebullient bon vivant and glittering raconteur into a sour monster who shamelessly dry humps heaters and skulks about looking for chocatley treats in order to make the damnable cold go away.
I adore Summer. I'm always sad when she sets off on the Northern hemisphere tour with her warm woodeny guitar and her songs about thongs.
I miss her. I miss my raggedy shorts and swimming in Pine smelling lakes. I miss intravenous beer. I miss being unthoughtfully warm.
Goddamn Norwegians. Goddamn Hemispheres. Goddamn Cycle of Life. You'll all pay.
Till next time,
Mick "I wish they made electric plug in trousers" Dog.
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