admin July 9th, 2008
On the highway
Once we climb the hill out of the jammed maze of Geelong, the dust dry paddocks start to fill the windscreen. The drought’s been long and hard, there seemed to be a shimmer of green last time I came through, but summer has been unforgiving, those days in the high thirties [centigrade] and early fourties […]
admin July 9th, 2008
I wait my place in the queue. In hand a flimsy rough paper ticket, the sort you used to get on long rail journeys or on a tram, rough matted paper with big blocky printed numbers that want to jump off and start doing weight lifting exercises; fat strong type. I’m sitting in a room with maybe twenty other people, the hum of the fluro’s the only sound, these are the days before wall to wall media and the constant assault of sound into our mindscape.
Sitting on the chair thinking about how things will play out. A last minute change means I am now going to the UK via America, and you HAVE to have a visa, this is Easter Thursday just past midday - the whole country winding down and I leave on Sunday. Part of me is nervy - a twitchy fidgeting belly, bat cave thoughts scream in my mind, movie scenarios of what if they don’t give me one? a whole trip will be canceled. I start to bite into the disappointment to come, even though it’s not arrived yet, just to set myself up in case of failure. It won’t descend in a Niagra falls moment that way, more like a slow rising of the tide.
My number is called and I make my way to the counter on the aching balls of my feet from the run I did to get here before the early close for Easter. My torso is bathed in a light layer of drying sticky sweat. I ‘must’ get this visa. The clerk waddles off behind a screen and I sing to a tune that runs through my head. Funny how I do that - when we got caught stealing at Woolworths as kids I did it, I was even singing along to the background music. She reappears - thankfully with my passport franked and ready to go. Relief sweeps over me like a Melbourne summer afternoon change- sudden.
admin July 8th, 2008
Throat is oven dry, been sucking on a lozenge for five minutes before entry but it hasn’t loosed up any rivers of saliva, voice is scratchy, croaky, not sonorous as I imagined in my mental walk through. I reach for water. It gargles around my mouth like mercury in a thermometer on a hot day, like a raft going through rapids on a raging river. There, that’s better. “as I was saying”…………. I bite into a sandwhich of confidence that the water has provided me and begin to rise above the barbed wire nerves that jangle in my tummy, I am lifting off, locked into the seat, safety drills dispensed with, my voice roaring with power, like a set of jet engines at take off, but not too loud, just quiet confident power. I am a floating balloon up there with the dull clouds that seem to be parting through tethered weighty glass. Smoky questions rise from the panelists and I get the bellows out and pump them up to a roaring crackle. This is gonna work! I sense I’ve got the position. What was I worried about? I walk out carrying a 250 kg weight above my head–EASY-, hey I can do anything! I look on at the other chumps who are going to be eaten for breakfast and pass into the elevator. My tummy is left on floor 39 as it descends.
admin July 8th, 2008
Library
It’s a long stop-start drive out to Monash Uni, but, that’s where the musty tomes I require reside. After hunting the parking lot for a deserted space, I crunch over oven dried yellow stalks of grass and then the unforgiving concrete apron before star trek doors whisper open.As the doors slipper shut, I feel a […]
admin July 7th, 2008
coffee shop
So here I am, on the very same stage where the ‘Seekers’ got there start in the sixties. It’s almost like that folky vibe is still just rippling through the air. Mavis the proprietor is bent over shuffling around, almost bound for a wheel chair, she was here back in those days, with the tiny […]
admin July 7th, 2008
Speaking with one voice they taunt me as I walk along a strip of uniformed take away shops, they’re all here Burger King, KFC, Nandos, McDonalds nestled in among the furniture stores from IKEA and ‘Freedom furniture’ Each one a building block in a giant business model, made to conform to a standardised image, look , feel, sevice, product .
I talk to automatons behind counters who are mentally scanning page 732 of the Franchise almanac for the correct way to address the customers needs, all tied up in a replicated apron with a silk tie around the back. In the background the hum of vending machines and sizzling burgers or chicken wings and deep frying chips. The replicated ‘may I take your order please’ - ‘what sort of sauce’, ‘would you like to upsize’. Delivered with healthy repition, If you’re bringing home the bacon then it’s OK I guess.
A soulless hand reaches for my offering, the plastic notes slide from finger tips, almost like there’s little grappling hooks on the ridges of my fingerprint, the money seems to be screaming an unwilling… NO! before it is shredded within the maw of the corporate franchise, through the machine presses of the behemoth perhaps emerging as part of an annoying advertisement, or maybe as part of a wage for someone who in turn will by fast food or have their lawns mowed by ‘Jim’. He’s now branched out into electrics and aerials and tag and test I see! That bloke’s got a lot to answer for. I sit down amongst 7 Eleven fluro lighting and munch away on my pre packaged 100% beef burger and think it tastes a bit plasic, the bun is as appetising as a sticking plaster, definitively plastic…..
admin July 6th, 2008
Automatic pilot - object Writing 28 April
My car is flying along the road and I’m on automatic pilot, stern hands grip the convulsing wheel and reactions flow without notice, my mind in a thousand zones at once, but the unconscious one is fixed in place, on automatic pilot.My uniform is not starched dark blue, no raised rivulets or captains wings on […]
admin July 5th, 2008
Airport
Movie theatre panoramic glass lets me view the ingress of the shiny white missile, nosing in from the neat tarmac along glowing lines of christmas tree lights to the accordion walkway that will soon play its jerky tune. There are clumps of people banded together, some with laughing smiles and heads thrown back, some with […]
admin July 4th, 2008
coffee shop
So here I am, on the very same stage where the ‘Seekers’ got there start in the sixties. It’s almost like that folky vibe is still just rippling through the air. Mavis the proprietor is bent over shuffling around, almost bound for a wheel chair, she was here back in those days, with the tiny […]
admin July 3rd, 2008
Hospital - object writing 26 April
Naked dingy hallways echo ginger footsteps as I’m headed toward the room of light, It’s at the end of the tunnel. They’ve moved him into a more private room, there’s a view over the surrounding country side, it’s like a water colour painting in the half mist that’s left curling around distant lakes, fields and […]
