Huck Walker's Blog, page 4

I should turn the security light off in the backyard if I...

I should turn the security light off in the backyard if I'm going to have a sauna in the nude. That way, if I decide to walk out the back door and enjoy the chill winter drizzle on my skin I won't disturb the neighbors with my pasty, luminous body.
I like looking at the night sky after a long, slow cook in the 'chamber of insights'. But instead of being invisible within the broad dark cocoon of the evening sky, I was blinded and exposed by the stupid motion sensor light. (LIBERTIES!)
Still, I did enjoy seeing the steam rising from my toes and knees. 


There is a picture that I'm working on. It will appear shortly, but my current position as deputy principal is eating into whatever passed as spare time that I used to have. I hope it will be worth the wait. It's nearly as lewd as a naked guy loitering by his back door.

The Deputy Principal job is only for this ten week period, and already I'm enjoying it far more than I would have expected. There is always a suspicion in my mind that someone is going to come up to me and ask; "Have you done the BLANK?" and I'll be all; "The BLANK? What's the BLANK?" And their eyes will widen and for a moment they will be searching my face to see if I'm joking. Then they will ask if I'm joking. Then they will realise that I'm not joking. Then they will swear quietly and back away, hands shaking...

Well, in an effort to avoid this, I'm going to be-bed my bone sack.

 oo
  =

Some nights when I go to bed, when the street has gone qu...

Some nights when I go to bed, when the street has gone quiet and my brain starts to relax, I hear a sound. Beneath the thrum of insects. Hiding behind the meaty grumbling and pumping of my own organs, there is the trickling of water.
I'm not sure if it's real.
But it makes me nervous.
I lie there trying to calculate the size of the cavern being created by this stream of water, the persistent tinkling at the edge of my hearing.

I imagine parts of the wall and ceiling of the cavern regularly peeling off and falling to be slowly dissolved by the running water. The vacuole grows until, inevitably it has undermined my home. A great, invisible bubble lurking beneath me. Ready to swallow me whole.

A limestone cavern with an icy river to drown in. Long trapped gasses not meant for breathing. Pillars of rock. Beautiful, tall and sharp, far below. If I'm not skewered, perhaps the fall will kill me. As the bedroom tilts towards the gaping hole, a beam might dislodge from the roof of my house and dash out my brains.

Of the multifarious dreams of my own demise, the 'hole in the ground' is a particularly disturbing and all-too-common meme; a ring of crumbling brown walls. Hand holds that melt under desperately grasping hands. Falling. Falling in towards that dark, cold spot; the Dead Centre.
In nightmares, there are oily horrors that breed in that pitch. Dumb, hungry abominations that smother their victims slowly, sitting on their chest, filling their ears, their eyes and their mouths with wet soil. It might take days to expire; immobilised, heart thumping and lungs straining and no light to glint off their translucent teeth...

Perhaps it's all in my head.
 

Back into the fray!

Heading back to work. With a difference...

See this guy? He's an accountant from The Quadrant of Deception. He's been invading my time and eschewing it from my goals;
Book two won't write itself. I can't allow this ugly gent to usurp my aims with his little swipes, sniggering snatches and underhanded grasps at my time.
There is nothing more hollow than lost opportunities and squandered potential.
I won't let this skinny horror whisper a long list of shortcomings in my ear when this year is out.
Perhaps it's a perversion of ego or a flaw of character but I feel a desperate urge to stamp out change in my environment. One that I believe I will be locked out of if I am not actively involved.

Not folding in a heap when the requirements of my daily employment are fulfilled. Pushing past fatigue. Resisting the temptation from the Quadrant of Deception. This is paramount.
Research and networking, planning and writing. These must be the bright jewels of achievement in my weeks. Lines of text, files of thoughts, even crippled by haste or poorly defined will be the proof of the ledger.
I must persist.
I must persist.

Wow... What a crazy day.After my morning coffee and a goo...

Wow... What a crazy day.

After my morning coffee and a good bash at some writing, I had a call from ABC Central West NSW(Radio).
 Looks like I'm doing an interview tomorrow morning!
GASP!   

Lazy Bones

After a mad couple of weeks I finally find my way back in front of the computer screen, tapping away.

The book writing progresses, though slowly. I'm currently still working on survivor stories with not a great intention of progressing much beyond this in the near future. Work for the new curriculum (mathematics k - 10) must take precedence. Still, I've had time to get away with the family to the snowy mountains for two nights at the beginning of the school break. The mountains weren't very snowy, but I did get a couple of nice pictures of fungus. Here's one;
I've got the house to myself this week. I'd better keep focused or I risk being ensnared by the clumsy hand of procrastination. Among my other chores, I hope to make contact with someone from University of Canberra for a chat about applying to study next year.
Anyhoo... here is another recent pic:

Does he still do a blog?

Well, yes, I still update my blog.
It's been a while as the past fortnight has delivered some amazing and persistant challenges.

The signing was GREAT! Not least because there was a cavalcade of personages from the twisting nether regions of my past. Here is a picture of some humans who purchased copy of 'The Griefing' then insisted that I sign it for them...
[I know, right? How dare they! Especially the little one! I bet he has no intention of reading it...]
But serious like; a big thank you to all the peoples who made an effort to come and say 'hi' and to the randoms who took a punt on an unknown author and parted with their hard-earned cash.
A big night ensued afterwards, then a wobbly return to the underworld of Yass... 
More to come!  

Impending Signs!!!

I'm awfully excited.

Two sleeps until the signing at Charlestown square (Newcaslte, NSW, Australia, Earth, Local solar system... etc...)

I've got less than 100 copies left from my January order. If I manage to offload half of them I should finally break even and I can value my eight years of work at approximately )$0 per hour. (rounded to the nearest dollar).

I'm a nut-job. I know that I'll keep working on book two, and the many other writenings that have been raiding my brain lately, despite the current value of my works. I can only hope that book one finds an audience in time, or that some future work makes an impact.

I'm a bit apprehensive about the Dymocks Bookstore appearance. I just don't know how many people will turn up. None of the media have picked up on my media releases and I know that that's probably because I'm still 'unknown' (despite the fact that my upper half is still on the Newcastle City website on their environment page. Here is the link if you want to have a laugh: http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au/envir...
That's me, up the top on the left... ... ...)
Still, if some of my old Newcastle pals can turn up that will go a long way to making the day a success.

I'm going to have to wander the streets for a couple of hours, drink beverages in more than one public bar type establishment and, on Sunday morning, take a dip in the icy ocean and stay in until my gonads retreat into my neck. Should be fun.

A new rule for the Metric System

Why is it taking so long for the Metric system to overthrow the Emperial system? Ok, so social inertia has a lot to do with it. As does the influence of 'Empire America' and the drivel that it spews from the tevelisheon. BUT! I have a couple of ideas as to how we might speed up the process and even (in my less than humble opinion) improve on some applications of the Metric systems' use.

GET RID OF THE 30cm RULER AS THE STANDARD IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS
From their earliest days in school, students are consciously and unconsciously dividing their world up into lengths based on the ruler sanctioned by their teacher. The ubiquitous 30cm ruler is a constant reminder of 'the foot' and pollutes young psyches with its twelve inches of LIES.

THE ALTERNATIVE
The 1/4 metre ruler.
250mm of raw, throbbing power, grasped in the hands of a generation of growing consciousnessesss... (ok... that might be a bit much)
I've suggested this plan a few times to peoples and have variously received ambivalence, annoyance and more than once, a perceptible distancing as people backed away from me and found other things to talk about.
"But what about the centimetre?" asked one caring soul, probably desperate to help me through my metric centric crisis.
"Bugger the centimeter!" I reply. The centimeter is rarely used in trades or sciences and doesn't fit neatly into our sexy, popular base system for most other measurements. Sure, it has it's place, as the cubic centimeter neatly equates to the milliliter, but that doesn't' excuse it's dominance in the education arena!
"But it's easier to think in inches..." objected a passerby, one finger jammed up to the elbow in his nostril.
"Bullshit!" I shout, watching as he wipes fresh nose-jam on his lapel.
This concept is based on the fact that most people are taught with the imperial system still hanging around, clogging up the works; people who still state their height in feet, their babies weight in pounds, fish length in inches... it's like nails scraping down a chalkboard being cut in half with a band saw. If we did away with this crap then people would have to fill the void... with metric measures.
Just because the millimeter is a finer measurement than the 'inch' doesn't mean it is beyond comprehension. We just have to start the exposure to the system earlier and root out more of this clingy emperial garbage.
ALSO, by giving students a 'quarter meter' ruler we encourage fractional thinking as part of regular classroom discourse. (neat, eh?)

(and another thing!)
ALIGN SOME OTHER MEASUREMENTS TO OUR LOVELY BASE METRIC SYSTEM
The base measurements taught for Mass, Length and Capacity are the Gram, Metre and Litre (respectively). I believe we should do away with the 'Tonne' and align each of these three base measurements with the other prefixes. For example, we could have a "three meg truck" instead of a three tonne truck. And, if we were traveling from Australia to Argentina we could say we had to fly "12 meg" or twelve mega metres. If we wanted to travel to Mars we might be traversing a convenient 80 gig of space (80 Gigametres).
In time, people would get used to differentiating between the different applications of mega, giga, terra (etc) for length, mass and capacity based on context; 35 megalitres of mulch, 19 gigagrams of pig iron, 150 gigametres to the sun...
Ahh, yes. A golden age of communication. That would be awesome...
(Huck senses people backing away from their computer screens, looking for something else to talk about...)

Well, my rant is done for tonight. I guess I'll have to start making quarter metre rulers and handing them out on street corners. Put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I guess I could put my own frantic head on the flat side, you know, to inspire and terrify the children?
[my own frantic hed]

Gargrrrlz

A big thank you to my friends and family for again helping me to maintain a sense of equilibrium amidst opposing forces.

The Newcastle signing at the Dymocks book store in Charlestown is on in just over a week and there hasn't been much coverage to date. Facebook peeps are being supportive and I hope to see some friends wriggle out of the boards and join me for a bit of rompage.
I know I look back on my years living in Newcastle with a fondness that has been inflated by time, but I really miss the place, the people and the bits.

Before I get maudlin, here is a sketch done when I was a telemarketer in Sandgate. It is part of the "John Woodhead" series.

[untitled](ball point on paper. A6.)

A very special nightmare

'The night has many faces'
It was a winter, many naked moons ago. Impossibly young, I sat with my future wife amidst the grey and tan brutalism of the University, our school of learning. Newly coupled, we were eager to plumb the depths of our imagined world. We spoke of things unproven, of matters beyond the physical and commonly denied. There arose within me a peculiar dislocation, a feeling that our connection to the plane of existence grew more tenuous with each passing word.
There seemed no reason to remain. With haughty breaths, we left the academics to their reachings. Through their lumbering gardens and out, onto the drabbery of suburbia, still we prattled incessantly. The scuttling of humanity was dampened by our shared discourse, the to and fro of wild speculation widening and deepening my sense of infinite possibility.
Presently, there crept upon me the suspicion that some unearthly presence hovered somewhere nearby. Nothing seen. Nothing heard or felt, just a persistent impression. Logic and reason, belittled by windy discussion, had abandoned me. Brave and flippant, I wordlessly invited this entity to join me, to follow as we left the thundering road, taking wide quiet streets to the house we shared on the edge of the Shortland swamps.
A masochist’s trick of design, the house lost all heat within seconds of the setting of the sun. But her room was a bastion. That night I slept in her arms, cocooned in a bubble of warmth until the dream came upon me.Swaying. The heavy wooden handle of a mop in my hands. The walls are white, the floor is checked with broad, pale-blue squares that glisten wet. The corridor is wide enough for two stretchers to pass each other, but there is nobody coming through the nearby double doors. Just off the hallway the researchers are murmuring to each other in a room that is overly bright and clean. They are calm. They are safe in that light.But we are far under ground. I take this for a certainty as any person waking in their coffin must do the same. I have to finish cleaning in the corridor. I have to clean in the dark room up ahead before I can join them in there, in the lighted room, where I can pretend to dawdle on some stubborn grime and share a luke-warm word or pleasantry with those learned fellows.The corridor is finished much too soon. I’m at the door to the dark room. It has a small glass window set at head height. The glass is thick, reinforced with woven wire. I open the door.I don’t want to clean in the dark room. It’s cold and cramped at the threshold. Grey light bleeds around me onto the floor, giving gloomy illumination to the jars, the vials and alembics, the many instruments of their craft upon the benches and at the stalls. The flicking switch is overly loud, amplifying the quiet and the dark. Flicking again, the sound strikes the immobile shadows and shunts the last warmth from them. The simplest of technologies has failed and my disquiet threatens me with fanciful, shapeless fears. Then I chide myself for a boy; a failed fuse or faulty wire is no cause for alarm. See now, my eyes are adjusted and more of the room is revealed. Surely it is no great trouble to wet the floor, to quickly pass the mops head about and retreat back up the hallway? Just dive into that dark for but a moment and retire to the brighter rooms.In I go. The bucket scrapes and the mop head slaps. My heart is pounding in its bone cage. My arms work the tangle of dull strings on the chequered floor, my hands hold tighter, the long handle flexing beneath their grip. There, towards the back is a storage room, its door is a black plane within the darkness. And the mop is pulling me closer, eating up the tiles with each scrape and slap. And I don’t want to be in this room anymore. Scraping and slapping. And the door is colder than the shadows. I don’t want this cold and pulling fear. And somehow I’ve stopped moving. And the room is holding its breath in anticipation. And I know at once to trust my heart and flee.I turn and run, the corridor is close. Cold air clutches at my back. I reach the doorway and through. I pull the door behind me firmly shut, holding tight the handle and breathing my relief.From my vantage in the hall I can see a thin wedge of light and the research room within. All murmuring has ceased in there and the light has frozen on the walls. I was all prepared to rush to that bright room, but now I’m taunted by that quiet. So I creep, the thin wedge of light widening and I see the tables within, all bright and radiant shining. But the researchers are not standing at their stations, not swapping muted banter as they work. They are gone.And on the far side of that radiant room a white door stands, teasing my eyes. I start to wonder if that is the way out, the way up and out to freedom, but for the quiet in there.Abruptly thump behind me and I spin. A head has slapped, bloody against the doorway of the cold room. A smear across the glass and wire window, the features scoured and eyeless. A dead thing meant to drive me on. I know that I am bound. There is no hope before me, behind me only death. My last act I turn towards the bright room. Petrified then, I watch the white door far away.A shadow stretches from the gap beneath the white door; two arms, reaching with ripping talons, a wolf’s head, fierce and carnal. Its eyes they see me there. Its long tongue tastes me on the air. My mind is breached. The outsider shows me how it sees; a plan with corridor and rooms, little black dots where corpses lie, and there a red pinprick in the hall; it’s me, caught between the cold and brightened rooms. It shows me what it knows. It shows me that I am a plaything, kept alive to feed with terror.From the meat of my eyes I see the white door, the shadow figure invading with its hungry body, its thin, lean legs. Then at last the white door flies apart and he appears.Abomination. Framed within the doorway the world behind him is pitch. He is not the wolf-man he casts before him on the ground. He is stocky, grossly short and naked. His flesh is banded as if removed in wide strips from his torso, legs and arms. His head is bald and grinning, wide with crenulated teeth.His arms are out wide, this world is his. I cannot look at his eyes. I cannot ignore him or keep him from my mind.“I am Metamorpho. I cannot die.”****I awaken. Full sweating, quaking. Sat up in that bed, the covers shucked. My head is full and sick. My eyes are clutching at the dark, looking for solace in concrete of reality.But there!In the darkened corner of the room. A figure squats no taller than my thigh. Emaciated and twisted but un-mistaken;He is here! He is in the waking world and grinning, the pinpricks in his eyes marking me. He has followed me at some dreadful cost. He has chased me from my dreams. And I know by his looking that he has plans for me now. He is smirking at the pact signed, the contract entered. I have played into his design; my new nemesis.I stare hard, our eyes locked. Neither one of us moves. A woman’s hands are upon me but their warmth is far away. My body tingles and numb with this terror. In time not able to be measured his colour starts to fade. The glow in his eyes diminishes. Still I cannot breathe. My precious woman whispers my distress. She hears my gibberish and soon she lights the room. The corner is revealed but the last of him has gone to hide in the thinner shadows. There is no looking that will reveal him now. Mischief and malevolence has escaped. But not far. Never again will he be far. He has found me now and bound to me tight.And he will be there at the end.   "Metamorpho Appears"
[A5. Ballpoint on paper]