Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 4

Thoughts while sitting next to a wet pug…

New Year’s day 2023 and I’m sitting next to a wet pug, while a sodden beagle and slightly damp kelpie snore on the slate floor. We’ve all been down to the creek where the horseflies swarm and the dogs paddle through the cascading rills and the snakes shrink under their rocks and nurse their new year’s eve hangovers…

And my boy isn’t here, which hurts as much as ever (although NYE with Felix was always, for one reason or another, awkward). There was the eve we spent with my ex-boyfriend scowling on the couch because my son had his arm around me…and the one just at the beginning of what everyone calls The Fires (‘Where were you in The Fires?’ we all ask one another) when my son was afraid the house would burn down, and the one where I went to a barbecue and he stayed home alone…in fact, I was never very good at New Year’s Eve.

However, I am good at resolutions. I generally make more than I need, and keep most of them. It’s a way of holding the reins together as this muddled chariot lurches forward…I may not have anywhere to go on NYE but by NYD I definitely do, at least on paper. Two books, passable Greek, hens, being able to plink out something on my electronic piano keyboard, and a monthly dose of intellectual adventure, that’s the Plan for 2023. If I were a more altruistic person this list would include stuff like volunteering at homeless shelters, but I’m not, and it doesn’t. That said, three dogs and one kitten are the better for my existence, so god or whoever, take note.

I’ve learned a few things about myself this year. One is, I’m contrary. I always want the thing that’s over the other side of the fence. Whatever you think, I don’t. Whoever I hook up with, I’d rather have the other one. And Two? I’m never going to be able to write Stephen King’s IT. Or anything that long! I just don’t have that much to say, let alone the observational skills to be able to render a small dysfunctional US town into ghastly reality. In fact increasingly, the only thing I’ve got to say is ‘I disagree!’ Help me out here, give me something to disagree with or I’ll just wither away…

My daughter wishes to go to the US, but I’m convinced all dreadful things begin and end there. You only have to look at the cultural products of the place to know what it’s like. Where do Stephen King’s monsters decide to set up house? Where does the zombie apocalypse always start? No Country for Old Men? The Colour Purple? Eight Mile? Police Academy III. Any song by Bruce Springsteen. That’s right, North America. And I haven’t even got to Marjorie Taylor-Greene yet! Thank God I live in a country where all we’ve got to worry about is snakes and spiders!

Small achievements in the garden motivate me and occupy my dreams. Things like putting cardboard down under the fruit trees so worms can frolic, and growing pumpkins from seed in a heap of grass clippings, and cleaning the gutters. Small challenges keep me groping ahead – the pull cord on the tank pump just broke. My dog’s questing snout in the morning is a rare source of delight…how I do love thee, oh Darcy the yap machine.

Here is a poem about it… Life, that is. Not you, Darcy.

This is how it was

Young, so full of being, bright, wild, I’d feel it pushing at my skin

Like light contained, an atom yet unsplit

Waiting for a word.

This is how it is

In fits and starts like a loose wire, life goes on, small pleasures please still

Until memory sends its barbed arrow

Deep into the heart

Also, here are some discounted vampires, including the inimitable Lady Charlotte.

Why I don’t want to be published!

Lately I’ve been having conversations with people about being published.

No, not those people – not the useful, prestigious ones like agents, publishers and Netflix.

I mean normal people – friends, relatives and such – who flatteringly think that my stuff is good and so I should try to get traditionally published.

Accordingly, I’ve been thinking about whether I actually want to be traditionally published. On one level, yeah of course I do. Boasting rights. Tick of approval. Money. Fame. Etc. Who wouldn’t??

On the other hand…and there’s a lot of fingers on that other hand. I write because I like writing. I like producing literatuah and then reading it over and going, yeah, that’s good, that hits the spot (my spot).

So suppose I do decide to try to get an agent, this is how it’ll go. First I’ll have to write a bunch of self-promoting crap to convince them not to put me in the slush pile – an author bio about how marketable I am (not) as a writer, a pitch about how marketable (not) the work in question is, possibly a run-down on what best selling authors/books I consider my work to be similar to (none), maybe a precis of the plot. To this I’ll attach my work – formatted in 12 point Times New Roman double space with headers containing name/title/word count and all the other frigging stupid requirements with which the manuscript-reading fraternity like to tease us. Including a cover letter to publisher/agent detailing (blah blah blah, did I mention I hate filling in forms?).

Now I send it off. To one publisher/agent at a time, because apparently they can’t bear to be dealt with en masse. And I wait. After three weeks to three years, I then receive a rejection letter saying my work isn’t what they’re after. If I’m particularly diligent (and they’re unusually quick), I’ll get lots. During all this time, my work will languish unread. By anyone. Also during this time, I will get more and more downcast about the value of my work, and spending time on it will cease to be enjoyable. What’s the use, I’ll begin to think, if no one who MATTERS thinks it’s any good?

But just suppose some crazy publisher/agent accepts it? Well then there’s the money, fame, recognition – and lovely, lovely editorial changes. Like, if I’ve put a gender diverse person in, or someone with naughty opinions, they might insist that I dilute it or take it out. Nobody wants another JKR on their hands, right? I’ve noticed that prize-winning novels these days tend towards the morality-tale/virtue signalling side of things. Since I’m more in the ‘if you don’t like it don’t frigging read it’ mould, that might be awkward.

And worse – what if they like it as it is and want another one? I don’t do same same. Genres annoy me. I don’t like pressure. My literary recipes are always experiments and as such, unpredictable.

And the money? Somebody I knew who (unaccountably, given he wasn’t much goodl) got published, said he ultimately earned about two thou. Which is more than what I earn, but hardly a massive reward for the masochistic ego-fuelled journey that is traditional publication. As for the fame, publishers are increasingly – so I hear – demanding that one markets oneself. Screw that. Sitting in bookshops waiting for someone – anyone – to want you to sign their copy of Whatever by Me isn’t my idea of fun.

So WHY would I choose to do any of this? To me it’s kinda like that fisherman story. In short, management graduate dude turns up to Mexican fishing village, says to fisherman, you should think Bigger. Get more boats, more equipment, maybe some minions, do like I say and eventually you could be Rich! Then what? says the fisherman. Then you can spend your time fishing and lying on the beach. Er, right, says the fisherman, and just how is that different from what I do now?

As it is, I enjoy writing and I feel like I’m good at it. I have a modest readership. I could use some extra money (who can’t?) but that’s not a big motivation for me. I’m not greatly drawn to fame or recognition. I suppose it would be nice if people reviewed my stuff in magazines or wherever it is people who matter talk about books and said, Rose writes a treat. Then again those people generally have horrible taste, as per prize-winning lectures on correct thinking masquerading as novels.

I would like to be able to say to my relatives, ‘I am a real writer! As evidenced by…winning something or my latest book being available at all good bookstores. I would like to be able to say, see, all that messing around was NOT wasted!’

But…is it worth it? Still on the fence, personally, and likely to stay there due to inborn indolence. How about you?

Speaking of publishing, my new historical adventure novel – All The Evils, sequel to Pandora’s Jar – is coming out in mid-January. Set in sixth century AD Constantinople, it’s about a woman who finds herself at the centre of events during the worst sports riots in human history.

I’ll be looking for reviewers, so if you’d like a thrilling free book in return for a review, get in touch with me! englishrose659 at hotmail.com and I’ll send you the details.

This month’s mysterious coincidence – men

I’ve been thinking about men and, as often happens, so has The Universe. For instance, I’ve been trying this thing at the library recently where I shut my eyes and pick a book, any book…anyway one of these books happened to be The End of Men, by Christina Sweeney-Baird. Then I was asked to review Men of Earth by Ingrid Banwell, my daughter came home with Testosterone by Carole Hooven, and an old (literally) friend gave me a sheaf of articles on why men rule the world. For the record, his favourite book is The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg. Spooky.

Which reminds me, did you know that KPMG was asked, by a well known feminist collective, to work out the cost of male crimes against women and provide an estimate of just reparations. Since they’d done similar work for the victims of climate change, child abuse, institutionalisation and slavery, they were able to apply the same well-tested methodology to arrive at a figure of several billion trillion, to be distributed to every female on the planet. Individual shares will be determined by nation, cross-sectional eligibility criteria, and whether the woman in question has a forgiving nature.

Obviously these estimates didn’t take into account (they never do) all the things the Romans (ie, men) have done for us. Woodchopping. Sex. Witty conversation. Breakfasts in bed. The road system. Etc.

I have a theory. Men who say they like women like us because we listen to them (try getting a man to sit there going ‘wow’ and ‘really, that’s interesting!’ and ‘tell me more about your life/depression/marriage issues’). Women who say they like men (that’d be me, at times) like them because (while they’re considering our cleavage) they’ll put up with our inane chatter (try getting a woman to meet you for coffee after you’ve revealed your obsession with Schopenhauer/past lives/handbags).

I have another theory, which is that I shouldn’t really theorise. You watch a man with a dog; he’ll try to order it around, no matter what innocuous thing it’s doing. Buster, come here! Stay there! No! Stop! The same, however, is true of a woman with horses or, on occasion, kids. Makes us feel bigger, I guess. Or take tools. A man will invent a machine which is – if at all possible – too heavy, complicated or greasy for a woman to operate. Hopefully all three. When it needs fixing, he will say things like ‘Yeah ya need a throgspottle for that, love…don’t spose you got a fragshinning set handy?’ If you go out and buy a throgspottle, it always turns out to be the wrong size or if not, require a Hungarian weight lifter to operate. A woman will invent a tool – like knitting needles, or the loom – that demand an almost superhuman resistance to boredom and frustration, as in ‘Knit one, pearl one, cast…oh fuck, not again!’ If a man tries to use it she’ll say things like ‘Oh not like that – you’ll break it!’ I know men who are lovely right down to the last bite, and women I’d choke on.

Still, men. When the country’s a mess, we blame the government. Men are (mostly, still) the government. It’s only fair they get blamed, right? That said, Australia’s public service is – so a man of my acquaintance used to claim – run by a cabal of lesbians who scream at one another. Also, Mrs Thatcher. Gina Rinehart. Marjorie Taylor-Green. Say no more.

Anyway, I’ve already worked out what I’m going to spend my share of the reparations on. A bloke with a chainsaw to chop down all the dead trees around my place and turn them into firewood, another one with a slasher to cut the long grass, another couple to put up some fences…though considering all the things they’ve done to us over the years, really they should do it for free. And if I was still hot, they would!

Here’s this month’s Epic Sci-Fi and Fantasy promo, all free. And I totally recommend both The End of Men (in which a virus wipes out 95% of people with penises) and Men of Earth (in which a bunch of slightly nutty women create the perfect men with which to subvert the patriarchy).

Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash

Pointless Dinner Table Conversations, part 1

“Dad, how do I know you’re not a robot?”

“Robots don’t cry in sad movies. The Turing Test says that robots can’t match people in emotional intelligence.”

“But you don’t cry in sad movies…”

“That’s because I’m a man, son, not a robot. Listen, you ever heard of the saying, ‘If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck?’

“It could be a robot duck, programmed to act like a real duck. You could be a robot father…”

“Look mate, Descartes said, I think therefore I am. I think it’s time you ate those peas.”

“Yeah but dad, how do I know that? I know I think. Maybe you just compute. Or maybe you’re an illusion. Or a computer simulation. Or…”

“Maybe. Know what Descartes’ wife said?”

“No. What?”

“He pays the bills therefore he is.”

“Is what?”

“Not completely useless, anyway.”

WTF is this? Well, I’m trying to distill selected philosophical ideas into a form suitable for our local newsletter, which goes out to farmers, retired hippies and such like. Why? I don’t know really. But it’s an interesting exercise. For instance, after years of thinking, ‘oh yeah, I know what the Turing Test is,’ I realised – I don’t know. So I looked it up and turns out it’s crap. Sorry Alan, but there’s no way to tell if your boyfriend is a robot. Long story short, if he holds your hand and is good in bed, don’t worry about it. ‘You think I am therefore I am’ is a more practical solution to the problem.

Am I wrong? IS there a way to tell?

An excerpt from Dead People

A novel about grief, loss and ‘the other side’

What is it like, being dead?

You say, it’s like this…

But you say it in a language that I don’t understand. Curling around my cheek in the whisper of air from the open window, hanging close in the hot darkness, moonlit drops of poison on the flowers of the old white oleander, distant traffic, the smell of night, sheets damp against my useless nakedness…

All I want is to be with you…

If I could dissolve into the walls, the mattress, the floor, I would. I’d be a part of all this – these extraneous doings, this other world, containing you, excluding me, from which my skin keeps me. I’d be with you. If I dared.

If wishes were horses, I’d ride, begging. Black horses, naturally, with wings like clouds and eyes of cold crystal, leaping the Styx, storming the ramparts of the dead.

You died a month ago. You slipped into the water and you sank, and no one noticed until an hour or more later; they thought you were with a woman. The woman thought you were in the bathroom, snorting something. Everyone thought you must be somewhere. On the boat, on the earth. And all the time you were nowhere, which I think should have a capital N, Nowhere, so that it sounds like a place that you could be. That I could find you.

I met the woman, you know. Her name is Marianne. She has long fairish hair, of a colour that I find hard to describe, because it has no real colour – straightened, with a straightener. A flat tanned space for a face, pale blue eyes, pale lipstick. Not your type, I would’ve thought.

“He seemed depressed, but I didn’t think he’d…”

“Depressed?”

You didn’t seem depressed to me. If you had, maybe I could’ve got myself ready for it, for something.

“Sad,” she amends.

But then, in this country anything serious is sad. You probably talked to her about art and existence and suffering and she thought, lighten up dude. It’s a party – it’s your party – and here I am showing you my cleavage all alone in the lights of the bridge and you want to talk about death, what’s wrong with you? Only the fact that you’re famous, my love, kept her there listening; that’s what I think.

You were turning thirty. I didn’t go to your birthday party. I had an opening.

I said, “I’ll come when it’s over.”

You said, “What? Are you going to hire a dinghy? We’ll be in Middle Harbour by then.”

I said, “Oh, I forgot about that,” and you pulled my face close and set your lips on mine and said, “You always forget. That’s why I love you.” But there was a bit of a sting in it.

You meant that you loved me because I was an idiot, I couldn’t put two and two together and make four. I never could. Remember the time you broke down on the way to Melbourne on a road trip with Kean? You were five kilometres from Glenrowan and so you walked there along the B road under the darkling eucalypt scrub drinking vodka and imagining you were Ned Kelly. “I’ll come and get you,” I offered when you rang me, and you said, “And then what? Are you going to come on tour with us?” Because I hadn’t worked it out properly – that if I gave you my car, I’d have no car, and anyway what were you going to do with the van, just leave it there by the side of the road? “I wish you would come, anyway,” you added, “It’s been five hours and already I long for you. To the bone, babe, to the bone.”

So you went to your party alone, and I went to my opening. I probably would have ditched it – I should have – but it was my first major show and anyway, we’d quarrelled. I was angry and brooding. I’d committed myself to punishing you and it was too late to change my mind.

It – the exhibition – came on the heels of the Archibald, and, suitably – because the portrait that won that year was of you (by Kaite Ashfyrd, not by me) the theme was blind love. I had you white-eyed, your hands on the keys; I had you with your hat drawn down, the angles of your face like poems. I had you blindfolded, a naked woman stretched over your lap like the Pieta; I had you with your back turned and your black hair forming notes behind you. They said,

“You’ve been married nine years. Does he ever do anything ordinary, like the washing up?”

And,

“I wish I felt as passionate about my husband as you do about yours. How do you manage to make it last?”

I said, “Orpheus is never ordinary, not to me. Do you ever look up at the stars – you know, out in the bush, where you can see them properly – and think to yourself, well, that’s nothing much? I bet you don’t, and neither do I.”

I went smiling among everyone, and it was as if someone had replaced the night sky with a cardboard cut-out and those gold stick-on stars parents buy to put on the fridge when their kids behave. That was how I used to feel about people who weren’t you – as if they weren’t real. They were just the matter that you and I moved around in, the crowds at the ball who watch as Prince Charming dances with Cinderella.

I went home from my opening at midnight, a little drunk, and guilty, and came into the house that you bought for us with your star-money, and went straight through to the back deck. I sat with my feet in the infinity pool (‘Infinity,’ you said once – I wonder now if it was a warning… ‘Imagine if it were? If we could swim out and out and never stop…’) and listened to the harbour slurping at the rocks beneath. I could see right across to the skyline of the city, where people in swanky apartments drank cocktails on their balconies and other people were returning from theatres and dinners, pulling their wraps around them because of the chill harbour breeze. I could see a few lights on the water; probably none of them were you. I imagined taking wing like an albatross, gliding down out of the night to carry you home. I swished the pool water with my feet, and missed you, and went to bed, and – I can’t forgive myself – went to sleep.

I woke up to the phone ringing. It was still full dark. We don’t keep a clock in the bedroom because you say, “Some spaces should be timeless, babe,” but later they told me it was about three am. I thought it was probably you, and as I reached for it I felt a familiar tug between my legs, a tightness in my breath. Even the anticipation of your voice could do that to me. To be fair, not only to me; half the women in the world under sixty would probably have felt the same.

It was Kean. He said,

“There’s been an accident, Eurydice. The police are on the boat, they’re all over the place. He’s gone overboard, I don’t know…”

My head went slow, stupid. My throat made a noise, somewhere between a moan and a gasp.

“What do you mean, overboard?”

“He jumped. Or something.”

I said, “But Orpheus can swim. He’ll be alright.”

It’d be just like you to go for a swim in the harbour at night, into the black waters with their cold white slick where the bridge lights hit. Over to the beach at Kirribilli, sliding past the sharks and the rays and the rubbish, walking out like Poseidon on the strand, hair slimy and dark as river weed.

“I dunno…the harbour police are out looking for him.”

“When did it happen?”

“No one knows, he just…you know how he is.”

They won’t find you, I thought. Given a few hours, a fearless person can be anywhere. You could be drifting with the tide, paddling out through the Heads, swept into the wide waves of the Pacific. Please not, please not.

In the background I can hear loud organising voices. Someone shouts, “Kean?”

“I’ll come…”

“We’re still on the boat. They won’t let us leave.” (“What, are you going to steal a dinghy?”)

“Then I’ll…” What? I could drive to the quay, get someone to bring me out…but suppose you’ve just gone for a swim? Suppose you comes home, smelling of harbour sludge and dare-devilry, and I’m not here? Let us not do the other supposing, not yet.

“I’ll call you, let you know what happens. I’ve got to go, they’re asking everybody questions.”

“Kean- ” I say urgently, as he hangs up. I’m not sure what I was going to say, anyway. Tell me this is a joke. Make some sense of this for me, because I can’t grasp it. Too vast, too dreadful. A slow wail sinks into the sudden emptiness of our bedroom, deadens itself against the thick walls, but I’m not one for indulging those feelings, even alone. I stuff the sheet against my face, and cower away.

I think I knew then that you were dead.

What do we mean when we say that? Is it latent pessimism – a belief that the worst thing that could possibly happen, has happened? Is it a way of protecting ourselves, as if there is one – a way of getting ourselves accustomed to the worst even before it strikes, and then, if it doesn’t strike, the relief will be all the greater? Is it fatalism, that makes us move to instant acceptance? Or is it foreknowledge?

I think I loved you so much, so wholly, that I’d been waiting for them to take you away, ever since I first had you. You were such a fine, precious thing, surely you couldn’t be meant for me. They were right, those people who asked how we made it last. You can’t inherit the earth and sky and not wonder if it’s going to pop between your palms like a soap bubble.

They searched for you for days, and on the third day, like Christ, they found you. You hadn’t drifted far; out with the tide, and then back again. I answered the door to a pair of police; a man and a woman, who spoke quietly, almost shame-faced, as if a chance word might set me screaming. Afterwards, Kean rang me, and Carol, your mother. It was as if someone had struck her; she could hardly speak. Me, I was iron-calm. After all, it was over; nothing could be done.

“Why weren’t you there? It was his birthday, for God’s sake.”

Why aren’t you the one that’s dead, I thought, looking at her drinking her tea at the breakfast bay. You old useless thing. She was thinking the same thing.

“I know. I had an exhibition.”

“But it was his birthday!”

I said nothing. I agreed with her. The guilt pressed on me like deep water, till my ears nearly burst with it.

“Why would he have done that? Was he drunk?”

“I don’t know.” You would have been a little tipsy, of course. Who goes to a party – his own party – and doesn’t drink? You wouldn’t have been shit-faced, I knew that. You were always intoxicated, just being yourself. You wouldn’t have been high, either – though your mother hasn’t asked about that yet. She lives in an antiquated world where songs are written about whisky, not meth. You say – used to say – “We’ve inherited the world, why look at it through the bottom of a dirty glass?” and Kean would say, “Because it looks better that way.” I would have agreed with him. But the most you ever did was a little dope.

“If you’d gone that night, it wouldn’t have happened,” she says, inevitably. “My son would still be here.”

Dead People is due for release in January 2023!

Heart of darkness?

I’m afraid to go to Africa. Flies that burrow and rot, worms that come out your eyeball metres long, fish that swim up your piss and eat your urethra, if the big fauna don’t get you the little ones will. Cowardly, yes, and then there’s the people.

I like Africans (I like nearly everyone). They seem nice. However, I’ve just finished reading Paul Theroux’ The Lower River, and I realise that Africa, for me and perhaps other white people, has two faces. One derives from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – a brutal, festering jungle inhabited by savages (‘the drums, the drums!!!’) and steeped in misery. The other, a joyous, colourful land whose people strive against the vestiges of colonialism and demonstrate the kind of effortless virtues that the west has left behind – generosity, human warmth, the ability to dance and sing in public – against all the odds.

The Lower River is about a man who spends time in Africa as a youth and cherishes a nostalgic dream of the only time in his life when he was truly happy – as a teacher in a village school, in love with a local maiden. So – in his sixties, divorced – he goes back to the village only to find that the school is derelict, the local maiden grossly fat and aged by toil, and the villagers corrupt, cruel and enmeshed by greed and superstition. Sorta like The Wicker Man but in Mali.

But I also read (a few months ago) The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, in which a family of missionaries sets up in a remote village. While the deluded and controlling father tries to convert everybody to an irrelevant God, the villagers are unfailingly polite and helpful. Later one of the daughters marries an African and they fight bravely (but futilely) for democracy against the evil machinations of imperialist America. Africans, the moral seems to be, are much nicer than Europeans with their fancy cocktails and penchant for ordering everybody around.

I suppose the truth is somewhere in between. I had a Nigerian boyfriend once who got expelled from school for knifing a schoolmate. The kid, he explained, had stolen his lunch orange. Another Nigerian guy I knew believed, literally, in demons (an oddity in secular Australia,though probably common enough in the USA). One reads about the albinos for parts thing, and people whacking each other with machetes, and raping virgins as a cure for Aids…and then there’s all the stuff that one doesn’t read, that doesn’t get into the news, anywhere; how Mrs Z helps her elderly neighbour with the shopping and Mr Y teaches maths to orphans and Ms X helps with the food truck, and life goes on and people are people, same as anywhere, same desires and irritations and ordinary virtues.

Only they’re not, we’re not. We’re all specimens of homo sapiens, we bleed, we love, etc, but culture makes us strange to each other, and not just in a superficial way. We think differently about things, I believe, and thus, the land of sunsets and rhinos and rivers and women with unbelievable posture is dark to us, in a very real sense. Perhaps we, in the land of overstocked refrigerators and buffet religion and magic as entertainment, are also dark to them. And when we visit one another (or even go to stay) we’re each living in a kind of movie set, adapted to our varying perspectives but about as close to reality as old-style depictions of ‘The Wild West’.

What do you think?

And now for a free book promotion (including two of mine) that ranges from money management (!) to post-feminist dog collar fiction (‘Grumpy Billionaire’s Baby’ no kidding, and why couldn’t I have thought of the pen name Defiance Sand?). Not for me, but I did pick up My Dad is Dead and Other Funny Stories (if you’re upset by the subject, there’s always Broken From Parent Loss) and Fresh Air, Long Run and Other Tales (I might read it to my dog at bed time if she’s good).

Having recently returned from overseas to my rural paradi...

Having recently returned from overseas to my rural paradise, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s one thing it’s missing; people who like speculating pointlessly about abstruse subjects in which they have no appreciable expertise. People, in short, like me.

I thought that there would be lots of these people lurking about here like wood bugs, just waiting for someone to lift up the rotting log of obscurity to come scuttling out into the light. Well, there aren’t. know. I advertised. Does the universe have an edge, I asked? What is art? Will AI ever be conscious? Is morality absolute? Do you care? Then sign up for my fun and intellectually stimulating salon (in the Madame de Stael sense) and let’s have a woodbug fest!

But no, they don’t care. Nobody in my area likes this sort of thing (well, one guy does, but I think he may be planning an exchange of bits pics). I’m not sure what my next move will be, but I feel my brain slowly rotting.

And on a kinda sorta related subject…you know those women who tell everyone what a pain it is to be beautiful? Usually they get slammed because a) how vain are YOU! b) everyone knows beautiful people get better jobs so what are you complaining about and c) hang on a sec you’re not even that beautiful anyway! So how much more would you get slammed if you complained about the trials of being too bright? Of course, the tragic genius will argue thusly. If you’re brighter (in the traditional IQ based sense, which is not to say there’s not many other senses) than, let’s say, 90 percent of people, you’re going to struggle to find a guy who can keep up his end of the conversation, and will have to settle instead for one who’s good in bed or fixes things. At barbecues people will say things like ‘I read that there’s this secret bit of the Bible about aliens’ and you won’t know where to start. You’ll have lots of great chats about kids and ‘men!!!’ and practically none about the theoretical underpinnings of The Matrix (possibly just as well).

Not MY problem, I hasten to say. I might have been bright-ish thirty years ago but now my brain is a festering swamp (is there any other kind?) traversed by a few oft-trod planks (historical fiction – ie stuff I shoulda/mighta/coulda done when I was younger, future fiction – stuff I might but probably won’t do in the decade left to me, and actual fiction, which now involves a lot of google synonym searches). Apart from these few planks, it’s all a dismal fen of Things I Can’t (or can’t be arsed to) Get My Head Around – algebra, lawnmower mechanics, garden science, literary criticism, crosswords.

No, my current problem is more that – to use a phrase I despise – I haven’t found my Tribe. Don’t get me wrong, there’s loads of people I like down here. BUT. In social interactions, I’m always participating in conversations about things in which other people are interested. Compost. Inspirational biography. The Melbourne Cup. I rarely get to discuss the things in which I am interested. Quantum theory. The origin of ethics. Whether dolphins make jokes. Yes I am also slightly fascinated by compost, at times. Still…

Ergo, I am bored. What to do? For one thing, I’ve decided to only follow blogs which really interest me. Yours, obviously. I might, also, visit the Big Smoke for the purpose of attending meetings of the Humanist Society. If I’m lucky, there might be nerds there. And…I should get out more. I might find woodbugs cowering under the shelter of, for instance, the local Poetry Workshop, or a lecture on Bernard Shaw. Only, a final whinge, I’m kinda over old people. I’m an old person, nothing wrong with that, but a little variety wouldn’t go astray. Something to get the wheels out of the rut and doing burnouts on the open road.

And on a completely different topic, this week I’m hating on…Daily Calendar Wisdom. Love heals everything. Live in the moment. Three steps to a better you. Inspirational shit in general. Can’t stand it. I thought of my own inspirational quote today though, it goes, True Wisdom is when you realise you’re a fucking idiot. Socrates, if I’m not mistaken.

Unduly negative? Yeah I know. Anyway, have you found your tribe? Are you bored? Well, here’s one solution – a bunch of free books from Devious Paradoxes. Enjoy.

The beach at the end of the world

An Etiquette Guide for Sluts

At the end of the world, there is a beach.

Beyond the beach, sky.  Grey sky, grey sand, where one begins you cannot tell, where the other ends, likewise.

Walk as far as you like, there’ll be no footprints.  Look back, and it will be as if you’d never been.

You can hear the sea, the wind.  They sing to you in a dark whisper, meaningless.

You tip your head back and see the grey clouds scudding overhead, fast as time-lapse, slow as dawn.

You laugh, you breathe, you take off like a child’s kite, bright and brave and free.  The hand has left the string, or the string the hand, it doesn’t matter.  What does, now?  You are without hope, you don’t need it any more.

Because this is the beach, the one you saw long ago, at the end of the world.

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A dream of death

An Etiquette Guide for Sluts

The clouds drifted like poison dust across a sky dark with prophecy.

Three women, princesses, stood on the high walls,  granite so high and sheer that the road below was silent and grey as air.  We watched as they, the deathly ones, marched the royal road below us, their stone teeth broken and bloody, their ice eyes rotten with hate.

No retainers came to shoot fire arrows through the cloud-dark battlements, no knights massed at the black iron gate, shut still, and forever.  We were alone here now.  We waited, and watched.

As I looked down on the marching ones, the king of ghouls raised his eyes to mine, implacable, amused, hungry.

What are the three of you, to us?  Windblown on your castle walls, lonely, while the sun is fading to red you will be safe.

But as night falls….

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The REAL problem of suffering

Has nothing to do with why God allows it. A mythical being, if He’s to prevent suffering, would have to prevent living. Living involves suffering and try as we might,, we can’t avoid it. And that’s the real problem that we humans just can’t get our heads around.

I used to think all that was rubbish. Suffering obviously happens, to other animals, in other places. I’d never really experienced it, aside from the odd infected toenail and some snide remarks at school. I’m one of those people who approaches pain much as a goldfish is reputed to do – oh, pain! Wait a minute, what pain?

My son was consumed with the problem of suffering. Not so much with his own suffering – although, living in constant anticipation of illness and death, he undoubtedly did suffer – as with the idea that terrible suffering is all around us and we barely notice. We traipse through the natural world, gawping at koalas and wondering at the beauty that surrounds us, without realising that inevitably just around the corner is some poor old creature dying of starvation or mange or being eaten alive by termites, and she’s not alone. There is awful, unimaginable pain everywhere. Elephants with toothache. Mexican torture czars. Third world organ ‘donations’. Inevitably it begs the question, how do you live with that knowledge?

When Felix died, I learned suddenly about suffering. That it’s ruinous. That it’s inescapable. That time doesn’t make it better. That the more completely you love, the more completely you suffer. When it happens to you, it’s not an option to look away.

So what the fuck do you do about it? Drugs make it worse. Wealth can’t protect you. Sex, pleasure can only distract for a while. Religion may be a comfort but not even the pious are happy when their kids ascend to Heaven. Philosophies advise us – tough it out, pretend it isn’t real, pretend you don’t care. Art beautifies it. Novels can’t exist without it.

Felix used to say, what if you could take a pill and feel as if you’d achieved something tremendous, even if you hadn’t? Wouldn’t you take it, rather than go to all the bother of actually doing the thing? What if – he used to say – we abolished nature and put all the animals in delightful zoos, where nobody would ever get eaten alive by termites? Since our entire life is bent towards having more happiness and less pain, wouldn’t that make sense?

What if God finally listened to the unrighteous and abolished suffering?

But that’s not the deal. If you’re capable of feeling, then you’re capable of feeling shitty. Right? Or…maybe…wrong?

What’s your preferred solution to suffering? Does it need one?