Where to start? Old ladies in blue crimplene pant suits cringed back from the wash of my car as I swept past in my only-pensioners-buy-them Camry. I was returning from my parents - dinner with sister and her husband, little H getting better, nothing wrong with her at all really, doctors expect nothing bad to come of it. And my sis got an iTouch outta the trip. Next time she needs a new piece of modern media equipment we'll just get H bumped on the head again and another medivac to good old home-of-iPods, Brisvegas.
Work is quiet, the boss-pair away on their paradisiacal island. I awake at 440 am and watch 3 hours of Battlestar G before going in late to work - too sick to hang out till lunch for the chem so I get dosed at 830am and get to work late. I had to give my patient chemist fifteen ten cent pieces I was so broke this morning, raising the 4 dollars was a mammoth task. S's pay came in 20 hours late, which is a long time in a land of 8 hour chemical effective half-lives.
Half-lives. What we lead when using.
So home tonight to rip a few movies for sis, set up her new iTouch, do up a quote for a top-end machine for a co-worker's friend, and try to type some words as I am doing atm. Updated my resume at work, caught by the auditor ut he was fine, he said "...well I guess if it's slow...". He's a nice guy, a relaxed auditor. He knows we don't do shonky stuff, boss S is likelier to over-disclose out of nerves than to try to hide anything at all.
--- my sister just returned a call, she was in the shower when i rang a minute ago to get some details off her for iTouch registration. Her call to me would have lasted less than 30 seconds I swear. She gave me the info I was requesting then signed off - "Bye.".
It's good to have a sister as a parity check of a sort. To realise that it isn't just you, that perhaps you are genetically hardwired for brief curt responses and an apparent lack of emotion. I know I get a real "she hates me" vibe off my sister although I truly know the opposite to be true - she's a great sister who would do anything for me. We're just pre-set to assume indifference or hatred from people who don't gush overly.
Or once again, maybe that's just me being WAY too sensitive.
I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to all past and present girlfriends who have had to endure this. Please know that I loved ya all, each and every one of ya, in a unique and crystalline way for every day we went out. Until every bitter end.
I wish I could have enunciated my feelings better. A lot of you were artists in some way - mainly musos but occasionally a painter or sculptor. Now I write this I wonder what it is that attracts me to artists? Creativity that I wish for, maybe a desire to have a teacher open up this side of me? If so, I've failed in communicating this desire terribly. I have learned no instrument and painted no pictures. Though a few bright girls have said "Write." so maybe it isn't all loss.
I mean, if I don't tell the world about the ladies in blue crimplene suits (and she had platinum blonde dyed hair, I swear), who will?
***
Perhaps I hope my random witterings will help me reveal a pattern in the chaos?
That one day I will look at something I wrote and say "A-Ha! That's why I do what I do and why people do to others what they do to others."
But so far the only patterns I see emerging relate to how I use more when I have cash. And that was not something that I needed to write for five years to discover....
But I am slowly learning, if not discerning. Learning that sarcasm is not everything in life. That speaking at speed is useless if the hearer hears nothing but garble. A few good friends strain their ears to interpret but the average Joe (or Giessueppe as Michelle is learning) doesn't expect to have to work to hear, so go ignored. For years I have played at throwing in bizarre remarks, ostensibly to see if the person I was talking to was actually listening. It is only lately I have realised that they may have wanted to hear what I said, and maybe even appreciated it, but given the mumbled and garbled style, all they heard was a "blither blather".
And you can't make crystalware from mudcakes, as I just invented...
***
I watched a Nick Cave doco/movie the other day. Like a Radiohead doco, it followed the 'low on content, high on general stuff' feel. This is not a criticism. I loved the Radiohead doco (Meeting People is Easy), although it made me very depressed. This film, The Road to God Knows Where, doesn't tell you a lot about the band but it does show the grunge, the petty business-spats, the low quality PAs, the boring interviews, all the things we know about bands on tour. Uli Schuppel directed it, it's black and white, and the one over-riding impression I took from it was that of "Prime". Meaning that this film makes it obvious that each of us have a prime. A time or point or day in which we shine, we exude energy and attract others through our approach to life.
Seeing Nick last month at All Tomorrows Parties really emphasised the point. He is still doing the poppy songs that he had already written back in 1992 when this film was made. His sound has so changed - back then it was so dark, so ANGRY, so viciously spat out. Nick reads a quote from an article at one point -
"Nick Cave used to have two problems - heroin addiction and his bad voice. He's kicked heroin and he's working on his voice."
Nowadays Nick has a well-trained voice that suits his love ballads. Back then his rawer voice fitted his anger songs. He was an angry young man, but what was better was he was an angry young Aussie man. At least for me. someone who expressed the alienation and despair of growing up in a nuclear-threatened 1970s and 80s existence. I tried to tell my sister and mother the importance of believing life could be over any day through nuclear war to me, when I was a child, but they seemed not to hear me.
It seems noone believes in nuclear war anymore, except perhaps some women at Greenham Common and a group of men who control the systems that can still send out this earth times forty death to us all.
PS - I heard from Michelle today that Tam and Bridget have broken up. No idea when it happened, but sorry to both of them. They were together longer than a lot of married couples. Prompts the question - is not marrying a demonstration in the belief of equality of men and women, i.e. believing that a woman can exist without a man and does not need legal ties to claim against him post-marriage (h,mm i can see a flaw in that - what if one party gave up an income to assist the other party - regardless of which sex did what, one party sacrificed something for the other's benefit, so dissolution of the relationship will leave that party at a loss). Or is non-marrying just a resort for emotionally bankrupt and misogynistic males?