Dear Bandyhoots,
Today is September the thirtieth and I just remembered a whole bunch of things I wanted to tell you about … like the dream I had a few nights ago … a recent excursion to the Skull Islands … the conversation I had with a lion in the African Bush and my sightings of a sailor on the high seas.
Last things first … a few nights ago I had a dream that I was on a mountain climbing expedition with two strange men. We had been trudging in the snow for quite a while when we arrived at a village that was notable only for the number of tents there were in what appeared to be the main street. I noticed that one of the tents was very small. A peek inside revealed a little girl of about five years old with brown hair, brown eyes and freckles … and the most endearing smile.
There and then I decided to carry her up the mountain … so I bundled her up … tent included … and with her still in it … and proceeded on my journey. It was a very long and arduous journey up the mountain … almost vertical in fact. Finally … upon reaching the summit … we arrived at a small village which reminded me a lot of those little villages in the Himalayas. Houses and Lodges made of wood … cosy fires in large communal living areas, brightly coloured woollen wall hangings and cushion covers … narrow little alleyways and dirty snow … also rickety wooden bridges connecting one cliff to another. This village had one such bridge … connecting one part of the village to another.
It was at this point that I decided to take the girl back down the mountain … because it only just occurred to me that her mother might be worrying about her whereabouts.
So back down the mountain I went and sure enough when I got to the village, the police were there. I handed the child over to the police and they gave her back to her mum. Later on I remember walking very closely behind them for a while. Either the mother could not see me or chose not to acknowledge me. I decided not to go back up the mountain again … mainly because I just could not be bothered.
Bandyhoots … do you remember me telling you about that exciting escape from the reptilian spaceship a few weeks backs and how we went north and had to drive through fire and nuclear waste etc etc …. Well … about a week later I got this terrible feeling that the reptilians were back in town … I saw their spaceship again …
So Bandy and me decided to head south this time … towards the southern sea. It was five minutes to five when we emerged from the elevator into the basement level car park. Four grim faced oldish ladies were waiting there to go up. I had a bad feeling about them.
It was an interesting drive … to the say the least that I can say … about it. The reptilian spaceship followed us for a while … and then we lost sight of it.
Leaving Queenstown I noticed the first of many teddy bears … that I would see that night … tied to a tree. Indeed that whole section of the Kings Highway between Queenstown and the Clyde Mountain was strewn with teddy bears and even one gorilla teddy bear tied to the trunks of trees.
On the lower part of the Clyde, where the terrain on either side of the road has levelled out … I noticed a most peculiar thing. I should say at this point that I have made this journey a hundred times … more or less … and I’ve never once noticed any campfires burning in these areas. And yet I saw quite a few that night … including one or two bonfires . I know this road, there are no camping grounds there and no car access.
At the bay we ate fish and chips. Spent the night parked by the roadside adjacent to South Bro Beach.
There’s not much more to report really. Bandy and me walked around Skull Island the next day and I took pictures. I made crystal and other offerings to the sea creatures. I went for a quick swim in Shark Bay. It was freezing! And then we drove home.
Bandy is convinced that I am leading a double life as a prostitute but I am not!
Very occasionally I find myself in a state of altered reality… perhaps it can best be described as being in two places at once or seeing another place in the space in front of me … and I am seeing it through a window in the quantum field.
Several months ago I had the very distinct feeling of being in two places at once … physically in my bedroom and ethereally in the African Bush talking to a very distressed and bewildered looking lion. He was upset about his cubs and about the men and their guns and about poisonous snakes hiding in the long grass.
On one occasion I saw a vertically placed apparition of a lion and a little white lamb … could have been a white wombat or oversized guineapig … walking side by side … through a portal …munching on grass.
Another time I saw one of these portals open up above the television set in my bedroom … it was turned off at the time … a scrawny, dishevelled looking sailor, with wiry hair and raggedy clothes stood on the prow of a boat … apparently frozen in time … behind him … in the distance … was a little island with palm trees on it.
I also saw one of my accumulators … the one with the smiley face and wonky eyes ... sort of hovering around my cactus plant in the little courtyard outside my bedroom. This was a most surprising manifestation since I had buried it up on Black Mountain … in a secret location a few months before.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Fungus in the Garden of Eden
A Letter to my Selve 28/8/2013
Dear Madge
Do you remember that day ... rather night ... we explored The Dark Portal School for Young Ladies…it was odd because it was like we had jumped forward in time or maybe backward and it was an abandoned ruin…that was after you died.
I’ve never told you this …how could I? … it was exactly three days after your funeral … you came to say goodbye … you slipped your hand in mind and said … till the white rose blooms again …
This Chapter of my ‘Life’ begins at the Karnak Grandma School of Girls in Melbourne Avenue … around the corner and up the road from the Butty Boy Boot Camp in Forrest.
One of my most vivid memories of those first few days at that school … was of an Indian girl … with very long black …dirty hair …that looked like it had never been washed. I sat behind her one day and the smell of it nearly made me sick … she left the school soon after because I never saw her again.
The three ‘daggiest’ girls in my year …Fonar Clayton, Robi Atkinsonar and an overweight girl with red hair and freckles and the last name of WebFoot … made a beeline for me in those first few days … so I joined their group. Needless to say the ‘cool’ group would have nothing to do with me after that. I was officially one of the ‘dags’. Not that I minded all that much.
In class …one day I noticed a beautiful girl with long black hair … a Pocahontas style of girl. It was Rosely. We quickly became friends and gradually disassociated ourselves from the other girls.
For two years we were in separable…and completely alienated from all the other girls in our year. It was not entirely a situation of our choosing … we were cast outs … for reasons I don’t clearly understand.
At the beginning of fifth form … there was an influx of new arrivals to the school …including Lulubelle and Vessle. For some reason Vesslie made a beeline for Rosie and me … she thought I was ‘cool’ which was a surprise … I was not exactly a member of the cool group. I would have thought Vesslie would be more drawn to the cool group than she was to us…but she wasn’t.
I thought Vesslie was pretty cool too … she had that confidence in herself that I always used to associate with American people … and her American accent conferred on her a maturity and an innate sense of self that I didn’t have … and that made her seem a lot older than her years.
The funny thing is … I don’t remember sharing any classes with her … I only remember seeing her at recesses and during lunch hours.
Vessle had only recently returned from a sojourn in New York and was full of stories about the place and the cool things New Yorkers get up to.
She was particularly enamored of the MacDonald’s Chain of Fast Food Restaurants … which at that time had yet to make an appearance in Australia. Both Vessle and her younger sister R-J… would love to show off their talents at mimicry by repeating the MacDonald’s advertising jingle … that went something like this… two whole beef patties …cheese…gherkins… something … pickles… something, something … on a sesame seed bun.
There was somewhat of a disdainful attitude to the Australian style of burger … as if our burgers were not the ‘real thing’ compared to theirs. They were very proud of their MacDonald’s Heritage is all I can say. I was not overly enthused and was a bit perplexed about this boasting of an American Burger Chain.
In the first term of sixth form Vesslie suddenly could not handle being at school anymore. As was the way with ‘parents’ in the seventies … they kicked her out of the house when she finally dropped out of school.
I dropped out too … a few months later … following an altercation with the Head Mistress Mizzard Short … Actually I was suspended for six weeks for back chat …but I never went back.
By this time Vesslie was living in a house On Jardine Street … Number One House … opposite Telopea Park … curiously this park has the exact same geometric configuration as an exclusive enclave in Japan for wealthy businessmen … I noticed this only recently in a short doco about these kinds of enclaves on You Tube …coincidence or no?
Anyhoos … surprise, surprise … I was kicked out of home as well …so I moved into Jardine Street too … J M Fowlter and Debbis … a girl I knew from Telopea Park High School … were also living there … and then later … Peter Danish.
This was the beginning of my binge drinking phase … I had never drank alcohol before so I used to get drunk very easily …on white wine mostly … and would often end up flaked out in the gutter on the front lawn of the house vomiting for hours on end …
Vesslie was very experienced and confident with boys … I wasn’t …I was actually quite shy around boys and very coy about sexual matters … the whole sex thing freaked me out a bit . In my head I still felt like a child and looking back I don’t think I was mature enough to deal with such matters at the time … also the constant pressure for sex made me uneasy …the role of femme fatale did not sit easily with me and it happened way to fast … one minute I was a child and the next a child in a grown up females body … My childhood had ended too abruptly somehow. For a start I felt really awkward and embarrassed about boys wanting to touch me ‘down there’.
By contrast, Vesslie had a confidence and knowingness about these matters that made her seem experienced beyond her years. I was shocked to learn about her proclivity for oral sex…having it to done to her as opposed to doing it to someone else. In her relations with her boyfriends … it was absolutely mandatory on their part … any boy who wasn’t prepared to do that did not pass muster … I think I asked her one day … something along the lines of … don’t you think that’s a bit of a tall order … to expect that every time ? and she was incredulous …. It was inconceivable to her that they wouldn’t. Are all American girls like this?... I asked her one day … “of course” she said genuinely surprised at the question.
Anyhoos I merely mention this things … because one drunken night … and as it happens …. on the second occasion of a threesome with the Shadow … both times an utter disaster … she proposed that we ‘go down on each other’ ….if I had been sober I would never have agreed to it … to tell the truth I find the idea of it a bit icky … hence the reason why I could never be a lesbian … even when I wished I was …
Well … what can I say about it … even though it lasted only a short time … it was as if I had opened the door to a surreal trippy world …I don’t even remember what happened next … did we fall asleep straight after or what?
The next day … everything seemed different …empty somehow …whereas before it had always been full of boys coming and going…evenings around the fire … listening to music … drinking and somebody nearly always had a Guitar … Mark Whimsey for instance …
R-J used to come over a lot too … so when we weren’t partying at home …we were up at the Boot and Flogger getting drunk.
That … next day … Vesslie and I agreed that it was a ‘one off thing’ and that we should just forget about it and move on … but here’s the thing … from that point onwards I started moving back in time.
I can hardly remember the days that followed…there was a short stint sleeping in the lounge room, which was Judee and George’s bedroom … three night time visits from Cee J who forced himself onto to me … felt more like rape actually … a visit from the Shadow who had written a song for me for my birthday …which consisted him of just making up a lot of gibberish and a lot random, chaotic noise on the guitar that just went on and on.
Now when I look back … I see that some of my memories of living in Forrest when Simoney was still around could not have happened before Jardine Street because they involved Judee and I didn’t know Judee then … moreover I lost contact with her after she left Jardine Street to go and live in the bush with a child of god.
One day …still in the depths of a long freezing winter … I noticed that everyone had gone…except for Peter Danish
Debbis…Jamil…Vesslie…George Washing Machine and Judee had all left …no more boys visiting…not even the Shadow ….One Jardine Street used to be a party house… now it felt like a ghost house…moreover it had fallen into a state of ruin…the front door was gone …. There were broken windows. I don’t recall having my own bedroom or sleeping in one. I don’t remember how I passed the time ...
I got diarrhoea one night and went looking for the toilet….it was out the back of the kitchen and totally unfamiliar to me. I noticed in the room opposite it … a dog and a litter of new born puppies. The next time I saw those puppies was in the summer … when Peter, Judee and I took them down to Broulee to experience the ocean for themselves….they hadn’t grown at all …. hardly at all anyway.
I don’t recall going back to Forrest either or seeing Marine or Dabios during that time and yet somewhere along the way I had been prescribed an anti-depressant medication called Tryptanol…at Marines insistence…but I don’t remember how that happened…anyhoos this medication was supposed to ease depression but if anything it made me feel like death …a total zombie … barely able function.
So I find myself alone with Peter Danish in this ‘ghost house’.
I don’t recall eating anything… there was never any food around anyway…except on this one occasion when I did suddenly…out of the blue…feel hunger … I opened up the fridge and was horrified to see a brain in there…not a sheep’s brain mind you …it was obviously human.
Peter Danish whom I saw only intermittently had taken to wearing gloves … because he didn’t want to touch any plastic… well… he told me that he was going to eat it…the thought of it made me feel sick. Even looking at it gave me the creeps.
When I say there were no visitors to the house…that was not entirely true. There were a few very old derelict men about. One of them did visit a few times that winter and later, in the summer. One afternoon we sat on the front porch and watched the house across the street burn down.
I know that one of my selves did eventually recover and go back to live with Marine and Dabios in the Forrest House…I even went back to school and got my higher school certificate.
But there was this other time…where it seemed like I was living there and it too seemed like a ghost house…Marine and Dabios and my sister SaRaHA were notable only for their absence.…On a few occasions Simoney turned up with a cache of magic mushrooms…there were two types that grew in the Brindabellas…blue meanies and gold tops.
One night … with Judee….I ate some….it was a crazed night is all I can say …and freezing …the depths of winters and the nights were long …. I remember running barefoot around those empty silent streets with Judee wearing nothing but our nighties … not feeling the cold or any discomfort at all.
Over the next few years my health deteriorated drastically… spiraling down and down into a state of crumbling disease and decay somehow … …somewhere I contracted the herpes simplex virus …followed by a wart infestation, eczema and constant asthma …and as I said I don’t ever remember being 10 years old.
Fast forward …. Living back in the Forrest, am with Max, he’s sleeping. The previous night, Max, Rosalie and her boyfriend Ben … the leprechaun had been to a band extravaganza at the ANU Bar … Seven Bands for Seven Dollars … Niavat … one of the orange people had given us some LSD … we cut it into quarters … but I’m not so sure Rosalie had any of it … anyway to cut a long story short … Max was completely unaffected by it.
For myself and Ben … it was the beginning of a three day long nightmare … culminating in me … crawling through a hallway filled with huge black spiders… the flesh falling of my bones … until I was nothing more than a bloody skeleton with bits of flesh hanging of it.
Seeya later Butty Boy ….
…. in a while crocodile ….
Dear Madge
Do you remember that day ... rather night ... we explored The Dark Portal School for Young Ladies…it was odd because it was like we had jumped forward in time or maybe backward and it was an abandoned ruin…that was after you died.
I’ve never told you this …how could I? … it was exactly three days after your funeral … you came to say goodbye … you slipped your hand in mind and said … till the white rose blooms again …
This Chapter of my ‘Life’ begins at the Karnak Grandma School of Girls in Melbourne Avenue … around the corner and up the road from the Butty Boy Boot Camp in Forrest.
One of my most vivid memories of those first few days at that school … was of an Indian girl … with very long black …dirty hair …that looked like it had never been washed. I sat behind her one day and the smell of it nearly made me sick … she left the school soon after because I never saw her again.
The three ‘daggiest’ girls in my year …Fonar Clayton, Robi Atkinsonar and an overweight girl with red hair and freckles and the last name of WebFoot … made a beeline for me in those first few days … so I joined their group. Needless to say the ‘cool’ group would have nothing to do with me after that. I was officially one of the ‘dags’. Not that I minded all that much.
In class …one day I noticed a beautiful girl with long black hair … a Pocahontas style of girl. It was Rosely. We quickly became friends and gradually disassociated ourselves from the other girls.
For two years we were in separable…and completely alienated from all the other girls in our year. It was not entirely a situation of our choosing … we were cast outs … for reasons I don’t clearly understand.
At the beginning of fifth form … there was an influx of new arrivals to the school …including Lulubelle and Vessle. For some reason Vesslie made a beeline for Rosie and me … she thought I was ‘cool’ which was a surprise … I was not exactly a member of the cool group. I would have thought Vesslie would be more drawn to the cool group than she was to us…but she wasn’t.
I thought Vesslie was pretty cool too … she had that confidence in herself that I always used to associate with American people … and her American accent conferred on her a maturity and an innate sense of self that I didn’t have … and that made her seem a lot older than her years.
The funny thing is … I don’t remember sharing any classes with her … I only remember seeing her at recesses and during lunch hours.
Vessle had only recently returned from a sojourn in New York and was full of stories about the place and the cool things New Yorkers get up to.
She was particularly enamored of the MacDonald’s Chain of Fast Food Restaurants … which at that time had yet to make an appearance in Australia. Both Vessle and her younger sister R-J… would love to show off their talents at mimicry by repeating the MacDonald’s advertising jingle … that went something like this… two whole beef patties …cheese…gherkins… something … pickles… something, something … on a sesame seed bun.
There was somewhat of a disdainful attitude to the Australian style of burger … as if our burgers were not the ‘real thing’ compared to theirs. They were very proud of their MacDonald’s Heritage is all I can say. I was not overly enthused and was a bit perplexed about this boasting of an American Burger Chain.
In the first term of sixth form Vesslie suddenly could not handle being at school anymore. As was the way with ‘parents’ in the seventies … they kicked her out of the house when she finally dropped out of school.
I dropped out too … a few months later … following an altercation with the Head Mistress Mizzard Short … Actually I was suspended for six weeks for back chat …but I never went back.
By this time Vesslie was living in a house On Jardine Street … Number One House … opposite Telopea Park … curiously this park has the exact same geometric configuration as an exclusive enclave in Japan for wealthy businessmen … I noticed this only recently in a short doco about these kinds of enclaves on You Tube …coincidence or no?
Anyhoos … surprise, surprise … I was kicked out of home as well …so I moved into Jardine Street too … J M Fowlter and Debbis … a girl I knew from Telopea Park High School … were also living there … and then later … Peter Danish.
This was the beginning of my binge drinking phase … I had never drank alcohol before so I used to get drunk very easily …on white wine mostly … and would often end up flaked out in the gutter on the front lawn of the house vomiting for hours on end …
Vesslie was very experienced and confident with boys … I wasn’t …I was actually quite shy around boys and very coy about sexual matters … the whole sex thing freaked me out a bit . In my head I still felt like a child and looking back I don’t think I was mature enough to deal with such matters at the time … also the constant pressure for sex made me uneasy …the role of femme fatale did not sit easily with me and it happened way to fast … one minute I was a child and the next a child in a grown up females body … My childhood had ended too abruptly somehow. For a start I felt really awkward and embarrassed about boys wanting to touch me ‘down there’.
By contrast, Vesslie had a confidence and knowingness about these matters that made her seem experienced beyond her years. I was shocked to learn about her proclivity for oral sex…having it to done to her as opposed to doing it to someone else. In her relations with her boyfriends … it was absolutely mandatory on their part … any boy who wasn’t prepared to do that did not pass muster … I think I asked her one day … something along the lines of … don’t you think that’s a bit of a tall order … to expect that every time ? and she was incredulous …. It was inconceivable to her that they wouldn’t. Are all American girls like this?... I asked her one day … “of course” she said genuinely surprised at the question.
Anyhoos I merely mention this things … because one drunken night … and as it happens …. on the second occasion of a threesome with the Shadow … both times an utter disaster … she proposed that we ‘go down on each other’ ….if I had been sober I would never have agreed to it … to tell the truth I find the idea of it a bit icky … hence the reason why I could never be a lesbian … even when I wished I was …
Well … what can I say about it … even though it lasted only a short time … it was as if I had opened the door to a surreal trippy world …I don’t even remember what happened next … did we fall asleep straight after or what?
The next day … everything seemed different …empty somehow …whereas before it had always been full of boys coming and going…evenings around the fire … listening to music … drinking and somebody nearly always had a Guitar … Mark Whimsey for instance …
R-J used to come over a lot too … so when we weren’t partying at home …we were up at the Boot and Flogger getting drunk.
That … next day … Vesslie and I agreed that it was a ‘one off thing’ and that we should just forget about it and move on … but here’s the thing … from that point onwards I started moving back in time.
I can hardly remember the days that followed…there was a short stint sleeping in the lounge room, which was Judee and George’s bedroom … three night time visits from Cee J who forced himself onto to me … felt more like rape actually … a visit from the Shadow who had written a song for me for my birthday …which consisted him of just making up a lot of gibberish and a lot random, chaotic noise on the guitar that just went on and on.
Now when I look back … I see that some of my memories of living in Forrest when Simoney was still around could not have happened before Jardine Street because they involved Judee and I didn’t know Judee then … moreover I lost contact with her after she left Jardine Street to go and live in the bush with a child of god.
One day …still in the depths of a long freezing winter … I noticed that everyone had gone…except for Peter Danish
Debbis…Jamil…Vesslie…George Washing Machine and Judee had all left …no more boys visiting…not even the Shadow ….One Jardine Street used to be a party house… now it felt like a ghost house…moreover it had fallen into a state of ruin…the front door was gone …. There were broken windows. I don’t recall having my own bedroom or sleeping in one. I don’t remember how I passed the time ...
I got diarrhoea one night and went looking for the toilet….it was out the back of the kitchen and totally unfamiliar to me. I noticed in the room opposite it … a dog and a litter of new born puppies. The next time I saw those puppies was in the summer … when Peter, Judee and I took them down to Broulee to experience the ocean for themselves….they hadn’t grown at all …. hardly at all anyway.
I don’t recall going back to Forrest either or seeing Marine or Dabios during that time and yet somewhere along the way I had been prescribed an anti-depressant medication called Tryptanol…at Marines insistence…but I don’t remember how that happened…anyhoos this medication was supposed to ease depression but if anything it made me feel like death …a total zombie … barely able function.
So I find myself alone with Peter Danish in this ‘ghost house’.
I don’t recall eating anything… there was never any food around anyway…except on this one occasion when I did suddenly…out of the blue…feel hunger … I opened up the fridge and was horrified to see a brain in there…not a sheep’s brain mind you …it was obviously human.
Peter Danish whom I saw only intermittently had taken to wearing gloves … because he didn’t want to touch any plastic… well… he told me that he was going to eat it…the thought of it made me feel sick. Even looking at it gave me the creeps.
When I say there were no visitors to the house…that was not entirely true. There were a few very old derelict men about. One of them did visit a few times that winter and later, in the summer. One afternoon we sat on the front porch and watched the house across the street burn down.
I know that one of my selves did eventually recover and go back to live with Marine and Dabios in the Forrest House…I even went back to school and got my higher school certificate.
But there was this other time…where it seemed like I was living there and it too seemed like a ghost house…Marine and Dabios and my sister SaRaHA were notable only for their absence.…On a few occasions Simoney turned up with a cache of magic mushrooms…there were two types that grew in the Brindabellas…blue meanies and gold tops.
One night … with Judee….I ate some….it was a crazed night is all I can say …and freezing …the depths of winters and the nights were long …. I remember running barefoot around those empty silent streets with Judee wearing nothing but our nighties … not feeling the cold or any discomfort at all.
Over the next few years my health deteriorated drastically… spiraling down and down into a state of crumbling disease and decay somehow … …somewhere I contracted the herpes simplex virus …followed by a wart infestation, eczema and constant asthma …and as I said I don’t ever remember being 10 years old.
Fast forward …. Living back in the Forrest, am with Max, he’s sleeping. The previous night, Max, Rosalie and her boyfriend Ben … the leprechaun had been to a band extravaganza at the ANU Bar … Seven Bands for Seven Dollars … Niavat … one of the orange people had given us some LSD … we cut it into quarters … but I’m not so sure Rosalie had any of it … anyway to cut a long story short … Max was completely unaffected by it.
For myself and Ben … it was the beginning of a three day long nightmare … culminating in me … crawling through a hallway filled with huge black spiders… the flesh falling of my bones … until I was nothing more than a bloody skeleton with bits of flesh hanging of it.
Seeya later Butty Boy ….
…. in a while crocodile ….
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