Confessions of a self-obsessed drifter

I sat on the toilet for a long time, being deep in thought about being deep in thought, till I realised that no-one was watching, and I had no need to appear profound. I stared at myself in the mirror for some time, contemplating future plastic surgery possibilities, and surrendered my self-opinion to the revelation I had known all along: I was still as fake and superficial as everybody else in the world, and often I was worse.

At times it had come to be that I only really wrote because of being still so preoccupied with impressing other people and providing an excuse for whatever weirdness I might project, whilst I convinced myself that only I could detect the affectations I contrived to make myself seem more interesting under the glare of the stupid and judgemental people who so often surrounded me.

In the mirror, I realised that I was looking at a ghost. An actor, not even- a representation of an actor, an image like so much else on Earth, an image lacking substance, a freak of vacuity. Naturally this concerned me, but I never sought then to find a solution. I just realized what I had become, and maybe what I’d always been. I cared about nobody else. My friends could die and I wouldn’t cry. I’d probably milk their deaths to attract sympathy from other people, to cultivate that long and sacred stare into nowhere, that phoney appearance of profundity and tragedy. Luke, my flat-mate, was god-knows-where, Helen I knew nothing of, in spite of having slept with her and contriving all the mandatory small talk and questions that one asks like some automaton, forgetting the replies as soon as they leave the speaker’s mouth. I never called my family, and never wrote anybody. I consciously despised most people on the planet, and all the lies they lived and breathed and ate and passed onto others like the plague. How God existed and created man from some great sacred image. How lying to yourself and pretending to believe bought a ticket to some afterlife existence. How this could all be true in spite of suffering, in spite of everything being suffering. The lies seemed eternal, the truth only fleeting. What was everyone else in the world waiting for? The house, the spouse, the car, the boat, and then the truth? Only then the reality and insights finally forcing the mirage to evaporate, the nonsense to be washed away? I waited for nothing. I wanted truth, I wanted virtue, I wanted greatness, though I did grow scared of what these things might do to me in the eyes of others. Would I be made an antichrist like Nietzsche, a Beast, an outcast in the mould of Cain, a crucifixion victim just like Christ? No, I needn’t worry. I was not exceptional, and even if I were, the bourgeoisie could embrace everything. Even if I hijacked planes and crashed them into the centre of the universe, I wouldn’t be completely condemned. I’d be partly understood, made a victim or a hero by countless millions of sociopaths, have my story told by profiteers.

Outside a storm was breaking. The benign fine lines of cloud had turned against the land, and now sat filled with rage. I pulled down the curtain in my room to create the illusion of insulation from the storm. In Collingwood, it only ever rains at night, one reason more why this town is Utopia.

Still I sat waiting for inspiration. I wondered to myself whether the behaviour of the people in my time was somehow normal. Perhaps my life was like Earth among the universe: a unique and isolated phenomenon at once both magical and tragic, so full of brilliant promise and potential and yet so dulled by the cynical, transient realities of the world. I tried once more to write things down as I sat indoors. Something brilliant, something good, not just anything. I was so not in love with the clichéd concept of the loner, the screw-up, the misunderstood intelligent loser. That’s what I thought.

Beethoven’s Ninth was playing on the radio. I remember it. The exact moment. An insight, of sorts. I stopped caring, stopped worrying, and realized the world did not revolve around me. Yes, I needn’t worry about crucifixion or institutionalisation, and there existed no rock upon which to ostracize me. Society had itself no values by which to judge. I could be Satan one day and Jesus Christ the next, and all three of us could lie to and manipulate one another. Besides, I could die tomorrow just by crossing the road. That’s what people always say. I needn’t worry. I was too shallow to become a tall poppy or a hero. Heroes are made to be surpassed, it’s true, and I was most certainly surpassable, but not heroic, no great icon. No execution or death threat from some shifty-eyed cap-wearing fundamentalist sub-idiot. No dismissal by my peers. No dirty looks in town. No arguing or fights in pubs. No ice-pick through the head, bullet in the chest, or stabbing in the back. I could fit in. The act would just go on, until death closed the curtains, but a longer show it would surely be, and I was fine with that. I surrendered.

Yonder Reality TV is visible here:

realityTV/

Not acting reasonably

It's that time of year again...or that time of month again...Muslims the world over are agitated and in a frenzy of righteous indignance! So, what actually was it about the Vatican Rottweiler's speech that so angered the adherents of Islam? Must've been something really bad, huh? Well. actually, here's a comprehensive transcript of Benedict's speech...(Here's hoping the Pope is above generally accepted copyright infringement practices)...

"In the seventh conversation edited
by Professor Khoury, the emperor
touches on the theme of the holy war.
The emperor must have known that Sura
2,256 reads: 'There is no compulsion
in religion.' According to the experts,
 this is one of the suras of the early
period, when Mohammed was still powerless
and under threat. But naturally the emperor
also knew the instructions, developed later
and recorded in the Quran, concerning holy war.
Without descending to details, such as the difference
in treatment accorded to those who have the 'Book'
and the 'infidels,' he addresses his interlocutor
with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which
 leaves us astounded, on the central question about
the relationship between religion and violence in
 general, saying: 'Show me just what Mohammed
brought that was new, and there you will find
things only evil and inhuman, such as his
command to spread by the sword the faith
he preached.' The emperor, after having
 expressed himself so forcefully, goes
on to explain in detail the reasons why
 spreading the faith through violence
is something unreasonable. Violence is
incompatible with the nature of God and
the nature of the soul. 'God,' he says,
'is not pleased by blood -- and not acting reasonably
 is contrary to God's nature.
Faith is born of the soul, not the body.
Whoever would lead someone to faith needs
 the ability to speak well and to reason
properly, without violence and threats ...
To convince a reasonable soul, one does
 not need a strong arm, or weapons of
any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death ...'

"The decisive statement in this
argument against violent conversion
is this: Not to act in accordance with
 reason is contrary to God's nature.
 The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes:
'For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped
by Greek philosophy, this statement is
 self-evident. But for Muslim teaching,
God is absolutely transcendent.'" 

...Make up your own mind. 

 

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD

If anyone alive, other than me, actually reads this webpage, then, er...you may have noticed a few changes. You can figure them out for yourselves.

Greatest real and imagined movie violence and death threats

''I'll rip your fucking balls off and stuff them up your ass so that the next time you shit, you'll shit all over your balls, got it?''                       -Team America

''I'll drill two holes through your dick so that when you pee it shoots out in all different directions.''                                                               -Team America

"Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape."                      -Planet of the Apes

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."                                                                                                      -The Princess Bride

"I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!"                                  
-The Wizard of Oz                  (not sure if that was actually a death threat, but it'd be good if it was.)

More Crap

''Don't have a big breakfast. Stay hungry. Fat people never accomplish nothin, unless they wanna be opera singers. and who wants to be an opera singer? Stay hungry. You think a woman likes a beer gut? They like their men mean and lean. They like men with balls. At least pretend you got balls. Always make it look like you got balls. Even if you don' got balls, you can run away. But fat men can't run fast. Stay hungry. At least a little bit hungry. Don't get fat. Stay hungry.''

-Imaginary dialogue from the next Scorsese/Coppola/Da Palma film.

I wonder how Al Qaeda and their ilk respond to satire? Well, here's a clue...

  ''Satire is a mode of challenging accepted notions by making them seem ridiculous...is intimately connected with urbanity and cosmopolitanism, and assumes a civilized opponent who is sufficiently sensitive to feel the barbs of wit leveled at him... To hold something up to ridicule presupposes a certain respect for reason, on both sides, to which one can appeal...An Age of Reason, in which everyone accepts the notion that conduct must be reasonable, is, therefore, a general prerequisite for satire.

These thoughts from Bruce Mazlish and Jacob Bronowski may help to elucidate what one feels may be a key sticking point in the idea that in order to combat religious extremism, (itself a fairly moderate term to describe backward, murderously stupid sub-moronic dogmatic idiocy), Western societies need to 'share dialogue' with people who are actually incapable by virtue of their subservience to sheer narrow-mindedness of in fact holding any kind of rational debate, let alone being equipped with enough consciousness and psychological maturity to tolerate satire or criticism.

The outbreak of unusually intense mass mental illness that gripped the Muslim world in the aftermath of the Danish cartoon controversy, and the frequent usage by zealots of terms long since faded from the vocabulary of less idiotic civilzations, such as 'infidel', 'apostate', and 'blasphemous', are simply further examples of how removed the consciousness and worldview of devout Islam is from that of the less medieval parts of the planet, and how difficult it is to have any kind of debate with minds so polluted by profound stupidity and dogma.

 

A rubbish story

“The other day at Danny’s Bar, I saw the antichrist himself,

He walked in, ordered a beer,

before which drinking, said a prayer,

He looked around, walked out the door,

I tailed him all the way to Kinky’s Club.

The strippers titillated none,

The antichrist still looked quite bored,

Before attempting to find God,

For a bout of friendly fighting.

That bored him more, as did the whore,

For whom he’d paid a dollar.

So back he came to Danny’s,

His pockets looking lighter, his eyes betrayed forgetfulness,

And no-one noticed when he left.”

 

My first flat in Rosedale

Cinnamon and Sapphire were the first two girls I met. It could not have been a far worse first impression, but let’s face it, I was pretty desperate to find a place to stay, in spite of not caring at the very same time. The girls smiled stupidly when I shook their hands, as if pretending to be expecting something else, and I spent the next thirty seconds trying hard to decipher their affectation-ridden accents. Then, before Doreen arrived, I watched their crappy quasi-hippy jewellery jingle and jangle and dangle from their wrists and ears and heaving half-bosoms.

       Doreen was the landlady. She wore next to nothing when we first became acquainted. Not that she ever wore much more consequently. She was all wrinkly smiles and shiny orange skin, her face like a hybrid over-pesticided half-rotten fruit, still edible to the desperate, but decidedly un-delicious nevertheless.

    I was shown the attic, garret, loft, whatever the hell you want to call it. The stairwell was dark and stunk of catpiss and many a years’ cheap marijuana smoke. The follow-up was little better. My future room was cramped and stank of something less instantly discernible, but Doreen’s description of the previous tenant soon put rest to my questioning. Dave had been a single, overweight thirty-nine year old who spent his days smoking pot, playing computer games, and invariably, jacking off.

    “He was always so short of energy,” said Doreen.

I responded with a nonresponse.  Looking out the loft’s single window, I beheld Cromarty Street- dull, decrepit, fetid, semi-slumlike, its silence only ever interrupted by the cacophonies of domestic violence and cheap souped-up Japanese cars screeching like bitches down the road.

  “So?” asked Doreen. 

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

   

About a boy
While I'm on the subject(kind of), I figured I should post another extract, this time from a different book which I must stress is in NO WAY autobiographical! Enjoy...

The first house I broke into was almost four years ago. I remember that day like my mother remembers the day of my birth.
I'd always been good with my hands. If only the girls knew that. I've never really had a girlfriend, and I probably never will. At the time I was twenty years old. My boss, Michael, was late for work on the house we were painting. It was a nice red house in the suburbs. He was supposed to have left a key for me to get into the house, or have left one of the side doors slightly open. He was always forgetting stuff like that. Stuff like remembering to pay me. Still, I forgave him, because he's a well-intentioned guy, and besides, I'm not without my own faults. I spent an hour trying to find a way in, but no luck. At about quarter past nine I went to the house next door to see if they knew what was going on. I knew that sometimes, neighbours on good terms have a set of the house next door's spare keys.
I knocked on the door. It was a nice little white weatherboard house with a small garden. I wasn't sure who'd lived there. I'd only been working on this current job for four days. Today was Friday. I decided not to persist with the little white house. I went back to the red house and waited for about ten minutes. Michael wasn't answering his cellphone, and I'd run out of credit on mine. The nearest shop was five blocks away, and I was already sick of spending money on work I should've been getting paid for.
On the other side of the red house was a pretty double-storey house. I knew that a teenage girl lived there, because I'd noticed her coming home on Tuesday, while we were having an afternoon cigarette break. She was a brunette, about sixteen years old, and looked quite attractive. She was wearing the uniform of a local private girls' school. I remember wondering to myself what her life must have been like. My high school was co-ed, you know, both sexes, and public. I'd always wanted to go to a private school, if only for a year or two, just to experience what it would be like, but since my father died, me and Mum have never had much money. Besides, my sister went to public school and she turned out just fine. She lives overseas now, and we never hear from her, which my mother says is a good thing.
I approached the double-storey house. It had a complicated gate, one of those ones with the latch on the inside that basically works according to simple laws of physics or gravity or whatever but can still be intimidating to use for the first time. There's a foreignness to them, and if you don't manage to open the gate quickly, you can look like a real idiot. On the front door of the house was one of those knocking things. I don't know what people call them. We never hade one. They're stupid things anyway, pompous and impractical. It's hard to know how hard to bang them. I knocked with it on the door, which seemed too dainty for the knocker, and after about twenty seconds of waiting and another round of knocking, I heard no reply.
During this time, and in fact since I first started working on the red house, I'd noticed how secluded the double-storey place seemed. Out back they had a deck, behind which were big sliding doors, and the whole back yard was fringed with large trees. Don't ask me what kind. I've never been good with trees. They were green trees. The point is, you could only look into the yard if you saw it from kind of a weird angle, and were about six foot tall, which is my height. You had to be standing on this exact spot near the red house's front door. Actually I'm five-eleven-and-a-half, but let's not be pedantic.
So knowing how well-hidden from view any burglar would be, knowing also that no dog was there, knowing that no-one was home, and seeing how the house looked so interesting to my curious self, and seeing also how bored I was that morning, I decided to do some snooping. It was foolish, I know, and I was having second thoughts when Michael sent me a fortuitous text message. He said:
"JIM. MIKE. BE THRE TWELV-ISH.HANG ON.SORRY BUDDY."
I went round the side of the house and approached the sliding doors. Seeing the alarm sensor in the lounge behind the deck, I decided to go round the other side of the house. This side housed the bathroom, toilet, dining room, and a small windowless wall of the lounge. I came to see that the best way of breaking in would be through the toilet window. It was just wide enough for me. But this was not the only thing to consider. One must always have a back-up, in this case, an exit strategy. I know that the first thing a lot of people do when they get home is head for the toilet. It's understandable, especially if you've been out for some time. I saw through the window that the dining room table seemed completely unused. I had an empathy for these people. A dining-room would have been a luxury for us too. Eventually I settled for the bathroom window. It was a good choice. Once inside, I had any number of exit plans, all of which involved a minimum of noise and disruption.
The first thing I notice about a new house is the smell. Maybe you notice it too. It seems that every house has a unique smell, or sometimes a stink. When I was three years old I visited my grandparents' house. They live overseas. I didn't see that house again for another thirteen years. By then my grandma had died and a lot of things had changed, but when I walked in, the very same smell came right back and I remembered like it was only yesterday.
This place smelled clean, but not sterile. It smelt new, though I could tell it wasn't. It was kind of like the place hadn't really been lived in. I had to move carefully, to evade the alarm sensors, and also to not disrupt anything, which was difficult because I had so much adrenalin rushing through me.
I was drawn to the stairwell. I wanted to see the bedrooms more than anything. I was getting more and more excited. Upon reaching a small short corridor at the top of the stairs I knew immediately which was the parents' room, which was the girl's, and which was the third or spare room. I can just tell. I decided to enter the parents' room first, out of obligation, although I couldn't wait to get into the girl's room. The parents' room was ordinary and seemed a little soul-less. I couldn't even be bothered rummaging.
I even went to the spare room before entering the girl's room. Again, I felt obliged. Again, I saw nothing of interest.
When I opened the door to the girl's room the blood instantly started pumping. My senses were all on high alert, and I felt a rush of animal exhilaration. I get high just thinking about it. I looked at my watch. Barely ten a.m. She would've been in here just two hours ago. I didn't bother pretending this time. I went straight for her chest of drawers, and had to open two drawers before I got to the one in which she kept her panties and bras. My conscience pained me for a second, but I couldn't even tell at the time. I just had some weird feeling and I didn't know what it was. So many feelings, not really human emotions, more just animal sensations and instincts.
After a little while I went back down to the bathroom and brought myself to orgasm within seconds. I know it sounds sick now, but boy did it feel good then. Most people my age took drugs all the time. I never had to. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. I didn't want to use any toilet paper. I dried the hands on my clothing and went back upstairs to make sure everything looked fine.
The worst part of that Thursday was getting back to the red house and waiting two hours for Mike to arrive.

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COPYRIGHT (c) JOHN WILBURY 2004