Sunny Breaks

Stop hitting yourself:
(a tanka, gross weight)
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself!

So I went to to that music street festival i mentioned so. Didn’t see AIH because it was too crowded to get in. Did see some jazz. I always end up stnading there longer than i can be bothered with for that kind of thing. It dies after half an hour. Caught up with one of my guardian angels, Flic, who i hadn’t seen in 6 years. She’s a head-doktor of sorts, which I’d always known, but hadn’t realised it was of the psychoanalitix subgenre. I was impressed to learn this because it’s the area that’s by far the funniest. Even people who are only a year or two older than me (like her) had seemed like grown ups whereas I had somehow been retarded at 18yo or younger. But I’m slowly starting to catch up or at least move on or something.

Me n’ GG wandered by the old house we used to be housemates in. It’s been officially vacant for a year or more now, but it looked like someone had been squatting there for a bit. It’s funny how squatters invariably end up creating the same kind of habitat that rats and other vermin do. Scrunched up newspaper and skanky matresses etc.
That foto is of the room that I used to live in, except the walls were painted smarties-green back then. Sometimes, in the warmer weather I’d lay on my bed and imagine the whole place was under water and I lived under water and that’s why it was green. Even if the room wasn’t, sometimes I lived under water.

Yeah, Ausculture?. I looked at that once. They were doing a bit on Golden Girls and I thought, ‘I know what that Golden Girls is, that’s funny’.
Back in March I walked around town with the camera and stopped people in the street and asked if I could take a picture. I asked them a few questions too, to give the impression that I actually gave a toss. ‘Who are you?’, ‘Where are you going?’, that kind of thing. I told them I was going to put it on the web. What I intended to do was just post the fotos here and make wise cracks about their appearance. Some of the people excitedly asked what the website address was, so I said, “Oh, um … Ausculture.com”. “Ossculture”, I pronounced.

A day or two later I happened to mention the idea to my attorney over dinner. He said it wasn’t such a hot move. His sagely advice has steered me out of strife more than once so the project has been shelved ever since.
My attorney is a small dog. His office is just a couple of doors down from here, so I often see him hanging out in the front yard when I walk on by. He rents the space with a scotch terrier, a barrister who has something of a habit of hitting the hard liquor at 3 in the afternoon.
I know what you’re thinking -> don’t I loathe small dogs? But my attorney is pretty cool, he doesn’t bark at you or nothing.

stock photo of a small dog. Inset: magnification of a stock photo of a small dog.

I am the U21 team’s 3rd top hockey player, state champs this year.
I have a flower shop in Hawthorn whose name plays on the word, ‘hydrangea’ sounding like, ‘ranger’.

�It’s a disgusting show of politicians’ lack of concern about the environment. …”

I am involved in monitoring the water quality of Whites Creek, which is located in Annandale.
Me n’ Jayce Moore make up Team Black Flag: 100% Male.
Last January I came 11th in the Category C BMX race at Bacchus Marsh and scored 11 points for it.
I graduated with a Masters degree from the Department of Geospatial Science and now work for Hatch Engineering.
I’m no.2 for Epping Eastwood soccer club.
I died in Canada in 1899.
In 1901, as a 30 year old farmer from Glasgo (sic)., I married Alice
I and some fellow chums from Scotch raced kayaks down the Murray in 1998. Go Scotch!

I live in Mortlake. I have many interests. My main hobby is motorbike riding. I have a Honda, and also ride a Honda four wheeler. I am planning to buy a new four-wheeler, aTRX250. I am excited about it. I am also interested in playing the drums and listening to music. I like all sorts of music, heavy metal, instrumental, 1980�s, and ACDC in particular. My favourite modern band is Metallica.

I am tweleve years old I have two younger brothers
My hobbies are colleting harry potter cards .
I took boomarange lessons and I do not have a picture for you.

Mrs bond spoke to us about dream time stories .

… Buys a train set, gets ALL the trains and coaches and freights and stuff, name them after your favorite characters, go to bed… soon you’ll have dreams about your trains coming to life and doing the race… and you’re only eight years old and you dream of trains having sex and stuff like that… oO
… You go to the skating rink, you’re so hyper and you want them to play a good song. You make requests but they don’t play THAT music… so whenever they pop in Shitney Spears, you blow them off, run into the middle of the ring where everyone is dancing, and start doing LATEOTT dance… and oddly enough the dance goes with the music… NEVER DO THIS! THEY’LL SEND THE POLICE AFTER YOU AND KICK YOU OUT!…

… When you are given an essay about the history of trains, you find yourself slowly and gradually changing that first Steam Train into Hoffa, making him meet up with a Sleeping Car, the two give birth to a little Steamer called Derwent and a stupid freight called Miles. Then you introduce new characters as you go along, including Gavin when the Diesel trains were made, Nintendo when the Bullet train was made, and Bobo, the 120 MPH Sudest! You name every character and their orgin, even CB’s, even though you stated the original CB looked like a cheap Akon MP3player Mario from Super Mario Brothers. Then you get into Race Night, how Derwent goes to enter the race to prove himself to Mini, a nice and new (and a little byatch) Observation car in need of a good humping. Of course you introduce the new train, Caramel, the AC-DC Train of the Future (imagine me explaining what AC-DC meant) and his five ultra cute and ultra sexy components. In a nutshell you’re telling him the whole story of your dreams and a pack of lies. So he read your essay and just DIES laughing… because he actually KNOWS what you’re talking about! that was the only reason why I didn’t get suspended for mention sex and ac-dc trains in a school essay. You fail the test, but you have a new friend, right? …
… Jumps into your skates, run outsides, and start screaming when a diesel train rolls by, singing about a stupid stuck up Diesel train. They’ll stop the train and ask if there’s a leak of gas or soemthing and if it’s intoxicating your brain…
… Gets skates on and skate up and down the road, screaming about your boyfriend ‘lacks the apparatus (sp)’ after you break up with him….

      KARAWANE
joliffanto bambla Ô falli bambla
grossiga m’pfa habla horem
égiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
ii  ii ii  ii
schampa wulla wussa ólobo
hej tatta gôrem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluw ssubudu
tumba ba- umf
kusagauma
ba -umf

I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.

Those Who Sit

Dark with knobbed growths, peppered with pock-marks like hail, their eyes ringed with green, their swollen fingers clenched on their thigh-bones, their skulls caked with indeterminate crusts like the leperous growths on old walls;

in amorous seizures they have grafted their weird bone structures to the great dark skeletons of their chairs; their feet are entwined, morning and evening, on the rickety rails!

These old men have always been one flesh with their seats, feeling bright suns drying their skins to the texture of calico, or else looking at the window-panes where the snow is turning grey, shivering with the painful shiver of the toad.

And their Seats are kind to them, coloured brown with age, the straw yeilds to the angularities of their buttocks; the spirit of ancient suns light up, bound in these braids of ears in which the corn fermented.

And the Seated Ones, knees drawn up to their teeth, green pianists whose ten fingers keep drumming under their seats, listen to the tapping of each other’s melancholy barcarolles; and their heads nod back and forth as in the act of love.

– Oh don’t make them get up! It’s a catastrophe! They rear up growling like tom-cats when struck, slowly spreading their shoulders … What rage! Their trousers puff out at their swelling backsides.

And you listen to them as they bump their bald heads against the dark walls, stamping and stamping with their crooked feet; and their coat-buttons are the eyes of wild beasts which fix yours from the end of the corridors!
And they have an invisible weapon which can kill: returning, their eyes seep the black poison with which the beaten bitch’s eye is charged, and you sweat, trapped in a horrible funnel.

Reseated, their fists retreating into soiled cuffs, they think about those who have made them get up and, from dawn until dusk, their tonsils in bunches tremble under their meagre chins, fit to burst.
When austere slumbers have lowered their lids they dream on their arms of seats become fertile; of perfect little loves of open-work chairs surrounding dignified desks.

Flowers of ink dropping pollen like commas lull them asleep in their rows of squat flower-cups like dragonflies threading their flight along the flags – and their membra virilia are aroused by barbed ears of wheat.

It’s funny how one can hold out against mobile telephony for a good eight years then within a week of giving in, wind up sitting on the can holding the damn thing.
I don’t know if this happens to other people but i getquite a few rogue messages — fragmented calls not meant for me, and in one case a text messages advising that a particular movie was to be on television that night. I assumed this was from someone that I knew and had emailed to say, ‘hey, send me a message’, so i replied, saying that I’d just watched The Italian job with a Glaswegian tug-boat captain, which was true.

I hadn’t seen a house as messy as that in ages. Not dirty-messy, but stuff everywhere. Furniture wasn’t arranged along the walls as per normal — everything was a couple of feet in, as if the room was too big for him; an audio visual junky. A series of TVs lined in chronological order. When the old one broke down it was left where it sat. And not small things either, the oldest did look rather old but had a sizable screen.
The present day set up was a video projector suspended from the ceiling with one of those pull-down projector screens that was positioned right in the middle of the room so that you had to duck right down under it to get from one side of the room to the other.
He was eating stewed meat straight, no vegetables or nothing. It smelled terrible. Although he was good enough to put together some beans and rice for me. The movie was about what you’d expect considering it was made to sell cars.
******

There’s a version of Negativland’s song, U2 here, on the Illegal Art site. It’s a little shorter than the version I have on tape, but it’s got the ‘fuck you too, Richard’ line that gets me my jollies so well.

I was resetting up the stumbleupon function for Mozilla and in the sports category there’s the subcat, cheerleading. Leftbanker is always going on about the unspoken, ongoing tradgedy of cheerleader accidents, so I decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Check this out.
Sometimes I get a little resentful because it feels like australia has become the 51st state, but thank fuck cheerleading hasn’t caught on here. I think some of the rugby teams have a few but they don’t throw women 3 metres vertical and such.
I mean, in the past I’ve complained about tertiary education being a bit shoddy, but at least I didn’t have to wash cars all weekend to put myself through, while some chick doing accounting got a free ride-scholarship just because she was willing to risk being crushed at the bottom of a human pyramid.

Got along to the Northcote Bowlarama. I haven’t been bowling since year 8 and it showed. Didn’t get above 88. It was fun but a bit more expensive than I remember. Put it this way, you’re not gonna bump into too many homeless people on the lanes. That probably sounds negative, I had a good time but it was kind of like sitting at a bus station between turns.
I keep doing all these things: chopping trees down, hoeing, dancing, cycling, and now bowling but they never use the same muscles — the consequence being that I always end up sore somewhere, like in the old right wrist and hand now … which is kind of surprising considering how much wanking typewriting I do with it.

GG got the whole zen flowing movement thing happening and top-scored.

Jimbo arrived halfway through and still beat me.

In some small way, everyone has some minor activity where they’re able to bend the universe to suit them, which stands out amongst the rest of this soul-crushing existence. There’s no guarantee that this activity will be useful, although ‘useful’ is subjective.
Some people can do crosswords, shoplift, have perfect pitch, can find your keys for you, get their legs behind their neck, can remember how to make a coffee for every person they meet, never lose their footing in the snow, don’t ever get barked at by dogs — and so on.
Jimbo is a brilliant parker. Wherever he drives with the intention of stopping, a parking spot spontaneously opens up right there in front of him and he just whacks it in there carefree as flicking a booger. I could say it’s phenomenal, but I’ve been observing it too long for that.

Some people out there might remember a sitcom called Growing Pains, that generally came on after Who’s the Boss? Anyway I heard about this website on the radio the other morning. Kirk Cameron, who was on Growing Pains became a raving mad christian, and is part of this thing, www.wayofthemaster.com — go try the quiz. I got 10/10 guilty.
Here I was thinking god was compassionate and loving but I read that it (He, they say, He) is actually angry and vengeful. Boy is my face red. I’ve been Idoling around and blaspheming when cleaning the bath tub.
To quote from 7., “But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” I do that all the time! Whoops.
Apparently I’ll be holidaying at some place called Fire Lake, or the Lake of Fire, this summer. I just hope the tent site isn’t too far from the shower block. That sucks.

I don’t know… I don’t think these christians understand that it’s really, really really hard to get your head around the concept of a trinity. I get dizzy just typing it. I mean, “3 things is one thing and one of the things is a person but actually isn’t”, wuh? And what about the Holy Spirit eh? It doesn’t get any recognition hardly at all. Holy Spirit is like Terminator X in Public Enemy. The other two just yell out his name occasionally but that’s it — yet if he wasn’t there, the remainder of the trio would just be two guys yelling.

I was after some red licorice for a special project, didn’t find any, but since I was in a lollyshop, decided to get a big bag of mixed lollies. Moving from one little bin to the next, scooping up a handful of brightly coloured stuff from each, for a moment at least, I felt at one with the universe.
I proceeded to the counter and plonked the paper bag on the scales. The little man looked through my eyes knowingly.
“Do you have any work here sir?”, I asked
“I have unending amounts of work … for the right person.”
“Can that be me? Please.”
“Answer me this. What do you find difficult?”
“Trimming my sideburns. For one, when I look in the mirror and move my hand, in the mirror-world it moves the right way, but in reality it doesn’t. Also it’s really hard to trim them to level.”
“Then you cannot work here.”
“Ah geez, why not?”
“Balance. You lack balance. Much of the work is pre-paring bags of lollies. Here, look.”

He held open the bag I’d chosen and scooped up. It was 90% fizzy things like coke bottles, sour snakes, sherbet bombs and gummi things. The small minority was chocolate; bullets etc.
“But I put some honey bears in”, I pleaded. He said nothing.

In a moment I realised he was right. My destiny lay elsewhere.
Of course the fizzy things are the yummiest, but without the powdery bananas and those big chalky white things that look like tablets — the coke bottle doesn’t even exist. It is defined by the filler – the also-rans in the lollybag of life.

I bowed and backed out of the shop.

*****************
I shouldn’t eat all those lollies. I’m so sorry.

There was this really excellent Ollie Stone doco on last week, Commandante, about Fidel and Cuba. Allowing for wind-sheer both ways (Ollie seemed overly interested in the Who Magazine style questions, plus he’s from Hollywood) and (the Cuban authorities probably put a little effort into seeing that the one or two whingers didn’t show up at every outing) and I thought it gave a pretty good impression of Castro and the Cuban Communist party. [There’s a whinger or two everywhere – I bet – even in Heaven, complaining about how fluffy the clouds aren’t comfortable and God is quietly regretting letting them in.]

My personal opinion and experiences of being honest and being a liar, while watching Fidel, reminded me that it’s so much easier to talk when you can be honest about stuff and know it won’t blow up on you. He’s a brilliant public speaker, even if I don’t speak Spanish. On the other hand, perhaps it is not that Bush jr. has an IQ of 48 that hinders him, it’s that it becomes extremely complex to complete a single sentence when there’s hundreds of factors to take into account “can’t mention this because it’ll effect that, can’t mention such n’ such because they don’t know the truth about the other thing” etc. I know what it’s like because I used to lie a lot. So in the case of Bush’s brain it’s like asking a 486 computer (a really slow one) to predict the ocean currents (really difficult) — it just bogs down. Viva Fidel.

That reminds me, I’ve really got to arrange to get out bowling this week.

But the politicians here are just as much of two-bit hoods as america or UK and probably other bourgeois-democratic, non-english speaking countries too. The circus is in town and the BigTop’s errected. The challenger this time has a clever spin/speech writer who can boil policy down to tabloid headline size, such as “Cheap Drugs for Sick Ausies”, “Ease the Squeeze”. The incumbent treasurer felt he had to respond to the latter in kind; “He’s trying to Hoax the Folks”.
I’d like to see the rest of the campaign performed exclusively in a mixture of rhyming couplets, rap and snappily choreographed, large-scaled dance numbers.

That’s right. Here is some ->

To obtain your official Sunny Breaks FUCK YOU TOO RICHARD t-shirt please send $20 plus $7 postage n’ handling ($13 P&H for outside Australia) to me@here.
Please note: style, colour and size may vary from that depicted. Also there probably won’t be sweat/deodorant stains on it (unless you really want).

Inspired by a Negativland track, transcribed here – third line from the bottom.

Digby reclined on the couch, sighed and interlaced his chunky fingers across his chest.

“It started when I’d be out doing something, walking along the street, thinking about stuff. I’d think of something, come to some conclusion, pause, and think, ‘You can say that again, Billy!’ or ‘ya not wrong there Billy boy.’, or ‘No shit Billy’.”
“Y’know? It’s just the kind of thing you do when you’re thinking things through by yourself.”

Digby looped his hands around behind his head and dragged them loosely across his afro, absent-mindedly massaging his scalp. He clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth like he’d made a bad move playing checkers.

“Then sometime after we finished the last case it started to get more. Like I was getting my sneakers cleaned and came out of the shop, about to put my wallet away and thought, — hang on, did that guy just short-change me? ‘You’re damn right Billy. You better get back in there and get what’s yours.’
So I did – or tried at least. Turns out it was my mistake. Made a real scene.”

“So, y’know. Stuff like that. The next thing I know There’s one of those life-size plastic Flight Centre captains standing in my living room, and the cops have nabbed me trying to unscrew the oversized plastic hood ornament from the roof of the Jaguar dealership at 3am.”

From his chair behind where Digby lay, the doctor spoke.

“And you think, Billy, has something to do with this?”

“Nah… ah… the way I figure it, there’s this thing in my head, and it’s calling me Billy.”

“I see.”

Digby sat up quickly and looked around at the man.
“Do you? Doctor, my name’s not Billy. I’m not Billy“.

What we’re reading:
I borrowed Obi Wan’s hardback copy of Alain deBotton’s Status Anxiety, have been frequenting the coolest coffeeshops and holding it up conspicuously in front of my head. Actually, it’s a shame I missed the two-part tv version because it hardly seems worthwhile writing a book about — reading through so far at least — the points are all so obvious, to me at least.
Although I can’t say I’m exempt from it all. Typically me, I’ve knee-jerked back against it all and am doing a paper round and hoeing other people’s gardens for free, or nearly free. Bigs said to me, “Hold on, I’ll go get you the little hoe” and I chuckle silently to myself. i was getting my kicks out of that bit all morning — Now where’d that dirty little hoe get to? .. and so on.

I saw Chris Wilson play at a joint the other night. In the bus on the way over I realised to the bottom of my gut that this was definitely one of those occasions where I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands. I was wearing jeans with those useless kind of pockets that nothing will go into, and since I’m not a drinker or even smoke a cigarette now, there was nothing else for them except flapping about … or was there?
I slipped open one of the top windows and stretched my right arm all the way out. A truck coming the other way took it off nice and cleanly. I went to the other side of the bus and did the same with my left arm, but had to wait patiently for ten minutes or so until passing through a narrow tunnel. Problem solved!

Little Green Bags – like this. If this was Invasion of the Little Green Bags! then the nasty twist at the end with Leonard Nimoy laughing would’ve well and truly happened by now.
From a marketing POV they’re a runaway success — I don’t think there’s been any advertising at all. There’s been anti-plakky bag guilt-trip ads but as for the LGBs – they’ve just showed up in large piles at the checkout and that’s all.
It’s things like this that give me a glimmer of optimism about positive change for the future. When people are given a reasonable alternative and they don’t have to think about it, they take to it like a duck to water. That is, all except for the old, senile and hopelessly disorganised —- who have LGBs in their car but forget to take them into the supermarket with them.

What I’m waiting for now is: Bandits to rob a bank with LGBs on their heads with eye holes cut out — or for it to at least happen on TV. TISM to perform wearing them.

Point one – Sagan should be damn thankful he got this record out before the rise of the P.M.R.C. (http://www.philagora.org/about-the-world/pmrc1.htm). There’s no way they’d‘ve let a record sleeve be published with pictures of boobs and ‘special fruit’ or specially cock n’ balls on it. They would’ve insisted, at the very least, that the guy be wearing undies. This is after all Patriarchy where the woman’s body is an object to be gazed at, but the schlong is taboo.
Instead of all that hydrogen and solar system jazz they should’ve just had lots of pictures of cocks, inter-continental ballistic missiles, submarines, sky scrapers, and Chiko Rolls. Although the scientific Mafia will try hard to not let it, conventional chemistry could be rendered dippy in a decade, while symbolism is ageless.

It’s great though, innit? It’s like he’s saying, “Hi, I’m nude!”
she: Me too, and I even shaved!
he: Together, we’re Whitey, and we run this planet.
she: you mean, you run the planet.
he: whatever! Also, I’m circumcised.

Point two: Who the fuck made carl sagan intergalatic ambassador anyway? All he did was write a book and talk in a funny accent. That’s some major coup if you ask me — just happen to be a space-dude born on the continent with the most weapons during a particularly boomy decade and you get to shape the first impressions of humans in the eyes/eye-storks of dozens of alien races.

They could rock up in 50 years or even tomorrow and be like, “Doo! Where’s Sagan?” and we’ll be like, “He’s dead already” and they won’t be impressed and use us for target practice.

The plan was to build a 3 metre long oblong-shaped bench with six treated pine posts and a bit of mesh on top. Inside a greenhouse. A greenhouse that has an arched aircraft-hanger like roof.
Since I was the one with a fully-functioning spine I got to do the augeuring of holes. An augeur is a person-powered drill thing, this one making holes a foot in diametre.
In the cold of the morning the greenhouse’s heat and humidity were nice. Not long after that sweat was tap-dripping off the tip of my downward pointed nose. There was two 44 gallon drums in the corner filled with, as I was told, some kind of yeast that dissolved anything animal or vegetable that was put in it. A dead pig had dissappeared in one, I was told.
We continued working while the drums sat quietly in the corner, doing stuff.

One end of the oblong disturbed an ant’s nest. First there was crazy ants localised, then there were crazy ants everywhere. More sweating. I flicked away an ant from behind my ear. More sweating, then flicking another ant from the same place.

The poles were dropped in, with a ridiculous amont of space around them. You’ve got to throw the soil back in and tomp it, he said. Tomp it in there. You’re the tomper. Tell Centrelink you’re a qualified tomper. Stop saying tomp, I say. And think about if I could write a bit about the Thompson Twins and tomping.

Most of the holes hit down into the closest thing to potter’s clay you’d find outside of a potter’s pottery. One of the hole inexplicably filled with water.
“There’s two kinds of spurs my friend. Those who come in through the door and those who come in through the window.”
Two black dogs stood at the door, their eyes filled with curiousity but they wouldn’t come in.

It was decided that I needed to re-add some clay to one hole for the sake of levels. It was then decided I needed to take it back out again. I wiped sweat off a cheek and unknowingly create muddy-coloured war-stripes there.

It was becoming a structure Escher would’ve been proud of. One row of three posts were deemed level. Two posts at one end were level, but the last of those two and the next one weren’t. The posts that looked equal in height to the naked eye were devilishly bent according to the spirit-level.
When given the word I’d sledge-hammer the top of one of them until it was level with the others. It kept going around and around as the maximum height of the bench diminished.
Without really saying so, we gave up on it and went in for lunch.