Sunny Breaks

…hollow as it may be.

Don’t ask me how this happens but last weekend I was hanging out with a buddy in seoul who works for uncle sam in an auxilary role, selling shit. He’s great, like a cross between Benson and bill cosby, from south carolina and really does say stuff like ‘Where the dirty tea-towels at?“
We got breakfast at the military base and while standing in line at the cafeteria he says, ”Man who got the idea to eat animals’ eggs anyway?”. Good point.

Trust the British to forge on into new chart-toppin’ territory re commercial audio. They used to play that frog thing a bit on the radio last year, but called it an indian swami guy on pixie stix. They’d play it with F1 news because it sounds like an F1 car, not that I’d know anymore.

Last, if architecture gets you your jollies at all take a look at The Gutter.

A few weeks back I had a rather strange moment in the supermarket as the usual, terrible in-house music was interrupted by what I could swear was a My Bloody Valentine track. I couldn’t place which one.

There is one music shop in town. I was just down there, and in amongst the M for Metallica, Moby and other various shite was both of My Bloody Valentine’s albums. So I guess for some reason they were big here. It was only 15bucks for the 2nd album, Loveless, so I thought, fuck it why not? I never actually had that one, just the first one on cassette. That cover is a bit of a classic, it’d be great to put on a t-shirt.

I remember back in ’90 or 89 or whenever and sitting up late watching music videos and seeing the clip for ‘soon’ and really digging it. It’s goes on the ‘songs that automatically need to be played loud’ list. And MBV in general are and always were an inspiration ot anyone who a) could string together a couple of weeks pocket money to get 2nd hand distortion/reverb and delay pedals, b) was too lazy to really learn how to play a guitar properly and c) was intentionally messing with their own chemical balances.
MBV had such sexy taste in guitars. I still eventually want to get a Fender Jaguar.

Check out the afore-linked neato site, Tremelo because it’s got some trax for downloadez and vid clips for the bandwidth-rich.

Been listening to FlashBack Alternatives net radio station. It’s 80s n 90s, and not stuff you hear much of on commerical FM. It sounds like it’s run by humans too, compared to a fair chunk of the computer-drivien radio offered up on the net.

After the third hour of nonstop watching teens busting out dance moves that’d make J-Lo (or one of them sorts) blush, I decided I had to get out of the auditorium but the main doors were shut so i went the back way and bumped to this troupe from the local high school.

When we here at sunny breaks said that petrol here was 13 bucks a litre, we were mistaken. It’s actually approx 1.30 a litre. It’s my handler miss park’s fault. She told me it. She also always says ‘doggy’ instead of dog, and goes looking for opportunities to use the word doggy, like in doggy-bag, but not doggy-style because that would be improper. Also she says, “excuse you”, which sounds lame. She hums madly whenever the opportunity presents itself – baseless, high-pitched and jumping from one note to another in random – it’s not a tune at all. But I’m not complaining, things could be a lot worse.

I haven’t watched tv more a month and more now – I didn’t count so I don’t know. Last year I always wanted to be freed of the thing, but this doesn’t feel like a victory because it’s just that there’s nothing good on.
However, this week via the computer I watched this series of ads – or a video-blog as they call it, but it’s really just corporate product-awareness building. Still kind of interesting use of a new medium though. And I was trying to find out moves.

This collection of excerpts from a candid camera style show where the rubes are told their auditioning for reality tv shows. The box one is the best.

It’s wella late for me since I did not get that much of the sleep last night due to adjusting to the over-softness of the new mattress, which may mean I’ll typo bad, and I don’t like letting things get monotone here. But perculiar behaviour is one of the few things that stops me from dying of bordom of the human rayce, and so here are three things from least to most:

- two girls thoroughly working over one of the girl’s arms with erasers. They were rubbing quite hard but not at any dicernable marks. Trying to rub herself out?

- Okay, now Rock, Paper, Scissors is big here. It’s used to decide all kinds of things that, in all seriousness, should be pounded out in conference rooms by professional diplomats and negotiators. PRS is used in preference to coin tossing, which seems far more tamper-proof than shaking fists with someone.
I watched two girls go PRS and everytime the same one would win. The winner got to flick the loser on the forhead. The loser would patiently hold still and adjust her head when the other required it, so that the thumb-n-index finger flick would hit exactly in the middle of the forhead. I watched for about three rounds of this. They’d do it without talking.

- Today there was a girl in class with this sign in Hangul around her neck. It was on thin card and the letters were in thick, black texta. I’m at the stage where I can read words but not know what they mean. I assumed that she was being punished for something, and that it said something like, “slacker”.
I tried to find out what it said, and what she’d got in trouble for, and which teacher had made the sign — ie who goes in for the public humiliation as discipline tactic.
But I found that it was actually the girl herself who had made the sign, and as the co-teacher explained, she doesn’t have any friends,or, she wants friends. Another girls said she wants a boyfriend. Yet another girl explained it most concisely; “solo”.
It reminded me of Nick Cave circa late b’day party, early bad seeds, where he’d wear pieces of paper with pictures of marilyn monroe or whoever saftey-pinned on the front of his shirt.

Goto adland, pay them money, then you can see the ads.

This place could be called The Land of the unexplained funk. You could be anywhere including the 30th storey of a business structure and still just be standing there and get a whiff of something and go, ‘p-hwoar, what is that?’. It could also be called The Land of the Disimbibed water. Not just hucking a loogie, although that’s awfully popular too, but a mouthful of water spat out onto the street. You see the evidence everywhere. Or, of course, Land of the Posed Photo.

And the students were up to plenty of that today because there was this choral group touring from a certain university in the lower half of california. A county named after a popular citrus fruit. Uni name: what would you call the gurad of the van? switch those two words round. I can’t get anymore specif or the sods’ll google me.

I was sulking because I couldn’t go to see there stupid choir for crappy jerks because I had to work. But then I did get to see one bit, and admittedly they did sing pretty well – they did a battle of the bands with our skols miss-yu choir. But while the locals did traditional, justified and ancient stuff, the proselytes did frikkin songs from Titanic. That says something.

And proselytes they were. They were spreadin’ on the ‘You Must Accept Jesus INTO Yr Heart’ stuff well thick. Funny in its own way because they were preaching to the converted —preaching to the choir. And of all the universal truths I’ve continually got on the test-bench to see if they hold, it’s this one that stays the most clearly back and white. It’s that the more fanatical, the more someone tries to convince me (or you) of something, I think, the less they actually believe it themselves. There was definitely some lost lookin souls in that group.

I haven’t seen that many westerners in a clump like that in months. Whenever I see other whiteys they always look so unwell — pasty and sniffling, watery eyes and sullen. And I tell ya, this lot were fine examples of the uber-morbid obeseness that we are told that the continent of n.america is being smothered under.

Anyway, all this was an enema for my grumpiness because it reminds me that the people I deal with day-to-day are pretty good, and that I get bitch-arse shitty with people sometimes no matter where I am.

Also I was halfway down the street on my way to murder the hunchback when i got a ph. call and got my mattress delivered.

For some unknown reason, call it astrology if you will, troubles always seem to build up for me in the last third of april and the first two thirds of may. Build like a constipation victim ready to explode shit everywhere. Once Gemini kicks in diarrhea brings the system back to normal.

I’m trying to get a bed made. You’d think that being so close to Japan that there would be futons here but they haven’t even heard of them. The local verson is called a yo, and oddly enough, when I asked several locals about these — they hadn’t heard of them either. It’s a rather thin crud-filled ‘mattress-like’ thing that’s chucked down on the lino-covered cement. I’m sure it works fine if you get hammered every night. So I asked for a triple-yo. Twice now the guy hasn’t had it ready on schedule.

I was just down there. It’s good being able to arrange these things with gestures, numbers, pointing at things and the odd word of english, but tonight the word ‘tomorrow’ wasn’t the one I wanted to hear. I said if it wasn’t ready tomorrow that I’d come back and strangle him. He just grinned sheepishly like he didn’t understand.

It’s my fault really. I should’ve followed the advice of an old aunt who alas is no longer whinnying with us; “Never do business with a hunchback”. She would do speedballs and stay up all night constructing model battleships.
The last time I visited her, the bedsit she lived in was awash with gunmetal wedges of destruction at 1:350. I mistakenly stood on the HMS Dreadnought, she flew off the handle and I left.
It was the Yamoto that did her in. 4980 seperate parts. It wasn’t even a regular off-the-shelf kit. It was actually a one-off, crafted by a man who was, I suppose, just as insane as dear old aunt Velma.

Got on up the hill to the buddha’s b’day bash. It was pretty okay. All kinds of stuff — a choir of ladies all hanboked up, a contemporary band, some equadorian dudes, a buddhist nun doing trad. hymns, and a couple of women singing solo pop to backing trax. They all sing really well and the acoustics up there were suprisingly good. I was a bit spaced.

I guess I’ve been a bit spaced for a week or more now. Maybe a bit of routine creeping in. It’s hard and loansome being an outsider. This whole jaunt is a picnic in the park compared to what immigrants to australia would’ve gone through. I didn’t come here out of hardship, and didn’t have to work in some rural labour camp for years to earn my right to stay. Overwhelmingly I don’t experience racism but the language and cultural gap are still huge and I can see why a lot of old migrant guys in australia are grumpy. I am making an attempt to learn the language but it’s a mammoth task.

I’m starved for real conversation. Even in Geelong it wasn’t an easy thing to come by. It was teacher’s day yesterday and I didn’t get a fucking cracker. No lollies, no flowers, no vitamin drinks, no presents no nuffing. It doesn’t take much to trigger me feeling hardly done by especially right now.

Interesting thingy on one fella’s vision of what the slide into a new, less oil-driven, lifestyle will look like. I’ve been reading these kinds of things for years, most of them more extreme than this.

I just found out yesterday that petrol here costs 13k per litre, which means approx. $15AUD per litre. Golly that’s a lot. Cars are cheap, like 500 hunnered bucks cheap, but I think I’d rather it the other way around and not be grumbling everytime I put juice in the tank. Not that I’ve ever put juice in the tank, nor will I by the sounds of of it.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said the public transport here is good. Sometimes I think it is, but then in situations like tonight I think it’s actually worse than Melb./Geelong vic. The last bus for eeetchon from seoul leaves at 10:40, which is stupid. The last train leaves Melbourne for geelong at 11:30. Tonight I had to stand up in the aisle with 15 other people for the whole 50mins. Not only is it a pain in the arse, it’s probably really dangerous.

Y’know there’s no off ya tree bong shops here and no ‘take me to your dealer’ posters with a smokin’ grey alien on them. I don’t think the locals have trouble with aliens at all but I do.
The other night one appeared in my apt and told me that I’d picked up the wrong electricity bill. I was all set to pay this bill for 38ooo that belonged to the architects downstairs. They’d already paid mine (7ooo — nuclear power, I could kiss you, except then my face would blotch and slough off by morning) and the alien wanted the money from me to give them.

I deemed this a reasonable request although I only had a tenner. Through some communication process, be it telepathic or technological, another alien was told that I needed change. While we were waiting for the change I tried to show him? it? the picture on the front of the whitely strieber book, but he just squinted as if the light wasn’t that good.
Another one arrived with three 1s. It struck me how light on their feet they are, really sharp movements. They basically ignored me and were talking to eachother saying I don’t know what. They were looking at my bed and slapping the side of the mattress and lifting up the side a little. They looked impressed and were pointing outside.
I think they’re going to come back and take my bed.

Then tonight I was just eating my tea and one peeks in the window through the flywire. It pointed at the light I’d accidentally left on in the bathroom. Like, you should turn the light off if you’re not using it.
Great. I can see it’s going to be a long summer if I can’t have the window open without getting ‘suggestions’ from beings from another planet.

I’m going to start picking up the wrong kind of audience if I keep posting pictures of students, but I was coming up the hill this morning and came across this little situation. Those heathens in the north should be made aware we have the hardware and the people to use it. I was kind of hoping the clear liquid inside the cylinder was something flammable but it was water.
Boy did that thing get up. It cleared the pitch easy.

Getting back to the thing that holds this blog together, velcro, we was talking velcro today and there was a bunch of pictures of clothings that used velcro on the page. There was a stock-standard astronaut there, plucked from its normal background and set on white-space. I asked what do you call that and got back, “science one-piece”. That kills me.

Via the worldchanging site, see left, was this foto-map of the world courtesy of the euro space agency. No, you can’t see your backyard, you’ll have to go outside to do that. It is amazing how Marsish australia is compared to the rest of the planet.

Of words that can technically be labelled a sentence, “The movie sucked.” is officially the most commons singular unit now found on the internet.

I’ve started jogging. I don’t know why exactly, I never thought I’d be one of those people, but I wake up at 6:30 and start running.
One of those things that happens at night was that that I found that I need to get up and take a slash, and had had a rather vivid dream/halucination that did, but then gained just enough consciousness to realise I had only mentally journeyed. I thought, I better get up and take a slash, then had an even more vivid visualisation of doing that, but again woke to find I was still in bed. The third time I dragged out for real to get to the toilet. It makes me wonder if I astrally projected there the first two times — did a ghost-pee.
At another point I got the urge to take my pyjamas off in relation to a dream, but I don’t know how it relates. Or what the dream was about.

I bookmarked this some time ago but forgot to link it; the truth about hell.

If one smalltown mid-skool could produce this much noise and fervour then I think I probably would’ve died at the world cup. Was great fun but. They don’t have school houses like in australia, it’s just one class against the next. So I barracked for my favourite classes and hurled abuse at the less enthusiastic ones. Or should have.

All we got is a sandy dirt soccer pitch so there wasn’t much running, just one relay for each level. Loads of volleyball though. Plenty of wind-whipped sand storms, and 2400 skun knees. They kept coming over to me and showing us freshly iodined abrasions and saying ‘I’m sick’, and I’d say, ‘Sick mate!’.

Since I don’t teach them I don’t really know the grade 3s, but was able to hang with them a bit today. And because it’s camp/excursion/field trip week, I get to go to everland with them on Fri.
This girl had the whole Leyton Hewitt thing going on, plus the angel wings for xtra-kool.

miss Eee! cracks the whip on 1-5’s tug-o-war effort

Sorry about the page load atm. It’s just a visual week I guess.

M’ bro uploaded some of his photos from last year’s junketting of china’s cowboy wild-west, xing-xang. They’re pretty neat, but of course I’m putting it down to him having a good camera and because he does captioning for a job. I like the one of the old boys from colac. So very colac.

* * *
Who’s on first?.

If it were true that ceramics got me a horn on, then it’d be a right time, right place situation. That’s because EEE!tch-on is the justified and ancient home of ceramics in this country, and every odd year it holds an international ceramix expo. The grand finale is in Sept. I think, but things have already kicked off.
The truth is that, back in the olden days, the whole nation’s economy was pottery-based. Then the japanese came and kidnapped the potters, so the economy collapsed.

I suppose I find ceramics mildly amusing. I visited a few large shops the other day. There’s so many ways to get your glaze on – both visually and tactile — the ceramics village would be a fun place to trip. There’s coarse red things that look like they came from Mars thru to this smooth pale green style, which is my personal fave. It’s almost soft/warm to the touch if you know what I mean.

The night-time cellophane-wrapped light in my joint doesn’t illustrate the green shade correctly, but you can see that cracked look that enables ETs to ‘fold space’, as they put it.

Here’s another thing that’s so old that it looks like it’s from the future (in the picture).

- they loaded their grain on their donkeys and left.

- When David had gone a short distance beyond the summit, there was Ziba, the steward of Mephibosheth, waiting to meet him. He had a string of donkeys saddled and loaded with two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred cakes of raisins, a hundred cakes of figs and a skin of wine.

- Who let the wild donkey go free?
Who untied his ropes?

- Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it, as it is written,

-When he sees chariots
with teams of horses,
riders on donkeys
or riders on camels,
let him be alert,
fully alert.“

- Do not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.

- A whip for the horse, a halter for the donkey,
and a rod for the backs of fools!

- With a donkey’s jawbone
I have made donkeys of them.
With a donkey’s jawbone
I have killed a thousand men.

- The donkey said to Balaam, ”Am I not your own donkey, [?]”

It’s buddha’s b’day on sunday [post-edit: sunday-week] and so this is a good time to be asking yourself, “do I have enough buddha merch at hand?”, and if not, start with this WWBD? tee, then go see your local vendor for the beads and the rest.
I think it’s going to be a big deal. Mr.Monk’s been hoppin’ to it double time, and the rest of the posse including the old lady next door seem to be out and on it a lot more. The lanterns are up, and sure, I might stop by the ghetto in the morning, but the real gig’s on up the hill. They gonna have a concert with Savage Garden playing. They got a big stone carved arhat there. I was there friday, someone had left him a packet of chips.

Here’s a buddhist story on studpidness which I can relate to.

There’s buddha gear shops in the metropolis too — I’ve seen grey, Indian dalai lama-style pith helmets … I want a pith helmet but it has to be white, WHITE, wot eh mm? To go with the safari shirt my tailor is making for me. It’s not extravagant, I’m still working on my work-wardrobe, and am desperately searching for ways to not tuck my shirt in. Particular in summer, which it has rapidly become.

I’m reading the as-seen-on-TV, old Eastern classic, Monkey, as retold by David Kherdian. It’s really good i.e. funny and interesting. He lives in The Water Cutain Cave, in the Blessed Land of Flower Mountain. I love that name.

‘Furious, Natha cried, “Change!” whereupon he was transformed into a ferocious deity with three heads and six arms. His hands held six weapons: a monster-slashing sword, a monster-hacking scimitar, a monster-binding rope, a monster-quelling club, an embroidered ball, and a fire wheel. Brandishing these weapons, he charged Monkey.
“So you’ve a trick or two up your sleeve,” Monkey said.
“Well, have a look at this!” Shouting, “Change!” Monkey turned into a demon with three heads and six arms. His cudgel had become three cudgels, and grabbing each with two hands, he engaged Natha in an earth-shaking, mountain-trembling battle. They flew through the air like meteors and clashed like lightning, each parry and blow a thunderclap, with sparks flashing across the skies like shooting stars.’