Winding

Well, I can’t really offer anything at the moment, I’ve lost any sense of meaning in the things I have to write, they seem redundant, auxiliary, meaningless, lots of things that mean nothing, I write and then leave it, I can still write though, it’s just all rambling, and irrelevant.

I do like Summer though, I don’t really know why but I’ve become very nostalgic about it, even though that’s the current Season. I like the way the seasons circle around from one to the other, in this sort of understandable way, Spring coming from the slow melting snow, Summer building upon the heat of Spring, in Autumn the leaves now two seasons old and withered from the Summer heat dry and fall to the ground, and Winter just being the gradual inclination of the cold from Autumn, and once again Spring. 

I used to think it was a terrible shame to learn too much about the world, it’s much more beautiful when you don’t understand the specifics of gravity, the nature of matter, things like that, it leaves you with so many questions, when you begin to understand one branch you realise you need to understand another and this goes on and on so long that in a single lifetime you simply cannot hope to understand every branch in the necessary detail to understand the universe, there is just too much. I can always see the attraction of religion, the simplicity of it, an eternal reprieve, purpose, community, everything, everything we want as humans, for others and ourselves, exists somewhere in religion, who doesn’t want that? Even if it’s only for their loved ones, sacrificing yourself is really quite easy, it’s sacrificing others that is difficult, I can be satisfied without an afterlife for myself, but not for the ones I love.

When I was very young I used to have a recurring nightmare of two terrify storm clouds which had faces that would attack me mentally and verbally. I also had a recurring dream of being on top of a cloud looking down on to earth and picking my parents. Weird for an Atheist huh? I was 3 years old when I figured out Santa wasn’t real, I saw an advert on television for K-mart talking about buying presents for Christmas.

I only ever talked to God when I needed help, when I was sad or scared, I would make agreements with him, exchanges, I’d offer him some earthly service of mine for his divine intervention, I always had my prayers, my wishes, come true, mostly I guess because I wasn’t a greedy child, mostly I just wanted everyone to be safe, really, oh but I did have a few bizarre selfish wishes, I wished for a baby duck once, which I got, I was living in a house where we had our own beach, in the morning the ducks would waddle up to the glass sliding doors and bang their beaks against the glass, sometimes I’d go and feed them, we also had a pelican come by that Terence, my father, would sit and talk to on the sand whilst feeding him sardines, throwing them into his open bill, even now Terence has a family of Kookaburras that visit him which he feeds and talks to, he has had that same family of Kookaburras visit him for the last 6 years, but he has moved 4 times so it’s quite surprising, he does leave meat out for them in order to attract them after each move but I don’t think that is all there is to it, it has to be something else, maybe smell or something.

One day I saw an injured baby duck without it’s family, I brought it some food and then left it there overnight, I wanted to take him home but I thought he might just be lost and he’d be found later, when I returned the next day he was still there quacking weakly, so I took him home, he was a lovely little creature, I had him for a week when my friend’s mother volunteered to take him to their home, which I was against, but we had a very large Rottweiler who I believe was harmless but my parents decided not to take any bets, Bruno, my Rottweiler was enormous, biggest you’ve ever seen, like a small horse, totally harmless though, pleasant and lazy, he didn’t even care about the duck when he saw it.

Oddly enough years later my friend Sam bought a duck as a pet from one of the stores down in China Town, he made a string leash and collar and they’d go walking down to the shops together. Sam was great, honestly, I just loved him, it was very sad when all his drug use just destroyed him, the last time I saw him he was pale as the moon standing outside of an arcade centre selling, he left school in year 10 but really he was told to leave they just didn’t want to mark his reputation with an expulsion especially since it was from the most prestigious (read expensive) school in Sydney. Sam was unflappable, he was genuinely unique, he barely talked, was happy to listen, and just did his own thing all the time. I become quite sad when I think of Sam, I regret that I didn’t help him, but I was off in my own world when he started into the drugs and within 6 months he was a totally different person, just, ruined, empty, sad, desperate, anyone ever hear that song by the Whitlams ‘buy now pay later’? I used to go to concerts with my friend Petra, at the Whitlams concert buy now pay later was performed, my first proper introduction to the band, we were at the Metro theatre, everyone pulled out their lighters and held their flame up into the air, slowly winding left to right, when they began playing Petra told me that this is the song she had told me about that reminded her of Sam. I was in tears by the end of the song, but it was nice in a way, I was happy that she saw that in Sam, she was basically the last person I knew from a period in my life that I had decided to cut out, I had no one to talk to about Sam, about my regrets, because it’s hard to understand if you didn’t know him, why it was so sad.

Petra was my sassy lesbian friend, I was her faghag as they term it, it was a nice weird reversal, I had dated her best friend years before, and god she hated me for it, but we got along after a while, I’m a bit weird in that I actually like people who are happy to criticise me, so long as it’s clever and done for humour, petty, deliberately humourless criticism is just exhausting, she was good at being a bitch, she’s actually a really lovely person though, but she’d just flat out swear at me all the time, yell me down when I talked, if I made any mistake she’d launch at it, I don’t really know why but I always found it terribly amusing and I’d crack up and she’d get furious and I’d find it even funnier. Petra and I got along a bit better when she told her parents she was a lesbian, they were upset about it and wanted to send her to a boarding school, which cracked both of us up, best way to counter-act her lesbian desires would be to send her to an all girls school and live on campus, right? We used to have sleepovers now and then at her places amongst all of ours, her parents always made an annoying thing out of me being present because all boys were predatory in their minds, but they would concede eventually, but after they learned she was a lesbian I was welcomed with open arms into that house.