Chapter 51: Peter's Miscellanea

Miscellanea: miscellaneous things, especially pieces of writing, brought together as a collection

A lesson in happiness:
A fantastic quote from the Buddha himself (sent to me by Shirley Temple)
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

A piece of music that will change your life:
Chaconne in D Minor, by Bach. I can't stop listening to it, can't believe how beautiful it is, have to listen at least once per day. If you want it, contact me. Following Buddha's advice above, I'd like to share it. Thank you Robert Murray for sharing this revelation with me.

The temporary end of Pete's Pretty Prose Pussy Posse My writing class has finished and I'm soon off on my annual travel jaunt. But I'm sad to leave too because it means no more meetings with Pete's Pretty Prose Pussy Posse, the trio of beautiful and talented women with whom I sometimes write. We went to an awesome play, The Art of War, based on the ancient Chinese philosophical text recently. In the picture at left, that's Mary Paul (with her porn-star boobies, completely obscured by her scarf, who said "Shouldn't we have the words 'ping pong' in our group title as well?"), Lisa (just who is she looking at?) and Jane (a real-life MILF). At night, when I can't sleep, I wonder what my child would look like with each of them.

Completely unpredictable predictive texting
I don't understand why my phone's predictive texting doesn't know "prawn" but knows "spawn". Do you think people often have cause to text the word "spawn"? Perhaps, they do as in Dear Wife, it's clear you've been unfaithful, because evidently our children are spawn of the devil," as opposed to "Please pick up prawns for dinner".

My underwear have rebelled
En masse, overnight, my underwear have decided to go baggy on me. When I put them on, I look like I'm wearing diapers (full ones) or, worse yet, a skort (see pic at left). But how did my underwear coordinate the attack of bagginess like this? And why? What does it mean?

The selfish pleasures of recycling
Very few things in life give me both satisfaction and a feeling of virtue at the same time, but I've finally found one: taking my collected cans, bottles and miscellaneous plastic containers down to the recycling bin. It's virtually orgasmic, when I dump the bag into the container. I like to let the load build up for a particularly large dump.

I'm addicted to TV and I blame my friend Duncan MacKinnon
It was Duncan who taught me how to use Utorrent to download TV programs from the internet, and now I have a serious problem. I'm addicted. And I'm pretty sure they don't have a 12 step program for this. The only two good things that can be said about this are (i) it's free and (ii) I think I can replace ALL my physical addictions with TV. For example, I gave up smoking. When I wanted to smoke, I just watched an episode of Entourage instead.

Oh, it all started off innocently enough with a few episodes, here and there, of Ugly Betty. But then my friend Ruth Slieker (of the long crinkly gray pubic hair fame, see Chapter 40 of this blog) put me onto Dexter (about a serial killer who kills other serial killers), and things got a bit worrying as I stayed up until 4am three nights in a row watching all 12 hours of Season 1 of Dexter in just 3 sittings. (I was like a crack addict, unable to say no to the next hit.)

So I thought I'd died and gone to heaven with Dexter, but then I discovered Entourage (about the entourage around an LA movie star - thanks again Duncan - which gave me a hideous case of lifestyle envy) which was even better. And now, most recently, Weeds, which as far as I'm concerned has delivered me into TV paradise. Mary Louise Parker (left) and Elizabeth Perkins (right, and an absolute goddess of bitch) in one TV show. I haven't laughed so hard in years. MLP plays a recently widowed suburban mom who takes to dealing marijuana to make ends meet, while EP is her best friend - an uptight alcoholic councilwoman, who has no idea and wants to turn the neighbourhood into a drug free zone. Example of the crackling script:

• MLP (speaking of EP's husband): How are things with Dean?
• EP: Well, let's see. He's a fucking loser, with a body shaped like a Cadbury egg. With hair all over it.

But now I have a terrible dilemma: what next when I finish Season 2 of Weeds? (And I'm going through my stash quickly.) Do I move on to Nip Tuck, or Brothers and Sisters, or Carnivale or Rome, or try to finish Battlestar Galactica and My Name is Earl, which I've also been dipping into from time to time? Help me!

Why do we feel more with TV than with real life?
Now, with all this TV watching, I've noticed something really interesting. When you watch good TV, the feelings are pretty intense! In fact, they are often stronger than in real life! I have cried twice watching Ugly Betty, and that hasn't happened in real life for a long time. When I reported this to Ruth Slieker, she made a deeply profound comment "Yeah, why bother going out and doing anything, when you can stay home and watch real life on TV?" Indeed. But after much contemplation I think I have the answer: it's because nearly everything in real life is so emotionally ambivalent, and nearly always comes piecemeal whereas in TV it comes in a sudden whallop, and they've also got the music to tell you how to feel.

To stay or not to stay, that is the question and the phenomenon of "sun pressure"
As I gear up for another 4 months overseas trip, I am really struggling with the issue of "to stay or not to stay" (here in Sydney). There are pros and cons. On the pro side:

• I'm already here, so I don't have to move my books anywhere
• I've got an excellent group of other writers around me
• The weather is absolutely flawless. Today, it's the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of mid-November yet it's so warm and crystal clear and blue that I'm wearing (as I always do) shorts and T-shirt. It's like living inside the music of a xylophone. I'm playing tennis in the sun and getting tanned, in November!
  

(Important caveat: Of course, good weather has its downside, as my friend Clinton pointed out: horrendous sun pressure. This is the phenomenon where you feel hideously, horrendously, catastrophically guilty if you stay indoors to be lazy and watch TV or have a nap, or recover from a hangover. One constantly feels "I should be outside." Sun pressure can be absolutely exhausting.)

On the con side:

• The immigration process if I want to stay here permanently is a huge bureaucratic headache. It makes me feel sick just to think of the paperwork.
  
• Sydney is so very far from so many people I care about. It takes at least 24 hours to get to Vancouver, New York or London, which combined with jet lag means it's not plausible to visit for just a week, which means you can't help but lose touch, slowly. For example, I missed my friend's Adam and Tom's weddding in London because I just couldn't get back and forth in time and I'm gutted by that. Now I'm staying away four months so as not to miss Ian and Agu's wedding, or Ken and Vinicius's in Europe.
  
• The gay scene here is seriously screwed up. I'm trying to be less cynical and more positive in life, as I do believe you get back what you put out, so I won't say any more about this, except that I feel that I don't really fit in here. Maybe it's because I feel utterly European in my sensibility.
  

The strange thing about having lived in so many places and having ties of affection in so many places is that one can feel kind of rootless, a citizen of the world but with roots in no one particular place. But I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Does having roots in no one particular place mean I'll blow over in the slightest wind? Anyway, regardless, I'm off on 31 May. Next report likely to be from Vancouver, where I'll be thrilled to have a month with my Mammasita. She better cook some good food for me.

Chapter. 50: To blog or not to blog?

To blog or not to blog? That is the question! And one which I have seem to have convincingly answered with a 3 month and 13 day lapse since my last entry. But actually it's not so clear cut. It's not that I haven't wanted to blog, or have been too lazy, or have had broken fingers. It’s just that every time I've been inspired to blog, think also “Nooooooooo, I shouldn’t write the blog! Instead I should write the damn albatross-around-my-neck".

Whoops, sorry! Did I say “albatross”? I meant “book”. I meant I should write the damn book. More on this later.

CRAZY SEXY SCARY RIO AND LOVELY MAX
It’s also that a lot has been going on in my life. I went to Carnival in Brazil with Max in February. Rio was fun, crazy, hot, chaotic, beautiful, steamy, violent, sexy, scary. Max and I were attacked once in the streets of Ipanema by some street kids (not seriously), and we nearly got shaken down by the police on a separate occasion after two machine gun toting policemen pulled our taxi over as we were looking for a club called Bitch. It was more than just a little freaky. My friend Chip said that it was "the best holiday ever", but then he always says that about everything he does. Gotta love his enthusiasm, even if sometimes I can't share it myself. The sad news is that after Brazil, after much agonizing, Max and I decided afterwards to go our own separate ways, but with huge respect and love. A wonderful man. In my heart forever.

DONE THE FIRST DRAFT; WHAT NOW?
OK, now you all want to know: What's going on with that goddamn albatross-around-my-neck? Well, I’ve sort of written a first draft, but it’s not really the book I wanted to write, and I just don’t know what to do with it. Burn it, stick it in a drawer, rewrite it to be what I want, or just toss it in the bin and start a new writing project. These are my options. I don't much fancy any of them. So in order to figure it out, I went back to Broome, in North-West Australia, which is where my book is set (in the 1920s). So many of you keep asking, that I'm putting a map here for you. In Broome, I find myself re-enthused and re-daunted in equal measures. But it doesn't matter, I love it up here anyway.


STARGAZING WITH THE KAMIKAZE MOSQUITO SQUAD
I went star gazing the other night with Craig from Astro Tours. He had a white beard down to his navel like Moses and an impressive collection of telescopes set up on a sandy plain just outside of Broome. The evening didn't start well. The sandy plain was situated right beside a mangrove swamp and as soon as I got off the bus, the mosquitoes attacked in coordinated kamikaze swarms. Clothes were no obstacle; the savage buggers crawled up my sleeves, flew up my nose, thrust into my ears, wriggled down the crack of my trousers, clustered on my neck.

When I got home later that night I looked like I had measles and my shirt and pants were absolutely covered in spots of blood. But for every one that I smashed against the fabric of my designer clothing, I think 200 got away with a great bellyful of my blood. It’s a wonder I didn’t faint from loss of blood.

But my goodness, I really didn't care at all because the star gazing was amazing, breathtaking, an absolute revelation! When we arrived, Moses had one telescope set up, pointing at something in the sky, and he invited people to look in it. Everyone stood back shyly like idiots, leaving the field open for me. I had no idea what I was going to see and bugger-me-stupid if it wasn’t Saturn, glowing luminous and perfect, with all of her rings! What I saw looked very close to this picture, except more luminous. I can tell you, friends, you can look at all the NASA pictures in the world, but seeing Saturn for real, so close in this telescope, was one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve ever seen.

But that was not the end of the wonders Moses showed to us that night. We saw the double star system of Alpha Centauri. (Actually, it's a triple star system but one of them is a tiny brown dwarf, and we could only see the two larger stars in the telescope.) It's the nearest star system to us, but even so at 4.24 light-years it would take the fastest moving man-made object, the Voyager 1, moving at 62,000 km per hour, over 73,000 years to reach it.

We also saw the luminous Magellanic Cloud (the nearest galaxy to ours), the Jewel Box Cluster (a lovely constellation of stars of lots of different colours, including a red supergiant, see picture at left, which doesn't at all do it's beauty any justice). Moses also pointed out to us many of the 88 modern constellations in the sky like the astrological ones in the ecliptic (the plane around the sun through which the planets, including earth, revolve) such as Scorpio (the only one which looks like what it’s supposed to be) and Leo, and some of those constellations outside the ecliptic, such as the Southern Cross (which can be used to find the terrestrial south pole) and Canis Major, with Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. We also saw the aboriginal constellation of the Emu, which unlike our constellations really does look like a giant bird flying across the Milky Way.

And then, at the end, a telescope was pointed at an object which had been steadily climbing from the horizon and bugger-me-frontways if I couldn’t see Jupiter, with 3 of her 4 visible moons (the fourth must have been in front or in back.) It was so large and distinct that I could even discern the bands running across her equator. Well, as I said to Moses afterwards “Mate, that’s the best $65 tour I have EVER taken.” (Did you notice how I used the word "mate"? I'm become such a local.)

And the whole experience was really quite moving, not just because of the beauty and fascination in the night sky, but also because it made me think of my poor Dad, dead nearly 8 years now. I thought of how he wanted to be an astronomer, but became a solicitor instead to satisfy his family and social convention, and maybe that’s why he turned to the bottle. And so I was that curious bittersweet nostalgic feeling which can best be described as happy-sad, as I felt close to him then and thought of how we would have shared something nice, sitting out here watching the jeweled night sky.

MAD CAROL: IN SIX MONTHS TIME SHE'LL NEVER NEED TO EAT AGAIN
The night was also special because it enabled me to meet Mad Carol (MC), the Canadian from Winnipeg. When I first saw MC on the bus to the mosquito feeding ground, I noticed two things. First, she had a squeaky baby doll whisper voice. Second, she was bald. In the dark I thought perhaps she was a chemo patient, but I later discovered she shaved her head. Maybe that’s why, aside from our joint Canadianness, why she liked me; we had similar pates. “I have a thyroid problem that I’m not treating medically,” she said, pulling back the mosquito netting that enveloped her head to reveal a fearsome goiter. She grilled me as to the purpose of my presence in Broome and as I quickly found myself on the familiar but ever uncomfortable territory of talking about my albatross (sorry, book) I resorted to my well-honed avoidance technique: I started asking the questions:
Me: “What are you doing here?”
MC: “Oh, I’m a sun gazer. All ancient cultures gazed at the sun. I increase my time each day by 10 seconds, and you should congratulate me because today I hit 15 minutes. Uninterrupted. When I get to 44 minutes, I’ll become a solar chip, like my guru.”
Me: “A solar chip?” I asked
MC: “I’ll draw everything I need directly from the sun. My guru hasn’t eaten in 8 years. Though sometimes he takes a glass of buttermilk or tea for social reasons.”

EWWWWWWWWWW! Now completely aside from highly interesting madness of Mad Carol, at this point I really have to interject, with a question to my readers: If you were not going to eat for 8 years, would the first thing you’d have be BUTTERMILK? I doubt it. BUTTERMILK IS GROSS, AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT! It is a fermented milk product, whose two most marked characteristics are tartness and a thickened clumpy nature, due to bacteria turning lactose into lactic acid and causing the protein casein to precipitate out of the liquid. (Incidentally, this goop is called clabbering, which I think is a lovely word. Oh, the things you can find out on the net!)

Anyway, back to Mad Carol and solar gazing. There is a website you can check out if you want www.solarhealing.com
It makes for absolutely fascinating reading. I only realized quite how mad poor Mad Carol actually was when I read the website. In addition to the stuff about sungazing being the perfect cure for all physical and spiritual ailments, here are a few tidbits on its other benefits:

• Historically, a lot of people have remained without food. [Yes, starvation has been a problem in history.]
• Accordingly in 1922, the Imperial Medical College in London decreed that solar rays were the ideal food for humans. [I wonder how much you'd have to pay IMC to get them to endorse this statement today.]
• You can develop psychic skills of telepathy, television... [Really? What are psychic skills of television, anyway? Is that when you can predict a sitcom plot within the first three minutes of the episode?]
  
• You can develop psychic skills of having your body at different places simultaneously [Now this would be useful because sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I need to pee, but I'm too lazy to get out of bed]
• You can read past, present, and future. This method can be safely applied to control obesity. [Notice the nifty segue from the psychic to the physical. I like it. Fatties take note: you need to stare at the sun more.]
  
• Almost all problems get solved. [Ok, fabulous, because I've got an ingrown toenail which is driving me nuts.]

But the thing was, I liked Mad Carol. I liked her a lot. She was articulate, friendly and enthusiastic. And more than a little tragic too. When I asked her if her 3 months of sun gazing so far had helped her to feel better, I felt really sad when her eyes started to water, and she said no, instead her goiter seemed to be hardening and growing, but she remained optimistic. She told me that her mother had a similar thyroid problem, but had fixed it with surgery. "But all my spiritual healers have concurred that this is a spiritual ailment of not being able to speak my truth that's been passed from generation to generation", said Carol. "And I'm going to fix it spiritually."

What could I say? This was her truth, no matter how ludicrous it seemed to me. And it's not so much more crazy than the Hindu's 300 million Gods (yes, that is officially how many deities there are in Hinduism) or Christianity's supposed Virgin Birth. But I also knew that there was something real in what Mad Carol was saying. I don't know how, but somehow I just knew that terrible abuse had happened to her as a child. And so, as I gobbled down a particularly large piece of pavlova in one of my favourite restaurants in the world (Old Zoo Cafe in Broome) I encouraged her to write her truth, her story, even if she couldn't speak it yet. She was very taken with the idea. When we said goodbye, I hugged her and we exchanged email addresses and I made her promise to let me know how she fares with her sun healing. And if the next six months of gazing at the sun in the desert of Alice Springs hasn't fixed her thyroid, I'm gonna do my utmost to persuade her to go under the knife. So maybe that's my purpose in Mad Carol's life. And what's hers in mine? Well, as I swallowed the last glorious spoonful of pavlova, she said “My god you really came alive with passion when you spoke about South Africa. Maybe you should write about that. Maybe you’re not ready to write your albatross yet.” So maybe that's what her purpose was. Or maybe it hasn't been revealed yet.

SOUTH AFRICA ON MY MIND
But it’s true, South Africa keeps popping up in my mind all the time. When I'm standing in line at the post office. When I'm on my bike. When I get up in the morning and drink my tea and stare out the window at the sailboats on the sunny harbour. When I'm writing. When I’m brushing my teeth. And today I realized something that may help to explain this preoccupation: I'm nearly on the decade anniversary of my move there. I really can't quite believe it! I moved to Johannesburg in June 1997 - ten years ago! - and yet it seems like yesterday. I remember everything - absolutely everything! - about my life there. My years in golden, magic, wild, exciting South Africa stand out in a psychological bas-relief as the most vivid of my life. Oh, how I miss it! Oh, I was so lucky to be able to live there when I did. I was lucky, lucky, lucky. Blessed, really, as I have been all my life, and I am so grateful for these blessings.

That's enough for now. If you've made it this far, your eyes are probably as tired as Mad Carols'! I'll write more another time very soon.