Chapter 56: Moving swiftly along...
A plague of moths upon ye. Or me
I am finally back in Sydney, and so happy to be here - for now. Although it is fly season. The flies here just frikkin love me. And if that wasn't enough, when I arrived my bedroom was like a scene from a lepidopterist's horror movie. I found 87 dead bogong moths scattered around my room, and that was just on my first examination. They are everywhere; I inexplicably find their dessicated carcasses in the deep folds of my formerly clean clothes and in shut-tight drawers. Dried out moth corpses continue to surface daily. There is moth-wing dust everywhere; my walls are covered in the marks of their vainglorious flutterings. Bogong moth carcasses defiantly refuse to be flushed down the toilet - despite repeated flushings. I cannot bear to fish the little corpses out with my fingers, so they float there for days, until a piece of toilet paper or something more substantial snags one and sucks it down. Their hard little carcasses rattle as the vacuum sucks them up. Attracted by the lights of the big city, blown off course by the wind, they arrived in their millions a few weeks ago, and it was biblical apparently. Even stranger is that some people in Sydney have reportedly been eating them.
Mother's blog rebuttal
So in the last chapter I blogged my travels with my mother. Because I'm fair-minded, I produce her rebuttal below:
"Let me tell you about my son's suitcase. It is bright red and enormous, really gigantic. He lives and travels around the world with this monster. When I left for Amsterdam, he went to Madrid for 3 days with 3 pairs of underwear, 3 teeshirts and 3 pair of shorts, plus his stuff for his beautiful face and body (lotions, potions, etc), all this rattling along in the monster and probably not weighing more than 10 lbs. On other occasions the monster is so stuffed that he has to pay excess weight charges that at times cost more than his air ticket. He has no smaller more suitable bag than the monster."
Mother's words are gospel truth. It is a monster - at times, having lived out of it for the last four and a half months, I could barely lift it - but at least it's clean monster. I had to give it a shower when I brought it safely home from its global travels; the water ran black.
Bizarre Catholic Art
When I blogged the travels with my mother, I forgot to delight you with the bizarre art we found in a monastery in Granada. It's like a contest of pious martyrs. Photography was strictly forbidden, but the paintings were so delightfully weird I surreptitiously took a few snaps to amuse you. There was no attributed artist (perhaps he was too embarrassed to sign his name). The first picture is "I Was So Entranced By God That I Didn't Notice When A Spear Pierced My Chest faces off against Not Even An Ax Cleaving My Head in Two Can Separate My Hands Joined in Holy Prayer.
The next in the series I've titled "For Goodness Sake, Didn't You Know That Even a Sword Through My Heart Won't Kill Me Until God Is Good and Ready to Take Me? faces off against There's An Ax In My Head? Really? I Was So Entranced In Prayer I Didn't Notice":
The third is "I Feel A Certain Sensation In My Chest When I Think of God dukes it out against I Shot Myself in the Heart to Get Closer To God, But It Didn't Work Because He Wants me Alive":
Moving swiftly along: Madrid, Barcelona, Gent, London
After momma left I had just a handful of days left in lovely Spain. I went to Madrid to hang out with Thommy Valdez Piedra (TVP), my lovely Cuban boyfriend from last summer, and his super friends. And then they paid me a return visit in Barcelona the next weekend.
TVP (middle left) is as utterly gorgeous on the inside as on the outside. We didn't work out as boyfriends but I absolutely adore this man! It just makes me smile to think of him. And then I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with the lovely Brazilian Marcos Melo (pictured on beach), so all in all I was in fact very sad to leave Spain where I was so very happy.
But moving swiftly along (less moss begin to gather on me, or some equally horrid fate!)... One evening I'm on a beach in Barcelona, and the next morning I'm on a train to Gent - lovely cobbled streets and placid canals, with gorgeous 16th century buildings for Another 
Gay Wedding. This time Ken (Belgian) and Vinicius (Brazilian) got hitched and once again I felt more than a little moved and weepy during the service and speeches. (Oh, will I ever walk down that aisle? I strangely desire it... Am I turning into the gay equivalent of the lonely spinster, crying into her sherry out of self pity at the weddings?) Many of my friends from all over Europe were there, so it was lovely. Then, so quickly it was over and I'm on the Eurostar to London (Oh, is there any more lovely way to travel than the train? I think not, and this is a theme I shall return to later in this 
blog.) London was a blur of friends, friends, friends, including a night at my favourite Thai restaurant ever (Bursaba Eathai - until you've had their chilli peppercorn squid you are only half alive) with my lovely ex-wife Ruth (Canadian), and her lovely new girlfriend Susie (Quebecois), who were there for one brief night. Dear friends! I love you all and wish I could be with you always!
Time Travel Through Edwardian Africa
Zipping down to South Africa from London on the way home to Australia (as one does), I had a series of spectacular experiences which reminded me of how much I absolutely love this country. I think my heart sings for this land and its people like nowhere else. I don't know why. Maybe I lived many past lives here or something. There is something spiritual about the land of Africa, the land that is the birthplace of man. I can't explain it, but everyone who's ever felt it knows exactly what I'm talking about. Anyway, enough metaphysical blather. I'm amazed it even made it through my second edit of this blog. Forgive me. I must be in a philosophical mood and I apologize for subjecting you to this.
So anyway, first stop in South Africa: Rovos Rail - a train journey from Pretoria to Durban, a luxury 1920s colonial-era train. Oh, it was just delightful! The romance of travel in another era. Unfortunately, my friend David who organized the whole thing at the last minute couldn't go, so I went myself, but of course the moffies are everywhere and I met some very nice boys. Oh the romance of it! My luxury bedroom suite of teak and mahogany with its large picture window through which I can watch the world pass as we trundle along. Outside a vast muddy plain, African cattle everywhere, and the occassional tree or scrubby bush, with a wet gray sky. In the distance, hills, shrouded in mist. The ground 
and bushes blackened by a recent veld fire. Impossibly white egrets stand patiently beside the grazing cattle, waiting for them to stir up insects or something? Game drives in Swaziland and Umfolozi, South Africa's oldest game reserve which is just chock full of rhinos. Civilized conversation as we dine on white linen in candlelight - excellent wines! - as the train creaks and sways and clatters along the tracks.
I am not a sleeper but on the train I feel overcome by the imperative to nap. Perhaps the rocking and swaying of the train is like a cradle. When I wake from the nap, the scenery in my picture window has changed. I see the bright green of Natals' sugar cane fields and banana plantations passing outside, little black children waving and shouting as they run after the train as it trundles along.
Canine cunnilingus
From there I went to stay with my good friends Harry and Keith in Capetown. They have two lovely golden retrievers, named Rex and Nina. Besides leaving hairballs everywhere - Harry and Keith have daily home help JUST to deal with the dogs - they are lovely, lovely dogs. And Rex is quite a good boyfriend to sluttish Nina. Every 5 minutes, Nina rolls onto her back and Rex licks her pussy.
Tonglen: An Ant Farm
After Capetown I went to stay on the "farm" of my friends Paulie and Ant. Paulie's been trying to get me to go for years. You can't imagine how grossly misleading the word "farm" is here. A Scottish couple established a cattle ranch here - 450 acres on top of a mountain - in the 187os but now it's just pure nature with no people. The place is called Tonglen, a Buddhist meditation on compassion - breathing in the fear, pain and suffering of others, and breathing out love. What a lovely name for a place that really is a piece of heaven on earth! We stay in the original stone house built by the Scots and lovingly restored stone by stone by the boys. There is no electricity, so rest and conversation and food are the house diversions. It's a 40 minute drive up an impossibly bad dirt road to get to the house. We are in Big Weather Country - huge sun in the morning, massive hailstorms with thunder and lightening each afternoon, cold starry nights. I can't describe it. I'm just going to give you pictures. Thank you Paulie and Ant for this experience!
I am finally back in Sydney, and so happy to be here - for now. Although it is fly season. The flies here just frikkin love me. And if that wasn't enough, when I arrived my bedroom was like a scene from a lepidopterist's horror movie. I found 87 dead bogong moths scattered around my room, and that was just on my first examination. They are everywhere; I inexplicably find their dessicated carcasses in the deep folds of my formerly clean clothes and in shut-tight drawers. Dried out moth corpses continue to surface daily. There is moth-wing dust everywhere; my walls are covered in the marks of their vainglorious flutterings. Bogong moth carcasses defiantly refuse to be flushed down the toilet - despite repeated flushings. I cannot bear to fish the little corpses out with my fingers, so they float there for days, until a piece of toilet paper or something more substantial snags one and sucks it down. Their hard little carcasses rattle as the vacuum sucks them up. Attracted by the lights of the big city, blown off course by the wind, they arrived in their millions a few weeks ago, and it was biblical apparently. Even stranger is that some people in Sydney have reportedly been eating them.Mother's blog rebuttal
So in the last chapter I blogged my travels with my mother. Because I'm fair-minded, I produce her rebuttal below:"Let me tell you about my son's suitcase. It is bright red and enormous, really gigantic. He lives and travels around the world with this monster. When I left for Amsterdam, he went to Madrid for 3 days with 3 pairs of underwear, 3 teeshirts and 3 pair of shorts, plus his stuff for his beautiful face and body (lotions, potions, etc), all this rattling along in the monster and probably not weighing more than 10 lbs. On other occasions the monster is so stuffed that he has to pay excess weight charges that at times cost more than his air ticket. He has no smaller more suitable bag than the monster."
Mother's words are gospel truth. It is a monster - at times, having lived out of it for the last four and a half months, I could barely lift it - but at least it's clean monster. I had to give it a shower when I brought it safely home from its global travels; the water ran black.
Bizarre Catholic Art
When I blogged the travels with my mother, I forgot to delight you with the bizarre art we found in a monastery in Granada. It's like a contest of pious martyrs. Photography was strictly forbidden, but the paintings were so delightfully weird I surreptitiously took a few snaps to amuse you. There was no attributed artist (perhaps he was too embarrassed to sign his name). The first picture is "I Was So Entranced By God That I Didn't Notice When A Spear Pierced My Chest faces off against Not Even An Ax Cleaving My Head in Two Can Separate My Hands Joined in Holy Prayer.
The next in the series I've titled "For Goodness Sake, Didn't You Know That Even a Sword Through My Heart Won't Kill Me Until God Is Good and Ready to Take Me? faces off against There's An Ax In My Head? Really? I Was So Entranced In Prayer I Didn't Notice":
The third is "I Feel A Certain Sensation In My Chest When I Think of God dukes it out against I Shot Myself in the Heart to Get Closer To God, But It Didn't Work Because He Wants me Alive":
Moving swiftly along: Madrid, Barcelona, Gent, London
After momma left I had just a handful of days left in lovely Spain. I went to Madrid to hang out with Thommy Valdez Piedra (TVP), my lovely Cuban boyfriend from last summer, and his super friends. And then they paid me a return visit in Barcelona the next weekend.
TVP (middle left) is as utterly gorgeous on the inside as on the outside. We didn't work out as boyfriends but I absolutely adore this man! It just makes me smile to think of him. And then I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with the lovely Brazilian Marcos Melo (pictured on beach), so all in all I was in fact very sad to leave Spain where I was so very happy.
But moving swiftly along (less moss begin to gather on me, or some equally horrid fate!)... One evening I'm on a beach in Barcelona, and the next morning I'm on a train to Gent - lovely cobbled streets and placid canals, with gorgeous 16th century buildings for Another 
Gay Wedding. This time Ken (Belgian) and Vinicius (Brazilian) got hitched and once again I felt more than a little moved and weepy during the service and speeches. (Oh, will I ever walk down that aisle? I strangely desire it... Am I turning into the gay equivalent of the lonely spinster, crying into her sherry out of self pity at the weddings?) Many of my friends from all over Europe were there, so it was lovely. Then, so quickly it was over and I'm on the Eurostar to London (Oh, is there any more lovely way to travel than the train? I think not, and this is a theme I shall return to later in this 
blog.) London was a blur of friends, friends, friends, including a night at my favourite Thai restaurant ever (Bursaba Eathai - until you've had their chilli peppercorn squid you are only half alive) with my lovely ex-wife Ruth (Canadian), and her lovely new girlfriend Susie (Quebecois), who were there for one brief night. Dear friends! I love you all and wish I could be with you always!Time Travel Through Edwardian Africa
Zipping down to South Africa from London on the way home to Australia (as one does), I had a series of spectacular experiences which reminded me of how much I absolutely love this country. I think my heart sings for this land and its people like nowhere else. I don't know why. Maybe I lived many past lives here or something. There is something spiritual about the land of Africa, the land that is the birthplace of man. I can't explain it, but everyone who's ever felt it knows exactly what I'm talking about. Anyway, enough metaphysical blather. I'm amazed it even made it through my second edit of this blog. Forgive me. I must be in a philosophical mood and I apologize for subjecting you to this.
So anyway, first stop in South Africa: Rovos Rail - a train journey from Pretoria to Durban, a luxury 1920s colonial-era train. Oh, it was just delightful! The romance of travel in another era. Unfortunately, my friend David who organized the whole thing at the last minute couldn't go, so I went myself, but of course the moffies are everywhere and I met some very nice boys. Oh the romance of it! My luxury bedroom suite of teak and mahogany with its large picture window through which I can watch the world pass as we trundle along. Outside a vast muddy plain, African cattle everywhere, and the occassional tree or scrubby bush, with a wet gray sky. In the distance, hills, shrouded in mist. The ground 
and bushes blackened by a recent veld fire. Impossibly white egrets stand patiently beside the grazing cattle, waiting for them to stir up insects or something? Game drives in Swaziland and Umfolozi, South Africa's oldest game reserve which is just chock full of rhinos. Civilized conversation as we dine on white linen in candlelight - excellent wines! - as the train creaks and sways and clatters along the tracks.
I am not a sleeper but on the train I feel overcome by the imperative to nap. Perhaps the rocking and swaying of the train is like a cradle. When I wake from the nap, the scenery in my picture window has changed. I see the bright green of Natals' sugar cane fields and banana plantations passing outside, little black children waving and shouting as they run after the train as it trundles along.Canine cunnilingus
From there I went to stay with my good friends Harry and Keith in Capetown. They have two lovely golden retrievers, named Rex and Nina. Besides leaving hairballs everywhere - Harry and Keith have daily home help JUST to deal with the dogs - they are lovely, lovely dogs. And Rex is quite a good boyfriend to sluttish Nina. Every 5 minutes, Nina rolls onto her back and Rex licks her pussy.Tonglen: An Ant Farm
After Capetown I went to stay on the "farm" of my friends Paulie and Ant. Paulie's been trying to get me to go for years. You can't imagine how grossly misleading the word "farm" is here. A Scottish couple established a cattle ranch here - 450 acres on top of a mountain - in the 187os but now it's just pure nature with no people. The place is called Tonglen, a Buddhist meditation on compassion - breathing in the fear, pain and suffering of others, and breathing out love. What a lovely name for a place that really is a piece of heaven on earth! We stay in the original stone house built by the Scots and lovingly restored stone by stone by the boys. There is no electricity, so rest and conversation and food are the house diversions. It's a 40 minute drive up an impossibly bad dirt road to get to the house. We are in Big Weather Country - huge sun in the morning, massive hailstorms with thunder and lightening each afternoon, cold starry nights. I can't describe it. I'm just going to give you pictures. Thank you Paulie and Ant for this experience!
Labels: bogong moths, Gay Wedding, Granada, Rovos Rail, Thommy Valdez Piedra, Tonglen
posted by Peter at 1:48 AM
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