eehbaby 4 sione

this piece of paper was stuck to the ground next to the Orbiter bus stop on Buckleys Road, Linwood (opposite Eastgate Mall). i was stuck wondering whether there's any significance to the fact it was discarded. is 'forever and ever' over for eehbaby or sione? cue: existential crisis centered on the impermanence of life and love. ms word love notes kind of tear me up sometimes.

obligatory earthquake post.

so, christchurch is gonna suck even harder now. go figure.

post apocalypse.

some things i have been dwelling on to kill time in between no work and no university:

+ is 'being drunk and on speed' during 'a major natural disaster' going to replace seeing some guy get dumped, beat down in 30 seconds after trying to fight us for like ten minutes, and arrested, as 'the 'buzziest' thing that ever happened'?

+ if god exists, and therefore should be thanked for the fact that no one died in an earthquake, should he not also 'take the blame' for stupidly creating a world based on tectonic plates? i feel like this dude is getting off kind of easy here. you owe me a television, bro.

+ how can i cash in on the suffering of thousands of people? is this an ideal time to purchase 'stocks and bonds' in relevant industries?

tuesday 1am, victoria st nite and day

christchurch with nothing but a used bus transfer,
two bottle caps, and a muddy head full of defeated thoughts.
ducking passing conversations about how
what we're writing can't be plagiarism
because 'the Beats' died with our falling enthusiasm for life.
still stuck on forever's problem;
the space between reality and late night schemes.
still trying to reconcile
the unfulfilled promises of modern life.
degrees in 'sales and marketing'
tuesday night punk rock shows.
full nude striptease.
full nude striptease.
the far off sounds of street-lit vomitting, and
drunks asking 'what're the cheapest smokes you sell'
to a school aged fuck up who 'gets it'.
spilled cans of Diesel and Carter Lager
leaking like the wounds of wartime.
surrounded by humming signs and hostile footpaths,
empty land guarded by barbed fences
and twenty four slash seven security signs.
still shouting songs of revenge at the moon.
our one chance
wasted on these streets
take no prisoners
take no prisoners
take no prisoners (x ∞)

doing my bit (broken glass as community action pt. 2)

i walked home with a brick in my hand
and broke every motion sensing light
that lit me up.
doing my bit for crime deterrence deterrence.

a numbers guy

This is the start of a longer short story I started writing. Not sure if it will ever get finished. Enjoy it going nowhere, for now.

June 12, 1990 was an unremarkable day in a relatively straight forward year. On this day, free from major air disasters or stock market crashes, Mark Smith entered the World. He was neither early nor late, and neither kicking nor screaming – just another unremarkable soul joining the procession of millions of other unremarkable souls who wind up seventy years down the track wondering where it all went wrong.

Throughout childhood, Mark maintained his steadfast commitment to the ordinary - role playing Dragon Ball Z at school with his four friends until a respectable age, and tossing his uneaten peanut butter sandwiches in the bin daily. His parents separated and his father moved to Australia, as was par for the course in those days. Later in life Mark would wonder if this event hadn't played maybe just a small part in how it all turned out. At the time, though, it had just seemed so, well, normal. All his friends got two Christmas presents too. Mark's mother Sharon had been back working since he started school, and so they were never poor or anything. And so, life marched on, each day inevitable as the planet's revolution, every week punctuated by Simpsons re-runs and Friday night fish and chips.

Adolescence, with its bursting hormones and the accompanying government-sanctioned sex-ed classes, proved the turning point. The point where Mark Smith, for reasons that would remain unknown to him, realised that he was Different. At first, it was just 'different'. The capital D came later in life. And not just different in that boring and cliched 'I'm a unique and wonderful snowflake and will dye my hair green and shout obscenities at authority figures' kinda way that was almost expected of teenage dirtbags at the time. Different in a different way.

By the time he was in High School, Mark was moving in the second-tier popular crowd. Not the top rugby players crowd, but only one step below, on the grand High School scheme of things. Sure, at 14 he wasn't attending all the parents-outta-town parties, but he still did okay for himself. This second tier friend group had corresponding second-tier friend groups at at least two of the girls schools around town at any given point, which was pretty good.

When the 4^th form school dance came around, Mark bowed to the pressure of his friends and asked Christina from the Catholic girls school (with the eternal reputation for teenage pregnancy) to come with him. Leading up to the dance, Mark and his friends spent more than a few hours talking about 'how mean the dance was gonna be', and 'who was gonna pash and/or finger who'. Despite this undefeatable young man bravado , Mark was becoming increasingly nervous. He'd never even kissed a girl before. Mostly, he messed up talking to them. Didn't know what to say. Sweaty hands preceded nervous laughter, which itself was the harbinger of impending failure. These pressures teamed up with a catalog of imagined inadequacies to weigh heavy on Mark's mind on the Friday of the dance. He almost threw up on the skill saw during last period woodwork.

the battle of adrianople

Through his father's connections (specifically- the production company which owed him a favour for sorting out the whole Next Top Plus Sized Model fiasco), he'd got a shot at it. At 'the big time'. Thirteen half hour episodes, commissioned after the pilot's entirely ambivalent test screening.

“It's essentially a show about nothing, y'know, like Seinfeld” he'd proclaimed to all the adoring young girls, who'd taken to ringing his long-term table at the bar, hoping for some sort of 'big break'. He left out the part about how it was like Seinfeld, minus the jokes. And how he enjoyed most television about as much as the general public enjoyed watching 'curvy, natural' behemoths heft themselves self-righteously across the screen each night to empowering messages about being 'real women'. That is to say, he knew fuck all about television, and even less about how to make it. What he did know, though, was how much television meant to these vapid martini drinkers. To have your own TV series, though, meant you'd made it.

“It's kind of like this conceptual, hard realist take on young peoples' lives, I guess. Like Skins, but funnier. And grittier. A realistic take on drug use”. He didn't even know about this part- it was mainly conversational filler really. Or maybe he would throw in some more drugs. Glam things up a bit with some thick white lines off of porcelain in 'pumping clubs'. Tired old cliches. It had to be nose drugs. The pilot had consisted almost entirely of the 'funniest' of his friends, smoking weed and talking about 'buzzy shit'. But really, no one wanted a 'realistic take' on weed. 6.5 hours of some doss cunts sitting on second hand couches watching Spongebob slightly paranoid and not wanting to talk heaps didn't exactly sound like Emmy material. And what else was there? Some old man, half-grey mustache waving as he rides helmetless on a stolen bike across wide ghetto avenues with pockets full of meth? Pockmarked depraved ex-private school girls slurping on the bulbous, diseased penii of grey faced and lecherous finance company directors? It had to be 'cocaina'.

“But yeah, we're gonna be casting next week, probably, if any of you are interested? I could run through some lines before hand too?”

the thrill of livin'

Today I woke up and wanted to write a story about nothing. So, I did. More buses and getting drunk, because that's all I know.

There were three lines. Two of them were lime green, and stretched across the automatic doors, where the buses pulled up. The other was a dappled tan stripe of vinyl, which cut a path through the industrial-kaleidoscope carpet. Through my blurring eyes, the effect was like a strange upended topographical map, and rendered the room in an extra dimension. I tried to ignore this illusion and focus instead on the other people waiting for the night's last bus--trying to figure out who was going Out, and who was going Home. Across from me were two girls gossiping about god knows what, and I could almost taste the cheap wine in their piercing laughter. I wondered if maybe they were going to the same party as me. Small chances in a big city, but you never know. Maybe I'd get drunk and hit on one of them. The red head, probably. Not the fat one. Or maybe, depending on how I was feeling. I thought about what her face would look like when she came. The only thing I ever learned from my uncle is that fat girls try harder. Anything for a distraction.

I thought the man who'd sat down next to me was trying to start a conversation, before realising he was talking only to himself.

'The boats! The boats! The waves!'

He looked like a homeless Robert De Niro, and kept up chanting his strange incantation the whole time I sat there. If I was a better person, maybe I woulda talked to him. Found out his story, if he needed help, that kind of thing. It's always a risk though. Talk to a guy like that and there's a fifty-fifty chance he starts putting dead cats in your letterbox, or something. I took the easy road and ignored him, instead stealing sidelong glances at his big wet eyes and wondering if being retarded is just like being drunk all the time, not caring about the god damned world and all of these problems, or if maybe it's like a bad acid trip with no way out. Blind speculation. Anything to pass the time.

The bus arrived around the time this guy progressed to 'The boats! The boats! The waves! The sand!'. It was empty apart from the four of us who got on. My fat girl and her friend paid child fares, and I felt like some creepy old pocket-masturbating weirdo. Our love died with a $1.40 concession fare. The muttering tard sat right behind me, even though almost every other seat was empty. I spent that bus ride focused on the classic rock hits which played quiet through the speakers somewhere up the back, praying to God that I wasn't minutes away from death by strangulation and wishing that I hadn't had those beers after work so I didn't have to ride the damned bus. I learned from John Mellencamp that life goes on, even after the thrill of living's gone. And it did.

The underaged girls got off at the same stop as me, and to avoid feeling even more like a creepy rape dude, I said hi. They were going to Josh's party, too--friends of his sister, or something. We parted ways in the kitchen, and I felt better. Soon enough I was outside by the fire, opening beers with lighters and talking shit about oh my god who was so drunk, and all that other stuff. Thinking about that red-haired girl I'd left in the kitchen and how society just couldn't accept a love like ours. You start to accept the impossibility of it all the further through the dozen you get. Less matters. Sure getting laid would be good, but who cares, have a good time. On the piss, or whatever. We talked about the guy on the bus. How he was some Navy experiment gone wrong, or De Niro himself, trying out method acting for the remake of Rain Man. How he was probably watching us through the fence, waiting to rape Josh in his sleep.

The night drew on and soon enough, I was sitting alone on a couch outside, tasting the cold air and watching the ashes fly skyward. Wishing there was someone I could talk about those ashes with without getting called a fag. Wanting to shout about what it'd be like to slowly float out of this scene, everyone blurring into the same face, the house beginning to look just like all the others. To look out from above, across that very same strange topographical dimension, on a grand scale, and see all the other blurred faces in the backyards of identical houses across the city. And how you'd look down, and see all the other ashes rising, making the exact same journey as you, and feel so common and meaningless, before realising that even if the journey's the same, your perspective right now is, like, different from all the other ashes, and none of them are in your place. Wanting to shout all of this at anyone who'll listen, thinking about all of this and feeling a bit to drunk to make sense of it all, and it stopped mattering at that point anyways 'cause Josh was sitting down with his arm around me telling me how drunk he was and how he wanted to bang the fuck out of his sister's ginger friend, and how we should go watch John 'Cougar' Mellencamp on youtube. I took one last look at the fire, and realised that some day those ashes would be the death of me.