vinegarfixfour

Guangzhou Asian Games 2010

2010-07-14T21:33:00.001-07:00

Just now starting to tune into the Asian Games which are happening in Guangzhou at the moment. Amazing to catch sight every once in a while, of mankind's greatest physical achievements, where men and women perform at peak fitness level.
The 16th Asian Games held in Guangzhou is a great chance for Guangzhou (and for China) to present itself to the rest of the world, promoting current-day essentials such as a low-carbon lifestyle. I love the way events like these raise world standards just a little bit!

http://www.gz2010.cn/en

2010-06-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

Baoji, China

2010-06-08T06:03:00.001-07:00

Bi Lour Tqun – An impressive kind of tea, made from the leaves of some terrestrial plant, but also of an animal from the sea, quite possibly the sea cucumber. Long and black and knobbly-shaped, the sea cucumber is ground into this mixture of sea and earth, to give the tea a slightly bitter, slightly magnetic, and very pleasing meaty strength. A taste much worth savouring, for my time here in Baoji!

The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin

2010-01-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

"Yeah baby hop right in between the pages and sniff these sci-fi goods of... to be continued."

I am currently reading 'The Dispossessed' by Ursula Le Guin, and, having said that I am reading it, I endeavour to do so more, for I am not yet a quarter of the way through and it is a little bit intriguing. It tickles the bases that people say science fiction is meant to address - the parallel social issues, the euphemisms for race between two tribes of 'aliens', and I can tell, as it is Ursula Le Guin and because I am familiar with her ways of speech and lifestyle, that it is going to touch more on possibilties of gender co-ordination in society. I am one of those people (if this category exists) who really really likes the idea of science fiction, but as yet, has mainly just read theoretical interpretations, and snippets of snippets of examples... I have liked the sound of Ursula Le Guin, and I adore the adoration which Fredric Jameson seems to bestow upon a wide variety of awesome-sounding science-fictions in his monster of a gem "Utopia: Archaeologies of the future and other science fictions", because from the sounds of it, we can appreciate humanity from the golden perspective of its follies and inconsistencies, its changing radical nature, and its ubiquitous diversity of morals, reasoning, in ever-changing flux.... all in the name of hyphenated half-words: sci-fi.

"There is a wall and on each side of this particular wall are two lots of people with communication difficulties on account of their differing syntax."

Padang

2009-12-29T01:18:00.000-08:00

People live side by side they sleep side by side they share bread and motorcycles and nasi. There is no space which exists by itself without others there to claim a part. You enter this city, you crave the people of this city, it absorbs you, it claims you. yOU don't own yourself, you don't own your skin, which becomes a thing, an attraction, a point of the conversation - kulit putih! cantik sekali! saya mau sy mau sy mau... - and like that we are spent we are not tourists but the spaces to be toured. Eye for an eye. Sharing breath and sweat and smoke and dua-ribu rupiah. Back of an angkot our hearts become one with the pulse of a loud and dirty tune or an Indonesian favourite. The heat cannot be deciphered as that arising from humidity or bodily warmth. People are the centre of gravity. The masses of them tell the story to be so. Our downfall. Our POTENTIAL. Our wishes to reach the highest point exists through people.
This is the crux.

2009-12-29T01:03:00.000-08:00

The more taxed, the more used up, the more depleted, the more sapped of energy I am,
for sure,
for living here,
~ but ~
the more I live,
the stronger I become,
the more I shall thrive, and
laugh at the end,
biting lip and
crazy like that with a
hardened shell of an eye
still soft on the inside.
Because
the more stressed, the more frustrated, more hindered, the greater the cage, the
greater the
b r e a k
from
this.
Suck all you want. :-)
(I'll just do something else.)

we and i, me and my. (quips on the symbology of fever)

2009-12-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

Fever. Feverish. Sweating profusely. Feeling a hotness of the skin yet it remains white with denial, or maybe green in counteraction, as the fever takes over. A possession takes place. Makes us appear livid as the fight within begins. A struggle for identity - are we human or are we virus? Delirium ensues and the feverish can never be sure . . .
Any thoughts?

methinks tis time to recycle Adrian and... do away with him completely.

2009-12-11T02:48:00.000-08:00

So instead I should like to introduce to you Paddy. She's a she, this time, now that sociology has got me hooked on blaming other people for the way some things in life just don't seem right or fair (wawawaaa, bitching about my race or sex or poo. again.) Anyway, her name is Paddy Malon, emphasis on the 'lon'. She's a little like a plant, roots uprooted to feel the breeze just before they begin to dry out, she is reckless, flitting about and tottering on erstwhile feet and a near-broken heart, mouth almost wrecked like it has been smashed in the past by a demolition ball. She abandons old self to enter a new one in a new strange land filled with other-mother milk, reverse-parents, money (not hers), stares, and a whole heap of people lapsing into incomprehension even though they speak the same sets of words.
There exists a little something called religion... and yet even within the one person will be an array of inconsistent remarks and changing breathing dynamic ideas in a state of constant revision yet who would ask for anything else??? least of all Paddy MaLON. Is it true that every body in this P-town is longing for what we in the West would call a white-picket fence and a dog that won't shut up...? (And a pet dog too?) Well sex on the sly doesn't sell, unless you want to feel like an artist, whereupon names are forgotten. Ah, give me a shit-whistle. Stay tuned to discover more tunes from Paddy Cake and what she ended up jamming like after this. . .
So together we will venture into a new era of creative processing, before I end up in a dark room, voluntarily, listening to Daniel Johns, Julian Lennon, and Enya, spewing words into a little black notebook Arabic-style, right-to-left. again.
Great!
After all, Indonesian Mama calls me keras kepala and I think she's onto the truth, as all mothers tend to be.
Peace out! - He:Di

"abstinence is purity..."

2009-11-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

I run from mother. My skin in the saturating rain is ever-more translucent. It loses its substance, and is no longer a thick, opaque white but now a faint, purple and blue revealing the blood vessels beneath like the skin and flesh of a snail. It is saturated, like paper, turning clear in the light and the rain, blending with the elements. Wind shakes the trees, making the gums slant like slashes on a manuscript, like people whose bodies are diminishing, above the sanded banks breaking and slipping. My reality is disintegrating. There is something else more real out there than me, and it is in the form of the huge sound of wind and storm.

Less is more. Abstinence is purity abstinence is purity. The memory of the personal doctrine ringing in the mind, the mind which is turning into a gradual pulp of mush and a slug-like thought. Mental constipation; the mind is clogged, or else no longer has the energy to push out thought. Nor does the rest of the body and yet I run.

She runs from mother. She runs from the hearty meals of meat dripping in oil, oil soaking the meat, its muscle-fibres, its bones, because she knows, she knows so well, you are what you eat. She knew she was addicted to the marrow, its hard-setting, blood-celled fats. The frontal lobes of the brain ached, they screamed, for nourishment, they wanted to think, they ached for it, and all they could think about was the ache for food and nothing more. It does not take alot to propel her light skeletal form. For some dilapidated reason she enjoys likening herself to a ghost... while suppressing, bitterly, that soon perhaps she will be one. Can't have it all, she spits, to herself. And she runs.

The muscles work, the blood is squeezed, pumped around the body to those places which are greying, greying from lack of oxygen, from lack of energy. It feels like a massage. The pressure of the wind squeezes her body as well, wringing her out. It feels good, this feeling of existence.

Nature crashes all around her; water is spitting from the sky. Leaves, knocked out of their branches by the splash, drop like pins to the road, on which she runs and runs.

It is so beautiful. The cool whip of air. The strength of wind. It returns her face to a substantive white, and widens her eyes to its wonder. Wind tears at the edges of her eyes and its coldness produces a thin line of lacrymal liquid. Beautiful wind. Beautiful trees. Beautiful and poisonous hunger. It is so beautiful she feels like screaming.

"Dissertation on the..." (I've forgotten)

2009-10-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

While they are having some kind of party downstairs at Casa Subang, Heidi is having quite a bit of trouble sleeping, but then, she isn't trying to, anyway. Upon deciding that learning French while trying to study Marguerite Duras - that outlandish, yet oddly familiar thinker - for the exam on Monday, she discovers that there is a kind of... 'pointlessness', to be experienced, for sure, with any regimented study such as this. It is not because it is a University study program, no not at all, certainly not... it is because the program is now tapering at the end towards a specific outcome of learning, which, if it might be added, has been learnt and learnt before to the point of tedium. So what does little Heidelbergensis do at this crucial hour, prior to the exams?
She studies astrology. Not from the sky. Nothing as interesting as that. She studies it off the internet. She learns about what it means to be born in the year of the dragon, in the month designated for virgo, that illustrious and deceptive 'virgin' (pff!), and the characteristics which arise due to being ruled by the planet Mercury, and the element 'Earth'. See, these are all self-absorbed areas of interest, and she does not like to come across often as being prone to such narcissism, but, you see, there has arisen withion the past few months a series of 'identity crises'. She has either entirely lost what she once considered to be the essence of herself, or she has been expanded outward, to merge with her environment, to the point of self-loss. In any case, that pompous and self-interested wench, got down and dirty to some much-needed soul-searching... well, if she is to be any good for this upcoming internship, she needs to take care of herself after all. And, furthermore, the identity does tend to flail when one has been grabbed recently on the brassiere by a sexed-up pre-teen in her local neighbourhood. (Not to mention two-years'-worth of postmodern theories being rammed up the arse and anywhere else they will try to fit.) So she read up on herself, as it is indicated by the stars and/or suns (she didn't read that far into it) of the solar system, and she got to thinking that all people are, all they amount to, is a series of pre-determined hormone-combinations, which have delineated all forms of life according to moon-phases, planetary rotations, and probably the weather, since the beginning of life itself!
Then she wrote this. Her 'dissertation' (on Pluto-knows-what):
I want to be an English cavalier. I want to approach the world with a 'snooty' and pompous air, thus concealing my overbearing love for the world. (!)
I want to trammel my perfect leather boots through other people's shit, and then gasp, feigning abhorrence, while I am spat on.
I want to lapse into mock outrage, decidedly indignant upon having my pride burst. I want to revel in my own superciliousness, and use the word, without looking it up in the dictionary first...
and feign shock at others' hatred for me. I want to be simultaneously loved, and hated, as I make my militant way through daily situations. I want to declare my love for people with a 'natural' British accent.
I want to show outlandish facial expressions! I want to pretend that I care! I want to be consulted on artistic and literary matters as though i am some kind of expert! I need! (Alot. Of attention.)
I care about you, and me, and the state of the biosphere!
I want to be part of a group and possess it, through being the joker, the singer, the sweet sweet entertainer.
i want to delight in perfectionism the angst that is me, and narcissism.
I want the rotations of the world, the planets around the sun, the mood of the solar system, to MOVE ME! I have decided to forego for now the plucking of the hairs on my legs, in favour of self-control, and assertiveness because I am a 'modern woman'. (And because I have other, better things to do.) I have chosen to not change, to never change, because it is senseless trying to bend always to others' wills, and to others' wants. I wish to cease all desire for learning, and in that sense, achieve more and learn, absolutely, more, for that is where confidence and leadership becomes a part of the person. To try to learn is to assume that the world is unknown, and that nothing, not any thing in this world, can be incorporated into the mind to cultivate it. Trying to learn is the inhibiting factor, the breaker of the spirit of the being who tries to learn, for how is effective takeoff possible without a platform?
And thus, Heidelus becomes inaugurated into the world, once again, as an actual being with an identity. This time, it's chosen. This time... it's personal.
(12:13 AM, November 31st, 2009.)

rain is an illusion

2009-10-29T03:27:00.000-07:00

The rain is just an illusion that we can't go out, can't escape. It rains and we feel silently positive. Hopeful that we may have a defense for our erstwhile lack of activity, lack of participation in the rest of the world.
We want rest. Sometimes. It is the foreshadow of a more positive acceptance of death.

If we are caught out in the rain, we come close to finding affinity with 'the negative', and convert it from negaitve to something entirely else. We accept our fate - getting saturated - and so, unhurriedly, continue to make our way. We silently rejoice the fact that the rain came upon us suddenly, unexpectedly, to teach us this simple message about life: that it doesn't matter whether you struggle or not, because if it is so, then it will be.

Rain can be smelt. Rain can be felt. When it comes on, we attune to our primal selves, and momentarily forget our prejudices, consumer 'needs', and otherwise ever-present daily stresses. It is for this reason that the fact of rain is like a drug. We choose to see it for what it is - a miracle.

new hot text!

2009-10-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

Hey, if you want to see something new and straight from the head, check out transignifier, a hypertext novel, fresh, virginal, just out of grade school and puckering up for the break-in into the real world of scratch and sniff wrestling. It's on me. Click here to be directed to the homepage, from where you can navigate your path through transuniversal topics. Oh, and there's PictureS.

AIESEC in Malaysia » Go Exchange!

2009-10-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

AIESEC in Malaysia » Go Exchange!

Opportunities exist and present themselves, every now and then. I believe in fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it... Being able to have the chance to go to another country with AIESEC, learn about the culture, the people, what motivates people, and the ways in which I can help communities, is incredibly valuable. If there is a higher purpose, then a greater personal connection with it, should encourage the individual to pursue that path which pokes out and presents itself as the one which is right for them. I feel the meaning rushing into life, and understand that this journey is my own. Here's to the internship - the next chapter of my experience in a fantastic world. =)

the here for the there

2009-10-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

This was composed in my little purple journal quite some months ago... the purple one sure did replace the brown one quick and in a fervour of writerly excitement (or should that be 'excrement'?), but has now relaxed, opting instead to be filled at a snail's pace, while i rejuvenate for exams. (Or as much as rejuvenation during exams is possible, which is close to nil. How about, while I 'bludge' for exams.) It is about the splitting of identities when one has two different homes, and when one finds it hard to choose between the places. Enjoy!

To cry from a distance. To pine at a song.
To dream from a hope. To ache in the body.
To shake from the cold. To quiver, down to nothing.
To spare the somniloquy. To retch at sentiment.
To expand beyond the self. To abandon bodily confines, while reaching out, and with mind-fibres, touching another place.
To weep without knowing.
To be mesmerised by pulsing stripes. To let the tiger go.
To know a question, and to hold it. To craft a response that in the end cannot be real, can it? To pass it off. To wait for later. To shock oneself.
To needlessly fight! To paint barriers as cold as winter, but without the rage, without the passion of the wind up the valley.
To set sail. To set sail with things still to do on the mainland.
To fly (and then some). To crap on about a home.
To be away from you. To leave you again.
To forget.

2009-10-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

At the moment, I am reading Eckhart Tolle's 'The Power of Now'. Like a regular (*cough) 'self-help book' (hey at least I admit it. And that I'm reading one...), this book tells you all that you already know. However, there is one simple difference: it tells you that you are reading over things you already know. Which is, in its own 'self-help' way, commendable. (I'd give it a home-made certificate for that little fact.)

So it tells us all that we know, while openly declaring it. (It is with great restraint that I don't add 'so frickin what?!') This is part of a larger scheme to replant the notion that truth actually is attainable. Words cannot lead to truth, indeed they are not-the-kinds-of-things-which-can-be-true; what words can do, is Point One To The Truth. Having lost my faith in Truth (capital 't') countless times during my almost-complete university degree - having to learn postmodern theories over and over again to the point of heartbreak - I now have a source to fall back on, to win arguments for human validity. (In the affirmative.) Truly inspiring.

'blood and qi'

2009-10-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

from the mountains to the sea, and everything in between. The individual gathers strength, no matter what, with the incorporation of the masculine with the feminine, in a perfect form of beingness.

trough of a dark enlightenment

2009-10-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

protector eyes

2009-10-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

Protector Eyes. To be worn if one is in danger of being looked at too much, should they be particularly attractive. Intended to thwart bad luck. Each bead has two small protrusions, spaced apart to resemble eyes.

This bracelet was given to me by a friend, after their return from their home country, Uzbekistan.

2009-09-09T02:18:00.000-07:00

Peptides get confused; the decay of the stomach rises in belches and just plain gas. It mingles with the breath, informing it of 'the problem'; a dialogue procuring a strong smell, a dying smell.
And meanwhile? The ingestion of yet-another artificially sweetened coke, takes place. Corrosion of the villi is imminent. Celiacs is glimpsed through the cracks of my deteriorating gut. And i will persist to harm my self... even with a pathetic hypochondriacal prophecy.

2009-09-09T02:11:00.000-07:00

///A search is underway.

How stupid to think we'd found.

Time moves in fast circles, repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating itself.

i deigned to think of an answer, and come up with a
shiner of a lie,
locked between teeth and thick as leather and with the
same taste.
Nostalgic cramp to think it could all just be a
bodily
experience.
(y e a h f u c k i n g r i g h t)
skin it feels so old after a week: mine.
And in a mentalistic void that is a self-fulfilling prophecy,
you coughed up my blood and became my illness,
a cynical fart clouding the air and
this,
is it;

How stupid to think we'd found,

HOW STUpid TO THINK we'd found.
///

Or else

2009-09-04T01:53:00.000-07:00

It seems you found me
In such an unexpected place,
In the corner of the draw.
Or the backing of a phonecall, its
Spinal cord ripped out, so that
From it
I could make sense
Of an intention
~ Clear and pure as sound ~
Whence from your croaky urgent voice you
Called me,
Called to me,
And in it there was a rose of truth:
'I'll see you tomorrow,
OK?'
Tapering
At the end
To a faint and gentle question.
(Beseechment.)

And if it wasn't for my own
Hard knuckles of consent,
I swear the flow of
Truth, would
Pass by undetected.
As though eyes had
Clammed shut and
Failed to heed the sign
That is and was the
Fatal omen:
S e v e n E l e v e n.

I've been seeing and in my fate
Recording this,
From clocks and other things
Since I hung by
Tips of fingers
Onto superstition.
Purposes mean more than
Blood and thoughts alone, and
Concrete surrounds to a
Vital core, is
Jackhammered, into
A fallen pile.
And from this
Deconstructive rubble,
Rises,
Phoenix-like,
Proud of plumage,
A
Rose.
On it is a
Simple thorn, a
Simple thorn of truth:
Cut this path I lose another.

2009-06-22T20:55:00.000-07:00

He pulls around in a wonky swerve, beating me to the corner. The window wound down, his face appears, beckons me over. He works so much his hands are melted to the steering wheel, skin splaying from fingers in a wheel-turning frenzy, all the time. Blackened tissue around his eyes from fighting the test of sleep and he's still going, covering more distance every day, more distance than the human body allows, in a part-broken taxi. The sound of the break shimmies, like it's messed up, shot to gravel, like it isn't there.

I've been thinking about religion alot. About how people use it to do what they want, its convenience in its meldability, the way you structure your interpretations. I'm an atheist. I cannot believe in God, I lack the imagination for it. I study religion, I study from an outsider's perspective, keeping it real. Keeping it within my safe and objective scientific lens. I study people from a scientific perspective.

'I believe in black magic,' he says, suddenly, turning to me and I feel a rush of black fogging the car. I see the yellow-whites of his eyes gleam golden in the momentary darkness, suddenly enlivened like coals with air blown over them to feed the fire within. Then he screws his lids, chuckles.

Susan's experience - part 1

2009-06-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Susan sank back into the plush couches and felt them swell up around her. When she fitted her chin into it, steam from the mug cupped in her hands seemed to catch on her cheeks nose and forehead. It was a pleasant and warm relief from the stiff harsh cold of the distilled air inside the lounge-room, its relentless freeze-over as callous, objectively scientific, arthritic, as - to Susan - a morgue. Stifling any chance of planning or any kind of meaningful activity. Utterly dead, sucking noise and light from the room. Even masturbation was out of the question.

With Jeffrey and Kyle out at the clubs tonight, and Mildred practically dead in the bath, senseless metal tunes grinding her into a somnambulent stupor, Susan was at a loss for either finding or developing her own erstwhile diversion to pass the time with.

Pictionary? Box eaten into cardboard tatters; no one to play with.
Television? Don't have one, flickshit. It was true. There was nothing left in the corner of the room where it used to sit, besides the short stack of bricks it used to sit on. Still, she wasn't regretting those text-books, the ones she had bought with the television money, cash-converters coming to the rip-rip-rip-off rescue.

Susan sighed quietly and nestled deeper into the couch, cold near to unbearable. It seemed to originate deep from within the floorboards, rising up steadily, and culminating in the icicling of a bogey, which now dangled from the tip of Susan's numb honker.
'What to do, what to do with this...' the rest of the sentence popping into her head like press-tuds, inauspicious: '...what to do with this cold misery?'
But then the striking of the clock clashes around the room, and Susan looks to, aghast, wondering when it was that any of them had actually bought a clock....

To be continued......

2009-06-14T03:43:00.000-07:00

Zombies, droning under lights. Their moans steady as drips of water.
Zombies, scratching marks in books, tearing quietly at pages. The symbols made by zombies are almost indecipherable; zombies scratch their temples with the tips of their pens, trying to reach some level of comprehension, unearthing scabs. They stare, eyes cloudy, splashed with pools of milk. Zombies look at the cryptic symbols they leave on their pages.
They can't see the pages for shit.

Zombies, muttering things inaudible as phantom-speech, heads hurting from the effort. Memorization is a task given them to keep them from dying, when all they want to do is sleep. Memorization is supposed to prevent dying, and yet the pain of it indicates only to zombies the degeneration that is occurring within their skulls, neural synapses dissolving, neurotransmitters leaking into stagnant cerebral fluid.

Zombies. You'd think they were being whipped to remain there. Their slow droll movements are manufactured exercises, bought from a store; routinized, not even understood, anymore.
'What happened to you?' an intruder says. A being to raise them from the dead.

The intruder enters, she spies them, a packet of zombies. Locked in a box-like room. Each zombie situated at their own zombie, child-size desk. A guttering unnatural fluorescent light. One common feed trough in the corner out of sight. Another corner, filled with miniature plastic bags, each placed neatly, compactly-as-possible, into the excrement bin.

'What happened here,' she repeats. She seizes what's left of the bicep of the nearest zombie, and pulls the muscle free till it's half-rancid meat in her palm.
He faces her with the corner of his face - the other side is still; trained upon his book. The look is momentary; he shifts back, jaw clacking in a remnant of indignation. The axle of his neck cricks as he shudders back to senselessness.

'Someone answer me! Someone answer me! What happened here? Someone answer me?' Someone answer me, she says, she says, and it is a question. Someone answer me, she repeats, flapping a book, flapping around in a circle, like she has caught a chook by the ankle, unawares.

A green and grey ponytail slipping off the back of a flat-headed zombie, bobs up and - with a more vehement effort than her de-bicepped brother - walks to the intruder and wrestles her pages back. She descends upon her desk and seat once more, absently unruffling the papers, fingers rubbing off onto the paper as she straightens it against her threadbare shirt.
'Now, come on, precious. What's wrong with you all?' says the intruder, patting ponytail until it hangs by a disintegrating single fibre of hair, and then slips to the floor.
A moan like an anguished dinosaur belittles the intruder; it puts her on her knees. She picks up the shock of hair, hair like pulling a bundle of it from the drain in the shower. She crouches.

Bald advances towards her. Bald is about to throw and release a punch, release an arm as it flies airborne and seeks out its target crouching on the floor. Time slows her, as a cry in the middle of the room stops time, in a cause-and-effect chain so momentous that the meaning of the zombies in the room either will or will not come into consciousness like a cloud descending upon people.
In the middle of the room one man forces through his zombie and lets out a shuddery cry, drops his pages to his side. His cry is so great, so hungry, it catches all attention.

He cries out again, and his head drops to his hands, still clinging to neck via certain strings. Head in hands, thin streaks of saliva escape between his fingers like steady streams of tears, melting away the scabs at his temples.

His neighbour cricks her neck around, uses the tips of her fingers to position her eyebrows to a state of anger. He begins to wail, a man forcing through, beating against the confines of his shell, a pupae cracking the ribs of its carcass-like cocoon. She grasps, wrenches her knee, and throws her kneecap into his head. It is a clean hit, sliding around the side of his temple, and away, into the air.
His cheek slides away with the kneecap, melding with it in the air, into oblivion, a fragment of a zombie.
Arteries exposed begin to haemorrhage, purple blood coating his lips, and dripping down steadily onto the floor. A moan like hunger fills the air and curdles it, but it is not stagnant, anymore. A moan like hunger moves the particles, swills the particles of the air, mixes, churns it up.

Just when his blood is running out all along the floor and he sinks into it, sinking off his chair and melting peacefully into his own liquids,
just when he ceases to move,
purple ooze runs clear and red as blood.

Murmur

2009-06-09T04:42:00.000-07:00

Talking herself through the study session, she weaves layers into the room, room otherwise desolate. The sterile white fluorescence of lights keeps the few of us hunched, as though in private bubbles. Into our books, into silence. Chicks in eggs, separated from each other by shell, incubating.
But she talks.
I know she will be here until ten o'clock. Filling the space with a constant murmur, so comforting. So nourishing, comforting, coming through the egg shells like streams of talk from a mother. Like through umbilical cords.

I do not stare at her. I do not want to scare her. I only glance. Making sure of the identity, the identity behind the murmuring.

Then I take a longer draught. I savour that gulp of sight.
Sometimes she talks, eyes staring at the page. Lashes like blinkers, training her gaze.

Sometimes she talks, her head raised. Eyes trained somewhere over the tops of pages. Memorizing, the stream of talk still a constant.

Pouring herself into study like study is cups, like cups are there to catch her in. I see the subjects in the books catching in her mind like her mind is completely and utterly open, waiting, little hooks like hands in the walls.

All we hear is the lulling lisp of the tongue on the roof of the mouth, the moan of speech like a janitor's trolley at the other end of the corridor, ghosty and comforting.

She leaves, Early. People look around, awakened by the quiet. Then their heads go down, return to study.

dirt

2009-05-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

I hold the pencil and it seems to grow in my hand as though it were made of cells, spontaneously regenerating. Alive.
It seems to grow, I seem to be able to make it grow, now, for there are so many things coming to the fore of my mind.

The words are blooming like graphite flowers on the page. Now in that empty space between sleeping and waking. free like a rock floating around in the Universe. And so I can write. I can remember.

I remember it like it was a dream.

Mother. Lying in the dirt. Wilfully mourning a bloody bundle. Wilfully mourning, rubbing the apertures of the bloody baby-sized bundle with an enriching humble dirt, so warm from the sun, so brown. Merging minerals, elements, with the not-quite daughter. Rejuvenation from the outer of the womb.

She is not repulsed. I understand that she wants to reclaim her.

My sister.

I can understand that she wants to reclaim her, for I remember wanting her too, but she was never ours to begin with. She left us before she came to us.

Mother. Approaching me. I see that she is approaching me, bringing with her a small piece of gelatinous flesh, dripped with red like a flower losing its petals. She goes quiet, her sobs and harsher, more animal cries dropping to a calm inner cry.
Her eyes stare. They are glass balls. Her eyes stare ahead. And then she brings a wobbling but perfect piece of flesh to her face. I think to myself right then that she will rub it against her face like she does with soft leaves when she walks amongst nature.
She brings the flesh to her face, testing it. on the point of her tongue. Testing it.
She tests it, earnestly, like probing with her tongue.

I quiver, externally, body vibrating. I quiver, whimper, 'you're eating my sister. Earnestly.'

She howls. A wolf will howl at night. This was the middle of the day, mother and son out on the green prickly lawn surrounded by gum trees like a fence. This was more urgent than time would ever permit, and so she howls, without the presence of the dark and the full moon.
She howls and her teeth stick out of her red and bloated face, face as emotive and decorated as a baboon's. She sees young Adrian standing there, she sees me watching her like she is a scene. 'I've imbibed her,' she says, 'but I don't feel her.' And her throat is choking on tears and foetus, choking, pipes clogging and choking, and she still gets out the words: 'you try'.

That Adrian of the past is a lot more 'normal'. Or so you could say. He hasn't had time to reflect on this incident, he hasn't had time to develop. You could say he is waiting for this experience to happen to him and change him forever.
He stands there, a bodily image of a child. He stands there, and does nothing but stand. Sometimes doing nothing means doing something more than doing something.

Her fish's eyes, they fix on me. Cold and fixed like fish's eyes. Cold and blue, and not sad, not pained. Cold and fixed, complementing the red background of her face, blue and fishy and swooping down upon me, sweeping towards me like a multitude of pens, their graphite nibs irascible, petulant, and stabbing the page as my own does, now, in haste. They say that fish are not sentient in the way that humans are, or not in the same way, not in the way that we would ever understand. And they will never understand us.

Cold and fixed and unrelenting, superglued to the bodily image of me.
My face and hair become painted with the blood of a piece of my sister, as mother's arm reaches out and daubs me desperately. Her breath is hot and smells of the iron of blood, like the smell of money, of fish. She lifts her arms to push the foetal 'cake' into my mouth and the rasp of her past-shaven underarms grates on my vision as though she were rubbing her underarms on my eyeballs. Clutching me by the hair, the shirt, my arms, she shakes wetness, tears saliva and blood, onto me.

I feel like i am the spattered drops i have on me, now. Torn apart and not whole. I have become my sister, but I do not think right then to tell her. I do not think right then to stop her.

It is emotion. It is mixed and raw emotion, as raw and infused with potential, as a barrel of yeast and sugar. This is what I wanted, right? To relive this?

To be able to write?

Act

2009-05-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

In my velvet mahogany seat, and I am surrounded left and right by other spectators. No one sits in front. No one sits in front because I am in the front, the front row, so close that I am blessed, by the light spattering of their spit.

The actors' spit. I can see the grease and sweat balling on their foreheads, bubbling to the fore from behind their beautiful and thick makeup, which they wear like second skins. Dressage for the face.

They rejoice, in their feathers and their magenta-and-lime suits, and look at us as much in the front as we look up at them.

We examine their bodies, their screw-up faces and expressions, their magnificant voices which burst forth, in auditorial blooms, and we find it disconcerting, that they can look at us, stare at us, perhaps more than we can look at them for any period of time, almost like we are the real ones on show, we are just as capable of feeling intimidated and that the construction of the stage is nothing more than that - a construct.

Staring at someone is like staring at someone with your guts. Pushing through your skin, visceral, the kind of thing that we tend to keep to ourselves, the kind of thing we tend to keep on the inside. But they stare, they stare with such confidence, and they do not feel ashamed.

Cinderella in a dream, a dream in cinderella

2009-05-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

Weaving a large arc through the air with my index finger, I disrupt the curtain.
That people behind the curtain can see this disruption, is obvious. I hear them talking about the curtain and the way it is moving, the way there must be someone behind there.

They are so slow in finding me.

I try to stand straight, try to not move the curtain, so that my existence will just be, what it is, behind the curtain, and not exposed furthermore.

I chased a butterfly behind here. I think it was in my mind.

I saw it flying, spreading its wings, not with a usually-repugnant weakness - so characteristic of fellow 'flutter-bys' - those childish, flitting phantoms - but with the strength, the muscle, of a bird. I guess it gave me hope, here behind this curtain.

And now they're giggling. A posse of people, genders indeterminate at this stage, like my own, ethereal because of their being on the other side of the curtain. Unknown.
Genders indeterminate, giggling, threatening, wanting to pull me from behind the curtain, pull me, a person, a person who only wants to chase butterflies and not grow up and not have to go hunting for a prince. (Or princess... but in their society, they haven't come across that situation before.)

Just when I am beginning to feel accustomed to the dark of the space enshrouded by this curtain, the curtain parts, lets in light, and I see that it is actually a harsh red of woven red thread, splitting the comforting black. A reptilian, feathered hand slithers in - red in a reflection of the curtain - and an image as sharp as murder comes to mind as it snatches. Snatches for a person, a person behind the curtain, snatching for me. Nails affix to my shirt, and nails clutch at the folds of my belly, scratching for something human, scratching for what I know I can't give, clasping around me, my flesh, my hair.

Suddenly I am in the light. It is like being evacuated prematurely from the womb. I look up at my tormentors, my friends, my people wanting to find me a mate. So that I do not have to be alone. So that I do not have to remain uncontrolled. They are looking for a prince for me, to 'help' me out from behind my curtain.
They are each masked, with feathers, glue, and a white-speckling paint. Masquerade. Concealing their identities, conveniently. They cannot be real, or real in themselves, because they strive to find complementarity in people, others, like fleshy mirrors. They are not naked, as I am, having been drawn from Curtain, prematurely.They do not react to this obscure nakedness, they just measure it with their judgment, their rulers, their perceptive and observant eyes. They actually hold measuring tape around me and do the equations, calculating the likelihood of my beauty.

Conclusion: this will not do. I am not good enough.
I have to go back behind the curtain, I should, but they need me to fill this space, they need the marriages to ensue, so that everyone can live 'happily ever after'. Only I know.

That deep down they're jealous of my nakedness.

I am dabbed, viciously, with a surplus of glue. Handfuls of feathers find their way to my eyebrows, my neck, chest, legs, and reptilian, feathered hands, go into a frenzy, like chickens pecking for the last morsel of grain.

'You'll look passable', they say, they chant. (They have ways of chanting in unison; the meaning of this chorus I am not privy to.) They laugh, they giggle, speaking at me, teeth flashing red and white like poisonous insects, hovering all around me.

The masquerade ball, does not exist for me as it does for every other person there. In a dream-like illogicality I close my eyes, and nothing exists, any longer. Nothing exists but butterflies behind my eyelids, flashing like the after-images of lights. I squeeze my eyes so tight, I can feel and hear and see the purple blood pushing through the vessels of my eyelids. I hold my eyes so tight I think I will stop seeing.

But it is another curtain.

Clock. Strikes 'twelve'. Home is barren. A once-peopled landscape rots in destitution, and rots with a peacefulness I know will not last. They will return, and there will be more masquerade balls. I haven't found my prince. And, as they say, I haven't found my validity in this world, validity in the reflection of another's eyes. According to them: I have not discovered that I am human.

2009-05-18T00:57:00.000-07:00

Ezra Pound.
I like the name.
I don't know why.
It could be a girl, and a boy, both poured into the one person. A mixed-gender pancake. A fictional character who hasn't yet been shoved into an identity or a plot; the seams of his/her confines remain unstitched.
My Ezra Pound.
A pseudonym for an anonymous writer, who writes from the perspective of both a man and a woman, equally well, a social degenerate, and a skilled superior, a primally organic being, as well as a prude, and a vegetable.

My name, is Ezra Pound.
I don't know if it is a good thing or an interesting thing.

I am not here to confess anything at all. I just have a disorder. That's it. An identity disorder. I am different things to different people. Depending on their needs. Needs which come crawling out of their heads, and are shadowy behind the irises of their eyes, transportable through their pupils. I don't think I am the only one who can see them.

Wants come to all people like inevitable dreams, touching you softly in the night like clouds' fingers on the heads of mountains. They haunt you when you wake, they make you thirsty for their fulfilment. They make you thirsty for water, too, should you resort to panting in anticipation of the fulfilment of your dreams.

If you're silent, people talk. The space lets them open their mouths, gives them room to enter into the air around them their needs, their wants. No one who is alone will sit there and stare, relaxed, doing nothing. They feel uncomfortable, because they see in full bloom their wants, spiralling open to meet and fill the vacant spaces like flowers facing the growing sun. They play with papers, read, write, talk, concentrate on their food, fiddle with their watch, and examine the clogged pores in their forearms.

The boy. Ezra Pound asked the boy, Josiah, to write his own piece.
On the manuscript, methodically, he wrote the notes out c, d, e, f, g, g, g, f, e, d, c, c, c. He is correct in where he puts the notes on the staff, making a small mound out of crotchets.
We talk about the other students, flirting with life. I make the lessons into so much more than centred around black and white keys, naturals and sharps; I like to teach people about the spaces between the tones.
'Promise you won't tell,' Josiah says, 'but me and Emily are in love.'
A child, confessing to an adult. Magic.

I like to suck on other people's dreams.
'That's fantastic,' I say, my eyes blooming wide like flowers to the sun.

bus

2009-05-16T06:15:00.001-07:00

He sits before me. Head twisted, directed left. His clothing is the colour, the texture, of old paper, greyed in the creases and cracks, fibrous to the touch. Large earlobes, he has, they say that earlobes keep growing when the substance behind them has ceased to grow, when the growth of the bones has slowed to a halt. When a person must continue to live with what they have, skin starting to deviate, sagging outward, for want of something else.
His head is twisted to what is behind the glass of the window, and the afternoon sun pierces his translucent iris, revealing an outer layer of light blue, surrounding the warm brown inner layer, like a strongly-brewed straight tea.

I swear I've seen him before.
Slicing fruit, depositing portions into short plastic bags, his stall vying for attention next to the mamak places which are bunched up around the corner. I've seen him before, he slices, he dices, he stares ahead, but he doesn't see the people, he sees his thoughts, his boredom, and the milky haze of the sky which slows all work in the afternoon and inspires nostalgia.

His papery clothes shake like sheets around his thin frame as he steps off the bus, into the dusk.

Bob D

2009-01-09T00:04:00.000-08:00

2009-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

thehoodismine/thehoodisme

2009-01-08T23:58:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

b&w Icarus

2009-01-08T23:55:00.000-08:00

Earthed

2009-01-08T23:53:00.000-08:00

unfilled Earth Man, Treewoman

2009-01-08T23:51:00.000-08:00

Earth Man, Treewoman

2009-01-08T23:50:00.000-08:00

spidey studies

2009-01-08T23:46:00.000-08:00

Fuck!Land!

2009-01-08T23:42:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

alien dude unfilled

2009-01-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

alien dude

2009-01-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

chicken, icarus, love and nurture

2009-01-08T23:33:00.000-08:00

In the womb of us with tentacles of blood

the small green beast

2009-01-08T23:29:00.000-08:00

closeup my fave figure

2009-01-08T23:22:00.000-08:00

my favourite unnamed

2009-01-08T23:19:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T23:16:00.000-08:00

ghost Icarus

2009-01-08T23:15:00.000-08:00

right panel, Icarus triptych

2009-01-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

mid panel, Icarus triptych

2009-01-08T23:09:00.000-08:00

left panel, Icarus triptych

2009-01-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

the complete ultimate Icarus!

2009-01-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows the tragic cathartic story - Feathers clogged with water, wax dripping in pellets and melding with the sea, and Icarus becomes that which he most desires to flee...

roast chicken picture

2009-01-08T03:41:00.000-08:00

One day he shall fly at random strangers like a sack of airborne teeth.

2009-01-08T03:38:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T03:36:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T03:32:00.000-08:00

portrait of Matt

2009-01-08T03:02:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T02:48:00.000-08:00

station of work, with surrounding inspirational materials

2009-01-08T02:30:00.000-08:00

the shrivel of the tongue, insistent puckering of the tastebuds, and running streams of water-saliva, the drops of acid giving pleasure to the tongue. its like pleasurable madness. There are some after-bile shocks, where convulsions confuse the body and put it in that state, the space between pleasure and pain. you take it, again and again, its like being ravaged, it's like dying, its like being born, but you do it, and you don't know why you do. Validity, self-confirmation. that we do exist. that we can feel.