after all these years, i have ended up where i am meant to be, in a unit i love, run by a great manager, a woman i really respect and admire, she's amazing. the ironic thing is our service is changing in march, it's being taken over. we are doomed. it's our last days, our dying days. 
i can't quite work out if i am unlucky or lucky. i arrive here six months ago  against my will, find it a great workplace and now in a few weeks it will be taken away. i'm unlucky. right?
but then maybe i am lucky to have found that place, even for a brief time it was amazing. my manager is amazing, and the clients are great. 
anyway. thinking about this paradox has sent me quite mad, lost my mind, my concentration is fucked, i'm so overwhelmed with paperwork, with reports i am failing in the total process of 'paperwork,' it's far to much in quantity, far to repetitive, and far to absurd.
however this lack of focus has given me a chance to do something i love doing, connect with one client and change their life.
so i am working with a guy in a wheelchair, and at first he wouldn't let me near him but he's got to know me now, and now we are friends. now there's a story of us, now i make changes, taking him from his old workshop into a new one. replacing his coke with beer, taking him out into the community for new experiences and adventures, pubs, bands and restaurants, he's doing normal things, making choices and smiling. 
    

people are so desperate to believe in something they believe anything.
'i love you,' he whispers in her ear lobe over the cocktails she has bought. she's already lent him two grand, what's a few drinks. i love you, is what she wants to hear, so like a key unlocking a door the petals in her bitter heart unfold and a secret timeline is revealed. it's the one where he takes her and her child, commits to them exclusively and saves her from the sadness she feels. the sadness because she is not beautiful, nor smart, nor flush with cash, after all she has been struggling with social services for years, lives with her parents, but she wants his love so bad she has already given him everything she has, even her flesh on that first night they met.
when he will not return her calls she starts that inevitable slide, further self loathing, further hurt, further sadness. her father yells at her, 'how could you give your savings to a stranger?'
her daughter looks at her wondering why they are unable to afford the cinema.
'why,' she cries, 'why?'

when i see her she is hostile, angry at me, the innocent, projecting and acting like a child. i buy her coffee as her anger slips from her tongue, her face contorted and eyes seeping rage. it deflects from me, and i watch her back cloud swallow her up. 
'i'll see you tomorrow,' she says and then when tomorrow comes she has gone. 

why? the answer is so obvious. i see it, we see it. why can't she?

HUANTED BY POE

one of my fave albums, from another life. enjoy.

i must stop announcing things in advance, it's like a curse. 
i've noticed this when i proclaim on here, i'm going to read certain books, something always stops me. take a few posts ago when i said i would be reading herbert shelby, that has not happened, although i did read one short story. then i began something else, so i have to finish that. 
however i know shelby will hold some effect upon me. 

so yesterday evening was so perfect i took myself outside and returned into the water after a long time. 
the effect was instant. 
it was glorious, however neptune is angry with me. yeah really, i know these things. he says i must be disciplined and give him a commitment before he gives me his daughters.  he says, i must surf when ever possible. i must re devote myself to his energy, he was really fucking angry with me and made it known when i shut my eyes  and spoke with him. i understand that stuff, he's right, i was wrong.   

i was watching a clip of steely dan playing to a tiny audience, answering questions and telling stories. i was cast back to a radio show on capital radio where a guy played rock songs late at night, and i first heard steely dan. the show was called 'your mother wouldn't like it.'
anyway it was not until i heard 'haitian divorce' that i really liked their vibe, only because lyrically they were good story tellers. 'kid charlemagne' was a good one to.
i never understood what the hell 'divorce' was all about, but it had a great feel, part science fiction, part william burroughs and part sub tropical lust story. 
there's that weird processed guitar, check the fade out, the reggae groove and donald fagans amazing voice. 
later i found out it was about a period in time americans would travel down to haiti to get a divorce and remarry their girlfriends all in a weekend. 
apparently the haiti govt. made a killing arranging these divorce tourists holidays and apparently only one person had to turn up. all perfectly legal. so he's telling a story about a woman (babs)who travels down to split from her old man 'clean willy', gets divorced, picks up a guy (some charlie)  in a bar, and on return to the usa finds she is pregnant and gives birth.
it's a weird song man, but it's great, it's great because the lyrics  match the music. that's what makes a song great for me. 

strange days have found us indeed, as we move from station to station, doctor to doctor, it takes me a while to find the one i want, i never use them unless i need a sick certificate and that's very rare. 
but the last few months i have been plagued by ill health, and my main man in the erina medical centre is not doing it for me. he's not really in tune with me at all. in fact he's outta whack with me utterly and completely. i gave him a few years and then recently move to the guy i take my clients to see, there's two of them and they are both very good. they both laugh a lot and keep things humorous between us, i can talk to them about anything, art, travelling to weird places, books and my work, they get what i do but they are old school doctors and come at everything with humour. anyway they fix me up with some x rays and ultra scans eventually discovering i have two torn ligaments but they do not address an underlaying issue i have. intuition has told me there's something else wrong, it's deeper, at the veins. i'm committed to my doctors but i know they just are not understanding me. 
that same week i notice a strange brown blemish upon my arm. being bombarded by awful cancer advertisements i freak and go to the sun doctors where i meet a very nice fijian / indian man who takes a biopsy. we make small talk and then he asks me about my legs.
he inspects them and tells me immediately what's going on and the implications, suggests i get a second opinion. i ask him if he knows a good doctor. he suggests a guy.
i'm in the surgery  it's filled with ice addicts and some derelicts from the local area. ice is big here on the central coast, it's nasty and i generally avoid it and it's users but here in the waiting room it's pouring out onto the floor. that energy is just not cool despite it's name. 
i'm in there for a long time, waiting, waiting waiting. i go through and meet a nurse whom asks me some weird questions, she's really nice, talkative. she's the frontline, a cool easy way, bright and someone i respect immediately.
she sends me through to see the doctor who informs me there's a councillor upstairs, a social worker and some other practitioner whom i can't recall. 
i smile to myself for some reason.
then the dr listens to me, i am just relaying the information the sun doctor gave me about my veins, i don't know what it all means and the doctor immediately conducts his own inspection and within seconds is making these referrals for tests.
the very next day i'm getting jabbed for blood, x rays shot full off iodine and shot through the doughnut machine. 
breathe the nurses say, breathe out. i take it all seriously, i'm outta my depth, how did i get in a doughnut machine, again!
however i'm kinda liking the idea of laying down and having a snooze. 
my eyes close. my body relaxes momentarily  as the nurses race into the room, pull the needles out from me and unbind my toes. (put there to keep my feet together for the scan)
'it's broken, the machine just broke.'
i open my eyes thinking off homer simpson and dougnuts and see the two girls fussing around. they say they have to do the whole test again.
i'm kinda chilled out, even as they jab me again and fill my body with iodine. the scan operates successfully this time. 
later they say i was a really good patient and i surmise they must get a lot of people freaking out but to be perfectly honest i'm very comfortable with doughnut machine. every few years i go for a ride in one.
it was a strange day, almost like going to the circus, except the rides are all designed by aliens who are probing for something that makes us humans human, only with me the doughnut machine met another alien and froze.   

i remember many years ago when i was travelling in new york, not the new york you know, this one was pre rudy giuliani, a different scene, one with a sharper edge, a harder kick. i was in queens and tuned in to lou reed talking about his fave writer, i think he was taking to william burroughs. anyway's he said 'last exit brooklyn' which i sought out when i had money again. 
i read it and was stunned, not just by the sheer brutal realism of the novel but the writing was immaculate. herbert selby jr had it, that quality of being a great writer.

what are they? for me they are energy. the words, the story have to have an energy, i guess that means it's got to speak to you, engage in your synapsis, heart and sexual organs. it has to turn you on, even if it's brutal and ugly. somewhere it has to capture your attention in some part of your body, guts, brain, cock. very few books capture them all.
i think i can tell when a writer puts everything they have into their book, i can tell by the story, the way it's told and how it effects the reader. everyone has a different experience of a book. my time with henri charriere aka papillon would be vastly different than yours. so we have to have some personal connection with what we read.  

selby was poor and struggled most of his life, only in later life did a new generation tune in to his work, films were made and his writing hit the wave of the new underground culture, still imbued with fringe credibility, now it was obscure post punk bands, filmmakers other writers and lou reed who seemed to acknowledge his work as influential.
i read that book in a couple of days, mind you that's all i did. page after page, it held me captive.
those characters  that life. nihilistic, the annihilation of it's savage trajectories as characters train wreckage lives were further crushed by savage humanity. 
when many years later i saw 'requiem' while being involved with a girl who was a character from the book, but was edited out for being to ridiculous. 
it was strange seeing all that addiction, processing my situation and relationship.  
so i'm about to re read some herbert selby jr. 
obviously some of that energy will find it way in these pages, be warned.

this planet is beautifully elegant, it absorbs the dead and sustains life, that's pretty freaking cool in my book. some cool humans know this, they see themselves as cultivators of this in the most practical of ways they quietly go about their business, gardening, landscaping, celebrating and respecting the idea. it's a great idea, only just a small part of it. the greater idea is to take the cosmic view  earth is just one element of a vast network of elements, within something we could never hope to comprehend. the real religion and spirituality is in the imagination, this is why imagination is so powerful and why some dark force of humanity wants to 'suppress' it.
the dark force is ideological. it's both religion and politics, which is to say most people attached to those constructs cannot see an idea as pure. they deconstruct it and project upon it, their opinion, critique of judgement. (yes, i am aware of the irony) 
the idea is just sold as a bad idea, and we are so conditioned by education we can't tell the difference. 
peace and love are good ideas. relaxing is a good idea. smoking weed is an excellent idea and sex is up there to. 
bad ideas, ideological ones. 

anyway's more news from mission control. 

the weather is back, well it's nowhere near as hot and strange as the last month. 
my garden is happy, the birds are out and i, thankfully feel fine.
energy levels are back, brain functioning reasonably well for an old model robot. i'm very old now as i have jumped through some sort of time displacement vortex. i must have done it when i was not smoking weed, never again. 
yeah this thing has sent me into my future self, an different one. a new mission. 
sometimes that happens, they wrote a book that describes it well, the time travellers wife, which is much better than the film. 
anyways, it's similar to dr. who now. i think that's what happens when you slide into your future self, you are wiser and more experienced with the whole condition.
so here i am in future mission, where i am paid a lot of money to generate ideas. it's the life i always wanted. complete freedom. financial freedom. 
that's the future life i was aiming for. 
what would i do?
that's a great question although obvious.
i would travel through space, time and mind much like i do now.