when its upside down, boy

short and sweet, keep it down in the front. danish is a funny language. there is only one danish director i can name off the top of my head, and he didn't direct the movie i'm thinking about. von trier. like von trapp, without the singing. he has a set of rules that he disobeys. they concern filmmaking. you have to take real life and represent it in 2D with only the colours and the sounds in front of you. you are not allowed to hum the song that is on loop in your mind when you see milkshakes sitting on the table, or a hazchem toxic waste sign above the door. the combination of the words 'wicked' and 'game' are to mean nothing other than what they say in the dictionary.

but the film i am thinking about has a man in it with a massive handlebar moustache and a caricature of an auteur that looks a lot like a guy in my class. same glasses. same hat, even. maybe he has danish in his blood. i wonder if nikolaj lie kaas is 100 percent danish.

i think it would be awesome to have viking in the blood. a history of violence. no shame. i don't quite know where my history is from. i mean, i think there is a shrine in china that has my surname on it and 23 generations entombed within it, but i don't know what they did, who they were. perhaps it is a peculiar problem of the newly middle-classed. people of peasant stock. i am curious about what that phrase means today, and what it says about me. is that where i get my bizarre inferiority complex from? or was it watching too much captain planet and power rangers when i was a kid, and feeling all that responsibility from the age of four-and-a-half. it's hard to know how to fix things when you are told that it is all up to you, but they don't give you any power. They. hm. and then they give us things like noah-son-of-sylar and tell us that bad guys really do exist, but they can't tell us who is who because that would be, like, cheating.

i'm not a fan of red cordial. i have a red dress (just one), and i like red grapes. but i have never understood the fascination. we create entire idioms centred on untruths. do you think that the assumptions that underlie our conversations warp our views of the world? if we all thought things truly then... but i suppose if three years of an arts degree has taught me anything, its that truth died in the seventies, and every attempt to save the planet since then has been like shuffling the proverbial deckchairs.

achilles was a warrior
he ached and strove for light
inspired by the sirens
that watched over him in the night
although the sands fought side by side
and darkness spread throughout
i wonder if we will ever land...

you know they found ufos yesterday. a few days after releasing that message to the stars containing dubya as the personification of evil. if ba'al had come looking for an ally, that would have been a pretty good plan on our side. the enemy would have fallen apart, no matter what kind of tech they had. wow. those scientists really thought that through.

remember, europa is not ours.

is here, inside your mind

there is a book i read once. it was by a man who, my lecturers told me, used to work as an advertising agent. i don't know what part of that is true. they certainly never told me of the time he spent in a hotel room in the middle of KL. the book, it spoke of places and times that the author can't have known without going there. the smells of the place. the ancient waiters at the coliseum, the racial super-awareness that always lies just beneath the surface. the sloe eyes. i wonder if i have sloe eyes. i wonder what sloe eyes mean.

there's a show i watch. it's called life. it has a lame tagline and some lame lines of dialogue. but when a suspect and a detective in channel ten's day of Brits pretending to be not, end up bantering quite seriously about boxing a cumquat, well, it can't all be bad. it's about prisons, and cells, and lies and the stories we tell our kids to get them to eat their greens, go to school and lie down at night. fathers and sons. husbands and ex-wives. things that we missed out on through no fault of our own. the bizarre-ness of a personal pineapple. and zen. lots of zen. i think the real world is starting to make charlie lose his zen. can a thing like that truly be lost? or does it become part of the whole. maybe it is the whole. hm.

we like to make our heroes human. so that they can have their foibles, their flaws. they have to make mistakes, otherwise we have no one but ourselves to blame for the way the world is today. maybe thats why my friends don't like the middleman. he is too perfect, too self-sacrificing. sometimes he seems as real as the person beside us on the train, with his perfect hair and eisenhower jacket. but we hope and pray that he goes into his room at night and thinks of a broken past. that maybe he was kicked out of the marines, maybe he betrayed the last woman he loved. maybe there's something going on with that she-demon running the fashion halfway house for succubi (was she the one in dodgeball? with the eyebrow?)

it was pretty cold today. i was shivering on that stupid station platform. i think they designed it purposefully to tunnel wind. i could have gone for more clothes. just yesterday i was sitting in class, trying to reach out with my super-jedi powers (it was post-modern anthropology, which i agree with, but nevermind) because of the boredom, and everyone was in singlets and shorts, and my eyes were closing of their own will. and then today. brr.

fathers and sons. legacy. i think of what i will leave behind if a freak storm of 297 lightning strikes causes a brick wall to collapse on my car. and me, with my hair caught in the door and the keys sitting on the front seat. i was trying to avoid this guy. maybe i like him. maybe he's taken. maybe he's not interested. too risky. but the wall falls and i die. you can't even recognise the car. my head and my hands have been sliced clean off. what will i leave behind? a shelf full of books about teenaged heroes in mythic lands falling in love, and having their hearts broken. sometimes i feel like my heart has felt more of those slings and arrows than it possibly could have. an overfull hard drive of bbc dramas and geeky wait-for-it sitcoms. a dvd collection that is extremely non-representative. except for farscape. and press gang. some people who knew me a little. no people who knew me a lot. it would be interesting to see them all meet each other. a bbq. like the one i cbf going to tomorrow night. ed will be sad, ha.

and if they send me to bellerive
all packed up like a camel to the sands
amongst the dewsong and the tentacles
and the ticking
and his hands
perhaps i will not utter
as you have been wont to do
a word about regretting
all the things i felt i ought to do
the organ drones
i hum
in harmony
looking down to the descent
all the blocks that rearrange
like they know what i really meant.