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.