~ the regalia of queasiness

Sometimes it feels as if this public journal of mine - these Sails of Oblivion, these Pavilions of Lethargy, these Blue Birds of Delirium - are indeed that: the blusterings of a clueless old misanthrope at odds, utterly, with the world and determined, when he has the energy, to rail against anything that pops into his wormy green brain.

Does it feel like that to you? Sometimes ...? And exactly how serious am I when I voice such things?

To be honest, I’m not sure. Certainly, I’m not always so drained and disappointed as I might seem of late, and yet ....

The Oriflamme of Tension ... The Obelisk of Weariness ... The Cinders of Accomplishment ...

On paper, things are looking better - particularly with Jenny’s return to the household. For me, single parenting is a thorny, complex, well-nigh impossible task, and that vision of Jenny on the porch, sparkling, freshly toweled, was like the answer to a prayer. Blue beads of health gleaming in her flesh. Sclera white as the dove of peace. Sudden streaks of blonde, bleached into child-soft hair. She was, at last, an unclouded girl. My uncontaminated woman. With her bags. On the steps.

Better. On paper. But until the passing of the big black cloud, much is relative. In the half-light, my spirit is wrestling a depraved axolotl of tremendous size, while treading water at the bottom of a flooded silo in which the concrete walls are slickened by a mat of phlegm-green algae. Better is when I briefly achieve a foothold. Better is when I steal a decent lungful of air.

The Gonfalon of Apathy ... The Ramparts of Debauchery ... The Regalia of Queasiness ...

But things will change. As they always do. And I think I have some decent karma saved in the soul bank for just this eventuality. I hope though, that during the interim, I’m not boring or depressing you with my tales of gloom and bad fortune. Especially at Yuletide, when most of you will already be battling depression, anxiety, frustration, anger and regret.

Christmas is a time when quality media input is indispensable. I must have my input; it’s as sustaining for me as food and drink.

Yet Jenny says I’m shutting out the world, that I lack the courage to be quiet and listen to the murmurings of my brain. That I’m losing my interest in people other than myself.

She’s right, but only to a point. When I put my head to the pillow and close my eyes, my mind immediately turns to the potential for imprisonment and homelessness. That’s why I need my ipod.

Even today - after Di’s characteristically elegant, inevitably toothsome Christmas feast - I slipped upstairs to have a nap accompanied by my nano and by This Week In Virology. The other night, realising that my pod was low on charge, I meditated upon the possibility of drifting to sleep without Starship Sofa or Pseudopod. Or, god forbid, X Minus One.

Before long I was out of bed, feeding electrons to my constant companion, to my dear and trusted friend.

The Waters of Lethe ... The Undercurrents of Despair ...

If you can, forgive the monotony of my emotional state. And allow me to thank you for accompanying me through such a long, peculiar and eventful year. Consider yourselves in receipt of a warm and loving Christmas embrace and a flurry of New Year kisses.

The Turrets of Crapulence ... The Bulkheads of Chaos ... The Bunting of Madness ...

The Sails of Oblivion ...

~ what football can do for a man

My father, Vilis Sejavka, arrived in Australia around 1952. He was a refugee from the Second World War, a displaced person who had spent at least six post-war years in internment camps around Germany.

Latvia, his home country, had fallen under Soviet rule. To return there meant probable incarceration in the Gulags. As he had been a (19yo) conscript for the Latvian division of the Waffen SS, this would more than likely have lead to his death.

His kidneys had been ruined after a night spent playing dead in the snow as a Red Army column passed close by. His German lieutenant, with whom he had deserted, lay beside him but his was no act; the pair had been fired upon earlier by the Russians. It was standard practice for the Communists to bayonet the dead, so Vilis did not so much as twitch. Imagine that. He claimed to have never been quite the same.

As truckload load after truckload of refugees departed Germany, bound for new lands in which to settle, Vilis watched and waited, praying that eventually his turn would come - which, ultimately, it did.

It is not difficult to understand the gratitude he felt towards Australia - though, as a willful, contrary child, I did my best. Once here, he worked in logging camps in order to fulfill his contract with the Government. While doing so, he contracted rheumatic fever and then tuberculosis. Down the track, it was the rheumatic fever that doomed him.

In a TB sanatorium, close to death, he fell in love with a nurse, my mother, and so on and so forth. But that’s not the story for today.

What I want to communicate is his unconditional love for Australia and all things Australian. He threw his heart and soul into this country. He had little contact with the local Latvian community - to my later chagrin - largely because of the Soviet spies who were thought to have infiltrated. He was fervently anti-communist, almost to the point of paranoia - Australia, his country, and the new family it had given him were all that he trusted now.

While I was being called a wog at school, he was calling himself a New Australian with absolute, unadulterated pride. He whole-heartedly embraced our traditions and culture. He acquired English at speed. Though he retained his accent, and was partial to borscht, pickled herring and sauerkraut - these things were all that remained of the Latvian Vilis.

My father grew up with the slow, exasperating species of football we call soccer, but once he hit these shores Australian Rules became his code. He was a New Australian and soccer was for ingrates. Because he lived with my mother in one of those little worker’s cottages on Acland St. up from Greasy Joe’s, St Kilda became his team. Not long after I was born, I was attending matches in my swaddling, first at Junction Oval, then, in actual clothes, at Moorabbin.

My father and I had precious little in common. He was an engineer and I was an artiste, but on football we saw eye to eye. It may seem sad, but it was our strongest link as father and son. The one certain thing we shared. For me the night of St Kilda’s 1966 Grand Final triumph is a volcanically joyous memory, perhaps the sweetest of my boyhood.

Now Vilis is long gone, but our team is not. Whenever I set foot in the stadium, whenever I bellow the team song, whenever St Kilda manages to win a game, the my father's ghost is there. That’s why I sometimes cry at matches, in case you were wondering.

We start another finals campaign this week, and already I feel him stirring. We’ve had a few chances over the years, but, since his death, no premierships. Still just the one ... Just the one ... This year Geelong stands in our way, but there is always hope.

From my father, with his harrowing, unforgiving life, ... from his thankless son ... for Robert Harvey and his twenty-one seasons of scintillating brilliance and old school tenacity … let me just say ... Carn The MIGHTY SAINTS!

~ a stranger from hell

A curious thing happened this morning.

Yesterday, Jenny passed me a phone message. Someone had rung asking if he could personally collect one of the books I have listed for sale on ebay – Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. Problem was the auction had four days left to run and I had not set a Buy It Now price. I didn’t ring back as the cost of a mobile phone call might easily eliminate my profit margin. [Pathetic, isn’t it?].

This morning he turned up on my doorstep - an average looking suburban bloke. [I was expecting an elderly Jew]

I explained the misunderstanding. He shrugged. It was no big deal; he lived just around the corner. I apologised that I couldn’t withdraw the listing as there was already a bid – additionally, it would violate Lampsucker’s^ stringent business regulations. Besides, Frankl’s book is one of those precious, obscure items that have the potential to skyrocket.

I was a teenager when I read that book, but I do remember being reasonably inspired by Frankl’s existentialist theory of logotherapy.

At the time, existentialism was one of my more acceptable arenas of interest [in contrast to William Burroughs, Lou Reed, Jack Kerouac, David Bowie, Tangerine Dream and Gary Glitter]. My parents were leery of it, but Frankl was Jewish, an Auschwitz survivor and his philosophy was not so dreadfully out of phase with their Christian middle class values. I recall this because it was one of the very rare occasions on which the tastes of the Sejavka family were in some kind of agreement.

So they took me to watch Frankl’s lecture at Monash University. Though I cannot now recall what it was all about, I was impressed by the man and his philosophy – and there wasn’t too much boring predictable stuff about Omnipotent Wizards in The Sky and the cultists who worship them.

I mentioned this lecture to the stranger on my doorstep, adding that Frankl’s book was the real McCoy, not some spiritualistic hogwash dredged up by greedy crystal-worshipping mountebanks.

Then I saw tears welling in his eyes.

He began to speak. The intensity with which he uttered the words ‘my hell’ motivated me to offer him a seat. I put the kettle on and made him a cup of tea, which he gratefully accepted.

I won’t go too deep into the abyss of this man’s life, but I found something quite meaningful in a particular aspect of his despair.

Repeatedly, he referred to it as The Duality.

Aside from his obvious distress, he seemed a perfectly ordinary bloke. He had married a beautiful woman with two boys from a previous marriage. He provided for them, working full time, housing, feeding and caring for them, and basically living the stock standard middle-Australian existence asked of him by society. But within, he felt he was living a lie.

He wanted 'to walk together' with his wife - to live as equals. Instead, she insisted he assume the classic role of head of the house with all that it entailed - and that she take the traditional role of wife.

Rather primitive in this day and age, you might say? But those forests of McMansions on the fringes of Melbourne are full of such dyads. Indeed, I suspect the nation may rely on them. The wage slaves. The breeders. Perhaps that’s why politicians like the arch-fiend Howard speak endlessly of the importance of family. And the concept of same-sex marriages? Well, that flies totally in the face of the static, Menzoid nation of their imagination.

The man’s wife involved herself in an amateur Christian theatre group, and in doing so got close to one of the male actors. A nine month affair resulted – and the Doorstep Man learned what it was like to live a nightmare. It was his family, his responsibility, and - regardless of the details - it was his failure that led her to betray him.

She – and therefore he – were involved in a Hillsong-like evangelical church. The troubled couple were offered counselling in the presence of ‘Prayer Warriors’. In a closed chamber, it was explained to him that he was the spiritual head of the family. It was his job to regulate the behaviour of his wife.

He told me, softly but with great force, that every finger in the room was pointed accusingly at him.

Men have a tendency to suffer in silence. And the hidden stress eats at their health. They are expected not to exhibit weakness or, God forbid, to cry. In time, they have strokes or heart attacks. Or they top themselves.

Though he did sense some wrongness in it, this man’s programming had always informed him how to behave, what to believe, and therefore with the opprobrium of his fellows came a loss of faith in himself and a profound sense of failure.

I empathise with him.

Though my life is nothing like his, my values and lifestyle wholly different, as a man I feel those same pressures. Thankfully, I have the resources to ignore them, recognising them as the residue of a previous age, yet I still experience them – especially living with my 'partner' in middle-class Mt Waverley and raising a small child. I found myself feeling a great sadness for this random ebay buyer.

To make matters worse, human males are wired for jealousy. Whether one expresses it or not, acts upon it or not, it’s rare for a man not to seethe when his wife abandons him for another. It eats at his pride – the pride that may be his only reward for playing the role of husband and provider. I expressed this to the Doorstep Man. He replied that it was immeasurably worse nine months ago when it all happened; when he at last decided to obey the impulses breeding in his heart - and abandoned what sounded like a truly malignant marriage.

Here we have The Duality. The exterior man who dutifully performs the role expected of him. The interior man whose hopes and ideals, wants and needs may be entirely in opposition.

But now he’s alone. Without the guidance of the masses. And he’s searching. He’s been to meditation classes, but was turned off by new-age talk of Angels. “Now raise your arms and seek the beneficence of Metatron … or was it Granian … or Zabkiel. There were so many of them. And they all had names.”

I told him I had a fat encyclopaedia of angels in my office. [It’s a fascinating book by the way. Highly recommended]. I also congratulated him on seeking out Man's Search For Meaning. It’s a solid, thoughtful book free from glutinous mumbo-jumbo. Good for him at present, I think. If I can remember any others, I might just text him …

Afterwards, I was a little shell shocked. He had appeared out of nowhere and our conversation had been pretty intense. Jenny opined that – though he might have plenty of male friends – they were probably normal men, and man-normal means you don’t share your emotions. We girls, she said, survive on sharing the contents of our hearts.

So true.


^ My ebay handle. [Lumpsucker was taken.]