~ a monstrous bellowing of gratitude

A monstrous bellowing of gratitude. To those many many friends, who have supported me over the past two years. Those who put up their hand for the Ears Reunion at The Corner ... Those who vouched for my character, gave of their time ... Those whose sympathetic, compassionate words buttressed my spirit against the fear and uncertainty ...

And all those others.

Two years and twenty three hours, exactly ...

Since that dreadful incident ...

And an honorable judge of the County Court saw fit to refuse the OPP's request of a custodial sentence - in favour of a punishment more befitting the error of illegitimate backyard gardening.

Technically: a two year Community Based Order. I know I can live with that.

The dark clouds that have dogged me throughout this experience are just beginning to disperse. It's going to take time, I suspect, for the reality of such good, good news to sink in. Perhaps, by tomorrow morning, the skies will be clear.

Amen to that, at last.

~ crystallised magpie

I ought not leave gloomy posts to sitting on my front page for long periods; I’ve had concerned friends ringing to find out if everything’s alright - which it is, now, by the way. Relatively speaking. And it’s heartening to be reminded how caring people can be. Thank you.

I’m buried deep in the meat of Ambergris, working each day, religiously, with the intention of completing this draft by the end of the month, if not by my birthday on April 2. I’ve reached that place where the world of the play - and it’s a complex one - is hovering always in my thoughts, like a shadow of the real world. That’s the main reason you haven’t heard from me: I’m living on a devastated island off the Queenland coast with a community of strange fictional characters. It’s only in this state that I can hold the whole play in my mind - and, in this state, I find that new ideas flow from the real world ... from the personal habits of friends, from weather events, from the contents of rubbish bins, from the attitude of cats ...

Yesterday I borrowed the idea of a crystallised magpie from a poem I was reading for an audiobook. For a couple of days each week, I’m working at Vision Australia, reciting the contents of The Best Australian Poems 2009 [edited by Robert Adamson]. It’s a really agreeable pastime. Though narrating Peter Temple’s crime novel was enjoyable and instructive, there’s something about reading poems I really like. The intrinsic theatre, perhaps. The density. And, of course, the focus on words.

Life at home is comfortable at present, and tranquil, but I’m holding my breath. I find it difficult to believe. Could all the troubles of years past have been solved? I’d be a fool to lower my defences on the basis of a week or so of domestic harmony - but I can always hope.

On the legal front, things trundle on. My matter has been elevated to the county court and will be heard on 24 Jan 2011. Problem is, the judge has asked that my financing be in place by August, so - even though the length, and therefore the cost, of the trial has been reduced (from five days to four) - I’m still under extreme financial pressure. On March 23 it will be a year since the police discovered the plants in my back yard - and what a year it’s been ...

Next weekend: the Global Atheist Convention. It’s been a while since I’ve looked forward to something so much. Richard Dawkins in the flesh ...

Also, it looks like we’re getting the Ears back in gear for a gig in April, I believe - more information forthcoming.

~ pink caligaric jug-eared

No point apologising for the wide intervals between my posts. No point promising to better my frequency, I’ll merely forswear myself. Life is too unpredictable and so am I. When things quieten, such as now, my mind turns to the Sails of Oblivion, but when I am harried by the innumerable demands of my mystifying existence ... it recedes.

I’ve finished my season performing for children as Roald Dahl’s BFG. Hundreds of litres of sweat passed through the fabric of my green giant’s costume. Many kilograms of snozzcumber popcorn spewed from my mouth onto a writhing, over-heated front row. I gave a thousand high fives, and hundreds of photos were taken of children in the presence of my pink, caligaric, jug-eared head. I damaged myself innumerable times attempting to match the energy of a cast which was, on average, less than half my age. Indeed, I went to school with the father of the actress Sophie Perillo, manipulator of an eponymous puppet which accompanied me through much of the show.

Actually, I think I’ve done something permanent to my knees. There’s a painful twinge now when I stand. In both of them. Have my seven weeks of delightful gamboling precipitated arthritis? [Not long ago, I espied an advertisement seeking applicants for a study on arthritis; the only prerequisite was a sore joint on the big toe of the right foot. I have that sore joint. I’ve had it for years. What does it forebode?] I still have a pain in my shoulder from Titus Andronicus. Perhaps I should be taking it easier. After all, I am approaching fifty. But then who cares?

My aim for the coming year is to raise fourteen thousand dollars, simple as that. The amount is a conservative estimate of what my lawyers will ask for representing me before a County Court judge and jury probably in early 2011. In some ways my life is on hold until then. I could be jailed and our house could be confiscated. Or I could come out clean. More likely the result will be something between these two poles.

In the face of this and other no less serious [but far more personal] difficulties, I’ve had to enact some complex mental and spiritual contortions to keep myself from sinking into a debilitating depression. In fact, strangely, I seem to be experiencing a kind of rebound. The year ahead is looking more positive than I would ever have predicted. The fright and horror of my legal problems appear to have splintered my inertia, and instead of running about in panic I seem to be taking what for me are calculated careful steps towards some sort of solution.

I’m coming to the end of Truth by Peter Temple, the crime novel I am narrating for Vision Australia. An invaluable experience. I think I would like to do more of it. I’m sure If I minimise my daily dose of spasmo-nemigron the gravel in my throat will recede to more acceptable levels. Through February, I am planning to at last complete a solid first draft of Ambergris, a play I’ve mentioned before in this blog. I have high hopes for it, which I believe are grounded in reason. I also have a slew of short fiction - speculative, mainstream and weird - which I’m going to polish up and spruik.

If you’re interested, I’ll be performing something at La Mama Poetica on February 8. [My name's not listed, but I'll definitely be there. There's also a Facebook group]]

In a book by the SF writer Charles Stross, I encountered the phrase ‘The troops entered wearing cream and beige office camouflage...’.

~ justice

Australia is commonly thought of as a reasonably fair and equitable place to live, at least compared to the rest of the world. It’s considered a place where government is unlikely to commit atrocities or human rights outrages, where miscarriages of justice are inevitably righted in the face of our abiding sense of decency.

But I wonder if such attitudes are complacent, if not wildly erroneous. There has been the case of Andrew Moore, who, though apparently a rather dubious character, was separated from his family and deported to an unfamiliar land where he promptly died. Then there was Farah Jama, an immigrant, presumably from Somalia, who spent fifteen months in jail wrongly convicted of rape due to a contaminated DNA sample. And, of course, the outrageous behaviour of our state government in directing the police to make protestors’ personal files available to the company responsible for the construction of Victoria’s new desalinisation plant … and these three examples, with others, all appeared in one edition of the daily newspaper.

And of course there are the stories we never hear about.

I can imagine the plights of these victims, inured in the cold concrete labyrinth of officialdom and jurisprudence … evaluated by clerks and functionaries and faceless enablers performing their ordained duties regardless of the human cost, holding to temporal laws, guidelines and directives as if they were the underpinnings of the universe, unwilling to deviate from the code that permits them to go home at night to their secure and comfortable loungerooms to watch Packed to the Rafters in the company of their well-groomed children and their clean, functional wives and husbands … while those they have judged are marched through the cold night to meet their fates…

I guess I’m dwelling on this subject because of my own current entanglement with our legal system. In case you didn’t know, I have dropped myself into a pretty sticky situation due to a combination of ignorance and stupidity. And unfortunately the charges with which I am faced seem designed for wealthy Mafiosi from Griffith, rather than a poor sod from the suburbs who needed something in the evenings to help keep body and soul together.

I never dreamt I would find myself in jail as a result of my wrongdoings. I didn’t think anyone would be particularly fussed. But that’s where I found myself. For sixteen days. With the potential for more on the horizon. Not only that, but my family home – home to Polly for all of her seven years, home to my partner Jenny, home to my dear departed parents for most of their married lives – is at risk. Our justice apparatus, horribly, may be regarding it as equivalent to the cigarette boat of a Floridian cocaine importer …

I just hope that we don’t become one of those sad, terribly unfair stories you read in the paper and then, with time, forget.

~ here I am

Life has been a tremendous challenge lately. All manner of threats and obstacles have been presenting themselves and I have had little choice but to face them, grim-faced and dour. I’ve been unable to update the Sails of Oblivion – or to do much writing at all for that matter. For this I’m really sorry. This blog has, somehow, become central to my work and my life and I’m a fool to neglect it.

My last month has been consumed by rehearsals and performances of Lynne Ellis’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG in which I’m playing the title role. We opened late last week after the fastest, most intensive rehearsal period I’ve ever experienced. I lost at least a stone in the process, but it was worth it. The show is very funny, even for adults I think, and I recommend it robustly.

There’s a ‘gala-night’ on Tuesday December 15 which you can inquire about at RMIT Union Arts. Otherwise the public season runs from Jan 5 to 22. (Book at M-TIX 9685 5111]

On top of my theatre commitments, I’ve been enduring the usual swathe of life-related challenges. I’m looking after Polly by myself just at the moment and my confused, absent-minded habits when blended with a child’s natural anarchy make for a very messy house and a very messy head. What’s more, Polly’s ballet concert is looming and involves an unlikely amount of concentration, organisation and driving. Thankfully, I’ve been able to palm off the sequin-sowing to Polly’s female antecedents.

As regards my ongoing legal problems, my effort to have the charges reduced to something more in keeping with the wrongdoing have been flushed down into the grease-trap of cruel mechanistic legality. I will be facing another year of fear and uncertainty, but I will continue to fight. I just wish I was the only one who was suffering. To say that my partner does not cope well with tension and anxiety would be an extreme understatement and Polly, of course, though she does not know what’s happening, is already affected by the changes in our circumstances.

I would really like to thank Jenny, Lynne, Dolores, Andrew, Robert. Sara and Di for their support the other day in court. I love you all.

You’ll hear from me soon.

~ survival fund

By hook and by crook, I've managed to pay off the lawyers - mainly through bank loans - and although the aspect of my legal problem is looking slightly less gloomier, it's still dire and in the meantime I'm living day to day in a financial sense. I think I've had to fork out just on 20G which is more money than I've ever seen in my life. If you enjoy the blog, or want to help me fight what seem to be rather draconian marijuana laws - or else just pity me - please feel free to make a donation. I'll love you forever.

Below are earlier versions of this post

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About a year ago, I ran into some trouble with the law. It concerned a couple of dozen marijuana plants which were discovered in my backyard with the help of a concerned neighbour. Fair cop, I thought. There's no such thing as a free lunch, after all.

But, to my horror, I spent the following two weeks in jail, charged with trafficking and cultivating a commercial quantity of cannabis. These are very serious charges indeed and are vastly out of scale with my offenses. I face the very real prospect of a considerable jail term and the seizure of my family home. Putting aside the impact this will have on me, there is also my family to consider: my seven year old daughter Polly, an innocent, and my partner Jenny. In a worst case scenario their lives would also be devastated.

The legal process has been long, nightmarish and expensive . Primarily with the proceeds of the Sails of Oblivion benefit show - to which such saints as Steve Kilbey, Brian Hooper, Sean Kelly, Greg Fleet, David Bridie, Hugo Race, Nick Barker offered their services - I have been able to pay the six or seven thousand dollars it has cost thus far.

But the trial is looming. Extraordinarily, it will take place before a jury and last four days in January 2011. I will again have to accumulate something in the range of seven thousand dollars before August this year - as the the judge has deemed that finances be in place by that time. As I own my own home, I am ineligible for legal aid, and I do not earn enough to qualify for a loan.

Naturally, any donation, however small, would be welcome. Clicking the donate button will take you to Paypal, from where monies will be transferred directly to my solicitor's trust account. If Paypal is not your thing, cheques may be mailed to 3 French St, Mt Waverley, VICTORIA 3149 Australia.

As you can imagine, it is humbling having to make this request, but my situation leaves me little option.

Love on ya.

[Below is the original text for this post. Once more, I will promise to post more often, if I am able. And I will have a hard look at the idea of selling artwork. And I am up for any suggestion.]

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You may have noticed that I’ve added a Donate button.

Due to recent events, (which, for now, I can only describe vaguely as being legal in nature,) my financial circumstances have become rather dire – and further challenges are looming in the not too distant future. If you’re a reader of Sails of Oblivion and/or just want to help, I and family will bless you for any contribution, however small. In return, I am biting the bullet and guaranteeing a minimum of four posts per week. I’m also thinking of creating a members’ list to which contributors’ names will be added, if they wish. I just have to put some thought into it, and any suggestions are welcome.

I’ve been producing some pretty interesting artwork recently, surprising even myself, and I’m considering offering it for sale at some point, hopefully soon.

I’m still not wholly clear how the donate button works, but I do know any contribution will flow to my paypal account. Be sure to leave an identifier, if you wish to be identified, and please, above all, do not feel even remotely obliged.

Love on ya.