~ arm in python

I heard a story the other day about a girl who, being thoroughly wasted, passed out on the couch in an unfamiliar house - to wake with her arm swallowed to the shoulder by an overly ambitious pet python.

When people intersect with drugs, when the safe day-time world is penetrated by heavy-lidded Morlocks on Kronic or Crack, on Krank or Can-D, bizarre complications often ensue – a phenomenon I'm quite certain is news to no reader of this blog. At present, I'm trolling the far oceans of abnormality for the best and most unlikely pharmacological tales as I'm editing a few issues of Whack Magazine - 'Whack' being the official (and mischievously named) 'organ' of Harm Reduction Victoria, the drug-users' advocacy group.

If you have one of these stories (or any interesting drug-related writing - fiction or not) I'd love to see it. Email it to sam.sejavka@gmail.com. If you dare. I'm also seeking imagery on the same theme. Payment is on publication (etc) and almost - but not quite - at normal commercial rates.

On Friday next week, Polly and her friend Ocean are performing in Snatches at RMIT's Kaleide Theatre . It's just a small piece - but an important (perhaps even critical) continuation of The Goitre Bird Cycle - in which the girls, while innocently fishing beneath a sewage outlet, encounter the baffling Starched Penultipope, and proceed to divest him of a fabulous treasure ...

As for me, life writhes and slithers ... like a tunneling snake of quantum uncertainty. For every tragedy, there is a boon, and though I still have plenty of good reasons to crumple myself like a piece of used tinfoil, other more mysterious, more beautiful and bountiful influences have eased the general havoc of my life.

Take, for example, Henry, the estimable and very musky billy-goat pictured below (with myself and Heronymous Posh, photographed by Suzi Q P Dhol). The pupils of his eyes are disturbing to behold: uncanny, ur-satanic, horizontal rectangles, the like of which I'd never before encountered. What's more, in rutting season, the hairy rump of of every nanny-goat in the paddock is reliably worn to bare hide by this proud, insatiable beast.

nb: the art at the top of the post is by Jenny Gameson.

~ the sweet milk of success

I don’t like to talk too much about football. After all, it’s only football, but sometimes I just get too excited to shut up. I’m hoarse [and more than a tad hungover] today from shouting my lungs out at the Docklands stadium last night. And not because it was a close, edge-of-the-seat type game, but because the St Kilda Football Club were just so, so good it was heaven to watch.

(That it was Collingwood under the sword only made it sweeter.)

For years now, we’ve been up there, a contender, but something’s been missing, some essential spirit or hardness or determination or who knows what. There was always the possibility that, instead of putting the knife in, the team would fall to pieces. You could never really be sure whether they’d shine or be shameful.

But now that elusive final element has clicked into place.

Through the long grey years of St Kilda history, there have been few sunny days and supporters have learned not to expect too much. The disappointment is just too hard to bear. But this year, this supporter, member 31800, is standing up and crying out the news:

This is St Kilda’s time! Our year!

(Will I regret this down the track, I wonder?)

Lynne, the Englishwoman I converted to St Kildaism nearly two decades ago, was with me there last night, lapping up the sweet milk of success. She’s right in the middle of preparations for Snatches, the annual theatrical mosaic she directs at RMIT’s Kaleide theatre.

Snatches' facebook page
Another Snatches link

If you are able or feel inclined to come on Wednesday you’ll see me play a squalid predatory gay psychiatrist. On Friday, I’m a psychopathic German neurosurgeon in Matthew Lambert’s play ‘Hitler’ and a venomous tool of officialdom in my own ‘The Goitre Birds’.

I promise that the title 'The Goitre Birds' came direct from my imagination. I had not the faintest inkling that such a thing might really exist - but here, courtesy of Glittersmacked, proving the old adage that there is nothing new under the sun, is a Supentius camelus or Goitre Bird ...