~ pressure release

I realised the other day - perhaps belatedly - why I’m seeing so many old-fashioned cigarette cases, particularly in the hands of women. It’s the images of diseased flesh, of course, which the arbiters of social control place with good intent on the commercial packaging, Evidently, some have begun to weary of carrying about with them, on open display, these increasingly nasty, glutinous, decomposing visions of a possible future.

On a lighter note, my legal situation continues to look brighter. It’s strange that every single person I’ve told about my conundrums has said ‘you won’t lose your house, not for that’ - while the lawyers and the law itself said - if I was found guilty it would mandatorily be seized No discretion. Well my friends were right. The house appears safe. I can garden again. I can make it nice. I can get Robert to fix things without the horrible possibility looming that it would be torn from my hands.

Yesterday, in the County Court, I pled guilty to cultivation and possession, in exchange for a nullification of the trafficking and commercial supply charges. Now my friends are telling me I won’t go to jail. I hope they’re right. There’s still a fight to be had.

I’ve been obsessing over the re-lease of old material of late, and over music generally. The old Beargarden album ‘All That Fall’ is available, for better or worse, on Bandcamp.com and will spread to the other digital outlets. I was interviewed by some eighties aficionados the other day in my lounge room and they were terribly excited. Typically, the little black cat captured and tortured and consumed a skink in the background while we were talking. For those interested in Beargarden, there’s a bits and bobs album - The Word That Refers To The Word That Refers to Walt Disney - becoming available in the same place this week. It’s better than the other one, I think.

With the help of the redoubtable Simon Polinski, and his tremendous hospitality, we’ve been collecting up and mastering the Ears record (Dogs in Space). It looks like 16 tracks now and it also will also appear on Bandcamp within days.

We’re on the bill at Lucasaid. Thursday the 2nd December - one week from today

~ the skinkatary

Let me speculate upon this image.

Both our cats, like cats the world over, are intensely interested in small running things. Tweety Bird catches and eats them. Little Kitty, who doesn’t know that they are food, just plays with them.

Garden skinks (ampropholis guichenoti) are a favourite and their local population is under constant pressure. We find so many tailless, dried up bodies that Polly and I decided to found a skinkatary. Thus far, there has been only the one burial, but doubtless there will be many more.

I have deduced that the ill-fated skink in the image at page top, while fleeing one of our cats, somehow found its way into the hollow beneath what I believe is an aquarium ornament in the shape of ... a rook perhaps? A donjon? A letterbox?

Somehow the lizard’s route of egress was closed, leaving only a tiny window at the top. (There are, by the way, similar small windows in old castles called ‘dream-holes’ which were built so that dreams could reach the bed chamber from the universe outside.) (It may also be possible that skinks are unable to travel in reverse.)

(In the movie Black Dream Hole Sailor Moon strives to prevent the evil queen, Badiyanu, and her loyal fairies using the "Black Dream Hole" to swallow the earth.)

Anyway, it seems the skink had the choice of dying within the musty confines of the ornament or making a bid for freedom. It appears to have chosen the latter.

And almost succeeded. Almost. But died, writhing twisting thrashing, its efforts waning as the last of its energy was spent. A ghastly death. A cave death. Pinned, stuck fast, doomed. The only consolation being that its small reptile brain may not have had the wherewithal to appreciate the claustrophobic horror of its circumstances.

Without doubt, it had dropped its tail. Skinks around here do that at the very first hint of an approaching cat. But the rear section of its body - what we would think of as the hips - was simply too wide to pull through, particularly given that there was not much to use for leverage.

There is a particular horror for me in this creature’s nasty end. It disinters a childhood experience which, though trivial, is cemented in my memory along with a very uncomfortable feeling.

We had returned from a three or four week summer holiday and opened up the house - this house, the one I live in - which had been very diligently sealed. I saw my mother looking at something on the kitchen windowsill.

“A bird got in,” she said, pointing to a cream bottle on the sill. Cream bottles in those days were of glass, roughly the shape of an old-style milk bottle and approximately half the size. They were sealed with a foil cap, which, I recall, was usually silver but sometimes golden, and were delivered by the milkman with his dray.

In the bottle was a black-bird. Head down. Beak agape. Eyes dead. Jammed like a feathered sardine behind the clear glass and smeared with dried yellow cream. I gaped at the bottle with dismay and utter incomprehension. It was my father who explained ...

Somehow, the bird had become trapped in the house. Over time, perhaps weeks, it had despaired for water. The only thing resembling water had been a tiny residue of cream at the bottom of the bottle and, in mortal desperation, the bird had tried to reach it, dooming itself in the process.

I found myself wondering how long it had taken for the blackbird to die: secured absolutely by the solid glass confines, upside down, unable to move ...

Unable to obey a single of its inborn instincts.

I've drawn a picture from memory ...




When I posted my picture to Photobucket, they offered to print it on a mug for USD15.00. They even produced an image of what it would look like.

Tempting, no?

~ all the more cats

A cry of utter revulsion came from the laundry, where Polly had caught sight of this –


Lately, distasteful things - even pictures of distasteful things - have been tending to make Polly cry, and this particular jigsaw puzzle of gore and grume on the linoleum was just too horrid for her to even consider trying to work it out.

Me? Well this sort of thing is my bread and butter; it’s hardwired into my masculine identity. I am involuntarily attracted to purulent, noisome, fetid, reechy, repugnant things. Indeed, as a young boy, the very first time I used a thesaurus, these were the concepts around which I sought to build a powerful vocabulary. There seems to be truth to the whole 'slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails' paradigm.

And that’s why I sometimes include images of this kind in Sails of Oblivion. I just can’t help myself.

What you see above are the remains of Tweety Bird’s night dinner: a tail, some extraneous blood and faeces and, again, that strange bean-shaped sac which she invariably places to the side.



Previously, we had thought it might be the liver, but now the truth comes into focus. It is the rat’s stomach. Clearly, Tweety, a proud feline, deigns with extreme prejudice to consume the kind of ordure eaten by a rat.


Tweety and Little Kitty, after breakfast of a morning, customarily engage in wargames: stalking, leaping, pouncing, and crashing around the house. This morning I caught this series of images.





(By the way, my Flickr account is full up, so my images have moved to Photobucket)

~ if there were no cats

At one point there, I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen, let alone touched, a cat for the longest period I could recall. Strangely - or perhaps not so strangely – it hit me with a flush of sadness. Of all the many things that were wrong, just for a moment, this seemed like the worst.

Cats weren’t the only thing denied me. I was captured in a sensory void, made worse by the constant sick-making bromide of banal television, and the thousand tiny limitations checking my thought and my movement, and the faint but constant smell of putrefaction.

All around me, the drone of communications between alien minds. Robot shells stalking the perimeter, some containing the ruined vestiges of human intelligence – not unlike daleks, I suppose – daring not to expose themselves in such a hostile environment.

Just to stroke a cat, just to hear its welcoming brr. Such a simple thing, a lovely thing that adds just a dusting of pleasure to the day.

And all the other things, the micro-things, the hundreds of them, which we use to add that little bit of comfort and pleasure to the harsh flow of life. Foods, scents, textures, personal rituals. And if they are denied, suddenly, en masse, if all the colour is suddenly drained from our field of vision, it sends a crack through the soul.

Once, a friend of mine was opining on the death of Michael Hutchence. Apparently, during the period Michael was going out with the Danish model Helena Christiansen, he was involved in a motorcycle accident. As I recall, they were leaving a restaurant in Copenhagen, when he was struck down and injured in such a way that his sense of smell was either lost or severely reduced.

My friend explained that this was much more than it seemed. For a start, Michael was something of a bon vivant, who savoured the products of all the senses. Wine, for example. I was told he was getting heavily into wine on a connoisseur level. Now, when you lose your olfactory sense, it affects your taste as well; the two, as I understand it, are synergistic. Try holding your nose when you eat; you’ll see what I mean.

This culling of his senses, as it does to many, resulted in depression. The same depression that was to play a part in his death.

All the sights and sounds and tastes and touches. They sustain us. They sustain me. We have two cats here at our house, as readers of this blog may already know, and all those random encounters, the petting, the nuzzling and the feeding, watching the small one chewing at the buttons on my shirt, watching them wrestle after breakfast time, watching the balance of their lithe bodies … well, they have a place in my life. They raise my spirits. Just a fraction. A sweet little fraction.

And I missed it. Along with my family, my friends, my work, my routines, my house, my room …

It's such a tiny, but poignant thing, our alliance with the cats.

~ decompositions of the season

THEYesterday a small car ploughed into the venerable magnolia tree on our nature strip. My wife arrived home from a free solarium treatment, (shared in its entirety with a fluttering moth) to find the car abandoned, two vacant child restraints and the neighbours milling about. Someone called the police, who were at a loss as to how a vehicle could have generated the necessary speed to destroy itself so thoroughly, coming up a steep hill on a perfectly straight, short and narrow suburban street ... A momentary suicidal urge, perhaps?


A lady from Somalia was found at her house around the corner, presumably in shock. The magnolia tree is noticeably canted and almost ring-barked. It’s been there as long as I have, the poor thing, I have seen it flower every year of my life, and to be struck like that ... out of the blue ...


Greyish Blackish seems to have caught her first mouse - though it may previously have been partially incapacitated by Tweety Bird, the Jack Ketch of the household. GB is a very sweet natured cat and appeared unaware that the object of the exercise was to kill.

The mouse in the image below is accompanied by a item of biological refuse discovered by my wife in the shower. Tweety Bird seems to have have chewed off the outer coating of something’s head and left the remains as her customary matutinal gift.


(Just now, as I was writing, my wife called me to see this morning’s offering: another bio-hazard on the shower floor, this one resembling a grub-shaped grey-green kidney. Can’t find the camera ...)

Recent rains have eroded the banks of the Grey Creek, revealing an item of archaeological curiosity. This shopping trolley was surely buried long ago, possibly during earthworks associated with the laying down of the abutting Monash freeway. It might have sedately decomposed down the aeons, but no, the elements have thrust its ghastly corroded form back into the light, to further pollute the habitat of Immaculata, that pure white duck.



I’ll let you know how the supermarket responds, when I report the trolley for collection.

And by the way: the best wishes of this dread season to you all. Thanks for reading, [and commenting upon,] my meandering, probably perplexing diary. I hope you all get as focused and happy and prolific in this next year as I am determined to be. Sorry, as usual, for the unpredictable timing of my posts.Usually, it's concomitant with my state of mind. [William Burroughs despised the word concomitant.) When the the posts dry up, I am either in a slough of despond or so obsessively busy with my life that I can’t pause to reflect ... Anyway ...

I hope you get something really good for Christmas. May the wind fill your sails.

~ elaborate feline accommodations

Yesterday, I was doing some recording with Nadav Rayman of White Noise Carousel. At one point, passing the bathroom, I noticed something unusual …

I wasn’t certain whether it was polite to inquire. When I directed an interested glance at Nadav’s partner, Liz, I could see at least some reluctance to discuss the matter. But, of course, there was no way I could resist.

I ought have guessed it would have something to do with cats. They have two: a dark brown Devon Rex whose fur is indistinguishable from astrakhan and a Tangerine Burmese. Since they are flat-dwellers the issue of the cats’ toilet habits is of some concern, therefore they have taken some innovative and, quite frankly, bizarre measures.

What I saw in their bathroom was a device for training cats to use a human toilet. Once the cats are acclimatised to using the pan of litter fitted over the toilet bowl, the central portion of the pan is removed, leaving a doughnut of litter. Later, a further section is removed, leaving a thin ring on the outside, then, finally, the entire device is removed. I would expect that the substance of the litter is steeped in catnip, or something similar.

Apparently, it works. Liz has seen the cats use it, though describes their reaction at being observed as ‘embarrassed’. This I understand. One of the many little things about cats that makes them so appealing is their ability to experience embarrassment. You may accuse me of anthropomorphising, but I have often seen cats embarrassed – particularly the more rarefied breeds. Usually when they fall or do something awkward, something at odds with the dignity and fluency of their physical style. They will turn, look directly at you, and quickly, humourlessly, depart. There is no mistaking it for anything but embarrassment.

Another cat-related device which I recently acquired from a rubbish heap somewhere:


For some reason, this strikes me as fiendishly clever. It’s a cat toy and Tweety Bird loves it to death. There’s a rail around the circumference fitted with a false mouse which moves freely and at lifelike speeds. The mouse disappears in and out of the concealed portions of track, giving the cat an impression that the mouse is fleeing in and out of holes. The device even has a bit of scratchy carpet fixed to the top, but I think this is more of an afterthought. Tweety Bird has never used it.

I don’t know whether this toy – or the cat toilet - are a waste of the planet’s precious resources. They’re rather an elaborate way of enriching the lives of our companion animals, but they’re ingenious and strange and I like them.

To close, here is an wholly irrelevant photo of Polly which I secretly took half an hour ago. She is having a picnic dinner with her friends, including Sea Turtle, Baby Alive and Potting Mix.

Oh, and one more thing. Tweety Bird caught a mouse today. Polly managed to confiscate its lifeless body and decided to give it a final resting place with a brick and a 'blanket'.