~ then fevers came, seemingly at random

Slowly, with certainty, day by day, I’m emerging from the woes of the past 27 months. I still have plenty to agonise over as I flail in my bed at night, but it’s of a far different order than what has gone before.

All that remains of the legal fiasco is a three-weekly visit to an unpleasant office in Oakleigh, where doors snap shut with the finality of jail cells. But after the many trials and tribulations of the recent past, I can take that n my stride.

Some time before the final hearing, with the help of toxic pharmaceuticals, I began a fresh assault on my liver complaint. (see ~my intimate blood borne saboteur.) The first few months were, as expected, nasty and debilitating. Anaemia. Neutropenia. Dysphoria. Then, around week twelve, they began to slacken off, almost to a level that was bearable. I was off-colour but I could manage the odd life activity. About this time that I even went to the Rainbow Serpent festival.

But, with the inevitability of death, a seed took root in my lungs. I began to cough, and to produce a lurid green sputum. Fevers came, seemingly at random and I took to my bed. For five weeks I was scarcely able to drag myself to the kitchen - although, every few days, I shambled around the block in a dark bulky overcoat, usually at night, to forestall any pooling of phlegm in my lungs. As my immune system was suppressed by the HCV drugs, I had little defence against the infection. Despite the heavy duty antibiotics I had been prescribed, the condition grew worse. I was getting just a little scared. I’d never been quite so sick.

Then my viral load results were unblinded. (I was on a clinical trial for a drug by Bristol Myers Squibb) From a starting point of 13 million evil bits per ml, it was reduced to 275. But, frustratingly, two weeks later, it was 500 plus. At this point, I ceased medications. Once again, on my fourth attempt, I faced failure, And this time I had been just a little concerned that they might kill me.

I decided to wait for some of the new remedies come on line - what doctors like to refer to as the ‘small molecule’ drugs. Telaprevir and Boceprevir are examples. There are nearly a hundred being researched (see hcvdrugs.com) and one day, in the not so distant future, I pray there’ll be regimens without such crippling side-effects.

So I lay back down, played video games and waited to get better.

Now it’s three or four weeks later and I’m waking up into the world. I’m exercising again. I’m brushing the dust off affairs that have not been touched in two and a half years. My garden is tugging at me, and I dream as I pluck the hated oxalis from the flower beds. I’m thinking about my house, how I might rid it of the teetering towers of books. Within the next few weeks I’ll be gnawing happily on my various, long neglected writing projects.

And the deadly spores ... even with binoculars I cannot see their dark, roiling, semi-sentient clouds on the horizon. I am even toying with the notion of breaking my long and bitter relationship with spasmo-nemigron.

~ earth stars

This morning on the ABC News Breakfast show, Mal Brough presented us an old chestnut which seems to be coming back into its own : why should Australia lead the world in reducing its carbon emissions (and why should we bother, as we're such a small polluter on the global scale). When Barry Jones responded, I was hoping he'd give the right answer. It would be good to hear the right answer clearly articulated on the airwaves, just once.

By my book, he did pretty well. Among the developed nations, Australia is the world's largest per capita producer of greenhouse gases. While most of the world subsists on trotters and belly pork, we are living high on the hog. Plainly, this places a moral burden upon us, more so than any other nation, to curb our negative influence on the environment. For their own reasons - largely selfish - many conservatives and the much of the business sector do not subscribe to this thinking - but most of us, I feel, would agree that ethically speaking we have an obligation.

Thus Barry Jones replied, adding that Australia has been a world leader in the past and is perfectly capable of being so again.

It is an position of integrity and right. Though certainly nothing Australia does in isolation with its emissions will curb the global pollution problem, it can act to secure the future by influencing the world at large. Australia – unlike the USA - is in no position to strongarm, but it is sufficiently large that its actions are noticed. It can pave the way that others may follow.

As well as the high-minded moral argument, I would not have complained if Barry Jones couched his response in more selfish terms. People are afraid of the coming change. They are confused by the clamouring voices, raised against each other, crying contradictory predictions and positions. And it is the way that when danger looms, humans look to their own.

If the current generation of Australians wish to provide a rosy future for their children and grandchildren, they can act personally but to little overall effect. Yet if they act as one to reduce their emissions, establishing new standards and new economic mechanisms, then they are lighting a beacon for other nations, who might act in turn - until sufficient of us are united in the cause to positively influence the future of the planet.


Yesterday, more importantly, while scraping up some mulch for my potted anemones I unearthed what I thought to be some old, partially digested plastic daisies. On closer inspection, I discovered they were ripe earth stars, their 'stomach-shaped sacs' bursting with spores. I've trawled for about half an hour, but can't identify the species, though the family is certainly Geastrum. Over my many decades of turning the earth in Mt Waverley, I have never before encountered earth stars.

~ the mind parasites

The human race, unbeknownst to itself, is under the complete control of a race of repulsive parasitic entities, who drink our mental energies and prevent us from evolving into super-beings.

Every few years, I find myself rereading Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites. I’m half way through it as I write. It’s a very odd novel. Unique. Genuinely peculiar. Badly flawed by any reasonable standard. But really interesting.

Wilson is a bone fide thinker. He first came to prominence with ‘The Outsider’ a philosophical work that established him as one of the so-called Angry Young Men of the late fifties literary scene in England. [John Osbourne [Look Back in Anger] was another of these].

But from that point on Wilson’s ideas grew stranger - though never any less well thought through or researched.

I became a fan after reading The Occult – the big green paperback that was half history of the paranormal and half philosophical treatise. Then I swallowed up his back catalogue and attended his lectures whenever he came to town.

[Allow me to diverge. It was John Murphy, the brilliant and arcane drummer of such bands as WhirlyWirld and The Associates who really put me onto Wilson. Now, John, at this time, had the most pungent odour problem I have ever experienced. I saved a seat for him at the Northcote town hall where Wilson was due to speak. He arrived, sat down and, slowly, one by one, the people around us began to relocate, creating a buffer zone of two or three empty chairs around the wellspring of an astonishing stench. I don’t know if John even noticed]

Wilson was perfect for me. I’ve always been a disappointed sceptic. I’m too rational to believe in superstition or higher powers but, nonetheless, I am drawn, inexorably, to the mystical and paranormal. Almost like Mulder: I want to believe – but not if the evidence is lacking

Wilson is similar - but he has reasoned his way into a conviction that there is a untapped reservoir of possibility in the human mind. In the realm of instinct and intuition. Or, in his words, Faculty X. He believes we are so immersed in the day to day, in habitual life that we can never realise our true potential - or find what the psychologist Maslow would call ‘Peak Experience’.

He has pointed a finger at the bicameral mind, suggesting that the two very different hemispheres of our brains are consistently out of sync, and that to bring the creative and the rational sides into harmony would force our whole lives into focus. We would see the beauty radiating from every moment of our existence. We would never feel tired. We would instinctively make the right decisions. And even have access to paranormal powers.

The Mind Parasites, on first glance, appears to be a shoddy little science-fiction paperback. It’s set in a very roughly drawn future in which there is rocket flight between continents and people holidaying on the Moon. Here, Wilson is a little like Philip K Dick; he uses a populist genre to present original, quite complex ideas.

Interestingly, it has a Lovecraftian edge too. The protagonist, Austin, an archaeologist, is an expert on pre-Hittite civilization and is digging in Turkey at a place called The Black Mountain. Impossibly deep beneath the Earth, he discovers a vast stone city built by giants and compares it openly with the cyclopean ramped cities of The Great Old Ones described by Lovecraft. Indeed, the book describes Lovecraft as a visionary, who has somehow accurately predicted the future. Perhaps The Mind Parasites ought be considered a peculiar, rather tangential addition to the Cthulhu Mythos.

Austin comes into possession of the papers of a colleague who suicided in peculiar circumstances. The papers describe a race of beings, not of flesh but mental energy, who, around the time of Beethoven and Goethe, took residence in the human mind and proceeded to control it utterly. These ‘Tsathogguans’ feed off our life force, preventing us from realising our true potential by deliberately nurturing depression and perversion. We are a slave race. The work of artists such as De Sade, described as warped in the book, are a direct consequence of the Parasite’s short-circuiting of our natural intellectual and sexual energies.

The book tracks Austin’s bizarre efforts to defeat the Parasites using Husserl’s techniques of Phenomenology. He trains his mind to fully understand itself – and in the process he and his colleagues develop parakinetic talents, telepathy, mind-control and the ability to sync up their consciousnesses. They come to live their lives as one continuous Peak Experience. In effect, they become super-beings doing battle with a cunning extraterrestrial adversary.

Though most of the book is either dissertation or situated deep within the mind, it is still a weirdly pacy read - as these urbane scientists try and ultimately succeed in convincing the world of this madness and then set about defeating it.

I do wonder about these Mind Parasites. It would explain a great deal. If they were real.

I know I have something lurking in the depths of my consciousness, advising me to do things which could have no conceivable benefit. I know I’m always tired. I know I have difficulty thinking clearly. And I can only guess when I last had a Peak Experience.

Could it be these Tsathogguans, who urge me go out and get on – despite the fact that the heroin experience is no longer a pleasurable one for me. Not only have I ceased to enjoy the drug itself, but taking it wracks me with guilt and makes me sick for at least a week afterwards. Yet the urges, the cravings continue – reasonlessly, with nothing but self-destructive intent.

Are the Parasites in residence? Deep in those murky waters? it would make sense.

That oleaginous voice begs most when I am at my weakest. When I am alone in the house and have money. When it’s a certain temperature outside. When I go to Richmond or St Kilda. When I see someone using on the TV. When I go to funerals, or to a band … At these times it is raised its loudest. It knows when I am vulnerable.

The craving voice, researchers say, is the result of a rewiring in the brain of addicted persons. No longer is the pleasure-related dopamine system in play, but the excitatory glutamate system. One uses not for pleasure, but to stop feeling pain. And later, when the whole issue seems resolved? The voice keeps barking out its hollow commands.

Perhaps I could counsel myself in the techniques of Phenomenology, enter the country of the mind and root out this babbling idiot who distracts me from my life? But if long habit has hard-wired it in, what am I to do? At least, if it was an malign alien entity, then I would have something obvious to fight.

And who’s to say that it is not?

Who’s to say The Deadly Spores themselves are not under malign alien control?

~ she had a dream

They have agreed that he should look after the money when it comes every second Wednesday – as the lure of the glistening honeycomb is too strong for her to bear. She loses control of herself too easily and surrenders to the dark vicissitudes of the Deadly Spores. She spends money she does not have. Money that ought be directed toward better purposes.

By Tuesday night, her mind is already probing the psychic net the Spores hold in place above the city. Her eyes are closed; she is seeking inspiration. How can his hold on the money be loosened? Can he be tricked? She hates herself for thinking this way. But it is not her thinking, it is the Spores, who have gained control of a section of her brain known as the nucleus accumbens.

On this night in her dreams there is a shallow puddle with a fish in it. And a rock. She turns the rock over to discover it is, indeed, an ancient turtle-like creature. Disturbed from its sleep of centuries, it begins to feed, voraciously, immediately consuming the nearby fish. Once satisfied it transforms into a different creature and begins to feed again, to grow again. This cycle is repeated, until she sees a monstrous pigeon approaching the house. At first, she is daunted by its terrible size, but then she consoles herself – it is only a pigeon and even if gigantic could not possibly be a threat. But then, she wonders, will it peck her family, unthinkingly, as it would peck at worms…?

Wednesday begins badly. He is busy with his work, but must also distribute her money quickly before he is outsmarted. He is tense because he is fighting a vast adversary in the guise of his lover; he knows she will leap at any hint of weakness, so he must be stern. She is tense because there is a battle inside her, and because she wants her honeycomb, but cannot get it.

Bickering breaks out, scattered flares of nastiness; she cannot control her tongue when she feels like this … he becomes frantic and cannot think straight …

But the day is a success. Almost all the money lands in the correct places, save a little that is kept aside for basic survival over the coming fortnight. He allows himself to relax. He walks the cat around the block with his daughter. He allows himself a glass of wine or two ... And then the Deadly Spores strike with the force of a hammer in his face

She wants honeycomb and now she will not let him keep it from her.

She becomes undeniable, yet he remains strong. He will not give her the food money. Or the the bill money. She will not accept refusal. She will not give up. He will not give in. The process takes about an hour, but the battle is lost when the first germ of desire enters his heart…

Ten minutes later, or so, he relents. They will share this vicious product of the spores … and ignore the consequences …

There is only one way I can do this, he thinks. I must become like steel. I cannot lapse. When the sweet voice of the Deadly Spores begins to issue from her mouth, I must leave and not return until I know am powerful enough to resist it.

~ tinselled excruciations, baubled spores

Weariness and worry – keywords of the holiday season.

Polly’s crèche held its Christmas do on Friday afternoon and we were obliged to attend – not least because Santa was arriving on a fire-engine. Polly has seen a lot of Santas lately and there has been much private churning in that growing head. For now, she has decided that all Santas but for the crèche Santa are false, particularly if they charge money for photographs.

We collapsed on some dry yellowing grass and swatted flies as we waited for our child to get satisfaction, which in time she did. Then we were away, by train, with Polly’s sweet little friend Mia, to the ‘Gala’ performance of Roald Dahl’s The Witches at Kaleide [RMIT]. This is Lynne Ellis’s kid’s show for 2007/08 and as usual it was hilarious, but I wasn’t quite in the mood. Neither was Mia; unlike Polly she hasn’t had much exposure to theatre and within seconds she was bawling with fear. A half hour of gentle cajoling resulted in her sitting up front with the other kids and loving it.

There was a celebration afterwards, but I didn’t enjoy it. I’m too worried about my partner. She’s too worried about money, and Christmas. I’m worried about money too – I think I’m the most penurious I’ve been in recent times and for some stupid reason it shames me. And – big surprise – the Spores are out, bedecked in Christmas regalia, revelling in the dark reaches of the soul, and sucking the will from my other half.

During the week, I had a meeting with a Romanian. I gave him some ‘quarantined’ money and explained that some of his business methods were destroying my family and would he cool off just a little. He said, sure, and then let me know that he’d found god. And that I should clean up my garage. Right. Sadly, some one has let him know where we live, against some very explicit instructions …

It just goes on and on. Horror without end. I wonder if I might obtain results by assuming the role of father, not only to my daughter, but to my wife? There are real trust issues in play here. There are lies being told. Things being stolen. Lines crossed which have not been crossed before… But before I can take any moral high ground, I must curtail are my own occasional lapses… I have to become without fault, and walk like a Jesus upon this Earth … if only …

Yesterday, Polly and I watched a choir recital. Her grandmother Di is one of the singers and it was pleasant to close my eyes and listen to those sweet voices. It had been my plan to join this choir next year, but now I am in two minds. The leader made the audience wait almost twenty minutes for her family to arrive. There’s something strange about that, isn’t there? Something a little, well … selfish? You see, I thought it was a community choir type thing, but the leader kept referring to it as her ‘job’ and later I learned that the members pay $15 a week to participate … If it’s her ‘work’ and everyone’s paying, isn’t it just a little much to hold a [paying] audience that long because her husband was waiting for their two year old to wake up?

See the mood I’m in? To make matters worse, when Di introduced me to this choir leader as a possible future member, she – crime of all crimes – briskly nodded, didn’t even turn to look at me and resumed a conversation with someone else. But if not this choir, then another. I really need to start singing again – I think I’ll be better for it, all round. Music is the universal panacea.

Tonight, I’m going with Lynne to see The Church and The Divinyls. I may be in a better mood by then

~ the twilight of the vilp

Usually, when I visit here, I sleep on the back porch beneath a slap-dash roof which has collapsed on me at least once in my memory. This time, however, I’m in the shed. It’s been cleared out, finally, and I have a very pleasant place in which to lurk – and it’s easy to avoid getting in the way of Nikki and Sid’s daily life. The chickens and the dogs wander in and out. At night, the porcine grunts and senseless giggles of the schoolies carry from the park across the street.

I generally fall into some kind of mindless routine after a few days here. I wake, walk to the Point, buy coffee, read the paper - the Courier Mail has gone from broadsheet to tabloid in my absence - swim, read on the beach… Though this time, it’s taking me a little longer to find a rhythm. I’m walking a lot, that’s for certain, and I’m fruitlessly attempting to take photos of very small things…. Crabs, barnacles, beautiful micro-fish darting in rock pools… I counted five species this morning, all lavishly coloured or patterned… I really have to get a better camera…

I’ve been going to the pub too, [where I am writing this]. The Straddie pub has metamorphosed from a typical and slightly dangerous Queensland hotel into a hulking complex with restaurants, accommodation, etc. that might easily have been transported whole from the Brisbane CBD. But there’s still the panoramic view of Moreton Bay out over Cylinder Beach…

I’ll walk back along the beach soon, as the sun sets, maybe watch some television, sleep…

Nikki has a bookcase dedicated to old science-fiction. All the books are dusty, the pages yellow, brittle, the bindings loose. She buys many of them for the covers alone, but there’s good reading too. She is a Philip K Dick aficionado and has a half dozen of his novels. There’s a lot of Clifford D Simak, some Badger Books and five treasured copies of The Twilight of The Vilp. I myself have at least ten. This is a hangover from a period during the Eighties when our Vilp Libraries vied for supremacy. I am certain I possessed at least forty copies at one stage…

I recall throwing out the page-blocks and keeping the covers, then later throwing out the covers… I don’t remember why… But almost immediately I started collecting them again. And of course they’re a lot harder to find these days…

I haven’t actually read the book, but Nikki claims it’s extraordinary. I have my doubts …

Andre Norton was a favourite writer of my childhood. I found a novel of hers in the bookcase and have just finished reading it. ‘Voorloper’. Quite enchanting …

With the walking, the swimming, the sea air, I’m already feeling healthier and have been able to steadily reduce my daily dosage of Spasmo-Nemigron. One senses the occasional breath of Spore activity… shreds of evil drifting over from the mainland… But for the most part this zone is clean.

One last thought on the election… from Tony Wright of The Age …

“Aunty’s floral prints, which once saw sunny days, have all gone drab now in the musty dark of the wardrobe”

The trepidation mounts as we enter, one hopes, the real twilight of the Vilp …

Ω the starman is summoned to elixesse quaternary

The shadows are oppressive tonight. The spiders move with caution – one eye on the bundling of the prey, seven alert for danger… The air itself portends the coming of the Spores.

At times like these - with Polly’s big party on Sunday, and two days later my departure for Queensland - when change is afoot, when time wrinkles - cracks will sometimes open into the country of the Spores.

Disruption serves them well. In periods of flux they mount their challenges. In their deepest nature they are opportunistic and willset upon their victims with the smooth reliability of German engineering...

Compare the bull-sharks that loiter in the drowned cars that lie scattered, half buried in sand, between Morton and Stradbroke Islands. At the changing of the tides, water flows at fantastic speeds through this narrow channel, and the sharks lie in wait, their black eyes cold and expressionless - to lurch out and seize whatever flashes by.

The tide is changing tonight … Who felt it first? She? I? Does it matter? Polly is five today. When she falls asleep and we slump before the television, then the current quickens …

*

From time to time, the Ørn will sense trouble brewing in a distant system, and request our assistance.

Tonight, the vast mineral intelligence of Elixesse Quaternary lies on the brink of annihilation. The roughly earth-sized planet orbits the K4 supergiant Elixesse, and such is its peril that The Ørn has urged me to abandon my negotiations with the ever-obstinate Dilobites and leave immediately.

In rough translation, the Dilobites refer to themselves as Those Who Would Gorge Upon The Universe. As their moniker suggests, they are a wolfish, squamous race - though not without cunning and an advanced physics-to-technology ratio.

I have sat through many long, tedious sessions with these gastropods, and I am certain that if it were not for my time-displacement field and the balloon that floats at my shoulder emanating lethal potential, they would have attempted to destroy me on first contact.

When I announced my imminent departure, their stubborn demeanour shifted to one of relief.

I warned them that the Terran system and its surrounding volume is held in indefinite escrow for the future use of humanity - when and if it chooses to redefine itself as a space-faring civilisation.

Mastocrease, their charge d’affaires, burbled humorously at this possibility. “Before that happens, you will despoil your planet and die starving in its festering corpse.”

The conference pod was filled with the loathsome, glutinous sounds of Dilobite laughter. Not for the first time, I explained that Earth’s property was defended - down to the last tumbling pebble in the Kuiper Belt.

I harboured no doubt that with our departure they would begin mining operations – so blind is the arrogance of Those Who Would Gorge Upon The Universe. Before we left, I made certain their every act would be recorded. Their doom was inevitable, but perhaps the data will be of use when the next set of invaders seek to pillage the birthright of humanity.

With the miraculous technologies available to The Ørn, our journey of 1.3 gigaparsecs would take less than a week. I make no claims to full understanding, but I believe its propulsion system involves the rapid-fire creation and destruction of micro-universes in a virtual cascade of folded dimensions.

The Ørn used the time to brief us on our mission.

The entity we were to encounter was without name. It was an inorganic intelligence that occupied – or rather, comprised – Elixesse Quaternary. Over the mega-years, harnessing the energy of its molten core and the radiation of Elixesse, this ‘being’ had redistributed the constituents of the planet into a matrix of exceeding complexity - achieving a vast, but somewhat naïve sentience.

Veins of copper, sheathed in sodium, web its interior like the circulatory system of a human being. Deviously blended alloys are layered from crust to core, indexed with zircon and emerald, moist with the condensation of iodine… Heat sinks of glossy hematite breach the rocky surface like towering weather vanes… Mysterious dodecahedrons of refined osmium rise and fall from bottomless shafts, seemingly impervious to gravity… Sublime star-like forms - like dandelion clocks of braided tin, uranium and mica - travel with obscure purpose through the deep molten regions: mineral synapses contributing to the planetary consciousness, A mind of native wisdom, says The Ørn. A singularity of innocence. A galactic citizen of immeasurable beauty under dire and imminent threat.

“In order to communicate - explained the Ørn - you must learn a language of breath. Short breaths and long. Deep breaths and shallow.”

With limitless patience, The Ørn instructed us. Expire. Inspire. Expire. Inspire.

The deck was perfused with the sounds of breathing

And soon, I slept.

To wake. To Polly. Standing on the end of the bed in her pink pajamas, declaring she was five.

Five!

§ the junky dream

Once
I was lured, in a dream.
To that dark webbed territory
where pale, seeking fingers
offer sticky grey honeycomb
from the shadows.

Where sweet honey oozes
From the teat-like glands
Of vast slave creatures
in the shadows.

There I wandered.
Endlessly through the Devil's Hexagons,
Marveling at the abundance
And then was torn away,

Before I could taste.

To be be there again
To be torn away
Again.
And once again.

Each time more despairing,
More agonising than the last.
Each time my lips a little closer
to that atramental cup -
That poisoned mead
a little closer to my lips.

To wake, in sweat
From a dream peculiar to those
Devilled by their deadly master

A dream of wild goose chases,
Through striated city-scapes,
With treacherous collaborators,
And eyes staring from the ditches.
Slithering without limbs or hair,
Through a brown, hazy chaos,
Deprived of senses
Shrinking with panic.

Centipedes are milling on the powerlines
Polishing the copper with mucilage,
Bitter pearly drops, fattening
On the wires...

Rarely, do I have this dream today.
It is replaced by another,
Which wakes me as remorselessly,
Crabbed, in knotty sheets.

I am a powerless onlooker,
As she washes, barely conscious,
Upon those reasonless shores;
As she ventures without will,
Or strength,
Into those same starving marshes,
Into those same lethal mists;
Returning changed
And defiant:
Outwardly vigorous, inwardly helpless.

There is damage to her feet
From stumbling there,
From the stinging insects of the waste ground.
Crusts and lesions, bites and stings.
Wounds that become scabs,
Then falling leaves,
Which evaporate to sewer gas.

My paralysis is a nail through the heart.
And I feel the future dithering,
Truncating. Before me,
The beautiful machine in which her soul resides,
Spits and crackles
Shudders to a halt.
And by its slow ruination
Returns to the earth.

When the horizontal hold is lost,
Her body flattens to a slash of light.
When the vertical hold is lost,
She is a mote,
glowing,
that will take time to fade.

~ Drive Me To The Dogs

My wife has returned from a bunker in Preston describing her experience as 'horrible'. The unisexual fortress was full of war victims with sour lips, fused minds and twisted bodies, many of them driven to madness by the depredations of the Spores. She described the sharp smell of antiseptic, and the stress of suddenly finding herself living in close quarters with so many wandering, murmuring, twitching reminders of what the Spores can do to a person. During her time there, she barely left her cell, as her own condition was somewhat critical; she was frail, cadaverous. paranoid, in despair, and wholly unable to manage her life - and it was here that she decided that preventative medication was the only thing that would save her.

It is a pity, as Spasmo-Dromoran is a harsh drug that mimics many of the effects of the Spore-illness in order to counter them. Under its influence, the bones and teeth may crumble, the love of music may die, one may sleep for upwards of fourteen hours, and the manner of the soul may become infantile. During my own time on this drug, I produced reams of writing, of which very little was useable. It was indulgent and hopelessly naff - my internal editor seemed to have lost its critical faculties. I dare not tell you what became of my teeth.


My wife, however, has come home bubbling. She has resurrected the house from its squalor; she has upgraded the contents of Polly's lunch-boxes a hundredfold, and has already mustered the confidence to go have coffee with friends. The household aura has shifted from piss yellow to restful blue. In recent months, owing to her emaciation, she has been too embarrassed to take on work as a life model. [her primary money-making occupation], but already, thankfully, she is putting on weight.

I wonder how long this pleasant part of the cycle will last? What I dread are the moods which Spasmo-Dromoran can generate. The bad, irritable moods, which come just after lunch time each day. Jenny is the sweetest creature with a delightful nature, but Spasmo-Dromoran gives her an acid tongue that can strip the flesh from my bones. When that starts, the best thing she can do is have a nap.

But for the moment we are all seemingly well, though impoverished. Soon, perhaps even today, I will have to return to my book-selling on ebay, an activity that drives me to the dogs. I am building the ant-pinata for Polly's upcoming party. I am in the yard cultivating nuVanilla. I am reading The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. I am thinking about a snooze, though it's only eleven in the morning...

~ The Devil's Hexagons

I woke in the late afternoon and was shambling into the lounge room when a huge barbed psychic harpoon tore through the wall, winged Jenny who was reclining on the couch, and buried itself deep in the opposite wall - where the surrounding brickwork changed in its nature to become a form of highly reflective crystal. The Slammerkin were silent, their vile scaled bodies huddled together in fear.

The air became dishwater, the surfaces around me softened, beginning the process of decay. The Deadly Spores were in the room - and in overwhelming force. A blitzkrieg so powerful there was nothing to be done but ride it out.

The crystalline substance was propagating, cracking along the fault lines, disgorging more crystal. Rays of light lanced randomly about the room, in searing colours from an impossible spectrum, seeking non-spore substance, seeking flesh.

Already, Jenny was speaking in an aberrant voice, of things she would not have thought to say prior to the attack. Wearisome things. Ghastly things painted to entice.

Myself, I could not speak, and impotently shook my head from side to side. All efforts resulted in an involuntary spastic flailing that left me weaker and further disassociated. I reached deep into myself for the power to resist, but found nothing. I was buffeted on an angry tide of those most deadly spores, the elite among their kind, the long-range infiltrators, called by some The Nebula.

We were locked in a crystal prison. I watched with resignation as the walls made popping and fizzing noises, briefly became glass, and then were lined with dripping hexagons, honeycomb, each cell oozing a viscous tan fluid sweeter than the mind could bear.

And I gorged on that irresistible slime, forgetting the sweet lies coming like a black stream from Jenny's mouth, forgetting myself, and my purposes.

Few can prevail against such an onslaught, but fortunately its very ferocity seemed to drain - at least temporarily - the distributed power of the Deadly Spores. There was, thankfully, time after that to regroup.

The following day, we participated in a small war council. Organised resistance to the Spores is rare. There are larger entities claiming to address the problem, but on the ground it is almost always a personal thing. Soldiers must fight alone, and are often too psychically compromised to risk friendly contact. Their tactics, also, are often too private to divulge.

But from time to time there are small, brief gatherings where intelligence may be shared, strategies evolved and heads bent in desperate prayer.

We left the council and lay together for a time listening to the new P J Harvey album, White Chalk. It seemed like we had made it through.

For one day, I continued to believe that we had survived the attack unmarred, but tonight I saw dark clouds in Jenny's eyes and a cold alien wisdom directing her desires.

Spasmo-Nemigron

Each morning, I go out to collect my daily dose of Spasmo-Nemigron. This is my primary medication and a defense against the Spores. Sometimes, at the pharmacy, I meet other users of Spasmo-Nemigron, easily identifiable by their thin down-turned lips, haunted eyes and furrowed skin; by their arbitrary grooming and their often threadbare garments.

One of these ghouls, Lemon, I have known for a couple of years and treated as a friend - until recently she did me great harm.

This complex war has bred monsters, individuals who have surrendered wholly to the Spores and who make a living in their service. Amy encountered one such man - a Romanian - who offered her fleeting luxuries in exchange for the betrayal of her friends. The first victim was my beautiful wife, Jenny.

At this point, I should pause to say something of the Deadly Spores' physical nature. Their principal means of enslavement is a glistening compound - excreted in an unknown manner and generally referred to as Honeycomb. It is a foodstuff so enticing, so delicious that few can resist it. But once it is consumed, some fraction of one's humanity is lost forever and replaced by spore-complient non-flesh. Men such as the Romanian trade in Honeycomb and, having identified her as vulnerable, he plied Jenny with this pernicious material, forcing her into despair and unmanageable debt.

All this happened fast and outside my knowledge while she was away and explains her unpleasant manner on the phone and in person. Thankfully, she has struck back, freed herself [at least to some extent], and - because she is returning to the fold tomorrow - I am allowing myself a little optimism. As for Lemon, ought I devise some way to punish her?

The Grey Creek

I am doing all the right things; I am taking long walks along the Grey Creek; I am swallowing fish oil and regulating my intake of red wine; daily, I vitamize many wholesome ingredients into a nutritious drink - yet the workings of my mind remain sluggish and without direction.

In nine days time I am performing the role of Prospero in a production of The Tempest and I have a massive quantity of lines, few of which I have by heart. As quickly as I learn them, my mind releases them. It's like handling a slimy fish. There's no traction there. Yet, learn them I must. I cannot disappoint Lynne, the director, nor the others involved. No matter that it is a small student production. No matter that its standards are not quite professional and that there's no payment. I must yet prevail. I urge myself with the image of my wonderful costume - the shimmering silver jumpsuit, the towering silver boots... I shall be the cynosure! All shall cower at my majesty!

So, as I follow the meanderings of the Grey Creek, I mumble to myself, concentrating on my task. The creek exists in the buffer zone between a howling motorway and the dormitory suburb of Mt Waverley. I have known this creek all my life. I knew it before it was landscaped, formed into wetlands and filtration ponds, before it hosted at least five species of water-birds. When I was a child it was a pungent sudsy vein transporting vile substances through poisoned quagmires, bestrewn with blackberries and rusted machinery, to the Yarra and thence to the Bay. When I dream of the Grey Creek and its surrounds, they are always in this original state.

Soon, my wife will be home and I must show, not only strength, but compassion. She has been labouring desperately against the Spores, and has found the will to form a battle plan. It is a poor one, I think, for it relies on strengths I doubt she has - but some independent will remains and that is something to be thankful for. I'll wind up fifty and looking like one of your old girlfriends, she said today. A wise observance. Many of my dearest friends, both male and female, have been slowly mutilated in long and strenuous conflict with the Deadly Spores. The Spores treat their enemies and their slaves with an equal lack of pity - and it is not just the flesh they sour ...

>As with age their bodies uglier grow, so their minds canker ...

Then there are those who will never live to suffer old age.