~ don't get a drug habit

On my walks I’ve often fantasised about dressing down the dog owners who let their animals swim among the teals and ducks and coots of the Huntingdale Wetlands. Once I imagined dropping a brick on the head of someone I saw yabbying there (though my outrage turned to melancholia as I observed him: an elderly man with his grand-daughter, possibly a European migrant like my father (an excellent yabby-catcher) who may have been used to rivers and streams with slightly less toxicity than ours. Conceivably, the maudlin pair may have caught a microscopic mosquito fish, but the yabbies that once existed in this area now rest in peace beneath the Monash Freeway).

I’ve thought of marking the spots where I find empty bottles and cans with a sign reading;

A complete arsehole casually defiled the planet in this place

Or something along those lines… I’ve even visualised the mass production of these signs and considered carrying them with me in a pack along my route, but deep down, thankfully, I know that my time is better spent in some other fashion.

But of course I applaud the author of the damning reprimand photographed above, although I should really grass him/her up to the Apostrophe Police.

I found the neat little tableau on my way to 3PBS to record an interview with Ruari Currin who hosts Fang It! He’s putting together a special on the forthcoming Dogs In Space/Ears Reunion axis, so look out for it. I think he’ll also be interviewing Ollie Olsen and Hugo Race.

My thinking cap kept falling off during the interview, but I suspect I made a little sense. He asked if I had any advice for young bands starting out. The question took me quite by surprise. I felt old and superannuated. All I could think of saying was ‘don’t get a drug habit.’

I did another interview yesterday with Patrick Donovan from the EG [The Age]. This one was more directly related to the ‘Post Punk’ stream at the film festival, but I think the Sails of Oblivion show will get some exposure from it.

And this morning, I woke to the sound of currawongs high in the peppermint gum in the front yard.

~ the toxic shrub

[… continued from earlier post]

Returning to those improvised demi-drugs which a certain character-type may consume before he or she can access or afford grown-up drugs…

- Bulbs, for instance, [which I never tried].

- Pure & Simple, [which I'm ashamed to say I did].

- Nutmeg, said to be used by ‘drug-starved prisoners’ and sailors at sea in the absence of alcohol, [I never tried it, not seriously].

- And poppy seed tea, [which I did not try because, thankfully, I had not heard of it at the time].

My HSC literature teacher, Brother McCarthy, a furious, opinionated Christian Brother, [who was certain an unattributed painting in the school lobby was a Tintoretto,] was speaking in class one day on the subject of intoxicants. I can’t recall the context, though certainly he would have been forbidding their use.

He made mention of the shrub ‘oleander’. He told us it was used in classical times to induce hallucinations and my ears pricked up. I knew the location of an oleander bush. It was right outside my parents window.

That night, predictably, I plucked some of its deep-green, leathery leaves. How many to consume? Circumspectly, I decided on just two – at least for starters - which I minced up and cooked with rice and vegetables.

Heaven knows where Brother McCarthy got his information, but he should have been more mindful before broadcasting it. Or perhaps it was a subtle policy conceived in the deep and ancient vaults of the Order, designed to rid the Earth of people like me before they reach maturity.

I was lucky I didn’t die. No, really. Down the track, I learned that oleander was a deadly poison. Consider these snippets from Wikipedia:

Oleander is one of the most poisonous plants … contains numerous extremely toxic compounds, many of which can be deadly to people … especially young children … The entire plant including the milky white sap is toxic … in some cases only a small amount can have lethal or near lethal effects … Oleander bark contains rosagenin which is known for its strychnine-like effects … There are innumerable reported suicidal cases of consuming mashed oleander seeds …

What I experienced was wracking nausea. Throughout the night, I vomited green bile out my bedroom window as my digestive tract roiled and spasmed. I told my parents that I’d eaten something that disagreed with me – and that was nothing less than the truth.

So, as you can see, from an early age I sought out any and all forms of altered consciousness with determination and ingenuity. As my body matured, I sought oblivion as avidly as I sought out sex.

My parents weren’t big drinkers, but they had a humble bar, consisting of various spirits and liqueurs. Of late, through lack of use, this had been removed to the shed.

On a few occasions, I had purloined bottles of my father’s beer, but had never really succeeded in getting a decent buzz on. What I wanted was to get solidly, thoroughly spiflicated - so one night, after my parents retired, I procured an empty milk bottle, crept out to the shed and filled it with just a little vodka, just a little Drambuie, a little vermouth, a little Benedictine and so on – so that the theft would go unnoticed

I left the house and made my way down to the region my friends and I had named The Quagmire. This was a zone of clay pits, degenerate plant life, rampant blackberries and mounds of dirt and building materials. Through it meandered the Grey Creek, which at that time was stodgy with effluent, sudsy with detergents, and which infused everything in its vicinity with a sweet faecal aroma.

I chose a dreadful mound of earth and perched myself upon it.

As I forced myself to drink the monster cocktail, I gazed out on the wasteland which was to become the Monash freeway, my mind constructing romance out of the reeking desolation. At that time in my life, I did everything with a sense of drama. As I drank I envisioned myself as a lonely, alienated teenager, stark under the nearby streetlamps of Foster’s road, betrayed by the dull monotony of the city, an unknown hero wrestling with conformity, deranged by his own genius …

Of course, this time I succeeded in rendering myself legless. I staggered home, crawled in my bedroom window and vomited my guts back out the way I came. Never again would I be able to bear the odour of Benedictine …

But once more this subject has proven itself too meaty for a single post. I’ll be back with more on gutter-drugs before you can say Jack Robinson.

~ the legs of the mighty

Days pass. Little changes. I clutch at my routines as if they are all that prevents my fall into the abyss.

Since I’ve been attempting to correct my financial situation by selling on ebay, I’ve had to actively search for stock. Books. My wife is incredulous about my need to keep buying, when the house is littered with ziggurats of piled books. She doesn’t understand. Those great mounds are composed of incomplete trilogies or series, which I am waiting to complete. You get a better result that way. There are also an awful lot of books on which I’m undecided. They look like they might sell… but I need to do a little research… and rarely do I have time… What I really need is have a market stall to clear everything out…

Then there are the books I want to keep. Every time I’ve abandoned or sold my library down the years, I’ve bitterly regretted it. I feel peace in a house full of books. A library has an aura, it emanates a gentle bookish radiance. It is a great seam of potential, there for the realisation. I love scanning shelves, head tilted sideways, waiting for a title or author’s name to leap out at me. I love it most when the books are mine, and I know that every one of them was chosen for a reason. I love having so many books that I can’t keep track of them. I love being surprised by what I’ve forgotten.

But, of course, it’s also a burden. A great weight of material for which I am responsible and which I must keep in order. At present there’s anarchy. I have nowhere near the amount of shelving I need. My ebay stock bleeds through my personal collection. The kitten knocks over the teetering columns, and time turns my neat arrangements into kipple.

I didn’t mean to talk so much about books.

Currently, my wife has a debilitating virus. Of course, I’m suspicious, but my instincts are telling me it’s not the kind of ‘virus’ one gets from consuming too much [or too little] of the soporific honeycomb.

Indeed, she’s been reasonably controlled of late. I believe I have managed to expunge the Romanian’s phone number from her phonebook – though in the past he has shown a nasty tendency to ring out of the blue, just because ‘he’s in the area’. Thankfully, without his number, her ability to ‘just pop out for a second’ is massively reduced.

Strangely, with the easing of my own enslavement to drugs, I find it increasingly difficult to ascertain my wife’s state. I have hacked my way clear, I think, to another plane, where priorities and potentials are very different. Perhaps that’s why my first knowledge of any flare up on my wife’s part comes only when the problem has gotten out of hand. Mind you, she is now on a mind-numbing dose of Spasmo-Dromoran - meaning she needs a hell of a blast of high-grade honeycomb to become visibly stoned. She openly admits feeling little or nothing when she does it - so why does she do it? Such are the mysteries of addiction – though needle fixation and simple habituation I’m sure play a part.

But trust is a problem. Since I can no longer rely on my senses, I find myself automatically assuming the worst, assuming that any explanation is a lie, that any trip to the supermarket is a scoring expedition …

*

Depending on luck, Camberwell market can be a good place to find the kind of books I sell. I’ve taught myself to ignore the things I might be at risk of purchasing for myself, [ie stuffed animals, general grotesquerie], and concentrate on my task. It’s frustrating how prices vary. One or two dollars is the normal market price for a paperback, but there are stallholders who charge over ten…

Yesterday was the first time in ages I’d been at the market. I encountered two faces from Erin and Hendrik’s wedding – Kerry and Linda – working a small conceptual jewellery stall. Seated comfortably in the shade with drills, snippers and glue they do all their work on site, creating freaked-out accessories from materials sourced only at the market itself.

They were kind enough to present me with a necklace recombobulated from the legs of plastic superheroes.

~ night of the bullet

It was some time in the early eighties. We were at Inflation, I think. Or it could have been The Underground. I was with Gus, sitting on a staircase.

Looking down, through the railing, we could see a well-attended bar. I remember Gus’s excited voice in my ear.

- You see that guy buying a drink? The one with the bullet belt?

- Yeah.

- Those bullets, see them? Each one is full of cocaine.

- No shit?

Gus explained that the guy was a friend of his brother Darren, and had bought the bullet belt, complete with shells, from an army disposals store in the city, obviously thinking it was kind of cool.

Upon getting it home and inspecting it with more care, he noticed something fishy about the shells. They were, naturally, supposed to be empty, but these seemed just a little too heavy. He opened one to find a white crystalline powder. Then he donned the belt and went for a night out at a Blitz club.

I didn’t really believe Gus’s story, but I went along with it, on the off chance …

From the beginning, the substance in the shells was referred to as cocaine. Why it wasn’t thought to be heroin, I don’t know. Presumably the belt had been in service overseas and used as a smuggling tool. Vietnam came to mind, and it was heroin not cocaine that predominated in that region.

Gus and I agreed that we should acquire one of these bullets, and the belt owner surrendered one without a quibble. Rumour spread quickly among our friends that we had a bullet full of coke.

But we couldn’t open it there. We didn’t have the tools.

I think there were about five eager inebriated souls who wound up at Gus’s place afterwards. One was a girl called Luisa, who wore striped leggings. Either Gus or I was going out with her at the time. Many years later, I was walking up Acland St when I was approached by a private detective. He showed me a picture of someone's daughter. It was Luisa. I don’t know her parents ever found her.

We converged on Gus’s dad’s toolshed. I remember being wary of that bullet. Bullets could explode, I knew that. And we couldn’t be completely certain this one was not live.

With as much care as a party of drunken revellers could muster, the shell was secured in a vice. We remembered to face it upwards, so that none of the powder would fall onto the floor. I watched from a distance, from behind whatever shelter I could find. With pliers, whoever was in charge grasped the pointed end of the bullet and tugged it free of the shell.

Though we knew what to expect, it was still a surprise. Free drugs, as if from heaven.

The powder was very crystalline. I had not seen anything that quite resembled it, but my experience was limited, particularly with cocaine which has never been my drug of choice. I recall insisting that no one shoot it up, and on this point everyone agreed. Luckily. It would have had a poor outcome.

So, beginning with small sensible lines, we snorted it up. It was very harsh, sharp, cutting. The second time round it was worse, jagged. But, lo and behold, there was an effect - and the effect seemed to be that of coke.

Unfortunately, it hurt too much getting it in. Probably, it had lost potency over the years spent in its steel casing, and definitely it had been cut with something unfortunate. Gus, I remember, thought it might be alum. Whatever it was, it was bad for the nose. We all developed large unsightly scabs around our nostrils, and our nasal chambers were tender for some time after. And none of us ever got really wired.

I wish I knew the history of that bullet belt. Where was its owner when he had the bright idea? Did Australia ever have troops in South America? Why was the belt [or belts] abandoned? I imagine it was inexperience that led to its being cut with the wrong stuff. Over the years I’ve encountered much good gear that has been ruined in this way. [Consider the story of ‘the mud’]. Anyway, there were to be no more bullets. To our astonishment, the owner of the belt surrendered it to the police, who then visited the disposals store to make certain there were no more.

I gave up after a few lines of that cruel powder. It felt damaging. And the pain outweighed the pleasure. But others, including Luisa and Gus, were not so scrupulous. Their scabs grew in length and breadth as, over the following days, they polished off the contents of that mysterious shell.

~ kipple

Everything is aging.

The stacks of books in my room – ebay stock carefully sorted less than a month ago – have begun to fall into each other and form a large muddled pile on which I have begun to lay dirty clothes and newspapers.

Order requires effort to maintain. Entropy is a law of the universe. A system will naturally increase in disorder unless energy is expended to halt the process.

My car is spattered with deep orange possum urine and greasy road dust. I love my old Renault, but at present it looks as decrepit as I feel. Everywhere I settle, there is an immediate accumulation of semi-discarded objects; receipts, nicorette packets, paper bags, coke bottles, plastic doodads … all subject to the slow, steady and eternal rain of dust.

I look at myself in the mirror and see the same thing. I am unshaven, my eyes are rimmed with sleep, my hair is senseless, my clothes are random and speckled with unidentified pollutants.

Clearly, I have failed to maintain these systems. When I regard myself and my decaying environment, I feel an overwhelming sense of futility. I cannot imagine where I will find the drive to set things aright.

As a teenager, I attended a lecture by Quentin Crisp at Melbourne Uni. I took away what I thought was a pearl of wisdom:

Crisp claimed that cleaning one’s room or house was a pointless exercise, as it would merely get dirty again. He had found that after four years the mess finds a plateau and never gets any worse.

Writing this now, I wonder if he was serious, but I took him at his word. Entropy drives ordered systems to chaos – and eventually a state of complete and stable disorder is reached. I believed Crisp when he claimed that the critical period was four years.

But his claim was far from true; there are deeper levels of decay and degradation, dark abysms of filth and debris, nightmarish funnels of choking dust into which the chronically unclean may be sucked with ease. I pity the householders singled out by A Current Affair. The ‘neighbours from hell’ with the ‘filthiest houses in Australia’ … They would sympathise with my plight. Like me, they struggle to source sufficient energy to keep ahead of the laws of nature.

This slow accretion of junk that builds like plaque. Where does it come from? Some of it I do not even recognise … though I know my hands have placed it there …

Philip K Dick, in his wisdom, described it as ‘kipple’. The ‘chickenhead’ John Isidore in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? lives in the abandoned suburbs of a future San Francisco. His apartment falls ‘day by day into greater entropic ruin.’ Things ‘sag in mutual ruin, victims of the despotic force of time. And abandonment.’

‘Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around kipple reproduces itself … if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it.’

The first law of kipple: ‘kipple drives out non-kipple’. ‘The entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleisation.’

So, am I doomed? Am I already defeated in this war? Or will I find the energy to impose order on my existence?

Stay tuned.

* 25 March 1981 Thurs 7.00am

Christine has died of a heroin overdose. One part of my life has also come to an end.

My mother, strangely enough, is singing in the bath.

I am ailing. Since the Friday night she died, my voracious appetite has ceded its place to a cruel inability to eat.

My heart is like a man tensing as the guillotine blade slips towards his neck. It has fallen a thousand times since Friday.

I and Peter Walsh also overdosed – but we woke up. Craig Elrick, who procured the drugs, has been put to blame by Christine’s family. Perhaps they are right, but I can blame no one.

Scraps of my sanity survive. This entire experience is a thousand times more sunken in terror, in horror than my father’s passing six months ago.

I do the crossword – Yearn: to long – Promise: to pledge – Stir: to try and wake that marvellous heart, so warm between her breasts.

The smell of sex from that Friday afternoon was still with me on the Saturday.

Nothing I look at, nothing I do is without her memory. I cannot really face that sliding blade. The hair in her brush, which I have kept …

Clearing out my flat … there was a nightmare of memory under every item of rubbish …

So ends the happiest, most content and oblivious time of my life. There was a funeral, a wake, even a rosary. I can’t believe she’s gone … wearing a black bow, as she slumped against the door … Good god, what shall I do …? My love is dead …

I am very quickly reorganising my life. Soon I will have my house and perhaps the flavour will return to my food.

I’m so scared of ghosts …

mt waverley

∆ george + the decrepitude of the whale

~ please be warned, the following tale may contain disturbing concepts ~

One of the most significant girlfriends of my past – I’ll call her Blackie – lived in a ground floor flat in St Kilda. It was approximately 1983. I think I had almost moved in, but not quite….

Blackie was a notorious door-bitch, guarding the entrances of places like the Razor and Hardware clubs like a sour, permed Cerberus. She had a deep, commanding voice and a scathing wit that could send grown men sulking away, their bellies to the ground. Understandably, at this time, I found myself doing a lot of clubbing.

One evening, there was some kind of party, celebration, I have no recollection what exactly, but I do remember a small, sallow boy with a strange manner who seemed to be deliberately lurking, particularly in the vicinity of Blackie.

It was a particularly drunken night. A whole mob of us retired to Blackie’s flat, including this boyish creep. He wasn’t much more than a kid and he had a way of staying unnoticed, of not being taken into consideration. His interest in Blackie was plainer now, but I just didn’t take him seriously enough to tell him to sod off. He was too innocuous. I think Blackie thought the same and, since she was as utterly inebriated as I, was not really bothered by his feeble advances.

One by one, our guests departed, until at last it was just the two of us and this boy. We pointed him out the couch and went to bed.

What follows is only comprehensible with the understanding of how uselessly drunk we were …

Some time later, from the profound depths of unconsciousness, I sensed some kind of movement in the bed, and also sounds. There was something disturbing about it, but I did not have the wherewithal to wake myself up. Then suddenly, nightmarishly, things started clashing in my head. The sounds I was hearing … they were the sounds Blackie made during sex.

Then what was this motion beside me? The implications began to dawn on me. Blackie, the bitch, had taken some other guy into her bed without even bothering to throw me out first. But then Blackie screamed and everything became dreadfully clear.

Mindless with rage, I chased him out, cornered the pale snivelling gollum near the garage in the weak early morning light. Blackie was curled up naked in the bathroom, weeping. I had acquired a weapon of some sort. I remember exactly what I said.

- I’ll cut your fucking throat, if I ever fucking see you again.

To this day, I wish I hadn’t let the rapist get his pants.


*

This incident still makes me blood rise when I think of it. It had a pretty savage impact on my pride; I couldn’t help feeling I should have been able to stop it. God knows what kind of emotional impact it had on Blackie… We never really talked about it; we couldn’t bear to. I took solace in the fact that she was nothing if not resilient.

But I seethed. As early as an hour later, I began to regret letting him free. I wanted to get this guy. I found out his name, where he lived, that he had done similar things in the past, but I never found occasion to visit revenge upon him – in part because I’m not at all into physical violence, in part because I have difficulty with the very idea of revenge.

But then, while speaking with my friend George, the perfect form of recompense was conceived.


*

Richard Lowenstein was directing a film called Strikebound in the Wonthaggi area of Eastern Victoria. I was playing the part of a police constable and had occasion to travel down there a few times and stay at the famous Pines motel near Inverloch. George came too; I think he had some extra work, or was interested in getting some, or something …

While we were down there - probably lounging in the vicinity of the reopened pit Richard was using as a primary location, waiting for something to do - we learned that further down the coast at Point Hicks approximately eighty false killer whales had beached and died.

We began to examine the possibilities. These false killer whales were said to be smallish, not too much bigger than a porpoise. If we were to acquire one, bring it back to Melbourne, dump it in the front garden of the rapist’s family home [recall that he was very young] and threaten to call the police if he removed it… then would that not be a satisfying turn of events?

We decided that the concept deserved realisation, but neither of us thought it through. The sheer absurdity of the idea buoyed us along, but we never really stopped to consider the possible complications. We could have done with the internet at that stage. Those whales were huge, man.

Our only preparation was to scour the kitchen of The Pines for useful tools. We came away with a ridiculous assortment of knives and forks. We had something like twenty-four hours before our next calls. We got in George’s car and drove, not bothering to consult a map.

The drive took nine hours, about seven hours longer than we assumed.

We arrived exhausted at what I know now is the Cann River National Park. It was here the whales were said to have beached. Obeying some instinct for caution, we decided to conceal our implements. We each tucked up to five bread knives, carving knives and screwdrivers into our belts, and covered them with our shirts. The idea was that if we couldn’t get the whale whole, we would at least bring back a large enough part of it to cause our victim extreme inconvenience.

The path to the beach led past a ranger’s shack. There was little we could do but follow it and, inevitably, a small officious guy in a uniform and slouch hat emerged and challenged us. When we asked for the beached whales, he became suspicious and protective.

Incredibly, he asked us what we had under our shirts and we had no choice but to show him. It was embarrassing really; we should have had something more impressive than cutlery under there, but he took us seriously enough and sent us packing with a warning that it was a crime to remove any part of a protected species.

- They’re dead, aren’t they, I said.

- Living or dead, said he.

There was no point arguing. We returned to the car, stowed our tools, and showed our stomachs to the ranger when we passed him again.

We walked for fifteen minutes along the beach before we encountered our first solitary whale. It was too far. Our plans were dashed. No road access. Legal resistance. And far too small a vehicle. Though it was a false killer whale, it was the size of a real killer whale and …. I don’t know … maybe one and a half, maybe two tons of dead weight? What had we been thinking?

It’s skin was peeling away to reveal the blubber beneath and there was a noticeable scent of decay. It’s tongue was blue and so swollen it was forcing open its great toothed jaws. The whale was a sad and horrible sight.

George, as always, had his camera and disconsolately we began to take photos. I put my foot up on the whale’s back in a kind of safari-hunter’s pose. George positioned himself low, near the mouth.

- Shit. Did you feel that?

- What? asked George.

- Something rumbled, I said. There it is again.

- What?

- The whale’s not dead. It’s moving.

Startled, we took a good long second look at the carcass. It certainly looked dead. After an uncertain moment we resumed our former positions.

Then a huge gout of disgusting red vomitus flew from the whale’s mouth. Only barely did George manage to topple out of he way, avoiding the nauseating stream by inches. It had come out under pressure, a lot of pressure, there were dark clots metres up the beach.

So… is it alive or dead? I asked

The stench was almost paralysing, but we endured it long enough to finish taking photos.

On the way back to the car, we encountered the ranger again, told him what had happened. He nodded sagely.

- You know, people can be killed by exploding whales. If one of them really goes up, it can propel missiles of flesh twenty, thirty metres … at lethal speeds

We stared at him blankly.

- The gases build up as the whale decays, he explained. The blubber forms a strong seal that only ruptures when the pressure is enormous.

What if our plan had worked…? The consequences would have been even more spectacular than we imagined …

It was a hard nine hour drive back to Inverloch. And poor George was the only one with a license


*

As a footnote, some weeks later, my ever thoughtful friend turned up with a huge dead cream-coloured Labrador in his boot – thinking it might serve a similar purpose as the whale.

It didn’t work for me; in fact just looking at the dog made me feel like crying. George kept it in his boot for a couple of weeks in case it ‘came in useful’, but ultimately I had to help him bury it on Beaumaris beach.

It was so heavy, I remember, and we carried it in a sheet. In the furtive dark, we felt like we were burying a human body …

*

A further footnote. It was during this stay at The Pines that George locked on to Tobsha, [the erotic fiction writer]. She must have been doing some acting on the film, and a weirder partnership has never been consummated. My guess is that Tobsha – as was her way - was lured by George’s fantastic Lithuanian body, his heavy uncircumcised penis and, perhaps, his incontrovertible weirdness. The relationship lasted nearly a year and it is said that George even pops up in one of Tobsha’s popular novels.

George + The Decrepitudes - index

* 10 february 1981.

Over the course of my life, I have kept diaries. Sometimes in beautifully bound journals with marbled endpapers, sometimes on butcher’s paper. I start them, stop them, and start them again. Most I have preserved, and all, to my [almost] certain belief, have been read by no eyes save my own.

From time to time, I will include them in this blog. I’ll edit them as little as necessary, and provide an epilogue to put them in context.

I will begin 26 years ago. I am 20 years of age and in love.

*

February 10 1981.

It's nine in the morning; I am tired and disinclined to leave my bed. Christine has recently departed for her job. She is a nurse. I am contemplating what I can do with my day - perhaps paint? My bathroom's gaudy colour scheme is almost complete ... Perhaps I’ll call my mother and go shopping with her.

I am obsessed, to a degree, with my flat. I think that somewhere, deep down, I believe my mental and social state will improve as it improves. As Dick Hamer furnishes Victoria with Olympic bids, Art Centres and underground rail loops, so I will furnish my rooms.

Most likely I'll ring Lewis [Mick] and arrange a band practice, but first I shall certainly lie in bed and finish Deus Irae [by Dick & Zelazny]. Existentialists believe we may infer our states from our actions. Mine must be a ghastly and dissipated state indeed; unrelated actions leading to no common goal, executed with no conviction. But then, 'What takes place in love is beyond good and evil' And I am certainly in love. More intensely and more bewilderingly than ever before.

It has initiated some confusing changes in me. I am now a victim of such frustrating emotions as jealousy & masculine pride. [Not since my times with Margaret Waldron in the sandpit, have I felt driven to shield a girl from danger] Christine [Harding] is actually Margaret’s cousin and knew her well. Margaret is recently married. [She couldn’t have been more than twenty]

I more or less live with Christine at the moment - a new experience which has thrilled me, but also caused me to doubt. It's been so long since August 30, 1980 - almost 6 months have passed. So, thenceforth this shall be known as my longest and most important relationship…

… I have been contemplating writing a story, perhaps this diary is my way of getting round to it... But Terry has bookings already for after Cathy's return, and we're mixing down our tape on Thursday - things will start rolling again soon.

Last night I cooked a meal and my hands still smell of curry. I do things like this for Christine. My manners, my personal habits, are becoming vastly more sophisticated.

The day before yesterday, I came home sweating, and cleaned the whole flat in anticipation of Christine’s return from work. As I cleaned the fireplace, I continually glanced over my shoulder, hoping she would not come till I was finished

Where is the old scrambled, confused, palpitating Sam? He is still there, I think. Only he is happy.

But he’s neglecting his god-given gifts.

*

I can actually remember how good I felt the day I wrote that. And I am still trying to make women happy by doing housework. It is a technique that has rarely failed me.

The flat was in Milton St, Elwood. I moved there from the Berry St house immortalized in Dogs in Space. A friend, Leigh Hooper had been the previous tenant

Leigh was in with the Turkish Book Club who imported Turkish language books with the centres cut out and filled with heroin. One time, someone on the Turkish end mixed the gear with something brown that became a silty gloop when mixed with water. Strictly speaking, it was uninjectable, but that stopped no one. It became known as The Mud. For a time, peoples arms were covered with hideous weeping sores, Leigh’s more so than anyone’s. She appeared to have advanced leprosy. [Those interested in strangely adulterated drugs, click here.]

Anyway, the flat was on the ground floor of a once magnificent mansion. It was in pretty bad shape and the odour of Elwood Canal emanated from the sink, but I loved it. A gay couple lived at the back, and Troy was my immediate neighbour. Troy, I will speak of again, and soon. [He has recently perished from AIDS]. A warlock lived in the mansion next door and his crow could often be seen, perched at the front of our drive.

The band referred to is The Ears. Cathy McQuade was the bass-player. Terry Rogers, the manager. The fireplace had beautiful green art deco tiles. All gone



Diary of 1981 - index

~ 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...