white trash

old friends, Salamanca

going places

fast mover

November 2011

January 2012

enter sandman

'I can’t turn my head in trikonasana,' I tell Lee before yoga. My old karaoke injury is playing up. The one from headbanging to Enter Sandman. I woke it up again wrangling with a trampoline.

In downface dog my little finger misbehaves. It’s off at right angles.

‘What’s this?’ asks Lee as he walks past. I remember: This is from grade six netball, flush-faced and buried by the coach in wing defence where I can only damage myself. My fingers strapped every second week from catching the ball wrong. 

In tadasana, there's a familiar click as my right rib pops back into place. That’s not normal. That’s from getting drunk on brown spirits at Nicole’s place in year eight and falling down a flight of stairs to vomit a waterfall while the guy I like punches cones from a coke can out the back. I still carry the click with me, this and a sour face when I think of brown spirits.

My hammy frays as I tighten the kneecaps in prasarita padottanasana. 

Iyengar does it the right way.

Nobody should pull a hammy doing yoga but I did, years ago, in McBikram while shaking off a year of vanuatu pastries. This is my reminder of what happens when you stare in a mirror and exercise in 40 degree heat. 

Our eyes are closed, muscles exhaling before we slip into corpse pose. The room is still and quiet, Lee shows us ways to breathe. I think of old injuries – finger, rib, thigh, neck – and how they connect me to forgotten moments, when he’s beside me. ‘You can breathe better than that,’ he says. 

I might be distracted, but that faulty diaphragm, it’s also asthma. I feel panic, a baby’s gasp for breath, the trashbag who can’t find a ventolin with any juice left. A body shaped by years of shallow breath. I don't run, not even for public transport, because i might die, I decided years ago. Something else to be unthunk. 

Jess once wrote that the world’s conflicts are marked on our society by waves of migration, like the rings on a tree. I want to twist this phrase so it refers to my body and how its idiosyncrasies record where I’ve been. But her idea is too beautiful to tamper with.

hard rubbish

Photo: Pete Haydon

your mama

nine of ten

‘Yeah I said grace at Christmas. Thought of this great line, waited til the right time, then: “May god keep the wolves from the door and the women in our beds”.’

He holds his cardigan arms out and recounts waiting for warm laughter from his family. ‘Great, right? Didn’t go down so well – I got clobbered by all my sisters.’ 

‘How many kids in your family?’ 

‘I’m nine of ten,’ he says, disappearing out the front to deliver a beer to someone before taking the stage. One minute he’s a toddler in a 1980s lounge room, learning from a shoal of siblings how to hold court. The next, he’s that soft, dishevelled post-hipster again, singing break-up songs while his maybe-new girlfriend beams at him from behind a glass of red.

stacks on

seven lemons

p: everyone's got their price. what's yours?
k: seven lemons.
p: seven lemons? what do i get for seven lemons?
k: you get to give me seven lemons. a day. no, a week. make that eight lemons because one always goes mouldy. and they have to be organic.
p: it's not my problem if one of them goes mouldy. and you don't just get seven lemons, it's a price. you have to give something in exchange.
k: how about a reasonable chance of regular loving?
p: i want more than that. i want your car. and i want another car to pick up the lemons in, because i don't want to pick up the lemons in your car. and two boxes to put the lemons in. and $50,000.
k: how about we get a lemon tree in a pot somewhere north facing until we find some ground to put it in. and you can wee in it whenever you like. i'll wee in it too. and while we're waiting for the lemons to grow you can buy them and sometimes i'll buy them too.
p: and the reasonable chance of regular loving?
k: as long as it's organic, you get that too. but if we want lemon meringue we'll need more lemons. seven lemons is the bedrock.
p: you're a bedrock.

no frills spirals

going nowhere

me: i'm reading short stories by Maile Malloy, all these little moments and people trapped in time. there's no storylines, no big what happens nexts. i love stories that don't go anywhere.

nan: well ... i wonder what that says? i think i'd like the new house & garden.

four items

mate, it's only four items. before you leave the joint, you check you've got your phone, your keys, your wallet and your smokes. it's all you need.

yeah i'll do that from now on. so can i have one of your smokes?

licking the envelope

oh, i can kick shit with the best of them, but can i just say that licking envelopes is gross. i hate doing that shit.