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.

great fitzroy soy spill

pleasure state

There’s a 360-degree view of trees and sea, but pete stares at me while I read jonathan franzen on the couch. Then I catch myself in the kitchen watching him read the paper in the afternoon light – I half expect him to offer a running commentary on the world as he soaks up the news, but he doesn’t.

Each time I leave the room, a past love flashes into my mind with little reminders of the first moments of that first falling. Like writing my 1999 Christmas to-do list on M's chest in our first week together, then staying in bed for days, blurred, indelible. Or waking in the night to study his face while he slept.

For once, these rememberies aren’t crowding out new love. Like moving house dislodges thoughts of all the shifting seasons that have come before, I am connecting gently with the last time I really felt this.

We’re putting on boots to walk through the forest. Razorbacks call out like mutant villains from either side of the path and I’m waiting for them to charge out of the bush and eat our internal organs, but pete says they’re only marking their territory and I choose to believe him.

I watch our shadows touch on the great ocean road and remember M and me on the beach after swimming in phosphorescence, the moment I said, ‘I reckon we’ve got legs’. 

This is the state of falling in love.

battery samoyeds

i'm standing next to a three-time 1980s AFL grand final player. i've sunk three glasses of prosecco and all i've had to eat is a couple of bites of paté on toast so i'm a little graspy as we try to find some common ground other than pete.

'marvellous dimensions, this room. imagine when there were people living in it,' he says.

'there's tunnels all under fitzroy, a chef up the road told me. they run beneath smith street between all the old warehouses ands shops,' i say. i can hear myself barrelling into a high maintenance anecdote but the only alternative is silence.

'i'd say they all have cellars at the very least, that's how they kept things cool.' he smiles at me from beneath his handlebar moustache. there's still some goodwill there. i'm trying to contain the inner tripper but she's clearly keen to get a guernsey.

'we were eating dumplings at a place just up the road when the owner took a delivery of all this dog meat. big bags of the stuff they had to carry in on their shoulders. which was fine, but then he came over and felt he had to explain himself. "samoyeds," he said. "we're breeding samoyeds in the cellar, that's why we need so much dog meat." then he told us about all the tunnels underneath smith street. now i can't go past that place without thinking about all the battery samoyeds in the cellar.'

*silence*

'that sounds stranger out loud than it does in my head. i'd better check it actually happened.' 

i spoke with him earlier

It doesn't look like the anchor has had a long day until he throws to the pre-record.

an earlier version of him, more freshly caffeinated, maybe. the skin tighter under his eyes, his forehead softer. He's pinker at cheek, jowls firmer against his jaw.

Grilling complete, they cut back to the studio.

It's a barely perceptible shift, this passing of hours in seconds, but i can tell. at least one pigment cell in one strand of hair in that Lego haircut has died in the scrolling back and forth.

we get to jump around in time.

planning day

we should be multitasked across the validity of our function.

weinmeisterstrasse