Sunday, July 6, 2008

Happy Birthday Scott Spark

This happens in that quiet little upstairs flat where the air ticks with the restlessness of refrigerators and oil heaters. Little sounds float to the surface of the silence, popping like bubbles in the strange new lull. Benjamin Law is away. The space he has left eases out like oil on water. The flat is filled with the lack of him.

Scott Spark opens his eyes to that Benjamin-less silence and smiles into an unfamiliar quiet. Without his whirling-dervish of a partner there is room for him to stretch and listen and take his time coming to terms with himself and the world.

Downstairs, in the same building, there is an almost identical flat and I am in it. It is late and I am sitting at my computer and I am trying to get ahead with my blog posts but there is the little ticking of the oil heater and the small, lonely sighs of the refrigerator and my partner, sleeping off a virus in the other room. Our flats are the same, the upstairs and the downstairs, only my bedroom is built where their lounge room is and therefore, Scott Spark is lying above the very spot where I am shifting in my chair, rubbing icy hands, on the hot metal of the heater, trying to focus on the computer screen in front of me, when, behind the blank page, there is a world of pornographic images whispering up from cyberspace like pesky poltergeists.

I take a deep breath, exhale. Above me, minutes later, Scott Spark eases onto his side and sighs, a little fragment of my own breath drifts up through the floor, filtered by the apartments in between, my cleansed breath entering his parted lips, my wakeful heat easing up through his mattress causing a gentle lick of warmth to creep up over his thighs.

We are both thinking about sex, a synchronicity of thought and movement as we give in to our temptations at the exact same moment. Scott Spark shifts a little, reaches for the bottle of lubrication that has taken up residence beside the bed since moments after Benjamin Law stepped on a plane and left the country.

It is almost nothing for me to shift to another tab on my computer, just a quick point and click and a site I have saved in my favourites loads with a slow clunkiness, grinding with effort as the machine drags itself beyond all the other programs and applications that I have failed to close, past a littering of files clogging up my desktop. I watch the little beach-ball of death doing it's pained dance on my screen and for a moment I think this session will be prematurely over and I will loose all my unsaved work when I am forced to re-boot.

While I am scrolling through a seemingly endless array of 'Naked Naughty School-girls', 'Sexy Naked Celebs' and 'Shemale Sex Movies' I catch sight of one called 'Soapy Asian Handjobs' and I think of Ben Law. Thinking of Ben Law, I think about Scott Spark who is currently also thinking about Ben Law.

Ultimately I bypass the Asian Hardcore for the more ambiguous 'Hotties Fist Outdoors' because it is just too weird thinking about people you actually know whilst trawling for porn. That is exactly the kind of behaviour that repeatedly gets me into trouble, my fantasies tangling with my real-world tripping into my writing, causing all kinds of creative and interpersonal turmoil.

I click on the link provided and that little hiccup in my process has corrected the momentary intersection between art and life. Scott Spark reaches for the tissues. I am still waiting for my clunky computer to crunch over into the great cyber-outdoors.

All is right in the world once more.

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