Shouldering 2009

The audience will meet me when the book comes out. It will be published through Text Publishing. I love Text publishing. It will be marketed. I will trudge and talk and appear at things and on things. If it does well I will have three months of this and then I will be dropped back into relative obscurity.
Still, this is a book about me. It is a book about my sex. My physical sex, the furious vagina that I have described in such intimate detail. You know the scent and the texture of it. You know that one labia is slightly larger than the other because of an early fall onto the box of a speaker. All this you know or you will know when you read the book. I will stand in front of you all at festivals, on television, if I am lucky, on radio. I will talk about fucking and being fucked. I will talk about the times that were hard to write about in the privacy of my rainforest retreat.

I am prepared for this, and yet there was that unsolicited comment on my blog post that I have deleted now. There was that other comment that greets me every time I look at my blogger account. There are unkind remarks that paint me as a slut, or an old boiler, or a piece of meat that might be feasted on by any passing bogan and his pit bull. I will have to stand up and soldier on through all that. Then, of course there are the bad reviews, so many of them and I would be better off not reading them, but of course I will. I am already hesitant about my own abilities. I read a bad book and I think I may be a bad writer. I listen to a podcast about bad apples and I think that I might be poisoning my workplace. I remember how one or the other of them said that I was unattractive or too playful to be loved and I believe every bad word, somewhere deep inside, a splinter worked in through thin skin and lodged somewhere like a clot travelling through my bloodstream, waiting for a small pathway in the brain before it will unseat me.

I am prepared for my audience to comment on my looks, my weight, my brashness, my craft and find me lacking and yet, I know that I am not so strong that I will remain unaffected by this. I have built a wall of people around me to protect me from them, Anthony, Christopher, Katherine, and Chris, with your new strong pillar of support I feel like I might be ready to stand my ground. Too late if I am not because I will be naked in front of the world. I am shovelling the cement of care around my base and I know that you will all stand by me.

Here in a new year, I nod towards the sure fort that I have chosen, take a deep breath, and I begin it.

things I talk about when I talk about sex

Lubricate A then insert into B or alternatively C. Keep D and E handy in case you become exhausted by the mechanics of the thing. Repeat, perhaps, if you can be bothered. Refer to diagramme or instructional video if the thing runs out of steam.

Simple. That is all there is to it.

There are other things of course that I have spoken about when I was talking about sex, but here, I have removed them for the purposes of this demonstration.

things I find sexy

To start a book and finish it.
To sit in a cafe working on a story.
When my writer friends are recognised for their work.
To come across something beautiful in an unexpected place.
To see a small gesture of care from an adult to a small child or to someone they barely know.
A flower opening
Insects in the act of pollinating
fish and eels and earthworms
snail trails in early morning sunlight
The first mouthful of a meal that has been prepared with care
lying in the shade and looking up at the sky.
Fresh mown grass
Jelly, silken soft tofu or the flesh of a lyche
wind on my skin or a variation in temperature
vanilla scraped out of the bean
sticky rice balls with black sesame seeds
the scent of a rose and the feel of a rose petal on my upper lip
watching dark gather.

Sad people in other people's houses

Itchy in the world. There are people who know how I feel. Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Annie Proulx and sometimes you although only in your stories and not in the real world it seems. I move around the world and I see other people pretending. They mostly rely on cliche. There are conversations that occur and nothing is really said but everyone leaves and seems relatively happy with the empty words and the pat responses. It is how we learn to be in the world. Sometimes I play the game for a while until I cannot bear it anymore. Then the honesty returns and people stop and stare and change the conversation.

With you I am always honest. I have never lied to you intentionally. I have started as I hope to continue.

I wander lonely in a world of other people's houses. Even my own home is not mine, it is slowly being transformed into somewhere where I must be restrained. Clean surfaces. Pristine benchtops and nowhere for me to hide the crime of my clutter.

I retreat to the complicated honesty of our conversations, a shelter of sorts, and one that I have built up over a steady period of months. This is a place where I walk naked and won't be judged. I am not judged. I am astonished by this because I judge myself so harshly.

Outside the shelter of our conversations, outside the warm hug of my marriage, outside in the world of other people's houses, I walk, lost and lonely and misunderstood.

sexually aroused by your story

So I read your story and I am aroused by it.

It is a story of two brothers and neither of them spend much time undressed. There is a shower scene but I didn't even imagine him naked. There is one passing mention of sex but it is just a word without images attached. Still, I am aroused by the sense of distance that you have managed to capture so perfectly and by the slow stages of editing, each word removed making the whole thing just a tiny bit better, the blossoming to perfection like an overblown flower abandoning it's petals leaving something stark and lean and almost perfect. I am aroused by your potential to write more stories and perfect them before my eyes, a strip tease of removals that I will be gifted with. The idea of a novel by you makes me physically tremble. I read Chris Ware and I say, there you are, in the panels where there is nothing but the edge of a sleeping face.

And if you touch my work, if you undress the over-wrapped novels that I am so fond of, it will be impossible for me to contain myself. I may become annoyingly hyperactive. It will be irritating and I apologise in advance, but I am aroused by the thought of being edited by you. The idea of your careful knife slicing back syllables has me undone. Is there anything more intimate than this act. Is there anything harder than the anticipation? You have read a paragraph or two and I am ready to drop any adjective I own at the ground before you. I am ready to stand bare and lean and vulnerable.

I wait.

I shudder.

Stuart's underwear

Stuart's thighs drip sweat into the coffee-scented heat haze. His arms tense and strain as he packs coffee grounds, hefts the implement, pulls another thick dark shot of coffee. It is all clang and clash and he reaches for yet another short black glass and the scent of his sweat is acidic. Viral rabies snarls in his blood stream, gnashing it's cellular teeth, causing him to twitch and groan as he sets down a cup of coffee in front of a particularly insistent customer.

Somewhere beneath his shorts there is a damp layer of cotton, ripe with the exertions of a barrista on Christmas eve. The air conditioner has started to blow hot air, and the customers are worn thin by their chafing against family members they rarely see. Stuart's underpants prop up the hurly burly of yet another day. It is their second outing and he is itchy with the juices of 48 hours of stress, but it will be worth it.


Later, at home he unpeels the whole sordid dampness of them from his skin which has begun to chafe and scab up. He opens the zip lock bag, deposits the underpants into it, seals it, dates the little white label on the outside of the packet. 23 & 24/12/08. Christmas Eve.

He deposits the bag on top of a pile of other similar bags each with their own crusted over pair of underpants. People will pay good money for this. He shakes his head and slips into a fresh pair of knickers.

Ours is not to reason why, thinks Stuart as he cracks another beer.

religious holiday

The mono-religious holiday where there are more instances of domestic violence than at any time of the year. When more people in rural Queensland clean the family rifle a little more vigilantly than usual and blow their own head off. When people crash their cars. When emergency rooms at the hospital are run off their feet. When children cry because of their disappointments. When adults cry because the are reduced to children, when old wounds are ripped open and new ones are created. When people wrap overpriced presents in green and red because of a marketing campaign by Coca Cola that suggested that these were Christmas colours. When shop assistants snap at each other like tethered dogs. When sex is performed drunk and without adequate protection leading to a rash of september babies labored over in the heat of a new season. When husbands and wives grit their teeth at the oddness of in-laws and crack their jaws over the failings of their own parents and siblings. All this because of a biblical story. A religious fairytale that I have never actually believed.

I know I am all ba humbug and I know that people start to be nice to you on Christmas Eve and that is nice of course, but I am feeling sad about my family. A strange and haunting distance that is just underlined by other families who come together and act like they really like each other. I feel more like an alien at this time than at any other.

So merry Christmas to the orphans and the outcasts among you. Stay off the roads and don't play with weapons. Drink a little, but not with any gusto. Look at art. Listen to music. Read a book and remember that there are people out there who you have chosen to be your friends. We will survive the season and I will see you back at work after two days of public holidays.