Sunday 20 May 2012

Ashmeko


A couple of days ago the door to my bathroom silently and irrevocably decided to become a wall. There was no warning, no creaky or groaning indication – in the night it was a welcoming portal to showery goodness, and in the morning it had seized up completely as if to say, “Hey, remember those communal bathrooms you’ve been assiduously avoiding since first year? Guess where you’ll be going for a while.” In the end, there was no fixing it – maintenance cut through the lock with a circular saw, covering the room with a fine layer of metallic dust, and turning my towel into a steel-shard encrusted piece of sandpaper. I’ve been drying myself with toilet paper.

I’ve decided to post a few of my writings from high school: partly because I was far better at writing back then, and partly because I am a very unproductive uni student and it allows me to procrastinate on what is already an ostensibly procrastinative blog. This will allow me to do all those things I don’t have time for and will never do anyway, like actually giving a textbook more than a precursory glance towards the shelf where it sits alone, dusty and dejected.
In this picture: books I never read 
and textbooks I'll never open again.
To the few that might be interested I hope you enjoy it. To the others that won’t, and who are currently wondering why they made that fatal error of clicking on this blog in the first place: my sincere condolences, may it fill you with the same feeling of joy and satisfaction that kicking a toe on the bedstead does early in the morning.

I’ll end this short entry by mentioning that a friend of mine has recently released a pop single on iTunes. As someone whose usual listening falls closer to progressive death metal and Finnish cello metal, I’ve listened to it several times already since downloading it yesterday: it’s an upbeat, catchy, and genuinely enjoyable release from a pair of ridiculously talented singers.

For the few that read this, and the infinitely rarer breed actually willing to take my music advice I recommend that you give it a listen: 'You and Me' by Ashmeko. 

Friday 11 May 2012

Kitten Kong


I’ve been down with a cold for the last couple of days. The sounds and things emitting from my mouth would be enough to make Ridley Scott squeal with terror, curl into bed with a stuffed xenomorph plushie and refuse to come out until the lights have been switched back on again. My voice has taken on the gravelly, straight-edged sound of a partial laryngectomy. I’ve been mistaken for Bruce Wayne several times in the street, and it’s becoming more difficult to keep my midnight vigilantism a secret.
Leaping laryngitis, Batman! 
I’ve taken a short break for coffee, which is as close as I’ll get to a ‘three day cleansing binge’ without first strapping my arteries to a vat of cucumber juice and taking all fluids intravenously. One day of caffeine withdrawal later and my voice has disappeared completely. I refuse to consider that the two events are not related, and will never, under any circumstance try to stop drinking coffee again. I’ve been surviving the withdrawal by listening to Meshuggah, which is aural heroin already; and Ministry, which is perfectly suited for a Junkie.

(If you get the Burroughs reference, well done – you’ve earned yourself a naked lunch at your favourite restaurant).

I’ll be honest here and say that this post is a little bit of an experiment. The previous blog post went a little crazy by any definition of the word which does not include asylums and dictionary writing surgeons. While I’m more than convinced that this will only be seen by the usual collection of aunts, incredulous friends and those few tragically misdirected individuals looking up ‘hoes’ in Google Images and receiving gardening implements instead, I’d like to say hi to any Redditors that may come by for a second look after running out of cats pictures in /r/Aww.
The biggest favour you can do yourself today is to
go home and watch all 9 seasons of The Goodies.

Friday 4 May 2012

Tamám Shud


It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve last written a blog, which I’ll blame on a series of exams and assignments, insomnia and caffeine induced hallucinations. Now that they’ve gone, I almost miss it, as the vacuum left in its absence has left me scaling walls in the hope that I’ll find something vaguely interesting stapled into the ceiling to save me from this well of boredom.

Which is where this blog comes in.

The thing I miss most from my childhood is the ability to read. By this I don’t mean being able to make sense of a series of orthographic glyphs thrown up on my screen and rendered unattractively in Comic Sans. I mean being able to sit down and consume, devour a narrative in a single sitting; to become so utterly absorbed in a fictional world of swirling type that your family begins to treat the purchase of a new novel with trepidation. This is an ability I have lost, or at least misplaced haphazardly in adulthood.

Today, the places I find time to read seem concentrated solely on public transport – on trains, on planes, at airports, and in cars. Places that are so utterly devoid of stimulation that cracking open a text of P.G. Wodehouse or H.P. Lovecraft (or anyone else that starts with a couple of initials, and ends with a portmanteau) feels like a complete liberation. For a few short hours, I seem able to dive into a story, and when I arrive home it dissolves into a mush of crushed up memes and amusing cat pictures.

This is all laziness, of course - there’s nothing stopping me from picking a book off the shelf and working my way through a Douglas Adams novel except my own lack of will and motivation. But I still miss the feeling of discovering a new book at the library, and finishing it a couple of hours or days later. I remember being denied a book at the library once in grade 8 – it was a Jeffrey Archer novel. The librarian refused to let me borrow it out, saying all of his other novels were fine, but this one she’d feel uncomfortable letting a 12 year old read (it had a graphic sex scene, I found a copy at home just a couple of weeks later ;).

A year later I wandered through the senior fiction section again, Jeffrey Archer consumed and finished. I came across my first novel by Stephen King, ‘Misery’, and wandered over to the check-out, fully expecting to be denied once more. He took one look at it, and asked me if I’d seen the movie, then recommended that I check it out. (“Blood, everywhere.”)

I’ll end this blog by giving a story about the last time I visited bookstore in Brisbane, Archive Fine Books. I was there with a friend from French, and we were browsing (she ended up going home with a steamy, Harlequin French romance - “If you don’t buy it, I will”). I chanced upon a hard-cover copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is famous for the stanza The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ/ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it." The spine was damaged, so the shopkeeper offered to fix it. As the glue was drying, she asked us if we had heard of the Tamám Shud Mystery.


The Tamám Shud Mystery takes its name from the final line of the Rubaiyat and roughly translates to ‘It is ended’. On the first of December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide. He was in top physical condition, dressed well - however, he carried no identification, and the tags to his clothes had all been torn off. The man carried no papers on him except for a tiny piece of paper which had been rolled and placed in a fob pocket in his trousers. It had been torn from a rare first edition copy of the Rubaiyat, and simply bore the words ‘Tamám Shud’. Despite intense media scrutiny and police investigation the mystery remains unsolved to this day.

TAMÁM SHUD.