Summer solstice, seems a more logical place to begin a year than January 1st, though Matariki’s starting to take off. December’s a month full of celebrations & summeriness & stuff winding down. The shape of the year in the southern hemisphere seems to have a more logical narrative shape than the northern, decline into winter then rise again, as opposed to peaking in the middle and then falling down towards the end. Not that I’ve lived in the northern hemisphere.
A lot of endings around now, the Matrix and LOTR trilogies finished so hopefully it will be possible to breathe again in Wellington. I’ve finished what I was doing over the last year, so time for fresh starts. Next year looks to be full-on for me, starting with writing a chapter for a book on jazz in NZ, bringing Foisemaster down from Palmy + restarting The Winter (a mostly instrumental band that I was playing in this year, kind of Derek Bailey meets the Dirty Three - got the name because we had our first jam on the Winter solstice exactly half a year ago on the other side of the yinyang), and then going into Massey journalism diploma. Hopefully I can use journalism to rewire my brain a bit; having to go out and research the outside world a bit could be a way out of the introspective cul-de-sac which I now know to be fatal (though no introspection is just as dangerous).
In the meantime I get to go off south for the Visionz festival and do some tramping. Not sure how long I should spend on this – I can get as much time off work as I want but will have zero income while I’m away and still have to pay rent on my Wgtn flat along with accommodation, transport, food etc so will quickly become an expensive trip. Do I dismiss the money issue as unworthy of bothering with and do the Heaphy Track or do I have a shorter trip and come back to get some saving done? I do want to get overseas one of these decades, though by signing up for a course I’m locked into another year of Wellington anyway.
Too late, I need to go to bed for work in the morning. Spent the last couple of days on the computer but not getting much writing done - reading articles by my favourite contemporary non-fiction writer Erik Davis at www.techgnosis.com and watching Ali G and Samuel Beckett on Film DVDs (John Hurt in Krapp's Last Tape and Julianne Moore in Not I are brilliant). Haven’t said what I was going to which was something about drug culture & capitalism embodying each other, save it for next time. Happy Christmas.
It’s been an interesting year, ups and downs more pronounced than usual and holding a number of surprises. I told my flatmate at the start of the year that things would have to be radically different from last year, and then the prophecy came true. I still haven’t left Wellington though I’ve taken a step towards it by getting a job out of town for the summer.
Dave at 22 – bummed around somewhat, finished The Marion Flow album which had been hanging around for a while, finished university and to my own surprise caught the attention of a female fellow student…
Dave at 23 – spent the entire year in a secure relationship, using it as a base from which to explore inner space. No fashion sense, no money, still living under delusion of imminent career in film. Became somewhat housebound, started vege garden, locking me into slow timescale watching the seasons (& hinting at affinity with nature). Doing good work writing – made first book (half the length of a novel but a solid chunk of work nonetheless) and intensely introspective solo album Mantis Shaped and Worrying. Unfortunately the combination of introspection and isolation from lack of funds became unsustainable. Smoking large amounts of pot. Girlfriend got film career happening, Dave got frustrated, wedge is driven between. Burnout over summer, fictionalised in story 'Overgrowth' (on website).
Dave at 24 – dumped. Emotional chaos in contradiction to logic of situation – she came, she went away; no net loss. Developed unnatural bald spot and first wrinkles in response to stress. Taunted by ex-girlfriend’s hard-partying lifestyle. Unpleasant flatmates. Loneliness. Cockroaches in kitchen. Survival through pragmatism – had to get back to basics since no longer able to handle complexity. Cut down on pot. Took up shitty labouring jobs, and was eventually able to drag self out of debt. Stroke of luck when offered temporary fulltime work over the winter at Department of Conservation – challenging, interesting, regular pay, new life direction? Bald spot went away (medical intervention). Good vibes from conservation work contrast with disillusionment with film. Finally found the right guys to form a band with – The Winter was born. DOC contract ended, period of return to unemployment in dirty flat. Decadent phase, pot-smoking again – finished off album Loose Autumn Moans, musically successful but tainted by circumstances. Dave went home one night with transsexual prostitute for unprotected sex, possibly picking up HIV or Hepatitis – indifference to own life makes all other achievements for naught? The Winter in hiatus for summer. Dave got summer job in Paekakariki, getting outdoors for field-work experience and good muscle tone, pay not great but OK. Feeling much better now, except for worry about the result of the Russian Roulette.
Dave at 25 – goes to get blood test…
http://fiffdimension.tripod.com
By David A. Edwards
(finished this one six months ago - think it'll ever get published?)
Get that fiery bloodsucking saxophone playing out of my skin! I exclaim as the band are leading me into the charge. I really pump and screw the reed and start biting down hard on it – the exact opposite of biting on one’s tongue. The crowd are going wild/home (delete one). This is or is not an is/not response. I feel the keys slithering. The saxophone engulfs me and I disappear headfirst down the bell, while my lungs are extending beyond, an actual slow-motioning of the rays being bombarded into it and translated slowed down into sound waves. We’ve got a really good and highly respectable bass player. Now, immediately this becomes a kind of social satire, formally acceptable nowadays as the stale breath of the new age lingers behind me. Once more, we find that we are finding the firm glances of the business round table somewhat more norbitantly received hatred than in previous phase.
It is now mid-Autumn .
The record’s coming out in June or July. It’s gotten to be this kind of monolithic edifice on which my outward attempt at social perfection is very important to me. We begin our melancholy race at the Easter Festival, except the whole European Spring Rabbit (ESR) imagery gets somewhat lost down here in the southernmost boondocks of asshole capital cultural world. Good one there Barney there me ol mate.
The whole heart of the problem was broken or upon weather to fade, and then the saxophone solos that I’m playing o that those thin walls would melt into my heart and that I’d show you the neighbours that by blasting through your nerves and the fact that you have an avant-gardist of very firm stature among you but would never be sufficiently credible in our particular church if you will. It is a temple.
Barney, who we never intended to give any opprobrium to, had recently come down with a cold and so we were there for the celebratory drinks round at the local parish pub. I’m blasting away on me tenor saxophone up there with Alfie Toad on drums and good ol Barney on bass, Barney by the way being a highly respectable musician. I’ve had three pints since the beginning of the set . Barney Boom Bass. I actually let the saxophone trail off slightly, since my respect for Barney suggests that the mysterious incipient hatred between meself and Alfie Toad was only an imaginary presence. When yr communicating with a fellow musician ye have to give them plenty of space to talk back. Barney Boom Bounce Bass. The refusal to follow this train of thought to conclusions. The playing music together is a socially acceptable public bonding among males. Alfie Toad flashes a shivery bone jacket over on drums. A dense flash rattle. A biff pow pang pong. Sometimes when I’m up here wailing my fucking guts out for you the audience on sax I feel like yr asleep before I come along to wake you all up, I sometimes get a very faux-messianic personality compound. I find that the saxophone is becoming encased in something, it is as though I have frozen at an impasse but project power and status nonetheless. But when’s the last time I made a new discovery? I have a very powerful and vivid memory of one time when I was practicing in the shower, with the taps on cold and myself naked while I made the discovery of a new high frequency range that I hadn’t been able to muster previously. That must have been six months ago. There’s a tension in my wrists which comes whenever I think about Alfie Toad, which is not so often these days.
Another day we might be out in the vineyards practicing out among scarlet moons, the whirling out constellation swinging me around by my feet, the breath dragged through my lungs. The high octave constellations in Bb minor. I counted five shooting stars during one particular performance to the moon, the dew sinking into my shirt as I lay on my back on the grass . Loose in out spirally tongue fluttering needless to say, down among dirt, two furtive little figuring gains out coupling in summer months beneath Sun Ra/Lester Young diet of Passover day severance. The downhill jog towards Easter, with the Golden Weather (GW) so-called abouting to fade & to fail at recapturing that extended-range of high techniquality. I keep repeating the same little riffs.
The notion of space in music is important. Since I have a depressive personality, and therefore feel like shit approximately two-thirds of the time, I try to get the notes out during the breaks – which last sometimes for fractions of a second, sometimes for as much as a minute or more – in which I feel OK. I feel OK when I’m not thinking about how depressed I am. I manage to distract myself from that once in a while. As soon as I get dissatisfied with the tone I am playing however the depression comes back. When it returns I stop playing, out of respect for the audience and my fellow musicians, and this creates space. If I were feeling good all the time my playing would become continuous, leaving no room for other sounds. The audience have learned to recognize when I am taking a solo, and to clap politely at it.
The curtains are panting more gently now as the evening swells down upon balcony -the writer predicts as he is frotting up against a mirror with a painting of his ex-girlfriend on it, that the grass which he’s been chewing on all day tastes kind of good, and he loves the texture of the shredding. His future plans amounting to a kind of vegetablism. Ah the shallowness of his tirades against shallowness. Ah the ruined corrupted little mind thinks of what a ruined corrupted little hellish existence of the rich & wealthy advertising executive must be. All the money & power & women cannot buy integrity he thinks grimly to cheer himself up. He will be integrated into dirt walls. His last email read “Hey help me buzzing out? Email panic? Reeling”
He’s calmed down a bit since then. An austere form of osteoporosis prose is a feeling that one is only fulfilling this one out of a sense of, on the whole, monetary imperfections on the whole to be monitored. Indeed the whole fundamental gleaming lit within me this sense is a sense of a whole other operational series (fundamentally non-functioning). The evidence upon which the osteoporosis prose is a one too many forms of fineward functioning mind time but within purposeful gleaming this time for once of this officance.
Hello glow to the fine time. The white within black yinyang imagery – it is obviously the white computer face screen, and later on mountain face slopes, following the dark part of the year. Conversely, there is a blackness upon the face of the summertime. Everything goes all African, cf Conrad Josef.
About all that he’s actually written is
Dream 19-6-03: worried about getting fat & unfit I start working out on gym equipment. Curious kids keep coming along asking questions & being annoying; I try and get rid of them, pushing them away and eventually threatening violence. Mr Pill comes along to punish me with martial arts techniques. I say his words are overly stylized & pretentious use of iambic pentameter and refuse to fight back. He starts throwing me around the floor – interrupted by alarm.
Meanwhile, the imperial bedroom gazing out over the melodramatic teardrop insertion at this point – the sight of the grocery store opposite never ceases to fails to drop out of his vision to be replaced by flowers or best yet austere wintery surfaces. This is probably more a case of having preconceptions about what one is seeing, and making it all fit to that.
Swallowing pills from a glass to hold off colds and worse. The winter-wind brazenly teardrops. Here, at the very epicenter of the white within black, he knows that he has no sense but to wait and await the revealing. But again you cannot look directly at it.
Chocolate lover experiences orgasmic explosion of shit inside mouth. Previously had been a dairy owner training 18-month old granddaughter to pronounce two-dollar-twenty. He has been eating far too much of his own stock. Since his wife left him with the mortgage he has been gambling and going to prostitutes far beyond his financial means. Bad news is now less than 48 hours imminent but he is not thinking about that.
Writer brings back milk from the dairy, having received a cheque for forty-five cents from the magazine, and pours it on the garden. He gets a spoon from his pocket and starts eating a breakfast of dirt with milk. One of these days there’ll be crunchy frost in it, but today there’s just a hint of birdshit and some weeds. Eating dirt is very good for the digestion. He briefly considers slicing off his thumb with a knife to see if it will grow back, but decides against it. He has calmed down so much since those long-ago days when the beach turned to glass. He’d written a great script about tragic love set against a backdrop of nuclear testing in the Pacific, his dad was one of the guys who’d had to look into the detonation and report back what they could see (used as a pretext). None had described it successfully, but he interpolated well – and then deleted it by mistake. There was a gap of some months while his vision went red. In the present day the writer’s jeans are getting wet from sitting in the morning damp. Told in the trodden opening down mailbox beginning of day, when the sun has yet to clear the shopping mall. The writer became a writer early on in life, when his bed some nights would twist and vibrate itself out the window and fly off with him on it. Told in the trodden opening accident damp; being announces itself early morning.
The process of writing is akin to asexual reproduction in plants, and is a necessary and apparent part of any writer. Conversely genital flower display. In the mean time a blurred flash photo found some thirty years hence will display a shallow worried man in a quick sideways glance to reveal to himself that there is nobody actually watching the paroxysmicals perpetrate an contradict an interweaven themsells until the whole contradicting flash eventuates. He does a sly half cover version of “Wanted Man” changing it to Ahm aargh wurrid man in sanitarium ahm a wurrid man in suburban home, ahm a worroyed boy in psyche wardie ahm a worroyed gouy in moy office…
Eye sore him lay a punch cries the bouncer out of his orifance. The fact that the punitive damage costs said against the necessary inadvertency face of adversity. It’s a great bit of film dialogue, full of insinuated meanings not the least of which being the I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know-that-that’s-a-false-accusation continuum. E said that E saw what was correct, and that E came up to the fro and caused violence, and whan in reality nay such thing had ever been appearantly happened within front of the crowd, and yet any me or any number of other selves to the whole point of that being would have done the same in any case. Bouncer’s testimony is presumably purchasable.
We are now driving through bus tunnel in the nighttime part of year. I follow her up the forking garden pathways. Note overtly sexual reference in Jorge Luis Borges (say 3x fast), otherwise slagged off as a bloodless intellectual by followers of the Henry Miller campiness, with whom we engage in shallow tirades. Toothache will now hit the dairy owner in six hours time.
A bus hits the false accusation roadblock and flips. Estimate damages wide of to the point. Two hundred and however many dozen was it lost their souls along the way through Barney’s bass-playing. A church had skidded off the road in the year’s first sleet.
Slowly, painfully he directs his first film.
Dan & the Pringlingmen are off against another set. They go in cocky and full of bombast right from the start, Dan overblowing more than in the first set. Barney now tends towards the forte end and Alfie Toad packs a splashing hit. Note the Cockney rhyming slang in that last sentence as the writer composes the review. He sits at the bar and regards the obligatory $10 he spends on beer for every $2 he gets paid as a necessity of being in this line of work. If he spends $20, to the point where the alcohol might affect him (as in putting on weight more than notable drunkenness) he can make $4. If he could spend a hundred dollars in one night he would be making $20 in one night for writing, and would probably also get drunk successfully.
Barney booming a lot as his bombast begins to barnificate the room. Griselle Toad, Alfie’s ex-wife is there at the bar quietly slipping strychnine into people’s drinks. She drinks meths from a high-heeled shoe, and smokes a joint laced with opium. Skunk perfume, and a thin mist rises about her. To order another round she does not turn to the bar but merely raises her right hand and the drink is placed in it. Axe murderer staggers past, having murdered his own thumb to avoid the draft and they make him fight on with a wooden thumb, the piece being read as a masculine rewrite of The Piano (Campion Jane, 1994). A whipping crew are behind him, as is the necessity in such militant cases, and the place rapidly becomes a whipping party. The bartender wields a cat o’ nine tails (each tail representing a life that the cat might have chosen, which would then diverge into parallel universes), inflicting it mostly upon the potplants and himself. The band set fire to the stage in a sudden bid for mainstream accessibility, and the bouncers start throwing fruit punch around and doing orangutan impressions forgotten since primary school. Smoke signals rise.
Writer is busy hiding in the toilets trying to avoid writing about the gig when the alarm goes off. Writer jumps to his feet and pants falling down around his ankles leaps out and starts waving his arms about it shouting Come and get me to the buzzing little demon flies buzzing around him and buzzing. Writer is now writhing & writing on floor. Partygoer comes in to use the toilet and steps across him. Partygoer’s shadow crosses writer’s face. Writer obliquitantly foreshadows preface.
The bouncer comes in and starts throwing writer shot-put style out the door. The best had of only once for this officance. That is to predict and to be predicted sold the within time fokes. Agree were all fakes. Enigmatically predict behind vermin. Inasmuch as he hadn’t intended found a fall down through stairways, doors. He is out on cold hillside shivering as the rain begins. He will eventually crumble from cold and go through I repent for I am militant phase .
The winter window’s beginning to open up. Likewise there is that cold moment exactly just past midsummer, when he perceives tentacled things reaching out to strangle him.
Depression no longer holds any terror, it is more a stagnantly familiar old aunt offering cups of tea and dispiriting biscuits. When once was the wet spray. When once was a forever how many times bring the sudden outburst of tea from cup, and there’s the way the drips descend so wonderfully slowly from face. He files a report on how the two reconciles do not compute. In his mean time and what a mean and scroogely use of time when he could be editorializing. A slow recompense for the damages suffered. He will find, and the undertaker agrees with him on this point, that the frequent and utter use of loss will tends to find itself beckoned & examining itself very closely on all the minutiae details. Edgar is over at the bar when the riot breaks out. He enthusiastically joins in although he could never have initiated any such thing himself. In the process he gains a new spleen.
The calcification process onlays its only self and woe for the fluttered wundrin. The glow from the parapet gleaming curtain keyboard bathed in oh for the radiant off-white computer screen. This piece is being written on a heavier model than previous. This CPU is Destroyer Class (stargazer).
Dan signs his contract. Dan will sign his contract. Dan has and will have on him hand in which the means to sign his contract. Dan’s artistic impulses are subsumed to the interests of corporate greed. He will not make millions, but he has graduated into the realm of three-figure contracts. He an Alfie Toad have had Artistic Differences (ADs) - one time when Dan is taking a particularly scintillatingly well-rehearsed solo, Alfie Toad starts fucking up the time signatures deliberately, imparting non-linearity.
Edgar’s grandmother recalls the sighting of tea being thrown but now exists almost entirely more conscious of the past than the present, so one’s life becomes progressively less linear as someone gets older, emerging out the other side of the black whole in reverse. She recalled that it chortled him. She immediately runs along on broken hip to the kitchen to get a cloth. She collects an armful of shortbread for young Master Edgar and throws out nieces n nappies n brews a mean crank of stew. E turning in tuning the past.
The past already behind me this present as I we pause and have in hand an very contradict. The equal an hopeful opposite sits opposite and gazes out from the opposite sides an the agony of the realization of the white with black being exactly the same as the black within white an the swing from one on an to another.
Let the side wubs fones in fance infance an every who they what was with ad one an one ants sudden wuft in was a fine would only infer in as many as what was fun. One would have won and what was fine and foreanforever. The skived off in logic. One way to way perfumed gets me negative rush. In a sleet of undifference rains. Too many people thank her. If a not an on then a needless needling neverness. Added on to too many weights. Perfect bearing led in captive tweaking on rope with non-alignment. Words are now carefully rationed.
Having now for some time been a Zelig (Allen Woody 1980). Well for a once of having had been a sign for anon prefix, struggle it. Feel a near management miss. Cruised in on the crime – there will perhaps be a need for purification, having just had a wasted pointless night and the useless morning as a cultural tourist, going undercover like spy but with only the most superficial of disguises, certainly no spy training nor mission objective. To be like the guy who gets into all the rugby team photos.
Trees get made into furniture in a parody of the way in which trees remaining in one place they are relatively permanent geographical features which can be used for sitting in, some more permanently than others.
He founds himself upon a cave of wooden candles. The brazier shape nets within twine. Earnest capacitance coming off the subroutines, a temporary grey little braincloud. Reroute the routines to detour around it and bypass the problem (cf Adams Douglas ‘It’s a bypass – you’ve got to build bypasses’). A contrary look up to the band that he is supposed to be reviewing, and sees the saxophone grunting in a highly articulate manner at the gesticulating drumkit, all very stern and middle class militant. Not picking up on all the disagreement subtext within the modulation to G.
And it’s sitting right there in front of. Blaming the outwardness castoff & played out, the onwardly vanishing gradedness curtains. An increasing difficulty of becoming theatrical, writing by numbers. Writing subdivided into noun and verb, the verb form being the one that causes problems, though necessary as the writing doesn’t appear out of nowhere.
I don’t actually deserve to come up with anything worthwhile writing at this point and so probably won’t.
Repeats the cold shatter. Ice from an glass graven images. Eye can still appreciate good rock in role he sez, Ear will be a band worthy of one’s attention. The transcendentalism of rock end rule now more something stated than felt. Having written at least one good review in a lifetime puts one in an obligatory position.
Head in hand upon head hand upon concrete land, he had them forgotten time as so to be stared for future remembrances even if it had to stand about at the exact same time that it had them over to many ways, too many ways for to wait for the hand stretching out and begging licked for to hand for to feeding being with a stomach hand, stomach itself being none the wiser. Hopeless hand having licked. Then it proceeds to the having been the having hand. The having hand itself is now locked away securely behind glass.
Perched up writing in tree, one of if not the oldest forms of selfhood persuasion, that one is running up to again foreign time sun. Hope hand will be agreed. Be it had a gone through one’s head. Sitting upon that branch then a wayward footing slips itself and he has to griplock onto branches. He will admit that hand worth and wane. He will handhold with the holding hand handling much more tightly for a few flattered seconds. Couldn’t even have often said the reluctance. Wayward footing logic. Green won were tonight an only not. Never hand nonethelessence. Obsiquation ended up on currents, need for none allowance ended up with a fired event. Flew to in fort & black & forth. Need the none will find for all intents had not to find purposes.
Say to nothing more. Said hi to an agreement went. Head the hide from this having nascent. Have the headroom left out. There was agreement hand neath with the many, too much was being in dependent on smiles throwing rocks.
The worstward
Going tonight flurried on den down on door. He invent a din hot in handedmeats as relief subtle wurridness wides. An true incandescent curridges itselp in cruns, and cruins crin hin.
An ecknowledgement rife with intrudes little error. Anaspeace enantangled. Grist was grey leaf griliffe glenifruant glyphs & signal sigil signing an execrated crease.
Prehifruant prayantention preyed in lots for an pran prentense. Prayan prayantortuid. Prayen yets prayan hand for an and harridgements herk haven.
Feels as much as hads contense. The tea leaves the cup in trajectory arc -
http://fiffdimension.tripod.com
1-12-03 The problem with electronic tools to make communication quicker & easier is that it becomes quicker & easier to say really stupid things. I should have my text messaging capability revoked given the way I've repeatedly used it to setback the slow process of reconciliation & acceptance with my ex-girlfriend. Since it was a non-mutually-agreed-on breakup against my wishes I'm always on the back foot - gets pretty tiring, I'm just about at the point of giving up entirely which will probably be a positive step. It becomes harder to see what basis for continued relations there can be when a) the relationship is now blatantly unequal (the dumper and the dumpee) and b) trust keeps getting undermined – the fantastic thing about our time together was that we trusted each other absolutely but by now that’s pretty much blown. There are very genuine good intentions but I have a strong tendency towards shooting myself in the foot.
What they don’t say in the ads for text-messaging is that text messages are the perfect medium for sending out the petty little bad thoughts that come up in the wake of an argument, which would be better left unsaid (or at least wait until the whole thing was put in perspective and considered sensibly). In this case the following exchange came about from feelings of bewilderment – our second to last encounter had been a fairly long heart-to-heart talk but the last one the barriers were suddenly back up. Worst-case scenario was that I was becoming the victim of mind-games – the hot/cold technique, first let him get closer and then calculatedly reject him. Hopefully this wasn’t the case, but it led to the following exchange which wasted sixty cents and several weeks of slow trust-rebuilding.
TEXT MESSAGE EXCHANGE
Sent: 'hope you don't hurt me for fun'
Intended message: It's true that you hurt me but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that it's non-malicious
Probable Received Message: Whinge whinge moan
Reply: 'fuck off you depressing fuck'
Consider possible humorous elements in tautology?
Sent: 'no wonder you cant have any real friends'
Intended message: You're being unnecessarily hostile
Probable Received Message: betrayal of a confidence (had previously admitted feelings of loneliness) + condescending implication that sender is the only real friend (grotesque arrogance & probable self-contradiction – friends don’t act like that)
Reply: 'I'm erasing your number. don't text me again'
fair enough - the last one was way out of line
Sent: 'OK, I still love you though. sleep well'
Intended message: Despite my painful incompetence in communicating I still care for you, and not just because I want to sleep with you again (though that too admittedly). I'll shut up now before I say something even more stupid, goodnight.
Probable Received Message: Psychotic stalker on the loose!
Not sure whether receding memories of great times and emotional bond in the past can justify the ugly post-breakup mess. Maybe it’s enough that on a fundamental level underneath all the bullshit we both still care. Usually I'm fine, and increasingly inclined to not want to bother. I'm a hermit on a hillside these days - keeps me out of trouble while I wait til January. In a way though the exchange had a positive outcome – ‘don’t text me again’ is not the same as ‘I don’t ever want to see you again’, and it highlights for both of us the inadequacy of texting as a mode of communication. I’ll just have to restrict myself to more primitive technologies with which to make a fool of myself…
http://fiffdimension.tripod.com