Post One Hundred and Thirty Nine: I Go There.

I'm leaving you, Brisbane. It's not you. It's me. I lack balls, you see.   

I have no testicles, that is a truth; but I also lack an aplomb, a surety about my viewpoint that a new megalopolis might lay bare. And one thing is for sure, people die everywhere. The inquiry into chutzpah begins; new city and new fatalities, yet the same perpetual questions remain about sentience and experience and pretty much all the shit that happens when people 'do life'. 

I'm now thus a wanderer with a knack for effortlessly natural mouth closures, reassuring back pats and meticulous bandaging skills. My resume is replete with the macabre, but the last three years have taught me above all else that I need to get out of my comfort zone. A life of convenience seems inherently vapid and spiritless, for me, for now.

 So to Melbourne I voyage, to Melbourne I seek! I wonder if the South is equipped?

Only time will tell.

Peace and mild hysteria,
S.

Post One Hundred and Forty Eight: You Make Me Feel Like A Wanker.

I hate the dating game. It's a thorn in my lonely side. Think about it with me, if you will.

I spend a lot of time cooped up into small, sterile spaces. I focus on and over clammy unresponsive corpses. Then, after eight or so hours I go home to 'decompress'. This down time sometimes involves baths. It sometimes involves wines. It sometimes involves Bruce Springsteen and a quiver of crackers and dip. More often than not, I think about how nice it would be to do/hear/eat these things in the company of someone else. I admit to owning romantic feelings.

It's reasonably difficult to meet someone that you'd like to spoon with when your money making activities involve aspiration, exhumation and repatriation. Moreover, it's problematic if you suffer from repeated bouts of sexually induced frontal labotomisation. Oh, how shit it is when you like someone and you turn into a mumbling and/or babbling retard in the presence of the very person that you'd like to kiss on the face.  I am like Stan and the sexy time target is Wendy, or however the South Park simile would go.

It feels like this disintegration of any personal social charm is worsening too, assuming that I had any in the first place. When I was younger I believe I was happy to make a dick of myself. I have learned a helplessness in my latter years like Scar from The Lion King, but I can't function well enough to imitate a crappy pseudo confidence.

I suck at the dating game. Let's jump to third base and buy a puppy. By let's I mean, me.

S.

Post One Hundred and Forty Seven: Nostalgicalidocious.

My Nan died. She was in that box, with me at her side. She faced the alter and I to her right, both of us with forced smiles and an inability to move adequately. I had a task to perform, and that was to arrive at the pulpit for the eulogy without vomiting or shrieking. It was a shitty deal, and my racing heart made up for her complete lack of beat.

During the service I couldn't stop looking at that box. I work with coffins every day. I fix the satin sheeting in them, I bang the nails into them, and I screw the lids down onto them. None of my experience truly prepared me for what it was going to be like, on the day, with her cold and very dead corpse packed into that small, shitty box. I wasn't unnerved about her cadaverous body (I'd prepared it the day before), but it was more the coffin in all it's gloomy jurisdiction that overwhelmed me. It was a symbol of containment, of barrier from us, that alarmed my sense of assurance.

It was in those moments that I realized that I could never wrap my arms around Nan again. Unless, of course, I was prepared to get on the ground in front of the congregation and wrap myself around the coffin like an activist around a tree.

I understand now, even more than before, how fucking weird death is. It's just so strange. You can be going along in your business and then BAM, you're denied of breath. It's uncanny and magical and downright intriguing.

So, with this first foray into burying my own blood, I feel nostalgic. I undertook the writing of my Grandmothers Eulogy as if I was Magnum, PI. I interviewed daily and wrote by night. This task was given the utmost importance, and I knew that if I could piece together her life with the right mix of colour, candor and integrity I would feel like I did a bloody good job. And I did.

Now I'm left to think about how I'm plodding along. Nan was a bit of a free spirit, and she didn't marry until she was 28. Free spirit may or may not suggest that she was a little bit of a coquette. Is it fair to place my timeline against hers, and see what she achieved and aim to do that plus a whole lot more? Am I a bit of a coquette? Awesome, if I indeed am.

I have technology, I have accessibility to the world, I have (relative) peace, I have an education. Let's go. I'm in. Death shows the benefit of life.

Through my Nan I can comprehend football, but fundamentally and most importantly through her I appreciate family and through her I perceive a most perfect love. Rest in peace Dorothy, you crazy amazing old bat.

 Peace. x
P.S. That's me (on the right) with my Mama and my sister Deb. They go alright.