Post Two Hundred and Eight: Dreamer.

I had a dream of you

we were walking hand in hand.

I wanted to say,

"I love you here.."

but before I did

I realised that I didn't know where we were.

Post Two Hundred and Seven: Like Patchwork.

For Loz. 

18/09/1951 -28/01/2002  

~it's your world now

  use well the time

  be part of something good~


People often ask me why I began a career as a mortician. My answer is generally satirical. I seldom acknowledge that the lure of the industry was an awakening of ideas and the beginning of my own epistemological journey.

Death. The unhinging of all of this that we are.

Before this gig I was working the counter of a successful cosmetic brand in a city department store. I studied full time and worked the cosmetics job four days a week, growing restless and disenchanted with the application of camouflage. My customers mostly wanted to impress a man or gain some power somehow, and although our quick exchange made me feel like I was giving these women a boost I was also painfully aware of the superficiality of my services.

One afternoon a co-worker threw a phone book on the bench and dared me to call a funeral home. There were two businesses in the city area. We'd been watching Six Feet Under at home and thus had begun a discussion on the practical applications of cosmetics on a corpse. Never shying from taboo, I called the first listing. As they say, the rest is history. They needed a mortician and I needed a challenge.

I'd seen a corpse just once before. Driving with my mother late one night when I was twelve, the head beams of our car illuminated a gentleman on his stomach, bloodied head still, contorted to face the direction that we were coming from. He was wearing a red checkered shirt and faded blue jeans. He didn't look mad or shocked or angry, he just looked like a very unfortunate splattered lumberjack. A police officer had ushered us to drive around the scene at the very time the covering blanket was moved for a forensic photographer to complete his work. I will never forget my mother's questioning.

"Well, what is it? What is it, for fucks sake?."

She was flustered by the commotion, but completely unawares.

"A man, mum. It's a man."

We drove the rest of the way home without any further discussion. How Bizarre by OMC came on the radio as we pulled into the driveway.

______________________

I was 17 years old when my best friend's father was killed. We'd been hanging about doing something teenagerish when she was called away to the hospital. I didn't see her again that night, as she and her mother had to make the very painful decision to switch off his life support after he was declared brain dead as a result of haemorrhaging. His death was so unexpected that the rest of 2002 was spent building this family, my extended family, a coping schedule.

As his death was a police matter, the road to healing for us was protracted well into the following years. There are many things about this period in time that I can't remember, possibly because I've blocked out those moments most painful. I remember his funeral though, as it was the first time that I'd attempted to understand tragedy.

I very openly sobbed through the majority of the service and I held on to my own parents as if the ground was going to gobble us up too. Through my distress, I wanted so desperately to keep it together. I was dizzy with grief, and I continue to acknowledge that the man that was buried that day often acted as my adoptive father at a time when my biological one wasn't always available. He went on a walk with his daughter and I EVERY Saturday morning to get the Courier Mail and buy us an icecream. He showed me how to cook a real english breakfast and bake the fluffiest of cakes. He took me to see my first music concert. He taught me what it was to work hard for every dollar you could bring in to the house. He ferociously loved his children, his wife, his bike, his life in Australia, and he never ever let us feel anything other than safe.

I will never forget the shock and the awe of that loss. The cataclysmic feeling that your world has been irrefutably changed forever. I know, almost eleven years on, that we think about him every day. This is what I remember every time I meet with a family who has lost someone in a similar tragic circumstance. Nothing makes sense and everything hurts, and there is very little that I can do apart from provide an honourable ceremony to make things...endurable.

__________________________


An accidental death. An accidental awakening. An accidental career. One big purpose.
These occasions, thrown together in a story for you, make me make sense.

Post Two Hundred and Six: Silent as the Grave.

I'm hypersensitive to sound. It's a unique and unfortunate side effect of working in an isolated and intensively silent workplace. I can't sleep if someone is doing the dishes or has the television on. I struggle to concentrate if someone is walking upstairs. It's as if being immersed in death during business hours makes the presence of life and living during rest time an overwhelming stimulation.

With this in mind, you can imagine that the particularities of share house living presents me with a few challenges. I can control what tunes I play in the mortuary and if I have the overhead exhaust fan running, but I cannot constrain my housemates to when they take a shower or watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Normal evening activities carry the noises of our bustling interchange and lately I've found myself fitting in an episode of mild neurosis before bed time. 

Luckily, I live with three of the most understanding and approachable individuals on the planet. They fill our home with a warmth and abundance that eases my upset. Even if I flip out, they'll be there to flip me back in. And then they'll have a beer and some pringles with me afterwards. 

Thanks friends. I love you guys, like real love but not the sexy kind. I'm buying us all Japanese slippers until I work through this. 

Peace. x  

Post Two Hundred and Five: Fragment.

I feel as though when you are in my thoughts I could be in yours.

A disconnected body of tender architecture. We might have made it from up here.

The Story Bridge at 4:30PM. The soupy, saturating sun that curtains across the buildings with a verve that speaks of you. Glass illuminated like the oceans.

This time of day.

I feel as though when you are in my thoughts I could be in yours.

Post Two Hundred and Four: Death Does As Death Pleases.

Death is the ultimate no no.

It's astonishing that life can actually exist in the first place, being that sperm and ova have to do that delicate little breakdance at the right disco to the right jam. But death can occur at any time from day one to day one hundred and something, and it's governance seems to be delivered like a round of apple bobbing. Do we play it safe or live theatrically on the edge? Death isn't actually weird, it's just the opposite of what we know and so we, as tiny humans in the big world, are a little scared. We're scared of blood and guts and anything hairy because they are things that could land us on cold silver tables.

I don't have any more answers than I did when I first entered the mortuary. All of the dentures and cotton wool and human waste has not shown me what it looks like behind a corpses stare, if it is a place to see or be seen at all.

Happy Third Birthday, Until it Kills Me. Let's keep looking.

S.

Post Two Hundred and Three: Home Is Where The Horse Is.

I'm sitting on my bed and drinking a glass of wine. It feels good to look around at my things and acknowledge, although admittedly egotistical, that my material possessions have shown enough value to remain close and slowly collect as do the wrinkles on my hands.

My walls are still largely undecorated but small and sentimental treasures have begun to emancipate themselves from their cardboard penitentiaries. I have a wardrobe and a bed. A lonely old guitar is propped upright, well behaved but under appreciated on a rack intended to house a family of five. There's an old suitcase that I've planted against a wall to throw some books on. My typewriter is beside my bed, and although far from being practical it serves as a reminder that articulation is my right hand man.

I had only just settled in early February before an old friend asked me to look after his home. Being full of positive energy from the move, I was quick to welcome another gratified opportunity. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spa, an entertaining deck, tropical gardens, a mahogany four poster bed and a well stocked and well hung adult DVD collection. For seven weeks I was to lord over the Queenslander, taking sole responsibility for the ferns and the fish and all of the fancy towelling that I could ever possibly wish to launder.

I've looked after homes before but there was something about this one that lent itself to calamity. Within a few days I'd forgotten how to take apart the pond filter. Within a week I'd over exhausted the jacuzzi. Within two I'd killed the plants. The washing machine died. The dog ran away. By the end of seven weeks I felt as though no matter how genuine my intent, I'd failed this crib. The demands of an opulent kingdom had overcome this honorary King.

It's fair to say that I over extend myself. I say yes to things because there's something organically good about being reliable. I thought that to be accommodating and adaptable and willing was to be a top notch citizen.

So no more house sitting. I have no experience in palm arboring nor do I possess a knowledge of orchid growing conditions. I can't remember to take the rubbish bins out every week. I can't guarantee that I'll dust the rooms that I don't step foot in. I certainly don't always remember when I ordered that Indian takeway. And I definitely can't turn away a gathering of beautiful young people desperate to drink champagne in a jacuzzi. You only live once.

There's a lot to be said about your own castle. Maybe, just maybe, this is mine. The horse is waiting outside and it's bloody good to be have four walls of my own.

Peace,
S.

Post Two Hundred and Two: Princes and Thieves.

When I was twelve years old I told my best friend that I was going to marry Prince William. I blushed in telling her, supposing that I'd be consumed by a sudden and furious celebrity exposure. Perhaps it was his downcast eyes and alabaster skin. Maybe it was his family tragedy that I found appealing. Consider this; Was Prince William the Edward Cullen for kids in the 90's? White, sad, historically significant and really really loaded?

(Ok, so I know nothing about Twilight, apart from the fact that the glitter spangled guy is British).

What I find interesting is that at one stage I felt destined to be a princess. The freshly-evoked feminist in me raises her brow in nervous apprehension.

I am not stereotypically lady-like. I curse like a sailor and dress like a perpetual camper. I stitch together body parts for a living. What part of Disney's 'finding my prince' phenomena did I not find metaphorical? I called bullshit on the Bible, so what in the fairytale kept me under spell? And lastly why, when no other personal qualities offer explanation to the attraction, would I deem myself an appropriate royal?

I was talking to my dad about my romantic failings recently. My sister was sitting with us at the dinner table, thumbing through pictures on my phone camera roll. I snatched it off of her when I realised what she was doing. What sort of person looks through another adults camera roll? I suggested that I might have pornographic images stored, to which they laughed. "What would YOU be doing with boob photos?"

It dawned on me. I've been treating the whole partnership thing way too seriously and even my family can see it. I'm making dot points so that I can beat down this illusion into simple anti-romanticised take home messages.

1) I've been waiting for someone to come and collect me in a motherf*cking pumpkin for sixteen years. Given, I've also expected him to shred like a demon and look like Johnny Depp. At any rate, this whole 'Prince' caper is a sham. It is no more right for me to uphold this expectation as it is for a man to expect his lady friend to be able to bake a goddamn Cherry pie).

2) I need to celebrate my boobs more.

and

3) My family are hilarious but I will probably never tell them about boys or bad dates again. My dad might do something protective like ask for their email addresses again.




Peace.