Being human

This past fortnight has been one of extremes. Last week, I was so busy I frequently lost track of time. This week, I am doing almost nothing and I continue to struggle to comprehend that it is only Thursday. This mix has had an unusual effect on me – I am uninspired, unmotivated and disinterested. Rather than being awake, aware and observant, I am in a daze – now I know what it means to be human (I write this, and title this, with DFW’s This is Water (extract) firmly in mind). The two states of being have conspired against me and it has worked. My mind is blank.

If I exercise in the morning, I feel sharper – than if I hadn’t exercised – for the rest of the day. I wonder if it is true or just mental. I suppose it doesn’t matter if that’s how I feel. And on hot days I stand under the shower, progressively turning the cold water tap to the left and the hot to the right. I increase the cold, letting the water land on the top of my head or back of my neck then wind down my body. I do this until I’m breathless and can’t take it anymore. I step out of the shower thinking that it is appropriate that the cold, ice, glaciers, snow are white.

Also last week I found out my father has (treatable) cancer. When I got the call I began to tremble. I considered going home. But what would I do at home?

I don’t have a close relationship with my father, I know his character but at the same time he is a stranger, so it was difficult to know what the news meant to me. My gradual feeling was that it was all too much, too hard – and that I wished I hadn’t been told at all. Being busy, I got back to work and soon forgot about it.

I’m not reading anything that inspires me to write, or write better. But I think often of what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of hope in Virginibus Puerisque. Without this inherent hope, we would not be who or where we are.

Beckett’s trilogy is next in line – I hope that goes some way in alleviating the fog.

This morning I past cockatoos sitting on top of the graffiti-covered wall of the canal.

I use Lead Igloo to record and to play and to post writtens that I feel either failed or got rejected so many times I can’t reasonably expect to publish them anywhere. But everything that I’ve been working on lately I want to put ‘out’ there. What little energy I’ve had for writing, or in this case, editing, I have been putting into my latest piece, a short story. The main character is based on one of my closest friends, who I fear for – but I cannot tell him that. I wrote a story about him a year or two ago. It was missing something. Never did I feel like I finished it. The piece is a synthesis of that story and another one. It’s feeling more complete now.

Yesterday, I past a line of deeply tanned labourers, their elbows dusty and their boots caked with mud. Each of them wore a fluorescent yellow or orange shirt and sat on the concrete, smoking.

Some of my best memories of summer involve cricket. Of watching day-nighters on television in sub-tropical Queensland. We were on holidays. My mother and aunt sat on the balcony. They despised Shane Warne, calling him a ’sleaze’ and a ’slime’. Every time he got a wicket I ran outside to tell them, laughing as they groaned and hissed.

I’m worried these fragments have made this piece sound esoteric.

In the beginning, J. Alfred Prufrock made me want to write.

LI

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