11-year old Jamison Stone has shot a 476 kg wild hog in Alabama. I had no idea hogs could grow that big. What a wonderful beast. It will be made, according to the young hunter’s father, into sausages. Not that I have anything against sausages; it just seems, well, a pity to kill something that extraordinary.

“It feels really good,” Jamison said. “It’s a good accomplishment. I probably won’t ever kill anything else that big.” Don’t worry, kid, there’s still plenty of protein out there organised into ambulant forms larger than that hog, huntable either legally or with enough greasing of the right palms. Or, alternatively, just find yourself a feedee and cut his or her throat once weight reaches the desired amount (or to avoid prosecution, let diabetes and heart disease take their natural course). Or take up microbiology and learn to hunt very small things, the real nasty fuckers… (which leads me to wonder if there are scientists who, after developing drugs to conquer a microbe, keep dead samples of the microbe in acetate blocks in a trophy cabinet…)

Last night I dreamt I was taking Mikhail Gorbachev around the arts precinct of a city, which had a European flavour, to show him examples of a particular kind of large painting for some official reason that might have been tied in with national security. We were with some friends of mine and Gorbachev didn’t appreciate their antics, so he wandered off to look for the paintings by himself. I went into a gallery looking for examples of the right sort of painting, but there was only an installation - a grainy, purple-tinted film of a strange, doughy-looking white horse pulling a cart down a country road, which I didn’t stay to watch. I went out into the gallery gift shop, where the man behind the counter, an African, flicked a spitwad at me. It hit the saide of my neck, I said “What the fuck was that for?”, he got belligerent and started chewing me out for saying “fuck” in the shop. He enlisted the support of another African man who was just coming in the door. This guy was very aggressive and threatening. He started pushing and shoving me. With a sense of mischief I told him to keep going. He tried to break and crush my ribs, but they were hard like metal. When he finally gave up and pulled away he looked all freaked out and teary-eyed; he also had an erection. Gorbachev then came in, but he had turned into Sigmund Freud (without really looking like Freud, but he hadn’t looked all that much like Gorbachev, either). I can’t recall what happened after that.

In the next part I remember, I was looking at a funny little black and white sketchy manga about Ashuram, the rather attractive black knight from the Record of Lodoss Wars anime. He was on a train, sleeping. His chibified astral self had left his body and was going through various transformations - into a rabbit, then a baby, then something else. There was a storyline but I can’t remember it. Then the manga turned into a fancier, coloured comic, apparently by Neil Gaiman. In the dream I could only look at it with a computer interface, which let me point, click and magnify areas, but rather than zooming inor out it was just as likely to send me to another area. The engine of the train was sculpted to resemble a beast with tusks like an elephant - in fact, it was probably at least semi-organic, as it was eating through a mountain. The artwork was very detailed. The comic then turned into full realism, though the sense of it being a comic lingered for a while. Ashuram had disappeared and my viewpoint was just travelling through successions of scenes, almost like a 3D slide show, of very detailed, unfamiliar environments, all on the banks of a large straight river (I might have been on a boat). The landscapes were all large and towering - mountains and the like, and the time of day and the weather changed in each scene. Eventually the scenery turned into a city - immense buildings, covered with green moss, still on the banks of the river, rising out of the water. I thought with a pang that this was Ashamoil, though it looked a bit too prosperous and European, really. “I” (I was really just a camera in space) drifted away from the river and into the city, which had Melbourne’s somewhat jarring mixture of Victorian and modern architecture. I felt rather disappointed, having expected something more exotic, and then I woke up.

I remembered my dreams last night unusually well. In the first one, my parents were coming around to help me move house and take some things back to their place. I lived in a place with a big concrete downstairs and a big false wood upstairs like the sunroom at our old house. When my parents turned up my mother had brought their washing machine and drier and a stove and sink in a large enclosing cabinet. I went off the deep end at her for doing this, because I couldn’t see how my stuff was going to fit in their car and trailer if they had to take those appliances back too, and she got very angry and upset and said she didn’t want to be away from their house without them.

In the second dream I was back in Thailand, where I was hanging around with this Thai guy who got me involved in some sort of dance competition at a monastery. The dancing area was crowded with brown laminate tables and the competitors had to interpret instructions shouted by a pretty, overbearing American girl. One of the competitors, who I registered as Thai even though she was white and blonde, complained that my top was too short, although her top was very short too.

This segued into a third sequence where the Thai guy and I went back to my place. My dad was there, doing some work in the downstairs concrete area. He opened the door and I saw he was naked. Then I saw, behind us in the lobby, Hannibal Lecter sitting on a chair with his eyes shut. I panicked and screamed and tried to get inside, Hannibal went after the Thai and, I think, ate his brain off-camera, and then me and a couple of other people were fighting Hannibal. I was bashing a skull against the corner of a table. It wasn’t Hannibal’s skull, but the damage was somehow having an effect on him. Mercifully, then, I woke up, ending the whole silly business.

Oh, wow. There’s a “new” contraceptive pill that will make monthly periods a thing of the past. Called Lybrel, it’s “the latest approved oral contraceptive to depart from the 21-days-on, seven-days-off regimen that had been standard since birth-control pill sales began in the 1960s. The new pill, manufactured by Wyeth, is the first designed to put off periods altogether when taken without break.” However: “About half the women enrolled in studies of Lybrel dropped out, said Dr Daniel Shames, a deputy director in the FDA’s drugs office. Many did so because of the irregular and unscheduled bleeding and spotting that can replace scheduled menstruation.”

But, you know, years ago when I was on the pill, the ordinary old 21+7 version, the doc said if I didn’t want to have a period, just leave the seven sugar pills and start on the next packet of 21. Which made sense, and worked when I tried it. I think I had a tiny bit of spotting but it came regularly, once a month, so no problem there. So what’s the big deal with this Lybrel stuff? Inquiring minds want to know…

I went out to price a timber venetian blind today. Getting out of the car, I saw a station wagon with a rear window sticker, “Less talk more ponchos”. Going into the first furniture shop, straight in front of me is an “Eastwood” sofa. In the second furniture shop the music playing is “A Horse With No Name”.

So, message from the universe, but what? Channelling the Man With No Name would just sound like “[silence]…bang!…[silence]”, right? I mean, you’d get more out of Harpo Marx.

My in-laws want our bed, but not the mattress. I looked for a charity to take it, but the Salvos’ number was wrong in the phone book, St Vincent’s wasn’t listed and the Brotherhood of St Laurence laughed at the idea of coming around that day to pick it up, so I switched to ‘Little Engine That Could’ mode and got it out of the flat and down the stairs from the third floor. Reaching the bottom, I was so bushed that I couldn’t push it down the drive. I thought about how I’d like to lie down. And realised I had a mattress. So I put it down in the driveway and lay on it, in the sun, under a tree. My shirt rucked up and the warm sun and a bit of a breeze alternated in warming and cooling my bare skin. Clouds migrated across the forget-me-not blue sky. I could have stayed there a long time. But the clouds massed over the sun, and by then I had enough energy to push the mattress out to the nature strip. I said a formal goodbye. I’ve thrown out a lot of stuff in these few weeks but the mattress was the only thing I’ve felt sentimental about. A mattress supports you through the mystery and vulnerability of sleep, through sex and pillow talk and lazy Sunday mornings and private crying. I felt guilty about throwing it out and was glad me and it had those last moments together in the driveway. Dirtied, and damaged from scraping over the bricks in the stairwell, it was nevertheless gone by evening, taken, like things always get taken around here when you leave them out. So now it will be a witness to someone else’s night thoughts and erotic life.

If he felt a certain delicate—fussy was how he put it to himself—dislike for some of the beings around him, to be acknowledged also was, alongside it, something nearly servile: a species of admiration which placed him below them. Rather than feel elevated or strengthened by his suffering he felt diminished and weakened—chastened, he thought, like a dog which has been whipped and kicked into obedience. Something had been chased out of him and while he knew he was worse off for its absence there was a sick desire, which frightened him, to invite circumstances likely to knock out even more of his being. He felt he could no longer abide by the steps of the dance of life; therefore, the mentality which adjudicated on behalf of humanity judged him as unviable as a child gone wrong in the womb and discouraged his elimination. This was the acceptable, faceable thought which his mind formed, heard and understood. Harder to understand, more unpleasant to handle, was the fierce desire for the interrupted abuse to resume and continue until it succeeded in driving him out of the world and removing all markers of his existence.

Yet while he disliked, he also loved. He loved indiscriminately, not with his intellect but with, he presumed, his heart—but a heart standing on its own, stripped of all education so that it could no longer make informed choices as to what it would love, so that he adored, for instance, a ginger-haired man who held a teacup with extreme delicacy, as if a hair trigger sat in the bend of the handle. His shirt collar was too small, so that the soft skin of his neck swelled tenderly over it. He appeared to be one of those people who are worn smooth by life, even in childhood, and go unnoticed for their lack of distinction. You could safely assume that he had never imagined himself as a fascinating creature, but to the man by the window he was, as were they all: objects of an unconditional, impersonal love, which, thought the young major, who, having no civilian position, had not relinquished the self-definition of an officer, was as unsatisfying as it was overwhelming. He bent under it like grass in the wind, bowing at its forceful insistence. The aching need for personal love was unanswered, and resentment over that made the mystical experience of universal love painful rather than liberating, the moreso because of the circumstances under which he had come to be capable of it. Suffering, against which he had never stopped protesting, had been the agent of his transformation. He could not explain what had happened. Suffering usually hardens the person but in his case it had worked a cataclysmic softening which the rest of his being faced with horror.

The train arrived, as it eventually had to. He quite deliberately lit another cigarette and watched the intricate changes in the rising smoke; then his gaze dropped to the table with its cheap white china cellars, sugar bowl and ashtray. It struck him as a suitable altar for an atheist, the lifeless things on it invisibly luminous with the quality of repose, which did not, after all, require the notion of the eternal effortless mind as a frame of reference for identifying sanctity. Those banausic objects, in being typical rather than particular, and in existing in counterplay to the acts of ambition, were quite possibly angels. At night, it might be easy to see them darkened with the preternatural significance of the consecrated tools in a sanctuary, and feel affected, as if by something extending from the substratum of their artificial bodies, if one’s own substratum was in a sensitive state. Then the angel would show its other face, then there would be no choice but to kill it.

The rattle of the train had long since died away. He paid the bill, picked up his hat and went outside. Though it was an unknown town he was not surprised to find that he had a clear idea of where he had to go.

Over on The Genre Files a few people, me included, are shooting the breeze about fantastical fiction.

In other news: the new lino is down, the vanity unit is in. The plumbers kindly left the old pipes in my bathtub - those things are always so useful, as bath toys if nothing else. Thanks, guys. (Genuine thanks to the electrician, who wrangled the old stove down the stairs.) I spent half the day dismantling the stereo/DVD/digibox/video and labelling all the cables. The rear speaker cables had got tangled with the air roots of the giant plant, one of which had grown down into the crack between the sofa cushions and sprouted offshoots into the wrinkles in the fabric. In the end I had to prune the plant - which I was probably going to have to do anyway in order to move it.

The plant:

All the bending and lifting is starting to make itself felt in my shoulders and back. But I’m so glad I took up Tai Chi; it’s great for strengthening knees and I haven’t had a twinge from mine.

My in-laws have been great. Stu’s sister is taking a lot of our stuff, but she’s renovating right now and it can’t go to her place, so they’re serving as a halfway house for our stuff as well as storing a lot of hers. They’ve also been keeping me supplied with cups of tea and making sure I eat vegetables (my own food choices are veering towards cold tinned spaghetti and licorice allsorts).

Today they’ll connect the new stove (had to wait for the lino) and the handyman is coming around to give a quote on the little bits and pieces that have to be done. I might try to do some of it myself - we’ll see.  Maybe a little plastering. I’ve at least dealt with plaster before, even if only at art school, whereas blinds and shower screens are foreign territory.

Cannibalising something else and hanging a turn. The writing is too stiff or arch or imitative or something, but what the heck, this is more like brainstorming now.

Amor: part seven

They came home changed. That was said and it was true as far as it went, only that ‘changed’ was such a general word that in it there could be heard, already, the sound of brooms sweeping the unpalatable, hard-to-speak specifics under the carpet. For those of them who had suffered imprisonment there was added, to the burden of things seen and done, the stigma of capture and captivity and the memories of torture, starvation and humiliation. The exchange of letters with home had not been permitted. They wanted a homecoming but did not know how, when the day came, they would be received. No one knew better than they how the living move on with their lives, leaving the dead and the good-as-dead behind.

The young major, freshly demobbed, found that he was relieved rather than frustrated when a hold up on the line forced a stop at the town, McAlister was its name, which he noticed, on its freshly painted white-and-blue sign, as he noticed everything, the state of hyper-alertness in which he had existed for five years not having abated.

Strong sunlight, the clear light of the inland, filled the tea room at the handsome brick station, incongruous bulk in the one storeyed weatherboard town, a building of some grandeur, stamped with an air of confidence in prosperity, with lavish mullioned windows through which the sun flooded, impartial to the last. (He remembered the commandant’s eyes: you could lay your burdens down in those eyes, drown your troubles like unwanted kittens.)

A green corrugated roof overhung a white wall which rose above an unpainted timber fence with a lattice top decorated with a yellow merremia. A window was the usual abyss, with cheap, depressing lace net curtains. Between the fence and the tea room, on a square of lawn ten or twelve feet across, was the station garden, whose flowerbeds, beaming with cinerarias, carnations and freesias, suffered the domination of an inexplicable adventure in planting: in a square bed, gladioli surrounded a centrepiece of tall stiff ornamental grass with red plumes, from which it was almost impossible not to absorb an impression of monumental botanical tribute, perhaps to some station official who had served in his post with distinction, or, alternatively to some tragic soul who had suicided on the tracks; to a local celebrity, or even to an idea or theme, such as progress, or friendship, or charity, or, indeed, victory, which had apparently been won.

An embossed paper dado ran around the walls at the height of the windowsills and a complicated cornice supported a high ceiling of pressed tin. A glass counter, containing cakes which, in their elaborations of icing, looked, to his eyes, as if they did not belong in the world, receded into a sunlit infinity, a corridor of eternal day, which he, gazing into and down, envisaged, for some several moments, entering without regret or return. But as he placed himself there, with a diver’s sensation of trusting the water below his descent to receive him, it shocked him by burning and suffocating. Coming back to his body, he found that he was hyperventilating loudly in a state of panic. Acutely embarrassed, he tried to ascertain whether his runner’s breathing had been noticed, but no—no, he was unnoticed in the flood, the other flood, of Mr Talier permitting himself a second slice of the lemon sponge—‘Since we might as well call this afternoon tea—’, Miss Rusden’s ethereal complaints—the bread was dry, the cake sat too heavily in her stomach—Miss Gordonstove’s delicate cough, Dr Sleeman’s passionate encomium to bentonite, Mrs Rogay’s admonishments to Neville and Justine for the peccadilloes of rocking on a chair and chewing on a lower lip, respectively: all surveyed by characters, godlike in their elevation on the walls—the pretty young woman who drank Pemberton’s carbonated drinks, the cherubic boy who washed with Bluebird soap, the stagecoach driver who smoked Charioteers, the bulldog mascot of Maxol breath mints, the Jubilee ice-cream snowman, and others unfamiliar to him, and a which had the air of a relic, of a grey-haired officer in a decorated uniform, the type of man, he thought, judging physiology and expression, who you pleaded with yourself not to become. Where they would hang you, in the end—it was a diverting question; whether the gallows, or a provincial wall—or, indeed, one and then the other. You could, potentially, last a jolly long time up there, he reflected, embosomed between the Bluebird boy and Bayswater gowns, overseeing the consumption of teas and cakes, listening to the massed clinking percussion of cutlery, driven mad at times by a flapping curtain, soothed by rain—he lit the cigarette his nerves were clamouring for—the bread had indeed been rather dry, and he had not finished his sandwich, the remains of which had been taken away by the waitress. The bones of his wrist had something to say to the jacket cuff of his secondhand suit, too short for him, a donated item he had been given. There was some miscommunication and his hand shook violently, so that he spilled his coffee. It was not that much and not that hot, but still he had to grip the napkin until the awful childish need to cry was conquered, and once in charge of himself again he dried his hand and smoothed the napkin out. He wondered if the rest of life would be this stumbling—again, he saw an image of a child—stumbling after etiquette, the old thoughtless grace of your former life gone like a twig down a raging river.

So the guy comes to take up the old lino in the kitchen and lay down the new, and we get to moving the stove, concerning which the guy who gave me the quote for the lino said, “Oh, it’s just plugged into the wall, our guy can move it.” Well, what do I know about the back of the stove? The front is unsavoury enough; I have never wished to know about the back. Anyway, it turns out there isn’t just a plug in the wall, there’s a thick cable that attaches to the stove in a mysterious manner. I turn the stove power off at the fuse box, but the lino guy has had an explosive experience with disconnecting a stove and mine seems able to heat up with the power off, so he doesn’t want to touch it and I don’t blame him. I have to get an electrician, which I can’t find in the yellow pages because they are now called “Electrical Contractors”. Most of them don’t answer their phones. I find one that does. I ask him how much he charges. $88 for the first half hour, and $11 for something or other. So, $99 in all to get a stove that isn’t worth five bucks disconnected. After I pick myself up off the floor I ring around and find another guy who’ll do it for $65 (which actually doesn’t seem too bad, taking into account travel time). I am putting off ringing the plumber, who has to install my brand new loo. I can guess how much that’ll be. What I’m wondering is why did our parents and teachers rant on and on about how you’ve got to go to university when becoming an electrician or plumber, or a carpenter or a mechanic, would have been a much better plan. Do a trade and by the time you’re 25, if you save your money, you’ll probably have enough to put yourself through uni. Or buy a small island - and you’ll be able to install your own stoves and toilets on it, too.