A Good Thing

You're going to die soon.
Too young.
Too soon.
Have you loved enough?
Have you laughed enough?

I think you should love
And you should hold
And you should love
And laugh
And laugh


So when it's all over
The ones left behind
Will smile.

That will be a good thing.

Dear Les Murray

A million years ago I had a fire in the belly. Eye of the tiger and shit like that. I thought I was going to be a successful writer and I was punching it, baby. I've just been talking to a friend who means more to me than she probably realises and somehow these documents from the past came up.

In case you can't be bothered clicking on the images and reading the details, I sent a story called Treading Water At Turtle Bay to Quadrant. Les Murray wrote back (looking through these rejection letters, I really have a lot of detailed, encouraging letters of rejection) saying he didn't want to go with the story. I sent the story back to him with a letter in which I actually tell him that I think he got it wrong... arrogant fucker I was.

Anyway, he did accept the next story I sent to him (Love Letter) and Southerly accepted Turtle Bay. But I just wanted to share my correspondence between my humble self and Australia's most celebrated poet.

Adventures In South Durras.

For once The Dreaded One and I escaped the city for a weekend that didn't involve doofing. We went away to a little bit of paradise on the South Coast called South Durras with a lovely couple we met at a doof late last year. It was a weekend of food and wine and laughs and late-night talks.

A few hours after arriving we had a bloody nice barbecue and many bottles of wine. Talked a lot, played lots of music. Got a lot of enjoyment out of two bloody enormous moths that moved in, and who we christened Herman and Hermione. No, I don't know either. Just the first two moth names that popped into my head. Typically, I stayed up all night, talking to Christine who also fell asleep when the sun came up. The other two succumbed several hours earlier. I wandered to the beach by myself, eating a sausage from the night before and drinking a beer. Took some ambient shots of the beach because it was so damned gorgeous in the morning light.

I got back to the house and where my late-night-let's-talk-bollocks partner had been snoozing was a small pile of hats. Mysterious. Upon her return we kept talking until the others got up and we drove to Pebbly Beach. This is a beach famous not for it's pebbles (there are none) but for its friendly kangaroos which come down from the bush and onto the beach. Unfortunately there were no kangaroos while we were there either. Not to worry because there were plenty of kangaroos back in South Durras. We did a lot of wandering and bird watching and thinking and drinking and it was very cool.

My favourite photo of the weekend is, I think, the one at the top here of the sign at Pebbly Beach. It's obviously the internationally-recognised symbol for the message "Please do not shoot the local marsupials in the face with hand-held firearms. Thank you."

Oh yeah - fatigue was clearly setting in because when I first interpreted the sign for the others, I said "The sign is saying don't shoot the wombies in the face."

They others kind of laughed and kept looking at the sign, and after about half a minute, realising that something was wrong, I said "What did I just say?"

"You said wombies instead of wallabies but we knew what you meant."

Cupping

My friend in the first image showed me how to do the stuff in the second image. Back whe we first met I never would have guessed she would one day be capable of studying such weird and wonderful things. I am genuinely impressed with her knowledge, her learning, and her desire to do good things for people in far flung places.

The third image is my first attempt at cupping when Chloe was not present. The flame was big and made me make The Dreaded One move off the rug and onto the fire-proof floor. Unfortunately the little ceramic cups were not concrete floor proof. Woopsie.

17 Pings Only

My Internet access just went down big time. At first I thought it was my beloved new lapppy, but the desk top also wasn't working. I isolated the source of the problem which was the new wireless router. Red light = not good.

Don't know about the rest of you but no internet access sends a chilling fear through to the very core of my being. No. Internet. Access. Fuck. Is life really worth enduring with no internet access?

I dug out the pieces of paper that claimed to have all the relevant information to end this hellish torment. Any of you regular readers will probably already be smirking because you know very well that when it comes to things technical, I'm a bit of an idiot. I'd rather not consult pieces of paper with all the relevant information on them but fuck man - no internet access! Dire situations demand drastic action.

Armed with my pieces of paper, I logged into the router wotsit on the big computer. I entered the top secret password and username and stuff came up on the screen. There was too much to choose from. It wasn't even colour-coded so that I could work my way through my favourite colours (yes I am bunging it on just a little bit... but as a tip to techies who set these things up, colour coding would be nice for idiots like me. You know, you start off with the friendly colours like greens and blues and work your way through to the angry colours as it becomes apparent that we are dealing with a very serious problem here).

I entered some numbers and sent a ping. I was quite chuffed with that. Ping indicated that something was okay but that still meant something was a bit buggered. I sent another ping because I liked the sound of sending a ping. Made me feel like Sean Connery in that submarine movie.

I ran some diagnostics which was even more impressive than sending all the pings I'd been sending for the last five minutes. This involved me hitting the diagnostics button and the computer doing something mysterious. I then attempted to analise the diagnostics. This involved me scratching my chin as I stared at some numbers on the screen and wondered what it all meant.

I sent another couple of pings.

I rebooted the router and for a short time it looked like the sun would, in fact, shine again. But nope. I switched everything off, unplugged everything, crossed my fingers and said a little prayer before hooking everything back up again.

More sadness. Another couple of pings and I stormed off in a huff to take a nice hot shower.

After my shower I returned to the computer armed with a whole lot of attitude and the light on the router was green. Green! A Happy colour!

Just goes to show, a nice hot shower can do wonders.

Justice Of The Peace, Man

So lemme get this right... the bank in another state I'm taking out a loan from wants me to get a statutory declaration signed by a Justice Of The Peace stating that I am the one and the same person. Welcome to my life. Oh wait on, this is my life.

It all started because for as long as I can remember I've loathed my middle name, and at some point in my adulthood I just stopped using it. But it does pop up from time to time and as a result on some legal documents I am Lee Mysteryname Bemrose (obviously it's not really Mysteryname... I'd probably keep that one), while on others it's just plain Lee Bemrose.

So everythings cool with the loan guys until the loan guys' legal guys notice the Mysteryname thing and go what? Could this be two people? Two people who look the same and live at the same address and who were born on the same day but are potentially two people? Hmm. Hmmmm.

So to put their minds at rest they ask me to get some Marvel Comics character called Justice Of The Peace (dunt dunt darn) to promise them that although he's never met me, I am one and the same person.

I pick a random Justice Of The Peace from a directory of Justices Of The Peaces (if only there were as many Supermans the world would be a much better place), and he obliges. Signs his name swearing I am one and the same person and I send it off to the imaginative solicitors in another state who have never met me or my Justice Of The Peace (yeah, he's my personal Justice Of The Peace now).

I try, but mostly I just don't get stuff.

Real DJing

Scared about the DJ gig I've dug myself into on the 20 somethingth of some month? Nah. Have to remind myself that I taught these guys everything they know.

Seriously, watch this clip and not smile. I dare you.