Moth drowning in the shower. Poor fluttering little guy. Even if his whole life flashed before his eyes, it’s only gonna be like 24 hours or so, right? ‘Flew up against this invisible wall. And again. And again. Changed course & met the Sun in person, hanging from a wire from the ceiling. Ate some wool.’
Author: moseara
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frat boys
A man I had been chatting with climbed on top of me as I was falling asleep after a party. It was at my friends’ friends’ place in the Hills so I had been offered a bed. I woke up to find him fondling and grinding on me. I have never been so tired and so alert at once. I knew there was only one chance. So I tried to reach him. As he reefed the blankets down I called him sweetheart and reminded him that he didn’t want to do this, we had been enjoying a real rapport, we liked each other, and he was not that kind of guy.
He may not remember this, but I do. He climbed off me, and said sorry, and went away. And I lay awake the rest of the night and fell asleep at dawn. So this guy toyed with the idea of becoming a rapist but decided not to. Every guy can decide that, too.
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bicycle fascist
I was overtaken on the bike path today by a puzzlingly hostile man. He seemed to have a store of labels and insults saved up and was eager to put them to use. The sun had finally come out. I had ridden clear across town to collect my Ghanaian visa. I was thinking as I rode: honestly there’s nothing like crossing the first bridge to open between East and West Germany in 1989 in a sudden sharp hailstorm to make you want to leave the country for a while.
Later on all the errands and grocery shopping were finally done and as I was cycling home – the clouds broke apart and a glorious sunshine lit the local world. I slowed down and looked about me, enjoying the pretty sky. Indescribable light at this time of year, sometimes. A pinging from behind warned of another, faster cyclist. I veered wobbling to the left, defaulting by accident to my Australian road rules, and the other rider pinged his bell furiously, with small intermissions, four or five times over. He called out to me. “Can you pull over to the right to let a person pass?”
“I have pulled over to the left,” I said, “to let you past.”
He pinged his bell again though he already had my attention. “Are you deaf?”
I said, “What? Are you German?”
“No,” he said, primly, as he passed me. “I am a Swiss. Keep your German fascism to yourself!”
Fuck you, I said, reverting to English, and then the tail of my skirt jammed in the spokes and I shuddered to a stop. As I disentangled myself and set off home I was thinking how quickly we had skipped through the steps to the full apparatus: accusations of physical handicap, warning sirens, curt instructions, national identity and then – within a mere moment, it seemed – we were already arrived at the most unimaginative form of terrorism there is: Fascism.
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Ghanagain
The grandiose way of telling this would be to say, I am flying back to Ghana for the premiere of a film in which I played a small role. The truth is, I fell in love. This happened before I ever went there, and on the first night of my first visit, in January, we met. He picked me up at the airport and I thought, how terrible if I couldn’t find him among all the brown faces whose country was new to me. We had talked so much by email and had spoken of our whole lives. He said he loved me. I said, you can’t say that until we meet.
He sent me flowers and chocolates and wine, which arrived at my door in Berlin while I was in Morocco, and died. The florist lady was so touched by our story she allowed me to visit and pick out a fresh bouquet, choosing out all the blossoms I liked best. By video I showed him. “I love orchids and I love roses.” I showed him the field flowers I had chosen from her big vases: valueless to some people, but beautiful.
We lay down together. We’d still not kissed. I looked at him and he looked at me. Three nights later when he texted to say, I’ve come home, I ran barefoot down the alleyway to unlock the big security gate and flung myself against its bars. And he grabbed me and dragged me to him and we kissed passionately between the curls of steel, and I felt as though I had come home.
My first morning in Africa, because Morocco is different, he said I don’t want you to go out on your own. Wait for me. No fear, I said, no way: I’ve been travelling independently since I was fifteen. This was further back for me than for him. I went walking and at the end of the day and after furious adventures I came home, finding my way and proud to find it. Outside a two-storey building which stood out, a woman said, “Are you American?”
I crossed the road to shake her hand. “No, I’m Australian, this is my first day, it’s so beautiful!”
“Do you think you could fake an American accent?”
“I dunno,” I said, “quite likely not well.”
“Would you like to screen test for a film we’re making? We’ve hunted all round Accra for the right white lady.”
I went in and she took me through a room full of people in headphones. I can’t act, so I just tried to imagine how this character might feel. The director came down, who had written the film, and spoke to me about what he wanted. “It’s an American woman, a bit older, and she’s flirting with a Ghanaian man online. And she knows that he’s scamming her but she doesn’t care, she’s bored or… maybe a bit lonely.”
I stuck out my foot. “My sandal and your microphone – they look like they’re cousins.”
My hairy goatskin sandals from Morocco and the furry windsock on a big boom mic made them laugh. “So what brings you to Ghana?”
I said, “You’re not going to believe this…”
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winter blast
Try to work out whether I can afford to get back over to Ghana to see my sweetheart, I asked a friend: how long will this pretty autumn weather last? We know all too soon it’s going to get misty and grey and damp and bitterly cold – but when?
Oh well, he said: November is the greyest month. You could go in November and miss the Nieselregen.
Nieselregen is a kind of drizzly slushy snowrain that gets inside your spirit and rusts it out.
Or, he said, December is ok because everybody’s looking forward to Christmas – and at least if it rains, it might snow. But you could go in January. January is the coldest month.
January seems to me such a long way away, I said, in a very small voice. We were sitting under the trees in a quiet marketplace and had large beers in front of us.
Go in February, he decided. Because by February, even Berliners are sick of it and everybody just wants to stay in bed for the rest of their life. At least in March, the weather is still horrible but you can feel the change approaching. Like, ‘Just sixteen more weeks til I’ll be wearing my t shirt.’
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wasp joy
This summer as the world goes to literal and immediate hell using bushfire and corruption, misogyny and greed, several small incidents have surfaced in my own daily life that help keep me afloat. I found a new bar, hidden behind a drift of trees, late last night as I was pedalling home from some arduous and exacting work that never seems to be done. I had passed this place half a hundred times but a man was sitting outside, on a comfy chair, his long legs crossed and his concentration sunk in a book. I went back around and locked my bike and walked inside, rather shyly.
They had faded couches and long rows of wine boxes lined with glinting bottles. I sat down and took out my book in turn. To be in Berlin, and be not the only person on the train, or in a restaurant, who’s reading. I read for about an hour. It slowly grew dark outside. The bartender came and squatted in front of me: what do you feel like? I’ll make you something nice. She made me something nice, involving cognac and whipped egg white, and I drank it very slowly and then got up and closed my book and went over to the bar. She was rattling ice cubes efficiently in a steel cocktail shaker. Ten euros exactly.
Oh, then… I gave her the note and held out my palm. Rather than picking through it vaguely to work out what might make a fair tip I would let her choose: so I informed her by my cheeky but underconfident smile. She dug in and showed me what she’d found. “Ich nehm’ ein Euro,” I’ll take one euro. We both smiled and I rode home to the pair of large ears which rise from the arm of the couch these days when I walk in. I have my little familiar, my smallest companion, the cat who was left behind in Brisbane six years back and finally got on a plane. She cheers me, too.
Today I sat in a quiet streetside cafe under the late summer trees. A leaf drifted by as I rode home last night and it’s unavoidable that winter will come. My subtropical heart quails each time. At the next table a beautiful man was reading. “Can I have your sugar?” I asked, without thinking, and his smile quirked.
“You can! the only problem is,” he said, in German, “a couple of wasps have been making it pleasant for themselves in there, so… I still took it.”
I opened the sugar and peered. Three wasps, butts bent up and heads gleefully sunk in the piles of golden sugar, made me laugh. The waitress brought me their largest glass filled to the brim with tap water. A car went past behind me very slowly. The cafe has scalloped blankets folded now over the back of some of the chairs. We will sit outside as long as we can, before it’s so cold and grey we have to turn for home and then never run into each other all the rest of the long Berlin winter, which is deadly low and close to the ground, obscures sun and stars, and lasts eighteen months of the year, I’m convinced of it.
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I spoke first
In a crowded lunchtime cafe we were pressed elbow to elbow. The couple beside me talked and talked, while both scrolling idly on their phones. At last I turned to the woman, whose mouth was open and full of food, and asked her,
“Excuse me, would you please be so kind (in German we say ‘so dear’ or ‘so love’) as to swallow first, and then speak?”
Her mouth dropped open further. Her gaze sharpened. So I said, “It’s kind of gross. And I am also eating.”
People who lack emotional honesty are often intimidated by it, I think. They turned to each other and went on as though I had not spoken, except that the woman changed her habit. But the man must have been revolving it in his mind, like the visible food in her mouth. I went on with my meal gazing into the beautiful day around us and was startled by his hand on my arm.
“Firstly. You should ask more politely. And secondly. If it is you who doesn’t like it, it’s you who moves.”
“That’s polite?” I said, almost laughing. But she gained courage from his hostility and soon they were both railing at me, jabbing hectoring fingers in my face, telling me off as only Germans can.
“Look, if you want to have a fight about this, can you do it amongst yourselves? I’m not interested.”
This outraged them further and the woman’s chest was heaving. The people at the next table looked shocked. The waiter came so I could pay and asked, how was it. And I said, truthfully, it was ok, thank you, it wasn’t super like it usually is.
Five German gasps went up around me like balloons. The Vietnamese waiter laughed. “It’s because today I cooked it myself.” It is interesting to me and I sometimes experiment, how much you can frustrate a German by simply refusing to make eye contact – whilst jaywalking, for example – because they long to tell off the transgressor and shepherd them back into the fold, but lack the straightforwardness to tackle someone who has not spoken first.
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transmisogyny
Transactivism has usurped the struggle of genuinely marginalised vulnerable people and become swollen with the entitlement of spoilt male narcissists.
Those people and their acolytes are now telling women to shut up. They are trying to ban lesbians from Pride march because lesbianism excludes the male. Men in frocks now regularly threaten violence and rape and have turned an oppressed marginal culture inside-out. It’s misogyny unmasked.
San Francisco Public Library last month held an ‘art exhibit’ featuring barbed wire baseball bats painting in trans colours and bloodied t shirts printed I PUNCH TERFS. In a women’s online group yesterday I watched in horror as a man calling himself Natalie laid about him threatening rape and boasting about the size of his penis in order to compel us to ‘respect his pronouns’: ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Womanhood is not a costume to be donned by men who are so entitled they want the one thing they cannot have: to be female.
Native American ‘two spirits’ culture, the Black civil rights struggle, the intersex community, and now lesbians have all complained in turn about the theft of their language and struggle by white males who now claim they are ‘lesbians’ because they sleep with women. The ‘cotton ceiling’, chillingly, is used to convey the crotch of lesbians’ underwear that, like a glass ceiling, must be forced. Small children are encouraged to believe they cannot play with non-conformist toys (dolls, if a boy, trucks if a girl) and still be a boy, or a girl. It’s ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians, and corrective homophobia, in pink.
This homophobic misogynist racist insanity has turned liberal communities upside down and ruined countless friendships between compassionate people as transactivists insist on framing themselves as the ultimate victims. It is happening at a time when more than ever in human history we need to pull together and stand up to the terrifying ecological and social damage wrought by narcissism and power hunger.
Every time I post about this I get emails from women thanking me for having the courage to speak up. I’ve seen black women told to stand down and check their privilege when they object to racism from white, upper class, trans-identified males. Meanwhile men are never called TERF. It is women who are silenced: same as it ever was.
I’ve been called Nazi, a bag of shit, bigoted, and phobic because I point out that women deserve our own spaces and that young women, Muslimas, and survivors of rape and sexual assault are unable to safely share changing rooms with men. Convicted rapists are now demanding they be called women and transferred to women’s prisons. It is seen as more important to respect Ian Huntley’s pronouns than to remember the two young girls he tortured and killed. Trans-identified men like Hope Lye, Jenn Smith, and Miranda Yardley who know they are not female are now routinely banned from Twitter and women are becoming too afraid to speak. Meanwhile women are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘vagina bearers’ who ‘chestfeed.’ If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
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the Nazi airfield in summer
I will tell you what Berlin is like in the summer. As I cycle home from a far-distant errand I cross over an overgrown field. Near the hangars, part of the largest manmade structure outside the Great Wall of China, a thicket of neatly rowed white demountable houses has bicycles parked and pot plants blooming. These are some of the one in two hundred Germans who are now Syrians escaping the war.
Six police officers in flak jackets are guarding the asylum seekers, lounging in the afternoon sun. The other side of the wire fence a summer circus has set up its tents; then a rippled concrete path runs past and on the other side of that, a fake beach is lined with volleyball games.
Behind the volleyball courts people have built themselves a tumble of pallet gardens. All of this takes place in the old Nazi airport, which also hosts Berlin’s emerging designer festival in its cavernous and sombre hangars.
On an obsolete airplane bumper of concrete with fading scarlet stripes a woman in a beehive and three-inch stack silver heels is picnicking, with her shirtless golden boyfriend, silver-chested, with his skateboard lying by them. They are both in their sixties. Further into the field two young women are learning to kite surf on vast sails. The runways divide meadows filled with wild flowers and dredged by butterflies, because half the local taxes are paid by artists and the city can’t afford to mow.
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summer treat
The woman behind me at the supermarket checkout had a little pile of five caramel bars, two gossip magazines of the trashiest kind, the ones with really flimsy rattling paper, and a tub of flavoured yoghurt. She saw me looking and her brow contracted. When I said, “I’m so happy for you,” which in German is said, I rejoice myself for you, “that looks so delightful,” her whole face relaxed.
“Ja,” she said, and picked up the stack of caramel bars and hugged them. “It looks really great, doesn’t it.”
“It really, really does,” I said. When I reached my bike in the row of bikes out front someone had dropped a leaflet in its basket to advertise a yoga retreat on Corfu. It is colder today and the summer, only two days old, feels already threatened.