Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: funny how

  • this one time?

    I came home after a long day, festooned with groceries. The bench on the subway platform was occupied by two girls and their shopping. I said, “Excuse me,” in German, and they said, “Excuse me,” in German, and cleared a space. Then one turned to the other and said, in flawless Brooklyn Privilege, “So I’m like, ‘the person who cooks’ in the relationship, but one time? Eli was like, ‘let’s make spaghetti together.’”

    At the station where I climbed out two men were playing a complex and delicate classical duet on two squeezeboxes. I passed a man in my street who was carrying a double bass upright on his back. Its long neck sticking straight up behind the face made him twice as tall. I’d been noticing the rows of inverted and upright Vs of manspreading and women’s frequent shrinking in public spaces on the train, and I thought: sometimes privilege is visible; and sometimes, it is audible; sometimes it hoards itself, and sometimes it emanates.

  • salami baby jesus

    I may or may not have been down to the markets today to visit the man who runs a wonderful salami stall; he offers salamii (that’s the plural) of goose, duck, venison, and pig. This man has taught me that the original salami were loaf-shaped, like baby cheeses, and the familiar linked sausage format is an innovation. What’s for certain is that I bought from him a plump, nipple-ended salami powdered in white rice flour which he says is called ‘the little baby Jesus.’

    He cradled it in both hands and rocked it a little, to show me. I had on my Dad’s pyjamas under my jeans and was only waiting to get home to get really, truly comfortable.

    After that I may or may not have suggested to him, Hey! You should make a nativity scene on your stall every year – and have The Little Baby Jesus as your Jesus.

    I would, the man said. He was rueful. I would love to. It’s just that – some people might get offended.

    I was crooning over my plump swaddled baby, sniffing its pungent head. “Offended?”

  • late night and overhead

    Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys of the caravans walled in along the water’s edge. Overhead, a syncopated honking. “It’s very late… for gooses to be flying around in the sky.” The laughter escapes between my closed lips. “Oh,” he says self-consciously – “I mean geeses.”

  • buy for me

    Young, scruffy, insouciant Indian boy is walking by the greasy canal with his parents. Evidently he’s been showing them Berlin. Lifting his shapeless hand in a vague gesture towards the old, carved terraces he says:

    If I were ever rich –

    the slight rush of his r’s making it clear he quite expects this to happen, doesn’t expect it to be all that difficult –

    and they pass on, his parents well-heeled and looking rather bored as though Berlin in its filthy grey boilersuit does not impress them, barely glancing at the costly apartment houses he has chosen out for them to buy for him.

  • Trump, the Musical

    Some lines from a musical we are idly writing, online, a bunch of strangers, in response to one of the many memes celebrating the second candidate’s atrocity, which says:

    super callous fragile racist extra braggadocious

    Which I realise also works as: super callous fragile ego sexist braggadocious

    So far we have:

    ….his ideas and attitudes are really quite atrocious, by Caroline McDonald

    …T’wards women and minorities he’s really quite ferocious, by Louise Gowing

    …even if he were a child you couldn’t say he was precocious… by me

    …if you say it loud enough he really is atrocious, by Steve Mcleod

    and

    superfragile egomonster expediting crisis! which ruins the rhyme, also by me

    All together now!

    Phew. Writing a musical is hard work. Who knew?

  • good reef

    I spend a lot of time in this household running downstairs to close the door and just breathe. I duck out to coffee houses and get sane again. I spend time among the trees, or failing that, among the pot plants. This morning a friend of my father’s, a gracious fellow whom Dad first met when they were seated side by side in the first year of Norman Park State School, came to visit and I made him some coffee and offered a slice of the cake another of their friends had brought. I was thinking how lovely it is that my folks’ friends come to visit even though Dad falls asleep on them, how they have friendships stretching back decades from living thirty years in the same place. My father went to school and grew up here, and has friendships going back to childhood. I was thinking how this will not be the case when I am 77. We had a fascinating chat about Sir John Monash, whose biography this man has been reading, and about the anti-Semitism in Melbourne that kept Monash out of the Melbourne Club. Dad’s friend volunteered the view that Murdoch, an enemy of Monash, even back in those days acted like he ran the world. I said how this was in evidence every time we have an election. I was thinking of the photos of Tony Abbott clasping a puppy, etc, paired with a front page picture of his rival Kevin Rudd with mouth half open which was titled, “Does This Man Ever Shut Up?”

    This led very quickly to a lecture from my father’s friend about the errors of environmentalism, which he perceives as a kind of conspiracy theory. He has holidayed recently on Heron Island and says grandly, “Heron Island is just as good as it was in the 1960s.” Oh good, I said: so all those acres of coral bleaching must just be a bit of a furphy. Well, he said: 7000 years ago the whole Barrier Reef was above water. Now it’s not so bad as that, is it? “Oh no,” I agreed, picking up my cup of tea, my notebooks and my cat and standing up to go. I kissed him on the cheek. “All just a big natural cycle.”

    These natural cycles are all but overwhelming me at the moment. The slow sleepy death of my father, whose eyes are rarely open and who will take no nourishment but ice cream and milk. The frantic collisions of my mother with a series of administrative chores which she sets herself, needing to gain back some form of control over her life, and which subsume her grief and dread, I think, driving her into a frenzy of impatience and a series of spills of papers and pens onto the floor as she is kept waiting on the phone line by the bank, the electricity company, the phone people themselves. Our larger darker howling emotions. It’s hard to live in them. It’s harder to live alongside them… I feel.

  • be the change you want to see in the word

    My German sweetheart and I argue about my right to make up new words in his language. It’s not that he’s possessive about the tongue, it’s just reflexive conditioning, embedded in even the most free-thinking German: Das machen wir einfach nicht. Das machen wir einfach nicht is a gem I have preened and polished since I first heard it and it’s become a watchword for me, one I use to tease him the way that he used to tease me, during Tony Abbott’s reign, by shouting whenever someone cut us off in traffic or nipped past us in a queue, Team Australia! It was given to me by the outraged waitress of a swanky cafe in the centre of town, where I’d ventured some years back to do something exhausting and invasive. I decided to reward myself by having coffee and a piece of cake in this gorgeous airy cafe space under an awning, because coffee and cake in a swanky place costs little more than cake and coffee in a greasy spoon – as opposed to, say, two dinners.

    The waiter took my order and took his time getting back to me. I could see him sitting yarning with the barista behind the big Gaggia. When he finally showed up he brought a coffee that was different in every respect to what I had ordered and his thumb was hooked over the cake plate. I looked at what he had set down and thought: You know what? I’m just not even going to argue, it is too much energy; I’m going to leave. As I was unlocking my bike out front a red-faced waitress came whizzing out behind me. “Gehen Sie?” Are you going? Yes, I said, taking her to mean Please don’t be disgusted with us – it’s ok, your colleague just didn’t listen to a word I said but no big deal, I’m just gunna go.

    She drew a deep, panicky breath. She was as outraged as a bantam. “Das machen wir einfach nicht!” she said, immortally. That, we simply don’t do! I got on my bike and rode away, quaking and laughing. To my sweetheart I have explained how as a 21 year old moving to England I had to learn to my horror a whole new vocabulary – mustn’t grumble, can’t complain, not for the likes of us and it’s simply not done. I have told him how I spent my first six months there in a rictus of “Why the fuck not?” I have twisted this über-German phrase into Das machen wir einfach so: we simply do it so, that is simply the way we do it. Last weekend tramping a thirty kilometre round between two scenic villages I lost sight of the trail of intermittent blue dots painted every now and then onto a tree trunk to guide walkers. Just as we reached the fork and needed our blue dot there it was. How come this trail was so well marked and others have been ill-signed and in disrepair? My partner shrugged. “The trails are maintained by different hiking clubs in the local area and some do a better job than others,” he said. Inspiration fell like a blue dot onto my forehead. “Das machen wir einfach so-so,” I told him. When we reached the last village and faced a final two kilometre hike uphill to the train station we had been walking for eight hours. I’m not a hiker. Wordplay is all that kept me afloat as we tramped upwards on the sandy path in between the needling trees. That, and the ferns by the path and the thought of our dinner, in the city, which we would einfach selbst machen.

  • nation of dog lovers

    You know you’re in Germany when you can saunter into a department store carrying your dog on a leash. The dog accompanies you up the escalator, looking longingly across at the fluffy bunnies quivering in their mesh cages down in the pet department. When the dog starts barking and kicks up a fuss in the queue to pay for haberdashery findings, and everyone turns with expressions of indulgent affection, that’s when you know you’re in Germany. When the woman staffing the cash register leans in to ask confidingly, Darf er eine Leckerli haben? Is he allowed to have a little treat? She has drawn open her cash drawer and pulled out a little bag of crackling dog treats. She gazes over the counter at the dog with a doting expression. She says, Mäuschen? my little mousie-mouse? wouldn’t you like a little yummy treat? The people at the next register have stopped their transaction to watch. Everybody is smiling fondly. The dog takes the treat politely, then drops it to the floor. His owner, known in German as the Herrchen, the little husband of the dog, bends to pick it up and then the dog takes it and gulps it down. An elderly lady in the queue says, That’s right. He takes it only from his Herrchen.

  • born by scissory section

    A German’s interpretation of my Australian pronunciation of flasher just yielded the phantom of the flesher: a guy who walks round with his coat open, flashing people with his flesh. Having cherished sundry other examples like “this cost fifty bugs” and “you have a great bump” I was reluctant to point out the error – but I’ve been made to promise so I broke it to him, gingerly; then had to turn away to hide my overweening affection when he confessed he now felt totally discombubbled.

    Yesterday my osteopath described his daughter’s birth by making a scissors motion: she had to be cut out, his wife had “a scissoring.” Thus we render unto scissors that which is scissors’, yield unto flesh what’s in flashes. It’s all gold.

  • the wrong underpants

    Walking home we were following a guy who could not stop fiddling with his own underpants. They were clearly intensely uncomfortable and as he walked, he plucked at them, front and back. It was amusing because he was so beautifully dressed, with a calculated insouciance that, as it turns out, requires constant upkeep. He plucked at his undies from behind. He tried lifting his belt away from his lean belly in front to sort of tug from inside. With pinched fingertips he took another slurp at the back end. Finally in desperation he started shoving his hand down the front of his trousers to rearrange everything for comfort.

    We were in stitches. My companion kept up a running commentary, gravely observing in an undertone as though reporting a flock of seagulls on the pitch during a slow game of cricket. The guy was in an agony of discomfort and we were in an agony of suppressed gales of laughter. It was just too picturesque. The long-legged boy and his long-legged friend had identical sloping gaits. They were tall and stooped forward as they walked, curving their shoulders, wearing a uniform of sorts: black stovepipe jeans. Leather jackets. Wide belts. Greased hair and sunglasses propped up in the slew. All of this grooming and devil may care was undermined by the incessant twitching and plucking. They reached a bench facing the water and plonked themselves down. We drew level with them. I was carrying a metre-wide loop of rusted metal I had found in the street and when I picked it up, saying, Oh! isn’t this beautiful! my companion said: so long as it doesn’t end up in my apartment – it’s lovely.

    I said to the beautiful young man as he lounged there, “Du sollst diesen Slip wegwerfen, er ist offensichtlich total unbequem.” I saw him turn to his friend to say, “I have no idea what that…” So I turned back. “You should throw those underpants away. Clearly they’re just completely uncomfortable.”

    His face broadened to a smile. He said, with a lilting whinge, “I want to put them in my friend’s bag but my friend won’t let me.” Australian. The friend rolled his eyes. We were all grinning like maniacs. “You should put them in the bin,” I said, pointing to the scuffed receptacle standing by them, surrounded by its usual audience of open-mouthed beer bottles like a choir of baby penguins. He said, “Just they’re these really nice underpants…” “No,” I told him, “No. They’re not for you.” “Ahhh,” he said, lying back in his splendour in the sunshine by the sparkling water, the summer of his life he bought a leather and went to Berlin.