Sunday encounters with humanity

Old codger crossing Johnson Street at Smith Street, on green light, at a slow shuffle
Car turning right from Smith Street into Johnson Street
Driver of car doesn’t see codger
Codger sees that driver of car hasn’t seen codger
Codger attempts to speed up but instead falls on his bottom, in the middle of the road
Car stops - driver sits in car - codger struggles to get up on slippery road.
Miriam sprints 50 metres up hill to help codger get up.
Finally, driver of car gets out of car and walks over, saying “I didn’t see him, I didn’t see him”
Miriam says to codger “Are you okay, were you hit?”
Codger says no, he’s okay but he’s got a dicky ticker. He seems fine and sprightly, though shocked at what just happened.
Driver looks around at other cars who are now stopped, unable to go anywhere because of all this, and says (as though looking for backup) “But I didn’t see him”
Codger [who is not tiny] says “I’m big enough, you didn’t have to look very hard!”
Miriam says “Let’s get him up”
Driver, half bent down with her hands sort of extended to help, but not actually doing anything, continues with her refrain… “but I didn’t see him, I didn’t see him”
Codger again comments that he has a bad heart and says - “Well you weren’t looking very hard”
Miriam says “For god’s sake woman get your hands under his shoulder and lift him”
Driver says nothing. Expressions cross her face and none of them settle. Miriam thinks that none of them are about concern for the codger.
Miriam loses her cool “Wake up! It’s not about you! Help me lift him you stupid fucking cow!” [can't believe I actually said that but by now I was shaking with the injustice of it all]
With driver’s help, codger is lifted and is not quite steady on his feet but otherwise okay.
Miriam walks codger to footpath, driver returns to car, turns corner and drives off.
Both codger and Miriam are vaguely surprised she didn’t pull over and see if she could do anything else to help. As time passes we become more and more disgusted.
Miriam walks with codger to chair and they chat just to be sure he really is okay.
Codger shows photo from his inside coat pocket, of a pure white Tasmanian devil crossing a road, near some road kill. He actually saw this. There’s another photo too, he says, of the same white devil on the other side of the road. The codger says he’s going to get it blown up. It’s very faded. It looks like he’s been going to get it blown up for a while now.
The codger reveals he’s on his way to play pokies at the pub up Smith Street then on to the Mission for a feed.
He says he makes Huon pine clocks at Austin Hospital. He has a friend, Warren, who makes violins. He gives Miriam Warren’s card.
Miriam notices that the codger has food down his front, long dirty fingernails and a really long eyebrow hair that curls back on itself threatens to lodge in the codger’s watery right eye.
She tells the codger her name is Miriam and he says his name is Max. He writes it down for her on the back of Warren’s card, so she can use it in her report, when she rings the police. He writes it in beautiful copperplate, in an old-fashioned way, as Mr M Ramsdale
Miriam calls police and relates story, but of course there’s nothing they can do, because the codger was not actually hit by the stupid fucking cow.
The police person is stoically silent when Miriam says “Where does one go to report bad human behaviour?” Or perhaps he didn’t understand the question.
Miriam sits with Max for five more minutes, but he’s restless and wants to get on.
A hug, a goodbye, and that’s it.
Another Sunday adventure.

Lifestyle life???

Signage travesty at Victoria Gardens

I keep thinking that rampant corporate spin-speak is a thing of the past, relegated to the realm of inside jokes among those of us who have been in the corporate world long enough to know the true meaning of bullshit bingo. Oh how wrong we can be about things sometimes.

Shopping today at Victoria Gardens for a new rubbish bin I spotted this sign. Somebody without the appropriate training or the ability to think (either one of these attributes would have prevented the travesty of signage I saw today) created this sign. Somebody who didn’t care enough approved it. Somebody with an attitude of [shrugs] ‘not my problem’ laid it out. Somebody else screwed it to the wall. And yours truly took a photograph…

I really don’t want to turn into a grumpy old cow. But how difficult that path is to resist, when one is faced with temptations such as this. I am learning to cultivate a quiet, knowing smile. Uggh.

And also, a young checkout operator yesterday asked me how to spell saucer so he could find it on the database ’cause the barcode had fallen off. Double uggh.

Words to avoid in the subject line

Just a note to correspondents… I have been updating my spam filters so if you want to be in touch, please avoid using the following words and terms in your email subject line or risk going straight to the rubbish bin: acai, viagra, cialis, rolex, cartier, designer watch, classy watches, jewelry, timepiece, acsub, chase bank, banking alert, college education, banking alert, BankOfAmerica, Bank of America, university diploma, meds, euroclub, Ally bank, penis, pecker, pfizer, casino, vegas, *****SPAM*****  or [----SPAM----]

By including this small list of words in my message filters I have reduced spam into my inbox from approximately 140 items to less than 20 per day.

[short pause for expletive utterance]

T&L Royalty Statement

It’s May, so it’s royalties month!  Every six months I get a royalty statement from the publisher for Tristessa & Lucido. Tells me all the money I earned from sales of the book in bookshops. Hah!  About $25 this year so far. Annually I get a PLR statement from the Public Lending Rights people. This one tells me all the money I earned from lending rights collected when people borrow my novel from the library. About $200 this year. And of course I never get any statements or royalties from second hand bookshops. It’s a funny old world.

Vermouth

Thanks to my friend B, who first introduced me to the Clunes Book Town event last year. She invited me to go with her again this year and I took the day off. Yes reader, a day away from email; away from the computer; away from extempore. A little drive in the country on a late autumn Sunday and chance to browse through thousands of second-hand books.

A highlight of the day was the panel discussion… Well actually Frank Moorhouse was the highlight. Me, who never asks authors to sign books, asked him to sign the copy of Martini: a memoir. I was a little entranced by the man, I guess. He does have a presence. And he talked about the absence of domesticated intimacy in a way that showed he understood a particular kind of loneliness. Hard to resist.

The book was even better.  While the martini could be considered a vehicle for an exploration of certain encounters and niggling unanswered questions in Moorhouse’s own past, I found the martini bits most interesting and particularly the tone of conversations with friend Voltz. These are the sorts of conversations that matter.The serious conversations about what to do with the olive pip. I am not being facetious here. There are few questions as able to get to the core of things as this one.

I was introduced to the martini by my friend J in Provincetown, MA in the USA. The best martinis I have had ‘out’  (i.e. not at J’s house) have been Fanizzi’s and also at The Mews, also in Provincetown. One night in 2004, when my heart had been broken by long distance telephone and I felt desolate, C took me there.  After just two little vodka martinis, he and I skipped down Commercial Street to the The Squealing Pig.

Tonight, on the way home from the gym, I bought a bottle of Noilly Prat. There is always vodka in the freezer. I take my martinis with vodka.  5 vodka to 1 vermouth, chilled. Shaken. 3 green olives on a toothpick. Sipping it as I write this.

Thanks to J, thanks to Frank Moorhouse. Thanks to C, who left me at The Pig (he had other fishies to fry) and I ended up being driven home by M. Oh happy days.

What will I do with the olive pips?

Tags: Frank Moorhouse, martini

and this today, on resonate

Today on the Australian Music Centre’s online magazine resonate: ‘Fools rush in…‘

Blogging [jazz] again…

Can I cheat, and blog here to say that I’m blogging there?  Well there, I did it.

Just keep working

A tidbit from my chiropractor this morning, in the slightly surreal circumstance of having my back adjusted in the ‘consulting room without doors’ that we use for early appointments… ['back' story {pun indadvertent but too good to remove!} is that my adjustments go better with the moving table than manually and the table is downstairs in full view of the reception area and normally used by the other practitioner at this location so I go early early early in the morning, when it's still dark and feel a sense of strangeness having the work done in an empty open area...]

But anyway…

What he said, in response to some comment I made about the frustrations of slow improvement in my yoga class, was that if you keep working at it, you do achieve success. Just keep working at it. A small but profound gem… and it struck me particularly because I’ve been reading a book called ‘This is Your Brain On Music‘ by Daniel J Levitin and on becoming an expert, he says that 10,000 hours of practice is required for a human to achieve world-class expertise in anything. Not just music… writing, bookbinding, printmaking, carpenting, plumbing…

10,000 hours = 20 hours per week for 10 years, Grasshopper.

Too much for a business card; perfect for a toilet door

I graduated today. The Conferring of Degrees booklet exhorts us graduands to bung the appropriate letters after our names and to make sure we slip a (Melb) in there as well, so people know that we graduated from Uni of Melb. My business card can now officially say Miriam Zolin  MCrWrtg  GCertArts(Ling&AppLing) (Melb) BA (UNE). [though I'm not sure about the order] Right. Not bloody likely.

That’s me hanging onto the handrail over there, degree in hand, cap askew…

Professor John O’Toole gave the occasional address, talking about the role of Arts graduates as creative spirits out there in the world. He asked us to ponder what colleagues we meet now or soon might remember us for in ten years’ time. What would we like them to remember us for. ‘How timely,’ I thought to self, because I had just that Friday created a piece of creativity where I work, in an IT area with my Masters in Creative Writing (that’s MCrWrtg  (Melb) by the way). You see, in the normal way these things go, the toilet door had been plastered with corporate signs telling us to leave the loos clean… there had been some off-colour behaviour with ladies leaving their tampons hanging out of the lady-bins and walking away from cubicles with skidmarks in the bowl. Much as I dislike the bad manners that leads to such thoughtlessness, I dislike even more the formalese that takes over in these situations; the boring, patronising ‘Clients use these toilets so please take care’ bollocks.

Here’s what’s on our toilet doors now…

Toilet door haiku

paper pulled too hard
falls like petals to the floor
pick it up and flush

private evidence
of blessed female cycle
dispose of with care

vitreous and white
if bowl is marred by skidmarks
brush them all away

clean, white waiting bowl
left as you want to find it
pristine, for next time

That’s what they’ll remember me for. That and sultana cake. Not the web pages, user manuals and requirements… I know it.

Helicopters and tremors…

Mikki’s looking out the window at things that move in the night.  There are a few of them tonight, including some she can’t see. Helicopters overhead tonight give rise to apocalyptic thoughts. Stirring my tea as they fly overhead and drown out the peace and quiet, I wonder quietly if this is how it ends?  Stirring your chai, thinking about the email you didn’t write before leaving work, wondering if you have the energy to go out and listen to live music (despite the reality that once you’re there it gives you energy) and picking bits of home-grown corn (thanks V!) from between your teeth?  What will I do about my neighbours? Should I put my boots on now in case I have to run? Perhaps the rumbles this afternoon and ten days ago were not earthquakes but explosions and we’re now in some period of social upheaval, en route to something resembling Orwell’s 1984.

And finally, I take the teaspoon out of my chai and put it on the bench. If this is it, I think, I’ll go gracefully. The chai has just the right amount of honey.