“Good morning,” I croaked.
He was moisturising and he wiped the excess fluid from his hands onto my face, it was cool, nice really.
“The salt mines are beckoning.”
Then he kissed me good-bye.
I was awake by then. I rolled sideways and looked at the time, it was 7.43. Goodness, that is early. Well, I was asleep by 11pm last night, this was not an unreasonable hour to get up in the real world, I suppose. That’s nearly the requisite eight hours and I always say I can get by on six.
“Ah, the real world.” I laughed.
I turned on my lap top and puffed up my pillows. After a short time pissing around on the internet, I decided to go and make some morning coffee. Mmmm, I could taste the flavour of Columbia on my tongue. I didn’t always have to wait for Shane to leave the house, I could head down before he got up. And… smile… at this time, it was still possible I could get the coffee made and escape back upstairs unseen.
Oh, it’s just my morning thing, no offence meant to anyone. I just like to have a bit of alone time before I officially meet the day.
Who wants to talk first thing? I mean to say.
The kitchen was a mess, still with coconut fragments nearly spread across its entirety. The many white flakes contrasting against the green granite. The rich red sauce encrusted bowls still lay haphazardly around the sink. So, I put on the coffee and washed everything up.
Have I told you how, strangely, I have got into old fashioned dish washing in the kitchen sink. Dish mop, rubber gloves, soap suds, up to the elbows. It suddenly just seems so quick and simple and hey presto the dishes are clean. All done, five minutes. To think how much I loathed it as a “waste of time” as a kid. I don’t know why, maybe I am going nuts being at home all day?
The time it takes for the coffee pot to brew, I can clean the kitchen, empty the dishwasher, prepare breakfast, it almost seems like… oh?... what is it that chicks think they are good at, have the patent on? Oh yes, multi tasking. The time it takes the coffee pot to brew, is my window into multi tasking. I can get everything in the kitchen done in that time. Viola! Hey presto! And a lovely hot cup of coffee too. Gorgeous.
It is amazing what you can get done, if you just do it. No excuses, no thinking about it, just do it.
I headed back to bed and tried to write a piece on 1981… the year that being gay peaked as a sexual, psycho way of life, where, I am sure, gay people felt invincible, able to do anything and every thing, or on the precipice of it. Of course, in my home state it was decriminalized the previous years, as it was in the process of being in most western societies. Canada had a law that sodomy was legal as long as no more then two were present. Who thinks these things up?
“The gays” had money, time and in their own ghettos from which to fight from, ever increasing power, or the notion of power, right before it all came crashing down in the most spectacular, unthinkable way, a plague on your house.
That was when my ears tuned into something else, something beyond the walls of my room, something beyond my control.
Scratch, scratch, scratch. Scrape, scrape, scrape. (No, Doc Strangelove was performing an abortion in Shane’s room… although, it would have been preferable)
What day is it? Quick, think.
“Nooooooooooooooo!”
It was Wednesday and that, I am sure, was the vacuum that I could hear.
“GUADALUPE!”
Noooooooooooo! Maybe I was hearing things, imagining things. I was delirious, from? From? From? I don’t know. It was my imagination, yes it was. I leaped out of bed, found my comfy black track-pants-material shorts and crept to the bedroom door and opened it a crack.
Veeeeerrrrrrr.
Bugger! I closed the door.
I opened it again. Veeeeerrrrrrr.
I closed it again.
What to do? Get in the shower. Then, grab your polo shirt with its horizontal stripes, which, rather unfathomably, looks good on you and your book and head to the park. Fuck the shower, have it when you come back, just grab your book and your thongs and go… oh, take your laptop, you never know. Grab your camera, well? Get your backpack, USB stick, memory card reader, glasses, wallet. What else? Towel! Towel?
Where’s my camera case? Down stairs on the coffee table.
Take you breakfast bowl, no use giving her extra work to do, you lazy arse. Take it, put it in the dishwasher and get the hell out.
She was sitting down having a snack when I arrived in the lounge room.
“Ullo.”
“Good morning.”
My camera case was on the coffee table, I grabbed it. She disappeared out of the room immediately.
Get your thongs.
But, I don’t want to feel like a refugee and I can’t get internet in the park. And I don’t want to hang around for two hours, an hour and a half. Just sit out the back, out of her way, and play on the internet. Yes. Easy. Surely she’d been here for over an hour, she doesn’t have the lounge to go, just upstairs. And I feel apposed to being driven out of my house.
Fuck her!
Besides, either of the plumbers might call. Fat chance of that, I thought. Plumber number one was rung last Monday and still nothing. Plumber number two yesterday, and he promised to get the girl in the office – I think that means his wife – to call back with a time. And nothing from him either. What is it with plumbers?
It is hot today, in the early thirties is what we are expecting, so my phone tells me.
I sat out on the back veranda with a coffee and tried to research the names of the five AIDS patients to present to the LA hospital in June 1981. I wanted to do this just to put a face, a person to what is always referred to as the 5 victims. It didn’t really mean anything now, as such, 31 years later. I just wanted to personalise the story just a bit. Just for me. I could find out their names.
The first man to die in New York was named Nick Rock. He was a housemate of the writer Felice Picano’s on Fire Island. I think he was a member of the Radical Faeries. He died on January 15th.
Anyway… I just wondered what these people were like, what their stories were? But, I didn’t get very far. Although, it took me up until the moment that Guadalupe opened the back door and said she was finished.
“Shane didn’t leave the money?”
Bad luck sister.
“Nexta time?”
“I’ll tell him.”
I spent the rest of the morning reading about the history of AIDS and then the history of Larry Kramer.
Anthony called to see if I had made it up to Sam for my indifference to Valentines Day?
“Oh sure, he doesn’t buy into all of that.”
No, he doesn’t. You see, I told you he was perfect.
Mark called to report in about the hotel renovations in Hanoi. It is all coming together. He’s in the foyer. He walks me around showing me the changes. I say hello to L, he looks as cute as ever. He shows me the new décor. He introduces me to the other staff, as they one by one walk into my line of vision, er, camera. It’s cute. No, it is. I feel like Raj’s parents off The Big Bang Theory.
I went to the coffee shop to see if they still sold seals for my coffee pot. They didn’t. They were giving away the remaining stock of coffee pot seals that they had and I could take one if there was one the right size. There wasn’t. Naturally.
I ate toast with Vegemite and cheese, for lunch, (hang the cholesterol) followed by toast with Apricot jam. (hang the fat)
I went to the second hand bookshop to look for a copy of Larry Kramer’s Faggots, despite all those promises made to myself about buying any more books before I have read the ones I have already bought. But, I question whether second hand books count. They didn’t have it.
I think second hand books do count.
This is shaping up to be the second week that I haven’t done any exercise. All that toast and all the jam. Bad Christian! Luke says I eat too many carbohydrates, but I deny it. I think six pieces of toast would count as too many though.
I wrote my journal finally in the afternoon. I closed down the internet and stopped wasting my day. I’ve got to put more time into writing and far less into wasting my life on the internet. Just write.
I still wonder if one of those portable modem things would be a good idea. You know, just enough credits to publish some blog pieces, but not enough to waste all that time surfing the net. You know, I really wonder.
I called the plumber and, no, the boss hadn’t passed on my message and, no, there hadn’t been a time allocated to me. Grrr!
WTF? Do I have anti plumber energy, or something?
Anyway, tomorrow at midday.
Shane came home with Chicken and salad.
I’m out of cat food, Missy isn’t happy, she skulks around the table, sliding her paw up every now and again, as if in a desperate plea for food. Cats can be such drama queens.
David arrives to collect his dvd. He eats our food and leaves as soon as Shane hands over the dvd. He’s bought us GaGa tickets, despite none of us really wanting to go, but he needed someone to go with and he has a way of demanding what he wants. We all now owe him $130.
Missy’s into the bin after chicken bones. Poor hungry cat, I swear I am a bad father. We hear the scratching from the lounge.
I’m still swatting moths, as though a plague has been sent to me, undoubtedly, for cat abuse.
We watched Absolutely Fabulous, more of the same, but good more of the same. Gordon Street with Adam Ant, who seems quite humble and unaffected. And a doco on the American Tea party, who have a lot of rhetoric and talk a lot about fixing America and reducing govt, but with surprisingly few details on how they are actually going to do it.
They are OneNation on steroids, or at least, the bigger and better, more nutters per capita, American version.
Interesting note – despite them having no leader, the closest they do have to one, apparently, is Grant Beck, who has no political mandate, but who has made something like 35 million. And Sarah Palin is now a multi millionaire and is again someone who has no political mandate.
I head to the supermarket to get Missy food. It is a hot, balmy night. It is nice walking down the street in shorts and thongs. I bought passion fruit yogurt and bananas.
Note, on the way back, the blue bike has gone. I’m going to put all my rubbish on the footpath, from now on.
No comments:
Post a Comment