Writing words in a reasonable order.

The first thing in writing is to start with a word which you follow up with another word. Usually the first word suggests the next one. It is best not to start off with a word plan that would prevent the freedom to change as you go along. It mustn’t be too preconceived. That would stifle the creativity of things that words are capable off. You wouldn’t know how words behave once they have been put in view. I mean, you can have certain words in mind but on reading those words it might just not always work out. It’s a bit of a mystery, but that’s the power of words for you.

“Head,” here is a first word. “Head found”, might be the next. Was it yesterday I read someone found a head in a plastic bag? The horror of an eleven year old girl finding a severed head in a plastic bag will be a difficult memory to overcome. Can you imagine? Poor girl. Why is it that lately we seem to read so many of those strange stories of murder and mayhem? I mean, a severed head accidentally could be possible, but a head in a plastic bag seems to have something deliberate about it. I mean man-made deliberation. I can’t really get to ‘woman made’, I really can’t imagine a woman capable of doing something like that, even though packing things in plastic bags might be more the domain belonging to the female sex.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-17/man-arrested-over-rottnest-head-find/4468644

Heaven knows how long the head had been in the plastic bag but police, after staring at it for a long time, seemed to have recognized something familiar about it. Something about the glint of those eyes perhaps?  At first they couldn’t put their finger to it, but there was something, just something about it. You wonder how they viewed the head. Did they put it on a desk wedged in between a couple of weights preventing it from rolling around? Perhaps it was adorned with ear-rings. How did they determine the sex of the head?  So many questions, so many answers, all related to this gruesome object of a body-less head. For me it seems difficult to imagine a head without a body. Sure, I have seen paintings of heads being held, usually triumphantly aloft, but curiously mainly in biblical scenes. The power of the sword, because those scenes, if I remember correctly, usually showed a man with the dripping head in one hand and a cutting implement in the other.  Is there also not a famous scene of a head presented on a serving platter?

As a child it held enormous fascination and I was captivated by the scene for many years. I would contemplate if it was possible to be still alive, even for just a split second, after the head was cut off. What exactly was the precise point of death? Could the eyes still see, just for a short second afterwards, or did everything look black? I vividly remember at history lessons and the French Robespierre being led, oh so deliciously and finally to the guillotine with the women in the audience, comfortably seated, cheering on, while some were knitting booties for their babies.

Can you imagine?

Of Dalliances and Dunny Men

September 25, 2012

Tags:Christmas, Council, Dunny, Europe, Lucky Strike, Migration, Thomas Hardy Posted in Gerard Oosterman | Edit |

We enjoyed the delights of having all our grandsons staying for a few days. The tent was put up in the back yard with stretchers and blow-up bed duly installed inside. A torch was suspended from inside the roof of the tent in case of an emergency. Max said he would provide emergency food rationings which we thought would be of some most dubious nutritional value, seeing he had been spotted at the Bowral ‘Lolly’ shop earlier on the day. Max and lollies are often one and in total sympathy with each other. We did not say anything about his stash of ‘food’ inside the tent. The boys are on holidays. So much for inherited genes. We both love vegetables thrive on just about anything that grows out of the soil.

The tent we had for some years. It is design whereby inter-lockable short pieces of spring loaded rods fit together and arranged through a series of loops sewed on the tent, then arch themselves around the outside of the tent and help to hold the whole structure of the tent up nice and taut. A simple design but what a genius who finally managed to get it right. There is so much in the design of good tents. Have you seen those small light-weight tents wherein the Himalayan climbers huddle in during freezing nights on their quest to conquer Mount Everest? They are small and weigh almost nothing. I remember seeing a movie made in the early fifties on those that climbed that mountain first. (Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay) They were lugging heavy canvas structures up that mountain. Now-a-days, hundreds climb it almost daily. The whole mountain littered with disbanded tents, oxygen bottles, toilets, and other debris and equipment with some horribly grimaced in their frozen death throes climbers as well.

H and I have long given up our plan to climb the Himalayans and are now just happy to take brisk daily walks through the church Yard and cemetery of St Judes. Milo, our incorrigible Jack Russell, forces us to go through the cemetery because, even though the church is in central Bowral, he knows there are rabbits around. A couple of weeks ago he found a frightened rabbit kitten and killed it instantly, merciless Milo is. Milo has beseeching eyes but don’t be fooled. He is a killer when it comes to rabbits and ducks. Bad boy Milo, good boy Milo.

St Judes’ church does its best to keep its ageing congregation and has many concerts, musical soirees and fund raisers. Parts of many churches are the collection bins near the gates where people can give and donate their unwanted goods to the less well off. Well, in Bowral it seems that many use those bins, in the dark of the night, to just jettison their rubbish. Too stingy to pay for tip fees, they use the bins to get rid of rubbish without having to pay. Broken TV’s, three legged chairs and wheel-less prams, smashed computers, broken Macy’s furniture, headless teddy bears, stained pre-loved mattresses, settees with springs poking through, bottomless suitcases, hose less vacuum cleaners. Week in week out the same story. Who dumps all that stuff and why?

Just read on the ABC ‘Just in’ News. The world throws out 50% of food. I reckon there must also be a steady stream of people who not only throw out massive amounts of food but also consume and chuck out, consume and chuck out goods. A kind of joyless life, the 2 minute thrill of buying unneeded stuff, spending money and then chuck it out, broken before even having used it. In between, jaws masticating just as joylessly unwanted food while driving (in the dark of the night) with a trailer and chuck it at St Judes.

Inside the church the congregation is enjoying a Johann Sebastian Bach recital.

Emergency Hospital; “Give me your sample in this jar, please”…

Getting old is not half as painful as knowing to have been young. The boy on his skate board turns and swivels in mid air and manically loop de loops and survives smiling. After seventy though, a slightly twisted wrong move to pick up a pepper-cracker and some Stilton cheese from the oak coffee table can result next day in a visit to the Hospital’s Emergency Department. That’s what it means to get old.  Ah youth, I remember it so well.

The Triage nurse takes temperature, blood pressure; both Systolic and Diastolic are just fine, with both eye and verbal response pretty well orientated. “Oh fuck, my back, my back.” I can’t sit down, oh, oh fuck, dear fuck.

“You could have a kidney mall function,” the smiling triage nurse announced optimistically and looked deep into my troubled eyes, while handing me a little jar. It had a yellow lid and I became instantly suspicious. “No, not here,” she said. “Give me your urine sample, please, I’ll show you were.” She took me to a toilet and left me closing the door behind her. I somehow thought the word ‘please’ added a rather nice touch to the hospital visit. It took my mind of the pain which was on the left side of my middle back. I peed (carefully) in the little jar and tightened the lid firmly. I did not want any embarrassing leakages back with nurse. I finished the rest (copiously) in the toilet bowl

There is nothing like a hospital visit to get things in perspective. I thought it rather wonderful and uplifting I could still pee in a jar on demand. ‘Things are not that crook,’ consoling myself. I confirmed that during my entire life the ability to direct a stream of piss had never once faltered. Perhaps, from now on, I should take nothing for granted anymore. Stop being so cocky, heaven knows how much longer that directional skill and ability will survive? Some women are jealous of us men.

After handing the still warm jar back to the nurse, she guided me back to the waiting room, “doctor will see you soon,” she added still smiling. The waiting room had only five waiting for treatment, two women with bandaged feet, a couple of large men in thongs and shorts and a very pale looking man with a cap on and wearing very tight dark jeans. He looked tense and was biting a ball point pen. He had a certain mien about him. He had seen better days.

In Hospital Emergency they have tightened security. Since I was there last with a bout of pneumonia, instead of an open window for the new patients to pass their health or pension cards through, they now installed a very narrow opening of just about 7 centimeters…Heaven knows, with crack-ice and all those new lethal meth- drug mixtures what kind of maniacal people front up at the front desk. You would have to admire staff for putting up with so much stress caused by chemicals and people gone haywire. The days of people with ingrown corns, a broken arm or a bit of a pulled muscle at casualty have turned into glassing, knifings, cut off ear lobes, and other horrors of abject violence fanned by drugs and booze. No wonder one sees some staff sitting outside puffing a well earned ciggie. Lucky, I was early and the knifings had not yet started.

A doctor with an Indian name saw me after the ‘sample’ was analyzed. No, kidneys were not the problem he assured me. He left again and after a long period came back with an envelope and a prescription for Panadeine forte. I expected at least an x-ray or some kind of examination. The envelope contained a referral to my own doctor. I was referred to as having a ‘back muscle’ problem. I walked out past the Emergency waiting room which still had the pale man and the two large men waiting for something to happen. I wondered what sort of lives those people all had. I suppose they all have ‘sorts of lives’. Just like all of us.

I hobbled home just around the corner and past the skate board riders, some in mid air. Boundless energy and acrobatic youthfulness. A couple of girls were hanging around sipping from plastic bottles. Some boys reached newer heights somersaulting on bikes as well as skateboards. All biding time. They too will visit Emergency Hospital, sooner or later.

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The tasks ahead for Obama and Gillard.

The only way out, it seems, would be for Obama to go hard on the Gun toting and  bullet lobbing pro-kill-‘m Senators and NRA by saying ; Either do away with your lethal guns voluntary or, I’ll resign and let the nation make this choice for once and all. We go for another election with a change of the second amendment of the constitution. The second amendment has been given so many different interpretations; surely they can find one that will support changing this ‘bearing of arms” by all and sundry.

When the Amendment was first passed in law back in 1791 by James Madison guns were just guns which took time to load and fire, giving a fair chance of survival, while in 2012 guns are killers by just looking at them.  The founding fathers then sought to place trust in the power of ordered liberty of democratic government versus the anarchy of insurrectionists. Today, the cult by the manically adherence of the right to bear arms by the individualist has usurped the insurrectionist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

The issues in Australia are not less problematic by our obsessing with asylum seekers. How fortunate or unfortunate that we have islands that we can ship them to. Those poor European countries are being entered by refugees on trains, boats, swimming ,walking and heaven knows what else, even in containers, ’refugees sans frontiers’, they could be called.  They enter by the tens of thousands, weekly. There are very few isolated European islands that boat people can be isolated on and forgotten about. The obstinacy by our politicians on having blown this up by the hysterical ‘border protection’ mantra is now costing hundreds of millions for just a few thousand.

At least most European countries have been canny enough that the might of the millions of refugees from war torn countries is best handled by, at least making the best of a bad thing, and treat them humanely and, after due process, let them work and pay tax. Howard’s refrain of “we will choose who come here and the method by which they come” could not possibly work there.

Neither does it work here. They come, no matter what obstacles are put into place, not even the risk of getting smashed against rocks deters the helpless refugee. They have nothing to lose. Some of the boat-people haters say, they are filthy rich which seems odd; why risk getting smashed onto rocks or drown from leaky unseaworthy boats?

I feel sorry for Chris Bowen. He tries to be, unconvincingly, unyieldingly hard like the rest, steely and feigning resentment against those more humane. His heart isn’t in it. Hopefully his wife will whisper kind words when he is tossing and turning during guilt ridden sleepless nights. He looks quickly sideways whenever he has to give an expected heartless comment about ‘deterrent’ or ‘no advantage’ to journalists. A shocking portfolio.

The opposition has no such trouble; full blown hatred against refugees comes fluently natural and so does their concrete determination to do all in their power drunkenness to show, and straight into the camera, unflinchingly, as much empathy as the ‘arbeit macht frei’ consortium some seventy years ago at Auschwitz.

Morrison’s, C. Pine’s and Abbott’s public resentment against refugees is genuine and without artifice. They all seem to have ‘against everything’ in their genes. The headmasters must have given them more than just the strap on their backsides.

Julia will have to consider, after getting re-elected and with a mandate, change our position, process all boat people on-shore, give them permission to work and pay tax. This world is different now. We can’t forever thump our noses at the most unfortunate and UNHCR.

The neighbours might talk.