Seatoun Tunnel / Ferry Street

Shaped Like a Corpse

Retiring the Old Banner

This banner has propped up the bottom of my blog page for almost a year now. Trusty old banner.


Putting it here for posterity.
Still think it's cool - all with the Strindberg and the pretty ladies getting sprayed with blood. (sniff) You had a good run, boy.
A year is a good run, for a blog banner.

Mr Benjamin Korea's short sentences, existential ponderings and ambiguous mental condition will resume shortly.

"It's a Trap"

Dark shape moving overhead
something tremendous
tremendous impact shakes the earth

A massive footfall

And it
(the shadow)
moves on,
and in its wake we have
pink dust, like
pink snow
falling down around us

You don't even notice,
you don't have time to lose,
you're up and moving


to find some clothes
to get dressed
to head out quickly
to cross the room
to a door, leading
to a passage
to a flight of stairs, leading down
to darkness;

to rub at your eyes
to hurry
to the bottom
to slip through a gap, closing, very narrow
to feel the walls close around your shoulders
to wriggle through, & out

to the light
to open spaces
to noises & people, rushing,
to almost forget
to check before running across
to the far side


to the side street
to the alley
to the path which leads
to the park
to the bus stop
to check your watch

to creep in through the basement carpark
to creep in late
to punch the button
to climb inside, be drawn upwards
to punch the clock

to work
to work
to stare out the window
to type to index to squint & agree
to hold, to wait, to drum your fingers
to work, to fidget,
to work


to stumble along
to take your bearings &
to realise you're lost
to realise you're tired, but then
to hear something
to listen
to hear them somewhere nearby, &
to carry on, looking

to crash against the mattress, exhausted, &
to try to think what you need
to remember for tomorrow,
to fall sleep wondering


to wake later in the night, remembering
to stare up at the ceiling, remembering

to work
to work
to lift them one by one
to carry each of them over & stack them
to carry them stack them load them up onto the trucks,
to step back,
to wipe the sweat from your face, then look
to the rest of it waiting
to be shifted, stacked & loaded


to exhaustion at the end of it,
to feel so fucking tired, &
to lean against the wall &
to wonder where all the money goes

to a bench
to sit
to take off your shoes before rising
to step inside
to silence
to the shade of a large cool room
to the muttering of dozens of people
to step amongst the kneeling forms
to find a place of your own
to kneel
to mutter
to mutter for hours
to barely know what you're saying, but simply
to ask
to say “please”
to repeat that word many times
to ask for relief
to politely ask for the pressure to relent
to ask
to be pardoned
to beg
to kneel & beg, & while so doing,
to try
to ignore the cold stone
to ignore the pain it is causing your knees &
to put aside your mounting suspicion that no-one is listening
to you


to work
to work
to lean against the wall &
to examine your hands
to admit
to yourself: it's not getting easier
to do this
to work & work &
to make it to that magical fucking pint
to the whiskey & the smoke
to that moment of peace

to accustom yourself
to a certain amount of pain
to accept it as inevitable, but
to admit
to yourself: it's getting harder
to ignore


to a waiting room
to wait
to stare about &
to wait
to be called
to stare at the faces of the others
to consider which seem stronger, which weaker
to hear your name
to walk in & sit
to bow your head
to listen
to them tell you what you need
to stop eating or stop doing
to breath a deep acceptance &
to nod;
to take it on the chin

to work, to work
to wake
to sudden pain, & then
to wait while they make the call
to watch them come in
to be lifted over
to a stretcher, carried
to the car, driven
to the ward, wheeled
to the bed, shown the controls
to lift it & lower it,
to wait there, to wait there
to take it on the chin, then


to a table & then
to a box & then
to a hole in the ground & then
to what?
to wait there?
to wait there & then at the sound of a trumpet
to be lifted up & carried away
to somewhere
to some great reward
to Heaven
to Jesus
to Santa
to life everlasting;
to be congratulated on your conduct &
to be told: “Yes”

Uncanny Story (i)

This is a good one. I'll try to get this right, tell the story as it happened.

I am 16 or 17. My older brothers moved out years ago, and my parents are away for the week. It's the school holidays. I have the house to myself.
I love having the house to myself. I get to do everything the way I want to. In practice I do everything more or less the same, except I rise later, eat more, etc.
But on the other hand it's creepy. I find that I'm walking around as quietly as possible – as if making loud noises will draw attention to myself. Whose attention?
I have to look after Monty (the dog). Walk him twice or three times a day, feed him, hang out with him so he doesn't go insane from boredom. Dogs are like children, they need to be constantly occupied. Monty prefers to stay upstairs in the lounge, where he can watch the street outside from a high window and bark at everyone who passes.

I'm downstairs. I'm sitting at the piano, practising. Lazily playing through the same old parts of The Wall, the parts I already know.
I stop playing and sit there, thinking, looking at Dad's bookshelf. Reading through the titles of all these old books, the ones that have always been here, lined up on these shelves. Even when we lived in the States, the same collection of old paperbacks.
The sound of a passing car outside. The sound of someone typing in the next room.
I think: wait a minute.
I listen.
Someone is typing in the next room. Typing on the computer keyboard. Reader: you know this sound. Summon it to mind – the sound of someone typing on plastic keys. It's unmistakeable.
I sit on the piano bench, and look at the closed door to the next room.
The next room is Andy's old room. My oldest brother's room. It's been converted into a combination guest bedroom and computer room, Dad set up his new IBM in there. Except obviously no-one else is home, so there shouldn't be the sound of typing, but there is.
I wait for this sound to fade away or evaporate. Sometimes when you get too far into a daydream you'll actually hear the sounds from it, and you'll shake your head or snap to your senses and they'll vanish. But this person is still typing. Click-clickaclicka-click-click-clickaclicka-click.
I think: what is this, supernatural? A ghost? Kind of an exciting possibility. Except there's no-one else at home, I'm here alone (and will be for the next couple of days).
I get up and walk to the door. I'm surprised by how well I'm dealing with this. You always wonder whether, confronted with something really weird, you'd run or you'd walk closer. I listen. They're still typing. I open the door.
The sound stops.
Exactly, as if on cue. Because the room next door is empty and the computer is switched off.

Lucky for me I had plans that evening – me and some friends were going to go see Alive, the new true-story film about a plane crashing the Andes, and all the rugby players have to eat each other's corpses. We were going to Wellington Boys College at the time, I think the story had a special appeal to us.
I walked Monty, chucked him into the kitchen quickly (freaked out, hand trembling) and left the house as soon as I could. Walked down the hill into town, thought about & rehearsed this incredible story for when I told it to my friends.
We met in the Mid City movie centre (RIP) and went to dinner at Pizza Hut first. This was back when Pizza Hut was an all-you-can-eat restaurant with a self-service dessert bar, in a sense they were glory days for me because I hadn't yet discovered smoking, sex or drinking. I weighed 100kg and eating was the biggest thrill in my life.
I was really nervous, I ate too much. In particular I ate too much dessert. I told the story of the “mystery typist”, I told it a few times to different people, milking it for all it was worth.
Someone said: "Are you sure it wasn't just the sound of your dog walking around upstairs?"
"No way. I know the sound of Monty walking around, I know the sound of typing. It was typing."
I wonder what we would have looked like that night – seven or eight 16 year old guys with no facial hair and no bad habits. Bad dress sense, probably. Loud, nerdy laughter.
Anyway the time came and we went up to the movie. Filed in, took our seats. I was sitting next to Texas Tim – or rather a 16 year old version of Texas Tim who at that stage I'm sure had never dreamed of going to Texas.
The movie starts. There's this plane, it's flying into the Andes. Everything's normal, except you know they're fucked, so there's this certain element of tension. All these people from South America are laughing and talking – and I CANNOT HANDLE THIS UNBEARABLE TENSION.
The plane crashes, OH MY GOD. It thumps into this mountain and whips around and people are ripped to pieces, dismembered. Mortality on an epic scale, IT GOES ON FOREVER... and then in the aftermath people are regaining consciousness, except their BODIES ARE MANGLED. One guy goes up to another and says “Am I okay? I feel weird.” And he has this HUGE bit of metal sticking out of his CHEST, he's in shock and he hasn't noticed it... and the other guy has to PULL IT OUT OF HIM...

Suddenly I'm in crippling pain, like a bad leg cramp except it's happening all over my body. The story has advanced considerably – I think I have missed several minutes. The pain is so awful I think I'm going to vomit. I get to my feet and stagger up the aisle steps & out of the theatre, except I can't stand up properly so I have to lurch like a hunchback.
Out in the lobby I sit down on the floor and start trying to straighten my spine, a long process which takes almost an hour.
After about ten minutes Tim comes out. “You okay?”
“I don't know what happened... I just suddenly had this pain.”
“You freaked me out,” says Tim.
He explains: right after the plane crash sequence (which I'm assured is not that horrific) I slumped forward with my head between my knees, as if in a faint. Then I slowly came up until I was rigid, leaning back and to the left in my seat in quite an unnatural posture, which I held for a long time before abruptly saying: “I need to leave.”
I said: “Oh man. I don't remember any of that.”
“It was pretty strange,” said Tim.
The others came out to check if I was okay. Reassured, they went back in and watched the rest of the movie. I can't remember, (I was in a lot of pain) but I think Tim sat out the whole movie talking to me.
“It's something to do with my brain,” I said. “You know what I told you, about hearing someone typing at home? It must have been a hallucination, and this fainting thing must have something to do with it.”
Why would that happen?
Too much pizza and sugar? But that had come after the initial hallucination.
Maybe my brain had been malfunctioning all day. It had run low on some important chemical or whatever.
I thought: shit, maybe I've been possessed by something. It hadn't been too long since I'd seen The Serpent and the Rainbow.
But why? How? Our house was built in the 80s, we were the first owners, it had no history at all.
“You sure you just didn't freak out because the movie scared you?” said Tim.
“Shut up.”
Get real. I'd seen worse movies than Alive.

Speaking of the uncanny, Ed sent this in:

"Chapter 7, Page 99"
just bought this
randomly opened it
read this thought of you:

In the 1950s psychiatrist Cathy Hayes raised a young chimp in her own home. In late infancy Viki, the chimp, began to trail an arm behind her as if pulling a toy on a string, and would even pretend to catch the string on obstructions and then release it again. After several weeks of this behaviour, Viki one day appeared to entangle the imaginary toy around the knob of the toilet, and cried for help. Hayes pantomimed untangling the rope and returning it to her, to be rewarded with what could have been either "a look of sheer devotion" or "just a good hard stare". A few days later, when Hayes decided to invent a make-believe pull-toy of her own that clacked on the floor and swooshed on the carpet, "Viki stared at the point on the floor when the imaginary rope would have met the imaginary toy, uttered a terrified "oo-oo-oo," leap into Cathy's arms, and never played the game again.

don't know what the context is or anything
just
from "On the origin of stories (evolution, cognition and fiction) by Brian Boyd (NZ Auckland academic)

Something I wrote, or was working on a few years ago - the image of a woman in a blue dress walking past, pulling a little girl (her daughter?) along my the wrist - the little girl in a blue dress, and with her other hand she's pulling along a doll - the doll in a little blue dress, and in the doll's other hand is something unnamable - a little blue dress and glittering eyes, and //n its# other han/#@//

But anyway that's monkeys for you. Monkeys are creepy & dangerous.

Leith Stories, Necropolis (i)

I once had a pot skeleton (*) of a tall building, a sort of monolithic grid of stone and broken windows, which floated in the water like a ship. In coastal cities, on fog-bound days, everything would fall silent and it would appear. It would drift out of the fog, a few hundred metres from land.
People would become possessed. They'd be driven to walk down to the quays, cast themselves into the water and drown.
Then: their corpses would float, drift, and wriggle back to life. They'd swim towards this building. They would climb up in their hundreds, climb out of the water and scale its stone face, climb in through the broken windows.
The structure was called the “Necropolis”. Once the dead were inside it would drift away, vanish into the fog, and take them with it. Friends, fathers and daughters. Entire families, safely nestled in their new home.
I told this to Doses and he said: “That's stupid.”
“No it's not,” I said. “It's cool. It's fucking freaky.”
“It's not freaky man, it's stupid.”
Turns out this thing exists, as many macabre and derelict things do, in Leith.

Where I live.
Not to be confused with Lethe, although judging from the state of the people here perhaps the two share a common function.
Quincey got to Scotland ahead of me & had to go through the whole arduous process of finding a flat on her own.
She says: “I chose Leith because I thought it would suit you.”
I'm not sure what I ever did to deserve this woman.
I mean look at this place, it's beautiful.


Here's something that happened to me in Leith. It happened on Monday morning, on the way to work:
I went to the shop and bought a cheap energy drink and a pack of gum.
I walked out, crossed the road, and started heading towards Pilrig Park like I normally do.
There's this thing on the footpath, walking towards me. A little thing. I'm looking at it, and I cannot for the life of me determine what it is.
I stared at it, watched it bumble towards me. It was awkward, clumsy. It had a dog's body, except smaller and yellowish. It's head was a gray mess of weird shapes. From the way it was moving, it was clearly blind.
Exhausted from a terrible night of insomnia (during which I posted this and this), I accepted the appearance of this strange, fucked-up monster. It had no face, no mouth. It didn't pose an obvious threat.
It stumbled into a bin. I realised it was a fox. A fox who had killed a pigeon, and was trying to carry the thing off to eat it, except one of the pigeon's wings had arced up to cover his face and eyes. He couldn't see. He was terrified, vulnerable being out in on the street in broad daylight, but too desperate and hungry to relinquish his food for even a moment. He was so thin.
Desperate, clumsy. The thing bumbled past me and smacked into the iron gates of a small housing estate.
I walked on – I was late. My boss prints off my clock cards, periodically calls me in to meeting rooms to bollocks me about getting to work at 8:35 instead of 8:30.
So I walked on to the alley which leads to the park. I turned back and got a last look – just a dead pigeon lying outside the iron gate. I thought: aw no, poor thing. Had to drop it's food. But then something fast, a snout I suppose, whipped out from behind the gate and yanked the corpse inside.


Wish I could have photographed it. This clumsy little compound monster was one of the strangest and most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Only in Leith.
Coming home at the end of the day I found a small pile of dead pigeons near my flat – feathers stripped from their sides, bloody red bit marks on their pink skin. I went inside and grabbed my camera, I'd meant to photograph the corpses, but then the idea seemed too ghoulish.
I walked down Constitution Road and took these pictures instead. (**)



* - this term will be explained in a later post.
** - thanks to Doses and "Alive But Not Living" (henceforth called "Alive") & partners for the digital camera

Hey you

Hey

Hey you

Don't you worry

You think you are alone


And no-one is watching you

And there is no-one to care for you

And all the mistakes you are making

You feel so bad


Hey you

Don't worry

We care for you

We are watching you


All the mistakes

We clean them up

To make better


So don't worry

We care

We fix you up okay


Churrr.

And

And? And? And? And?
Annd. Annd.
Annd. Annd.
And? And? And? And?
Annd. Annd.
Annnd. Annnnn-
-nud.
Annnnnnn-
-nud.
Nud. Nud.
Nud. Nud.
Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. Nud. Nud.

(ut) Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nud. (ut) Nud. Nudut. Nud. Nudut. Nud. Nudut. Nud. Nudut. Nud. Utnud. Nud. Utnud. Nud. Utnud. (ka) Nud. Utnud. (ka) Nud-ud-nud-ka. Nud-ut-nud-ka. Nut nkah. Nut nkah.
Unkah. Unkah. Unkah. Unkah. Unkah. Unkah. Unkah. Unkah.
Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Ut. Utka
Ut! Ut! Ut! Ut! Ut! Ut! Ut! Ut!

Ahaha. Ahaha. Ahaha. Ahaha.
Ah-haha. Ah-haha.
Ah-ha-ha-ha. Ah ha. Ah ha.
Ah-ha-ha-ha. Ah ha. Ah ha.
Ah-hee. Ah-hee-hee! Ah-hee-hee!
Ah-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hehehehe-hehehehe-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee
Ah-ha-ha-ha. Ah-ha-ha-ha.
Ah-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee
AH-HEE AH-HEE AH-HEE AH-HEE AH-HEE AH-HEEEE AH-HEEEE AH-HEEEE AH-HEEEEEEEEEEEE
AH-HEEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEE

Ahh. Ahh. Ahh. Ahh. A-ahhhhhhh. A-ahhhhhhh.
Ah-hah. Ah-hah. Ahh. Ahh.
Ah-hah. Ah-hah. Ahh. Ahh.
Shhh. Ahh. Shhh.
Shhh. Ahh. Shhh.
Ahh. Ahh. A-ahhhhhhh
Ah-hum. Hum. Hum. Ah-hum
Ahhhhh. Ah-hahhhh.
Hum. Ah. Huh. Nh. Ah. Hum. Ah.
Awwwwwww.

Awwwwwww.
Yahh-awww. Umm. Ay. Ma. Umm. Ay. Ma.
Ay ma ay ma ay ma
I am a I am a I am a I am a
Awwwwwww.
I am a I am a I am a I am a uh uh uh uh
I-am-a-I-am-a-I-am-a-I-am-a-I-am-a-I-am-a-I-am-a-I-am-a
I AM A I AM A
I am a I am a I am a I am a
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
I AM A I AM A I AM A I AM A
I am a I am a I am a I am a
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh

I am a.

(Near) Death of a Sock Monkey

Had a series of bad traffic accidents a couple months back.


The first one was probably the worst – coming up the ramp onto the motorway, I would have been going about seventy or eighty k, getting set to merge lanes and all of a sudden the cars in the next lane stop, and the van stops, and everything else stops. Dead still.


I'm sitting at the wheel, staring ahead, or at sort of an angle, staring out across the lanes of traffic. I can see these trees on the far side, the leaves, the long grass. They've stopped. There's grey shapes in the corner of my vision, hovering in mid-air, which I assume are stopped pigeons except I can't check because I've stopped too. Can't move, can't even swivel my eyeballs in their sockets.

And I'm thinking: fu-uck.

Time's fucking stopped.

Except my consciousness has continued in the gap.

And I'm there.

And at first I'm just thinking: fahh.

Mate.

But then I think: when is this going to start up again? You know? 'Cos I've got no way of knowing when, or if, things are going to start moving again. This could be it, this could be me – trapped for forever in just this one moment, driving three dozen crates of wine and spirits up onto the motorway. Staring out across the traffic, with the trees behind half-in focus. Can't even focus my eyes.



This could be me, forever. Weeks, months, years. Centuries even. Millennia. My own private hell – fuck's sake! I'm thinking: it'll drive me out of my mind. Drive me fucking mad. And then what? Drive me even further out of my fucking mind. It'd just keep going. Sustained pressure on my sanity, there'd be nothing left. No reference except for this one same moment, this one bunch of stimuli. Train of thought would just come apart completely, round and round, thinking about the same things until you couldn't even call it thought anymore, it'd just be chanting.

But then I think: what if it starts up again? 'Cos I'd be fucked then too, since I've got my foot down on the accelerator, like I say I'm going seventy or eighty k into another lane of traffic. So I'm worried that when (or if) it starts up again, I won't be able to react in time, I'll slam into one of these cars, probably this yellow one just behind me which I can barely even see.

Fu-uck!

You know?

Like, how am I supposed to be prepared for this moment when time resumes? If, in fact, it ever arrives? Driving a van at eighty k is one thing, but going from zero to eighty in the blink of an eye, going from not driving to full on driving down the motorway... that's a different story!

I make up my mind to stay tense, stay prepared. I'm staring out across the lanes of traffic like a dozey fuckwit, not moving, not doing anything, but mentally I'm prepared for things to go whizzing into life the next moment. And then the next moment. And on and on. I'm sitting there, and half of me is scared that I'm stuck here for eternity and I'll go mad, and the other half is just shit-scared I'm about to fly into a side-on collision at eighty k.

I'm thinking: first thing to do is take your foot off the accelerator. The very first chance you get. Then hit the brake, pull the wheel to the left. Foot off the accelerator. Hit the brake. Steer left.

Somehow I have the theme music from Labyrinth stuck in my head. Don't ask me why.

Thinking about Labyrinth reminds me of Beth, my sister. Beth likes Labyrinth, I mean everyone does, I certainly do, but she likes it more than anyone.


Beth's always on my case about my driving. Dumb cow. Not that there's anything wrong with my driving, because there isn't. She's just decided I'm a bad driver, keeps telling me to get a different job.

“If you keep driving that van you're gonna have an accident and kill yourself. Bet you fifty bucks.”

I think: bet you fifty fucking dollars that when time starts up again and I hit this yellow car, Beth's going to blame it on my driving.

Blog Entry

Ordinarily I wouldn't be making an entry about my personal life (at least in the present) or music or going to see bands etc, that's not the sort of blog this is.

Not really out to post photos of my friends or anything ("look, there's you! And there's ME!"). Go on rants about my political opinions. Talk about celebrities or thinkers I think are cool.

HOWEVER

Yes HOWEVER because through the good graces of a woman who is not actually named Quincey but for the purposes of this blog is, I am in possession of the following:



Probably this means little or nothing to you. YOU DAMNED FOOL! I forgive you.

This is like you getting to see one of YOUR bands, whatever they are for you, like the top two or three bands in your life. Jhonn Balance is unfortunately dead, so there's no more Coil, but Peter Christopherson made all the music anyway and this is him and I'm getting to see him.

And it just keeps coming:



The first ticket is a 12 hour horror movie marathon. Then Threshold Houseboys Choir. Then on Monday they're showing Suspiria. In a cinema! Amazing.

The movie tickets, I should say, were subsidised by the Film House membership I got as a going-away present from my job in New Zealand. So in something of an irony, working to promote the rights of women has given me a discount to see a film where women are stabbed, dissected, impaled by glass, hung from nooses, covered in maggots, cursed by surreal flashing lights, dropped into a room full of barbed wire, and then brought back to life to attack their friends.

If someone pitched me this weekend, and said: "all of this could be yours, but we'd have to pull one of your fingernails out with pliers", I would have said: "okay, do it." I would probably have asked for a shot of whiskey or something first. But going to these movies and this gig is better good than having a fingernail pulled out would be badly bad. Go Quincey.

Thank you for indulging me. Hopefully this does not constitute gloating. Probably not.

It probably doesn't mean a lot to you. There has been mention that recent Sleep Dep entries ("Sleep Dentries") have been gloomy and suggestive of a sad or depressed state of mind. Not so.

Here is a picture of a boarded up primary school near my office:

Hey Hey We're the Sock Monkeys

Goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy-goobeddy.

Leith

Our local chinese.


OR ELSE the cover of a dance compilation, circa 1996/97.
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I'll go first.