Pike River

…a short story about fucking tragedy.

For those unaware, New Zealand has just ‘celebrated’ the anniversary of the Pike River mine disaster, an explosion that killed 29 men.

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2017

This year I’m going to deepen my practice. I will reach out into more artisanal forms of whimsy. I will engage more deeply with a sense of lightness, follow essential rhythms and embrace the cadences of serendipity.

Also, I’ll get to work on that random fuckspeak generator. It’s overdue.

Puh..

I’ve realised, since moving to Australia around a hundred years ago, that it doesn’t seem hot until 37c. And then it’s body temperature. And then it’s hot. 

It’s still ‘normal’ though, the kind of weather one describes as ‘disgusting’, rather than ‘frightening’ (frightening is reserved for 40c and up). 

Only in Australia does it get too hot to go to the beach. 

Hello gums

Christmas. A deserted beach. Happiness.

What would happen….

Yesterday I shook an enormous centipede out of my togs.

‘What would happen if it had bitten me?’

‘You’d have a centipede bite’

‘Yes. But what would that be like?’

‘Well, it’s not something you’d want’.

 

So ends today’s insight into Australian culture.

Protection from ourselves

Two days ago I walked into a pharmacy and bought 3 ampules of b12. For a known reason, my body doesn’t absorb b12. Initially I was prescribed b12 injections, which brought my b12 level up from ‘heart failure’ to ‘low/uninteresting’. I was told that I would probably require supplementation for life.

No worries, I thought, I can buy the stuff from the chemist and inject it myself (intramuscular, not venous). This, incidentally, was the advice from my doctor.

So, after putting it off for too long, I finally went to the chemist and bought three months of b12. And then I asked for the syringes to go with it.

The pharmacist gives me a dead-eyed stare; ‘We don’t sell syringes here’.  That’s what his lips said anyway. His eyes said; I see you in your voluminous, unusual shaped skirt, mid length hair and earrings you would describe to your co-workers as ‘funky’, but your boring middle-aged woman disguise won’t work on me. I know you’re a filthy junky. 

Now I don’t know a lot about injecting drug users but I’m pretty sure they’re not asking for intramuscular syringes. It seems to me they’re probably aiming for a vein, not a soft, rising mound of pale buttock flesh. I don’t think those blue lights in public dunnies were put there to make your arse look more like a moon. Because no-one wants to inject the moon.

Where was I? Ah yes. Junkies.

If I thought that buying intramuscular syringes at the chemist was the root of galloping drug use and its accompanying entrenched social decay then maybe I’d get it. But it isn’t. Australia, in case you haven’t noticed, is already awash with drug addicts. There doesn’t seem to be much trouble accessing drugs. And, in this area, it seems that the non-injecting drugs are far more problematic than the old fashioned ones. Like everywhere else, ice seems to have taken hold. And of course it’s a precious irony that the local chemist that refused me stands next to the supermarket bottle shop.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of decriminalising ice, but my opinion doesn’t matter – if the amount of staggering lunatics is anything to go by, it appears to be more or less tolerated anyway.

After all, the average life span of a regular ice user is ~5 years, with a fairly low standard deviation. Unlike other drugs, ice leaves its survivors compromised in expensive ways, potentially requiring a lifetime of health interventions and support. What’s a government to do?

A) Wait for it to ‘run its course’? (5 years of potential anti-social behaviour in disastrously sweaty sneakers). Cost; policing possibly jail, ~5 years.

B) Assist addict to rehabilitate and pay for resulting lifetime of healthcare. Cost ~40 years of intensive healthcare.

Oooo, it’s a tricky one.

 

Yuletide instruction

“I do not want to come home to find the Christmas tree duct-taped to the ceiling again”.

Politically, egregiously, disastrously wrong

Meet Mong Bear.

At the tender age of three, my daughter designed this bear. I’m unsure of how Mong-Bear got her remarkable moniker, but let’s go with the excuse de jour; The Russians made us do it*.

I’m sharing Mong Bear with you all because I was recently asked how to encourage creativity in young children. I don’t think Mong Bear is quite what the nice woman in the hand-shibori skirt had in mind when she asked. And yet, here we are.

Mong Bear is a girl. All my daughter’s teddies are girls, including Bruce, the chain-smoking camel from Tennant Creek. Bruce went through a bit of a rough patch during in the plastic-sheet floods of 2012 but he perked up a bit with a touch of lippy. Bruce, however, is a ‘normal’ teddy – he came from a shop. As you can see, it’s going to take more than a smear of Cinnamon Blush to set Mong Bear to rights.

But here’s the thing; Mong Bear is  actually perfect. Like the squid that swims backwards or Gina Reinhart in a pair of safety goggles (think: shrink-wrapped polyp with windows), Mong Bear is the pinnacle of her species.

I know this because teddies, all teddies, are designed to make little people happy. And, four years on, Mong Bear has delighted, captivated and comforted my daughter in ways that a normal teddy could never do.

Mong Bear’s perfection lies in her design; she was made to the exacting specifications of a three year old. Armed with a pen and huge piece of paper, my kid and I thrashed out the blueprint for the World’s Most Loveable Ted. It went something like this;

Small ears.

Roundy eyes.

A head shaped like this.

No, no, more like this.

A biiiiig tummy.

A long thin body.

Arms, not too long. Shorter. No shorter. NO MUM! Shorter! Yes, short legs too. Very short.

Kids are acute observers of humans. Good teddies must be teddy-ish but also human-ish. That is, wobbly, myopic orange nerds that are at once too thin and too fat and evoke the suspicion that Teddy’s mum got stuck into the mint julep at a critical juncture. Mong Bear is eminently patient and cuddly, but also, clearly, requires thick glasses and endless operations. Perfect.

Mong Bear has provided my daughter with years of love and fun. But she’s also taught me an important lesson: Big People have no business designing teddies. Big People have troubling pre-conceptions about Cute and/or Fluffy and discernible limbs. Indeed, Mong Bear made me realise that, aside from the ones that look like animals, most store-bought teddies resemble Kevin Rudd. They are small eyed and biscuity, with wobbly heads and a penchant for being smarmy in Mandarin.

Three year olds do not design Kevin Rudd. (Maybe they should).

All children should design at least one teddy. They will, of course, need your help.

Now I realise that a lot of adults have trouble being creative in this way. So I’ve devised two simple guidelines;

1. Your teddy should be completely unique – see above.
2. the end result should look like it could win a heart-wrenching class action suit against the Federal government at some point in the future.

Now, get stuck in!

 

*Sometimes it’s way dodgier to explain why the name that sounds ‘good’ isn’t actually good at all, than to just cough loudly and say ‘Oh, yes she’s named after our daughter’s favourite bean sprout’.

Waking up to….

Noooo, I just want to go to the toilet, I don’t want to face the radical death-stick of doooooom!