Notes # 243

Wow, what those little burnt offerings do to me. Why I return beats me, except that they still exist and nearly didn't, just like me. Anyone who has been swimming in A WineDark Sea over the years will know the story of my notes that survived the fire: an unpleasant incident where I set fire to fifteen years' worth of personal diaries to appease a jealous fiance who would have preferred to marry a clean-slate girl. The thing is the fire's remnants are rather beautiful artifacts. The stuff written in them is the standard agonised navel-gazing formative stuff that when you read later are boring as shit, tawdry and excruciatingly embarrassing. But as artifacts, they are beautiful. Precious ... taonga, as Merc said once.

Romancing the Medicine Wheel ... I think I was referring to the wolves in this quote above and how they disappeared from Europe and the Americas due to people's fear. Cue the twenty first century and replace wolves with folk you don't know.

 I still love the Nepalese books, hand made of cloth paper with beautiful designs on the hard cover. My pen bounces over fibre strands, making the writing shaggy with texture. At that stage I loved my fine Artlines. These days any Uniball or Bic will do but I still buy these books to write stuff in.

Once upon a roadkill I found a kookaburra and a picture to sticky tape its poor old tail feathers to.

A dream ... the same dream I still have from time to time. I break into a house that isn't mine. The inside of the house is gutted by fire but there is a complete bookshelf of the most amazing books. I know I'm in danger so I can't sit and relax to read (there are no chairs anyway). On the table are candelabras burning four, five six candles.

 

The day I was tattooed for the first time, she turned up at my house with a milk crate full of her equipment and set to work on me. I was romancing Stormboy's father-to-be at the time and she tattooed him too. We spent a summer's afternoon in a sweaty fugue of pain and endorphins. She was really beautiful and getting tattooed was horny, given the hormones and natural painkillers coursing through our bodies. Later we went for a swim at Muttonbird to cool off. All the colour dropped out of my tattoo and she had to come back and do it again. My foot has been retouched again since. Getting your foot tattooed, that drumming of needle on bone, it really hurts.

 

Several pages of the diary look like this. After I'd set fire to the whole stack and stoked them for several hours, I went to bed exhausted and quite traumatised. My fiance got out the hose, bled the text into flaking charcoal. He could have been coming from honourable intentions, but for hiding the remaining diaries from me because he wanted to read the rest in private. Days later I realised what he'd done when he started quizzing me. I found his stash of my diaries, took them out to the rubbish truck as it went by, threw them in. 

This is one of the few books that survived. For some reason I kept it and wrapped it in a silk scarf. As I opened it tonight, pieces of it fell into my lap, pieces that I brushed away like cigarette ash.

The hose-soaked page above is detailing a tarot reading with a man sitting resident in a local crystal shop. I still think about that reading sometimes. He talked about a straight-backed woman with a red plait down her back going to market with her produce. "This is you," he said. "But not yet. Now you're stuck with the same thing that will play out over several seven year cycles." Even though he claimed to be a gypsy and smelt like cum (no, really) and used cards that he claimed were his grandmother's and probably weren't, even though he was leery ... I know now this old bloke's words have repaid me more than the twenty bucks I gave him seventeen years ago.