Hemry's Arcanums

Whenever I thought about what we would say when we grew up, he would scrunch his stupid face and look at me like I was squeezing bubble wrap in my mouth.

He never thought it was so interesting to think about the future. At least, not in the way I thought he thought. Not in the way he pretended that he thought, mostly when he was drunk.

Hugs never meant anything to him.

Me? I never really liked him. I just clung to him because he made me feel like I had to work, put in the effort, do something, anything, to be better than the person he was so sure I was going to become.

I think sometimes I loved him, but I never liked him.

Think about it. Every day you are going to wake up and just hope that you have fallen in love. Most people spend their time wishing someone else could love them, or that they could fall out of love with someone. Not Hemry.

I remember a time when he told me the story of his name. His father wanted to call him Hemmingway, but his mother wanted to call him Henry, so, on the day of his birth, when she was too tired to notice, he signed the name Hemry on the birth certificate, took all her money and fucked off. He didn’t come back. Nice guy.

Love is something Hemry said was for domestic animals. They had to pretend they loved you, so you would feed them. He said that people were just stupid pets, bred to love so they would eventually have a house and food. He said this wasn’t why people actually existed.

Somebody told me once that I should find somebody else. Somebody that wasn’t so obnoxiously stupid. Occasionally though, after he would say something terrible to me, something bone crushingly pathetic, he would smile. I thought maybe he found it funny, the way he treated us, and that, he just didn’t know. And I was too tired. To find somebody, anybody;

Else.

5am

I would sleep in the front, hidden only by a gate and a blanket. The cars would drive past and if I knew a friend was near I would wake to greet them. I thought of installing a lock but never actually bothered. She had a small person with her this day, he resembled her past lover in so many ways and I just knew that this child had to be hers. She had kept him hidden. I shook his hand and called him mister, and her face had suddenly aged, she had become someone I had known many years before.

I had proof. It was hidden inside of an old answering machine at the head of my bed, attached to the wall. It was a joke, a prank, pulled by myself and my lover and my then future husband. It ended in anger, in screams, in old violent American films and me alone for the rest of my life. In me, nothing more than crumpled dirty clothes on the floor of different hotel rooms.

When my father was drunk he would scream at me through the gate. Bash his hands up against the metal and scream at me to come out, to come out and be his child. To make him feel like he was more than just an old man. By this time I had eight boys that soon became twelve. They had been playing and came to see what the fuss was, what he was fussing over. He softened as he saw the boys and pulled from his history twelve broken guitars. He told them he would not be around to see their fortune, but he would always have them in his heart. This is where he was criminal and merciless and this is where he was fearful and irrelevant. I thought about telling the children to put the guitars down and never accept gifts from strangers, but after all he had done, I could not do this.

My husband had received the deed to this hotel. And yet, I still slept alone.

You say the secret ingredient is everything, and I don’t know how to cook what you are on about. We say the secret ingredient is learning how to spell correctly, but it isn’t really. It’s just an easy way to pretend to be stupid.

I met him by some sort of lake, but I doubt it’s true, because I don’t imagine I have ever seen a lake in my life, not that I would remember if I had. We sat on some wood, like a jetty of some sort, but little. A bridge perhaps. You were there to kill me, of course, as always. This time it was a different kind of kill, and you were just a child. I couldn’t believe it as you were much, much taller than me and I had been alive for quite some time. I was not a child.

I thought maybe you had forgotten everything as well as I, and it would suddenly make sense. But it didn’t, and you showed me your umbilical cord which had only just begun to shrivel and fall off. A cord that was probably made of twisted fibres, of which had probably kept you alive for this long, having no idea who you were or where you were going. But oh well.

I kind of giggled that day, because I think it took you twenty four years to realise that it wasn’t an umbilical cord at all, but the one thing that would tie you to another human being, eventually, if one were to exist. Giggling is for stupid people, you said. And from then on, I made a point of giggling as much as I could. I didn’t want to be smart anymore. I didn’t want to know you.

Everything is Going to be Alright

"Make money online" she says. But then how will I avoid the impending doom of fat. Which is really the only reason why I would want a job, it has become very easy to just, not do anything. And then drink, when I decide to do something. I still don't eat very much, but then, it's never been a strong talking point amongst the other attendees.

"Make money online" she says. Like it's that easy (and it isn't). I always thought that we were doing something that we loved, but, apparently that is impossible, unless you have like, heaps of money, which we don't. Dir.

"Make money online" she says. And this is where it begins? Making money online, so I have a little bit of extra pocket money. I'm not a freaking dinosaur, or a kid. I don't have kids of my own (or dinosaurs). Although I wish I did. I could sell them on ebay, and make money online. Dammit.

We say that we study and work and practice to make the kind of money we need to buy a house and have kids. Oh lordy lord, if I believed in religion I would say "Jesus Christ Holy Moses MY GOD" that is possibly bullshit. And so, so very boring. I just want to GO. I want to study and work and practice so that I can GO. How many times have I swapped lives with you? Too, too many. It is no longer fun, it's now just reality tv, and it's kind of pathetic.

I spend more time looking through dictionaries than I do looking through job search sites, and that's not to say that I don't spend a lot of time on job search sites. Enough to want to smash your computer time and time again is enough time in my inattentive mind. I spend more time looking for music I might like than I do listening to it. I spend so much more time looking at art I might like than I do making it, and that is supposed to be why I am here, Jesus Christ Holy Moses MY GOD. No.

No. No. No. No.

I like words a whole lot more than I do pictures. I don't look at the tv when it is on. I certainly don't look at you when you are talking (although I spend a great deal of time wishing I could remember what the hell you looked like). I cry to music and scrutinize spelling and fall in love with dialogue, but I have never cried about art and I have never thought about the social implications of it's existence and I have certainly never fallen in love with art, or an artist. (However I have fallen in love with someone you might call a musician or a writer.)

I have to remind myself sometimes that this work exists, and that I am doing this shit for a reason, and that what it says is most certainly true, and that the man that made it, if not for truth, is happy. A happy, happy man.

Jude's Pet Armadillidiidae

Dear Jude,

If I am ever in hospital and unable to do much besides watch television (or make ghosts out of rubber bands and tissues) please don't change the channel to football and walk out of the room.

If I ever ask you a question about ultimatums, and you don't know how to answer, always choose the very last choice as this will be the one I want you to choose.

If you ever come home and I am watching television on the verandah, please look after me, as we don't have a television on the verandah.

If I ever tell you that I am going back with Trotsky, say no, say no it is the wrong thing to do. Don't say no because you are scared I will leave you for some revolution. Don't say no because you are bored.

If I ever leave you because I become too content, too complacent, with all that surrounds you, just go to sleep and forget about me.

If I ever tell you about the six holed double adapter in our lounge room and how whenever I plug something into the fourth hole the third hole sparks, this is the sign, that I am leaving you for a Trotskyite who watches fictional television on the verandah and never gives ultimatums and never watches football.

The six holed double adapter in our lounge room will never be spoken of otherwise. Don't try and ask me about it Jude, because I will shake my head and tell you I am not ready. If I loved you, I'd let you go, but I do not.

When I Close My Eyes, My Advice to You

Never near enough,

scrolling down the side.
Slide away,
skipping past, little girl.
Past joint.

Pick pocket,
weary of time,
repetition scale,
excitement.

If I wore pants once,
I'd hit myself.

Hair.

Discordance,
hilarious.
About time.
Yesterday was, anyway.

Here my finger is still bleeding.
Adornment.
Compliment.
A mouse died yesterday,
escape.

Blow me away,
sit on my mind,
abomination of perfection.
Ordinary,
perfectly ordinary.

Already did it yesterday.
Alright?
Clean the blinds,
stop! Good, good.
Good.

Pull something big out,
in the foreshore.
Fight.
Flight.
Dangerous hill.
Sanctify.

Urban Legends

Our exhibition got relocated to The Cot which will be cool fun. I have little to say as I am so so tired but here are some pictures for when I need pictures to show someone! It was a very fun night.

Clint taking a photo of stuff with the cork board in the back.
It is full of little pictures of lots of stuff, including naughty stuff.
Tom, Rurik, Jean and Leah sitting on the stairs.
Jackie's work about the knicker knicker (man that steels knickers off the line)

Me and James. I say me and James because I am to the left.

Jane improvising on the door.

My pictures about eating babies, going blind, and hanging out from a tree.

Clint's scary man that was projected onto the wall for all to see. From the street.

Some of the people there. It was a good crowd but I didn't get many
clear photos of them all, too dark.

Rurik's paintings. One is of a man that comes as a ghost to your bed if you have a rubbing of his grave stone in your room. One is of a tree around a dead body. I can't remember what it meant. And the other was of a girl who died of fright when she got her dress caught on a gravestone.

Drew, Richard, Shane.Shane's about poprocks and coke making you explode.

The End.

My Box

Here are some pictures of my box. It is full of little folded pieces of paper that are tied with string. The pieces of paper are from my diaries from high school. It is about adolescence and the self serving center-of-the-universe crap that we think. Someone in my studies who I cannot remember the name of because I am useless at citing said that adolescence is the ability to think you are the first to experience all the emotions you are experiencing and that you are obviously experiencing them more intensely than anyone else ever will again. So this is me tying up all the bullshit I probably spun to myself and the world and hiding it inside this locked box.

"The earth is flat and nobody could tell you any different,
so your interior encompassed all that existed."

Mostly I just think it looks cool, so many little papers, different yet unified. And I have to spin some academic shit so it fits into a thesis. Yay.