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I need new friends
I need new friends.
Friends who need a friend and not a baby sitter or a co-offender, not a look-out or a driver.
Catching up would involve bookings at restaurants with food, wine and pleasant lighting not booking in supervised visits had at metal tables under clinical lighting.
I need new friends.
Friends that make good choices. Choices that involve positive personal growth and not growing plants in hidden houses.
Friends that pay with bank cards in shops not friends who can count a thousand dollars at break neck speeds.
I need new friends.
I need friends who own one, maybe two, registered & working vehicles not friends with car yard front yards full of unregistered & immobile ”works in progress”.
I need new friends.
Friends with good credit and not good-behaviour bonds.
I need new friends.
Missed call from mum
This works.
Here is my piece;
I’m not a religious person, I could never grasp the idea of “blind faith”, however looking back at the moments leading up to that call, I can’t help but to question what forces are actually out there.
I’m always asleep that time of the morning, the world at 7am is for runners and retirees not me.
I fumbled for the phone when it rang, only just waking up enough to register its jarring ringtone.
Missed call,
Mum
Suddenly I felt my heart fall to my feet, my mind immediately wakes, I can feel my veins thumping as my blood pressure suddenly spikes.
“Shit, I think dads having a heart attack”
Now I should mention at this point that my father had always been in good heath and didn’t have any heart issues that we were aware of.
But for some reason, some cosmic reason, I immediately knew what that missed call was about.
I call back before my mind could even finish my thought.
Mums hysterical, dads in the ambulance being rushed to St Vincent’s hospital, she wants me to come quick.
Calmly I tell her that he’s having a heart attack, she insists that they haven’t told her what’s going on yet but that he’s very very sick.
I calmly repeat mum he’s having a heart attack, I’ll meet you at the hospital.
Those moments, that handful of seconds, between missing her call and calling her back, we in some surreal way the most real moments I’ve ever felt. So real that they almost feel like they have physical form- like I could reach out and touch every millisecond and feel it’s pounding pulse beneath its sharp and hard surface.
The memory exists in my mind as some strange artists installation piece.
What made me assume it was a heart attack I will never know.
Maybe I was just an innate educated guess based on family history or maybe it was something else, something explainable only through faith and beyond human forces.
Whatever it was, those moments will never leave me.
When I was calling mum back dad was being revived in the ambulance en route to the hospital, he had had a massive cardiac arrest - doctors told us that no one could have predicted it, he had a silent electrical cardiac condition that was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.
Only 10% of people survive a cardiac arrest like his
And thats only if they receive professionally administered CPR within 4 minutes of the arrest happening.
Almost no one survives when an inexperienced person is the one to provide the immediate cpr, and if they do manage to beat the odd they almost always have some left over brain damage from the lack of oxygen.
I look back at how calm I was on the phone to mum “he’s having a heart attack I’ll meet you at the hospital” I don’t remember feeling scared in those moments.
Dad made a full recovery, “a miracle, touched by god” said the doctors.
I wonder if those moments immediately after I woke up, the phone call with mum, the absence of fear and the confidence I had in my diagnosis….
But then I stop and remind myself, I’m not really a religious person.
Work very much in progress..
(if you have the time please comment with any suggestions or comments or feedback pretty pretty please xx.... chapter 2 is a shitshow of ideas and not actually a structured chapter yet lol)
(untitled)
Working in the Dopamine Department is always a rush.
Each and every dopamine neurotransmitter constantly firing across synapses and running in and out of neural pathways making sure its human citizen is functioning.
There are three main sectors in the Dopamine Department; The Department of Reward & Motivation (the DRM), The Bureau of Attention & Focus (BAF) and The Division of Mood & Emotional Regulation (DM&E). And then, Overseeing this whole bloody fiasco, is me, Daphnia, the Secretary of Dopamine.
Now, when I took this particular job 34 years ago, I had only skimmed over the briefing paper on Genetics and Predispositions for my specific human citizen, and boy do I regret that now, let me tell you!
Anyway! It’s my job to make sure all my dopamine agents are going out to the right jobs and that they are working in the correctly sized teams for each specific release. And, to be fair, we started off pretty well.
Everyone was going out to the right place, with the right numbers, at the right time. We even managed to limit interdepartmental disagreements to a low rumble now and then.
But, and of course in life there is always a “but”, our citizen did experience some external turbulence so to say… Extended exposure to reoccurring domestic violence and some other authority related break downs in trust.
As a former on-field dopamine agent for the DM&E, I knew we were going to take a bit of a hit. The resulting cuts to departmental funding would mean we would need to take some of the agents working on the “Mood and Well-being Portfolio” which was not going to be ideal in the long run as that meant having less agents working on the core policies on positive emotions and general sense of optimism.
See this is where the whole thing started, this first funding cut. You know that feeling you get when you’re arch nemesis neighbour just so happens to park in your favourite spot? You know that broiling anger you feel as you gaze upon your street, with your spot stolen by that grating asshole? Yep, that was it- that was exactly how I felt about those fuckwits down at the Norepinephrine Arousal and Stress Command (ASC).
I guess I should probably fill you in on what our human citizen had experienced. Now don’t worry, I’m not going to sit here and play back the full show- it’s just way too long and I’d rather not relive it, it was shit enough sitting through it the first time, so I’ll just give you some basic insight…
Her grandmother was someone she loved. Her tiropitas, creamy pasticho and poorly appropriated “special rice” were on the weekly menu and our citizen loved that. As a toddler, her yiayia was, in some ways, as present as her own mother. Her parents were driven, with the kind of work ethic normally reserved for working class homes, so this meant her grandparents inherited a large portion of her childhood school day caretaking.
Even now, she can still hear moments from back then. Judge Judy playing her 2 o clock spot in her grandmothers lounge, her widowed grandmother stood over the burning stove, as she had been for much of the afternoon.
Her cousins, bickered with whines and sneaky slaps, fighting over whose turn it is to play snap with their father Steve. And while she might have briefly felt comfortable, that feeling was not accepted, she knew that any resemblance of serenity that she might snatch up now would soon enough be drowned out by the sounds of the violence. When she was in that house, uncertainty was the only certainty she had come to expect. Well, uncertainty and guilt.
(Ch2)
The Government of The Brain had an “on-the-fly” approach to its distribution of funding, which meant that each department would have to plead their case every time they felt the citizen was facing a situation where they could benefit from the departments expertise.
The goal of every brain government is for all its departments to work together in managing all the different human citizens responses in the healthiest way possible.
And as is with all governments, this is not often how things play out.
The General of the Norepinephrine Arousal And Stress Command was a guy called Nigel. We both started out on the same project, I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do remember that we had our team meetings in the prefrontal cortex building. He would always have these carefully dot-pointed notes done in this blur of anxious cacography that only he could read.
While my office walls were coated with reminders of great achievements, beautiful wild horses and all my favourite bright colours, his office was decorated with step-by-step guides, carefully directing you to the nearest exist or how to check for signs of stroke. The only thing we both had up was each of our report cards from our graduating year- both spilling over with high distinctions, but I don’t think we shared the same reasons for hanging them.
So anyway, Nigel ran his team just like a drill sergeant fresh outta ’nam, marching out his soldier’s as soon as our citizen heard the first signs of war, and, at my direction, we poured out behind him desperately trying to provide her with adaptive responses to handle it all.
Her grandmother’s back yard had a small brick patio that joined the back door to the large grassy garden out back that was sprinkled with reminders of home, a reaching fig tree, small lemon tree and the kind of make shift veggie garden that was clearly built in keeping with the mentality of a poor villager.
It was on that patio that a big green plastic table sat, its emerald green chairs seemed to be patient in wait for their next turn to be used. Her memory of that table, in that silent wait, can only be recalled for a moment before the nostalgic tranquillity is raided by the sound of her uncle’s accosting voice making hard demands with her grandmother’s thrilling questions in response. It’s at that point that her mind goes blank for a moment.
Which is actually not blank for any good reason other than the fact that Nigel and I were all the way down at the temporal building and didn’t make it to the hippocampus in time to form the memory properly… so yep, our bad…
Anyway, as soon as her mind is able to pull the next moment from its files, the moment’s moved to. Not up or down in severity, but just across. The air now seems to smell of immediate threat.
The sounds have changed, less verbal now.
Yard slipper’s soles slap the paved patio, plastic is dragged along the red ceramic and then lifted above his head.
Her grandmother, still circling the large green plastic table, yells Greek spoken pleas of mercy. He launches the plastic green chair toward her. Our citizen, delayed by the stress, her decision to jump up and intervene came just a “click” past the moment that her uncle threw the chair, and thankfully, around the same time her grandmother ducked. She hears the crack and clatter of the green plastic chair as it connects with the patio bricks and then collapses, tired on the ground.
Her memory ends with nothing more than the abrasive sounds, an omnipresent force of tension and the heaviness of residual fear.
The Dopamine Department, hand in hand with the Norepinephrine Arousal and Stress Command, deployed on-field agents for active policy implementation and we had worked together as on as part of the brain’s immediate response to stress. So look, I’m a pretty driven impulse myself, but I like to feel good. So I actively try and seek out experiences that leaving me feeling on top of the world
Easier to handle On a full stomach
Every time I wipe away the crummy evidence from my lips and adjust my pants to account for my calorie loaded slip up, I find myself declaring “That is it! This can’t continue! My diet starts now!”.
It seems, like most things, the idea of a diet is much easier to handle with a full stomach.
A generation of sensory overload. The standard existence of todays youth.
We can't deal with anything so we try and take on everything while actually doing nothing.
We have perfected this concept, recreated it an then perfected it once more.
So please, credit where its due, thanks.
It's obvious that there are some exceptions to the rule.
Some managed to jump on the other life boat, the one that went the correct route back to shore.
These people avoid the rest of us.
They hide in libraries and go hiking on their weekends.
While we are trying to chemically alter the reality we live and reach a new level of misanthropic being, they are exploring the wonders of history, nature and space.
I've tried this once.
It required too much drive and in return gave very little in the field of immediate reward.
That's they key.
The song from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory once again rears its head;
"I want the world, I want the whole world".
Silver platter and all!
BUT i don't particularly want to lift a finger.
So if you don't mind just passing it over to me kthankyou, then I wont cause a ruckus when my time comes to walk through those fiery gates.
Oi! Larry! God! Mohammed or who ever the hell you are! Give me some kind of break here champ! I'm clutching at straws but each one keeps shrinking!
I'm not sure this is what i signed up for.
What's the number for the ombudsman of life? I've got 10 bucks that says it's not a toll-free 1800 number, which means my credit-less phone is once again rendered useless against this horridly cruel situation.
I guess every one has their search.
Their inner quest for knowledge or chocolate or oil or whatever they please.
Without these lifetime long journeys we would not be human.
The people who disregard this pure fact of life are nothing but confused and fearful souls.
It’s not about where you land but the way you flew, fell and glided there.
It's about those small exchanges of simple words with a stranger on the street.
It's the glow that fills your body when you make a new friend.
These silent pleasures are what shape us and make us all unique and strange.
I know it's going to be okay.
I know I'll find the oil-lamp destine to light my path.
I know this because I still enjoy these small, special pleasures of life.
With my jail cell bedroom, straight jacket blanket and dill sergeant TV screen, it's a battle to just get out of the house.
"Sleep is my drug, My bed is my dealer and the alarm clock is the police".
I'll keep marching on, left foot right foot, till I cease to exist.
I mean hey, isn't that the story of life?
A migrant sport.
I never really fully understood sports.
I never watched the Grand Final, or those hideously long test matches.
I didn’t even realise Melbourne was where the Australian Open was played.
I wasn’t in the local basketball team and I’ve never even been to a football match at the MCG.
But for some reason, some deep seated reason, I feel an innate need to like soccer.
Well, I guess it’s not that I “like” soccer so much, I mean I’m still stumped by the notion that one would actively choose to chase a hard leather ball around outdoors in the middle of winter, it’s more that I think I see soccer as the working class migrant sport…
Since I can remember I’ve wanted to be a soccer fan, so much so that I’ve got my chosen Greek League team, Paok, every 4 years I religiously force my dad to watch the entire broadcasting of The World Cup with me, I even spent a decent chunk of my youth holding my place as a member or South Melbourne Soccer club’s HFC Fan Club.
But even given all my efforts, my Deep desires to be a true fan, I’m not exactly sure I actually “like” soccer. Or any sport to be exact.
But I do think I know WHY I feel such a strong connection with a sport that I couldn’t probably careless about.
I come from Greek migrants who came to australia in the 70’s. They came with a dream, a suitcase or two and a poor understanding of Australian language.
They were too poor to play tennis, too ethnic for cricket and I’m pretty sure the shape of the AFL ball, to them, just didn’t make sense.
In Europe, even back when there was usually only one single Tv shared by the whole little Greek village, even back then soccer still managed to find their fields.
So, soon after their ships landed on the old green and gold, many young wog boys and young wog men set search for connection in this foreign land.
They often spoken a broken Greeklish- a pieced together form of English that they’d pick while working their factory jobs or by attempting to serve customers at their fruit shops, so their language skills were not exactly opening doors for them, socially speaking.
And they didn’t exactly have treasure troves of money spare to spend on community building activities.
But, they did have the bodies of fit farm workers and the competitiveness and the team focused loyalty of battling tribes men.
So tennis was out, cricket was out, horses seemed so much more overpriced than the village donkeys they had been used to- so equestrian was out, basketball didn’t seem to figure much into consideration and like I said, the Aussie rules footballs shape made them scratch their heads in befuddlement.
Soccer was familiar, energetic and the cost to play only slightly dearer than the ball it’s self.
It was accessible and it gave them opportunities to branch out their social circle beyond the extended family.
I think the essence of this nostalgia, this sense of linking to my parents youth. My father passing the ball between his Brunswick team mates, my mothers Sunday match afternoons perched on the side lines watching. My uncle’s rare opportunity to share a common ground with him son and our shared ritualistic easter Sunday family match, in the a cobble stone Brunswick lane way behind my grandmothers house.
So, while it is true- I just don’t understand sport, I do “like” soccer, and all it represents for me.
One of those nights
Have you ever had one of those nights where everything scares you?
When you arrive home, not much later than you have in the past, but this time the distance from your car to the front door seems bigger than before?
The darkness engulfs your front yard.
When you left the house earlier on you strolled past the bushes, the corners, the nooks and crannies without a moments thought, but now they’re no longer just bushes, nooks, crannies, now they are places they might be hiding .
Tonight is one of those nights that you grab your keys and thread each one between each of your fingers and clench your fist- “If I have to hit them then I better do some damage”.
Have you ever had one of those nights where you can hear every single creak around the house? The wind becomes some unknown danger, a person creeping perhaps? A nefarious threat.
Have you ever had one of those nights where shadows take shape and sneak about? Following you closely.
One of those nights that run up your power bill, with every light on in the house?
Doors locked, then locked again. Then locked again just to be safe.
Tonight is one of those nights for me.
One of those nights where I wont sleep a wink Until these deadly shadows that keep stalking me are finally slayed by the morning’s light.
Let them stain
Often, as each heave falls and the next rises, with each sob and stuttered inhales, every tear that grows full enough to embark the decent and reaches its weakened end upon the check.
When we can feel it’s salty weight heavy enough on our face, each and every one of us will reach up our forearm, hand or more likely our sleeve, and we will sweep up any obvious marks of that tears journey.
Do we feel impelled to dab away only because we find the sensation of our tears upon our cheeks unpleasant?
When you consider all the other sensations that comprise together the act of crying, tears really don’t match the heaving, sobbing and spluttered breath do they?
No.
We dab & wipe not because they FEEL unpleasant but because we are doing our best to mask the physical evidence of what we are feeling, the pain or hurt, sadness, the trauma.
We do that so often, try to hide the evidence of tears. We are putting sleeve to cheek with every fabricated “good” or “I’m well thanks” when some asks how we are.
We do it when we smile loudly while actually we silently swallow down that lump, masking a subtle cringe as we feel it travel down our throats.
We seem to have this aversion to leaving the tears to rest and settle upon our cheeks.
We soak up not only the remaining little ball of salty evidence that has escaped from our eyes and fled down our face, we grab at tissues, sleeves and the backs of our hands and we travel from where it’s journey ended, somewhere below our cheek bones horizon and we brush up.
All the way up to glide across our lower eyelid. Soak, dab, wipe and dry up the tear and any remaining evidence of its path downwards.
But what if, what if we didn’t? What if we just left them there, right there on our cheek, if we left them and their moistened travels right there on our cheek to just dry up.
What would happen if we let our tears dry up and leave their stain? Evident to those who cast gaze. What if we answered those “how are you’s with the salty honest truths, what would happen if we just returned with the dampened words, what if we just said we were not okay?
Once in a while when I cry, when I can’t stop the raining on my cheeks, sometimes I keep the backs of my hands dry, I do not moisten my sleeves. The tissues I leave sleeping in their box.
Once in a while I let my tears dry in their own time, I let the stain form. I study the marks they leave on my cheeks, each tainted line of pains pignmentations running across my blushed and tired skin.
Once in a while, I let my tears stain. And then I watch with growing strength, each time I let them stain, I watch with growing strength as those marks left behind from the salty saline upon my skin- eventually they fade away and leave me cleansed.
So I wonder, what would happen if we just let our tears to dry, if we just let them to stain.
What would happen if we just wore our struggles and replied we a cleansing salty simple “I am not okay”.
The big green plastic table
My grandmother‘s yard was broken into two parts. The back end was beautiful. A small field of fern green grass, sprinkled with memories of her homeland. The tucked away in the rear right quarter stood short but wide reaching fig tree, whose fruit seemed to grow so bulbous and heavy that the tree could never grow tall against their weight. Closer to the house, making a more central statement, she had planted a quintessential greek essence, seen as a staple necessity, a green and gold lemon tree and to its left sat a humble veggi patch, built with the mentality of a poor villager. Old fabrics cut into thin strips tying mix matched bit of old wood to from a makeshift fence, chicken wire piled beside freshly churned soil.
Then between two dividing flowerbeds is a single and lonely step down. There the grass is replaced with a small red brick patio, the ceramic tiles lack uniformity, intact rectangles beside ones showing evidence of past drops and clumsy accidents. The patio was less weathered, saved by shelter, covered by a pergola that had seen better days.
And sitting in the centre of the red brick patio, was a big green plastic table protected by a tablecloth of clear plastic and with Emerald green plastic chairs tucked patiently under waiting for their next turn to provide reprieve to tired feet.
But today, there was no serenity. The green plastic table did not host the usual happy chitter chatter of family lunches. The emerald green chairs no longer provided feet with comfort.
I don’t remember the words, they are almost the least important aspect to me. I remember the air, almost trapped between the red brick and the open roofed pagoda above. The air, thick with tension, icy with angst. I can hear the soles of house slipper slapping against the ground as he chased her around the table. To him, maybe it was a justified squeeze play, and to her perhaps he was having a mere moment of roguery, no doubt explosive, without posing any real danger. I even though I was too young to hear the words and know their meaning, I was not too young to heed their tone.
I could hear the malice, the evil in his demands. I could hear her desperate, confused cries for help. Even as a small child, while I watch on from the kitchen window, even I could see the danger.
My grandmothers yard had two sections, one half is made of calm green pasture and the other is built of red brick floor, with a big green plastic table and emerald green plastic chairs, but now one has a crack in its arm rest and a crack in its leg.
I have so many memories of that table, many of times I hope I will always remember and one I will always try my hardest to forget.
The weight of survival
Sometimes I wonder what he would be like if, in childhood, education was held with greater importance. Sometimes I can feel his inner struggle—not one of inability or incompetence, but of two minds whose roots are separated by vast oceans.
Sometimes I can see his eyes dart and then glaze over as I speak with words that, to him, sound like a foreign tongue.
It's not that he lacks faculty or intelligence; both blessed him at birth and are present in abundance and quality. It is, however, that he was not born into the same household graces of privilege. While my own parents were working hard to acquire bachelor degrees at university, his parents barely managed to finish high school. Their dreams were trampled under the weight of survival, so the luxury of prioritizing education was a foreign concept.
While my parents were rejoicing at the news of new life forthcoming, his were watching their country burn.
When I was merely moments old, safely snug in my mother's arms, he was gasping for each new breath as dust and ash from falling bombs settled upon his sterile incubator's protective walls.
To me, education is the most important pursuit in life. To some, however, the dire, critical weight of survival takes precedence over the pursuit of knowledge.
I wonder what he would be like if he had been born into privilege like I was, raised with the empathy of education rather than the harshness of war.