Stoned.

I remember lying on a pebbly beach somewhere, and they were throwing rocks at me.  And I didn’t move, but I could hear them calling things like: ‘Can he hear us?’ and  ‘He isn’t moving.’

Is that a memory of how a previous life ended?  Perhaps that is why it has stuck so clearly in my memory.  Perhaps that is why, at the time, it seemed frighteningly familiar.  Perhaps that was why I was unable to move or speak, but just lie there while they threw rocks, till they stopped.

The way I now remember it, I was with some other Boy Scouts.  I guess we were a Patrol.  I wasn’t particularly friendly with anyone.  I participated in everything without additional conversation with anyone.  We were on a beach somewhere.  In bathing suits.  For years afterwards I was haunted by the sight of one of the guys in black speedos.  I wanted to look like that, and tried for years, but never succeeded.  Anyhow, at the moment of my memory, like a snapshot in time, they were sitting together a short distance away, while I was lying on the sand that was mostly rocks, facing away and trying to ignore them and hoping they would all go away.  They eventually did, but not before doing everything to arouse me from apparent slumber.

A Couple of Mates

Let us call him James.  He went with, let you and I call him Don, to Tasmania bush-walking.  James was accomplished and did it often, abseiling and rock-climbing to reach magnificent, inaccessible places.  I was envious because I would have liked to be taken, though now I think of it, I never asked.  They came back rather faster than anticipated, and stayed at my place so no one in their home town would know they hadn’t stayed as long as planned.  I knew another guy years ago, from that same town but no connection, who had taken a job in a lighthouse, promising us all that he looked forward to the solitude; he returned after a couple of weeks and joined the Army!!

It was always my suspicion that something had happened between them.  A few years earlier, James had kissed me.  Once, sensuously but briefly, before glided away and we never spoke of it again.  I wondered if the same sort of thing had happened while they were in the bush.  Don managed to be unobtrusively heterosexual in a non-aggressive, non-macho way.  It was at a time when people were just learning how to raise the collective consciousness of social gatherings.  It may have been a New Year’s Eve late last Century when both James and I floated past each other, briefly alighting on a pile of coats and scarves on a bed in the dark. 

James, as we are calling him, had a Mother from Pakistan.  I believe he inherited the Sensuousness that pervades many cultures in the Middle East as portrayed in the 1001 Nights and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.  Pleasurable physical contact between people need not be sexual.  In countries with total and strict gender segregation, many men behave as do many other men do in prisons or on ships – for the duration.  After a time, he married a charming lady from Scandinavia, who must have found him exotic, though born and raised in Australia and being half Anglo-Celtic he was also like an average local

It was so long ago that I didn’t know what I was, or indeed that I could be anything in particular at all.  Looking back with present knowledge at times long past can be revealing.  Don was well ahead of his time.  In today’s contexts, he could have been gay or straight, it was hard to tell.  Certainly, he displayed none of the overt masculine behaviour of flirting, and certainly never inappropriate behaviour, though he did move in early, liberated political circles.  It was only many years later, but still many years ago, that I returned to the town for a reunion and a party and saw Don in the arms of a woman.  When I commented on it, all the other women in the room laughed and I was told that they had all been one of Don’s ‘conquests’ at one time or another, he was just very, very discreet.  They had all found out a couple of years previously when he invited them all to his birthday party, I won’t reveal which one, and he gave them each a rose and owned up to his infidelities.  

Did I mention that Don was little bloke who didn’t say much, but who was really good at football, all codes, as well as ball games played with sticks or balls and hoops?  He was very popular and had no enemies, so all the husbands, brothers, fathers and sons of the ladies with whom he dallied accepted it as quite natural that it should be so, and were pleased their wives, sisters, daughters and mothers were included.  The only women missing were the visible girl-friends that he had been known to occasionally and briefly have tragically ended relationships, but they had not been at that party nor the one I was attending.  Might I also mention that little Don also worked at the Tax Department, so he probably knew everything about everyone, but was very discreet about that too?

just angry tody

Listening to ABC radio leads to distress.  Not a good lie-in at all.  Firstly about stolen Aboriginal wages in WA.  Millions stolen, eventual recognition of the problem and a slow process of correcting it, except that the final outcome is a minimal token to the few people who have survived the drawn out recognition of their rights.  The way Aboriginal people were treated is horrific.  It still persists, and worse, many Australians retain the mentality of approval or denial of this horror.  If Tony Abbott thinks Daesh is equivalent to the Jewish Holocaust, then he should look at the continual official treatment of Australia's first nations and the descendants of the long-term owners of this country.

Then came an interview about "drugs".  Portugal legalised all drugs fifteen years ago and since then heroin use has halved, AIDS transmission ceased, all drug use fell, and so forth.  The writer of a new book is speaking in Australia.  The arguments are so persuasive, yet the situation remains in Australia.

No wonder I feel resentment when in the presence of Medicos or Lawyers, the people who should be leading our society but instead are holding it back.  Pace "doctors' wives" the supposed majority component of the "new left" including the Greens and the Socialist Left, whose policies are as extreme, unrealistic and counter-productive as the Right.

I should be posting this publicly, but who listens to me?  I just make enemies, draw attention from undesirables and attract interest from the private, secretive "public" authorities.

I wrote something about public transport, yesterday, that I haven't yet posted to New Whig, that I am thinking of promoting, but my thoughts continue to be about the Nature Strip, and I might write something about that and promote it widely.  If I am to bring about one change in my lifetime, what little is left, then stopping the poisoning of endemic wild-flowers and mowing grasslands, all part of the recognition of Country, will be eternally worthwhile.

Yesterday I felt terrible.  Lunch went really well, but when I returned to Billy's later, I made us canned soup and ended up on his couch, almost asleep and went home early. The problem was partly his choice of programmes.  the Lilly Tomlin sitcom with Riba Macantyer (sp?), Malibu Country, was entertaining to start with, except now it is a total bore, except that the Lilly Tomlin character smokes weed and campaigns for it in the show.  That is good to see.  Marijuana is openly praised on television and normalised into family life in sitcoms.  On the MTV Video Awards show, they did a "3,2,1, Marijuana" cheer and gave their top award to a user and campaigner for drug normalisation.  Today, however, I don't feel too terrible, and will go to the city first for lunch and then tram to St Kilda to see Bad Jews at the new Alex Theatre.

The 

New Play

New Play

About a guy, based on me, married to a woman based on Billy.  She is not on stage at the start but makes an entrance half way through the first act.

He is a moderately successful architect.  Part of the action is his arguments with bureaucrats about a development or extension or something.

Anyway, the wife is an addict.  Notes to the script can suggest that the production make her an addict to what ever is plausible at the time.  I don’t want to lock in a drug.  Perhaps after drugs are legalised and normalised, there will be something of an equivalent.

Anyway, a visit from her supplier occurs in each act.  There is discussion on the virtues of the illegality. 

Perhaps I can make it a vehicle for my Melba Opera House idea.  There should also be a mother in law.  Clearly there is tension between He and Her’s family.  She can be from an aristocratic, Toorak family, old money, with the proceeds of selling the ancestral homestead and property, dating back to Selectors.  No problem knowing who she is based on.

It is a Melbourne play, about identifying with Country.  It is also about retributive justice and using the Law to punish people.  Everyone has secrets.  She about the drugs from her mother.  We later learn the Dealer has imunity and can keep dealing because he feeds information about his clients. It is why He misses out on some contract or tender, or prize.

She may in fact be of aboriginal descent.  Many old families hushed up such a thing long ago.  Opens the debate into what it means to be Australian.

Ok, so the Architectural competition behind the play is for an Opera House for Melbourne.  The winner is a foreign conglomerate design in Port Philip Bay, with a Racing Circuit round it and hotels and wealthy apartments.  Not a people’s place.

There had better be a Grand Daughter, so we have the three phases of womanhood.  Perhaps she can act as a kind of “chorus”.  She might break the fourth wall.  She ruminates on her life and family as if they were a play she was watching or caught up in.  The unreality of it.  When she is left alone with the Dealer for some reason, they can have a big argument.  Good place to put Economic ideas. He would be New Capitalist, she New Anarchist.  

scrap of dialogue

D: You only want to win because you think you can get a knighthood, now. 

H: That is ridiculous.  It is an important competition that I am entering to have my vision for Melbourne built.  I don’t care about the recognition, though I admit that would be nice.  And I am not after a knighthood. 

D: You were very supportive of the idea when it was reintroduced, when everyone else in Australia was ridiculing. 

Perhaps the four scenes can be each week, on the same day.  The play could be called “Tuesday”.  Or else the day could be what ever day the actual performance was on.  I like the idea of changing a performance, perhaps making it time relevant.  Time is cyclical.  This play is cyclical.  Not the same day repeated, like Groundhog Day, or many others, but life repeating another, new day’s, similar activities in similar order.

H: If Aus had become a Republic we would not be having this question.

D: Well, I like the Queen and all the Royal Family.  Why do you want to get rid of them?  They aren’t doing any harm, don’t cost much, what ever you say, and some people say they provide stability to our constitution, and without it we would lose our connection to a thousand years of constitutional development and all that tradition, and become just another new, young republic, whose government is open to any faction that gains power through whatever means.

H: Of course the Royals would be welcome to visit, and you can take just as much interst in them whether they are our Monarch or not.

D: But that is silly.  They are only celebrities because they actually are real royalty.  The world has dozens of deposed monarchs and other nobility, and no one ever hears about them.

H: Don’t be so sure.  The Surbian Royal Family is back in their Palace and filling many of the social activities of their ancestors, like marking important national days, without any political power.  He calls himself “Crown Prince” and is just waiting for his coronation. 

D: That just shows how relevant the Crown is to the Constitution.

Her’s speech, Act 2?

You have no idea what it was like growing up in my family.  The expectations were intense. Failure was ignored after praise for being a good loser.  But no help!  Oh, no! We were expected to do it all by ourselves. 

I saw siblings and cousins receive heaps of praise for their achievements, their ambitions, but anything I did was regarded as trivial.  Worse, any time I did manage to start something by myself, suddenly “he” would destroy everything I had started to do, just so “he” could help me start.  I remember starting to climb a ladder as a toddler, and making it up a few rungs before he saw me and came running.  Instead of praising me for being able to do it, which Marcia, my therapist says a normal father would do, he grabbed me and pulled me off the ladder, put me down on my knees, although I had stopped crawling by then, and grabbed a hand and said he would teach me how to climb ladders.  I just burst into tears, so “he” yelled something at me and walked off.

I felt I was lost in a dark forest, like in my story books, but I didn’t know there was a way out, didn’t know I should try and get out, and no indication of which way to go, anyway.

Perhaps there will be four scenes, two in the first Act.  In each “Dealer” comes in, has conversation with daughter and father separately, perhaps one each time, then “her” comes in, but takes whatever it is out of room.  I don’t want any jeckle/hyde transformations happening on stage.  No demonstration of paraphernalia, or methods of administering.  Anyway, she returns a different person, more “real”, honest, perceptive, etc.  Defensive, vulnerable sad.  Aggressive and in control. Perhaps differently each of the four times. 

The fourth time, she comes back very “natural” and life of the party and efficient, as if she had worked through her other problems, but still obviously with the dependency, but that is now seen as harmless, though costly, and indeed beneficial if kept in control.  This in contrast to “Him”s demise, because this is a tragedy, with the tragic floor of goodness.

New Story, perhaps a play. 

A  group of year twelve people.  When they were sixteen they became sexually active and all screwed around a lot including with each other, and now are bored with sex and certainly don’t want to do it with each other.  The Education System has been made very easy for intelligent children to coast through, with good results made easy, or else their futures are mapped out for them through family obligations or connections or social limitations.  Essentially, they are bored.

They decide to commit the perfect murder.  So the play becomes a debate about the morality of death.  They expect their success will come from the unexpectedness.  It must obviously be a murder, but one that is mysterious and inexplicable.  It has to be someone distant from everyone and they consider a random person, but then decide to ensure the person has no connection to any of them, and to their astonishment , everyone in the whole city has some remote, but not insignificant connection to someone in the group.