Sitting in ICU with Mr Bad Decision

Posted by mark - 07/02/10 at 02:02:40 am

As you can see by my previous post, I never expected Ross to take his own life. They are turning off his respirator today so it probably won’t be long til more awful phone calls. I was (and still am) quite angry at him for taking selfishness to the ultimate degree. His act of self harm (deviously constructed within a psychiatric ward) seemed designed as an attack upon those who had foolishly decide to love or like or nearly like him. I nearly liked Ross - he wasn’t always very likeable. Maybe this was part of the disease - at most times I met him he seemed angry and intolerant with nearly everyone and everything around him. But then, surprisingly, he could be charming and insightful. I remember one birthday he gave me absolutely the most perfect gift ever (a book about the church in India, at a time when I was processing this profound juxtaposition). But most years he gave me what he wanted for himself - and what he thought I would therefore want. Strange comic books about evil penguins, or remnants of 1980s comedies, or…must have forgotten the rest. Anyway, I didn’t expect him to take his life. When he announced on his 50th birthday that he was sick, I thought he was being melodramatic as if he was the first person ever to have ever suffered depression. Well, I suppose he was the first person to ever suffer whatever he wrestled with in less than 4 weeks since then. It sounds like he must have become someone else in order to  overdose and then strangle himself with such efficiency and organisational ability. It’s rude of me to write about this, like this, but that is why it is my blog. And it makes no sense after all.

Narcissus lost in the centre of the universe

Posted by mark - 31/01/10 at 11:01:43 am

Co-dependent called,

And asked if I, Bind Support,

Could please talk to Depression for her

She put Narcissus on, who, while depressed, was mainly seeking

His place back in the centre of Mother Nature.

Narcissus even asked me to pray for him, to our Heavenly Father.

Who do you mean? Are you mocking my religion, Narcissus?

He feared it would all end in Nothingness and needed Co-Dependent and her Mother to be with him at all times.

I told him, as Blind Support, that all I could suggest at this stage

Was that Despair could now be claimed on Medicare.

God help us all - to treat the right disease if nothing else

Not necessarily the one friends name for themselves.

England, Out of my system?

Posted by mark - 08/12/09 at 04:12:06 pm

It’s a very beautiful country, but also quite challenging and difficult. In some ways I can see in England a lot of the things I like in Australia. But there are some things here which are much worse - the cultural friction is sharper, the environment is stressed, and unemployment seems high. It’s been good for me to spend so much time here at this time of year, as a kind of reality check for the idea or fantasy of ever living here. Anyway, I am looking forward to the space and relative quiet of Australia, even though Brisbane is bursting at the seams. Not sure how I’ll cope with 35 degrees centigrade…

Reading Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter”

Posted by mark - 08/11/09 at 11:11:20 am

I was drawn in by the main character’s sense of duty and faith. I feel like I have more duty than faith - my excess in one makes up for my scarcity in the other. Scobie, the novel’s protagonist, is a man of duty - to his job as a policeman, to his long suffering wife, and to his grief for a lost child. Set in a wartime African colony, “The Heart of the Matter”, is a morality play, featuring repressed spies, oppressed servants (as well as oppressive public servants), and misunderstood businessmen. And, oh the humidity. It’s very evokative of tropical colonialism. This book changed me - it’s descriptions of the relationship between responsibility and pity strike at the tender heart of belief in a suffering god. Very worthwhile book.

This time of year, around here

Posted by mark - 06/08/09 at 10:08:26 am

Festivals galore in Brisbane
The usual suspects at Writers’ Week
Still amazing panels (although how long can Nick Earls, 1963 son of Newtownards, be considered young, he’s as old as I?)
Longer, clearer days
Cricket season beckons (do bats still need oiling with linseed? some pretty angry bats, my reckoning)
Riverfire boasts of best tall building views
You can really see it here -
Yes, but you can really smell it down here,
fireworks, young people’s drinks, Brisbane
is one crowded house as springtime
draws near, will the Broncos miss the finals this year?
Ekka Wednesday, last public holiday til Christmas,
not counting Melbourne Cup Day,
how will we survive?
this year we’ve already had the westerly winds and flu outbreaks
teacher’s strike and early election.
All that’s missing now is Warana, blue sky kitsch, and the colonial festival (notwithstanding The Courier-Mail, which is a colonial event all year round).
And magpies start swooping on cyclists to protect their young,
Time to start walking again.

Full moon.

Posted by mark - 14/06/09 at 10:06:15 am

Fitzroy corners an intruder at 2am at the morning,

and sets off his cat alarm.

Its 2 degrees at 2am, 2 cats are out tonight,

and I am too awake, too cold and too outside for this time.

‘Be quiet’ I whisper loudly,

without waking the neighbours.

Mother Nature never sleeps.

Nocturnes - review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book

Posted by mark - 04/05/09 at 10:05:42 am

“Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall” (faber and faber, $29.99) reiterates Kazuo Ishiguro’s talent for storytelling in which five musical protagonists change key at a crucial moment of their lives. The first story, ‘Crooner’, features Tony Gardner, a Johnny Mathis like singer from a bygone era, who recruits a cafe guitarist to help win back his disillusioned wife, Lindy, by performing from a gondola beneath her Venice hotel window.
(Lindy returns in the hilarious fourth story, ‘Nocturnes’, cocooned following cosmetic surgery in an opulent Beverley Hills hotel. She helps fellow patient Steve, the fading jazz musician next door, find self-respect amidst his own marital breakdown and facial bandages).
‘Malvern Hills’, the third of Ishiguro’s delights,  is about a struggling songwriter who encounters Tilo and Sonja, a juxtaposed musical couple from Germany who are looking for inspiration and harmony in Elgar’s English countryside.
‘Cellists’, the fifth story, takes the reader back to the piazzas of Italy, where Tibor, a Hungarian cellist, is mentored by an eccentric patron of the arts, Eloise McCormack, who is burdened with an obsession about how the cello should be played at the highest level.
The second story, ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, is the most whacky story, whereby Raymond, a languishing language teacher holidaying in London, tries to reconnect with university friends,  Charlie and Emily, who are powering along in their urban professional apartment. Raymond shares Emily’s love of old American Broadway songs - and the ensuing attempt to save one another from a life of failure and futility becomes wonderful musical farce.
This is Ishiguro’s funniest literary offering to date; but he maintains the interpersonal tension and tormented loyalties of his award winning novels set in postwar Japan (’An Artist of the Floating World’) and prewar England (’The Remains of the Day’).  ‘Nocturnes’ is an elegant and playful collection reminiscent of Woody Allen’s  screenplays, but with likeable characters who are at least trying to understand one another.

Is there a better word for ’spirit’?

Posted by mark - 24/04/09 at 11:04:11 pm

It is a very elusive word

An alcoholic drink

A tone of voice

A sign of the times

An intention behind a law

A flavour, an invisible thread, a hidden comfort, a ghost, a soul, a dead person walking

Holy Spirit, even more complicated.

Holy Voice

Major Voice

Quiet Voice

Inner voice

Inner silence

Silent witness

Guide, friend, guardian, angel, companion

Is something out there? in here? all together? bit of both?

Unfolding, unravelling, stored energy, stored love

Reservoir of goodness

Wind of truth, breeze of freedom, zephyr of zealotry

The space in between the notes

The sense between the senses

The full stop of our lives.

Bishop of the road less travelled?

Posted by mark - 13/04/09 at 04:04:11 am

In 1984, when I first moved to West End, I used to help the Catholic Prison Ministry team visit the inmates at Boggo Road Jail on Saturday mornings. Father Peter Kennedy was one of the Catholic Chaplains to the men’s prison. Peter was very patient and welcoming; ever mindful of any injustices which prisoners and their families might be experiencing. I remember he gave a wonderful precis of M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Travelled” one Saturday morning. The members of the congregation warmed to the book’s theme of serendipity. It might have been this morning, or another, when I wore a blue shirt, an accidental act of solidarity with the inmates, and was nearly stopped as I readied myself for the trip home. I still wear blue shirts, to work mainly, but have lost touch with Father Peter - he has been otherwise detained by the church warders who suspect he looks like someone they don’t want in a position of leadership. Ironically, on one of the Saturdays when Father Peter was away, I accompanied another priest; whose style was much more formal but still committed to talking about grace and justice and mercy (sounds like three distant cousins looking for a family reunion). This priest ended up becoming a bishop, whom I admire greatly for his scholarship and ecumenical leadership. I’m not saying either priest is ‘better’ or ‘more authentic’. I guess I am doing a little name dropping, in light of the St Mary’s passion play - maybe this is what happens when you try to meet the messiah behind prison walls. You rub shoulders with people who are pretty serious about making a difference.

Warranty blues

Posted by mark - 29/03/09 at 10:03:49 am

I had to take a day off work to look after the sick appliances

The sound was bung on the television

The wires were protruding from the new sound system

Electrical stores were very understanding

Like day care centres

They know the disruption of a sick loved one.

Meanwhile I await the government stimulus package

so I can adopt more luxury orphans

Is capitalism dead?

Did it every really live?

I’m not feeling so good myself.

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