40 days in the wilderness

She spins me around and I’m going nuts. She spins me around on this thing. It spins. It’s making me dizzy. It’s giving me a headache and when she finally stops me, the world decides to spin without me. I’m still feeling nuts.

This comes a little after the kiddie horsey rides and watching the fat white kid bossing around the skinny Asian kid with his toy gun. But a bit before the movie. It comes after the dinner and the blown out candle and the dirty spoons and the summer roll that she wanted banged around to see if it was still moist.

It looked so lonely by itself.

And this on a rainy night that didn’t rain. A gloomy patch of sky that God cleared up for a few hours just for me.

This is of course long after the 40 days began. When I decided to switch from eating dead animals to dead plants and fungal growths, and unfertilised potential foetuses for the duration of that period.

Well if you really want to be technical, I could go back further to when this Dude (with a capital D) died on a cross on a hill on the other side of this rock around 2000 years ago. But that would just be stupid.

At this stage I also had a home. Well I have a home now too, of course, but not my home. Then I had my home. Or maybe more the bank’s home but it would’ve still been mine. Then my lawyer called and I talked to him and then I called the agent and spoke to him and then the bank manager and then both my lawyer and the agent called again. No. I had to call the agent. And by the end of it I had no home. Well not my home anyway.

This was before, during (well not during during) and after all the spinning and the dirty spoons and so on. And ended around the same time as when I put in my mouth the first piece of dead animal that I’d had in 40 days. There were tears. Perhaps some were tears of joy but most probably they were tears of chilli.

And in between the beginning and the end, but long after the Dude died on the cross, there were the inane emails and the mango beers and the church where a man thanked me for giving him my piece of paper when he didn’t have one of his own and the café that didn’t have what she said they should have had. There were the writing classes and that English guy that I don’t like so much, and how I reduced a man’s masculinity by turning him into a ballet dancer. Sorry about that. And somewhere in there was the fracturing of my poor old Grandma’s brittle arm. God bless her

I supposed I’ve had very little to write about.

But in the end the home (my home) was gone, along with many other things of varying significances. And I feel like I am back at square one. Back where I was a day before the 40 days. Around Tuesday, I suppose.

For everything that was in the beginning is now gone and everything that was new is now old again.

But don’t worry, she says. You’ll bounce back. Remember, this is your year.

So… maybe she just said that to shut me up.

But my year?

Yeah!

Thanks Lil, I needed that…

Stupid real estate agents. Stupid Honkie owners. I feel like strangling someone.

I cannae take much more o' this kaptin!

Almost a month in between

My dad came home. Well I suppose he did. I suppose he must have on countless occasions. But I can’t remember a single time he did. It’s escaped my memory. These things always do and I can never write down anything about them.

But at my writing class, it’s all that anyone seems to want to know. What’s the fascination with childhood?

I workshopped my ‘Falling in love on trains’ story from a blog a long time ago and one woman asks: ‘You mentioned your dad in the second paragraph. Then he disappears. I wanted to hear about your dad!’

But it wasn’t about my dad! It was about me! Me! Me!

I can’t remember details. We do exercises in class where we have to describe something vivid from our childhood. The best I can do is remember that my Year 2 teacher looked somewhere between Arnie in Kindergarten Cop and Troy McClure from the Simpsons. And that he made me pick up 1000 papers for talking in classes.

Yep, I can remember events, dialogue. At least the significant ones. But images, smells, colours, sounds and the mundane. They’re like water through my hands. Too elusive. Not concrete like words. And even if I could remember, I can’t write them down. I never know how to represent them properly. Without loss of essence. And this is what we’re told a writer does. I should be able to do all this.

Does this mean I have no hope as a real writer?

Sorry my Return blog wasn't more exciting.