Someone Else Entirely

I've been working with a friend to put together a show for this Saturday night, for the launch of the 52 Pick-Up truckstop playing cards at the Red Rattler. I haven't done a show onstage in over a year now. I wrote this to my friend when I was thinking about it at work today:

It's a bit funny- I haven't performed onstage in so so long, and the last stage persona I had was such a sweet little pop & bounce thing, it's a challenge to be pulling out this vampy grown-up character opposite a big king, masculine partner. It's fun but strange. Rehearsing is weird. I've been feeling silent and antisocial lately and it's odd to take off my gardening boots and put on stripper heels, rehearse these movements in that headspace. I'm enjoying the strangeness of it all. Also, I've lately been feeling a lot less 'decoratively femme' than usual, so assembling this decoratively femme character to go onstage is a lot more deliberate, less created out of playfulness and personal desire. I'm not rehearsing to be 'me plus stage volume', I'm rehearsing to be someone else entirely.

I had to write a blurb for a photo of me that's on a playing card today, as well, and had sent through to me a link to an academic article (PDF) I was interviewed for two or more years ago. It's been a funny day of seeing myself through other people's eyes, through the media I am represented in. I feel a bit off about it all, itchy and unconvinced. I'm sure it'll pass.

Still life with silverbeet

Sometimes I look at things like the small mountain of silverbeet I harvested today and think I can't believe I grew all that food. I can't really take credit for the mandarins, since I've not had much to do with the tree (although I've noticed it's flowering since I fertilised it), but that silverbeet is all me. Well, me and the genetic determination of plants to live.

I am filthy and exhausted after a day of constructing, re-arranging, transplanting. Bed-building, hole-digging, compost-churning, re-planting, tree-climbing (twigs and spiders in my hair from an adventure up the mandarin tree). I've been in a distinctly off mood all weekend, and the day out in the yard helps. It doesn't solve the problems, but it gives me something more interesting and constructive to think about.

Carrots, spiders & poetry

A few weeks ago, it might have been some silly early hour of some morning, I was on the front doorstep of my house with a girl across my lap, spanking her in time with another friend, and we were singing: "And we won't stop until somebody calls the cops, and even then we'll start again and just pretend that nothing ever happened". Like it was a protest chant, an anthem for the early hours and those kinds of adventures. I like to imagine that the original artist wouldn't have minded at all.

Tonight three of us were on the porch having our last drinks before bed, talking a mile-a-minute to fit in all the things we always need to tell each other, when we heard someone walking by. One by one our heads popped over the balcony railing and the woman below, glasses-wearing, older, kinda hot, said: "Oh! There's three of you! I shall have to serenade you". So she walked back the way she'd come and strolled by again, singing a song to the three girls she'd found on that balcony above her. "We LOVE YOU!" we told her, and she told us she loved us too.

I pulled a handful of carrots out of my garden today, full-sized real-sized carrot-sized carrots. I was so proud. We ate them with dinner, and posed like bunny rabbits (which you always have to do with carrots still wearing their leaves). I did two hours of karate tonight and every time I was told: Mokuso (eyes closed), I closed my eyes and pushed my limbs through the air and in my minds eye I saw the seedlings in my garden pushing themselves up through the crust of the dirt, reaching with their incredible strength towards the sun.

On my way to bed I found this spider hanging out with the poetry on the wall, waving his legs & trying to look much bigger than he really is. I wanted to pat him (the silky-soft fur of huntsmen spiders is so velvety and touchable-looking), but the arachnophobic housemate asked me not to.

Magic light

We have been worshiping warmth with bare arms and no coats, lifting our faces sky-wards with joy. "It feels like it's been winter forever", said my housemate, and she's right. Last summer we never even got the chance to put our winter coats away, never more than a few days of warmth between bland chill and grey skies, so this heat is a rare gift.

I lay on the trampoline last night underneath the almost-full moon and cried and cried, wrapped up and safe between housemates. People react so differently to sadness than they do to anger (and anger is always my first response when I am hurt: hiss, spit, claws, venom). Two full moons ago my world fell into a dark, angry black hole, a highly pressurized little isolation field constructed around myself to be angry and destructive in, but entirely cut off from anyone I could have hurt with my anger (my friends stood unseen outside the black hole, shouting to be let in, trying to tell me that cutting them off hurt more than raging at them). On the last full moon I was back at a shaky equilibrium, cruising forward but with that wound still raw and bleeding and real, still wounded-animal-alone. Last night I really cried for it, for the first time I think, found it in me to be sad instead of angry. Sad and resigned and mourning, with a publicly-accessible grief for special things long gone.

I find it so difficult to trust that there would be someone there for me if I lost it, so I hold it in and convert grief to rage and use the fuel of that rage to push myself onwards, to keep going & keep coping & keep living. I am hard-shelled and inaccessible in my rage and hurt. It was so alien to let people hold me last night, to be soft, to admit need. I realized that I'd forgotten how to be sad among friends.

And today is getting on with things in warm wind beneath a full moon, beginning to believe in spring and the wild, unrestrained growth of things. I sat watching movies with my laptop in my lap, exclaiming: "If I don't obsessively document my garden, something dreadful will happen!". I went over to fix a friend's computer with dirt under my nails and seed packets in my pockets. It is spring, and I have things to do.

Eat your greens

And your reds, pinks, oranges and purples, too.

I forget that if you get your food only from the grocery store, that silverbeet only comes in one form: green with a white stem. I forget that there is one kind of a summer squash variety called a 'zucchini', and that it's dark green and cylindrical. I forget that tomatoes are always red, carrots are always orange, beans are always green and potatoes are always white on the inside.

My fluoro-coloured silverbeet, green, yellow, black and purple tomatoes, seven varieties of zucchini and button squash (green, white, bright yellow), purple beans and purple carrots and purple potatoes make so much more sense to me. Finding little pieces of flamingo-pink silverbeet stem in my silverbeet & lentil pie tonight made me smile.

My Delightful Contradictions

I came home from an all-nighter in the clubs (highlight: discussing gender theory with a lovely woman on the side of the dance floor while receiving a lap dance from a very cute stable-boi) to a few hours sleep, then up, then cooked breakfast, then out into the garden. I filled a new bed with compost, found newly germinated potatoes and tomatoes (pride!), sprayed a biological caterpillar control over my brassica crops. Then wound up chatting to my over-the-fence neighbours who wound up coming over to help me chop down a few feral trees, weeds springing up and growing strong in places where they were guaranteed to cause problems. We were at it for a few hours, sawing and chopping and lifting and carrying. I sent them home with an armful of fresh coriander for their troubles.

I came inside, muddy-handed, ran into housemates and a visitor. We went to the park with the dog for the evening, ran into more friends there (so randomly, walking through), made even more friends who came down off their balcony to join us. We played guitar, sang songs and danced in the grass, laughing and free and full of joy. Came home when it started raining to find the rest of our household and wound up the night in squealing silly delight, singing full voice to the pub rock hits of the 80s and engaging in questionable housemate boundary-crossing. Percussion-play with leeks and herb harvestings made the kitchen smell amazing, there was wax, and I got to bring out my prize flogger to christen it from the top-side.

I have retired now to a room full of half-finished crochet projects and the smell of armfuls of jasmine I've got arrayed in teacups on my shelves. I can still hear giggling and activity downstairs. "I want to come to ALL your housemeetings!" squealed one lucky guest, high on it all. It pushes and challenges me, yes it does, but this life, right now, is so right for me. Crochet and trashiness, dance-floor debauchery and domestic bliss, responsibility and wild possibilities realized. There is no other way I'd rather be doing 25.

Internet memory

Whoa. Last time I ordered a book off Amazon, I lived on Ashbury St in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, CA. I lived in a wood-paneled dining room with curtains on the glass doors, on a street so beautifully decrepit it made my heart ache. I dated a 50 year old body builder from Santa Cruz, met my friend for mimosas on a Sunday morning down the hill in the Castro, went out dancing at hip-hop clubs all night because the white dykes of San Francisco so rarely seemed to dance.

I was this strange Aussie rebel who insisted on keeping actual cow's milk around because the idea of putting 'fat free half and half' in my tea was so revolting. And tea. Oh. I caught busses across the entire city to find the Trader Joe's that sold tea that tasted like anything I would consent to drink.

I learned how to cook plantains and black beans. I knew vegans who were allergic to soy and wheat, who lived on nothing but plantains and sweet potatoes and almond milk. I learned to cook for them too.

The books I was buying were original editions of Doing It For Daddy and The Leather Daddy And The Femme.

That all came back to me just then, one jumbled moment of sense-memory. I am tracking down a copy of the (hushed, reverent tones please) Harmony Guide To 300 Crochet Stitches, Volume 6, and the accompanying volume, the Harmony Guide to 220 More Crochet Stitches, and thus: my first foray into internet book shopping in three years. My tastes- well, they may have shifted a little.

A perfect, tiny gift

I was hauling plants around the garden, re-arranging the many pots which had to be shifted when arborists came recently to hack down some huge weed trees (thus opening up the whole fence line for new garden beds, hurrah!). I picked up my big planter of strawberries, admiring the perfect little new leaves they're putting up through the thick winter mulch, thinking: Oh I can't wait for these to flower, I will be so excited when that day comes.

And then I looked down closer and nearly dropped the whole planter in consternation, because there, tiny and round and perfect, hidden among the fresh green leaves, was this flower. On the first day of spring. Perfect.

Oh I was so excited I was leaping around and yelling (once the planter was safely positioned in it's new home). It was a spectacle, and I couldn't find anyone nearby to get excited with me, but I didn't even care. I have been beaming all evening about this first flower.

Like Magic

Those are lettuce seedlings, germinated beneath up-turned salad punnets, reaching up towards the sunlight. Four types of lettuce there, although mostly 'Purple Oak Leaf' which has done really for me so far.

The garden grows, it does, and today is the first day of spring and I can see sunlight and hope flooding in. I mostly journal my gardening adventures over at MyFolia these days, so if you miss my gardening entries I might suggest heading over there to see what I've been up to. I suggest this journal for a cautionary tale in why compost bins need to be actively managed. Slop-heap style and 'hoping for the best' is pretty much doomed to fail.