Nights, Ghosts, Nigerians

At night I sit naked in bed and listen to John Coltrane while eating toasted cheeseys and reading about the Iran-Iraq war. The night air squats warm and still and my posters, which are mostly old maps bought at Save-the-Children-Fund booksales, peel away from the wall and faint to the floor. The cheese doesn't taste like I remember it tasting on childhood cheeseys. I think I've lost some skill in cheesey-making over the years. My feet reach for the cold depths of the sheets. Cottesloe is completely silent, except for the dull rush of cars flashing alongside the trainline. The trains finished runnning an hour ago.

My friend Marty lives next to Hyde Park, and it turns out his house is haunted. I wish this was my story to tell you all, but really its not. It's just me recounting a story. Basically: over the last couple of months there have been the most crazy things happening to and in this house. It started with attacks of eggs and rocks at the front windows, followed by things placed on the window sill - a mushroom with "XXX" written on the top and "j" on the base of the stem for example. Then there were black X's written on window panes... some of them would even appear while they were home, in the rooms with the marked windows themselves. Then, on a back window the words "NO NEXT WEEK" appeared. And then months passed without incident.
A few weeks ago, more eggs, including one coming from over the top of the house and hitting the street, while they stood there. They ran through the house, but there was noone to be found. Then: a bullet shell on the window sill. And a few weeks later there was another. And then the voices.
Last week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights there was a voice, which repeated every half hour or so, in different volumes and from what seemed like different places in the house (but it was definitely coming from within the house). The voice is a woman's, sounds desperate, and says "I want to talk to you". All three housemates (and Courtney from Australian Idol who is a friend of Dan's) have all heard it a number of times, from different rooms. The voice sounds distorted or static, as though it is coming from a tv or a recording device. The housemates are, understandably, pretty scared.
Oh, and on Saturday morning? A ring of salt appeared on Dan's floor, within a three hour period in which no one was in the house. The ring was about the diameter of a lemon, according to Marty, and piled one inch high. There have been no more events of this nature since Saturday.
Obviously we are all are very unsure what to believe, or what to expect from here on.


I end this post with a hilarious and lovely message I got this morning on a popular "online community" that I am guilty of belonging to. According to her profile she is Nigerian. I don't quite know what I liked about this message so much, other than the obvious delight in her choice of words. It's nice because pretty much ever unsolicited message I have ever got on this site has been generated by a robot/computer named "Jenifer" telling me how lonely they are and how I should check out their sexy photos on site "x". And every email I have ever got from Nigeria has asked me to send my bank details to help transfer vast sums of money out of the country. So, assuming there is no junkiness involved in the communique below, it makes for a pleasant change, and is sweet, I think, in its simplicity. And because I imagine Rose to be a 40 year old christian Nigerian woman in a floral dress. I recommend you imagine the same:

Hello Chris
how u doin,...i hope u are havin lovely day out there?Well i got to check ur profile out ,..and i did love it,.ok.
Rose is d name,it will be my pleasure getting to have an wholesome chat with u anytime,..u seem priviledged.Here is my chat ids smilingrose10@hotmail.com,ulookhoney@yahoo.com.
And lets i forget to say that"u have a very lovely picture" on [online community].
i'll be waiting to read from u soon.
urs Rose

Gettin' nerdy about Seperation Sunday

These days I live with my parents, in a big modern house in Cottesloe, which is near the beach, close-ish to Fremantle. Every day, pretty much without fail, I drive at least once to and from the 'inner-city' area where traditionally I live, where my friends live, where the bookstore is and where the venues I frequent are. In the middle of the night, when there are no cars on the road, this takes me about 20 minutes, this drive. In the afternoon, when mothers in shiny gas-guzzlers are picking up their darlings from school, it can take me close to 40 minutes. Basically, I am spending more time driving these days than I ever have before.

In my car for the last couple of weeks I have been listening to very little else but one album, which I borrowed from Jackson and which I have come to know intimately, and to love, greatly. The album is Seperation Sunday by The Hold Steady. There hasn't been a record which has featured so strongly in my life in recent history. It is crucial, you understand.

Nick says it sounds like bad 90s rock, like Everclear. He begs me to turn it off. I often do, because I am a fantastic guy, and I understand where he's coming from, in a way. But as soon as he's out of the car, it's on again.

One of the very great things about it, perhaps the very greatest thing, is the way the songs all weave together, stacked as they are with shared images and themes, with recurring characters and settings. The album itself cannot possibly be seen merely as a collection of songs, but as a whole document, a portrait of a scene. Its a literary work about religion and addiction and being down and out in Minneapolis. It's huge and sprawling and beautiful.

Today I sat and tried to map out all the songs and their contents. This is one of the most useless things I have ever done and was harder than I thought it would be, but for your interest (or despite your lack thereof) I have included, below, a list:

Number of songs on Seperation Sunday, out of 11, which obviously deal with drug use, dealing, addiction or rehab: 9
Number which mention bible stories or Christianity: 10
Number which mention skaters, hoodrats or punks: 5 +
Number which refer to being "born again" or to a resurrection: 5
Number which refer to saints (Saint Theresa, Saint Barbara etc), or to the US city Saint Paul: 4
Number in which a drug dealer named Charlemagne is a character: 2
Number in which Holly (short for Halleluilah) is named as a character: 5
Number of songs which I think are actually about Holly, if you consider that Holly is actually the often mentioned hoodrat friend: 9 to 11
Number which mention the Mississippi River, or camps which are on its banks: 3

et cetera.

I love this band, you see.
Ah, you know what? Just ignore me, and this post completely.

www.theholdsteady.com

black and white pictures of (and 10 observations about) the 6 authors who i am reading books by at the moment

Observations:

1. Half of them are wearing glasses.
2. Three of them are British, two are American, one is Japanese
3. Two of them are dead, four of them are not.
4. All six of them are men.
5. Only one of them committed ritual suicide by cutting open his belly after a failed coup attempt.
6. Only one of them kidnapped a Thai child prostitute, bought her off her father and put her in a home and school.
7. Both of the Americans won the National Book Award.
8. Only one of them was badly beaten by an angry mob in Afghanistan, although another of them did go to Afghanistan when he finished college to try and volunteer with the Mujahideen in the war against the Russians.
9. Two of them are journalists, one of them writes children's books and four of them write novels.
10. I have met only one of them.

(robert fisk, yukio mishima, david mitchell, william gaddis, william t. vollmann, philip pullman)

piedras que el cardo seco morderia escupiendo

I saw you standing in Fritz-Foerster Platz. Your skin pale, your coat with clusters of badges. I saw the effort you had made, and I saw you smile, broadly. There were sparrows and there were crisp snowbanks over your shoulder. I saw you there and you were laughing with some boy who wasn't German but he might have been French. Or he might have been German after all, I don't know. I saw you lick your lips to save them a little from the dry winds. I could see your breath. Your laugh carried out all the way across the shadows of the buildings, cast on rough angles by the 4 o'clock light.

But we both know life aint as peachy as that little scene.

And that too much thinking can make you leak fear.
And that you're always breathing too fast, gettin' pent and gettin' wounded.

But, then, also: that you can't own situations, or people, or moments or hearts.
And that you gotta dance to the music thats playing, and just forget about that other show in that other bar.
Especially when that show is the same old band, playing the same fucking songs to the same old drunks in black jeans.
And when you've got absolutely everything you'd ever need to kick it.

Bookshop stories

1. A difference of opinion =

Australian Member of Parliament Danna Vale, Tuesday 14th February, 2006 - "[Australians] are almost aborting ourselves out of existence... Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years' time"

Customer at Oxford Street Books, Wednesday 15th February, 2006 - "Oh my God, SO many people are having babies these days, there's babies everywhere, don't you reckon?"

2. Way I was described by my friend Simon's mum when he asked her who was working at the bookshop today: "Turkish looking guy, about 30 years old"

3. Number of famous celebrities who came into the bookshop today: 0.