The Slug

How long have I known the word? Ten years? Fifteen? Sluggish: adj. slow, indolent, torpid. And there I was, walking to uni one day and thinking, gee, I feel so slow, and indolent, and torpid. Like an upright slug dragging along the pavement. Slug-ish, I thought. I feel slug-ish.

And then it hit me. Sluggish: of or like a slug. From Middle English, slugissh.

Un-believable.

The Boyfriend

So the banshee went one fury too far and suddenly I could never spend another night in that place where she lived, which just happened to be the place where I lived too. So I spent the next week in my bestie's bedroom, hunting for houses and stealing his clothes. I guess I've been dabbling in the giant shirt/jumper + hypothetical skirt look for a while now, but by the time I left (with a bottle of his cologne, a Westwood Man jumper and new banshee-free accommodation to boot) I had to admit to being a newly-converted, fully-subscribing practitioner of the 'Boyfriend' look. The moment of truth? I opened my wardrobe. Skirts, dresses, things I'd been missing all week, but "I have nothing to WEAR," I moaned, and ran to the nearest op-shop to find a giant mens' business shirt.

(Seriously, this guy (the bestie) should open a business or something. A B&B-cum-Tupperware-Party kind of thing, where you go stay at his house with minimal clothing and unlimited access to his wardrobe. He'd make a killing.)

Anyway, so there I was in this op-shop, avoiding the womens' section like small boys avoid girl germs, and damn was it good. Racks upon racks devoted to all possible permutations of shirts + trousers: short-sleeved/legged, long-sleeved/legged, in-between-sleeved/legged, summer-sleeved/legged, winter-sleeved/legged, overalls, singlets, suits, finito. So easy. So simple. None of this short-medium-long-dress/skirt/shorts/slacks/trousers/jeans-button-up-button-sideways-zip-down-zip-up-high-neck-low-neck-turtle-neck-jackets-coats-cardigans-teacosies-too-baggy-too-tight-too-floral-too-bright-everything's-perfect-but-for-THIS. Nuh-uh. It's all too big and it all don't fit and I love it.

I liked to think I was being a touch ironic at first, given the prevalence of the 'Boyfriend' in marketing campaigns of late, but it's so easy to be all superior and think you're mocking a 'look', isn't it. I mean, in the absence of a boyfriend, it's probably the look that's mocking me.

Puss-in-Boots

This post is dedicated to my poor, innocently bystanding feet, upon whom a classic case of Girl vs Boot was inflicted this morning. It happens every year: some summer garage sale yields a miraculous pair of damn fine, perfect-for-winter and EVER-so-slightly-too-small boots for the price of a coffee or two. I try them on and strut around, casting admiring looks at my ankles in every available semi-reflective surface, figure my feet'll shrink in winter anyway, and take them home, where they sit smug and good-lookin' by my wardrobe. Then winter comes. It's their time to shine. I crack them out, build an outfit from the feet up, and limp home two hours later with giant blisters where my heels used to be.

It's not as masochistic as it sounds because I'm pretty sure I have the world's most blisterable feet. A pair of carpet slippers once put me in flip-flops for a week (and then I got blisters on my toes, just to balance things out). But these boots were their own particular variety of hell. They're (too) solid, (too) well-made, and lined in sheepskin. "That'll cushion things nicely" I thought when I bought them. It didn't. So I spent most of the morning lurching around on my toes, like I was wearing high heels after two too many drinks, wincing and staggering every time I had to stand up. In Round One of Girl vs Boot, Boot was the outright winner.

Normally under these kinds of conditions I'd give in, you know? I like my feet. I spoil them with the occasional massage and lick of toenail polish. I wear orthopedic shoes almost every day. I'm only prepared to inflict so much on them in the name of fashion. But these shoes are amazing. They're hot. They're everything I ever wanted in a boot, and then some. They're not the kind of boot you'll ever find anywhere again, let alone in a half-size larger. They were made in Italy at least twenty years ago and they look like they'll last another fifty. Substitute Brisbane for Italy and the same could be said of my feet. So we're even, right? Let Round Two begin.

In maybe a month.

Man/Girl

So I realised recently that I'm just a grumpy old man trapped in the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl. "Oh, you don't know grumpy," said Forty-Two at work the other day, "you just wait."

"You don't live with a psychopathic witch," I grumbled back at her, and it was true, she didn't. She ceded the point. And so doth youth ever deny age the wisdom of experience.

In honour of this new self-recognition, I'm smashing some last lingering youthful ideals. I figure the grumpy old man in me's gotta die at some point, I mean men only live so long, don't they? And assuming some kind of karmic regeneration process it follows that I'll probably end up as a six-year-old kid in the body of a thirty-year old or something, and that suits me just fine. So there'll be time to be all young and reborn later on. In the meantime I'm cultivating a doughty pessimism, pronouncing drearily on everything from the weather to sex shops, making an art form out of daily glasses misplacement, and lingering over-long around tobacconists. I'm also THAT close to buying a kitten, but I better not. I'd probably trample it or something.

build 'em up, cut 'em down

one of the inherent functions of being young and female, apparently, is to be unwitting instigator/audience member of the comments flung from car windows, pub huddles, construction sites and so forth by (mostly) men you've (mostly) never met in your life. i mean, it's just an educated guess - i've never been old and female, or male of any age - but in the meantime, i live in eternal hope of hearing something truly original amongst the generic babble of wolf whistles, "show-us-ya-tits" and critiques of various parts of my anatomy. the best i've gotten so far was the slightly perplexing "i fuck chicks!!" back in 2006 (implication: he'd fuck me? or a spirited defense of hegemony?) and today, when two cars sidled up to the intersection i was crossing on my way home. the guy driving the first car met my eye, whistled deliberately, said, "fiiiine legs, lady," and turned the corner. the guy in the combi van behind him pulled up and yelled, "fat bitch!"

In Back of the Real - Allen Ginsberg, 1954

railroad yard in San Jose

I wandered desolate

in front of a tank factory

and sat on a bench

near the switchman's shack.

A flower lay on the hay on

the asphalt highway

- the dread hay flower

I thought - It had a

brittle black stem and

corolla of yellowish dirty

spikes like Jesus' inchlong

crown, and a soiled

dry center cotton tuft

like a used shaving brush

that's been lying under

the garage for a year.

Yellow, yellow flower, and

flower of industry,

tough spiky ugly flower,

flower nonetheless,

with the form of the great yellow

Rose in your brain!

This is the flower of the World.

Of (Mark) and (Anne)

I had a book binge last week, which included a second-hand copy of 'Winter Trees' by Sylvia Plath. It was SUCH an unnecessary purchase, seeing as I already own her complete works in a single volume, but there's something about a novel-length collection of poems that I find endlessly daunting. Not to mention the way it seems to obliterate the individuality of each separate collection. So it looks like I'll be making up the complete works a second time.

It's a nice-looking book. I was pretty happy. What I didn't notice in the shop was the inscription. It's written on the first page, in loopy blue biro.

(Anne) to the most adored, loved, mentally bejewelled person this side of anywhere - with lots of frog-freckled love, not to mention hugs, kisses, smooches, cuddles, the odd rummage and so forth - Mark xxxx 9/11/81

The romantic in me wants to believe they had some star-spangled giddy love affair culminating in the untimely death of Anne (Mark) and the dispersion of all her worldly goods (given her by Mark) to the winds by her (his) grief-stricken lover. The cynic in me suspects they had a star-spangled giddy love affair culminating with graduation and disillusionment with the real world, followed by a period of cold unnecessary bickering and painful drift. Then they would've parted ways; Anne probably found some lover in the corporate sector, got engaged, and came across this slim blue volume while cleaning out all her old junk in preparation for moving into her fiancee's sleek inner-city digs. Preferring to disavow her romantic/literary/bohemian past, she chucked it on the 'out' pile along with some Ginsberg, Kafka, Beauvoir et al. Not usually one for sentiment, she couldn't quite bring herself to throw them out; instead she bundled them up and left them outside a second-hand bookshop in the dead of night. She drove off slightly flustered and stopped for takeout on the way home.