It seems—at least in the case of Western culture, the only culture that I have any real experience with—that when strangers or acquaintances or even best of friends and family try to start or continue conversation, there is a point of inevitable silence which introduces a degree of unrest and uncertainty and discomfort that can cause nervous habits to appear out of thin air like nail biting, excessive blinking, tracing invisible marks on tables with a finger, desperate attempts to avoid eye contact, and tiny fake coughs that sound like you’re trying to clear your throat but all you’re really doing is making the other party anticipate you saying something but you don’t say anything and as a result the silence continues until someone finally, inevitably brings up the weather. It really does not matter whether it’s your bff or a homeless man sharing a park bench with you, the weather is something that we have all experienced and it’s something we experience every day and it provides excellent fodder for light, meaningless conversation. And this phenomenon takes place between the closest of friends, too, because it is hardly humanly possible to only ever talk about serious matters like analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, Romantic literature, transcendentalism, ecocriticism, post-modernism, post-structuralism (when talking about post-structuralism, it usually involves people talking about things they really don’t know about in order to appear smarter than they really are), art, politics, religion, and bands that you’ve been listening to that no one else has even heard of yet. Sometimes you need a break from the serious. Sometimes you just aren’t drunk enough. Sometimes you need to talk about the weather.
“Crazy weather we’ve been having lately.”
“Yeah, it’s like it can’t make up its mind.”
“I’d buy an umbrella, but then it’d stop raining.”
“Sound logic, Kyle.”
-or-
“Beautiful weather we’re having.”
“Oh, it’s so lovely! A perfect time to sit in the park and read a book and relax and listen to the birds fucking.”
The weather in Sydney today has been erratic. I wake up and it’s sunny. I go out and it rains. I get some coffee; it’s sunny. I walk to a park; it rains. I get some dinner at a café and sit outside because it’s the only available seat, and it’s sunny and cloudy and really windy and it rains and pours and stops and starts and blows my menu away into the street.
After eating my bean nachos and drinking a whole pitcher of water, I wander over to gleebooks because it’s close and it’s a good bookstore. I look around on the first floor a bit and head upstairs where they have some used fiction. When I get up there and start leafing through books I’ve been considering buying for about two weeks, it starts to violently pour. I guess I should settle in here, I think, and wait for the rain to stop before I go outside. Maybe I should buy an umbrella.
So I’m sitting on this little stepping stool leafing through The Satanic Verses trying to decided if I want to buy it and telling myself I don’t have enough room and that I’m only about a quarter of the way through DeLillo’s Underworld and that I should really finish that before I start on another thick book. There’s also a biography on Anton Chekhov that I’m considering as a break from my constant consumption of fiction. While I’m leafing through other books by authors I’ve never heard of there is a loud crash. It came from the roof. I look over and it’s raining in the bookstore. Just a small section of the bookstore is raining, but it isn’t everyday you see it rain at all inside bookstores. It was only me, another man, and a woman behind the counter in the upstairs portion of gleebooks. I almost laughed as I saw the rain come pouring in, but I thought that it wasn’t too funny that it was raining in a bookstore and thought it might be rude to laugh at the misfortune of the store. Fortunately for the books, it was raining where there weren’t any. I just smiled like an idiot instead of laughing like a fool as the woman and man moved a few tables to ensure that none of the books would get wet should the hole in the skylight grow larger.
All of the indoor rain made me have to pee, so I just sat tight on the stool until the rain finally let up so I could leave the store and find an establishment with a toilet for my convenience. As I was leaving I heard the woman on the phone suggest that they get someone with a tarp to try to cover the hole, and it made me wonder how easy it’d be to get on the roof of the bookstore.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Kyle's Easter Sunday
I woke up about 1pm today—Easter—thinking that I may as well not sleep the day away. I had been up to about 6am reading and writing and feeling incredibly creative. There is creative craziness in being a little sleep deprived. I like it.
I noticed that a note had been slide under my door sometime between 6am and 1pm. The first words said “LAST Notice” and I was worried that I was being kicked out of my room. Shit, I like it here, and I don’t want to leave yet.
I read on, though:
LAST Notice
12/04/09
Due to early morning bad remarks and threats made towards me, I’m informing you to keep your own door. Due to my LAVO –orders from 4 years ago given out to Royal stalkers. No further notice will be given. If you don’t keep to yourself, 100 commonwealth police will approach you. You already have a permit AND –order not to approach me. Don’t breech the order. My royal guards are watching you! You are wanted for Copyright of my Royal Palace reputation and Services. I will Summond (sic) you with 100—police cars if you try anything. Keep to yourself, stranger. Don’t talk to me, don’t follow me or I, will call my police to collect you!
The Psychiatric Doctor. Dr. Catherine.
Minister of Correction Propriety.
Englands Palace Propriety.
Telstra Propriety 1975.
Rogue Traders.
With my sleepy, blinking eyes, I felt a bit anxious at first. This person is fucked up and might kill me. But then I chuckled to myself and took my morning piss. Since I had to pay for my week’s accommodation today, I decided to go downstairs, pay, and show them this letter and see if I should be alarmed or something.
“Oh, yeah, she does that,” the girl at the bar shook her head and smirked a bit, “Yeah, I lived up there last year, and I got a letter like this, too. I think each new person who moves in gets one of these. She’s harmless, though. Like she’s never done anything. She’s just lost a bit upstairs. I’ll let Alana know, though, and she can have another talk with her. I apologize for this, though. I really am sorry.”
I assured her there was no need to apologize and that I got a kick out of it. Quite the present left by the Easter bunny.
It’s a humid day today, and it looks like it’s going to rain. It feels like it’s going to rain, but I still went for a walk to Glebe, ate some pizza, had an iced coffee and found a place that sells A&W root beer. This is the first time I’ve seen root beer in Australia. It was made in the US and was made with high-fructose corn syrup. It was delicious.
I found a park bench not far from Glebe Point Road, sat down with my can of A&W, and read some A Farewell to Arms. Ah, I thought, it’s been a while since I injected myself with some Hemingway.
After reading maybe a chapter and a half, I saw a man approaching me out of the corner of my eye, a man who I knew would ask me for money.
“Excuse me, sir, do you have any change to spare.”
I’m easily convinced sometimes, and dug a dollar coin out of my pocket.
“What’s that book you’re reading?” he asked.
“A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway, “ I said.
“Yeah yeah, I’ve heard of him. He’s pretty famous?”
“He is.”
“Where is he from?”
“The US, born around Chicago.”
“Where are you from?”
“The US, born around Chicago, too.”
“Oh, really?” He widened his eyes and rubbed some sparse whiskers on his chin.
“I’m Frank. What’s your name?”
“Kyle.”
“Kyle, have you ever met an Aboriginal?”
“Yeah, I’ve met a few.” I might have smiled at this point. He smiled. He looked about 60, but he carried himself with energy and spoke more eloquently than I had expected.
“You like it here?”
“I do. Especially Sydney. I really love Sydney.”
“That’s good. That’s good. It’s a great city,” he motioned his hand towards the skyline off in the distance.
“What do you do?”
“Not much of anything really. I’m trying to write a book. I’m maybe half way done.” I hate telling people things like this. I don’t know what I do.
“Oh, like Hemingway?” He nodded his head in acknowledgement.
I smiled, “I hope so.”
He thanked me for the change I spared. We shook hands, and he said goodbye.
I noticed that a note had been slide under my door sometime between 6am and 1pm. The first words said “LAST Notice” and I was worried that I was being kicked out of my room. Shit, I like it here, and I don’t want to leave yet.
I read on, though:
LAST Notice
12/04/09
Due to early morning bad remarks and threats made towards me, I’m informing you to keep your own door. Due to my LAVO –orders from 4 years ago given out to Royal stalkers. No further notice will be given. If you don’t keep to yourself, 100 commonwealth police will approach you. You already have a permit AND –order not to approach me. Don’t breech the order. My royal guards are watching you! You are wanted for Copyright of my Royal Palace reputation and Services. I will Summond (sic) you with 100—police cars if you try anything. Keep to yourself, stranger. Don’t talk to me, don’t follow me or I, will call my police to collect you!
The Psychiatric Doctor. Dr. Catherine.
Minister of Correction Propriety.
Englands Palace Propriety.
Telstra Propriety 1975.
Rogue Traders.
With my sleepy, blinking eyes, I felt a bit anxious at first. This person is fucked up and might kill me. But then I chuckled to myself and took my morning piss. Since I had to pay for my week’s accommodation today, I decided to go downstairs, pay, and show them this letter and see if I should be alarmed or something.
“Oh, yeah, she does that,” the girl at the bar shook her head and smirked a bit, “Yeah, I lived up there last year, and I got a letter like this, too. I think each new person who moves in gets one of these. She’s harmless, though. Like she’s never done anything. She’s just lost a bit upstairs. I’ll let Alana know, though, and she can have another talk with her. I apologize for this, though. I really am sorry.”
I assured her there was no need to apologize and that I got a kick out of it. Quite the present left by the Easter bunny.
It’s a humid day today, and it looks like it’s going to rain. It feels like it’s going to rain, but I still went for a walk to Glebe, ate some pizza, had an iced coffee and found a place that sells A&W root beer. This is the first time I’ve seen root beer in Australia. It was made in the US and was made with high-fructose corn syrup. It was delicious.
I found a park bench not far from Glebe Point Road, sat down with my can of A&W, and read some A Farewell to Arms. Ah, I thought, it’s been a while since I injected myself with some Hemingway.
After reading maybe a chapter and a half, I saw a man approaching me out of the corner of my eye, a man who I knew would ask me for money.
“Excuse me, sir, do you have any change to spare.”
I’m easily convinced sometimes, and dug a dollar coin out of my pocket.
“What’s that book you’re reading?” he asked.
“A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway, “ I said.
“Yeah yeah, I’ve heard of him. He’s pretty famous?”
“He is.”
“Where is he from?”
“The US, born around Chicago.”
“Where are you from?”
“The US, born around Chicago, too.”
“Oh, really?” He widened his eyes and rubbed some sparse whiskers on his chin.
“I’m Frank. What’s your name?”
“Kyle.”
“Kyle, have you ever met an Aboriginal?”
“Yeah, I’ve met a few.” I might have smiled at this point. He smiled. He looked about 60, but he carried himself with energy and spoke more eloquently than I had expected.
“You like it here?”
“I do. Especially Sydney. I really love Sydney.”
“That’s good. That’s good. It’s a great city,” he motioned his hand towards the skyline off in the distance.
“What do you do?”
“Not much of anything really. I’m trying to write a book. I’m maybe half way done.” I hate telling people things like this. I don’t know what I do.
“Oh, like Hemingway?” He nodded his head in acknowledgement.
I smiled, “I hope so.”
He thanked me for the change I spared. We shook hands, and he said goodbye.
Friday, April 10, 2009
A Bit of Sentimental
I was just sitting here reading Underworld by Don DeLillo, and I’m only thirty or so pages into the massive 827 page epic, but these first thirty pages or so have been about baseball, specifically the game where Bobby Thompson hit his famous walk-off home run back in 1954.
Now all this white wine I’ve been consuming (shrimp counts are low, but I just tried sushi—raw fish—for the first time ever; it’s not shrimp but you gotta work with what you got) and this talk of baseball and me knowing that baseball season has just started up again in the states, it all gets me a bit sentimental. I’m well aware that half the people who read this don’t care about or know anything about baseball and I know that half know some about baseball and there are a few who love it with a passion of an infinite number of burning suns the way I do, so I’ll try to keep this short. I don’t like talking about sports around people who don’t care.
But I will say this: I miss it.
As for where I am, as I am often asked online, I am back in Sydney and if you are FaceBook friends with me you’ll be well aware that I’m living ABOVE A BAR, and I caps lock that phrase because I feel a little bit like Hemingway in Paris in the 20s or Miller in Paris in the 30s. I feel a bit of romance here. It ain’t nothing special if you see my room. It’s got a single bed, a small desk, a small table, and a wardrobe to put my clothes in, there’s a shared bathroom and shower, a shared fridge that I was advised not to use, a coin operated washer and drier, and a shared microwave. When you first come in the door through a back alley behind Bar Broadway, you smell rotten beer and wine bottles that better be recycled soon, and as you walk up the 3 flights of stairs that fermenting garbage smell morphs into the smell of Asian food. I keep my windows open for now as the nights have been cool and pleasant, and you get a front row seat to all of the cars racing up and down Broadway. It’s a hypnotic sound that I find soothing, and it helps put me to sleep. That and the wine.
I wish I could articulate it better. I feel I should have the right words for it, but I just dart all around it. Perhaps I’m just being too sentimental again, but Sydney is a great city, and I feel at home here, almost as much at home as I feel at home. Maybe it’s the people, they’re so kind and helpful here. Maybe it’s the weather, it don’t snow here. Maybe it’s the parks and the cafes and the coffee and the wine, the good food and the smiling faces of friends. I don’t know. I just dance around the possible explanations. I’m here for a while longer, though, so there is plenty of time for me to find the right words.
Now all this white wine I’ve been consuming (shrimp counts are low, but I just tried sushi—raw fish—for the first time ever; it’s not shrimp but you gotta work with what you got) and this talk of baseball and me knowing that baseball season has just started up again in the states, it all gets me a bit sentimental. I’m well aware that half the people who read this don’t care about or know anything about baseball and I know that half know some about baseball and there are a few who love it with a passion of an infinite number of burning suns the way I do, so I’ll try to keep this short. I don’t like talking about sports around people who don’t care.
But I will say this: I miss it.
As for where I am, as I am often asked online, I am back in Sydney and if you are FaceBook friends with me you’ll be well aware that I’m living ABOVE A BAR, and I caps lock that phrase because I feel a little bit like Hemingway in Paris in the 20s or Miller in Paris in the 30s. I feel a bit of romance here. It ain’t nothing special if you see my room. It’s got a single bed, a small desk, a small table, and a wardrobe to put my clothes in, there’s a shared bathroom and shower, a shared fridge that I was advised not to use, a coin operated washer and drier, and a shared microwave. When you first come in the door through a back alley behind Bar Broadway, you smell rotten beer and wine bottles that better be recycled soon, and as you walk up the 3 flights of stairs that fermenting garbage smell morphs into the smell of Asian food. I keep my windows open for now as the nights have been cool and pleasant, and you get a front row seat to all of the cars racing up and down Broadway. It’s a hypnotic sound that I find soothing, and it helps put me to sleep. That and the wine.
I wish I could articulate it better. I feel I should have the right words for it, but I just dart all around it. Perhaps I’m just being too sentimental again, but Sydney is a great city, and I feel at home here, almost as much at home as I feel at home. Maybe it’s the people, they’re so kind and helpful here. Maybe it’s the weather, it don’t snow here. Maybe it’s the parks and the cafes and the coffee and the wine, the good food and the smiling faces of friends. I don’t know. I just dance around the possible explanations. I’m here for a while longer, though, so there is plenty of time for me to find the right words.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Wine Time
I think I will always remember Melbourne as the City of Free Hats. I received two free hats while playing poker at the Crown, one a Jim Bean hat signed by Mr. Hock and the other a Grand Prix of Australia hat from 2007 that was left under my seat.
Yesterday I won my third hat, a cowboy hat from a Yarra Valley winery. I finally went on a wine tour, finally enjoyed some of the delicious wine and forested low mountains of Victoria. Soon after the tour began, I slowly became famous on the ride up to the first of four wineries by guessing that kerosene was a common descriptor of Rieslings. Everyone else didn’t believe me, but the guide smiled and said, “We have an expert on board!” I was sitting at the back of the small tour bus, and I felt all the heads turn around and look inquisitively at this bearded curiosity.
I solidified my fame by guessing the correct grape variety of the “mystery wine,” mostly because everyone else had guessed all of the red wine varieties they had heard of and I just chucked up Sangiovese without really knowing for certain whether it was right or not. The guide, named Orson “like Orson Welles,” smiled again and put this cowboy hat on my head, “You won yourself a hat!”
After that I was asked a number of questions about wine throughout the day. People from Canada, Switzerland, China, the US, and Perth all wanted to know where I learned so much about wine.
“I only took a class a few years ago. I’ve forgotten a lot of it.”
“That’s one more class than I’ve ever taken,” stated a blunt woman from Canada.
It was an enormously enjoyable day out in rural Victoria. The sun beat down on the half harvested vines, and I did my best to find shade and take pictures of the low mountains that surrounded the valley. Some of these hills and mountains bore the scars of the fires that burned not two months ago. I don’t think I would have noticed at first because a lot of the burned land had already recovered enough to look reasonably green, but Orson pointed out the scars—and also his house—where he had lost a shed and where the flames lapped only six meters from his front door. He and all of his neighbors had to evacuate, and he considered himself lucky that he still had not just his life, but his home as well.
“I don’t want to bring down the fun at all, but this is just what happened, and to understand what this region has been through, you need to know just how bad these fires were and how helpless all the residents here were to the power that were the towering flames. I lost a shed, but fortunately that was all. I was one of the lucky ones.”
The bus grew guiltily silent, and Orson smiled and said, “But now the tours have started back up, and we’re all happy to be getting back to our normal lives and showing you wonderful people the great wines that we make here in the Yarra Valley. You’re going to have a great day today, you’re going to try up to 60 different types of wine, and you’ll all get feeling real good by the end of the day. Enough of the sad shit, let’s play a game!”
Yesterday I won my third hat, a cowboy hat from a Yarra Valley winery. I finally went on a wine tour, finally enjoyed some of the delicious wine and forested low mountains of Victoria. Soon after the tour began, I slowly became famous on the ride up to the first of four wineries by guessing that kerosene was a common descriptor of Rieslings. Everyone else didn’t believe me, but the guide smiled and said, “We have an expert on board!” I was sitting at the back of the small tour bus, and I felt all the heads turn around and look inquisitively at this bearded curiosity.
I solidified my fame by guessing the correct grape variety of the “mystery wine,” mostly because everyone else had guessed all of the red wine varieties they had heard of and I just chucked up Sangiovese without really knowing for certain whether it was right or not. The guide, named Orson “like Orson Welles,” smiled again and put this cowboy hat on my head, “You won yourself a hat!”
After that I was asked a number of questions about wine throughout the day. People from Canada, Switzerland, China, the US, and Perth all wanted to know where I learned so much about wine.“I only took a class a few years ago. I’ve forgotten a lot of it.”
“That’s one more class than I’ve ever taken,” stated a blunt woman from Canada.
It was an enormously enjoyable day out in rural Victoria. The sun beat down on the half harvested vines, and I did my best to find shade and take pictures of the low mountains that surrounded the valley. Some of these hills and mountains bore the scars of the fires that burned not two months ago. I don’t think I would have noticed at first because a lot of the burned land had already recovered enough to look reasonably green, but Orson pointed out the scars—and also his house—where he had lost a shed and where the flames lapped only six meters from his front door. He and all of his neighbors had to evacuate, and he considered himself lucky that he still had not just his life, but his home as well.
“I don’t want to bring down the fun at all, but this is just what happened, and to understand what this region has been through, you need to know just how bad these fires were and how helpless all the residents here were to the power that were the towering flames. I lost a shed, but fortunately that was all. I was one of the lucky ones.”
The bus grew guiltily silent, and Orson smiled and said, “But now the tours have started back up, and we’re all happy to be getting back to our normal lives and showing you wonderful people the great wines that we make here in the Yarra Valley. You’re going to have a great day today, you’re going to try up to 60 different types of wine, and you’ll all get feeling real good by the end of the day. Enough of the sad shit, let’s play a game!”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)