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Posty’s Favourite Columns

Boiling Mad Over Heat.
First published in The Age, 25 February 2000

Goddamnit all to hell – who can think, who can actually use their brains, in this endless bloody heat? I don’t want to whinge here, I don’t want to go all self-indulgent and I know that you already know how much I hate the heat and everything, but this is getting nuts. My brain is mush, MUSH I tells ya. I’m not there yet but I’m rapidly approaching, indeed, can see the event horizon of Total Tether Termination Point, and it scares me, I tells ya, it scares me.

The other day I was found whimpering in a corner, just repeating over and over again, “It’s never going to be cool, it’s never going to be cool, it’s never going to be cool EVER AGAIN. All work and no play makes Sue a baaaad little girl, red rum, red rum, don’t go near the light Carol Ann! Don’t go near the light!”

This heat doesn’t just bake, it roasts, stews and parboils. My concrete backyard is a barbecue! Every day I have to fight the urge to shove an apple in my gob and roll around on the ground with a sprig of rosemary up my butt. And I know I’m rambling, I know I’m not making much sense, I know this is just rolling on and on and on and I know I’m not using much proper grammar or stuff like that, but my brain is MUSH. Did I mention that already? Who cares about grammar at a time like this anyway. It’s not like I learned it properly in school or anything, it was the 70’s goddamnit! You spelt things the way it felt right to you. Creativity was positively encouraged! How are you supposed to go sanely through the world when you’ve been taught rubbish like that?

Ooh, ooh, ooh! Wait! I know! It’s art. It’s high art, it’s literary with a capital “L”, it’s thoroughly respectable, stream-of-consciousness, Joycean, Proustian, smarty-pants, elitist art and I can use as many exclamation marks as I want! You can’t stop me! This is post-modern! That’s what it is! Wait, no it’s not. Post-modern is SO last century and like, so boring. This is…POST-post-modern!

(God I love having most of the important art movements of the last century named after my family.) That’s the ticket. Post-post-modern. Or po-po-mo for short. We’ll get the Beach Boys to release a single. It’ll be great. And when the great po-po-mo movement inevitably grinds to a halt (I give it two weeks) then we’ll move on to NEO-po-po-mo. And then the world will be mine!

It’s a full moon tonight. Does that help explain things a little? I’m nuts, I’ve crossed the line, hell, even my cats have crossed the line. Full moon and a strong wind. My cats are racing around like fools, slipping on the tiles to end up spread-eagled in the corner. We gave them ping-pong balls to play with. Ping-pong balls on tiles. WHAT WERE WE THINKING? Ah, crap. I have no idea what’s happening anymore. I think I might be channeling some dead person. I have no idea who. Maybe Jack Kerouac. But that can’t be right. I haven’t even read any of Jack Kerouac. Made the mistake of seeing a doco about him before reading his stuff. And there was this quote in the doco, and this quote about Jack, well, see for yourself. Some Guy Talking About Jack Kerouac, “He didn’t want to be just a poet, he wanted to be a jazz musician who played the typewriter.”

Which just made me want to PUKE, man. You dig? ‘Playing” a typewriter makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Unless he wanted to sign up as one of the 500 monkeys who, in 1000 years, will produce the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly hitting keys on a typewriter. And HA, joke’s on him because now they use computers! It’s all so clear to me now! I can see infinity! No, wait, that was just my eyes turning to MUSH! Must go have cold bath now. Must try to reconstitute myself into human form. Must get airconditioning. Must go, full stop.

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