Friday, June 17, 2022
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Of course, it's only a movie.
Trawling through the 200 odd pages of movies I came across one called genius and, it kinda stands to reason, something like that is going to interest me, I've had that thrown at me often enough, not for a while thank God, but enough in the past I've found it intriguing.
And the movie had quite a low IMDB rating, which was interesting given the cast, and was about a writer, one I'm not familiar with but that's not surprising as I'm not only not well read, in the sense of understanding these things, but I'm also incredibly forgetful of any ideas about what rates in society and what doesn't, I have my own way of looking at things... which, tinkle, tinkle, you might already sense where I'm going with this.
Yesterday I had a dose of what's unmistakable for me though just washes off. Had a look from someone, they had a feeling of recognition, started out as something else but in coming up through them was, as usual, directed without much cognisance, once it surfaced, well, perturbed by the imbalances most feel as a kind of fear between intellect and emotion... nothing I can do about that, at all, so, as I said, just washes off. This leads quite nicely into Thomas Wolfe but I still have to widen it out.
Later I'm coming home and remember that big ol' tree that's still there on the edge of the water between Otahuhu and Mangere. Normally it's just big and massive, doing it's own thing, but this time i'd somehow managed to notice these other biggies leading up to it, spaced out across and through which was my ol' stomping ground, that curiously wild place where I grew up and every so often go gliding on through.
So this big ol' tree had been hit by a car, a car I'd been following way, way back when I was maybe 16 or so, maybe a little older, and coming the other way, meaning coming from Otahuhu, most probably a early winter night as it was dark and I wasn't. at that age, out too late, and so I'm following this car, we're just going past Pacific Steel, and I can feel a dread from it, maybe mounting maybe sudden but I start to back off, give it some room. It's a Mark 3 Zephyr, not straight but a bit hoony, bit of a hot rod, South Auckland styles of those days, and the distance between us lengthens and I start to feel comfortable again, kinda have room to feel whatever it was in a sense of it being clarity though I'm still decades away from even knowing what that is, and it's not quite mournful and not quite angry as there's a crazy edge to it, a scattered and frenetic jarring cacophony but there's a distance now so it's almost like I can be curious but then, of a sudden, it just ramps up, this, I'd suppose, psychic phenomena and with that whomever floors the accelerator, a rush of blat from the exhaust and then the big metal is aimed across the road and, within milliseconds, has smashed into the tree and part of me, feeling the whole thing as violent and dangerous, just goes 'you fucker, how dare you even begin to make me a part of this' which, and here I'm kind of assuming, but not too much as I've always had this, has me throttling up myself and getting home to ring the powers that be.
I mean I'm only 16 and completely uninterested in knowing what a sense of responsibility is at least in the sense of being societal and only really curious about how what I feel fit's in and I just felt bully, like this selfish fucker had taken a swing at me, minding my own business and this 'out of the blue' aggravation just isn't worth any effort.
And It's South Auckland, not that that's an excuse, but when you're a skinny white boy there's certain things you learn, certain way's of being that aren't just about being in the wrong place but if the wrong place finds you there is a quite certain way to respond, despite what hurt might be, which needs to be understood.
Why I say that is because I got home and rang the 111 and said what I'd seen and was almost immediately told off, like why didn't you stop and see what you could do to which, and here we're getting into details and who the fuck knows what I replied but somehow I seem to remember saying something or other that got me off the hook and put him on the line back on his own.
So early years having what might be termed psychic sewage thrown at me but this wise ol' deep voice that reckons towards having to wade through it and see what my validity is against drawing up the terms of engagement and so yesterday I get this feeling, a by now quite obvious refrain, from this woman standing in line at the flash place to buy food and know exactly what it is but too, there's the responsibility, which both is and isn't, that if she's gotten this old, late thirties early forties, and still doesn't know then not only is there nothing I can do but doing anything, given it's taken this long, will just dig the naivety deeper.
Ah, but no... jump on out. What I do, what anyone is, feelings go back in, not to be suppressed but the simplicity of just allowing, say from my end, that's part of it. A little of how I am potentially adds itself to what she is feeling as it does what it all does.
Back then to Thomas Wolfe and the movie called Genius and maybe why that isn't a statement and might be a question?
An interesting part of the movie is when Tom and the editor start cutting all that is seen as not to the point, discussed as overly flowery, even ostentatious, so the point can be made. And that's kinda interesting and maybe it's about the fine line if there even is a line. 'Cause when one does the work, gets attuned as it were, and eventually as it's not an easy commitment then it often isn't about getting to the point so much as allowing moments to be so wide and so full that even knowing there might be a point needs forgotten.
And the movie had quite a low IMDB rating, which was interesting given the cast, and was about a writer, one I'm not familiar with but that's not surprising as I'm not only not well read, in the sense of understanding these things, but I'm also incredibly forgetful of any ideas about what rates in society and what doesn't, I have my own way of looking at things... which, tinkle, tinkle, you might already sense where I'm going with this.
Yesterday I had a dose of what's unmistakable for me though just washes off. Had a look from someone, they had a feeling of recognition, started out as something else but in coming up through them was, as usual, directed without much cognisance, once it surfaced, well, perturbed by the imbalances most feel as a kind of fear between intellect and emotion... nothing I can do about that, at all, so, as I said, just washes off. This leads quite nicely into Thomas Wolfe but I still have to widen it out.
Later I'm coming home and remember that big ol' tree that's still there on the edge of the water between Otahuhu and Mangere. Normally it's just big and massive, doing it's own thing, but this time i'd somehow managed to notice these other biggies leading up to it, spaced out across and through which was my ol' stomping ground, that curiously wild place where I grew up and every so often go gliding on through.
So this big ol' tree had been hit by a car, a car I'd been following way, way back when I was maybe 16 or so, maybe a little older, and coming the other way, meaning coming from Otahuhu, most probably a early winter night as it was dark and I wasn't. at that age, out too late, and so I'm following this car, we're just going past Pacific Steel, and I can feel a dread from it, maybe mounting maybe sudden but I start to back off, give it some room. It's a Mark 3 Zephyr, not straight but a bit hoony, bit of a hot rod, South Auckland styles of those days, and the distance between us lengthens and I start to feel comfortable again, kinda have room to feel whatever it was in a sense of it being clarity though I'm still decades away from even knowing what that is, and it's not quite mournful and not quite angry as there's a crazy edge to it, a scattered and frenetic jarring cacophony but there's a distance now so it's almost like I can be curious but then, of a sudden, it just ramps up, this, I'd suppose, psychic phenomena and with that whomever floors the accelerator, a rush of blat from the exhaust and then the big metal is aimed across the road and, within milliseconds, has smashed into the tree and part of me, feeling the whole thing as violent and dangerous, just goes 'you fucker, how dare you even begin to make me a part of this' which, and here I'm kind of assuming, but not too much as I've always had this, has me throttling up myself and getting home to ring the powers that be.
I mean I'm only 16 and completely uninterested in knowing what a sense of responsibility is at least in the sense of being societal and only really curious about how what I feel fit's in and I just felt bully, like this selfish fucker had taken a swing at me, minding my own business and this 'out of the blue' aggravation just isn't worth any effort.
And It's South Auckland, not that that's an excuse, but when you're a skinny white boy there's certain things you learn, certain way's of being that aren't just about being in the wrong place but if the wrong place finds you there is a quite certain way to respond, despite what hurt might be, which needs to be understood.
Why I say that is because I got home and rang the 111 and said what I'd seen and was almost immediately told off, like why didn't you stop and see what you could do to which, and here we're getting into details and who the fuck knows what I replied but somehow I seem to remember saying something or other that got me off the hook and put him on the line back on his own.
So early years having what might be termed psychic sewage thrown at me but this wise ol' deep voice that reckons towards having to wade through it and see what my validity is against drawing up the terms of engagement and so yesterday I get this feeling, a by now quite obvious refrain, from this woman standing in line at the flash place to buy food and know exactly what it is but too, there's the responsibility, which both is and isn't, that if she's gotten this old, late thirties early forties, and still doesn't know then not only is there nothing I can do but doing anything, given it's taken this long, will just dig the naivety deeper.
Ah, but no... jump on out. What I do, what anyone is, feelings go back in, not to be suppressed but the simplicity of just allowing, say from my end, that's part of it. A little of how I am potentially adds itself to what she is feeling as it does what it all does.
Back then to Thomas Wolfe and the movie called Genius and maybe why that isn't a statement and might be a question?
An interesting part of the movie is when Tom and the editor start cutting all that is seen as not to the point, discussed as overly flowery, even ostentatious, so the point can be made. And that's kinda interesting and maybe it's about the fine line if there even is a line. 'Cause when one does the work, gets attuned as it were, and eventually as it's not an easy commitment then it often isn't about getting to the point so much as allowing moments to be so wide and so full that even knowing there might be a point needs forgotten.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Karma?
I think that starting a post and calling it karma, about karma, might be wrong simply because the same reason people might misrepresent karma, and indeed have others then misunderstand it, is actually, within what karma is, exactly why it is misunderstood.
Mainly in the west it is understood as cause and effect which is quite good except the way in which we come to our sense of how things work, through Christianity and an all powerful God, has so permeated all cultural 'action', with even those whom might call themselves atheists being so inclined, that how a Buddhist might understand karma simply cannot easily be understood by a westerner.
But there is hope and especially within the science of psychology and most determinately within the study of trauma which, in it's simplest form, states that traumatic experiences reconfigure both the neural cortex and nervous system to the extent that action in the world is from this default status.
Though to even give psychology a context we have to go back to the age of enlightenment and even, perhaps, a little further into the beginnings of liberalism and the reformation and not for the advances it gave us as regards progress so much as what we brought with us without regard as to the underlying perceptual framework in which we saw the world.
This is to say that even as more people learned to read, which essentially was the reformed church and the printing of bibles which allowed anyone with extra currency, and that in itself is a telling story which needs some expansion but I'll leave it for now, to have their own copy of that book and study it beyond the system of Catholicism which determined how it was understood from the pulpit yet that determination of authority, the pyramidal structure of leaders at the top, was ceded into even as information and ideas worth discussing started to move alongside currency and trading of commodity which interestingly, as scientific exploration began to make it's mark, it too was unquestioned as to the pyramidal structure of what authority is.
And then if we, and it isn't really much of a jump, apply the same set of principles of trauma that psychologists are advancing as to how trauma resets the neural pathways and nervous system it isn't at all difficult to apply the same sense of the resulting liberalism which created the age of reasoning, the birth of science called the age of enlightenment, was quite basically a societal reaction to the trauma inducing action of the authoritarianism of Catholicism and it's modelling of the human psyche of God as all knowing.
This though allows us, somewhat, to blame the church, have them as responsible, though what was it, what is it, within this dialectic of the singular and the group which keeps what is essentially the power of decision going upwards, a passing of the buck as it were, that responsibility, and even what that is becomes a trickle down effect?
So this is principally why something like karma is misunderstood in the west simply because how we see our ability to effect change and view consequence is always mostly about determination beyond us. Because authority is always beyond us and our sense of action is always little more than a allocation of what is allowed, a reflection of ultimate authority determined by our own sense of what we can and cannot authorise, then we are only able to see cause and affect at the level of the physical which, within the modern world, is compounded by the nature of consumerism to the extent that cause and effect is yet again mirrored outside of ourselves as choice commitment to our ability to acquire.
But what happens now is that we'd actually have to go further back, possibly look at how the Christians came, as it were, to found the Roman Catholic Empire as a building consensus within what could have been the dissolution of the Roman empire, keep going back to some original experience of the western human family but what is really happening is that I'm am being authoritive and telling whom might be reading what I believe is this or that. I am essentially creating a fabric of potential, a construction designed to be stable, to take all the various pieces and lay out a table of contents which can be understood within an already relative set of intellectually understood as useful frameworks and added or subtracted, as needed, to the overall construction of human understanding.
I am basically bargaining what I have constructed, my not necessarily original set of fabrications, as a depiction of what my authority might be. Now, within our understanding of this consuming, we all have the given right to pick and choose what we add or subtract to our own sense of what reality is, but often completely unquestioned is that we all do it, we all keep looking for the authority, the authoritative, and this, in essence, still completely and utterly is the building of pyramidal structures of what power is and can be.
And then what modern psychology might be getting around to telling us, if and when we get around to provisioning the singular as the group and vice versa, is that this is our ongoing trauma, that this always alluding to what authority is, always being told and acquiring the told at our discretion is merely recreation of the trauma creating our world in reflection. Therein not the fault of authority itself so much as how we view what authority even is.
Which brings us right back to karma which, in eastern philosophy realises, as psychologists are beginning to give much more credence to, that the principal cause, which creates effects, is subconscious and that all practise to understand consciousness is to render that which is subconscious and unconscious of conscious awareness.
And then too it isn't authority within the modern western or our lack or own authority so much, as the authority is merely a polarisation, but that other pole of the subconscious, both singular and at levels of what group is, potentially needs us all reckoning of the pivot on which it all swings.
Mainly in the west it is understood as cause and effect which is quite good except the way in which we come to our sense of how things work, through Christianity and an all powerful God, has so permeated all cultural 'action', with even those whom might call themselves atheists being so inclined, that how a Buddhist might understand karma simply cannot easily be understood by a westerner.
But there is hope and especially within the science of psychology and most determinately within the study of trauma which, in it's simplest form, states that traumatic experiences reconfigure both the neural cortex and nervous system to the extent that action in the world is from this default status.
Though to even give psychology a context we have to go back to the age of enlightenment and even, perhaps, a little further into the beginnings of liberalism and the reformation and not for the advances it gave us as regards progress so much as what we brought with us without regard as to the underlying perceptual framework in which we saw the world.
This is to say that even as more people learned to read, which essentially was the reformed church and the printing of bibles which allowed anyone with extra currency, and that in itself is a telling story which needs some expansion but I'll leave it for now, to have their own copy of that book and study it beyond the system of Catholicism which determined how it was understood from the pulpit yet that determination of authority, the pyramidal structure of leaders at the top, was ceded into even as information and ideas worth discussing started to move alongside currency and trading of commodity which interestingly, as scientific exploration began to make it's mark, it too was unquestioned as to the pyramidal structure of what authority is.
And then if we, and it isn't really much of a jump, apply the same set of principles of trauma that psychologists are advancing as to how trauma resets the neural pathways and nervous system it isn't at all difficult to apply the same sense of the resulting liberalism which created the age of reasoning, the birth of science called the age of enlightenment, was quite basically a societal reaction to the trauma inducing action of the authoritarianism of Catholicism and it's modelling of the human psyche of God as all knowing.
This though allows us, somewhat, to blame the church, have them as responsible, though what was it, what is it, within this dialectic of the singular and the group which keeps what is essentially the power of decision going upwards, a passing of the buck as it were, that responsibility, and even what that is becomes a trickle down effect?
So this is principally why something like karma is misunderstood in the west simply because how we see our ability to effect change and view consequence is always mostly about determination beyond us. Because authority is always beyond us and our sense of action is always little more than a allocation of what is allowed, a reflection of ultimate authority determined by our own sense of what we can and cannot authorise, then we are only able to see cause and affect at the level of the physical which, within the modern world, is compounded by the nature of consumerism to the extent that cause and effect is yet again mirrored outside of ourselves as choice commitment to our ability to acquire.
But what happens now is that we'd actually have to go further back, possibly look at how the Christians came, as it were, to found the Roman Catholic Empire as a building consensus within what could have been the dissolution of the Roman empire, keep going back to some original experience of the western human family but what is really happening is that I'm am being authoritive and telling whom might be reading what I believe is this or that. I am essentially creating a fabric of potential, a construction designed to be stable, to take all the various pieces and lay out a table of contents which can be understood within an already relative set of intellectually understood as useful frameworks and added or subtracted, as needed, to the overall construction of human understanding.
I am basically bargaining what I have constructed, my not necessarily original set of fabrications, as a depiction of what my authority might be. Now, within our understanding of this consuming, we all have the given right to pick and choose what we add or subtract to our own sense of what reality is, but often completely unquestioned is that we all do it, we all keep looking for the authority, the authoritative, and this, in essence, still completely and utterly is the building of pyramidal structures of what power is and can be.
And then what modern psychology might be getting around to telling us, if and when we get around to provisioning the singular as the group and vice versa, is that this is our ongoing trauma, that this always alluding to what authority is, always being told and acquiring the told at our discretion is merely recreation of the trauma creating our world in reflection. Therein not the fault of authority itself so much as how we view what authority even is.
Which brings us right back to karma which, in eastern philosophy realises, as psychologists are beginning to give much more credence to, that the principal cause, which creates effects, is subconscious and that all practise to understand consciousness is to render that which is subconscious and unconscious of conscious awareness.
And then too it isn't authority within the modern western or our lack or own authority so much, as the authority is merely a polarisation, but that other pole of the subconscious, both singular and at levels of what group is, potentially needs us all reckoning of the pivot on which it all swings.
Friday, July 26, 2019
A vision slowly forming; a new appraisal of collective bargaining? Part one.
So if you were up in the air, a few hundred feet would do and hopefully gliding, engines off, as that's be a bit more serene, we'd see what amounts to a Koru with all kinds of fractal stuff around it, lot's of little branchings with leaves forming. Quite sort of straight and hard edged, the buildings and lines, at the beginning, the root, of where the Koru meets the road in but as it progresses, swings in on itself, it all gets much more organic, edges less defined and nature meeting the works of us creating shelter and perspectives back out and into the natural world.
Then the view changes and you're entering from the road and it all looks kinda normal; there's curbings of concrete and asphalts to drive on, the buildings have windows with aluminium frames and there are signs like we're used to. But as we move in, and incidentally more people seem to be moving about, going here and there, the edges get more rounded, the asphalt makes way for compressed rubble and broken rock, the planting become more haphazard and even inclined to a certain optimism.
So, as it all seems busy but somehow easy, we sit down under some shade and wonder what's going on here.
The buildings right out front, the two opposite each other on each side of the road, one was emblazoned, all stern, Detention centre yet on the other side didn't have a name so much as a slogan written around it's footing "Consider yourself to reign safely when you rule willing subjects. For the unwilling subject rebels when they have the opportunity. But they who are ruled by the bonds of goodwill are firm in their obedience to their ruler" (Agapetus)
And what are these two buildings which somehow seem at odds, but, at the same time, are questioning each other?
On the one side, the Detention Centre, seems to be about prisoners, people who have broken the law, and yet it doesn't quite have all the accoutrements expected; yes there are fences, but no barbed wire, and yes their seem to be guards but they don't look so different from those who might be convicted of wrong... it seems both lazier and yet more trusting.
Wandering up to the building we find a notice, okay, and the headline is 'Statement of intent' which reads.
Our responsibility as citizens is to enable those whom have found our disfavour the wherewithal to understand what our favour is; therein we acknowledge that what we have defined as our favour isn't wide enough or inclusive enough and has, by our own ignorance, allowed these, granted disfavour by law, the opportunity, shared with us, to understand, and have the time to explore, what favour they might find to add to ours.
So, and looking around, it seems that these people, found guilty in some way, are given longer leashes. stretchy even, and not locked away behind such obvious boundaries... the boundaries are being discovered for what they might actually represent.
And too, across the road, and opposite, it feels like what leadership actually is, how it can work, is being tested. It looks as if, even at the front desk, the barriers are down and those whom sit behind them seem to have something about them that they are used to far more important public roles... and it's even written there on the name plates, him what asked 'how can we help?' was a district court Judge... how does that work? Yet too, given what seems lax, we could just walk right by this desk and go down to the windows facing the sea and the sun, it seems somehow that that is where 'normal is'. But inbetween we walk through what seems museumish, mausoleumish, busts, in various styles, carving and sculptures, and around and about them sayings and proverbs which all revolve around what leadership is... or has been anyways.
Okay, seems enough for now but what is it? Where is it and what purpose might it all serve... I basically don't know the full story myself, visions tend to be like that, you have to trust them and ride that wild horse.
Drawings now, well soon... they'll help with perspective and as in doing such as that, possibly reveal the next few steps.
There's one bit though I'm looking forward too, it's the view north and out over the harbour, and it's these quite preposterously huge sculptures, like totem poles, that are so big that they throw shadows across the whole thing. They are the line where the past meets the present... they can't help us feel small, but proud too, and beyond them, down to the shore, are the old bones and the memories and the rock gardens finding themselves again... left in peace to be what they always were.
Then the view changes and you're entering from the road and it all looks kinda normal; there's curbings of concrete and asphalts to drive on, the buildings have windows with aluminium frames and there are signs like we're used to. But as we move in, and incidentally more people seem to be moving about, going here and there, the edges get more rounded, the asphalt makes way for compressed rubble and broken rock, the planting become more haphazard and even inclined to a certain optimism.
So, as it all seems busy but somehow easy, we sit down under some shade and wonder what's going on here.
The buildings right out front, the two opposite each other on each side of the road, one was emblazoned, all stern, Detention centre yet on the other side didn't have a name so much as a slogan written around it's footing "Consider yourself to reign safely when you rule willing subjects. For the unwilling subject rebels when they have the opportunity. But they who are ruled by the bonds of goodwill are firm in their obedience to their ruler" (Agapetus)
And what are these two buildings which somehow seem at odds, but, at the same time, are questioning each other?
On the one side, the Detention Centre, seems to be about prisoners, people who have broken the law, and yet it doesn't quite have all the accoutrements expected; yes there are fences, but no barbed wire, and yes their seem to be guards but they don't look so different from those who might be convicted of wrong... it seems both lazier and yet more trusting.
Wandering up to the building we find a notice, okay, and the headline is 'Statement of intent' which reads.
Our responsibility as citizens is to enable those whom have found our disfavour the wherewithal to understand what our favour is; therein we acknowledge that what we have defined as our favour isn't wide enough or inclusive enough and has, by our own ignorance, allowed these, granted disfavour by law, the opportunity, shared with us, to understand, and have the time to explore, what favour they might find to add to ours.
So, and looking around, it seems that these people, found guilty in some way, are given longer leashes. stretchy even, and not locked away behind such obvious boundaries... the boundaries are being discovered for what they might actually represent.
And too, across the road, and opposite, it feels like what leadership actually is, how it can work, is being tested. It looks as if, even at the front desk, the barriers are down and those whom sit behind them seem to have something about them that they are used to far more important public roles... and it's even written there on the name plates, him what asked 'how can we help?' was a district court Judge... how does that work? Yet too, given what seems lax, we could just walk right by this desk and go down to the windows facing the sea and the sun, it seems somehow that that is where 'normal is'. But inbetween we walk through what seems museumish, mausoleumish, busts, in various styles, carving and sculptures, and around and about them sayings and proverbs which all revolve around what leadership is... or has been anyways.
Okay, seems enough for now but what is it? Where is it and what purpose might it all serve... I basically don't know the full story myself, visions tend to be like that, you have to trust them and ride that wild horse.
Drawings now, well soon... they'll help with perspective and as in doing such as that, possibly reveal the next few steps.
There's one bit though I'm looking forward too, it's the view north and out over the harbour, and it's these quite preposterously huge sculptures, like totem poles, that are so big that they throw shadows across the whole thing. They are the line where the past meets the present... they can't help us feel small, but proud too, and beyond them, down to the shore, are the old bones and the memories and the rock gardens finding themselves again... left in peace to be what they always were.
Saturday, December 16, 2017
How it works.
It was at the tail end of the Crowded House job, way back in the '90's, and I'd got a bit sick and tired of chasing Kerry and Bruce up for the money they owed me, and my crew, so I think I'd wrung up that lawyer guy who did the BFM slot and asked him about what I could do. He'd even heard about the video shoot, bein' Auckland is so small, and thought it was all rather funny, if I remember correctly, and that the D12 thing would get things moving for me.
'Cause a D12 is the start of proceedings for bankruptcy against someone who owes you a debt. No piss assing about, no selling the debt to collectors or signing up for small claims, just a good old fashioned quick punch. or actually just the threat of one, to the kidneys to remind folks how it's supposed to be.
I'd even factored in that this video shoot was a total shot in the arm for this fledgling film company and I was somewhat prepared to let them forgo payment for a bit so they could ride whatever opulence came their way but the thing was they'd started rewarding themselves. New stuff, flash stuff, started to appear at the offices they had down town... and that was just plain rude.
And the whole kerfuffle, the whole shebang, me and mine doing the props for pop stars was all built on serendipidity and it ain't a good idea to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
I'd been with Veer, the mad Indian woman, doing the Pluto cafe thing, which turned out to be a big mistake except it was all kinda fun too. The cafe/gallery was completely in a bad place and shit wasn't movin' at all, and she had high overheads to begin with so that didn't help either with such a risky venture.
But I'd just built a shop down in High St, upmarket suits, shirts and ties for men all super bright colours, Peter Gabriel style, but even a big portion of that dropped into the Pluto hole wasn't enough so Veer told me to get the cafe on TV in the hope that'd swing us into market favour... so I did.
Only Nightline of course but one of the reporters, Peta Mathias's little brother, was one of their reporters and he liked havin' fun and we'd already done a coupla stories for his show revolving around my inner city escapades so I rang him and he agreed to come have a look at the cafe but as TV3 was just over the back of Newton he and his camerman met up with us at the Ground Zero headquarters where I was still kinda based, had my welding gear and shit, and filmed them madmen and me doing a bit of sculpture fabrication right there on Newton Rd... great juxtaposition it was given I managed to borrow a full suit, shirt and tie from the shop I'd built, in fluro colours for the filming down the cafe in Lorne street.
Anyway, the thing was Kerry, who I knew from way back and skating for Edwards, and his men of celluloid had happened to be watching Nightline that night and were in the process of getting the Crowded House shoot and so I was, obviously, the man to build the props for it.'Private universe' was the song... which also kind of fit nicely.
Weirdly, though it isn't, at exactly the same time I'd managed to get the fifteen hundred square feet of warehouse down in Newton, and opposite the Kings Arms, so the deal got done well quick and with three hundred bucks me and just about all the folks from Ground Zero, whom, Felix and Michael, I'd just taught how to weld got stuck in over the weekend to build stuff for the shoot that Monday.
And that was fun, the shoot, as we all got invited down there for the day, even got parts in the video, scored drugs for the band and got stoned with them as well as munched out on all that fine food those types are used to. Paul was my favourite, he was goofy as and lots of fun but the best bit, 'cause despite all the hype film shoots are pretty much to me the absolutely most boring places in the whole of human existence, so after a very long drawn out day the restlessness went a bit frantic and as the sun was setting me, Felix and Scott (maybe Michael and Damian as well, 23 years is a long time ago) grabbed a bunch of broken instruments which included a busted tuba and a saxophone, that's all I can remember, and went out on the driveway, away from all the importance still doing it's thing, and had a weird noise making jam which went on for ages and was really fun and when we finally stopped we heard clapping... so we turned around and there was the band, the world famous trio, applauding us... that was so fucking ironic it was beautiful.
So there I am weeks later, the hubbub had died down and it was business as usual, needing to find cash to fill the holes being presented by silly choices, and these guys were being rude so fuck 'em, I'm doing a D12, I'm lawyering up 'less you fuckers present the cash quick smart... and it worked. Next morning I was down those offices with a cheque for the full amount in my hands but I felt like a cunt... I mean I didn't want to light a fire under their asses but they'd forced me into it so I had water at the ready and felt somewhat obliged to make amends so I looked up, at the ceiling, and had a vision of an artwork so I said I'd build it for them... explain Kerry asked, so I described this contraption which was a big metal circle fabricated from tubing and, totally what later became known as Steampunk, festooned with old tractor headlights... Cool, said Kerry as Bruce hardly even looked up from his plotting.
That particular course set of moments softened I went back to Pluto to let her know disaster was averted for a little and she had me straight back out to my illegally parked ute to shuffle up to Ponsonby to check out a shop, just opened, which I found out later had been built by Virus Mikes builder mate.
I get up there and most probably parked illegally, couldn't help it in those days though it's even harder now to do business in town, and walked into the shop, looked up, and sitting in the ceiling was the exact thing I'd seen in my vision about an hour beforehand and described to Kerry... that's how it works.
'Cause a D12 is the start of proceedings for bankruptcy against someone who owes you a debt. No piss assing about, no selling the debt to collectors or signing up for small claims, just a good old fashioned quick punch. or actually just the threat of one, to the kidneys to remind folks how it's supposed to be.
I'd even factored in that this video shoot was a total shot in the arm for this fledgling film company and I was somewhat prepared to let them forgo payment for a bit so they could ride whatever opulence came their way but the thing was they'd started rewarding themselves. New stuff, flash stuff, started to appear at the offices they had down town... and that was just plain rude.
And the whole kerfuffle, the whole shebang, me and mine doing the props for pop stars was all built on serendipidity and it ain't a good idea to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
I'd been with Veer, the mad Indian woman, doing the Pluto cafe thing, which turned out to be a big mistake except it was all kinda fun too. The cafe/gallery was completely in a bad place and shit wasn't movin' at all, and she had high overheads to begin with so that didn't help either with such a risky venture.
But I'd just built a shop down in High St, upmarket suits, shirts and ties for men all super bright colours, Peter Gabriel style, but even a big portion of that dropped into the Pluto hole wasn't enough so Veer told me to get the cafe on TV in the hope that'd swing us into market favour... so I did.
Only Nightline of course but one of the reporters, Peta Mathias's little brother, was one of their reporters and he liked havin' fun and we'd already done a coupla stories for his show revolving around my inner city escapades so I rang him and he agreed to come have a look at the cafe but as TV3 was just over the back of Newton he and his camerman met up with us at the Ground Zero headquarters where I was still kinda based, had my welding gear and shit, and filmed them madmen and me doing a bit of sculpture fabrication right there on Newton Rd... great juxtaposition it was given I managed to borrow a full suit, shirt and tie from the shop I'd built, in fluro colours for the filming down the cafe in Lorne street.
Anyway, the thing was Kerry, who I knew from way back and skating for Edwards, and his men of celluloid had happened to be watching Nightline that night and were in the process of getting the Crowded House shoot and so I was, obviously, the man to build the props for it.'Private universe' was the song... which also kind of fit nicely.
Weirdly, though it isn't, at exactly the same time I'd managed to get the fifteen hundred square feet of warehouse down in Newton, and opposite the Kings Arms, so the deal got done well quick and with three hundred bucks me and just about all the folks from Ground Zero, whom, Felix and Michael, I'd just taught how to weld got stuck in over the weekend to build stuff for the shoot that Monday.
And that was fun, the shoot, as we all got invited down there for the day, even got parts in the video, scored drugs for the band and got stoned with them as well as munched out on all that fine food those types are used to. Paul was my favourite, he was goofy as and lots of fun but the best bit, 'cause despite all the hype film shoots are pretty much to me the absolutely most boring places in the whole of human existence, so after a very long drawn out day the restlessness went a bit frantic and as the sun was setting me, Felix and Scott (maybe Michael and Damian as well, 23 years is a long time ago) grabbed a bunch of broken instruments which included a busted tuba and a saxophone, that's all I can remember, and went out on the driveway, away from all the importance still doing it's thing, and had a weird noise making jam which went on for ages and was really fun and when we finally stopped we heard clapping... so we turned around and there was the band, the world famous trio, applauding us... that was so fucking ironic it was beautiful.
So there I am weeks later, the hubbub had died down and it was business as usual, needing to find cash to fill the holes being presented by silly choices, and these guys were being rude so fuck 'em, I'm doing a D12, I'm lawyering up 'less you fuckers present the cash quick smart... and it worked. Next morning I was down those offices with a cheque for the full amount in my hands but I felt like a cunt... I mean I didn't want to light a fire under their asses but they'd forced me into it so I had water at the ready and felt somewhat obliged to make amends so I looked up, at the ceiling, and had a vision of an artwork so I said I'd build it for them... explain Kerry asked, so I described this contraption which was a big metal circle fabricated from tubing and, totally what later became known as Steampunk, festooned with old tractor headlights... Cool, said Kerry as Bruce hardly even looked up from his plotting.
That particular course set of moments softened I went back to Pluto to let her know disaster was averted for a little and she had me straight back out to my illegally parked ute to shuffle up to Ponsonby to check out a shop, just opened, which I found out later had been built by Virus Mikes builder mate.
I get up there and most probably parked illegally, couldn't help it in those days though it's even harder now to do business in town, and walked into the shop, looked up, and sitting in the ceiling was the exact thing I'd seen in my vision about an hour beforehand and described to Kerry... that's how it works.
Sunday, November 12, 2017
That Cactus trip.
I was 17 and it was a bad Cactus (mescaline) trip. I'd been introduced to acid about two months before, maybe only a month, and I loved the stuff. Had some every second or third day then Barry introduced me to Cactus. There was one up the garden centre, a San Pedro, and he'd go chop some off of a night and do a boil up then you'd drink it, wait an hour, then spew it up... the gates to heaven opened.
Maybe I'd already read Carlos Castaneda by then, or had just started to, or maybe it was later, I had a thing for anything story wise about drugs... I loved them.
So by then it was maybe my third mescaline trip and the second I remember taking it, spewing up, then getting back to my place just as it's coming on and lying down in front of my radio gram to look at the lights... then it was morning. I'd just disappeared, whoever I was, whatever I was just sunk into the experience.
I'd also done that with the hitch hikers guide on acid. Took the trip over a buddies place in Long Bay, but my friends hadn't (had acid) and so they'd eventually gotten tired, went to sleep, and all I had was a copy of the book so when the trip started coming on, I started reading and then it was morning and I was just finishing it when I kinda came to.
Oh but this third one. The Black Power guys wanted to try it so my mate set it up and we all met up at the sergeant at arms to do the business. Patches on the walls and gloomy lights, bravado and machismo... I didn't like it, but I liked tripping. I drank the yucky brew, it's totally horrid, with them, smoked some dope to bring it on, started getting paranoid... it was all a bit too much, so made some excuse I was going to get something from my bike, the trusty little 100cc Honda my dad had given me, and scarpered.
Got home and tried to settle but the morbidity had me. Knew I should spew but for some reason didn't, couldn't, I don't know but I had a fucking bad trip and it just kept getting worse and I was all alone, fucking devil wanted my soul... eventually snuck into my parents room and stole one of my Dads tranquilizers... took that, and I came right. I wandered off down to my mates early the next morning and climbed in his window, didn't want to wake the family, he woke (he told me this later as I remember bugger all) and just left me there sitting giggling to myself and he went back to sleep... his trip had ended far earlier.
Eventually I walked home, about a mile and a half maybe, and preceded to my Mum and Dads bed and slept for three days solid. Poor Mum and Dad. My brother didn't want to tell them the truth, he knew I was going hard on the psychedelics, lovin' it too, so he kinda gave them a story and they all just left me sleeping... for three days solid.
That fucking scarred the shit outta me. I stopped there and then. I didn't know what had happened, except for the obvious, I didn't know how to deal with it so I just carried on and hoped it wouldn't have long term implications... but it did.
Then yesterday I read something about complex post traumatic stress disorder and fuck me, that's what it was. By the end of the twelve page article it was obvious that thats what had actually happened to me. All the stuff those who have that suffered through I had happen to me and didn't even know what it was. I knew it was related to the bad trip and the fear I'd felt during that episode as I'd get triggers and be cast back into self loathing and fear, absolute abandonment... these are all things that were mentioned in the article.
And it kinda made sense. I mean sufferers of Complex PTSD have it all build up over years of trauma but with psychedelics everything is so heightened, so wonderfully or terribly deep and sensitized... well, theres no reason the outcome can't be the same.
The name of the article, and what it's about, is emotional flashbacks and that's what I'd get, some trigger or other and I suddenly be terrified that nothing was real, it was all a dream... similar to Robin Williams Wifes plight in the movie 'What dreams may come.'
But I got through it, I managed it and I figured out, along the way, what was going on, not the whole thing but in increments of each type of fear based reaction, and I dealt with it. Meditation helped alot... I think, I'm not actually sure what I did or didn't do, too much time has passed but it's almost now, being able to look back, and this was kind of stressed at the end of the article, I'm a lot deeper now than I would have been without the trauma.
And that's a thing now. I've read a bit here and there which tends to state that traumatic experience is a precursor to creativity which is interesting because most art is therapeutic in some sense but the tendency is that the person, who undergoes trauma, is deepened somehow, that the acclimatisation to fear sends roots down deeper into the psyche which in turn, I suppose if the conditions are right, can create a bigger more opulent tree.
There was one particular incident. It was late one night at the house in Mangere, the original family home, and a movie came on that started with a wall, a simple brick wall on the side of a building and I was immediately full of dread, full of sense of foreboding and immediately went into my breathing exercises to calm down... it took a while and what ended up being quite a boring movie held no clue whatsoever as to why this dread had engulfed me at its inception (which incidentally, the movie inception, was tinged with for me too except many years later it was, almost recent, and I now understand what the feeling hints at... and am okay with) but I did get a clue at the end, quite a good one too, because the movie had been made in the town of my birth and that wall, that plain old brick wall, was the side of a convention centre in my neighbourhood and one that was across the way from the playground in the school I went to.
That eventually got pay dirt (no pun intended) as I realised we have much deeper connections to places that we know, that places themselves somehow care for us, yet learning their language, even accepting there is a language to place, took me a lot of time to fathom. And so it was almost an impetus to explore, the whole fact of trauma became, even as I didn't know I'd had it, or would admit to it even if I'd known it was a thing, a way of understanding myself and the world I inhabit but not as I'd been told to inhabit but how I needed to inhabit it... as me.
And maybe its that that counts. That even before the bad trip it was all about exploration and possibility and these ideas were already quite well formed as an outlook for me even at seventeen. Maybe that, being out of childhood and into early adulthood, was what allowed me to take on the endevour of not even admitting there was anything wrong but regardless dealing how I could with what happened as a result.
The thing was I'd had experience of terrible fear as a child, not many and not for long, and had a very powerful imagination, which doesn't help, but I'd also been kept away from religion as my father had had the shit scarred out of him as a boy by the Catholics who'd schooled him and he wanted, my Dad, to keep us away from it but then weirdly enough in my early teens I'd been introduced to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and that, as I learned later, had been specifically designed to bring little boys like me back to the good old good and bad dichotomy... it's true, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and another writer of fantasy novels had all met up at Cambridge or Eton, or somesuch other toff college, and were studying divinity and over late night suppers had decided that the hoi polloi needed being brought back to the fold so decided to write novels for young boys to teach them good and evil... bastards!
So there seems now to have been a genetic disposition ( excuse that use, it could be a psychic disposition... doesn't really matter what it's called so much as a link exists) to take fear on and get beyond it and realise what having a super duper imagination is really all about. Because pretty much at the same time I had my bad trip my Dad also had his own reckoning of sorts where his own fears appeared as outbursts of anger and he sought medical help and was put on tranquilizers. Dad, you see, loved New Zealand to bits, after Scotland and then Canada, with all the wild and the freedoms and was even getting into yoga and meditation, it was he that taught me the basics of those, and as we know now, is an almost established fact, that when you start doing stuff like this then repressed fears start to come up and with my Dad this would turn into anger at the most inopportune times.
And so it all cedes together, that's mostly what I'm learning, as 38 years later I can also chuck in a whole bunch of past life traumas as well. Except by the time they were revealed to me I was able to identify their meanings, their uses even, within the bigger picture of an on going spiritual awareness because, and now I seem to know this, and in knowing this there is acceptance, that it all has purpose to it, all of this supposed non-connected trauma is connected, and basically we're all in this together.
Yet even as we're all in it together we all have to kind of find ourselves alone, that only we can save ourselves, because in saving ourselves, finding that deep calm within, and finding it by the unique route each of us alone has to explore, we save each other. That is how we are all connected.
http://pete-walker.com/pdf/emotionalFlashbackManagement.pdf
Maybe I'd already read Carlos Castaneda by then, or had just started to, or maybe it was later, I had a thing for anything story wise about drugs... I loved them.
So by then it was maybe my third mescaline trip and the second I remember taking it, spewing up, then getting back to my place just as it's coming on and lying down in front of my radio gram to look at the lights... then it was morning. I'd just disappeared, whoever I was, whatever I was just sunk into the experience.
I'd also done that with the hitch hikers guide on acid. Took the trip over a buddies place in Long Bay, but my friends hadn't (had acid) and so they'd eventually gotten tired, went to sleep, and all I had was a copy of the book so when the trip started coming on, I started reading and then it was morning and I was just finishing it when I kinda came to.
Oh but this third one. The Black Power guys wanted to try it so my mate set it up and we all met up at the sergeant at arms to do the business. Patches on the walls and gloomy lights, bravado and machismo... I didn't like it, but I liked tripping. I drank the yucky brew, it's totally horrid, with them, smoked some dope to bring it on, started getting paranoid... it was all a bit too much, so made some excuse I was going to get something from my bike, the trusty little 100cc Honda my dad had given me, and scarpered.
Got home and tried to settle but the morbidity had me. Knew I should spew but for some reason didn't, couldn't, I don't know but I had a fucking bad trip and it just kept getting worse and I was all alone, fucking devil wanted my soul... eventually snuck into my parents room and stole one of my Dads tranquilizers... took that, and I came right. I wandered off down to my mates early the next morning and climbed in his window, didn't want to wake the family, he woke (he told me this later as I remember bugger all) and just left me there sitting giggling to myself and he went back to sleep... his trip had ended far earlier.
Eventually I walked home, about a mile and a half maybe, and preceded to my Mum and Dads bed and slept for three days solid. Poor Mum and Dad. My brother didn't want to tell them the truth, he knew I was going hard on the psychedelics, lovin' it too, so he kinda gave them a story and they all just left me sleeping... for three days solid.
That fucking scarred the shit outta me. I stopped there and then. I didn't know what had happened, except for the obvious, I didn't know how to deal with it so I just carried on and hoped it wouldn't have long term implications... but it did.
Then yesterday I read something about complex post traumatic stress disorder and fuck me, that's what it was. By the end of the twelve page article it was obvious that thats what had actually happened to me. All the stuff those who have that suffered through I had happen to me and didn't even know what it was. I knew it was related to the bad trip and the fear I'd felt during that episode as I'd get triggers and be cast back into self loathing and fear, absolute abandonment... these are all things that were mentioned in the article.
And it kinda made sense. I mean sufferers of Complex PTSD have it all build up over years of trauma but with psychedelics everything is so heightened, so wonderfully or terribly deep and sensitized... well, theres no reason the outcome can't be the same.
The name of the article, and what it's about, is emotional flashbacks and that's what I'd get, some trigger or other and I suddenly be terrified that nothing was real, it was all a dream... similar to Robin Williams Wifes plight in the movie 'What dreams may come.'
But I got through it, I managed it and I figured out, along the way, what was going on, not the whole thing but in increments of each type of fear based reaction, and I dealt with it. Meditation helped alot... I think, I'm not actually sure what I did or didn't do, too much time has passed but it's almost now, being able to look back, and this was kind of stressed at the end of the article, I'm a lot deeper now than I would have been without the trauma.
And that's a thing now. I've read a bit here and there which tends to state that traumatic experience is a precursor to creativity which is interesting because most art is therapeutic in some sense but the tendency is that the person, who undergoes trauma, is deepened somehow, that the acclimatisation to fear sends roots down deeper into the psyche which in turn, I suppose if the conditions are right, can create a bigger more opulent tree.
There was one particular incident. It was late one night at the house in Mangere, the original family home, and a movie came on that started with a wall, a simple brick wall on the side of a building and I was immediately full of dread, full of sense of foreboding and immediately went into my breathing exercises to calm down... it took a while and what ended up being quite a boring movie held no clue whatsoever as to why this dread had engulfed me at its inception (which incidentally, the movie inception, was tinged with for me too except many years later it was, almost recent, and I now understand what the feeling hints at... and am okay with) but I did get a clue at the end, quite a good one too, because the movie had been made in the town of my birth and that wall, that plain old brick wall, was the side of a convention centre in my neighbourhood and one that was across the way from the playground in the school I went to.
That eventually got pay dirt (no pun intended) as I realised we have much deeper connections to places that we know, that places themselves somehow care for us, yet learning their language, even accepting there is a language to place, took me a lot of time to fathom. And so it was almost an impetus to explore, the whole fact of trauma became, even as I didn't know I'd had it, or would admit to it even if I'd known it was a thing, a way of understanding myself and the world I inhabit but not as I'd been told to inhabit but how I needed to inhabit it... as me.
And maybe its that that counts. That even before the bad trip it was all about exploration and possibility and these ideas were already quite well formed as an outlook for me even at seventeen. Maybe that, being out of childhood and into early adulthood, was what allowed me to take on the endevour of not even admitting there was anything wrong but regardless dealing how I could with what happened as a result.
The thing was I'd had experience of terrible fear as a child, not many and not for long, and had a very powerful imagination, which doesn't help, but I'd also been kept away from religion as my father had had the shit scarred out of him as a boy by the Catholics who'd schooled him and he wanted, my Dad, to keep us away from it but then weirdly enough in my early teens I'd been introduced to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and that, as I learned later, had been specifically designed to bring little boys like me back to the good old good and bad dichotomy... it's true, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and another writer of fantasy novels had all met up at Cambridge or Eton, or somesuch other toff college, and were studying divinity and over late night suppers had decided that the hoi polloi needed being brought back to the fold so decided to write novels for young boys to teach them good and evil... bastards!
So there seems now to have been a genetic disposition ( excuse that use, it could be a psychic disposition... doesn't really matter what it's called so much as a link exists) to take fear on and get beyond it and realise what having a super duper imagination is really all about. Because pretty much at the same time I had my bad trip my Dad also had his own reckoning of sorts where his own fears appeared as outbursts of anger and he sought medical help and was put on tranquilizers. Dad, you see, loved New Zealand to bits, after Scotland and then Canada, with all the wild and the freedoms and was even getting into yoga and meditation, it was he that taught me the basics of those, and as we know now, is an almost established fact, that when you start doing stuff like this then repressed fears start to come up and with my Dad this would turn into anger at the most inopportune times.
And so it all cedes together, that's mostly what I'm learning, as 38 years later I can also chuck in a whole bunch of past life traumas as well. Except by the time they were revealed to me I was able to identify their meanings, their uses even, within the bigger picture of an on going spiritual awareness because, and now I seem to know this, and in knowing this there is acceptance, that it all has purpose to it, all of this supposed non-connected trauma is connected, and basically we're all in this together.
Yet even as we're all in it together we all have to kind of find ourselves alone, that only we can save ourselves, because in saving ourselves, finding that deep calm within, and finding it by the unique route each of us alone has to explore, we save each other. That is how we are all connected.
http://pete-walker.com/pdf/emotionalFlashbackManagement.pdf
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Mangere Rd chapter five draft
Along a bit from Bob Andersons is the crossroads and many years it took to even know that Kings College was down the end of that road and I remember, God knows when, but I was coming back, as it were, from down the hill and swinging left into Salesyards, that big house on the corner still there with it's thick robust hedge all around and always bursting into the stream, on One of Dads little scooters, a little 50cc gutless plastic wonder without any weight and little feet when, damp one would think, it skidded away under me and no worries, as it slid away free I just picked it up, still chigging, and on again to amble, those things then being an embarrassment I couldn't handle, yet somehow that simple ease was a hint at a rethink.
So that bit, between the railway tracks and up the hill to the crossroads and Otahuhu proper, is one of those places which often isn't as it isn't one and it isn't another, a borderland though not a no man's land. A crossing over place even but even in that there were two almost insignificant landings though spread far apart.
Way back in the skateboard days and it must have been towards the end or maybe even after it I found or refound the guy Chris and he and his mother had a flat down a long drive halfway up that slope... I can't remember much of it, at all, but I know at some stage I got an Australian bush hat, from his Dad maybe and for some reason then easily given away, but it was too big for my head, I have a little one, and so I cut it in half, longways, thonged it back up and, possibly even decorated it somehow... maybe a pre-Crocodile Dundee thing but then, how was this? My sisters friend's father took a liking to it and bought it for a nice sum. I've no idea what might have transpired my sister's friend still too young, 13 - 14 maybe, so maybe that was it. That was the beginning of what ended up as the move to Cook St.
The favourite of that, quite long in and sharing with Gary who ended up being the manager of the City, that bar, of many we'd find empty then have to leave as our happy filled seats, and him I'd quite successfully car dealer'd, as in I'd taken his money and disappeared finding my promises too hard to keep yet still thrilled by my ability to play with others money, was when Bobby came back home from Opononi with bags and bags of good weed and we smoked a joint under the watchful gaze of central... the stall being on that corner and by the doors so easy to sun out and be the breeze. At 15 I'd gone all the way up there on my little 100cc scrambler, a Honda and yellow, and it took hours and hours and hours, through Whangarei hoping it was the right way still far too young and shy to ask any, and near nightfall, all the clothes I had on and the sleeping bag wrapped around me, coming over that brow, the big silver sands across the swells, and into that land of plenty.
His grandmother was way up on the hill and she brewed Ginger beer and we went for treks out in the bush with Bobby trying to scare me with Tapu caves and their bones and wild cows and bulls at any time amongst the trees. Then maybe one of my biggest mistakes and leaving without goodbyes or thank yous, the old Maori lady scarring me a bit, she was stern and I'd maybe felt I wasn't allowed, wasn't to be given, my own purse so scanty.
I'd already 15 to 17 made cash from skating, been able to buy things, and while that useless first job as a furniture apprentice didn't teach me anything except those big cold places were horrid as they dragged the chains of our needs across cold concrete floors, the sounds of a hundred staple guns firing a forever that chilled me, merely cutting a hat through and remembering Grandfathers art, his saddlers start in India and ships in bottles made on the back step while Grandma, the two having flown across the biggest sea, still told my father off as if our escape was a disgrace to be chased... it was to leather, and making bags, of all things, led me to Cook St.
From bags to clothes, heavied canvas and hand dyed, I jumped Cook's ship to other shops and ended up on Queen St. The manager, a she in her forties maybe. loved what I did and paid cash... suited me. Then still drinking hard and always stupid and dipped in risk my brother and I, sneaking off to smoke weed we backdoored that shop, seen though by the cleaners, and I nicked a waist up mannequin then back in the office bar, settled into the settee, she joined us for drinks.
And always for the shows, I'd been taught that early, Barry's cousins up from the country how to tempt the coppers then get off scot free, the gift of the gab to be learned willing alongside spanners and crescents... to fix it then bluff it were the medals to be gleaned.
But again though it was great having the police find us in the Pub and talking our way free, too much a nuisance then to even see, it was the aftermath, another older woman I'd not known that politeness was the real gin.
Always I've thrown myself at life and figured recently maybe that's why all my teeth are broken as in the big bites have cracked them all up when long ago I'd heard broken teeth were not being able to get life, not being able to chew it and understand nourishments... somehow though, maybe that was only half of that story.
Further down that road, and a few more decades worth of greated failures with the biggest one almost wasting me, that first real battle as the Rich threw money at me, and crashing into my subconscious and having no idea, I'd done my sulk and I'd got back up, time this one number three, there was a need to settle. Well into being a cowboy I needed a ranch, a stable, some place to sit into and wonder more freely who was me.
Mum then came to the rescue and I'd convinced her to sell up that dingy flat on the truck rd, though not so dingy really but I'd hoped my hope was a hope she might see, and get a house, with land and I'd look after the house and then have some outside for me. And further down this road and left, parallel to the railways tracks, down this street was a beautiful little oasis carefully tended and well loved but just beyond her means. It was tiny but every inch, every corner bright with a found use, and a garage and a shed and gardens all, though, compacted and somehow a little too severe.
But it totally served me as I knew Mum could see I could make that, all that well living, I could do... for her, so it set our bargain i think.
So that part of the road, that between, lived somehow in that and maybe still does and is just before, comes to, the bridge.
So that bit, between the railway tracks and up the hill to the crossroads and Otahuhu proper, is one of those places which often isn't as it isn't one and it isn't another, a borderland though not a no man's land. A crossing over place even but even in that there were two almost insignificant landings though spread far apart.
Way back in the skateboard days and it must have been towards the end or maybe even after it I found or refound the guy Chris and he and his mother had a flat down a long drive halfway up that slope... I can't remember much of it, at all, but I know at some stage I got an Australian bush hat, from his Dad maybe and for some reason then easily given away, but it was too big for my head, I have a little one, and so I cut it in half, longways, thonged it back up and, possibly even decorated it somehow... maybe a pre-Crocodile Dundee thing but then, how was this? My sisters friend's father took a liking to it and bought it for a nice sum. I've no idea what might have transpired my sister's friend still too young, 13 - 14 maybe, so maybe that was it. That was the beginning of what ended up as the move to Cook St.
The favourite of that, quite long in and sharing with Gary who ended up being the manager of the City, that bar, of many we'd find empty then have to leave as our happy filled seats, and him I'd quite successfully car dealer'd, as in I'd taken his money and disappeared finding my promises too hard to keep yet still thrilled by my ability to play with others money, was when Bobby came back home from Opononi with bags and bags of good weed and we smoked a joint under the watchful gaze of central... the stall being on that corner and by the doors so easy to sun out and be the breeze. At 15 I'd gone all the way up there on my little 100cc scrambler, a Honda and yellow, and it took hours and hours and hours, through Whangarei hoping it was the right way still far too young and shy to ask any, and near nightfall, all the clothes I had on and the sleeping bag wrapped around me, coming over that brow, the big silver sands across the swells, and into that land of plenty.
His grandmother was way up on the hill and she brewed Ginger beer and we went for treks out in the bush with Bobby trying to scare me with Tapu caves and their bones and wild cows and bulls at any time amongst the trees. Then maybe one of my biggest mistakes and leaving without goodbyes or thank yous, the old Maori lady scarring me a bit, she was stern and I'd maybe felt I wasn't allowed, wasn't to be given, my own purse so scanty.
I'd already 15 to 17 made cash from skating, been able to buy things, and while that useless first job as a furniture apprentice didn't teach me anything except those big cold places were horrid as they dragged the chains of our needs across cold concrete floors, the sounds of a hundred staple guns firing a forever that chilled me, merely cutting a hat through and remembering Grandfathers art, his saddlers start in India and ships in bottles made on the back step while Grandma, the two having flown across the biggest sea, still told my father off as if our escape was a disgrace to be chased... it was to leather, and making bags, of all things, led me to Cook St.
From bags to clothes, heavied canvas and hand dyed, I jumped Cook's ship to other shops and ended up on Queen St. The manager, a she in her forties maybe. loved what I did and paid cash... suited me. Then still drinking hard and always stupid and dipped in risk my brother and I, sneaking off to smoke weed we backdoored that shop, seen though by the cleaners, and I nicked a waist up mannequin then back in the office bar, settled into the settee, she joined us for drinks.
And always for the shows, I'd been taught that early, Barry's cousins up from the country how to tempt the coppers then get off scot free, the gift of the gab to be learned willing alongside spanners and crescents... to fix it then bluff it were the medals to be gleaned.
But again though it was great having the police find us in the Pub and talking our way free, too much a nuisance then to even see, it was the aftermath, another older woman I'd not known that politeness was the real gin.
Always I've thrown myself at life and figured recently maybe that's why all my teeth are broken as in the big bites have cracked them all up when long ago I'd heard broken teeth were not being able to get life, not being able to chew it and understand nourishments... somehow though, maybe that was only half of that story.
Further down that road, and a few more decades worth of greated failures with the biggest one almost wasting me, that first real battle as the Rich threw money at me, and crashing into my subconscious and having no idea, I'd done my sulk and I'd got back up, time this one number three, there was a need to settle. Well into being a cowboy I needed a ranch, a stable, some place to sit into and wonder more freely who was me.
Mum then came to the rescue and I'd convinced her to sell up that dingy flat on the truck rd, though not so dingy really but I'd hoped my hope was a hope she might see, and get a house, with land and I'd look after the house and then have some outside for me. And further down this road and left, parallel to the railways tracks, down this street was a beautiful little oasis carefully tended and well loved but just beyond her means. It was tiny but every inch, every corner bright with a found use, and a garage and a shed and gardens all, though, compacted and somehow a little too severe.
But it totally served me as I knew Mum could see I could make that, all that well living, I could do... for her, so it set our bargain i think.
So that part of the road, that between, lived somehow in that and maybe still does and is just before, comes to, the bridge.
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