Day 8. Surfing Out to See the Sharks

*A buoy bouncing out on the sleazy seas to the Expo Centre (of the Universe)

Already an emotional wasteland after a long-distance feud, over the intangible battleground of skype, I was running late to attend the grey suit and sharp teeth event of the month; the 2011 Baltic Real Estate Forum.
As business writer for a regional rag (potty training puppies from Tallinn to Trakai), it is occasionally expected I suck in my downtroddy demeanour and sock out my sunken peepers to don a blazer and attend these rallies intended for the stock-market-hearted. These events are usually social soirees, chin-wag and chick-chat opportunities for members of similar shit-talking sectors. Here they can meet and greet and gossip and glow in the gloss of next week’s funny papers, after the jerk from the local press immortalises them squinting, hungover or with frosty coffee remnants hanging from the corners of their lips. (Jerks, eg, me, or any other of those corrupt press cronies I call my comrades, who will attend myriad of these listless and boring events to score a cheap angle and a free lunch).

So I was late, and owning neither tie nor car tires, I made do with my second-hand scraps and dressed in a frenzy. Even the iron was hurriedly busted out- a sighting in my household as exotic as seeing the Aurora Borealis in the bathroom- to perform miracles on a musty blue workshirt in seconds.
Evil magnets were spiralling to extend my delay, hiding my socks, toothbrush, and seemingly sucking my sunglasses into some far-reaching dimension.

The real estate conference, the shark tank of tip traders, had begun @ nine, and the clock’s hands were climbing well into the north-west of the hour.
I somehow gathered the skerricks of My Personal Wasteland together, and bustled my squeaking bike out the squealing door. The conference would be on the outlying reaches of Vilnius city, an area where bicycle paths descend into irrigation ditches.
The event was to be held at the Lithuanian Expo Centre, or as it is sometimes called, the Cultural Centre of the Known Universe. Having previously never needed to travel to this pinnacle of creation, used to my happiness in the Periphery of the Known Universe, flying like a rabid flamingo on my 4-speed, I managed to, with difficulty, find myself in a completely different universe than the one I was aiming for.

I was lost- yet somehow not far from the track. Circumvented by daffodil speckled grass knolls- a cute garden piece to the roaring concrete backdrop of highway abutments, bridges and an industrial landscape stretching to Italy- I stared in defeat at my hand-drawn sketch from Google-maps, which could have easily been an extract from Mr Squiggles experiments with methadrone. Groan.
It was time to play the, “Hello, any English,” pathetic non-native game, and try to scramble back on to the trail.
Scanning the settee, I was up the garden path with no prospect. There was nobody to ask for directions. An urgency was filling my insides and I could feel hope starting to wane.
Suddenly! A toothless fatamorgana appeared on the bike paths horizon.
There he was, my decrepit saviour;
Wrapped in a faded ‘MIAMI’ t-shirt and pulling off the best ‘I just woke up under this same bridge’ impression I had seen in hours, he seemed up to the job. Caution to the wind, I screeched my tires halted by his shadow.
“Labas! Sorry, any English?” I bared my teeth so he could see I was serious.
He started backward, and then peered into me; as if at some obscene or disturbing object.
“Where you come from?” he demanded, his shadow encroaching.
I didn’t have the timeaday for pleasantries, but I abated.
“Uh, I’m from Australia.”
“AUSTRALIA??”
“Yes, and I’m really looking for this road…”
“Yes, yes, this is road.”
“Which road is it exactly??” My discomfiture was working its way to a peak.
Mr Miami shifted his stance.
“Do you have paper?” He quizzed me.
I blurred then quickly refocussed,
“A cigarette paper? No, I’m sorry, I don’t think…” I flummoxed around in my pockets with the full knowledge I had none.
“No paper? You are not Australian.” Curt. He began shuffling away into the gassy miasma rising from the melting road tar. Then, in his final triumph, he turned around and in a fiery Litho drawl (remember to accentuate the ‘rrrrrr’ sound) he yelled out,
“Faarrrk you!”
I had no response. I had been told. I didn’t know whether to burst a kidney or into laughter.

So, with no compassionate compass to guide me, I fled off in whichever direction was deemed less deadly at the moment. I peddled the bike down into the irrigation ditches, spinning through sprinkler systems until I stumbled upon the Centre of the Universe.
As for the convention, the free lunch surpassed all expectations a free lunch can have, and served me well into the afternoon. As for anything to do with real estate, or how the event proceedings unfurled, just check the local Baltic paper, and look out for the photos of the grey-suited sharks; squinting, hungover, and with greasy hunks of chicken skin falling down their chins.

Day 7. The Boogaloo.

According to wise and omniscient online portals, ‘The Boogaloo’ or when fully amped, ‘The Electric Boogaloo,’ was a kind of bizarre human mating ritual, swung by teenage Cubans and tall-talkin' New Yorkers, enacted and originated between the colourful décor of gay Brooklyn dance-floors during the 1960s.
Among the many names and guises The Boogaloo still continues to hide under (including Electrified Eel Belt-Banger and Persian Pack-Rape) it is also, as I realised today, the title scribbled on the front of a scrunched and crumpled napkin, discovered in luck before laundry, lining the grizzly depths of my unwashed brown blazer.
Sentenced to the boondocks of my dresser drawer due to elaborate cloud formations of whiskey, ash and unknowables donning its lapel, the said threads had been nary touched for a month. Not since it last coathangered itself upon my shoulders, to join the invisible posse to where my cousin falsely advertised as “the best club in Lithuania,” on my first ambitious night in the country.
Today, peeling open the corners of the crusty kerchief, amazement hit me as I found a letter within, written to myself; one of those rare bursts of calculated memory, placed in secret to later piece together the panorama of this whole eclectic escapade- from the date of its origins, just over one month ago.
So here ahead, weathered reader, lies the pocket entrails detailing a split second interlude between bad dancing and beer crimes, on a muddy night amid the pleasant concrete playground of the country’s second biggest city. Somehow I squeezed in uninvited by the side of my stork statured cousin, blonde and basketbally, and her two dazed and dazzling comrades. As the three storklets shook their Baltic booties to the beat of bad club favourites from 1997, ‘The Boogaloo’ was born, as this little piggy leant dribbling and visually vomiting over the bar. So here now...

THE BOOGALOO: FIRST NIGHT IN LITHUANIA

"After the bumpiest flight since Apollo 13, I have awakened in new surroundings. Statues of dead poets. High crime rates. The birthplace of my grandmother!
The wind howls Mary outside this Euro tra-chic nightclub here in Kaunas while I, dressed inadequately in soiled Bulgarian dinner jacket and hat made from STRANGE HAIR, hunch over the bar leering (unintentionally) at the bar wenches dressed down in pantless commie soldier duds.
Wait, unintentionally? This is 2011! I leer out of pure wayward curiousity.
How has time passed since the fall of the soviet empire?
Society is now free from the shackles of pants!
Long live the Stalinist slurries. No counter-revolutionary offence meant.
Anyway, back to my lovely grandmother.
(indesiphable mush, then-)
I left, waving in the Frankfurt dawn as the bus exhaust spat fumes into the ripping cavern between us.
Oh why say “Goodbye?”
In Hungarian, “Hello” means goodbye.
If I was Hungarian, and could forever say hello, life would be a continual embracing reunion, rather than the ever-approaching fearful tearful farewells.
…It was imminent, but now over, sweet eyes dripping salt of togetherness out on to the asphalt as we set apart…
(Again, intangible jibber, slowly descending into weepy garbage, then the last line read…)
THE SOVIET BARMAID IS WATCHING… KGB??”

For anybody concerned at how this night ended, you don’t need my input to regale you. It can be replayed at your own pace, in your own home.
Just follow these simple directions;
Self-digest a cauldron of whatever cleaning products line the shelves underneath your sink, blabber at the top of your voice to your cat (as he/she will understand you potentially better than Kaunas natives to a wasted Australian) and indulge in perverse hijinks, such as karate kicking your coffee table, whistling at your window panes, and washing your shoes with whatever falls out of your intestines.
Also, for added re-enactment realism, do the falling down dance to Tutti Frutti and try to digest the pillows of your couch.
In the final step toward replicating perfection, attempt to order a pizza, fail, then pass out only to wake and realise you were lying in a puddle of potato.
Lastly, wash, rinse, shave, and forget anything ever existed.
One month later, open your pocket, and search through the garbage to the goldmine. Bingo. You've done it.
Welcome to ‘The Boogaloo’ my friend.
Black spots revisited.

Day 6. Creature of Habit, or just a Habitual Creature

Those all-knowing philosophers dubbed ‘they’ say music makes the heart grow tender. As does a severe case of pneumonia or the shingles. Listening to the latest hit shingle from the Pneumonic Sonics, a tenderising shiver blasts not only the unhealthy divets of the pulmonary pipelines, but also sends a shuddering grind through the back annuls of the brain stem.
Groan. “country roads…take me home…” a cover of the song sung by the strumster who left on a jetplane in a fiery pile of embers, Don Jenver. When this lame wind knocks the smoke into your eyes, you really feel something is lost, more important than a kidney, less embarrassing than a shoe.
And here sits bedraggled and gangly older-than-I-should-feel I, gaze floating off into the outside dusk like a kids lost air balloon levitating into electricity wires.

The dizzying sunsets and sunrises which shot off over the plateaus of the last orbital spins gone by have brought along with them some strange and unforseen slivers of strife.
The Autowasher 16 can go fish, the mice can suck on sour worms.
Sadness can pile up upon a human tick-tocker like a soiled sack of washing by only three variables.
Three causes exist to eclipse the world’s son’s sacred hearts; and I’m guessing you could bet your butter on knowing them.

The Three Scrooges: Love, death and pimples.

Not so much pimples, but they do pour plight on any preppys promiscuous park-date promenades. No one wants to pucker up to a sack full of sausage ends pissing out puss. Except of course, freaks.
Yes, FREAKS.

Anyway, nobody died or found themselves pissed on by pimple puss. But rather, a visit from the Girl of the Frangipanis, accompanied soon by the gape of her subsequent departure, blew a few dynamite holes in the fortress of solitude this old sasquatch hides out in.
“oh, here we go, fuckin’ boring pining nonsense,” I can sense the callous crows jeering, “another whimsied wind-bag letting his load loose to the sympathetic search engine squinters.”
But, hold your clucky browser trigger finger, clever clickers!
I'm about to tell you a tale of a different gyp, a muscular spinneret of a story; of sex and survival, a fateful yarn of devils, poison, trapdoors and murder.
Yes, MURDER.

It’s a fortuitous fable of the undone underbelly belly buttons, the sunken, mishappen, ashen milkshakers, the bathrobed, robust bottlebrushed robots, the saged, the savvy, the slum-bitten and the strangled, this here is a declaration to all the sleeping snot-heads and their wrinkled flesh pants, the rocket-minds of the pillowcase philanderers, the sexy sluts of South Sydney, the rockinroll spiders underneath aftershave alley, the principal of the school of Hard Cocks, the rabbis and rabbits and stingrays with rabies, and the rickety shackles of the hard-bitten would-be emperor slaves, the dusty, blustery earthquake cavity kids, and the shoot-down hooter babes from the downtown stove chambers.
It’s a story of unrequited library books, of orgasmic fabrics and fishing hooks, of bandits throwing horseshoes and bandy horse-legged shoemakers hooked on harry and coughing up glue, of the sniffing nerdy perverts trapped between the walls and warcraft, of the suffering hungry slobs too stuffed to salivate. The following fortune-trolling is a page ripped from the remains of the unequivocal rent-a-tongue, inside-outs indicating how-to-use life in between hookahs and hokum, a plant-feeder for all the crushing variables within the pooling debris of human love, laughter, sore thumbs and cut throats, an alchemists transformation of a bluebottle to a baby tooth, a stark reminder of pickled eggs and lazy seats, ridicules, miracles, saviours, sadists, serpentine statuettes and slobbering pig-farming suffragettes.
This wayward folly I’m about to relay is full of them, this hobbly kitsch little family circle, and it’s all got to do with the chuckling, chundering, chinking, ching-a-linging, wee-willy-winking, slinking, tambourine tinking, chin-chinny-chunking, blinking, hot-bed bunking, shimmying souls of the millions before who have sunken into sand, into the spinning turbines of the day to night to daytime back to darktime turning twisting whirl, and ends with the moral of ‘send ‘em home for bread without sunshine.’

And it all began, as the merman stood bare-footed in the smoky doorway, yelling TRICKERY! while the Girl of the Frangipanis fled fleet-footed along the cobblestones, starlight immersing her tread, until upon learning the art of the air-bound damsels, she tripped over a toadstool and splayed out full-belly, flying through the moon-tinted alcove, howling like a wicked witch unto the night…

Or maybe I won’t tell you anyhow.

Day 5. Hymn of the Nameless Song (or vice-versa)

I’m not a big connoisseur of classical music.
In fact, I'm outta my depth even mentioning it.
The last time I met an opera singer, she told me she had a decent vibrato, so I called her a skank and she slapped me.
But this morning, oh peaceful morn, I was jagged out of sleep, from deep circadian waters, (from a dream where I was a beggar holding a walking stick, and my father was Julian Assange shovelling books on to a blazing coal fire) by the most beautific and golden, haunted strains of a piano piece which I think I had ever heard, in the acoustical abcesses of my head.
It went, da da da, da da,da dumm, dummm, da da...

I knew the sound from somewhere.

Growing up, I had lived in a house rich in the diamonds of classical music. My brother had been training as a concert pianist, always hammering away trying to channel a khachaturian or tchaikovsky, or equally unspellable composer's concerto. The household was abundant with the musk of music, piano reverberating through the chip walls as if the houses foundations were purposely sucking it in, absorbing it into its brick bastioned soul.

**As a quick side note, my ACTUAL father claims to this day that the upstairs roof tiling, on the same said house, was shingled into rhythmic sequence, bam bam bum, in cheap labour, by the drummer from sixties oz-pop square-Os, The Easybeats.**

Gravitational breaking booms shook the structure as the maestro practiced his newest rendition of some long-dead tortured genii. Plonkity tonk. The complexities of the sound structure made it near impossible for a bonobo like me to truly appreciate it, at the time.
It sounded like a buffalo herd stampeding through a windchime factory, headbutting and stomping their way to the top of the aluminium scrap heap next door where the juvenile calves would proceed to jump on every different size shard to make sure they didn’t bypass any disjointed or ear-severing sambal available.

“LUDWIG, SHUT UP!!! THE SIMPSUNS ARE ON NOW!” Was my attempted end to the talented whirlwind @ 6pm on Channel TEN!! each working weekday evening (unless the turd had some kind of examination for which to prepare. At these moments, it was time to hunker up and bunker down. Knitting needles and conductors batons are the appropriate length for severing ones own eardrums, a Bonobo professor once conferred to me).

Nowadays, as he occupies the older years of his younger twenties, Ludwig uses his piano gravitatus for party tricks, usually after being cudgelled into submission by a bottle of red. Then he’ll magnetically, majestically, let his fingers meander over the subtle and turgid time structures of the 7.30 Report opening theme, something by The Fugees, or Paul McCartney’s Yesterday.
You’ve sold out, man.

As for me, I had nothing to sell. I grew five foot eighty in this household, for eighteen odd years, hearing but not listening to the virtuosities of the dead great classical masters. Wooing to the deaf ears of the youthfully stupid and unappreciative, they sank by the wayside.
In the same household, fluent Lithuanian language was spoken on a weekly basis, and again, I heard it, it whirled around my vista, trying to locate a place to land, then finding the runways too full of teenage testosterone, trends and bratty behaviours, it spun out and crashed somewhere over by the backroads of my concentration span- near to the abandoned hangers of Latin, Religion and Math.

If I had taken heed of the Lithuanian lessons, not that they were directly at me, but if I had absorbed the words spoken around me, suckled them in, they would have been very handy for right NOW, today, as I imitate the signals of an air-traffic controller trying to explain the problems of the Autowasher 16 to Romus
(turns out, he doesn’t know what's wrong with it either).

So Lithuanian language and classical music; I know the sounds but not the names.
And I really wish I knew the name of this one, this mournful timbre tinkling between my brows.

It has lapsed into my awakened consciousness now, softly plonking a gentle atmosphere upon the morning, flooding me with warmth and depth…
“Shut UP!” I yell at my brain, “The Simpsuns are starting.”
I taped on the remains of my boots and bid good morning to the mice. Romas had left the toilet in a state of Fukushima fury, so I decided it was safer for nature t wait. I threw on my old bear-hunting jacket and lovingly transcended from darkened doorway to daylight, into the 8am air. Though there was sun streaming, a biting chill of a breeze swarmed around my neck, with the nasty reminders of a long winter.
Begone with you, scrooge!
It seemed Vladimir Pooty had turned down the thermostat, in another of Russia’s cold, cold threats upon this country.

Thinking in placid pops, I perambulate along the footpath. The piano loops and flows like a torrenting soundtrack to the changing season.
Blooms caught between roadway cracks, rustling slow. A ginger cat chases a kitten up into the branches of a cherry tree, creating a cacophony in cat-language. People walk about opening car doors in a human tapestry of tendencies, cigarette smoke, dangling key chains, mobile phone message mashing, or my personal favourite, the glazed facial ‘I didn’t sleep now I have to trudge to a job I hate’ robotic acceptance.
All the while, minor As, major Ds, crashing over these human sights, sweeping it up with its mighty suction as if the scenery is all but shells on my song's shifting tides.

What could it be? Where had I heard it?

I had reached the end of my street now, and stood beneath the neighbourhood landmark; the Russian Orthodox Church, Saint Constantine.
Its green onion domes, everyday street purveyors of sunlight, impress over the situation a certain noble statesmanship.
The masked musician of my memory had moved his fingers into the lower keys now, and his bass clefs were heavy with the indescribable volume of Russian history.
Wait a second.
I listened as the breeze stilled…
Da da da, da da, dum, dada daa…
This was not in my head. The tune was external, an actual instrument, and its notes were sifting out between gaps in the stained glass windows…As it hit the outside, I could watched its organism tumbling through the air, the bars, the treble clefs upon the chilly breeze, smiling, singing, then sucked away with the leaves as a trolley bus roared passed.

Somewhere behind the rustic wooden doors of Saint Constantine, somewhere between Russian Jesus and the water of holes, some precious preacher was jamming my song.
I rapped on the door in quick fierce successions to the beat of the tune,
Da da da, da daaaa, dum….
A silence. Scratching. A shuffle of footsteps.
The wooden door creaked open an inch.
“Taip?” She wore a moustache, and looked about as sweet as a saucepan.
“Ah, would you mind telling me what song you were just playing? It was beautiful.”
She looked at me with the vague quizzicality I had seen before often.
I slumped a little, “Never mind.”
As I span to leave, I offered her a farewell wave; and a remarkable transformation ensued.
Her ancient lips curled into a rainforest of delight, her moustache grooming her saccharine smile so gorgeous, it could have only been her playing the song. I could see her music now, as she flicked a return wave in my direction; she carried some kind of youthful soul deep within her withered package.
I turned around and began strolling back out into the chill, one hand thrust into pocket, the other scraping the litter of leaves from my wool jacket.

Classical music and Lithuanian.

If I could turn back time for today and focus on these two titbits which had been nestled by my fingertips for so long, and learn them, I would not be in this situation at all.
Da da da, da da, dum…
On the other hand, if ever I am being held at knife point by Talibandits or Nazi skin grafters, who say they’ll only release me if I can relay to them the name of the cocktail recipe which surly sleaze-bag barkeep Moe stole, and it subsequently made him famous, I’ll be walking out of there faster than you can scream,
‘TEEVEEADDICTADOLESCENTS,” into the knitting needle puncture marks of my ear drums.
(It was the ‘Flaming Homer’ for all you octogenarians or older out there).

And if anyone can help me by naming my subconscious song, please do so.
It goes da da da da dumm da daaaaa, da da, dummm…

Or, just visit me in my dreams, where I’ll be waiting for you, the carved snake on my walking stick spiralling up your arms, as we wander off over a milky horizon, whorls of wheat like amber glowing in the paddocks by our sides, hit by wind but motionless, and we’ll play it together, you and I, two hobos singing along, blowing harmonica and following the ghosts chasing up the running river bends out and around, winding the path of the serpents and sasquatches before us, until we end up back at the place where we began.

Da da da, da da, dummm, da da, da dummmdada da daaaa…..

Day 4. Are you dumber than a Bonobo Monkey?

Most people are.
Bonobo monkeys are some of the foremost forward thinking terrestrials since nameless teenager twelve hundred billion discovered the combination of the soft-serve vanilla ice-cream cone upon his MurkDonals hotcake breakfasts.
True pragmatists; Bonobo apes are able to utilise such pseudo-phenomenal human contraptions as internet blogging, browsing eyePads for porn, and urinals.
Now reader, if you still remain in the competition against Bonobos after the last round test (cataclysmic and truthful fact which it was), praise be to you and your toilet trainer.
If however, the Bonobo has beaten you; thrash yourself against the keyboard and fall to sleep in a stream of your own steaming urine, and smile in knowing, dear sir, I envy thee.
“Enjoy your outlook; enjoy your luck while you have it!” A Bonobo philosopher once warned me.
“Life is like a haemorrhoid,” he continued, “It’s painful and embarrassing, and it always goes to the wrong spot. But once you pop it, and the juice is gone, your arse always feels like its missing something. You miss it you do, like sex on a Sunday.”
Sexual miasma emitted from the heat rays of a Bonobo orgy lingers around a Bonobo colony for days. Farmers have been known to strangle themselves rather than inhalate these vapours which pollute the baron soils of their Congolese pastures.
“Just goes to show you, it’s a matter of taste,” My Congolese bongo bangin’ Bonobo brother went on. “One man’s miasma is another monkeys’ mud.”
Too true, my brain bloated bosom.

Recent research (conducted between myself, three of my least murderous Bonobo buddies, and a horny pack of llamas) has screened a cutting dichotomy of the ape and human races; it PROVED, without any measure of doubt, Bonobos are blessed in the cerebral sufficiency department at least twelve hundred billion times more than man.
At least, this is what they told me, as I walked off to buy them all another round of tasty guava nectars.

”Why?” I can hear you scratching your peeling scalp, “What does this have to do with Litho-mania?”
I bring up Bonobos, not for the enjoyment, oh no.
I bring up Bonobos, because just now I have returned from the vacuumous space station impersonating a city supermarket. Oh yes.
The Vilnius Vacuum.
The Bonobo Basilica.

Searching for rat poison, I began to hear internal trombones beggaring me to ground.
Where is it? This supermarket escapade was the longest four hours and sixteen minutes since time stood still in the Kimberley town of Derby for approximately three weeks (which was a long time, even on Derby standards).
Dripping features as I rumbled along alone, I looked like I had fallen headfirst out of a Dali drawing.
I consulted the 25 clerks of the 25 nations whose language still revolves around high-pitched gargling, angry glares and the mating calls of a mastodon.

The aisles became like rotors, a whirligig of surgery fluorescents and endless padded luxury. I was doomed.
Then! As if I had solved the last riddle set by the labyrinth’s sadistic gatekeeper, I found my sack of poisonous pellets, and made to amscray like a jackrabbit to the till.

I was almost out…but no.
A Bonobo sat gawking at me from behind the lone checkout. His beady black dots for eyes radiated one notion directly into my simple mind,
“Your level of brain function is ill-equipped to deal with the diabolical Bonobo battering I am about to subject you to.”
His stare pierced through my skull like an x-ray. I jumped, jingled my pellets, and thought nostalgically of the mouse-plague at home.
“Is it worth it to wait it out?” My futile human brain stem clunked away at the decision as the crew-cutted Bonobo began chanting rabble war-cries in my direction.
“Little bit English??” I spluttered, foolish to his gaze, and detached myself.
I started thinking about how if I quickly gobble up all this mouse poison I will get away clean.
Bonobos upper lip turned upon itself like a wave, bearing a thick set of jungle jambalaya chewing chompers in my direction.
The brainy black dots shining out from his humungous brown dome penetrated into my soul. I felt raped. Brain bashed by a Bonobo.
I gulped again, wishing it was I who had invented putting the 40 cent cone on to hotcakes. He cracked his hairy knuckles. I flinched.
The future was coming on hard and fast now, like a Bonobo broad in a banana grove.

Day 3. A Far Bigger (smaller) Problem

Peering out from the cloistering space of his greasy hollow- from the untouchable realm between floorboards and stove- the graveyard of fallen knives and salt shakers, where washed hands fear to reach- he snuffled his spindly nose, and launched himself into one last brave cannonball run to the light.
“AHH, ANOTHER ONE??” I leapt into the air with all the grace of a wounded zebra, and my spatula fell to the floor. In true stereotype housewife fashion, I began to tremble and squeal, as nervous dribble splashed from my mouth, as if I were a brain-zonked vegetable. The arrow of spit trembled, as if in slow motion, then drifted apart as it descended to ground, nearly hitting the mouse on his forehead.
The little rodent just stood there. He was sickly, perhaps dying of scurvy, as I hadn’t put any fruit under the oven in at least a week, and the chicken bones I’d left him were as vitamin-filled as a punk. He just sat upon the green vinyl flooring, shivering, as if he were cold, or epileptic, or about to spew or something, and my initial shock turned into jaded realisation.
“Mice die of old age in this place. This is like a Buddhist retreat for the furry vermin,” I thought it in meditative silence as I scooped him into a bucket.

I am living with a serious mouse problem. This is not funny. In previous universes I have neighboured with crack monkeys, dived head first into drunk dens, spent routine mornings brooming wolf spiders from their fertile nests behind furniture, and found renegade redbacks by the tips of my toes under the rim of the backyard kiddy pool.
But this is too much.
Not exaggerating, I have thrown three mice out of my first story window this afternoon. Count another one from yesterday, that’s four flying furballs in twenty-five hours. These are the ones I have found.
What about the unseen, the dark dwellers, the scratch, scratch, screeching at the sides of the cupboard, chewing at the chipboard of your consciousness, just as you begin to beggar into slumberland. What about them??

The first mouse I threw had appeared to be engaged in some kind of sneezing fit. The little germ bag waltzed out from his hideout beneath the refrigerator, and then he just sat, and began blowing bubbly sounds, and no doubt toxic snot, from his noisy mouse-haired nostrils. I stood transfixed from the middle of my mashing potatoes.
I mean, am I NO THREAT? When an asthmatic rodent is unintimidated by your presence, you really get a feeling as to what you equate to in the scheme of it all.
I’m actually surprised he didn’t walk over my face, or vomit on me.
I slanted up against the stove, eyes clear, wide, white, hair near catching alight on the burners, which were boiling steadily, attentively, where my potatoes were awaiting action. I raised the masher in front of my fear tangled features, protecting myself, crossed it against my scummy spatula and held it forward to act as my prayer stick, my crucifix against this brazen little demon.
And then, the ill, infested creature (not me, the mouse, you arsehole) started sneezing. Abstractedly I stared at him, wondering if I should lend him a tissue, or if he will sort himself out. THEN I remembered; the battle lines had already been etched, there were no free handouts, not today, Mickey.
Unabashed, he crawled in hay-feverish circles, ambling around the kitchenette like a doped-out don, owning the joint. I gently scooped him, with the finesse of a garbageman, into some soiled receptacle at hand.
I had captured the spook.
The little spooker of housewives, elephants, and now, he adds to the list, this Litho maniac, who runs in cold heat through the hallway. The mouse tried to clamber out of his container, but to NO AVAIL, anddddd LIFTOFF…
The fat fucker blew out into the orbit, to travail through the abyss of the afternoon.
Sniff the air, I did, in brief repose…the afternoon was accompanied by the gentle wafts of new spring shoots, I noticed as I leant out the sill, the muddy receptacle still tightly clutched in my palms. I took a far-reaching, all-endowing breath into my gullet, and gulped my fear of being entirely engulfed by pestilence away.

For five minutes.

The next feral I found, let’s call him “Big Bill”. This one, too, seemed to have a case of the willies, and was swooning spastically on the bathroom tiles. What was wrong with these things? Too many bucket billies rat features, you’re sliding all over the place. My bulging eye sockets came close to him. Ugly black-tinged hairs poked out of his back, as if he’d been misbred by a pug and a porcupine (the mouse, you dickhead). But he was in actuality, as they say in German, einen kleinen SCHMUTZIGEN mauschen, and as they say in Lithuania, it was time for him to fuckin’ fly.

Soooooaaaaaaring away into the infinite, number two went off to meet his cosmonautic fate.

In this state of war, being overrun by vermin, feeling like I was drowning in the suckers, I tried to avert my thinking by delving into some work.
I retired to my computer to transcribe an interview; A Lithuanian NATO officer who had recently returned from Afghanistan, whom I had recorded last week in a cafe. With calm, though grammatically poor, breaths, he was hammering on about “Explosions in the east,” and the “Security deteriorations caused by local Mullah,” or some such recountings, and with my headphones fortifying me from the rest of my foreboding flat, I finally felt tranquil. ”Women risk their lives just to go to school,” he drivelled on, as I swam into some disconnected nirvana. Total peace. But!
Oh no.
Just as there is peace in my minds middle east, my malfunctioning bladder decides to run AWOL on me.
It began to palpitate with drastic urgency, as I shuffled around in my seat.
“#&@**!#” (as they say in the comics), and I chucked my headphones down. The thin voice still bleating on about war torn hellholes, as I pelted to the toilet through mine.

I absconded to the depository. And there. THERE, mid-flush, between the chain yank and the woosh of water, out of the corner of my evil eye I spotted number 3.
Lucky Number 3.
This one was scrambling in the bathtub, unable to climb to freedom, trapped in a porcelain prison. His pink limbs scrambled up the walls in quick bursts, then in a fit of trying, (which probably would’ve looked cute to eyes less disgusted than these), it slid down the tubs green and hard-water tinged sidings with a cacophonous rrrrrrrrrrrrr, like a window squidgee of filth.
“Enough,” I thought in the mindset of a radical religionist, “This Buddhist temple is shutting its wooden doors TONIGHT.”
I retrieved my loyal receptacle.
Somewhere inside me, as I walked to the window, a little bell chimed, a dinging nugget of truth,
“This is oblivion. This is what it looks like,” The bell-ringer whispered.
And as he went on gonging his preposterous binging triangle, I shook and sweated, and vowed to the Starlets of the Moon and the Twenty Seals which bind them, ONE DAY, yes, one day, I will get a real job.

As I opened the shutters and sent our third astronumbat into the evening sky, (pre-warning him of aviation lesson number one, primarily to land ALIVE) I noticed a pair of glinting green eyes watching from beneath my window.
Perched and purring, a fuzzy black and blue tortoiseshell buddy was winking up at me.
A cat had taken roost beneath my ever-giving sill.
“You wait the night out, Ginger. Methinks it’s just the entrée.”
And I shook out my receptacle, departed the night air, and crawled back into to my safely dimlit spot- between the oven and the floorboards, where the hands of washed men fear to reach.

Day 2. The Cracks are Already Starting to Speak (or: Revenge of the Autowasher 16)

(This first portion is transcribed from manic, misanthropic scrawling, pen stabs against plighted papers, words tumbling out in fateful, cryptic sequences, an undecipherable symphony of the mornings mundane misfortunes. As he bumbles the streets with a cardboard box loaded to the gutful with soggy undergarments and salvation army swag (his wardrobe), wet, grubby, stinking like bath rag, he monsoons pebbles of sweat, which drain from his head like a colander. He occasionally laughs to himself, cheery, mad, and these passages, it shall be warned, should not offend anyone, after they have realised this state of the author himself).

This may be a running theme throughout the next thirty days. Cleanliness, or lack way thereof.
I write this sitting opposite the Giant EGG (almost an Australian invention, a cousin of Queensland’s Mega Mango, a delicacy on the humungous hamburger, with chopped slivers of the Big Ram underneath).
Some Vikings argue like vultures over a vodka bottle to my right. The man appears to be crying… His face has been all but splayed into an omelette by some twisted adversary. One eye is black, his heart a matching darkness as he swigs direct from the bottomless pit… And I?
Stuck in the abyss of the unwashable.
Here I am carting around a ten kilogram box of wet, SOILED, clothing, victims of the Autowasher 16.
ARE WE MEN, OR ARE WE FLY-BIT CATTLE?
It seems after marching an endless loop around Vilnius…
(the writing begins to loop into circular patterns on the page)
…a bandaid on my near severed finger from a tussle with a tin of tuna- a finger which I would graciously raise in salute to the bastard lungfish creator of the Autowasher 16-
It seems Lithuanians do not believe in organised laundrymats.
Organised crime, fine, but laundry, fuck you in space.
WANT TO HEAR MORE OF MY WEARY WASHING BLUES?
No?
Well, then, my esteemed overlords, go home to your shining white laundrettes, and spin a curtsy in your effervescent and sparkling clean gowns, amassing FAB and NEAT and WAZZO powders like cocaine over your shelves, letting them touch, almost tango upon your fine fabrics, as your precious spin cycle turns like this planet, as it should, in unison with the seas gravitational pull, washing and slushing, around and around to a better, brighter, tomorrows underpants.
Then think of me with my sopping shirts in sadness. That’ll sully you up a little at least.

(Here the filthy villain returns his pen to his jacket pocket, heaves a sigh to the heavens and clods off with his oversized laundry box into the unkindly warm morning. Composure, like a cool tide, has washed and replenished him, as he goes about his retarded task of searching for a washer).

Near the carpark, away from the trappings of the Big Egg and the grim birds which swoop around her, here, where the smell of atrophied meat, maybe venison, Rudolph, floats upon the air like cobwebs.
Congealing puddles from stale morning mist reflect sunlight, and send me to squinting. I am prone to light sensitivity, like an anti-moth, scurrying into the unlit corners of dank and empty recreational rooms. Perhaps this is why I held like an amulet to my habit of habituating the dimlit corners of roustabout joints, frequenting the back tables of squalors like Sydney’s Hotel Hollywood for a quiet arm-to-mouth activity with myself in the mournful plateau of morning.

**
(A PAUSE IN PROCEEDINGS: A word on the Hotel Hollywood).

The Hotel Hollywood:

Where the stars shine like fading embers,
Where the lights short out, but who remembers
Where it could be June, or late September
But forget your sins! your woes! your gender
Just put your money down, big spender,
You’re in here now- enjoy the blender.

Any Sydney ciggie slinging slob who lives on the down sides of depravity, knows, and has lurked for many a fun evening, in the backrooms of the Hotel Hollywood.
Like a musty time capsule from 1953, flying through stagnant space and somehow defying all laws of physics, health and safety, this bar is like a lighthouse in the stony winter evenings, glowing from its porch out in flurried Surrey Hills.
The intergalactic patterns on the carpet, in their glowing neon retro fuzz, glide you into the palace where stars aren’t born, they come to croak and wheeze around on a packet of winfields and vine. And whispering, following the Hollywood beaming hope, you would trundle down there, on weekdays, (or Sunday mornings were preferred), as you could dwell in the wooded back corners, and sit upon the ripped purple cushions, and write away like a foolish wizard experimenting with spells.

The backroom of the Hotel Hollywood had about four poker machines, all from the times of Tetris, and between their humming electro bleeps, and the old time classic jazz, always jazz, which was trumpeting, kazooing, and whooping it up on a constant repeat through the speakers, you could really feel your body existing, between the peeling chipboards and the unvarnished tables, just tapping your feet away.

The owner was an elderly gal, always draped in floral picnic blankets, or moo moos, or stylish 1930s garb, her lips puckered and blazing a devil red, and her eye lids sagging in contented white-wine afternoon love. She would spin around to the mixture of Armstrong and Ellington, whisked any man young enough to call her granny by the arm, and always, without fail, grab their virgin arses. Not just a pinch, but a real perverted pluck.

The lighting through the bar wafted rather than rained. It illuminated where it wanted to, when it wanted to- and this was the beauty of the obviously fried circuit boards, as you could never tell if it was 3AM or four in the afternoon. The dim ambience was always the same. There were no gateways to natural light. And in the ancient days where smoking cigarettes was still permitted behind city barwalls, clouds used to hover through the halls, shifting around like spirit dancers, swoop, sweep, sliding out the open doorway to the grubby gutters of Central, as the next potential arse-grab for granny wanders in half-cut.

This was the room I received an important lesson of Entomology (the study of insex):
These horrible black bugs used to swarm around your beer unless you hatted your Carlton with a coaster. As soon as you let your guard down, glunk, dunk, your amber ale is filled with buzzing urchins out to reap their fill.
These are known as ‘fermentation flies.’
The buzzards of beer.
Barflies.

Hotel Hollywood.

Where silver screen
Was a madmans dream
Inside a padded box

A movie scene
Of dead James Dean
And then the doors were locked.
**

Anyway, we were leading to some sort of climactic solution for the raggy mans washing woes.
And his squinting eyes. As I was getting at, his eyes suffer from an apparently common, yet distractedly annoying, condition dubbed Blepharitis.
In the pangs of the ailment, vision remains “sharper than a desert eagle,” as one (no doubt drunken) Alice Springs doctor once informed me, but your eyelids have the unpleasant urgency of swelling up, and scratching the pupils as you blink or close them, sending them to water, leaving you in the purgatory of neither being able to shut them or spring them wide to alleviate the nuisance. All the same, to quote Eric Idle, “plenty of worse things happen at sea.”

Due to the glinting off the stagnant puddles, the pools by my feet, (the feet roped by disintegrating Timberlands), and due to the midday glare refracting off car chrome in all directions, like a strobe show, my vision was shuttered, and I didn’t notice the figure of fate bearing down upon me like Thor’s hammerhead.
“Hey, how are you doing!”
My cousin approaches. All I can see is a brown silhouette which looks like it has been chiselled by a butcher’s cleaver, strange, muddy offcuts surrounding my blindness.
“Good, good,” I repeated, coughing and cantankerous at being caught with my burdensome box.
“Don’t they have any laundries in Vilnius??” I plead.
She laughed, a joyful, booming bear cub curdle.
“What? No, not in Lithuania!!” Accentuate the accent- the curls on every letter, c’s with strange tufts, z’s with heads, u’s with little umbrellas above them.
“But why no laundries? I need to wash!”
“I don’t know, maybe Soviet scheme meant everybody had washing machine in own house. Why don’t you open new one? Yes, open new laundry!”
“Yeh, well, maybe…” I trail away.
“Anyvay, how vas rest of your day?”
“It stank,” I mumble.
“You don’t say…” She retorted in cutting haste, eyeing off the contents of my box.
Then politeness ensued, formalities quickly undertaken, then like a fox, a fox with a fever, off I squinted into oncoming traffic, ready to find the afternoon.