Saturday, July 23, 2005
Dear John..........
It's the baby's birthday today. She's 3. And the only other other person in the family with a birthday in July. I really wanted to talk to her or see her, so I called her in case I couldn't see her tonight because there was the tsd party at Mr. L's house. I called and she didn't want to speak because she was upset that they'd just brought her to the dentist which she hated and didn't want to open her mouth, then left her at home and went out.
"Hello? Hello? Happy Birthday!"
"OKAY!"
"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"What do you want for your birthday?"
"......CAKE!"
"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"But we had that last week already!"
"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"(went away to do something)"
"Hello?"
"(still away)......"
"Hello?"
"Hello????"
"Hello (in a weird low voice)"
"(giggles and gurgles)"
This went on for 5 minutes. Listening to The Beatles now. I would learn the harmonica because of 1. The Persh Creek Family. The father who was in brown leather shoes and a white shirt and khaki pants and a golden brown beard was blowing the harmonica and playing the guitar. 2. John playing the harmonica on Love Me Do. I think the Persh Creek Family (the real one, not my group name) is the most magical real thing I've seen. HEY! I've never thought of going to google and typing in persh creek family before!!!!!! I'll do it right this instant! Only 66 results, 6 pages, none with concurrent keywords, nothing about them. Well all the better, it would ruin it if they had a webpage (?!). The only way I can really really remember them is the poem I wrote for lit when we were supposed to write one that had imagery (but it didn't and I had no idea about it so I got C-) and all i wanted to do was write one about the persh creek family and so i did. I'm not too good with poems and sometimes I hate them very much, and people who like them and people who write them except children. Here it is.
The Persh Creek Family by me
I spotted them along Surfers' Paradise
On a bright orange-speckled evening
The beach a hundred metres away,
Crashing waves, endless sky and fine khaki sand
The elusive stars fell upon us as
Their music danced around the night air and about
People in red surf shorts, yellow bikinis and purple polkadotted slippers.
They sat upon a multi-coloured woven carpet
One Dad, one sister, two brothers.
A brown wooden suitcase lay in the middle
The Persh Creek Family read it, with daisies round the curly words.
The Daddy had a red beard and brown suspenders
Funny sad brown eyes upon his weathered face.
He strummed the lacquered guitar and sang with some spirit
Blew his silver harmonica at the same time
And tapped his leather-soled feet.
The sister, she wore a sunflower sun-dress
Over a white puffy blouse on her pale skin and
Sat cross-legged right in front.
Her golden pigtails shook with her head,
Her freckles pranced as her mallets danced upon the glockenspiel
She seemed to know every tinkling note
And made the tinkles folk-dance round our still legs.
The little brother no more than eleven
Sat on a stool with a prosthetic leg
A farmer boy hat, a straight, sullen young face
He made us wonder
Suddenly he stood up and walked and blew a horn
With such gusto he shook his body with the rusty old horn
We were swept away by the odd boy and his little brown horn.
My favourite of all the young teenage son
Proud ringmaster was he, adorning a black top hat
Red-and-white suspenders and thigh-high black pressed shorts
Round-eyed, rosy-cheeked, he sat on an old leather chair
The drummer clanged away on crumpled golden cymbals
Plastered queer drums and pots and pans
The light tapping of the snare drum got us listenin'
The jolly beats of his white sticks got our fingers a-tappin'.
Their very happy music snaked round the people
Messengers of sun and fun and tanned bronze skin
It charmed its way around us
Even as we stood still our hearts were waltzing
Our minds were floating, drunk in tequila
Mesmerized by these queer curious extraordinary folks
On this queer little ordinary evening
What a day. The baby is 3. She's probably asleep now, her small body on a mattress and her long eyelashes on her smooth skin and her straight shiny hair with her straight fringe resting nicely and breathing being alive for 3 years. I wish I could smell her. I've been alive for 18 years and 10 days. I'm quite tired though I have barely done anything. She's just getting ready to do EVERYTHING. My father just came in and after a while of standing in the doorway doing nothing just looking at me asked if I'm waiting for him to go out before resuming what I'm doing on the computer and I said yes and he smiled and told me to sleep early and then went out. He hardly knows anything about me and maybe vice versa but if there's anyone I can count on it's him. 'Yesterday' has just come on and it's horrible and horrible and horridly sappy but i'm crying and john i hope you are in heaven i am so sad tonight at least i have john bean to hug.
moled at 7/23/2005 07:48:00 AM
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
For the first time in weeks it's one of those alive nights where I sit in my room alone with my equally alive computer. life hangs in the balance and nothing matters. everyone is asleep as planets shift and turn outside in the dark star spangled sky.
Public p was awesome but almost totally surreal as it happened. On friday (8th july school day) was the day it would just take off (fly jefferson airplane) and i did my ds (what an odd thing to say) that day. to put it less oddly, i did the summer of love. no, i did the beatles thing. that sounds least odd. Yes, and I CAUGHT THE KEYS!!!!! One hell of a satisfaction. Before that, Darrel was convinced he was a bad thrower and we'd forgotten to practice much and were still practising almost right before Dicky Moonbeam began his thing outside. Before the first run it was just a messy blur of nausea, setting up, carol and yuhui's birthday poem, running to pee in daisy costume, sitting around the set doing nothing, having people say 'good luck' a lot of times. The first run I felt like a thawing corpse. I heard Harris snigger and I knew papa was right in front. Did not catch the keys but it did not matter. The first run came and went, somehow. Funny, after I leave the room almost at the end of the piece I always jump or contort myself madly in some way after fully closing the door. After that I felt totally clear-headed and exhilarated and knew that I was ready for the second (and absolute last) run. The lovely wreath was a funny bulbous thing like a hawaiian fruit basket, everyone was in their places, i had just glued into place a daisy right at my privates that was falling off (pushing and pushing it into place) and zhiying just put on the red white and lime face paint and I patted on the silver and rainbow-coloured light glitter below my eyes. People gathered outside and Dicky did his thing and they came in finding seats in the dark and somehow I didn't feel ready again (it's always like that, you never feel ready when it comes) and then it began (have a spliff! -suck blow- how'd he think it up?!) and the electrifying guitar solo and mr. L was bobbing away right in the middle at the back and then there was no time to think or be afraid (as always) because you get swept into it all. and somehow, suddenly, i knew again what i was saying! i knew what the lines meant (stupid, of course, to realise, since i bloody wrote it) and as I sat at the table and put on makeup and Imagine plays on drifting around the room, that odd little raspberry of a thought popped up again. It goes, ''hey! What are all these 60 people sitting in front of me for?! Oh, it's because I'm acting something for them. Hey, i could just break out of it now and wave to them and go 'HELLO!'....oh, but I won't, and I don't really know why but I just won't.'' It's all very odd but i was loving it. The light spoilt but to hell with that, it didn't really matter. And as I stood up I had this little feeling that I was going to catch the keys (though I never had it before) and then Darrel threw it (he was in total darkness except his legs, I couldn't see him at all, just a blur of silver as the key came nearer) and then swoop and I caught it and had to resist the urge to jump in joy that I did. it's absurd how happy that makes me. And then, i walked out the room and it was over. what definitely meant the most that night was what the comments after meant. the whole night meant so much i couldn't sleep though i was so tired. i wasn't even sad that lets lick lennons lemons was over, i just felt happy! so truly happy i could have hugged a pillar for hours.
The next night manjo met. We did our makeup by ourselves, incredibly. the old people reunited under the tree one last time and i don't know what else to say. it was as simple as that. crippled ahling, happy go lucky kind ah neo, mad xiao yun, sad ah long, rich but unhappy ah suan and wild pathetic sally. we ate nonya kueh. we could all have given the old people a big hug except...we were them.
After that I carried out my well-planned strategy of changing in ten minutes and getting off all that makeup and washing my hair in the sink at the garden tables and then I was all ready to watch everything else. Government Property was hilarious in such a great way.
The next day, the last day, it was a wet sort of day. I was one of the sm-s. it moved so fast, what with bringing people from one place to another and pretty soon it was over, and khairul's was totally electrifying! (a very hard speech to memorise too to introduce the piece) when it ended everyone gathered on stage and took photos and the year 1s gave us flowers and it was all a terrible but great mess. i rode back on esmonde's shoulders and we went to the teacher's office and everyone just seemed quite quiet though not dead. the year 2s seemed different, sitting around, while the year 1s seemed more alive. i was feeling absolutely odd. papa sprang a surprise visit so i had to go home, feeling even more peculiar, the end. what a strange adventure.
'yoko brought a walrus, there was magic in the air...'
moled at 7/19/2005 08:42:00 AM
S is for shut the hell up
I, complacent imbecile, got outbid at ebay for an orange Reese's Peanut Butter Cups t-shirt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No...............I am going to be devious and alert from now on!
Harry Potter was just plain odd. Goblet of fire was the most magical and wonderful and now it's all dark but with kissing eels. Highly disturbing. What's also highly disturbing is that today on the bus there was a woman who seemed totally unaware that she was wearing jeans that were so low, a third of her buttocks were visible. After she sat down and stood up, her flowery pink thong was visible. Even more disturbing she looked like a conversative middle-aged woman. What's less disturbing but more incredible is the maori chant and haka (?) that the maori boy from new zealand did at assembly this morning. it was just like in whale rider! totally aggressive and alive and it was amazing, just seeing it done there and then to the entire hall. whale rider is an incredible movie, so spiritual it's incredible.
RUBBER SOUL- a Beatles cd which I bought when I went to buy harry potter on saturday morning. I want to buy them all in the next few months. An intriguing cd, because it was in the middle, during their transition stage when it wasn't quite the innocent 'She Loves You Yeah yeah yeah' songs but not like 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' or anything yet. The cover is of the 4 of them sort of looking slightly down with the camera aimed up at their faces (some people say that this supports the 'paul is dead' theory because they're looking into his grave) and they have the oddest hairstyles they've had I think. It's the mop-top, but with the earside hair so long it covers the ears and maybe even curls. The fringe is cut meticulously so that it forms a certain shape (interesting arch) around the eyes, jagged at some parts, curved at some. And behind their huge heads is lush green trees. And on the top left corner is the words Rubber Soul, and probably the only cd on which the title on the cover has the conventional psychedelic print font. It's swirly and curvy and shapely and brown.
The songs. Baby You Can Drive My Car is almost like the beach boys' version. Norwegian Wood is one of the queerest songs I've heard, like Blackbird. It has John singing since it's his story and George playing the sitar and it goes 'I once had a girl, or should i say, she once had me. she showed me her room, isn't it good, norwegian wood.' it's about his queer experience having a one-day affair with a girl. Michelle (Michelle, my belle, those are words that go together well, my Michelle) reminds me of musty little libraries in houses, and dark paisley pritned couches and dark orange light and cosy people sitting in musky rooms. It's amazing how every new Beatles cd that I buy, I find incredible without expecting it. The one I bought before this was Let It Be. It's making new little discoveries.
On Monday I was possessed with the urge to study so yesterday and today I spent one and a half hours taking the bus home. There's a lot you can think of on a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride while staring out the window. They tend to be daydreams and I wind up sort of talking to myself or making facial expressions to the person in my head that I am imagining a conversation with. Horrid. I think everyone has the perfect stranger friend somewhere in the world. There's a stranger for everyone who will turn out somewhat of a perfect best friend adventure mate if you start talking to them on the bus, train or whatever. Meanwhile, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
moled at 7/19/2005 07:48:00 AM
