Sunday, April 02, 2006

well, here's one of the fragments that might make more sense than any of the others :). it follows on from what i first posted.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Awake… my eyes leap open and almost fall out. I blink widely. Something about something red…
“Awake are you, Stella?” A familiar tattoo sounds at the doorway and I groan an assent, pulling myself out of bed and whispering appreciation for a long-standing habit of falling asleep fully clothed. I face him at the door.
“Good – seems you artists don’t know night from day, I swear. I said I was coming around today”
“I remember. You know, it’s hard to tell night from day with that light”
“Hah, the dinge of creativity, eh”. I wait for the self-satisfied little laugh, though not bitterly. With luck I’ll be gone soon. “You’ll be gone soon, anyway. Eh? I’ve got the lease here,” He stares at me with tired eyes. I’ve never asked his age, though I suppose it to lounge at around forty-nine, an estimation mostly based on the fact that he talks to me as though I’m wearing a frilly dress with gigantic polka dots. “do you know where you’re going yet?”
“Maybe Melbourne. I just need something to inspire me, you know?”
He answers quietly with his eyebrows, reminding me that my fantastic escape from listlessness probably seems instead fantastically mad. Perhaps it is. I’ve been alone with that cockroach too long.
“What is it that you paint?” He asks, casting an eye to the canvass.
“Landscapes, mostly.” There are a dozen postcards and photographs of various places, dusty outbacks to metropolitan outlines, tacked about my newest of artistic endeavours. Some of them have been sent halfway across Australia, I think enviously to myself.

* * *

Stupid universe.
Stack stack stack.
Stupid lonesomeness.
Stack stack stack.
There has to be something nicer and warmer than vexatious infinity.

* * *

A month passes slowly when you’re counting down to something. I’ve spent the last three days of it economising my belongings – deciding what I do and don’t need. Since childhood my process of deciding such things has been to place myself in a desert, and from there decide what I could live without. This seems particularly appropriate now that I head forth into the red centre of Australia. I’ve now divided my belongings across three looming bedroom corners; one for storage, one for getting rid of, and one to take with me.

In the first pile: a table, chairs (etc)

In the second pile: two thirds of my clothes, a quaint little toy piano that I found at the market, a garden gnome, some prints (etc)

And finally, the third: clothes, camera, easel, brushes, bandaids (etc)

The train is tedious as always, rattling on methodically as a fanatic preacher. The blueness and the brightness of the sky outside plays off the small open window that rests parallel to my knees. I once had a friend who told me they’d love me forever if I taught them to fly. I think of them now, as I stare at my knees in the sky, and I wish I had a welding torch so I could take the window and the moment with me instead of having the two remain glued to side of these cycling carriages forever.
It’s tremendously difficult to draw people on the train, not because the page moves about, but because the people do. Either that or they stare at you suspiciously, almost daring you to lower your Progresso to the page once more. My quiet revenge is later filling in whatever amount of form they deprived me of with that of a lizard. Silly lizard people.
A woman to my far right clutches a fly net in one hand and a cigarette in the other, tapping the cylinder irritably against a pile of papers now and again, probably asking things like what has the law ever done for me? And so anarchism is born, I muse.

I find myself being jostled into slumber, and scramble for puzzles in order to keep myself awake. I finish a crossword and move onto god, which seems to develop into a kind of soul searching interview, the train carriage becoming an elaborate Orpheum as red warmth beams down from a billion windows camouflaged by light. A voice behind a curtain speaks to me in twisted middle English.
Godhede: well well.
Stella: no purpose for the visit.
Godhede: I see. No one likes to be drawn. Foolish abasshen folk, yours.
Stella: they what?
Godhede: fool of a creation!
Stella: ... apologies.
Godhede: that be god.
Stella: [sighs]. Apologies, God.
Godhede: [pauses]. You know, I hate this vexatious curtain.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

night

(i don't know about the middle enlgish, i simply need something stylistic and appropriate to differentiate god from the others.)

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