from the vault
Miserable git
I walked along the Merri Creek from the Yarra to Clifton hill, a moody walk, walking with my head full of unspoken conversations and well thought out rebuttals. This story is about me. I have never written a short story before, its inevitable its going to be about me , what else do I know, and I’m hopelessly and indelibly self absorbed. Walking along Merri Creek was as peaceful as this claustrophobic and polluted city can get, its pretty and if you don’t look at the rubbish that has collected in the trees thanks to the freak storm and subsequent floods and if you don’t analyse the smells on the breeze too much it could almost elevate me from the miserable gittness I am currently projecting. You’ll notice two things in my writing style immediately, I have little understanding of tense and grammar. After a while, or maybe now, if you are quick to judge, you might pick up that this format doesn’t sit well on me. It writes like I have tried on my mum’s shoulder padded suit jacket and it feels resolutely uncomfortable. I’m more at home in the blanket of prose and rambling observational analysis that is much like my life, I like to excuse my lack of direction with a sense of freedom from form. It’s a thin veil at the best of times but at worst derails me with the abject lack in the anything ventured ,anything gained department. But what really happened on my walk in inner city Melbourne? I did what I always do when walking in the city , I day dreamed about a violent confrontation ending in me dead in a pile of blood. Not generally what you would expect to be running through a late twenties female brain walking in the sunshine on a summers day now is it, well actually is it? I have always wondered if this wasn’t actually that uncommon amongst people, whether it was in fact maybe nothing more than some innate survival mechanism, role playing for the worst case scenario. I don’t do it out of paranoia, there is no fear there. I am not one of the many women who feel unsafe in unlit streets or chastise themselves for taking unnecessary risks, I feel like sometimes I am willing these things to happen just to see how I would react to them. If in a moment of crisis I would infact rise to the challenge or dissolve into a puddle of uselessness. Invariably I die, which given my theory on role playing doesn’t really bode well for my abilities in the fight or flight area. Today’s day dream involved a botched mugging resulting in a knife wound to an artery and a rapidly spouting loss of blood. There of course was no one around, not those two Nike wearing 30 somethings in matching track pants and certainly not that doctor looking person across the creek. I am of course in a part of the creek which doesn’t back on to houses, a major road or a café strip. And I am able to call an ambulance but unable to give them a specific location. There are twists and subplots and multiple variations on the ending .I stumble on to a mainroad only to find my blood supply negligible and die within meters of assistance, (that’s the gothic tragedy ending), I die alone in a puddle of blood toying with ideas of self and meaning and the finality of death (the existentialist ending), I call some old flame or unrequited love/ am found by some cute person, who helps me into the next life by holding my hand (Mills and Boon version) or the social realist version, where I’m in heaps of pain, it takes ages to die and I’m shit scared the guys going to come back and do something torturous to me. The last is the ending I usually settle on. I don’t have much time for mills and boon, Wuthering heights or bloody existentialism bar the occasional crisis or two. I didn’t have a single one of these scenarios attack me while I was walking in National Park in Tasmania, seemingly the city brings it on, something about the way the air tastes, the feel of concrete under your feet and the knowledge that you and everything around you is in a process akin to fetid decomposition. In Tasmania I sang and nutted out some complexities in my friends break up, I wrote little poems in the sand and I thought how nice it would be to just live, bum like on the beach in my tent. Backpackers didn’t menace me, sounds in the night were never anything but possums and the moderate panic about getting bitten by a snake was more grounded in a real and present danger than a thing to pass the time. There was still a sense of decomposition but also the regeneration that comes when things live again from the things that die, I don’t feel that in the city, not often. Today, I had a minor epiphany where I thought maybe infact the four hypothesis’s I have to explain my fixation with violent ends may infact be null, those being 1. I’m a miserable git, wallowing in miserable gitness who is too inherently gutless to top her self and is vaguely hoping someone else will do it for her 2. I’m a morbid git with an overactive imagination 3. Role playing 4. I watch too many cop shows. Today I thought maybe all this prose writing has been shielding me from my true calling, that having moved on from being a rather appalling poetry writer ,to an email writer, I could now see the new phase of my life becoming clearer. Crime novelist. I don’t have to be good at it. People seem to read this shit religiously, regardless of its general crapness. I guess my love of cop shows implicates me in this degradation of culture. Well I seem to have the multiple of scenarios ready to go, I have some obstacles of course. Apart from the obvious ones, lack of tense, no knowledge of grammar/spelling/punctuation, a real aversion to narrative structure and well lets face it, dialogue just has me a little stumped. How is it that you write a conversation that doesn’t sound like , he said, she said, and then he said, pauses to scratch her head, which by this time is well and truly over the idea of the conversation. Now the writer of the Monkeys Mask, name always alludes me, she did crime novel meets prose and well, it is interesting but not that interesting and its certainly not an easy configuration. So there are options, I give up is always the first suggestion and put my violent fixation down to any number of Freudian foibles or any number of the explanations listed above. Or in an effort of self improvement that I’m not sure is altogether worthy of the crapness of the genre picked, I learn just how it is you do these things and do them. There’s a friend of mine, who if ever reading this will be positively frothing at the mouth at the opportunity to tell me to stop being a miserable git, get off my arse and do what ever the hell needs to be done to stop my incessant whining, god it pleases me a little too much the level of irritation this could cause. How though do you learn to do dialogue and why can’t my calling be beautiful magic realism and linguistically complex novels of Nobel peace prize winning capabilities. Surely One Hundred Years of Solitude started on a walk by a river ? Which river , I don’t know, If I did then I would go there and hope to god the scenarios I start to see are channeling a less credibility challenged source. I dread the thought, new novel by young, although not that young crime novelist Kelly Sherree Warner (suddenly my middle name becomes an appropriate indicator) called One Hundred Years, One Hundred Ways to Die. I’m not sure that any of my friends would disown me as such, I think they are a little less shallow than that but a few would get a bit of perverse satisfaction in the fact that I , as an irritating youngster gave them no end of shit for reading Mills and Boon and telling me the spice girls were really new wave feminists. New Wave Feminists like Linda Lapplante is pushing some serious boundaries man. My friends would forgive me, my sister would be secretly delighted, an excuse to read pulp fiction at last and my dad well he’d be sure to make my web page with interesting links to crime scene investigations and statistics on crime in contemporary society. Would and could I sleep? It might mean my nightmares finally don’t involve serial killers, although I’m not sure that is going to do anything about the crocodiles that like to chase me frequently, altho in a stunning new plot twist artificially intelligent reptiles are used by cunning scientist to mask his attacks on women. Would there always be a social justice/environmentalist/ esoteric meta narrative to atone for my sins of cheap thrills and utilitarian sentence structure? Would I start each chapter with a quote from a decent well respected author just to show I can read and have some sense of perspective? Or would I revel in my trash and write papers on how, like reality TV trash novels enrich culture by representing the needs and desires of the lowest common denominator. Would I find love, fame, fortune, would I lend my hand to world domination by product placement, cross marketing and the endorsement of rightwing reactionaries. By now I realise that this isn’t and never was going to be a short story. I just can’t shut up for long enough to develop a character and devise a plot. And quite frankly the quick demise of my career from potential quality writer to crime novelist in the space of three small pages has gotten me more than a little miserable. And as an aside, how about the lack of paragraphs.
I walked along the Merri Creek from the Yarra to Clifton hill, a moody walk, walking with my head full of unspoken conversations and well thought out rebuttals. This story is about me. I have never written a short story before, its inevitable its going to be about me , what else do I know, and I’m hopelessly and indelibly self absorbed. Walking along Merri Creek was as peaceful as this claustrophobic and polluted city can get, its pretty and if you don’t look at the rubbish that has collected in the trees thanks to the freak storm and subsequent floods and if you don’t analyse the smells on the breeze too much it could almost elevate me from the miserable gittness I am currently projecting. You’ll notice two things in my writing style immediately, I have little understanding of tense and grammar. After a while, or maybe now, if you are quick to judge, you might pick up that this format doesn’t sit well on me. It writes like I have tried on my mum’s shoulder padded suit jacket and it feels resolutely uncomfortable. I’m more at home in the blanket of prose and rambling observational analysis that is much like my life, I like to excuse my lack of direction with a sense of freedom from form. It’s a thin veil at the best of times but at worst derails me with the abject lack in the anything ventured ,anything gained department. But what really happened on my walk in inner city Melbourne? I did what I always do when walking in the city , I day dreamed about a violent confrontation ending in me dead in a pile of blood. Not generally what you would expect to be running through a late twenties female brain walking in the sunshine on a summers day now is it, well actually is it? I have always wondered if this wasn’t actually that uncommon amongst people, whether it was in fact maybe nothing more than some innate survival mechanism, role playing for the worst case scenario. I don’t do it out of paranoia, there is no fear there. I am not one of the many women who feel unsafe in unlit streets or chastise themselves for taking unnecessary risks, I feel like sometimes I am willing these things to happen just to see how I would react to them. If in a moment of crisis I would infact rise to the challenge or dissolve into a puddle of uselessness. Invariably I die, which given my theory on role playing doesn’t really bode well for my abilities in the fight or flight area. Today’s day dream involved a botched mugging resulting in a knife wound to an artery and a rapidly spouting loss of blood. There of course was no one around, not those two Nike wearing 30 somethings in matching track pants and certainly not that doctor looking person across the creek. I am of course in a part of the creek which doesn’t back on to houses, a major road or a café strip. And I am able to call an ambulance but unable to give them a specific location. There are twists and subplots and multiple variations on the ending .I stumble on to a mainroad only to find my blood supply negligible and die within meters of assistance, (that’s the gothic tragedy ending), I die alone in a puddle of blood toying with ideas of self and meaning and the finality of death (the existentialist ending), I call some old flame or unrequited love/ am found by some cute person, who helps me into the next life by holding my hand (Mills and Boon version) or the social realist version, where I’m in heaps of pain, it takes ages to die and I’m shit scared the guys going to come back and do something torturous to me. The last is the ending I usually settle on. I don’t have much time for mills and boon, Wuthering heights or bloody existentialism bar the occasional crisis or two. I didn’t have a single one of these scenarios attack me while I was walking in National Park in Tasmania, seemingly the city brings it on, something about the way the air tastes, the feel of concrete under your feet and the knowledge that you and everything around you is in a process akin to fetid decomposition. In Tasmania I sang and nutted out some complexities in my friends break up, I wrote little poems in the sand and I thought how nice it would be to just live, bum like on the beach in my tent. Backpackers didn’t menace me, sounds in the night were never anything but possums and the moderate panic about getting bitten by a snake was more grounded in a real and present danger than a thing to pass the time. There was still a sense of decomposition but also the regeneration that comes when things live again from the things that die, I don’t feel that in the city, not often. Today, I had a minor epiphany where I thought maybe infact the four hypothesis’s I have to explain my fixation with violent ends may infact be null, those being 1. I’m a miserable git, wallowing in miserable gitness who is too inherently gutless to top her self and is vaguely hoping someone else will do it for her 2. I’m a morbid git with an overactive imagination 3. Role playing 4. I watch too many cop shows. Today I thought maybe all this prose writing has been shielding me from my true calling, that having moved on from being a rather appalling poetry writer ,to an email writer, I could now see the new phase of my life becoming clearer. Crime novelist. I don’t have to be good at it. People seem to read this shit religiously, regardless of its general crapness. I guess my love of cop shows implicates me in this degradation of culture. Well I seem to have the multiple of scenarios ready to go, I have some obstacles of course. Apart from the obvious ones, lack of tense, no knowledge of grammar/spelling/punctuation, a real aversion to narrative structure and well lets face it, dialogue just has me a little stumped. How is it that you write a conversation that doesn’t sound like , he said, she said, and then he said, pauses to scratch her head, which by this time is well and truly over the idea of the conversation. Now the writer of the Monkeys Mask, name always alludes me, she did crime novel meets prose and well, it is interesting but not that interesting and its certainly not an easy configuration. So there are options, I give up is always the first suggestion and put my violent fixation down to any number of Freudian foibles or any number of the explanations listed above. Or in an effort of self improvement that I’m not sure is altogether worthy of the crapness of the genre picked, I learn just how it is you do these things and do them. There’s a friend of mine, who if ever reading this will be positively frothing at the mouth at the opportunity to tell me to stop being a miserable git, get off my arse and do what ever the hell needs to be done to stop my incessant whining, god it pleases me a little too much the level of irritation this could cause. How though do you learn to do dialogue and why can’t my calling be beautiful magic realism and linguistically complex novels of Nobel peace prize winning capabilities. Surely One Hundred Years of Solitude started on a walk by a river ? Which river , I don’t know, If I did then I would go there and hope to god the scenarios I start to see are channeling a less credibility challenged source. I dread the thought, new novel by young, although not that young crime novelist Kelly Sherree Warner (suddenly my middle name becomes an appropriate indicator) called One Hundred Years, One Hundred Ways to Die. I’m not sure that any of my friends would disown me as such, I think they are a little less shallow than that but a few would get a bit of perverse satisfaction in the fact that I , as an irritating youngster gave them no end of shit for reading Mills and Boon and telling me the spice girls were really new wave feminists. New Wave Feminists like Linda Lapplante is pushing some serious boundaries man. My friends would forgive me, my sister would be secretly delighted, an excuse to read pulp fiction at last and my dad well he’d be sure to make my web page with interesting links to crime scene investigations and statistics on crime in contemporary society. Would and could I sleep? It might mean my nightmares finally don’t involve serial killers, although I’m not sure that is going to do anything about the crocodiles that like to chase me frequently, altho in a stunning new plot twist artificially intelligent reptiles are used by cunning scientist to mask his attacks on women. Would there always be a social justice/environmentalist/ esoteric meta narrative to atone for my sins of cheap thrills and utilitarian sentence structure? Would I start each chapter with a quote from a decent well respected author just to show I can read and have some sense of perspective? Or would I revel in my trash and write papers on how, like reality TV trash novels enrich culture by representing the needs and desires of the lowest common denominator. Would I find love, fame, fortune, would I lend my hand to world domination by product placement, cross marketing and the endorsement of rightwing reactionaries. By now I realise that this isn’t and never was going to be a short story. I just can’t shut up for long enough to develop a character and devise a plot. And quite frankly the quick demise of my career from potential quality writer to crime novelist in the space of three small pages has gotten me more than a little miserable. And as an aside, how about the lack of paragraphs.
posted by kel at 5:57 AM
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