Because I Don't Want to Be Any Trouble

I saw the Great Dane puppies again today.  They are 16 and 17 weeks respectively.  One is blue and one is spotted black, white and grey.  This is the second time I have seen them in a week because I have been for two walks this week. I don't know the last time that happened.

Both times I have gone walking in abject frustration and with simmering fury at my body and the way its limbic system has revolted against everything ever since I was a teenager, as if a whole swarm of bees or a sabre is constantly threatening to end my life there and then.  No wonder I developed chronic fatigue syndrome.

I went walking both times furying and frustrated at this reaction that occurs without my permission to things that aren't even there and didn't happen last decade or even the decade before last, let alone now.  Having said that, I'm pretty sure that I'm traumatised from having this stupid disease, and at finding myself back in this relapsed state after being quite convinced I was healed forever of CFS.  Won't make that mistake again.

I went walking without the heart rate monitor, which is the CFS version of riding the top of a train or snorting cocaine with a bunch of hookers, or going out drinking all night.  Walking without the heart rate monitor is walking on the CFS wild side.  On the other side of the wild side is perhaps some kind of post-exertional malaise but I don't even fucking care because I've been able to go walking twice in one week!

When I walked on Tuesday (or was it Wednesday? All the days blur one into another in my stupid life).  No, it was Wednesday, which means I have gone for two walks in two days.  I reckon the last time that happened Hawthorn wasn't the premier.  At least.  Maybe it was even a Geelong premiership year.  We play Geelong tomorrow night.  I'm not scared of playing Geelong any more, not like when they beat us 90 squillion times in a row.  Which doesn't mean they won't beat us, just that it doesn't feel like we're their bitch anymore.  I would say if anything that it's probably more like Geelong is our bitch, but I don't like saying that kind of fate-tempting stuff the day before we play them because really, either team could win tomorrow night and really, I don't like saying another team is our bitch because I'm not 15 and I'm actually quite zen about being beaten.

When I walked on Tuesday I saw these puppies for the first time and they were just so beautiful.  One of them looked quite like this:

Jonathan Willier (creative commons 2.0)

The other one looked a little like this, only bigger and with different spots.

Bryan Peters (creative commons 2.0)

Or a little like this, only smaller and with different spots:

Jay Iwasaki (creative commons 2.0)

The woman who is the dogs' pet told me that her previous Great Dane had died a year ago at the hefty age of 13.  That's ancient for a Great Dane, who tend to live only till they're about nine or so.

Whenever I think of Great Danes I think of the Little Golden Book I had as a child.  One of the pictures, by that illustrator that I loved most called Louise someone or other, was of a Great Dane sitting next to a baby.  Gentle giants they are considered, and the dogs' pet said so too, and I could see it in them both even at this young age.  They are obviously well looked-after and of the pedigree variety of Great Dane, and are going very well at their doggie obedience classes.  The spotty one especially was quite smoochy, and sat very nicely.  Today they only jumped up a little bit and stopped when their pet said to stop jumping.  If there is any dog you must teach to not jump it's a Great Dane.  Well, any dog really 'cause jumping is very uncool, but if you lapse on training a Great Dane not to jump you'll accidentally kill your Aunt Martha when they jump on her in greeting when they're three.

When I saw the two dogs coming towards me today I felt a fluttering in my stomach because dogs are pretty much maybe my favourite thing ever.  They calm the limbic frazzle.  I may possibly have squealed a little, I'm not sure, as I approached them but I likely used my puppy voice.  I apologised to the woman.  I said, "Agh, you're going to start cringing every time you see me coming. Here's that bloody woman again, stopping me from walking my dogs."

"No, no, it's fine," said the woman, and I didn't believe her because my confidence is a tattered blood-stained period rag.  "It's good for the dogs to meet people," she said.

I patted the dogs for a bit and then shared what I had just been pondering before I came upon the dogs and their pet.  I was walking down the recently newly-opened track, the bit I'd never walked down before a few months ago because by the time I came upon the scene it was closed because of damage from the 2009 fires.  Six years later there is hardly any evidence of the fire anymore, just little bits here and there if you care to look.  Like on the rather beautiful, straight ghost gum tree.  Large, so that I just had to touch him as I walked past, almost white.  One of his branches had a branch running off it that was black.  But the rest of him was burnless, his skin intact.

"I was just thinking," I said to the woman, "how nice it is walking down here.  It's such a lovely track and seeing it now it's regenerated is cool."  Or something like that.  I can't remember what I said because it was more than two minutes ago.

But as soon as I said it, this pondering, ruminative kind of statement, it fell to the ground straight after coming out of my mouth.  The woman agreed in a dull kind of way, and I just knew that she was gunning to get going again, to walk her dogs so she could get home and do the seven tasks, and make dinner, and get online and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I felt, as I feel so often, that I really need to just restrict that kind of pondering, ruminating to writing, and to talking to Andrea and my mum, and to not hardly ever speak a ruminative word at any other time because I'm so tired of this feeling that I'm like the old lady in the street that you try and avoid because you know she's going to ramble and you don't have time for rambling.

As I left the woman in my wake I continued feeling bad things about inconsequential things.  I felt that familiar feeling that accompanies me almost constantly these days, of being half invisible, a pointless blot on the landscape, a useless thing.  And I felt it rise up in me, this extreme dislike for people I don't know who I'm interacting with in a public place, who seem more and more like fucking zombies when I do talk to them.  And then it reinforced the same feeling that is probably reinforcing everyone else and making a giant snowball that will roll down the hill and smash us all to pieces, that people are crappy and closed off and disinterested and not worth talking to anyway.  I don't truly believe in my heart that people are crap, but it feels like they think I am.

Actually, as I walked away, I felt like the next time I come to walk here I will make sure it is earlier or later so that I don't run into this woman again, even though I really, roolly, truly want to run into her dogs again.  But I feel like I will feel uncomfortable next time, as if I can sense off that she feels uncomfortable, that it will be a burden stopping and letting this inconsequential woman pat her dogs.

And the inner witness part of me talked back to me and it said, "No, no. This feeling is just your paranoia talking. That's not necessarily how it actually is."

But the feeling that she might think that way about me is enough to make me react, so that next time I will happily cut myself off and go walking at a different time just to avoid it.  Because I don't want to be any trouble.

I've referenced Glaxo Smith Kline on here more than once in derisive tones.  They are a placeholder for the revolting capitalist corporate greed that we are all tired of because now we've realised that it doesn't have to be like this, it just is like this in the story that we're also sick of and are wanting to change without knowing quite how.  However, despite Glaxo being as tossbaggy as any other corporation, I find myself taking one of their products, lamotrigine, which I have grudgingly begun taking because it's good for people with CFS (I took it years ago for years until I stopped and forgot all about it.  Why I stopped is a reason consigned to the great Londonish fog of memory).

Lamotrogine is also good for anxiety, depression, mood stabilisation and PTSD.  Wish me luck.

Because I don't want to keep feeling like I'm being any trouble.

Walking

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I love walking.  It's so good to get your squiggly monkey mind under control. I have a chronically fatigued body and a speedy mind that races, races, races, and so when I am out walking it feels so doubly good for me. It is an opportunity to get out of your own damn head, to use your distance vision to take in something that's not a computer screen – which, if you’re lucky like me, means many trees, with the autumn sun shining on the topsides of some of them but with most of your walk in shadow, while the hill ahead has the sun still shining full pelt on it.

Chiaroscuro walks are the best ones, especially in autumn.

I didn’t have any truly great Nietzschean-level thoughts today, however. Or if I did, they were of the sort that slithered out through one of the large mesh holes in my brain where the short-term memory is supposed to live.

I thought about economics and how it has us tied up in knots when we don’t need to be.

I pondered the trajectory of the word “queer” over the last 80 years. I read it in Enid Blyton books as a descriptor – “How queer!” said Joe as Fanny span past him on a giant squid.” That sort of thing.  And now it's meandered its way into a description of someone who is gay.  I wonder how it got there? 

I love the history of individual words. Some of them change their meaning over the centuries, just a drip at a time like water on a rock, until they can even end up meaning the exact opposite of what they once did.

I reminisced about the time my cousin Andrea and I gave all of the Archies individual surnames. (They were, in case you're interested, Archie Arsehole, Reggie Root, Veronica Vagina, Bettie Boobs and Jughead Junkhead. I’m not sure how Jughead managed to avoid a surname referencing body parts or actions that crack you up when you’re 10 years old and very rude. I guess we hadn’t heard of jism and jerking off back then).

Different walk, different day, same benefits

Walking has become my favourite form of exercise. In fact, it’s really the only form of exercise I do apart from yoga - which I'm not sure could be considered exercise, even though you sure can work up a sweat doing it. And your heart sure can beat fast on some occasions.

Just the pace and the rhythm of walking and the being away from the computer and not being able to write brings out a whole stack of things that I would like to write about. I once used to have bouts of writer’s block where I just wouldn’t know what to write about. I never have that problem anymore.  These days, I have so many thoughts and ideas that I have to actually remind myself that it's okay for them to slip through my hands. I can't catch them all. I just have to trust that the very best ones will return on another day when there is a pen or a keyboard in the vicinity.

Treating thoughts like water is good for your mental health.  Plus it makes you feel rich at the same time.

The walk I took this afternoon was just a small one. I am trying to reacquaint myself with the benefit of small things, seeing it’s so easy to think that anything other than grand gestures and big walks and 3000 words a day is failure.

Walking is a bit like that. Brings you right back down to earth, literally, where you move at your own pace, literally. There is much to notice on a walk that you would never, ever notice in a car, no matter how observant you may be.

An Uncorporate Life

Yesterday evening the manfriend and I drove down to Thai Angels for some takeaway.  While we waited half an hour for it to be cooked, we went for a walk around the side streets of West Footscray, down Warleigh Road and exploring the newly-formed Beaurepaire Way and adjacent streets, a new housing development on the site of the old Southern Tyres land.

Unbearably neat townhouses run along the length of Warleigh Road too, across the road from that old white Victorian house I went and looked at when it was for sale years ago, another lifetime ago when I was trying to find a house that would make everything okay inside my soul, out the tail end of a six-year illness and a marriage, me so unbearably messy, everything hanging out of me like sausages.

Now the Victorian has across from it a long row of townhouses in the current style, two storeyed, combining dark brick with lighter rendered areas, clean lines, every surface clean, straight lines, the landscaped gardens corporate style - completely inoffensive, like corporate art, wanting to make a statement and an impression without actually saying anything.

Down Beaurepaire Way is a children's playground, new and pristine, safe with its coating of rubber underlay.  Next to it is a large, grassed public area with a sign saying Keep Off the Garden.  The row of townhouses which run down two sides of this area have a bit of green for their eyes to rest upon.  It does give a nice feeling of space, and even a slight nod to community living.  It is not, however, apparently a space they're allowed to muddy up by placing their defecating, orgasming, farting, dying bodies upon.  A corporate public space, for show.  (Or, depending on your view and your selling point, an iconic space).

The long white Southern Tyres building and its art deco round-windowed office building still stand facing out the other side, onto Cross Street and the Sydenham railway line.  Many of the windows have been broken by disaffected 14 year olds asthmatic at the ambivalence of West Footscray on the one hand going pretty, on the other hand its new footpaths and walkways no more inclusive and welcoming than the previous incarnation.

The townhouses proposed for this site are ones I could never afford.  A one-bedroom apartment is yours for the bargain price of 340 grand.  A two-bedroom deal up on Warleigh Road will set you back closer to half a million).

We walk back along Cross Street and then round the back of these two buildings.  From here we are facing once again the public grassed area further out in front of us.  Its pristine safety is separated from this view by temporary fencing, from the as-yet unreconfigured mess of old abandoned buildings.  More townhouses ran off to the left of us, and as we walk towards them I think that if I was a new inhabitant of one of those townhouses, I would prefer it to stay how it is right now, the old buildings and their now-vacant land space, dirt turned to mud, glutted with water from the recent rains, the earth just lying there in the rest of being fallow, barren but honest space.

Earth breathing while it can, until another 40 townhouses get slapped down upon it, each one taking up 96% of its available footprint, blocking out the view of the Sita Bus Lines building with its red and yellow sign up on Sunshine Avenue, on the other side of the train line.  I've never seen that bus lines building from this angle before.  I've driven past it and ridden past it in a train carriage hundreds of times and thought it ugly, with its concreted yards and rows of buses lined up facing the wall, like kids in trouble at school in earlier times.

Perhaps it's just the chilliness of the air that suddenly fills me with melancholy.  Unseasonably chilly, making me feel like there should be a football game on the telly and a coat round my shoulders.  A melancholy come in suddenly sharp and tart like lemon on the tongue, right on the back of a moment of gratitude as I walk the streets with my beloved, in anticipation of a good meal, good company, a public holiday the next day, a spacious, workless day of meditation, yoga, walking, lovemaking, cooking, writing, of being inside a body and a life with mess, waste and tears, joy, snatches of hope, and music, and fear.  A real, Velveteen rabbit life, everything belonging.  An entirely uncorporate sort of a life.

Some Things Are Worth Barking At, Some Not

I thought I was in the Matrix for a split second earlier. Lester and I got out for a walk after this afternoon's rain, into clean-smelling air. He was sniffing good smells and licking the grass at the same time. I hope this is because he likes the taste of water droplets on grass rather than the more sinister idea that he likes licking the urine of the dogs he's just been smelling. Who can say, with a dog's taste? They're a tad different to mine. He stopped to take big, long draughts of rainwater, fresh from the sky in the gutters. Whenever he wanted he stopped and had a wee on something green. I tell ya, it's a free dog's life.

Before we left for our walk, the stupid dribbling black chihuahua with a bell around its neck came into our yard. It is fascinated by and terrified of Lester. It stares at him, runs when he goes near it, and runs from the sound of my voice. The chinhuaha's pet, an elderly Asian lady with no English, followed the sound of the bell into our yard and after a whistle the dog came trotting. She put it in a small child's stroller.

Lester and I began walking down the driveway and she followed. "Isn't it beautiful now it's sunny!" I called out. She didn't have a clue what I was saying but words are not necessary when you're making small talk, I find. She nodded and smiled.

We walked to the new IGA just around the corner and bought dog food and yoghurt, Lindt 85% chocolate and a litre of milk. The woman gave me $1.05 change which I carried in my hand, having no pockets in my trackies and having already strapped my heavier-than-before backpack onto my back. We walked past the life-size bronze sculptures of Aussie Rules local icons Dougie Hawkins and Teddy Whitten that stand outside the local pub. Lester barked at them as he always does, whether on foot or in car. The other week he nipped at Dougie's foot but he declined to do that this time. Earlier he had barked at a white plastic bag that had flapped itself up against the chain link fence of the local primary school. Lester barks at the giant white horse outside the Whitehorse City Council in Nunawading. Cows in paddocks are an extra special exotic barking delicacy. I think he thinks they are giant dogs.

After we passed Dougie and Ted we rounded the corner of the housing commission flats and I flung the $1 coin and 5 cent piece into a gap in the fence where three or four palings had come loose, along with a prayer that some little kid who was young enough to get a thrill out of finding a gold coin on the ground would find it in his playtime.

We passed an elderly Asian man with a jeep and two sandy coloured chihuahas. He was putting junk mail from the jeep into the letterboxes of the commission flats. Neither dog had a bell; one barked at Lester as we passed. Lester was too busy sniffing and the chihuahuas too small to disdain a response.

We continued walking, round the shabby streets of my neighbourhood back to home. On Darnley Street, smart people had planted different sorts of succulents in their front yard, plants that thrive on the drought conditions that are Australian living. Such strange, odd and curious shapes. I am liking them more and more.

We continued on and walked past the street that runs parallel to mine. There was the elderly Asian lady with her stroller again, with the dribbling black chihuahua in it. We waved as we passed each other.

The next street was mine. As we turned right to go into it, an elderly Asian man was crossing the road. He had a jeep full of junk mail and a sandy coloured chihuahua. For a millionth of a second I felt my brain stop and get ready to glitch out on the influx. But it was a different man. The single dog proved it, Mr Anderson.

We rounded the corner into our street. When we looked back, the chihuahua was standing at the foot of our street, staring down at Lester. It barked. Lester was too busy licking water droplets off the grass to bother responding.

In rather more attractive surrounds, Lester at the Olinda Arboretum