Blast from the past

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth
- Tonight, Tonight The Smashing Pumpkins

I've been brushing the accumulated dust off a few of the old albums I've accumulated. In listening to them, I think that I've also been brushing the dust off a few old memories, too.

One of the albums I've brushed down and breathed back into life is The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which is a two-disc odyssey mainly composed of polar opposites: fuzzed out anger, and sweet lilting love tunes. There's an overall attempt at hopelessness, but honestly it doesn't stick. What I find amazing is that even though I haven't bothered to keep the dust from gathering in layers on the surface of this album, all it takes is one listen to have it all come flooding back. You know what's coming in every song, you anticipate the opening to the next track, all those words are still tucked away in your mind ready to sing along. All without being aware that the knowledge still exists somewhere in there, dormant, but ready to rise given the need.

I think the lyric above - you can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth - can be interpreted in a positive way. Yes, you leave a piece of youth with these things that gather dust in dormancy. But blow the dust off and it's still there waiting to be experienced again. In those moments, time is never time at all.

PhotoHunt: Emotion(s)

Smile like you mean it and one day you'll realise that you do.

I dispense this advice to the people I care about, knowing that it's worked for me before. It worked for me during a hellish breakup - I was working in customer service and faked my smile and conversation with the regulars until occasionally I would realise that I wasn't faking it, that my laughter for once was real. These people had no idea about the times that I had talked and joked with them about the products and the industry and then had to high-tail it to the bathroom out the back so that I could silently scream it all away. They had no idea about the infections and the constant vomiting. They saw me running out of the shop to the warehouse to get their order and thought I was enthusiastic - where really I couldn't go at walking pace because I would have too much time to think, and to think meant to allow the possibility of falling apart again. Eventually the sad bits fell away, and my smiles did have meaning.

I've lost sight of that.

You're not happy here. It comes across as an accusation to my spiralling mind. It's true - I'm not happy here. But that isn't the full extent of it. I'm not happy here, there, or anywhere. A well-timed how are you will bring it all falling out of me - screaming, thrashing, hurting like a caged feral animal. I want to hide, I want to die, I want to escape the constant feeling of failure that I carry with me.

I thought I was stronger. That I could move away from the mistakes I was involved in at my last home and build a new life from scratch. I thought that this process would build me as a person, but instead I'm broken. I feel like a failure in my social life, my music life and through my inability to be a strong foundation of support, a failure in my love life.

Being gay comes into it. I have trouble dealing with gay people who throw their sex life about in conversation. I don't think it's necessary, in fact it's trying to build a divide in a way. I don't like being introduced as a "dyke" even though I identify as one. I am Vic, and what I do in bed is my own business. But then there is conversation on the way to work. In choosing to not disclose my sex life, my partnered life, I am automatically segregated from the conversation anyway. The guys I work with can make comments about what "the missus" packed them for lunch, and I can't really participate. It's a losing situation. Through that need to hide to avoid conflict with those around me and also conflict with my own ideals, I have started to lose my own identity. I used to be proud of myself. I used to be proud of the way I dressed. I wasn't hiding my femininity, or even trying to be "one of the blokes". I was trying to be Vic, who likes suits and collared shirts, and dress pants. Vic, who lusts after cufflinks not because of what they represent but because they are goddamned sexy.

The fact that I've stopped talking to my parents should be a relief. It kind of was. The last contact I had, Christmas just past, was heated and completely awful. To me it was a culmination of twenty-seven years of bullshit, threats, bad tempers, apathy and lies. Too many years of sweeping feelings under the carpet and finally I walked away. I'm angry at them. I'm angry for the traits that I've learned from them that I hate. I'm angry for the lack of positive emotional support they ever gave me. I want them to suffer my absence as punishment for that in a way, but mainly... Mainly I want all of that to disappear so that I don't have to acknowledge it. It should be liberating. But it isn't going away. Their brilliant teaching of self-blame and internalisation is still biting me, especially now.

Even playing guitar is slipping away. I get frustrated and violent at my own inability and segregate myself from my instruments due to a possibility of hurting them irreparably if I lose my temper. This causes another spiral in itself. Days, weeks, months without playing will affect my ability more. In a way I am too scared to touch my instruments because they remind me of my own failures. I know this will get worse but I have no idea how to stop it. This kind of withdrawal in case I damage something is not restricted to my instruments. It's people, places, everything. I'm scared of opening the fridge in case I lose my temper at something and I hit it, denting it. I'm scared of driving in case of the temptation to put my foot flat to the floor and wrap myself and the car around a pole. I'm scared to live and I'm scared to die.

PhotoHunt Take Two: Red Means Danger

There’s two danger stories I clearly remember from my childhood. Both of them are associated with red, in a way. I came across both on the same day a week ago, and had the opportunity to photograph them.

The first… I was four years old and we were visiting a friend of my parents’ in Sydney. They had a kind of basement area that we got to stay in, so it was dark and dingy and a little scary. On their fridge was a spider identification and warning poster. My sister and I were told very firmly to watch out for the Sydney Funnelweb, and were shown what it looked like on the poster. That’s not what caught my attention. All the spider drawings on the poster were black, except for the last one. It had a slash of red down the abdomen - the Redback spider of tacky Aussie bush song fame. According to the song, it likes toilet seats.

Somehow I associated the fear of being told to avoid the Funnelweb no matter what with the Redback instead. That fascinating and awful red stripe caught my fear and held it.

They still strike fear into me. Any other spider? It can meet a simple death with a flip of the shoe. Not a problem. The Redback? That fear and morbid fascination cause me to stare in horror and freeze.

We had a batch of local pumpkins delivered to the veggie shop I work in a while back. They were infested with Redbacks and I didn’t know about it. I busily gathered a bunch of these pumpkins in my arms and hauled them into the prep room to cut into wedges for the shop display. Only when I raised the knife to punch through the first one did I discover a happy little family of Redbacks gathered around the stem end. Oh shit.

Yes. My workmate at the time discovered that I have a terrifying weakness. The man thought he’d have some fun and get one of these spiders on the end of a knife, pointing it at me. I was backed into a corner and shaking with a mixture of terror and anger, yelling at him to get it away from me.

The second… Red-bellied Black snakes. My family lived on a river, in a somewhat rural setting. There were tall reeds on the riverbank, and plenty of tall grass in the paddock next to the house. Snakes were a given.

The house was a big old one with a wide verandah that went all the way around to near my bedroom. My sister had built a “cubby-house” right outside my bedroom window, which consisted of some sort of frame, and blankets – from what I can remember. One day she was playing out there with her friends when I heard a scream. I was outside, too, and I knew what that scream meant.

Snake!

There was a Red-bellied Black snake in the cubby-house. Right outside my bedroom window.

We all bailed, in a hilarious manoeuvre (hilarious with the benefit of hindsight, of course), to an island of hope. The septic tank.

After that I had trouble with the idea of sleeping, just in case something came into my bed to snuggle up with me. I settled with having the bedding tucked right up to my chin, with all limbs within the covers at all times. A little Vic cocoon. I still worried about my head, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

Another Red-bellied Black incident I had was on the riverbank itself at the family home. We had goats tethered about the place as part of some inventive laziness scheme of my father’s never to have to mow the lawns again. He was good at inventive laziness. The ideas he had were brilliant in principle, but execution was always a different matter. The goats had to be tethered because there wasn’t proper fencing. They got a star picket hammered into the ground with a rope on it, giving them a radius to eat everything within. So instead of mown lawns, we got crop circles. Of course, in the parental tradition of child labour, we were contracted into making sure that the animals had food and water daily.

I was pretty young. I had - hold back the laughter - pink gumboots on. Not bright happy playful pink, but dusty prissy boring pink, with white soles. I was standing down on the lower part of the riverbank with a bucket in my hand, feeding one of the goats when a snake came out of the reeds. I think it was a combination of good teaching and fear reaction that caused me to freeze on the spot. The good teaching said you know what to do when you see a snake? Don’t move! I can hear my father’s voice saying it to me even now. The fear reaction? I think part of the reason I froze was also a bit of a deer in the headlights situation. I just stared and went into lockdown.

So I stood there, watching with horror and morbid fascination as a Red-bellied Black slithered out of the reeds, and directly over the tips of my little pink gumboots.

Guess who?