The Future

We enter through shiny silver doors and wait in a cramped box. Coloured buttons and lights blink on the wall. The box ascends, and comes to a halt. The doors glide open to reveal a busy, bustling place of white. White lights illuminate white walls and white tiles. Music blares from every corner. The beats conflict and the tunes clash. Clothes, make-up, perfumes, handbags… all can be purchased here from almost identical young women. Faceless, alien-like mannequins holding awkward poses display brightly coloured shoes and tiny dresses. One wears nothing but a hat and a single glove.

Dahrrrrling

We push our way through the throngs of people. Everywhere we look, signs tell us inexplicable things. Words about beauty and fashion, dad scents, points to be won. Is it some kind of competition? We make it to the doors and into an even grander and more confusing place. A hall filled with tables, food and people. Holes in the wall sell any kind of food you could want, from every place in the world. TV screens show images of India, China, Japan – “take your tastebuds on a tour of Asia!” Colours clash, lights flash and thousands of people cram themselves in tiny chairs to eat with hands, forks and chopsticks.

Here, a man with dreadlocks to his waist, there a woman in a dress that would shame the mannequins. In front of us a little girl squeals in delight at the distant sight of a shop that sells pencils in the shape of animals. A teenaged boy giggles with his boyfriend. A family sits down to a banquet of noodle dishes in cardboard bowls. All the while, glass containers move up and down the walls, ferrying people to more levels of shopping, other levels of wonder.

About 2 years ago, it started being the future, and none of us noticed. The scene I’ve just described could be from Doctor Who, but it’s from a shopping centre in Brisbane, Australia. All it took was 6 months away from this sort of place for me to notice: our shops look like something out of a film. And I’m not talking about old films that laughably tried to predict what life with flying cars might be like, I’m talking about films we watch every day. The glittering futures from our movies look exactly like the glittering present from our reality.

On the drive home from Brisbane yesterday, I downloaded an album of music to my phone. And even though we drove for 3 hours through nothing but fields and trees and cows, we were still able to listen to that whole album before we got home. I did not own that music when we got in the car, but I did by the time we got to Toowoomba. That is wizardry.

Even out in the country, it is the future. Farmers do their business online as much as they do it in the fields. Everyone knows that if you can’t buy it in town, you can have it mailed to you within a couple of days simply by clicking a few buttons on your phone. Meanwhile, Boyfriend and I are in a virtual band that we access via a gaming console in our living room. He’s lead guitar, I’m on drums: we’re doing a festival tour of America. When we’re not rocking, I’m an Assassin in Ancient Italy and he’s Batman, so that’s pretty fun too.

Today I hung out with seven awesome friends in my backyard. Two of them were in Brisbane, another in Canberra, one was in Hobart and the rest are in Newcastle. A dog barking in Newcastle made the ears of my neighbour’s dog prick up. So next time I’m whingeing that my wifi dropped out, or I’m an idiot for accidentally wiping the last 6 months’ worth of stuff off my iPhone (such a fail), I’m going to remind myself that I live in an age of fantastic, bizarre magic. And hopefully take comfort from that, while I rage and moan.

We take the future for granted, and that’s what makes it the future. 

Words

Are these words working, do they work for you?

Damn I love words. Words are the cleverest thing humans have ever thought up. Like, science and maths and all that are pretty clever, but how in the heck do you explain your complicated new theory about fire to the other Homo sapiens if you don’t have some way to codify ideas into vocally expressed thoughts? With stick drawings in the dirt? I don’t think so.

Ta da!

I get unreasonably excited about words. Today, while watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Jane said “loquacious”. I love “loquacious”. I had to stop the video to clap my hands like a kid. Number 1 best ever use of “loquacious” was by Hermione J. Granger in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (movie). It was the best ever because the joke in itself is funny: that Victor Krum is a bit handsy, but it’s even funnier because it’s Hermione, and she didn’t say “handsy” she said, “Victor is not particularly loquacious”.

Words make us laugh, but they also wound. You can stab someone, shoot them, throw a rock at their head, and hurt them, kill them, instantly. But words take time. They can twist and fester and pull right at the gut of a person. Even a cutting, scathing remark that hurts upon hearing will worsen with time, biting deeper and deeper. Words start wars, words end lives; words change us.

Even though words, at their worst, are brutal things, I still love them. I love them for their flexibility, for their changeability and for their ambiguity. I love that you can make people groan with a pun and snort into their tea with a particularly crude phrase. I love that you can put a lot of them together in a certain way and tell a story; that you can conjure them up out of thin air to make fiction.

Mostly I love that words belong to people. Words change, language changes, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. With words, in my firm opinion, majority rules. If enough people start pluralising the word “you” to form “yous” or perhaps, “youse”, then it’ll be a word. Lots of other languages have a plural, but in English; particularly Australian English “youse” is associated with lower class or uneducated speech. Well listen up, non-bogans, if the bogans get that word to spread enough, someone will put it in the dictionary, and we’ll be stuck with it. There’s a beautiful irony when people say “you can’t just make up words!” because that’s all words ever are, made up sounds that some motherfucker (probably Shakespeare) has decided mean something.

Don’t get me wrong. I like correct spelling and grammar. I’m not saying you can just write whatever you like and hope for the best. But the main reason I like it is not because it’s good and proper, but because English is so convoluted; there’s so many glorious ways you can say something, that you’re bound to be misunderstood if you don’t get it right. So you’ve got to get it right. Commas and apostrophes, they mean stuff. Without them, you start to turn words into letters again. Just boring old letters. You need all the other little dottie bits to keep those letters together, keep them as fantastic, beautiful, clever words.

I wonder why I’m talking coz I’m talking all the time. We won’t forget the message and just leave it all behind. The conversation’s trivial but trivial is fine when held up to the light. - Words, Kate Miller-Heidke.

Dog.

I have always had mad drawing skillz

When you think about it, keeping an animal in your yard is a pretty weird thing to do. We are, as far as I know, the only animals that keep other animals as pets. Except maybe monkeys, don't put anything past monkeys. Farming animals is a thing that makes sense. You can understand why ancient peoples were like, “wait, instead of running after the damn things, why don’t we get ourselves some boy ones and some girl ones and just see what happens?” It makes a lot more sense, sustenance wise, if you don’t have to chase after everything you want to eat. But at what point did people start thinking,  “Let’s not eat this one. Let’s call it Buster and treat it like one of our kids”? I’m sure someone actually knows, but to be honest, I don’t care, all I want is a damn puppy.

When I was 3, I went to see The Wizard of Oz. And not long after, my mum bought me a puppy from the pound. I rather imaginatively named him Toto. He didn’t look anything like Toto from the play or the movie, but he was small and white and I loved him. Toto was a mongrel, but I’m pretty sure he had some sheep dog in him. Because damn, did that dog love to herd things. The main things he had in his life to herd were chickens. He would gently herd our chickens into certain corners of the yard, and then watch them all day. When our neighbour’s chickens jumped the fence he would not so gently tell them to fuck off.

In both the houses we lived in during Toto’s life, we shared a fence with a horse paddock. And Toto had an unfortunate habit of running off to hang out with the horses. It was unfortunate, because horse paddocks tend to have paralysis ticks in them too. If you’re lucky enough to have never encountered one, probably don’t do a Google image search. They are awful little creatures that latch on to an animal, and then suck blood until they are so fat they fall off. The other thing they do is release a poison into their host that causes slow and horrific paralysis. Starting in the hind legs, the paralysis, if left unchecked, will spread and eventually take over the lungs and heart, causing, you know, death.

That’s not how Toto died. Toto got about 10 of these in his life, and every time, we’d see him dragging his back legs, find the tick, take him to the vet and wait. The vet would remove the tick, give Toto some anti-venom, and return him to us, sore, sad, shaved, but ok. The last time he got a tick, I was 15, and my mum told me just how much that anti-venom cost, and explained that unfortunately, this time, we just couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t mad, I completely understood. And I sat in the driveway and held my puppy and sobbed. He just lay there and let me hold him. He’d never been one for that, but I believe he understood that I was distraught, and just let me cry into his fur.

We took him to the vet, they kept him overnight, and he was bloody fine. The bastard had developed a tolerance to the poison.

Actually now that I think about it that might have been one of those lies my mum told me. She may well have bought the anti-venom anyway. It’s like that time she told me she hadn’t seen my budgie, when in fact; she’d seen him pecked apart by magpies 10 minutes earlier. Mum, remember how you told me about the pecking a few years’ later? I don’t want to know if this one was a lie. I want to live in this reality where he overcame that tick on his own. Ok? Good.

Three years’ later, I was 18, on a train in business clothes, packed in like a sardine when my mum called me. “Toto’s got a tumour, in his stomach, it’s massive. The vet said we should say our goodbyes”.

“Wait, how long does he think he’s got?”

“Two weeks? Maybe less?”

We put him down 3 days’ later. He deteriorated quickly; I think the vet had accidentally burst the tumour or something. It happens. And it wasn’t ok to keep him around for us. I will never forget the final drive to the vet. Toto in the back bit of the commodore, with me in the back seat, just patting him, looking backwards at things I knew he would never see again.

When they put a dog down, there are two injections. One that makes them go to sleep, and dream some pretty wild shit, and one that puts them “to sleep”, where there’s no more dreams at all. We sat with Toto after the first injection for a while. His eyes went crazy behind his eyelids, and I’ve always wondered what he dreamed about in those last few minutes. After the second injection, we had to leave him there to be cremated. We didn’t get his ashes back or anything. I’m pretty sure they do it in bulk. You’d probably get something that was 1 fifth Toto, 4 fifths cats.

Not long after, mum bought a new dog. He’s a nice enough animal, and he’s grown on me. But he’s not mine. I moved out not long afterwards, and he is very much my siblings’ dog. In fact my sister was a very similar age when Greg (oh yes, Greg – I much prefer Gregorius) came along to what I was when we got Toto. I hope she doesn’t have to deal with any of this ‘til she’s a lot older too. I just wasn’t ready for a new dog.

But I am now.

The puppy over the back fence and I are in love with each other. She stands there and waits for me all the time, and whimpers if I don’t pick her up and cuddle her. I want to steal her away. But I can’t because 1 – she already has people and 2 – my house can’t have dogs in it. But I’m going to get a dog sometime soon, right after I’ve gotten a new house. And it might herd chickens, or it might not, and it might get ticks, or it might not, but we will love each other and be friends, and I’ll forget to ponder why it is humans think it’s ok to keep animal friends because everything will be dog, and nothing will hurt. 

Ladies *wink*

Butts. They sure are nice. But is there more to life?

Ladies. What are they even?

This seems to be a question on a lot of people’s minds at the moment. From female volleyballers being treated as butts with athletic ability, to our Prime Minister being likened to a bovine, people have been wondering whether ladies are real, and if they are, whether they are the same as normal humans.

See now, feminism is a nasty and dangerous thing, isn’t it? It’s all screaming and bra burning and making men feel bad for having a penis. Feminazis, I think is the official term here. Because of course, fighting for equality is definitely the same as brutally interning millions of people and then working and gassing them all to death. It’s just like that.

No wait, no it’s not. That’s right. Sorry, I’m always getting confused between equality and genocide.

Every single person should be a feminist. Whether you’ve got a vagina or a penis, or both, or neither or WHATEVER. Because if you say you’re not a feminist, you’re saying you don’t think everyone should be treated equally.  Men should feel they are allowed to be feminists. Women should feel they are allowed to be feminists. It’s not something any one group of people owns. It’s not a dirty word. It’s something we’re all responsible for. I don’t say I’m not into the abolishment of slavery because I’m not black.

And if I did, you’d call me racist.

Take the example of the volleyballers. It’s not that they don’t have nice butts, or that men should feel bad for looking at those butts. Butts are nice, ok? Everyone likes a good butt. If you happen to get distracted during a game of beach volleyball by the butts of some of the players, well, that’s a pretty normal thing. But those players are very excellent sports people. They have trained for an exceedingly long time to get to where they are, and are very good at their sport of choice. Most importantly, they are humans, and they should be treated with respect. And it is all of our responsibilities to criticise photographers who publish photos of their bodies with no faces, and don’t even identify the players in the photos. And when they say, “it’s what the people want!” we should all say, “no it isn’t!” And refuse to buy magazines or frequent websites that display photos like that to prove it.

Sometimes people say that equality has been reached, that we need to stop whingeing about this stuff and move on to more important things. And to that I say,

1.     no it hasn’t

2.     multitask

It’s the same with marriage equality. “Why are we bothering about gay marriage? Shouldn’t we be worrying about homelessness or the economy?”

1.     because equality

2.     when was the last time you cared about the economy?

3.     multitask 

So anyway, I live in quite a conservative town, and sometimes people say things about ladies that make me want to stab them. And it’s difficult sometimes to call them out or challenge them, because, well because it’s a small town and unless you’ve lived in one it’s pretty hard for me to explain what it feels like. But I try to lead by example, and I try to tell stories from my own life, about electric drills and driving and how my partner cooks food and how you know, we both do stuff that interests us whether it’s video games or theatre or whatever. Why?

1.     because equality