Last night we were sitting on the couch, The Silverback and I, and I was saying that I want to see that new movie with all the nominations. Someone had seen it and said that I would love it. Let’s be clear: this is not a movie review site. I found the movie to be disturbing (why so many guns, America?), superficial (why don’t we actually get to know even one character properly?) and *spoiler alert* it had a shitty cop-out of an ending. I tried to like it, really I did, what with Woody Harrelson and Napoleon Dynamite’s Nanna, but it was insipid. Too sad and too bleak in a pathetic, relentless way. Two wrung-out stars.

But that’s not the point of this blog. The point is something different. Of doing something different.

On Tuesdays when I finish work, dinner is cooked and the kids are in bed. We eat, then sit on the couch together and scroll through the book of faces (that’s true love, right there, no?) and I watch that show with the doctor who does Asperger’s. His voice prickles me like blowing across the top of a pen lid (arghhh), but I do like the dramatic medical events that unfold. It’s good to know that hospital admissions aren’t all strung out meth-heads and people with complications from the stupid amounts of medications they are mixing in their cells. This is proper emergencies from causes other than the stupid.

The medical drama was about to get going, and I was settling in for some good old blood letting, when Nath said, “Why don’t you go then?”

What?

An unplanned movie trip on a school night that starts in six minutes and I haven’t even made popcorn? Surely that can’t work? Or is the plan so simple that it just might?

So before anyone had a chance to call it off, I grabbed a Stella from the fridge, dug out a coat that would be suitable for Antarctica, and ran out.

And I cannot tell you how good it felt. I think twenty years flew off and out onto Sunshine Beach Road between home and the cinema, and when I took my seat (far enough from the weird old guy on the far left wing so that I couldn’t see what he was up to. Nothing, I’m sure he was up to nothing), and close enough to the screen so that I could be encased in the vista without getting a neck extension injury, I’m pretty sure another six years fell into the aisle and rolled to the front like Jaffas. I lost another two when I surreptitiously opened the Stella and it made a little sigh as the house lights went down, when for some reason I was convinced that the man-child usher would come and scold me in front of the pod of teenagers in the back row. (Funny how, even at this advanced age, I wanted to hold up my stubby of bootleg beer and show them I was cooler than them.)

It was nice losing all those years. Nice feeling the responsibility of a school night, and the heaviness of the incomplete To-Do List, shrink to a pinprick as the curtains drew back, and I got lost in someone else’s world.

Going to the movies is better than going on holidays. It’s far easier, it’s more comfortable and if I don’t like it I can leave at any time. Or fall asleep in a hug of red velvet. As long as that weird guy doesn’t come too close.

When the shitty movie ended and the lights came on, everyone hurried to evacuate, but I stayed a moment more. Savouring the smell of freedom that was masquerading as popped corn and fake butter, and the perfume of the last person whose arms rested underneath mine. I breathed in that smell and I breathed in that feeling. And I tried not to breathe it out.

…From The Ashers

Do you remember that show? With Norm and the other guy sitting at the bar? I can’t remember the other guy’s name right now, and I know that’s not right, because Cheers was all about having a place where “everybody knows your name”. Anyway, if you know Cheers, then you are screaming the Other Guy’s name out right now. (I’m pretty sure he was in Toy Story as well. Just call me IMBD.)

Moving on. I have had a couple of places like that in my life. And like my list of friends, I guard them closely. I don’t have too many (I don’t like to spread myself thin), and I choose them carefully. The Morning Star Hotel in Willi was one. Taco Bill’s in Clifton Hill another. I’d like to say Cocktails and Dreams on The Goldy as well, but I think that was more about NOT welcoming me in (another bar, another life). These days it’s Village Bicycle and Bistro C. And here.

The first two are by choice. The third, not so much.

And yet when we arrived here today, at a place that I don’t want to come to, to do a thing that I don’t like doing, I realised that this place is a part of me and I am a part of it. I have a favourite room (27), a favourite carpark area (mezzanine, part e, because: Me… I can always remember where I’ve parked), and even a favourite mug in the parents’ room.

Fave mug. Insta worthy hospital flat lay. Yes I used Mayfair.

Smiling nurses greeted us by name and made a fuss of the kid as if she was Suri Cruise. Doctors who I’m now on patient advocate boards with, popped in for a chat. Other trainee doctors came in to feel the kid’s excellent hepatosplenomegaly and marvel and the lowness of her haemoglobin (everyone’s gotta have a talent, right?). We feel comfortable enough to put our faces right in close to the camera at the entry, and make stupid faces to make Margie on the front desk laugh. We know the order of things, and we are close enough with the guy at Merlo to raise our eyebrows in conciliation when the idiots don’t understand the discount system for bringing their own cup. We never say a word to each other, Merlo Guy and I, our wiggling brows say it all. Today he was almost a seagull, as he step-by-excruciating-step explained the difference between cup sizes (why are they in ounces?) and the store pricing policy to an irate lady dressed in KT-26ers and leggings-as-pants, who was arguing over 30cents and her card being declined. Usually I would’ve just said to pop it on my order, but it would’ve felt like a betrayal to Merlo Guy, and us stalwarts have to stick together in here.

In here.

A funny thing happens to the kid when we get in here. I try to speak in the language of hospitality instead of hospitals. I call it “checking in”, and we run to the bathroom to see if we are getting L-Occitane toiletries (we aren’t). We look at the “room service” menu, and talk about how yummy the Mango Chicken will be (it isn’t). And yet, still, she becomes a ‘patient’. She lays in the bed all day, even though she could easily sit on the couch with me, and is as quiet and compliant as a lamb. It’s like the institution does something to her, as it does to me. She goes docile, I go to war.

Today I decided to play it a little different. I made a decision to treat this funny, mushy-pea walled place as my Cheers. I chose to see Margie as Sam Malone, and Penny as Diane Chambers. Kevin was Norm, and Stu was the Other Guy. (I tried not to call anyone Carla, but my brain accidentally might have. I told it to hush now, we don’t have to be that mean.)

In some weird way, after so much stretched-out time together, this soft, speckled lino and the sweet-prickly smell of chlorhexidine has gotten into my nostrils and into my being. I didn’t choose it, wouldn’t have chosen it in a million years, and yet here we are. If I love my life (and I do) and I love my kid (and I mostly do, can I be “barley” during tantrums?) then I must also love the experiences and the laughcries and the learning I have done in this place. It has tested me more than any other location (yes, even more than the Cricketer’s Arms in 1992, may I never get a stomach bug like that again), and it has shown me more about myself than I ever thought I wanted to know. I’ve had some of my biggest moments here, both fair and foul.

And so now, just like the blankets. A part of me is the property of Queensland Health.

Cheers.

So you wanted a post about cakes, eh Chrissy?
**Warning: Rude content**

Once upon a time we went to America and we were presented with a cake so vile and oh so anatomically correct that I suspect all of the women in the room immediately ran to the bathroom with mirrors and torches to compare their nether-regions to the magnificent glistening icing, that was representative of a trio of assorted female genitalia.
On a cake.
There was a jaunty little script at the bottom that said, “Welcome, ya bunch of *#%$.”

I’m not sure what the collective noun for such a gathering is, but I think it should either be a committee, or a cosy.
A cosy of
(The word that I dare not write, lest my Mum read this post and I be castigated.)

Every inch of my being wants to show you the photo of said c-cake, but I dare not, lest this blog be labelled as porn, and I am relegated to the literary internet dustbin.

The photo of this cake is neatly tucked away in the back of the photo album labelled “USA 2003”, and I delight at the thought that one day when I am all but dust, some descendant will look through the blurry, bland images of Denver and Vegas and Hawaii and come to this final little pearl and wonder, “What the fuck was that all about?”

They might flip back through the photos, trying to glean some hint as to why there ever was such a cake, who made it, and what happened to it after that first staged snapshot.

Well in case that never happens, I’ll tell you the story.

Not about the how and the who, but what happened next:

Everything happened.

Every single thing that you might imagine happening to a cake festooned with a cosy of vaginae, happened.

At first we were shy to approach her. As if she might bite, or something even worse. Then as the evening wore on, and we gathered our courage from the bottom of our Bud Lights, we became more enamoured of her subtle curves. We started to sidle up to her, make a few lewd inferences, and the boldest among us even tried to touch her up… There may have been a Donald Moment or two.

The rest of what happened is a little fuzzy, but I will tell you, that in the morning there was a pile of crumbs were the cake had been, no-one seemed to know where the the members of the cosy had gotten to, but Stanly The Pug had a dollop of pink icing on his nose that looked suspiciously like a clitoris.

I just hope that there were no American Pie moments.

…From The Ashers

Driving down the motorway, the familiar tightening in the back of my eyeballs starts. I know this sensation more than I ever thought I would. And more than I ever wanted to.

Every time it grabs me, I’m right back to the first time. The time when I thought that maybe things were still going to be okay. That life would go on as it always had. That this dash was a false alarm and I would be able to call my girl whenever I needed to know how to make spanakopita, again (“You know, the lamb one that you saw on SBS that time.”).  Or when I feel ripped off that there isn’t just one more sip in my capp (when I thought there was), and I can send a photo, and within moments my phone will ping with: #crook #fuckthat and I will know that I am heard. That there is someone in the world who knows my heart and my stories and understands my FW anguish.

Driving down the motorway, the familiar constriction of my throat starts, and I wonder if I have grown a tumour in the distance from Sunrise to Coolum- the looming head of the defeated warrior that is Mount Coolum seems to get me every time. What is it about dreamtime stories and connection with messages of the heart? The throbbing sensations of the rhythm of this land have a way of bringing me back to heart. And heart brings hurt. If it has been marked.

My heart has markings on it Hayls.

And you made them.

You made them deep and you made them good.

So tonight as I drive past the moment where I saw your last sunset, I allow the torsion in my eyeballs to wring their salty liquid, and I let it flow and flow and flow. The bruised greyblue skies reflect me, and the cane fields greedily devour our shared wrenching. The dusty cracks in the soil strain to be quenched with our grief. We nourish the sugar with our loss, and I wonder if there will be a bitterness in the sweet when it is refined. Or is all sweetness laced with loss?

The heaving in my chest surges like the Maroochydore River, and as I cross her, I say,  “I see you Maroochy. I see your sad and I hope you found your peace.”

I hope I will find mine, by and by.

Tomorrow we will cast the last of my girl into the biggest salty water, and I will watch her fly free, and wish I could have kept her here longer.

She will dissolve into that big blue, and I will not.

I will wish for one more laugh, one more lesson, one more conversation to stop the world turning. And I know that my wish will not be granted this day.

Not yet.

…From The Ashers

Make it count

Mental AS

Once upon a time I had a Dad who was alive in this world and he loved music.

He loved to listen to it cranked up so that it drowned out whatever he was tinkering with in the shed. If you listened hard you could hear his sighing, gravelly voice joining in with that riffy blues that used to get under the skin at the base of my neck and make me want to shrug like Atlas. The blues gave them to me then, and they give them to me now.

Thankfully, he loved many other styles of music, with a record collection stretching from Abba to Zappa like a long line of Friday afternoon bank customers, craning their necks to see when it would be their turn on the table to start the party. His tastes expanded mine from 3XY, giving a breadth that allowed me to take in more than the latest chart topper, and aged my repertoire so that I often have people older than me take in my skin, and try to figure out my generation when I know the words to something before my time.

He taught me that music is to be shared and pooled and mixed together and made available to all. He was always a one for making tapes of the albums he bought home from Brashs most Fridays, taking them out of their slippery sleeves to check for scratches before reverently placing them on the turntable. I think he held his breath a little until the crackles gave way to the opening bars. And then he was away. Lost in the story and the emotion.

The first time I heard Mental As Anything we were at our holiday place at Torquay, where the salty west-coast winds flapped the canvas roof up and down all summer long, reminding us to get to the beach before the cool change came in. My Dad had made a TDK-60 recording to play in the black tape-recorder that sat on top of the 1950s fridge (Current paint job: royal blue).

“Woah-ho, the nips are getting bigger.” sang Greedy and his buddies, the flippy tune forming an exuberant sound-track to my latest Trixie Beldon. It was the one where they found some dope-smugglers and when I asked Mum how to pronounce “Mara-jewu-wana”, she snatched it away with a black-snake whip, until I could convince her that Trixie and Honey were catching the baddies, not sparking up. I spent most of the rest of those hols, humming along to the Mentals, and laughing to myself about how a song about fishing and the nips they were getting, could be so catchy.

Last weekend, Greedy and a new gaggle of fellas came to a little country town near us. Reg has gone onto other things, and Martin is pretty crook, but Greedy was there, playing his keyboard and belting out all the old tunes as if it was 1986.

At first I thought I might stand politely up the middle-to-back and have beer or two (I started out, just drinking beer.) and maybe lip sync a few songs then head home. However the first notes of the fist song did something to my synapses and within a beat I was back in that summer.

White zinc cream mixed with that hard, peeling skin on my nose. Lips infused with salt. Hair faded to light from the sun. Sandpaper sheets, and still, melting heat making it hard to sleep, whilst parents caroused- the cadence of their laughter and stories a backdrop to the click of the crickets. Eventually silent, only moments before the crows started their morning dance on the thick canvas roof. We would toss and turn and try to scrinch out the light, until the paperboy started his litany, “SunAgeAddyAustral-yan” and bleary-headed Dads in their jocks ran out to grab the news of what they were missing from their city lives.

So when Greedy started, I wove my way through the crowd like an eel, taking my place among the old and the young. The Old who were swaying to the echoes from a simpler life. The Young who were there for the cheap live music, or, in one girls case, because her Mum had loved The Mentals.

Had.

I sighed with her, and kissed her maternally on the head as she told me her story of loss and scattered corpuscles, and we toasted her Mum and we toasted my Dad and we toasted the silly, fizzy soundtrack that could take us back to a time and and place where our hearts were still whole and unscarred.

Where we could live it up.

Thanks Fellas, You’re still Mental As.

…From The Ashers