letters, disease, rock 'n' roll, koi fish and a cult
The only person I write letters to now is my aunt Joan Johnston - Joanie. Also they're not letters, they're emails, but it works well. I can attach photos. She's getting pretty old. Her husband Trevor is my Dad's youngest brother; both my Dad and the middle brother, Noel, are dead. Trev is a good guy. He is a retired real estate agent in Dunedin, New Zealand. Loves rugby and a square meal, also sweet and powerful drinks such as Drambuie and Benedictine, which not everybody likes, but he does. Last time I visited from Melbourne he showed us the house where the brothers grew up, in Ravensbourne, with panoramic views from the hill of Otago Harbour. It was here that Trev told me about a time my Dad - in the Royal New Zealand Air Force by then, but not yet in the Pacific hunting the Japanese - came home on a visit in a two-seater. He flew over the house and dipped the wings of his plane. Then he went and landed it at the designated airfield and came home for lunch.
Ravensbourne, yesterday:
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Multi-millionaire sports stars have the plague. Rats are running through the reinvented Moorabbin Oval, following each other into the ice tanks where they shit themselves and squeal in unison. Pandemic, fire, cruise ships, the grotesque clowns in public office, drought, neo-Nazis. I wish JG Ballard wasn't right about everything. People in masks fight with knives in the supermarket. We dance at the end of the world, at the last concert to ever be held; dancing to Everything's Gone Green, dancing to Love Will Tear Us Apart, dancing to Isolation. It's interesting that when Ian Curtis' widow Deborah Curtis wrote a book about what it was like to live with him she called it Touching From A Distance. I ride my bike to work in Mulgrave and the truck fumes seem fresher than before. A workmate cries because people are re-calibrating the distance between desks with tape-measures. My wife signs up for Airtasker so she can do odd jobs for people who are scared to go out. I think of the giant sports arena empty for round one, a strange stadium of mirrors with no crowd but swarms of locusts circling the centre-square.The celebrity athlete snaps a miracle goal on the siren from an impossible angle, but the mirrors distort the angle such that the angle can never be properly measured, and no-one sees the goal. The mirrors all explode into tiny flash-lit shards. None of this ever happened.
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The crowd here on this live version of Hollywood Nights by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, from 1978 in California, now all but locked down, is absolutely off its nut
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In the process of not writing a short story about a man and his koi fish, I found a print-out of this, from last year, which includes a link to Philadelphia carpark magnate Joseph Zuritisky who really really likes koi, but it also mentions koi beauty paegents. These are, it turns out, paddling pools of carp on display rather than a Cruft's style obedience and agility thing, which is a shame, but also understandable. It says in the Quartz piece the most expensive koi ever cost $US1.7m, and in captivity they can live until 70, and old-time Japanese rice farmers made friends with them in order to make them stay in the paddy and fertilise the crop But they sometimes killed them and ate them too.
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Recently I looked into the background of a prominent Australian vaccine sceptic who also happens to be a two-time Australian Senate candidate and senior official in the vaccine sceptical Health Australia Party. You'll notice the euphemism here, but it's for good reason. The "vaccine sceptics" have had a lot of success at the Press Council in terms of the way they are depicted and described. They say they are not against vaccinations for children but would like to see the practice of non vaccination as an option. My guy sells what are called nosodes - natural vaccines - from his clinic near Melbourne. He used to be in a fucked-up UFO and free love cult, based at Bells Beach, in which the leader (now dead) felt he had the right to not only amass nine 'wives' and 63 kids - but also sexually abuse young girls.
Anyway, I had a file on the guy going, just documents etc in a manilla folder, and I'd written some questions down for him so I could pepper him with them when I got him on the phone and after I figured I knew enough about him to make the call. He didn't say much at the time but then played a weird long game with me on email, off the record, where he tried to find out whose bidding I was doing; specifically whether I had any links to big Pharma, who he of course believes have prevented natural vaccines from becoming more popular. He also spent time in the emails decrying me for making money off an article about him. I'd quite like to publish that email tree even though it was off the record but because it was off the record and I've already told you some of the content, I probably won't. But here's some of the questions I scribbled out for that initial phone call.
did you know Laishkochev
were you in his cult
did he rename you Yitsak
what is your real name
did you know Mal and Uri in Golburne
do you believe in aliens
did he liken you to Samuel Hahnemann
should you have disclosed all this to the voting public or patients
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"By Gathering", by Simon Stålenhag
