adventures in role-playing

Phew. Christmas is finally over. My family gathers on the 27th and, since the death of my mother two years ago, I seem to have fallen into the role of matriarch (it hardly becomes me) – that is, it falls to me to cook the turkey, organise the rest of the family’s contributions and effectively host the event, though not at my place, since Granny could never get up the stairs. This year I took half my goddamn kitchen to the ‘games room’ of Granny’s nursing home. I’m tempted to reflect further on the event, but it would take time to tease it all out – the delicate dynamics of assembling a bunch of people with precious little in common except blood, frustration, and the best of intentions – and I’m busy packing.

Tomorrow I’m off to the idyllic Glenworth Valley for the Peats Ridge Festival, where I shall be Mistress of the Boudoir for Kamikaze Couture – the dress-up tent. It is my job to have an absolute ball… actually it’s my job to ensure that everyone who comes in has a ball and leaves feeling like a million dollars. My employer called it ‘essentially an interactive performance’ – I can’t see it being anything but fun. To add to the joy I managed to wangle Eug a job as a stagehand, so when NYE midnight comes around I’ll have beloved company – and of course a few thousand likeminded revellers. Jezebel the Kombi is shipshape for camping, we are well-stocked with yummy Christmas leftovers – just gotta grab a sarong for the daytime and some glitter lashes for the night, and we’re off to wonderland :)

noel noel

Christmas is such a volatile time of year. In Los Angeles a disgruntled ex-husband dresses up as Santa, goes to his ex-in-laws’ Christmas party, massacres the guests and incinerates the place, while in the UK Channel Four TV broadcasts a Christmas message from the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who sticks the boot into Christian hegemonic hypocrisy most lovingly and respectfully.

I’ve got time for that bloke Ahmadinejad. Must be a hell of a job that, and he’s smart as a button and straight with it. Not bad looking either… I know, I know, he’s a 50-something politician with disputable attitudes. But I like disputable attitudes. I’d sure rather see him on my front door step than an ex in a Santa suit with a gift-wrapped gun.

australia’s stone heart

I went wandering on Google satellite maps… and was transfixed by this new perspective on an old image (you have to zoom right in). I sat and stared at it, fascinated, till the energy-saver dimmed the screen. The shape, the shadows, the energy of all that diagonal texturing, the fertile associations, the symbolic power, the simple, revelatory miracle of a vertical view – the awful, ironic, necessary marring with Google copyright marks…

Australia’s physical and spiritual heart. But there’s more: pull back to see the whole continent and look at that round swirl in the middle, circling Uluru and Alice Springs – a big fat egg yolk in the messy fried egg of Terra Australis. Trace the rents in the fabric of the earth around that great central ring – a series of lakes and rivers, beginning and ending just east of Coober Pedy, is this not art? (You can get it without the tabs by typing Coober Pedy in the search box and pawing your way east. Do zoom in.) A looping, magical, pendulous, genital jewel in blameless cerulean blue. Whence it all must drain subterraneously toward the great fissure we now call Port Augusta.

Pull back out. If you stare long enough you can almost see the continent rotating glacially, clockwise, chunks breaking off against the currents, against the resistance of the planet beneath, as if someone out there were twisting a cosmic knife in its adamantine heart.

damn censorship

I’m puzzled by the precise wording of the petition, or at least this version of it – “miss the vast majority of unwanted content”? – but I know what they mean; I’m aware of Government manoeuvres to introduce mandatory nationwide Internet filtering, and I can’t think of a more urgent matter for objection within these borders. From this widget, created by the marvellous people at GetUp, you can sign the petition, email your friends about it, or embed the little wonder on your own page. Currently approaching 88 000 signatures, they’re aiming for 95 000. Please take 10 seconds to sign the petition and protect your future access to information and resources – if you want more information on the Government plans and the GetUp campaign, just click through to the GetUp site.

……………………….damn technology

Bugger it. No matter what I try, the marvellous widget won’t come up: no doubt the fault lies with me rather than the boffins at GetUp. IT-minded readers are welcome to query the problem with me (after signing the petition, of course). Don’t let my technical limits retard you – just click on either of the links above. They open in a new window and will give you immediate access to all the necessary info and resources – as well as the chance to ensure the Rudd government doesn’t block our access to same (without even telling us what we’re not allowed to see).

Oh, and if you want a bit of neutral (ie, sans GetUp’s righteous moral outrage) reportage on the subject, here’s the Sydney Morning Herald story from December 5.

ancient conversation

“When I look on you a moment, then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over…”
(Sappho)

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
(Jalal ad-Din Rumi)

the public acknowledgement of reality

Oh. My. God.

I can’t believe I’m doing it again.

I keep asking myself why I do it, and I keep coming back with the same gleeful answer: because I can.

It appears there is a virtually unlimited number of handsome, bold, intelligent, engaging young men out there keen for some fun – and often something more, some warm/hot/cool experience – with an older woman. And when I say young I mean they’re in their twenties. I look 30-something but am 46. Now darlings I know I’m bragging, but while my life isn’t really all that unusual, it’s just not the sort of thing you often see mentioned in print. And as a result, this not-so-unusual reality doesn’t get much public acknowledgement.

And I’m all for the public acknowledgement of reality. So here’s mine.

In the 12 or so years since my divorce, there have been something less than 20 lovers in my life, one of whom has been older than me. (He, incidentally, was quite botanically batty, but then so were several of the others.) They range in age from 21 (when I was 41) and 22 (just recently) up to a year or two younger than me. Length of relationships varied from a night or a few weeks (3 months is a nice affair, I find), up to several deep friendships of overlapping years and varying intensities. The longest lasted over 10 years as a primary partnership, travelling together, living together, living not far apart. He was 10 years younger than I; the next longest, still going at six years… he’s 16 years younger.

Is there something unseemly in this lifestyle? Or perhaps particularly in the public confession of it..? If my sexual history had been like my mother’s (may her god rest her soul) and her mother’s, and as mine was intended to be – I met my husband when I was a virgin a year or so out of school, we have two children -  would it then have been perfectly fine to tell you? Guess it would’ve caused no blushes. Unless you’re the kind of person that blushes at the mention of virginity. In truth, I barely recognise that as a sexual history; it comes from a time when you weren’t supposed to have one. But I was a kid during the revolution.

Are these musings prompted by the cover of this week’s Drum Media, where Tim Rogers and Charlie Thorpe do a John and Yoko love-in for Homebake? (Note Tim’s ironically turned wrist… mm, Tim Rogers, tops the list of people I’d like to meet in Sydney.) Homebake’s slogan this year: Peace. Love …or something like that, deadpanned Bernard Zuel. All more arch than the Bridge. Peace, Love? What decade are we in? What do these words mean post-’80s, between the ecstasy and the drug dogs, post-Tiananmen, in the ugly scramble for the planet, post-Bush/9/11/Guantanamo? Peace, Love and my sweet purple furry hotpants. Homebake, reduced to stylistic nostalgia; how are the mighty fallen? Sure, I doubt any of the amped-up rentacrowd thugs that turn up to this mass gathering on the chance of a bit of biffo so much as paused for thought.

Yeah, anyway, so some brave ideals were upheld in that decade of love: most proved absurdly untenable. But I have this one that seems to work for me. Does this make me wicked, or a freak? I wonder who thinks so, and why? Does it make me some kind of female Don Juan? Casanovella? My friends would snort at the idea; I’m more often seduced than seducer.

No, seriously. I rarely go looking for it, but with so much on offer, what’s a girl to do? I laugh up my sleeve about the supposed man drought – I wondered for a moment whether I should write to the Herald and explain that the lads must all be at my place, but it’s marriageable (or at least breeding-ready) men in their thirties that are apparently in short supply, and while I count three of them among my dearest friends I’m hardly holding them from the market.

But these men in their twenties… ladies, do not miss out. They are fit and skilled and ripe for adventure, open-minded and curious and insanely good fun – and they mostly move on before you get sick of them. Though at least one of mine has become a lifelong friend.

Vive la difference. Vive la tribu.

:)

the lost art of beachobatics

On a tangent while doing online research for the Bonachela interview, I came across this gem of art news. Have a look at a bewitching bit of Bondi history.

And before anyone comments on the excruciating neologism in my heading, I lifted it straight from the SMH story, which implied it was in use back in the day. The art of amateur beach acrobatics may be lost but we’ve retained the more dubious art of contracting two unrelated words into one etymological slashfest.