Skydekkerix

Oh lordy babies I need me a job. The problem with gettin the bipolar disease, being on the disability pension for six(?) years and having about a year and a half work experience all up is that I don’t need to finish that sentence. I done wrote this poem after searching online for a job using the terms Creative and Writing because it is what I am good at (debatable). I got zero results. Here’s hoping kids.

 

Thumbs

 

I sit and wait

Cos my awkward gait

Steps on children, puppies

People’s dreams

 

I spill on myself

I’m not good at health

My hands are thumbs

Is what it seems

 

And I still wait for the day

That I can truly say

I did a good job

Successful schemes

 

But

 

If I gotta think

I got all, plus kitchen sink

 

And when it comes to good cheer

My smile’s always near

 

And if you wanna fight

I’ll punch keyboards all night

 

I’ll write me under the table

You bastard

2.

 

When I was very young I thought jesus was a young boy who had a moon for a head that lived on the moon and cried every time you did something bad. No idea where that came from.

My first school was an Anglican private school. We sang hymns every morning and learned about the bible in religious education. They seemed pretty good about it; not a lot of hellfire or hate. I remember most of the lessons about morality seemed right. All along the lines of do the right thing regardless of what people say or think about you or if they are different or believe in different things.

I decided I was an atheist when I was maybe ten, mainly because I prayed that I could fly and it didn’t turn out. What I had in mind was a cool pair of bat wings because I was a Dark Kid. When I didn’t get them I decided God was not real and did not look back. I learned how to fly in dreams when I was very young and now it seems second nature.

When I first heard “Starman” it seemed synonymous with jesus. I listened to the lyrics and the picture in my head was a boy with a moon for a head that lived on the moon and watched us and wanted us to be happy.

There is a very specific hurt right in the middle of me that I get whenever I hear it.

 

1.

 

I am in the death star in star wars. I liked the new movie but it was still not that great. There is too much shit in this hangar bay. Like a million stormtroopers and an AT-ST and they are shooting a million laser guns. The lasers are shooting in every direction and there are a lot of explosions.

There is only me and David Bowie on the rebel side. We are doing okay even though there is no line-of-sight blocking terrain because the stormtroopers are mainly shooting each other. I have a laser gun but it doesn’t do anything when I pull the trigger, so I just aim it at stormtroopers and make laser noises to fight. David Bowie has a carton of eggs but he seems hesitant to throw any.

“Sam,” David Bowie says, “There are babies in these eggs, every one.”

He has a haircut like a kid who takes up smoking in grade seven.

“They are casualties of this war. Whether I throw them or not. I cannot save them sam. These babies are dead already.”

David Bowie starts crying. His lightning bolt is leaking.

“Dammit Bowie.” I say. I am angry because I am his commanding officer, but I understand. It makes me sad too. “You gotta throw those eggs son.”

David Bowie opens the carton. There are a lot of stars behind him, outside the hangar shield in space. They are beautiful and make my middle hurt. He cries more as he throw an egg, he sounds like he is singing. The throw is weak and the egg smashes just in front of him. There is a dead baby chicken on the ground, covered in yolk.

“The babies are already dead Bowie.” I say, I aim and make three short pchews, a stormtrooper falls over. I think one of his friends shot him.

 

0.

 

There is a poster for McDonalds on the inside of the Ipswich train. It is a picture of a giant burger with a thick layer of ham under the chicken patty. The words are mainly just jumbled letters and copyright symbols. The train is quiet except for the jostle of the tracks. David Bowie sits on the opposite side of the four-person seat. His hair is red this time.

“I am poor Bowie,” I say to David Bowie, “and hungry. I can’t remember the last time I bought a hamburger.”

“Sam,” David Bowie says, “I can lend you $11.60. Get that hamburger, do not worry about the commercialism.”

I am very grateful for the $11.60 but I am too tired to cry about it. The train is going down the middle of the street. We pass many McDonalds but the train is not stopping anywhere. I am very hungry. The sky is grey.

The train stops in the middle of Ipswich in the future. David Bowie left when I wasn’t looking. There is no McDonalds close so I dump the $11.60 in the coin part of my wallet and zip it up. I won’t have time to get a hamburger because I need to Be Somewhere.

I walk through the big park in the middle of town. It is mainly giant concrete rectangles but there are some nice trees and water features. I can hear frogs croaking. Normally frogs freak me out but it sounds nice this time. A ladies voice plays from speakers set up around the park.

“The frogs are croaking because they like us. They want to let us know that they want us to be happy.”

There are too many people at the party. The table with all the food at it is crowded and I can’t get to it. My girlfriend is there hanging with Someone Else. She approaches me, smiles. She asks if that instead of moving in with me she can move in with Someone Else.

“Yes of course.” I say. I look over her shoulder at the food table but there is no path to it. I am very hungry but I can’t get food because my girlfriend is breaking up with me so I leave.

When I get outside I start running. I try to look where I am going but I can’t lift my head. All I see is road. My middle hurts. I start to stumble, remember I can fly. I try to fly to a McDonalds and my feet lift off the ground, set back down.

I try again and I think I am flying.

 

69.

 

I should have been sad that Bowie is dead right

I mean the guy made me believe in aliens

That is very important to me

I was an atheist when I was young because I didn’t know how to do magic yet

I don’t identify as agnostic because I got too much proof

I like to believe that heaven is going off into space and having adventures and shit

Bowie is defs doing that so I am not sad

I mean whats the fucking point of being a cynic right

 

Part of being a bipolar human means that sometimes it will be a Sunday afternoon and things will have been Going Wrong for a while now and you hate yourself and you’ve forgotten your friends and it’s always gonna be this way forever. There is a knot in your chest and it rises and you know something’s gotta change soon or there is a storm of fire coming or Judgement.

Part of being a writer means sometimes all that comes outta your writing whole is shitty heartfelt poetry because deep down we all saps no matter how many adverbs you edit out or how many ex-wives you give your character.

 

Flux Capacitor

 

And if I don’t return

If I’m different, if I learn

Then I just want you to know

That I did, I loved you so

 

If it’s time for me to range

Out of earshot, if I change

Know that I still call your name

Even though I’m not the same

 

If I have to move

If I’m gone, just let me prove

I can get the things I lack

That I can make it back

 

And if I forget

The steps that brought me here

 

Let me regret

That I don’t have you near

 

If you slip away

And I don’t shed a tear

 

Let me remember the day

And the name that I held dear

Well guys I have gone and done one hundred blog posts and I am still yet to make any kind of money from it. I have officially wrote A Lot of things and some of you been listening to the voices in my head for quite a time now. Shout out to Dean’s mum.

There is a lot of self-absorbed, meaningful bullshit on this blog so for my century I know I had to up the ante some. This site has been a journey, my development into the writer I am today, and as such I wrote about a journey that is very personal to me and has shaped how I approach writing every time I sit down at my shitty laptop. Thanks for reading guys I do it for my army of spam bot followers.

 

Film Review: Battle of Five Armies

 

Peter Jackson you piece of shit. You A+ fuckwit. You sack of assorted genitals. You grub brained greed golem. You vacuous bank account person. You computer generated image of a human being. You son of a bitch.

When I was very young my father read The Hobbit to me and my siblings, even after my parents got divorced and we saw him only every second weekend and on holidays. He is an excellent speaker and did all the voices, brought to life the characters that Tolkien wrote with such love and imagination. Even though I for some reason pictured Bilbo as a tiny lizard person and Gandalf as an elderly chinese man, that story is still the most vivid and meaningful  experience of fantasy I have had to this day.

The battle of five armies is three hours of old people in front of green screens playing dragon ball z. I walked out of a movie about elves and mountains in the comfort of my own home. How.

In case you never had a childhood and were instead born a bullshit salesman with a large budget and a maths sum that had to be a positive number at the end, here is a list of how not to suffocate the child inside everyone under the giant dump you have taken on our memories.

The Hobbit is not a videogame. Videogames are not good stories. You ever sat down and watched someone play videogames for three hours? It is at best mediocre, even if you are high as snoop dogg on his birthday. Video games are entertaining because they immerse the player in a setting by presenting themed challenges. You do not get a turn in the battle of five armies. It is a badly scripted cut scene that you can’t skip through and you don’t even get to vent your mounting frustration by pretending you are hitting all the characters you hate with your sword designed by a thirteen year old that gets erections when they draw boobs on elves.

The Hobbit is not a stoner comedy. Point me to the line in the book, you bastard, that says “Gandalf gave Radagast a hit from his weed pipe. Weed smoke puffed out of Radagast’s ears. He was high. Hilarious.” Stoner comedies are not good. Stoner comedy fantasy is a special kind of worse. Stoner comedy fantasy adaptations of beloved children’s books are about as fun as inducing an aneurism by reading comments on auspol articles while Kanye West screeches to the tune of an army of fedora wearing ukuleles. You like drugs and fantasy? Buy a caravan, pretend to be an elf in a bikini on your Xpensive box and try not to drive any motor vehicles or make any dogshit movies.

The Hobbit is not about tennis balls. Ranting about the over-reliance of CGI in modern cinema is incredibly cliché but that is because you keep fucking doing it you morons. A good story needs only a plot and characters. The plot doesn’t have to be intelligent or original as long as you can get the audience to relate, and the characters don’t need to be deep or interesting as long as they are endearing. The Hobbit was meant to be proof of that how do you fuck that up. Giving someone a fuck off CGI mount is not character development dipshit who made you. You made Ian Mckellen cry I don’t care that you threw him a party afterwards bad job.

The one achievement of that half assed fuckfight of a movie was the scene where Bilbo and Gandalf are sitting next to each other, traumatised by all the imaginary orcs they made pchew noises at and only able to provide awkward facial expressions and body language to each other as comfort after such evil times. I walked out before then but it was exactly the scene that played out between my brother and I after the film.

It’s possible that your hands were tied on this one, that my ire is misdirected. It is hard enough to get a film produced, pandering to the whim of public opinion and the stipulations of those who provide funding to heap more upon their pile of cursed gold. Just maybe next time adapt The Wheel of Time or something, that thing was already a piece of shit.

Peter Jackson if you are reading this I really loved your adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and if you or your studio(?) are hiring in any kind of capacity I am available after ten-thirty am on a good day.

Once I went to a writing event and had this conversation about the two types of writer with a student she said all organised writers are jealous of tortured writers and I said I am a tortured writer which I knew meant I was a bullshit person but hey we all monkeys and then I drank too much wine and there were a lot of old important people there and it got confusing.

I been writers blocked up like a post guinness bog lately and it was getting me down and loathsome so I wrote some heartfelt poetry to the universe pleading to get a god damn break for a change and by the end I had wrote something and I remembered how to write again so now I am writing a novel coming soooon.

 

Prayer of the Hot Mess

 

Dear Universe

Is it ok

If just for today

I am allowed to be a mess

 

Can I not clean my house

And let other people see

The clothes on the floor in every room

Don’t mean I’m depressed

 

Can I just smoke cigarettes

Weed, drink booze just please

I know I’m trying to quit

But I can’t write this stressed

 

Can no one ask me questions

I don’t remember these:

Where I’m going, what I’m doing

Can I just fail this test

 

Cos my muse is beaten up

Bloodied, broken, been abused

 

And I don’t know how I got here

This is not the place I choosed

 

I just want to write something

Like nobody showed me how

 

And I need another sentence

So can I be a mess just now

The year is well into sci fi. Internet scams now include houses on Mars. They turned The Hobbit into a zero player videogame. I saw Tony Hawk stumbling around on a hoverboard because his ass old now.  I been writing around since declared Not Able but Money People want me to get a Real Job. Apparently it is nigh time I returned from outer space and put the mission of the sacred heart on hold so I can make coffee for some arsehole who is angry about how many metal discs he has to cough up to get kilojoules.

 

Ancient Work History

 

Male Staff

KFC

Early 2007

 

Responsibilities:

Covering colleagues for weed breaks

Beatboxing

Making that gross ass waste gravy

 

Skills Acquired:

Stealth Vomiting

How to ask for lunch breaks

Complete resistance to burn injuries

 

Sandwich Artist

Subway

2007-2008

 

Responsibilities:

Secret drinks fridge police/main offender

Food Court soundtrack

Every damn thing

 

Skills Acquired:

Caffeine

How to be one of gang

Made a sandwich so bad there was a picture on the internet

 

I tried to get into the air force about here but it turned out Warrant Officers hate exactly people like me. Dodged several bullets.

 

Student

QUT

2008-2010

 

Responsibilities:

Public Transport

Gandalf sleep with eyes open thing

Attending (didn’t)

 

Skills Acquired:

Keeping my damn mouth shut

Beer

How to bullshit

 

Sandwich Artist

Subway

One day somewhere in 2009 I think

 

Responsibilities:

Way Too Many

 

Skills Acquired:

I quit as soon as I was further than yelling distance from the store so nope I guess

 

Disabled

My house

2010

 

Skills Acquired:

Beer Weight

How to be cool with hallucinations

Killed it on fallout

 

Muse

Gumtree

That really weird week in 2010

 

Responsibilities:

I was supposed to have conversations(?) with this real intense American dude and maybe travel the world and shit

 

Skills Acquired:

How to realise that is probably serial killer

 

Wrote Website (Should have learned what that is called in uni)

Startup Genetics Company/High School Friend who had too high an opinion of me

2010

 

Responsibilities:

Advertising

Explaining

Yes I Know What I Am Doing nods

 

Skills Acquired:

How to hate advertising

How to hate stereotypes

How to hate 8am

 

I don’t remember like any of 2011

 

General Writer

My House

Always

 

Responsibilities:

Write things

Hope

Stress

 

Skills Acquired:

Too self-deprecating for this section

 

Sorcerer Technically

My House

Dawn of Spacetime

 

Responsibilities:

Not much

I give a lot of wise advice if that counts

 

Skills Acquired:

Fencing

Diabolism

Elemental Manipulation

Divination

Astral Projection

Nothing Useful

 

Also I gave my number to three different record producers who wanted me to be in a band but I am pretty sure now those guys were just hitting on me so no dice there

 

Possible Career Opportunities

Glam Rock Frontman or any kind of President

Bouncer at medieval themed bar

Normal people things surely

 

I do weddings

She says don’t speak to me of the well, and shows me

Her house, the colour of sun-bleached brick and wiped clean beige counters

Wedged into the coast with many, no beach line, houses half sunk

 

The top, unlucky level thirteen, cold dread rationed from above

A maze of bedrooms, torn butcher’s paper loud in the wind

Drawn through the crawl in and die spaces, she’s slept in them all

 

At the bottom a stair, a basement, a cupboard, a breach

An earthen shaft, lousy with wet

The ocean counting in waves, flushing us down

 

Light stained by brown water, a rise and then a dip

And then dry clay too deep for roots

A line of memory a long way back up

 

I see the well, below

I see hellfire, horn crowned lords, the classics

But I don’t understand

 

She says

Don’t speak to me of the well

It goes deeper still

You see the top

 

She says

You draw from the bottom

You dig forever down

You are well past the sight of others

 

She points, wings, chains, blood and iron

 

Says, these are things like any other

They are solid, make sense

 

You do not need the rules to be real

 

Hell is where the fire comes from

And there is fire here to burn anything

Don’t look into my eyes or you will see

How long I’ve been gone

That I can’t remember where home is

 

Don’t read me

I am not finished

And my words are wrong

 

Don’t dig me up

I am not buried

I can still breathe

 

Don’t point me the way

My eyes will wander

I will get lost

 

I do not know

If you will wait

 

I do not know

What will be left

 

I do not know

If I will remember when I see it

 

But I promise

 

The tide will bring me back

 

And the wind will point in your direction

 

You will see me take those last few steps to your door

 

I will breathe the air I know and have no more miles to tread alone

 

The hours I missed will be gone and nothing

 

When I make it home

Weird kid you’re gonna need to learn. Nobody is going to teach you what parts of your education are wrong. Your parents will try their best if you are lucky and you will end up standing on their mistakes until you make enough of your own to realise it never mattered whose fault anything was. Trusting to the government and the plotted line is going to get you nowhere forward because the whole place is run by idiots exactly like you. Weird kid you’re gonna need to work things out.

 

Hours:

Life goes forever and you will forget all of it. Relationships will last until you have gotten drunk and dug up all your lies, created an entire new music collection and fucked someone else. Grudges are not useful.

You were also an asshole in high school.

Get pissed off if somebody throws time is short/live in the now/plan for the future bullshit at you, it will help you think harder.

Time is messed. You will spend weeks trapped in a moment. In the dark you will travel backwards through every part of your life until you are a scared animal. There is no way to tell which one of your prophecies will come true.

It is best not to think about it until you find the right album.

 

Bullshit:

It takes a stupid amount of friendship for anyone to talk to you in a voice other than the one they use for all the other vaguely ape-shaped noise makers that fill the background.

If your parent’s told you the reason that they tell you that they didn’t do drugs it would be a more convincing argument but you would still probably do some drugs.

Anything that a person in a movie/song/tv show/book/comic/giant picture/uplifting video tries to convince you is a good idea is designed to make money.

Money is exactly a bunch of numbers someone you haven’t met has decided is important and will make damn sure they keep track of for you. It is how many meals are between you and stealing to eat. The more people it is spread around the smaller the stupid decisions that can be made with it.

Everyone’s personality is buried under a heap of mental. You will see it if you keep eye contact until they are uncomfortable or if you spend enough time digging through their shit. People’s bullshit includes music/television/movie/reading tastes, language choice, means of income, living arrangement, circle of friends, clothes, haircut or anything done as a means to scrape some individuality out of the pile of humans. None of this is important, you can dig through any amount of a person’s shit and forget what it smells like as soon as you see them cry. Most of your relationship with anyone is going to be non-verbal and mainly shaped by how long you spent the last few hours with them.

 

Secrets:

Everybody has seen some shit that they will not talk about. If you don’t start out short and full blown crazy then you will be watched closely. Grown men will die psychic until we make ourselves robots. People have been pointing fingers and making wild eyes since we figured out how to yell at each other.

You will get no help with secret things. They are yours. Each person has their own god, even if they read it from the same book. We all have our own ways of bending our universe. You are born with your body already working and you will die figuring out why.

This is the important bit.

 

Stars:

Weird kid you are going to need a dream. Fuck off the disney songs and drink those stars from your eyes. A good portion of the population want to kill themselves. If someone tries to crush your hope fight for it. It is survival of the last one left alive.

You are going to have to make the reason why things happen to you. You are going to have to starve yourself for something. You are going to need a rope to hang on to and you will need your last gasp of air.

You are supposed to be your own chosen one. There are 7 billion people that don’t know what they’re doing and need at least one person who’s got their back. You only use 10% of your brain for making bad decisions. Destiny is a result.

 

Weird kid you gotta work things out. Everyone has their own universe to save. If you don’t make things important to you then you will spend your life sleeping.

Weird kid your thoughts are just thoughts. Sometimes they are words, or numbers, visions or voices. If you thought like another person you would be a different animal. You will remember the thoughts you need when the time is right and you will unload the ones that are too heavy on friendly ears. The rest could have never happened.

So I finally checked my emotions and got the memo that love is bullshit. Everybody knew this already which makes a lot of sense now you fucks. Here I been getting misty eyed and planning speeches while everybody is pretending like a regular person and bouncing around like hot rabbits.

Invented by bacteria as a sex part magnet, love is a tool used by the wicked to trade people, property, wallet sizes, tiny people and bodily fluids. It sells exactly one song, rocks and uncomfortable clothing. It gives you the classic “look over there” while it drains your bank account, precious lifespan and enthusiasm for doin it.

And now society has shoved its gross ass love all down my throat and got me feeling like half a person just because I ain’t making some poor lass deal with the slow heat death of my anxieties. If I don’t make a girl like me with lies and haircuts, somehow figure out what comes next and then marriage I am not doing my part for the overall mass of the human population.

If it were up to me I would jump this train wreck, deal without text politics, frown conversations and the dramatic soundtrack. I would take my lonely island in a sea of booze thank you.

But the songs are already my favourites and my nerves got me too big of a heartbeat and what I’m really trying to say is that I’ve had that god damn Janis Joplin song stuck in my head for three days now and I can’t afford to buy a plane ticket to move somewhere foreign and marry her ghost.