Mop and Repeat

For me, it is Bleach. The smell of Bleach. To be precise, it is the smell of Bleach, diluted with warm water and dragged over white tiles with a damp and clean sponge-mop. As the streaks evaporate and the smell of watered down Bleach lingers with only a hint at its potency - that smell. I like that smell.

It is not nostalgic nor evocative nor comforting nor escapist. It is just a smell. It is its own thing and I like it for what it is - without your judgment or need to explain it to or for me.

The time some waiter told me that he liked the smell of Gasoline, was the first time I realised that folks out there like some fucked-up smells. Gasoline? The smell that rises up off those few drop that drip out when you pull the nozzle back out of the tank at the gas station? That smell? Really? Why?

Because he did. Because I like Bleach. Because her neighbor likes a reed diffuser set (do you know what that is?) that pushes out a sickly sweet and thick odor, that can only be described as: a plastic cup of coconut bubble tea sweetened with a kilo each of icing sugar, sweet & low and stevia, so that it's almost glowing.

Because your Mum likes the smell of the ink and paper in the glossy magazines at her divorce lawyer's reception. That smell is also there at her personal trainer's, her realtor's and her osteopath's. Because his boyfriend likes the smell of nail polish remover. Because they said they like smell of wet dirt.

Because you like what you like. Whatever weird smell you like. You goddamn, fucking weirdo.

And A Plastic Warning

Farringdon is such a fun word to say.

Say it:

Farringdon.

It can also be a dramatic word to say, if you can pull together a partly hoarse voice filled with a jumble of recognition, remorse and wistfulness.

Farringdon.

It is after midnight and I'm not drinking nor drugging - neither myself nor someone else. So it is just me and the beige mist and the cotton touch of the sheets and the still, thick warmth trapped and left over in the room - even though the heat of a blazing afternoon has long set off and away. That balmy, floating atmosphere tangles and fights with the cool breeze entering in off the fly-screen door that opens out onto a timber-slat decked courtyard.

Except those slats ain't no timber.

They're plastic or resin or composite or something. I'm not exactly sure. I just know they are not timber. The landlord told me that. We were signing the lease and he hadn't said much and I'd asked even less. The questions usually come when one party doesn't pay the rent or another party doesn't fix the rusted hot water system. But I was just signing the lease and he was just giving me the keys. Neither of us had any need for questions. I just silently scribbled away and he spoke none.

Except for on his way out.

He picked up the papers and after putting a hand on the front door handle, he turned back around, pointed with his chin and said:

Minimalism

I live in an aluminum half boatshed. I eat panadols three at a time and drink sharp mineral water. I fall in love when I shouldn't and only take intimacy in ounce shots when I should. I report on places I'm not in and tell stories that you think are true. I find hope and lose guitar picks and take time and miss calls and respond out of order. And I'm lucky. Luckier than you. For sure.

I like accents. I like it when there is a disconnect between what is being said and the accent it is being delivered in. Like a French person dropping Australian slang, but slower and rounder and more romantic than we would spit out the same phrase or shortened word. If I didn't want to be the sort of writer that I now don't want to be, I would have written that I like it when there is a "dissonance to the delivery". But I don't want to be that sort of writer. And I don't want to put a baby in your guts. And I don't want to know what your dietary requirements are. And I don't want to pretend to care.

a hyphen is as good as a comma to a blind man

A few years back there, somewhere in the middle of England, I meet this guy. Actually, now that I think on it, I remember exactly where it was that I met him.

Just below the dawdling canal running through Startford-upon-Avon, winds a road heading east out to Wellesbourne - or some town just as equally dull. It was on that road that I met that Welsh-born, Midlands-raised, Red-head. Let's call him 'Welsh-Red'.

If you head the other way on that road - towards Bidford - you'd find yourself along a stretch of tar flanked by houses of the very rich and the very poor. No pattern to their procedure - they just all jumble in all together. A few mansions, then a shack, then a twisted metal garage door, then a tiny yellow car, then some more large houses, then a council flat. Another council flat and then a bald, high-price lawyer leaving the sprawling, low-slung house he bought for his bride some twelve years earlier. He was just dropping off the kids.  He doesn't live there anymore. That same bride done tossed him out months ago. She had been OK with his late night fraternising at the office, but once the gaggle of single mums in that line-up of cars outside school learned that he had unzipped his trousers with one of their very own in that very same line-up, well, you know...disloyalty, shame, embarrassment, betrayal, rage... it all leads to the same place - late Saturday nights at that grey-toned house with the kids and the estranged husband replaced by young men, strong drugs and un-eaten take-away. Only way to treat that particular pain....

But all that is on the road to Bidford. I met Welsh-Red on the road to Wellesbourne - whole different set-up on that side.

I Don't Remember

I can never remember which stripes are meant to be the slimming ones. Is it vertical or horizontal? I've been told that this is the stuff that matters, but I can never remember which ones are which. So I don't wear stripes. Not the vertical nor the the horizontal ones. Because I can't remember.

There is so much I don't do simply because I don't remember.

Always a Train

Elizabeth Cotten.

I have her story in my mind. A story about her. It might be true. It might not be. She is a real person. Was one anyway. You can see how real she is in the photo above. Photos don't never lie. So she definitely had a story. I'm just saying that I might have confused myself by borrowing a few different parts from other people's stories and then brought those pieces together into one story and then gone and attached all of that to her. That is certainly something I've done before.