Ghostbuster.

She patted my left shoulder, i wandered why, then my right, followed by both my hips.

Apparently i had ghosts tethered to me, ghosts from the land that i live on. Spirits caught in limbo, well if my major anatomical joints could be conferred such a description. So naturally, she removed them for me, as we continued to dine and be merry. She was a witch doctor of 20 years experience, myself a serendipitous guest unknowingly haunted.

'Three females and two males' she elaborates, 'the female ones have been preventing you from forming meaningful relationships in recent years.'

Why of course! Makes sense now...

The eyes of my translating friend widened in sincere astonishment. 'What?' I ask, 'more than 5?' No. Don't be afraid she reassures me, which curiously had the opposite effect.

'What? Do tell.'

'They are coming. All 468 of them.'

'Eh? Who?'

'Your ancestors, they will soon arrive here and rid you of these ghosts'

'This is a good thing right?'

'Of course'

Home now, feeling lighter. Or is it heavier?

7 minutes.

"Hey there!"
"What?"
"Nothing, just wanted to get a response from you"

He turned the corner. The pavement was littered with concrete wrinkles characteristic of an urban landscape engineered on the ad hoc whim of town planners playing catchup to an unrelenting gentrification of an old ghetto, now forcibly hip, and ostentatious. Except for the pavement, a quiet bastion of honesty.

She threw her right shoulder against the rough inertia of the brick wall. A smile unfolded. The cheek, the audacity, the nerve. Ipod vibrates in left trouser pocket with a brevity suggestive of an SMS - her ex. Focusing on the space that delineated an absence of him she settles on taking in the ill-defined space that punctuated this ill-defined moment that will pass like many before, with a exaggerated mindfulness disproportionate to it's significance.

He walks on. Tomorrow they'll meet again, for more of it. For now, artichoke soup awaits. Cold hands find their way into warm jacket pockets.

9 minutes transpire.

Acorn.

Somewhere there is someone traveling interstate to deliver an acorn to a loved one. An acorn found below a tree during an afternoon stroll that was spent inwardly thinking about her. A walk through suburbia, amidst parked cars, lawn mowing and neat bricks with tapered concrete driveways coloured by an inner hue that is anything but paedestrian. An absence of epiphany, kapow and noise. Just an ordinary stroll to the tempo of a meandering mind that culminated under a tree to be that sole witness of an acorn falling to the ground.

So as to be picked up. Delivered. And shared.

Ode to Ocarina

Dear Katherine,

I broke it.

The string got stuck upon the corner of the table as i swiveled in excitement at finding a website that would slowly make a clay musician out of me. It took half a moment to smash upon my ceramic floor.



So sorry.

I still wander why i didn't just attend your graduation when you invited me too. It didn't matter that we were apart. Being there would have.

I remember you. Not always. Not even often. But i remember you. You were a bit crazy. Crazy enough to think that you could change for someone, craziness that made you believe that such a thing would be worth it. It isn't.

Hope you are well, married and happy. Not necessarily in that order.

Remember that leaf, with the ink on it?

I do.

Ordinary things.

Days are filled with moments collected for that conversation. A conversation that explodes from a dormant reservoir of an unshared biography. Moments that are characteristically silent and coloured with the narrowed aperture of eyelids as the spirit focuses it's energy to take an inner photograph in all the dimensions that only an imperfect memory can capture. Which is then stored away, and forgotten indefinitely until it reappears during 'that' conversation.

About filipino chicken feet.

Politics.

Definitions are important when they rest on something that resembles truth and have the quality of being unquestionably obvious. A doctor is defined by their inclination to care for patients. In absence of this simple impetus the role, however monolithically revered by society should erode and dissolve in a vacuous mess of pretense.

Hospital medical administration is defined in a similar manner. It breaks my heart to hear a good friend assert 'they don't care' as if it were an accepted given. We define them.

So i wrote a document with the desire to affect change. A document that was one part diagnosing the particulars of ineffective administration and 3 parts pragmatic suggestions for improvement. Diction was mindfully tempered by a consistent theme of diplomacy but inadequacies were presented adequately blunt to reflect a palpable dissatisfaction that was several generations deep. Said document found it's way up to the meta-administration that is the nebulous locus of administrative control, whom in turn forwarded a directive to not discuss the entire content in absence of appropriate 'executives' being in attendance.

I was summoned to meet with the Medical Director to discuss the 'Bigger than Ben-Hur' nature of my document. Meetings without a clear agenda are like a blood test for anaemia. Repeated tests only yield the same conclusion and quite fragrantly leaves the problem unfixed. I don't like meetings. Would sooner bake a cake.

Rhetoric based on an insidious employment of corporate jargon to confound and dissolve the gravity of a real problem that affects a multitude of doctor's lives and their families and ultimately patients, deserves rhetoric with more substance. Please don't knowingly use terms i don't (need to) understand to attain empty levity in argument and alleged authority on subject matter, because it's quite obvious, suffocatingly myopic and blatantly deceitful. Doctor's are aware of the dubious power that speaking a foreign language in 'English' yields, so let's not play that game.

Politics is vexing. But necessary to alter the status quo. Now is unfortunately not the time to make that change. I will wait until this wee fire burns big enough to not be put out by the wind outside but be fed by it.

I have spoken enough for now, so will return to listening for a while until my next eruption of consciousness.

Grapes.

Ceramic bowl sits stationary with an absence of grapes. Grapes that are no more, and probably busy reincarnating amidst the nocturnal contents of my bowel. Change is constant, but then - what is constant? Something that is fixed, unchanged? A strange paradoxical comment that. So often offered as an unquestioned morsel of profundity during 3am conversations. It's true of course, any statement with the audacity to capture the ambiguous duality of things lies closer to the asymptote of truth than the dirty progeny of reason. Speaking of which, i haven't had one of those for a long while... 3am conversations.

Gladys is dead.

I'm not.

A near death experience keeps one honest. A blessing. Life is (potentially) short. So a fraudulent existence bathed in delusions of longevity, security, predictability and plethora of should-be is the antithesis of the way it can be and will be.

Will sleep now. Pause it all biologically for a wee while, until the eruption of possibility that tomorrow brings wake me up. It's gonna be fucking awesome.