Our final hours in the city (versus the eternity it took to get home) will only fill a couple of paragraphs. I’ll provide that in a second, but what’s more important (to me) is what the experience meant overall–its affect–and if you’ll allow me some grandiosity here I suspect it changed me a lot. Like it or not, culture in Oz is a hybrid of which American customs and social mores feature significantly. So it was enlightening to trace some of my ‘adopted American values’ to their root.
But facts first: we woke on our final day in the US to a blocked toilet. Not blocked by anything nasty we put into it, just blocked. Our plan was to have breakfast, pack bags, grab lunch and enjoy Bryant Park one last time, then check-out and begin the commute home. We didn’t want to sit around twiddling our metaphorical thumbs while they unblocked the dunny, so we left housekeeping a ‘Surprise!’ note, a bit extra by way of final gratuity, and my MetroCard, in case she can make use of the remaining $16. Stepping out, we discovered no desire whatsoever to frantically tramp the streets one last time: we both just wanted to go home. So after a bite to eat, a quick circuit of the Park, and a look through the New York Public Library, we left.
Insert here, if it interests you, a 5.25 hour trans-American flight, a thirty minute transfer at LAX, a 14.5 hour trans-Atlantic flight, one headache-inducing hour in a succession of queues with about fifteen hundred exhausted and bad-smelling travellers at Sydney airport, and then suddenly we were in our car driving home on a bright, bright Sydney autumn day. So good to be home. We stayed awake, unpacking two massively overloaded suitcases, lunching with my daughter, repeating summaries of the trip to different persons. Everybody being kind in the face of our fatigue. But when I got a quiet moment, what I felt was a bone-deep satisfaction. I used to think I wanted a bigger house, but now I’d rather stay in my modest dwelling and save money for more trips. So where next? Italy, Scandinavia, or the British Isles?
I suspect impressions, like waves, never stop coming, with every seventh one or so a complete surprise. I’ve already returned to favourite NY-based books and movies for a greedy fix, but those are other peoples’ memories of the place, not mine. Reading ‘Humans of New York’ on the way home proved one thing, though: I didn’t meet any real Americans. Just as those employed by the French tourism industry made sure I kept out of the banlieus of the Parisian périphérique, I didn’t get to experience the working-poor of Brownsville, USA, either. But, so what? Was I meant to? More offensive, surely, are those bearded, sandal-wearing, bandanna-clad 18-35yo wankers who seek out the shittest locations on Earth so they can update their Fakebook with ‘look at me keepin’ it real in Aleppo‘ selfies. It was a holiday, ffs, not a sociological mission into deepest, darkest America.
Home at last, I’ve indulged myself in an extra week of leave to get over the fatigue, but also to prevent work from overwhelming my thoughts before I finished processing them. From a poetry perspective, expect some. This is some good shit. But I want to give the poetising time too, because I need to work out how the homeless girl with acne-scarring in Time Square relates to the plastic-surgery victim I saw on Lexington. Because they do, somehow, and that’s exactly where my poems are born, in the interstices. And excuse me in advance if I can’t help betraying an now-unrequitable longing for NY pizza and cheesecake.
But you can keep your coffee, aight, it was terrible.
I mentioned haruspication in my previous post (telling the future by examining the entrails of animals) but there’s really no need to dirty your hands. Could it be possible, for example, on the basis of the far-right surge in the US to predict the outcome not only of the French presidential election in April-May 2017, but also the Australian election all the way into the far reaches of time (ie. 2019)? Hell, why not. I mean, nobody is reading this shit anyway. Am I right? AM I RIGHT? Of course I’m right…
Because it’s a foregone conclusion in France, let’s begin with them. In short, while they’re currently in the throes of their primaries, nobody really has a chance against Marine Le Pen and the National Front. France seems unlikely to forgive François Hollande’s socialist left for failing to protect them from terrorism. Le Pen would exsanguinate a thousand baby harp-seals with a rusty coathanger to win the election, and then will impose a regime that will make the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit of 1980’s East Germany seem like a bunch of fun guys. But that won’t be the end of it, oh no. To counter the civil unrest Marine Le Pen’s term will inevitably stir in the Gallic breast, Marine Le Pen will cede leadership of the National Front to her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen. More angry words will be written about Marion, the ultra-right’s weapon of mass distraction, than there ever were about Trump. Big call, but you heard it here first.
Following a tactically-unsound double-dissolution of government earlier this year, Oz goes to the polls in 2019. Brexit and Trump have given an oxygen-boost to conservative politicians downunder, especially the ultra-right represented by independent Pauline Hanson, famously dubbed by yours-truly as the Wicked Witch of the North. And I have to say, if I am going to be doing some longitudinal raging at the poster-child of the Australian right-wing movement, why in hell couldn’t she look more like Marion and less like a shaved Pomeranian about to savage your about the knees? While there’s no possibility One Nation will ever govern in their own right, she could hold balance-of-power with the renascent neo-cons of a new-look Liberal National Party. And that’s my prediction: that Malcolm in a Muddle will be replaced with somebody infinitely more loathsome, who’ll ideologically if not literally hop into bed with this scaly horror.
That’s it. A short post. Had to do it before my crystal ball went blank. Either that was a genuine psychic flash into the future, a completely random guess, a symptom of my enveloping pessimism for the political future of this world, or reflux on account of all the alcohol I consumed this afternoon. No matter what, I think us progressives have our backs against the wall and will need to dig deep. I’m don’t know what the answer is, but one thing I am completely sure of is this: we live in interesting times.
Tourism Australia are going to shit when they read this. But it’s not that I want to discourage our Asians neighbours from spending all three days of their annual leave here, or that I don’t welcome our European cousins despite their maudlin tales of economic woe and devalued currencies, no; it’s just this sense of civic duty I have which impels me to warn international visitors that they’re coming to a country where everything wants to, you know, kill and eat them.
Fun fact, contrary to popular opinion, the word ‘australia‘ is actually an ancient Aboriginal term for ‘land of many deaths’. Why? Maybe because 40,000 years ago when the first Aboriginals came here, the infamous thylacoleo carnifex (aka. the marsupial lion, the real ‘dropbear’) was a minor pest compared with all the other man-eating megafauna rampaging across the continent. When I say ‘minor pest’ what I actually mean is an apex predator the size of large lion, that could stand on its hind quarters and climb trees where it functioned superbly as an ambush predator, with humongous carnassian premolars that gave it the most powerful bite of any mammal living or extinct, and which endowed it with a unique bite designed to — and here I shit you not — decapitate it’s prey with a single bite.
They put a ‘dreamtime’ gloze over it now, but Oz in 40K BC was more living nightmare than sylvan idyll, with gigantic carnivorous kangaroos that hunted the Pliocene woodlands in packs, 10′ meat-eating birds called the ‘Demon Duck of Doom’ (Bullockornis planei), lizards 18′ long with rows of viperous fangs that remain the largest venomous creatures of all time (Megalania), and a python that was at least 30′ long that lived in the fuc*ing trees, for god’s sake. Pity the poor Aboriginals who, upon seeing all this nasty bitey shit, though ‘Piss this off for a joke, bro! This place is a fuc*ing deathtrap, ay!’ and turned around, only to find the landbridge to Asia under three hundred metres of water infested with, you guessed it, toothsome prehistoric sharks (Megalodon) the size of locomotives. So, welcome to the land downunder!
Fast forward 400 centuries, and the only megafauna we see in Oz now are fat white people herding in the food-courts of our vast urban shopping centres for a Middle Earthian second breakfast. The hungry beasties that used to chase young Aboriginal men and women through the riparian wilderness are all long gone, and you might think the average chubby Aussie now basks in relative safety. And we do, but we’re not silly, either. We all sleep with one eye open, and subconsciously shake out our footwear before putting anything on. And we trust nothing, not even this little bloke:
While we’re as much in danger of death by arterial clogging as any American, we’re much more likely to be killed and eaten by our fauna, and the unpublicised fact remains that Australia, land of many deaths, remember, is the number one spot in the world to visit if you want to die of natural causes (if being bitten, stung or scratched to death = natural). So if you want to get shot in the street by some fuc*ed up teenager with a handgun, go to São Paulo. Want to become pink mist at the hands of a Russian airstrike? Work for an international aid agency in the streets of Aleppo. Come to Australia, though, and we’ll let our wildlife do the dirty work. The girl in the picture below? Never seen again.
I’m not here to remind you people that we have more world-class deadly snakes than anywhere else on Earth. Our poisonous snakes are so famously killy that people forget about the pythons we have here in plague proportions which grow to 8.5 metres or more (28′) in length and can swallow an adult. Forget about our spiders, like the common Sydney Funnelweb spider will bite through a steel-capped boot and kill you on the spot, or that our water buffalo are cantankerous bastards who’ll gore you without warning, or that the male red kangaroos, like our grumpy cassowaries, will disembowel you with one kick, as this idiot is about to find out.
Likewise, you all know to cover up and avoid the deadly diseases borne by our ticks and mosquitos, or the friendly fatal jabs of our blue-ringed octopi, cone snails and box jellies, the most dangerous animal on earth, btw, with a sting so painful it stops your heart. Sure, go for a swim, idiot, and enjoy the bull, tiger and great white sharks that seethe along our coastlines. Think you’re playing it smart by sticking to freshwater? Our billabongs are full of estuarine crocodiles so big they hunt great white sharks for fun, and which will wait patiently for you step too close. Every couple of days someone disappears off a surfboard or gets yanked out of his fishing boat, and us Aussies don’t bat an eyelid. That’s just life (and death) in the Great Southern Land.
Instead, I’m here to alert our international visitors to a new and heretofore unheralded menace. One which can kill or maim you if unlucky, and it’s waiting for you the moment you step off the aircraft. I have unsuccessfully battled this creature every spring since childhood, and bear scars both physical and psychological as a result. Unlike the angry ‘roos, lurking crocs and patrolling sharks, all Australians fear this savage beast, which hunts and harries us from the moment we step outside our homes. Nobody is safe. They could be (and are) anywhere. So, let me introduce you to the infamous Australian magpie.
Death from above, that’s what they are. These black and white winged devils live for 25 years, are highly intelligent, remember faces, bear grudges, target the eyes, are stealth attackers, and are utterly relentless in their territoriality. There’s little we can do. Forget retaliation, it only makes them more vicious. Forget gluing eyes to the back of your helmet, they know the difference and scorn your clumsy attempts. Forget waving a stick above your head, it just aggravates them. Forget full faced helmets, they just go for your neck and shoulders instead. Don’t bother with the zip ties or pipe cleaners, that just makes them laugh (before they attack you). The only defence is to avoid them altogether. But you don’t know where the next one is UNTIL IT ATTACKS YOU, so that method is fraught. Our plight has become so desperate we have a dedicated magpie attack website. Our terror has even been featured in the NY Times.
Now, you may think, come on dude, it’s just a bird. Well, smartass, this is a bird that thinks its an attack-dog on steroids. Literally. During attack season the male magpie is flooded with 480% more testosterone than normal. It turns them into deranged aerial killers. They come at you like they’ve been fired from a crossbow straight at your head. The magpie is proof that dinosaurs evolved into nasty, nasty birds. What makes the universally feared is that they will always attack. Full stop. Getting taken by a croc is a numbers game, roll the dice to get eaten by a shark; but a magpie will attack you 100% of the time. They are scary motherfuc*ers with a thirst for human blood. Look at this poor bloke; he’s dead now.
Thank me later, but if you have plans on visiting us downunder, maybe cancel them until the wave of terror is over. December, hopefully. Until then, if you can’t change flights, at least come prepared — by which I mean, make sure you get medical insurance, because nothing can save you from the magpie. You will be attacked, you may be injured, permanently scarred or even blinded. I’m sorry to be the bearer of ill tidings, but if you thought you had all the perils of Australia covered because you read the red section at the back of the guidebook entitled ‘Things in Australia that want to kill you’ please think again. Forewarned is forearmed. The Australian magpie, silent assassin of the skies.
Home at last, I’ve indulged myself in an extra week of leave to get over the fatigue, but also to prevent work from overwhelming my thoughts before I finished processing them. From a poetry perspective, expect some. This is some good shit. But I want to give the poetising time too, because I need to work out how the homeless girl with acne-scarring in Time Square relates to the plastic-surgery victim I saw on Lexington. Because they do, somehow, and that’s exactly where my poems are born, in the interstices. And excuse me in advance if I can’t help betraying an now-unrequitable longing for NY pizza and cheesecake.
