Cry Tough, Kiki

On the Lonely Death of Jani Lane

2011-08-14T16:12:00.002+12:00


Jani Lane: 1964-2011

So it's true... the first big, professional, arena-level rock band I ever saw perform on stage... was Warrant.

I didn't go to the concert for them, but they made me laugh and I enjoyed the show anyway. My most enduring memory of the whole thing was the pretty girl in the front row who handed Jani Lane a note (which he read out over the mic): "Jani how I love you, let me suck the ways"... Jani's response was swift. "Get her a backstage pass!" he grinned. And we all cheered.

It was January 1991, and I was 12. 'Cherry Pie' was still on high rotation. Warrant were opening for Poison on the Flesh & Blood tour. The camaraderie between the bands seemed strong enough that CC DeVille actually played on 'Cherry Pie' (a fact that many didn't realize at the time). Looking back, we didn't really understand that that year was to be the big swansong for Hair Metal. Some pretty strong and decent albums came out in '91 and '92, but fashion was moving on, and the 12-year-olds like me were about to fall in love with Eddie "I hate to be a rock star" Vedder. I'm sure that bands of adult men don't really like to think that they're marketed to pubescent girls, but it's really outside of their control. Record companies know that older kids just don't create a "phenomenon" the way that a bunch of passionate pre-teens do. If you want Beatlemania, you need to find the mania... and then pretend that the band is really being marketed at the over-18s who can legally do all the stuff they're singing about.

Maybe it should have been a sign. A few weeks after I watched them in awe, Warrant ditched the Poison tour and made a bit of resentful noise about how they weren't being given enough room. They apparently felt that they were above the level of an opening band, and ought to headline on their own. I'll admit, I thought that Jani Lane was being an ungrateful dick. But I was 12, and my blind devotion was strong. Looking back, Warrant had good sales in the US and a handful of top ten hits. They were at the level where other bands had begun their headlining careers. If they'd got a record deal a couple years earlier, they would have become one of the big names of Hair Metal. But they peaked too late, and their next album (1992's Dog Eat Dog) sold a measly 500,000 copies. The party was well and truly over. The pretty girls had moved onto another bus someplace else, probably after pulling a flannel shirt over their halter tops. And the new bands showed them not joy and appreciation, but public disdain.

Excuse the subject matter, but this really is too good a song to let it go by unmentioned...

Yet the musicians don't just disappear when the spotlight turns off. We quit paying attention, but they still have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. They have to figure out how to make their way in a world where the rules have changed yet again. Most keep doing what they've always done: playing music and trying their darnedest to get paid for it. If I had that kind of burning talent, I'd struggle to quit playing too. But it can certainly be a rough life. You end up in yesterday's clothes, with a constant flu, eating a half-cold burger at 3am - the soles of your shoes all taped back on because you just can't stop needing them. After so many demands from promoters and agents who care more about making money off your hide than offering any kind of support or job security, I've heard plenty of people say they end up feeling like a used-up old whore. Not just on the outside: on the inside.

That's also often the point where all your good intentions can't reach that person anymore.

Of course, old rockers like Jani Lane meet far more spite than good intentions. I'm the first to admit that even I had a few jabs at him, in private. When I saw him on some rockumentary, complaining about the success of 'Cherry Pie'... well, it still sounded like ingratitude. Pretty sure he wasn't cursing 'Cherry Pie' when he was a fit young man who got that girl back to the bus on a cold, January night. I never made fun of his drinking problem though. I know how easy it is for men in his position to get that way. I've met those guys. It's embarrassing to watch what they do to their lives, and I guess even the fans who loved him would occasionally wish that he would just get off the stage and stop showing the world his gradual decline. Sometimes you can like someone and still want them to go away for their own sake. But I don't think they ever wanted him dead. It would have been a better, and much more deserved fate, to see him clean and healthy and ready to rock. He had a huge amount of brains and talent that he seemed to toss away. What we all need to understand (Jani included) was that that was a choice he had to make for himself. It sucks, but the only person who can really save you is you.

I started thinking about this while reading about how Glam fans have been affected by Jani's death, and how we all get so conditioned to defending the bands we love. I started thinking about it because I realized that time has tempered me in a way that it never did for Jani. Once, I would have agreed wholeheartedly that our knee-jerk defense of Warrant was a fundamental part of our love for their music... but I grew out of that. Their lives are not my life. I don't feel the need to defend the music I love anymore, simply because I genuinely don't give a shit what other people think of it. I'm not wounded by others' spite. I like what I like, and am peacefully contented to be outside of the herd. To many, my lack of a roaring defense means that I am no longer a "true fan"... but I couldn't give a shit about that either. I gained the self-confidence and self-assurance that Jani never really did. And I don't tend to assume that these grown men are in need of my protection.

But I didn't know Jani Lane. To me, his presence on this earth became something like seeing a guy you went to high school with. You were never really friends, but after a while you get old enough to forgive all the times you thought he acted like a douche, and hope that he forgives you for being kind of douchey too. You stop being jealous of his success and stop expecting him to be grateful for a life and career path that often kind of sucks anyway. And you just get comfortable with the idea that he's around, and you feel a bit sad when you see that he never really achieved everything he might once have achieved. If you pass him on the street, you'd probably say "hey" and ask after his kids. The confidence that allowed me to shrug off his critics was the self-same confidence that allowed me to forgive him in the first place.

What I know now was that Jani was lonely in a way that nobody should ever be. Nobody's dad should ever be left to die alone in a hotel room. I didn't wish him harm, but I never tried to help him either. I don't remember ever stepping up to his defense. I'm not totally convinced that it would have made a difference. I've tried to help people in Jani's position before, and I know it's hard for them to recognize love (or even benevolence) through the mist of so much contempt.

And how arrogant would it be to assume that the love of a "true fan" would have reached him in a way that the love of his wife and kids could not? I'm sure both Jani and I knew that the "love" expressed by fans is generally neither benevolent nor altruistic... nor, in fact, real. As Janis Joplin (another lonely death in a hotel room) once piqued: "Onstage I make love to 25,000 people - then I go home alone". That's not love, man. It looks like it, even smells like it, but it's not holding you day after day. It doesn't care about your worn-out shoes. It doesn't put up with you being a dick (and let's face it, we're all dicks sometimes).

Ironically, Warrant's first big hit was a pretty ballad about being blessed by the love of the right girl. And if Jani still believed in that, he might well have been waiting for an angel to drop down and rescue him. Shortly before he died, he wrote warmly about how he'd recently married "the love of my life". If we all want to reassure ourselves that our love and affection could have saved him... how shitty does that make his wife feel now? The fact is, all the love in the world is only a band aid if you haven't yet learned how to love yourself. The "right girl" might well come along, but you choose whether or not you let her in. It's easier to ignore that level of self-determination and pretend that it's all up to other people - it's easier to feel self-pity - but the only person who's ever really able to help you is the one who faces you in the mirror.

A friend of mine described Jani's death as "another R&R sob story", and... well... he's right. When you're in front of a crowd you might be able to convince yourself that these people really like you - the real you. When you're alone with your vodka on a day off... it's not that easy. We all probably "get" how Jani Lane ended up the way he did. Perhaps the most tragic fact of his death is that the world will gain neither insight nor compassion from his passing. We already knew how these stories tend to end. I don't know that anyone will be saved by his example. All that happened was that his kids lost their father in a way both demeaning and avoidable.

Another aging, good-looking rocker, Sebastian Bach, made a very good job of eulogizing how the Jani Lane's of this world end up where they do. Again, people may snipe, but (at least from what I've seen, across the other side of the world) Baz has always had a remarkable level of common sense and wit that can shine through at the most surprising moments. "The solitude of the empty hotel room becomes the diametric parallel of the adulation of strangers." Baz reminds us all to offer kind words to someone, before it's too late. And he's right. But we're grown-ups and we ought to have known that already. Jani didn't have to die in order to teach us to be nice. He wasn't Jesus Christ. And the people who were the most cruel will be the least affected by his passing anyway.

I guess that's a big part of what makes his death so sad. We gain nothing. His family gains nothing. Not even peace of mind.

The best we can hope for is that he found some kind of peace for himself.

Redrum

2011-06-05T00:55:00.000+12:00

So I said we were looking for a new place to rent, and then we found one. R is very happy because it's in the country. I am slightly less thrilled to be moving to the country, because I've lived in the country before and I know it's full of cows and grass flies.

However, it's a larger house (three bedrooms, with a small section of its own) for less money. It's only three years old and has a nice big kitchen, a separate laundry, a fireplace (with a wet-back), and a bath. I'm very excited about the bath.

A couple of years back, I wrote on another website about how my electric heater had broken down and how miserable it is to live in an older New Zealand home (i.e.: early than 1970s) in winter. We don't have insulation, and it's not required by law in older houses. It doesn't snow where I am, but NZ is still home to penguin colonies and such like, so it's not exactly tropical. My house is cold enough (even with the heater) that the olive oil goes white and gluggy just sitting in my kitchen cupboard. A couple of foreign friends were very surprised to hear that we don't have insulation. Still more friends were just interested in the penguins. If it helps, I've held a penguin before. R has also held a penguin before, only it got all upset and shit on him. R doesn't like penguins now.

But anyway, the new house not only has insulation (and a fire), it also has double glazing! This makes me doubly excited about the potential power bills. R is such a Kiwi that he didn't know what double glazing was when I pointed it out... because he's never seen it before.

Still, he has made promises to now do a lot of manly, country things - like mow lawns and chop firewood... which might be nice, because it might stop him from doing the vacuuming while I'm out, because then I just feel guilty about not doing the vacuuming. I will also be stuck in an isolated country house a lot, so I might end up online a bit more... or just start talking to the cows... or write a book about someone stuck in a house who goes stir crazy and tries to murder everybody (except everyone's already read The Shining anyway, so there's probably only so far I can go with that plot). If worst comes to worst, I guess I can chop firewood.

My mother has also seen the new house once (today) and already found fifty things wrong with it. She's good like that. My dad says "she's just trying to be helpful". I don't believe him. Instead, R and I celebrated a hard day's packing by sitting down to watch Star Wars Episodes 1-3... and I sat there for hours and loudly jumped on everything that was wrong with those movies. I figure shit has to roll downhill. And Hayden Christensen is apparently downhill.

Sadness is a Blessing

2011-06-01T00:10:00.000+12:00

It's been a few weeks since I last posted. There is probably a lot to report, but I can't remember any of it.

Instead it's been weeks of medical tests punctuated by grinding days of work. I have band-aids on my hands and a bruise on my shin the size of a beer coaster. I start getting more work at this time of year. It sounds good but the money doesn't carry me far. Other event-people snipe and try to steal my jobs. But the clients are sometimes a grateful boon. In between times, I sleep like I'm dying. We're also trying to find a new place to rent.

What brings me back here is more than just the first evening off. It is the need to record a thought so that I will remember it tomorrow.

Another webpage led me to this video, in the depths of 2am last night:

I'm not sure I like the song. It's growing on me with repeated listens, but it's really the video that made me stop and pay attention.

I've said before that when I write my book, it plays out like a film in my head. Indeed, each scene is largely dialog, so it's a lot like a script to begin with. I see the characters talking to each other. I hear what is said and see what is not said. A great deal of the story goes unsaid.

And this delicate little video appealed to me immediately because it looks a lot like I imagine my novel looking. It also speaks to a same theme, and I feel it in the same way. All this would probably make more sense if you'd read my novel... or it still might not make any sense, as the case may be.

In any case, I can see a girl confrontational and defiant, reckless in her own attempts to deny despair... and ultimately not in control of her own fate.

And a man. Brilliantly fleshed out in little more than an impassive expression. His embrace is all at once menacing and paternal, even erotic though not really sexual. He runs everything. And as much as I suddenly want to sweep my hands across his shoulders, I know he would destroy someone like me...

I am only passingly familiar with Stellan Skarsgård (the actor in this) but it's interesting how a well-directed music video can show off his acting talent in such an achingly powerful way. Nothing is said. And I'll admit that in my head, I'm measuring him up for the role of Max in my book. This is much as I imagine Max's face. He is too tall for Max, but that's easily forgiven. There's even a scene where Max wipes the hair from her face and holds her while she breaks...

Ach! I must be tired. I am casting fantasy movies at midnight...

Maybe it would all be explained if I could read Chinese...

2011-05-12T05:25:00.003+12:00

Okay, we're back to this again... Adult subject warning.

I'm sure it will shock no one to learn that the Internet is a very strange and dangerous place. However, even I was quite surprised to discover just how quickly my innocent curiosity can see me fall down the rabbit hole of web weirdness.

This was how my evening began: on the apparently safe ground of iTunes.

I was looking for music videos to add to my phone. I'm partial to a good music video, but I think there are scarce few of them that I'd bother buying. A lot of the "great classic videos" now bore me a bit, just for the fact that I've seen them too many times. However, when I like a video I generally like it for the sheer production value and composition, rather than just the music. I treat them like little movies - an art-form in themselves. I'll buy videos of songs that I don't like, but not bother with bad videos to otherwise great songs.

My quest led me to quickly purchase REM's Everybody Hurts, as well as The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up (both classics in themselves - and I apologize for YouTube pixelating all the naked women). As I searched through categories like a rummaging bag-lady, I tried to remember things I'd seen in the past and enjoyed. I cursed how few good videos are available for sale on iTunes. One particular video played on my mind, but I didn't know who the band was. "... you know... that one set in the Forbidden City... with all the Last Emperor bits... and the singer with the pretty eyes..."

It was a video that I first saw on TV about four years ago, and used it to irritate R. He hated the song the moment it came on and wanted to change channels. I just stared intently at the screen and replied "Shush! The singer is making googey eyes at me!" I thought the comment was a whole lot funnier than R did (he just gave me that "oh really?" look), but I still remembered the video four years later, and wondered if I should find it just to annoy him.

A very quick search of Google revealed the song to be From Yesterday by 30 Seconds to Mars. Yes. This is how old and uncool I am. I have no idea who 30 Seconds to Mars are. This is possibly the reason why they don't anger me in the same way that they anger R... but I'm really too old and uncool to be bothered about liking the "right" bands and disliking the "wrong" ones. I like what I like. And I liked the video. It was clearly expensive and had nice cinematography.

Still, I wanted to be sure that I'd still like it on a second viewing. iTunes was being its usual copyright-enforcing self and only giving me a short preview. However, Google took me to the full length Vevo clip on YouTube.... Which is right here (all 13+ mins of it)(sorry about the ads):

See?... Very purdy eyes. I think he kinda looks like a Siamese cat.

Now, after watching the video for a second time, it occurred to me that I knew that singer from somewhere. One of those little niggly thoughts that eats away at the back of your brain when you're sure you recognize the face but don't want to say so in case you make a dick of yourself and discover that they just resemble some person who once served you in a shop... So I went to Wikipedia to find out where I knew him from.

His name's Jared Leto. As it turns out, beyond just being a singer, he's also an actor (yes, I know, I would probably have known that if I ever bothered to read a celebrity magazine... ever). He's also a bit older than I thought he was. Either it's good make-up or he's aged well. I must have seen him in Fight Club. And American Psycho...

"Who the hell was he in Fight Club?"

Wikipedia took me to his profile on IMDB. Turns out he was "Angel Face" - the hot blond guy who had his face caved in by Edward Norton. Now I know...

It also turns out that he directed that From Yesterday video himself (under a pseudonym). That made me grin a bit, because even though I'd say it was very nicely directed and he seems to know how to compose a shot, it might explain all the lingering close-ups. Like the time I sat down in front of the video of Van Halen's Jump and snarked to somebody that whoever the director was, she was obviously madly in love with David Lee Roth because he was onscreen pretty much all the time and he got all the nice, soft, slow motion bits... And then I discovered that David Lee Roth directed that video himself, and it all made a lot of sense really. Call it Lead Singer Disease.

Now IMDB is kind of a half-fan/half-trade site. If you subscribe, you can get contact details for the guy's agent and such like, in case you want to hire him. A lot of the info on IMDB is pretty well vetted, and designed to make the performers (and films) look good. However, at the bottom of everyone's IMDB profile, there's a message board section where anybody can post things that link to a particular actor (or a particular film). Usually they're fans asking very specific and geeky questions (eg. "What was the name of that song that played for ten seconds behind that one scene where they're in the kitchen?"). Attractive men also seem to have lots of message posts about their "hotness", which appear to have uniformly been written by squealing teenage girls. Attractive women tend to get less of this lecherous posting, but I guess there's still a bit of it.

However, what drew me to Mr. Leto's message board was that the top post is titled: "This is absolutely untrue..." .... Hmmm. Well you can't just pass by a statement that intriguing, can you? What is untrue? And is it really untrue? Why post it here if you don't want people to believe this lie? Why give it a wider forum than it has already attained?

One click took me to this post (which I'm just going to repeat in its entirety):

by Samantha2013 (Sun May 1 2011 22:13:46)
A friend and I were discussing something absolutely irrelevant in which she went to look up the irrelevant thing we were trying to figure out, in which she found this little gem, and sent me the link to laugh in delight or possibly in sorrow for the poor man who had this written about him.. http://www.voy.com/16357/25377.html

I responded there when I read it, but it said something about a moderator having to allow it to be posted, so I'm stating it here too.. This story is either absolutely untrue or he treats the women he dates completely different than the groupies he sleeps with. I don't know why but I felt like I needed to defend the guy in saying this. I don't know where all these stories began and where they started but I know this is not true. Bits and pieces are true but I highly doubt this girl really had this experience.

I use to live out in California for years and I happen to still be friends with a girl who Jared dated on and off for a couple years. We talked, as all girls do over drinks about our private and sex life, her included, and I never once heard her ever say that she was fantasy raped by the guy, or that he was overly rough or that he enjoyed choking a girl out during sex. These are all lies, unless like I said, he treats other women he doesn't have relationships with different. I happen to know alot about things she had said in the past about their sex life and she knows about all us girls who are a group of friends, and the only thing I do know to be true is that he does sometimes enjoy spanking and he does have a above average size...other than that, I highly doubt the rest of this story to be true. Our friend had been raped as a teen so I highly doubt she would have enjoyed being fantasy raped over and over again for 2 years to kick up old memories.

I remember, while living in Cali, I would meet up with her on occasion at parties at mutual friends homes in the hills and sometimes he would be with her, and he seemed like a nice and attentive boyfriend by all accounts and everything she ever said to us. He didn't seem like the guy who was going to slam you down and make you feel pain lol. I do remember her talking on occasion about how sex was difficult for them when they started sleeping together because of the size of him and the fact that she was not a whore, and how she sometimes needed to take baths or get frozen vegetable bags out of the freezer after she had sex and I remember when she was telling this issue to us, me specifically asking her if he was gentle, because that's something you think of when you hear something as that, and she had said that he was gentle, and that he had gone to a pharmacy one night to buy different kinds of lube to see if that helped at all because he felt bad when she was in pain so these crazy stories about him hurting girls just isn't adding up when I personally know someone who had slept with him many, many, many times and what she tells her girlfriends. I also remember when they would every once in awhile take small weekend trips when their schedules allowed it, and I remember her talking about one weekend in specific where she was talking about him taking her to San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara and how romantic he made things and how they spent most of the weekend in their cottage making love, so once again, if he was fantasy raping or choking her out and being rough, I seriously doubt she would be able to keep up with a full weekend.

Just this whole thing seems ridiculous. I am not there to know for sure whether these stories are true or not but I do know they exact opposites of everything I ever heard from a girl who was with him on and off for quite awhile. Like I said, maybe he is different with groupies, and goes all out on weird fantasies that he would never try with the ones he actually loves, but it just seems like such polar opposites that I have to wonder the validity of their stories when everything I've ever been told about the guy doesn't even touch these stories being spoken about on the internet, and had I seen something like this sooner, I would have said the same then.

Oohhhhkay.

Wow.

So, wait... Is this lady mad about someone writing about the man's sexual habits? Because she proceeds to go into quite a bit of detail herself...

So, you know I have to go to the link she's given, just out of sheer morbid curiosity. A casual "who the fuck is that guy?" has now turned into a full train-wreck rubber-necking kind of thing...

The original post (which got IMDB lady so angry) is actually on a groupie message board, on a different site. It's titled (cringe): "Subject: Jared leto fucking RAPES his hookups." ... Oh, this can't be good...

Date Posted: 16:06:18 06/24/08 Tue
Author Host/IP: 70-91-242-30-BusName-Illinois.hfc.comcastbusiness.net/70.91.242.30
In reply to: Susie Sawdust 's message, "Re: 30 Seconds to Mars (Jared Leto)" on 08:34:27 03/05/08 Wed

He's a fucking dick and an asshole and doesn't give a shit about the girls he hooks up with in the least! I know that's NO surprise and I didn't expect him to care about me or fall in love or anything HAHA. Alot of rockstars don't give a shit but at least they treat you like a person. This guy is one of the most selfish lovers i've ever experienced even to this day. I hooked up with him several years ago and I was about 4 months over 17. He was the 4th rockstar I hooked up with "all the way" not just sucking off , at that time.

I'm not fully blonde but I had blonde highlights then over light brown hair, blue/green eyes, and I'm about 5'6 115 lbs-slim but not too thin and my boobs are a B so not huge. If I had to compare myself to a celebrity, I'd say I look like Jennifer Aniston so not a huge knockout but not entirely ugly. I'm sort of sweet-faced and he made several mentions about my face looking innocent.

Anyway, the choking is 100% true as well as restraining and alot of holding you down. He fucks hard and rough and quick. There's alot of movement and position shifting and tit biting and sucking. There were marks left. He doesn't give a shit that his cock is fucking giganto and it hurt like satan. It's not only long, had to be about 11-12". It's thick and it burned and he wouldn't slow down even when I told him to. There were times were I had to bite down on him because of the pain down there and he didn't give 2 pisses about it. I think he got pleasure out of hurting me, in retrospect but I was too young and didn't know that then. He was a major dick when I would tell him to slow down or to change position to ease the pain a little. After that, I'd get attitude.

I didn't like the choking and at least he eased a bit on that but he still did the wrist restraining and ramming. I like rough sex but he seems to zone out and it's scary.

I liked the ass smacking, that was a huge turn on and I didn't mind his name-calling but basically the whole time I was fucking him, I felt as though I was being raped and not even a "play rape". In his mind, it seemed like he thought he was fucking raping me. It was very odd.

So girls, if you're into this whole thing then by all means, Jared's your man. I'll say one thing, if you can handle a big cock, go for it.

Oh awesome... I really regret clicking on that now.

And it occurs to me that, within ten minutes, I have gone from not knowing the foggiest thing about this guy (up to and including his name) to suddenly knowing that his alleged sexual partners report that he has a huge penis and enjoys choking and name-calling.... Great.

I spend the next ten minutes scrolling through the various posts on that groupie message board - both before and after this woman's rant... and shaking my head a bit, and wondering why the fuck I'm reading this stuff. There are lots of other posts apparently disclaiming or corroborating bits and pieces of her story. The size thing seems to have several witnesses. The choking too... but some women claim to like it. Other than this lady, nobody else has anything really bad to say. Who the fuck knows if anything is true?

Now someone who knows me in real life will know that I'll bring sex into any conversation. Amongst my friends, I'm famous for it. I'm totally happy to talk about sex in grossly clinical detail. I'm a complete sex-nerd. So the graphic nature of something like this doesn't offend me at all... But I rarely, if ever, talk about MY sexual experiences. To me, that's someone else's secrets I'm sharing too.

So this was definitely more train-wreck than I was expecting. I'll be honest: I don't give a shit what the man allegedly likes in bed, or how endowed he is. I'm never going to fuck him, so why would I care? It just made me feel sorry for him.

However, I'm not going to get all judgey about the women who DO get together and compare notes on this stuff. Because, if banging rock stars is your thing, then it only makes sense to get a bit of background info. I accept that the problem with any one-night-stand is that you never really know what you're going to get. And if your post-show hook-up is into something that you're not into, then it's probably better to know that beforehand. It might enable you to make a more informed choice. Let's face it: at the end of the day, a lot of these ladies are out for a bit of fun, rather than just fixating on one performer in particular. You might think this musician is hot, but if you know that you're not sexually compatible, then you're probably going to choose someone else. No harm, no foul.

Of course, it should always be remembered that one person's experience of a one-night-stand may differ from another's. Nobody has sex the same way every time. Not even famous people... Probably.

I can still see the value of the message board though. If I was into banging rock stars, I'd probably read that post and (taking everything with a grain of salt) decide to find someone smaller. When you're in a relationship, you can find ways to make things work - but if you want the sex to be enjoyable the first time around, it helps to be anatomically suited. I've met big before, but big does tend to make things more tricky. I suspect that other women would read that message the same way.

Naturally, I'm never going to downplay an allegation of rape (helllll no!), nor am I going to suggest that "nice" or "pretty" guys don't do such things... But for what it's worth, the lady who claimed to have such a bad experience with him doesn't actually specify whether (after having given consent in the first place) she ever withdrew consent. It would appear not, considering she describes it as "it seemed like he thought he was fucking raping me". Emphasis on the words "seemed" and "thought" - as though she was trying to interpret his fantasy, rather than making a clear allegation. If you told him to stop, and he doesn't, then you both know what's going on. It sounds rough, painful and unpleasant... but not forced. I'm sure I'm not the only woman on earth who's had painful and unpleasant sex that was still fully consensual. Sometimes you just suck it up and give him a bit of "Oh, alright already... just make it quick." And sometimes you're just young and stupid and don't know that sex gets any better. The word "rape" is a heavy one - about as heavy as four letters can be - and shouldn't be thrown around without due consideration. But that's just my opinion, and I'm not going to chastise the woman for venting. It sounds like she'd pissed. It's just that she could have found another way or another place to let go of this experience. Bad sex or hurt feelings are not justification enough to try and bring another person down in flames.

I guess what surprises me about all this is that I found this page without really looking for it, and linked off some very mainstream websites. It made me wince for this guy - remembering that I still know basically nothing about him. But he's a person too, and probably not so keen to have himself described in this way (... well, he might be okay with the "huge cock" thing). Regardless of whether the story is true or not, its publication is about as justified as some angry ex-boyfriend posting naked pictures of you in a chat room... only to have someone then link them off your personal profile on your company's website. Not cool.

But perhaps I'm still very old-fashioned. I value someone's ability to keep it civil, even when they've been hurt. It wouldn't be cool if a man wrote about a woman in this way, so I'm kinda surprised that this post has been up for three years without it being removed (or the lady getting sued).

Am I wrong?...

Chicken & Black Bean Enchiladas

2011-05-03T02:37:00.003+12:00

Chicken and Black Bean Enchiladas... that's what I was doing. I was making dinner. A decent dinner for the first time in a couple weeks. ... with corn and zucchini and a dry Sauvignon Blanc.

And it reminded me that these little moments pop up every so often in life, where we will always remember where we were. And so often we are doing something very banal.

My mother once told me she was helping her dad to change the oil in their car. It was a Saturday here: that fairly sunny, spring morning when JFK got shot.

For some reason, the Challenger sticks in the mind of a lot of people in my generation. Perhaps it was because we were studying it at school. We were going to witness the first teacher in space, and our teachers were all so proud. It had been in the Weekly Reader. It was a cold, snowy January in Arizona. And back then there were only ever two or three TVs in any school - all huge, old things on metal trolleys. My brother's year, Fifth Grade, were going to get to watch the launch live on TV. But there just weren't enough sets for everyone else. Third Grade would have to read about it instead, and just wait until we went home if we wanted to see it on TV... I think we were doing math. My brother's teacher came in. All pale and shaking, like she was going to cry. And she said something very quiet to Mrs. Emerson, and then we all got told to get up and walk down the hall to the Fifth Grade classrooms. We were trooped into the back of my brother's classroom, along with some of the Fourth- and Sixth-graders. About 150 kids, all packed together in standing room only, just gawping at reruns of the shuttle exploding. In retrospect, I don't know what our teachers were thinking. I guess they were just frightened and upset, and wanted to be together. They cried. Only the most dramatic, attention-seeking girls cried with them. Far from being traumatic, I actually remember it as being vaguely interesting. We didn't know those people on TV, and so it wasn't scary. Later on, we made lots of jokes about teachers exploding.

As for Diana... I was cleaning the make-up tables after rehearsal. Can't even remember what the show was now. But we had heard about the crash on the radio as we drove in to rehearsal. And a few hours later, I was cleaning the tables when my lead actress came rushing back inside in tears. She had gone to leave, and switched on her car radio, and then flown into hysterics. She threw herself down on the bench and wailed "She's dead!" in the sort of tone that howling dogs use when you kick them. Actors. And I just raised an eyebrow at her ridiculous performance and went on with my cleaning - probably a bit annoyed that she couldn't deign to clean up her own mess. It's not like any of us knew the lady. And I'm honest enough to admit that I never liked her when she was alive, so why would I have fallen into such grief when she was dead? Sure, death is tragic regardless, and I didn't revel in it... but I hadn't ever bought into the tabloid narrative about the woman's sainted "victimhood", and simply saw her as manipulative and narcissistic. Loudly proclaiming her "truth" as the only truth, and making hay from the fact that her enemies had few friends in the press (and little interest in making friends). Sometimes people seem to equate physical beauty and good PR with virtue and/or integrity... I just felt sorry for her kids. But I felt sorry for them when she was alive too.

So I guess there's a difference... R watched the BBC online while I finished cooking. Fresh hydroponic lettuce, and low fat cheese. A JDs and Coke for him. A wine for me. A kiss when the plates hit the table. And then a quiet raise of the glass. From me.

I do not usually feel vengeful, or celebrate anyone's death... But I'm glad he's gone. I'll be straight up about that. I saw no redeeming features. I have always regarded him as nothing more than a murderer. He was neither a martyr nor a freedom-fighter. He was unimaginative and less intelligent than he liked to think. Incredibly selective in his medievalising, and a poor student of history. Just a recalcitrant criminal who had tried to disguise his self-obsessed power trip as some kind of philosophy, and who preyed on others' abysmal education and low self-esteem in order to build an army of disaffected teenagers. A man who pretended to suffer while others really suffered on his behalf. A Manson. A Hitler. An overlooked son of privilege, recooking the old "race-war" chestnut like he'd fallen across something new and original. A tyrant. To raise him up to monster-hood simply gives him more time than he was worth. Last I heard, he was a 44-year-old man who married a 17-year-old girl ("gifted" to him by the girl's own stupid family). He wasn't worth my attention. He would have been so terrified of someone like me that he'd probably have shot me on sight... or simply got someone else to shoot me. Because he was too much of a bitch to risk going to prison.

But I will remember the enchiladas, because the enchiladas were good and I should write that recipe down. A worthwhile invention that would be good to revisit someday. Some things in life are far more important than Mr. Bin Laden ever was.

My Rock and Roll Nerd

2011-04-30T14:12:00.023+12:00

The royal wedding/hoopla/apoplectic-ecstasy-over-the-"surprise"-of-a-skinny-tall-rich-girl-getting-married-to-a-skinny-tall-rich-man has totally taken the spotlight away from R's birthday... so I do what I can to make sure that 35 is not forgotten in this household.

Presents this year included such romantic notions as:

- a new set of tires

- my old iPod (with all the Black Eyed Peas removed)

- a cake with racing cars on it

- a guitar pick that cost more to mail from the US than it's actually worth

- and taking off my clothes very slowly whilst upside down and trying not to fall off the chair (while smiling and pretending that falling off the chair was the last thing on my mind).

I also found this song, which I thought I'd post as a fitting tribute to my baby. It's by the Australian comedian, Tim Minchin, and I think sums up both of us surprisingly well... but perhaps it's a little more him than me. Because I never wanted to be a rockstar. And I like rock crowds... and I can do a semi-smart impression of angst... sometimes... (please don't look at my school records)...

I love you, baby. :)

Because the world is full of quiet moments that need to be appreciated

2011-04-18T02:57:00.001+12:00

And a certain percentage of those quiet moments come at 3am, when the coffee is wearing off, and house is starting to turn a little colder, and the cat is a sleepy, orange blob on my red sofa.

And I have spent a day half-cuddled against the rain. Where folding laundry moved to an hour on the beanbags, stroking R's short-cropped hair and cleaning his ears. Because I love him. And because my love is intimate and unrestrained.

Then dinner and lying in bed while he reads Douglas Adams aloud. Arms in awkward crushes under one another's shoulders, yet not so awkward at all. White-socked feet resting in a pile together. And a silly, comedy struggle over the blanket.

For some reason, the right song will just find me at 3am....

A local musician for once. And this singer's a super-nice guy too.

I'll see ya...

2011-04-12T11:41:00.001+12:00

I probably should've watched this video about ten years ago.

I don't know that it would've changed anything, but it might have made some things make a little more sense. Might have saved me some trouble too.

It's funny how people end up mimicking things they see on TV. I don't know whether they grow attracted to it simply because they can relate, or whether they just need to follow a path that's already been mapped. I guess we all do it from time to time...

Well... I'll see ya...

The Only Two Poison Fans in New Zealand

2011-04-08T23:54:00.053+12:00

I reserve the right to change names to protect the innocent… and to take a bit of poetic license. But I haven’t exaggerated the bits you might suspect I did.

… And I will also put in random photos of happiness, because otherwise the story can be a bit of a downer in places.

Jessica once told me that I was like a bad smell in that I was always hanging around where I was unwanted. [Ed. See? Told you. Downer.]

That was the first time we broke up our friendship. It was the only time we have ever fought… and really it was more like her and another girl picking on me rather than any sort of actual fight. In any case, I didn’t fight back. I had heard those words before. Too many times.

We stayed non-friends for about a month.

I’d met Jessica on the first day of school. Yet another new school in the long line of once-yearly new schools. We were both ten at the time, soon to become eleven. I remember that she was wearing a yellow top that day, and a dress with love-hearts on it. It all happened in that kind of loose, vague way that children tend to pick up friends. I hung out with one girl (whom I didn’t know) and she then seemed to start hanging out with Jessica (whom I don’t think either of us knew). As an adult, I’ve sometimes looked back in wonder at how those things just seemed to happen. Like animals, with our unspoken, instant and easy alliances.

The other girl faded away without complaint, but Jessica and I kept hanging out. Eventually, another girl came and joined our circle. A few weeks later, sometime after Jessica’s 11th birthday, this was the girl who banded up with Jess to drive me away.

And it worked. I wandered around by myself for a few days – which was really my standard playground trope anyway. I was used to that, even if I didn’t like it. Eventually, I fell in with a trio of “bad girls” (or as bad as you get at the age of eleven)… But they certainly weren’t great at their schoolwork, and they all came from families that gave them “hidings” (and probably did much worse behind closed doors). They knew I wasn’t one of them, and they hated me for things I couldn’t change. I remember us talking about sex a lot. I mean very graphic and specific discussions of sex. I also remember them picking on me a lot, but I kept coming back so I was an easy target… That was my other standard playground trope: hanging around people who hated me and were mean to me, just because they were the only people who’d talk to me.

But I missed Jessica. I missed Jessica all the time. And it was weird, because she was hardly the first “friend” to ever be nice for a few weeks before telling me to fuck off. There were lots of them over the years. Maybe even hundreds of them. Brittany, Sara, Megan, Samantha, Toni, Aubrey, Danielle, Claire, Melanie, Anna, Joanna, Kelly, Monique, Summer, Denise, Rowan, Sophie, Lee, Rachelle, Rachel, Donna, Lisa, another Kelly, Aimme, Andrea, Kirsty, Nicola, another Lisa, Cara, Katherine, Angela… So many that I’ve honestly forgotten all their names. But I didn’t miss them… Well, okay, I missed Toni. The rest of them I didn’t really like all that much anyway.

Jessica was my second Toni. She was the one that I liked. The one that I missed. The one whose parting words cut me so deep that I can still quote them more than 20 years later.

To this day, I don’t really know why I went back.

Perhaps that was one thing I learned from watching Toni leave… and then spending six months having to watch Toni across the school cafeteria every lunch time. Holding onto that little teddy bear Toni gave me at school one day (yes, I still have it) and getting heartache every time I saw the paperclip (the paperclip!) she gave me too… (And yes, I still have that damn paperclip as well – it is part of my narrative history)… I don’t think I was born as an obsessive wee monkey – I was just lonely. Unbearably lonely. And when I lost things that made me happy, I tried to remember that joy for as long as I could. There were months and months of watching Toni and Aubrey with their new friends. Catching that single, sad, wistful glance that Toni once shot me as she went to scrape off her tray and return it. Like she wanted to say something to me and she just didn’t know how. Like she wanted to say that she missed me too.

I clung to that one look. In my head, it gave me value. It stopped me wanting to die.

What I learned from that experience (aged just eight) was to take the wistful look and grab it. Run the risk of being laughed at again. At least then you will know.

After a month, Jessica gave me that look. And I grabbed it. And she didn’t laugh at me again.

We just kind of fell back together in much the same way that we had fallen together in the first place… And a few weeks later, we banded together to drive out the other girl.

Honestly, I felt bad for doing it. It was the first and only time of my life that I’ve picked on someone. It was the only time that I’ve ever tried to make another human being feel bad about themselves for no real reason. I’d never done it before because I’d never had the chance… but I also knew how it felt. And that empathy chained my tongue. To this day, I still feel bad about having done it.

Yet I also knew that I needed to drive her out in order to not be driven out again myself. And I found the will to fight for the friendship I wanted. That is the other way that children are a bit like animals.

Jessica told her that she was like a bad smell too. I’ve never forgotten that either. The easy way that it seemed to roll out of her mouth. I knew she had forgotten that that’s what she said to me.

In many ways, it was probably an inauspicious start to what turned out to be the closest and most long-lasting friendship of my life. But what I took from it was that I had to be willing to fight for her. And that she missed me too. And that her missing me stopped me wanting to die.

Literally. But that’s another part of the story.

Jessica and I became very strongly bonded as friends. We not only hung out at school, all day every day, we also ended up at each other’s houses pretty much every day after school. We spent our weekends together. And it was effortless and relaxed and never felt like an imposition. We just seemed to love spending time with each other. We laughed a lot. We were hopelessly silly in the way that all pubescent girls are hopelessly silly. But she always had a much easier time making friends than I did. She was a very nice, gregarious, warm sort of person who was very easy to like.

Undoubtedly one of the things that bonded me and Jessica was our shared passion for Poison. I met Jess in the same year that we both found Poison. And my parents were much laxer than hers, so I could make her tapes of the rude music videos, and photocopies of the more revealing pictures (which she would then hide in her books). Eventually, we became The Only Two Poison Fans in New Zealand… but that was later. When we first met (in 1989), pretty much everyone at our school had only two choices in music: you were a Poison fan or a Guns ‘n’ Roses fan. Well, okay, there was actually one Iron Maiden fan in our class (but he was a very unique and isolated boy) and one Bon Jovi fan (but, a whole two months after me first going crazy for New Jersey, we had already decided that she just wasn’t grown up enough to like “real” men). Everyone else liked either Poison or G’n’R. Boys were allowed to be both Poison and G’n’R fans at the same time, but girls weren’t, because girls had to show loyalty to whichever lead singer they had a crush on. That was how you got the lead singer to like you, and how you got other girls to respect you. If you liked both Bret and Axl at the same time, then you would be a total slut. You had to choose because you had to know that (if you were loyal) you might get to marry him someday. Note that this was a year before Rap had any real impact on New Zealand at all – whenceforth the rules changed once again. There was a HUGE chasm between being a Poison fan and being a Guns ‘n’ Roses fan – including clothes, hair, jewelry, and general outlook on life. The fact was, as I’ve already noted, I actually started out that year as a Guns ‘n’ Roses fan.

Ahhhh…. Yes, I remember the Every Rose underwear shot…
Of course we only ever loved you for your music, Bret. *cough*

But Poison tempered my personality as much as they darkened Jessica. She came from a good family. So did I, and yet I hated the world a whole lot more than she did. Jessica wasn’t one of the girls who talked about sex. It was only when she and I were together that she could get to watch Dirty Dancing in its entirety, and admit to having not-so-innocent feelings about boys. There was a big poster at the head of my bed, which featured Bret Michaels onstage during the Open Up & Say Ahh… tour. He was wearing a red jacket and skin-tight leather pants, and he stood singing with legs apart. In one of our (many!) afternoons of silliness, Jessica and I took to sitting on my bed with pillowcases over our heads, and seeing if we could remember the content and location of all of the different Poison pictures around the room. There were hundreds (I mean hundreds!) of Poison pictures in my room. It got to be my turn to wear the pillowcase, and I was going around the head of the bed with a good degree of accuracy: “Bret and Whiskey in the sunshine… Rikki with his green drumkit… Bret sitting on his ‘Vette… CC wearing that sparkly coat… Bret and Bobby in front of the brown background… [cue big poster] My Bret!!!” And I placed my hand upon the poster with much enthusiasm, only to send Jessica into peals of giggles. “Um…” she snickered, trying to catch her breath back, “take a look at where you put your hand…” … Yep…

From then on, “My Bret” actually became a game of ours. Like some deviant version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, you put the pillowcase on your head and tried to get the crotch-grab. We both had surprisingly good aim.

But I was happy to share Bret with Jessica. She was awesome. We had one of those friendships where she just talked incessantly and I listened to everything because I was actually interested in what she had to say. She talked, and I was quiet, and we complemented each other very well because we were both happy to be that way. But I still knew something that nobody else seemed to notice: when she shut up, she was really hurt. I think most people just assumed that if she wasn’t talking about something, it didn’t really bother her. But when she was quiet, I could step in and be her protector.

I remember us going on school camp together, later in that first year, and how we ended up sharing a room in the cabin. I hardly got a lick of sleep, because she snored. Oh my God, could she snore!!! But I never had the heart to wake her and tell her to turn over. So instead I got up and tried to read by the window in the moonlight. And when that didn’t work, I remember just watching her sleep for a while. And being gripped by the sudden, insane fear that she wasn’t real.

I was scared that I was so lonely that I might have just made her up. A delusion so whole and robust that I could literally see her and talk to her. But maybe she wasn’t really there.

At 3am, that fear held a lot more sway over my mind than it would during daylight hours.

The thing is: I understand that I’ve always watched people. Always. It’s a habit borne out of shyness and the desire to understand how other people thought. Back this past December, I basically gave up on Twitter. I didn’t give it up out of boredom, but simply because I was starting to feel that it wasn’t good for me. I spent way too much of my day reading about other people’s thoughts and feelings. It started to take over too much of my life. I pretty much gave up Facebook (and a few other social sites) for the same reason. I’ve often said that I don’t have an addictive personality… but I do. I just get addicted to information and social cues. I am still trying to figure people out. It’s not really stalking, because there’s no desire to possess the other person (not anymore anyway), and there’s never been any thought of controlling or harming those people… it’s more like filming a nature documentary in order to watch what fruit flies do when no one else is looking. I can stop myself taking it too far. And I do (stop myself, I mean).

To be honest, I probably have Aspergers Syndrome. People confuse the fuck out of me, but I’m still obsessively learning in the hopes that one day I’ll be able to figure it out. It’s never been easy or natural for me.

Or maybe all that watching will just make me a better writer. Hopefully.

Jessica and I had a friendship that (surprisingly) endured us being separated. Like I said: the school where we met was just one of a long line of once-yearly schools over the course of my lifetime. I was in her neighborhood for a year. By the next year, I lived in another town about an hour away. I remember the week that we moved away, and how I spent many hours tearing myself to pieces over whether I could give her a hug or not. At eleven, you worry about it being taken the wrong way. But I was in agony at the thought of leaving my only friend in the whole world – my only real friend, ever. And on that last day, I cracked and gave her a hug on the front veranda of our old house. And she didn’t mind one bit. And she never thought that I was weird for doing that.

In fact, the only thing that changed with the distance was that I didn’t see her at school every day, and we couldn’t bike over to each other’s house after school. Instead, we wrote long, funny letters to each other, in that old-fashioned pen pal way (before the Internet). We talked on the phone several times every term – having long, multi-hour conversations where she talked till she was hoarse and I listened until my ears really did start to ache. We never, ever argued. Not once. We did sometimes have differences of opinion, but we simply liked each other far too well to ever argue about anything. I accepted her just as she was, and she accepted me that way too. And we went and stayed at each other’s houses during school holidays. Every school holidays. For the next six years.

But by then we were The Only Two Poison Fans in New Zealand. All the other kids at school had found different bands to obsess over. Some of the G’n’R fans were still around, but even they faded out eventually. That’s the thing with teenage fashions: they become unfashionable as quickly as they appear. And I was living in a different town, in what often felt like a completely different world. As far as I was concerned, I was living in my own personal hell.

The kids in Jessica’s town came to sneer about Poison, but at least they did so with a bit of guilty acknowledgment that they had been Poison fans themselves once and “I s’pose they’re not that bad really”. The kids in my town were much more elite, and much more terrified of expressing an opinion that deviated from the official line. Bullying was rampant, and generally supported by teachers and guidance counselors (who told us off for “narking” if we dared complain, and threatened us with psychotherapy if we couldn’t “fit in” better). It sounds unreal now, but that’s just the way it was. It was a rich, white town. People owned yachts. And I went to a “good school” which meant, more than anything, that I couldn’t be permitted to make a fuss in case some parents got scared of sending their daughters there. There was funding at stake. Like a race horse, I needed to be trotted out to win the academic prizes and get my picture in the paper (in the “dress” school uniform, with blazer and tie – which we never got given to wear at any other time), but I wasn’t allowed to resist or look unhappy.

For six years, the only time I smiled was when I was with Jess. She just let me be me.

And being with Jess actually gave me a courage that I didn’t possess at other times. I became very resigned to the knowledge that I couldn’t escape the bullying in any place except in Poison… which was kind of ironic, because being a Poison fan was the number one thing that put a target on my back. When I was at school (locked in a toilet or getting jabbed with scissors under the desk) I would carry pictures of Poison around with me, so that I could just focus on them and block out the rest of the world and completely lose myself. When the other kids took those pictures away, I actually hid one on my own body. Every day. When I was at home (and the bullies often followed me home – and my mother used to lecture me about how I should go outside and “play with your friends since they've come all this way"), I would just shut the door to my room and try to build up a whole barricade of Poison posters around me. They covered every wall. They covered my ceiling and my curtains. They kept the world out. And I could finally put on their music, and turn it up really loud, and just escape…

Camera timers… God’s gift to stupid teenagers everywhere.

I think it was actually that escape that got resented the most. When Jess and I were together, nothing could touch us. We would laugh again. We could wear matching Poison shirts (like dicks) and spend hours writing out lyrics. We often went out in her town, wearing our Poison shirts. We got funny looks in her town, but no comments. We only once went out in my town wearing our Poison shirts. I had lots of Poison shirts, but I didn’t wear them in my town. I couldn’t. When we walked down the street in my town that day, other teenagers started yelling abuse at us from across the street. Not girls that I knew from school: just strangers from some other school. It didn’t really matter whether they knew me or not – I was different and that was obvious. The girls got very aggressive and very specific. They followed us down the street. And I remember Jess getting flustered and threatening that she should turn back around and “dong” them on the heads with her heavy, eagle pendant… and I just laughed that dry, gallows laugh and gave her a hug. That was Jess: unable to talk any sense when she was really upset. And that was the difference between our lives. No stranger had ever chased her across town, yelling all the way that she was a pathetic piece of shit, just because she had dared like a band. It happened to me every week. It was only the fact that we were a pair that kept it from escalating further. If she hadn’t been there, I would have been toast. That was why the shirts stayed in the drawer.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether, up until then, she hadn’t really believed me when I told her how bad it was. Nobody really did.

… Random photo of happiness…

But Jess stuck by me, in spite of everything. She stuck by me even though she had other friends. She said that I was her best friend, and that was how it worked. She was a big supporter of me when I was a crazy teenager… and I was a really crazy teenager. There are elements of the crazy that I will never admit to on this blog, but it was deep and abiding and she got to see all of it. It’s stuff that I just don’t talk about anymore.

I think in some ways that you don’t grow up that lonely and that relentlessly bullied without hitting puberty as a whole mess of crazy. And I was a whole, huge, gelatinous mess of crazy. Looking back: a lot of us were. Some girls at my school went anorexic. Some girls got heavily into drugs. Some got pregnant. Lots of us cut ourselves. Some succeeded in their suicides, while most of us didn’t. Some had dreams that God was talking to them, and actually “saw” Jim Morrison climbing out of his poster and trying to seduce them. Some stuck rotting goat skulls on their bedposts. Some began speaking in tongues. Some had sex with strangers in cemeteries. I saw all of those things. But nobody did crazy as well as me – if only because I didn’t look crazy on the outside.

Somewhere in one of my school notebooks, there is a very detailed sketch of the girls in my class playing tug of war. And I am tied by the arms in the center of the rope, suspended over an abyss, being torn in two by these two teams of children. I put a lot of effort in showing the tendons on my shoulders being stretched to the point of ripping. My fists are clenched around each rope with the vain effort to pull back and ease some of the pain. My legs are writhing wild and useless in mid air. Some of the girls have bat wings. Some have faces like monkeys. Most of them are laughing. I was thirteen when I drew that picture.

I always did have a martyr complex.

The reality is that I was the quiet, dumpy, bookish kid who really was planning the shooting rampage and wouldn’t have felt a moment’s pause or remorse for it. If I go digging, I can probably show you the journal entries where (at fourteen) I planned out my hit list, along with graphic descriptions of how I wanted each person to die. They just weren’t people to me anymore – or maybe they were people, and I was the one who wasn’t. I was dangerous crazy. I just happened to live in a country where I couldn’t buy a gun. I didn’t like Mondays. At all. But that is just paddling in the shallows of my crazy. That homicidal rage was nothing compared to what was really going through my head.

Boomtown rats - I don't like mondays

(For the record, I eventually decided not to massacre my schoolmates on account of the fact that stupid people would blame the bands that I listened to.)

(And I guess we're all entitled to our moments of blind anger, especially when we're young. I’m much better now… *twitch*)

Yet Jess stuck by me, even though I’m sure it was sometimes confusing and upsetting to her. She tried to understand me on my level – even though my level was somewhere out near Saturn. And I loved her for it. She was the only one who seemed to think that I was an okay person, just the way I was. It can’t have been easy. She carried me a lot. For the life of me, I don't know what she got out of our friendship... but then, I don't think I'd be friends with someone like me.

I remember many, many private conversations with my mother, when she would put on her sympathetic eyes and remind me that I loved Jess a whole lot more than Jess loved me. My mother always thought that it was sexual, even though it never was. She told me that Jess didn’t like me. She told me not to call my friend, or spend “too much time” with her, or give her things, because she said those things just made Jess uncomfortable. That might sound logical, but I stand by the statement that I really didn’t look that crazy on the outside. In any case, to this day my mother just rolls her eyes and laughs if I suggest that I wanted to kill people at my school. She tells me not to be so dramatic. She obviously never read my diary. But she never noticed the cuts either. And she once took me to a psychotherapist upon my school’s instruction. And the psychotherapist just tried to talk to me about what I could do to “make more friends” and “get on better with my peers”, like it was my fault that I was getting abused because I just didn’t conform enough… and I just sat there in her office, put on my walkman with Flesh & Blood playing, and told her to go fuck herself. All I needed was to have someone else in my corner.

For the record, I don’t think Jess was ever really uncomfortable about me liking her. I asked her a few times, and she reassured me that we were best friends and she really enjoyed hearing from me. We laughed all the time. But I was scared of getting too close anyway – of becoming a nuisance to her when she didn’t want me, of being… too much for her. When you have no model for it, it’s hard to know what friendship is meant to be. How do you stop them getting the wrong idea? Where is the line when they stop enjoying your company and begin to find you an inconvenience? And do they tell you when that happens, or are you just supposed to know? I hadn’t had a lot of practice at interpersonal relationships, and I was very aware that the friendships I had had, I’d sucked at. That’s why people always told me to go away. The doubt that my mother (and many others) implanted in my head just continued to erode my sense of worth.

There were so many ways that people around me made me feel inherently unlovable. I learned the lesson well. I learned that the only way I would satisfy someone else was when I put on a mask and pretended to be self-reliant and completely disaffected by other people. I learned not to admit that I loved and needed people. My affection for others still looks like a bogey man to me. I can’t show it, because it’s ugly and scary.

Yet I’ve always resisted that thought too. I resisted it when I determinedly decided to buy Jess birthday presents regardless of what my mother said. We wouldn’t often talk about love – me and Jess – but I could bring her my offering and scurry away, like a dog leaving a dead bird on the doorstep. I am still very affectionate in my sexual relationships, both physically and economically. We just don’t talk about love. Talking about it is weird and frightening and so very, very wrong. I love people by calling them “shithead” in an affectionate way… and then cutting their toenails for them and buying them a car. I understand love in deeds, not words.

I’ve also resisted it by trying to resist those relationships where I felt the other person had fallen madly in love with the self-reliant mask of Kiki. Mostly.

Okay, there have been a couple of times when I realized a guy just wanted me to be the strong, stoic one that he could hide behind, and I just went with it because he was a nice enough guy and we were good mates anyway. But there always came a time when I was needy and crazy and having to hide under the bed because he didn’t know what to do and I just didn’t want to inconvenience him. Always. If you live with someone long enough, you get to see those bits.

And they killed me. Just a little at a time. It wasn’t the crazy that killed me, but the fact that I had to protect other people from the unlovable thing that was myself. That knowledge that I could never be allowed to need. Other people do not like it. So I sat under the bed until I had successfully strangled the need into unconsciousness again, and shoved it back in its box. I had to do that because nobody else would.

And then I’d go and laugh loudly, and crack dirty jokes, and lose myself in music, and drink. If I was a man, I’d probably have hit things.

The only times I have ever really admitted that need to a lover – shown the whole of it – … well… two of them fled and one of them threatened to kill me. It’s easy to see the value in my mother’s warnings, even if I disagree with her. I am hard to be around.

There came a point, at age 14, when I said my goodbyes to Jessica. We were sitting together by the roadside, at the end of one of our standard school-holiday visits. I had been at her house for a week. Her mother and my mother always made arrangements to meet and “drop off the girls” halfway, so that neither parent had a two-hour round trip. Our mothers chatted, but I dragged Jess over to a quiet spot beside the highway and said my goodbyes. I had already attempted suicide several times. I knew I wouldn’t make it through another term – the way things were, those terms seemed endless. And it bugged me to think that I might go and never get to say goodbye to Jess. So I said goodbye. And I made sure she knew that I meant it.

And that’s the other thing she said that I’ll never forget.

She just looked at me, with that confused, wordless sort of expression that she always got when she was upset. And I knew she wouldn’t know what to say. It was going to be one of those “dong them with my necklace” kind of moments….

She just looked at me and said, in a small voice: “Don’t die. I’ll be lonely.”

… And that that was what saved me. Literally and completely.

I’ve never, ever attempted suicide again. Never. For all of the hardship I felt I was facing at the time, I knew one simple thing: I couldn’t make her lonely.

But why did I get onto this subject of talking about my friendship with Jessica? Considering how huge a mark her friendship left on my life, I think I’ve hardly ever mentioned her before. We’re grown-ups now. We’re different.

The fact is: I had a dream about her last night. I don’t think I’ve dreamed about Jess in years. But it’s her birthday today. And for some reason, I’ve never forgotten her birthday. Even though there are no presents anymore, this day always dances on my calendar and I remember her – just for a moment.

The way I dreamed about Jess was this:

We were adults and meeting each other again for the first time in a long time. We had lunch. We started talking politics, and then we made our goodbyes. And I didn’t really regret leaving her. It was civil and relaxed, and certainly not the kind of heartsick trauma that it once was. She had become a different person from the girl I once knew. But that’s okay, because I’ve become a different person too.

In my dream, Jessica had become a Republican. An American Republican. A Republican not in the “I’ve considered my opinion and respectfully disagree” sort of way, but in the half-crazy, Sarah Palin-esque sort of way. A mind full of passion but no curiosity. A person with the kind of moral and social certainty that is inspiring to some and so terrifying to others. I actually don’t mind hanging out with those people – they’re often very nice and very polite. But there comes a time when we must part ways – quietly and casually, like a goodbye at a party when you know you’re flying out to Borneo the next day and never coming back. We will always part and not feel pain from it. They have too many answers. Me: too many questions.

For the record: she is not that way. At least, I don’t think she is.

It’s a fear that actually springs from the only really lengthy conversation I ever had with the man who eventually became her husband. He was a university freshman at the time, and full of that kind of clear-eyed assurance that some freshmen get the first time some teacher talks to them like equals rather than minions. He talked about politics a lot. At 18, he was a member of the ACT Party (which is about as far right as NZ politics gets, before you start getting into the swastikas and “let’s put all the brown people on a boat” sort of thing). Mostly it’s economically right-wing, with a bit of social conservatism thrown in as a means to support the rampant capitalism. Shawn described himself as a “liberal” but then went on to hector anyone within earshot that he meant “liberal” in its true, original, economic form. Which basically amounted to extreme laissez faire capitalism (i.e. no taxes, everyone sinks or rises on their own “merit”). I’m pretty sure he read it in a book at a time when he hadn’t yet been crushed under the weight of many, many books. I’m also pretty sure that he was just being strident for the sake of trying to start an argument. Jessica actually rolled her eyes a bit and apologized later.

I found it odd (and slightly unsettling) that Jess liked this guy. It was not a strain of politics that she’d ever expressed any interest in before – in fact, just the opposite. But Jess was an outwardly strong person who inwardly tended to fall in step with whoever marched through her life carrying the loudest and most colorful drum. I had the piles of memorabilia, but she was the real collector. She collected interests. As years went by, I had begun to wonder whether she really liked Poison for their own sake, or whether she just liked them because I liked them. If I hadn’t been there, would she like them anyway? When she met a girl at high school who really liked Metallica, suddenly Jess discovered Metallica. Then she met the druggies and found Sepultura. And so on and so forth. She dressed from the Ezibuy catalog (because her mother did too), unless I was around (because I dragged her into leather slut-wear stores during school holidays, and she seemed to love it). Her open heart was never deceptive or patronizing, and I think she genuinely did like the stuff she claimed to like… but only while that other person was in her life. I don’t think I ever saw her like anything alone. I certainly never saw her like anything completely in spite of the people around her. It didn’t bother me. It was just who she was. She needed to find… well, she needed to find Jessica. And Jessica was an ever-changing thing.

I didn’t mind that at all, because whatever Jessica turned out to like that particular day, she was still cool.

I even had that conversation with her flatmate, during Jessica’s sophomore year at university. Her flatmate had met Jess early on, and they had become good friends. A year later though, flatmate was beginning to really notice the change. The flatmate didn’t like Shawn, in the same way that Jess didn’t end up liking the flatmate’s “Vanilla Ice” boyfriend either. Flatmate had seen Jessica’s taste in music suddenly change drastically, to become more in line with what Shawn liked. Her politics had changed too. She’d lost a lot of weight. Flatmate didn’t like it because she felt that Jessica was losing herself to this man. I’m pretty sure Jessica told her to go to hell.

In any case, I had just shrugged and reassured the flatmate that that really was what Jessica was like. She was a chameleon. She was eclectic. Her heart and mind were open to new influences, all the time. She never lost herself; she just lost other people along the way. She changed and they didn’t.

Yet I also understood what her flatmate didn’t: that Jess had had a few fumbling, innocent troubles with men. Even at 19, when I’d had no man-trouble to speak of at all and males were only just starting to realize that I existed. But Jess was much more garrulous and gregarious than I, and she had already found company and made mistakes… and been picked on for it by the other girls at her high school… and pretended not to mind what they said about her, even though she did. She was definitely looking for something. Secretly (and this is something I’ve never admitted before – not even to her), I blamed her dad.

See, this is my version of getting stupid about men…
Males are just so wonderful to look at. How could I ever give this up?

That first year that Jessica was at university, her father left her mother for another woman. Her parents divorced.

Jess was the eldest and I think, as crushed as she was, she always tried to hold it together for the sake of her mother and brothers. But I was always going to prioritize her own needs, even if she wouldn’t. I made sure she knew that I was there for her, and that she could call me any time she wanted – no matter what time of day or night that was… She never called. I think she felt that I just wouldn’t understand. My parents were married and happy – they still are. And Shawn, the son of a bitter divorce, lived just across the hall. He gave her a place where she could be vulnerable. She found comfort in him. And I found comfort in the hope that he was taking good care of her.

In many ways, my conversation with her flatmate turned out to be very prophetic. Jessica and I made an effort to stay in touch, and yet we still drifted. I wondered endlessly whether my madness had finally dawned on her, and she’d chosen to walk a wider path around me in case I was dangerous (which I wasn’t… anymore). I wondered whether I was too much for her, despite all she’d ever said. When we were in our early 20s, my boyfriend T and I paid her a visit at her new house down in Wellington. It wasn’t long after her birthday, and I had brought her a gift. And there was that awkward moment that had never been there before. She realized that she had no birthday gift for me, and she was embarrassed (even though I didn’t mind). When we caught up in town for coffee the next day, she gave me a pair of etched drinking glasses. I knew that it had been a last-minute thing – something she’d hurriedly picked up on the way to the cafe. And I felt bad for her, even though I never mentioned it. I never wanted to embarrass her. It was like my mother’s prophecy finally coming true.

I wished later that we’d had a chance to make light of it and laugh. But we never did. She had changed, and I hadn’t.

At a time when I was still learning about men, and making my own stupid mistakes. Jess and Shawn decided to get married. It was going to be a small, family affair. I wasn’t invited.

And I’ve never had any sisters or anything else in the way of a really close female friend. All my friends are guys. So I guess I probably won’t have any bridesmaids or anything at my wedding (if I ever have a wedding)…but I also know that I actually have no idea what a bridesmaid does, because I’ll never be anyone else’s bridesmaid either.

I don’t know if Jess had bridesmaids. I presume she did. It hurt that it wasn’t me though. Because she had said for years that I was her best friend… only now it was much, much harder to believe.

But I never said that to her. I never told her how much I wanted to be there. Because I really wanted to be there for her, and if she didn’t want me there, then that needed to be okay with me.

What I did say, in a final fit of stupidity (I had recently got back from chasing Poison to Denver and was going through a whole big phase of stupidity at the time), was that I wanted her to tell me why we weren’t friends anymore.

I never got an answer to that one.

I really shouldn’t have bothered her with such a question a few days before her wedding. It was too late to change anything by then, and I’m sure it must’ve hurt her. I didn’t hear from her again for about ten years.

Sure, it hurt me a lot too, at the time. It hurt like Christ.

T later broke the drinking glasses Jess had given me the last time we saw each other. He broke both of them, at separate times. When he broke the second one (even after I had begged him not to use those glasses, and wrapped it in newspaper and hidden it in a box so that he wouldn’t use it, and then he found it and got it out and used it and broke it)… it was the angriest I’ve been in the whole of my adult life. I wanted to take the bits of glass and drive them into his eyes. I actually hit him – I pummeled his chest in that weak-wristed, pathetic, girly way. And instead of further violence, I ran outside in the middle of the night, and went into the front yard of the house next door, and collapsed on the grass and sobbed. I knew that Jess wasn’t coming back. I just hated him for reminding me of that fact.

It became a lot easier to believe what my mother had once said… and a lot harder to feel like maybe I was worth getting to know. That wasn’t Jessica’s fault – not one bit of it. That existed before her. She just gave me respite from it for a while.

And then Jack came along and I wanted to die again. Beautiful Jack, who smelled so good and smiled so well and had the laughing blue eyes of God. Jack who I would have followed across the glacier on bloody stumps. Jack who told me that I was amazing, and wonderful, and so very special, and that I made him happier than he’d ever been, and that he didn’t deserve me… and then told me that he’d stuff my body into a cardboard box (“this cardboard box, that I’ve saved for just this purpose”) and that nobody would ever miss me because I was a rotten, crazy, disgusting human being.

And so maybe Jack saved me – in a completely different way. Or maybe I saved myself.

Yeah. I think it was the latter.

Like I said: we became very different people, me and Jess. Where once I needed her need to keep me going, now I just need me. I kept on resisting the belief that I wasn’t worth knowing. I resisted it until I broke it. And then I stomped all over it. And then I dyed my hair. I’m allowed to be both weird and awesome at the same time. These days, I call myself awesome without any hint of sarcasm. I don’t need anyone else to tell me that I’m awesome. I can be very self-absorbed that way, and not feel guilty about it at all.

Fuck, it only took 30 years.

One of the strangest points of my adult life was the week I first joined Facebook. I did some vague search and collected about five friends – the only five people on earth that I actually know. I didn’t search for Jessica. I don’t often think of her anymore. Many years earlier I’d vaguely and painfully heard that she was moving to Britain. It was only painful because the news came to me via my brother, who still saw her around Wellington from time to time and kept in touch. I hated that he could be her friend when I couldn’t. We used to make fun of my brother. Together. And he’d never expressed any interest in her until she stopped talking to me… Yeah. Okay. I know I said before that I don’t get possessive. But I’m allowed to feel it inside from time to time even if I try not to inflict it on anyone.

What was weird about that first week on Facebook was that Jessica found me. We don’t have any friends in common in our circles. We don’t even have any groups in common. All I can think is that she just searched Facebook for my name, and I popped up. The fact that she contacted me just a few days after I first joined Facebook made me honestly wonder how many times she’d searched for me.

She said she still Googled my name from time to time. She’d read stuff online about shows I’d been doing. She learned about awards we’d won. She’d felt like she was involved, kind of. At least it helped reassure her that I was still alive. It was the modern-day equivalent to that one-time wistful look.

I’d never Googled Jessica’s name. I’d fallen across her name only once. I don’t know whether it was because it was too painful to look for her, or whether it was just that I’d accepted that she didn’t want me in her life.

But apparently she did want me in her life. Kind of.

We made up as Facebook friends. We don’t talk (but I’m hardly ever on Facebook anymore anyway). She knows that I still write, but she doesn’t have the address of this blog. I’m very much in two minds as to whether I should send her the link to this entry – but I think in the end that I won’t. We are… different people. I am honest here in a way that I haven’t been honest with her, not for a very long time at least. And there is an awkwardness in adulthood that never existed in adolescence. I worry that she will think less of me because I’m poor and she’s not. I worry that she wouldn’t like me talking about her or her relationships. I worry that we won’t be able to find common ground on account of the fact that I’ve never married. I worry that that would make her feel sorry for me when she really shouldn’t. Stupid shit like that.

I’m sure she probably still thinks I’m crazy. And that I still think about Poison waaayyy too much. But we have never met each other as adults. I have no idea whether we’d get along.

For what it’s worth (and despite my dream), I don’t know much about her politics – other than the fact she’s now a vegan and very vocal about animal rights. My first response to the animal rights thing was to nod and give that casual, half-stoned “alright!” – and not in any mocking way. I’ve been belligerently on the side of animal rights my entire life (something that became just another part of my teenage quilt of crazy). But I wonder whether it may also be a sign that her husband’s politics have softened. It was probably inevitable, as he actually struck me a quite a nice guy and certainly never struck me as stupid. It’s basically impossible to support animal rights in an economic system that treats everything as an exploitable resource; humans and animals alike. It’s very difficult to support human rights in that system too. Humans’ natural tendency is to do irritating, unproductive things (like giving food to disabled people), which in turn hurts the economy. We are social animals: altruism is equally as natural as greed.

And I like that she’s still altruistic. And I like that she’s still a nice person. And I like that she is still eclectic and changing and will probably dig something else tomorrow. She always had so much passion. But she always had questions too…

And yeah… I like that she searched for me.

So I don’t know… maybe I should send her the link to this blog. Maybe I should grab a hold of that wistful look, just one more time.

Or maybe I should just let her be. It’s been a really long time and I really don’t mind us not hanging out anymore. I’m not watching her across the playground these days. That doesn’t mean I don’t like her, it just means that I’m perfectly okay playing over here in the mud by myself. The sheer joy and wonder of life had made me pretty oblivious to any joy once lost. There’s just no point in fretting about it anymore. The world is full of so much happy if you just bother to go looking for it.

I wish I’d known that when I was ten. But then, if I had, we might never have been friends in the first place…

P.S. Crazy stalker song or just being supportive? Hmmm…

Hero

2011-03-24T02:45:00.003+13:00

I'm debating whether it's a sign of insanity to be sitting in my underwear past 2.30am, eating chocolate and listening to god-awful, soppy Richard Marx songs on the internet. Given that I am female, over 30, and unmarried, some people would probably consider such behavior normal and healthy. In a Bridget-Jones, God-I'm-so-desperate-and-pathetic-that-I-need-a-man-to-make-me-whole-and-give-me-babies-before-my-ovaries-retire kind of way.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the Ms Joneses of this world... but I'm only remembering Richard Marx from my brief flirtation with mindless musical pap when I was a silly and heartsick eleven-year-old. It held no allure to me after I grew a personality.

Still, it got me thinking.

One thing that occurred to me is that it's been a really long time since I had an "our song". All of my previous relationships have had a gushy romantic song stapled to them at some point... usually on a day when I'm all weepy and hormonal and having girl-feelings. It's only in such a diminished state that some grown up song can start playing on the local adult contemporary station and have me thinking like the lyrics actually fit my life... or I guess that should be "our lives"... but mostly, really it's just my life. I've dated a couple of romantics before, but they've still never gone so far as to pick a song. They had testicles instead.

I think the closest that R and I have to an "our song" would be something from the Lamb of God catalog. Not a lot of sunset beach scenes and flappy-white-dresses-in-the-wind in those music videos...

I don't think that's R's fault. I think I just got too spoiled for feelings in the last couple of relationships and wore out my "our song" drive. There were too many feelings and weepy girl-moments. Jack and I had a whole lot of "our songs"... which were really all my songs in the end. See explanation above.

... Like it or not, they all still stick with me.

Mostly they make me depressed.

But it's a good way to remember the sentiment that I was putting out there into those relationships, hoping to get it reflected back. The fact that I never did see it reflected back is why the songs are depressing, and why they're enlightening at the same time. I'm not that cold and self-contained. Sometimes I get feelings. Sometimes I fall in love. Sometimes I get things I want to say to people, and things I want to hear said to me.

When those things don't get said to me, I apparently go find a song that says them anyway, and just pretend...

So I guess I have to share one...

This is a Jack one. One that always reminds me of all those things I once said to him that I so desperately wanted him to say back...

And yes, it's better as a video. It's better as a video on account of the fact that, if I'm going to sit through 4 mins 30 sec of Enrique Iglesias, I'd at least like to watch him get beaten up by Mickey Rourke.... And let's face it, Mickey Rourke is a lot sexier.... And after watching this, I got lots of girl-fantasies about being restrained by bad guys whilst wearing a pretty white dress.... because I have to turn everything into porn.

Kiki Chrome... Wanton sex goddess speaking...

Vaginas and Stuff

2011-03-15T04:37:00.001+13:00

I had a plan last night. My plan was to work late, talk to V for a bit, find some porn, masturbate and then go to sleep. It was the plan of a standard, bored adult. A plan beautiful in its simplicity.

Only it didn't work.

It didn't work because I ended up with that creeping sense of discontent that gets up under my skin and makes any sex (even solo sex) impossible. I wonder whether all women get this sometimes. Those times when everything else loses its luster and all you suddenly want to do is sit down and cry.

I honestly hate crying. Crying just makes me feel ill.

So instead I did what I tend to do to stifle that urge: I listened to Eminem, and The Muppets, and anything else that took my fancy, and I wrote. I added a very small and gentle rewrite to a scene in my novel. I gave her a moment of happiness - even if it is empty happiness. It's peculiar that my knee-jerk response to feeling sad is to secretly give someone else joy. And I only ever do it to people who can't say thank you.

Imaginary people.

It strikes me that it's actually been a very hard couple of months lately. Some people in my life have died. And a lot of strangers have died too - all over my TV. I'm not sure whether that's what eats at me or whether I just need somewhere else to vent the stuff that I can't write about. Some things you keep from friends and strangers alike. But it seems petty to be thinking about my own troubles when so many others are suffering so openly.

This is when I should probably have some female friends. People who can talk about vaginas and stuff without feeling self-absorbed.

Except that I know I probably wouldn't like them.

Someone else wrote a blog called "Fuck You Earthquake" and I thought that was a great title

2011-03-01T04:26:00.007+13:00

A few months ago I was writing about how lucky New Zealand had been. Last September, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck a previously unknown fault line near the South Island city of Christchurch. Several buildings in Christchurch were severely damaged. There were a lot of near-misses for the citizens of this picturesque, English-style city. No one was killed.

Mother Nature will remind us all not to get too smug.

One week ago today, another earthquake shook this poor city. The statistics would say that it should have been less significant than the first. It was a moderate 6.3 quake, making September's quake officially 8 times stronger. But the fates were not smiling so widely this time. Last week's quake was both very shallow (just 5km deep compared to 10km last time) and very close to the central city (10km away as opposed to 40km). It centered on the port town of Lyttelton, just across the ridge from central Christchurch. It also hit in the middle of the day, instead of the wee hours of the morning. Streets were full of shoppers, tourists and office-workers on their lunchbreak. The results were catastrophic.


Rescue workers pick through the ruins of the CTV building

Streets were filled with shoppers & tourists when the masonry came down

Dust rises from the central city immediately following the quake

Two women comfort each other outside the collapsed Pyne Gould building

Some older buildings were still being repaired from the last earthquake, and couldn't take the force of the second tremor

Witnesses described the first earthquake as like rolling on a rough sea. They described the second as though someone had just grabbed the whole city and shook it violently like a can of spray paint. Hundreds of buildings simply shook to pieces. 755 have already been "red-stickered" by engineers as unsafe to enter and fit only for demolition, with thousands more damaged. The death toll has been climbing all week. To date, 148 fatalities have been confirmed, and around 200 people are still officially listed as missing. Rescue and recovery crews from around the globe are working 24-hrs to try and locate people in the rubble. They haven't recovered a survivor since last Wednesday.

Beneath that boulder is the Sumner RSA (Returned Services Association) building. You can imagine how lucky you would have to be to escape.

I stated last year that Christchurch was always a very "bricky" city, and so poorly prepared for a large earthquake. The brick facades of all those pretty, old buildings just peel off and collapse onto the sidewalk. Many stone churches and government buildings have disintegrated completely. [see the link for before and after photos of some of the city's most prominent buildings and churches] What's more, there are plenty of steep cliffs to the south, prone to landslides, and the silty soil under the city has proven to wobble like jelly and bubble up through cracks in the ground, allowing large structures to sink.

That's not water, it's silt that's come up out of the ground.

Up until last year, they hadn't had a significant earthquake recorded near Christchurch, and it was thought to be a very safe place (unlike most of New Zealand). Modern buildings still adhered to New Zealand's strict earthquake codes, but earthquake-proofing has been only a very recent science, and anything built before the 1990s would not meet the codes today. Furthermore, many older buildings were still in a state of repair from last year's quake (and had continued to be damaged by months of rolling aftershocks). For anyone who's been following the news stories, it's easy to notice how many buildings were already covered in scaffolding (now all bent and broken) and surrounded by temporary fencing. [link has lots of photos of devastation from around the city] This widespread construction work also accounts for how many men in hi-vis coats can be seen in the earliest footage of the quake rescues. Construction workers leapt in immediately to save people in buildings that had come down. Still, several buildings that had been assessed as "safe" in September, were brought down completely in February.

The bad stories are very bad. I listened with much of New Zealand as a Christchurch grandmother phoned talkback radio that night to mourn for the loss of her 9-month-old grandson, who was killed by a falling TV as he lay on his living room floor. A 5-month-old met a similar fate, in the relative safety of his own home, and was laid to rest just yesterday. Scores of relatives and friends have reported getting phonecalls and text messages from loved ones trapped inside buildings, not all of whom have been found. One collapsed building housed a TV station, medical center, English-language school, nursing school, and a daycare facility. At least 120 people were estimated to have been killed in that one building alone, including students from Japan, China and the Philippines.

The parents of baker Shane Tomlin were horrified to see footage of him being carried, semi-conscious, from the ruins of his workplace. After several days of trying to locate him (apparently trying every hospital across New Zealand), Police broke the news to them yesterday that he had died of his injuries and they would be preparing for a funeral.

Last year, I shared a picture of myself outside the beautiful Christ Church Cathedral, right in the middle of the city. We briefly visited the city last winter.

In photos of the cathedral as it looks post-quake, the red arrow shows where I was standing when that first picture was taken:

An estimated 22 people (most of them tourists) are still buried under all that masonry. The nature of tourists has made it very difficult to predict where searchers should look for the missing.

Several news outlets ran these harrowing pictures of Donna Manning's father and teenaged children, who had camped in a park outside her office building, waiting for any news. Photographers captured their reaction when Police informed them that the rescue mission had been ended, and there were thought to be no more survivors. (this isn't a photo I like to re-post, save for the fact that it makes my heart ache)

In an appalling act of human greed, while this family still waited in the park for any news, burglars broke into their house and robbed them.

A trust has since been set up for the Manning children, and New Zealanders can find the account details here.

Last year I shook my head at all the bizarre people who flood Yahoo News at times like this, and scream about the end of the world. Many claimed that God saved Christchurch because it was a "Christian" city, and flattened Haiti because it wasn't... except of course, that Haiti is about 98% Catholic and Christchurch is actually named after the school at Oxford College... Several people also used the Christchurch quake as a chance to bash Haiti and New Orleans for all the criminals and looters who'd appeared in the wake of disaster (and a lot of comments got pretty racist about that, stating that Kiwis don't go looting because we're all "white"). But it was incredibly naive to suggest that New Zealand wasn't getting looting and fraudsters too (of various skin-tones). The video footage from right after the quake shows New Zealanders of all ethnicities pitching in and helping to rescue the injured (hi, yes, we're not all caucasian).

Warning: this is raw footage shot by the Christchurch Press newspaper just minutes after the quake. It contains images of deceased and seriously injured people, as well as a bit of swearing.

LINK

There was also on-the-spot video of Police arresting people for hindering the search efforts... white people. Like all people, we're mostly a good sort. However, there are scumbags everywhere. This isn't paradise: it's planet earth.

The happier stories have been fewer, and often tempered with the greater backdrop of tragedy. Emma Howard's fiance rushed to her office at the Pyne Gould Corporation building soon after the earthquake, only to find that the whole structure had pancaked down to rubble. Frantic, he explained to a reporter that they were to be married on Friday... They got their wedding. Emma was pulled from the wreckage six hours later, relatively unharmed.

One family had a falling boulder plow right through their house like a massive cannonball, destroying their children's bedrooms. Fortunately, they weren't home at the time.

And we want there to be more happy stories, but it will probably be a few more weeks of suffering still to come. Heaven knows when they will recover the last body. Insurers have already started saying that the clean-up from this earthquake may crack NZ$15billion. It is still a very raw time for this little nation. It's easy to feel powerless.

Instead, I found myself going through the little collection of photos I took last year, and thinking about how R and I had mused about moving there. It seems like the sort of city that's easy to love... And it is easy to love.

Even though Christchurch will mourn its dead, I know it will come back.

Kia kaha, Christchurch.

The Station Fire

2011-02-21T02:06:00.002+13:00

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a guy about blocking a fire exit. I have the same conversation about six or seven times a year, with various different people. It usually goes something like this:

Me: "You can't put that table there."

Him: "We need to put it here. This is where we're laying out our invites/awards/drinks/whatever."

Me: "That door is a fire exit."

Him: "We'll they can push it to one side if there's a fire."

Me: "You are going to have 600 drunken people at this gig. They won't know to move a table when they're panicked."

Him: "Jeez, it's just a table. They can use another exit on the other side of the room."

Me: "What if the fire's over that side of the room?"

Him: "Well what are the chances of the place catching fire anyway?"

Me: "I'm putting your table over here. Have a nice day."

About 99% of the time, it's not my job to moderate the fire exits at gigs. Usually I'm just hired to turn up, put up some stage curtains/lights/scenery/whatever, and piss off. Sometimes I organize the band and other bits and pieces too, and often I stage-manage. But I don't belong to the venues anymore. In common practice, it's the venue's job to check their own exits.

Around here, I see this check happen at about one out of every ten events I do. For "private functions" the venues generally don't require ushers and so they put on some minimum-wage teenager to babysit the public areas for the night. There's little or no training offered. Even at "ushered" gigs, the ushers frequently don't know what they're doing, or are too scared to tell a customer to move their shit.

I'm not too scared to be unpopular. This is why I'm unpopular.

Last year, I had to point out to a client that they had draped their entire auditorium with non-flame-retardant corduroy curtains. Corduroy is brushed cotton. If you put a match to it: it basically explodes. The client just shrugged and walked away. The curtains were not taken down.

I don't go through these speeches just for the sake of being a busy-body. I'm lucky enough that I've never been in a venue that caught fire. I've done plenty of fire drills in venues. I've evacuated gigs due to smoke alarms, earthquakes and bomb threats. I've extinguished fires and seen some very near-misses. But I've never been in a building that caught fire. Touch wood.

However, I thought the timing of yesterday's conversation was disturbingly apt. If clients really want to get into a beef with me about their damn fire exits, I have recommended that they Google "the Station nightclub fire"... but only if they have a strong stomach.

Yesterday was the 8th anniversary of the Station fire.

For those who haven't heard of it, the Station nightclub fire occurred in Rhode Island back in 2003. The band, Great White, were performing in a small club to a packed house of about 460 people. A short burst of stage pyrotechnics set the building on fire. 100 people died, mostly struggling to find an exit in the thick smoke, or trampled in the narrow passageways.

I'd imagine that pretty much anybody who lives in the States, and has some interest in rock music, knows about the Station fire - but it didn't tend to make big news over here. I only know if it because I had seen Great White a few years earlier, when they'd toured with Poison in 1999. The news story caught my eye, and obviously made me very sad.

However, there are all kinds of reasons why the Station fire offers a very good example for me to throw at uncooperative clients. For a start, it's worth understanding that very few people ever bother to find out what a venue is made of. At the Station, the foam sound-proofing in the auditorium was not flame-retardant (in fact, it was clearly very flammable). The owners didn't apparently know this. Neither did the band or the crowd. Most importantly, nobody had bothered to check.

Lesson one: check your materials. If you don't know what something's made out of, assume it's flammable.

Lesson two: smoke and booze tend to work in combination to disorient people. Don't assume that everyone will be able to see an exit, or be capable of reacting quickly.

Lesson three: know your venue capacity. The Station was well over-crowded for the number and type of exits it had.

Lesson four: fire moves really fucking fast. Faster than you could really imagine.

One of the reasons why I suggest that people look at the Station fire, is that there is video of the whole incident, filmed by a cameraman who was in the venue at the time. It is on YouTube. It is horrific. I do not recommend that anyone should watch it if you have any association with the fire, or if you're afraid of fire, or if you are a sensitive sort. It includes footage of people dying. It's one of the scariest fucking things I've ever seen. The link is here if you can stand it.

It's a 9-minute video, all in real-time. The fire department arrive at the scene less than 5 minutes after the fire starts - a very impressive response time, that I doubt we'd be able to duplicate here. However, by that time it's already too late. The building is clogged with black smoke just a few seconds after the pyro goes off, and a virtual inferno within two minutes. Two minutes sometimes sounds like a long time, but the video proves just how quickly people have to react in order to escape. It's terrifying.

In an additional point, which tends to get me where I live: the road manager (the guy who pushed the "go" button on the pyro) plead guilty to manslaughter and went to jail.

And as concerned as I am for people's safety, I also don't want to be that guy. Because I know that if I did the dangerous thing at a show (or even if I saw the dangerous thing and did nothing about it), and people died... I'd be pleading guilty too. There's a weight of responsibility that seems to settle with knowing how to run a show.

Even though it's not my venue and they're not my fire exits. It's still my problem.

Responsible Kiki will remain unpopular, thanks very much.

To Gary

2011-02-13T05:42:00.006+13:00

What with all the family drama lately, I'm sorry to say that I haven't been keeping up with my various social networks as well as I used to... And I hate that some news now only comes to me through Facebook, as if we were nothing more than onetime "Facebook Friends".

We were more than that, weren't we, bud?

We were proof that old road-crew speak in a language all our own. We both understood the burn. We both spoke in bumper-sticker, hippie philosophy sometimes. We cracked bitter, crude jokes and made each other laugh like hyenas. Not really that hippie-like after all.

Yet we also communicated on other levels. When he spent a surprise Christmas alone, I checked in on him regularly because I was genuinely afraid he would top himself. It's the original strain of groupie-love that comes out of me. The need to offer comfort and salvation to people who ask for neither.

Gary was the friend who helped me up and made me smile when Bret had his hemorrhage last year. Gary got me in ways that are too difficult to explain to other people. He was the first of my favorite, cuddly soundies.

We said goodbye at least twice in the past few years, but our paths always ended up coiling back together eventually. Goodbyes are for suckers, and hardly ever meant.

We didn't get to say goodbye for a third time. What we got was an "Awesome, dude. Keep me posted."... and then a quick fade. The last note hanging in the air, but still feeling like the song was only half-over.

Nice hang, man. Bright. You left 'em eager and yearning for release like a bunch of virgins on a first date.

It's a good way to end it.

The night always ends, the trucks are loaded, and you have more traveling to do. We won't see you around this particular dusty stage again.

...And I know that you were just an old, Hair Metal hellion like me, so a 21 confetti-cannon salute might have been more appropriate... but I also knew you as a man. A good man. A proud, single father of three young kids. A man who knew the value of sweat.

So this is what rose to mind in my memory of you. I hope you wouldn't have minded...

atlantic city -live bruce springsteen
Uploaded by runawaydream. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Just a quick note...

2011-02-06T02:05:00.001+13:00

My grandmother died at about 10:15 tonight.

Peacefully. Or I guess about as peaceful as these things get. It wasn't unforeseen in any case. As it turned out, her long hospital stay had left her with some nasty infections... and she just started to refuse to eat, no matter what anyone tried. She had been lingering unresponsive for a few days.

It occurred to me that I still have some of her clean laundry sitting on a chair in my living room. Stuff from the hospital that I had taken home to wash and was going to bring back to her at the new rest home.

I also have her wedding photos here. They've been unframed for years - just left on the back of the shelf as the old, hard, card photos that they are. They have her pretty handwriting on the back, with the date and location of the service, as well as the names of her wedding party. I had rescued them from the pile of photos in her house, and brought them back to frame them. I have gradually been framing her photos and bringing them to decorate her room. I figured it helped her nurses to see that she is loved, and has a family, and that she's a person - a person with a full life and a history before she came to be with them. I guess I hoped that she would remember that too.

She never noticed the photos in any case. She also never noticed the calendar that I got for her, and filled in with all of the birthdays of her friends and family... I don't hold any of that against her. The recent dementia stole away the charming, bright, loving woman that she was...

I bought a block of butter today. I was going to bake some chocolate muffins to take to her at the home tomorrow.

I might still bake them anyway. I'm sure that it doesn't hurt to show the nurses that we are grateful for all their care over the last couple weeks.

It's funny, but it's those little unfinished jobs that pick at me. It's easy to feel so useless when people get sick and die. So I cling to the basic things that I can do. I was never much good at conversation, but I can bring people things in order to show them that they are in my thoughts. I'm like a dog that way.

I will miss being able to bring her things.

I got off the phone tonight and went and sat down on my chair... and the cat got up from where he was sleeping and walked over to me and jumped up on my lap. It reminded me a little of the night that my grandfather died, about 15 years ago. We all sat around the kitchen table, all the local family, and ate fish & chips. There were no tears - it had been a long, lingering illness. My mother and her sisters discussed the funeral plans. My grandmother was very quiet. And I noticed this and reached under the table to hold her hand. She squeezed my hand so tight I thought she'd break it. I realized then how scared she really was. But we never needed to talk about it or draw attention to it.

It's a reminder to me that the universe is a collective. Some things we all understand, even without words.

When you eat rotting garbage... I have my limits

2011-01-28T01:30:00.000+13:00

As a few people here know (and is is something that I've banged on about before) I'm a pacifist and a Buddhist. I try to step real lightly with things and not get wound up, and it serves me well.

But I'll admit to breaking from time to time and needing a bit of extra Buddhist-help keeping centered.

Case in point:

There's a house across the road from mine that's been a rotting hulk for a long time. It's a painfully small, timber-framed cottage that's probably about 70 years old. Some genius decided to build it on a fairly flat, soggy piece of ground, and so it's been trying very hard to turn itself back into compost for a long time. It's owned by a Fijian Indian man, who doesn't seem to speak a lot of English. He rents it out to... the sort of tenants who don't mind living in a rotting hulk.

Since I've lived here, every six months or so the tenants in that house have changed. Some of them, I think, get very annoyed about the damp and the cold and the mold and the fact that the windows are growing mushrooms. Most of them, I suspect, only exist as tenants for as long as the bond lasts and it takes the courts to process the landlord's complaint for subsequent non-payment of rent. Every six months, the little Fijian man reappears to haul away a trailer-load of filthy sofas and broken plastic toys, and take another scrawny abandoned cat to the SPCA. We call him "the slumlord". We began to wonder when he'd get sick of it and start to actually DO something about fixing up the house.

Last year he ripped out the worst of the external walls (and the whole neighborhood got a view of all the mold inside the house) and built a new one. He does all his work himself, clearly to cut costs. That repair was really little more than a band-aid, and this year he's finally decided he's had enough. For the last couple of months, all of the cladding has been ripped off (not that it wasn't already falling off), a fair percentage of the framing has been replaced, the roof has been replaced, and he's started to build a brand new addition out the back (getting rid of a particularly rotty door). It will be some time before it's ready for tenants again, as he does all his own building work, and only in the weekends... at like 7am on a Sunday morning, with the damn concrete cutter out there... grumble grumble...

The benefit of this is that hopefully we will soon look out on what appears to be a new house. The downside of this is that he's disturbed all the Gisborne cockroaches that were slowly eating his cottage.


New Zealand's own (Australian) Gisborne Cockroach... about life-size. Honestly, mostly they live off rotting wood.

Now I'm generally okay with bugs. I believe that everything has its place in the world and every living creature has as much right to be on this planet as I do. I've never been freaked out by bugs or spiders... I even think some of them are quite cute. I went for most of my adult life without ever owning a can of bug spray, until my last flat got inundated with masses of Argentinian ants and I bought some barrier spray to try and convince them to stay outside. That was five years ago and I still have that same can: that's how often I use it. I ain't gonna judge something (human or animal) just because someone says it's ugly. Ugly is on the inside, and everything is just doing what nature needs it to do. Something needs to eat your garbage. You can't be mad at a creature for just following its nature.

Having said that, I've also generally never had a problem with insect infestations. I'm religiously untidy as a person (you should see how many letters and notes and bills are piled up on my desk right now) but I've never been dirty. There may be a building project happening in the middle of the floor, but the house stays clean. Because of that, I've never really had a house which was accommodating to bugs. The sugar gets sealed up in a jar rather than left out on the counter. The fridge and stove get rolled out regularly so that I can clean beneath them. That and I leave spiders in high, inconspicuous corners. I think it helps.

So a couple weeks ago, when I see a big 2" cockroach in the middle of the living room carpet, my conversation with the roach goes something like this:

"Okaaaay... Wow, where did you come from? Honey, there's really nothing much around here for you to eat. Here, you stay there and I'll go get a jar so that I can take you outside and put you on the neighbor's wood pile. There's a lot of damp old wood there for you to eat, and you'll be a lot happier."

Note: this isn't my carpet. This is a stock pic from Fotosearch.com

A few days later, I switch on the kitchen light after 2am (searching for coffee - don't ask), and there's another big cockroach sitting on my stove...

"Aw, dude! I'm gonna have to clean that again now! Screw it, I'm not carrying you across to the wood pile at 2am. You can go out the window. Don't come back."

Fast forward a couple more days, and I'm on my way to bed. I flick on the bathroom light to find a big, tasty cockroach chewing on the bristles of my toothbrush...

"Okay, you can keep that now. I'm going to put on a coat and drive down to the gas station to buy a new toothbrush."

Yesterday, we're putting away the dishes and find a cockroach sitting between dinner plates in the cupboard...

"Awgh! Shit, we're gonna have to clean all those again now! This is getting really stupid, you nasty little motherfuckers!"

And today... on my freshly-made fudge...

"Okay, now: you die."

You see, pacifism has limits. And apparently my limit is: thwarting my enjoyment of fudge.

"My fudge!!! Bad roachy!!!"

Tomorrow, I am buying a roach motel and hoping for some opportunity to relieve my conscience at a later date.

Small Bag of Sand

2011-01-19T01:02:00.002+13:00

There are certain reasons why this blog is anonymous, and I'm about to explore one of them.

I wrote last month about the fact that my aunt has had a bit of a breakdown relating to the fact that her mother (my grandmother) had to be put into a home. A few friends know, basically the day I wrote that blog, my grandmother was also whipped off to hospital with pneumonia. She was found semi-conscious and mumbling on the floor of her room, and they'd initially worried that she'd had a stroke. After a lot of oxygen, and about 36 hrs unconscious in the ward, she started to come right. The problem is that she's 93, and quite confused and upset about the whole experience.

Now, my grandmother (my mother's step-mother, but really the only grandmother I've ever known) was raised to be a lady. Despite her family's modest means, her widowed mother put aside part of her husband's estate to send their daughter to a very expensive private boarding school... during the Great Depression. There she was apparently educated by the Lady-in-Waiting to Princess So-and-So. The end result of which was that she's a very sweet, very polite woman, with a large circle of friends, who's never picked up so much as a garden trowel in her life. She could never afford the very best things in life, but she made up for it with a little collection of Royal Albert china and an insistence that nobody ever missed a meal. However, somewhere under that twee, tea-rose facade, there's a bit of a rascal. One of her earliest memories of her father was the day she skipped school (at about age 7) and got caught downtown singing dirty songs in the window of the local music store. In her 20s, she bounced off the "elegant suitor" expectation and married a modest dairy farmer, who was then serving in WWII as a lowly Army corporal (!)... And he was Maori too (!!!)... We all love her to bits, despite the fact that her "helpless female" persona goes down like a lead balloon with my mother. If my grandmother knew that I was writing this blog, however, she would be mortified.

This is why I'm keeping it anonymous.

She's been in hospital since about Dec 19th. I've been to see her almost every day, which has been playing havoc with my health, but I really think it's the dutiful thing to do. My thyroid problem has been playing up a lot, making me very tired and weepy (among other things), and so all this trekking back and forth to the hospital has the added effect of making me come home exhausted and in need of a stiff drink. Almost every day I go in there, she cries... and there is very little in life that's more heart-wrenching than a frail 93-year-old woman who is crying and confused. The hospital stay has gradually revealed a few things about her health that she was either hiding or wasn't adequately dealing with. I won't go into all that, but it has prolonged her stay in any case.

The hospital finally called us in for a family meeting last Tuesday. Her other biological daughter has flown in from Australia to see her mother (since the local daughter is still housebound with severe depression), but they really haven't had much contact with one another for 30 years or so. Because of this, there's really no one family member who can fill in the hospital with all the bits and pieces of information that they need. At any rate, we've all also been getting different information from my grandmother anyway. She'd found ways to lean on different people for different things in order to make it look like she was coping better than she was. I suspect that, now she's in hospital she's both more confused and less able to rally herself to "look fine for visitors". She's the sort of person who would be terrified of looking like a burden, so she'd pretend that things were okay even when they're not.

The hospital has determined a few things: 1) she's unable to go back to the supported living home that she was in. 2) her old heart murmur caused them quite a bit of concern (despite the fact she's had it since she was 12!) and so they've put her on Warfarin. That's actually caused a few other problems with bruising in her legs and fighting the antibiotics she needs for the pneumonia, but we've got very insistent with them about taking her off it. 3) she's tested on their cognitive scale as non compos mentis, so they've officially diagnosed her as having dementia. That's a very recent turn, as she's always been pretty sharp and very insistent about doing her crosswords and keeping track of things.

We've had to get a bit firm with the hospital here, because they weren't really encouraging her to walk, the nurses often weren't moving her enough and allowing her to lie without pain, they often had male nurses bathing her, they'd put in a catheter (because they were too lazy to take her to the toilet!), and they'd lost interest in whether or not she ate. Last night, after sitting with her for 30 mins and trying to get her to eat fractionally more than three mouthfuls of ice cream (with all of her "Oh, I'm so scared and I don't know what's happening to me, and I don't know where I am, and I don't want to eat anything") I settled her enough to be able to step out and speak to one of the ward nurses... about the 30th nurse I'd seen in the last month - there's nothing like a lack of consistency to make things even more difficult. I gathered my frazzled nerves enough to ask the woman to encourage my grandmother to eat a little more before they came and took the dinner away... and the woman gave me a look of false sympathy and a little speech about how "Oh, they often get that way in the last days. It's all part of their journey..." I damn near slapped the woman. I bit back that my grandmother wasn't dying - she was actually being discharged in the morning. Her body is as good as it's been in years. Her mother lived to 103! But this nurse had just taken the attitude that there's no point in encouraging a stressed-out, 90-something patient to eat because they were too old to live much longer anyway...

I am so, SO grateful that we chose to take her out of that hospital.

She's now listed as "one-person care", which means she needs a nurse in attendance to help with things like walking and toileting. She's actually too heavy for most of my family to lift now - but that's due mostly to swelling in her legs and the fact she's got a bone disease which is gradually making her skeleton really frigging heavy.

Because of all this, we've had a busy week of trying to find her a placement in a new nursing home/hospital, as well as clearing out her old house and sorting out the mess of legal affairs. The house belongs to the family farm, but the terms of my grandfather's will insisted that she could live in it rent-free for as long as she liked. It's now been 15 years. If it gives you any indication, the entire house (carpet, curtains, paint-job) is rose pink.

When she went into the first home in October, she was pretty insistent that it was only for "respite" and that she'd be coming home again in a few weeks. Because of this, her entire house was basically closed up, as is, and left - from her clothes in the drawers to her hand-cream on the sink. My mother was sensible enough to retrieve the perishable food from in the fridge, but everything else was just left to sit until we knew what was going to happen. Now that the hospital has made that determination, we really needed to get stuck-in and split up the heirlooms while she's still cognitive enough to assign them back to the people who gave them to her... This has meant that I'm now the proud owner of some very chintzy Royal Albert china... You can imagine how thrilled I am.

Luckily she'd started making lists a few years ago of who she wanted some items to go to. Unfortunately the lists are far from complete, and there's a few things that we can't find. It's nothing major - she never had much in the way of assets anyway. There's been a whole troop of us: me, my mother, my mother's step-sister (the daughter from Australia), the other step-sister's best friend, and the step-sister's brother-in-law and his wife. Yes, it's all a bit extended and vague in my family.

The first couple of days were spent laundering and packing up her clothes and linen (a lot of which had gone back into the closet dirty, because she clearly just didn't want to admit that she needed help). The major furniture has either been gifted to family members or assigned to be sold to help pay for her care. We developed what became known as "The Gordon Rule" for all the knick-knacks. The Gordon Rule is that if someone holds up an item with a statement like "who would want this?", and anyone within earshot expresses recognition/like/dislike/humor/disdain for that item (or basically says anything at all): it's theirs. This is how I was stupid enough to be saddled with an empty gin bottle with windmills on it and a cake tin covered in pictures of golden retrievers. But my mother got the orange potpourri bowl that she always hated. :)

Most of these things are of basically no value, but my grandmother had indicated (in a more lucid moment) that she was happy for anything to go to her kindly neighbor who sold second-hand goods to help pay for the grandchildren's sports teams. We were pulling out pots and wrapping dishes and doing all the normal house-clearing stuff when her daughter got into the vegetable bins under the kitchen bench.

"Ooo. We've still got onions here. Does anyone want onions?"

The onions were assessed as still being edible and split up amongst the workers accordingly.

"Oh, now what's this bag?"

Next to the onions, in the vege bin, was a gift bag with pictures of teddy bears on it - the kind you'd get for holding a birthday present. In the bag was a card from my great-aunt's funeral in 2005, and a DVD eulogy from the 2006 funeral of one of my grandmother's friends. Everyone agreed that no one wanted those, and they could go in the rubbish. There was also a small package wrapped in gold tissue paper, so before the whole lot went in the bin, the daughter quickly tore open the package to check it wasn't valuable.

"Oh, see, now honestly! Who would save a bag of sand?"

My mother snorted from across the room. "Hmpf. You'd better double-check it's not someone's ashes or something."

"Oh," says the step-sister. "... oh."

Then everyone in the room kind of shares a look and goes rushing over to have a look at this bag of "sand"... And sure enough, it's a little snaplock Glad bag full of ash, with tiny ground up bits in it. All wrapped up in gold tissue paper with a plastic teddy bear figurine... and not labeled at all...

After the initial shock, we all just hooted with laughter. I mean, you kind of have to laugh, don't you? We now have human remains on our hands, and we have no idea who they are... or how they ended up in the vege bin with the onions... There were many comments about how many times we ate my grandmother's onion gravy.

Without having a name to go with the ashes, we were kind of stumped as to what we do with them. And it's not like anyone wants to call the authorities and ask. "Um... yes... we just found a dead person under the kitchen bench, and we kind of don't know what to do with the remains..." My mother ended up calling a local undertaker, only to be told "dig a little hole in the garden and no one will ever know". She's pragmatic enough to think that made a lot of sense. I, on the other hand, was quite appalled and thought that we should do more to give this person a proper, respectful service... Thanks to The Gordon Rule, I now have a little Glad bag full of human ashes sitting next to my desk.

The delicate question got raised with my grandmother, and she knew enough to admit that the ashes belong to the friend from the DVD... but she didn't want them, and she didn't know what to do with them, and that's how they ended up sitting with the onions.

I'm sure that makes sense in someone else's mind.

I've done a bit of research and found out that this woman did indeed have a daughter, who lived nearby to her mother. All of that might make for an awkward phonecall to enquire as to why she didn't have her mother's ashes... but I haven't sucked up the courage for that yet. In the meantime, I've just been focused on getting the house cleared and getting my grandmother a bit more comfortable.

She went into her new nursing home today... which was a trial lasting about 8 hours... and which, by the end of the day, had a few of us quietly standing in the garden in tears. I've been very insistent all week that we don't let her repeat the same "I don't want to deal with my old life" trick that she did when she went into the first home. I've spent a lot of the week getting things set up at her new place. I've moved her dressing table and a great deal of her personal effects down to the new home. I've gone through her photos and found a few nice ones to frame and put up on the walls. The pictures of her two husbands are on the dresser. I sewed labels into all of her clothes (she has so many clothes!) and took them down there too. I lined the drawers of her furniture (and the home's furniture) with scented papers, just the way she likes. I made her bed with her own quilts. I have got a calendar, which I will fill in with all the family-and-friend birthdays so that she doesn't forget. I bought her a new chrysanthemum for her windowsill, and aired out the room with her favorite tea-rose scent. I brought her coasters for her furniture, and put her favorite fridge magnets on the towel holder over her sink. I got her two new pairs of fluffy slippers for her swollen feet. I put fresh chocolates in her bedside cabinet (and a couple sneaky bottles of port in the bottom drawer), and had fresh date scones baked and waiting for her when she arrived. I want her to feel like she's "at home", and not forgotten, and a whole person again.

She will probably never notice or appreciate 90% of what we've done, because she's currently stuck in a "you're all just sending me here to die" sort of mentality. Having her things around her almost looks more like an abandonment, rather than less. She got a bit upset... but it was the right thing to do, and it will hopefully help her feel more human through the next few months. I don't need gratitude, I just need my own peace of mind. I'm not going to treat her like she's dying because I simply don't expect her to die anytime soon. I was horrified when I saw how little she had in her last rest home. It took me less than five minutes to clear out her room - and that's no hint of a lie. After so many months with hospitals, mediocre nurses, no haircuts, generic food, pain, patronizing, and poor-handling, I want to be able to go to bed tonight feeling like I've tried to give her back a bit of the dignity and life that she's lost.

It's been a lot of stress and a lot of change in a very short period of time. It's like someone died, but without the real sense of finality. We all just want to see my grandmother happier and more comfortable, and we're hoping that after a few weeks in the new home (where the staff are really lovely) she'll settle down and become a bit more like her old self... hopefully. But I guess there's no way of predicting these things. I think it's likely to be a long journey ahead.

But I'm definitely writing a comedy sketch out of the "body in the onion bin" one day. Maybe after my grandmother has passed on... and anonymously, so that she wouldn't have to feel embarrassed...

Ahh, families!...

Sex with Guitars

2011-01-13T02:50:00.000+13:00

Well not, you know, actual sex with guitars... because guitars have sharp pointy bits, and that's uncomfortable.

Believe me. I know.

And you have to make sure you clean them really well afterward, or else you can tarnish the finish, so it's all just a hassle really...

No, I mean that I've decided to carry on a bit of a theme from my blog about Steven Adler yesterday and post a couple more videos of sexy hard rock icons who make me feel like I did when we used to climb the ropes in gym class... :]

I think I've actually posted both these videos on different blog sites before, so my apologies if you've already seen them, but I do think they're just too darn sticky sweet to not watch again. Both of these are pretty old too. Way too old for me to have ever loved them the first time around, but they still gave me a tingle when I discovered them later.

Let's face it: I love watching men. I'm madly in love with maleness. Men are raw and powerful and beautiful sometimes.

Van Halen: 'Ice Cream Man' (live in Largo, 1982)

David Lee Roth's reaction to Van Halen's critics... I'm not normally into the whole blond surfer-dude look, but oh... ohhhhhh.... He was just sex on legs back then.

I dig the ones who look like they have a sense of humor too. It's important to be having fun. :)

Led Zeppelin: 'Whole Lotta Love' (live at Madison Square Garden, 1973)

Robert Plant definitely had a charisma all his own (and all the camera angles of his crotch probably don't hurt either). Again, I've never met a British guy in real life who made me think all the bad thoughts that this video does. :) Sorry if that sounds terrible, but it's true.

The whole guitar/vocal interaction in the middle is just pre-orgasmic too. It does things to me...

Mmmmm....

Right. It must be time for bed now.

Steven Adler

2011-01-12T01:36:00.001+13:00

Okay, standard warning:

If you're the sort of person who wears comfortable shoes, and is easily offended by swearing, and thinks that there's too much sex on mainstream TV these days... do not, under any circumstances, read any of my blogs pertaining to Guns 'n' Roses. I can write about other bands and be kinda vaguely cute and polite, but any discussion of G'n'R will involve coarse language and adult themes.

Don't read any further.

No, seriously. Don't.

I'm not kidding. Last time I tried to talk about G'n'R I ended up relating Appetite for Destruction to rough anal sex in a dirty public toilet stall.

Right, that got rid of the prudes, didn't it?

***

I've been sick lately. Christmas and New Year is a lame time to get sick, especially considering it’s summer here, but it's given me the chance to get an ass-load of editing done on my manuscript, and a chance to re-read (and savor) a book that I only crashed through in a panic a couple months back. Last time I read this book it was a borrowed copy that had to go back. This time, it's my copy (my Xmas present to myself) and I can take my time.

It's Steven Adler's book. And I'd been really looking forward to reading it again.

Now, I mentioned Steven Adler a couple months back, when I did my little riff on Appetite for Destruction. For those (few) of you who are still hard rock virgins, Steven was the original drummer in Guns 'n' Roses. He's also the only original member of G'n'R that I actually like.

Undoubtedly, part of my original "like like" for Steven came from the fact that I thought he was HAAAWWT! I think half the reason I first bought that cassette of Appetite was because I wanted to perv at his picture. Truth be told, Steven was the first rockstar to ever give me an orgasm... Of course, I was by myself at the time, but... well... you get the idea.

My puberty rocked!

… Hmmm… Come to think of it, the first time I ever made out with a guy we were listening to Appetite for Destruction too. It’s no wonder I associate that album with sex really. It still makes me horny…

I mean, come on! This is such a “Phwwoooaarrr!” picture, who could resist? I’m digging those Lip Service pants… I always liked guys with body hair too. I don't know why men get rid of it, really. But, oh well: their choice… Sigh.

But I liked Steven for more than just the obvious reasons. In all the interviews I read, and clips I caught on TV, he seemed like a nice guy. He seemed like the sort of person I'd probably get along with in real life too. Always smiling, kinda happy-go-lucky positive, but also with that air of the kid who got picked on a bit too often. He was the bullied kid, and not the bully... And I like hanging out with those sort of people, because I was the bullied kid too and it makes it a whole lot easier to relate. [Edit: Yes, I know that I'm totally projecting here, because I've never met the guy so I really have no idea what he's like in person, but shut the hell up; it's my blog and I can imagine whatever the fuck I want.] All of my real-life friends (the few who really stuck by me in bad times and good) are the schoolyard misfits with a fair bit of pain in their back pocket. The friends who didn't get it - the ones who’d never been kicked in the face just for being themselves - they've faded out of my life every time.

Back in those chaotic, amazing years of the late ‘80s… I love that Adler is the only one in the band who smiles. And that he sings the words even though he’s not miked – even the “fuck off” at 1:52 that Axl so carefully skips. It’s so joyous. He really looks like he loves being there and isn’t putting on an “I’m too cool to dig this” façade. He looks like a fan who just accidentally ended up as a rockstar, and therefore suffers no artistic ego. This is the sort of artist I like knowing. Rock music is meant to be fun. His face is a picture of what every 12-year-old thought being in Guns ‘n’ Roses would feel like…

I also can’t understand how this video only has like 1,700 views. WTF? This is a great live version of a great song!

Steven was the only guy in Guns 'n' Roses whom I could relate to. He clearly liked what he did for a living. And in 1990, when the other guys kicked him out of the band, I could really relate to him a whole lot more. Of course you were the first to go: you were the easiest one to pick on. Some people find it hard to forgive you for just being you… and those people are assholes (but that was just my opinion at the time. Age has tempered me enough to understand the attraction people feel towards the other guys in G’n’R… but that still doesn’t mean that Adler deserved the treatment that he got).

Officially Steven got kicked out of the band for doing drugs... which even at the time we all knew was deeply ironic, considering that all of the guys in G'n'R were on drugs... lots of drugs... they were probably loaded all the time. Weed, booze, pills, acid, cocaine... both powder and crack. Heroin... Steven’s attempts at rehab were actually making it more difficult for him to function productively. He was even sick enough to sign his copyright away for a paltry $2000!... on an album that has sold like 30 million copies to date… And so, following the ousting, Steven rebelled against his former friends’ cruel labeling of him by... doing lots of drugs. More drugs. An unbelievable amount of drugs.

To him, the firing was a personal betrayal. I suspect that Adler still saw his band as a bunch of friends and brothers who could be expected to have each other’s backs… and his brothers had booted him out of the family. However, to others the band had already stopped being “show friends” and become Show Business. They simply felt that one particular employee was slowing them down.

For the record, I didn’t think that the singling out of Steven was ever fair. It was already pretty common knowledge that G’n’R as a group teetered constantly on the edge of “too fucked to play”. When they were good, they were really good. When they were bad, they were like listening to some drunken garage band – out of tune, forgetting the words, couldn’t keep time. The saddest part for me was that, even back then, there appeared to be no one around the band who seemed deeply interested in giving these guys’ careers (or lives) any sort of longevity. I suspect that G’n’R was something that a few people thought they could ride (and make a killing off) until enough of the band members dropped dead from overdoses and the party ended. Back in about 1992, when all the popular girls in school had “discovered” G’n’R and made them trés fashionable, my standard response was: “Wait.” I felt that I could read people well enough that I didn’t expect the band to last – not through lack of talent but simply through over-indulgence. The fact that none of the band members did drop dead was more good luck than good management.

I love that Axl just wanders off at about 1:55 and misses half the song. You look at Steven’s “what the fuck?” face a few seconds later, when they’re all rolling into the verse and realize Axl’s not there. :) You can see Slash have a moment too, but then they just keep on playing. It’s like “Has he fallen off the stage and died? Nope. Okay, carry on then.”

Following his ousting, and for a long time, it became really hard to find out what happened to Steven. This was before we all had access to the Internet, of course, and living in New Zealand often feels like living on Mars at the best of times anyway. News travels slow, if it ever seems to get here at all. All I had were my four-month-late Metal Edge magazines that often sold out at the local stationers before I could get a copy. And every so often I would think of Steven and wonder what became of him. He had disappeared into his habit. I worried and prayed for him. I hovered my little eagle totem over his picture (no seriously, I did) and tried to send him good thoughts, because I was always convinced that would save him… Somewhere around 1995 or 1996 I heard that he'd had a stroke. The next time I saw him on TV, he looked like a completely different person. He slurred from the nerve damage. His pretty face was a bit beat up. And I cried.

Steven on Hard Copy. I think this was about 1996.

I wrote a story, somewhere around then, about how I wished I could invent a time machine to go back in time and save Steven from ODing... and then go see Hendrix play... and give Jimi an awesome blowjob that would make him write a song about me.

You know, I never asked for much in life... :)

Soooo prophetic…

But, of course, there is no time machine. And despite a hope that Steven would take the stroke as a good warning to quit his habit, he disappeared out of my magazines once again. It’s not that we weren’t thinking of him, it’s just that no one seemed to be telling me how he was. I was optimistic, but it turned out at that point that he still had more than ten years of addiction ahead of him. I kept waiting and wondering if he’d ever bounce back and recover. It was easy for people to write the dude off, but it was also such a waste. Of all the guys in Guns ‘n’ Roses, he was the one whom I thought deserved way more than life ever gave him.

Granted: I’ve never been big on drugs myself. I’ve never been big on chemicals in general. A couple of drinks will make me happy, but more than that tends to make me depressed. Weed does nothing to me. Zip. Nada. Nothing. I never saw the point of cocaine or heroin or meth, because I actually kinda like my lucidity – even the bad bits of it. Hell, I rarely even take painkillers when I’m actually in pain. Doctors prescribe them to me, and I just throw them away. What’s the point? Pain tells me that something is wrong.

So I guess I’ll never understand addiction from the inside out. That’s probably a good thing. But I felt mighty bad for Steven.

Reading his book again, one thing that struck me was how quickly I got through the post-G’n’R chapters. It’s as if life happens right up to about 1990, and then there’s just kind of 20-odd years of drugs. A lot of important stuff happened in those 20 years: divorce and re-marriage, jail time, law suits, so many more ODs than I ever knew about… But there’s also the sort of stasis that a serious drug habit blankets down over your life. Things change and yet nothing changes. The crack is still there. The heroin: still there. Everything else fades in importance.

I’ve heard a few criticisms that Steven’s book wasn’t hard enough on the man himself… but why do we need to see the guy hating himself? What does it gain him (or us)? He admits mistakes and he calls out a few other people too. That’s life. He confessed that he’s been suicidal, and so I’d really rather not see the guy getting wrapped up in despair and anger and self-blame. That’s not healthy. And in the end: I think he got a raw deal. He’s well within his rights to feel bitter about that.

After finishing the book, I sought out episodes of that Celebrity Rehab show he was on. I usually don’t watch stuff like that, so I wasn’t even really aware of it. I’ve never been the sort of emotional vampire that enjoys watching other [famous] people suffer. I sat down and watched his entire season of Celebrity Rehab over one night. And I cried some more. [Yes, okay, sorry: I cry. I’m a girl… Sometimes.] I then went on and watched Sober House... which made me very sad indeed.

In the end though, Steven does seem to be doing better. His band, Adler’s Appetite, is working and has a few singles out in iTunes. He’s getting some great feedback, and he generally seems happier and more switched-on these days.

I guess I probably wanted both the book and the TV series to end with a real breakthrough. A sea-change that explained how he’d kicked his habit for good, never to be washed out on that tide again… But addiction is no fairytale. Recovery takes a daily fight, especially at the beginning. Relapses happen way more often than not. People need to know that a relapse is not an irredeemable failure – it’s just another bump in the road, and one which can be overcome by redoubling your efforts. We want to be able to snap our fingers and have someone suddenly be better, but life just doesn’t work that way.

You try changing something you’ve done every day for the past 30 years or so. After a while, it feels like it’s part of who you are.

In some ways, the vagueness of Steven’s health at the end of the book is a lot more realistic than the bravado cheer we often see at the conclusion of addiction tales, celebrating how he “overcame his demons for good”. He’s still overcoming his demons. He’s going to be an addict for the rest of his life. The choice is in whether or not he uses today. And then tomorrow he will deal with when he gets there.

It’s still not fair though. That’s not an excuse for him to sink back into self-pity, but Steven was the guy who really did deserve better. And he can’t ever get back the past 20 years. I just hope he gets the next 20.

Props to you, man. You’re fighting the only fight worth winning: survival.

Blue

2010-12-19T03:46:00.005+13:00

Mum: "I just feel sorry for [her husband]. You know how outdoorsy he always was, and now she won't even let him leave the house! It's no fun to be suddenly living with a crazy lady."

Me: *rolling eyes* "She's not crazy. She has anxiety and depression. That doesn't make her insane. I had anxiety and depression for two years: I wasn't insane!"

Mum: *snorts* "That's what you say."

... Yup. That's my mother. A veritable beacon of empathy.

The conversation was about her step-sister and our impending family Christmas. Her step-sister has long been a powerful, good force in the local Methodist church. She volunteered in a charity shop three days a week. She organized food drives and took in foreign exchange students who wanted to learn about Kiwi farming. There would be no one on earth who could say anything bad about her. She’s just one of those amazingly nice people.

But about three months ago, my [step] aunt and her husband went on a trip to England to visit their daughter and her newborn son - the first grandchild. While they were away, my [step] grandmother took ill and had to be moved to a nursing home. My aunt had been caring for her mother twice a week - doing her shopping, cleaning her house, managing her bills and generally keeping her company. We're not sure whether it's the guilt from having been away when her mother got sick, or the fact that her own children live overseas, or just that circumstances have fallen upon her in a peculiar way, but since returning to New Zealand she has come down with what is obviously a crippling case of depression.

She no longer leaves the house, and she gets panic attacks when her husband tries to go outside too. Other people in the church have been doing their shopping for them, but she still struggles to even make it down the hall to see them when they stop in. She was always such a lovely, warm, no-nonsense sort of woman. We've never seen the likes of it before - not in her anyway.

And, unlike my mother, I feel very able to relate to my aunt's sudden decline. I feel sorry for my uncle too - very sorry for him - but I don't think my aunt's insane. It’s an illness, but it’s not insanity.

It's reminded me of something though: as a family, we place a disturbing amount of weight on the insistence that one should never burden other people with your problems (even other family members). Suck it up. Stiff upper lip and all that. For God's sake, never, EVER cry - not in any way that anyone else will know it anyway... These are rules that never have to be expressed in such blunt terms, they simply seep out in conversations like the one I just had with Mum. If you let other people see your fear and pain, then you are inflicting a terrible trial on them. You are a bad person, and all your previous good deeds count for little. God hates a drama queen.

It's precisely that fact that made my mother's comment such a tragi-comedy to me. She really, honestly thinks she suffered when I had depression. She thinks I was a crazy lady who inflicted my problems onto her.

She has no idea.

Like most people with depression, I hid the worst of it from others. My mother and I spoke once every couple of weeks, and I tried to make light of things and not let on what I was going through. I didn't tell her I had depression - not until very late in the piece. I just stopped doing stuff, and pretended that it was my choice. She didn't have to clean up my house after a bad night, or patch me up when I was bleeding. If I could have, I probably would have committed suicide in such a way as to quietly bury myself as well, so as not to make a fuss. I really didn't want to burden other people with my shit. I was embarrassed and felt that I was failing. Problems should be kept to yourself. I didn't tell her what was happening, because I knew she'd just treat me like I was attention-seeking... and that knowledge just made things so much worse.

It was easy to feel like I was a horrible person. You start out feeling like the biggest shit in the world and quickly realize that just telling people that makes you an even bigger shit. You don’t want to hurt them or worry them, and you certainly don’t want to become a millstone around their necks. I was isolated. There was no soft place to fall and no one to champion me when I needed it. Support can't be over-emphasized here.

But I'm not writing this out of self-pity. Self-pity is something that I try to have no time for anymore. It's bad for me. It's always better to laugh at myself. Four years on, I’m amazed at how much I smile these days.

Sadly, depression is really common in New Zealand. I've heard estimates as high as one in three Kiwis will get depression at some point. One person in six will get severe depression. In part, it's to do with exactly that cultural pressure that I've just talked about. Don't inflict your problems on other people. Shut up. Don't whine. Get hard. Don't be so selfish... It became enough of an issue here that the government funds a very good public awareness program, fronted by prominent ex-All Black, John Kirwan (who also had crippling depression). One of the most obvious pieces of advice, which fits nicely into a 30-sec TV commercial: you can't tell people to just "harden up". That only makes it worse.

Thanks in part to careful work like this, the suicide rate in New Zealand has been declining since 1998. However, New Zealand officially still had the highest youth suicide rate in the OECD in 2009. We have a long way to go.

I'm fairly open about the fact that I used to have depression. Probably more open than most. It's not going to be something I put on a résumé, but I'm not really ashamed of it anymore either. I’ve had depression three times, truth be told. The first time was when my family moved away from my one and only friend, and I went into a school where I got very badly bullied. That lasted from age 12-16, and got to the point where there were a few suicide attempts… quiet, private ones. I recovered after dropping out of high school, and had a fairly happy five-year block. But then there was another decline after I came back from the States in 1999 and decided to shelve my first novel. That lasted about a year (I was 21), but petered out into what was still a fairly depressive state. When I was 27, I fell in love. Then I got raped by the guy I loved. That turned an already depressive brain into a fucking depressive brain. It was understandable, given the circumstances. That most recent bout lasted two years, and went back into thoughts of self-harm.

I understand that depression is obviously just something my brain does when things go badly wrong. It may be genetic, or it may be a symptom of my upbringing. There’s some research to suggest that depression is more common in people whose mothers were stressed while still carrying them in utero. The year that my mother was pregnant with me, my father nearly died of cancer.

But there is something very different about the way that I have emerged from that last bout of depression. I am not fool enough to say that I’ve kicked it (because I suspect that it becomes like alcoholism – just a tendency which is a part of you and you have to work around for the rest of your life), yet I recognize that I am better armed against it than I ever had been in the past. I’ve changed the way that I see the world, and the way that I see myself. I’ve changed the very way that I think. It’s not a change that everyone around me has appreciated or enjoyed, but in the fairly rough three years AFTER my depression (money troubles, health troubles, laid off from work) I can at least say that I’ve been down but never out. I’ve felt bad, but not THAT bad… and that’s come as a very pleasant surprise to me.

There are still plenty of things to laugh about… and I’m the biggest one.

My mother has spoken about how selfish her step-sister is being. I've done my best to convince her that what she's seeing is not an act of selfishness but a sad deepening of my aunt's already selfless personality. She's not trying to hurt anybody, and I'd venture a guess that she feels like shit if she knows that she's hurting people. She's not seeking attention: she's just trying to disappear... and other people aren't letting her.

It's a difficult thing, because I really want to help my aunt but can't easily see a way around my mother.

Last year, I wrote a few bits and pieces about depression, and the steps that I’d taken to fight it. I began by pointing out that my advice was probably quite redundant, because when we’re in the midst of depression we’re pretty bad at responding to advice (no matter how sensible it might be). There are plenty of physical things that you can and should do when faced with depression: eat properly and exercise regularly (even though you don’t want to); you need your Vitamin D so you should get at least 20 mins outside in the sun every day (ditto: even though you don’t want to); take Omega 3 supplements, or eat oily fish regularly; try St Johns Wort; practice things like yoga or meditation… None of these things will cure depression in themselves, but they help to keep your brain fit and healthy. And depression is all in your brain.

Lots and lots of people find relief through medical anti-depressants… But I refused to take them. I’m not going to say that that was a smart choice, yet I believe it was the right choice for me. I recognized that this was a pattern in my life. I wanted to heal my brain permanently, and stop it from ever doing this to me again. I didn’t want to just treat the symptoms of depression and wait the illness out… But I would never advise anyone to do what I did. It’s effing dangerous.

If you’re at the stage where you’re considering harming yourself (or others) then I personally believe that medical assistance is really important. Anti-depressants don’t “make” you happy. Depression simply shuts down the dopamine and serotonin receptors in your brain, meaning that your brain is unable to feel happy, no matter how many happy hormones it’s pumping out. Anti-depressants reopen those receptors, and that can be the first thing that enables you to see that life isn’t so bad after all… but anti-depressants do not fix your broken marriage or bring back your dead child or make you produce more dopamine. If you’re truly unhappy and unfulfilled, you will remain that way (anti-depressants or not). Anti-depressants are an assistance – not a cure.

But all that’s the easy, straightforward bit.

I'm a firm believer that meds can give you back a more realistic viewpoint, but you've got to get yourself healthy in order to hold back depression long-term. Why make things harder for your brain? If you broke a leg, you wouldn't spend the rest of your life lying around - you'd support the leg with a cast while it needed it, and then you'd go into physical therapy to build back the muscle and help get it strong again. You’d learn to avoid the particular activity that broke your leg in the first place. Why treat your brain any differently?

A couple of years back, happier and healthier and sitting in a hair salon waiting for my foils, I read this article in a local NZ magazine. It’s about a leading psychologist and expert on depression. So much of what she said made sense to me, and I’ve since recommended this article to a few people. I will bring a copy to my aunt, and she can do with it as she pleases.

In the article, she talks about the over-diagnosis of depression, as well as the importance of talk-therapy and willingly changing your perception of reality. That last part is the hardest thing to do, regardless of whether you have depression or not. It’s like suddenly having to change your religion. Plenty of people stay on anti-depressants (and stay depressed) because they are unwilling or unable to change themselves. The journey of a thousand miles begins with that little choice. I began effecting my change through a course of really good counseling... but it took a long time to work through, and even longer to really properly take on board. Most of us have people around us who do their best to prevent any change - who take us on guilt-trips for no good reason, or make us feel like we’re selfish or bad if we try to help ourselves. When you’re depressed, it's hard to learn how to give up those people, and it’s a choice that you have to come to yourself, in your own time… If I could have seen my future self, five years ago, I would have hated the me that I am now. I would have called her self-involved.

But that’s okay.

And it’s strange that that’s okay, because I had been such an expert on beating myself up. I was actually afraid of becoming the Kiki I am today. I spent years working long and hard in an effort not to value myself. I saw it as a lifestyle choice, and something to be proud of. I thought it made me a better woman, and a more complete artist. I was so good at suffering. I was a freakin’ expert at diminishing myself.

Less than the weed, that grows beside thy door,

Less than the speed, of hours, spent far from thee,

Less than the need thou hast in life of me.

Even less am I.

- Laurence Hope, ‘Less than the Dust’ (1901)

I was stupid… and wrong. It took me a long time to reach this point, but looking back, I wouldn’t give up the life I have now for anything I thought I wanted then. What I have now is better.

I am better.

http://www.depression.org.nz/content/home

http://www.thelowdown.co.nz/

http://www.mindfood.com/at-dorothy-rowe-depression-mental-health.seo

Groupies Pt 3 - Return of the Killer Groupie

2010-12-16T02:23:00.001+13:00

Okay, I have a confession to make, and it’s one that I’ve seriously debated sharing on here. I’ve said plenty of times before that I try to keep this blog as open and honest and warts-and-all as possible (preferably without boring the snot out of everybody, because my life really isn’t that interesting), but this is still a topic that I’ve tossed around for a few weeks before coming to a decision.

So here’s my confession: I got kind of pissed off at Mark Morton (from Lamb of God) the other day. Initially I didn’t want to admit that because it’s an extremely rare and uncomfortable thing to find myself annoyed by some “imaginary” internet person whom I’ve never met. I took conscious steps to kick anger out of my life when I was still a teenager, and I largely succeeded. Mostly I try not to get all nasty and judgmental about people (and half the time when people assume I’m knocking somebody else, I’m actually knocking myself). My blog is sometimes a skewed perspective on that, because it’s naturally the place that I come to when I want to have one of my very infrequent rants. I didn’t want to rant about this one though. Those who know me well enough know that I don't often get angry at people, and when I do it usually blows over if I can sit down and logic it out and try to see things from their perspective. It’s taken me a couple weeks to thrash this one out in my own head, but I think I’ve succeeded.

The reason I find myself in this strange state is that I follow Mark’s page on Twitter.

I currently only follow 40 pages on Twitter, so I do actually read pretty much everything that those pages churn out. I have a handful of “celebrity” pages in that mix. Bret Michaels’ page is the whole reason I joined Twitter in the first place, because when he had his brain hemorrhage earlier this year, I was working a lot and it was the only place where I could get accurate updates on his condition from my mobile while I was out onsite at gigs. Bret Michaels’ page is not fronted by Bret: it’s run by staffers and about 95% of what goes up there is just advertising for some single, or concert date, or online vote. I actually gave up reading their posts some time ago because they’re all advertising. If it wasn’t for the medical issues, I’d probably unfollow his page altogether. I suspect that Bret’s unlikely to ever engage with his page directly: despite the very social, very public façade, he’s always seemed to be quite a private person. After seeing the nasty-crazy-possessiveness that some fans want to inflict on him, I can’t blame him for keeping to himself. Plenty of people need to back the fuck up and understand that the performer and the performance are not the same thing, but it’s not a separation that I can see many Bret Michaels fans making any time soon. For one, he creates false familiarity in people’s minds by doing things like his current reality TV show. And secondly, he has never seemed to want to front up to the media in a truly three-dimensional way. His responses are measured and careful, and he often uses humor to bat away real emotion. He never seems to intentionally cause offense, and that makes him easy to like. As for what he really thinks: 20+ years after first picking up the thread of his career, I honestly have no idea. In a different life, he’d probably have made a very good politician.

Amongst the celebrity pages which actually ARE fronted by that performer, I also follow: Steven Adler [Adler’s Appetite and ex-G’n’R] because he seems to be nice and eternally grateful and always says such positive things about his fans; Zakk Wylde [Black Label Society and ex-Ozzy] because he’s funny as a motherfucker; Nikki Sixx [Motley Crue and Sixx AM] because he’s also often funny, although probably not intentionally; Randy Blythe [Lamb of God] who is sometimes funny, but also gives good links to obscure metal bands; and Mark Morton [also Lamb of God] who seems to be really, really normal. Sometimes I comment on their shit, but only if it interests me. At R’s prodding, I also thanked Randy and Mark for the free tix to their gig in Auckland (even though I DO understand they had nothing to do with it and probably couldn’t care less). I know that the comments probably do make me look like I’m standing in the corner, jumping up and down, pleading for attention – but I’m just being me, and rarely give a fuck what other people think. I have always engaged with performers as human beings [although sometimes performers are also boring, useless, lazy, complaining human beings who only do a tiny fraction of the work involved in putting a show together but seem to think we’re all meant to worship them anyway... grumble grumble...] [hint: crew people don’t think your shit don’t stink, and yes we might actually piss in your beer if you annoy us] [not that I've ever done that... *blink*]… They may all think I’m weird, but that’s okay by me.

Truth be told, it’s the "normalness" that makes me like Mark’s page. His page is my favorite out of all my 40 pages. He doesn’t seem to play a role, rarely tweets like he’s “on”, and genuinely seems to not give a fuck what people think of him. I can sympathize. He also talks about his garden sometimes, which instantly made me like him. I understand how salutary it is to finish a show and just go sit in the backyard for a while and be amongst the plants. It’s difficult to describe why home is so good sometimes. Thanks to his openness, plenty of his fans seem to be disappointed in him for not being some kind of goat-killing, cage-fighting, Metal god… which is really funny and just goes to show how difficult it is for some people to separate their desires from the reality of another person’s existence.

A few weeks back, in what almost seemed like an attempt to provoke this fan-hate, Mark started using his Twitter account to answer people’s questions. The more he answered, the more people bombarded him with yet more questions. What’s his favorite band, what kind of car does he drive, who are his influences, what’s for dinner… that kind of thing. He got so prolific at it that, when I returned to my computer that evening, there were literally hundreds of tweets on my page (which is rare when you follow so few people), and most of them were Mark answering questions. I knew that they were in Melbourne on a day off from the tour. He was possibly just really bored.

The reason I knew that they were in Melbourne is that I’ve struck up a friendship and correspondence with one of the sound techs that I met in Auckland. We are shockingly alike in our outlook, despite him doing big gigs and me eking out a living on very small gigs. We are both in a state of transition at the moment. Plus we both have disgustingly dirty-minds, and we carry on a pretty good comedy routine in our messages, and he has never yet acted like a douche to me. I really enjoy our conversations, and I like that he’s a smart motherfucker and uses big words and understands the big words I throw back at him. He is unlike anyone else I know. I like that we talk about families and relationships (in the context of doing lots of shows and never being home), and we both get where the other one is coming from. While they were in Australia, I was probably one of the few people he knew who was wide awake and able to talk when he finished his gigs. That’s how I knew that he had a day off, and that the company was throwing an end-of-tour party that night (despite there still being one more show to go). While my tech friend was at the party that night, I was carrying on a txt conversation with him and trying to make him laugh or blush so that other people would think he was weird (or that we were doing something really dirty over the phone). This is the type of shit that some crew people like to do to one another, because we’re often really mean, wrapped up in niceness, wrapped up in mean. It seemed to work as far as making him look a bit weird… but don’t ask me about the Spidergirl or the Cheeky Monkey.

While I was chatting to my tech friend that night, Mark reappeared on Twitter. That kind of surprised me, because clearly other people were still at the party. Mark was complaining that people were now sending him lame questions. I couldn’t think of a more boring question than “How was the party?”, so that’s what I then sent him. I didn’t expect a reply because it is a boring question. And yes, okay, I kinda was amused at him for spamming everyone’s inboxes earlier in the day. I guess he must get spammed a lot and thought he’d give a bit back.

A few minutes later, the answer he sent out into the cyber world was this:

“fun! u want me 2 tell u Metallica stories??? (i wont) RT @KikiChrome How was the party?”

Okaaaaay… I understand that it’s difficult to pick up tone of voice when someone is writing on the internet, but this really wasn’t a response that I was expecting. “Fun” by itself would have sufficed, and was a direct answer to what I’d asked. If I had known Mark, I would have probably assumed that he was pushing my buttons and trying to mess with me… and I would have laughed… But I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me, and it’s therefore difficult to tell when someone is kidding. The first word that fell out of my mouth upon reading his answer was: “cocksucker”… And no, I wasn’t mad at the lack of Metallica stories.

Then I took a breath and sent back a response that was a lot more polite than “cocksucker”:

“@MarkDuaneMorton Honestly? No. But thanks for the reply. :)”

I wanted to add “Dick!” onto the end, but I didn’t. See, I do the Girl Scout thing when I’m pissed-off in public. I get really, really ultra-polite and use smiley faces.

The reason why his answer pissed me off is twofold. For a start, most people were getting fairly perfunctory “yes” or “no” type answers to their questions, so I had absolutely no idea why he would have assumed that I wanted anything more than that. Mark and I have never met, let alone carried on a conversation. I have NEVER asked him ANYTHING about Metallica, even in cyberspace. I honestly couldn’t give a shit. I am rarely awed by anyone’s fame, and I also understand that people are entitled to a modicum of privacy and confidentiality when they’re at work (something that’s very hard to achieve on the road), so on some levels I function on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to the talent. In any case, I’m way more interested in the production and performance than I am in the people (I'm an asocial dork, after all). So it bugs me when people sometimes throw that “crazy stalker fan” noose around me. Especially when it was thrown around me alone, and not everybody else who pestered Mark with a question that night… But he also posted his response as a public message that went out to 3000-odd people simultaneously.

That actually gave me pause, because normally if people want to say something about me publicly then I figure it’s actually more of a reflection on them than a reflection on me. I shrug that shit off. So it was weird that this stung as much as it did. I was really, blindingly mad. I got off my emails for a while and went and listened to early-80s funk, just to calm down.

And that’s honestly not “like me”. People misjudge me all the time. On some levels, I probably invite it. [One day, you should ask me why I invite it] Plenty of times, it makes me laugh my ass off. Yes, people are shallow. However, most often, I find that I can’t blame them too much for their assumptions because I understand how I look to other people. I deliberately fuck with people’s presumptive nature.

But how do I look to this guy? And (given that he doesn’t know the first thing about me) why does it suddenly bother me? I don’t desire his friendship, and I don’t want to have sex with him, so who gives a rat’s ass what he thinks of me? I should be laughing at him, and yet I’m not.

The more I thought about it, one thing occurred to me: I don’t think Mark ever told anyone in Twitter-land that he was going to an end-of-tour party that night. Yes, okay, granted, that may well have made my question look really creepy. And I then wondered whether he’d actually clicked on my page to see if he knew me… and then clicked on the link to my blog and read the banner that I’ve since taken down… “Now guaranteed at least 20% more stable than the average groupie”…

Okay: mea culpa. If that is all you ever read about me, then I can see why you’d jump to the “crazy stalker fan” assumption. It doesn’t make him any less small-minded for going with such a snap judgment, but at least I can understand it. I would have thought that it was clear from the banner that I’m taking the piss, but maybe not always. My sense of humor makes sense to… pretty much nobody. Just a few weeks back, I was hassling my tech friend and asking him to give Mark a kick because he wasn’t responding to my stalking [Note: I’ve never stalked the guy, nor would I. Just sayin’]. I think (hope) my new friend knew that I was kidding, because he knows that he can poke the “psycho groupie” button in me in much the same way that I poke the “asshole roadie” button in him. We both understand how we look on the outside. We both laugh at ourselves and each other… And I have actually named and decorated this page in such a way that I have INVITED such a horrific level of judgment, just so that I can laugh at it. I'm not purple in real life - honest. It’s a performance. Beneath the boobs, I’m really quite prickly and nasty and anti-social, but it can be a good way to toss other people’s prejudices into sharp relief.

And, of course, it also throws my own prejudices into relief too.

Because, the fact is, I clearly can’t blame Mark for deciding that I wanted something more than what I’d asked for… so why did it bother me that that’s the assumption he leapt to? I have no right to get pissed off when I’m intentionally kinda messing with people.

I guess, at the end of the day, I’m just bothered that he didn’t read any further – or maybe just didn’t understand what he found. My tech friend admitted, a week or two back, that he’d started to read my super-long Poison blog, but then gave up before he got to the end. And I insisted that he really should read to the end, because otherwise it’s hard to see what’s changed in me since that experience and how I started to learn the lessons that I have. If you stop halfway through, it’s going to be really easy to see me as the person that I was in 1999… and I’m not that person anymore. I really set this blog up as an attempt to expose the many ways in which people often aren't what they appear to be on the outside – even if they themselves don’t understand that. I know this, in part, through exactly the kind of show-biz type people that I’ve already talked about. A performer and a performance are not the same thing. Plenty of us walk through this business recognizing that, and cherishing people more when they’re honest behind the scenes. It doesn’t mean that you need to invite people into your private life, but heaps of us are at least upfront about the fact that what you see in one environment is not necessarily what you’d see in another. The show world isn’t the real world, and mostly we get that. It’s the people who seem to mistake the performance mask for their own face: those are the ones you have to look out for… because they have no self, or at least no self that they want to acknowledge and/or live with.

I’ve talked about this, in the context of certain celebrities, I don’t know how many countless times. I’ll probably have to keep talking about it forever, because heaps of “fans” out there still don’t seem to get it. They still want to get annoyed at Mark Morton for listening to Nirvana, or disappointed in Vince Neil for donning a sparkly ice-skating costume. They see it as a betrayal of the image and often want to attack or punish somebody for being a fully-rounded human being. I think I’m just beating my head against a brick wall when it comes to this one. Fans pay for their album, they pay for their tickets, and they sometimes think that means they own the artist outright. They get a bit annoyed when the artist disagrees and just goes and lives his own life as he pleases.

I’ve realized that I want people to understand my point. I really, really, really want people to understand my point, because it will make us all happier and more relaxed in the long run… But that becomes a self-defeating notion, because I still hold onto the only Buddhist tenet I’m any good at tackling: personal desire leads to unhappiness. I should just talk and say what I need to say. The desire to be understood is redundant and will only make me unhappy.

Thank you, Mark, for highlighting that to me all over again. I need to learn these lessons better, and in as many ways as possible…

I’ve come back to this story today (and ‘fessed up and posted it here) on account of a couple of things that I saw last week.

One of the other people whose social media I follow is Poison drummer, Rikki Rockett. Rikki’s long been an internet fixture, and is another “celebrity” who seems to make a point to just be himself when he’s online. Yes, he’s pretty diplomatic, but he doesn’t seem to hide behind an image and genuinely tries to be helpful and nice. In the only interactions I’ve ever had with Rikki (brief as they were), he gave me the impression of being helpful and nice in real life too.

On one of his recent posts, Rikki (or his assistant) drew attention to a profile of a woman who was posing as his wife. I won’t give a link to it, because I’d rather not connect my blog to more crazy people if I can help it. Rikki’s attention also highlighted a lot of fake profiles, which all appear to have been created by the same woman. She has even set up a “Rikki” profile, where she can talk back and forth to herself and make it look like there is a real relationship happening. Sadly enough, in my two (very green) years of engaging with internet social media, I’ve actually seen this tactic before.

Let’s be honest: it’s not a very good fake profile. She not only claims to be Rikki’s wife, but also Bret Michaels’ wife, and the wife of Ivan Moody from Five Finger Death Punch. She has also set up a Bret page, to similarly create a pretense of marriage. I didn’t go through all of the hundreds of other pages she linked to, but two minutes of skim-reading and the number of double-ups would suggest that she has many, many more fake profiles in the names of a whole swathe of celebrities. It may also suggest that she’s not the only person in her circle who is doing this. She further claims to be the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister (I’m hoping they didn’t procreate together, because I can hardly imagine what that child would look like even if it were biologically possible for two men to have a baby). She claims many famous “siblings” and a raft of children as her own, including Rikki’s baby son and Bret Michaels’ two daughters… leaving aside that her profile lists her age as 21, so she would have to have been about 10 or 11 when Bret’s eldest girl was born. As far as fake profiles go, she has failed on every level to make this one credible. It would be funny if it wasn’t just so darn sad.

This is also beyond creepy. I know that people rarely see “celebrities” as wholly human, but you don’t ever, EVER bring someone else’s kids into your little fantasy world. Those kids’ parents are going to be considerably less than impressed – that’s just human nature. Sometimes it’s hard for fans to see the line where their behavior moves from friendly appreciation into terrible imposition, but this lady clearly pole-vaults over any line that every reasonable person would see.

In the long, disjointed section that serves as her bio, you get such statements as this (my apologies for capitals and the complete lack of punctuation, but this is as it appears):

“IM THE REAL DEAL BABYY DUHH DONT SEND ME HATE MAIL DONT BE MEAN JUST BE COOL GUYS AT ALL TIMES JUST BE NICE NO GIVING ME SHIT NO HATE MAIL AND SAVE THE DRAMA I DONT LIKE DRAMA SO PEOPLE DONT START IT”

And this:

“I AM THE BEST DAMN GIRL EVER AND ALL THE REAL STARS RESPECT ME FOR WHO I AM THEY KNOW WHO I AM AND THERE SWEET 2 ME SO I KNOW WHOS REAL AND WHO ISNT BECAUSE THE REAL STARS GO ONTO BRET MICHAELS MYSPACE PAGE NOT ON HERE BUT THEY HAVENT BEEN ON IN MONTHS I MISS THEM LIKE CRAZY ALL OF THEM BC THEY ALWAYS WROTE ABOUT ME EVERYTIME THEY WERE ON I MISS THAT BUT HEY HIT ME UP EMAILS OR SOMETHING ILL GET BACK TOO YA ASAP JUST BE COOL SO CELEBS IF YOU ADD ME AND IF I KNOW ITS REALLY YOU GUYS THEN TALK TOO ME BUT LIKE I SAID THE REAL STARS WENT ON BRETS PROFILE AND THEY ALL KNOW VERY WELL WHO I AM AND I GOT PROOF EVERYWHERE FROM WHAT THEY WROTE ME IN THE PAST!!!!! SO YEAH DONT TRY AND PULL A FAST ONE ON ME BC I KNOW WHOS REAL AND WHO ISNT AGAIN I WOULD KNOW”

Oh, the irony in that last bit just makes me squirm as much as it makes me want to weep for someone who does this with their life. If she’s kidding, even I don’t get her sense of humor. On some level, that’s not funny anymore. I feel really, really sorry for this girl.

And sure, I also understand just how ironic it is that I can wince at one crazy fan, when I found the link on the site of some celebrity whom I do not know personally. The irony of my even telling this story is so deep and multi-faceted that it may well make my head explode!

But perhaps it is the simple fact that I can at least see the irony that puts me back on the other side of that creepy little line. I’m not going to claim to know any of these celebrities and I wouldn’t strive to validate my existence through garnering their attention. I don’t need it. Look or don’t look, it really just says more about you than it does about me. I ain’t stalking anybody (I’m too damn lazy), and I really dislike chasing anybody about anything... not even money... I’m relaxed and happy with who I am and I don’t require “famous friends” in order to feel better about myself. I honestly wish that everyone else had the same peace of mind.

This all kind of gets back to my earlier story about Mark Morton. Sure, I think I get where he was coming from. But he’s still a dick for saying it. And that has nothing to do with celebrity. Plenty of other people have made similar judgments about me, and they were dicks too. Being famous doesn’t make him any more or less human, or any more or less of a dick. Dude, I really wasn’t trying to bug you, I’m not going to impose upon you, and I didn’t deserve the kick.

Ten years ago, I probably would have deleted his Twitter page from my list and gone scurrying back off into my hole, scared that my existence was somehow bothering him. Perhaps that’s even the more correct, more reasoned response. To stay in his "followers" seems a lot like forcing yourself onto somebody who doesn’t like you. Yet to leave also smacks of sour grapes… So I thought about it. I get why he may have reacted the way that he did. I also still really like reading his shit, because I can relate. But I am not so married to the internet or social media that I need to mainline celebrity gossip in order to have a life. I had a life before bothering with the internet, and I’ll have a life when I inevitably one day give it up in disgust and pile the computer into my backyard where I then live in asocial squalor with my 50 cats. (Let’s face it: we can all see that last bit coming at some point.)

The decision I made was that I really wasn’t imposing just by continuing to follow his posts. He has no idea what I read, so long as I don’t go bugging him with shit. And if he really doesn’t like me, he can always block me. If he did block me: that would officially make him the first person to ever do so… so maybe I’m not quite so universally bothersome to people as I might appear. If you tell me to fuck off, then I will fuck off – but you might have to tell me first, on account of the fact that I’m stupid and generally optimistic and don’t understand people all that well. Don’t send mixed messages and don’t be subtle. I’m not good with subtle.

And yup, I also understand how stupid it is for me to essentially lie about my emotions in my response to him, and act like I wasn’t pissed off, and then come here and say that I don’t like mixed messages. But I’m not going to kick him for not knowing that I was pissed off. My intention was for him not to know. It’s not a mixed message; it’s just being polite – pure and simple.

But then, naturally, a little bit of self-doubt can get thrown into the mix… After that first, bored day in Melbourne, Mark has kept up his habit of answering questions on Twitter. A few weeks have passed. After a while, you start to see the same questions coming up time and time again. “What do you think of this metal band?” “Why haven’t you come to my country?” “Are you touring in 2011?” “What sports do you like?” “Favorite Lamb of God album?” “Favorite Metallica album?” “What do you drink?” “Are Willie and Chris on Twitter?”… blah blah blah… Last week, he got exasperated enough to suggest that some of his long-term followers would be able to answer these questions for him… and I could. I can answer all of them, and then some. If he’s posted the answers on Twitter, then I’ve read them and remember them. Unfortunately, my brain still works well enough to remember stuff after seeing it only once – and is pedantic enough to be insistent on getting the details right. It ain’t personal – I can tell you a lot of random shit about a huge variety of subjects [test me on human biology… or 19th Century architecture… or clothing of the Middle Ages… I’m a geek]. But I began to realize that all of Mark’s spamming Twitter with answers has given me a shocking amount of trivia-level knowledge about the guy. More than I ever wanted to know, really. And upon noticing this, I actually just wanted to go “ARRRRGGHHHH!!!!” and scrub out the inside of my brain!

Case in point: Bret Michaels’ real name is Bret Michael Sychak. He has two younger sisters: Michelle and Nicole. He was born on March 15th, 1963, in Mechanicsburg PA. His parents’ names are Wally and Margaret. He is 5’11”, and wears a size 9.5 shoe. His natural hair color is dark blond. His first concert was The Sweet. He has been an insulin-dependent diabetic since he was 6 years old. He played football in high school, even playing as the quarterback, but dropped out of school at the age of 16 so that he could focus on music. He loves the Steelers. He worked as a busboy… etc. etc…. And I don’t have to look any of that up before writing it here. I’ve known all that stuff since I was about 12 years old. It just pours out of the archive that is my head. I could go on with “Bret facts” for frigging hours!!!

And I think that, sometime in the past ten years, I decided that I would never again willingly develop such a detailed and completely pointless knowledge of any random famous person. I actually, genuinely, don’t want to know. I don’t even know exactly how tall my boyfriend is! I’ve never asked him. So who the fuck wants to spend their life collecting all of this ridiculous biographical information on someone that they have no connection to? It’s not that I dislike you, random famous person; it’s just that I dislike what it says about me.

So it kind of faces me with a dilemma, because Mark’s Twitter posts are actually filling my brain with exactly the sort of trivia that I have tried to avoid for the past few years. I don’t want to be that person. Maybe I should unfollow him after all. Or maybe this can just be a test to see how much I have changed in the last decade. If I want to find out if I can keep stuff in perspective, that’s as good a test as any.

So okay, Mark… I still don’t like you for being a bit of a judgmental fuck to me. But I will try to not be a judgmental fuck to you back… Unless you really were messing with me, in which case that’s funny as all HELL and everything is forgiven!… I really don’t care what your favorite Metallica album is, or what size shoe you wear, but I understand that this seems important to other people and you’ve shown a lot of patience and surprising good humor in answering all these annoying questions. I will try not to send you any more annoying questions. I will, however, continue to try to mess with you, because it really amuses me… Because I’m a dick too… Having said that, I will never make a genuine attempt to get into your pants (married and no tattoos, puh-leese!), and I’d only actually flirt with you if I knew you well enough to see that you thought it was funny and knew I was joking. I don’t expect to ever know you that well. And if you clearly didn’t think it was funny, I wouldn’t flirt at all because I actually do have respect for other people’s spouses… Unless I was being extra especially dicky that day, in which case you’d be fully within your rights to kick me and I wouldn’t blame you for it… In order for something to amuse me, we usually both need to understand when I’m kidding and that I won’t do anything that I know will make you uncomfortable. I am never serious about that flirting shit. And I’m generally mortified to know that I’ve caused offense. I will also never talk about your kid, or get pissed off just because you like Nascar and I think it’s the most boring motorsport there is. I might call you a redneck at some point though, because… well… Nascar!?!… I will never impersonate you or any member of your family on some website. I will never push to meet you, but I will continue to encourage my boyfriend to go “yay!” at you sometimes because he loves you to bits and I think it would be good for him to understand that you’re a human being too and he doesn’t need to be scared of that fact. I will continue to like your band and consider it my current squeeze-on-the-side, until I get bored of hearing your albums too often and find something else to listen to. I will never ask you for gossip about other famous people… or about anyone for that matter. I won’t get annoyed if you don’t respond to me. And if you want to don a sparkly figure-skating costume and go on a reality TV show, I won’t care. It won’t make me hate you. And if you continue to tweet about your backyard and your wife and your baby and your dog sometimes, I will think that’s nice, because that’s the shit that really makes life worth living.

I will go back to thinking about you virtually never.

And we will probably both be happier that way…

Namaste.

P.S. Nascar?!? Really? … Dude…

Push-Up

2010-12-06T04:57:00.001+13:00

Okay, another music-related story (and yeah, I know everyone's bored of my music stories by now)...

About 5 years ago, I was watching this video on TV, and dancing around the living room and having a wonderful time...

And then Jack came in... beautiful, evil, roadie, Jack who smelled so very very good and had the laughing blue eyes of God. And I showed him the video because I wanted to share my joy with him, as if I was a puppy or a baby who has just found something particularly fun...

And then he turned off the TV and said it was "disgusting" and that if I ever danced like that again he'd dump me...

I've never danced like that again. I've never been that weightless and free again...

But tonight, when I was looking forward to a rough week ahead, in a venue I dislike, and running on little or no sleep: I went back and found that video. I had no idea what it was called, but I found it anyway.

"Push Up" Freestylers
Uploaded by againstthegrainrecords. - Explore more music videos.

And it surprises me not one iota that he would have seen such offense here. It is an assault to his view of life. Because it is a joyous celebration of life. It is exactly what I've long pursued with every conscious part of my being. There is already too much sorrow in the world to get upset over something so harmlessly fun.

This is exactly what makes to world so wondrous...

And if I ever go to London, I am TOTALLY dancing in the street like this!!!

The jacket is awesome too

2010-12-01T04:10:00.000+13:00

There are some songs that just seem to linger in my life, for whatever reason. Songs that others hear on the radio so often that they pass without comment. Background noise. But some of these songs attach themselves to memories in my mind, and grow into them and around them - like the song is a tree growing through a wire fence, until the grasp of roots and branches pulls the fence into the flesh of the tree, and you are left with no fence at all. Just a scar on the tree...

This is one of those songs.

Artists have a right to their own journey, and I will not deny them that. But it's almost a shame that Prince has walked away from his past, and found God, and shunned the fleshy nature of where he started... because this song has long made me want to crawl naked across the dance-floor, just so I could kiss his feet.

Painful, supplicating and divine... It makes me a better person.

Peculiar

2010-12-01T01:58:00.001+13:00

Had a really weird conversation with my mother today. She asked whether a publisher had contacted me.

Apparently an American lady called my parents' house last week, looking for me. Mum said the woman gave the name of some publishing company (she can't remember what the name was), and it sounded like an international call. She gave them my number.

It's made me very confused, because no publishers know that I exist. I've never sent anything to any publisher, anywhere. I am currently a lone nut howling into the wind, and I'm fine with that. It will be something that hopefully gets remedied in the New Year.

And why would they call my mother's place? I haven't lived there for a really long time. They must have some very old information. There's nothing on this blog that connects directly to my parents, and if it was in relation to my blog, why wouldn't they just email me? Even if they want to threaten me with legal action, they can email me!

I'll be honest, the only thing that popped into my head was that I gave that disk (a floppy disk!) of my old manuscript to Bret Michaels ABOUT A ZILLION YEARS AGO!!! (okay, like eleven and a half years ago) The disk had my parents' phone number on it... And this confused me even more, because I'd always figured that disk ended up in the trash that night, as it should have. I was comfortable with that. It's landfill somewhere... Unless they found some other way to track me down. After not being able to raise anyone in Bret's camp (and attempt to explain that I was really just looking for licensing costs and permissions, and I'm not a crazy loon)(good luck proving that last bit...) I also emailed Rikki... and succeeded righteously in making myself look like a crazy loon... which I probably was at that stage, to tell the truth.

When that failed, I called their record company in the US, who deferred me to their reps in Australia, whom I called, and then they insisted I email them, and then I never heard back from them other than a "we can't help you". It was all a bit of a dead-end really.

Oh, and Stu asked for my number on the night, should he ever come to New Zealand... but I've long figured he was just being polite...

All of this was more than ten years ago. I'd assumed that none of that correspondence still existed. Why the heck would anyone care about it now? I haven't even looked at that manuscript in a decade!

It's got me intrigued though. It's like a little mystery...

Surely it would only be good news, if someone went to horrendous lengths to track me down from overseas. They're hardly going to call me NOW just to tell me to piss off. I understood the "piss off" well enough back then, and haven't raised the issue since. I'm a very different person from having had the experience.

But they haven't called me.

I will be bummed if it turns out to just be telemarketing or something. :]

Before you can read me...

2010-11-20T02:04:00.000+13:00

Okay, there's been a bit of a weird story bouncing around the New Zealand sections of the Internet for the past week, and I thought it might be worth addressing. I've weighed in with a lot of comment on this blog, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much.

Last week, The Dominion Post newspaper reported that a 14-year-old schoolgirl had been told by a teacher that her skirt made her look like "a slut", and that she needed to pull it down. The girl's parents complained, and were unsatisfied with the teacher's apology. All fairly minor, domestic stuff so far.

When R first read the article out to me, my initial response was "diddums". New Zealand high schools have uniforms, and my high school teachers said far worse things to me (and other students) when we violated dress-code. Was it an appropriate thing to say? No, of course not. But it says a whole lot more about the small-mindedness of the teacher than it does about the sexuality of the student. Hey, teachers are people too, and sometimes they're stupid and vindictive. It's a stressful job and they have their moments.

However, what fascinated me was that quite a few people then took it upon themselves to weigh in on the teacher's side. The girl had discipline problems at the school. The skirt was a full 4 inches shorter than the rules allowed. Many argued that the teacher was right to "correct" the girl in a way that made it obvious her actions could potentially have negative consequences. If she looks like a slut then you should tell her so... As one letter to the editor proclaimed: "the next thing is that the parents will be complaining when she is raped."... Um, well yeah. I'd fucking hope they'd complain about that, really.

And it made me sad reading all of this crap. If a 14-year-old girl is sexually experienced (and let's face it, there's no evidence of that here) then she's not "a slut": she's a victim of statutory rape. Hi, the legal age of consent in New Zealand is 16. And how exactly does an article of clothing somehow make someone "a slut"? It's just a skirt. It's not causing her to have lots of sex. It's a skirt. It's not holding a conversation with you. It's not provoking you to act. It's a goddamn skirt! It's an inanimate object. It doesn't override the girl's right to say "no", and you shouldn't take it as a sign that you understand "what she wants" without actually having to talk to her. The girl could go to school stark bollock naked and that still wouldn't trump her right not to be attacked.

I've bashed my head against this same brick wall a few times recently. Plenty of heavy metal websites seem to think that if you're a female and you wear anything other than a baggy t-shirt and not-too-tight jeans to a metal gig then you're up for fucking half the crowd. It makes me weep for humanity.

Sometimes clothes are just clothes. Yes, I know that it can confuse the shit out of a lot of guys (especially awkward, asocial guys who would go out of their way not to have to talk to a girl if they can help it). Yes, men (and women) can get bad, stupid advice from all kinds of quarters about how a skirt, or a top, or a shoe, really IS a tacit sign that she wants to fuck you... total stranger that you are, and her vocal protests be damned. All of these posts in favor of the teacher, and bashing the girl for being "slutty", only serve to muddy the water even further and make the world just that little bit more dangerous for everybody. The fact is: you can never know someone's intent to provoke until you talk to them about it. "Sluttiness" is an entirely subjective assessment. It's in the eye of the beholder. And sometimes a skirt is just a skirt.

What's funny is that, as I was reading some of these articles last night, I had a song leap into my head that I haven't heard in years. I am usually a very positive, joyous sort of person, and so it befits me to respond to tiresome finger-pointing with a bit upbeat dance and a healthy level of "fuck you". Ironically enough, this was a song that came out the year that I turned 14. Wasn't one I paid much mind to at the time, because it was all just so blandly obvious. Yet I suddenly realized last night it just how relevant it was to the whole debate... And it made me terribly, terribly sad to see how far we've regressed as a society in the past 18 years. Far from living up to the wisdom that we once embraced without comment, we have now climbed back onto our high-horses and reverted into petty, exclusionary, Victorian sniping. Where did we go so wrong?...

Before you can read me, you've got to learn how to see me...

Baby Got Front

2010-11-15T01:44:00.001+13:00

I have a very brief complaint to make. I don't know whether this complaint is aimed at God, or fate, or just some funky thyroid-related hormones, but I will complain all the same.

Just the other day, I was commenting on this nice lady's blog. She had said that she'd worn a dress to a formal work function, and her boobs were a bit... obvious. Other people made comments (good and bad). She felt like a slut... Which is really, really sad and stupid if you ask me. Having large breasts doesn't make you a slut. It would be like getting all ashamed (and judged) just because your second toe happens to be a bit longer than your big toe, and certain shoes make that visible. How in all fuck could anyone think that relates to promiscuity? Promiscuity is an action, not a body type.

Yes, I get really pissed off when people feel that they should be ashamed of their bodies like this. Mostly I get pissed off at all the jealous, insecure mofos who feel the need to MAKE other people ashamed of their bodies. I've picked fights with people on this issue before. Fundamentalists stand at one end and say that sex is shameful, and therefore anything that makes another person think about sex (regardless of whether that's my intention) is also shameful. Yes, yes, God gave me boobs just to tempt you to misbehave. It's His fault you have these sexual thoughts, and my fault, and everyone else's fault except... um... yours.

What lots of people don't realize is that there are a lot of old-school feminists standing at the other end of the "I'm angry about your boobs" picket-line. The basic argument seems to be that we only wear clothes, or talk to men, or have boobs for the sake of sucking up to the "patriarchy" like a bunch of brain-washed bimbos. Yes, yes, I know. All heterosexual sex is just subjugation. Everything I do is clearly just for the sake of getting male attention. Yes, yes, I'm very stupid for daring to think otherwise. Christ knows I'm too dumb to have... um... free will.

So basically either way: having boobs = gagging for sex.

I'm just going to get this out of the way right now: this blog is about my boobs... and I still don't want to sleep with you.

The fact is, I like my body for the most part. Sure, there are bits that make me go "blech", but mostly I like what I've got. This has nothing to do with what God likes, or what men like. This is entirely to do with what I like, and what I think looks nice. I do what I can to dress in a way that flatters my shape. I'm very particular about that. I've pointed out before that plenty of other people don't like how I dress, and I've also pointed out before that I couldn't give a crap.

The other simple fact is: I've got big boobs. Anyone who's ever met me in real life (and looked at me for more than a second) can attest to that one basic truth. "Baby Got Front." I didn't start out that way (obviously). I still remember being twelve and desperately wishing that I could just get something, anything happening on my chest. My mother is a 34A. I figured I was destined to follow her.

But nature has some odd twists sometimes. My mother is a 34A, but my grandmothers were a 36C and a 32D respectively. [I know this because my mother is the type who notes and remembers people's measurements, even 40 years after they died!] If I look like anyone in my family, I look like my dad's mother: short, curvy, pale skin, lotsa thick dark hair. She was the 32D. In retrospect, it shouldn't have been a surprise that I went from being a training-bra at age twelve to a 32DD before I hit fifteen. They just turned up when I wasn't looking, and I was pretty happy with that.

But of course, I have a little body and a big bust. They were never really all that proportional to the rest of me. They are always going to be obvious. Hey, they stick out of the front of my body! I can get all sad about that, or I can just learn to live with it. I learned to live with it. I really like them.

Yes, they get attention - both positive and negative. When I left my old job, one work colleague wrote in my card "Hey Kiki, put your tits away!"... and then one of the crew guys wrote underneath it "Don't listen to her". Have I mentioned that I like crew guys? Have I also mentioned that I never actually got my tits out in front of either one of them?

Most of the negative attention seems to come from women, but men can be pretty vicious too. I once got an anonymous letter (at work!) from someone who claimed that they'd seen me in the supermarket, and that although I had nice breasts, I didn't need to be showing them off like I was... and that he was a father of three daughters, and that I was clearly a slut and a "disgrace to womanhood". The angry, attacking tone of it actually scared me a great deal. I had worn nothing more revealing than an old ballet-top and jeans to the supermarket that week (I remembered, because everything else had been in the wash). I felt that I was dressing scruffy. It certainly wasn't an attention-grab, and I was oblivious if I got any attention. Nobody seemed to pay me much mind. I was just buying groceries for fuck's sake!!!

I showed the letter to our venue's lighting tech (who was a lovely guy), and he just blanched a bit and swore about all of the weird religious nuts in that town. He told me to take it to the police. Instead, I took the letter home to show my partner, and he just shrugged and replied with "How does he know you've got nice breasts?" He then told me to throw the letter away and never think of it again - although clearly I have continued to think about it, even years later. I've often wondered why some people are so full of hate and anger that they need to go after a total stranger like that, in order to try and make their lives a little bit unhappier.

The fact is, my partner was correct in one assessment: the guy who wrote the letter had no idea what my breasts look like. It was all just in his imagination. I don't walk around topless (not outside of the house anyway). I just have big boobs. I didn't chose them, I can't take them off, and they have absolutely zero bearing on my value as a woman. They don't magically make me more sexual, or more immoral. They are as relevant to my character as my knees, or my kidneys, or my gall bladder. The assumption is that I am supposed to be ashamed of them and do what I can to hide them and pretend that they're not there... but they ARE there. Wearing loose tops just makes them look bigger (along with the rest of me). Strapping them down doesn't make them smaller, it just squashes the roundness out to the top and sides, rather than straight forward. I'm not ashamed of them because I KNOW that they don't make me more promiscuous, and I have nothing to be ashamed of in the first place. If people want to think sexual thoughts (or anti-sexual thoughts)... well who really cares? I don't. Some people think sexual thoughts when looking at feet.

But, of course, there are plenty of other downsides to boobage. It's hard to find clothing that fits well, and don't even get me started on the nightmare that is off-the-rack swimwear. I once spent three days (three fucking days!!!) in various shopping malls, in two different cities, trying to find a bikini that fit me without resembling a piece of civil engineering. Buttons strain and knits overflow. Boobs are heavy. They're uncomfortably hot in the summertime (so much so that I tend to walk around the house with no shirt on). They make it painful to run anywhere.

And... well... they're real. For a lot of years, I figured that meant that nobody else would like them, even if I did. Real breasts are much-maligned when they go past about a C-cup. All those beautiful nude paintings of antiquity rarely go any bigger than a B, (even Rubens, who was meant to be on the side of the larger ladies, tended to paint women with very small breasts). Large, natural breasts are rarely seen, and so it was hard to know what they were meant to look like. They don't sit on my chest like two moulded jellies on a plate. They move and sway and bounce around. It's very hard to find anything (porn or otherwise) that's created in defense of big, real breasts. When I was a teenager, I took that to mean that men didn't like them... and plenty of men don't. I've spent many years - and probably thousands of dollars - applying skin cremes and lotions that were meant to make everything higher, tighter, firmer, etc. I considered surgery.

But they are what they are. And they are here to stay. As I said before: I have to learn to live with them.

Now, after our first Metallica concert last month, I carefully took R back to our hotel, and put him to bed (a few people will know why, but I'm not telling). I then went and had a shower. On the way out of the shower, I caught a look at myself in the mirror and snapped a picture. I realized that I didn't have any record of the gig that night (didn't take the camera the first night, remember?), so I'd better get one before bed... But mostly I took the picture because I looked content, and real, and I figured that one day it would be nice to look back on myself at the age of 32 and see me looking happy.

This is that picture (with the room cropped out):

I wouldn't normally post it here, because slightly revealing pictures have a way of getting loose on the Internet. But if I'm talking about my boobs... well... that's them. Free of everything bar a bath towel.

For years and years and years I was a 32DD. Earlier this year, I went and bought a new sports bra, only to find that the DD didn't fit. I had to go up to a 32DDD (or a 10E in New Zealand). It was strange to suddenly be a different size after [counts on fingers] 17 years.

After that, I noticed that a lot of my bras weren't fitting all that well anymore. I figured that was just because I'd suddenly gotten that one size bigger, so I needed to go get some more new bras. A couple days ago, that's exactly what I did.

... Only, the DDDs weren't fitting that well either. I was a bit perplexed. The saleswoman ran a tape measure on me... and gave me a 32F. *gulp*

Crikey! My sweater puppies have turned into fully-grown sweater Labradors!

This is where the complaint comes in. Because, hey God, I know I said that I like my body, but don't you think that an F cup is a bit on the extreme side? I'm not pregnant. How the hell am I supposed to find clothes now?!? Not to mention bras. It's really hard to find bras in that sort of size range, and most of them look like they were designed by a bridge-builder rather than someone dealing in lingerie.

I came home and voiced my complaint to R, who responded with a resounding shrug and a "so what"? Just to point out the magnitude of this, I put on one of my new bras in order to show him just how big a 32F really is...

Yep. It fit on my head.

... Sigh...

*grumble grumble grumble...*