Sarah Jane

The crazies come out to play

I’ve always been pretty socially inept. Perceiving or improvising interactions with other people in a normal manner has never been my forte. The very thought of becoming a by-product of General Pants Co gives me heart palpitations. GP sales assistants are like lizard people on some kind of sabotage mission behind enemy lines. They whisk you into a corner with aesthetic walls that glitter with encroached blabber and invade your personal space - both physically and cognitionally. They are reptoids, tickling you with dread and panic until you piss. No, I do not want to be that guy. I do not want to be the cause of somebody vacating my store with a dishonorable discharge for pissing under interrogation.

Unfortunately, this kind of social kidney-strain follows me into the brawling, hysterical, post-urban suburb of Surry Hills, where I currently reside. I probably have a particularly dark vision of this place. To me it seems like a pretty burned-out world where drug companies rule and nature is salvaging what it can. It probably doesn’t help that the local men strut around with gynecomastia and the local women are seen squatting commando on corners in weary disbelief as the past disappears. 

This kind of habitual awareness is all well and good until it brings on the Tachycardia. Ah, the audacity that some people have to just come on over, sit beside you and breathe down your mother fucking neck. Just yesterday I was sitting at a bus stop next to low-income housing (I guess I was kind of asking for it) and upon came an arguing couple, both potentially dependent on diamorphine. She attacked his masculinity. He bragged about an ongoing affair. And there I was, sitting statuesque in an uneasy fog of pure awkwardness. The concept of both public and private were beyond boarders at this moment. What’s worse is they then decided to include me in their domestic dispute. Bring on the innocent bystander to really Jerry Springer things up. I started getting a painful twinge in my forearm when the girl asked what my opinion was concerning her boyfriends low libido - I didn’t have the heart to tell her he probably exhausts it regularly on the local bar wrench who serves more than a schooner of Reches each night. Of course then the heightened martial presence of the boyfriend radiates the scene in a demeaning manner, and there I am sitting between two people who will probably die soon of an anal cocaine cancer overdose while they call one another a plethora of demonic names ranging from one to five syllables.
 
When the bus came light-years later, I was actually left with the overwhelming inability to deliver a perfunctory, helpful reply? I was also left with the assertion that I live in a town I can only identify as one big outpatient mental institution that probably fuels my current social inadequacy. But hey, it’s my home and I shouldn’t be so picky.

A dream preceding a hangover…

                       

Something to do with sleep deprivation. Something to do with radioactive liquids consumed on a night that unshakably lingers. A haze of absurd beverages induce tremble upon tremble. Mexican potions labeled with 4 syllable names; purely designed to intimidate ones liver in a manipulative manner. 

My feet are what move me. My body is on autopilot. Hissing automatic doors introduce me to a stuffy crawlspace of an attic bedroom, naked of a roof; a place to house all the abstractions. I look to the sky. It is clouded by people: executives floating to work in suits… kids soaring too high, backpacks dangling by a strap. Suddenly my geographical coordination is seduced by a distorted reality; overshadowed by contempt, and a fun house I once endured as a child. Roads kaleidoscopically framed, the sky: a sharp mirage of a rotating pavement - optically defining the fundamental laws of nature.

Flashbacks of being in Sydney’s worst gig venue take up residency in my unconscious state of departure: a concrete box with prison acoustics and glassy dance-pop thudding the floor. My neck is aching from an unwelcome shiver of tension and longing. I revisit the rippled shade of the sidewalks, which are in severe disrepair, as everyone in this city glacially flies.

I avoid fellow terrestrial travelers, who inevitably seek to combine their misery with mine. They are now ballpoint doodles of stick figure men - intricate and subtle. The path is dim – is flawed, unreal and lonely—but veined with a sunlight sifted down through soft, weightless limbs….

Zine Time #2

It’s no secret that most coming-of-age-moments are, for the most part, profoundly hideous and immature in hindsight. If you can pinpoint the moment where you suddenly emerged from a pube-sprouting, cartoon moron trying to fit in – to a coolsie bean, high enough on the social Richter-scale to invent your own hip language – it’s instantly flabbergasted into thin air with unforgettable memories of classmates perpetually regarding you with mortified pity and judgemental sneers. This was generally due to your financially distressed parents buying you discounted Converse knock-offs from K-mart.

7^th grade was a truly traumatic time. Everybody around me was becoming universally adept at manipulating combinations of fingers, mouths and genitals. As a pre-pubescent, burgeoning spring chicken, I felt distinctly left out. The ol’ bird and bee’ metaphor had turned into an erotic visual of unguarded, involuntary arousal for most. For me: it coerced my genitals to spontaneously curl up and die.

The closest sexual encounter I’d had at that time was with a  frozen desert that had sexual connotations. My friend Amy decided it would be educationally beneficial to conduct a paddle pop tutorial on French Kissing. I still remember the ever-so-wise words, “As the paddle pop enters your mouth, swirl your tongue around like a tornado.”  It pains me to envision that scenario: a gangly kid with orthodontic braces, molesting the tip of a paddle pop behind the canteen - whilst being dictated by an equally disproportionate gangly kid, sporting red hair and an excessive amount of hippie beads. We were more embarrassing than Ellen DeGeneres on a methamphetamine binge.

When the opportunity came around to ditch the paddle pop for a set of lips, I jumped unflinchingly into saliva-genocide action. Corey O’Donnell wanted to, in the most mature essence of words, get with me. He had passed me a note in English class. The note read one Hemmingway-inspired sentence that didn’t beat around the bush, “I want to get with you.” I had cootie-induced nerves and pulsating sweat glands emanating from my potentially sinful body. I had to deal with it. It was a simple function of time and I wasn’t going to let my nerves piss away my attempt to overcome biological inevitability. I reassured myself with pop culture references that not all 13 year olds who sinfully kiss would die helpless and alone in a puddle of their own wee. Sometimes they live happily ever after, like Dawson and Joey.

The minute the bell rang, all I could think about was the tornado tongue technique that Amy had taught me, and masterfully putting it into play. I had this sudden boost of confidence. It was almost as if somebody had just injected several litres of Fluoxetine into my blood stream. I was about to crack my first Pepsi and Corey O’Donnell was thy chosen one.

The anticipatory stare before the kiss was much like an episode of 90’s sitcom, The Wonder Years: certified awkwardness, minimal geographical co-ordinates of oneself and birds suddenly appearing.  The kiss was very much the same. Only lubricated and lengthy, with some inappropriate bodily sounds orchestrating the scene. I remember walking away with an extended stride in my step, a banana split smile and a whole-lotta-womanly-tude.

Zine Time

Thomas Jay Burke was 11 years old with startling green eyes and a head of hair, that looked as though it had been drawn on by an autistic child. What can I say? Sporadic curls and undisciplined dreadlocks had me falling into a pulsating heap back then. I thought he was pretty happening in a far out way.

However, my heart was homeless and I was faced with the anti-romance of the post-apocalyptic Achilles heel. In other words - my existence was obsolete in those startling green eyes. I was an awkward looking child, with buckteeth that could open a beer bottle. I thought I was cutting edge and totally working it in my hyper colour t-shirt and Oakley aviator sunglasses. Fact: I was not.

I had a faint idea of how to survive the bacteria-filled wading pool of pre-pubescent love; I had to take the self-contrasting plunge and tell Thomas that I thought he was the most magnificent creature to insufflate oxygen on planet Earth. I had to tell him that he induced impure thoughts upon me and that I began disregarding all logic in the name of thy Lord. Ultimately, there was one diabolical issue standing in harm’s way: being in the same pericutaneous space as this genetically blessed being would send my nervous system into overdrive, causing me to break out in hives, or worse, impulsive urination.

After reciting countless and recycled b-grade romance movies, I discovered a communication loophole. I was going to write my eternal soul mate an anonymous love letter, with a conclusive ‘guess who’ description of myself on the back. This was my anesthetised entry into the neon cauldron of the lovesick. Behold, I was the lovechild of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. I was also the mother of intolerable self-destruction. If only I were momentarily aware of it.

The love letter turned out to be a blushingly honest proposal for requited love, of stark and aching aural perfection. I quoted numerous Savage Garden lyrics, and included a poem, rhyming my potential counterpart’s name with words like “stupendous” and “tremendous.” It was heart-on-sleeve-agony at its finest.

The day had finally come to deliver the letter to Thomas. I had decided on the cowardly act of placing it in his school bag, which was situated conveniently outside of the classroom. I was not aware of it at the time, but my arch nemesis and alert bomb-sniffing dog, Megan Taylor, saw me place the immortalising love letter in Thomas’s bag. 

The next thing I know, Megan Taylor is reading my letter out loud to the entire class of year 5. I thus began experiencing a painful twinge in my forearm, as my pulse quickened from the undiluted panic and rage I was undergoing. There was an orchestra of composed frequencies of laughter propagating in the classroom. I was instantaneously paralysed, firmly groping my skirt until my palms ached.

One mortified dash to the public toilets and a knotted skirt later, I was slightly more in control. Although, in hindsight, the fact that I dramatically exited the classroom in a heated sweat, before Megan even had the opportunity to reveal my identity, was possibly a mistake.

From that day forth, students thought it would be psychologically beneficial to cast me out like a leper. A sinful, hormonally charged leper.

I guess if Sigmund Freud were to read my letter, he would most likely psychoanalyse me as an 11-year-old girl possessed by a sex devil. Wild and sexually haunted.

Party on, Garth

There is something privately and intrinsically attractive about having an arrested adolescence. Amid the contours of breathing air in a society that does not permit culture unless it is conforming to very narrow moral parameters, you take the self-contrasting plunge and disregard judgmental sneers from those whom are inherently inundated with undiluted panic and rage fuelled by the sinister act of colouring outside of the lines.

You wear t-shirts with ironic slogans, climb inanimate objects with the absence of inhibition, get an elaborate hairstyle, partake in a flash mob, do the worm on the dance floor, watch recycled Simpsons episodes and peruse the toy section in k-mart – because you’re subconsciously certain the green goo in that plastic Play-Doh-inspired container will bring subsequent joy to your afternoon.

You’re eternally pubescent and answerable to nothing. That’s the dream, anyway.

Submerged

 


Your fate is unstitched. A wave of bliss settles over your mind, until the future happens, apologetically, again. The year slowly drags on, then speeds up, then repeats March three more times, then does April backwards, and then skips to December. You find yourself knee-deep in a series of unconscious metaphorical realms, where you’re held captive under the sea. Currents are flowing in every direction at once, never going anywhere, distorting your sense of direction. The law of gravity ceases to exist. Perhaps it is no more than a passing flux, subsequently giving birth to a new set of rules? You can’t be sure. You’re aware that you become dust when you die but unaware that prior to that, a little bit of dust becomes you.

Inevitably, your waking life gets the better of you. Death stops you in your tracks. Your heart and lungs shut down. Before the oxygen escapes your body, causing the electrical activity in your brain to short circuit and cease, 12 minutes of brain activity is afloat, generating one second of dream consciousness, which is infinitely longer than a waking second. The possibility of eternal life is upon you.

Familiarity soon fuels contempt. A stop-clock moment of misappropriated lucidity is born. You’re poised, frozen and content, transfixed on the inanimately hypnotising image of a girl writing in her notebook. It’s an exquisitely boring scene, yet you cannot abandon it, nor are you satisfied by it. Time is standing still. Your unconscious state of departure is now a rehabilitation program for the terminally ambivalent. You lucked out; the power to control your waking rational abilities is no longer on the menu.

… But in retrospect, was it ever? 

Soooo…

I don’t know if it’s the lingering effects of sleep deprivation, the lousy weather, or the continual subjugated awareness that life is an empty series of gestures made upon the journey to the grave, but I am having a rough go of it today.

9.00am: Wake from a dream in which a faceless man tickles my arm, and then offers me a checkered sweater. Hot. I yawn artfully then make a vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath several books. No success.

9.10am: Get out of bed feeling wonky-eyed and incoherent, like Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the proper proportion of nostalgia and irony.

9.25am: Drink an instant coffee, inadvertently consuming freeze-dried granules of horse poo.

11.00am: Sit through a 2-hour stab-a-fork-in-my-eye anthropology lecture. My brain is inundated with nonsensical ramblings of undiluted panic and rage.

1.15pm: Overhear a girl call another girl a ‘stupid hoe’. Sophomoric insults, wow this is an advanced university.

1.30pm: Attempt to study, but instead youtube various bands singing about their crackpot conspiracy theories, mirroring my collective self-involved insanity.

2.00pm: Boy in library playing Creed, unforgivingly loud. A light bulb moment is fueled: humanity is doomed; Earth will be cracked open, not by a comet but by Christian Rock. Steam will rise above the ocean and wind from every direction will catch fire. The sky will be covered with heavy tarps of black burning dust and every one of us will end up stenciled like letters into the fossil record. I mentally shake my fist at the boy and elbow him in the dick with my eyes.

2.20pm: University Professor dressed like Peter Brady enters the room. The fly of his plaid pants is unzipped. Students cannot help noticing; yet talk about everything else, carving out the unsaid.

2.30pm: Continue to revel in nihilistic thoughts.

Things we rarely mention or document

The powerful, morbid fascination with countless daily ritual nothings: False accretion of detail in the advertisements smeared across the city. Graffiti that perfectly frames each commute-contours, irregularities and shadows that were and weren’t there yesterday. The seconds wasted every week on the observation of people driving in their cars. The realisation that you’ve lost your marbles when misplacing inane objects, only later to come across them in the fridge or freezer. The insurmountable mental list of daily errands you construct in your head while sipping your morning cup of coffee. By 5pm the list is revisited – the boxes remain unchecked. 

Fantasies bred upon malicious intent: When moving though a crowd of people, I fantasise about shoving absolutely everyone to the ground with my shoulder: children, the elderly, men twice my size with shaven heads, women twice my size with shaven heads, flawless men in precarious shoes and suave suits, sleep-deprived students carrying books, policemen, Pauline Hanson, street preachers, drunks, D grade celebrities aka Sydney club whores, the old school friend I recognise but want to avoid, one of the hundreds of trendy hipsters with impeccable style in my neighborhood, who probably jack off to George Michael each night, the Indian man in 7/11 who looks down on me, like I am some kind of Delinquent, the girl who sort of looks like me, mothers who convert their prams into bulldozers, tailgating me on the footpath. I will shove them all. The crowd will subdue me, eventually; they will band together, pin me down and demand legitimate reasoning for such a vengeful act. I will politely reply that this was always how I pictured it. 

Bill Murray: In the context of film, I have always despised the term, “one of a kind”. I put it in the “ridiculous superlative” category, along with “best in the world”, and “very, very” anything.  And as soon as somebody uses the term more than once in reference to a film, or without a certain conviction, I lose interest.

So, this is my one and only time. I promise. Besides, I am not referencing a film. I am taking my hat off to one of the film industries finest. Bill Murray inadvertently seduces his audience with an effortlessly comedic approach to existence, with a spoonful of arrogance in interpretation that, while against the “rules”, is elucidating. He attracts us to the novelty of his subjects’ ”otherness”, before surprising, and engaging us with a reflection of ourselves. 

Bill-Murray-a-thons are a regular, habitual ritual in my world. It’s a bit of a love affair, really.

Living in an overpopulated world of emptiness: We’re conditioned on a mass scale and society is just a kaleidoscopic state of corporate slavery. Political agendas are there to control you in a buffet of dishonesty. We have been procreated from the moment we vacated from our mothers wombs to conform to a structured ideal of what humankind is considered to be. We’re all ants, insignificant ants, going through life on autopilot, extracting real human qualities. Stop, go, buy this, eat that. Actions that are purely designed for survival of ones self. We communicate to remain alive, in an efficient, polite manner. It is very rare to examine an extension of ones personality, without the miscellaneous assortment of social, religious, cultural and political typecasts overshadowing it. A girl walked passed me today. She was wearing a hat I admired. I wanted to tell her that I liked her hat. When I made eye contact with her, I received an unconscious, soulless, robotic glance back. 

Shit gets real during Sydney’s heat wave

It’s really hot outside. So hot you could fry an egg on the pavement. You’re practically naked wearing a maximum of 3 items of restricting, skin clenching clothing. You’ve decided to boycott layers today (these heady times are to be dealt with pragmatically). You’re sweating profusely. Instead of regulating the functionality of your lethargic pins, you hail down an already 7 minute late bus. You mentally justify the incompetence and unreliability of the Sydney state transit bus system with the refreshing reassurance that a spacious, air conditioned seat awaits you.

The bus arrives. You discover the air con is not working before you even step on to the bus from the exhausting visual of a crisp tomato-esque bus driver turning the wheel with a handkerchief wedged between his palm and the steering wheel. You sigh, but accept such inefficiency. After all it’s too hot to allow your emotions to escalate. Your electrolytes have been drained from your body. You’re weak and defeated. The seat is small and your leg is pressed up close against the man sitting next to you. Your right bum cheek is just touching the woman on the other side.  There are 53 hot, practically naked bodies sitting amongst you. You counted.



For a 22 year old who feels claustrophobic in Westfield shopping centre’s, the reality of exchanging sweat glands with a diverse range of strangers on a bus is overwhelming, to say the least. The idea of officialised nudity en masse is hard enough to grasp, but when a large group of half-naked twenty to sixty- something’s start unconsciously rubbing their bits and pieces up against others, it allows you to form disconcerting visuals in your head. Right now it is as though you’re sitting in a European sauna, where it is considered mandatory to strip down and violate each other’s limbs with scented liquid substances. Yes, an appropriate visual, just so you’re not misunderstanding the atmosphere. 



A shirtless guy standing at the front of the bus appears to be accommodating a strong current of sweat streaming down his back, like honey that melts like butter on hot skin. The pungent, heady smell is overpowering. You feel, um, a little strange. A bra-less 30-something pregnant lady just got on wearing a floral moo-moo. The moo-moo appears to be lacking in length. This observation does not go un-noticed to the folk on the bus as the pregnant lady’s decision to go commando today is most apparent. Alas, no raised eyebrows have been captured. It’s just how it is.



The whole bus is filled with bouncing stomachs and jiggling boobs and balls. Bodies are real, disproportionate, flawed. Suave perfection is nowhere to be found. The shirtless 20-something guy just took off his jeans and is now down to the bare minimum. Shit just got real. It’s a tad disheartening to discover Sydney’s most common mode of public transport has successfully achieved the ability to produce more revealing, liberal specimens than the exhibitionists who regularly choose to emulate the iconic Tony Abbott, prancing around in a pair of budgie smugglers down at your local pool. All you can do is go with the sweaty flow and make peace with your fellow commuters. I guess there is something special about partial-nudity that equalises people. Everyone is equally exposed. Like that dream we’ve all had, where we wake up, naked in a public place or something. It can be a humbling way of dealing with your demons… as they escape.

Without clothes – symbols of status and state - we could be anyone relaxing in a sauna, pool or even a bus. There are very few exhibitionists, and those who do strut are unlikely to have an Alfa Romeo to show off down there. When your city is facing a major heat wave, all you can do is relax and adapt to the liberal mentality of those around you. And really, this is what Sydney has begun to feel like: a remembrance that is fudged together by some entity ascending into the next consciousness. 

This uncomfortably extreme temperature is causing your hypothalamus (the thermo-regulation center of the brain) to malfunction. You’re starting to lose your mind. The clarity of the entire bus ride is disintegrating and what little sanity you have left is instantaneously replaced with a heat-induced, foggy realm of escapism, similar to a dream preceding a hangover. For a bleak moment of faded lucidity, you realise you went to Hell, or Hell came to you.

Essentially, this revelation isn’t too bad, more of an indefinite shift, like your coffee tasting like wine, your hair growing too fast, inert objects gleaming with raw and terrible life. In fact, it might just be you? You were always half-certain you’d lose your grip on things one day. Reality is what’s unraveling – one can’t ignore the perpetual ball scratching occurring next to them, wincing at the smoky scent of blatant chafing in a public space. One can’t escape the full frontal obscenity of middle-aged men and women publically exposing their not so aesthetically appealing beer guts. Bliss resides far from you at this point, while a dark cloud of contempt cultivates above your head. You bring home your despair as your bus stop approaches.



Anything is normal if you can convince yourself of it. Hell, just ask Tom Cruise: 

“What Scientology is, is it addresses man as a spiritual being. Okay? And it gives people tools that they apply to their lives to improve conditions. And that is what it is.” (Tom Cruise, 2007).