October 11

October 11

This blog is rated MA for mature audiences. May contain sexual references and adult language.

I dreamt that I was in a gymnastics competition and at the very beginning a voice predicted from the loudspeaker that I would win the beam event, Kim (Brendan’s ex-girlfriend who runs the mad people’s program) would win the on bars and my friend Freyja would win another event. Freyja got onto the beam and did a beautiful dance in an eighties bodysuit and tights and I got stage fright and ran outside (the competition was being held in a bar)- I was hoping that by some miracle my performance would take place without my actual presence. At some point I realised that it wasn’t going to happen that way and went back in to face the music: I saw that all the judges were ten year-old girls with freckles and teeth slightly too big for their faces and felt comforted.

Then I was in the lane outside my house with a Newtown bouncer. So you know what this means I will have to explain that in Newtown, there is a Maori bouncer cartel and that outside most of the seedier bars there is a musclebound gatekeeper of Islander stock who makes sure that no juveniles, delinquents or people in thongs are allowed to spoil the tone of the place. I am in the lane with one of them and in starts to rain. I am wearing a red jacket and suddenly feel an unbearable romantic urge and start kissing him passionately. Cut to five minutes later- we are fucking in the alley outside my front door – he is holding me off the ground with his 100-plus kilograms of pure muscle and when the rain falls on his skin there is a slight hiss like water falling on a hotplate.

So it seems that I have graduated from my series of nocturnal erotic encounters with Ghassan (my Palestinian colleague) to something even less salubrious. Why I can’t have these adventures with my Prospective Spouse is another issue but I’m sure that I’ll end up in psychoanalysis one of these days and I will explore it further then.

I will end this post with the overseas news, since this year I have been abandoned by my two dearest friends. Cameron is in Oxford about to start his academic career and Marcelle in Panajachel in Guatemala living happily ever after with her little brown lover and running a bar. It has been flooding there after a hurricane and she sent a long group email about life in times of natural disaster- no electricity, bridges washed away, drownings and the difficulty of getting food and clean water. I imagine her walking into town through the mud (which now takes one hour because the bridges are gone) as on an SBS documentary about the misery of other less fortunate climes and feel how far away she is from me. When I allow myself to think about it I get a sensation of equal parts loss and envy, because she had passed some final frontier to belong completely to a place which I have never seen.