Field of Dreams

The chicken pen---that looks akin to a war trench without the shrapnel---got shooshed and their hutch was relocated. There's bare earth where it was, a mix of hard soil and soft because when it rains the only dust bath is the one shielded by their quarters above.

It's nice out and I'm in wait mode for a call. So I went in and raked over that space, gouging clods from the ground.

They ran off when I entered but it didn't take long for all those not laying to get on in there and claw, claw, look, eat. They susserated as they scratched, lost in deep pleasure.

Chicken love---it's real and it's spectacular. 

Post-event 30 minutes on is great

As a fat person blessed with IBS I am constantly in mild gut pain. It's better since I semi-retired but being clogged up and gloomy for it is my norm. That combined with muscular-skeletal malformation that left me a foot shorter than I should be with malformed fingers (short) and feet (flat) means I am a grump who is always sore.

But now and then comes an event in toilet town that goes down a treat. The post-spasms fire for about thirty minutes then stop and for a couple of hours your guts are absent of pain.

I was riding through Canberra when the spasms stopped kicking in and I fully re-lived the experience of immediate relief (even with argle after-glow) as I was gliding my electric pushie across the newly-laid tar of decent public cycle-pathing. 

"Fuck me," I said through my mask—we're in lockdown until mid-October—over and over as my mid-section felt lightness and nice. Nice for the sudden eye in the fecal storm that is my motions of bowel. 

Nature is amazing; it gives you the power to feel part of it all—and there's nothing like a null-space in your gut that is not firing pain to make you feel connected to rest of the universe. 

My body, working badly since est.—but at least for a moment I copped a breather.

WFTW.

Love for Trump is my dad shooting whales off a tugboat

After some years inland we moved to the coast and there was an island for day trips from the harbour via a tugboat. For school kids most got a yearly visit and on some you might be lucky to catch sight of a whale

Our teacher asked us to draw a picture of the day and I still have it. There's me, the tugboat, other kids, and my dad in an orange shirt at the prow shooting whales.

He wasn't there that day and whilst he did at the time to me seemingly wear that one orange shirt he didn't own a gun (or use them). 

But I fucking loved guns and I loved my dad, likely because he was away a lot and I didn't get on with my mum who was experiencing reverse post-natal with my younger brother.

On another illustrated adventure for school we went to the butchers and they showed us adding sausage to their casings. To the side my dead-eyed dad with his rifle which may or may not have been fired on students, teachers, staff, butchers and or sausages. 

He wasn't there that day; I put him in packing steely heat. 

That was the '70s and now I'd have been packed off for counseling about my obsession. 

It's just that I loved guns and I loved my big, strong orange dad. He could do no wrong—he even cut out a rifle shape in a bit of wood, painted it black and gave it to me and I tooled around with it everywhere; guns!

It was the demented love of a sad child for an emotionally distant (slash) abusive parent who I obsessively drew in his orange shirt shooting a bunch of shit that didn't need to be shot: whales, meat-lovers, birds, gravy, small rocks etc.

I had no agency; as a small, broken child I had no agency. No wonder I was attracted to guns (a kill wand that makes big people fall down) or my dad. That crap you did as a child, bragging about how your dad could beat up some other kid's dad like it was ever going to happen. My love for my orange clad, whale-shooting dad was a basic need because even though they both made me feel sad because he wasn't around as much he made me the saddest the least. My reaction was to laud him in pics, blazing away like no tomorrow.

We moved across the country, back to the inland, out in the boondocks where it's so dry the crows cry weak despair and the air cracks.. 

They left my black gun behind. 

That place was the place where my parents one day, mad at my antics in the backseat, put me out of the car in the middle of fuck, dry grass and flat with nothing on any horizon and tried to drive off. They only relented because I was holding onto the door handle and being dragged along the road.  

I never felt safe again; never. I have abandonment issues now because of all the times they attempted it or threatened to inflict—from as long as I can remember through to my final days in my home town before my adult time put paid to their parental failings so acute if dueling were legal I'd demand satisfaction.

So love for Trump is like my child love for my dad, also orange, trust and faith invested in a menacing figure who looms large and projects menace. People draw pics of Trump as Rambo the way a six-year-old me crayoned out my dad with the one rifle to rule them all if the all were Southern Ocean cetaceans.

Love for Trump is my dad shooting whales off a tugboat; don't get trapped in love for an abusive orange fuck who gleans joy from your misery. 

Also, Trump would not only put you out of the car to leave you to die he'd back the fuck over and laugh while he did it.

Fish are revolting!

 ... and they're led by a sturgeon general.

Three pants dreaming

I wear ladies PJ bottoms to bed---because they don't have a dong flap like the boys so I can wear them in public---and mostly sleep on my right because of the bursa on the left. 

Last night I writhed about so much I woke and changed my pants rwice, my lower half slick with dreaming sweat.

I don't know what it was that caused me to blow through two pairs---medication, weight and/or the dreams---but two of the three were the nice ones I look forward to wearing and my only memory is putting them on only to wake to swap them out.

Fuck me; I'm in always pain and a nice bed and bed pants is something that takes the edge off. Then it's sometime in the early morning, I wake moistened and my nice pants are soiled with nightdamp.

My body; hurting and now sleep squirting.

UPDATE: Ads by Google is now giving me ads for ladies pajamas.

Bare-chested with a hat on

It’s raining in the nation’s capital and I had to go outside. Dressed in my underpants shorts, boxers made of cotton with an elasticised waist which are pulled high, I didn’t want to arse about for a shirt since I want to go back to sleep.

But I put on a hat.

You don’t think about balding until it happens to you and my appearance is already a flesh ruin so it neither adds nor detracts but missing hair up there is irritating in the rain; the steady pound of God tears is an uncomfortable wet sensation like when you’re not sure if you’ve cum or not.

Pitter patter is somnolent bliss, and with being snug as it pours is basically the nicest predicate for return to snooze as you can get.

But that heady glow is robbed if just before you let your pink defenceless first responder to soak with the irrits of it having happened twixt prickly nasty echo sensation on your misted scalp.

Being bald is balls which is added hilarity given a bald head looks like a ball.

Fuck you, hair loss, and my retort is a reverse hats off.

24 hours

I just went 24 hours without gouging at my four active wound sites. I thought I'd kicked it but relapsed.

So 24 hours; let's try for 48. 

Self-harm is deeply fucked up and hard as shit to stop when you have access to all you need instantly at hand. Like at 3am when you've just woken for a wee and your first move is to claw at your cheek.

Forty years of this crap; forty. 

OCPD might make me a better man but it comes at a cost of literal defacement. 

UPDATE: I lasted 36 hours then tore at them again. Fuck.

Class Action Park

Class Action Park is a totes awesome doco on about a decidedly '80s.amusement park that used faked insurance to get away with amusements that were a cascade of injury and death in potentate whose survival was a rite of passage for kids in the tri-state area. 

One former staffer---most of the rides were overseen by 14-17-year-olds---said that the '80s childhood was the last of the latchkey kids where wandering off on your own for most of the day was normal as was a visit to an abandoned mental hospital to smash fixtures. The sort of free-range mischief you could get up to because your disinterested parents didn't really give a fuck about where you were or what you were up to as long as you came back for dinner.

He then noted that a lot of that generation are in therapy (like me).

For instance, fire. On fire night, when you'd have a bonfire on a cold winter's night with potatoes in foil in the embers that would always be burnt and ash coated when butter evaporated to mist over the mouth lava innards that you'd gamely still risk eating--you got to play with fire. Like a long stick of bamboo you could jam from the edge then weave the burning tip around like it was an ET finger. 

Sometimes you'd have sparklers and wave them about to score the with initials or swears in cursive that lasted a hint in afterglow across the fire-lit night.

Then the in therapy stuff---and in this case in front of everyone---you'd enwrap plastic bread bags 'round your bamboo, set fire to the bag then melt in fat drips the plastic ruin onto bare thigh skin them peel the waxy slick from your leg now partly singed from the slag.

It's bonkers the stuff we did back then, the risks you took in an era of no mobiles or internet. Playing on building sites on the weekend when the builders were away, drinking the dregs of their backwash from the thick glass bottles of coke that littered the ground or crawling under cracked floor slabs of a ruined house lost to time that was across the road from your house on the outskirts of town..

I nearly died---and was wounded---a bunch of times but that was considered acceptable risk in an era of lackadaisical parenting. 

It was what it was and I survived; but through luck more than anything else.

The '80s childhood; thirty years on and we're still paying the piper.

I’ve dug another hole!

That is a classic line from The Castle where one of the characters digs holes for pleasure.

The other night I dug a hole in my middle left toe when trying to sleep I ripped the toe nail off.

Sounds gruesome but I got pleasure throb from the wound site as it blared from its tightly wrapped confines within doona folds.

I talked with my psych; that it’s a coping mechanism from childhood on I used to combat turmoil and stress but its gone out of control now I’ve drifted into the pleasure lane—where my brain gets a happy kick from micro-harm.

Or macro; a naked toe bed is no soft touch. But that it was better off than on is a deep concern that my conscious logical brain is going YARRGH! WTF?! Are you nuts?!

And I am; I’m mentally ill. I’ve been that way since nine.

We binged on Hoarders and all the subjects were mentally ill; their common root was trauma of loss—often sudden like surprise breakups or all siblings and parents dead in a year. Their hoard was a protective sheath—objects linked to memories of the lost. Or was accrued from shopping where the purchase high wasn’t married with actual use of the item got; oft rotting in place covered with filth, mold or shit.

Their hoard was armour—literal protection from would-be intruders with only those of the house who know the paths through the trash; like the garbage compactor in the Death Star without the tentacle monster within.

My clawing at body is balm for the mind like their mounds are to them. Who was I to judge.

At least though with mine there’s no chance of dead cats; you wouldn’t believe the state those corpses come out in from hoards of animals with stuff.

And the poo; good lord, the poo. A level five hoard is where there is no power, water or heat. No water means poo bags for humans and poo free for pets.

Hoarders; their pain is manifest for all to see—my wounds lie hidden beneath dressings or clothes.

The next day the nail bed was no longer throbbing though agony to touch. My psych said that’s the hangover, the price paid once the rush has gone. That perhaps ‘fore I do it again remind myself what lies on the other side of the pain-pleasure barrier once the pleasure is void.

Self-harm for people; it’s a rush—instant onset and bliss’d relief.

The afterglow is fucked; I iz proof.