I want to write,

I need to write.

Writing is in my brain.

People like reading and

People read the written.

Reading is fun and

Reading teaches us.

I love people who read and

I love people who tell stories and simply,

I just love people.

I want people to be well.

And happy.

And have amazing lives.

And I want people to learn from others and

To appreciate each other.

I want people to know

There are all kinds of people

in the world and

I want people to know

They can be just who they are.

They don’t need to listen to the voice in their head

Which makes them be like everyone else or

Makes them be a person they’ve been instructed to be.

Life can be shit.

Life can be hard,

Life sucks (too many times)

And writing helps me to see

Through the storm

The rainy, hazy sheet.

The first time that I saw the framed, black and white photo I thought I saw a resemblance to my great aunt’s next door neighbour. how on earth do i know what they look like? In fact, i thought it WAS my great Aunt’s neighbour. it cost me $500 to find out actually; in the archives of Wellington’s State Library.

The photo was of three men – all wearing top hats and looking very earnest.  100% pure New Zealand, i can hear my grandfather say.  i’m not sure what makes them look so, because they looked like every Caucasian male of that era; circa 1920s.

Anyway, the smaller of the three looked like the person in question. He was the size of a small child, yet he was clearly a fully-fledged adult, standing in a three-piece suit and pointed black shoes. Actually, I’m guessing they’re black as it is a black and white picture.

But I don’t understand why this picture is hanging on my neighbour’s lounge room wall. i was baffled. And I would have to stay baffled because my neighbour was dead.

These shoes hurt, i thought. In fact, everything seemed to hurt these days.  i sat down on my comfy velvet couch and rub my heels as I stare up again at the photo, that is now hanging on my lounge rom floor.

I was turned on by the though of discovering the strange, coincidental relationship all those years ago.  That feeling was overtaken by frustration, angst and …now …what do i feel now? Meloncoloy?

Oh, can you please turn that off Doris. I can’t think with that wireless droning on and on. She should listen to real music if she wants us to cooperate.

Where was I? Melancholic, apparently. Maybe I’m reflecting the feelings on show on the faces of these three gentleman.  These three friends. They’re all I have now.  They’re all I have.

This course, this writing course. Revelations. Expectations. Degregdations of Self. The eccentracies of ego. Egoic pleasures and egoic destructions.  The truth reality of any given moment. The most precious time we have is in the now. Yes. It is and then within spacial mili-seconds it’s dissapated, but has yet burst into shards of hope, visions, fragments of what was that metamorphisises into a branded bubble of nothingness and something precious webbed together by collective and chaotic collisions of new information that, becomes redundant once spoken but with explosive potentials, to stick into the perception of an audience consciousness, thus influencing their perceived truth reality, changing thought processes, rewriting conscious blueprint, enabling physical response.

The point is, since thoughts, ideas, truths etc, are less than a second in time true, at any given moment, then the whole process is an illusion and it’s very real illusion that births a desire.  The desire once birthed, comes with choices and those choices are inspiration – whether to pursue the collected and collective of fusions or to exhaust the moment by squashing the oxygen out of it because of learnt fear and negativity.  All that remains are ashes and voided hopes and dreams that birthed question marks of the ‘what if?  It wasn’t meant to be”.

The alternative.  Co-creation with your minds eye, tabling the tangents and touring the spaces where the gaps reside.  Touch, feel the tangible trade of the tango in the mind.  Observe and witness the translation of mind to hand to paper.  Watch the ink make shapes on the paper and focus on the sobriety of making love to pure ambiguity, just being present, being you, just being.

I was running; Running from everything and running out of time. It was hard to understand how I’d been so blind. If I had learnt this early in the piece my life would have been different. It was not complacency, but a fear of ridicule. I had been an ‘add on’ to a successful man. I guess you could call me Little MISS..CELLANIOUS.

I stared out of the carriage window thinking of the times I should have left.

I never dared think that perhaps if I made a small change that would be the catalyst for something better. Like the train I’d just raced through a dark tunnel allowing my life to be driven by another driver.

He decided everything for me. What I wore, what I ate, where I sat at the table.

Right down to what I thought.

“Don’t ask Jenny she knows nothing.” ……

“Jenny doesn’t eat dessert. It puts on weight….” Etc..Etc..

But today I was running and I knew exactly where to go. I was running to find me.

The first time I met Judge Judy as at a holiday camp. I had travelled upstate with my brother, a lumpen boy – much like myself, I suppose – with a penchant for two things: nose picking and ping-pong.

“That’s her!” he whispered one morning, after breakfast.

“Who?”

“Judge Judy!”

He hissed this last as if I were heading his personal League of Dimwittery, which I probably was.

It cost $500 for each of us to earn the week here in the sultry embrace of nature and her crawling things. We hadn’t paid it, but I suspect that our parents had grown sick of the sight of the two of us over the sweltering summer. So we’d been transported in a long bus, driven by an observant complainer, equally taken with kvetching about the weather and ensuring his yarmulke was still attached to his thinning hair; that the weak A/C hadn’t turned it into some kind of religious frisbee.

This was typical. We’d escaped Judge Judy’s omniscient televisual gaze to encounter the real thing during a purported holiday break.

And in swimwear, no less.

The first time we saw her – well, my brother did the spotting, because I wouldn’t have recognised her without the robes and the pissed-off bailiffs – it was on a sun lounge by the camp’s single pool.

Being pasty, doughy kids we generally eschewed the pool, but had to walk past it to get to the rec center, a down-at-heel building which smelled equally of sawdust and kids’ urine. Importantly, it contained a trio of ping-pong tables where whe’d while away the hours other, better-adjusted children would spend on more productive goals like orienteering or the cultivation of nicotine addiction.

I can’t express how mystifying it was to see such a familiar figure of yelled justice reclining by a pool. I don’t understand how the woman lying in the sun in a one-piece swimsuit – black, natch – was the same person who’d provided the moral exemplar (as far as my mother was concerned, anyway) to my life to date. I guess technically we didn’t meet here because – well, what would you say?

She never looked up as we moved past, eyes hidden by enormous glasses, but we were sure we could feel her watching. It became a game: the threat of her notice was punishment itself.

Complaining? Judge Judy’ll get ya.

It began innocently enough. The sneakers I was wearing were too small for my growth-spurt feet.

“These shows hurt,” I had said.
“Shaddup or Judge Judy gonna gitcha!” my brother intoned, ominously.

It went from there, until every thing invoked the wrath of Judy. Everything.

Though I was thirteen, I was still a very timid kid. I had hormones but no idea what they meant, or even what language they were speaking. I was turned on by the girls my age who splashed – in the pool! Just near the Judge! – but felt guilty about it. These girls were beautiful. And I? Some jerk! They danced to tunes blasted from a black portable CD player, and were luminous and beautiful.

Well, they danced once. I remember seeing Judge Judy – who would be so familiar as to call her by her name alone? – raise an eyebrow and turn towards the din.

“CAN YOU TURN THAT OFF?”

Her televisual imperiousness brooked no argument, and they acceded. No more words were spoken. Wind out of their sails, the group took their leave soon after, and the Judge settled back into her lounge.

After that she had the pool to herself.

After a week of close-fought ping-pong games (my brother won; he always did)  it was time for the camp to send us back to where we came from, and to welcome new meat to be tenderised by the Great Outdoors. We left as we’d arrived – on a bus, packed with too many kids and too little deodorant.

From behind the pool’s fence, the black eyes of the Judge watched us leave.

I wonder if she thought we were bound for adolescent chicanery? I figured I wouldn’t be, because I’d heard The Voice of The Law in real life, one muggy summer’s day.

And man, those TV speakers don’t do it justice.

***