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Final Fantasy XIII, Disc 1:

Final Fantasy XIII, Disc 2:

From an early age, it was clear that Luffy enjoyed music. He seemed to prefer simple, dynamic sounds, particularly Krautrock bands like Cluster and Harmonia. He would sit in front of the speaker and tilt his head, a little like the dog from the HMV logo. In the car he seemed to react most positively to upbeat, syncopated dance music like the Jackson Five or the Pointer Sisters. My understanding is that dogs cannot differentiate between different pitches as well as we can, only differentiating between high, middle and low pitches within a single octave. He has never seemed to enjoy rock and roll at all, which I presume sounds like a wash of noise.

Our new dog, Toki, seems to have no interest in music at all, and doesn’t react to it. But he does seem to have a taste for literature. He is roughly four and a half months of age at the time of writing this, and his puppy teeth are still coming through. Like most teething puppies, he chews on things to alleviate the discomfort. And we found that he had started picking books off the shelves of the various bookcases in the house, to chew on.

I didn’t think much of it until I noticed that he had pulled down a copy of Aristotle’s writings on literature that I had forgotten I owned, which got me thinking. I collected up all the books with chew marks on them and piled them on top of one of the bookshelves in the hallway. When a new book takes his fancy I add that to the pile.

I was talking to Gerald Murnane on the telephone. Gerald is residing in the country for awhile. I told him about the new puppy, and how he had a taste for literature. Gerald asked me if Toki had tried any of his own books, and I told him no, that for now Gerald’s books were a little beyond him.

But funnily enough, a few days later Toki found a photo of Gerald’s country house that he had given us, and chewed the corner. I haven’t talked to Gerald since he picked up his award at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, but I want to know if he visited the Murray Bridge bunyip on the way either there or back, as I suggested.

I suspect that Gerald will be pleased to know that Toki has given his country place his blessing.

Toki’s Recommended Reading List

1. Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
2. Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron
3. Michel Tournier, Gilles & Jeanne
4. Len Deighton, Horse Under Water
5. Mark Leyner, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog
6. Aristotle/Horace/Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism
7. Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner

Alex Rizkalla told me he had seen an old organ in the Sydney Road Savers, a Roland, an R-something, and that it had just been marked down. A Roland R-something could be almost anything – a string machine, an organ, or a synthesizer – so I had to go see.

We took a detour on the way to Gilpin park, where Luffy has regular social obligations. The Savers was real busy. This was a Monday afternoon, around four. There was a sale on. Kate waited outside with Luffy, tag-team style, while I went in to look for the Roland organ.

It had probably been sold. All I found was a sad little Italian GEM spinet with a $1199 price-tag, which is about 1199 times more than anyone would pay for it. But that was at the back of the shop, so I had to work my way past a lot of people there and back.

Most of the customers were dressed like normal people. But there were a lot of young hipsters as well, that end of Sydney Road being increasingly fashionable. And as I walked past them, the hipsters would give me this strange look. They’d smile at me, but like they were embarrassed.

Afterwards I realised what it was. The smile was their way of telling me they were shopping ironically. They weren’t there because they were forced by circumstance to buy secondhand clothing. They were there to find cool op shop kitsch. But they were, of course, concerned that strangers might confuse them for one of the more impoverished customers buying necessities. So they gave me that uncomfortable grin to re-affirm their social status, the Savers smile.

I’ve just been down the park with Luffy, chucking him the ball with the ball chucker thingie. I’ve got an old iPod and some bulky professional headphones I’ve started wearing to listen to music in the backyard while I lie on the cat’s banana lounge. But there was no shade in the backyard this afternoon, so I decided to go down the park instead. The headphones wouldn’t fit under the only hat I have big enough to fit my overly large head, so I didn’t wear it. The long shot is I got sunburn again anyway.

I was listening to the old The Fall album Grotesque (After the Gramme). I was listening to the song ‘NWRA’. The bass line is mostly one distorted note. I was thinking: ‘That’s a great tone. It sounds like they ran it through a mike pre-amp’. The energy of it, the anger of it, got me feeling excited. Then I started to feel like a phony.

I’ve been feeling old for years. I’m middle-age now, forty next March. That should be considered old. I don’t want to be young forever. People who remember being young with fondness are mostly full of shit. Life gets better in almost every significant way the longer you live. But I never felt like a phony before.

I just wrote a fairly long piece about my recent experiences working for the ABC, more for the therapeutic value than anything else. I’ve been putting out feelers to a few people I know with the idea of publishing it somewhere, adding a little assurance that I can always get rid of the swears. From the replies I’ve been getting the general consensus that Quadrant will be my best bet, enemy of my enemy and all, but that even they might be worried about the more defamatory bits.

So I was thinking about how I could edit the piece to get it past lawyers and I was listening to Mark E. Smith singing: ‘Too many people cower to criminals.’

That’s when I started feeling like a phony. Because once upon a time I wouldn’t have given these things a second thought. I wouldn’t have even considered whether or not it was defamatory, just whether or not what I wrote was true, an accurate representation of the events as I saw them. Nothing else mattered.

When you get older I guess you start worrying more about what people think of you. You learn to recognise all your flaws, and then you start to think: I don’t want people to think I’m a gossip, or that I’m self-righteous, or that I’m intolerant, or that my fucking shit smells. I’m going to cover it all up and pretend. I’m going to have them all thinking I’m a meek motherfucker, just like them.

And then you realise you’ve started cowering at criminals. Because you’re thinking: ‘You get more flies with honey’, and how the extra money comes in handy.

Fuck that. Flies get squished. So I’ll wait a couple of days and see what happens. If nobody wants to publish the thing I’ll put it online here. With all the swears left in.

Cunt flaps.