by Nicole Skeltys
Cosmic saloons and dangerous strangers
The last fairly hastily posted blog was about T and I returning to Melbourne, to sell or stow our few remaining possessions, catch up with loved ones, then return to Pittsburgh to quickly resume our film work there and other commitments. As I write this, T has safely flown back to Pittsburgh - after a whirlwind trip featuring her brief stay in my studio/ storage space, frantically turfing out her stuff like a crab hurling sand balls out of its beach hole, then racing up to see her Mum and buddies in Sydney, then back on the impossibly long flight to America. But I am delayed here in Melbourne - the discovery of a giant growth in in my womb which has been causing me an increasing number of ailments has pinned me here like a specimen in a medical display case, my life suddenly frozen.
The fibroid feels to me like "The Monster from the Id!'"- the unforgettable cry from Dr Morbius from '50s sci-fi classic film 'Forbidden Planet'. Towards the end of the film, Dr Morbius finally named the malevolent psycho-sexual force that was destroying the hope of his new planetary utopia, which otherwise had been looking very promising with his lovely daughter floating around silvery new blinking machines and Robby the Robot wrestling happily with bakelite knobs. Similarly, the giant fibroid (the size of a 5 month fetus) - or MOFO to call it by its emotionally correct name - has been the unexpected twist that has thrown into doubt my return date to Pittsburgh.
Before I posted the last blurb, I edited out a few phrases which I felt were a little too grandiose to leave in: one of those was feeling that I was in someone else's plot, that my life (or indeed, any individual's life) was being scribbled from 'the beyond', part of a cosmic soap opera complete with cliffhangers, created for The Great Whatever's own amusement.
This was no intellectual speculation, or poetic metaphor, but a feeling that first kicked open the saloon doors of my consciousness about a decade ago and occupied it for days, holding my gaze with the confidence of a dangerous stranger who knew more about me than I did. I spent days radically adrift from my 'normal' sense of self, experiencing my thoughts as part of a greater, infinitely mysterious, consciousness which was being broadcast as 'my experience'. A little while later, I tried to capture some of this 'cosmic saloon' encounter in some lyrics for an early country truckin' song for my band Dust called '111.0':
"Am I once forgotten, now remembered?
Am I something found then cast away?
All I know is the moment I am driving through
A frequency that soon will fade away..".
I posted the last blog very late at night, and the next morning I started sorting out my book collection, deciding which books I would give to my friend Paul who was starting up a second hand bookshop in Northcote, hoping of course I would still be eventually leaving Australia again. One of the first books that emerged from the pile was by a Californian psychotherapist Robert H. Hopcke which sported the title "There Are No Accidents!: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives". It was a present for my brother Kim, who had leant it back to me to read, but I had put it aside and forgotten all about it in the rush to leave for America in May last year. I opened it up and read the following words:
"What if I - or you - were a character in a story?... What if what we experience as our life was indeed a work of fiction? How would we know? How could we know?...Synchronistic events - meaningful coincidences - make us acknowledge that there may well be more to our story than we think, and that everything, even things that may seem frightening or bad...is part of the narrative structure of our lives."
I closed it and held in my hands for quite a while, as I turned and looked out the glass patio doors that separated our lounge room from the leafy, lazily dappled sidewalks of Clarence Street. I decided it was probably a very good time for me to read this book.
Everyday magic
There's no doubt that Tanya and I regularly look for signs and magic in our everyday lives, trying to work out the meaning of why this happened versus that, what we are 'meant' to bring to someone's life, what they are 'meant' to bring to us. "Am I following the spiritual clues correctly, am I on the right path?"
We are not alone, a lot of our friends think this way too - and as I have made my way through story after story in Hopcke's book over the last week or so, its pretty clear that this 'magical thinking' is not the preserve of New Age crystal gazers or Calvinist determinists, but something close to a basic human instinct - a version of the 'religious' impulse that William James so rigorously described and defended in his brave psycho-philosophical treatise 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'. Synchronicities - defined as 'meaningful coincidences' - hold powerful sway over our hearts and minds precisely because they suggest there is more out there than is dreamt of in Western survivalist/ rationalist philosophy. And we need to believe that: well, at least T and I do for sure.
For example when T and I first decided our destinies were intertwined, and we finished off our Jilted Brides album in a frenzied few weeks in January 2008 as a kind of offering to the cosmos, something that might act as a passport to a better future, I found (through coincidence of course) a highly gifted artist - Kuba Fiedorowicz - to create the artwork for the CD we had produced. Neither Tanya nor I had met Kuba until well after 'Larceny of Love' had been finished. Kuba listened to the music, looked at photos of us, then told us he had an image we 'might be interested in'. Several months earlier, he had painted a picture, a semi-medieval, mystical face of a full lipped, beautiful blonde bride. Then for some reason, a few weeks after that, he had added a second bride, a thinner faced woman with long reddish hair. T and I looked at the painting and we gasped: it was us. It seemed Kuba had seen our images and painted us as brides before we had met him, even before we had thought of ourselves as brides; even before we had got together as a musical/ creative duo. Kuba's dual bride image is now stamped on our CD, its our icon.
Now that I am once again facing an unexpected health challenge and my soul once again feels like a bunny in the headlights, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that in the last two weeks an awful lot of 'coincidences' have occurred, starting with my accidently picking up of Hopcke's book and reading my own phrases there. As they say in Pittsburgh (in another context altogether) "Here we go....!"
Synchronicity Central
A day after I got the MOFO confirmation, I was sitting on the couch of one of my oldest friends Kerry with whom I was staying; Kerry and I are very close, like the sister I never had. She slammed the front door, and walked into the lounge, having just visited the doctors to see what the mysterious pains in her pelvis were that had started around the same time as mine (ie a few weeks ago). She told me that she too had fibroids; not a single super-sized womb eater like mine, but a malevolent swarm: "dozens of them - Its a jungle in there!". I stood up and we hugged each other. I'd had a feeling that she was (freakily) suffering from exactly the same problem as me. We laughed ruefully in disbelief. "Well, " I said. "At least that means we can help each other through this journey together."
"Yes possum", she sighed. Then with her usual great sense of humor and resilience added. "Its FTF mate: Fight The Fibroid. We've got our own club!"
One of Hopcke's descriptions of synchronicities is when one unrelated event after another seems to reinforce a message or theme: the fact that I now had a buddy to share the research and medical system navigation was the first sign that dealing with a serious health problem was not going to be as traumatic as it could have been. The second signs were the ease and swiftness with which I was able to get tests and see specialists for advice - to the astonishment of my doctor, Jeff, who was sure I would be waiting weeks to see anyone at all, let alone get any treatment. It was Jeff's certainty, based on the experience of other patients, that I'd be stuck in Australia for months unless I could afford treatment in the private hospital system that got me feeling like Job: a petulant God was asking me to sacrifice my greatest object of value, my first-born - my vintage Roland System 700 synthesizer - to pay for my health and ticket back to America!
Ten days ago, however, it became clear that Old Testament testing and judgement was not to be visited upon me just yet. A gynecologist was quickly found and visited (her receptionist cried: "You've got the same birthday as me - what a coincidence!").
By last Tuesday I was sitting in the office of the head interventional radiologist at The Alfred, one of our best public hospitals. I'd called on the Friday to get advice and here I was three days later being assessed. He convinced me that a procedure called uterine fibroid embolisation was definitely worth trying, because it would probably alleviate my symptoms by shrinking MOFO to a less megalithic shape, and it was a "low intervention" procedure: in and out of hospital in 24 hours, about 10 days recovery. The alternative was major surgery - hysterectomy or myectomy. "You don't want to go there unless you absolutely have to, they are serious procedures of last resort." After asking me with some surprise "Why do you have to rush back to Pittsburgh?", he finally picked up the phone and said "Well, let's see what we can do. What about doing the procedure next week?". My heart leapt - so soon!! And in the public hospital (i.e. free healthcare) system! As we left the office, he grinned at me through his handsome salt and pepper beard with easy Australian humor: "I hope next Tuesday is soon enough for ya?". It certainly was!
The last few days have been a coincidence pandemic.
On Wednesday I am driving down to meet my old pal Tim Patterson for lunch - Tim ( a film editor) and I last worked together when I did some remixes for 'The Secret': the production team for this international 'power of attraction' movement is based in Melbourne, and Rhonda Byrne, its guru, is an Aussie chick, with a background in TV advertising. On my way to lunch, in a kind of daze, I suddenly thought: 'Hey, I should be alert to synchronicities'. No sooner had I thought this, than I looked up and saw a truck in front of me sporting a sticker with the company name of "Patterson". When I got to the restaurant, I waited for a long time but Tim did not show. I sipped my wine and went into a reverie again: I started to think about whether I should talk about Tanya having some precognitive dreams in the next blog. No sooner had this thought entered my mind, than a young woman at the table next to me started to tell her dining companion about a psychic lady a mutual friend of theirs had seen last year: "She made all these predictions about her having a baby, the size of it, hair color, and everything, and she wasn't even pregnant! But you know, within a year, it all came true!"
I got up (Tim did not show), drove back to the studio and started writing a piece about mental illness and bi-polar in particular. The last book I read before I left Pittsburgh was a memoir called 'Scattershot' by David Lovelace who was not only bi-polar himself but who came from a family where everyone (except his sister) had turned out to be bi-polar too. In his at once absorbing, horrifying and exhilarating account of life as a 'manic depressive', he briefly sites statistics that 'about 1% of the population' is clinically bi-polar. That statistic jumped out at me as implausabile, as I count amongst my current and former close friends, about half a dozen people so diagnosed. I started to jot down some notes about that, and also how some mental illness bleeds in and out of psychic phenonema and mystical experience. Then I hopped on a tram going down Lygon St into the city, and met a former work colleague for dinner. After I rattled off my two minute pot-boiler digest of my American adventures to date, we turned to her situation. She started by explaining that her holiday house investment had gone pear-shaped recently due to the fact that her husband's brother, one of their coinvestors, was bi-polar, and he had gone off his medication and was starting to turn their lives upside down with a prolonged manic episode...
Finally last night, holed up in my studio/bedroom, I was frantically trying to finish off some music for the Grandview Scenic Byway Park films that Tanya and I were working on in Pittsburgh. For one section, I pillaged some of my back catalogue, an old funky acid track called 'Authority Over the Fish' which I had not thought of, let alone listened to, for years: but it seemed to fit a particular action sequence very well. After I had finished editing it, I saw my Gmail blinking. I had been sent a message via Facebook. A friend of Tanya's who I didn't know, had befriended me, and part of his introductory message was a fond reminiscence of '90s Australian techno-acid favorites, including a track he'd heard on the radio a few times and taped it because it had this wicked psycho-acid bass line, brass stabs and funny sample about someone having authority over the fish....
Tomorrow I go in for a procedure that may or may not help me get better, and get me back to America. One of the most frequent ways I seek consolation and guidance is by laying out Tarot spreads, or flipping over other kinds of divination cards - most often alone in my room, intensely wanting some kind of conversation with my destiny, with the Great Whatever. T makes me feel good by flattering me on my knack with the cards; certainly since the three years that I have began studying and consulting them seriously, and periodically recording results, I have managed to give myself (and others) goosebumps with the seeming accuracy of what falls in front of me - and not just 'wishful thinking' at all, but warning messages which eerily come to pass. So tonight, as a way to finish this blog on synchronicity, what could be more appropriate than my asking the Tarot about the outcome of my operation? So, once again, here we go...
'Page of Wands'; Meanings: new beginnings on a creative level, ideas still forming but with much potential; a message of a new things to come; great promise and hope...
*phew*
Monday, March 16, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Melbourne (Part1): Twists of fate
by Nicole Skeltys
Twists of fate
Tanya and I have been back in Australia for just over a week now. And in that short space of time, I have got some news which made me realize that my life over the last 2 years has actually turned into a series of novelistic cliff-hangers. My return to Pittsburgh - which was initially planned to be in 4-5 weeks time - is now uncertain.
Two days before we left for Australia, The Jilted Brides had our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was a splendid night. Richard Parsakian dressed the band out of his stylish retro clothes collection and we could have been on Top of the Pops in 1969. There was a good crowd, and the band played extremely well. After the show, there was much positive feedback, people bought CDs and even asked us to autograph them. T, Scott and I came back to our Lawrenceville boudoir late that night on a high, cracked champagne and had a mini-party in Tanya's attic bedroom long into the night.
The first twist of fate happened the day after the gig. When I popped the question to our brilliant new backing band ie are we now all ready to move on to even bigger and better gigs? the answer was well, actually, no. Our drummer, guitarist and bassist all emailed me one by one saying they have other creative and professional priorities. That was it - one great performance that will never be repeated! Its always hard keeping a band together, harder than most 'blended families' I imagine...
On Sunday 16 we boarded the first of five flights that would, two days later, deposit us in Melbourne. From Pittsburgh to Denver, Denver to Vancouver, Vancouver to Taipei, Taipei to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, my mind circled two preoccupations like a demented vulture - how to make money from music in Pittsburgh, what was the 'Big Idea' that would keep The Jilted Brides going and help us prosper? And, more disturbingly, what was going on with my health - I had been in more or less constant pain for three weeks, there was something wrong with my stomache and it felt suspiciously like there was a growth. At the back of my mind I knew the first two years after a breast cancer diagnosis are the highest risk for metastases (tumors) to appear anywhere in the body.
At Taipei airport, T and I tossed around many business ideas - some whacky, some not so whacky. Suddenly, just as the boarding call came for our flight to Sydney, we hit upon it - we actually hit upon The Idea. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, we thought 'yes! this might just work, this could combine a lot of objectives, spiritual and material!'. More of the 'Big Idea' in a later post, but it felt good to walk out of the departure lounge onto the China Airlines plane with a vision to pursue, a creative way to perhaps make a living when we got back to the USA.
If I got back.
Make-up sex and Brunswick revisited
As the Qantas plane dropped below the cloudline and began its descent into Melbourne, you could see the thick pall of smoke haze that hung over the city and the surrounding north-east countryside. Less than two weeks earlier, super-hot temperatures (47 degrees celsius/ 116 degrees fahrenheit) had combined with chronic drought conditions (or more precisely, global warming conditions) and galeforce windspeeds (up to 125km an hour) to create a firey holocaust - massive tracts of bush, and entire towns were incinerated within hours. And most horrificly, at least 209 people died, many as they tried to escape in their cars but were engulfed by the racing flames.
Despite this sombre context, we were nevertheless joyful to return. My dear old friend Aaron picked us up from the airport and took us back to our old house in East Brunswick, where he treated us to beer, wine and Indian take-away as we collapsed into the beaten up old sofa onto the front porch. My old flatties Roland and Hiroko welcomed us home, and I met the new couple that had just moved into my old bedroom. I noted with great pride that the little backyard vegie patch I had started all those years ago had, under the loving attentions of Roland and Hiroko, doubled in size over the last 9 months, and even the front yard now had been replaced by a permaculture garden. Pipes from the roof had been extended to the ground to ensure the (increasingly scarce) rainwater reached the plants and trees. Australians are famous for being obsessed with their backyards, and I realized how much I missed that connection to earth, the appreciation of fresh food pulled from your own garden.
Tanya moved back into my former backyard bungalow studio where we had spent the previous summer sweating, swelling and panting in the heat, recording our debut CD 'Larceny of Love' which is what we had launched at the Andy Warhol museum just before we left. I bunked down with one of my dearest, oldest friends Kerry, and her park ranger husband Chris, at their flat not far away in West Brunswick. The plan was for Tanya to spend a week sorting through and getting rid of the rest of her possessions (either selling them, shipping them up to her mother's house in Terrigal - just north of Sydney - or simply giving them away), then she was to head up to see her mum and visit her old pals in Sydney before flying back to Pittsburgh a couple of weeks later. Upon her departure from Melbourne, I was to move back into the studio to work out what to do with my remaining stuff, which mostly consisted of my beloved old synthesizers and recording equipment.
While T complained about the heat, which she was really feeling after chilly Pittsburgh, I found myself falling in love with Melbourne again in exactly the same way that you see the very best in your former lovers shortly after you've broken up with them. It was like make-up sex, only with a metropolis. I wandered down Sydney Rd, Brunswick and marveled once again at the abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap cuisine of so many ethnicities. Melbourne is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, if not the global food capital. Its actually hard to get a bad meal in inner Melbourne: even the local pubs have menu items like 'pan-fried zucchini flowers' or 'duck wontons with harissa and wild rice'. Before I had left, I had felt the cloudless blue skies and searing heat sapping my energy in the same way they were sucking out any moisture from our scraggy, rock hard lawn. Now I beamed up at the sun (rarely seen during the Pittsburgh winter) and relished the thought of getting a tan. I could even walk into a bar - any old bar - and order a single glass of champagne, my drink of choice, something I had not been able to do at any bar T and I had patronized during our trip through the USA (you could sometimes order a bottle, but that was beyond my capacity, notwithstanding Australians' notorious reputation for alcohol guzzling.)
But most of all, my spirits lifted because I was back with my network of buddies again. As both T and I had never married, nor bred, all our emotional investment over the years had gone into creating ersatz families from our friends. While most of T's friends were in Sydney, mine were in Melbourne. As I started the process of catching up with everyone, I started to feel stronger, more myself again. I found myself sitting on the toilet and staring at Hiroko's motivational notes: "Do not always push the moment away! Do not always push love away!" as well as the household injunctions to be eco-conscious and save precious water: "If its yellow, let it mellow; if its brown, flush it down!" and I wondered, with a pang, if I could find like-minded souls like this in Pittsburgh. Idealists with a sense of humor, eco-activitists who loved to have fun, down to earth visionaries, spiritual trippers with big hearts.
Giant fibroids and rare, analogue synthesizers
As T frantically raced against time sorting through all her remaining possessions, I embarked on a week of nail-biting medical tests. I was prodded and poked up both ends (gastroscopy, colonoscopy), had my boobs squeezed flat (mammogram) and had my uterus zapped by an ultrasound. To my enormous relief, by the time last Friday came around, I had been given the all-clear from cancer again - reprieved again from any threat of imminent demise. But the news was not all good.
I sat opposite my doctor Jeff, a handsome, ridiculously healthy looking man my age, who was progressive by any medical standards (he was also a naturopath) and political standards (I found out during the last Federal election campaign that he was also a member of The Greens and from then on we spent half our consultations discussing my health and the other half whining about ALP and Coalition policy failures). Jeff looked up from the ultrasound report and announced that I had "a giant fibroid". In fact, it was "the biggest fibroid I have ever seen. It takes up your entire uterus".
I stared at him. "What does that mean?" I asked, now suddenly a little short of breath. "I mean, how do I get rid of it?" It was a relief to know that the painful growth I was feeling was benign; but I now felt like Ripley in Alien - there was an intruder in my womb! Jeff shrugged "Well, sometimes hysterectomy."
"HYSTERECTOMY!???" I just about shrieked. There was no way I was having a hysterectomy. "OK, OK!" Jeff leant over to his computer and started typing out a referral to a gynecologist. "Well, we won't send you to any of the old male gynos then. The old guys like doing hysterectomies you know. When did you say you have to return to the States?" When I explained that I needed to be back in Pittsburgh in 5 weeks time, to finish off a film project we had started, Jeff looked grim. "You'd be lucky to see a gynecologist in less than 4 weeks. And as for surgery, well forget about the public hospital system, you'd be waiting for months." But the angels had not entirely scampered off - after several phone calls, we found - incredibly - a female gyno who could see me within a few days.
That afternoon, I wandered back to Clarence St and sat in the lounge room slumped in front of my computer trying to do some paperwork, but full of foreboding. If I had to have urgent elective surgery at a private hospital, that could cost thousands. Kerry and Chris had very kindly sold my car for me a few weeks earlier; so I now had only one possession of any serious value left, and that was a rare, analogue synthesizer from the late '70s - the Roland System 700, which was my pride and joy. I googled it and sure enough, it was worth a pretty penny.
Tanya came in from the studio, leaned against the kitchen counter and tried to cheer me up. I said, putting on a brave face: "You know, if I have to I can always sell my System 700, it would fetch a few grand." Tanya looked at me with surprise and compassion; I suspect she heard the catch in my voice. When I had looked up the machine on the web earlier that afternoon, one entry had really stuck in my mind. A vintage synth site had described the System 700 thus: "This extremely rare machine is quite possibly the best synthesizer ever built." And I knew then I couldn't do it. I felt as loyal to that bunch of modules, circuits and wires as if the System 700 (or Seth as I called him) was my own flesh and blood. Giant fibroid or no giant fibroid, Seth was staying with me.
This afternoon I headed off with Natasha, Robert and his son James to check out the Sydney Road street party and Brunswick Music Festival. Melbournians are addicted to festivals, there is one happening somewhere just about every weekend. This was the big one for Brunswick. We pushed past the dreadlocked men, the veiled women, the overexcited kids, terrible middle-aged punk bands and multi-ethinic world music ensembles. We gnawed on satay and drank middle eastern soup. Tash and I finally ended up at my local pub, The Lomond, nodding and giggling to a ukulele blues band. I'm hitting the sack now, back in my Clarence St studio which Tanya vacated a couple of nights ago, surrounded by piles of boxes, cables and gizmos. And tomorrow I see the 'gyno', after which I guess a new chapter awaits.
Twists of fate
Tanya and I have been back in Australia for just over a week now. And in that short space of time, I have got some news which made me realize that my life over the last 2 years has actually turned into a series of novelistic cliff-hangers. My return to Pittsburgh - which was initially planned to be in 4-5 weeks time - is now uncertain.
Two days before we left for Australia, The Jilted Brides had our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was a splendid night. Richard Parsakian dressed the band out of his stylish retro clothes collection and we could have been on Top of the Pops in 1969. There was a good crowd, and the band played extremely well. After the show, there was much positive feedback, people bought CDs and even asked us to autograph them. T, Scott and I came back to our Lawrenceville boudoir late that night on a high, cracked champagne and had a mini-party in Tanya's attic bedroom long into the night.
The first twist of fate happened the day after the gig. When I popped the question to our brilliant new backing band ie are we now all ready to move on to even bigger and better gigs? the answer was well, actually, no. Our drummer, guitarist and bassist all emailed me one by one saying they have other creative and professional priorities. That was it - one great performance that will never be repeated! Its always hard keeping a band together, harder than most 'blended families' I imagine...
On Sunday 16 we boarded the first of five flights that would, two days later, deposit us in Melbourne. From Pittsburgh to Denver, Denver to Vancouver, Vancouver to Taipei, Taipei to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, my mind circled two preoccupations like a demented vulture - how to make money from music in Pittsburgh, what was the 'Big Idea' that would keep The Jilted Brides going and help us prosper? And, more disturbingly, what was going on with my health - I had been in more or less constant pain for three weeks, there was something wrong with my stomache and it felt suspiciously like there was a growth. At the back of my mind I knew the first two years after a breast cancer diagnosis are the highest risk for metastases (tumors) to appear anywhere in the body.
At Taipei airport, T and I tossed around many business ideas - some whacky, some not so whacky. Suddenly, just as the boarding call came for our flight to Sydney, we hit upon it - we actually hit upon The Idea. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, we thought 'yes! this might just work, this could combine a lot of objectives, spiritual and material!'. More of the 'Big Idea' in a later post, but it felt good to walk out of the departure lounge onto the China Airlines plane with a vision to pursue, a creative way to perhaps make a living when we got back to the USA.
If I got back.
Make-up sex and Brunswick revisited
As the Qantas plane dropped below the cloudline and began its descent into Melbourne, you could see the thick pall of smoke haze that hung over the city and the surrounding north-east countryside. Less than two weeks earlier, super-hot temperatures (47 degrees celsius/ 116 degrees fahrenheit) had combined with chronic drought conditions (or more precisely, global warming conditions) and galeforce windspeeds (up to 125km an hour) to create a firey holocaust - massive tracts of bush, and entire towns were incinerated within hours. And most horrificly, at least 209 people died, many as they tried to escape in their cars but were engulfed by the racing flames.
Despite this sombre context, we were nevertheless joyful to return. My dear old friend Aaron picked us up from the airport and took us back to our old house in East Brunswick, where he treated us to beer, wine and Indian take-away as we collapsed into the beaten up old sofa onto the front porch. My old flatties Roland and Hiroko welcomed us home, and I met the new couple that had just moved into my old bedroom. I noted with great pride that the little backyard vegie patch I had started all those years ago had, under the loving attentions of Roland and Hiroko, doubled in size over the last 9 months, and even the front yard now had been replaced by a permaculture garden. Pipes from the roof had been extended to the ground to ensure the (increasingly scarce) rainwater reached the plants and trees. Australians are famous for being obsessed with their backyards, and I realized how much I missed that connection to earth, the appreciation of fresh food pulled from your own garden.
Tanya moved back into my former backyard bungalow studio where we had spent the previous summer sweating, swelling and panting in the heat, recording our debut CD 'Larceny of Love' which is what we had launched at the Andy Warhol museum just before we left. I bunked down with one of my dearest, oldest friends Kerry, and her park ranger husband Chris, at their flat not far away in West Brunswick. The plan was for Tanya to spend a week sorting through and getting rid of the rest of her possessions (either selling them, shipping them up to her mother's house in Terrigal - just north of Sydney - or simply giving them away), then she was to head up to see her mum and visit her old pals in Sydney before flying back to Pittsburgh a couple of weeks later. Upon her departure from Melbourne, I was to move back into the studio to work out what to do with my remaining stuff, which mostly consisted of my beloved old synthesizers and recording equipment.
While T complained about the heat, which she was really feeling after chilly Pittsburgh, I found myself falling in love with Melbourne again in exactly the same way that you see the very best in your former lovers shortly after you've broken up with them. It was like make-up sex, only with a metropolis. I wandered down Sydney Rd, Brunswick and marveled once again at the abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap cuisine of so many ethnicities. Melbourne is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, if not the global food capital. Its actually hard to get a bad meal in inner Melbourne: even the local pubs have menu items like 'pan-fried zucchini flowers' or 'duck wontons with harissa and wild rice'. Before I had left, I had felt the cloudless blue skies and searing heat sapping my energy in the same way they were sucking out any moisture from our scraggy, rock hard lawn. Now I beamed up at the sun (rarely seen during the Pittsburgh winter) and relished the thought of getting a tan. I could even walk into a bar - any old bar - and order a single glass of champagne, my drink of choice, something I had not been able to do at any bar T and I had patronized during our trip through the USA (you could sometimes order a bottle, but that was beyond my capacity, notwithstanding Australians' notorious reputation for alcohol guzzling.)
But most of all, my spirits lifted because I was back with my network of buddies again. As both T and I had never married, nor bred, all our emotional investment over the years had gone into creating ersatz families from our friends. While most of T's friends were in Sydney, mine were in Melbourne. As I started the process of catching up with everyone, I started to feel stronger, more myself again. I found myself sitting on the toilet and staring at Hiroko's motivational notes: "Do not always push the moment away! Do not always push love away!" as well as the household injunctions to be eco-conscious and save precious water: "If its yellow, let it mellow; if its brown, flush it down!" and I wondered, with a pang, if I could find like-minded souls like this in Pittsburgh. Idealists with a sense of humor, eco-activitists who loved to have fun, down to earth visionaries, spiritual trippers with big hearts.
Giant fibroids and rare, analogue synthesizers
As T frantically raced against time sorting through all her remaining possessions, I embarked on a week of nail-biting medical tests. I was prodded and poked up both ends (gastroscopy, colonoscopy), had my boobs squeezed flat (mammogram) and had my uterus zapped by an ultrasound. To my enormous relief, by the time last Friday came around, I had been given the all-clear from cancer again - reprieved again from any threat of imminent demise. But the news was not all good.
I sat opposite my doctor Jeff, a handsome, ridiculously healthy looking man my age, who was progressive by any medical standards (he was also a naturopath) and political standards (I found out during the last Federal election campaign that he was also a member of The Greens and from then on we spent half our consultations discussing my health and the other half whining about ALP and Coalition policy failures). Jeff looked up from the ultrasound report and announced that I had "a giant fibroid". In fact, it was "the biggest fibroid I have ever seen. It takes up your entire uterus".
I stared at him. "What does that mean?" I asked, now suddenly a little short of breath. "I mean, how do I get rid of it?" It was a relief to know that the painful growth I was feeling was benign; but I now felt like Ripley in Alien - there was an intruder in my womb! Jeff shrugged "Well, sometimes hysterectomy."
"HYSTERECTOMY!???" I just about shrieked. There was no way I was having a hysterectomy. "OK, OK!" Jeff leant over to his computer and started typing out a referral to a gynecologist. "Well, we won't send you to any of the old male gynos then. The old guys like doing hysterectomies you know. When did you say you have to return to the States?" When I explained that I needed to be back in Pittsburgh in 5 weeks time, to finish off a film project we had started, Jeff looked grim. "You'd be lucky to see a gynecologist in less than 4 weeks. And as for surgery, well forget about the public hospital system, you'd be waiting for months." But the angels had not entirely scampered off - after several phone calls, we found - incredibly - a female gyno who could see me within a few days.
That afternoon, I wandered back to Clarence St and sat in the lounge room slumped in front of my computer trying to do some paperwork, but full of foreboding. If I had to have urgent elective surgery at a private hospital, that could cost thousands. Kerry and Chris had very kindly sold my car for me a few weeks earlier; so I now had only one possession of any serious value left, and that was a rare, analogue synthesizer from the late '70s - the Roland System 700, which was my pride and joy. I googled it and sure enough, it was worth a pretty penny.
Tanya came in from the studio, leaned against the kitchen counter and tried to cheer me up. I said, putting on a brave face: "You know, if I have to I can always sell my System 700, it would fetch a few grand." Tanya looked at me with surprise and compassion; I suspect she heard the catch in my voice. When I had looked up the machine on the web earlier that afternoon, one entry had really stuck in my mind. A vintage synth site had described the System 700 thus: "This extremely rare machine is quite possibly the best synthesizer ever built." And I knew then I couldn't do it. I felt as loyal to that bunch of modules, circuits and wires as if the System 700 (or Seth as I called him) was my own flesh and blood. Giant fibroid or no giant fibroid, Seth was staying with me.
This afternoon I headed off with Natasha, Robert and his son James to check out the Sydney Road street party and Brunswick Music Festival. Melbournians are addicted to festivals, there is one happening somewhere just about every weekend. This was the big one for Brunswick. We pushed past the dreadlocked men, the veiled women, the overexcited kids, terrible middle-aged punk bands and multi-ethinic world music ensembles. We gnawed on satay and drank middle eastern soup. Tash and I finally ended up at my local pub, The Lomond, nodding and giggling to a ukulele blues band. I'm hitting the sack now, back in my Clarence St studio which Tanya vacated a couple of nights ago, surrounded by piles of boxes, cables and gizmos. And tomorrow I see the 'gyno', after which I guess a new chapter awaits.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
