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Previously on Cum Tacent Clament…
“We’ll always have Paris!” yelled Oxfam Girl as she vanished into the blackness. I don’t think I ever wrote about her in Paris, but that’s women for you.
“That wasn’t very sporting,” I said indignantly.
“Who said I was going to play fair?” asked the woman in black, as with a nonchalant flick of her head she slipped back her hood revealing…
And now, the next thrilling instalment of Write-Me-Back Falls:
“Oxfam Girl?’ I spluttered in surprise.
“Of course it’s me,” said the woman in black, who did indeed appear to somehow be Oxfam Girl. “Don’t you ever read your own blog? You must have figured out by now that any time a mysterious unknown woman shows up, it always ends up being me.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “But I just… Did you just push yourself off a cliff?”
“I did,” she said cheekily, “but you must have known I’d be back. You can’t push someone off the Write-Me-Back falls in the middle of a thunderstorm and expect that she’s not coming back.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I conceded, “it’s just that normally people wait until after they’ve disappeared before they reappear. And they don’t make a habit of paradoxically making themselves disappear in the first place.”
“Quite right,” said an indignant voice behind me, with the sort of tone that would make people who like the sound of finger nails on black boards wince. Just my luck. What was she doing here?
“Biscuit Lady. How lovely to see you again,” I said, in my most gentlemanly voice.
“That’s Ms Lady to you, young man,” sniffed BL, “and how dare you let me catch you out here with a poor defenceless young lady in the middle of a thunder storm. For shame!”
“What do you mean defenceless?” I asked. “Last time I saw her, she was having a light sabre duel with you on my front lawn. And she was winning.”
“Silence!” demanded Biscuit Lady.
“I don’t think that encounter was actually real,” added Oxfam Girl unhelpfully.
“Shut up both of you,” I snapped. “This is my blog! I’ll be the one who decides what’s real and what isn’t, thank you very much.”
“My dear boy,” said Algernon Moncrieff, who had materialised beside me, “You’re currently standing on top of Write-Me-Back Falls in the middle of a storm, having an argument with an imaginary girlfriend and an anthropomorphic projection of out-dated societal expectations. And, might I add, you’re losing. Are you sure you’re in the best position to be making reality judgements?” I turned around to punch him as hard as I could, but he had already disappeared. Besides, he did have a point.
“Okay, fine,” I said, since doing anything other than agreeing with them probably wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “If you’re both here and ganging up on me, it’s obvious that something fairly heavy duty is going on my subconscious. What’s on your minds?”
“It’s your mind, not ours,” sniffed Biscuit Lady. Trust her to expect me to take responsibility for everything.
“And how do you know you’re not just wasting time while you’re supposed to be writing NaNoWriMo?” asked Oxfam Girl, who was developing a nasty habit of missing the point completely.
“Stop changing the subject and tell me what’s wrong,” I yelled.
“We can’t,” explained OG in a voice that implied I was missing something flagrantly obvious, “We’re not all here yet.”
“Oh good grief,” I groaned. “Who else could we possibly be waiting for?”
“For me, of course,” said a voice behind me. And since I was standing with my back to the cliff edge, that was a little disconcerting. I turned around slowly and realised that it couldn’t possibly have been anyone else.
“Nice of you to join us,” I said to…
TO BE CONTINUED...
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So Nanowrimo is going well. You can see the progress metre on the right side bar showing you my journey to 50,000. I’m about a day behind schedule, but there’s plenty of time to make that up.
Strange things start to happen to your brain when you start investing this much mental energy into one pursuit. The other night, somewhere between choreographing a space-age bar fight and staging a daring escape from a locked cargo hold, I had a visit from an old friend. Someone I hadn’t seen for many years, and to be honest, hadn’t expected to see again. I certainly never expected to hear her knocking on my door at two in the morning.
What followed was complete and unadulterated nonsense, but by now you’re almost certainly not reading this blog because you’re expecting it to make sense.
Gw2Rs: Oxfam Girl? What the hell are you doing here? I’m supposed to be writing a science fiction novel in a month, to say nothing of the other side projects I have on the go. I haven’t got time to waste writing made-up adventures for some imaginary girlfriend I haven’t seen since I was in Europe.
Oxfam Girl: Shhh. I need your help, Sugar.
Gw2Rs: I am not your sugar. What’s wrong?
Oxfam Girl: I think someone’s trying to kill me.
Gw2Rs: What makes you say that?
Oxfam Girl: The last three nights I’ve been visited by a mysterious stranger who does nothing except say “your time has come” and then disappear.
Gw2Rs: Wow. That is mysterious. What does this stranger look like?
Oxfam Girl: Sometimes she’s wearing a jet black robe with a dark hood.
Gw2Rs: Sounds about right.
Oxfam Girl: Other times she’s wearing red bathers.
Gw2Rs: Eh?
Oxfam Girl: I don’t know. You have a weird imagination.
Gw2Rs: Me? I’m not the one who… yeah okay, whatever. Why is she trying to kill you?
Oxfam Girl: That’s what we’re going to find out. Follow me.
Gw2Rs: Where are we going?
Oxfam Girl: Wherever we have to. Just hold this quokka and think of home.
Gw2Rs: … ? … No.
We teleported anyway. Next thing I knew we were standing on an ominously jagged cliff top in the middle of a thunderstorm. Very dramatic. A bolt of lightning out over the ocean revealed the woman in black standing a few feet from us. Before I even had a chance to start writing a witty and internally asynchronous introductory monologue for her, she calmly walked over and pushed Oxfam Girl off the edge.
“We’ll always have Paris!” yelled Oxfam Girl as she vanished into the blackness. I don’t think I ever wrote about her in Paris, but that’s women for you.
“That wasn’t very sporting,” I said indignantly.
“Who said I was going to play fair?” asked the woman in black, as with a nonchalant flick of her head she slipped back her hood revealing…
TO BE CONTINUED
Because I’m really supposed to be working on my Nanowrimo story right now.
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I love sunsets. I’m one of those peculiar people who can quite happily sit on a beach, balcony or boat and do nothing but watch the sun slowly sink below the horizon. I love watching the colours shift and refract in the clouds, and I love that no two are ever the same.
Darwin does an awesome sunset. It’s part of the reason I love this city so much. When I’m not run off my feet with rehearsals or church or God knows what else, I’ll quite often just take myself down to the beach or to the Nightcliff jetty and watch the sunset while I think, pray or complain about the day I’ve just had. And I’m usually not alone. There’s always at least one photographer out with gadgets ranging from a simple hand held digital camera to an SLR on a tripod with a lens longer than his arm and three different kinds of light meters.
They do get some good ones. I’ve seen professionally produced photos on sale around the city from time to time and some of them are spectacular. But there’s something that leaves me a little restless about the amount of time that goes in to capturing the “perfect sunset” and putting it on a page for sale, when we can just sit and watch it for free every night.
The other interesting thing about sunset photography is that there actually isn’t any such thing as the perfect sunset photo. Anyone who’s ever stood on the beach and taken some quick snaps will tell you there’s always a better colour, light, cloud or reflection just when you thought you’d got the shot you wanted. I took a traveller down to Mindil Beach the other night to watch the sunset, and laughed as she stood up every five minutes to take another photo. I was a bit concerned for her, because I’ve seen these symptoms before: It starts out simply enough with a few happy snaps from your holiday. The next thing you know you’ve bought a fifteen hundred dollar camera off the internet and can spend entire Sunday afternoons talking about nothing except the effect on memory size of different shutter speeds at higher resolutions.
I took to her to talk to one of the professionals at the markets for some therapy and to ask about her collection of sunset efforts. Some of them were just stunning. She’d been working as a professional photographer in the Top End for four years, and we asked her which one of her photos she thought was perfect.
“None of them,” was her answer. “I keep trying, but there’s always something more you can improve. The light, the focus, the reflections; there’s just so much going on.”
At the risk of over romanticising it, I think there’s a lesson to be learnt from the plight of the sunset photographer. You could spend your whole life out there waiting for the perfect moment, for the perfect photo. But if experience is anything to go by, you’re never going to find it. You can work your whole life trying to capture it on film and end up with terabytes of photos which are almost perfect. Or you can sit and enjoy it, and end up with a head full of memories which are absolutely flawless.
Say cheese.
Garry with 2 Rs
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Recently it has been suggested to me that my blog has lost its edge. That for some reason, I’m not conveying that certain je-ne-se-quois (Well actually I know exactly quois. The term is “cranky”) in my posts, and it’s leaving some readers disappointed. I’m sure I can’t for the life of me think what might be going wrong with my brain that I’m suddenly so full of positivity. It’s a bit gross really.
I’m well known for my willingness to let public opinion tell me what to do, so this week I was going to post the most virulent, cynical rant I could come up with, but the truth is I’ve just come back from holidays and I’m feeling pretty damned good. So here’s another happy piece. If you don’t like it – or rather if you do like it but would prefer not to, or if you think it’s too… or not enough…
Look, just shut up and read it okay?
Kakadu is one of those places that all of us Darwin locals claim to know heaps about, but which most have us have only been to once or twice. The last time I can remember going out there we took my now departed grandmother out there to look around. I have some memories of her climbing up Ubirr rock to look over the wetlands and the escarpment. The last time she was fit enough to do that must have been nearly two decades ago.
Anyway, I recently got reacquainted with the most famous part of the Northern Territory. It’s funny how your perspective on things shifts when you look at them at different stages of your life. When I was a kid I used to run past the cave paintings without a second glance; the point of Kakadu was to climb up on top of the rocks as fast as you could. This time I actually stopped to appreciate the presence of artwork which is purportedly older than most parts of the Bible, and to admire the different colours and shapes in the rocks for moment before I went climbing all over them. And I don’t seem to be quite so sure footed as I used to be.
There is no getting past it; it’s still a magnificent part of the world. From the towering rock formations to the sprawling wetlands, it’s no wonder indigenous and migrant people alike consider it one of the most special places on the planet. Unfortunately this time around I was confined a bit to my awesome yet undeniably two-wheel-drive Ford Focus, so the big waterfalls were inaccessible. Next time I’ll have to look into borrowing/hiring a four-wheel-drive and really getting off the main road.
I also spent a bit of time in Litchfield Park, which is probably my favourite place in the world. All the better for the fact that, unlike the last three times I’d been out there, Wangi Falls was open for swimming. I spent a good two hours just hanging out in the swimming hole, remembering all the hours we spent down there on church camps when I was a kid. I challenge anyone to come home from that and write a cranky blog post.
So shut up.
Garry with 2 Rs
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What is Garry? Stunt Linguist? Raconteur? Space Pirate? Freelance revolutionary? He is all these things, and none of them.
He’s also an organist for hire, apparently.
I’ve just got home from a gig playing organ for a wedding. It’s the second time in a couple of months that I’ve been hired to play for someone I didn’t know. It’s a nice little side project, and it means I get to call myself a professional musician. At least on a technicality.
I also got to play the super high tech digital organ at the catholic cathedral down the road from DMUC. I don’t mean any disrespect to the DMUC organ, which certainly gets the job done, and has been fighting with me a lot less of late. But to say that the DMUC instrument and the St. Mary’s instrument are both digital organs is a bit like saying that Garry with 2 Rs and Aaron Sorkin are both writers. It’s technically true, but in reality there’s no comparison. For one thing the St. Mary’s one cost about three times as much and has a whole extra keyboard. Also, while the DMUC auditorium has been carpeted and modernised and generally made more comfortable, St. Mary’s is still all polished concrete and panelling inside, so it reverberates like an echo chamber. That means when you open up all the stops and cut loose, you’re no longer just playing an organ; you’re playing the whole building. It’s pretty cool.
The strangest thing I’ve noticed about the last couple weddings I’ve played for is that the bride and groom have had no idea what music they wanted for the processional and recessional. One bride-to-be even told me to just pick whatever I wanted. I can’t imagine doing that, but then if it were me I’d probably have the music all programmed out weeks in advance, and then go looking at suits the day before. Each to his own, I guess. The couple I played for this afternoon apparently hadn’t even thought about it until I asked them. I told them my default offering is Purcell’s (Clarke’s) Trumpet Voluntary for the procession and Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for the walk out. Most people just agree to that to avoid admitting they don’t know what I’m talking about. That works for me.
Except that this time, just a week out from the service, the bride-to-be decided she’d like the overture from the Marriage of Figaro instead. And like an idiot I told her I’d learn it. I duly downloaded a copy of the sheet music and discovered it was fifteen pages long, and really difficult. Cue four straight nights of frantic practising and devious shortcut creation. In the end I managed to learn about the first three pages and the last page, and found a way to jump straight from one to the other. And fortunately it’s Mozart, so no-one could tell the difference. “Prestissimo” is your friend in this situation; go fast enough and it really doesn’t matter if you hit the right notes or not.
Well we got through alright in the end. The building helped a bit, reverberating over all the uneven quavers for me, and the friends and family seemed happy enough. The father-of-the-bride even came over and paid me in cash on the spot; slipped it to me in a gentlemanly handshake like some kind of mafia boss. That was awesome.
So yeah: I’m a free-lance organist now. And I’m building up quite a useful little repertoire.
Songs that sound surprisingly good on the eight foot diapasons:
- A Song of Freedom
- Blessed Be Your Name
- The Theme from Doctor Who
- 40 (The U2 version)
- Bohemian Rhapsody
- Aníron (Theme for Aragorn and Arwen)
- The Theme from Star Trek Voyager
- Highland Cathedral
- Gollum’s Song
Make of that what you will.
Garry with 2 Rs