Japanese Suicide Clubs

Life is crazy. Bad things happen, and good things happen. One day the sun is shining, the next day there are big dark clouds and maybe a hurricane or tornado, or cyclone, typhoon, or even a willy-willy. Willy-willy no problem - only blow plastic bag around gently like at the end of American Beauty.
But life is unpredictable, that's for sure. People die, yet other people mysteriously (even stubbornly) go on living. Think of the miracle of yourself waking up each morning, still alive. You continue to live, but many have died while you slept. Then sooner or later you will die while many others sleep, and they will wake up and probably not appreciate how lucky they are. Although, others would try to convince you it's the dead who are the lucky ones. Yes, there are those who feel that way, and if you don't believe me simply Google the words Japanese Suicide Clubs.

Starship Battle

There was me and somebody else (sometimes Brother Mikel and other times Tank Commander Puckeridge). We got in some kind of trouble in a big housing estate which was part futuristic and part present day. Garbage was overflowing and blocking the laundry room. We thought people were about to come after us any second but they never did. Anyway, we got out. Then on a massive bridge, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a starship was in the sky slowly spinning, scanning for us. We triggered a disruption in its beams (or something, ha ha) so it lost control and slowly spun over against a big concrete wall of the bridge. Its tail block hit and sheared off. The starship fell into the water. Or maybe it just disappeared. But then we looked around and panicked because we were surrounded by uniformed guys with machine guns, but soon realised they were not paying any attention to us. It was a McDonald's carpark and they were only guarding the place. We walked in, laughing, and ordered breakfast.

Maniac Bus Driver

The bus I got home after work today was driven by a maniac. Whenever he came up to a bus stop and somebody wanted to get off or on he slammed the brakes as though he'd suddenly realised he was coming up fast to the edge of a cliff. It's hard enough to see the cover of the book the girl next to me is reading without the bus driver pulling stunts like that. And he did it at every stop, including traffic lights. Driving up fast he would suddenly stomp on the pedal and the bus would slow down at an alarming rate which forced the people standing in the aisle to swing from the poles like monkeys spinning around chrome branches. A mad scene. A bus full of people growing angrier and more indignant after each violent screaming stop. Why didn't anybody say anything? They were angry, their faces glowing red and steam blasting out their ears, and the bus driver was probably doing it on purpose; a sadistic and satisfying action guaranteed to relieve some mysterious unknowable venom. But nobody said anything, simply let their faces grow more and more contorted with humiliated rage. Why? If it was Mexico you would have half a dozen passengers zooming up the aisle waving machetes, murder in their bloodshot eyes, but in Sydney we do things differently. We suffer in silence, and go home and write about it in our stupid blogs.

Shining

I'm looking at the TV. There is a girl and her eyeballs are enormous. But her eyeballs, they are so WHITE. The whites are pure white and it's awesome and devastating. Big eyes with so much white around the colour. Eyes that grow bigger and whiter every second. I can only see her eyes, large and glowing almost, shining.

Media Terrorists

This afternoon listening to the radio I heard a report on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina that amazed me. It amazed me because the reporter was reporting positive things and not negative things.
The TV news reports were strictly negative. The dead bodies floating around. The looters. The armed gangs raping and attacking people. The horror, the anarchy and the ugliest side of humanity. You watch that kind of *news* for long enough and you can get depressed, or angry, or start feeling helpless or powerless in the face of such relentless horror. And you can really get twisted up with it. It can twist your mind around in a sick way when you are only shown the worst and ugliest aspect.
But in the radio report I heard this afternoon, the reporter was focussing on positive things. One of them was a story about two guys who had been neighbours for years, had only ever said hi to each other, but in the big exodus from the flooded city found themselves walking together along the highway. By the time they got out of that doomed deathswamp they were like best friends. This fearsome terrible natural disaster threw them together and they bonded where they never would have otherwise.
Another story was about the people seeking refuge in a sports stadium. Some *looters* came in with food and drink and shared it all around with everybody. But the way those TV news people reported it, the word *looters* meant wild criminal gangs running around opportunistically stealing shit from stores for purely selfish reasons, like "Yo dawg, check dis out I gawna git me a big screen muthafuckin' TV!", and naturally that made the TV news viewers go totally bananas and righteously declare "Damn, we gotta go after these looting bastards and shoot 'em on sight!"
So now we know that when you hear the term *looters* it can mean two different things, but the TV news won't make that distinction.
The TV news reports it in such a way that makes normally quite sane and reasonable people act rabid, howling for blood. Why do they do that? Why was it such a big surprise to hear this radio report that revealed positive aspects of the disaster? Of humanity? People bringing out their best qualities; qualities that were previously submerged and only brought to the surface by this ferocious appalling act of nature. Men and women acting in a selfless way, sharing even when it could mean their own demise.
People think they are smart and can't be fooled. But the media has an awesome power to fool you, to twist your mind and sabotage your better instincts. I think there's something vitally important to be on guard against and it's this: if you find that after absorbing some kind of media information you suddenly begin to experience feelings of HATRED, you're probably being manipulated.

Hell on Earth

Like millions of others, I've been following the Hurricane Katrina reports since when it was way off the coast. It was really shaping up to be quite spectacular. Everybody loves EXTREME WEATHER. I bet you've seen the movie Twister at least once. And how many EXTREME WEATHER documentaries have you watched? Thousands I'll bet. Extreme weather rocks. Sure it sucks for the people who get hit by it, and especially maimed or killed by it, or who have loved ones who have been maimed or killed by it, but try to deny that you get some serious kicks watching it on TV and I'll call you a damn liar.
Anyway, Katrina was shaping up to be a real monster. A real killer. A real savage brutal bitch. And what a pussy name for such a killer hurricane. Katrina? Maybe they should have called it Adolf or Arnie or something like that. But Katrina? Please.
So now Katrina, the hurricane with the lame girly name, has hit the Gulf Coast and turned out to be the biggest motherfucking destructo hurricane in the history of the world just about, and dead bodies are floating past live bodies. Thousands of people are stuck in sports stadiums pissing and shitting right where they are miserably existing in some kind of foul Hell on Earth. The whole city looks like a damn filthy swimming pool with roofs and telegraph poles sticking out like a demented kid went and poured a big bucket of water on his Lego village. What a mess. What a nightmare.
Now to make things even more interesting, I hear there are armed gangs roaming around raping young girls and women, hunting tourists for some sick sport, AND shooting their damn guns at helicopters that are only there to try and help the bastards. It's insane, man. I've seen the footage and it looks like a George Romero movie. You know, you only see that kind of utter despair and horror overtaken an entire city in a zombie movie. But it's not a zombie movie. It's New Orleans!
It's awesome TV too. I'm glued to the set.

Obituary

I bought the new issue of Terroriser today. Obituary are on the cover. Man, Obituary! That takes me back! I say, smiling crookedly and rubbing my grizzled whiskers as I lean back in my rickety chair.
In 1989 their debut album Slowly We Rot came out and I bought it. What a great album. It sounded like the kind of music turbo zombies would make. I listened to that album over and over and never got sick of it. Another great thing about it, I was sure that if I played it to somebody else, (at least) 99.999% of them would absolutely HATE it. That was pretty cool. For sure, only if you were truly HARDCORE could you handle (much less enjoy) this kind of music, so it felt pretty damn great to know that I was one of these totally hardcore dudes. Ha ha! *head thrown back, mad egomaniacal laughter going on and on well into the night*
And the band photo, it was taken at night with a light behind them so you could only see their silhouettes. I noticed how goddam skinny they were. Hey, I was pretty damn skinny too! These turbo zombies were the same age as me, and they were skinny like me too, AND they made this totally EVIL music that I LOVED but just about everybody else HATED.
Anyway, with Obituary coming back it made me think about the *age thing*. You know, young dudes make fun of the oldies going along to see the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd or Yes or whoever, and I know I did too - those ponytail dudes, ha ha! But what's even funnier is, when Obituary come out here touring their new album and showing off their bigger stomachs, looking like that silhouette photo on the back of Slowly We Rot, only a fatter version, I'll go along to see them, and there will be some young dudes there who were making big steaming smelly piles in their nappy when I bought that first Obituary album, and they will look at me and say, Ha ha, look at that dude, he's pretty old, hey. Don't stay up too late Grampa!