Tattoos and Ice Cream: Mr Nobody’s Guide to Nothing
Hi.
Fuck I hate hi. Hi is for teenagers. Hi is something we should grow out of, along with sushi and ice cream.
And while I’m at it…
Fuck I hate fuck. Who said it’s suddenly okay swear in public? Not my mum. Fuck is something we should never grow into, along with tattoos and muscles.
God doesn’t exist, but I bet he’s angry anyway. I know, because I don’t exist and I’m angry.
Fudging angry.
I’m angry because I’m Mr Nobody and because I’m being forced to write this newsletter about nothing.
Okay, so there’s no-one here with tattoos pointing a gun at my head and asking for ice cream and telling me, Mr Nobody, to hurry the fudge up and write a newsletter, and to make sure it’s called ‘Mr Nobody’s Guide to Nothing’.
No, there ain’t. (If you don’t count God.) But there might as well be.
Because I just made a big mistake. I read something – a newsletter, in fact. And? And that’s the big mistake, you fudger – reading, just reading.
I read that to be someone these days – to be Mr Nobody even – you have to promote the fudge out of yourself online, even if it means you don’t have time to do anything else – anything meaningful, I mean.
Well, I’ve ticked that box – the not doing anything meaningful box – so what’s stopping me promoting the fudge out of myself online? Nothing, if by nothing you mean the no-one who’s not here pointing ice cream at my tattoos and asking for fudge.
Fudge?
Fuck off.
[Photo by Massimo Adami on Unsplash]
The Play’s the Thing: On Being the Bearded Boy
For every action there’s a reaction – or, in my case, an over-reaction.
Not long ago I got some bad news: Jesus doesn’t want me for a sunbeam. My dream job wasn’t mine after all.
It was a blow, of course, and one I responded to in the usual way: I spat the dummy.
That’s it, I thought, angrily. No more working for the man. From now on I’m going it alone. As a writer. On Substack. Because ‘writers earn a living doing what they love’ on the Stack.
Okay. But which writers?
Writers like me, surely. Writers brimming with brilliant ideas.
Brilliant ideas like… The Bearded Boy!
He turned fifty last year, the bearded one. Me, I turned fifteen. Together we’re Timm – puzzled parent, partner and employee, perennial pupil and apprentice. Join us on the front line of our privileged yet perplexing life as we struggle to square the circle of existence.
Angst-ridden analysis of the absurdities of adulthood – that’s what it was supposedly all about.
No-one hates waste more than a wannabe writer. Here, then, are some ‘highlights’ from the Boy’s first (aborted) bulletin…
I just don’t get it. I’m clearly a genius and yet I’m still expected to prove it.
People won’t will publish my (brilliant) books until I write them, or give me PhD scholarships until I apply for them. And they won’t give me the job I want until I stump up evidence of my awesomeness, as if I’m competing in a country fete.
And even when I do they’re still not convinced that I’m the best bloke since sliced bread – me, the Bearded Boy! It’s enough to make a (half)grown man cry (and start his own Substack newsletter).
Adult life is all about destinations, dead ends, standing still. I want to keep moving. I haven’t got time to stop and tell you where I’m going. I don’t know!
The bearded one wants me to redirect the river, so I can reach my destination sooner, so I can cash in at the casino where I’ll win big. But I just want to be washed along, to ride the rapids. Eventually I’ll arrive at the sea, where I’ll sail, like Reepicheep, into the sunset, into the next great unknown.
My genius isn’t for ‘results’. Indeed, it spurns and despises such illusions. I don’t ‘achieve outcomes’, I mess about. The play’s the thing. And I don’t do it because it’s good for me or for the world – I do it because I’m a bearded boy and I have to. (I’m playing now.)
If you get it, I salute you. Together let’s celebrate all things ineffectual and unfinished. The Bearded Boy is nothing if not half-baked. All ends are dead. Childhood is too good to be left to the kids.
And finally: When you’re finished you’re finished.
One day I might return to the Stack. Now, though, I’m off to start something else.
Regulation Punishment: Exploring the D’Aguilar National Park (Part 1)
Of all the good things my new home in Brisbane has to offer, the D’Ag is probably the best.
A boot-shaped strip of bushland whose toe has a hold in the city’s western suburbs and whose top touches on the southern fringes of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, the D’Aguilar National Park sports the usual array of natural sights and sounds, native plants and animals.
According to the experts, visitors can expect to experience rugged gorges, rock pools and rainforests, not to mention bopple nut trees, Hiller’s snub-nosed katydids and Mount Glorious torrent frogs.
Okay, so maybe not the frogs, torrents of which there are not. (The species hasn’t been seen since 1979.)
In fact, the least interesting thing about the D’ag is its name. Situated on land traditionally owned by the Jinibara people, the park bears – with awful irony – the name of George D’Aguilar, the author of Regulations and Punishments of the British Army, a best-selling textbook from the early 1800s.
Three hours into our walk around the Enoggera Reservoir, a lake located at the tip of the park’s toe, this seemed all too appropriate: me and my family were experiencing the regulation punishment – the pain that usually accompanies such expeditions.
We set out just after ten on a Saturday morning, me, my wife, and our son (13) and daughter (9), driven by my sudden desire to get back to nature and by my wife’s love of bushwalking.
Despite a few difficulties, the ensuing seven-kilometre hike had its highlights.
Early on we narrowly missed being mobbed by a wave of water-borne tourists.
The track wove its way through trees aplenty – some wearing wasps’ nests like bumbags and others playing dress-ups with ‘grandfather’s whiskers’ (a kind of moss).
At times we wondered for whom the bell birds tolled, for toll they did.
We kept catching tantalising glimpses of our destination – the dam wall.
We stopped for lunch – bread, cheese, relish, grapes and nuts – in a shady grove not far from Enoggera Creek itself. Several groups of walkers went by, and the kids begged me (in vain) not to greet each one with my joke of the moment: ‘Ah, there you are – just in time for lunch!’
Back on the track, we day-dreamed about swimming across the lake’s narrowest arm, but the shore was choked with water lilies.
Around one bend we witnessed wildlife of a different kind: teenage boys swinging from the trees.
And then, at long last, we reached our destination – the ‘damn’ wall. As big as it was, it couldn’t contain our relief.
The worst, however, was yet to come.
Stumbling into the park’s ‘Discovery Centre’, we discovered that the café was about to close. For a moment we faced an uncertain future – one averted by take-away milkshakes and a long-awaited swim.
We’d made it!
Lolling by the lake, the trials and tribulations of our walk already half-forgotten, we vowed we’d return to explore more of the park.
Well, I did.
Circe’s Wise Words (Resisting the Song of the Sirens)
I heard a song on the radio recently as I was driving home. I didn’t catch its name, but I caught the name of the band.
Guided by Voices.
We’re all guided by something.
Sometimes it’s a grumble in our guts, the murmur of our hearts or lewd whispers emanating from somewhere much lower.
Occasionally conscience calls.
Mostly, though, we’re led on by the voices in our heads.
In Greek mythology a Siren is a creature – half bird, half woman – that lures sailors to their doom with its singing.
Odysseus encounters two such creatures as he sails home from Troy. Heeding Circe’s wise words, he has himself lashed to the mast so he can’t steer his ship on to the rocks.
Now, to resist the Sirens’ song, I too have tied myself down, although not to a boat but a bus – the Bridges Omnibus.
[Image from SPHS]
Caliban’s Rage (Seeing and Not Seeing My Face in a Mirror)
I’m fifty and I’ve still got a full head of hair. That’s a good thing, right?
Wrong. My locks, I tell you, have got me tied up in knots.
It’s those men and their amazing reflecting machines – mirrors, they call them.
Ostensibly aids in the trimming of hair, these dastardly devices serve a more sinister purpose: they cut characters like me down to size.
Which brings me to Shakespeare’s Tempest.
According to Oscar Wilde, Caliban is infuriated by seeing – and not seeing – his face in a glass. His rage, Oscar argues, accounts for the ‘nineteenth century dislike’ of realism and romanticism alike.
Call me Caliban.
What I see in a mirror is my face and yet it’s not; the reflection is real enough and yet it shatters my illusions.
It’s enough to drive a man mad – and to steer me clear of barbers’ scissors.
[Image from The Met]
Why I Write (And Why I Don’t Care that Nobody Cares)
Why do I write?
It’s a question no-one wants answered – no-one but me, that is.
And that’s the point.
I write for myself. Partly because I love piecing words together and solving puzzles; partly because I love the way words look in print, and how they sometimes shine with insight.
I do it, too, because I love learning.
In other words, I’m an amateur – and a proud one to boot.
See what I mean? For me, those two weird little words make this piece worthwhile.
To boot.
Is that me, the writer, putting my foot down – or getting it stuck in my mouth?
One in a thousand wannabes make a living from writing; even fewer win fame and fortune. Writing for money is a gamble.
I can buy me a lottery ticket but I can’t buy me love. Love must be made.
By writing.
Ghost Writing (Johnno, Dante and David Malouf)
I’m not normally a fan of horror stories and yet I’ve found David Malouf’s Johnno a fascinating read.
Ostensibly a book about two boys growing up and out of Brisbane in the days before it became a city, Johnno is actually about possession – about two opposing figures trying to win the other over.
Johnno’s the hero. He’s daring, disorderly and dangerous, a restless irresistible rebel.
The narrator, Dante, is the author’s alter ego. He haunts the story, refusing to declare himself, relentlessly evading capture – by his father, his birthplace and his friend.
‘I’ve spent years writing letters to you and you never answer, even when you write back,’ Johnno complains.
Johnno, the novel, is the author’s brutal belated reply.
When it appeared, in 1975, Johnno the man was long-dead and Dante had won, having taken possession of his friend as only a writer can.
Man of Many Parts: Shakespeare, Modern-day Novelist
Since his death Shakespeare has had a long and illustrious career, playing many memorable parts: immortal bard, literary imposter and, somewhat improbably for an upstart crow, a swan.
Recently, Will has even been cast as a shiftless time-waster – a timeless shape-shifter, I mean.
Clearly, Shakespeare has been many things to many people. In his lifetime, though, he was simply many things full stop. The son of a glove-maker, Will turned his hand to one vocation after another – actor, poet, playwright, investor, producer – acing them all. And yet he never became a novelist – unsurprisingly, perhaps, since in his day the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe, was over a century away.
Back then, the future, too, was still to come, as was our current century – the twenty-first.
Would Shakespeare make it as an author today? Would he ever! To my mind, Will is the very model of a modern-day novelist.
I came to this startling conclusion a week ago, while pretending to write a proposal for a PhD project located in the city from which I’d fled last year, a project entitled ‘The Novel in the 21st Century: Reading Contemporary Book Culture’.
I read novels in the 21st century, I thought. I’m qualified to critique the state of the art. And yet part of me wasn’t so sure. I’d failed to finish any of my forays into long-form fiction, after all, let alone have one published.
Deflated, I wondered why. Robinson Crusoe had appeared long ago, so I couldn’t use Shakespeare’s excuse. Was I simply a shiftless time-waster?
And then it struck me. Shakespeare!
I haven’t made it as a novelist because I’m not like Will.
New-age novelists don’t sit lord-like in an inky tower, channelling unchallengeable wisdom, painstakingly making immutable monuments designed to be decoded in private. They’re performers who collaborate like playwrights and play many parts.
The novel of now isn’t a big book thick with detail and description, whose life is strung along lines and bounded by covers. It’s a set of directions aimed at activating an audience and spawning new stories – a staged production, no less.
For a time Shakespeare was based at the Globe Theatre in London. There, during performances, actors and audience, playwrights and producers alike would interact, working as one to put on a play.
Literature is theatre once again. Today’s stories, though, are told on a truly global scale, woven in a web populated by people working with a will, like a Will.
Until I join their ranks I might as well hang up my pen and paper.
[Artwork from OpenArt]
Diversionary Tactics: Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere
The legendary blues singer, Robert Johnson, was blessed: he came to a crossroads just once in his life.
Me, I’m not so lucky. Not only am I anything but a great musician – Johnson became a blues god when he supposedly sold his soul to the devil – but I keep stumbling across them.
Crossroads, that is.
Since submitting my thesis, I’ve been beset by doubts and distractions. Should I expand my story into a novel or should I leave well alone? Should I stay on the straight and narrow or widen my horizons?
Should I go this way or that?
My journal, poor suffering soul, bears witness to my meandering missteps.
They begin in mid-October, when, buoyed and emboldened by my thesis-writing experience, I get side-tracked by the Faber novel-writing scholarship, and an application I never submit.
Within days I’m eyeing a different diversion. Having just received confirmation of my aboriginal ancestry, I contemplate applying for an Indigenous Coffee Creative grant, even though I’ve already started exploring my ambivalence in an essay I think I might enter in the Kill Your Darlings non-fiction prize.
It’s easy now to look back over my life and see supposed signs of my ‘aboriginality’. There are the unexplained affinities I’ve felt with certain people and places. The bush, for example. Ever since I spent two years in western Queensland as a kid, I’ve been drawn to the land. And not just in the abstract way most white Australians always have been…
I don’t – apply for the grant or finish the essay. Instead I stumble on, staying, for the moment, on the beaten path.
Within a week I’m toying with pursuing writing as a profession, by enrolling in a Master of Writing.
Mastering that impulse, I impetuously take the next turn, writing three stories: one for the Neilma Sidney prize (not submitted), one a titillating tale, one a work of flash fiction.
He asked for whisky because he remembered he’d liked it, long ago. There was some argy-bargy at the bar over how he wanted it, so he wandered off, finding himself in the beer garden, which was half-full with men and women and music. He planted himself in a corner, next to some plants. Dumping his backpack on the table, he began to go through it, looking for a clue. Before long, a woman in black brought him a glass. On the house, she said, with a wink. He stared at her and used his new powers to freeze her where she stood. Not his type, he decided. Tucking a credit card into the top of her skirt, he let her go, with a wink. She went quickly, stopping in the doorway to study him. Funny, he thought. The further she got from him the closer to her he felt.
Dazed and dishevelled, I duck back on to the main drag.
In mid-November I come to yet another crossroads: Podcast Parade. Making the turn, I pen poems and scraps of piano music for ‘Bitter Sweet Nothings’, an audio work I park when I discover I don’t have the ability or equipment to produce it.
Then I get my study results, which are good enough to send me scurrying down another side alley. Before long I’ve submitted an adaptation of my exegesis to Island magazine. (No response as yet.)
Returning to the high street, I briefly consider becoming a teacher, having had some success at work as a coach, and then an entrepreneur, having fallen under the spell of some of my sillier ideas.
The devil being only in the detail, I move on.
Finally, in early December, I reach my last junction (for now); on one side lies writing as a craft, on the other writing as a hobby. Unswayed by either option, I plod back to the present.
The truth about Robert Johnson’s turning point is now lost in legend. As he left his crossroads (real or imagined) did he know where he was going? Or was his subsequent success an unknown destination, recognised only when it was reached?
The key to life, I suppose, is to keep on walking, eyes on the horizon, going nowhere in the hope of getting somewhere. Only later, looking back, does the path become clear.
Until then, my fate lies in the lap of the gods.
Unless I decide to play the blues, of course, in which case my destiny is in the hands of the devil.
[Photo by Mike Enerio on Unsplash]
Making the Crossing: Roy Bridges, Tasmania and Me
Almost a century ago, in 1926, the popular Tasmanian-born writer, Roy Bridges, arrived in England for an extended stay, having just published his seventeenth novel. He had been living in Melbourne with his sister, secretary, and housekeeper, Hilda (herself a successful author) since 1909. The death of their mother, however, had broken up their home, and Roy’s restlessness – his ‘nervous curse’, as he later called it – sent him on his way across the seas.
Roy’s visit to Britain, his first, allowed him to reunite with long-lost friends, to meet with his publisher, and to see the land whose history and literature he had revered since childhood. It gave him a chance, as well, to experience new ways of living, thinking and writing, and an opportunity, crucially, to make a fresh start.
And yet by the end of the year, Roy was on the boat back to Australia, driven out of England by the loneliness and depression that had afflicted him in London, and by the demons that had finally overcome him on a visit to York. Roy’s hasty retreat heralded the beginning of the end – the end of his attempt to break with the past: his own and that of his home state, Tasmania, which loomed large in his imagination.
Within ten years Roy would be a captive on the ‘prison island’. For, in 1936, he retired with Hilda to the family farm in southern Tasmania, where, isolated, impoverished and unwell, he wrote his remaining eight novels – several concerned with the cruelty of the island’s convict past – and scores of letters in which he bemoaned his fate and his declining literary fortunes. There he lived out his final days, dying, in Hobart in 1952, unfulfilled and largely forgotten.
As I set out a year ago to write Roy’s story – my story about ‘Roy’ – I decided I wouldn’t make the same mistake. Like Roy, I was dogged by demons and haunted by the past; like Roy, I was faced with a dilemma: stay and stay safe or go and confront my fears; like Roy, I chose to go. Unlike Roy, however, I have not retreated.
In February I moved to Brisbane from Hobart. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. It was also the most selfish – I left my family behind, after all. (They join me here soon.) And yet it was also the best thing I’ve ever done. By going it alone and making a new life in a place filled with bitter memories, I’ve faced and overcome many of my fears. Most importantly, I know now that I can live with myself, and thus that I’m fit to live with others.
I know, too, that I can be the kind of writer I want to be. This year I made not only the crossing (from Tasmania to the mainland), but ‘The Crossing’ (my honours thesis). I made my story and I made it to my liking. In doing so, I re-made myself – something, it seems, Roy Bridges wasn’t able to do. It’s an act I hope will rewrite my ending, leaving me feeling less unfulfilled than Roy, if no less forgotten.
timm in type 