he's looking for you

Yesterday (I don't mean to write this in italic but something Bela has done to the keyboard - he's pressed an F button - has sent the whole system this way) I was at Gladstone Park SC where I seem to do most of my interacting with the human race these days and a diminutive bikie who saw people who weren't there was dancing, yelling at imaginary people, explaining things reasonably to imaginary people, etc. This was the exchange at the nut shop, where I was buying almonds and banana chips, between the proprietor and a middle-aged woman (by which I mean, she was probably about my age or younger). It started with them both talking together, him greeting her as senora and she saying of the bikie, 'poor bugger'. When the prop. realised she was talking about the bikie he said, 'he's looking for you'. I love this kind of inclusive, yet slightly cruel humour. But she misheard him and said 'he HATES me?' He laughed, seeing (I suppose) the lack of need to repeat the joke: it was of the moment. Then they talked about nuts. That's not funny in relation to the bikie guy as he was a bit disturbing as well as disturbed, because he was most definitely riding a bike, in fact he sped off on his hog while I was in the car park, leaving/leading me to wonder if, since he obviously saw people who weren't there when he was walking around, did he also see vehicles which weren't there when he was driving around?

TV at the moment is full of great new shows to fall asleep to. Last night I fell asleep to Bulworth. The way that Warren Beatty raps in that film is something to behold, I wish I had never ever seen it. It was just awful.

Kathryn Clarke, one of my heroes, sent me the most amazing present recently - a present for my birthday last year for some reason. I was very chuffed. It was firstly a book of all the New Yorker cartoons ever - most of them are on CDs but 2004 of them are in the book itself. Like anything (including everything I have done myself) I am pretty sure I could have done it better - like, for instance, some of the cartoons are the same joke published twenty years apart. But in the main it's a complete gem. And secondly I also got Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which I think is going to be a source of great inspiration to me, and to you as I quote bits of it over and over again in this blog, over the years.

I have many wonderful friends and I am pretty sure (oh, I know how pat this sounds) I didn't do much to deserve them. Kathryn Clarke, who I usually refer to as Clarkus, Clackety or Kathryny, is in one sense one of my oldest friends - I met her in 1983 when I was 18 - but in another sense I've only known her for a few years, because we completely fell out of touch after '85 in what I suppose are still quite mysterious circumstances which I really should discuss with her someday. We met again at Melbourne University where she was working in the 90s when I saw her crossing a road somewhere. She had not changed a bit, whereas I was significantly older and more pathetic. This I now recall must have been 1998 because Millie was a puppy. I am very fond of Kathryn Clarke, and like to pretend she is fond of me. Kathryn Clarke now lives in another town far away conditionally referred to as 'the big smoke', so it's nice she remembers her old pals from long ago and sends them 1400 page collections of quotations. I have opened it at random to page 573 and offer unto all of you, Cezanne's immortal saying:

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

Kathryn Clarke tells me she cannot see the pictures on my blog. If anyone else has this problem please let me know, though I don't know what I can do about it, except remove them all perhaps, and a staid equality will return to the land.