Thank you for your patronage

"Thank you for contacting the Prince Charming hotline, your call is very important to us. You are currently number 18,569,874 in our priority queue and we will attend to you as soon as an operator becomes available. We appreciate your patience... please continue to hold.
 

No time to wait on the line for the next 30,000 years just now? You can find answers to our most common queries on our website at www.suckitup.com, which many people just like you have found extremely useful. We especially urge you to visit our ‘Manipulative Strategies’ page, which covers basic techniques proven to enhance your chances of success, such as: Flailing For Maximum Impact; Mind Games, Head Fucking, Power Plays & Other Methods of Emotional Blackmail; Protecting Your Financial Investment; A How-To Guide To The Effective Ultimatum; Chucking A Baby At It; Using Others As Pawns To Get What You Want; Entrapment and, of course, that all-time popular favourite for those that simply can't be bothered - Taking The Path Of Least Resistance.
 

Telling of the blunt truth is definitely not recommended; it risks causing offence - or worse - never getting an opportunity to make it to third base ever again. Instead, subtle hints and half-truths shedding you in a better light are considered best practice to ensure the covering of all eventualities and, technically, are quite different from outright fibs. This way you are exonerated from any resulting falling debris. It is also worth noting that we strongly advocate the use of avoidance tactics (information on the latter can be found in the aforementioned Path Of Least Resistance sub-section).
 

Sleeping with the myriad of rich, but geriatric and creepy married men that are always trying to put their leery hands all over you and who live in hope that, if they get you drunk enough you will go for it, is one form of potential validation you might find helpful. Lie back, think of England, and focus on all the money and trinkets and stuff. Failing that, looking up an ex that you don't actually want but who you know never really got over you, stealing someone else’s man or moving onto your ex’s mates are some other particularly popular options.
 

Alternative desperate measure therapies include dancing on pub tables knickerless whilst drinking yourself into a stupor, taking up a chemical addiction, throwing yourself into your work, jumping off a cliff, writing rubber cheques from a remaining joint account, fine-tuning your personal radar frequency, trekking to Cambodia to dig irrigation channels, lining your walls with self-help books and listening to Bob Dylan incessantly just for his uplifting factor.

Naturally, you are officially prohibited in any public place from smiling, talking to or even acknowledging the existence of any members of the opposite sex who are already ensnared. This just makes everybody feel uncomfortable and often leads to serious conditions of jealously, dark looks, hissy-fits, things people would rather not think about, knives in the back and general all round ugliness. You are, after all, directly responsible for the insecurities of every other person in the priority queue, not to mention the planet. In fact, it is preferable if at all possible, that you either leave town or turn lesbian.
 

Lastly, we admire and encourage your ongoing cynicism; this will get you far. If you wish to request a call back from a member of our staff - please lie down, remove your bra, leave the keys in the letterbox and we will be with you shortly."

Surrealism

Surrealism is a movement in literature and art characterised by its use of unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions seeking to transcend logic and habitual thinking to reveal deeper levels of meaning; often related to Freudian and Jungian concepts of the unconscious mind. These are not my own words, but abridged from a definition I came across somewhere.
 
So, surrealist treatment can be as simple as reading something forwards …and then reading it backwards and getting an entirely different meaning from the same words. Months ago my flatmate showed me the first verse of the below that she had come up with. This week I added a second verse.

get out
and
try
now

for what
you
always
wanted

But if you read it backwards it takes on an entirely polar perspective...

wanted
always
you
for what

now
try
and
get out

It reminds me of the alleged use of backmasking and finding subliminal messages by phonetically reversing musical recordings that everyone used to go on about when I was a teenager growing up in 'heavy metaller' Wanganui! And these are quite interesting, even if some seem a wee bit far fetched.

Taking it even further, I've been playing around with completely reversing any scene taken from a script to see what happens. And bizarrely, it kind of works. Sometimes it gives a scene a completely new meaning or context and sometimes the meaning remains very similar - but either way, a piece of script written intentionally to run in a forward sequence can usually be reversed (with a very slight jiggling around of the action cues) to still make for an interesting scene in some sense or another.

Here's an example of a short scene I wrote forwards (before having any idea of giving it this treatment) ...and then backwards. The overall meaning of the scene (being irony) stays pretty much the same, but in a way it's better because it brings out the protagonist's cheeky character even more and the source of the irony is not revealed to the viewer until the end of the scene, which makes it funnier.

That's cool. Imagine doing that to a whole film just to see what sort of story came out?

How the horseman lost his head

The moon shone bright and full upon this night as the heinous hag hunched over her violently frothing cauldron, muttering black thoughts and hissing unspeakable evils through her putrid rotting excuse for teeth. Chopped Liver, her manky fleabagged feline, bristled his bottlebrush coat as he gnawed ravenously on the remnants of a small child’s dismembered ankle bone cast aside at the trunk of a nearby sycamore tree.

A mile away, a dark cloaked figure galloped madly through the uneven cobbled lanes of Chatterton hamlet, scythe in hand glinting in the moonlight. The flanks of his coal-black horse heaved with exhaustion, having already hastened 3 mile that night. But the steed required no whip or spur. She knew no one was safe yet.

As the hag withdrew a gnarled finger from her protruding beak, tossing discovered gremlins into the concocted mutation broiling away in the pot, a crow squawked with delight as it pecked tasty eyeballs from the decaying bodies dangling amidst the tree branches. A blood curdling screech formed in the base of the hag’s throat as she grew more and more excited and incensed.

The plight of man and horse became increasingly urgent as they closed in on the sycamore forest. The mare quivered with nervous tension, but never missed a beat as she rose, effortlessly gliding over the high stonewall of the forest perimeter with several feet to spare.

Lickety-split, the hag whirled around as the pair thundered upon her. The horseman was no match for this embittered wretch of a woman as she grabbed the glinting scythe from his mitt and raised it mercilessly. She fucken hated it when he was late for dinner.

Being fabulous

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

 ~ Marianne Williamson

The village idiot

A parochial town

 

A surreal exchange (paraphrased) in the pub the other night. Because although they were coming out of his mouth, I recognised the words not as originating from him, but as coming from further up a food chain. I think it made him feel clever to repeat them. Or maybe I just feel clever saying that, teehee  ...yes, I'm taking the piss out of myself :P

Hopefully, one day more people will choose to see opportunities rather than threats and realise that sharing toys actually just makes for a better toy box for all to enjoy. Oh perception is an intriguing thing!

Thankfully, these days I am finding it much easier not to buy into bullshit and insecurity, my own included. Because my mind is a self-fulfilling prophecy and whatever I let in goes forth and multiplies in there! All is well xx

Regrettable

Came across this article by writer/songstress Bronnie Ware the other day - the top five most common regrets according to her experiences nursing the dying. Interesting reading. But why wait until we’re dying to get our shit together. Here's the top five in a nutshell…

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Seemingly, most people don’t honour even half of their dreams and die knowing this was due to choices they had made or not made.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard. The regret of spending so much of life on the treadmill of work existence.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. Many people suppress their true feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settle for a mediocre existence and never become who they are truly capable of being.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Golden friendships slip by when people become so caught up with their own lives.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. Many don’t realise until it's too late that happiness is a choice. Staying stuck in old patterns and habits, fear of change have them pretending to others and to themselves, that they are content. But deep down – often not so much.

Live like you mean it. Be real. Be true. Be kind. Be happy.

My back garden

New green leaves follow a winter of woody spindle

The fig tree heart in my back yard

Wind chimes and weather worn prayer flags lull in the breeze

Lying on a beanbag on my sunny back deck

I look up past my own painted toes

To the backdrop of a blossom canvas of the old cherry tree

Snowing down each time Mother Nature whispers through

Onto the clean white sheets waving from their peggy place

Under the banana tree midst spiky native grasses

A blackbird perches on the arm of a silvery wooden bench

Before swooping amongst sparrows

Guzzling this morning's uneaten toast. Territory wars.

The thicket of anemones will close down their smiley faces at dusk

The hedgehog pattering & foraging any leftover crusts

His hair never goes curly

In a pebbled cottage garden hidden in the middle of town

Majestic white elephants stand royally

Beside Buddha and a one-armed rusty wheelbarrow

A secret city leafy haven

And warm spirit.

A heart to heart conversation

-- What shape is your heart?

-- What?

-- What shape is it? Is it deep? Is it broken? Is it warm? Is it beating? Does it sing?

-- It just is

-- Is what?

-- And sometimes it isn't