Festivus Of The Shantoozy

Festivus - (n.) a week of celebration centred on the week of the anniversary of one's birth.

Here is but a short post pertaining to Shantoozy’s Birthday Anniversary Festivus Celebrations.

A short while ago now, I accompanied Shantoozy to her Chinese Medical appointment, which is out at RMIT University in the sticks, even slightly past my own La Trobe University stomping grounds -cum- Henry Lawson story setting. Then, being the Festivus week of Shantoozy’s Birthday Anniversary, we thought it would be an amusingly tacky thing to do and so on our way home we decided to go for dinner at Smorgy’s, which is a massive all-you-can-eat buffet situated way out there near the two uni.s. It was probably the best of such low-quality dining experiences you could hope for and was reasonably priced, and much of the food was actually perfectly acceptable (vegetarian pizza, roast, good-sized prawns, Oriental rice and noodle dishes, lasagne, fresh donuts and flapjacks, and such). At one point I mentioned nervously that I hoped none of the Chinese Medicine practitioners we’d just seen would be eating there and Shantoo said that, no, of course they wouldn’t, they would eat more healthily than that and so we ate and a little while later who should we see but someone who was not a Chinese Medical practitioner, well, not one of hers anyway, just a regular Jo/Joe, like us, but then we did see the head practitioner we’d visited earlier, sitting down, dining away! We are pretty sure it was he, anyway. He’d occasionally glance over at us in a friendly demeanour. It’s not that interesting an occurrence, to be sure, but it was odd.

The main gift I gave Shantoo for her B’day was Owl (spelt WOL, of course) perched on one of Pooh Bear’s honey pots in the form of a ‘Royal Doulton’ figurine. She already had one of every other character from the 'Winnie-the-Pooh' series except for an Owl, which seems to be the rarest one to obtain. She was a smiley Shantoo-the-Pooh when she got this little trinket, and then I was smiley, too. Ain’t that cute!

All in all, Festivus was good, except that I felt a bit down and (or – I can’t fully remember now) stressed for a couple of the days, but we shall do some more fun stuff soon to make up for that.

There's More Where That Came From

My posit was wrong! Again! Hooray!

A continuation of the previous post:

But I like girls I can talk to. I love bodies, make no mistake, but I like there to be a Soul inside. She must have heard the word ‘literature’ before I’ll find out if she’s heard the word ‘cunnilingus’. Hee-hee!

Well, I’m simply being honest.

And that’s one thing that all books must have before you can call them great. Honesty. The author must be willing to look beneath surfaces, even their very own, and show us what goes on there, and wonder why. And when we wonder why, too, and can see the manner in which fellow humans have dealt with existence and their specific situations in the complex, somewhat tatty web of life, then that, to me, is when a book is doing its job. The writer must milk the Earth for truths. Writers are no less helpful than scientists; we are simply mathematicians of the heart. Of feeling. Sometimes we, like the scientists, don’t know the right answer.

The best things in life are always ultimately free. I mean, you can possess a tangerine-coloured Peugeot but if you cannot be content, or are anally retentive, then you do not possess as good a version of the experience as you could. A poor man can look at a lump of resin he owns of interesting shape that he found out in the country one January and really see lightness and gentleness glistening off of it and feel pretty content, even though he is poor. We cannot, perhaps, choose the life we lead but how we choose to experience our life is ultimately up to each of us to decide for ourselves, I posit. A character in literature – dare I say, the character of a good book itself – and I don’t mean The Good Book, The Bible, which is actually kind of a bad book in that it is authorativley declared by some as a work of non-fiction to lure people to their knees – can exemplify this sort of possibly helpful philosophizing.

So, yes, I suppose I philosophize a bit. I suppose that any good writer does. I have my head in the clouds sometimes and I suppose that’s why I’m not concerned with fashion. The clothes I wear are the ones I largely have chosen, rather than those which others have chosen for me via billboards and videoclips. But, er, um, you know, reliable threads are a good thing to have. They stop one being arrested for indecent exposure. And what, by the way, is with those couples in movies who have obviously just fucked a blue streak (it is legal to have intercourse with a blue streak in certain states of the union, incidentally, mainly the sexual union), what is with them, I ponder, that the woman must cover her titties when they are both sitting up in bed, talking? (The humans, that is.) What girl does that, unless it’s in a really cold woodshed or some such place? And I don’t know about you but I haven’t ever done much fucking in woodsheds during Winter.

My writing is my ultimate mistress, said the writer. I think that’s about right, too.

Bookish, Yet Wacky. Wacky, Yet Bookish.

I was just out front milking the garden, for I hate to throw away empty soy milk cartons if there are any usably loose droplets of milky refreshment and so I always make certain to shake the carton out fully on earth’s soil before I toss it away to remain mummified for centuries below the surfaces of our footfalls in some ghastly landfill’s stomach, when I thought, I must look odd to passer-bys sometimes but there really is some semblance of sanity belying the existential modes of my wacky actions. Wacktions. Small fractions of wacktions. Etcetera (in its unabbreviated version, did you notice?).

Nonetheless, I am also somewhat of a bookish person. I can relate to the lifestyles of certain other bookish writers like Virginia Woolf, A. A. Milne, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson, as I image they’d potter about their libraries, admiring the materialistic aspects of their collection, and then get reading and then achieve sparkling artistic inspiration. I love books. They are one of my very, very favourite things.

I love what’s in them, whole worlds and inner journeys, and a lovely aroma wafting off the physical pages. You meet great friends in books, and they don’t think you are strange for enjoying to sniff the pages of books in public places, sometimes even around children. Yet it’s a weird relationship you share; a papery connection where you get to know the author but they don’t get to know you - until, perhaps, at death. I think that one actually connects more with the characters of books, like Winnie-The-Pooh, Jay Gatsby, Boswell’s Samuel Johnson LL. D., and fascinating cohorts, than with their authors. Nonetheless, that still makes two great connective opportunities to help you to not feel so lonely in your confusion about the world.

Another one is, of course, with other actual human beings; people like Bob what ya hang out wif at da boozer. Or sweet, curvaceous Miriam who likes to get naked and together.

…Yes, yes, I said this post was gonna be about Shantoo’s Birthday Festivus, which wasn’t all laughter and success, but I appeared to have misled you, even as I misled my own grey brain-box device that you can’t smash with aeroplanes, other than by physical piloting on into my physical body. The post relaying information pertinent to Shantoo’s Birthday Festivus shall be the next post after this one. I posit.

I Am Titular!!!

Well, it was Festivus for Shantoo's Birthday Anniversary just recently, and I'll write a post about that next. O Brother, has there been a bunch o' stuff I been doin' of late keeping me away, like a randy bull cordoned off from the paddock of cows, from posting afresh here. I have been composing poetry. I have been reading. Shantoozy and I spent a night at the grand opera, in the second best row in the house, on these tickets she'd been given as a thank-you from some market research company she'd fill in a survey for. I went to the Picasso 'Love and War' exhibition. I watched 'Fantastic Four', the recent movie. It was quite good for its genre, which is valid yet necessarily limited. I've got zero problems with that every once in a while. I must say, though, I think they should have been called the 'Elemental Four'. Soon Marvel shall release 'The Iron Man' movie, starring Robert Downey Jnr. as the titular super-hero, a role that Downey campaigned for and won. I've hung out with friends, and been generally a little more energetic than usual. Yes, there's been sex and food and laughter. There's been songs sung in the kitchen whilst preparing hot vessels of invigorating brown gold, too.