Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

THE HUMAN MIND RECOILS

I make no claims. The human mind recoils. Figures and calculus. The algorithms of trajectories. Factories belching smoke. My hands. My money. The human mind recoils. Who I talked to. Who I touched. Seven years of bad luck. The human mind recoils. The ribbon in the sky! The ribbon in the sky!

I have no idea how to live. I am constantly sifting through all data for clues, examining evidence, researching. Sometimes this feels good. Like I’m unfinished. Fluid. Growing. Refusing to ossify. But god! I’m 38 years old! I’m stunted! Unable to commit to a mode of being. Frozen with terror at the gates of the adult world. Trapped in an extended adolescence. Uncertain. Or does everybody feel this way?

Anyway, I got a new job, kiddies, about which I am deeply pleased. Remember when I promised you I would claw my way out of the pit of misery I was in? That. Okay. Yes. To the patient historians, regular readers and manic supporters who wrote in, who visited, who sent gifts and yet heard nothing back from me, just know now that you gave me strength. Expect a renaissance. This is not a scenario. Strength through discipline! Sydney or the bush!

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Wednesday, August 27, 2003

THE ACCORDION BOOK

Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we favour the accordion book. One long strip of paper folded back and forth upon itself over and over again and slapped between two covers. An asian invention, we think. We have this one accordion notebook that never fails to baffle us when we open it to write in. Although it looks like an ordinary notebook, one can open it in four ways, and we can never find the way we want the first time. Never. Each of the four possibilities leads to different content, and we always have to flip around to find the one we’re looking for. Like there are four different Mango Pudding Blueses: the extravagant, risqué European Version; the International Edition, which has similar content but comes out the night before; the Techno Remix, which is far longer, more detailed and contains much more math; and this, the Classic Mango Pudding Blues, to which you subscribe.

We are writing this in it now. The accordion book. Lying in the hot sun in the local park, nearly naked, working on our fabulous tan. Later, of course, this will all be typed by one of the girls in the steno pool and e-mailed to the development team in Mumbai, where coders do the markup and upload it to the net. So.

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Monday, August 25, 2003

FEAR OF AN OLD PLANET

I have always felt uncomfortable around people much older than me. Grownups, you know? The intensity of the fear varies based on a number of factors, and there are a few exceptions, but still. Then the other night I realized gleefully that I will have less and less to worry about as the years go by and people die and fewer and fewer people will actually be any older then me.

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Sunday, August 24, 2003

PHANTOM PAINS

I once went to the dentist with a toothache in my lower right back teeth. He gave me a filling in an upper right back tooth cavity. “Phantom pain,” he said with a shrug. “Happens all the time. You can feel it but you can’t accurately locate it.”

Same thing emotionally. When I was a poor freelancer I’d be convinced that my life was shit and then a cheque would come in the mail and I would be cured instantly. Or working in the bursting high-tech bubble; I’d hear rumor of a coming wave of layoffs and I would tell myself I didn’t care, that I was ready to go, that it wouldn’t bother me. And then everything I was working on seemed crappy, and every meal didn’t taste right, and I would wonder about my haircut or my relationship with my parents until the layoffs would actually happen, and I would be spared, and an always unexpected euphoria would well up in me and make everything so beautiful. So beautiful.

And it’s like waiting for a job to come through.

Everything can change in an instant.

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