a fillet of salmon meets its demise, surrounded by green: green peas, green mash, salsa verde.
bloody hell. has it been a week of freakish death or what? i started watching “look both ways” last year, and one of the characters, an artist, had moments where she saw random and violent ways in which she came to an end. these episodes — being flattened by a train, or eaten by a shark — were animated in the style of her painting… and were strangely similar to the fleeting glimpses i get from time to time: if i’m standing high up somewhere, i look down and imagine myself broken on the ground below; or if i’m waiting to cross the street on the corner, i might see a car riding the pavement and ploughing into me. which is what happened to those people in kogarah. did they ever think it would happen to them? i never did see what becomes of the movie; it was a rental, and halfway through it started sticking every few seconds. i returned it unfinished, and got a credit on my account, and eventually used it to borrow an instalment of the last season of “six feet under“. me, obsessed with death? naw.
there were times in the last couple of weeks though, where i thought my unravelling would be due to the book i’m currently working on. i cannot describe to you the despair i felt as i opened each jpg, to find that it was yet another badly lit, out-of-focus snapshot, and that it had been scanned in at too low a resolution; a blessing or a curse — that it could only be used small? by last weekend, the RSI had set in, and my eyes itched in revolt when i so much as glanced at my screen. still, i felt like i had finally broken the back of the beast. i knew where things lay; i knew what had to be done. and then the email came in:
“i am going to send you the book map that we changed around a bit too (minor) so maybe send the pagination once you have done your stuff.”
you did not hear the screams, but they were so loud (major), in my head.
but it hasn’t all been crap, even when my grandfather died last thursday. he’d been sliding into dementia for years, and had suffered a series of mini-strokes which left him increasingly placid and smiley. he no longer knew who i was, and i hardly saw him anyway. but when i was six, he taught us — me and my cousins — such things as not to point at people with our chopsticks, and not to sit at the dining table with our legs propped up on our chairs; only rickshaw drivers sat like that. he obsessively clipped stories from the chinese newspaper and pasted them into his scrapbooks, and sometimes he would test me by making me read headlines. he never really accepted the excuse that i only knew the simplified modern characters. he was admitted into hospital already halfway gone. my mum txted me while we were at the powerhouse on that day — harmony day — when all visitors wearing thongs (footwear, not bumfloss) got in for free: she was on the 7.30 bus to KL. barely twelve hours later, they shut off the machines. and off he went.
if you go to the powerhouse museum before april 22, you will get to see guan wei‘s splendid mural on the walls of the top floor, a “floating, poetic corridor in which history and memory, fact and fiction are blurred” [in his own words, from the powerhouse website]. it is great, and there is a stuffed wombat.
so there was that, and also, one day i made green mashed potatoes — buttery mash with some improvised salsa verde swirled through (with extra salsa verde on the side) (and enough mash and salsa verde left over for two more meals consisting solely of mashed potato and salsa verde).
and yesterday, walking through pitt street mall, the kid and i simultaneously glanced over at the entrance to the myer food hall, and simultaneously registered that there was a pair of gigantic golden bunny ears popping up over the escalators. specifically it was the lindt gold easter bunny, ten feet tall, the best kind of inflated doll. we had just missed some sort of chocolate demonstration, but the lindt girl offered us a lindor easter egg and a little easter chicken from her easter basket. (and then while waiting for the bus, maeve insisted on unpeeling her chicken, and the whole body of it fell out onto the funky black ground, leaving her holding onto the tiny hollow head, still wrapped in foil, and she was rightfully traumatised, but there was funky black matter stuck to the chicken, though only on one side, so i broke off the tainted side and gave the rest of it back to her, and she ate it and was mostly fine except for a bit of a loose bowel today.)
and two sundays ago, we went to the playschool concert in tumbalong park, during which a purple paper birthday cake was unveiled, and everybody sang “happy birthday” to the sydney harbour bridge. the cake was nice and all, but nowhere quite as delicious as jay la’gaia.
and then later in the day, we walked over the bridge, and looked up into the steel arches, and down between the gaps in the roadway into the deep green harbour, and by the end, just as it began to drizzle, i hadn’t fallen in, or been flattened by a girder.
