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15TH APRIL, 1998, THE BULLSHIT ARTIST
'Bullshit', he said, 'and the world loves you for it,' even when your arms were liars, I was leaping inside to be held by them, you say it off the top of your head or what you think they want to hear, words brush off your shoulders like crumbs or city pigeons that couldn't land properly on your head, someone has suddenly taken it upon themselves to believe you and you are surprised, feed them bullshit and hope for the best, 'bullshit baffles brains,' he said, throw a bit of bullshit over a paddock of people, it melts in the sky like a ufo and flops onto them like a pizza, there is a one in five hundred chance that someone will have their eyes shut and mouth open, it's the ones with their eyes open that are the problem, he walks casually with his coat hanging off his shoulder, when inside he is somber, controlling, obessive, he has polished his open ribcage fifty times before leaving the house, on the surface he is smooth sand, inside he is a rotten log, one doesn't cancel out the other, listen to what he does rather than what he says, what he says may not be what he does, both are part of the same landscape, remember what your father told you about men like him, and remember that he was like them, like him like them like him, what landscape does this man belong to?, he is a leopard wood tree standing alone off in the scrubby woodland just outside Bre on the Coolibah road, a leopard wood doesn't change its spots too often, the tree is multi layered and contradictory, yet all part of the same landscape.
He figured out all the stuff about planets and pain and he wasn't gonna take the world seriously anymore, as a matter of fact it was a big joke and heaven and hell didn't exist, there were no prisons for the bad after death so why not make it a riot?, why not make it a fucking riot whilst you're alive?, and go full-boar hells-bells, rage against existence, you were going to be ethical, formal and disciplined at some stage but what's the fucking point?, no one else's doing it, we all lost out brother, so who gives a fuck?, I don't, I don't give a flying fuck, and besides you'll miss out on all the fun, he was intelligent enough not to believe the bullshit of others and to get the most out of life, he laughed a lot, sometimes inappropriately and too much, and sometimes at other people's pain and expense, in the end he became transparent and no one believed him again, but they did you see, there's always a sucker and in the end he believed his own bullshit just in order to help them along, he was listening to himself, he wasn't listening to you, you feel the usual need to scream down into the phone receiver, was it three times or twenty?, he wasn't listening anyway, the next day you said it again, and asked him if he remembered, 'yeah,' he said, 'I remember and I'm sorry too, you asked him what he remembered and why he was apologising for something he didn't do, of which he admitted that he didn't actually know, so he laughed, this is how he protects himself, then he hides inside like termites in a mud and wood mound, eating himself alive. |
