home salon writing writers University of Adelaide contact quiet lives, by bern smith can't get any lyrics down today and jo is coming over, she'll be pissed. she'll doubt i try for her, for us. i live in a dive in melbourne as we other half tend to do. there's a lemon tree next door. that's the only positive about this place lemons. you can eat them there's no sour. spike milligan has a line in one of his books, in the only one i've read of his 83 books, describing the onset or outset of dawn or dusk, and he says the colours there, as he sails to war, are pink, lemon and sherbet. that's as comforting as thick blankets that press down on you and you've washed the sheets yourself. last gig we had 30 people there, which was one of the best yet. I'm The Boss feelings were smelted as usual by rob's misplaced girlfriend who asked me Why i didn't cut my hair anyway since the year was 2005, how old was i anyway, It's time to outgrow aesthetics of formative years. some say i overreacted. there's no coffee there's no goddamn coffee and i have no lyrics. this dive with cockroaches, and human housemates who are vermin too but worse because they ask you for money. my girlfriend says i should move in with her but i'm sick of moving on always, slinking sideways. i'm bloody Quasimodo somedays. i show jo what i've got and she says it's different but good and then she is itching to leave. we don't even play, i don't know why she bothered. that's when she tells me that The trip is off and i can't even be bothered with it at all. she says They'll all be at The Republic later. I say I've got plans. i go to my girlfriend's and we watch Solaris for the hundredth time and she looks beautiful today. jo at The Republic. Those lyrics you gave me today were sweeping. and she actually means it i think because her eyes aren't black, but when she says Sorry about the trip they could be black. rob's General Sherman of a girlfriend is laughing uproariously, my neck starts hurting. i have a drink and realise that it would be all her fault anyway and that figures, and i get rob aside to find out but he's cruising and i don't want to lay any bad eggs around him. jo showed him the lyrics and he reckons gold too but then he does think PM Dawn has been snared by the middle class and actually belongs to us. Still, he's good like this and when his girlfriend comes over i apologise for what happened at the last gig meaning apologies for your black heart my dear, and she twists her lips sideways like she's deciding whether to be full of grace or not with her upper upper hands. I look at rob who's looking like a Saint Bernard puppy so i don't tear her hand down. my girlfriend has a heart murmur. she has a huge scar down her chest from when she had open heart surgery as a kid. she always wears necklaces with fat pendants so it covers the tip of the scar no matter how i tell her that no one would notice or care. her mum took her to Italy a few years back to go to Saint Rita's tomb because she'd prayed to her through the surgery because she's the saint of congenital heart defects or something. we don't talk about religion since the argument when we first got together and i don't know why i kept pushing the point because i liked all that was different and same about her. she didn't argue back much and i took her silence as fuel because i thought she was a passive aggressive. sometimes i have to take her to emergency because her heart will start racing and they have to use those things they use when they shout out Clear. and she says she can't describe what it feels like because it's blurred up like a fast road but she's pretty sure it doesn't hurt. i think she's just being tough though because why else would they have to shout out Clear so loudly. her name is Angela Marina. i've written many songs about her. Do you get embarrassed about my songs about you? (this was years ago.) No. I once went to a fortune teller and she told me that i would have many songs written about me. (this is without arrogance, this is something quietly saintly.) this is why i keep writing them. sometimes they don't start out about her but i twist a few things around when i've finished because i want to suck up the quota of songs due to her so that it doesn't fall onto someone else, some bloody folk singer-songwriter who she ditches me for who is 6 feet tall and tells her that the only way to really read On The Road, is to have someone read it to you on an urban balcony. i'm not sure if this is cheating though, me sucking up her songs. i'd jump off an urban balcony rather than fuck with her stars. i'd jump off the urban balcony if some folk singer started reading me On The Road. she has a perennial argument with her best friend sally smith which is ten years old. sally says: A fortune teller told me that I will take lots of photographs one day. my girlfriend says No you've got it wrong. The fortune teller said you would have lots of photographs taken Of You. it's the only negative trait in her whole body sometimes when she's around sally. she wants her to be passive too. she thinks she sexualises herself and doesn't know thyself unless someone is staring at her tits and telling her she's got this something. i think sally has self-awareness though because one time we were all hanging out in her room mixing smoke ash with paint and drawing on each other and i noticed this new picture stuck on her mirror. it was silver and glittery and had a hole in the middle as big as a face where a face would reflect. and it said in fat cowboy writing: You Are Obsessed With Your Own Reflection. my girlfriend thinks sally thinks it's ironic, a statement of celebration. sally does think after all that transcendental house is finally tapping into the core of a universal music. i'd jump Onto the urban balcony and chain myself to it to escape transcendental house. i'd ask the folk singer to sing me On The Road. rob deteriorates swiftly. and of course his girlfriend the uproar of laughter goes shrill and she starts to look all puffed up like someone's been pulling at her a bit with forceps. rob is funny and he once really liked this woman who was absolutely perfect but not too perfect, like she had a few metaphorical gaps in her teeth. her name was Amber Rose Lee if you can believe it. they'd just shagged for the first time and he says she penetrated his mind's eye and they were one together exploring Space in exploration proper not colonisation. and they were just mucking about talking about. telling each other things that you are not supposed to tell after the first time you've shagged, but not wanker-like rob stressed. and it just came up. Amber Rose Lee didn't say it in a way that defined any sense of her being or anything. it just came up that she was a premature baby and was in a humidicrib for ages. rob stayed the night but didn't sleep because all he could see was this thing in his arms in the humidicrib and he never saw her again. none of this goes any way to explain why he is with this horror, this piece of shrapnel in everyone's leg. sometimes you just know that you don't ask rob to explain anything because that's it, that's all there is. he has demons but of an off-beat nature. i saw Amber Rose Lee once at an Arches Of Loaf concert, one of the few they ever did here, thank god i made it. and i'd heard she was pretty broken up about rob as you would be after the whole Space thing heavy on her heart, resounding in perplexion. and i wanted to say something so i said, He has demons of an off-beat nature. and the way she smiled. rob deteriorates swiftly and everyone starts to get a bit full of angst. i'm okay because i'm laying back and i know i shouldn't but i ask him: So what about the trip. she's laying with her forcepian head in his lap and it comes out that she reckons it's too much money and for what - to play for the door and free drinks to people who don't even live in a city with an independent radio station. So you agree do you rob? he agrees. Since when did you become band manager Ms Ono? and i know the Ms Ono comment was the lamest thing that's ever been uttered through teeth in the heat of battle, but i got fired up in the space of nothing and before we all know it rob and i are going round 700 of the Musical Ideology Where Art Thou Soul / I'm A Realist Debate. this one looks like being worse than You Become A Drummer To Get Laid –versus- There's Nothing Wrong With Fringe Benefits –versus - You Should Have Been Given A Shot of Thalidomide At Birth. no one even joins in anymore except jo, good stalwart jo. how could i ever have doubted her? we are a self fulfilling joke. jo and i of course take the points because rob is inarticulate at the best of times unless he's talking about World War 2 about which yes he is articulate but confuses his statistics somewhat: a hundred million Australian troops died at Leningrad. and i should look ahead and learn from history myself because after the You Became A Drummer venom rob forced himself into a corner and a throwaway 5 a.m. speed wrecked comment that I'm getting back the deposit for the new kit you prick, saw the light of day and we didn't play for four months. jo and i end up at Chairman Mao's sitting in the corner in the dust. we justify ourselves to ourselves and wonder about the world and say we'll never ever go the way of Something For Kate, who wander and pout in slow motion on screens lip synching their own words whilst a smoke machine instructs 12 year old girls that they are gods. we say we'll go to Darwin anyway and i actually believe it for a bit, but know that rob is the best drummer with two or three arms ever known to man living or dead and without him we do not know ourselves. Cheers to rob and we guzzle. my girlfriend turns up and we all go out and don't get home until day break, and then sit around listening to Gram Parsons. i show Angela Marina my new sweeping lyrics which are all about her. For more on Bern Smith click here. Top