17 january
5.14pm
I’m sitting on the toilet see, and as I sit I tend to meditate, it’s quiet in the loo and I like to chill out. So, there I am, pants down round my ankles, one of the times when there is not much difference between men and women I guess. Well? So there I sit, and as I sit my eyes scour the floor, is it clean, did I, should I vacuum? Nope it’s clean but there is one thing, an ant or a spider, bit small, can’t make up my mind as to which. If it’s a spider could it be one of those nasty Australians, a white tail? Nope it’s an ant. It has marched from the floor to the floor mat and as it does I ponder the meaning of life. Hang on, now I remember, it was a fly, ah, that makes sense, I was wondering where this story was going to go with an ant or a spider but a fly, yes, that makes sense. So this fly hops on the rug and is walking around as fly’s do and I am taken to pondering the meaning of life. A small fly equals a small life? Usually I wave them away and now that it’s summer I am more aggressive at wiping them or waving them away. They are bloody annoying as I sit in my comfortable reading chair with it’s native american blanket and two medium cushions, reading is important, a very important part of my life, always has been, always will be and the chair I curl up in equally so. So when a fly begins to walk up my bare leg it tickles and tickling is not a good part of reading, especially when I am into Steinbeck or heavy stuff by James Hillman. That is not a good mix, Hillman and the Fly!
And then of course once I wave it away it decides a game of tennis would be fun and so he alights on my cheek, that takes a different stroke than when he lands on my neck or decides to stroll up the Boulevard Forearm! I never flatten them, I don’t sit with a fly swat but what I do try, is to catch them with my open hand. And if I manage, which I never do, to catch one what then? Death by crushing, give it to the cat, the dog? But I never do catch one. I have swatted them on the kitchen table though, splat and there, I got two of the little buggers who were actually fornicating in front of me.
But sitting on the toilet contemplating life I reconsider my aggressive violent attitude toward flies. I suddenly apply James Hillman’s philosophy that everything from the universe to me to bugs, we all have a soul and that soul has an equality such as trees, rivers and sheep being readied for the slaughter house and who am I to pass judgement and a death penalty! Not I said the fly.
Not me either. Life is for living as one of those buzzers has come into my studio, uninvited, to see what I am writing and would you believe it, the little blighter or one of his cousins has decided to climb my leg, my calf. Fuck! It tickles but now that I am enlightened by my own ‘apparent’ mortality I cannot take action to kill the fly.
Catholic guilt is not part of my make up, I was raised C of E and that is the pale English wimpy version of the Italian canon. Mind you I am sure that jesus on the cross, yes we all agree, he was crucified, jesus would have been visited by flies and that must have been excrutiatingly ticklish. Did he die of mirth or of death? Nails driven through one’s hands and feet is not conducive to longevity and jesus was in his thirties when his life was extinguished. And so the fly on the wall, the fly by, the flying creatures of planet earth have as much right, if not rights, to be here. They sing. That’s their buzz you hear.
Now when I leave the house to go somewhere, anywhere and I close the doors and windows, because we have these gangs of kids in our town who know no boundaries as neither do their mothers, that’s the reason the father beat it, got tired of beating her in retaliation for her potty mouth carping. But when I secure my property the flies are locked in and I never realized that flies really are freedom lovers of the strangest kind. So on return I find that they have committed mass suicide, something those kids would never think of. Damn! So masses of flies on the table, the window sill and the floor. The Cat, the Dog, neither of them eat the flies when they are dead, even though when alive my Amigo and my Kiri love to snap at the flies and occasionally get one followed by a crunching sound that is a real turn off. Fancy chewing a fly! Oh no! Mind you, I have yawned with bad timing and have come close to choking with the fly stuck down my throat! Yuck!
And then, in some years, in some areas of this country side there are those who live elsewhere, but like the concept of “our cottage in the country don’t you know” and lock their second residence for months on end only to return in the off chance of a quiet weekend to find the flies have swarmed! AAARRRGGGHHHH! I have heard the call go out late at night as they turn up in their BMW’s, case of wine and latest girlfriend, as opposed to wife, in tow for a dirty weekend to be confronted by a ceiling layered and I truly mean layered with a swarm of flies. I am sure you have seen a swarm of bees, hanging in a romantically rounded cluster from the branches. Not flies, nothing romantic. And the blood. I need to finish this expose on life and soul, I am becoming or coming to the gross out part where the clean up takes place before the love making, the stripping away of fine fabric, the giggling from kitchen to lounge and a final plunge on to the bed. Flies are all over the ceiling. And to clean it they have to be gotten down off the ceiling. No neat vacuum cleaning job this. This is a broom and buckets and even spades to scoop them and then toss them outside for the night creatures to feast on. How do I know this. Well, when I met muy lovely lover, when we first began hanging out at her house just outside town, her one and ‘only’ house, when we began hanging out, the local South Featherston flies decided to test us but in a kind of, sort of, manageable manner and only in the bathroom, excepting that this was a very old kind of historic type of house and the ceilings were very, very high.
Almost, totally actually, impossible to reach with a broom so a ladder and vac were called in and we did what we could. Messy. I never knew flies could be so bloody and a mass of flies is simply a mess of blood.
And so sitting on my Loo none of this came to me as I studied the Soul of the Fly! It wasn’t until now it all came back and memories became up front and clear as a bell. It totally, along with my shrinking bank balance, put me off buying a second country estate and so muy lovely and me, well we simply live together in our small cottage in town with the lovely garden and the compost pile and the grass clippings that flies just love. Yep, another piece of fly mythology that can keep till when I next visit the loo :) gotta fly!
