PERMANENTLiens

Now throw some rods in your hay-r

And wave it like you just don’t cay-re

And if you like curls and twists and all that perm shit

Everybody let me hear ya say oh ye-ah

Ode to non-ticklish women

*dusts off an oldie*

Yeah I did this one a while ago but thought I’d stick it here for posterity.

Honestly, over the years, I’ve known many a woman who will collapse into giggles if you even
breath on her wrong. Sometimes certain parts of the body are completely off limits to kiss or
caress because of a reaction to touch. When you’re in love with someone, things like this don’t
matter, but still, let me take some time to appreciate in these late hours those women whose
bodies can accept and even welcome the touch of an other’s hands.
Because damn.
Lemme tell you how amazing it can be as a man to be engulfed by you. Beautiful women come
in all shapes and sizes and can after a relationship’s started turn all shapes and sizes, and when
you’ve captured our minds and hearts its beauty is evergreen in all its phases.
But to be able to put lips to each eye pleasing curve and tell you how our kisses feel so
comfortable to be couched on them that they will gladly play layer upon layer and never have a
prayer of ever wanting to find their rest anywhere else.
To be able to soak your scent into each fingerprint and learn every surface like we’re learning
beautiful lyrics in braille, or survey the lay of your lands with our hands until we even know the
acoustics of each curve as our hands caress them in the silence of night.
Even better? Is the woman who’s body can be just that little bit ticklish so that when shes being
touched, there’s that barely contained smile and quiver. The woman who will sigh as the full
surface of your palms and fingers massage her once, her breath drawing shallower as you
reduce the touching surface to fingers, fingers to fingertips, to barely fingertips, to finish with the
lightest stroke of that many times blazed trail with fingernails. If fingernails down a blackboard is
one of the most grating sounds in the world, the sound of a woman enjoying the touch of those
fingernails down her backboard is surely one of the sweetest.
Many thanks ladies, for the hours that you have given to the pleasure of our curious fingers and
lips. Being able to fully explore the secrets of a woman’s body without restriction is a gift that
can never be appreciated enough. Your curves are what part of what makes you you. The
familiarity and safety in those curves that house your mind and spirit etch themselves into our
minds with every stroke of the hand.
Especially first thing in the morning, when I get to gaze on the sight of you new to another day,
to take pictures in my mind’s eye of the moments that, at least for that day, I know will be mine
to know alone.

I generally dislike generalities

The nature of my prejudice is so advanced that I often dismiss them straight off the bat without giving them a chance to prove to me that they are the exception that proves the rule. Generalities do have their uses sometimes and I suppose that discounting them off hand undermines my sensibility at times.

However, having observed Internet and media discussions recently, I’ve become disheartened by the desire to seek generalities in regard to human relations. In particular questions like “Are co-ed schools or single sex schools better for <insert gender>?” or “Why do women do XYZ.”

Sometimes these questions are in jest and poke some intelligent fun at the disconnect between different groups in society. Often I’m worried that these questions are asked in serious earnest, as if there is an arithmetic to human behaviour that one can coldly apply to a subject given a similar set of circumstances.

As someone who dislikes being but into a figurative box, often reading these questions being posed by people who do not appreciate the same, the contradiction is bemusing, and sometimes a little worrying.

Sometimes the question needs to be “Does my child with these needs more fit this school or this school?” or “Given this context and this personality, why did she do this?”

There’s a need out there to become more familiar with the unique variable of each person’s nature, a need to understand how individual the answers to such issues tend to be.

Many answers to questions of our human interaction are best answered generally with a ‘depends’. We should never lose that word from the back of our minds, lest we become the designer of the kind of box we dislike others confining us in.

Kitchen Chemistry Appreciation

For me, this is about the women who either abdicated a bit of their sovereignty in the kitchen to accommodate my peasant pan handling, or those who didn’t really cook before but learned to love it after joining in.

This is about those times when you’re both home to cook together, when you ignore the gender roles and there’s a synergy about your movements in the kitchen. No one is designated the stirrer or the preparer, no-one is charged with the washing up. You both look at the menu and go about a subtle dance in the kitchen where each places a step where another doesn’t have enough feet.

This is about getting your hands dirty together, the affectionate touching as you move around one person to get another spice or grab a bowl of ingredients to spoon into the mix they’re stirring. This is about finding a time where you can both be productive and still share those important conversations about the stresses of the day or the hopes for tomorrow.

This is about human bonding and interactions, the mix of which results in plates of food and a cleaned kitchen.

I love it when that works, that unspoken understanding and spirit of partnership. Cooking’s one of the few household things that doesn’t feel like a chore to me, and I love it when you ladies share it like that.

Shit feels like home.

How Now Uni-Brow?

Campbell Vorgenfeld was quite the unicyclist. He even enjoyed a brief period of fame as a stunt cyclist at the annually held Fjorluksheim Summer X Games. The local constabularies were well known to often stare in amazement as Campbell executed tricks on his unicycle that a roller-skater would be jealous of.

One day Campbell had an idea for stunts that would draw an even wider audience. He designed another, smaller unicycle to be propelled at the same time as the other, using his hands.

After many months of practice Campbell got the hang of contorting himself into the strange pose in order to get the two cycles working harmoniously. Soon he was performing tricks on the street again.

He appeared later the next year at the X Games again, prepared to attempt a triple flip with his new contraption.

The crowd gasped in horror as, in a cruel twist of fate, Campbells trick went awry and the impact of the smaller uni-cycle on his nose collapsed the centre of his face, to the point where his eyebrows were touching.

After years of rehabilitation and plastic surgery, most of Campbell’s face was restored, except for his brow, which forever remained welded together. Campbell blamed the sorry state of the healthcare system for his predicament, but the Old Boys Club that is the medical establishment never allowed him to gain enough evidence for a malpractice case.

Campbell was last heard to be making a career as a tyre re- treader.

No Size Fits All

Some characters I’d never have met if it wasn’t for my girlfriends. Meeting Samuel Anthelton was a product of my young teenage love for a Japanese woman.

I had asked her to go to my high school ball and she had accepted. The high school ball tradition was alien to her and she was keen to get to know this cultural side of young life in my country. She wasn’t going to let being three years older than my seventeen years of age get in the way. Japanese girls were still fairly rare at that time in our city, and certainly taking an older one to a ball was extremely rare. But my height, coupled with my ethnically ambiguous looks made the combination more natural than it would have been for my more vanilla class mates. It was one of those rare moments when ethnic minority worked in my favour.

New as she was to the culture of ball going, she was familiar as any other woman in my country with the female sense of occasion. Every detail of her aesthetics had to be delicately balanced. I realised with some bemusement at the time that for many women the universal desire to fit in at these occasions saw each do one’s best to standout from everyone else in the crowd. As she had no school mates to bond with in this balancing act, the responsibility fell upon me to accompany and assist her in her hair, makeup, eyelash, nail, dress, and shoe fashion choices.

For the most part the process was relatively enjoyable. I found the psychology behind her makeup decision making process interesting, and have never found women’s clothes shopping a chore. Seventeen year old boys, if the right attitude and attention to detail is taken, can find much to enjoy in the many dress changes of a beautiful young woman, from the various leg and neck lengths, to numerous requests to help zip up dresses and the mid dress change conversations that often afforded an ‘innocent’ look into the changing room. She being very comfortable with her body certainly didn’t hurt. As long as I offered appropriate opinions, showing some consideration for how colours matched with her skin tone, her eyes, and her purse, she stayed happy. I was given a visual buffet of eye candy until she finally settled on a vintage 1970s green cheongsam dress.

The one problem was the shoes. Finding an adequate nexus between form and function required an intuitive logic that I still do not possess today, let alone at a tender seventeen years of age. Feet have never inspired much desire in me and my inability to offer any real insight rendered the process too uninteractive to be of consistent interest to me.

When she finally found a shoe that met her requirements it was with little surprise that I learnt the shoes were an uncomfortable size and a half too small. I began to despair of ever reaching the end of the process, and began to rue not taking the slightly plainer, but much easier going girl from my sister school who had asked me to take her.

The shop attendant however, quietly took us aside and said they had another option open to us. At the cost of an additional $100, she could arrange to have the shoes fitted to my ball date. My date looked at me expectantly and I decided that the cost of another three weeks worth of wages (and thus social life) was far outweighed by the benefit of having the puppy love of my life as a partner for all to see for one night.

We were instructed to go to a non-descript, abandoned shoe warehouse at 8pm the following week.

Enter Samuel Anthelton. He was there at the warehouse (his place of abode I later learned) to greet us, in a pristine white suit on black shirt, pants held up by a bright red tie threaded through the belt loops, with a make shift windsor knot tieing the two ends together on the left side of his hip.

Samuel was a shoe fitter. Given a week with a pair of shoes, he had a method for making a shoe fit a woman, within two sizes of the woman’s actual size. He spent the week making secret preparations with the shoes, then spent an hour with the customer carefully massaging their feet until he was satisfied that foot would fit shoe. I was skeptical at first, but given the money back guarantee had little to lose. Samuel motioned my date to a staff room out the back, and I spent an hour listening to my walkman. To my surprise she emerged an hour later beaming with satisfaction walking comfortably on what, to my uninitiated eyes, appeared to be devices designed expressly for the purposes of impeding movement. My date hugged me with great appreciation, and I in turn said a few words of sincere thanks to Samuel.

It wasn’t the last time I was to use his services. I asked him immediately for his card, knowing it would surely come in hand for the future. He didn’t have one, but gave me his number on a torn piece of paper, saying it was rare for any men to show an interest in his talent, let alone at the age of seventeen.

Over the years of various women and various shoes I got to know Samuel. The son of a modest cobbler, Samuel had grown up with little and as a result often had to turn to shoes for play things. He said it was always important to work in partnership with the materials, never to force them to one’s will, the same with people’s feet, which he also became familiar with while helping his father out in his vocation. However, the modest nature of his father set him aside from many of his peers at a young age, most of whom had parents who were customers of his father. His financial inability to join his classmates in much of their fun, and his odd affinity for shoes and feet, ensured that Samuel never really found a way to fit in. Always isolated, even when his talent for fitting shoes emerged, it always happened that the very thing that drew people to him pushed them away, as they always saw it as a product of perversion.  This was why the shop assistant had been so clandestine about Samuel’s services. Samuel’s service was always unofficial, always plausibly denied, arranged through back channels.

I was not without a certain sympathy for Samuel. I always saw him through the lens of my love life. I never found it difficult to attract women, but always found it hard to keep them. My love always three sizes too big for what was required. Samuel’s eccentricity, likewise, was three sizes too big to be accepted readily by society.

Strangely enough, it was my ball date who eventually led to Samuel’s salvation. His talent made an impression that always stayed with her, and she returned many years later to take him with her to Japan, a land of many niches where even fitting in with only half a percent of the population still means you have several hundred thousand people who agree with you. With her as the face and Samuel as the talent, they made quite the business out of importing expensive designer shoes of odd sizes and re-sizing them for an exclusive clientele. In the land of the otaku Samuel found a place where he could be quite at home for not fitting in.

He also makes a fair living on the side writing books in Japanese on that very subject. Between that and his ever expanding list of elite clients, Samuel is in fact well on his way to becoming a celebrity over there.

I still ask him to fit the odd shoe for me, which he gladly does, never for any more than the $100 he’s always charged me for the service, even though he can charge over ten times that now. Of course, I still have to make it to Japan with my partner and the shoes to take advantage of the prices. So yes, I make the trip several times a year.

Some women and their shoes. Sheesh.

Lip Service

Her name was Simone, and I met her on the bus. This was while I was still at university and still too busy enjoying my youth to save up enough to buy a car. We were both sitting in a four seater facing each other.

Beautiful.

She had long obsidian hair that could set the sun on her command, dark eyes and rich exotic features that softly chanted tales of distant hilltops overlooking moonlit seas. I stammered up enough courage to approximate what more accomplished men do when they ask women on a date. After eyeing me for a moment, she agreed. But one date only she insisted. That is all I would have.

Like a salesman sensing when their foot was in the door I still felt I was in with a chance. Sure she might say one date now, but given the opportunity and setting the right mood, I was sure I could solicit more rendezvous. I started to make suggestions and elaborate plans, but she cut me short.

“When we get off this bus, we are on our date. We’ll go to the park, sit down and talk. Take it or leave it.”

Taken.

We settled in the shade of a small tree and began to talk. It turned out she was what she called a lip reader. I say reading lips like I say people read your tea leaves or your coffee grounds. Much to my delight though, she read lips through touch. She would run her fingers delicately across my lips and could offer vague references to my life. These were really the things of most psychic pretenders, but I didn’t mind. Her fingers seemed to find the grooves of my lips and release a silent melody of emotion. Not to forget, she was beautiful, and I was happy for her to play DJ with my lips.

An air of frustration set in for her after a while though, she crossed arms and softly sighed “Hmph.” She eyed me, looked at my lips again and remarked:

“It’s not working the way it should, nothing’s clear. I don’t think we’ll get to the bottom of this unless I kiss you.”

Here was me thinking I’d have to be smooth and suggest that very thing.

So we kissed. I can only describe it in terms of how the release of pressure must be when a dam near overflow is relieved. The rhythm of her lips and their caress on my seem to pull many a tension built up inside me. She said that I was a constant thinker, and the desire to not be too biased with any conclusion I came to in my thoughts meant an infinite number of reconsiderations on any particular issue. This resulted in my relative silence in conversation, for fear of seeming too biased, and a somewhat aloof appearance around my peers. She suggested that I perhaps speak up more often, and allow others to take up the alternate considerations for me, saying it was easier for them to formulate while I listen, than formulate all on my own.

“Learn to delegate.” She said.

I was taken aback. The idea was somewhat new to me but somehow made sense.

“And with that”, she said, “Our date is at and end”

I was still coming to terms with what she was saying as she walked away. I gathered my senses enough to shout after her.

“HEY!”

She turned around and regarded me with a warm questioning smile.

The effort of shouting had exerted much of the physical effort I had left in me after my experience. All I could do was mouth silently and deliberately to her:

“Thank you.”

She looked at me strangely and yelled back:

“HUH?”

Post Whisperer

I did get involved with someone I met online once. Her name was Raven Osslimstich. She came into my life with the following email:

Re: Emy Coligado is mad quirky cool

“You’ve got something there.”

“Emy Coligado was great in Malcolm in the Middle, although her character suffered for losing her sass as the show progressed. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re likely to see her much from now on other than bit parts in TV shows and small movies like ctrl-Z.”

“Unfortunately people in film and television land don’t share your enthusiasm for diverse casting.”

Of course, the first instinct in this scenario was to assume spam. But the subject was one close to my heart and I had to reply with an inquisitive:

Re: Emy Coligado is mad quirky cool

“Huh?”

And that’s how it started. It turned out she was replying to some forgotten post I’d made on a message board some years ago. She was a curator of what she called a post orphanage. Designing a programme to scour the message boards she was a member of enabled her to download and save any posts that had a zero post count. All life was precious to Raven, even the life of a post, and she felt that in her care posts that would otherwise die lonely deaths gained a fair chance at life with her reading them, then replying to the authors. Through her experience she’d found that often posts that went without comment carried wisdom, but often didn’t solicit comment because online there wasn’t a huge market for balanced post agreement. Her revival process was not perfect however, she explained: many parents of the original posts didn’t wish to reply to her, even if they remembered posting the message in the first place. It concerned her a little, but she could only put her best effort forward. If the parent wished to abandon the child, she said, what more could she possibly do anyway?

It’s fair to say I liked her almost straight away.

She was a great exponent of the art of language. Less an academic talent, she had more an innate ability to soak up what emotion struck what chord in a person. She described it as a chemistry between her heart, her fingers and the keyboard. It was its own little eco-system where each sustained the other, and her expressions less the discipline of intellect than an instinct of rhythm for finger on key. I was quickly seduced by the magic of her words and spent hours online with her. We never met in person; it all seemed that much better in the abstract. It was our online selves who were in love, and we did not wish for reality to place its grubby hands on the delicate binary of our connection.

I learnt much from her about how to craft a post, and enter a certain character relevant to the kind of responses I could expect. Holding the tone not just for the original post, but through all the replies was of utmost importance. She was a stickler for good stewardship of a post too. Each person who responds must in turn be responded to, until the tangent was exhausted. Respect the post and it will respect you, she’d say.

Suffice to say that while under her wing I enjoyed a small period of notoriety on the boards I frequented at the time. With her as my post whisperer I entertained other members with well expressed intelligence and wit.

Sadly it was not to last. She ruined the ligaments in her fingers in what she would only describe as a bizarre sewing accident. Because her fingers had betrayed their fidelity to the keyboard with a seam work flirtation, she had paid a price. These fingers were only meant for one purpose, she explained, and she had strayed from their first love. The mojo was lost from her fingers, the damage robbing her fingers of their rhythm. She would never post, and I would never ‘see’ her again.

I was crestfallen, and without her, could not post with the same verve I once did. I still make posts that no-one responds to though, in the hopes that she still at least gives them a home.

Posts are literature too.

Norman Huddensclove

Quite a curious fellow, who was into making sculpture out of tampons. When he wasn’t designing scale models of buildings with them, he was designing period design tampon firing weaponry to lay siege to them with.

Watching the progress of Norman’s sculptural efforts was like watching the evolution of man’s technology over time. Through the stone, bronze and iron ages forward each new year was greeted with a new period of building design, with the siege weaponry to go with it. He said he kept old period pieces in a storage locker in the suburbs. Buildings would be populated by tampons secured to a small carboard base with meticulously painted body and facial features. His ability to bring out great painted detail despite the absorbent nature of the tampon was truly something both fascinating and worrying.

Norman of course was a huge history buff, and that’s how I got to know him. If you could stand to wade through a white sea of historic structural decay and broken ammunition in his small flat he had much to offer in the way of study aids, and he helped me through some of my history papers at university. Nothing quite sticks in the mind like a historical scene re-enacted entire through the mediums of paint and tampon.

Unfortunately, Norman’s career was washed into oblivion in a flash flood. The irony was rich when it was noted that the tampons had soaked up most of the damage, while leaving his other, less prized possessions, mostly untouched as a result. A particular favourite of Norman’s had been a staging of the story of the fourty-seven Ronin, who, for a second time it seemed, had sacrificed themselves in the name of their master Norman, but in doing so had hurt him all the more in the process.

The whole event was too much for Norman to absorb. He tried to make a claim through his insurance, but of course no-one at the company would put a value on what he had lost.

I never saw Norman again after that. Last I heard he was living an isolated life by a beach, and now apparently works on pontoon technology to help save stranded dolphins and whales.

Conrad Shipwhittle

I met him at a cemetery. This was while I was dating a woman whose ex was dead. She lost him on their honeymoon at a pretty young age. I believe her family name was and to this day still is hyphenated with his, even now that she is married to someone new. Some things stay with you forever I guess. We weren’t really right for each other and it was, truth be told, the wrong time in our lives for each other. But she lent on me and the force of that against my own then listing self held me upright. It lasted for as long as it did, and every third Sunday of each month during that time we’d make the trip to her ex’s grave.

Every time I went I saw Conrad there. He had a mess of brown hair that always appeared to be in the same configuration every time I met him, like a surfer who’s stayed by the sea until the salt cakes his hair into place, never to move again. Otherwise there wasn’t much about him to look at, always the same pair of overalls, beat up no brand shoes and a pair of engaging but somehow distant eyes.

Except for the fact that he looked all of 17 years old, working in a cemetery.

I didn’t get to know him until after the woman and I broke up. In the aftermath I still took her to the grave (she didn’t drive, not since the accident) but she always insisted on catching the bus back. That gave me more time to kill once she’d finished visiting the graves, and I’d linger over the others, quietly leafing my way through concise memories that loved ones had defined lost lives with.

I was considering the life of one Peter McDowlingstock 1925 – 1981: “He loved hard, until his heart couldn’t take it anymore” when I heard a voice from behind:

“Makes you think, doesn’t it.” he said.

“Yeah, almost rude in a way, a headstone really ought to give a SPOILER alert before doing that to you. I’d like to be asked first, not be made to think. Besides, it can ruin the road of life when things point out the potholes like that.”

“To be honest, I wouldn’t know.”

“Yeah? You have no thought one way or another?”

“Not on life itself, I’ve kind of taken a break from it.”

“Hmm… thus you spend your time here with the dead?”

“Sort of. I’m here free of charge. The church that looks after this place gives me a room, food, and an internet connection, so I can frequent the cemetery caretakers chat rooms and get the latest on ground and headstone care. I’m here for free, and I think my form of gratuity comes in paying respect to the dead. I’m here off the back of people who leave loved ones here and are separated from visiting them by life. I’ve stepped out of life and found a place where I fit in their stead.”

“That’s strangely introspective for a teenager.”

“My friend, I’m already 28. I’ve lived life to the fullest. Since day one, my parents told me, I was full tilt, didn’t know how to stop. I’ve run with the bulls, climbed Mt Everest, played medic to guerilla insurgents, learnt seven languages, built homes for the poor, fought with sharks, plus a little more. Even met a woman.”

“Here we go.”

“You might say that. She was the first woman, the first thing, to ever make me stop to take a breath, because in the following instant she’d always steal it away again. I loved her, but my passion, like so many other things, was too full on, too much. There was no balance. In my passion for her I neglected myself. I actually aged in that time terribly. She couldn’t stand to see what she felt I was doing to myself, and said leaving me, while breaking her heart, was eventually for my own good.

“Wow, how do you recover from that?” I interjected.

“I don’t know, I’m still recovering. I’ve taken a holiday from life, and my body, as you can see, is getting back into shape, but the rest of me… I dunno. I feel like I take it easy, I feel like I slow down with these people of the past who have now stopped forever. But I look around me, and the work I do here…”

“This is one of the most well kept spaces of earth I’ve ever seen. It’s almost CGI good.” I continued for him.

“That’s right. I don’t know if I’ve learnt how to slow down enough to get back into life. I don’t know if having my breath taken away again means having it taken away for good.”

“And now here we are, with Peter McDowlingstock.” I finished.

“Yeah.”

I lost track of Conrad after a while. I stopped taking the woman to the grave, and going there just to chat to Conrad seemed an extravagance in a life of pressing matters that required attending. He no longer works there, and he’s no longer to be found on any cemetery caretaker message boards. Rumour on the net had it that he’d gone to take care of a small plot in the Ainu community in Northern Hokkaido. At his cemetery they said they thought he’d gone off to study Archaeology.

I sometimes wonder what his headstone will read.