What a week!  Here’s the Hits:

1. School holidays!  Yay, to long lazy days by the tepid pool, ice-creams leaving sticky, drippy, trails down salty, sun-kissed arms and almost wet, humid air, all set to the background drone of the cricket commentary.  No morning rush to dump the kids at prison school.  No homework.  No lunchboxes.

2.  Setting up the Christmas Tree.  We make a bit of a big deal about it, having a roast and some cranberry drinks to celebrate turning on the lights.  Sweet traditions of ornaments old, and one new.  The advent drawers with a tiny gift from the Elves every night.  Let’s hope they remember to leave said gifts, every.single.night, for twenty-four nights.

3.  A day of no time constraints and no drama, sitting by the pool today at a mate’s place.  Happy kids.  Happy Mums.  Happy days.

4.  Plotting and planning all things Christmas, handing out the teacher’s presents, finalising all the other present purchases, and just basically, getting ready for the fun that is the weeks to come.

5.  Chocolate and beer.  A match made in Heaven.  The End.

Have you set up your tree? Send me a pic.  Or not.  As you wish.

I have a few friends.

Not too many close ones though.  About five.  And I don’t even tend to them very well.  They are left, mostly to look after themselves, and pick up where we left off, whenever we find each other.  Somehow they are a bit like my tomato plant- I got it from The Worst Shop in the World, for two bucks, stabbed it into the Smallest Patch of Sandy Dirt in the World, and it hung in there.  Still.  Neglected?  Oh yeah.  Bearing fruit?  Double yeah.  You are my kinda friend plant, tomato.

One of my five died this year.  I have written about it a bit.  Less than I’ve wanted to, but more than Regular Readers probably have wanted me too.

For a while I thought I might try and find somebody new, to boost the membership, fill the space perhaps, but the hole is too big for me to reasonably expect anyone to fill it.  Plus, I think I like the wound open.  Maybe I’m a bit like those kids who cut themselves, the pain makes the pain a bit less.  Or something.

Anyway, I was thinking about friends, and time, and how much we have available to allocate to each, and I remembered this episode of Curb, one of the funniest shows ever made.  You are one clever/silly/annoying/cringeworthy/hilarious man Larry David, and here, you speaketh the truth.

Enjoy.

From time to time I have be known to go off on tangents regarding health practices; high doses of fish oil for the family until we were all whiffier than the Bli Bli Big Fish Farm, bucketloads of high potency Vitamin B until we were up all night pinging and burping on that good gear, Ginger Extract that had to be kept cold at all times or it lost it’s effects (apparently), Sea Minerals, Selenium, Chlorophyll, Probiotics.  You name it, I’ve probably done it.  Other than green smoothies.  Don’t get me started on those things. I think I have made it clear I will not drink anything green unless it contains Midori, or at a pinch, Creme de Menthe (Hello Mint Slice, you old friend of 70’s dinner parties and fun in a glass).

My latest is acai. I know, I know, acai berries have been and gone, but I’m still into ’em.  Mostly, I suspect, because the brand I buy comes in a fancy wine bottle.  I shit you not, it looks like a schmick bottle of vino, and in fact, it actually costs more than most of the squashed grapes that we imbibe around here.

I keep mine in the fridge, so it’s icy cold when I have it in the morning, and I imagine I’m kicking back in some tropical paradise when I slurp that baby down.  Some days I have it in a shot glass, some days a wine glass.  I have even been known to have it in the Royal Doulton champagne glasses when I’m feeling particularly fancy.

But it is the vessel in which it comes, the wine bottle, that was my undoing today, as you shall soon see.

We were a bit under the pump here this morning.  It was the last day of school, and there was a multitude of things to remember to do and to have, and today was also the day that I decided that I would get ALL OF THE THINGS DONE, so I wouldn’t have to do them with the brat-bags next week.  As well as that, today was the day I decided that I would get fit, which means it took me longer to get ready, because, as we all know, if you want to get fit, you need to look fit first.  Even though my planned exercise was running on the treadmill in my own hotter-than-the-butterfly-enclosure-at-Melbourne-zoo-when-you-have-a-panic-attack-because:FLYING THINGS-garage.  I needed to look hot, and I don’t mean my temp.

I may* have also been distracted by the internets a little bit too.

So it transpired that there was to be no fake, slowly sipping on a berry-colada, dose of acai today, it was down the hatch or not at all.  It will make my Mother’s bottom prickle to read this, but, shockingly, I decided to drink straight from the bottle.

I was over at the sink at the time of this infraction, head back, gullet open.  A bit like those good ol’ lay-backs we used to do at the bar of Brat Pack, way over yonder in the late 80’s when we called Tequilla “ToKillYa” and thought it was funny, cos it didn’t.  (And now it does.)

Our kitchen window overlooks our sideway, and lines up pretty much with our neighbour’s kitchen window.  As I wiped the berry residue of my acai-slammer from my lips, I got that feeling that someone was watching me.  I looked into my neighbour’s joint, and I could see him standing there, head turned, eyes averted.  I can just imagine him saying in his head, “I will not look at that lush, I will not let her see me seeing her swing from a wine bottle at 6am, oh those poor children, oh hang on, the children probably caused it.”

Of course him looking away and pretending not to see, has made it worse, because now, how will I bring it up?

Me: Oh hey, you know how you saw me drinking wine straight from a bottle at 6am on a Wednesday? Well that wasn’t really wine, it was my vitamins.  Special vitamins.  You haven’t seen them ‘cos they aren’t in shops.  I get them delivered.

Him: Okaaay, sure, I didn’t see anything, but okay, vitamins, in a wine bottle. Cool.

So yeah, I’m looking forward to the Street Christmas Party this year.  Shouldn’t be awkward at all.

I’ll be the one on the acai.

*My twitter feed has been particularly stabby today, so I was voyeuring around the joint, as well as checking checking to see if any of you had read my blog yet.

The other day I was lamenting alllllll of the things that I’m not doing so well at: buying too much stuff, not exercising enough, feeling like I never have enough time. Etcetera etcetera and blahblahblah.  I went on and on with this moaning monologue, carrying on about how this must all stem from some unmet need of mine, perhaps from my childhood or adolescence, perhaps because I don’t feel like I do enough, achieve enough, be enough.  That I am not enough.  Or something.

My friend was kind and looked at me as if she was listening.  For quite a while.

Then she said, “Just stop it then.”

What?

“Just stop buying stuff.  Stop doing so much.  Stop talking about imaginary exercise you haven’t done, and do some actual exercise.”

What?

“You can change your mind and your life in a heartbeat if you really want to, so do it.”

What?

“Do you want to live the life you want, or whine about the one you wish you had?  If you really want to do something, do it.  If you don’t, don’t.  Not what you think you should. What you think you would.”

What?

“And don’t blame some thing in your past, that’s just a habit that you keep on reinforcing.  Don’t think these behaviours stem from some deficiency or defect within you, that there is something making you do, or not do, these things.  You are choosing, or sometimes, not choosing, in which case you are still choosing, by default.”

What?

“You can live your life looking ahead, or by trying to steer, looking only in your rear-view mirror, it’s your choice that makes it so, and nothing else.  There is no mysterious force propelling you to perform.  There’s just you.  And your mind.”

Well.I.Never.

And then another friend showed me this tonight (clearly my friends are not feeling like friends, but like underpaid shrinks)- I think you might like to watch it.  I laughed.  Snort laughs and proper laughs too.  I laughed because it is funny, and tried not to laugh so much, because it’s true.

“Stop it.”

You might hear me say that once or twice in the weeks and months ahead.  Please feel free to say it back, if you sense one of my soliloquys coming on.    It’ll save you a good thirty-seven minutes of your life (cos aint nobody got time for dat).

What do you need to “stop it” about?

Could it really be that simple?

Today I had a massage, and something weird happened.  Not weird in a George-from-Seinfeld: “it moved” kind of way, but just weird for me.  Somehow, whilst she was unknotting my muscles, she untied something in my brain, and I now can’t seem to catch onto a thought properly.

Usually when it comes to the time of the evening when I sit to write the blog, my mind is sharp and pointy.

I have words jumping around and jostling like popcorn, all trying to pop onto the page at once.

There can be noise and television and talking and I just go into the page and tease those phrases into some kind of order.  And slash away at the lantana of the ones that don’t fit.

But not today.

Today nothing has been acute.  Everything has been hazy and fuzzy and blurred, and it’s probably lucky because I can’t quite shake the feeling of the void that opened up on the road outside my house yesterday and swallowed the life of a lady in a red car.

I went and looked at that road again today, to see if it was different to any other part of the road.

It wasn’t. Isn’t.

It’s just bitumen.

There is no way of knowing the exact spot that took her dreams and plans for Christmas and life away.

My day has been a series of images, like old vignette photos.

A day of instagram images: waving goodbye to the back of the bus carrying Nath’s Mum, the smile of the teacher as Liam gave her her present, Coco clutching her certificate on the stage, the twinkling chikkachikka of our Christmas lights, lasagne and salad arranged just so on a plate, Liam hunched over and strumming the guitar, Coco biting a Santa-red apple, sheets drying in the wind- caught mid gust, a teacup, the glossy cover of a book.

A day of frozen moments.  Disjointed and jarring, none related to the other.  A slideshow in my head that holds no meaning for anyone else but me.

Will the red car lady have a slideshow at her funeral?  What pictures will someone else choose, in order to say, “This is her, this is her life, this is who she is”?  How will they know what all those images mean?  Which colours to show?

I’m guessing they won’t.  Not really.

That hue is now lost to this world.

This morning around 7am we were spamming about the house, and just kind of Sunday drifting. The kids were getting hungry and the Mother-In-Law wanted to know what we were doing for breakfast.  Nathan wanted to go out and get a feed someplace lovely, since the sun had come out, but I wanted to stay home, because: lazy.  And on Sunday mornings I’m all about lazy.  Plus, when we stay home, Nath cooks a killer feast on the barbie with all the trimmings, and I sit and sip my coffee as time slows down.  Moments to cherish.

I put forward my stay-home argument, got my own way, and Nath hurumphed out onto that balcony to fry up the expected.

We heard a pretty loud bang from out near the road, but I put it down to someone’s outdoor furniture being moved around by the wind.  Or some other beige thing.

We went back to disparaging Daryl Braithwaite’s top 20 favourite songs on Maxx, and waiting for breakfast.

Then: sirens.  Lots of sirens.  Then a few more.  Then silence.

I went up onto our roof deck, and saw there was some kind of a bust up on the road.  I could see so many of the Sunday cyclists that clog the sharp curves of David Low Way on any given weekend, and assumed one of their number had gone for a slide.  Maybe dislocated a shoulder, broken a wrist.  Something painful enough for his mates to call for help, but of course nothing really serious.  I mean, it happened practically in my backyard.

We resumed our breakfast preparations.

Then: a helicopter.  Trying to land next to my back gate, but being bullied about by the wind.

We went out to have a closer look, and saw two cars scrunched up like discarded easter-egg wrappers.  Both facing in directions to defy the natural order of the roads.  The scene jarred.

There was nobody running around panicking.  No sense of drama, just all necks in extension, eyes to the skies, waiting for the helicopter to land.  There was nothing else to be done.  Just wait.  We sat on the footpath and watched.  An ant nipped my foot.  It hurt quite a bit.  I felt petulant whinging about it, but there wasn’t much else to say.  And it’s hard to say much over the beat of the chopper.  Words don’t mean as much when you see those whirring blades.  Guiltily glad/relieved that they aren’t spinning for you.

After a time, the helicopter did land, and I went inside, deciding I didn’t want to see, after all.  The crowd slowly dispersed.  Some, like me, left before the end of the movie, and others stayed to the final scenes, even though the plot was raw and unredemptive and you had to guess your own ending.

Turns out the story so far, is far from great.  Turns out someone died and some others are still in hospital.  Turns out some people were tootling along our road, maybe popping out for breakfast someplace lovely, just like we thought we might, and someone else just drove right into their faces.

I went and had a look at that bitumen.  I can’t see any skid marks from where their lives all turned, on the head of a pin.  I can’t stop thinking about all the funny, boring, nice, frustrating, lovely, yummy, annoying, interesting things that happened in my day today, and didn’t in theirs.

The worst thing that happened to me this day is that an ant bit me.  And it kind of hurt.

Vale, red car lady.

I hope that as you passed by our back gate, you were smiling at your girl and laughing at the day and loving that sunshine and singing with all your heart.