I Returned Home At Dusk

and there were planets in my backyard.

Look:


that's Venus on the left, and Jupiter above the crescent moon which the overexposure of the photograph required by the low light levels has made into a semicircle. They are the brightest planets in the sky. They are gleaming and beautiful and I am glad I am alive.

This is a ridiculously athletic city. It is perfectly acceptable to variously undertake grave distances just to see how fast it can be done, after work. I go for an innocent swim in the harbour and end up invited to partake in annual swimraces.

On the next sunny day, Stephanie is coming over and we are going to drink cold pear cider on the roof of the neighbour's garage because once I was walking down my street and a child climbed though the fence from the undergrowth and continued up the street. She had come from the shady leafy top of a concrete shed that opens onto the street below, which immediately hairpins and passes the roof of that same shed, because Wellington has wonderful atrocious topography.

I was going to practice open sea swimming today but I went down and though the sea had been calm as death yesterday, today it was....well, people were hanging onto lampposts.

Yesterday I walked underneath a bubblegum tree.

Possessions

I have just come back from a summer at home with more additions to my sentimentality collection.

Among them:

Granny's painting suitcase. It has her initials on in black vivid, which, but for the middle one, are mine too.

The 20-year old Roland keyboard, hours of childhood musical experimentation. I still subconsciously think of stringed instruments as being in the sixties (i.e., that was their code on the keyboard)

Other comforting possessions are the tambourine my aunt painted, the screeds of postcards from various friends that are collaged on my wall, jewellery made by friends, and an old learn-the-blues book of Dad's.

I still can't play the blues.

Free Psychotropic Medications

Astronomy:

It is essential to stare at the stars past the point of boredom, until it sinks in that the stars are not going anywhere fast and that we are safe for now. Besides, eventually they will stop being mere points of light and you will find that Orion's right shoulder is a red supergiant, Beetlejuice , Sirius flashes red and blue like a police car, and the closer planets will become gleamingly beautiful once you are accustomed to the other stars which twinkle. It is nice to have such faithful friends in the heavens. Also, it is good for you.

Most importantly, if you regulartly practice imagining distances and your position in space, you will feel inconsequential enough to kill that subconscious insecurity that so defines humanity.



Mountains:

Regular achievement of their summits will (unless you are already Chuck Norris) increase your confidence in other areas of life, such as cooking new recipes, writing novels, and social interaction.
Ideally you will stop wasting your time attempting things that you already know you can do.
I get high just thinking about all the gravitational potential energy I have and how I could use it.



Living It Rough:

As long as this is not a necessity borne out of poverty, which is legitimately depressing, this will eventually convince you of the tenacity of human life, how trustworthy your survival instinct is, and how much more difficult it is to die than in the movies.
This practice can be combined with Mountains.

Lies, It's All Lies.

Colour and sound do not exist. The physical variables that they are associated with (frequency of electromagnetic energy for colour, and frequency of physical vibration for sound) are coded for by the special electrical cells in the back of the eye, and the inner ear deep in the skull. These cells are connected end to end to make 'wires' which are then each insulated from each other by a special fat and bundled into nerves. Each cell only 'fires' in response to a particular frequency, so colour and sound are coded for in the nerves by which particular 'wires' conduct electricity to the brain. It's just those particular sensory cells which pick up specific energy forms that mean that the characteristics of incoming energy represent colour and pitch.

So, the world is really grey and silent.

Perhaps the moon would actually be a really interesting place to live if you had the right brain. Perhaps they should be studying retinal cells of penguins and polar bears to see if their eyes do pick up other types of visual variations in their environments, so it's not all white to them.

But wait.

Perhaps the brain spends the first two years of life correlating incoming electrical patterns to actual sensational experience (assuming colour and pitch ARE real after all, which, fortunately for our sanity, can never be proven. I think we are so fixed in our post-modern abandonment of reality that the idea of any absolutes freaks us out), and this is why there is such poor memory function up till then.
The frontal lobes can then begin, in response to the signals from the eye and ear, to automatically call up the neuronal activation patterns which represent the reality of colour and sound. This would leave the rest of the cortex to move on to other more abstract functions, like negotiating which tv channel the family will watch over dinner time.

We pitched camp in the dark, joking about serial killers, having got to the site after 1am.
I said but there's lots of cars down there and Matthew the tax collector trailed off with "and no....people....."



and round the corner is



But we are climbing up to that saddle first, see it is about halfway up to the top from here anyway, and it is steps. The Devil's Staircase indeed. I am a sprinter (not quite), and get to take large rests waiting for the others and trying to identify foreign languages. It is blazingly sunny. The track peters out at the saddle and we sit for a while, going numb in the wind and putting layers of clothing back on. (naaassssssty hobbitses, we shall lose them at the sssummmmitt)



It is three hours to the summit and back from here. Looking up, it is just a great pile of gravel.

It IS gravel. And small scoria rocks. And large ones, none of which are connected to each other in the least. I think grovelling would be more accurate a term than climbing. Surely all the climbers eventually make the mountain lower with all the stones they are constantly pulling down.
It's only thirty degrees but it looks like sixty at least from here and we talk about visual psychology.



Singing S Club 7 when we were justabout at the summit. Don't stop, never give up, got to get high and reach the top,

It is not a summit it is a crater. That other little crater over there is shooting out steam!!! And over there, Taranaki!!! Peeping out of the clouds! Not often you see its summit. We are so above the clouds. When we look down to where we came from, that Devil's Staircase looks flat. I know damn well it's not. As for Tongariro, which is a mountain that people climb, well, it's not really a mountain, is it?

(That blue lake is one of Tongariro's craters, and behind it you can see Lake Taupo)

Snow on the other volcanos, snow in this crater. Magical. Collective exhileration, people dotted round the crater. Some nutty German is in the bottom of it, why??
We sit on the edge of it and eat apples.



While up there, I decide to run the half-marathon back in Wellington and only ever attempt things that I am not sure I can do. All that gravitational potential is intense. I am high on endorphins and victory.

Back to the scree slopes, where there is the periodic call of "ROCK" and everyone stops and looks up to dodge. It is fun making slow deliberate steps in the loose pebbles that slide for several feet.




The Devil's Staircase again. Steps!! What a luxury.

My left eye was pissing pus by this stage, but it was better in the morning so I went to the thermal pools instead of the doctor. It wasnt sore, just annoying. Must've just been full of that fine grey dust. That blister on my sole must be fifty cents size. LOOK AT MY BRUISES how did I get one on the front of my knee? I only recall falling backwards. Cool. The anatomy graduate gives us musculoskeletal advice. I love Otago expats. They are adventurous, and healthsciency.

Let us leave this godforsaken place.

Ah Wellington, I have missed you.

Today I only got as far as Lambton Quay before I had bought bohemian jewelry and headpieces to wear immediately.
And it was only a little further before a man in a superman tshirt stopped me and asked for a dollar to buy some organic pistacio's to go with the organic orange he was tossing in the air. He is a vegan. I said, sorry, I happen to be a carnivore, and gave him a $2coin and he even gave me change.

I inadvertently walked down Bunny st, even after having learnt off the shuttle driver that it is a wind tunnel. But I had survived the plane landing, and so I know I am invincible.