Ecological necessities are not votable

I used to watch the whales from my grandmother’s upstairs window. Trying to focus her huge binoculars in my hands to see amongst the red-herrings of sea-weed, if there were any big moving bodies of energy about. We like them being there, even though we don’t watch them daily anymore. To kill them… it’s like flattening an island, sinking a ship full of people, tearing down a mountain, cutting out a rainforest, blowing up my neighbour’s home…
Humans cannot live without anything else to sustain them. Even lead boxes let things in and humans have pores that sieve the air and great big blow holes taking in and expiring. We interact with the earth and its creatures, we even interact with the energy of far distant singularities. Interconnection cannot be denied. I’ve tried thinking about a way a human could sustain itself without anything else and I came up with the idea of humans feeding off humans. It wasn’t a utopia and it still didn’t quite make sense.
So I reckon we’re not actually destroying the earth, we’re destroying our habitat. The earth will live on, it’s bigger than us. Humans will die off. And I like humans. It’s just that some of their systems tend to run backwards, or take way too much time to catch on, making human survival doubtful.
As I voted today (incidentally in a polling booth which is normally an army barracks) I thought, is there satisfaction is killing when it is not for hunger? Or are people doing as they are told because someone else says the only choice they have is this? And why indeed is it that only a couple of parties really get to have a say; when one is prepared to pulp Tasmania’s forests, and the other is stuck in the raciest and dirty industries of the 1950s? And neither would be prepared to protect the big visiting locals who travel the sea.
When people are forced off their land they own, with guns to their head so that companies can mine it… I just find Australia a little strange. But at least there are some organisations out there prepared to body-guard the whales.
http://www.seashepherd.org/
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/

Threads and buttons and leather looks

I’m very minimalist in what I wear. I tend to get paint on everything anyway. Besides, I’m not sure if I want to have garments that make people look at me, because I’m not quite sure what the point of that is.



There was a woman sitting across from me, on the tram. I noticed intricate patterns on her skirt. They were like nothing I’d seen before… but my mind started reminiscing about lace-work my nana made and that long, long dead relative that was a court embroider. The tiny delicate stitches. They were gold against the black and swirling. I was wondering who made it. I forgot it was a skirt... I forgot there was a woman wearing it, until I reached her shoe and looked up.

Her face was like a snarl that had been hit by a shovel as she looked at my plain shabby clothes splattered with paint. Okay, she didn’t get the same treat when she looked at my gear, so I guess it was rude to look upon the beauty and wealth of her material.

I told my friend Buddy about this. He said, “You just don’t want to look at women’s skirts, in general.”
“But it was so pretty.”
“Even more reason to not look apparently.”
“Why do they wear things that are so attractive if they don’t want people to look? She was just a middle-aged woman. I wasn’t eying her off, even if I was into that stuff.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been in trouble for it too.”

I get recycled clothes, this has to do with what I call “ethical economy”. My priority is for pockets. Also, Melbourne’s weather changes in a snap and I’m out for a sunny day and then the rain and wind comes in.
This happened recently, but I was lucky enough to be passing by a shop. And they had a nice red coat for me. Unfortunately this came with unknown problems… I found that my keys disappeared, for there was a hole in the pocket and my keys were jangling around in the lining of the coat.
Then, on the way home I was about to get off the tram when a nice young chap tapped me on the shoulder.
“You’re losing your buttons,” he said handing me one of my little cherry-red things.
“Thanks,” I said. Thinking about how he would feel if someone came up to him and said he’d lost his leather… coat. Yes he might just be as red as my button in some places.
Look, I was cold and hungry, and at the point of wanting to feast on some poor little fish or anything else that I could find. Clearly I was losing my buttons in more than one way.

Scent trail

I was walking through the local gardens and got a whiff of this sharp biting scent. I remember the smell from bushland when I was nine or so, I found a chrysalis and wanted to take it with me, but thought better of it. I have no idea what the creature hiding inside the opaque brown thumb-sized hibernation was; but there were many of these cocoons and they had that strong acidic smell which only seemed to be present during the early evening.
Just small little black flies in the air. The dragonflies had their wild day in our city garden. Probably should do a painting of them. Made such a motorised buzz of noise when they zoomed past or rammed me in the nose. So I was thinking the smell was either cicadas, or wasps.
If I could digitally record and map the particle wave patterns from this scent, load it into Google, then get an instant answer it would stop bugging me… This sort of thinking waffled through my mind as I created Scent trail. It's not really how things look, so much as the picture a scent creates in my mind that drives my hands to explore on the canvas.