Paul J Penton – Songwriter

The sun had now dipped down far enough that it was casting long shadows across the asphalt of the schoolyard. The minister of the local church was standing in front of a tented temporary stage rolling around a barrel as fat as a capybara while giving a running commentary on a handheld microphone. His black clad arm reached in for the grand prize – two thousand dollars worth of travel vouchers donated by XYZ travel at Chadstone…… The Lawler family. The name swept the schoolyard like radar, but nobody pinged with delight – but somebody yelled out that they knew them. Again the hand reached into the barrel, his fingers cutting through a thousand tiny moths softly nipping at his fingers another small square was secured and dug out of the pile. Sam Quentin- again no response from the crowd, but a phone number would deliver the news.

Sometimes I have to go and sell raffle tickets for various causes, I carry about a book of tickets like an executioner waiting to find a victim, most people are good hearted and the option of winning a car is helpful, and for two bucks can you go wrong? But I do get annoyed by random phone calls asking me to sell for causes I’m not so concerned about, or for that matter random phone calls almost demanding I donate. Pre-prepared donation speeches start pouring out as soon as you say who you are -Now I just stop them – unless it’s one I trust, and say I’ve already donated to charity this week… etc. I guess for them at the other end it’s bit of a lottery- but if my profile already has the word SUCKER written across the top they might think I’m an easy mark……

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Cork grows on trees, did you know that? I certainly didn’t, but while on a week long stay in the tiny port of Carviero Portugal I discovered this fact. At 6.30 am I was picked up by a slightly dillapidated land rover, just outside my hotel. I climbed in to a smell of slightly leaking or burning oil from a motor that had seen better years. My guide had a small hedgerow growing under his nose and smiled eagerly as we took off along the cramped streets, away from the sleeping sea. A discussion about the state of the economy since protugal joined the E.U. and his family kept us busy ’til the next pick-up at a range of high rise monstrosities reminsicent of the Costa Del Sol. Some English couple on a honeymoon filled the rear and then some Canadians I think.

We set out along a standard dual carriageway for half an hour before a right turn lead us into sun-burned fields and hedgerows. By now we were a convoy of four land rovers in equal states of degredation. As we approached a morning tea stop – after visiting the remnants of a castle – we pulled in to a by-way . We all clambered out and were given the run down about Cork trees. We stood around in the humid air keeping under the shade to avoid the prickly sun while our guide ran us through how the bark of the tree is harvested – after 20 or so years of growth, before getting turned into what we know as cork. This is what gets used to cork bottles , to make ‘cork boards’ etc etc. Twenty Years!

Now when I engage a corkscrew and withdraw a cork with that hollow sucking sound I think of Portugal – but it’s getting harder and harder to find bottles with corks these days – they’re all plastic- better or so they say. I pour out the golden fermented grape juice into a wine glass so clear I can see tomorrow through it and the let the wine talk to my tongue, telling me stories with bouquets of peach and lemon with hints of acidity…….

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There’s a knowing, a sense that reality is shimmering like you’re watching it through the vale of a crystal clear waterfall, looking on slightly disembodied, weightless, floating above the action while being in the action. “I’ve done this before”,or “I know what’s going to happen next”. Perhaps it did, perhaps it has. It’s more about the time than about something someone said. Maybe it’s about things that are similar to other times – like driving for example, once while cresting a hill I encountered a setting sun – it seemed to be an exact replay from a previous time- but how could it be as I’d never crested that hill at that time before – Small intake of breath, ants running in my veins. It would be real nice to have Dejau Vu about the lotto numbers, or any situation really – would we act to make it difficult – or is it already set in place though? I guess the unpredictability of it would not make it a dependable thing – it’s as if the supreme being rolls a dice and you’re craps table and it delivers snake eyes for a nano second, but that’s enough for you to know this scenario, to taste it like a familiar meal or desert. It lasts all of an eye blink- but in that eye blink you ‘know’ so much, which is so soon forgotten.

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Overweight clouds gather together toward the end of the day – all the accumulated humidity seems to be getting compressed and crunched and punched into a row of them. These big muscly clouds look as if they have been sorely bruised and are pretty angry and ready to shout. They do. A roar, an explosion, a thousand backfiring cars all at once whipcrack across the sky. So angry, so vehement that windows rattle, the ground seems to shake a little.

The clash of a cold front and a warm front had become a Titan battle in the skies, clouds wrestling one another for supremacy, but the dark heavy one was always going to win. It spits lightning down into the bay as I watch, the sky becoming a momentary camera flash and a few seconds later another round of thunder resonates inside me. After a day of ironing board heat the rain is welcome relief. Beautiful thick drops that pluck away at the strings of footpaths and roads all over town, making the tar sizzle and steam and release that smell of long trapped dirt and grime. The sun begins to set as the storm continues and these clouds continue to menace and merge into the spreading black.

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She sits on a wall on a corner near a block of flats, dress cut way above the knee, short sleeve shirt two sizes too small showing her assets. The punters drive by sizing her and all the other prospects up, but how many would think that she is a he? Or used to be. She’s got a smorgasboard of prices for any body who might pull up to see what’s on offer, this time it’s a gent, late fourties early fifties perhaps. An electric window grinds down on the passenger side and he gets a close up view and is interested. Between anxious snapping jaw drops on grape flavoured chewing gum she gives him the deal, at the end he goes for his wallet and shines a silver badge in her face. Her playful sunny mood drops to a sub arctic chill as she is ordered into the back of the car.

The drive to the police station seems to drag as if anchors have been thrown out the back of the car and in a brightly lit interview room she’s asked if she wants a solicitior – of course she does – hasn’t got a clue about this legal stuff. After a few hours in an echoing cell a handle creaks and the door opens and she’s led back to the interview room where she’s met by a pudgy good Samaritan lawyer with a pasty grip. He can’t help notice the oversized hands as they shake and files the info away in the back of his mind. She starts peeling out a schpeel about how it’s so hard to make ends meet, how she’s got a habit to feed. She starts to get the shakes and wonders where the next hit’s gonna come from to make all this go away. Composure slips down a plug hole. The world becomes all floppy and un-centered. Yes she knows she shouldn’t have been there, but where else do you go.

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Does a single day go by without at least one look up on the megalith of Google? This magnet for questions of the web world remains stable, with occasional banner changes to pique our interest, but 99.9% of the time you’re just there for that little rectangle that will provide you with the answers-NOW – or choices about the answers. Once you search has been entered – for example WW2 Spitfire aces, a compendium of abbreviated descriptions and lines in internet blue appear- some bolded some bordered, all trying to catch the attention of your eye.

In general it’s the first ten results that get all the traffic, unless you’re a determined digger and you believe there is gold lying in them there hills. Yes trawl through a few lesser pages and you’ll find a webmaster with less skills but juicier content – trust me I know I’ve been doing it for a while. Lying behind each of those titles and tags are hours of carefuly measured sweat and blood to get it in front of you – the viewer- because it isn’t so much about reading now as it’s about ‘entertainment’ and inserted media apps and clips. Fully produced YouTube clips with advertorials slung across them. It really is the new way of filling in our time- instead of sitting like cattle in front of network TV , now it’s search for whatever it might be that interests you and sure enough someone else in the world has put it on video or written about it or heard someone saying something and you can read about it on your mobile phone on their facebook or myspace or wordpress blog and engage in a communication… except those stupid spammers ruin it all. I don’t get it, these ridiculous messages they leave for me from: xzfdsgd skdkj – talking about —– akjasjdaksj anbd dkdhf;ldu bfsmsl???? Huh???

– straight to the delete bin with those ones- I wonder if that’s where the lost socks go too? Where does stuff go when you delete it? Does it still have the spark of inherent molecular memory somewhere inside the Computer or the ram or the memory – until the day the hard drive is reformatted and the slate is wiped clean- wouldn’t that be nice- to wipe the slate clean just by pressing erase- but that’s for another day.

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The oven door yawns open and a pale yellow light reveals a tray – sizzling and spitting away. The heat from the oven wells up like a 42 degree Melbourne summer scorcher-that dry sort of heat from the North – no humidity. My hands are draped in thick oven mittens that insulate my delicate skin from the sizzling surface. I pluck out the tray and rest it on the bench. Roast potatoes and the smell of rosemary suffuse the air as the lump of well browned meat is stabbed with the carving fork and transferred to the carving block. I open the top draw, the cutlery clatters together as I search for the sharpening tool. It’s handle is cloudy and yellowed from age and sits easy in my hand, my fingers protected by the butterflied ends, safe from being sliced off. I withdraw the carving knife from its scabbard and slide it along the sharpening tool toward me . It’s metal grinding on metal in a thin silver sound. I flip and push it away, flip and pull it back again, the blade gets caught in the barbs of the sharpening tool’s grooves as it goes against the grain.

Now sharpened to perfection I run the blade beneath the tap, the water pings hollow against stainless steel and echoes through the kitchen. The knife is rested on a crunchy bit of seared flesh and then glides through the roast lamb leg – easier than a surgeons scalpel delivering lean slices of meat slightly pink in the middle. They build up on the outer edge of the carving block. Steam rises up infused with the tang of lamb and rosemary. I taste a morsel and a gamey explosion of juices shatter the tranquility of my dormant tongue. My mouth begins to water, anticipating the cloudy insides of the roast potatoes, currently trapped in a their brittle scorched shells.

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A repository of discarded thoughts and ideas. An inverted volcano wanting to spew forth a lava of rejection. Paper fish swimming in a tank of air. Classic scenes of the frustrated writer, the pen scribbling on the pad, ripped from the bindings, paper cutting into his palm as he compresses and fragments and rejects another idea. Balloons of imagination again start to fill with the helium of great ideas, they’re tied off and floated and then he takes the shotgun and shoots them down and they become more tightly compressed balls that are shot into the bin. He imagines a basketball crowd cheering on his relentless desire for perfection and uniqueness, he’s almost up to one hundred points now – even thrown a few three pointers from outside the ring, but why won’t this concept come and play ball? Maybe the idea is already there, lying sobbing in the bin, it’s ego was not big enough to say – hey! Notice me! Has he just been gliding over the surface skimming for something immediate instead of taking the time to take one thing and dig it and fertilise it and grow it until it becomes THE idea?

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Tuning in on the old Rambler radio, the big dial surfs across waves of static, occasional bursts of foreign language caught in short wave swirl that licks the sound as if it were a lollipop, the sound going all curly whirly. The scanner comes across a series of dots and dashes caught in a wah wah pedal wash of high and low frequencies, but the message is constant. Automated noise filling more of the worlds unseen micro waves.

As a last resort a radio operator in a tiny metal coffin lets his fingers tap tap tap away in measured moments dots and dashes, short long long short long long short dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot, S.O.S.. this bird is in trouble, the Titanic filling up with the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, lights disappearing underwater souls trapped for nearly ever. dot dot dot……

A telegram in mum and dads photo album. Missing you ++STOP++ home soon ++STOP++ love Pete ++STOP++. In the days before international telephones he communicated from whatever part of the globe the navy had deposited him in. The notification in faded creamy paper with red borders, the message in solid black.

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Flipper on the TV, black and white from memory – or in memory. Rising out of the water on his tail and dancing – Flipper talk – ee-ow ee-ow ee ee ee ee ee…. was that really what he was saying, or was it dubbed in later on? How did a dolphin in a pool manage to solve so many problems – or did they let him out? Obviously I have too many questions in relation to Dolphins. I see it now, the skin glistening wet, the water repelled as he powers through the undercurrents, a fin protruding from the surface cutting through with ease. Beneath the water a tail working furious, like when we do a gym workout, but is he holding his breath?

Aquariums and synchronised displays of jumping and going through burning hoops, quite amazing really while bums get bored to death on cool plastic seats and we indulge in ice creams and drinks bought for outrageous prices at the kiosk. Seals barge in and annoy trying to catch the limelight- are they as intelligent as Dolphins?

Walking round the aquarium at Manly, seeing the face of a giant eel hanging almost frozen in space. The only movement its jaw opening and closing – very very very slowly – slow motion freeze frame eel. Waterworld – Manta rays fly over us as we walk through a plexiglass corridor somehow holding back tonnes of water, sharks, and parrot fish and multicoloured gropers, all in the same tank- no dolphins here- some people enter in wet suits and scuba gear- they’re going to feed the sharks- dangerous……maybe they’re all fed up before hand anyway. This world is a cosmos away from the hyperactive world of the dolphin.

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