Paul J Penton – Songwriter

The bed is comfortable, sheets new, it has a three way adjustment control panel. Watching television suspended in mid air, waiting for the surgeon. Earlier a nurse has come and checked my veins and burrowed under the skin at the top of my hand and left a tubular device in there. I feel like a cyborg, part man, part machine as the catheter sits there like a periscope. It still is a bit prickly. I hear conversations in the corridor float by on naked footsteps on the linoleum. A feint whiff of antiseptic hangs in the air like sunshine- clean and free.

The surgeon comes in, I haven’t met this one before, he’s Indian, a bit pudgy in face, but full of enthusiasm for a good result. He checks charts and tells me I’ll be wheeled out in a few minutes. It’s a strange experience, lying on a bed, being wheeled down a corridor into a zone you’ve never been before, part fear and anxiety – flicking on and off in your mind like the indicator in a car, part curiousity and excitement wondering how this might taste, this experience. After being in the holding bay a few minutes the last 30 meters are covered. It’s a room full of lights and banks of LCD screens and five or six people standing around in gowns and masks. The bearish surgeon appears above me and explains what’s going to happen, how the probe will move up through my arteries and into my heart, I start to phase out as the anaesthetic kicks in.  There are flashes of disembodied memory occuring. Pictures on the LCD television, almost like an old time photoshoot with the man under the cape and the handheld flash.

Sometimes it seems we’re hanging on by our fingertips. All hope abandoned , but just a glimmer in the sense bank that we might be able to pull ourselves out of this one, swaying in the wind over the edge of a bridge we should never have climbed, salty breezes licking our faces like a wet dog’s tongues. Hanging on, the world below, formless, memory of falling at other times, the stomach turning moment of release, but a hand comes a fingertip of hope brushes skin and safety is found, but death was just a fingertip away – maybe financial death, maybe metaphorical death nevertheless.

I play pool or eight ball, the varnished cue is silky and smooth beneath slightly dried out skin at the tip of my finger- It supplies me with the connection, the bond the one-ness with the cue as it swings back on my pendulum elbow and then follows though for a satisfying snick and drop into the lower pocket- a celebratory swig of Cascade Ale from a perspiring bottle- my fingertip feels the wetness and perceives the inner cold of the bottle. Revived, the eye scans the angles for the next shot, finger tips rest spider-like on green felt

He was half in, half out as I walked through shifting shadows cast by the stately elms. I could hear him from the Hampden hotel  until all the way up to the clock tower. His conversation was a live broadcast for all to hear. Obviously he didn’t have a mobile or he’d be using it- probably still be loud. I overheard who’d been ripping him off, who’d been sleeping with who and what had happened to his car while my eyes finished interrogating a faded epitaph on the base of a statue – John Curdie- he loved mercy and justice.  The man finished his public broadcast and got into a utility with huge whippy aerials and stickers plastered all over the back, a V8 motor gargled to life and climbed a hill of revs as it paced off down the dormant Friday night street, and there was silence. 

A thought came to me of when we were kids and we were making a call from that very same phone box, then  it had no door and smelt vaguely of urine. I remember a tatty eared phone book – how the hell did that not get stolen/vandalised? Today’s booth had been made so everything was hoon-proof as possible. The body of the phone itself with huge wrestlers shoulders and armour plating worthy of a troop carrier. Inside various tags from wanna be graffiti artists adorned the back wall – for a good time call 3#&^%&*. All the usual. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to use one, now the mobile phone is a second brain we carry round with us every where. Phone numbers/ diaries / appointments/ applications all on that palm sized piece of technology- star trek come true, the only thing missing is the ‘beam me up Scotty facility’. I’m working on that in the back room of my mind because travel is SO boring – the getting to places, the time lost in between – Driving, the monotony of being on the road, the mesmorisation of the miles and then the arriving. I think I was just about ready to bite my arm off on that three hour trip from Camperdown to Melbourne when I was kid- you know the tyranny of time thing. As a kid an hour seems to last a life time, so three life times in the car was pretty horrific. The white Valiant hemi 256, a big square thing ,with that funny radio that had all the call signs of the stations instead of the frequencies…….

He was half in, half out as I walked through shifting shadows cast by the stately elms. I could hear him from the Hampden hotel  until all the way up to the clock tower. His conversation was a live broadcast for all to hear. Obviously he didn’t have a mobile or he’d be using it- probably still be loud. I overheard who’d been ripping him off, who’d been sleeping with who and what had happened to his car while my eyes finished interrogating a faded epitaph on the base of a statue – John Curdie- he loved mercy and justice.  The man finished his public broadcast and got into a utility with huge whippy aerials and stickers plastered all over the back, a V8 motor gargled to life and climbed a hill of revs as it paced off down the dormant Friday night street, and there was silence. 

A thought came to me of when we were kids and we were making a call from that very same phone box, then  it had no door and smelt vaguely of urine. I remember a tatty eared phone book – how the hell did that not get stolen/vandalised? Today’s booth had been made so everything was hoon-proof as possible. The body of the phone itself with huge wrestlers shoulders and armour plating worthy of a troop carrier. Inside various tags from wanna be graffiti artists adorned the back wall – for a good time call 3#&^%&*. All the usual. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to use one, now the mobile phone is a second brain we carry round with us every where. Phone numbers/ diaries / appointments/ applications all on that palm sized piece of technology- star trek come true, the only thing missing is the ‘beam me up Scotty facility’. I’m working on that in the back room of my mind because travel is SO boring – the getting to places, the time lost in between – Driving, the monotony of being on the road, the mesmorisation of the miles and then the arriving. I think I was just about ready to bite my arm off on that three hour trip from Camperdown to Melbourne when I was kid- you know the tyranny of time thing. As a kid an hour seems to last a life time, so three life times in the car was pretty horrific. The white Valiant hemi 256, a big square thing ,with that funny radio that had all the call signs of the stations instead of the frequencies…….

An electric shock – a real ‘buzz’, eh? It’s a funny experience an electric shock – and as they say it’s not the voltage that kills it’s the amps. Our domestic supply runs at 240 volts, enough to kill and make flesh smoulder, that’s a particular smell isn’t it-  burning flesh, not that I’ve smelt it much, but it has a tinged barbecue meat vibe to it. Just thinking about my last electric shock, it came from a U.P.S.- an uninterruptible power supply. This thing is about as heavy as a cow and we lug it out on outside broadcasts for the wireless station I work for. This block of portable electricity will run for about twenty minutes – while you try to work out what’s happened to the real power. It charges up while being plugged into the wall and acts as a ‘pass through’ for all your other equipment- if the power fails it kicks in . What they didn’t explain in the non existent training is that it also it works back wards…….. So there I am at a site and I’m about to plug its INLET to the wall, I wrap my hands around the end of the plug and ZAPPO! It’s like having a dry vomit, a convulsion that makes my whole body rigid. Time also seems to become frozen while the awake part of my brain seeks to release my hand, but my hand is stuck in a vice grip of my own making around the bloody plug.  But I do let go, and start to breathe again. Luckily it’s only 50 Volts not 240- not sure about the amps.

Good old Mr Voltaire , back there in the dusty years of science working out all that stuff about joules and energy and Mr Watts for his clever calculations Watts = Voltage X Amperage. High school science classes, Mr Fielding doing his best to contain a rag-tag bunch of 13 year olds who’d rather be outside in the sun, we can see it through the shuttered windows. The high voltage sun…….AC/DC starts to play in the back of my mind — high Voltage rock ‘n Roll……..

Growing up in the shadow of a volcanic crater one can’t help but encounter the after effects of this mutli million year spat. Try digging your garden and you encounter these moon rocks. Happily I’ll be digging with the hand trowel to get at the root of some troublesome plant and I get a ‘ting’, a jar to my hand as I reached a submerged object, a submarine sent out by Mount Leura all those years ago. They vary in size but most are the size of your palm. They’re quite light almost lighter than a sparrow, delicate and fine with that bubbly consistency, like an aero bar. They’re not much good for chucking or skimming and actually have a slightly sharpish edge in general.

Up at the quarry near the mount we used to ride our bikes around in the offal from the excavations and mostly it was fine ground powdery stuff from over excessive rape of the cliff face, but still some more solid bits – watch out for those tyres. Up there we’d make jumps out of whatever was lying around, there were also some natural hills and dales we could get around on  in what was the precursor of a BMX bike. I had the coolest thing;  a three speed  gear change as part of my hand grip- I didn’t tell everyone else what a pain it was to use because I wanted to be thought of as ‘cool’ but in the end I think I just disconnected it.  It was on my modified Repco Dragster, then with knobby tires like black teeth that bit the dirt and the road. There was the inevitable pedal squeak and the cotter pin sometimes coming loose and the pedal knocking against the frame after I upended the bike one time….