The tale of the horse that tried to kill me.

I suppose I should really get around to writing out this story and how it made me feel - one, because it's an interesting story and two because it made me feel a whole gamut of emotions that I want to crystallise because they were particularly interesting.
So.
I'll set the scene. It is about 5:30 in the morning in Fiji, and we are in a van on our way to the airport in order to catch our flight home. Our driver is travelling down some winding roads through villages at quite a fast pace. I was seated in the front passenger seat, and the entire family are seated in the back. Most of us are leaning on our seatbelts and trying to rest. I, for most of the trip, had sat with my knees drawn up to my chin and my head on the seatbelt, however, I had just sat up and stretched my legs out beneath me, leaning back straight against my seat. I am aware that had I not made this move, I would have not have survived what happened next. My eyes, unfortunately, were shut.
There was a dull crump sound and then a lot of things started to happen.
I don't remember the airbag hitting my face - I didn't even feel the burns it left until a little later on - but I do remember the car careening wildly and the driver swearing. Everyone was yelling. From what I heard later, most of them were pitched out of their seats, and my younger stepbrother cut his hand open on a bit of flying glass. But of course I was more concerned with my own predicament at this point.
The entire dashboard of the car had caved in. The windshield was shattered and slanted inwards, almost at a point. The glovebox, had I still had my knees under my chin, would have broken my legs. As it stood the glovebox was a scant ten centimetres from entering my stomach. Understandably, in the four seconds it took for the driver to get the car to a stop, I emptied my lungs yelling, as did everyone else.
As the car stopped, I found myself unable to open the door, as the handle was completely obscured by caved in dashboard. Instead I had to wriggle over the seat - marvelling at the vast amount of broken glass beneath me that somehow, miraculously, did not cut me. We got out and I took stock of our surroundings. The driver, through immense skill, had stopped us pitching off the road. We had stopped dead in the middle of a lane, and there was a horse lying on the road just behind the van, stone dead.
Now, as horrible as this sounds, there is a punchline to this story - but I won't get to it just yet. I said I wanted to cover my feelings while they were fresh - so to speak - in my mind, and I will.
The first thing I did when I got out of that van was pray.
Which I feel I should examine because I'm not one for prayer. It's interesting that even the most anti-religious person, when faced with something so overwhelmingly fortunate as to survive something that should have killed them, will probably hold a glimmer of spirituality. I shudder to think of the athiest, who, on his deathbed, sees the shining light and says to himself "Oxygen deprivation to my brain..." and thus dies and misses the bigger picture. And I was annoyed with myself - that it took something like my impending demise in order to incite such thoughts in my brain. Even now, with this event a week past, I find it difficult to have faith. At the time though, I knew. I knew something was watching over me.
The other emotion that I wanted to examine was cold fury. Interesting that in that white-hot moment, in that instant were I was pretty convinced my existence was going to come to an end, all I had room for was blinding rage. I didn't even have particular room for fear - all there was was shock, and then anger. Lots of anger.
I suppose I was so angry because my life at the moment is quite wonderful. I had been a week in Fiji - a week away from the people who I have found to be quite lovely. And in that moment I suppose I was utterly enraged at the fact that I wouldn't get to see them again. That my life would be cut short before I got to say the things I wanted to say, do the things I wanted to do, experience all the things I hadn't yet - and that these people were intrinsically linked to all those things. In a very real way, that incident taught me that life is too short not to love - especially when it could get a hell of a lot shorter at any time.

AND NOW FOR THE PUNCHLINE.

So we were sitting there on the side of the road, huddled up like penguins. Concussion had set in and my eye was searing agony from the airbag. We were quite sorry for ourselves, and as we waited for the back-up van to come and get us, a car came along the road. Traffic was having a difficult time getting around us, the lane was taken up by the van and the dead horse, so they were only able to use one lane. This car tried to get past at the same time as another car, and they ended up facing each other - so this car, driven by someone who clearly was very impatient, attempts to drive over the top of the dead horse.
Over the TOP.
Of a DEAD HORSE.
And as my little sister burst into tears at this supreme act of idiocy, the car gets stuck on the horse and is unable to reverse off or carry on. The wheels spin and the motor roars, but the car is stuck fast, a breached ship on an iceberg.
STUCK ON TOP OF A DEAD HORSE.
So five burly Fijian women get out of the back and start to push the car off the horse in their floral print dresses, and this was about the point where I fell over laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. It may have been delirium from the adreneline and concussion, but I don't think I've seen anything so funny in all my life.

Fijian Diaries.

Day 3
12:15pm
It has taken me this long to find an opportunity to get out my laptop and document my experience here in Fiji thus far. This might give you an indication of how busy it has been – or how lazy I am. I’ll attempt to cover, in a nutshell, how things have been.
Plane ride = quite good, though I had a screaming toddler in front of me, and when one’s Ipod has run out of batteries that thing can be the biggest pain in the eardrum. Something this trip has taught me is to never, NEVER, bring children with you on them. They are too young to appreciate the astronomical cost and luxury, they will monopolise your time, and they will limit your activities. Plus, they are hell on planes. Your nerves will be more frayed AFTER the holiday.
So, anyway. We got there and went and stayed at Novotel hotel the first night, as our resort was an hour and a half away by car and we landed in Fiji at about 6pm. I ordered room service. The icecream was fantastic. The shower was not. The air conditioning was beyond my comprehension. I had a bit of a sleepless night.
The next day we were roused at 7 by the parental types and went to have breakfast – and again I have learnt something about my constitution. It seems that a habit of getting up late and eating breakfast at about 2pm over these holidays has trained my stomach into not eating between the hours of 3am and midday. A luxury breakfast – baked beans, bacon, eggs, toast, the works – is quite a shock to the stomach and mind after such rigorous conditioning. The orange juice helped, though.
Then we boarded a bus for a very long, very hot bus ride to our resort. I regret to inform you that I slept for a portion of it, but for the rest I looked out the window with interest. Fiji is two things that Australia is not – green, and poor. The place looks like the artist got sick of all the other colours and determined to paint a landscape using nothing but green and blue – and I honestly believe if he wasn’t worried about realism he would have made the sky green too. The place is absolutely lush. Palm trees, sugar cane, endless rolling hills and fields, marvellous. Of course, Fiji is a poorer nation than Australia – I think their main sources of income are tourism (judging from the amount we had to pay) and sugar exports. However, it was a bit of a shock to glance at the houses we drove past and to see that by Australian standards, ninety-nine percent of them would have been called hovels. No doors, dilapidated roofs and walls, paint on the outside but rarely on the inside, outdoor fires, filth – the people keep themselves and their clothes clean, but the living conditions are appalling to imagine. Funny, then, that the people I have met so far are exceedingly happy. I suppose most of them were employed by the hotels to be just that – I shall have to wait and see what happens when we visit one of the villages.
To wrap this up – we got to the resort, absolute luxury, but most of the holiday goers are fat and/or old. The only kid around my age is, by an astonishing coincidence, exceedingly attractive. I suppose we’ll see what happens there. He did smile at me, so that’s something.
Got to my room, walked on the beach, read a book all the way through and slept that day and night away.
I am writing this at half past twelve, after waking up just in time to go get lunch. In five minutes I am being picked up by bus to go to this zip-line thing – apparently the largest flying fox in the southern hemisphere. Sounds like fun. I’ll write more this afternoon.
4:15pm
Well, that did nothing for me. I don’t know why, but it didn’t. Consisted of several zip-lines that went through the jungle to several different platforms. Everyone else seemed to get an adrenaline rush out of it – I just thought that it was rather a nice view. Oh well. The bit where the girls caught sight of a giant millipede was suitably funny.
This evening there is a ‘crab race’. Apparently you have to pick a crab and pit it against everyone else’s crab on a track. I am intrigued.
10.33pm
My crab lost. Sadface.

Day 4

12:09pm
Breakfast here is a sickening affair. Sausages, bacon, eggs, salads of all types, fried rice – for a stomach used to one piece of toast or two weetbix, it is particularly stomach-turning. I can never manage much.
Turns out that it was probably a good thing I didn’t fill up on scrambled eggs, though – as I needed the room to fill up on salt water. Today we went snorkelling. I probably ingested more salt water through my snorkel then I have in my entire life. Particularly amusing was the snorkelling guide – and it struck me how different things are over here. Back home, you would have had to sign documents promising not to sue, there would be strict guidelines, the works. Here, our warning/legal procedure consisted of “Don’t go too far to the left, and watch out for anything spiky, it’ll probably be poisonous.” Gotta say, very refreshing.
Despite my poor ability at breathing through the damned snorkel, we eventually got out into the thick of the coral and in no short order were investigating schools of fish, giant clams, sea urchins (spiky! Must be poisonous) and fish that looked like the bastard offspring of a lizard and a vacuum cleaner.
Out there, surrounded by the teeming, vibrant life, with the sound of the waves echoing around (and sometimes inside) my snorkel, I felt suddenly and intensely close to God. If he does exist, he’s in the reefs. Indeed, this entire trip has made me feel a lot more spiritually aware. I think it must be the people. For example, we were driving through a decrepit, tumble down village the other day, where the inhabitants were all living in poorly constructed shacks. Their church was the same, and the sign outside read “The Church for those who know their God is great and will do great exploits.” And everyone we saw was smiling. I cannot help but be impressed by the prevalence of the faith here. Every village has a church. Perhaps here God is stronger. His enemy, Technology, is certainly absent.
Anyway, now I have lunch and apparently a trip to some hot springs. Strangely, all that salt water has worked up my appetite extremely.
10:03pm
I didn’t end up going to the hot springs. I fell asleep and slept till dinner. Holiday life is bringing out the sloth in me.
It is interesting how many Indian people holiday here. I’m not sure why, but something like forty percent of the guests are Indians. My mother tells me that many Indian families came here to work on the sugar cane when the industry took off – they had to, she asserts, as Fijian people have a reputation for extreme laziness. I’m not sure how true that is, but it results in dinner usually being some form of curry. For someone like me with finicky eating habits...
I am worrying my mother immensely. She can never hold her tongue about my weight – I should be admitted to hospital, I’m so undernourished, no wonder I’m tired all the time, why don’t I go try the beef and potatoes. It is a sad fact that I often find it impossible to defeat my tastebuds. They are used to highly processed fodder.

Day 6
1:39pm
Yesterday was too full for me to find time to write, but I’ll type it out here.
We went to an island to watch dancing and firewalking and stuff like that. I have encountered an amusing phenomenon called ‘Fijian time’. Two minutes in Fijian time is about twenty minutes Australian. They take so long to get anywhere and to do things, but they don’t seem to mind.
The firewalkers were very impressive – walking over hot rocks that then had water poured over them to prove their heat. The dancing was also quite neat, and the girl in the hula skirt who flung the knives around was breathtaking. I did not enjoy the boat ride back from the island around midnight, surrounded by drunk, middle-aged holiday goers. I did see a sea snake, though.
So, that was all yesterday. This morning I had a massage. My muscles feel like water – truly fantastic. I think my mother actually managed to fall asleep as they were massaging her.
Tonight is New Year’s Eve. There are to be fireworks, apparently. I’ll have to think of some resolutions.

Day 7
5:36pm
Today is New Year’s Day, and as 2010 hit the coast of Fiji I was being informed by my brother that he hates me, that the entire family hates me, that I’ll be booted out of home in a few months, and that every friend I have ever had or have hates me or will hate me. Happy New Year! Ah well. I thought of some resolutions, too. I’ll write them up later.
This will be my last entry as we are waking up at 5am tomorrow in order to catch a plane back to Australia.
I suppose I’ve figured out a few things about holidays – this being my first time away from home soil, so to speak. I’m not sure I enjoy travelling – or at least, staying at this kind of resort. It seems to attract two types of people – the middle aged who need variety in their boring lives or parents who want to treat their kids. I fall into neither category and thus probably didn’t enjoy this kind of place as much as I could have. A week is a long time to be away from one’s busy teenage social life.
Still, it was certainly an experience – snorkelling, sunsets, the mildest curry I’ve ever tasted – and I am grateful to my parents for taking me on this, the last year I’ll spend at home. Though when I heard the cost, a part of me would have preferred the cash.

Immoral Morality

Justification of departure from purity,

Is simple; when forced, you’ll do what you must

It’s a given that people may claim to be moral,

But when push comes to shove, in evil we trust.

And it won’t be a sin if the voices are silenced.

Because it isn’t a cage if the bars keep them out.

Guiltless and faultless we are when we’re driven.

The will of the masses is never in doubt.

We tried and we failed to live and be righteous,

The only way out is to take what we crave.

Corruption of morals is the natural order.

To live for another is to live as a slave.

Aspirations of sainthood are foolish, pathetic.

We are all ourselves, nothing more, nothing less.

To feed our desires on the ruin of others;

Satisfaction of ego is the one happiness.

And the best part about it – the crux of the matter;

This method of self-satisfaction is all,

That people are left with when morals prove useless,

To embrace your nature, in corruption’s call.

New Year's Resolutions

1) Create more.

2) Give up on this ridiculous notion to regulate your emotions.

3) Be happy.

Merry Christmas.

brb fiji

Glimpse

Rumpled sheets and body heat,
smooth skin and silk.
Fulfillment in flesh and flame,
within you.
White-hot need,
within me.
I am drunk with desire, desperate with it.
Hand down your spine, grip in my hair.
Contact, lips locked in a twisted smile.
Yours.
Mine.
Possession and surrender in a blurred union.
Do you feel the resonance, the harmony?
Our heartbeats as one, our fires as one,
our lust,
our desires,
as one.
One.
Whole.
Pressure and power and in that white-hot moment,
something more, greater than the sum
of us,
the parts.
Bliss, in that glimpse.
Come.
We have walked in the shadow too long,
Let our bodies lead us to the light,
Our union guiding the way,
to the moment when we will be strangers no more,
walking the path to the glimpse,
as one.
Fulfillment in flesh and flame,
White-hot need,
Locked lips and passionate hearts,
and bliss, in the glimpse.
Our bodies guiding the way.
There is nothing to fear.

For I am you, and we are not afraid.

Physical Abuse and Side-Effects

I got physically assaulted this evening by representatives of a society that is making every attempt to annihilate me off the face of this planet for my sexual orientation, and am sitting here hating myself for falling for heterosexuals and coming to the conclusion that I am never going to find someone to be happy with.
So I'm going to deconstruct these feelings in this blog post and thus feel better about them.

Kind of silly, really. We were down at a big park and one of them recognised me from high school. Did the whole "Oh no, get away from me" spiel. Like I was contagious. Ignored him, walked past. Saw his shadow loom up behind me. Didn't bother retaliating, just felt sad about the whole thing. I knew what was coming, and sure enough, I ended up having a fist swung into my gut. Knocked the air clean out of me. Didn't feel angry at all, only sad. And winded, of course.
Now, to deconstruct my original thought trail.

These people do not represent your society.
Hell, everyone in the group was prepared to kick the living shit out of them in retaliation. Lay actually went haring off after the guy as soon as she noticed I was on the ground. Ben had his knife out, for godsakes. For every person that wants to kick you until you pass out, there is one who will defend you to the death. Do try and remember that before you think that the entire society you live in is represented by these cretins.

Society is not out to get you.
Compared to how your kind (god, like I'm a species) has been treated in days past, you have it easy. You have no right to complain of injustice. You probably shouldn't have been in the area anyway, despite the fact that you live in suburban Canberra. The simple fact is, there are some people around which you are not safe, but you shouldn't feel in danger if you're sensible about it - and most of the time you don't, do you?

You can't help how you feel.
You're usually pretty good about this whole thing - feelings for those who will never return them is a fact of life, not just of homosexuality, and you've had to deal with your fair share - but it is ludicrous to hold yourself responsible for falling for people who won't fall for you. It isn't something you can control, and that one time you tried to, it ended badly. Let it go.

You are happy with people now - being in a relationship wouldn't alter that.
Yeah, I know what you meant. You want someone to love and hold and 'be with'. I get that. But you're with people - many, many people - who make you happy every day. You need to remember and appreciate that more. Just because you're not romantically entangled does not mean you're alone.

Right, I feel better! Now to make me a sandwich!