Things I'm Doing For Story Ideas

Martin Ilgner

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:53:47 +1200

Martin Ilgner

Joseph Szabo

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:53:34 +1200

Joseph Szabo

Evenings

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:51:00 +1200

I could not update on the night as I couldn’t get the wifi passwords for the three houses I visited. I’m really only posting this because I said I would, it was just a bit of fun and it turned out to be a pretty crappy, meandering night anyway. Keep in mind I was thumbing these little notes into my phone when I was quite drunk.

2150 It is a nice night for a nice night but the sense of calm is ominous, if only to me. My city is never windless,it must be sick, it must be preparing for something. It allows my passage through its streets as if under a watchful eye. Or it could just be the hundreds of pairs of curtains left agape like open mouths, I feel rude glancing in but nobody can rely on the manners of strangers. There is never anything of interest in their dim lounges, they are plain girls in little dresses.

2220 I meet you outside the hospital and we both have our own problems which we exchange to smooth down for each other. You always do a better job, I take mine back to roll around in my palm. You tell me I look nice and I lift my shoulders to my ears.

2240 The kids on the steps outside of Mein look like they are urgently battling sadness, they grind their teeth to keep it from spilling out from their mouths, eyes like the dinner-plates they did those sugary lines off of.

2300 I know you have been watching me so when you follow me outside I am not all-together too surprised, I don’t even bother collecting myself because I know exactly the kind of man you are: jaded, drunk, once-married, older than everyone here. I do feel sorry for the softer parts but I think this is what you were betting on, it is not enough for me to sink into. Nor is it enough to let you sink into me.

2335 Some guy is selling something similiar to acid which I don’t want if only for the memory of an ocean flooded with demons I could not get away from.

0005 Singing happy birthday in the kitchen, all the glasses were dirty, I swig openly from a bottle of reisling. I make eyes and make plans to leave with a friend who can’t decide if she is having fun or not. She isn’t.

0020 Constable Street is littered with bodies across the front lawn, devouring the open air. The grass is cold, I stay silent for fear of hearing my own voice.

0100 Standing in the doorway my friend makes jokes about the gauntlet as we wave our arms in front of us. I have been pressed up against too many bodies and I don’t know any of their names. Not everybody is talking about art or music but that seems to be where most conversations are narrowing to fit in to. Lychee flavoured gin. The girl with the red hair looks at me like either she wants me, she knows of me or she doesn’t like what she has heard about me.

0120 I have only slept with one person here.

0130 No wait, two.

0145 Your collarbones are literally about to explode from your chest, guy. If I was a kind young girl again I would cover them up with my fingertips, sling you around in the palm of my hand.

0200 Are You Having Fun? I am having the possibility of fun but you pull my head to your shoulder and you never mind the small raw things like my split ends or my haggard late-night laugh, you leave and I leave with you.

0230 We walk past the hospital again and I don’t say anything but I remember being cooped up inside those little rooms and never once hearing anybody go by and how I wished that I would. I am cursing somebody out-loud as I swing my almost-empty bottle out from under the sleeve of my sweater, I hope somebody sick hears me and knows that life will still be there for them when they are able to rejoin it.

0300 Marjoribanks is closing up, almost. We sit outside and tire of things. You ask me what happened between us and my mouth is full but my face wont allow it to work for the sake of saving itself.

0315 I don’t even make it home before it starts.

0330 Bulletproof by Radiohead.

0430 You have come back for me because I asked you to and I don’t remember falling asleep but I must do quite quickly, against your t-shirt and the warmish denim of your jeans.

Mourning Early Morning

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 19:13:19 +1200

People seemed to like a fairly recent post I did on finding a new flat mate, where I wrote about each person that came to view the room in the minutes after they had left and tonight I am going to do something similar. I am going to a party and I have put reminders on my phone at random intervals to remind me to write something about the night as it happens.

This is mostly a warning. You’ll see why later. I’ll try to keep it on one page.

Keep safe,
TN

Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:18:30 +1200

Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong

Fawn

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:53:11 +1200

I don’t know what they say about boys with small faces,
you don’t know what they say about girls with no eyelashes.
You have rear-view mirror wishes (closer than you think).
I would run to meet all of them.

I joke with my friends about dating musicians and having your fundamental flaws put to music like the cruelest of Disney films.

My pickup line was accusing boys of being gay and when they assured me they weren’t I’d tell them to prove it.
Even my dreams were crass, inside of my sarcastic sleep.
You were too efficient for my cheap lines, my overused tricks. Standing on a street corner that you swept me off of.

Who needs feet when you have somebody else’s arms.

There is only a heavy restlessness when you slip out of consciousness with your fingers beneath my neck to keep them warmed against my throat, to be reassured of my breath.

But where could we go from here?

I wish that I was one of your lovers so that you might write about me the way you do about them.

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:39:22 +1200

That is a lovely thing to say but I have written truly awful things about people close to me, I don’t exactly make apology for it as it felt justified at the time but I do regret it to some degree. Thank you nonetheless.

I often look at the list you made of every person you've ever kissed and I would be very interested in seeing what your personal sexual endeavors were like, if you would write about them.

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:03:40 +1200

Thank you for taking an interest, funnily enough I’ve had this request quite a few times and I’ve always shied away from the idea mainly because I have, unfortunately, in the past let people I know in real life read TN, including those I have slept with. Posts that aren’t even about sex/love/hurt, whatever, have been put under scrutiny by said people and I got sick of conversations that were always obviously leading up to: Is that one about me???

I also feel like I post about sex way too much as it is and it would be even more self-indulgent to list lovers and the way they make love (most of them don’t make love, either). If I was to do it, though, I would not number them because I feel that’s overly crass and I would have to use fake names. If enough people were interested I would definitely give it a go but really I think it would get pretty monotonous. Sex on sex on sex.. Uh. I don’t know.

June

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:38:49 +1200

Have A Heart is such a sick imperative.

The water from where you are from tastes of silt and leaves my speech grainy, but you don’t notice it so much the more you drink. I could live there, with you and your family. Your city’s small habits could grow on me as you did. I could linger on my knees for days in praise for this, that I did not fall for the idea of you. You were not an image in my head before you were the hand thick in my hair.

Martin Ilgner

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:20:10 +1200

Martin Ilgner

Two-Oh-Twelve

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:18:50 +1200

January. I am oppressed but still sleep beneath somebody else as if self-imposed it will be less noticeable. He does not breath when I do, I catch his exhale every time.

February. I visit the old fever hospital for the first time and become vegan because I am more of an animal than I could ever begin to swallow.

March. I rip out all of the pages here. My twenty-first party falls on the night of a massive storm and I stare my own hands with bloated pupils as they wither and fade. My Father is dying and I begin to die with him.

April. You were not in love. I am propositioned at a party and girls I don’t know giggle at me as I go to say goodbye and your mouth collapses on mine.

May. I try my best to leave my house. My dentist notices white patches in my mouth and I think these must be exclamations I have caught before they have broken past my teeth. I have said so much to strangers that in personal company I get confused with how I should act.

June. I have no love letters to look through, the season closes its legs and becomes frigid. You fuck me harder than ever but my hands still cramp with the cold as I fill out applications for jobs that I don’t want.

July. I steal my Father’s morphine tablets and we do nothing but we do nothing together. I wear a little dress and red lipstick and feel as if my body is made bold amongst a bar full of threadbare script.

August. I cry in a public bathroom. Friends call me at four am to sing ‘Call Me Maybe’ down the phone, I sit for days with my knees up to my mouth, I make plans to change my sheets. My body must be filled with salt water.

September. At the hospital you talk to my Mother with the taste of me still on your breath. I work eleven days in a row at my new job and feel initiated into a world I was so wary to join.

October. A co-worker crawls through my bedroom window and I ignore my self-perpetuation for weeks. The weather forecast keeps on repeating that next week it will be sunny. I am Snow White for an evening and repeat If Only You Could See Me Now to myself but I don’t know who I am referring to.

November. My Father’s remission calls me to tell me that I am very ill, I try to pace myself but at the start line I call people I used to love, one by one, their answers are weak and my heart mimics them. I write them letters to tell them You Have Failed but I never get around to sending them.

December. The warmest Christmas we’ve had in fifty years. Drunk in my Mother’s living room while she fans me, my body sticks to itself and I make the tightest of resolutions. I braid them into my hair and let somebody I don’t know rip them out on New Years Eve. I aim to forget instead of aiming to please.

You don't tag your posts with spilled ink or prose or anything? you could get a lot more attention for your words if you did.

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:45:39 +1200

No I don’t, I never have. When I first started doing this I didn’t even know about tags so I didn’t use them and now it’s more that I don’t want to claim that what I’m doing is anything. Like if I was to tag something as prose somebody might come along and point out that it isn’t prose or that it is, in fact, shitty prose. Tagging something as spilled ink when all of my posts are personal even if they are written in a certain way invites negative comments about what a crap writer I am, when I don’t even claim to be one.
It’s as if I were to write slut across my forehead before going out so that if anyone saw me in the arms of some random person at a bar and called me a whore I could just shrug because I know.
What I mean is: When people ask me what I do I say I am a barista or a waitress or I’m going to be studying nutrition next year. I don’t claim to be a writer. It’s something I do get a lot of shit for by overly-confident-artists IRL who are so quick to grab my hands and yell JUST OWN IT. But I don’t need to own it, what I write about lends to the idea of not owning anything at all. Reading back over older things and the style, if I have one, is not really a style at all, just a feeling of being alone in almost every endeavor I’ve written down.

While I very much appreciate the attention and the kind words from the people that do happen to stumble across my things, especially recently after I was featured in Prose a couple of times and it certainly does make me feel somewhat validated, I don’t need 10,000 people following me. I like my little bunch of followers who chime in on my life from time to time. I don’t want to bring in the whole ‘quality over quantity’ thing but mine are pretty boss. I send out Christmas cards to those who want them at the end of the year and I don’t think I could afford the postage if I was ‘Tumblr famous’.

That being said: Thank you for being so kind to be recently, especially in regards to ‘I Love All Of Them’ and thank you to whoever featured me. I’m not one for self-promotion because of above reasons but I got this close to posting it on Facebook.

Drunk On My Parents' Anniversary

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:37:53 +1200

My mother was not a damsel in distress and maybe that was the fault. Their relationship was a century and the disease that came to pick them off in the center of it was their needless coupling. My father is not the valiant-knight-type. His women are not waifs, I mean.

My father met his second wife in a bar, watching the Tour De France on a shitty television.
‘Why do they do it?’ He asked.
‘Perhaps for the prize?’ This is her, all dumpy and dour, wearing a floral shirt and no makeup.
‘Yeah, but why do the others do it?’
My Father at this point in his life looks just like every single boy I have ever fallen in love with (my Mother has similarly large eyes, like that of farm animals, that I am much attracted to in women).

Or that’s the story someone told at their wedding. In reality she had been a checkout operator at the supermarket my parents owned together. The only thing she needed saving from was the beds of other less worthy faculty members. That’s what I think of when she gives me foreign advice on my life. You sucked off a bunch of my Dad’s friends.

You’re probably wondering where this is going but this is how it ends. You may fall in love with pitiful people and they might lie down with others even more pathetic than themselves but somebody does love them and you have to live with that.
But not necessarily yourself.

Video

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:10:11 +1200

Benjamin Schmuck

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:53:23 +1200

Benjamin Schmuck

Never Have I Ever: Named Names.

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:51:27 +1200

My last best friend came to pick up her coffee table today and her mother looked at me with such a wary disdain that I felt like assuring her that I did in fact know that I was not a warm person and that I ruin the things I appreciate for lack of knowing that I do appreciate them. I would have drawled.
This empty space in my room serves to remind me of the empty inbox of my phone or the social calendar that I have not kept for months. I wish I were still on Marion Street where the year flew by with my aloneness so close to the city I was never aware of the lengths of time spent by myself. Now I count them off on my fingers as my nails grow longer and longer.
And longer and longer and longer.
Eating fistfuls of frozen raspberries over the sink while my cat chirps and swims around my feet.
Yes I know, Vita, affection, I get it.
Fuck.

I coloured my hair black to be Snow White but then I suited the anonymity of it, compared to the brash red that people claimed to like so much. I see my sister, coming up for a baby shower because people are getting older and falling in a more serious brand of love, she says You Look Dead. I don’t have to assure her that I am not but I go out of my way to cancel plans last minute so instead of Dead she just sees me as myself. Oh, that’s _____ for you, she never answers her phone, she never turns up, she always flakes. But she’s alive, so there’s that.

And longer and longer and longer.
It’s not like I don’t care, though.

Something is slowing down, Autumn is dusting its hands of me. My favourite season. It’s getting to that time where I will try to make amends with the city and end up at a bar till four and then when I get home I’ll cut all of my hair off. Some girl with terrible eye-shadow will sit next to me at a party and assume I am gay while I assure her that I have a boyfriend he just works as a bartender so he won’t be around till three am. Lying through my teeth so much lately I do wonder why the backs aren’t stained with the sloppy truth I mean to say.

And longer still.

Why don't you have any photos of yourself?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:03:49 +1200

Where are you from?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:10:38 +1200

Wellington, New Zealand.

WANT(ON)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:54:50 +1200

I want to get catty with bitches in bars.
I want to make fun of other girls for having fun when we’re not.
I want to be openly hostile about my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend
& for people to laugh.

I want to key a car in a supermarket car-park because it cut me off, like my mother did.
I want to wear push-up bras & little shirts
& then I want to make eye contact with older men.
I want to get really thin & flip off cars of boys who whistle at me.
I want to tell my daughter, when she’s old enough, that I only slept with babes.
I don’t want to have to lie to her.
I want to wear red lipstick that smudges when I kiss you, that I wipe at with the pads of my thumbs when we’re done.
I want to take photographs where everyone is caught up & laughing
& I want them to like the way they look in them.

I want to be OK about not being OK about a lot of things.

I want to buy a whole bunch of shit I don’t need.
I want to appreciate my grieving body.
I want my grieving body to be appreciated.
I want to spend the last of my pay-check on pick n’ mix candy
& I want to go for walks at night without being afraid.
I want to stop crying when I want to stop crying.

I want a hand up over a fence &
I want to put my fingers inside girls in public places &
I want to work a shitty job but to throw my hands up in the air whenever anybody asks about it because
Money Is Money &
Somebody Has To Do It.
I want to laugh about the time I got a UTI on Christmas Day with the guy I got it from.
I want to sell all of my stuff and go somewhere else.
I want to be 5’9, I want to loom over other women.

I want to feel justified.

Mark Drew

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:28:03 +1200

Mark Drew