antarctica, et cetera

Vast Antarctica, yet not so vast or curious that it cannot be eclipsed by the thought of her face.

Antarctica: the place to experience unrequited love.

An Antarctic journal in which can only be found thoughts not of Antarctica but of a woman with whom I've become enamored.

Her "should-be-socks dress."

Her trapezoidal nostrils.

Sliding on my back down a snowy slope of Observation Hill, craning my neck back to look upside down uphill at her sliding about 25 feet behind me - the soles of her boots, puffy coat, raised mittens, the peak of the hill rising behind the pom-pom of her hat. And this is a contorted metaphor for what aspect of our relationship? There need not be one, metaphor or relationship; it is enough that I'm perhaps the only one to have seen her from this perspective.

There is the kiss on the cheek. There is the kiss on the lips. But there is also the kiss placed deliberately and lightly on the corner of the mouth.

Intense heartache nightly.

Like passing a magnifying glass over a series of words, of pictures, that is, time, the magnified present between past and future. At the present time, magnified pain.

A bit of fun is the most we can expect from life.

She engages in responsible action, whereas I indulge in irresponsible thought; the honeymoon would be disastrous.

The Four Pickles of the Apocalypse.

"God what an awful place!" - J. F. Scott, 1912
***
"God what an awful woman!" - me, 2001

Hoping to survive a woman's presence as explorers a hundred years ago hoped to survive the continent.

Prometheus bound - but with skuas.

She wasn't whom I'd hoped she'd be. Letting go of a dream-reality hybrid: front half, dream; rear, reality.

Considering the feelings involved with loss, the loss of a love relationship in particular, what an immense sadness must accompany death, the loss of the entire world around you, including you.

The Great Alone, as H. Ponting called it.

Alone is the biggest word I know, even bigger than the word God.

One consolation may be that we all in the end fall into the meat grinder.

Note: Lightheartedness required.

All I'm saying is that the Santa Clause of the North Pole theoretically cannot exist without a corresponding Anti-Santa of the South, a black-bearded, purple-robed doppelganger, scavenger skuas having mutated into evil, winged elves set on doing his sinister bidding. What alternate fate could you anticipate for a town like McMurdo, Antarctica, a town during summer lacking the cloak of night necessary for Santa's selfless, nocturnal generosity, not to mention its dearth of kiddies?

The Law of Universal Transience. On a continent which appears unchanging. A frozen world without plant or animal, under 24-hour sunlight.

After five months in Antarctica I land in Christchurch, New Zealand, to the news that a friend has shot himself dead. The sun never set those months in Antarctica. I'm grateful in Christchurch there was a night to wander in.

Reading cyberpunk fiction in the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Hot little cyberpunk cuties carrying an old-fashioned wicker picnic basket in the park.

Cassowaries. Ostriches. Emus. Rheas. Flightless birds the height of humans.

Downtown here in Chinatown, Sydney, a few blocks from my hotel, just past the Eros Theater, there's a church with a big picture of Jesus' hand with a stake through it, and below the picture a sign reading "Body piercing saved my life."

The most spectacular sight in Sydney: Not the opera house but the two rows of trees running the middle of Hyde Park, the branches of which rise, converge and knit together a cathedral ceiling. In the evening the branches begin dripping with fat bats - a model for all cathedral ceilings.

Reality for each of us is what we experience more often than not.

She writes at the bar and her writing slowly unravels.

Our superhero The Powdered Wig transforms into the villainous Merkin.

Proud to be co-founder of The Shackleton Bondage Society, McMurdo, Ross Island, Antarctica.

Du bist so schmutzig, aber doch so shon.

We meet for drinks and spend the next fourteen nights together. That is all. Circumstances. Two weeks of my life. With her.

To hold each other's eyes for a moment, an extended, slow moment in passing.

If we ever see each other again, let's touch eyeballs.

Wind without lull or respite, without fluctuation, relentless wind into which you walk and against which your feeble rage rises (feebly).