those creative types

A momentous week, a week of sunrises that mean something.  You’ll have an opportunity to find the best in you under the darkest of circumstances.  Pressures and stresses will try to sever you from your feelings, but you will stay strong, ensuring that you treat the taxi driver whose lateness cost you the big one with compassion, for you have it in your heart to know what it is to be human and to err and to not know about it until much, much later.  Later in the week, passions will calm, tensions will abate, and you will have one of those rare moments of knowing yourself to be no more nor less than a collection of mass-creating bosons.  Loosen the knots, and you might sail away.

This week you will start as dangerous as a wild cat, stalking the urban streets for your next meal.  The people you meet will look at your eyes and glance quickly away; your own reflection will stare defiantly back at you, unwilling to blink first.  But soon enough, the claws will retract and you will find yourself cuddling up in the softest of couches, all fur and purr.  What’s got into you this week, my feline friend?  It’s the days now getting longer by degrees, curling into your sub-conscious, making you crazy with the scent of the sun.  Soon, soon, it will wax around the globe, reaching your toes, then your knees, then even the tips of your fingers, outstretched to greet it.  Until then, you keep stalking, thrumming the early dark with instincts you would not allow in the light of a summer day.

Last week, I introduced you to Mr Middleton.  I have provided an excerpt for you below, from my interview journals with Mr Middleton, from when I first came across him. It was on a meandering walk I took, through Paddington, not long after I had moved to Sydney.  Not knowing my way around, and with thoughts of what documentary I might try my hand at next (at the time, I fancied myself a documentary maker, having made a couple of TV-length attempts, none of which had been broadcast), I had decided to try and find the next subject for a documentary simply by roaming the streets.

 The first few attempts were dismal; I interviewed some perfectly pleasant, utterly boring Sydney-siders, one a cafe owner, one a cosmetics shop proprietor.  Then I came across Mr Middleton exiting his house on his way to the grocery store.  

Journal excerpt

…His plainness, the total anonymity of his suit, made me think, oddly, of Einstein and his wardrobe full of the same suits, one for each day of the week, to avoid wasting his mental energy on menial tasks such as deciding what to wear each day.  Mr Middleton was either going to be the most interesting person I had met so far, or the least.  Either way, it was worth the attempt.

As I got close, I am sure I heard him mutter under his breath something about a “teleporter.”  Better and better.  I cornered him for a couple of questions, as he stood outside his gate, nervously fidgeting with his coat the while.  I did manage to get from him that he was a scientist of some kind, and I thought I would slip the teleporter into conversation as if I knew about it already, a technique which I had used in interviews in the past and which generally seemed to achieve greater disclosure.

Q: Where were you born?

MM: Sydney.

Q: What made you want to get into science?

MM:  I don’t know what you mean.  Science is everything.  How can one get into it when one is never out of it?  

Q:  What first prompted you to try to invent a teleporter?

MM: You know about that?  No one is supposed to know about that yet.  It’s not ready for other people to know about it.  Have you told “Physics Today?”  I beg of y0u, don’t breathe a word to the toadies at that magazine.  Not yet.  They wouldn’t know true science if it poked them in the eye.

Q: How will your teleporter work, once it is ready?

MM: I can’t say.  There’s a combination of expectation energy…but no, I can’t say.  Not before it’s ready.  They’ll just think I am mad again.  This will show them, my theories are not mad at all!

Q: What do you do for a living?

MM:  I work at a television factory, doing quality control.  But my real work is in my laboratory.  No one has ever understood, but I’m sure, if I could only work out how matter can be transformed and reconfigured rather than transported…we could save so much time…there could be instantaneous travel.  But no, that’s enough.  What was I saying?  Nothing, nothing.  Very well.  Get on now.

Q: Do you have any family?

MM:  That’s enough.  I’m very busy.  Please don’t come back, as I won’t have time.  Good-bye.

I’m afraid that’s all Mr Middleton had time for.  He did not tell me when he expects the teleporter will be ready; in fact, he seemed to want to not speak of it.  He did not let me into his laboratory, but I am hopeful for next time.  I will definitely be back.  Mr Middleton, this funny little man, is on to something.  Mad man or genius; either way, good talent….

To be continued.

This week, love is in the water, grass, trees, the air you don’t hesitate to breathe. You are fleet-footed this week, running as light as light from one task to another, and that’s when you’ll feel it; the thrum, the silent, hidden buzz; that’s love, an all-consuming, all-pervasive hug that the Universe is giving you everyday.  Between coffee and lunchtime, as you stretch your limbs and water your mind, be sure to give the cosmos a squeeze back.  It needs it from you just as much as you need love from it.

May I introduce to you Mr Middleton.

Mr Middleton

Mr Middleton.  Say hello.

MM: Oh, uhmm.  Yes, but the impersonality co-efficient.  If it was to the power of z, then proportionally it might make no difference to the material transfer.  Where’s that glass?  

Doesn’t look like we are going to get his attention, but at least now you’ve met him.  He’s like that.  I’m the only friend he has, and that’s because he doesn’t know I exist.

Mr Middleton will be making future visits to this blog, and will be setting up his own site soon enough. Won’t you, Mr Middleton?

MM:  What’s that?  No, can’t do it.  Got to work at the sub-atomic level for it to be of any use at all.

Let’s take that as a yes.  Mr Middleton.  Mr Middleton!  Do put away that bottle, there’s a good man.  (Doesn’t understand a PR opportunity when it is staring him in the face.  Might be best to close off now.)

Next week, I’ll tell you more about Mr Middleton, including his likes, dislikes, and how he came to be in the teleporter business. I’ll also be introducing you to Mr Richards.  You might find Mr Richards a little more, ehem, communicative than Mr Middleton, although I will keep trying.

Once upon a time there was a city called Sydney. 

I met Hoang back at Berkelouw’s two weeks later, to see the character drawings and the first of the scenes.  We had agreed to do this to check that we were on the right track.  

Hoang brought his wife, Cat, with him this time, and I brought Y (my fiance).  Cat was the girl with the beautiful hair whom I had met at the Paddington markets.  She and Hoang seemed a perfectly matched pair, complementing each other’s creative and business strengths and weaknesses, the type of couple you always hope will like you and, more importantly, that you will some day be like.

Hoang was excited.  I was excited.  Y and Cat were supportively boisterous.  

Hoang drew out from his satchel…

the perfect Mr Middleton.  He had the alcoholic red nose, the disconsolate slouch, and the round belly of middle-age that I had imagined without actually  imagining it quite as perfectly as this!

Mr Middleton was closely followed by Mr Richards.  Again, perfect.  Hoang had achieved his angularity, his moonish dissatisfaction, his quiet desperation, and made him look likeable at the same time.

The crowning glory…the first scene, to go with the opening words:

Once upon a time there was a city called Sydney, in a country called Australia, built like an old-fashioned beehive across a flurry of sprawling, sparkling, rudely alive water.  Tall buildings sprouted out of the city’s conical centre, around which clustered thousands of winding roads and terraced houses.  Homes jostled with offices and buildings inside of which people lifted weights squeezed next to places where they put them down again.  All around, streets spread like lines of hardened honey for hundreds of miles, people buzzing to and fro, some filled with music, others with rage, others with forgotten shopping lists that in turn concealed memories of loved ones, of regret; all of them keeping the veins of the city alive.  

It was glorious.  Hoang had given so many little details which revealed themselves only on closer inspection, and had taken the essence of the scene and the entire story and captured it.  He got it, and he had translated it into a look, feel and masterful illustration.

I almost wept into my LSD.

“So you like them?” Hoang asked, grinning.  

We spent the next twenty minutes being excited together, before agreeing to come and see him at his home and office in the Blue Mountains in two weeks time to see the final two drawings for the pitch package.  

Hoang had already made me see the possible wonder of the book.  Now we just had to show these pictures to the publisher and give them a moment of wistfulness in their days, and see how they responded.  

To be continued.

You may feel like it’s a bit too soon for the week to begin, but it will begin without you if you don’t hurry into your best shoes and don a nice smile to welcome the new days, each one freshly minted from the giant day-press on the other side of the sky.  This week will find you most days with neat hair and matching sunglasses. You will naturally look just like your favourite Audrey Hepburn photo by virtue of throwing on a headscarf and dashing out the door to your next appointment.  It’s something in the weather this week; something at the mundane level about humidity straightening out your hair, and at the sublime level about you coming into your own.  Each one of you a movie star in your own right, each one a shining beacon of your own fashionista trends (inside and out).  You know you look good; how could you not, the way you feel right now?   Come on and share some of that good sweet stuff you got going on with the rest of us, throw one of those heart- bedazzler smiles our way.

In which I am asked the question, what does a teleporter actually look like?

It was 10.06 pm when the phone rang, about three days since the events of my last self-publishing post.

“Jackie?”  

“Yep, Hoang, how’s it going?”  Trepidation..he’s going to say it’s too hard..

“Good, good.  I was just wondering, if you can tell me because I can’t really find it in the story: what does the teleporter look like?”

“Look like?”  

“Yeah, look like.”

“Umm…”  I racked my brain for a memory.  Surely I had imagined what the teleporter would look like…”Um,” I improvised.  ”I guess it might look sort of like, there is something coming from the ceiling…actually Hoang, what do you think it would look like?”

Nice save.  

“Well, it could look all industrial, so with like, red lights and big metal doors and things.”

“Oh yeah, that sounds cool.”

“Or, it could be more minimalist, like, just a light from the ceiling, with a few hooks.”

“Oh, yeah, that too.”

“So which do you prefer?”

I paused.  The thing was, both sounded cool.  But I had never really pictured the teleporter before.  I kicked myself for this oversight.

“Can I call you back?  I just need to think about it for a bit.”

“No worries!”

I lay on the bed (my favourite thinking position, after he baththub) and tried to imagine the teleporter.  Both of Hoang’s options sounded good, and I wanted to give him full latitude as the visual creative on this project.  This situation demonstrated to me how much of a word person I was, and not an image person.  It also made me feel like a bit of a nob, really.  Not knowing what the third word in the title of the book even looked like?  Dear oh dear, Jackie, I berated myself (in somewhat harsher thought-words).  

I thought, and I thought.  I eventually put the (metaphorical) baseball bat that I was whacking myself with down, and let myself realise something that had been nagging at me.  

The story was not about the teleporter.  It was about the experience of being teleported.  I had spent ages and ages, imagining what it would feel like to be teleported.  What it would do to a person.  How they would lose part of themselves in the process of becoming what the person at the other end of the journey “expected” of them (the teleporter, as everyone knows, works on the principle of expectation energy.  The downside, or upside, depending on your proclivities, is that you become what the person who is waiting for you expects.)

I hesitantly explained myself to my betrothed, who immediately made me feel like I wasn’t an avisual loser.  ”You wrote about what mattered to you,” he encouraged me.  

“So, I was thinking, do you think you could illustrate Mr Middleton being teleported, rather than the teleporter itself?”  I had called Hoang back and now waited to hear his response.

“Yeah, I think so, absolutely.  Can you explain to me what it feels like to be teleported?”

This, I could do.  ”It’s like, your whole body disintegrates, and you are a million atoms but you are none of them, and you could be tugged in a hundred directions, but the person expecting you applies their expectation energy which gathers you into the person they expect.  But before that moment, you are ego-less whilst still having self, distributed across all the different particles which are all the particles of the Universe.”

“OK…I think I have an idea.”

To be continued.

Hello and welcome to the week ahead!  This time around, you’ll find the dimension of space-time bending in upon itself (as it is wont to do), curling around your ears and tickling your cheekbones.  Sudden memories of past days will feel as real as the one in front of your eyes: your most embarrassing moment at high school,the colour of your favourite t-shirt when you were only five, the scratch of your parents’ new couch when you really wanted them to keep the old one.  If you move your head quickly, you’ll catch time spinning even faster away from you, until you are smelling the Turkish coffee from the life you spent as a travelling salesman across the Middle East, and you’re seeing the flash of a smile as you collect coins for your street act as a circus urchin.  Isn’t it sweet!    Thanks for the accounting tips back in 1818 (I never did say but I like your hat); thanks in advance of the bakery treats (you have the molecules of deliciousness just waiting for your future self to awaken).

In which I drink an LSD which changes my life forever.

In Part 8, I had just managed to locate the brother of the artist, Hoang Nguyen, who had done the picture I had fallen in love with.  I gave the man my manuscript and all I had to do was wait, and pray, and try not to pick off the entirety of the skin around my fingers (gross, I know).  

I had resigned myself to having to wait the full week before making a follow-up phone call to see how Hoang had reacted to the story.

I got a phone call on the Wednesday, just three days later.

“Yeah, look, I really like the story.”

Double take.  Swallow.  ”Really?”  

“Yeah!  You have a crazy imagination, you know that?  Some of the stuff in this is unreal.  But I think what you write about is really similar to the message that we try to give people, about living a sustainable life in touch with the environment, and making joy and family and community first.”

I nodded, a bad habit I had had since I was five years old when I used to answer the phone and nod or shake my head without speaking.  

“I think it’s such a coincidence,  you know, because we were just thinking about doing a book too.”

“That’s great!”  I said. Finally, vocalising.  Progress! “So, how about we meet up after the markets this weekend and talk about our next steps?”

“OK, I will be at the Rocks markets until quite late, so say, 7.00?”

“That’s fine.  Can we make it Berkelouw’s?  It’s a book store with a cafe on Oxford St, not far from where the book is set.”

“OK sounds good.  See you there!”

“Great, see you Hoang!”

WOOHOO!  He liked the story, he liked the story….I did my little kitchen dance, which involves a bit of foot swinging in the air and jigging my arms around.  Then I called my affianced, who was suitably excited for me.

Saturday rolled around.  My fiance parked the car on a side street and reclined the seat to have a little nap while he waited for me.  I hopped it to Berkelouw’s.  As I walked, Hoang  called to say he was running a bit late from the markets, so I had time to order myself an LSD at the cafe.  ”LSD” to the uninitiated is a “latte soy dandelion,” and is way better than it sounds.  It is creamy, and delicious.  I have espoused its virtues elsewhere so that’s enough for now.  All coffee drinkers, shame on you for sniggering.  

As I was sipping my LSD and pretending to leaf through a book about Sicilian tiles, a young, sprightly man approached.  He was Australian Vietnamese and it was impossible to tell how old he might be, given he had a shaved head and no lines on his face except for big smile ones as he barrelled over to my chair and shook my hand.

“Jackie!  I’m Hoang.”

“Great to meet you,” I said, because it was.

We chatted, and it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this was going to be awesome. We seemed to agree on everything: the proposed style of pictures, the key messages and moral of the story.  Most of all, Hoang agreed 1000% with the prerogatives for a creative life.  He told me how he had started off his business when he had moved back to Sydney from Alice Springs with his wife.  He had previously worked at an ad agency, then moved to Alice and done massage for several years (which was something else he connected with in the story, when the antagonist, Mr Richards, travels to Alice to find himself). Theythen returned to Sydney but weren’t sure what to do next, when his very smart wife suggested he print off some of the pictures he had done, which were saved on his computer.  They set up a market stall and made enough money to do it again.  And again. And again.  

Pretty soon, they found themselves doing what they had always dreamed of doing: making an income from their creative pursuits, with very strong ethics of environmental sustainability, inspiration, spirituality, and whimsy.  

I was getting more and more excited throughout this conversation.  I had never found a perfect creative collaborator before, but I thought that this might be It.  

We agreed that Hoang would create two character illustrations, one for Mr Middleton and one for Mr Richards, and three pictures from key scenes: the beginning, something from the middle when all the World goes crazy with teleporting, and one for the end, when Mr Middleton has the transformative experience of teleporting for the first time himself. He also agreed to do them within a month, which was amazing, so that we could get the pitch to the publisher before they lost interest.

Soon my affianced came looking for me.  He met Hoang and noted that things must have gone well because he “Could hear my laugh from the front door.”

Things had gone very well indeed.  Now all we needed was for Hoang to be visited by his muse, five times, if we asked very nicely, in the next four weeks.

To be continued.