I picked up my mouthguard from the dentist yesterday, with its extra sticky-out bit in the front so that my enormous Irish jaw can't stretch past its edge. Still, it's smaller than what I imagined. And its a frosted white colour, which soothed me. I'm not sure what I was expecting- perhaps a kind of gummy-pink. And it's called a splint, not a mouthguard, which sounds more medical.
My dentist asked me if I'd like to keep the cast of my mouth; the making of which had caused me considerable discomfort. I said yes, mostly because I didn't like the idea of the muth cast going into the bin with a whole lot of other mouth casts, all gaping, slack-jawed at each other. I took the teeth home and set them up next to the phrenology head collection. They look quite pretty, in a way. And maybe even useful. I imagined using them to snap out things at people on the phone that I was too shy to say in person. "No. Get lost. I'm not giving you any money." Or if people came over and stayed too long I could pick up the teeth and make them say "Time to go, now. Party's over."
I showed the mouthguard to Thieu. He said "When I went to the dentist last week he showed me the wear on my molars and said that I probably need one of those too." Imagine it, the two us lying there side by side, with mouthguards. Imagine if Mt Dandenong suddenly became volcanic, and Thieu and I were turned to lava-statues to be pored over by future anthropologists, who would debate long and hard about the things sticking out of our mouths.
A fashion item? An unusual courtship adornment? An unusual formation of our palettes?
In the morning, Thieu left early for work and lent over to kiss me goodbye in the dark, forgetting about the splint. I stopped him in time, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. And what about when we both have them? What then?
Hmmm... after reading this article about the Cremaster cycle I think I might try to get an aisle seat. I sense it may well prove too much for a narrative-fan like myself. A narrative-fan with a short attention span. I didn't know he has a kid with Bjork. There you go. I'm sure it will grow up to be a very weird adult.
Yesterday I came across Rejection Collection; a site where people post their favourite rejection letters from publishers and some of them are great. I particularly like this one.
There are also letters from people who have used rejection as motivation to press on.
On the floor below the one I work on someone has made a sign out of black paper letters: Welcome Back Alan! Below it in the window is a gnome wearing a tinsel boa. It's been there a week now. I don't know what's happened to Alan. Probably he's come back and no one has gotten around to taking the sign down and packing the gnome away. Maybe he's decided to take another week off. Or maybe he called up and resigned.
The gnome is smiling but there's a slightly anxious look in its eye.
I Walked through Falkner Park yesterday, noticing how everyone was doing exactly the sorts of things you should be doing in parks. Dogs were being walked, tracks were being jogged, tennis was being played. Benches were being sat on all over the place, and ice-creams, despite the coolness of the day, were being consumed. It was all so perfect, and everyone was so well-spaced, so blandly non-descript, that I started looking around to find out who the stars were in this film the rest of us were clearly extras for. I imagined that it would be a piss-weak Australian version of an American romantic comedy, and this would be a scene, quite early on, where they'd be getting to know each other by walking in a park, and one of them would have a dog (or a friend's dog that they were pretending was their own) and the dog would do something terribly embarrassing, like humping some old lady's pekinese or killing a duck. The female star would end up having to wade into a pond or something and would emerge with the most darling smudge of dirt on her nose and her hair artistically mussed. And the stars would laugh alot and be brought closer as a consequence.
Then I noticed the man practicing his fly-fishing technique on a quiet patch of lawn. He cast his line out, over and over, flicking it back soon after it rested on the grass. I imagined the director jumping out from behind a tree and saying “What is that person doing over there?” and the frazzled Director’s Assistant explaining that he was practicing fly-fishing and the Director getting into a rage and saying “I wanted people doing park-related things. ” Someone (maybe the Grip or the Gaffer) would nervously chip in and saying “People do sometimes practice fly-fishing in parks” and that they had an uncle who did this all the time. The Director would become apoplectic and sayi “Not in any park I’ve ever seen” and he would demand the instant removal of the fly-fisherman.
Then someone, probably the DA, would approach the fly-fisherman, and touch him gently on the arm, and explain that the Director couldn’t use him in this particular shot but that if they ever needed a fly-fisherman, perhaps even in this very film if there was a change of direction or if a new scene was written, then they would definitely give him a call. Maybe the DA would give him a business card at this point. The fly-fisherman would look very surprised but would take the card, then pack up his gear and drive to another park because he hadn’t even realised that this was a film set, he was just trying to practice his fly-fishing.
