my friend's gay gloves

A man attacked my friend Josh last night. It was not in some dark alley in Lilydale or the backstreets of Sunshine but on the corner of Elizabeth Street and LaTrobe. He was on the way to meeting me at the Arthouse to see a local hardcore act called Identity Theft. The man dressed in a suit came up without provocation and threw my friend into the wall screaming something about the faggy green gloves he was wearing. The man who was with his one hand still holding his mobile phone remarkably talking to fuck knows who, telling them that he was going to kill Josh, was with the other trying to bash my friend's head in. In combination with this distraction and Josh's artful dodging allowed him to break free and leg it, running full pelt but it was several city blocks before his pursuant gave up on chasing him, still screaming into is mobile phone about how my faggot friend was dead.

Josh arrived at the Arthouse unsurprisingly shook up and spent the next half and hour, upstairs in the cool of the night, venting as I talked and comforted him with my arm around his shoulder. It was a gesture that drew its own undesired attention in a venue full of men pashing women, touching furtively then with flagrance as the pots emptied of draught; a man with his arm around another man was something to be stared at and commented upon. "You're in man! He'll be putting out tonight for ya!" Some dick yelled at me, wearing a black bandana under black cap tilted askew, hatebreed emblazoned on his black t-shirt. It wasn't a friendly jibe, it wasn't meant to encourage my pursuit. But then what did we expect? I hear you say. Why were we even there? you ask as my hand detectably moved an inch away from my friend's back.

The bands were good, really tight and energised, and the local hip hop crew from out of Box Hill, Ascertain and DJ Bogues were a welcome relief from screaming vocals and heavy guitar. Yet I couldn't help but feel unnerved, my friend undoubtedly ten-fold at the general verbal abuse directed (and indirected) towards faggots and poofters in the masculated atmosphere. That hat is gay, this song is gay and I heard at one point one of the rappers from Ascertain style "clear the faggots off the dance floor." Thankfully not a reference to Josh and I, who had removed ourselves to the back of the room but to Melbourne's nightlife generally I think. I found the overt and hyper-exaggerated machismo increasingly nauseating as the night drew on: the fists in the air and on the ground, the shouts of abuse, the air guitars and the hugging and groping between men that could have been easily mistook as homoerotic but we'd only an hour before been singled out for less. Half way through a song called "A Poofy Start", Josh and I chose to leave. Now apparently a member form Identity Theft is gay so maybe the song was ironic but it was an irony lost not only on me but the I think the large majority of the crowd.

I am being too sensitive I hear you say. Perhaps. This is what my straight friends tell me when I complain about their use of language. "It's only a word dude, we don't mean anything by it. Everyone uses it. We're fine with your sexuality." Oh I am sorry for not taking your feelings into consideration. Yes it really my fault for going to an overtly heterosexual club and putting my arm around a friend after some guy had tried to bash him. Get fucking real! If it's just a word then stop using it.

i'm barely able to drag myself out of bed this morning, a stranger stares back at me from the mirror as i shave and apply deodorant, a computer screen just flickers at me white light and fuck it's eleven-thirty already. my skull echoes with the office fluorescent hum and i wish that i could only just play some music, put my earphones on and extract myself. it must be wednesday but i keep thinking it's thursday or maybe tuesday. bins go out on thursday, that's what my housemate said to me as i stood there positioning the recycling by the curb, "yeah, figures! kinda wondered why no one else was putt'n em out," i replied. i spend lunch in the park alone eating a shitty foodcourt sandwich that was wrapped in plastic like miss palmer while a duck glides over the surface of a pond in the carlton gardens, leaving, well, a wake in its wake. i feel my head expanding and contracting and i feel dizzy and unstable, emotionally. tears well up for no good reason on the train platform as i wait. waiting for my dinner, red lentil dahl i chat to the man i have a crush on about languages and garlic and leave without getting his name, cursing like the bee gees, all the stupid things that i said. fuck i hate wednesdays.

hometown baghdad

I've just spent the last 24 hours watching the 38 episodes of this web-doco series I found on YouTube called Hometown Baghdad. Filmed by two Iraqis, Director Ziad Turkey and Producer Fady Hadid with some camera work done by the subjects as well, Hometown Baghdad follows three young guys, Ausama, Adel and Saif, middle class Iraqis, as they just try to go about their day-to-day while their country falls further into shit. "It's a living hell but that's your home," says 23 year old Adel, engineering student and aspiring metal musician as he reflects on his life. "I only live in the present, I'm alive today so I do whatever I want to today and enjoy this moment... Could be one moment to end everything, you and your plans, and send you underground."

The first episode came online March this year and the last was posted on 17 June and it is good viewing. Each episode is mostly under five minutes and deals with an aspect of the guys' lives both maudlin and comic, from love and dating, to writing metal lyrics about the invasion and the disintegration of civil order into civil war.

It's easy to forget when you are barraged with images of car bombings ad nauseam, and terrorist body counts piling high, you forget that there are people actually living on the ground amongst it all. About the intersecting lives that cross in and out of our two minute snatches on National Nine News, that the grandmother's house that is first raided by American forces once (no terrorists), twice (no terrorists) and then looted by the Iraqi Army, is also a place of cherished childhood memories now tainted; or the intermittent power supply that is three hours on and three hours off, cuts coverage of the football that friends have gathered to watch.

"Where's the liberation?" asks 20 year old medical student Ausama. "The American forces, they're not here to help us... I don't see anything good and it's been four years."

These guys are educated and thoughtful, moderate moslems mostly who are in far more danger from 'insurgents' and 'terrorists' (or the US forces) than we could every be, in a place where just playing music, western music can get you shot, well "... that's the reality, welcome to Baghdad."

Watch hometown baghdad

It was a nice afternoon today, don't you think? The sun warming me through the glass walls of the tram-stop shelter, keepin me from the slight chill winter breeze as I waited for the 109 heading down Vic Parade for a friend's birthday lunch at Quan 88. It'd probably would've been quicker to walk but hey, I couldn't be fucked and besides it was a nice day afterall.

I glanced down at my hand, noticing that some of the light that took all of eight minutes from the sun to reach me had refracted through the glass into a beam of its composite colours. Light itself has properties of both particle and wave, if I remember year nine science class correctly, although I still don't understand it. Humans can only perceive a small fraction of light, somewhere between 380 nm to 740 nm (nanometres) of electromagnetic frequency, which includes not only these reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violets that I can see before me but infrared, ultra violet and goddamn fucking x-rays and gamma rays. I looked this shit up. Thing is, the colours are only an illusion. These cells in my retina like, called cone cells are sensitive to particular wavelengths of this electomagnetic spectrum and in consultation with my brain (no doubt with the assistance of millions of years of jury-rigging) choose to see 'em that way, in technicolour that is. Still, as I rotated my hand, palm up and around through the light I could feel the colour wash over my skin. Strange.

When light passes through something with a different density it refracts, from the air and through the glass, it changes speed. If it passes through, say a glass tram-stop shelter wall, wave forms with different frequencies can separate, refracting in different directions and thus through the funny little cone cells in my eye I see a rainbow.

be alert and very alarmed!

Fuck Osama Bin Laden, he can have his Tora Bora cave complex and well he's already got the North Western Frontier Province but fuck him. He's just another distraction from humanity's real enemy: the cephalopods! Octopi, squids and the like: they're fast and have big fucking brains, ergo they're intelligent and well maybe they're not Mensa intelligent, more of an alien versus predator kind of intelligence, but they can shoot ink and camouflage themselves and shit! they can fit through tiny little holes that otherwise would get us vertebrates fucking trapped. These fuckers have been biding their time since the late Cambrian Period (over 500 million years ago) when they ruled this planet, top of the shitheap as it were and they're just waiting for their opportune moment and give 'em a couple more years and wham-bam-goodbye-human-fucking-race!

Watch these frightening educational videos:

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

ZOMBIES ATTACK!!!

While the risk of zombie attack on terra firma is well reported, we are largely blind to the danger that they all pose to us and god's fair creatures on and under the water.

watch out! disco attack!

Sure this blog doesn't have the readership of the Barco Independent and sure those that do read it are mostly friends and hell, probably have heard about it from Tim already but I'm nonetheless gonna spruik it in the hope that I can enlighten just one soul to the exciting new world of disco attack!

What praytell is disco attack! you ask?

disco attack! is a must, it's what we need, it's fun and safe. It's art, it's music and it is soul. disco attack! is genetic, it's inside of you and me. disco attack! is the best form of defence and is the closest we have to a super hero. disco attack! is a deadly adversary, a bomb that explodes in your head but is still the best insurance we have against terrorism and cancer. disco attack! is action not belief. It is the liberation of the proletariat. It is treason, the absence of all restraint and is not public policy. disco attack! is the opiate of the masses and is a secret conspiracy to take over the world. disco attack! is coming. disco attack is imminent and is upon you.

disco attack! is Friday 13 July from 9pm till late. disco attack! is at 51 Gipps Street Collingwood.

Hope that cleared up any confusion.... I suppose at this point I should mention that this is not an official disco attack! media announcement.

disco attack! is really:

8 things you unlikely know about me but nonetheless might’ve guessed (or maybe I told you)

Thanks Richard for meme-ing me on this. So here you are: eight things you may not know about me (or you just might).

1. I’ve never read Milton’s “Paradise Lost” but I keep it on my bookshelf because it makes me look smart.

2. As a kid aged 12, I planned my suicide to look like a break-and-enter gone horribly wrong. Suffice to say my schemes were logistically unsound and I never carried it out.

3. At my year 7 camp some blonde haired thugs pushed me into the urinal wall while I was still pissing. The rest of the camp I tried to keep a low profile and was very secretly relieved when these same guys turned their attentions to my roommate. I felt guilty that I never said anything instead of laughing along but my god did he fucking snore.

4. I am currently downloading a porno called “Here cums the bridegroom”

5. I have a very hairy back.

6. As part of our bi-centenary celebrations my grade-three class had a fancy dress day. While most kids came dressed as convicts I insisted on coming as Captain Arthur Phillip.

7. I get far too much satisfaction out of popping pimples.

8. I have a healthy sperm count.

I am in turn tagging Strummer. Good night and good luck.

Admiral Arthur Phillip (1786 portrait by Francis Wheatley, National Portrait Gallery, London)

21.10.2002

The cold steel sky filled with the black beating wings of a large flock of ravens, the sound of their calls and the clutter of thousands of wings as they beat against the wind, dominating the space between the Menzies Building and that of the Union as they circled round the twelve storey eyesore. Standing on the concrete walkway that divides the lawn, I watched as one then two and many more of the birds broke formation and began to land. Quickly I find myself surrounded by the ravens, hopping around, settling themselves and seemingly pausing to wait. Silence falls all around me, waking me decidedly unsettled.

A few days later, on the morning of Monday 21 October 2002 Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang entered his fourth year econometrics class with five loaded hand guns and opened fire, yelling "You never understand me," killing two of his classmates and wounding another five. He was supposed to be giving a class presentation.

The two students who died were Steven Chan and Xu Hui "William" Wu. In his trial it came out that Xiang believed Wu to be an agent of evil who intended to destroy him academically and it was his own destiny to kill him. This gives some insight into his mindset that day and it is not surprising that he has since been diagnosed with paranoid delusional disorder and is serving a possible twenty-five year sentence at Thomas Embling psychiatric hospital.

The class' lecturer Lee Gordon-Brown who had already sustained bullet-wounds to his arm and knee, with the assistance of a student named Alastair Boast were able to wrestle Xiang to the ground while he attempted to switch to another gun. They waited fifteen minutes for the police to arrive and by that time Gordon-Brown had already passed out of consciousness.

I was finishing up my honours in history that October at Monash University Clayton and the schools of history and archaeology shared the sixth floor where the shootings took place, with economics.

I was not at uni that day.

wikipedia - monash shooting

northside / southside

I was first told about the northside/southside divide a year or so back at some friend's house party. I was drunk and so was he, some guy I'd just been introduced to, and we'd propped ourselves up on elbows talking on a housemate's bed about sex and politics and Melbourne queerdom.

Melbourne's gay world is divided in two, he tells me, by the Yarra river running between; it's cold war shit: East and West. Soft electronic music beats away in the background played by some graveyard community radio station volunteer. Nothing overt like but understated power plays go on in what is in essence a battle for cultural hegemony. You have Commercial Road, el centro del sur, switching briefly to spanish and back again, where prissied up pretty boys parade around with no shirts on, dancing to house remixes of Kylie Minogue. It's all top 40 and homogeneity.

Northside you've got overeducated art students sipping lattes on Smith Street reading Foucault's discourses on Sexuality and agreeing so emphatically about politics that you'd think they were arguing. Wankers on both sides I add. Generally speaking, he continued unfazed, the North pays more than lip-service to inclusiveness than our Southern brothers; and I do say brothers as I can't think of one lesbian bar South of the border.

Q & A has been the stalwart, a steadfast partisan in the defence against encroachment from the south, he said. Playing good music with a mixed atmosphere that allows you to be yourself but even it's creators admit that it's become increasingly coopted by a younger more vacuous crowd, crossing the border under the cover of night with their vapid requests to hear Madonna or Shakira or some shit.

......................

Yes Q & A is ending after eleven and a half years and I'll miss it but then as a comment on Richard's blog says, quoting the man himself "it'll force people to come up with something new." I wish I could say gay life in Melbourne has become pretty stagnant of late but I don't get out enough and this feeling may have more to do with me that the homo-world. There is after all Trough Faggot Party and Witness Protection Society but they are irregularly placed and I do have to say that I find the former a little too andocentric and I haven't attended Witness enough to comment.

But but but... on Sunday I went to the very first Sweaty Betty, part of the Camp Betty festival described on their site as a "radical weekend of sex and politics". A reaction to what the organises state as a certain sense of malaise or apathy within the community. I don't wish to understate my feelings about my evening but the party was fucking ace. Held in Crystal T's, a less-than-gentleman's (stripclub) on Sydney Road, it was full of all the colours of the homo-rainbow including a nice smattering of straight people ta boot. There was good music and some live performances including one woman exposing more than just her exquisit tats of jaguars adorning her torso. The tease culminated in her sim-masturbating a rather generous pink dildo that she was wearing: a definite eye-opener.

There is hope.

......................

"So which side are you?" he asked.

the peel vs straights & lesbians

I am not sure I feel entirely comfortable about the Peel's exemption to the Equal Opportunity Act that was reported in the papers today. The exemption would allow staff of the Peel to refuse entry to the venue on a perception of an individual's sexuality as apparently the gay male clientele had expressed concerns about the number of heterosexuals and lesbians entering the venue, all prompting management to apply to the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission for this exemption. Tom McFeely, owner of the nightclub was quoted in the Age as saying that the move was necessary to ensure that the gay male patron felt secure enough to express his sexuality freely. 1 Cate McKenzie deputy president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) who granted the exemption said that "[s]ometimes heterosexual groups and lesbian groups insult and deride and are even physically violent towards the gay male patrons" while others just came to gawk, acting as though the gay male patrons were animals in a zoo. She said, "To regard the gay male patrons of the venue as providing an entertainment or spectacle to be stared at, as one would at an animal at a zoo, devalues and dehumanises them." 2 Indeed the gay bars in Melbourne are few and far between argues McFeely, "We're the only one out of 2,000 venues in Melbourne. Those heterosexuals have other places to go to, my homosexuals do not." 3

But regardless the idea of prescribing behaviour to a person on the basis of their sexuality is blatantly discriminatory. To imply that an individual who identifies as heterosexual or as a lesbian will engage or is likely to engage in violence or verbal abuse or whose activities while inside will upset the clientele of that establishment goes wholly against my moral fibre. Could one of the 'straight bars' that McFeely refers to legitimately apply for an exemption on the basis that gay men make their patrons uncomfortable? I sincerely doubt it.

I personally feel that a gay man who is intimidated by a straight man or a woman, whether she be gay or straight, for who they are, is at best hypocritical and worst pathological. If a person's behaviour in any club, pub or bar is inappropriate surely then security have the right to eject them. As a community we should be engaging and open, not hiding in closets.

Now I do not pretend to know what evidence exactly was put forward to the Tribunal, something I believe you have to apply for, but I wonder whether this application for exemption has anything to do with the mens-only 'upstairs' section of the Peel that staff enforce with such admirable efficiency. In the decision by the Tribunal that it handed down there is no mention of the sex-on-premises above. Cate McKenzie states that men should feel safe to engage in activities such as "kissing, hugging, or expressing love, attraction or affection in a physically intimate way" that might be frowned on in a ‘straight bar’. Now unless you are ready to describe what goes on up there as expressing love and affection (and I’m not) then I would wager that engaging in sexual acts was left out of their application.4 With the Greyhound in St Kilda and an apparently "as-yet-unopened gay bar on Smith Street" both applying for sex-on-premises licences in order to attract 'punters', one wonders how much the Peel's concern for a safe and comfortable atmosphere is really there to allow gay men to have fuck and suck. 5


1 'Gay pub defends 'straight' ban,' The Age, 28 May 2007.
2 Matt Doran, 'Gay pub can out straight patrons,' Herald-Sun, 28 May 2007.
3 'Gay pub defends 'straight' ban,' op. cit.
4 Peter Rolfe, 'Sauna bid `sleazy',' Port Phillip Leader, 8 May 2007.
Danny Corvinni, 'Nightclub sex rooms and saunas,' samesame.com.au - forum, 23 May 2007.
5 Peel Hotel Pty Ltd (Anti Discrimination Exemption) [2007] VCAT 916 (24 May 2007)

homeline twilight - a long distance haunting

When I was fourteen Telstra or Telecom as it was called then, sent my family an international telephone bill. Not so unusual you say? Except that is that it was addressed to my father who'd been dead for two years. I know that Telstra prides itself on their wide range of products and services but I was unware communication with the dead was among them, then or now. But what if they did?

Do you have aged relatives who expect a call every Sunday without fail? Can you imagine if this chore didn't end with the grave?

If you think outsourcing call centre jobs to India is bad well picture yourself sitting down to your microwaved healthy-choice dinner (fiesta chicken by the way) when you get a call from a telemarketer selling life insurance FROM THE LAND OF THE DEAD.

bible fight - ring side seats

Ever wondered whether Moses, the jew raised an egyptian king and saviour of his people would knock down Noah, sailor and zookeeper extraordinaire a few cubits to be called the biggest baddass in the pentateuch? No you haven't? Wait, wait, please sir. Obviously you are looking for a little more titillation of the five senses than two old geezers throwning their weight around, and there's nothing like two women wrapped together in combat; there'll almost certainly be mud. Picture it Mary, Mother of G-d clawing it out, hair tooth and nail in the garden of Eden with Eve, the mother of humanity. How 'bouts it? Both in their pert prime and there's someone flinging clay and it ain't the Holy Mother I tells ya.

Ah-hem. Well.

Clearly I have here a most discerning and cultured gentleman. Well what you're no doubt looking for is some real endtime entertainment, top notch judgement day extravaganza: Jesus, son of G-d and our Saviour in the ring, in Hell opposite Satan, father of all lies in a battle for the Universe.

Oh come-on... there's simply no pleasing some. Jesus!

Sir, sir.......




play bible fight

leaning to the left hand

I had a dream last week where I found myself involved with a group of radicals pushing for a halt to growth in global population to save our much afflicted ecosphere earth. This group were committed to a most controversial public action that to be honest never sat too well with me, advocating masturbation and not procreation, staging unannounced wank-ins in select public places flying their movement's ensign, a veined engorged phallus gripped by a closed fist imposed on a picture of the globe, held aloft by members not otherwise engaged.

Never actively involved in any of these protests I stood as the group's cameraman charged with filming the demonstrations, then blurring out faces with my editing suite on the hq-computer so as to upload onto the group's website. Suffice to say I quickly became disolutioned with the whole thing, its activities, the politics and soon left, concluding that they really were a bunch of wankers and quite frankly found the whole protest thing a little strange.

So it goes - Vonnegut dies at 84

Pehaps he has simply been caught in a chrono-synclastic infundibula set for his next corporeal appearance on earth (along with his dog - not a humanist), in another 59 days. Or perhaps not. Kurt Vonnegut died last week so it goes from a injury to the head sustained a few weeks prior.

He had fallen at the age of 84.

He was (is/will be) one of my favourite authors who might I add was recommended to me by a mad man who thought I was god, yes yes who I was visiting at St Vincent's psyche ward at that particular time maybe eight years ago. It's a true story but I digress.

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" were the words written on Billy Pilgram's epitaph, the soldier/optometrist who travelled back and forward in time in his best selling Slaughterhouse five. It mightn't have been true but it did sound awfully nice.

It's been a difficult week it has. Tuesday especially hitting something of a dark spot, intense magnetic/emotional activity characterised by lower than usual temperatures... and what can I say? I lost it. And for the rest of the week I've been picking up my shattered little pieces, feeling immensely fragile as a result and snapping, huffing and puffing like a certain dragon by the seashore. I am left now with anxious butterflies that I am worried will find a way to burst out, through my stomach, my mouth and through my head.

Coming back from lunch last week circling down down in my desperate melancholy, I asked the universe what exactly was I supposed to do with all this. This mess, this noise: my head. And well it answered...

While crossing the driveway of a multilevel carpark I absent-mindedly strayed into the path of a truck pulling out. On its hood read the word COPE in bright bold lettering.

So I guess I had my answer.

Easy for it to say.

sunshine - preview @ hoyts melbourne central

Last night I attended a preview screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine at the Melbourne Central Hoyts with a q & a featuring director and actor Rose Byrne following. What a fucking travesty!! Never in all my years have I seen a cinema fuck up a screening so badly. We were maybe a third of the way through as we cut to what I thought was an overly obtuse dream sequence: Capa the ship's physicist played by Cillian Murphy (that man has crazy blues eyes) dreaming his death in reverse, ambient music playing all through as you watched the final moments of the mission. It dragged on. And on. And on. Boyle what are you doing I asked myself? Sure Kubrick set a high standard in sci-fi incomprehensibility but this makes no sense. It's as if the film is playing backwards. Fuck it is playing backwards!

I looked to my left and right searching for my friends' expressions: Mike to my left leaning in towards his boyfriend and Darren passively watching the screen. Am I not arty enough, it that it? Is this doubt a sign that I am missing the point, not getting it? No seriously the film is playing backwards, they're fucking ruining the film as I watch characters dying as the end game plays out or in or something. Whispers grew to open protests as the lights come up and there are apologies as apparently the reel was wound backwards but everything would be up and running in say five or ten, so take a toilet break or grab a snack at the candy bar or some shit.

A fucking hour we waited before they offered us the choice to watch the rest of the film or leave with a full refund. A few opted out but the vast majority stuck around to watch the rest of Doyle's much anticipated space adventure to the sun. It was three years in the making and it has been hailed by April's Empire magazine as breathing new life into a tired and banal genre of sci-fi cinema that had suffered so much after years of brainless blockbusters offered up to us by hollywood a la Armageddon. Well yes... and Hoyts fucked it up or someone did, maybe the distributor I don't know and I don't care. Call me a purist but I think a film should be watched first time straight through in its entirety and the right way round and maybe I'm a traditionalist jump-cut Jean Luc Goddard shaking your head at me but fuck you I don't care.

The film came back on without the sound and not from where we left off, missing who knows how much. I had finally settled in and began to absorb myself in the story again when they stopped the film. Apparently the reels were mislabelled and out of order and it was impossible to continue.... fuck.

The q & a continued anyway with Boyle and Byrne perfectly apologetic and friendly but it's really difficult to discuss a film that the audience hasn't seen and while they'll be mailing us out replacement tickets to see it at some later date they've destroyed the magic. And I know it sounds trite but I think there is something sacred about the movie going experience. There's something deeply freudianly mirror-stage (thanks Roland Barthes) about sitting there in the dark losing yourself in other worlds and when you consider the premium price of tickets and the five-fifty I paid for M&Ms what I lost isn't made up for by a replacement voucher.

confessions of a hypochondriac

Perhaps the hypochondriac in me that is a little concerned, a little worried about all this, I thought to myself as I lay there passively through an ultrasound on my testicles today.

"Can you hold your penis up on your stomach please," instructed my not too unattractive ultrasound technician as he pushed back my gown smearing gel on the probe and he began to move it around on my balls, first my right and then my left. I tried to think of anything that wouldn't end in me getting an erection and further complicate what was already a pretty awkward situation. This considering the week I'd gone without wanking-required for another test tomorrow- and this I suppose the most action I'd seen in nearly four months.

His name was John, my technician that is, as I made special mental note to remember it, thinking it's important to know the name of any man with his hand on my nutsack. I stare at the ceiling. Nothing like the dentist's office where there are all those calming posters of rainforests and deserts and far away places where they hope you'll be as they drill cavities and root canals. There is no noise, nor traffic or din of other doctors and patients in the room to distract me, just the hum of the machine. The room is on basement level of St Vincent's hospital and I'm the last patient of the day, just John and I and I think the receptionist somewhere about turning lights off. So I turn my attention to the machine and wonder at the different size probes next to me and what they might be used for ... he sure is spending an inordinate amount of time around my left testicle as I notice the soundless vibrations and the warmth the machine is generating.

"Do you normally feel any pain in your left testicle?" he asks me. Why? What's wrong? "No, not normally," I reply. He hums recognition without giving away anything and hands me a towel to remove the excess gel. So I thank him, get dressed and leave.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You couldn’t help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same.”

Said a dying Mary Kathleen. Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird. p226

If our souls are the stars projected onto earth then which star is mine?