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Joe, you are a beautiful writer. You craft your words with a delicacy I can only replicate in the deepest hours of the morning. This is art, and in my favorite form. - Lauren Holmes

Cheers :)

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Water.

Last Tuesday morning Bede was convinced that the shack was going to get washed away. That the thunder clap of the ocean hurling itself into the sandbar was about to explode on top of him, inside him. In the event of trapped boy vs. ocean, he didn’t like his chances, but who would. When she was moody like this the ocean made Bede tense. Fingers clicking, he would shuffle around the place as much as you could move about in its tiny floor plan, building up the gumption to leave his sanctuary and check out the frontier on his doorstep. He never knew why he clicked his fingers. His thumb and forefinger just seemed to snap together at the slightest sign of trouble. The kids at school thought it was hilarious. He clicked a lot at school; but it was pretty clear from the start that the place didn’t click with him. His clicking had slowed down since they left the city.

The ocean was concrete today. Grey lines marched into the bay and stood up tall, proud. Bede wondered if the waves knew they were about to be tripped up by the bank lying in wait nearer the shore. He didn’t reckon they did, because all of a sudden one would rear up, shocked, and then the slab would turn itself over, folding and breaking beautifully until it announced the end of its journey with a final thwack on the beach.  To say there wasn’t a drop out of place seems cliché, but there really wasn’t. Bede wondered how far away that one had come from. 

  Come on tiger!

Jesus  Mum, steady on,

You shouldn’t have been standing here daydreamin’ then. Go grab your board,

Mum its too big,

What are you, my daughter?

                                Bede didn’t know how to respond other than to click his way back to the shed to get his board. His mum had made it for him, it was missing a fin, he paddled out anyway. Bede sat bobbing on his board out the back, deeper than the waves were breaking, watching his mum scratch into wave after wave, popping up right at the crest and sliding gracefully all the way into the beach. He loved the water. The way it felt like silk as he ran his fingers through it, the way the spray cascaded off the back of the waves in the offshore breeze, exploding into rainbows as the sun caught the droplets. Water created an alternate universe to the land that people clung to, a universe that was violent one minute, tranquil the next, but always a mystery. For as much as people love the water– they’d spend their life savings just to get a view of it for Christ sakes – they fear it. Water submerges things beyond comprehension. Fear of the unknown, that’s something that society has grappled with since the beginning, that’s why they watch from a safe distance in their glass houses and extravagant boats.

What Bede loved most about the ocean though, was the feeling of insignificance it instilled in him. He was just a piece of flotsam, powerless against the winds, tides and swell. Bede took solace in his belief that no one could humiliate him as much as the ocean made a mockery of humanity. It was some sort of social leveller in that no one could understand or control it. Water, he thought, doused society into fairness. Presidents, tycoons, drug dealers, the kid who broke Bede’s nose on his first day of school could all get washed off the rocks, they could all get bitten in half. The water left everyone just as hopeless as himself and Bede liked that.

As a set approached, Bede stroked his board into position. He let the first wave go underneath him  before turning and paddling toward shore, matching speed with the second wave of the set. The power of the lump of water as it steepened shocked him as he scrambled to his feet, and he sensed the lip of it beginning to feather behind him as he skimmed down the wave face.  And then the world changed. The wave turned itself inside out. With a deafening crack and an obscene gurgling the wave pummelled into the sandbar as boy and board clung to the wall of the liquid cavern. Bede was flying but time slowed down, he could hear nothing but his board chattering underneath him, see nothing but a de saturated blue in the dim light. It was completely and utterly unreal. As the wave spat itself onto the shore, Bede didn’t come out. He was lost under the water, euphoric, his body being violently flung like a ragdoll through the turbulence.  Finally the water released him from its embrace and he slumped onto his board coughing, vomiting the brine. Bede sat up and turned his back on the land and all the bullshit he didn’t understand. Instead he faced out to sea, he knew full well he would never understand the ocean, but he also knew didn’t have to.

By me.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Concrete.

Concrete scares the shit out of Wayne. It has done so since the day he unwittingly pushed both himself and his trusty scooter into the wet stuff down on Constellation Drive and tumbled into a hysterical mess of cheap steel, course aggregate and shattered 9 year old boy. You can still see the marks. On the pavement and the knees. Having said that, he doesn’t really mind concrete in its viscous form. At least then it is soft, it forgives. At least then it is significant that he was there. Or at least the words he scrawled into it claimed that.

No, what he is terrified of is when the cement hardens. When it is set.  He hated the word ‘set’. Concrete in all its solid grey glory is too still, too final, too harsh. Too real.

Last year Wayne cheated concrete. It had established itself in a bunch of hills and ramps and bowls that clung in between the dunes and the monotony of Mullaloo. He took to the skate park with a feverish passion before it was even finished.  The sky a heavy bruise, he would slip through gaps in the fence to skate the concrete that had hardened that very day, avoiding the gaps where steel reinforcements stood to attention, primed to be smothered just like the rest of the godforsaken suburbs. Sliding and flying over the concrete on a plank of wood, he was a conqueror. Wayne believed skateboarders were artists because they danced on, made a mockery of the unforgiving, the treacherous. To Wayne, to skate was to surmount the exhausting urban weight that cemented too many into submission.  Wayne’s overzealous notions of triumph, however, came hurtling down with his body, crumpling into concrete reality. Concrete broke Wayne’s ankle but it also broke something else.  It was almost like his innocence, his spirit, shattered along with his fibula. Wayne had fantasised of social suppleness. That maybe things wouldn’t ‘set’. But the cruel truth spoke of brittle structures and people and bones.

Woozy, either from the morphine or the shock, Wayne’s thoughts made the hour drive to the sleepy fishing town up north. ‘Lancelin Concrete and Plumbing.’ His Pop used to own that joint. You could see the huge silo all across town. Wayne and his family used to go up there on the school holidays to visit his Gran and Pop in their house on the yard. Wayne remembered the men with gruff voices that he could never understand, and how the film of dust that makes up the bloody concrete seemed to strangle everything like the town strangled his Gran.  His Pop didn’t speak much. When he did it was about the football or the dickheads in town, if Pop took much notice of Wayne he didn’t voice it. He seemed more interested in drowning his sorrows in a can of Swan Gold. Wayne was to be seen and not heard, or maybe not even seen at all. For some reason Wayne remembered his Pop’s hands. Angry blisters ravaged his palms like the skin on those horrible sick people Wayne had seen in the National Geographic magazines his mum stacked on the coffee table at home. Except his Pop wasn’t sick. Under closer inspection Wayne had noticed the cement had taken residence in them, under his fingernails, in the crevices of his skin. With a drip poking out of his arm and plaster gripping his leg, Wayne realised, his Pop had hardened. He had ‘set’. Tough and unforgiving, Wayne’s Pop became what he sold so successfully to the people of Lancelin. Wayne was glad his cast would come off in 6 weeks. He liked being malleable, he liked being soft.

Given his track record with concrete, the irony of his career path is not lost on Wayne. Bachelor of Design at the University of Western Australia. Architecture. Sculpting and scattering ideas into concrete blocks would contradict all of Wayne’s fears, would it not? The little bastard must’ve sold his soul. But it is quite the opposite. Concrete can’t go round and round in the mixer forever. Wayne had to drop his defiance, accept that at some point it has to solidify. And if something is going to ‘set’, why not make it beautiful.

By me.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

So I hear you have some new work to put up...

sheeeet

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Team Average

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Corolla.

People let us down like that shitty car with the rusty back left door,

And the more it happens the less we drive,

The music quieter, eyeballing the gauge, watching her walk away,

Waiting for something to overheat, someone to kick us in the guts,

Trust is fragile, but I think I should just put my foot down,

Throw some bloody belief into the wind.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Frayed End.

Let’s not keep tiptoeing around,

We don’t have to pretend,

I told you there was nothing,

There’s nothing left to end,

  And I don’t care how its supposed to be,

How it could’ve stayed,

Because right now you don’t even know who I am,

And I’d like to keep it that way,

  There’s no one on the beach anymore,

No one on the corner,

They aren’t singing their anthems anymore,

Its a kind of torture,

  There’s a hollow agony of balance,

This whole half hearted mess,

But I can see through you,

And I don’t get it.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

I used to surf every second day and now I can't and it bums me out.

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Content.

To be content is something that is so revered, so sought after. But to be content is an ailment, a sickness that attacks our thirst, our hopes, our ambitions.  Google ‘content’ and you will see that it is defined as a state of peaceful happiness, of satisfaction. It seems ludicrous that a word with those fluffy connotations could also be seen to be so damaging, so limiting. But in my mind contentedness can be just that, too often laurels are rested upon and boundaries accepted and it’s all too damn easy. I admire the ability to be satisfied, people that don’t have a desire to alter their circumstances, who believe they are right where they should be. But how do you have the slightest inkling you are right where should be? I don’t think I can ever be sure I’ve made it. Unless it somehow gets spelt out in my Alphagetti.  

Or maybe the search for this nirvana, this warm embrace of fulfilment is just that. A search where you get absolutely nowhere but that’s the point. I think the most incredible people in the world are never content and I don’t know if that’s a curse or a blessing. They are never satisfied, and so they continue to push boundaries, to chase swells, to write, to go faster, to jump higher, to love more, to create. The most incredible things happen when people feel that things are inadequate. The idea of settling for second best terrifies me.  But its just as terrifying to never settle at all.

I don’t want to be content yet, I want to go to the places and do the things that invade my head space when I lay in bed at night, when I talk to incredible people, when I see beautiful pictures. Then once I do that I can be content. There gets a point where you’ve seen enough. Then I just want to see what I love.

By me. 

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Rusakov Workers Club 1927.

Konstantin Melnikov.

Russian Constructivism.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Lost.

When did everything become a sort of hollow?

When was the time when the mirror changed?

When the mirror warped and twisted?

When the reflection spat an undigested illusion back at me?

When did the vision ahead lose its clarity?

And more importantly, why.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

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AM.

I don’t wake up when my eyes open. There’s an odd kind of limbo between me being roused and when I fully wake. I fall in love with mornings because everything seems soft in my half-conscious state. The sheets are warm and embracing, the shower licks my skin and coffee tickles my nostrils. I like how the morning is almost silent, but not completely. Tents being unzipped, chinking china, those ’hoo hoooo’ birds that only seem to make noise in the morning . I love the way people seem to talk quietly, hushed recounts of the night before, stories of sport and weather and surf, and asking me how I slept, when to be honest I don’t have a fucking clue.

The sun isn’t yet too high and casts beautiful shadows, fresh light making the dew twinkle and warming the bricks. As it burns low to the east I know it has to circumnavigate the whole sky over my head and dive into the ocean, and I feel like if the sun can do that, I can do anything. In the morning nothing has gone wrong yet.

I like finding out what it is that really wakes me up.  The ocean slapping me in the face. A smile from a pretty girl. A good song. A sight. A smell. When I wake up I am inspired.

Some days I’m not sure if am even woken.

By me.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Routine.

Once I realised that the more you did something, the less it meant.

If you stuck that same Joy Division song on over and over again it didn’t get to you anymore.

Fresh air becomes stale.

Dropping into that bowl was a blink, a shrug.

Colours become washed out.

That roadtrip led to the drab.

If you just woke up every morning, then one day there might not be a point.

Routine becomes a vacuum.

Sucking vision and aspiration into a dust of gloom.

 .

I want to keep making things mean something.

No wave, person or place is ever the same.

Is falling in love the same?

Maybe we only fall in love once.

Then it always means something.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Alex Knost.

[thecanofbeans-blog]

Reunion.

Pieces of peace,

Of sun and yesteryear,

Wrestled to dovetail,

Fresh scent,

Warm embrace,

Comfort belongs,