Of a Life Only Ordinary to the Rest of the World

By Evan Scarlett

A not so extraordinary life to all but himself; yet he found the need to put it down on paper just so that he could recall it all when he added dementia to his list of mental illnesses. And also so that his son could know what sort of man he was in case he died before the boy could find out for himself.

He wants to be strung up in a tree somewhere north of Maree when he dies so that the birds can pick his bones dry. It would be such a waste of good food to put him in the ground or to burn him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jan 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452527321

Evan Scarlett

The author is a knockabout bloke. Some might say that he gets knocked about a bit. Some may say that he knocks about a bit. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and currently lives there until his health improves and he can return to Kangaroo Island and, of course, Vietnam, where he belongs. He was told by his English teacher the day before his year-twelve exam that he had absolutely no chance in hell of passing the test as he was almost illiterate. He is a painter, musician, and chef as well as a lousy writer.

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Copyright © 2015 Evan Scarlett.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-2730-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2732-1 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/30/2015

Contents

The Very Early Years

Teachers

My Twenties

Meeting The Kookaburra

Pooh’s Place

Karin And Ruth

Violet

The Manila Folders

The Farm

London; Winter Number One

Jane

Café Des Fleurs

France; Summer Two

London Winter Number Two

Souel And Bits Of Europe

To Greece And Home

Back Home

Evan Scarlett

Is a

Musician, Painter, Chef, Writer.

He is an enigma possibly even a figment of his own imagination he gets so lost in his own world at times

This book is dedicated to

My Muslim

brothers, sisters, mothers, children,

aunts, uncles, grandparents, fathers

that we have murdered

in the name of

Christianity

Sorry

Also

to me

and my life thus far

also Avon Hudson, Kevin Buzzacott and Yami Lester

This is my story of my life as I see it.

I know that my memory at times is not good

and my perception of reality is perverse.

But all I can do is tell it as I see it

Most probably very little in this book is bona fide the absolute and legal truth, but I will call the shots as I saw them coming out of the end of the barrel that the very first time I saw it; I remember thinking it looked a little pink rather than gun barrel grey. But then I am not much more of a painter as I am a writer so I may have been blinded the light that I thought I saw at the end of the tunnel on that trip, and mistakenly believed it to be the stairway to heaven.

Very little has improved in my expectations on this planet for my ability to perceive reality, because if Christians are largely a bunch of arseholes then what hope did I ever really think that I had of parking my butt on the runway of heaven on this particular touchdown landing in my lives throughout the ethers of evolution.

THE VERY EARLY YEARS

I guess I should give you a little background history to my family of origin here. Because this is after all the story of my life, I might as well tell you all that I think relevant. I am not nor ever have been an important man or a player in the unfolding history of those around me, nor of happenings on the planet. I have never done anything particularly great or even good and I have a bad attitude towards most other humans on the planet, yet I have an urge to tell my tale.

My grandparents on my father’s side met I think at art school and even though she was a good foot taller than him and they probably needed a milk crate to consummate their love, fell in love. She was from a wealthy Cornish family and he the son of Italian immigrants and yet they then both left art school moved back to the town where she was unwelcome for welcoming him into her pants, married and he became a blacksmith and water diviner. Its funny that the feeling for underground water tables can be passed on down through the bloodlines much like blood flows from an open incursion into ones own body, let alone an incision.

My mother’s parents were farmers and Scottish musicians.

I firmly believe that 95% of the humans that I have met here on this planet are little more than monkeys stealing oxygen and regurgitating ideas taught to them, very few people have the inclination or the ability to think for themselves. This may seem harsh and it may give you the opinion; probably quite rightly, that I have a bad attitude. But I have observed people for many years and have decided that few have thoughts of their very own; and that also they have nasty thoughts and attitudes towards their fellow neighbours; whether it be next door or the more dangerous type of attitude, the country over on the other side of the planet.

So this is my excuse for being little more than an excuse for a real person, it is my story. Yes this is my version of what transpired in my quest to live a decent life and to try as best I could to change what I could for the better, because it can be very difficult to be a real human being in this place. Very few are privileged enough to be able to perform their employed duties in life with any sense of justice; if that is they actually have a reasonable conscience. I reckon that few men or women go through any day in their life at their work without having to lie, cheat or do something that even they know is wrong. For some unknown reason not understood by me, this has perturbed my life forever and another day since I can remember first thinking these things at the tender age of three and a half. It may seem upon reading this that I was just going on through life on a rampage of self excess but I did spend many years as well doing volunteer work or just trying to help those around me, usually with little success. Generally and most probably because like most interfering do gooders I jumped in to mess with things before I was actually asked.

I was born in the Altona hospital, Melbourne on the 12th. July 1958, a day that I’ve been led to believe was a Saturday. This is so because, as family legend tells it, my dad was playing football and got reported that day, for bad behaviour. That is he got told off and sanctioned for acting in a way that was unacceptable, within the code of conduct and rules for the game that he was playing that day. That is the particular code relating to human beings, that would be current to the local communities rules, for Australian Rules football circa 1958 suburban style, in Altona on that day. Every local community has its own rules and its own particular style of government, its own interpretation of societal boundaries. This is a thing that has governed the behaviour of people since people have existed.

You may get away with fucking your cousin in your village but please do not think that it is acceptable behaviour in the very next small town. And no I have never been lucky enough to have a romp in the hay with one of my cousins but I do have a brother that managed to tick that one off his bucket list.

There are always rules within rules, as decided by the particular people playing said game and I know that there was an exacting code of ethics associated with this particular incident that involved the actions of my dad on this day, my day of birth. Somehow these rules took control of the circumstances surrounding my introduction into this world. This was particularly significant for my dad at the time, because he was a policeman and both he and my mum, were very interested in him having a squeaky clean image.

This squeaky clean image is something that my father and my mother, both protected to the detriment of even their own children. To their death they would both hold on to the ideal of a perfect familial existence and they both always denied anything that suggested that they had been anything but perfect parents. Well maybe this is harsh because it was not that they denied the possibility, but more that they could not see where they had done anything wrong, with their children in particular. And they held on strong to all possible attacks on their doing wrongs. This is probably a fair enough attitude for most parents and with mine; looking back it seems fair that they be seen in this light, even if I often wondered why they acted the way they did.

I guess in retrospect and upon reading this again, that they did in fact do nothing wrong, because as my father always taught me, if you do the very best that you can with your abilities at the time, then you have done nothing less than your best. You have done nothing wrong. He also had a sad and worrying belief in the idea that justice prevails, which is a funny attitude for a cop who lived with years of incompetence and corruption within his profession.

It is far too easy for a child to criticise the behaviour of adults, because when you get to be an adult, you have largely forgotten, or are oblivious to the nature of the soul of a child.

He was in disgrace big time the day that I was born for his conduct and as I begin to romanticise about my life, I’d like to believe that he purposely got reported, so that he could come and see me enter the world from the corridor in the hospital, that most fathers back then must have thought was where babies were born. If you paced up and down that corridor back then; sooner or later a nurse would open a door and out would pop a baby. Way back then fathers never knew of the tribulations of childbirth.

I think that it is a possibility that he may have been set up for being a cop and hassled for not doing much more than being a footballer, but even this thought is probably a romantic view. He may have done nothing more that spat the dummy and lost control under the pressure of knowing that he was about to become a father for the second time. He probably went to the bar and whinged about being sent off, because I was born at five to six and most games finished well before that, in reality no matter what time he got sent off, there was plenty of time for him to get to my birth at six, but then of course I did not tell him exactly what time I was coming home. It was probably not even necessary for him to come into contact with the bar at all, but I am sure that he did, like I said societal rules of the play of the day.

I reckon he was not present at my introduction to the world, because back then, fathers never were. I believe that there is a reason why he was not there; like lubricating himself at the bar at the time, but he is dead and my mother only ever gave me excuses, she could not or would not, recall the truth of much that has passed under the bridge. Women of her generation had the good sense to not criticise their husbands. Or at least when they are dead, because most women have the good sense to criticise their living husbands to their faces.

Yet in effect, in my recollection of the events, he came to see me after I was born because he wanted to and was not there when it happened, because it was not appropriate behaviour for him in his society in his era.

This is where the local rules system always comes into the nature of what people do, because what one community or even one small group within a community does, could be totally unacceptable in the very next street.

In truth I tell my story like most do, with myself as the central character. Flawed I may allow myself to be, but still, in general, I probably tend to look back and emphasise the worst intentions for others, and the best for me alone. We all like to think that we are immune to serious flaws in our own selves.

So please keep this in mind as you judge my life and remember, that if I am admitting to making it up as I go, already then, you can probably not be able to trust me, to recall the absolute truth of my life. Like most I would like to hold on to the belief, that I am the hero in my own not so memorable melodrama.

So before me, my dad was a hero as well.

You see this is the sort of macho patriarchal society that I was born in to. You have to show that you are a big tough man, by playing football, whilst your wife is having your child and then you bop some poor bloke, so that you can get out of playing football so as to pretend to be sympathetic with your wife and yet managing to avoid all the ugliness that is a birth and suffer at the bar with a beer. Yet to tell the truth as my mum recalls it, he just told the umpire that he was a wanker, obviously not the precise words, but I am trying to get across the sentiment here. As I have said this does not explain why he was not there at my entrance to the world, or waiting in the corridor where all babies come into the world, because I still reckon he was in a bar somewhere. So he did the right thing he drank at the bar and he made an appearance at the corridor outside the birthing room. So you have done your bit, that is after you have waited at the bar with your beers and your mates, for too long believing that the baby might miraculously appear there, this is Australia of course, so you go to the place way back then where babies are really born, the corridor outside the room.

Yet if he did not bonk some guy on the head, it is comforting that his violence was curturbed by himself. It is nice to think that cops back then had some self-restraint.

This is something that I feel that I can be proud of because, verbal abuse, that is but a soft foul. It is a way of defying the rules and getting cautioned, to the point of being told to go away, without causing physical damage on your fellow sportsmen or your fellow human beings. The being at the bar scenario makes sense I guess, when my dad arrived after I was born, because in those days, the idea of a bloke watching the pain and suffering, of child birth, was not cool for a man. It was just not going to happen, because the birth was going to happen any way. I can only wonder how stupid men were back then to believe that babies were born in bars; or possibly corridors in hospitals, but then I am probably no smarter now, because I am yet to even kick a goal in the baby department.

And so the orgasmic rush of semen, relates to the pretty flush of a cleaned baby as an end result and men of those times were absolved from being involved in the in between messy bits nor did thy need to know anything about women’s plumbing systems or what goes on inside the female form at all.. The fact that having to look at your misses with her feet spread and the big pink head of your semen’s goal saying hello in a not so elegant as a surprise is one thing men did not have to deal with back then. Better you stay at the bar and be thankful that she spread her legs for you in the first place.

The timing factor here is a little obscure cause if my dad got sent off and he went straight to the hospital then he would have been there sooner, this apart from knowing the habits of men like him makes me think that he may have spent time in the bar, waiting for me, he was probably just twenty years to early, because if he went there to the bar twenty years later I would most likely have actually been there..

Like I said timing is all important, maybe in my romanticism I would hope that he got sent off nicked down to see my mum and then snuck off back to the footie to have a beer with his mates and snigger about being sent off in the first place, then rushed back to pace the corridor of the hospital looking for me. One would hope that your old man was just such a genius that he could balance all the necessary expectations of society. But then all of this is probably just bullshit. I can honestly say that now, me personally, an inspired protégée and improved version of my father; I do not believe that when you get your wife pregnant you can wait in bars or hospital corridors, expecting a baby to appear. If I get lucky I plan to be there and watch it in all its tequila sunrise glory.

Like most I don’t quite remember being born, but I do remember my sister coming home from the same hospital nearly two years later without ever looking for my dad in a bar or hospital corridor. I kept giving her great big hugs and kisses, I loved my sister from the moment I saw her. I remember how my elder brother always loved me and looked after me and I was happy, that now, I had someone to love and look after.

You may think that it’s not possible to retain information of these events from such an early age. But I do recall some of this very clearly. This memory has been facilitated by the fact that my dad was among other things, a serious photographer. My memory was from very early on, jogged by constant viewing and reviewing of eight mm film footage as well as innumerable still photographs.

I do have other early memories, apart from the ones, that were propped up by photographic aids. Images of me going in the pram, with my older brother, and of course with my mother, down to the local shopping precinct, in the search for necessities. I used to love these shopping trips, my first real adventures outside the home. See I could follow the ways and paths that these forays outside my home took, I could monitor the routes that we travelled, just in case my mum got confused and lost. I could remember the way that we had travelled so that if it was necessary I could find my way home. Thirty-seven years later I can still go back to those streets and retrace the exact routes that we took. They are forever imbedded into my brain, more than where my car keys are at the moment.

I have always been obsessed with knowing where I am, and being confident in the quality of my sense of direction. Even today whenever I move to a new area I have to check out the layout of the land and it’s surrounds before I can relax, settle in; and feel comfortable. I have to have a mind map of my position, where I am, and the relative place of everything around me that I know, and this must fit in within this map in my brain and have its place. And this map is then superimposed over my window to the world for every waking moment of the day. At any place in space and time I can then point out North, or else I will have to stop and calculate just where it is so that I can then get on with my life. This is an inherent part of me. Unfortunately this causes some problems with getting about at times, because I have to know where I am at all times. But generally it is comforting because usually I think that I know just where I am in the world.

I spent a lot of time talking to my dog when I was very little; maybe I picked up a few tricks from him because I know that he always checked out his new environs very thoroughly after each time that we shifted home, he was a good dog. As it turns out I am also born a dog in the Chinese cosmos of cosmetically confused concepts. It was very funny to see him when we moved to a new house, he’d run around like crazy sniffing out all the hidden and interesting little places of a new abode then; as he knew the house block, he would gradually take on the neighbourhood. He was a lot of fun in those days. I soon learnt to be a little more cool than Laramie, I’d watch him, I’d take notes and then I knew what to look out for. I learnt to use him as a scout, but that was when I was much older, nearing my teens. You see we moved quite a bit as my dad moved up the promotional ladder of the police force, I think I counted twenty two times that I had moved house by my twenty first birthday. Six or seven of these were after I turned eighteen though; so it wasn’t always my father’s career that uprooted my life in a constantly irritating way for a little Cancerian boy.

I remember having the excitement of an excursion to the shops shattered one day when I must have been no more than three. We stopped at a shop that we had always passed by, we went in and I became the focus of attention, the funny looking man and my mother were looking at me with an artistic eye. Suddenly I found myself in a big old leather chair with lots of polished metal bits on the side, there was a white cloth wrapped around me straightjacket style. I knew very quickly that this was going to be a bad experience; somewhere in my subconscious I recalled the story of the mass murderer who sold meat to the pie shop in London some years before I was born. The machine that my man had in his hand made a god awful sound, a metallic whirring cacophony that made my head spin. Somehow I escaped outside, I nearly made a clean getaway, I knew that I knew the way home, but I was hampered by things; I think by this white sheet wrapped around me.

That whirring sound and the vibration that it made on my skull still reverberates in my head. Particularly at the place on that bone just near the back and above of your ears, bad vibrations that sent messages rumbling deep into the brain. THIS IS NOT GOOD FOR ME. I was traumatized by my first haircut, big time.

I don’t know why, it probably does not play in the memory of most other humans, that first cut. Maybe I am romanticising and extrapolating here. Maybe it is that maybe this is the excuse for all the victims of the world, that very first cut into your privacy. Maybe I was just too young to be anything else. But definitely I can remember, very clearly, the panic, the fear and the extreme anger that I felt at being betrayed at this point. For it was my own mother who had caught me and returned me to this seat of torture.

Soon I realised it was my own mother who had orchestrated the whole operation, the drama that was to be my first haircut. Yet she recalls that I wanted to get a short back and sides. She is very good at blaming me so I often return the compliment, in reality how is a tiny boy going to know what a short back and sides even is.

For years and years my mother laughed and teased me about how I looked with a short back and sides, derision of the pain that I felt being at being placed in the chair of torture and then being ridiculed and scorned by my own mother about the hairstyle that I had to wear afterwards. If I had wanted that haircut she would not have that ammunition to torture me and this is the problem with her intelligence, she brings herself undone with her lies.

That first cut into my brain. I haven’t forgotten, I haven’t yet quite forgiven. It’s impossible for adults to understand the damage that they can cause to the little folk with their assertions on their lives and the fact that they think that it is all in all but a little humour, a funny little remembrance that we will look back on and laugh about, a part of growing up.

My mother to this day will not accept the pain and suffering that she still causes me with this behaviour. The fact that she will not stop invading my privacy, the fact that she thinks that it is her right as a mother.

Now it’s the fact that that I will not kiss her on the lips.

Until I was forty she never wanted to hug me or show me any affection then after, I suspect, a visit to a medical professional; she decided that she had to make up for this and hugs were the now thing to do. For me this was strange when I had already learned to know that hugs from your mother were not good. But the kissing on the lips, sorry but that is just way too creepy for me, especially when they are done with such slight of hand and mouth and not invited, welcome or understood. You cannot go from no contact to full-blooded lovers lips in the space of one year after a thirty something year drought.

My lips are for lovers not mothers that’s my contemplation on the matter.

She makes great fun and drama about the fact that it is not cool for me to accept such a gesture. I have told her that I do not wish this intrusion into my personal space yet she laughs at me and scorns me for not being a proper son. So she laughs at my objections and makes a great point of trying to slam a kiss on my lips every time I meet her. How sad and sick is this behaviour, how sad is it that a mother would try to invade her own son’s privacy in this manner. How sad that she insists that I am a wimp for complaining about this. And yes maybe I am, but then maybe I made the mistake of assuming that I was born and raised by a human being.

I felt where my convictions lay very strongly that day when I was less than three, I felt that it should be one of the basic human rights of people, the right to decide when and how to cut one’s own hair. This is probably a strange thought for a little boy but they were my thoughts and perspectives and I will live by them until the day that I die. I do not like people invading my personal space and generally all people are the same they just think it is a God given right for them and not for me.

It is funny that as I grow old it seems sad that such a basic right, is one that to the many in the world, whose rights are invaded to a far greater extent, the millions in the world who would die to have a situation where the lines of a haircut was their battleground; would be their frontline, makes me look pathetic. Yet this is something for which I am not ashamed because as I have learned in life, today the haircut, tomorrow where you sit, and the day after everything you say and do. This is what my mother did and this is what I found my life fighting for.

I may not have understood the meaning of the words human rights, but I sure as hell knew when mine had been violated. Funny though that my mum swears that it was me who asked to go and get my hair cut that very first time, funny how there are always two sides to the story. It’s facetious how that the bullies always have a very different recollection of the damage that they inflict. It’s droll that when I talk to my mother these days that she has a different memory of