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Dirty Work at the Kitchen Sink
Journal of a Futurist - 2 August 2002
Fuming Fathers & Pedophile Bishops
Hello and apologies yet again to all you neglected web-addicts. I don’t know why I agreed to gather some of my intemperate blabberings and put them together for a dead tree vanity pack, a book, while also trying to earn a living and stay in the same house as a family that makes Ozzy Osbourne seem like the original Brady Bunch. Anyway, it’s over. Just a few more days on the drip feed and I’ll be back to knock the White House into shape. Thanks for your continued emails, he spat through gritted teeth, some of which I’ll post when I’m allowed out of the nut house.
The other night they strapped our Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, into the next bed. According to Matron, an undercover agent for Amnesty, the Minister is the subject of an ongoing investigation into his ability to function without registering emotion or feeling shame. If the secret is discovered, it will guide the recruitment & placement of future Liberal Party ministers. Not that my wife, Julie Clarke, thinks there’s much difference between Ruddock’s barren psychic interior and my own, judging form her wonderful diary entry this week. Let’s hope she agrees to keep her insights coming. Humiliating for me, but fun for you. The personal is the political. Read on:
A WIFE’S DIARY: No stopping Bush from bombing Baghdad
Richard has just finished a brilliant final chapter for his forthcoming book, Amerika Psycho, to be published by Ocean Press It grapples with the future of the human race and is very stirring. As he was reaching his intellectual climax about 2pm yesterday afternoon, he set off for a walk in the park with our dog Fang in the hope that the ultimate jigsaw-puzzle piece of humanity’s situation could be popped into place in his head. Then he could write the conclusion, email it to the publishers, and get into the ABC radio studios down the road to discuss pressing questions of current affairs on Monday Forum.
I too had some challenges in the home office that afternoon. Running a household for me is like wrestling a giant squid - a gruesome and hopeless task. Nevertheless I persist, and I was engaged in a round of washing, fridge cleaning and bill opening interspersed with phone answering and To Do List writing. To add interest I increased my pace, adding document and garbage sorting plus stain removal to my afternoon agenda. The ability to do many things at once as opposed concentrating on one thing is, as we all know , the main difference between men and women.
Then there was a sudden fluster of rain and I darted into the back courtyard to get the washing off the line and at the same moment the door slammed shut and the bolt dropped and there I was locked out. I was philosophical because there’s a shed out the back where I have several unfinished manuscripts sitting in drawers and shopping bags. Under normal circs I avoid this spot like the plague so I went in to visit them, and quite forgot myself so entranced I was by a chapter I picked up, until I was alerted by curses and hurrumphing as Richard and Fang broke in through the side gate. They too were locked out , as I wasn’t in the house to let them in. For ten minutes he had already been knocking !!!! And was not happy. In fact considering the elevated mental areas he had been exploring in the park- Connection, Collaboration, Community and Consciousness , his attitude and the epithets that poured forth at this very basic and human bungle were surprisingly unhelpful. At first he thought he could climb in the bathroom window, but those days are past .Then he said we should wait half an hour when Angelica would be home from school with her key but I said no, she had netball practise. The aspect of the situation that was exercising Richard’s mind was that this very mishap had befallen me once before, therefore it wasn’t an accident, it was my fault.
Is pedophilia worse than abortion?
Forget the blame, find a solution I snarled. I knew the only option was to smash the glass in the French window and proffered an appropriate rock. Considering the time he has spent in gaol with proper criminals, he was surprisingly chary of taking the violent option, but finally did so, not allowing me to do the deed , as he said through gritted teeth that was dangerous and I might hurt myself. As we regained entry to the house from the back, Angelica arrived home via the front door and walked in to find shards of glass everywhere and a fuming father who returned to his office to wrestle only momentarily with humanity’s problems before he then had to leave to discuss whether a bishops opinion that pedophilia was worse than abortion was a relevant comment, how the democrats could save themselves and whether farming subsidies during drought were morally justifiable.
Like watching a trusted friend
I refused to drive him the studio, as I sometimes do. Instead I made a couple of phone calls and had a delicious bath with orchid oil during which time I did not listen to the radio. But I couldn’t help thinking that if Al Gore had won the US elections, our family life would be a lot less stressful. Richard would be occupying himself with gardening projects instead of his vendetta against President Shrub, and the International Court of Justice would be dealing with Al Q’aeda. Unlike my husband I decided to accept that in the short term there was nothing that I could do to prevent the bombing of Baghdad, and anyway, what to cook for dinner? But I still had a political thought, which was that as the news of American foreign policy unfolds, it is like watching a friend one had grown to like and trust turn into a megalomaniac. Then I tidied the living room and covered the long dining room tablet with beautiful old pieces of embroidered and printed fabric from Africa and India, and placed a big white china jug of bright pink Oriental lilies in the centre of it. I lit the candles in the candelabra . Doing this, I suspect, made me feel almost as satisfied as Richard must have felt writing in his cluttered office, finishing the chapter that mapped a way forward for humanity . Then we had dinner with the teenagers by candlelight and made a toast to the book, and he probably thought that I had forgiven him for certain hasty remarks about my stupidity with keys and locks. But no. Soon he will discover on his schedule, which I now run, that he is booked in for a hands-on, take-no-prisoners, warts-and-all prostate examination. Something else to cross off my To Do list.
JULIE CLARKE
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