529…197…601…WORK
Itamar on the left there once needed a job so bad that his dad told him, and this was back in high school, to go to the Hackett IGA and hand them a resume and if they didn’t accept it then to go in the next day and give them another copy until he got the job. He didn’t get the job. Around the same time that Itamar was trying to get work, I was riding my bike. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t need money as bad as Itamar, but rather I just enjoyed riding my bike more than I was willing to work. Not that I was good at riding. I ate shit constantly. Lost a lot of skin. I was a little older when money became an issue. I went to TAFE and got some certificates in youth work/community services because that was what was free. I drew stupid sketches the whole time.
260…4…296…APPETITE
I read in ‘Salad Days’ by Ronnie Scott that eating is all about putting parts of the world inside of you. My initial thoughts were that Dr Scott needs a little less sad Sartre and a little more shakshuka in his life. My subsequent thoughts were that you could probably say the same thing about getting boned. I’ve rarely been without a girlfriend since I was 14. I’ve also very rarely been hungry. My favourite way to eat is to put food inside of other foods, like in a burger or burrito or (pictured) arepa. My favourite way to have sex is to put my body inside of other bodies, like missionary or cowgirl or (pictured) romantic language.
416…545…134…SHAME
The showers thing might take some explaining. Basically, my girlfriend at the time had this friend who was obsessed with showers as a self-soothing thing to, like, pull her out of these big swings she got as part of, I think, BPD or BPAD or AN or something. She was in and out of facilities a lot. I always liked her, she had humanity. I made this post that was just a picture of a shower and I tagged her in the description, asked her what she thought of the image. She never commented on it. She didn’t want to talk. The same way no one talks about Crazy Frog anymore. The same way I don’t want to write about rapists, so.
213…336…333…IMPULSIVE
This guy, Tobias, he had an old antique lighter that had a metal cap that flicked open when you lit it. But if you held the cap in place when you lit it then the metal cap would heat up. In my memory it glows red. He dared me to hold it on my skin for five seconds. I asked him what he would give me. I think he said something like “I’ll give you a hundred dollars. Aha. I don’t have a hundred dollars. But will you do it?”. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. I found out later that it was because all the nerve endings died within the first second. I had a massive crush on Sara. She liked the whole bad boy thing I had going on, you know, talking back to teachers, burning myself, smoking bongs. She liked it, but she didn’t love me. Mia, on the other hand, said she loved me but she never seemed to like me very much. Sometimes when people ask me about the scar, I tell them it was a soldering accident.
434…41…606…BEDROOM
The bedroom became a space of womb-like regression when I was 18. One time I spent the whole week in bed with a cold. I would wake up and smoke bongs, then boil a kettle and pour the boiling water into a pot. I would lean over the steamy pot until my sinuses got nice and gooey, then I would huck up snot into the pot for about 4o minutes until my head was no longer gluey but instead god-awful dry and just all red inside. Then I’d get tired so I’d smoke some more bongs and fall asleep. Around five o’clock I would wake up and find this now room-temp pot full of water-logged boogers under my bed. I lose all sense of ‘world’ in the bedroom. I forget about things. It becomes a dirty dark world for thoughts, room-temperature water-logged self-conscious thoughts. I used to watch that show on the Netflix, ‘Review with Myles Barlow’. That whole week was so fucking weird, I fell asleep watching ‘Review’ and dreamed up entire episodes. Then I’d wake up and spend hours searching “myles barlow reviews blackface” on Google because I couldn’t figure out if I’d been dreaming or not.
11…436…614…OBFUSCATE
I read a lot of books in high school. One thing they taught me in Year 12 Creative Writing was that we should write characters who have conscious and unconscious desires. What do they think they want? What do they actually want? I wanted to get fucked up on 2CB and get my dick sucked by hot vegan chicks. I also wanted Titus Andronicus to drop another good album. Instead I got a lot of relationships with ambiguous boundaries and some 90 minute rock opera schlockfest with maybe two standout tracks. They also taught us in Creative Writing about the rule of three. How things go better in threes and there’s no reason for it, it’s just one those proven axioms of human psychology. That’s probably why I’ve always liked triptychs. Once your painting has three frames, you know that people are going to read it as some sort of story, a progression. But you can still choose how to interact with that assumption. There aren’t a lot of new stories, but I think there’s a lot of new ways to interact with old ones. The words “corkery ended up dead somehow” (above) scan different to how they used to. Corkers got Hodgkin’s lymphoma before graduation. He's still alive but there’s really only so much better you can get after like twelve months of being told every day you might die. My whole time as a student I always had the sensation that there was something good and calm and full of sense which was just out of my reach. Now I know that there’s nothing out there that can save us from a long and boring life. They also taught me in Creative Writing that if you’re writing a horror then you can make it scarier by not showing the monster, or only showing parts of it.
END
Charles Roper is from Canberra, Ngunnawal country. He studies Creative Writing at RMIT. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Paperchain Bookstore Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. His work has been featured in Obsession, an anthology from Bowen St Press. You can find him feeding the possums at Fawkner Park.