Every time I close my eyes I find myself drifting back into fantasy, hell – I don’t even need to close my eyes anymore. In fact I have spent so much time daydreaming over the past 26 years that I have perfected the art of drifting off into my fantasy whilst having a conversation, watching television, doing the company book keeping and even driving. I guess this is a perk of being born female and able to undertake more than one task at a time! Quite simply – I am boring. In my fantasy world I am not the overweight, lazy, self-loathing ‘writer’ that sits here typing, but a modestly sized, almost attractive, outgoing Pulitzer Prize winner. Oh, and that tall, dark, handsome, ever so friendly, but simply not in my league guy – he is my lover! Some people write out ten year plans for themselves. Like business proposals of projected earnings and potential expansions. I like to think of my fantasy as a somewhat more relaxed plan for myself. It’s not an unreachable goal! Surely if I became a little less lazy I could reach that goal weight ‘Jenny Craig’ and ‘Weight Watchers’ keep harping on about. Of course when I reach that ever elusive ‘goal weight’ I have to get the guy and, well, the Pulitzer is in the bag really! My dog is an ever present source of inspiration and awe to me. She doesn’t have to justify to anyone the fantasy land she lives in! She must be having a hell of an adventure though! The sporadic, yet passionate and deliberate bursts of energy that see her running in swift circles, jumping from couch to couch, bedroom to bedroom, front garden to back deck, stopping only for a quick drink of water and then off again, surely serve a purpose! I wonder is she chasing, or being chased? Oh to be a dog! Never having to justify your actions, just looking up at your owner with those big brown eyes and the “but I love you” expression, and having all forgiven. Not to mention the flexibility animals have – you know what I mean! On the downside, dog food never did look appealing, and I do like the concept of walking upright on two legs. I am getting off track though; I have a habit of doing that. Sometimes I get so off track that I forget if I was actually on a track to begin with. I wonder if you pretended that you were riding on a train for long enough that you would actually somehow, miraculously end up at a different station? Like those women that want to be pregnant so badly that they actually develop the symptoms of a real pregnancy. The power of suggestion is powerful indeed! But there I go jumping off the tracks again. Some people might say I was insane, and they are probably right. But I firmly believe that as an artist it is my prerogative, and even my duty, to experience the full spectrum of the emotional scale. “Sure,” people say “I respect that. But maybe experiencing the entire scale in a period of less than five minutes is a little unhealthy”. I want to write my first novel before I turn 30; I simply don’t have the time to waste on years riding an emotional rollercoaster!
As each birthday passes and we all grow yet another year older we lose so much of that innocent wonder that captivated us as children. As we become adults it is no longer acceptable to believe that a fat man dressed in a red suit breaks into our house once a year and leaves presents, or that a life-sized rabbit spends his spare time making chocolate eggs and hides them in obscure places each April, and even that a Tinkerbell type fairy manages to squeeze in between our pillows as we sleep and exchange lost teeth for money – let alone that the tire at the base of a hundred year old eucalypt somehow grew out of the tree itself! Whilst I no longer believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, or little miss Tooth Fairy, (a disbelief stemming from the fact that these ‘people’ stopped visiting me once I moved out of the family home – even thought I had been a VERY good girl) I refuse to concede defeat and staunchly protect my right to believe that tires can grow out of trees. My childlike wisdom also fuels my belief in the ‘Angels Among Us’ theory. Of course, angels are not quite the ethereal creatures that the bible and storybooks would have us believe, but more of a shiny forehead kind of person. Call me crazy, call it a delusional conspiracy theory, call it what your damned well please, but no amount of debate will sway my faith in this hypothesis. You see, I believe that all those shiny fore headed people out there are in fact the ‘Angels Among Us’. Just as man is believe to evolve from the ape, angels have managed to evolve into beings accepted in our modern society. The evolution of the modern day angel involved a lengthy, and possibly quite painful, process of cerebral hemisphere modification. The halo has simply dropped over time. Now, I myself have never had the honor of a halo bestowed upon me, but I have seen a few movies, and read a few books in my time, and it seems logical to me that the consistently bright light hanging about the head would have to reach exceptionally high temperatures. One would assume that if this object fell onto your head it would have to leave its mark. As we have all experienced, the human body has the remarkable ability to heal itself, and so why should an angel’s be any different. Given this proven fact of life it would seem only logical that the shiny part of some people’s foreheads was in fact a halo that the skin had simply grafted over. It all makes perfect sense. I hear your groans and sense your rolled eyes, but the proof is out there! All it takes is a little lateral thinking – lateral thinking that has recently helped me prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is a city of spiders living inside my friend Adam, eating away at his flesh in order to survive. How else would you explain his disappearing arse?
