Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Signs and Wonders

Hail,

I will skip the usual grovelling about lateness and get right into this.

And I'm just settling in to my new office in the heart of Mordor. SMAC-HEAD's office is nestled amongst several others, all squat, pale brick and barred windows, in the middle of a vast expanse of bitumen, across the road from the railway tracks. It's as if the entire complex has deliberately been made ugly.

There has been some confusion about who is working where when and so the preceding doctor has left some of her personal effects here. As I work stuffed trolls and monkeys loom over me from the bookcase behind me, and pictures of improbably sweet-looking children in eighteenth century dress, with the small stature, big head and pale skin that often goes with paediatric osteomalacia.

I know the secretary has a cheery painting of a bear above her desk. The bear is wearing fisherman's clothes, and clutching a rod in its paws, and is standing in a river smiling broadly towards the viewer. This is meant to reassure us, but I can't help but imagine the viewer's response if they were to see this in real life: a hyper-intelligent tool-using grizzly bear, which has presumably already killed a solitary fisherman and taken his clothes, and now turns its fanged face towards you. How do you stop something like that?

We at SMAC-HEAD are numbers 11 to 13 Mureceptor Drive. Number 7 is Centrelink, to whom you go when you can't get a job. Number 9 is Child and Youth health, the people who take your kids off you, number 15 is the folk who go out to your house when you go mad and take you off to the insane asylum, then there's some kind of gambing recovery place at seventeen.

Up the road, and just around the corner, are the opposition: the TAB (gambling), McDonalds, Smokemart, pokies and yet another Booze Brothers. From there it's only a quick walk to Mr Hydro (hydroponics to grow cannabis), then once that really kicks in there's the gun shop.

Anyway, more on this aspect of the job as it develops. Next post (later today, I hope), why the ears, rather than the eyes, are the windows to the soul.

Thanks for listening

1 Comments:

Blogger Foilwoman said...

When did you start the new job? I think the nose is the sense most essentially linked to our sense of who we are, but I look forward to reading about the ears/sense of hearing.

2:36 PM  

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