Airport

 

From the plane: 

snow on the mountains above Christchurch.

Crossing into the Drop Off lane is half the battle. Swerving taxis have a mind of their own. Climbing the ramp, the airport comes into view. Missing are the old signs for International and Domestic. Muscling ubers behave as if you’re competition. Parking is miss and hit if you’re not careful. Finding a vacant opportunity, we signal into the gutter. Lifting the one piece of luggage permitted from the hatchback. Recalling the Vietnamese driver yelling from his tram at a pushy car: okay, you want hatchback, you get hatchback! Sliding doors invite you and your wheelie-case onto the concourse. Looming are squadrons of robots squat in squares on the bright marble. Swirling travellers negotiate the robots, attentive but anxious. Sliding your grotesque passport photograph into a cradle, the robot lights up. Greeting you by name with instant recognition, you wonder how the robot knows. Curling luggage tags snake from an aperture. Whirring of luminescent slot delivers your very own boarding pass. Stunning as it seems, you recognise what it is. Checking its seating arrangement, you learn you will sit near the cockpit. Half-wittingly you search for a human to approve the one piece of luggage. Smiling, someone in Premium asks if the case go on the conveyor belt. Winging it, you had already slid the curling tag through the handle in a quadruple Möbius strip. Lifting the case into place you hope to see it again at the other end. Disappearing through rubber veils it’s a weight off your shoulder. Ping go phones some areas, and more ping tones. Missing the old customs already, communication for example, the human voice (to coin a phrase), you head in the direction of customs. Resembling a production line, it is approached via a labyrinth of queue cordons on posts. Rotating with rolling cylinders, hand luggage and coats and other hard objects whisk off in containers towards the unflappable x-ray. Removing your belt (buckle thereof), you hold up your pants as you enter the metal detector. Glowing, according to the monitor, is something in the back pocket. Arresting is the officer’s objectionable request to pat your backside for what is glowing. Annoyingly, you temporarily lose your unflap, by the official public threat of being handled. Turning all your pockets inside out, they’re empty. Calling for the supervisor, the officer is disconcerted by this “difficult customer”. Feeling his way, the airport customs supervisor explains, as much as to say, they have  a job to do. Knowing you have nothing to hide you offer to stand beltless again in the scanner booth. Astounding, the second time the scan cannot detect any solid evidence of soft inner glow in your back pocket. Wondering, as you walk towards facial recognition, what that was about you are shaken by a close thing to a frisk. Sliding your passport mugshot into the recogniser, you long for Wilde times, when it was enough to declare your genius. Standing on your dignity, the feet outlined on the floor, you must face the truth, you cannot recognise yourself in this tactless robot hell.

Helmet

 

Lime helmets bestrew the urban landscape. Separated from their lime bicycle or lime scooter, even more elegantly, e-scooter, lime helmets rest quietly as tortoises at the juncture where their motorist bestrode the beast and bestrew the headgear. It is what it is. What it is, is it. It is it, what is. Like other exotic imports, lime helmets pop up randomly in unlikely locations, a wonder or a weed depending on viewpoint. Their outsize appearance is what? A Martian mushroom, a smoothest cactus, a globular bulb, a football triffid. They roll roundly in the sunshine, they catch raindrops when left upsideup. The legal requirement to protect the head is a nicety of the ninety percent. The other ten percent have forgotten, if they ever learnt. We, not being there at the time, assume they possibly didn’t care, one way or the other. If the hat fits, don’t wear it. It is a case of leaving their brains behind, as the 10% wheel off into a future that is ever before them, void of basic cover, freely hair flowing. The Newtonian collision of cranium with bitumen, forehead with foreground, mind with matter, is incidental. And, just as they dismiss the law on mandatory wearing of helmets, so e-scooterers defy the laws about taking their beast along footpaths and crazy roadways. They weave along the wrong side as trucks heave into view and road-ragers veer around corners without warning. The question of whether lime vehicles have laws that apply to them is moot when their riders have sidetracked all commonsense, leaving their helmets behind them. There it remains, solitary and significant, a canopy for green thoughts in a green shade. Such thoughts circulate under the braincap of lime helmets, an air that’s its own small atmosphere. We can only wonder at the fresh green shoots that ping like neurons in that sacred space. Were they meant for the age of penny-farthings, are they actually as lonely as they appear, or reminders of care and protection? It is what it is. Count yourself fortunate. This, strangely, was not the destiny of o-bicycles. Lemon yellow, these imports were visible beneath brown waters of the Yarra, whence they had been ungraciously hurled by mindless card-carrying layabouts. The glowing frames of those sturdy beasts accumulated beneath the tidal flow, their cause not aided by a lord mayor calling them “urban clutter”. Steady income flow was unforthcoming from the yellow tangles, murky bubbles rising from their lemon helmet vents. The vagrant layabouts needed to invest in a thinking cap. Lime helmets think back to those days of 2018 with a certain relief. Left a while in unusual places on the board, like pieces in some game with evolving rules and a rotation of users, lime helmets await the next shift in their fortunes. They dot dull patches of Melbourne with hardy iridescence. They keep their own counsel.

Internet

Iso-mandala No. 177 (October 2020)

Each person their own internet. Sometimes I wonder about my internet. My little corner of the internet, I mean. Not that it’s a corner, given my reach extends in seconds to all the world’s “imagined corners”. The only corner in this exchange is the corner where I am found at the time, in home, library, fast-moving Mitsubishi. Surfing like a Californian, objects pop up in my path, products I lack interest in, reminders I long since chose to forget. Waves may be a long read, idle interruptions, a mean meme dumper that tempts me to shut down. My path is dripping with clicks, but to what extent this is my act of will, or the waves’, it’s a matter of guesswork, of calculated chance. My invisible path closes over each time, like a lost line of Keats. My internet was a sandpit, before it became a desert; a paddle pool in the days before it was tsunamis. It’s a relief to meet someone who has never used a computer. I try talking about my internet in the third person. His internet is a dragon that daily may flaunt colours extravagant, or then breathe a fire of dismay. His internet is a toy, a dream, a rest, it will bury him in images, or weary him unaccountably with geometric melancholia. It's useless keeping these grammar games going when war breaks out into my internet. Live updates turn events into sports coverage, as each news flash corrodes my hardy emotions. Dozens of reactions to updates by friended friends lend to the corrode, as I effortfully try to meet them halfway. The corner of the screen is the centre of my minute-long attention as I try to think of what to say next. War is over, if want it. Left to its own devices it would become more storage. It takes me to make it get up and out in the morning. When the power zeroes, when servers crash, when I’m feeling bereft, I simply remember my favourite sites and then I don’t feel so what do I feel but the blank screen and the view outside my Windows 10, the common explanations that my internet calls home. My internet is but the everlasting threads that trace from thereabouts, home. The giddy bytes that bring transitory luxury, a plethora of postcards, will turn to rust. My internet seems so transfixed by selfish motives, could it ever be reduced to selfless giving? A huddled attention-seeker seeking what I might give, is it much more than a tireless exposé of directions home? If home is the comforts we find each day where we belong, now? Or the day of the plug arrives, the day when the plug is the server serving up this multiverse of imagined corners, the plug pulled on my little corner of the internet too, as it happens, so that home must be found somewhere else, beyond my Windows, the upgrades of my Apple, somewhere that is there anyway, having been so before my internet was ever tiptoed into, as if by some accident.