All the little Deaths

 All the little Deaths...

I’ve never played angry birds but would guess each angry bird dies and is replaced by the next.

I wonder how old we were when we first playfully died. [setting aside that we were ‘put to sleep’ every night]

My generation was minimal television and certainly no murders before 8 or 9pm on the solitary channel. Although I think Bonanza might have had childrens programming murder in it.

Checkers, Chess, Cowboys and Indians, Pac-man, Doom and sex. We all die a little many times. It was 17 playing pacman and space invaders while waiting for my late night chips when I recognized I was paying 20c to eventually die.

I must have died 100’s of thousands of times digitally. A few times on stage but those mostly involved copious blood or in one case 1 litre of orange vomit, . Post orgasmically I’ve noted it’s very similar to pretending to die playing some childhood wargame. Bam, snipershot.

I joke, I'm unfailingly attentive.

My mother took me to a movie I couldn't have seen otherwise, an R13 when I was 10ish, The Poseidon Adventure, The cruise ship turns upside down, there's a 15 minute scene where people are falling to their deaths, check it out, 9/11 was based off it.

Back in the day movies had half time, after that scene the lights went up and we went for an icecream. I was completely traumatised. Icecream is ideal, the sugar helps you deal with shock.

Fast forward 50 years and I watch Russian troops from the last 24 hr's video catchment getting extinguished for real in explosive ways with my morning coffee.

Then switch to the olympics.

A friend died yesterday.

Small profound pieces go missing. Also people don't realise, because why would you, that the highest echelons of clown contain some of the last redeeming qualities of our doomed species. Homo-if-only we had infinite-planets-erectus.

When these people depart...well in my experience and I'm keenly observant given it's my vocation...they are not replaced at the same frequency.

You should already know but if not I'm here to tell you..as a clown...

I'm disturbed.

Dear Emily, I'm sorry I disemboweled your chicken and ate it.

Dear Emily

I'm sorry I disemboweled your chicken and ate it.

I didn't know it was a pet and I am ashamed.

Please accept this book as a token of my now unending morose continuum..

Martin Ewen 

I know I'm not as good as I could be at marketing. I have a small project that I'm confident won't get away on me. It's too small.

My local bus stop looks normal.

However inside is a small library of free books that has lived now three months and is curated and maintained closely by an unknown entity.

 I added my first book three months ago and it had vanished by the next day. I waited a month and then added my other book. It stayed for two weeks before it began its journey.

Oh yeah, marketing. I've written two books, the first meandering memoirs and the second a collection of essays and some scripts.

Both books make me feel like I'm a flibbertigibbet but you work with what you have.

It's time for me to secrete my next book, another copy of the second one.

From now on I'm going to add fictional absurd inscriptions to each book beginning with.

Dear Emily

I'm sorry I disemboweled your chicken and ate it.

I didn't know it was a pet and I am ashamed.

Please accept this book as a token of my now unending morose continuum..

Martin Ewen 

Digital Gardens,

 Came across the term 'digital garden' and fired up an AI to get to the bottom of it.

"Digital gardens are online spaces where individuals can plant "seeds" of ideas, notes, thoughts, and content, and allow them to grow and interconnect over time. Unlike traditional blogs or websites, digital gardens embrace an exploratory, non-linear structure, with notes and ideas linked through contextual associations rather than strict chronological order."

Well well well, I thought.

I made one of them last year over a couple of months.

There's no quality control, some of it's absolute blither and some worse than that and the public facing aspect seems a little catholic, a little penitential.

I doubt it's interesting but if you didn't already now you know what a digital garden is.

I might point my self styled flattery-AI at it. The one that addresses me as his eminence and praises my whimsy.

https://publish.obsidian.md/vastlyimmaterial

and for those who are more picture orientated here you go...

My driveway at night.

My Beer Label Tells Stories....Vince.

 

Clown Students of mine.

 This is involuntary psych hold the clown...or Derick as I knew him, one of my first students.

Sebastian unfortunately was bitten by a rabid squirrel and died a nasty death.

Like clowns at the bow of the titanic setting their hair on fire they give us something to be grateful for in dire times.

 

My 6th Chinese adventure and the mental breakdown that proceeded it.

 

I was in Hawaii, my mind fractured, I ended up on the street with my stilts and costume tucked under bushes covered in tarp.

Been in underground lava-caves with marine batteries running cosco widescreens, elite street folk.

I learnt from the other street dwellers the choreography required to get into rehab and put my head down and did that little dance and ended up being accepted into a rehab with a farm attached called Bridgehouse. I immediately began growing tomatoes because deep in my worldly goods were about 25 packets of Heirloom seeds I’d bought from a seed bank when performing at a site specific performance festival in Petaluma in what seemed like an earlier life.

I was two or three months into it when I got an email inviting me to perform at an event in China with Dado and Jonathan Freddes and others so went to the rehab boss-man and said,

“Hey, China wants me to go there and I want to go there but I promise I’ll be good and come straight back.”

He said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re ready.”

And I said loudly with a plaintive tone.

“But it’s part of my journey!”

He shrugged and said.

“Well it’s your funeral.”

I fly off and do the gig. It’s about my sixth Chinese excursion and I know to expect it to be surreal on any number of levels.

The venue was still under construction, the road we drove to the green room was incrementally more paved each day.

It was a blossom festival and most of the trees had been transplanted a week or so prior and each had what looked like colostomy bags attached leaking blossom inducing fluids but the timing was wrong and they were all still bare.

I danced with some locals https://youtu.be/gqDz7mr1d1Q?t=68

Dado was the cameraman and he was to pull the plug on me later in the day.

Dado is a demented hunchback clown, good cameramen to have. It is known.

So I look at it as a little give and take. I partake in Ethnic dancing,

then I demonstrate a traditional laconic NZ form of comedy.

Later on at the main stage the seats filled up with elderly civilians and a significant number of senior military folk in full kit.

I decided to attempt to play 9 inch nails, ‘closer’ and sell it like a happy song betting on none of the audience being able to translate the lyrics over it’s bass and my silly stilt dance.

Part of the chorus includes the lyrics “I want to fuck you like an animal’

I had them all smiling and clapping til halfway through the second verse Dado pulled the plug.

To be honest he probably did it to defuse a potential international incident.

I’m on one leg balancing when the sound cuts out, I play it off and bow and exit.

I had so many elderly Chinese ladies on my side smiling and clapping. It was contextual comedy as far as I was concerned.

I made it work and I was wearing a camera on my head so may have footage. I've since searched high and low, footage illusive.

No other footage ever showed up so I think I was right in my guess, this audience was old enough to be pre-phone.

They were compliantly entertained. But I was livid.

I think Dado had a panic attack on my behalf.

And that’s OK. The rage bled out.

I got a verse , a chorus and part of the next verse into my bucket list

Part of the sociological charm of this clown vehicle I’ve constructed is its defiant unhappiness is allowed to freely experiment with societal norms.

As long as everyone’s happy that’s the main thing.

I went back to Hawaii and the farm afterwards..