WEDDERBURN: After giving a talk as a married man on rejection, invalidation, and humiliation, Payton L. Inkletter threw a rotten tomato at himself.

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

In other news…

01^st February 2009:

Sunday: Early morning was woken by a migraine developing, and so a couple of white comforters helped me return to sleep. When we both surfaced, about midday, I noticed my right eye’s crimson veil was now covering almost half the entire surface with blood, making me look ideal for a horror movie without the hassle and expense of makeup, with even the bag under that eye swelling up.

It was hot, humid, and the type of day for wrinklies to be indoors doing very little, and if they are blessed with airconditioning, even if it’s but one room, they belong in that room. Well, we are now such a couple, so we spent a couple of hours together, old love vultures that we are, in the cool lounge, watching on free to air the Australian Country Music Awards. My how Kasey Chambers and hubby cleaned up! Baby Inkletter very early, in her early teens, became a big fan of Kasey, and I managed to get her an album signed by her (no, not of Baby Inkletter for Kasey, the other way round!).

As a sea breeze had begun, I braved the outdoors while the sun was still fairly high, and began my frenzy of watering and fertilizing front and back, this being my extra blood and bone day for the spoilt bamboos. Which are going bananas by the way, with the heat, water, and food.

I broke off this work to deliver vittles to Pa pree, who, since getting his shakuhachi flute has been googling like a man possessed, and he informed me that madake bamboo, can grow four feet in a day when it’s happy – I wish mine was that happy! Back home I broke bread watching My Beloved, and then got captivated, as did Missus InkleIlovepandas, with the Aunty documentary ‘Cherub of the Mist’ about red pandas in the Himalayan foothills. I’ve shot a few dozen black ones here in my backyard that were raiding my bamboo, but the red ones are faster, and while we get them here, I’ve yet to shoot any dead, with quite a number getting away missing part of a tail or ear, or whathaveyounot. (I wonder how long it’ll take…)

I charged back outside and finished my big summer garden maintenance schedule under lights until Janny called me in to watch a Compass repeat on Aunty, ‘A Small Town Welcome’, about the Sudanese refugee family settled there. We saw it on its first airing, and as is so often the case, a second watching of a show is worth it, because you miss stuff. We both had a tinge of feeling that the locals who sought the family to help settle in Dorrigo had at long last got their ‘trophy’ or sufficiently ‘sexy’ or curious or different family in need. I was moved – forgive me please Dorrigo well-meaning folk – to think of Ja’mai in ‘We Can Be Heroes’, the masterpiece comedy series by Chris Lilley, and ‘her’ sponsorship of the scores of African refugees in her attempt to win Australian of the Year. I wonder if an aboriginal family, for example, desperate for assistance from the Northern Territory, would have been as welcome, or a white down and out family from anywhere in Australia? Yes, please forgive me, because no doubt there was at least a great deal of genuine humanitarian motive driving those Dorrigo folk helping this family. I don’t know if they were Anglican folk, but they were church goers, and I also caught a whiff of those exquisite ‘close to translation goody goody two shoes the men have higher pitched soft voices with soft effeminate faces and everyone talks such beautiful motherhood statements’ emanations which, if not peculiar to, are common among Australian Anglicans. So yes, please forgive me, and take my observation with a grain or two of humour.

I wasn’t going to, but I got tempted to watch The Daily Show with John Stewart Global Edition, another almost cockywhacker American comedy, to bunch in with Letterman. He is funny, I have to admit, but he’s also a bit warped. Then before I knew what had happened (Missus Inkleweary having hit the sack), I had watched the following comedy, the American version of The Office. That witty Steve Carell makes it work, but I can’t go past the genius of Ricky Gervais’ original, and if I had a criticism off the top of my head of the original, it was too crude, which wasn’t necessary to make it work and be funny and captivating.

My eye had bloodied up the more as this day wore on, now with just the top half of my iris surrounded by white eye white. I did a kitchen clean up, and then somehow mustered up the energy to go for a walk, because I just so badly need the exercise to slow up the Grim Reaper’s sharpening of his scythe. I got back drenched in sweat, on this typical February night, without a breath of breeze. I have been a veritable greenhouse gas generator this evening, and Janny told me later that pears can do it (she cut up about four pears for me to eat late afternoon); all I know is I could have temporarily significantly eased the Russian Gazprom supply shortfall across Europe due the strictures in the Ukraine portion of the pipelines. So why didn’t I?, I hear you ask. I was here in Perth, the need is in Europe, and my bottom line can’t stretch that far.

I showered, and hit the sack near five.

+paytontedwithlove+