DAY TWENTY TWO

HOW TO ASSEMBLE A FREECYCLED BIKE

Welcome to the latest concept in riding technology: the freecycled bike. 

Your most recent acquisition is as green as the hills you will soon be riding. All of the parts that make up this bike, from the hubs to the handlebar tape, have been collected, gifted or recieved by donation. In other words, entirely free! In addition, the construction of the bike has been a true labour of love as all the parts are second hand, a testament to the local biking community and their inability to throw things away. To top it all off, the freecycle is quite literally green! So as you peddle around the streets of the vintage bike capital of Australia make sure you do so with a certain smugness. Not the usual type seen on the faces of hipsters with their fixies, but the type associated with knowing your freecycled pushy doesn't need fuel, material consumption, ego or lattes to power it. In fact, by choosing to ride this beast you are not only lowering your carbon tyre tread but theirs too...and for that they owe you a latte. 

Happy freecycling! xx

 

step one> Open your ridiculously big box. Childlike excitement included.

step two> Attach peddles to cranks remembering that left pedal is reverse thread.

               Left pedal is marked L

               Right pedal is marked R

step three> Attach wheels making sure the wheel is centered between brake pads.

                 Be aware the locking washers on the front wheel remain on the outer edge of the 

                 forks. See image below.

step four> Spin handlebars until in the correct forward position. See image below for 
               correct angle. The angle of the handles should be in line with the top bar. 

step five> Tighten front bolt. See image below.

step six> Tighten top bolt. See image below.

step seven> Ride with gay abandon around the streets of the vintage bike capital of Australia!

welcome home/happy birthday/merry christmas. in that order. xx

DAY TWENTY ONE

When I was nine my two sisters and I spent a considerable amount of time in factories. Not so much in the child slave labour sense where we might be paid $4.16 an hour to clean the cages of battery hens but more as a form of entertainment. Of course, now that I look back on it, I realise this wasn't the usual choice. Other children wouldn't have taken rusting heavy machinery and an increased chance of tetanus over a comfortable evening of popcorn and Pierce Brosnan. But in a sleepy post-industrial town the options were somewhat limited. You either risked flocks of cranky, disease-ridden pigeons as playmates or chose to be hypnotised by the jiggly arms of Elsie Toothern shaking your deep-fried chips of their oil. After a brief discussion and three artery-clogging meals at Toothie's Takeaway my sisters and I agreed. We opted for bird-flu.

Madeleine, the eldest, always angled for us to play in the old biscuit factory. It was a cavernous building whose lingering smell was a reminder of its previous life. As romantic as that might sound, it was not. The trapped air baked under the day-long sun as if the building was holding its breath until we arrived. Being the strongest Maddy would force back the rusted, once rolling, metal door and from its hot, sour mouth the factory would finally exhale. It was reminiscent of an old man's yawn, had he eaten a packet of Milk Arrowroots just half an hour prior. 

I matched Maddy's eagerness to play amongst the slackened conveyor belts and five-person ovens. Unlike other forgotten warehouses its eroding insides harboured a second life. Echoing empty extruders now played host to a young family of rats, silver pathways along which our imaginary Ginger Snaps travelled had been bombed by the birds above, and the matted piles of half-rotten hair protectors provided excellent insulation for the nests of both. On a good day you might not even notice the smell. Just fifteen minutes of acclimatisation and you could be forgiven for wondering if Mum might bake a batch of Jam Drops for dessert that night.

However our younger sister Anna didn't share our sentiments. She just didn't appreciate all the old biscuit factory offered. Her eyes only saw the residual licks of black smoke along the exhaust fan edging or the mould-lined cutting moulds. When she complained that the floury cloud perpetually hanging in the air made her throat dry I dismissed it, telling her to think of it as an exotic micro-climate. Her enchantment with the factory was as lacklustre as the redundant machines it housed. For her the biscuit factory equated to a lot of 'make' but to me it was a lot of 'believe'.

DAY TWENTY

My heart leaps up when I behold 

          A rainbow in the sky: 

          So was it when my life began; 

          So is it now I am a man;

          So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die...

My heart leaps up when I behold

           An apparition of the sky:

           So is this heavenly body of no flesh;

           Marking rains fallen fresh;

           'She'll never be yours' I am told,

          

                      This elusive love between the sun and I...

DAY NINETEEN

 

Sometimes, when I am really bored, I like to think about you. Mainly in the moments when not much is happening. When I am leant up against the kitchen bench waiting for the kettle to boil or sitting through commercials about incontinence pads that claim their miraculous feat of absorption my mind drifts to that familiar place. There you stake your claim, set up camp and inhabit the corner of my mind reserved especially for moments of nothingness. 

As I pass by Mr Samson fastidiously trimming his white Azalea's or wait for the girl at the checkout with the lazy eye to ring up my loaf of bread and three apples I like to wonder what you're up to. I wonder where you are now and if you might also be buying a loaf of bread and three apples. We could be connected in that sense. Sort of  like a parallel universe. Just as my loaf is waved along its invisible flight path before the scanner so is yours, travelling the space between another lazy-eyed attendant and her register in some other part of the world. It would be right then in that chordal moment that our loaves would chime together. The only difference being of course that my bread is white and yours is undoubtedly wholemeal.

You were funny like that. For someone who could drown their long day at work in a packet of  the cheapest and nastiest lollies, a food I thought closely resembled hyper-coloured nuggets of rubber, you always insisted on buying wholemeal. "White bread is so processed," you would say. Having never expressed any other dietary concerns it always struck me as odd. Your diatribe sounded distinctly rehearsed. "It's a refined carbohydrate, Simon. They remove all traces of the husk and bran, bleach the flour then go and add gluten and raising agents to it to make sure it actually rises. By the time it reaches the shelves there is next to no nutritional value." You would tell me as if I was in desperate need of educating. But instead of being informative and interesting it reminded me more of a high school science teacher recently made redundant.

That was another thing I did between events; I liked to weigh up your contradictions. Just like each apple that made its movement from the counter to the scales I would mentally figure and balance them:

     One. You would loudly claim the ridiculousness of religion given it was essentially based on stories and hearsay. Yet you did so over the crumpled edge of the Sunday paper having just read me your horoscope. 

     Two. Whenever you saw teenagers silently texting in each others company you would hold the technology responsible for a modern breakdown in communication. But anytime caller ID drew the eight lucky digits of your mother's number you would pretend not to be home. 

     Three. Despite your feminist values on marriage - "It's so archaic. It only reinforces outdated ideas of gender roles." - I can still recall the morning of Marc and Eva's wedding when I caught you stuffing your coat sleeves with extra wads of tissues.

It was in the lulls that I enjoyed itemising your inconsistencies. It brought a sense of order to something that was chaotic by nature. Sometimes I would rank them from most annoying to least or alphabetise them: Afraid of spiders, Bad breath in the morning, Cries over period dramas, Dry elbows, and so it went. Mentally picking and choosing their arrangements I created whole shopping lists of shortcomings. In the end though they were just like the apples. In the end the habit cost me. Everytime I sunk my teeth into your faults and chewed them over I was thinking of you and since you'd left. Nothing had tasted as sweet.

DAY EIGHTEEN

Everytime I walk back home from your house the word mocks me. It nags at my guilty self. Just as each step is reassuringly repetitive yet painfully familiar as is my mistake, over and over and over. As I pass by I often wonder if the vandal considered his audience? Was his parental tone specifically for me and my shameful Sunday morning pilgrimage? Did he predict his actions would speak louder than his word? 

I doubted it. All he thought was set on stone.