A box of dice and a bag of tricks

"Daddy, what's in the bag?"

"A box of dice and a bag of tricks, love," he would respond, sometimes pausing to kiss her forehead, sometimes stroking her cheek with a faraway look in his eyes. She loved the evenings after school. Her dad was always just waking up when she got home; he would help with her homework and then make dinner while she watched her favourite television shows. They would eat dinner while watching the news and wait until her mum came home. Her dad would take the bag from her mum and head out for the night.

"Mum, what's in the bag?" she would ask as her parents whispered to each other in the kitchen.

"Your future, my present, and more past than you need to know, Crystal," her mum would reply, handing the bag over to dad. They never really looked at the bag, her mum and dad, they just traded it like a relay baton when walking in and out of the small apartment. "Say goodbye to daddy, baby, it's time for bed."

"Goodnight, Daddy. I love you, will you show me a trick soon?"

"Maybe not these tricks, Krissy, honey," her dad would reply laughing, leaning down to pick up Crystal and give her a kiss. "I'd never fool you with these ones."

Crystal sat on the edge of her dad's bed, looking down at his fragile form. "A box of dice and a bag of tricks, Dad?"

"What else could I say, Krissy?" he croaked, hand reaching out to sit on Crystal's knee. "We never wanted you to know, we had a plan. You were never to know." He broke down into another fit of coughing. It sounded so much worse in the sterile emptiness of the hospital room, the machines beeping to accentuate the silence between each of his wracking breaths.

"So why?" Crystal rested her hand for a moment on her dad's limp fingers, and then pushed his arm away from her. "Why do I find out three days before I go to college, why do I find out at all? And why like this?"

"The money, baby. Not a lot, but enough, for you," his eyes were full of guilt, glistening with tears that could not have been far from falling. "Your mum decided that we had to stop using as soon as you were born, but we could still push, we still needed to push, for you, so you saw normal, so you saw us as normal. But your mum fell first, and when she did, I fell soon after. We still pushed, but we lost our way."

"Why didn't you stop when she died? I wouldn't have known, Dad, why would I have known?" Crystal turned her head to look at the doorway, trying her best not to sniff audibly or let her shoulders convulse. "She just disappeared, you let me think she just disappeared!"

"Krissy, I'm sorry. For what good it does, I am sor--" her dad broke into a violent episode of coughing. Crystal looked down at him, at the intravenous tube in his arm adding little to the pinhole damage already in existence, at the blood starting to show through the bandage around the gunshot wound in his chest, and she could feel the shaking in his legs from withdrawal. "I didn't know any other way. I still don't."

"A box of dice and a bag of tricks, Dad." she stood up and looked down at her dad's gaunt face. "Thank you for putting me first, but fuck you for how you did it!"

"It's always gambling and illusion, Krissy, always," his voice had died halfway through the sentence leaving Crystal to read the rest from his lips. She leaned down to kiss his forehead for what she knew was the last time, and left the room to the sound of his ever-weakening cough.

A box of dice and a bag of tricks, she thought. How much do I owe to chance and magic?

A six petal rose

I can’t believe I’m doing this, he thought wryly. If someone was filming , they could make a straight-to-tv, midday movie from this tripe. With a smile, he shook his head slightly and pulled the first petal from the long-stemmed rose in his hand. It was a yellow rose, chosen not because of preference for colour, but because it was wilting and had been marked down for quick sale at the florist. Frugality was not a part of it either, he had simply chosen not to waste a healthy rose on what he was about to do.

He was looking out over the ocean from a cliff edge high above the frothy white  mess of wave meeting rock. It was a long drive to get here, but the location had come instantly to mind the moment he decided what he was going to do. Isolated, unblemished by human touch, and windy enough to let nature bite him while he admired her beauty.

He placed the rose petal on his upturned fingertips and stretched his arm out over the edge. An up-draft from the sea below quickly grabbed the petal from his hand and carried it out toward the horizon.

“She loves me.”

Opal Dreams

Source

Last night I had a dream, and although this is not exactly an earth-shattering revelation for most, it’s strange to me for many reasons — not least of which being the fact that I remembered a dream at all. Many may lament the loss of these subconscious insights, some may even go another level up and take some lucid control of the dream world, but not me. I know all too well what my mind can conjure even when it’s wide awake and as sober as your average monk, so I’m happy to stay away from what it produces unchecked.

Of course it’s not the first time I’ve remembered a dream — I didn’t wake up saying “[What.] The. Fuck. Was. That?” — but it was the first time I have woken and still believed that the dream is an outside chance of happening. When you see the subject matter of the dream, you’ll realise how strange that is. It makes me a little concerned that I’ll start basing my socially acceptable behaviour on whether or not I believe a dream where it happened. Will it get to the point where I dream of walking into a mother’s group to start juggling newborns, and wake up thinking “Yep. Could work.”? Will the argument “I dreamed about it and it totally seemed legit,” hold up in the inevitable trial if I completed the act in real life? It’s probably best if you don’t answer those questions, leaving them rhetorical makes me appear a little less insane.

The dream itself started off in the way dreams do, I dropped into my pseudo-consciousness perfectly happy with the location and the reason I was there. I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there is a small, high school swimming and athletics carnival happening in London at the moment — they call it The Olympic Games and quite a few people are watching it. I was in London, at the Olympic Basketball arena, watching The Opals (The Australian women’s basketball team) take on … somebody. I can’t remember the identity of the second team — it could have been Mexico, it could have been Madagascar — and it’s anybody’s guess why I travelled all the way to London to watch a game of basketball. To me, basketball is like a slower version of tennis with less impressive backhands, and even though I support gender equality (where possible) in sports, my dislike for women’s basketball pips the men’s version slightly because there are fewer sex scandals and drug controversies.

So, there I was at the London Olympics, sitting court-side as The Opals played Iceland (probably?), and I can’t remember if I was alone or with a group — there’s every chance that in this dream I was a true basketball enthusiast and didn’t want to be disturbed by non-aficionado friends. Nepal was wiping the floor with The Opals, the score was outrageously one-sided, when the unthinkable happened. Australia’s star batter (is that the correct basketball term?) came down injured in a scuffle with the opposing team’s (Belarus, probably) wicket keeper. At this moment — and I can remember just how certain and focussed I was at the time — I stood up, stripped off my jacket and removed my jeans, knowing that beneath the clothing I would find myself in a basketball uniform complete with my name and number emblazoned on the back.

I looked down, eyes locking on the Australian’s coach, she gave a nod, and I, a twenty-eight year old, male spectator, walked out onto the court to take the position of the injured player in a women’s basketball clash between Australia and Tunisia. The crowd gave an awed “oooh,” but not because a spectator was chosen as a player, because I was chosen over another spectator who was favoured to take the position. I walked around doing a few stretches and high-fiving all of the players, got some advice from the coach, and was sent in to play. This sounds absurd — of course it does — and I know this, but there is still a part of me, muffled and up the back, saying “No, that’s totally how they do it. Most teams only bring just enough players and when one is injured, they can totally just choose someone from the crowd — man or woman.”

What then happened — and I say this with equal parts pride and shrinking embarrassment — was my finest sporting moment to date. I single-handedly brought The Opals’ score back to level with Senegal’s, and then proceeded to stretch the lead out beyond reckoning. Every shot I took hit its mark —I’d like to say that I dunked a few, but even my dream self couldn’t manage that — and The Opals beat Fiji by a substantial margin. When the game was over, I received a couple of pats on the back and a hug or two, got a respectful nod from the coach, and simply walked back to my seat, returned my casual clothing, and left the stadium.

“Da fuq is that all about?” is what most of me is saying, but still, even now, that quiet voice is saying that it’s normal, and that if I were to head off to London to watch a basketball match, it would play out like this. When I argue with the voice and tell it that the most I ever played basketball was to play some games of BASEketball, it tells me that I would perform a lot better under pressure …. The worst part? I am inclined to agree.

I dread the day I remember a dream of something less ludicrous as I might subconsciously convince myself of things that aren’t possible.

Actually … could that explain all of my life’s failed ambition?

The old man and the sixpence

She waited at the bus stop, lost in thoughts of what the day — the future in general, really — might have in store for her.  It was a big risk this, and she knew it. The first day of her new job, a job she had left everything behind for — family, friends, house and memories — to cross the country and start anew. She stared across the road through the constant stream of traffic, trying to ease her nerves and remember the path to take from the bus set down through the city’s streets to her new workplace.

A shuffling sound she had initially mistaken for the whisper of wheel rubber kissing bitumen brought her head around to see an elderly man approaching along the footpath. His short, sliding steps were not fast, but he displayed the economy of movement and familiarity seen from someone accustomed to working with slightly faulty tools. She looked up at him as he turned to sit on the bench beside her. His face was wrinkled, skin loose from age, corners of the mouth held down by cheek muscles bound with the worn elastic of old age, and despite the thick strands of white hair poking out around his temples, she immediately knew he was balding underneath the grey, woollen flat cap he wore. Her eyes met his for the brief moment before she looked away and she was surprised to see vibrant blue irises and perfect whites — a startling contrast next to the grey radiating out of every other part of him; from his bushy eyebrows to the grey trousers he wore.

She resumed staring through the traffic across the road, watching the old man in her periphery as he reached into the pocket of his sports jacket. A moment later she heard a faint metallic ping and turned her eyes in time to see a coin tumbling through the air, to be caught deftly on the old man’s hand. From his closed fist, he turned it out onto the back of his other hand. The coin showed heads.

The old man looked at the coin and as his face broke into a smile, all assumptions she had made about his disposition vanished. His whole face seemed to glow as the wrinkles came together to accentuate his sparkling blue eyes.

“Heads,” he breathed. Her bus arrived.

…

Beneath their beautiful eyes

The room was spinning, fluorescent lights fizzing by in a dizzying blur. He focussed on his mothers eyes as she held him aloft, dancing and twirling across the floor. He knew so little of life, had so little basis for comparison, but he knew the smile beneath those beautiful eyes was happiness. In his mother’s eyes he could see his own laughing face among the whirling reflections of objects in the room. Even with his legs flailing so wildly that the ends of his purple socks were coming loose and even with no control of direction or speed, he felt as though he could not be safer anywhere else in the world. He stared into his mother’s eyes, through them he stared at his own smiling face. She blinked …

Digits and windows

Hold on.

You should watch them more closely.

They will tell you more about me than I am able to articulate. They will tell you more about me than I want you to know. They have the power to touch you. They have to power to hurt you. They have the power to tease you and to please you. They can feed you, heal you, comfort you and sing to you. They identify me in a way that nothing else can. They tell you what music I like. They tell you my mood. They tell you who I am.

And yet …

They are not mentioned when describing me. They are not mentioned when complimenting me. They are not mentioned. The sonnets, odes, songs and ballads written in their honour could be counted on one of them.

I did it

Heh heh. Suckers!

I have a confession to make. Forgive me if I waffle, but admissions of guilt come as easily to me as vaginal orgasms — which is to say that until someone learns how to give a guy a vaginal orgasm, I will have trouble admitting I am wrong.

I did it.

Yes. Please take a moment to collect yourself and fetch your pitchfork and hatin’ fire.

I did it. Everything. You curse it, I did it.

Anonymous revolution

They were assembled on the borders of civilisation, rank and file arranged in battalions, battalions amassed as a legion that spread as far as an eye could see. The invisible legion; Invisible as their grey, shapeless forms blended with shadows cast by the waning moon. As invisible as an idea, coalescing with the wind.

Indistinguishable from a gust of wind through the canopy, an authoritative voice spoke.

“Are we in formation?”

“Yes, General. The anonymous legion is assembled, ready to begin the revolution.” The reply came like a sigh by the seaside, identical to the first voice yet unique and subordinate. “Each entity has the messages, they are keen.”

“Good. Good.”

The voice of authority stepped back to survey the congregated forces; the movement of a shadow of a silhouette caught in a breeze. It raised its voice to the dull roar of a waterfall, still not out of place within the surroundings of the  night.

“Invisible legion! Anonymous army of abstract concepts! Today we go to war.”

As the idea of the words passed over the illusionary semblance of the ranks, the silence that was all around transformed into a black hole for noise. In contrast, the speaker’s voice boomed into the emptiness like thunder in cloudless sky.

“We go to war against a mindset, our weapon is an idea. Each of you holds the sharpest sword ever minted, a blade that cannot be dulled regardless of how often it is used. Wield your words, your swords, and take this fight to change mindse--”

The superlative voice stopped suddenly as a ghost of footsteps approached. The sound was natural and yet artificial, the sound of a stone thrown by hand. A voice with a timbre, a personality, in perfect synchronisation with the anonymous grey hiss, spoke.

“General! I must raise my objections again. Our goal is pure, our fight is justified but we hide in the shadow, we slink through the dull tones of night.

“The message we carry is worthy, warranted and needed but why must we deliver it from beneath a cloak? Under this cover of darkness, our mission is naught but delivery of unsolicited mail. Why can we not show our faces?”

The black hole for sound had imploded, replaced by apprehensive, curious silence. Colour and faces began to flicker amongst the spectral legion — momentary phases of solidity.

“We are cloaked in shadow so that if we fail, we remain an invisible legion to wage this war again!” the figure of authority hissed.

“We should show who we are so that when we win, our victory can be celebrated. We should show who we are so that if we suffer defeat, lessons can be learned knowing who it was that fought and failed!” the voice was no longer natural, this voice was becoming real, the entity that spoke the words showed a face, became more than a shadow and stood solid, eyeing the invisible army. “I will not use this sword of words to stab from the shadows, I am going to war and I will show who I am to the mindset I fight!”

The solid figure moved beside the idea of a leader and spoke to the legions of nothingness.

“You can fight from the shadows, cowering behind a fear that your name may be attached to a failure, or you can show who you are and we can bring this revolution into reality. We will not abandon the invisible legion, we will fight alongside them, but we will fight unashamedly showing who we are!”

Across the ranks, as far as the eye could see, shadows took on forms and faces.

Now, on the edge of civilisation there stood two legions. The legion of the invisible and faceless and the legion of the solidified entities.

As one they emerged from beneath the trees to start a revolution against the pessimistic, armed with the idea of kindness.

Two parallel revolutions had begun.

The lies we tell our children

Of course you will grow up to be an astronaut.

Lying has a lot to answer for. Maybe, one day, we will get an answer. And if that day comes, we can immediately dismiss the answer for it will no doubt be a filthy fib. Sure, lying has a lot to answer for, but we do not ask for an answer because we owe more to lying than we may ever know.

We may debate what is truly considered a lie and what is merely a decorated truth. We may debate the moral, ethical and spiritual dilemmas arising from speaking that which is not. We may debate the point at which lies cease being compassionate and start being outright dishonest. We may argue that lying should be eradicated and that chastity belts should hold all lips shut lest our tongues be sullied by a sinful fabrication. And we may one day rid humanity of lying; on that same day we will stop humanity from moving forward, leaving civilisation to turn stale.

The birth of a moniker

I am often asked where the username Rakuli comes from and why I use it everywhere online. 


The second question can be easily answered: I like to have one username everywhere as it makes it far easier to remember what to type into login forms.


The first question is a little bit more involved ...
___________

My advice on giving advice

Anchor related caption.

Advice (noun)

1. Guidance or recommendations concerning prudent future action, typically given by someone regarded as knowledgeable or authoritative.
2. Information; news.

What a wonderful word, what a wonderful concept. Information shared and distributed with no implicit or explicit requirements for acceptance; guidance offered in the hope it will useful but not under the pretense that it will be taken; recommendations, outlines, things to try; not mandatory, not ruling, not commanding.

Downunder

                                                                I am an
                                                           inhabitant of a
                                                      land downunder.  It
                                                   is a  strange,  mystical
                                               land where each day I ride            into
                                            work on the back of a kangaroo         whom
  I                                     have named, Roger.  Every morning           I’m fed
my                                breakfast (Sydney Opera  House shaped  pancakes)
  by                           a koala named, Ringo.  Wherever I go, I’m not more than a
   two                   minute walk   from the desert and I am constantly in         a
     battle       for survival            against the venomous snakes and
          spiders  that                         run the Australian government.
                      My                                   accent lends    itself very
                                                                 well to an         avid
                                                                  ‘crikey!’        call.        
                                                                     Beer     is  the
                                                                       only    thing
                                                                       ever
                                                                       to go
                                                                         past
                                                                          my lips,
                                                                             even when
                                                                                    they’re parched
                                                                                                       by the
                                                           sun that never, ever, ever, ever goes away.

The selfishness of pain

Cheer up, me.

Have you ever noticed how your perception of the world changes when you’re in pain? I raise the point from a specific, physical pain I presently suffer from, but this observation applies to any acute hurt you may experience; be it a broken arm or a broken heart.

Today is identical to yesterday in almost every way. A beautiful autumn sun shines through my bedroom window, the curtains rise and fall as though breathing with the breeze and the air is filled with the fresh scent of nature.

Double-entendre

Pop! Goes the something or other.

I woke up sporting my usual morning glory and rolled over to rub it against her back. Morning glories were our shared favourite flower and this was the way she liked to wake up.

“I’m always so horny in the morning,” she said drowsily. “Can you do something about it?” I leaned over and removed the Viking helmet she was wearing.

“There you go,” I said. “You really do choose some strange sleeping attire.”

Perfunctory preamble

I don't want to sound like a bitch or anything but your voice grates at my ears like a drunken mosquito and for all that I’ve been trying to figure out what you’re saying, you speak about as much sense as a kicked cat. Every time I look at your face I fly into a fit of rage wishing someone would finally flush that used toilet paper you carry around atop your neck.

Life is

Life is a cliché tale of tragedy; as soon as we are introduced to the main characters, we realise that none will make it out alive. And yet, with a promise of continual revelation and the prospect of a plot twist around every corner, life captivates us from our first breath until our last. Somewhere deep inside, most of us hope life’s main protagonist finds their one true love so their eventual demise is alongside a love everlasting.

How to stop a bunny being kicked

Bunnies — not rabbits, rabbits aren’t fluffy enough. Bunnies: Nature’s Punching Bags.

The fact that most things in nature lack the appendages to make a fist doesn’t change that title; you can kick a punching bag, and you can kick a bunny. The more cute and innocent the bunny, the more likely it will get kicked.

Won't somebody think of the peanuts?

There’s a lot of things about peanuts that people know; like the fact that peanuts aren’t technically nuts at all even though they contain “nut” in the name — nuts right (but not really)? That’s because my mate Steve — the guy who invented the English language — and botanical scientists can’t agree on what is a nut and what is a legume. Peanuts are known as “Goober Peas” in other parts of the world and even that’s less nuts than calling something that’s not a nut, a nut.

Another thing that a lot of people know about peanuts is that they grow underground — if you are walking along and a peanut falls on your head from a tree, it was probably thrown at you by a monkey. This is where common knowledge of peanuts starts to fade and hide the real truth behind peanuts. This is where human ignorance takes over and stops most people from seeing what is right under their eyes. This is where cruelty becomes cold, emotionless murder. This is when the peanuts lose their rights and die without ceremony or remembrance, without any acknowledgement from those committing the genocide.

Cycles

I find that things usually go well until they don’t; it’s all good until it’s not and then it’s good again but that’s only until the next time that it’s not. I find that things usually go up until they come down; it’s all heading up and travelling well and then it’s all heading down and getting hard to catch but there are times when the up keeps going up and that’s good unless the up never stops and you lose it and that’s bad but that’s only bad until you find it and then it’s good again until it’s not.

I find that things go in cycles but sometimes reverse themselves to go in reverse cycles and then sometimes reverse themselves to go in reverse cycles of the reversed cycles. I find that things are quite unpredictable until they become predictable and then they become unpredictable the moment you try to predict the predictable unless you predict that the predictable will become unpredictable from your prediction, then they stay predictable unless you predicted that they would not.

Renegade Commuter

I knew it was going to be her. I’m usually able to spot them and it’s easy once you know what you’re looking for. I was halfway back in the single file queue of about thirty people, she stood toward the front yet wasn’t in line. From the moment she had arrived and taken her position leaning against the bus stop wall like a brand name lamp post, she hadn’t looked up from her phone. To a casual observer, she looked like just another passenger waiting for the bus to arrive — albeit a passenger whose expression suggested the world disgusted her. But I saw her for what she was: A renegade commuter.

The tension in the line increased, someone had obviously spotted the bus approaching and started the redundant pushing from the back in the futile hope that this would somehow get them a seat. As is my usual way, I didn’t move forward and let the people behind me bunch up in a commuter concertina. She could see what was happening too, the movement in the queing masses had signalled that it was time for her campaign to begin. Whether she was dialling someone in actuality I cannot say but she raised the phone to her ear and she began to gossip.

The bus brakes squealed as it slowed down at the stop, it overshot the head of the queue as is often the case and the renegade commuter used this as her time to shine. With elbows held out like fleshy tripwires while speaking loud enough to not hear the polite “excuse me”s and sorrys coming from the queue behind her, she started toward the bus door about a step ahead of the person who held the line’s rightful number one position.