Issue #19 February 21st - 27th 2003

Sister Janice and the Cabbage Conundrum
I have had rather an odd week. Yesterday a man knocked on the door of The Space Shed. He shouted something about my shed posing a threat, and wanting to inspect me.
By Sister Janice Slejj

Remains of a day/All you need is love
On the 15th of Februaury 2003 people in more than 600 cities and towns all over the world marched to say no to the war against Iraq. The friends of the heroes report back from three of those cities:Thessaloniki, London and Glasgow

Hallelujah for You
When mortals began to exist, angels felt sorry for our indifference and graced us by allowing hallelujahs to fall to earth like a meteor shower. We curiously picked up the little bits.
By Emily Ann Potter

An interview with the Trashcan Sinatras: The Band You Wished You Were
I wish someone would ask me what I'm like in bed (good at sleeping).
By Paul Williamson

Juxtaposition
He knew I was scared, scared of being hooked again or losing others so he put a yellow Band-Aid over it. We had the same thing in mind.
By Mandee Wright

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Sister Janice and the cabbage conundrum

Sister Janice is our new agony aunt. She used to be a nun, but after becoming involved in an accident at her convent involving a papal emissary; the mother superior; the convent dog and a bottle of 'citrus fresh' bleach, she decided it was time to find herself a new career. These days she travels through the galaxies in a converted garden shed.

Write to Sister Janice Slejj care of Friends of the Heroes. She will answer your problems and questions with the insight unique to a disco-loving alternative-gardening defrocked clergy member and cosmic adventurer.

Hello again, my little arrows of desire

I have had rather an odd week. Yesterday a man knocked on the door of The Space Shed. He shouted something about my shed posing a threat, and wanting to inspect me. So I flashed him my tits through the window.

I didn't see him again after that, but at around the same time the oil tank - the one that keeps this little Cosmic Shed Of Discovery coursing through the heavens - vanished.

Now you know me, my children - always an open mind; aware to all possibilities and vibrations of the Universe - but I swear it was one of those bloody nuns I used to live with launching some sort of revenge attack. The Convent of The Bloody Nuisance were marching for peace this week. I only wish they would let me have some. I'm sure someone has been in here while my back was turned. Someone picked several of the leaves from my little plants, smoked them, and left roaches scattered around the place last night. AND several of the battery-operated items I keep getting sent by mail order (they're addressed to a man named Victor in Colchester, I'd been saving them up to send back to him. And I would have done. I've just been busy.) appear to have been removed from their packets and used at some point during the week.

Its a shame my memory of last night isn't very good. If I could remember which of those Thieving Fascists In Habits made their way up here and rifled her way through my belongings I'd....I'd....

Well, I've already killed the Mother Superior, quite by accident of course. And the papal emissary. And the convent dog, poor little Julia Andrea. Maybe they have suffered enough. Maybe I'd do nothing.
Maybe I'd forgive them.

An interesting issue, this week. One that I'm sure we've all struggled with at some point:

Dear Sister Janice,

Well, D., there are a few issues there. Firstly... you talk about concealed potatos, but do you know for certain that the potatos are actually there? Yes, you may have bought the meal, prepared it yourself and served it, but if you can't see the veggies, you shouldn't go jumping to conclusions. It may be that since you bought the vegetables and put them on the plate the potatos have simply vanished into thin air. You need to look closely, enlist your friends too. There's every chance they're stowed away in an underground food cupboard somewhere..

And...why this particular hatred of potatos anyway? Surely you're aware of the pain caused by parsnips, and the repressive nature exhibited time and time again by brussels sprouts? Are you sure you have your priorities entirely correct?

Look, the whole thing is a matter of perspective. Some say that it isn't the fault of the tubers, that the greens should never have been there in the first place. Others point out that you may have purchased and cooked the cabbage, but there's no evidence that you're actually able to EAT it. Others say you should just microwave the whole thing and be done with it.

I'm afraid there isn't an easy answer. Beware of people who offer you absolutes. Follow your own ethical codes, if you have any. But remember this:

People who make Sunday roasts have to be prepared to wash baking trays
Peace, my children, and may the Almighty Bless your Planet.
xx

Sister Janice Slejj

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All we need is love is all we need

On the 15th of Februaury 2003 people in more than 600 cities and towns all over the world marched to say no to the war against Iraq. The friends of the heroes report back from three of those cities.

Thessaloniki, February 15th, 12am - 3.30pm (eet/gmt+2)
Bear in mind that this is a fairly big (about 1.000.000) but introverted to the point of being navel-gazing, northern-greek/southern-Balkan town that occasionally pretends to aspire to be a part of modern Europe.
By Dimitra Daisy

Glasgow, 15th February, 10am (or thereabouts)
Then we walked. Happy and excited through the streets of Glasgow, singing as we went. There is something about being part of a singing crowd that makes me feel like crying.
By Rachel Queen

London, February 15th, 12 am and onwards (gmt)
But he spoke the best on the day, and it came from as near the heart as I need. He spoke like a real politician, a man who's trained for years in speaking to crowds. He pushed buttons to make whistles blow.
By the Pinefox

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Hallelujah for You.

I was given a wish in the form of a white dandelion, like fairy dust in the arms of a weed. In my small hand I held the power to wish for absolutely anything.

I want so many things to dress my universe. I want understanding. I want light. I want purity. I want deep heavings of soul. I want really good chocolate truffles.

I took my wish out on the back porch. I realize now that the whole process was one continuous, soft glide. Opening the back door fell silently into raising my arm, and inhaling waved into wishing and without pause I blew fairy dust into the sky.

It was understood. It was pure. And it heaved my soul to my core's depths. Without willing my lips to move, they parted and my wish's p.s. traced the air with one word.

I wished a hallelujah.

My hallelujah for you was for your happiness with your wife and children. I hailed down hallelujahed magic for you from the mists of all muses who surround our planet. I beckoned for hallelujahs to fill your lungs. I wished for you to be as happy now as I will be one day. I gave every speck of my fairy dust weed to you.

Two days later, I haven't recovered. Yesterday at work they played Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and I had to pretend I was functional for the rest of the afternoon.

Leonard Cohen understands what hallelujah means. I know you do too. I had hallelujah ghost juice running through the redness of my blood all day yesterday. Nothing could heal me from its potency. At the end of my day I sat in front of my fireplace with a woman cloud. I was telling her, eyes closed and trickling, about hallelujah.

There is love, and then there's hallelujah. Leonard Cohen said that love is not a victory march. It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah. I see it as being the most purified substance available on the angels' market. When mortals began to exist, angels felt sorry for our indifference and graced us by allowing hallelujahs to fall to earth like a meteor shower. We curiously picked up the little bits. In our imperfect world, we wouldn't be able to handle them in their purest forms. So they are cold and they are broken hallelujahs. But they feel nice to touch and are very intriguing.

We started giving them to each other, and when we did they became very soft and warm, and we called it love.

But love is still a hallelujah, in just a consumer-friendly form. Leonard said that every breath he drew with her was a hallelujah. To say "I love you" is the mortal's way. It's very filling and full of wonder. It's the password to carry us away from the earth to a golden place where hearts burn.

Kissed, embraced, and approved by the Certified Association of Muses...

set free to journey through unknown crosspaths with only poetry books, handwarmers and ginseng tea to guide us...

and tracked by the powerful combination efforts of a vanilla-scent and one grey scarf...

we learned to breathe in and out like gods.

Hallelujah in. Hallelujah out.

Now, in a place so far away from our last goodbye, you still make me fall down when I breathe your ghost.

In its purified form, I would have never recovered from my encounters with a real live hallelujah. But I do recognize the existence of small, crystallized particles still living in my system.

And even with all the thick daily mud of reality on my boots, I cannot pretend that your whispered hallelujahs so long ago don't affect me, purely.

Hallelujah.

Emily Ann Potter

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Trashcan Sinatras: The Band You Wished You Were

Songs that make you dance, and sing, an manuovre your sullied limbs in a very weird way. This, my friends, isn't some decrepit rock and roll band, or some nouveau riche soul maestro, or even Gareth Gates and Will Young.

This is the Trashcan Sinatras.

This is the band who have spent the best part of 15 years ignored by all and sundry whilst still being the best that the last 15 years have had to offer. I defy any of you, ANY of you, not to be moved to places you never knew you had, by at least one song of theirs. It really is that simple. Trust me. In fact, no, just listen to what Frank Reader, chief singer-songwriter, had to say to me. Not just on his band, but on many, many things. He makes a lot of sense, and you'd be a fool not to listen...

The first question I'd better ask, seeing as the webzine is called 'friends of the heroes', is : who are your heroes and (perhaps this is the more difficult part) why?

My heroes are anyone who can admit an inability to get through their lives without making bad choices, and can make a joke about it.

Your last record, 'A Happy Pocket', seems an age away to seasoned admirers of the band. Why has the new one taken so long, and will it take much longer?

The new record will be along shortly, in relative terms. I suppose it has taken this long mostly because we've had to pay for it ourselves!

Is there a specific way that the band goes about writing a song, or is it just a case of you, say, drawing the blinds, clutching a guitar and pen, and seeing what happens?

i think there might be a specific nature to the completion of songs after initial ideas have been dreamt up by individual members. we have a filtering system which does the job that masses of self-confidence should.

Your songs have been part of the heady soundtrack of my life, and evoke many (occasionally bad, but usually good) memories. What songs (apart from your own) would you say are the soundtrack to your lives?

I've tried to pick the first song that came to mind when recalling each decade: first - "seasons in the sun" by terry jacks; second - "a town called malice" by The Jam; third - "I won't share you' - The Smiths; fourth (so far) - "the name of my sorrow" - Richard Harris.

What's the best and worst memory you have associated with a song?

The best memory associated with a song might be my dad singing Elvis's "let's have a party" at every single family party we had in our house. Worst was at a quiz when I couldn't remember who sang "movie star" (it was Harpo) - cost me £200.

What do you think of the current music scene?

is it any better or worse than it has ever been, or is it just a case of having to look harder for what we want? i couldn't begin to give you an opinion about the current music scene. i don't watch top of the pops anymore, if that's an indication of anything.

Is image important, or is it substance that counts?

erm...substance?

Any plans to tour in the near future?

hopefully in support of the album but, as usual with us, these things are a bit up in the air at the moment.

Is there any song you wish you had written, or any song you wish you hadn't?!

i wish i could write something like "Boeing Boeing" by Roger Miller, but I'd have to be a different person from the one i am. i suppose I wish I had written "Easy Read" and "Earlies" [these were written by other members of the group]

Finally, is there any other question that you want to answer, or want the answer to?

i wish someone would ask me what I'm like in bed (good at sleeping). Oh, and will this pain in my ribs ever go away?

Paul Williamson

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Juxtaposition

This is an account with no dialogue.

      Back in those days, we were unaware, and we unintentionally spawned. It was half-hope time—garden greenery wilted under the summer heat and the city stunk from it for months on end. It didn’t rain all summer. We conserved through ordinary traits, washing our hands from gathered water in pots in the sink, watching our plants turn white from radiation, showering together like stoics but to no avail. Everything dried up anyway. A small jungle gym rested in a gravel pit outside our bedroom window and every afternoon a red-shirted boy swung for an hour, becoming breathless, and then he’d slip away, safely, into his envelope of a home, somewhere near mine.

     Students—we said it to adults and parents, but we didn’t realize what it meant. What were we studying? Some vague liberal arts motif that involved reading and writing and skipping class and avoiding professors’ menacing glances— but studying? That fell in with the forgotten envelopes, like the boy’s. We looked at books and passed them around, underlining key phrases that maybe had some shred of doubt that rode along with them, index cards flying around like paper doves, title, author, and the quote waving goodbye on a term paper. Bye-bye, they said. They chirped.

     We were broke and bored. I gave myself over to them. So did he. Our net worth would skyrocket to $5,020. There would be no confessions.

     Juxtaposed on two operating tables, a Mexican woman and I held a conversation before I would fall victim to anesthesia. She clutched her abdomen like a paper sack about to flail into the wind, being lost to oxygen. Paper dresses rip more easily than expected. I wiped my fingers nervously along my sides, leaving behind greasy inklings like some squid had found me, found mine, found my heat, and refused to go; it couldn’t decide. Were the woman and I twins? They left us there together.

     My glasses vanished after my operation. One minute they were there, laying on my bedside table and then they slipped away, sealed up in something we couldn’t see. I, myself, couldn’t see. He told me I looked as if I had been hooked like a fish and thrown back with the others, just a tiny incision etched pink below the slope of my stomach, contrasting with green tones. My glasses were green.

      The five thousand dollars scattered quickly, like the doves—and also like my glasses, we didn’t know where it all disappeared. We had already established that this was some sort of equal contribution, but between the two bathroom sinks his hair littered the countertop more than mine ever had.

      My hook mark was barely visible except in fluorescent lighting, lecturing on the right side of me. I couldn’t slip for fear of sliding over and gutting myself—spilling myself out and unveiling other things still covered. He knew I was scared, scared of being hooked again or losing others so he put a yellow Band-Aid over it. We had the same thing in mind.

     August was no kinder than the previous months—we were drier than moths and skin flakes flew everywhere when I scratched my neck. The skin surrounding my incisions crusted over pink and purple; diseased like some dead reptile (a green iguana I had once had named Gin). I began to

look forward to the courses of the fall: rain and schoolbooks, pregnant women in some other cities, clicking their tongues in excitement.

     Other languages have a complex system, a precise, needle-point-thin definition for one word that maybe will appear in one instance in one sentence of someone’s conversation over the phone, but that word exists; it circles around in some universe of others, always ready to be found, extracted. This language leaves us half-filled, and even then, you have to string together some sketchy adjectives to get them honest. My queries are never answered, my words are left vacant, and I struggle to think about what I was thinking about.

     Whether one recognizes it or not, there is a word, a verb, for when one’s glasses fog over from moisture. This verb pertains only to the fogging up of glasses, spectacles, not of windshields, or windows, or containers of wind, likewise, vice versa—eyes, coverlets, glasses. Those apparatuses. Mine were missing. They were green.

     I found my glasses in late September. They were inside my hospital slippers like some cockroach. It rained that day and I havered like I had never havered before.

      This, as I stated earlier, is an account with no dialogue, and I am about to change my mind. Dialogue is about to sprout across the page—and not only that, but unimportant, irrelevant dialogue.

     Here is the scene:

     He and I sat adjacent to each other, juxtaposed like two nuns, I—reading a cooking magazine, eyeing the slick exterior of a Christmas ham pasted across the front cover. He poked me in the back, his symbol for something meaningless about to spill out of his mouth:

     —That ham. It looks like someone I know.

     I mumbled something to the effect of a prying utterance, ending it on a high note, implying an edge of question.

     —Yeah. This guy I once knew—he had a greasy face just like that.

     Dialogue such as this, it doesn’t say anything. He wasn’t communicating to me the way humans do, through signals. Alarm clocks can go off, making sounds that repeat themselves over and over again until there is a response. The alarm does not think, it has no consciousness—it can only think to make that sound, the alarming sound. Sounds were falling out of his mouth, but they were muted by the fear of being alone. Thoughts—they like company, but they sometimes cannot be spoken. He spoke to me through dialogue, but I couldn’t understand him.

     I never really knew him through dialogue; I never really knew him in one moment, like how you can stare at your hands in front of you and know exactly where they go and where they came from, and what their use is. You know the lines of them, the way they slant in the air in that single solitary slice of one day. He wasn’t like my hands, or my glasses, or any ordinary thing that I know in one moment of one day, or maybe in one piece of one dialogue between myself and a woman on the street corner—he was a network, capillaries that spread throughout my mind that could not have possibly existed in only one moment, but an hour, a day, infinitely, like the weight of my body that I forget I am carrying around.

     My mind stopped working in words and regressed to the language of pictures. I thought of myself as one of those amphibians who carries her eggs on her back. If only I could carry them there, exposed in the daylight. The surgeons wouldn’t have had to cut me open that day—they could have plucked off a few, fresh and pearlescent, and instead of being left with me who would ignore them like some scab just out of reach to scratch away, given away to women who wanted to be pregnant.

     Those classes began again after the rain and he and I were forced to communicate through short, stabbed notes on scraps of paper left on the kitchen table. Maybe it’s just some terrific sickness that we all have where we think fall was created for ourselves. I saw a bird today while I drove, hundreds of butterflies float past my window shading green sunlight and I’d realized the birds, the butterflies—they’re just rotting leaves, brown and green and that this heartache wasn’t meant for me or anyone else for that matter.

     Nothing changed for him and me. The papers began to crowd my dashboard, razored with red ink and barbarisms of time between appointments. A comment, she wrote. This is ridiculous, not even a punctuation mark to end that despair. But, then I remembered—despair never does end.

     I asked him, and he agreed my stomach looks swollen and uncomfortable.

     We also agreed that the most disgusting phrase in all of this language is this: “She will make babies someday.”

The leaves had been flooding the streets and I recalled back to the days of conservation; how those hand-washings had seemed so lavish and decadent—it was strange to me that the gravel in the playground was now always sopping like some fibrous cereal. The boy in the red shirt had gone away from us, and I wondered where he went—if he, like that unknown embryo, was growing in somebody else’s stomach. She will make babies someday; I will not. Someone else will make them for me, and we will have unintentionally spawned. He didn’t know it yet, and neither did I for that fact, but our dialogue had been lost into the baby that was growing. It was talking to itself inside some woman whom I did not know, relaying that dialogue in the gelatinous placenta, realizing it would never speak to the world. The boy in the red shirt, maybe he wasn’t gone, but he always would be as long as he wasn’t swinging where I could see him. As far as I knew he was dead. He was a dead boy to me, draped in a red cloth to match his shirt that had been long forgotten. That jungle gym outside our bedroom window; I grieved over it. It wasn’t a labyrinth of steel held together, it was a headstone where so many red-shirted boys had been lost. They were not counting the moments, the particular second when it is appropriate to go flying off the swing; they were waiting to be reborn into somebody who would ultimately hate them.

     It was as if my abdomen had been stolen from me quietly in the night—that round globe had been developing on some other woman’s stomach. I imagined a retarded boy named Otis coming from her womb, growing up to have a constant cowlick and a long string of drool hanging out the corner of his mouth. She’d have to remind him to eat his corn, to brush his teeth, propping his head up for family photographs, his eyes flailing down to the corner of the photograph like he’s eyeing some cat or a disturbance in the shadowed section of the room.

     And him, that man who I began to relearn through the papers and the rainy nights that erased us both, tricking us into believing that something new had been uncovered, he knew nothing of it in the most disturbing of fashions. Reading through the entertainment section of the newspaper, commenting on some four-star review—he didn’t know; he had no idea what we had done, how our spawn was stretching out, meiosis, mycosis, capillaries that I knew him through, they were growing inside somebody else that would form another red-shirted boy, but one whom I would not recognize. He knew nothing of anything in the most disturbing of fashions; the way that ham was reiterated ridiculously through his speech,

the way no matter how hard I tried I would always look up from my plate at breakfast and find myself alone, the newspaper rumpled like an abandoned sleeping bag, those four-star reviews left and forgotten.

     I felt that pregnant woman in some other city’s remorse. She would give birth to an impossibility that would hate her through dialogue.

     I slipped away from him that fall, like my eggs had slipped away secretly to that vial, hurrying from that gelatin mold of an ovary. Every morning I would approach those big wooden school doors, seeing pink flesh peek out from hats and mittens, and it would disgust me. Breakfast would always revolt, finding its way up my esophagus and I’d have to leave that institution. I couldn’t stand people’s eyes on me, their flesh pulsing behind their eye sockets, the way a professor would open their mouth, strings of saliva stretched across their incisors, their lips stretched up into the light revealing their slippery red tongues. It made me sick, all of it. I couldn’t stand to see their yawning cheeks and yellowing skin—I would always envision one of those photographs of an enlarged mosquito perched on some innocent’s forearm; how those skin cells seemed as large as god’s, immense holes that could eat you alive while you slept—those cells were out to get me, their dead selves falling all over my footprints.

     So Iíd bicycle home, flopping on the couch, entertaining thoughts of a better life, but ending up falling asleep every time, my pillow sliding out from under me. I nodded my head, balancing between the thin line of sleep and awake, dreaming of myself walking through the city, carrying my azure coat behind me as if someone were inside of it, droplets of water following us, crystallizing in the air and then falling to the ground and breaking, the beautiful dissonance of glass shattering, the waves lapping against the pavement. The dream felt like some life to which I should have belonged. Had I been avoiding the sky? Clouds floated by overhead, tinted blue, like some strange sea anemone staring out from its display case, floating by, and ignoring me.

      It was as if I was following something I couldnítómaybe my coat, or air, or the city itself, the lines of my frame rippling through the water parading through the downtown alleyways, women wading through the streets pulling out their hair as their babies floated away from them.

      He would never return on time; the refrigerator stood open, the bright colors of condiment bottles gleaming in that beautiful light. He would arrive, his coat falling to the floor, heavy and dumb. He would find me, and touch my shoulder lightly. Iíd shudder at his touchóhis hand, slimy and pink, leaving behind a trail of skin cells on my bodyó skin cells that werenít mine, which bothered me the most. I felt grateful Iíd given those eggs away; I couldnít bear to have his sperm in me.

      I could tell by his facial expressions that I had started to bother him, just as he bothered me. He was one of those tip-toeing silent types who always listens to music on headphones and never shuts any doors, but rather, allows them to quietly journey to a crack in the doorway. Iíd rummage through our kitchen cabinets, slamming them shut, pushing drawers closed violently—I could hear his mind squirming as he sat on the couch watching me. I made noise whenever I traveled, shuffling my feet down the hallway, flopping on the bed, making the mattresses groan in protest. The louder I was, the quieter he became, like he was shrinking back, retreating from my awesome power, as if I had a hold of his hair as I marched around; soon he would just be transformed into my lap dog: quiet, sitting at my feet like a rug.

     We hardly ever spoke because my voice would always crescendo over his, no matter how hard he tried: he’d be on his knees, my stomach in his hands, and maybe he could hear those two heartbeats that would always outweigh his.

     Usually conversation breaks situations like this in half, but we said nothing to each other. We’d tear the sheets in half at night trying to decide which one of us would conquer the other. If I could have remembered what songs would make him give himself over to me, I would have happily played them. Light from outside leaked onto his head beside me—it was as if he was only created for hair to grow, the strange forests of thin wiry hair that grew more and more grotesque the closer my eyes came to his scalp. I waited for him to stop breathing.

     Before this I had been the one who always came back. But I knew that I was going to be the one that stopped breathing in the night, not him. He stayed alive. I slid over the ice into my car and drove off into the darkness, the trees framing the night like some exclamation of smog, out of the city, where only the barnyard lights flood the streets. Cows numbly breathed in the darkness; they stared back at me, kicking up dung in the feedlots, the dull flame of my lighter cascading over their pupils. They moved across the earth, stumbling in the same fashion, as I struggled to gain composure while walking through playground gravel. I thought of him and the child as I leaned against my car, staring at the movement of the cows’ bodies—I thought of him, and I couldn’t decipher, I couldn’t figure out which personality I had fabricated, which one had been the original: myself, or him.

Mandee Wright

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