Alice Night

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Even when you feel like it is pointless, like no-one’s going to come, like no-one wants to listen, like no-one understands – create, share, create, share.

When you sing, when you pick up the pen and start writing, you are the hands of the ancestors, you are the life pulsing, passed on and on. Even when it seems like a whole lot of effort for a whole lot of not much in return, remember – not everything of value if monetary. In fact, we know that the most vital, precious moments of our lives have nothing to do with money.

Perhaps all that time you spent practicing writing, was so that you could write to your beloved friend in a way that wakes her up to the present moment and the preciousness of life and of friendship.

You don’t need to be a best-seller or featured in the New York Times for what you do to be valuable. Some of the most important writing has not sold millions of copies.

This said, it’s vital to allow our art to be findable! Leave a trace for people, help them hear you, let them know about the shows and the exhibition, and the screenings, don’t keep it all locked up and quiet and then wonder who cares, that is setting yourself up for a trap of self-defeat.

There is work to do: Clarify the lyrics, clarify the melody, practice the guitar part. Harden the tops of your fingers for playing the strings and soften your heart to let the story land in you and in others.

If you have fingers that work, a mouth that can open and make sounds it’s not too late.

And yes being seen is going to be part of this journey. People will want to put a face to the name, and so you embracing your face is actually part of being a bard queen, part of being an artist.

Is an anonymous release and an AI generated music video going to inspire your teenage daughter to love and embrace herself when it’s her turn to make, release and stand by her art?

Darling, this is the change-making we need, and it starts here. It starts by deciding aged 47, 57, 67, 77, 87, 97, that it is not too late to create art and share it.

David Attenborough is 99 and standing by his last official documentary at the moment, the skin on one of his eyes isn’t opening up fully, does that stop him from sharing his message about the Oceans? Fuck no it doesn’t, because the ocean is more important that his need to be attractive.

It’s not our fault, that we have been conditioned into the idea that unless we are a particular vision of beauty, we are unseeable… what a cunning way to cut down a massive percent of our messages, voices, stories, voices, knowings, revelations, revolutions.

Don’t you see?

You believing you are unseeable is part of a deliberate plan, and your art being made and seen is the only way to dissolve the particular darkness that has been rendered to shut your messages down.

So, what are you going to do?

Healing is through doing – write the song, learn the parts, book the photo shoot, release the music, make the doco, write the poem, find a way to share it and stand by it with your whole self.

Overtly spiritual conversations happening at the other side of the metres-long-cushioned-bench at the cafe. Music from another era spinning through the space – saxophone or something. The light is low, it feels like people should be smoking in here but that’s illegal. I’ve ordered a macadamia latte (forever the rebel.)

I can hear the woman’s accent, across the room, part of me wants to move closer to her. I think she’s the woman from the psychic sessions flyer? She’s intense. Light and dark. Maybe she’s Canadian? Maybe American. She is so here. I love her, and I am repelled. She’s talking about blocks… ‘dismantle the first block,’ I hear her say to her quieter gentleman friend across the small black table, her audience of one.

I want to join them. I want to be the kind of woman who meets a friend for breakfast to share everyday stories, interspersed with spiritual dimensions. I am that woman.

This was meant to be the name of a play that I write. I am yet to write it. A collaboration with my friends.

My lord, strap me to a desk and bring me small meals in small bowls, pour me one glass of dark wine a night, light a candle, but don’t leave it too close to me, so as I don’t become infatuated with wax and get distracted. Let me write. Just let me write.

When a find a good song it’s really all I want to listen to. If it takes me to the place I want to go, why would I listen to anything else? I am serially song-nogamous. Right now it’s Jon Hopkins – A Drifting Up. Thanks Jon! I’m grateful.

A man just arrived, in full force. He exhaled loudly and plonked himself down across from me on the other side of the room. His naked laptop ready on the table. Who carries a laptop around without a case? It feels somehow wrong, perverted even. He’s smiling as he types into his phone, his long hair pulled back, clean shaven. I feel relief. Relief that I am not drawn to every stranger I behold anymore.

The psychic woman has left without me even noticing, the table is bare where she was. What is this feeling? I miss her. There’s a crumb or two left from the meal she ate. She’s like a ghost now. Like a grandmother.

I miss my grandmothers. Human as they were, their golden hearts beam down still. The lives they lived are in the memory department now. The places they inhabited. Their courage, their devotion to living, their strong spirits. The dreams they died with. And I am alive, sitting in the corner of a local café, the sunlight streaming in more fully through the high windows now, listening to a song on repeat, drowning out the semi-sophisticated jazz, only having heard one sentence from the woman with the head-band, the long grey hair, the ability to take up space, with her words, with her energy.

Dismantle the first block. Start there. One block at a time baby.

I had the best therapy session of my life yesterday. With a woman who has just returned to land after two years at sea – need I say more? Perhaps this will be my new requirement for therapists, they will ask me about my family background and I will ask them: but have you spent the last two years at sea?

What is the first block I must dismantle? Returning. Forgetting to return. Returning to the place that is forming. Returning to the book that is forming. Returning to the love that is forming. Remembering the vow.

What is the first block you reader must dismantle?

At the café, a blonde-headed man who looks like the younger brother of the faun from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is staring at phone, with his Bluetooth earphones in. His legs are crossed like he’s meditating. His bare feet entwining with his flesh on the bench while his sandals lay discarded under the table. As I wonder just how long he has been sitting here, I see him pour the last of a large glass water bottle into his cup.

His moustache creates a little curtain over his top lip, and I guess his age, perhaps 27. I imagine he’s watching a video interpretation of The Celestine Prophecies made by one of his soul brothers in California. His hands are neatly folded together, fingers interlacing in his lap. I don’t like him, probably because he is sitting at the table I’d like to be sitting at, and he’s not even ordering anything. His seeming lack of concern for taking up the best table for his meditation practice infuriates me.

The clouds shift off from the sun and an intense glare hits my laptop screen. The top of my back and my underarms start to moisten in the sudden heat. I sip my coffee so slowly it is going cold under my care; I am like the young faun man, taking the piss out of this café with my small purchase and elongated stay.

On his table is a strange vanitas of his life. Two phones, one that he’s watching, and the other dormant. A set of keys, a small white container that looks like dental floss, a wallet and sun glasses, the kind that are so metallic you can’t possibly see the eyes of a person beneath them when they wear them. The glasses make me think he’s perhaps a tradie, and perhaps just watching a movie, forgetting that he’s at a café on a Saturday morning and not in an airplane on a long-haul flight.

Why do I hate him? There’s a unique breed of self-indulgence in this place that I live. I see it, and I am part of it. You spot it you got it, they say. At least around here that’s what they say. I don’t know what is said in the rest of the country, or the rest of the world for that matter, because I live in a bubble.

I touch my laptop screen and it is so hot it alarms me. This laptop is my best friend! I need to protect it. I move inside, trying to catch sight of the young man’s video like a detective, what the fuck is he even watching at his large shady table? I see subtitles and movement on the small screen.

A woman gets a refund of $8.65 for her takeaway coffee that was made on dairy, not on nut milk. She’s not angry, she just wants her money back. She’s in a rush, she can’t wait for another to be made.

The queer looking chef who should be my peer glances up at me as she brings the tray of fresh croissants to the front table. I offer her a micro smile; she offers me nothing.

I continue to nurse my oat latte with tiny sips because in my world view this nearly cold coffee is my right to be here. I wouldn’t continue sitting here, and definitely not on the best table, while drinking only water and watching a movie. I’m not that kind of person.

This morning, on the way to coffee I spotted a pile of things that someone has left outside their apartment block for passers-by to rummage through. And rummage I did. I felt sure that I appeared dishevelled, because my jumper is oversized and my hair is greasy today. Even though beside me rested my laptop and phone, $2500 worth of gear, I felt kind of pathetic, crouched down over the things. I felt my desperation for all of it, for possessions. I wanted the pillows and the books, the mini keyboard for my future child, or for my music career, and the soccer shoes, for my hobby soccer life. And the massive watermelon-scented candle, even though I hated the smell, and the blue wren and waratah illustrated mugs, and the terracotta vase that mimics ancient Greece.

I wanted it all.

I took the two mugs, two miniature mole-skin notebooks, and a small ironic-looking book called THE BOOK OF CAREER QUESTIONS by Max Eggert, published in 1996. I know it’s outdated, but I’m hoping it will just ask me one potent question that might help me know what to do with my life. As I was walking down the street this morning, I was feeling mildly guilty, that over the last five years, since covid, I haven’t really achieved anything. I could have become a psychologist by now, like most of my friends are becoming.

The book is Blue and Yellow. The back cover starts off with the question: what work would you do if you only had twelve months to live? Gosh, that really is a good question. Maybe I’d become a Jujitsu master and be the warrior I know I really am, maybe I’d make fruit and vegetable shaped candles, specialising in wax fennel and wax grapes. I don’t know. Maybe I’d write a stupid little book called The Year of the Cat, or 500 Oat Lattes. Maybe I’d make an Australian art-house film…

Incoming are 50 ‘bits of writing’ you probably don’t need in your life, but may find entertaining and occasionally insightful. They are written from and inspired by the bubble I call home, Northern NSW Australia aka ‘The Shire.’

500 Oat Lattes is a combination of rants and revelations, comedy and commentary, interspersed with intimate unravellings, lots of lattes, and attempts to become a better person.

Also, this writing is completely fictional, it bears absolutely no reference to the authors lived experience or anyone she knows, has ever known, or will ever know.

The fact that the author Alice Night does in fact order oat lattes is the only true to life feature of the following passages.

If after reading some of these passages there is a related theme you would love me to write about please do let me know: alicenightmusic@gmail.com

Thank-you for reading you bloody legend!!

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