She blinks at that. He sees so much! But she presses on:

JESSICA: You don’t know everything. For thousands of years, we’ve been carefully crossing bloodlines to bring forth…

PAUL: (in disbelief) …the One?

JESSICA: (nodding) A mind powerful enough to bridge space and time. Past and future… who can help lead us into a better future. We think he’s very close now. Some believe he’s here.

– Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth. Dune (Screenplay, based on the novel “Dune” by Frank Herbert). Salmon Revisions. Final Shooting Draft. June 19, 2020.

Switch.

You wake up at SeaTac.

I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats on the ocean, her brown hair spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn’t smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.

This must be an emergency.

Oh.

We’ve lost cabin pressure.

Oh.

You wake up, and you’re at Willow Run.

Old theatre, new theatre, to ship a movie to the next theatre, Tyler has to break the movie back down the original six or seven reels. The small reels pack into a pair of hexagonal steel suitcases. Each suitcase has a handle on top. Pick one up, and you’ll dislocate a shoulder. They weigh that much.

-Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club (p. 22). First published in Australia in 1997. Penguin Random House Australia. Amazon Kindle Edition.

Before we hooked up I was working as a cycle courier in Wellington, living at my folks’, saving money and thinking vaguely about a solo 12-18 month cycle touring trip around South America and up to The States. But I had some success racing the local cross-country mountain bike series that year and was keen to see if I had what it took to move up to the expert class at national events. I was scheduled for shoulder surgery in the spring so wouldn’t be racing that summer. I wasn’t committing to either idea, my skiing still needed a lot of work too.

I was having surgery because I’d torn my shoulder when I put my foot through a snow bridge into a crevasse on a climb at Mt Cook and some months later dropped my chain sprinting in an MTB race and went OTB (over the bars) and bust my collarbone and it got weak. Then it kept dislocating and getting stuck half out of the socket when I was climbing and skiing, multiple times, and I had to give up rock climbing and it was getting too risky to ski in the backcountry.

Yaz and I got together just before my surgery. We were workmates. Bikes 34 Daz and 36 Yaz. We’d become good friends quite quickly after she lured me in one day announcing on the radio that she was at the Electricity Corporation with a chocolate coated banana lolly if anyone wanted it. I was close and immediately replied “34’s Treasury, I’ll see you there in one.” I was lying. I was actually a long way up The Terrace, coasting down the steep hill at high speed on my shitty old work bike with bad brakes, passing cars and dodging taxis and delivery vehicles and office workers scurrying across the road, while talking into my radio with one hand, as you do. I didn’t want anyone trying to race me for that banana lolly. I needed to crank it.

-D. A. Steel. Dreams Love Fucking Life Near Death and Some Other Shit (Part One). 2016/17.

i have the beginning of a film adaptation of the memoir of the millenium in my head for a few years now. when i listen to Triad by Tool and i see the opening sequence, it’s so beautiful i literally weep uncontrollably. listen to it. think about a spark flying into the universe and finding The Sun and The Earth with a timer running on the bottom of the screen, days before the millenium. i won’t go into it, but listen to it and think about a waka, a maori war canoe being paddled.
I sometimes wonder if now i’ve dropped this much, my work is finished. and i’m going to go like donnie darko. those planes won’t leave me alone, even where i’m camped. but i got tons of good shit. and i’m looking to 2051 or something.
i see it was 40th anniversary of apocalypse now on the 15th of this month. nice.

-Darryl Steel. Email to David Fuller @ Rebel Wisdom with attachment “Sympathy For The Killer Awoken Before The End (THE Fucking Shit)”. 27 August 2019.

Yasmine’s sister Mariam had also moved to Nelson from Wellington not long after us with her partner Andrew, after he scored some kind of communications and media job with the Department of Conservation. Mariam had just completed a journalism diploma. We were all good friends. They’d both worked as bike couriers in Welly too. But they were settling into domestic bliss and we weren’t a crew.

My uncle and aunt had moved to Nelson the year before. We were friends, but they were the same age as my olds. And then there were my olds. Mum and Dad had come to live in Nelson earlier that year too, and that was something that had been a bit of a sore point for me.

My mum and dad were simple, honest, hardworking, working class people who were liberal at heart. The previous year they’d decided to try doing something different with their lives and had sold the family home to go partners with a couple of friends on a lease of a motel in Napier, Hawke’s Bay.

In hindsight it was a pretty dumb idea. They asked if I was okay about them selling the house. I was happy for them that they were having a go at something, and I was busy and didn’t get involved. They’d never worked in that industry before, and they shared the manager’s residence with their friends. My mum got married when she was 19. She was almost OCD when it came to doing housework. The motel was too big and nowhere near the main strip. The broker probably saw them coming from a mile away. It was a recipe for disaster and the partnership with their friends ended in tears and animosity.

They only told me about the problems after things had come to a head, and said they were thinking of moving to Nelson. Dad was a driving instructor. When I started the carpentry course I noticed that the first aid tutor was also a driving instructor. So I asked him about opportunities in Nelson and he told me about someone who was selling his business. A business like that is basically just goodwill, but in a small city like Nelson, which had a fierce reputation for being difficult to get in with the locals, that was everything. So Dad bought it and they moved down.

Unfortunately my parents lost a lot of money, and they didn’t have that much beforehand. The housing market was down in Wellington when they sold, and they struggled to get a buyer and only got about 170k. Less than two years later friends of Yasmine and I bought a place around the corner, not too dissimilar, and paid 280k. Regardless, my folks were never going to be able to afford a place of their own again.

It was a bit depressing, but we all did our best to remain positive. The first night they got to Nelson we all went for dinner at my aunt and uncle’s. The old boy wasn’t in a very good mood. He should have been eating humble pie with his head well pulled in. Something on the TV news pissed him off, I don’t even know why it was on, and he went off on some angry rant. I tried to talk some sense to him, but he got horribly surly. I wasn’t having it and stormed off to the car and left, leaving poor Yaz there.

My Dad, John, had a bad temper. When he was a kid, living in Three Kings, Auckland, his old man was a drunk who used to abuse his mum. Then his dad walked out and never had anything to do with the family ever again, before dying of liver disease sometime. Dad joined the air force as soon as he was old enough to get away and became a driver. That’s how he met my mum, Jenny Smith, in Wellington. He was stationed at the air force base in Shelly Bay, on the harbour. The RNZAF used it for their Sunderland flying boats. His mum ended up back in Auckland and we only ever saw her a handful of times.

Dad wasn’t a regular drinker, only on special occasions, and he wasn’t abusive. I copped a few hidings, but nothing more than plenty of other kids did back then. But he did go off, when sober, like a bloody nutter from time to time.

This time there was no excuse for his behaviour. Not after I’d scored him a start in Nelson and he was coming down into my territory. I decided he deserved a good tuning, so I completely avoided my parents. I eventually started talking to Mum a bit on the phone after some weeks had passed. I didn’t want her to feel like I was punishing them for what was a shockingly stupid venture that had lost us all a family home in the capital for nothing. I knew they must already be feeling pretty bad about it.

I was the fourth generation to live in that house. My parents bought it off my grandparents and moved there when I was just a few months old. My mum, and my uncle in Nelson, had also grown up there. It wasn’t a great house by any stretch of the imagination, but it was an okay property, with plenty of potential. It was a bit close to the airport, but the noise wasn’t too bad, and I thought it was a pretty cool part of Wellington to live. The real tragedy was not so much losing that house, as it was losing their capital investment.

It was the land beneath the house, to which I felt a connection. It was culturally significant to me for both my personal and family history and also for some special stories that existed long before my people arrived.

The suburb was called Rongotai, which means the sound of the ocean or something. The land was a narrow isthmus that joined the Miramar peninsula, and we were in the middle of it. When Europeans first settled in Wellington it was a shallow channel passable only at low tide. A large earthquake in 1855 caused major uplift in the region and Rongotai rose clear above the ocean. Maori oral history tells that a few hundred years earlier the same thing happened when the channel was much larger and the peninsula was a permanent island.

I always imagined the Rongotai isthmus as being the part of the jaw below the tooth of Te Ika-a-Maui (The Fish of Maui), where his hook would have pierced. I never heard that interpretation before, but it always looked kind of obvious to me in the way Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington harbour), when viewed on a map, looks like a good fit for a hei matau (a stylised carved fish hook.)

Maui was the mythical Maori demi-god. He was the youngest of five brothers. He was born prematurely and his mother thought he was too weak to survive and she threw him into the ocean, wrapped in a knot of her hair. The gods took pity on him and the Sky Father, Rangi, nurtured him to adolescence until he was able to return to his mother.

Maui had special powers, like shapeshifting into birds, and his brothers were a bit jealous. He was smaller and often wanted to prove himself. Once, he got them to help him catch the sun, Tama-nui-te-ra (Great Son of the Sun), so he could give him the bash until he agreed to slow down so everybody had more time to get things done.

His brothers never wanted to take him fishing, but Maui was determined to catch the biggest fish ever. He had a magic jawbone that had come from his grandmother, he’d used it to bash the sun, and he chipped a piece off it and carved it into a hook and then made his own extra strong line. He hid in his brothers’ canoe and surprised them, once they were out at sea and had dropped anchor.

Maui didn’t take any bait and his brothers wouldn’t give him any, so he bashed himself on the nose and bled all over his magic hook and cast it deep into the ocean. Maui chanted a spell and something immediately hit his line. When he started pulling it in it was obviously huge. Because the canoe was anchored they were nearly sunk. The brothers were terrified, but Maui eventually tired the fish out and pulled it to the surface, where it had to be left tied to the canoe.

Maui dived deep into the ocean to say thanks to his old mate Tangaroa, the god of the sea. While he was gone his jealous brothers jumped onto his fish and greedily hacked it to bits trying to get as much for themselves as they could. That’s the North Island. The South is obviously the canoe with its anchor stone below.

The Hawke’s Bay region lays claim for Cape Kidnappers as Maui’s hook. How his hook came to be stuck just in front of what looks like Te Ika’s dorsal fin is a story I haven’t heard. Perhaps one of the brothers pulled it out and tried to throw it away? That sounds like a fair twist to the tale to me, because I like to think that the mouth was left closed, and perhaps that was the reason why. I like to think that because it fits beautifully with another mythological story concerning Rongotai.

When I was at primary school we learnt a story and a song about two taniwha who were trapped in Te Whanganui-a-Tara when it was closed off from the open sea. I can’t remember the song, but the story is easy to recall.

The two taniwha, mythical aquatic beasts, were somehow forced to share this closed body of water in the head of Te Ika-a-Maui. Their names were Ngake and Whataitai. Ngake was bigger and aggressive and would thrash and swim around in circles dominating the space, while Whataitai would spend most of his time just keeping out of Ngake’s way. There were plenty of eels and fish for them to eat and over time they grew big and their home started to feel cramped.

They could hear the great ocean crashing against the south coast, it would sing to them, and they both wondered what it would be like to be free to swim and explore the world beyond. Eventually it was the bold and strong Ngake who decided he’d try and break out.

He coiled his tail like a spring and released it with as much force as he could, propelling himself around the big pond to gain speed before smashing against the barrier of the land. He carved through it, into the open ocean and was gone, leaving Whataiatai alone, with the newly formed harbour to himself.

Whataitai also longed to explore the great beyond. He could easily have swum out Ngake’s channel. But he had forever been living in Ngake’s wake and if he just followed him, then that was all he would ever be, a follower, someone who couldn’t forge his own path to freedom. So he decided he would smash his own way to the other side.

He coiled his tail and released, swimming as fast as he could, but his line wasn’t as long and wide as Ngake’s, and he wasn’t as big and fast him either. He smashed into the land and carved towards the sea. He could see the open ocean and he thought he’d done it, he was nearly there. But he didn’t make it. He had run firmly aground, beached as.

The tide could now reach him, but no matter how hard he writhed and wriggled he couldn’t free himself. He stayed trapped there for many seasons with the tide keeping him moist and bringing fish for him to eat. If he didn’t eat then he didn’t have the strength to try and free himself. Ngake never returned and there was no one to help pull him free.

Then one day there was a massive earthquake. The ground under Whataitai’s head rose up, lifting his mouth above the tide. No longer was he able to eat and he slowly starved to death. His spirit took the form of a bird and flew to a nearby mountain to make its farewell cry before passing to the other side.

The Rongotai isthmus was sometimes known as the head of Whataitai. I had two great grandfathers from the Smith side of my family who had bought a piece of it. One was Danish. He’d emigrated to New Zealand when he was seven and was the one who bought the house I grew up in. I’d often ride my bike from that house to the top of Matairangi (Mt Victoria), where Whataitai’s spirit had flown.

My other great grandfather, Mr Smith, was a second generation New Zealander. His Grandfather Smith had emigrated from England in 1850 with a huge family of 12 children, and died from dysentery in a wharf shed in Nelson six days after their arrival. The family settled in Kaikoura, which was a place where Maui’s foot had blown out the side of the canoe when he was hauling in his catch. Great Grandfather Smith bought a house on the edge of the Rongotai isthmus when he moved to Welly from the farm, to get treatment for piles. I guess they were quite bad, but things worked out well when he married his nurse. My grandfather and some siblings were born there before they moved back to Kaikoura. The farm went broke in the thirties. My grandfather settled in Wellington after going to war for five years and didn’t waste any time finding a wife and making kids, my mum was born early ’46, and they moved into the Rongotai house with my other great grandfather.

It was nice to have some family history passed down from the Smiths, given that there wasn’t really anything to be said for the unfortunate Steel side of the family. Dad’s mum was Jewish and emigrated when she was a kid and his dad was born in Rotorua. Dad was born early ’41, so I guess he was conceived before his father went to war.

-D. A. Steel. Dreams Love Fucking Life Near Death and Some Other Shit (Part Two). 2018.

Gods help me, I was only 18.

I thought about it as I grovelled around the apple trees looking for clusters of recently formed apples to break apart. Fuck apples! I don’t even like fucking apples! I was caught in a mind riot, tied within, and needed to escape and get some peace. I felt a yearning to go and be alone in the mountains and pay homage to my lost brothers. I’d heard somewhere about a hike down the far West Coast where you took the coastline of Mt Aspiring National Park south of Haast down to Martin’s Bay in Fiordland National Park and came inland up the Hollyford Track to the road. There was some exceptionally good weather forecast. It had to be done.

I told Yasmine she could do whatever she wanted, she could have the car, I needed to do this mish. I hitched down the West Coast, an adventure on its own, with good luck and a real cool ride or two. One of my first rides was in this big beautiful shiny blue classic car. A cool couple from up the North Island were doing their first road trip down south.

“Wow, really?” I said, “You guys are really lucky, you know, this weather is something special. This car’s pretty choice eh? I’ve never seen one before, what is it?”

Dude replied it was an American Motors Rebel, also called a Rambler Rebel. “Hey bro?” he asked, “You smoke weed?”

“Yeah bro,” I replied with a grin, “but I haven’t had any for ages.”

“Well it’s a bit early, but you wanna sesh? We don’t like driving stoned because this car makes us a target for getting pulled over by the cops, and it sucks when you’re red-eyed and paranoid eh? But now you’re here and Lynn wanted a drive anyway. That sweet-as Babe?”

“Yeah, no worries,” She replied, “it’s all good.”

“Cheers bro,” I replied, “that would be totally wicked.”

They did a cool driver-swap sliding across the bench seat and my man pulled out a fatty and sparked that sweet delicious Kiwi bud. I stretched out on the spacious back seat. It really was a beautiful day, sunny blue sky, lush green countryside and towering mountains. It was a beautiful country, beautiful people, a beautiful place to live. We were lucky. We rolled smoothly through the magical island in the Rambler Rebel and as my thoughts wandered to what I was doing there a song played in my mind and I giggled.

“…For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s heading my way…Ah, sometimes I grow so tired, but I know I got one thing I got to do…Ramble on, and now’s the time, the time is now…”

Hiking the wild west coast wilderness of Te Waipounamu, solo, was a serious undertaking. But I was supremely confident in my skills and ability. I was relaxed thinking about the trip and all I wondered was what special experiences I might be gifted.

Something strange happened when I got to hiking the isolated coastline a few days later. I’d get intense sensations that the ocean, which was mostly calm, was suddenly going to rise up above me and sweep me away. I had no irrational fear of water or the ocean. In Wellington I spent my life playing around the coast on rocks and swimming, sometimes in the surf. The previous couple days I’d crossed the intimidatingly large Cascade River and had frantically swum another close to where it flowed out into big surf, without shitting my pants.

The sensation came from deep within me and was powerful and unnerving. I’d never experienced anything like it, although I recognised it from dreams. I’d dreamed recently about a real scene from that winter. We’d gone for a drive to Greymouth from The Pass with the crew and Mark took his surfboard. There was a monster swell at the Greymouth bar, no good surf, but Mark just wanted to get out amongst it. We sat parked on the breakwater and watched. In the dream a tsunami wave rises up and I can’t out-drive it and it catches us with that same sensation. It wasn’t to be the only time I had that dream. I’d also had a similar recurring dream for years where it was basically the same thing but I was on the beach down the road from where I lived in Wellington. Both dreams were very vivid. Even though an interpretation seemed obvious in a way about how I related to my world, it felt like something more, and I wondered if I’d met such an end in a previous life or something.

-D. A. Steel. Dreams Love Fucking Life Near Death and Some Other Shit (Part One). 2016/17.

I talked about it. A bit. Later in 2001 I hitched to Dunedin for the first visit riding a heavy wave of hunches and synchronicities. Scored a ride from Christchurch with a young surfer dude, Matt Yamashita, from Molokai, Hawaii. Told him what I was up to. Exploring my ability to create substantial synchronicity for a story in the context of who and when I am in Aotearoa, while taking time to recover from the trauma of months of hardship and losing my life from having been put through the mental health system with heavy medication after a difficult break-up.

He was on a gap year after graduating from film school in LA. A wealthy NZ family who had managed the main ranch on Molokai had shouted him a free trip to NZ as a graduation gift. Later we called in to see them near Oamaru or somewhere. Beforehand Matt had decided to carry on down to Dunners that day to visit their kids who were at uni and so we could talk more. He was for real.

He said he knew how traumatic break-ups could be. His parents were psychologists or psychiatrists who had concerns about the over-prescription of medication. We discussed relationships.

“Above all, the most important thing,” he said, “is to just always be totally honest.”

“My partner told me I shouldn’t be so honest.” I replied.

He frowned. “You must have been in the wrong relationship.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t go into it. We had better things to talk about.

Down at Tomahawk Beach I told Tim about what went down. I wasn’t psychotic, just very, very high. I remembered everything. Completely uninhibited. Free to fully explore what I represented on the millennium. The phone calls to the El Orfi’s to tell them I could see the role they were playing forcing me to confront my embodiment of Christ and Anti-Christ and I held no animosity towards them for the emotional manipulation they had wrought which had led me to call them up very late one night to cheekily inform them that they were acting like witches and it would make men want to burn their house down. That little shit Omar. And what did Ali used to call Yasmine? Ghoula?

Tim became seriously concerned. I could see that flicker of anger that used to burn in him a few years earlier when he was younger and on the hunt.

“I saw Yasmine in Wellington when you were locked up,” he said, “I asked what was going on and her exact words were, “It’s alright, Darryl just thinks he’s Jesus, that’s all.”” He imitated her confidently clever voice perfectly.

“Was that it?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know what to think or say.”

Was she high or drunk? She seemed pretty in control to him.

“Bro,” I replied, “I might have been going off, high as a kite, but I went into it in detail like I said, and Yasmine and Katherine are both very intelligent, confident women. And I most certainly never said I thought I was Jesus.”

I guess that’s what she told all our friends. I heard some other things elsewhere.

I explained my realization of the millennium and the full force of accepting being in a position to represent as a second-coming figure, which was something I had consciously been working around since I became fully aware of it when I was about 21.

It was blowing my mind on one of those millennium mornings, still so high from the Christmas Eve acid trip, just like I’d been planning and training for many weeks. I walked down to the local café in perfect sunny calm weather. The smell of the blooming cottage gardens mingling with the scent of the ocean was intoxicating. Something appeared in the middle of the footpath in front of me. What’s this? It was a small booklet lying face down. I picked it up. It was Christian junk mail. The title was “The Second Coming”. I kept it. It was real. Yeah baby, it was on.

I showed it to my mother when I was released from hospital, still under section, and we were having to pack up my stuff for storage because I was being forced to move to Nelson to live with them. I tried to tell the story, but speech was difficult under the medication. But I got the result I was expecting. Her pitiful ignorant scared expression.

“What happened to my cards?” I had asked them, as I stood trembling, looking at the bare polished timber floorboards of the living room.

“We packed it up,” she said. “It looked like some kind of shrine.” There was terror in her voice. It was so pathetic. I couldn’t feel pity, or disgust, or annoyance, or frustration. I couldn’t feel anything. Except death. Black emptiness.

A shrine was exactly what it was. A shrine for the spirit of the Goddess. It was a meditation rug surrounded by Klimt postcards. His golden women and his flora impressions. I’d sat there grounding myself, feeling an immense energy flowing through me, my heart expanding until it became one with the world. I wept with joy before going to my bed to sleep peacefully.

Next morning the mental health crisis people showed up. Here we go. Bring it on. I went blah blah blah blah blah. They went “We think you’re very sick and need to come with us.” I went “Good for you. I’ve had coffee and no breakfast, the gardener’s turning up shortly, and I really need to go for a run to burn off some charge, it was nice meeting you, there’s the door.” Exit the mental health crisis people. He was a dick who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was, but she was hot, like fuck yeah. Mind you, I was tanned, extremely fit, and the hottest guy on the planet, so maybe it was just me.

Then the gardener shows up. The owner of the cottage had arranged it. The gardener’s name was Xena, like the warrior princess. She was a boss, with a big crew of young people under her strict control. They ripped into it with steel blades flying.

I stretched out for my run. I was planning a big one. It was overdue. Two full end to end circuits of Queen Elizabeth Park. I told Xena I was going out and made it nearly as far as the driveway before I got stopped by the police.

I can’t remember how much I told Tim about all that. And I can’t remember how much I told him about the months of apparently orchestrated gaslighting Yasmine had subjected me to. Gaslighting. We didn’t have that term then. And now we do. Yasmine’s was textbook, to the extent of being, at the end, very blatant. I never gave the full account of that. It hurts. It still does. So I’ve sat on it. Pain is a fire in which one can harden resolve. One day I’d tell the full story. I would never forget…

To be continued.

(This is a section to be included in the existing memoir “Dreams Love Fucking Life Near Death and Some Other Shit” and it comes before “Prophecy 2001”.)

-Das Steel. We Need To Talk About Yasmine El Orfi (Part One). December 2019. (You know when, eh?)

So the shit all started to hit the fan in 1999. In our flat in Hataitai, when she spectacularly kicked two holes in the wall with each foot at the same time that she punched another one. I can’t remember what triggered her, probably because I didn’t know what it was and she wouldn’t tell me. We were always discussing psychospirituality, the zeitgeist, the future, and on two occasions in ‘99 she just suddenly, out of nowhere, lost her shit and went crazy. I was stunned, like what the fuck?

Total tanties, screaming, hair pulling and foot stomping, and yeah, kicking holes in the wall. Then she went and sat in a chair with her arms crossed saying nothing like a petulant upset child. I was bewildered, scared and suddenly very isolated. I tried to get her to talk.

“You don’t know, do you?” she snarled.

“Know what? What do you mean?”

“Yeah exactly, you just don’t get it!”

It was hard for me to not get upset and angry.

“Well fucking tell me what I don’t get!”

She screamed and stomped her feet and pulled her hair again, shaking her head.

“It’s like that time when we were riding around that estuary and you were singing that song, you don’t even know why you were singing it.” she said contemptuously.

“What??? Yeah I do.”

“Oh no, no you don’t.”

It was getting ridiculous, which kind of cooled down the situation, and I didn’t push her on it. We both settled into a cold sardonic adversarial tone.

She was talking about the first summer after we had hooked up in ‘94 and we went for a mountain bike cycle tour around the top of the South Island. We were riding around an estuary in Golden Bay and I started singing something stupid like a dork, words that just came into my head.

“The estuary, the estuary, we’re gonna ride ‘round the estuary, the estuary…(ad nauseam)”

I pronounced it “es-jury”. Yasmine asked me why I was singing it. In hindsight, that was a fairly good clue. It was just a goofy thing, like I’d often do, why would there be a reason? She asked it with serious intent, which made it seem a bit odd, and that’s why it stuck in my mind.

So I figured, from her tanty performance, that she was talking about me not being aware enough about working towards being ‘The One’, a messianic figure, that people would want to fuck with. What else could she mean? She refused to say anything more. I always imagined I meant the s-jury was the ‘secret jury’, but was it more like the secret Jewry? Who knows?

“Jeez,” I said, “maybe you shouldn’t smoke any more weed. You seem to be having real problems dealing with your daddy issues or something.”

I don’t think we were high at the time, maybe. We weren’t habitual smokers. We’d have a sesh with mates once or twice a week. Her behaviour was suddenly so extreme and unexpected, it was the only thing I could think might have caused it.

“Oh I’m not the one with the problem,” she retorted.

“Yeah well, I’m not the one who just kicked…hey look, you put three holes in the wall! Fuck Yaz, that’s awesome!”

We chilled out and it didn’t get discussed further at that time. In the coming months we both continued to work on the ideas for how we were going develop “TranzMissionRide” into a media brand dealing with psychospirituality and social politics to deal with impending societal dead-ends.

I thought I kind of understood what was affecting her. I was the man. We all knew that, right? It could be a mind fuck, which was why you didn’t focus on it and kept it real by working on where it led. But who knows?

Around that time we were walking down Kent Terrace away from the Embassy Theatre after seeing “The Matrix” for the first time. We were pretty excited. There were a lot of ideas in it that we had been working on.

“It’s you, right?” she said.

“Yeah I wish,” I replied, “have you seen me try to hold a wheelie on my bike?”

“Yeah, but you know?”

I laughed it off, and she didn’t say anything more about it, ever. Or at least not to me.

As the year progressed she continued to show that her situation was bothering her. I did what I could to give her space and freedom to move, but she chose to stay involved with me and the project, at times wholeheartedly. At other times it was like she didn’t want to be there. I wanted us to be a team like we’d always been, but if she wasn’t into it, then I didn’t want to be holding her down. So I let things flow as best I could and didn’t push her on anything, like the fucking computer.

Our desktop editing system was a lemon that had developed some major bug. We both had a good understanding of how the software and hardware systems worked and where the issue probably was. The place we bought it off were totally dicking us around, big time. Were they trying to fuck with me? Yeah nah, the guy was just a dick, who knows? Yaz had a law degree, and that kind of problem was way more suited to her skill set, so she took responsibility for it, and then didn’t sort it out. I didn’t want to hassle her, and ended up busy, driving miles every day to make some cash, building house frames, to pay the rent, the computer loan, the credit card, blah blah blah.

’98 had been a huge year for us. We had achieved a massive amount in a short space of time. Yaz had been a leading influence in driving us to make some brave moves and committing to some big targets. I was excited by the challenge of extending myself way beyond my comfort zone, but I was often struggling, out of my depth.

We’d put my name on the letterhead, Steel Edge Productions, and we’d boldly made production commitments. There were times when we were really up against it and I was totally shitting my pants that we wouldn’t pull it off. Yaz was a champ, she had the winner’s faith that I was trying to develop. I knew how my weakness was frustrating for her, she’d tell me, and that put me under even more pressure.

I knew it was an important part of my development, and did my best to roll through it. Unfortunately there were some mornings when I had to get up to try and puke the butterflies out of my stomach before trying to run it off. But we made it.

So in ’99 I was very conscious about keeping things cool and not letting the pressure get too high in the boiler, while still staying productive and setting goals. I didn’t know how my partner was going start working against me.

We’d moved out of the city up to the Kapiti Coast. I’d seen a cool cottage advertised for cheaper than what we were paying for our small one-bedroom flat in the city. I talked with Yaz about issues concerning us being somewhat more isolated up there. We always considered everything in depth. I didn’t want to be leading her into a situation where she’d have less opportunity to pursue things independent of me and the project. She had her own friends and family in Wellington. But it wasn’t too far away, and she was supposedly still totally committed and into it.

We were in the city one night at our mates’ place, the boys’ flat. A day or two earlier Yaz and I had been discussing ideas about gen-x individualism and their blind spots concerning collective social orientation, or something like that, the usual shit. The lads had been discussing something in which they displayed exactly the thought systems we had described. I was excited about it, and driving home I was going blah blah blah. Yaz interjected with an unexpected nasty tone.

“You think maybe it’s just you?”

I was a bit taken aback by how she said it, but she was raising a point we had been looking at, so I thought she was engaging me combatively. We had been developing awareness of how we influenced our realities. Our mate Olly Brunton, who lived at the flat, was also working on such ideas in his personal development and we had talked, on a different occasion, about ‘puppet master influence’.

I replied to Yaz in cocky debate mode something like “Aw yeah, but even if I’m projecting, it’s their realities that are producing what I’m…”

Yaz screamed. It was just like that day back in Hataitai. Stomping her feet and pulling her hair.

“Aaaaargh! Can’t you see what you are?! You’re just like your father!”

I was dumbfounded. What the fuck? I was nothing like my old man, unless she meant…? My father was a chronic mansplainer to my mum. My mum wasn’t the smartest woman and it was sometimes easy to get frustrated when she couldn’t work something out. I’d developed, to a lesser extent, my dad’s bad habit of mansplaining. We didn’t have that term then, but I understood it, was aware of it, and it was something I tried to fix. So that must be what Yasmine was accusing me of. But, to be fair, that vocal inflection was also a symptom of being a know-it-all smart arse Wellington wanker, of which Yasmine was also not immune.

“Hey I’m sorry,” I said, “if I’m talking down to you, I don’t mean to do that, I’m just excited and debating your interjection.”

She screamed again, with the stomping of the feet and the pulling of the hair.

“It’s not that!” she yelled “Aaaaargh! You just don’t get it!”

This shit again. “What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”

She didn’t reply and just kept on with her tanty. I pulled the car over to the side and parked. We were up Vivian Street about to get onto the motorway.

“What are you doing to me?” I yelled at her. “I’m not forcing you to be here. This is your choice. You freely made the decision to get involved in this. If you don’t want to be on my ride, then get off, get out!” I leaned across her and opened the door. “Go on, go stay at your mum’s! I don’t have anywhere else to go, you do, so fuck off if you don’t want to be with me!”

“No! I can’t! You don’t understand!”

“FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!”

I was in tears now. I grabbed a handful of her beautiful long curly strawberry blond hair and yanked it hard.

“There! Is that what you want? Now get out and go!”

“No! I can’t!”

“What do you mean you can’t?! Stop fucking with me!”

I completely lost it and punched her hard on the arm. “What more do you need?! Now fuck off, please, please just go! I can’t take this anymore! What are you doing to me?!” I sobbed.

“No! I can’t! You don’t know!” she cried again.

I gave up and just wept. I didn’t know. And I didn’t know what to do. I had nowhere to go. There was no reason why she couldn’t get out and jump a bus up to her mum’s or ring for a ride. Yasmine slammed her door shut. I drove us back to the coast.

All I knew then was, for whatever reason, Yasmine was going to fuck up my shit. It explained how she could have been so thoughtless and insensitive to me on her birthday. That too was very painful. Later it became obvious when she turned it around on me, ridiculously.

Beforehand I had to wonder if she was sick. In the first week of the next year when I was high as a kite, well off my rocker, I told some mental health people who turned up at my place after someone had rung them, that I was high partly from discharging prolonged emotional stress from the break-up of a relationship that I suspected must have become co-dependent or something, “I guess you guys see a lot of illness from co-dependent relationships, right?” I’d blabbed, just showing off, while trying to work with what I’d guessed they’d been told, when they asked why the relationship had failed.

Yasmine and I had been in some kind of like textbook functional anti-co-dependent relationship. We were way too fucking smart for that shit. But I wasn’t going to tell them something else. She was the sick one? Or maybe she’s part of a psychospiritual conspiracy against what I represent, you know, look who her parents are? I wasn’t even considering back then, thank goodness, that it might have been something more. She did love telling the one about how when she was a kid in Tripoli the nice American couple who used to babysit, Uncle Bob and Aunty Doris, were actually CIA spies. Yeah right, as if?

Who knows what was going on with Yasmine El Orfi?

To be continued.

(This is a section to be included in the existing memoir “Dreams Love Fucking Life Near Death and Some Other Shit” and it comes before “Prophecy 2001”.)

-Das Steel. We Need To Talk About Yasmine El Orfi (Part Two). December 2019.

What are your legs? : Steel springs.

And what are they gonna do? : Hurl me up the track.

And how fast can you go? : As fast as a…?

And how fast will you go? : AS FAST AS A…?

THE UNBELIEVABLE FULL ACCOUNT OF MY SEPTEMBER 11

I woke up at my friends’ (T and A’s) place at Tomahawk Beach in Dunedin. It was Tuesday. I was feeling pretty charged and ready for action. I was still fired-up from the previous day.

Monday’s post had brought a letter from my mother, forwarded to me by a friend in Wellington. I had become totally estranged from my parents early that year for reasons that were comprehensively confirmed by my mother’s letter. I was pissed off, hotter than hell, you might say. I went for my first run of the spring to blow some of it out. I donned my trusty adidas Trail Response runners (the only shoes I had) and headed for the statue of the World War One soldier way off high above the bay.

I warmed up along the beach and hit the track leading up to the ridge. The track had obviously been used by a herd of cows and had become a shin-deep muddy cowshit bog. The gorse on the sides of the track made it impossible to get around. I was swearing and cursing and was considering turning back when I realised there was going to be no dodging cowshit for me. I caned it hard, straight up the guts. I passed slowly through the herd near the top and, pushing the pain, charged into the strong headwind up to the old digger giving it my all. I came down via Centre Road back to Tomahawk and washed the shit off my adidas in the ocean. I met Jack the huntaway puppy and still had enough to out-run him along the beach.

That evening I was hanging out in the warm kitchen with my friend (A) who was cooking dinner, I was still high from my run. My mother’s letter had got me going on ideas of things like fear and security and death. “You know what I wanna be when I grow up?” I said, talkin’ shit with a grin. “I used to wanna be an assassin, but I don’t care about individuals anymore, now I wanna be a terrorist.” I ranted on about it for ages trying to express the ideas I was having. I drew some parallels with themes from the movie “Fight Club”. I thought about the last scene and imagined dropping the buildings while they were full of people.

-D.A.Steel. Epiphany 2001 (Prophecy 2001). 2006 edit.

DAVID: This is my grandfather.

CHRIS: [Translates in Aboriginal]

DAVID: Ah, yes. Here are two pictures of my mother’s grandfather.

CHRIS: [Translates in Aboriginal]

The second picture is old and faded, showing a priest standing in front of a stone entranceway with a large snake carved above it. Charlie runs a finger along its wavy serpentine length.

CHARLIE: [Speaks Aboriginal]

CHRIS: [Translates] Where is your… clan… territory?

DAVID: My clan territory?

David looks questioningly at his white Australian wife, Ann.

ANN: I don’t know what he means.

CHRIS: Uh, from sunrise… or sunset?

DAVID: [Chuckles] From sunrise. From South America. I was born there. Why is he so interested in my, my mother’s grandfather?

CHRIS: He’s interested in you.

CHARLIE: [Speaks Aboriginal]

CHRIS: [Translates] We’re nothing but the law… we learned from our forefathers.

Carving the long white spine, in the springtime
Westland, Aotearoa, 1997
Across the sea, east of the land of the Dreamtime

In what distant
deeps or highs
burnt the fire
of thine eyes?

One score and two years before

The Kick-Off

DAVID: Chris, I can’t help you unless you tell me what Billy saw.

CHRIS: No! Can’t you see it is hard for me? Your people pulling me this way. Something more strong is holding me back.

DAVID: You’ll go to jail, all of you. You’re in desperate trouble.

CHRIS: No! You in trouble. You!

DAVID: Why do you say that?

CHRIS: You don’t know what dreams are anymore.

DAVID: Chris, what are you trying to protect me from? Charlie? Where is he? I want to talk to him.

CHRIS: He’s not here. He’s gone away.

DAVID: I had another dream.

CHRIS: You’re dreaming about secret. It is death to know them.

DAVID: What secrets? Chris, if you tell me, I can get you off. For Christ’s sake, you’ve killed a man!

CHRIS: Listen to me! Why don’t you go away? You’ll die! Leave us alone! Go away!

DAVID: I can’t go away.

CHRIS: Charlie is an owl. He can fly through the air. He can do many things. Lots of magic. He got the power. [Chuckles] But you… [He takes David’s hand in both of his] I think you may be… Mulkurul.

DAVID: What is that?

CHRIS: You different tribe… from another world. Across the sea… from sunrise.

DAVID: Mulkurul. Mulkurul.

[End of scene.]

Part II

I Am It

Lost and Found
in the land
of the Dreamtime
From the Alpha to the Omega
Never Forever back again
I am THE
I AM
I am
I am the
The killer awoke before dawn
It put its running shoes on
It took a mark from the ancient gallery
and it ran off out the door
Pulling its steel
from the sheaths
of its feet
it thrust apart
the feathered blades
of its wings
It rose
above all
into the warm winds
of the west
Slowly banking
it climbed
through the darkness
towards the first
threads of light
penetrating
the scattered clouds
of the east
over the horizon
into
and through
the rising sun…

…to be continued

Hawkeye Jupiter’s Eagle

Flying on
elsewhere
it will become
its own beast
There must always be
a reason to return
to keep coming back
into the future
A first draft
of a beginning
can be found
at the end
in a second
appendix

-Das Steel. THE Fucking Shit. 2019.

AGENT: (showing amazing restraint) I do have a fabulous rate on a cruise ship departing for Australia tomorrow. But you wouldn’t want to do that.

TRUMAN: Why wouldn’t I?

AGENT: I thought you were in a hurry.

TRUMAN: (calming down) That’s right.

AGENT: You want to book the flight?

Truman pulls out a wad of money from his pocket and several rolls of quarters from Marlon’s vending machines. The agent looks askance at the pile of cash.

TRUMAN: You were expecting me, weren’t you?

The travel agent ignores the question and prints the ticket.

AGENT: It’s non-refundable.

EXT. SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. DAY.

CHRISTOF stands with a PRODUCTION MANAGER, mid-thirties, on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House, its sail-like roofs soaring above them. Framing the background, the coathanger-shaped Sydney Harbor Bridge.

PROD. MANAGER: (unable to conceal his pride) Happy?

Christof gives a grudgingly complimentary nod.

CHRISTOF: (staring out at the pleasure craft littering the harbor) Can we contain him long enough?

PROD. MANAGER: I think so.

Christof looks skyward at the cottonwool clouds above the harbor.

PROD. MANAGER: (anticipating his next question) He flies at night. Thick cloud cover to disorient him. Hopefully we’ll knock him out with complimentary cocktails, pull the shades down during the movies. He’ll never know.

-Andrew Niccol. The Truman Show (early screenplay). Date unknown (film released 1998).

EXT. PIER 13. DAY.

TRUMAN comes back to reality. He steels himself, shuts out the doubts and dives into the water.

EXT. NEW YORK HARBOR. DAY.

Underwater we see TRUMAN panicking at the shock of the cold sea, arms and legs flailing. Suddenly he stops and sinks for a moment in the weight of his clothes. Then slowly he rises to the surface and begins to swim.

Moored in the harbor is the scaled-down replica of Columbus’ flagship, The Santa Maria.

INT. CONTROL ROOM. DAY.

CHRISTOF is spooling through significant scenes in the history of “TRUMAN” on a preview monitor.

He pauses on the scene of SYLVIA and TRUMAN at the fountain in Flushing Meadow Park in the show’s seventeenth season. Sylvia has her finger to Truman’s lips. Christof presses “PLAY” on the mixing desk.

SYLVIA: (from monitor) You remember when you were a little boy…

Christof fast forwards, then presses PLAY once again.

SYLVIA: …Trust that boy…

Christof jabs the “PAUSE” button, freezing the picture. He recites the words to himself.

CHRISTOF: Trust that boy… (to Simeon) We’re not watching the sea.

SIMEON: (confused) Why would we?

CHRISTOF: Sweep the harbor.

EXT. NEW YOUR HARBOR. DAY.

TRUMAN is at the wheel of the Santa Maria, wind filling her sails. Covering the face of the ship’s compass is Sylvia’s composite picture.

His is the only craft afloat in New York Harbor. As the archaic vessel passes under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridget, the bridge appears on fire in the glow of the sunlight. Truman steers around Norton Point and sets a course for the open sea – the horizon.

-Andrew Niccol. The Truman Show (early screenplay). Date unknown (film released 1998).

I experienced the tsunami sensation and dreams again in 1999 when I was living on the Kapiti Coast.