Madonna

If Madonna reinvents herself one more time she’ll actually be back where she started off - I’ve done the math. She’ll even be Italian again. Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, growing up in Bay City, Michigan with the Rollers. And the whole adventure starts again. She might just go on forever.

Actually, that was one of three possibilities my Mathematica Problematica (patent pending) predicted. The data also suggests that the energy used in another reinvention will produce so much heat that Ms. Ciccone will spontaneously combust, or that mad Mads might actually perish before reinventing herself, having accidentally suffocated in her own arse while trying to perform yoga moves and pass them off as choreographed dance. Less likely, but far more entertaining potentialities. The world holds it’s breath – and the blue planet turns slowly bluer.

Four days after I walked away from the scrub-fire licking at my property, fallen trees at my back door were still smoldering away like Orlando Bloom - only more smoldering and less wooden (ba dūm ching! Hands up who saw that coming!? Zaap!!). I’m was impressed. That fire really knew how to hang on. Stupid really - all my experience with fire revolves around trying to keep the fuckers going. In reality they’re like sea monkeys – leave them alone and they’ll look after themselves.

My computer became infested with ants the other day. They were crawling up the lead, wandering through those vents in the back and reappearing out of the speakers at the front. Either something sweet or dead was imbedded in my computer screen or the millennium bug had arrived in swarms, six and an half years late. I reached for the flyspray in the full knowledge that they were actually ants – I’m resourceful like that. I said a quick prayer and gave them a Baygon bath.

A full 48 hours later the army was still on my desk squirming. They were incapacitated, surely – each curled in a little ball, reaching out their little anty legs and writing in agony. Perhaps flyspray really isn’t good at killing ants, and I’m a daemonic prick for using it. Or perhaps ants are just tough little bastards. Two foodless days of choking on poison, and they’re still going strong. Still fighting for life. I respect that. I don’t fully understand it, but I respect it.

Take any of the above stories and interpret it as symbolic of the plight of Aboriginal people – except perhaps the bit about Madonna suffocating in her own arse. They all say a lot about what is happening, what has happened, and what may still happen. They’re all relevant in their own way. Each is used by people to debate the ‘issues’, from either side. I can see it all from where I stand, but I can’t see how it all fits together.

Two hundred years of choking on poison, trying to keep a flame burning, all the time under pressure to be constantly reinventing yourself. Aboriginals and their culture are a commodity. I guess that’s true of all of us. Life is a market. Values are often arbitrary. The question at the end of all of this has to be ‘What have you got to lose?’ Well, little Maddy C from Bay City… which one’s it going to be?