Aaron Goldberg

Aaron Goldberg is a Melbourne Australia based writer, some-time musician, try-hard film-maker, masturbator, I.T loser and father. He toured the English speaking world in the early 90s with his indie band 'the Earthmen', then studied screenwriting in the early 00s thinking like every shlepper he'd make it in 'Cannes'. He completed three screenplays and was rejected each time despite his teachers telling him he had more talent than his peers. So much for their advice and the subsequent mental illness. After siring some offspring he has retreated to the serene suburban confines of the suburb Eltham, once legendary for it's art communes, now another dull suburb like all the rest. This has made him a very 'Angry Penguin'. His debut novel 'Foutre La Merde, Dans' and a book of essays on rock n' roll culture 'Whenever I feel like it' will be out on obscure P.O.D label 'Leda Tape' in August 2010.

See more of Aaron at
His BLOG
And HERE

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Excerpt from the novel 'Foutre la merde, dans' by Aaron Goldberg© 2010

It was Yuval’s cravings that brought him the rubbish-bin full of misery. Craving after craving after craving. In the best Freudian tradition, it was the sexual cravings that kicked them off. Those primal genetically encoded desires for flesh, and more, softer, firmer, smellier, warmer, stupider, whatever. Being an only son in the Holy Land made it difficult. The shadow of the Holocaust, the fear of annihilation, the strong binary, disciplined society, and the Logan’s Run styled realization that you not only turn a man at 13, but you repeat it again for real at 18, when compulsory army service came around. But dickheads in the Diaspora would never know with their upper middle-class liberal existences. Yuval’s confrontation with death was a daily chore - he’d imparted death, and he died himself on duty. His encounter with death happened while was laying a communications dish in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. A routine job by any standards, he wasn’t aware that the Fatah University Students had decided that this day was ' the memorial day for the Martyr Mohammad El Nazir'. And so, it just happened to be Yuval’s stupid luck that he copped the arse end of a Molotov cocktail, the blast knocking him unconscious and rupturing his trachea. He died for about 3 minutes as he stopped breathing, but luckily, the Israeli military doctors, let alone their standard hospital trauma doctors, were the absolute best in the universe. Cutting a hole in his throat and inserting a straw kept him breathing, and a week later he awoke in hospital to see his teary mother and his girlfriend. His dad had long left to live in Australia and start a ‘Sour Snake lolly stall’ in a Gold Coast shopping centre. Cheating death, Yuval’s positive lust for life was immense, but so too was his lust for that other life, sex.

In the greater scheme of things, sex was simply a craving. The girls loved his deep ‘Sabra’ melancholy, his brusque machismo. Israeli men are the Old Testament’s spit in the eye to that frumpy old Australian feminist’ treatise ‘the Female Eunuch’. Israelis didn’t get bashed by their alcoholic fathers, and if they did, their mothers would break their fathers' nose, most but not all times. Israeli women don't take as much shit as Anglo-Saxon women who always seemed to take the punches, that’s why they shit things out like ‘the Female Eunuch’ while Israeli women cavort around holding Uzi's, the Israeli's voted a woman into power well before Australia or America ever have. But alas, another distraction.

Craving, craving, craving. Aversion, aversion, aversion. Yuval sat in the meditation room, going out of his mind, as some old, fat, Burmese man who looked like some weird creation out of a George Lucas ‘Star Wars’ movie, drummed the words into his head. ‘Craving’. ‘Aversion’. ‘Misery’. That brunette’s arse wobbled so effortlessly. She must do lots of exercise. I bet she walks around the suburbs in her ‘skins’ just to accentuate that perfect shape. Then she walks into this room of intense self-reflection to show us her 'symbols'. Or the hippie with her perfect posture, for instance. She sits for 5 hours in the same Buddha posture. Unlike the other losers who hunch and stoop and fidget, her posture is perfect, sublime. A persons’ body, their posture, their face, their look, will tell you more than anything that comes out their mouth. All these thoughts, these distractions caused Yuval’s snake to rise. The venom filled its' head, and he became fully aware of the simplicity of his cravings. And then, just as simply entered the misery. 'The Misery'. Annica. The snake became inert, impotent, and since no-one saw his interjected humiliation, he started to feel, strangely....calm.

Like all the other Israelis of Gen X/Y/Z he took the ‘spiritual’ path to India, not that he actually gave three shits about India, since he was ultimately a Hebrew. Most Israelis went to India because India was Israel's ally, and one of the few countries in the world they could go to and not get spat on, or kidnapped or worse, be You-Tube’d of them getting their throat cut. The Indians didn’t hate Israel. Just like the Thais. So the Israelis went there for post Army freak-outs as well. The Thais just thought, well at least they aren’t Paedophiles from Germany or England or Australia.

In Thailand it was like a scene out of Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now'..Weird, beach-side parties full of people completely out of their minds on powerful psychedelics, listening to blaring beat-noise that sounded like it was a fanfare inviting people to the gates of hell. A thumping head-smash of horrible, horrible death.

Leaving Thailand he made his way to Australia, Melbourne precisely, and found himself in a sharehouse in the Jewish fringe suburb of Elsternwick. He found Melbourne oppressive and didn't want to stay there for long. He found the place oppressive because the Jewish community there reminded him of his grandparents. Most of the community in Melbourne were from first generation Holocaust survivors, and because they were stuck in the arse end of the world in Australia, were far more conservative and neurotic than Jewish communities elsewhere in the world. He shared the weatherboard house with two other Israelis, Pini and Fria. Pini was able to get himself involved with the lucrative ecstasy drug dealing scene, and had set himself up perfectly amongst the upper middle-class Jewish university students, most of whom would follow their Israeli brothers and sisters into the spiritual gates-of-hell beat-music listening faddish group of the Global-consciousness trance disco party scene. Such was the disposable income of his clientele, that Pini would regularly bring in over $2000 cash per week. Fria found occasional work as a child minder, working for South African Jews in nearby Caulfield, and orthodox Jewish families with a minimum of four children, in the nearby borough of Balaclava. She would turn up in their modernist homes and look after their children, who loved to talk Hebrew with her and ask her about Israel. Yuval didn't work much, and when he did, he basically did lackey work for Pini. But it wasn't in vain. Pini had a regular customer called Jake, a 22 year old male Jewish stoner who grew a beard like Bob Dylan and was really into trance music and Jeff Buckley. Jakes' parents were multi-millionaires, their family owning a large fruit processing company, as well as owning a substantial real estate port-folio. Jake had done his year's pilgrimage to Israel where he met his girlfriend and future wife, Tali. His life was set, and his parents managed to get him into the law school he needed to go to, and he was planning to have a career in the entertainment industry or 'arts', away from all that 'corporate bullshit, like my folks'. Jake would often share a bong with Pini and Yuval as thanks for keeping him supplied with skunk marijuana, and it was during one of these 'peace pipes' that Yuval was able to use his innate Israeli persuasion to hook up a job at one of Jake's parents warehouses. Yuvals' tasks were simple and soon he was bringing home around $120 cash per day, and he worked the odd day over a weekend where he would get double. Yuval shared his warehouse duties occasionally, with the brother of Jake, a 16 year old called Angus.

Yuval soon noticed that Angus had no idea about life, sex or war. Angus always asked Yuval about what it was like fighting in the army against the 'fucking Arabs'. Yuval took pride in explaining that they were 'fucken stupid' people, and that he doesn't understand why the media refers to Palestine as the 'occupied territories' when they really run their own shop down there, and really, most 18-21 year old Israelis would prefer to be in active combat action like a Golan-Globus movie, rather than punch young Palestinians in the head for throwing rocks or yell at old Arab ladies who can hardly walk. Yuval would ask Angus about whether he has a girlfriend, of which Angus would reply in the negative. Being Israeli and forthright, he asked Angus if he's gay, Angus replied in the negative. From there, in order to break up the monotony and boredom of stacking boxes of cranberry juice, or shifting around palettes of prune juice with a forklift, Yuval would talk constantly to Jake about sex. He would proudly tell Angus how horny the young female soldiers were in the Israeli army. About how much fun it was to spy on the girls as they took their showers, or how kinky it was to fuck a woman in a soldiers uniform while her Uzi would rattle against door of their jeep. He loved to tell stories how once he fucked one of the communications officers, a blonde from Petah Tikvah, in the arse just after they had done a search on a suspected Hamas activists apartment, and how he ejaculated all over the sheets of the activists' bed. In fact he regarded that the most successful 'covert' operation he had ever done, and in his words: 'at least no-one got killed, and my point of view was explicitly and effectively expressed.' Angus thought that was 'pretty rad'. One morning, Angus was instructed to open the warehouse. Upon arrival, Yuval noticed Angus struggling with the lock. Here let me do it, Yuval ordered. Angus obligingly gave Yuval the key, and after a few moments of fiddling, the door opened. Yuval was quick to explain to the bewildered Angus: You have to understand opening a lock is the same as putting it inside a girls pussy. You have to slide it in the right way first, and you have to know how to use the key properly once inside. Angus though he was cool as shit. The conversations between Angus and Yuval would continue, Yuval never had enough stories to tell and Angus never had enough questions to ask. Yuval promised Angus that when he finally fucked a woman, it would be the greatest thing he ever experienced. Better than punching and shooting Arabs, better than trying to dance to undanceable blare from the gates of hell while smashed out of your brains on drugs that made you impotent anyway, and even better than eating Kosher food. Remember one golden law of nature Angus: “They want it as much as you.”