Exhaust

I wanted to continue this until I reached 100 posts, and despite the fact that I am almost there, I can't continue. I don't enjoy doing this anymore. I don't want to do it anymore. It started off being something I was so excited by, and loved, and thought about and cared for. Now it feels like an overdue essay. And I feel as if it is a door that needs to be closed. The past year's worth of cultural/historical/personal vomit can now be forgotten and left to rot in space. I am sick of not finishing things (art, writings, essays - the only thing I seem to finish is work, and books, but perhaps that is because I am consuming books, not producing), and so I will force a finish.

I'm not sure what to say now, or how I create some kind of formal conclusion.

I think this is it.

Projects

I was listening to some people on radio talk about the environment, and I felt guilty because I was driving at the time (it was a work car though, and I couldn't help that I had to be driving it), and they were talking about individual action (and partially about how ineffectual it is. So what if we reduce plastic bag production by 2 billion a year.....) and collective action, such as writing to local MPs (although it is a nice idea, I can't help feeling as if it is futile). I was thinking about how perhaps I should have a new project, now that Project Blog is drawing to a close. Perhaps I will write to politicians for a year. I was thinking about writing very sensible and reasoned polemic, but then realised that for the sake of 'art' and in a sense, posterity, I would rather write very personal letters about how I really feel about certain things in Australia at the moment. Are politics, art and self really seperable? I'm sometimes concerned that my desire to do things differently arises from a need to distinguish myself from others. Not that this in itself is a bad thing, but there are times when I feel a perverse drive towards alienation, because I want to prove myself to be irrespressible, non negotiable and resistant.

There is a beautiful warm and orange light coming through the window. I felt guilty when the people on the radio were talking about 100 watt light globes. I don't know if I can stand anything less.

Long Yet Laconic

I am so nearly at the end that I can hardly bear it! 7 more posts after this one I think. I am amazed by how eager I am to finish, how uninspired I feel, and how silly it seems to continue when I don't want to. All in the interest of symmetry perhaps?

I lay in a park and looked at the sky yesterday. A particular feeling creeps in: I can't speak adequately, and I make numerous attempts to articulate a particular feeling, and instead talk around it and around it and around it. It takes a long time, but somehow it is stupidly laconic. I can't express these feelings of fear and failure. I can't tell him that I am scared that he will leave me because there is so much wrong with me. It doesn't quite make sense the way it does in my head. There is a horrible disparity between what I feel and what I am able to say. Am I not able to speak when I need to? Yet I am so well equiped with the tools to do so.

Blogging feels stupid now. Are we over it now? Is there any future to it? Is it all just self indulgent wank that no one cares about? I can't be bothered reading other blogs now, when I was so excited by them to begin with. And I feel that if I leave mine to sit and fester here on its own, it will eventually disintegrate and no longer exist.

A Serious Process

The Welfare to Work scheme is revolting. I have spent a considerable amount of time on the phone today trying to refer someone to a service without allowing a really intrusive assessment to take place. Centrelink is becoming (or has it always been?) the devil's agent, and the staff sound apathetic and incompetent (I remember some of the staff in the Fitzroy office having multiple facial piercings, and someone in Centrelink on Sydney Rd telling me to make up some jobs I had applied for when I hadn't finished filling in my form. It was close to Christmas, and one of the jobs I claimed to have applied for on my dole form was as Father Christmas). Remember our social security services in the 80s and 90s, when you could be unemployed, or seriously fucked up, in privacy and with dignity? Welfare to Work: for god's sake, there are reasons that some people can't work, or stay employed. Are we trying to homogenise to the point of making ourselves ill?

I was reading an article in Broadsheet about the unsustainability of human living. Sometimes I feel as if everything is fucked and like we are committing the most irresponsible of acts regularly. I saw that someone had written an article called I Hate Australia which made me think that perhaps things aren't so bad. As long as we are still able/allowed to hate who are, and criticise ourselves and our actions, surely things can't be too bad? Although I feel that we are dangerously close to losing our critical capacity through systemic and debilitating selfishness and our capacity to 'think globally' yet not 'act locally' (maybe that was a dangerous statement. After all, Australians pour money into foreign aid, yet balk at the idea of examining povery and inequity within our own country. I too am guilty of it: I donate to Amnesty International, and I suppose it makes me feel good - or at least alleviates some guilt. Really I should be forming a seditious army and researching successful mutinies).

Just because all the cool countries do it doesn't mean that democracy is the best model. And perhaps there is no model that can work long term, or ever. I too Hate Australia to a large extent, because I don't think it is a just or equitable place. I hate Centrelink, and I hate the Howard government and feel that nothing I do or say can make any difference. Does that matter? Perhaps I make a habit of viewing myself with a gratuitous significance. If I don't I won't bother living.

How Do We Record Each Other?

I am so concerned with recording myself that often I forget to consider my recording of others. And when you record other people in some way, do you really allow them to exist?

"headfirst into the headboard"

In the interest of symmetry, I will continue until I reach 100 posts, or until November, which will be a year from when I started. November 28th is that date. I write more in my diary now, as all sorts of private things are happening in my life. There are things now that I can't write about or expose. And perhaps one of the things I have to come to terms with is the idea that when you are with someone, nothing is ever 'just you' anymore, as awful as that may sound. There is always a large part that is always 'just you', but because you choose to have another person very close, you choose to expose them to things too. I have realised how harsh I am, how 'just me' I am, and how horribly uncompromising and selfish that is. I thought I was just tough and independant, until I realised that what I was doing was resisting the people that I want. And for so long I have revelled in the idea of contradiction, and people's ability to disagree with themselves, and then I realised that part of me wanted to create a smooth and homogenous self that was based on past feelings, becuase it is more comfortable. It also provides a way of knowing yourself. There are so many ways of knowing yourself and we fail to explore so many of them.

What scares you more than anything?
What embarrasses you?
What do you dislike about yourself?
Who do you love most in the world?
When do you feel sexy?
Do you think you are attractive?
What habits do you have?
What have you done?
Where do you put things?
What do you never want people to know about you?
Are you ever totally honest?
Do you look at people?
Do you desire strangers, just because they are strange?
What is familiar?
What are you unable to explain?
What do you not want your parents to know about you?
Are you interested in things you wish you weren't?
Do you worry about what people think of you and how that will change who you are?
Do you pick your nose?
Do you enjoy your body when it smells unwashed?
Do you have desires that you have never told anyone about?
Have you ever seen a psychiatrist?
What do you want to do more of?
Do you wish that people thought thought of you more?
Have you ever felt terribly guilty?
Are you secretly racist?
Do you have a fetish?
Do you ever think about hurting people?
Have you ever wanted to be the opposite sex?
Do you want people to desire you?
Do you wish you looked different?
Do you often feel jealous?
Are you suspicious?
Do you think you deserve better?
Do you think other people are better than you?
Do you think your friends talk about you?
What do you think people say about you?
Do you want people to fear you?
Do you ever feel as if you are either ridiculously complex or ridiculously simple?
Do you desire people you think would never desire you?
Have you ever found your partner repulsive?
Are there things you won't talk about?
Do you feel as if you have never been in love?
Are you dysfunctional?
Are you good at your job?
Do you think people think you are weird?
Do you think people feel sorry for you?
Are there members of your family you are embarrassed by?
Do you despise people who disgust you?
Are you obsessed by money and material?
Do you worry about bodily functions?
Are you healthy?
Are you self pitying?
Are you too self interested/centred?
Do you talk too much?
Do you talk about yourself too much?
Do you demonstrate how you feel about the people you love?
Are you too opinionated?
Are you a selfish cunt?
Do you find some people pathetic?
Are you dismissive of things you don't understand?
Do you pretend to know more than you do?
Do you try to convince others that you know more than them?
Do you want people to always agree with you?
Do you ever disagree because you feel like it?
Do you ever wish to anger or upset someone?
What is the most horrible thing you have done to another person?
What are you ashamed of?
What will you never recover from?
What will you never forget?
What do you wish you could forget?
What part of your body do you not want people to look at?
What do you want to happen to your body when you die?
Do you ever imagine your funeral, and how many people will be there?
Do you think people like you?
Do you think people find you irritating or stupid?
Do you have many friends?
Do your friends genuinely like you or do they just like your partner?
Does anyone really dislike you?
Do you really dislike anyone?
What makes you panic?
When are you most tired?
Do you think the best part of your life has already happened?
Do you wish you could be famous?
Do you wish you were more intelligent and better looking?
Do you wish you were thinner or larger?
Do you try to be different to other people?
Do you work hard?
Are you generally self conscious?
Do your clothes fit you well and do you like them?
Do you think you are better than some people?
Do you ever wis you could kill someone and get away with it?
Do you bitch about your friends?
Are you good at keeping secrets or do you confess?
Do your friends trust you with their secrets or do they know you have a big mouth?
Do you wish you were more reliable?
Have you ever slept with someone you shouldn't have?
Do you really love the person you are with or is it habit?
Do you wish you could go somewhere alone?
Are you able to accept responsibility for your failures or do you blame other people?
Do you think the things that are wrong in your life are someone else's fault?
Are you helpless and hopeless?
Do you have a good memory?
Do people laugh at you?
Do you laugh at yourself?
Are you happy?
Do you really want to exist?

Natural (?) Conclusions

I don't know if my blog has come to its natural conclusion or if I am just sick of it in general. Perhaps it is time to go back to simpler forms? I don't know if I have had a sudden attack of privacy or if I have said all I can be bothered saying. I know this sounds stupid, but everything dies at some point, and surely if I leave this space untended and uncared for for long enough, it too will die. Right now it is live/alive. But I suppose because anything 'on the net' is ephemeral insubstantial crap, it can't exist for very long. Is this one of the things that makes me hate the internet, and ipods? The idea if vitual space? Perhaps I like for things to exist more physically, and with evidence. I don't like the traces, or hints of the physical that we are all so fucking smug about these days.

Another reason for stopping now is that I have that overwhelming sense of who gives a fuck. And I know that last time I mentioned stopping I got all sorts of responses, but this time perhaps it is me who, after all this time, doesn't give a fuck. I think to start off with I had an urge to put my thoughts into the world, no matter how rough and unfocussed they were. Now I feel a bit aimless. This is aimless isn't it? And does that matter? Do you think anyone really cares other than me?

Although the thing that scares me most is the volume of what I have made, and I don't really know how to manage it, what it is for, why I did it, how it can be used or misused or what its destination is. That makes it a strange concept. And scary. What am I doing and why?

I am again reading depressing stories about AIDS (why am I so drawn to disease/epidemic/catastrophe writing?). This time by a guy called Adam Mars-Jones. One of the first things I wondered when I started to read was whether or not kids at school called him 'martian', or said he was from Mars. I probably would have found that really funny in primary school. Or perhaps not, considering I was, and continue to be afflicted with a mad and terrible surname. And perhaps I was less of a swine then than I am now?