"Don't You Know You're Life Itself".....

I have been listening to the Nina Simone song Wild Is the Wind recently. Over and over again. Because it is so terribly sad, and I don't know why, but I am compelled to listen to things that make me feel sad. So I took a photo of myself listening to it one night. And the other photos....well, the first aid face, and a fake hand.

AW and EJ gave me an inflatable tongue for my birthday.

Jesus Jesus Jesus Fuckin' Jesus

Today I am having some kind of crisis. I think I might be a total wanker. I don't know what I can do about this, if anything. What is with this blogging thing? Often I have concerns about the self indulgence of it. Is it like a love me love me love thing? I don't know. I am terrified! I could also have a crisis about not blogging, because maybe I am addiced to it and can't stop. It doesn't stop me writing in my diary. Do I just have this burning urge to constantly EXPRESS MYSELF? What does all of this mean.......? It concerns me that I obviously think I have so much important stuff to say.

Jesus, I can't deal with this.

Anyway......

We saw Dylan Moran last night, and aside from deciding that I am totally in love with him, I laughed so much, and felt sad and nostalgic and weird. He reminded me so much of MC (and not just because he is Irish), and living in Dublin, and the immense pleasure I took in MC's personality. We used to spend so much time together talking shit in cafes and pubs. His birthday is the same as mine, 24th April. He is 34 though.

The Last Stop on the Maternal Line

Oh this blowery bloody weather. I've been reading another Herman Hesse book, and rather than feeling my ususal literary whimsy, I keep wondering if it is, in fact, just fucking stupid. I want to believe what I read in books, I want to believe that it is possible, and that the stultifying and transcendental moments these fictional folk suffer is just as possible for me (as long as the eventual reprieve is too). In this book (Gertrude), the main character suffers from unrequited love, and rather than it humiliating him, and making him foolish and diminished, it enobles and drives him. Is this some kind of wicked distillation of errant* and sedimentary parts, or a truculent fantasy whose aim is akin to the religious fantasy of salvation and ok-ness?

And so, although it seems unrelated, I can't help but go back to Edmund White's comment ("I think sex is worth dying for" - in reference to having unprotected sex in the 70's and now having AIDS), and wonder why we seek worth at all. I have wanted to pin things on the significance of a comment like that before. But you can never count on consistency, and you can never count on other people to understand what you are saying.

Today is all about suffering for me. Not that I am suffering, just that it is concerning me, the idea of it. And it is also about living through the indignity of the body, and how it, in part, moulds our becoming.

This morning I think I found a moment of love and peace in the maternal line. Perhaps not peace, but quiet. My mother talked about an early memory of hers. She said that my grandmother had 5 miscarriages between herself and her younger brother, one of which she remembers. She was in grade 1 at the time. On this particular day she was confused because her mother did not come to meet her from the school bus, and so she walked the short distance home alone. She let herself into the house and found her mother on the sitting room floor crying and surrounded by blood soaked towels. She said she was terrified because she didn't understand where all the blood had come from. But my grandmother was too weak and bleeding to get up and use the phone. She asked my mother to run down the street and tell her aunt that my grandmother needed her. My mother remembers walking back home with her aunt, who was very serious. And eventually my grandfather and my grandmother's brother arrived at the house and lifted my grandmother up and carried her to the car. By this stage she was so weak she could hardly move. And then she just disappeared for about a week and my mother didn't know what had happened.

It is strange to think of this grusome, gory and humiliating thing happening to my grandmother. To think of her as a victim of her own body and its processes is strange (despite the fact that we all succumb to our processes eventually). To me she has always seemed impenetrable, rigid, and lacking in the kind of feminine vulnerability that seems to characterise so many women. She was fucking tough. Now I feel sad for this soft, crying, bleeding woman who has just lost yet another foetus. When I look down this line of women, as I am trying to do now, I am finding such resistence, but fear that it is on my part. Perhpas staying with the historical accounts is always easiest? And perhaps in part, a refusal to identify yourself as part of a lineage forces you to identify only with your own accounts of these people. For ZP and I to really understand and end the badness in our family's history, we need to accept our own part in it, and identify with it to some extent. You can't adequately reject something without sufficient knowledge of it first can you?

What was my grandmother becoming before she miscarried? She lived through that indignity, and then I saw her final indignity, which didn't seem so terrible. What was my mother becoing when my father left her? And what have ZP and I been becoming, and now wish to stop? In some small and triumphant way, I look forward to the final indignity, and living through it to die, because it is so satisyingly human, as if it is the culmination of the human experience, or the essence of what it is to be alive. I'll live through the death of my body, and show it off, in order to die. I imagine dying and thinking 'look, I'm dying but I'm still living, but I'm dying, but I'm still living, but I'm dying, but I'm still living.........'

*errant - to travel, travelling, to stray off the
right path, moving aimlessly or irregularly.

Kiss Me Like a Wanker

There are times when I seriously consider giving up alcohol. Today has been one of those times. Yet I am pulled by the allure of feeling like I'm 16, in an atmosphere that is sweetly crass. So, despite being terribly grown up.....last night we went to Golgotha. It was terrible and hilarious. Sadly BS and I drank too much to be at all sensible, and at some point in the evening I found myself paired up with an incredibly beautiful goth boy (who actually turned out to be 35) called Shine (ha ha ha!). I think the whole thing appealed to me because it really reminded me of a period of time when I was 16 or 17 or something, and drank too much and decided to be a miserable goth. Later in the night I had rather a large rest on the floor of a toilet cubicle, until AM came and found me (she could see one of my shoes poking out from underneath the door). The last think I remember is lying on the toilet floor willing myself to concentrate on the ceiling. I think I was there for over an hour. But, because it easter, and being such a reverent bunny, I was resurrected. I came back from the dead and danced until 5.00am.

Today (as a consequence of last night's actions) has been quite revolting. There are huge black patches in my memory, and today AM and BS told me about things that happened that I have no recollection of (one of which being that I went into the toilet with BS and after he had pissed got stuck into him about using toilet paper. Apparently I was complaining about men not wiping after urinating. Perhaps I was feeling bitter because I know that I always have to use it. Not a fan of the drip dry...And then we got asked to leave the toilet by a bouncer. God, I really don't remember this happening.), and yet part of me really doesn't care. Part of me is interested in trashing myself and experiencing those extremes. Still, I don't think I have been that drunk for quite a few years.

I felt so beautifully ruined when we came home this morning, wearing a huge black tutu-like skirt, fishnetted arms and heavy black eye make up. Somehow I enjoy looking dishevelled, revolting and sleazily trashed.

I'm not a goth you know. I just indulge in it sometimes.

Suburban Sleeplessness

When you try really hard to elicit a response from an otherwise unresponsive individual, often the response is not the one you were hoping for. I field like a cricketer, and attempt to soak up other people. I am so aware of their responses, bodies, idiosyncracies. I notice the way mouths move and the way people hold themselves. And people are so contradictory, and you want so desperately to read them, and they continually resist your efforts. Sometimes I feel addicted to the response. Like poking someone in the eye until they punch you. I am resisting the urge to push things to their limits, to the ends of their possibilities. Perhaps I need for everything to be said, so it can expire and I can end it.

In the coming weeks I want to:

• learn to more adequately control certain impulses
• learn to feel physically without the need to for analysis and (negative) scrutiny
• stop seeking flaws and inadequacies
• learn to be less fervent, intense and insistent.
• make fewer assumptions about people's reactions to me
• not say everything at once
• hide the light slightly (under the bushel of course. God, I can't believe I am considering that, which in fact leads into the next point...)???
• make space for uncomfortable contraditcions.

The Monday Mouth

I arrive at work on Monday morning, and regardless of it being a new carton, the milk always tastes strange. Almost ridiculously sweet and rancid. It is as if I bring with me my weekend mouth, which must then become the working mouth. Here I have the work mouth, and at home, in private, it is simply a foul mouth.

We Don't Induce Vomiting or Steal Faces

Over the last 2 days I have been doing a first aid course. It was all very serious and I was quite bored until someone in the group started making rude comments. The strange woman teaching us was talking about not inducing vomiting, and how in hospital now instead of pumping the stomachs of pissed people, they just give them charcoal, and a guy said 'so they shit heat beads the next day?' We made inappropriate comments about rectal and vaginal bleeding of course. I don't imagine ever getting over my delight, fascination and humour for the human body. How can you possibly want to ignore this fantastically complex, mysterious and hilarious thing you are in possession of?

Most first aid stuff is really boring, and seems to attract those weird old short types who like to do good things in the community. I remember the Red Cross shop in Hobart, and all the diminutive and slightly hirsute older women who worked there. They all seemed so fucking weird, and now I am concerned because I now know that these folk are probably first aid gurus. My question is, what attracts someone (voluntarily) to first aid? Everyone where I work has to do first aid, otherwise I couldn't be bothered. I know this is probably very much THE WRONG THING TO SAY, yet I am happy to admit it and question the whole first aid industry rather than my humanitarian urges. What happens when we equip people with a very slight knowledge and the drive to use it? Of course I hope I never have to use it, and I suspect that although I got 30/30 on the test, by next week I will remember things about funnel web spiders but not about Expired Air Resuscitation or Cardio Pulminary Resuscitation. Clearly I need to watch more ER and buy my own defibrillator (I would like the multi-lingual $10,000 kind thanks - I don't want language to be a barrier to survival). I am now equipped with more daft acronyms, and I am interested in some serious cross-germination of them here. I think it is important to have an integrated approach. I am so fucking full of acronyms that I am tempted to always use the full name.

I like the sound of expired air resuscitation, it is somehow romantic and intimate. I can imagine it being part of a pick up line. I stole a face from the Red Cross. One of those ones you put on the mannequin to do EAR with. How can I use that to lure men? I wonder if these expert first aiders use them for those purposes? Their mouths don't open wide enough to do anything really useful.

Here's a question: why is it that people's shit, sweat, piss, dirtiness and foot odour all seem to smell slightly different, but the smell of semen is unmistakeably the same from person to person? I'm no expert of course, nor have I conducted any legitimate research in this area, but I have a healthy curiosity.

Secondly, in addition to the interest in the odour, I have for a long time been curious about the effect cooking semen. Is it like egg albumen? I have never managed to convince ANYONE I know to donate a sample for research purposes. This in itself is now more interesting to me than the result of the cooking. Despite MP and I being together for 10 years, and me promising not to tell anyone that he did it, he refused to participate.

For the entire 2 days, I had to sit very close to 2 men who smelt bad. There was a combination of old food, unwashed hair, unwashed hands, perhaps even unwashed genitals. One smelt smoky, the other one just smelt damp or curdled. If I had had my wits about me I could have said to them 'you smell different, but I bet your cum smells the same'.

Saturated and Salmon

I go between thinking I should bury myself in a hole and thinking that I should be more "out there" (and bloody hell, what does that actually mean? There are all these 'modern' turns of phrase we use, but I wonder if anyone actually considers specific meaning. Semantics people....I wonder if it is something that has changed over time. Were English speaking people once more concerned? And KF, are Japanese people concerned with exact and specific meanings??? Anyway, I digress....). Last night BS told me that he had been on a tram, and sat next to a young woman whose bag strap was lying on the seat. He moved it, and she said oh sorry, or whatever, and he really wanted to say 'that's ok, I just didn't want your bag strap to go up my arse'. But he didn't. He also went to a pub who had run out of both brandy and Drambuie, and he wanted to ask 'what kind of fucking pub is this?' So he suggested a pact; that we just say those things we feel like saying but don't because we deem it inappropriate or weird. But maybe he and I just are inappropriate and weird. And fuck it, do we really care that much?

We saw a Kim Salmon extravaganza on Saturday night. He played Come on Spring, which nearly made me cry. It was an MP and I song. We loved it many years ago, and then in Tower Records in Dublin, we found it for 50p (unwanted and unloved...), and we were so excited, being two little Australians in the cold north. We played it over and over, because it was one of the few cds we had there. And we danced around, and I remember that there were always some things that made MP a bit teary. That song was one of them. It was such a love song for us. So on Saturday night, I had quite a revolution. I heard the song, and became aware of the expanse of sadness, and then felt a surge of newness and renewal. It is gone, and I don't have to mourn its passing any more. I felt happy in a way that I haven't felt for a long time. It was a different version of the song, it was live, and I was there with someone else.