The Sick Feeling

You know how sometimes you have that revolting feeling in the pit (where is that anyway?) of your stomach.......? I haven't felt that for a while. I feel it when I am driving and I don't concentrate for a second and I realise the car in front of me has stopped, and I don't have time to change gear, I just stop. It makes me feel sick and sometimes flushed.

AM just told me about a car accident. A 16 year old boy who died, the cousin of one of her friends. How does the body react when receiving news like that? How must the boy's parents have felt? I can't imagine that sickness, that revulsion and nausea. I can remember some of the moments of nausea I have experienced, and the way my face has felt as if it growing, becoming tomatoesque....

Am I too serious here? It's funny, because I am so frequently so fucking ridiculous. Did KF delete her blog because she thought it was a load of crap? I'm reluctant, but I can't help thinking that mine is too. And a big wank.

The Flagrant Vagrant: Disregarding All The Things You Believe Are Real

YES, it is FUNNY that I sit around at home and ponder the nature of (my) existence, and I (and others...) make jokes about this, and it is ridiculous and perhaps even wasteful. BUT, I have to think about it because sometimes I worry that I may not exist at all. After all, the only real evidence I have of my existence is my belief in it. Is reality simply a very firm belief system? Whether or not I actually exist is quite arbitrary in a sense, because my 'feeling' of existence is what I am informed by. When I think of change over 31 years, it seems strange to refer to myself as the same person as I was when I was a day old. Perhaps there is some kind of genetic destination (or fate) for me, which will prove that I continue to be the same person over a lifetime, but I don't know what that destination is.

When I think about the way my life is strung together, I feel itinerant and incoherent. Like life's great temporal vagrants, who perhaps eek out a successful and peaceful existence merely by continuing to exist, I feel as if I am not properly strung together, as if I experience myself and the world in a homeless state. And with flagrant disregard to the temporal conventions. You must be persistent to exist. Existence requires space, place, time.....context, and a degree of organisation.

This seems like a primary school query: how do I know if I am real?

I am sad about the absence of KF's blog, and I am currently mourning its passing. I thought about it last night after I went to bed (important thinking often happens in bed. Important events sometimes happen in my bed too) and decided that I could never delete my blog. I could remove it from the net, but I couldn't delete all these words. Because I know that I can't erase the things that I have already thought, said and written. They are, in a sense, indelible, and I need them to prove to myself that I have existed at times other than now. I wonder who the most legitimate 'I' is? Is it the one I am occupying at this very second, or a culmination of all the ones that have gone before today? The ones that are written into pages? Perhaps it is also about immortality. This body can't always exist, but perhaps something/one I have been can continue to exist?

At some point you can convince yourself that nothing matters, but it isn't true. It does.

I was thinking AW and EJ, you really owe it to AJ to keep diaries of this time. Imagine how valuable it will be to her when she is older, imagine how it will change her world.

What Do You Want From Me Anyway?

I have a terrible fear of not being understood. I imagine saying things to people and the blank return. This is a fear I have had since I was a teenager and I used to feel terribly lonely. Because I am obsessively seeking these intense points of connection, I also worry that I may miss the most basic ones that are directly in front of me. If I understand everything as so complicated, then what happens when it isn't? I am full of doubts and questions. Significance. My body aches from coughing so much.

A Hand in the Road

This morning whilst driving to work I saw what looked like a severed hand on the road. I started imagining that it had been, and then felt quite delighted because things like that never happen. I remember being a kid and really thinking that anything was possible, and that all things I could possibly imagine existed somewhere in the world. There are so many things that do exist, and yet there are more that don't. There was no severed hand on the road this morning, because as an event or occurance in my life it doesn't exist. Imagine Kyle McLaughlin's fright when he discovered the severed ear on the ground in Blue Velvet.

On my way to work this morning I was thinking about the idea of falling in love. Perhaps it is simply an idea, and such an event never exists. Often I feel silly when I think about it happening because I begin to think about need. Is it about what people need? It doesn't seem to be that all encompassing transcendental thing that we are shown in films. But then in films everything that occurs is stuck in a particular moment, whereas we know that our lives are continuous, messy, enormous, overgrown. And so perhaps those 'in love' moments don't really exist, because they can only exist in a contextless moment. Perhaps what I really want to say today is that nothing exists? Then again, it is only Monday and I'm not quite ready to fall into an existential hole so early in the week.

I had to go to a Laundromat last night to dry some sheets, because the day hadn't done it sufficiently. AM came with me and we sat waiting whilst looking at the things on the walls and talking about our respective 'love' lives. We laughed about how 'young' it all seemed. I like laundromats though, they remind me of the people I have lived with at times when we haven't owned a washing machine. They remind me of WK's antics in the one on Goulburn St in Hobart, close to where we used to live. He put himself in a dryer one day and tried to make it spin. And MM, who I used to force to come with me or he would never have washed his clothes. And the time TR washed his discman with his clothes. When I remember these things it is summer, and sunny. There was a Saturday evening after an election when I watched the results in the laudromat, and wanted to shout at people passing by because I was so angry with them for voting Liberal. Although it was Goulburn St, so they probably all voted Labor anyway, or didn't vote at all. There were all the strange old toothless folk in that street, who shouted inappropriately and stank of the Dog House (which no longer exists).

"We're Just Wired That Way"

How do you feel when you are blind? What happens to the thrill that runs through you when you see someone you find attractive? How do you understand your 'self'?

Someone mentioned men wanting to have multiple sexual partners, and someone else responded "we're just wired that way". How many things can I get away with by saying that I am wired to do them? Do I believe that even desire is subject to control and rational thought? I don't know. I'm not sure I know what desire really is. Certainly I don't understand it as a feeling that is divorced from thought. There have been times when I have chosen whether or not to feel. Sometimes I am even too tired to respond, and I wonder why I don't care, and then I feel pleased because I think that I am not ruled by emotional impulses. This isn't true of course, but it provides me with some (minimal) comfort. But then I like to feel, in excess and overload, and I like to desire and feel obsessed and frustrated.

Free Association

I was reading a book last night about free association (psychoanalysis) and the Freudian Pair. Any time I have tried to do it, I become so conscious of 'thought' that I revert to thinking about thought and not just 'thinking'. I like the idea of significances within random thought, but I'm not sure how possible, or 'free' free thought can possibly be.

I thinkn about how my lips are dry, and I can really feel them as part of my face, before you come to any conclusion, and I need to cough, I'm starting to be conscious of thinking, I worry about my eyes, I watch someone open some bread, think about office cups and how stupid and petty people can be, the sound of speech through food, think I need to go to the toilet, love the feel of my fingers touching the keys, and I hugged Tom this morning only wearing a bra, a push up bra, golgotha, if she comes she comes, before you come to any conclusion, vegemite on an ulcer, the thought is there, that revolting wobbly voice, since London, my lips feel so big, just scrape off the brown bits. These don't seem to be thoughts anymore, just listenings.

Alice

The only thing that has excited me recently is my friends making a person. The night she was born I felt as if they were the only people in the world who have ever had a baby. I cried, and I cried on my way to the hospital, and I nearly cried on the Friday before she was born. I inspected her in my arms and couldn't believe that we all started out that small. AW said that she now understands why parents feel they own their children. Because to begin with they do, they MADE the child, WITH THEIR BODIES. I find this an incredibly strange idea. AW will no longer ever just be one person. This person I have known since we were children, whose body I have seen change over the years I have known her, has now pushed out another person. I am lucky that she is so open about the process, because it is fascinating and grotesque and beautiful. All the horrible things pale in comparison with the end product. That babies have the capacity to make me use a voice that is higher in pitch, use words I wouldn't usually use and make strange pigeon-like noises amazes me. If I ever have a baby I want to be able to spend hours with it when it is born, alone, to be able to make animal sounds, and feel primal and powerfully preternatural.

Winter is killing me, and I am hating the colours, temperatures and feel of the air. I can't bear the light and every day there isn't a pure clean light I despair and wish my eyes could feel light. This year I think it is more dramatic than any other year I remember. And I can't understand why suddenly I am so affected by the winter gloom.

Recently I read some Rupert Brooke poetry. Because I read his poetry so obsessively as a romatic teenager, the lines have never left my head, and they often occur to me at odd times. That sickly feeling of nostalgia was so strong I wanted to cry. Not from sadness but just from a kind of supernatural familiarity. He dies when he was 28. I remember reading a memoir in St David's Park in Hobart when I was 16, and crying when I finished it because I couldn't bear the idea of his death.

Apparently Edmund White spoke at Readings recently, and I missed it. I wanted to cry then too, because he is old and has AIDS, and I had that fatatlistic feeling that I can't bear.

See, winter is killing me.