The Gasp Incendiary

Exhaust

2006-10-22T20:53:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-03T01:18:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-09-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

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?

Slatternalia

2006-08-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Ah, what delight I take in fucking and swearing, and their inherent similarities. I swoon with the sheer intensity of both activities, and create mucal rivulets between my lips, of which there are many. I'm constantly drooling at the moment, from whichever orifice is happiest and runniest. I am at the point of exploding with a feeling of visceral aliveness. Have I felt like this before? I am beginning to wonder.

Some things are too important to metion flippantly.

Mother Cake

2006-08-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

Why do our bodies prevent us from sleeping? I woke during the night, at 3.30am. The room is quiet and when I look around I desperately want there to be light. Everything becomes strange when there is no light. I imagine that is how the world will end.....all the light will disappear.

When I listened to a particular song last night I felt like I needed to cry (it said "how could I love a breaking thing?"). Partially as an expression of tiredness and alienation from my usualness, but also as a reaction to what has been happening (internally and externally) recently. Although I feel good, this is a huge upheaval and one I'm not always sure I am ready for. I don't want to be tentative, I want to throw myself away like a rotten thing and be consumed by the bin. I'm as dirty and messy as any tip face today, and yesterday, and for the past 2 weeks. In some way this is still about letting go, but it is about picking up too. I am having to explore things I have hated for 2 years, and this process of renewal, the newness and unsurity of it, is terrifying. And I feel as if I could fall out of myself. I don't think I have ever been entirely sure of what I have wanted. There have been times when I have almost been sure, but I am a stupid and fickle person, and overly zealous yet underly committed often. How horrible it is to know this about myself.

I can't concentrate. My parents are going to court today, to settle, which is ironic because more than ever, today they are stirring up 32 years of murky water. Water that 2 other human beings emerged from, somehow clean. I remember a certain point of total resignation post MP that made me feel ill. My mother is still clinging to half baked/boiled/fried answers that clang with a resounding stupidness that I find difficult to stomach. "Maybe men are just...." and I hate to be on the receiving end of it because despite how hard I work against it, there is always an element of indoctrination. She is my mother after all, and she gave birth to the world! But she spouts a dark and apocryphal tea that never quite convinces me of the spineless cruelty of men. Interpretation mother, you must try to read the world differently, and not that I necessarily want you to be like me, but I need you to see differently, and further, and wider, and more cleverly. I know there are extenuating circumstances, but they won't always exist. One day you might realise that you are bitter and old for no good reason.

Parents can never seem to understand that parenting goes beyond care and nurture, but that parenting means being perfect. When I think of the Virgin Mary, I imagine an aromatically intense pleasure - mother smell. What is a mother really? Is it a model of virtue and chasteness, as we imagine as children. Or is the mother allowed to really exist, dirtily in the world?

It is a luxury to look out this window, and to be here, on a bland Tuesday.

Science is Sexy

2006-08-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

There are times when being looked at is unbearable. I love and hate that knowing gaze. I'm going through an intense period of readjustment I think. And it makes me feel like crying.

"The Sudden Smell of Burning Flesh"

2006-08-06T01:22:00.000-07:00

**'s cousin disgusts me. Even his teeth and lips, the way his gums appear when he speaks. The curve of his mouth and the almost sneer. I find him fascinating to look at, yet repellant. On Saturday night we were drinking after dinner, and I don't know if he was drunk, but for a moment I wasn't sure if I was offended or amused. I wasn't drunk. He talked about shooting black people in South Africa and leaving bodies to rot. I thought of the song Strange Fruit, particularly the Nina Simone version...."black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze". I become sarcastic and barbed in situations like that, and attempt to humiliate people into agreeing with me, or at least pretending to. I wish I didn't, and I wish I could truly accept difference (I even want to accept the idea of hating people, wanting to kill them and watching their corpses decompose, yet I rankle immediately at that, as if I was implanted with that horror pre-life) but I can't. How can you accept something that disgusts you? This reminds me of my obsession with violence, with Le Differend, and with our inability to recuperate anything from experiences/people/actions we find abhorrent. We like to exclude and demarcate until the cows come home (where were the cows anyway?), but acceptance is almost impossible. Yet there is also the tendency toward complete assimilation. Perhaps along with the desire we have to fuck each other, we also wish to consume each other (or are they the same thing anyway?). And do we fuck or consume with a view to changing or reformulating the other person? It is a strangely partisan system of control and exchange. I am often surprised by my desire to submit quietly to the person who I wish would fuck me. And despite my consistent ebullience, I want sometimes to be tamed to death.

Vellum: Paper or Skin?

2006-08-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt about leaving a job. I know I am wracked with sleepless fear at the moment. It is a strange sensation. It was constant 2 years ago, and I would lie awake, elecrically charged, all night and my eyelids would not stay shut.

I think a lot about surfaces and substances, and how things are really made. And about the changes in substances that we are unaware of. The body changes so dramatically, and yet we don't even see its evolution. And it isn't because we aren't watching. ** showed me a piece by a live artist whose name I can't remember. He took photos of himself every day for a year, in the same room, in the same position, in the same clothes. He changed significantly in appearance over that year. But I don't know if we only see superficial change and are blind to substantial change. Even the supporting structures must change. Do we not see it because we refuse to believe in the idea of substantial instability?

And surface too. I remember as a child being astounded by the body's ability to heal. I wonder if children experience the horror of wounds that can't heal before they realise that they can? ** and **'s cat has had a wound that can't heal for about 2 years. It stinks, and I am alwayts uneasy about it. Children's incessant scab picking is perhaps because they don't understand their skin as a preservable surface, but just as an opportunity for prickly, naughty pleasure. Scabs were so fascinating when we were children.

I like the idea of X-Rays. There is something funny and old fashioned in the name even. I used to often want to have them taken just so I could look at myself. Now I want an MRI. There was an artist, although I can't remember her name, who was part of the same exhibition as Char Davies at ACMI who had done amazing stuff with MRI.

Manikin/Homunculus

2006-07-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

When I saw Manikin Pis in brussels I was terribly unimpressed because I realised that my grandfather had a replica in his garden when I was a child. Of course when I was a child I found it terribly funny and enjoying turning the tap on really hard so the little boy was gushing piss into the pond and damaging the lilly pads. Apparently when he had the statue/fountain installed I asked in front of numerous people 'why would anyone want a statue of a boy weeing?' What a philistine I was as a child! Ah, but now I have seen the thing itself, and still found it funny, and not even in a quaint European way, but just stupid. So, the little man - manikin or homunculus - continues to urinate, which somehow I find almost sad, as if he isn't ever able to expel all the liquid, as if he is just a urine conduit and nothing more. Imagine being defined by your bodily functions.

I haven't been able to sleep properly recently. I know I am stressed when I don't sleep and my skin is crazy. It is itchy and raw on my fingers. Recently I wore latex gloves to bed over my cream covered hands, in the hope that making them sweat would soften them. It is a funny idea. It didn't work. And when I don't sleep properly I have strange, shallow, almost real dreams. Perhaps it is just that I am unable to distinguish dream from reality sometimes. I still feel very strongly that Bert Newton is gay, due to a dream I had many years ago.

Seacock, Sea Blanket

2006-07-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

I saw Aunty Ed's friend Mavis on Saturday, who will also be 90 next year. She is the one who did a striptease for her friends on her 80th birthday. She is a fantastic woman, and tall and strong looking. I drove one of Aunty Ed's friends home to View St, and she told me that she knew my father's parents, Bruce and Lulu. Hobart is funny like that. And driving around I felt strange and sad, realising that it is all past, has all passed, and that I can't have whatever I was there. When I went to Ireland I had no idea what I was leaving. I didn't know it would be the end (or the beginning of the end) of so many things. It makes some of my final conversations with SD seem rather prophetic now. I said to her that I was scared that I would lose everything, and that there would be no place for me when I came back. She assured that everyone loved me and of course I would be wanted. But then she became a Muslim and didn't want me.

At Salamanca I felt uneasy, and sure that I would see someone I didn't want to (MP or family) in that idyllic family atmosphere. There were rugged bearded men in polar fleeces and women with dreadlocks and brown jumpers. This is what I love about Tasmanian folk - their inability, or unwillingness to be like other people, to follow fashion, to live fast lives, to be flashy, to be truly wealthy, to be totally connected to the rest of the world(???). It is a different place. And on the boat I (again) looked at the water and thought about connection to place/land and wondered about my alienated connection to the idea of Tasmania. Is it something that we Tasmanian folk are quite obsessed by? Or do some of us leave and never look back?

Dad talked about seacocks (things like taps that let water in and out of boats), and I laughed, and then we met a man who had a leaking seacock on his boat. And Dad showed me the sea blanket he has bought, which is used for ocean racing. You can wrap yourself in it in wet clothes and it will dry you and keep you warm. I loved it, and I said over and over "really?' because I can't quite believe that such things can exist.

The Safcol Jetty

2006-07-20T01:49:00.000-07:00

Very few people will understand this title. I am going to Hobart tomorrow for Aunty Ed's 90th birthday. I am splitting the time between my mother and my father. My father and I have arranged an almost clandestine meeting on a jetty near the Safcol fish place, and he will pick me up on the boat. After we made this arrangement I laughed and thought about the rift in my family, and all the strange and secret activities. Perhaps a slightly bitter laugh?

Other People's Lives

2006-07-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

I have had a horrible alcohol depression in the last 2 days. Today I feel ok. As I walked in the back gate at work this morning I felt happy. Sometimes it is so intangible and fleeting, but it is there nonetheless. Perhaps part of this shitty feeling is due to wiping the weekend out from drinking so much on Friday night. And I went somewhere that doesn't make me happy. But it is fascinating. But at some strange person's flat at 7 or 8 in the morning I felt sad. I looked out the window into an amazing hard and windowed space and thought about what it means to live in the city. And these people, the people who were there just struck me as lost, sad, lonely and desperate. There was debauchery, drug use and drinking at 8am, and I lay down and fell asleep. Funny how often you realise what you don't want to be by seeing others do it. They seemed to be living a horrible night time existence, that is unsustainable and uncomforting. I suppose we often play at being the things we are not. There were silly girls who reminded me of ** (a mythical name these days) with their ridiculous and embarrassing frilliness and their on the floor girl-play. It reminded me of parties I went to with **, and she was such an idiot, and performing the cute girl for all the boys, and I hated it, but they loved it. I hated it because I was too serious to be cute, and I wanted to be liked but was never prepared to sacrifice anything for it. And now I am all grown up, and looking at these girls and feeling repulsed and slightly angered, and eventually they will probably be embarrassed by it too. And then there are the men who fuck them. I don't want to make a judgment, but gutfully, I feel that it is horrible and sleazy.

I don't know why sleaze is something so abhorrent (perhaps that is too strong a word?), when often it is indefinable and almost invisible. It seems to be a presence, or something that you sense, without seeing. This word can make us ladies so angry with men, because we often refuse to recognise it in ourselves. We posit ourselves as powerless victims of sleaze. I know I have participated in my fair share of sleaze, albeit obliquely. But is it something we are repulsed and embarrassed by because we are always on the verge of it? Are we all prone to sleaze, the way we are prone to indulgence, selfishness, violence? Is it something we are scared of because we only just keep it at bay?

And guilt. Which sometimes seems like a quaint and anachronistic feeling, but which creates a position of power. I was thinking about this on Sunday, as I looked out the window into the garden. Sometimes I think I feel guilt as a form of control. If I feel guilt, then I must have some control over the thing I feel guilty about. Does the presence of guilt somehow negate or at least slightly alleviate the sleaze. I know people who feel no guilt about being sleazy, and that is scary, because it means unrestrained desire.

I don't actually know what sleaze is, but sometimes I sense it in people (including myself). Perhaps we find it repugnant because of the quality of desperation it carries with it. And I'm not sure why desperation is something that scares us and disgusts us. I sensed it everywhere on Friday night, in all those half smiles and meaty stares. And who can resist the allure of cheap charm in the middle of the night? Who can say that it doesn't feel good to be desired (actually, I think I can, but then I'm really fucked up about that.....)?

Shatter Proof

2006-07-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I am lucky, and like KH, shatter proof. It has been a strange and almost gratuitously intense few days. Today I feel flat (or lumpy, I don't know) and pushed backwards. Is it because I have such an intense desire to be loved and appreciated? I was talking to someone about falling in love, and suddenly I hated the idea, and felt terribly angry with myself, and other humans for wanting it. Today needs to pass me - who is stuck in the rejection reverie, and wondering what happens next. What does happen next? I keep thinking of some KH lyrics "I know I don't want you....I feel broken and miles away". Fantastically dramatic for this stupid situation, yet these kinds of things always appeal to the theatrical/tragic part of the self. Speaking of the 'tragic', I read a page of an Eagleton book about violence and theatre (I think) where he talked about Nietzsche's ideas about interpretations of history. Nietzsche was against a "bloodless historicism" in which we understand history as objective fact. I like that Foucault's historical work has always been very "bloody". I like the idea of "historicism" rather than "history", and it being a practice rather than a fact.

It is a slightly stinging loss, but not a brutal one. And I don't think I will cry beyond what I did at my desk in front of ** who was very kind. It could never have been right, and I know I was pretending to a large extent. But then, I am always open to suggestion....

When I feel sad often I wish for the warm and loving arms of my father. I sometimes wonder if I idolise him the way he does his own father. And is it an idolatry that is enabled by fear and lack (sounding a bit femmo here I think)? Or by my polarisation of both parents and subsequent refusal to see my father as anything but perfect, and my mother as anything but deeply flawed? I want to be deeply flawed, and I am, and yet I look towards perfection knowing it to be a fiction, yet creating it in my head to support some ancient fantasy. Do we as children first learn about 'perfection' and how to create it within our minds? No matter how vehemently you think you reject an idea, if it has always existed around you, and you are unmistakably informed by it. I remember SD used to have those days where she said "nothing is solid" and she felt scared by the instability of everything (and I do really mean everything). I sometines have those days, and I want to tell people about how my reality has momentarily changed, but it is like an insurmountable task/conversation, because I know that I can't put into language the things I need to say. I think earnestness is something we can't adequately speak and interpret.

It is possible that at this point I have stopped making sense.

** and I made a list last night to try to work out who we wanted to win the World Cup. We decided that Italy wins with cars, pasta/pizza and inventions/science, but France wins in terms of philosophy/critical theory, sexiness and wine. One of Italy's major detractors was that they have the Pope, albeit it in his own little half a kilometre squared country. It became a funny discussion. The Pope isn't Italian, and doesn't really live in Italy, but is surrounded by Italy. I think when AM and I discuss these things, we can always create an oblique and absurdly sensible philosophy about anything.

We couldn't decide on who we thought should win, but it didn't matter, because Italy won anyway, and this morning I had that ridiculous sense of inevitability that you can only have after an event (and it is almost as if you feel like you should have known, that you should have had foresight).

(This) Demise of a Blithe and Sibylline Spirit

2006-07-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

I feel today as if I want to attack stupid people. And not stupid passive people, but actively, aggressively stupid people. It strikes me as sad and strange to have concerns that are well beyond your field of vision or reality. Personally, I believe in minding one's own business to an extent, because I don't want to be all heavy handed and American about things. The reason for this is because I don't presume that I am always right, properly informed or in authority. Some people are corrosively stupid, to the point of disliking intelligence. These are probably the people who think The Da Vinci Code is mind blowing and a great literary work (fucking philistines!) We all position ourselves with such particularity, and sit there feeling righteous. I know so many people who do the 'right thing' and don't question what the 'wrong thing' actually is or why they don't do it.

I was talking to ZP last night about the way we position ourselves politically/morally/ethically etc, and how we make a massive leap of faith when we decide that where we sit is the right position. Is violence ok? Is racism normal and quite acceptable? Why do we feel the need to care about other people? We exist in a rich, busy and telluric reverie, so involved in our own mud, that we forget the meta level, we forget to be critical, we forget that perhaps existence is a concept rather than a fact. And it seems stupid to me.

You can always take a moral highground when you choose not to think beyond the immediate. When you accept your own position with such sureity, you are inevitably missing the things that make the world work. You are also shutting off awareness of your own perceptions and judgments.

This isn't ever about restitution or moral arrogance, but about making sense and making pieces. I look askance at the people around me and wonder what they think. Do we all feel as if we have inherent understandings of certain things? AM showed me some Paul McCarthy live art; a very weird performance piece - him punching himself in the face wearing boxing gloves and making guttural and animalistic sounds. He pours paint (or tomato sauce, who knows?) into his gloves and continues to punch himself. He is naked and his penis is covered in a red goo. The first time I watched it I found it really funny, but there was also something about it that I found quite disturbing. AC watched it, and I commented on the fact that I had found it disturbing. He just found it funny. Perhaps he removed himself from the artistic level and only saw the ridiculous? Perhaps when I first watched it I was in a fragile mood? To me the very idea of perception/(and)interpretation is endemic to the instant response (or the gut response, or whatever you want to call it), and it turn to living itself.

Well Lit

2006-07-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

Last night I drove past a lighting shop close to work. It was dark and the shop was ablaze (as you would expect) and to me, at that time, it seemed to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was agog (I only used that word because I find it funny), enrapured! What is this obsession with light? It is aesthetic, but it is also healthful.

I am reading The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto again (Mario Vargas Llosa), which is definately the right thing to do. I am absorbed. Someone recently asked me how I know what to read, and I realised that it is something that just seems to happen. I follow a chain of links perhaps. I know I became interested in Simone Weil (not that I have properly read any of her work) through Chris Kraus. How did I discover Edmund White, or Peter Carey? Perhaps because they are seminal (especially in Edmund White's case....ha ha). I bought my first copy of Nights at the Circus ([Angela Carter] I now own at least 3 copies of it) at Fullers bookshop in Hobart in 1994. This was when I lived in Warwick St with Weej, in a revolting old house that nearly froze us to death. I read a lot of it in the kitchen there. I didn't ever smoke cigarettes during the day then.

What is the name of the lighting shop at the beginning of Sandy Bay Rd, opposite Byron St, the one that has been there since I was a child?

In that house I read a lot. I didn't really have much else to do, as we were so poor. There was something we really loved about being poor though, and it always made us laugh. Poor, drunk and dirty. A very Hobart existence. Funny how I couldn't do that now. And I don't think I could live in Dublin now. SM sent me a text while she was at Ri Ra (horrible club in Dublin) and reminded me of the time we were in there very drunk and were nearly locked in the toilet. We were talking and the club closed and no one realised we were still in the toilet. When we left we staggered around until we found a Spar or a Centra (equivalent of 7-11) to buy some shitty food. I heard someone speak with an Australian accent and before I knew it I had said 'fucking Australians' to this person. I don't know why. Perhaps I was angry? Perhaps it was some weird disidentification thing? But I so fervently held on to being Australian while I was there.

The world is, and should be well lit.

The Sick Feeling

2006-06-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-06-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-06-17T03:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

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.

"You Can No Longer Move, I Can No Longer Be Still"

2006-05-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

There are things I still do, despite knowing that I don't want to. It was strange to encounter BS's solemn French friend who stayed with us over the weekend. I had forgotten how I must have been after MP and I split up. This French friend, O, kept his head down. He seemed to want to look sometimes, and you know, sometimes I want to touch people just to see if it makes any difference to them. AM and I lay in her bed and talked last night, I would have touched her even if I didn't want to, because it is what I do when there is nothing to say. It is that awfully sad time of year, where to me everything seems either depressingly mundane, or extravagantly sad. I have been thinking of all the things I can do to make myself feel better, good things like intense exercise and flooding myself with light, but then I think that perhaps somehow this seasonal malaise is right. It is fitting, I know, and yet I find it so difficult to understand how people can be happy in winter. I miss the quality of light in Tasmania. It is specific, and perhaps only I notice it, but notice it I really do. Maybe it is a light memory rather than a tangible quality, but being one who is so obsessed with light, I feel that I am talking about something very real.

This time is muted. I often think about time. I don't know if I ended up writing anything about my recent feelings about time (oh time, how I love you, and and and and and hate your ways), but I know I meant to. After reading The Outsider (Camus) recently, I started thinking about how bound by time (its pieces, passing, significance, restrictions) we are, and how perhaps the reason we don't do certain things is because we are by nature incredibly anticipatory. We think about the next piece of time, and perhaps in The Outsider Mersault didn't? I also thought about Bataille's ideas about death. And the reason we don't kill people for the pleasure of it, is that because we consider what happens in the time post-killing? Of course it is simply the ability to understand repercussions, which is (obviously) contingent on some understanding of time. So I was wondering if there could be a moment of absolute pleasure and freedom where we don't think about time, where we are unaware of what comes next. Perhaps orgasm provides this to some extent? It is a powerful moment of losing your self, losing physical control and losing time. The petit mort.

Sister Wendy, A Pope, A Shit.

2006-05-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

The Retail Nun

2006-05-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

I asked someone from Consumer Affairs to speak at a meeting. Inspired by my contact with, and deep love of (I assume) the Consumer Affairs people, last night I had a dream about "The Retail Nun". She was a bit like Sister Wendy, only had a half hour slot on tv in which to discuss scams, bargains and general consumer issues.

I must remember to email/call Channel 31 to complain about Red Lobster, which is a late night program consisting of Very Bad Poetry, generally read by Very Weird People, who I suspect are either stoned or have some serious mental health issues. AM and I were hysterical last time we watched it. There was the dowdy woman with long hair who looked a bit like a man, but who I suspect spent a lot of time playing role playing games and talking about World Of Warcraft (fuck I hate computer games), and of course the obligatory middle aged lady with large puffy/frizzy hair and large 'hi I'm really spiritual' ear rings, whose poetry was all about women, because you know, there hasn't been enough vag poetry over the years has there? You know those women who wear big ear rings, in that scary womany/tribal way. I am (middle aged semi hippie) woman hear me snore. They are the kind of women you expect to be into clay and ceramics etc, because it is really earthy. Fuck off. I know you can't really expect a lot from community tv. The word community is becoming funny, and almost synonymous with crapness. I work for community organisations don't I? What does that mean?

I always enjoy Channel 31's 3.30am Fishcam though.

If Only He Knew What You Were Doing Right Now....

2006-05-13T02:16:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm going to stay at home and drink my own wee.

And Grant McLennan Died.

2006-05-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

Forewarned is Forearmed

2006-05-08T16:50:00.000-07:00

The rescue people rescued the miners in Beaconsfield, and Australia was in a frenay about it the 2 weeks they were down there. They are rough Tassie heroes now. People were so curious about their bodily needs. On various radio stations I heard masturbation and shitting discussed. We have to know what happens to the body in these situations.

I often dream about my parents, and it makes me uneasy. I think of those broken down phone calls from my mother, and the fact that I can't bear to tell her about my father. And I think and dream about my father, and try to imagine his new life. And I wonder if it is false? I know I have lived falsely at times, and it is painful. I'm feeling slightly ragged and sensitive. I heard the ** song *** * **** ** *** on Sunday, unexpectedly, and I haven't heard it for many years. I was in the kitchen, and I slid to the floor and cried hard and loud. Funny how you can just feel sometimes. It swamped me, and I felt so indescribably sad. It was a song MP loved when we were first together (is it really 13 years ago that we met?), and I had the 7" single of it, and I gave it to him. All the things I gave to him he kept and loved.

There are so many things I omit. I don't know if it is because I feel private, or because I feel false. There is something about violation and humiliation that appeals to me. Something about baring yourself.

AM and I saw Gotharama on Saturday night. The Victorian Gothic thing. It was funny and intense. The last scene that was performed was the woman (Moira Finucane) standing on a bed in a white dress. The piece was called The Bleeding Heart. She stood there and looked distraught, and clutched her chest. Gradually the dress turned red, and she took her hands away from her chest and her body was bleeding. How incredible.

Frank

2006-05-04T01:54:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday whilst driving to St Kilda I noticed the car behind me and then beside me seemed irratic (the driver I suspect) and I looked over to see the elderly driver of the car with an oxygen mask over his face. He seemed to be breathing deeply and with some difficulty. He was only able to drive with one hand (not I bet he was driving an automatic), as the right hand held the mask. It reminded me of Blue Velvet. I wondered if he should be driving, and then realised that it was an incredibly funny image.

I remember looking at an Andres Serrano photo of stab wounds, and I was amazed by how much they looked like little mouths. In some strange way they were quite beautiful.

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

2006-04-27T23:49:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Artificial Dissemination and the Liquid Trajectory

2006-03-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

Do you ever feel like one of life's sales people? I hate that. I hate having to provide explanations, or have a spiel (or schtick, or load of crap). What happens if I simply always answer 'I don't know'. And often, really, I don't...... (Dave Graney has a song called My Schtick Weighs a Tonne).

"Take a Pretty Picture, Sex Dwarf"

2006-03-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

I have been listening to the camp and beautiful voice of Marc Almond, and I go around wanting to bark 'sex dwarf' at people. AM plays it at home. Last night we spent half an hour or so saying 'bitch' in different, varyingly odd/revolting voices. And laughing. She loves Sex Dwarf.

I'm not sure what to think of the things Dad and I talked about while he was here. AM said she was amazed by how open he is. He's funny like that, he will just talk about anything, as if everything is just material/subject matter, and up for intense scrutiny. Sometines it is almost as if he is disconnected from his personal life. But then I think perhaps he is more connected to it than I am, because despite the weirdness of it, he embraces it and questions every thing that he does. We drank G+T and talked intensely. He said again that I know him better than anyone else. Yet for me it is quite a private relationship (it includes ZP of course, as everything in my life includes her). He referred to the conversations we used to have when I was a child. He used to come into my room and sit on the end of my bed and talk about LIFE, and probably there were times when I didn't understand. I remember talking extensively about the existence of god when I was 12 or 13. I don't remember what we talked about when I was younger than that. And he used to sometimes read the newspaper to me. How funny now to think of that. And how funny to think of myself as a child, and the fact that he knew me then.

He loves his iriver, and so again we listened to Sweat Lodge, which we first heard in Dublin. It makes him laugh so much, and even though BS was asleep one evening, Dad couldn't resist shouting 'I'm not an alcoholic' and something about being bald (lyrics from the song) as he was leaving my house. My god, he is so fabulously eccentric!

I haved been reading the most amazing book (Demian). It is one of those existential/transcendental/spiritual/religious books that makes you think ohhhhh about everything. Oh Herman Hesse, how I love you. So I have been quite heavily bogged down with thinking about Cain and Able, the concept of god and the devil as a split being, Abraxas, and the significance of images. It is one of those books, you know, that I know I will refer to (only in a personal sense) for a long time. It seems to be holding great personal significance for me at the moment. It resonates (I really am loathe to use that word, but I can't think of one more appropriate at the moment).

Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth is a novel by Hermann Hesse, first published in 1919. In it, Emil Sinclair is a young boy who was raised in a bourgeois home described as a Scheinwelt, or world of light. Through the novel, accompanied and prompted by his mysterious classmate Max Demian, he descends from and revolts against the superficial ideals of this world, eventually awakening into a realization of self. The novel references concepts of Gnosticism, particuarily the demiurge Abraxas, and shows the influence of Carl Jung's system of psychoanalysis. Hesse said the novel was a story of Jungian individuation, the process of opening up to your unconscious. Demian was first published under the pseudonym "Emil
Sinclair", the name of the narrator of the story, but later Hesse was revealed
to be the author.

Bewigged and Begloved

2006-03-21T15:17:00.000-08:00

Perhaps brightly lit, happy, harmonious, sanitised supermarkets breed a cretinous type of customer? These customers appear to be site-specific, although I know they are not. It is unfair of me to suggest that they are cretinous I know, when really they are just old and crusted. In Safeway in Prahran this morning, with only one check out open, I waited in line behind a string of unusual types. The cashier had yellow tinted glasses and a hearing aid (which made me wonder if he was attempting a Morrissey-style "the NHS is actually cool" thing), and had t hat gormless air of someone who doesn't think very much. (Sometimes I wonder if I should actually be saying these awful things about people, but then it is what I think, and what better place to express all my nasty unkind thoughts than the self-indulgent space of here?) Perhaps he thinks too much and is distracted by it?

I wondered today if perhaps often old women feel differently about money to young women. This is something I thought about in the car on the way to work. The old ladies in front of me at the checkout were not embarrassed to squabble over money, and accuse each other of cheating. One of the women, the one who was most noticeably slumped, had on a coarse blond wig and misplaced make-up. Her neck was dirty with a thick ring of loose skin and grot, almost like a tough rind. Old people have such strange skin, so blotched, wrinkled and multicoloured. It is fascinating and grotesque. Another woman was wearing a short sleeved top yet had on very thick gloves. She was tall and horse-like, with equine teeth and a long face. They were so floral, and I wondered how they would smell. It reminded me of the two women who lived near me at Liverpool St (in Hobart), who were sisters, and whose putrefaction was evident as they walked past our house every day. They were always together, always walking, and always wearing large overcoats, even on warm days. They would stop and talk to Tom, and said to me once that he was like the cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. KFG knew about them once she became a nurse, and sadly, told us about how they had died in their eccentric squalor with no running water and no toilet. There was shit (cat and human) throughout the house, and they were sick.

____________________________________________________________________

ART

I think Jenny Holzer is incredible. I saw an exhibition of hers in Hamburg in 2002. I often seem to include art in here. What do you think of this image? It will be on my bedroom wall soon.

Do we all want to lie to back to front with someone who adores us? Am I back to front? Is everyone back to front?

Look Over Your Shoulder Just In Case

2006-03-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

I wonder what is wrong with my mother. This isn't something I should wonder. Oh no. It is dangerous territory, because every time I begin to wonder, I then wonder what is wrong with me. The scariest thing is that there is something seriously amiss and I am not aware of it. KF talked about sickness and unhappiness, and ZP and I looked at each other in sad recognition. There is an interesting history of women and illness (unrelated to my mother believe it or not) as there is an interesting history of women and starvation (is anorexia our new word for protest?). My mother is perpetually ill. I refuse to be ill or made ill, despite the efforts she went to when I was a child. KF said that her mother was pleased when she was sick because she was 'calm'. Again, I wonder if some people are 'too much', if there are people whose excess energy and joie de vivre enervates and angers other people. As I said to KF on Sunday, for me it is about the intensity and excitement of living - it is about an excessively sensory joie de vivre. There are these incredible people who are irrepressible, who fire up and create life for themselves when they could just as easily shut down and give up. KF is obviously one of those. I love that.

A list of things I plan to learn in a hurry:

moderation
patience
chilling the fuck out
balancing different things in my life
switching on and switching off
how to fully relinquish control
how to ask for what I want in a polite manner

Echo and Narcissus

2006-03-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

Cupid and Psyche

Today is all about lovers, love, loss and infinite possibilities.

CH called last night. She said that one of her friends recently had a baby and called it Echo. I don't know if it is funny or just silly. But then at dinner last night we spent a long time discussing AW and EJ's baby names (some of my favourites were Homeboy, Jewish, Just and Scrotum). I would have trouble with a name like Echo because I would want to call the kid Echo Echo Echo Echo Echo.

Orpheus and Eurydice

This next thing really appeals to me. It reminds me of a group of girls at school when I was in grade 9 coming to school and saying that they had a seance and contacted Roy Orbison. But really, imagine this:

Imagine John Lennon spinning in his grave.The ex-Beatle, who was murdered over 25 years ago, is the latest subject of a pay-per-view seance arranged by the producers of a 2003 attempt to contact the dead Princess Diana.That show made money but was slammed by critics as hitting a new low in television tastelessness."People say this is disgusting and I accept that criticism, but we're making a serious attempt to do something that many, many millions of people around the world think is possible," said Paul Sharratt, who heads Starcast Productions, which made "The Spirit of Diana." The Lennon show will air on April 24 on a pay-per-view channel and cost $9.95. Sharratt himself is a "non-believer," and admits to not being totally convinced otherwise after psychics attempted to contact the dead princess in the 2003 program. Nevertheless, it made for some great television, he said. Sharratt said he chose Lennon because the former Beatle, like Diana, is an icon and was also a deeply spiritual person. The special will culminate as psychics, colleagues and confidantes sit at a seance table for 30 minutes surrounded by infra-red cameras that can capture any "presence" or spirit that enters the room.
Aren't we all very spiritual people when we choose to be?
Perhaps this is in fact a spiritual person? I don't know who this is, but I like what this guy has decided to do with himself. It is supposed to somehow represent Echo and Narcissus.
When do we decide to be spiritual? How do we do it and why? I sometimes wonder if it happens somehow in conjunction with some transcendental realisation about mortality? Or perhaps it is the realisation of human neediness/desperation. I pretend to be solid, and not in need of anything spiritual (not like Sian, who I clench my teeth with derision over), but perhaps I am, and in fact everything I do learns toward the spiritual? The thing that is funny, and confounding, is that whenever I attempt to define something, it becomes absurd, and I realise that all I do is attempt to break things apart. That is how I feel safest. Perhaps though, spirituality requires you to desire unity and oneness. I believe that we are obsessed with the number 1, the idea of one. It seems to be what we wish to reduce everything to. When you can reduce to one, nothing else matters.
This is Echo and Narcissus. Echo on the left, speaking, Narcissus looking into a mirror, and Narcissus again once turned into the flowers.

Day of the Triffids

2006-03-15T21:40:00.000-08:00

This morning AM and I were talking about snakes and the contact they have with the ground. It seemed somehow funny to think of an animal moving forward without legs, wings or fins. And they feel vibrations through the ground. Their little muscular bodies rub against the ground. They don't rub themselves raw, and they aren't lubricated. Imagine shedding a skin, and not mourning it.

I am disgusted by the Commonwealth Games. Apparently the opening ceremony cost $50 million. It was hideous quasi-'cultural' artifice. What are we doing? It scares me when something so huge happens, and the majority of people don't seem to question the validity of it. So what happens to the village (with no air conditioning) when it is over? Today the MCG must be like the stinking greasy condom from a drunken fuck. The bloody queen sitting there next to John and Jeanette. I know we are in the minority in thinking these people are revolting, yet I feel absolutely justified. How can people value things that I don't? We know how to handle ourselves, like excited teenage boys on the verge of ejaculation. I'm on the verge of something too you know.

The Wig Librarian

2006-03-15T00:44:00.000-08:00

The tram driver I had this morning had excruciatingly long fingernails. Somehow they made me angry. Someone else I know has long fake fingernails, which also make me angry. They are caked with a brown scunge that the wearer doesn't even seem to be embarrassed about. I found myself apologising every time I touched someone on the tram, despite the fact that we were packed in tight enough to really inhale each other. We seem to shudder and recoil when we touch someone accidentally, as if that contact is so charged that it may be painful. And it is strangely intimate. There was a girl/woman in front of me whose neck was arched into my face, whose tag was out and I couldn't decide whether I should put it back in for her, embarrassedly, or pretend I hadn't noticed. Of course, due to tram etiquette and general appropriateness, I chose the latter. We people are funny aren't we?

BS's mother was here over the weekend, and AM and I loved her. She told us about her father eating a run over chicken, and a woman who had a 'wig library' for women who had cancer.

AM and I cried during Shameless on Monday night.

"A Boy in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush"

2006-03-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

"yet you start to recoil, heavy words are so lightly thrown, but still I'd leap in front of a flying bullet for you....but now you know the truth about me you won't see me anymore, well I'm still fond of you, but no more apologies."

I was desperate to see ZP all day yesterday, and when I saw her I held onto her and breathed her in. I had a most awful dream about her the night before last, and I woke up at about 4am feeling sick, and I wanted to ring her but knew I would just cry.

I am surprised by my ability to cry at times when I don't realise I need to. Any kind of emotional change produces an effect in me. Today I feel overwrought and saddened by the failure of things. Nothing emotional is ever simple. The world I exist in will always be intense and tempestuous, and I refuse to calm down and accept flattened out blandness. We'll only live for another few years.

Tenebrous, Tenebrae, Tenebrism

2006-03-08T15:05:00.000-08:00

I think Dario Argento is a strange man. I watched Tenebrae recently, and although I laughed at the axe through the head (and other parts of the body) murders, I also wondered why he wanted to display this gore. There is something satisfying about the spray of blood that comes from a taut piece of body, as if the innards are always straining to escape. There is something almost akin to the surprise intensity of orgasm in the sudden break of skin and the bursting forth of a tide of gore. There are these sudden bodily things, that continue to excite us, and perhaps they are part of the reason we continue to live (surprise!!!). Moments.....

Tenebrous (despite it being such a beautiful day) and slightly sad today. But perhaps I am just all about the emotional overload. I can't help but wonder about how meaningful it can possibly be when it is always on your sleeve?

I'm also fuming.

Scopophilia and the Pleasures of the Flesh

2006-03-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

What is good about going to the zoo? For me, nothing, but reaffirming my dislike of it. I looked at the animals and felt angry and embarrassed. It seems as if we humans simply have a desire to own things, to somehow capture and contain the essence of a thing. Are we envious of the idyllic lives of animals and so need to scrutinise them? Where does this immense pleasure in viewing come from? It seems so strange that to express love, care, admiration etc, we need to possess the thing. We need to look at it, and not in a simple and fleeting way, but stare intently until we are able to discern its difference to ourselves. I wondered what it feels like to be stared at, commented on, laughed at. And although we are happy to imbue animals with human qualities (funny how many people refer to an animal as 'him'), we won't afford them the same dignities as ourselves. It fucking disgusts me.

Again, I am very very sure of the reasons I don't eat meat. I wish I didn't have to participate in the things I feel are wrong.

I have been thinking about the work of the Starn brothers. Especially the large horse photographs, and the big photo/metal globe-like things. I want to make something big and revolving. At the moment the idea of revolving very much appeals to me. I'm in a revolving state. I like that they are concerned with light.

And Neil Gaimon has a blog.

Ah Tony: My Octogenarian Love

2006-03-06T00:14:00.000-08:00

When I swim I feel as if I put myself back together, after the day of taking myself apart. When I stop I feel that beautiful rush behind my eyes, and I relax into the water and wonder if I want to drown. I saw Tony, who I haven't seen for a long time. He used to ask me where ZP was because we used to always swim together. It is terribly difficult to understand what he is saying, but I persevere out of a sense of awkward enjoyment. Other humans can always provide some pleasure. Tonight he asked me if I would go to the casino with him. I said I am not into gambling, and he said that I didn't have to gamble. I don't know if I am into gambling or not, I've never really tried it in earnest. He asked me to go to his house for dinner (yet again) and I said perhaps one day I will. As he rubbed his eyes like a child, he told me about the chillis he had used today that had made his eyes sting, and he talked about the healing/therapeutic powers of chilli. I feel the same way about garlic......as some of you very well know! He's a funny man (remember AB, when you met him and couldn't understand what he was saying in Italian anyway?), and I worry that he will die in the steam room. Another man told me recently that he was taken away in an ambulance recently because he collapsed in there. Still, he complained to me today about how they won't let him lie down in there any more.

I didn't even drink very much on Friday night. I danced with CG while AM did OTHER THINGS. ZP was incredibly drunk and had to go home. I sat at a table on my own for a while and weatched people, and noticed how many people looked happy, and were dancing, laughing, kissing and touching each other. It was one of those funny moments of interprestation where I could have decided that it was sleazy and awful, but at that moment it looked beautiful, sensual and terribly human. I admired the fact that there were so many people in a room moving and laughing and feeling. We all look at each other, and smile, and desire each other. The greatest pleasure comes from the possibility rather than the result. I went to bed very happy, and pleased to be alone in my room. Funny, you know, recently 2 people have commented on my room. ** talked about it last night, and about partnerships and owning things together. I agree, and I am scared of being an adult and sharing my world with anyone. But one of my problems with that (and psychology) is that I don't think things are so easily reducible. You can never adequately control conditions/history/situation. I suppose (as always) for me it goes back to critical threory, and not science or empiricism. What do they mean to me? At times very little. It feels like a cheap contradiction sometimes, because my understandings of reality have to be based in mutuality and empirical interpretations. Perhaps I can't stand stability and answers? I know I seek to complicate things.

I occasionally have these self conscious moments when I become aware of what I am doing, and question my need to do it. Is it some crazy narcissistic drive? We never know when to call ourselves legitimate, and when experssion of the self is acceptable. I've wanted reality to be some kind of scary unhinged Baccanalia at times, because I have wanted to push everything to its limit. It is a contradiction, because sometimes excess and over experssion embarrass me and make me angry. Bugger, you know what? Most of the time I don't know what to think. I am having this big thought vomit because I spent an hour swimming and I always feel different afterwards. I wonder if I will delete this tomorrow?

"I know I don't want you.....I feel broken, I feel broken, and miles away"

2006-03-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

Fervently, I cleaned the bathroom, whilst singing and getting wet. I scrubbed the tiles in the shower and felt a bit primitive. It was a good therapeutic comedown. When I woke up this morning I was compelled to rearrange things subtley in my room/life, which involved me opening a box containing old letters. I found some beautiful letters from MP, and despite telling AW and EJ that I don't seem to care any more, I fell onto my bed, clutching these letters to myself and cried for what seemed like a long time. It astounds me that I can go for so long without noticing that perhaps it is always just below the surface. Is it possible to ever stop loving someone? I felt that pain again, although in a watered down and brief manner, but still, it is there. I don't know how to assimilate this experience into who or what I consider myself to be now. It makes me sad that I can't answer my own questions. How can I go from knowing someone so well, and being familiar with every part of their body, to not knowing them at all. Just after we broke up he came over and talked to me while I was in the shower. It was weird, and I said "is this ok?" and he just laughed and said of course it was. Then we became physically shy with each other, not out of awkwardness, but out of inappropriateness, and it one of the saddest things ever.

My mother says to me that she has to think of my father leaving her as like a death. She is grieving....of course. And she talks to me about it and I feel like a war veteran, and I say things like "it will take a long time". I remember the things LA said to me, and how I thought I couldn't bear it any more, and how I couldn't wait that long to feel better. And now it seems dim and distant. There was that night when I had to stop driving and call ZP because I so desperately wanted to crash my car. What is my mother feeling? Sometimes I don't imagine her feeling anything other than anger and hate, but she must, because even though she is only just human at times, she is human all the same.

It is a sad day today and I don't think I want to say anything else now.

"You're one in a million....you're one in two"

2006-02-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

A Furious Spring Leg

A Complex Living Growing Skin

2006-02-26T20:48:00.000-08:00

Not a film as before, but a real live workable (sometimes permeable), not perishable skin. I'll build my own complex casing. This is what has occured to me since the conversation with KF on Saturday night. We drank beer and smoked until 4.00am (although I only had 1 beer when we got home because I had chosen the sensible driving the car option because it makes me feel slightly grown up and as if I have some modicum of responsibility and respectability), and she expressed sadness, joy, anger, pride, regret, hurt and desire. Next to her I feel wan and slightly lifeless. It is funny kno0wing that she is reading this. It is a strange version of self conscousness that I enjoy, as it makes people feel conscious, self and other. Perhaps one of the most exhilarating things about knowing other people is experience the range and immenseness of them. KF is an immense person in many ways, and I am inspired by her confidence and belief in good things. I felt embarrassed yet ridiculously flattered by the things she said, in an unearthly way. I always seem to need a safety net though. Perhaps this can be replaced by the semi hermetic yet giving and living skin I plan to grow? This has made me look at skin, and here today, amongst all these young people I saw a girl with a horrible skin problem on her neck. It was brown, cracked and wart-coloured. Whilst staring intently at her neck, I was thinking about celebrating that which is discoloured and disfigured, and I wondered where our ideas of what skin really is come from. This of course is reminding me of that Didier Anzieu thing in Volatile Bodies. It changed the way I thought about skin and communication.

When I examine the lives of my female friends, my sister, my colleagues (to some extent), I realise that I don't know many women who are the quiet ideal. My friends are loud, intense, intelligent and tempestuous. My sister is strong, brilliant, vital, beautifully considered and intensely herself. I struggle to imagine this non confrontational woman, although I do know one or two, and despise what they do. Perhaps it is true that we are all too much, and that the simpering slight sprig of a woman is infinitely more attractive and manageable than us? When do I decide to be a martyr for my own cause, or when do I decide to lie down in love and devotion and give myself over to the pleasures of the flesh? Look at someone like Shirin Neshat, and how much of a challenge she must be. Is she a martyr for her cause? I never tire of sacrifice and drama. But recently I have thought about sensible emotional decisions. This arises from the conflicts MP and I had about my unwillingness to compromise certain things. It seems like a moment of choice. I no longer have the desire to punish myself emotionally. It was a result of my belief in intensity, and how my experience of the world should constantly be emotionally exquisite, sensitive, turgid and consuming. Perhaps now I am more a believer in cautiousness rather than impulsiveness? What did Shirin Neshat sacrifice in order to achieve the things she felt passionate about?

I have been reading some of Hanif Kureishi's short strories (Love in a Blue Time), which have been addictive. Yesterday in the bath I read a story called The Tale of The Turd, which was about a recovering (or not recovering?) junkie who has to shit at his partner's parents house. The turd won't flush away and turns out to be alive....a green eyed little monster. I wanted to laugh, and eventually I did, but my first response was 'jesus, but this is utterly outrageous!' Of course it is utterly outrageous, which is why it was good. What would Bataille have thought of it eh? It seemed outrageous to cross the very serious world of fiction with the nasties of the body. The unspeakables of the body. Of course, little community, you know that this subject is one very close to my heart (and arse I suspect), and there are some of you who HAVE to read this story.

I have also found an online etymological dictionary, which is really exciting for me! Now I never need to leave the world of flowery language.

My father's post relationship journey has begun with the most intense release of previously stifled being I can imagine. He is creative, contemplative and scared. I wrote an email to him today about the process of renewal that all 4 of us are experiening. ZP and I talked about it for a long time on Friday night, and I realised that opportunity is not a superstitious occurance, but a result of enmeshed lives and lived in selves. God, he,I...we are well worn in, well lived in, have made our indelible marks on ourselves, and now we are choosing to change, and it is powerfully real. The tectonics of all of our relationships are shifting, in alignment, misalignment, alienation, intense closeness.....there is a groundswell afoot in the little family (are we still a family?), and I can't believe how liberating this feels.

So he has decided that he wants to write a book. I encourage this as he lacks the confidence to express who he really is. Perhaps between pages he can exist as the fantasy self (or the imaginary self - that life saving projection onto the wall in front of you, or onto everyone and everything you know, that mechanism for survival....). He called me this morning and said that he had emailed me. Below is some of what he wrote:

I am sorry if what follows is boring/silly/self indulgent whatever. I am bouncing ideas around. I think about my life and the things/jobs/hobbies etc. The idea simply (not so simple really) has to be teased out and written down in this work of fiction developing in my head. Can I get the crazy employee living on campus, the chain smoking dyke on the Harley, the control freak wife, the free wheeling bloke with theWinnebago/boat and a housing crisis, the rational wealth creation plan within the hype and spin of the financial planning industry, can a partner ever bounce in the same direction (off thewall)IE is a Winnebago Wife a possibility (about sea-change/Australian demography really), the control freak and a minor indiscretion, the Longines watch and the reinforcement of doubt, the moving theatre of offshore yacht-racing and the crap men talk and laugh about, the concentration and stimulation of one-design racing and what men take seriously, the art of living with a soft touch (not hurting others), care and sensitivity for hairy blokes, The Spooky Men's Corale and bloke-ism, you always have a choice, where does happiness lie, miniaturization men and the economy(something to do with owning cheaper belongings), Zen and the art of being a bloke (about enjoying now),those we instantly like, the catholic priest the child-carer and disgrace (ties in with 'where does happiness lie'), unconditional love (very personal will have to be written with great care), around Ireland with a fridge (well the Ireland experience/laughs), into a humorous, entertaining and interesting essay/short story/book. There is plenty to write about. Easier if it were an essay. But it has to be fictional characters, about their lives, certainly not true, circumstances embellished etc.I guess
its going to be about a bloke bouncing off walls and heading off in different directions. How do you invent a whole lot of characters and weave this stuff into a story? I wonder if that is the best starting point?

I Know All There Is To Know About The Crying Game

2006-02-23T19:37:00.000-08:00

It is so fucking hot today. Sometimes things seem ridiculously complex and ridiculously simple. I feel pleasure at the fact that it is Friday.

I have been getting into a magazine called What We Do Is Secret in the past week. Having only just discovered it, I am not totally commited or obsessed with it or anything. But the latest one had a beautiful review written by someone I know in Hobart. I loved it because it was passionate, rude, involved a lot of swearing, and mostly, because it was personal. I also really loved the article about activist art. It is free and you can get it at Polyester (music) on Brunswick St.

I know all there is to know about the crying game today because it is hot and I often feel like crying when it is hot, despite the fact that I really enjoy it. My eyes feel hot and liquidy, and I am sticking to things, which is an idea I like. I like the idea of connecting with objects, and sticking to them with sweat. It is all too human.

Shameless

2006-02-21T21:16:00.000-08:00

I can't begin to explain how into Shameless I am at the moment. The second series began on Monday night, and there were some beautiful moments (like Veronica pretending to be on with Karen saying "she makes me fanny go all wavy") and although AM and I were scared it might be a bit shit in the second series, it is still wonderful. We watched the episode open mouthed and gasping.

I am at uni. I don't know what I am doing here. The air conditioning in the library isn't working, so there are fans and sweaty people. It is making me feel sick. I am tired from talking, and emotionally drained. I am confused, scared, ballistic, sad, excited.........I talked to AM about these things in the car. Sometimes I loathe concentrating and I want to stare at something minute and think about its relationship to me. God, what am I saying?

Being here makes me feel guilt, because I know how much stuff I have to do, and how frequently I choose not to do it. I think I am no longer a proper uni student. It is half arsed commitment, which is shit, because I really love this and want it. I also want to work and feel more connected to the world.

God I feel so ill I have to get out of here. The air is warm and making my lungs feel wet (I know they are already) and clammy, or mouldy or something?? You know that sweltering hot damp air feeling and all you want is desperately cold air? I am so fucking dramatic, at times it upsets me.

Vest Yourself In Me

2006-02-16T17:01:00.000-08:00

David Shrigley

I have been having transcendental swimming experiences recently. When I swim I seem able to disconnect myself from myself, or my mind from my body (although I don't want to be all dualist here) and I listen to the sound of my breathing, and the exhalation growl I can't help but make. It is a sensual experience at what is for me, a sensual time of day. The end of the day. The combination of skin, light and water. I stop sometimes to look at the sky, and then to look at the other people in the pool. It feels like a very gentle time of day. I feel as if time is malleable sometimes, as if I can extend day if I choose to. Cyril Collard in Savage Nights talks about "the hour of the wolf" - that half-light dusky moment between day and night. In Swedish it is called Vargtimmen, and in Danish it is called Ulvetimen. Do we have a word for it? Is it because that quality of light is so present in the north of the northern hemisphere? I find this interesting because of the problems/concerns I have with light (I can just hear AC and AB laughing or groaning), and specifically the emotional effects of light on people. I remeber the sky after I had gone to the airport in Dublin one evening, and the light was the most beautiful I have ever seen - a weak, streaky yet bright light quite late into the evening. The light was one of the only things I really loved about Dublin. In summer it isn't fully dark until about 10.00pm. This extended light makes me feel secure, safe, brave, excited.....

My Cold Bretheren Abroad

2006-02-13T14:51:00.000-08:00

Nervous, Yet Hard Boiled (???)

2006-02-12T22:08:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I can sustain this intense fervour and nervousness, like cerebral priapism. I feel turgid, alive and quietly mutating. Osmosis. When I spoke to MP the other day....well, I feel like it was a different person speaking to him. And perhaps I am DIFFERENT? I have often waited for the feeling of difference to be upon me, but have always been made sad by my unsurprising sameness. A kind of diligent sameness, as if difference would be beside the point, or losing the point, or not the point. I don't fucking know. I have a song in my head, the lyrics of which are "tonight I'm feeling like an animal..."

I survived the Return of the Matriarch. What a small matriarch she is too. Had dinner with AW, and was relieved to watch them talking about pregnancy (clearly a topic that is quite foreign to me!). There is that amazing sense of specialness when your mother talks about the time after you were born. It is time I can't control, or own in any way, and in a sense, I feel as if it is a power she has over my reality. It is ridiculous I know, and the world is (way too) rife with these feelings of ownership and discomfort. It is a feeling of disquiet though, of wanting to move away from her. Especially now. At one point during dinner I had to go to the toilet to tell her one of the craziest things I have ever heard. Thank god she is my sister. She is one of the most sensible people I know. Strange how just a few days of talking and thinking can make you believe you are someone else. Or at least that you FEEL like someone else.

Expletives Included: A S(L)urprising Conversation

2006-02-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

I felt awkward, confused, kind of stupid and shy. Possibly there is no way to overcome these things. I want to know everything at once, and I want to say everything at once. This reminds me of summer, when I was on holiday and I spent days talking to CH at my house. We sat opposite each other and drank heaps of tea and talked about all the things we could think of. It never exhausts me. Now she is back in New Zealand and her brother is here instead.

So. What happens now I wonder at 2.00am, feeling electrified and nervous?

Bugs in Jars

2006-02-06T21:57:00.000-08:00

I went to the Bugs Alive thing at the museum ages ago. This photo is old but I really love it.

I Flew Too Close to the Sun and Burnt My Wings

2006-02-04T23:48:00.000-08:00

So I have been looking at some other blogs recently. I checked out the one that won the blog award thing. The thing that really strikes me about blogging is that people write a whole lot of messy, weird, often cryptic stuff about themselves and their own lives. As text (god, starting to sound very wanky now) it isn't especially accessible. It seems to me like the author reclaiming ground and making up for lost time. I enjoy the process and the catharsis obviously, but because I am not creating coherent narrative, or even providing points of access necessarily, it is a piece of stuff that is powerfully and necessarily me. So what would Barthes and Foucault have to say about this new style of authorship? The non censorious nature of the blog is interesting too. This kind of writing really allows you to run at the mouth and become very self absorbed. I don't think of it as publishing, I suppose it seems to me like emails to myself, and a forum for my friends to criticise me anonymously. Not really. But I do love the fact that it provides parallel conversations and allows us to explore each other differently. I sometimes feel embarrassed by the fact that I am doing this, in a kind of 'who do I think I am' way. But then, I know that in Australia we generate a 'who are we' kind of culture. It is an amorphous and often awkward identity, and we are sometimes an incoherent disparate group of people who aren't really allowed to feel anything too grand about ourselves. And so at times I feel like I am creating a false self here, but in fact it is a twinned identity, as it is more me than I am in person, yet heavily censored and awkward.

I think I am proud of my blog, because it is the first time I have presented myself to anyone in this way, and felt legitimate doing it. KF has been a huge influence on me with her fantastically powerful sense of 'me-ness' that comes across in (seemingly) everything she does. She has made me feel as if expressing myself in the ways I find meaningful is an acceptable thing to do. I know that sometimes I am terribly rigid and that I find it difficult to change the things that have been long felt. Also, I suffer terribly from embarrassment. I read my book of lists recently, and found a list of things I find embarrassing, one of which was the sound of water being poured from a kettle to a cup. I decided that if I found that book of lists (if I was not me), I would think the person who wrote them was rather weird. But that's ok as AM would say. Anyway, excuse me, I digress....KF has been fantastic for me because of her vitality, openness, strength and intelligence. Often I forget that there are in fact other people out there in the world beyond the ones I know and love. I think this is kind of boring so I'll stop now.

Another thing: it makes me sad that I have written so fucking much on here, and perhaps no one will ever read it all. Perhaps I need to go back to being a ridiculously secretive compulsive diarist? I don't think I have thought enough about purpose.

And I have some more questions for you, crazy little community:

do you think that you have any kind of purpose in your life?
what boundaries would you never transgress?
how often do you feel proud of yourself but aren't able to express it?
do you ever feel spiritual?
how do you balance modesty and self esteem?
what are your biggest sources of pleasure?
what associations do you make between different things/conditions that are meaningful? For example an association between love and home (KF, you'll know what I mean here)

Sleepless

2006-02-02T17:58:00.000-08:00

I watched a Dario Argento film last night called Sleepless. I would love to have seen the reactions of AM and I towards the end when the villain is shot in the head through a window. The thing that was striking about it was that the bullet came through the back of his head and out the front, so his face exploded. It was this amazing eruption kind of thing. I realised that I have never seen anything like that before in film or tv. It was a very non-traditional film shooting, and almost rather beautiful. It reminded me of a film I once saw where a man was shot with a machine gun, and his body convulsed and danced about quite comically. There was something satisfyingly beautiful about that too.

I went to bed and quivered and twitched, feeling that horribly familiar electrical current run through me. I want to learn how to sleep deeply and effectively, but I think in some way I am too scared to do it.

My Cup Runneth Over

2006-01-31T21:31:00.000-08:00

Possibly it is one of those days where I don't have anything reasonable or sensible to say. It is a crappy rain day, and I am glad I have my car with me today (my room on wheels as AM says) for the comfort and privacy. Although I have been getting into using the tram recently. It is nice to feel vacant and irresponsible. Driving makes me shitty sometimes because I get sick of concentrating. And other reasons.

AM suggested that doing Kraftwerk would be a great drag act. I am glad that she thinks about drag so frequently. It has become a bit of a THING for us recently. Have I said anything recently about the Star Hotel, my new favourite place? It is a place of drinking, drag, and dance; amidst a wild pack of sweaty, stylish lesbians. I wonder about the whole lesbian crush thing. Possibly I don't wonder about it enough.

Un-fine, Un-good and Un-healthy/holy

2006-01-30T22:02:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a slightly dreadful yet quite reveal-atory book that KF has leant me. I feel as if I am discovering all sorts of scary things about myself, and that if I am not careful, my entire world/being/reality/history will fall apart.

FUCK

It is a pretty big call I know, but I feel as if I am having some kind of religious epiphany. I suspect that soon I will return to my cynical how can you ever really know ways and decide it was all false. But then who knows, perhaps I will discover the self-help revolution. I know I have a terrible aversion to Americans (they are often quite foul after all), but really, what is up with a nation that lives on ideas of self-help, self-enhancement, lifestyle coaching, personal trainers and motivational speakers? And The Terminator is the Govenor of California. I am not sure if this is hilarious or really scary. I know it is both. At times I love to watch late night infomercials in order to experience some kind of non drug induced altered reality. I love it when they talk about improving the body, or when they come up with ridiculous products that seem revoltingly excessive and decadent. Perhaps a great deal of stuff that comes from that country, or is influenced by that country is excessive, revolting and decadent. Like David Bowie, I'm afraid of Americans.

Went to the Stanley Kubrick exhibition on Sunday. There weren't enough jokes in it (in fact there were none, and I very firmly believe that you need jokes. I don't want to explain this any further, because I feel that if you are some form of sensible human being reading this you'll know what I mean). This is pretty hypocritical really, considering my blog contains very few (if any) jokes. This may be something I need to work on. I think when KF introduced me to blogging I was so excited about being able to SAY SOMETHING LOUDLY and express myself that I forgot that humour is my favourite thing in the world. Really it is.

Unforgettable

2006-01-24T22:19:00.000-08:00

I waited outside the funeral home for my father and escorted him in. I was scared that someone would say something horrible to him. We sat together at the back, and when the song Unforgettable was played, we gave each other a wry smile. What an unforgettable woman indeed. It was strange and funny. Now, sitting on the boat with dad, we laughed at the choice of song. And we talked about the preparing of bodies. We had a 'viewing' before the funeral, in a room that stank of orchid (I think) and slight sourness. I touched her hands and face, which were cold and hard. The overwhelming thing was the realisation that she is dead, that her spent body was lying in a crass box, awaiting the next stage. It is a process. We humans love a good process. Her fingertips and around her fingernails had turned purple. While we looked at her, I wondered if it was really her, because the old physical indicators were gone, or had receeded to the point of unrecognisability. Her face was small and sunken and her head was hard and cold. I couldn't help imagining that suddenly she would gasp and sit up. And I kept thinking about one of the last things she said to me, which was that she was planning to come to Melbourne to haunt me. Death itself is fairly unrecognisable, except to those who are used to it. I cried for a brief moment because I was standing touching the corpse of someone I have known all my life. I think I felt sad because I had to think about instability and change in the world, which is something I am not good at. Perhaps everything can suddenly change and I can't prevent it?

There is always something mildly humorous about a funeral, and I think with hers it was the irony of talking about what a wonderful, kind, loving person she was. Yes, Unforgettable indeed. Tom Payne (for those non Tasmanians, he is a newsreader turned celebrant, which in itself I find hilarious. He did my grandfather's funeral too, and before he died my grandmother asked who he wanted to do the funeral, and he said he wanted Tom Payne. My grandmother asked him if he would not rather have someone he knew, to which my grandfather answered that of course he knew Tom Payne, he's been watching him on the news for years) talked about how her family loved her and would miss her, and how she will be with us forever (god forbid!). I wonder if I rolled my eyes at any point?

"I would rather not go back to the old house..."

2006-01-23T14:50:00.000-08:00

there's too many bad memories, too many memories..."

I am a drunk! There were 2 falls on Friday night, and so much stupidity....even me outside talking to the bouncer about his life, because after midnight, with too many drinks inside me, I was really interested. I slept in the bath accidentally. It was hot, so at about 3.30am I had a bath, and woke up at 8.30am, cramped and withered. I went to bed for a while but slept listlessly. My mother called at about 11.00am to tell me that her mother died. She sent ZP and my father a text message at 6.25am to tell them, but strangely not me. I was asleep in the bath, drunk, when the grandmother died. It seems pathetic and funny. I have decided that I can no longer drink excessively, as it disgusts and scares me. My father told me that at the time when my grandmother wrote off their car (in 1975, just after I was born), when she was staying with my parents, my mother found bottles of beer in a drawer beside her bed. ZP and I found this hilarious, particularly because she would have intended for my mother to find them. Desperate people. I don't think I can even talk about my mother's desperation at the moment. It repulses me.

Is it strange that I wish to see her corpse? Someone suggested to me that perhaps I need to see her to make sure she is really dead. It doesn't feel that way.

I have been thinking about the balance between desire and expectation. Is there a disparity between these things for most people?

Also I have been thinking that I am perhaps too serious, and perhaps too boring, and that my blog should have more jokes. I don't know any though. It is a very self indulgent pleasure this blogging business.

Bluish White Malleable Ductile Toxic Bivalent Metallic Element

2006-01-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

My Cadmium Life:

I have had two dreams recently that have stuck me as somehow significant. Although when it is your own dream it always seems significant on some monumental level. MP and I had a rule about the telling of dreams: other people's dreams are always boring, so if you really must describe a dream, it has to be somehow relevant, and you only have a very small period of time in which to do it. If I was telling him about a dream, he'd say "mate, the other people's dreams rule". And I'd say "oh yeah", and he would imitate me saying oh yeah because he thought it was really cute.

They are significant only to me because I choose to find similarities in them, and wish to relate them somehow to my body. The first one was about a flat tyre on a bike. I went to a service station at night to have it pumped up by a man I didn't know. As he was pumping it, innards that looked like guts began to push themselves out, and I realised that tyres are made of/full of guts. The second, which was last night, was that I was pregnant and didn't realise until it was too late. I had been drinking and smoking, and then realised that I might have damaged the baby. This dream probably relates to the AW+EJ pregnancy (which is real!), but really, I wanted it to mean that my body was telling me something. I wish I could relate to you The Most Beautiful Dream In the World, but like so many things, it is inexplicable; stuck in my head. I described it to TR, and he and I had fantasies about VR worlds. This was after I had done the Char Davies thing (Ephemere and Osmose, which were fucking incredible). I waited for about 6 years to see that stuff!

VR - the moon.

What is your body telling you?

It is a funny thing, that we are so interested in messages and communication, and that our bodies are involved in the exchange of information. No matter how much we deny our bodies their presence, they push themselves into our thinking. So much theory about 'the body'. What about the body politic? There was an interesting thing in Imaginary Bodies (Moira Gatens) about theoretical relationships with/to bodies. I like the idea of the imaginary body, because I do think that our bodily realities are far more amorphous and perverse than we account for. I love this book.

You May Kiss Me....I Don't Mind.

2006-01-17T16:46:00.000-08:00

A list of things for this year:

boundaries and ways of being with people
saying no when I need to
more money
finish Masters perhaps?
distance from my parents
New Romantic boyfriend
less guilt
more new people
get the car fixed
go somewhere different
tell people what I want
convince my mother to get some kind of psychiatric treatment
sleep
insularly self sufficiently approximately independant and tough
rough and submissive sex
dressing up. More costumes and bawdy song and dance
more smut and sleaze
more self acceptance
new job
make a costume (armour or nuns habit?)
astronomy and anatomy
new music (or old music, but new for me!)
make things and give things
repair
touch more things
physical experimentation and bravery
have eyes tested
pap smear and breast check
fall in love?
yoga
love

Part of my sister's christmas present. So far unfinished....'A Special History'.

2006-01-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

In the rude suburban depths of the wild colonial outpost of Maggot Upon D’Entracasteaux, a vile stinking pot hissed and spat upon a small flame in a dew dampened tent. The beads of moisture slid down the walls of the mildew scented tent, forming in tiny rivulets and running towards the tent pegs. A strange contraption had been established over a high school issue (or in this case stolen) Bunsen Burner. This hastily and shoddily soldered contraption was the scaffolding for the grand pot hard at work atop it. This was no ordinary tent, or even a tent as you may imagine a backyard tent to be. This tent was a laboratory, most scientific in nature. Whilst it sat at the side of the house, only metres from the gas cylinders, and with a view onto the kitchen table, it was, in the mind of its owner, very far from home. This was the laboratory of a young genius, a scientific renegade.

On this humble Sunday, the scientist herself had not yet entered her laboratory to begin her day’s work, yet her eager cousin had been lying awake in bed waiting to hear the sound of the scientist’s alarm in the next room. She would not really have described herself as the laboratory assistant, nor as a participant in the miracle being performed in the tent. Rather, she was the poor relative, whose parents were never, and quite without explanation, part of this story. This poor relative, poor cousin, Dorothy, sat before her mirror, combing her greasy tresses, teasing out the tiny particles of white matter which had accumulated around her ears and the base of her skull.

At the sound of the alarm, the scientist awoke and removed herself from bed. She found her glasses in her bed and was thankful that she had not broken them. She wore a patch made of koala patterned contact over one lens of her glasses, and often would proclaim emphatically “its purpose is to Correct my Lazy Eye”.

Dorothy was always upset by the disquieting clang of the alarm in the next room, as it was the whinging cry of the D’Entracasteaux mud flat cane toad. The body of the toad, which held the clock face gently in its stiff arms shook and rocked itself across the bedside table. Dorothy, whilst appreciating her cousin’s scientific endeavour, had never understood her fascination (or some might say obsession) with toads.

The scientist’s eye was ablaze as she entered the room.
“Dung” said Dorothy.
“Dog breath,” said Dung “it is time for us to begin our work.”
“But we haven’t had any breakfast” Dorothy complained.
“BREAKFAST!” cried Dung “is for bourgeois swine and capitalist whores. We, on the other hand, have important work to do, and not enough hours of daylight to do it in. We must go first to find our specimens, and then begin our Great Project.”
“Can I just have a banana or something?” asked Dorothy bravely.
“Take whatever you want from the kitchen, but know that one day you will have to give back all that you have taken, from society, and from the universe.” Declared Dung triumphantly.

“Doggy, where are you?” The voice of the scientist arrived at last. The door flew open, and there in all her morning dressing gowned glory stood the scientist herself, Dr D Beetle, dean of the faculty, manager extrordinaire, professorial in her solemnity. As well as conducting her own research, Dr Beetle taught in the Department of Diatronics at the University of Tasmania. It was a department established after the implementation of her Diatronic Scale. The scale is thus: a-atronic b-atronic, c-atronic, diatronic, e-atronic.

Poor Mick, small and scaly and nearly always referred to simply as Hippie, spent much of his childhood in ‘care’. It was a care of sorts, but certainly not the kind of care you or I would consider. Mick was the last of the eight Hopson children, all of which (unfortunately) lived well into their eighties and nineties. The Hopsons were a family of miserable bastards, who complained so long and so bitterly that they were punished by being abjectly poor, and abjectly dirty. Each Hopson child had his or her share of unsightly boils, welts, pustules and ingrown toenails, but none so much as poor Hippie. The eldest child, Elsie, an old horse of a girl, with a puckered, blistered face and a creased leathered neck, was old and disgruntled before she even reached the age of ten. She had what in those days was described as ‘shit on the liver’ (which is now known as Fecalised Hepatic Syndrome). Sadly though, this was not diagnosed and dealt with until she was 21, by which stage it was too late for her to meet a nice man and settle down. Instead, quite determinedly, she became and Angry Lesbian, and refused to have any communication with men. Hippie only ever knew Elsie as the angry portrait hanging in the hallway at home. It had to be said, that the portrait was an example of exquisite artistry, masterfully capturing Elsie’s anger and hatred of the world. It was painted after a particularly violent rally against the existence of men, in which Elsie’s hands had become stained from the violent bloodshed.

The Derangement of Hippie

How many times is it possible to see a doctor in a week, or a day, you might ask. If a doctor works from 9-5 with a 1 hour lunch break, and each appointment lasts approximately 15 minutes, then potentially you could have 28 appointments with a doctor in one day. Unfortunately, this was not a question the Hopsons asked themselves. It is a question the nurses and receptionists asked each other at the Sandy Bay Clinic where Hippie spent from 9.00am until 4.30pm from Monday to Friday (and even during school holidays). However, they never received an answer.

Frequently Hippie was ill, with a green river flowing from his nostrils that stained and crusted on his already filthy clothes. At first the doctors, nurses and receptionists felt sorry for him, but became aggrieved by the pervasive odour of ancient feet and incorrectly wiped bottom. But Hippie was content with his appearance and personal hygiene, as it often gave him an opening for conversation with the kindly elderly patients. He would turn his boggled eyes upon a kind Mrs and say “do you mind if I sit beside you? I know I smell awful, but I am suffering from Parental Neglect, so I am not properly cared for”. Any elderly Mrs with any kind of warm and beating heart would cry out and her eyes would become misted and watery. Often the nurses offered Hippie the use of the shower in the clinic, but mostly, he politely declined.

One kind Mrs, Mrs Lydia Smelter, would offer Hippie money and other riches. She was a wealthy widow with no natural benefactors. Her fortune lay in wait to be bestowed on someone as terrible as Hippie. Mrs Smelter was a philanthropist of the highest order, seeing her purpose in life to Help the Poor, and bring the word of the Lord to the uncivilized world. Later in life, Hippie would embark on a world tour of religious fervour with Mrs Smelter, spreading the word of the Lord to the uncivilized masses. But for now, Mrs Smelter would offer Hippie exotic treats and sensual experiences. Lydia Smelter bought Hippie clothes, books, chocolates, shoes, soaps and other delights he was not interested in. Often Hippie would hope (in vain) that Mrs Smelter would just give him cold hard cash that he could go and spend on his first love in life: toads.

Culinary Adventures at Toadthwart Cottage.

At the tender ages of 10 and 12, the young cousins, Dung and Dorothy, decided it was high time they found themselves part time employment to support their scientific work. It was Dung who suggested they work in the restaurant owned by their aunt and uncle, Bob and Molly Greaso.
“Doggy, we need money, we need to work, we need jobs”
“But Dung, we’re too young to work, it’s illegal” replied Dorothy.
“Bugger that Doggy! We need to start a fund to be able to buy toads to dissect.”

And so the hapless cousins undertook employment at Greaso’s Restaurant, at the rate of $3.55 an hour, a pittance really, but sufficient to purchase the requisite number of toads for Dung’s scientific project.

The restaurant was shrouded by scented plumes of ripe fruit and flowers, hanging delicately from ancient trees. It was housed in a beautiful old sandstone cottage, called Toadthwart, and was bedecked with dusty chandeliers and horned balustrades.

“Craigy boy, where the fuck are ya?” screamed Molly down the phone at her eldest son, who as she knew was forging a career for himself in the music industry, following a most successful stink on the television drama ‘Neighbours’. But music was his true passion, and despite Molly’s protestations and pleading that he should come to work in the restaurant (and even offered to pay him $5.50 an hour), Craig (who had changed his name from Greaso to McLaughlin) refused, and released his first hit single ‘Hey Mona’.

“Tell that boy to get himself back here and take some bloody responsibility for himself” bellowed Bob Greaso from the stinking cool room.
But there was no way Craig would ever return to that festering, greasy stink hole. This phone call was the first that Dung and Dorothy had heard of this Craig.
“He’s your cousin sillies” said Molly.
But the young cousins had no idea that there was another Greaso child.

The restaurant was in some respects quite spectacular, yet customers were few and far between. Occasionally a tourist or eve blind person would happen upon the restaurant and experience a rude and disgusting sensorial awakening. “Oh, the stench” customers would wail. “Putrefaction” the propietors would sniggeringly retort, alluding to the state of the food gently stewing in the kitchen.

As restauranteurs, the owners of Greaso’s Restaurant were particularly unskilled. They ran a tight family business, employing even the youngest children, who were 9 and 10, as waitresses. The food was lovingly prepared by Massive Molly Greaso, and sent through the food chute by Big Bob Greaso. This was a job Bob did with a mighty gusto and a sleazy grin. While the rest of the family worked until they were damp with sweat, Bob Greaso stood like a sentry at the mouth of the chute barking orders. He did however have the occasional jaunt into the dining area to assess customer satisfaction and assess any ladies present.

Back in the kitchen, Molly spread a thick layer of butter onto a slightly floor ditied slice of white bread. She stretched an overcooked egg over the bread, placed another layer over the top and brought the eggy sandwich up to her nose and inhaled deeply. “Oh yeah….that’s a good sandwich” she declared and placed the sandwich on a plate and passed it to Bob, who eyed it with suspicion and pushed it through the chute. Next in the chain of service was Vung Greasy, the eldest girl in the family. Vung worked evenings and weekends in the restaurant and went to school during the day.

Vung delivered the egg sandwich to the far table closest to the grease smeared window that looked onto the street. Sitting at the table was a tall young man with a faded green fedora and a moustache grown at a jaunty angle. At first glance Vung thought he was an angel sent from heaven, but quickly became aware of the wicked odour emitted by his person. Still, she gracefully delivered the egg sandwich to the young man in the corner.

The tall young man giggled as Vung retreated to the kitchen, and artlessly picked up the egg sandwich and ate it with imprecision. Vung watched him through the kitchen chute until her father shouted at her to get back to work. When the young man had finished his sandwich, he paid and left the restaurant. Soon after he had left, Vung’s younger brother Shung handed her a note. Most of the words were misspelt, but the message was clear: ‘meat me at dog and kart fuctury on coner ov tha rode done ther you gurl.’ Vung had no idea of the young man’s name, but realized that she must find an excuse to leave the restaurant to meet the man at the Dog and Cart Factory on the corner.

“yoou got Dung Beetle?”
“Do you mean my cousin Dung?” asked Vung, bitterly disappointed when she realized that the young man wanted to discuss her cousin and not her.
“Is she alright?”
“Yes, she’s fine, she’s working”
“What ‘bout them frogs she does? Does she make yous eat them or what?”
“We don’t serve toad or frog in our restaurant. It is against health regulations”
“What about Dung?”
“Do we serve Dung?”
“No, Dung, do she serve frog?”
“No, why would she do that?”
“Cos I hear she wants to turn people into frogs”
“that’s ridiculous you fool. Who are you anyway huh?” Vung was becoming irritated by this young man’s attempt to besmirch her family’s good name.
“Cos that’s what I heared”.
“And who are you?”
“Dick”
“Dick? What, Dick Head?”
“No mate, Dick Hopson”.
“My god!”
“Private Detective. Here’s me card.”
And after handing the shocked Vung his business card, Dick disappeared, as mysteriously as he had arrived.
Vung slowly walked back to the restaurant, where she was greeted with a torrent of abuse from her father who was very angry that she had been ‘slacking off as usual’. But Vung was despondent and didn’t seem to hear her father’s guttural bellows. She was too annoyed, and too intrigued by the rude and sleazy Dick Hopson.

Incest and Buggery

As Dung retrieved the rejuvenated toad from the incubator, she noticed the cheeky glint in its eye, and the string of toadslime hanging from its lips. It grinned and drew in the string of slime with an almighty slurp. Dung peered into the dimly lit incubator and screeched. Dorothy trotted into the tent to find out what had perturbed Dung so. Dung was aghast, and shaking like a rocket bottomed toddler.
“They’ve bloody gone and done it…” she cried
“what have they done?” asked Dorothy.
“Bred” shrieked Dung, her eyes bulging out of her head like a firmly squeezed fish.
“Oh. I guess that means we have to get rid of them then?” said Dorothy.
“Get rid of them?! Are you bloody insane woman? It is perfect! A scientific serendipity my girl.”
“But won’t they be retarded”
“Do not cast aspersions on my beautiful babies Dogg breath. They are perfect for my purposes”
“They look weird though Dung”
“And so do you Doggy, so do you” whispered Dung, clearly in the throes of scientific ecstasy.

The first toad to be presented at the annual Diatronics in Contemporary Desexualisatory Practice conference, was a bearded fellow with a faulty Mucus Release Valve. Rather than releasing mucus onto food prior to eating to soften it, this poor bearded bastard simply released mucus without end, at times nearly drowning himself in a sticky pool, and causing himself injury with his mucus stiffened beard. At the podium, before her peers in the scientific community, Dr Beetle decreed “he has lain with his kin, and has mutated to the point of becoming another species. Before you now, I shall demonstrate the fervour with which these toads attempt to reproduce” and with that she placed several toads on the large glass table before her and aimed the microphone in their direction. Suddenly there bellowed throughout the auditorium, a strange cacophony of toady cries. Dung grinned with glee and watched, as her specimens began to move toward one another.

As Dung rubbed and wrung her hands with glee and excitement, she failed to notice the strange heaving and bilious expression on the face of one of her toads, called Festoon.

Suddenly there was an enormous popping sound, much like the sound a tyre makes when it explodes, and a warm rain of fetid stinking toady mucus covered Dung, Dorothy and everyone in the first two rows of the audience. A deathly silence came over the auditorium as everyone present attempted to gain some understanding of the events that had just transpired. Dung however, stood triumphantly, if a little maniacally before the audience and guffawing declared “well shhhiiiiiiiiit, I didn’t see that one coming”.

“Fuck!” screamed Dorothy, struggling to wipe the putrid mucous from her face.

“Let the desexing begin” roared Dung, as Dorothy scampered in to provide her cousin with clean instruments.

The Return of Dick

Because Greaso’s served, undeniably, the best egg sandwich in town, Dick realized that he would need to go back to the restaurant, despite not really wanting to see Vung again. He had sensed her disappointment at his lack of interest, and it irritated him. But back he went all the same, with a carnation in his buttonhole and a feather in his bird’s nest hat. Vung, who was in the kitchen, did not see Dick enter. She was sweating profusely over the washing up, and had a covering of stain up to her elbows, as her father would not let her change the dish water until it was practically solid. On the stove an enormous pot heaved and plopped as its contents became like tar that would never be removed from the interior of the pot. The condensation on the black and green blotched ceiling hung low, and dripped into the pot on the stove, allowing Molly to add water to the pot less frequently. The kitchen incinerator was on at full blast, belching black smoke and a stench sufficient to seriously wound most people. The Greasos, of course, were immune to the smell. They burnt all their waste, including used toilet paper and feminine hygiene products, to save money on runs to the tip. As shrewd business people, Molly and Bob had the incinerator installed despite it being absolutely against health regulations. But the health inspector was a faithful patron of the restaurant, and so kindly turned a blind eye.

Dick seated himself by the window looking onto the street, and while waiting for someone to take his order examined the stains on the table cloth, and took notes about the activities of the staff and other patrons. Just when Dick had become utterly absorbed in his mis-spelt notes, he was approached by one of the fine waiting staff. Tung, who was rarely noticed by his parents except when he failed to work as hard as they would like, was of Chinese descent, although no one could explain, or even understood why. He had not looked at all Chinese when he was born, but had developed in a very Asiatic manner. He even had a Chinese accent and seemed to possess intuitive knowledge of Martial Arts and spring rolls. At the age of ten, Tung had adopted the name Tung Bok Lo, and refused to be identified as anything else.

I Gasp At The World, Inside and Out.

2006-01-16T16:52:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about making myself some armour. I imagine an ornate and beautiful breast plate, and perhaps a low slung sword. An articulated aegis. Last night AM and I talked about clothes and costumes. She brought back some 'beards' from Hobart that we can use for our drag show. We were both so inspired by the drag kings at the Star Hotel that time. I like that I don't need to be gay to do these things. Anyway, I realised that I want to wear some severely chaste outfit with an Elizabethan collar and a sword. I am a chaste girl after all. All the things I would like to wear are awkward and restricting of movement. I think this is something that appeals to me (on top of the historical element of course) : stiff Elizabethanness, Victorian bustles, chain, starched white linen, armour, things that are impossible to sit down in. I like to be solemn and trapped.

There was an anatomy book I wanted recently, that was based on the Visible Human Project, which I am deeply excited by. But the book wasn't especially beautiful, which makes me reluctant to buy it. Sometimes I dream about losing books, and it upsets me terribly. Last night I did, and suddenly I had a pile of shitty books that I was embarrassed by. These dreams sometimes involve MP stealing books from me, which is funny, because books were so important for us, together. This attachment to books makes me think of my attachments to physical objects, sounds, images and gestures. A while ago I wrote a list of things I find embarrassing. One of them was the sound of water being poured from a kettle into a cup. I can't say what the others were because I will feel embarrassed. It is as if I have an irrational attachment to arbitrary things in the world, and fail to diconnect myself from their significances. Particular words I hear, and I look askance at the mouth it came from, and wonder if it is now ugly to me. And that feeling of humiliation when the wrong thing happens......It is very differrent to dislike you know, in that when I dislike I don't care. But when I am embarrassed, I care too much.

"Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together."

2006-01-16T00:52:00.000-08:00

"KNOW? This may suprise you, but I'm backtracking & will not claim to know anything. For me, it's a balance of probabilities - given my own perceptions, and the words of other's alleged experience, I draw what to me are the likely conclusions. Can I live with this? Do I have a choice?"

If I concentrate I can feel the weight of deadened animal between my hands. As I walked back to the car I cried, in much the same was as a day a few years ago when I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I have so fequently been told that things are alright. And so after I left, crying and feeling sick at the idea of paralysed body, I convinced myself that she (the cat) would be ok. Just a funny looking plaster cast. But the Vet said that 75% of her body was paralysed (I think). I had that Sadako feeling, as if pain is the most pervasive thing in people's lives, as if there is so much pain that I can't live with it. There is that cry out of shock and indignation (like when a little crushed cat tries to crawl out of a basket) that makes me want to cry until I pass out. I have never decided whether I think crying is a good thing or not. Oh, and don't say all the obvious stuff about it being emotionally healthy etc. Sometimes every action comes with its degree of manipulation and intent???

I think I am seeing everything in the most sinister of ways today (and yesterday and the days before) because I have become disgustingly aware of how crazy my mother is, how angry I am, how sad my father is and how violated I feel my boundaries have been. I can't do this yes thing anymore, and so I have decided that 2006 is the year of finding and defining my boundaries. I can no longer afford to base so much self worth on saying yes to things I don't want. I am so hideously angry with the world at the moment. I can't deal with this. Sorry. Finally my father has left my mother, and I feel guilty because I am so pleased for him, and so relieved for ZP and I. As if our problems will stop here? Certainly not, but in the coming months (years?) we will redefine these problems in a way we have never been capable of before. Everyone deals with family pain, and it is blindlingly horrible, but I wonder if many people try to break each other?

Doesn't this whole being 'in love' thing just reflect our individual need to be loved and adored? I am beginning to feel as if RECOGNITION is the most important thing. There are always people who are not capable of it. Last night I wondered if perhaps the most genuine (jesus, what kind of a stupid concept is that?) form of 'in love' is the one that is unrequited? It is perhaps the one I am most omfortable with. You can break down the idea of love until it no longer exists, but like god, it is something people insist on. Were MP and I ever in love, or did we just despreately need each other? Perhaps love is as mundane and awful as a desperate need? I am angry with humans, and angry withe the idea of love, and angry about the fact that I feel as if at times there are no common understandings between people. Why does my mother seem to exist within a totally different reality to mine? How do we proceed?

I have been watching a Duran Duran DVD, and have fallen in love with Simon Le Bon. I am totally in love with New Romantic hair (and just New Romantic style in general). I can even deal with the headbands, strange trousers and jackets with no shirt underneath.

The reason I asked about pleasure in rejection was becasue of a Dublin experience. I was incredibly attracted to one of my housemates, whilst still with MP. But it was an unsustainable and inappropriate attraction, and so I decided that to derive some pleasure from it, it would have to be in the denial of it. I think you can derive immense pleasure from denial. And it makes me wonder why desire and pleasure always have to do with possessing and sating. Surely the cessation of desire is when we have what we want. I felt as if desire could become a different thing for me: an elongated and pleasurably painful process. You know the pleasure that comes from not knowing, from guessing and interpreting?

"I see and feel and touch and smell and taste stuff. Is this the full extent of it? Probably not! Do others experience more? Maybe, but how the fuck do I know? I catch myself wondering about this stuff a couple of times a month, when I think ‘how the fuck is all this possible? What the fuck is real?' But the net result is the same...does the answer effect me day-to-day? Not really."

"Some People Call it a One Night Stand But We Can Call it Paradise"

2006-01-11T18:36:00.000-08:00

I've been talking to CH for a few days. She has been staying with me. BS arrived home slightly drunk as usual on Monday night. I like that he is usually slightly to quite drunk, although sometimes it worries me. It seems luxuriant and decadant to me, the irregular heavy drinker with Emotional Issues. Not that BS doesn't have emotional issues, just that often he seems measured, contained and (held) controlled. I use the word held because I have been thinking about it over the past couple of days. EKS talks about it. I am rereading A Dialogue on Love, and the resonances (that word is such wank) are powerfully personal and therapeutic for me. She is an American academic in queer theory/gay and lesbian studies/literary/critical theory. I read Epistemology of the Closet many years ago at uni. One of the things she talks about is the fact that because of her work is gay/queer oriented, people assume that she is gay. She is beautifully contradictory, complex and complicating, soft and tough. She had breast cancer a while ago. More about 'heldness' later.

So these talks with CH have been gentle and kindly. She doesn't laugh as much as I do, or feel humour in the way that I do. Because I feel it very deeply, as one of the fundamental principles of my life, and one of the most startling peaks of my personality. Perhaps I am proud of the fact that I find most things funny on some level. Perhaps the only way I can manage sadless, grief, loss, anger and happiness and wellness is through humour. At uni I wrote an essay about corporeal humour: the abject body and the drive towards comedy/humour. I was so fucking into Bataille back then I nearly started eating dead things to prove a point. Not really. Is it a case of consume or be consumed? And how do people feel about humour happening without their consent?

It is an intense process this 'getting to know' someone in the way that I do it. CH and I have spent entire afternoons and evenings talking talking talking up until we are both delirious at 3.00am. I need to know, or at least attempt to know and understand. It is an insanely intense drive. We have talked about so many things, and I think now we have a different sense of each other.

There are awful things happening between my parents at the moment. Dad has gone to pick up a 'divorce pack', which sounds like a rather neat means of dealing with the enormous raw and stultifying problem. My problem is that I can't disconnect myself. I talk to AC about it because he is so rational and sensitive, and he makes me feel like what I feel is acceptable and normal. But still, I can't deny my father this level of support and intimacy. I think about the relationship he had with his father, and how close they were as friends, and how much they liked each other, and I think perhaps this is just part of being adult. Perhaps as a friend I need to divorce this from my own feelings about my mother and just help and support my father?

By the way, the title is one of the funniest lines I have heard in a song. It is a song I really love - Save A Prayer - Duran Duran.

Collect Your Personal Effects?

2006-01-10T14:12:00.001-08:00

"I dread every bad thing that threatens people I love;

for me, dread only I may stop knowing how to

like and desire the world around me" EKS.

Eve Sedgwick suggests that no one can be entirely unaroused by scences of punishment.

It seems as if there is a huge demarcation between pre and post accident time. On Friday night ZP, AC and I had an accident in Richmond. In the split second before the two cars hit, I realised that I may be about to die, and it was strange because for some reason there was something slightly humourous about it. All three of us screamed and swore as we were about to crash, and afterwards none of us really said anything. I got out of the car and ran to the other car to see if the people in it were ok. It was very cinematic. When I got to the other car, which had spun around and had been thrown across the intersection, I looked in the driver's side window, and the woman driver stared at me but didn't respond. After a few moments she wound down her window and continued to stare at me. Within a few minutes an ambulance, the police and the fire people had arrived. Still the three of us stood on the side of the road and looked at everything happening and simply said oh fuck.

I have impressive bruises, and the other driver admitted fault. The insurance people called ZP and said that she could pick up her "personal effects" from the car. Somehow I found this sadly impersonal and quaint.

I have a list of questions I would love you to answer. Please do answer, and you don't have to leave your name, I'll just guess.....:

how do you remain interested in and engaged with the world, and how do you prevent yourself from despairing at the idea of all the years ahead of you?
how frequently do you think about death, your own or other people's?
how do you KNOW things, and if you don't, or if you don't trust yourself to, how do you live with that?
how do you balance perception and judgement?
how often do you think yourself a less than worthy person, if ever? And how does this manifest itself in your emotions and behaviours?
do you feel like you are really loved by someone? And when you really love someone, how do you separate it from your need to be loved?
do you derive any kind of pleasure in being rejected and disappointed?
how do you deal with yourself when you don't know whether you are doing the right thing or not?
how do you cope with embarrassment, humiliation, shame? Where do you put yourself with these feelings?
how do you compare yourself to others? Do you feel inadequate, ill-formed, immature, ugly, beautiful, sleazy, suggestive, powerful, redundant, hopeless, uncontrolled, boring, mean, stupid, humorous?
do you feel as if you are noticed in the world?
how often do you engage in behaviour you really dislike?
what is your process of interpretation? What are the markers of interpretation and perception for you?
how do you balance the feelings of utter conviction you have with the possibility of disagreeing with yourself later, or with other people disagreeing with you?
how do you feel about your persuasive powers?
what do you show people and why?

No doubt I will have more questions later.

Enquiring Time

Occasionally I wonder if there are people in existence who aren't in a state of partial self-loathing. The 'self' bears a great deal of responsibility, and perhaps the self can not be valid or safe unless there is an emergency exit. And it is all contained within one loose or taut bag..... the self perhaps needs a way out of itself. I think about becoming, and being something other than a self. I love those ridiculous Deleuze and Guatarri ideas about becoming, and bodies without organs. It used to make me feel sick with being. MS at work said to me not long ago that I seem to have a great deal of confidence but lack of self-esteem. I suppose it is true, although I never really recognise myself as confident, just brash. The confidence seems hollow, one eyed and childish, because it is about bravado and performance. Are there secret patterns and secret histories and secret ways of being? An arcane form of being. Do I have a secret way of being? As a teenager I had so many private and embarrassing ways of being, and now I wonder if being is as illusory as it is impractical. Remember those times when you found the idea of being alone in your body so horrifying? And the idea that no one would ever really know you made you want to stop existing? I wonder if it was about unity and coherence? It was a time of outrageous yet quite fortuitous epiphanies and constant arousal and frustration. God I was a bastard of a teenager.

I Come With A Man Downunder: Night of the Living Fecalith

2006-01-02T02:00:00.000-08:00

I come with a man downunder. This is what I realised on New Year's Eve, in my alcohol fuelled haze. AW agrees. Regardless, I have started thinking about remaining single for the rest of my life. I had a horrible thought today: what if life is just boring? What if there is no more excitement. All the things I have wanted, and wanted to do, what if they are actually boring and meaningless? ZP and I talked about relationships and children today, and she was saying that having children is exciting. It made me feel horrible and selfish, but I don't want to live vicariously through 'the children'. I know that isn't all there is to it, but I am feeling crabby and despondant today.

I thought perhaps I would be sensible on New Year's Eve and not drink, and drive home. Instead I drank all night and was sitting outside talking shit at 6am. By christ I am good at drinking. The effect of drinking all night is that I start to think that everything is boring, and that life is an unendingly unexciting jet of rough and watery shit. Not even painful shit, just boring shit. God help me, I think I am prematurely old and miserable.

I have learnt an exciting new word: fecalith. Fucking FECALITH. When a piece of shit gets stuck in a pocket and turns to stone.

Perhaps time to stop and TAKE STOCK of things. Which things?

Norman Bates: My Mother's Brother....

2005-12-27T20:31:00.000-08:00

LP and I were talking about families. She said that someone she works with has a father who is on medication for 'morbid jealousy', which we both found incredibly funny. I said that I think my mother's brother (I can't bear toy refer to him as the u word, he's too foul) is soon to become a Norman Bates type who dresses in his mother's clothes. The relationship between him and the grandmother is bizarre, incredible and disgusting. They both disgust me because they are no0t normal humans, yet they are so repulsively human. He is distraught because she is dying, and he cries. When I went to say goodbye to her I looked at her lying in her putrid bed in a dank room and felt no sadness. She started bitching about Aunty Ed, who I adore, saying that Aunty Ed had lied about something years ago. I asked her why she even cared and she said 'I don't care for myself, but she goes around telling people this and it isn't true', and again I asked why she even cared. She said to me 'if you are going to be like that I won't talk to you'. I smiled her and said ok. When I got up to leave she said that when she dies ("deeeeaaaar, when I'm gone........eargh...aaahhhhh) I must write to and phone my mother's brother, because he will be devastated. I agreed to so as not to upset her (and I might start eating shit from the toilet when she dies too), and gave her a wan smile. I leaned in to kiss her wrinkled hair scented head, and I thought, Christ, you smell like you're dying, even though I don't know what that smells like. I said that I would come back down in a couple of months, and she said she probably won't be around in a couple of months. And I said 'oh well, we'll wait and see'. I think she was shocked that I didn't cry. Why would I? This is her final performance, and she must be angry that half the audience is either missing or doesn't care. Even my mother seems fairly indifferent to it all. She cares about suffering and pain. As do I.

So I expect to see reports of bizarre crimes in Tasmania soon, involving a man who dresses up as his mother and kills people. And with pride I can say "well fuck, I'm related to that". Funny how some people can only be redeemed by doing something horrific.

Some Public Enemy

2005-12-24T05:46:00.000-08:00

At least The Strokes are now playing Fight the Power. I love Public Enemy. I love the way that Flavor Flav always looks like a total spaz, but fucking cool too. This song reminds me of Do the Right Thing (the Spike Lee film). Jesus, he's wearing a full lengh acid wash denim coat. That's hilarious.

Shit on the Liver

2005-12-24T04:58:00.000-08:00

I fuckin' hate christmas. And that is because it is cheap, trashy and stressful. How is anyone supposed to 'enjoy' themselves when they are meant to. Stupid bloody thing.

So I went to the market today, and it rained and everything seemed a bit gloomy. Met up with AM and LP and bitched about the weather. I told AM that it felt good to be back with my people, and that I needed some traditional food. She said oh my god, so I started singing My Island Home, which I think should be some kind of Tasmanian anthem. Yes, today I embraced my cultural heritage, and appreciated the Tas aesthetic. There's nothing like a good solid Tasmanian man with a massive beard, polar fleece and sandals with socks, buying organic produce from someone with more unfortuate body odour than their own. I have a nasty feeling that Tasmanian women are slightly more hirsute than women from other parts of Australia. It is a scary little place I tell you.

To more pressing matters:

I am watching Rage and it is shitting me to tears, because I think perhaps I hate The Strokes more than I despise that evil and thankfully dead Jeff Buckley. The Srokes seem to make fairly godawful music, but to salt the wound further, they are also eejits. I hate the faux stoned rock star voice.

AM just sent me a text about the masturbatory rock on Rage.

I think that just about relieves me of my burden.

landscapes and familyscrapes

2005-12-23T04:36:00.000-08:00

Here is my father, snoring beside me. I'm using his laptop. His face relaxes in a way that it doesn't when he is awake. His mouth is open, and his skin is so brown and sun smoothed.

We sailed back down to the mooring this afternoon. I loved the feeling of pushing the rudder against the waves and making the sails taut with wind. Dad uses so many terms I don't know, and it makes me smile, because this is his thing. The thing he loves most. We talked about the beauty of time while you are sailing, and the fact that you are conrolled by the environment, rather than controlling it. All these points to head towards, and ways of navigating and guiding. I never stop wanting to slip off the side into the water to become a fish. Sophie, a girl I met through swimming, and I used to pretend to be fish when we were kids. After lessons and on weekends we would be obsessed with being under water. Even now, sometimes I really wonder if I can breathe under water. At times I have really belived that I can.

"Heroin and ham are in completely different categories"

List of things I need in January:

litre of latex
red copper wire
more wire
tracing paper
new eyes
fabric paint
adhesive felt
printed fabric
paint (acrylic)
hair dye????? Do I need to have black hair these days?
glue sticks and pva

D'Entrecastaux

2005-12-21T23:53:00.000-08:00

I can't believe how exquisite and sensitive this place makes me feel. Last night we (Dad, ZP, KG and a friend of Dad's) sailed from the mooring up to the DSS in Sandy Bay. The sun set electrically behind us, making the sparse clouds look like flaming blooms. I sat on the deck, eyes watering from the salty wind, and felt like it was my water, my channel, my pieces of land tree hill dry dirt. But it isn't, and I wonder how Tasmanian aboriginal people felt about this exhilarating land when it was inhabited only be them. I wonder about modern interventions like the Western ideas of self, landscape (and of course that ridiculously antiquated term, wilderness). How is it that we know where to draw the boundaries between self and land. Of course there are the physical boundaries, the feeling of pain as you connect with landscape too roughly. Consciously, how do you know where you stop, and where your place begins. I have often wished I had something spiritual available to me, to connect me to the world, and to land. The only significance I allow myself is colonial. When JE, my supervisor gave me this book (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/perspective/stories/s1418604.htm) to read, I stayed up nearly all night, and cried, and felt ashamed and disgusted. I am related (and not distantly either) to people who were born at the time Trugannini died. This book was a harrowing experience for me, and I talked and thought about it incessantly for a couple of weeks. Still, I will only ever know a colonial self. I remember when JS became obsessed with being a Tasmanian aboriginal and Jewish. Hence MP inventing the term Aborijew (I wonder if AH would appreciate that term????). He even gave a conference paper about aboriginals and jews whilst growing a wild and enormous beard. And at that stage I think he was half crazed and half way to being quite insane.

And then there was Mudrooroo, who for a long time believed he was Aboriginal and then discovered he wasn't (I think this is what happened anyway).

Section 2

The Palliative Pathway Project.

My family is in chaos, and rather than feel stressed or sad, I have decided the most useful and most therapeutic thing I can do for myself and my mother is to create a Palliative Pathway Plan for my grandmother. There is of course some humour in this, but more importantly, I have decided that creating plans is a wholly useful, diversionary measure to ensure that we all survive christmas, and that my mother survives the next 6 or so months until the grandmother dies. My mother's brother is so fucking ridiculous. And he has been (or allowed himself to be) disabled by his relationship with his mother. ZP and I find it revolting, and quietly Dad and I bitch about him.

So I spent so much fucking time on the phone today trying to organise respite, daily washing, nursing home with palliative staff, centrelink, a social worker. The palliative services down here are good. I talked for a long time to a woman today who was being very gentle with me, euphemistically gentle, until eventually I said "ok, so this is how I understand it - she'll go into a nursing home with high level care until she's about to die, then she'll come in and die in the Whittle ward? Or can she die in the nursing home?" She was a slight pause, and I didn't need to tell her that this whole process wasn't especially upsetting to me, and that I just wanted to get certain things done. Bugger euphemisms unless they are funny. This evening I called the family to the table and decided to discuss the options. It was funny, because often I am not as assertive as I would like to be, and other times, fucking hell, I am so fucking assertive no one has a chance to disagree with me.

Tomorrow I have to go to see her again and help her to fill in forms. I need to make phone calls and sit the uncle down and tll him his fortune. He needs to pull himself together and try to be of some use to someone at some point in his life (so far it would seem that he has failed miserably). Enough!

Yesterday when ZP and I were there, she found it difficult to breathe and had to use a nebuliser. She looks so small, grey and withered....and monstrous with the mask over her face. I felt like an arsehole because I was amused by the fact that it was reminding me of Blue Velvet (although I suspect the grandmother is not any exciting kind of deviant). ZP looked distressed. I looked at her impassively and asked sensible questions. It was strange that I didn't feel anything much about it, beyond pitying her because she is a human being dying in agony.

Pornography For Children - part of a story.

2005-12-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

It came already born, grown and bound up in a skin, the beginning of my disasters. This was a most furious birth. Out came a skin of kinds, concealing a bursting grape of life, whose wetness soaked the hospital sheets and made the nurses exchange awkward glances. I had a terrible thing that came out covered in a plastic caul, gripping onto an elastic umbilical that almost snapped back inside me.

When this baby was conceived I didn’t ever think about birth defects, and I continued to live as though I was only taking care of myself. The one concession was giving up smoking because so many people looked at me like a child molester when I continued to smoke. So many people said “I don’t think it is necessarily bad, I’m just really surprised that you’d do it, that’s all”. None of them were pregnant though.

I’ve seen things I don’t want to remember. My son, I can’t erase him. He was born with hydrocephalus: a build up of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain. Water on the brain, a huge forehead and bulging eyes. I was cruel and named him Balloon. They held him, waving his arms and legs in front of my face and asked me what I wanted to call him. “I don’t give a fuck”, and I decided on Burt, because it was suitably unusual and suitably offensive.

“Burt….what a gorgeous name. Is it a family name?” crowed an obscenely broad nurse, whose tits I’m sure, were quivering wetly in response to the puling baby.
“Family? No.”

I never meant to have my legs that far apart, to be so levered. I never meant to part them for strangers at all, but parturition makes a public space of your body, and creates a stifling space for humiliation and rejection. Balloon exploded in the crisp hospital air, a tumescent thing, a balloon on a stick, bean shaped and gummy eyed. And only moments before he appeared, I looked into his father’s eyes as he said “good luck mate”, and realised that I had been rejected by this man I didn’t love or even respect, who was a stranger who slept in my bed.

He was altogether human, but I couldn’t touch him until he was three months old. His nappies were utterly repulsive to me, unlike other mother’s who bore the holistic glow of faecal connection with their children. At mother’s group they’d ask me ‘but don’t you find that it really doesn’t smell that bad because it is your own child?’ I thought that just made it smell worse. Other mothers gently removed their leaking udders from their milk encrusted bras and fed their babies lovingly, while I experienced the tickling sensation an amputee has in the limb that has been removed. When Balloon began to speak, I held him close for the first time and squeezed his head close to my chest. He cried and struggled to remove himself from my desperate embrace. Then he recognised me, and began calling me Ma, me instead of my sister Pol, who looked after him for the first years of his life.

There is a physical and emotional horror that is unique to material produced by your own body. Shit, piss, pus and snot are all expelled from your body, become abject waste. People learn to be humiliated by their own physical waste products, because it is considered uncivilised to be too intimate with functions we would rather not experience; the shy sound of shit shifting in its hold, the sound of shit breaking like bread, and the internal aromas meeting the fresh air. When Balloon was born and nearly ripped me apart with the insistence of his massive head, Pol said to me that I needed to accept the limitations of my own body, and learn to love what leaves it as much as what stays inside.

“When I say his name, I can’t help imagining him now as a hot air balloon.” Edmund smiles with me in confused sympathy. I have presented myself to him, a new ‘client’, a new participant in his professional therapeutic project.
“He was like a hot air balloon.” I laugh because it is funny.
Jovial cheeks and bad breath, he was bent and rickety, stumbling ahead with the vigour and enthusiasm of an aging athlete. E.T, or The Globe he was called at school and never made real friends who were able to envisage a smaller more appropriate head. For a while there was Natalie, who at six wore thick-lensed glasses, whose mother would wait for her after school, chain smoking and musing about how cruel children are to each other. Hair didn’t ever really grow properly to cover his head, so his soft fontanelle was slightly depressed and discoloured, creating a dark dip on the top of his head. I joked to him once about using his head as a mixing bowl, as it was just the right height when I was cooking, and he looked incredulous, beaten down and humiliated. I told him I only said things like that because I loved him, but never provided any explanation of how that constituted love. Perhaps he knew I loved him in an obscure and ashamed way, but he also knew he was hideous, and that I longed for beautiful children with glossy hair and manic smiles. Every day when he woke up, I saw him flip open his eyes and look at first astonished and then bitterly disappointed that he was still himself, still imprisoned in his horrible life. Sometimes I laughed when he did this, because his eyes were so huge, he looked alien, and sometimes I felt repulsed because he looked alien. Mostly we would sleep in my bed, except on the rare occasions when he was feeling brave enough to sleep alone. I laughed with him about how having him in the bed seriously reduced my chances of a normal sex life. He didn’t laugh with me though, because he didn’t understand the purpose or pleasure of sex, and nor would he ever. We lived together in solitary confinement, and I drove him the short distance to school every day as I was afraid of what other children would do to him if he walked alone.

Sometimes I watched him piss, fascinated by how he held himself, as if his penis were a dying bird, leaking precious urine onto the floor. He would stand before the toilet, penis across palm, and piss on the floor, as if he were not able to control the direction of the flow. And infrequently he noticed me watching him, and would turn and offer himself to me, dripping dick first. He’d carefully remove his clothes and stand there naked, as if trying to show me that his body was beautiful even if his head wasn’t. I would watch, mesmerised by the potential for sexuality in his body, and then turn away, repulsed, and shout at him to put his clothes on. “But I need a shower” he’d tell me, and I would realise that I hadn’t made him shower for three days.

Everyone is aware of the indignity of the self, of the horrible realisation that existing is contrary to dignity, that it is revolting and uncontrollable. Balloon though, he tried very hard, with grace and calm, to create a dignified self that could live with cruelty. But how can you live with the kind of patronizing cruelty that doctors and teachers lavish on you? “Oh, what a lovely big strong head you have there, let me have a look at it….”, and the jibes of school children who can’t contain their excitement when they see your misshapen head.

“In my family there is a tradition of producing monsters; loving them and hating them”
“You don’t seem upset when you say this.” He is curious and kindly probing.

“I thought they only happened in books and films, made by people like Angela Carter. I’ve been a monster too, after Balloon died, I felt hideous.”
“But you wanted Balloon to die”.
I show him the only remaining photo of Balloon, playing in a dirty hollow in a park. Those filial and pious little hands, huge face pushing out of the head, constant sweat hanging from his skin. I would touch his beautifully hairless arms sometimes while he slept in a chair, a partially concealed erection pushing through from his sweet dreams, those thready veins on his face and purple stretch marks in his thighs as if he had grown over night, perpetually tumescent. I am ashamed when I recognise that he is wearing clothes that I know I didn’t wash for weeks. They are the clothes he died in, and the clothes he was burnt in. It was the moment that changed the world, made everyone guilty and complicit. Gilded with an ornamental spray of golden hair, Balloon was taken by furnace fire to somewhere I could not comprehend. Mrs Agary who killed poor Balloon wailed most, and reeked of stale alcohol and foot odour.

Here is that moment, constantly relived so he can always be almost alive: he stepped carefully onto the road, looked down at the path he was about to tread, lurched forward and fell suddenly onto his face and under the wheel of a yellow commodore.

As I heard a pop, or a bang, I don’t remember, I covered my ears, and felt a warm spray on my face. The screams of Mrs Agary provided me with extra-optic images; raw skin, twisted body, exposed brain. I assumed I had been covered in blood, but tasted it to find it tasteless. Water! He became a burst pipe on impact, a hydrant, rupturing onto the swell of himself and my sun dress.

I have looked for reconciliation – between things, feelings and people, as a way of having mercy on myself.

When I was a kid, in my bedroom one day, folding clothes into drawers, I was singing, and using words I found embarrassing and ugly, words that I had no idea about the meaning of, obscene words that issued forth in an angry mellifluous torrent. I turned around to find that my mother had come quietly into the room behind me. She was watching and listening with a wry smirk on her face. We stared at each other for seconds, neither of us wanting to be the first to acknowledge the words that were now between us. There was a moment of ultimate humiliation, because I had used words that I did not have control of, that were harsh and crude sounding. It was like being caught eating a scab you have picked, or sniffing your fingers after going to the toilet. Those things are intimate and private, but when you are caught doing them, it becomes public, and an indicator of your person. My mother said nothing and walked away, making herself complicit with the words, and the implication that there was something wrong with me.

It was similar to the moment when Balloon was hit, because at that moment I knew that I had a freakish son, who I had failed to protect, and that by implication I was a freakish mother who lacked the normal natural maternal feelings of other ‘real’ mothers. I realised that there was something wrong with me and that for ten years I had been attempting to come to terms with Balloon’s condition, my own unlovliness and my inability to hold down jobs or relationships.

For all the done things, there are a hundred that are undone. You can decide against all the stupid moralistic terms that have landed on you; like lazy, greedy, horrible, selfish and unkind. Surely everything must have an origin, and it can’t be reduced to a word, that links your whole being with some kind of weird religious guilt. I won’t feel that, I refuse to feel anything. Instead, there is Edmund to lick my conscience.

Like when you squeeze, and there is a sudden rush of pus, and it sits on the surface, and you whimper, because you assume that there is something wrong. And when you cry, or falter, or feel angry, you assume there is something wrong with you.

Context: a term of meandering meaning yet stable reference, a shifting notion that is occupied by every person, object and situation. Somehow it can only be used if we are prepared to use its opposite; formlessness. Here are two contexts; a society whereby common virtues are of ultimate value, and the commandments are easy to comprehend. Or, a society where frailty of truth is abundant, and multiplicity of understanding prevails.

Secrets. I recoil with sensible horror, after discovering myself so myopically attached to the deficient and reified notion of self truth. Truth runs steadily along unsteady axes and biases, and self truth has never existed. Surely the idea of being truthful with your own self is a sham metaphor, a moral obligation and a manipulator’s technique?

We understand secret actions and feelings in terms of privacy, but do we ever think about how so many absent minded, disengaged moments create an internal story that we can become shameful of? Everyone has these secrets, and I am fascinated by the truth……..What a nauseating and conspicuous version of voyeurism. We liked to be looked at, and more than that, to be seen. Hold your breath, feel your insides. We have somehow arrived at the same day, the same conclusion, but still we are no closer to what we consider to be an ‘essence’ of self. It is a world, a multitude in a bag, that is not able to make sense of the variables. Now I’m feeling shy, beginning all sentences with ‘oh, I think…’ I am owed an explanation. Luxurious sentiments.

When I woke up today I needed to cry but couldn’t . There was an awful lack of reason, and I was compelled by nothing, no reason. I was so scared by the absence of reason and desire. All that was left was the sediments of yesterday. Tomorrow will be the same. I have suddenly become ancient and sullen. Geriatric in my slowness, reluctance to go outside. I can live by proxy; I can be the third person, the body-less teller. Just a mouth or an ear. How does 4am come so listlessly, restlessly, silently, and with paroxysms of guilt?

Another day of warm and tired, no disturbances. It is so quiet when I wake up, as if no one exists any more. And there is a drop and looseness to my eye lids: they have no reason to stay open.

I dreamt that there were slug-like things attached to my feet, that had to be removed in hospital. I was looking after someone’s children at the beach and we had been running in the water, and then crawled into a cave, and I discovered them sucking on my toes. They looked like snails without shells, and I tried to pull them off but it hurt, and I couldn’t.

Perhaps we are husbanded like animals? When I look at you asleep next to me, grumpy colonialist. It seems that everyone likes to believe that there is no one word that would adequately describe them. It hasn’t been invented, and so none of us have been invented. What we have and what we are capable of speaking, is encased in the darts of skin and folded pleats of a finite body, a foreign object, a collector’s item, an antique structure, objet d’art. Have we become obsolete?
Movement is equated with sight. The blind traveller whose guide dog sees the cities and landscapes. And perhaps seeing is equated with experience?
There are no random fantasies, mass or individual. If you bring into words something you don’t know, haven’t you created an article of knowledge? Speaking means existing, yet they are so different. Sometimes I want to be a therapist, relieve people of their terrible burdens. So you think it happened, but it turned out differently, and you fucking choked on it.

There is something, always something, never nothing. There is a barrier I need to step through, this anterior film that prevents range and multiplication, a calcified relic that still has the power to summon panic, anger, illness and sadness. A concubine, I’ve harboured and eaten whole, rough skin and stems. My teeth shut tight together, and I am unsuccessfully pushing back an inflating anger. Tonight I feel so defeated, so hopeless. The apogee of my personality? Or a smart and unkind aphorism.

Occasionally the feint scent of piss is comforting. In bed here, so close to the bathroom, I can detect a vaguely acrid smell of ammonia, Edmund’s ammonia, a putrescence similar to men’s public toilets. His body too is humming with odours. I find my own body’s smells both repellent and comforting. Like the hair smell on my pillow that I am sometimes reluctant to wash away. Scent is a way of identifying ourselves historically, a way of tracing back through the day to when you emerged from the shower smelling only of soap and shampoo. Now at the end of the day your hair smells of oil, your armpits smell of a good curry and your genitals smell like decay. Scent reminds and re-introduces the past: it is your personal history of olfactory awareness. Chanel no. 5 reminds me of my mother, the way I smell when I wake up reminds me of my father. The smell of dirt reminds me of animals. I hesitate here, and stare at my fingers, wondering about the harsh scent they develop during the day. After urinating Edmund lies back down on the bed, resplendent in his morning glory. I gaze across his body and wonder about the secret mechanical processes that neither of us can to see. I think about the mechanics of him shitting, and laugh suddenly.
“What?”
“I was laughing because I was imagining you on the toilet.”
“Why are you thinking of that?”
“Because it’s funny.”
“Not especially.”
“No, but it is interesting”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me think about the fear and humiliation we suffer because of our bodies. We are at the mercy of our bodies. But once you have a baby, you have such different feelings about bodies.”
“I imagine so.”
“When I had Balloon I…”
“I really don’t want to have our therapeutic relationship continued in the bedroom.”
“All relationships are therapeutic Ed, or at least you can make them function in that way.”
“You have odd ideas about the functions of therapy.”
“I just think you can live in a manner that is therapeutic to you. Even pain can be, you know, like that amazing catharsis that comes after grief. Or when you are in physical pain and afterwards you feel stronger because you lived through it. Everything can be remade in your own image. You know when you experience something awful and you need to talk or write or think it out of you? That’s therapy.”
“Stella, I really have to refer you to a colleague. I can’t keep doing this. Not only will I be deregistered if we’re caught, but I’m really uncomfortable with it. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want for us to have two relationships.”

To form opinions and ideas we have to hesitate. Hesitation and space, arbitrary marks on a page? Look into the spaces between the words, between the letters. These marks are defined by relief: positive, negative. I am defined by what takes place in parentheses. What did I believe in when I was a child? Did I hesitate or did I know? Where is instinct in childhood? There is no coherent sequence of specific memories, a narrative as such, but individual memories and feelings seem to be non-sequiturs that are vaguely symbiotic and organically linked. Sense and scramble. How can the adult brain process and analyse the events that occurred in the childish brain? Nothing about it is accurate or analytic, it is floating and disconnected. Last year: perhaps that was childhood, because no matter how much, or how meticulously I record the specific context for memories or events, it is removed. All these years prior to now are childhood because they were once known, and are now unknowable. It is as if patterns are drawn onto the brain, a gestalt, symbolic marks pressed into the folds. And it is encrypted and phrenologically arcane. Still, the idea of the brain is invented, and we are looking for physical evidence of mental occurrences. Perhaps we are still too eager, with our attributive tendances, to find ‘the brain’, the improbable locus of all humanity. Almost, we are like tissue or muscle, looking for our limbs. We are all in some way horrified by our own bodies, the gentle alembics, in a way that we are not horrified by animal bodies. Did we become obsessed with the death of Christ because his decomposure and degradation was able to articulate our corporeal horror? It is a dreamless idiocy, a corrupt and manipulative image, in love with pain and humiliation.

“I am not really superstitious but there was a thing with a crow that happened ages ago. You know…? I was at a bus stop, watching this crow try to eat a piece of chocolate you know, and it was squawking really hoarsely, squawking as if it were trying to speak. And um, the inside of its mouth was dark, but I could see further, down into its throat, which was this kind of livid red. There was something ominous about it all and I felt like I should be superstitious about it and everything, but couldn’t really allow myself. I was very superstitious…….or just paranoid maybe….when I was a child. Odd and even numbers, steps, cracks, tiles, carpet.”

“I don’t think it is unusual for children to be that way.” In our ‘therapeutic’ relationship Edmund’s voice is low and devoid of emotion. I am desperate to make him react emotionally to me, but I know he won’t allow himself, because he’s abstaining, like a married man from porn. He thinks it is the right thing to do under the circumstances, and I admire his attempts at professionalism under duress. Rather than look at me he takes notes and deep breaths. Neither of us will at any point during our hour make reference to the other relationship we have.

‘When I was a child my grandparents had a horrible painting at the end of the hall. A man, sweaty, swarthy and serious looking, with a jacket of browny yellow. Side on he is dignified, but imagine when he looks straight at you he sees through your clothes and looks at your nipples becoming erect. Walking towards him I would try not to look into his eyes, but I was unable to resist the fear it caused me, because I knew he was always watching me, in the sly half light of the darkened hallway. Sometimes I thought about him when I had gone to bed. It was always me who looked away first.’

“Did you feel sexually uneasy when you looked at the painting?”
“In a way, but it was strange, because I always knew it wasn’t real. It seems that every time we draw on an old memory, remember something, we re-experience it. Is that how you can end up being fucked up by things? Is that why I’m so angry? We re-experience the pain or anguish we initially felt, only we don’t have the initial point of reference, only the overwhelming emotional reality of the situation. Is that what you think I do?”

‘Perhaps this is something we can continue this evening?’ His voice is so cool, and I am drawn to it as it provides safety, normality and equilibrium. Tonight, tonight……something in west side story?

I know we’ll meet, and have dinner in a lovely restaurant. I won’t eat too much, but I will eat, because it is sensual, and I want him to see me putting things in my mouth, and swallowing. All the sallow and shredded skin will glow with desire. I’ll mount a mutiny, to bring him into my harbour, overthrow his power.

It is tonight. Question me, as if I was bodiless; mercurial and tyrannical. I told him that I could tell him anything, give myself to him, be his experiment. There is an uneasy tension between the definitions: doctor/patient, friends or lovers?

“Have you been thinking about those techniques we discussed last week? I really want you to try to visualise the pain you feel, really give it colour, shape, depth, dimension. Don’t think of it as an expulsion, but as a release.”

“I feel so guilty though. If I allow myself to release this pain, it is like he is gone forever.”

“Stella, sweetheart, he is gone forever.”

I can only stare at him with wonder and horror. We are in a restaurant, decadent and decked out with money and style. I have such subtle make up, to appear younger than I am, but so as not to appear a desperate old slag.

“I don’t want to talk about him now, not here while we are having dinner. It trivialises him, and I feel sick. I really do feel sick.”

“Do you need to go to the toilet or something?”

“Or something? God, I’m not a fucking constipated child.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to sound like that.”

“How is it supposed to sound when you ask someone if they feel sick because they need to shit? I’m not one of your kids.”

“I know that.”

He pays the bill and goes to the toilet. I wait outside and feel bitter and ill. Of course, we will go to his place, because mine is disgusting and inappropriate for this kind of liaison. His place is neat, clean, impersonal and well lit.

“I want to go to my place.” I know now that he will make an excuse.

“Sure.” I am surprised and nervous.

We walk to his car and drive carefully to my street. I can’t help watching him drive, and finding his ability to control such a big machine appealing. I want for him to control me in that way.

The vacuum cleaner is a ‘dirt devil’, it says on the box. And there is a tea chest: product of Ceylon. Videos and records with titles that seem arbitrary and prosaic are scattered near the television. A Red table, a shopping trolley, collected on a drunken city rampage. A ‘political’ map of the world, tattered corners, which seems to be a kind of cartographical subjectivity. A doll’s head, dirty and scarred, eyes rolled upwards. Clothes drying, evidence and remnants of enjoyment. Food, wine and tobacco, postpack all the way from little Tasmania, which is on the map, but not very politically. It is a beautiful big room, but the objects it contains are awkward and disjointed. Of course, he eyes them all with suspicion.

The first light of morning casts heat on my side of the bed. A weak syllogism. These church bells crow every morning, and there are murmurings from another kitchen of someone rummaging for food or water. It is almost winter: that seasonal menopause. I worry about my life being prosaic and unremembered. I worry about things not being the way I had hoped, as if I have made such a failure of everything. It was never meant to be like this.

Edmund is still asleep, but I am awake staring out the window until my eyes ache. I have dreamt of Balloon again. He was drowning, and I had to pull his body from a deep murky pond, to resuscitate him. His arms and sides were scraping against the stone walls of the pond and he was bleeding and limp. He wasn’t dead, but somehow there was no discernable life in his body either. There was no breathing, and I was held there in abeyance, like a soul before St Peter waiting to be judged. Balloon died in my arms a romantic watery death, with wet shining lips and a cold furze covering his head. His body was firm but malleable, as if death makes a comical putty of the human body. I screamed at him, and put my mouth to his and blew as hard as I could, pumped his chest ineffectively with my fist, the other arm supporting his body. I put my tongue inside his cold wet mouth and sucked until I was hoarse. I kissed him passionately, in the way that I had been taught by the boys at school. Long firm deep strokes in and out of the mouth with the tongue. Make sure you have some chewing gum, and make sure you don’t produce too much saliva. Lick the lips sensually, and tilt your head to the side, allow him to put his tongue inside your mouth, swish it around a couple of times, and then draw away slightly. You don’t want him to think you are a slut. Balloon’s mouth was salty and small. His tongue didn’t move, but lay inert against his teeth. Will I put myself in your hands Balloon, or will you always be in mine?

My fingers are so bitten and raw they are starting to appear deformed, or ravaged by eczema, or burnt. Yet I can’t stop myself from pulling off the skin. I have found something so satisfying in peeling fingers, as if they were very hard and erect fruits. Even now, I pause momentarily to take some skin between my teeth and pull as if it were a thread.

Is it everyone’s fortune to become a gap or to fill gaps?

These instances are movable yet static, deeply listless particles of someone’s life undone from behind. These people who stayed in the same place, who grew their hair long and forgot to wash.

I woke feeling caroused and jellied, shaking and barely awake. This stinking place is wretched. I wanted to cry when I woke up because I remembered being so cruelly exposed. A humiliated anchorite. I woke up panting, startled and hot. Today it seemed so funny to me, the way people want each other, so arbitrary to desire itself. It is perhaps a symbolic sating of the wrought senses, the engorged brain and inflamed face. It cheated on me, gave me a feeling that can’t be transformed, or eradicated by my willingness for it to change me. The agonizing alembics of irresponsible desire: tied me in knots, this solipsistic movement; a revolution in ideology. As old as molecules, the gravel of genes, there was no time before I met Ed.

Concern eats into every person, and brings to life dead objects. Significance, born of concern, places itself, often inappropriately, between objects and subjects. Uncomfortable conjunction. There is no easing it away, like soaking the bandage, hard with dried blood and scab off a knee. It clings keenly, and for dear (dear) life, significantly, while you reassess the significance of the significant item. The most significant person is the/your/my self. I bear the weight of the world on top of me, I understand its sickening and resurgence, the uncanny infarctions. Every day I stuff everything into my mouth, and then I excrete the world, whole and in agony.

You have to understand that the world can only happen in fragments, because really it is unspeakable, unthinkable, unknowable. To exist you have to scrape some significance for yourself, make yourself a private thing, get all dolled up, go out on the town and make a life that is explainable. It’s desperate, a corollary or perhaps consequence of fear, of aging and dying. I’m fucking terrified, I want someone to save me, immortalise me, and that is the reason to write; you give in to posterity and fear. There is no need to be brave.

There was a car, still in the middle of the road, no one seemed attached to it, doors closed, engine off. On the bus, every day, I go to put my foot on a shelf beside me that I know isn’t there. Today I looked down, despairingly, and said, I know you’re not there. Those endless repetitions, the ultimate check, where you think you know for sure, but have to go back, in case you were in fact wrong. Does it come from the feeling that you are stupid, I am stupid, and unable to remember and understand? I can point at those repetitions, that can span a life time and form a humiliating matrix, and say there it is, that is eternity, self perpetuated eternity. But perhaps life is just sad, and knowledge is saddest.
Balloon comes back to me, a late night chimera. I lie in the sweat of sheets, the ripple that has occurred because I can’t keep still.

Bitten, swollen and mauve. To calm that vertiginous feeling I went to the roof and let the sky hail on my face. As soon as something is considered or thought of, it is domesticated, made tame, given a name, demarcated.

Distillation. I must talk about a dream I had last night. I walked into a room that was art somehow. The floors and walls were made of a wild green but transparent rippling rubber, that looked vaguely like guts. As I stepped on it, it quivered and bulged, gave way beneath my shoes, and I sank slightly but bounced back with each step. There were paths in the room, and I tried to get through the room, but was halted by the arresting sight of tiny figures. Not dolls, but representations of people, somehow made of eggshell but reworked into human features. They were all broken though, just pieces of arms and legs, faces with the back of the head missing. And really sad faces. I picked up a few faces and took them with me, knowing I shouldn’t, but they were so fragile and beautiful. I had walked up a large hill, in the sun and heat to get to this place.

There is that morbid slippage that makes sex so revolting and so comforting. As that benevolent and lambent sheen falls over you and you are coloured, skin coloured by what you want. It is morbid because time stops you still, and stolen you are. Because it is an entry into the world.

A crazy reticulum, a taut beginning.

Using arbitrary terms to produce/create something, you have no real relationship to the thing produced. Being fed other people’s shit and neuroses. Illness as cure.

Tonight I saw the most beautiful sunset. I stared straight into the sun as it eased itself below my eye. It was tempestuous but so sad, so sad and quiet. Everything paused, and for just a moment I felt the most impossible serene calm, like I was lying, supine, waiting for the sun to eat me. Tonight the sun was an eternity, and it was breathing. I wanted to cry, I wanted everything to run down my face. But I couldn’t, because that lack of tears was beyond speechlessness.

The discomfort of wanting someone who doesn’t really exist.

Set alight, I’ve been in so many dark rooms, sat still. Never really wanted feet, just wanted my parents to put me to bed softly. I will be children again, oily and bent. If I keep going, it has to get better, if I give up, then I have given up.

But I feel hopelessly dirty and trawled, the physical discomfort that seems only to be eased by sleep. Film of dirt over my skin.

Just as poignantly and pungently as she had arrived, she departed, leaving, amongst other things, the poison bearer’s fumes, and the pugilist’s mark. Thick masks of airy sadness made the air hot, and gelid men, were worn into their clothes with sartorial wit. But she had left forever, and the fever hadn’t ceased for weeks, just wavered around public places. You might think of Buffy, or Dana Scully, but she was something other than that. Because she was not beautiful, or pretty or handsome, and because her eyes stung when she turned them on you, she charged every person she encountered with discomfort and self consciousness. Not only was she excessively built, but she consumed as if she meant to consume the world, and every person in it. Passionately she’d consume food, alcohol, cigarettes, books, music, films, art, drugs and conversations. She was the nightmare and the precious fantasy of every man in the town, because she was mother and seductress, she was huge and welcoming and harsh and terse. Deep in the matt of her pubic hair, was a richly putrid scent that was both alluring and utterly repellent. Tropical, Amazonian and sweet lipped, giantess Lulu, Lucy or Lola (depending on when and where you met her) swayed through days with the gravity and grace of a tragic Victorian, yet there was nothing at all Victorian about her manner. In the days before she left, she bore everyone around her, they swung off her, tried to chew on her, sucked her hair and nipples, and begged to be the one allowed to go with her into her future, which was cut dramatically short when she stepped out in front of a car and was seriously injured and confined to a wheelchair. It was a future of sorts, but not the one that the glistening Barbarella had sought. Her breasts wilted and she cried bitterly about the murderous rage she felt for her deflated life.

She went to Pol - champion of the underprivileged - worn and grey. And Pol loved her like a baby, despite the fact that she would never grow, change or progress in the way Pol hoped everyone could. Her real life was cut short, and all she had now was a dreamy stasis. Pol, Lo and Frankie, the defective trifecta, lived comfortably within each other’s ear shot in a comfortable suburban bunker. Their house felt safe, with its vulnerable and tough occupants guarding all the entrances. It was a veritable fortress that offered protection and retreat from the world.

As I climbed the dipped and worn stairs, I heard Frankie cry out. “Frankie?” I found him wedged into a chair beside a mirror. “What is it?” Frankie turned his streaming face towards me, eyes like swollen arseholes, and opened his mouth to cry. “Love” he replied casually, as if I should know what it was. “Love, Stella, I can’t cope with it anymore. All the pain in the world can’t be fixed by love. I can’t ever be made right with love can I? Cos there’s no love that can fix me right up.”
“Frankie, you know that Pol and Lo and I love you so much.”
“Lo’s my sister, you don’t love anyone, not even Balloon, and Pol won’t fuck me because I am ugly.”
“That isn’t true Frank.”
“Which part isn’t true? The part about you not loving anyone? ‘Cos the rest of it’s true for sure.”
“We all love you. Pol loves you enormously. She really does.”
“She won’t fuck me. We did it once, but she won’t do it again.”
“You did it once?”
“When I wasn’t as ugly. She let me play with her tits, and lick her and stick it in until…”
“Ok. I don’t need to hear about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a private thing that adults do.”
“You don’t think I’m an adult?”
“Of course you are.”
“So why can’t I talk about it?”
“It isn’t appropriate to discuss it.”
Frankie started crying again. Big ugly wailing, punctuated with funereal moans.
“Fuck you….fuck you. You’re a big old bitch, Stella. You don’t care. All you care about is fucking and yourself and Edmund, who doesn’t even love you. You didn’t care about Balloon, you fucking bitch, you didn’t love him. You were glad when he died. I wasn’t. He was my best friend, and you fucking killed him, because he wasn’t right. Like me, he wasn’t right.”
My face prickled with heat and a rash bloomed on my chest and spread upwards to my neck and face. I felt Pol behind me, seize my shoulder as it collapsed into my chest. She held me up as grief poured down my face, leaked out of me. And behind her was Lo, who had hauled herself out of her wheelchair and dragged herself up the stairs. She was resting behind Pol because her arms were hot and aching from exertion.

Many years ago Lo would disappear for months on end, ‘go on tour’ as she called it, which meant she was travelling the country and performing in strip clubs in her exotic manner. She never stopped believing that her burlesque art was beautifully crafted and poetic. I saw her strip on many occasions, and it was incredible. The intensity with which she gave herself to the audience, the ethereal facial expressions she pulled to enhance the drama, served to make her a goddess of nudity. Shining Lo in the throes of a dance would have the audience enraptured, the men became quixotic and gallant in her presence, each one straining to be her suitor. She never seemed especially interested in men though, only in Frankie, Balloon and her work. She worked desperately to conceal what she did from Frankie and Balloon, yet worked incessantly to increase the respectability of her art. “It is art, I do it artfully, I do it with passion and precision. I don’t just take my clothes off, I am a performing body, and I provoke emotional responses the way any other art form does.” When she was in her early 30’s, Lo consented to an affair with a lonely bar manager who artfully seduced her by suggesting she go to a college for performing arts. “You are so right Lo, it is a beautiful and old art form that is never adequately recognised for what it is.” On the nights when Lo performed in his bar though, Steve would avert his eyes, or find reasons to leave early, because he hated the idea of other men looking at beautiful Lo’s writhing performance. He believed in art and modesty in equal measures. Lo asked him why he never watched, and he broke down and admitted that he found it cheap and slutty, and that he was jealous of the other men looking at the body he thought should be private. Lo said that once someone has sexualised you, made you their object of their desire, they can never see you as fully human again, because to be desired is somehow ignoble and disgusting. Steve felt that the desire of other men was encroaching upon their relationship, cheapening and weakening it. “But you are the only person I give myself to darling” she’d implore when he cried and raged. When their relationship ended, she insisted that it was because he was many years younger than her. “He was such a pup, had no understanding of his own sexual fallibility” she’d insist. “Christ, if he wanted a little church bred girl to screw, what was he doing with me? I’ll always be a loose woman, a tart with a heart, but soft to the touch all the same”.

And now I’ve known Lo for all this time, and she has never quite reached the state of bliss she has aspired to. She will always extol the virtues of sexual and corporeal liberation, despite not really being sure of what that means to her, and continue to coach her harem of dark eyed virgins in the feminine wiles and the art of strip tease. “You must tease them, mercilessly, and make then feel as if it will never end, as if they must get down and kiss your feet before you will reveal another inch of flesh. You must learn to find yourself sexy, no matter what size or shape you are. It is that you are a woman that makes you sexy. You are beautiful and free, not sleazy and cheap.”

When I was a child, my mother’s father lived with us. For the most part, at home in the quiet damp, he was miserable, bellicose, a fiery brethren prone to wheezing and coughing fits. He’d sit in front of the tv all evening with my father, his eyes smarting and keening at all the tits on display. “Give me a go of her and I’d be up to me nuts in guts”, he’d slur. I’d sidle into the room, and he would pull me to him and sit me on his lap, force my legs apart with bony knee and bounce me up and down. “You’re my girl” he’d croon, while I started to feel excited by the motion of his legs and the scent of beer on his breath. I’d kiss his rough cheek and he’d bring his mouth around to meet mine “my sweet baby, my precious little princess” he’d breathe into my mouth and slide his hand up my leg. I would slide off just as I knew my mother would enter the room, and run upstairs to my room and furiously masturbate until I came, shuddering and sweating.

Recently I was thinking about the immense pain of loving and caring for people. I thought about my grandfather, and the photos of him that I kept beside my bed when I was about 12. I imagined him as a brave and emotionally damaged war hero. It wasn’t until I was 21 that my mother told me that he didn’t go to war anyway. I don’t know why. I went to the cemetery to see him but didn’t find his grave. I was in love with him as if there were two of him; the smooth faced war hero, who would have rescued me from the sleazy old cunt in the sitting room.

We met today, unceremoniously, and humiliatingly, he gently suggested that I have aged considerably during the eight years we haven’t seen each other, and so I wrote to Pol;

Today I feel really sad, because I missed a connection, something I had built up for 8 years, and it was wrong. I saw him, and he saw me, and it was awful Pol, I could have died. There is so much past there, a dam of emotion, for me…..at least for me. And then that unknowing of love, and that agony of wondering and not wanting to assume. You cling to the vestiges, to what imprints have been left, whatever inconsequential pieces have been delivered personally to you. I am so sad, so full of regret. I have done this to myself so many times, and so last night I dreamt of them all, a group of similar and different men, all utterly vulnerable to me, all different and very unavailable to me. I’m chilled with possibility, framed when I speak, and eager. How do you become responsible, and why do I feel so fucking hard, like I have an overabundance of feeling, like I need to be deeply affected by every thing?

It was dramatically hot. As I walked home, hot dust blew up my skirt and scratched my legs. Coming around a corner I fell, onto my knees on the bitumen, ungracefully twisted. All the air exited my lungs in a strained exhaust of sickly breath, and I felt that falling-induced nausea, where your organs turn into soft beads, livid and racing, and sweat trickles between your cheeks to give your underpants a bloom of a stain. Plumes of flies follow every movement of your body, drink your bacterial sweat, and settle on your skin as if you are already dead.

I found Balloon in the garden, (or what I called the garden but was actually a square of dirt and dead grass), supine, with arms spread and flies crouching around his nose and mouth. He was naked and asleep, a silvery trail of semen creeping up his stomach and falling over his side, his long brown body stretched from garbage bin to fence. Discarded beside him was a magazine, pornographic. On the page that lay open was ‘Velvet Vanessa’, with the soft smooth velvet vagina. I could imagine Balloon’s eyes, bugging out at the size of her breasts, with aureole and nipples the size of large biscuits.

It is a terrible banishment from life. It is a negative knowing, an ersatz for life. Recently I have thought about the meaning and mechanism of death. How can you not be curious about the space, existence or origin of it? I am besotted, the idea of it runs my head into the wall, and I am constantly fighting off its permission and regard, decency and reality. It is one of the only certainties. And so many people have died, are dead, no longer exist as anything but an idea. They have become negative space, only thought space. This makes my life feel like a dirty ugly wasteland where everything becomes refuse, because I can not refuse inevitability. It is unspeakable, unknowable and unexperienced, but it is our main theme of obsession, the lowest common denominator that makes everyone the same. How many times have I asked Edmund what it feels like to die? He has seen it and felt nothing but surprise. How are we supposed to live with the knowledge that we will die?

Urine scented sweat. I build a fortress to buttress me. If everything is a series of moments, and regret is the effect of not taking the other path, or not making the other decision, then I am paralysed by the power of this assertion, because it is always so linear and sequential. Every moment is contingent on the last, alive with plangent moments, so your life is built, and it seems irrelevant to think about long past moments. The proliferation of choices makes everyone impossible, but so corporeally congruous.

I dreamt of porn, of watching porn with other people, but showing the wrong thing continually. I meant to show something funny and tame, but showed a tape of violence and bestiality; people in animal masks with circular blades. I was admitting to enjoying this tape. It was the shock of sex and violence, explicit and in repulsive permutations that embarrassed me. Is revelation the end of desire? Losing something you have never had hold of, a strange fragility in the way you hold time, desire, real time in a gestalt of nights and days that are never adequately punctuated. It is mystery and lack that enable desire, a contradiction, that desire means you want to know or possess something, and when it is possessed it is no longer the same object, it can no longer be the same desired thing. The reward is always empty, eventually, extinguished, exsanguinated. An experiment in perpetual desire that never comes close but is always on the edge of orgasm, a self-perpetuating and motor-driven condition. That edge; puberty, death, health, comfort, and always the desire for the almost-state that can eventually be relinquished. Pleasure seems to arise from the discomfort and enormity of desire. I feel like a machine sometimes, wet and wired, electric and mutable, poisoned and illuminated by everything that passes through me. Everyone comes alive through knowing, people live for knowing, finding out, and suspense.

I want for you to be able to understand everything, and to be complicit in this story. I want to reveal these things to you slowly, and allow you to be drawn in. At the same time, I don’t want to give it all away instantly. By the end of the story, you will know whether or not you were meant to read it, and if you were, you will take on a burden of knowledge, and become part of the tale. You are, in a sense, me. You are the perfect reader, who is in a position to understand. You are only partially a real person, and the rest of you is so fragmented that it makes no sense to you. Nothing makes sense does it?

I am the subject, with a compulsion to tell, explain, divulge. The urge to tell is like a constant erection, and I am straining against it, trying to pace myself. I’m in a dark room with a fan pointed at me, because this process makes me sweat and heave.

We moved into a little red brick house in a suburb north of the city. It is a small but dense city, richly populated and quietly fickle. The house was dark and the walls were blistered with old paint but the carpet was new and felty soft. We each had bedrooms, one beside the other, and a huge garden full of dandelions and assorted weeds. Sometimes we’d spend the day gardening together, but neither of us knew anything much about plants, so the garden eventually looked barren and sore. Next door was another mother and son, who lived in their private ghetto. Balloon used to talk to Pete, the child, who had dentures at the age of twelve. Pete and his mother had been in a car accident, she was drunk, and Pete’s face had shattered so badly all they could do in the end was remove the shards of tooth from his head and start again. He had a beautiful shining set of teeth that looked slightly too big. “He’ll grow into them” I heard his mother say on a few occasions. Whilst playing with Balloon, he’d take his teeth out, so he could concentrate better, and leave them in the dirt amongst the tiny trucks and cars. His mother, Ellen, would start to breathe heavily and work herself up into a furious moan about finding his teeth. But it was always her who retrieved the teeth from the dirt and lovingly cleaned them and set them in denture solution to rest.

The step up to the stage is worn by the sweating feet of a thousand vaudeville girls and burlesque ladies. Lo and Bess step up to the stage and into the spot light, with stuffed chests and hidden veins. Each night, a tribute to strip tease is made by some front row Joe, who spills it all out onto the stage and at the bar, rupturing pockets and testicles, awry. The bar is lacquered smooth with years of sticky alcohol, and pock marked, like acne scars, by cigars and cigarettes, grease stained by burgers and chips. On any seat you choose to sit on, there are stains in the ancient garishly patterned velvetine. The chairs were covered cheaply in the 1956 refurbishment. Now they are considered ‘originals’, and contain an organic history, a love taxonomy, an inventory of seminal secretions. The staff joke at female customer’s expense, “don’t get pregnant in the love chair, love.” But still, it is a beautiful cove of ill repute, where men can be wild animals and women can be flies.

Lo and behold, Lo and Bess, tall and painted, smiling chimeras, undulating ladies, step onto the stage, Lo behind Bess. Lo smiles triumphantly, while Bess sniffs the air for premature ejaculations from the front rows and she is always furious. Strange large Lo, who is also furious, but cunning and circuitous, fashioned after her dear mother, shaped by adventure, arrives ahead of time and sings to her customers as they eagerly undress her. Joe, who has been coming to see her perform every weekend for a year and a half, has begged Lo to run away with him, get married, have ugly babies and die old and together. Lo laughs and says sure, squints at his moustache, revolted by the greasiness of his skin and the softness of his erection. Long Lola, were you trying to say something to me with the flailing hands, create a particular intimacy?

Pol thinks of Frankie as a small stone, smoothed and pressed privately into her palm, and she sweats around it, makes it slippery. From behind they look like mother and son, Pol is so tall, with long long straight hair, and Frankie short and rounded, always distracted, slightly hunched. Frankie asks Pol frequently if she is going to always take care of him, because now that he has her, he has forgotten about the ‘independent living’ program, and the classes on personal hygiene and appropriate social behaviours. He’s never been drunk, never been laid, never left the city and never slid his hand inside someone to see if it will fit. He has small browned hands.
“Frankie you can look after yourself, you know that.” But Frankie is not hesitant in telling her that he is in love with her and wants to be with her.

A single bed, and him there, on his insidiously drunken maiden voyage. Too subtle to think, the stiff air lies around him, slips away like a slippery eel-faced friend to leave him breathless and dying. This is the gauge and the thermometer; the twittering mass of twitching, that imparts knowledge and adulthood in the most cryptic and sequestered way. There he beats beside Pol, erratic little heart and bursting erection. Pol is the teller, he’s the listener, and he pushes his hands and face between her legs. She helps him to take his pants off, and smiles when she sees the bald faced genitals, small but straining, and takes it all in a bunch in her mouth, and feels the slimy secretions. He cries as if scared, and he is scared, because this could be a first and last, a glimpse of what most adults do with frequency and ardour at some point in their lives.

Frankie’s eyes are brown like cow’s eyes. Ears look dried out, leathery, rigid. Nose is small and rounded, mouth large with small jagged teeth. Always a silver streak of misplaced saliva on chin. Hair coarse and chin length. Small body with ill fitting clothes.

He lovingly brought down her clothes from the line, stiffened by heat and wind, and folded them into squares for her to collect when she needed them.

What happens when I come home at night? I want to talk about you, think about you, write you into my life. I wipe my eyes and the eyeliner rubs across my cheek. But that isn’t something you have space to be concerned about when you are roping yourself into a story. I come home to you, an absence, and I feel bloated, stuffed into my dress. Today it is a polyester dress that makes me sweat and stink, but I persevere with it because I have been told my tits look ‘great’ in it. How can tits be great? They are ridiculous formations. I have been told that ‘over-identification’ can occur when you feel that someone really understands you. That extraordinary intimacy shakes me, and we talk as if trying to subdue deep priapism in each other. I have always been erect, engorged with blood, red and hostile, blistering with the desire for an intimacy that will transcend my experience and anger. You look for familiarity and home and blow jobs with me, and it excites you not to find them, but to find a deeply selfish un-nurturing un-caring wreck. When Balloon was small I read to him the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. He cried when Sadako died, and from then on built symbolic cranes, as homage to Sadako’s suffering. He built private structures in his room, in the garden, with food and kitchen utensils. He bottled worms and flies, all for Sadako, so she could know (albeit posthumously) that he cared enough to try to capture and recreate the world. I told him that death means no more hearing or seeing, that it is the end of something and the beginning of nothing. He said that nothing ever really dies, but that all things are transformed, made good or ungood. I am not a spiritual person, and Balloon did not believe in endings, but in transcendence and continuation. Balloon was a creationist, an alchemical theologian. He was epic in proportion and reputation, and exhausted by life and its mutations. Mutation into what? He asked why I had such an aversion to creating beauty; “Mum, why do you try to make everything nasty, and not make anything beautiful?”

“It’s me…. Stella…”
“You can’t call me this late”.
“Why not, are you busy? Were you asleep? Are you with someone?”
“No”.
“What?”
“What…….it is really late, it’s 3.00am. I was asleep. Why are you awake?”
“Aren’t you pleased to hear my voice?”
“I was asleep”.
“So you’re pissed off that I called”.
“No, just surprised.”
“Surprised? Who else would be calling you at this time?”
“Not surprised that it was you, just surprised that the phone rang at all. Have you had a bad dream? I can come over if you like?”
“No, I’m just a bit drunk”.
“Oh Stella. I love you. You have to stop doing this”.
“Really? Fuck it, I can’t. Look what your therapy did for me, just fucked me up even more.”
“I don’t really want to talk about this now”.
“Everything has to be on your terms doesn’t it? Nothing is ever about me or how I feel”.
“We met because you felt”.
“Don’t be so bloody facetious.”
“I’m sorry, I’m tired, I have to work in the morning. I’m pissed off you called and woke me up. But it’s ok. I am pleased to hear your voice, and I want to know when I’ll see you.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
I have the feeling that I should cut myself off from Edmund.

"nothing you confess, could make me love you less..."

2005-12-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

I saw one of those World Wildlife Fund ads last night, you know, the one with the song 'I'll stand by you'. They always make me a bit teary. Now I am sitting here and my face is kind of leaky, and I keep sniffing, and I am paranoid that ** thinks I am crying. Oh god, perhaps I am crying and I haven't realised. I don't think I have ever considered that - crying without realising you are doing it.

Years ago, after I saw The Deer Hunter, I woke up one morning and I was crying. I had been dreaming about Russian Roulette and Vietnam. It was crying fuelled by terrible sadness and fear, and I had been crying in my sleep. I felt horribly sad for the rest of the day.

“There’s nothing I won’t say”

Often I think about why people enjoy watching crime, and the vicarious pleasures we indulge in. When I was reading about detective fiction a few years ago, an article talked about the way different fictional narratives treat homicide. There is such a monumental contrast between the Angela Lansbury (Murder She Wrote)/Agatha Christie homicides and the CSI/Law and Order homicide. How do we understand the quaint murder differently to the visceral putrefying murder? Corpses were clean and unbroken, now tv corpses are in disgusting disarray. Funny as well, the fascination with forensics. Is it just the word forensic that appeals, or is it fuelled by the arcane world of crime and corpses? Do most people think of death and rape when they hear the word?

AC and I talked about these two things; being genuinely bi-lingual, and tone deafness. The capacities and incapacities of the brain are creepy. It makes me wonder if our brains can be completely different from each other. And yet we are always looking for these universal signs of similarity. I looked at a book today about body language, complete with funny photos of people with 80’s hair. The whole thing was about being able to read people through the body (does feminism have a field day???), and I started thinking about our desire to transfer language to things that are non-linguistic, and how strong our urge for interpretation is. So, do these things actually make any sense? When we look for meaning, perhaps our desire to find it eclipses our ability to rationally or adequately interpret or understand.

When you look for these similarities you suddenly feel as if the entire world can perhaps make sense, and that you can make sense of yourself.

And tone deafness. And the fact that we consider things as/in absolutes. AC talked about 'amusia': the inability to perceive music as music. I imagine hearing music as a clump of sounds, and I wonder if I would go mad. Sound eh? That World Wildlife Fund ad, I wonder if I would really feel if not for the music?

A week or so ago, I told ** a great deal of stuff I later regretted. And I think I regretted it because those kinds of confessions situate you very particularly in other people’s minds. It is that shocking moment of disclosure that unnerves me, that "fuck, did I just say that?" feeling.... and......I don't fucking know. I probably need to chill out. But still, as I said it all, my voice wavered, and I wondered if I was about to cry.

The Amazonian Healers - part of a story

2005-12-13T21:04:00.000-08:00

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, ALIEN?

1. Philanthropy

Amazon – strong, masculine, missing one breast, the one that they removed to be able to use a bow and arrow.

My top lip was heavy today, pressing down onto my teeth, like pelt over bone. Yet it looked swollen, and puffed like a cold bird’s breast. The sweet green and soft peas that fell (accidentally) into my lap as they were shelled smelled of the foul, fouled ground they had dropped onto. We never seemed to bother picking them off the vine, to have fresh and unspoiled, but wait until they were heavy and dazed, and awaiting their imminent meeting with the chicken shit that is unartfully scattered on the ground. When I touched them, and held them between my fingers, I didn’t know how to touch them, as if touch is too solid an implement to be handling them with, too impermeable, and too trembley. But they will be eaten, and given the benefit of the doubt, until we suffer from late night nausea and flatulance and know that they were contaminated.

There are times when we don’t even bother shelling the peas, and instead make a giant pea soup, or stew, or casserole, or whatever word you think is the appropriate word. Did you know that peas give milk, like most living things in the world? Most things either give it willingly or have it grudgingly extracted from them, like oats and rice. Everything goes through a process to reach its full potential. The world is rich and creamy like that, and full of potential.

Christ, as I am sitting here with this laptop perched on my legs, I feel sick. I have nausea, as if writing this is causing me illness. I have taken some anti-nausea pills, but is suddenly comes on, and I want to vomit forth into the room. It is as if everything can make you sick, and this is like some kind of symbolic sickness. Perhaps that’s what nausea is? A symbolic sickness. My eyes water and I feel like clutching my poor gut, despite knowing that it will make no difference. And that is the sad thing about nausea. It is symbolic, untouchable and intangible. That’s it, it is like the best and the worst things/feelings, intangible but horrifically powerful. I feel hunched over, and as if my whole body is bloated by the presence of the nausea. I am bilious, swilling with bile bilge. I wish I could expel it. So vomit is an expulsion, and it is funny, because we are generally kind of fascinated by it as a concept. Tonight Anna told me about a drummer in a band who played so furiously and intensely that he threw up from exhaustion. Jesus that’s extreme. We see vomit as a sick reaction to something, but perhaps it isn’t. And we have such obsessions and fascinations with what stays inside and what doesn’t. If it wasn’t usual to shit every day, we’d probably find that even more horrifying than we already do.

And suddenly I noticed that she had her leg up on the bench, and waist height, cocked like a dog, as if about to piss on the food. “ya muthafuckas” she screamed.

There are inky nights of eyeless heat, where every human being hangs with a topical, tropical sweat so thick and viscous it is practically a caul of mucous. We sit, limpid in the heat, with a pallor of rough verdigris green, and feet and heads swollen. You keel over in this weather, and I am only saying this now because it is cold and I can’t feel the heat, only remember it in its most bloated and corporeal form. In this heat everyone is ugly. Upon meeting in the street or the shop, every person’s touch is lubricated with a sickly trickle down the spine and a stickiness in the handshake. There is no need for make up, because it slides off and pools in the ravines of the face. I have seen so many women in heat, looking mad and dirty, sick from floral synthetic dresses and hot nylon stockings. Sensible people stopped wearing white, because they knew that far from being innocently clear and crusty, their sweat was in fact yellow, and stainworthy. A great deal of bleach is purchased in the heat, and people talk quite openly about the effects of sweat on clothes, bed sheets, car seats, books, computers and shoes. Think of all the things you touch in a day, and imagine if you stained and salted them all.

Florid temper/tempering the heat.

Dense and personal ruminations.

There was a point where I had to stop asking what they would do, because they couldn’t know, so blinded and incensed they were by the gravity of their pain. But try vomiting for three days straight I say, and then you’ll understand pain in its most human incarnation.

Idea of physical being so overly physical, and revolting, and having such an impact on objects, that you just exist spiritually. Transcending physicality. Old metaphysical idea. Can you claim to exist only philosophically, and have no physical form? You can’t prove to me that it isn’t possible.

There was that time you thrust the garden hose down your throat because you wanted to cleanse yourself of the stinging bile. It was the ultimate act of self preservation, yet at the time I thought you were deranged.

Hospital illness. The sheets become hard with liquid before they are changed, and the odour of wounded human bodies is sweet and pungent. Malformed and damaged bodies lie side by side, and I feel castrated by the gravity of my own injuries. Injurious when my favourite little nurse Barbara comes to change the soaked dressings. Bless her, because she doesn’t gag, but smilingly and lovingly tends to these open parts with wet cotton wool held between tweezers. She is efficient, and spends no more time with me than necessary, but I think I am in love with her because she is the only woman I have see for weeks beside my mother. Young and single, Barbara sometimes smells faintly of apricot sweat. Older women’s sweat tends to be tomato or chicken scented. But Barbara is young enough to still smell like fruit. And then I wonder if the odour is in fact day old semen, and then I’m jealous and want to ask her, in the most proprietorial of manner’s if she is seeing anyone at the moment.
“So, jyahave a boyfriend?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Obviously I do or I wouldn’t have bothered asking.”
“Well Mr Grumpy, I’m not going to tell you until you give me one of those lovely smiles of yours.”
“No need to fucking patronize me, I’m sick, not invalid.”
“What’s that love?”
Suddenly, with both my hands I pull back my lips, pull them out and too the side to reveal teeth right up to their roots, and obscenely red gums. I want her to say that the colour my gums remind her of erect penis, and that she would love to see mine. But then, to her I am an impotent man; I can’t work, I can’t sleep, I can’t shit, I can’t work, and I certainly can’t fuck.
“Funny kind of smile that is!”
“A special one I invented for you.”

Like the suck of a drain/plug hole.

I don’t feel the heat any more, because it isn’t relevant to me, and although it seems like a somewhat abstract cliché, it is also true. If you spend so much time vomiting, you must at some point transcend the physical, and exist only spiritually.

You were considerably more violent than I had expected.

Lipids – fats, greasy feeling, soluble in alcohol but not water. Lipo – fat. Lipoid – fatty. Lipochrome – natural pigment containing a lipid, esp the pigments of butterfat.

Rural guttural roars and porcine whines. Always salty, always sultry. Whenever I had to suck your whimpering mouth, you were salted and puckered, as if you had spent your (I know) misspent youth crying and whinnying. What are the limitations of your self esteem young man?

I could always hear the faint puling from your tent, as you half slept, half wept with fright and melancholy. One day you will remember who I was, who came to you with a bowl of water for you to sip from and another for me to bathe your fevered brow.

Inky night, sunken eyes, verdigris pallor, eyeless heat. Topical, tropical sweat. Amazonian faith healers, women and nurses, who take on all the nausea in the world, who suck people’s pain and feel ill. Always vomiting.

A dozen chinks in the armour. Nausea, the world gives me nausea. Gutter, guttering.

Torrid times. They were torrid times, before the invention of Pramin. Anti-fouling – like a dose/drink of anti-fouling.

Degeneracy, degenerative illnesses. The world is full of nausea. Standing on an overpass, desperately wanting to throw rocks at the cars. A toothy monster.

I’m not upset or crying, I’m sick, I’m nauseus. I think you have always wanted me beside you when you vomited.

People vomit as an expression, and artistically. Doused in vomit. Vomit to put out a fire, to cure a skin condition, as a substitute for crying.

Acne lacunae – the lacunae left by acne’s greasy ravages.

Homage to my favourite museum. All that time spent in there, feeling like a wild colonial boy.

All the things that can cause nausea. Smell, blocked ears, horrible sights. Is nausea about an assault on the senses?

Tits as emblems, assets or totems.

Sometimes I am afraid of solid forms, as if committing to something solid would be like committing to the world and its strictures.

2. Boisse: the Hollow of the Hand

I have tried to give up smoking on five occasions with varying degrees of success or lack of. And yet I love those plump grey plumes of smoke now more than I did when I was a younger man of fat-thickened skin and healthy lungs. I love smoke now because I am slow and quiet, measured but not feeble. I am languid not indolent.

I often dream of gently swimming sturgeon, heavy and slow, weighted with roe. When Janice comes to wake me in the morning I am still floating just below the surface of the water, grasping at my own body, which is as flabby and translucent as a luminous jellyfish. The weight of the air and the smell of Janice’s unwashed hair draw me from the water into the room, and I’m still stertorous and warm as we kiss passionately, tongues interlocked and mouths leaking onto the sheets. You would not expect a passionate exchange between a man of 56 and a woman of 23, but there we are, five minutes after I awaken, thrusting deep inside her, wracking myself while she sits astride my opulent, taurine form. There is so much pleasure in taking the body of a young woman beneath yours, and feeling the sweet sponge of her insides mould to your outsides. This has been happening for six ecstatic years, and this fleshy well of honey is still overflowing, her rosy openings flowering profusely.

I was a lonely child, one bereft of childish charm and an upturned cherubic face with which to beguile those taller than me. Instead, I looked down, to locate my feet with my eyes, which were weak and one was lazy. The optometrist said; aha, he has a lazy eye, and I wondered if I had done something wrong, if I had made it lazy by being a lazy person. My mother said; what do we do about that then? The optometrist sternly said; well he’ll have to do exercises…..you will do them won’t you young man. I solemnly agreed that I would, and felt myself enter into an intractable contract with this man who guffawed before my mother with such jocularity…or should I say ocularity? I was dizzy with nerves, stygian with the effort of concentration and exhausted from holding my breath as the optometrist stared romantically into my eyes.

A lazier child than I would have said bugger the exercises, but diligently, my eyes darted around a page of random symbols, desperately seeking sense and patterns. I thought that finding the patterns would make me unlazy, would make me sensible, and that some secret would be unlocked for me. No such thing was ever conveyed to me by anyone else, but I felt my intuitive nature grasp onto this idea as if it were life itself. The search for patterns became a superstitious (and supercilious) search for meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. I became concerned with poverty, cruelty and destruction because they seemed so meaningless, and so in my 20s I became an avid campaigner for the rights of those I did not perceive as having rights. But this morally instilled l
‘laziness’ persisted until I was obsessed with activity, and felt guilty when I slept. Eventually I had to move back in with my parents, because I was exhausted and spent, and they asked me why I refused to sleep enough. I told them that I felt guilty, because it made me feel lazy, excessive and wasteful to sleep through time that could be spent Doing Good in the World. My parents looked at each other, and my mother’s mouth puckered disapprovingly, and I almost heard her say that young people are melodramatic and silly. My father asked me if I had ever considered that rather than sleeping through time, time actually stops when we are asleep and resumes when we are awake. That can’t be I told him, because we can see that time has elapsed while we have been asleep. But he said that it is possible that time stops, because time is intangible anyway, and the only ways we have to quantify it are linear, but we don’t really know anything about time. He said that thinking of time in that way is the only way he can cope with the idea of his own death. “When I cease to exist, the world ceases to exist with me”.

My feisty older sister refused braces when she was13, claiming that having a mouth full of metal would make her mouth taste bad, and boys would feel sick when they kissed her. Nevermin that her teeth stuck out in a manner more impressive than Sister Wendy’s. When she was 25 she took herself off to the orthodontist to have braces out on. A year later when she had them removed her top lip had that shortened look of people who have had braces, and her teeth looked too long.

Janice can’t wash her hair very often because her scalp aches when water hits it. So I rub warm almond oil into her head, and hold her small head between my large hands and imagine crushing it and immobilising her forever.

3. Don’t Hide Your Light Under a Bushel

The almost sexual heart massage pumping of a lifeless body, prostrate on a surgeon’s table, wrought with intractable agony. You know things are bad when the prefix you receive is ‘long term’. Do you even remember who I am, what I did for you? I knew you were an ungrateful little bastard, swinging from the ceiling beams like a savage.

Profligate, Propagate, Procreate.

weary and watery: family histrionics

2005-12-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

Had a funny conversation this morning with ** about evil grandmothers. It was funny to talk about the family to someone I don't know, and someone who doesn't know them. It all seemed/sounded rather dramatic, like some poignant suburban tale of childhood abuse and misery. It is mundane though. Those conversations I had with Ruth (am I using her name rather than initials becuase she is dead???) about my mother allowed me to reconsider the power dynamic between us. Once she came with me to see Ruth, and the look on her face was appaling and terrifying. She behaved like a fucking brick wall, and Ruth and I talked about having to accept her inability to talk about anything emotional. Reminds me of a line from a KH song; "...it's not my fault you don't love me..."

Have you ever seen yourself when you weren't expecting to? Sometimes I accidentally look in the mirror when I go into the bathroom, and I feel hurt, because I only wanted to go to the toilet, and didn't want to look at myself. There are times when I look like a greasy spectre, or where I look like I smell bad. When you are expecting to see yourself, you shape your face into something you imagine to be appealing, something you could present to other people. When I am not expecting to see myself, I realise that my face is set hard against intrusion.

some pictures

2005-12-11T19:43:00.000-08:00

here is a picture from one of my old visual diaries. And 2 pictures that are drawings on paper that have been varnished and are hanging by fishing wire at my house.

Music of the Sphincters. Renaissance Bum Pipe Organ Classics.

2005-12-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the word cervix means neck? I think it is a neck leading to an opening. I think that may be the next thing to print on a skirt, because I find it funny. Perhaps I can stop wearing the furious skirt. Perhaps I'm even over that now. Although it was very important to me at the time when I made it.

CERVIX

It is AC's birthday today, so we went out for cocktails on Saturday night. It was kind of strange. We sat around talking about vaginas and AC decided that they should have sphincters so cum can't fall out. He wants to start a lobby group: Spincters for Cunts. I was very impressed with his willingness to talk about it, because vaginas usually make him wince. It was funny talking to him and WE about vaginas, and neither of then have been near one. AC didn't even come out of one (he came out of a horse's arse - hahahaha....), he was a caesarian birth.

My mother was fucking crazy over the weekend, while ZP was away. Dad called me this morning to tell me that he'd had a shitter of a weekend with her. I felt a flicker of irritation, and wanted to say 'what the fuck do you expect me to do about it?' but also felt sad and worn down by it.

a link and some pitures

2005-12-07T19:54:00.000-08:00

this is one of my favourite books:

I Love Dick. Chris Kraus.

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/01.98/books-98-1.html

Stellarc and a sexual reverie

2005-12-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

Last night AC and I went to view Stellarc. I say view because when you are talking about someone like him, you go along expecting some kind of spectacle. Perhaps I was being an art groupie, expecting him to deliver some amaaaaaazing performance in a Carlton bookshop. It was not to be....it was quite disappointing...

I talked to KF today about wanting to have sex/not having sex/feeling asexual. She said that she wrote that she felt like having sex again and then felt embarrassed about it. This morning AH made a comment about arty people having more sex....?? (I think he was reading an article) and I asked "what's wrong with me then?" I hate feeling like not having sex is bad, and even worse, not particularly having any desire to. Sometimes I think wistfully about intimacy and romance, but very rarely about uninhibited, intense fucking.

AC and I were talking last night about national self esteem, tall poppy syndrome and aboriginal cultures. He said that perhaps Australia developed this self effacing and 'humble' culture because of the effects of aboriginal demonstrations of respect, shame, modesty. It is interesting that we don't often consider to any great degree, where our national self esteem is built. We are very bad at the art of self promotion. I was telling AC about a workshop I went to where an aboriginal guy talked about the differences between aboriginal and non aboriginal stuctures like family and community. I hate the American dream, and the disgusting and cruel individualism they promote. I like the idea of genuine community - like the aboriginal family. The guy at the workshop talked about how within aboriginal communities, if someone earns money, it is shared within the community. I am so part of this spending and ownership thing, that I am quite romanced by the idea of equitable communities. Communal. Ha ha, remember my commune idea? I still think about that...

We also talked about anti sedition. We agreed that rather than vote and complain, we should really do something. I don't know what to do or what is appropriate (or useful!). Of course, I'm always more into guerilla activities, because I'm that kinda gal. And I like the cred that comes from being naughty. Reminds me of a line in the Breakfast Club about how it feels good to be bad.

Now for a list. I've been bad with the lists recently. I don't remember the last one I wrote. It is important to keep them for posterity though. My poor little book of lists is yawning...

Things That Shit Me To Tears:

intense and unselfconscious selishness and self indulgence
middle aged women patronising younger women and assuming they are naive
middle aged second wave feminists (or those who think they are) who feel that it is their right to devalue and humiliate men, especially young men.
dim/mood/romantic lighting.
having someone's arm around me when I'm walking
bogan driving
insipid and infantilised women
disappointment

I am really dreading going to Hobart for Christmas. My mother has gone crazy again......again again again.......she's accusing dad of having affairs again. What never ceases to shock me is the deep and profound lack of respect she has for him. And in some ways also him for her. As a partner, I'm not sure how you could respect her. The only time Zo and I fight is in Hobart, around her.

So now the grandmother is in hospital to die, lying prone in a bed and looking like an old fungus. Her body is eating itself. When I look at a cigarette, I think of tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide and I wonder if I will end up with incapacitating pain, crippling me to a bed. I don't think about dignity, and the humiliation and loss of control that occurs in the process of death. For some reason I like the idea of it, as if it is the ultimate experience, or as if it is the expereince of being ultimate. I appreciate the horrible things in life. And I appreciate the idea of the slow and cruel descent towards death. Perhaps it is the idea that everything falls away from you? All these qualities that we consider to me of utmost importance, and then the body itself begins to fall away, to become disconnected and dysfunctional. I like that idea.

Philistinian Terrorists Plan an Artistic Mutiny.

2005-12-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

The anti sedition laws scare me half to death. I wonder what people value in a society. Many people in Australia must value 'safety', order, compliance, control, agreement, etc

There is a Barbara Kruger exhibition coming here soon. Jesus, I was so relieved that it wasn't being held at the NGV, because I don't want to miss it, and I feel like I ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT go in there. Zo went in there last Friday, and saw MP, and she told him about the grandmother, and he made jokes about her actually dying this time (not like all the other times when she has pretended to be dying), and it made me miss him terribly. That irreverent and foul sense of humour....oh mate!

Sultans and Sultanas

2005-12-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

I had a weird weekend. Towards the end of it I felt really sad about my life and it's expenses and deficits. EJ's birthday dinner was lovely, and I had that special friendy feeling that I get when I re-realise how much I like these people.

I'm tired and slightly crabby and I don't have anything else to say.

The Ejaculatory Theoretical Paradigm. Frankfurt School? Or more Cocktail Sausage?

2005-11-30T18:49:00.000-08:00

It is apparently 34 degrees today. Last night BS and I talked for a long time about sexual dysfunction, or at least sexual fears. I am starting to feel like I don't know how to do it any more, and I'm not sure if I even want to either. We talked about relationship sex vs casual/one night stand sex. I realised that despite having had numerous sexual partners, I have only had one with whom I enjoyed sex. Often it seems mechanical and mundane. And kind of disgusting.

Only 19 days until I have to go to Hobart. It will be a weird Christmas, and I will have to the awkward thing of going to see my grandmother who is dying, and find a way of saying goodbye. I'll look at her dying body and think about abject waste, and how humans deal with it. Sometimes I find it difficult to have an immediate emotional response. Bataille talked about the corpse as human waste. Still, like all abject products, we have twinned fascination and fear of it. Sometimes I really believe that I'm not going to die, because I'm just so fucking determined not to. How can I? The world ceases to exist without me. Strange to think about reality.....AC got very annoyed with me because I took the Hei (heigh) degger road (ha ha ha), and said that nothing provably exists beyond perception. The hermeneutic circle thing. He said that there are things we can rely on as indicators of common reality. This conversation began with Christianity, and him saying that he thinks there is a fundamental stupidity at work when people allow themselves to believe in god. I talked about SMA, and about being in Ireland. Commonality vs perception perhaps. But the urge to believe in something doesn't seem odd to me at all. We all want to have some kind of transcendental experience I think, whether it be through drugs, religion, meditation....whatever. Bodies are always a problem....there is all that corporeal presence to deal with. God, how awful! This is not turning out the way I had hoped, for today anyway.

I think I have had a serious few days of experiencing intermittent sadness. I don't know why. But today was the first day of happy. Although I think I had shitty dreams last night.

The Absent Pearl Necklace and the Present Pearl of Wisdom

2005-11-29T21:14:00.000-08:00

The world is so junkily and awkwardly full of acronyms. Sometimes they make me feel official and important, and then there are the times when you really need to say them in a very Real Estate agent/Recruitment agency way. What is with those people anyway? For god's sake, what the fuck possesses someone to become a slimy, effusive, dishonest, half-cocked cock head? I have hated these people for years. I remember getting fired from somewhere for drawing rude pictures in the training manual, and so I emailed the recruitment agency to tell them they were a bunch of greasy cunts. I really meant it too you know.

Anyway, the reason I have come back to this today, is to deliver a pearl of wisdom for me to collect and eat at a later date. I was talking to ** about relationships. It is comforting to know that someone who seems so bloody sorted out and fucking perfect in fact isn't. I was thinking about MP and me, and the fundamentals of our relationship. When everything wears off and you kind of hate each other a bit, I feel that there still needs to be a deep sense of awe for each other. Despite us no longer being together, sometimes I find drawings he did, or think of things he said, and I know that I still think he is the most amazing man I have ever met. Relationships can be so beautifully eccentric (I mean ec-centric), and subtley oblique to the main funtionings of life, and I suppose that is how they are sustainable. But I miss those incredible times when MP was the most important thing in my life, and I was speechless with love. No wonder I often feel hideously bereft and loveless these days.

So, I think what I am trying to say is that I feel like the most important things you can have in any relationship (even with your parents!) are:

a constant and pervasive awareness of the reasons those you choose to maintain the relationship.

respect that is based on really knowing the person.

knowing that if you no longer feel 'in love' with them, you still think they are the most wonderful person you have ever met. Is this unrealistic? And I think that having a passionate, tumultuous and difficult relationship is always more rewarding that a comfortable one. Hey, that's just me though...

When I was in about 3rd year uni, I became quite obsessed with the (Freudian) idea of condensation and displacement. Funny how you can find long lasting significance in seemingly simple things. Just words.

2005-11-29T16:04:00.000-08:00

These are scary times....even Malcolm Fraser thinks the Howard government are fucked. He even considered leaving the Liberal party. As crass as it sounds, last night I dreamt about living in a police state. It was terrifying, and I woke up at 4.00am, sweating and angry. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and noticed that I looked ill. Perhaps I am ill, and perhaps the government makes me ill. Have we been poisoned???? Does everyone look ill at 4.00am?

I am going to a meeting later today, and thinking about it, I have realised that I really don't like meetings. They make me feel like a dog. I am officially docile and obedient in meetings. There are always those people who are smooth and brown and good at being. Good at being? Funny to think that some people could be better at being than others....

I find it strange that when I go to sleep I am absent. The coherent 'I' is missing and I (the INcoherent I) am a simple and snoring sleeping mass in a bed. It is incredible that we are so prepared to sleep in front of other people, that we are so trusting. Do most people see it as a simple biological function? I understand it to be anti-expression of the self...a withdrawal or truncation of self. And perhaps that is why depressed people sometimes sleep a lot. There were times when I couldn't stand being present inside my own brain. I have been reading about the hypothalamus - as the core of being. It seems like an easy and false notion. Funny, the drive to discover who and WHERE we are!

You know, I don't even know what other people talk about in their blogs.

performance anxiety

2005-11-27T14:41:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about the rather tumultuous weekend I have just had. I am now recoiling from the horror of my personality, and wondering what sorts of god awful things I unleashed onto my unsuspecting work colleagues. Poor things....but I had some amazing and intense conversations (Kate F). I love it when you talk to someone and feel warmed by their vitality and determination. Those are the kinds of people who provide comfort and stability for others. I am always impressed by the expanse of other people's lives. As adults our lives are so enormous. When I was a child I thought that adult life would be ordered and complete, tempered by those filial and parental loving moments. But it is a gaping yawn of instability and chaos. I don't like to use the word chaos, it seems inappropriately dramatic. When I looked at my parents lives, they seemed so real, and so beautifully crafted and structured. When is it that you first become aware of the desire to fashion yourself as a Proper Person? Now I know my parents, and I see the seams, and the gasps of hurt and confusion, and I see myself. Sometimes there is an absence of real communication.

On Saturday night I did my ususal I Love You thing. When I am drunk and emotional everything takes on a monumental significance. Same for everyone I suspect. In an almost superstitious way, I had to tell Andrew a story about how much I love him before he went home. He's so used to it, and I just give him a look and he says 'I know you love me mate'. I feel so horrendously guilty when I try to remember the times I did that to MP. I think I just expected him to know that I loved him. And perhaps I saw us as siamese beings, in a way that felt like we were beyond love or relationships, as if we had just become aligned intensities.

Walking to the shop this morning I thought about emotional hooks, (like tenterhooks perhaps, TENTERHOOKS???? What is that?) and how I so easily become deeply connected and involved with other people's emotional lives. For me, writing this is difficult and strange, and it certainly isn't something I am comfortable with. I am wondering how far I will actually go with this. It is an interesting process of exposure....so.....I become connected, like protein. Today I have this gentle wolfy feeling. I am refashioning myself, I'm protean....which is kind of weird for an obsessive person who is always seeking whole things. But when I think about being partial, mutable, hypocritical, I realise that it is all I want to be. Perhaps the greatest achievement for me is the knowledge that I can allow myself these things.