Management apologises

For the complete lack of interesting posts and assures you that our large team of writers have all been horsewhipped. As soon as the doctor has seen to their wounds they will recommence thinking of something interesting to write about. In the meantime why not write an opera?

Several excellent decisions

Apart from periodically wanting to crack my coconut heart on his pointed defences I have made several excellent decisions. I will include them in boring list form.

1. Work four days a week for month of July in order to attack manuscript with force.
2. Schedule all social appointments around fictional engagements in diary for Queensland art gallery I found today. Will do this for month of July.
3. Go to sleep before midnight on school nights, starting tomorrow.
4. Eat more vegetables.
5. Can't remember.
6. Something else I can't remember.
7. Oh who cares anyway.
8. Get stupid Talking Heads song out of head, as the days go by, something about being underground, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
Best method for getting any song ever out of head is to think of Jump by Van Halen, guaranteed success every time. Can't you see me standing here I've got my back against the record machine, I ain't the worst that you've seen, don't you know what I mean, ah go ahead and jump.

Where is my wife and family?

What if I die here?

Just wondering.

Come on! Rain, blow, hail!

All evening I have been waiting under battened down hatches for the storm to end all storms reciting earth, wind, fire, dale. Elemental my dear Watson.

I have candles, I have firewood, I have marshmallows. I am completely prepared to spend the entire day tomorrow sitting by the fire while the world worries about how to fix itself. I'm going to give myself over entirely to luxury. Book, fire, marshmallows. Everyone else in Sydney can unflood roads and jump start trains and walk about in weird yellow rubber outfits shouting into the wind. I may wear fuzzy socks.

So cross your fingers and pray for the worst. I really really need a day off and I don't care how many treetops I have to sacrifice.

Kork Chork

If you want to hear people make bleeping noises on computers, see pixels and things on big screens and watch people doing some really odd things, on purpose, and help raise money for a school in Cambodia then go see Kork Chork.

I am an island

I wish I was an island, with guards and gates and rope bridges and a team of psychologists who examined whether or not letting someone on to the island is a good idea or not, without me ever having to know. But I'm not. I'm an empty block on a busy street, no fences.

I had a marvelous day with Elliot yesterday despite being chaperoned by the rehab escort but something is creeping in. All day I checked my email, just in case. All day I felt a rumbling in my foundations. All day I felt, strange and then this evening its manifested into something odd.
He doesn't like my curtains.
He hates my curtains and its doing my head in.

I love my curtains. They're only Ikea curtains, yes yes Ikea is the devil etc, but I love them. They were the first thing I bought for my life post Artboy. I remember coming swinging across the carpark with a stupid grin on my face, convinced for the first time, that I could make a new life for myself, one piece of fabric at a time.

Yesterday, sitting on my bed with cup of tea in hand, Elliot strumming away on the guitar and Raul sitting silent like a sentinel, Elliot suddenly looked up and declared "I hate your curtains. A dead moose could have picked better curtains." I can't remember if I asked him if he liked them or if he just made the evil proclamation unprompted and now I am obsessed.

I tried to phone rehab and ask if he meant it or if he was joking but he's in an AA meeting. I left a message asking him to call me but I doubt he'll be able to manage it this evening, things are pretty strict in rehab but I am a woman possessed by the need to talk about my curtains. I wasn't going to phone him for a while, thought it best or didn't want to start timetabling my life around talking to him but this is overriding every sane thought I've ever had. I need to talk to him about my curtains, now and I don't care how I manage it.

A zine collective?

Interesting.
Maybe.
I might have a look.
Although its a definite possibility that I think people should only buy my zine.
But I sold out.
So you can't.

http://www.myspace.com/nswzines

The Dalai Lama vs A really big piece of chocolate cake

I spent the day. The whole day with Elliot and Raul, his escort from rehab. We met by the fountain in Hyde Park. I almost vomited three times on the way to the station but I made it, vomit free and relatively dry, on time, to be wrapped in a long overdue hug. He smelled amazing.

I want to tell you that we sat on plastic garbage bags in the Domain and were enlightened but it didn't happen. The whole thing was yesterday and we walked in on a major bump out but we didn't care. I didn't care. I spent the whole day with Elliot and the details are so new, so precious, that they're all mine.

I'm not freaking out

I'm not freaking out but what if he doesn't call. What if I wander listless in the pouring rain while the Dalai Lama talks with the masses and he doesn't call. What if I wait and wait and wait at the top of the wrong stairs at the wrong station and he doesn't call. What if he stays dry and safe in the confines of the rehab while I scour the crowds for any glimpse of a man like him. What if everything I ever imagined crawls out from under the bed and takes me hostage. What if I sleep in, what if I lose my phone, what if he can't find a pay phone, what if he takes one look at me and says, no, not you. What if this dropping in my stomach pulls me to the bottom of the ocean. What if all the rescue divers blow bubbles of wonder at the invisible anchors while I writhe and the pressure implodes my lungs. What if he forgets to phone. What if he phones and I don't where he is, what if I can't find where he means because all the landmarks are swirling and this geography is killing me. What if he doesn't exist and all of this imagining is all that I deserve, this sordid cracked imagining of a broken man fighting for sobriety and the courage to go on.

Mr Gideon, you need to rest

Instore gig. Fantastic! What a crazy damn pleasure to ride all the way West in Spencer's car until the horizon frees itself from this city grip and you run smack into the bottom of the mountains. All the way west until mullets lose their irony and Starbucks gains sophistication. All the way west until you're crammed into a tiled record shop with twenty five people and a band.

A man stumbled into the shop midset, in a fluoro yellow council workers jacket and started dancing with his umbrella. Between songs he started yelling "This is fucking amazing. I'm forty two years old and I've never seen anything like this before. I went to a Kiss concert once and I can tell you, you kick Kiss's arse." Ah, Penno, spiritual home of the bogan.

So many joys in one small day, much good company and occasional dancing, a trip to the Lapo for rum & coke on tap. Let me say it again, in the mountains they have rum & coke, premixed, on tap. Its hideous! I had two. Back in the city the tempest continues. The breaking of the drought is breaking me. I don't know how much longer I can get rained on without pulling out a hail cannon and sending shock waves right back at those murderous clouds of doom.

Elliot is allowed out of rehab, with an escort, to see the Dalai Lama. We're going to try and meet in the crowd, in the rain. In less than twelve hours I'm going to get my first hug in six months. I better start warming up now.

Repressed

I'm off to Repressed Records in Penrith, of all places, to see an instore gig. I'm about a decade and a half too old for this kind of shenanigans but when the band is Spencer's I just have to have a look see. What the hell is he doing playing in a shop in Penrith?

The next obvious question is why does Penrith still exist?

Well now. What do we have here?

Matt said... Too bad you weren't able to collect any data other than that dating sucks. Glad you're able to affirm yourself so easily.

My initial reaction involves words that computer won't even let me type. Firstly dating is not what I was doing. I used the word dating but dating it wasn't. It was other. I mostly see dating as a very American construct anyway. Things seem to happen much more organically in my part of the universe.

The data I collected is that I like myself. I like myself and I think that one day I'm going to meet someone who likes me too. I'm going to meet someone that I find interesting, someone with spark and humanity, someone that isn't afraid to imagine.

And as for the easy self affirmation. That's easy. Get fucked. Its been seven months, fifteen days and one hour since Artboy lost his beautiful beautiful mind, and my entire sense of self with it. My existence cracked and shattered, in a heartbeat. So don't fucking tell me that I'm walking around singing about how easy it is to feel good about myself. Don't fucking tell me that when the man before Artboy suicided. Don't you dare fucking tell me anything at all.

Warning: post may appear angrier than it actually is.

The one that I want is Me or A beginner's guide to a miniature celibate sexual revolution

I'm drying my hair by the fire after an appalling walk home through the back streets of Newtown in the pouring rain with a bursting bladder. I met, had coffee and conversed with the experimental coffee date man, let's call him Bert. Let's call him not quite boring but getting there. I was hoping for something different, something wild or rude or horrid or obsessive about coffee cup placement or some damn thing but what I got was, I suspect, average citizen.

I came prepared to hold close the secret nature of the experiment but Annushka had filled him in even given my blog url, so cover blown I lost all my tactics and not a little of my sense of fun, just like the time I phoned Rupert. I thought I am not this serious. Why am I being so serious, this is twice in about a week that I found myself being inane and serious. So I looked for common elements. What do Rupert and Bert have in common? Fucking nothing, except that they were talking to me. Its all about context.

Once at the pub with a host of friends I fondly noted their strange and wonderful outfits, Spencer was wearing one of his inappropriate cowboy shirts and the others all looked like objects or ornaments, beautiful like blown glass. I was wearing a plain button up shirt and jeans, orange sneakers my only nod to anything. I mentioned my plain outfit to a friend and she looked me up and down and said Yeah, but your personality's edgy. But I've lost my point. The one that I want is Me.

I stretched out the one soy latte and politely only had two cigarettes, instead of smoking my damn head of, which is why cafes were invented. Bert was polite from start to finish, he phoned to say he was running late, he offered me his scarf when I said I was cold, he even paid for my damn coffee. He attempted his share at keeping the conversation going, but never quite made it. We had nothing in common. He's some sort of office having computer talking person. He's reading Moby Dick but not loving the strange shift in narrators and the over the top introductions of characters that just disappear. He's wearing a white jacket that zips up, he's got hair that he probably combs, he's not into creative self-expression. And I don't care because the one that I want is Me.

Bert seems like a nice man but I don't care because I've suddenly discovered that my best light is an in context light. I fit my backstory like a glove, I carry this bag of survival, sorrow and joy like a flag. I am one funny scary fabulous intelligent woman and I'm the hell done with giving a shit whether strangers like me or not. So thanks Bert for coming out in the cold wet to meet a stranger and share an hour or so. You're a nice ordinary man and I'm really pleased to discover that I don't give a shit whether you like me, or not.