Return from the south pole

I have installed tins of peaches, cordial, jelly, soy milk and half a peanut butter sandwich in my office fridge. Coffee on the shelf above the sink.This has failed to have impact on anything except the ability to abate sensations of hunger or thirst.

I had imagined the process of deliberately equipping the office with personal comforts might effect the low resonant tolling of what feels like a submerged death knell. It has not. Peanut butter remains powerless against the darker forces of the universe, this is a great and burning shame.

First lady

First woman back in the office this year, only woman in the office this year, only human actually. At my non-PAN job, a horrid necessity, I am the only employee. The solitary and isolated nature of the job opens up all sorts of opportunities but so far I have limited it to loud music, dancing, throwing shoes and tying hair back in unflattering manner. I'm sure I'll think of something more exciting soon. Tomorrow I might attempt to use all the coffee mugs at once.

Happy fucking new year cocksuckers

I have developed a fondness for swearing, more so than I have ever felt before. I blame Deadwood for this. In an interesting side note I was wearing one of my mother's rings on Christmas day, the gold was dug out of the Black Hills of South Dakota, as was the gold in the necklace now laying on my desk. Both of these were gifts given to my mother by American friends a long time ago. I am sure they never dreamt the greatest joy they would bring to me is to stare at them while I watch Deadwood and yell "cocksucker!".

Oh yes, it is the new year. I can only report that I feel happy. That's right cocksuckers, I feel fucking happy. Spencer and I saw in the ticking of the clock on the Peach Deck with Gemma and one or two select friends. We wanted, I wanted and Spencer's wishes coincided, to have a quiet and drama-free evening doing anything or nothing as the notion took me within the friendly confines of these walls. Mission accomplished.

I am happy, a small part of me hopes you are happy too, the rest of me wants to joyously shout "cocksucker!" in your face and then fire a pistol into the air and gallop away on a horse.

Every day there is music

If there was something here like the blowing of horns or the spies and flag boys, if there was something here instead of the shackling wide-walk bound in black denim, if there was something here other than the shrill grating of those fuckers come in on buses for a pub crawl or the students clearing out for Christmas or the untalented begging beer money with shit-out-of-tune guitars. If there was something here other than the stinking concrete corners sending back memory odours of beer and piss and dogshit and the occasional drops of blood then maybe, maybe we could build something. It's not enough to pretend, you got to practice.

Failing deliberately?

Turning down the offer of a well-paid, sensible and corporate job for a bizarre and lowly part-time one has got me thinking. Is this a kind of deliberate failure?

Here are the reasons, inside my head, for wanting a part-time job:

1. I am exhausted by the world and it's demands. I feel as though I might die if I don't have enough, more than others seem to need, time to just be, to read and think and write and sleep and just be.
2. I am trying to finish writing a manuscript. A whole book-length novel manuscript and this feels impossible even when I have nothing else I am obliged to do. I need time.
3. I am trying to run a magazine. A stupid kind of magazine but one nonetheless and I want to do the best that I can, I want all the amazing people who work on Team PAN to feel as though I am doing all I can, that I am not taking advantage of their work and their time that I am trying, that I am brave, that I have a good plan. I need time for this.
4. I cannot be a corporate person. I have tried. I have failed. A law degree does not make me a suit. It doesn't make me anything other than a person with a massive HECS debt.
5. Almost every day there is at least one moment when I think, 'I can't do this, life is too hard'. I quite often, so often it doesn't even phase me anymore, think that I won't make it through the day. This is normal for me, but it seems that other people don't necessarily agree that it's normal. I manage these feelings quite easily, usually, and just go about as though that wink at oblivion never occurred but it marks me in a subtle way. If you know what you're looking at when you look at people you'll see a tidemark on me, see that I've been to sea, been washed up, been marked by experience outside the good and kind. It takes effort to move with ease among those who don't know what I'm talking about, it takes enormous effort to conform to an office culture. I feel too tired to attempt it.
6. The morning. I struggle with regular early rising. I struggle against the need for clockwork rising, I battle myself with late nights, with random insomnia, with the inability to manage it for than three days at a time. I can't do it. I feel as though I can't physically do it.
7. I have the wrong clothes. I don't have any money for office clothes, I can never find any that I can wear without looking like a balloon animal. I am inappropriately attired, always, and I don't know how to change that. If I was a slip of a girl I might go to the op shop or ask friends to loan me things but that is really not going to work.
8. I'm sure there's more. I don't what they are at this moment. I'm going to finish defrosting the freezer and have a cup of tea and watch an episode of Killing Time. I like David Wenham, this doesn't mean I prefer him to Richard Roxburgh, I don't think that 's a rule.
9. This is an incomplete train of thought and perhaps the negative part of this train of thought. Later there might be a long line of positive ideas and notes and perhaps even laughter.

It is interesting

It is interesting to go to a party and sit between three singer-songwriters and have them all break into song, at the same time. Very interesting indeed.

NPO (New Peach Order)

It's time for the NPO. The Peach has finally and thankfully shrunk from housing three residents to two. This process was not without some tension. The one that moved out was both a self-righteous and sanctimonious little antfucker* who saw fit to upset Grizelda on her way out the door.

Anyone who upsets Grizelda is not okay with me. The problem was simple and unavoidable, she gave notice but come moving day failed to move all of her furniture then attempted to store it here for another week. I said no, Judge Judy says no, so we told her no, so she came and got the rest of her stuff two days later and upset Grizelda.

It wasn't small boxes or the last bits and pieces, it was an entire double bed, a large l-shaped lounge, a huge television and other assorted things. Surely it is normal to move out on moving out day?

I'm not sorry to see the back of her but I am sorry that Grizelda got upset. Seems to me she just wanted to leave with a bang.

She was problematic as a housemate, rarely cleaned, almost never washed dishes, came and went like it was a hotel and then kicked up a stink every time a bill rolled in. This is not the kind of person I'm willing to share a roof with but I was willing to give it a try for the sake of Grizelda's peace of mind if nothing else. I even apologised for not being personable which is a world's first but there you have it.

I am looking forward to feeling delighted the very next time I come home and know that locking the door behind me means locking the likes of her out. In my mind home equals respite from antfuckers and people who straighten their hair for the twelfth time that week then deliberately go to establishments owned by Justin Hemmes after they have finished rereading their list of financial goals and pretended to follow religious direction but I digress.

It is time for the New Peach Order. May wandering in the hallway and trackpant wearing and tea making and cat feeding be the only exciting events to occur under this roof for a long long time. If not then I'm going to buy a gun. A big one. And I am going to shoot things in anger, like Elvis and Hunter S. Thompson and Hemingway and my grandmother did. It is a fine tradition.


*Dutch term, look it up, it's kind of amusing.

All kinds of fraud

Lately there's been credit card fraud on my credit card, email fraud on my email, even mail fraud in my letterbox so just for a little bit I'm battening down the hatches.

Blogs are bad enough already without someone committing blog fraud.

This is a test

Does this 'buy now' button work for back issue of PAN magazine as ebook work?

Buy Now

Because people always want reasons

It's a Groucho Marx problem and to explain it properly I'd have to understand the complete complexity of myself, but I don't, so I'm going to wear this fake moustache and ask you to leave.

On a jet plane

I'm picking Spencer up from the airport in a few days, well Grizelda is driving me in her car to pick him up, and I can hardly wait. I love picking people up from the airport. Airports have everything that counts, heightened emotions, shining public spaces, bars and moving walkways, newsagents lined with novels and people at the end or the beginning of adventure.

I love the long moments of watching a crowd walk by, searching for a glimpse of that familiar person, the top of their head, the curve of their turned back. That second when you spot your person of interest and know for sure that that glimpse of forearm weighed down with a bag is the one you are looking for feels like a revelation. How can it possibly be that the merest glimpse of their outlined shape fills me with such certainty? It's one of those minor miracles, the way we become so accustomed to another that we know, from an abstract shape or disembodied limb, they are walking towards us.

I wonder if Spencer will be grumpy, most likely he will be tired, travel-weary and swirling through relief at being home and regret that it's over. Either way I'm certain of one thing. I'll be glad to see him.

Turner vs Turner

Painting by Mick Turner

I explained that it was a Turner. He said "Turner! That's impossible, there's no way you could possibly own a Turner. I mean how did you even get it?"

I told him how I bought it, from a fundraising art sale for PAN magazine. He insisted that was ridiculous, that no one would ever donate a Turner to an independent literary magazine run by a bunch of drunken failed intellectuals. It was at this point that three things became clear to me, the first that the man was a prat, the second that he needed to be ejected from my bedroom as soon as possible and the third that he had no idea who Mick Turner is.

What kind of a man doesn't know there's more than one Turner and how to tell the difference between them?

Bad photo, taken by me, without a flash, it looks better in real life, come over and I'll show you.

Lemon Gold

Geoff Lemon has dropped another one, this time it's about Qantas.

"Of course, those of a certain view will always find a way to blame unions. The unions faked the moon landings. The unions gave me herpes. Union dingoes took my baby. The unions are the reason why my kids hate me and my wife never quite looks me in the eye anymore." - Click here to read the rest on Heathen Scripture