Obviously I am a sucklord

I've been spending a fair amount of time with a friend lately and mostly it is quite enjoyable but this weekend it dawned on me that he might have got me all wrong. It feels like he has decided which boxes I tick on a list, writer, not stupid, careless with fashion, rebellious in some ways, good listener, but that is all.

It feels like a major failure of communication on my part. How can it be that someone I spend so much time with doesn't know who I am?  I know quite a few things about him, intimate things, broad things, daily habit things, but this knowledge is not reciprocated because he never asks and I don't offer. Ordinarily I am a font of information, about myself, but with him I don't ever feel the urge to tell, only the urge to listen and observe.

On reflection the failure feels more fundamental than just a lapse in communication. It feels like I let myself become unimportant in his presence, overwhelmed by the oddness of wanting to listen and listen and not speak in return. Obviously I am some kind of sucklord.

Horrible horrible horrible

My pancreas, or similar organ located in middle of self, feels odd due to beer or similar. It seems clear, to me right now, that I am drunk and this is probably the main reason for feeling like shit. The other contenders in the "reasons for feeling like shit contest" are as follows:

No. Not going to make list of reasons, that is shit idea. Better idea take shoes off.

A new kind of sponge

I can't stop listening. From the moment I leave the house in the morning until I come home in the afternoon, and sometimes again after that in the evening. It's not music. I've gone off music. These are words. Podcasts and audiobooks. Interviews and recordings of long dead poets, children's books, even American radio programs, anything I can get my hands on.

I think I've become a new kind of sponge. I haven't been this excited about anything since I learned to read my own bedtime story, all by myself, and spent the next ten years reading every book* in the house, even the dictionaries. I remember my mother looking horrified when she came in to tell me to turn off the light and there I was, propped up in bed, reading my Junior Macquarie Dictionary like it was a story. She asked me what I was doing and I replied "reading the dictionary". She left it at that and didn't mention it again until years later, when she used it as an example of my excessive reading habits. I think this is a good example of my mother's storytelling habits. Maybe I'll make a podcast about it...

*It might have taken longer to read all the books in the house, there were so many and new ones kept appearing all the time.