Backwards/forwards, its all a direction

Everyone is travelling backwards, spending their days writing piles of words about the past, or photographing the fading dying corners, digging their own little nostalgia holes to sit in. I love reading what they write, or seeing what they exhibit but I'm wondering what's going on. Is it that time already where me and my contemporaries turn to look over our shoulders and see a vast highway of rich things already attempted, experienced or felled by? Surely we have a way to go yet. This can't already be the point at which we fold up like dying spiders and take permanently to the memory pit. I'm still walking around realising things for the first time. I'm still learning the names of the flowers on my street and the birds in my trees. I only just learnt how to buy a dress and I'm trying just as hard as I can to get a media pass for my first ever Dolly Parton show. Should I be spending more time sitting still and remembering?


A cursory and incomplete clickable list of beautiful memory pits that I thought of in under two seconds:
Biblioburbia by Vanessa Berry
Dress, Memory by Lorelei Vashti
Parramatta Rd by Lyndal Irons

Another forgetting gets remembered

I've been ushered down the horrifying path of remembering that I started a project and then forgot all about it. Vanessa Berry has started a new project blog called Biblioburbia, like all of Vanessa's writings is definitely worth reading, but it is also the cause of my shameful remembrance. Best to just have a read of Vanessa's project while I go about trying to remember where I was up to with mine...

Roger Daltrey is a centaur!

No further words required.

The superpowers of logic and maths combine to make drinkable a sub-standard coffee with the additional benefit of Cosbys

Rainsoaked and wracked with freezings chills I diverted my path home to secure my tenth cup of Paper Cup coffee knowing that it would ease more than my saturated shivers but I was a little wrong. The new barista, under the watchful eye of the Scottish man who has perfected the art of coffee making, made my usual coffee. I clutched the cup carefully under the shelter of my umbrella as I walked home. The fury of the rain making it impossible to do anything but chart a careful course and hope to avoid being wrecked against a fence or parked car.

I took my first sip in the shelter of The Peach, it was disappointing, the milk had been scalded, not burnt but definitely scalded and this got me to thinking about maths. I am sure there must be some kind of mathematical theory about the tenth one of something being different, why else would metric have invented itself?

Then I got to thinking about things in tens and it occurred to me that if every tenth coffee was sub par it was part of a larger plan to highlight the perfection of the other nine cups of coffee. Like the idea of good needing evil or light needing dark. Then it occurred to me that this was just like 'The House of Cosby's', but in reverse. If every tenth cloned Cosby has superpowers that can save the earth then the other, the in-between Cosbys, are worth making. So it is with Paper Cup coffee, every tenth coffee might be flawed and listless on the tongue but it is worth drinking for the sake of the in-between coffees, the ones that have the superpower of making me feel good to be on this earth. If you think about it mathematically that's a pretty good equation, especially if you have a loyalty card that makes every tenth coffee come for free. Maths and logic, saving the day, for once.

Nor breath nor motion

I can't remember how it all goes.

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

But I don't suppose it matters. The venue for yesterday's horrifically frightening job interview had those words painted across the office walls and I keep wondering why. Was it just because it mentioned ships? They have something of a maritime streak running through their core business. It was one of those frightening interviews, a full panel, them loaded with tea cups and reference papers, me on an armchair feeling marooned and a little at sea. It was neither bad nor good. I could have been better but there is always in everything room for improvement. My hours of preparation seemed to leave me unprepared, I had not correctly guessed at what they might ask, nor why. There was the one obligatory 'what attracted you to apply for this role' question which I was prepared for but at the last moment discarded my rehearsed answer and went in a peculiar direction. It felt like neither a bad nor good idea. It is notoriously difficult to judge the outcome of these kinds of things. They informed me it will be several weeks before they have a final answer and I discover whether or not I shall be obliged to pass under Coleridge's haunting words each morning. 

I walked hunched and freezing from the interview, down by the waterside to the long and ancient wharf where Grizelda works. I was dodging hale like bullets, throwing up a wake of water with my heels. I was aiming like an arrow towards a place where I was already known, where I didn't have to attempt to explain and re-explain my whole being in three sentences or less at four minute intervals. I sat on the curiously placed lounges in Grizelda's workplace and whiled away half an hour talking amongst her colleagues. Nothing of any importance was said but it was almost enough to reset me back into being, just sitting in a place where people know my name.

Today I have neither breath nor motion. I made my tea with knots of rope, dropped sails down the mast to fashion into dresses. It is difficult to determine if I am sleeping or awake. But is not unpleasant. I am here inside The Peach warm and dry in drastic contrast to yesterday's encounter with the elements. When I arrived home I hauled off my boots and tipped out genuine puddles of water, I peeled off three layers of saturated clothes and spent ten minutes under the hot jet of the shower before I began to feel any kind of warm at all. I'm beginning to wonder if these elemental trials of woman versus nature are an ordinary part of the job seeking process.

Important points to remember not to mention at tomorrow's frightening job interview

1. My imaginary submarine.
2. Obsessive recurring thoughts about discovering Antarctica.
3. Tendency to attempt to calculate my longitude by chronometer when seated at cafes.
4. Voyages on my imaginary submarine.
5. That summer I spent snorkelling in an inland swimming hole.
6. Being frightened by the idea of falling off the continental shelf.
7. Design plans for the unitard uniforms on my imaginary submarine.
8. Spooking like startled a horse every time I see a fish whilst snorkelling.
9. My drawings of a diving helmet for my cat.
10. My fervent wish to attach a mast to the roof of The Peach and be the first person to sail a house to the supermarket and back again.
11. That time I dove into the midnight ocean yelling, 'don't worry I'll be fine but if I'm not just tell my mother I was taken by the sea'.
12. The two litre plastic bottle full of sea water I keep under the sink in case of ocean-needing emergency or similar.
13. That I wrote a list of points to remember not to mention.