Blogs Never Truly Die or Who Even is Lloyd Cole

I was reading a book about a woman with a blog when the message arrived.

Please restart your blog. Lloyd Cole. Housemartins. 

The message was not sent by Lloyd Cole of the Houesmartins. It remains unclear to me why Lloyd Cole was mentioned but I'm assuming it has something to do with drinking.

The message could have been mystical, except that it was incorrect. Blogs never truly die. 

I admit writing on my blog is not something I ordinarily do, but it does still exist. See - here it is. I can't restart what never stopped. It slowed, sure, slowed to the pace of a pre-global-warming glacier, but it exists. It atrophied, and much like my person became ridiculous with age, but it didn't stop.

Blogging is not a thing I will admit in public to have ever done, despite the many perks, friends, and "career" opportunities it has made possible across the years. Blogging, like American court-sanctioned misogyny, is something one ought to be heartily ashamed of and stop doing at the earliest opportunity, which for America was today. For me, well that was probably fifteen years ago. 

After trying, and failing, to get my head into the manuscript I'm allegedly finishing next month, I made my way down to Petty Cash Cafe where both the food and the patrons are blessed by Kenny, Suspected Local Deity and Unofficial Mayor of Marrickville.

Two hours ago I sat back down with the manuscript and wrote - Victor after drowning rose up in a panic misted out into the corners of the hospital room. Rectangle and room-shaped he surrounded his parents, his sister, the wires and machines, his own empty body tucked under a blanket on the bed. 

And now I have to figure out what comes next, and how the actual fuck that relates to anything else already existing in or pegged for inclusion in the manuscript. Is Victor even a good name for a boy who may or may not have permanently drowned? Should he permanently drown or should he be revived? What else happens to Victor? Is Victor important to include or yet another weird distraction?

What would Kenny do (WWKYD)? I think he wouldn't care, about the why and how. I think he would just keep on writing and see what happens next man. Such is the gentle way of a Suspected Local Deity.

SIDEBAR A- The New Cat floated up onto the desk holding a tiny fish-shaped packet of soy sauce in her mouth. She batted the plastic sauce fish around the desk a little before piercing it with her teeth and leaking soy sauce all over the desk, my notebooks, and my second favourite pen. I scrambled for tissues and wiped the sauce up as best I could without resorting to a trip to the kitchen for cleaning supplies. The New Cat is now systematically licking the entire surface of the desk. 

SIDEBAR B - A common house martin is a migratory passerine bird. Passerine is of or relating to the largest order of birds and mostly consists of altricial songbirds of perching habits. Honestly, I'm surprised. I thought Housemartins might be referring to one of the furred and fanged martens who hang out in the forests of Europe and sometimes make appearances in Irish Murder Novels. I have no opinion about the band or Lloyd Cole.

SIDEBAR C - Now that I think about it, blogging is delightfully pointless and liberating. 

SIDEBAR D - Maybe the message was mystical?

Trading kinds of light

In yet another coincidence of light I was walking home straight into the setting sun while a Radiolab podcast told me the story of a man detained by a cup of tea and bathed in a hot white light. The light was followed by a roar that threw him into a field of potatoes and raked the skin off his body. The white light was filled with gamma rays. The gamma rays shot into the cells of his body, knocked electrons off his water molecules, and created free radicals determined to go after his DNA.


The man was in Hiroshima, I was following a chain link fence down by the railway tracks in a back street of Newtown but I was remembering all those hours I spent riding straight into a winter sunset on the back of an elderly horse named Lady. She was small but rangy with a choppy little stride that could shake your bones out of place. Those days I would ride my bike as fast as I could down the long hill of my street and out past the market gardens and the back gate of a navy base to the stables where I worked after school.


I was eleven years old and already worried it might be too late to be learning how to ride. I saw kids barrelling around the neighbourhood on ponies like they were born in the saddle while I diligently worked mucking out stables, mixing up buckets of feed, stacking bales of hay and wheeling endless barrows of muck up on to the top of the largest pile of shit I'd ever seen. Once or twice a week the stable manager would give the order to bring Lady up to the hitching rail and saddle her up for my lesson. More than anything I remember riding up the long side of the school* straight into the setting sun being terrified and humming "Yellow Submarine" under my breath because it was the best song for keeping time at a trot.

It's no secret that I no longer ride, living in inner city squalor like I do, but I don't suppose many people know that I dream of the horse almost every night of the week. It feels like a muscle mantra, every night in the very middle of oblivion every cell remembers not the thought but the sensation. Walking home this afternoon the big low sun and clear winter air tempted me into remembering but despite hundreds of hours spent riding straight into a winter sunset from the back of a horse it didn't quite work.

Two months ago I started taking what I call crazy pills, the doctor calls them something else, but its been a long time coming. I got so used to feeling suicidal that it was practically my normal state of being. I'm not sure exactly how the medicine works but it does, in more ways than one. I used to feel the stab of a memory or the hook of newly forming story like a physical barb. I would pull in towards me and turn it around and around until I knew just which word should come after the other to make it into a picture for somebody else to read and see. Not anymore.

Now I feel a small mental pulse and know there's a story or a sentence or half a line just waiting there for me but its foggy and unappealing and I'd rather just keep walking along watching the setting sun than follow any thought to see where it leads. I've been worrying about this because I have a December deadline for my manuscript and my progress has slowed to roughly a page a week. A page wrought only with great effort and difficulty and almost no joy. This is a new kind of problem.

Like free radicals coming after DNA I think I've been reconfigured by this medicine. I feel less, I feel better, but I miss those barbs and hooks and threads of thought. They used to lead me somewhere I was free to rearrange the alphabet into stories that made sense of everything but recently they just dangle and fade into nothing but a simple walk, like this afternoon's coincidence of light.




*fenced in rectangular arena used for training horses and riders

Suggested reading - James Bradley's "Never real and always true: on depression and creativity"

Desk-bound and drowning

I'm thinking now about the time Geoff Lemon stayed in The Peach, in the library, before it was properly organised and still housed the old floral stink source of a sofa bed I dragged in off the street. He was fresh back from both overseas and Newcastle and had in his possession only one bag and a tiny laptop computer. It was really minuscule and I wondered how on earth he managed to get anything done on such a tiny screen. But work he did.

He sat there nearly all day and worked on his tiny computer. Today I have been moving from room to room, working variously on paper or in notebooks or my relatively large laptop. I haven't been able to find one good place to sit and work. Every half hour I move again and try once more to settle into the work. Thinking about the solid concentration and work of Geoff that day in The Peach Library I feel a little ashamed and awkwardly unprofessional.

I suppose there is only one thing to be done. I shall go back in time and start this day again.

Dig

I should be one of those tortured writers sitting at my desk groaning and swearing at the noise coming through the floor. My ears covered with impromptu muffs like scarves wound around my head or tissues stuffed in hard. There should be a montage of me working despite the jackhammer and concrete saw at work underneath The Peach.

But I'm not. I've been smiling fondly at the noise, mildly regretting not attempting to work but mostly reading the newspaper in bed with a cup of coffee on hand.

I almost like the noise, the knowledge of underground excavation wheeling out the structure beneath my feet one barrow at a time. I like the idea of living in a house floating above a dig. I feel sure that at any moment something important will be discovered about my life.

Uphill battles can be won quite easily if you tip the world over a little

I really thought Spencer would demand some kind of Spencer Awesome Test but he didn't. Shows what I know. He did suggest some kind of negative test, a sort of unawesome test but I'll leave that kind of thing for the haters who hate. Everyone needs a hobby. 

Today was one of those stupid days where facts and tasks roller coaster around I point at them and laugh. There'll be time enough tomorrow to take the ride and do the screaming but for now I'm pondering out some early plans for something new. One of those side projects to a main project, like Tim Sinclair's

Re: Reading the Dictionary. In my fake interview with Tim I discovered that this remarkable project first came about as a distraction, a little project done on the side of a big one. Today it struck just how grand of an idea that is.

Writing a whole novel is sometimes boring, often trying and takes a long fucking time. Unless you are Ian Fleming who once wrote an entire James Bond novel in three weeks. It is a shame I'm not writing about spies, or in the 1950's when it was more acceptable to make loud typing noises on typewriters and fill entire houses with second-hand smoke. But back to the part where it takes a really long time. It takes a really long time and long deliberate hours of sustained effort and right now I'm finding this more exhausting than anything else, like the world has tilted and every direction is now uphill. But fuck that for a way of being, I'm going to take on a smaller project as well. One with a short deadline. A project that can be commenced and completed inside of a month. If that doesn't level out the tipping a little then fuck this I'm buying skis.

My new distraction project has the tentative working title of Remembering The Horse. It will be variable in content, crammed with the overly-sentimental, starkness, spareness and good raw bones. It will be what any anguished moments in April turn into. And then it will be an ebook. And then it will be done.

To help things along a little I'm going ghost protocol for all of April. This will be a combination of minimal electronic communication and blogging, pots of tea, a brand new notebook and possibly pen, and long stupid dresses worn inside the house. I might even be looking forward to it.

But now am

I was lost. In my own unfinished manuscript and it was fucking awful. More crying than was strictly necessary forced me into an unusual manoeuvre. I sat down with one piece of paper and a pen and asked myself one question. What is the story of this novel? One hour and one sentence later and there are no more tears, no more frustrated screaming at the walls and halls of The Peach.

It seems so simple. Why did it take me three quarters of a day, in an emotional state closer to crazy than I care to admit, to figure out all I had to do was ask myself one little question? I must be a lot stupider than I thought I was. Either that or I truly am some kind of sucklord.

In other news I have thought of a project for April. No title yet but it involves leather straps and steaming breath before dawn.

You are boring

Work - challenging (in an odd but not bad way)
Home - peaceful (and mildly clean)
Friends - all fine (unless they are pretending)
Family - no problems (and presumably still alive)
Manuscript - going (yes)
PAN - in progress (a way to go but in progress)

BORING.

All work and no play makes Dale a dull girl.

I'm not seducing disaster, merely making an observation, pass me the champagne.

Portraits & lemon wheels distract island resident

I took this dodgy photo of Lyndal

Grizelda has gone away for the entire weekend, left Friday morning and won't be back until Sunday night. I consider this to be incredibly excellent, good fortune on my part because I have been in need of uninterrupted time to work on my manuscript. All week I've been excited about having all this time, so excited I have named this weekend My Island.

I planned to spend every waking moment from Friday after work until Sunday night in a deliberately blissful state of writing reverie but as it so happened one or two things popped up. The first thing was work, stupid fucking work, I ended up working until almost eight at night, until Spencer came in the office door with a Rolling Stones poster and the pronouncement that he was bored and sick of waiting for me to finish. We had planned, earlier in the day, to travel together to official distraction number one.

Official distraction number one was having our portraits taken by the excellent photographer Lyndal Irons, who happens to be a friend of ours. The portraits were Lyndal's idea, not mine. When we got to her house the lounge room was transformed, huge light panel thingos and boxes that look like amps but aren't,  they were giant light-controlling box things. We all sat in the back yard drinking beer and yammering in our way until Lyndal called us in one at a time to take her shots. I don't like having my photo taken, I'm not at all photogenic, I'm all surface, no shadow, unlike Spencer who has more angles than a geometry lesson, but when Lyndal asks me I'll do it.

It was odd just sitting there, occasionally being directed to turn a little this way or another. Lyndal looked busy, changing settings on everything from her camera to the giant light-controlling boxes, moving big things on stands around. I have no idea at all about anything to do with photography, except this, when she works there is a beautiful intensity about her. She becomes transformed and it's mesmerising.

Official distraction number two came the next night. I had two to choose from, one party where Spencer was the dj and I'd know about a billion people. The kind of party that I might easily find myself still at as the sun rises or a party at Mr X's house where I would know almost no one and would most likely stay well within the limits of tame. I chose the wrong party if my purpose was partying. I went to Mr X's house to help his lovely housemate celebrate her thirtieth birthday. It was a mild party, the housemate's friends were over-groomed and simultaneously over-confident and embarrassed. The embarrassment became evident when the housemate declared it was time for an air guitar competition. There were grown men hiding behind the lounge to avoid being called up to compete. If I had declared such a competition at my birthday party a few weeks ago I'm fairly confident that at least three pieces of furniture would have been destroyed in the resulting mayhem. As it was Spencer, Madam Squeeze and  AHC performed a five minute interpretive dance piece, with moonwalking, P Street and E from next door waltzed mightily into the refrigerator, Abdullah did something entirely unexpected and I injured myself jumping around with a bucket on my head, and at least three highly shocking yet hilarious events occurred before midnight.

At Mr X's tonight three sets of people competed in an abashed manner and then rejoined the herd as quickly as possible. The poor birthday girl tried getting everybody to do it at once, and then tried to do just general dancing but nothing would work. They all stood there hoping not to be noticed. I felt sorry for the poor girl who is obviously quite a bit more fabulous than her general network of friends.

Around midnight a serious case of the yawns set in, just as Mr X reappeared from the kitchen with a mug of gin and tonic that included a whole wheel of lemon. I suppose I might have stayed and talked merrily with Mr X and the small band of people I have come to know but the yawns got hold of me mightily and skulked back through the back streets to The Peach. I wrote for a few more hours but now I'm giving up for the day. It's three in the morning and I've run out of steam.

I'm hoping tomorrow, with no scheduled official distractions, I can get back to island living.

What if there is no stream?

Always there is some larger struggle, ideologically, physically, emotionally. This week I despair at the low pay and unlikely nature of current job. Three years ago I kicked against an average income and full-time hours because it hurt my need for respite and writing. I had a thirst for time on my hands.

This week I have felt ignored by my employers who largely leave me to my own devices in an otherwise empty building. I have complained, loudly, to everyone I know that I wish to feel busy, used up by the end of the working day so that I may feel a sense of accomplishment and drop exhausted into an ordinary civilian slumber at the close of the day. Grizelda, who is wise in unexpected moments, told me to shut up and use any available time for working on my own projects like PAN or my manuscript. She said this job, apart from only just covering the rent, is ideal for my needs.

I wonder if she is right. Apart from the appallingly low pay* I seem to be swimming against an idea that was previously my ideal. Brushing my hair this morning, it was at midday but I wanted to give the impression I was more organised than I am, I remembered a horse rider I admired when I was ten years old. Her name was Glenda, she was a grown up with a firefighter husband, babies in prams and a beautiful black horse who was vicious and wily. I was forbidden from entering his stable without supervision. Glenda used to waltz in and out of this stable without caution or alarm, drape her arm across the beast and laugh if he turned from his hay net to make a face and bare his enormous teeth at her. Unlike the stable supervisor Glenda had no trouble handling this horse at all**.

Glenda had long red hair, hanging thick and heavy to nearly her waist. She always, every day, wore her hair in plaits. I longed to make such a firm decision as Glenda seemed to, to decide on one way of wearing my hair and stick to it every day for the rest of my life. I wore my hair in plaits for three days then became bored and attempted a Princess Leia style before wishing it all chopped off like a lady in a Scott F Fitzgerald novel. I was an annoyingly precocious reader.

It bothered me that I was unable to take one thing and absorb it seamlessly into my way of being. I felt always to be swimming upstream, from the way I brushed my teeth to which breakfast cereal I preferred in the mornings. People I admired seemed to be people of habit, resolute in their ways and this was accepted if not admired in them. I struggled to make decisions about everything, final decisions, to form habits, routines, things I always preferred or did or said. My mother had definite habits, sitting on a series of strange ergonomic stools with a dog at her feet as she wrote her latest thesis. My father would spend days doing boring chores, lawns, gardens, cleaning, organising, then sit exhausted and watch a bad movie on television before suddenly taking up a pencil and beginning all over again the extravagant and immersive experience of designing and building something beautiful from scratch.

I change my mind from moment to moment, any long-term decision is likely to be discarded five minutes after its declaration. I seem unable to choose a single goal or way of being and working resolutely towards its completion. My existence feels more fluid than it ought to, water running over everybody else's levels, never really settling always wanting to move on, down, forward and assault the land mass with arched innumerable lashes.

I wanted a part-time job so that I would have time. I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I'm tired of being miserable now. Also there didn't really seem to be a point to this post, other than the quick expulsion of several loosely connected thoughts. Perhaps I am working something out.


*On being offered this job I clumsily negotiated for a higher rate of pay. After being told I was successful in my bid to be paid at a higher rate they informed me I would be working five less hours a week than the previous employee thus ending up with even less in hand than I thought I would be. Fuckers.


**Until the moment of his tragic death when she quite understandably entirely lost her shit and did not get it back for quite some time.

Tired of not being able to shoot people in the head? Me too

You know those days when you need, and I mean really need, to white the world out and have time, all of it, to concentrate and write? Every day is one of those days for me. But I can't manage to do it. There's always work to be done, or looked for, applications to write, money to worry about and dishes to wash. I'm tired of living like this. Exhausted beyond reasonable human capacity is more apt, which is why I placed an ad in Gumtree for a patron earlier this evening.

So far only one response, and it was a man who simply said, "That was well written". Well 'forfunandbeyond' you can suck my imaginary cock. I don't have time to sit down and write some ridiculous essay begging for money. I'm too busy working on my magazine, and on my manuscript, organising all my notes and research and applying for fucked up jobs so I can pay my rent and on top of that dealing with a housemate (not Grizelda) who has preposterously decided to only pay a percentage of the electricity bill based on some kind of ratio of how many hours she spends in the house.

You should come over, I'll introduce you to her, you can sit down together and work out how to prepare a well-written proposal to me to pay rent based on the size of her arse and how many cubic centimetres of air it displaces when she walks down the hallway, or a letter to the resident cockroaches of the Inner West advising them that because she spends less time in the neighbourhood she should spot a percentage less cockroaches in gutters. Actually don't come over, go have a drink at The Ivy and drown in the rooftop pool. I'll be sure to make time to write a eulogy that outlines my precise percentage of giving a fuck.

A letter to Spencer in North-West France (you told them you'd be back)

Dear Spencer,

You know how pineapple is the king of all fruit? Well I mentioned that last night, in a conversation about artificial fruit scents whilst smelling a scratch'n'sniff sticker. Nobody understood what I meant. The sticker-giving woman thought I meant pineapple was my favourite fruit, Mr X was just puzzled but he leant over a little and said "I like pineapple, it's a good fruit." but quietly, like you might say to a child who got something wrong by mistake. He only said anything at all because he is a kind interlocutor. He is kind in a lot of ways. Today he came to The Peach and drove me and some boxes of magazines to a shop so I wouldn't have to carry them, but then he said he had to do laundry and went home. So you can see it was one of those real kindnesses and not the fake kind, which is actually a little disappointing.

Go ahead and jump

Warning: Do not read if you are recently bereaved, possess an overly sensitive nature or are one of those people who enjoy yelling at writers when they write something you do not like (in fact piss off if you are a person who enjoys yelling at writers).


People are concerned about me, which is nice, but unnecessary. I'm entering a research phase on suicide prevention for my manuscript, hence the incessant talk about the topic. There is a little twist to my research, I want to find out what not to do in the case of coming into contact with a suicidal being. In fact I am determined to put together a large volume of information about pushing someone past their tipping point and right off the old cliff there.

Whoosh. Straight down. See ya later alligator. Splat, crunch, splatter, gasp, death rattle, gone. Hallelujah and good riddance.

I'm thinking about the kinds of things one could utter to a person perched on a precipice to encourage a good old jump off the mortal coil. Reading research papers on the topic of suicide has been so far quite unhelpful. They are full of the usual charts about risk factors, tipping points and the no-good nature of social isolation. What I want are some ideas for sentences cruel or callous enough to cause a confused being to stop their calculations and put all their eggs in a death-bound basket. What are the kinds of things it is crucial not to hear at a moment of indecision? How can one person talking to another fail to offer even a small pocket of hope or comfort when faced with such drastic circumstances? What is the string of words least welcome to a consciousness in agonising mental pain?

If you can help in any sensible way drop me a line.

A letter to F. in Western Australia

Dearest F.,

I've been slaving in an office for a few weeks, editing video titles and adding the appropriate rating. G. PG. M. MA. Tedious just about covers it. As usual I am dubiously and sporadically employed by real organisations. The rest of my time is spent more wisely on editing PAN magazine, making notes and drafting things for my manuscript and generally running about looking at things and wishing I didn't notice every tiny detail about everything. The footpath just three houses down the street has begun to exaggerate its folded crease as the tree roots underneath swell with time.

Last weekend I travelled to Canberra with my brother and his girlfriend to visit Dad and the other wonders of our nation's capital. I found them to be much the same as last time I saw them, which is good in the case of my father. My brother and I planned to take advantage of Canberra's lax stance on smoking pot and get high in a hedge maze by the lake. When we got there the hedge maze was missing. The miniature train driver said the government had the hedges removed. I was wondering if maybe too many people had the same idea and there was a meeting in parliament about whether or not the government ought to provide a large hedge maze in which stoned people frequently ran about in and got lost. It was a great shame about the hedge maze. I was hoping to able to sell my brother to someone dressed as David Bowie.

Several weeks ago I was invited to read a short story at Penguin Plays Rough. I decided definitely not to do it due to high internal levels of fear. I was however forced to do it by the inimitable Pip Smith who runs the show. In the end I did not vomit, faint or run away and the thing was got through tolerably well. After the reading Spencer and I drank an enormous volume of beer, Pip folded a sum of money into the palm of my hand and it turned out to be the highest paid ten minutes I have spent in my life. Unless you count inheritances, of which there have not been many, but it doesn't take more than a minute for someone to die. On second thoughts that's not really earning is it? Now if I murdered someone and inherited money from that act then it might be considered earning I suppose, so no earning at all in this case.

Yesterday my mother telephoned to yell at me. Fortunately I was not the topic of her yelling, she needed to express some violent anger on a topic and decided I would do. After the yelling ceased she instructed me to get myself down to the harbour and report on the water. In an amazing coincidence that had been my intention all along. I rode the train down through the tunnels under the city until it emerged suddenly, without seeming to climb, at Circular Quay. The day looked a grey one but I was unsure as to the real colour of things as I was wearing unfamiliar sunglasses. The sunglasses belong to a friend of mine. He gave me a lift home in his car and in order to avoid sitting on the things I stuck them in my pocket. My only failure was I did not take them back out of my pocket again until I was inside The Peach. I have confessed my accidental crime to him so I do not feel as guilty as I otherwise might.

My only purpose for going down to the harbour was to visit the Satyr statue by Francis (Guy) Lynch. It was placed in the botanical gardens, just near the Opera House gate sometime in the 1970's, I believe it was originally sculpted in the 1920's. The face of the statue is reportedly based on Guy's brother Joe Lynch. Joe is the subject of Slessor's brilliant lament Five Bells. Five Bells is of course wildly popular, one of those Australian poems repeatedly set in the school's English curriculum forever and a day but I don't think you should hold that against it. The first time I properly read the poem I was at university and definitely uninterested in all things poetic. At the time I wanted violent contemporary fiction and wildly intellectual essays and nothing else at all would do. I read the thing because I had to, but made no internal note of it.

It wasn't until I was hanging over the railing of a ferry searching for jelly fish and ghosts that I remembered this line, "Deep and dissolving verticals of light". I hung perilously over the ship's railing reciting, "Deep and dissolving verticals of light", and watching the light split the "waves with diamond quills and combs of light" and plunge single-fingered through water, fish and ghosts and time waving weed that I remembered the poem at all. Bloody hell a lit match head just flung itself off the end of the match and scorched a permanent mark between the 'v' and the 'b' on my laptop. I suppose I should give up on matches and move across into lighters but I do love the sound of match being struck, nothing quite like it.

All the notes and drafts for my manuscript cross and recross the harbour. The idea of Joe Lynch seems submerged not just in our national poetic consciousness and the harbour itself but in all of my recent thought. It is possible that I have fallen in love with the man, this "Joe, long dead, who lives between between the five bells."

I was distressed to hear of the recent loss of one of your friends. I hope that you can find some solace in your impending adventure overseas.  Write to me dear F. for I always miss you. Here now is a photograph I took of myself with Old Joe.

Spencer turned thirty and thought nothing of it

Spencer turned thirty on Saturday. It was about fucking time. He's been in his twenties the whole time I've known him, first he was twenty-one and then a whole year at every age until thirty. It's been a long ride.

Thirty is one of those reflective birthdays where you sit down and have a little think. The first things I thought about were how much he has annoyed me, which is a lot but probably not quite as much as I have annoyed him. Friendship is sometimes a two-way annoyer-annoyee contract. I was thinking about making some notes about the annoying times but that would be easy and a little glib. Then I thought about the moments of support through sorrow, betrayal or ridiculous romantic muddles with hideously inappropriate men. Spencer was there for all of them but that too would be easy.

What is more difficult are moments of friendship and understanding that drop like a mantle pinning you still for just a second while the world glides on your own gentle axis.

Last Saturday I had to read a short story in front of an audience. I did not want to. I was petrified. I was coerced into going through with the deed by a horde of people, Spencer being one of them. I had friends in the crowd, all of them lovely, but Spencer was the one I knew I would go to if I fucked it up royally, made an irredeemable fool of myself and needed someone to make a fast exit with. I shouldn't have been so afraid, writers do this kind of thing all the time, but I was because before that night I've always said no, let my fear guide my answer and just said no.

The reading went with no major hitches, no one was more surprised than me. My next move should have been the bar, but the crowd seemed impenetrable. They were planted wall-to-wall like cross-legged rocks, jagged and unable to be stepped upon. I gave up on the idea of a drink but Spencer went over the back of the armchair he was holed up on and picked his way to the bar.

He strode back towards me, triumphant over the cross-legged crowd, holding two open bottles of beer. I saw he was heading for some difficulty, climbing simultaneously between the red hanging wall partitions and over the back of a sofa. I stood up to help and fell into a five second ballet. He came up suddenly over the back of the sofa rising gracefully as an eagle, passing a bottle into my open hand then placing his empty hand on the top of my head for balance. While he was up there, tall as a rafter, I looked up at the travelling arc of him and realised we were mirroring the same grin, shining and elongated with one long unlit cigarette out of the corner of each of our mouths. I kept looking and grinning as the flat palm of his hand centred his descent and he came to rest feet first on the ground.

It seemed to me that everything was communicated in that five second arc over the back of an old sofa with full beer bottles and unlit cigarettes and stupid grins. It seemed to me like we'd sat for hours talking, me saying how much I had needed him there, him saying of course he was going to be there and that I did alright. Me saying that for years it was him turning his back and taking three tall steps up and onto a stage and that it seemed important somehow that just this once it was me doing the climbing. Him saying that I did it, and he knew all along that I could.

I don't suppose it sounds like much, five seconds of grinning and balancing in the quest for beer but just in that moment it was everything. To be wordlessly understood as the somersaulting mix of fear and relief left me giddy. To know absolutely that his open palm on the top of my head was guiding him safely back down no less than his presence was safely guiding me.

Spencer is one hell of a friend. So happy birthday to him.


note: 
       I actually received an overwhelming amount of encouraging advice and support about mastering my stage fright and reading my story. From a whole bunch of people like Gemnastics, Geoff Lemon, Anushka, Spencer, Vanessa Berry, Thomas G Watts, my mum and especially Tim Sinclair who came to my house and got all Geoffrey Rush on my Colin Firth arse but right now this is about Spencer.
       I am grateful to the people who came up to me afterwards and said they liked my story, especially the people who quoted lines of it back to me, that was odd but nice that you remembered some of my words. And to the woman in the red coat at The Duke thank you for coming up to me and saying you liked my story, days and days and days after the fact. That was kind of great.
       Oh and erm, thanks Pip Smith and Penguin Plays Rough for making me do it, giving me free drinks and then paying me money. I hid the money in my sock drawer.

Homeless accidental toothbrush self-murder with shit in pants and train full of kicking horses

I have been asked to do something frightening. I said no but they said they weren't taking no for an answer.  So here I am, sitting at my desk working out how to do the frightening thing. I asked The Peachettes and Spencer if I should do the thing and all of them, straight away, right at my face, said 'YES! Overcome your fear. It will be awesome'.

Awesome.

I want to know why in the fuck doing something you are afraid of doing is awesome. Here is a list of other things I am afraid of:
A giant poisonous spider dropping into my open mouth
Throwing myself under a speeding train
Being kicked in the head by a large horse
Shitting my pants
Freezing to death
Accidentally killing myself with a toothbrush
Being homeless

Now tell me, where is the sense in facing any of those fears? If I was a homeless person with shit in my pants, a spider in my mouth and lying cut in half underneath a train I am pretty sure that would not be awesome.

I am unclear as to why a person should immediately run out and do something they are afraid of doing. I understand if the fear is making an unhealthy impact on life, such as social phobias or fear of eating vegetables that it is best addressed head on but this does not fall anywhere near the same suburb as vegetables.

Now it's 11:17am and I have spent one and a half hours sitting at my desk being frightened of working out how to do the frightening thing. I predict this is going to be a hard week.

Public alphabet causes mild humiliation in shopping centre

Grizelda was standing next to the display shelf right near the front of the shop, which isn't very interesting until you learn the next part, the part where I tell you what she was saying. She held up a pink sparkly pencil and very clearly and loudly explained to me how to hold a pen. I attempted to emulate her but apparently I got it very wrong. She went on to give another demonstration before grabbing my fingers and making me practice writing letters all the while giving loud instructions and corrections.

You see Grizelda has recently discovered that I hold my pen 'incorrectly'. I think it all began when I asked her to correct my chopstick technique to minimise soup splashes on my white shirt. What makes it worse is that Spencer agrees with her. He also thinks I hold my pen incorrectly, which is how I wound up in Smiggle receiving a public lesson on writing letters of the alphabet then purchasing a triangular pen-grip holder to 'help' me. I don't think Grizelda would have run so publicly wild if she hadn't have had Spencer's support on the matter.

I can not even begin to describe the intense feeling of embarrassment I felt standing near the display shelf at right near the front of the shop while Grizelda waved around an over-sized pink sparkly pencil. I wanted to yell, 'I am only being docile about this because I am writing my manuscript by hand and it hurts. My hand hurts!'. But a quick scan of the sniggering twelve-year olds in the shop kept me quiet.

I don't know if the shop incident was merely a coincidence but today I began to type. Before today any effort made towards writing the damn thing on the computer was thwarted by an insistent inner voice that said, 'you must first write this by hand'. Today the voice was absent so I went digital and began the work of typing it all out. It is depressing how reams of handwritten pages shrink down when they are typed out,  like mushrooms in a hot pan. I never cook enough mushrooms but fortunately the manuscript is not finished. I have no idea how the whole thing goes which is almost the loveliest part. There aren't too many things left where I get to discover something brand new every step of the way. Don't vomit yet, I'm not turning into Anne of Green Gables I'm just saying that not all art feels bad to birth. That part of it, the pain part, is at least partially a myth. If it didn't feel good, apart from the unexpected public alphabet humiliations and the odd day of horrifying slow-progress torture, I'm quite sure we wouldn't all be doing it.

Clockwork rising

I haven't stopped paying attention. Night sounds still crowd my ancient windows while the cat bolts under the blankets on top of my bed. She'll burrow and curl herself into a dear little bat-eared knot. Wait out the worst of the overnight cold with her measured breaths and unconscious whirrings. She'll emerge at a predetermined signal, known only to cats, step delicately across my shoulders and face. Paw to nose, paw to eye, paw to hair.

I might sleep through bat-eared whirrings and the hallway pulling cold breaths under doorways until well past first light. I may sit all night bent as a bachelor over hand-written piles of nothing or like last night I might lean back upon pillows and read through the hours of other people's words.

Some people ask me if I would be so kind as to read what they have written and tell them what I think. This happens more frequently than it used to, I suspect it has something to do with being the editor of a magazine. I always used to say no, some writers are horrifyingly precious, won't even take a modicum of measured feedback given gently, with sugar, in a positive light. Witnessing floods of tears followed by defensive justifications is not my idea of a good afternoon. Of course there are always people I will read for, writers who have the good grace to ask for an opinion only when they genuinely want one.

I was sent some writing the other day, parts of a journal not yet worked up into something bigger. He would like to know my opinion on whether or not they are worth the working. I debated whether or not to say yes. Not because he is precious or a terrible writer but because one of the great joys of my existence is reading other people's journals or diaries or scrawlings, notes, jottings, ideas, brain blurts. Anything that was written just for them. I took a moment to balance my desires. It seemed possible that if I said yes it would be to satisfy my own urge as a favour to myself and not to him.

It is not the first time he has sent me something to read, he is someone who knows what they are doing and would not send through pages without thinking it through first, so I said yes and I'm glad that I did.

There is nothing more magnificent than a writer with an open throttle, when thought and language combine in lightning fast unconscious combinations. All the good bare bones are there on those pages, whole paragraphs of flowing prose shot through with real and jagged ideas still hot and bloody. I adore this stage of other people's work. Every word is a footstep further into the usually guarded mind, sentences are raw and intentions unclear. I feel like a scientist with a microscope wondering at new puzzles of the universe. It is the very best reason for staying up late, a silent joyful worship for the absence of a clockwork rising.

Randomly chosen bit from today's work on manuscript for no reason

The worst part is when they change their mind, the last crumpling of courage. He always found it difficult to watch this inward folding. Sprayed spider of a human dispensing with all attempts at dignity. Sometimes he would sit beside them reciting modified respiratory movements from memory.

'Sobbing', he would exlpain, ' is a series of convulsive inhalations followed by a prolonged exhalation. The rima glottidis closes earlier than normal after each inhalation, so only a little air enters the lungs with each inhalation'.

I am my favourite horse

It recently dawned on me that I am nobody's favourite person. I was having a bit of a ponder about flying wall ducks and the stiffness of measuring tapes when it popped into my head. I am nobody's favourite person. I don't mean that everybody hates me, only that everybody I know has at least one person who rates higher than me in their invisible rating scale of people, like their long-standing grew-up-together-best-friend or a boyfriend or wife, or the undying object of their unrequited love.

I am no more a workhorse.

Five seconds after coming to that conclusion I felt immensely pleased. I have discovered a new kind of freedom. So far I have used this freedom to leave parties without saying goodbye, not reply immediately to missed calls, text messages or email and importantly to not bother about including people in my plans. If there is not one person out there who will be especially hurt to not be said farewell to or invited to the art gallery, movie, cafe, bookshop, picnic, graveyard, Peach Deck or ferry ride then I needn't be bothered wasting time thinking about other people when I make plans. I can do whatever I like, whenever I like and not have to answer to anyone. Spencer will tell me I'm being a fuckwit if I start running around being deliberately rude, but his scale of rude is quite different from mine to begin with. What I would consider quite rude indeed he wouldn't even consider.

When there is someone, I mean someone special, a first port of call on all matters large and small I have the luxury of a second opinion. That opinion can stretch across all facets of life, from what I am wearing to what I'm saying, eating, thinking, reading and most importantly, what I am writing. In cases like this I have acquired a constant reader.

I am a racing horse.

I despise a constant reader, one that feels like they need to comment on every single letter of the alphabet, wants to know if I was talking about them, wants to know if this is really what I mean to say. It is easy to be weighed down by a constant reader who wants to act as a second head, no neck was built to withstand that kind of strain. It's like holding a mirror so close to a dancer that it shatters with every point of a toe.

Don't go feeling sorry for me walking around being nobody's favourite person. I have no constant reader, no man burdened with mental illness tracking my every move, no person aching to call me to account for every minute I spend in silent reflection. No watchdog counting the relative merit of every spindle of thought. I have the freedom to fail, flail or spend the whole day writing without interruption. I can cancel any obligation without guilt, I can stay away for days or curl into the arms of a good idea. I am my favourite horse.

Storage solutions will solve only the problem of storage

I have become confused by furniture. All of these years I have simply pushed around cupboards and drawers with all-day Tetris intent. It has never failed, not until three days after my most recent attempt. This time I have bruised all of my fingers and quite a high proportion of my toes, my record player described a perfect arc before landing upside down and in pieces. The very end of my bed has demonstrated why knots in wood become vulnerable points for anything and my typewriter will not come out of its case. There is one thing I have not moved but only because other people wear pajamas, this will make more sense in less than a minute.

It is quite difficult, I think, to enter into a whiskey-fueled state of rage and typing when I live somewhere called The Peach and when The Peach is populated by people who come home from working, cook food in the kitchen and wear pajamas in the most normal of ways. This is why the bottle of whiskey has not moved from where I placed it three weeks ago. I suspect most people would not like to enter into a whiskey-fueled state of rage and typing but by my calculations I make up only one 6,830,586,985th of most people, this is a startling figure, I should commence cloning operations at once. Statistics have never been my strong point but I feel certain if there was more than one of me it would be easier to throw pajamas to the wind and rage with whiskey and typewriters all through the night.