Well it's another day over I'm sitting here in the office on the computer still got things to do like posting that parcel to my cuzz cuz he left this kilo parcel of proscuito in the fridge silly bugger why did he do that and then i have to pick up the baby no really it's no biggy just take it off to the post office and off it goes but otherwise it was a pretty good time we had over the weekend hanging out on oxford street and at coogee and a couple of nice feasts one at red lantern vietnamese restaurant and one at my place
been enjoying life lately just for a change and even enjoying my job got some real nice students man i'm a lucky bastard really and big big news i've been accepted into the graduate diploma course so i'm off to being a student once again damn that is going to be wierd really don't know how it'll be to be sitting in a classroom again and taking notes and doing research and submitting essays etcetera you know i'd really rather just win a few million in the lottery and never have to work again this struggle i've had enough please dear lord just let me be a gentleman of leisure you know that's what i'm good at actually
Alright. Enough.

There was something else I wanted to say.....gone. Bloody drink and loud music.

Just about all of us have to work, for reasons that are unavoidable. Three professions available: pimp, whore and theif.

Well I was hoping to put up one of a series of rather interesting photos that Rhea took, but alas I need an extra piece of kit to do that, so leave it til tomorrow......Australia day in Sydney isn't a bad larf, for those of you who haven't been down here at this time of year when we celebrate the invasion and colonisation of this fair land and its displacement from a bunch of wild savages otherwise known as abbos, coons, boongs, indiginous Australians, Murris, Kooris. And why not when this is where it all began. The convicts sent out here for stealing bread or horses. The drunken, rum-running, thoroughly corrupt police forces sent out to oversee them, the erasure of most traces of native culture. John Howard says we should celebrate our history. I say bring it on Johnny.

The best thing about the day was that the museum of police and justice was open for free. Well you can't seperate Australian history from police and justice so it seems just. Of all the museums I've seen here, that was the best by a long way. Visitors are warned that some parts of the exhibition contain "adult themes". It is a rather disquieting experience in places. It's located in an old police barracks, complete with cells, one of which is restored to its original condition. The cell, with its spartan setup and thick sandstone walls was strangely beautiful. The commentaries in each of the rooms are rich and detailed, often riveting. To tell you the truth I couldn't suppress my anger in the fact that the history presented at that museum was exactly the history that John Howard doesn't want us to be reminded of. And, at the same time, he says that a bill of rights for Australia would be a "big mistake". Johnny, do I still have the right to tell you where I think you should get off?

Madness and sanity aren't so far apart.

Dad turned up in my dream last night. Unlike in real life, in dreams he's always there when you need him. He took me on a trip around the country, explaining all the lay of the land along the way, the soil and the climate and what crops should be planted, things a city slicker like me hasn't got much of a clue about. I felt like a retard, but was comforted by his presence, a presence from the other side, always positive.

Everyone spends years of their lives asleep. Some people spend years in bed awake, staring at the walls.

Any profound thoughts today? Nah.

Spontaneity=joy

5 in the morning. At least I got some sleep last night. The last few nights were a regular old nightmare. Keep waking after just 3, 4 hours, unable to get back to sleep, so I get out of bed and surf, surf surf, chat chat chat. I should probably be doing something useful. I should be working on my work, starting a new novel or something. Anything. Write a few poems, whatever. Then I just sit in front of the screen and stare at it for hours and nothing comes. I start surfing or chatting and everything is just flowing flowing. In life everything is always flowing, artists just harness the flow and bend it slightly to their will.

sweet_honey_pie(and i)

ha

Sunday morning. Ever noticed that shit smells different after it's been rinsed in beer? You take a squat and the smell of Kings Cross comes back into your nostrils.....sweet beershit. Why is there no other place in the world where people get so messy that they hang their turds on the floor? I mean bad aim with the willy is one thing when you've had one or six, but how can you...? Sorry I tell a fib. Heathrow Airport, the last thing I ever saw on English terra firma was the unsightly sight of a dropped brown one right there between the cubicle and the washbasin. You'd think that in any other airport there'd be a cleaner in immediately, but this one was getting dry, and someone had walked through it left tracks and everything. Tell me if that happens at any other international airports you know. For those of you who haven't been, England really is terribly frightfully quaint, just like you might have imagined. So frightfully frightfully quaint.....

Have reached a point where I've discovered that I no longer want to have sex just for the sake of shagging. Unbridled lust, as all the religions of the world inform us, is the likeliest cause of man's downfall. Of course there is a phase in one's life where one doesn't really care about that. For most male humans that phase is known as the teens and tweties. Then you get a bit older and you realise that the pleasure it brings can't possibly equal the pain it causes. You look at women and you realise that even the most beautiful women can only give you so much, and that's not much if the main motivation is desire and nothing more. It's like I'm not quite in awe of women in the way that I once was. They don't have the same power over me that they did and I'm grateful for that. At the same time I feel like there's a bit more respect as well, like it's ok to just be friends. The sexual tension that ran through the boy/girl platonic relationships used to be pretty insufferable at times.

Or maybe I'm just bored.

Tawdry little things, our lives.

Some days you just feel the life drained out of you. You chew too much of the fat off life and suddenly you find yourself with nothing left but the bone and marrow.

An abundance of cutting-edge technology is a pre-requisite for fascism.

The worst experiences may help you to find happiness. Sinking to the bottom may help you to appreciate the summit. Excessive sexual indulgence may help you to overcome desire.

There's no need to kill yourself. You're going to die anyway.

The torture question is an interesting one. Was watching a doc about it last night and you see how a culture of degradation begins at one place (Guantanamo) and then spreads to others (Abu Ghraib, among others). The people at the top, the very top, give the green light and the ranks below very quickly and easily do the bidding. In a climate of intimidation, fear and loathing, with the thirst for revenge a human constant, why wouldn't people start torturing each other? Watching the program I felt, for the first time, an understanding of the torturers, their motivation. Damn they must have enjoyed their work. Just as much as Mr Rumsfeld enjoys his. But we all know that too much enjoyment can lead to a nasty hangover.

It just might be possible for one person to make a difference in the world. Just think about it.

Dreams with music are always the best. Amazing how an old tune can take on new life if it passes through the prism of your nocturnal reveries. They come along to remind you that everything is ok. Ok?

You get a little older and you just can't help missing the passions of youth. That and other hackneyed cliches. Well it's been on my mind a bit lately. Less spontaneous sex, less of those crazy nights out where you stay out all night, until 5 o'clock in the morning. We all regret our lost youth but I wonder what made mine so special. Was it that we were the first generation to turn onto E? Did our generation really discover, like no other before it, the true meaning of a disposable culture. For the first time everything was not only disposable, but expendable: relationships, work contracts, government offices, marriage.

If you just took away all the hypocrisy from the world, it might be a tolerable place to live.

Huhu I'm back at work and just take a look around. The office is as sterile and lifeless as you'd expect the office to be. Had a not very exhausting day's teaching, am supposed to be starting at something a bit more demanding any time soon. I've been wondering what exactly the point of this particular little web diary experiment should be, other than the psychological equivalent of a latrine, offending as many people as possible with the stench. So far it's been ill-disciplined, lacking in focus. Of course, most of the blogs I've seen around the traps are far slimmer. I'm certainly more concienscious than the average blogger by the looks of things. Most people it seems, just want their nanosecond of recognition in cyberspace and that's it. Graffiti doesn't work any more it seems, it gets stripped down with vicious efficiency, so the web does the trick these days.

Cut. Cut. Cuuuut! Shit.

Desire is the disease. Love is the cure.

>

It is still. It is clear. It is cool. It is fresh. Something new may be born into the world.

The holiday comes to a close and you come to the conclusion that you've got just about nothing done. But at least you've managed to offend one or two people, which could be considered an achievement. Those days when the hours just slip away and you wonder what the heck it is you've been doing. Answer: sitting there on the net chatting, surfing and otherwise performing activities that are as useful as twiddling your thumbs.

Been reading Houellebecq again of late. Having covered every conceivable topic of controversy, outrage and disgust, he moves onto the touchy subject of middle-aged man's lethal attraction for barely pubescent girls. Western civilisation, as he puts it, offers everything and delivers nothing. Which is as true of sex as anything else, with ever younger girls being tarted up and put in front of cameras to appear in magazines informing ever younger girls of "style", early teens and tweens in heels and short skirts and midriffs and sticky make-up, while the judiciary and media become more and more indignant in their howls for the incarceration/ chemical castration/hanging/birching of perverts, monsters and other individuals who act on their more primitive desires. There are those who may say that Houellebecq is no better than pornography. One crucial difference. Pornography is basically a lie, depicting as it does a succession of women enjoying things that no human could possibly enjoy. Houellebecq, on the other hand, holds up a grim beacon of truth about such topics as pornography, sex tourism, adolescence, middle age, racism and other things we'd usually prefer not to be reminded of.

Indeed they are tense times we are living in. Couldn't really be any tenser. Just about everyone it seems is paralysed by fear, one way or another. It's amazing anything happens at all. Whatever does happen, people don't seem particularly happy making it happen. The war on terrorism is over and it looks as if the terrorists have won. Right-wing shockjocks, politically correct whingers, neurotic mothers, visionless conservative politicians from both parties, dead-head accountants, corporate functionaries and all the other people who blanche the colour out of our lives. Yes they've terrorised us. In fact they are us and we are them. And no hint of resistance to it that I can detect. We keep voting for the same conservative visionless politicians. We keep supporting the system that is dragging us to the cliff's edge. The more perilous the situation gets, the less inclined we are to do anything about it. Maybe it was just the same in the third century in Rome too and all.

.

In spite of my nihilistic tendencies, it may surprise you to know that I like to look after myself. Hence I avoid tobacco, coca cola, hamburgers, beef, pork, driving, commercial television and orgainised religion. I have my vices, but there has to be a limit. So I limit myself by avoiding all of the above. Yes in spite of my profession which is supposedly social I'm really a deeply anti-social individual. I prefer my own company to just about anyone else's. It doesn't take much before my so-called fellow humans shit me to the point where I agree with Sartre's maxim, "Hell is other people."

Organised religion. Someone, you know who you are, keeps dragging me along to Mass, as if that will somehow instill some kind of religious fervour in me. I think I'll only ever be a detached observer as far as Catholic ceremonies are concerned, as pretty as the ceremony may be in many ways. Yes it's a beautiful religion, as religions go. Only Islam and Hindu can really compete for aesthetic grandeur, far as this little skeptic is concerned. But anyway, I didn't grow up with it and I'm not really sure what to make of all that self-crossing, knee-bowing, phase-recanting caper that goes on. What is the point supposed to be? It seems to me that God made the world and all the people in it, if there is one, but the ceremonies of the Catholic Church are a strictly man-made business. If there is a God I just hope He's not as petty as some religious human beings would like to make out.

Been having the prettiest dreams the last few nights. Shoot I can't recall last night's now, but the night before really stuck. I was a camera, getting up close and personal with the Crusaders as they sailed towards the coast of Palestine. As they disembarked I heard the narrator's voice explaining that the Crusades were a rather odd enterprise, considering the Christian faith they were supposed to represent. "Jesus was no Prussian," he said. What a phrase. Wish I'd thought of that one myself.

little more

Back from a late lunch/ early dinner, Long Island iced tea in hand, olives on hand. All is good in the world. I've been thinking about depression, suicide. Actually haven't been particularly suicidal of late, but one always leaves oneself open to all sorts of possibilities. I'm not sure if I've thought of ending it any more or less than the average person, whatever that might be. Certainly there were times when I was so depressed that I couldn't leave my flat for days at a time. I got over it just by lying low, and more recently by popping prescribed pills, which do a pretty effective job of getting you out of the troughs. So don't worry folks, it's all good. I got me pills, me booze, TV, internet, all the things one needs to keep one braindeadly contented enough to keep from doing the ultimate deed.

eraser

I'm sure you've noticed how, when you have all the time in the world, you just don't get around to doing the things you promised you'd do when you got to have time to do stuff. Well, that's how it goes with me anyway. Today I slept in til 10:30. Couldn't really believe it, that I would sleep so damn much ever, but I did. I justified it to myself by saying to myself that it was a small way of making up for all those hours of lost sleep, that sleep deficit that's even deeper and more hurtful than the credit card debt.

So I got up, showered and breakfasted and went out to Well Connected, the cafe down on Glebe Point Road that makes the best coffee of any place within a radius of several square miles. Had a long black with hot milk on the side, read the Herald pretty much cover to cover, save for the sports and pages 2-5. I then trotted off to Dymocks, not to buy anything, God forbid I'd give a faceless company like that any of my hardearned lucre. Just to use their space to read. Gawd knows they have plenty of quiet cosy comfortable nooks and crannies where you can pull up with a book or six under your arm and go over stuff at your leisure. If I did anything productive today it was simply to start compiling a list in my head of the books I should get round to reading in the coming year. There are a couple by Paul Bowles that are crying out for attention. I've never read him and it seems that I really should, dealing as he does with very similar terrain to my own little stretch of turf. F Scott Fitzgerald also warrants a bit more focus. Maybe a bit of Zola and Orwell, E.L. Doctrow and Don Delillo. There isn't much Delillo left for me to read, Underworld looks daunting to say the least. Don't know if I'll have the perseverence to get through it any more than I was able to persevere with Ulysses all those years ago, but one feels obliged to have a go anyway.

fire etc.

Saw a few different editions of the Qor'an recently sitting on a shelf in my local bookstore. Pulled one of the more accessible editions off and had a browse but there was only so much I could hack. Yes, it is a fiery old document the Qor'an. Spectacular for that, although it seems to spend a bit too much energy running down the other Western monotheistic faiths. You might as well rail against the colour of the sky for all the good that will do you. Religion and culture are just facts of life. They'll never go away and all the violence and vitriol in the world will do absolutely zero to seperate people from what they believe, be it Hinduism or Christianity, Islam, Communism, Atheism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism etcetera. It always bemuses me when people try to impose their beliefs on me. Do you think I'm going to suddenly become a bornagain/Iraq war supporter/freemarketeer/pro-corporation person just to make YOU happy? Sorry, not gonna happen.

I'll maintain a healthy scepticism, if you don't mind. Then again, I should probably save my breath every time I rail against the above evils/annoyances. Why would anyone bother changing their fucked-up ideas/beliefs just to make ME happy?

Who was it recently said that I shouldn't resent the big corporations too much, because they have created the wealth that I also enjoy. Allow me a riposte. That may be partly true, and it may certainly be true that corporations rule every aspect of our lives these days, as much as we may like to think of ourselves as individuals. However, I would say that the corporations benefit a whole lot more from the system than me or any one individual, save maybe for the occasional CEO. Am I really such a huge recipient of their wealth, living in my 110 dollar a week dumpette? I'm sure that Nike and its CEO are doing a tad better out of the arrangement than I am, but that's not the worst of it. I also happen to share the planet with people in such nice places as Indonesia and China and the Dominican Republic and India and other places that are used for sweatshop labour. Whatever small crumbs a sad miserable creep like me may acquire, that's still royal wealth compared with what those at the coalface in the so-called developing countries are given. Excuse me for pointing out that the whole textile industry for one looks like a vast network of modern slavery. Why do vastly wealthy companies like Nike have to pay the absolute minimum they can get away with, apparently less than legal minimum wage in Indonesia? Would it REALLY kill them to provide people with 3 dollars an hour instead of 1 and a half? Of course it isn't just Nike, they're all up to it. Human nature at its most Darwinian, the corporate person is as ugly and psychopathic an individual as you're ever likely to meet. Corporations have the same rights as persons, by a quirk of history. Legally they are persons.....persons without heart or soul, persons with nothing but appetite. As we move forward, it seems we are starting to become more and more like the corporate individual. Wasteful, and unable to see beyond ourselves and our own stinking avarice.

bin a while

Happy New Year to y'all out there. Supposedly the time to make a fresh start in life. Thus far I haven't imbibed any spirits, so that's a start. But maybe it's time to take a fresh look at the old life in total. Maybe if I'm going to stay in teaching I might as well think positive about it, get better qualified etc. I actually feel good about doing the graduate diploma. I wasn't looking forward to it, but now that I've sent my application off, I think it won't be so bad. Maybe it will help me to breathe new life into the old profession.

I've come to the conclusion that the net provides infinite opportunites for enhancement or destruction. It's all there, all the salvation or damnation you could ever wish for. That's just a thought, no doubt you are perfectly aware of what I mean.

Yes it's been sweltering here, 44 degrees on New Year's day. That's 110 or thereabouts for those of you in the US of A. Thousands of poor suckers hit the beach, only to be driven off it by the midday heat. Us sensible folk headed to the cinema. On a day like that it's touch and go whether the aircon will hold out or whether the whole grid will collapse. Well, we made it through all of Harry Potter (Rhea's choice not mine, at least it gave us more than 2 hours) in comfort. Well, hope your new year was white and lovely and you enjoyed the chill. You really wouldn't want to suffer in this heat, whatever you might think.