Life is good if you can remain sane. Not easy that, always.

With insomnia one feels everything stripped right back to the point where there's no fat or flesh left. In the revealing of the bones one hopes for a miracle there. Or perhaps there's only death. Perhaps that is the miracle.

Well it was a good day today I went for a nice walk through Hyde Park with the students saw the war memorial and the cathedral and the hyde park barracks and mint and parliament I tell ya state parliament is a lovely bit of space those politicians really have it well worked out here it was positively regal and then we strolled down to the park and lunched before heading to the opera house for a quick mosey around then coffee then a walk along pitt street to rhea's place

Well as I was saying to Rhea this morning I'd rather do an MA in creative writing than this crappy thing I'm doing now, if I'm going to be doing anything. Life writing, that's the thing for me. Biography, my own or others'. I can't invent characters, even ones who are pretty closely based on my own disgraceful self. At least then I'd be more motivated to actually study and work on my stuff rather than staring into space, into the screen of the tv or the computer.

Another day, another opportunity missed. I was sitting on the bus and listening to a man speaking in pure schizophernese. He was sitting right next to me. He sat next to me and he proceeded to tell me about the sunglasses he'd just got for five dollars. He said they were good because they were blue. "You go into a bar and black, they just don't work." Everything, or almost everything that he had, seemed to have cost 5 dollars. He ranted on about all sorts of things, about how potatoes contained sulphur that made them look like angels. How they were putting "particles" in the International Roast instant coffee. How he had a pack of cigarettes that contained traces of cocaine and morphine. "A prety good pack." After I got off the bus I realised I should have asked him if he had any contact details. Probably he wouldn't have given me his real details, nothing about this person was real, although in some ways he was more real than any of the other people there or in any place. On the off chance that I might have got a phone number from him, I'd have got back to him and put my videocamera on him, his parents, his carers, his shrink, everybody. I really wanted to know who this person was, I wanted to know what the factors were that comprised this person's world. I wanted to ask the psychiatrist about what his long term prognosis was, whether there was any chance that he might ever return to the reality that the rest of us inhabit, if there was any kind of employment he could do. He had to have someone who was looking after him, a family that was wealthy enough, as he was neatly turned out enough and well-groomed enough and he wasn't that young. He must have been around 50, although psych conditions tend to age a person. Anyway, I know I'm no fiction artist, but documenting what goes on out there is something I can do. Shit I wish I were a Dateline journalist, that'd be the job for me. I need to do something that I can believe in. Teaching is alright at times, but.......

Anyway, pass the SSRIs

I'm sick and tired of violence and mindless bubblegum. I'm sick and tired of the banal brutality of my own culture. The only real outlets I can think of are classical music and Australian aboriginal art. Nothing much else can calm the heart or soothe the soul. Just about everything else gives off a negative vibration. If you don't agree, take a look around an art gallery that has a collection of Australian aboriginal art, compare the sense that it gives you with the violence and pointless ugliness of modern "art". Fair enough, the ancients had a clue, but we don't. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew what beauty was, unlike the Romans who have been the role model for Hitler and Stalin and Bush and the rest. I remember strolling through the British Museum and seeing all that beauty from Greece and Egypt and East Asia and then moving on to the Vic and Albert and realising that modern civilisation is just so much junk. When people find remnants from ancient Greece and Egypt and medieval Europe, they can see the beauty of those objects. What will they say about our objects? What is the beauty of our television sets, our box architecture, our Ikea furniture? If only all out war could be declared on ugliness and beauty in the world could be restored. If only it were always worth getting up in the morning. If only everyone felt that they belonged somewhere and people of the world no longer felt alienated from each other.

How much of life is just waiting for something to happen?

There are those days when you haven't slept and you feel like you're being dragged slowly through hot mud. Those days when the thought of imparting wisdom to others seems ludicrous but that's what you're supposed to be doing. And then the students say that they love you anyway. It's odd.

I wonder if I should even continue with teaching. As I get into this course I feel like I really have to do something else. There's practically nothing left for me to learn in this kind of teaching, or that's how it feels. I need to throw myself into something else. Acting could be the go. I was too gutless to become an actor at a much younger age. But I could have been good at it. If you can teach you can act. Thirty six seems a little late for such a career change, but you have to have something to look forward to. Something different.

I know I'm guilty of many things, not least of all a pathetic lack of ambition. But what can one expect? It's enough really that I've survived, that I haven't jumped off a cliff, hanged myself, swallowed pills, gone for a swim at Bondi after a bottle of gin. When I was in there I never thought I'd get out. It was hard to imagine a life beyond those walls. Those walls that are so much more than just physical. Anyway, I don't think I'd ever go that far again. The new pills are vastly superior to the old. If I feel myself going down, just one pill can prevent a crash landing. Chemistry, pharmacology, long may you prosper. Bleak, is it? That's what some say and what the heck they may be right, but what am I supposed to do about it? If that's the way it looks, that's the way it looks. There's no point pretending to be cheerful when that's not the case. I do that at work and there's no need to carry that on here. At least here is one place where you can just be yourself. If my true self is choked with black bile, so be it.

Well, on a happier note the weather has been beautiful here lately. I love the autumn in this town, in any Australian town I've lived in. Autumn here doesn't have the deep melancholy that it carries in Central Europe. It's bright and it's fresh. It's dry and it's sharp.

Workers in this country are getting screwed now ladies and gentlemen, just in case anyone in the great beyond beyond were wondering. Sunday overtime rates just got ditched. Unfair dismissal laws are out. All power has gone from the worker to the employer. Not that workers had all the power before but now the bosses hog the lot. Collective bargaining gone. Individual negotiation is the name of the game. How is a 15 year old worker supposed to negotiate with Mcdonald's anyway? Psychopathology is allowed to run rampant.

back at work again. zzzzzzzzz........