It's good to count your blessings. Was watching a thing on the news tonight about poor kids in Congo who have to work in some dustblown open-cut mine. The lucky ones finally get to go to school. School is a building with a hundred-odd desks and a thousand students, no computers and no phone. Plenty of dust in the playground for the kids to muck about in. Here's me, living in what I think is poverty and obscurity in Sydney, with my degree, my career, my 24/7 internet connection, my TV and telephone and conveniences and outside there's greenery and peace and prosperity and inside there are stacks of DVDs and CDs and books and booze in the fridge and a comfortable bed to sleep on and and and and and. Why the fuck do we still find things to complain about?

I should be working on my last essay for the term, but instead I'm here and all day I've been elsewhere, inventing excuses not to do any work. You know how it is. You know how it is when you are determined to invent excuses for not doing anything about what you should be doing.

Ever heard of Elfriede Jelinek? She won the Nobel prize for literature a couple of years ago. She's the author of a book called "The piano teacher" which was turned into a film by Michael Haneke. I admire her greatly. She's agrophobic, and was unable to come to the ceremony in Sweden to collect her Nobel as a result of her condition. I relate to the her for the fact that she gets to be so very misunderstood for simply articulating things as she sees them around her. She gets completely sledged by the near-Nazi right wing of Austria. Jorg Heider proclaimed in his campaigning that the nation had a choice between Jelinek and Art. Having spent a bit of time in Central Europe I can say it takes a brave soul to dare to be an individual voice there and offer something different from the dominant paradigm.

Actually it takes a pretty brave soul to go against the dominant paradigm right here right now. I never realised before just how fascism could take hold, or how things were done in medieval times, but it's all coming clear to me now.

My main ambition in life is to be left alone. I get really tired of people trying to tell me what's what. Most of the time when people try and tell me how it is, I just want to hit them over the head with a blunt heavy object, but I don't, because we're all supposed to be civilised and apparently we've evolved beyond that. Maybe I don't want to just be left alone, maybe what I really want is to find someone who I can actually agree with about things. I get really tired of treading through the minefield of human stupidity and ignorance. I get sick of ignorance combined with stinking belligerence. But apart from that, I think that people are alright.

Anyway I'm not really articulating too well. A couple of martinis is supposed to help the flow, but it's all looking rather clunky. Yeah maybe I should go back to some real writing instead shouldn't I? Yeah alright alright.........