tales from an ordinary world

1999-08-03

Three and a half hours to kill in the city before I meet A. to see 'Pi'. I guess I could go and sit in Caf� Sahara, or, if all else fails I can always go and kill time at the office. But I know I shouldn't do that if I can avoid it. There's meant to be more to life. Or something.

There's so much stuff in my head waiting to come out, but it's all blocked by all the music and lyrics spinning around in my mind.

I'm wishing for too many impossible things. Please make it stop.

There was another guy writing, at a table just over there. A latte instead of my macchiato, and soft-pack (oo-err) cigarettes. But he was writing. Well, I think so - he was hunched over it, like he needed to protect it from something ?

Listening to that old Tear Garden CD I picked up a month ago, I remember what I love about this sort of music - the sheer randomness of sound, of noise, but all the same it's by no means unlistenable (unless you're easily put off). I'd love to be able to do stuff like that, but it's hard to know where or how to start...

1999-08-04

I saw Pi last night. It was an interesting film, with a few nods to Eraserhead perhaps, but the thing I liked most (?) about it was that the main guy just wanted to be left alone. He had plenty to do, him and his brain. He didn't need anybody else, and they were all so annoying anyway...

Of course, I don't claim to be like that. As I've said to a few people lately, I don't think I'd be able to work from home every day, I'd go mad from the lack of human contact. When I'm with friends I might not say all that much, depending on my mood, but nevertheless...

1999-08-05

It's all about symmetry, baby.

More random chance meetings in Missing Link, and an old Gang of Four CD that they couldn't find the disc for, behind the counter. Ah well, never mind.

I think it's time I did my hair again - but should I bleach it all first, or just colour the bleached bit on top ? The indecision ! When will it end ? My life's such a self-parody sometimes...

I couldn't help myself. I had to have another Muslimgauze CD. It rocks. This one uses a bit more distortion, and it's very loopy & drum & bassy. Music is feeding my soul tonight. My discman when I'm travelling home, the headphones at home that drown out the TV...I'm surgically attached, or close enough...

1999-08-07

You are in a maze of twisty little pieces of software all alike. Your mission, like it or not, is to Work It All Out. Jump into the trenches. Stay afloat. Wonder why you couldn't give a fuck anymore about ones and zeros. Try and devise a method of making a living without having to touch computers ever again.

Hank Williams is nowhere to be seen, but at least I can sing along to The The's Hank Williams cover CD. Hank's a bit like Morrissey^* - he's great to sing along to when you're feeling a bit down. I'll even admit to enjoying the overly religious I saw the light (although I stll won't get to the church on time).

^* I don't quite know why I keep comparing people to Morrissey. I can't help it. Nevertheless, it Must Stop.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this dream I had the other night after I drunk too much cointreau but didn't have a hangover in the morning. Yeah. Anyway, I found some old tobacco pouch thing (you know, for when you smoke rollies. This one was Winfield Red, if it matters. and I can't for the life of me imagine why I dreamt this) that apparently belonged to Dad (who didn't as far as I know, ever smoke, although I do faintly remember him having some plastic mini-cigar cases he was using to store screwdrivers in in the toolshed, or something. anyway...), and in it was all this stuff he'd apparently assembled before my birth that he figured was, in some way or other, important. Pictures of people he thought were relevant (some 60's pop group I'd never heard of), and other things he thought I should do ("appreciate music from before the 60's" - maybe a reference to Hank Williams ?). I forget what else happened, unfortunately. But it sounded like a cool concept...

Dad's a bit of an enigma. I'm still, after 26 years, completely incapable of working out what makes him tick. I guess I find myself noticing more things about him now that I don't live at home. When I went on a week's holiday with mum and dad last november, we were listening to Bob Dylan singing "Blowin' in the wind" on the car's tape player, and Dad says "you don't get songs like that anymore". I wasn't sure what to say...

Ana wants me to go and visit her in Amsterdam. I'd love to go. Somehow I'll have to save up enough money for a ticket, plus one or two passports (depending upon how useful it is to have an English one as well...). It's a lot of money if you think about it a certain way, but I've never yet put a price on friendship, and I can't see a reason to start now.

I gave in and chucked this on the diary registry and someone's webring. I dunno how favourably I compare to the others, but at least there's 6 months of old stuff here for random people to read when they're bored.

1999-08-08

To paraphrase Voltaire, if Neil Young's Heart of Gold did not exist, it would've been necessary to invent it.

It's amazing what you find when you go and do a search on your surname :

• Chris Cosgriff runs cosgriff.com, as well as his Officer Down Memorial Page which I remember finding a few years back. There's a Joseph Cosgriff who owns cosgriff.net, too.

• RIP, Paul Cosgriff, who's listed on the USA's Vietnam memorial wall.

• Another Kevin Cosgriff (not my father) had something to say about travelling in Vietnam.

• There's another A J Cosgriff (!) at Melbourne Uni of all places, doing something about microbiology.

• Janelle Cosgriff appears to work at the Friends for Life Animal Sanctuary.

• Another Andrew Cosgriff, back in the 1860's.

• Brian Cosgriff sailed in the Sydney to Hobart race in 1998.

• John and Carolyn Cosgriff have written a book about, of all things, genealogy, called Turbo Genealogy : An Introduction to Family History Research in the Information Age .

• Stephen Cosgriff is a DJ. He'd actually mailed me a year or two ago and sent me photos of himself and all his family, who were all firemen.

• There's a Carolyn Cosgriff who works (or worked) at Rice University in Houston, Texas, as a web hacker.

• Matthew Cosgriff seems to be a Police chaplain in Timary, New Zealand.

• Rick Cosgriff has been doing his bit for Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transexual (or transgender ?) rights. Good work !

More later - I've got a dinner appointment to keep.

1999-08-09

Everybody knows what's going wrong with the world
But I don't even know what's going on in myself.
The The, Slow Emotion Replay.

It's a confusing world out there, especially on a Monday. And there's a lingering sense of, well, unfinished business. But I can't do anything about that, so I shouldn't really be worrying about it. Nor should I be worrying about other people's arguments. I don't need to get involved...

I did the Fawkner Park circuit for lunch, taking a CD with me (from which I quote above) so I could drown out the voices of the passing business people talking shop amongst the trees. Get them away from me. At least for today.

A very relaxing evening was followed by me finding that I had to do the radio show all alone - Anthony just didn't turn up, and Tom was busy organizing some campus band night that didn't end up being broadcast after all. I made some lame attempts at talking about a bit of net news (I'd managed to do a small amount of research), but mostly stuck to playing music. *shrug*. I wasn't particularly bothered, and it kept the night a bit low key, which was more what I could cope with.

So yes, it's a confusing world in Melbourne Town tonight. A lot of friends seem to be dealing with inner things at the moment. Whether it matters to them or not, I do care. I worry about each of them in turn. I'd like to think I could help them all, but all I'm really good at doing is listening. That only helps so much. I have my own inner things to deal with too, but it's a long, protracted battle that never really matches up to others' problems, as I sometimes get reminded. But that's fine. I know what she was trying to say, and I understand. I think.

1999-08-10

So I'm listening to the The Trinity Sessions, by the Cowboy Junkies. I got it on the weekend, about 10 or 11 years after everyone else did, but of course, back in those days I still thought Pink Floyd (or maybe Joe Satriani) was the best thing that ever happened to music. I was a much less complex person at 16...I pretty much just assumed I'd go and do computer science and end up in some programming job or other that'd be heaps of fun and that'd be my life. I had a good group of friends at high school, who I still keep in touch with today (one of whom I'm sharing a unit/flat with at the moment). I may have, at 16, still been convinced the world would end in a nuclear war one day, although I suspect I got over that fear a year or two earlier. Despite my claims of a lack of complexity, I was certainly a very awkward teenager, though. Even then I worried a lot about things. The more I try to think about it though, the less I can remember about 1989. I was in year 11, the second-last year of high school.

Aha ! My notes ! I just remembered. Ever since the end of 1988, I started carrying a notebook with me (these days I have a Palm V, but it's all the same in the end). I had so many ideas in my head I had to write them down somewhere. Sometimes it was horribly abbreviated, such that a few months later I had no idea what I'd written down (much less 10 years later...I mean, wtf does "play R on the S on g." mean ?) All that Pascal programming I was doing (I'd been using Turbo Basic before that). Reminders of records (and later, CDs) that I wanted to get. Friends to talk to. Things I had to do for school. Back then, I was obsessed with quotes, and prompted by something Dad mentioned about a program on some "unix"^* box he used at work that gave you a random quote when you logged in (he'd printed them all out for me), I wrote myself a program that took a file full of quotes and printed one at random.

^* It wouldn't be until 1991 before we had some sort of unix at home - first Xenix/386, then SCO Open Desktop (40 floppies of it !), and, in August 1992, 5 floppies of MCC Linux graced our computer for the first time...

I'm poking through the first notebook, from the and of 1988. There's ideas for some program or other I was trying to write, that I think was meant to be some sort of Natural Language shell thing...Phone numbers for bulletins boards I used to call, "Maxitel" being one I used to frequent...Info I'd worked out from hacking about in save game files for an old role-playing computer game called The Bard's Tale...A folded up bit of A4 paper at the back, with really bad poetry on it (it rhymed, but at what cost ?), lamenting various things - the usual teen angst kind of stuff, plus one mentioning my best friend in year 11 or 12, who I clung to like a leech. He went off to do medicine at uni, and we never saw each other again.

Onto one of my 1989 notebooks. Results from Formula 1 and 500cc grand prix races - For some reason or other, I'd been writing a program in Turbo Pascal, about 1500 lines or so (plus another 1500 lines or so of library code I wrote that did text-mode windows and menus and mouse handling and stuff like that) that tracked the progress of Formula 1 teams over a year, graphing positions through the races and all that sort of stuff. I wrote it as much for the library code as anything, really, but it was fun and hell, at least I was using my brain for something vaguely useful.

A quote (from William Blake ?) I'd written on 2 pages in a row - "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Reminders of where to go to play the compulsory Saturday morning sport - "Xavier, 9am on the chapel oval. White shorts !". More quotes written down to remind myself to put in my quote program...A reminder to "yell at Lionel" (the friend I mentioned above). I wonder what for ? Details for going and seeing The The at Festival Hall when they came touring that year (1989) - I remember my friend, who was a Smiths fan at the time (I didn't catch on to them until a few years later), going on about it being the first time Johnny Marr was coming to Australia. Sure enough, there were plenty of Morrissey fans at the concert, with the hairdos and the t-shirts, trying to dance to Matt Johnson's music.

Where was this entry going ? I'm really not sure...

1999-08-12

The new Guided By Voices CD came with not only a poster, but also a cardboard drink coaster thing. Those wacky americans...Oh yeah, and blah blah blah no more lo-fi sound thanks to Ric Ocasek blah blah blah wank wank wank. Sounds good but.

I hid out in "Fat Ben Cafe" to escape the rain. It's this tiny little cafe just off Flinders Lane, with the retro furniture, a bit of anime art and all that sorta stuff. The guy had a turntable (fine) and a laptop to play his CDs, which seemed rather quaint. Given that it's in this narrow alleyway in the middle of lots of buildings, plus it was raining a lot, I guess I oughta insert a gratuitous Blade Runner reference here (sorry).

But how am I feeling ? Christ, I don't know. My head's a mess of thoughts, feelings and confusion. And I don't know where to start...

1999-08-14

(I borrowed Droo's digital camera for the weekend, and took a few photos I was going to put here, except I forgot to borrow the cable, so it'll have to wait.)

I'd avoided the Great Blundstone Era of the early 90's, when all the indie kids in the UK were buying them (meanwhile, we were busy buying Doc Martens from the UK...). After much deliberation, I finally own a pair, mostly as a reaction to my current pair of Adidas casual sneaker things, which were curiously named Lawsuit II according to the side of the box, and now I know why - the laces have an incredibly annoying habit of spontaneously coming undone whenever they feel like it. So now I have some Blundstones. With no laces, dammit.

1999-08-19

For the first time in a few months, I caught up with an old friend Terry, even though he lives 5 minutes' walk from where I live. It's odd, but life has a habit of working in odd ways...although given the change in his life circumstances, we'll probably be seeing more of each other again...

It's been...an introspective week, which I guess is something of an excuse for not writing so much. I've been thinking too much about...life stuff. Why I don't have any long-term plans, and so on - I really just don't know what I want to do with myself, although I don't necessarily feel all that bad for not knowing. I do wonder how long I can get away with making it up as I go along, though :)

On Sunday, I met up with Sarah (photo above) for lunch to see her for the last time before she moved to Perth to try and find work. Her train left Monday night, and then on Wednesday night whilst watching the late-night news I heard there'd been a train crash in Western Australia - it had to be the same train, so I tried unsuccessfully to make a few phone calls to find out about it. The Age's website had no information whatsoever (thanks guys), so I had to give up for the night. In the morning I finally managed to find out that she wasn't one of the 16 injured people, at least. Unfortunately I don't have her mobile number, so all I could do was email her and hope she's ok...Hmm...Tonight's late night news had footage, but I didn't see any sign of her. It was the first time in ages that I actually sat glued to the television...

1999-08-20

Last seen hopping off the tram and wandering through the Balaclava shops on the way home from work...

Last heard listening to that new Fountains of Wayne CD (which isn't 'arf bad)...

Last...oh, I don't know...

"bueno, bueno..."

1999-08-23

First, the administrivia. Happy 30th anniversary, Mum & Dad. Happy 27th birthday, Scod.

Right.

I'm still deep in the trenches, but when you're feeling this way most people just don't want to know, so I hold it in and wait for the sun to break through the clouds - It's gotta happen one of these days. A slight case of optimism can be such a curse sometimes...

...and it's times like this when random loud music comes to the rescue. Moby's Animal Rights, Skinny Puppy, whatever else. I forget. Such a whirl of noise - lyrics that just don't make sense. Noise, noise, noise. Make it all go away. Make it stop.

Please.

Addendum : While reading the insert to Skinny Puppy's last studio album, The Process, I notice the dedication to one of their members, Dwayne Goettel - born February 1st 1964, committed suicide August 23rd 1995. What an odd coincidence. Thanks for the music, dude...

1999-08-24

A perfect day. Most un-winterlike. The sun was out and Fawkner Park was full of people making the most of their lunchbreak. Something was in the air, because I couldn't help but feel fairly jovial all day...I guess the weather affects me more than I'd like to think.

1999-08-25

I've spent far too much time fiddling with computers lately. Last weekend turned into an episode of complete technology debauchery - first, we gave the beloved bund (upon which this site sits) a new motherboard. On Sunday I popped over to buy a CDROM drive for what was going to be an upgraded gateway box for home, and ended up buying a new motherboard and CPU 'cause it was so cheap...

But that wasn't it. On Tuesday Lee went and bought a DVD unit for our stereo system. It's nice to finally hear stuff in "real" sound (we don't yet have a stereo VCR, but that's apparently about to change too).

Later, I managed to cobble together a second machine out of some spare bits plus my old motherboard. It's been christened Pistolero, after a Frank Black and the Catholics CD - the first thing that popped into my head at the time...

For a while there, I was really getting into it. It's fun getting all the bits going (especially when it all just works first time, more or less). It's fun thinking about the possibilities, even though I'll prolly never quite get around to implementing most of them. Nevertheless, it was heaps more fun than sitting around moping about my life.

Required listening : The Blurred Crusade by The Church. Fabulous stuff. The kind of CD you can throw on while you relax on the couch and let the lyrics overtake you.

And if love was worth a fortune, then I'd need a rise to be in your eyes...

1999-08-26

Random photo from the other week - "...and if it weren't for those darn kids..."

The technology show rolls on - the new TV arrived this evening, and it sure is a purty thing. I suppose I ought to like, watch more TV for a while, until the novelty wears off. Or something. I always find it hard to sit down and watch TV though, in itself.

I bought the new Roland S. Howard CD today. Man, I could have done with this last week. Very moody. Wailing guitars. An intriguing cover of Billy Idol's White Wedding (remember that old chestnut ?).

A bit short on words today. But my mood is decidedly better.

1999-08-27

Words often fail me.

...or am I failing words ?

1999-08-28

Lightheaded - sudden climate changes affect me so much today - I step into a warm stuffy music shop and the disorientation overwhelms me for a moment. Same thing as I step off the train at Ripponlea, out into the cool air...

"It's like this: chess is an art. You can do one art, you can do them all." - Martin Amis, The Coincidence of the Arts.

In Balaclava now. Two girls sit in the café, hunched over their maths homework, with their lip balm, mobile phone, coffee and cigarettes strewn around the table. Seeking silence of a sort, I sit at my usual outside table, read my book and watch the people stroll by.

I grab the Pulp CD and go for a walk around the block to kill another hour...the rain starts falling but not in an annoying manner - the slight mist is fairly pleasant...as much as these things can be.

I've been walking a bit more again lately, in terms of just wandering the streets around where I live. I started doing it in the first year of uni when I was still living with my parents...I couldn't study, my mind was far too restless, and I just needed to get out of the house. So I walked. and walked. and walked. I didn't really go anywhere in particular, I'd just try a street I'd never walked down before, and see where it went. By the time I moved out of home I'd walked most of the streets in Glen Waverley. It was something to do.

1999-08-29

Have you ever looked up at the sky on a cloudless day ? One blue fades into another as you stare up into nothingness...

Café Sahara's record collection currenty sports a Go-Betweens record sitting at the front. Maybe they'd been playing it earlier, but at the moment it's Portishead again - same as last time I was here...

But there are other people here this time - the window seats are occupied, unfortunately. Food, wine and coffee. I sit back next to the wall and drink the cool dark air along with my beer. I should've brought my book, but at least the Palm Pilot provides the illusion of occupation.

1999-08-31

Another Netizen pub interview, ie. after they pass the initial interview you take them down to the pub and see how things go...The pub in this case was the Charles Dickens in the city, which is pleasant enough (if you can avoid all the TV screens with sport on them). After a reasonable amount of Newcastle Brown, I tagged along with 2 of the others - we went into chinatown and had steamboat for dinner, whilst the others all wandered home or wherever. It was the first time I'd actually had steamboat, and it seemed (to quote Benno) "like an asian fondue party". But definitely worth a go.

As I walked home from the tram, the sky was full of clouds except for this bit that seemed like some huge paw had ripped it away...By the time I actually reached home though, the clouds had oozed back to regain their lost ground...