tales from an ordinary world

1999-10-03

A cocktail party last night, where nothing particularly much happened, although I did talk to one or two odd people, and it was pleasant. It certainly didn't feel like 2:30am when I got home...

In order to feel like I was doing something useful with the day, I walked all the way down to Ripponlea and had lunch at Café Surreal while I read another Burroughs novel. There really wasn't a lot going on in the world, it seemed. The whole of Glen Eira road seemed to be lacking something - there were a few cars going past, and one or two people walking around, but it all seemed pretty lifeless, in a way that reminded me of walking around Canberra, once. You got the impression that everybody was hiding away in their homes, but you couldn't quite work out why, as if there was some sort of curfew you hadn't been told about. You could feel some of them watching you out of their windows, too.

It's been a wasted weekend. I should be feeling a whole lot more relaxed, because I haven't done particularly much. I feel stuck in a cycle of merely killing time, by working, sleeping or wandering about, as if I'm anticipating some sort of blessed event happening some day that'll magically change my life and make me feel it's all been worthwhile. Yes, I know, it's extremely lame. I've no idea what sort of event I'm waiting for, I just have this impression that I'm subconsciously waiting for something to happen. Somehow, when this event occurs, I'll feel less tense, more releaxed, and all that sort of stuff. Christ. Anticipation is a dangerous thing...

Well, at least all this exercise is doing me good - I walked all the way to Elsternwick for dinner at Sue's and walked most of the way home too. I took 2 old Guided By Voices CDs with me, which helped put me in a good mood (I've no idea why, but there you go :)

1999-10-04

Some things become so automatic you just don't pay enough attention - I came home from work, removed my contact lenses, and just as I walked out of the bathroom I thought "Hmm. That was fast. I can't remember actually doing it. Maybe I washed them down the sink instead ?" and had to go back and check, to find that no, everything was fine. and my little blue circles (without which I'd be, like, totally lost) were floating happily in their little container. I must've been having one of those Monday moments...

I'm beginning to think it's time to write some sort of glossary of my life. Not quite as extravagant as Everything, but still somehow useful to the random traveller - Seemingly without trying this is my 120th entry, and it's probably time I started having a few canonical descriptions of all the important people, places and things in my life...

...so yes, maybe I'll get a Round Tuit one of these days. Until then, you'll have to just make do. I guess I'm finally starting to get used to the fact that people seem to actually read all of this. It's frightening in a way, but I guess that's why I did it - making myself do something I never really thought I could do. I mean, sure, there's lots of other seemingly more impressive things I never really thought I could do that I still haven't done, but I guess I don't feel ready for them yet...

1999-10-05

Did I react correctly when she told me the news ? I'd been expecting it for a while now, but even so there's still that sudden sting as you think about it all, all over again - I'd pretty much resigned myself to it when she departed a few months back - I spent a lot of time thinking it all over then, seeing the opportunities I'd wasted and figuring that, well, life rarely gives you second chances. But I'll cope. As I told her, "I'll feel weird about this for a while, but don't worry, I'll be ok."

Some kid is singing on the tram - something like "...and the son says 'daddy, I don't wanna go to school'...". Drugs, insanity or just a desire to make his fellow travellers uncomfortable ? It seemed to be working, though - people nervously smiled to one another and watched as he ran to the end of the tram and back whilst making racing-car noises.

Sing like a bird, monkey-boy. You never know when it might end...

1999-10-06

"...and I have no need for electric light
'cause I dream the same dream every night..."
Lloyd Cole

With nicotine clarity I see every leaf on the trees just beyond the café courtyard. A solitary white fluffy cloud lurks behind, waiting to spoil the clear blue sky. People talk behind me but I'm not listening, as I stare at the sky and into myself. Sometimes I'm just too introspective for my own good.

The CD changer managed to play 2 different versions of John Lee Hooker's I Cover the Waterfront this evening - not one after another, but even so...I hovered over the remote for a moment, then thought "I wonder if it means something ?".

1999-10-08

"All these moments
will be lost in time,
like tears in the rain..."
Philip K. Dick.

I sit in the park and look around, having just finished my book....

...a little girl runs past and looks up at the tree. She sticks out her arm, trying to reach the branch...

...a couple of young shirt-types are sitting behind me. One of them talks about someone (his girlfriend ?) who's just finished an interior design course...

...I start walking back to work, and there's a guy with long red dreadlocks in leather gear, standing on a bench seat reading out something or other to his more conventionally-dressed workmates...

To quote a local cartoonist, it was a near-life experience. Trying to prove to me that I just don't appreciate this life as much as I ought to. But I'm trying. Or I'm trying to try. Or something...

1999-10-09

you will go straight to heaven
while I'll probably hang around
let down and uncrowned
Stephen Cummings.

Memories, thoughts, despair attacked me from all sides today, but I was determined to at least be out of the house while it happened - even if it meant I'd be wincing every time I'd walk past couples arm-in-arm and all that sort of stuff. I needed the air. I needed to feel...like I was still part of the world, or something. It was warm and sticky, one of the first days of summer - somewhere, a storm was brewing.

2 hours of work suddenly intervened, which at least kept my mind occupied, after which I wandered down to St Kilda beach just as a few sporadic rain drops began to fall. I sat on a concrete wall near the pier and lit my cigarette. A few people were playing with a dog on a much smaller pier nearby. A girl wearing angel wings sat and watched her friends. Joggers, awkward rollerbladers and cyclists clogged the pathways as I made my way down towards Acland St, where the street was chock-full of the usual weekend crowd. I walked right past an old friend, but somehow it just didn't seem to be the right time to talk to anyone...I wasn't feeling coherent enough...

I walked past a Tarot reading table, and since nobody was there I sat down and had mine read...The lady put a positive spin on things that cheered me up a bit, and perhaps that alone made it worth it. She asked me if I had any questions I wanted to ask, but I couldn't really think of any Big Questions I really needed to have answered - I was more just randomly curious, and besides, I guess I feel that the Big Questions can only be answered from within. Still, it was an interesting experience, and if you've never had your Tarot read you should try it some time.

Today's soundtrack - Spiritual Bum by Stephen Cummings and Deserter's Songs by Mercury Rev (yeah, I finally got it the other week...).

1999-10-10

I was sitting on another tram, to Chapel St, when an elderly couple got on and sat in front of me. In amongst their other normal banter, the guy suddenly said "Whenever I get on a tram I think of John Garfield". Having perhaps lost those couple of brain cells that remembered who John Garfield was, I'm a bit puzzled by this.

We saw Election. Many films have me averting my eyes from the screen because of the "I know what's about to happen and I can't bear to watch" syndrome (half the time friends see me doing this, and ask me "are you ok ?"). This film was like that but even more so. That's not to say I considered it a bad film, but...I dunno...

Soundtrack for today was Jesus Christ Superstars by Laibach.

1999-10-12

"I had to teach the world to sing by the age of twenty-one..."
R.E.M.

The office seemed short on air after lunch, and in the early afternoon haze I could hardly move from my chair, with the headphones squeezing out the repetitive percussion of another Muslimgauze CD. A co-worker came by, saw the cover and said "hey, cool".

One of these days, I hope to work up the inner strength to actually try and make some music - it'd probably be experimental noise, random sounds, or something. It's so hard to know how or where to start, though. Well. I kind of started something the other week, but it's all rather embryonic, to say the least.

Mike sent us a first email from his European holiday. I hope he has a good time...

1999-10-13

for someone half as smart
you'd be a work of art
Elliot Smith.

...communicating by grunts, they made their way to the top of the street, where they found the corpse of a once-loved football, and a few empty beer bottles. "where to now ?" one of them asked...

Screeching cockatoos in the park. The gentle distant sounds of trains, trams and traffic. A light breeze makes it seem like the trees are waving me goodbye. It's time to go home.

1999-10-14

A cloudy but kinda warm, sunny morning. The other people on the tram seem a mile away as I sink into the quiet twang of the Scud Mountain Boys. For an instant, I look back at the tram line and it seems to go on forever. I lean on the window sill and watch the world go by on this lonely planet.

An old girlfriend of mine hailed from Indonesia, studied here in Melbourne, and a few years later when I next heard from her, she was working in the Middle-East. As she'd always say at the end of her emails,

"i'm a lonesome cowboy
so far from home..."

1999-10-15

dream - walking. Dad is walking^* too. He's naked (maybe I am too, I didn't notice). We walk into some place that might be a science show ? There's a guy in the room we wander into, who says something like "uh, I'm nearly ready." We move on. Some people are standing over some bubbling saucepans. They appear to be making some sort of foamy stuff (polyurethane ?), as a group participation exercise. One person dips his hand in and comes out with a handful of white foam...

^* Dad's been wheelchair-bound (a paraplegic - paralysed from the waist down - his legs have withered away, but his arms are fine, or perhaps stronger than they were, since he pushes himself around) since 1980, after a gliding (no, not hang gliders, the planes-without-engines kind of gliders) accident. I was 7 years old, in grade 2 of primary school. I'd take time off school to go with Mum to visit him at the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg. I remember the friendly old hospital gatekeeper, with his kittens and his plums. And I'll never forget that chemical hospital smell. Later on, when he was out of hospital, and adjusting to life in a wheelchair, I had dreams (or maybe fantasies ?) of being in some sort of accident where I'd conveniently end up wheelchair-bound : I wanted to be just like Dad.

1999-10-17

dream - At the old tennis club near mum & dad's place is a big underground access tunnel (to what ?), but it's all overgrown now...(someone has plans to reopen it ?) There's a smaller tunnel nearby, too. Everybody wonders what's in there, and I think people were daring each other to walk in there and see if they could come out of the smaller tunnel. There seemed to be some sort of feeling that we'd get in trouble if we went in there. But I don't think we knew who we'd get in trouble with. [ In real life, there's no such tunnel, by the way. ]

dream (another one. I'm unsure of the details of this, and bits of it may have been somehow invented after I woke up. I'm not sure) - Jello Biafra was hanging around. Or rather, various people were hanging around him. I've no idea what he actually looks like or anything, but it was definitely him. [This is the bit that mostly came to me after I woke up] I think he was going to rant about something or other (like, as some sort of performance), but somehow whatever he was going to rant about got "re-edited into one key sentence" (???) (by some music journo ?) and maybe there didn't seem to be any point in doing the performance after all. So nothing much happened as far as I remember, it was just a few people hanging around doing nothing in particular.

Why Jello Biafra ? I was never a big Dead Kennedys fan or anything, but I do have a few CDs by Lard which I haven't listened to in ages. I think I flipped past one of them in my CD case yesterday when I was finding something to listen to, and it must've stuck...

For a few weekends in a row, I make the same tram journey, hoping that it'll be subtly different each weekend. I still don't know exactly what it is that I'm looking for, but I keep looking nonetheless.

1999-10-20

I'm totally unable to focus today, for reasons that escape me. I feel, in some kind of way, slightly broken. Not in a whingeing angsty way, but just plain and simple. Maybe broken is the wrong word. Perhaps it's more of an inability to act, a kind of powerlessness...

1999-10-21

Funny how the ones you don't expect are also suffering from that "so what the hell do I do now ?" kind of general life ennui that creeps up on you in your mid-twenties without warning. "You've changed so much over the past 5 years", she tells me, "and I haven't. Everything's still the same." "But you must've changed somehow, somewhere, right ?"...

Living the Examined Life in this Asphalt Eden. It's an odd world, but I find an almost perverse pleasure in living this way.

1999-10-22

box. latch. twin. Some random green plant out in the back garden. 73 days of free hot water every year. And why can I smell something like bread (or dough ?) when I go out the back ? A black t-shirt with bleach marks on it. It's cold outside. I'm lonely, but not sad. Blue jeans, which I hardly ever wear nowadays. Fonts. Button-with-flashing-light. A whole lotta Post-It ^TM Notes. Star Trek on the telly, but I'm not paying attention (as usual). A dinner appointment that never happened (I'd guessed that it wouldn't, but still...). Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. So much to do. I wish I felt like doing it. Noise. "Use the space key to Devour Souls". Thrust. Parry. Dodge. Time's going a lot faster since I changed jobs. Peril. Self-adhesive labels. But no string. None whatsoever...

1999-10-24

I'll tell you about my day later on, when I've got time. But the above is something of an end-result...

1999-10-26

I sat on some remote seat in the middle of Fawkner Park contemplating life through my rose (well, red)-tinted sunglasses. Ox (a co-worker) walked past, and commented "it doesn't get any better than this". So I pondered, and counted my blessings for a while. The sun wasn't shining, it could have been a tiny bit warmer, and hey, nothing particularly much is happening in my life at the moment, but it was still a good day. And it's been a good week for just generally relaxing vibes. Something is going on. The winds are changing somehow. Most weeks, I'd be getting myself down about times like this. But now it's different - I've no idea why, but then...I suppose it's better to think about what to do rather than why the hell it's happening to me.

Giving in to my restlessness, I walked back to work, past the people playing soccer, and past Ox doing his Tai Chi. The day rolled on, slowly but surely...

1999-10-27

"You're not an airplane"
Guided By Voices.

Sometimes I'm the victim of such amazing coincidence I can't believe my luck. I wandered into Chapel St, to look at Borders for a few books and stuff. I listened to some Guided By Voices CDs, but for reasons unknown decided I'd buy them some other time. Dinner was at "That Little Noodle Place", which wasn't quite what I expected, especially with the insipid Backstreet Boys-like music filling the place. But never mind. Rain made me decide to hop on the tram and go home, but halfway towards Dandenong Road it eased up, and I felt like a coffee so I hopped off, and walked back towards a place I'd been once before, when I saw a Giant Robot t-shirt in the window of a shop. I'd manage to avoid spending any money so far, but I had to have one of these, so I wandered in, and the guy seemed really happy to have a customer (or something). I mentioned I'd read a few issues of Giant Robot before and this seemed enough to get him really enthusiastic, telling me all sorts of stuff about how they'd met the guys who do the magazine, and because of that, they're the only people in Melbourne (or Australia ? I forget) who get the nifty extra-bits and signed stuff for the magazine and other related bits and pieces. I managed to restrain myself to buying 2 t-shirts for the time being, but I know I'll be back sometime soon enough...

1999-10-28

Space. I just finished this book that was basically just a whole heap of photos of the living spaces of ordinary people living in Tokyo, with commentary by the author. The thing that really struck me was the lack of space all these people had. It certainly makes you consider what you'd do if you had less space. It also made me think (again) about all the things I have - how much do I really need ? I have this recurring fantasy of selling everything I own and just going...somewhere...and just starting all over again. But I often wonder - all of these things define who I am, don't they ? So if I remove those things, what am I left with ?

I don't remember why I found that book on Sunday afternoon, it was just kinda there, and it caught my eye somehow or other. Sometimes I wonder if I pay enough attention to coincidences...