tales from an ordinary world

2000-05-01

I bought a black suede jacket on the weekend, but every time I wear it I'm painfully aware of the fact that I'm wearing dead animal. This never bothered me when I wear leather boots, though. I'm puzzled.

2000-05-02

"I never let you down with my stereo sound"
Beastie Boys

I feel like a taut string, resonating as the wind blows right through me and picking up secret communications from the leaves as they wave their messages at me in some kind of hugely parallel morse code.

There's a maze of twisty little thoughts running in circles in my head, probing, looking, wondering, fearing, smiling and laughing. I dropped a spanner somewhere, thinking of global monochrome and new beginnings. Infotainment is over - the lines are blurred.

How did I sleep last night, before hollywood ?

2000-05-05

We packed up the office. Tomorrow we move down the road, back in with the rest of the organization. Things won't quite be the same - we won't have the same sense of freedom from being 10 minutes' walk away from the rest of them. We'll still be in a big room to ourselves, with no partitions or other subtle control mechanisms. Our office culture will go on. I'll get a nice corner to myself. I wonder how it'll all work out ?

In any case, I'll always remember taking the photo of them drinking their beers on the boxes we packed.

2000-05-06

And so we moved offices into the great glass building, which happens to be next door to another great glass building that houses the American Consulate. Last year during the whole Kosovo Thing, angry Serbs would stand outside this building, waving their flags and occasionally throwing things. Apparently a stray brick broke one of our windows - perhaps all glass buildings look the same to an angry mob.

2000-05-07

After a few more hours of preparation in the house of glass I'm tired. Drifiting off to sleep on the tram tired. Propping myself up in the restaurant tired. Needing a coke and a smoke tired. There didn't seem to be very much physical exertion on my part, and yet it still took its toll.

2000-05-08

"I've got seven days to live my life
or seven ways to die"
David Bowie

Our first day of work in the house of glass. We're a bit of a curiosity to the others, which is fine. If I'd had time I would've coloured my hair just to play it up a little, but I had to settle for donning the big boots. I stayed all day from 7:30am to 6pm - it could've been longer, but it seemed like time to go. All the same, I was restless - I couldn't stand still on the tram, I couldn't find any random CD to buy in Second Spin at Balaclava, and I didn't feel like grabbing food before I got home.

Later, someone nearly ran into a parked car trying to undertake the tram. Everybody stood up to look out the window. He'd only slightly dented it. The screech was impressive, though. The rest of the ride home seemed like such an anti-climax.

I hide in my headphones to avoid yet another law show on the TV. Time to try and let that David Bowie CD grow on me a little more.

I haven't read a single book this year. Now there's two of them on the floor, waiting for me. It's just so hard to feel like it. I want something else.

2000-05-10

"We're interrupted by the telephone
you didn't think they were invented then"
The Church.

I'm the passenger. The car wheels take me on, to the familiar destination. Time after time. It's all rather comforting.

2000-05-11

There's no good coffee in this part of town. I miss the Irish guy back at the old place - I could walk in, not have to say a word, and he'd hand me my coffee. It wasn't that I didn't have to speak, it was just that he remembered.

And now ? A coffee machine on another floor, a cafe across the road that's too busy to feel friendly, and the as yet not-fully-explored cafe inside the Insitute for the Blind.

In time, it'll all be home. Some day.

2000-05-12

"On every street of this city
I heard you call my name."
The The

I bid my drinking companions farewell - "come and help do this and we'll have a beer across the road while we do it" had turned into five. It was a nice night to be alive, and I made my way across the busy road to the office, to collect my things. My head was buzzing and I noted the thought that if I was to suddenly slip under the path of a speeding car, at least things would be ending on a pretty high note, all things considered.

Morbidity wasn't on the agenda though, I had places to be. Through the happy fuzz I could barely hear the music on my headphones. The tram moved on, emptying most of its passengers at Flinders St. By the time we got to dinner I was sober, but still jovial.

The shiny happy people coming in to party, and the sad, tired ones making their way home after a week of work. The lights, the wheels, the overhead cabling. All of this makes Melbourne on a friday night.

2000-05-13

In the Malaysian restaurant, some proud parents Ooh and Aah over their young son mastering the use of chopsticks. I remember doing this - every time my parents got Chinese takeaway, we'd eat it at home with chopsticks. This sounds rather tacky, but at least I can use them now (if not completely properly).

On the way back to Mavis' house, the effect of a fairly uplifting song on the radio (the Pet Shop Boys' cover of Go West - oddly enough, the Village People film was on TV this afternoon) is cancelled by the sight of a fairly bad crash - the battered car, the multiple police cars with lights ablaze, and the tow truck silently waiting just adjacent to the scene.

At the pool parlour, I sit on the bench and watch from the edge. Smoke curls up quickly like a warning signal from the cigarette at my knee. An old U2 song plays on the jukebox, reminding me of meaningful high school days gone by.

My observations cease while I play a lack-lustre game against Mavis, who's in much better form tonight. The world is a rectangular piece of green cloth where one learns to master geometry, inertia and momentum. A world in which my sense of control needs some serious work, but one in which I can manage to keep my head above water - waving, not drowning.

2000-05-14

Hours spent looking at shelves full of consumer goods
Fathers chastising sons for wanting to buy
Familiar couples try out sofas
Staff in bedding department chat idly
Imitiation texan restaurant is full
Extended families celebrating Mother's Day
yee-ha
where do we go from here ?
I want to buy, buy, buy
but unseen forces hold me back
like that guy on the radio says
"trust the energy, 'cause the energy says..."

2000-05-16

It's that kind of time, when you can feel sickness casting its tiny shadow. I'm reaching new heights of restlessness - last night I was completely absorbed in music twaddle, tonght I can't sit down for five minutes.

I can't stop sneezing.

And so the world turns. At least I've managed to do a few useful things for people lately but, all the same, I can't help noticing the distance between things. Even now, when past lives are manfesting themselves with olive branches I'd always hoped for but never thought I'd see, it's hard to decide exactly how much of a difference it really makes now. I'm grateful, of course I'm grateful. Maybe it's just that I can't take a compliment without feeling guilty about it. Perhaps it's more that I couldn't really disagree with some of the things that were said about me, back then. And like, have I really done all that much to improve myself in all this time ?

I've got that feeling like when you say "did I somehow miss some kind of important lesson about XYZ at school ?". Except this time it's hard for me to even pinpoint what XYZ is.

I suppose it's just the restlessness talking - rattling my bones, whispering in my ear and asking those difficult, difficult questions.

I'm a long way from home.

2000-05-20

So as I head into work on a rainy Saturday afternoon, feeling slightly in doubt of my cranial capacity after last night's party, there's this sudden smell of fried food - fish and chips perhaps - in the tram. How come that smell only carries so well on cold, wet days ?

2000-05-21

We shop in Bridge Rd. Some toothless old lady in a beanie and tracksuit pants asks "are you going to church ?" "uh, no. We're shopping." "can I come ?"

At Second Spin, I buy a signed copy of the record I named my old radio show after. I figured that made me more committed. Or something. And I figure I Probably Ought To Have the Kid Koala CD - you know, to round out my collection of random CDs, and all - I'm trying to increase the breadth, but I've got a long way to go.

I seem to be losing my grip on time. It's a nebulous concept, but even moreso lately. When I think about lost time, I think of that old, old Lloyd Cole song, Lost Weekend.

2000-05-25

On the way to work, Droo told me a friend of his at the Bureau of Meteorology reckons tomorrow'll be a really weird weather day. Maybe it'll even snow in Melbourne town, as it does once a decade or so.

I remember it happening once before, while I waited for the school bus one morning. The other kids were busy talking about...the kind of stuff schoolkids talk about in the morning - odd varieties of nothing at all...My head was in the clouds, and all of a sudden it started snowing. Everybody was silent.

2000-05-26

"I left my baby by the side of the highway
she just didn't see things my way.
Someday I'm gonna treat you good."
Sparklehorse

The schoolgirl on the morning tram has this hard, bunched-up look on her face, like she'll grow up to be one of those women with a permanent tiny frown. I'd always wondered how such things began.

At the train station this evening, everybody seems to be talking to me - "hello, Cos" - I whip around, and someone's on the phone. Then there's this coughing sound from a different direction, the kind of sound you make to grab someone's attention...but when I look up there's only a guy buried in his novel. It's all getting too distracting - time to don the headphones and zone out. Even the everpresent graffiti at Malvern station makes less sense than usual.

2000-05-29

People are leaving, moving on, to other places and times. This little piggy's going to Amsterdam, so we gather round at the Nott to sink a few in appreciation. That one's going to Canada. Someone's leaving work to go try the UK. Even my housemate's taking a month off to visit the US.

Others are suddenly appearing out of the woodwork. Old friends I hadn't heard from in months, or a couple of years. It's always hard to summarize my life, in that "how've you been ?", non-committal kind of way. The Great Inner Journey ? Yeah, that's going just fine. Drifting along. Singing a song. Something like that. Not much to show for progress, but I feel better about it these days.

The net, the great Enabler that helps keep people together, once in a while. That great bit-hose in the sky, occasionally it deigns to shower us with missives from the other lost souls we know and love. When it rains, it pours. There's a near-life experience lurking in every silver cloud.

Current listening :

• The Hunting Picture, by Sandpit.

2000-05-30

Some things are better left to chance - the purchase of flimsy plastic things, takeaway food, and a handful of CDs from the local second hand shop. Second hand store. Whatever.

It's hard to appreciate words when the music's turned up in my headphones, but I need to block out other things for a while.

The storm rages on, in a one-man sea. Vision blurs, memory fades. We're leaving it all behind, like tiny blades of grass in the wind. Twisting. Slowly.

There's a wedding soon. I lack the means to skip town for this. I can't afford the past I made - a past gone mad.

2000-05-31

The city was an open book. An alleyway I'd never walked down, a shop I'd never paid attention to, and lunch at somewhere I'd never eaten before. The rain turned on and off like a faulty tap. We step out onto Bourke St - some kid materialises next to me and quietly croaks "chasin' ?" but I ignore him, trying to focus on the objective at hand. I was struggling to keep up with the task-switching I'd been doing all week. What did I miss ?