tales from an ordinary world

2000-07-01

"and they'll say that you're so sick, boy
but you're only sick of love"
The Blackeyed Susans.

It's an odd place to hear a band - a free gig, in the bistro of a largish pub. Most of the people aren't there to hear the band, and don't pay them too much attention when they start. By the end of their show, closing with a song called "my body has a mind of its own", many of the patrons have been replaced by a more appreciative audience.

A guitar played the right kind of way - that delicate soft wail - sends my head to other places. Wide open spaces. They've been on my mind a lot lately, as if I could somehow escape my life, like I've always wanted to.

A few years ago, I picked up a particular Blackeyed Susans album with a cover of some song called "Apartment number 9", about someone lamenting been dumped - "and the sun will never shine on apartment number nine". Having just been dumped, and living (at the time) in number 9 in a block of flats, the song meant something to me. Deliciously sad, the ambient noise of traffic in the background, and Evil Graham Lee's pedal steel just to help set the mood.

They all seem so much happier, now that I'm out of their way. I deserved every inch of pain, every tear, every sleepless night. And it'll only happen again and again until the big sleep, with my ashes scattered across this city.

2000-07-02

All washed up in consumerville. The holy trinity of electrical goods, clothes and food. We did it all. I stared at it for hours, and came out feeling lonely, empty and confused. Only a jumper to show for the afternoon's work, but the alternative would've been to impulse-buy a Micro HiFi system for the bedroom. Or something. It's not time, not yet.

We drove past some kid sitting on the kerb at the bus stop, eating his pizza from a box whilst a flock of seagulls expectantly swarmed around him. I need to refresh myself with such simple pleasures, I need a lost weekend. As it is, I'm usually able to account for every second of my time on the weekend - Sleep, get up and shower, eat, shop, come home, empty my pockets onto the floor, do random domestic chores, stand in front of the CD collection and try and choose something to match my current mood, and for much of the rest of my time, sit at this little window to the rest of the connected world and wait for something interesting to happen.

2000-07-04

Feeling a little more productive perhaps, but also less creative. Fooling one's self is easy, perhaps that's all it is. I sense a great need. My head needs feeding - I've been high on sound but low on words, visuals, but even so I can't seem to make time to sit down and read or watch something. I just can't do it. "If you look over to your left you'll notice my attention span fading off into the sunset..."

Last night spent lying on the lounge room floor, trying to compile a shortlist of CDs to test potential new stereos with. 10 is still too many, even without the salesman-scaring Merzbow CD you can't leave home without. Concentrate.

2000-07-05

"Oh yeah I've got a heart of darkness."
Sparklehorse.

It's like moving through treacle. Going in slow motion, office to tram stop, tram to railway station. Even the train seems to slowly ooze alongside the platform as we all jog up to catch it. Sleepwalking, and dreaming of sleep. Nobody quite seems to be paying attention. I'm sure I've had dreams like this.

At Mavis' flat, the sounds of traffic distract me. Out the window, the suburbs are lit up by thousands of bulbs, groups of white and yellow ones. We lie on the bed, she asks what's wrong. My life's flashing before me. Everything and nothing.

I could write a postcard on those eyes.

The smiling moon hangs low in the sky tonight as we drive home. I stand out in the backyard for a while and look at the stars, but I can hear the mournful cry and rumble of a freight train and later, some sirens. The wind moves the trees in familiar ways. I'm wearing my dark green jumper, it reminds me of Dad.

2000-07-06

"I did know the secret of the universe,
only I forgot..."
Matt Johnson.

[...]

Current listening :

• Bend Sinister, by The Fall.

• Burning Blue Soul, by Matt Johnson.

• Fire and Skill - songs of The Jam, by various artists.

2000-07-07

Budding Discordian sits on the tram quietly reading manual. And later, at the pool parlour, Roskilde tshirt guy tells his friends about how far away from the stage he was - "like, the band was this big from where I was standing !"

Never much of a Cardigans fan, but Erase/Rewind is stuck in my head.

2000-07-10

...and she said "I can't watch black and white films - I find it too hard to concentrate."

A walk for lunch, but the back streets around all these office buildings gives me no joy, nothing, just the cold wind and the bright sun. A snatch of conversation as I walk past two people standing around on the pavement - "that's what I did before I gave up." Endless traffic, the odd angry driver and nervous pedestrians. That subdued Monday feeling, back in the office.

My limited focus denies me the secrets of the new music I've been buying - I need more willpower to really dig into them, but I'm too tied up with other thoughts, other things. Everybody seems to hurt when I shut off like this. I never say enough in these situations, the words just won't come to me, and they're left to make up their own minds about what it is I meant. I'm sorry.

2000-07-10b

"should you awake
to feel like you've never slept
and feel so very old
well don't you feel alone"
Lloyd Cole.

It's the old familiar story. That unshakeable spectre that despite the unstoppable flow of good feelings from friends and family, periodically appears to slaps you around the head and throw you to the ground, saying "this isn't enough, this isn't right, this isn't you, this isn't going to last, you've wasted every good opportunity you've been given and by fuck you'll pay for this, goddamn you."

And so the day goes on. You keep up basic appearances and functions, while most of your brain power is spent panicking and trying to answer that essentially unsolvable question of "so just what is it that I need to change about myself to make things better ? Where do I even begin ?"

...but I repeat myself.

I've been sleeping ok I guess, but I haven't remembered a dream in ages.

2000-07-11

"You know I'm thinking of you
in the bookstore
in the laundromat..."
The Lucksmiths.

A retreat into geekdom sometimes helps more than you expect it to. It's nice to have a fallback. The sun's still out, but as I tread the familiar path of office to ATM to lunch to office the wind lacks yesterday's bitterness.

I'll always associate this street corner with this particular person, the way we always did lunch in the same way. Similarly, those couple of roads, heading toward the outer south east suburbs, they remind me of her, the variously-coloured cars I sat in as we drove out that way under yellow street lights and filled up at the petrol station near her house. And that particular 7-11 in Burnley reminds me of another girl, way back when, driving unlicensed across town to visit a cousin in the immigration detention centre. We had to clear out his flat, piling his stuff into another friend's van, while my friend ended up with his car, the beat-up old Datsun. The clutch died at the lights one time in the western suburbs somewhere, on our way to the detention centre - we were left motionless, holding up some angry drivers. 5 years later, I found myself wandering around North Melbourne one day with Ohnmar. We walked up to the footy oval, then somewhere near railway line and the Four 'n' Twenty (I think) pie factory, and back along a few streets to Chapman Street, where she'd apparently first lived when her family came here. Walking past one tiny house, we heard someone practising their saxophone. We found number 13, but there wasn't much to look at from the street.

So how did I get here ? All these random occurrences, merely strung together by the ether. And what comes next ? Where to from here ? I hear a faint call from other places, but...but...but...

Current listening :

• Avant Hard, by Add N to (X).

• A Good Kind of Nervous, by The Lucksmiths.

2000-07-13

A familiar journey, I've done it a few times before. All these little towns, they never really change a hell of a lot. It'd be nice to have time to explore each of them, but that's something I'll never manage to do on my own.

It's dark by the time the bus reaches Canberra. We drop our stuff at the hotel and wander hungrily into town. The open mall is much the same as I remember it, 2 years ago, 5 years ago. The guy selling roasted chestnuts from his red wagon. The merry-go-round. The near-life-size chessboard. Plenty of Magpies, Mudlarks and Currawongs the latter more common here than in Melbourne, especially in the city centre. It'd been ages since I'd heard them.

In the Thai restaurant, a middle-aged couple at a nearby table played the romance game - wine and kisses, etc. She did most of the talking. At the beginning, she was saying stuff like "I think you could be the one". They discussed ex-spouses and such. A bit later on, I heard her explaining how independent she was, how a friend had commented on her single lifestyle - "he said, 'a lot of people try and be single. You are single'. And it's true, y'know. I can walk into a pub by myself and have a good time, no worries.". As I got up to pay the bill, she was asking him "can I rely on you to be there at the other end of the phone line ?". We left, with her saying "I can't do that. I won't do that..."

2000-07-14

Questacon's full of kids again, but that's what it's all about. It's a shame we don't have a Tesla Coil down here at Scienceworks, although I guess we've got the planetarium instead. Science is fun - if only I wasn't so lazy about it.

The National Gallery had an exhibition of new Chinese art. An entire room (walls and ceiling) constructed from human hair collected from barber shops around the world. All over the walls were fake chinese characters, english words, and so on. Someone else took photos of various family members and hung them all over the outside of a crumbling house. There was communist propaganda mixed with advertising slogans, plenty of pictures of Chairman Mao, and a room full of roses, each pierced with a handful pins.

Exhausted, we retreated to the hotel room for the evening - the first time I'd ever called room service to order dinner and all that kinda stuff.

2000-07-15

5 years ago when I was here, I'd chanced upon a weekend market and picked up a few really good secondhand CDs. We managed to track it down again, and turned up just as everybody was finishing their unpacking. Plenty of home-made clothes and jewellery, as well as second-hand books, music and clothing. 70's prog rock over the speakers. People had their Tarot read. Out the back, a family cooked Salvadorean food. I searched every CD vendor for gems, but didn't really find anything much this time around - A Tom Waits album I hadn't gotten around to buying yet, and some old David Byrne single with remixes by the guy from Meat Beat Manifesto. We sat down for a while in the cold sunlight with our tiny dutch pancakes, watching all the people going about their business.

2000-07-16

The long ride home. Goodbye to the city of beige buildings. I'm paranoid the other passengers are going to lynch me because I'm coughing so much, especially when it turns out that the people sitting opposite us on the train were sitting right behind us on the bus. At Seymour, not too far from home, the train stops for a 10 minute break. All the smokers hop out for a quick one - mindful of my sore throat, I step out and just wander about the platform, in the cold dark evening air. Somewhere out in the north-western suburbs, we pass a real estate agency called "Sherlock Homes".

2000-07-18

Mr Sandman, this day is yours. Most of it, anyway. The rest ? It was wasted. Forget about it.

2000-07-19

Automatic pilot's the only way to go on days like this. A head that feels like it's full of cotton wool, the day after a sick day. Nose still off-base. Other systems functioning adequately. But no, a man is not a machine. Let us not fall into that kind of temptation.

More postcards from the other side of the world. It's nice to be unexpectedly thought of.

Fifteen minutes to go.

2000-07-20

I feel disappointed by this month's entries. They all seem a bit awkward, slightly forced. Every now and then I used to be able to come up with something I could look back upon and be happy with, but it's now turning dangerously toward becoming a chore.

I need some kind of inspiration. An angle. You know...

Sprawled out on the couch of some yuppie pub in Prahran, I felt like some kind of answer was almost in my grip. Clues. That kind of stuff. But it all dissipated into evening conversation by the time I left.

Flashback : It's new year's eve, we've turned up to someone's party. He's got a pool - we didn't know, and didn't bring our swimwear. Oh well. Eventually, he lends me a pair of shorts, so I jump in. She stays on land, and at one point I swim up to say hi to her and all she says back to me, in a voice only I can hear, is "I hate you so much right now."

Current Listening :

• New Wave and Now I'm a Cowboy, by The Auteurs.

2000-07-23

it was a zero cd and one t-shirt weekend.
sitting at the laundromat weekend.
too much time spent playing computer games (which i don't do very often) weekend.
stuff like that.

2000-07-24

your mallrats deserted you when you came of age
spent your whole new life staring at an empty page
come on now honey, it's okay to let me down
I drove all night for a glimpse of that pretty frown.

2000-07-27

And then it hit me, standing on the tram going home. I'd noticed they now had timetables above the ticket machine. I was going to get one, but thought "Hey. What for ?". Gone are the days of checking the timetable before I leave the house, and randomly standing around the lounge room waiting for the optimal moment to walk out the door and hurry to the tram stop. These days, I just go when I'm ready. There's no rush. Part of the journey's in the waiting, watching the endless traffic going by, the impatient drivers who won't give an inch to anyone else, the joggers heading up to the park and back, people walking their dogs...I don't usually get all that at home, especially when I've turned everything off in anticipation of leaving. The thing is, I can't remember when it was that all this changed. It wasn't a conscious decision.

So once again I ponder the nature of coincidence - having walked past some random serious and determined-looking woman walking the other way in front of the town hall as I approached the tram stop, I got off the tram this evening and walked home past the town hall, passing the very same serious and determined-looking woman walking the other way. Had she been waiting for me, just so she could do her Serious Walk with her loud shoes tapping the pavement for all to hear ? Maybe she'd been practicing this all day, walking back and forth in front of the town hall. I can't imagine any of this is true, but how did I manage to end up with such symmetry in the day's events ?

2000-07-29

By random chance, I finally ended up visiting Mink, this bar I've had 3 or 4 friends or work colleagues rave about. Dark lighting, stone walls, little rooms off to the sides, old Russian posters on the walls, red leather seats and ottomans, and an emphasis on vodka-based drinks. I had some odd honey and cinnamon martini, but everyone else had coffee or bourbon. It's not all that often that I do stuff with Mavis and her friends, and I had a good time.

2000-07-31

"Yesterday dreaming's just a waste of time"
Elliott Smith.

I've set myself something of a task, in that I hope to try and create a couple of interesting sound creations with AudioMulch every week. By the time I've got a decent collection going, hopefully I'll have come up with some greater plan for exactly What To Do with them. Maybe one day I'll feel up to tackling Buzz. Maybe I'll find something similarly cool for Linux so I don't have to make such an effort to dick around with music stuff. Maybe...