tales from an ordinary world

2000-08-01

Gold star for robot boy
well that's ok.
Guided by Voices

Some days, everything looks like an empty page struggling to form coherent words and phrases. People look up quizzically as you walk past them on the tram to get to an empty seat. Others just have that dazed and confused look about them. And there's that sense of waiting, that something big's coming sometime Real Soon Now if we'll just be patient and sit quietly.

I'm trying to do, rather than wait. Starting's always the hard part. Wish me luck.

2000-08-02

There's an occasional faint smell of petrol in my part of the office today causing random thoughts of airports and going places and stuff...

It's been one of my favourite album covers for ages (or at least, the memory of the picture if not the picture itself), and I finally managed to borrow it to have a listen to. I wonder if this is where that old dream came from ?

It's been ages since I had a good walk, so I ended up walking home from Elsternwick on a nice cool evening with nothing better to do. Signs telling me I can get an Ice Cream Fudge Sundae for just $3.50. A few restaurants with signs saying "reopening soon", like that odd "Mex-Asia" place I'd never made it to - now turning into just a Mexican restaurant. The funeral parlour has these deathly white wheelie bins parked out the front - not a nice bold white but that slightly opaque plasticky kind of white instead. I wasn't quite curious enough to open one up and see what was inside, though. Regardless, the image remains - White Lady Funerals with their white wheelie bins.

Current Listening :

• I'm your fan - songs of Leonard Cohen, by various artists.

2000-08-05

"Treasure your spin cycle"
Zippy the Pinhead.

Lee's new washing machine is a thing of joy. No more busted spin motor and having to wring clothes out after washing. It bleeps happily when you turn it on, and again when you hit the play button and let its fuzzy logic decide what to do.

2000-08-06

The endless procession of technology. All these identical boxes with increasing numbers on them. A town hall full of this stuff, swarms of people milling around the rows of stalls with the same collection of boxes, asking for prices or just silently staring and moving on. Today I'm in the latter category - poking my nose around, trying to get excited about hardware. But this is not my life, so I shuffle out and head down Glenferrie Road where there's a nice little second hand CD shop. I'm trying not to spend too much money so I pass on that new David Holmes CD for the time being, even though it was fairly cheap. Some other time. I'm practising being good. None of the cafés along this strip seem sufficiently empty out front for me to feel like stopping - I walk onwards, down to the park. More kids playing lacrosse. It's a nice day to be outside. Time for a gin and lime at home, later on. I kinda miss those sunny afternoons spent in Café Sahara, staring out the window onto Swanston St with drink in hand. They were nice times.

2000-08-07

"You see, you hear these funny voices
in the tower of song"
Leonard Cohen.

On the evening tram home I manage to get a standing spot right at the back, where you can look out the rear window and watch the track unfold. Down the hill from the junction, the lights from the after-work traffic reflecting off the windows, then under the pedestrian bridge near that pub with the pink elephants on it. We stop here and a busker gets off - the same guy who I'd seen on the tram once before, but I didn't recognize the songs this time. After a while, enough people get off that I can sit down and stare out the window at the blocks of flats along Dandenong Rd. Lights on here and there, the yellow street lights keeping the road alight, but there's a lingering darkness up in the trees. Night's falling. The sky is falling.

She's still telling me how sorry she is, and I'm not real sure what to say. Sure, it really hurt at the time, but I still have good memories. I still don't know what caused the revelation in recent times that maybe she'd been a bit hard on me, but I don't want her to stay feeling so bad. It's hard to feel like I deserve so much sudden sympathy.

It's hard to know when I'm doing the right thing. Sometimes it's hard to feel like getting up in the morning if I think about some of the decisions I've made in the past, like the way I dealt with various girlfriends. People I let go. Things I probably should have done. Nevertheless, some of those decisions I regret were for the best, I suppose. And I've still got the future. I can't change things overnight, but hopefully I can subtly steer things in the right direction over time. Generally speaking I'm a happier individual than I used to be. I enjoy being slightly lost, navigating by instinct, by smell, by feel.

2000-08-08

Picture this : there's a student on the morning tram with her textbook on C Programming. A heap of those coloured tape flags hanging out the side of it marking hopefully important sections. She's got the book open, trying to read, but can't help idly staring out the window instead. Watching the world go by is generally a much more pleasant option.

Tanya, our friendly waitress at the Bluestone, pretended to be enthralled in my story of spending my weekend waiting for and marvelling at the new washing machine. The three of us swapped washing machine stories for a while. It's an odd life.

2000-08-09

Evening spent in red wine haze, an SMS frenzy because a friend wants reassurance about some guy she's keen on. "You're the same species, you oughta know !". The CD changer keeps picking up John Lee Hooker.

2000-08-10

"I've got something better than your washing machine story," she said excitedly. "My best friend just bought a new vacuum cleaner !". When I told her that, yes, cleanliness is next to Godfreyness, she sneered and walked off.

2000-08-11

Lunch turns into an afternoon, our quest to find out what time they actually close. Tanya's story of the day is about how, back in North Queensland, a housemate of hers had a cheeseburger from a certain wellknown family restaurant that lasted 2 years, during which time no living thing (ants were pretty easily attracted to the house normally) went near it. Some stories sound better when you're not sober.

2000-08-12

Merzbow is on the cover of The Wire that I pick up in St Kilda, and remembering hearing about the incredibly intriguing Merzbox a while ago, I head into Peril Underground in the city to ask Peter if there's some vague chance he can get one in, but mostly I'm just curious how much it'll cost. For now I satisfy myself with a copy of Door open at 8 am.

The day for catching up - lunch with a friend I haven't seen in person for a year - very pleasant, even though we don't have all that much in common when I think about it more.

Dinner with the high school group. Some of them have already caught High Fidelity, so we're swapping theories on our top 5 albums of the 90's. 1990, our last year of high school, was definitely a good time for music.

2000-08-14

"and who shall I say is calling ?"
Leonard Cohen.

My SMS friend doesn't talk to me any other way now. She eschews ICQ, and left goofey behind long long ago. I suppose email must be too wordy. So every now and then I get a message like "just got nose pierced", or "my date with that guy went well, but kinda weird". Cutting down interaction to the bare essentials is something to be admired, once in a while.

So what would I have been in a previous life ? These days I'm thinking of a fly on the wall. Someone sitting in the corner listening, not talking. What'd happen if I went somewhere else in the world ? The same thing - I guess it's what I'm born to do. How does one evolve into these roles, these lifestyles ? I interact with people, all the time. I gather information from them all, and file it all away. I feel like I should do something with all these random notes in my head - in a way, this is it. But perhaps there's something more ?

2000-08-14b

I've been digging a bit, but it's hard to find memories that thrill me, that inspire me somehow. I'm expecting something unknown, waiting for something to happen. I've been like that on and off for a while, lately. What do other people do in these situations ? It's throwing me off from time to time too. I couldn't find appropriate music for the office this evening, for instance - a small loss, to be sure, but it's easy to let little things build up and overthrow one's fragile existence.

Digging. I don't think I've ever used the world loam, apart from when playing with magnetic letters on Skud's fridge one Sunday afternoon.

How exactly does one relax ? The whole process of letting go of things is somewhat foreign to me. It's hard to stop...I just can't get off this rollercoaster, this thing that I barely understand but which nevertheless propels me onward. I feel like I'm understanding things a lot less these days, spiralling into confusion.

2000-08-17

Dream : I'm in my pyjamas, sitting on the edge of the front porch at my parents house. There seem to be a lot of chickens in the front yard, white ones, some of them are flying around and they seem generally...unsettled maybe ? There's a white goose too, wandering around, and a lamb, but this one's a black sheep, not white like the other animals...

2000-08-19

More consumer electronics, more flashing lights, more wireless control. I'd held out for long enough, but spending more than about two hundred bucks always makes me feel guilty.

Also a new pair of trousers and a t-shirt with some random warning message in German, violating my personal standard of not buying something when I don't know what it's actually saying. Of course, over the years I've broken quite a few of my personal standards. Sometimes with reason. Sometimes just for the hell of it. My life isn't about staying the same.

2000-08-20

"...it's not about who you are,
it's about what you like..."
from High Fidelity.

So yes, I've finally seen High Fidelity, the film for music nerds everywhere. I feel absolved. It felt at least as good as the book, and it wasn't over-americanized like we all feared. Yay.

2000-08-23

Some days go so slowly you can count the individual seconds. My headphones seem like a distant object, but the buzz of conversations in the office still occasionally poke through my wall of sound.

It's not a self-frustration thing, not this time. I'm just tired. It's hard to find a sense of wonder in the future for the time being. Watching people have the same old pointless arguments, watching the same old things happen again and again, and feeling like the best thing I can do is to simply opt out of direct participation. Sometimes I'm so non-confrontational it hurts.

Last night I kept hearing freight trains again - the line's a good few kilometres from where I live, but when I'm lying in bed feeling low, that lonely low-pitched horn always finds its way to my ears.

I wish I were a pedal steel guitar, mapping out the depths of human loss and longing.

Now listening :

• El Corazon, by Steve Earle.

• The Trinity Session, by The Cowboy Junkies.

2000-08-25

"I haven't talked to you in ages" she said. I watched the glowing red ash fly into the glass ashtray and pondered this.

Later, a girl on the tram struggles with her yellow mobile phone for a while, such a harsh and confused look on her face. She puts the end of it in her mouth for a while until it beeps (an SMS ?)

I hardly ever talk to people on the tram. Well. Sometimes people talk to me and I'll answer. Things like that. So there's this girl on the tram this evening looking like she's coming home from work, half-sleeping and leaning on the window. Occasionally she looks over at me and smiles, eventually introducing herself as Kathleen. I stumble over and shake hands. "I'm sleeping, 'cause I'm a bit drunk", she tells me. The usual smalltalk goes on, and she relates how she'd driven to work the previous morning and run over a pigeon - it was in the middle of busy traffic on St Kilda Rd, but she stopped to pick it up and take it to the vet. I was about to tell her she probably had very good karma right now, but my stop arrived sooner than I expected and I flew out the door as she said "thanks, you made my trip shorter."

2000-08-27

The forgotten advantages to going back to the familiar orange hair dye - going for a walk around Caulfield and having an old friend you haven't seen in a year or two jump out of his car and say "Cos ! I thought that was you !" and so you stand on the nature strip making the usual catchup smalltalk with smoke in hand and it's great to see him happy and smiling and doing well for himself and hey, we'll do something real soon, maybe next weekend, we're catching up with all the other guys anyway, so come along, here's my email address and we'll sort something out.

An evening's catchup with Alex, not seen since others were still here, in a restaurant so loud you feel like even people's thoughts are bouncing off the walls and into your ears. Escape to Big Mouth for coffee and dessert, but even they're playing music slightly too loud to relax to.

2000-08-28

More catching up, this time with SMS-girl, not seen in person for 3 years due to odd incidents, but fortunately things seem fine and we stay in Globe - she drinks barcardi and coke whilst I drink more gin and lime - until they kick us out (where to go on a Monday night anyway ? Maybe it's true what all the overseas student friends of mine say about Melbourne being a boring place, but I always reckon they're not trying hard enough) so we we walk down Chapel St so she can get some smokes, from the 24 hour milk store that used to be a 7-11 or something but is now a lone ranger in the world of all night conveniences. We walk further, all the way to Dandenong Road, finding nowhere to go and nothing to do but hail a taxi.

2000-08-29

Riding this mad wave of opportunity to catch up with old friends, I let myself be nagged into coming to trivia at the pub back near Monash. Old faces and some new old faces, people who never used to come along. It's good to see them all, even if the pub's lost its slightly daggy atmosphere since they renovated it not so long after I left last year.

"Ay mate, you an Essendon supporter or somethin' ?" asks one punter, pointing at my orange (and black rooted) hair. "Nah. Sorry." Later, while I'm in the toilet, someone asks "is that real ?"

2000-08-30

"she hates songs that never seem to go away
and now neither will mine."
Fountains of Wayne

The Ana clone was on the tram again, presumably the one that freaked me out once before. It's easier to take these things calmly the second time around, especially when you're half-tuned-out after a long day at work that didn't really go anywhere much but then suddenly got busy as you were winding down and then just kinda fizzled, so I left the rest of my beer, killed the music and hopped on the tram to head home, where I saw her. Or someone very much like her, anyway - the same face, but maybe lacking some of that childlike wonder. I must admit, I've been extremely slack on keeping up with the real Ana. It's all my fault, indeed. It's easy to let things slide when they go and find better lives and better guys on the other side of the world. After all, I'm not the competitive sort, I've generally felt that I just have to accept my fate and get on with things. So I did. But while I was on the tram looking deep into that face, all the memories - both good and bad - were set free for a short amount of time. It didn't feel emotional at all, just...familiar.