tales from an ordinary world
2001-06-01
It was all very civilised. They handed me a complimentary glass of wine to have while my hair bleached (the cape they put over me had slits to put my hands through. Amazing), and a copy of FHM which I declined to read - I'm just not a "men's magazine" type of guy, and besides, I'd just bought the extremely fun Anthropology by . A t-shirt with some german underground railway map on it. A couple of CDs. And so forth.
2001-06-07
Dream: I'm walking through some empty showgrounds, and student radio's being piped through the speakers as I wander along the abandoned pathways. In one of the bigger buildings/sheds/whatever, there's a couple of people, presumably hanging around the radio station - a couple of sneering teenagers, and the "den mother", a girl I vaguely knew from Monash. I wander on, listening to nervous voices announcing their favourite songs over tinny speakers hanging from overhead cables and poles.
Later, I'm in a house near a street. It's dark, and there's cars parked outside, but inside the house the living room's full of clothes racks and prams, and I'm making my way through, trying not to knock anything over.
2001-06-13
It's that old "hunted" feeling again. Like I'm doing the wrong thing again. Not terribly so, but slightly. Like I'm going to find out what I'm doing wrong, sometime soon, in some unpleasant way or other.
2001-06-13b
Claustrophobia restaurant crime, overwhelm me with your adjacent table conversations, too loud for a quiet evening in this Moroccan restaurant. Flames hop about in the bottom of some cutesy-design glass in front of me, and I should talk more, but I feel so defeated, and I wonder how I'll get out of my chair without bumping all these other people. Words hang too heavy tonight. There's always tomorrow.
2001-06-15
Worse things happen at sea, I'm told. Brine and seaweed. Little men in little boats. A lifetime of opportunity, washed up on the shore.
2001-06-19
Dream : I'm with some high school friends, we've gone away...somewhere...and we're stuffing around in a swimming pool, and all of a sudden I think "I need to put on that t-shirt", so I go back to the room and search through my pile of t-shirts, only I can't find the one I want. I think about putting on one that has "The Jetsons" on the front of it, but then I figure I don't want to ruin it in the pool. And then I can't remember what t-shirt I was looking for in the first place. Eventually, one of the others comes looking for me to see where I've gone.
2001-06-22
There are no words, no useful words, there's nothing I can say in reply that helps, that does any good, that makes me feel any better.
I wasn't made to talk, I was made to listen.
But I do want to understand why it's this way. Pain even in leisure. Confusion by the seaside.
I feel the finger, pointing. Even as I sleep.
2001-06-23
"It's only 40 miles to Saturday night."
Paul Kelly.
The way she keeps saying on the phone how "every day's a bonus" for this person, and that person. Deterioration, oxygen machines, job relocations and rehiring. The feeling that time's running out in different ways for each of them. I've got a headache, and feel so far away.
But that's how it's going to be elsewhere in my life, too - distance, in increasing quantities. I can't fight the way people drift in and out of my life. I can only quietly accept the way things go.
2001-06-24
The weekend's shopping :
Saturday
100 Black Post-It NotesTM, and a couple of light-coloured pens to write on them with.
Some other, small, assorted Post-It NotesTM.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? on DVD. I'd been waiting...
Paul Kelly's Under the Sun. It was cheap, and I (still) didn't have it yet.
Sunday
Another pair of 501's, but this time they're not black.
The soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Another copy of it, along with the Songcatcher soundtrack, both for Mum's upcoming birthday.
The new book, Sputnik Sweetheart, and a new one by called Lust.
A pile of computer books - I haven't bought any for ages (maybe one in the last year ?), and I never remember to claim them on my tax. This time, I'll try harder. Plus I randomly picked up a book, Faster.
2001-06-25
The dull buzz in the tram makes it pointless to dig for my CD player, and it's already dark in Melbourne Town, yellow street lights and passing cars. People are talking or reading, or listening, or juggling unwieldy items in their hands, but each is in their own separate world. Occasionally they'll acknowledge each other's presence. In the end though, we're all floating, waiting for our stop and once we get off it's over, we can go home, we can stop pretending.
I'm not a rock - a rock feels no pain. a rock doesn't falter. a rock doesn't disappoint people - but I am an island.
2001-06-29
A full-on work kind of day, the sort I haven't had in a while but you love and hate at the same time, and then to the pub for one (and only one) celebratory beer before I'm almost late for dinner in some other inner suburb, where I feel like I'm talking at about triple normal speed trying to catch up with friends, and there's so much to talk about all of a sudden, it seems, and so little time, and then it's over, some of us in a jazz bar, some not. We go home, and I'm playing that Tobin Sprout CD loud in the car on the ride home, the one I forgot I'd lent to somebody a few months ago.
