tales from an ordinary world
2001-07-01
There's nothing quite like digging out all your 5-to-10-year old tapes to play in the car - throwing on The Church, and when Almost With You starts up like a long-forgotten friend, it feels so good that you can't sit still.
2001-07-02
The TV's shouting yet another law show at me, telling me to convict this man, but I don't care, I don't care, I don't care about those kinds of invented situations. I've got coveted new book by favourite author, and in the afterglow of finishing it in a single reading, nothing can touch me, nothing can stop me actualizing the distance, the lonely confusion and loss, the feeling that things will never be quite the same. "No, I'm fine, I really am" says balding laywer TV man, behind the CD I quickly threw on to try and give myself a sense of space. But I'm not fine. I'm digesting. I'm busy. I'm wishing I could describe myself better, like a book, like a book that somebody wants to curl up with on a night like this, when I sat on the tram and didn't know where to look, and I felt cold at the tram stop - me, cold ! - and the walk home filled me with an unusual sense of momentary dread as I ducked around the town hall's odd little Japanese garden. Are things catching up with me ? Am I not attending to my needs ? It's true, there's a certain part of my work that just doesn't excite me, that feels like going to the dentist, that I wish I could entrust to somebody else. But in the end, it's a minor concern. Work is work is work. We can't pick and choose it (not really, not like we fool ourselves into thinking). It's important to have some kind of work pride/ethic thing happening. I feel like I have that, at least. But work isn't really what bothers me in the end. It keeps me going - I feel I'd go insane without it - idle minds, devil's playground, etc. - and at the same time I feel like it drains me - after work, I don't feel like doing much, often to the disappointment of others. It was like that 6 years ago, and it's like that now. I've become a dreamer, my faculties wither, and I have to kick myself so I don't fall into thinking that it just doesn't matter anymore. I don't make any sense. I've let so many things go, because other things always seem to come along, but I feel like I'm living more and more on my memories, memories that divide my thoughts about the kind of person I thought I was versus the kind of person I now think that I was, way back, in other times. And now, the way there's always a small subset of things I can talk to any one person about, the really really close friends I once had have drifted off - probably more my own fault than theirs - and I'm feeling so incomplete, so out of phase, because I don't have that feeling of having someone on hand to ground me. There's people who want to talk at me, and people who want me to listen. Sometimes these people feel like it should be the other way, but it just doesn't feel right to be any other way, other than how it is. And people will go, and new people will arrive, and life will go on, and it'll never be the same, because each moment is different, bringing me new anxieties, new memories, and new regrets. I'll only appreciate things after they're gone, because I'm just a man, and we men are all fools.
2001-07-05
2 and a half days in the white room, off-site, where the roads are full of long trucks and people welding things and the sky takes on that whole industrial feel to it, even though you're not quite there yet, just next door. Lunch is a choice of 4 takeaway shops all huddled together against the truckyards, with their hamburgers, dim sims and australianized "chinese food" - lemon chicken, beef and black bean sauce, etc. I don't belong here, but it's refreshing. Anything's better than spending all day inside the white room. Just down the road, the yuppies are coming, buying and building and renovating and redecorating, and things just won't be the same. My systems chatter happily - disk arrays, computers, ethernet switches all flicker their LEDs in turn. I don't think I've ever used a laptop computer all day before - they're always just toys that other more important, suit-wearing people have. People like me, we get by using dumb terminals in cold white rooms, standing up for hours on our own, talking to inanimate objects as we slowly move closer to our goals. I've felt so isolated that when I've met up with friends after work this week, all I can do is stare at the inner city surroundings, the things I'm familiar with, but just now feel so far away from.
Welcome to smoke-free dining.
Current Listening :
Rock Action, by Mogwai.
2001-07-10
Another quiet walk home through Caulfield's streets. I've got them mostly to myself, if I tune out and ignore the cars. The tram depot's pretty quiet, even at 9pm. The shops are almost all closed, but you can see the odd shopkeeper still hanging around, enjoying the silence. So I keep going, in my boots, with their square front and inner-side zips, that took over from my trusty Blundstones, the only pair I'd ever had, that lasted me a good 2 years, and went to New York and New Zealand with me. I'm getting too big for my boots - the kid from the mid-outer suburbs, the guy for whom Zone 2's too far out to live, nowadays. Every street light's somebody I didn't say goodbye, or thankyou, or hello to. As I get closer to home, off the main road, lights come on, automatic or not, as I walk past. Car headlights temporarily blind me. This is not mine. This is not my street.
Current Listening :
Atardecer, by the Friends of Dean Martinez.
Horse Stories, by the Dirty Three.
2001-07-11
"It's a long way to fall
when you find out that it never happened at all"
Joe Pernice.
So why didn't I ? It was a simple, quite reasonable question for somebody to ask. But no. I'm wary of stepping back into my past. I'm wary of wasting time looking for things that have already moved on. I can wonder what might've been. I have to look forward, though, wherever that might be. So no, I didn't. I haven't. Maybe sometime, when I feel ready.
2001-07-13
dream: I'm playing (australian) football. It doesn't seem to be a serious match, but all the same I'm getting confused. There's more than one ball, for a start. It's never exactly clear when a particular ball becomes the focus of play. As with most footy games I played as a teenager, I don't see much of the action, but that's okay, because I don't feel like I'm particularly good at it anyway.
During a break in the game, I'm drinking water from a big cardboard cup. I throw it, torpedo-style, to a friend who's some distance away, but I miss. Worse, I think it hit somebody (how much can an empty paper cup do, though ?) - I can see two people carrying somebody off the field, injured. My alarm wakes me up, and my head hurts.
2001-07-15
In the Greville St Bookstore, I pick up the nice little boxed version of Murakami's Norwegian Wood, and a copy of Sleaze Nation magazine, for their New Order interview. The girl at the counter asks me if I want a receipt for the book - I think she's under the impression that it's an art/design book, given the packaging and all, I suppose it's a reasonable assumption - A book about wood from Norway. Or something.
One paragraph sticks out, from the interview :
Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant allegedly broke down in tears after hearing Blue Monday because the track encompassed all his ambitions, before he'd got there.
2001-07-16
It's all just headlights shining on passing cars. You don't get far in the world if you can't accommodate other people, but I forget where I learnt that. I feel good about trying to live by it, I wish I could make other people live by it...well, maybe not live by it, but at least to try harder to do it once in a while.
Now that I think of it, I learnt it from my mother.
2001-07-18
It's raining. I'm walking. I've gotta go, I've got somewhere to be. They're waiting, hopefully not impatiently. I left my umbrella on the tram last week, so I'm wet, but happily wet. I missed the tram, so I'm walking. It's raining, but on and off.
I arrive. We keep walking. I'm a bit flustered, and I don't really know the other person we're with, so I keep quiet, walk behind, speak when I'm spoken to, and so forth. I navigate, when we're all in the car. I might've never got around to getting my driver's license, but I can navigate. I love maps. So it's fine, it's fine.
We drop her off, and wind back around the dark lake towards home. Dinner first, though. My evenings have all been some kind of rush like this, lately. "Fusion" noodles in a cramped, but nice enough little place in hip Middle Park after work yesterday, near the old train line that got turned into a tram line. I could see people still coming home from work off the recently repainted trams while somebody came into pick up some food and talked to the girl at the counter about some house for sale on the weekend, and how he was moving out. The staff, between them, seemed to know everybody who came in, except for us - I wondered if they knew we weren't from around these parts...I guess it was fairly apparent. The food was odd, in that disconcerting fusion kind of way - people's idea of how food could be, and it's not too bad but either I wasn't as hungry as I thought, or they misjudged the proportions of food.
2001-07-19
Much like Magnolia, the week's slowly but steadily drawing towards a conclusion that I don't really have much direct involvement with, but nonetheless feel nervous about.
It'll be over soon. And then what ?
2001-07-19b
"with every mile
another piece of me
peels off and whips down the road"
Smog
I can't work it out. Just like the other day, I'm on my way home from the tram stop and I walk past the japanese garden in the town hall, into the carpark, and I almost feel defeated, like it's all over, like I should just give up and go home. By the time I get in the door, it's gone. But where did it come from ?
2001-07-23
I remember...
...the piano, the metronome, and an endless stream of young piano students that she taught in the front room. Trips to the beach in the old navy blue VW beetle - somehow, we all managed to fit in the car. The cat (a russian blue), and later, the dog (a wire-haired terrier), and now, the dogs (beagles). The croquet set in the back garden. Her voice at the door, cheerfully dropping by to visit my mother...
Rest in peace. Please.
2001-07-24
"what comes is better
than what came before"
lou reed.
A life spent pushing soundtracks, waiting for mine to appear, things put on hold, and the general feeling of limbo...waiting...wondering. Everybody's making plans of some sort. Network diagrams, small holidays, whatever. I'm just waiting until it's time for all of these things to happen. Living from event to event. Or something.
Current Listening :
some Paradise Motel stuff.
a bit of Cat Power.
that Low + Dirty Three in the fishtank thing.
2001-07-25
I lost my CD-shopping mojo to a sense of general frustration, coming into the CBD for dinner after work but having half an hour to kill beforehand, thinking I'd go and buy some music. But no, no, no. 6:30 on a Wednesday evening and all my shops have closed already. One, just one CD shop I find that hasn't yet closed, but it's too late, as I flip through the racks, it's obvious I won't find anything because I've wasted my energy feeling annoyed. I made it through the day promising myself some quality music-buying time, and I guess I'll just have to wait until some other time.
2001-07-26
the "tired" half of a hangover.
pondering an old Michael Leunig cartoon about the "miracle of deconception".
the new Kirsty Stegwazi CD, out of curiosity sparked by a nice little compilation a while ago.
a tie that's not red (it would seem wrong).
that Sir CD, that kept looking up at me in record shops all over Melbourne.
I'm awake, but the will to stay awake has left me.
2001-07-27
The more I try to be receptive, the less I feel I'm succeeding (frustration, etc.). But the morning sounds of Balaclava junction seem a bit louder, or maybe they're just resonating a little more through the monkey suit I've put on for this funeral.
The half-hour train journey home (after a 20-minute tram ride) - time to think, remember, etc. It's been forever since I caught the Glen Waverley line. There used to be a high school on that hill, but now it's just more housing. Prime land, I guess. The train's a brand new one, they've reverted back to the old days - no carpet on the floor. The handles on the seats and the poles near the door are painted in a garish lime colour, and the patterns on the seat material is just random, weird, coloured shapes. The kind of thing that belongs in states further north, but the new buses in recent years seem to have the same problem.
There's some time to kill in Glen Waverley, so I grab breakfast at some cafe where they have speakers underneath the outside awning, pumping insipid "R 'n' B" into the sunny morning air. I'll cope. The waitress trips over the step while she takes my order.
At the bus loop, they've moved the buses around since the last time I waited for one, as if it's some huge game of musical chairs. What if I'd had to walk this much further all those other times ? I would've presumably missed an extra few buses. Lost, or rather, changed time. Time spent waiting. Time spent thinking about what I'd do when I get home. Time spent wearing out that tape of Hindsight by The Church. Time spent watching people go about their lives at the bus loop. Time spent looking at the ads posted all over the bus shelters (today, they're all advertising various underage dance parties. whatever).
The powerlines hum and crackle overhead as I walk home from the bus stop, past the tennis courts, past their house. You can almost see the cloud hanging over it, even though there's still 2 cars under the carport, and the garden's still looking nice. We come to say goodbye.
Sun gives way to rain by the time the funeral starts. Afterwards, while everybody has tea and biscuits, I shuffle to one side of the room, feeling (as I usually do in crowds) like I'm in everybody's way wherever I stand. I pass up watching the burial, and trudge off in the rain towards the station, where I stare blankly out the window until we pull into Flinders St. Comfort food's just half a block away at Tonkatsu Joshu.
2001-07-31
So I've started reading Christie Malry's own Double Entry, having noticed a reprint of it in a bookshop, the connection coming from Luke Haines doing the soundtrack to a recent film of it - a bit like how I got into Burroughs (through Laurie Anderson), I suppose. Connections can come from anywhere, and in some ways it's the random discoveries (Murakami, and others, that I picked up by chance in a bookshop and came to love) that I feel prouder of, in moments of allowing myself to play the old security via obscurity game, where you feel worthwhile (at least for a short time) for finding the odd hidden gem - "look what I found !"
But the concept of being able to balance one's life...well...I believe in some kind of cosmic balance, I suppose, but one that exists at a greater level than the individual. I feel as if I'll always be in debt - not necessarily monetarily but, rather, morally. The old "catholic guilt" thing - The world owes me nothing, and there'll never be enough that I can do in order to allow myself to feel good about my existence. But I try to do the "right thing". Some times are easier than others.
