yeah whatever

x

2010-04-02T10:49:00.002+10:00

Dear you

I am giving up writing. I will let myself be a hack, write my pirate book, become wealthy I hope, but I am giving up my belief in myself as an artist.

I believed that I could write what it is, see into the world and make it into art. I believed that I could write work that would move millions. I believed in myself, that I had been right not to become like everyone else, to make money everything and value nothing and nobody, to not lose faith that I had something to offer that ultimately could not be resisted.

But I can't. I can't move even one. I have tried the artifice I have and it was worthless, pointless. How could I ever have imagined that I could make something that people would cherish when with the coin I have, I cannot buy hello?

That is all. I could write more but I already told you I love you and that's all I had to say anyway. That is all.

D.

Millions mean nothing

2010-03-31T13:24:00.003+10:00

Dear you

Sometimes I feel like I could believe in your god, because they say he is the love we feel for each other, and I know that it is something elemental and real, which often seems to come from outside us, yet flows through us, yet is bigger than us, so much bigger that we can seem lost at sea, on the point of drowning. But I feel that you can never truly die so long as you have love, that you will be buoyed up just enough.

Sometimes it seems big enough to make everything else small enough that it can be overcome.

Man, how did I become stuck only able to express myself in words, and they are so insufficient. But what can you do in the face of something ineffable, intangible, yet powerful enough that you can be humbled by it?

Do you feel like that? I remember when I saw you, I felt like it made sense in a way that I could not possibly explain, yet if I ever could, I could wrap it up and sell it for millions. And of course I wouldn't; I couldn't. Because if I ever could, I would only want to give it to you for nothing.

And it cannot be your god, because it is not huge and untouchable. It is something tiny and precious, so little and fragile, I snatch it up and hold it tight, so tight in my hand, my fist clenched, afraid that if I open it, it will be gone, that I will open my hand and you really will have flown.

But there is part of me that never lies, a small part, deeper than anything else, and sometimes when it is still at night, when it is cold and I feel like nothing can warm me, it warms me. I know you cannot understand what I am saying and it feels like you dare not, but I cannot write the words it says because they are not in a language I understand, but strange and incomprehensible as it is, I am compelled to try to listen and I will die wondering whether I ever really knew. And I ask myself, does she have a place in her too that sings for me or am I just imagining a world in which I am more than nothing at all? And I won't let go from fear that that world is only something some corner of me has spun from the emptiness that would otherwise engulf me.

D.

Mooning

2010-03-28T12:57:00.002+10:00

Dear you

Did you ever watch Breakfast at Tiffany's? Such a fine film. I wish I would one day write a screenplay that good, and of course, Moon river is my song. It goes without saying that I found, loved and lost, my own Holly.

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness."

I'll drink to that.

D.

A day in Tampa

2010-03-25T14:03:00.002+10:00

Dear you

I had mostly a nice day hanging out with A in Tampa. We tramped around Ybor, the old Spanish section, which has some great old buildings. It feels a bit odd not to be able to talk to you about it, because I think you would love to hear about the streets, the sounds, the smells, the sights. As I walked around, it struck me a couple of times to wonder what you are doing. I miss knowing the little things about your life that matter: about what you do with your kids, where you go, getting your nails done, having a new hairdo, the small shit that we share to bond us more closely. Yeah, I know that's the problem. R, A's husband, has gone a bit weird because he doesn't understand how come this guy he doesn't even know can say he loves his wife and they can be good company yet they haven't met before. But that's the internet. It's made a world we never would have believed possible, right? So me and A have "met" many times and shared a lot of laughs and some tears; although I am in a lot of ways a stranger, I am also a good friend of hers, as close a friend as any she has here in Tampa, I think. But of course, I can put myself in his shoes. It would be fucking weird if L had had a friend to stay who she was somehow best mates with but I didn't even know.

And you know A has been a good friend to me. And friendships can take all kinds of forms. Did you ever see 84 Charing Cross Road? If you haven't, it's written by a woman who has a 20-year correspondence with a guy and comes to love him, yet never meets him. I feel a bit weird about making internet people real, because it seems like you risk ruining everything (and I'm due to meet some more people who are virtual friends, so I should get used to the idea!). You don't know whether you will destroy the image they have of you or improve on it. (A is though just exactly the person I knew her to be and I am very glad to have had the opportunity to have made her a "real person" and as it happens, her husband is also a lovely man and I feel privileged to have been able to be part of his life too.)

It feels odd not to be able to talk to you about how I feel about visiting America. More than odd. It feels like a big gap in my life, like you ripped something out of me. And I do understand why you felt you had to do that, but you were wrong. The day I start thinking that it is wrong to love someone is the day I give up on this life and become an automaton or just die. Nothing is better than love. I've tried a lot of what else there is, and I'm confident I'm right.

Maybe I just don't know how to calculate it. I seem to have been blessed with a mind that can run through mazes of thought, yet in some things is simple. What can I do about that? Anyway, it's not something I would ever want to change about myself. I am content to feel that love is worth more than anything else and that you disagree is not anything like an argument that convinces me.

D.

Once your spark

2010-03-24T13:03:00.003+10:00

Dear you

Most of the day I was listening to old music. They say it soothes the savage breast, or something like that (at least if you keep the heavy rawk at a minimum), and I stumbled across this. It's a pretty bad live version but I couldn't help wondering when you last listened to this:

It made me feel uplifted. I didn't feel sad that we can't listen to it together or anything like that. Rather it made me think of your smile. I don't remember you ever doing anything but smile. Am I romanticising it? I suppose I must be, and I know I've made you angry from time to time -- or frustrated at least -- but when I picture you, in all the dreams I have of you, you are smiling, and I am at least some of the time causing you to smile. I wish I still could be your spark.

I wanted to find something that sounds as beautiful to me as you are. But there is nothing really beyond the secret song that my heart sings to itself because you exist. So this is only second best, but I hope you will find it beautiful too.

D.

Monday

2010-03-23T00:52:00.001+10:00

Dear you

I have another lonely day. I have no company and no one to spend time with. The best thing about having you in my life was that you are great company.

I know you will read this and I know you are thinking about me at least from time to time. All you have ended up doing is punishing me for what you feel you were doing wrong. That's my life though; I'm used to it.

D.

By the river

2010-03-22T11:45:00.004+10:00

Dear you

I vividly recall the lights in the trees by the river. I had seen them on the way out past it, but on the way back, I did not notice them again. I wanted only to look at you. I longed to hold your hand but of course I couldn't.

I have never wanted to be with someone as much as I wanted to be with you as we walked by the river. I have never felt better about being with someone than I felt about being with you as we walked by the river.

D.

On the ritual need to hurt each other

2010-03-21T13:00:00.003+10:00

Dear you

Someone mentioned something interesting to me. Maybe you'd like to think about it. In the book of Matthew, Jesus is asked why he is hanging out with sinners, and he quotes Hosea 6:6: "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."

This makes sense to me, that God should feel that abiding by the form of goodness is worth much less than being good. Given that I am as far as you are concerned the burnt offering, it strikes me quite forcibly that this is true. I have a simple view of morality: I try to deal fairly with the world, to do justice, yet to allow it mercy. I do not have beliefs that force me to hurt others because at heart I agree with the Buddha: we should do no harm.

Still, the bible is also full of people who take great comfort in righteousness, yet God rarely favours them. Jesus is saying that you could not curry favour with him by being righteous, but by loving others. Jesus and I have that in common: we favour love over "principles", and I like him a lot as a moral guide, especially when, as I have had to, I have to deal with grey areas that do not allow easy answers.

One thing Jesus never said, as far as I know, but I believe he would have if he had thought it necessary. That is that we should first show mercy to ourselves. I have had to learn to do that and I am only sad that you believed yourself not worthy of mercy for something that only men, I believe, and no god worth worshipping, would find wrong.

D.

About you

2010-03-19T11:31:00.002+10:00

Dear you

I am simple. I suppose it’s curious that a person who can deal in big words, big concepts and big ideas, can spin feelings out into words so that they seem complicated and huge, is willing to say, I know nothing much about feelings, only that I feel them.

I have a simple understanding of love. I love you or I don’t. I can’t force myself to, or force myself not to. I do not know how to. I am not inside you or anyone else, but I don’t know how any of the people in this world can be different. Isn’t it just like a spring that wells inside you, that you feel it and cannot deny it?

It doesn’t always last forever. You love and lose, we all know that. But having said that, I have never stopped loving a person; they have just chosen that I not love them any more, and I have had to live with it.

I do not know whether I love a lot of people or a few because I do not know how many is a lot. But I know I can enumerate them easily and I have no doubt about how I feel about any one of them.

I love my mum. I have loved her since I knew what the feeling even was and I do not know how she would make me stop, not that she would want to. She is a fine woman, and she made many sacrifices for me, but that is not why I love her. I do not love her because she would die in my place if I were dying, although I know for certain she would. She does not have to earn it in any way. I love my mum.

I love my dad. I have complicated feelings towards him but they are all based in love. He is a sensitive man, and that has made him hard to love, but I love him all the same. I have sometimes not respected him but love does not require respect, and anyway, you can misjudge respect. Love you cannot misjudge. It just happens and you go with it. I love my dad.

I love my sisters. They are fine women. But that is not why I love them. When I see one of my sisters, I want to hug them, to enfold them in my arms and keep the world from harming them ever. I want them to know they are loved in every moment of their lives and that there is not a second that they are not present for me. I love my sisters.

I love Zenella. I do not love her because she is sensitive, because she is funny or because she is clever, although she is sensitive, funny and clever. I love her because she makes forever a real word for me. I want everything for her, for all time. I regret that she must live a human span more than I regret anything else in this life. I want the world for her, wrapped up and delivered. I want what she wants, and more, because I fear that she will not want enough, yet I don’t know what enough even would be. I love Zenella.

I love Zenita. I do not love her because she is cheeky or because she makes me feel beloved with her smile, although she does that. I love her because she made me realise that love is not limited in me, that even though I could not believe I could find more love after Zenella, still I could. I love her because if I had the privilege of dying for Zenella, I would with my dying breath beg God for another life to give for her. I love Zenita.

I love Naughtyman because he is beautiful in every way to me. He is as handsome as a boy can be, and charming too. But of course that is not why I love him. I love him because he is gawky and clumsy but that moves me deeply in a way beyond words. I love him because he is fragile and lovely and yet that is not why I love him. I love him because he is my son. There is no other way to explain what I feel for him but that he is my boy. And I admit, this is a way you can love yourself, to have a son and love him. I love Naughtyman.

I love L. It is quite simple for me. We laugh together even now we are embittered and unhappy with each other. I love her for reasons I cannot begin to articulate, and when I try, they sound thin and unflattering: that I promised it and meant it, that she deserves love as much as anyone else, that I cannot help it. All true, yet none the truth. The truth is I still believe she is the person I loved simply and truly and I cannot stop believing it, and don't want to. I love her because I want still to be worthy to love her. I love L.

I love P. I love her because she was entirely unaware that she can be loved when I began to love her, and even now when she feels loved (and I am glad beyond measure that she does), she does not realise the good that is plain to see in her. I love naivety in anyone who exemplifies it. I love frailty, the ability to fail, to lose, and I love people who make me laugh. I love P.

I love S because she did not give me the opportunity to stop loving her and I became confused, so that I am left with the residue of love and no way to resolve it. So I know love can be painful and fractured, yet it is just as the Buddha said, a flower in the rubbish heap: if we can walk away from the destruction of our promises to each other with a feeling of love, we will never have failed. I love S.

I love A because if you want to know what a good person looks like, you could look at her and be content. She is a friend who will not desert you, will give you what she has and not complain at the hardship that giving entails. She is infallibly decent, a scale to weigh your thoughts and deeds in, yet she would not punish you for being wanting. I love A.

I love E because she is the love of my life. That is all. I love E.

D.

In the dark

2010-03-18T23:51:00.002+10:00

Dear you

Here's the thing though. I say that my poetry doesn't move you because if it does, you keep that to yourself. That's not something you say to hurt someone; it's something you say because you are hurt. It's something you say because you wrote from your heart, something that you believe should make even stone bleed, but the person you wrote it for did not allow you any part of any warmth they felt, if they felt any. People can only know what you feel when you express it; they cannot see inside you. And yes, they get you wrong; you can feel maligned when they have you wrong. But they can only say what they feel you are like. Of course you have good reason not to share what you feel but if you don't, the other cannot know. And to the other, a cold shoulder looks just like a cold shoulder: what else can it look like? No matter what the intention behind it is, it will seem that way.

I know I am selfish and I can only express the pain of being out in the cold. I am not saintly; I am like a small child who wants the warmth of their beautiful friend, and cannot understand why they do not have enough meaning that the other person will want to wrap them up. But the small child is not trying to hurt anyone when they cry in the dark; they just want the light to be turned on. And when you are angry with the child for crying, their pain redoubles. I do not know what your childhood was like, but in mine, sometimes I would be sent to my room and my light turned off. I would cry in the dark, and nothing felt worse than that my mother seemed not to care enough that I was in pain to come and hold me. I did not know that she was suffering to hear me cry because she was convinced it was best not to express it. She was wrong: there was no lesson to be learnt from it. This is why I say I am suffering for an abstraction: she did not respond to me as a person, as a being, and that was wrong. If the small child crying in the dark becomes an adult in waiting to you, who must be taught that actions have consequences, or whatever lesson I was being taught, that cannot be right. At the least, the child feels to themself that they are a being, not a concept.

You know what you are like? You are like the sun on a rainy day. Don't you know that it feels cold to have the sun turned out? It feels like I have been punished and I don't know why. I know it is hard to love someone when you shouldn't. I don't diminish how bad that can feel. But I don't know why that means you should stop. It must be painful to do that. I know you are kind and will not enjoy hurting me at all. I am not thinking you are just callously serving yourself. I know it seems like I don't understand; but I understand, I just don't appreciate it. No matter what reasoning leads you to feel it's better not to love me (or make me feel beloved, because you are right, of course, that I do not know your feelings, but I am trying to say that both seem the same from where I stand, and maybe you do not know that), I am left the person who feels unloved.

I understand that you chose your life, but I thought I was part of that. I thought I was important and that just ridding yourself of me would be a bad thing. It hurts that it's less painful to be rid of me than to suffer for having me. And if that's not true, be with me in the way you can. I would rather have any small part of you than nothing at all.

Please don't be angry with me, sweetheart. You do not know how wonderful you are, how good it is to know you; if you did, you would understand how painful it is not to have you in my life. You know that people in places like Iceland go mad in their long winters, because they do not see any sun? They do not go mad because it is dark. They go mad because they remember how good the sun felt and cannot stand to have it gone. Like them, I do not care that I am mad, or what anyone thinks about that. I care only that it is dark.

D.

Ain't too proud to whine

2010-03-18T12:16:00.003+10:00

Dear you

I wouldn't hurt you if I knew how not to. It is like being in purgatory for you to cast me out of your life. I felt happy when I was part of it. Please enjoy these songs that made me think about you:

D.

On the breeze

2010-03-17T15:02:00.003+10:00

Dear you

Last night I dreamt of your smile, and how beautiful that was, and for a moment I thought, perhaps she will relent tomorrow because she would not want to hurt me, because I had forgotten that my dreams do not have the power to move you. But I was awakened by a small but persistent voice that mocked me, saying "she does not even wish you to exist". Such is the pain of waking in the cold at 3am: you cannot tell whether your own heart is true or lies to you; you cannot know.

When I was a child, sometimes my mother would lose her temper with me and shout at me, but that never hurt, and I would just laugh. My sister S was smarter. She knew that I could only be hurt by demonstrating to me how easily love can be withdrawn, and that if she would not be angry with me, I would not feel the love that powers anger with those we are close to.

But I had then too great an opinion of myself and I thought that I could be loved and not just be for all my days someone who could just be taken or left as you pleased. They say that a lesson we learn begins when we are first born, and do not understand that the world is bigger than us; gradually, we come to realise that there are others, that there is a boundary between us and the rest of the world, and with time we are diminished, if we learn our lesson well, until we are able to be dismissed and not think so much of it, or at least, we are become so small that cast away we are like the leaves on the breeze, without meaning to those who pass by, and in ourselves, brittle, fading songs of vigour, no longer expecting to be heard by anyone, even ourselves, no longer even to hope that there will be a book we can be pressed in, kept and cherished, although while we have any green left us, any living cell, any piece that can still feel love however undesired it is, we remember the spring we were once part of and do not truly believe it is all used up.

D.

Love in vain

2010-03-16T05:46:00.002+10:00

Dear you

They say Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil. He gave his immortal soul for the blues. I cannot sleep these past few days: I have nothing to smoke and my sweet dreams have been washed down the drain you opened for them. So I lie awake and think about what I would give the Devil for my half of the deal. And I think, so long as he gives me love, what's a soul to me?

D.

Sunless

2010-03-15T00:54:00.002+10:00

Dear you

In the place I love the leaves are coming in. The world will become full of colour, it will deepen and enrich the world, then fade and disappear, till all that is left is the stark outline of the beauty it once held. Then the people who live there will huddle up in the cold and wish again for the brief sunshine.

I hope your world is brighter without me. I feel only sorrow that I am a cloud when all I ever want is to be a small warming glow somewhere in the picture of your life.

D.

I am not lost

2010-03-03T19:55:00.003+10:00

I remember a frozen pint of beer -- at least I think it was beer -- in the street in Reykjavik, a snowball fight with Zenella outside Hallgrímskirkja, the pipes clanking in the mission building, huge basalt cliffs, the birds over the Tjornin, fulmars nesting and asparagus soup. Each of these things the acme of its kind.

I remember a cappuccino as Mrs Zen confirmed that Zenella would come to be, smoking on the patio at Yeronga, a picnic by the river with Zenella propped up between my legs, a hot kiss in Byron, sex at the Shingle Inn, she is so warm and this is where I want to be. Each of these things the acme of its kind.

I remember chaos on the dock in Bissau, the ropes and yells, Justino Delgado rocking the boat, BAGGAGE in Ghana, three men dead in a tree in the rain, our car the lights go out when he brakes, the whores in the courtyard full of joie de vivre, my brain boiling in my head. Each of these things the acme of its kind.

I remember lying quietly with E, her heart beating strong and just for me, kissing in the dark, the weight of her on my hips, her magnificent tits in my hands, the heat we generate, kissing me like a boy kisses, for a moment I am in bloom and I do not want to be anywhere else. Each of these things the acme of its kind.

I remember singing my soul out in a muddy field, we catch each other's eye and we're like YES, and off my head in the long grass, music moving me and we are all singing together. Each of these things the acme of its kind.

I remember Cantona bringing magic to the pitch, we forget we are among the "enemy" and we leap for the sky, I remember our voices are one voice, marching on together, champions, on top of the world. Each of these things the acme of its kind.

I remember holding my son as he slept, safe in my arms, safe forever. I know I can do harm, but I have never meant to, and I know I can feel joy, because I have felt it. I do not have much I want to celebrate in my life, but each thing I celebrate is the best it could ever have been. I have a good heart; it will not be broken forever; I will find my way home to the beach where we ran and laughed, I know I will. I am not lost; I have just forgotten where I am. I will remember; it will be okay.

In my winter

2010-03-02T12:00:00.003+10:00

I am glad I am going to the States next week. Things are so hopeless for me that I do not think I could face many more days of this. It is just one thing after another. I cannot bear how lonely I am. I have no one to help me through it and that makes it hard.

I did have. I felt loved and wanted and that helped sustain me. But I know I am not the kind of person who can be loved for long. I don't know what it is about me, I truly don't. Maybe it's just the confusion of life.

Each of the women who have loved me has found it has gone sour for them, without my really feeling I ever really had any influence on their feelings or how things were. S was angered by my need to protect her, P felt slighted in ways I don't really understand, Mrs Zen felt she should have more allowance simply for being a wife and E decided I have too little meaning for her to bother with at all.

There is nothing worse in this life than for someone to stop giving you love. I could bear torture more easily. I keep telling myself that it's not unreasonable: S needed me when she was at a low ebb, and felt I let her down; P needed me because I suppose she felt it flattered her to be befriended by someone she looked up to; E needed me when things were bad in her life, and now she feels they are better, she is discarding me. What do I have to offer anyway? I am just a sad, lonely person with little left to give. I wasn't good enough at having a family to keep my children; I wasn't good enough to keep my job or for my clients to want me to work for them; I am not good enough to suffer for. I am not even good enough for women to want to go on a second date with, even when they laugh all the way through the first.

It's hard not to be good enough, to feel that you are never going to be, that it's only a matter of time before people decide it's just not worth it with you. I don't want to be writing this, and I think this will be the last I ever do write about this kind of thing. It's going to be pirate stories and other shit from here on in, because I can't stand that the people it really mattered to me to care about me just didn't, that I am left with the fear that in time, I really will be lonely enough that I don't care about living any more, and no one will even care about that.

How did I get here? How did that nice Cornish boy come to this? I wish I knew so that I could unravel it. But I can't. Sorry for wasting your time with more whining. I won't do it again.

An unwanted gift

2010-02-26T13:09:00.003+10:00

When I was a teenager, I did a stupid, albeit romantic, thing. I quit university for a woman. How could I do that? Well, she had quit her course, for whatever reason, and I quit to be with her.

But I was stunned when soon after, she signed up for a different course. Still, I tried to understand why she had betrayed me. It seems weird now, but I lived a long way from her, and we didn't see each other for the summer after I quit. I went to Reading to see her in the first week of the new university year though.

I remember meeting her vividly, although I can't quite picture where it was. She wouldn't see me during the day and I didn't understand why. But we met up in a quad, or a car park, somewhere concreted and open.

I had bought her a necklace and I gave it to her when she walked up. She straight away handed it back and dumped me without any further ado. She wouldn't even go for a drink. She had arranged to do something with her new friends.

I didn't know what to feel. I didn't understand and I still don't. I don't know how people can be the way they are. What had I done to make her stop loving me? How had I displeased her? Of course, in hindsight, I can see that I was no longer the bright fellow student who she had been going out with. I was a loser dropout. I had nothing to offer her.

I never understand when people change, because I don't. I only shift in my feelings when I'm compelled to. As anyone who converses with me knows, I am mostly reactive. I respond to others, but I don't make things happen. It makes me discontent to be like that, but I don't know how to change it. It's making it hard to move on with my life, because I can see clearly how thngs can be good but I can't control or, it seems, even influence them. Others choose, just as A did back in the day, and they choose to hurt me more often than not. I am left wondering what I did that made them stop wanting me, stop loving me, stop needing me, when it seemed to me that I didn't change. I feel like I have a lot to give, but it's never right, never enough, never any good.

A never explained. She obviously didn't even think it was worth bothering. I accepted it and went to another university. My problem is that I find it hard to recognise that she did something very wrong to me. Because that would be grossly unjust, and I find it difficult to accept that my life should not be just, I had to believe I had deserved it. I couldn't accept that she was just a selfish bitch, who had strung me along when it suited, and then binned me once she had something better. She probably found another boyfriend who was richer/better looking/better suited to her.

I feel like I have a lot to give, but no one wants it. It is killing me, because I am constituted to serve others, and not having someone I can be of service to is profoundly painful to me. If I am not increasing someone's happiness, I feel cast down. It's very hard for me to feel good about myself in that circumstance.

I could list the ways that I have been made to feel worthless recently, but what's the point? I know that none of the people -- all women, of course -- who did it meant me to feel that way. They just didn't think I had any worth.

Rolling a rock

2010-02-24T18:14:00.002+10:00

So I did the poetry reading again last night and each time it has gone better. A couple of people even whooped when I read On a train, so that felt good. I wrote a new poem specially, but I rushed through it. I couldn't help thinking that all I wanted to do was whisper it to the person I wrote it for.

I have a lot of things that I have to grit my teeth and bear at the moment, and it's one of the lesser things, all in all, that she doesn't, won't ever, want me to do that, but being unwanted is a feature of my life. I have to take care that I don't allow it to become part of who I am, that each time someone kicks me in the balls and says that that is how they intend to care for me, I don't believe that this is something about me. For years I did, but I was sick. Now I'm feeling well and have to believe that even if I do seem to face a mountain, I will roll my rock to the top of it somehow and it will not roll back and crush me again.

I wish it meant something. I wish I had some way of making myself mean something. But I am just a quiet, soft person, the kind of person who sits at the fringes wishing that someone would look at him, the kind of person no one gets much moved by, the kind of person you take or leave like that. I'm trying to be okay with it. Sisyphus was cheerful and I will be too.

Erm all right

2010-02-22T22:55:00.003+10:00

So the Lady Jane won't even get up to 110 on Stein Rd. But I'm always tired in the eyes, so I blink and my wheels are in the dirt, and I wake up sharply.

And she's saying, we need to take the editing up a level.
And I'm a bit wtf, I am going to need to see these errors your daughter thinks I made.

So she's like, this, this and this, they're all things the client will get arsey about. And I'm like, yeah okay, but these are disimprovements to the copy, so we're not really going up a level. Maybe sideways.

You know, wtf. If you want to hire some person because she's a friend of your daughter's and you want to show off your munificence some, stiffing me on the work you promised me, don't bullshit me about her background in "instructional design". I see her work. I know what kind of writer she is.

So I'm listening to her criticise my handling of abbreviations, and I'm like, no, do you not remember, we had an exchange of emails about abbreviations. I followed what you asked for to the letter. The rug. Whoosh. She knows I do that. And she knows I have the email.

So that brings the meeting to a smart ending, and that's good because this is the kind of meeting where she says, we're just having a discussion, and I say, no, in a discussion both people talk.

Here's a thing for you grammar fiends. She goes:

"Whether a person is eligible depends on his or her service"

is difficult to understand and learners would have to read it five times. It's "instructional design", she says. She wants:

"A person's eligibility depends on his or her service"

which has a slightly different meaning, so no editor is ever substituting it. So I'm like, yeah but I have studied textual analysis and in fact sentences with nouns are less comprehensible than sentences with verbs. Which is true but she goes, you're more difficult to meet with in person than you are in email.

I'd say I'm about the same. I'm polite but I'm a professional. I do it pretty straight up. She prefers a yes man, but editors bow to style guides not position titles. Hard to understand? Her course writer will not write an active sentence if there is any way known to man to make it passive. She doesn't read over her work even once, as a professional would, and sometimes writes things that so badly need a verb, they wake up in the night crying for it.

But that's her problem. Mine is to have to imagine an alternative to erm all right, so that that doesn't seem like the only thing I ever have to say.

Fiction

2010-02-16T16:02:00.003+10:00

Just for my own interest and so I can find it, I am making a list of the fiction I have posted on this blog. I don't mind if you want to read it, of course, but I'm posting this purely so I can find the stuff myself.

How am I going to get home tonight
Fu Manchu and the Golden Phoenix
Canaries
Butter
At Mapoto Gorge
Shot
Thigh and I
Minute
Unadorned
Sally Anne (for D)
On a train
The case of the Del Inspiro

I think that's it. I'm probably going to read the second and third from last at the next poetry reading because they work as prose poems imo (they're meant to) and they will make a change from the more romantic poetry I've been reading.

Inspired

2010-02-09T22:11:00.003+10:00

Sometimes I feel I have been playing timid for too long, because really, I do have balls. So I went to the poetry open mic again at the Inspire tonight and I felt much more confident about doing it. I had practised reading my work with A -- she stayed up late into her night to help me and I can't help feeling lucky to have someone who is willing to be bored witless by me blathering about poker, poetry and shit because she knew how nervous I was about it.

I read Unadorned, which is long and only really quasi poetry, but it was well received; Lamorna beach; and a poem I wrote today for Sh, who has, in her own idiom, encouraged me to regrow my nads and man up. I reproduce it below because I am pretty pleased with it.

It's hard to read my poetry out loud, because it seems to me to be the sort of thing you would whisper across a pillow. Poetry, when it is good, is the sound of your inner voice speaking to your reader's inner self, trying to find a way to move the part of a person that they keep from view. My inner voice is gentle and cannot shout.

Epiphanies of love

sometimes
we have epiphanies of love
an understanding that
we do not have to
hate or fear each other

it does not last
and we sink
back into the sucking mire
that we are calling
home
because we never feel at home
with one another

sometimes
I see sunlight on your face
a smile
that I have never seen you
smile before
and I realise
I have never known you at all.

Glass of coke

2010-02-05T11:32:00.006+10:00

Box of noodles in sauce, slice of cheese, glass of coke. I eat intermittently but I never get thinner.

Feel my shoulders. Skin and bone. The less I eat, the more misshapen I get.

And Mrs Zen says, are you okay? No, ofc I'm not okay. I'm dying and it's unpleasant.

Roll up the shirt, the needle barely hurts. The injections aren't working. Life is still shit. Perhaps I need more.

Give me a cuddy Naughtyman, but he won't, and when the others are getting into the car, he's hiding in his bedroom, under the covers. I don't know what it means.

I don't know what any of it means.

Transferring the database is harder than it seems it needs to be. I have no expertise.

When people ask you, what are your interests? I smile and say, I'm not interested in life at all. It's passed me by and what else am I going to do?

I read something about a Chinese child chained to a lamp post. People steal children. They do various things with them.

And it's hard to have faith in us when that is what we do but I only want to love my neighbour, so what can I do?

Zenita's teacher goes, tell us when you know how you're fixed. Because the kids need reassuring. I say, we don't have anything settled yet. By which I mean, that fat lazy bitch is settled but I'm stuck in limbo. And how can I possibly know what's better? My sister says, won't she consider living in the UK for a while? Because that is so clearly the right thing to do, ofc S thinks that. She's a stickler for doing the right thing, without being a huge PITA about it.

No, I say, she won't consider anything. She won't even talk. Sometimes I email her and she'll say, I have lots to say but I'm not saying it.

I know I shouldn't call her a fat lazy bitch. I know it's right to try to retain some fondness for her. I know what is right. You get sick of doing it for no reward though. I mean, yeah, you could judge me harshly but I tend to see things as wholes, and on the whole...

***

There is a soft voice on the other end of the line and I'm surprised. It is Ae, a Chilean woman I have been messaging. It is nice to hear a woman's voice that isn't Mrs Zen's. K used to ring me from time to time but she has not for a while. She has decided we should try to be cooler than that.

I am not good at cool. I am not good at anything. It's unfortunate: I had the ability to be good at just about anything I chose, but I could not, failed to, choose.

I don't know what to say to her. I don't have anything to say about anything. I don't even have an opinion on the chained Chinese child or Haiti or the Dalai Lama or anything at all.

I think you will hear more about Ae. We will meet once and she will decide never to see me again. Maybe twice. Certainly no more than that. It's what happens. I have society in small snatches, and I'm left bewildered by their choices because I feel like I was good to be with, but obv. not good enough to bother with again.

B12

2010-02-03T23:38:00.002+10:00

In the car today, I was singing, belting out the songs I love, and you couldn't stop me.

It cannot last. They did not make a drug to make me whole. But I know I can live if I can just get high on B12 and the dreams I have.

***

Zenita is skipping to and fro. I say, we have to wait for Zenella, I'm sorry. And she says, it's okay, I'll skip up and turn around, then skip down.

I do not want to drown in resentment. I have only ever wanted someone to love.

Sometimes I look at myself and think, he is old and helpless, how could anyone love him? When Naughtyman says, I wanted Mummy to pick us up, I don't even know what to feel. I feel cored like an apple. I want to say, I am sweet, but he has found my flesh dusty.

When I realise that she will have them forever, I do not know what to feel. It is like I see oblivion eye to eye. It is like dying and your body forgets to die.

I do not want to drown in resentment. I want to find a way to blame myself.

***

I want someone to say, he is sweet; he is not dusty. I want to be judged kindly. It's not that I don't know I've done wrong. I just do not want it to be all there is to say about me.

I want not to have died.

***

It's funny. We all know that when we get high, we are going to get low. And we never even stop to think. We take it, because the slightest joy is worth it.

***

I am holding Zenita and we are playing loose and tight. She says loose and I am tight. She is laughing and saying, no Daddy, when I say tight, go tight. And she says tight, and I go loose.

And we laugh.

That's all I have to say. I'm sorry it's not topical.

Two old men

2010-02-02T10:00:00.000+10:00

Today, I'd like to contrast two views from two elderly men. One shows love for his fellow humans; the other not so much. One makes a gentle, heartfelt plea to extend dignity and compassion to humans in suffering; the other a complaint that my home nation extends tolerance to a section of the community that he disapproves of.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's and will decline as he ages, losing the wit and vivacity that define him. I'm not a huge fan of his books but their gentle humanism has surely done no harm to the many people who have read them. He is an outspoken supporter of the right to assisted suicide, and has made a suggestion that resolves many of the difficulties with this approach to terminal illness. It's a genuine concern that many have that were we to permit euthanasia, the elderly would be pressured into it, killed off by relatives greedy for their estate or tired of caring for a sick parent, perhaps unsure what they were agreeing to. A tribunal that decided whether the person was making the decision with reason and sound mind is a fine idea.

We are not lumps of meat. We should not treat ourselves as though we are. Life in itself is not valuable--living is. It's a distinction that I think is valuable. Of course it is difficult to decide whether someone is truly living: many people have a quality of life that we would not accept for ourselves but we find difficult to judge whether it is sufficient for them. I read the other day of a young woman who had contracted severe ME, and could not speak or move. She wished only to die. It is a tragedy that a life should be cut short, but in my view, a greater one that it should be prolonged only so the person should suffer.

I formed my view when my beloved granddad was dying in Arrowe Park hospital. He had lung cancer and was destined to die in the bed he lay in. He was in a lot of pain and wanted only to die. His life had ended; there is no other way to think of it. He had no enjoyment of it. The things he liked to do he could no longer do. Yes, it would distress his wife for him to be allowed to die, but she was concerned only for herself. Of course I believe that is understandable: she had loved him for many years and I know what a wrench it can be to lose a partner that has been part of your life for a long time. She did not want what was true to be true.

My granddad begged to die. He was too weak to find a way to kill himself. Nobody should have to do that. I do not care what your religion says about life; I do not care how sacred you think life is. Living is what counts. I have never forgiven myself for lacking the courage to help him.

I don't know what the Pope's illness is but more and more, this horrible reactionary old man fashions himself into a figurehead of intolerance and hatred. Catholicism is not alone among religions as being a tool for horrible reactionary old men to hate other people with, but you cannot help but feel that it's a pity. In the Bible, Jesus is quite clear that we should love each other unreservedly. There is no codicil stating "except for teh gays". Catholicism could be a force for good in the world (I'm sure in some ways it is). After all, its believers are mostly unreflective, adopting the religion because they were indoctrinated as children, and many adhere to whatever moral strictures are doled out to them by Pope and priest. Sadly, those strictures do not generally focus on loving thy neighbour, but more on petty matters of sexual morality, which are a peculiar focus of a group of celibate men for reasons we need not speculate on.

One has to remind oneself that when the Pope claims that the UK is restricting the "freedom of religious belief" that that belief is that gays are hateful and should be hated. Why anyone even listens to an ancient womanhating clown is beyond me. The guy has no idea how people live. He's never even been married. Indeed, he's never even had sex, as far as I know, so what would he know about the feelings we share for each other. He's spent years whipping his out of himself.

The last three seconds

2010-02-01T19:17:00.003+10:00

Sometimes I feel I have been thrown into a hole and can't climb out. And sometimes I wish someone would care enough to lower down a rope ladder and pull me out, and other times I get my pitons and say fuck it and climb a few more inches up. Sometimes a piton springs out and I fall back down a few more feet, and I curse myself for how weak I am, as though I could somehow have flown if only, if only.

I am not going to die down here because I am determined that my last three seconds I will not spend crying.

I feel tired of feeling that everyone is entitled to judge me, to weigh me in scales of their own devising and discard me because I don't measure up. And none of the people marking me down has done anything to deserve the privilege. I realise, when I think about it, that having a good heart is the quickest route to getting that heart broken, but I don't want to be a coldhearted arbiter of others, enforcing my black and white view of how it should be.

Because what good did that ever do us? To break each other on the wheel of our whatever. What I need is a friend who cares more about me than they do about how much they care about me. It is not too much to ask that someone finds something golden in me because I have something golden in me. I do not believe you if you say I don't. I will not love you for harsh judgements. What good did that ever do us? I do not judge you harshly.

Here's something really good from Beach House. I am dedicating it to Mrs Zen because I don't think she has ever known that I loved her truly and she burned it for petty jealousy. For something I don't even feel, so alien was that to me. To punish me for liking someone. If I had ever had the chance to make account for myself, I would have explained that having a heart big enough to love her meant having one big enough for others. But she wanted something wizened and small like her own, and I didn't get that chance: she destroyed our marriage instead. Still, she deserves something this good--everyone does, and I feel bad about not expressing that I did, do, love her:

When I meet people, I know that it will be them who decide. I will try to find ways I can like them, and they will weigh me in a balance and, it seems, mostly find me wanting. I think it is a virtue to be want to find something in a person to like, even if it's not always possible. But it means I am always the one battered at the end of the night, a week later, when it breaks down.

It feels painful to be putting myself on the line, always saying "like me" to strangers. I don't mean I put on an act. I wouldn't even know how. I just quietly hope someone will.

This next is from JJ's new album. This is for K. It's hard to pick something for her because our tastes do not coincide. But here's the thing. They don't have to. I am lost in a world where people feel you have to have a shitload in common before you can like each other, but in fact, you can just like each other and the rest of it takes care of itself. So I hope she likes it, but if she doesn't, I'll like it twice as much for her:

Sometimes I wish I was somebody completely different, that I wasn't lame, ugly, stupid, whatever. Then I stop and realise, no, I just want to be loved for who I am and most of the lameness, ugliness and stupidity is just accretions, and if you know that, you will not need me to change.

Here's something from Four Tet's excellent new album. It's for anyone who wants it:

It's all about cycles

2010-01-30T17:31:00.002+10:00

So Sh came over to drop off a book I had lent her. I feel sorry that she doesn't want to know me but not everyone can like you, after all. It's just a pity. I liked her a lot and seeing her reminded me why. Oh well.

Here's something I have been listening to a lot recently. It's super good and if you listen, you must listen all the way through because it really becomes something special after three minutes. If this doesn't make you want to hug someone, sorry, we're probably inhabiting different universes. I'm going to dedicate it to Sh because you can be wrong about me and still not be wrong, iykwim.

About Sh

2010-01-27T09:49:00.008+10:00

Did you ever meet someone and think that you would cherish her? You meet her and you know that she will always find a way to make you like her. I know, I'm not deep; I do not do considered opinions about people. I know the first time I meet you how much rope you are going to get to hang yourself with me. But I have a small boy inside and he falls in love with people who make him want to sing.

This doesn't happen often, maybe two, three times in my life. But some people seem beautiful to me in a way that has nothing to do with how they look (although, let's face it, it doesn't hurt for a woman to be good to look at), but is something about them that emanates when they talk, bathes you in warmth and makes you feel nourished.

Did you ever meet someone who when you think about them, your first thought is to wish them well? I know what you're thinking: why not wish everyone well? But I am not describing a vague feeling that they should thrive: I am talking about a piece of you that wants to rush out and make everything well for them, to increase their happiness in any way you can. I was once a small boy whose greatest joy was to see someone smile when he ran up. That boy has never died.

Whoever said the drugs don't work was taking the wrong drugs

2010-01-25T19:18:00.003+10:00

So eventually being a whiny bitch just wears you out, because you've created a vicious circle for yourself to run round like a deranged hamster. Misfortune -- often something so mild that let's face it, you could shrug off if you have the least measure of fortitude -- strikes, you start to whine it up (and the whining gets you down even more than the small misfortune does) and being a whiny bitch just brings more misfortune onto your head.

Do you know, I've been too insane even to realise that, and I feel like I have just woken up and seen myself in the mirror. And I realise that I am not in fact a 12yo schoolgirl -- I mean no offence to 12yo schoolgirls, few of whom are as whiny and annoying as I can be -- but a grown man. You know, I could defend you in a fistfight, fix your roof in a storm, cook food that would make you weep with pleasure, leap tall buildings in a single b-- okay, let's not get carried away, but I'm not truly a miserable worm.

So I've been trying something new. Instead of wallowing in whinge, I have started doing something about it. The big thing is that I have been taking tryptophan supplements, and they work. I don't know whether they work because I really was lacking tryptophan or because I'm crazy enough to believe it and the placebo effect is strong, but I feel at least fairly close to an even keel. Not perfectly adjusted (Zen laughs softly to himself) and maybe you wouldn't notice, but I feel more like me and I like it.

Now the misfortune arrives and yeah, my first impulse is to give in to misery and whine about it, but my second impulse is arriving with the fuck-that cavalry. People snub me, and I reach for my hankie but before I've managed even to start sniveling, the cavalry arrives. Fuck that, I say to myself, their loss. My future looks bleak, and I start thinking I could have a good mizz over that, but the cavalry storms in. Fuck that, I say to myself, at least find some small ways to love it or you are going to be found hanging over the back steps, and that would suck. I cannot begin to fix loneliness if I curl up in a ball and wish it all away. I'm going to have to saddle up with the fuck-that brigade, say fuck that to mopery and suffer some blows. I'm man enough, right?

Hey phatic boom boom

2010-01-25T10:23:00.006+10:00

I am not like anyone else you know. I'm pretty confident of that. I'm unique. You are too, but you probably don't know it.

I don't seem it to people I meet, I'm sure. I just look like a generic, ordinary fellow, a bit bigger than some, okay to look at, nothing special.

The other day, someone said to me -- and she wasn't the first -- that she thought I just wasn't interested in other people, because I don't ask the usual, boring questions. But I am topsy turvy like this: if I'm not interested in you, or you didn't make a good impression, I will ask you about your job, where you live, what the film you watched last night was like. If you want to know that I think you're dull, you'll know it because I do all that and we're done five minutes in.

If I want to know about you, I will let you reveal yourself. For me, to capture someone involves setting them free. I bind you to me by allowing you to roam. I am waiting for my chance to ask you about what really matters. I can easily find out what you do for a job, and you'll tell me if I don't ask, anyway, but it's harder to find out what matters to you really, what you love, what you desire, what you hope for, what makes your bell resound.

Who cares about what you do for a living? You reveal that readily. What makes you shake? What could a person do to you that you would make your stomach flip? How could you be touched and it would be the right way?

So this person says, you met my husband and didn't even ask him what he does. And I said, he does this and he works for so and so, and he comes from here and you and he did this last year. Because she had conveyed all that in the standard way, and I remembered. Because this is how you can become good at writing, at thinking even: you observe closely. Most people ask their list of six questions and don't even listen to the answers. I listen. If I want to know who you are, I listen to the way you say it, the small things in what you say that reveal what you feel about what you are saying, the lacunae that reveal more about you than the words you surround them with.

***

I know, I should try harder with phatic communication. It seems odd to people if you don't bother with it much. But I figure, it's only the people I actually care about who I don't talk small with much. And you'd hope they'd understand in other ways that I'm genuinely interested in them. Also, I do every other thing in social communication. I say hello, how are ya, goodbye, safe journey, shake your hand, kiss you if we're kissing friends, hug you if we hug. I'm not autistic: smiles don't confuse me.

***

Anyway, enough about me. Tell me about you.

Well, that's the thing actually. I hate talking about myself. I'm not interesting. I'm a reactive, hollow sort of person. I don't have anything inside that you need to pull out. I'm okay with it. It's what makes me unique: I'm content not to reach for the stars--I already think I hold them inside and that's what counts.

Sometimes, anyway.

The well

2010-01-24T11:21:00.001+10:00

Reading this post, I was struck by the thought that the saddest thing in my life is that when I was happiest, I had no one with me to share it with.

Yet it may be that it is a good thing that I was able to feel it without needing someone else to validate it.

I was happiest drinking coffee on a cold morning in the main square at Shimla. I had left behind the aggressive whiny child I had been in my twenties and discovered myself, a flawed but real human being. I was doing something I would never have believed I was capable of, travelling on my own without the fear of strangers that made me unable to ring a pizza place a few years earlier.

I was thin, handsome and confident--not overweening, simply convinced that I was as good as the next person, that when I walked into a room, I would find people who wanted to know me, women who would be into me, men who would find what I had to say valuable. And of course these things are true for all of us; you don't need anyone else to point out for you why it's true--you can find it if you go looking for it.

I found it by surrendering, by giving into the truth that I should be measured by what I am, not by what I'm not. I think that it's easy if you have a belief that people are fundamentally good to believe that you too are good, so long as you allow yourself to believe that you too are human. And I do do that: I think about what people are, not what they promise to be, not what they lack, but what they have. Mrs Zen sometimes would say to me that I was dissatisfied with her because she wasn't an intellectual like me.

But I never was. I loved her for what she offered, and never thought less of her for what she was not. We are capable of inspiring each other and showing each other beauty; we just don't know it. As I stood in the square in Shimla in the cold, I was warmed by knowing that I had been able to win her back simply by offering myself, not a scrambled version of me.

The second happiest time in my life I did share. We sat and drank coffee and Mrs Zen told me the doctor had confirmed her pregnancy. I suppose you would think that Zenella's birth was as happy a time, but I don't think it is the right word. I felt fulfilled. That may be even a richer feeling than happiness, I don't know. I have been so far from fulfilment since then that it seems a strange, foreign place I think I once visited but truly never saw.

Worth it

2010-01-22T23:35:00.003+10:00

The other night, I was at a poetry reading. I mumbled a poem because I'm unaccustomed to public speaking, and afterwards, I was talking to a younger man who was set on emulating Bukowski.

He somehow found Bukowski admirable, and was perplexed by Eliot. But, I said to him, both Buk and Eliot were reacting to their own nihilism. Each had concluded that the world has no meaning or purpose, which is a distressing conclusion to reach. Buk reacted by not caring about himself or what happened to him, and by seeking personal oblivion, so that, one supposes, he did not have to think any more about it. Eliot reacted by trying to find small shreds of meaning in an absurd world. The difference, I suppose, is that Buk says we cannot live, Eliot we must try to live.

I tend to agree with Eliot, as it happens.

So this guy is saying, I have been doing the greyhounds, because of course Buk did the horses. And the guy is talking up the dogs, like it's a trial of manhood. No, I say, it has to be poker. Because you have to suffer.

See, that's Eliot for you: man must seek out suffering so that he has a reason to live.

And the guy is saying, you're fucking awesome.

So I'm ready to rationalise that away, that he's just impressed by intellectualism or whatever, and then I realise that it would be easier just to accept that he thinks I'm awesome.

And in that moment, I began to recover. I became myself again. Started to become myself.

I am thankful for the people who have sustained me when I would have found it impossible to believe that I deserved it. The other night, I was on my way to Sh's for dinner, and I am thinking, you cannot begin to convince yourself that there is any reason to invite you round than she likes you. I am thankful to have met a friend who makes me laugh. I wasn't built for frowns.

People have loved me! They were willing to care about me even if I refused to care about myself. I am able to be well because of K, A, S and P. I think that it is like when I looked at my luck in poker and found I had been luckier than I had felt. On balance I feel much better about what I have had than I do bitter about what I have lacked.

I rejoice that I have known those women, and I will become myself and be worth it. I love each of the people who have sustained me. Not just those I mentioned but others who have proved I have value. Because Bukowski was wrong and Eliot thought too small. We have meaning because we create it among ourselves. I've always believed it and still do. We have meaning because we will sustain each other, and it begins and ends with the love we have for one another. I've always believed that that is what there is for us, and I won't stop.

Gone

2010-01-17T00:22:00.003+10:00

So we are dancing at the casino. I don't like the music or the place, but I'm dancing because I like the woman, and maybe she is interested in me.

I'm going for a drink she says.

So I follow her, but she's moving pretty fast, and she walks past all the bars.

So fuck it. I know no woman wants me. They even run away so that they don't have the awkwardness of saying good night.

What's the point of my even bothering? No one will ever want me. I don't have enough to offer even to be worth bothering to tell me you're not interested.

Why bother doing any of this? Just accept that you are shit and you have what shit deserves.

***

Okay, so I've sobered up and now I'm able to laugh at it. It's all material for my memoir "How I wooed and was completely humiliated by women on several continents".

The Tory brand

2010-01-08T13:41:00.001+10:00

Shock revelation. Tory is a cunt. In other news, the Pope remains Catholic and yes, bears prefer trees as their toilet decoration.

Surely this actually reinforces their brand? No one actually buys the "compassionate conservative" thing that David Cameron is pretending to? Did we not notice that Bush ran as one of those and immediately swung hard to the right as soon as he was in office? I'll say one thing for the rightards here: at least Tony Abbott doesn't pretend not to be an arsehole. He wears it with pride.

I love reading about conservatives who promote the "big society" as though they weren't pretending to believe in equity because most of us are poor and wouldn't vote for them if they admitted to being nakedly in pursuit of the agenda of the rich. Of course there is no such thing as society. They destroyed it. The idea that you can gut the welfare state and expect citizens to fill the gap is ludicrous because for 30 years they've also been selling us the idea that the goal of our lives is to fuck everyone else and make bank. Which has led us to the soulless, bereft, misshapen thing that passes for society today.

We are idiots because we allow ourselves to be conned by the messaging, and never look at what we are actually being sold. A key policy goal of the right (and in fact Labour, ironically) has been to destroy the power of unions to bargain collectively and to push people into "workplace agreements".

The thing is, when your boss offers you a workplace agreement, the deal is "take it or leave it". There's nothing you can do if you don't like it but look for another job. And good luck with that! When a union bargains for us, the deal is not "take it or leave it" because if we leave it, they are fucked. Now it's "please take it because I recognise you can fuck me".

Bosses, on the whole, are not kind people. They are people who have been trained to think of you as a cost that needs cutting if possible. They want to milk you as hard as they can for as little reward as they think you'll accept. Selling this as a virtue, and calling it an "agreement", when the choice is agree or starve because the right also took the floor out from unemployment support, was a great work of politics.

Did you know that your real wages have fallen? I'm pretty sure that's true for everyone reading this blog, because I'm pretty sure no one who reads it is particularly wealthy (my apologies to you if you are in fact wealthy and can I interest you in staking a moderately successful poker player?). Naturally, you may have changed jobs and now do something more lucrative than you did ten years ago, but otherwise, your real wages will have fallen. Yet the economy has grown (despite the recent problems) in real terms.

Why didn't we share? If this is a society, why didn't we all get a share in it? Answers on a postcard.

They conned you. They distracted you with immigration (who cares who lives in your street? You don't talk to your neighbours anyway). They distracted you with terror. They distracted you with wall-to-wall bullshit on the TV, newsertainment, celebrity culture, mobile phones that can film your life and make your tea and football, which they also destroyed, so that now we have a ridiculous parody of the contest of hometown allegiances that used to thrill us.

They conned you. Yet the Liberals here, the Tories there, the Republicans in the States all have hopes of a return to power in the next decade, and the parties they replace are not the parties of the working man they affect to be, but grim managerialists who differ only in nuance from the rightards, not in any way that will likely make a difference in your life.

Being what it is

2010-01-05T23:29:00.004+10:00

Because almost everything I say feels insincere to me (although at the same time I don't feel I am ever exactly dishonest), I feel surprised when I let the truth leak out. It seems almost corrosive.

A small example: we are waiting by the lights to cross George St to go into the pub. A rough sleeper comes up and says, can you give me some money so me and my mate can get hamburgers? I say, no. And he says, why not? It's a long time since I've encountered anything resembling an aggressive beggar and it jolts me into being frank with him.

I don't give a fuck about you, I say.

What. Did. You. Say.

You asked me why I wouldn't give you money. The reason is I don't care about you.

And I realised that I was like a man who finds himself naked in the middle of the village green in midwinter: unshielded, out there. Because you are supposed to have some socially acceptable reason: I don't want to encourage them to harass others, or they'll only spend it on booze (like I wasn't planning to myself), or whatever you feel excuses you.

But he is nothing to me. I did not know what happened to him before I encountered him and will not know what becomes of him. And I have no interest in finding out. But if you do not care about the beggar, you are paying him money because of some other thing you care about. I won't speculate about why one does; it's easy to imagine all sorts of motives for it. But I have no other thing I care about in that way and I am left only with the truth.

****

I have been talking with A about what it is, which led me to ask myself, what is it? Leaving aside the answer to that, what if galaxies were like atoms and our universe merely an object like a stone in some greater universe? It would be the same to us.

I was talking to her about throwing a stone into a pond. Say a beetle was on the surface of the water near where the stone splashed, it would experience the ripples as waves. It would have no concept that the waves had any particular cause, and less so that they could have an agent. You are on a scale far too large for the beetle to comprehend. Not only is the beetle's viewpoint different. Its conception of what is in the world is different from yours (and I am not doing a "what is it like to be a bat?" excursus into how a beetle is different from us; my beetle is comfortably anthoropomorphised).

The point being the world seems a particular way to us because of us, not because of anything about it. We are active participants in how the world is.

Why talk about what it is? Well, you need to see what it is before you can change anything about it. And what is it? It is what it is. It is like glimmering froth, nothing permanent or immutable, all destined to change endlessly, while we try to tie ourselves to it, to pretend it can be held static, to create fixed points and hammer ourselves to them.

A asks whether I am following my own advice. I say something flippant but the truth is that I would be scared to. I have been thinking about poker, and how I was surprised to see that over my "career" I have been neither lucky nor unlucky. I do not believe it says anything flattering that I would feel I had been unlucky but had not been. We understand that poker is mostly luck, with the main purpose of the skill to navigate that luck. So if you cannot feel you underperformed because of luck, you must now conclude that it was skill you lacked. You weren't as good as you thought you were. Seeing what it is can, you see, be scary.

***

A weird thing is that I stopped tilting at poker. Well, not stopped tilting, but stopped feeling the injustice in a bad beat, that particular form of tilt. I don't know how I stopped. I just didn't feel it any more. I lost to a stunning bad beat and didn't care. I didn't feel enraged. I felt good about my play and content that the same spot would bring me money in the future. But how did I learn that? It's something that wasn't rational, by which I mean that I didn't just need educating in the reality of ups and downs and probabilities, I understood all that, but rather I needed my emotional response to be trained. But one day it wasn't, the next it was. I suppose it's a bit like learning to type, where you labour at a particular level and then, all of a sudden, you are 10WPM faster or you have realised just how to hold your fingers.

I am not totally over it. The injustice of a bad call rewarded still stings, but it's not my losing I mourn but the inequity of cruel chance. But even so it is like I started not just to see it as it is but to know it, so I know that seeing it can have good outcomes too.

***

It is frightening to feel that you might drown. You only know it is a real feeling if you have felt it. Otherwise it seems wrong that you should not just see what is good in your life and pursue it. But if you have felt that you are swimming in a rough sea on a dark night, with too many hours till dawn and fear that years of trying to keep out of the water have left you too weak to keep your arms moving, then you know how real that feels.

I envy those who are certain that their god will pick them out of the water. I mean, even if he doesn't (I know I should say even though he doesn't, but without certainty how can you dishonour the thing someone else sees and you don't?), the notion that he will serves to buoy you up.

Eventually it is like learning how not to tilt. One day you realise you are just swimming. Or at least I hope it is.

My dream

2009-12-21T11:02:00.000+10:00

So we are walking hand in hand on a beach that I do not recognise. It seems like it is Byron, but the rocks look like they are Cornish. It is a weird half light, so it is as though we are walking through a negative of a beach, the moonlight and clouds washing it out so that we feel like we are walking through an alien world.

We have been at dinner and I am feeling mellow and tired. It seems like the night is quite cold, but your hand is warm and soft in mine. It must be warm enough, because I am wearing summer gear. You are wearing a long skirt and a blouse.

We do not walk far before we stop and sit down in the sand. We are just sitting wordlessly and I am looking at you. You are wearing your hair a little bit longer, and it's like you have grown it out a little just to please me (although I like it how it is, I am not saying I don't). I touch your hair and you lean in towards me. I gather you into my arms and we sit listening to the sea crashing on the rocks. It's definitely a Cornish sea, not the soft rollers of Byron.

We are lying in the sand, side by side, so close that you could not slip a hand between us. I can feel your breasts pressed hard against my chest and your legs intertwined with mine tightly enough so that I can feel the heat of you.

I kiss you on the forehead and ask the world to keep you safe for a long life. I kiss your brow and ask the sea to provide you with fish that will delight you to eat. I kiss your cheek and ask the wind to blow you good fortune and contentment. I kiss your lips and ask the sun to shine on you, to bless you for all your days. I can feel your tongue in my mouth and I am thankful for the day I met you. I close my eyes and breathe in your scent--the fragrance you wear and the smell of your skin and I am thankful to my fate for allowing our paths to cross, and I want to believe in your god so I can thank him too for creating you so that I can love you. I feel your breath hot on my neck and I am simply thankful to you for being you.

I do not know how we become naked but we are, and we feel safe because the beach is entirely deserted. You are spread out on the beach and I am touching you gently, so that you are not sure whether it is the wind or my fingers on your shoulders, your breasts, your stomach, your thighs, your legs. When I touch you between your legs, you have no doubt, and you open up to me.

I touch you only gently because we are not here to hurt each other or cause each other pain, but to love each other kindly. You do not need to say anything to me for me to know what you want. I know how to touch you as though I had a map or instructions and you are the same.

I pull you towards me, so that we are back on our sides, and you wrap your leg around me and pull my cock into you. You are wet enough for it to slide in almost its full length without my barely moving.

We start to fuck in rhythm with the breakers. I am looking at your face, only inches from mine. You have your eyes tight closed but still your face is beautiful. I look at you carefully because I want to remember every line, every hair, every freckle, every part of your life that is written on your face. You have never looked so beautiful in your life as you do now (and that is true not only in my dream, but in our lives, because age has blessed you so that it thrills me to look at you because you are so beautiful to me). I pull you in closer and we are kissing. Our tongues move like the foam on the sea, our hips slowly like the waves. I feel your pussy enfolding me, hot and warm. I feel harder and stronger than I have ever been. I reach a point as deep in you as I can reach and stop. We lie for a few moments, our hot breath in unison, and I can feel tears on my cheek. I am crying for happiness. You feel a tear on your cheek and I can feel your fingers brush away the tears as we kiss fiercely but tenderly.

I feel your hands on my back, urging me to fuck you and we are ever closer, so close that I do not know how we will ever separate, and we are fucking slowly and gently. You can feel yourself coming like a riptide rushing through the water, and I feel like you have brought down the moon and put it inside me, but it is only that I have closed my eyes, and somehow you have rolled on top of me and I hold you to me, sliding in our sweat, as we come like breaking waves.

We lie for a long time in the sand afterwards, stroking each other and kissing, your head on my chest. You are smiling and it feels like I am still having the tail of an orgasm that will not end so long as you are there, smiling, your teeth glowing in the half light.

And that is it. If I do not write that we leave the beach, my dream will not end, so I am content to leave us lying in the sand on a beach you could not find on a map, belonging only to me and to you because I give it to you as I kiss you in the gathering dark.

Above water

2009-12-08T20:28:00.003+10:00

I feel like I have been under twice but as I was choking, remembered I could swim after all.

Then I forget, and wish someone would throw me a lifesaver, but I have no one to rely on but myself, and I'm not reliable, anyone will tell you. I say six and arrive at seven, if I turn up at all. Mostly I'm quivering at home, too afraid of the lights and noise to be where I need to if I want to be anywhere at all.

I feel like I am the water circling the drain, yet somehow I am never drained away. I keep spinning round, round and round. If I close my eyes and try really hard, I can make dizzy into exhilarated.

Did you ever do that when you were a child? Make yourself spin round until you were high. I feel like I never stopped and now I do not know whether it's my world out of control or me.

***

We are all laughing in the water, the girls close by and Naughtyman's beautiful eyes alight with joy.

He has all the best features I have but he will not be weighed down. If I had a god, that is what I'd pray. Don't let what I've done bring him sorrow.

Zenella is floating on her back. Her smile is beatific, you could frame it.

Her smile is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. If I had a god, I would pray that I would never make her cry.

But I will.

***

I cannot help what I am. I didn't choose it. I never sat down with a checklist.

Once I did, and I was a better man for it. I was wrong in all the ways I'm wrong, but I felt good about it. Rascal and bastard are two sides of the same counterfeit coin; one you love, the other you cannot spend.

I want to be coin you put in the bank. I want to be currency that a person can use. I want to serve the ones I love, more than anything, but it's not the only thing I want.

***

I have stopped feeling bad about it. Okay, I'm useless. I deserve nothing but charity. So I accept it, and still, I have love in my life. Now I accept it, there is nothing for a monkey to screech at.

And I will die before he gets another chance. I cannot live ten more years of suffocating myself. I would rather let go and drown.

But before I do that, let me tell you, I would rather join you on your planet, if you will have me. I would rather smile with you, tread water and smile, if we can.

About K

2009-11-28T18:16:00.003+10:00

Dear you

I am simple and 99 percent of the time, I don't know what to say, so I just talk shit. But when I talk to you, I want to sing sweet rhymes, lift you up and make you feel all right.

What I want and what I am, they can be miles apart, I know, but good intentions count, tell me they do, because I have only good intentions when I talk to you.

I want to tell you the thousand ways you are pleasing to me, but it is everything about you, and I can say it just by saying your name. I want to tell you how many times I have dreamt about you, but you are my dream, and I can dream you just by saying your name. I want to tell you you are luscious fruit hanging on the vine, but words are dry and useless tools that I will never learn to tame. They will not say anything but that you are pleasing to me.

I want to tell you about your laugh, and no one laughs like you. It sounds like you are unsure you should, which makes it a gift that I treasure when I can bring it out. I want to tell you about your smile, how I love to see your perfect teeth, pale jewels in a mouth I'd love to kiss. I cannot tell you about your kiss; words are too few, too barren. I will, given the chance, show you my meaning, that's all I can do.

I want to tell you about your hair, your eyes, your cheeks, your lips. I want to tell you how beautiful you are to me, how the world made me a dream and you were it.

You are a treasure that I would keep close to me for all my days, a world that I would explore and never grow tired of unravelling its secrets. I do not have words to explain, only the sighs I sigh, only the few feeble lines I can make from the poor treasury of signs that I possess.

But what does it matter? What do words matter? Here we are: just hearts that beat. Here we are: D and K, that's all we can be--I am D and you are pleasant to me.

D

For K

2009-11-25T23:38:00.000+10:00

Says it all.

"Treat me like a fool"

2009-11-24T09:12:00.002+10:00

When you have been lonely for a long time, you ask yourself, am I just clinging on to whatever, whoever passes by, yet I think I want to know the people I know and I feel they are not just passing conveniences because I would not trade them.

At the start of another long hot day in someone else's office in someone else's house, I am staring at his map of western Asia and I know my brain is memorising the shape of Kazakhstan and what good will that ever do me?

It's easy to ask what good anything I do will ever do me, as though the purpose of my life was to do me good and not just to feel good about what I am doing. Maybe it is not even something I do; maybe it really is something that just happens to me -- and how good or bad it will be depends on how I am about it. Right now I am okay.

I know what you are thinking though. If you are lonely, make friends. But it's not easy to push yourself beyond your boundaries when you are unsure that there is anything worthwhile to project. Twice recently I have been reminded that I am not interesting enough for people to want to know. Two old friends -- one an acquaintance to put it more accurately, but the other an old friend who I met up with in the UK when I went there -- wrote to me and I wrote back, excited and I thought conveying that excitement. Neither replied. This happens to me a lot. I know it's not a big deal. People have lives that I am barely a tiny part of. Even people who I don't think have much of a life still have a day to day that doesn't include me. But what you know and what you feel are not always in alignment.

I am constituted to go with what I feel. I couldn't change that because it's what I consist in. If I did change it, what would I be like? Would I "fulfil my potential"? Or would I simply become more coldly calculating? Would I be happier if I knew the answers, or knew how to pursue them? I know I am capable of feeling my way to happiness -- I know that with a certainty that is diamond hard because I do feel it sometmes and I know why -- but can I reason my way into it?

I sometimes wonder whether I have constructed myself this way to avoid hard answers, to make wrongness right. What I mean is, if you do wrong, you may hold yourself up to moral inquisition and blame. But if you say, I just felt it was right, you can excuse yourself. I have been trying to unravel where I have done that, not because I want to beat myself up for wasting my life and opportunities but because I don't want to continue to do it.

***

When I was, I think I was 14, I had a crush on a girl called Sally. She seemed special to me -- mostly special to look at because I didn't know her to talk to. I would watch from the window of my class as she walked to her class. She had a dignity of carriage that I still find incredibly attractive in women -- it is one of the things about K that attracted me, a certainty that she was worthwhile that she expressed in how she bore herself -- and she was pretty. I believed that I would be a good boyfriend for her: I did not think anything of my looks, although in fact, looking back at my pictures, I was handsome enough, but I was sensitive and kind, and I was sure that away from the playground I could listen to what she had to say and find good things to say to her. I wrote poetry about her, about my unrequited love and my dreams of walking hand in hand with her, or whatever I dreamed of. (Then, as now, I saw the person I loved as someone I wanted to hold gently, rather than someone I wanted to have sex with, although of course I was old enough to think of women in that way. She seemed too nice to think of like that.) In any case, one morning I found reserves of courage that I did not know I had and asked her out. She turned me down flat. She may even have laughed at the idea, I don't remember, but certainly she was scornful. I had to wait till lunchtime to be able to find somewhere private where I could cry.

I felt a bitter injustice. I knew I could be right for her and I had no way to show it. She had disallowed something good that I had to offer. And worse, she did it unkindly. After that, I no longer watched her from the window, I no longer wrote poetry about her (although I still have the poetry I did write) and I tried to still my thoughts about her.

But I do believe that my world should be just. I don't know why, but I do. I believed it then and I believe it now, even though I am perfectly aware it is irrational to think so. I could not credit that someone I had thought so wonderful could be cruel, so I rationalised the injustice away. I came to believe that she had chosen correctly, that I was not worth going out with, that I was too ugly, too boring, too vapid. It never occurred to me that it could simply be that some strange boy, who she had no awareness of, had approached her out of the blue and taken her unawares. Tell my heart that! It won't listen. And anyway, I was not wrong. I would have been a good boyfriend for her or anyone, and when later I had girlfriends, I was good for them. The injustice was the world's, in that it equipped me poorly in means to show her that I was the right choice, or mine, in that I expected a world that does not care to care about me, to nurture me, to not let me be lonely or unhappy, because I am still that gentle boy looking out of the window yearning and I don't know how not to be.

About K

2009-11-23T08:31:00.000+10:00

Dear you

Did you ever have anyone in your life that you never felt a moment's bitterness towards? Even though they may have done things you wish they wouldn't, or not done what you wish they would, you could only feel goodwill about them?

It is a blessing to have someone like that in your life and I do.

Did you ever have anyone in your life who uplifts you, who makes you feel good just by existing? I have ups and downs, spells of irrational energy and spells of agonising depression. But I have someone who can uplift me, can make me feel the same manic burst just by being with me. And there is no one I have ever met who is more pleasant to be with.

It is a blessing to have someone like that in your life and I do.

I had a dream when I was a youngster, marooned miles from civilisation in a country village, a dream that some exotic stranger would walk into my life and capture my heart, a beautiful gypsy with dust on her shoes, darkhaired and darkeyed, a look of mischief but a smile that if I could uncover it would warm my heart through all my days.

That luscious gypsy came and went but I did not ever forget her. She is the guiding star of my heart because it sings her name when she is near.

It is a blessing to have known you and I have been blessed.

D.

Joy

2009-11-17T19:51:00.003+10:00

The band is playing soul burners and a small crowd is dancing, growing though, ever more people. Some are dancing clumsily and some well, but most are dancing with pure joy.

The band is playing the Four Tops, I can't help myself, and I am not feeling joy, but I'm crying for love because the Four Tops specialised in simple truths and I am simple in matters of the heart at least.

At least I feel like I am.

So I do not dance, although I'd like to, because I am someone who cannot find joy within themselves, but I need to be led by the hand and I don't have anyone who does that in my life. I would not even know where to look for them.

That does not mean no one ever does bring me joy. They do, of course they do.

***

Sometimes you are just sick of never being right and I am sick of it. I am sick of not being right in myself, constantly feeling as though I am someone I am not, yet if I'm not me, who am I? It's a problem because I fear I may have been deluding myself into thinking I am someone else inside when the outside is not deceptive at all; I just am this person.

But why then do some people love me? What do they see that is loveable but I don't see? What do they know that I don't know? I feel sorry that S is clever enough to help me by showing me ways I am wrong with her, but has, and had, nothing at all to say about why I was right. She earned it though, and I am sick of not being right with other people, not being able to give them what they need, sometimes not caring, sometimes not understanding.

I am sick of feeling I could be what people need but powerless to move them and have them believe it. Or sick of being unable just to see what it is, so it's just another way of not being right for them.

I am thinking this as we are walking along Byron beach, and I think that I have been what M needs because I have worked hard at it, but it's not something I could keep on doing.

***

Other people at the pub talk to strangers easily and I'm envious because I cannot overcome myself enough to be able to do it and I never will be able to. So I will not make a great life out of where I am now. I need help and no one wants to help me, or if they do, they don't know how.

And why should they? I am not right with anyone. I am not good for anyone. I don't know how to be. Sometimes I do try but it's easy to be discouraged. I have a long list of people I've tried to be good for, sometimes against what I felt were my own interests, or my needs at least, and I feel like the rewards were slim, that where I could have expected some increase in the good they did for me, I just got kicked in the nuts.

Am I just wrong about that though?

***

And M is saying, as we're trying to keep out of the gale, you are obliged to Mrs Zen because you married her, and I say no, you become obliged to someone because of how they are to you, not because of the name you put on your relationship. Yes, you make allowances when someone is something to you, but that has its limits. They do not just receive your respect because at some point you signed some piece of paper that says they are whatever, nor even because you swore to your god that you'd respect them, nor for any other reason but that they earned it by being the thing that has that name.

I didn't earn it either though but it's not a oneway street, after all.

***

There are lots of people dancing by the end of the night, although the band has gone off some and now is more cabaret than it began, which is not good.

I feel huddled within myself, unable to show anything to the world that is good, unable to believe that there even is anything within me that they would want to see.

I do not even know how I could know I was wrong though if I am wrong.

Access

2009-11-13T11:38:00.006+10:00

Whoever is accessing this blog from News Limited, identify yourself either in the comments or by email.

It's totally fucking out of order that when you are aware that I took my blog private to stop you from accessing it, you continue to do so. I am aware that no one connected with News Limited has a shred of human decency, but do try to summon some up and let me know who you are so that I can decide whether I need to bar access again.

Please note that I have another blog, Monkey Banana, which you are welcome to access anonymously, but I am sensitive about people who sacked me raping my archives and I won't tolerate it.

***

In other news, my new life sucks almost as badly as the old one, it won't surprise anyone to learn.

I'm desperate for a trip away, says M. So we decide on Byron Bay because I can't go up the coast for one reason or another. So okay, that entitles him to be a slight pain in the arse, under the International Pain in the Arse Rules. He says where do you want to stay and I say, somewhere cheap, because, as you know, I don't have a job and I don't have much spare money.

I'm not that keen on going away anyway, I should note. I'm doing him a favour as much as anything.

So he says, I'm not staying in a hostel. Okay, I say, find the place you do want to stay in. So he looks for an hour or so and goes to bed without saying whether he booked anything. Because I'm like that, I hang around waiting for him to say, rather than hassle him. He's liable to get stroppy when hassled, and I'm a guest, here on sufferance, which in small ways he makes very very plain.

So I ask him this morning and he says he was too tired to concentrate on finding somewhere, and even though I do not consider looking for accommodation to be the most mentally taxing task a person can undertake, I say okay, I'll find something. So I find a guesthouse reasonably near the town. It's perfect, but apparently being within 500m of the beach is not good enough.

I feel like saying "why don't you just bite my cock, you miserable cunt", but you know, house guest and all, I have to wear his shit, and I spend at least 9/10 of nearly every conversation that I have not saying what I feel like saying, so it's no big deal. When I do express myself, I find myself much more expendable than I hoped.

I am thinking that I am going to have to rent a studio flat and drink myself to death. It won't be fun but you know, my life isn't anyway, so wgaf?

***

Shit, I realise that sounds super critical of M. It's not meant to. I mean, he's annoying over the accommodation in Byron, but he was kind enough to let me stay in his house, and he's used to having his own space all to himself. He sorted out his junkroom for me and it's not like he's wandering around in a huff because of whatever. He's a good guy. That's why we're friends. I wouldn't like to leave the impression that I don't think highly of him.

Monkey business

2009-11-11T16:55:00.004+10:00

After talking it through with a friend, I have changed my mind about how my life came to be the way it is. I always thought I was basically a good person and had made bad choices. She has convinced me that I am not good at all, and made the choices you would expect. I am thankful to her for carefully destroying my illusions because I like to think I deal in what it is, and now I see it a lot more clearly.

I am sorry though. I wanted to be good. I thought I was doing what was right, but I guess if you twist things enough, you can make any bad thing the "right thing to do". I know that people have done that to me: done things that have really hurt me and were convinced that they were justified. And probably they were.

So the good thing is, I don't feel I have to rely on others for my wellbeing. I realise that they are right not to concern themselves about that too much. I feel I can choose for myself and I can accept the circumstances, because I will not blame anyone else.

Leaving

2009-11-01T20:13:00.002+10:00

Mrs Zen has the phone and she's saying, do you want to talk to your sister, she has your family there, and Zenella has been talking to them about how much money she will get when she lands in the UK.

Because everyone has promised her ten pounds when she gets there, but she won't get there.

So my mum is on the phone and I ask her how she's going, because she has just recently had an op, and I am asking how that is, she says she is getting there, and are you okay? And I say, no I am not okay, I am leaving Mrs Zen. And I can feel my mum's shock across ten thousand miles. Oh I'm sorry, she says. I'm not, I say, I feel good about it.

I do feel good about it. I mean, I feel good for me. So long as I only think about myself, I feel relieved and happy about it.

But I can hear Zenella playing on her recorder, playing the song she has been writing, it sounds a bit like one of my songs that I play on my iPod. And I couldn't make Zenella English. I just wasn't man enough. I tried but I failed and what am I even worth? What am I worth that I couldn't stand Mrs Zen's shit for her sake? That I couldn't stand my own life being worthless and ruined so that I could get her to England where she could become herself?

What good am I that I chose my own hope of salvation over my children? Please don't write and tell me I did the right thing. I don't have a right thing to do. I can only choose which very wrong thing I break my heart over. God why did she do this to me? She only had to love me and I would never have stopped loving her.

I couldn't stand it any more. She sulked all week because I wrote an email. She said, I've been hurt because you were writing to your women. It doesn't matter that the email that upset her was to my boss, who knows I am online a lot and writes to me at night sometimes with work things. It could have been to K, or S, or P or A. They are the women she means. They don't seem like anything dirty to me. They seem like the people who have sustained me and I write to them because it makes me happy. Mrs Zen would rob me of my small measure of happiness for the sake of what? I don't even know what I am supposed to get in exchange. Years of the cold shoulder, manufactured hurt, spitefulness, inattention.

And my beautiful children. Who will now live the rest of their childhoods in her dad's house, strangled in suburbia, slowly becoming strangers to me. It should be her that is leaving. I had love enough for everyone. She had none to spare for anyone but herself.

Public

2009-10-30T19:57:00.003+10:00

Given that some time has passed and it makes me sad that no one can stumble on this blog any more, not to mention that at least three of my very small readership gave up because they couldn't get a feed any more, I intend to reopen it to the outside world shortly. I mean, it doesn't really matter to me because I've always written it strictly for myself, but I do feel a bit meh that no one can stumble on my archives and enjoy some of the things I've written. I know I moved a lot of it to Monkey Banana, but it doesn't feel the same to me.

I'm not sure though. There are decent reasons to keep it hidden too. I'd welcome views if anyone has them.

Yeah never

2009-10-30T19:17:00.003+10:00

So R, the daycare woman, smiles and I smile and I wish I was brave enough to say to her, you should bottle that smile, because it seems like that would be nice and I like to brighten people's day. (No, really. Sometimes.)

But then I get to thinking, that's more likely to frighten her than brighten anything, and I put the notion away to the back of the mental cupboard. Because I am thinking, does anyone else have this problem about themselves, that they just don't know how others see them?

I imagine everyone has some idea how they are presenting themselves, what others see when they look at them. I don't mean what they physically see: I can be objective enough to recognise that they see a big man, carrying some middleage spread, greyhaired and a bit worn, fairly unwrinkled for a man of his age (less sun than most as a kid, rather than miracle skin, although until age started to creep patches of wtf over it, I had good skin), ordinary at best. I mean what they think of you.

The best I can come up with is slightly dull. But that doesn't really answer my question, because what I am asking is more like why anyone would bother with me. Because no one does and it bothers me.

I am not entirely lonely. Even on days that I don't see another person, I have company. I talk for hours with people online. I have no idea why they bother though. What am I giving them? Do they all simply enjoy being charitable? I know why I'm talking to them. I enjoy talking to A because she is wise and openminded and she will put up with me when I whine. I enjoy talking to P because she and I have surprisingly lots in common, and she is funny without trying too hard. I enjoy talking to S, although she doesn't often bother, because she feels like my intellectual peer, she is manipulative and clever, and because she writes so nicely that you can't help revelling in it. I enjoy talking to boots because he is a oneoff and I think that he is aware he's talking shit but cannot help smuggling the odd diamond into it. I enjoy talking to Tom because he does not think thinking is a crime, and he is an oldschool conversationalist, always able to think up stories or illuminations that add value. And I enjoy talking to K because she is the single nicest person to spend time with that I've ever known, and I value niceness above everything else, because underneath my shell is a small boy, who flinches at the anger and pain that fuel our world, and basks in the warmth of someone pleasant.

R seems nice, but all she sees is another dad, I'm sure, an old guy who she would laugh at the thought of spending time with. I am just physically lonely. I need someone proximate, someone I can hold, make feel good, lavish kisses on. I need a girlfriend because I want to be needed, and not just by a child who wants me to give it something, which the four people who do need me most all are. Someone said to me the other day what a pity it is that I need someone else to love me to feel validated (or words to that effect), but it's equally the case that I need someone to want me to love them. The monkey does not tell me that no one can love me. I know people love me, for whatever reason they do. It would be hard to force yourself to believe that when people say otherwise. He tells me that I have nothing to offer. That's much harder for people to prove to you.

I didn't always feel like that, and I am not condemned always to feel it. Of course I don't believe I would be fixed simply by acquiring a girlfriend, or by becoming acclaimed for one thing or another. But in the year before I first moved to Australia, I had a strong self-image. You would have liked me then. I knew what people saw when they looked at me and I knew they liked it. How did I do that? I became myself. I'll write about it some time, but the essence of it was I shed the accreted shit of my first *mumbles* years. I meditated, I ate well, I focused on what was good about me and I was convinced there was plenty. I had a job I enjoyed, friends who I enjoyed being with and didn't feel I had to try hard with. Simple.

So. But someone said to me, and I hope they won't mind my quoting them:

you feel trapped by forces beyond your control... This is making you see things all wrong, including the way you look at yourself.

and I know it's true. In the year before I came to Australia, I made myself happy. I was fucking great. I have to believe I still am, if I want to live, because I am sick of dying. It has been too little fun and the result has been, well, dying, which is not like life, however much you try to convince yourself that it is.

About K

2009-10-24T08:59:00.002+10:00

Dear you

I dreamt of you last night. The monkey is not totally in control. Sometimes I wrest the wheel of the car from him and drive free. It was brief but joyous. We were laughing together as you showed me some clothes you had bought. The time you were giving me was only for me and I was happy.

D.

Rare bird

2009-10-23T14:37:00.003+10:00

Dear you

I remember a day when I came to meet you at the hospital you were working at. You were very businesslike and offhand with me, but I wasn't offended. I wasn't doing anything special and you were, but you were sparing time to be with me.

That was one of the days that made me love you the way I do. You were so proud of yourself, what you were capable of, who you are. And I was proud of you too. My high opinion of you wasn't based simply on your good looks!

You merited it. And I am hurting because you still do. I want to believe I do too. I want to believe that you too have a song inside you that sings my name and that you cannot ignore it. I know that those songs are full of danger for us: mine is too. But mine is full of joy: the simple joy I have in seeing your name in my inbox, the joy of knowing I can make you smile. I want to believe I bring you joy too. And if I do, I don't want you to put it aside.

It's rare. Do you remember, on our trip, we stopped to take a walk. In the forest, we saw a lyre bird. Not clearly, just among the trees, so that we were not sure. I have never seen one since. And as we drove, near the state border, an echidna crossed the road in front of us. You do not know when these things will happen. It was not convenient! It would have been better had he walked across our path as we walked in the bush. But he was in that road, and we had to stop and look, because they too are rare.

I don't know any other way to say it. I am sorry that it is hurting you too, and I know it must be. But I cannot help hoping that I am right that my name sings in you, however softly, and that you will listen to that song, will not be able to close your ears to it, because the chorus -- man! the chorus! -- is fucking great.

D.

About K

2009-10-23T07:43:00.005+10:00

Dear you

The sun has come out this morning and there will be blue skies. But I will sit in the dark in my basement and count off another lonely day.

I suppose that in the hours I spend on my own a stray thought of you will enter my head, but I will do my best to chase it away, and remind myself that I did not deserve any part of you.

I cannot stop loving you, any more than the uncomprehending animals can not love the sunshine. But the sunshine doesn't care. It does not even know it makes them content.

I know the memory of your face will fade. I can look at your photo and remind myself but that is not the same. When you touch a photo it is flat and meaningless. But you made me sing inside and the song may grow faint, but won't fade to nothing.

I am sorry I'm not feeling inspired this morning. Even the sunshine has not warmed me. Realising it is illusory, that there was no sun, I was just making believe there was, makes it harder to bear that it has stopped shining, when you would think it would make it better. But it's no comfort to know you do not love me. And I know you would say you do. But love is not just a word, not just something you say to someone to make them feel good. Love is what would hurt you too much to do this. Even pity would hurt too much.

I often wondered about S. She didn't pay any price for knowing me, but I did for knowing her, and she didn't care about that. She quickly found other things to fill her days and had not a scrap of remorse for hurting me. Eventually you realise it's you. When you are stuck in a tough spot, of course you appeal to the universe, to your god if you have one, that you did not deserve it. And it answers back, if you listen carefully, and says, you did. No matter how much love you have for them, no matter how great a desire to make them happy, you are too small to be anything more than a ripple in the sea of their life.

I talk about a monkey, but really, it's just my sense of how it is that talks to me. It says, how could you imagine...? And really, given how little imagination I have, how could I?

D.

About K

2009-10-22T14:09:00.004+10:00

Dear you

In my dream, we are sitting on a park bench laughing, pretending that we are strangers telling each other jokes. You are more beautiful in my dream than you ever were, but that simply reflects the reality that you have ripened like a pear in the sun.

But I will not dream about you any more. The monkey forbids it. He knows that I do not deserve the comfort of dreams. You know it too and I'm sorry for that.

Just for a moment, foolishly, I believed he was wrong. I believed that you would choose to love me and the broken pieces of my life would be reassembled into a shape that was not hideous. I do not wish you had not made me believe that. I only wish you had not been so weak. It is the only thing I didn't like about you. Do you remember I wrote about it?

I was right. Sick read, eh? I'm sorry that I don't have any more poems in me for you. I'm just not feeling inspired today.

GOING TO AUSTRALIA.

wail and weep
creep

creep into my arms
unravel all
your splendid charms

I know a word.
I know a joke about
how all I had
spilled about
I know a good joke.

we're like sheep
bound into life
by a million words
commitments & promises
we can't let go,

and what we truly feel
we cannot let it show.

wail and weep, creep,
your motherfucking heart is weak.

But I know
that when once you look
into the depths
of where you want to be
you will see,

you will still want me.

D.

About K

2009-10-22T08:19:00.001+10:00

Dear you

I knew you only loved the idea of loving someone. That is all.

D.

Drowning

2009-10-14T17:14:00.004+10:00

Sometimes I have thought I will walk out of the door, go around the corner and never come back. I do not know what is around the corner but the day when I would have been afraid to find out is gone.

You would never hear from me again. I think I would fade. Faster for some than for others, but it would not take long before no one remembered me except as a name, something like a smell that they sometimes thought they knew when they smelled it, but when it was gone, they realised they did not know at all.

I've thought about doing that for this person or that. Simply never bothering them again, so that it is as though I had walked away. One of the great pities of my life is that I am vain, so the truth that they would not care that I had disappeared prevents me from doing it. I want to be cared about. That is the heart of the vanity that partly powers my life.

I say powers my life, but my life barely has any motion. Other people decide what I may or may not have in it, and mostly they do not care what I want. Or if they care, they utterly disregard it. I don't know why that is. I don't even want much. I never have, really.

***

I have been in my basement for nine hours today. If I hope to finish this book on schedule, I will need to stay in here for another five hours. Earlier, Naughtyman came down with a packet of pasta. He wanted me to make him macaroni. It would only take 15 minutes but I won't do it. It's not the time. I don't want to be around Mrs Zen. I am not feeling able to put a nice spin on life for her, and she is in the mood to needle me. At least I am safe in my basement. Very little can affect me here.

I am a terrible father. You could imagine that I am planning to suffer for my children--because for sure I am going to suffer and it is because I want to be part of their lives. It would be easy to walk away, and I would at least have some hope of finding someone to be with. But I can't. I have to be with them. And I realise I am not noble; I am not suffering for them. I am suffering because I do not want to lose them and because I have hopes for them that I fear will be destroyed by Mrs Zen. I do not know what those hopes are, but I know that I want them to know I love them, and I don't know how they would know that if I disappeared.

***

I don't know why I am writing this. I am just so flat. Someone reached out to me a couple of days ago, and I was able to be there for them, and it felt really good--I was at the peak of a manic spell and I felt capable and strong. Then they confronted me hard with reality and the wind went out of my sails.

Whenever I feel any hint of joy, any hint of the possibility of happiness, I get smacked down. Even my job, a hint of life in that I got to get out of the house and go to an office, even that someone decided I wasn't going to be allowed to have.

I don't think Mrs Zen appreciates, even realises, how much I feel I gave up by accepting being a freelance so that I could make a living, and so that I could support her when she needed it. It's a large part of why my life went so sour here. I don't care what she appreciates any more, to be honest with you, and I am able to surrender bitterness because I simply don't care about her any more than I need to just to get by. I feel deeply ashamed that that is true, as though I have committed a crime in it, but I don't see the point in being dishonest to myself about it.

They also took my pleasure in blogging. It had dwindled for one reason or another, but I still liked to express myself. Now I can't. Now I have to watch as people who don't like me poke and pry, try to find things to hate me for. And I write some great things, but they don't make any impression on the people I write them for, and I realise that I made a big mistake on the day I stopped writing only for myself and started believing that I had any power at all just because I can turn a pretty phrase.

I do not. I feel completely disempowered. I have totally lost the ability to tell what is right. Because if this is right, I just never knew. I look at how some people have treated me, and I think if this is right, I just don't have a clue. Because I cannot stop believing that the world will be just to me--not merely that it should be just, but that at least as far as I'm concerned, it is just--and I do not understand how I deserved it. I must have done, but I do not know how.

I cannot stop feeling like this. I try, but I see the years ahead of me and they're so ugly and barren. And I know I could have been happy but no one wants it for me who can make it be. I don't blame them for it. We are all doing the best we can by our lights.

I made myself very sad transferring my posts to Monkey Banana. I read some and I enjoyed how funny I used to be, how warm and friendly I was, how good I felt I was to know. That person disappeared. I don't know where he went. I want this one to disappear too. I don't like him and no one else does either.

***

This is my way of saying goodbye. I will not disappear, but this person will. I cannot sustain him any more, that bewildered boy. I let him down and gave him this future and I know that that cannot be just. It just cannot. He didn't hurt anybody. He never had it in him. I will mostly be blogging on Monkey Banana because I intend to bury him in an avalanche of lies and that isn't what I do here.

I mean that I will stop loving him. It is the only way I know that I can stay alive.

Famous for today and tonight

2009-10-12T17:10:00.001+10:00

My fame spreads

A researcher from Channel 7's Today Tonight wants to talk to me about it. If I tell you that Today Tonight is the visual equivalent of the Courier-Mail, you can guess what I think about that.

Also the Australian. I have to say that Fagan is a fool. Of course I was improving the copy! I linked to it elsewhere and you'll see it's in pretty good shape. I wrote a five-minute email to my blog about the paper. Who has never written an email critical of their workplace? Anyone want to claim they've never written their mates to complain about a shitty day at work, or how boring their job is that day? No, didn't think so.

The tank full

2009-10-12T12:20:00.007+10:00

So I'm at 110 on Stein Rd before I hit the dip and I think if I hit 120 the car will leave the ground.

And how fucking cool will that be! To fly on a sunny day, to fly away.

There is a man ahead in the road. I slow down. He is a man in a turban. You see all sorts of things, but this is odd. A man in a turban in the exurbs, just walking up Stein Rd.

I am listening to the mix I made for this trip and it's perfect for the day. This spring has been quite lovely here: there has been some rain and the trees are green and alive, the jacarandas are in bloom and there are hints of wildflowers. Through the polarised lenses of my new shades, the world is warm and inviting.

The first song up is How I escaped my certain fate by Mission of Burma. It's to set the tone (because this is a postpunk mix, with most of the songs dating from the early eighties, when punk mutated into a creative and intelligent artform that to this day speaks to me because it was made by (mostly) men like me, or who at least I flatter myself are like me). I am singing -- shouting -- along:

Can I count on you
if I fall apart
if I fall
if I fall apart?

And I did fall apart, and I had no one I could sing that to, because I was too crazy to love anyone enough to trust them or for them to trust me, except the person I did love, who was crazier than even I was.

Next up is Fragile, which is S's song. I mean, it's a song that makes me think about her. I have probably mentioned it before but I have songs like that: it's not that they invoke memories in particular; it's more that they invoke the person. I didn't put it in my mix because of her though, but because it is such a perfect example of what punk became when clever, arty boys took on the form and made it into a more arch commentary on our times. What I think I love about this genre above all (apart from the crunchy guitars) is its willingness to be complicated. It appealed to me as a young man, that other young men should be glad to say about themselves that they were confused, unhappy, alienated, scared of their own feelings and those of others:

I have a feeling of love
scorches where it lands
Fragile

Which is quite so. But what can follow such a great song? Well, you can't have a postpunk mix without Joy Division, that's clear. I chose Transmission, because this mix is upbeat on the whole, although I'm feeling a bit more like Atmosphere these days. But Transmission is fairly early Joy Division, so it has more punk bite and less of the deep, hollow high art that they later created. Also, who doesn't love to sing along with that great last verse and chorus:

Well I could call out when the going gets tough
The things that we've learned are no longer enough
No language, just sound, is all we need know
To synchronize love to the beat of the show
And we could dance
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

It feels good to be out on a spring day, the tank full, the car running well. Freakscene is burning the air. I don't know whether it counts as postpunk but, well, it came after punk and couldn't exist without it. It's one of those archetypal indie songs, which everyone into this kind of music knows intimately. And I think we are only ever truly sad when we cannot think of anyone we could sing this to:

Sometimes I don't thrill you
Sometimes I think I'll kill you
Just don't let me fuck up will you
'Cause when I need a friend it's still you

Sigh.

And suddenly I recall the dream I had last night. I had put it to the back of my mind because it was a bit frightening. Lightsabre cocksucking blues, by Mclusky, is next up, but it's not right for this moment, so I forward it on. The next song is not right either, but the dream is short enough for me to recall it and move on mentally, or try to. So while He's a whore, by Big Black, is playing, and I am singing along at the absolute top of my voice, because I'm a whore! And I'll do anything for money, and I'm not in the least bit ashamed of it, I am thinking it over. I am in a car with K. It's not this car. And it's weird that I'm driving, because I think she will be someone like Mrs Zen, who does not like to be driven, but likes to drive, and I've never really cared, so I just be the passenger, but maybe K has wanted me to take control, and I feel like I'm in control. And we are negotiating the promises we will make and the lies we will tell -- the promises for us and the lies for others, because if we promise each other, we will have to lie to others, and let me tell you something, I never did much of either before I came to this place, because I didn't like to make promises I couldn't keep, and I was proud to be honest -- and it feels good because I am in a car with K! And it doesn't feel unreal or forced, as dreams obviously often do. It feels like it could some time happen, is not impossible or unlikely.

It's a bigger car than mine, that's what is different, so that we are not touching each other, and it would be a strain to bother. But that's okay, because we are together in a way that doesn't need touching.

Then, out of the blue, there is a voice in my head. A weary voice that sounds like someone who has been patient with me, and still has reserves of love for me that I cannot fathom, but is disappointed. And although I could not articulate why, I know exactly why. And all it says is my name, David, just like that, barely louder than a whisper. It's a real voice. I am not dreaming it; I am hearing it as though someone has awoken me by talking to me.

I should probably consider swearing off the weed because God does not often talk to me in my dreams. But it feels good; this morning I felt uplifted, because I realise that even I am not beyond redemption, that what I have failed to do is allow my heart to set my course, and that made me unable to stay in one piece.

Next is Tom boy, by Bettie Serveert. The more widely travelled reader will recognise that that is a Dutch name, and Bettie Serveert are, I fear no contradiction, the only good band ever to come of Holland, with the possible exception of Focus, but they only had one decent song, amirite? Tom boy is one of my songs for Naughtyman (the other is The broads by Minotaur Shock) and it's a belter. Tom boy is an outsider anthem, an extended fuck you from Carol van Dijk to the haters, or at least it seems to be:

They call me a Tom Boy and I let them
'Cause only a Tom Boy could forget them
And simply change it
They call me a Tom Boy and I love it
'Cause only a Tom Boy could stand above it
By simply changing

I suppose you could complain that I strayed from the postpunk vibe, but for me it's not as narrow as punky sort of bands that happened along in 1978-80, but would be wide enough to encompass alt.rock bands that could not have existed without punk. So R.E.M. scrape in, because before they became a sucky stadium-oriented borefest, they were a smart postpunk band. I chose Superman because a/ I love covers that surpass the original and b/ I feel it applies:

I am, I am, I am Superman and I know what's happening
I am, I am, I am Superman and I can do anything
You don't really love that guy you make it with now do you?
I know you don't love that guy
'Cause I can see right through you

It seems like exactly how I feel about life just now. I am not feeling downtrodden or hurt, although I should be. I'm feeling capable and alive. Yes, the serotonin is through the roof. I must have eaten some good cheese! This is why I'm never, and I mean never, getting treatment for whatever ails me. Well, there are two reasons. One, depression sucks, obv., but mania is as good as it gets. Some mornings it's like someone pumped me full of coke (the white stuff, not the horrid fizzy drink) and set me loose. I really wish you could be with me right now, if you think you would like to be with me, because I am great to be around, as long as you like to listen instead of talk. I become capable of anything, and so warm you could use me as a stove! This is a good time to hit me up for a loan, or ask me to help you move home, because I feel boundless and able.

It's when I make my best plans. And I've had the creeping notion that I will visit America. I've always wanted to, and I started thinking about it a lot. Partly, that's because I have been having (very mild and I'm pretty sure muscular) chest pains. And I started thinking, I could die soon and I'd really regret not seeing San Francisco. So I will, if I can get the money together, maybe next month, maybe early next year (and maybe never, of course). Maybe also Portland, Oregon, and Vegas if I can, and if I'm welcome in the first and have the money for the latter.

Vegas! Mecca, innit.

But maybe not. I told Mrs Zen and she was pretty pissed off. She wants me to want family holidays, not to do things for myself. That's not totally unreasonable but hello? We've been married for 14 years and you never noticed I am the kind of person who needs to do things without you? It's not even about her. I am that kind of person. You could call it self-absorption, if you like. You could call it selfishness. But I am just someone who feels I spend a lot of my time satisfying others in one way or another and sometimes want to satisfy myself.

Aren't we all, if we're honest?

It's odd, listening to Sixteen again, by the Buzzcocks, because it's punk, plain and simple, yet it fits very well into this sort of mix. But the Buzzcocks were not about anarchy or anger; they were all about love. Pete Shelley wrote some truly great love songs, all about the kind of love that exhilarates and excites you: headlong, wonderful love, forbidden, crazy love, loving someone you shouldn't, loving someone who doesn't love you. Ah me, but of course I chose none of his love songs. I think Sixteen again is all about how we never age if we never let ourselves, how inside us we still hold those gauche children, their hearts yet to be broken. Well, maybe not, but I was another year older yesterday and I do sometimes wish I could turn the clock back.

And then I stop with that shit, because there is nothing wrong either with being older and wiser, and in some ways I am, and I know that I can be sixteen again if...

Long before the Cure became dreary Goff whingers, they were teen punks. They actually weren't very good punks and would have disappeared without trace, likely, without Boys don't cry. It's something of an update on Tears of a clown:

I try to laugh about it
Cover it all up with lies
I try and
Laugh about it
Hiding the tears in my eyes
'cause boys don't cry

But we do, sometimes. We are required to shoulder our burdens manfully, and we usually succeed, and we learn to be strong in a way that makes us somewhat rigid. But if we allow it, there is still within us something fragile, which when it is touched, can leave us unable to maintain our facade. Sometimes it is as little as a song that has meaning for us that will be the last straw; sometimes we need to be severely hurt; sometimes we can only allow ourselves to grieve when we have real cause for grief.

For me, it is the realisation that I could find happiness but never will that creates a yearning in me so deep and broad that I cannot prevent tears from falling. Sometimes, it feels like between you and others there are chasms infinitely deep, infinitely wide, so that you cannot ever hope to reach across them, and sometimes you realise that they are just as wide as the width of two arms and all you need is that they reach out at the same time. Yet you cannot find the way to have them do it; which is not to cry over -- what is truly heartrending is the impossibility of knowing whether there is a way.

Having had a snivel, we feel washed out, so what's better than So run down, by the Psychedelic Furs? The Furs are all about our wasted lives, the shit we bother with that is meaningless and empty:

sometimes she says she loves me
i just don't believe it
all day she says
my set it plays
love songs all day
it sells toothpaste
razors band-aids
it sells love
and it sells hairspray
ha ha all day
monday monday

I once saw the Furs at Glasto. I was off my face on acid and Butler was about thirty feet tall with a coat of neon lightbulbs. I don't remember any of the songs they played and it's entirely possible that I was completely deaf at the time.

Winding down, I choose Bed of nails, by Husker Du. The Warehouse album that features it is like a journal of heartbreak: wistful, yearning, hurt in parts, uplifting too. Bed of nails is the sound of a man who has been cast down a well and does not know how he can climb back out. I know that sound. It is also about how you are forced sometimes to tiptoe on a highwire, to keep everything just so, to hold it together so that your life can be liveable. Who writes stuff like this:

Sometimes i just pretend that all the lies are true
And i know i might depend on you
But if my concentration breaks
I'm washed away with pain
And then my feet begin to bleed upon my only bed of nails
And i'm stuck here in the middle of a sea of lies
Inside my bed of nails
From years and years of practice
I know just how to stand
Alone with perfect balance, hand in hand
Prepared with boards and hammers
And several bags of nails
I could build a wall to lean on
Roof above my mind
I can see you've got your own plans
Please don't drive your nails into this heart of mine

It's wrenching stuff, but I think what moves me most is that Bob Mould was able to climb out of his well and become happy.

I finish off with The hardest walk, by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Man, that is the sound of my youth! Phil Spector with feedback, the Ronettes with a heroin habit. Looking back, particularly with the accretion of the rest of their (awful) records, it's hard to recall how invigorating and wonderful Psychocandy was. Until you listen to it! And man, it still rings the same bell for me.

And this is such a fucking great song! I want you to love it too. Give it a shot:

And I'm stuck in a shack
Down the back of the sea
Oh and I'm alive and I'm alone
Inside a sick sick dream
Oh is it me
Is it me that feels so weak
I cannot deceive but I find it hard to speak

The hardest walk you could ever take
Is the walk you take from A to B to C

I walk
Oh honey I talk
Don't want you to want me
Don't want you to need me

That last verse... man, it's as good as pop gets, confused, desperate, in love, and if your life has been like mine, your heart sings along and you find yourself pulling into your drive in this quiet suburb, scaring the neighbours' dogs because you cannot stop yourself from singing along as though your life depended on it, and if it depends on anything, it does.

So you know, there it is. The engine's running, the tank is full and I'm going for a drive. Hop in. Don't worry about where we're going. We'll know when we get there, baby.

***

If by some chance I've made these songs sound worth a listen (and you actually made it to the end of that blather, or more realistically, skimmed down to the link), the
mix is here. In the unlikely event that copyright holders find this and don't like me sharing their music with my friends, the email addy is top right etc etc.

Sheared

2009-10-06T21:34:00.006+10:00

So I had a run-in with the clippers and now I could be an extra in a Guy Ritchie film. If he was casting ugly people.

Why do I flatter myself that anyone would want me? What do I have to offer? I am as interesting to talk to as I am good to look at. I am not even good at companionable silence because before long the vacuum becomes too much for me and I fill it with noise.

At least I don't look so old. Mrs Zen sheared off most of the whitest hair, and my roots are still dark. It has taken, oooooh, at least 18 months, two years off. So now I only look 57.

No. I am not actually 57. Some days I even feel relatively young.

But I am not. I am old and I'm in a shitty spot.

Do you know, I still think I should in some ways be desirable. It's tragic. The last five, six jobs I applied for, I thought I should have a great chance of all of them. None of them even replied to my application. Not even fuck off.

No woman wants me. I fear I will never kiss a woman again, never touch a woman, never feel good again. You'd think I would. You'd think there'd at least be a woman who was desperate, someone who thought, fuck, he'll do. But even the women who want me don't want me.

I know, you should not wallow in self-pity. I do know that.

But when I wake up tomorrow, I have to be me. I have to live this life. I am feeling down because it is like I have been jailed and can see the blue sky through the bars. I know it doesn't have to be like this. Things could be a lot better. I know that, because I've seen it. I've had the sun on my face and it felt great. But then they slammed the door and days like today, I fear they threw away the key.

She is beautiful

2009-10-05T22:26:00.003+10:00

She is beautiful to me, like no other. I don't know why. But if I have a type, she is my type.

If you say to me, what should a woman's hair be like, I will tell you, like her hair.
If you say to me, what should a woman's eyes be like, I will tell you, like her eyes.
And if you say to me, whose face thrills you just to look at it, I will tell you, her face thrills me just to look at it. And I could do that all day long and never tire of it.

But if I can make her smile, I do not know a better thing to see. When I dream, I dream that I will make her smile, and these are the sweetest dreams a man can have.

She is beautiful to me, because something beautiful inside her reached out to something inside me, and we chimed like bells. And that part of me that sings her name will resonate forever, a beautiful slice of the music of the spheres, the way her name rings out within me.

More blather

2009-10-05T12:33:00.003+10:00

For those of you who cannot get enough of me, I am also going to be blogging in a more family-friendly way, iykwim. The quality of the posting will not be improved, but you won't see me calling anyone a motherfucker.

Not often anyway. So rush over to monkey banana for more tedious blather with a lot less motherfucker and probably nothing ever about anyone I work for, have worked for or might work for.

A harbour

2009-10-05T08:26:00.003+10:00

Dear you

Last night I dreamt you love me. Not like a dog, although that too would be good, because when we say we love a dog, we are saying we are responsible for their wellbeing, and I do not have anyone who cares much that I am well. Nothing as casual as that: you love me in a way that is inescapable and does not permit you to choose not to.

For me, "I love you" are not just words, they are a mandate, a compulsion to do whatever I can to bring you happiness. I cannot imagine another way to love (and of course I know that is likely a failing on my part) and I know that people who I do not care whether they are happy, even if I do not wish them unhappiness, I do not love.

So in my dreams you are always smiling because there is no cause for unhappiness in your life. It is as beautiful as I would wish it to be for you. For me too, there is no sadness. You love me and that is enough for me to be happy. I am as simple as that. I do not know why the world conspires to make something so simple so impossible.

It is okay. I know that dreams are not real. I know that you would rather drown in unhappiness than allow yourself a degree of freedom. It is natural that we dream that others are not how they are. If the change in them is slight, they are good dreams; if it is very big, I do not think they are dreams at all: they are directives we send to our lives to stop hurting us the way they do. My dreams are good. You are just who you are in them with the only thing added that you love me.

We are not doing anything special. We are just laughing because we have a simple joy that the other exists. This is the happiest dream I ever have had because in it I am content just to be. It makes me happy even that I am able to imagine that that is possible, even if in the cold light of day I know it is not.

In the dream I have of you, I hold you and it feels like the whole of the warmth of the summer afternoon we are sharing emanates from you. I feel like I will not let you go and you will not ever want to be let go, because you are as safe with me as I am with you. It makes me happy to imagine that we have a harbour, a place of rest, and that I need not consist of anything beyond what I consist in, that that is enough, and you are enough for me.

D.

Judge and jury

2009-10-03T20:49:00.002+10:00

Man, I love that boy! We were going wrong, I don't know why, but he didn't like me, and I started just doing the right thing, and now we are in love with each other. He comes to me and asks for cuddles; he looks to me for succour and I am there for him.

Man, I love him! You think you love your boy but you don't love yours like I love that boy!

So M is saying to me, we are judge, jury and executioner with our own families, and I agree with him. Because I believe that too. I am a pacifist, a gentle, kind man, but let me tell you.

Let me tell you. If someone fiddled with Zenella or Zenita, I would take the knife from the kitchen door, go to their house and hack them down.

I will kill you if you hurt my girls. And I won't feel bad about it. I will laugh as I kill you.

You underestimate us. Small men. Quiet men. Our little, pointless lives. We live them and we're forgotten by all that do not love us.

Mrs Zen says, before you had kids you were never like that.

Yeah, true. Before I had kids, I never knew the depths of love. I never knew how much you could love a person. I never knew what I was.

I would kill you in front of the police station, in front of fifty witnesses, in front of a TV crew, on the six o'clock news. And I would laugh while I did it.

And if you are good to my kids? If you love my beautiful Naughtyman? If you hold him close and make him feel good to be alive?

Well, you need not ask. We will be friends forever. We will be lovers because we love him.

Let us love each other! I have plenty to spare. I realised, in the course of having children, that I am a man who has enormous reservoirs of love. I am not as small as I thought.

***

I was among friends today. I felt warm and loved, comfortable, at home. Everything I said was good, sure footed, real, right on the money. I didn't fuck up in any way. I nailed every conversation, every aside. I made everyone who interacted with me feel better for it. I uplifted and warmed everyone who was there. They were lucky, would have felt lucky, to be there, to know me.

My Naughtyman, my star, came and sat on my knee, and he didn't say anything, he just laid his head on my shoulder, he didn't have to say anything, I understood him perfectly. I didn't care about anything bad about my life just at that moment; all I knew was how much I love that boy. My life will never be bad. Never. My life will never be bad if I am loved. I truly believe that.

Private

2009-09-30T11:14:00.004+10:00

I have made my blog private. I need to be able to post about whatever I want to without people who do not care about me trawling through it to find things to dislike about me (I make an exception for Gunt). I didn't want those people to read it and I feel like it hamstrings me to have to worry about people who aren't at all warm towards me just hating on it.

I have also learnt my lesson: that there are people who might read my blog who I really, really don't want to. I'm no longer willing to take that risk. My personal journal is too personal for that, I realise, and too dangerous for me in ways that will be very hard to control.

I am not intending to undo this but I may start another blog on more general topics. I don't know.

Famous for 15 seconds

2009-09-29T15:53:00.003+10:00

Granny Zen will be so proud. At last, she will say, that useless lump of a boy has amounted to something.

Yes, I have made the newspaper.

No, it's not for winning a big poker tournament, writing a wonderful book or my charitable service to, erm, something charitable.

It's for being victimised by the jobsworths at Queensland Newspapers. Oh well. At least they spelled my nym right.

Mist on the West Lake

2009-09-28T19:25:00.004+10:00

So it's not all doom and gloom chez Zen. My good friend A has spent hours (weeks, months?) making my China travel diary into a book. It feels really good to have someone show so much faith in my writing. I have put a badge in the sidebar that allows interested parties to preview the book and it can be seen here.

I am really left without words to express how much I appreciate what A has done. It has uplifted me at a pretty glum time. Thanks A.

I will whisper

2009-09-27T21:39:00.003+10:00

Dear you

I wish you were here with me now. We could just sit and say nothing. I really need that right now. Not sex, not anything active or complicated. I just need someone to be with me who wants to be with me. It seems each passing day I become humbler and must want less.

I don't dream even of kisses. Just to be able to live and not have to deal with seething discontent for all my days. Just to be able to live.

I held my son in my arms and I thought that soon there will be a last time. And I cannot help thinking it just isn't fair, because I love him more. I love you more too. And I hope I have not had my last time with you, but I am too small these days even for hope.

And I look at Zenita, and she is saying again how happy she is -- how happy I have helped make her -- and I can't stop myself from thinking, but I will make you sad soon enough.

I am sorry I do not have anything beautiful to say for you. I am feeling like my voice is very small, and my big mouth already got me into trouble. I did not know there were people so ugly they would want to hurt someone as small as me, but there are, and I am left only with whispers.

So I'll whisper what I have to say to you, and if you are sitting close enough by, you and only you will hear it, and only then will I know that I have an audience that will not want to hurt me for what I have to say.

D.

In the morning

2009-09-26T08:52:00.002+10:00

In the morning, a noise awakens me. It is Naughtyman. He is getting into bed with me. I wrap my arms around him. He feels thin, insubstantial, a bundle of wires.

I love you, Naughtyman, I say, and he moves in a little closer, till we are like one melded lump of dad and son.

Dad, you're always so warm. Because you stay in bed for sooooo long. Naughtyman is early to bed, early to rise.

I'm English, I say. We have to be warm because of the cold winters.

He is squirming to get free. I don't want to let him go but there is too much besides me in his life to keep him here.

Readership

2009-09-25T22:21:00.004+10:00

This blog has had 43 hits today. That's pretty normal. 39 of them are unique visitors, and 17 are returning visitors. That's a bit misleading, because it doesn't mean 17 returned from yesterday. Sometimes a person hit on a search thing, and then looks again five minutes later.

There are 10 actual returning readers. One is me. One is someone at the newspaper, who is slowly raping me by reading my archives. The cowardly shit doesn't have the balls to email me though, or to leave a comment. One is maybe Julie Novak (hi Julie if that's you!). I'm not sure whether she would be glorifying in taking away my livelihood or just checking that I don't say anything bad about her. Another is someone in Julie's circle -- dunno, colleague friend, and maybe another the same. I actually have nearly more readers among Julie Novak's circle than I do in my own.

And this was worth getting me sacked for? That five, six people would know that some anonymous guy thinks you are an idiot? This was worth my children's daytrips, their summer clothes, their treats?

Ugh. That I have to share a world with people like her! No matter who is "right". No matter what way of living is the best for humankind, no matter what scales we ever find to measure that, mine is moral. I know that because I am moral. I hurt no one, took nothing from anyone, I wrote something silly for my five readers.

No one's child goes without a thing they have coveted because of anything I did.

On being a word whore

2009-09-23T22:16:00.003+10:00

Obviously losing my job is on my mind, so I'm going to say some more about it. I'm not going to whine about how petty the people involved are or anything like that (although given how minor the offence was, the wild overreaction -- although it is exactly what I would expect, sadly -- has dented my faith in humanity just a little). I thought I might though take the opportunity to talk about being a whore.

Okay, so I don't get to have the sex life of a whore but I do an activity for money without much caring who I do it with. I don't think it's admirable, but it's still honourable. I put the same care and effort into each job, regardless who I do it for, and I think that's a good thing.

I had cause to think about this when the woman who sacked me, Anna Reynolds, was telling me that it was sooooooo terrible that I said bad things about the paper (Ms Reynolds doesn't know me very well, or she may have realised that I exaggerate, I piss and whine, I glory in overegging the pudding, but whatever, she doesn't know me at all, and doesn't care to; I'm just the problem sub who upset a columnist). So she is saying "it's not a good fit". And I'm thinking, what a weird thing to say.

Because it would make sense if I made decisions to do with policy, or to do with what went in the paper, or it actually mattered what I thought about the stuff in the paper. (Or if I expressed the same opinions in the newsroom or to people who work for the paper, so that I depressed morale in some way; but I did no such thing.) But none of that actually does matter. A sub doesn't make decisions except for in matters of English, and English is a medium, entirely agnostic to what is written in it. In the same way, I might scoff at the columnists (and I'm pretty sure that Ms Reynolds, who I credit with some intelligence herself, does not think that some of the blatherers in the Mail are worth reading) but I treat their work with care.

I've worked on some terrible things in my time. I worked for a vanity publisher for a couple of years as a freelance. I have no shame! Some were decent -- just not particularly saleable -- but others were truly terrible. Do I feel bad about being part of exploiting them? Yeah, but I did an honest job for them. Their books remained terrible -- nothing I could do about the lack of plot in a novel or the incoherence of a thesis in nonfiction -- but they became well written.

I worked for a set of shipping magazines that consisted entirely of wall-to-wall advertorials, which made no pretence of being anything else. I edit books now that leave me mystified why they were ever commissioned. But no matter. It's not for me to care why. I don't commission them.

Is this truly hard to understand? A lot of subs enjoy their work -- and I enjoy subbing over copy editing too -- because it is satisfying to them, but do they think the papers they work for are good? Are you kidding? You think subs on the Sun think the Sun is a great newspaper? LOL. You have to remember when you ask that question that most subs are very intelligent. Many have graduated from being journos and are, in general, well read and attentive to language. They are not Sun readers, in other words. (The Courier-Mail is not as bad as the Sun by a long chalk. Although I think the columnists in particular are weak, and the selection of front-of-book stories really lacks, there is a lot of decent content: it's a full-spectrum paper like an English broadsheet, rather than a tabloid. Its problem, for my money, lies in its politics and its desire to knock down rather than build--which isn't uncommon among newspapers. It's reminiscent of the English Daily Mail--and I would put money on it that most of the subs on the Mail would make a bad "fit" in Ms Reynolds' view, because it carries so much stuff that is plainly supposed to pander to its readership, and is wholly transparent to anyone smart enough to sub it.)

Saying that a sub should "fit" a newspaper is a bit like saying a house painter should like your house. But what does it matter if they do, so long as they paint it well? So of course I know Ms Reynolds is smart enough to know this as well as I do, but if she doesn't have an important-sounding reason, she is going to have to tell me the truth: she fired me because a huge drama was caused out of very little and when there's a drama in a corporation, heads must roll, and my head is pretty small in the big scheme of things (and small details like that it's my living, that the punishment doesn't by any means fit the crime, that there were several better ways of handling it, all mean nothing because the opportunity has presented for drama and serious decisions, and anyway, sacking people is a regular job for an executive at News Limited, so what should they care that the person they hurt is actually a human being, who was more or less blamelessly doing a good job, making them look good?). After all, who would seriously get upset that a whore does not much like his john? So long as you fuck me, what does that matter?

On stimulus

2009-09-23T18:56:00.005+10:00

To do myself justice, I am going to discuss the commentary that caused me to write the post that so infuriated the Institute of Public Affairs or Julie Novak to instigate my sacking.

(I'd suggest that you follow the link so that you can refer to Ms Novak's commentary as you read, because I will not reproduce it in full here because I fear that a woman as vindictive as she is may attempt to pursue legal action for breach of her copyright if I do. I mean, who knows? If your reaction to someone's telling his five readers you wrote screeching nonsense is to get him sacked, there really isn't anything too low for you to consider for revenge. She has already taken the food from my children's table -- I imagine it would be no big thing to her to try to bankrupt me into the bargain. I apologise for its mutilated form: I believe it would probably be okay to have published it in full with commentary, but I won't risk it.)

The first thing you'll notice is that it's reasonably tightly subbed (the head is mine, btw). That's because I'm a professional. Whatever my personal views, I do not allow them to intrude on my work, and I give the same care to Ms Novak's nonsense as I would to something closer to my own views.

With ... has engineered a great escape for the Australian economy.

At least in the short term, one would have to allow that the Australian economy seems to have escaped the worst of the global recession. Now, of course, Ms Novak does not want to credit the Australian government for this, but I feel she would have been first in the queue to claim it was responsible were we to have suffered a severe recession.

My view is that applying stimulus was the correct move, and the good economic results bear this out. That's not to say that there are no downsides to the stimulus, nor that the government's economic policy is entirely satisfactory. But I think it was a lot better than some of the alternatives. I note that the Institute of Public Affairs, which Ms Novak works for, suggested a large tax cut rather than stimulus, and promotes austerity. These measures are favoured by most rightwing parties the world round, and I think we can be thankful that few of them were in power in the major economies. Rightwingers think tax cuts are the solution to everything, but you have to consider that in a world economy whose major problem was a deficit in demand -- spending -- giving more money to the agents who were refusing to spend does not seem a particularly smart idea. Of course, Australia, like most Western nations, has tried a tax cut as well as stimulus: the money it handed me and my family was in effect a tax cut. But I rather think Ms Novak believes that that money should instead have been handed to the rich. (I won't put words into her mouth though.)

As for austerity, well, that was tried in the Great Depression, and was largely responsible for the "Great" part of that name, and as though to prove that history does repeat itself, in Japan after its banking crisis, which resulted in economic times so bad Japan calls them the "Lost Decade".

I do not expect Ms Novak to know much economics though. She has elsewhere repeated the canard that the American financial crisis was caused by President Clinton's forcing reluctant banks to lend to poor blacks. While I would agree with her that the Clinton administration was irresponsible in its regulation of the finance industry, the crisis was caused by a collapsing asset bubble, whose inflation was barely affected, let alone caused, by community schemes such as that blamed by the American right, desperate not to allow the finger to be pointed where it ought to be: irresponsible, greedy lenders and successive governments that encouraged that greed, undermining the soundness of US financial regulation. My understanding -- limited, I confess -- of the Australian banking sector is that it is more tightly regulated, and I take it to be a consequence that Australian banks did not suffer as badly as others.

I will touch on a couple of fundamental errors in economics that Ms Novak makes below.

Retail sales remain buoyant, as they have been for 15 years

I cannot speak for the past 15 years, but retail sales are not buoyant. The July figures showed another decline.

and surveys ... expenditure measure of gross domestic product has increased for the past two quarters.

It's slightly confusing to describe GDP as an "expenditure measure" (although it is), but I would not have been permitted to recast this. We were recently sent an email telling us not to rewrite columnists, and I didn't have either the time or the access to Ms Novak to discuss a reformulation.

For the layperson, GDP is best understood as a measure of the productivity of an economy, and stating it that way would make it clearer why it is considered it important that it not fall.

... a body that includes an Australian government appointee.

The insinuation here is quite incredible: that the OECD only congratulated the government because of a Rudd fifth columnist. The subordinate clause in this sentence should have been stricken, and in anything approaching a neutral newspaper, it would have been.

Of course, anything approaching a neutral newspaper would not be publishing yet another comment piece by a neoliberal extremist. This is not the first I've subbed, and not even the craziest.

However ... a beneficial impact on economic growth?

Well, let's be honest, they give you a pretty broad hint. If economic growth is measured by increase in GDP, and GDP has as a component government spending, then if the government increases spending and GDP increases, perhaps it is reasonable to suggest causation?

Indeed, no serious economist, no matter their ideology, would care to debate that. (Actually, on reflection, I should note that some "serious" economists actually do debate that, but they can only do so by indulging in economics errors that you wouldn't make if you paid attention in a Year 10 class.) It's clearly the case. What you might argue is the degree of benefit and whether other measures may have brought more benefit. To suggest that the stimulus did not bring growth is, well, let's just say it can only be intended to fool the rubes, because Ms Novak cannot expect to be taken seriously by anyone with even a bit of a clue.

There are some grounds...

Okay. So we've outlined the benefits of the stimulus and now we're going to give grounds for discounting them. Fair enough.

I enjoyed Ms Novak's reference to "irrational exuberance". Given that this, on the part of the market, is the root cause of the crisis, it's deliciously cheeky to accuse Rudd of it.

Let's ... take from your wallet $3636. ...

Two things struck me when I read this and the following par. First, and most importantly, the government gave many of us much more than $900. I know I got more. Perhaps Ms Novak is too rich to have benefited as much as some, or does not have children. There are reasons the government targeted families with children, of course, and we could argue the merit of those reasons. But "boo hoo" is not in itself a sound argument, we should note. Second, the government has not taken $3636 from anyone, at least not yet.

Ms Novak frames this as though the government has committed highway robbery. Again, this can only be for the benefit of the rubes. It may be that we end up paying the money back in full, with interest (and this aspect of Ms Novak's thesis has at least some tiny bit of merit, although I'm sorry to say, not much, because it is simply the case that were we to allow our economy to slide into depression, the cost to us would be much, much more than 3K a head; but let's discuss that when we get to it).

I immediately give you back $900 ...

I then spend $2227 of your money on things that take my fancy.

Here is the thing. What caused the global recession? I don't mean the ultimate causes: the asset bubble or the poor blacks' buying houses, whichever you take it to be. I mean, why was there a recession?

No one was spending money.

That's what a recession is. If GDP is a measure of expenditure, and it falls, this is equivalent to saying there isn't enough money being spent. Let's not get into a lesson in economics on why this is thought to be a bad thing. We'll agree that it is. I am pretty sure that Ms Novak would not argue that a fall in GDP is a good thing for Australia.

In effect, recessions are caused by falls in demand. Less demand, less need for production; less need for production, less need for people to do the producing.

So we need someone to spend money. The idea behind a stimulus is that the government steps into the breach and keeps the economy from faltering. We can argue, if we must, over whether there are other ways to increase spending (and if we must, we will be led to conclude that those other ways are less effective than government spending, which has been shown so often you'd think even the looniest rightards would just give up and concede it), but you just cannot expect that you could do nothing at all and everything would work out fine.

This is a fallacy in economics as it is in other areas of life. Doing nothing is doing something: it is refusing to take all the other options you could take.

Some lobbyist ... (let's call it what it is, a tax)

Well, let's not! You could, if you chose, say that the government had made you give it a loan, but it hasn't taxed you and it's quite ridiculous to suggest it has.

It should imply taxation. I mean, let's get this clear: the government is going to have to pay for its spending, and it's very unlikely that increased revenues in a recovery will cover it, although that is not impossible (I will also allow that it may not be desirable that it should). There is no reason that the government should not tax those who benefit most from a strengthening economy, particularly if they are not using their money as productively as, say, I would. The assumption that the very wealthy use their riches productively ought to be challenged, and given that they benefited most from the asset bubble and its associated wealth production, it is not unreasonable that they should pay for its outcome.

I do not expect Ms Novak to agree. She is not paid to think that the wealthy should pay for anything. Far from it.

towards housing insulation batts would somehow save the Earth.

Ms Novak has some sort of issue with insulation batts.

And school gyms. (I am for both, on the whole. I think reducing the amount of energy we consume is a good idea, although my understanding is that the IPA is a global warming denying institution -- my apologies if this has been misreported -- so possibly Ms Novak thinks that we should not concern ourselves with that. I also think school gyms are a good idea because a healthy body promotes a healthy mind. Perhaps if Australians did more exercise, they would not write turgid shit like this?)

I think we should point two things out though. First, we can argue that the government should attempt to spend its money in the most productive manner. I would agree with Ms Novak on this score in general terms. By all means, let's scrutinise the stimulus spending and insist that it does the job it's supposed to. I'm all for that. But it should spend it, and ultimately it does not matter what it spends it on. One could employ men to dig ditches and that would have the desired effect. The productive use of our money is an added extra in the stimulus, not a sine qua non. Second, Ms Novak seems extraordinarily not to understand that money is not destroyed when it is spent! The housing batt people are not going to burn it, Julie! They are going to pay their people with it, and those people will go and buy other things. That's how economies work.

The purpose of the stimulus is to create demand for things. It doesn't really matter what you demand, so long as you ask for something. Then the economy will produce that something: be it batts, gyms, tanks, ponies. And the people who are engaged in producing it will have jobs (and Julie, note, jobs are on the whole fungible -- in general terms it doesn't matter to GDP what people do so long as they do something). They will spend money in shops, and the people working in the shops will spend money on this that and the other, and the economy will continue to spin. That's the point.

Yes, it's nice if we get some roads and the like out of it. If Ms Novak had spent these words arguing that we should more tightly focus the stimulus on infrastructure and more tightly control costs so that we got more for our money, I would not have said she wrote screeching rubbish. I might not have agreed but at least she would be arguing about what we should do with the stimulus money, not, horrors!, arguing incoherently that we should not have it.

I forgot to mention at the outset that 14 out of every dollar I spend is on my own administration costs.

You would imagine, reading this, that the government pays its "administration costs" by building a bonfire and burning 50-buck notes. Luckily for us, and for Ms Novak herself, who it turns out was responsible for some of the government's "administration costs", it doesn't. It pays public servants.

Now you may not believe public servants do anything much productive, and for sure, when I worked at the Department of Education, half the people there didn't seem to be doing anything at all but their money is as good as anyone else's. When Mr Public Officer buys a schooner of VB, he pays the same money as Mr Factory Worker. And at least the element of cost that he represents is turned into value for the brewery, which is able to pay its own factory workers with it.

While this scenario ... to bolster a market economy.

Erm no. It doesn't even discuss how a stimulus does or doesn't bolster an economy! It completely avoids that question.

Again, let's point this out, just in case anyone has actually read all this and not got it: the stimulus bolsters the economy by providing demand that the economy then meets. In meeting the demand, the economy must produce goods and services: whether they be batts, schooners of VB or people working in little offices inventing costs for school gyms out of thin air.

Whether other methods could produce this demand, whether the right areas of the economy are stimulated, whether the amount was too much, too little or just right, these are all questions that could be asked. None of them was though.

Because money trees do not exist

It's funny that Ms Novak said this, because at this point I was of the belief that she did think that there were money trees.

Here's a thing. Apples grow on trees, as we all know. And when you consume an apple, it is gone. It is a scarce resource.

Money does not grow on trees, as we all know. But when you consume money, it is not gone. It is merely passed on. It is not a scarce resource in the same way an apple is.

Yes, I am saying you must compare apples with apples!

and most governments recognise that printing new money simply stokes inflation ... someplace else.

The first part of this sentence is incorrect as a matter of fact. The problem word is "simply". I will not digress further into the weeds of economics, and will simply allow that the government cannot pay back its stimulus by printing money, which is true.

It will have to get the money from some place else. But where?

We have discussed one option earlier, but we don't need to soak the rich for all of it. Why not?

Consider a simple model of what a government does in the economy. Money circulates in the economy -- let's imagine that each dollar does a circuit of an actual circle -- and at points in that circle, the government dips in and takes out some dollars. At other points, it puts dollars back in. Let's say the government takes a fixed percentage of the dollars (it doesn't, of course, because it adjusts its take year on year, but the adjustments can be quite fine).

If you have a recession, the amount of money going round that circle becomes less, and the government cannot take enough out to cover what it wants to put in. Its revenues fall but it's hard to cut its spending -- particularly bearing in mind that recessions are caused by agents in the economy not spending enough!

But if you have a boom, the amount of money going round that circle becomes more, and the government's take increases to more than its spending. Now it is also an agent in an economy that has enough agents that are spending.

Do you see? What a miracle! Increased economic activity allows the government to cover its borrowing. By not allowing the economy to stagnate, the government brings forward the recovery, which will increase its revenues. So it borrows today and pays back tomorrow.

That's the plan, anyway. I am willing to entertain Ms Novak's riposte to this, which will be that the government will then extract money that could be used for private investment. This is true, but private investment will only happen if there is demand for it. Ms Novak would have it that the government should decrease its tax take in times of plenty, so that the money can be invested productively (ignoring again that the government is not actually going to burn the money it takes in taxes!), but is not willing to accept that the times of plenty are, in part, a result of the borrowing that the government must now cover. This is the nub of it: the economy must climb from some point or another to reach this time of plenty. If we allow it to collapse into recession, that climb is both longer and slower. Sure, when we get there, we will have more spending money, but we are not getting there any time soon. Ms Novak, I believe, will have it that the peak of those good times will be lower for the drag of taxation. But she will have us live in an economy that does not demand the investment she thinks the government is preventing.

Someone always ... would otherwise be the case.

Again, this would only be true if the government did not spend, did not invest, did not do any economic activities. It would be true that the economic pie would be smaller if the government did less with its money than you or me, but I see nothing in this commentary or in Ms Novak's collected works that suggests she can argue that it does. This is a fierce battleground in economics, to be sure, and I am not willing to take it on here given that Ms Novak simply assumed her side of it, rather than stating its merits.

I will leave the rest, because I have spent too long on this already, bar saying that this:

On the spending side, the scenario above illustrates clearly that government is merely in the business of shuffling funds from the private sector into activities it perceives to be beneficial.

is true, and the government would argue that it is in the business of doing things that are beneficial, and I would agree with it. I don't believe the rich are all that interested in benefiting me at all, and certainly investing their money in rent seeking doesn't help me.

and this:

However, what is overlooked is the economy-wide perspective suggesting that economic activity and jobs will be lost in other industries that endured a tax burden instead. More pink batts or school gyms, and less of everything else.

is not true if the people who make batts are willing to buy other goods, which they are.

Here is something the right pretends not to understand. If I tax you at 20% and you earn 100 units, I take 20, you keep 80. If you earn 200 units, your "tax burden" is 40, double, but you keep 160, also double. If my actions increase your ability to make money, you gain. Not the whole of the amount of the increase, but a lot of it.

We should focus on arguing whether the government increases the amount that you gain, not on what you must pay it for doing so. And we allowed at the beginning of this piece that the government's actions have helped us avoid a recession that would cause your 100 units to become 90 units!

It's not rocket science. My mum could understand that.

and this:

By refusing to withdraw its stimulus, the Rudd Government is looking to portray itself as the economic Pied Piper right up to the next election, but continuation of the stimulus will merely direct scarce resources to less productive uses.

simply repeats what she has been suggesting, that money is scarce in the way apples are, and that creating demand is not "productive". She has not shown either to be the case. Indeed, the meat of her commentary was simply the suggestion that the government is taking 3K from everyone to spend on pink batts, and that's bad. Well, to be honest, if no one wants anything else, if no one will spend money on anything else, well, it's a good thing the government wants pink batts. It will keep us afloat until we do want other things.

And you'll note, if you read the entire commentary, as I urge you to do, that Ms Novak at no point suggests what would be more "productive" than making pink batts. You would think that they are just things the government will be burning on the same bonfire as its "administrative costs".

Rather me than Jay

2009-09-23T14:36:00.004+10:00

I feel bad that Mrs Zen will not now be able to have the holidays I promised her, the daytrips that she was excited about researching and booking.

Because I did a stupid thing, a moment's inattention, and was foolish enough to write something mean about someone horrible enough to hurt me and everyone in my life for it (although of course I didn't know that Julie Novak, or the Institute of Public Affairs, whichever caused me to lose my job, was actually small enough to want me to suffer that for writing something that no more than five people would ever have read -- and none would have cared about), Mrs Zen will be made unhappy. I feel sorry for that. She has not deserved her life. People are what they are. They do what they are capable of and sometimes that disappoints, or even angers, us, but they are still constrained by the limits of their selves.

I wonder what Ms Novak would say to Mrs Zen. She probably feels nothing more than vindication and would express that to her. How dare a nobody smear her on the web -- a "public forum" as Anna Reynolds, the woman who sacked me, put it, as pompously as I think only a corporate executive could? Of course, I am used to that "public forum" -- which is, all in all, nothing of the sort: it is accessible to the public but it is not broadcast, and, frankly, this blog isn't intended to be part of any wider debate -- and the rules that tend to govern it. I've been smeared dozens of times, and I don't mind it. I respond in kind and everyone enjoys themselves immensely.

I am reminded of a guy whose name I have forgotten. He used to post in the writing newsgroups. He wasn't very good at the combat prose that gained you kudos there. Jay something? Really, I can't remember. So he developed a new tactic: he outed people who flamed him. He would publish their names, their addresses, their telephone numbers. How sad. He had been so thoroughly defeated in the marketplace of ideas that he had to resort to that.

In my world, there is no worse thing than to be Jay something. I don't have economic power; I don't have influence, no cushy sinecure at a thinktank, no managing editorship at a newspaper; I don't even have an actual job. But I don't need to bring a knife to a battle of wits. I'm glad about that. I'd rather be me than Jay.

About blogging about work

2009-09-22T19:13:00.006+10:00

I realise of course that I shouldn't talk about work (and I'm not going to make a habit of it) because there's a spate recently of people getting victimised because they have blogged about their jobs and some turd has found it necessary to hunt them down. I am only a casual at the paper and if some humourless toad was to get upset that I laugh at their story, their headline, their column, I could pay a price for that. (And I'm sorry to say, there is no shortage of humourless toads in this country. I am sure there are funloving great people too, but they don't live around here.)

I noticed that earlier today someone had searched for the "Institute of Public Affairs" and a post I'd made about the paper had come up at the top of the search (the blogs are not ranked on how interesting or funny they are, sadly, but on how recently they have excoriated the clowns at the IPA). I don't know whether it was someone curious what's being said about that particular "thinktank" (most likely given the provenance of the hits) or someone from the thinktank itself, checking to see whether there is something they can get outraged about (because, after all, that's what rightards do: get outraged about basically nothing so that they can get up a head of steam that will allow them to make other people's lives just a tad more shitty so they can feel good about themselves). And I'm pretty easily identifiable from the post -- my name is in the system on the story. It's not by any means the first time that I've written something about my work that could backfire on me though. It's just one of those things bloggers have to accept is a possibility if they ever say anything about their work -- and how can you not if you blog about your life?

There are already five or six people I wouldn't like to read this blog (I won't say who they are but it's reasonably obvious), and the only reason I don't cover my tracks more carefully is that it's so unlikely they'll find it, or realise who I am from whatever brief contact they do make with it.

But I also have a self-destructive urge that makes me prize brazenness over caution.

I am nervous though when I see Australian IPs, particularly if they come back for repeated visits. If I had my way, Australian residents would oblige me by emailing or commenting to let me know who they are (and I thank Our man in Canberra for doing precisely that). Actually, if I truly had my way, I'd exclude Australians, bar one, from reading it. They're not going to like it anyway. I never watch terrestrial telly, so I don't have opinions about MasterChef or Rover, or whatever, and I don't care for the sports. So that's culture out, and the politics is grindingly boring. The Liberals make the Tories look like moderates, and Labor out-New Labours New Labour. Both are collections of tedious managerialists who would bore your average accountant to sleep.

So anyway, I can't live in fear, and I don't. I write whatever I want to and I'm not going to stop, within the limits that I already have (and yes, I do have limits; I know it's hard to believe). But whining about how bad the Courier-Mail is would soon get tedious (even more tedious than the usual content) because once you've said it's a provincial newspaper that focuses on the concerns of the right-leaning middle class, most readers have formed an impression that will be wholly accurate. And I have other things to write about: so let's do that.

UPDATE: So I was right. The woman in question, Julie Novak, is a humourless toad. Instead of writing to me to say that she was upset about what I had written for my five readers, she got me sacked.

I was really content with my job. I don't like the politics of the newspaper, but I'm a professional and I did a professional job there. But they are cowards, I'm afraid. The woman didn't like what I wrote, rang up and demanded I got sacked, and I got sacked. Now I will really struggle to feed my children because I said Julie Novak wrote screeching rubbish. Which she did.

At the paper

2009-09-22T12:46:00.007+10:00

I am soooooooooooooooo bored today. Tuesday is my least favourite day here. It goes very slowly. It's also the day I sub a lot of the columns, and they suck. The Courier-Mail is a very rightwing paper and it's what you could call a "knocking" paper. It just relentlessly bashes everything and everybody. It appeals to the miserable middle classes, who spend their entire lives worried about being robbed, mostly by people at the margins: blacks, teens, foreigners. It's not fond of the government (which is currently formed by the centre-right Labor party at both national and state level) and it spends a lot of its time inventing scandals to be outraged about.

Not that the politicians here aren't corrupt, but the Mail insists on endlessly blathering about minor rorts that no one in their right mind would care about (much like the "expenses scandal" in the UK, which was just a way to express public rage at politicians). Yesterday's front-page story, I shit you not, was about coppers using a police van to go to a drinks party, and running nude through a suburban street -- presumably as some kind of weird pig ritual, I don't know (at least it made a change from endless stories about rugby league). No one sane could read the Courier-Mail without going "don't give a fuck about that" on every page.

The columnists are the worst of it though. The humourists are relentlessly unfunny and the wowsers moralise sternly while considering facts as bothersome, and as useful, as mosquitoes. I am subbing a column at the moment by Julie Novak, a rightard from the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, which is generously dubbed a thinktank -- although Ms Novak shows no sign of thinking in her incoherent screeching about how we're all going to be taxed to pay for the stimulus, which has allowed Australia to avoid recession, a triumph for Prime Minister Rudd that the right resents so much it's choking on it. I have read the column three times and I still don't see the "argument" she is making. Like so many rightists, all she has to say is "taxes are bad". Yeah, we know, and the more you earn, the worse you think they are. We all think that, Julie, but some of us are glad to have schools, hospitals and roads, and we don't even mind the occasional handout to the indolent and darkskinned. Fuck it, we're all in it together, hey?

That sentiment is lost on Ms Novak and her like, of course. They see themselves as islands, and others are entirely separate entities from them, who just want to suck the dollars from their wallets. Ms Novak ignores that without the despised masses, the corporations that fund her salary would not have the income she resents Rudd taxing. They are not "creating wealth" in a vacuum. They are making it because they exploit us. We are, despite what Ms Novak thinks, in it together. Without us, they are nothing. We, on the other hand, probably could live without them. And her. Because I may only be helping produce a newspaper, but I'm good for something, whereas all she's producing is hot air.

UPDATE: Actually, I say the columnists are the worst, but I don't think they actually are. I think the executives are worse. I understand the bind they are in though, truly. They probably agree with most of what I say above (although of course it was a bit strongly worded -- however, how should I know that they would ever read it? my blog literally has five readers and they all know I go off a bit when the wind is in my sails: it's fun! It's not a serious critique of their goddamned paper, which is just what it is: a rightleaning provincial paper that does what papers of that type do. But they are stuck with it. If you want to progress, you have to pursue a party line. And grovelling to advertisers (and columnists) is part of the game -- I have to be honest, if they had asked me to withdraw my post and apologise to Ms Novak, as decent people would have done, I would have done it: as I say, I write to amuse myself and my few readers, not to upset Anna Reynolds. But my idea of decency and theirs, like mine and Ms Novak's, differ. I would also have apologised for writing it in work time. I was feeling bored and I actually emailed it in. I'm sure that they never use office resources for anything but company business, hey?

Digit

2009-09-21T20:41:00.001+10:00

My right index finger has swollen up like a balloon. I have no idea why. I woke up this morning and it was livid and purple.

It feels odd that people will read this long after the pus (yes, sorry, there was pus -- in a shade of green that might look nice in a t-shirt, but you don't want leaking from above your nail) has gone and the finger is back to normal. Some poor soul will doubtless searhc for "index finger" or "balloon purple" or who knows what and will be served the sorry tale of my swollen digit.

"Digit." Fuck but that word makes me laugh. My sister J had a longtime bf who was a big fan of Lock, stock and two smoking barrels and, a Cockney himself, would delight in quoting that anyone who crossed him would lose a digit. Now I can't see that word without hearing his voice.

J has had few boyfriends, but each has been of a type, I think: mummy's boys. When she was, I'm not sure, 16, I think, she attempted to scandalise our parents by moving her bf, N, into her bedroom in their house. They were resolutely unfazed though and treated him like a second son. A first one, really, because they were going through a phase of treating me like shit.

N died though (after they had split; she wasn't the cause or anything). I wondered how it must feel for J to have had a bf die like that. I've never known it, although I once lied to a gf that an ex had had a fatal car accident to excuse some other thing I did. I will leave it to you to imagine what I could possibly have done that I needed to be bereaved to excuse it.

J was cut up about it. She never felt that her relationship with N was resolved -- his mother was involved somehow in their split. The details are hazy. But I know she felt she had lost something because there was a talk with N that she had never had. I wonder though whether a thinking person must always be left with the feeling that they lack resolution. Our lives have so many possibilities, so many stories that they could reveal; we are bound to wonder what some of them may have held for us. The sadness in my life is, or has been, that those possibilities have narrowed to a small set of unhappy endings, so that I have forgotten that I can at least try to enjoy the book before I get to the final chapter. And there are other things to resolve: I still need to publish a book, to play poker professionally, to live in Siena, to sit in my walled garden at peace with myself and the world. N's death robbed J of the possibility of resolution: I need to take care not to rob myself of it from sheer cowardice, indolence and fear.

Let me tell you

2009-09-18T23:09:00.003+10:00

Let me tell you about her voice. Her voice is like honey when I am troubled; it eases the splinters of my mind. Let me tell you how it thrills me when she says my name; how she makes the word I've hated into a mantra that uplifts me.

Let me tell you about her laugh. Her laugh is like a gentle waterfall; tumbling and free. When I can make her laugh, I revel in it. And I won't ever make her cry.

Let me tell you about her smile. I can't tell you about her smile. Even my words have limits. How can a smile have captured sunshine? How can gold be not a thing you wear but a thing you entail? And her smile is forever golden to me; I would pay all I have to make her smile, but I have so little, only the precious words that run dry when I think how to say, I love her smile.

Let me tell you about my dream. We are together on a warm afternoon and I can feel her hot skin next to mine. Somehow I have become beautiful because I am beautiful in her eyes, and she is beautiful in mine. We are laughing together, relaxed and unhurried. We have nowhere to be, nothing to do but lie in the warmth of each other's laughter.

I will never stop loving her. No court can bid me; no human law compel. I will never stop dreaming I am beautiful in her eyes, and she will forever be beautiful in mine.

My Friday mix

2009-09-18T17:48:00.003+10:00

So this is one of my favourite times in my life: we are in the car driving to Coorparoo to get chips for the kids on a Friday night. They are excited, glad to have finished their week and happy that they will soon be sharing a can of fizzy drink, chips and scallops (potato scallops--they are all three vegetarians).

I play a CD in the car that I made earlier. It's a mix of stuff that is moving me this week or at least felt like it might be nice to play in the car this afternoon and in the next few days.

So I lead off with Plans by Dinosaur Jr. If you like Dinosaur Jr, you're going to like the new album Farm. Many thought previous work Beyond was a return to form, but this is better. It has all the old Dinosaur trademarks: Lou and Murph mesh to make an arsemoving (well, arsetwitching, I don't think anyone actually has ever moved to Dinosaur Jr) rhythm section, J Mascis's languid, intricate guitar sings and he murmurs something or other about something or other. Plans is the standout for me: everything is in its right place and this is more emotional than you'd expect from anything that could even feasibly be described as grunge (we are not talking about the entirely faked emoting of the likes of Pearl Jam; this is genuinely affecting and wonderful music).

I was talking to someone earlier today about why I think this is superior to Pink, who she likes.

The thing is, Pink is fungible.

She has ability but so do thousands of other women like her. She doesn't contribute much to it but looks and the ability to fake the right attitude. I know those things have their value, but it's just an act. It doesn't mean it's not an enjoyable act -- and it's great that you enjoy it.

But Pink could be replaced easily by another Pink. J Mascis is not replaceable. Lots of women pout and dance like Pink. No one plays the guitar like J, and his lazy, touching love songs are deeper than anything anyone would ask Pink to do.

Next up is London belongs to me by St Etienne. This is the sound of good times in my home city (well, where else would be? Here? Don't make me laugh). It is wistful and gorgeous, and with the passing of time, it sounds like a warm memory of youth.

I also put on I'm a lady by Santogold. I'm not sure she's my cup of tea, but I like the mix she did with Diplo to promote the album. Her own work is more indie than the crossover style that the Top ranking mix uses, but I'm a lady works in both idioms. She was much hyped a couple of years back, but I think that she'd need to choose either to go more for the hybrid electropop style that is in vogue recently or more for the coffee-table end of things, if she was to become as big as, say, Pink.

Malcolm Middleton is half of Arab Strap and his own music bears comparison with them. If you know the Strap and are expecting Middleton to indulge in miserable bastid kitchen sink minidramas, you are not going to be disappointed. Solemn thirsty has offkilter martial drums and a sweet guitar lick, plus a guest vocalist (who, I don't know) whose sweet Scottish accent gives me what our American cousins might describe as wood. (Yeah, I know, it doesn't take much; I'm still virile, ladies!)

Equally downbeat, but more tender, is Trashing days by the Notwist. Germans are most renowned in my world for making pumping techo (which they're very good at) and hilariously bad new wave. But this is something quite different: a gentle technopop that blends heart-on-your-sleeve emotion with sweet melodies. Trashing days is a particular favourite of mine: as far as I can tell, it's about the horror of living in a small town when you are a sensitive boy, which I know about all too well. If you like your music lovely and fragile, you may like this.

I included a couple by the XX, who I mentioned a few days ago. They make restrained but soulful pop, which I cannot recommend highly enough. The chick has a huge voice in the Tracey Thorn line and the guy does a smoochy jazz voice, which complements her some. The music is minimal, suggestive but not overwhelming. But that would only make them Everything But the Girl crossed with Young Marble Giants, amirite? Yes, but these components are put to good use in smartly turned little pop masterpieces. Crystallised and Shelter are as good as anything the aforesaid YMG did, and that's high praise, in case you're not aware -- in indie circles, YMG are up there with the Smiths and Gang of Four and bands of that calibre.

So I needed a Beatles track, because I've been enjoying them a lot recently. I could have gone for I feel fine, which is as good an example of "Merseybeat" as was ever made, or Here there everywhere, probably my favourite Beatles song (and perversely a McCartney song, whereas I'm much more of a Lennon man), or perhaps the wonderful A day in the life, or even You've got to hide your love away, which seems apt. But I went for Across the universe, because it seems to be playing in my head all the time. It is the soundtrack of my love story, or some of the good parts of it anyway. And of course it's a brilliant piece of pop, which the Beatles did as much as anyone to create as an expressive and profound form of music.

Having taken it down, you gots to bring it up, and I don't do buildup, I just floor it. Next I have the On the road to Paris version of Pogo by Digitalism. It's an instrumental version of Digitalism's standout electro belter. I could imagine getting down to this, actually, if I had someone I wanted to dance with.

After that is Stockholm syndrome by Yo La Tengo. I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I love this song. It speaks to me in a way few songs do, but I don't know whether it's the lilting melody, the sweet, broken vocals or simply its beautiful lyrics:

No, don't warn me
I know it's wrong, but I swear it won't take long
And I know, you know,
It makes me sigh; I do believe in love

Another season, but the same old feelings
Another reason could be
I'm tired of aching, summer's what you make it
But I'll believe what I want to believe

Which does make me sigh.

Because I have not been able to find Husker Du's version of Ticket to ride, which they did for the NME, and P has not been around much and I can't bug her to get it for me from Soulseek, I plumped for their cover of Love is all around. If you don't know it, it's the Mary Tyler Moore Theme. Yes, really.

Then there is JJ. I went for the sway and drive of the quasi-Balearic My life, my swag, because it is generous and uplifting. There's a whole Scandy thing going on right now, a reinvention of pop, summery and sweet, made by people who have have imbibed dance music, understand it and can use it as part of a pop sensibility that is not dance (but I guess it's danceable) but is not the kind of pap that Hollywood churns out ten to the dozen (sorry Pink fans, but yes, we do mean your favourite's entire output).

So I wrap up with Love by Lennon. Because love is all, and he knew it, and if you know it too, you can sing along and lose yourself in a world that never has existed and never will outside our dreams. But what dreams!

I doubt this (rather dull and too long) post has excited anyone into a massive desire to hear my Friday mix, but you never know. If you do feel so moved, it's available here. (If copyright holders should stumble across this and have a huge problem with me promoting their music to my three readers, contact me at the email addy top right and who knows, maybe I won't just tell you to fuck off.)

Dream

2009-09-15T12:25:00.001+10:00

Deep in my dreaming sleep, I am touching her, and she unfolds underneath my fingers. When I wake she will be lost, gone forever, and I do not want to see the day.

Deep in my sleep, I am kissing her, and she parts like waves under my soft tongue. What words this tongue would say if it knew human speech, but outside this dream, I am struck dumb, and there are no words I can use to make her mine.

As the sun comes, I am paralysed, inert, drained like a battery you used and cast aside, once powerful and alive, now just a shell of metal, filled with useless acid, dead to the world.

Dr Zen has yet another "grown-up" conversation

2009-09-14T23:04:00.003+10:00

So Mrs Zen says, when we come back in two years.
And I'm like wtf, you're not doing this again. There is no fucking way we're coming back in two years.
So I have to live apart from my family? she is saying. As though that was actually a big deal and I didn't have a family of my own, which I say to her, but you have family there too. Our children have family there too.
So I'm like, but look, in June next year I'll have 30K Australian and the 3K my dad has given me. That's a ton of money and it will still be hard. From what fucking pile of fairy dust am I pulling the equivalent of another 30K in two years?

She doesn't say anything.

No, I am saying, you don't think you need 30K because you think we will just move back to this house.

And I'm thinking, this is who you are, what you do, you don't listen, don't care.

We are never doing that, I'm saying. Are you fucking crazy? I mean, there's a chance we'll move back to another Australian city, but there's like a one percent chance I would ever agree to live in Brisbane again and absolutely zero chance that I would live in this house.

My cage. The place where I lost my mind. Where I became unmanned. Yeah right.

I'm like, you seriously need to think your options over. I knew you would do this if I gave it more time, but I think you need to do that. Because there is no fucking way I am committing to coming back in two years. I'll allow it's a possibility but I'm not saying ever that we're doing that.

She says, but you fucking hate me and you want me to give up my family. And I'm thinking, I don't really do hating people, and that's all I can think about that.

But I say, you can blame me as much as you like but it's you that isn't bothering, won't try. Which is all true. I'm not perfect but I didn't want this and would, at any point, have fixed it if she had been willing.

She says, you are living some sort of fantasy. Which is truer than she thinks, but I say, yes, I am living in a fantasy. I fantasise each day that this will be the day you wake the fuck up and realise you are 42 and not 12.

But it will never happen.

Ugh, women! I know you'll never do rational thought but for fuck's sake, can you at least try to get in touch with reality? I don't hate anybody here. I am sorry for the wrong I have done Mrs Zen: she has given up a lot of her life for a man who didn't deserve her to give up her life. But it's done. The task is not to gouge away at me in the hope I will agree that I am to blame for how shit she feels -- I am not to blame and I will not agree to give up every shred of happiness I have to assuage her anger about how her fairy tale turned to shit. The task is to maintain a liveable life for the sake of three people who have harmed no one and need, deserve, two whole people to be their parents. I want that. I'm trying to make it happen, but you know what? The tango really is fucking hard when only one of you is dancing.

Pretty thighs, pretty eyes

2009-09-14T21:14:00.001+10:00

So I am sitting on the bus on the way to town and a young woman gets on and sits opposite from me. I want to catch her eye and smile, because I am trying to do the "I am friendly" look, rather than scowl the whole time, but it's probably a good thing I don't manage it, because "I am friendly" and "I am a psycho killer" are not readily distinguishable.

I am just idly eyeing her, as men do then they have nothing occupying their thoughts and there is something pretty to look at, and I'm struck by her thigh, because she has crossed her legs and summer is coming so her skirt is short. She has a lot of thigh but I like that. I'm not keen on skinny women: my idea of beauty is healthiness. I like women who glow with wellbeing. If you're too thin, you look sickly to me. Men seem to be obsessed over childlike women -- but give me a ripened, radiant grown woman any time and you can keep your stick-thin consumptives.

I stop looking at her because there's a point at which idle gaze becomes dirty old man's leer. And I'm feeling old today. The other day, I went for a skin cancer check. The skin guy ran a light over me. That's a sign of ageing, he said. That rash is just age spots, he said. That mole? Just age.

So I'm not dying of skin cancer. I'm dying of age.

And I found myself being tested again this morning: this time my eyes, because I have been trying out some contact lenses. The optometrist squirted some dye into my eyes and peered into them.

Your eyes are good, she said.

Thanks, I said. I had not realised she wasn't paying me a compliment. But I have pretty eyes, everyone says so, which is why I am returning to wearing contacts. I want to catch the eye of women on the bus, and smile like a psycho killer, because I feel like I have withered into a shell and that's no good.

Honey

2009-09-13T22:12:00.002+10:00

Dear you

I want to write for you some of the poetry that sings inside me just because you're you. I want to say simple words that seem enormous enough to encompass love, as though I could pin down the million quicksilver emotions that love is to me.

I want to tell you that for all these years, I have had a tiny, untrammelled joy when I heard your name, that the small thoughts of you that have entered my life have seemed bright rays of sunshine in storms, and caresses when I have known calm.

I am fractured and broken, ugly and scarred. I am only fragments of a man but you are the warm glue that pours into my cracks and makes me feel for a moment whole, and I can dream that wholeness is a possibility. I am cast down, always weeping, and you are a cloth that mops up the tears and you raise me up. You have made me believe I am big enough to be loved, that enough remains, despite the blows of fate and the humblings of a life that bites, scratches and tears at me, that you can find good.

How beautiful you are! I could, if you would permit it, sit and watch you for hours. I would kiss you endlessly and never think of the hours that passed. I find you beautiful in every way. You were luscious when we were young together -- juicy and fresh, so sweet to the taste -- and you have ripened into rare gold. I have never wanted anyone as much as I want you. It is like someone parched my throat and now you are the only drink that will quell my thirst.

The song I sing will say you are beautiful, and I defy the world to condemn me for saying so. I defy the world to condemn me for loving you. What do they know, unless they know how it has been for you to warm me? You are the pear in my tree, the sweet fruit that life has brought forth. Who could not love you?

This is the song I sing about the love of my life.

I want them to write it, inscribe it, cast it in lead; I want to live a life that glorifies me simply so you can be glorified too. I want them to write in my book that he did what he could, that he tried and failed, maybe, but tried all the same, and he loved you. I want that written in my book; settle it there now and it will never be scrubbed out.

D.

Broken pictures

2009-09-12T14:51:00.003+10:00

Sometimes you wake up and realise you are not who you thought you were, to the extent that being who you thought you were would mean pretending. It happened to me. I thought I was decent, loyal, reliable. And mostly I am, but mostly is not black and white. I thought I could be described in straight lines, but I found out I am more complicated than that.

I am better off though, or I will be, if I ever swim out of this rough sea and reach dry land. I think I am wiser for it. I have stopped wanting to hurt myself for falling short, and started to think about how I can build on the truth to make myself into someone I can admire.

I had a picture of myself that was flawed, and it was painful to try to make the world, and how I acted within it, fit that picture. For instance, I thought I would make a good father. I would learn from my own father's mistakes and I would do a good job of it. Well no. I am not very good at it. I'm lazy and inattentive, easily distracted, sometimes unable to take the positive approach that I know is right and occasionally unwilling to make the sacrifices that their long-term security demands.

But I do what I can within my limitations and I am able to accept that that is not going to make me wonderdad. But shouldn't I forgive myself for that? I forgive others for their failings. If I know they are doing what they are able, I am content to consider they are good people for it. I think when you have a certain view of morality, which I had and to some extent do have, it's easy to refuse yourself the standards you would readily allow others. You believe you have to be better so that you are able to consider yourself unique, important.

I like to think that I am good at helping others accept that they are not describable with a pencil sketch, that they are rather variegated, and if they can only accept what they consist of and are capable of, they will love themselves more for the beautifully coloured mess they are than the sharply defined lines they aim to make their reflection. But I rarely succeed. We like to imagine that underneath the splodges of rainbow are thin graphite lines that are the outline of who we really are. And then we start hacking away at what we consider doesn't fit, sometimes maiming those round us because they are part of the colour we are trying to expunge.

I know I have! Always in the pursuit of the "right thing", a mythical course of action that is both correct at the time and can only have good consequences. Yeah right. And agonising over it worked for me too. Accepting that you cannot figure out how your life will unwind if you choose this or that makes it a lot easier just to do what feels right and live with it. And I've found at least that I can avoid feeling I have to keep trying to cram everyone else into the "right" box as though those consequences can somehow be forced to be good.

So, right now, I have a couple of areas where I do not know what the right thing to do is, to say the least, in part because the right thing is often not something that can be set out in a single imperative, but is complicated enough that there can be several right things, each right in a different way. (Luckily, if I can use that word, it's pretty clear that in each area, whatever I do is going to end in tears, so I don't have the usual problem of trying to figure out which course won't be a disaster. I have the luxury of already being in the shit.)

And maybe I will have to accept that I am not a particularly pretty picture. Part of wanting to be calligraphy rather than Pollock is simple vanity. I think vanity is born out of lack of being loved, or the lack of being able to feel loved, however you come to lack it, and the consequently inability to love yourself. The vain care a lot about what picture others see when they look at them. So can I put vanity aside and accept that whatever has splashed on me now is me? I don't know but I know that I was not vain when I felt loved, and I suppose that was because I was reassured that someone who mattered to me thought that my picture was pleasant to look at and I was able to believe that they thought it better than the sketch.

Good day

2009-09-11T20:56:00.004+10:00

So I do a lot of whining on this blog, and it wears you down always to be complaining about what is, after all, a fairly comfortable, easy life. So just for once I'm going to journalise a good day (which would have been better if I had written the uberpost I was planning, but you know how it is, road to hell and all that).

So this morning I woke up and had morning thoughts. Usually, first thing, in the short space between waking up and Mrs Zen phoning me as my alarm, I have thoughts that I do not allow myself in the rest of my day. The what-ifs, the suggestions to myself, the many small things that I love to think about but in the rest of the day would get in the way. Sometimes I just mull over my dreams, if I can remember them. Today I had an exquisite five minutes, because I had had a short, but lovely dream. I won't recount it except to say that it began with K completely naked on a bed.

So I spent the morning listening to Motown and doing the washing. It's funny how mundane tasks can take you out of yourself. You relax into it and it feels good to let go your concerns and just do something.

All day I chatted with two people who love me. We didn't talk about anything special but it's nice just to be in the company of people who want to read your bullshit and bullshit back in return. One wrote me something very kind and deeply moving, which I do not feel worthy of.

Also, my poker buddy B emailed me. He has been missing me because I haven't been on AIM. He has recently split up with his gf and sent me a photo of his hairdresser, who is cutting his hair next week. She is smoking hot so I am crossing my fingers. I encourage him because it is better to bounce back when you've been hurt than it ever would be to wallow in it.

I also heard from S, another poker buddy, who had a Vegas marriage (I don't think it was actually in Vegas but you get the idea) followed by a Vegas divorce. He has been blanking me some, but I think it's because he's afraid of having let me down, because I had given him some advice on his gf issues and that didn't end so well. So he says he's doing fine and that makes me happy.

In the afternoon, I pick up my kids from afterschool care. As I walk up, I see that Zenella is dancing in the playground with a friend. She looks carefree and content, which warms my heart to see.

In the car on the way to the chipshop, Zenita is talking about love. She says, I love Naughtyman so much it makes my heart beat fast. I want to say, yes, I know what an enormous, ungovernable force love can be, and sweetheart, take that into your heart and hold it there, because whatever we are, whether we are just bundles of molecules that kid themselves they are real or spirits riding in a vehicle that ages and dies (and I'm willing to believe either is true), we love and it's the best thing that can happen to us.

After tea, Mrs Zen is complaining of shoulder pain and I give her a massage. I close my eyes and put my loving spirit into my fingers. You have to do this if you want to do it well and tbh I don't find it hard. Mrs Zen is not good to me but there is no reason I should not be good to her. It feels good to be decent to people (be ready for my uberpost, which is on exactly this topic) because the good builds in you and you feel good for yourself because you have accumulated good feeling.

I know, it sounds like some ridiculous hippie shit, but I am feeling good about myself so you are going to have to bear it a bit.

Now I am downstairs, relaxed and happy, playing poker (successfully so far) and watching videos (when I'm done with this). I am hoping that someone I want to talk to will appear online a little later, but I don't feel stressed about it, which is unlike me. I have some slight sadness that a good friend who I may have expected to say hello did not, yet again, but I am trying to understand her and not judge, which is hard because I do have a part of me that just feels hurt at being left in the cold, but people have their reasons.

So that's what it is. I know it's boring, but you know what? I really like boring days that feel good. I can push aside the things that make me unhappy and relax. But this is what small words, well meant, can do. I am going to dedicate my day to K and A because knowing them is what has made this a good day for me, and as long as I know you, I know I will have feeling good within my grasp.

XX marks the spot

2009-09-10T18:22:00.002+10:00

Wait wait, I have to tell you, I thought JJ's album was good, but The xx blows it away.

If I made my dreams come true, and held the woman I love in my arms, this is the album we'd be playing. It's like the Young Marble Giants discovered sex. It's just the burning, beautiful sound of wanting someone on a long, dark night.

While I'm on the subject, here is something for those of you who appreciate yearning. After As it is when it was, I think this is my favourite song of all time (I mean the one that remains my favourite and doesn't change each week!).

It feels good to know that whatever happens, I have a few golden minutes and the songs I love have meaning they lack without someone to love.

Now I think about it, maybe it would be a close-run thing with this, a song with so much meaning for me that I cannot bear to listen to it often, just when the mood is right:

And As it is when it was? I don't know why but I have loved this song more than any other since I first heard it. Sometimes I love others more, but this is the song that if I'm pushed, I say is my favourite. Unfortunately, there's only this live version on youtube, and at that it's the slightly weird Pumped full of drugs show, but anyway:

Dad can't make me sad

2009-09-08T20:41:00.004+10:00

So Zenita comes out of her bedroom and she says to Mrs Zen, I've got a smiley face and I can't stop smiling.

It's past her bedtime, way past, but it's hard to be upset with a child who has a smiley face.

She comes over to kiss me goodnight, and she says, you can't make me sad.

So I say, in a stern voice, no computers for three days. Nope, she says. Not sad.
So I say, sterner still, no lollies for a month. Nope, she says, you can't make me sad.
I pinch her back and she laughs because it tickles.

Mum, she says, Dad can't make me sad.

Well, I'll try not to.

Earlier, Zenella had put on a "show" for us. She likes an audience. In the dark, she dances with glowsticks the only light. Zenita goes, wait wait, it's my bit, and she does a dance they have clearly choreographed. But she breaks it off and comes to hug me. She can't help herself. I do not, as it happens, play favourites, but I am Zenita's favourite, I know. It is an awesome responsibility to be the person someone loves most in this world.

I will not ever let them feel I do not love them. That's the way your dad can make you sad. No matter what happens to me, no matter what cost I have to pay for it, they'll never feel that, not even for a moment. It is not a difficult task for me. If I love you, I will, other things being equal, love you for good, and I have no problem letting you feel it. Because no other currency matters to me, nothing else is worth hoarding, and I know, if you have love, you're rich, and if you don't, you're damned to a poverty that nothing else can alleviate.

All I do is dream

2009-09-08T12:17:00.001+10:00

So two hours have passed when I wake in my chair and I have missed the programs I planned to watch. I am not concerned. I plan to go down to bed and dream of K. The night before, I dreamed of her so vividly I could feel her skin under my hands and against my body, but the dream was curiously unfinished.

Often I dream in serials. When I was a child, I would dream whole adventures, in which I would fight to save something or other (I'm not sure what).

And I was sure part two would be good

But weirdly, I didn't dream of her. I had a fractured curious dream, in which I took a piss in a fridge, and marinated some tofu. I don't doubt there are those of us who think the taste of tofu would be greatly improved for a couple of hours in a bath of wee, but it's not something I commonly do.

I felt distinctly disappointed. But after all, maybe my subconscious is telling me something, although the only message I can figure out seems to be, don't waste your hours and days dreaming of women you cannot have when you could be enjoying a good hard piss in the refrigerator.

In my spare time, I also do bad poetry

2009-09-07T18:01:00.002+10:00

I can't remember whether I usually link out to poems when I write them,
because it has been quite a long time since I wrote one, but if I don't
linkwhore my own work, who the hell is going to?

Here

At least this one isn't lifted from a gmail chat, although that doesn't
mean it's any more profound than anything else I say or write. I liked
it though.

I wanted to say thanks too to the people who have written kind things to
me about my writing. I know that most people are able to motivate
themselves from within, but if I was most people, I wouldn't be me.

Monday morning, grey skies, cold

2009-09-07T10:42:00.003+10:00

It is 20 to 11 and our street is quiet. An elderly couple in sports gear is walking slowly down the middle of the road.

A while ago Zenita rang me. Whenever she is away she will phone. She just peels away from the rest of them and phones me. I never know what to say. I am not good on the telephone at all, and I struggle with small talk with adults, let alone small children.

I think it is because I prefer to observe than interrogate. I let the world come to me passively and allow it to be what it is, and hope that that process will reveal it to me. It does, but I think that it is a way to learn what it is but not what to do with it.

More than once, people have said that I don't seem interested. Mrs Zen says that people think I don't care about them. I want to say to her, I have no idea what they think because I have no idea what my image is to them. I do not trust her judgement about that either. She is very good at seeing my flaws. Sometimes I say to her that it is painful for a person to hear always what is wrong with them, that it makes me unhappy for her not to be able to see any good in me.

And she doesn't respond, or if she does, she'll say I know there's lots of good in you. And I'm thinking, yeah, but you can't say what any of it is.

The bigger problem is that I'm inclined to agree with her view. What can you think about a man who is unable successfully to make small talk with a child who loves him?

It is 10 to 11 and I hate to be lonely, because when I feel that I'm on my own, I start to pity myself. But no one was around who wanted to talk to me and I don't have people I can telephone or hang out with. I have had to be self-reliant and I'm not good at it.

I know that I will now receive at least one message that will suggest that I can develop that ability, and I will be stuck once again with having to say over and over, patiently and unavailing, that I just can't. I only seem to be capable because you don't know me very well and I can bullshit over the cracks.

That's the problem with a blog. I can tell you about my life, but it can't answer back.

It is 11. In two hours, I will walk to the bus stop to go to work. Maybe I will read a book. I have started reading novels again. Nothing heavy. I read a John LeCarre the other day. It seemed like the work of someone who wanted to write something but didn't quite have it down. But what do I know? I'm never going to see my name on the front of a book. To achieve that, you need a well of self-belief. You need not to be discouraged when people tell you your work is boring, because you are convinced of your own worth.

It doesn't matter how much talent you have or even whether what you have written is any good. It matters how much you believe it. I seem to recall Mrs Zen saying more than once that she would try to get my book published or my poetry, and I was really pleased, because what greater sign could she have given me that she believed in me?

But she never did a thing.

It is 10 past 11. I am going to read my book. I don't know how it is that I bring sorrow to everyone who knows me. I don't try to. I don't know whether that's the same as saying that you try not to.

Sweet dreams

2009-09-07T00:25:00.002+10:00

So I have the facility that I can start on a train of thought while I'm awake and dream the rest of it when I sleep, a type of lucid dreaming that reinforces how I feel about people in my life.

So last night I am thinking about the WCW, which I do when she is around, but it's not working at all. Nothing is working.

What is wrong with a body when hot women do not work your crank?

Well, cherchez la femme, as our French friends say, and when I fell asleep I dreamt of K and felt my head spin with desire.

So tonight I will think about her, the two of us in a dark room, my hands on her shoulders. I will feel the warmth of her body, and if I am gentle, the throb of her heart in the blood vessels under my finger. I will whisper in her ear, reciting the words of the poem that filled my head when I was on the bus this afternoon.

I will fill her head with foolish talk about things that she has forbidden herself, but this is my dream, so we will kiss, and I will feel myself melt away, all the wearying accretions of life will drop away, and I will touch her, and I do not even know the words for the place you can be in, but I will be there, and fast asleep, dreaming that I feel her breasts against my bare chest and I do not know which heart I feel beating and I do not care.

Mr Potato Head can talk, and he says

2009-09-05T20:55:00.003+10:00

Hello, is this thing on?

What?

Okay, so anyway, I was looking at a page of webfoolery and I was thinking, hmm, I'll blog this and then I'm like, wtf, where did my blog this button go? Because it's gone. Did someone delete it or did the interminable updates of Firefox kill it in some way?

So the page I was blogging was Daniel Brandt's Wikinerd parade. OMFG. Is it like a requirement of nerddom that you must have a misshapen head? No wonder they don't have social lives.

OMG! I don't have a social life! Does that mean I have a misshapen head? Now I'm worried. I can live with being plain, but ugly! Ugly! I am suddenly feeling the urge to phone my mother.

"Mum, I'm not repulsive to womankind, am I?"
"Well son, I wouldn't go as far as repulsive to all womankind. Wasn't there some woman a few years ago who thought that you were only slightly disgusting?"

Okay, maybe not.

I have to tell you that S2 is a wikinerd of some repute, but I am glad to say that her head is not overly misshapen. Yes, I am vain enough to insist that my e-flings are attractive in reality as well as in the cyberworld.

***

So this afternoon, the wife's cousin's wife was round, sharing illegally acquired software with us. Obsessive readers of this blog will remember that I have something of a crush on the WCW, which Mrs Zen has noticed. She is not attractive, but hey, I'm not shallow, you know. It's her personal-- okay, no it isn't. I'm pretty sure she doesn't actually have a personality. It's because she seems dirty. She actually smoulders and I really like that.

I don't think she does it on purpose. But when I see her, I think, I am willing to put money on it that her husband (who is in many ways the anti-Zen, and I tease Mrs Zen that what she wants in this life is that I should be him -- and it's cruel teasing because it is soooooo true, because he is the epitome, the living epitome, of staid, a man entirely untroubled by thought) would not appreciate that, and I'm willing to wager that he has never, will never, could never ring her bell, light her fire, make her unable to breathe.

I could. I would find a way. I would find the secret thing that she cannot resist.

I wish there was a way to communicate that to her. But life is all about never getting to say what you think you should say. Life is about never having what you think you should have. It's about fencing yourself in and congratulating yourself on how nicely you made the fence. It's about no one knowing, no one caring, what your secret is -- and you say well done to yourself for keeping it tucked away.

***

By this point, maybe you are thinking, is there no other woman in Dr Zen's life who would tell him he does not have a misshapen head? Does he really have to approach his mother with that?

Well, actually, I'd like to ask B, one of the women at work, who I have the distinct impression goes out of her way not to catch my eye. I want to say, hello, did you decide on first meeting that I was a/ clearly too ugly/boring/retarded to bother with and b/ obviously attracted to you so must not be encouraged? Because I'm not kidding you, this woman is plainly not catching my eye.

(b) is true though, although she has thin legs. Why wouldn't I like thin legs? Well, here's an odd thing. I can actually trace my dislike of abnormally thin legs to a specific incident. When I was a kid, 15 or whatever -- which the observant will have noticed was a good time in my life, when I actually began to feel attractive to women -- I went on a school exchange to Germany. I was a big hit with the German women (who to this day I have rated very highly as the fine specimens of womankind they are, should any lonely German women living in Brisbane be reading this, and let's face it, fraueleins, you will not meet many halfway passable Englishmen who find a German accent sexy), but more importantly, one of the girls on the exchange was clearly interested in me. And it had to be clearly, because I really do need a written invitation. So, as you do (and we do, when we're boys, in case you were wondering), I am canvassing my friends on whether this girl is as nice as I think she is. And I think she's nice: she's quite pretty, funny, worldly -- maybe a bit scary for a gentle, shy boy (let me tell you a story -- it says it all about who I was, and who I am, let's be honest -- when I was, I dunno, 13, 14, my sister made a friend with a new girl at school, who was the only black girl in our town. There were two of them, B and A-M, and their mother, who was entirely white, but had married a Nigerian chief. A-M was quite stunning, flawlessly beautiful and erect in the way I think only black girls are capable of being -- do you know what I mean? straightbacked yet sinuous. Man, she was something! And I really really fancied her, but I was far too shy to say so. We talked a fair bit, because we were contemporaries or nearly so (I think she was a year older) and I spent some time at her house, and we got on well, although she was quite a lot more sophisticated than I was. She showed me her writing journal, and shared some of her hopes with me, and she seemed as interesting to me as she was nice. I would dearly have liked to ask her out, but that was impossible for me. So I wrote her a note. I just wrote "i fancy you". She never replied and doubtless thought I was entirely pathetic, but that was all I could ever have managed.), but all in all, nice. And one goes, omg no. Look at her legs! Her legs are sick.

These were his exact words. Her legs are sick! And you know, I had not even noticed her legs. But once he'd said it, I'm entirely enable to see anything but that she has sick legs.

But at least I recognise that was childish and I'm willing to forgive B her thin legs, not least becasue she has artfully sticky out hair. By which I mean, she must spend hours fixing her hair so it sticks out at angles just so. And I do admire people who take care of themselves. I used to. In my early thirties (yes, I am older than 30, but I have relatively few miles on the clock, so you need not fear that I won't go like a 17-year-old -- back, knees and heart allowing, of course), I became a metrosexual, and it suited me quite well. I used more face products than the average woman, wore contacts, kept in decent shape, dressed nicely, even bathed some.

And if you are thinking is Dr Zen really so shallow that he would have his head turned just because a woman spends some time on her hair? Well, you should know, yes, he is.

Or no. Because of course there's more to it. The thing is, a woman who tends herself wants something. And what she wants is to be admired. It is so easily done. And what sin can there be in giving someone what they want at no cost?

Also, she is pretty and has big tits for a small girl.

I know, shoot me. But it's a long seven and a half hours if you don't lust a little.

***

But you are paid to subedit (whatever that is), Dr Zen, are you not?

You know, I've always retained some vestige of dignity by believing that if I am hired, you are not paying for hours of my life, but you are paying me to do a job. So I feel that if I do the job as well as anyone else, I have given what I owe you, and I need not worry that I spend half my time doing something else. Yah, I would do a "better" job if I was able to focus entirely on what I'm supposed to be doing.

But how are you supposed to focus if you have a lively mind? I think this is why I never much warm to my fellow editors. To be any good at editing, you need focus. You need to carry a mass of detail, keep it in check. That's as much fun as it sounds! The better side of it is the feeling of control, the ability to know what should have been when you look at what there is, and to find the compromise between what should have been and what there is that will leave all believing that they had originally written what you left them having written.

Actually, there was a woman at the twins' kindy who I thought was attractive solely because she had artful hair, so I have to conclude that it is the hair.

(I will feel I have entirely succeeded as a writer if at least one person fixes their hair on reading that sentence.)

***

So after I had written about her, I googled A-M, and the only trace of her on the web is her Facebook page. This is true of quite a few people I have googled (yes, I am one of those sad fuckers who will google your name after talking to you -- lucky you use a false name, hey Gunt!) -- and I forget that not everyone spends their entire life online. Other people have lives!

So all they are in cyberspace is a Facebook page they do not bother to keep up, and suddenly I am sad, because I know that in real life I am that same presence, barely there, and I would be lucky if I could find two people who would say, oh him, whatever happened to him?

And online, I could find those two people, but a week or two later some other thing would have caught their eye, and being gone would be just not updating, and if you don't update, you are gone.

***

And I was thinking, the thing that I love the most about the internet is that you cannot be lonely. Because I am sure enough alone, babysitting duty on a Saturday night, but I know three people that will read this all the way to the end, and those three people have saved me from loneliness, because I could write some bullshit and know that for the five minutes it took them to read it, I kept them company. Well, me and the porn, obv.

The best rubbish

2009-09-05T13:42:00.003+10:00

So we are sitting in the loungeroom, and I am talking to Mrs Zen about her diet plan. She has lasted a couple of weeks on her plan and now she wants to switch to another one because she is always hungry. I say, eat vegetables when you're hungry. That's what you're supposed to do. (It doesn't sound like much fun to me. You replace meals with shakes and eat meat and vegetables at tea. The meals you replace are ones I don't even eat though. How could I replace breakfast when the earliest I eat is 11, and then only rarely? Not that I couldn't do with replacing something with something.)

You know, we should fix the exercise bike, I say. Because we have one but it was a cheapo thing and the parts didn't fit properly, so we've never been able to use it.

Well, there's a bikeshop in W Rd. They might be able to fix it.

Great, I say, give them a ring. Why not do it now while I'm out with the kids?

No.

What?

I mean wtf though. So I'm like are you fucking kidding? You could take responsibility for sorting this out.

And she starts to drone. I dread the droning. It is the sound of resentment. I have never met anyone who resented their role in life more than Mrs Zen. She has to get the kids ready for school, to pack their lunches and to put them to bed. She takes them swimming and a couple of days in the week, if she can't get out of it by just not being dressed in time, she takes them to school. She occasionally cleans the house in a desultory way for half an hour. You'd think she ran the country or something.

I accept the blame. I carried her when she was pregnant with the twins and first had them. I arranged our life around her and I was glad to work from home so that I could make it easier for her. But she took all that as her due and now she is resentful. Of being a mother, of being a wife, of being an adult even.

But you know, I could do more but I am resentful too. I hate that about myself but I don't want to fix it. I don't want to become indentured to her. She doesn't deserve it. I know some people think that just getting married is enough to bond the other person to you, to make them willing to do whatever you want in whatever way you want, but really, it's more of a process than that. We should be negotiating our lives, renewing our commitment to each other's happiness, in a sense trading needs. But we don't.

I care whether Mrs Zen is happy. I don't want her to be miserable. But I don't want to have to take responsibility for her happiness. (I'd be delighted if she found a boyfriend, but that's a very distant prospect.) I realise that I have in the past allowed her to be, in a measure that is way too great, responsible for mine, and of course, she failed. I think she could maybe have succeeded, because I'm not really all that hard to please, but she hasn't thought there is any need to worry about pleasing me for the nine years we have been parents (and I know what you're thinking -- how can you not have realised that before you had more kids? but you know, you assume it's new motherhood, then you hope that it will change given time; you imagine that your partner ever actually was someone who cared about your happiness, instead of the truth, that they tried to make you happy because they saw that as their role, and that's the thing that has changed, not how they look at the world). But I feel like I was dragged down, pulled into the mire.

So you know, I'm in it. I can't get out of it, because no matter what I do, she is going to be able simply to refuse to negotiate because she has this house to run to. So I can join her in droning -- and yes, that's what I've done, somewhat, for the past few years. That's the "easy" road -- which is not so easy because bearing it is tough. The harder road is to man up and accept that I have a burden that I am capable of carrying without sinking.

I do not know which I will be able to choose. I know myself well enough that I'm aware that I chose to stay here longer in part for all the good reasons I have but also in part because I know that living with her in the UK will be very difficult if she continues not to make any effort to be my wife, and giving us six months longer here allows me to choose not to do that if it seems unbearable (which right now it does, I have to be honest, but I have not given up hope). Because I know that going there means committing myself to making it work for her at least for some years (realistically, three years is how I think of it -- which would be long enough for her not to be comfortable with trying to bring my children back here).

But what else can I do? I have the misfortune of having married a woman who thinks it is a reasonable thing to say when you suggest she rings the bikeshop she just mentioned to ask whether they can fix your exercise bike to go no, it's your exercise bike, you ring them. You know, we can trade blame for our relationship's failing: you are lazy, you are badtempered, you don't like sex, you are grumpy, you don't like conversation, you aren't patient, but you cannot do much about any of it if you cannot be grown up and say this is where we are, this is something we both must be reasonable about, both must take responsibility for, both must work on or we will both stew in it.

Or I just accept that I have four children and give her the love I would give an awkward teenager, because when it comes down to it, I can be dragged down into a mire of resentment and pain or I can rise above it and be better than her, better than myself. I don't need to be rewarded for it (virtue, I remember being told often by my dad when I was a kid, is its own reward).

I do not believe I am a virtuous person. I am not particularly good. But I can be. And should we not make of ourselves what is possible? However we get there, should we not have a day when we can say to ourselves, you know, you are still pretty rubbish, but at least you are the best rubbish you can be?

Just like Bryan

2009-09-04T09:10:00.002+10:00

I was listening to some Roxy Music yesterday and it reminded me powerfully of a place and time I was happy and successful and it seemed to me that my dreams -- although they were inchoate -- could come true.

And strangely, what I could remember most clearly, and hold most dearly, was one weekend before that time. Maybe -- memory is misty and when you are a romantic you collide your reminiscences together to make a more satisfying past -- it was the start of the happiest time of my life.

On the subject of Roxy Music, I do recall very vividly buying Pyjamarama in Pratt's Market. There was a secondhand record shop that carried the detritus of Hayle's record collections. I had never heard any of their music before that, I'm fairly sure.

It was one of the first "real" records I ever owned, the first that was in any way alternative or leftfield (not that you'd think of Roxy Music as particularly leftfield now, but the early artrock was significant in its day, and even when I was a boy, some years afterwards, it stood out from the sludge of the early seventies).

For a sensitive, clever boy, Roxy Music were the perfect band. The impossible glamour, the upfront nerdery and Bryan Ferry. It wasn't just the girls who loved Bryan. He was my idol: a Byronic figure, a colossus of suffering, whose pocket masterpieces of heartache seemed to advertise to us a glorious world of beautiful women who would break our hearts.

K was a beautiful woman. In any case, she seemed like a woman to me, although we were peers. She was one of those girls who seem to go from 14 to 23 and miss their late teens. She was incredibly attractive and carefully made up, but what set her apart was her asymmetric haircut. She had hair like Phil Oakey's, which was beyond cool.

I didn't, couldn't, dream that she would be interested in me: she struck me as impossibly sophisticated and had an older boyfriend. I was not sophisticated and few women seemed to look twice at me. I suspect though that my problem was more that the right women would not look at me -- I was then, as I am now, prone to the hopeless crush, and would centre my desires on one girl, who would in every instance oblige me by snubbing me cruelly. At least, this is how I was until the time that began with the weekend I spent with K. I began to be more comfortable with girls, and realised that they liked me, I thought because I could be funny and kind, but when you look at my photos from back then, they probably just fancied me, because I was very handsome and did not know it. Sadly, my confidence was burned away when we left Hayle, and never returned, although I'm comfortable with people now simply because I am old enough not to fear them and do not care so much about their judgement of me.

So K invited me to stay at her dad's hotel (the more careful reader will have been suspecting that K's sophistication was born out of being wealthier than most, and she was, let's say, spoilt some) one Saturday night. I don't think I ever knew why she wanted me to hang out with her. (Of course I realise in hindsight that there doesn't have to have been a reason, and she may just have liked me, but I didn't know I could be likeable because for so long people -- boys at school, my dad, whoever -- had made it clear that no one in the world would ever like me.) Maybe it was because I loved Bowie, which was rare where we were, and for her, a woman who made herself up to look like him, a plus.

So we went to Peggotty's, which was something new for me. Everyone of my age from the St Ives area knows Peggotty's. It was the disco. The Northern Soul night at Beachside (at least I think it was there -- I remember it being up near there, anyway) was fun, but Peggotty's was it.

I found this video of the outside of Peggotty's, taken before it was redeveloped. I remember walking through the door like it was yesterday, into a dark world of loud music, cigarette smoke and indeterminate noise.

It's to laugh at now, because of course it was not Studio 54, but believe me, with a couple of ciders in you and Love song at full tilt, it's impossible not to get carried away.

I am sure K regretted dragging a wide-eyed boy behind her, because I didn't know anyone and wasn't witty or interesting. But I loved being with her, not that she was witty or interesting either but because she was cool and beautiful, and let's face it, New Romantic music, which I loved, indulged itself in vague, huge concepts that didn't stand up to examination. We hoped not to consist of anything but to be admired, and in turn we admired image over substance. The first band I ever saw live, at the Barn in Long Rock, was headed by a man who wasn't just pretending to be a Red Indian, but actually believed he was one.

And the bands I loved were unabashedly romantic, willing to cast their own mundane lives aside and sing about their dreams: in Simple Minds' case, the dream of swapping suburban Glasgow for central Europe's faded glamour; in Duran Duran's, the dream of leaving dull old Birmingham and cavorting with brownskinned women in the tropics; in OMD's, the dream of suffering for something noble, or if nothing noble presented, at least for love.

So K had some other friends to meet and we took a cab to some pub in the north of St Ives that had a DJ. But the music was horrible, and her mood soured some. She consented to dance to Depeche Mode though and as we shuffled on the wood of the dancefloor, the music not even loud enough to cover the sound of our shoes, she smiled at me, a wan but genuine smile, and I felt like my life would possibly be good to me.

As we were leaving, the DJ was spinning Same old scene, my favourite Roxy song, and I wanted to ask her to stay to listen at least. I had a vision of her in my arms, me in my tuxedo, just like Bryan, my hair just so. But she had already gone out into the night and I had to run to catch up. I think she had forgotten I even existed.

I could hear the music fading as we moved away, and I felt my heart beating hard in my chest, surging with yearning and hope.

Roxy was the music of my dreams. I knew when I listened to Over you or More than this that I would one day leave the narrow streets of my home village and enter the magic kingdom of London, where I too would don a tuxedo and find the woman of my dreams.

So, as these things go, I did go to London, and I found the woman of my dreams, loved and lost her, but hey, I still have the dreams and they are great!

And when I hear Same old scene, I can see that beautiful, sensitive boy, hoping to catch the eye of someone wonderful, hoping and yearning, ever hoping, and he's never died but lives in the part of me that never left St Ives Bay.

A jewel

2009-09-03T15:24:00.003+10:00

Some people have an immense inner strength, an ability to rely on themselves that sees them through hard times and allows them to take true delight in good ones.

So I'm not one of them. I mean, sure, I'm strong if you are weak. If you needed me to carry you, I'd carry you. I'm good at service, and if I have a role to play, I can play it as well as anyone. Except "man". I freely admit I didn't grow past 14. Which sucks because I'm pretty sure there's a good man in here and all he needs to do is blossom. (And yeah, I can be deluding myself about that, I know, but what would it matter? If somehow I deluded myself into being the man I believe I am, I would actually be that man so far as you knew, whether I created it from thin air or not, amirite?)

So someone sent me the video of Working class hero today and it's not something I've ever listened to closely, but there's a man who knows me!

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

So I can't follow the rules and my life is a fucking mess because of that. I know what they are, I see them clearly enough, but I can't do it. I am stuck with being pushed and pulled by internal tides I do not understand and cannot ignore.

I remain unconvinced that the rules will in any case build us a good world to live in, but you know, I have a lodestone that I believe, have always believed and will always believe can lead us there.

I know I can be content. I can flourish and blossom into the fullness of what the boy would have been if he wasn't hurt, hit and hated into oblivion, what I continue to believe, will always believe, we are all capable of being.

But I need sunshine and I need care. I'm not afraid to face the truth that I am fragile enough to need love. I think I am worth loving because I believe I can bear fruit, and I believe the same of you too, even if you don't.

Lennon wrote another song that I am much more familiar with than WCH. It's like my anthem, some part of the song that sings in those few cells of my pear tree that keep it alive, just barely alive.

So I do not have inner strength, but I have faith and I know that when you have a jewel, you hold it close, because that is all there is:

2009-09-02T17:23:00.002+10:00

I will never stop believing that you should burn the world down for love, that it's the only thing that makes it worth this life. Even though that belief has laid me low, I won't give it up. I will never stop believing that love is all, and no monkey will ever mock that belief enough for me to stop thinking that it could have been my salvation, if only.

I want the people who bear me goodwill to know that someone made my walled garden grow, and stole the oxygen that keeps the monkey alive, keeps that part of me that wants me to die sad and lonely, broken and crazy, which has grown, feeding on the hatred and scorn that have consumed me more and more, from killing what's good in me, but ultimately, I am too small, the part that you can love too humble.

Smokey was right

2009-08-31T15:36:00.001+10:00

Today I felt beautiful, just for a moment. I stepped outside myself and looked in and I thought that I could see good. It didn't last. If I am good, how come I am being punished?

I felt good, like I had honey to roll around in my mouth.

Smokey was right. That's all I'll say about that.

The monkey is laughing laughing laughing. He says, you are a fool and this is your reward for it. You are a fool to think you can be loved. You deserve the desert and here it is. Enjoy!

You know, if I could wish just one thing, I would wish to have never believed I was golden at all, so that my life would not be one long process of finding out how wrong I was.

And please, please, spare me from your belief, your shaky, hollow belief that I am. Because the monkey knows and he laughs at you too. He is crueller than you are kind and he knows much more than you let yourself know. Or me either.

Whinetrap

2009-08-30T18:02:00.001+10:00

I need Gmail to introduce a whinetrap (some would say, I'm sure, that this blog could do with a whine filter too). I tell you, it's not my fault though. I'm English and we have it in the genes. We can't help ourselves: the slightest hint of adversity and a noise like a fleet of mosquitoes fills the air. We are not called the whinging Poms for nothing.

I often send emails I wish I could recall and re-word. It's part of the cost of being impulsive. It could be worse, I suppose. I could have married in haste and... oh wait.

So in a bid to introduce some responsibility to my decision making -- because life doesn't have a whinetrap for people who make stupid choices too quickly -- I am thinking about stalling my trip home some. It's for good reasons, which I won't rehearse here, because anyone who actually cares already knows what they are. It's sensible. I don't like being sensible, but after all, I am not really 12, despite appearances.

A cup of coffee

2009-08-29T07:32:00.004+10:00

I am thinking about a time I was on a beach on a beautiful spring day with K. It doesn't matter when this was, because the best times in life are cut out from time and set aside.

The sun is shining on us as we are sitting on the beach, and I am able to kiss her, and although it has been some time since we have seen each other, it doesn't feel like it. It seems easy and natural, like we do this all the time.

But we don't, and she says to me that she won't do it again. She wants me to understand how difficult it is, and I understand that, but I don't know how not to want a good thing: I don't have enough good in my life to think it is worth setting aside something that feels this good for any reason.

Birds are skimming across the water. They are just carrying on with their lives, as birds do. Not for the first time, I am envious of the other animals of our world. They are not weighed down with others' choices. They do what they are able. Maybe I do too, and I want it to be others' fault that I cannot be happy. That is what B thinks. She thinks I want that because it is easy.

But it isn't easy. Being unhappy is the hardest thing that you can do. You want it to change so much but you are Sisyphus, struggling to get your rock up your hill, knowing that you can never succeed, but will have it roll down and crush you.

I wish sometimes that I had better heart, like Camus' Sisyphus, and could face the waste my life is cheerfully. I did once. I grew into melancholy, and yes, I think that others helped me into it. It does not absolve me of anything to say that.

So I am touching her face and I am feeling like this is something I should do. It is something I should have because it is part of me to love her. I want to tell her that but I know that to be beloved can be like having a loaded gun at your head. I think she loves me too -- I'd say I know it, but knowing it implies imposing my belief about someone else's feelings on them and I am not about that: I know only too well that people think that there are ways you should and shouldn't feel, and I am determined in this life to let people feel whatever they feel about me, without my drawing a box for them to be in, without becoming a cage for them to sit in.

When we parted, I could not look behind me. I did not want to see whether she had waited to see me go or had gone as soon as I had started to walk away. I do not know which would have hurt more.

Earlier, when we were talking, she had squeezed my hand three times sometimes, as though to reassure me. I don't know whether it was to tell me she shared the feeling I expressed, or to make me feel better about it, because I hadn't remembered her ever doing it and didn't know what it meant. But as I came home, I could still feel the imprint of her hand in mine, and it felt like a small fire, warm and real.

***

That night, I did not sleep well. I did not want the dream that I knew awaited me. I would be sitting on a bench in the garden of my stone cottage. But the bees had long deserted the pear tree. No one had cared for it and it had died, leaving only the wood in the form of a tree.

And I would be sitting on my bench hoping that somewhere inside the tree was a living core that wouldn't have died, and I can't say why, because it is too much for anyone to read, and I can only let it echo out in a small closed corner of my being.

And the wind and rain would have melted away the cement because it was not well made, and one by one the stones had fallen down, until there were almost more in the rubble than in the wall.

And I realised that my garden had stopped being a place where I felt content, and had become a testament to illusions that I could not make real: that I can be worth loving, worth cherishing and that there is any place in my life where the sun will shine.

But I know too that other nights I will have other dreams, and in some, she will remember my voice as she is walking out of the lychgate, and want to hear it just once more, and turn, and as we talk, she will nourish the tree that needs only enough care to keep itself alive -- because pear trees are hardy -- and she will forget that there even are wind and rain to pull down the walls of the gardens we build to hold our dreams in, and we will sit together drinking still lemonade on a glorious day, the last of summer, and our lives will not lack anything because we are here.

Stories

2009-08-26T22:46:00.003+10:00

So I'm in the taxi, and the driver is saying his mate used to be in the SAS and now he has a job as a cleaner. But they also consult him on security.

Because obviously that's what you do. When you want to consider security, you ask the office cleaner for his views.

So this afternoon, there's a knock at the door and I go, and it's an old friend of Mrs Zen's, although I have to say I didn't realise that until she said who she was.

So she is having marriage problems and she wants to know whether she can stay or does Mrs Z know of anywhere she could stay. So obviously I'm all sorry to hear about your marriage, and thinking oh fuck. So she's saying yes, he's a very bad man. He has abused her some, and is aggressive and mean to her, but is nice as pie in front of the children and outsiders.

That's a bit odd, because I think if you are angry with someone it's not just cunning, but somewhat sociopathic to bottle it up until there's no one else around.

So she says he had girlfriends and he's into drugs. And here's the thing, he's connected with bike gangs, and she's afraid he will get bikers to kill her.

I am beginning to wonder whether the stress of a bad breakup may not have disturbed this woman's equilibrium, if you know what I mean.

And I think you do.

So I ask her in and it's all very sad. I want to help but I want to be helpful, not just nod and go oh dear.

The police are surveilling him, she is saying.

Oh, I say.

Yeah, they are going to trap him, and when that happens I can get the kids.

Why don't you have the kids now? You are the mother. The court would give you them.

Court? They don't talk to me. My daughter thinks I'm psychotic.

I am thinking that perhaps having her to stay might be problematic in some ways.

So you've seen the police? I say, thinking that if she had seen them, she might contact them. I am beginning to think that possibly there is more than meets the eye.

Well, okay, obviously there's more than meets the eye, but I am thinking that perhaps she has something to fear from the police herself.

So she says she has been hiding, in Melbourne and Sydney, but now she had come to Brisbane because it's the last place he would think she would be. She is utterly convinced that he will hurt her if he can.

And the police have been following her in each place. How do you know it was the police? I say.

You wouldn't understand, she says, you're a man. A woman would get it. It's intuition. A feeling.

My feeling is that she is entirely bonkers. I don't like to be judgemental but she continues to tell me that she put a keylogger on his computer. And a virus. And then had someone retrieve deleted files.

But she doesn't know whether they have evidence of the girlfriends she believed he had or of his drug dealing, because the hard disk is at her parents', where she can't go, but she knows it's there because she felt the computer guy was being shifty.

So the plan is to stay in hiding until the police arrest her husband. I ask her how long she would be doing this before giving up. She doesn't know. Six months? I say hopefully. She doesn't say anything.

So, I say, look, I'm not making a judgement but have you considered the possibility that because you have a stressful situation with your husband, you really really want the police to sort it out for you.

You're saying I'm paranoid, aren't you? she says.

No, I say, I'm not saying anything. I'm saying you have a bad situation and of course you need to resolve it. But sometimes people feel they cannot resolve situations on their own. They turn to external sources. Some turn to God. So maybe you really needed the police? And of course I mean that she may have invented the police who she believes are gathering evidence on her old man and will haul him off when they have whatever they are trying to get. She has no idea, it seems. Just drugs. (Which is weird; she never names a drug. She says she thinks he's addicted to something but doesn't even take a stab at what. See, this is what distinguishes the truth from a story: it's the detail that is not constucted. If someone is really doing drugs, you likely know which ones. If not which particular drug then the type. But when you have a story in which the addiction is incidental, there is no particular drug. He's just addicted to something.)

They're there, she says.

Yes, but how do you know?

It's intuition. You men don't understand.

I understand you have a bad situation, I say, and whatever the truth of the whole drug thing, you have to resolve that. You need to get your children back.

But, you know, I'm being all sensible and practical, which is fucking annoying for her because she just wants someone to go you poor thing.

She weeps a little. I am strongly convinced she is a nut, but I am thinking she doesn't need to have been a nut before her breakup. So when I'm asking her whether there's anything she could think that she would find difficult in a family court, I'm asking whether she has been on medication or whatever. She pretends not to understand what I mean.

And I worry some that it is reasonable to believe that her story is entirely correct (and there was more, including her feeling that an interstate biker network was hunting for her, an unexplained inability to go to her parents' house, her knowledge that people were coming and going from her house on drug business without her ever actually seeing even one of them, and ditto girlfriends) so maybe I should have just done that.

But I'm a writer, fuck it, at heart anyway, so I want to know the story.

And the taxi driver is telling me that the Spanish flu, he's read a lot about it, and people who died of it were mostly malnourished. But I read the other day that it killed the most healthy because it created a cytokine storm -- in which your immune cells overreact to a reaction and are overproduced and destroy your own healthy cells. He will have none of that bullshit. He has read several books.

I've only read this and that, so I drop it, and we chat contentedly about the role of sickness in winning wars, and he is very content to have an informed yet willing to listen rather than talk audience, which I am, and I'm able to half-listen and make the occasional encouraging comment or question, while the quiet streets of our suburbs roll past me.

Most -- I'd say all, but I think I can remember one or two who didn't -- taxi drivers will talk here. An older guy tells me about his son's urging him to get a reverse mortgage, so that he have a comfortable retirement. Yeah, I say, better to enjoy it now. But he wanders into a financial wasteland of chat and i'm able to tune him out because I know finance and I can be pretty sure of the map ahead.

The shy Indian guy tells me he lives in Aspley. That's odd, I say, because there's a ton of Indians on the southside and not so much in the north. So he laughs some because I mention Sunnybank, where there are a lot of Indians, and Chinese too. So much so that I'd doubt Sunnybank is majority white. But in Mansfield there are a lot of southern Indians and Sri Lankans. The southern Indians are mainly Christian, as far as I know.

There are no Christian Indians in Aspley, he tells me in a way that makes Aspley sound much more like the North-West Frontier than it in fact is.

He is telling me about his village. Five thousand people and he knew them all. Here he knows no one at all. He is sad about it.

About A

2009-08-25T23:42:00.003+10:00

You know how some people just toil away in your life? They love you and they give and you rarely get the chance to give back (or if you give back, you don't really realise you are doing it). Being a parent mostly puts you in that role, but we all (I hope it's all of us) have people who work to make us happy, without show or fuss, they just do it. You hope that your partner will be one of them, but they aren't always, and I think in that case you appreciate even more those who are there for you.

Which is a long way round saying that I wanted to make a note of appreciation for A, who has been there for me, despite having more than enough in her own life to concern her, and has given me far more than she has ever had in return.

I have never met, and probably will never meet, A in the flesh, but it's a sign of our times and how we live that she is as good a friend as I've had in this life. I would never willingly let her go.

And how did that happen? Well, you know the good thing about A? There are no fullstops for her. She has made no conclusions and doesn't count anything out. I don't think she actually realises that is true about her, but it is. Some of us can be content because we will settle in one place or another. But some of us find it harder, because we are always wondering what else there could be, what could change, how we could more readily have what we feel we need.

You can't not like someone who has not closed the book.

As for me, I have been wearing contact lenses. I have to say, I have been feeling somewhat fresher for it.

You know, you have to smoke weed to ever get to a place where you'd post this, but you know what? It actually does you good.

Pearshaped

2009-08-20T15:22:00.004+10:00

Something crazy and I don't know whether it is good or bad, but it's different happened, and there's a scent of pears in the air.

It will end in tears, I know, but still they could be tears of joy. What else is worth pursuing in this world? I have never found anything I wanted more than to love and be loved. The rest is hollow and joyless, but if I have smiles and kisses, I have gold. That's what I believe, and if you believe it too, you are a friend of mine, and so long as that is what we are trying to achieve for each other, how can we go wrong?

Well, we can go wrong, I know. We can hurt each other and others, and few of us at heart want that. But I believe that a good heart counts. I can't surrender that belief, and I can't surrender my belief that love is all, and that whatever we do to increase each other's happiness, if it is done out of our common affection, cannot be judged amiss in any tribunal.

Nothing whole

2009-08-17T22:42:00.004+10:00

I am scared about going home because everything turns to shit. Well, not everything. Some things are shit to start with.

I am scared that my life is broken beyond fixing, and even more scared that one day I'll just take leave of my senses. And scareder still that I never will.

I have lost any ability to think of myself as someone who even has a life. It is just something that happens to me. Nothing good happens to me. Anything that seems like it will be good is quickly burned. I know, I do most of the burning, but I seem to be living in a world that is full of forgiveness, but none for me. Every mistep leads to more.

I feel lost without any signpost. I am scared that even going home will be entering perdition.

I am so lonely. I feel like I was abandoned on this planet and that somewhere there must be people who recognise in me a kindred spirit, but if there are, they've never found me. I find I am cursed like Cassandra. I can understand everything, but I can't do anything about it. I could resolve your life easily (but you wouldn't listen -- that's Cassandra's lot) but mine? It doesn't seem to have anywhere left to go. I have spent years turning inwards, becoming less and less, smaller and smaller. I barely have anything left that I trust. It's no wonder that no one wants me: I don't really exist -- just a whiff of smoke and an idea that there has been someone there, but nothing substantial, nothing whole.

A night at the football

2009-08-16T23:09:00.003+10:00

So we're in the Aussie Nash before the game, and C is saying that the only drug he does regularly is this one, and he points at his beer.

Because he likes to do this weird thing that reminds me of those ultra-portentous American docos, where facts are not permitted to seem humble, but must be dressed up with increased drama.

And I say, no man, you are what, thirty...
Thirty-three, he says.
So you should be doing hookers and blow, I say. And Chinese girls.

Because I have yellow fever and I'm pretty sure C does too. I mean, who doesn't though?

Isn't coke really dangerous and addictive though? he is saying, which is a bit wtf, because you don't do serious research before doing coke. You just do it if you can get it.

Well yeah, I say. I guess feeling really fucking good about yourself could be addictive, but I don't see how it's dangerous.

Well, I say. You could burn out your nose.

I ask the barmaid for two schooners of heavy. Heavy is bitter. But not bitter in the way English bitter is bitter. It's odd though, when I first went to the pub, bitter is what you drank. I mean, if you said beer, you meant bitter beer. Now lager has crushed bitter. It is better out of a can. If I had to guess the reason it won, that would be in the mix. And it is light.

She gives me a look that you would consider saucy if you were not me, which you're not, so you may. But I figure this is just what barmaids do, right? They make you feel you are attractive as part of their shtick. They are told to smile and when they are not rushed off their feet, they remember to do what they are told.

So we are drinking heavy and talking about shit. I don't talk about the thing I want to talk about, because I can't talk about it with him. He would only say something incomprehensible and possibly stupid. I don't hold it against him but he's not someone I'd bother talking to about anything that was troubling me.

Nor though is M, who I went to the football with. I mean, I'd go blah and blah, and he'd just not seem all that interested, because that's his demeanour. And what would be the point anyway? I would not feel unburdened and he would feel obliged to express his opinion, perhaps. And to be honest, I don't care what anyone thinks.

So why say I want to talk about it? Because I am vain. And I have a tiresome desire to express what has meaning for me.

So I have to tell you that Australian Rules football is incomprehensible and does not have enough nuance for someone brought up on real football. The best thing about it is that there are men in bright yellow kit whose job is to chase the players around the park, haranguing them as instructed by their coach.

And I now know what malt is. If you already know, look away for this paragraph. So you let barley sprout and then kill the sprouts by applying heat. It's one of those things you can imagine the accident that led to its discovery.

And I know -- I mean, I knew before, but this made it something I viscerally know -- why Australia is so grimly determined to succeed in sports. The twins had their sports day. It was horrible. They made the kids run sprints (which were far too long for them at a hundred metres -- terribly discouraging for Naughtyman, who is not very strong in the legs and has therapy for it) with heats and finals. So the kids do not understand that winning and losing is not a reflection on you, but on what you consist of. S, a girl in Zenita's class, is much bigger than Zenita, and nearly a year older, so she can run considerably faster. I try to explain to them that you cannot choose how fast you can run. You can only choose to do your best. Or not. This proceeded for a couple of hours. I'm not kidding: I sat for two hours on an increasingly hot day (28C in the middle of winter -- I'm not shitting you, it felt every degree of that) watching children get humiliated, and so did my kids.

England is better. We had fun sports days when I was a primary schoolkid. The events were designed to level physical advantages and disadvantages. The fast would be paired with the slow in the threelegged; the balancing act in egg and spoon prizes rapid grasp of technique over footspeed; and the sack race needs a skill that you do not often use, so it can be something of a lottery who turns out to be good at it. Everyone got to do all of them. But a lot of Australian culture, using the term widely, is powered by humiliation and the desire to avoid it. Fear is the most reliable motivator here. As I am watching the football, it occurs to me that the roles are very simply defined in Aussie Rules, and players are ultimately judged by how often they fail to do the simple things they are asked to do, rather than how often they succeed. But this may be because I don't understand the significance of the statistics used to measure success game by game.

I now also know that it is less easy to convince someone to do something they want to do than to do something they don't. Doing what you don't want to feels noble, but doing what you want feels indulgent. At least, that's how it feels to me, and I imagine that I'm human too.

More about rulesetting

2009-08-15T13:09:00.002+10:00

I often think about the connected questions of why I should be good and how I can know what is or isn't good. Unbelievers are often challenged by those who have easy moral codes (although those codes sometimes strike us as the source of wrong action). They say, how can you not have rules? How can you teach your children right from wrong? But of course I do have rules of a sort (I believe strongly in the need for rules, as it happens, which should not surprise those who know I earn my living by applying rules to others' work).

This is what I wrote about rules in writing:

In my profession, the rules are essential. My knowledge of them is what I live on. My ability to employ words that obey them is what allows me to say I can write (by which I do not, as some seem to think, mean to say merely that I know how to put words on paper but that I am confident they are the right words – or at least properly chosen out of the words that can be right). The rules are not, though, the straitjacket that (mostly unskilled) wouldbes like to make out. They are the natural consequence of the desire to communicate – guidelines in a concrete sense. I sometimes use the metaphor that they are the road language drives along, not the speed limit or the prohibition against drunkenness. Of course the road is sometimes poorly signposted. You don’t always know where you’re going.

But you should be able to tell when you’re driving on the grass.

I think life works the same way. I could equally have said that in life, the rules are essential. We need to have them to create order from lives that are sometimes chaotic and confusing. Our ability to use them (and understand their provenance, which is a step sadly missing in most people's understanding of morality) is what allows us to live lives that work. (I am not saying though that we need them imposed from above, or that we need them prima facie in any sense, although I am not arrogant enough to believe that the best approach is to disregard others' wisdom and just make it up as I go along: I had a sunday school education, and my moral code, such as it is, is basically Christian, and I believe the ethos expressed in the New Testament by Jesus -- and not the horrid, womanhating bullshit mysticism of St Paul, designed to enslave us, not free us -- is powerful and useful.) They are not the straitjacket that some (many, sadly) like to make them. They are the natural consequence of the desire to live with each other. I see them as guidelines, rather than laws, that help you navigate life, rather than imposing ways of living on you.
You cannot always obey the "rules" you set yourself, or accept for yourself, whichever you have done. But they are not meant to be rods to break our backs on -- and those who think they are, who serve gods who demand that you break yourself in an extended moral trial, are deserving of pity, not admiration. (And those who use them as cudgels deserve nothing more than contempt, as I mentioned here.)

Of course, it isn't even easy. Even people who lead dull lives, such as me, are confronted sometimes by difficult choices. Sometimes, those choices would be made much easier by having a code to refer to (and the desire for regulation of your life is strong in many Muslims' lives, for instance, although I believe that is born more out of a desire not to offend their (extremely easily offended) god than a need to live an untroubled life). And deciding whether the outcomes of our choices even are good or bad can be difficult, because not only can we not see the future but we cannot make others behave in ways we want -- and our outcomes are never in our hands alone. But is easier better? I think back a few years, when I drove far into the grass (away from any recognisable road, let's be honest) with S. By any moral standard, what I did was wrong. We were both married, after all, with all that entails.

But what I did was right. It cannot be wrong to rescue yourself from bitter unhappiness if you think you see the chance. I cannot believe it can be.

Was I doing wrong to Mrs Zen? Well, she thinks I was, and of course I see the merit in her belief. She believed I had a contract with her that precluded consorting with other women -- and of course I believe I did too (although it should be noted that contract law has an understanding that contracts should not necessarily be enforced when they are entirely detrimental to the contracting parties, nor should they be considered binding if they are made under duress). I also believe though that this is a contract that is renewed all the time -- one that is refreshed by our continued desire to hold to it, and diminished by failures on both sides to uphold it. I made promises (and I don't take promises lightly, because I strongly believe they are central to living in societies that require trust to operate, as any human society does, ultimately), but I did not vow to accept hurt for someone else's ideal. And I didn't promise that nothing would change no matter how shit things became. What would be the use in that? I don't see any value in the promise itself: only in its outcomes.

That, for me, is the central idea in rulesetting. The rules are not valuable in themselves: their worth lies entirely in their ability to allow you to create good in this life (just as the rules of English are entirely meaningless in the abstract, but exist only to make communication work well). Would applying a law to my life have helped me with difficult choices? No. It would have served as a way not even to think about them. I could have just not gone there, patted myself on the back for my moral uprightness and I don't know what would have happened, but I can't think that it would have brought me much happiness.

Nor would I have felt particularly that I had done a moral act. Quite the opposite, because all I would have achieved is to avoid acting morally or otherwise by abdicating my responsibility for choosing. All I would have gained from it would be to increase my unhappiness. Perhaps it would have increased Mrs Zen's some, but I can't really see how: is it really better to have a faithful, deeply unhappy husband or a less faithful but more content one? Are we really all about one single facet of ourselves, or are we composites?

Well, we are what we are, and that is fallible, precious beings who cannot hope to get everything right, and can only hope that what we choose will be better than the alternatives, and, so long as we choose as best we can, who can judge us for that but ourselves, by our own lights?

Bitter

2009-08-14T15:09:00.004+10:00

Some things are just crushing in this life, and they are nearly always things that others choose for me, rather than what I choose. Indeed, I rarely get to choose to have what I want, when it really matters. Others get to choose that, and for whatever reason, that has rarely been good for me.

So I have been disappointed and the monkey is dancing in his cage. He knows why it hurts. I am not enough.

I was not enough of a son for my dad to want to make sacrifices for me when I was a kid; not enough of a boyfriend for the women I loved not to chuck me when it became difficult; not enough of a husband to be worth cherishing; not enough of a friend to be worth keeping; not enough of a lover to want to, well, whatever lovers are supposed to do when they are star crossed.

My whole life is a long series of lessons in not being enough for the people in my life. I want to be wonderful, inspiring. I guess we all do. We all feel we are special.

But I am always disappointing, leaden where you hope I'll be gold, a seeming bad bet that no one wants to roll the dice on.

And I don't blame them. I am not worth gambling on. I've never gambled on myself, so why would anyone else bother? I can rationalise it all I like, that I have a side that wants me to fail, that undermines me, but the truth is, I am just a leaden, dull person and I am having what that brings you. I thought the wrong, the foolish part of me was the monkey, but really, the fool is the deluded clown who sees gold in a core that is empty, bitter and cold.