turn that frown upside your head

I keep forgetting to take my medication. It took me almost an entire episode of heroes, tears rolling down my cheek, to realise there was something wrong. Hey this really isn't all that heartbreaking I thought to myself and now I feel sick and I am nearly out pills, maybe a week left and I all I can do is pace this room, bouncing off all these ideas five or six at a time. So is this how it felt like before? I think this aloudly to myself as I remember I don't want to speak to a doctor about any of it and I really do wish people would stop pointing out my failings like I can't think of them on my own and so many more accelerating like some cyclotron throwing particules around a vacuum chamber.

I have a death wish maybe... I sometimes sit on the train to work imagining that I'm sitting opposite the next Sid riding the westbound Circle line as he stands up bag strapped to his back, just another number, what would it be? The Melbourne February 27 bombing, g-man body 2 or 3. Just a number, a body count where no one but the families remember the faces or the names, just the numbers as we compare, counting fingers in some macabre tally that death scratches in the dust: 52 is less than 190, which are both less than 2,974 in NY or 655,000 in Iraq.

When the end comes I sure hope I'm listening to something good on the i-pod... bopping along to "float on" by modest mouse, smile on my face as I am engulfed in flames with the last thing I hear "bad news comes don't you worry even when it lands/ good news will work its way to all them plans..." ... and we'll all float on OK.

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000, Washington Post October 11, 2006

g-man's valentines day message

To quote Phillip J. Fry "Oh crap! I forgot to get a girlfriend again," (correct that: boyfriend) and yet another lonesome Valentines Day to notch up on the belt. So how many has it been? Well to date... let me see, mumble, mumble *pencil scratching paper* ummm, carry the 5... I don't know maybe all of them... yes this day holds a special place in my heart to say the least and every year I like to prepare a little speech to commemorate this bubbly holiday of love.

I was chatting a while back with my spanish teacher on the topic of love and sex and the many things in between and this came up: "Crush? What is a crush?" I tried my best to explain, asking whether there was an equivalent concept in spanish. She seemed perplexed. To me there is a whole colour in the love spectrum dedicated to having a crush on someone; think of all the pathos and the tragedy of knowing... just knowing that they don't feel the same.

"No, I don't think there is a word for *crush* in spanish," stressing the word like one might hold soiled underwear: with as few fingers as possible. "Must be an Anglo Saxon thing," she said after a moment's consideration, laughing to herself.

Pobre de mi.

dark lord of the australian right

A fucking ceremony? A goddamn fucking ceremony? Yes well I have sensed a great disturbance in the force padawans, it's as if a thousand voices cried out in joy only to then be silenced. Our very own Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Attorney-Generalus Phillip Ruddock, deformed by dark side powers that flow through him like electricity flows through copper wire, dark black-red viscous electricity, has used his evil Federal powers to block this new hope, the ACT's The Civil Partnerships Bill, that had it become law would've provided same-sex couples in that territory (should they have chosen) with similar rights and recognition to that of heterosexual couples. But Ruddock refused it, he says on the basis that the law required a declaration be made before a notary and witness, placing it too close, he claims to the institution of a marriage. A "ceremony" that even its patron ACT Attorney General Simon Corbell described as similar to signing a statutory declaration in the presence of say a fucking pharmacist.1

Now in June last year Ruddock struck down the ACT's Civil Unions Act based on his belief that it would "likely undermine the institution of marriage." An institution that is defined by its role of bringing children into the world, he said. The territory has since been making changes hoped at passing it through without Federal government opposition, who have the constitutional power to remove territory statutes from the books. And well Ruddock wasn't satisfied.2

So what can I say? Marriage: based on its ability to pop out children? He makes it sound like some monstrous war machine for baby production. What about all those marriages, that despite their best of intentions cannot bear fruit? An old argument I know but why can't Ruddock just admit that the real reason he struck this and the Civil Unions Act down, is the same reason he introduced the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill, and refused Peter Kakucska a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage and that's all because he just doesn't like gay people. Yes that's right, he doesn't like gay people and any rights we have are concessions.3 Just fucking say it without all the hooha. I mean seriously how will gay people damage an institution that heterosexuals have managed to erode nicely on their own? It's a really stupid argument trying to make homophopia sound reasonable and I am tired of it. Just like I am tired of all those Christians still making that stupid pun about how it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, and then still finding it fucking funny.... seriously these people are allowed to breed?

Tomorrow the Melbourne City Community Services Committee is meeting to take a formal written submission and oral presentation from the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby about why the City of Melbourne should set up a relationship register that would allow gay couples to publicly declare their relationships. Deputy Lord Mayor and gay, Gary Singer said that while it would be largely symbolic undertaking it would nonetheless help couples by providing them with proof that they were actually in a relationship.4
Despite this being but a "largely symbolic" register a lot of groups particularly some conservative christian types are feeling threatened by it and have been voicing their consternation and the plan is actually in danger of falling on its arse.

So I think I'll go and if you or anyone you know wants to lend your support and fight the good fight then attend:

Date: Tuesday 13 February
Time: 7:30pm
Address: Melbourne City Council Meeting Room.
Access via Level 2, Town Hall Administration Building, 90 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Note: Requests to address the committee for 3 minutes must be made to Council Secretariat on 9658 9707 by midday on 13 Feb.

Props go to Richard for pointing this out.


Govt defends block to same sex marriage, The Age, January 18, 2006.

ACT gay marriage plan rejected again, The Age, February 6, 2007.

Clay Lucas, City to open register for same-sex couples, The Age, November 18, 2006.

Kenneth Nguyen, Ceremony not for gays, says Ruddock, The Age, February 8, 2007.

c is for computed tomography

I feel like I am looking at some prehistoric fossil dusted painstakenly from a badland plains.

What we are really looking at is my spine. My spine damaged. It is only slightly damaged and this is good. Good because it should get better soon.

While on the multilingual theme…

I went down to a Blairgowrie with some friends the other weekend. There we spent two nights drinking, chatting and relaxing. A friend Mick brought down of all things a Mandarin phrase book, with which he popped out bawdy come-ons and pillow-talk in Chinese. Now this got me thinking about a mandarin bi-lingual dictionary that I’d stolen some way back while I was at uni off a friend after some falling out. It was published in 1978, two years after Mao died and makes for some interesting reading. So I thought I would offer my own brief lesson in Chinese, communist and red-book waving.

fàngsōng: relax; slacken; loosen. We mustn’t slacken out efforts to remold our world outlook.

Despite not being able to drink (much) because of the medication I’m on and a minor spinal injury incurred while foolishly trying body surf at the Sorrento backbeach it was a good weekend.

liánjié: bind; tie; join. A common revolutionary goal has bound us closely together. The ties of friendship join the two peoples.

It was just the eight of us down having started at the Midsumma opening in Federation Square extending through Saturday into Sunday at Cam’s beach house. I suppose you could say it was a gay boy weekend away, free from the chains of heterosexual patriarchal oppression and the like and as you expect we approached it with shocking abandon playing party games such trivial pursuit and mastermind.

We’d been at the beach most of Saturday and back at camp, the evening began with the most expensive pizza and a game of “never ever”, a variation on the theme of “truth or dare,” which never wavered much from talk of sex despite Cam’s greatest efforts.

Oh and then there was the skinny-dipping.

qiáng zhì: force; compel; coerce. People cannot be compelled to accept one particular style of art or school of thought.

The weekend was part of Glen’s birthday celebrations and he’d been talking about swimming in the buff since Meredith, early December. Now I was not totally against the idea, some part of me wanted the experience. Maybe I wanted a bonding session which’d draw me closer to a group that I sorta feel a little on the outer and maybe there was also the rabid homosexual in me who was a little bit curious about my friend’s bits. Yes well and you see this is the problem. Glen tried to sell it as a liberating experience, that the intense sense of shame that I felt about my body would somehow be dissolved in the water, amongst the waves, naked and around a group of gay men, sizing me up, judging me…


luŏ: bare; naked; exposed; stark naked and undisguised.


I stood there without clothing, water lapping at my thighs, arms crossed. I didn’t feel particularly free. Why was no one talking to me? Was this all in my imagination? Their eyes averted? Were they trying to avoid seeing me all flabby, hairy and pale as frigid cadaver?

This is why I never felt nudism to be particularly revolutionary. Clothes are not what I need to shed, social expectations and the baggage I carry ain’t so easily hidden amongst the bracken by the shore.

Why couldn’t we do something really liberating like karaoke?

yĭncáng: hide; conceal; remain undercover. A bourgeois careerist hidden in the revolutionary ranks. A counterrevolutionary who has succeeded in staying hidden.

blairgowrie jetty

Taken Sunday January 21, 2007.

el fin de todo

Hay una teoría de eternidad y un tiempo cuando los planetas y las estrellas han muerto. No hay nada, no hay ninguna vida, ni coches, ni arboles, ni fieritas lindas. Aún los agujeros negros han desaparecido y los atomitos han olvidado su fuerza y se han ido, no hay más sustancia o energía y entonces el universo se queda oscuro. No importa que cuan inteligentes somos o cuanta tecnología asombrosa tenemos, como Yeats dijó, todas las cosas se caen a pedazos. Es la segunda ley de la termo dinámica que todo muere. Pero no parezcas tan preocupado, si va a pasar, no va a pasar en un tiempo largo. ¿Cuantas años? Quiero que pienses en el numero uno, después que le pongas atras cien ceros.

Sin embargo, en lo oscuro algo muy raro va a pasar. Sin frequencia, casi nunca, hay pequeñas fluctuaciones al azar del "vacio quantum" pero en billones de años que pase, es posible que algunas partículas aparecen talvez aún un nuevo atomo o dos.

No voy a fingir que lo entiendo pero los cientificos nos dicen que en las eras del vacio otras cosas podrían aparecer, objetos más complejos que unos atomos. Desde nada podrían venir una roca o un nuevo planeta brillante. Cuando se presente con tanto tiempo las posibilidades son interminables. Podríamos encontrar vida talvez aún unas personas que han existido antes en la historia de la tierra, como Elizabeth Cady Stanton o Kubla Khan, quienes podrían jugando dobles con Jesus y Muhamed Ali. Aunque ahora estoy siendo tonto, Katherine Freese, una física de la universidad de Michigan ha dicho "En el tiempo infinito, un día, yo podría reaparecer."



http://www.exitmundi.nl/eternity.htm