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

workers unite - lets garden!

Channel surfing as a kid I'd often stick between stations and watch static like that girl from poltergeist but instead of seeing the ghosts or whatever I imagined the antenna was picking up TV shows from Soviet Russia. I would swear to you that I could see shots of farmers ploughing wide fields extolling their virtue through manual labour and while most likely the combination of sensory deprivation and an overactive yet geopolitically attuned imagination, I'd convinced myself that a chain of extraordinary events, a pigeon shitting on our aerial perhaps, a freakish meteorological electrical storm or some frighteningly superior soviet transmitting technology had allowed my family to watch, grainy and without sound albeit, a Communist gardening show from the far flung USSR.

acid tears

I've been seriously thinking of trashing this blog, deleting it. I had contemplated it. Put plans together and thought about what would be my farewell speech etcetera but here it stands and I am still trying to force blood from stone. Well things have been pretty dark of late; I'd be hard pressed to deny it. I've been self medicating, drinking mainly to feel normal and hell I even turned up the other week to a doctor's appointment drunk. And then there's been the mood swings and fits of uncontrollable crying while reading, watching tv, holding back tears while in queue at the checkout, dread and panic at the thought of leaving the house and then the same fears about returning there.

I took an e on the weekend, sunday night, new years eve and then I took another one a few hours later. Sure I make no sense, I babble, make noise just to fill the spaces but I feel alright yeah, well to do and well adjusted... relatively of course, the special kind. The electrical storm dissipates leaving the quiet, the oh so quiet that I can hear the old man in the room next playing solitaire. Well that and the screaming vocals of Martin Sorrondeguy from Limp Wrist, the queercore band I was seeing at the Arthouse with friends Josh and Richard. I can say of all the drugs I've ever tried MDMA has been my favourite. Yes most certainly.

Now cut to the morning, 7am as I am walking home from the house party Josh and I had ended up at after the gig having left Richard at the Arthouse. The evening had had a very high school feel to it, live music followed by a party at someone-or-other's house, beer and at least one stupid fuck on drugs (me for the less perceptive of you). There was chatting and flirting and confessions all around and neighbours banging on the fence telling us to shut the fuck up and yes again, I am walking home, still buzzing, left by the others zooming off in their cabs to the other sides of town, when my left eye began to cry. I stopped in the street as it began to burn: my tears were burning my eye, squinting, rubbing my eye with my sleave wiping it hoping the tears would stop. A sign perhaps. Of what? I don't know. Difficult things these signs and portents.

I went to the doctor yesterday. The results of a breakdown of sorts and an intervention staged by a good friend who'd been there on the phone when it'd happened. After a forty or so minute session with the shrink I was prescribed a drug known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of antidepressants that increase the available serotonin levels in the brain or something and funnily enough is chemically similar to MDMA, my bestest buddy e.

hobby

When I was a child I used to play with model trains. I remember fondly building railway stations out of lego and placing the little lego men and women on the platform to await their dreary nine-to-fives that approached with every tic-toc. I would set time-tables and interconnecting train and bus services and build customer service desks and little franchised coffee stands that sold overpriced lattes (50 cents extra for soy). Then there would be delays and cancellations that made these unhappy little passengers miss their connections and I would have to make the following announcements that would always come too late to be any use to anyone, raising tempers and blood pressures but I would always be apologetic, yes and understanding without accepting fault or liability.

tirade of self flagellation

I saw a woman on my way back from lunch today finishing off my last handroll from that sushi bar just around the corner from the Winsor Hotel. She was maybe Papuan, western pacific and walked with this haphazard gait from underneath her denim skirt almost touching the ground. A walk that suggested some sort of deformity or injury, perhaps polio paralysis or some other preventable disease of the third world that I suppose I should feel more passionate or at least more informed about. As I past her in the street I couldn't help seeing myself through her eyes or at least my objectified sense of how I thought she should see me or maybe more correctly projecting my own white guilt and self loathing onto another person based on poorly informed racial stereotyping. Geez!! This all makes me dizzy.

What a stupid world we live in where one of the leading causes of death in this country is obesity and its various related illnesses. When access to a nutritious diet, clean drinking water and adequate healthcare is no longer a problem we find disease and death in plenty. Just to walk around, just for a second, and see through the eyes of someone else and look upon the absurdity of it all.

Well that feels a little better. Thank you for humouring me in this little tirade of self flagellation I hope I haven't offended too many of you.

cigarettes

I started smoking the other week frustrated at a particularly awful day at work, it seemed like a good thing to do satisfied that what I was doing was slowly killing me. All very noir. Smoking a lazy three cigarettes a day I was on my second pack - Marlborough Lights with a ghastly grin of someone with mouth cancer, ulcerated and teeth a rotting green-yellow- until I was forced to stop. I had been revelling in displaying the pack to work colleagues, holding the pack centremetres from my ear, smiling wide showing my teeth in comparison. At lunch I caught up with a group of fellow smokers, conscious of their siege-like comradery that I was hoping to be part of when I was told by the heaviest and most nicotined stained smoker of them all "You do know you're not even doing it right. Smoking, I mean you're not even breathing it in."

I was heart-broken, publicly humiliated before my peers as a hack, an interloper. Running, almost in tears, back to the office I left the pack in the top drawer of my desk with the remaining cigarettes unsmoked.

Fuck-em I say and today I joined the gym.

melbourne sunset

The view from my window at work this evening 31 floors up. I just thought I like to share.

Even when things are getting pretty dark there is still something to be thankful for.

How I closed my eyes and prayed to Jesus

It's hard being a christian in this day and age after living under such darwinian oppression for hundreds of years or so I can understand why they feel they need to stay in the closet, why the Family First website doesn't mention jesus even once, even when their policies are directly informed by faith. Oh I mean every christian has their coming out story: to their friends, their family and work colleagues, having to watch their faces drop in shock and horror. I can relate, I truely can. I understand why they need euphemisms like "family" this and "family" that instead of "the bible says" this and "God smote" that and why they need to lie in order to hide their shame: their faith and their business interests.

Seriously. They talk about the hidden Green agenda but how can you take a Party seriously that pretends it's secular when they're all basking in the light of jesus? How can you trust a party who talk about defending families but have such the narrow definition of what a family is that unless you're the family member of some director of a large corporation you can bite their shiney monetarianist asses[sic]?

this state election sure is hotting up

Leaving my house this morning on my way to work I discovered my letter box open and a letter from my state ALP member torn up and strewn across my front lawn. Now a quick glance aside I could see several neighbours' boxes also thus open... hmmm I wondered: stupid kids fucking with peoples' mail or a concerted anti-labour putsch?

snatched conversation

I love overhearing little snippets of conversation. For example, today I was walking past the two dollar shop in Barkly Square, Brunswick when this rather upstanding gent, holding two champaign flutes in one hand and another just above his eye level in his other hand, examining so as to catch the light, said "Query," addressing the store clerk in his very best aristocratic British accent, "do these come any stubbier?"

the definition of a bureaucrat

bureaucrats are "...men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired."

Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan. p. 56

mushroom cloud over chadstone

I went out with a few friends after work on Friday. We'd had dinner and finally ended up, two friends - Adrian and Cam - and I in Black Opal (a TAB joint in the city) playing a card game called cheat with a deck we'd won in some Heineken promotion; Adrian I've know since high school, some fifteen years now and Cam, well is someone I sort of attached myself to last year at the Meredith Music festival and suffice to say they come from opposite poles of my social circle. But it worked and I had and hope they had a fabulous time sharing stories from our various pasts between the devious ploys and counter ploys of a game that I am proud to say I won: where we had grown up, the shopping centres we had hung out. For Adrian and I it was Chadstone Shopping Centre and for Cam some complex in Doncaster.

* * * * * *

I was in the old stomping ground today, just driving through with my mum in the car on the way to Forster Road and the south-eastern freeway onramp. We were on our way to see Rachmaninov Vespers being performed by the Melbourne Chorale at Hamer Hall - her birthday present. We'd passed the 7-11 convenience store that Adrian and I had loitered outside on various summer evenings, the creek where we drank and smoked weed and the stormwater drain where these girls from our clique had graffitied some warning about a nymph of the sacred spring who slumbered there. I laughed as we drove past it telling my mum the story who in turn changed the topic. I don't think she was very impressed by this disclosure but then I suppose there are a lot of things about my life she doesn't know about, then and now and sometimes we're better for it.

It's been a big day. I was woken my the phone around half past nine.
"... an emergency. Your sister has gotten herself into a little bit of trouble," my mum said down the copper line.
"Say what!?!" I exclaimed finally waking up, wedging myself up on an elbow to give the conversation fuller attention. I'd gone out on Saturday night all by my lonesome to the Peel in some pathetic attempt to pick up and although I'd plucked up enough courage to eventually talk to this one guy, some accountant who worked for KPMG I could tell he wasn't in for anything more involved than a non-committal chat so I cut my loses and left.

"Your sister had a big night last night, a few too many glasses of wine," she said. "We need to go down and pick her up and that University car that needs to be returned today. I'll need you to drive my car home." My sister had been down at Phillip Island doing research for her PhD when somebody had tipped her glass one too many times and now she was apparently vomiting in a public toilet in San Remo.
"What about the concert this afternoon? By the time I get to your house it'll be midday; you think we'll have enough time?" As far as I was concerned she'd done the drinking and she could get herself out of it. It was all part and parcel of a hangover but my mum was insisting on being far more reasonable.
"I know, I know, look if we have to miss it, we have to miss it," as if repeating everything she said would some how sooth my rising irritation.
"Okay, I'll be around as soon as I can."

* * * * * *

We'd driven over 200 kilometres by the time my mum and I managed to take our seats B27 and B28 in Hamer Hall, oh so close to the front of the stage. The lights dimmed and the Melbourne Chorale walked on and for the next two hours we listened to the works of two Russian composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet era composer who had gone in and out of Stalin's favour and Sergei Rachmaninov who had been writing chorale works for the Russian Orthodox church in the 19th Century. The Vespers by Rachmaninov were by far my favourite, truely beautiful, my mum later told me she had to fight back tears and while I can't claim such I did feel a chill down the spine. It goes to show I suppose that no matter how much power Stalin might have wielded he could never have inspired the kind of transcendence that faith in God brought out in Rachmaninov.

* * * * * *

I had a dream after the night out with Adrian and Cam. I was in the car with friends, old friends, driving through the old neighbourhood down Warrigal Road on our way to Chadstone Shopping Centre. I looked out of the window only to see a brilliant flash of light and a ball of flame barrel upwards into the atmosphere: the CBD below a roaring inferno. While I can't say why my friends couldn't see the explosion I nevertheless had to go crazy yelling at them to find a safe place. Acting on this the driver turned the steering wheel sharply and swung the car and us into the shadow of Chadstone Shopping Complex. We were safe.

* * * * * *

On the drive home from the city as the sky grew dark and the fat moon sat on the horizon, I told my mum that I was gay. I was shaking and could feel my stomach drop even though I had an inkling of what she was going to say.
"I kind of guessed that but I am glad you told me." She said but continued: "I don't claim to understand what homosexuality is all about but I am fine with who you are."

* * * * * *

I've been dreaming about the end of the world on and off for about six or seven years now, beginning just prior to the click over of the millennia and keeping me entertained since then. Sometimes I think they are more than some sci-fi obsession gone wrong but are actually building up to something. Oh... I don't mean in any kind of prophetic sense but a more internal, spiritual one. Because the apocalypse isn't about the end of the world so much as it is quite literally the revelation of a truth so profound that the world has no other choice than to undergo some fundamental change. And so I truly hope this one comes for the better.

my settler hat

I own a hat- yes I do - and I call it my settler hat, it's black felt and moderately brimmed curling all the way round and while not quite a fedora and more like a homburg I picture this hat on a dusty and probably illiterate Irishman staring back at me through the sepia toned photo-graph all the way from the 19th century- ay. It is thus my settler hat.

I was in diva bar last Friday waiting far too long for a friend to arrive throwing back a vodka and lemon- my second- listening to this awful pop fodder while watching some pretty somebody shake his sinuey shirtless torso to some top 20.... ah. Leaving my glass at the bar I pass my dancer friend on the dancefloor. "Say are you jewish?" Pointing to the hat.
"No, are you?" I asked, not being the first time someone has said shalom to me in a gay bar.
"Yes I am," he says taking me a little by surprise.
Hmmm. "Are you a practicing jew?" I ask. "Like are you going to synagogue tomorrow?"
"My parents bought be a property in Balaclava, if that's what you mean?" He giggled.

walk the line (of control)

I fell asleep last night reading Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, the book shutting, eyes shutting closed just as I finished the chapter on Kashmir and Jammu. And this is what I dreamt:

Surrounded by the sublime beauty of the himilayan footfalls I sling my rifle on my shoulder surveying the vast green land beneath. I am on duty, a Kashmiri dreaming the dream of an independent state not torn apart by foreign powers with their foreign motives and objectives, fighting with foreign weapons. As I enjoy the autumn sunshine in this reverie I am punctured through my woollen tunic, my phiren by maybe two or three or four bullets, one entering through my neck; there was red and then an overexposed white that bleached the land and the sky leaving only the man, the interloper that shot me; maybe he is Jaish-e-Mohammed or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen or some such but as I spit blood trying to breath I use my leeched strength to prop up my Kalish, aim and pull the trigger watching the bastard crumple, my weapon flashing without sound....

... and then I woke in such a state that I was convinced I was still breathing through the hole in my neck that’d been pierced through by a 39mm shell.

... a friend at work said she thought I dreamt a past life and well I suppose this is a comforting thought when maybe that this is all coming from anywhere but inside my head.

wrong side of the bed

Jolted awake by a mobile phone alarm that'd been thrown to the opposite end of the room the night before as I've the tendency to switch my alarms off in my sleep. It occurred to me early on that if I was ever to get to work/school on time the clock needed to be a good many feet away to make any such attempt by my sleeping otherself foolhardy. Now with my decaying wooden single bed placed up against the room's whitewashed brick wall I threw myself out of bed and like a stunned blackbird who'd flown into a glass window I fell back almost unconscious. Rubbing my head I laughed to myself as I had quite literally got out of the wrong side of the bed.

these red eyes - the mothman prophesies

I just re-watched Mark Pellington's The Mothman Prophesies starring Richard Gere and the beautiful Laura Linney and although it plays out like a made for TV adaptation of some article found in an almanac of the uncanny, I really dug it. It's a dark film that uses its lighting and soundtrack carefully so as to never really give you the mothman itself, a plus for someone who is tired of hollywood's tendency to overbudget and show everything when what we are really scared of is not the monster itself but a fear of the unknown that it represents, the irrational, the pale face at the window: death my friends, the undiscovered country (thank you mr spock). Although you gain a few brief glimpses of the mothman (or Indrid Cold) blurred or bleached out in overexposure, its nature, its intent are left dangerously outside our knowing.

Based on true events, or more correctly based very loosely on a book based on a series sightings of strange winged man/creature in areas surrounding Point Pleasant and Charleston in West Virginia between November 1966 and December 1967 culminating in the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River killing 46 people. After the disaster the occurrance of sighting began to drop off and the film claims that this entity is somehow tapped into and attracted to death and references are made to other sightings through out the world including eyewitness reports of such a creature being sighted just prior to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Now after doing a little research on the topic I stumbled on something a little unexpected, something that to my knowledge has not been widely reported in the media and I suppose not surprisingly. The photo besides was taken by NY resident Steven Moran on 11 September 2001 and appears to show a large winged creature flying near the smoke and debris of what were once the Twin towers. Now according to Wikipedia the photo has not to date been discredited or shown to be manipulation or fake and so I am left feeling, well.. what the ...? Now according to mothman.us there were reports of non military aircraft in the area in the minutes just after the attacks, a few mentioned "winged, flying-men". Doing it conspiracy/x-files style these reports have been largely been ignored or not investigated by authorities.

Sights/sites

The Mothman Wikipedia

mothman.us

02.10.2006

So it's my birthday and I am 27, having spent the evening with friends, dinner at Lentil as Africa in Brunswick and not satisfied with my three beers (to their apple frusion and three coffees) I buy a longneck at the bottle-o on the walk home as I begin to see my slow slip into alcoholism with an austere sense of humour that maybe I'm carrying some sort of generational torch, some family tradition. I think to myself, only had I my i-pod to distract me, how surprised I was to find a birthday card in the letterbox from my brother and that I didn't even have a number to call and thank him, then I think of how my weekend date was just another notch to add to a failed love life and my job something that I can barely get out of bed for.

I went to the doctor the other week about my panic attacks and he suggested I see someone, talk about it, open up to a professional saying "You see," he told me "it's all existential. You don't have to do or be anywhere or anything you don't want to be. It's an illusion that we are trapped, it's only convention that keeps us here." You're wrong I thought, I am trapped. It's all in here.

Happy birthday g-man

a not so evil empire

On this day, 17 September 1859, one Joshua Abraham Norton then resident of the city of San Francisco proclaimed himself to be "Emperor of These United States," printed in the city's newspaper the Bulletin it was sign Emperor Norton I. In a further decree the following January Emperor Norton I, citing corruption and the disproportionate influence of various lobby groups disolved the Federal Congress.

Now some have called this man eccentric, others have labled him crazy or even schizophrenic, but this failed business man who when he died on 8 January 1880 with no more than a few dollars to his name, tens of thousands of mourners attended his funeral and the procession that followed his casket was more than two miles long.

Indeed the man had his own currency and would eat in gratis at businesses bearing plaques reading "By Appointment to his Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I of the United States." Even the City allowed Norton a degree of recognition when in the 1870 census Norton's occupation was stated as "Emperor" and the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco appropriated enough funds to purchase new royal vestments.

In 1867 a police officer Armand Barbier arrested Norton with the intention of having him committed causing a public outcry. The then police chief ordered him released, stating that Norton "had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line."

Indeed while on one of his "Royal Inspections" it is said that Norton actually put himself between anti-Chinese rioters and a group of Chinese. Apparently he bowed his head and began to recite the Lord's Prayer, with which the rioters shamed dispersed.

Crazy!

Read about him on Wikipedia from which this blog entry is sourced.

Wikipedia - Joshua Norton

having major panic attack or dying, not sure

Home safe now but you know public transport is a very scary place when in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Yes tonight has been truely awful. I am chilling out a little now but about an hour ago I thought I was going to die as I sat hunched over staring our the window of a bus, watching my breath condense and evaporate. I did the same in the tram and finally the train, doing my best to ignore the crazies all around me, those real and imagined.

It all started during my spanish lesson which my teacher offered to end an hour early as I was sounding unwell and having a lot of trouble concentrating on her set lesson and might I say that this is no small thing as it basically meant she was letting go of half her fee. Now we got to talking as we do and conversation quickly turned to my work and as I began to recount my day I promptly forgot to breathe.... disorientated I inhaled deeply, shaking and at that I explained that I had to leave stumbling to the door I said hasta luego.

I'm not going to die. This is all in my head. This is not a heart attack. I repeated my little mantra as I made my way to the bus stop, top heavy and very unsteady as my mind accellerated to light speed counting all the ways this could go, were those late night joggers over the road likely to know CPR, had I paid up on my ambulance membership and where was the nearest hospital? HElp, breathe, breathe!!! Alone at the bus stop waiting, waiting I looked at my mobile, who can I call? Who can help? Do I have enough credit? Will these be my last words? Breathe deeply and I settled on a text message. "Having major panic attack or dying, not sure," I wrote. Oh fuck!, what a dick head I am!, I thought and called him.

"What's wrong? Are you by yourself? Oh that's not good.... ummm... want to catch up over coffee tomorrow?"
That'd be nice I told him, I like to think he didn't understand the immediacy of my problem so I made my excuses and disconnected just as the bus pulled up. Now having a man sit a few seats behind you on an empty bus and sing and whistle loud to some sub-continental pop anthem might all sound funny to you but I was truely terrified. He kept this up a good ten minutes before I got off near the arts centre and while he held a pretty good tune my nerves were frayed... and all I could do was breathe deeply in and out again and again.

An hour later, unable to see a doctor in what was a vain attempt to acquire valium I was home and as I said breathing and calming down but still strung high as a fucking kite.