Leave you to it.

Give me a reason, a topic, a purpose, a knock about the head, or anything that will get me writing again.

While I'm on dancing all over the trivial...

Has anybody got any suggestions for music to go with Proust? Something backgroundy to cancel out the fascinatingly distracting sounds of the world going on outside.

Penny-novelish pettiness.

I have realised that to be passed over for a Lavender Davis is not so bad when it's a Christian Talbot doing the passing over.

I suddenly realised that the restless itchy feeling was the need to write. So I will.

Thirty-one, thirty-one!

For the first time in an age I have a song crush. I have played one song so often that I fear my neighbours may be getting out the pitchforks. The burning plastic smell may indicate that they decided to forego the pitchforks and the stake and go straight to the burning. Woe?

By now, really, reasonably, rightly I should be sick of it but I’m not. I have reverted to teenager type. I suspect that I shall shortly start doing weird things with incense, start colouring my hair with textas, write endless tedious and monumentally pretentious letters, and just generally moan about things. I really was a cool kid, yeah.

What you got is what you wanted. Alternately, so many different choices that you've got to make instead.

Is this the life I wanted? I feel stuck in default. Did I want the default? Should I have fought harder? Should I have set my mind to a vocation and a career and just gone for it? Yeah, the usual crap I’ve been going on about for years. Which reminds me, I read High Fidelity the other day. I’m changing the title to Me As A Man. My internal monologue checklist went tick tick tick and tick tock once or twice. There’s really nothing like fiction to hold a mirror up to one’s soul and have it spit back the broken glass of failure. Not just failure but holding off, holding back, keeping the options open and watching life slip away. I think the seven years bad luck is at an end.

Won’t you stop and remember me…?

I have, quite unashamedly, been enjoying the election. What fun. Despite a general consensus – sometimes expressed very crudely indeed – that I neither understand politics, political processes, or, in fact, anything about anything especially that relating to The Real World the politics nerd in me as re-awoken with a roar. Frighteningly, there’s a lot I’ve forgotten and quite a lot I may never have known. Despite generally feeling like I should know everything as everyone else seems to I don’t really mind admitting that I’m ignorant. Nor do I mind reading, watching, listening, asking questions and just generally trying to alleviate my ignorance.

Standin’ on the corner of civilization.

In the last couple of months I’ve realised how much I have been deluding myself. I’ve always known how I try to please other people - don’t be difficult, don’t make a fuss, have a nice stable job, don’t ask for money, don’t need any help, don’t make me worry about you. More than anything I have failed to please myself for years and I have hidden away. Most critically, given how much time we spend doing it, I have deluded myself as to what I should work as or at. Better a job in the hand and better a better job in the hand. I am capable and intelligent and quite good at solving problems (rather over being an agony aunt though – the answer is grow the fuck up – seriously). I learn quickly. I make connections fast. All of this leads to me being very bored a very great deal of the time.

Last year I made a compromise plan to get myself a better job and well blah blah. Lately I’ve realised how disastrous that would have been. My interests, when it comes down to it, are politics, political history, the bizarre world that is quantum physics (understanding minimal, keep plugging away though), and good writing. You could probably add a bit of psychology and sociology into that – they are, to a certain extent, implied in politics and history – because I like to know how people tick. Most importantly, I can’t come up with a single fucking reason why I should work boring shit jobs and not be involved in things I’m interested in. That’s quite a scary moment. There’s a part of my brain that asks why I should be different from other people. There’s another part that asks why I shouldn’t. I’m quite used to being thought a freak – I often wonder if other people get the criticism and backhanded insults I get simply for doing such things as reading books or speaking well. How fucking dare I, yeah?

I still need to write so maybe I’ll do some more of that.

Because I can't share it on Facebook.

The PM is following me on Twitter. LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously. LOL!

Are they?

Dear Dale,
I got your magazine. I haven't read much yet but have looked at all the pages. It looks good. I like the way you've presented the poems. Cramped poetry is an unappealing read. I much prefer air and space presentation.
The whole thing made the SMH, which I also looked through today, look like a waste of coffee money. I suppose it is really.
Best luck,
Shelley

Wassup

I’ve spent the last week very busily and strenuously recovering from surgery. The translation is: on the couch reading and watching tv shows. I may have overdosed on True Blood but it was southern fried fun while I was doing it. My only, very minorly, vaguely intellectual thought from this is that the Queensland/Louisiana thing is not entirely wrong. This makes me quite uncomfortable for a number of reasons that I don’t think I’ll go into in the right here right now.

Hospital was interesting. I reacted to the whole process with breathtaking calm given that it was entirely new to me. My biggest freak out was being asked, at about 4pm, to swallow five uncoated tablets with the aid of about half an inch of water. Cruel given that I’d had no fluid since 2.30am. I got man-handled, and I don’t really like people touching me, by just about everyone. Doctors are awfully touchy, aren’t they? Like unnecessarily so. It all seemed a bit silly when all I really wanted was the blissful touch of anaesthesia. It all went off without a hitch and, hopefully, I shan’t have further problems. I made my surgeons and nurses happy so I suppose all is good.

Recovery has been rather slow but only in the sense that I am tired and a little sore as well as wonderfully bruised. Had I a tum for showing off I’d have posted pictures of my interestingly bruised bellybutton. Other than that nothing. I am tying to force myself to do nothing. No lifting, not too much standing, and limited sitting upright which tends to the uncomfortable. I am reading Possession and David Marr’s Power Trip and feeling oddly disconnected from everything.