Seek Comfort

I can see that it is a pleasant grey-skied morning outside, as the kettle is a-brewing in the kitchen of the 1800s terrace house that Shantoozy and I rent off some anonymous impropriator. I think how peculiarly impersonal is our society.

Although it is almost malevolent summertime again, there are still lovely cool days like today to be had way down south here. The ice has tinkled to the bottom of this fragile hemisphere.

But, as life's day draws on, the ice is melting. Ours IS a strange society – tellurian propulsion from the tickertape whir of green paper. Into the apocalyptic void, I suppose.

However, I sit sipping from my caffeinated cup and simply try to be calm and enjoy the while, cosily. A good friend of mine used to end his letters to me with the advice, ‘Seek comfort.’ To survive, this is part of what we must, with propriety, do.

Ah, listen. Here comes sweet rain.

Cruel Humans

I’ve recently become a vegetarian again because I hate the cruelty that humans inflict upon other animals and so I just refuse to participate anymore. Plus, the whole concept of flesh eating has gradually become unpalatably vulgar to me. This vegetarianism also, it seems, has been a good move towards reducing my waistline.

This last night I was feeling so depressed, though, that I selfishly toyed with the idea of ordering a pizza with pig in the form of ham or bacon. I asked Shantoozy whether the pigs really were treated inhumanely but she didn’t know, and having partly grown up on a farm her experience was that they were not – apart from the ultimate extermination of the animal, of course. Anyway, I flung myself onto the ’net to do a little investigation.

Before I became a vegetarian I wouldn’t eat veal, or, with some exceptions due to shameful unconcern, battery farmed chicken, because of the ludicrous cruelty. So, I checked out the situation with the pigs and it turns out that here in good old backwoods Australia (and God knows how many other countries besides) they are battery farmed. Needless to say, treating pigs (or any other animals) this way is completely unacceptable! I believe that we need to reëvaluate our habit of eating animals, for this was a habit formed millennia ago, before the modern, industrialised methods of torturous impoundment that are currently in practice.

I suggest that you check out this site for more info.: Animal Liberation .

And maybe reread ‘Charlotte’s Web’.

Now it's back to those halcyon days of toddlerhood for me, when I'd eschew slushy, tinned baby fodder for fresh garden salads (’tis true) and then mi Mum would plonk me onto the potty in front of the telly where, apparently, I’d fall asleep watching ‘Days Of Our Lives’.

Uncorked Whine

My email provider is inaccessible, as it has been every time I’ve tried to access it for a day or two now. This is just the cold, hard iceberg tip of my current frustration in life. There is also the fact that I live in one of the most backwoods countries in the Western world, and possibly the least cultured. And that my room is a dusty mess. And that the human is an highly destructive parasite. To further make this a fun li’l post for youse all, what follows are details of one of several major fucked-up-nesses. (I apologise - well, to the extent that my self-indulgent whining allows me to while not nullifying its own existence.)

I used to feel that with time and devotion I would, before too long, become a successful writer (and possibly also, actor). Successful enough, that is, to comfortably support myself and partner financially through my art, and to be renowned and critically supported enough to no longer feel severe doubts about my talent and skill and the validity of my work, or like some God-forsaken amateur. Then I grew up a bit – that is, got a bit duller with age – and nothing had changed for the better regarding my position artistically. Some things had improved, sure – my skill, for example, and the projects with which I became involved were somewhat less unprofessional; but other things had declined – my delusion that I was destined to make the ‘big time’, for example, and the energy of my creative focus. So, all in all, it about equals out to the same squalid situation I’ve been in ever since, at age 19, I realised that I was a writer (as well as, to some extent, an actor – which I’d already held to be so).

Who knows? Things may yet suddenly change and I’ll have finally more or less ‘made it’, but life always seems to behold for me at ’most every turn a new and unexpected nasty surprise. What will I discover next? That I’d actually just been writing, over and over, for years and years, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’?

I hope things are easier and pleasanter after death. Doth death (how funnily clumsy soundeth those two words adjoined? – I’ll start the sentence afresh)... Does death, life’s opposite, await with pleasant surprises? I’ve only approximately 15,800 days left ’til I find out. How long have you?

Wild Colonial Boys

I've been feeling somewhat more energised this week thanks to healthy living - take that, fatty liver disease! (That's a generally curable hepatic condition, so not quite so severe as its name implies.) And I should ammend my previous post in relation to this and say that, of course, the major problem caused by this condition is to the health of one's liver and not a lack of energy, which would actually be merely the major secondary problem, I guess - at least, for myself. (For further information about all this wonderful liver wackiness, see my comment in the previous post's comments section.)

This past week or so has been fairly good over-all, in fact. I have been working on my second novel; don't wish to give anything away, of course, but it is coming along okay so far and if it maintains its current qualities it should end up being quite unusual and amusing.

My partner, Shantoozy, has now finished school (University of Melbourne) for the year. Yay! Now she can make me dinner every night and bring me beer whenever I dictate it and if you take me seriously then I'll get YOU to bring me the beer!

I heard that an old and very good friend of mine (from high school) was getting pissed on free beer at a Sex Pistols reunion gig or some such in London with its bassist, Glenn Matlock!!! Paul has been a Pistols fan for decades and I remember even giving him Matlock's memoirs for a gift one year, so I know he would have been quite impressed with his evening! Paul is currently involved in a year-long English tour with his band, Vanlustbader, incidentally. The record company has the whole band packed into a tiny apartment, apparently, but I don't think he minds from the sounds of his crazy nights so far. Thor knows the amount of times he's tumbled down venue stairwells over there! But this guy needn't be on tour with any band to be bar-chatting with renowned punk rockers. On a solo holiday to the United States of America a few years back he ended up having a drink with Jello Biafra, whom he'd encountered unexpectedly in a San Francisco bar. I'll add a link to Vanlustbader's site so you can check it out if you like.

Writing of wild nights, I won bingo the other night in Brunswick. The host is a drag queen and the night is called, 'Barb Drops Her Balls'. Her prizes feature such lovely articles as a Sadaam Hussein talking doll, 'The Cunt Colouring Book' ("Good bush," she tells us) and 'The George W. Bush Colouring Book' ("Bad Bush," she says). I won a beautiful(!) tablecloth with a map of Australia on it. Made in China. According to this map, Victoria is not much bigger than Tasmania, Queensland is about as big as, err, well, two Queenslands, actually, and the Northern Territory's most significantly novel animal is a dark-skinned man who wears practically no clothing and carries a spear in each hand, and Tasmania still contains Tasmanian tigers. It now lies gaudily atop our dining table, which is a beautiful(!) '70s fake veneer piece that Shantoozy recently found on the sidewalk.

Stay glue-orbed to this venue for more exciting updates, m'lovelies!

Limbo To The Lowdown

I’m sick and tired of being those very things! Arghhh! When you have a fatty liver condition like it is professionally assumed I do (but in process is the discrediting of anything more serious, which, I am told, is rare) it makes life’s very basics somewhat of a struggle. Lack of energy is the major problem caused by this condition but there is also a dizzying nausea with which to contend, and a grumpiness borne partly of frustration from not being able to fully function and partly from the angry energy pumped out by the upset liver. These symptoms are not unrelenting, thank fortuity, but they do hit regularly. When your energy for thinking is as low as mine gets at times and you can't be bothered finding a better word to use there than 'gets', then you know that something is amiss! When you can’t read or write, and when that’s of the utmost imperativeness to your life, then all too easily may you slump into the murky, swampy blues. It makes the mind feel like concrete. Of course, I am working towards rectifying the ailment by eating healthily, losing weight, drinking plenty of dandelion root beverage, etc., but it takes time. And I’m forcing myself to read and write, at least somewhat. I plan to write a page of my novel a day.

Anyway, it is basically this fatigue that has hindered my efforts to post anew in this gutter of the daisies. Such a cunt! Such a cock-and-balls! Actually, I get great enjoyment from those odd-looking organs of lovable sin so I should cuss elsewise but where’s the energy for such? Burp! Fart! George W. Bush! Saddam Hussein! Neo-Nazis! Faeces! ...Oh, groovy, I somehow found it.

...Limbo now to a brief lowdown, if you will.

Rupert and I attended a dang fine hair salon hosted Hallowe’en party in South Yarra on Saturday night. We’d given ourselves nicknames for the night – he, ‘Fly Cassanova’; I, ‘The Baron’. However, the host insisted upon introducing us as ‘the pervert’ and ‘the paedophile’ respectively. My rather disconcerting title extended from the fact of the unusual moustache-less goatee I am cultivating for my short film rôle of later this month, and the fact that he felt I needed something to make me seem creepy (as Rupert had neglected to mention that it was a Hallowe’en party I had just dressed boh-dandy), and what with Rupert already a pervert our host, dressed as a skeleton, hatched his evil plan and monikered me thus!

Afterwards, Rupert and I cabbed it to a photographer’s warehouse space and gibbered with hairdressers and hair models. We attempted some sort of action plan for seduction but the rings of Saturn, along which we were both happily slippin' and slidin', proved far too distant from any activities available on Earth just then and so it was impossible for anything to eventuate.

Next, having parted ways with all the other stragglers, we went to a café and asked if they had ‘writer’s rates’. “You know, for unemployed writer types,” I asked, or something like that. They didn’t. We breakfasted elsewhere. Twice.

We reflected on the two girls who were at the warehouse. “Which girl did you prefer?” asked he. One had appeared a tad 1920s to my bric-a-brac brain. “The Twenties one, but I would have been happy with either, of course,” I said. “It’s funny you should say that,” he replied, “because I got the impression with the other one that I was …looking at her, …drunk.”

Rupert bumped into a shop front. “Oh. Oh,” he slurred. We would pass the odd drunken hobo. “I wish those bums wouldn’t walk in the same manner as us,” he humphily declared. Soon enough, still wearing his tasselled fez, he lay across the gutter as we waited for a tram beneath the morning sun. Home wasn’t very far, yet it sure was a long journey back there.

I slept. Arose. Life goes on.

Wednesday evening I attended a li’l park picnic in honour of Shantoozy and Hissykitty being ‘ace’, which was hosted by their friend Toxiclash. There were balloons and swings and wine (not for MY liver) and cake and other snack treats. Certainly not an unpleasant way to hoist the moon up.

My main work of the moment is regarding the short film, ‘Realising Sigmund’ – to keep learning my lines and develop a suitable characterisation over the next couple of weeks. Oh, and to keep this comical, hircine tuft sprouting from my chinny-chin-chin; and the drivel running down my chin and onto this here blog for you.