Thursday, January 19, 2006

January 21

Today Marcin went for a job interview as a draftsman in Arncliffe, where he was harangued for an hour by a steel trader with a bar masquerading as a desk. According to this man, Marcinski's qualifications entitle him to work in an office in North Sydney with men in black suits and a secretary with a double D cup, and not in the industrial zone near the airport with a swampy view of the Cooks River. Result? No job but license to dream of a beautiful future full of secretarial knockers and the pleasure of telling people I am an architect (a pleasure which I get to share by the way when I make my vicarious bid for importance- My Prospective Spouse is an architect.) As for me I find myself erring in the direction of caring for the mad and infirm when it comes to employment, and wondering what my chances are of improving conditions for anyone.

Well, my mother called today to discuss her burial and will with me so I'm off to negotiate my inheritance. Over and out.
January 14

Yesterday I tried to blog at the Marrickville library and a warning came up on the screen : You Have Tried To Access a Site Which May Contain Dangerous or Damaging Material. Maybe the blocking software has understood the perversion of people who hang around in dark gardens etc?

We went to the museum in the Hyde Park barracks yesterday, as an expression of new found interest in my convict heritage. Shoes half eaten by rats preserved behind glass under low lights to prevent their further decay, a row of hygienic and lice-deprived hammocks swaying gently in a sanitary breeze. Little plaques and locked display boxes everywhere- as usual the tourist rendering of the Olden Days is so far removed from the reality that the effort of imagination required to feel any empathy is exhausting. In Tuol Sleng, the prison and extermination centre in Phnomh Penh, they had gone to the other extreme and left everything exactly as it had been at the departure of the Khmer Rouge- bare iron bedsteads strewn with pieces of rotting rope and rusting boxes for administering electric shocks – and the only thing under glass was the photographs of the doomed, staring into the camera with the whites of their eyes showing like a herd of panicked horses. The moral of the story? There’s more than one way to skin a cat (arrange a museum).

Will close with selected highlights of the alphabetical listing of things you could be transported for.

illegal pledging
illegal selling
incest
insubordination
insurrection
intoxication
killing
larceny
machine breaking
maiming
manslaughter
miscellaneous
January 12

Back in blogland find myself having the same old ethical dilemmas- do I have to keep a paper diary as well where I tell thetruththewholetruthandnothingbuthtetruthsohelpmegod? This would make the online version so wholesome as to be unreadable and so isn’t feasible. My solution: tell a maximum of two people about existence of blog and then poach their readership who do not know me. They are reading this because they are the type (types? ) of person (people?) who hang around in other people’s gardens on dark nights peering through the window and waiting to see what happens next, not because they are a) interested in me or b) interested in finding some mention of their good selves and willing to plough through swathes of cyberjunk to get it.

Back in Sydney doing home renovations like a good pair of young marrieds- we cleaned the storage space above the stairs to make some room for the shoes and camping goods which had been breeding quietly under the bed. The accumulated refuse of a junkie, a weightlifter, a Goth with a mucus problem, an aspiring actress and a homosexual biochemist yielded the following bounty:

5 (five) expired cockroaches (proving that they would not in fact survive a nuclear holocaust)
1 motorcycle jacket
8 moldering cushions acquired from hard rubbish with the intention ( unfulfilled) of creating opium den ambience in lounge room
3 kettles
1 beached television set
1 faux fur muff

In fact on the home front the optimism factor is fairly high considering that we are two unemployed people sharing a room in a slum where one has to walk half a kilometre to piss in the middle of the night- I am deeply in love which is a relief since a refund is out of the question on faulty mail-order sex toys.

Today we spent our first day apart in 6 weeks and I went to meet my English student in Burwood. She’s small and brown and pregnant and always meets me barefoot at the door and offers me a drink when I’m about to leave- they live in a one bedroom flat in a backstreet off The Boulevarde with a maroon patent leather lounge suite and an Amway manifesto hanging on the wall.

I AM EXCITED ABOUT MY LIFE AND ABOUT AMWAY

I WILL SUCCEED BECAUSE MY TEAM IS THE MOST LOYAL AND DIVERSIFIED

I AM POWERFUL AND POSITIVE

I AM A CAM

I AM A CAM

I AM A CAM

I WILL DO IT

THAT’S ALL

PERIOD

There’s more but I can’t remember - I had to improvise to get that far. I wonder what a cam is?