webvoyeur

Warsaw (from memory)

2009-05-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

Warsaw is a city where you feel constantly exposed. Perhaps this sensation is a hangover from viewing old aerial photographs of the city after the war, the ruined buildings poking out of the rubble with their entrails exposed, miles and miles of them, layers of history obliterated in a few months. People say that it is one of the few cities in history to undergo such systematic destruction that it consequently lost its soul. Or perhaps it comes from the width of the streets, made for the passage of tanks and marching armies. The boulevards of Warsaw could host an unforgettable car chase if not for the inhibiting factor of traffic gridlock at most hours of the day. Perhaps it is the bulk of the Palac Kultury i Nauki looming over the city, the building which Stalin gave to the Poles in the fifties. It has been endlessly maligned but I reserve an affection for it as the site of many cinematic escapades and tete-a-tetes (tetes-a tete?), a place to view and review Warsaw on every visit. (Click here if you want to read more about 'the Palace's unique ability to encode and compel the changing constructions of individual and collective narratives of Polish identity.' )

It is this sense of exposure which makes the boltholes that much more attractive where they can be found. One of these is a bar known to me only as 'the kurwidołek' (vulg., 'place where there are prostitutes'), within a block or two of Marcin's old apartment building on Ulica Hoza. It is a dim-lit place, presided over by a pockmarked, long-haired barman who looks as though he has been taking lifestyle advice from Keith Richards. The walls are draped (in memory if not in fact) in purple velvet. It is a place without windows, entirely divorced from external reality, which closes when everybody goes home. It has the ambience of someone's loungeroom, with couches strewn about and such limited visibility that you can only see the person you came with, and others recede to shapes in the gloom. In this womblike space love affairs grow (including mine), watered by vodka, and sometimes die for lack of sun.

These are my twin impressions of Warsaw: the secret city, with its renewed soul, its lovers and drunks and whores, and the wide-open city made for constant surveillance. It's easier to pronounce like this from a distance, where the detail doesn't interfere.

Luisa Helen Frey

2009-05-27T15:32:00.001-07:00

Today I read of the death of Luisa Frey, whose blog I have followed for the past couple of years, admiring her discipline, enjoying her love for S. and passion for words, appreciating her honesty. Her life has touched mine, gently, obliquely, from the other side of the world. Now her death touches me too. I am thinking of S., who must be living a nightmare that defies imagination.

2009-04-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

Reading Czeslaw Milosz, looking for the keys to the Slavic soul, I find instead something more complicated. I find myself understanding for the first time that religion matters, and that the ferocious battles of the Enlightenment (science vs religion, God vs nature, empiricism vs metaphysics) have left their mark on my own mind. I have never bothered to consider religion in any way- I have always thought that the discussion is over and that it's entirely beside the point. The things which Christianity provided- a sense of the centrality of human beings in the universal scheme, a sense of wonder- seem to me to be perfectly possible without God.

It turns out that my atheism is not a straightforward inheritance from my parents, bolstered by my own adult tendency to empiricism. In fact I am heir to these ancient struggles, and my currents of thought have roots in a time long before my conception.

New Zealand again

2009-03-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Some months later, and the details have faded before I have managed to record them here. What's left is a distillation of selected highlights. (What this means is that although I think I can remember every meal we ate, place we slept and person we spoke to, I'm not going to inflict it on my readers).

Coming down to The Gates of Haast from the pass through a drenched vertical landscape thunderous with the descent of water, steep walls rising on either side. It is gloomy and excessively green, vegetation crawling on every surface. We stop to let our brakes cool and take some photos but the strange chlorophyll light won't allow itself to be captured: the pictures are saturated with brightness in some parts, sodden with darkness in others. The air is so wet that I can feel its damp touch on my skin. When we're finally disgorged into the grassy, innocuous flatlands, it's a relief.

Waking up to see the white flanks of a mountain that had been cowled in cloud all afternoon finally revealing itself, and riding all morning beside blue-green rivers. Around every corner another peak slides into view. A car passes us with a trailer full of dead deer: there is dew caught in their fur and the inert bodies jig slightly as the trailer sways on a bend.

Riding all day in the rain, with nowhere to stop for 60 km except the Copland Bus Shelter. We set our sights on it for 40 km but when we arrive find it infested with sandflies. We eat a muesli bar, standing, and converse with some malodorous hikers who have just traversed the Alps from Mount Cook.

The first sight of the tongue of Fox Glacier, protruding down through the rainforest from its mist-veiled neve. We walk up from the carpark with our heavy boots and woollen socks dragging at the end of our legs. When we step out onto the ice, everything is suddenly different. The temperature drops 10 degrees and the light shifts from green to blue-white. The crampons even necessitate another way of walking, feet flat to the ground, biting into the ice and requiring a slight wrench to free them. There are layers of ash in the glacier that have blown across the Tasman from our own domestic bushfires. I stand on the surface, eroded like limestone into crevasses and strange peaks, listening to the water run in its invisible channels and feeling fragile and organic .

For a while after returning, I see things in my world I have never seen before. I read the placards scattered along Canada Bay describing estuarine ecology and the mechanics of mangroves I pay attention to a (very large) sandstone house near Tarban Creek that I have been riding past every day for years and have never noticed. This new vision lasts for a couple of weeks before it is eroded by familiarity and I am back in my old mental landscape, blinded by routine to everything around me.

Queenstown-Lake Hawea: 3 Jan

2009-02-24T13:40:00.000-08:00

We started to ride early, up the valley to Arrowtown, sun shining, birds singing, traffic mercifully light. After an hour or so of riding my ankle was still intact (to my great relief) so I took 2 ibuprofen and we proceeded to the Crown Range Road. Followed around 20 km of climbing , watching the snowy peaks slowly emerge all around us as we got higher and higher, trying to ride in a straight line and keep our wheels on the ground during the final near-vertical kilometre. On the top there was a tortured tree and a little plaque naming the pass as the highest (paved) road in NZ, and a road sign warning traffic that the next 40 km would be downhill (!!!!!!).

And so it was. Initially a steep drop through a lot of switchbacks, crossing the Cardrona River 12 times in its infant stages. Then down down down, all the way to the lakeside at Wanaka. Another spectacular blue wind-whipped lake, surrounded by more steep young mountains. We weren't tired yet so continued on to Lake Hawea where we spent the night listening to the (head) wind blowing through the trees around the tent and hoping for a meteorological miracle to bring us a southerly in the morning.

Queenstown 1-2 Jan

2009-02-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

Again woke up feeling like hit by a truck, a sensation similar to jetlag but in the body rather than the head. Before too long we had an argument and decided to avoid each other for the afternoon. Having the advantage of not being hungover, I went walking beside the lake, and took a thousand photos of the scenic peaks, blue choppy water and the steamboat beating across to Walter Peak farm on the other side of Lake Wakatipu (it later transpired that Marcin had gone one better, descending into a glass-walled tank below the water to observe the incredible diving ducks).

I had a pain in my Achilles which got worse and worse as the day progressed- by evening I felt like a zombie with a sports injury. I hobbled around town feeling more and more paranoid that I wouldn't be able to ride. It rained all day. When we got up the next day it was raining again and we decided not to go anywhere. We went up the mountain during the day (rain) and I limped around complaining and generally ruining our fun. In the evening we ate dinner with a Dutch couple who were also cycling - one was a doctor and we talked about his doctoring days in Zambia and I got some free medical advice about my ankle. Early to bed, me with my foot on the pannier as a belated attempt at elevation of the afflicted limb.

The Otago Rail Trail-29-31 Dec

2009-02-21T11:56:00.000-08:00

Wake up in Middlemarch and do some tyre-switching, and set off around 11. It is burning hot with a huge sky- the countryside is barren and shadeless and looks like a steppe or a prairie. We ride and eat, eat and ride. In the middle of the afternoon we nap by a stream in a shaded gorge. There is an insistent piping sound and I wonder, half-asleep, if there is an exotic flightless bird in the vicinity. After a while it becomes clear that it's a lost lamb looking for its mother. These (and rabbits) are still the only animals we've seen.]

There are plaques every couple of kilometres beside the trail and we stop conscientiously to read them all. Thus we learn about the Taieri Pet, a cloud formation created when the north-westerly blows up over the Rock and Pillar Range, piling the cloud in towering layers. We also learn that the steam trains were liable to set the countryside on fire with sparks from their engine-boxes, and that barrels of water were kept near wooden bridges so that any passersby could douse them if they caught alight.

In the evening we start to ride again. About ten or fifteen kilometres from Ranfurly we stop at a pub to fill our water. There are unfriendly signs on the door threatening cyclists who try to have a surreptitious piss and get unauthorised liquids. It turns out to be the last preserve of the local bogan species and we have a beer and watch them come and go in their trucks, red swollen men and little dessicated women, all with fags hanging from their hands.
We sleep in the campground at Ranfurly. Because the sun goes down so late, it's hard to stay awake until dark. We are fed, watered and reading The New Yorker (told you it had a lot of words) by sunset.

I wake up in the morning feeling like I've been hit by a truck. Probably the heat the previous day. We pack everything anyway, choke down some unadorned porridge then go to the supermarket for real breakfast. When we start riding I feel OK. It's cooler than the previous day but the wind is picking up again. We cross the pass and also the 45th parallel, halfway between the south pole and the equator. From there we are suddenly riding downhill all the way to Omakau and our second night's camp.

In the campground we meet a scientist working on discovering the causes of diurnal changes in diameter of pine trees. He is utterly incapable of small talk so we discuss stem diameters and dendrographs for a while. There are also 2 kids riding the trail with their parents- their mother tells us that there's a no-whingeing policy, but when the going gets tough they get a piece of chocolate every 3 kilometres. Nobody seems to have informed them about stranger danger so they pop up every few minutes asking questions- what do you eat for energy? Where do you come from? Why do you have accents? When are you catching the boat to Wellington. Camped beside us are another family from a different demographic (the kids have mullets and have to carry all their own gear) who keep to themselves and strenuously ignore us when we try to talk to them.

In the morning the scientist is up first- he sleeps in a coffin-like bivvy bag and has no incentive to linger in bed. We are also up early and eat a huge plate of leftover pasta before setting off. We cover the 30 km to Clyde a bit sadly, stopping every 10 seconds to take photos. There are fields of purple flowers everywhere and we pass the smallest post office in NZ. We try to buy a postcard to send Ange and Renee but nobody's around. It's still more or less downhill, beside a river now so that the enormous sky is held at bay. At the very end of the trail we see a family who's just started riding and have a puncture already. That's the only puncture we've seen on the whole trail.

At the end of the trail we stop and eat all the food we have left- cheese sandwiches, nutella, some tomatoes that have seen better days. We sit on the damp grass, eating and looking at the road we're going to take- it's uphill and the traffic is heavy, and we both get depressed.
The hill is brief but the traffic is real. After 3 days on a carless track we're used to being kings of the road and aren't keen on sharing. Also, there is a raging headwind that sweeps occasional showers towards us. We labour up the valley towards Cromwell beside a milky-blue dam, half considering stopping there for the night. The next town after that is Queenstown, another 50 km away.

We eat in Cromwell and I buy a tube to replace the one that exploded. It's still early so we decide to keep going, thinking that we can spend NY Eve in Queenstown living it up. The wind is still raging and we stop to buy cherries just outside town-we can't carry them so we just sit there next to the road in the eddies of dust and eat half a kilo of them. Then off we go.

The road is narrow and rather busy. We're riding in a gorge with a speedy river the same colour as the dam roiling along beside us. It starts raining but there's nowhere to stop and put on our rain gear so we just keep going. There's about 20 cm of chewed-up shoulder we can claim as our own, and it takes all our concentration to stay on the white line and keep off the road, while also avoiding falling over the railing into the gorge. The shoulder is populated with the damp, decomposing bodies of stoats which we ride over every few kilometres.

It keeps on raining. Apart from the lack of space, the cycling isn't bad-the elevation drawing made it look like an endless uphill but it's not the case. Coming out of the gorge there is a break in the traffic and we ride along for a few peaceful minutes through the misty hills with the hawks circling above us. We stop for 3 minutes to eat our emergency cake but have to start agan because we start to freeze.

On and on through the rain. We arrive, finally, in Queenstown in the evening, and find there's nowhere to stay except the rugby field. We desperately don't want to sleep there and eventually find a place in the campground, though not without considerable risk to our marriage. We find a bungalow which is not being used, and pitch our tent on the verandah. It's dry there, secluded, and we have a view down over the lake and the peaks of the Remarkables (they are).
After dinner we sit on our verandah with a bottle of wine, not saying much. Marcin suggests we go into the tent and talk in there. Within 10 seconds we're both unconscious, and the midnight fireworks barely make an impression.

28 December

2009-02-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

Finally left Dunedin after a long morning- coffee, further gossip, farewells. Marcin hadn't smoked for three days and when we stopped to provision in the city I begged him to let me buy some nicotine patches, but to no avail.

We didn't really start riding until midday, and consequently when difficulties started it was in the hottest part of the day. At the foot of the first (highly vertical )climb, a puncture, which we repaired in the blazing sun because we were unwilling to lost the 10 m of altitude we'd gained so far. When we replaced the tube and pumped up the new one, it exploded. We had a heated discussion about the cause of the detonation- I say it's defective gauge on the new pump, leading to over-inflation, Marcin says it's the edge of the valve-hole cutting into the valve stem. We gave up the discussion when it became clear nobody was going to back down.

On the second attempt, success, but I rode off very gingerly, expecting another eruption at any minute. We continued climbing, in the heat, with a headwind. 6km/ hour. The roadside sheep ogled us with barely concealed amusement. There was nowhere to shelter and we kept riding without stopping except to consult our map. An unspoken mantra of how far now? hung in the air.

Finally we arrived at Clarkes Junction, went into the pub and ate 2 stacked plates of salt and saturated fat while the publican's daughter, who looked about 8, conscientiously smeared the tables with a damp cloth. After this Marcin miraculously recovered and we set off again on the 'downhill' portion to Middlemarch, which still included a couple of significant uphills. It was getting late and the trickle of cars slowed- we had the whole great grassy desolate expanse to ourselves. We photographed ourselves silly and finally descended to arrive in Middlemarch just on dusk, and took a hut in the campground.

Boxing Day

2009-02-01T13:46:00.000-08:00

Another early morning. I would sell my mother for another 2 hours sleep. We drift through the empty city to the bus stop and load our gear onto the bus to Dunedin, and proceed through alternating tropic and arctic temperatures through the morning. (The driver is cold. He turns on the heating. When it reaches 35 degrees he gets hot. He turns off the heating. When it reaches 15 degrees he gets cold. He turns on the heating. And so on.) The country is flat, fenced and utterly tame. The only things that stand out from the landscape are huge box hedges grown along the sides of the fields as windbreaks. Marcin says Ahh... the land of the long green tree, and we laugh halfway to Dunedin. I don't feel a moment's regret for not riding on this road: the traffic is heavy, the wind howls, and the cultivation is relentless.

From Dunedin we ride up to Sawyers Bay along the harbour rimmed with petrol storage tanks and industrial buildings emitting a questionable smell. My friend Ange and her partner Renee have just bought a house up there, with a soft green lawn and a spectacular vegetable patch which sends me into the first of several pastoral reveries. We sleep in their guest room in the most beautiful bed in the world. I tell Marcin that we should consider acquiring this sort of linen for our guests and he says We should have it for ourselves, you show off pony.

We graze their Christmas leftovers for several hours and then they take us down the peninsula to see the penguins. The sun doesn't set until about 10:00 at this time of year so we have plenty of time. They show us a sheep farm where you can go and choose a sheep to produce you a custom made jumper. You pick the colour and the type of wool and they send you the jumper and pictures of the naked sheep as proof of its provenance. At the end of the peninsula there is a car park perched on windy cliffs, with an albatross colony (the only mainland one in the world) on the outcrop above and the sea beating on the rocks below. We see some albatross and smell some seals (they stink like an old can of tuna which has been left in the fridge for a week). Renee knows everything about the plants and animals in the area- she is a marine biologist working for the Dunedin City Council, and tells us that young female sea lions often turn up on the beaches around Dunedin where they go to escape rape by romantically inclined males.

Then we settle down to wait for the penguins. As sunset approaches a small crowd gathers, including a pair of Americans who cannot shut up and commentate every vacuous thought that goes through their heads. We are waiting to see the disturbance of the water which marks the approach of the penguins as they come ashore in a 'raft'- it is a windy evening and every ruffle on the water is discussed extensively by the Americans. The penguins (more cautious than David Attenborough would have us believe) wait until the sun has set to come ashore. They waddle hesitantly out of the scrub, freezing every time a flash goes off or somebody shifts and mutters. It takes them over an hour to be convinced it's safe enough to come out of the bushes. They move slowly up to their burrows and we start to hear the happy sounds of homecoming.

Anyway, the whole process was very long for someone who has watched too many nature documentaries and expects penguins to leap out of the water and race heedlessly for home. More like the 'making of ' extra, where you see how long it really takes to film five beautiful minutes of animal activity (eg three years in a row of failed snow leopard expeditions to the Himalaya before getting any footage at all.)

New Zealand New Zealand

2009-02-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day 2008.

We get up at 5 in the morning. Marcin trips the first crisis by pretending not to have the keys to get back into the house after the first load (I really don't have any). I narrowly avoid killing him in the staircase while he smirks down at me in glee.

Even the taxi driver is stunned into silence at the obscenity of the hour. At the airport it transpires that our luggage is overweight. This is mainly because I have decided to pack all my warm clothes and my sleeping bag in my hand baggage in the event that we crash land in the mountains, survive, and need to keep warm while waiting for rescue. This means I can't use the usual packing technique of compressing all the heavy things into a leaden but innocuous-looking carry-on bag, leaving the checked baggage within the weight limit. Marcin's smirk (from this angle it must look charming rather than invite a homicide) convinces the woman at the check-in to give us a discount.

Now we have to wait because in my overcaution we have arrived 2 1/2 hours before the flight actually departs. There is a lego display of a wind farm and propellor-driven boats which you can activate by blowing into a hole in the glass case that contains them, and we spend a long time examining them- the model builder has gone into great detail and included a lego diver being approached by a lego shark, some lego sunbathers on deck being watched by a voyeur through lego binoculars, some lego barnyard animals grazing around the base of the lego wind turbines. Then we buy a copy of The New Yorker which is so dense that it lasts us almost the entire trip. Such profligacy with words is unheard-of, even in the weekend magazine. There is an article about what makes a good teacher that rests on an intricate analogy with choosing a quarterback (apparently it's as impossible to predict when promise will fulfil itself on the gridiron field as it is in the classroom); the first thousand words are about football, and only then is the real point of the article introduced.

On board the plane, we forget all about The New Yorker , because we have been upgraded to business class! That means real cutlery, remote-controlled seats, a personal conversation with the hostess. I spend most of the flight with my feet sticking out in front of me, marvelling that they don't even come close to the next seat back. Marcin listens to a voice recording of a book about building your wealth. By the time we land it feels like we have already lived several extra unexpected lifetimes, as early risers, business class travellers and readers of the New Yorker.

In Christchurch airport there is a bike assembly area. It is located right next to the smokers area so we assemble our bikes in a cloud of carcinogenic smoke. We go into the city and eat something and meet 2 cyclists who have just finished their trip. In the evening we go and drink beer with them and they give us their cycling guide and their address in Singapore. By the end of the day we have spoken to more strangers in 24 hours than in the past 6 months combined.

2008-11-14T17:12:00.000-08:00

The American elections are over, the end of another piece of theatre which has held me in thrall for a number of weeks. McCain, arms windmilling, eyes popping, little engine whining against the ever-steepening gradient to victory. Obama, cool as a cucumber, bringing his hand down emphatically on the podium and swearing to change the world as we know it. It is so absorbing that I overcome my customary squeamishness and listen open-mouthed to the blame and hope and promises that fly through the air, faster and faster, a manic tornado of claim and counterclaim which is suddenly doused by the climactic election of the first black American president of all time.

According to the rules of Hollywood, the story ends here. Disadvantaged (but virtuous and intelligent) black man overcomes all odds to reach the pinnacle of success. Violins swell. The crowd goes wild. Tears well in the eyes of disadvantaged black man as he accepts their homage. The credits roll.

Reality, on the other hand, is an affront to our sense of narrative. The story is over. Good has prevailed. This is the problem with politics: the frenzied leadup to elections leaves everyone with a hangover.

2008-10-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

At the theatre after some years of relying on the cinema for my visual stimulus, I am shocked by the three dimensional bodies of actors rotating and breathing in front of me. Cinema is a flat world swelled only by music, where everything you see is included for a reason, and body parts are amputated and blown up on the screen as ciphers of feeling. The camera zooms in on hands, twisting in nervousness or reaching for a gun or clasping one another in fear or desire or an attempt not to fall from the 25th floor. Eyes, lips, heaving breasts fill the field of vision as the violins howl. Each body part carries such a surfeit of meaning (apparently Hugh Jackman's beard had its own separate screen tests for Australia) that the sight of an entire organism could overwhelm the viewer completely. All that exists is the piece in the frame.

At the theatre, on the contrary, there they are, living human anatomies, the kneebone connected to the thighbone connected to the hipbone. Nothing is obscured, nothing is irrelevant. You can see their eyes and feet all at once; their fronts have backs, their tops have bottoms. The character is built slowly, in the thrust of a hip, the motion of a wrist, a shifty sideways glance. The bodies must only move as the person they are pretending to be, in a dance equal parts freedom and constraint.

At first I find them oddly unconvincing: they are too much on display, they cannot possibly be anything but themselves, clumsily faking another set of mannerisms, another life. But look what happens as the show proceeds: I am drawn in, slowly but completely, to this imaginary world, to the orbit of these three bodies. It is only a story, but a story lived in every muscle and sinew of the three men on stage, who must surely forget who they are for the duration of the show, who must surely cease to be who they are until they are recalled to themselves by the applause of the audience.

It is pure magic. The human body, unairbrushed, unmade up, unrepentantly flesh, is more lovely and more expressive in its entirety than it could ever be when decomposed on screen.

2008-10-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

Enough about the crazy right, what about the crazy left? Politics in the (Irish) pub on Friday night, a talk about Iran and Palestine (War or Dialogue?). A quick perusal of the internet reveals a large amount of cyber-bile directed at the two speakers, one of whom sweats heavily and stumbles over his words, the other honey-tongued and welling with smooth private-school confidence. The crowd is what is really interesting- mostly over 50, and all deranged to various degrees. I have the impression that they are desperately seeking their 15 minutes of fame behind the microphone in question time. None of them actually asks a question, using up their allocated minute on establishing their credentials to be there in the first place. I am from Middle East, I am an academic who...., I have been to the middle east etc etc etc . There is a man in a beret (yes, a beret) seated at the back of the room who devotes himself to drinking and heckling in the time-honoured tradition of beret-wearers. There is bad feeling, resentments and general pettiness- more like a 2UE talkback session than a gathering of intellectuals, which is how they bill themselves. I feel simultaneously disappointed and vindicated: as with hippies, left wing intellectuals are no more virtuous than anyone else.

2008-10-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

A long weekend of good feeling and alcohol in the City of Melbourne, reconstituting lost pieces of myself that reside in the memories of Marcelle and Brendan Renkin. The week starts with initial apprehension- Brendan and his friend Damien are in Sydney. There is old love and hurt feelings, and the possibility of awkwardness. For some reason this awkwardness doesn't materialise, as it sometimes does, in defensive sparring and mockery: we drive to Melbourne together in harmony, talking about Australian identity, about pedophilia, laughing at the contraband foodstuffs in the boot that Brendan's brother has acquired by questionable means and sent south to his numerous relatives. Marcin and Brendan talk about Russian politics. I watch them with proprietorial pride- such good boys, look how they get along. They turn out to have other things in common besides their romantic involvement with me. Look how modern, how mature we all are, driving towards Melbourne without discomfort or envy, discussing the nature of the universe and smiling at each other. As I write this I realise it sounds as though we are driving towards some horrible denoument, but we aren't. Things are simply alright.

In Melbourne there are shades of scores of other trips to stay with Marcelle. We giggle for days about nothing much, consume bottles and bottles of booze, dance and drink and eat. We lie in bed and talk to Marita and cuddle her daughter. We go to the shopping centre and buy cheap and hideous Australiana for Marcelle to distribute when she gets back to Panajachel. We finally have time for silence as well as constant jabber.

When we leave them on Sunday afternoon I succumb to a terrible feeling of loss which I have not felt since Marcin left me 5 years ago in Awasa. I pine (mainly for Marcelle- I have erected defenses against Brendan long ago) all the way to Albury. It takes several days after returning to Sydney for the good feeling to reassert itself, and I remember leaving them another time, nearly ten years ago when I came back to Australia. It was a definitive separation for me and Brendan, though I didn't really acknowledge it at the time. They drove me to the bus station in Manchester. It was a gritty, grey autumn day, eddies of wind blowing takeaway wrappers and empty plastic bottles around the benches. I kissed them goodbye as they stood there in the turbulent air, and instead of doom and impending loss I felt simply happy to know that somewhere in the world, the two of them existed. Toxic blues eliminated through the usual metabolic processes, I feel the same now.

2008-09-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

I am spending this early part of Sunday morning finally learning something about the geography of the United States of America. I have managed to absorb all sorts of stereotypes and iconic landscapes (laconic Texans in sheriff's uniforms, fast talking New York cab drivers, ranchers, pioneers, cult leaders, Indians, snow-capped mountains, bayous, seas of prairie-grass, cactus, casinos, border patrols, slavery, obesity, immigrant dreams and nightmares with firearms), all without having any real idea of the shape of the country. Perhaps that's why there's something about it I don't quite recognise, why the idea of America hasn't put down roots in me the same way the idea of Europe has. When I read American fiction I feel a vague sense of alienation; now that I know which side of the country LA is on, maybe it will disappear.

2008-09-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

The summer is here, bringing with it lethargy, nakedness and a strange sensation of bodily nostalgia which manifests as a heaviness in the stomach. I feel fuzzy-headed and disinclined to leave the house. Did I really dream of this all winter?

2008-09-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

At this particular point in time, I am not very interested in the present. I spend half of my mental life projecting myself into the imaginary future, envisioning myself as a happy and assimilated Polish migrant. I don't think very hard about how this will happen or what it entails; instead I think about the feeling of effortlessness that marks life here, a sort of daily absence of friction, and project it onto the half- known landscape of Warsaw. It is partly a feeling of being half asleep, of being entitled to ignore my surroundings because I have absorbed and internalised them. I currently spend my trips to Poland with eyes like saucers, staring around me and straining with the effort of trying to understand how it looks to its inhabitants.

The other half of the time is spent in the archives of the past. My current self operates as a sort of didactic historian in these circumstances, unearthing strata of old bitterness and old joy, adjusting her pince nez and poking with her tweezers, muttering that's why....... ahh, it's because...... don't you see? This world is like the land of dreams, where I am both myself but not myself. It is a world which- like the dreamworld-makes sense both currently and retrospectively, in two entirely different ways.

The present (at present) is nothing but a zone of synthesis for these forces of history and possibility, a cocoon of routine from which I can safely observe what has been and ponder what might become.

2008-08-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

I am coming to realise that learning Polish is not the satisfying linear process I had hoped for. Vocab comes and goes, submerging itself when needed and then reappearing at will like an unpredictable hippopotamus. I grope for words that I knew 24 hours ago: the intervention of Anglophone jabber has loosened my tentative ability to talk about tightening a bolt. I am able, by virtue of endless repetition, to ask someone if they have seen Warsaw by the light of the moon, but the words for laundry or lock regularly evade me. Not so automatic baggage locker (bezobslugowa przechowalnia bagazu), which has lodged deep in my left hemispheric cortex despite the very remote likelihood that it will ever be any use.

I like the term language acquisition for describing this process. Acquisition is less passive than learning, more of a struggle. It describes the strong sense of ownership for words gained and also the almost physical sensation of clutching after expression. Language acquired is mental ground ceded and finally reconquered; language fought for, language possessed, language deserved.

2008-08-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

My revelation of the week is that I have a choice. Memories of primary school provide me with an exemplary case.

It is nineteen eighty something. I am friends with Shellee Collett, a girl slightly older than me with long, straw-like blonde hair and a nose that looks like it has been broken right in the middle. It hasn't been- two of her sisters have it too and only the youngest, who metamorphosises mysteriously into a snub-nosed, siren-like changeling as the years proceed, has avoided this inheritance.

They come from a farming family and along with the nose the three older sisters also have ample buttocks that my brother claims are perfectly designed to fill a tractor seat. The second sister is in my year and on the first day of school, when she stands in front of the class to be introduced, she has a smear of something orange beside her mouth. I have a mental snapshot of this moment which has somehow escaped erasure from my archives: Lori Collett standing in front of 20 children, with a home cut fringe, a pair of terrified hazel eyes and something unidentifiable caught up in the fine blonde hairs along her upper lip.

The details of how I came to be friends with Shellee Collett are lost in the mists of time, but I remember that she had an enviable way of flinging the long blonde hair over her shoulder. She lived with her family in a large farmhouse with a wraparound verandah and took showers instead of baths. I don't think our relationship lasted very long, since I can only remember being inside the house once. In fact, I think it was over in the moment I am going to describe to you.

I am sitting with her above the oval, watching the boys playing soccer. There is a row of rose bushes along the embankment where we sit. It is morning, before school starts on a warm day, probably early summer. We are watching the game and I make some forgotten comment on the tomboy girls who have joined in the match.

Suddenly she stands. She says, I'm a tomboy too, you know. She flings her hair over her shoulder with a determination I have never seen in her before, and plunges down the hill to join the game. I am burning to follow her, having long harboured my own fantasies about sportive inclusion, but I am far too scared of being mocked or rejected. She is absorbed into the game without comment while I peer down bitterly from amongst the rose bushes and curse my own timidity. From this moment onwards, she is one of the girls who has the right to join in all boyish activity on the school grounds.

Twenty five years later, I am finally magnanimous enough to openly admire the tractor-arsed Shellee Collett for this magnificent decisive act. It is possible to simply decide that you want to live a certain way, and do so. This is a lovely possibility and I will bear it in mind from now on.

2008-07-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

After a month of susceptibility to every winter germ on the market, the colour has gone out of the world somewhat. I have finally succumbed, admitted that my immune system is unequal to the task of eight hour work days, and made the decision to abandon fiscal caution and spend three days at home. The most beautiful part of these days is the morning sleep. Alone in the bed (a blissful condition), I wallow in the morning sun that pours in through the blinds. I wake and read for a while, drink some tea, sleep again. This sleep is populated with swooping circular dreams which inevitably include the plot device of at least one bicycle theft. It seems that this event has replaced the exam nightmares and concentration camp dreams of my early twenties; as if, entering on the decade of greatest solidity, the most fearful prospect is the loss of material possessions.

On this subject: facing unemployment (or underemployment) and the prospect of another six months in the country, I'm forced to meditate on a recent penchant for buying clothes and hoarding money, activities which give me a disproportionate satisfaction. I consume therefore I am. A growing wardrobe renders me a person of consequence.

I suspect it all means that regardless of my blessings I feel fundamentally unsafe, and wonder if love and luck carry their own dark burden of fear which cancels out the joy. Ahh, the manic-depressive counterpoint of my third decade- a steady drumbeat of prospective loss shadowing the high hopeful strains of possession.

2008-07-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

There's something magical about my weekend rides with Marcin around the city. For him it is still a strange land, and he swivels his head, open- mouthed as a showground clown, taking everything in. We sail lycra- clad through the suburbs, stopping to admire an indoor swimming pool enclosed in a high glass cage and drenched in light, a narrow-edged building wedged onto a street corner like a slice of cheese, a lozenge-shaped house perched on the cliffs looking out over the blue wind-whipped Pacific. We explore the brown, oily reaches of the Parramatta River and find a tree with a strange, thick-skinned bulbous fruit on it; we pick one, stomp on it and poke it with a stick to see what's inside. In the space of a single evening we see a fog sculpture ( emitting an atmospheric hiss and a cloud of steam into a stand of casuarinas in Olympic Park), a crowd of football supporters and a Bangladeshi boy band.

The seedy, foul and merely depressing are transformed by his presence into the stuff of adventure. We go to the industrial hinterland around the airport and watch the planes take off. One day we find a mound of dumped oranges near a fruit wholesalers on the ring road sending off an acid smell of mould so strong you can almost see it floating by in a blue haze. In the grass nearby there is a rampant crop of zucchini plants running down to the banks of a malodorous canal. We are democratically excited by both a flock of ibises picking at some kind of biological waste, and a 360 degree water view.

Only a particular kind of companion can enable you to understand the wonders of rot and sprawl, smoke stacks and industrial waste, freeways and plastic-littered mangroves. On the occasion of our second wedding anniversary, I can confirm that Marcin Ojrzynski is that kind of companion.

Hypochondria part 2

2008-06-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

It is not the visible ailments which bother me; the bruises and sore muscles and other afflictions of the limbs and skin. These things affect the levers and coating of the body, and can be looked at, prodded and dismissed. What I am concerned with are the more intimate rebellions of the dark damp places at the core of the body, the sticky internal revolts which cannot be gauged from close examination of the surface. What excrescences may be slowly growing across the blood-flushed surfaces there, what sudden failures of lymph might be occurring, what rampant multiplication of cells? These things are as mysterious to me as the workings of an electric circuit, and thus as prone to sudden and inexplicable breakdown.

And so I live in frightening and turbulent times. On the surface, all is calm. I wake in the morning and drink my tea, reading a recipe book, watching the football. Slowly my resentment at being conscious at this obscene hour wears off. I leave the house just before sunrise and pedal by the calm reaches of Canada Bay, all rosy and benign in the pre-dawn light, and over the mouth of the Parramatta River. I am thinking about money, our trip to Asia, a photocopy I have forgotten to make, a book I'm reading. Some days I feel stronger, some less strong. Some days there is wind and some days I need gloves to keep my fingers functioning in the cold. I take a shower, turn on the heater, sit at the computer. I sign some papers, give some advice (they are not orders in this business) and the day is over.

Superficially it is an ordinary existence. But there is another life I live where I am struck down day after day with terminal ailments: I poke at my underarms and groin, looking for unexplained swellings, obsessively fingering sore places. I watch myself for forgetfulness or lack of balance which may indicate a tumour of the brain. Any pain or abnormality is magnified into something critical. The internet assists in this; a google search of a single given symptom can provide a thousand unpleasant possibilities. My workmate (unaware of my private preoccupations) says, "Cancer always seems to start in the wet places, doesn't it? The mucous membranes, the lymph nodes, the organs." I shudder and spend the day visualising chaos in my own wet places. Then I wonder what effect the chemical accelerations of anxiety might have on this hidden activity.

Neurologically speaking, our brain is not developed enough to allow us to fully conceive of consequences or make rational decisions until we are in our twenties. I am now thirty years old, with a well-formed amygdala that allows me to consider the possibilities for the future, and I am suddenly afraid of dying.

2008-05-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

I have been a hypochondriac for my entire life. My first phantom illness was at the age of two, when I developed a mysterious limp which lasted for several months. My parents hauled me around the country to all sorts of different specialists after my mother had watched me like a hawk for some time and realised that I was hobbling consistently and not only when I thought somebody was looking. Family wisdom has it that I was inspired to do this in order to compete for concern and attention with my brother, a year younger than me and sickly from the beginning with chronic diarrhea. The specialists found nothing wrong and the limp eventually passed, leaving me with a slightly shrunken leg and my parents none the wiser. I proceeded onto the usual childhood illnesses, the most memorable being a series of bouts of raging tonsillitis, which brought more concrete rewards in the form of special invalid foods: roast chicken and exotic juices and nectars sold in exclusive one-litre cartons instead of cans or plastic bottles.

The next serious imaginary illness developed in my teens. At the age of thirteen, I stopped eating. Anorexia was suspected, but in fact it was a conscious ploy to keep me out of school where I was the current pariah amongst my group of female friends. It's a feat which mystifies me even today: I put myself on strict rations of a cup of milk a day, and stayed home in my nightie getting thinner and thinner. I don't know what eventually convinced me to give it up and go back to school; it might have been the get well card which came from my class, signed by my tormentors in a way that made me believe that all was forgiven. It turned out to be a ruse, because on my first day back at school they followed me into the toilets where they loudly declared that they knew I hadn't really been sick, while I cowered in a cubicle and considered my options.

After the uncertain success of this illness, the hypochondria went into abeyance for a while. In my early twenties I developed a few real ailments which seem to have kept me busy over this period: cerebral malaria, cervical dysplasia, a Cambodian parasite which had me projectile vomiting for three weeks, a broken collarbone, anaemia.

In the last year or so, the phantom diseases have returned. They always have their basis in a real physical symptom which is then magnified into something terminal, helped along by google-diagnosis and a consciousness that I'm now reaching an age where things really might go wrong.
They serve a different psychological purpose than their predecessors, which I didn't really believe in but used as means to an end. Now they form part of an elaborate game of worst scenarios which I have started playing, in order to second guess my own physical vulnerability. If I treat every swollen lymph node as lymphoma, I will always be prepared for the worst. This is a hypochondria for the mature years, and probably the thing which convinces me more than anything else that I am ageing.

The connection between armpits and blogging

2008-05-07T00:55:00.000-07:00

Today I caught sight of my winter-pale armpit in the mirror as I tried to remove my cycling shirt and put on a jumper at the same time, and realised that I haven't looked closely at my own organism since the end of summer. This led to an equally unexpected craving to return to the public self exposure of blogging. Maybe the strange bodily secrecy of this time of year can find its counterpoint here.

2008-02-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

Our first death, a drug overdose. Fergus, blue faced and stiff on a Saturday afternoon. The irrevocable words have reverberated all week: Fergus is dead, Fergus is dead, Fergus is dead. I'm unaccustomed to death, and masticate this pronouncement as I go about my business, needing to be convinced. What is the protocol, in these circumstances? He wasn't my friend. I was paid to know him. Nevertheless, I had a great affection for him- lazy, dishonest Fergus whose collection of pornos gave the lie to the claim that psychiatric medication ruins your libido. Well-mannered Fergus who shoved Cum in my Bum out of sight under his couch cushions when we came into his house. Gentle Fergus, who loved his mother and got upset when she split up with her boyfriend. Fergus who loved movies and good music and wrote short ecstatic poems about the small joys of life- trees and birds and the breath in your lungs.

I mourn him in a sneaky and sporadic fashion, listening to Union Station (to which he introduced me), looking at the order of service with his grinning bearded face on it, crying sometimes when there is nobody to challenge my right to do so. I look at our other clients and wonder that they are alive and he is not. Mostly, I just wish it hadn't happened.

Australia Day in Portland

2008-01-29T17:09:00.001-08:00

Heading out of Sydney for the long weekend- ten minutes to the freeway, half an hour to the foot of the mountains. Out past Mount Victoria the sky starts to open up and the concerns of city life dissipate perceptibly: here there are too few buildings or people for anxiety to reverberate as it does in the crowded psychic spaces of the inner west. Paranoid fantasies develop, detach, and float off into the ether like clouds, lost in a wash of light.

In this state of beautiful unconcern, I miss the turnoff for Rylstone. We drive along a minor road, passing through rural backwaters which are bleached and empty under the midday sun. Until, unexpectedly, after another wrong turn we find ourselves in the main street of Portland.
The road has been blocked off for Australia Day celebrations. There is a tattered jumping castle, a one-horse carousel and the air is rich with the smell of frying sausages. At the very front of this scene, there is a formation of line dancers, none of them younger than 60. One of them has yellow flowers on her hat and a surprising sense of rhythm: her post-menopausal flesh, bulging around her belt, moves in precise time with the music. She sings along, her eyes fixed on the horizon; kicks her leg up, pirouettes. One of her companions dances alongside her carefully on chalky bones, with her fading face obscured by an enormous Stetson.

We walk through the sun- blasted streets, smirking at each other. I cannot decide whether it's a scene possessed of some odd dignity, or the most depressing thing I've ever seen.

2008-01-21T17:00:00.001-08:00

A long time between blogs, an indication that life post-thesis is no less frantic and fragmented than life before. I am moved to write today after resurrecting the ancient anecdote of my encounter with a Turkish would-be rapist to tell Marcin. Having not repeated it for years, I was overcome with melancholy memories of my fearless twenties, and relief that I actually managed to survive them. My father's theory is that an understanding of consequences is a result of sophisticated biological developments which don't come about until the mid- twenties. In any case, I'm not that ferocious penis-biting creature any longer: my current profile is closer to that of a middle-aged hypochondriac. What a difference a decade can make.

2007-10-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

My annual revelation this year is the sheer variety of ways in which a human being can feel bad. My least favourite is the sensation of cold shock, where your soul shrinks into a tiny kernel deep inside, leaving your extremities frozen and useless. This sensation cannot generate tears, but brings on an urge to smoke cigarettes which has been dormant for more than 2 years . This is the king and queen of bad feelings, but it brings with it a retinue of lesser bad feelings to do its dirty work when it is not available: general malaise, loss of the will to live, a sort of magnetic (as in opposite-poles magnetic) anti-enthusiasm which makes my mind turn away from any thought of the thesis and bolt, scattered, in a million different directions. Today I am under the influence of lost-the-will- to live. Tune in tomorrow for more of the same.

2007-09-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening after three hours editing my single chapter in the library I got on the train in Redfern. It was six o'clock, the sour hour of the homebound commuters, and I went upstairs and sat down next to a thin young Asian girl who looked like she wouldn't spill over into my seat. As the train pulled out of the station, I slowly became aware of a voice reciting quietly in the corner of the carriage.

At first I thought it was somebody on their mobile, but instead of the usual public-transport monologue (I'm in the train. We just left Stanmore. Etc. ) I slowly became aware that the voice was preaching. I looked around, surreptitiously, (already knowing that it wouldn't do to catch the eye of the reciter) and easily spotted her , marooned in a desert of unoccupied seats, surrounded by sullen work-worn faces all staring stubbornly in another direction. She was a middle aged woman, with long grey hair tied in a pony tail: on the seat beside her was an old ladies handbag which she stroked to the rhythm of her own voice as she recited a litany of natural disasters (2003, earthquake in Pakistan, 137, 000 people killed. 2004, tsunami in Asia, 200, 000 dead. Mudslide in Bali, 25000 dead. And so on). When she ran out of natural disasters, she started on the glory of Jesus (Jesus can do anything. He can save the lives and souls of everyone on this train...It reminded me of the stickers we used to see around school advertising TAFE courses. Girls can do anything- take up a trade! They were supposed to convince us to become automechanics instead of teenage mothers) . When she got fed up with Jesus, she went on, in the same measured tone, to blessing the contents of the train.

She blessed the train back to front and upside down, with all its sorry human cargo included. She blessed the young suit squeezing his pimple as he looked at himself in the window and the lady in red polyester with her red vinyl bag cushioning her head while she napped. She blessed the woman with the grimy child who had somehow contrived to shove her pram through the doors of the train at Town Hall and colonise half the ground-floor of the train and she blessed the train driver and she blessed the students reading their economics notes and she blessed the plumber with the blue esky and the nagging wife and the silent moustachioed husband hunched down behind the Daily Telegraph.

The blessings started to get on our nerves, more than the mudslides and the earthquakes and far more than baby Jesus. By the time we arrived at Petersham there was a growing groundswell of irritation in the carriage, the averted faces starting to turn warningly in her direction like a field of fractious sunflowers. The people sitting in the seats closest to hers got up and moved downstairs to hang off a pole in peace and quiet. The relentless tempo of the blessing started to sound ominous- a drumbeat in the jungle warning of impending disaster.

Eventually, somebody shouted Shut up!!!! I looked around, but none of the closed faces gave anything away. We were at Lewisham. The lady got up, collected her bag and walked, soft-shoed and still blessing us, out onto the platform.

Spam to brighten your day

2007-09-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

This is from a catholic elementary school test. Kids were asked questions about old & new testaments.
1. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the Sabbath off.
2. Adam & Eve were created from an apple tree. Noah's wife was Joan of ark. Noah built an ark & the animals came in pears.
3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.
4. Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had truble with unsympathetic genitals.
5. Sampson was a strongman who let himself be led astray by a jezebel like Delilah.
6. Samson slayed the philistines with the axe of the apostles.
7. Moses led the Jews to the red sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.
8. Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to mount cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.
9. The first commandments was when eve told Adam to eat the apple.
10. The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.
11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada. Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.
12. The greatest miricle in the bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed him.
13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. he fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times.
14. Solomon, one of Davids sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.
16. When the three wise guys from the east side arrived they found Jesus in the manager.
17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.
18. St. John the blacksmith dumped water on his head.
19. Jesus enunciated the golden rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. he also explained a man doth not live by sweat alone.
20. It was a miricle when Jesus rose from the dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.
21. The people who followed the lord were called the 12 decibels.
22. The Epistels were the wives of the apostles.
23. One of the oppossums was st. Matthew who was also a taximan.
24. St. Paul cavorted to Christianity, he preached holy acrimony which is another name for marraige
25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

2007-09-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

I would like to disagree with the Buddhists and say that the absence of desire is a horrible thing. In support of this claim I will describe an encounter with it from a number of years ago.

December 2004 , Northern Sudan, some days before Christmas
I arrive in Dongola after six days cycling on a dirt road which runs beside the Nile and at times has trouble imprinting itself on the plain of glittering gibbers which stretches out on either side. I am not especially fit and have been permanently dehydrated throughout the trip: also, at some point in this six days I have succumbed to the ubiquitous fiction that the Nile water of northern Sudan is the 'best in the world', and drunk from the river. Somebody has given me a kilogram of dusty dates from their store and it's hard to tell if the culprit is the dates or the water, but I am quickly losing the will to live and am feeling a creeping malaise which seems to originate in my stomach. When I arrive in Dongola and feel bitumen under my wheels I start to cry with relief.

I stay in Dongola for three days. In this time I meet Marcin, his friend Anka and two Czechs all travelling together in a mobile new democracy whose decision-making process seems to me like a good argument for dictatorship. He gives me some medicine for intestinal parasites and I am charmed by his accent, his scarf, his black rimmed glasses which, I will discover later, can only be worn in circumstances where peripheral vision is not required. He is very nice and this encounter will change my life, but it is not a matter of immediate concern to me.

What I really want is my appetite back. And it comes, slowly, in increments, as I revive. On the first day, I eat a piece of fish. The parasites revolt. They want green apple fanta and cake. They punish me for the rest of the day. On the second day I manage two meals by placating them with heavily sugared tea. But it is not until the fourth day that I am really hungry again.

It's difficult to explain the quality of the feeling of wellbeing which the desire for food creates in me. I leave Dongola with a packet of bread, some cheese and a couple of tomatoes: enough to last me a day or so. By 11:00 I have already had five meals, stopping to scoff sandwiches in patches of shade beside roadside hits and wells, under a tree at the periphery of a cornfield, between the crumbling mud walls of towns abandoned to the flooding river . There is a metallic smell of earth and vegetation coming off the alluvial flats in waves where the sun hits them, reminding me of the market garden my parents had when I was a child.

For this day, I don't think of love (following me at a distance in its black glasses and scarf), or literature, or the future. It is enough for me to feel this hunger, which tells me that I am alive.

2007-09-18T01:36:00.000-07:00

A weekend depression of a black and comprehensive variety, brought on by too much coffee and a less than impressive PowerPoint presentation on my goddamned thesis last Friday. More or less cured by Monday morning by the therapeutic combination of 30 episodes of the Gilmore Girls, a leg of lamb, ten bottles of wine and the vision of a pair of mating stick insects on our window (would a stick insect give a flying fuck about a thesis?). I can throroughly recommend this cure.

2007-09-05T16:44:00.000-07:00

My thesis is starting to coagulate, slowly, at the back of my mind. I catch frequent glimpses of the edge of it emerging and feel it lying there at the very limits of the known world like Australia on an old map, amorphous and incomplete, a temptation and a terror. (Terror Australis) It is guarded by sea monsters that rear their unrealistically long necks and bare their nightmare teeth when I turn towards land, hissing at me as I make for the shore.

But I am entering the territory of total panic where doubt is not an option, the zone of compulsion where there is no choice but to proceed, sea monsters in hot pursuit and an unmapped coastline veiling its face behind the white spume of the shorebreak ahead. Arriba!

Warning to Jorge: contains rodents

2007-09-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

There is a family of small creatures living in the long grass near the train line in Lewisham where I cycle on my way to the university. The first day I notice them, I see a ginger cat too, lying in the sun with its stomach to the sky, eyes narrowed. The weeds around it are alive with something but I don't see what it is. The things don't flap like birds or bound like kittens- it is more of a scuttling motion, and they are fast enough to avoid identification, at least on this first encounter. The ginger cat is undisturbed.

The third time, I see that they are rats. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, skinny ones, racing industriously back and forth on their rat business between the retirement home and the train tracks. Every time I pass they are there, and they seem to be getting bolder. After the initial surprise wears off, I start to get squeamish. I am glad that I'm on a bike and that there's no chance that they will choose to run their rat errands between my feet.

Then I start to think about the ginger cat. Why doesn't it do something? I get more and more disgusted and start to metaphorise : the cat is an analogy for the human race, which has lost its hunger and is no longer intent on survival; it aims to get through its days as comfortably and uneventfully as possible. We lie in the metaphorical grass by the train track, balls to the sun. scratching our ginger arses and waiting for the next tasty morsel to be dropped into our plate. This line of thought occupies the remaining four kilometres to the university, my disgruntlement with the species definitive proof that my internal weather is synchronising with the tantrums of spring: squalls and sunshine, sunshine and squalls, five times a day.

2007-08-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

Dinner with my colleagues at a Chinese restaurant in Manly, owned by the father of a Chinese- Australian social work student. The job attracts a strange mix of migrants, misfits and dogooders- E, a middle- aged Argentinian with a handbag collection to rival Imelda Marcos' shoe stash: C, a stud in his early 50s with Indian parents and a freshly trimmed moustache that sits stiffly just above his upper lip like a broomhead: T., sexually abused as a youth and now involved in suspicious cult-like activities with a woman who promises to change his life (this information gleaned secondhand through another colleague who apparently invites confidence more than I do, though an indiscreet soul lies under that trustworthy face): D , a Maori woman with a consuming passion for cigarettes who has been heard to claim that she would rather die than give up, and her Fijian husband hiding at the corner of the table under his cap and occasionally muttering unexpectedly funny additions to the conversation; J, the social work student, and me. A motley assortment of human creatures out to save the world, make a living, and thrive on the proximity of extremity.

2007-08-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

It's springtime in Sydney and outrageously beautiful Australian wildflowers are vying for supremacy with vulgar and excessive European imports.. our room has windows on three sides and I wake up every day before dawn with a feeling of possibility, girding myself for war with Soula and thesis. It would be a brave real estate agent who chooses to do battle with me at this time of year. (I have never seen her but from her name imagine a moustachioed Greek who grows squatter and more unattractive in my mind with every conversation we have). Love and life are reconstituting themselves slowly after the trauma of the move, though my thigh muscles still retain the memory of two thousand trips up and down the stairs. Perhaps everything will be alright after all.

2007-08-29T23:49:00.001-07:00

Hard to imagine how love can survive a relocation without dying under the weight of strangeness and logistics. I go back at night to a stranger's house which has, by some miracle, been populated with my possessions, with a distant view of the city and an ancient Moreton Bay fig probing the foundations of the building with its curious old roots. What is home? Is it a lampshade, a chair, the fall of light or the view from a window; a habit, a person, a smell, a language? Currently I feel totally uprooted, and as if anything can happen in the hiatus between two zones of comfort- things can fall irreversibly apart in the chasm that separates Alexandria from Summer Hill. This general sense of disruption is compounded by the fact that we are fighting a rearguard action with Soula of Century 21 over being classified Dirty Tenants as well as (of course) over money, which only confirms my opinion that real estate agents are worms in suits.

2007-08-01T17:07:00.001-07:00

I am terrified of my thesis supervisor. It's hard to imagine why, as he is a gentle and mild-mannered man who is also several inches shorter than I am (which means in evolutionary terms- I like this perspective-gaining exercise- that I should feel superior) . But this is the human jungle, where being bigger and stronger doesn't mean anything- and so, whenever I have to see him, I am overtaken by a completely irrational and strongly somatic attack of panic: pounding heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth, blank mind. He is more powerful than me (says who? The oppressive patriarchy, if not the law of the savannah) and I live in dread of exposing my stupidity.

So: it's the beginning of August and three months of hernia-inducing effort and panic attacks of the aforementioned variety lie ahead. Blogging for this period may be very boring, and I warn you in advance.

2007-07-23T18:10:00.000-07:00

Meditating on the evolutionary value of a constant feeling of anxiety about matters which are (at least on the evolutionary scale) minor events: does it have a purpose? In Poland I was in a constant state of vigilance trying to work out what was going on and what was going to happen next, which seems to me like a fairly productive if not entirely comfortable form of the beast. Australian worry is a different species and seems entirely disproportionate, but maybe it's more serious because I also have to generate solutions for my problems rather than looking on as a disinterested spectator. Here are the problems, in order of time frame:
1. Where are we going to live?
2. how am I going to write this fucking thesis ?
3. what am I going to be when I grow up?

Interestingly, when worrying about these things, I usually start at 1 (around 3 am) and work myself up over the following hour or two to 3. If I lose interest in these things I have several optional issues to gnaw on: organising a new magic button to open our garage, whether or not Marcin has enough friends, and that old chestnut: money. It' s boring. And exhausting. Over and out.

2007-06-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday. In Pruszkow it is 6 am and has already been light for two hours- I am the only one awake and I'm enjoying this situation. There is still a sort of ringing in the air (or maybe in my ears) after an enthusiastic dinner yesterday which served as our Polish wedding party- it started out demure and awkward and closed with a furniture breaking tango that necessitated the removal of two of the guests under pretense of 'going for a walk'. This veiled eviction led us to the railway tracks where we drank beer in the rain and watched the trains go by with Remigiusz (Kuba's faithful friend who he speaks to almost every day on Skype) and Marcin's friend Macek, who started training to be a priest but left and went to work in a porn shop (women being his downfall). We squatted on the weedy verge amongst the beer cans and cigarette packets, eaten alive by mosquitoes, and Marcin told me, This is my Potato Point and Broken Hill...now you understand the forces that shaped my character. On arriving home he started to vomit and is expected to spend the day in a state of pale green dormancy.

2007-05-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

Seven hours in front of the computer, typing like a fiend on the first real day of winter, leaves me with a strange sense of elation- although, like Frankenstein, I have no idea what I have created and am far too pleased with myself to take a critical look. It has taken me six weeks to get this far with my bastard of an honours paper. SIX WEEKS!!!!!!!! Nevertheless I am feeling cheerful and as if I've reached a turning point in this horrible year. I have even answered the phone a couple of times this week, and read Bernard Schlink's The Reader again, scanned and briefly wept over before falling into a corpse-like sleep that lasted 11 hours. Currently revelling in a long-suspended feeling that everything is going to be alright- thank you and goodnight.

2007-05-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

The things which make me feel better in these difficult days are many and varied. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

hearing that other people are miserable
baths
red wine
a good sleep
coffee
cirrus clouds
the smell of the mangroves in Tarban Creek
the prospect of terminal illness which will make it unneccessary to finish my studies
good movies (especially involving terminal illness and other people's misery)

The things which make me feel worse are no less numerous.

stories of other people's success
coffee
the thought of terminal illness etc.
the blue computer screen which appears periodically saying 'physical dump of memory completed': after this cyber bowel movement, being forced to turn off the computer and start all over again.

2007-05-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

It has recently occurred to me to resort to a paper diary for certain internal investigations, and I'm learning something about my own distinction between the public and private and what it means for this blog. The marital universe in all its shifting complexity is not, unfortunately for voyeurs among you, a subject for these pages unless it is sunny and free of blemishes. I wonder how many romantic alliances collapse under the weight of these privacy laws, or- alternatively- under a sense of betrayal generated by public airing of dirty laundry?

2007-05-02T23:46:00.000-07:00

An autumn revelation- going outside on Sunday morning ( a few hours off from my torture), down a deciduous avenue of falling leaves on my bicycle with my love at my side (or behind me, or- more likely- in front. He doesn't like to be beaten). We go for breakfast in a cafe near the park- it is early, and only a few dog walkers and cyclists are there, swilling coffee in the expectant air. We eat, gossip. Marcin reads the paper and I read a draft of an essay I've been writing- the sky is deep blue and I suddenly like what I've written.

Outside, sitting tigetherat a table on the footpath, there is a middle-aged man and an old one. It is the old one that interests me. From where I sit, I can see his tan plastic hearing aid and liver-spotted hands. He has a pair of glasses with an extra set of black tinted frames clipped onto them, and he washes down a rainbow of pills with his orange juice. And I (with my juices still flowing, much good though it does me) I'm suddenly envious of him as I am, these days, of everyone who seems able to receive simple pleasures- he has gone past the tyrannies of youth- vanity, competition, the urge to achieve something out of the ordinary. He is free to reflect and to take full advantage of mornings like these under the plane trees , to fossick in the compost of his past for old joys, old conquests (I like the decomposition metaphor). Nobody expects much of him, except that he take his pills and not repeat himself too often. I begin to look forward to my retirement.

2007-05-02T23:15:00.000-07:00

The news that my friend Freyja has written six chapters of the great Australian novel has galvanised me into blogging again- along with the urge to preserve for posterity the pain I'm going through with this goddamned motherfucking honours business. The last six weeks have been spent suffering and making regular excursions across the borders into utter derangement- some days I can feel my mind beating around in my head like a moth stuck in a lampshade, and think that I know what it means to crack up. I didn't know (oh limited imagination!) that it was possible to feel like this over intellectual endeavours as well as emotional ones- that said, it could lead to a divorce and then I'll have both. So, in order of magnitude, since last I wrote the world has inflicted the following trials on me.

1. Crisis of confidence of unheard of proportions
2. Computer misbehaviour
3. a mysterious pain in my left breast (today fondled by an ageing mincy doctor who may well never have touched one of these objects by choice)

In return I have had one compensatory vision. Two days ago, the library was evacuated by a (false ) fire alarm. There were sirens and shouts, the firemen came, they left. The library staff were allowed back inside. One librarian (the hairy one with a bald patch which is overcompensated by the tufts of hair sprouting from every orifice further south) stood in front of the library, arms askew, holding back the tide of nerds poised to overwhelm him and roll in a wave back to their computers. One boy (an Asian with a wispy moustache) can wait no longer.... he breaks loose from the crowd and bolts for the library door........ despite his youth and desperation he is intercepted by the hairy librarian, who turns him away. Without losing any speed he turns around and runs off in the other direction.

I still haven't stopped laughing.

2007-04-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

On Monday and Wednesday nights, Marcin fights in a children's school in Redfern, where there is a class in an Israeli fighting technique called Krav Maga. People (mostly men, but not all of them) meet here twice a week to beat the shit out of each other- he returns from these forays into testosterone land without his glasses, wet with sweat, covered in bruises and in a mysterious good humour.

Last week I went to collect him afterwards on Wednesday night to go grocery shopping. I was waiting in the car, reading Kuba's rules and regulations on his housemaid's job in the Manly Pacific Hotel, when they emerged: two big men and Marcin. One six foot something Israeli with a jaw like the Terminator, and the instructor, a dark solid man with his head cocked permanently at an angle as if he was expecting someone to run up and try and tear it off at any minute. They formed a little sweaty constellation outside my window and Marcin said to them, "This is my wife."

I am still trying to analyse the obscure little thrill that shot through me to hear myself described in this way. Where did it come from? Do I like the idea of a man I love and admire laying public claim to me ? Was it caused by a cloud of pheromones emitted during manly activity? Is it pride, that somebody was willing to promise me until death do us part (though actually nobody did)? Is it the novelty of hearing myself described in a way I had never imagined I would ? And what does it really mean to be a wife?

Wife is a word of substance. That's why the phrase 'my wife left' always shocks: wives don't leave. They are immobilised under the weight of their title, held in check by wedlock. Being a wife means you exist in the world, that you are tethered by tradition to the past and the future. Wives are soft and smell of yeast and milk- do I, with my chicken legs and protruding ears, qualify? Wives forgive, make beds, wipe small faces and occasionally, when it all gets too much, shout and cry. They hang around and feed the dog and if you need something you can call them from work, they haven't got much to do so they can fix things up for you.

I am a wife. I don't do any of these things, though my will is good and I cook dinner sometimes.
Nevertheless, I belong to someone, and as time goes by I realise that I like the feeling.

2007-03-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

I am celebrating my last chance to read fiction and tracing a decade of development by rereading The Alexandria Quartet. It appears that all that registered on my twenty year old mind were instances of aberrant sexual behaviour- child brothels, 'inversion', Pursewarden's incestuous passion for his sister and a multitude of convoluted and diverse extramarital relations. Questions of politics and ethics passed me by, (or at least made a very shallow impression) although on this current read they seem to be the most salient things- Mountolive's conflict between duty and personal affection, Pursewarden's suicide to escape same (or was it), the venal and eminently bribeable figure of Memlik Pasha, the prospect of Egyptian independence and the complicated relations between the Egyptians, French and English associated with it. I'm fascinated, looking at the pre-Israel middle East: a world which vanished at the end of the second world war, a commercial and social disposition of forces which has gone forever.

The romance element, on the other hand, strikes me as tedious and embarrassing this time around.Perhaps my interests are maturing- am I past the stage of looking up cunt in the dictionary and giggling? Or is it a corollary of marriage that I have stopped scanning the written page for references to Love, in the same way I have stopped (more or less) scanning the material world for prospective lovers?

2007-03-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

During an alcoholic fancy dress party at my friend Annabell's house, Marcin (dressed as Borat) confessed to me (dressed as Bindi Irwin) that he knows of the existence of this blog. Until now he hasn't dared to read it because he isn't sure of the ethical ramifications of doing so. Is it like reading somebody's paper diary which they have accidentally left open on the table? (In this case you deserve, apparently, what you get.) Or is it more complicated, since I have an audience anyway and what difference does one more make? But on the other hand, since I didn't inform him of the presence of said blog, does it mean that in some sense I am refusing him access? He also commented that since he is present, presumably, in its pages, he feels like he has taken unwitting part in a game of Big Brother which he doesn't especially like.

So: who owns the rights to the world we share? This is my blog, but can I say anything I like about anybody in its pages? The fact is that I don't, and that I probably expected him to read it sooner or later and have been fairly careful not to include (many) details of an intimate nature. It seems that all the usual constraints on honesty, usually generated by desire to be liked and not offend anybody, apply here as much as anywhere.

2007-03-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

Back to school this week. Am I enjoying it? I'm not sure if the vocabulary of pleasure is relevant to this kind of enterprise - I have various sensations but wouldn't call any of them enjoyment. Self doubt, excitement and a kind of relief, as if I am getting something out of the way which has been hanging over me for a long time. I like the sensation of being forced to think and suspect I need the discipline of being told how to go about it. But there's also a sense of vertigo when I think of the proliferation of knowledge and literature that exists in the world, growing every minute - do I have anything to contribute? Is it possible to know anything about anything? Which may be precisely why it's necessary to compartmentalise and classify information- to prevent it from becoming an amorphous mess that covers the planet like a great junket and obscures all joy and sense of progress.

At the same time I am having a last brief Indian summer of fiction reading- Disgrace, The Alexandria Quartet, Graham Swift's Ever After and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. I read several things simultaneously and gluttonously, hiving stories against the long dry winter ahead like a junkie intent on the last hit before quitting. David Malouf especially, because he writes about Australia and all the things I like to think about: the way this country which is so familiar to us must have looked to people raised on the damp green hills of the English countryside or the pullulating alleyways of English cities; the irony of feeling claustrophobia in the middle of so much space; the sense of owning-by the sheer fact of having a white skin- country about which you know nothing and which stubbornly refuses to succumb to your advances.

hallelujah!

2007-02-24T13:21:00.001-08:00

It appears that blogger is back to normal. I am going to spend the day trying to think of something intelligent to say to celebrate.

an advance! I can publish anything written in the title window, but not elsewhere. Will begin writing haikus

2007-02-21T16:56:00.001-08:00

2007-01-20T14:10:00.000-08:00

A trip to the dentist, for the first time since the late eighties. It is a small, well-airconditioned office in Newtown with the usual complement of unisex trash magazines. I am so unenthusiastic that I arrive on the dot of ten thirty and only have time for a brief perusal of the latest round of baby-buying and love ratting. I am peering into Angelina Jolie's pout to try and see her teeth when my name is called.

My dentist introduces herself as Yippella Espino. I'll be your dentist for today, she says. She is a small, dark neat Phillipina with her own row of pearly teeth peeking out from between a pair of plummy lips. She buzzes my chair down several centimetres and I can feel my pallid head emerging into the pool of light under the lamp like a sickly bean stalk. I am invited to open my mouth . When's the last time you went to the dentist? she asks me. My eyes skitter around the room, bouncing off stainless steel implements and into shadowless corners. A couple of years ago, I say. She peers into my yellow, unlovely grimace and we both know I am lying.

She puts a pair of black goggles on me and reclines my chair. She has a little mirrored piece of metal on the end of a stick and insists on showing me my cavities while I squint into the light. She and her assistant put on masks (spawning paranoid speculation that they are protecting themselves from my halitosis) and she stands over me with a metallic instrument in each hand, systematically rummaging through my mouth like a well-bred cannibal wielding a knife and fork over her victim. 31/5, occlusal and labial. 24/1, occlusal. 18/2, occlusal and labial. She is listing the teeth that need fillings, and the list goes on and on.

After that they clean them. I close my eyes and soon I hear a buzzing, whining, grinding noise. It takes some time to realise that this is the sound of something scraping on my teeth. Periodically she stops and pokes about with her knife and fork, making an enamelled little clink like a spoon falling into a sink. Then she continues. I lie back slavering while my tongue is sucked up into the spit-remover and then released with a slap and a small explosion of spray. Suck, grind, slap. Suck grind slap. I stagger home through the early weekday streets of Newtown feeling both shell-shocked and relieved.

They say that eyes are the windows of the soul, but if you think that. think again. The window to the soul is actually the mouth. Every cigarette, every meal, every blow job and kiss and cocktail and breath leaves its residue there, building up layers of sediment that contain the history of a life. Eyes know how to conceal their secrets, but the warm damp cavity of the mouth reveals everything to those who know how to look.

2007-01-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

Last week I had a message from my friend Gabie, an Israeli living in Italy who I met when I was cycling in China. She is coming to Australia, and this news precipitated an unexpected internal turmoil. Since we met we have lived increasingly divergent lives, mine becoming more and more conventional as hers becomes less so. She has been catching dengue fever in Laos while I finish my degree, selling clothes in the markets in Italy while I try to save the mad people from themselves, and -apparently- applying for a working visa to Australia while I enjoy the plateau of peace of my early married life and wonder what the catalyst will be that will jolt me out of the complacent pleasures of certain love.

Suddenly I am imagining the way it will look to her- a sign of submission to the patriarchy on my ring finger, an ensuite, forty hours a week at the office. It drags me out of my complacency and I am starting to wonder if this is how she felt (and Jorge, and Dirty Rotten Jack) when I came to visit them in Europe before I came home from Jordan. Why do I live in the way I do? It feels like pure circumstance but there is no such thing. Having visitors from foreign parts, especially ones I rarely see, has the strange effect of forcing me to look at myself and my surroundings from their perspective, and always generates an internal process of reckoning. Maybe it's a habit bred from years of secrecy, from possessing a character so private it borders on shiftiness- a thought process that goes Is someone looking? If so, am I doing anything I want them to see?

2007-01-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

The usual New Year hiatus in blogging is over- back from Tasmania to find an embarrassment of Christmas riches from mama in Poland and a letter from the quarantine officers saying that her Polish sausage contravened regulations and has been captured at the border. Not so the 30 sheets of communion wafer, the body of Christ miraculously passing where the body of an unfortunate pig could not.

2006-12-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

Cruising the web for some sunrise entertainment, I have just come across the information that the site in east Darling Harbour recently contentiously named Barangaroo (and not The Hungry Mile) should actually have been called Gomora.

2006-11-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

Today I will map out an olfactory geography of my daily trajectory from Alexandria, on the rim of the airport industrial belt, to Ryde in the heart of the bordering-on-western suburbs. This is a trip of about 15 kilometres which takes approximately one hour, from the coffee-laden airs of Erskineville road to the fumes of the 506 as it squeaks and grumbles to a halt outside my office. The backstreets of the inner west give off their own affluent and slightly exotic aroma of jasmine and good living which fades to a mingling of Co2 with the clashing perfumes of the small flock of commuters waiting to cross Parramatta Rd in their straight skirts and spiky heels.

The Co2 persists, down Johnston Street in Annandale to the Balmain dockyards at the end where the City Westlink edges around the harbour. Here the odour depends on the time of day- a concentrated, powerful mingling of oil and mud at low tide, a saltier and more dilute version when the water is high. At the Darling Street intersection in Balmain, before the long rugged sweep down to the Iron Cove Bridge, there is a whiff of ammonia struggling with hospital grade disinfectant emitting from the public toilets (which are painted- appropriately- in a weak, well-hydrated yellow). Two petrol stations contribute their potent emissions to the mix as I swoop by.

The Iron Cove Bridge- more salt and, because of the exposure to the wind, a taste of distant bushfires or storms, depending on the time of day and year. On the other side I leave Victoria Rd and and cut through the backstreets of Drummoyne- more affluence, more commuter perfume, the more subtle fumes of expensive cars. The Gladesville Bridge is more impressive for its views than its odours, until - reaching the bottom end of the cycle path- there is a sudden sweet and overpowering waft of wattleflower.

And now downhill to Tarban Creek. Early in the morning the grass is still damp and smells of dew and at the very lowest point of my trip the path leads through the mangroves towards Gladesville and Hunters Hill. Here the odour is rich, organic, bordering on rotten but somehow still pleasant. The flowering shrubs and trees in the nature resrve on the other side of the creek balance it out with more honey and musk. This is the end of the trip, the last thing I smell before the steep climb where my own pungent sweat takes over and I am onto the final kilometre of my journey.

2006-11-20T01:44:00.000-08:00

Marcin and Kuba thrive on noise, and to live they need a constant soundtrack which keeps total silence at bay. I don't suffer from this aural horror vacuii and when they aren't home I listen to nothing at all and find that it is loud enough in itself. There is a hum of whitegoods, a sporadic swish of tyres down on Euston Street, the tapping of the keyboard. I can hear a phone ringing and a fire alarm erupts as somebody fries their evening meal with too much enthusiasm on the floor below, but it is the sound of the electricity in the walls which I notice the most. It is a sort of symphonic accretion of sound, a low background hum overlaid by a chorus of erratic squeaks and a steady high-pitched whistle. I sit in front of the computer and feel myself caught in a web of invisible impulses which ebb and flow in the air around me, ripping through my cells and creating an unseen turbulence in the tranquil spaces of our flat .

It is nothing like the lively night air in the bush, province of possums and owls : in that silence and that darkness you can feel yourself expanding, released from something confining which you notice fleetingly as it disappears. The night silence of the city vibrates with uneasy human sensation that makes the air contract around you.

2006-11-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

My Rostered Day Off is an island of calm in the month which I swim towards with growing desperation as another four weeks reaches its culmination . Yesterday it was marred by caffeine and a disturbing reread of Peter Goldsworthy's Three Dog Night- a novel about jealousy, the secret seed of destruction that lies at the heart of the empire of happiness. I have read this book before and because I know what happens, because this prior read puts me in a position to see the signs of ruin rising like a tide towards the happy love affair at the centre of things, I found it almost impossible to bring myself to repeat some sections. Maybe it's a bit too close to home.

For example: Freyja and Zaf's birthday party. We are up at her father's place at Peats Ridge, drinking around a fire under the stars- I go to bed early because I have to get up in the morning at seven, drive back to Sydney and go to work. I fall asleep briefly and wake up after an hour or so- Marcin is still not there. I am overtaken by a feeling of foreboding which I affix to a possible incipient attraction between Freyja's friend Marnie and my husband. He has expressed an admiration for her ability to keep herself in a consistent and extreme state of drunkenness without succumbing either to sleep or sobriety, and my paranoid mind goes to work on this so that sleep becomes impossible. I go outside and stumble towards to circle of firelight. As I get closer, I pull up short. They are sitting together on a wooden bench. I peer and squint in the darkness. Are they touching each other? Leaning on each other? I am overtaken by panic and can't go any closer. I lurk in the shadow of the barn, squatting on the stubble of recently-cut grass, and watch.

2006-10-31T13:46:00.000-08:00

In Europe, Halloween takes place on the eve of the year's darkness, the time of steel - grey skies and contracting days when winter is beginning to wrap its bony fingers around the world. The spirits are released into these last possible moments of light and warmth, through the thinning barriers that exist on the seasonal littoral between autumn and winter. On November 1, in Poland, the graveyards are crowded with people lighting candles on the graves of their ancestors and taking advantage of this easy access to the other world. In Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Germany, France, this is a time to celebrate the deceased, a black festival that refuses to take death seriously and laughs at the coming cold.

In Australia, the time has just leapt forward an hour and the evenings are long and balmy. Trick-or-treaters here begin their evening in broad daylight , and cycling home from work I see that they are out in force, from three year olds in pyjamas and rabbit ears to girls on the brink of puberty, about to overbalance into the top- heavy world of womanhood. Witches and monsters, sweating inside their rubber masks, rub cheeks with fairies in tulle tutus waving silvery wands. In Annandale, an eight- year- old Grim Reaperette brandishes a paper mache scythe: a Balmain vampire knocks with trepidation on the door of a nineteenth century stone cottage, urged on by her mother who waits in the shadows by the gate.

And so Australian infants rot their teeth on the rituals of another hemisphere, transplanted and transformed into an excuse for an evening walk on the cusp of summer. This antipodean perversion of meaning gives me huge pleasure.

2006-10-30T12:16:00.000-08:00

My workmate, R., is a beautiful young woman from the Northern Beaches. Unless you live in Sydney, you cannot immediately know what that refers to - a narrow peninsula where a final bastion of white middle classdom remains, bordered by the Newcastle freeway grinding away on one side and the sea on the other. Young women from this area are blonde and pretty with an air of the incipient housewife hanging about them - success here is a big white wedding or a new couch. R. is a recent psychology graduate with a Brazilian boyfriend and a record of brilliant academic achievement. She is also the proud possessor of a new nose.

Her previous nose (before the operation, undertaken to 'help her breathe better' )was longish and narrow and had a sort of aquiline charm, like the nose of a greyhound or a llama. It gave her a slight imperiousness and hinted at a mere possibility of cruelty. Now it is gone, replaced by a still-swollen button nose which has reduced her to perfect beauty and symmetry. In the course of this transformation she has sustained one black eye, a tiny scar, and severe nasal pain, which she considers a small price to pay for 'being able to breathe better'.
Her expensive resculpting has been, as far as she is concerned, a resounding success.

2006-10-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night I went with Marcin to see Children of Men, a futuristic film based on a PD James novel about a collapsing world where no children have been born for 18 years. In this film London is a third world city, the streets choked with rickshaws and drowning in garbage, with a few enclaves where the rapidly disappearing upper classes carry out their rich white duties despite the imminent extinction of the human race. It is set in 2027, and led to thoughts of the nature of imagination, the idea of selecting one of an infinite numbers of nonexistent worlds, one of an endless set of possible configurations of actions and events and personalities. The defining factor of the fruits of the imagination is that they don't exist, and so they are only allowed as a reflection of reality, a sort of cast of the mould of the real world. Imagination is confined on one side by the facts and on the other by the limits of the human mind- rather than having no bearing on reality, it has various bearings, with reality remaining as its point of reference.

October 18

2006-10-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

This is a post dedicated to gifts given twice, memories which have been forgotten and then returned to me by friends and by my archives, in the last couple of months.

1. A night in Byron Bay with my friend Sara, and Pablo, her landlord's manic depressive son (who had a key and wasn't afraid to use it). Pablo spent twelve hours pacing and muttering and trying to seduce a former girlfriend who- in a terrible lapse of judgment or in the throes of her own bout of mental illness- had consented to come home with him. Sara is responsible for returning this memory to me and my own records confirm, adding this priceless piece of dialogue to the reconstructed occasion:

Pablo: Women have all the power in this world. How do you think it feels to have a dick and nowhere to put it ?
Sara: That's hardly our problem
Pablo: (triumphantly) Well, if you don't like it, get a sex change.

2. A pair of ceramic teacups which my old flatmate Melanie and her Prospective Spouse Masa brought back from their prenuptial visit to Japan. I had admired these for a month or two, having forgotten that they were indeed ours in the melding of sharehouse possessions.

3. A story I wrote in Poland starring a sex tourist and a young Ethiopian man (funny how fiction and life collide sometimes).

4. This image from February 11 2004, in the bar of the Park Hotel in Addis Ababa.
Nigeria is playing Tunis in the Africa Cup semi-final and despite all the talk of the tribal faultlines that shatter Africa, the bar is fully united in opposition to the Arabs. Nuweiri men (refugees from southern Sudan) with their scarred foreheads and herons legs crouch over orange flames of Fanta and appear to be in total agreement with the Amharic speaking waitresses and the cashier in his grimy purple coat. I would like to photograph this warm geometry of intent faces, shining glasses and white chairs but -as with all my photographic fantasies, it seems too intrusive.

October 16

2006-10-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Freyja's father is still handsome, though ageing, and never seems to get drunk though he always has a glass in his hand. He has retained most of his hair, in conjunction with a sort of shyness belonging to a much younger man, and the only sign that the alcohol is affecting him at all is a barely perceptible loosening of the tongue. When this happens the consequences are hard to predict- often he begins, in measured, quiet tones, to describe the downfall of his sons, both of whom have spent time in psychiatric wards as the result of drugs and (he doesn't say this but it is there, between his calm, unblaming lines) a rather fucked up upbringing at the hands of their Jehovah's Witness mother.

Last Friday, he recounted how, in 1969, he and two of his friends were leaving the country for the first time. The nose of the plane was lifting off the ground when the pilot realised something was terribly wrong and aborted the takeoff. The plane buckled in the middle and both engines caught on fire. It turned out that a flock of seagulls had flown into one of them and jammed the propellor. The plane skidded into the swamp which, in 1969, marked the end of the runway, and the cargo of screaming passengers had to crawl along the wing and leap off into chest deep water to save themselves. His parents had been watching from the observation deck, waving their final wave, and had just enough range of vision to see the engines catch alight before the plane disappeared from their view into its watery grave.

Seems like it's harder to have a travel adventure these days, and I have spent the morning vicariously cycling in Madagascar since this sort of thrilling event is not likely to happen to me (now there is a special seagull- scarer who comes out onto the runway before the planes take off and blows a horn to discourage mass suicide and consequent engine trouble). Anyone who would like to do the same, click here .

October 10

2006-10-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

The end pf a long day with the mad people- I am longing to lie down on the floor and watch a romantic, undemanding movie and massage my aching legs. However, in order to do this, I need to first rid the house of Rambo, which has been imported as part of my cinematic education. The brothers Ojrzynski claim that anyone who hasn't seen it is ignorant of modern culture and cannot possibly understand the world today. I am going to take it away and get The English Patient instead.

October 5

2006-10-05T01:27:00.000-07:00

Last week I dreamed that I was in labour, a long dream that lasted the entire night and caused a lot of pain but didn't actually lead to the appearance of a baby. Drawn to make comparisons with my constipated creative faculty which, after a lot of straining, finally produces a few unsatisfying pellets and then shuts down again. At least there is always the blog- a couple of weeks ago Jorge sent me a link to an extract from Susan Sontag's diaries and I was struck by the fact that it is considered legitimate, this most private and disjointed writing with the secret desire for an audience lying at its core, inadmissable (reading someone's diary is the eleventh deadly sin) but informing all its content. The lists, the sketches of people and events, the ruminations, all bound up with a nice picture on the front and sold as literature. There's a degree of relief in the thought: this self-indulgence is permissible and even valued. As it seems to be all I'm capable of, I'm glad.

September 18

2006-09-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, on a Sunday morning at the end (or beginning) of another long week, Marcin started to wax his legs. I was sitting on the floor urgently depilating myself in preparation for the summer and he was lying in bed reading the paper : he decided that he would like to see how it felt. A few quick rips left him looking like a moulting bird and convinced that there was no way but forward, and so the process continued throughout the day- one paragraph of the weekend paper, one piece of leg cleared of its old growth. Every time I tore off the wax he squealed, stamped his feet and beat his legs with the flat of his hand in an effort to ward off the pain,and both of us watched with interest as a new man emerged from the hairy chrysalis of the old.

This new smooth creature is slipperier, harder to get a grip on than the old rough one- less likely to purse his lips with disapproval at suggestions that prostitution and drug dealing are honourable professions, less likely to call mama religiously every Sunday, less likely to take offence at homosexual advances . This week there has been a stranger in my bed, more womanly and amorphous than the man who used to be there, and the collision of waxed legs in the night reminds me that all might not be as it seems.

September 16

2006-09-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

One of our clients at New Horizons is D. (confidentiality deprives you of his full name). He is 35, and smokes like a chimney- he is morbidly obese and by the time he answers the door when we come at 11 to watch him take his medication, he is already wheezing after his long walk from the couch. He often lets us in without bothering to get dressed in anything more than a bathrobe that falls apart as he shuffles slowly back into his recumbent position- if he is feeling particularly modest he will haul a blanket over himself with a great display of effort, before closing his eyes and reaching for his tobacco. Often there is a blue-striped glass on his table with a pool of congealed or congealing phlegm in the bottom: once, a puddle of vomit in the sink which he implied was the result of ingesting vegetables for the first time in living memory. He has pale pink nipples and ginger chest hair and a pair of strangely slanted blue eyes that he has inherited from his mother, a former junkie turned religious maniac and hypochondriac. Meeting her, it suddenly becomes much easier to understand why he is the way he is. One morning she proudly tells us that she has taken great steps in drawing boundaries with her son, by refusing when he shouted at her from his bedroom to bring him his tobacco from the living room. His case study. compiled by the hospital staff before his discharge, states: D. and his mother have a codependent relationship.

D. inspires in me the most bizarre mix of affection and revulsion. He is like a 12o-kilogram six-year-old, with a sweet smile that occasionally emerges from his red beard and a deep need for approval. Most of the time, however, he is grunting and dissatisfied and happy to blame everyone around him for the misery and squalour he lives in, and utterly unwilling to do anything at all with his time. He spends days lying on the couch, sleeping and smoking and thinking paranoid thoughts about his upstairs neighbour. ( "she knocked my shoes off the balcony, the bitch." " And what did you do?" "I called her a bitch".) When I start thinking that my life is not as it should be, I console myself with the thought that it could be like his.

September 12

2006-09-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

Just back from Canberra, a national capital strangely deprived of life with its loose ovoid lines and box-like buildings scattered here and there on large blocks of land and connected by loops of freeway. We spent the weekend as married couples do- eating, going to the cinema, fucking and arguing- it's a shame that this catalogue doesn't really transmit the sheer pleasure of such activities. It was grey and freezing- there was an icy wind blowing off the fake lake, and we had to walk home from Manuka after the movie because the buses stopped running at 10 pm on a Saturday night. We stayed in a hotel and Marcin (ruled as ever by his iron aesthetic creed) refused to bring his clothes inside because they were stored in a large striped canvas bag of the kind pensioners and indigents use when they make long bus trips. He preferred to scuttle half-clad up and down the staircases every time he needed to get changed and leave the shameful luggage secreted in the car. On Saturday night there was a gathering of drunken juveniles in the function room and we arrived back after our marathon walk to find three boys howling in the street while an unsteady, half dressed teenage girl wobbled down the steps on high heels and tried to insert herself into a taxi that was already occupied.

On Sunday we visited Parliament House, emptied for the weekend of its cargo of politicians apart from a lineup of paintings on the wall- Gough Whitlam, all expansive hand gestures and eyebrows, in the middle of a row of his more sedate colleagues. Bob Hawke liquid-eyed and strong jawed, Paul Keating with a mysteriously augmented chin, a lounging Harold Holt. In another room an exhibition of females in politics- great pains had been taken to make them look as human as possible by adding children and dogs to the composition whenever they started to seem to unfeminine. A composed woman of indeterminate years, with flawless elocution and an air of faint, generalised disapproval gave us a tour, smiling in a restrained fashion at us and scowling ferociously at anyone who attemped to walk through our huddle or interrupt her flow of talk.

Back in the rain on Sunday night- Marcin drove while I sat in the passenger seat reading Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved with a head torch and reminding him every five minutes that his speed limit was 80 kmh. Glad, for once, to be home after a weekend away- conclusion: I would not want to live in Canberra.

meditation on sausages

2006-09-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

In late winter, I ride down to West Ryde train station after work, the temperamental air of early spring closing in with clouds and then opening up an apocalyptic gash over the steel cables of the Anzac Bridge and the stern geometry of the city. I have forgotten my lamp and cannot see anything, only feel the road heave and dip beneath me as I pass the hollow of Boyce Street, past the park and up again to the crest of the hill. The air here responds to altitude- in the dip it is cooler, a stagnant chill that lies along the creek bed and will condense into fog as the night wears on. The warm air rises and lies like a cap along the narrow ridgetop where the road peaks briefly before falling again down into another hollow.

It is only six thirty but a suburban silence lies over everything, penetrated only by the pallid headlights and beady taillights of homegoing traffic. I am riding towards the station amongst houses that are either asleep or on the brink of waking, over the fume-laden artery of Lane Cove Road and onto another swooping downhill towards the roundabout by the Leagues Club, when I smell the sausages cooking.

It is impossible to pinpoint where the smell is coming from, without the giveaway hubbub and clinking glasses of a backyward barbecue, or a kitchen light beckoning in the empty street. It's late in my day and the smell evokes a series of complicated feelings in me. The uppermost of these is simple hunger, but underneath is a host of other things to disentagle. It's a smell of childhood, of unwilling Saturday mornings at the soccer compensated only by food, sausage sandwiches and Violet Crumble bars purchased by combing the car for coins: of evening events in Nerrigundah (usually invading my olfactory system while I sulked in my tent): of the annual barbecue on the patch of grass outside the toilets behind Potato Point beach (to be overwhelmed by another smell one year when Daniel Evans fell through the covering on the septic tank during a game of chasings). And then it's something else besides- an Australian smell, and this is a complicated thing too.

It's not an iconic, clean, nostalgic smell like the smell of eucalypts or the bruised-fruit pungency of the sea, or the hot buzzing aroma of the coastal scrub on a summer afternoon, or even the smoky threat of a bushfire. It's the smell of something stodgy and unimaginative, and fearful, and irremediably colonial. I hadn't thought I felt like this about Australia, about Australians, but when I pull up 'cultural cringe Australians' on Google I find about 38000 responses so I am apparently not alone.

This is what Arthur Phillips said on coining the term in 1950:

'We cannot shelter from invidious comparisons behind the barrier of a separate language; we have no long-established or interestingly different cultural tradition to give security and distinction to its interpreters; and the centrifugal pull of the great cultural metropolises works against us. Above our writers -- and other artists--looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon achievement. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe. . .'.

Yet there they are, Kate Grenville, Peter Goldsworthy, Thea Astley, Delia Falconer Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all: proof of our literary abilities at least, that we are something worth writing about, worth thinking about. Will continue to think about this myself-

September 1

2006-08-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

Bronwyn Oliver used to make sculptures, mostly out of wire- fragile, light-webbed things like tumbleweeds or leaf-skeletons, built with slow, compulsive care. These painstaking accumulations of copper wire wrap around themselves and spiral out towards the air with anxious certainty- they enclose space without strangling it, giving it a place to breathe within the fragile metallic confines of her work. She has spent hours, days, years producing things that can be crushed in an instant- in the contrary way of the world, they aren't. They are displayed in a gallery, lit to perfection and festooned with signs imploring visitors not to touch- they are too respectful to do so. They amble through, stubbornly alive, trying to sniff out suicide in the convolutions of her art.

Now that she has gone and done it, of course, you can see it's there- the agony that has gone into her work, the obsessiveness, the attempt to render the world comprehensible. There is talk that she had just ended a twenty year relationship with the wine writer Huon Hooke- he himself is stubbornly silent on the matter. This is what he had to say in the month following her death:

2004 Kingston Estate Merlot, South Australia, A$13/NZ$15.95The Riverland-based Kingston is looking further afield for grapes, with the result that this is a Langhorne Creek/Clare/Riverland blend. An odd mixture, it smells of raspberry and green mint to gooseberry on one hand, and dark berries and oak vanillin on the other. It certainly delivers on the palate, which is big and brawny for a merlot, with flesh, weight and tannins galore. It's chewy in texture and has guts. Elegance is not a word that springs to mind, but it sure packs some flavour and grip. An excellent barbecue wine.

25 august 2006

2006-08-29T01:02:00.000-07:00

Even though literature is lying around everywhere, the appropriation of it is not as easy as it should be. Sloth and self doubt are to thank for the long silence – I am having the usual difficulties submitting my internal monologue (which has not been silent) to techniques of active expression, despite an ongoing interest in the sweat and greasepaint and boredom and delusions that constitute the world. The details of my life have altered again, with a change in backdrop: we now live in Alexandria in two- bathroomed bliss. Our flat is on the top floor of one of the blocks that has cropped up in the no- mans- land between Erskineville village with its overpriced fruits and trendy cafes, and the industrial hinterland that surrounds the airport. It’s a situation which takes some getting used to- space, privacy, release from the accumulated old couches and abandoned heaters and multiple toasted sandwich makers of 44 Chelmsford St. Contrary to expectations, the whole business of living somewhere beautiful has provoked a good two weeks of anxiety in me which is only just starting to subside.

On the weekend we moved into our new middle class life, two of Marcin’s friends arrived from Poland after an epic overland trip through Mongolia, Nepal, south east Asia and northern Australia. Lukasz had left his wife to run off to foreign lands with Justina, one of his school students: they inserted themselves neatly into the breach between slum and penthouse like a pair of tawny envoys from another world. From the first glance it was obvious that they had been having adventures- the suntans, the weariness, the intimate memory of the prices they had paid for everything from rooms to plane tickets, from Warsaw to Lhasa and from Kathmandu to Bangkok. Pangs of envy (it’s not a life I want to give up) and pangs of conscience ( becoming a bourgeois pig) ensued. Despite being dirty, poor and chronically underfed, I do love the simplicity of travelling, the immediacy of your concerns. There is a framework for the day, a soothing routine of arranging meager possessions and taking care of bodily functions, within which anything can happen. Packing, eating, shitting, staring, poking, photographing, unpacking, sleeping. Who would have thought it could be so absorbing, only because performed against a backdrop of swarthy strangers and unfamiliar landscapes? Of course there can be disruptions to this exciting round of events- mostly as a consequence of disruptions to aforementioned bodily functions, and in particular shitting out of sequence. I want to travel again and need to make a definitive decision on when and where.

July 24

2006-07-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

I dreamt I was in a bark canoe on a brown river lined with spindly reeds, moving downstream at a great speed. Suddenly I hit an obstacle and fell into the water, and realised- from the shouts of my canoe-mates- that the river was in fact a stream of raw sewage. I climbed back into the canoe and removed my sewage soaked clothes, and suddenly there on the skyline was the city, a bright cluster of lights on the horizon. ThenI found myself naked and outraged , demanding that I be hosed down- Marcin was standing beside me with his arm around my shoulder, a gesture which ressembled (as in life) a headlock more than an act of tenderness, due to the fact that I am almost exactly his height.

July18

2006-07-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Marcin's brother Kuba inhabits a Sydney entirely different to the middle class commuter world the rest of us know. Riding the bus from Dee Why into the city at 5 am on his way to the Homebush factory where he will work a twelve to fifteen hour day, he falls asleep. He wakes with a hand in his groin, opens his eyes to find that a seventy year old woman beside him is the culprit. She begins to talk- where is he from ? Poland. Can she please move her hand? How interesting, she herself is of Russian parentage. Fascinating- can she please move her hand? Obligingly she moves her hand a few degrees and lets it come to rest on his upper thigh. Who supports him? she wants to know.

It's not an isolated incident and he sees her in action again the next week, hunting the dawn buses for well endowed bums (or migrants) who need someone to take care of them.

June 5

2006-06-04T19:29:00.000-07:00

In early 2004, in the Ethiopian hill town of Lalibela, we met a small boy called Yayo. Yayo was our unofficial guide and gatekeeper for 5 days and would sit on small stool in the corner of our room at night until he fell asleep and had to be sent home. He accompanied us down into the valley on a futile chat-chase, defending us to the best of his nine-year- old ability against the horde of other (slightly bigger) small boys that we acquired as we went, bony calculating children wearing frayed shorts and flattened sandals, carrying sticks and leaping from rock to rock, chanting and prodding and never taking their eyes from us. He accompanied us to the tej bet and sat unobtrusively in the corner with a coke while we watched the masinko players and iskista dancers, ducking outside occasionally to bring us back fried fuul. He accompanied us to the stone churches, and waited patiently at the gate when he wasn't allowed inside. He accompanied us to the cafe for our morning macchiato and disappeared politely at dinnertime in order not to put us in the position of having to feed him. When we left we bought him a pair of shoes from the market, brand new Dunlop sneakers slightly too big (he would grow into them).
Later, the other small boys of the town came enmasse to our door, demanding we buy them shoes too- none of them needed shoes any less than Yayo, and some probably needed them more. We bought them for him because we knew him, because we liked him, and most of all because he didn't expect them. Moral of the story? Make it up yourself- I belive in reader responsibility.

May 26

2006-05-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Last night Australia played Greece at the MCG in a preliminary World Cup 'friendly' (most of the time the teams were eyeing each other like baleful chimpanzees, ). Almost 100000 people in the stadium: it was like theatre on a great green stage, and I started to realise why there's such a fuss when goals are revoked or a foul is allowed. It offends people's sense of history: impossible to try and disallow something that has already happened, and in particular on the basis that it's unfair. Started to think shapeless thoughts which I can't quite express about sport as a metaphor for history, sport as a parallel of history, sport as a second chance at history. Seen from this perspective, my incoherent theory might explain why football matters so much and why a Togolese priest has seen fit to make a trip to Brazil to seek mastery over the fate of Togolese football through acquiring the superior magical knowledge of Brazilian voodoo. (spawning a discussion on an African talkback program on Sydney radio entitled 'does voodoo work?')

May 25

2006-05-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

Woke up minutes before the alarm from a dream of writing- I was on the edge of a dark, damp forest which somebody wanted for a setting in a play or a film, and it was my job to describe it. A clogged creek flowed thickly through the leaf litter and beside the mass of darker trees, standing slightly apart, there was a willow with its paler fronds trailing on the ground. This was the site of some event which was to take place in the play/ movie - somthing horrible, it go9es without saying, but I wasn't especially concerned about that. Under the willow tree and mostly hidden by its hanging curtain of vegetation, was a small concrete foundation like a site for a caravan ina campground. This was the stage for the Event. I sat down on the soggy ground and started to write.

This was followed by a more archetypal dream of the walking-down-the-street-with-your-pants-off variety. Marcin is having a birthday party- I am not invited. I poke out my tongue and say' I'm busy anyway,' and then spend the rest of the dream moping around waiting to be found and appeased. Not very exciting but these are the sort of adventures I have these days- they all take place in the overheated hours between 10pm and 6am in the ever-changing landscape of the marital bed.

May 23

2006-05-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

Winter is here, a leaden sky lying over the world like a dead weight, a heavy, inert cold that reminds me of Europe in November. It's depressing and I'm finding it difficult to move my seasonally affected arse beyond the confines of the marital Ikea quilt: shades, once again, of Polish winter. I remember arriving in Warsaw at the end of January last year and Marcin meeting me at the airport- the first thing he did was reach out, finger my coat and say, "Roza, it's not warm enough." I felt my self respect take a jolt- what could I, a frivolous puff of hot air drifting up from the thirty fifth latitude (south), possibly know about the deadly serious business of keeping myself warm? This morning I contemplated my clothes rack in the annual Mauy reckoning and realised I still have nothing remotely suitable for warding off this sort of grey seeping chill.

So those of us with attractive and appropriate winter wardrobes may find comfort in finally having an opportunity to parade in their knee length boots and tweed: as for me, I am seeking solace in soup and sleep. (also alliterative sentences by the looks of things). Off to complete my reading of the weekend paper which I have been too sluggish to manage until now.

May 18

2006-05-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

My mother, at 62, has retired, and has started to write some undefined hybrid of family history, world history and fiction constructed over and around letters found in an old suitcase in her garage - from her great great uncle in the trenches, from his sisters and family to him at the front. She has taken to telling me (quoting Manning Clark) that anyone who wants to know the meaning of humility should try sitting down and confronting a blank page. This is how I feel this morning in front of my blog, though I am wondering if it counts as a blank page with the free holiday (call within sixty seconds to win) flashing up in the left hand corner and the tempting offer of an enlarged cock inching its way (no pun intended) across the screen. The whole interface* is crawling with imperatives, urging us to want things- money, clothes, hot chicks, large cocks - in an escalation of desire that never ends. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my topic for today.

Last month I want with Marcin and Kuba to see an exhibition at the Maritime Museum about WWII in Australia, about the bombing of Darwin and the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour. Part of the display consisted of Women's Weekly magazines from the forties, all urging frugality and recycling. They were full of clever instructions on how to turn an old suit into a housefrock and a pair of decrepit pantaloons into an evening gown, lists of the benefits of saving your string and stockpiling old newspapers. Frugality (along with sock knitting and market gardening) were seen as service to your country- bizarre to compare the Women's Weeklys of today, with their exhortations to buy buy buy , to these quaint old dinosaurs with their tinted pictures and recipes for making a jam pudding out of a pile of sawdust and two plums.

So this week we have two social markers of the last hundred years in Australia- the graph of the female suicide rate ( I can't get over the beauty of it, the elegant geometry that leaps and sinks and refuses to explain itself, the temperature chart of a century) and Women's Weekly magazine. Time to ablute and abort Mission Blog.

*what a nice word.
in·ter·face ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ntr-fs)n.
A surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases.
A point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact: “the interface between crime and politics where much of our reality is to be found” (Jack Kroll).
Computer Science.
The point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.
The layout of an application's graphic or textual controls in conjunction with the way the application responds to user activity: an interface whose icons were hard to remember.

May 17

2006-05-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

PS Happy birthday to my blog which is one year old today.

May 17

2006-05-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

Back to a.m. blogging interspersed with searches on Vanuatu and forays into The Complete Book of Sexual Love, which we found in the rubbish that people had put out for council cleanup in Dee Why (along with Where do I come from and The Hunt for the Red October). Somebody has taken their perusal seriously and underlined relevant sections in green highlighter.
eg:
'Orgasm in males is of course essential to procreation, as climax brings about the release of sperm. In women this is not so.'
and
'It is said that many married men who also use prostitutes do so because of frustrated 'fellation libido'..............Provided that the man is scrupulously clean and has washed his penis thoroughly, the practice is in no way unhygienic.'

Being a high quality book which doesn't stint on colour photographs, there can be found within its pages a catalogue of codpieces and cartoons, erect satyrs and women in garters, pictures of Leda succumbing to the swan and statues of Priapus, and a discussion of the medical problems of Akhenaten, king of Egypt from 1379 to 1362 BC, who 'suffered from an endocrine deficiency. His statues show a very unmanly body with heavy hips, breasts and a pronounced stoop. Surprisingly, he was not infertile and fathered six daughters.' Venus of Willendorf, faceless and fertile, rubs up against purse-lipped 1920s pinups rendered breathless by whalebone and photographs of medieval chastity belts. It's far more comprehensive than the other sex manual we found with it, which was more clearly a product of its times (the seventies) and featured misty shots of hairy sepia couples in the throes of coitus and looked like The Joy of Sex without the rose-coloured tinting.

May 16

2006-05-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

Despite my best intentions, two blogless weeks, which have been spent undergoing and organising certain rites of passage. Graduating, arranging a wedding, buying tickets for a honeymoon to Vanuatu. I don't quite believe that I'm doing any of this and a small independent voice in the back of my mind is chanting a litany of the joys of spinsterhood and commanding me to do a Google search on codependency. The part of me that faces the world has begun to discuss the possibility of buying a flat in Warsaw. Probably the majority of my panic is caused by the fact that it really does look as if it's going to go on for a long time, which requires a renegotiation of everything - no use waiting for the divorce to free up my time.

In the middle of all this Peter Carey's wife has made the front page of the Herald 'striking back' at a smear campaign against her based on an ugly divorce, claiming that she slaved away over his manuscripts for years and this is the thanks she gets. The headline runs Peter Carey's ex speaks out- I can't even remember what her real name is. Is it a reason not to get married? In my opinion it's a reason to be wary. Along with the spike in female suicides that shows up on suicide graphs for the twentieth century in the late forties as all the maimed and twitching diggers came home and started asking for their jobs back. Overall, male suicides were still higher, though women made more attempts. We are either more ineffectual or more equivocal, or maybe it's a matter the available means? Sticking our heads into unreliable ovens or overdosing on not-quite- toxic enough tranquillisers while our male counterparts went and shot themselves competently in the head. Time for work in the blazing autumn suburbs: this wave of arboreal red might be the most excitement Ryde sees this year. Over and out.

2 May

2006-05-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

The current plagues of 44 Chelmsford St include: cockroaches, fungal growths, dust mites and alley cats. There have also been several sightings of rats which I would rather not discuss. Maybe it will prepare me for the houses of my mad people, who are starting at last to move out of the hospital- heady and nerve-racking times.

April 29

2006-04-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

A suburban Saturday morning blog from 44 Chelmsford Street, where the air is full of enthusiastic hammer blows and the more refined whining of a drill or circular saw from numbers 36-42. A cluster of terraces with their corrugated roofs and working-class ghosts are being demolished to make way for nice white town houses with 3 bedrooms and four bathrooms (so hard to keep clean in these dirty times.) I had planned to go for a run with my friend the corporate lawyer but twisted my ankle chasing the neighborhood alley cats out of the back yard and had to cancel. My Prospective Spouse is snoring in bed after his hard week at the office and I'm inclined to wonder what's become of us and if we will suffocate in this cosy domestic corner we have painted ourselves into.

On Thursday we went to see a film at the German film festival about a compulsive rapist and a woman who falls in love with him, with my old schoolfriend Annabell and her philosopher boyfriend Daniel. Miraculously the philosopher didn't develop the headache which generally comes on when it's time to meet with us and so the movie was followed by a midnight stroll down Oxford Street, pass the drag queens and the Thursday clubbers, discussing love and morality, love and rationality, morality and aesthetics (all with reference to compulsive rapists and the women who love them.) Daniel (philosophically qualified to lead such discussions) constructed a disquisition on the topic which proceeded in the seamless style of a public speech or an essay while Annabell tugged his sleeve and looked furtively about for a taxi.

April 23

2006-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

Home sick from work on Friday- having a bath and waiting for Marcin to come home reminded me of winter trips to Poland. The division of the day into segments of time to kill, the early anticipation of his return, waiting for life to begin. Dragging myself eventually from a warm nest of blankets long after he had left, a desultory cruise of the internet which never gave quite as much satisfaction as it promised. Writing for an hour or so in a sort of desperation, thinking that it was the only thing that could justify my housewifely presence there.

Eventually I would be driven out by cabin fever or the presence of housemates in the middle of the afternoon to walk along the river: by this time the pale sluggish sun which had heaved itself onto the horizon for a few hours would be almost ready to sink exhausted into long dusk. The river was a sort of consolation prize, a vein of wildness colonising the heart of the city, thick with plates of ice with raised rims of ice shavings caused by the rubbing as they jostled and eddied against each other in the current. It is a monochrome world completely exotic to me, a world assimilated through early absorption of European fairy tales of wolves and cold forests, but never seen. A world in suspended animation where motionless fishermen crouch on stools above their ice holes in frozen backwaters, a black and white world of soot and snow. Easy to imagine how it could produce a sort of harshness of character, a dogmatism, an overwhelming moral certainty in its inhabitants (more difficult to accomodate the virulently fertile summers with this theory.)

Home late afternoon, shopping bags in hand. The fat gatekeepers ignore me, having worked out that I don't speak any human language. As the season progresses they don't even bother to leave their heated office. On the wall behind the intercom there is a postcard that Marcin sent them from Africa. I eat something, drink a can of beer. I get into the bath and marinate until my body is pliable with heat and dress myself with the care of a kept woman . Then I arrange myself on the couch to wait for the sound of the intercom buzzing ( I am in possession of the only keys) and the footsteps of my love on the stairs, the aura of cold emanating from his skin, the kiss in the doorway. I have buried another brief, barren day.

April 21

2006-04-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

My love and I are sampling the degrees of physical misery available on today's market, he with a broken collarbone and I with a mucus-laden chest. On Monday at an unspecified point somewhere on the Ingar fire trail we had our first encounter with downhill drama when Marcin hit a rock at the speed of 50 km/hr and flew through the air with the greatest of ease while several shocked spectators looked on. Rounding the corner a minute of two later at my pensioner's pace, I registered several standing bodies and one crumpled heap and went into an entirely self-interested process of elimination to ascertain whether he was amongst the standing or the fallen. And there he was, glaze-eyed and grunting and clutching at his arm in the gutter beside the track- luckily the bystanders were both less shocked and more competent than me, having no vested interests at stake, and took command and called an ambulance, rigged a sling out of a spare tube and made sure he was warm. And so to hospital- x-rays, stitches, painkillers, lights in the eyes and large scale disinfection- it was such a long process that I recovered from my shock and started to regret the sheer inconvenience of it all. As for the doctors and nurses and emergency staff: what sort of people live a life constructed out of glimpses of other people's life-changing moments, and make death and injury their daily bread? They are soldiers of sorts, living in an atmosphere of extremity and trying somehow to accept it as normality .

April 13

2006-04-13T02:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, struggling with the looming apparition of my own ordinariness, I recounted the Seduction of Abebe Birera to my workmates- an English slapper, a misogynist Irishman, a wide-eyed dancer from the western suburbs and a depressed homosexual of indeterminate years. This is a story in which an Australian woman in her late twenties deflowers a tennage Ethiopian virgin in the hill town of Gondar, assisted by a litre of honey wine and a low grade episode of mania, for no other reason than that she feels like it (he doesn't object either.) The Ethiopian virgin is also of undisclosed age but dances like a young Michael Jackson and produces charming grammatical aberrances like 'shoeses' and 'stuffs' which is enough to override the horrible possibility that he may not be eighteen- as he claims - but something rather closer to sixteen. He is five foot tall (the pervert cougar is about six), and the romances blossoms in the Gondar cinema where the prospective lovers court over a bunch of chat, five cigarettes and an action movie starring an Aryan hero and a man- eating monster. The usher tells Abebe sternly that his mother will be informed.

For the next ten days this romance proceeds in fits and starts, with Sean Paul singing about sexy ladies all over town in the background and the first tiff occurring within days over the presence of an extremely drunk junvenile, asleep with his shoes on in the disgruntled sex tourist's bed. Disgruntled sex tourist takes the cue of the cinema usher and threatens to send drunk juvenile home to mother should this ever occur again. Luckily for all the affair is too brief for this to become a real issue and within a week the sex tourist is on her way out of town in a rattling bus that will- before the trip is over- see the birth of one long-lasting romance between the sex tourist and a Polish architect and the death of one donkey.

April 8

2006-04-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

It's autumn at last and in earnest and the city is regaining some of its innocence and enthusiasm after the lethargy of the summer. The dockyards in Balmain, which have been sulking in the heat, are starting to bustle again and the markets at seven in the morning are an indication that the cynicism and obsession with appearances has momentarily abated. Mothers in tracksuits briefly share the world of homebound clubbers at the market cafe- this is bleary-eyed Sydney with her makeup off, lighting her first cigarette, forgetting to pretend for a few minutes. At this time of year I always have a renewal of love for the place and remember that I'm a daughter of the city, and this year it's particularly strong because I've taken up the most quintessential Sydney habit- commuting.

There are millions on the streets but it's not a revolution. It's a perfect metaphor for individualistic society- together but alone, everyone isolated in his private cocoon and not thinking beyond establishing and maintaining his place in the metallic serpent that stretches, gleaming in the sun and shot through with flashes of irritation, from the city across the Anzac Bridge, the Iron Cove Bridge, the Gladesville Bridge and into the hinterland of the western suburbs. Millions of people oscillating uselessly between work and home, picking their noses at the traffic lights and dreaming of what they will consume with the money they've sold their lives for. I can tell you all this with authority because now I'm one of them.

April 6

2006-04-06T01:23:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a day spent in the company of the twitchy, the paranoid, the phobic, the delusional and the just plain poor to make you count your blessings. And to make sure I understood just how well off I really am I read the diagnostic manual for panic disorders and sexual dysfunction and took a long hard look at a picture of a cirrhotic liver. It's not only the starving children of Africa who make you realise how lucky you are to be born a sane middle class white honkey in a first world country.

April 5

2006-04-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

A weekend in the mountains feeling manic with joy- the weather has turned to autumn and it was possible to ride all day in the coolness with the air so clear that Sydney was visible from the escarpment, clustered on the horizon like a dream city gone smoky grey with distance. The riding was a fantastic mixture of corrugated firetrail and boulder strewn single track and as I rode down to Bedford Creek, deafened by the sound of trembling and distressed metal, I had a flashback to my childhood and my days as Rattletrap Rosie. This name was given to me by Simeon McGovern, the Christadelphian boy down the road , and now I think of it he was named quite aptly as well since he used to ride hunched over his handlebars like a chimpanzee winning the Tour de France. I developed a crush on him as I did (in my rural pragmatism) on every boy in a ten kilometer radius and now that I try to quantify that I realise there were only three of them - Simeon, Ben DeVries and Hrothgar Brennan. Ben DeVries was the most enduring of these passions, and gave early indications of what would be an abiding interest in short brown men. He was lefthanded and mysterious and it ended in tears before it had begun when I asked my younger brother to request his hand on my behalf and he refused.

March 24

2006-03-23T14:48:00.000-08:00

Daylight saving has been extended in order to accomodate the Commonwealth Games so I now wake up in the dark to head off to my daily rounds of the mad people, where I am developing my feminist principles and my concept of social justice and trying not to purse my lips too much at frequent infringements of same. I am seeing the dark underbelly of Australian society which nice middle class girls like me don't usually infiltrate: the inside of psychiatric wards, the Housing Commission dumps with squatters living on the balcony, the supermarkets on pension day. I still have the energy to cope with this and to believe that things can be changed albeit in a random and very incremental way, but I can imagine that this optimism wouldn't last long if I had to live in the circumstances that a lot of the clients live in. ('Patient' is out, as a designation. 'Consumer' and 'client' are the tags of the day. ) . At the moment, despite being chronically underpaid, I am getting an education I wouldn't be without and regretting the loss of my student life less as time passes. And now off to a picnic in the rain with Julie.

March 14

2006-03-13T23:14:00.000-08:00

Vision of the day : a roomful of schizophrenics and other damaged souls shaking maracas and singing 'Volare oh oh oh oh' at the top of their lungs in top-volume tuneless karaoke style. As we howled away like we were testifyin' to the good lord I felt my cynicism about these sorts of activities take a mortal blow : it really seems to work, and to give people an unselfconscious pleasure that they might not get in any other way. It almost created enough warm fuzziness to dispel lingering remnants of Wolf Creek which are lurking at the dark edge of my psyche. On the Gladesville bridge this morning on my way to work I theorised that inability to watch sadistic psychopaths taunting their victims on screen is actually an indication of a highly developed empathetic faculty but on the other hand maybe I'm just a sissy.

March 13

2006-03-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

On one of my rare forays into the alcoholic land these days I ran into Marcelle and Brendan's friend Damien and his girlfriend in the Town Hall. Damien is fresh back from Guatemala and south America, with a moustache to prove it, and I stayed until two in the morning trying to inhale some odor of foreign parts. Unfortunately I drank so much and was so consumed by misery and regret the following day that all that remains is a vague impression of the physical similarity of Damien and Anna, who exhibit the same uncanny convergence of behaviour and features as the bandy-legged man who walks his bulldog in Camperdown Park.

In other news I've completed my first full week of work in about five years and although it's engaging I'm suffering from the constriction of social life that inevitably follows. I feel as though I have no time. I leave home just after sunrise and come home late in the afternoon : the year is growing old, the light is shrinking and fading, and I'm feeling coming-of-age pangs. I've got a live-in lover, a full-time job, and the tendency to feel a periodic stab of loss when I think of my spinster student life.

March 6

2006-03-05T22:49:00.000-08:00

A weekend of staring into space and gossiping with Katherine- the Prospective Divorcee, the still-unemployed Pole and the try-hard social worker bonding in the bush. I got drunk for the first time in three months and started ranting about my father, but otherwise the expedition was a great success. Today the try-hard social worker started work, an exhausting day which began with an idealistic edge and is ending in a dream of the dole queue- do I really want to work? Have I made the right choice re: Appen? I have made a decision to leave Marcin to his own devices and to consciously attempt not to worry about his fagging and financial state, but it's useless. I am going to watch Capote thank you and goodnight.

March 1

2006-02-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

My favourite piece of news for the year is the one about the suicidal Frenchwoman who had half her face eaten by her dog while unconscious after an overdose of sleeping pills and subsequently became the first person in the world to have a face transplant. It has everything you could want in fact or fiction, from desperation to bestial behaviour and the redemption of modern medicine, and provides a conversation starter from an endless number of standpoints including:

1) what an amazing operation
2)what a fucked up woman
3)what a naughty dog

If anyone would like to pursue any of these lines of discussion, you known where to find me.

February 23

2006-02-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

Suffering a small scale human tragedy of the decision making variety- I went for a job interview at Appen where the mistress ( an obnoxious specimen by the name of Julie Vonwiller- I wonder if this will appear when she googles herself) showed me all her teeth at regular intervals for an hour and said that she was almost sure they could use me. It seems that the issue is that I am in fact too employable. She is such an abrasive character that I tell myself I will only accept the job if she offers me a million bucks but of course in reality I'm interested. The thing that really horrifies me is the idea of calling someone up and telling them that I've had a better offer but probably it will provide some long- needed training in assertiveness. Interesting isn't it that I like to imagine myself as a powerful and independent woman but then crumble into a small heap at the thought of saying no to anyone.

Occupying myself more than I probably should with the proceeding disintegration of Katherine- and -Tawfiq: the plot is now so thick that Hollywood would reject it on credibility grounds, and I have spent hours straining my mind trying to work out what's really going on. I am inevitably coming down on Katherine's side ( the sisterhood isn't dead after all ) but having a few regrets as I had Tawfiq earmarked as a nice friend for Marcin to guide him through the pitfalls of migrant life. To be continued.

February 20

2006-02-20T03:08:00.000-08:00

Contemplating womanhood recently - a difficult subject which is, believe it or not, further complicated by the fact that I am one ( a woman I mean). The subject gives me a sort of vertigo, as if I am inside a building trying to picture how it looks from the outside. How to distinguish the characteristics of my natural self from those attributable to my second X chromosome ? I am thinking of these peculiarly feminine sorts of behaviours and desires such as the urge to tell people to take a warm jumper with them when they go to the movies and a more generalised sense of responsibility for things which I can't control (the happiness of my prospective spouse, the imaginary feelings of my prospective employers should I decline their kind offers ). I fight with the niggling worry that my conception of liberation, and in particular the idea of sexual freedom, is just another nasty joke by the patriarchy - an insidious fashion which isn't really freedom at all but a twisted expression of all the old urges and a novel way of exploiting women by convincing them that they are doing exactly what they want. What can you do when the woman in a burqa (or the woman sucking a stranger's cock in a nightclub dunny) says, this empowers me, I'm acting on my own will, this is what I choose ? Having been so thoroughly molded by the external pressures of socialisation and ideas about gender, an attempt to get an outside perspective feels like an extreme effort akin to a mental space program that catapults me away from the gravitational pull of The World as We Know It. Think of the hazards and casualties of this sort of program- how many dead simian astronauts, how much galactic politicking, how many shat-in space suits, all for the sake of seeing a few square kilometres of dead rock and the vision of the little blue marble called Earth which suddenly looks like a perfectly good place to be after all.

February 14

2006-02-13T12:44:00.000-08:00

Anarchy is in the air - it's a time of divorces and flux, and it's reflected in the demolition process going on at the university where they are knocking down the building beside the library. Behind a high wire fence they are slowly reducing it to a pile of rubble and it's a peculiarly satisfying sight: the smashed windows, the twisted wire supports protruding from the concrete, the sudden visibility of previously hidden rooms as they are torn in half and reveal that inside, there is nothing interesting at all. The same impulse that leads me to secretly hope to see a terrible car accident is the impulse that makes watching this destruction such a pleasure: it demonstrates what everybody knows, that nothing is stable, that everything will fall apart when the right amount of pressure is applied in the right place.

These maudlin thoughts provoked partly by Katherine and Tawfik's separation, which is unfolding as we speak in surreal technicolour. He went to Egypt to photograph an archaeological dig, fell in love with a sexy young headbanger and came back listening to Iron Maiden and requesting a separation. My powers of imagination are so exercised by this unlikely scenario that I am even dreaming about it and trying to make sense of it in my sleep. My first thought is that he has gone completely mad but Katherine tells me that 'that's what she thought at first, but that's what people always tell themselves when they're being dumped.' She is vocal and articulate about the process- the pity succeeded by rage with a constant drumming of pain in the background. Destruction is not only a source of secret fascination, it' s also unbelievably easy: it's possible to ruin something that's been years in the making in a matter of minutes.How depressing it is and how paranoid it can make one.

On another, not entirely unrelated topic , yesterday I made my first ever visit to a psychiatrist. I had to meet my mad phone-friend's doctor before meeting her, so at 12:30 I rolled sweatily up to the door of a discreet house in Paddington which had the blinds drawn and only a tiny Please Enter sign to indicate that it was anything other than an ordinary residence in a fashionable part of town. Inside the decor was relentlessly beige, the trashy magazines (Vogue and Cosmopolitan, not New Weekly- there is both money and taste here) lined up with military precision on a spotless glass tabletop, the light moderated by pale, neutral blinds, soothing music and a smiling, unintimidating receptionist hunkered down behind a high desk. Obviously the designers didn't realise that a lack of any discord is just as likely to cause an outbreak of madness as a hot pink couch and a Black Sabbath soundtrack.

Dr. Both himself was smooth and pleasant in the same uncompromising way - polished shoes, a balding head shaved to minimise the obviousness of his hair loss, neat ironed trousers. He sat in one wide beige chair and crossed his legs in an accomodating (as opposed to defensive) manner : I sat in another one opposite him and mirrored his pose. An easy conversation followed with exactly the right amount of eye contact, guided precisely by the doctor who gave me (in an unemotional but caring fashion) a rundown of Julie's illness. Diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia 20 years ago, she has never worked due to her condition and currently lives at home with her parents as she has for most of her life. She struggles with finding ways to occupy her time and has only recently ( within the last couple of years) found a medication which controls her symptoms (voices). She has made a couple of unsuccessful suicide attempts and frequently suffers from anxiety in new situations.

This, then, constituted the only discordancy: this recount of what has basically been an unhappy life circumscribed by recurrent madness, uttered in this reasonable tone by a pleasant- faced young man in his beige office.

February 9

2006-02-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

Last week I went for my first job interview in a mad people's service provider in Ryde. I had forgotten how heavy the silence is in the suburbs- the only commercial sign of life was a bakery selling yellow bread hard up against a decrepit pet shop with empty fishtanks in the windows, the occasional bus rumbling by and stopping to drop off a pensioner in front of a shuttered house.It was forty degrees and I was dressed in my best brown polyester and sweating like a pig- being my father's daughter I arrived 2 hours early and since there are no public amenities in the suburbs I was forced to leap the fence (risking destruction of aforementioned best brown polyester) to piss in the Field of Mars Nature Reserve. Luckily Mad People Central was airconditioned to arctic temperatures so when I finally got inside my synthetic cocoon stood me in good stead.

The panel consisted of a gone-to-seed Morticia Adams, a smurf, an earnest young blonde and a shadowy HR representative called Nhu Nguyen. They gave me a list of questions before going in and the interview consisted of me reeling off my prepared answers while they looked at their notepads on the other side of an enormous round table and scribbled. The only hitch came partway through when the smurf started to cough his lungs up over to the north west- I was too deep in my incantation of Disability Service Standard 2 (Decision Making and Choice) to notice until Morticia stopped me to enquire ostentatiously after his health. The smurf (who liked me) hushed her irritably and my earnest recitation continued unbroken for the next half hour.

Apparently this lecture suited everbody as they offered me the job. Now I'm in a quandary- since, apparently, I am capable of getting a job, maybe I should keep trying and look for something better ? I want to keep studying as well. Will I get to be a famous linguist if I spend my energies reminding mad people to pay their rent and clean under the sink? I am already planning how to combine these two diverse interests.

2006-01-19T20:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-01-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

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