October 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

January 21

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

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

January 14

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

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

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

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

January 12

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

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

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

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

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

I AM EXCITED ABOUT MY LIFE AND ABOUT AMWAY

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

I AM POWERFUL AND POSITIVE

I AM A CAM

I AM A CAM

I AM A CAM

I WILL DO IT

THAT’S ALL

PERIOD

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

november 28

In the psychiatric ward of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital there is a raging black market in cigarettes- anorexics beg Horizons from schizophrenics and the recently psychotic try to defend their private stash of Winnie blues from bipolar entreaties. To get into the minimum security section of the unit it is necessary to pass through two locked doors though it would be easy enough to leave over the fence. The observation unit for acute cases (the acutely fragile, the acutely unheard) is better defended by a four- meter metal fence, and this is where the damaged and addicted souls of the inner west come to rest when it all gets to be too much. I haven't blogged for three weeks because I wasn't sure if it was legitimate to discuss the revelation that this exists just at the back of the university with a view of the oval where the college boys play football in their underpants. I mistrust the mixture of pity and prurience inspired by my visits and wonder if there's an element of voyeurism in them- I can't help being fascinated by the idea that these people are on a voyage which I can't even imagine, although I probably wouldn't want it to happen to me.

I found myself in Jorge's blog disguised as an extra in a Cairene telenovela and got a strange proprietorial feeling regarding ownership of my past and my character. I am half fascinated and half defensive by the vision of myself in a revolting polyester frock parading through the pages of somebody else's not very fictional fiction. On the other hand maybe the copyright period on that particular incarnation of mine has expired. I am about to become the de facto partner (with a possiblilty of marriage if six monthly performance targets are met) of a Polish prince and I have to say at this point in time that I can't believe my good luck. Long may the honeymoon last.

November 6

Today I am discovering that it's possible to commit a rape against yourself. I am sitting in the library writing a discourse analysis paper about a debate between Keating and Howard and I have forced myself to do it without my consent. At the end of this week I will go to counselling.

October 29

preliminary list of logistical issues associated with arrival of a prince-

1.birth control pills for princess
2.internet access for prince
3. quarantine for white horse?

October 11

October 11

This blog is rated MA for mature audiences. May contain sexual references and adult language.

I dreamt that I was in a gymnastics competition and at the very beginning a voice predicted from the loudspeaker that I would win the beam event, Kim (Brendan’s ex-girlfriend who runs the mad people’s program) would win the on bars and my friend Freyja would win another event. Freyja got onto the beam and did a beautiful dance in an eighties bodysuit and tights and I got stage fright and ran outside (the competition was being held in a bar)- I was hoping that by some miracle my performance would take place without my actual presence. At some point I realised that it wasn’t going to happen that way and went back in to face the music: I saw that all the judges were ten year-old girls with freckles and teeth slightly too big for their faces and felt comforted.

Then I was in the lane outside my house with a Newtown bouncer. So you know what this means I will have to explain that in Newtown, there is a Maori bouncer cartel and that outside most of the seedier bars there is a musclebound gatekeeper of Islander stock who makes sure that no juveniles, delinquents or people in thongs are allowed to spoil the tone of the place. I am in the lane with one of them and in starts to rain. I am wearing a red jacket and suddenly feel an unbearable romantic urge and start kissing him passionately. Cut to five minutes later- we are fucking in the alley outside my front door – he is holding me off the ground with his 100-plus kilograms of pure muscle and when the rain falls on his skin there is a slight hiss like water falling on a hotplate.

So it seems that I have graduated from my series of nocturnal erotic encounters with Ghassan (my Palestinian colleague) to something even less salubrious. Why I can’t have these adventures with my Prospective Spouse is another issue but I’m sure that I’ll end up in psychoanalysis one of these days and I will explore it further then.

I will end this post with the overseas news, since this year I have been abandoned by my two dearest friends. Cameron is in Oxford about to start his academic career and Marcelle in Panajachel in Guatemala living happily ever after with her little brown lover and running a bar. It has been flooding there after a hurricane and she sent a long group email about life in times of natural disaster- no electricity, bridges washed away, drownings and the difficulty of getting food and clean water. I imagine her walking into town through the mud (which now takes one hour because the bridges are gone) as on an SBS documentary about the misery of other less fortunate climes and feel how far away she is from me. When I allow myself to think about it I get a sensation of equal parts loss and envy, because she had passed some final frontier to belong completely to a place which I have never seen.

9 October

Rereading my statutory declaration about my relationship with Marcin, with the footers on every page swearing that this is the whole truth and nothing but and so on and so forth. In fact it’s anything but the truth, this earnest unequivocal chronology of coming and going and holidays in the snow. It has nothing to do with the development of a love which has been miraculous and ridiculous in equal measures from the very beginning, a tie constructed primarily out of absence and fantasy, brought into being by two stubborn animals with the aid of fertile imagination and a liking for impractical romance. I wonder how this longing will translate itself into appreciation of a presence? I’m suddenly glad to have time to think about it and to savour my solitude: I am about to change my life in a dramatic way and I hadn’t really considered that aspect of it until now. Being loved from a distance has been easier in many respects.

Not to mention the matter of farting. Yes, we have been together for almost two years and still neither of us performs this small act of intimacy in the presence of the other. Katherine and Tawfiq laugh at me (‘oh that’s right he’s had that operation hasn’t he? That one you had? so that you never fart again?’)
This is a requiem for the days of farting in my own bed, of pissing in a bucket when I don’t feel like making the long journey to the dunny, for nose picking and spinster meals straight from the can and for a thousand other joyous antisocial habits which will have to be terminated in the early phases of the new regime.

October 8

Suffering a lethal cocktail of excitement and terror at the prospect of Marcinski's arrival in Australia- I feel like I'm in a fairy tale. You can have the prince but you have to kill the dragon. Or a game show- you can have the Ferrari but you have to know who the Australian cricket captain was during the third last Ashes test and what a coprophage might have for dinner . Doubting Thomas has joined my mental menage- what if he isn't the prince? What if I'm not the princess? And how the fuck am I supposed to do anything productive in this state of terminal agitation?

Last night Liz and Christina came around and we had our fingernails buffed and made racist comments about Chinese people and compared fellating techniques (I'm the only one who swallows.) I am feeling sad in advance as my spinsterhood draws to a close , and slightly territorial when I imagine sharing my room with someone who won't fart in front of me and expects the same treatment in return. And now I am going home to drink tea and watch movies and probably have virtual sex with my Palestinian workmate who has been walking unclad through my dreams this week . Over and out.

October 6

I sent on chain mail containing a sickening prayer, sucked in by the promise of being granted a wish and the next day Marcin called Klaus Masannek and got an interview. What can I say? Vomitous New Age magic has its place.

Dreaming holocausts of various dimensions – in one dream I am at a funeral of an old boyfriend, a friend of my sister’s that I lived with when I was twenty two. At that time he was in the opening phases of an addiction to opiates of every possible configuration- heroin, melted down morphine tablets, a revolting concoction made of steeped poppy seeds which caused me to lie on the floor and vomit for several hours when I tried it. A patient, easygoing, precise man with jeweller’s hands that could find their way around an engine in the dead of night, sounding out its convolutions and its ailments without faltering. He had an old Peugeot that started with a crank, an overbearing mother and an attitude to sex that bordered on absolute indifference. Once I watched him inject himself and saw how his quiet hands were shaking so much with the urgency that he could hardly tighten the belt around his bicep- since then he’s fulfilled all his early potential and gone on to become a full-blown junkie, one of that caste of middle aged Australian men drifting in a limbo of substance abuse and emotional incapacitation.

In my dream it was his funeral but he was still alive. People kept arriving until there were hundreds of them and I was the only one crying. Eventually such a festive atmosphere had developed that his mother started selling tickets for $25 a head.

From there to Siberia, where I’m travelling with a strange man in the middle of winter. We argue and separate, and I find myself wandering in a nuclear waste dump- everything is grey, there is no sign of human life, and I am in a state of extreme panic feeling myself getting more and more radioactive by the minute.

September 30

30/9/2003

The Basement with Freyja, Zaf and their gap-toothed eco-terrorist friend for a jazz concert. When I was small I used to have a recurring delirious vision whenever I had a fever : a disembodied spoonful of medicine floating in front of me, the liquid in it shaking slightly as it hovered there. The first half of the performance was the musical equivalent of that vision – repetitive, quiet, disturbing, trembling on the edge of an event that never eventuated. In the second half, it did happen: a frenzy akin to a prolonged bout of teenage masturbation. The three men on stage, eyes closed, sweating and thumping and fingering with single-minded oblivion, and the audience dead silent, some watching but mostly with their eyes closed, each wrapped in their own private hypnosis. Impossible not to listen and impossible not to feel horribly isolated- this is Australia, inarticulate, passive, infinitely thirsty and utterly unproductive.

Last week my new housemate's father died suddenly and I found myself with the quandary of consolation, complicated by the fact that they hadn't had a good relationship at all. The DG stood back and pondered the syntax of difficult moments, the Novelist was overcome with empathetic sorrow, the Public Servant arranged the funeral. The Bag Lady thought that it would be a good chance to get rolling drunk.

On Sunday afternoon I rode over to Bronte to see Veronika and Evan after several hours of prolonged and highly effective procrastination. It was a golden sunny afternoon etc and in the alleyway just before Centennial park (One Way- Police Horses Excepted) I happened on box of clothing which a young eastern suburbs professional had discarded outside her house, some of it still with the tags on. I came to the conclusion that despite her best bulimic efforts my benefactor had been unable to fit into size small Supre pants and being unable to say no to such a gift I stuffed the lot into my panniers and pedalled away as fast as I could, thanking Baby Jesus for my summer wardrobe. What can I say? My total inability to resist this bounty made me realise that the middle class fantasy is as unattainable as ever - the DG, the Public Servant and the Novelist share lodgings with a bag lady who has a collection of used teabags and burnt matches and spends her nights amongst a hairy mountain of stray catflesh and her days drinking metho in the cemetery.

September 20

Last week I went with Christina to get a Brazilian wax in Dulwich Hill, emerging some hours later minus mustache, eyebrows and the rest. It's a measure of how intimate we have become in recent months that we could lie there with our respective pussies open to the four winds, having our bum crack waxed and gossiping about the pervert from the pool who has been wooing Christina from a Greek Club Med where he is holidaying with his wife. I started to think about writing a linguistics thesis on the discourse of Brazilian waxing from a functional grammar perspective but had to give up the fantasy at the point where I had to explain to Jim Martin what a Brazilian wax is.

Have decided that I hate the Palestinian I work with who endlessly approaches me from my blind side talking to me in Iraqi, Gulf and god knows what other sort of Arabic, which I never understand. After feeling inferior and stupid for several months I decided that one crucial component is missing in our communication- ie the will to comprehend and be comprehended- and that it doesn't mean that I'm retarded. A comfortable conclusion.

September 11

It has been snowing somewhere - there's a cold wind off the mountains and I am negotiating with my ageing liver which is making its distaste of my drinking habits known. At the same time I am girding my loins to begin the promised campaign of systematic harassment against Klaus. Yes, if you are a serious voyeur or a disaster- monger you have come to the wrong place - if you want real news let me direct you to New Orleans where cirrhosis and immigration ordeals have been rendered irrelevant by a grand Act of God. Thank you and goodnight

September 10

This week marked by a lucky escape from avian flu after sharing my lunch with the Chatswood pigeons and the onset of study panic at about 2 o clock this morning: to add to this I am complicating my life by making bizarre plans B-Z re: what to do if Marcinski doesn't have his visa by November. Caffeine is back on the cards as my one true and faithful love and I am sitting in the library palpitating and grinding my teeth while indulging megalomaniac fantasies sponsored by Campos, and last night I had a flood dream brought on by hurricane Katrina. Now away hame to drink beer and depilate for a garden party celebrating Nathans thirtieth birthday.

Last night I had racist dreams about my house being robbed by Aboriginal children from Redfern- funny isn't it how you never imagine a burglar from Mosman. I am having a midlife crisis and deciding that I don't want to work in an office but ride through the mountains of Central Asia instead: the middle class fantasy is crashing and burning and I'm not sure if it's spring restlessness or a real change of life. Just in case I mean it I am going into training for a high altitude cycling trip by swimming up and down the pool in Victoria Park a few times a day and eating my greens.

August 27

Back in the library transcribing away at thirty seconds of breathlessly boring 'intimate conversation' : I had always thought intimate conversation might be something that I'd like to hear but now I suspect that what I wanted was the selected highlights which probably crop up once every millennium. Perhaps I should watch television instead. Or is it television that has made me an event junkie? Last night I watched 'Spooks' and cried when the beautiful star of MI5 is sentenced to ten years jail for causing the death of an evil Turk (which by the way she did for the greater good of the human race, since she is not only beautiful and composed but also deeply compassionate). Luckily this is television and she doesn't have to serve ten years ( they swapped her for a smackie) but something even more heartrending occurs when the young black spy who has loved her since he first set eyes on her but can't have her because it's television and miscegenation is forbidden has to convince her to take her fake passport and leave for Chile. Actually that was probably the part where I cried.

A brief flash of excitement sometime last week when I realised that there were four comments on one of my posts. Here are the 'people' who love my work:

anonymous 1: Wedding Photographers UK
anonymous 2: Free software downloads site
anonymous 3: car loans related site
anonymous 4: cheap ceiling fan blog and website. ' I have a cheap ceiling fan website. It pretty much covers cheap ceiling fan related stuff.'

I'd just like to thank you all for your support: thank you and goodnight.

August 17

Marcin, forgetting his Slavic pragmatism and resorting to near metaphor (admittedly plagiarised) told me once that a translation is like a woman- either it's beautiful, or it's faithful. This week the news has been of terrorist suspects in dressing gowns peering through their night googels and fondling rocket lunchers by a mosque where the light minaret is zodiac and has ceramic. It reads like a cross between a transvestite shooting outing and a science fiction novel and I have decided that the translated lady of Appen Speech Technologies is neither beautiful nor faithful, but very funny.

As for Marcin I'm currently deeply charmed by him and feeling the sort of pathological tenderness usually reserved for babies and puppies. I am reading Women Hormones and the Menstrual Cycle surreptitiously on the train and hoping that it will provide me with an explanation for this unnatural affection. Or is it enough to say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Trying to rent out Cameron's room which has been a bit of a fiasco. One man called on behalf of his Thai girlfriend and rejected the room out of hand when he found that it was a seven minute walk from the station. Another came round and ranted for an hour about his days at a Scottish hunting lodge owned by the Swedish Tetrapak millionaire. Most candidates turned up their noses at the dwarf dunny in the back yard but eventually we found one nice normal girl who appeared interested. We will see tomorrow when she has to put her money where her mouth is.

August 13

Cameron is moving out of the house this weekend and has spent the last few days immured in papers lamenting the fact that no matter how much he throws away, the amount of crap around him never reduces. He is trying to get rid of his porn collection so I inherited White Trash Whore 17- the next night he had a dream that he was killing mice by feeding them poisoned Tim Tams and then wrapping them in the pages of dirty magazines, then burying them in the compost where they were (in a shocking twist) discovered by his father.

Looking again for a housemate: hoping for a somebody with two X chromosomes, a functioning bank account and a brain. I feel annoyed about having to look again but as Marcinski says homies have to help themselves.

August 8

A weekend in Newcastle with Phoebe and her lover Bruce- walking on the dog beach, Bruce regaling us with tales of canine passion- labrador meets golden retriever, schnauser meets doberman, chihuahua meets rottweiler. The beach is long and terminates with a red outcrop of soft rock at one end and a cluster of smokestacks at the other: in the middle Bruce and Phoebe stopped and I kept walking until I had worked myself into a state of low grade ecstasy where every touch of my feet on the sand produced the female equivalent of an erection. Driving back Phoebe told us about her grandmother who had advised her from a young age to 'keep herself nice' ('I thought she meant I had to brush my hair'), but wondered frequently in her cups why young women were ever homeless when they could pull out the furry chequebook in exchange for a roof over their heads.

August 3

Lunch with Jack in a Chinatown food court which left me -as always- feeling disturbed. Why did I think that I wanted to have a relationship with such a joyless creature? I listed his flaws all the way back to the university: unhappiness, a complex about being persecuted because of his swarthiness and dress sense, unhappiness, unhappiness, unhappiness. Is it a flaw? Then I realised that the reason these meetings bother me is because I have abandoned him so completely and can't (or won't) feel anything for him at all, when once I would have sold my soul to be loved by him. I find it hard to meet his eyes and I know that it's because I'm scared that he wants something from me, that he will ask me for something I'm entirely unable and unwilling to give. Ah guilt. That's what it is.

Later: I have just been to a yoga class at the university- the teacher is named Erin and she has a cavity where other women have stomachs. Here I discovered the shocking truth that I like to chant ommmm. I also spoke to Klaus Masannek last night (with much trepidation) and was surprised to find him a) available (Marcin's theory being that he was skiing in Bavaria) and b) civil. I will have to find a new demon for my romantic and other kinds of trauma.

August 1

A weekend at Bronte possessed by the irascible and antisocial spirit of my father, walking and drinking tea and ignoring the world. I feel anxious and worried and plagued by hormonal doubts about my future, romantic and otherwise. Until Klaus Masannek resurfaces I'm living in limbo and I resent it. I have forgotten the colour of Marcinski's eyes and I'm ashamed but vindicated- it means we've been apart too long. He doesn't seem to mind as much as I do, being possessed of endless Slavic patience (and stubbornness), but I'm starting to seriously wonder if it can go on like this for much longer without falling apart.

Later and home from work- back on the Arabic project, though this time only half the conversation is represented so that the translation looks something like this:

condoms, singlets and underwear

sexy movies

no

blue

Abu Mohammad

two meters

green

bombs Kalashnikovs and RGB lunchers

They've given me a semi-real job and a chance to work on Arabic and learn something about the way a project is run and I feel slightly guilty: plenty of bilingual Arabs more competent than me are still labouring away in transcription hell. I feel -as so often- like an imposter which is one of my major causes for anxiety (the other being atrophy of my genitals after half a year of disuse). In fact everything is really OK - I am doing an interesting job, I have been encouraged to pursue something I love by someone I admire -Jim Martin told me that he hopes I become a linguist because I really do have more than what it takes-, I'm having a functional relationship, I have enough money that I don't have to think about it for the moment. The only thing is that I can't shake the idea that I should be pursuing animal happiness up a Himalaya instead of cultivating urban neurosis as I hunch over my computer hoping that nobody will find out I'm not really a grown up. Physical immobility doesn't suit me - ask my neglected reproductive organs.

July 27

There is an endless list of numbers which I need to run my life and operate as a human being. Bank account numbers, tax file number, phone numbers, passwords for logging in to my email, the Homeland magic card number for calling foreign parts, Centrelink customer service number, my student number, Marcin's case reference number for his visa, the code for opening my mobile, the code for opening the door at Appen (which, by the way, changes every five minutes). It's a kind of modern-day Kabbalah where numbers open the way and unveil the secrets of ordinary domestic existence - without them, it's impossible to survive a single day of life as we know it. A person can find out anything they want about you, rob you blind, wake you at three in the morning, read your personal correspondence, just by possessing the right combination of digits. It seems that words are superfluous so (for the moment at least) I will cease and desist.

July 25

The first day of the university term and the first day of my last term as an undergraduate-everybody smells fresh and looks enthusiastic, and there is a soft premonition of spring in the air. The last few days have been marked by minor technological triumphs: installing a printer and discovering how to burn CDs on my computer. Mobile phone in hand, I am proceeding apace into the 21st century.

I finished reading The Black Sheep, which dragged me in before I knew it with its good sons and bad, its peaks and troughs of fortune, its intrigues. All the favourite elements of the trash mags wrapped up and presented as literature which was good news as Appen seems to have cancelled its subscription to New Weekly and I am tired of rereading the Charles and Camilla Fairytale Wedding back issue.

On Saturday night there was a farewell barbecue at Liz's house: she got poisoned by the salad and went to bed, leaving me to be harangued on the combustion engine and architectural software by a chemistry student who insisted on telling me about his extremely boring life in minute detail. In fact it appeared to be quite similar to my extremely boring life but there was no opportunity to point out any of the miraculous parallels (poverty at the hands of Centrelink resulting in a diet of lentils and cabbage) because I wasn't allowed to open my mouth. His successor was a schoolteacher who had recovered from narcolepsy with the aid of Paolo Coelho, baby jesus and an Indian guru and now induces it in others instead. What is it about encounters with the majority of Australian males which leaves me feeling brutalised and unsatisfied? I think that it's a lack of reciprocal curiosity and a need to impress which is almost infantile at times, and usually has the opposite effect: the whole conversational transaction is draining and I can't imagine conducting any sort of friendship with these creatures.

July 23

On Thursday morning I woke up at 5 am and started worrying. Here are some of the things I worried about, in order of appearance:
1. Marcin's visa. His case officer (henceforth referred to as Klaus- that really is his name) is AWOL and doesn't answer his emails or his phone calls. What if he is refused and I have to survive my state of suspended monogamy until the end of the year and then go to live in a country with 4 million Catholics and no vowels?
2.My future. Closely linked to point 1. Will I end up Warsaw housewife or a lifetime transcriber? Neither option looks appealing.
3. My tax return. Having not lodged one for the past 10 years I should probably start to consider the possibility of the ATO kneebreakers turning up unannounced on the doorstep. This led me into thinking about
4. the PAP smear police. I owe somebody $40 for the pleasure of having my vagina excavated which I have not gotten around to paying. See above re: visits from the kneebreakers.
5. When I went for a blood test in Jordan and they euphemistically declared me 'free of contagious and infectious diseases', did they definitely mean AIDS? because I have been watching Angels in America which reminds me that it's not a disease I would like to have.

These are only selected highlights and of course as any dedicated fretter knows the options are endless at that time of day and in that frame of mind. Things improved somewhat when I found out that there are jobs open for transcription supervisers and the office manager asked me to apply. At least I wouldn't have to listen to irate callers telling the robot what they think of it for 8 hours a day (and the irascibilty quotient has just gone up because now we're dealing with Americans.)

On Thursday night I went with Bob and Cameron and Liz to see Margaret Cho at the Enmore theatre. She made a lot of political satire and I realised how far out of it I am when it comes to current events. I have been steadfastly ignoring all media for so long now that even Pope jokes and reminders of the idiocy of George Bush have regained some of their novelty. I'm ashamed to say that I buy the newspaper so that I can play the word game with 9 letters in a box and read the book reviews and the House and Garden section (did I mention that I am nesting with a vengeance?) and then throw the rest away. The content bores me and the sensationalist language embarrasses me and that's my excuse if anyone is interested.

Back to school next week so there will be ample opportunities for diary updates as I hang around the library reading the desk graffitti and pining for my Prospective spouse. Stay tuned.

July 19

Back from QLD with carpet burn on my knees after 4 days as my beautiful tyrannical niece's horsy, and an existential dilemma is looming. Why I am selling my life for $17 an hour to optus and the CIA, in order to pay off the devil (thinly disguised as the Australian embassy in Berlin) who has no compunction about accepting my soul as payment for a migration visa for my Slavic lover? There must be other ways of making a living. Probably this crisis has been brought on by the fact that my beloved Arabic project is finished and I'm back in the outermost circles of transcriber hell where old ladies search in vain for their remote controls under the couch and the answering machine stubbornly refuses to comprehend the term 'adult movies' until the frustrated caller (who has probably had an erection pointed at an undisclosed target for the past week) finally shouts 'PORN! I MEAN PORN'. Which the innocent answering machine hears as poor. Which in the case of this caller is probably not that far off the mark.

The day is both extended and somehow redeemed by the long commute. In the train humanity is at its most naked- nobody is trying to impress anyone, here. There's no point. We pick our noses and stare out the window and push people out of our way like children on the school bus, and for those who care to look the world is wearing its heart on its dust jacket. A hairy youth in a beanie reading Twelve Steps to Successful Living, a fat middle-aged man engrossed in Memoirs of a Geisha, a mousy brown lady of indeterminate years perusing The Satanic Verses- their secret selves are on display. ( I am reading Balzac but I hide the cover in case anyone is attempting to leap to conclusions about me- as I do about them- based solely on my reading matter.)

In other news I am now the not- so- proud owner of a mobile phone, a castoff of my fathers which heralds my entry into the techno-age with a tinny rendition of the Mexican Hat Dance. I pretend I'm not interested in it's eruptions but I'm not fooling anybody as I slink off to the dunnies in my break to see if the vibration in my handbag was actually an abbreviated signal of love from eastern Europe. Now there's no way back.

July 2

Everything is functioning as it should except that there's no time for autobiographical updates- I have been working every day proofreading translations of interviews with Iraqis which is more nteresting than I would have imagined possible(everything that you get paid for must be obscenely boring, in my world- that's why they have to give you money to do it). For the moment everything is apposto- financially, romantically, professionally. Let's leave out sexually for the next couple of months, though at least I've stopped having mad extramarital fantasies.

That's all. This is for the record so that if and when my fortune fails I'll have a reminder that sooner or later it will be back.