skull stuff

By God, this internet thing is something else. Just when I’m yawning in the face of Facebook and thinking it has nothing new to offer me, a whole new world opens up to me out of nowhere (but not on Facebook, usually, might I add) and I’m beguiled all over again, woozy as the first time it happened… but now without the accompanying screech of dial-up. The great cyber trapdoor swings open and a pixelly pool of glitter forms before mine eyes, all oasis-like and sugary.

All last week I was obsessed with all things astronautical. But I woke up yesterday morning and it had passed, leaving a small well inside me ready for my next bout of short-lived rapturising, which is usually not very far off.

I’m listening to the new Brian Eno album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, in my new office. Both are extremely good.

Jillyfran called tonight to tell me a funny internet story. The internet is downright CRAZY!

I have been reading Kristin Hersh’s new memoir, Rat Girl. It’s fucken excellent. I just want to be her friend. That probably sounds weird, but I’ll put it out there anyway.

Sylvie’s back to stockpiling leaves, Doozer style, like never before, each leaf warranting its own squeaky fanfare. It’s how I know she’s happy. Her happiness, of course, being directly proportional to the number of leaves I wake up to find strategically placed in the bedroom doorway in the morning. She is also having a love affair with carpet. Until a month ago she’d never seen carpet before in her life.

Today I created a new email rule (I couldn’t automate it, though, so it will need to be manually applied): any email containing a word that wrongly ends in z — or should I say endz in z — will be deleted, irrespective of what else it might contain. I can’t imagine anything worth sticking around for in that kind of email, anyway. I stopped going into shops bearing wrongful Zs in their name a long time ago. Come to think of it, to be honest, I don’t think I have actually ever set foot in one in my life (just scoffed at the signage from afar, probably — what an uptight and boring little pedant I am). 

And now for the skull stuff and my latest internet fixation. Now that I have got Google Reader properly working for me again, and now that I’m not giving every spare minute of my day to hideous brain wrenching, I am free to stumble and marvel at leisure (well, not quite at leisure… that might imply that I didn’t have to earn my keep in ways that don’t — always — involve surfing the net).

In quieter times I keep an eye on The Rumpus and there, yesterday, I discovered A Journey Around My Skull. And, in particular, Psychic Explosion and the works of Adolf Hoffmeister. Fucken hell. And man that site has got a LOT of brilliant stuff on it. I’m dedicating at least part of my three-day weekend to giving it my undivided attention (as well as practising my conference talk, but we don’t talk about that). As well as getting ideas for new bookshelves on the book porn site.

That reminds me, soon — when I have even more time on my hands — I am going to update my things I like section and include all this stuff. Like Bookshelf Porn and A Journey Around My Skull.

The other day Frankie resumed. It’s on. She has a slightly different sense of humour this time around. It took me by surprise.

sometimes some strange shit happens

I didn’t really think about it too much at the time. It was momentarily strange and then the day kicked in and it was nothing at all.

Also, I have been dreaming so much lately it feels like I have a sort of underwordly/hall-of-mirrors/phantasmic other life thing going on. It sounds all very exotic when I describe it, but really it’s just a bit weird. Dream déjà vu is dumb because there’s no way of getting to the bottom of it.  

But none of this dream stuff has anything to do with the strange shit. Because the strange shit has been corroborated and dreams really can’t be. They’re just dreams, whatever you care to make of them.

Back in the days when I first started Frankie, I mapped out the plot for maximum melodrama (because I figure if you suck at plot then you can inject a few crescendoes — a showy surface ripple on dead water, if you like — with some carefully placed swooning and a few doses of possibly ironic emotion-overkill).

And let me get one thing straight, just quickly. It wasn’t autobiographical. Well, not particularly autobiographical. But no sooner had I got the plot more or less in order…… it started to resemble, well, life. It was quite disconcerting. I was deliberately outlandish in my imaginings and life still had a way of trumping and belittling my tale. All that stuff about the truth being stranger than fiction and life imitating art I’d hitherto taken for rhetorical cuteness.

To be honest, in my own skewed way I was a bit fucked off at life for doing that to me. Making me look all hackneyed when I thought of it first! (oh, but who’s really going to believe me… and what does it matter now, so many years on…) and a bit callously magpie-ish, ghoulish, even, stealing storylines from the misfortunes of those closest to me (when – honestly – Frankie had nothing whatsoever to do with them in the first place). 

But while all this may have seemed strange and unfair to me once upon a time, this isn’t the strange shit, either.

So, enough. The strange shit, then.

Last Thursday morning it was my birthday. (Actually it was my birthday all day Thursday but it’s the morning we’re concerned with here.) I woke some time around 7 in the morning to a mechanical-sounding rendition of happy birthday. In my semi-somnolent state I thought Simon was holding one of those singing birthday cards over me. (Not an unreasonable thought — those cards are quite popular amongst the seniors in my family — last year my grandparents gave me one that serenaded me with a breathy and somewhat surprising rendition of happy birthday, Mr President… )

But Simon wasn’t holding anything over me. He was as surprised as I was. It was coming from my radio alarm clock.

But even that would only be a mild coincidence if my radio alarm clock had actually ever been tuned to an actual station. It’s not, though, and pretty much never has been. Every morning I wake deliberately to high volume static (some days with a tinge of Polynesia wafting in and out).

I have found the most noxious noise that exists on the airwaves and I have made it my morning birdsong. I don’t think I would ever make it out of bed otherwise.

But on my birthday my radio played happy birthday. A tinny, robotic kind of happy birthday. But it was unmistakeably happy birthday.

Every morning since I have waited for another sign, some more evidence of strange shit afoot. But nothing. Just dream-shaking noise interspersed with fragments of a language I can’t make out.

new things & cover pages

Not sure if it was just me, but I used to spend an inordinate amount of time when I was younger designing cover pages for my projects. I drew them first and then ran out of time for the actual project. But at least I had a damn good cover page. And if I had my cover page drawing time again I wouldn’t change a thing. Content be damned — prettiness is everything.

And I’m not afraid to admit I will always judge a book by its cover. No one likes an ugly cover, not even the most bookish or myopic amongst us. (Unless the cover is ugly beautiful, which is another thing altogether.) Anyway, speaking of covers, I just got the new Jonathan Franzen book, Freedom, and I am sort of transfixed by the holographic bird on its cover (and rushing this so I can go and read it).

And speaking of covers — again — and to finally make it to what I was meaning to say, instead of writing this I spent the last half hour or so making this (above) and this (below).

But I was making them for a reason. Sort of like cover pages. See, I thought since it’s the first day of September, and spring, and the beginning of my birthday month, I would do something a bit different. I thought I’d post the new intro to the intro (yes, it’s convoluted, I know) of Frankie right here. And to do this — of course — I needed a cover page. (And an extra one for good measure.)

So I had some other things to talk about, but I will talk about them some other time (like the nearly dead guy on the steps of St Peter’s today… Christ).

People have occasionally asked if I’d think about putting Frankie excerpts here. I’m not against it but she doesn’t excerpt well. She just kind of falls to pieces. But this should be okay. It’s only the intro to the intro.

Maybe you could tell me what sort of book you think it might be and how it’s all going to end up (that would be helpful, or at least interesting).

So:

Things went quiet after a bit. Frankie knew what some of them thought, that the breaking news would come any time soon. That some Sunday driver would find Lila face-down somewhere, off the beaten track, maybe with leaves in her hair, her op-shop clothes pulled apart by damp. Gold coins and bus card untouched in what remained of her pockets.

But no news came. People stopped leaving frozen shepherd’s pies and date loaves and chilly bins of shellfish on ice. And then they stopped asking. And after that people stopped averting their eyes in the supermarket aisles, returning to their customary glazed nods and their slow-motion trolley manoeuvring.

That was when Frankie knew life wasn’t going to deal out any more thunderbolts. Lila’s column centimetres shrunk to nothing and Frankie could eat fish and chips out the back of the pack house without seeing Lila’s face all steeped in grease.

It was like the world had one day revealed a canyon-sized cleft, a hole so giant its dimensions couldn’t even be guessed at, and then sealed it over smooth as an old wound the next, turning its attentions once more to the pressing business of sun showers and tumbleweeds.

frankly, my dear

Tonight (Matthew) I was going to talk about escapism, but now I’m not. Now I’ve got blog stagefright. Or maybe I just have nothing to say.

Earlier this evening it felt like I had a lot to talk about. Stuff about whether I am barking up the wrong tree or chasing my tail to no avail, or if I am maybe all bark and no bite — to use my three best dog analogies.

Earlier this evening I cussed quite vehemently in a sort of mock rage. And then I made a mess in the kitchen and I didn’t really give a fuck about the thing I was cussing about any more.  Although might I just say there are some almightly fuckwits in the world. And who would study, anyway? It’s stupid. It’s just a bunch of pompous stupidity. I only sort of mean that. But right now I actually mean it a lot.

Oh, and it’s also especially stupid if you happen to be lecturing on a discipline that fundamentally, more than anything, requires people skills and you happen to be utterly and spectacularly lacking in them. Oh, and if you’ve clearly never actually actively worked in the field you profess to know so much about. Or if you ever did it was about 30 years ago when people used carrier pigeons to get their news out. Oh god. My blood pressure.

That’s the thing about being a mature student. I’m actually more concerned about things like my blood pressure and putting my muddled time to good use. And it seems my bullshit detector has had some polishing in the days since first I made an eager and eternally grateful sponge of myself. And I can’t do all-nighters any more, or give too much of a shit, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage.

The night before last I rewrote the Frankie intro. And in eight weeks and counting I can write the end and eviscerate the middle. That’s quite good news. It makes incidental fuckwits sort of bearable. (Dear sir, you and your humourless remarks mean not a thing to me…)

Also, and more importantly, some of our new furniture turned up today. I hadn’t expected it to be quite so big. That’s the thing with ordering stuff online. The internet is entirely dimensionless. And houses are, well, full of dimensions.

I have been working at home a little bit too much lately and have been having some rather engrossing conversations with myself/the cats. There is something to be said for working in an office.

The latest, as of about three hours ago…

Me to Baxter, who is nudging at the cat flap, looking back at me disdainfully, witheringly: 

“Oh, so you’re off out, then?”  (Like I’m mother to a teenager who won’t tell me where he’s going.)

Me to Sylvie who is practically surgically attached to the heater all day long:

“Sorry, Sylver — do you mind if I just turn the heater down a wee bit?” (Said truly apologetically and like I’m actually expecting an answer.) “It’s just that it’s getting a bit hot in here and I’ve got the oven on as well. Why don’t you just come into the kitchen? It’s very nice and warm in there. You’ll like it once you get in there, I promise.”

She looks at me and blinks and does nothing (it’s been tested – she will stay surgically attached to the heater all day long whether it’s on or not).

“Oh, okay then, okay. Sorry. Yes, fair enough. You just stay right where you are. Sorry I asked.”

And that’s about it. I’m looking forward to having a functioning TV in the new house. Come end of October I am just going to hang out and watch TV, possibly for the rest of my life. When that time comes, if anyone asks me to speak at a conference or even just think harder than I need to at any given point in time then I will tell them, quite politely, that my season of ass-busting is over. Possibly for the rest of my life.

I would much rather fill my head with the Living Channel and crime documentaries than case studies on crisis management and dialogic models. Unless it involves a paint chart or a creepy voiceover and some telling DNA I just can’t bring myself to give that much of a damn about it.

sea change on the me-dial

I just found out the meaning of holding pattern, for real. I thought it meant something completely different. Sort of like a holding pen. Somewhere where you keep agitated hens, or slaughter-ready pigs. I think that’s what I thought it was, beyond just being an expression, I mean.

Today I had a ghostwriting dilemma. For some reason I wanted to use the words sea change in a document but I knew I’d be using the wrong voice, that it was something this person would probably never say. I did it anyway. I’m not really a very good ghostwriter. In fact I’m terrible. In the stairwell or by the fluorescent coffee machine or in our last-limbed lifts (at the same time praying that we don’t plummet to our deaths) people say to me, you wrote that, didn’t you? Because it ends up sounding like me, everything does. There are just varying degrees of me on the me-dial. Like business me and plain English me and clipped policy me and fuzzy adspeak me and call-to-action markeing me and colloquial/collegial tongue-in-cheek me.

And I’m just talking about work here. But the same is true with other sorts of writing, too. The night before last I sat down to write something that wasn’t Frankie or Dorothy or work or school or this. Something completely unrelated to anything. And yet, a few hundred words in it was the same old introspective nothing-going-on wordscape with the same breed of psychologically paralysed anti-heros, mooching in barely-lit limbos (or — dare I say it — holding patterns), deafened by their own go-nowhere/downward-spiral thoughts. So I stopped writing. I think I might have painted my nails at that point.  Whatever it was it was more useful than me writing the same thing over and over — only fractionally different each time, like one of those spot the difference pictures — for the rest of my days.

Maybe it’s not quite as bad as all that. But nearly. I took these photos tonight. Some of my favourite things. And Sylvie and I had fun on the stairs. Bax isn’t quite as photogenic, but he’s equally as cute. He’s a bit of a gangly adolescent and he runs funny, sort of lopsidedly. I think he might need to see a cat chiropractor.

Another thing for the things I like/don’t like list: FANCY LETTUCE. This one’s on the don’t like list. I’ve recently confirmed as a fact that iceberg lettuce is in a league of its own, and it’s cheaper. Even the name — fancy lettuce — is stupid. Two thumbs down. I still bought it at the supermarket tonight, though. Very begrudgingly.

Can’t think of anything else for the list. Lindsay Lohan is going to jail. Someone set their mattress on fire. It’s really cold. Nope, nothing else. 

I think my favourite lyrics for tonight are from Get Big by Okkervil River. Quite hard to find decent unmuckedup lyrics online (and no, I don’t want to download the fucken ringtone). So I have patched these up a bit.

And now I am off to write the same old circadian saga. Same saga, different day. Same sagginess of the soul, no plot to speak of. It’s like the overtrodden pathways in my mulish brain won’t let me do anything else. And still I persist. I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Etc. 

Once we get to the end of this song,
then it will begin again.

So you said,
in our bed.
I was watching light slip
through the blinds to find your skin.

So take your medicine
and I won't ask where you've been.
Live your lost weekend.
I know you've wanted it.
Get big, little kid.

And I can't say why each day
doesn't quite fit the space
we saved for it.
But if that space now demands
that you throw up both your hands,
that you call it quits...

Take your midnight trip
I know you've dreamed of it.
Walk your sunset strip,
because I think you've needed it
to get big, little kid.

But just remember that our love
only got this good
because of those younger days
that'd you like to outstrip.
So drink your cup down
to the dregs and leave
that club on shaking legs
with another guy,
but just remember: I'm not him.

Take your medicine and I won't ask
where you've been.
Live your lost weekend,
because I know you've wanted it
to get big, little kid.

And once we get to the end of this song,
then another will begin.

spider solitaire — hotel beds — the other side of town — ending up becoming yourself

I felt a bit weird about posting the word/picture thing above. It’s taken me a couple of days to actually do it. Going back to my what’s private/what’s not musings from a few nights ago, this felt a bit earnest. A bit too heart-in-my-mouth-or-on-my-sleeve or wherever.

So just now I did a curious thing. I cropped the top and the bottom off it, and then I felt a bit more okay with outing it. Pretty much I cut the middle section out, and that’s what you see above (no sky, no earth, just the horizontal regions). It’s incomplete, completely truncated. And because it’s incomplete it’s somehow beyond proper scrutiny. Which makes it okay, putting it here, like this. You cannot possibly know what came before or what comes after. And that makes me okay with it. Silly, maybe.

Today was my no after-work drink day. It was, but it isn’t now. Tonight I have been playing spider solitaire mindlessly and loving every moment of it. Drowning out Simon’s music with my own with semi noise-cancelling headphones, drinking the wine I’m not supposed to be drinking. I don’t know what I ever did before headphones. Or wine, for that matter. But I don’t really mean that. The wine part.

Tonight I am especially listening to The Rural Alberta Advantage & Frightened Rabbit. My own personal CD collection is getting quite large now. I think it might be back up to about 20 or 25 CDs. I am pretty fussy about what gets admitted into my music collection now.

Today I ventured out to the other side of town. It was sunny and I got to look at lots of people as they went about their business. I especially like sitting inside the curved Lido window for a bit of laidback people watching.

It was kind of funny how it worked out. Simon and I met there quite randomly (probably the first time we’ve had weekday lunch together in about a year) and it so happened that my brother happened to be at the table next to us having a serious coffee meeting. I was actually quite mature about it, considering I could have easily made disconcerting eye contact and put him off his game. Then someone walked past who knew us all, saw us sitting apart but pretty much together and was like ‘what the fuck?’ on the other side of the giant window pane. (Having just recounted that, I see it’s probably one of those situational humour scenarios, but it was actually pretty funny. And stuff like that usually doesn’t happen to me of a workday, since I mostly lunch at my desk.)

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to get out of the office more. Like once a day, no matter how busy I am.

I started editing Frankie. It’s a good disaster. It’s not even really a real disaster. But it is a lot easier to procrastinate. She’ll be right — Frankie will — but just not right at this very moment in time.

It feels like we’re living inside a showhome at the moment. It’s nice being immaculate, but it’s really not me. It’s like coming home to a hotel bed every night. And every morning I hide all traces of us being there. And I turn up to work late (or even later than usual) and a little bit frazzled.

I read about this book today. Although of course you end up becoming yourself. I liked the title. And I have been thinking about that lately, about becoming yourself.

I am going to go now. This is pretty fragmented. But I can see mess out of the corner of my eye. It’s hard to just be still.

thirteen images from the dark land

Today it felt like winter. I haven’t felt much like writing. I think about Frankie every morning. I think about what to wear and whether to bother with makeup. I think about not much. I get downstairs, unmade up but presentable enough. Sylvie is usually sleeping on the newspaper on the kitchen table, curled up like a tiny woodland creature.

I consult my phone to work out my appointments for the day. A clear-ish schedule bodes well lately. It’s the season for tucking my feet under my desk. Big meetings make me a bit wide-eyed at the moment. They make me feel like maybe I should have bothered with makeup (if only I’d consulted my phone for my daily schedule before making the sometimes arbitrary call on facepaint).

In the weekend we biffed my broken 12 year-old filing cabinet. It had been sitting in our garden shed since forever, its runners buckled and awry, all the drop-files behaving badly, like malfunctioning coathangers or tipsy partygoers, impersonating vertical.

I rescued a lot of notes. I don’t even mean halfway practical lecture notes or cutesy school exercise books. I mean mind-boggling stuff like this.

I mean notes as old as – or older than – the filing cabinet itself. Maybe they should have been given up over the edge of the mucky Happy Valley precipice along with the warped beige husk of my old office storage system. There’s got to be some sort of catharsis in that, surely. (Like burning love letters in a metal drum at dusk once it’s become clear that the paper has outlived — for one person, at least — the very emotion that once upon a time brought the paper to life).

But they wouldn’t make such a satisfying metallic smacking sound as they hit rock bottom. They’d probably waft away halfheartedly on a putrid breeze. They’d snag themselves limply on the wire fence barricades, ensnared along with all the city’s forgotten grocery bags, just as pitifully diaphanous and flappy.

So, no, I didn’t sacrifice my bundle of notes to a new life of decomposition, unlikely bedfellows of whiteware and disposable nappies and hopelessly three-dimensional television sets. Instead I sat cross-legged in bed in the very early hours of the morning some days ago and attempted to type them out. It wasn’t that I wanted to preserve them. I just wanted to maybe get a handle on what the fuck they might have meant. To cut a long story short, I didn’t work out what the fuck they meant. I actually called it quits about halfway through the task (because I wanted to preserve myself).

But I did find some interesting stuff. Like this. Not some Rorschach experiment but my first forays down the Girl Cat path.

And some oblique things that may or may not have been intended as poems, like this:

  

dumb

you say words are over as soon
as we say them
& when we write them
the words are dead
before we even begin

you say
look at the pause
at the end of the line
it is the end of the line
you say
look at the way the dark print
swims
in spaces
all around it there are spaces
that it cannot fill

we spill over
into the drumless beat
of sleep
& silence

I keep a box of words
under my pillow    you
keep a burr of quiet
on the tip of my tongue

you say
a page is
a cage that catches
nothing but itself
in its own hook
of letters

you say
this room
is hollow but
for our bodies
which will soon
be in some other room

& that none of the rooms
will remember us

but i only know this language

it is a driftnet
catching fireflies
sometimes

it is an umbrella of
echoes & reflections

it stands between
me &
the sky

you have made
it into an origami heart
you have made
the surgery 2dimensional
& painless

& now we do not feel
anything we say
to each other we
don’t say
anything we feel
to each other

we live in the same city     one day

we will live in different cities
& the cities will not remember us

I imagine one day
we will live in different languages
rendered dumb
with this

whatever this is
so unsummupable, so enduringly papery
 

the bed post

Now it’s dark at hometime. I thought about writing here over Easter but even checking my emails proved too hard. The trees were old and huge and resplendently autumnal, and a bird made the strangest, clearest notes on the ledge outside my window in the morning. I listened to it for what must have been nearly an hour. I clean forgot about Facebook.

I read – and finished! – a book in broad daylight. We went to see Boy at the Hastings movie theatre (the whole experience even felt like the 80s). It’s a lovely film, my NZ film of this century, even.

I managed to laugh until my cheeks hurt at one point, Easter Bunny came, Dad stocked the outside fridge with sauvignon blanc, people made fun of my sleep habits (especially the ones who had been up since dawn with children), I got punched in my sleep, got mesmerised by a wee blue-eyed girl and woken in the night by a chattering, cot-rattling curly-haired boy. We sat with the families in the sun down on the grass court past the rose garden (right where the dancefloor was at our wedding). We talked about a new chapter for LP and Mr America. We talked Broken Hill and ate apology sorbet. I topped it off with a small mouthful of gripe medicine. (And I mean that quite literally.) We talked about Frankie and operations (but not in the same breath) and golf scores.  

It was cold when I got home, and dark, and so I got into bed. Sometimes I write in bed, but only certain things, and not much. It doesn’t take much for sleep to overcome me… and I need a little bit more rigidity and urgency and momentum than my me-shaped stack of pillows offers me.

I have an ambivalent relationship with winter. There’s love and there’s comfort; there’s dread and sometimes bundled up alarm. Sometimes the toes of my stockings get wet, and then my shoes smell, or the elastic on the waist goes and I’m irked all day, forever walking into meetings trying to hitch them up and keep them there without anyone noticing. With the warmer months there’s just constant like, somewhere safely in the middle ranges.

I currently have minus two days’ leave owing to me. Which, of course, makes me long for a holiday more than ever. Wanting the thing I can’t have, etc. Short-lived, rugged-up stints in bed will have to do, for now.

a week in review

I started calling this post Staring down the barrel of a new week and then I took a good hard disparaging look at myself and asked myself if that was the best way to think about all the infinite and beautiful possibilities awaiting me on Monday morning, and all the glorious times ahead ….. And no, of course it isn’t.

I thought about a lot of things over the past week and made a note to mention them here. But I didn’t, and now I can’t remember what they were. I will try, though.

So, a (slightly cock-eyed, fractionally haphazard) week in review.

I was going to write about my beautiful recurring dream. It’s the dream where I am completely weightless, and usually there is water nearby. One time I was moving above the water, quite fast, but not touching the water in any way, and there was a school of dolphins swimming underneath me. Last week I was driving over a bridge that wasn’t even there. It was at the sea’s edge. I was driving and I was also videoing the water to my left at the same time. In the dream I was thinking shit I’m not watching the road, I could crash. I encountered a mild sense of dream-panic. But it didn’t matter. Those kinds of things don’t matter in dreams.

In the dream I was going to collect cats’ eyes. That’s another thing I was going to write about. My love of cats’ eyes. It’s true – I love them so very much. I dream about them all the time, too.

I was going to write about the stoned window cleaner on my way to work on Monday morning. He was sitting in his van, kitting up for the job, getting high. Either that or he was smoking his misshapen cigarette in a very odd fashion indeed. And I thought to myself, ye gods, give me a desk job, terra firma and a clear head any day of the week…

I was going to write about Frankie, but I didn’t have time to even write her, let alone write about writing her. And besides, it’s a long story.

I was going to write about real estate and then I got caught up looking at it and getting ahead of myself.

I have been making screens this week. This one is a very belated Christmas present for my parents. I guess it’s a bit of a spoiler, me putting up pictures here, before they’ve even seen it. Or maybe it’s more of a teaser.

One screen down, one more to go by Thursday. I’ve calculated that each screen takes 23 hours to make, all up. This one may look finished (actually, it doesn’t look finished at all, not if you look up close) but 87% of it hasn’t even been glued down yet.

I love making screens. I especially love making customised screens, like this one. The gluing part is hideous, though.

I was going to write about how much I have been loving Morrissey lately. I go through patches with him. I denounce him and then I find him all over again and fall as hard and as stupidly as I ever did.

Right now I am listening to Late Night, Maudlin Street. Perfect soundtrack for a Sunday night (some context: a Sunday night where I haven’t achieved any of the work work I was supposed to do over the weekend, and now I am staring down the barrel of a new week…).

Inspector don’t you know, don’t you care, don’t you know about love?

I took the key from Maudlin Street, but it’s only bricks and mortar. Oh, truly I love you. Wherever you are. [Wherever you are.] Wherever you are, I hope you’re singing now.

separate in a shared space again

So it has been a while. Some things don’t get any easier. Some things get better with time. Perspective is all. Trouble is, sometimes you’ve got to go somewhere far, far away to get it.

Woke up in my own bed again this morning, smiling. It was not the blissful blacked out sleep-of-the-dead I had in the hotel room bed over the weekend, waking like a stunned mullet amidst skyscrapers, remembering almost nothing at all.

I think autumn is coming. Everything feels different, but it’s not just the weather. It must be the season for merciless mouse slaughter. We ate cheerios for dinner.

Whatever you have in front of you is what you make it. Funny how we grow into the cliches. They are comfortable and true. But give me an aphorism over an aneurysm any day.

Laughter is good, and so is the kind of love that gets bigger and bigger as time goes on.

Today I wondered if it was normal for grown ups to have the impulse to just up and run away, just like we did back then (whether or not we acted on the urge). And you know what, I think it is completely normal.

I have a place I think about running away to, and I take my buddy with me. It’s like the desert island thing. I have a picture of it in my head. It is a real place. But for some reason I can’t get there. All the barriers are mental, in all senses of the word.

Anyway, this wasn’t what I was going to write about. In my absence the blog traffic spiked dramatically and it didn’t even have anything to do with mentions of s*x as I had naively anticipated. In my absence the cats got on with their sadistic business and the bills kept coming in the mail.

I made the thing above partly in the Auckland Koru lounge yesterday (the words came from a magazine there, and I happened to have pens on me) and partly the other night when I took a photo of a light in the Town Hall. And tonight I muddled them all together into this. Bungling Photoshop/wrangling with borrowed words is the perfect Monday night distraction. And now I might go right ahead and watch some TV.