Stream of Consciousness

In approximately 8 minutes and 33 seconds the alarm on the oven will go off, signifying the end to the cooking time of the muesli bars.  It is nice to be cooking muesli bars in the oven because it has been too darn hot to cook bloody well anything in the oven.  I miss the oven when I don't cook things in it.  Let's see how much I can write before the alarm goes off.  I went out yesterday, to the Toolangi Tavern and hung out for several hours with some of my relatives.  This is the second time in half a week that I have spent hours hanging out.  It feels very delicious.  It is probably impossible to be able to convey how good it feels being able to go out and do such a simple and taken-for-granted thing such as this.  And enjoy it.  Because for most of last year pretty much every single thing I did was an effort of some sort.  To have gained something like 20% more energy than I had before I started taking d-ribose makes me want to shout to people with fatigue that it is most definitely something worth giving a shot.  A study on CFS patients found something like 67% of them reported benefits from taking it.  I was very hesitant about having many expectations at all about whether I would be in that 67% but I am gratified to find that I am.  The good thing about having been so restricted is that it's an almost orgasmic experience when you find yourself sweeping the floor.  This, however, is a honeymoon period and I'm sure if I find myself with sturdier energy levels on an ongoing basis, that in five years' time it'll be the boring as batshit experience that it really is.  I wonder how much time before the oven alarm starts going, "Beep.  Beep.  Beep"?  We went and ate in Hungry Jack's the other night and mein gott, it should be illegal to force people to work for shit money in a shit and plastic environment and then insert on top of it beeping things.  Those beeping things get ignored by your brain after a while, which is very cool, but I'm willing to bet Gina Rinehart's bank balance that your central nervous system doesn't feel the same way.  This is most likely why living in our current culture is so patently shit some of the time.  Not for me, however, right now.  Because energy.  And because all I can hear is the clicking of my fingers on the keyboard and the slow whirr of the oven.  Yesterday, I stopped with the Woman who Bore me from her Womb in the middle of Old Toolangi Road, where we'd just been for a quick squiz at my dear old auntie and uncle's house.  They're both long gone now and the people who own their house have done much sprucing, with lovely hedges and cute gates set into them.  I stopped on the driveway outside of their gates and the view ahead of me of a far bank of trees threw me straight back into my childhood with all of the sense that Christmas at Auntie Shirl and Uncle Bob's entailed (freedom and masses of space ahead, going with Andrea and Auntie Dawn and Uncle Alec back to their place.  Weeks of play and fun.  Noice).  Mum and I stopped on Old Toolangi Road and all we could hear was wind in the trees and nothing else, and it reminded me yet again that I crave silence, that it doesn't scare me, that whatever lies behind it feels beautiful and benign, and oh, there goes the oven.