tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48796153878503456222023-11-16T18:21:15.819+11:00DiscombobulaI love Rumi's field and Leonard Cohen's crackSuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.comBlogger1361125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-79913215594835032472016-04-08T13:45:00.000+10:002019-03-18T15:22:40.078+11:00Bloggy Furniture RearrangingI just went to the Wayback Machine to get some screenshots of this blog when it was in its earliest (and best) incarnations in 2007 and 2008. Much to my horrorment, this blog only goes back to 2011! I know it used to go back further. Perhaps they ran out of space and had to ditch some of the old stuff. After all, they do now archive 472 billion pages.<br />
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That's a lot of pages.<br />
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I feel sentimental thinking about those early internet days of flashing gifs and frames and horridly ugly, busy web pages. But the internet wasn't monetised then. It was more contained. It wasn't the commercial beast it is today, with every dentist and his dog with their own page and their own marketing approach to get the attention of potential customers, to keep their current customers, to tweet and post to keep their fucking customers. God, it's all so fucking try hard.<br />
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This system makes us scrabbling try-hards, my lovelies. It should be below our dignity, this blarey sideshow of screaming. Honestly, the quicker this whole capitalistic schemozzle dies, the better for all of us. We can stop doing the hustle, giving people more time to do the hustle.<br />
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I like that hustle much better. Which is saying something because that pipping flute is really bad.<br />
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Anyway, I was talking about historical internet and got caught up in politics which is no coincidence because IT'S ALL CONNECTED.<br />
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I've been reminiscing about this blog's history too. I really did an awful lot of headers for this blog at one time. Seemed like Discombobula changed her clothes every week for a while there.<br />
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I do miss those higher levels of creativity. It's harder to get to it these days. Though I wish to and I hope to.<br />
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So I've decided to move Discombobula to a new place, with a new name. I'm going to be blogging I guess essentially about the same sorts of things I've blogged about here, with a focus on what it means to be human from an interior, subjective perspective. I think it's so important in a technological age to remember our roots, to understand what has been lost for us to have the worldview we do. We can see the destruction it's caused in the world around us. We know something is seriously wrong. We need to learn how to become re-enchanted again. So please, come <a href="https://suestevensonwriter.wordpress.com/blog">read. </a>I'd love to see you there.<br />
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<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-67271788890305081322016-02-20T13:18:00.000+11:002016-02-20T13:39:42.430+11:00speaking up and the fear of the slapdownWhat is it about the criticism of others that holds so much weight for us long into our adult years, when we are big? My father was super critical and super cold when I was a child, but I think that even if I'd had the world's most loving and supportive dad, I'd still suffer from the plague of hypersensitivity. It's a drag, especially when another part of you is opinionated and is a writer putting your words out there to be criticised.<br />
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In recent weeks I've written two pieces for Independent Australia. One was about Bernie Sanders and the <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/what-does-the-iowa-caucus-mean-anyway,8640" target="_blank">Iowa Caucus</a>, which starts off the presidential election race. The more I read about that part of the election process, the quirkier it seemed, and kinda haphazard too. The second piece was about a TV show here in Australia, <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/qa-deep-questions-inch-thick-answers-and-the-public-square-we-need,8694" target="_blank">Q&A</a>, and the frustration watching it causes for those of us who like our topics discussed from multi angles and in depth. It's also about the debate around free speech, and how we are unable to have any kind of a conversation about what that entails, because the instant reactionary accusations is that people concerned about it must be racist, misogynistic, etc, etc. This aggravates me no end. I'm sick of our public square being dominated by binary oppositions, by offence. Fuck your offence, it counts for nothing. Truly. Get past it, or else develop some emotional intelligence to enable thoughtful consideration, tolerance of opposing views, and paradox.<br />
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But just please don't yell and attack me while I'm in the process of yelling at you about this. Because I will crumple like a truck-hit bumper bar and will nervously break down into a million pieces that will be unable to be repaired, unlike your car when the truck reversed into it on your birthday. But you digress. And you have also changed tenses somehow from I to the royal you.<br />
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So will I crumple down into a sodden blob when you criticise me, like a wet paper bag in the rain? Will your differing opinion change my thoughtfully-concluded one? Well, maybe it will add another facet of understanding to it, but ultimately it probably won't. My viewpoint will stay where it was before you criticised it. But I will feel your criticism in my super-sensy solar plexus. But so what? What happens then? I feel uncomfortable, the sky remains in its place, the little chickens a few doors down keep clucking.<br />
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(The frustration that people will misunderstand where you're coming from, will take your words and not consider them but just react to them from within their technologically-allotted eight-second attention span is another matter entirely, and any criticism that comes from there is easily dismissed as not worth your attention if people aren't going to bother bestowing theirs in you to begin with).<br />
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But isn't it weird how in order to protect ourselves from possible future discomfort we feel discomfort by bracing ourselves against it? As if resistance of that kind ever achieved anything except extra aortic plaque. Standing free in the flow and rolling with the changes is easier, is an exhilarating ride when we stop dragging our nails along the sides. <br />
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. Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-42194445452166320962015-11-06T15:30:00.001+11:002015-11-06T15:50:26.929+11:00New WebsiteAhhh, and up she rises with seaweed entangled around her ankles after three weeks of bronchitis. The wonderful thing about having had something like that is you have a renewed appreciation - for breathing in clear and slow with no jagged edges. Of not coughing up phlegm. Of feeling the return of creativity and a lessening of fatigue (it's extra weird having CFS and something like bronchitis because the boundaries blur, but my fatigue levels had lifted enough before getting the bronchitis that having it made me feel like I wanted to stab myself with kitchen knives in abject frustration).<br />
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I have finally set myself up a <a href="https://suestevensonwriter.wordpress.com/">writer website</a>, my professional shingle which details my published bits and bobs to date and contact details. It feels quite good to do this, being something that I've been meaning to do for ages (like my tax - oops, just remembered again!)<br />
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I'm wondering - do I wish to blog over there? I'm in two minds about it. If I do, it will be more writing-focussed than here, where I just spurt whatever (and the last few years that's been rather black squiddy depressed ink-type spurting). It's set up as a static site at the moment but I'm wondering about whether to start blogging there because (a) I'm barely blogging here and (b) there are so many writers blogging about writing that do we really need another one?<br />
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To be honest, I feel a bit disappointed by a lot of writers-blogging-about-writing websites. I think because there's so much emphasis on the marketing maxim of <i>give them something to takeaway, make yourself useful or else the eyeballs will flick elsewhere</i> that that translates out into how-to articles. Now, I'm a fan of how-to articles. I read them regularly. But a lot of them are kind of ... well, depersonalised. They are all lovely and shiny and you presume the person on the other end of them never has any writing hassles at all with anything. Because they are set up on a writer's own site, where they're getting clients appraising their shingle and asking them to write for them, sometimes the excess gloss of professionalism tends to feel a little too thick, especially on content marketing-type websites.<br />
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I'm really not interested in writing how-to query articles (I'm so bad at querying that at the moment I could only write how-to-query-badly articles - which, now I think of it, could be kind of interesting). I'm not interested in writing how-to-write-short-stories articles because I don't think I'll get my head around that mysterious space until I'm about 75. That kind of blogging is not for me; it makes me feel about as deflated as an octogenarian whose Viagra script has run out.<br />
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So I've been thinking - if I do blog there, I would like to blog about the inside moves that go with writing. How it feels. But not a purgative dwelling on the feels, the sort that feels kind of self-indulgent, just like a big vomit for the benefit of the person who's heaving. Not like that, but still coming from the inside. What I'm interested in is the subjective experience of writing. Of the emotional issues that go along with it and how to manage those in an emotionally intelligent way. Or something.<br />
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I like the idea too of writing a blog that is about what I do to fill my creative well so that I have a lot to dip into when I write. Using creativity as a means of expression. I get out of the loop regularly on extracurricular creativity, though, because it takes up so much energy that it goes on the backburner, and I'm scared that if I set something like that up it would become a millstone if my health goes worse. Plus I'm an amateur at lots of creative practices, but still, that could be an asset, I guess. And it would encourage me to sculpt again, which I miss terribly, and which I feel a natural aptitude and talent for which I want to explore further. But even now I realise that in trying to describe a well-filling-type blog, I haven't even begun to describe what I'm trying to get at, at all.<br />
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So much of what I wish to write about these days is hazy, blurry on the edges to myself. I feel like I get a glimpse of it, of the container I could put everything I'm thinking of in so that it becomes more conscious, less fuzzy. But then just as I feel I've got a grasp of it, it dissipates and falls through my fingers until two hours later or the next day or whatever I'll be thinking about something and it will ping and I will go, "That. That's it." I think it's the same thing that I would like to achieve with Liminal if I ever end up getting it off the ground, with a weekly writing meditation group that I would like to run some day, maybe. If I was to categorise it into philosophy it would be in the realm of phenomenology. It's something about living in our bodies and our subjective experiences of them being important, giving us meaning, in an age where the subjective is viewed with abject suspicion.<br />
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Something like that.<br />
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Ultimately, I feel like what I try to do when I write is pan out to the big picture, to connect things together in an interdisciplinary approach in a world that is fragmented and so super-specialised. I feel in some ways that that's all I've ever been doing here.<br />
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It is very odd to keep feeling like you're stumbling forward with something you can't articulate. Does any of this make sense to you (if you've read this far)? Does what I'm trying to do feel more cohesive to you, make sense, than it does to me? If so, I would certainly like your feedback!Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-62797985941963178502015-09-24T23:57:00.001+10:002015-09-25T00:00:12.567+10:00Living in the MomentIt is not long till midnight. I am typing in the dark, the deep dark outside a chink in the curtain, the screen illuminating enough for me to see the papers on the grotty desk in front of me, the outline of that cool porcelain sculpture I did quite a few years ago now, the still-unfired one, which makes me happy when I look at it and reminds me that I really need to go and buy another bag of clay and start doing something more now I have some extra bouts of energy in which to do so.<br />
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Oh, man, I love that sentence.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Creative commons - free to use but please link back here.</td></tr>
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There is something to be said, I suppose, for health issues that force you to see how you're always walking on the edge of where the ocean meets the land just like you're walking on a wire in a circus (thank you, Adam Duritz). That line that is invisible but weaves its way through every single day. For a long time it's been a particularly drab and shabby line, like it's made out of old wool that's got balls on it like an old jumper that's been around too long, and it would lead from the bed to the couch and to the kitchen and the bathroom and often back to the couch. Other times, like recently, it's been a line that's opened up forests on one side that I can trip off into. Nothing major or extraordinary for anyone but me. Going to the supermarket and going for a walk in one day. <br />
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Other days I walk along that thread and fall into the sea. Sometimes it's a bit heartbreaking. I never know when I've overdone it. I'm asked again to give up what I've been given. Which is the whole of life but with so many couch-filled days in recent years I have a tanty and lose perspective when I fall back into the fog again. Even if I know that these days it's not going to be a life sentence, that I will climb back out at some point. <br />
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On Sunday things were good enough that I went with my mum to see a local Aussie muso, Billy Miller, play live at the Caravan Club. We stood for about three hours. That's nothing to people who do that every day but for me it was a really big deal. There was no way I would have been able to replicate it the next day. My feet were so fucking sore. <br />
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The recplication the next day is the biggest test of CFS. The point isn't so much whether you see me today, walking in Belgrave, coming from the doctor's, into the Book Barn to buy pens, to the library to drop off a book and pick up a new one, to the post office. Doing chores. Flittering. I would have seen quite chipper to you, I'm sure. But you see the adrenalised version, not the ATP-deprived one the next day who spends more time on the couch.<br />
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Still, I've had lucky days recently where I've done something like that and had No Payback The Next Day. That feels miraculous but really it's just functioning mitochondria.<br />
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It's not what happened on Monday though. The day after Sunday's three-hour-standfest the world had that greyness to it unrelated to the sky. As did Tuesday. Feeling the anxiety running through my body, different from a mind-manufactured sort. A buzzing kind that at the same time puts a sense of doomish urgency into everything. Why are you sitting on this couch? You need to be not sitting on this couch, or else if you just sit here like this that will be a terribly wrong thing to do and something bad will happen. <br />
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This kind of anxious body-fuelled thinking is problematic at any time, and I can generally take steps to ease off its push. But Tuesday it was difficult because the next day was the funeral of my ex-father-in-law, which I very much wanted to attend. We still kept in touch from time to time. The last time we spoke was via email a few weeks before. We had great conversations when he lived in the granny flat and Mark and I lived in the house. He was a gentle man, a kind one too, and I wished to go and pay my respects not only to those who are living, but to him.<br />
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I don't believe that we are gone from the earth when we are gone from our bodies. In our age of one-size-fits-all knowledge, the sort that is peer reviewed, double-blind, placebo controlled, many have little time for the perceptions that come from the subjective space. That sort of knowledge is good but it brings with it hubris if it's the only kind you ascribe to. It upsets me, really, this disrespect for our subjective life. It's my life in here. It's just as real as the life that is out there. It can't be branded, it can't be monetised, it can't be shared, it can't have its privacy taken away from it, and I won't allow its dignity to be annulled by those who claim the experience in here is inconsequential just because they cannot measure it with a measuring device. <br />
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My ex-father-in-law is gone, but I don't think or feel that he is gone. Even anxious, fatigued, inflamed, the strange toxicity that comes when these fatigue situations happen, as if something in my body is struggling to work and instead is spinning its wheels, splattering genetically dysfunctional mud all over me. I wanted to be there. Even though I began worrying about what other people would think. Paranoid things. Like, would my ex's sister glare at me at the funeral and refuse to say hello? Would they all think I was a freak, in my childless, cloistered life? Would I drive off the road halfway there and cause a multi-car pile-up because I was spacey? Would people believe me, if I didn't go, that I wasn't pikeing out because funerals are difficult but because I actually didn't physically believe I could get there?<br />
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7am is not so much of an issue for some people. For me it's been one for more decades than I care to count. Perhaps this was one harbinger of the CFS that would come in my late 20's, the endocrinal dysfunction that made getting up such a holy horror. 7am for me feels maybe like what 3am feels for some other people if they've got drunk the night before. I dunno. Maybe. How can we compare our own internal experiences to each other?<br />
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What happens when you know you have to get up at 7am and you're worried how you'll feel? You wake up at 5.30 and don't go back to sleep. And so I finally conceded that this wasn't going to happen for me. That to drive when I felt like that was an irresponsibility. I would have had to leave home by 8am, drive for two hours in peak-hour traffic, and then turn around and drive back again a few hours later. <br />
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And so I just had to be there in spirit instead. I guess if I'd died and some people couldn't make it to my funeral but were willing themselves there in spirit, that would be fine with me. Maybe I'd see their colours anyway, flowing out like ribbon, connected to everybody and everything wherever they happened to be. Time and space not always so constraining. Do we sense people after they have gone? I feel like I had some kind of communion with Mike in the days after I learned he died. (How lovely of Mark to let me know. He didn't need to). How can we tease out the strands of what we wish to be true about life continuing after life, what we may be inventing, or what we may be perceiving on a plane that's not visible to us, not parked at any airport, not existing at all according to many and yet which many others claim to swim in their whole lives? <br />
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These kinds of experiences are between you and yourself. They are the last bastions of privacy in an internet age :) Nothing to be proven. Nothing able to be proven, just felt, or sensed, and wondered at. A space, like the negative space between two objects that you are taught to see when you are drawing. Once you see it, you can't not. You draw better when you draw the shape of the space in-between. That nifty little technique brings all of the world into the fore. All the empty spaces fill.<br />
<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-46660880976592088452015-09-20T11:57:00.000+10:002015-09-20T13:55:25.943+10:00Staying On MessageBack in the throes of 2007 when I first began blogging, the internet was a different beast. Websites with frames abounded with glittering flashing GIFs. It was, in hindsight, kinda homely. This internet, pre-Snowden revelations, had an innocence about it that makes it seem like it was 100 years ago. At least.<br />
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These days, your kids' lemonade stand has a website with proper SEO customisation and a fully-integrated shopping cart. The monetisation of the net ~ massively increased when the money that never did trickle down ran out further in the 3D world with the GFC ~ made all of our website pages slick. Sometimes, when I'm tired and thinking cold and Boston isn't helping, I look at all of the shiny online personas and so many of them feel marketed, packaged, lopped off. I feel like people online have lost their levels of complexity, because of fear of whose eyes will be watching and judging. I may be sentimentalising the past a little strongly here, because really the net never felt completely safe, but these days, with so many more people on it and with what's happened politically and economically in the intervening period, we <i>know</i> it's not safe in a way we didn't then. <br />
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Our internet cherries were long ago popped and money is getting tighter. Those two aspects are reflected, I think, in the way we've all started 'sticking to message' more. Now we've all Googled ourselves and seen, despite our carefulness, how easily accessed we are, how the web is becoming more and more interlinked, how what we do in one place online can reflect back onto us in another place online, and right down into Monday morning at the water cooler. I don't really have a great deal of professional persona at stake, to be honest, but even I feel the pressure, the self-consciousness, even while it chafes and constrains. This blog, where I have talked so much about my malfunctions, is linked back to from Weekend Notes, with my full name, as does my Twitter account (and as would my Facebook account if I didn't find it so alternately overwhelming and irritating that I've removed myself now ~ again ~ for over half a year). How do I know that something here won't bite my bum in the future?<br />
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I don't. But I have consciously decided to refuse to be limited by that fear. The other part of me cringes.<br />
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It's understandable and sensible that now we know how far-reaching the internet's tentacles are that we will have cleaned up our online personas to prevent any harm to the selves that walk around in the world and earn our livings. Not so much for us now yearning, open-hearted keening into blog posts about our inner worlds, our struggles, our fears, our complexities, our contradictions. At least, not in our own names and with our own avatars. Or not without giving a thought to how it will appear if the boss happens to read it. Even if we have been greatly careful to ensure that our online confessional presences are shielded from our bosses, present and future, from affecting our careers, our shininess, we cannot be so ... ourselves, unselfconscious, online in the shiny new net.<br />
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I was doing some research a few weeks ago for a piece I was writing about professionalism, about how what is constituted as professional changes like our fashions. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when people came off their farms and from their cottage industries and into the factories, the concept of gearing the beginning of your workday to when the big hand was on the 12 and the little hand on the 6 was anathemic. The newly-powerful mill owners had to start spinning the idea of punctuality as akin to professionalism for the workers to conform. Now, with the net so new but so much a part of our lives, I can't help wonder if it's not the new way that those with the bucks who pay us keep us held in line. Constraining us with our own selves, rather than with the clock.<br />
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These days, slick with marketing, we understand that all of our words are a shingle, that too much openness may affect our clients', our coworkers', our line managers' perceptions of our professionalism. It is still really not considered professional to be too human, no matter how many programs the HR department implements.<br />
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Well, fuck all that shit. The mark of professionalism, in its creepy constraining fashion, is so often the mark of a robot. You can perform your actual work as professionally as you like, but if your humanity happens to seep slightly out the sides of your costume, the perception of you will diminish automatically. These days, in the corporatocracy, you are only as professional as your bland brand. And unless you find yourself in some field where it's acceptable for you to be a Trump brat, or a rock star, or a literary bohemian, if you're not in one of the professions where your personality traits are allowed to be a part of your own personal <i>brand, </i>then you better lock yourself in and stop any of the seepage and get on with being that bland little robot.<br />
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Whether you're a marketing consultant or a bohemian rock star, you're still locked into your brand though. And while the latter has a far wider and more colourful turning circle, they would still feel the pressure of conforming to spec, of not causing confusion by going outside of what is expected of them by what has come before. Your brand must be clearly delineated from the other brands. Uncluttered in its message. You gotta stay on message. The worst thing you can do for your <i>brand </i>is to go off message, to contradict yourself, to vacillate, to change your mind, to hold two conflicting opinions at once, to say you don't know. That kind of mess harms your platform. It makes you more mistrusted. Your brand must be something that people can trust or they will switch off.<br />
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Despite the over-reach of the professional brand tentacles, you are not that. You are That. Your brand is your shingle and it's also your protection. It hides your soft guts and your fluttering heart from the trolls and the NSA eye. It both promotes you and hides you. It is your vehicle for moving around in the world.<br />
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But you are 16,356 times bigger than that vehicle. You are a person. You are messy. You are contradictory. And that's alright. You never could fit into a brand, even if you try. Even if you have the loveliest and shiniest brand and we all love you (hi Nigella) you still have messy relationships and foibles. You'll likely shit your pants once or twice before you're gone out of this world and you will feel ashamed. You will feel and perceive beautiful things and your heart will skip when you see the unity amongst everything. You will grasp at varying degrees your right to experience your life as you experience it without an expert validating your experience. You will be real, like Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit and at times you will look upon your brand with some disdain or some despair because you will know that you are legion and you are one and there is no brand in the world big enough to be able to contain your crazy, beautiful, messy, sad, special complexities. And you will be right.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://visionart.deviantart.com/art/tHOUGHT-337589686">Thought by Tostofs</a> (creative commons 3.0 - noncommercial, no derivs)</td></tr>
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<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-59672453152544511062015-09-14T12:34:00.000+10:002015-09-14T13:42:30.037+10:00The Pain, The Love, the DesireI went visiting a few of the blogs I regularly read today. There are so many people struggling with so many different painful things.<br />
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Sometimes life just feels like a constant battle to stay above the waterline.<br />
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My heart goes out to everyone who is struggling. Including myself.<br />
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<i>Ouch. I have lost myself again.<br />
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found.<br />
Yeah, I think that I might break.<br />
Lost myself again and I feel unsafe.<br />
Be my friend.<br />
Hold me.<br />
Wrap me up.<br />
Unfold me.<br />
I am small, I'm needy.<br />
Warm me up and breathe me.</i>
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I wish I could ease other people's pain. I can sure feel it. I wish by feeling it I could transmute it. Then I would sit on the couch all day, turning people's pain into gold like Rumpelstiltskin. <br />
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Some people do believe that we can take others' pain and help to heal it. I believe that too, in the times when I am feeling more grounded and hopeful. Not today, but maybe tomorrow. That's how connected we are. <br />
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<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-6251803207109955212015-08-14T16:52:00.005+10:002015-08-14T17:05:23.142+10:00Because I Don't Want to Be Any TroubleI saw the Great Dane puppies again today. They are 16 and 17 weeks respectively. One is blue and one is spotted black, white and grey. This is the second time I have seen them in a week because I have been for two walks this week. I don't know the last time that happened.<br />
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Both times I have gone walking in abject frustration and with simmering fury at my body and the way its limbic system has revolted against everything ever since I was a teenager, as if a whole swarm of bees or a sabre is constantly threatening to end my life there and then. No wonder I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. <br />
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I went walking both times furying and frustrated at this reaction that occurs without my permission to things that aren't even there and didn't happen last decade or even the decade before last, let alone now. Having said that, I'm pretty sure that I'm traumatised from having this stupid disease, and at finding myself back in this relapsed state after being quite convinced I was healed forever of CFS. Won't make that mistake again. <br />
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I went walking without the heart rate monitor, which is the CFS version of riding the top of a train or snorting cocaine with a bunch of hookers, or going out drinking all night. Walking without the heart rate monitor is walking on the CFS wild side. On the other side of the wild side is perhaps some kind of post-exertional malaise but I don't even fucking care because I've been able to go walking twice in one week! <br />
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When I walked on Tuesday (or was it Wednesday? All the days blur one into another in my stupid life). No, it was Wednesday, which means I have gone for two walks in two days. I reckon the last time that happened Hawthorn wasn't the premier. At least. Maybe it was even a Geelong premiership year. We play Geelong tomorrow night. I'm not scared of playing Geelong any more, not like when they beat us 90 squillion times in a row. Which doesn't mean they won't beat us, just that it doesn't feel like we're their bitch anymore. I would say if anything that it's probably more like Geelong is our bitch, but I don't like saying that kind of fate-tempting stuff the day before we play them because really, either team could win tomorrow night and really, I don't like saying another team is our bitch because I'm not 15 and I'm actually quite zen about being beaten. <br />
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When I walked on Tuesday I saw these puppies for the first time and they were just so beautiful. One of them looked quite like this:<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF6zD9T5YUwTwMeckT6CoZ4H_iY4cEiQUVKsNMcGRb7JY2m0Rz2vrhclnSd7mmbYGlyslWYHn9Yp18jdVb7xs0Pro6OrvZovFjRFCVui7tt9g-eKApUMb8Tw15KxMDvhyphenhyphenKfcMoSXf5OuCg/s1600/4117685171_e19bcd117c_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF6zD9T5YUwTwMeckT6CoZ4H_iY4cEiQUVKsNMcGRb7JY2m0Rz2vrhclnSd7mmbYGlyslWYHn9Yp18jdVb7xs0Pro6OrvZovFjRFCVui7tt9g-eKApUMb8Tw15KxMDvhyphenhyphenKfcMoSXf5OuCg/s400/4117685171_e19bcd117c_b.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jwillier/4117685171/">Jonathan Willier</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">creative commons</a> 2.0)</td></tr>
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The other one looked a little like this, only bigger and with different spots.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh-wnMLP0ohyphenhyphenIfXRsPkF_ClAJvg80KnQmIKUyxwyNQ0P7eulwyZ1_47MeaS-bdtuazU8cSu_G-bFUwweNR4lwkBtXX3wTqK2lWf9c61zTqZeOqiuCFiHjMFH_9KJQH2IFXetkUCm8uNmpC/s1600/21901361_9b0ba638bd_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh-wnMLP0ohyphenhyphenIfXRsPkF_ClAJvg80KnQmIKUyxwyNQ0P7eulwyZ1_47MeaS-bdtuazU8cSu_G-bFUwweNR4lwkBtXX3wTqK2lWf9c61zTqZeOqiuCFiHjMFH_9KJQH2IFXetkUCm8uNmpC/s400/21901361_9b0ba638bd_z.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/urbandude/21901361/in/photolist-2WfvF-6SszqJ-YYBJq-fhrP7C-fhrNRQ-v1WvT3-fhrNH3-7igrkJ-7igrSm-55amoR-6Fj9rd-oovkHJ-6gqrwu-nAHqoy-qyX9Be-5VnJ5k-eHmTb-5z6591-6ouLxX-nT57Pw-nT8n5b-nAHhva-nUZnkK-pQjcFu-4STHWB-99y7vh-99y6Z9-99uYgB-99y6tW-25mAEn-5mm4vf-6qEaTg-7icxDF-nu5E4-5sCyrx-dzBhXj-aRuUfR-5YBbxE-4szCeU-TpUqd-Y6Z2j-5c9wc6-Y6YYJ-ebCdPs-dKZ8vk-9TPGnA-6gmffB-oRik4N-oRijXf-kWTrVy">Bryan Peters</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">creative commons 2.0</a>)</td></tr>
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Or a little like this, only smaller and with different spots:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizMoTFUmT-KvlPLLBNvJgdbSWKozYKBGogswGwPCZmt1DXdrdS2jP8wS2w6dQeT92EOfZNOFKA13pNSqHIltJo2B1RnPYSNm20YNVaA8M3r5iBU60AG8-DsCcSAbXrWWXQSe3pP9lLON1I/s1600/2322447605_2961960c9e_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizMoTFUmT-KvlPLLBNvJgdbSWKozYKBGogswGwPCZmt1DXdrdS2jP8wS2w6dQeT92EOfZNOFKA13pNSqHIltJo2B1RnPYSNm20YNVaA8M3r5iBU60AG8-DsCcSAbXrWWXQSe3pP9lLON1I/s400/2322447605_2961960c9e_z.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/iwasaki/2322447605/">Jay Iwasaki</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">creative commons</a> 2.0)</td></tr>
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The woman who is the dogs' pet told me that her previous Great Dane had died a year ago at the hefty age of 13. That's ancient for a Great Dane, who tend to live only till they're about nine or so.<br />
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Whenever I think of Great Danes I think of the Little Golden Book I had as a child. One of the pictures, by that illustrator that I loved most called Louise someone or other, was of a Great Dane sitting next to a baby. Gentle giants they are considered, and the dogs' pet said so too, and I could see it in them both even at this young age. They are obviously well looked-after and of the pedigree variety of Great Dane, and are going very well at their doggie obedience classes. The spotty one especially was quite smoochy, and sat very nicely. Today they only jumped up a little bit and stopped when their pet said to stop jumping. If there is any dog you must teach to not jump it's a Great Dane. Well, any dog really 'cause jumping is very uncool, but if you lapse on training a Great Dane not to jump you'll accidentally kill your Aunt Martha when they jump on her in greeting when they're three.<br />
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When I saw the two dogs coming towards me today I felt a fluttering in my stomach because dogs are pretty much maybe my favourite thing ever. They calm the limbic frazzle. I may possibly have squealed a little, I'm not sure, as I approached them but I likely used my puppy voice. I apologised to the woman. I said, "Agh, you're going to start cringing every time you see me coming. Here's that bloody woman again, stopping me from walking my dogs."<br />
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"No, no, it's fine," said the woman, and I didn't believe her because my confidence is a tattered blood-stained period rag. "It's good for the dogs to meet people," she said.<br />
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I patted the dogs for a bit and then shared what I had just been pondering before I came upon the dogs and their pet. I was walking down the recently newly-opened track, the bit I'd never walked down before a few months ago because by the time I came upon the scene it was closed because of damage from the 2009 fires. Six years later there is hardly any evidence of the fire anymore, just little bits here and there if you care to look. Like on the rather beautiful, straight ghost gum tree. Large, so that I just had to touch him as I walked past, almost white. One of his branches had a branch running off it that was black. But the rest of him was burnless, his skin intact. <br />
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"I was just thinking," I said to the woman, "how nice it is walking down here. It's such a lovely track and seeing it now it's regenerated is cool." Or something like that. I can't remember what I said because it was more than two minutes ago. <br />
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But as soon as I said it, this pondering, ruminative kind of statement, it fell to the ground straight after coming out of my mouth. The woman agreed in a dull kind of way, and I just knew that she was gunning to get going again, to walk her dogs so she could get home and do the seven tasks, and make dinner, and get online and blah, blah, blah, blah.<br />
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And I felt, as I feel so often, that I really need to just restrict that kind of pondering, ruminating to writing, and to talking to Andrea and my mum, and to not hardly ever speak a ruminative word at any other time because I'm so tired of this feeling that I'm like the old lady in the street that you try and avoid because you know she's going to ramble and you don't have time for rambling. <br />
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As I left the woman in my wake I continued feeling bad things about inconsequential things. I felt that familiar feeling that accompanies me almost constantly these days, of being half invisible, a pointless blot on the landscape, a useless thing. And I felt it rise up in me, this extreme dislike for people I don't know who I'm interacting with in a public place, who seem more and more like fucking zombies when I do talk to them. And then it reinforced the same feeling that is probably reinforcing everyone else and making a giant snowball that will roll down the hill and smash us all to pieces, that people are crappy and closed off and disinterested and not worth talking to anyway. I don't truly believe in my heart that people are crap, but it feels like they think I am.<br />
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Actually, as I walked away, I felt like the next time I come to walk here I will make sure it is earlier or later so that I don't run into this woman again, even though I really, roolly, truly want to run into her dogs again. But I feel like I will feel uncomfortable next time, as if I can sense off that she feels uncomfortable, that it will be a burden stopping and letting this inconsequential woman pat her dogs. <br />
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And the inner witness part of me talked back to me and it said, "No, no. This feeling is just your paranoia talking. That's not necessarily how it actually is."<br />
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But the feeling that she might think that way about me is enough to make me react, so that next time I will happily cut myself off and go walking at a different time just to avoid it. Because I don't want to be any trouble.<br />
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I've referenced <a href="http://discombobula.blogspot.com.au/search?q=Glaxo">Glaxo Smith Kline</a> on here more than once in derisive tones. They are a placeholder for the revolting capitalist corporate greed that we are all tired of because now we've realised that it doesn't have to be like this, it just is like this in the story that we're also sick of and are wanting to change without knowing quite how. However, despite Glaxo being as tossbaggy as any other corporation, I find myself taking one of their products, lamotrigine, which I have grudgingly begun taking because it's good for people with CFS (I took it years ago for years until I stopped and forgot all about it. Why I stopped is a reason consigned to the great Londonish fog of memory). <br />
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Lamotrogine is also good for anxiety, depression, mood stabilisation and PTSD. Wish me luck. <br />
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Because I don't want to keep feeling like I'm being any trouble.<br />
<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-46924769342931359622015-08-04T18:16:00.001+10:002015-08-04T18:25:47.748+10:00Beneath the Skin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Australia is having a bit of a conversation about racism at the moment. The booing that's oozed all over AFL player Adam Goodes for months may not have started out as racist, but it's certainly morphed into it now. If you dare to boo at him in upcoming weeks in the way you may have done previously, then you can guarantee that that's the label your booing will receive. (Which is unfortunate if you happen to be a person who is entirely unracist but who doesn't like something Adam does and wishes to voice your protest by a large boo, as is common to the football-going species. This will feel entirely unfair and restrictive to you. But, you know, maybe give it a few weeks until all this blows over. Booing Adam Goodes this weekend will be like dancing in 3/3 time to a 4/4 song. You don't really want to seem like a dick. Just sit it out for a few songs, ya know?)<br />
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The whole Goodes saga has climaxed in Australia collectively lifting up a few large rocks to examine whether unconscious racism still scurries underneath our society. There seems to be quite a bit of scurrying going on it seems. Some of us feel repelled by that. But it's not all that surprising.<br />
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It's hard for people to change their views in a climate of repulsion though. Repulsion has the reverse-magnetic effect of moving two unlike groups away from each other, to a space of safety where they will demonise and label and caricature further, and makes everything more underground and poos and scurry-ey. We seem to like to demonise and label and caricature these days, especially online. It's why our quality of conversation is generally so inherently unsatisfying. There's not a whole lot of space for nuance when we're sizing each other up ready to shove each other into rectangular dynolabelled boxes as quickly as we possibly can. But we feel like we know what we're dealing with a little better that way. It makes us feel safer. And hell, there's a lot out there to make us feel unsafe. <br />
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Makes sense to push away, because repulsion is a horrid feeling. But labelling a racist and putting them far from us is sort of interesting when you consider that that is what racists are doing in the first place. Seems our quick-flex reactions are universal. And they're understandable, too, on a biological level. After all, our ancestors taught us, millennia after millennia, to fear that which isn't Our People. It's leeched in our bones, in our synapses, in our limbic system, at contradistinction to other parts of us that given the right environment yearn to flourish higher than a reactionary state. We can be higher when we're not being fight-or-flighted. But that fight-or-flight nervous system response is what pings continually in many of us these days, and we feel it fire up when we see that person in front of us who isn't My People, whether racially or ideologically. From a limbic perspective, it doesn't matter at all if that person is a minority and you happen to be a majority. Look at the 1%. Look at white Australians. All our ancient limbic system knows is the quick sizzle, that fight-or-flight reaction that suited us on the Serengeti but is so fracturing in our current urban crumbly society. All the limbic system senses is a possible impending danger clothed in the sinister garb of Not My People. And depending on how your frizzled central nervous system lets you play it, they can be fucking everywhere.<br />
<br />
Despite everything Descartes and your limbic system tell you, you're no more separated from your environment than your body is from your mind. Everything affects everything else. Your society affects you personally, and Australia has had racism etched into its own bones because that's what happens when His Majesty's ships come into port and one culture begins being slaughtered to within 10 inches of its life. It might not feel like it to us, but 230 years is really nothing at all. That's all the space there is between now and then. <br />
<br />
Some of us find it abhorrent to keep talking about it. We're sick of it, frustrated with what we are supposed to do with that information. Why should I feel guilty? Well, you shouldn't. You weren't there, you didn't do anything to make that happen. What your response requires is to go micro, to examine your own inbuilt assumptions, to see what you carry around in yourself that you've imbibed, and whether you want to continue to do so. <br />
<br />
So we have all of these reactions at a time when our society is changing, as societies continually do ~ examining its biases, refusing to accept distinctions that seemed so obvious to those framing themselves within different stories in different ages that gave them different biases. This is good. We call out stuff that sucks, that demeans people, like racism and misogyny. And like all modern people, we want change to happen last Thursday. But just because we have decided to move on from an historical position doesn't mean that it's gonna happen even next Thursday. If we don't allow for our bodies' reaction and our society's shadow to catch up, all we will hear reflected back to us is our own stridency. <br />
<br />
We need to make far more space, in this quick-to-judge age, for what repels us in others. People need space to tease out their biases and their creepiness in some kind of safety, without condemnation from those who are quick to take refuge for their own safety in self-righteousness. If we don't create that space for each other, then the change will only happen on a superficial level in the macro. If we desire change as much as we say we do, then we need to care a little more for the micro who make it up, encrusted though they may be. After all, how else but encrusted could one be after swimming in neoliberal swamp water most of their lives? And isn't that what we would wish for ourselves?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Control the Chaos (Cosmic Onion Bag)</i></td></tr>
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<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-47117903443803834922015-08-01T17:33:00.001+10:002015-08-01T20:23:30.101+10:00The Long PlayIn my teenage years in the 80's we had big, cumbersome storage devices. The floppy discs I worked on as a typesetter were huge, but not as huge as the LPs we played on our turntables. LPs were good; the cover art was big, lyrics were often supplied, so you could sing along as you sat, without computers, tablets and phones to distract you, and listened to an album in its entirety. Sometimes it was hard to put the stylus on the record without scratching it, it was so small - especially if you just had to listen to a particular album after you'd been out drinking the two cans of UDL vodka and orange that got you drunk for the night. <br />
<br />
It wasn't too far past the 70's so apart from big storage devices we also had big pubic hair. No one had yet told us that carrying our pubes around au naturale was a hideousness beyond belief, and so therefore when you looked at us side-on in our underwear, there were ever so slight bulges of soft and fluffy pubic hair. Some of those pubes occasionally poked through your undies, if you ran your fingers over their outsides. Pubes are horribly condemned. They're just trying to protect us, after all.<br />
<br />
But this is not about pubic hair. This is about my record collection. Or what's left of it.<br />
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I had more albums than this. There were my Mum's old original Beatles albums, Please Please Me and Hard Day's Night. There were others that were probably pretty good as well but I will never know because they have disappeared. I like to presume they were stolen from the garage when I lived in Braybrook. I don't want to cast nasturtiums on any one person, but my bias would like to say it was Dylan, who rented the house in front of the granny flat I rented at the back.<br />
<br />
I tend to think it was Dylan because he was basically a bit of a prick, really. When I moved out, broke as usual, and he still hadn't paid me the money he owed me for bills, he simply ignored my text messages asking, nay pleading, for the 300 bucks. Some people are just quite simply arseholes with very little concern for other people. Dylan indeed was one of them. His girlfriend Jane drove around in a pink car with "Janey" numberplates and when I looked at them I saw future domestic violence written across her face. I hope Jane has upgraded.<br />
<br />
So yes, the missing albums. I also can't find a large stack of singles I had. Some of them were truly ghastly. Others were daggy one-offs that I'm happy to lay claim to, like 5705 (but there's no reply!) And who can go past the wonderful Ah! Leah! by the punctuation-loving Donnie Iris? Never heard of it? Well, where have you been? Get onto this 3 minutes of pure pop/rock awesomeness with self-deprecating nerdy-wish-fulfillment right this second! The bit at the end where he's sing-screaming to Leah makes all the chest feels go all chest feely for me, just like it did all the way through the 80's.<br />
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<br />
The singles could possibly be around somewhere because my organisational capacities are malformed, and with my drastic energy levels are quite chaotic. I just got my 2009 tax return done three months ago. It's possible also that I have some cassettes lying around, although surely not by now? Surely, the once-a-decade clean-up that happened in the 2000s took care of the cassettes? I would have seen them, known it was time, and felt horribly guilty throwing them in the rubbish bin. I hate living in a world where we produce so much shit! My cassettes are probably making up part of that giant plastic island that lives in the Specific Ocean. <br />
<br />
I do have some cassettes still though. They are from the time in the early 90's when I was penpalling a guy in Arizona State Prison from my rental house in Noble Park who had put an advert in one of the music mags. He used to whisper quietly into his tape deck's microphone. Occasionally I would hear an iron door close in the distance. He paused the recording a lot. He drew a picture of me once. He used to say, "Mercy, girl," and in the end it kind of creeped me out a bit because it just felt ... I don't know, like suddenly it was a commitment to be writing to this guy. One day I just never wrote back. <br />
<br />
I'm sure he was a lovely guy in his way, even despite the fact that the internet shows me that he is still in jail, after being released for some time. One day I will bring myself to listen to those cassettes, there luckily being several cassette decks lying around these here parts. But I'm having to build up to listening to them. I feel like listening to them will make me feel squishy, embarrassed. I don't really know why. I wish I would hurry up and have built up to listen, because those tapes are going to be like a time capsule from 20 years ago. I really only want to listen to them to hear what James from Arizona feeds back to me about what Sue from Noble Park was doing and thinking at that particular point in time.<br />
<br />
So that photo above is all there is to hand of the pre-digital music that made up my teenage years in the 80's - if you don't count the videos. VHS video tapes came in somewhere around 1987. I still have a few of those lying around as well. I don't really know why. I suspect I had this idea of transferring the music clips I taped off the TV onto something more digital, little knowing that YouTube most likely has got there first. Or has it? I mean, what are the chances that YouTube is going to have something obscure that I might find on those tapes if I looked that I would be horrified at the thought of losing again, after our enforced separation through chancing mediums for 30 years? Surely coming across an old, well-loved musical treasure that you'd forgotten clean about is ... oh, I don't know, it's like the ultimate in musical spirituality. That kinda reclamation can transport me for <i>days</i>.<br />
<br />
So these albums. This small little Dylan-depleted bunch of stuff that, quite frankly, is hardly representational of the music I loved, and the music I would grow to love in the future. I mean, I was a teenage girl, right? Some of it will be actually quite embarrassing. And it's for that reason that it is going to be a pleasure to trawl through them, one after the other, as little possibly feet-curling memory portals back to a time when my hair was as huge as my pubes, climate change wasn't a conscious thing, and I would have been disturbed to discover that as emotionally wrangled as I was then, I would still continue to be so when more collagen-depleted, writing an excessively long sentence to end a blog post on a medium that I knew absolutely nothing of. <br />
<br />
Stay tuned.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-16344296326690765952015-07-31T13:51:00.000+10:002015-07-31T13:51:32.018+10:00BodywritheWe go deep. Apart from the conscious part, there's the swirling undercurrents that pop themselves up when you night dream, when you daydream, when you create. Then there's the different layers, the different parts of your brain and body which sometimes can be at cross-purposes with each other. The limbic part, the one linking us to our deep ape ancestors. Our bodies. We treat our bodies the way we've treated the earth - as dead living slabs, to be done with what we will. But both our bodies and the earth have a language all of their own.<br />
<br />
There are different dances you can do that don't even involve music or dance floors. This latest one I tried, TAT, made my body writhe.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.photoree.com/photos/permalink/57108-12759383@N00">Christi Nielsen</a> (creative commons)</td></tr>
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Down in the deeps my body is scared of males. Up top here in my mind, while they can perturb me and even dismay me, I'm not scared of them the way I am in the part that I didn't even know was there. My body in tandem with my limbic system trips me up at inopportune moments that have nothing to do with anything except memories that I have now forgotten. <br />
<br />
Last night I practised this simple technique. It's like others I've done. They have all made me excited and in wonderment at my body speaking out and releasing the stuckness you knew was there. Last night I brought to mind several recent incidents, all of which involved my partner, who in this instance is entirely innocent except for being a trigger. I feel ashamed, the shame dripping down from my head through all my organs, dropping in wet clumps from my heart onto my stomach, looping down through my gut, gushing down my legs, running out the soles of my feet like piss. This hot shame, as if I should somehow by now have dealt with all of this stuff. <br />
<br />
This stuff, this stuff, all of this stuff. Some of it is from my own history, some from my parents, my grandparents and theirs, all the stuff passed down through the ages. Sometimes I wonder if some of it is from other people who appear to be entirely unrelated to me. I mean, where do we stop and others start? Where does I end? Sometimes, I think there is no stop and start. Sometimes, I think we are all me, I am all you, and we are in some strange way our worldview has blinded us to, all together. Walruses included.<br />
<br />
God, I wish John Lennon was still here. <br />
<br />
This trauma is like a hidden layer that is almost invisible when I'm out in the daylight. I can be myself without its interfering. Then I go too far and suddenly up it pops, like one of those air-filled men that fly around outside shops selling vacuum cleaners.<br />
<br />
Last night I allowed my body to do what it wanted to do. This space for allowing seems to be a primary aspect when I do these sorts of exercises. I have to sort of tell my body that it's okay if it wants to do its thing now. Otherwise it sits patiently for decades, carrying its load. It's not like it bursts into flail while I'm walking in the park or sitting at the footy. I have to be alone, it has to feel safe, I have to say yes.<br />
<br />
When I say yes, it beings its slow writhe. In response to the technique I did, which is below, for about 20 minutes or so my body moved itself about in different directions. No pinched muscles this morning, though it wouldn't be surprising if there was. But then, my body doesn't jerk like the vacuum cleaner man when it's doing these gyrations. It's so smooth in the way it moves, though I don't understand its dance. What is the meaning and the beginning of this arrow thrust of movement up my spine? I can feel and see its progress, like the wind, by the way my prone body lifts up a little as the energy travels up, kind of like the way it looks when people have ECT, only not so violent. Or the way when you orgasm. The arrow keeps moving, travelling right up my back to the top of my spine, pushing up my shoulders, my neck, my head forward, on its way to my brain. Being lifted, for a second, by electricity. Gut and brain talking.<br />
<br />
At another point the energy flows into my right shoulder, the one that's been a little sore the last few days, and it pools there. It turns me slightly sideways on the couch, so that my shoulder is pressed into the cushion, and here it stays for 10, 20, 30 seconds. I lie, submitted to whatever is going on here, trusting this body even though I am disappointed in its failings. This is an oasis in a sea that taught me to do the opposite of trust. This body, which is treated as an object, as a walking dead slab of matter by this stupid world, is speaking. <br />
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I wrote about this this morning. Hopefully one day I can finally shake these traumatic reactions, I wrote. Haha, shake these reactions. I wrote without realising the deeper impact of those words. Where does that term come from? How did people know they had to "shake" something off? Animals know how to shake it all of and continue on. We are in the process of relearning what we've forgotten.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-rDF_qUntDg" width="420"></iframe>Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-59626669457533693842015-07-01T10:56:00.002+10:002015-07-01T11:27:59.527+10:00MisanthropeI'm finding it more and more difficult to not regret any word I write. I keep feeling afterwards that the .75 millisecond anyone devotes to thoughtful reflection really means that nobody is able to get past their own internal shriek to hear much of anyone else's, and that perhaps it is easier to quite simply say nothing at all.<br />
<br />
Of course it is. I decided for a full 24 hours after The Monthly rejected the thing I'd worked on for months that I don't have the requisite skin to do this. But then I do have the heart, and so 24 hours later I'm back on sending it out somewhere else. What a fuckwit. If I could work out something else I want to do I would do that instead and learn to forget what feels like vocation.<br />
<br />
The world doesn't give a fuck about vocation. Its dead eyes say that vocation is a childish concept for those who haven't yet learned the true way of things, but perhaps they just don't understand how you can float on a ball knowing it will one day die as your bones will turn to dust and that doesn't mean you can't try to tell the most beautiful stories possible of your shimmying on through.<br />
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And then in the shower - where else? The shower is a haven from this stupid world of beepery - an idea comes, and I desire to wrangle it and see where I can go with it. But who is there to play with that will pay? Who wishes to engage when to do so requires an ability to not only engage with Not Me, to thoughtfully enter into another's world while being careful not to step on their floor-strewn stuff, pull down their half-hanging curtains, poke your finger to deep in their complexes, but to do so being mindful of the dwindled finances, the need for every word to soar high enough to draw the eyeballs, the ADHD-riddled eyeballs of the digital reader.<br />
<br />
What the hell am I doing here? Perhaps I don't belong here. Maybe I don't have what it takes.<br />
<br />
I don't much trust people no more.<br />
<br />
The world's a little too full of thinking that emptiness is empty, and way terrified by the belief that fullness is only contained in the forward thrust to be much good for the kind of discussion I'm starving for. Too many zombie people keep believing this stupid story.<br />
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Still, amongst the rubble of the rabble there are still thoughtful souls afoot, and I'm gratified that some of those diamond souls even read here, and that I share my bed with one.<br />
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For all that though, I'm fucking sick of this story. Its narrative is wholly unsatisfying.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-35095782367792024592015-06-20T00:59:00.004+10:002015-06-20T01:04:03.622+10:00Writing RotI came across a writing prompt a month or so ago and I can't for the life of me find the link to it now.<br />
<br />
It was a 'write your own modernist poem of nonsense'. Wonderful fun! It really worked in loosening up my fuzzy becretined brain. As ever and always i wasn't sure if I'd be able to come up with anything, but an invite to the inner shit spurter was readily accepted. Here's mine:<br />
<br />
<i>Cecilia, androids help to</i><br />
<i>navigate cabbage draughts.</i><br />
<i>The collateral shook Nancy</i><br />
<i>then in ordinances shook you.</i><br />
<i>Remembering dread, fondling hibiscus</i><br />
<i>in the neonatal him of androgyny</i><br />
<i>I peak. Hark! we yell to the</i><br />
<i>formaldehyde sprockets, the</i><br />
<i>lionine scampers, the degenerate</i><br />
<i>scatological seals on their</i><br />
<i>lymphatic rocks in the</i><br />
<i>roiling ocean of sprouts.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Hear us, we say to the</i><br />
<i>catalogue of Bunnings boilers,</i><br />
<i>the rows of concertinaed</i><br />
<i>marshmallow hiss, the graven</i><br />
<i>pus of cantankerous globules.</i><br />
<i>And then finally, Leave us,</i><br />
<i>we say and turn to the flattened</i><br />
<i>nose of the sun, the hopeful</i><br />
<i>cup of the sassenach slaps,</i><br />
<i>the sunny farts of the</i><br />
<i>beautiful goats and we</i><br />
<i>breathe home.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Powerful stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Hopeful with just the right touch of melancholia.<br />
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Truly, the world passes me by, not seeing my genius. It will be sorry after I'm gone that it did not love me while it could.<br />
<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-26456932241774815782015-05-28T10:59:00.000+10:002015-05-28T13:24:53.487+10:00Salt of the EarthMy writing practice rises and falls with whatever is going on in my body. In recent months I have been unable to remain standing for too long, and so I have been writing lying down. Recently I have gone back to researching one of the basics of CFS, orthostatic intolerance, and began trying out some recommendations to address those symptoms. The main one - which sounds odd to many ears - is to add more salt to your diet. Yes, more. More salt and two litres of water. Lots of CFS people suffer with low blood pressure (yep) and also <a href="http://www.cortjohnson.org/treating-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-mecfs/enhancing-blood-volume-in-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-mecfs-and-fibromyalgia/">low blood volume</a> (I think so, though I haven't been tested). Many, if not most, CFSers have less blood in our bodies for some odd reason and what we find is that standing up can become a most uncomfortable experience - not because of the fatigue so much as that the blood in our bodies is pooling in our legs, and our brains start going a little nuts and mushy at the same time. Lie down, and five or 10 minutes later you find your mind clearing to a greater or lesser degree. The extra salt and water helps stop that from happening so much.<br />
<br />
This brain blood drain can also be hindered by doing things like crossing your legs if you're sitting down. Walking helps, too. There's so many things going for walking when you have CFS. If you're able to get out of bed to start, it can be as hard as meth to stop. The fatigue falls away a little. Your joints and muscles sway to the rhythm. You feel some semblance of being alive. Stuff the post-exertional malaise - this feels good enough for any payback. <br />
<br />
Except when you're paying back.<br />
<br />
Sometimes though the payback doesn't come as much as you thought it would. Those experiences are as rare as Willy Wonker gold tickets though, so you celebrate them as miracles from the virgin when they do. It's added irony when those moments come from the 101 category of CFS management, orthostatic intolerance, when you've had this thing for 16 years. CFS is such a complicated illness - there's so much going on in your body that keeping up with all of your symptoms is really difficult. Note-takimg is an essential. I wish I hadn't only learned that bit in about year 10.<br />
<br />
I went to the footy last weekend. It felt risky. I hadn't even bothered the week before. Anthony had to do the driving, Belgrave to Richmond and back, after driving from Belgrave to Tullamarine and back for work earlier that day. It required a 15 minute walk from the car to the ground, some of which I spent feeling awful and crying a little bit because of the two homeless blokes sitting on Swan Street on the way there. It was loud at the ground. I was worried i was going to fade, start sliding down in my seat halfway through the first quarter, feel trapped feeling awful in the confines of a large outdoor pit with 63,000 too many people. But it didn't happen. I have been following this extra salt/water thing for about 10 days now, and my symptoms are muchly flattened.<br />
<br />
So increased ability of course means increased writing. It follows the night like a day. Extra space and the creativity pours in, grown more lovely from the unwanted respite. And so I'm busy at work at the moment writing an essay about why I think Australia Day should be celebrated in August, marking the anniversary of the <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurindji_strike">Wave Hill walk-off</a>, and how that's a story for our time that goes way beyond black and white reconciliation, right through political ideology and right to the very future of our planet.<br />
<br />
I also came across a new writing prize yesterday, <a href="http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au/the-richell-prize-for-emerging-writers/">The Richell Prize</a>, named after the founder of Hachette Press who died too young last year in a surfing accident. The prize is for new and emerging writers, a category that fits me despite me being old and haggy and prolapsed. And so after I finish this essay I am going to work on my collection of <a href="http://discombobula.blogspot.com.au/search/label/train%20travel">train travel stories</a>. Excitement!<br />
<br />
I also wrote a novella recently. It's the longest thing I've written, at over 13,000 words, and I think I'm happy with it. But I'm so sick of it at the moment that it feels like a recalcitrant child I've bundled off to Grandma's and I'm happy for the peace.<br />
<br />
So I'm well and truly back in the writing seat, and the only thing that has been missing is writing here on my lovely comfy, messy space.<br />
<br />
The interesting thing about writing is that while everyone thinks they've got a book in them, not everyone can make it past the nasty gargoyle, the first draft ferryman. Any hubris you have he will shred with his pitchfork in the time it takes him to ferry you from the beginning of your draft to the end. If you can bear to sit for an entire ride with his foetid breath snorting in your ear hole, then by the time you get to the other side you will have a stinky pile to work with. It's generally not pretty. In fact, it's often such a mess that you despair that you'll be able to make even a satin purse out of this sow's ear. It will send you into raptures about' how fucking pathetic you are as a writer and you will question whether you are not completely deludedin your insistence on persistence in this area.<br />
<br />
The beauty of having written for a bit is that you begin recognising that this is just a stage of the process. Like one of the lines of the I ching says, "Waiting in the bog invites the arrival of robbers." If you can believe that there is gold hidden in this pile of poo you've written, then that's when the real writing starts - revision. Out of that lump of clay you've crafted from out of the air, you work it up into something good. Sometimes it's even really good, so that you start strutting and thinking you're a little bit fancy. The same way you overdo it as soon as you get a tiny bit of energy and start planning all kinds of things and then find yourself on the couch.<br />
<br />
That's okay. Strut and overdo. Have your fun. The loamy, salty dark mess of the next first draft is waiting, just around the corner if you're lucky, to slice a bit of that strut off, keep you humble, ground you back to the beautiful earth.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-40665644662775320942015-04-14T17:32:00.004+10:002015-04-15T14:16:12.053+10:00Things of AstonishmentSometimes, when you've been inside too many days in a row, venturing out is a walking into astonishment. Today at Birdsland I walked past the barbecue area, over the little bridge and alongside the cow paddock. It's always very pleasing to me to see this paddock. It is gently but highly rounded and accompanied by a half moon hayshed, and at this time of year the grass is getting wildly green again. The paddock is backdropped in the near distance by many trees with green hues ranging from mid green to olive.<br />
<br />
Today, the haziness of the air showed up against the tree backdrop. I stopped, because my watch was beeping. It told me that from the car to the paddock I'd already gone over my allotted heart rate limit. I've taken this limit as my marker. It was set by some CFS researchers who found that <a href="http://www.cfidsselfhelp.org/library/pacing-numbers-using-your-heart-rate-to-stay-inside-energy-envelope">keeping under this rate</a> is a handy thing to do if you wish to exercise without too much payback. That the heart rate limit is a pitifully small 105 is particularly frustrating and slightly embarrassing, but I wish to exercise in a way that has the least amount of effect tomorrow and the day after and the day after as possible. <br />
<br />
I gazed at the paddock and as I looked, over the top of the hill came a badling of ducks. To describe a group of ducks as a badling seems a bad thing but apparently it's <a href="http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Pointless/AnimalGroups.html">a thing</a>. These ducks are usually found on and around the lake that begins a little further up ahead on my walk, but today as I watched they spilled over the hill, about 30 of them, pecking at stuff hidden in the grass that was gently idling in the warm April sun. To see them pour over the hill is really not so much of a big deal, but then when you are in a certain space it feels like a thing of astonishment.<br />
<br />
I only walked up to the big bridge and back. I'm trying to live within limitations so I can expand those limitations, even though sometimes I feel like taking methamphetamine and going clubbing. But today it was the bridge and back, and I focused on not feeling hard done by but instead on feeling grateful that I was out having this walk at all.<br />
<br />
The water ran under the bridge and pulsed over the rocks on its journey. I leant and gazed into the water and the sun ripples glittered into my eyes in a most pleasing fashion and it felt like a thing of astonishment, the way this most beautiful world that we are a part of works.<br />
<br />
On the way back, I was almost astonished at the two people who said hello to me. So many of the people I saw felt like me - smothered under a layer of generalised anxiety caused by a disordered world. I could feel it. In that space, everything is The Other, even yourself. When I am feeling less misanthropic than I confess I was today, I would take the opportunity to originate the hello to more than the two people that I did, and from whom I received no response in return. I wish I wasn't so sensitive, that someone not returning a hello that they might have not even heard, let's be honest, did not hurt, but I confess that it does.<br />
That's why I liked standing and staring at the three cows that were down near the paddock fence. Animals just are. And seriously, those big black cows look like enormous dogs. Everything looks bloody well astonishing. All of this variety of life. It's just so truly beautiful and nothing says duality like feeling like a misanthrope while at the very same time feeling at one with the world, but hey, it's a fucking mess at the crumbly end of this version of civilisation. But now I think about it, perhaps it says nonduality more than duality. Perhaps the negative and the positive all fit in the same boat, all together in a messy wet blob. I don't know. This is why I go walking, to help ease the strain of thinking so hard about all of this stuff. <br />
<br />
Not that there's anything wrong with thinking. I think it's quite an under-appreciated habit, to be quite honest with you. It's just the degree to which you think. When you can feel steam escaping out the top of your head, you know it's time to go for a walk. <br />
If you can. And when you can it is a most common, everyday dinnerset, tracky dacks kind of astonishment.<br />
<br />
I stood, my watch beeping, and stared at the cows, the gentle autumn sun fondling their backs, and a man and his four children walked towards me and they smelled fresh. The children had animation in their eyes. The little boy looked at me with that twisted kind of mouth that says "I refuse to smile at you even though part of my body wishes to disobey." The man said hello. They felt like a switched on family. That felt very nice to me. When the man said hello he looked in my eyes and his relaxation and positive switched onedness flew across the path and into my head. How very astonishing. <br />
<br />
After they walked past one of the little kids said, "Daddy, what's that ... the thing ... that thing?" and the daddy answered, "I don't know."<br />
<br />
Back at the little bridge just before the barbecue area, the creek was holding up some fuzzy green water moss on its surface. The moss looked like it totally belonged there, even though there are a million different combinations of moss that feasibly could be there instead. So many options, variable, possibilities. And there's really something a little astonishing about that.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-65392601522321008452015-04-01T13:32:00.002+11:002015-04-01T13:57:28.064+11:00Gratitude as Attitude, or Gratitude as CommoditySee, this kind of thing is why I'm glad I'm not on Facebook anymore. <a href="http://lifeandothercrises.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/gratitude-is-commodity-and-im-not-sold.html">Kerri Sackville</a> has just blogged about how she feels that the idea of gratitude has changed somewhat. How with the advent of social media it's become something not so much personal and sensory and private as it's now something that you share in your status update. Gratitude as your brand. How practising gratitude is fine and dandy and yet it's no cure-all. It doesn't make a jot of difference to the badness of the bad things that happen to us. <br />
<br />
And neither should it.<br />
<br />
I understand the frustration about commodification. Hell, I feel like we've been commodified to within an inch of our genitals, and so why wouldn't even sharing things that are beautiful start to feel rather forced, strained, constrained into boxes and memes, to be packed up, shared, as an alternative to community? Gratitude as social cachet. Gratitude as a way of me putting a unit of blip out there in order to gain from you a unit of blip in return. Everything turned into a bit of exchange.<br />
<br />
You know, I think exchange is a great thing. It's just that in this current paradigm we live in, everything gets flattened down into the same size, for the spreadsheet. It's not meant to be like that. <br />
<br />
Oh, I don't know. All of this - the ridiculous extent to which we live online, the commodification of everything, the refusal of so many to buck the system but instead to ride that status quo as hard as possible to the very end, frustrates the hell out of me. Because while it's frustrating, I understand that of course people are going to ride it for as long as it's there. They're after all legitimately scared of losing what they have, and the mortgage has to be paid and the kids schooled. <br />
<br />
But that's just survival. It's not flourishing.<br />
<br />
If I had to propel myself into the future and think about the one thing that I'm going to be most grateful for when we have (hopefully) come to a better place of doing things differently, it will be when we have finally and truly understood how completely infiltrated we are by the machinations of this global economic system. I mean, I hate money, really. I find it boring and constraining. It flies through my fingers like water, most likely because I don't have enough of it to meet my needs but also I like to think that I do that because I now understand that that is how money is meant to be. It's mean to be living, moving, a greasing of our parts so they move better together. Not something that people hoard.<br />
<br />
The only thing I hate more than money is the system that has grown up around it. We are ruled truly by it. I don't even think a whole lot of us even realise the extent of it. Maybe we're starting to. But the GFC was seven years ago, and perhaps we're happy to settle back into complacency again, even while we notice that things are terribly wrong.<br />
<br />
Last night I watched George Megalagenis's rather good two-parter on the ABC, called <a href="http://blogs.abc.net.au/wa/2015/03/making-australia-great-with-george-megalogenis.html">Making Australia Great</a>. It talked a lot with politicians past about different facets of Australia and our history, covering such topics as Melbourne's glory years as the richest city in the world in the late 1800s, through to how we handled the global financial crisis in 2008.<br />
<br />
The elephant remaining in the discussion room though was the same one that is in all mainstream media rooms when we discuss the future and how we're going to get there. It is that we cannot go on as we are, that the changes required to move forward will be far bigger than we can imagine ... but perhaps far easier once we gather our loins to make the changes. To do so will entail facing down the biggest powerbrokers in the world. That's all.<br />
<br />
The room elephant is that a global debt-based monetary system is not only not going to be able to continue, but that the longer it does the more it is going to kill the earth you are living on and it's going to kill you too. A debt-based system means that it is a mug's game before the horse is even out of the box. For the system to keep upright, it has to keep growing, and growing, and growing. The same way cancer does. Which translates out into you being required to be a consumer. Keep consuming, keep buying stuff. Keep doing it, or we'll go under. <br />
<br />
Consumption in itself isn't bad. It is when it is attached to a finite world of resources, where more and more humans are living, and more and more want the lifestyle you and I happen to be living right now. It's not sustainable. <i>It's not possible</i>. Not without change.<br />
<br />
The Catholics have got a whole lot of things wrong with their particular system, but I'll say this about them - they cried out about interest from the rooftops for a long time. They called it usury, and they weren't the only ones to warn what could happen if such a concept was introduced. Well, it was, centuries before you were born. It infects your life in a way that you possibly cannot even begin to imagine. But it does. Look into it. Go delving into surely what is one of the most tedious and eye-glazing of subjects, economics. I can't bear to go too far into it because not only does it make my brain switch off, but it's not possible because it's too complex for any of us to really have our heads around. Looking into it, I have the sour taste of disgust in seeing how the complexity that surrounds our current global financial system has come about partly because the mugs, the workers who have been had from the start, who have jobs within this current economic system, are trying desperately to make ways and roads through something that is corrupt at its very heart. In order for them to do so, they must become corrupt themselves. And in the process they have destroyed the lives of people who were never going to be able to get their heads around the whole mass of worms to start off with.<br />
<br />
And so when I think about gratitude (remember how I started this rave talking about gratitude? How did I get from there to here?) But when I think about gratitude, I can't think about a higher pinnacle that I would ever be able to stand upon than that of looking back over decades and seeing a gradual, growing golden onrush of people who understand that the way we do stuff now has its own built-in algorithm. That algorithm means that so much of what you do that is innocent is done at the expense of others. An understanding of that will switch us onto the idea that it actually doesn't need to be like this.<br />
<br />
It doesn't need to be like this.<br />
<br />
It doesn't need to be like this.<br />
<br />
It doesn't.<br />
<br />
That would really be the heights of gratitude for me, if that's how history panned out looking back in 40 years' time. It would mean that the kind of forward-thinking positivity required would have stemmed from a growing up, a refusal to hide from what scares us in a fluffy New Age insistence on everything being hunky dorey. It would mean that the people would have insisted on a rewrite of a badly decomposed story.<br />
<br />
And that would mean that the real determinant that makes a country and a people great would have been achieved ~ that the people knew that they were worthy of being far more than consumers and mugs. That's empowerment. That's vision. That's flourishing. Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-53729610692727690112015-03-23T15:34:00.001+11:002015-03-23T23:03:33.074+11:00Just For a Couple of Hours ~ Why going to the movies still feels specialI love going to the movies. I love seeing enormous people who are not politicians or corporate schmuck smeared with PR propaganda juice going about a life. I get to see through their eyes, and sometimes, on very special occasions, I see something so different, so good or so bad, and it changes me.
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Ulv3mzP7c47-A69ORJoxS2OGJjtKrL7gq22VEC3ayETOowb-HLxRUBRsfMrzWcBDbkMY8dzMLXb2WPEVmLkLv91i5_cMZ0Z1bAuJ-edN_bmd0Ngas3Ovb-5rlk57RKMom3eW5anWTMJe/s1600/2970157506_11e459bce2_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Ulv3mzP7c47-A69ORJoxS2OGJjtKrL7gq22VEC3ayETOowb-HLxRUBRsfMrzWcBDbkMY8dzMLXb2WPEVmLkLv91i5_cMZ0Z1bAuJ-edN_bmd0Ngas3Ovb-5rlk57RKMom3eW5anWTMJe/s1600/2970157506_11e459bce2_b.jpg" height="398" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzj/2970157506">Franz Jachim</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">some rights reserved</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
In the ordinary world, we're all attentionally deficit. I work at home on a computer, and against my
better judgment, sometimes while I work I flick backwards and forwards between
my work and the internet because I simply can't help myself. On any given day I tend to have 10 browser pages
open at once. Before I finish the end of
one page, I have generally flicked over to another, or to check my email, or to
look at Facebook when I'm on it (at the moment I'm not), or to look at Twitter.
<br />
<br />
We are starved for stories in the world we live in, though we're surrounded by words and great stories. But where are the good stories about us? Where do good stories fit in a world where the
economy is the god, and we are forced to be its subjects? Where do we fit in? And how do we see each other? It feels like every turn in this world I am encouraged
to see people as cogs. There is nothing
to stop me from looking at you and seeing someone who is simply not-me, and
simply in my way.
<br />
<br />
I sat in a university class a couple of years ago listening
to fellow creative writing students who are 20 years younger than me talking
about how flatpacked and meaningless this world is to them, how going overseas
opens up their eyes because they see people who are living in ways that
matter. There was something about
hearing those people say those things that made me feel hope. Even though they have been born directly into
consumer culture in a way that I wasn't 44 years ago, they still harbour the
same hopes and desires for things that it's becoming harder and harder to find
the words for.
<br />
<br />
This search for meaning, for story, is why I love writing
and reading. And it's why I love going
to the movies. Like <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/texting-in-the-cinema-not-on-my-watch-20120503-1y0on.html?rand=5091273">Patrick
Goldstein</a>, I am an old-fashioned purist when it comes to the cinema. Even in the age of Netflix and DVDs, there is
still a ritual about moviegoing that sets it apart from those other forms of
viewing. Something about sitting in the
dark feeding your face with popcorn with a whole lot of other people who are
all sharing the same story turns it into a sacred space for me.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtx-QbxNy5w8-tO0f6uIxaloTW43olbXabiRFwCyF-_4PQlX2L8acNTaRH5XLmOZR11XD84oJobhBpkrLSoJ-VqW2_Etc126dn3N15ir5PJhG31XvNTygdzhrDKXcXo52a76IO7z0XyMtR/s1600/6924351981_7e24088def_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtx-QbxNy5w8-tO0f6uIxaloTW43olbXabiRFwCyF-_4PQlX2L8acNTaRH5XLmOZR11XD84oJobhBpkrLSoJ-VqW2_Etc126dn3N15ir5PJhG31XvNTygdzhrDKXcXo52a76IO7z0XyMtR/s1600/6924351981_7e24088def_o.jpg" height="518" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The old Barkly Theatre in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray.<br />
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofvictoria_collections/6924351981/in/photolist-bxT7AZ-bxT7J6-bnHow4-bnHohz-bnHoug-bjYet9-bjYew7-bnHoyg-bjYeqY-bnHopB-bnHomc-bnHonX-bxT7G8-bxT7xV-bjYekd-bnHofB-bnHoA4-bucVCX-bjYeoA-bxT7CR-bnHoj8-5Xyn2R-6iVTvb-jCa4gA-hxFC9h-REYo4-2aTwrG-7EyemD-iRRQYj-8TUjAM-8TUjqZ-n2RrMH-7EC54y-6ssYQn-6ssYjD-e2TUgm-e2TUxW-nYAkJ4-e2TUk5-e2TUDC-e2TUzq-e2Ngaa-8TXkxJ-q9rt2W-pueoaM-ptZY73-qqPdua-ptZXdQ-qqZfXR-8TXnX9">State Library of Victoria</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">some rights reserved</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
When I go to the movies, I guess a lot of what I like to see
is about meaning as well. When I was a
child and before I could read, my Mum read a story to me every single
night. By the time I was eight years old
I was spending afternoons clambering up the Faraway Tree, polishing off one of
Enid Blyton's books from the time it took to end lunch and begin dinner. It was escape, but it was also developing
imagination. It was realising that there
are as many different ways of looking at pretty much anything, and that every
way you do look at something opens up a particular world at the top of your
tree. It colours the way you see
everything.
<br />
<br />
In the cinema, I am stuck in the best possible sort of way.
I'm not at home. I can't go and
get online. I am forced to sit there,
even if my mind wanders. I don't want to
check my mobile phone. Nor do I want
anybody else to check theirs. We might
miss something. I want us, just for this
little time, to be all looking the same way and all seeing the same thing. Just for a couple of hours.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg07CtMJFZRpd2usdu02_4m-V8sB9saUAV4fArKTj1KKVXDK_ULiJz6aEMoC4uGLXbK7YHxkNUJAWo6pU9moguOtpxy__gq1XfaKfcQ6bTweLy38uaeqINBFhuaRS8KzeYNleQidg0BzK6O/s1600/14612409818_1328e50a04_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg07CtMJFZRpd2usdu02_4m-V8sB9saUAV4fArKTj1KKVXDK_ULiJz6aEMoC4uGLXbK7YHxkNUJAWo6pU9moguOtpxy__gq1XfaKfcQ6bTweLy38uaeqINBFhuaRS8KzeYNleQidg0BzK6O/s1600/14612409818_1328e50a04_o.jpg" height="640" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Moviegoers at the Melbourne International Film Festival, enjoying the wonderful Forum Theatre in Melbourne's centre. Pic by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hecubasstory/14612409818/">Anne Holmes</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">some rights reserved</a></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-12674313664027551022015-03-13T13:54:00.002+11:002015-03-14T11:49:09.482+11:00Just Call It Albert ~ On the difficulty of renaming an unsexy and underfunded chronic illnessI developed chronic fatigue syndrome when I was 29 after a bout of glandular fever. Fifteen years later I'm still dealing. I really loathe that stupid name, chronic fatigue syndrome. Sure, fatigue is a large and scary component, but it’s nowhere near the only one. <br />
<br />
A panel of CFS experts from the Institute of Medicine proposed a <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-gets-a-new-name/?_r=0">new name for CFS</a> in February - Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease. Which is none too soon, given that a cruddy name like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome doesn’t particularly assist people in having their illness believed, by doctors and others' and especially not in a world that is itself exhausted. I helped run a booth in a shopping centre several years ago just before CFS Awareness Day. A woman breezed up in a flood of perfume that smashed itself into my nasal cavity and made me feel dizzy. After hearing our explanation for the booth's existence she breezed, "Oh! I might have that. I'm soooooo tired all the time'" before flouncing off for a bout of pleasure shopping. Now, no new name is going to puncture that sort of breezy self-absorption, but in a world full of people whose adrenal glands are taxed and pushed, a differential between garden variety 21st century tiredness and CFS is beyond overdue.<br />
<br />
So I welcome the idea. It’s just that systemic exertion intolerance disease is not quite working for me. I mean, it's a start, but it's certainly not a stop. At least it gives the impression that it's not just about feeling really tired. It impresses that it's bodywide. It even maybe gives a bit of a hint that for those CFSers who are well enough to not be bedbound, there is a variation in the amount of energy your body is granting you today which is often predicated on whether you've overdone it yesterday or the day before. Which means that the person you're hanging with over an extended cafe sesh today, and who looks really well and seems rather together, may well be the one paying for it tomorrow or the day after by spending most of it on the couch.<br />
<br />
The problem with finding a new name is there's not an umbrella big enough under which to fit the wide variety of symptoms that come with CFS. It is truly systemwide, and its flow-on effects mess with your endocrine system, your digestive system, your central nervous system, your organs. They range from bedbound people requiring care to athletes who are able to still compete as long as they monitor themselves the rest of the time. <br />
<br />
And perhaps we shouldn't even try to find a new name for CFS unless it’s marketing-savvy. I loathe the mere existence of marketing departments, but nevertheless, if we want greater recognition of our illness – which translates into more funding for research to find its cause – perhaps we need to sex this bugger up. Systemic exertion intolerance disease is about as raunchy as Fifty Shades of Gray. Plus it’s really boring. About as boring as calling a newly-discovered star EPIC 201367065.<br />
<br />
So I propose instead we call it Albert. Or Glimpf. Or Smuggleglupp. Easy to remember (after a fashion). Much easier for the marketing department to invent a readily-remembered little logo dude to raise awareness around. Smuggleglupp would be like a cute purple blob, smiling weakly from her spread-out morass on the floor. Albert would be frizzy-haired, for reasons best known to my odd imagination. I kind of like the idea of personalising something that has wreaked havoc on millions of bodies ~ makes it somehow more palatable, workable, in a way that systemic exertion intolerance disease probably never will. That thing is better than CFS but it still smells like it was invented by a committee. And how do you pronounce its acronym, SEID? Is it SAYED? SEED? I personally reckon if it makes it through the goals as the new CFS name we go with the latter. I’ve got just the logo for it – a flaccid, flabby sperm lying on the floor of the fallopian tube. Too stuffed to swim anymore towards the fuzzy-edged egg screaming all wired 20 metres away. That’s as good a place as any to define a disease that rides us right down to our cells.<br />
<br />
Albert has a better ring, though.<br />
<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-35796234502611261562015-03-06T14:20:00.000+11:002015-03-06T14:26:23.142+11:00Book Review - The Happiness Jar by Samantha TidyI really wanted to love this book, hard. The main idea of it really tickled my fancy. Rachel Hudson dies of cystic fibrosis at 27. What she leaves behind in her will, from the very small estate she accumulated over her small collection of working years, is money transferred into instructions for her mother, Beth, and her brother, Matthew. Rachel was a spirited type, the antithesis of her anxious mum, who uses her faith to hide from life, and her disconnected brother, who hasn't found his place.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Despite her disease, Rachel had not resisted the travel bug; instead she had packed her illness into her luggage like a bulky and inappropriate souvenir bought too early in one's journey. Her medication and her portable vaporiser packed deep into her backpack, she had set off to Europe, Asia. The postcards that had accumulated on the fridge, Beth had, upon their arrival, placed carefully in a shoebox under her bed. Beth had wondered if this shoebox might one day be some tangible object that she might need to caress, in the absence of her wild daughter, found dead and raped in some horrendous city on the other side of the world.</blockquote)<br />
<br />
Brian, the family's father and husband and the focus of the prologue, has disappeared years ago, the aftershocks from the Vietnam War untethering him from the ground that would have kept him in the place he wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Each character was reasonably drawn. I got a feel for each one that they were real, whole people, except perhaps for Beth's faith, which seems to be somewhat of a caricature.<br />
<br />
But it's the language and the grammar that broke this for me. I lose concentration when a sentence does not have an end enclosing comma separating a phrase. I lose concentration when those commas are then placed in other spots they're not meant to go. There was a repetitive use of the characters names that with a little work could have been smoothed.<br />
<br />
Which is a shame, because this book could have been something special. I would love to have seen this book given extra airing time, laid aside for a few months until that last hard edit. There were glimpses of possibility here and there, in a turn of phrase ("She had called upon her faith to hold her. It was a rope she could latch on to. A thread. She could weave herself in to it, and settle in the twine") and a turn of plot, and in the drawings of the Pilbara, but these were overridden by clunky phrasing and a particularly implausible plot twist towards the end. <br />
<br />
Not all novels have to be literary. (And I guess if I had to define what I read it's the stuff that verges closer to the literary than mainstream). Not everything has to be literary. But everything has to be as good as it can be.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-7266650665957480122015-02-28T16:08:00.001+11:002015-03-01T12:25:22.349+11:00On Being the Train Audience and the Studio AudienceThe train is about to take off from Belgrave station and my bag bulges on the seat beside me. If I was a baby, my mum would be accompanied by a hefty haversack full of nappies, wipes, a bib, a change of clothes, and whatever else is contained in nappy bags. There are an astounding number of things that babies may need in a several-hour outing. I'm unfortunately no different. My burgeoning bag contains health-related d-ribose, progesterone cream, and coenzymated vitamin b6. It also has a book, a 48 page green exercise book, various pens, a phone, tampons (grown-up nappies of a different variety) and a lot of crud on the bottom of a bag which hasn't been cleaned out in ages.<br />
<br />
Girls from Mater Christi College, our local private Catholic school, are on the train too. Two sit down across from me, and one begins to tell the other about some of the classes she had in school today - Maths, French, Orange House assembly and RE (Religious Education). I wonder what RE looks like at Mater Christi. Is it cutting edge and political, so that they get a glimpse of, say, a man overturning tables of people who are fucking around with charging interest on their money loans? Or what about the version of Christianity that appears to emanate from the writings of Origen, in which a belief in reincarnation appears so commonly-held it's not even spelled out? (At least I guess Catholicism had the decency to come up with a purgatory sandwiched in-between the eternal heaven and eternal hell, where you could work off your accrued karma until you're shiny enough for God to bear to look at you. But that fear of never quite knowing if you've scored a one-way ticket to eternal hellfire is a wonderful touch when it comes to the minions. Keeps them in line).<br />
<br />
Do Mater Christi girls feel superior to the public school kids? I would imagine so. There's an inbuilt superiority/inferiority thing that automatically accrues when you spend more of our society's value symbol on one thing than another, so they must, even if it's unconscious.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
A little way down the line, a massive amount of schoolkids get on at Upwey from the local high school, a rather cool-looking art deco brick building up on Burwood Highway that once housed Red Symons and then once housed Wendy Harmer. One of the boys from Upwey High is yelling several times for Cassidy, but Cassidy, alas, does not appear.<br />
<br />
An Upwey High girl in front of me is looking at her phone. Her and her friend both have freshly brushed, long hair and a decent whack of makeup. The phone shows what has the feel of a hastily snapped shot, of two boys in the schoolyard. The way she's looking at it, pensively, cheek-chewing, I reckon she'll be looking at it a few more times this evening.<br />
<br />
If <a href="http://andrea-cloudbusting.blogspot.com.au/">Andrea</a> and I had had phones and computers when we were teenagers, we would have filled up our hard drives with gigabytes of photos of Pas on hers, and Dale Cassar on mine. I would have been quite happy to see the next round of photos Andrea had snapped that week, of Pas playing basketball, of Pas outside the maths room, of Pas saying hello as he walked past. Pas looked like Stewart Copeland, which was pretty cool, seeing Andrea was in love with him too. Plus, his name was Stuart too, so double bonus. Andrea managed her love of Stewart Copeland and her love of Stuart Passingham quite well, I thought.<br />
<br />
I apparently enjoyed being in love exclusively with unattainable people. I was in Year 7, while Dale was in Year 11. There is nothing now to remember him by except a few grainy memories of yearbook photos where he'd dressed up in makeup for a school play. Dale left school at the end of that year, and I was mortified until I found Marc Ward to unattainably love the following year. I would have filled another hard drive taking photos of Marc zooming out of school at lunchtime in his Holden Gemini, of Marc in his fluffy pink jumper, of Marc outside the maths room. Marc's girlfriend, Suzie Szabo, was in the same year level as him. I despised her with a warm fear and a cold despising that probably would have required a couple of photos of their own.<br />
<br />
Marc was in Year 12. I was in Year 8. I liked my unattainable boys a little bit older. That same year I would also full unattainably in love with Brian Mannix, the lead singer from Uncanny X-Men, for whom I would almost die running across Kings Way in order to reach as he got out of a taxi to go speak on 3XY. It's not pretty, folks. It's not pretty. Several years after that, Andrea and I would go to see the X-Men play at The Village Green. Andrea would ask for a kiss outside, and Brian would comply. He would then say that it was the most amazing kiss he'd ever had. Not that I'm chafing about that or anything.<br />
<br />
It's so weird looking at these girls on the train with their phone and thinking about how different things were for us. Yes, it's a common refrain held to by every generation that everything has changed, changed, changed (which is maybe more about time and memory and changes in ourselves than anything outside of ourselves). But I think there's some validity in us reeling a little from all of the changes our lives have gone through. It has been really different for each of the last three or four generations. It's no wonder our heads spin so that we feel disorientated and need to go lie down and watch seven episodes in a row of Game of Thrones. <br />
<br />
Things have changed in the ways teenagers interact. It's so much more secondhand now. Andrea and I would have been able to know <i>way </i>more about Pas and Dale and Marc than we could possibly have known back then, even with Marc's brother Carl to query. We would have all known way more about each other. And I wonder too if we would have known way less, maybe, in other ways. <br />
<br />
Did we all look each other in the eye more back then? Maybe. We're definitely more in our own bubbles these days. I miss the common sense of wider world community that was stronger when I was young. Still, despite that yearning for the security of something shared, that doesn't mean that it didn't used to hurt to look people in the eye, with the shame I dragged around so intense at times, like a curtain. It wasn't just the harsh paranoia that came from having an ever so slightly turned eye that people generally didn't notice unless I was drunk. Looking people in the eye is such an intimate act. I do understand the poetry of the eyes being the windows to the soul. Sometimes it feels to me that with the onset of our awesome technology, we spend so much more time with our own eyes plastered to various screens, that looking at each other has grown scary by comparison. Eek! This thing I'm looking at ... is alive, and looking back at me! Not in a box that I can switch off or delete! This feels weird, man! I wonder - has looking at each other become more like an invasion? <br />
<br />
There are so many more ways to be alone while we're together now. As a self-conscious, shame-struck teenager, I imagine that would have been better, that would have been worse. But still, imagine, feeling like your friends were always in your pocket. Friendships as teenagers are the best. You need each other in a way you won't again. Not like that. <br />
<br />
The freshly-brushed pensive girl and her friend have got off, and another girl has sat in front of me now. She has just sprayed a floral scent from her bag. It's quite nice, actually, but it still causes my central nervous system to launch a weak panic stations alert that some incoming foreign body may possibly be trying to kill me. I ignore this limbic panic, try to distract it like a child by noting how the high notes of the girl's fragrance don't screech like death metal in my nose the way a visit to the $2 shop would. <br />
<br />
There are so many different schools on this train now. But the uniforms are kind of all the same. One girl wears dark and light purple and white check. I would have been stoked to have that for Bentleigh High. There are so many students that I wonder - are more of them catching trains to school now? It felt like when I was at high school you went to one of the ones you were zoned to and that was it. Are parents, in the quest to get their kids ahead, chucking their kids on trains so they can do the program that fits best? Maybe. I guess maybe some of these kids are on the way to their other parent's house. It's all so scattered. And yet from what I can see, school curriculums are way more interesting than the dry, dusty crap served up to me in my high school years.<br />
<br />
I talked to my mum about this. She said she couldn't remember anyone from her high school catching the train, that everyone who accompanied her to classes in the late 50's and early 60's walked or rode. There's something nice and nostalgic about that idea, that the friends you make at your school share the same space as you. <br />
<br />
The David Jonecs ad on the platform at Box Hill has an Asian woman in a matching fuschia bra and undies set that would have earned her grandparents a pittance to make and mine much more to earn wheeling and dealing to get the lowest prices, the lowest prices, the lowest prices, which would then be marked up 400% or more to sell to us in the glorious land of globalisation.<br />
<br />
I saw a woman on another train once, years ago, while I was on the way to work as an apprentice, vomit into the cardigan held on her lap. She got out at the next stop. As you would. <br />
<br />
I get out at Richmond Station and catch the Sandringham train. I have never been on this line before and it feels like people are doing quite well on it. There are two men in business attire, separated by a sheet of perspex. Both are wearing checked shirts on white backgrounds, with minor variations. Are these shirts like the business version of school uniforms? What's it with checks? Do checks convey a sense of purposiveness, of industry, of concentration?<br />
<br />
There are two separate phone conversations going on in this train carriage. Both are about real estate, selling and renovating respectively. There could possibly be three, but she's speaking Greek so I don't know, my Greek extending to kalimera, kalispera, kalinichta and baklava. People on this line clean their shoes. The woman next to me is wearing black and white leopard skin shoes and is reading the free train newspaper, MX, which once published an essay of mine that was a variation of <a href="http://discombobula.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/fifteen-minute-friendship.html">this post here</a>. And so despite the fact that my shoes are ancient, I feel somewhat validated, until the the woman behind me says on her phone call that she is spending 5.5 grand on a mechanical door. This once again makes me feel invalidated again until I realise that it's not her personal door, that organising the construction and installation of this door is a part of her job.<br />
<br />
I do not like this relentless comparison. It is particularly limiting. <br />
<br />
The other woman has finished talking about her house that is up for sale and is now telling Kerry about how her husband is away at the moment and so life is fantastic. Apparently they will take photos on the Tuesday. Will that be enough time, given the opening is on the 7th? It all sounds so important. Important enough that those of us not wearing earbuds must be subjected to it. But they're probably photos of, like, taps. Or boxes of tampons. Items for the next Aldi catalogue.<br />
<br />
Although that doesn't really fit in with the opening, does it? Still, never mind. Thinking of this woman organising photos of something banal makes me feel better. And really, the fact that I even bother going there with this stupid comparison, that makes me feel worse.<br />
<br />
I reach Elsternwick, and here I alight to the ABC studios. Anth is here to meet me. We are being The Studio Audience this evening for the first episode of the new season of Shaun Micallef's <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/shaun-micallefs-mad-as-hell/">Mad as Hell</a>. As we enter into the studio, one of the people working there tells me this is exactly the same studio that the musical staple of my childhood, Countdown, was filmed in all those years ago. I find it patently absurd that I never once went to a Countdown filming. Brian Mannix was on it often enough, and Elsternwick was closer to where I lived than Richmond was, where we did go several times to see Blankety Blanks tapings. It's an anomaly, a strangeness, a big chunk missing, something that should have happened in my teenage years but quite incomprehensibly didn't.<br />
<br />
But I'm here now instead, at 44, and Shaun Micallef is a much more appropriate replacement, and a bit of a GILFIIHAL (GILF If I Had A Libido), and it's fun, but exhausting, to look at the making of a TV show. It is tiring, being the ones responsible for laughing. It is terrifying being the focus of the camera while an introductory skit is being filmed. The camera, with it's enormous eye, pans from where it's pointed in our direction, where we have been asked to laugh, over to Mr Micallef, who makes some joke that I can't now remember because I was too fucking terrified having to juggle having a camera pointed at me and being required to laugh at the same time.<br />
<br />
They didn't end up using the footage. I was both relieved and disappointed in equal measure :)<br />
<br />
But before I am allowed into the studio I must open my bag for inspection, the one bulging not with a gun but with progesterone and pens and b6 and so many wrappers, and old bits of cruddy paper that have been in there so long that they are caked with the unidentifiable crumbs that line the bottom of my bag. It is terribly embarrassing. And then some things fall out, and of course one of those things is a tampon.<br />
<br />
I guess that's one thing that's changed from when I was a teenager. I wouldn't have given a shit about how messy the bag was, but I would have been chastened, horrified, by the tampon. Now, I don't much care that the man inspecting my bag knew for a fact that I insert wrapped cotton into my vagina. But I did feel rather chastened that he also knows I'm a massive slob.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-57602564142031644752015-02-23T18:23:00.004+11:002015-02-24T11:05:52.225+11:00A Stopper For the Guilt VoiceThere have been two giant obstacles to me blogging lately. Anxiety/fatigue is the main one. The other one is inflamed by the first. It sits in the shadows till I notice and name it, so it took me a bit to work out what it was. When I peered closer and thought about it, I identified it. Oh. That again. It's guilt, in its broadest sweep. The guilt that says why do this, where is the value, where is the permission? The creaking bridge that links those two giant hillocks is an abject feeling of uselessness. I feel as completely useless as a great hulk of mouldy cheese, purposeless in a world of people busily achieving their quarterly KPIs. A big lumpy Bob Hatfieldy waste of space, while meanwhile my partner works eleventy six hours a week. And so what right do I have to write?<br />
<br />
If I could slice that part of myself out and I only had a blunt knife, I'd consider it. It's an ongoing issue, this lack of worthiness thang. I've written about it before on this blog. It's an ongoing refrain not just of mine but of most everybody who writes, or sculpts, or paints, or does something creative in a culture that despite its Apple ads really does not value innovation from people. <br />
<br />
This guilt is the most depressing utilitarianism. It's the same harsh-scratching grey-robed dullness that says I shouldn't be writing by hand because it's not <i>efficient</i>. I'm a major fan of writing by hand. I find that there is something soothing about it so that though the dirgevoice says it's not efficient to write by hand, in actuality, for someone who is a raging fire of anxiety a great deal of the time lately it's quite efficient in the end, thank you very much. It gives me the space to breathe, for time to slow down, just me and the pen moving across the page, the emptiness of the page something exciting, a container that may be filled by something that I'm not even sure of, even while I'm doing it.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjksadeW7_AoHUT96IPTIMgLBj2Th6xgh0Pmnhaj8irtzIwuIu4XR5-fzXCOd1eRZyga-WXQTg0p8qRmEIuraS1M4M1pc0yz3jHKWOX0_LxFkE9n233uWnOqyCB-i2LscFOZilhht4mk6Kp/s1600/Clay_pots_in_punjab_pakistan-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjksadeW7_AoHUT96IPTIMgLBj2Th6xgh0Pmnhaj8irtzIwuIu4XR5-fzXCOd1eRZyga-WXQTg0p8qRmEIuraS1M4M1pc0yz3jHKWOX0_LxFkE9n233uWnOqyCB-i2LscFOZilhht4mk6Kp/s1600/Clay_pots_in_punjab_pakistan-2.jpg" height="640" width="491" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CC pic by <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clay_pots_in_punjab_pakistan-2.jpg">Jugni</a></td></tr>
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<br />
Efficiency is not worth a great deal if you don't ever get started because you're cowed down by the voice that makes something fun into dreariness and repulsive cubicleness. Do it this way. <i>This</i> is the best way. Only this way. The world is full of those voices and they're really fucking tedious. And yet here I have my very own in my own head. Maybe it's an understandable virus of the age that says the only way for me to produce is to cubicle myself into chunks of bland party cheese. Maybe I need to inoculate myself out of this idea that the best way is a depressing bland one that vampirically sucks all the joy out. I spent some time this afternoon reading about well-known writers who also do this apparently insane thing of <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/02/15/modern-writers-technology/">writing by hand.</a><br />
<br />
<br />
I don't even hold to this efficiency-by-number-the-fastest-way-possible-is-the-best-because-time-is-money crap. And yet it rules over me so much, like seeping wetiko. It's so boring! And anyway, why does whether I write or how I write have to be linked to worthiness, based on whether I've achieved enough over the previous week? To prove my worth of existing on this planet? Just because that's what I feel like my life has told me doesn't mean I need to hold to it in Inner Susieland. If the kingdom of heaven is there, and all change flows from our insides outward, then this is exactly the place where I need to be pruning back that particularly ugly bush. That bush of guilt and holding yourself back because you're not worth it is a giant bush of massive ugly hairy testicles with big bits of pus drooling from them. Hell, not even pruning that bush ~ chop it down. No herbicides because Inner Susieland doesn't respond well to those sorts of chemicals. Cutting into the bastard and chopping out its roots and burning the whole thing in a bonfire that I dance naked in front of afterwards.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTmnXeCtxqlORoLR4V8QXBnAXqPAfLdb4A9ZvMhxXHbWYBAbtzpgp4rhi2_pdKX0PgS5esndqArvFcaHdZP4zJsqT2dOJ-g7RQ7EiIHR2WzOlVuvdoeSjaT5z92I9ibd3N_zkvpZt0rls-/s1600/flames_95__Uprising_by_Eris_stock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTmnXeCtxqlORoLR4V8QXBnAXqPAfLdb4A9ZvMhxXHbWYBAbtzpgp4rhi2_pdKX0PgS5esndqArvFcaHdZP4zJsqT2dOJ-g7RQ7EiIHR2WzOlVuvdoeSjaT5z92I9ibd3N_zkvpZt0rls-/s1600/flames_95__Uprising_by_Eris_stock.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pic by <a href="http://eris-stock.deviantart.com/art/flames-95-Uprising-74808315">Eris-stock</a></td></tr>
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Sheesh. That dancing naked in front of a bonfire thing keeps popping up. Whether I ever had the guts to do it would be another story. I guess I should head up to Nimbin or somewhere to give it a whirl. Or I could practice in the backyard. Burn the house down.<br />
<br />
So this voice, that tells me <i>how </i>and <i>when </i>to write, why is it linked to worthiness? Why does it not ever put forward its case as a way to better health, for example? If my own productivity is so valuable to it, then why not treat the vessel in a way that will ensure productivity, treat it with care, fill it with the things it loves, as a way to rehabilitation? Because that would be a bleeding-heart left-wing type of action, and that voice, if it was going to vote, would surely be right in on this Abbott government and whatever other austerity-measure-forcing far right-wing governments it could find in the world that punish the less so the more can keep gorging. That voice doesn't actually seem to be particularly focused on achieving good outcomes via the best way, but just on smashing me in the face with guilt. So why listen to a voice that's so lacking in imagination? I mean, I have to listen to those sorts of voices from the culture all bloody day. <br />
<br />
Maybe that cultural familiarity is why I'm not tuned into switching that voice off quicker. After all, it's not just simply a voice I took from the culture, but one that came ready-packaged from within the bosom of my own family from as early as I can remember, so why the hell would I not have created an extra deep rut for it to burrow into? And the size of the rut is probably why I do not sometimes think earlier that it's really simply a case of reaching out with my trusty internal remote and switching that fucker's voice off.<br />
<br />
That's it. Simple. I'm not listening to this thought. Switch off. And it <i>is </i>that simple. But it's not. The exhaustion comes from the relentless dirgelike way that it's back again the next day, and when you're a little exhausted to begin with you're weakened, dear boys and girls. Susie is life-tired. Sometimes, all the will in the world can't rise up because the plain exhaustion is there already, disengaging me from reaching for the remote and switching off an energy-draining voice. It's the relentless surrounding culture, it's Tony Abbott, it's the ongoing lack of response from editors when I put my all into pieces and pitches that aren't accepted. It's the inability of others to know what I need to do to be able to do even the little that I do. It's the constant rushing drain of return not exceeding investment. That's why some days I can't even get to the remote at all. All sick people know this space. That's why the breezy recommendations from those who are not here are so teeth grinding to hear at times.<br />
<br />
Despite the beliefs of the relentless positivity brigade, switching off the negative voices isn't the end of the story. You could be excused from thinking, by reading the derisive way we comment to each other on online news spaces, that everyone is simply lazy, that willpower and force and application and a good positive outlook are all that's needed to get you to where you need to go. It's the neoliberal sexual fantasy. That way, whatever misfortune occurs to you can be blamed on you. But it's not that simple. Never that simple that a satisfactory result of a complicated situation is going to be something that would spurt from the same spout as the sort of kneejerk reactive blamethink we see on the net, and that we may even engage in ourselves ~ even if it's only from inside our own heads to ourselves. <br />
<br />
We need more than willpower and application, good though they are. We need new containers to pour ourselves into. Completely new jars, whose frame will shape whatever new society we are going to come up with next. One that's worthy of us pouring ourselves into, and that recognises our inherent worth. Those sorts of containers contain natural stoppers that block out those voices that are so destructive and do so much damage. The ones that say some should get at the expense of others. There's classier containers than that. Like the one that says that what happens to the least of these is what happens to the most of these That's the type of container I'm dreaming of.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXBHMmQWW69fU2dsGRT2gFfh-ydb251yPMdF7IF6EwQEq2rFTjYsml5_-sji0DmfaCkffjJn2M8zf9gbZ3lDUYAq7A09d-OLBA-x7zZlo92Cksv9BO6KRa-Zj0Qdoty5Lv_vxS_YH0N97/s1600/ceramic-88197_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXBHMmQWW69fU2dsGRT2gFfh-ydb251yPMdF7IF6EwQEq2rFTjYsml5_-sji0DmfaCkffjJn2M8zf9gbZ3lDUYAq7A09d-OLBA-x7zZlo92Cksv9BO6KRa-Zj0Qdoty5Lv_vxS_YH0N97/s1600/ceramic-88197_1280.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>CC pic <a href="http://pixabay.com/en/ceramic-clay-craftsmen-folk-gorj-88197/">Byrev</a></u></td></tr>
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<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-74623363366632478642015-02-01T19:08:00.002+11:002015-02-01T20:20:46.653+11:00The Light of the ShadowThe evil that is manifesting in our world is an expression that light is nearby, just as shadows are themselves expressions of light. A strong light is the best shadow-projector; in the source of light there is darkness enough for any amount of projections. We tend to think of shadows as the absence of light instead of one of its manifold expressions. Only when the full light shines in the darkness is the full intensity of the darkness made manifest. Joining the shadow with its light is, spiritually speaking, to be in possession of great wealth. A medieval proverb says, “Light over darkness is the Antichrist; Light through the darkness is the Christ.” Light is ultimately revealed through darkness; it needs darkness, for otherwise, how could it appear as light?<br />
<br />
Paul Levy, <i>Dispelling Wetiko</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNfuMq29GhXwmVNg0DDsychXsdJSqN5XbSI7G8jcWInyGv7vvTpI_yNMblwITt7Yn7yXqTWgMItLjobfOMyY9nKLMgoRSgH_t74YqxgX32YTNdwSKpb8lg0W8QeUHrcv0sKSAEeIX3mc4J/s1600/14770821388_737fe8a6e8_b+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNfuMq29GhXwmVNg0DDsychXsdJSqN5XbSI7G8jcWInyGv7vvTpI_yNMblwITt7Yn7yXqTWgMItLjobfOMyY9nKLMgoRSgH_t74YqxgX32YTNdwSKpb8lg0W8QeUHrcv0sKSAEeIX3mc4J/s1600/14770821388_737fe8a6e8_b+(1).jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pic by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/7691436@N06/14770821388/in/photolist-ovfjAh-ovroEf-ouFQBd-d3Tf53-8v44tH-d3TcL9-eYxFqG-gtA2r3-9DiwNm-gzyQH5-7PhJ73-buVQWv-m3cqBM-iViuNQ-bpmLHP-fcJds1-j9z95L-okdJSB-oTnEdv-d3TixW-dwjDir-pDWsV1-n56c3K-nw1DfV-gVYQM4-piEYuC-ezXDbG-7zcJnt-q7sM1m-cjjaLG-8kUfxq-gumCD9-aqHwQ1-qSkatz-oR5t42-ow5X64-m96aZB-m79GPr-dNwEqK-9BkQ7m-dyWCHD-nVPU8V-8xdjuR-jYv2yi-gGdxBs-j8Ab7y-o9AJ7M-8k6jNi-h1uXN3-ncEDbj-iTpSyJ">Lolowaro974</a></td></tr>
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Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-34252986784116492672015-01-14T16:08:00.001+11:002015-01-15T16:35:00.984+11:00Installation<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNinUyAQ0WLUklNShrElOBDbgydzdKvBPYKHj9pcQXryoMutAMRyL9HIT0wd1MDM3tUyqii0_z5o1oot5_622Xz7Af8F1_rY83Nqc7LOKQlm8BGycBVP_nZ9mlmptWa3mHhYxjlgVfFRdB/s1600/IMG_20150114_152440.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNinUyAQ0WLUklNShrElOBDbgydzdKvBPYKHj9pcQXryoMutAMRyL9HIT0wd1MDM3tUyqii0_z5o1oot5_622Xz7Af8F1_rY83Nqc7LOKQlm8BGycBVP_nZ9mlmptWa3mHhYxjlgVfFRdB/s1600/IMG_20150114_152440.jpg" height="400" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Granny's Barra, </i>2015, located at the artist's residence</td></tr>
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This installation uses steel and natural elements to speak to common themes of the artist's work - those of death and rebirth, and of the dire necessity for humanity to reposition itself back into restorative natural rhythm, before it manages in its insanity - acknowledged as yet not in each individual bosom but only in everybody else's - to ruin the whole fucking game via collective psychosis.<br />
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Keen fans of the artist's poetry will note the reappearance of the blue hydrangea. In the poem <i>Scuttlebutts and Plop, </i>published in The New Yorker in 2016, the flower symbolises the next evolution of the species, while in <i>Gloppy Tankard, </i>from The Paris Review in the same year, the hydrangea indicates the renewal coming from that which Westerners most lack - imagination and the ability to follow breadcrumbs into dark forests. It signifies the 'left hand not knowing what the right is doing and unwilling to anyway, even if it was possible, being totally drunk on its own limited perspective,' which was the loose theme for her most recent exhibition at Hobart's MONA, featuring pieces made from string.<br />
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The steel used in this piece is literally from her dearly departed grandmother's wheelbarrow. Once a vivid yellow and surviving years as a well-kept tool in her granny's gardening repertoire and stored religiously in a shed, the barrow lasted barely 10 years when in the untidy possession of the artist, lying about any old where in the rain before being appropriated for one of the most stunning and profound examples of her glimpf period.<br />
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Somehow we're sure her grandmother won't mind.<br />
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<br />Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-40264296645454196432015-01-11T07:13:00.000+11:002015-01-11T07:21:00.302+11:00Digital SpaceThe harsh<br />
yellow-stripped<br />
fact of the matter<br />
<br />
Is that digital fingers<br />
clicking like, retweet, favourite and ♥<br />
do not ladle you soup.<br />
<br />
Likes, retweets, favourites and ♥<br />
while you finger the grate<br />
with your toes.<br />
<br />
If you slid through the 3D bars of Not My Problem<br />
they would leave condolences<br />
on your wall.<br />
<br />
They would feel sad for the second<br />
it took for another avatar's rise<br />
to take your place.Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-60984334460740187762014-12-15T13:35:00.003+11:002014-12-15T15:34:12.404+11:00Bah Bah Black Sheep<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCAkcXpizK08pUPYLY65iRJto7nrBbniLWO2Hz-qJuMz_04IVHhIercd9U1AVptTn-h2yuCOfdr2AE790M7RaDGw4Ghj98aQc_kDys76qJCsV1aampdFmTIEFkwJzp3WbblX59FPBsZc2H/s1600/5298378078_0ae8b04a7b_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCAkcXpizK08pUPYLY65iRJto7nrBbniLWO2Hz-qJuMz_04IVHhIercd9U1AVptTn-h2yuCOfdr2AE790M7RaDGw4Ghj98aQc_kDys76qJCsV1aampdFmTIEFkwJzp3WbblX59FPBsZc2H/s1600/5298378078_0ae8b04a7b_b.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Creative commons pic by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamkr/5298378078">AdamKR</a></td></tr>
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Ponder this: Santa sees you when you're sleeping, and he knows when you're awake. Ergo, Santa <i>knew </i>that that little kid was watching him kiss her mummy. That child woke from her slumber, heard something going on, and snuck down those stairs for a peek. HE KNEW! Santa knew, but he went right ahead pashing her mum. And if that's not creepy, then I don't know what is.<br />
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Seriously, though, there's about 16,000 reasons ahead of that one why I loathe Christmas. It's not even the Jesusy bits either. I'm quite partial to his far-seeing, regardless of whether he lived or not. Some of my loathing is probably partially due to the fact that his birthday wouldn't even have been on 25 December anyway, that this whole thing we do was a convenient way for a creepy church to do away with all that nasty pagan earthy womany dirty solstice stuff and slap a bit of Jesus in there to whiten it all up.<br />
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Christmas is empty, meaningless and void. As far as a ritual goes, it's cobbled-together shite, an excuse to load up consuming extra stuff for no real reason whatsoever, unless you are a Christian. I guess when you look at where our culture is at in the decay/renewal stakes, Christmas is actually the perfect end-of-year ritual for a collective space that has also become empty, meaningless and void.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTmRw62ecSxj4S5h7JG5Tmnqi0PeU_ZH6yD6xY9HkX-WnKbvDlEt6FQdUpf78jD7cC0SdZpagj6BtFpd0K4UNqwfqhcOxjba-2-qrI0YusDxFjc0JsVJDHVaA_vd4fW3YBzc3kfhk40Z3Y/s1600/11542726906_0f4186fe32_k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTmRw62ecSxj4S5h7JG5Tmnqi0PeU_ZH6yD6xY9HkX-WnKbvDlEt6FQdUpf78jD7cC0SdZpagj6BtFpd0K4UNqwfqhcOxjba-2-qrI0YusDxFjc0JsVJDHVaA_vd4fW3YBzc3kfhk40Z3Y/s1600/11542726906_0f4186fe32_k.jpg" height="230" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Creative commons pic by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/arg_flickr/11542726906">Andrew</a></td></tr>
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I imagine some people would be protesting now reading this. What a depressing cow. And If I was able to peer closer, I would think it would be a reasonable bet that many of the ones protesting loudest would have young children in tow. It must be a lovely thing, to be sure, the pleasure of giving your child gifts, of seeing their pleasure in return. How good that would make you feel. Especially after being marketed to for months about how wonderful you're going to feel giving your kids all those presents. <br />
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If I could wave a wand, I would replace Christmas, sometime soon, logically, the same way it is logical to stop using coal as an energy source when a sun beats above our heads. Because it's quite obviously reached its use-by date. But Christmas is not going to stop anytime soon, and parents are forced to keep the tired old show running (especially because for many them it probably doesn't feel tired and old at all) because there is nothing like Christmas to guilt a parent into feeling they have to give their kid way more than is good for them. That's actually why <a href="http://viralslot.com/christmas/is-cancelled/?t=df">these brave souls</a> have cancelled gift-giving this year. I take my hat off to them.<br />
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I don't have children, so I'm happy to continue to be the grinch who wants to kill Christmas. Now, the traditional retort of bah humbug may also come from those who ride the swell of the season without paying it too much mind. It's just Christmas, you know, and just like the weather's hot and the beach is beckoning we have tinsel and trees and Santa and stuff. That's what we do. What's the ish? <br />
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That kind of swell-riding is, well, swell if you can go there. Not everything needs deep massive analysis and inspecting about where it all fits together - or should - in the system so that stuff works properly and we get to live beautiful. Unless you're me. And so therefore I struggle to go there, to empty ritual, because it actually hurts me. This may sound weird to some people but that's just how I roll. <br />
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But hey, I understand why hating Christmas categorises me as a scrooge. And I understand the need for traditions in the face of so much uncertainty. But Christmas hurts me in the same way that watching the economic bit at the end of the news hurts me, with its relentless focus on economic growth without ever once mentioning that it is impossible for such a thing to keep happening in our current economic system without continuing to kill the earth's resources and make climate change worse.<br />
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When you find yourself living in a bizarre and dysfunctional paradigm, empty rituals can be as creepy as Santa copping a feel of Mum under the mistletoe. I've thought a lot about this sort of thing in the last 15 years of enforced solitude through chronic illness. Meaningful rituals are absolutely necessary for a culture to keep itself glued together. I guess that's why I'm not so sure Jesus wouldn't have sympathy to my desire to ditch the whole Christmas thing. He seemed to have some kind of an understanding of the importance of wine needing new wineskins. Empty, dead, floppy rituals may possibly be intellectually dangerous to people requiring empowerment, people who have been so heavily and heartily <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda,7184">Bernaysed</a>.<br />
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I love my family, but my partner and I are resigning from Christmas this year and going away, to a mudbrick house halfway betwen Daylesford and Castlemaine. My illness has flared horribly this year, my anxiety is extreme, and I don't know from one hour to the next how I will be feeling. Apart from the fact that I just simply physically don't know if I can do it this year, the fact that the meaning behind the get-together is something so empty with such high expectations, makes me feel worse. The fact that in the end it's just a get-together meal with my family is something that I struggle to get to from the layers that surround it.<br />
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Can't we get together in March instead?<br />
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Can you imagine a collective ritual whose individual elements fit together to make some kind of story, one which has resonance and relevance to our daily lives? One that makes us feel or think differently, that opens us all up a little so that the shame of being called consumers all year by lying politicians can seep out and be replaced by something a little more edifying and heartening and empowering? A ritual that's sort of something like a big roleplaying game that you can walk into and play each year. A ritual that means something, that helps us feel part of something bigger than ourselves that is beautiful, not destructive? <br />
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I don't quite know what that is. But it'd be a ritual worth doing, I reckon. Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879615387850345622.post-46662389568864282312014-12-04T14:39:00.002+11:002014-12-06T10:55:22.818+11:00May You Live in Interesting Times<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities ~ I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not ~ that one endures<br />
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~ Friedrich Nietzsche<br />
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<br />
Well, then. That's a little harsh at first glance, innit?<br />
<br />
I can tell how much anxiety I'm bombarded with by how I respond to that above quote.
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When I am feeling super-dooper ill and my anxiety has flared like it's Black Saturday, I wish to smash Mr Nietzsche right in his (rather handsome) face and then curl up in a ball and vanish into thin air. At those times, I have gone way past the point of acceptance and I am just screaming for it all to stop. Sometimes, anxiety overwhelms to the point where you don't feel you can climb out of anywhere.<br />
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When I am feeling better, and have, say, increased my vitamin D levels to 10,000IU a day, I believe that our dear Freidrich is quite right on this score. I say it with some trepidation though, because I don't believe the loneliness we feel in our suffering is helped by living in a culture whose parts are so disconnected from the whole. I don't believe that the stiff upper lip of letting people drown in their suffering without knowing you are there to assist them helps anything at all. And so I add to Mr Nietzsche's statement - we should be ready to assist other people to endure their suffering better. <br />
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But even so, if I had a magic wand to relieve your suffering, I would wave it, because you have to have a magic wand waving experience once in your life, surely? And because I have an overwhelming desire to be a fairy godmother. And anyway, it's not like you're not going to have another 10,000 bouts of suffering to learn to endure under, coming right up behind today. <br />
<br />
If there is one lesson I will learn and forget over and over again until the day I die it is possibly this. It's not what happens to you, it's how you respond. I seem to have, somewhere deep down in the unconscious murk, developed a resistance to life as it is presented to me. And so for me, I'm taking a little longer than some to realise that acceptance is not weakness. It is the most amazing, durable spiderweb strength. Like a still pond that can turn further downstream into rushing water.<br />
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The sophisticated, classy, empathetic human who results from this lesson is worth all of the pain that goes beforehand. I have quite a large dose of that third element, but I'm going for the first and the second :)<br />
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Endurance is a difficult beast, though. It seems that for some of us at least, the very darkest times are those where for hours or days or months you are cut off from being able to respond appropriately to that which is tormenting you in the first place. Your ability to respond in a way that will help your own self is for the moment defunct. At those times, your central nervous system has gone haywire. (And in an age where chemicals continue to be poured into our environment on a relentlessly ongoing basis, we can't expect not to be affected. I do believe though that we are beginning to make the slow connection to the fact that we are not islands, and if the merchants amongst us can't resist defecating in their own nest for their own profit, then we must continue speaking out until they stop. But I digress.) <br />
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Sometimes, you can't gird your loins up to even climb back on that rather delicious knife edge of life where, despite your desire for the easy ride, you receive whatever happens to you with grace, knowing that your response is terribly important. Knowing that doorways open up from this space that you can't get to otherwise. On the other side of that is joy and resilience, hidden right in the middle of a busy city street. <br />
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Days you've fallen off the edge of the knife and on the way through it's sliced you in half, and you're spending hours, days, weeks, trying to get back to the you that is whole (even while at the very same time it is all inside you, complete. You know it is, because the last time you were chopped up into 19 pieces you came back again and suddenly there you were, in some faint semblance of a coherent whole). <br />
<br />
On those days when you are sliced in half, the kindness of strangers and friends helps staunch the blood flow, helps you endure-without-enduring until you can get back to those spaces where again you can climb back up onto the edge of the knife where hardship gives birth to joy. This, surely, is why compassionate people enjoy the virtues of universal healthcare and welfare. Because so many of us fall down below the waterline. A sophisticated society helps people up, resisting the urge to blame. A person who lives in such a society receives strength at their worst times. Such things create resilience until people can climb back onto the knife's edge once more.<br />
<br />
May you have the strength to live well in interesting times. And may you be held up in the times when you don't.<br />
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(Inspired by Brain Picking's post on <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/15/nietzsche-on-difficulty/">difficulty</a>)Suehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01122659239039900398noreply@blogger.com5