Pat is right

We are young
Heartache to heartache
We Stand!
No promises, no demands
Love is a battlefield

zoo and I seem to be having an online love in comparable to the skanky jane/artswipe marraige of late '06.

I was inspired by another set of postings on skirts are bleeding - to think of the benatar - which reminds me of texta queen which reminds me of Abel - coz we were both obsessed with that song after seeing textas stirling karaoke rendition - in platform boots....

Strange silly synchronicity - which probably has LOTS to do with the smallness of sydney sapphic circles much more than anything else.(Did I tell you about the 'blind date' I had from pink sofa.... where I walked into a room and the new date was THE ONLY PERSON I didn't know?)

So today - I listenin to abel's CD she burnt me last year of classic faves.... which starts with the benatar....... then segues to lots of other stuff - that made my eyes water so I had to change to Patti Smith instead.

It's funny how the universe finds time to drop precious little turds of personal growth opportunities in our mouths at SUCH SPECIAL TIMES....

I spent last week getting increasingly weepy and mopey and miserable and piney and wishing for the wifelife and being reminded of her nipples and craving her body and missing her eyes and her skin and her softness and her voice and EVERYTHING.

And it was just like the Kathellisism song.... (which you can hear online)

and I want to kiss your neck
I want to touch your skin
I miss the small of your back
I miss the stubble on your chin
(yeah - well maybe the latter is a bit of an exaggeration for her bumfluff - but er.. yeah)


And I spent the weekend doing lots of sobbing and waking up in the middle of the night and texting the brixton cowboy to send back some chuckles and smut and a nice reminder of somewhere different and very far away from where I was and am aright now and a very different way of fucking and everything very very different and all in aid of remapping my circuits of personal longing and desire into something that should no longer be so piney and pathetic....

and so yesterday I woke up to his call and after being cooed and chuckled into a state of contentment - decided to check my email.

A message from Abel. guiltily I let my pathetic girl heart flutter with joy and opened it.... and read that she'll be joined by shewhoimnotallowedtocallslutanymore for a few months - as of next week. Yep. Next door. in the garden, in the barrio, at art openings, on the scene, at the sly. the happy bloody couple rubbed right into my face on my turf. Isn't Paris enough for them? Isn't Belle Ile? why here?

Bodies speak so much better than words, as thoughts flit between various ambiguities....

so I was tapping out a response... while shaking... and interrupted by bellows of pain emanating from my mouth... I haven't wept uncontrollably over a keyboard since ... Monday May 24th 2004 - when I read pred's last posting.

Weeping, shaking, running between keyboard and bathroom as my nether ends also opened and I thought "Oh, great - another bout of weight loss coming on - and all those fucking 'you look so attractive' comments when I feel so shitty"

then started plotting escape and hiding strategies, silently to myself. Made dates for bands, the zoo (I mean taronga), harbour trips, visiting friends out of town - anything to get out and away, far, fucking away from this shit. Felt glad to be not the only one. felt glad that that I've got Hermano Grande around the corner in case of random urge to silently sob into beer...emailed zoo and TEDG. Texted MFCC, replied to Abel, read over advice of Wonderboi....

fingers could talk, mouth could only howl, and I wandered shakily into uni somehow. dressed in war paint. Bright colours to ward off nasty dark pain. Pink hair, green tights, pink skirt, sacred heart on my chest. Talismans. Necklace from Kath, Top from TEDG....Was this march 2006 or July 2007 and how will I fill in july 2008? still this FUKKED UP?

Stupidly vainly noted the flatness of my belly and loose fit of skirt and hated myself for being SUCH A GIRL. Girls like to disappear. girls like to be skinny and passive and like to be looked at. and the thinner they are, the sadder they are the more passive and pathetic, the more they can be picked up by a big strong hero eh?

I'm not a girl.

I strode out of the house into the sunlight, reciting to myself "crisis is the condition for change, for challenge, for contingency, for the brilliance and beauty of indeterminacy, for becoming, for surprise."

then chuckled as I thought again of Pat Benatar....


wooo ooohhh hooo
WE ARE STRONG
No one can tell us We're WRONG


so is there reason to this wallowing?

Kind of. Part of me, however brutal and hard and hellish - means that what I asked for WILL COME. Abel will be here - NOT as my wife, or my ex - but with someone - with whom I find it impossible to revert back to any friendly nostalgia trip.

I'll be forced to move on, to protect myself - to not seek out contact - to stop trying to pretend that things are *cool* between us.

somewhere in my thesis I wrote about how pain produces amnesia - and I'm amazed by my own amnesiac relationship to pain. I always forget how bad migraines are when I haven't got one, I always forget how much Abel - HURT me. - and she of course doesn't want to remind me.....

so - daily little stabs of hell - will hopefully drive me to protect myself - to move and keep moving on, to grow into my own becoming....

does this sound like hypocrisy?

I have brought other lovers here, and Abel has been so 'civil' and 'nice' and non jealous, and so 'decently sapphic' around them.... that maybe I should reciprocate. but I only took lovers after we broke up. I was clear about when and why I would start bringing people back home... and I haven't used any lovers or friends to drive a wedge between myself and a relationship I didn't want to face or resolve or have the courage to end first.

I *know* I'm not perfect - but I don't make promises I don't intend to keep - and I tend to tell people what I'm doing and with whom - because I believe that sex and love and proud beautiful things and don't want use them for hiding, for shaming or for silence...

I know that Love is often really stupid and girly and spiteful and the spite comes form the most surprising places. A close friend who made some catty comment about another friend 'having no self respect' - like it was an insult - and not a reason to show this person MORE RESPECT. Maybe I feel so abject and pathetic so often - that I don't feel the need to distance myself from peoples abjection and pathos - but to actually give them affection, respect and support. Maybe i'm just too perverse for this world.

I've always been bad at sport. Always fallen over, missed the ball, tripped on my feet, broken my glasses and come last in the race. If I viewed sex as a contest I'd never leave the house. for me- sex is the thing that happens on the sidelines. Sex is drawing a silly face on the ball or pretending its an egg, sex is zig-zagging across the running field or swimming in circles instead of laps, sex is trying to catch the girls on the netball field instead of the ball - sex is the divine perverse mad possibility of doing everything in the WRONG WAY for the RIGHT REASONS.

I know that love and sex have some dark, dark, angry elements. I know my own heart has a mean posessive selfish controlling streak - but I'd rather grow back my hymen than reduce sex and love to a matter of competition. I had nearly 8 years to fukk abel in any manner both of us could have desired - and if I couldn't do then what I can do now - then so be it. I hope she's happy with shewhoimnotallowedtocallslutanymore and i hope that shewhoimnotallowedtocallslutanymore is a better fuck than I was. As much as I ache, and miss and pine for Abel - I'm HAPPY to have moved on, and happy about what I've learned and am learning and will learn and experience.

Anyway - there's a nice story to end all of this. I followed the Brixton Cowboy's advice and took the credit card into a decent sex shop and bought some indecent objects and used them indecently with my a very obliging friend.... and I discovered new ways of fucking, new ways of desiring, new parts of myself, of herself - of how bodies and feelings and gestures and roles can be remade and rethought and refelt. We fukked to patti smith, plotted mad performances and laughed and cuddled into the night.

Red white and blue

Red white and blue
Here's a pic of zoo
Writing poems is cheesy tho
…so I’ll have to end here and return to prose…..


this pikki of Zoo – is coz it was bastille day and she was in red white and blue (ok – red and blue and black – but with her white skin – she looked a tricolour treat)

and zoo was part of the late nite- early morning fun and madness at kooky , and zoo write things on her blog as I think them and vice versa – and zoo is my favourite breakup buddy and we have this strange crossover of words, and dressups and tears and absolute silliness that is divinely beautiful, and helps me to love my life.

At the moment I love my life and my friends so desperately that my mouth waters. At times my life is more brilliant and brave than any of my wildest dreams – and its not so much me – as having good – no great people around me. And my world is filled with colour and light and madness and hugs and sheer mad joy…. A lot of the time.


And so I’m sad and shocked to spend so much time feeling so incredibly sad – which is how I have felt in the past week. As soon as I stop the mad whirl, the crazed rush into the light, I sit and get filled with gloom and hell and sobs. I spent the past week hibernating. Sleeping 12 hours a day, I dreamt about waking up on the Boulevard Michel with blocked ears and my backpack – looking for ear candles and finding only bookshops. Wondering why the fuck I was in Paris, where I don’t want to be, don’t want to remember, don’t want to return to….

When I woke up from the dream above, my ear left ear was blocked and I thought of My Favourite Consort Cure – and beery ear candling in blighty – where my ears and chest were blocked with phlegm so much of the time…. Yesterday, my chest was blocked again. My Favourite Consort Cure put her hand on my chest and felt the grief, tried to massage it out and felt her own eyes fill with tears. I was blocked, numb, dumb with pain. Eyes just sad, mumbling…. Eventually I shed a few tears and we cried and cuddled and slept.. then we woke up, hung out with the posse, freaked up, went out dancing and laughing.

Me: madly - when life is unbearable I 'cope' by putting on a mask - by pushing myself in extremis into something else... wearing a wild and scary mask, dancing out every fukking fibre of pain. No I wasn't drunk, I wasn't high, I don't need to be - I just need movement, madness, to be suspended in something while my own dervish tears itself apart.

And so, today i woke up with a rash on my chest where her hand had been, and a nasty sinus migraine from where i should have cried. I walked into the sunshine, went to a rally, chatted with friends, bought fruit at paddies, came home and collapsed.

tonight - another nice synchronicity. zoo's latest posting strangely echoed my own dillemma. One would think that being held in such an incredible network of sexy brilliant freaks, of close human contact, of being able to fuck people I love, and love people I fuck and not be jealous or neurotic but happy and open and confident, and be surrounded by people who i love - and no I don't have to fuck all of them or even most of them, and no - i'm not sex addicted either - but just lucky enough to be in a very nice couple of spaces at the moment - that I'd be *happy* and not pining after something that in many many ways I was glad to get out of.

then i wonder what it was that My Favourite Consort Cure cured me of in the first place, and why she can't cure me of this other thing - the wife life syndrome - this old scarred shadow under my skin, in my hands, in my mouth, in my tits, sometimes even in my vagina - that as much as I try to shake, fuck, dance, kiss, fantasize, laugh, shit and weep it out of me is still there.

I associate My Favourite Consort Cure with relief, with movement, with life and my sheer joy to be no longer in love with or heartbroken by the consort - to be unrebounding - to no longer be flailing in the space of heartbreak and lurching into another one. I am so glad to share sex and friendship and intimacy and honesty and pain in a SANE way - that is caring, that is intimate, that IS trusting and intense but doesn't have this clinging girl need to be taken and fused and remade with someone else. I can and do walk and dance on my own feet, and so do my other lovers. we don't hold hands in the street. this is a relief. we do dirty dance and pash on the dance floor. (sometimes wiht each other) this is a delight.

and i wonder how the hell Abel got so deeply inside of me, - actually no i don't I remember how - and I vow - please god don't let that happen ever again.... or at least not to me....

then I get scared and sad and scared again that i'll never get over her unless I do fall for someone like that again - that I do open up and fuse myself into another mummy/baby dyad. As much as my ovaries are screaming at me to breed - and my uterus twitches at the smell of lactation and the sight of infants - the fact is, I feel incredibly releived NOT to have or be anyone else's 'baby' at the moment.

I feel relieved to stand on my own feet - not to cling or be clung to - that i want to have this, hold this, enjoy this sensation for just a little bit longer, while I grow just a little bit older.

but growing older *hurts*. If I sit still, I fall back into memory, sensation and loss. I sit mired in the past and this stupid, stupid state that I wish I didn’t feel anymore. sometimes I feel so much pain that I don't know where it ends and where I begin. I don't know how to end the marraige - how to move on and separate her from my being. It's not only the joint wills and immigration files under the bed, it's not only the boxes and boxes and cupboards of photos, letters, notes, drawings, postcards, objects accumulated together. It's not only the music, the language, the injokes - the mad flights between languages. It's not only clothes that I've worn that she's worn, the sheets, the furniture, the objects the spaces.... everything here that is linked to our shared life.that's OK - TEDG has broght in new furnishings and objects, we've moved the furniture, I changed the bed and brought others onto my sheets, into the bath onto the furniture....

but there's my thesis - which started out of working as a life model - which was intimately connected with Abel - she also worked as a model - my major argument - the major raison d'etre - comes out of a performance piece we did together 5 years ago. Each time i sit in my intellectual blankness - I'm returned to this connection, and it aches. There is also the ART, and the fact that I haven't painted since we broke up. Every vulva, every painting on the wall is about her, her body, our conversations, our desires, my desire, her soul, this desperate love that I felt with every breathe. and I wonder - do I have to throw out every single painting, every vulva I'm made? how do I exorcise her out of me?

and then if I do - what will she do in return? how will she punish me?

ex-catholic me - fears this the most. I don't trust that she will let me go - I'm scared of being haunted by desire, by sadness, by guilt, by a sense of responsibility - for the rest of my life. given that I've known her for 9 years - given that it took her 6 months to move out of the house - given that she didn't 'break up' with me - just kind of said -that she was in love with someone else and didn't want to fuck me - this is understandable.

given that she lives so close and so easy to touch and so nice to touch and hold and talk to. given that she gets along so well with my other lovers/friends/flatties - given that she so often, so easily - fits in - I want to keep her in - to keep whatever silly shred of nostalgia and connection we've got let - to feed the fantasy that we can have could have did have the great relationship - and that it can continue - as something open and expanded and we can walk on our own two feet -and only sometimes hold hands....

which is a myth - a nice little story that i tell myself, while ignoring the nasty gaping heartbreak/terror/guilt ghost.

Meanwhile i try so desperately to invent and live out other stories - for the way if might have been. My long distance affair with the brixton cowboy - a litany of phone calls and correspondence almost as lengthy as that between abel and I - my own girlie musings over photos and gushing at the sound of his voice - trying to live out a long distance affair - not as a craving for contact - not as a demand to move - but as a sharing of distance - as an enjoyment of the possibilities that distance provides - and the freedom - that if we don't ever see each other again - then certain things don't matter - and we are free to reinvent ourselves and our desires and share our own mad desires and mad affairs and adventures. Making the gap into a space of possibility instead of loss.

this is all philosophically sound and sexually inspiring and ethically noble and will make a great novel one day - but day to day my life is as pathetic and tragic as any sod with a broken heart. I fantasize about an elaborate ritual, some incredible performace that will break this spell of longing and love that I have for her. then i imagine how I'd rope her into it. then I realise what the problme is. which is, in these scenarios - she doesn't exist, move, negoitate or articulate her own condition or desires - that I project onto her - the stuff that is within *me* - and it is this that I have to exorcise and leave behind or bury or burn...

that i fuse her with mine - with my demands, ideas and needs and she doesn't resist. or she runs away. this is the nasty rub. this has to end. I have to make my own ending for this story - and one that has a more delightful twist than me navigating the brixton cowboy around the marais by text.... but one that involves me being able to walk away from abel and my sad stupid crushing longing.

so much of me clings to the past, I recite and remember and rehearse old anniversaries - so so scared of letting go and losing the past. If i was a better buddhist - I'd embrace the immanence of death - and the necessity of loss for life to continue - but i've still got far too much catholicism on the inside. I still want to light a candle to my grief, my longing, my pain - to make a little shrine to it, to embellish it - to not let it go and walk away.

Like i said - it's about me, and not about her. and i'm still just a sad silly thing a lot of the time. Grief is just slow and sad and hard.

Wintereisse - farewell to 35

Last night I felt as if my chest had broken open. The silent and continuous flow of tears of the past month came pouring out as large wailing sobs. Slightly muffled by my pillow but consumed more but the icy darkness around me. So much fucking sadness. Grief sitting on my chest like some evil demon, sinking it’s claws inside, sucking out my will for life and making me earnestly wishing I was dead.

After lying and sobbing silently for about an hour, I decided that my preferred mode of suicide would be to drop a hairdryer into the bath. Since I don’t own a hairdryer and currently have no access to a bathtub this seemed reasonably remote to indulge in as an anaesthetic fantasy of self obliteration. I’ve got a few ethical objections to suicide, mainly involving anticipating the pain of other’s around me. I don’t feel I have the right to cause anyone the terrible pain of grief. So, Hellish as it is, I acquiesce to continue living.

This heart, this broken aching heart is hell. I’m sick of tears stinging my eyes, and I can’t believe that I’m in this much pain. I’m curious about how emotional pain gets psychosomatically located in this strange lump in my chest. I wish I could freeze out this pain. Grow up, get over it and move on. Focus on my work, be a good serious, self contained proto-doctor, not this pathetic undershit, weeping over someone who simply isn’t worth it.

So today I happily acquiesced to Heli’s suggestion that we go and plunge ourselves into a hole cut into the ice of a frozen lake. It is less extreme than it sounds. The hole is right next to a sauna, and today the weather was well above zero (ok mainly only 5 or 6 degrees by 5pm, but she’s gone there in minus 20). I fantasized about the cold waters cauterising my heartbreak, providing some sort of shock to jolt me out of the miasma of grief. And I’d never say no to a sauna.

The first time I happily screamed and laughed aloud at the icy shock on my feet, my legs, my torso as I descended in, and quickly emerged (they have a stairwell into the hole). And, back in the sauna, I enjoyed the round of applause from the stoic elderly ladies, politely impressed at my feat of tourist bravado. The second time, I tried to allow myself to sense what it felt like. The terror as my feet and legs went numb, combined with the sheer thrill of the cold as I resisted the urge to leap off the stairwell and swim around in the hole. Then the strange rush of my blood thickening. Blood thickening – is something I’ve always associated with the cold rush of a dead sweaty panic. Icy emotional stabs from small instances of heartbreak, disappointment, shock. So often I’ve felt my blood runs cold when I sit and numbly grunt at some nasty little shock revelation of betrayal or hurt or absence, but it was nothing like this. I could feel my capillaries contract, felt a really funny internal rush that almost made me swoon. But I didn’t swoon, and remained upright, sensing the weirdness of the cold, the liquid on my skin. Then I raced up the stairs, and stood around – in a strange hysterical high. Such happy numbness, no, not numbness, something else.

My heart is no where near healed, but I’m less of a mess than last night. And my old emotional reflexes seem to be kicking in at last. I hate the consort. Maybe I should hate Abel too, but the consort is an easy target. Because I wanted out, but didn’t think I’d feel this way, because I thought it was desire and not love, because it was seven months and not seven years, because he confused me every step of the way, because he’s a man and I never thought a man would ever hurt me this much (again).

Maybe the latter is the more important point. I always associate heartbreak with women – which certainly sounds more romantic than weeping over a man, but there’s something deeper. When I think back over a lifetime’s habit of coldly describing injuries done to me by men; emotional abuse, betrayal, sexual abuse, coldness, coerced sex, general nastiness, drunken date rape and sexual rejection, I wonder why I haven’t been able to articulate this as a personal injury, but I’ve either theorised it or turned it into some tidy little narrative, where I seem to vanish. I think vanishing is part of the point, and probably explains why such incidences are so annihilating, and why all I want to do afterwards is annihilate myself. To vanish, disappear, feel nothing, say nothing, do nothing, to sink into a hole an never emerge. To be mired, silent in my own deathly misery.

Part of my loves the bullshit in break-ups. The eternal line “oh, yes, we’ll still be friends, of course we’ll be friends, I still love you and always will”. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to know what a total crock of shit that is. Despite many attempts and experiments at this particular project, I am not good friends with any of my exes. We’re civil, and some of us can even socialise – but the end of a relationship is exactly that. It’s a defeat, a failure, a termination. The memories remain, but the future trajectory is over. And I don’t think it is really possible to remain good friends with someone who has caused or does cause you a lot of pain, unless you’re a masochist, which I’m more reluctant to be lately.

This trajectory of musings came from another silent little bout of tears tonight. I was musing on the feminine grace of the consort, which is what attracted me in the first place. He’s one of the faggiest men I’ve ever met, and a big part of me was convinced he was gay, but repressed – but given my own circumstances, I’m assuming there was a fair amount of self projection involved. But he was and is, incredibly, beautifully and exquisitely feminine, and yet strangely masculine as well. I know I was intensely attracted to the sheer queerness of someone so camp, prissy and girly being able to nail me to the floor with his phallus. But there was something deeper than the thrill of being fucked by a femme, because I’ve been fucked by dildo wielding femme dykes, and enjoyed the odd brief foray into flipping butches too. And I think it was the last deep gasp of my own masochism.

There’s nothing queer about heterosexuality – particularly when the roles within the relationship are so fixed. And between mayhem and consort, the roles were fixed. He, and older man, definitely wore the pants, sex only happened when he wanted it too, and it happened on his terms, where he was the active partner and me the passive. I hadn’t been that passive (not even with a man) since nineteen eighty something, and intensely enjoyed the experience. But for me, what was a fleeting intimate opening into softness, passivity and trust, was and is something entirely different within heteronormativity. I think all of the consort’s exes have been upwardly mobile, middle class, intelligent women. Professional socialised butches of the straight world to his own faffing femininity. But whatever the social roles, the sexual union maintains his own subjective position as a man, even reinforcing it. I had a strong sense that the consort gets off on ‘flipping’ dominant women, and this is one of the reasons why he isn’t gay. His femininity is a ruse, a disarming seduction, a play, and a delightfully queer one at that. Kind of.

What cannot be queer in such an encounter – is that he, socially, ostensibly is a heterosexual man, and the bearer of both subjectivities. Kristeva’s argument that men can bear the symbolic values of the feminine and the masculine, but women can only ever transvestise ourselves is a timely reminder of this paradox. Men are imbued with an internal subjectivity, that of masculinity, at their core. Women aren’t, at least not when we start messing with the phallus. My own exquisite delight at being fucked, being filled with a penis – was a delight at being filled with the phallus, at collapsing myself into a skin, a layer, a shallow carapace for this cultural figment. I wasn’t even ‘feminine’ in this, merely a part-object, an embellishment of another object. The play of seduction, he was feminine, insisting on pursuing and seducing me, and expressing disdain or aversion if I tried the same trick in return. This hurt a lot, but also contributed to my feelings of ‘victory’ when I could finally feel him inside me. For him – I guess the victory was in seducing a top, in having a profoundly articulate dyke begging for his cock, in taking my arm and walking down king street, remapping my very queer cruising grounds as a coupled heterosexist space. I’ve got no doubt about his investment in heterosexuality as a social institution. I have written and workshopped bisexuality for over a decade, but that doesn’t help my feelings of internal betrayal in allowing this to happen. Part of me was intrigued by this remapping, this strolling, this remarking of the territories crossed and recrossed by Abel and I, in the arms of another, entirely different body. Part of me delighted in the sheer queerness of it, and It felt very queer to me, but not in the right way. Becoming the human condom, was a delight, a vertiginous delight of descent, away from myself, from my own subjectivity, and my own confusion. But I feel hollow, hellish and bereft as a result.

I wish I was tougher. I wish I was immune to men, and wanting to be desired and loved by them. I wish I didn’t long for a rapprochement and healing of my own ancient wounds of love and betrayal and loss for the deadmen in my biofamily. I wish, that by cutting my hair and swaggering around grinning at girls and occasionally fucking them, that I could immunise myself against this hurt. This immense stupidity of my own vulnerability, as a woman, as something inscribed as ‘lacking’ in relation to men, that makes any meaningful relationship with them, literally impossible.

I feel weird writing this - and putting it up for the world - and the consort to read. for every paragraph of what seems like impossible bile here - i have 10 tear sodden ink pages scratched out ink bic biro at desperate hours of the night - or the day. sometimes living is total total hell, and I write because to not write means that I suffocate. Maybe one day I'll feel less hurt, less scared, less sad, less fucking bitter. At the moment my hatred, my fury, my frustration is the only thing getting me out of bed each day. that tiny little fire in my belly, stopping me from freezing completely.

It’s not all bad. Reading velvet park, I came across an article about the confusing challenges to health care provision in san fran – generated by the proliferation of transgenderism. Lots of FTM’s are fucking gayboys, or straight girls, or MTF’s, or queer girls, and vice versa. Reading this I imagined a utopia where gender binaries cannot exist – and have been queered out of existence. I image a utopia where gender doesn’t matter – and can be changed like a set of underwear or drag outfits, and where genitalia are freed from the constraints of gender, or sociality, of subjectivity and can salaciously stroll across open fields of lusty willing flesh. Then I regret sending my wonderwand home.

Feeling Down 2

Fancy That!

sometimes the universe is INCREDIBLE - in the way it just responds to your inner psyche.

the previous posting was a cut and paste job from some email that just arrived in my inbox: with "Feeling down" as the subject heading.

I love the NON-english of spam - it's the last pure form of automatic writing... and I think there's a message in there somewhere for me - past the buttons for cialis, viagra and xanax......

At the moment I need all three - I'm so flat I can't even get my dildo to stay erect.

I'm debating whether or not to venture out to the launch of "Velvet Park" - which is meant to be the alternative version of "Go" which is the big apple's version of Lobotomies On The Loose. the cute girl-on-t at Babeland said it wasn't really quite "on our backs" - but seeing as I missed the SLIT launch last week in Sydney I thought it might go some way towards alleviating my feelings of vaginita cobwebitis.

On the other hand the theme is "roller derby" - and I'm about as natural arround roller skates as the average pussy cat, and I find sporty dykes totally unsexy - sport, sweat, netball, uniforms, running shoes, EUGH.

AND the website has WAYYY too many references to the L-WORD - which I think is like STARBUCKS of sapphodom - ie non coffee drinkers think Starbucks must be a good idea - and I.... am proud to say that I've been in the USA for 3 months and not stepped foot in a single one!

and I was feeling too depressed even to brave Dr. Sketchies, (actually i've decided that I never want to draw another titty tassle as long as I live....) and so I'm still thinking that maybe I should take advantage of another late night in solitude wiht my skethcobook at the MET.

Yesterday i fought back tears and entertained myself for at least an hour underneath Carpeaux's version of "Ugolino and his son's" - looking up and imagining a mayhem version of Monty Python skit - done ocker style.....


"i'm sorry lads, but there's just too many of you, and we're all starving to death, so i'm afraid I'm going to have to chop one of you up and feed you to the others..."
"ohhh SHIT dad, that really sucks, can't it be Jason?"
"No, craig, Jason's too small, he'd barely feed a cat, I'm afraid we'll have to go with Brian"
"Fucking No Way!"
"Listen, son, I know you're the favourite, and i'll try and let that console me and the other's while we're savouring your barbecued, flesh; you're a big strapping lad, and maybe, just maybe with your help, we'll all pull through"


Actually Just add that to the pile of reasons not to go - I love art and the met is open till 9pm again tonight....

OK, reasons to go:
I should see some Lesbians for I leave New York
the magazine is the nearest thing NYC has, to SLIT
the launch is a 10 minute walk away from where I'm staying
I could check out some of the openings that are in the area
I could even score dutch courage at openings before hand
I'm wearing all black
I might get laid and this might improve my mood
I might get laid by some homocidal freak and this would eliminate my mood
My mood ain't good


Again more reasons not to go:
I'm trying not to drink. this limits my gregariousness
I feel about as sexual as an armadillo in the fucking 4 layers I have to wear everywhere so I don't freeze my tits off
I was feeling too withdrawn to cope with Dr. Sketchies then I don't know how I'll cope with A) willliamsburg art scene B) Williamsburg dyke Scene
I feel about as sexual as a wombat generally. I think this is a sign of depression.

I think i'm depressed

Reasons for depression are all noteworthy and logical

I'm probably premenstrual (no sign of the menopause yet)
I'm been bedbound nearly all week with a nasty headcold
I haven't been dancing, or exercising or having much fun at all
I haven't had sex for nearly 3 months, and that was with the consort
I'm a bit broken hearted about the consort
It's the anniversary of the end of the lesbian marriage

Inspired by ZOO - I signed onto the ANU MoodGym (where KPI's meet cognitive therapy)
so I went through and they reckon I'm not very depressed but I am very anxious. Of course I'm anxious! i've got a year to submit my PhD! And then i'm cast off into the cold world of unfunded doctoral purgatory......

"your thoughts determine your mood"

A wise proposition, but I reckon the ones from the SPAM email are far more interesting....

maybe I need to go and update the list they have, of shit things, OK things, good things that happpened this week, and my responses......

or maybe I just write them here:

1.I lost my flashdrive. totally Crapolla. thoughts were "fuck, fuck, oh fucking fuck, fucking hell. I'd better go buy another one and try to track down/back up info."
2. I had evil sinus headcold for 5 days. Thoughts were "ohhhhh, fuck, this sucks. Have I got enough codeine? I don't want to take sudafed, PLEASE don't get bronchitis, I'd better start taking my athsma medication again, I don't want to get out of bed. Have I got enough food? fuck this suuuuuckszzzzzz zzzzzz blow nose, cough, sleep etc.
3. consequently didn't present conference paper in finland, had to contact organisers and hosts, and hotels and change plane tickets. Feel a bit of a dill
4. felt like shit and couldn't do any more research and lost a week on my 4 week travelpass....
3. My mobile phone stopped working - and the phone company ate the $10USD credit remaining. It took me a few days to notice and a few more days to work out why. fucking nothing I can do. can't be fucked giving more money just to send 3 sms...

good things
1. We managed to work out some sort of a semi-reliable local wireless internet connection - this was good coz the landline has been down and I had to change/arrange a lot of crap
2. today was sunny and 55 degrees in the morning
3. I had some decent books and got to wallow in bourdieu's distinctions.... argh such a canny marxist he was! I love it when the world can look straightforward and clean and critical - and we can wipe all traces of identificatory enjoyment with dismissive sneers at the bourgeoisie.....
4. Blueberries were only $3.00 a punnet instead of $5.00

anyway - before crashing and collapsing I was trying to ward off impending feelings of doom by keeping myself busy - running between sketch clubs and the library and doing dinner wiht people - and getting out of the house and away from myself....

but then I crashed and collapsed - so now i'm a little scared of pushing myself into avoidance.

so here I am, debating what to do with myself.
did I write that my libido has VANISHED. (yes, a surprise) and a sign that I'm meant to keep myself under wraps - and that I haven't got a lot of energy for others, maybe.... or a sign that I'm completely shutting down and avoiding human contact and the world because right now i'm ACHING like hell, and don't know what the FUCK to do about it!!!

i'm not really a total emotional escapee - hell i'm wallowed on this blog all last year, and the year before, and i did A LOT OF CRYING last year. and I saw a therapist, and had regular shiatsu and did a lot of yoga and even had a full immersion rebound affair..... which has now, in it's inevitable and timely and sensible denoument left me feeling hollow and horrible and heartbroken and very hurt and alone and sad.

which are all just feelings. I didn't want the lover, didn't want the relationship, just wanted the sensation of being held and fucked, and cooed at.

but it was rather attaching, all the same.

as for the trouble and strife, well.

One year ago yesterday, or the day before (because time differences are rather odd). I was on a bus from Tampere to Helsinki with my dear friend heli, and for some reason, I couldn't stop crying. Tears streamed out of my eyes, and I had this horrible feeling that Abel didn't love me anymore. Now most people would assume that NO SMS's - infrequent emails and initiating sex with someone else while i was in the same room (and NOT with me btw) - could have been pretty clear warning signs that something was up, but intercontinental intuition in a snowy landscape sound so much more poetic.....

I thought I'd die. And I didn't. but every now and then unconscious oblivion doesn't seem like such a bad idea. It'd be NICE not to have what feels like a hole in my chest, inadequately compensated by a lump in my throat. In would be NICE not to be fighting back tears half the day. It'd be nice to stop whingeing. and to laugh.

I know things are bad inside when my sense of humour goes nutty - my inner clown trying to cheer up the rest of me. so I wandered through the Frick and nearly burst out laughing at Reynold's portraits of Lady so and so - coz they looked EXACTLY like the crazy trannies on Little Britain... or I start rescripting the gory tales behind 'neoclassical' sculptures (even thought I'd class Carpeaux as a stock romantic myself.... love the work....)

and reading another email from Abel full of earnest assurances of her sobriety "apart from one disastrous occasion" and remembering the past eight and half fucking years of the same fucking script- and involuntarily reciting details of "oh, apart from that time where I got a bit tiddly and fucked the dog and crashed the car, or crashed the dog and fucked the car, or maybe the dog fucked me in the car ... but err... No, I don't remember. No. I felt very bad the next day. No I don't remember it at all. I was just a bit tiddly. No I don't know why. I've been moderate apart from that."

there are a surprising number of homocidal maniacs who while not in the throes of an axe wielding frenzy have been regarded by many people as "moderate". this doesn't stop them from being homocidal maniacs.

this isn't meant to be an Abel bashing post - maybe it's just an easy fallback when i'm feeling scared, and sad and desperately insecure. Hell! The last time I walked into an unknown dyke bar, alone, in a foreign city was.... July 31st 1998... and then look what happened. If I was going to meet someone more fantastically amazing, brilliantly intelligent, creative,really wild and yet so tender so caring - it would be here in New York...... but I'd have to let go of her first, my stupid sad little dream that the ideal Abel would somehow emerge and we'd both rip each other's clothes off, that I wouldn't feel this level of sadness and terror around anyone and not around myself.... I'm letting this old scarred love form like a chrysalis around me, because it's secure, safe structure....

hang on, why am I saying this shit? I totally opened up to the consort, and just got crushed and confused as a result. I tried to console myself that he's way more confused than I am, but that was just delusional. I'm the one in hell here. today I went drawing and the model had the same facial structure as him. I thought I was hallucinating. I kept drawing the room around the model - everything to avoid looking into those eyes that looked so familiar and yet were so unfamiliar. Thank God the model gave me some back views so I could remember how to draw - again - and thank god his body was nothing like the consort's.... But it was freaky, in a way. another little push from the cosmos, telling myself to grit my teeth and get over it.

My latest epitaph to the consort: his phallus was like his library; magnificent yet woefully underused.

and I call myself a bookish lesbian