Strangeways Here We Come.

It’s 2.30am and I could be calling my friend in texas. I’ve got a phone card. I’m writng this – not even live online but pre-typing in word. My dialup account has expired, so I’m stuck typing into the closed dark circuits of my e-mac. This may encourage me to use spellcheck before posting.

Each day I discover a new limitation of a large white box. I bought 3 depressing moochy CD’s yesterday but they won’t play on my poota. I’m not sure if I want to here the neighbours hearing me play THE SMITHS on the stereo downstairs– so…. Yeah, err, I’m not sure what to do.

Right now I’m listening to the greatest breakup CD in the history of the universe. It’s from Abel – and full of our froggy faves: “Je suis Conne!” by Bridgette fontaine (I’m not sure if I can translate all the nuances of this crazy tune – ‘conne’ is dumbcunt – and more a part of the common parlance of those feministically challenged frogs than C**T is for anglophones).

She also put on Anais’s crazy acapella parodies of every pop genre imaginable, and then a CD of another acapella onomatopoeia queen: Camille. That’s what I’m listening to 50 times a day. Partly coz it’s easier to split my brain between 2 languages, and coz of lyrics like these:

je t’aime toujours
je t’aime toujours
je t’aime toujours
ton amour, je sais
je t’aime toujours
les saisons passé

(if you need translation: I love you always, your love I know, I love you always, the seasons pass)

It then goes into a bit of a duet thing which I can’t discern and then there’s the weird interpretive libretto segue as my audio and translation skills both segue into random association…

Mais qui est cette homme avec des yeux? (but who is this man with the eyes)
(or is it ‘Mais qui est cette ombre desous?’) (But who is this shadow beneath)
Mais qui est cette homme, qui tombe amoureuse? (but who is this man who falls in love)

Yeah, right. I’m, full of shit and I digress. The song is called Pale September. It’s now October. My heart is so heavy, sodden, grey. My eyes drag down with tears and my chest drags.

I feel slow, remote, pathetic, exhausted, incapable of anything, removed, apathetic.

I’ve gone back into breakup mode and I don’t know who it’s for or what for or why. Abel has moved out (at last) and the consort appears to be drifting away – or I’m pushing him away, or something. It is a relief.

I feel like a sad pale marshmallow sitting inside some large thick walls. The walls are my own making and I’m not sad to have put them up – but turning away from the world, means facing myself, and at the moment it’s painful.

My heart, aches. It feels like period pain. Oh, you know, just an ache, sitting quietly and occasionally catching my breathe, strangling me with its intensity. But it’s not horrible or horrifying, just averagely awful. And awfully familiar.

There is no rational or decent reason why I should feel this way. My life is fucking fabulous haven’t you heard? I’ve just returned from a wonderful class reunion, having spent the weekend surrounded by people who love me, and who I love. Before that I had a delightful night out with some lovely ladies and I’ve been having a 3 month rebound affair with a caring ubermench. I’ve got an amazing work teaching really interesting courses, I’ve got stimulating and supportive colleagues, Sydney uni feels like home and I’ve got an amazing flatmate (TEDG) moving in on the weekend.

Good girls are always grateful

But I’m a fucked up bitch, neurotic, greedy, needy, demanding, malcontent.

And a week alone in a 3 bedroom house is a damn fine reason to wallow. So I dragged my heavy heart up the street and bought a copy of my favourite first breakup album (it was an ex’s flatmates so I never actually owned it). Doncha love morrissey?

Stop me, stop me
Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before
Nothing’s changed
I still love you
I still love you
But only sightly
Less than I used to.

I got inspired to admit to my smith's predilictions by the eloquent postings on "skirts are bleeding". (click on the link called 'ouchy bits'). she updates far more regulalry than moi - and with stunning eloquence:

This bit below pretty much sums up my state of mind at present:

"Some days I (almost) wish that I could just be that straight girl, you know, the pretty one who isn't going to call anyone's identity into question, who isn't going to run about being a lactating faggot and packing under her tutu, who will stand by her man as the perfect reassurance and confirmation of his masculinity. Who doesn't disrupt the equilibrium or make anyone think twice. I feel like such a mutant and hybrid monster, always wanting odd combinations of menu items instead of taking the set banquet:

I want the boy, but don't want to be the girl
I don't want to be a girl, but don't want to be a boy
I want the house together, but don't want to 'shack up'
I want my PhD, but don't want to be an academic
I want to have a baby, but don't want the nuclear family
I want a committed relationship, but don't want to be 'married'
And on it goes."


Well, hell I wihs I could be a confused mutant lactating faggot instead of a confused mutant bleeding snotty scragg - but no-one's perfect.

I've had hideous head pain, back pain, stomach pain this week. That nice reassuring punch in the nose type migraine that makes every other stress kind of pale into comparison, well I can handle that, but the screeching agonies of small sounds distance perfume wafting - makes it a bit hard for me to be around humanity.(teahcing undergrads was a barrel of laughs this week). I've also been blessed with the scary skewer in the back twisting hardness, catching my breathe as I attmept to walk. and have clamly booked in a shiatsu for this afternoon. Avoiding codeine. trying to strethc, relax, calm down, cope.

but the gut wrenching shaking abdominal agony.... yeah well, that kind of sucks a bit. I was gasping shaking grasping for the slippery elm yesterday, grabbing and gobbling bits of bread, barely able to speak. TEDG thought I was just needing a coffee, and the houseguest barely seemed to notice as he gave a detailed whinge about his insomnia. Insomnia? Easily solved - turn on the light, grab a book, meditate, draw, wank, write. It's inconvenient, but OK - compared to shuddering pain - the sort of thing which sleep should be a respite from..... eugh.

On things prickly, Able has a got a copy of Salo - which we are going to watch before she heads off to frogville and her girlfriend (who'm I'm no longer allowed to call SLUT) for the next 3 months.

nausteating sado maso seems like a good adieu to this hellbitch separation year.

and copraphagia.

I feel like I've been swallowing shit all year.

Last night we went to a concert of our neighbours, at a cafe up the road. The cafe, with various neighbours and familiar tag alongs, singing, strumming, saxing and blowing horns - with various other neighbours tucking in and cheering - felt like HOME. Abel and I sat across from each other "drawing in stereo" as one neighbour put it. stoic scribbles to the kathellissism heartbreak songs bouncing aroud the room....

Last night reminded me of the scene in "the singing detective" of the old singalongs during ww2. Everyone joins in - everyone knows each other - the ocmmunity is an extended network of friendss, aquaintances, exes. HEartbreak washes around the room - songs written for more familiar faces and sung for others.

no wonder I've got such a provincial view of culture (it's the stuff that ordinary people make and share with other ordinary people). the last time I heard the Kathellisism experience was at Succulent - where i'd dragged mum and the consort to hear my brother's ex 'sit in' and play double bass. In 2 months time I'll be able to hear her sit in on lots of other gigs - in New york - only they'll all be famous people (Kath introduced her as woody allens bass player coz that's her 'regular' gig).

But silly me, I blithely assume -that it'll be like here - muso's making music for each other, for their friends - as something to share and play with and make life meaningful - not some abstracted out-there brilliance that only the cognoscetti get to connossiership of.

I guess I'm in for a shock. Sydney is such a small town -and I live in such a safe, insular little part of it. I only go to places - concerts, clubs, galleries etc. where I know the organisers or friends do and I reckon I'll know most of the crowd - not because I'm 'cool' - but because I can't deal with the out of placeness of rocking up to some abstracted uberzone of 'culture' (TM) where the only reference point is a review in 3D world or realtime.

anyway - I was nestled on the couch trying to disguise my pervings on the gaggle of burches opposite, under earnest scribbles as Kath stood on the table and yowled sonorously....

"You don't a lover,
you just need
someone
to love you....."

and I saw the consort standing edgily at the bar, and wondered if she was singing the lyrics for him.

*sigh*

I'm not even sure if I can be bothered finding the words for my dissapointment, anymore.

*sigh*

I've written Kath's lyrics before in this blog, so I don't need to write them again. I only had a few tears in my eyes when she sang them again. I even allowed myself a few longing glimpses at Abel's torso, and I quickly scribbled a cartoon of her in a corner of a drawing.....

The wounds have covered over - They aren't as red raw and gaping like 6 or 3 months ago, and I can even look at my research notes from 6 and 9 months ago -where each page of earnest note taking is interspersed with pages of scrawled tear sodden agony.

No wonder this chapter has taken all fucking year.

And as much as I can sigh with relief and feel thankful that I'm not so hurt, that time has healed that Kath's great advice:

"Just move on, keep walking. walk away and don't look back, just keep your life moving forward because it's like some big hole that's going to swallow you up if you let it. but if you keep moving, in six months time, you'll look back and you'll be six months away from this place where you are now, and it'll be better..."

is so true it feels like a miracle.......

fuck this hurts. I still love Abel. My 'ideal relationship' is still inextricably linked to her, to us and our life together. Still. Noone else comes close.

Getting out of my Navel

God my problems are so damn trivial.

I've been reading Salam Pax and listening to the Smiths to get some perspective on my PMT (Premenstrual Thesis) gloom.

but then I got this in my email inbox


Here's the text version if the images are indecipherable

On the *14th of October, 10.30 am, at Sydney Town Hall,* Friends of
Lebanon-Australia along with other community groups has organised a
*public memorial for the Lebanese who have died in the recent war*.

In the weeks following the war it became clear that many Lebanese
Australian families have lost friends and relatives and were privately
in mourning. We felt it important that this mourning be public as well.
We were also keen that such a public event does not become a 'Lebanese
community event' but an Australian event where as many non-Lebanese as
possible can come to join the Lebanese in their mourning. This is why
the event is held at Sydney Town Hall.

Muslim Lebanese Australians have been on the receiving end of a lot of
negative stereotyping, prejudiced ill-feelings and discriminatory
behaviour from various sections of our society for far too long. It is
time for those of us who disagree with this this state of affairs to
not only be critical with those who peddle racism and prejudice, but to
take the more positive step of embracing the victims and showing them that
we regard them fully and unconditionally as part of our Australian
community. Joining them in their mourning is an important way of doing
so. Integration is not only about migrants adopting our values. It is
also about us learning to share their sorrow and pain.

We wish this event to be focused on a politics of inclusion within an
Australian context rather than on the Middle Eastern politics that
clearly underlies it. This is a unique opportunity, for those of us who
wish to do so, to assert an inclusive politics of friendhip in the face
of the incessant politics of hatred and division that is becoming part
of our everyday lives.

We urge you to join us in solidarity and to do your best to circulate
this invitation.

Ghassan Hage
For Friends of Lebanon, Australia.

Bad Pashin

this is getting banal
Actually I'm so tired and grumpy I can barely write an SMS, let alone a blog entry, let alone a thesis.

SIGH

so i'm posting the latest pics with my new dressup buddy. i'm the one without the teeth. this was taken by the fairy fraggle a few wee hours before we dragged each other off with an enigmatic catwoman for fun femmy frolics at dawn. i'll leave the compromising pics to readers imagination.

I wanna be a porn star.......

My life is like a dream sometimes - I've found the best dress-up buddy in the universe.....

We went out trash bagging at Kooky - and I tried to pick up a girl but forgot how - and the only girl I got any where near said "You're cute, but I don't do zombies...."

Check out the pics behind Zombie Slut and Cave Girl!

Bumfluff

These images of Schappylle's tribute to Brandon Teena come courtesy of Rapunzel in Suburbia. big thanx to Les, Emma and Bifusion crew.









Abel has finally got her own back and has her own blog

too bad if yer can't read frog - you'll just have to settle for my version of events

Abel also sent some pics of Schappylle Scragg and the dogwoman at bifusion.









I showed Abel's DVD of Scragg's hen's night performance to the consort. He covered his eyes, groaned and said "you didn't tell me it was a Waltz!". I'm afraid I've inspired him to give up on Dancing Lessons. 6 years of Ballet and I'm still unco as hell.

Cheese Single

this posting is dedicated to Kegroll - infamous sister of the now mountied TXQ - who just sent me a eulogy about that corcodile wrestiing dude all the way from maple syrup land.....

Actually this posting has nothing to do with Keg - except that i've stolen her vinyl spinning moniker of Cheese Single. Together Keg and texta are known as the cheese sisters - coz they are the world's biggest connosieurs of cheese - I mean the cultural variety coz they are vegans. Texta got me into trashy DVD's when I was really depressed a few years ago, and the two of them are into cheesy clothes, cheesy mock cheese, cheesy vinyl.

which brings me to the lyrics of the phill collins song that haunted me last month

you know I love you but I just can't take this
you know I love but (aaarrrm i've got cold feet?)
you know I mean it but I just can't take this (maybe?)
something something but I'm in too deep?

OK I never claimed to be anything but shit at karaoke - and I always liked the blood curdling schmaltz of that little tinny synth riff that follows anyway - and hell -if you want decent well referenced reactive readings of trash culture go look at bloody antippopper!

so. ahem
the subject at hand

my department (cultural studies) now has a new blog: "thinking culture."

naturally I'm wayyyy too scared to post on it.
partly coz i've got 3 or for blogs already running.
Partly coz i'm scared my supervisor will see how much writing I'm NOT doing on my thesis
Partly coz I feel nauseous thinking about any of my students reading aobut my sex-life.

(am I such a puritan for regarding the tutor/student relationship as akin to parenthood - neither of you should ever have to imagine or witness either of you having sex - or are sydney uni undergrads just extremely sexually repellent?)

but I would like to be able to share some of my teaching/life experiences coz they are fun at the moment.

i'm teaching 2 subects: one is sex violence and transgression and it's so much fun (reading Bataille, foucault and even bloody zizeck and sharing the love with eager young fee paying minds) I'd even do it for free. (hope brendon nelson never reads this)

the other one is also great: a cutlure studies 101 - which is hard to get the students to take seriously and rise above the anecdotal -thogutb I'm starting to make some progress. Structuring the tutes into debates seems to really work with the bright children of sandstone: I guess they are aussies and love a competition and if you can convince them it's like a footy match they'll even engage in a bit of collegial intellectual endeavour.

(fuck.... do I really enjoy teaching after all?)

anyway this week we were doing de Certeau - and Ideally I wouldn' have liked to have taken them on a trip down vaneigem street - but.... I don't think they'd notice or care.....

so- in an attempt to get the minions motivated this week I brought in a packet of CHEESE SINGLES (generic brand) and got em to do a semiotic & ethnographic and political analysis according to a debate on whether the cheese singles were emblematic of modern australian life.

the first class (a whole room of NON-SKIP sydney uni arts students - shock horror!) really got into it. the second a bit less so - a few of them opened up the plastic and made faces or ate the cheese.

Anway - it's weird living out your fantasy writing/theoreising subjects vicariously in a tutorial.

coz I've been wandering around blabbing to people for the past month that the Cheese single is the ultimate emblem of atavisitic skippydom. that you can't comprehend the skip until you can comprehend the cheese single. So it's suitably ironic that the coffee coloured kegroll claims cheese single as her moniker. (In Australia Keg and texta constantly get asked "where do you come from?" and they say "perth", and people keep asking them about their origins instead of just being blunt and barking "why are you brown?").

Abel (who 6 moths after we broke up, and after spending our 8th anniversary and 5th wedding anniversary under this roof is FINALLY moving out_ was feeling disconsolate about sinney siders the other week, so I tried to console her with a little analogy. taking De Gaulle's comment that you can't rule a country wiht 200 types of cheese - I took cheese as the ultimate meotnymn for naitonal spirit; so the yanks chuck their cheese in a spray can (translates a a bombe in french) and aussies divide theirs up into individually wrapped hermetic portions; precalculated, prefabricated, hermetic, artificialy pale coloured, flavourless, insulated, contained, concealed, artificial, plastic. I told her, "skips like to calculate their food, and control how much goes to whom, we have to label our food on our kitchen shelves, we have to argue about the milk, and split the bill after yum cha, and bring our own drinks to parties; we can't help it!"

Of course, this analogy -though providing cofomrt and amusement to abel is pretty limited given the amount of the global populatin that is lactose intolerant or doesn't have a lot of cloven hooofed sucklable mammals. so I'm glad I confined it to the tutes.

now. back to the never ending soap opera of my life.

as the pressure has mounted over the past few months - i've taken up more and more forms of natural self help and self care. I must be gettig old - of maybe more desperate - cooz I've had almost no urge to drown myself in either chocolate, guinness or scotch. Actually - probably since I spent the previous 2 years doing just that - and consequently feeling like shit - this is probably whiy I've left the alcholism & overeating behind.

anwya everyone tells me I look fabulous

yee fucking harr

My thesis is still a slow trudging debacle, my social life is minimal, I'm not making any art, I'm not getting enough sex, and I've spent this week wracked by hell stomach pains, nausea and diaorrhoea.

anyway -this may have been the result of the last self help pitch - a nice celebration of my household resolution (yes - both flatmates are moving out this month - anna has a room at No.11, and coco is moving into no.10) I dragged a relatively hermetically fleshed fairy fraggle out to the korean ginseng baths on monday night. (finding a window period between the last piercing and the next suspension was not easy).

I'd aquired a blistering thong burn (from my footwear not my g-string) over the summery weekend so was hopeing this wouldn't disallow me from soaking in the spa..... but maybe I should have demurred.

the baths were great - we scrubbed and soaked and sauna'ed for 3 hours and I felt like a soft down pillow afterwards (i felt that I was one) or the centre of a marshamallow.

I floated home and floated into bed and slept the sleep of the just.

until 4am.

woke with throbbing migraine.

bastard head. took aspririn.

then the nausea started.

I slept on and off and swooned and sighed and wondered if it was a migraine or poisoning or a flu.

tried to meditate and fell over.

felt so shitful that I thoguht i'd watch old videos of Abel getting undressed and dressing up as a drag king. Only felt slightly worse.

then I felt horribly cold, and sore all over.

started curnching codeine and working out how to arrange my tutorial for the afternoon.

found some stomach pills. Bussed into uni. taught, somehow.

i'd had a noice night planned: meeting The Estimable Doctor Germs and taking in an art opening before being joined by the consort for dinner and a night of danicng to a 17 piece mambo orchestra.

After teaching I headed for the quad and met The Estimable Doctor Germs (henceforth referred to as TEDG) and she accompanied me on a slow crawl home via a friendly pharmacy, and the consort came around and prepared them both dinner and wine while I swilled aspirin & miso soup & tried to convince TEDG to move in.

Aspirin, codeine and whatever I got from the chemist worked and I can't resist mambo so I (god my mum would disapprove) joined the posse out to the basement..

I sipped tonic water and danced a little bit and broke out in a sweat and tried to draw but failed. fuck.

also met the ex of the consort. This was an experience not unlike an endoscopy I had 2 years ago, except that I was more tranquilized during the endoscopy and can't remember much of it and Abel was holding my hand anyway.


How to find reason in things that are unreasonable - like emotions? the consort has met my ex (because she wouldn't move out and then kept coming popping in - and still does) and I tell him about the few other fleeting flirty things I have (wiht all the time I have they are tragically minimal). we're not monogamous, and freshly emerging from the last marriage there's no way I want to try that nasty little experiment... well - at least before I'm 40 or gravid with child or something. so how to explain my feelings of... jealousy is it? He told me he would introduce me as his 'friend'. so I told myself I'd pretend he was a girl and we were in a suburban nightclub. be in the closet. Fuck. i didn't tell him anything. just something nasty hardened within me, and I can't see it thawing for a long while yet.

The consort is obsessed with his ex. When he's not exorting me with buddhist aphorisms about being in the present moment, he's exorting me with tormented tears about hi ex, who seems nice enough, but isn't actually his lover. I am. Well, not right at this moment. but I am in his presence, when he talks about her, buys her drinks and not me, fantasizes about her, takes me to their favourite restaurants, tries to include me in their little old routines and habits. Like him, I'm also in love with my ex, i've also wept on his shoulder and cried in his arms about abel, and god, of course I still long for her. but not when I'm with him. Or anyone else. Call me the immanence queen but I find sex delightfully and deliriously about the present moment, the present person, the present flesh, touch, taste, smell. So I've started calling myself the placebo in my diary, and whingeing a lot to my counsellor, and to my friends, and even to him. This is good, he's not comparing me to her as often. (Can you believe i'd put up with this shit? yes! I'm fucking tragic!) Of course i don't measure up. not skinny enough, not feminine enough, not frigid enough, not a good enough dancer, not as good in bed - I don't come enough, I don't come at all actually and no fucking wonder. Vaginas are intelligent things, really. Mine begs and begs and begs and wants a vast amount of attention and refuses to perform any acts of instant reassuring satisfaction before... well ......

god. sorry to bore whoever is reading this with all with this excessive bodily detail.

a rebound thing seemed so simple and safe and straighforward. Both of us non committal because we're both recovering from and in love with other poeple. both of us so extrmely different that the relationship has a shelf life infinitely shorter than that of a cheese single anyway. Him being a man is a nice safety net coz I'm still queer - still dreaming of the perfect woman to sail into my life and sweep me off my feet... but then, confusion still strikes.

i've got a new habiit of looking at my vulva in the mirror each morning - not as some trippy 2nd wave feminist self love exercise - but because I'm completely perplexed. she's completely infatuated with the consort. Leaps and sequeezes and oozes at the sound of his voice on the phone. Drags me over to his place, similing , simpering in the hope of contact. Generally I have a great deal of respect for an implicit faith in my vagina, and the life affirming and self preserving tendencies of her desires and whims. (It took 4 years of somatic psychotherapy to reach this point). but this has got me really perplexed and confused.

Because - cavorting with the consort is hideously inadequate. Sex occurs once a week, for an hour at most. This is decent and rational because I've got a thesis to write and a damn busy life and I shouldn't complain and it's exquisitely pleasant however occasional and I don't have to act on all my desires, and I can still just enjoy my sexuality wihtout being fucked senseless every waking minute and maybe I am a sex addict after all, and maybe this is all just utter shit. I'm 35, in realsonalbe good health, attractive, intelligent and passionate. I'm in my sexual prime! of course I should be be fucking myself senseless every fucking minute plus anyone within grabbing range!

Readers will be relieved and slightly bored probably to read that straightness is not of course a matter of gender, or genitalia. It's a state of mind. Most of the men I've slept with in the past, were, if not queer, then certainly quite eccentric and not afraid of themselves or other men, or kinky sex, or stupid sex, or mess, ambiguity, confusion, ineptness. the consort comes from a different planet - one with too many no-go areas, too many rules, boundaries, appearances, norms. If I come from the land of messy raclette, bad moulding philly, goopy 5 cheese lasagna, vache qui rit, cheese sticks, cheese singles, cheese cream, cumquoiatte, scary smelly munsters, dumpster diving mouldy chevre, and gorgonzola icecream, he's definitely from - if not cheese single land, then the pre packed pre prepared david jones food hall approved gourmet portions. He's the ONLY man I've ever slept with who hasn't tried to impress me with some bravado boast or feat of nascent bisexuality! (Oh, actually there was this bank teller in the early 90's. He'd been in the army and was pretty fucking homophobic, but he was HUGE, and I was drunk and we only fucked twice before the impossibliity of conversation killed any further encounter - and I think I had a girl return to port anyway)

I'm not sure if the cheese analogy works actually. I don't really eat a lot of cheese. Too much cheese gives me migraines and i've got a big fat gallstone, and I only kee the cheese singles in the fridge in order to scare Abel. I like to tink of myself as a rabelaisian gourmande - of sex, life and love - but i'm pretty ambivalent, scared and confused about most things. I don't know if blabbing about it online helps or hinders my slow muddling through life. Am I really here?

I'm meant to come up with an act for BIFUSION next sunday at 3pm - and I reckon it's time to seriously purge some shit (I seem to be doing that physcially at the moment anyway)

I thought of dressing up as scrag and doing a version of:

"I spent my last ten dollars
on birth control,
and beer
My life was so much simpler when
I was sober
and queer
but the love of a strong hairy man
has turned my head I fear
and made me spend
my last ten bucks
on birth control,
and beer"

but it's probably innappropriate for a performance about celebrating bisexuality.

so I reckon i'll do a scraing scragg version of a great Mambo track instead:

Un poquito de ton amore
Un poquito nada mas
Una sonrisa de tes labios
tanto querer me feliz"

not only coz I got it on mp3, but the lyrics refer to my scraggling scraping inadequate unrequited desperate existence at the moment.

"A tiny little bit of your love
a tiny bit, nothing more
Just one smile from your lips
Is plenty to make me happy"

Bull fucking shit

viva la fromage!

Hell in a pink tracksuit

you know things are bad when you're sitting in a pdust pink trasckwuit wiht Phil COllins going throgh your head.

the above scenario is so ghastly that I have to write it as an abstract conjecture.

I've Had an exquisitely shitty couple of days, that have borught me to a new low ebb.

Last week I had to give a lecture on homophobic violence - performing as the respectable face of queerdom when I'm not feeling very queer at all......

more like queasy

but I managed

managed with the binarised bloody text we had which thank god some student managed to critique as bi-phobic.

Dealt wiht the abjecting sneers of homophobic students staring at me in tutes, and I'm thinking 'god if only you knew'

Then raced through the next days teaching, did yoga, came home exhausted.

Fought with Abel, and then got collected by the consort - for a week's escape, along with ditheringly assembled chattels.

Somehow did my best, fighting fury and panic to work on a scrappy paper for a departmental presentation. I wanted to try out a different chapter strucutre, and tyr out a different ficto cirticla rant that I kind of liked.

well - despite crunching away on it for a day and a night and morning, no, well it floppped really.

shit

I was so tired on friday I could have wept.

consort aand i went tout to some concert - great music, really amazing - then I collapse on his couch befor ebeing coaxed to bed.

saturday was exquisite.

apart from crying, all morning, even during meditation.

Sunday I also cried during meditation. Can't remember what else - oh yeah, wlaking adn swimming wiht a firend, rnning madly to meet the ocnsort ofr an eevning yoga class, hihc left my limbs aching, but kind of limber.

Monday - no meditation, just sobbing, crying crying crying, doing half the manly to spit walk, while tyring to read a Barthes book for the purpsoses of teahcing, book reviewing this week. Crying ad writing mad long love letters to the consort. Met wiht another manly firned, wlkaed, chatted deeply and distractedly.

Left flowers, words and tears at the consorts flat and trudged home wiht some chattels. Exhausted I collapsed.

inside all is hell, outside it's all sweetness and light.

Abel kind of sort of has a possibility of staying in another offiically vacant house in the coop - whihc the incumbent former tenant refuses to surrender tho - so he's squatting there and won't hand over the keys.

so she's crahsing a tthe neighbours, trying to avid me, and I'm here, tyring to make my little next into a safe sweet studious shell.

the coop where I live is a fucking joke. Larz von Triers crossed with Solzenitzen.

Im back there this week. because I need to work, to thingk, to prepare. because it's the only home I've got until next march.

because I'm going overseas in 4 months so don't want to move house beofre.

becaus eI don't want to be anyone's wife. I need my space, my stuff, my centre.

home is a place to dream.

even though I've got insomnia - I can get up, move aorund, sit up and write till dawn like tonight. i'm on my own time here.

I feel like the wheels are falling off the cart.

i'm not coping, fucking up uni, fucking up the thesis, letting things slide.

Feel like i've bitten off more than I can chew with the consort, feel overwhelmed, scared, pressured.
also delighted, trusting, soothed, aroused, healed.

it's too easy for me to collapse in his arms, to run away and hide in his home, to play at someone, somehting new. but it doesn't stop the pain, the hardness the reality of my lonely effort at living and working here.

so I'm retreating from the shit that bugs me, from the coop, from other stuff, fun stuff, gratuitously hanging out with the consort, wasting time because we can. I'm retreating from Abel, because nothing I can do or say will change anything.

trying to eat more salad, keep walking, reading, planning, meditating.

Living on a Prayer

You know it's a bad week when you find yourself reading George Bataille's "eroticism" as a self help book.

BOOM BOOM!!!

Welcome to the whacky world of mayhem.

I had to read some of his dry cailloisey stuff so as to teach it to the youn'uns on tuesday..... Talking about praying mantises and deaht and seduciton as linked and weird proliferating nature of sexual versus asexual reproduction......

and then the next little bit on the structure of desire and transgression within marriages and orgies. Nice solid vintage colege du sociologie stuff. Nowhere near as weird as that egg and urine story. Sex, violence & transgression all in a palatable sandstone format. so I got bored and turned to my nice english copy of the accursed share - to bask in nice pages, nice gratuious words....

And the bit about 'the object of desire' twinning absolute collapse, repugnance, fear of collapse, delight in surrender etc. etc. all made complete heartbreaking sense.......

Let me tell you a little story.

I spent last Sunday morning sitting I on a couch in a suburban medical centre, having waited for an hour in the hope of seeing a bulk billing medico. Beside me, sat the olive toting consort, trying to be supportive, responsive, responsible and proffering me more buttery sicilan olives in the hope of comforting me. On the next couch, some mullet headed forty something surfie masticated loudly on jellybeans. I needed comfort. It was the 8th anniversary of meeting Abel, and last night a condom burst. I ran to bathroom, tried to rinse vagina over sink, cut and inserted a wedge of lemon (homegirls guide to kitchen cupboard spermicides 101). Woke frantically in the night and realised that my periods were already a week late. Sobbed for an hour. OK less, but it felt like an hour. I felt like tess of the D'urbervilles. I sat cursing myself, cursing him, cursing my stupid hosebeast of a libido.

Is (it) fucking worth it? an hour of pole dancing once a week, stripped and sauntering between clean sheets after dinner, after a week of distracted longing, trying to be good, trying to work on the tome, reading theory, reading books, mediating, swimming, walking, eating sensibly, voiding abel, avoiding ambiguity. a nice reward for a nice girl. And now this. Sex should not be about life or death but it is.

So back to the couch, in the burbs, surrounded by trancksuit clad, four wheel driving Breeders and their mcDonals fed spawn. enough to make me want to jam a coathanger up my cervix forthwith. Hormones however, have other ideas. I find myself involunterily clucking at babies. bloody hell. I scowl and bury my nose in the Bataille.

A song comes over the radio......

Oooh, we're half way theeeey-errr
Woooo oooh!!
Livin on a prayer!!!
Just one chance
We'll make it I swayyyerrr
Woooo oooh!!
Livin on a prayer!!!

wayyy cool! I can't help chuckling. I smile at the consort. he's not my age, doesn't know the reference, prefers classical music anyway. I explain how my whole year 12 sat on the stage at the shcool hall, drily mouthing the words as the song was blared out during our farewell concert - half the class runing offstage in relays, spewing ornage passion pop into buckets. The rest stoicly soldiering on beneath bad mullet perms and badder sunnies. It was my first day without a hymen. ho ho heterosexuality is such a stupid thing really.......

Back to the books. He's reading the 'passion as a path' section of a self help book that I also adore. Yep, even better than my perennial favrourite "It's called a breakup because it's broken". He hasn't reached the bit that made me cry, just yet. Or maybe he has. that the feeling of death, of dying, is part of the change that accompanies any relationship. that the feeling that somehting has died between a couple - is a sign that they can let go of old habits and open themselves up to something new. (why dind't I read that 6 months ago? then I'd still be wiht Abel, instead of well, still wiht Abel?). That there is a profoudn linke between llove and death; that to experience love, you need to embrace death and that to die, you need to embrace love. Or words to that effect.

so to Bataille. Sex, death, trasngression. I'm meant to teach it to the earnest twenty somethings at sandstone city. Dear old George, trying to be alll earnest and marxist - delinieating his honest account of subjective eroticism form an 'objective reality' of the science of how animals, cells, plants split and divide. it's the mingling of earnest assiduous quasi scienctific proclamations wiht the painfully intense honesty that makes me falll in love with Bataille each time.


bascially he's tyring to intellecutally juxtaspose two dillemmas: what happens to the original cell when it divides in tow? does it die? where does it do? and 'why do I feel so empty after great sex?'

hell what a legend!

check this:

"It seems to me that the totaity of what is the universe swallows me (physically), and if it swallows me, or since it swallows me, I can't distinguish yself from it; nothing remains, except this or that, which are less meangingful than nothing. In a sense it is unbearable and I seem to be dying. It is at this cost, no doubt, that I am no longer myself, but an infinity in which am lost....

No doubt this is not entirely true; in fact, on the contrary, never have I been closer to the one who... but it's like an aspiration followed by an expiration: suddenly the intensity of her desire, which destroys her, terrifies me; she succumbs to it, and then, as if she were returning form the underworld, I find her again, I embrace her....

This too is quite strange,: she is no longer the one who prepared meals, washed herself, or bought small articles.She is vast, she is distant like that darkness in which she has trouble breathing, and she is so truly the vastness of the universe in her cries, her silences are so truly the emptiness of death, that I embrace her inasmuch as anguish and fever throw me into a place of death, which is the absence of bounds to the universe. but between her and me there is a kind of appeasement which, denoting rebellion and apathy at the same time, eliiminates the distance that serparated us from each other, and the one that separated us both from the unverse....."

(the accursed share vols 2&3, translated by Robert Hurley, published by ZOne Books NYC 1991, p116)


I found the above paragraph the most enlightening thing about straight male sexuality, since the bit in "sex tips for boys" about morning erections not actually being an invitation to sex.


so now I know, that not only are men less likely to want sex first thing in the morning than women (in my experience) and that they are betrayed by their genitals (women aren't - an open wet throbbbing vagina usually means one thing, or two or three or four or five....) , and THAT THEY FIND INFINITY AND COLLAPSE INTO THE MORASS OF DESIRE TERRIFYING.

whereas I find it quite delightful.

I took the consort to Liz Grosz the other night to hear her deliciously expound on deleuzian becoming, creativity, music and animality. He was blissed out as I was. "See!" I tried to explain "grosz's view of life an endless becoming, a line of flight, outward from the self, an infinity of molecular possibilities, it comes from her experience of being a dyke. Lesbian desire IS INFINITE. It's not a nice refrain coded by society and taken after dinner - it's constant, endless, impossible!"

i'm not sure if he understood and I'm not sure why I felt I had to share it with him. I sitll don't know what I'm doing, gobbling morsels of staightsvilles, while i'm mired in my own immense desire.....

oh yes, now I know. My desire, my life, my wife. here at home, in the next room.

You want infinite and endless? bloody hell, we've been broken up for nearly 6 months and she still hasn't moved out, still eats all my food, still offers me hers (which i decline, doesn't she GET IT?), still offers me cuddles and conversations which I accept and return, and we sit sobbing for bloody hours and hours.....

fortunately she wears a chastity belt of beer breath most nights or i'd be racing in and ravishing her as well. and then doing her washing, and hey ho its back into the marriage we go. she still loves SLUT, still wants me as her wife.

so I sit here and try to read or meditate, or type like now, when I can't sleep at night. Go to the consort for sleep, meals, fruit and vegetables, decent coffee, conversation, cock, cuddles, comfort. Retreat into chez consort when I can't stand it any more, when I'm scared i'll run in and start clawing at her clothes. He visits here sometimes, for chaste cups of tea. We kiss in his car, plot sex in random places, or wait for his place.

Actually, this is all so unbelievable fucked I don't actually have any words any more to describe it. I am at my wits end, I don't know what to do, I'm annoyed and powerless and too tired to even panic anymore.

I haven't sobbed for 2 days, but will probably resume tear flooding in the next day or two. I write, I walk, I mediddate, I do yoga, I see a counsellor, I get massage, I try to read, try to teach, try to write, try to even do my thesis sometimes.

Try to be a nice girl, a good friend, a good lover, a good teacher, a good student, a good art reviewer, a decent person. Try to breathe.

there's a certain level of freedom in a state of complete powerlessness. while calmly and coolly planning classes, travel, completing timesheets, payslips, articles, whatever, inside I'm quite happily anticipating my own death. I'll just keep on trucking on, and if I drive myself into an early grave - well that can't be helped either, can it?

It's not a morbid fatalism. Just a bewildered sense of the impossibility of my life at the moment.

Vanille et Framboise

sitting typing into the night because i'm home and it's nice to be in my pink nest and I saw alight under Abel's door before and now I can't sleep want to escape into the net, not think not feel.

this is frightfully hellish!

so I'm surfing net/checking out other bloggers, feeling less lonely in my insomnia

just checked out Manky's oldish posting on straighties.......

http://smurfcasting.blogspot.com/2006/06/update-on-cuntberra.html

and wondered what the fuck i'm doing with my life

I had a member of the oppoiste sex coo me into somnambulence a few hours ago and hopefully will call and coo me out of it in the morning....and after 2 nights in purgatory I'll go and nestle in his neat and tidy flat and be fed coffee, avocado and cliff views in the mornings and other things at other times, comfort, stimulation, conversation, sex.

It's all swimmingly blissful really

thank dog part of me says.
this is karma - the nice bit for putting up with so much shit at home.
shit from psycho fuckface neighbour, fucking abortion of biological family, and fucking daily postmortems with the wife.

so she's been back for a week
glad to see her, not glad to see her. Love chatting, we had breakfast on tuesday and I was a vague braindead wreck after.

Decided to have a bath, cut various bits of hair and dance around to vintage madonna

Wrote in my diary because I felt completely split in - pulled apart by two different realities.


the reality of loving her, nostalging the past, still dreaming of a future - ya know the pink picket fence of a nice girl, nice baby nice dog?

meanwhile praying earnestly inwardly that swollen breasts, vagueness, bloating and huge appetite are premenstrual, not preabortional.

loving her, so glad to have her around, imagine her, dream her... and being so hurt, cut, punched inside and so happy to be able to runaway to someone else.....

who incidently - I'm not sure how would fit into my queer career, let alone my circle of madder younger, wierder friends or this house, this suburb, while she's here,

So I'm straddling two incompatible realities - reminding of the ghastly patterns of performance, playing, double speak complete insane contradiction of my childhood.

am I just playing out my old girl games: being one role to one person and playing another with someone else.

not to self: don't take up bigamy if I can avoid it.

so anyway, last night in his bed, the ghost of her scent filled my nostrils and I shed silent little tears.

the night before Abel had been sobbing on my couch in my room in front of the bar radiator. fuji had turned up to give me a shiatsu and we were all chatting and Able and I were singing Kath Elliss's song.... "I'll be FINE" to each other.......

because singing and laughing are great outlets for hysterical sobs......

and I'm a stupid softy and don't want to cut her cold, or that part of me that loves her and is sitll linked to her. But every hug, eveyr word, eveyr soft look...just act like stupid little shoots of longing inside me.....

hmmm breakup as privet weed

and I have no time for drawing no inclination for painting.
the last attempt was a little coloured sketch of the rasberry/vanilla features of Abel. I dashe dit out while singing in the skethc club.

colour, abel, paint, feeling, singing, abel, pink, rouge, creamy white, chocolate.

mixed crazy marks with a brush - all done from this feeling of her inside me, holding me, guiding me.....

La vanille et Framboise
c'est le Mamelle du destin

It's very hard to let this go.

but I MUST. so have late dinner now, hide in room tomorrow morning before she leaves. swallow lump in throat when I see her out tomorrow at that opening - hide in room when she returns tomrrow night . repeat all of the above on friday, hold it in till I can jump on a very with a bag of books and migrate north to nice cofining escape. Where i'll be fed, nurtured, comforted, entertained, stimulated, healed, fucked... but won't go looking for any girls, and wont' find any and hey look! this is how people crawl back into closets don't they?


I think lady stain has just arrived

the Dancing Master

".... stroking my whole body all night long until your fingers became fine sprays of white flowers until they became fine silver wires electrifying my epidrmis until they became delicate instruments of torture and the night wore on for too many hours and I loved you irritably as dawn reprieved us we are two live-wire women wound and sprung together we are neither of us afraid of the metamoprhoses trasmogrifications thee meltings the juices sqelching in the body out of the body-a split fruit of a woman we are neither of us afraid to sink our teeth into the peach it's not love or sex it's just that we are collaborating eveyr night on a book called "the Pleasures of the flesh made simple..." (Mary Fallon, (1989) Working Hot, p87 in Elizabeth Grosz, (1995) space time perversion p184.)

One of the great pleasures of a damn fine tome is sensing how ideas, woords, echo and expand with the mind, with experience etc.


I remember gasping deliriously struggling over the words in Liz grosz's assembled book of essays when I bought it 10 years ago. a bit like reading french now - a weird vertiginous dellight of almost getting it, getting it, losing it, finding it.... incrediible ideas slipping just outside my reach.

then reading rereading underlining, crosssing, commenting, scribbling pencil screeds in the margins - while working over THE WORD for my honours essay 3 years ago....

and now returning to the same well thumbed pages, tears spring to my eyes. Phrases now injested fully, ideas, rereadings, references worn into my own internal meanderings. And the pages of delicious phrases of desperate hope that I cling to now...... reminiscing delight, rebelieving... what was Adrienne Riche's phrase? "Inscribing with its unrelenting stylus....." She was writing about lies, actually, but it's great line.

and now, i'm wondering about everything. as bloody usual. deferring writing a lecture on queer theory, a faintly disguised sour hint of semen wafts up from my doona as I demure from my duties as a professional lesbian (guest lecturer, book reviewer, fledgling academic, what else). Delaying by angsted missives to that nice girl I still hunger for..... (hmmm sounds like the surname of another nice girl actually...) We cross each other at intervals and I hold my clawing hands back. eyes flit in proximity and we both type of strange aching longings towards 'boys' only she spells hers with an "i" and both of us rebounding madly blindly stupidly into more strange ambiguous messes. Life getting too hard? why not complicate it further?


Abel is in flight, in air, in a nonleiu of transit. maybe she's in the home town of another nice girl I seemed to have let slip through my fingers. I'm not sure when she arrives back. It's imminent. My stomach has clenched, i'm wracked with hell's wind pains and diarrhoeah. Funny tummy. I'm on the vergo of tears. i'm aching for her. aching for her beating heart under my hand, her haunches across my lap, my torso, my face, feeling her singing from the inside. My own cries and laughter as whe was inside me...... eternal infinite bliss. I still want her so much, ache for her, and her alone so desperately. Try to quench myself with someone new, so different, so extremly different is size, shape, tone, timbre........

He asks me what it's like wiht women, wanting a mechanical account. Statistics, size, duration, positions, speciificites... as if exstacy can be reduced to such details. Scrimmaging scraps? number and positions of fingers, placements of legs, arms, actions of lips, tongues, such careful choreography. you can't make an inventory of infinity. He asks me why I won't come in his presence, from his hands, lips, tongue, cock? why? is he not good enough? am I really gay after all?

Exstacy has no closure, no ending, no numbers, no statistics. It's not just that women never ask "did you come" - not just that fingers are more intelligent, subtle, sensiitive than even the finest phallus, it's not that at all. It's her burning need meeting mine, and mine meeting hers. It's fucking as a form of prayer, endless unending insane mad making terrifying opening. This exstacy used to terrify me. Sex with the nymph scared me so much that I pushed her away, roughly crudely, spat and hissed and wrote elegant vituperative essays in THARUNKA on postmodern queerness, bisexuality and non normative gender politics.

that was ten years ago. I'm no longer a girl, i'm a woman.

I don't need any easy foucaultian formula in which to bind the unbearability of my ambiguities.

yes it's there. People pay to hear it now. I have a line. a nice line. Several nice solid well conceived social analyses that enable me to hold his hand, his toso, hiss cock even, while my twat twitches looking at girls........

Even my school friends from the country, even their prepubescent sons can deal with this much: Sexuality is fluid. People change, people are attracted to different things at different times. you don't have the same idenity all your life. They know it say it believe it, and go to mass each week. (Get that one up ya George Pell!)

It's the strange internal dynamics of desire, that trouble me. as much as I try to be all open ended and deleuzian about the whole thing. Try to ponder our naked couplings as a rhizomatic becoming, a machinic assemblage. Tho there's nothing mechanical about our encounters.

there is somehting spcifically exquisite in the naked encounter of two torsos on each other. Of genitals butting up against each other's strangeness. Of silly yogic clamberings over the furniture and floor. Naked with him, my whole body feels like a face, turned towards and embracing the other. Extreme sports leviniasian imperative. and I don't know any other word for the reosunding intimacy of this carress than the L one. Agapo or Eros? what's the other one? dunno. words are often inadequate, still.

Exstacy is in the strange slippages between desire, carnality and knowing. Exstacy is not the tidy performance, the perfect score, the picture perfect porn, the seamless segue from clothed caress to naked gliding flesh. Erica Jong wrote of a Zipless Fuck - and this may have been before I was born - so maybe that's why it seems so passe, because I like wrinkles, fumbles, tears, tearing stretching clothes, buckling flesh and fingers, the odd disruptive moments, reminding of our own separateness. he can't know where he takes me as I beg and beg and plead, writhing around him instatiable and yet so satisfied. I can't know his thoughts as he comes, cries with another woman's name on his lips. am I meant to love her as well? Part of me does, inevitably. There's allways three in our bed, at least three, if not thirty. For me, a history of old lovers, old hatreds rises wihtin my like some strange orchestra, not orchestrated. a crazy chorus. schizo analysis eat your heart out.

And i want him to take me like I usually want to be taken by a woman. Expert hands and winning smile orchestrating me beyond myself. Abel's small frame and baby ways were a shallow disguise for how she was within me. she held me, inside and out, sustained, tutored, supported, tormented me from within. and without. And without, I feel so bleakly empty, sometimes that I wonder how i'll live through this, how i'll walk long and far enough to find another.... soft chested, hard handed wide lipped..... woman.

I like men, and I love sex to much to let genitalia stand in the way of a good time. good sex with a man feels like revindication of all the arseholes in the world. Something beautiful, noble and strong. Profound amitie, delight in the other et cetera, et cetera...... there's always this slipping outside though. My desire as excess, outside, incapable of containment. Ther's always the 5% of me of pain that won't be cured by any man, of mistrust, of terror. and the other wilder infinite slipping stretching beyond imagining. that craving towards the infinite, unbounded possibilities of pleasure, of myself, or her, of sensations that haven't existed before we create them sense them, explore them, push them beyond the limits of anyone's wildest dreams. Pole dancing ain't enough for this. Even if I open myself up to the crvane possibilities of beomcing a total hose beast, let myself get fucked in every hole I can think of by some army of caring ubermenches who'll still respect me in the morning - i'll still feel incomplete. Even drenched and drowned, I won't be sated, and I'll still have to drag myself away, with my longing and go for some nice long walk on a beach somewhere......

Life is so often, incomplete and painful. How do I not tread on his toes, How do I walk upright with dignity, hold my vulnerability, tenderness and desire in my frame. Not push it down or away?

And how do I be physically around Abel in this house, in a few days when she returns?

why am I writing this here, publically, when I haven't told him, or her or not even my diary? well, OK barely my diary, I have scratched out things in 2 languages on paper, in a book.

i don't think Abel reads my blog. tant pis, it's her loss. I'm don't think the dancing master has the time. And that nice cute girl at uni finds it too scary she says (what!?). so who reads it? why write it? I guess I've got friends and aquaintances who scroll down these long missives, wondering if i'm going mad, glad to see I'm still writing, misstyping. trucking on.

If I compose words here for the imaginary public, the imaginary girls like myself, stuck in some stupid zone of pain and fumbling. Stuck in some normative or prescriptive deinfition of sexual identituy politics, stuck in some dodgy gender studies course, suck in some dodgy queer collective/gay or lesbian (TM) bar, dodgier marriage or fucked up family, or small hell home town of rednecks. Maybe these words offer a disturbing comfort.

Maybe i write for my previous selves. the ones that were confused, hurt, silent, stupid. stuck in all the previous scenarios described above. Stuck in my own fear of becoming, feeling desiring things I couldn't didn't still don't understand.

It's hard being a bespectaced adenoidal articulate intelllectual. because its so damn easy to reduce life to some nice intellectual framework or political ideology. Preaching the word with glasses sliding down my nose. thick lenses hiding the doubt, the terror, the desire in my eyes. So here, reduced to disembodied text. Fingers fumbling over a keyboard, crossed legs clenching over a tender twat I write things to comfort myself. such fine fragile words, such honesty, such bad spelling!

So much more resolved than a torrent of tears I could have shed into my bed instead, eh wot?

such a brave mature articulate woman, she holds herself with dignity, walks with her pain, not afraid to look you in they eye, is she?

Such wordy brilliance clears a space away from me - where people don't enter. so it's another form of self negating stupidity, really..... but I keep writing, must keep writing. Feeding one words, feeding out words. Strange things.

A valedictory for "the unity bar"

I’ve got a note book, covered with stars, from my first trip to Paris 8 years ago. In it I’ve got pages of illegible biro screeds interspersed by a series of poorly drawn biro scrawls. Scribbling circles denoting buttocks, breasts, heads – with ovoid limbs spanned by slashes – probably ‘inspired’ by pool queues.

In the sketches from ‘le club privee pour les femmes’ done in July 1998, no one is really identifiable. I was drawing in the dark and it was the year I failed life drawing at art school. But the act of drawing inspired Abel to head towards my table and try to peer at the sketches – which she feared were a documentation of her humiliation at pool. …. And so the rest is history.

I’ve got another note book from January this year. It looks like some picture perfect artists sketch book from Paris. Pages of expressive, skilled graphite sketches of Paris street scapes are interspersed by my notes in biro – some academic – many just my inanely boring travel reflections (“poor sleep, checked email in Puteaux, spent 5 euros on kebab” etc.) and a few notes form the biblioteque nationale. Many sketches feature the sculpture of Carpaux’s dance outside of the Opera Garnier – flanked by scarfed and beanied buskers, banging out java in the sleet as I drew. There are multiple sketches in metros, cafes, people’s houses, views from platforms of various ‘gares de la banleiu’. (frog for suburban train stations). Almost all feature the fluffy hair, dark almond eyes and half moon face of Abel. These were probably the nicest parts of our last Paris sojourn. When we could splurge on a weekly carte d’orange – we could spend days just flanning around. Standing in the cold, drawing buildings until our hands and bodies grew numb, and then heading into a café for a ‘vin chaud’ and sketching while we thawed, and then if it was too cold or too dark to face the streets again – we’d do a ‘derive au cul’ – jumping on the nearest metro and playing random games of hopping on and off – sketching in between. Line 2 is still my favourite – I love the overhead route from Abesses – past Stalingrad over to Belleville – and in reverse – we could take it to Rome and then stride down to Gare St. Lazare for the Banlieu line home.

So there’s a few pages featuring serpentine lines and triangulated axes of women playing pool. I think I had the skill and the sense – to stick in more details like the pool tables, overhead lamps, posts, walls and floor. Some have foreground details of heads and arms nearby, and in the background you can see women chatting, smoking (les gouines chiantes!), sipping or staring into space. Some are sitting around tables, some are huddles together, standing and talking or dancing madly to tacky ‘80’s eurotrash.

Quite a few feature Abel and Slut – huddled together, chatting, smoking dancing. Hell! the hand captures what the heart refuses to admit. I’d like to believe Abel when she says that they didn’t sleep together before last week – but their body language in these sketches certainly suggest otherwise. I thought it was Slut just playing butch. I did my stone-ish act in return. Danced with both of them, shared drinks, and when their smoking got too much – headed to the other side of the room and sketched and chatted to a couple of older dykes – who Slut insisted were ‘drageurs’. Her view of human relations is a bit limiting sometimes. I’ve got an attempted half portrait off Slut – thin hair, glasses, square face – sitting net to Abel who I’ve drawn looking not entirely unlike Alexis Carrington from dynasty. Maybe I was just pissed by that stage.

This revisitation of the place where I met Abel 8 years ago this month - sounds quite painful – when recounted through the prism of these sketches – so I’ll let words – those elusive tangental things – try to capture more of the nuances of the evening.

Last month, I told Abel that if I ever saw Slut again that I’d kick her in the teeth. That I couldn’t be angry at Abel – but that anger had to go somewhere – and she shouldn’t even think of bringing Slut here, to our home or to the coop. I wouldn’t even want to be in Sydney – if she was here. Sound melodramatic? Possessive, domineering, malevolent? How frigging un politically correct. Yeah. And whoever said you could legislate for peoples emotions? Vladimir Illyich lenin maybe? And look what happened to Russia. I’ve spent four months feeling like I’ve been kicked in the guts. I’ve lost a chapter I would have had finished tomorrow, I’ve lost two stone and I am probably going to lose my home, and I’ll count mysef lucky if I don’t lose my sanity in the process. I have good reason to be angry. And then Abel tries to tell me that she’s not even happy! This situation is fucked.

But the nuances, the layers of ambiguity – are that half the music on my computer is thanks to Slut – and I can’t help but thanks her for it. she introduced Abel to so much music which Abel introduced to me in turn – and I have to say I’m glad to know Java, and their lyrics probably did more for my French than anything else. (except nino ferrer perhaps). Last winter, Slut got us hooked onto Anais (whose song; mon amore; mon Coeur! Mon amour; mon Coeur! Je n’aime pas les couples, parce que quand je les voir, je resouviens que je suis seul… etc.” is probably the siren song that wooed Abel away from me and is certainly our swansong in French– but hell – I digress) , and to bitch and animal (whose ‘best cock on the block’ kind of describes my weekend – but I digress again). And I’ve got a random song by Erin McKeon “my hips” who I also think came from the same frightful woman. So I can’t hate her completely.

And that night in the unity bar – was mostly pleasant thanks to the presence of slut. When I strode in to the unity bar – in that awkward anxious way that butch dykes (even ones wearing pink) have of unconsciously imitating John Wayne (Maybe the bow legs are a way of hinting at a good fisting recently but I dunno, I just do it). I was standing there, meeting friendly hungry eyes all around me, feeling my pelvis realign as I ordered a beer, I saw her at the back of the room at a table of dykes – and called out. That familiarity of our exchange – mad bad banter in argot made me feel so at home. It was one of the first times that I really felt ‘yeah, I could live in Paris, this isn’t too bad’. I’ve written elsewhere of the delight of this exchange – of the experience of social interpelation as a need – something really essential to feeling… well, like, not so much like a dyke even –but like a woman. I feel like a woman (or two) – I feel sexual, strong, human, female, alive. I’m not posing and playing some little role for the amusement of others, I walk and stand with my desire naked around me. It’s a fine, fine thing. It happens everywhere in Newtown – and lots of places in the Sapphic halls of sandstone – but almost no where in Paris. So, despite the smoke – I, and we, danced, chatted, drank, flirted and sang with slut –and the others - a series of incredibly cheesy Eurotrash songs. There’s something incredibly delightful about seeing a room full of stone butches singing like schoolgirls at the top of their voices – they said that they were trying to outdo the gaybar 3 doors down. Abel refused to screech along to ‘Roxanne’ – so I leapt around with Slut – singing the words and mouthing the rest, as Abel ordered drinks and laughed. Then Abel and I had our turn at an insane rendition of – god! Who did that song? The pointer sisters? Abel and I – had done so many mad performance stunts, posing together and playing imaginary worlds that we were happy to take over all the floor space we could find. Running up stairs, swooning, racing around the pool table, inventing more and more baroque gestures that would make Madonna concert look like Kraftwerk – as well mimed to the lyrics. And the song…. “allleleluliah! it’s raining men!” . Butler could go to town on this one. Sweet mad irony…..

…Which has effectively morphed into a paradox six months later. I was sleep deprived and collapsed into bed at midnight after meeting my brother’s ex at the airport and chatting and hugging and laughing over dinner. Woke up at 4am to attempt to rewrite a paper for next week. These are all good excuses for having missed the highlight of the lady-loving eye candy calender of the year….. THE PERFECT SNATCH contest at the Sly. I’m lucky enough to have been on intimate terms with some of the pink bits on display (yeah yeah, me and half of Newtown) – and would have been delighted to have a reviewing. Even braving a chilly 20 minutes stride across the suburb. Even braving beer and cigarette smoke with lack of sleep and ladypain. OK the cigarette smoke was a deterrent. And the thought of having to decide between a Carlton Black hangover or cramping sober in a room full of drunken wenches.

But it’s also that I’m probably incredibly lazy about sex. As soon as I know where the next bout is coming from – I lose interest in leaving the house and trawling the streets for interpellative possibilities. And also, at the moment – I’m not sure how to walk, sit or stand. How to look, when a smile constantly shimmers at the corners of my mouth, and my eyes keep involuntarily glazing. I guess I’ll be able to sit normally by the weekend – but my flesh keeps tingling and I nearly come from feeling my thighs rub against each other. So I involuntarily blush, and try to ignore the open roaring yowls from my nether regions. This feels extremely queer and not in the usual sense of the word. It’s very strange, very intense, very pleasant –but completely unnerving. Maybe it’s just my biological clock screaming out an alarm, but … other pole-ish encounters haven’t produced anything like this. Maybe I just need something, and someone completely different from Abel. Something to efface all of the traces, the inner maps of our movements together, the touches, scents, caresses. Nothing will efface those, but my flesh aches to be drawn over by a skein of new sensations. Every singly cell. My hands, lips, thighs want to move differently, to shapes themselves in other ways, my back, torsoe and breasts to feel different possibilities of being. My ears ache to be filled with other honeyed tones. This longing is unbearable, and I’m only letting myself feel it in the cracks between short term memory and brief anticipation. I’ve got 12 hours of waiting today. My mind hums distractedly.

If Abel read this, I’m sure she’d argue that this is what she has felt for Slut. Because she’s a freak –she’s prolonged the anticipation for 4 months. Calling, emailing and texting obsessively, seeking a strange comfort in feeding longing. She used to do it with me. 10 pages each week for 4 months in 1998, then 9 months before June 2000. I’m still amazed, even while dying on the inside, and part of me sees this state as the source of her creativity. Maybe that’s what she thinks? Maybe that’s why she, insanely wants to return here, alone, to an expensive art course in a city far from her lover, with a hostile ex looming in the background. And I thought I was the recovering catholic.

All of the above is my invention or course. Or my interpretation on events and situations that I can’t understand. I’m scared that if this is what I believe about her, then all I’m doing at the moment is a type of mimicry. Than what I’m feeling isn’t about now, it isn’t about me, and it isn’t about the rather delightful object of my affections. Maybe I’m just jealous of her – so much so that I want to feel what she feels, feel it better, harder, bigger, longer, louder, closer. Here, in our home, between the sheets where we slept. In this body, where I’ve felt and shared so much with her.

I think I write, when the lines of communication go down – when I can no longer tell someone what I feel about them. I have to have some stream outwards. I could write anecdotes about who I’m seeing now, but enclosing someone in a story…taking a fragment, one facet and drawing it out into a line…. I’m scared it closes off the possibilities of what might happen. I started to blog about Abel – converting our relationship into literary nostalgia as it wilted between us. The parts within me, the parts I’ve shared with, that were nurtured by Abel, are withering and dying. The only way to describe what I feel physically – is as analogy with a dying plant – its roots in my belly, branches and leaves though my frame. (hell, this is so arboreal and not Deleuzian at all). I spent all last week, prostrate with this sense of dying, withering ending. It was hell. So I’m patting it down with words, nice stories, sealing it off and sending it away. Here now, as the sun has risen on this continent and Abel no doubt has just farewelled a midsummer sunset in the caresses of…. Someone I can’t bear to think about it. She’s gone. It’s over. End the possibilities, wrap it up, finish the story.

So the new thing, is outside words, and hopefully shall remain that way. Dancing, eluding a niice neat tale, a category. I sent a text to some friends last night – and they immediately wanted names, details, statistics. Wanted to pin this down, and I understand theem – even as I’m eticent to do so. Part of me is. Part of me is terrified by this openness, by the ambiguity, by the intricate negotiations of identity formation that lie ahead of me if this thing continues. Which I hope it does. Yes its fulfilling now, I have been filled, fully thankyou….. but these new circuits of touch, my touch softening even my own skin after such tender strokes across other flesh, feeling not just as a comfort but as a discovery, and finding space for a possibility I can’t even imagine…. Well, it’s nice. As the salsa about pedro Navajo goes “La vida tenga sopresas; sorpresas tienen la vida”. Where there is room for surprise, there is life.

Molecular Meanderings

While media have been used as the basis of much classification of artworks, how can art practices be described or classified outside of the legible (or credible) art objects? Arguably, the classification of art within the forms of its ‘media’ is imbricated with a molar view of substrates, materials and exchanges, fixing the engagement with art practices within a reified authority of a textual analysis.

This panel aims to draw together some current research across a variety of fields of visual culture, and explore the problems and possibilities of ‘extra-object’ aesthetic research. It aims to explore how the concept of medium can be reconfigured via deleuzian thinking and practices of ethnography. By researching practices that do not produce credible art objects, or visual modes regarded as obsolete or marginal, or even the types of exchanges that occur beyond the reification of spectatorship into a singular perspective of an art critic, this speakers on this panel hope to explore the aesthetics of becoming, of movement and possibility.

NO I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT EITHER

I wrote this as a draft panel proposal for some conference I want to present at in December. It's a product of a productive felafel lunch with the one other research i've found who is interested in a similar appproach to THE DISCIPLINE as myself. Unfortunately she lives in western Finland.

Deleuze is overrated and overrcited - and I'm interested in using "the rubric known as deleuze" in relation to the tension of molecularity ( discrete, contingent and temporarlly situated objects that are capable of multiple cnnections wiht a range of other similarly discrete, contingent and temporarily situated objects) - rahte rthan a molar - (think of chemistry labs in 1989; stained lab coat, flirting with boys while carrying phials of sulphuric acid - what's the aliquot? measuring the molar emount into an ehrlein flask... with a friggin oral pipette....). yeah, molar. Molar is an arbittrary and set, definied amount of the potentiality of an existing molecular configuration to effect err.... something.(wihs pred was still alive to correct and clarify this blither) Molar - is defining something as a fixed measurement. Molecular conveys potentiality (what could it do) and contingency (it could fall apart, and probably will, it is only like this under a specific range of circumstances) and i like it.

In relation to A R T... rather than describing art according to some lexicon of this is the truth, the whole truth this is the word, and the word was with god (the mastercritic)and one with god (the masterpiece) etc. - I like to think of a form of art discourse - that opens up an authoritative interpretation, (well, hell , breaks it apart even) - to other voices - to the contingency of the critical moment. Who is interpreting art - what are the exchanges behind producing the art object, describing it - what's being closed off in that moment off describing a work, what's bieng closed off in the moment off describing or liiting art to a specific artowork, objet or image?

what's being closed off when I write this particular set of propositions? when I extract, remove, censor, refine and code into JARGON my set of vague hunches and generla complete confusion about my thesis, my work, my life.

I spent most of this week, lying flat on my back wiht tears pouring out of my eyes. Each day I have found myself almost frozen in immobility. Can't move. well, I eventually move, but it's hard, slow and painful.

Writing is a melancholy act - and the kind of euphoric palabric flights that issue forth are a strange and probably inevitable counterpoint to the morbid stillness which precedes them. I'd like to be able to write - like Leiris in 'scratches' - in a way that articulates both staates. the condition off deahtlike immobility ad te flight of dazzling ideas...... I'd like to be able to articulate this moevement between the state of hell and state of pure delirious joy.

but hell, i can barely spell
who do I think I am?

and the whole elevated project is laughable when i consider the subject matter of my tome.


I jjust tried 3 times to insert and image into this posting - dragged of the internet - of an amateur life drawing class form NZ. Nothing about this image conveys lines of flight, or molecular becomings. It looks incredibly moribund and banal.

maybe thats the point.
the violence of a photography, and it does to violence to these sort sof encoutners - in seizing a singular moment - and draining it of all the temporal richness where the meaning is created.
if there is any meaning
and who gives a fuck anyway?
fuck oh fuck

I don't know whether I've been so sad this week - because i've been gestating on a paper (that still won't come), or missing abel horribly, or grieving for my brother. I try to imagine he's in the same place as charlie parker (I know that sounds hideously pretentious but trumpet players deserve their own heaven)

I heard a flugelhorn at a gig last night and had to force tears back in the darkness. soft dull tones, like a Paris sky in winter - sounding like soft drizzle. Very hard to do mambo on a flugel (it's much more milonga) .


the gig was crazed caberet with the sax player from Waiting for Guinness doing schamlzy skanky riffs. and the singer, a good friend - belting out the swansong of my former marriage:

Aaaaaannnnd
I'll be fine
and You'll be fine
No-one's died
and theoretically
We can still be friends
just as no-one pretends
that's it's the same
as before

Times like these feel like the onion cellar in gunter Grasses "the tin drum"

it's stopped raining. I'd better go for a walk before I collapse in front of another SODUKO.

Blame the chicken

Yesterday was a really horrible horrible bad day.

things were kind of greyish and OK, and after a day ff pointless onanistic gloom I decided to push myself under the shower and then head off on a long stride into uni to prepare the art and mayhem segment - which I strode up to UTS to deliver.

Daz and I chatted about ladypain and lady gloom in between track changes and the segment - and then I headed off, ostensibly to get some vegan junkfood in the form of deep fried tofu with peanut sauce (its the elvis version of TOFU and it costs $4). STUPIDLY however, I decided to go all random and adventurous and attempt something new.

I'm not usually a chicken eater - but thought a big bowl of chicken soup wiht noodles and green things might be good for my b-vitamin count and decided to lash out $8.
And then (5 minutes later) I was brought:
a thin plastic bowl with some instant noodles, dried spirng onion, a lettuce leaf, dried mushrooms, and dried savoury cornflake things
And a a sperate bowl with some water

My jaw hit the floor and I stupidly dragged the thing back to my seat and sat silently injesting msg and palm oil with a modicum of soya lethicin modified hydrongenase.... BLEEEAHAAAAHGGGGHHHH!!!!

then felt so depressed that I went to bread story next door and bought more shitty fluffy overpriced junk food, (but durian flavoured - just to get rid of the scary msg taste) and then staggered acrosss the road an caught a bus home.
hit the hay -
- hay smelling futon

Injesting bread story cconfectionary induced a sugar rush which slid into a big fat trough by the time my bus reached home - so I collapsed somnambulant for an hour or two.

then woke up to hell and gloom.

rang my mum and mumbled monosyllables while she breathlessly babbled utter bullshit. Ignored other phone ringing later -wwhihc tunred out to be Abel, ringing from chez maman at lunch. Her mum has been sending me texts and my stomach churns thinking of Abel with her girlie - and fuck I wish I didn't have to see her face ever again.

things are unspeakably bad -when I can spend 5 hours on the SODUKO in an old copy of MX

How am I meant to write a PhD with this brain?

It was all horrible horrible horrible, wanted to die, wanted to sink through the ground - didn't even want to kill 5 people first - just wanted to evaporate.

I even seriously considered going to queensland.


what brought this on?

I'd had a weekend of overnurturing - playing host and tourist guide and endlessly washing dishes sheets for a bunch of , well one was an old school frined, the others were her friends - and i swear that was really really dumb thing of me to do - and I hope I don't do it again in the next 10 years.
It made me feel exhausted, empty and bored, and a bit pannicky.
I don't need anyone's approval that much

this of course being the weekend - after abel left the country. and letting her back in my life before hand was also extrmely dumb and I am now going through the same old hell I went through in march - of separation. She's happpy living 2 contradicotry realities - the life with me as her wife - and her real passionate fantasy world of SLUT - and fuck only knows who else. sure she has to be pissed most of her life in order to do it but she can still do it.

I was sooooo happy - a light delusional joy when she grovelled and moved back in a fortnight before her departure, swearing she'd give up the grog and calling SLUT while under the same roof. she stayed grog free for 4 days, and kept her finger moving over her phone keypad everywhere, in conversation, in the car, at the dinner table. constantly

how could I be so stupid?

After sitting crouched over the computer with hell gut pains at 4am - writing misspelt missives on lists and incurring wrath of some freak (who lives around the corner) upon my poor eardrums, - I crawled into her bed, for chaste cuddles and sweet slumber for 3 hours before our neighbour woke her up to drive her to the airport.

i'm still in love with her, she wants to fuck me, and I fell fucked by her, fucked over. this is all just fucked

Note to self: don't let her ever stay another night under the same roof with me

the day she left - I went and saw a counsellor, had a shiatsu and then got involuntarily screamed at for 15 minutes by some freaky 'activist' type - whose out to solve the middle east peace process by her highly developed skillls in rhetoric and diplomacy. GOD PLEASE LET HER GET HIT WIHT A SKUD I prayed while backing away

Ohhh god doesn't exist and if he does he's certainly not on my side

Note to self: must cancel registration for queer collaborations. I thought it might be a strategy for desperate damsel wooing - but err..... god...... pathcouli, activists and their lack of humour, that abstracted idealism, innappropriate and unmananged anger projected onto the revolution or veganism or some other poor bastards sorry fucked up life or god only knows what and really poor social skills, YUCKKKKKKK.

I'm not twenty and can't be drunk enough to pretend I am anymore.

and the conference website is one of the most patronising things I've encountered in a long time.

I am too old for this
too sober

adding to gloom

and then yesterday was my brother's birthday - and I've decided that if I have any say in my death that I'll try to arrange it on my birthday - so there's only one day of hopeless incomparable sadness for my family to deal with each year instead of two.

so today, I've washed a lot of sheets, and vacuumed the house, and stuffed myself with pumpkin soup and had a shiatsu and barely left the house and I feel safe and warm and well cared for and I'm going to engage in some trivial part of the thesis work rather than some large amorphous imaginative chunk whee I have to face my own doubts about everything and the HELLISH CHASM WITHIN in order to pull something out of my arse.

Pity coz I've got a conference paper to give in a fortnight - based on a chapter that I haven't written

fuck

Every Sperm is Sacred

As you will no doubt be aware, our current government
cares deeply about all children, including the unborn.

sinking the SIEV x was just one example of the the
current governments child protection plan, not to
mention the mandatory detention of aboriginal kiddies
in the NT for stealing textas, plus the concentration
camps for the kiddies who arrive on boats in utero or
associated with adults not in posession of a valid
tourist visa.

So, it will come as no surprise to learn that the
merry mob of canberra have been using some of our hard
earned taxes to fund private counselling services in
womens health.

These cousnelling serivces don't come from any of the
namby pamby chardonnay sipping medical, bureaucratic,
or social worker sets but are made up of honest,
hardworking, god fearing, ordinary Amer....ahem
Australians who don't want to bludge off the taxpayers
and don't want all those baby murdering doctors and
unwed mothers to do the same.

Our government cares about the initiative of ordinary
australians, and so have been doling out the dollars
to such nicely named gourps as "pregnancy Help
australia" (who received $300,000 last year). these
private groups are being funded to give such useful
advice to roughly 11,000 sperm laden ladies each
year, that abortion increases the risk of breast
cancer, and that it will prevent them from becoming
pregnant in future, and that they are murderers for
even thinking of depriving life to their unborn child,
and that they shouldn't be having sex outside of
marriage anyway, and sholdn't even think of shaving
their legs before the age of twenty unless they want
to burn in hell as one of the damned whores of satan.

This is a bit of a worry when, as we all know,
thousands of sperm are wasted daily on internet porn
sites, and each month, millions of women go
shamelessley discarding the unborn by flushing their
used tampons down the toilet.

Instead of allowing the wasteful expenditure on
privately run telephone counselling services why not
join other citizens in mass consumer boycott of
masturbation aids such as pornography and kleenex, as
well as sanitary products that encourage the wasteful
and needless destruction of human embryos through the
unhygenic and often painful practice of menstruation?

why not start smashing up those sanitary bins in
public toilets and banning sodomy, bukake and oral
sex?

why not make it a condition of earning a passport
that all australian citizens demonstrate they are in
posession of a mortgage, a plasma screen TV and 2.5
blue eyed blonde haired you beaut bonza kinder... err
kiddies?

why?

Lets make more aussies! stopping abortion is too late,
the earlier the better! Every sperm desrves a chance
to become an aussie kiddie and so does every egg!
Fertilise every single one!

Consumer boycotts are not the only means of saving the
kiddes and ending the waste. you can also go to the
getup site and sign an internet petition. Apparently
the pollies are about too debate the issue in
parliament.

go to:
www.getup.org.au/campaign/StopDeceivingWomen

spread this message with lashings of fabulon and see
you in the obstretrics ward.

Frigid weekend

It was thursday night and I was on the train from Sydenham to Town Hall. I was wearing little more than fake tan, a denim micro mini, a truck load of blond hair extensions, false eyelashes, a fur lined white cardigan, fake tattoes and ugh boots.
I was scragg.

I also decided that I needed false nails to complete the look. I opened the box of $3.00 decorated pink nails and unscrewed the tube of nail adhesive. The realised it needed to be cut open. i tried biting and gnawing it instead. then read the ingredients list as i tasted cyaonocongeloggoaguatationguanisocin66opospluhpheoluons on my teeth and tongue.

it was going to be a toxic night. what goon would wash this crap off my tongue?

Undeterred by iminent carcinoma I squeezed droplets of the glue onto the false nails and pressed them onto the finger tips of my right hand. flashing my voluntarily disabled digits and deciding that I'd save my left hand from such fate.

that was 3 days ago and these false nails, unlike my usual $1.00 ones, refuse to budge. the glue must have been some mutant form of builders bog or something left over from the space shuttle. After 2 days of not being able to type, dress, search my pockets or do other two handed tasks, I decided to cut the false nails. Im left handed so I'm not totally immobilised, but there's one major major problem.

My right hand is the organ of lady love, and right now its festooned with 3D plastic pink flowers and glitter. Even in their trimmed state ths is guaranteed to send any girl not starring on a lesbo porn website running a mile. bugger.

I've had a fun weekend of running around and going out dancing. such delight aof gratuitous booty movements to fund music! such delight of the fairer sex before me. And yet, I felt like I was wearing a chastiity built. Immobilised, neutered.

I guess this was an appropriate way to spend the 10th anniversary of the sunday night fest of FRIGID. the 10 year farewell bash was held on a saturday night just to confuse things and I arrived just after the 2nd set and missed TOOTH. bugger again. the entranc eof Newtown RSL was not unlike a Blue lgiht disco - wiht a big fat que of bag chekcers, membership checkers, ID chekers and god knows what else.gratutious inneificient ridiulous bureacracy reminding me of Sdyney airport. Don'cha love Australia?

Inside saw friends and then tried to meet the extreme booty challenge of swinging to some extremely unhappy hardcore err, ithink the term is banging trance. Lots of tesosterone. Not many buxom wenches on the dance floor. the dance floor like a sauna. i retreated. retreated further from PV's extreme oscillations between slow fluffy e-trance and hard herdish hip hop. Like tha hard core dude he was wearing a thick fleecy hoody. he told me it was because he had a broken toe and couldn't dance. But I reckon he was doing some secret cryogenesis extreme cool challenge. they probably pracitce by weraing thermal underwear in saunas. I sat near a cool wall and saw old friends from the 90's and sat aroudn chin wagigng about our bunions.Inwardly pondered my previous nights extreme enjoyment of Albanian dance music. I really enjoyed it but I think in my eurotrash garb - that I scared the more modestly clad albanians. Everyone else there aready knew I was only doing this part time.

the frigid dance experience was rescued by sir robbos extreme schwanky cheese. Even luke was dancing. It was like hendrix meetsmotown meets the best ever 70's porn sudntracks and so I was happy, happy as larry. Really really happy and sober as a judge. I then floated in to Luke vyberts hard but witty techno retro smorgasbord. this ended on a really stilly segue of happy hardcore. I was glad my friend hoorst was around to hear it. this was a nice entree into the biggest sillliest happiest sub set i've heard in a long long time. Yayy for luke's orchestrated arm waving. yayy for the lovely combo of luke and sebmixing togehter dancing toehger. this is mixing as perfomrance - as a lovely live impro thing that reminds me of great jazz. yayy for seeing MD on the edge, floating near a big speaker and looking completely spacey and not recongizing me with no glasses, no eyebrows and no black hair. (I have a horrrible suspicion that I met MD on the UNSW library lawn in 1989 and the first thing he evern said to me was "you know the rave scene isn't what it used to be...." As I recalled this moment the snarl put in an ORB bit. yayyy!!!! and finished with classic butchered bowie.

My extreme frigid moments included stumbling over couples snogging on the dance floor (am I so puritan to find slow snog e-ing to be an inapropriate chemical strategy for a dance party?) and then seeing one of my students at the bar. (I fled and missed gemma's set!) . Some guy asked if I was the hula girl. I told him I was the booty queen and it was an important distinction. Not enough cute girls and not any cute boys actually (or am I really gay). all irrelevant due to ex-wife in next bedroom and plastic finger tips making me feel like a eunuch anyway.

Walking home in the drizzle, I had to slow right down to a barely moving crawl to avoid a gaggle ff drunken 3 am yobs that even the cabbies were reluctant to pick up. this was annoying.

Trucking on

I had 3 days of unanticipated pain last week.

migraines suck.

this week, i feel fluey cold sore tired. My mouth has ulcers, my bowels are loose, and I'm sure no-one wihses they'd just read this.

After a week of extreme fluffy cuteness, tail between the legs tenderness etc., abel has resumed normal adolescent stone baby butch programming.

I'm so over it that I'm numb.

she leaves in 8 days. I can't wait.

she'll be gone only for a month -but a month! a whole month of no guilt, somtach cramps, pain, nerves, anxiety, jelaousy, regret, impotence being rubbed into my face with lashings of old dead longing

So I'm calm and collected about current tense hell. Being civil, remote.

I barely believe what she says I don't care, try not to care, try hard not to care

It's hard trying

Typing messages to NBL - who is a life saver. small missives of hope and possibility. Evne if nothing comes of it, if it all falls in a heap, later one, right now, its a miraculous comfort. Like little pathces of sunlight amist the sodden sky.

Never before this I ever understood the miraculous hope of gratuitous flirting. Expectation as life sustaining. I hated tension, indecision, unresolvedness. never one for dates - I always preferred jumping into bed wiht both boots and mopping up the consequences later.

so this is extremely nice.

I don't have any certainties about my life at the moment - feel pulled professioonally between quite two distinct realms, and my home life has fallen in a heap - so I'm adjusting to uncertainty, precarity, not knowing what will happen.

treading water, if I stop flailing I still float.

Eating Myself

At the moment I'm stupidly stuck in a slow intertia of indecision
and excessive alliteration

my apologies

I went out last night dressed in a lawn bowls outfit. Instantly my movmeents slowed and I wanted to be in bed before the witching hour.

maybe its just cold?
maybe I should't try to go to NYC in the winter but sweat it out in swampy sydney wiht the mozzies?

I've been bingeing on sugar and I skipped my shiatsu and i feel like shit.

sleeping 12 hours a day

slow, very slow

I don't want to do ANYTHING

there are objective (hah!) reasons for this current miasma...... and my stomach clenches remembering them.

I've been way to close to Abel lately. Being a sweet caring sisterley type. we even shared a bed the other night
(the one night when I could't sleep and had to force myself awake to guzzle slippery elm)

I think my body is trying to tell me something.

better to be a gimlet eyed sobbing hysterical freak than this damp clamped down numbness.

i don't trust her, I can't love her and I shouldn't pretend.

its over its over its over

she wants it both ways - to have me loving her here and to lve me in retunr and then to head over the high seas to slut and co.

"objectvely" this shouldn't be a problem should it?
opne relatinoships work all the time right?
what arguments have a got against this?

none - convincingly enough that can escape from my upper lips. No reasonable grounds for opposition.

Lower lips clamp shut in damning silence.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Vagina's are wonderful things. Dependeable, honest, trustworthy. Vagina's don't lie, and they won't revela your secrets to all and sundry but discretely flitter and flap and ooze into fabric. Quietly.

my libido is dead. My soul is dead. I can't do this

she can't find a place. she's leaving the country in 3 weeks. I said 'yeah, ok leave your stuff here we'll sort it out when you get back'.

I've been considering the martyrish thing for 2 days now.

leaving my big bright pink room. all my books and paintings and vulvaed muppets. Letting her have it, stay her and work for the coop - becuase hell, I don't want to...... I'm sickof it. I'd rahter teach, write, research, pick my toenails.

I'm scared of leaving the people I like here. Scared off casting myself adrift in some new lonely suburb. Scared of bieng a martyr and what damage that willl do deep down.

and I'm torn, twisted, birfurcated.

My top half, head, hands, tits, mouth lips, arms - desperatley wants to be a nice good girlfirend. to hold her, touch her nurture, hear her voice, kiss her, have her touch me. I cna talk the talk and do the cuddle snad be ever so sweet.

bottom half refuses. Is numb.

Stomach is weird and bloated. tormented. twisted in two.

this is all extremely bad.

I have to set some limits. stop cooking her dinner, callling her name in the courtyard. giving her cuddles, lending her books. Just stop it. Let myself feel sad sobbing remorse and move on from it.

i don't have to be a bitch to her, but this is hurting me too much.

i don't want to be anyones mother, or big sister or asexual auntie.

I want to just survive somehow and get on with my life and paint and dance and have sex.

It's weird, how alcohol functions in this equation. I've been drinking more than before. Not getting rat arsed - but being looser, not holding myself away from alcohol as before. and the effect it has is to make me slow and numb and dull and stupid. Not wild and crazy and unleashed and messy.

yuck

Intense Immense Stupidity

SOmetimes I think that every moment where the present is consumed by the past is one stolen from the future.

maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself. Maybe I shouldn't be so goddam metaphysical.

during the weekend Abel and I dragged each other into bed for a night of sobbing silly breakup sex. Silly. Well. Stupid I guess. In so far as sex can be stupid, whihc its not, but it is. The denoument of our 7 year tryst had fizzled down into a pathetic wilted fragment of LBD. So this was the breakup sex we were meant to have. I guess I kind of rehearsed it with the blue angel. Except with the blue angel, i didn't wake up with my jaws aching from grinding my teeth so hard.

i can't tell myself that it would have been better if it hadn't happened, because it was sex, and I wanted it, and I love her, and I shouldn't let her near me again, and I was only just recovering right and I shouldn't let her undo all the good hard work I've done, and I'll only feel ten times as bad in four weeks when she leaves and goes back to france to spend time with SLUT.

'she doens't love me' I tell myself, and my flesh protests. Oh god, what a fight this is. no wonder stone butches turn all granittey.

apart from the headaches since, the indigestion, my curiously shrivelled libido, can someone tell me why this is so bad? My hangover lasted all weekend.

I sagely spent part of the weekend with NBL. Magic hours langorously lapping at Lattes, while teasing cakes apart with our forks. She chatted incessantly, delightfully. Me, I must have seemed dumb. all I remember was studying her freckles incessantly. her jaw, her smile, the way she moved. She also played monkey magic as a kid. fuck. I wanted to impress her. I could so, so easily fall in love with her, and I smile just to think of her. And yet I mentioned Abel and tears fllooded my eyes and fogged my glasses and I hated myself for being this trapped in the past.

Maybe, just play it softly. Be a mother. Let abel in, hang out with her, do the cuddly ex-intimate friendship codependancy things, and then let myself fall apart when she leaves. I fight my libido, and it shrivells back into a hard little seed inside me.

last night I had nasty nasty nasty nightmares. dozing at dusk. racked by stomach cramps. I've got very bad demons and I don't know how to handle them at all sometimes. Seek whatever comfort I can, even if its pathetic, unreciprocated, inadequate, dead, deadening. Even if it kills off the future.

I'm sick of running. I've been running from abel, running from this house, running from my feelings. Fair enough because all of the above have been abjectly shit house. It makes reading a bit hard. Writing, you know, (the serious tomal stuff) impossible, painting unthinkeable.

to sit still, and be mired in my self. to sit still and risk stillness. To sit still with the past, the present, and a future not present, is just hard. I'd like to spend more time here. I'd like to work on my tome. I'd like to cook for myself. I'd like to grow strong through this. I'd like to paint.

running around, going dancing, seeing lots of people and not eating very much, I apparently seem more 'functional', more coping, more attractive. the thin body enteres into discourse, whereas my mounting elvis dimensions of the previous 2 years largely escaped comment. Stillness and softness, was also an embodiment of what I was doing; thinking, refelcting, opening up. Now i feel like a steely eyed manic freak.


I'm not having a very good time am I?