I've been in New Zealand (1wk) Saturday 30-September-2000

You just can't trust them, especially when they leave you. They creep out of you like small sweaty voles covered in the muck and refuse of your deeds. Coloured slivers of personality coalescing in the background, slowly worming their way into your peripheral vision, taunting in their apparent comfort. They are all part of you. I render the thought in my mind as they slide across my body, millions of nimble feet gripping at my clothes. I close my eyes and they disappear. I am surrounded by other peoples personalities, I can hear them drifting through the thin air of the bar. I lose myself in the combined voice, a part of some milieux in which I take no part other than as a blind observer. I am happy here surfing the wave of voice, of opinion, surrounded by the communication of others. Slowly opening my eyes I find my food waiting, I am ready to sate my base requirements, and as luck would have it I have chosen well. The oxtail stew slips easily down my gullet and mixes magnificently with the wine in my belly.

Of course, I muse to myself, I am presupposing the cacophony around me is indeed communication. I always get a little rancorous when I am eating alone. I think back to the last time I really communicated with someone, how I felt, stripping away layers of my own self consciousness, to grasp what is essentially the essence of me, thrusting him to the fore. He is really a sad old fellow, sort of wan in his ineptitude. Still I love him, along with his jiggly old thoughts and lack of understanding.

I remember I was brushing the hair away from her forehead, an empty symbol of my feelings. I saw my hand, the aging remnant symbolising my humanity, creased and knotted yet so dexterous and light, it skimmed past that perfect visage, young skin, wise mind. The hair I had chosen, parted under a gentle touch and slid along my fingertips each nerve in my hand sparking a message to my brain, the myelin sheaths working overtime to tell me that it was real, as real as I would ever know. I paused in wonder as I realised how my own flesh had seemed to sully her as it reached out to speak. I never could really talk to her again after the night I died. I suppose her tears and my tears had somehow rusted away at my insides gnawing orange holes of iron oxide through those mirrors that present us with the alternate reality that we call love.

I have missed my pen. You can't see this but I'm plotting my life on a bit of paper, the writing flows in small curls around the boxes, self indulgent prose cutting its way across the ordered reality of flow diagrams, squares full of sigils representing time, people, information and communication. It is a pure abstraction of reality covered by the scrawl of the ink, huddled between the white sublimity and the faint guidelines I was supposed to follow.

I wonder where my caution has gone, I search my breast pocket but he is not there. Perhaps the mealy mouthed mugtoad has left me forever. Him and his insipid platitudes, I miss him already. "Many things should never be spoken", "one should never expose the doddering old fool", "pretend to know what is going on". All good lessons that that grey fellow taught me. Sadly without him I shall spend my days running from one to another. Skipping the pleasantries and social mores that represent a whole layer of life. "At least" I think to myself, "I have been to places where others have never ventured".

It strikes me as odd that the moments I remember in my life where I have really talked to someone often have no words. Those silent moments between words, the soft touches, the smiles the gentle nudges. All of that means more than the words I bandy about in a manic haze of verbalism. Silent moments, quiet reflection and comfort, those are the shavings of personality that come from sharing.

Along with caution, I miss my comfort. That place to nuzzle between the neck and shoulder, where the skin tastes sweet, and the warmth of the jugular can press against your cheek. I miss knowing where and when to rest, she could always tell me. Freedom - that glorious peacock of riotous colour - I suppose has its price, never knowing when you might be subject to comforts' whims again is a frustration I find hard to bear sometimes.

I suppose I should be in bed, resting for the morrow. But now, here in the silence of a lonely room where the only companionship is the silent tapping of the keyboard and the drone of traffic on the freeway, away from the physical stuff that defines me, my books, my bed, my city I have time to brood. Time to mull on the vagaries of where I am. I consider once more a quest to find comfort, to gird myself with caution and to launch into the upper stratum of social nicety, so once again I can fall down into the depths of grim happiness, oblivious to the things I can see around me now. It is a hard choice, perhaps made easier by my obvious unattractiveness to the ones who might matter. I settle instead for a glass of wine and a good book, a safe unidirectional shared experience, mediated through the skill of the author and the craft of the vigneron.

Time obsessed 22-September-2000

So why are we obsessed with time? Okay well maybe I should say, why am I obsessed with time? Where did the obsession come from? When for instance did the peasants start caring about how many years had passed since Jesus was born?

I can understand time keeping for the sake of keeping track of seasons, that's something that is required when you are closely engaged with the land and extracting your sustenance from it. But now we live in these big self contained season neutral edifices pushing little bits of data around in magic boxes, why is it that time is such an issue in modern western society? Is there something that makes us want to catch and savour every moment, or feel as if we are wasting time… do you suppose it is some sort of virus, like all that Dawkins meme stuff, you know something we catch from society.

I'm looking at myself in the mirror this morning and I'm about this close [--] to throwing my watch away when all the consequences of doing that crowd in on me, they all have something to do with organising my work, or my social life.

So I stare at myself a little longer, thank goodness I don't actually see myself when I look in a mirror eh? Okay so if I ditch my watch, I lose my job, so, I lose my place to live, I lose my lifestyle, but I'm free of time and that stupid obsession with being on time. If I lose these things then I will most definitely lose my social life which will mean I'm free of everything. It's one of those small decisions that could change my life.

I'm sitting here at work this morning checking my watch every 5 mins, I have a conference call with New Zealand at 9:00am. I'll only have to check it five more times before the call starts. Sometimes I even dissapoint myself.

Huzzaaahhah! 21-September-2000

Phew ... tax isn't due in until October 31 (I love the new Tax Site - it is one of ours) , so I have another month or so of procrastination time. Not that I always procrastinate about things, but the Tax office wants me to send in an extra bit of paper outlining why I spent about $1000 dollars on my professional library last year, and how much I spent on it this year. Thing is I didn't spend as much on my professional library this year because, well I bought all the expensive ones last year (Tufte etc.). I wonder how they will react when I send in a smaller request for money this year. I expect I'll probably be audited * chuckle *. What a pain in the arse, that means I will have to go through the expanding folder of doom. You know the one, the one where you say to yourself, okay this is my last three years tax stuff, that's cool I'll just shove it in this folder section marked N for 1990's. Hmmm today is definitely a half empty day.

Just a tid-bit of gossip for all you gossip mongers out there. I'm sorta excited about a person I met recently, haven't been excited about a person for a long while so I'm all "what's going on with me". You will have to put up with drivel for a little while until I sort it all out.

Doppelgangers 20-September-2000

Damo and I are sitting in this pub last night, and we look across the road, and we see a doppelganger. Swear on my mother's grave (she's not dead yet thank goodness). A spitting [splitting] image of a friend of ours.

"I wonder which one is the evil twin" -pause-
"uh... did I say that out loud"?

Sometimes i'm so incredibly bad that I figure I must be someone elses evil twin.

And then I woke up 20-September-2000

It was all a dream, I know that because I was woken up by the phone. It sliced into that subconscious state you have like some stalker ripping into your guts with a rusty knife. The dream was vivid and strangely abnormal. There was a truculent little tin mouse, with perky ears running around in circles on my chest repeating the words "down down down Alice fell until suddenly she landed with a thump". In the corner lay a little pixie, she was crying and stroking the broken veins in her dragonfly like wing, it was bent up all wrong from the shock of my backhander that had sent her careening across the room into the wall. I suppose that would teach her for trying to steal the food from my beard, under my bed there was a golden snake a single green emerald for an eye, it winked at me, because it could not blink, the emerald sparkled then turned blue.

I find myself mumbling incoherently in the phone to my nocturnal interlocutor, speaking with brevity on subjects I know not what. A prime period to pry information from my soul, shocked by the dream and caressed by the sound of another humans voice. Was the phone call real? Who knows. What does the dream mean? I have no idea.

I suppose its just like that old Chinese dude said,

"I once dreamed to be a butterfly, fluttering between here and there, in all its aims a butterfly. I just knew that I followed my moods like a butterfly, and was unconscious about my human nature. Suddenly I awoke; and there I lay: again "me myself". Now I don't know: was I then a man dreaming to be a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly, dreaming to be a man."

Dreams and reality sometimes mix, sometimes reality is like a dreamlike state from which you never want to be ripped, those soft glow moments when everything reaches slow motion capture. I wonder if proximity to these events are a little unhinging to ones state of mind, or perhaps I am never often interrupted in the midst of dreams that make no sense. Augh … let me get back some semblance of normalcy so I can breathe properly again.

Olympic event 19-September-2000

Welcome to your Olympic live site!
7:55am Wish me luck!
8:12am The preliminary rounds
8:45am Through into the secondary rounds with flying colours
5:10pm There off and racing
7:00pm The winner is? Sid-a-knee (well not me anyway)

Is that a tic I see before me? 18-September-2000

When I was a kid I used to sleepwalk. I never found out what I looked like when I did it, though my parents did say it used to scare them when I would come wandering down the stairs into the loungeroom while they were watching television. I wonder if I still sleepwalk? Actually I know I do, I don't really have very good sleeping habits, and recently they have been getting worse. I'm sitting here with this stupid tic under my eye, its not visible to anyone, but I can feel it, jiggling away under there like a Liptons tea bag. That's when I know I'm lacking sleep. Funny thing is I don't feel any different to how I have felt for the past few months. I'm starting to wonder now if I have just been sleepwalking for a while.