What we have here is a failure to communicate 21-October-2000 Saturday

There are few better things in life than hanging around with yourself. You know who you are, what you like, where you want to go. I suspect that sometimes, just sometimes some doubt creeps into your head as to how suitable a match you are for yourself.

Then again there are other instances that confirm that as you get older finding someone who ignites that interest gets harder and harder. Being inflexible and set in your ways is a terrible thing until you realise that those things that make you inflexible have made you who you are. The longer I am single the more I think about never having to change for another person again.

I'm sitting drinking coffee munching on a beautiful chocolate hazelnut tart, exceedingly rich, exquisitely flavoured, and picked for me by the lovely waitress at the café. The sun is beaming down turning the dark golden pages of the secondhand hardback I'm reading (the robe by Lloyd C Douglas) a brilliant white. The black text stands out starkly as the letters march before my eyes. Their meaning piped into parallel thoughts of conscious threads.

It is fascinating the way the human brain (or at least mine does) can run three or four threads all at once, I suspect this is one of the benefits of having this massive bundle of interconnected nerves in ones head. Not having to switch between thoughts and think about them one at a time, but being able to think multiple things simultaneously. Of course sometimes this ends up in disaster when you start to mix across boundaries. But hey … it all gets translated back into linear modes when you go to write it down or spit it out of your mouth, a limitation of the output devices we have been given I suppose.

So while I'm reading about the new slaves that Lucia and Marcellus' father has purchased I'm pondering to myself why she would be late. It is a crowning moment in a string of unhappy coincidences that has shattered my belief in my own judgement. She arrives, looking beautiful and my hope lifts for that moment as she gracefully settles in the seat across from me.

The conversation passes comfortably, but I'm struggling to stay with it.

I want to ask why I can't find anyone who is willing to be crazy with me, to let go of what is normal, to embrace the randomness and fun that is out there.

I want to ask why even though I feel this way, am I acting in this constrained manner, more suited to some electronic shop mannequin, manners and movement.

I want to ask what really makes her happy, to play with those ideas to curl them up in a ball of string and then tease them out in an unexpected cats cradle.

I want to know how just the sight of her can make me feel happy.

But I don't.

I sit there like some plastic big mouth billy bass with worn down batteries running patterns of banal conversation, while in my head I'm entranced by her sparkling eyes, and the way she wrinkles her nose. In my head I'm listening to another conversation and it is not going well. I'm trying to find the connect between what's going on inside and what should be going on outside, and I just can't find it, perhaps it is never going to be there with this one.

I go inside to pay the bill. By the time I have sorted the cash, I have convinced myself of a few things. My failure to communicate is one, the second is that perhaps when the mystic 8 is shaken and it comes up with the message "forget about it", perhaps you should do just that.

Like the corners of my mind 20-October-2000

I flopped on my couch and began thinking about the people I know whom I haven't seen for a long time, Rebecca, Lucy, Helen, James, Jules, Pags … you know all those people who you get to know and then see really infrequently if at all. And with each name there is one trait that links them into your mind, a thing that boxes them neatly into a classification system that makes it easy to recall them. Then dangling off the end of that core memory, say for instance the sparkle in someone's eyes, there are little boxes for shared memory, thoughts, ideas, feelings. Well that's the way my brain works, I wonder what word or image people use to store me in long term memory.

Grey and Black 18-October-2000

I'm lying staring at the ceiling its lost somewhere up there in the grey. My dad was up from Canberra for the night but he decided to leave at about 2:00am. I'm there thinking in my head. I hate it when I'm thinking sentences, the words forming in my brain as though I had spoken them out aloud, the muttering of my mind keeps me awake.

The words are running down some meaningless tangent, something to do with the darkness, and how in every city the night is grey. In true darkness you can't see your hand in front of your face. Your brain can pretend to see it, it can imagine that the rods in your eyes have seen a flitting shadow and it etches that pattern somewhere in your brain, images not from the optic nerve, but created from your imagination. Darkness creates a special need to affirm who you are by inventing yourself. I wonder how many things I have invented that live in the darkness that I have never seen.

Here in the city you never get that sense of non-being. It's always grey, there are always shadows to be cast, images constantly filtering through your eye, through your eyelids when you sleep. I wonder how restful I used to be when I'd camp in a tent in the middle of nowhere, it's been a long time between darknesses.

Out on a limb - flame away. 17-October-2000

I'm reading this web site the other day and someone was writing about how many derogatory words we have for a sexually promiscuous woman and how few for men and how that was indicative of the oppression of women by men. I thought that comment showed a lack of critical thought. I wasn't surprised at all by what the author stated, but I would think that you need to examine such phenomena in the wider social context. Towards this end I would posit the following question of the observation. Is it more often than not the case that we as a society (not just men) tend to give derogatory names to things we fear? Chinks (outsiders in our country), Sluts (women who break the sexual norms), Himbo's (Men who are dumb but pretty, and not often rich), Misogynists (Men who actually hate women)?

I would suggest that rather than an isolated phenomenon, the naming of things we fear is not an act of repression by a single sex but rather societies way of regulating behaviour that is not considered part of the social norm. For instance how many words for coward are ever associated immediately in your head with women? Sure there are weaknesses in my train of thought and I accept that, but sometimes I wonder how much we ever think about the memes we are propagating. How much anger we are generating and towards what ends we are driving division in our world, when really all we want is equality and acceptance.

It would be an interesting to map out abuse words and see how closely they map over time to the evolution of fears within society. To track down what the major thematic's are and how western culture and globalisation has started to consolidate those fears into pockets of them and us.

Figured out 15-October-2000 Sunday

Every time I think I have myself figured out I decide to go and change something, and I have to start all over again. I mean what is the deal with that? I suppose we all change, but why is it always at an inconvenient time. And how come this time I'm so happy?

I know all about gift horses and stuff like that, but I am a little scared about this one. I wake up this morning right, and I'm sick (still), headache, pain and fever... sounds like a panadol commercial doesn't it? But it takes me about 20 mins to get up and get over it. I have no idea why but as I'm wandering over the road to grab some breakfast I am suddenly filled with this great sense of happiness in being me. It's a really strange sensation to actually like who you are. I suspect that it must be a passing fancy, and soon I'll slip into those lovely comfortable sheets of self-loathing that I usually keep around my person. But despite the manic depressive undertones that this sort of mood suggests (and I've been wondering how close to having some sort of bipolar disorder I am), I was happy being me by myself in a café reading a well thumbed novel.

One fascinating moment this morning had me enthralled. I was walking down the road and a small gust of wind blew against me. I loved the way I could feel it moving around me, I could feel that sweet warm zephyr, that packet of air, pressing against me. I was displacing it. I felt it move in invisible curls around the tips of my fingers, tracing chaotic patterns up and down the hairs on my arms. It was going around me, making way for me, it made me feel real and physical.

Perhaps my illness and my constant dosage of antihistamines, pseudoephedrine and other class s4 poisons have detached me from the living world. Perhaps I just needed to get away and be by myself for a while, perhaps I have just decided to have fun with life, who knows... don't worry though I'll let you know when it all comes crashing down.