The Move 28-October-2000 (Saturday)

We are sitting in this Greek restaurant and I'm drunk. Empty stomach, gin and tonic and half a bottle of wine. My stomach is distended full of Greek morsels. The christening is going well, or so it seems, they are doing the speeches, and the cameraman has this light, it's like a miniature sun. It thrusts itself into my bloodshot eyes, pushing my drooping eyelids apart like some he-man lifting a portcullis.

"I'm awake" I stutter to Damo who is sitting across from me looking contented. The light has woken me out of a licentious revelry involving one of the waitresses and several of the patrons dancing to the loud Greek music.

He mumbles something incoherent about seeing the light and how alpha particles kill vampires. I'm sure it made sense at the time. The world is pretty hazy, but we have had a good day.

Damo had just that morning moved into a place just up the road from me. We spent the afternoon on the balcony sipping beer and watching the sun go down over the twin TNT towers. Aeroplanes dropping out of the sky in the distance their slow steady descent mimicking our slide in torpor.

Snippets of psyche 27-October-2000

How much can you tell about a person from a phone call? I tend to sound overly happy when I'm on the phone. Does that make me disingenuous, or does having a completely different personality / voice on the phone belie the fact that I have adapted myself to living with technology, or that I use the relative anonymity of the telephone system to express myself more fully? Or indeed could it be that the deficits inherent in strictly verbal communication mean that I over express myself as compensatory behaviour? I suspect this is the case, drawing this thread to a logical conclusion would explain why there are so many arseholes in chatrooms.

Coloured vision 24-October-2000

I woke up this morning and my room was bathed in blood. The sun was coming up through the haze hanging over the city and the scattered light coming through my curtains was a rich deep red. It was as if the whole room had been dipped in red paint. I rolled onto my side and looked at the cupboards, through the haze of sleep in my eyes the tops of the walls seemed to be rolling, curls of light distorted along the junction between roof and wall. Small ribbons of gold rippled and played with each other like so many little dragons cavorting in the morning air. A gentle rub of the eyes cleared them from my view, and as the sun rose further my room once again returned to the haze of morning grey.

Physical versus Mental, reflections on Sunday 23-October-2000

Some people have an affection for physical memory. I used to think that press clippings, and pictures were mnemonic aids, used to help recall feelings and stories.

But I'm sitting in this room, the blinds are drawn and the still grey light filters around the gaps at its edges, lighting the wall like some great fluorescent fixture. The scene illuminated before me is shrine-like. I read it as a single wall of glorious text, memories collated and organised, pictures, glimpses of personality. I'm trying to get it all into my mind, the idea that physical memory is not different to those moments captured in our heads. It is just as real, perhaps more so in the way it doesn't corrupt over time.

It belongs to a friend, it is glorious. Sometimes moments like this change your perception of a person. How they interact with the world, how you see them move about it. She is a collector of life, capturing moments in some form of essence. The raw beauty of this collection, the emotion poured into each part written, drawn from sources varied, each with its own story, each with associations. It overwhelms me. I go silent and flop back on the bed, the warm doona nestles my poor head.

My brain is starting to hurt, perhaps I'm just a little hungry. I wonder if I look bored, I can do that when I don't speak.

She is reading me stories from a photo album, you know the way you do when you know each thing intimately ... "oh hey and look at me here, I can't believe I wore that dress". I'm watching the pictures, a chronological journey through someone else life, they jag back and forth in wide sweeps of time but progress towards some consistent end. They are ordered.

I think of my own box of pictorial memories, a shoebox, stacked with a chaos of information. Memories not tied to time but to images, fewer pictures of people more of locations long gone or forgotten. We have different brains I think to myself. Which I suppose is what makes this whole experience stunning. It is a whole portal into another universe, a perspective changed.

I am a little disappointed to be drawn out of the room to watch a video, but still one can't revel in those moments of joy too long lest they pale.