iam temporary

2010-01-28T19:38:00.004+11:00

I'm pissed off. Why, you ask? Today I've been trying to single out some event or thought that tipped me over. That's what my doctor asks me to do. Maybe it's being told by a co-worker that it was my responsibility to fix a photocopier. Maybe it's a culmination of a general malaise, a dissatisfaction with my job, my chronic singularity. Or maybe it's because I woke this morning after a sleep full of nightmares concluding in being eaten by a dinosaur, specifically a t-rex.

I went to the gym in the hope I could burn my frustration away. This year the gym moved the cardio room to a space half the size, workout machines packed side by side. I found no relief there and my anger grew. I felt like a battery hen. "So, this is temporary right?" Oh no.... "We've closed that room to reduce the rent. We were intending to grow membership but that didn't happen, so rather than raise your fees we decided to do this," the box jawed jock said smuggly as he leant back in his office chair. It all flashed back to high school, picked on, called fat and a faggot by guys like this and I asled to terminate my membership. "You say you're saving me money but the way I see it I'm paying the same and I'm getting less." It was the closest thing I could get to punching him in the face. I guess I was bound to do something irrational and impulsive. At least I didn't quit my job.

2010-01-26T14:18:00.003+11:00

It's not unusual to be haranged by jesus freaks on the corner of bourke and swanston streets, be offered hugs by desperate brits wearing oxfam t-shirts trying to sell charity, or be asked for a few bucks to support a smack habit. Nor is it strange to find a gathering of socialist youths blaring slogans into megaphones and asking passers-by to sign various petitions to get troops out of Iraq or Afghanistan, end the occupation of Palestine or some diffuse idea of ending racism. Over the past few months socialist alternative who've run a stall on friday nights and saturdays have turned their campaigning to equal marriage rights for same sex couples.

I've been suspicious about their motivations in this. Marxist doctrine is generally pretty unkind to the institution of marriage. Decrying it as a bourgeois institution that oppresses woman by defining restricive gender roles/morality and sustains the capitalist/industrial machine through the production of children. Marriage they believe is heteronormic and should be seen as the enemy of gay men and women alike. For them to argue that this institution should extend to same sex couples seems to me at best hypocritical and worst, an opportunistic ploy to latch themselves like a parasite to a mainstream issue that might garner them some new members and sell a few mags.

However upon reflection I think I've been way too harsh. Socialists have historically played a integral part in the gay liberation movement in Australia and feel my comments above are unfair and ungrateful. Like many socialists the issue of whether to involve ourselves in what is essentially a heterosexual exclusive domain has divided the gay community for decades. However at least according to the socialist alternative website they appear to have put this debate aside for a moment. Liam Byrne, National Queer Officer in the National Union of Students puts it like this:

"The ultimate goal for socialists is the total liberation of all oppressed groups, and this requires getting rid of the rotten system of capitalism that perpetrates these oppressions ... But in the here and now, we want to throw ourselves into every campaign and movement where the oppressed are struggling for their rights. Today, that means marriage rights. This issue goes well beyond simply whether or not we are allowed to marry. It is about demanding equal recognition of our lives and our loves, and our right to celebrate our sexuality publicly without fear of persecution."

The fact that they're on that corner raising awareness or at protests with their megaphones and chants should be welcomed. I guess I should do less of the pow-powing and more of the getting involved and active. At least they're doing something, which more than can be said for far too many of an increasingly complacent and apathetic LBGTQI community that is too busy partying and coming down to wave a banner in the air or shout anything but another round.

gay creation story

2009-12-12T23:35:00.006+11:00

I went to the Rally for Same-Sex Marriage Rights the other week in Melbourne (28 November 09). As we marched up Collins Street, this guy standing at a tram stop yelled "...you came from a man and a woman, it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve." Not particularly original but today I thought of the best comeback: yes but I'm not the one who believes in the virgin birth." A child born of two men now that would be a miracle.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh.
And Adam said, this is now my bone and my flesh and he shall be named Steve; he is of me and I of him.
And they were both naked and they were not ashamed.
And Adam knew Steve and they conceived a child and bare Cain; for great is the power of LORD God that maketh the infertile fertile.

AMEN to that!

long time between posts

2009-11-03T12:37:00.003+11:00

Two thousand and nine has been a shit year. Never mind the fires and the floods, earth quakes, the insurgents and their improvised explosives, I turned thirty. Abandoned by the rest of my siblings (who've gone off to enjoy their exciting lives) I've had stick around Melbourne to look after my mother. Having to put off returning to Chile and Julio and South American adventure. I've had to move out of my home because of a dickhead house mate who was petty and aggressive and had issues with my sexuality. I'm now living alone. I've had one of my best friends misread an sms I wrote and decide that I was killing myself. To make matters worse the Optus network died and he couldn't call. He thought I'd switched my phone off. He was soooo angry when I tried to explain the misunderstanding. He told me he was tired of my games and I told him to fuck off.

Despite all of this and yes I am really thirty, I am feeling positive, I am feeling good. I am looking forward to meeting new people and making new friends, to living alone with my own crazy thoughts and writing again. Here's to thirty and cheers to that.

2009-06-27T14:42:00.002+10:00

i'm having one of those lower case days where i can't be bothered hitting the shift key on the keyboard. you see i'm trying to quit smoking. i only made up my mind a half hour ago to drop the habit while cycling down to the shops in brunswick i thought i was going to have a heart attack. heart beating like a mad fucker and all i could think was - is this the last thing i am going to see? fuck needed to use the shift to type that question mark. but that's not the only thing i guess. it's been a stressful week, nightmarish temper tandrums from a housemate that almost led to violence almost led me to the point of leaving, a social life that has crawled to well a crawl, and not to mention a job that is uncertain because of budget cuts. yeah feeling pretty lowercase.

tasmania

2009-06-08T17:37:00.004+10:00

When I told my mum I was gay her first response was of love and reassurance, her second was that she didn't understand and was concerned about my future, and lastly that if I didn't mind terribly much she wouldn't tell the rest of the family. It is this third comment that has resurfaced in conversation time and time again. The fear and shame that the moral disapprobation from her conservative Christian family would be "all be a bit too much of a bother."

Her recently widowed sister and her female friend have been staying with my mum this week and out of some obligation I headed out to her place today to say "howdy." They laughed at this as I entered the room and after introductions my aunt and her friend returned to their card game and my mum to her British crime drama. I sat down and pulled from my bag, a book that my friend had lent me yesterday called Coming Out from Within and from what I can gather it is a spiritual approach to understanding and dealing with grief and loss faced by gay men and lesbians (from coming out, homophobia and death). As my mum drove me to the train station I realised it wasn't in my bag, I'd left it on the couch in her living room.

It hurts that my mum is so worried what her family will think about her. That she is deep down (not so deep) really ashamed that her son is gay and it is a fact she feels she needs to hide from them. For a moment there I actually considered not telling her and let the fates decide whether her sister found the book or not. However this thought was a brief one. Embarrassing my mum like that would do neither of us any good and so I offered her a choice: if you don't want my aunt to know that I'm gay then you'll need to hide the book. I'll pick it up next weekend.

I hope she reads it instead.

The Forever War

2009-06-06T14:54:00.005+10:00

I stumbled across some notes I'd scribbled down a few months ago after finishing Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. The novel is something of a sci-fi classic, less for its science or its story but its anti-war basis, which is largely attributed to the author's experiences in the Vietnam War. The book is diametrically opposite to the psuedo-fascist musings of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (which it is often compared to) written at the end of the 1950s. What I noticed, quite unexpectantly however, running beside this anti-war theme was a somthing of homo subtone, which was largely ignored in my edition's introduction.

When William Mandella, the book's main character returns to Earth after a disastrous campaign agaist the Tauran enemy outside our solar system he finds a changed world. Relativistic physics means that weeks maybe months have past for Mandella but back on Earth it has been decades since he left. Earth is now a violent and impoverished planet where the global currency is based on calories. To combat an unsustainable population, the global government has introduced what are termed homosex policies. Homosexual relationships aren't now so much as tolerated but encouraged.

Mandella tracks down his mother, now elderly living with a female friend, her lover and partner after the death of his father. It is something he struggles hard to come to terms with. Back in the 1970s, he says, before leaving for the war there was a growing acceptability of the homosexual lifestyle. It was something he generally agreed with but to find his mother living with a woman: this is something different. Uncomfortable with his mother's life choices, Mandella flees to the country to find his fellow soldier and lover, Marygay Potter.

As relativistic time throws Mandella further into a distant future, he finds himself commanding an entire strike force of homosexuals. Centuries in the future homosexuality is now considered the norm, throwing his hetero-normative world upside down. Children are born in vats and heterosexuality is seen as something medically disfunctional; children who are found exhibiting these tendencies are "reeducated" early. This leads Mandella worry that his sexual orientation, his pathological attraction to women will undermine his command.

I am in two minds about this, either this is an early attempt to demontrate difficulties experienced by gay people in everyday life or it is simply an exploitative vision of the future where tolerance has led to a nightmarish disfunctional world. I prefer to believe the former although Haldeman does cop out at the end when Charlie, a sypathetically portrayed gay man chooses to be medically transformed straight. Oh well.

cocaine diaries

2009-01-25T15:20:00.013+11:00

Alex James, ex-Blur bassist and now cheese farmer, once wrote that he had spent a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. Now cocaine-free James recently visited Colombia, the source of 80 percent of the world's cocaine, on the invitation of President Alvaro Uribe, to see first hand what his personal drug habit and that of the estimated 800,000 Brits has had on his country. Vice President Francisco Santos explained to him, upon arrival that when a "person starts consuming coke, all that money comes here to finance landmines, destruction of the environment, terrorism, kidnapping, displacement." During his visit, James met with drug dealers, farmers and members of an anti-narcotic unit, who according to the BBC website, 10 percent of them have been killed since filming in 2008. In Bogota, the capital of Colombia, James met with a contract killer, disguised as a taxi driver. Driving through the streets of Bogota, the driver told James that business was very good, making allusion to the paid killings. It's all drug related, he explained. The taxi driver was killed himself after filming.

I saw the documentary Cocaine Diaries: Alex James in Colombia a few weeks ago and it got me thinking. So much attention on part of the 'left' is paid to sweat shops, organic food, and reducing carbon emissions, of thinking globally acting locally but how many of these people use illicit drugs and how many of these people know where they came from? And again how many of them care?
I was at a party a week or so ago and I was chatting with this guy who told me he was partial to the occasional line of coke. So I told him about the film. "Yeah I've heard about it but haven't seen it," he told me, "Actually I have a friend who's constantly bugging me about my drug use for all those very same reasons and I feel kinda bad but I think I live a reasonably good life, I buy the right things and give money to charity, you know? It's just a bit of fun."

It's like the blood diamonds, I told him. Westerners with too much money, wanting something bright and shiney on their finger, whose money was used to fund a brutal civil war in Western Africa, where aputations and killings were a part of every day life. The war was sustained by there money, and in the end it was more about controlling the supply of diamonds that it was about ideology or territory or old ethnic tensions.

"What if I offered you a line, right here and now?" he asked me. "What would you do?" So I answered him as honestly as I could: "I guess I would have to think about whether the several hours off buzzing off my nut is worth more than the life of someone on the other side of the world and I hope I would say no."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/7200749.stm

the self hating homosexual

2009-01-16T13:35:00.005+11:00

I've been listening a lot to gay troubador Rufus Wainwright of late, having bought two of his albums, Want One and Want Two at this marvelous post christmas sale at JB HiFi: two CDs for sixteen dollars. Chilling-out in my room with the lights turned down low listening to what I can only describe as theatrical folk, I was taken by the thought that I so rarely get to hear songs where the lyrics so explicitly relate to gay men in love (or out of). I mentioned this to a friend of mine while sitting round the barbeque on my balcony. "I'm not a big fan," he replied. I'll admit I was somewhat surprised, I had thought Rufus Wainwright was so him and so I pressed the issue. "A guy at work was playing one his albums off i-tunes and I thought it was kinda cool, but have you ever heard him speak? It turned me off him a little," he explained.
"What do mean?" I asked him.
"Just go listen to him and you'll understand," he told me and I did.

Watching an interview from American television on youtube, Rufus explained how he had been living in Berlin with his boyfriend recording his new album. He spoke with a slight but noticible, well I guess you could call it a "gay lisp", wouldn't you? He sounded gay.

I was reminded of a book I read while I was at University called Jewish Self-hatred by Sander Gilman. It was all about how European Jews, pre-holocaust, that were attempting to assimilate into a wider Gentile and generally anti-semitic European society. They disavowed themselves of anything Jewish, the mannerisms, the traditions, in the hope of being accepted, while at the same time criticising and even attacking such behaviour in others, labelling them the bad Jews. The thing is however, the reason why anti-semitic Europe reviled the Jews was not about how they acted, but the very fact they were Jewish. No matter how much they acted Gentile-like they would never be accepted and their future was to be like all those flamboyant and unrepentant Jews: the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Thinking about it, there is a similar mindset within the gay community. You can be straight-acting or camp, a good homosexual or a bad one. Dating websites are replete with references to acting straight and being indistinguishable from our straight brethren (something it seems that is both important and desirable) except for the simple fact that we like to suck cock of course. A small difference, yes? The point however, is that the reason why we are so disapproved of, feared and hated has nothing to do with a lisp or a limp wrist, it has all to do with sucking cock and taking it (or giving it) up the arse. Sure acting camp makes you more open to homophobic abuse, but since when has a victim ever been to blame for the violence of others, whether it be in word or action?

What does it matter how a person talks? I ask you. What is important, to steal from the Reverend Martin Luther Jr, is the content of a person's heart and not the limpness of their wrist. Straight-acting as a term seems loaded with self loathing, why should anyone act? While wider society may ridicule the effeminate man, it is only a symptom of a deeper unease. To say there are good gays and bad gays is a chimera; there is one thing homophobes and I agree upon and that is that they fear/hate what we do in bed not our haircut or the way we walk and talk.

home truth

2009-01-07T19:46:00.004+11:00

I got an email from a friend last night. He was responding to an email I sent prior to Christmas and I guess I must have been moaning about work/life etc; who knows, I was probably drunk when I sent it but in his response he said: "I never remember you ever saying that you really liked it that much." I didn't pay it any heed but I guess home truths are like that: it's better not to think too hard about them, just file 'em away for later.

I lay back after finishing my poorly worded email to Julio and picked up Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. Somehow trying to understand the intricacies of warping spacetime at half-past-twelve at night is a war I can't win, no matter how many Simpson's characters Greene drags out to explain Einstein's theory of general relativity. The book dropped onto my chest and I was fast asleep...

...wobbly spacetime distortion effect...

It was my birthday and my friends and family were throwing me a big big party in the warehouse apartment that was my home (yes one can dream). Everyone was there, throngs of people... wow I didn't realise I had so many friends... and then the speeches began. My mum, close and bestest friends all saying exactly the same thing: I've been on this planet for thirty years now and done jack with it; I've amounted to nothing and by the look of it, I never will. I was ropable. How could people who professed to love me say such awful things? While tears welled in my eyes the merrymaking continued around me, drinking laughing smoking as I sat in the corner feeling sorry for myself, abandoned. As things wound down, people made their excuses and left. The night was young and apparently there was a better party to go to.

Alone now, my appartment seemed to expand and darken and grow colder as I wandered around it.... then my alarm buzzed and I was awake and I knew it was time to get up and get ready for another day at the office.

Funny hey? I'll admit I've spent most of the day thinking about this. The dream's left me with a feeling I can't shake and as a result I feel a little shaken. It's not like it was an epiphany or anything so profound like that, nothing I didn't know before but hey I guess that's why you call it a home truth.

2009-01-03T17:17:00.001+11:00

Do we ever really leave the closet? I think as I sip tea in the house of my Sudanese friend. Years back I used to teach him english, way back when he first arrived in Australia as a refugee. He could barely speak a word of english then and now we can discuss politics, the global credit crisis or why for example I am not married. "It's important to have children, I think you should have at least six children... you need to find a wife" he tells me.

It's moments like these that time stops, butterflies fill my stomach as I experience something you might call the truth or lie reflex. I dodge and evade until I can either disclose my sexuality or ... for instance say "maybe 2009 will be my lucky year" and reinforce his belief that I am just another happy, albeit unlucky, heterosexual.

Why did I say that? I think to myself, whincing a little but with my friend's conservative christian values, I just don't want to have THAT conversation with him right now or perhaps ever. Where does that leave us though? Do I just keep quiet hoping it'll never come up? I am not normally ashamed of who I am but there are times when I just don't want to get into it. I don't want to explain or defend who I am. I just want to be one of the boys ... but then one of the boys generally means being heterosexual.

I was at a new years party, sipping a vodka mixer. I was engaged in a lively discussion about South America with me the centre of attention. I was standing about outside on the balcony having a cigarette with a couple I had just met. They'd wanted to know why I'd been drawn back to Chile so soon after my first adventure eight months earlier. You meet someone? The guy joked. I hesitated. "Yeah I met a... guy."
"Oh.... that's wonderful," the girl said with a little shock but recovering it well. "So what's his name? Where did you meet him?" I answered her questions gingerly but soon relaxed. We talked about our various opinions of men, past relationships (mainly mine) until the guy bored, up and left the conversation.... and then she sprung it on me as if she had been waiting for her moment, "so when did you come out, when did you tell your parents?"

I had to answer those same questions twice more that evening/morning until I felt like I was just going through the motions. Surely this conversation is as tired for you all as it is for me? Obviously not.

concluding comments:
I do wonder whether you can ever really leave the closet. We all have that moment in our gay lives that we can point to and say "that's when I came out," but we rarely say "that's where I briefly stepped back in," or "oh, when did I come out? Just now actually to you... and before that to that woman over there who kept touching my arm and asking me to dance."

2008-12-18T17:02:00.002+11:00

Waiting in the lobby for a lift, listening to something appropriately blue from the ride into work, I caught sight of a guy... Michael that I used to work with a while back in the contact centre. Waiving and doing the polite thing I removed my headphones as he walked over and I slipped the i-pod into the front pocket of my backpack and said "hi."
"I refuse to buy one of those things," he said with a little distain, motioning to the silver nano as it disappeared into my bag.
"I don't know, this one's come in pretty handy...."
"No, no," he interupted, "I've got an mp3 player, I just refuse to buy an i-pod. I don't like doing what everyone else is doing, I mean everyone owns an i-pod," he said sounding like he was some fucking revolutionary. As we moved into the elevator, I thought with some irritation, it's too early for this.
"Making a different consumer choice about which electronic device you buy is hardly non-conformist." The suit in the back stifled a laugh.
"I don't like to follow the crowd," he said, as if I hadn't understood the first time he'd said it.
The doors opened on the second floor. "Well I guess I'll be seeing you," he said as he stept onto his floor. Not if I can avoid it you fucking idiot, I breathed as the doors closed.

history / tourism / grief

2008-10-27T19:54:00.010+11:00

He read the names of those that had disappeared, those that had been abducted in the middle of the night by agents of Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA) from their families and brought here, tortured and killed and now thirty years later, in their absense, their families responded: "presente." A chill went down my spine.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a ceremony outside what had been for so many years a derelict building, known now primarily by its address: Londres 38. In the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship, opponents of the regime were being rounded up, tortured and murdered, many of them were students, activists in there twenties. AQUI SE TORTURO Y ASESINO. Here thery were tortured and murdered. For years relatives of the victims fought for recognition, every week standing in vigil outside the former DINA interogation centre that remains government property, lighting candles and pasting posters of their missing love ones on the walls of Londres 38 and every Thursday a government employee would paint over them in a dull battleship grey. On 14 October 2008, a little over thirty-five years after the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown by a military coup, the president, Salvador Allende committing suicide as the army of Augusto Pinochet surrounded La Moneda (the presidential palace), I attended a ceremony marking the commencement of construction. Londres 38 is to be made into a memorial for those, los desaparecidos (the disappeared) that were killed by that regime.

I suppose it's moments like this where you have to wonder what the hell you're doing at something like this. Watching old women cry over sons and daughters, still living in the moment they were taken from them, you really have to ask whether you have any right to be there. When Claudia asked me if I would be interested in going, I said yeah sure, it sounds interesting but the reality was something else; was this grief tourism? I asked myself.

I recall a heated discussion that I had with Claudia and a couple others a few weeks prior while we were holidaying down in the south of Chile. We met a British couple who had been in Chile for the ski season and with that finished, were heading into Argentina. They'd stayed in the nicest of resorts, and other than the ski slopes and the occasional pisco sour they were happy to stay hermetically sealled from the rest of Chile and its history. They knew nothing about Pinochet or Britain's complicity in the deaths of thousands of Chileans and this irritated Claudia. They had come to her country without the slightest idea about Chile's past. She was right to be annoyed, but then I guess I entered Chile with only the vaguest of details. For christsake, the Lonely Planet pretty much says, Pinochet came to power in a Military Coup and some years later retired. Subtext I guess is that Pinochet is not polite discussion in Chile. However I told Claudia that there was no point dwelling on the ignorance of other people especially when this couple seemed generally shocked by what Claudia had told them. It was a far better story to tell that this British couple had learnt something and would go on to educate others in turn. So I thought anyway.

So maybe this helps legitimate my presence at Londres 38, but there are limits I think to this. As the doors opened and the relatives moved in to place flowers and to grieve, I stopped. "Claudia," I said, "I can't go in. If you want photos you'll need to take them yourself" and I handed her my camera.

Maybe I'll go back when the memorial opens.

we don't speak the same language

2008-10-15T02:00:00.003+11:00

What is so fun about being in a relationship? You're always worried abouth them and they you, and then you're worried that their worried, and you have to figure them in to all your plans for the future, with anything that you decide directly affecting them... and then there are the arguments, the stupid little fucking arguments that blow things all out of proportions, like for example, last night when Julio and I agreed to meet at six and we both sat around for half an hour waiting for each other in the same fucking place without seeing one another. He left without calling me, pissed and when I called him he was so angry at me, where was I and what time did I think it was? I asked him the same question. When we finally met at seven he was still shitty, how is this my fault? I asked. He didn't buy into any of this mutual acceptance of blame. It was my fault. He complained that he waited around for thirty minutes in the cold for me and I din't turn up. I was fucking sitting over there the whole time, pointing to a seat opposite the metro. I told him that I was cold to and I bet he didn't get into an argument with a crazy local about the difference between frogs and toads (sapos y ranas). He didn't find my attempts to lighten the mood very amusing. We walked for a while in silence when I finally said that if he would prefer meeting up another day it was okay. He shook my hand, yes fucking shook my hand and stormed off.

I sent him this message:
Tú eres una de las pricipales razones por las que yo estoy aquí. Quiero que entiendas que estoy tratando tanto como es posible.

Loosly translated: You are one of the principle reasons why I am here. I want you to know that I am trying as hard as is humanly possible.

What else can I do?

Quick addendum: It turns out that when he said "thirty minutes", he didn't mean "meet me in thirty minutes". He was sitting round waiting for me while I went and got a coffee. This was why he cracked it. Ah... mi culpa. Woe the joys of being lost in translation.

It´s hard to remember that our lives are such a short time... when it takes such a long time

2008-10-10T03:35:00.002+11:00

I am killing myself with every puff I take; christ I sound like a QUIT commercial! I woke this morning with the sensation that there was something there, something on the wall of my lung and no matter how much I coughed it wouldn't dislodge. Maybe it's cancer. Maybe I want another fucking cigarette!

I've been thinking a lot about the past lately, about my relationship with my father before he died. I remember when I was maybe 10 or 11, about a year before he died, we were sharing a caravan because my grandmother was staying with us and so they put her in my room and I got to sleep in a rented caravan that sat in our driveway. It was my mum's brilliant idea that my father sleep in there too. Maybe she thought it would be our chance to bond or maybe they were fighting. I don't recall.

We didn't. Yeah that pretty much sums up that week. We didn't talk, communicate, nothing, we just went to bed and slept. I remember I was reading some boy-fiction about conservationists in Africa battling poachers to save some mountain gorillas and just as my father turned the lights out, I wished that just once that he would talk to me. Did he hate me? I thought about telling him that I might be gay, then at least that would get a reaction out of him. It's funny how something so trivial, so long ago can just come up like reflux and feel so raw. I wonder though, had he known that he was going to be dead in a little over a year, how those nights in the caravan would have passed.

and so I dreamt

2008-10-04T03:31:00.002+10:00

... that I witnessed the second coming of Christ. Yes the son of God was brought forth once more into the world to clarify I few misinterpretations of His word; this time around in the form of actor and failed singer, Mandy Moore.

Mandy, angelic and radient as always, guided our rag-tag gang of disciples around the countryside preaching His/Her word aboard a poorly maintained and disintergrating mini-bus. I can't remember too much of what this liturgy was about, soley that I kept pestering her with questions about my sexuality. "So what's the go on the whole gay thing?" I'd asked her. She promised to get back to me with an answer.

The last I heard the whole story was being made into a movie, I think I was going to be played by one of the Belushi brothers, possibly the dead one.

gay pride worldwide

2008-10-01T00:55:00.008+10:00

Julio refused to go and it took us some time of heated and confused discussion to understand why, with all my bad spanish and his seeming inability to slow his speech to a rate that renders understanding possible. At first I thought he believed that all gay relationships were un-natural and should therefore not be celebrated and kept in secret and shame, to which I replied with some indignation: "¡NO SOY CONTRA NATURALEZA!". He clarified, it wasn't that he thought gay relationships were wrong, but wider Chilean society were of such an opinion and he didn't see how one pride march was going to anything but cement this feeling. Coming from a semi-radical background, I can't say I agreed.

I bought a book the other week that chronicles Chilean political posters of the 60s and 70s, there's one colourful print that states that "sometimes praying isn't enough" with a priest in full vestment, arm held back, taught, ready to hurl a rock. What have gay people ever gained from staying quiet? In the 1930s there was a Chilean president, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo who rounded up homosexuals in a series of systematic witch-hunts. These people were never heard from again and it is rumoured that they were thrown alive, their feet set in concrete, to the bottom of the ocean. Only fifteen years ago, in the port city of Valparaiso, a place famous for its art and cosmopolitan life style, the gay nightclub Divine was deliberately burnt to the ground; sixteen patrons died inside. No one has ever been charged.

Inroads have been made in Chile regarding treatment of their gay population. In 1998 sodomy laws were removed from the statutes and since there have been efforts made by all levels of government to improve relations with the gay community. It's not perfect, no. I have read numerous and recent reports of police brutality against gays but victims, with the assistance of groups such as the Movimiento de Integración y Liberación Homosexual (MOVILH), are making complaints against offending officers. Again I ask, what have we ever gained from staying silent?

On 27 September, I attended Santiago's third gay pride march. I can't say I understood all the speeches. There was the municipal councellor candidate, Gozalo Cid and Rolando Jimémez, president of MOVILH among others. They expressed solitarity for the gay community in Ecuador as, from what I could understand, a Bill is to be introduced that would remove expression of same-sex love from their equivalent of a Crimes Act.

Like any pride march, anywhere in the world there was music and dancing and girating and one really sexy guaso (sort of the Chilean equivalent of a cowboy) shaking his hotpanted clad booty to "girls just want to have fun" by Cyndi Lauper. And there were the drag queens, walking down the Alemada in impossibly high heels, drapping themselves provocatively infront of the presidential palace. This is what the media cover, Julio told me emphatically, not the old men holding hands for the first time in public, not the same-sex families with children or the parents who want their gay boy or girl to live without shame and guilt and fear. They ignore the long line of gay Chilean writers and intellectuals such as Andrés Perez, Pedro Lemebel and Pablo Simonetti. They sensationalise and pervert and instill prejudice.

Maybe so, but nonetheless I bought him a badge that says "No soy gay pero mi pololo sí," I'm not gay but my boyfriend is. It took him a few minutes to see the funny side but eventually he let his frown give to smile and I was content.

for all you still watching...

2008-09-27T06:41:00.003+10:00

I leart a new word the other day from Julio: SANTIASCO. It´s a play on words, combining the name of Santiago and the spanish word for disgusting: asco. And I guess it´s a pretty accurate discription of the place; Santiago is so heavily polluted that there are days where you can´t see the mountains, the Andes that normally tower over the city. It´s congested and agressive and it´s bound to drive you crazy. I saw a stray dog yesterday, standing alone on the side of the Alhemada, barking aggressively at the traffic. I turned to Julio, and said in my very awkward spanish "this is a war that the dog can´t win." The capto-facist policies of successive governments gets to you too. Pinochet sold off almost every public service there was to private enterprise, cementing the class differences and making the user pays mentality standard in even the most basic of services.

I saw my first instance of street-crime in South America the other day, which given my summed time here is pretty fortunate considering the continent´s reputation. At first I thought they were just messing around, when the lady yelled "chucha tu madre" but when the guy kept running and the women after him, I had to reassess. Wearing sneakers versus the lady´s high-heels, the kid easily speed off; so can I say to any woman (or man for that matter) reading this, be this a lesson to you: high-heel shoes are really stupid!

But there is something else in SANTIASCO, that I am yet to fully understand, a humour mixed in with the disgust that makes the place bareable for its 11 million or so inhabitants. Is it forebearance? No, this is too restrained. I´ll have a think about this and let you know about any working conclusions I may come to.

porno

2008-04-27T15:42:00.004+10:00

Now I guess I should preface this entry with a confession: I watch porn, gay porn. You know the stuff where men (mostly naked) touch, suck and insert their parts into other men? I mention this because before I go about moralising I should come clean. Pornography isn't exactly the most shining example of human expression there is, nor is admitting that I watch it my finest moment, but hey it's there and it serves its purpose (cough). I am not here to condemn it nor shout it down wholesale in some religious fervour, no but I do feel as gay men we are far too quick to justify questionable sexual activity with the broad brush stroke of liberalism. I am not talking here about pedophilia or beastiality videos (things that are truely indefensible) but something that at best receives little if any scrutiny and at worst general unquestioning acceptance within the gay male population. What I am talking about here is videos portraying the seduction of straight men.

There are many porn companies producing movies that portray supposed straight men performing sexual acts on themselves or on other men. In of itself this doesn't sound so bad. The gay porn industry abounds in rumours of "gay for pay" actors who are simply in it for the money and I have no problem with that, so much as it is their bodies and their lives. However there are videos that go beyond just a straight-identifying man having sex with other men. It is all in how it is presented. The website BrokeStraightBoys, for example, advertises that their guys are "...hot, they're straight but most of all these boys are broke. Real straight guys doing anything for money!" Again with the self incrimination. I have seen some of these videos or at least bits of them and and the men are made to look uncomfortable; this is part of the attraction it seems. This is not an isolated company, there are plenty of them, Seducing Straight Boys (an Australian company), god there is even a website that claims to hypnotise straight men into performing sexual acts.

This is not just about being sexually attracted to straight guys regardless of whether the men are acting or not. This is about showing men who due to circumstance are forced into performing sexual acts with themselves or others for our enjoyment, and might I say against their own nature (so-stated). BrokeStraightBoys state on their website that "Rather then lose their apartment, girlfriend, etc. they do sexual acts with other guys for some quick cash." Now I think "forced" is the imperative word here and any of us who get off on this sort of thing should do some serious introspection into their own darkened souls as to what exactly is exciting them.

Coming from a community that has fought so long and hard for social acceptance of our own sexual nature, fighting for the right to live as we are and not feel compelled to live like they do by getting married to the opposite sex and do acts we find contrary to our nature, we should not then want to see others put in the same situation, especially for our own sexual gratification. It is exploitation and it is ugly.

three days in Wilsons Prom

2008-04-21T16:06:00.000+10:00

I can feel my muscles rebuilding themselves, the warmth emanating from my shoulders, my thighs and calves, as their fibres reform and the bruises yellow and my blisters heal. I can barely move my right middle finger, inflammed and sore from having steadied my five kilo camping tent as it swung back and forth, negotiating an outcroping overlooking the deep blue bass strait on what was effectively a forty kay hike through the Wilsons Prom wilderness.

I've learnt some valuable lessons over the past few days. Firstly, while it is nice to have a three person tent to stretch out in, a roomy ante-chamber to hang my sweat soaked jeans up in, that towered above the other hikers' pitiful one man squats, having to carry it however is another thing entirely. The words "think before you pack" ran through my head like a mantra to the rhythm of my footfalls.

A large black raven sat perched on a branch overhanging the track, watching and waiting for me to pass. My housemate, John was a good five minutes ahead of me. His waist-strap on his backpack was about to snap, forcing all the weight onto his shoulders but I wouldn't find this out for another fifteen minutes when I came upon him on the side of the track cursing the makers but for now I was being watched by the pale blue eyes of the raven. Everytime I would pass it, waiting a moment or two, it would fly on ahead of me to wait again. It kept this up for maybe a kilometre or so. I'm not dead yet you bastard! I was nearly out of water.

Here in lies my second lesson. You know you can walk for eight hours and drink two litres of water and still not need to urinate. Before setting out on our over-night hike I was only intending to take a 600ml bottle of mt franklin until John made me buy two 1.25 litre bottles at the Tidal River general store and I drank most of that on the first day. John had to give me one of his bottles on the morning of the second making us both run dry. With a little over eight kilometres to go, our canteens empty, we were brought to drinking from a small stream.

We sat there by the running water cursing our bags, our aching bodies and my poor planning as we enjoyed another smoke. I looked up at John and said "You know, for all my hurt there has not been one point where I've said to myself, I don't want to be here. This place is so fucking beautiful." John looked up at me and smiled.

As we climbed away from our oasis, exhausted but no longer thirsty we were past, going the other way, by a couple dayhiking. The woman was dressed in a long black summer dress that fluttered about her in the wind, an oaks day hat and Jackie-O sunglasses. On her immaculately manicured and pastel painted toenailed feet were bright pink thongs.

Fucking hell! How depressing.

2008-04-07T19:37:00.004+10:00

It's been almost a month since we broke up, since I was dumped, drunk and in his house barely able to grasp what he was telling me, but then we weren't really together either and so like the war on meaning being perpetrated by one un-named superpower, orwellian goodspeak like, I wasn't really being dumped was I? I can tell, he said, that what you want is a boyfriend and I'm not really looking for that right now, my face blank with soused incomprehension. I actually had to message him the next day for clarification, saying "I don't have a clear recollection of the events last night but my vague understanding is that you've ended whatever was going on, yes?"

These three weeks now hang in some relational null space where I was denied the nomenclature, the right to definition, that my brain so needs to file and forget. He was my un-boyfriend in our un-relationship and that's about as good as I can manage. Just another un-event in my life that I can't own.

But words like "define" and "own" are bad, right? Who do I think I am John Hanning Speke? It was only three weeks after all and in my own defence I avoided words like "boyfriend" and "relationship" like they were tabu and they were. I gave him the distance I thought he wanted, and accommodated as best as I could as I explored this new world, keeping my developing taxonomy to myself (as best as I could).

It's true enough though, he had a point, I really did want a boyfriend. I had this fantasy, one that he actually suggested, where we were on a road trip heading west, sleeping by the beach in my new tent, cooking imaginatively prepared 2-minute noodles while a small pup yapped at our feet; excited just to be anywhere. But when I think about this un-dream, the dog is blurred, like a television prime-time news criminal, shifting brown and grey and then black. It stopped there, unfinished.

It is possible, I warrant that I was fixated more on the idea of being in a relationship, of wanting a boyfriend, with all these dreams and fantasies, than I was really interested in him and while I can see how the imposition of ideas upon reality is fraught with problems, the pressure it places on something new and fragile, someone was actually interested in me beyond the first night fuck and I was caught in the novelty of it all, the hope it offered, wanting to see where things lead. So for three weeks I stood confused, unsure what was really going on and then finally, three weeks later, it ended and now I am left no less confused. All I know is the un-relationship is gone and I am single again: solidly, verifiably single.

2008-03-27T22:22:00.002+11:00

I just wrote what would be a lengthy email to my friend in Chile, in spanish no less, asking him to forgive me for not responding to him sooner, while he writes within days of mine. I've wanted to write back earlier but every time I sit at the computer I just freeze up. There are several emails that are sitting in my inbox, left wanting a reply but I just can't bring myself to ... I don't know, get my thoughts down and send them via the interconnecting fibres that are the internet. I guess that's why this blog has for the last few months become all dusty and cobwebby. Why?

One theory: When I was a kid I was diagnosed with a learning disorder, apparently one side of my brain runs faster than the other. Effectively, as my honours' supervisor said that I have a great ball handling skills but once I get to kick the goal I don't know what to do with the ball. He was one with the football analogies. I think en largesse but I can't seem to get these things down on paper. It'll be a miracle if this even gets posted.

Another theory: I am scared. I can sit in front of a computer for an hour, writing, re writing and then deleting. The voices of my imaginary audience shouting me down: It lacks flow! Your prose is cliched and forced! Why are you even trying? they cry. Writing emails is even worse. I actually know who I am writing to and I can hear their voices, their criticisms of the sad state of being that is yo. As soon as I click that send button, my words are out of control in some madcapped Derrida deconstructuralist nightmare, wreaking their own havoc upon unsuspecting friends.

I am not sure I am making sense.

Theory three: I am fundamentally lazy. Sorry to anyone who never got a response to anything they ever sent me.

obiturary

2008-01-23T17:44:00.000+11:00

I don't normally like to comment on the shit that is reported in MX nor the lives of celebrity A lists, how they live or die, but leaving work today on my way to this internet cafe I stubbled across a copy: Heath Dead, it reads. My stomach dropped. I will admit that while I never felt he was a particularly strong actor, even his oscar nominated role as Ennis in Brokeback Mountain I wouldn't describe as unforgettable, however I liked his films good enough. Reading through the front page article I found myself absolutely disgusted, an emotion I commonly associate with this compost bin liner admittedly.

I will now quote the last few paragraphs from the article:

Reports Ledger was in an appartment owned by Mary-Kate Olsen were denied by her publicist Annette Wolf"
"She and her sister have an appartment in New York City [approximately 8.2 million people live in New York City] but they were not in this building."Wolf said.
The apartment is a six-room, three bedroom Soho loft with a monthly rent of $26,000. [Whose apartment, Ledger's or the twin Olsen's? Besides more importantly, is that in American or Australian dollars? I am looking for somewhere to live]

The article then briefly describes as a sidenote Ledger's film career.

Seriously some forms of journalism should be declared a crime against humanity.

the taxonomy of travel

2007-12-22T04:53:00.000+11:00

Most travellers you meet enjoy offering their opinion to you on other travellers, critising anyone from tour groups, gapsters, israelis, backpackers (generally), anyone who spends less that six months in anyone given place, someone that rides anything but local transport like colectivos or doesn`t hitch-hike their way around. The list is endless and I guess they`re all trying to me that most travellers haven`t really experienced South America; they don`t know the place; they have managed to travel for six months or so and haven`t picked up rudimentary spanish. They`ve followed what is known in the biz as the gringo trail and never left it; drinking with gringos, eating with gringos and sleeping with them, barely having left the hostel to partake in said activities.

But then surely to claim to know a place is also folly: a town, a city, a country, let alone an entire continent. By learning the language and leaving the hostel yes, I agree, you might end up having a richer more diverse and colourful experience. But what is South America? I`ve been told that on more than one occasion that Santiago and even Chile is not really part of South America. It`s too expensive and the kids wear designer clothing and their parents drive european or japanese cars on sealed roads, I am told. There are no crazy stories about riding on the roof of a petrol tanker in this country, no. One Australian,Adrian and I had the misfortune of speaking with, told us that he had felt like he had left South America as soon as the graffitti had changed from political slogans (Viva Eva Morales etc) of Bolivia to the tagging of the Chilean middle class. But what are we saying here, that South America is all chicken trucks and poverty and illiteracy and Jesus shrines in taxis. That you haven`t truly been South America until you`ve bribed a cop or had a gun pulled on you. Christ the worst that`s happen to me here is a kid threw a banana peel at me in Arequipa (it missed too). Is getting to know a gay Chileno a waste of my valuable time, since being gay is not particularly South American? How can South America have only one story? How can Santiago have only one story for that matter?

Besides all this talk about Santiago being more European than South American disguises not only the self interest of your average tourist but also the fact that Chile is expensive for Chilenos too and that the wealth here is actually concentrated in the hands of very few. According to this guy I met in San Pedro de Atacama (I know great research), Chile has the second biggest gap between rich and poor in all of South America.

All this talk about knowing a place seems to me as problematic as only leaving your hotel to visit Macchu Pichu; it ringing of colonialist adventureteering.

But what is all this about: this travelling thing? Why do we feel compelled to leave our sunny shores? Is it something noble, like the desire to expand our horizons, explore strange new lands etc? Or something more base, like the freedom to act up, drink and have sex when one feels that mummy can`t see you? Maybe it`s just about saying I did it, pointing to a map and saying I`ve been here so we can say we didn`t waste our lives.

Really when you think about it, being a tourist is kind of problematic in itself. There are extremes of course such as sex tourism, but on the whole what purpose does leaving your home to seek that of another the sole purpose of your entertainment? I mean seeking out the exotic, seriously? We are truely the direct descendents of those colonial explorers, that those in camp left deride so. Is a traveller no different, sticking our fingers into everything and ruining whatever we touch?

Is there a good way to travel?

green-go

2007-12-14T09:21:00.000+11:00

Maybe it is getting a little late to be having these thoughts, asking these questions and then ranting them at you all through what is likely to be some messy and drunken prose.

I`ve been in Santiago a week now and I find myself getting a little too comfortable. I`ve got friends here and I`ve met this chileno called Julio and well, I am not so sure what to make of that. I am supposed to hang out with him tomorrow and part of me hopes that he`ll end what I think is just a elongated one night stand.

I am just so used to rejection that it has become the less scary of the two paths.

He doesn`t speak very much english, in fact I speak more spanish, but this has so far proved less an obstacle and more of a source of amusement as he both ridicules and compliments my attempts, between our kissing como los peces.

He explained to me the other night the origins of the word gringo. Apparently at time of the conquest of Mexico, the spaniard conquistadores were wearing the colour green in their uniform and the word makes reference to that: GREEN-GO. Fuck off foreigner!

As Kermit the Frog said: "it`s not easy being green."

As the Clash said: "should I stay or should I go."

salar de uyuni

2007-12-05T02:25:00.000+11:00

"I´d heard bad things about this Tour company, I´d been told this driver was bad and that this has happened before."

I snapped finally, "Your right Thomas, fine, you predicted this all but how does that help us? Seriously? How does this help our current situation?" The arrogant bastard finally went quiet after carrying on the entire two days with smug self satifaction, lecturing us every topic imaginable. I had clashed with him a few times, coming up against his soft fascist opinions but had generally pulled out, avoiding a front on collision. Dylan was driving the jeep now but only after Margot had confronted our driver Roberto, and we had argued between us for over half an hour in the middle of the desert 4,800 metres above sea level. Our driver was so drunk, he was swaying side to side, his eyes blood red.

Now I´d like to tell you all about the sheer desolate beauty of the Salar and the drive to the Chilean border but I am afraid the last day is likely to dominate most of my memories of it. Bolivia has such beauty and I think they are very proud of it, but what do they do with it?

"I am not getting back in there with him. I don´t care if I have to sit in the desert and wait for another jeep." She sat on the side of the road in the sand. "I am not playing with my life," she yelled at the driver in spanish. Thomas intervened, only making the situation worse as he explained how because Margot was Belgium she had higher expectations.

"You don´t like Bolivia," Roberto began to get heated and I pulled Thomas away, saying that Ruth who was Peruvian was better at talking with him.

Roberto had been up all night with several other drivers and guides drinking at Laguna Colorada, our stop for the second night. According to the guy I am sharing a room with in San Pedro de Atacama and has been travelling through South America, on and off, for more than twenty years, there has been a major problem with tour drivers for years now. He said that on one occasion an Israeli tour group fresh from military service actually tied an intoxicated driver to the roof of their jeep, taking over the driving. He is now working with one tour company to install a satellite dish and a TV in one of the major stop-offs in the hope of distracting the drivers from the drink.

"You are all stupid," he said to us, reddening in the face. I began to fear that he might actually drive off with us leaving us in the middle of nowhere with our bags still on the roof of his jeep. Now at the time I was prepared to get back in the car and risk it rather than wait in the desert, but I could understand where Margot was coming from and chose to keep my mouth shut. I was confused and totally out of my depth and my nerves were beginning to fray. Neil, the pasty redhead who burned through clothing approached me while I was standing in front of the car, hoping to disuade any drive off.

"You seem to very laid back about everything."

"Oh no," I replied, my voice shaking. "No I am not." Right then I felt like crying.

Finally another jeep arrived and that driver was able to talk Roberto down and convince him to let one of us drive. Dylan, the amiable and hyperactive Alaskan took the wheel, having some experience with mining vehicles. He actually proved best at calming Roberto, reassuring him that he liked his car and responded positively to the directions the were given between changing CDs, singing and passing in and out of consciousness.

On our way to the Chilean border we encountered another jeep, the driver knowing Roberto, agreed to take those not heading to Chile back to Uyuni. I think the reality, Roberto now awake, had started to sink in as he began to apologise to us all, his mouth full of coca and still slurring his words.

This left Dylan and myself in the jeep alone with Roberto for maybe another ten minutes to the border. Tears began to well up in his eyes as he told me that his wife was going to kill him and how his dreams of owning more jeeps and expanding were seemingly destroyed.

Now I was not angry. I actually felt sorry for him (and suppose I still do). He has a problem, a very human problem but what happened was very unprofessional and from all I hear this activity is likely to continue. The Salar de Uyuni was one of the most beautiful things I have seen since arriving here in South America and the companies in Uyuni that run these tours do a disservice to a Bolivia that hopes tourism will improve their lives.

"All it takes is an international company to come in and steal away what truely is a tourist goldmine from these small short sighted companies who do nothing but bicker amongst themselves and change nothing, improve nothing," said my room mate.

potosí and the temple of doom (aka cerro rico)

2007-11-29T06:49:00.000+11:00

I mean no disrespect by this title. I will admit I had misgivings about visiting the mines of Potosí, having had several discussions with travellers along my ways about the pros and cons of such turismo: ¿irresponsable o no? In hindsight I don´t think the tour was like the "watching monkeys work" that one backpacker described it. At no point did I feel like I was in a zoo, behind a glass window watching the workers perform. This was their workplace and there was no forgetting this. And what a workplace!! As I struggled to breath in the hot dust filled air, inhaling the same toxic gases, crawling through (and sometimes sliding down) the same narrow tunnels they worked their fucking arses off. And while I lent my hand at unladdening a rubber basket of rubble that contained zinc and lead (the mountain´s main offering to the cooperatives now that the silver was drying up) and I helped to clear a track to make way for one of those iron trolleys from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, so they could dump more ore. I felt like passing out. The hard work that these men and boys do now renders the term meaningless when describing anything I do in the future. I would die down there, taken away from my office and my phone and computer and climate controlled airconditioning.

But the I guess they do die down here. While Pedro, our guide, never gave us numbers, accidents did happen, which was not supprising when the technology many of the miners were using came straight from the nineteenth century. The others, well they contracted silicosis pneumonia: la pulmón negra. Our guide himself worked in the mines for five years from when he was teenager. It was only night study and luck that got him a job in tourism and his stairway out of hell. And they call it as much, with little statues of el diablo, the god of the underground, strewn through the complex of tunnels of Cerro Rico. They offer alcohol, coca leaves, cigarettes to the devil on Fridays, asking for safework and a plentiful bounty from his domain. The devil incidently looks like the whiteman.

Pedro said his father had been working down there for 30 years and his grandfather now bedridden, was dying from his life spent down there. Patting his chest, Pedro said he himself had the black lung. Tellingly there is a street, a very long steet in Potosí lined with lawyers´offices and I am told that the demand from widows to get some recompense from the mine cooperatives is quite high.

But barely any of the miners wear gas masks, too expensive, too hot and hard to breath, Pedro said, preferring to chew huge wads of coca leaf that bulge from their cheeks, working anywhere between eight to twelve hour shifts, pushing trolleys that weight several tonnes, shovelling and digging and exploding dynamite (I´ll get to that). The workmen we were talking with, were bemoaning that a trolley had broken down somewhere in the upper levels and had delayed work. They told us that they could be there until ten or even two AM to finish the job and they would still have to return the next morning at nine to begin it all again. Just another day in their six day week.

What choice did the men of Potosí have? Poorly educated, some who spoke only basic spanish (their first language being quechua), Pedro said, and with Bolivia a very poor country, employment was not plentiful and the mine is Potosí´s primer form of work. Without it the town would likely cease to exist. Tourism too was dropping, our guide saying he only took two groups down a week now, which was nowhere near peak.

The miners liked gringitos, Pedro said, getting their cut of our tour fees plus getting the gifts we brought, soft drink, dynamite, smokes and coca leaves.

The experience is not an easy one. I don´t recommend it for claustrophobes or asthmatics but the guidebooks say as much. I do think it is worth it though, for two hours down there it will be a while before you will complain about your job again.

Oh did I mention dynamite? Yes there were the explosions. Pedro at the beginning of our tour told us at the conclusion of our tour we would get to detonate some TNT. Handing different sticks of dynamite at the miners´market, he told us that in Bolivia you can buy and explode it without a license or even giving a name at point of purchase. Children buy it, certain "social groups" in Sucre buy it, pointing to the current unrest there. He laughed, asking whether any of us were married. Perfect solution! Bring your mother-in-law to Bolivia and buy some TNT. KaBOOM.

He shook my stick of dynamite, explosive powder falling down my vest onto my shirt. I winced. Bolivian miners, he said preferred the Bolivian TNT and not the powdery substandard Peruvian stick that I held. Note to anyone thinking of entering the mines of Cerro Rico to strike it rich; buy Bolivian dynamite.

2007-11-16T09:33:00.000+11:00

The images of Jesus, the mother Mary and various saints are all over the shop in South America. You cannot ride in a taxi or a bus or walk into a corner store without the some holy visage hanging from the rear view mirror or the cash register. And I now think I know why. They need all the help they can get. A few days ago on the road between the Jungle town of Puerto Maldonado and Cuzco my bus broke down in the middle of the Andes and refused to start. It was approximately ten-to-one and pitch black and freezing cold outside. Now my spanish is bad at the best of times but at this time of morning with no coffee the only word I was understanding was "gringo" and since I was the only foreigner on the bus I guess they were talking about me.

As passing trucks stopped, passengers in small numbers gathered their things together and disappeared into the night. I attempted to have a broken conversation with the driver about the prospects of a pick up. He did not seem optimistic, at least as far as I could understand. Maybe around 3 am a man entered the bus and asked me if I was going to Cuzco. As soon as I answered yes, my backpack was flung onto the roof of a petrol tanker with the words peligro emblasoned across it, and I was invited with a helping hand to climb up. Once aboard I was handed a flimsy blanket, too small for my large gringo frame and with a few moth eaten holes in it.

I was coughing and splurting phlegm like a machine and I seriously thought I might contract pneumonia or something. As I mentioned my spanish is bad at the best of times but I must admit I was supprised at the concern the other passengers showed me. As I understood it one of the older men riding up front near the cabin, who seemed to command some sort of seniority and respect instructed one of the younger passengers, maybe in his 20s to huddle up against me to keep me warm. He then handed me a few sheets of toilet paper to wipe the snot from my face.

The sight of sunrise over the Andes might have been a little more spectacular had it not been for the bighting wind and cold but as we arrived in a small town called Urcos, perhaps 5 hours after the pickup and still a few hours out of Cuzco, the same men helped me with my bags from the tanker and escorted me to the main square to ensure I got on the right bus.

I don`t know their names or where they`re from but if there is God in the heavens above let He/She bless the fuck out of them.

2007-11-07T07:34:00.000+11:00

Don`t get me wrong Cuzco is a swell town. It`s touristy yes, when every second local is trying to sell you something, yes. There is even this five-year-old-kid who wanders round Plaza de Armas at 3 am, approaching drunk grigos saying "mis amigos, ¿como estan? Buy my candy." The cusceños seem so willing to sell everything. I mean plastered over every boleto turistico (tourist ticket), a ten day pass to various cultural and archeological sites, is a warning that Peru does not support sex tourism. It may not support it but it`s there.

I was in a bar called UpTown a few days ago with a friend enjoying our free courtesy drink, watching the gringos gyrate up against local cusqueña women. It has been explained to me that these women are not there for a good night, the dancing, the music or just to meet a nice gringo man to take home to introduce to mamá. No they are there working. Called Bricheras, these women sidle up to single (well) gringo men and do almost anything and everything to get drinks out of them. You see, these women are paid commission for the drinks that get sold and some are willing even to go home with these gringos if it means a few more drinks. There is actually graffiti plastered all over the hostel that I was staying at that warns heteros to watch those "Brichera bitches" who`ll take you for everything you`re worth.

But this assumes that these poor gringos are innocent in these transactions. They know exactly what they want and all to happy to take some Peruvian chick for a ride, god forbid they should be exploited. Nothing is ever equal in love and war. And these locals are not just stupid yokels.

And I think this is why I respect the cusqeños and I suppose any population that live in a tourist trap. My friend from New Zealand, Shaun would get pretty irrate whenever some hawker approached us in mid conversation trying to sell us her wares, "you buy, yes", "massage for you hansome," but as I see things they`re just doing their job.

I think Cusco is kinda like an Apartheid state, you have the gringos on one side and the locals on the other and there is a big wall that divides them. There are gringo bars, restaurants and hospedajes and while I am getting this second hand, the local bars here have a general no gringo policy. Sort of like that infamous colonial sign "No dogs and gringos allowed."

Side note: On 31 October my hostel "The Point" hosted a Halloween party. I went dressed as "the death of free speech", with a piece of paper stuck in my hat that read "FREE PRESS" (spanish translation on the opposite side) and wore a noose around my neck. "So it`s metaphorical?" an American called Mike asked me. Yes, I guess so, I replied. "I think you`ve missed the point of halloween, my friend. Halloween isn`t supposed to be subtle or witty". Mike for his part was dressed as an indigenous woman in brightly coloured hat and dress and a baby doll strapped onto his back. There is a fine line between being funny and offensive and he was definately teetering over to the offensive side. A Canadian named Misha entered the room wearing almost exactly the same costume. I slapped my head.

The hostel was opening it`s doors to the general public and as a consequence bumped up it`s drink prices. "Fuck this, let`s go drink on the streets."

So as it transpired it there were two gringos dressed as local women wandering round the streets of Cusco, drunkenly asking kids for money and candy in bad and very loud spanish, another American called Cody dressed as GI Joe, shooting strangers and trying to handcuff them and Joseph dressed as a Robot and I standing back drinking our vodka.

At first I was worried we would be taken the wrong way (or should I say the right way). But no the locals really seemed to find us funny. They were laughing and taking photos, wolf whisting at the boys in drag. We were drawing a crowd and there was even a guy with his handy-cam filming us.

This was great. Cusco the tourist mecca of Peru were being given the opportunity to turn their cameras back on us.

el camino Inka

2007-11-02T09:32:00.000+11:00

Everyone has to sacrifice something to walk through the sacred valley of the Incas, and on the last day racing the daybreak to the Sun Gate, the entrance to Machu Picchu, I sacrificed a bowel movement and clean teeth in order to wake at four and had to rely on instinct to shove my shit into my backpack.

These four days of hiking through the path have possibly been the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done. Not only did we need to walk between four and eight hours a day but the altitude made me huff and puff at even the slightest exertion. As we climbed close to the summit of Abra Warmiwañuska (also dubbed Dead Woman´s Pass) on the second day we reached of around 4 200 metres above sea level. Then there was the steep climb down on narrow steps which was made increasingly dangerous as the rain was pelting down. It´s funny how such a little people the Quechua were/are (Incas) could make such big fucking steps.

The tour that I took followed the old path built by the Quechua over 500 years aho, and curved like a rainbow through a variety of ecosystems and archeological sites. Being from the great flat that is Australia, I could help but stop and just stare around me at the glacier capped mountains that just seemed to rise and rise into the clouds. When I use the word sublime, I mean it in the sense that I was belittled by nature to the point of insignificance. I can see why the old Quechua worshiped and sacrificed to these mountains or who they called Amu, the mountain gods.

Walking through dense subtropical jungle, following the path, I came across a clearing. As my eyes drew up I beheld the ruins of what was once a Incan agricultural centre, the terraced farms that rode the mountain up, topped by stone buildings with their doorways that inclined at 13 degrees. I felt like I was in some pre-adolescent boy´s adventure novel, where the hero discovered a lost city in the heart of the jungle.

And in typical colonialist fashion, while we were beaten down by rain and wind, every lunch and dinner we found our camp laid out by an army of faithful porters, 19 in number. They had our dining tent set up, with tea and coffee (with popcorn) available while they prepared our dinner, the best food that I´ve eaten in South America and possibly sometime before I left Australia.

The porters never ceased to amaze me. No more than 5foot5 they carried possible two to three times the weight I carried (they carried possibly between 20 and 30kg) yet they were able to bound up and down steps in sandles or ripoff converse allstars, passing us on their way to set up our camp. This disparity took some getting used to, as I pushed my body to exhausion each day only to reach camp and be treated like some honoured guest. We must have appeared as oddities to them. What the fuck were we doing there? Paying their wages I suppose.

As a side note, our first guide Carlos told us that their were two paths to Machu Picchu from the capital Q`osco. One was a trading route that ran supplies and messages between the capital, Machu Picchu and the various stations between. This was the short and direct way. The longer path that we were walking was the pilgramage. Carlos said that it was a way of cleansing oneself and it was the path that the Inca himself would have taken.

Addendum: I sit on a rock eating a mandarin beside a mountain lake, placing the skin and pips in a side pocket of my backpack. Being neither the fittest or the slowest of the group I`ve found myself hiking alone. Sipping water diluted gatorade I look about me. I watch the tiniest of birds flitter about the water chasing each other as cloud slowly rolls down off the moutain. All I can hear is their songs and all is good.

Further Addendum: On the last night I sat and talked with our second guide Raul as we waited dinner. I asked him about the problems facing the trail. He said that numbers on the trail had been reduced and hikers had to go with an approved tour company and that laws had been introduced to encourage responsible and sustainable conduct. He said that once a year in February the path was closed for a month so that cleaning and restoration could be carried out. Was this enough? I asked. No. Combined with natural erosion and current levels of use geologists, he said, had calculated that the Inca Trail would be gone in approximately ten years. There was a law introduced by the Peruvian government that prohibits porters from carrying more than 20 kgs. When I first heard about this law I thought it was there to protect the welfare of the porters. I was wrong, apparently the porters are happy to carry more weight, as more weight means more money in which to feed their families. No, the law is there to protect the trail. "You saw how the porters run down the mountain?" It is only one of the problems.

Closing the trail to preserve it is not an option. Fundamentally Peru needs tourism. Cusco makes a lot of money off us gringos and this wealth means education and health and public works.

The question is, had I known all of this would I have still gone on the trek? Would others? Should I have known?

2007-10-25T07:08:00.000+10:00

I left Arequipa yesterday with Sarah, seen off my Lindsey and Wayra. The first of many farewells I suppose. Wayra, before we left to catch our bus to Cuzco, said to me that while we had only known each other a short time, he could tell we were all good and pure people. He said, as I understood it with my bad spanish, that he knew this from when we first met at Cruz del Condor, as we sat about freezing our balls off waiting for the sun to rise and the condor to fly us by. He said we were different from the other tourists that he meets in Chivay and along the Canyon, and that with my bad spanish, Lindsey`s better spanish and Sarah`s amusing mistakes, we were able to exchange jokes and laughs and eventually email addresses. He said that while we were from different cultures and beliefs, what was important that we felt, pressing his fist to his chest.

We hugged and he kissed me on the cheek saying "hasta luego mi hermano" and we saluted each other, fist to heart, fist to sky.

I think this is my first real connection here in South America, life is about feeling something I guess. I just wish I knew what that something was.

seventy bottles of beer later

2007-10-21T13:06:00.000+10:00

I am in Chivay, a small slightly touristy town at the mouth of the Colca Canyon (the world`s second deepest canyon. The first being located somewhere close by) is something of a ghost town as I write this entry in my moleskin slightly hungover, sitting in the shade of what is usually a bustling market. Today, the 21 Octubre 2007 is El Censo Nacional. A day where Peruvians are required to remain in their homes from 6 am to 6pm while Census Officials go door to door counting the people as police parade the streets enforcing the curfew. Tourists are exempt to this of course and I can see a few about taking photos and looking for somewhere to eat and drink while some tourist restaurants that have received excemptions from this enforced closure. Well at least this is my understanding. As I sit here in the shade however, writing, more and more locals appear from closed doors having, I assume been ticked off by officials, and the police themselves seem to have regressed to milling about outside their station chatting.

Later today Lindsay and Sarah (an American and Brit who I met in Lima) are supposed to meet up with some locals we met at Cruz del Condor yesterday, while trying to catch a glimpse of some big fucking bird with a wingspan of 4.3 metres; members of a Peruvian folk band. They invited us back to their place for a fiesta last night, which as it turned out was a small room with only a matress and a TV, out back of a souvineer shop. We drank, smoked and chewed coca leaves as they entertained us with guitar, pan flute and singing. This is one of those experiences I suppose that as a tourist you can only dream of, practicing my spanish and learning (and subsequently forgetting) words in Quechua. This night symbolised if nothing else by our passing through the curtin at the back of their shop.

I would like to claim credit for last night but truely the draw card of the night was the two girls I was with. Lindsey was quite comfortable with what can only be described as Wayra`s (one of the senior members of the band) less than subtle come-ons but Sarah was let´s say, less comfortable with the advances of Edgar, who stuck his arm around her continuously asking me how to say she was beautiful in english. Saying te quiero, te quiero (I love you, I love you). As Sarah spoke no Spanish and Edgar, no English, it was up to me to turn him down, explaining to him that she had a boyfriend.

As the beer passed around, hand to hand, and we became increasingly drunk, talk turned to sex and in particular my sexual preferences. "¿Quieres las mujeres? ¿Te gustan las peruanas?" I stumbled, unsure how to answer this question to a group of drunk men who came from clearly muchismic culture, who were already talking about having sex with beautiful curvacious women. "Sì, yeah, um sì." Fuck, why did I say that? Should I have been honest and said "no me gusta, yo prefiero hombres"? But I suppose there in lies our problem.

Apparently tonight I am to go to some discoteca with two of the younger members of the band, Chi Chi and Eduard who want to find a Peruvian lady to have sex with me... oh my. What I am I to do?

on the toilet in Arequipa

2007-10-17T19:35:00.000+10:00

It was those god damn chicken empanadas that I´d ate in one of Arequipa´s main terrapuertos (bus stations). We were hungry and bored waiting for some fellow Australianos who had got the bus from Lima after us. Two hours we had to burn and while preparing a welcome sign had taken all of 2 minutes, we found this dingy cafe at the back of the bus stop. I jumped at that choice on the menu, having had such wonderful experiences with empanadas in Santiago. Those crisp pastries, wrapped over flavoursome insides of meat, tomato, mushrooms and a variety of other choices, only to find a floppy, damp, microwaved imitation slapped down in front of me.

Now I am sitting hunched over, shitting my guts out with a mild bout of food poisoning. Perhaps the gods are telling me something with their usual ironic mirth, laughing at my expense, that I should´ve stuck to my guns and stayed a vegetarian. Their joke on me is I suppose that I get food poisoning from eating chicken when all those around me (a total of seven) are all vegetarians (save one other) and my arguments for breaking fall on deaf ears, that vegetarianism was too difficult and restrictive in South America, when some of them have been on the continent for more than six months. None of them have had food poisoning by the way. Bastards!

on the road to Arequipa

2007-10-15T21:34:00.000+10:00

It´s all class , pure 100% class riding Peru´s top line Coach service Cruz del Sur on my way to the white city Arequipa. Treated to dinner, including a detailed description of the cultural and geographical origin of each component of our dish. Swanky you say? Yes, well as swanky as any airline food is I suppose: microwaved and a little plasticy in consistency.

As we ate the hostess played a turistico video about the Southern region of Peru, around a city called Tacna, which was presented by a bikini clad Limeña, giggling as she listened to leathery old fishermen hawking tours. As the film wound on she took off more and more clothing, finishing in this g-string number that rode right up between her pert buttocks. Dios mio!

After dinner we were treated to an en route Bingo game. I could barely believe it as our hostess began handing out the game cards. My travelling partner, Lindsay couldn´t help but laughting, yelling out to a friend a few seats back, asking if we were really at a Catholic church fundraiser. The prize was a free (non-transferable) ticket between Lima and Arequipa. When a man finally yelled out BINGO, he was invited to the rear of the bus and asked to say a few words into the microphone: "Thank you señora, for your good service and the fun game." Gracias señor, gracias, she replied.

Stopping about five hours into our journey we picked up a couple elderly nuns in full penguin regalia. By this time we´d finished with the tourist video, which I was relieved about. To be honest I am not sure I could have withstood the collective shame regardless of my own sexuality. It would´ve been comparable to seeing breasts on TV as a teenager when your mum was still in the room.

the trouble with Chilenos

2007-10-12T01:03:00.000+10:00

Valparaiso, about an hour-and-a-half out of Santiago, is all bright colours and has an arty/bohemian vibe that makes me feel like I could settle in here quite nicely but then again it also has fifty percent unemployment and packs stray dogs mauling and fucking each other. So I guess it´s not all blue skies and sunshine.

Regardless I am convinced that there is a gay/lesbian etc scene here in Valpo. I can smell it, sense the vibrations, like the rattle of the ancensor Espiritu Santo that I climbed to see Matta´s street mural. On my wanderings through the winding colourful streets I found this small bar near Plaza Ambal Pinto that had had pro abortion poster on the door. Inside behind the bar, were two women hugging and kissing. Now I don´t wish to jump to too many conclusions here as it is infinately difficult to tell in the country the difference between simply affection between friends and romance.

On my first night I hung out with some of Adrian´s Santiago friends. We went to what was supposed to be an after party for some Mexican hip-hop crew called Molitov, with Adrian´s friend Olga, a crazy but very cool Chilena, got our names on the dorr. The club was located in the upstairs of the arthouse Cine Alameda which seemed to be hosting a gay film festival (if I get time I´ll have to go see a film). The music was great! They were playing the clash, Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode and heaps of other cool musica both International and South American.

Why I mention all of this is because one of Olga´s friends, I think his name is Mauricio, was very very friendly with me, almost to the point of pushing his crotch into my leg. Thing is I think this is how straight chilenos act when they are drunk. It´s very confusing, yes, as he was rubbing his face against mine and telling me that we were very good friends.

But then if I hoped to see a rainbow sticker or something or the sort I think I am going to be disappointed. If I am going to discern South America´s gay life from the background radiation thrown up the continent´s overpowering muchismo then I am going to have to retune my gaydar.

Anyway folks ciao for now.

*While I am typing this there is a techno beat on the radio repeating the words: "I want to be a cowboy/ no soy gay."

2007-09-28T23:49:00.000+10:00

I woke this morning barely able to roll out of bed. I seem to go through these cycles of intense dreaming where for a week or so the neurons in my head fire like some crazy electrical storm and I wake feeling like shit, tired, irritable, etc.

Last night I dreamt that I moved into a new place with a few friends, an old terrace apartment in some innercity suburb. While moving furniture, one of my friends called me and the other housemate over to show us what he'd found. In the centre of the living room, hidden under an ancient dustmite ridden rug was an ornate iron manhole that was covered in these geometric lines. A design that you might expect to have seen in blueprints to some 19th century timepiece.

Failing to open it, I began to beat my fist against it, and as a joke began yelling at the top of my lungs, asking if anyone was down there. We froze, silent as the sound of splashing could be distinctly heard from the bottom of whereever that hole led. Silence.

At first it was just the one voice that cried out. If you could call it a voice I suppose: high-pitched but guttural if that makes any sense, inhuman to say the least and then it was followed by more, three, five or ten frantic cries. What the fuck had we stirred up? I asked myself shitscared. What the fuck had we signed a lease to?

Returning from the supermarket that day, I walked into the living room to find a couch over the hole and my friend sitting there watching television. I tried unsuccessfully to broach the topic but no one wanted to talk about it.

2007-09-22T16:14:00.000+10:00

What's all this hoo-har about Pol Pot winning "Britain's got Talent"? Firstly I thought he was dead and secondly I didn't know he could sing and if he could, what the hell!?! Nessun Dorma for christs-sake! And what the fuck does ITV think it is doing, having a genocidal dictator on its programme? Seriously, they're exploiting the deaths of more than 3 million Cambodians for nothing more than a few rating points! Geez! Someone should do something about this.

fear of the werewolf

2007-09-18T23:08:00.000+10:00

By day Wolf became Man. He would only recall this other life like one remembers nightmares. Flashes of strange and great things, of electric lights and cars and office buildings that rose so high they pierced the sky. But the traffic and noise, the flickering of his computer screen was unbearable and encroaching on his waking life. It was like the beating wings of an enourmous hornet, buzzing buzzing so loud that it became deafening. Wolf felt something dying inside of him. His senses dulled and he lost his joy in the hunt. Wolf could no longer smell their fear, hear their desperate footfalls or taste the blood, sinews of the flesh, feel the texture of broken bone. Not like he could before. It had all become bland and colourless.

Wolf feared he was becoming Man.

2007-09-18T21:21:00.000+10:00

He breathed deep as he slept, my arm interlocking beneath his, held tight as I smelt the nape of his neck, the perfume, sweat, hair and product. I drew it in as I listened to the sound he made, slightly nasal, blocked, forced and as I too began to fall into sleep swore that in it, I could hear the calls of sea birds and the rush of the ocean....

...I woke with his hands brushing gently along my arm, wishing that things would not go this way, that I could just lay against him as the daylight faded. Maybe all I wanted was to feel his warmth, hear his heart beat and hold him for just a while longer and know that I am needed and wanted and loved. But then I heard the clink clank of his belt buckle and I reached down to help him remove his jeans.

2007-09-02T20:56:00.000+10:00

This rather dark clip is from a film called The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) and is a "feature-length Claymation fantasy [that] follows the adventures of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn as they stowaway aboard the interplanetary balloon of Mark Twain. Twain, disgusted with the Human Race, is intent upon finding Halley's Comet and crashing into it, achieving his "destiny." It's up to Tom, Becky, and Huck to convince him hat [sic] his judgement is wrong, and that he still has much to offer humanity that might make a difference. Their efforts aren't just charitable; if they fail, they will share Twain's fate. Along the way, they use a magical time portal to get a detailed overview of the Twain philosophy, observing the "historical" events that inspired his works."

Plot summary is from IMDB

2007-08-31T19:02:00.000+10:00

I can't help but think now that there is a cafe in Brunswick that I can no longer walk into. A cafe that when I walk past, I'll have to drop my eyes awkwardly and increase my step. There'll be no more red lentil dhal for me.

I went home with the barista on Wednesday night and he hasn't called. He said he'd call me as he left Thursday morning with a kiss and that'd we'd hang out tonight, Friday night but here I sit alone with just my second wine a little to my right, keeping me company.

He did say such nice things, oh such nice things. He told me all about what we would do on future dates, a trip to the zoo to meet his orangutans on Saturday and then waking in each others' arms and the morning sex we'd have that he so enjoyed; he bemoaned my leaving to South America in a month and talked about hooking up when I got back. He told me emphatically that this was not a one night stand and I believed him.

It seemed to go all so well, surprisingly so, well until I suppose he didn't call.

***********

There is a voice in my head that tells me that the nice things he said were all true. That he meant every word of it. That I was engaging and intelligent, that my eyes had both depth and insight beyond my years yada yada.... and then he saw me naked. There is a voice in my head that talks about the economy of beauty versus intellect, that if you are lacking in one, to attract a mate you must compensate with the other. However this voice reminds me that in all my sexual encounters no one has ever called the next day or returned that text that is doing its very best to hide its disappointment.

Sebastián

2007-08-28T22:42:00.000+10:00

Cuando Sebastián era un joven, vivía en San Miguel o como es conocido mejor, Debajo de la Loma, el suburbia de los muertos en nuestra capital. Debo poner de relieve sin embargo, cuando yo digo no lo digo "vivía" porque de la costumbre, no. Como todos sabemos que nadie no viven en este lugar por decirlo así, solo los muertos andan los calles. Pues excepto Sebastián quien fue todavía en la flor de la vida.

El mundo de los muertos no es tan diferente que el mundo de los vivos. Trabajan y pagan los impuestos como nosotros que respirar. Sebastián trabajaba allí y aún jugaba en un equipo de futbol. Él fue trabajando en una empresa de contabilidad en el norte de Debajo de la Loma. Le gustaba allí aunque no estaba seguro de que quería trabajar por el resto de su vida. Le gustaba su jefe y sus colegas, y el trabajo le pagaba suficiente, con horas que podría dedicarse a las interés afuera su empleo.

Sin embargo los padres de Sebastián no le parecían con sus elecciónes. Le llamaron una noche expresar sus sensaciones exactamente, pues más o menos.
–¿Es esa chica tuyo? ¿Qué se llama?– Su madre preguntó, aunque lo conocía.
–Alejandra mamá.
–Sí Sí, eso es. ¿Le cohabitas con ella todavía?– A la madre de Sebastián el olvido fue una arma retórica.
–Sí mamá, todavía vivimos juntos.
–¿Comó puedes decir "vivimos" cuando ella no tiene un latido de corazón?– Su madre dijo por lo bajo.
–¡Mamá!– Sebastián suplicó. Entonces para Sebastián conversación con su madre hubo llegado a ser así.

Hace un año Sebastián conoció Alejandra. En aquella tiempo no sabía que Alejandra ha muerto, no. El primer tiempo clavó los ojos en ella fue en lugar que se llama El Cuervo Cabido, un bar pequeño que jugaba el jazz para los aficianados. Ya sabemos que haya unos días del año cuando los muertos estan permidado caminar con los vivos. Generalmente guardan las distancías, pues excepto cuando deben realizar sus ritos ancestrales pero eso es una vez al año. No importa, para Sebastián estuvo el amor a primera vista, pensó que hubo mirado una angel y se le acercó al lado y trabó una conversación.

Sebastián fue tratando de callarse porque Alejandra estuvo en el cuarto siguiente.
–Mamá, por favor. No quiero discutir contigo.– Él dijo en voz baja, oyendo un supiro desde su madre.
–Hable con tu padre.– Dijo bruscamente. –Aquí Jorge, hable con tu hijo.
–Hola Seb ¿comó estas?
–Hola papá, estoy bien, ¿y tu? ¿Comó va el barco? El padre de Sebastián construía los barcos modelos escalas. Estaba construyendo un galeón español. Fue el gran amor de él y Sebastián sospechó a veces que su padre lo enamoraba más que su madre.
–Va lentamente pero es mejor tener cuidado que romperlo.
Sebastián podría escuchar su madre en el fondo.
–¡Digale! Digale nuestro hijo que el sobrino de Luisa me preguntó el otro día si él fue un necrofilo. Me da vergüenza pensar lo que le digan de él. ¡Me moriré de vergüenza!
Su padre sonaba cansado. –Tu madre me pedió....
–Yo le oí.– Sebastián dijo bruscamente.
Después hubo un momento de silencio en cual Sebastián pensó que oiga un ruido, un zumbido, talvez hubo alguna humidad en la linea.
–Digale adiós a mamá y quedate bien papá.
–También Seb. Hasta luego.– Después colegó el teléfono.

2007-08-27T20:42:00.000+10:00

"Twenty-six degrees and still winter," my work colleague raised his head over the partition to talk to me. "You know, I think you might be right about with what you were saying the other day."

I paused to think. "What, you mean global warming!?!" I replied with incredulity, realising only too late that he was taking the piss.

"Yup," he said, smiling mischievously.

2007-08-11T23:32:00.000+10:00

Is it wrong to have fallen for my travel agent? It was love at first sight as they say when I sat down in Student Flights opposite him a few weeks ago as rain poured down outside. I gushed over him as he tried to sell me travel insurance, a diamond stud on his nose, just visable as it glints and gleams in the light as he tilts his head thoughtfully, to the side and back, comparing flight prices and destinations and taxes. The wooden brown-beaded necklace that is suspended amongst his fine sandy chest hair, peeping through his v-neck and open clean white shirt. I drew in his fresh smelling cologne, imagining my fingers moving, exploring through his fine fair chest hair.

However it is as they say "against the bylaws of the International Order of Travel Agents [which I assume he is a member of] to get involved with clients." Yes rules are rules, says Mr Lies.* And besides I think he's straight.

Well forget my sad attempts at flirting with a straight man, my ticket is now confirmed and my leave is approved so goddamn it, I guess I'm going to South America.

****************

Standing here, at Jewel train station, waiting for the 9:05 city loop, late for work again, I stare into the sky: a blue cloudless dome. In the distance I see a lone Qantas bird climb steadily on its way to thirty-thou.

I buckle my safety-belt and look through the plexi-glass and think: who's really leaving whom? Maybe I'm here just sitting still and the city of greater Melbourne falls away below, leaving me and I am hit with a wave of loneliness.

I turn back, fighting off the melancholy for just a while longer. Glad I suppose that something's moving, changing at least and I settle into my economy class seat, letting the g-force take hold, the jet engines roaring outside, waiting for the safety demonstration to begin or an inflight movie to come on. Soon the boosters cut in, not really a standard feature on your average seven-four-seven, and with my insides wrenching back and my face forced into some awful grimace we accelerate towards the forty thousand clicks an hour required to break orbit. My vision shakes and blurs but still I can see out the corner of my eye, blue thinning to black and more diamond studs blinking into existence.

There is a point where earth's gravity will cease to pull me down, with all my earthly problems and my earthly dreams leaving my tired little shoulders but not yet, no. As this baby continues to accelerate like this, the inertia keeps me stuck here, heavier than I was back on earth. After all it takes a lot of energy to escape and be free.

*Angels in America (HBO)

my friend's gay gloves

2007-07-28T15:50:00.000+10:00

A man attacked my friend Josh last night. It was not in some dark alley in Lilydale or the backstreets of Sunshine but on the corner of Elizabeth Street and LaTrobe. He was on the way to meeting me at the Arthouse to see a local hardcore act called Identity Theft. The man dressed in a suit came up without provocation and threw my friend into the wall screaming something about the faggy green gloves he was wearing. The man who was with his one hand still holding his mobile phone remarkably talking to fuck knows who, telling them that he was going to kill Josh, was with the other trying to bash my friend's head in. In combination with this distraction and Josh's artful dodging allowed him to break free and leg it, running full pelt but it was several city blocks before his pursuant gave up on chasing him, still screaming into is mobile phone about how my faggot friend was dead.

Josh arrived at the Arthouse unsurprisingly shook up and spent the next half and hour, upstairs in the cool of the night, venting as I talked and comforted him with my arm around his shoulder. It was a gesture that drew its own undesired attention in a venue full of men pashing women, touching furtively then with flagrance as the pots emptied of draught; a man with his arm around another man was something to be stared at and commented upon. "You're in man! He'll be putting out tonight for ya!" Some dick yelled at me, wearing a black bandana under black cap tilted askew, hatebreed emblazoned on his black t-shirt. It wasn't a friendly jibe, it wasn't meant to encourage my pursuit. But then what did we expect? I hear you say. Why were we even there? you ask as my hand detectably moved an inch away from my friend's back.

The bands were good, really tight and energised, and the local hip hop crew from out of Box Hill, Ascertain and DJ Bogues were a welcome relief from screaming vocals and heavy guitar. Yet I couldn't help but feel unnerved, my friend undoubtedly ten-fold at the general verbal abuse directed (and indirected) towards faggots and poofters in the masculated atmosphere. That hat is gay, this song is gay and I heard at one point one of the rappers from Ascertain style "clear the faggots off the dance floor." Thankfully not a reference to Josh and I, who had removed ourselves to the back of the room but to Melbourne's nightlife generally I think. I found the overt and hyper-exaggerated machismo increasingly nauseating as the night drew on: the fists in the air and on the ground, the shouts of abuse, the air guitars and the hugging and groping between men that could have been easily mistook as homoerotic but we'd only an hour before been singled out for less. Half way through a song called "A Poofy Start", Josh and I chose to leave. Now apparently a member form Identity Theft is gay so maybe the song was ironic but it was an irony lost not only on me but the I think the large majority of the crowd.

I am being too sensitive I hear you say. Perhaps. This is what my straight friends tell me when I complain about their use of language. "It's only a word dude, we don't mean anything by it. Everyone uses it. We're fine with your sexuality." Oh I am sorry for not taking your feelings into consideration. Yes it really my fault for going to an overtly heterosexual club and putting my arm around a friend after some guy had tried to bash him. Get fucking real! If it's just a word then stop using it.

2007-07-25T21:57:00.000+10:00

i'm barely able to drag myself out of bed this morning, a stranger stares back at me from the mirror as i shave and apply deodorant, a computer screen just flickers at me white light and fuck it's eleven-thirty already. my skull echoes with the office fluorescent hum and i wish that i could only just play some music, put my earphones on and extract myself. it must be wednesday but i keep thinking it's thursday or maybe tuesday. bins go out on thursday, that's what my housemate said to me as i stood there positioning the recycling by the curb, "yeah, figures! kinda wondered why no one else was putt'n em out," i replied. i spend lunch in the park alone eating a shitty foodcourt sandwich that was wrapped in plastic like miss palmer while a duck glides over the surface of a pond in the carlton gardens, leaving, well, a wake in its wake. i feel my head expanding and contracting and i feel dizzy and unstable, emotionally. tears well up for no good reason on the train platform as i wait. waiting for my dinner, red lentil dahl i chat to the man i have a crush on about languages and garlic and leave without getting his name, cursing like the bee gees, all the stupid things that i said. fuck i hate wednesdays.

hometown baghdad

2007-07-24T22:51:00.000+10:00

I've just spent the last 24 hours watching the 38 episodes of this web-doco series I found on YouTube called Hometown Baghdad. Filmed by two Iraqis, Director Ziad Turkey and Producer Fady Hadid with some camera work done by the subjects as well, Hometown Baghdad follows three young guys, Ausama, Adel and Saif, middle class Iraqis, as they just try to go about their day-to-day while their country falls further into shit. "It's a living hell but that's your home," says 23 year old Adel, engineering student and aspiring metal musician as he reflects on his life. "I only live in the present, I'm alive today so I do whatever I want to today and enjoy this moment... Could be one moment to end everything, you and your plans, and send you underground."

The first episode came online March this year and the last was posted on 17 June and it is good viewing. Each episode is mostly under five minutes and deals with an aspect of the guys' lives both maudlin and comic, from love and dating, to writing metal lyrics about the invasion and the disintegration of civil order into civil war.

It's easy to forget when you are barraged with images of car bombings ad nauseam, and terrorist body counts piling high, you forget that there are people actually living on the ground amongst it all. About the intersecting lives that cross in and out of our two minute snatches on National Nine News, that the grandmother's house that is first raided by American forces once (no terrorists), twice (no terrorists) and then looted by the Iraqi Army, is also a place of cherished childhood memories now tainted; or the intermittent power supply that is three hours on and three hours off, cuts coverage of the football that friends have gathered to watch.

"Where's the liberation?" asks 20 year old medical student Ausama. "The American forces, they're not here to help us... I don't see anything good and it's been four years."

These guys are educated and thoughtful, moderate moslems mostly who are in far more danger from 'insurgents' and 'terrorists' (or the US forces) than we could every be, in a place where just playing music, western music can get you shot, well "... that's the reality, welcome to Baghdad."

Watch hometown baghdad

2007-07-22T20:10:00.000+10:00

It was a nice afternoon today, don't you think? The sun warming me through the glass walls of the tram-stop shelter, keepin me from the slight chill winter breeze as I waited for the 109 heading down Vic Parade for a friend's birthday lunch at Quan 88. It'd probably would've been quicker to walk but hey, I couldn't be fucked and besides it was a nice day afterall.

I glanced down at my hand, noticing that some of the light that took all of eight minutes from the sun to reach me had refracted through the glass into a beam of its composite colours. Light itself has properties of both particle and wave, if I remember year nine science class correctly, although I still don't understand it. Humans can only perceive a small fraction of light, somewhere between 380 nm to 740 nm (nanometres) of electromagnetic frequency, which includes not only these reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violets that I can see before me but infrared, ultra violet and goddamn fucking x-rays and gamma rays. I looked this shit up. Thing is, the colours are only an illusion. These cells in my retina like, called cone cells are sensitive to particular wavelengths of this electomagnetic spectrum and in consultation with my brain (no doubt with the assistance of millions of years of jury-rigging) choose to see 'em that way, in technicolour that is. Still, as I rotated my hand, palm up and around through the light I could feel the colour wash over my skin. Strange.

When light passes through something with a different density it refracts, from the air and through the glass, it changes speed. If it passes through, say a glass tram-stop shelter wall, wave forms with different frequencies can separate, refracting in different directions and thus through the funny little cone cells in my eye I see a rainbow.

be alert and very alarmed!

2007-07-09T21:59:00.000+10:00

Fuck Osama Bin Laden, he can have his Tora Bora cave complex and well he's already got the North Western Frontier Province but fuck him. He's just another distraction from humanity's real enemy: the cephalopods! Octopi, squids and the like: they're fast and have big fucking brains, ergo they're intelligent and well maybe they're not Mensa intelligent, more of an alien versus predator kind of intelligence, but they can shoot ink and camouflage themselves and shit! they can fit through tiny little holes that otherwise would get us vertebrates fucking trapped. These fuckers have been biding their time since the late Cambrian Period (over 500 million years ago) when they ruled this planet, top of the shitheap as it were and they're just waiting for their opportune moment and give 'em a couple more years and wham-bam-goodbye-human-fucking-race!

Watch these frightening educational videos:

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

2007-07-08T22:07:00.000+10:00

ZOMBIES ATTACK!!!

While the risk of zombie attack on terra firma is well reported, we are largely blind to the danger that they all pose to us and god's fair creatures on and under the water.

watch out! disco attack!

2007-07-04T20:01:00.000+10:00

Sure this blog doesn't have the readership of the Barco Independent and sure those that do read it are mostly friends and hell, probably have heard about it from Tim already but I'm nonetheless gonna spruik it in the hope that I can enlighten just one soul to the exciting new world of disco attack!

What praytell is disco attack! you ask?

disco attack! is a must, it's what we need, it's fun and safe. It's art, it's music and it is soul. disco attack! is genetic, it's inside of you and me. disco attack! is the best form of defence and is the closest we have to a super hero. disco attack! is a deadly adversary, a bomb that explodes in your head but is still the best insurance we have against terrorism and cancer. disco attack! is action not belief. It is the liberation of the proletariat. It is treason, the absence of all restraint and is not public policy. disco attack! is the opiate of the masses and is a secret conspiracy to take over the world. disco attack! is coming. disco attack is imminent and is upon you.

disco attack! is Friday 13 July from 9pm till late. disco attack! is at 51 Gipps Street Collingwood.

Hope that cleared up any confusion.... I suppose at this point I should mention that this is not an official disco attack! media announcement.

disco attack! is really:

8 things you unlikely know about me but nonetheless might’ve guessed (or maybe I told you)

2007-06-25T23:02:00.000+10:00

Thanks Richard for meme-ing me on this. So here you are: eight things you may not know about me (or you just might).

1. I’ve never read Milton’s “Paradise Lost” but I keep it on my bookshelf because it makes me look smart.

2. As a kid aged 12, I planned my suicide to look like a break-and-enter gone horribly wrong. Suffice to say my schemes were logistically unsound and I never carried it out.

3. At my year 7 camp some blonde haired thugs pushed me into the urinal wall while I was still pissing. The rest of the camp I tried to keep a low profile and was very secretly relieved when these same guys turned their attentions to my roommate. I felt guilty that I never said anything instead of laughing along but my god did he fucking snore.

4. I am currently downloading a porno called “Here cums the bridegroom”

5. I have a very hairy back.

6. As part of our bi-centenary celebrations my grade-three class had a fancy dress day. While most kids came dressed as convicts I insisted on coming as Captain Arthur Phillip.

7. I get far too much satisfaction out of popping pimples.

8. I have a healthy sperm count.

I am in turn tagging Strummer. Good night and good luck.

Admiral Arthur Phillip (1786 portrait by Francis Wheatley, National Portrait Gallery, London)

21.10.2002

2007-06-24T16:39:00.000+10:00

The cold steel sky filled with the black beating wings of a large flock of ravens, the sound of their calls and the clutter of thousands of wings as they beat against the wind, dominating the space between the Menzies Building and that of the Union as they circled round the twelve storey eyesore. Standing on the concrete walkway that divides the lawn, I watched as one then two and many more of the birds broke formation and began to land. Quickly I find myself surrounded by the ravens, hopping around, settling themselves and seemingly pausing to wait. Silence falls all around me, waking me decidedly unsettled.

A few days later, on the morning of Monday 21 October 2002 Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang entered his fourth year econometrics class with five loaded hand guns and opened fire, yelling "You never understand me," killing two of his classmates and wounding another five. He was supposed to be giving a class presentation.

The two students who died were Steven Chan and Xu Hui "William" Wu. In his trial it came out that Xiang believed Wu to be an agent of evil who intended to destroy him academically and it was his own destiny to kill him. This gives some insight into his mindset that day and it is not surprising that he has since been diagnosed with paranoid delusional disorder and is serving a possible twenty-five year sentence at Thomas Embling psychiatric hospital.

The class' lecturer Lee Gordon-Brown who had already sustained bullet-wounds to his arm and knee, with the assistance of a student named Alastair Boast were able to wrestle Xiang to the ground while he attempted to switch to another gun. They waited fifteen minutes for the police to arrive and by that time Gordon-Brown had already passed out of consciousness.

I was finishing up my honours in history that October at Monash University Clayton and the schools of history and archaeology shared the sixth floor where the shootings took place, with economics.

I was not at uni that day.

wikipedia - monash shooting

northside / southside

2007-06-12T21:13:00.000+10:00

I was first told about the northside/southside divide a year or so back at some friend's house party. I was drunk and so was he, some guy I'd just been introduced to, and we'd propped ourselves up on elbows talking on a housemate's bed about sex and politics and Melbourne queerdom.

Melbourne's gay world is divided in two, he tells me, by the Yarra river running between; it's cold war shit: East and West. Soft electronic music beats away in the background played by some graveyard community radio station volunteer. Nothing overt like but understated power plays go on in what is in essence a battle for cultural hegemony. You have Commercial Road, el centro del sur, switching briefly to spanish and back again, where prissied up pretty boys parade around with no shirts on, dancing to house remixes of Kylie Minogue. It's all top 40 and homogeneity.

Northside you've got overeducated art students sipping lattes on Smith Street reading Foucault's discourses on Sexuality and agreeing so emphatically about politics that you'd think they were arguing. Wankers on both sides I add. Generally speaking, he continued unfazed, the North pays more than lip-service to inclusiveness than our Southern brothers; and I do say brothers as I can't think of one lesbian bar South of the border.

Q & A has been the stalwart, a steadfast partisan in the defence against encroachment from the south, he said. Playing good music with a mixed atmosphere that allows you to be yourself but even it's creators admit that it's become increasingly coopted by a younger more vacuous crowd, crossing the border under the cover of night with their vapid requests to hear Madonna or Shakira or some shit.

......................

Yes Q & A is ending after eleven and a half years and I'll miss it but then as a comment on Richard's blog says, quoting the man himself "it'll force people to come up with something new." I wish I could say gay life in Melbourne has become pretty stagnant of late but I don't get out enough and this feeling may have more to do with me that the homo-world. There is after all Trough Faggot Party and Witness Protection Society but they are irregularly placed and I do have to say that I find the former a little too andocentric and I haven't attended Witness enough to comment.

But but but... on Sunday I went to the very first Sweaty Betty, part of the Camp Betty festival described on their site as a "radical weekend of sex and politics". A reaction to what the organises state as a certain sense of malaise or apathy within the community. I don't wish to understate my feelings about my evening but the party was fucking ace. Held in Crystal T's, a less-than-gentleman's (stripclub) on Sydney Road, it was full of all the colours of the homo-rainbow including a nice smattering of straight people ta boot. There was good music and some live performances including one woman exposing more than just her exquisit tats of jaguars adorning her torso. The tease culminated in her sim-masturbating a rather generous pink dildo that she was wearing: a definite eye-opener.

There is hope.

......................

"So which side are you?" he asked.

the peel vs straights & lesbians

2007-05-28T20:01:00.000+10:00

I am not sure I feel entirely comfortable about the Peel's exemption to the Equal Opportunity Act that was reported in the papers today. The exemption would allow staff of the Peel to refuse entry to the venue on a perception of an individual's sexuality as apparently the gay male clientele had expressed concerns about the number of heterosexuals and lesbians entering the venue, all prompting management to apply to the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission for this exemption. Tom McFeely, owner of the nightclub was quoted in the Age as saying that the move was necessary to ensure that the gay male patron felt secure enough to express his sexuality freely. 1 Cate McKenzie deputy president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) who granted the exemption said that "[s]ometimes heterosexual groups and lesbian groups insult and deride and are even physically violent towards the gay male patrons" while others just came to gawk, acting as though the gay male patrons were animals in a zoo. She said, "To regard the gay male patrons of the venue as providing an entertainment or spectacle to be stared at, as one would at an animal at a zoo, devalues and dehumanises them." 2 Indeed the gay bars in Melbourne are few and far between argues McFeely, "We're the only one out of 2,000 venues in Melbourne. Those heterosexuals have other places to go to, my homosexuals do not." 3

But regardless the idea of prescribing behaviour to a person on the basis of their sexuality is blatantly discriminatory. To imply that an individual who identifies as heterosexual or as a lesbian will engage or is likely to engage in violence or verbal abuse or whose activities while inside will upset the clientele of that establishment goes wholly against my moral fibre. Could one of the 'straight bars' that McFeely refers to legitimately apply for an exemption on the basis that gay men make their patrons uncomfortable? I sincerely doubt it.

I personally feel that a gay man who is intimidated by a straight man or a woman, whether she be gay or straight, for who they are, is at best hypocritical and worst pathological. If a person's behaviour in any club, pub or bar is inappropriate surely then security have the right to eject them. As a community we should be engaging and open, not hiding in closets.

Now I do not pretend to know what evidence exactly was put forward to the Tribunal, something I believe you have to apply for, but I wonder whether this application for exemption has anything to do with the mens-only 'upstairs' section of the Peel that staff enforce with such admirable efficiency. In the decision by the Tribunal that it handed down there is no mention of the sex-on-premises above. Cate McKenzie states that men should feel safe to engage in activities such as "kissing, hugging, or expressing love, attraction or affection in a physically intimate way" that might be frowned on in a ‘straight bar’. Now unless you are ready to describe what goes on up there as expressing love and affection (and I’m not) then I would wager that engaging in sexual acts was left out of their application.4 With the Greyhound in St Kilda and an apparently "as-yet-unopened gay bar on Smith Street" both applying for sex-on-premises licences in order to attract 'punters', one wonders how much the Peel's concern for a safe and comfortable atmosphere is really there to allow gay men to have fuck and suck. 5

1 'Gay pub defends 'straight' ban,' The Age, 28 May 2007.
2 Matt Doran, 'Gay pub can out straight patrons,' Herald-Sun, 28 May 2007.
3 'Gay pub defends 'straight' ban,' op. cit.
4 Peter Rolfe, 'Sauna bid `sleazy',' Port Phillip Leader, 8 May 2007.
Danny Corvinni, 'Nightclub sex rooms and saunas,' samesame.com.au - forum, 23 May 2007.
5 Peel Hotel Pty Ltd (Anti Discrimination Exemption) [2007] VCAT 916 (24 May 2007)

homeline twilight - a long distance haunting

2007-05-14T19:51:00.000+10:00

When I was fourteen Telstra or Telecom as it was called then, sent my family an international telephone bill. Not so unusual you say? Except that is that it was addressed to my father who'd been dead for two years. I know that Telstra prides itself on their wide range of products and services but I was unware communication with the dead was among them, then or now. But what if they did?

Do you have aged relatives who expect a call every Sunday without fail? Can you imagine if this chore didn't end with the grave?

If you think outsourcing call centre jobs to India is bad well picture yourself sitting down to your microwaved healthy-choice dinner (fiesta chicken by the way) when you get a call from a telemarketer selling life insurance FROM THE LAND OF THE DEAD.

bible fight - ring side seats

2007-05-08T20:59:00.000+10:00

Ever wondered whether Moses, the jew raised an egyptian king and saviour of his people would knock down Noah, sailor and zookeeper extraordinaire a few cubits to be called the biggest baddass in the pentateuch? No you haven't? Wait, wait, please sir. Obviously you are looking for a little more titillation of the five senses than two old geezers throwning their weight around, and there's nothing like two women wrapped together in combat; there'll almost certainly be mud. Picture it Mary, Mother of G-d clawing it out, hair tooth and nail in the garden of Eden with Eve, the mother of humanity. How 'bouts it? Both in their pert prime and there's someone flinging clay and it ain't the Holy Mother I tells ya.

Ah-hem. Well.

Clearly I have here a most discerning and cultured gentleman. Well what you're no doubt looking for is some real endtime entertainment, top notch judgement day extravaganza: Jesus, son of G-d and our Saviour in the ring, in Hell opposite Satan, father of all lies in a battle for the Universe.

Oh come-on... there's simply no pleasing some. Jesus!

Sir, sir.......

play bible fight

leaning to the left hand

2007-04-22T20:51:00.000+10:00

I had a dream last week where I found myself involved with a group of radicals pushing for a halt to growth in global population to save our much afflicted ecosphere earth. This group were committed to a most controversial public action that to be honest never sat too well with me, advocating masturbation and not procreation, staging unannounced wank-ins in select public places flying their movement's ensign, a veined engorged phallus gripped by a closed fist imposed on a picture of the globe, held aloft by members not otherwise engaged.

Never actively involved in any of these protests I stood as the group's cameraman charged with filming the demonstrations, then blurring out faces with my editing suite on the hq-computer so as to upload onto the group's website. Suffice to say I quickly became disolutioned with the whole thing, its activities, the politics and soon left, concluding that they really were a bunch of wankers and quite frankly found the whole protest thing a little strange.

So it goes - Vonnegut dies at 84

2007-04-16T20:39:00.000+10:00

Pehaps he has simply been caught in a chrono-synclastic infundibula set for his next corporeal appearance on earth (along with his dog - not a humanist), in another 59 days. Or perhaps not. Kurt Vonnegut died last week so it goes from a injury to the head sustained a few weeks prior.

He had fallen at the age of 84.

He was (is/will be) one of my favourite authors who might I add was recommended to me by a mad man who thought I was god, yes yes who I was visiting at St Vincent's psyche ward at that particular time maybe eight years ago. It's a true story but I digress.

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" were the words written on Billy Pilgram's epitaph, the soldier/optometrist who travelled back and forward in time in his best selling Slaughterhouse five. It mightn't have been true but it did sound awfully nice.

2007-04-02T00:25:00.000+10:00

It's been a difficult week it has. Tuesday especially hitting something of a dark spot, intense magnetic/emotional activity characterised by lower than usual temperatures... and what can I say? I lost it. And for the rest of the week I've been picking up my shattered little pieces, feeling immensely fragile as a result and snapping, huffing and puffing like a certain dragon by the seashore. I am left now with anxious butterflies that I am worried will find a way to burst out, through my stomach, my mouth and through my head.

Coming back from lunch last week circling down down in my desperate melancholy, I asked the universe what exactly was I supposed to do with all this. This mess, this noise: my head. And well it answered...

While crossing the driveway of a multilevel carpark I absent-mindedly strayed into the path of a truck pulling out. On its hood read the word COPE in bright bold lettering.

So I guess I had my answer.

Easy for it to say.

sunshine - preview @ hoyts melbourne central

2007-03-13T22:27:00.000+11:00

Last night I attended a preview screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine at the Melbourne Central Hoyts with a q & a featuring director and actor Rose Byrne following. What a fucking travesty!! Never in all my years have I seen a cinema fuck up a screening so badly. We were maybe a third of the way through as we cut to what I thought was an overly obtuse dream sequence: Capa the ship's physicist played by Cillian Murphy (that man has crazy blues eyes) dreaming his death in reverse, ambient music playing all through as you watched the final moments of the mission. It dragged on. And on. And on. Boyle what are you doing I asked myself? Sure Kubrick set a high standard in sci-fi incomprehensibility but this makes no sense. It's as if the film is playing backwards. Fuck it is playing backwards!

I looked to my left and right searching for my friends' expressions: Mike to my left leaning in towards his boyfriend and Darren passively watching the screen. Am I not arty enough, it that it? Is this doubt a sign that I am missing the point, not getting it? No seriously the film is playing backwards, they're fucking ruining the film as I watch characters dying as the end game plays out or in or something. Whispers grew to open protests as the lights come up and there are apologies as apparently the reel was wound backwards but everything would be up and running in say five or ten, so take a toilet break or grab a snack at the candy bar or some shit.

A fucking hour we waited before they offered us the choice to watch the rest of the film or leave with a full refund. A few opted out but the vast majority stuck around to watch the rest of Doyle's much anticipated space adventure to the sun. It was three years in the making and it has been hailed by April's Empire magazine as breathing new life into a tired and banal genre of sci-fi cinema that had suffered so much after years of brainless blockbusters offered up to us by hollywood a la Armageddon. Well yes... and Hoyts fucked it up or someone did, maybe the distributor I don't know and I don't care. Call me a purist but I think a film should be watched first time straight through in its entirety and the right way round and maybe I'm a traditionalist jump-cut Jean Luc Goddard shaking your head at me but fuck you I don't care.

The film came back on without the sound and not from where we left off, missing who knows how much. I had finally settled in and began to absorb myself in the story again when they stopped the film. Apparently the reels were mislabelled and out of order and it was impossible to continue.... fuck.

The q & a continued anyway with Boyle and Byrne perfectly apologetic and friendly but it's really difficult to discuss a film that the audience hasn't seen and while they'll be mailing us out replacement tickets to see it at some later date they've destroyed the magic. And I know it sounds trite but I think there is something sacred about the movie going experience. There's something deeply freudianly mirror-stage (thanks Roland Barthes) about sitting there in the dark losing yourself in other worlds and when you consider the premium price of tickets and the five-fifty I paid for M&Ms what I lost isn't made up for by a replacement voucher.

confessions of a hypochondriac

2007-03-13T21:47:00.000+11:00

Perhaps the hypochondriac in me that is a little concerned, a little worried about all this, I thought to myself as I lay there passively through an ultrasound on my testicles today.

"Can you hold your penis up on your stomach please," instructed my not too unattractive ultrasound technician as he pushed back my gown smearing gel on the probe and he began to move it around on my balls, first my right and then my left. I tried to think of anything that wouldn't end in me getting an erection and further complicate what was already a pretty awkward situation. This considering the week I'd gone without wanking-required for another test tomorrow- and this I suppose the most action I'd seen in nearly four months.

His name was John, my technician that is, as I made special mental note to remember it, thinking it's important to know the name of any man with his hand on my nutsack. I stare at the ceiling. Nothing like the dentist's office where there are all those calming posters of rainforests and deserts and far away places where they hope you'll be as they drill cavities and root canals. There is no noise, nor traffic or din of other doctors and patients in the room to distract me, just the hum of the machine. The room is on basement level of St Vincent's hospital and I'm the last patient of the day, just John and I and I think the receptionist somewhere about turning lights off. So I turn my attention to the machine and wonder at the different size probes next to me and what they might be used for ... he sure is spending an inordinate amount of time around my left testicle as I notice the soundless vibrations and the warmth the machine is generating.

"Do you normally feel any pain in your left testicle?" he asks me. Why? What's wrong? "No, not normally," I reply. He hums recognition without giving away anything and hands me a towel to remove the excess gel. So I thank him, get dressed and leave.

2007-03-10T16:50:00.000+11:00

“It’s all right,” she said. “You couldn’t help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same.”

Said a dying Mary Kathleen. Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird. p226

2007-03-09T20:16:00.000+11:00

If our souls are the stars projected onto earth then which star is mine?

the point - think about your troubles

2007-03-01T19:41:00.000+11:00

On February 1971, early evening, the American TV station ABC broadcast the 74 minute long "Movie of the Week" called The Point!; a story about Oblio the only round headed boy in the Land of Point, who feeling 'different' goes on an epic journey of the mind, body and soul, accompanied by his dog arrow, to get the bottom of it all. * It's a tale all about diversity and tolerance and a lot of other hippy crap but don't let that scare you, from what I've seen it looks kinda cool. Here's a clip from the film and I must admit it's made me feel all intuned to that deep hum the earth makes as it flies around the sun and well yes the music is by Harry Nilsson who, I'll be honest I only know because of that song from Midnight Cowboy "Everybody's Talkin'" but yeah, I'm sure I was going somewhere with this.

Anyway I think I want to track down the rest of this film. Yes yes, well enjoy.

turn that frown upside your head

2007-02-27T22:42:00.000+11:00

I keep forgetting to take my medication. It took me almost an entire episode of heroes, tears rolling down my cheek, to realise there was something wrong. Hey this really isn't all that heartbreaking I thought to myself and now I feel sick and I am nearly out pills, maybe a week left and I all I can do is pace this room, bouncing off all these ideas five or six at a time. So is this how it felt like before? I think this aloudly to myself as I remember I don't want to speak to a doctor about any of it and I really do wish people would stop pointing out my failings like I can't think of them on my own and so many more accelerating like some cyclotron throwing particules around a vacuum chamber.

I have a death wish maybe... I sometimes sit on the train to work imagining that I'm sitting opposite the next Sid riding the westbound Circle line as he stands up bag strapped to his back, just another number, what would it be? The Melbourne February 27 bombing, g-man body 2 or 3. Just a number, a body count where no one but the families remember the faces or the names, just the numbers as we compare, counting fingers in some macabre tally that death scratches in the dust: 52 is less than 190, which are both less than 2,974 in NY or 655,000 in Iraq.

When the end comes I sure hope I'm listening to something good on the i-pod... bopping along to "float on" by modest mouse, smile on my face as I am engulfed in flames with the last thing I hear "bad news comes don't you worry even when it lands/ good news will work its way to all them plans..." ... and we'll all float on OK.

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000, Washington Post October 11, 2006

g-man's valentines day message

2007-02-14T20:54:00.000+11:00

To quote Phillip J. Fry "Oh crap! I forgot to get a girlfriend again," (correct that: boyfriend) and yet another lonesome Valentines Day to notch up on the belt. So how many has it been? Well to date... let me see, mumble, mumble *pencil scratching paper* ummm, carry the 5... I don't know maybe all of them... yes this day holds a special place in my heart to say the least and every year I like to prepare a little speech to commemorate this bubbly holiday of love.

I was chatting a while back with my spanish teacher on the topic of love and sex and the many things in between and this came up: "Crush? What is a crush?" I tried my best to explain, asking whether there was an equivalent concept in spanish. She seemed perplexed. To me there is a whole colour in the love spectrum dedicated to having a crush on someone; think of all the pathos and the tragedy of knowing... just knowing that they don't feel the same.

"No, I don't think there is a word for *crush* in spanish," stressing the word like one might hold soiled underwear: with as few fingers as possible. "Must be an Anglo Saxon thing," she said after a moment's consideration, laughing to herself.

Pobre de mi.

dark lord of the australian right

2007-02-12T22:19:00.000+11:00

A fucking ceremony? A goddamn fucking ceremony? Yes well I have sensed a great disturbance in the force padawans, it's as if a thousand voices cried out in joy only to then be silenced. Our very own Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Attorney-Generalus Phillip Ruddock, deformed by dark side powers that flow through him like electricity flows through copper wire, dark black-red viscous electricity, has used his evil Federal powers to block this new hope, the ACT's The Civil Partnerships Bill, that had it become law would've provided same-sex couples in that territory (should they have chosen) with similar rights and recognition to that of heterosexual couples. But Ruddock refused it, he says on the basis that the law required a declaration be made before a notary and witness, placing it too close, he claims to the institution of a marriage. A "ceremony" that even its patron ACT Attorney General Simon Corbell described as similar to signing a statutory declaration in the presence of say a fucking pharmacist.1

Now in June last year Ruddock struck down the ACT's Civil Unions Act based on his belief that it would "likely undermine the institution of marriage." An institution that is defined by its role of bringing children into the world, he said. The territory has since been making changes hoped at passing it through without Federal government opposition, who have the constitutional power to remove territory statutes from the books. And well Ruddock wasn't satisfied.2

So what can I say? Marriage: based on its ability to pop out children? He makes it sound like some monstrous war machine for baby production. What about all those marriages, that despite their best of intentions cannot bear fruit? An old argument I know but why can't Ruddock just admit that the real reason he struck this and the Civil Unions Act down, is the same reason he introduced the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill, and refused Peter Kakucska a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage and that's all because he just doesn't like gay people. Yes that's right, he doesn't like gay people and any rights we have are concessions.3 Just fucking say it without all the hooha. I mean seriously how will gay people damage an institution that heterosexuals have managed to erode nicely on their own? It's a really stupid argument trying to make homophopia sound reasonable and I am tired of it. Just like I am tired of all those Christians still making that stupid pun about how it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, and then still finding it fucking funny.... seriously these people are allowed to breed?

Tomorrow the Melbourne City Community Services Committee is meeting to take a formal written submission and oral presentation from the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby about why the City of Melbourne should set up a relationship register that would allow gay couples to publicly declare their relationships. Deputy Lord Mayor and gay, Gary Singer said that while it would be largely symbolic undertaking it would nonetheless help couples by providing them with proof that they were actually in a relationship.4
Despite this being but a "largely symbolic" register a lot of groups particularly some conservative christian types are feeling threatened by it and have been voicing their consternation and the plan is actually in danger of falling on its arse.

So I think I'll go and if you or anyone you know wants to lend your support and fight the good fight then attend:

Date: Tuesday 13 February
Time: 7:30pm
Address: Melbourne City Council Meeting Room.
Access via Level 2, Town Hall Administration Building, 90 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Note: Requests to address the committee for 3 minutes must be made to Council Secretariat on 9658 9707 by midday on 13 Feb.

Props go to Richard for pointing this out.

Govt defends block to same sex marriage, The Age, January 18, 2006.

ACT gay marriage plan rejected again, The Age, February 6, 2007.

Clay Lucas, City to open register for same-sex couples, The Age, November 18, 2006.

Kenneth Nguyen, Ceremony not for gays, says Ruddock, The Age, February 8, 2007.

c is for computed tomography

2007-02-06T22:03:00.000+11:00

I feel like I am looking at some prehistoric fossil dusted painstakenly from a badland plains.

What we are really looking at is my spine. My spine damaged. It is only slightly damaged and this is good. Good because it should get better soon.

2007-02-05T21:49:00.000+11:00

While on the multilingual theme…

I went down to a Blairgowrie with some friends the other weekend. There we spent two nights drinking, chatting and relaxing. A friend Mick brought down of all things a Mandarin phrase book, with which he popped out bawdy come-ons and pillow-talk in Chinese. Now this got me thinking about a mandarin bi-lingual dictionary that I’d stolen some way back while I was at uni off a friend after some falling out. It was published in 1978, two years after Mao died and makes for some interesting reading. So I thought I would offer my own brief lesson in Chinese, communist and red-book waving.

fàngsōng: relax; slacken; loosen. We mustn’t slacken out efforts to remold our world outlook.

Despite not being able to drink (much) because of the medication I’m on and a minor spinal injury incurred while foolishly trying body surf at the Sorrento backbeach it was a good weekend.

liánjié: bind; tie; join. A common revolutionary goal has bound us closely together. The ties of friendship join the two peoples.

It was just the eight of us down having started at the Midsumma opening in Federation Square extending through Saturday into Sunday at Cam’s beach house. I suppose you could say it was a gay boy weekend away, free from the chains of heterosexual patriarchal oppression and the like and as you expect we approached it with shocking abandon playing party games such trivial pursuit and mastermind.

We’d been at the beach most of Saturday and back at camp, the evening began with the most expensive pizza and a game of “never ever”, a variation on the theme of “truth or dare,” which never wavered much from talk of sex despite Cam’s greatest efforts.

Oh and then there was the skinny-dipping.

qiáng zhì: force; compel; coerce. People cannot be compelled to accept one particular style of art or school of thought.

The weekend was part of Glen’s birthday celebrations and he’d been talking about swimming in the buff since Meredith, early December. Now I was not totally against the idea, some part of me wanted the experience. Maybe I wanted a bonding session which’d draw me closer to a group that I sorta feel a little on the outer and maybe there was also the rabid homosexual in me who was a little bit curious about my friend’s bits. Yes well and you see this is the problem. Glen tried to sell it as a liberating experience, that the intense sense of shame that I felt about my body would somehow be dissolved in the water, amongst the waves, naked and around a group of gay men, sizing me up, judging me…

luŏ: bare; naked; exposed; stark naked and undisguised.

I stood there without clothing, water lapping at my thighs, arms crossed. I didn’t feel particularly free. Why was no one talking to me? Was this all in my imagination? Their eyes averted? Were they trying to avoid seeing me all flabby, hairy and pale as frigid cadaver?

This is why I never felt nudism to be particularly revolutionary. Clothes are not what I need to shed, social expectations and the baggage I carry ain’t so easily hidden amongst the bracken by the shore.

Why couldn’t we do something really liberating like karaoke?

yĭncáng: hide; conceal; remain undercover. A bourgeois careerist hidden in the revolutionary ranks. A counterrevolutionary who has succeeded in staying hidden.

blairgowrie jetty

2007-02-03T00:55:00.000+11:00

Taken Sunday January 21, 2007.

el fin de todo

2007-02-02T21:37:00.000+11:00

Hay una teoría de eternidad y un tiempo cuando los planetas y las estrellas han muerto. No hay nada, no hay ninguna vida, ni coches, ni arboles, ni fieritas lindas. Aún los agujeros negros han desaparecido y los atomitos han olvidado su fuerza y se han ido, no hay más sustancia o energía y entonces el universo se queda oscuro. No importa que cuan inteligentes somos o cuanta tecnología asombrosa tenemos, como Yeats dijó, todas las cosas se caen a pedazos. Es la segunda ley de la termo dinámica que todo muere. Pero no parezcas tan preocupado, si va a pasar, no va a pasar en un tiempo largo. ¿Cuantas años? Quiero que pienses en el numero uno, después que le pongas atras cien ceros.

Sin embargo, en lo oscuro algo muy raro va a pasar. Sin frequencia, casi nunca, hay pequeñas fluctuaciones al azar del "vacio quantum" pero en billones de años que pase, es posible que algunas partículas aparecen talvez aún un nuevo atomo o dos.

No voy a fingir que lo entiendo pero los cientificos nos dicen que en las eras del vacio otras cosas podrían aparecer, objetos más complejos que unos atomos. Desde nada podrían venir una roca o un nuevo planeta brillante. Cuando se presente con tanto tiempo las posibilidades son interminables. Podríamos encontrar vida talvez aún unas personas que han existido antes en la historia de la tierra, como Elizabeth Cady Stanton o Kubla Khan, quienes podrían jugando dobles con Jesus y Muhamed Ali. Aunque ahora estoy siendo tonto, Katherine Freese, una física de la universidad de Michigan ha dicho "En el tiempo infinito, un día, yo podría reaparecer."

http://www.exitmundi.nl/eternity.htm

workers unite - lets garden!

2007-01-07T23:32:00.000+11:00

Channel surfing as a kid I'd often stick between stations and watch static like that girl from poltergeist but instead of seeing the ghosts or whatever I imagined the antenna was picking up TV shows from Soviet Russia. I would swear to you that I could see shots of farmers ploughing wide fields extolling their virtue through manual labour and while most likely the combination of sensory deprivation and an overactive yet geopolitically attuned imagination, I'd convinced myself that a chain of extraordinary events, a pigeon shitting on our aerial perhaps, a freakish meteorological electrical storm or some frighteningly superior soviet transmitting technology had allowed my family to watch, grainy and without sound albeit, a Communist gardening show from the far flung USSR.

acid tears

2007-01-04T22:58:00.000+11:00

I've been seriously thinking of trashing this blog, deleting it. I had contemplated it. Put plans together and thought about what would be my farewell speech etcetera but here it stands and I am still trying to force blood from stone. Well things have been pretty dark of late; I'd be hard pressed to deny it. I've been self medicating, drinking mainly to feel normal and hell I even turned up the other week to a doctor's appointment drunk. And then there's been the mood swings and fits of uncontrollable crying while reading, watching tv, holding back tears while in queue at the checkout, dread and panic at the thought of leaving the house and then the same fears about returning there.

I took an e on the weekend, sunday night, new years eve and then I took another one a few hours later. Sure I make no sense, I babble, make noise just to fill the spaces but I feel alright yeah, well to do and well adjusted... relatively of course, the special kind. The electrical storm dissipates leaving the quiet, the oh so quiet that I can hear the old man in the room next playing solitaire. Well that and the screaming vocals of Martin Sorrondeguy from Limp Wrist, the queercore band I was seeing at the Arthouse with friends Josh and Richard. I can say of all the drugs I've ever tried MDMA has been my favourite. Yes most certainly.

Now cut to the morning, 7am as I am walking home from the house party Josh and I had ended up at after the gig having left Richard at the Arthouse. The evening had had a very high school feel to it, live music followed by a party at someone-or-other's house, beer and at least one stupid fuck on drugs (me for the less perceptive of you). There was chatting and flirting and confessions all around and neighbours banging on the fence telling us to shut the fuck up and yes again, I am walking home, still buzzing, left by the others zooming off in their cabs to the other sides of town, when my left eye began to cry. I stopped in the street as it began to burn: my tears were burning my eye, squinting, rubbing my eye with my sleave wiping it hoping the tears would stop. A sign perhaps. Of what? I don't know. Difficult things these signs and portents.

I went to the doctor yesterday. The results of a breakdown of sorts and an intervention staged by a good friend who'd been there on the phone when it'd happened. After a forty or so minute session with the shrink I was prescribed a drug known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of antidepressants that increase the available serotonin levels in the brain or something and funnily enough is chemically similar to MDMA, my bestest buddy e.

hobby

2006-12-19T22:37:00.000+11:00

When I was a child I used to play with model trains. I remember fondly building railway stations out of lego and placing the little lego men and women on the platform to await their dreary nine-to-fives that approached with every tic-toc. I would set time-tables and interconnecting train and bus services and build customer service desks and little franchised coffee stands that sold overpriced lattes (50 cents extra for soy). Then there would be delays and cancellations that made these unhappy little passengers miss their connections and I would have to make the following announcements that would always come too late to be any use to anyone, raising tempers and blood pressures but I would always be apologetic, yes and understanding without accepting fault or liability.

tirade of self flagellation

2006-12-19T21:45:00.000+11:00

I saw a woman on my way back from lunch today finishing off my last handroll from that sushi bar just around the corner from the Winsor Hotel. She was maybe Papuan, western pacific and walked with this haphazard gait from underneath her denim skirt almost touching the ground. A walk that suggested some sort of deformity or injury, perhaps polio paralysis or some other preventable disease of the third world that I suppose I should feel more passionate or at least more informed about. As I past her in the street I couldn't help seeing myself through her eyes or at least my objectified sense of how I thought she should see me or maybe more correctly projecting my own white guilt and self loathing onto another person based on poorly informed racial stereotyping. Geez!! This all makes me dizzy.

What a stupid world we live in where one of the leading causes of death in this country is obesity and its various related illnesses. When access to a nutritious diet, clean drinking water and adequate healthcare is no longer a problem we find disease and death in plenty. Just to walk around, just for a second, and see through the eyes of someone else and look upon the absurdity of it all.

Well that feels a little better. Thank you for humouring me in this little tirade of self flagellation I hope I haven't offended too many of you.

cigarettes

2006-12-04T20:32:00.000+11:00

I started smoking the other week frustrated at a particularly awful day at work, it seemed like a good thing to do satisfied that what I was doing was slowly killing me. All very noir. Smoking a lazy three cigarettes a day I was on my second pack - Marlborough Lights with a ghastly grin of someone with mouth cancer, ulcerated and teeth a rotting green-yellow- until I was forced to stop. I had been revelling in displaying the pack to work colleagues, holding the pack centremetres from my ear, smiling wide showing my teeth in comparison. At lunch I caught up with a group of fellow smokers, conscious of their siege-like comradery that I was hoping to be part of when I was told by the heaviest and most nicotined stained smoker of them all "You do know you're not even doing it right. Smoking, I mean you're not even breathing it in."

I was heart-broken, publicly humiliated before my peers as a hack, an interloper. Running, almost in tears, back to the office I left the pack in the top drawer of my desk with the remaining cigarettes unsmoked.

Fuck-em I say and today I joined the gym.

melbourne sunset

2006-11-27T21:41:00.000+11:00

The view from my window at work this evening 31 floors up. I just thought I like to share.

Even when things are getting pretty dark there is still something to be thankful for.

How I closed my eyes and prayed to Jesus

2006-11-23T23:14:00.000+11:00

It's hard being a christian in this day and age after living under such darwinian oppression for hundreds of years or so I can understand why they feel they need to stay in the closet, why the Family First website doesn't mention jesus even once, even when their policies are directly informed by faith. Oh I mean every christian has their coming out story: to their friends, their family and work colleagues, having to watch their faces drop in shock and horror. I can relate, I truely can. I understand why they need euphemisms like "family" this and "family" that instead of "the bible says" this and "God smote" that and why they need to lie in order to hide their shame: their faith and their business interests.

Seriously. They talk about the hidden Green agenda but how can you take a Party seriously that pretends it's secular when they're all basking in the light of jesus? How can you trust a party who talk about defending families but have such the narrow definition of what a family is that unless you're the family member of some director of a large corporation you can bite their shiney monetarianist asses[sic]?

this state election sure is hotting up

2006-11-21T20:09:00.000+11:00

Leaving my house this morning on my way to work I discovered my letter box open and a letter from my state ALP member torn up and strewn across my front lawn. Now a quick glance aside I could see several neighbours' boxes also thus open... hmmm I wondered: stupid kids fucking with peoples' mail or a concerted anti-labour putsch?

snatched conversation

2006-11-20T01:07:00.000+11:00

I love overhearing little snippets of conversation. For example, today I was walking past the two dollar shop in Barkly Square, Brunswick when this rather upstanding gent, holding two champaign flutes in one hand and another just above his eye level in his other hand, examining so as to catch the light, said "Query," addressing the store clerk in his very best aristocratic British accent, "do these come any stubbier?"

the definition of a bureaucrat

2006-11-11T19:44:00.000+11:00

bureaucrats are "...men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired."

Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan. p. 56

mushroom cloud over chadstone

2006-11-05T22:34:00.000+11:00

I went out with a few friends after work on Friday. We'd had dinner and finally ended up, two friends - Adrian and Cam - and I in Black Opal (a TAB joint in the city) playing a card game called cheat with a deck we'd won in some Heineken promotion; Adrian I've know since high school, some fifteen years now and Cam, well is someone I sort of attached myself to last year at the Meredith Music festival and suffice to say they come from opposite poles of my social circle. But it worked and I had and hope they had a fabulous time sharing stories from our various pasts between the devious ploys and counter ploys of a game that I am proud to say I won: where we had grown up, the shopping centres we had hung out. For Adrian and I it was Chadstone Shopping Centre and for Cam some complex in Doncaster.

* * * * * *

I was in the old stomping ground today, just driving through with my mum in the car on the way to Forster Road and the south-eastern freeway onramp. We were on our way to see Rachmaninov Vespers being performed by the Melbourne Chorale at Hamer Hall - her birthday present. We'd passed the 7-11 convenience store that Adrian and I had loitered outside on various summer evenings, the creek where we drank and smoked weed and the stormwater drain where these girls from our clique had graffitied some warning about a nymph of the sacred spring who slumbered there. I laughed as we drove past it telling my mum the story who in turn changed the topic. I don't think she was very impressed by this disclosure but then I suppose there are a lot of things about my life she doesn't know about, then and now and sometimes we're better for it.

It's been a big day. I was woken my the phone around half past nine.
"... an emergency. Your sister has gotten herself into a little bit of trouble," my mum said down the copper line.
"Say what!?!" I exclaimed finally waking up, wedging myself up on an elbow to give the conversation fuller attention. I'd gone out on Saturday night all by my lonesome to the Peel in some pathetic attempt to pick up and although I'd plucked up enough courage to eventually talk to this one guy, some accountant who worked for KPMG I could tell he wasn't in for anything more involved than a non-committal chat so I cut my loses and left.

"Your sister had a big night last night, a few too many glasses of wine," she said. "We need to go down and pick her up and that University car that needs to be returned today. I'll need you to drive my car home." My sister had been down at Phillip Island doing research for her PhD when somebody had tipped her glass one too many times and now she was apparently vomiting in a public toilet in San Remo.
"What about the concert this afternoon? By the time I get to your house it'll be midday; you think we'll have enough time?" As far as I was concerned she'd done the drinking and she could get herself out of it. It was all part and parcel of a hangover but my mum was insisting on being far more reasonable.
"I know, I know, look if we have to miss it, we have to miss it," as if repeating everything she said would some how sooth my rising irritation.
"Okay, I'll be around as soon as I can."

* * * * * *

We'd driven over 200 kilometres by the time my mum and I managed to take our seats B27 and B28 in Hamer Hall, oh so close to the front of the stage. The lights dimmed and the Melbourne Chorale walked on and for the next two hours we listened to the works of two Russian composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet era composer who had gone in and out of Stalin's favour and Sergei Rachmaninov who had been writing chorale works for the Russian Orthodox church in the 19th Century. The Vespers by Rachmaninov were by far my favourite, truely beautiful, my mum later told me she had to fight back tears and while I can't claim such I did feel a chill down the spine. It goes to show I suppose that no matter how much power Stalin might have wielded he could never have inspired the kind of transcendence that faith in God brought out in Rachmaninov.

* * * * * *

I had a dream after the night out with Adrian and Cam. I was in the car with friends, old friends, driving through the old neighbourhood down Warrigal Road on our way to Chadstone Shopping Centre. I looked out of the window only to see a brilliant flash of light and a ball of flame barrel upwards into the atmosphere: the CBD below a roaring inferno. While I can't say why my friends couldn't see the explosion I nevertheless had to go crazy yelling at them to find a safe place. Acting on this the driver turned the steering wheel sharply and swung the car and us into the shadow of Chadstone Shopping Complex. We were safe.

* * * * * *

On the drive home from the city as the sky grew dark and the fat moon sat on the horizon, I told my mum that I was gay. I was shaking and could feel my stomach drop even though I had an inkling of what she was going to say.
"I kind of guessed that but I am glad you told me." She said but continued: "I don't claim to understand what homosexuality is all about but I am fine with who you are."

* * * * * *

I've been dreaming about the end of the world on and off for about six or seven years now, beginning just prior to the click over of the millennia and keeping me entertained since then. Sometimes I think they are more than some sci-fi obsession gone wrong but are actually building up to something. Oh... I don't mean in any kind of prophetic sense but a more internal, spiritual one. Because the apocalypse isn't about the end of the world so much as it is quite literally the revelation of a truth so profound that the world has no other choice than to undergo some fundamental change. And so I truly hope this one comes for the better.

my settler hat

2006-10-26T22:01:00.000+10:00

I own a hat- yes I do - and I call it my settler hat, it's black felt and moderately brimmed curling all the way round and while not quite a fedora and more like a homburg I picture this hat on a dusty and probably illiterate Irishman staring back at me through the sepia toned photo-graph all the way from the 19th century- ay. It is thus my settler hat.

I was in diva bar last Friday waiting far too long for a friend to arrive throwing back a vodka and lemon- my second- listening to this awful pop fodder while watching some pretty somebody shake his sinuey shirtless torso to some top 20.... ah. Leaving my glass at the bar I pass my dancer friend on the dancefloor. "Say are you jewish?" Pointing to the hat.
"No, are you?" I asked, not being the first time someone has said shalom to me in a gay bar.
"Yes I am," he says taking me a little by surprise.
Hmmm. "Are you a practicing jew?" I ask. "Like are you going to synagogue tomorrow?"
"My parents bought be a property in Balaclava, if that's what you mean?" He giggled.

walk the line (of control)

2006-10-13T00:37:00.000+10:00

I fell asleep last night reading Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, the book shutting, eyes shutting closed just as I finished the chapter on Kashmir and Jammu. And this is what I dreamt:

Surrounded by the sublime beauty of the himilayan footfalls I sling my rifle on my shoulder surveying the vast green land beneath. I am on duty, a Kashmiri dreaming the dream of an independent state not torn apart by foreign powers with their foreign motives and objectives, fighting with foreign weapons. As I enjoy the autumn sunshine in this reverie I am punctured through my woollen tunic, my phiren by maybe two or three or four bullets, one entering through my neck; there was red and then an overexposed white that bleached the land and the sky leaving only the man, the interloper that shot me; maybe he is Jaish-e-Mohammed or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen or some such but as I spit blood trying to breath I use my leeched strength to prop up my Kalish, aim and pull the trigger watching the bastard crumple, my weapon flashing without sound....

... and then I woke in such a state that I was convinced I was still breathing through the hole in my neck that’d been pierced through by a 39mm shell.

... a friend at work said she thought I dreamt a past life and well I suppose this is a comforting thought when maybe that this is all coming from anywhere but inside my head.

wrong side of the bed

2006-10-07T22:12:00.000+10:00

Jolted awake by a mobile phone alarm that'd been thrown to the opposite end of the room the night before as I've the tendency to switch my alarms off in my sleep. It occurred to me early on that if I was ever to get to work/school on time the clock needed to be a good many feet away to make any such attempt by my sleeping otherself foolhardy. Now with my decaying wooden single bed placed up against the room's whitewashed brick wall I threw myself out of bed and like a stunned blackbird who'd flown into a glass window I fell back almost unconscious. Rubbing my head I laughed to myself as I had quite literally got out of the wrong side of the bed.

these red eyes - the mothman prophesies

2006-10-07T00:39:00.000+10:00

I just re-watched Mark Pellington's The Mothman Prophesies starring Richard Gere and the beautiful Laura Linney and although it plays out like a made for TV adaptation of some article found in an almanac of the uncanny, I really dug it. It's a dark film that uses its lighting and soundtrack carefully so as to never really give you the mothman itself, a plus for someone who is tired of hollywood's tendency to overbudget and show everything when what we are really scared of is not the monster itself but a fear of the unknown that it represents, the irrational, the pale face at the window: death my friends, the undiscovered country (thank you mr spock). Although you gain a few brief glimpses of the mothman (or Indrid Cold) blurred or bleached out in overexposure, its nature, its intent are left dangerously outside our knowing.

Based on true events, or more correctly based very loosely on a book based on a series sightings of strange winged man/creature in areas surrounding Point Pleasant and Charleston in West Virginia between November 1966 and December 1967 culminating in the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River killing 46 people. After the disaster the occurrance of sighting began to drop off and the film claims that this entity is somehow tapped into and attracted to death and references are made to other sightings through out the world including eyewitness reports of such a creature being sighted just prior to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Now after doing a little research on the topic I stumbled on something a little unexpected, something that to my knowledge has not been widely reported in the media and I suppose not surprisingly. The photo besides was taken by NY resident Steven Moran on 11 September 2001 and appears to show a large winged creature flying near the smoke and debris of what were once the Twin towers. Now according to Wikipedia the photo has not to date been discredited or shown to be manipulation or fake and so I am left feeling, well.. what the ...? Now according to mothman.us there were reports of non military aircraft in the area in the minutes just after the attacks, a few mentioned "winged, flying-men". Doing it conspiracy/x-files style these reports have been largely been ignored or not investigated by authorities.

Sights/sites

The Mothman Wikipedia

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02.10.2006

2006-10-02T21:14:00.000+10:00

So it's my birthday and I am 27, having spent the evening with friends, dinner at Lentil as Africa in Brunswick and not satisfied with my three beers (to their apple frusion and three coffees) I buy a longneck at the bottle-o on the walk home as I begin to see my slow slip into alcoholism with an austere sense of humour that maybe I'm carrying some sort of generational torch, some family tradition. I think to myself, only had I my i-pod to distract me, how surprised I was to find a birthday card in the letterbox from my brother and that I didn't even have a number to call and thank him, then I think of how my weekend date was just another notch to add to a failed love life and my job something that I can barely get out of bed for.

I went to the doctor the other week about my panic attacks and he suggested I see someone, talk about it, open up to a professional saying "You see," he told me "it's all existential. You don't have to do or be anywhere or anything you don't want to be. It's an illusion that we are trapped, it's only convention that keeps us here." You're wrong I thought, I am trapped. It's all in here.

Happy birthday g-man

a not so evil empire

2006-09-17T18:59:00.000+10:00

On this day, 17 September 1859, one Joshua Abraham Norton then resident of the city of San Francisco proclaimed himself to be "Emperor of These United States," printed in the city's newspaper the Bulletin it was sign Emperor Norton I. In a further decree the following January Emperor Norton I, citing corruption and the disproportionate influence of various lobby groups disolved the Federal Congress.

Now some have called this man eccentric, others have labled him crazy or even schizophrenic, but this failed business man who when he died on 8 January 1880 with no more than a few dollars to his name, tens of thousands of mourners attended his funeral and the procession that followed his casket was more than two miles long.

Indeed the man had his own currency and would eat in gratis at businesses bearing plaques reading "By Appointment to his Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I of the United States." Even the City allowed Norton a degree of recognition when in the 1870 census Norton's occupation was stated as "Emperor" and the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco appropriated enough funds to purchase new royal vestments.

In 1867 a police officer Armand Barbier arrested Norton with the intention of having him committed causing a public outcry. The then police chief ordered him released, stating that Norton "had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line."

Indeed while on one of his "Royal Inspections" it is said that Norton actually put himself between anti-Chinese rioters and a group of Chinese. Apparently he bowed his head and began to recite the Lord's Prayer, with which the rioters shamed dispersed.

Crazy!

Read about him on Wikipedia from which this blog entry is sourced.

Wikipedia - Joshua Norton

having major panic attack or dying, not sure

2006-09-15T20:53:00.000+10:00

Home safe now but you know public transport is a very scary place when in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Yes tonight has been truely awful. I am chilling out a little now but about an hour ago I thought I was going to die as I sat hunched over staring our the window of a bus, watching my breath condense and evaporate. I did the same in the tram and finally the train, doing my best to ignore the crazies all around me, those real and imagined.

It all started during my spanish lesson which my teacher offered to end an hour early as I was sounding unwell and having a lot of trouble concentrating on her set lesson and might I say that this is no small thing as it basically meant she was letting go of half her fee. Now we got to talking as we do and conversation quickly turned to my work and as I began to recount my day I promptly forgot to breathe.... disorientated I inhaled deeply, shaking and at that I explained that I had to leave stumbling to the door I said hasta luego.

I'm not going to die. This is all in my head. This is not a heart attack. I repeated my little mantra as I made my way to the bus stop, top heavy and very unsteady as my mind accellerated to light speed counting all the ways this could go, were those late night joggers over the road likely to know CPR, had I paid up on my ambulance membership and where was the nearest hospital? HElp, breathe, breathe!!! Alone at the bus stop waiting, waiting I looked at my mobile, who can I call? Who can help? Do I have enough credit? Will these be my last words? Breathe deeply and I settled on a text message. "Having major panic attack or dying, not sure," I wrote. Oh fuck!, what a dick head I am!, I thought and called him.

"What's wrong? Are you by yourself? Oh that's not good.... ummm... want to catch up over coffee tomorrow?"
That'd be nice I told him, I like to think he didn't understand the immediacy of my problem so I made my excuses and disconnected just as the bus pulled up. Now having a man sit a few seats behind you on an empty bus and sing and whistle loud to some sub-continental pop anthem might all sound funny to you but I was truely terrified. He kept this up a good ten minutes before I got off near the arts centre and while he held a pretty good tune my nerves were frayed... and all I could do was breathe deeply in and out again and again.

An hour later, unable to see a doctor in what was a vain attempt to acquire valium I was home and as I said breathing and calming down but still strung high as a fucking kite.

nick berg

2006-09-14T00:43:00.000+10:00

The fear hits taught the strings of my heart that beats so fast it just can't keep on going like this. Death can see me as the outside darkens and disappears and the walls blacken and I turn inside myself. The world is ending and my hands are bound my clothes wet with sweat and captivity. They talk to the camera lens of revenge as my lines of fate draw in like light streaking caught in a singularity and all I want to think about is those I love, joy and sunshine but everything just keeps on shrinking down until this last act of violence that I know has been coming will end all this.

Nick Berg was murdered on 7 May 2004 to the words Allahu Akbar, God is great.

don't party too hard mister grey-HAM-ser

2006-09-11T23:30:00.000+10:00

As the twentieth century ticked over into the twenty-first I swore that I'd get my license before the apocalypse. My driving instructer was one very large Mexican called Marco who would turn up half-an-hour late if he turned up at all, explaining that he'd had the sort of family problems that required the paid employment of lawyers. Still he would sit there with his Mcdonalds meal deal and discuss his latest fad diet as I nervously merged into freeway traffic cutting off a beemer or a merc, and we'd bond in some odd way when he'd pick me up at uni on hot thursday evenings undressing the ladies through his dark ray bans while I did my best to stay gender neutral; listening to bad fox pop laughing as he switched the car's inside lamp on and off to the beat: our party's strobe light.

And at end of each lesson he'd tell me "don't party too hard mister grey-HAM-ser" and in all honesty in the past few days I've been thinking about these wise words as I recovered from what could be only described as malicious self abuse.

I drink too much. Yes I do.

padre de octubre

2006-09-02T15:06:00.000+10:00

Well it's nearly that time of year again with Christmas just a few months away and before you know it all the tinsel and the reindeer and the shiney little baubles will be hanging from the rafters of our hermetically sealed shopping centres and what with all the various feasts and saint's days in between such as St Francis Day (October 4), the Presentation and then the following Immaculate Conception of Blessed Virgin Mary (November 21 & December 8 respectively) and then there's my birthday it's time I make some gift suggestions.

Now with World Youth Day to be held in Sydney in mid 2008 the building frenetic excitement is sure to make 2007 catholic flavoured and what better way to feel part of the action than with a catholic themed calender.

Piero Pazzi an italian photographer has been bringing out the Calendario Romano, full of very hansome Italian "priests" for a few years now, published chiefly as a souvenir for tourists visiting the Vatican it has been latched onto by a UK website which has been selling calendars with one pound out every one sold going to Food chain, a british charity providing nutritional services including home delivered meals and health advice to men, women and children who are chronically sick as a result of AIDS. Now as it turns out these priests in the calendar are actually models and while one apparently was once an alter boy none of them it seems will be offering communion come sunday. Pazzi's website has put a call out to interested clergymen wanting to appear on the calendar but I've not been able to find out whether there's been any ecumenical niblings on this. Nevertheless these guys are very very pretty (my personal favourites being October, March and June) and I do believe this calender would make any good (or bad) catholic's trinity sunday* and while the naughty little catholic in me** is a little disappointed about the authenticity the plus side is that at least these guys haven't sworn no oath of chastity.

"What about nuns?" I hear you say. Well if that's your thing then maybe Nuns Having Fun 2007 Calendar is for you. The black-and-white photos from the 1950s and 60s brought to you by Maureen Kelly and Jeffrey Stone, show Nuns "frolicking through ... waves (yes, in full habits), nuns at the bowling alley, nuns on a roller coaster, nuns singing, nuns in a chorus line, nuns playing jump rope, nuns on a road trip, nuns in bumper cars. Oh, and what fun they’re having!"

Also:

Nicole Martinelli, Italian 'Priests in Calendar Are Models. Zoomata, 2 March 2004.

*Probably not to be displayed in the same room where el papa is hung.

**By the way not catholic, but who can say that there isn't a little bit catholic in all of us.

digital zombies

2006-08-27T21:45:00.000+10:00

During an ad-break for VideoHits last week my friend Adrian and I, both very hung over from the night before encountered a chocolate bar commercial endorsed by someone I would consider to be one of the twentieth century’s most iconic celebrities. Nothing out of the ordinary there I hear you say except, that is for the fact that this particular celebrity is dead and has been dead for over thirty years. The advertisement in question for Mars Bars included the footage of a late Bruce Lee, shirtless and skin glistening in sweat at his peak physical prime and utilising the latest in computer imaging like techno voodoo has the dead kung fu master with his lightening fast reflexes eat one of their chocolate bars with their chocolate-malt nougat centre, covered in a layer of caramel and coated in milk chocolate… I was livid and quickly lept to my feet in indignation.

To many of us the idea that we will be remembered after we die holds a central part to our spiritual lives, our motivation to procreate and get up in the morning, hell the ancient Egyptians believed that if people forgot who you were after death you would suffer a second one. But no need to worry, that is providing your name keeps getting mentioned, allowing you to party in the afterlife to you ba's content and similarly celebrity status holds a key to immortality. Think Mozart, Shakespeare and Leonardo Da Vinci and you have a few members of what could be classically termed immortals. Now Bruce Lee is just a modern day entrant and he's not the only one. Indeed celebrity status met dizzying new heights in the twentieth century and for some being dead was an excellent career move, in 2004 Forbes Magazine published a list of the world’s top ten earning dead celebrities to which unsurprisingly Elvis Presley took top billing and it can be argued that, and I will attempt to minimise the schmaltz, that the use of their images, music, artwork etc with all the cash that come from it functions in keeping their memories alive (so to speak). And fair enough. Concord Moon LP, a company owned by Linda Lee Cadwell and Shannon Lee Keasler (wife and daughter of Bruce Lee) hold the name and likeness rights for Bruce Lee and through the non-profit organization The Bruce Lee Foundation has this stated intention. The foundation’s mission statement says that they intend to “enrich lives, open minds and break down barriers through the active proliferation of Bruce Lee’s legacy of undaunted optimism in the face of adversity, unwavering humanism, mental and physical perseverance, and inspirational presence of mind toward the betterment of our global community.” This apparently involves selling chocolate bars and whether the man in question would have objected or seen this as furthering his legacy I am not in a position to answer however it opens an ethical question as to whether the images of the dead should be sold and leached off to build a company’s brand identity or shift units especially when a company’s philosophy or product is seemingly incompatible with the person or the lives that they led.

A perfect example is the Street’s Magnum Swinging 60s promotion that my friend pointed out to me there in my living room mid rant, where Streets introduced nine new Magnum flavours, all with a 1960s theme, among them were Jami Hendrix, Woodchoc, John Lemon and Cherry Guevara. Now I could understand an Andy Warhol flavour (suggestions?) but what exactly is it about the lives of John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix or god forbid Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that lends their posthumous support for tackily themed ice creams?

With the maturing of digital imaging technology and techniques in what I feel is becoming close to a virtual necromancy, where it is increasingly possible to have the dead talk and act as though they were still among the living. A situation where the dead are forced against their will, ripped from their peace to sell sell sell products and promote brands incongruent with the lives they lived: at the best distasteful and on the other extreme a form of electronic purgatory. Surely it would be more appropriate to attach the strings to those monsters of history like Hitler, Stalin and maybe Idi Amin and have them dance and make fools of themselves or maybe even have them apologise for all the wrongs they’ve done but then there’s no money in that, no parasitic brand can leach their je ne sais quoi and synergise.

Also:

Dan Glaister, Dead stars who rain money on the living. The Guardian 9 April 2005.

my last two dollar coin

2006-08-25T16:29:00.000+10:00

I spend my lunch breaks alone and while I know this sounds awfully anti social well that's me I suppose, but really I just like to wander the city streets listening to my ipod thinking and humming to myself and am happy not to be bothered. And yesterday while doing this, standing at the lights near parliament waiting to cross I saw one of those AIDS trust fundraisers across the road just waiting there wanting to make me feel guilty for just passing by, looking all innocent and goodly made me rush rationalise why I wasn't going to drop a coin into her bucket. Look I give to them here and there, I even volunteer goddamn it and I mean solidarity and all but when you reduce it down to its basics I just don't know anyone who's positive and while that's not the limits of my generosity it is a deciding factor when handing over my last two dollar coin.

It was just then that an African couple, possibly Sudanese thinking I recognised the lady from Footscray, with their little boy approached the AIDS fundraiser in her plastic bib, the man stumbling around in his pockets for change as the pedestrian light went green playing some salsa hit by Ismael Rivera from the 1950s. The man took his son by the hand to cross, turning seemingly annoyed that his wife wasn't with him only to then smile with broad enthusiasm when he saw that she was hanging back rummaging through her purse for more change.

I don't mean to comment here on their financial situation even if it is true that many African migrants, especially those from places like Sudan are here in Australia because they have experienced extreme deprivation of their human rights but merely to say that I saw in a short seconds glance that to some people the statistics that I read about on BBC world are really a part of a plague that is of an irreducible immensity and even here in Melbourne on this sad cold and wet thursday of a horrible immediacy.

Regardless of all this and the fact that all I had to do was just get more money out of the wall I still didn't give up my last two dollar coin.

memed in

2006-08-22T19:14:00.000+10:00

Thanks goes to Richard for the tag. The game's rules are this:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Now technically the closest book was El Principito, a spanish translation of that french classic Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, however as there was no page 123 I had to therefore settle for the book underneath it, the controversial Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

Here we go:

'It was the Devil,' he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. 'The last time it was Shaitan.' This is what he has heard in his listening, that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that's a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me.

midwinta protest

2006-08-14T22:53:00.000+10:00

I went to that midwinta protest outside the VIC-state parliament on Sunday with a friend from work; we'd decided to add our shiney faces to the crowd demanding some public and legal recognition of our relationships should either of us ever find ourselves in one. It was my friend's first protest and well .... I'd been to a few here and there but nonetheless there were some first times there for me as well, such as the sight of a rather hansome hombre signing (AUSLAN) with a lisp and all those miniture purebreed such-and-such yap-yaps that only homos would think to bring to a political action. The crowd was bigger than I thought it would be with theage.com citing over 2,000 awashed in red, balloons and clothing. I wore red boxer-briefs beneath but kept this fact to myself.

On Wednesday last week in my lunch half-hour I'd walked past an anti-abortion protest on the steps on parliament and the day before that a freedom of speech protest that was nothing but a cover for various right-wing church groups who were fighting for the right to slander muslims. I stood there on Sunday, sun bright and sky cerulean with a satisfied grin on my face that our protest outnumbered theirs combined and then some. I was particularly moved by one minister who spoke on behalf of those christians who took Jesus' message about inclusion to heart, inviting gay men and women (single and in union) into the fold. It was nice to see the words of hate and exclusion and their adherents were down in the stats for once.

Labour and Liberal representatives were there and they skipped oh so merrily around the issues, voicing their support with one hand for the removal of discrimitory legislation but conveniently omitting the fact that both their parties oppose any formal recognition of same-sex unions: anything that resembles an adam and eve not adam and steve. The Greens were unequivocal and the Democrats took the middle ground.... but were we all there? There was something or someone missing... maybe?

Maybe it was the more outlandish among us, who were coming down from their saturday night... the drag queens were all sleepy heads in bed leaving it to the socialists, the red block to lead us into what was a very convoluted chant. Now don't get me wrong I like socialists, in fact I have my little secret activist boy fantasy but sometimes I feel as though they think the year is 1968. Let say they lack the pizzazz, the kitch, the glitter, and glam that I felt we needed as we walked into swanston street gawked at by so many happy snappy tourists.

Well... that said. Canada, the UK and various EU states have enshrined same-sex relationships on their books, are we so backward? If not now then when and will I have a boyfriend? I ask you.

i hugged a heater for warmth and got burnt

2006-08-08T21:38:00.000+10:00

I am on my third set of pain killers today and my head just won't quit from hurting. I think it has something to do with the wisdom tooth that's pushing through the gum way back there in my food hole. Every year it does this... well at least the last three and reliable as ol' faithful, I say, come winter my mouth begins to swell and I start chewing check. But then as I get round to making an appointment with the dentist the pain dissipates and the inflammation goes down and I am made the fool and feel the hypochondriac.

the writing on the wall

2006-08-06T16:37:00.000+10:00

"The lamb's teeth will be sharpened"

- scrawled on a rotting fence just east of Christchurch (city of churches), New Zealand circa 2004.

jogging on

2006-08-05T18:48:00.000+10:00

My shorts are too short and tight I think to myself as I attempt to keep some semblance of pace as I jog around princes park. I hear the shocked and amused thoughts of those I pass in my head; the paranoid psychotic voices are always hard to filter out even when I am exercising but then again where else to go but inward. Strange weird swirly visual effect.

I find myself dwelling on a conversation I had with a friend of a friend last week at some homo party held regularly under inflation nightclub in geddes lane in the city. I sip on my vodka lemon/lime spritz spouting my usual crap, nonsense that comes out whenever I am nervous... which is most of the time. Imagine standing on the Bolivian plains of El Salar de Uyuni (something I hope to see next year) the world's biggest salt lake wearing pitchblack motorcycle goggles, the kind Tom Waits would be proud to wear... stillness and blinding light reflecting on the pure white lake contrasted by a deep breath of blue sky above. I say if only I could find the optometrist crazy enough (oh my, my poor myopic eyes) , say with the vision to undertake my patronage. Turning to me he grins in his sheepish way and without detectable venom "did you realise I stopped paying attention about five minutes ago." I am taken aback. Fuck you too I think and shut my mouth.

Disolve to a small cafe, a scene in which I sit with my soy latte retelling this to a friend; still a little put out by it all. His eyes light up, incredulous that someone had sought to shoot me down about this and we build together on my little fantasy stimulated by caffiene and we both dream of mad optometrists in lab coats surrounded by diodes as lightening flashes through tubes above.

My foot lands in a puddle on the path and mud splashes up my leg but I keep jogging.