Saturday, May 31, 2008

how'd you like to run away from these machines?







Thursday, May 29, 2008

wish you were here

i dyed my hair green on one side. that should keep the cutlery woman off my back for a while. she's my favourite customer now, i think. who else? a very friendly long haired german, who always says 'fanks'. a few welsh people, who tell me my name is beautiful (my name is welsh) and ask about my genealogy. also, apaz "when i get married" i can say that there is a picture of my mother in law on the flag (the welsh flag is a picture of a dragon-monster thing. ha!). oh you, welsh.

i bought an ipod. mm. i never thought i would, but i've always been unfuriated by the lack of space on whatever other device i've used. and now it's solved. so that was $360 with an extended warranty. and i say that because i bought the most awesome long-sleeved old-woman cape-dress from vinnies for $2 on the same day, and it's making me almost as happy. the fabric is patterned with dark reds and greens, purple and gold, with puffy shoulders and a random militaryish dangling shoulder-chain thing. on one side. gold buttons down the middle, with the gold paint peeling off. it makes me feel like a rock-god magician. i'm wearing it tomorrow to the partay.

some other things:
i've been listening to pink floyd and marnie stern today. some music is too fucking cool.

i would sell my soul for a date scone right now. DID YOU HEAR THAT, THE DEVIL? nothing happened. maybe this will prove once and for all the devil's non-existence. i should probably do things properly, and spill my blood on a dusty crossroad somewhere. but they are so hard to come by in urban environments, which is presumably where the majority of the soul-commerce goes on. right? maybe a dusty figurative crossroad would work...
er... fuck! which way? in my life? should i go? when i cannot see, through the dust... of my subjective experience?

THE DEVIL?

no scone for bron.


OH YEAH. the new dresden dolls album No Virginia is out. it's fantastic, but i've always had high expectations of them. "the mouse and the model" and "ultima esperanza" were 2 of my favourite songs even when they were bootlegs, so it's amazing to finally listen to them on a studio recording. i might start carrying around copies of the cd, so ask me if you wants it and can't be bothered waiting 30 minutes for the bittorrent!

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Hold onto yourself by the sleeves, i think everything means a little more than we think

it has been an interesting week.
tuesday: watched boosh season 2, read books, had $3 tacos and $3 tequila shots. ole! happy festival of birth jaredcakes!
wednesday: had uni. saw tokyo story, which could be more appropriately titled crouching drama hidden plotline. (oh geez these white kids who make risickulous comparisons between early japanese cinematic responses to modernity and contemporary chinese action flicks!!!!) i was not a fan! but i was not in the most excellent of moods... and i suppose there are worse ways to spend two hours in the dark. like maybe if the room was slowly filling with poison gas.
thursday: read work work work work (proportionately).
friday: read, met up with megan, went to filmsoc - watched The 400 Blows, which was excellent... and then made my way to Emmie's for a great night. i wound up on oxford street for a couple of hours, and had some fun while i was there.
saturday: i got off work 3 hours early, so i had a whole night up at megan's... it has put me in the most amazing mood. i'm still all blissed out.

and i wrote something. it's not finished but i'm tired, and i never usually come back to these kind of things, so i may as well post what i have...


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I’m on the corner of Denison and Spring street. It’s marked by the most beautiful Liquidambar in three suburbs, but to use a less subjective point of reference, it’s next to the North Sydney TAB. It’s 5:30am, and the sky is grey. Not blank, awaiting colour, which it sometimes seems, but drained, like a drying sheet pegged up by buildings and bridges. And ice particles and atmosphere, obviously, let’s not get carried away. The milk trucks interrupt me and I interrupt them; people crouched on footpaths with writing all over their legs aren’t to be expected. I trouble the corner shop for some paper. They don’t sell paper, it seems, but the guy at the desk gives me a spare sheet from the bottom drawer, half covered with a draft of orders. Calls me love. There’s a camaraderie, when you’re the only two people awake while the rest Rests. I’m only awake because people can’t wait until a decent hour to get their hands on some cauliflowers. They can’t wait because they’re in offices until the sun sets and we close, they’re in offices because their clients can’t wait to get the day under way, and their clients can’t wait because they have cauliflowers to sell, damn it. The cauliflowers of course still get to wait for the sun to rise before they begin their cauliflowering. This is largely the reward of a six month strike in the late 90s, a triumph of solidarity.
I feel a terrible sympathy for the rest of us, caught up in this conspiracy against decency. Who was the first? Who was the first to think it would be a good idea to make money at such a time? Criminals, probably. I deduce this by the fact that the only other people awake out of choice are the fitness obsessed. What are you running from? Why only when no one is around? Is it a secret? They never stop and they always have earphones in so of course I never ask. It is more polite to make prejudiced assumptions. Also more entertaining.
I nod at a truck driver as he unloads a pallet of smug cauliflowers. My shift starts soon, so I ask what the time is.
“Well my watch says it’s ten past 8pm, but that means it’s, uh, around five to six.”
“How’s that?”
“Ah, I set my watch in time with my sleeping pattern. I drive all night, you see. So a normal person’s 7am is my 5pm. Yesterday I woke up at 16:45pm and set my watch at 07:00, so that when it gets to 23:00 I’ll know it’s time to rest.”
“Even though it will actually be, what, a quarter to nine in the morning? Couldn’t you just go to bed at nine without having to change the time like that?”
“Dear me no, no one does anything productive between 1am and 5am. It’s for drinking. Yeah, I’d probably be an alchoholic without this watch.”
It’s difficult to separate nutcases from eccentrics sometimes. Avoiding some form of supposedly assured, temporally bound self destruction by means of an elaborate exercise in denial is one of those things that particularly problematises matters.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

goodnight preciousnesses.

Friday, May 23, 2008

i took some photos of the sun through the blind!




How to disappear completely

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Morally Metacarpalcapped
Or: I Really Wanted to Demonstrate New Anatomical Knowledge. Phalanges!!!

so i killed a mosqito the other day. i do not know how to feel about this. on the one hand, it had exhausted its two warnings, and if i let one off it will be a matter of minutes before the others sense weakness and come in for the kill. on the other hand, was capital punishment a little too extreme in making my example? i wonder if this is really the right approach. on another hand entirely, i have about six mosquito bites. and on my feet i have four, and they are driving me insane - there is really only so much i can tolerate. also, i'm not entirely convinced mosquitos can comprehend the kind of covenant i'm trying to establish.
but i really try not to intervene in nature more than i can help. more for the fact that i don't like any gesture of violence, even on the smallest scale, than because i think nature would somehow function more serenely without humans killing things all the time. there is a moderation to these things... without a certain amount of killing nothing could survive. (maybe algae. but nothing you can have a conversation with or stroke or love, without being a freak.) i suppose i don't feel like i have the authority to take away life for no real purpose.
so one more thing about moderation. moderation is having 10 minute showers AT THE LONGEST! you fiends!!

in excellent news, i have not seen that cockroach-ant-cricket-silverfish-devil insect in my room in a number of weeks. its scuttling is so loud you can hear it across the room. it clicks, and kind of hops. not hip hops. or scotch and hops. or hopscotch. DEATH HOPS. the kind of thing that could easily crawl into your skull and multiply until your brain explodes. or even WHILE your brain explodes, in some kind of perverse brain-explosion fetish. if i see it again i'll photograph it, and you'll see what i mean.

the weekend has started reasonably. smashingly actually. my friday night was fantastic. today and tomorrow are full of work and attempts at essay finishing, with a disappointing lack of spooning. but necesary things will get done, and next week will be awesome, i expect.

oh yeah the blog format's back to normal.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Goodness Gracious Badness

maybe not gracious. i'm handing in my essay a day late - which is worse in terms of the terrible ramifications one might extrapolate according to my patterns of behaviour in previous semesters than the actual damage of the act itself (2% loss of marks). but still lame, obviously. gracious lameness? no such thing. (although i will review any videos you might (for whatever reason) have that attempt to prove otherwsise, for i imagine they would be full of hil-arious fallings down. followed presumably by pathetic weeping and moans of self loathing.)
on the bright side, everything else so far has been handed in on time.
on the lame side, again, the slow progress i'm making on work kept me away from multiple shindigs with friends last weekend. i apologise, if you are one such friend.
i made attempts to get out of the house on sunday, but realised as i arrived at the station that i'd left my phone at home. what followed is the reason i never wanted to have a mobile phone: a semi breakdown, an attack of anxiousness over HOW ON EARTH i would line up transport to the event once getting off the train. so i became incredibly surly and wandered home again, leaving megan to worry about my poor head. once i arrived home again my mother spun some convince (i am using 'convince' as a noun meaning 'evidence or a story that someone uses to convince you of something'. i'm fairly sure there's an existing noun that would be less ambiguous here, but i can't think of it) about my leaving my phone at home being the Great White Spirit's way of telling me i should stay home to finish my essay. i mumbled that the Great White Fuck should have given me an extension. but agreed to the broader sense of her argument.
so that was sunday afternoon. sunday morning was great - Megan had stayed the night and it was her birthday, so i was lucky enough to wake up snuggled beside her on her first day of being 19. we had kind of a delayed start, which meant missing breakfast, which i felt awful about, but nevertheless spending the morning with the girl i love is always a fantastic start to the day. the week, if you're one of those people who sunday as the first day. is that a bible thing? i don't know.
saturday night was nice as well, as it was the official opening of my dad's building, celebrated with an exhibition of his, phil's and nick's artwork. none of nick's photography was there, but here is a link: http://www.nickrobinson.com.au/photography.html
look at it.
that is the weekend in brief.... hopefully the rest of the week is productive!

Friday, May 02, 2008

I’ve changed the format of my blog, so you can only see one day’s posting at a time. It’s a half hearted exercise in intransience. Half hearted because you’ll notice everything is still archived on the left. Maybe next week I’ll get rid of the archives… maybe the week after I’ll burn everything I own. It is probably good that we don't live in a communist society, or I’d be out with my matches in the streets and in your houses. As for the more intangible things that i might be said to "own", or qualities that i "posess"... i'll have to think on it.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Encounters in Enmore

Hey, hey, here
And he put a lollypop in my hand
Is the bus coming, or what?
Yeah they come every five minutes
Down this road -
Maybe not at eleven, though.
Have a good life, have a good life, you know?
Yeah, yeah it’s good, how’s your life?
Oh yeah oh yeah
People
Life is
People are great, aren’t they?
And I unwrapped the lollipop.
Here it is!
He was drunk, or just old.
Hey, hey, here
And he gave a lollipop to
A woman with an obvious distaste for
Lollipops or strangers.
Hey gorgeous!!
Another girl walked past on the bus.
Nice to be nice, isn’t it?
Although you can’t take it too far, right?
Yeah that’s right, but
You seem nice.
He was drunk.
I waved goodbye at my stop.

Hey is this train coming, or what?
Yeah I know, I’m freezing!
They come every fifteen or so
Maybe not at twelve, though.
Had a good night?
Yeah, yeah
People are
Strange,
And great, you know?
A guy just gave me this lollipop
I don’t know if it’s
Laced with something
Haha oh I’m a nurse, it’s ok!
Oh haha, yeah then I won’t worry!
Maybe it’s laced with
Something crazy, you know?
All the kids will be like
Where’s that drunk
With the lollipops?
Hey yeah.

My hand was tingling.
Hey weird, my hand’s tingling.
And she said
You’ve got a slipped disc, hey.
Ah I think I’m ok.
Nah, go to the hospital, hey.
Alright,
Hey I’m Bron, by the way


nothing went to plan today, it was fantastic.
i skipped a lecture to stay with Megan until she had a tute, i met up with Rach and talked about the ethics of eating meat, i found out my tute had been cancelled (or something. in any case no one was in the room apart from myself and one other bewildered classmate) so i worked on my essay instead... and then wandered to Jared's, where we made something reasonable with lentils and watched QI.
it then took me two hours to get home, partly because i stopped off at the Bank to say hi to Shang, partly because i didn't realise trains stop at 11:55 on normal week nights. about ten of us waited for over half an hour - i would have given up earlier and caught the bus to central, but an awesome girl on the platform struck up a conversation with me, and i felt no pressing urge to leave a good conversation just so i could get home to procrastinate.
i also, earlier in the evening, met a man who gave me not one but TWO chuppa chups. both of them good flavours... not something lame like pineapple. i was absolutely charmed by his gesture of friendliness toward a stranger. this has happened to me before... the day of my HSC group performance i sat next to a woman with blue eyebrows on a seat at Waitara station. her name was Pat, she gave me two lollies and told me about her life. we talked about how nice the sun is.

oh yeah i don't have a slipped disc. that part was artistic license.

but the moral of my day was that people are everything, and everything is awesome.
also, always take candy from strangers. (unless they are speaking in tongues, probably.)