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...


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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.

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goodnight preciousnesses.