Attendance

This week I -

attended two board meetings and could see the possibilities
blew a minor gasket at work that needed to be blown
walked quickly everywhere for long distances, sweating off inertia all the while
stood on a High Street with strangers in warm night air and scrawled over the sky looking for a comet. Found it. Watched it slip between earth and sky
sat in the corner of a large room and knitted and listened and nutted out stuff like anxiety and recovery
made basil pesto I am still thinking about
slept beneath a sheet and felt to be the perfect temperature
swam across a basin of water and back and plan to double the distance next week
perched on a rock and discussed panic attacks
made art that I like where its going
opened up an atlas and let the pages open to a country to aim two passports toward
watched planes depart for, and arrive from, an island I need to touch base upon
hatched ludicrous and delightful plans based upon buttery rolls of Romance that will never be consumed

The Modesty Swivel

Today was a lesson in how from one hour to the next, a day can swivel from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Naturally, this swivel can take place upon a millisecond but I haven't the patience for millisecond analysis': the day has been long enough as it is.

So, the swivel was the moment that my son turned from baby to boy and I don't want to make a big deal of that so much because it happens and I'm in no mood to make nostalgic whimsies of it but still, holy fuck, did I witness something huge today. It was society and children and modesty and Lord of the Flies and a scenario where I truely did think, o fuck the lotta you . . . altho I had to gather myself to do it.

It was my favourite summer evening pastime. The 5 o'clock swim at the basin. I didn't have the head for a swim but the Q did and so my mum went to do her thing across the basin proper and Q and I went for the pool. A concrete, 50's homage to summer cut and run. So, I realised that we'd forgotten Q's bathers, and he wasn't wearing any undies, but what the hell, Q was in the water before that was an issue. And then I noticed: my darling boy, with that massive smile of bliss in the water was creating a scandal. He was nude. He wasn't just nude, he was Naked (nekkid) and boy, did he create a splash amongst the kiddies. They did double takes, they nudged each other and giggled, they pointed and gulped chlorine-wee in their excitement and I realised quicksmart (but always a little too late), that some slight shift in age had occured in the past twelve months. That lengthening out of my child's body had all these Modesty Ramifications.

So how does one deal with this scenario? For a while there I was feeling awful: guilt ridden and responsible for putting my child in this position of exposure, and I wasn't thinking Prying Eyes, I was thinking Hurting Words. But then something extraordinary happened, a swivel amidst a melee. I just thought Fuck It, and the reason I thought, Fuck It, was that Q, amazing little wonder who taught me a Big Lesson today, was completely and utterly oblivious to the Scandal that his joy was creating. And, (this is the killer) his joy forced me to stand my ground and stare down his would-be taunters with a beatific smile that dared them to think that this was weird. If I had reacted any differently, I would have simply reiterated what the little 'upholders' of social decorum were plonking on the water. And so we had to create this little bubble of dignity/bravery/glee where neither of us had to say a word to anyone and we were quickly left to do what we were there to do: cool down like everyone else.

This year is fast sorting a lotta shit out! I adore a Big Edit. (Can you tell I've recently read The God of Small Things?)

Duck Duck Goose

An exercise of tag:

4 jobs i have had

1. blueberry picker
2. apple thinner
3. MS Readathon envelope licker
4. museum attendant

4 Movies I could watch over and over (or, movies that I remembered liking alot)

1. The English Patient
2. Pride and Prejudice (ditto Ms S-S)
3. Short Cuts
4. Struggling: I can't remember the movies that I have loved

4 places I have lived apart from where I live now

1. Melbourne
2. Flinders Island
3. Hobart
4. Devonport

4 tv shows that I love (or used to when I was still watching tv)

1. ummm
2. Spicks and Specks
3. Gardening Australia?
4. The Movie Show?

4 places I have been on hols (the glamorous sounding ones)

1. Beuamaris
2. Vietnam
3. Laos
4. Japan (but they didn't feel like a holiday, they felt like a mission)

4 websites I visit daily

1. hotmail
2. abc news
3. mystic medusa
4. justjared for the trashiest of the trash

4 favourite foods

1. lamb chops/stew/roast
2. rice in all its guises
3. yoghurt
4. muesli

4 places i would rather be at

1. Flinders Island: in my granny's living room
2. in a cold gallery in a far away country
3. in a tent with my head out the door and the rest of me in a sleeping bag at dusk in a 'wilderness' landscape
4. a restaurant eating food I can't afford to prepare for myself

4 people I am tagging

umm I have no friends. . .Colette? Micah? anyone?

la chambre

Yesterday Q and I swapped bedrooms which I think is one of my all time favourite past-times. Room alteration!

As a child I would regularly undertake such a process. It would require documentation. I drew up room plans, to scale, each article of furniture accounted for. It would take me a weekend and the night it was completed, I slept the heavy, calm sleep of the rejuvenated and purged.

As I write, a moment of perfect timing: the choral music of Tavener (sic). It'll make you meditate no matter how hard you are fighting.

My bedrooms have become the most pared back spaces of my life.

But now I can rest a little easier on rubbish nights. Q had taken to climbing out of his bedroom window to meet the rubbish truck. I would be woken up by intuitive tugs: Q's voice outside at 5.30 am talking to the guys. A little unnerving to say the least.

On the weekend I stripped wallpaper in my hall way. In other words, maps of paper countries and continents flukily took shape and spread their boundaries. But, have finally done with the rank as shit salmon painted wallpaper that was offending my very soul.

s' aviser

'to rumble'

ah, I think my life has begun to rumble again and, as a gorgeous friend of mine noted recently, the cues of fear are shared with that other emote-grip, excitement. I'm sure my nostrils are flaring and my eyes are darting even as I write.

The rumble is the sale of a dear little house with a whole lotta baggage! I am loving that I have absolutely no idea as to the shape, quality, or soundings of the future into which I and my loves are about to be dropped. Or, less abruptly, placed.

Mighty Q is obsessed with the world atlas. Every day, he asks me to draw him a map of a different country.

Se remettre en marche

So time is waddling on and I am plumping myself up on a diet of ideas, phantasies and potentials. Sometimes, stones chink together, people-stones, and everythings sparks and fractures a bit and little idea-fires smoulder away, flame up, burn down, and then the re-gen starts to shoot green spikes. The last couple of months, this is what my bubble has been harbouring.

Quelle coincidence?

A couple of nights ago I had one of my rare, vivid and remembered dreams. My childhood home burnt down because a ladle in a pot had been left on the stove. My distress woke me up: I think I was yelling into my mobile, trying to go through the steps of an emergency call. Then, a conversation with my co-owner of this house, and I am suddenly gripped by the idea of selling this home, my home, and being a bit domesticity-vague for a while. The ironic emphasis being, that I have recently been organising myself loans for renovations - bigger gestures of nest-building and via a series of sparks:

un arret
l'arrivee
allons
la chance

some bridges may be burnt.

I recently came across this snippet, wired to the virtual ether:

. . . I was the only thing to break down on Monday, but I like to do that every once in a while - things always seem rebuild themselves on a more secure footing . . .



Recently the walnut tree in my garden had to be dismantled and it was a beautiful thing to watch. I am not sure if my own on-going process of dismantling has always been an attractive thing but, perhaps for once, I feel like I am about to become the active one in its initiation.

Just like Lego.

Hats Off!

All done. . .and, as if to make up for all the last minute horrors of formatting stresses and printing chaos' that I endured (because I was slack - no doubt about it) throughout undergrad, today was surreal and easy and indeed, almost fucking nonchalant. Wonders will never cease.

It was so odd holding these bound up little things and thinking, is that what all that was about? What was it about again? oh yeah, some book. an old one.

So now. . .where is that list I constructed all those months ago as to what I was allowed to do post-essay?

See you all soon eh? Gin and tonic on the patio and all that. I might even be able to arrange a view.

Head Peace

A nice off shoot of this current writing thing is that I can now categorise how I like to write. Ie the props that I need to sustain the flow/focus etc

For instance, I have just realised how dependent I am on:

The head covering. I suspect I may look a bit comic actually but I am completely addicted to either the hoody hunched over the keyboard or, as at present, the new sun hat, pulled low over my eyes. Thinking cap. Keeps my vision low and focused. Something.

And the music is just crucial at low times for energising: Alison Krause, Gillian Welch and Kimya Dawson.

And when it stalls and all locks up indefinately I go weild the hoe and smash it up a bit.

Lucida Grande

Lucida grande is the name of this font.

I wish I was feeling lucidly grand, instead feeling a bit limbo-ed: just want to finish the damn thing but intertia cripples.

Today I left the front door open to let in the hot gusts of air because it felt so good! I picked up my dog from her morning run to Woolworths Kingsmeadows (which was full of people who looked the same, and I don't mean that in a negative way, just in a, they-all-looked-the-bloody-same way), I drank ginntonic outta can at my parents place (classy), I tiled the floor with A4 sheets of paper that constitute drafts and mourned some trees, spoke to my good friend and we each ranted about stuff.

Actually, there is a lot to be said about visiting 'new' supermarkets and checking out the demographics. . .and analysing the stock range.

word cleaning slow

Cocktails on Full Moons should be outlawed

but I'm feeling much better now thank you

have cleaned my bedroom, bathroom, kitchen (again), and vacuumed house

wrote 100 more words of thesis

deleted about 1000

all good!

Brain-bergs

News radio is strangely addictive: a chunk of Antartica, a state sized chunk, broke off from the continent and became an ice berg and floated off around the seas. A storm, 37, 000 kilometres distant, was found to have caused it to be ground down and chipped up. And a butterfly sneezed.

I've just cleaned the kitchen down to grouting level. Never mind that I don't have any tiles in the kitchen.

My writing is due in about twenty days. It is a major struggle today. I am hating my topic, my protagonist, my own inertia when faced with all those blah blah words.

Also, I am childless mother for a week, the longest we have been apart. I have been so focused that I have hardly noticed. But that is a product and a privilege of knowing that he is at the beach with his dad and having the most excellent time catching up.

The obsession is post-thesis life.

Mee grain

The migraine is creeping around the aura of my body, which sounds wanky but that is where it is at. And I can feel its energy source. The locked in tension in my neck and back.

Weird poem below though. . .I just liked that it ended on the word tonic. Some people will read in some other stuff as well but. . .it's from a great word space. I have a theory of textual addiction. Whether it is a daily horoscope or a daily poem, some of us seek out text to hang our coats on. Rely on the hints/quelle coincidence/ideas that will, or will not, resonate or gesture us towards where we are at present.

More Tonic

Wine Water

I shared a bed. Some man came and said

he hadn't slept all his life. I gave him some of my night

hours without

even thinking. Wish someone would have warned me.

Now I dream a man's blue-

shaven visions. I can't tell if I'm a woman

or a man in the dreams, but it doesn't matter.

What happens when they mix:

soil, Sister. That's all we've

become. Man plus Woman equals

Ditch Dirt. And this is supposed to be beautiful,

the strongest tonic.

Stephanie N. Johnson

/Beloit Poetry Journal/

Volume 57, Number 1

Fall 2006

Bikes Are Tonic

Have just been sitting on my front step again. This time with my dog and a glass of G&T and in the dusk. . bliss. It's been an interesting day: a mammoth, bouyant rally and all the people bouncing off each other with that rare familiarity that can be bred at such things. But I feel a little guilty; the writing I was meant to do today didn't occur much. Is it self-indulgent to need an afternoon to absorb the synchronisities, the conversations, people glances, that the universe throws at you: the stars throw at you?

Q got a bike for his birthday which is hardly original but damn it is loved. And it was via this bike that I learnt, again, how becoming a parent has made me uberfrenetic. And, it was via this parental gift that I was reminded as to the art of lolling about in the sun in a park. It takes patience! After ten minutes I am bored, I could contentedly leave; after twenty, I'm finding a more comfy body position; after thirty, when I next look at my watch we've been in the park for over an hour and Q is proudly noting how sweaty his hair is.

Isn't tonic a lovely word?

Today

Today I bought prosciutto and whilst I bought fruit and salad my dog ate it (the ham! Not the, ah whatever) in the car, I wrote at my new little desk that stares out my bedroom window, I wrote at my computer in complete silence, I wrote at my computer with the Beasties blaring, I weeded a small segment of the back vegetable bed and dreamed up zuchinni, beans and basil hedge, I walked my son in the sun up to creche, I made osso bucco and did the dishes twice, I declared to myself that I had to cut down my sugar intake, I built lego houses with my son and enjoyed it, I sat on the front step with my ex mother-in-law and smoked a rollie and just chatted. That's about all.

PS. I think this gal is worth reading: it took me a few reads to get her (a trawl through her archive) but she is great fun and clever clever.

PPS. Self congratulatory moment at first implant of link into blog!

Sharon Stone and I. . .

Did you know that Sharon Stone and I have the same taste in children's names? I know, who would have thought. . .

Both her children are named from 'my list'
as in within the top 2. . .bizarre.

Secret Tags

and I just remembered that I've been tagged by dear fuffenscheit. . .to tell a secret. . .but the funny thing is that I'm struggling. . .there's either the things that are way too secret or not secret enough. . .quite a dilemma. . . so I'll hang it in suspense, just like on Home & Away. I'll be back.

Ode to the Afternoon Nap

Ode to the afternoon nap: splendid treats if you can luxuriate the time enough to foetal beneath the doona. Afternoon noises of the street sway, the dog snores. Loyal dog.

Have just eaten curry treats and am enjoying a cordial glass of beer.

In the Indian restaurant I bumped into some friends; a couple who were washed out with some unnamed trial of the day. They've given up alchohol, they haven't time for the pub anymore, perhaps if she was single still. . .we drift back off into our respective lives. I think about such declarations, so hard and fast. . .

Still, I've been similiar of late. Knocked back into a world of study, illness, recovery, study. But I am so contented in my bubble; my house and the figures within. Child, dog, garden, treasured food, word games over tea. It sounds revoltingly idyllic and sometimes my independence scares me: how much longer until the control freakery is cemented?

I am currently loving Vika and Linda. Ventured into the spectacle of the casino with my friends and we sat up like contestants on some obscure game show, or the muppets, and watched these incredible musicians effortlessly gift us with the best live entertainment I've seen in . . .a damn long time.

My current inability to frame text is freaking me out. Lots of paragraphs left isolated in white space. . .I will not panic.

oz, g, Kg, pt, fl oz

Man, this flu is nasty. Really had to declare that, am vvv over it!

Am speechless/struggling, weighing up ideas. In my palms they all feel like weights, not quite ready to be tossed into the air with my attachments.

More later.

A week ago and never declared. . .

There is a lovely snippet of sunshine on a hill that I'm staring at from my desk. If I wasn't aware that it was the winter dip of August, I'd be thinking that it was early evening mid January. Despite being tagged by a decent hacking cough, weird upset digestive system and the encroaching thesis due date, there is that lovely shift in the air of seasonal change and future possibilities.