Yesterday: boring. Very tired after writing previous entry. Worked up the energy to play Quake 3 with Chris at about 8PM then went to bed early.

Today: nice day on the water with the seagrass group. We picked, marked and monitored four sites in Mangles Bay, which was hard work and required a lot of time in the water. The results seem to come out a better with the new sampling system though. Dennis and crew managed to rescue some kids in a sail dingy on the way back, after one had fallen out and couldn’t get back in.

Also picked up the following from James:

Uber Vegie Burgers

Soak brown lentils overnight.
Drain. Chop or grate onion (+ garlic).
Grate a potato and / or carrot,
mix with self-raising flour then add egg,
add soy sauce, coriander / curry powder,
parsely, etc. to taste, keeping it dry as poss.
Dip into polenta + fry

Thanks James!

Gig review – [Chris Fuller,] The New Black, Namaste, The Harrys and Simon London and the Spirits at Mojo’s Bar. (26/2)

8:55 PM

So I’m on the bus and these idiot teenyboppers in the back seat start blowing bubbles onto all the passengers. Normally, fine, but these are the long-life goop bubbles that leave snotty stains on you suede jacket. F**k. So I sit there. Some international type swears at them as she’s getting off. They’re so wasted they come down to annoy me and then they get angry when I tell them to piss off. Anyway, the bus driver tells them to shut up, and they do.

So it was an OK bus trip. What really set it off for me was this woman – she was like, Meg White pretty or something – and she looked at me and smiled as I stood on the train platform. Awww. I’m in love. I hope she can see me writing this and thinks I’m some kinda poet.

* * *

I missed Chris Fuller but I didn’t get a press pass so hey, it’s give and take. The New Black definitely knew what they were doing. Very hard-rock but not as clinical as you’d expect. The bass player was a bit green but he was new. Now the bartender’s served me a pint of cider instead of a half. I look like a bloody dwarf with this huge mug.

Namaste: Ani Difranco always leaves me wishing I’d listened to Fiona Apple instead. Still, Namaste looked like they really meant what they were saying and Fiona Apple wasn’t in the room at the time. In fifty or a hundred years, we will look back and think that drummers today were a bit over the top.

The Harrys are an extraverted, super-tight pop-rock band. People like this will have the last laugh, unfortunately. Most people have left by now, including my friends. 11:28 PM

Simon London and the Spirits know all about frills and they’re doing just fine without them. An epic kind of rock with very appropriate drumming. I’ve just missed the last bus home but it was worth it. As I leave, I contemplate human seriousness and what the universe really thinks of us. I chat to some guy while we’re walking across the Fremantle Bridge.

XXX

Love, Mark

Just look at the latest post (25/2/04) on www.DeliciousJuice.com and see what a real blogger can do. Note that my lame-arsed attempt to leave a flattering comment has been justifiably destroyed by the site’s blogging program. Ugh.

Anyway here’s the (also lame-arsed) entry I wrote earlier:

Tonight Jammo, Chris, Kat and I went to a new movie called One Perfect Day. I had some free passes that a friend at the Murdoch student guild gave me. Jammo arrived late, but I left his pass in a plant pot under a wilted rose bush and, strangely enough, he actually managed to find it. Score.

Meanwhile, the movie was a load of bollocks. Full of ravers and drug deals and stuff. The sound design was wonderful but the scriptwriting has obviously been done by a group of lemurs holding pencils in their prehensile tails. Well, you get what you pay for, right?

Looking very nice with a new haircut, by the way: http://stillgotbutterflies.tripod.com/about

nighty-night :)

I guess it wasn’t that bad. -M

I worked out today. Well, OK, not a macho sweaty gym workout with lots of machines and stuff, but I did do *several* pushups. And some stomach crunches and some bike riding and some Feng Shuei* moves I learned from the hippies in the Junkadelic samba band. Nothing feels better than working up a good sweat while ignoring work. In fact, I’m starting to notice my pecs are getting bigger (I can actually say I ‘have’ pecs now. Sweet.) and I’m able to go exercise for longer without getting tired.

Also: a cute moral dilemma. The woman delivering my new mobile phone says that since my mother paid for it, then only she can sign for it. BUT, she will let me forge my mother’s signature to save me the trouble of driving down to Mandurah to get the phone at a later date. She says last time she let someone forge a singature she got into trouble with her boss. So the question is: did I do it or not? You think you know me? YOU THINK YOU KNOW ME?!

*OK, it isn’t Feng Shuei. I can’t remember the name of the thing but you know what I mean.

Today was a very regimented day of work on the dissertation, which probably explains why nothing of note happened.

I’m reading this neat book called Fear of Flying by Erica Jong - it’s from the seventies and it’s about some neurotic woman going to Vienna on a plane full of psychiatrists and ranting on about her sex life and how neurotic she is. I think it’s feminism.

Dave delivered the ‘Rocky Blues’ CD with our song on it, but I’ve decided our song is extremely bad, and the CD is full of the blues so the outlook is not positive. This is what happens when you write +++ Valium Monotono-rock Darkness and then record an acoustic version. What a crock.

Anyway, I’ll come back tomorrow night with something interesting to say. Maybe an interesting bit of bathroom graffitti, or something about how my bus ticket was illegible to the little ticket cheking machine.

He heee eee. The Still Got Butterflies site - stillgotbutterflies.tripod.com - is up :) I’ll install a corresponding sidebar in the links here soon. Go see it - it has almost no information on it :) LOL

I’ve just been hanging out at home this weekend. Yesterday we bought an electric mower out of the paper but I haven’t been bothered to use it yet. Instead, Alan from next door helped us prune the butterfly trees and pile up the leaves for green waste. We were still in a pruning mood this morning, but I cut my finger with a saw and got a bit frustrated after that.

McMahon / Lizard Brain rehearsal went OK - we played Laid (by James), completely impromptu and unrehearsed and it was good. I think we played it through three times with the verses in a different order each time. I couldn’t get the falsetto bits, but Barry couldn’t get the snare thing so at least we were even.

The McMahon website is also up, I think, at mcmahon_band.tripod.com I’m learning this thing slowly but surely.

You’ll notice that yesterday was the first full day without an entry. Scary. I have been going more than a week at least.

Last night Kat, Adrian, Julia, Chid and some other dudes went to the Over the Fence film festival in King’s Park. There was a great film where a guy keeps getting beaten up by a bear for no particular reason, and one that was unmistakably Grug and the Fascist Fair Go Party people (though they used pseudonyms), about the importance of flush toilets in preventing the rise of the evil Nazi faeces of the Turd Reich. We didn’t stick around to see who won the prize, though.

As a result of many subtle hints, Kat’s lending me her disgusting ruffly crayfish-coloured ball dress, on the pretext that I’m wearing it on stage at the next show. Yaaay :D I think I will have to devise a way of stealing it from her. It belongs with me. IT BELONGS WITH ME!!!!

Is that a justifiable use of exclamation marks?

Another meeting of the philosophy group today and, no surprise, the discussion got bogged down in phenomenology. Phenomenology is a moderately hip branch of philosophy that uses impossibly thick jargon because its ideas have gone beyond the possibilities of normal language (or so say the phenomenologists - I’m doing OK with normal English so far.) I figure these people like phenomenology because a concept is so much more attractive if no one else understands it.

Call me cynical…

After meeting with papercut media today, it has become increasingly clear that a) We don’t know what we want on our CD cover b) we don’t even really know what the CD should be called c) we don’t actually have a plan for making people buy it. I’d like to think that I’m just an artist and people should take care of these things for me, but let’s face it, I’m not and they won’t.

Our new title is Destroy all Ornaments. Like it?

Oh, and how stinking hot is it? The woman in the deli near Tomas’s house said 42 degrees was today’s maximum, and at eleven thirty it’s still twenty-nine outside. It was so humid and this big scary thunderstorm filed up the sky while I was walking home and made it go dark early.

nighty-night :)

XXX
Mark

(This is based on a true story about my family)

Say you Dad tells you that if you take up smoking you won’t get any inheritance because you’ll just end up spending it on cigarettes anyway. You start smoking anyway but don’t tell your Dad about it because of the hundred thousand dollars share of the inhertance you’ll be giving away to your siblings.

Now your Dad is dying of testicular cancer and you have one last opportunity to tell him about your habit. Do you:

a) Stifle the cravings long enough to see Dad and secure the inheritance, but let him go to his grave without knowing that he has been lied to.

b) Whip out a spliff and light up, thus losing your inheritance but sharing a precious moment with your father that will make him proud of the honest person you have grown up to be.

Post your answers with the comments link below :)

*PS: I’ve TM’ed using Tripod Blogger, thus preventing me from seeking alternative hosting for the time being. I maybe should start up a diaryland site anyway*