What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately

Steinbeck - Winter of our discontent

I think everyone must have one person who they never could say no to. Someone they won’t forget about very quickly. Mine had many names - women, as they say, live their different lives one after the other. I think she’s Penni now. I remember her as Phillipa. It makes no difference.

I knew her when she was seventeen. I can’t help but think if I wasn’t such a stupid little fucker I could have held onto her and given her the support she needed and the bad stuff that happened wouldn’t have happened after that. But I was, and I didn’t and it did. That’s the price you pay a lot of the time - you only become the right person to act after your time to act has passed.

Yesterday I searched the web to see her sites. Horse RPGs. It looks like she’s happy and busy, and I’m hopeful about that. Time must have put right what I didn’t.

Part of me wants to send her a message, just to see if she will answer - it wouldn’t be dignified but it would be an experiment (and I do like experiments) so, one day, I guess I will.

In the end I didn’t say no to her, I just went. She might have cared but didn’t say it. Now, I’m the man who should have been there five years ago - who truly would have done things right - and I’ve come all this way with no one to meet. One day I will tavel down the coast to Eden, where her mother wanted to retire to ten years ago. I think it must be the centre of the world of things that could have been but weren’t.

This week was pretty lame, with my time divided between handing out tutor assessments at uni (OMG I hope I never have to read any of them - I’m sure they all hate me on account of how incompetent I am and how I put my feet up on the seats when they’re not allowed to) and working on a new paper about the atom bomb (I know I’m no politics specialist but it’s going to be great - I’m using stuff from the justly famous Simulacra and Simulation which I might add has nothing to do with The Matrix despite appearing on Keanu’s bookshelf in the movie.) Got my passport finally.

It’s also worth adding that because I’m generally a slack bastard and also because I’ve been swimming a bit lately, my former RSI problems are nearly gone. I’ve gotten used to typing until I’m tired, but I lasted late into the night last night - which is really too much I can now wisely tell you, so on the whole I’m taking it easy with optimistic glee (not enough glee in the world nowadays…) I can also play the guitar without going all clawlike. I can also play the guitar very darn funkily if you’d care to know. I have a new song about buttons.

And since all the birthday junk has arrived, I’ve prepared a list of the best bits - in Haiku!!

A raincoat:

written on the tag:
‘keeps you warm in New Zealand’
I sure hope it does

A top with splatty paint on:

jumper from Aunty
pockets full of chocolate
wash it in the sink

A beer:

glass of darkish ale
the same as every other
went down just as fast

A fifty:

a swim at the pool
Turkish pizza for dinner
remainder for bills

woohoo. wanna say something? - say it with haiku.

I O U : one real post - luv, Mark

Before I die, I would like to: Build a house! Paint a self-portrait! I would really like to own a house where I could paint pictures of fields and deserts on the walls, and with a shed so I could build furniture. I would also like to get married and join a really loud band that would play songs about all our friends.

I am quite good at: thinking of rhyming words; cutting and pasting; overthinking things.

I am absolutely shit at: sewing, though I still try; getting up early and not looking very angry about it; holding my liquor.

I am attracted to: It’s hard to say, isn’t it? When I’m attracted to someone I almost always interpret it as a failing on my part. ‘How could I fall for someone like that?’ I maybe could say I have a thing for English women (or ones who do a good cockney accent when the occasion calls for it) but you can see it’s all pretty arbitrary and won’t make me fulfilled in the long run.

I’m nearly always saying: dude and sweet. I also use the word ‘probably’ far too much. I guess I’m too skeptical to be committed to any particular sentence.

Celebrities I find attractive are: Agent Scully, Christa Miller and Zooey who played Trillian in the Guide movie. Misato must also be mentioned, but she’s a cartoon so she doesn’t really count.

So Dad calls up in the morning and I think I more or less deal with that in an adult manner. Not that I can remember on account of being half asleep - it’s just a feeling. Then I head over to Surry to meet up with James and Glen at the Strawberry Hills. It’s a lunchtime on a sunny Sunday morning and everything is peaceful in the city. James rocks up in his shorts and tells me about the virtues of watching cricket as I grimace at the big-screen TV and wonder. Then Glen brings me this little book called The Relevance of the Humanities which was the response of a bunch of Aussie academics to the impending HECS apocalypse in the 80s. Glen is also wearing shorts but it’s less of a thing with him. We have the famous Strawberry Hills lunch and chat on the veranda where the light is so bright that I almost fall of my seat. At some point Chris rings up and says Hi and I say I’m coming home for Christmas.

Late at night I can’t get to sleep because I feel like I haven’t done something. I decide that it must just be another feeling and go to sleep anyhow.

My favourite sentence, I decided the other day, is this: Where have all the wolves gone?

Do you have a sentence you think is really neat?

It seems they’ve dubbed The Simpsons for TV in the Middle East. Among things cut from the show are Homer drinking and eating bacon and any mention of Krusty being Jewish.

I’m not sure about this. Taking out everything that isn’t consisent with an Islamic Homer (or Omar as they’re calling him) is perfectly natural, but taking out the references to religion is different. As far as I can tell, it means one or more of the following a) it’s not OK to depict non-Muslims on TV b) it’s not OK that Omar is friends with non-Muslims c) it’s not even OK that there are non-Muslims in existence. In other words: bad stuff. So I was wondering, why does The Simpsons need a dose of racism and insularity to get a place on TV in the Middle East? Are people really that nuts that they can’t watch a Jew being Jewish? And are those who support the censorship ever going to be happy with the show? I mean, in the end, when all these compromises are made, it’s still going to be the Simpsons. It’s a symbol of everything western, and the people who watch it probably won’t mind seeing non-Islamic values.

I don’t just want to question religious conservatism here, but to ask whether this is how people in the Middle East really want television to be. Does the censoring of The Simpsons give us an accurate idea of the values of the audience? Or - conversely - does it create a false image in the hope that everyone, the audience and the outsiders, will see the Middle East in a certain way?

One of the prevailing misconceptions of our day is that everyone who isn’t white is a clone. We know people are wrong when they say we’re all decadents and infidels but we still think that all Muslims are fundamentalists. Does The Simpsons make them all angry? Or should we attribute to them more ambivalent hearts, beneath the convenient images held up by dogmatists eastern and western?

Don’t tell anybody but I stayed up really late last night. You can probably tell, in fact, from the way I leer and drool at everyone today. -But the important thing is not to tell anyone I was, y’know… writing. A poem. That annoying habit reared its head in the late evening and I spent hours pondering and scribbling. Trying to find the best way to work in the story of the Trojan Horse, because that’s what I do when I’m short on material. I even came up with this line, a complete embarrassment:

soft like a sneeze on the nighttime breeze

Pfft. It’s pretty lame, don’t you think? (But to tell you the truth I’m secretly pleased - greasy rhymes like these appease my faculties. It’s a disease and I’m seized like six JD’s. Or I freeze with a beard of bees to my knees; careful not to disrupt the, er peas.) So tonight I’ll edit. Just keep quiet and don’t let it get around. Real men don’t write poems, do they?

And in case you didn’t know, it’s my birthday on Sunday.

Yep, the first people I know from high school to get married and now the first to pop out a kid. Can’t believe they’re only 22&23.

Old friends from high school with children are meant to engender contempt and pity in the unmarried aren’t they? After all, it’s fashionable to look down on those who choose responsibility and committment over a life of meaningless careerism. In fact I’m completely jealous. I know Tomas and Eleesha are going to love being parents and I bet they’ll be really good at it too. We should all be so lucky.

Preston’s got a great future ahead of him. He just better like cheese on toast.

You know I wouldn’t be standing here, waiting for the little green man, if I hadn’t pressed the button. You know it but still you drive an icy dagger into my heart by walking up and banging on that button again. Tap-a tap tap. Again!! Tap-a tap tap! WHY?!!

Some day I will just turn around to whoever you are and scream. Someday I will go to Mitre 10, purchase a broom handle and some chain. Make myself some nunchuks.