Guess who has to restructure an 18000 word chapter by Wednesday :( Well, that’ll learn me for being such a crap writer.

Today I packed up my office and brought the last of the junk home. Here is a brief manifesto:

My birth certificate (ineffective as means to obtain passport)
An very uncomfortable ergonomic keyboard rest (I make my own now. You want one?)
A ‘Smile: Jesus Loves You!’ yellow eraser
A crappy whiteboard marker
Spare apartment keys
Souvenir conference name tags (Sydney, Melbourne, NZ)
Fake plastic ivy for blue-tacking to furniture.
A button badge reading ‘Pointless Ironic Badge’ (I totally love myself for thinking of that)
Paperclips

Which means just one week’s worth of nose-grindstone proximity and I’ll be headed your way, Sweet Land of No Daylight Savings. I’m wearing my RED de Bono hat - that means INTENSE FEELINGS.

INTENSE, PEOPLE.

I caught someone who thought they could copy from an internet essay site without references. They are now officially BONED. Rock and roll.

Also, I went with James to a talk by Clive James about post-war Australian art. Clive was a nice old chap but committed a mortal sin by bagging Lacan and Foucault as art critics. Well… I guess Lacan is kinda lame but that’s no reason to say he’s ‘poison’ to the art world.

Oh wicked! Battleplan is starting and this week’s manouvre is ‘insertion’. Gotta go.

Travelling home from summer holidays with my dad’s family. In the truck we eat some cheese sandwiches that will make me sick for the next week. When we arrive at home the house is spotless because dad’s wife stayed behind for a few days after we left to clean it. My backpack, which has been on holiday and is therefore full of sand, is not allowed inside. I have only a couple of clean items of clothing to wear.

I decide to go see my uncle and aunt on my mother’s side who live nearby. They are nice and the next day I take a big bag full of my clothes which have been sitting by the door at dad’s place. We have dinner and watch the DVD of Chicago.

The next day I plan to go into the city to see the art gallery but dad’s galah escapes and we have to spend all day asking people if we can go into their backyards to toss tennis balls at it, as it moves from tree to tree under the barrage. We eventually get the bird back.

The day after, my aunt takes me around Melbourne shopping for clothes that will no longer fit when I’m back at home and have the usual amount of food to eat. I am quite thin, but haven’t really noticed. Dad gives me a key to come back in at night.

The next morning I sit in the garden and she comes and takes the key away. Later she will say she doesn’t know my family; they could be associating with criminals.

It’s her, really. She can’t stand my presence. I just put up with it because that’s what I’ve always done and at this age it doesn’t hurt any more. As a child on access visits I would cry and cry and get sick. I would learn to be afraid and ashamed of myself. Mostly, I would learn that I couldn’t cope with very much. Now it’s different, and I’m not afraid. She can’t get to me, and if he can’t protect me it doesn’t matter any more.

I leave on the morning of the last day, walking with my backpack to the train station. Funny how the line between childhood and adulthood can manifest in something so disposable as a train ticket.

My aunt sees me off at the airport. On the plane home it’s all ocean and desert.

A couple of years ago I arrived in a tutorial room early and was looking out the window. It was a cloudy day and the room was up on the third floor overlooking the Chinese garden. At a seat next to the pond there was a pudgy asian girl and a white guy talking. I thought, ‘What a strange couple - he’s way better looking than she is. Either I’m wrong about who gets who in life, or they’re not going to be together for very long.’

For a minute I went and took out my books and notepad, and then came back to the window. The guy was walking off below me up toward the library and the girl was sitting there crying against one of the red concrete pillars that held up the roof over the seating area. I couldn’t hear her from so high up but I could see it on her face. Her track pants must have been getting damp and dirty from the wet paving where she was sitting. Eventually she stopped crying and walked away in the direction of the student flats.

So I think I was right. The universe corrects itself, often brutally fast.

My dad called my work today and told the administrative officer that he had lost my phone number. I feel embarrassed about that. Not that he lost the number, which is just embarrassing for him, but for taking up other people’s time. And I don’t know how you can lose somebody’s phone number, especially a relative. I guess he accidentally threw his filofax in the garbage. Or his wife did.

My dad isn’t a complete twit. He did build his own house, which I guess is pretty cool. I’ll have to ring him tomorrow to see what he wants, and I’ll probably have to make plans to see him when I get to Melbourne. Which is the hard bit, because he’ll want me to go to that house and I promised myself I would never go back there. He won’t understand. I told him a long time ago and I’m sure he forgot about it.

I don’t know.

Why should I keep that promise if it will never mean anything to him? Why should I bother being angry if it won’t change anything?

But still what I’m scared of is that I just don’t have the courage to go there. Promises to myself aside. Walking into that place again and pretending to be happy to my sisters and my brother… I don’t know if I could get halfway up the drive. And if that’s the real point, then it would be better if I didn’t call until after. I’d rather be the lazy son than the idiot who wants to make a scene; who can’t just be normal.

Big strong man am I. I don’t know why this is suddenly such a big deal.

Marking essays on Henry David Thoreau after watching Serenity a few times is pretty psychedelic. At intervals, speeches from the movie run through my head.

River: People don’t like being meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t walk. Don’t run. We’re in their homes and in their minds and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.

One day I will teach my own class on civil disobedience and I’ll have these as sound bites to play during the lecture. I may even show up in costume.

Mal: One day they will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.

Apart from bouts of righteous libertarian fist-waving, nothing much else is going on. I’m headed for Melbourne on the 10th, so if anyone who reads this is in town and wants to meet up, just drop me a line. Ross will be there visiting his cousins so I get some free accomodation, and we’ll go around and see different relatives and hang out in the city for a while. We may even rent a car car car to go drivin’ along woohoo.

Hey, what should I see when I’m in Melbourne? Know any good places to eat / rock out?

First I would like to bitch. Blockbuster Video:

a) You know I don’t like bright lights and public places. Why must you traumatise me further by conjuring up arcane billing systems so that I never know how much a trip to the video store will cost?

b) We *all* thought DVDs were the greatest thing ever, but the fact is you can’t play them more than twice without them turning to shit. We need another solution.

c) Just for the hell of it - please don’t pretend you like anime. It’s clear you only ever buy the first disc of a series and leave us hanging.

Okay, so I managed to watch Sean of the Dead, but only by using my computer to rip it and play it off the hard disc (which, I suspect, may not even be legal). It was a pretty good film - at least the best zombie film I’ve seen - and I was glad there was a happy ending. But I guess I made the mistake of also borrowing Serenity, which is a fucking indescribably tops film-

ohmygodohmygodohmygod I wanna have Joss Whedon’s babies!!

- and by contrast Sean of the Dead was good but not great. Yeah, I know you hate me. Now excuse me while I surf the web for dodgy DVDs of Firefly.

Squee!

Is that manly?

Cartoons rule today.

Looking Back:

I’ve never had a real birthday party, not since I was seven. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I never had the confidence that people would show up if I did have one. Anyhow, on my twenty-first (this must have been three years ago) my friends actually threw me one.

It was at L’s house, so I went along there in the afternoon. I can’t remember who else gave me a present, but L gave me a couple of second hand books. One of them was a fairly good Terry Pratchett novel, the other a very bad sci-fi. The birthday party went like this: we sat around in the Hamilton Hill Hotel drinking Coopers for a few hours (L’s boyfriend has a thing for Coopers but I find it nasty) and then all five of us packed into E’s VW convertible went to a poetry reading at the Rosemount where Tomas read some of his poetry. The poetry reading was small but somehow I was press-ganged into Tomas’s act and, as I recall, nearly gave him a broken rib playing that ‘bounce off each other’s chests’ game. Poetry can be a contact sport sometimes.

After that we were sitting in L’s loungeroom running out of goon and there was a debate about whether a bottle shop would be open. L and I left the others to walk down the hill and see.

And this is the main thing that I remember. We found the shop closed and decided to walk to another one in the next suburb over, which took about an hour longer than we were expecting. When we finally found it that one was closed as well, so we got KFC instead and walked back eating chicken burgers. By the time we arrived at L’s place again, we were running so late that her boyfriend was getting into his car to come look for us.

I guess said boyfriend wasn’t happy, but that’s not the important part. For a while, L and I were just walking along and talking shit, completely oblivious to the rest of the world. All we had in mind was the poorly-conceived goal of walking to a bottle shop that was closed before we even set out. I had the feeling, and I always had the feeling when I was with her, that nothing else really mattered. That we were in some small bubble that the world couldn’t get into, and we could go anywhere or do anything and it would be okay. Maybe you know what I mean and maybe you don’t, but the point is that it was one of the most exciting times I can remember. You don’t normally think of L as ‘exciting’, just as some quiet girl waiting to be bent into whatever shape her man desires like so many other girls, but it’s true. More than anyone else I’ve met.

Looking Forward:

I think: so many of the stories men tell are sad ones about how the past was better for them than today. I try never to tell stories that way, because it’s not cool. After a year and a half, I’m moving back to Perth because Sydney is expensive and boring and far away from everyone I care about. Being a mover and a traveller is good for your CV but not good for anything else I have decided. I never want to leave again unless I have that bubble hanging safely over my head to protect me.

At this point I will stop telling the story, for fear of it going the wrong way.

• I have been sick. I would rant and rave about it, but it really wasn’t that bad - only it sucks because the school is hosting a conference and I want to go, but with my tiredness and constant nose-blowing I would make a real dick of myself if I did. Snorting for half an hour and then falling asleep is not a good way to receive someone’s paper.

Ooh, here’s a new ‘bit’ I developed last night: Facts About Mark’s Nose!

1) I am used to colds, since I spent most of my childhood drenched in snot. I was allergic to dust and pollen, so with the dusty sheets and fluffy jumpers of winter and the flowers of summer, I had the whole year covered. Nowadays I’m mostly over it, but sometimes my nose will start running like a tap just to prove that it’s still a bit part of my life.

2) I have a favourite nostril - it’s the right one.

3) I am a VERY accomplished sneezer. I don’t just ‘achoo’ politely, but really throw my back into it with vigour. It has been said to resemble an epileptic fit. If there are no strangers watching and no furniture in the way, I can usually pull off a row of five or six and end up lying on the floor clutching my nose. If there were a world championship for melodramatic sneezes, I wouldn’t just win it - the trophy would be a statue of me.

Well I hope you enjoyed ‘Facts About Mark’s Nose’. Those are really the only interesting facts, so there’s won’t be a second episode.

• I am VERY ANGRY. Today I went to do my washing and left it going in the laundromat while I went to get groceries. Then, when I came back to get it, the laundromat was closed early for the public holiday. Not just at 3pm like it said on the door, but ten minutes earlier than that. Now I have to wait until tomorrow to scrape my clothes out of the bottom of the fucking washing machine. My jacket will be all wrinkled. Why would you give someone change for the machine if you were planning to shut the shop before the machine had time to finish? Grr!
• I have realised, after being told so many times, that I need to see Sean of the Dead. The only problem is that Blockbuster scares me. There are all these doors and electronic detectors to get through, then there’s millions of DVDs arranged in no particular order so you have to wander around for fifteen minutes trying to find the one you want, and finally there are all the bizarre rules about discounts and days of the week so you can never tell exactly how much you’re going to have to spend. It’s a nightmare. But I will try.