Yesterday I rode all the way to Peppermint Grove just for the hell of it. It was good fun, despite giving a bunch soccer mums a chance to try and run me over in their huge SUVs and Mercs as they were picking up their kids from Peppermint Grove School of Advanced Poshness for Giftedly Posh Young Australians. I am l33t with the gears and spokes and shit. (Here is a neato bicycle comic from Dinosaur Comics while we’re on the topic.)

For some reason I have been a bit dizzy for the last couple of days. I’m not dehydrated or anything, and there was a delay of at least 12 hours between the demise of Mr. Grants McScotchbottle and the onset of this dizziness, so I don’t know what’s going on. At least it seems to be going away.

The other thing is I’ve rediscovered Total Annihilation. It’s super groovy, tho my stupid crap PC keeps crashing it for no reason.

I put a link to my Flickr account on the side there so you can see my photos and stuff. It has my whole name on it, which I think is okay because everyone knows it anyway. I just don’t get to insult people I work with more, so:

please, let me just say,
ONCE and FOR ALL,
to everyone I have ever worked with
or studied with
or just met randomly in the street
or at a party,
YOU’RE ALL FULL OF CRAP AND I HATE YOU.

signed,

Mark

Wow, that feels better.

Tomorrow is Australia Day and the tv news is talking it up. It’s like a disease.

Here we are on the edge of the world, in the most isolated city on earth. As I understand it, we will have nothing better to do tomorrow than to wait in the 40-degree heat for a dodgy fireworks display by the river, proudly swinging flags that are more tainted than we will ever know. Maybe we will turn on the radio and listen to My Chemical Romance win the Triple J Hottest 100, but we will probably forget to bring the radio. I love this place and how dumb it is.

Hah, tutorials have finished and there’s only about sixteen thousand essays left to mark before I can get back to my own shit. W00t. I have CFPs (that’s calls for papers) from Northwestern and some place in Ontario that I want to answer, and only a couple of weeks to work out what I want to send them. Tricky. But I might get to go to America and / or Canada so fuck yeah I’m like going to send them some cool stuff that they ought to be totally in love with.

What else is there? Not much. Star Wars Trivial Pursuit kinda sucks, but I won so that’s okay. Apart from that, it’s all Futurama reruns and hangin’ out in my underpants.

You can take that metaphorically if you like.

I’m going to write a story about an over-protective dad who murders the bullies at his kid’s school and then blackmails the person at the licensing center into letting the kid pass his driving test. I’ll call it ‘LICENSE, LICENSE, LICENSE’. It’s going to be very excellent, and political also because it’s about authoritarianism and violence.

btw, how come I can’t write a story without someone dying in it? I guess I always write manly stories so that kinda explains it. Even if the stories are always taking the piss out of the men in them, they still have to have plenty of cowboys and rocket ships and strange deaths to make them cool and manly enough in the first place.

Um, how cool are the band Be You Own Pet? Fuck yeah. Girls on TV is an especially awesome song.

Oh, and I’m having a Jean Stafford short story revival. If you’ve never read any of her stuff, get the collected stories and try ‘Philosophy Lesson’ or ‘A Reading Problem’. They’re all American and stuff.

It’s busy. Get up, go to work, come home and change, go out, come home, sleep, repeat. Busy is cool though, when it involves being about to go and get a roast chicken.

I keep noticing people with little faint scars in the corners of their eyes. Not, like, both eyes on one person. Just one. It must be a weird common point of injury. Funny though, since I think very few people have serious eye injuries and a lot seem to have serious bit-right-next-to-the-eye injuries.

Man, it’s hot.

What news is there? The real estate agents were cool with me going onto an ongoing lease, but this just makes it clear how soon I’ll have to leave. Which sucks, because I won’t just have to leave Perth but also think about packing up my junk, moving it to mum’s place, arranging to have the most useful bits of it moved to Sydney, finding a new place over there, booking a flight and a room at a backpacker’s and paying for all of the above. Man, what a drag. There is some good stuff about it though - I’ll be on the home stretch of the PhD. with a good idea of how to finish it, I’ll get to see Glen and James again and maybe even Misha or Shelley, I’ll be able to eat Turkish which is a food that Kicks Arse, and if I pick a less trendy suburb than Enmore (Blacktown perhaps? :P ) I should be able to get a place that isn’t completely microscopic. Maybe I can even move somewhere where it’s a bit safer to get out on the bike.

Any other news? Not really. Spent yesterday watching season 2 of That 70’s Show. Man that’s some funny shit. Today I will eat much.

Addicted to sitting around playing ‘Good Feeling’ on the guitar and singing in a whiny voice.

Work is cool, but dammit walking around all day makes me hungry.

I think Morgan isn’t calling me because I don’t want to be in his band. Funny, he put hardly any work into that band, but at the end of the day it was the most serious thing in the world. Anyway, he’s marrying two sisters so what the fuck does he need to worry about me for? (That is, he can only marry one of them and the other one will just live with them. He was very proud of himself last I heard, but I don’t think he’s planning on boning the sister so much as making her do housework.)

Summer school tutorials start tomorrow. Eighty wide-eyed (or, more likely, recalcitrant) young types to fill with semi-relevant (yeah, not at all relevant) knowledge for 12 mostly consecutive frickin’ days. I at least vaguely know what I’m supposed to be doing now. That’s cool. And the lecturers are good value. This university - I won’t say the name but you can probably guess which one - is a funny place… everyone’s a bit overworked and things aren’t as organised as I’m used to, but at the same everyone’s a lot more relaxed. They don’t have lunch at their desks like in Sydney. Must be the WA effect. Or the no-hope bottom-rung university effect.

Oh, and did I say that, like, eighty percent of these students are women? a) wtf? b) dammit I hate sexy tutorials…

Today the real-estate agent sent me a new lease and a notice that the rent is going up (timed to arrive just after the period to cancel at the end of the last lease expired, crafty buggers). ‘Course I’m headed for Sydney so I ain’t signing nothin’, and will have to call them about it. I don’t know whether they’re likely to be angry about things like that.

At this point I wonder how people who work 9 to 5 find time to do things like argue with their landlords. I only have two weeks of 9 to 5 coming up, and I already don’t feel cool about it. Like the weasels are closing in, as Hunter S. would say.* Other people must feel like this all the time. Like they can’t do enough, no matter how hard they try, because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s not a poor person’s world.

I think. Hell, at least I can call ‘em during my leisurely lunch hour and find out about my rights as a tenant on my shiny new computer. In fact, I won’t even call ‘em. Let ‘em write me about it one more time.

*Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas … with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
—–Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas