enterprising transient.

Goodnight, 20s. You were weird.

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:19:03 +1000

Goodnight, 20s.

You were weird.

“I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel...

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:24:59 +1000

“I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility.”

The Houses that Can Burn

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:24:03 +1000

In the Blue Mountains bushfires of 1994, my cousin’s house was caught in a firestorm. They knew it was coming. Half the street fled, half stayed. There were no right answers, each family did what they thought was best, or all they could do.

My uncle stayed in the house with them. They’d hosed the roof, removed the dead leaves, taken all the precautions the rural fire brigade had issued. Houses were exploding, one by one, down the street. The sky was black with smoke.

The fire rattled closer and closer, down the street, skipping certain houses like Israelite doors painted with lamb’s blood, devouring others whole. My uncle said it was like being in hell, all shadows orange, all air thick.

They lived.

Others who fled either lived or lost everything. Others who stayed either lived or lost everything.
There was never a right answer.

When my body shut down last year, I fled. I took no precautions, left the lights on, the doors unlocked. Abandoned myself in the night, a shadow against the fire, retreating as far as the arctic until the flames were fluttering sparks in the dark west.

I returned home, months later, to find everything moved, ever so slightly. As though children had come in to turn over my knick knacks in their small, smooth hands, sanding down wild edges, their thumbs hooked behind the hinges of my jaw, patient, careful. It was not unpleasant, but it was disorienting, to have the mess corralled while I was frozen all those months.

(It wasn’t accidental – as useless as therapy felt some weeks, it was a glacial drift back to land. Moving through a frozen sea in increments, the strange absence of the arctic, back toward the houses that could burn, the unfrozen world.)

Whatever bravery comes with returning home I can claim, accidental but true. There was never a right answer. I fled because I could not stay, and returned only when I could. It’s luck, and precaution, and gut instinct, and fraught.

S9E01 Castiel and Dean shopping montage straight up or GTFO.

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:51:26 +1000

S9E01 Castiel and Dean shopping montage straight up or GTFO.

Fixed Points

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:51:00 +1000

My grandparents didn’t know, when they married May 19th 1943, that 40 years later, to the day, one of their grandchildren would be born.

We don’t know anything until it happens, until it pops into existence from the fog of the great unthinkable.

I bought a coffee one morning, maybe seven years ago, and got on a train, and on that long train ride into the city I made plans and promises to myself, jittering on a caffeine high. So as a direct result of that coffee, those plans and promises, nearly everything about my life is as it currently stands.

That morning in late 2006 I was 23, and I decided I wanted to be a rock DJ, which came to me whilst thinking about Queens of Noize and Robots in Disguise, which I was aware of because of many years obsessing over the Mighty Boosh, which I watched in part because my friend Chris loved it, who I wouldn’t have met if I hadn’t followed Tegan to ACU, who wouldn’t have moved to my high school if her Father wasn’t in the army, and who I wouldn’t have talked to very much if I hadn’t spent the previous four years in a completely destructive friendship that I was so open to burning to the ground.

Since then, I became a DJ, which introduced me to the network of people that includes something approaching 100% of the people I’ve kissed in the last 5 years, and lead me to meet my current housemates, to meet the friend who would eventually hook me up with my current job, and all the sprawling, intricate implications for my future career that this is currently having.

That was just a cup of coffee, and the big and little things that preceded it. It’s hard to remember that I’m building something, here, we all are. We’re cobbling together something huge and lifelong, even when it feels like you’re not, even when it feels like you’re standing still.

It’s a strange thing to reflect on.

lucytann: Olive Cotton

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:15:13 +1000

lucytann:

Olive Cotton

The Untitled Dental Assistant Screenplay Motion Picture Soundtrack

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:05:00 +1000

So there’s a film I want to make about a really strange thing that happened to a friend recently. I can picture it perfectly, in parts, the cinematography catching the morning sun on a suburban street, a dark park, the menial tasks of a quiet job. Sadly I’m incredibly unmotivated and not particularly good at writing things like that, so it shall remain in my head for now.

I just threw this soundtrack together, though. It’s not in any filmic order, but it’s representative of the mood.

Sufjan Stevens – All The Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands
My Morning Jacket – Rocket Man
The War On Drugs – A Pile of Tires
Dum Dum Girls – Take Care of My Baby
Townes Van Zandt – I’ll Be Here In The Morning
Bruce Springsteen – Downbound Train
Youth Lagoon – Posters
The Cure – Other Voices
Cat Power – Sweedeedee
Low – Nightingale
Kurt Vile – Peeping Tomboy
Radiohead – Codex
New Order – Age Of Consent
Tom Waits – Who Are You
Dirty Beaches – True Blue
Minks – Kusmi
Mick Harvey – The Story of Love - Act 2
PJ Harvey – Dear Darkness

office space.

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:57:00 +1000

Let’s pretend this is that incredibly dense and interesting piece I keep meaning to write about the special kind of relationship you form with co-workers, and how it’s the closest thing to being born into a family that we ever experience, short of when we are actually born into a family (we don’t choose these people, we are grouped with them by chance). Through the lens of depression, as well. All through the lens of depression.

Let’s pretend this is that, because I cannot write it?

The pleasure of empathy when you feel empty, these people you can care for, talk to, hear about, in a way that doesn’t interfere with your broader collapse, of your not leaving your bed except to go to work. It works in conjunction with it, even. I was hugely depressed for a large part of last year, and the only human emotion I felt was when I was “work” Michelle. Lost in the soothing, numbing tasks of excel spreadsheets and cold fusion errors and right and wrong answers, that was the wasteland, and the only conditions, in which I was able to connect with people.

There’s more. That’s not all of it. But I can’t quite map it out. A family you’re thrown in with, and need to find a way to exist with. I haven’t been depressed in a couple of months, but the fondness and ease remains. It’s a special kind of dependance I have on these people: who they are, and what they care about, and what they expect from me, and what I want to offer them.

In some ways they illuminated the path I think I want to follow: understanding what makes people feel happy and strong, and helping them to work out how to get it.

johnroderickpaine: My friend Michelle doing what she...

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:54:08 +1000

johnroderickpaine:

My friend Michelle doing what she does.

Reblogging my housemate and friend’s xmas present to me, in honour of him officially being too badass for the Jewish school system.

On behalf of my people, I forgive you x

Remember anything,any context for hollows and frecklesany cover of night, any night. It’s a...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:07:38 +1000

Remember anything,
any context for hollows and freckles
any cover of night, any night.

It’s a mid-marathon terror dream, sweat and
salt to prove a point, years of unchallenged thoughts and
an inward-facing altruism, a wave you pass under
alone before washing up awake,
wild.

Remember nothing of the waste,
the pinch of winter flavouring your skin,
the roll of eyes above your shallow grave of nape, of
neck, where he buries himself,
an earnest monument in
a silent room.

Any night, any night, any night,
remember any night.

nevver: Go What would you do if you weren’t afraid.

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:49:10 +1000

nevver:

Go

What would you do if you weren’t afraid.

The Handsome Old Cloak

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:23:00 +1000

I know all too well that my states of mind are fluid - I can spend months on an upswing followed by relative darkness, with little to no discernible trigger. It’s a scary thing, that your brain can just flip a switch like that and then you don’t get out of bed for four months except to go to work.

But one thing that I’ve finally learnt from having that as a reality is to not over-think the good times. Don’t sweat the possibilities. Enjoy feeling stupid on a saturday afternoon, and harmonising with your housemate playing guitar, and exposing your vulnerabilities openly, and expecting nice things, drawing the gathering desire for love around you like a handsome old cloak. It’s the human time, now, the heartbeat times. When you suddenly have so much more to lose it’s the time to hold the paradox of that in your hands like a baby bird.

My frustrations at the moment are with work, knowing what I want for once and it being a hard-won process. There’s only so much I can do immediately, for myself, but there are some small victories of satisfaction. Insinuations into other people’s lives. Imagine that, actively getting your hands dirty with other people’s stories. Imagine that.

I picture what I want for myself so clearly at the moment. It feels like I’ve just been gathering all this data for years, ever the scientist, and finally have enough to build a realistic picture. I can tell you what I do and don’t accept, in myself and in others. I can tell you who I am, literally for the first time in my life I understand the question that has plagued me since high school. Who are you. How was that at all quantifiable? And it isn’t, I don’t think, until you understand the power of your own humanity. It’s not that I went to the woods etc etc to find that out, spent years in darkness on purpose to emerge wizened, profound. I’m neither, I’m just conscious again. It was a horrible mess that I dissociated from almost completely at times. But I think that - for now, for now, for now - everything that has passed constructs a concept of myself that I just couldn’t see before. I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who either always understood the question, or thought they did. This is news to me. It’s so basic but it is news to me.

And I still don’t think it’s quantifiable in words. I am infinitely capable of being alive, but also of changing my world, and needing all the stupid, perfect nonsense that comes with coming back from the dead to find the world unchanged, waiting.

My car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:48:19 +1000

My car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk from your front porch to my front seat. The door is open but the ride, it ain’t free. And I know you’re lonely for words that I ain’t spoken, but tonight we’ll be free, all the promises will be broken.

"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths..."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:14:00 +1000

“Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”

- Henry Jenkins, in Textual Poachers: Media Fans and Participatory Culture (via jaimelannister)

gallows-bird: An American Gods playlist [download] (photo...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 10:30:23 +1000

gallows-bird:

An American Gods playlist [download] (photo credit)

1. Clouds Moving In || Beat Circus 2. Fingers to the Bone || Brown Bird 3. St. James Infirmary || Tumbledown House 4. 16 Tons || Tennessee Ernie Ford 5. Springtime Can Kill You || Jolie Holland 6. Things That Scare Me || Neko Case 7. You’re Nobody When Nobody Loves You || The Mills Brothers 8. Ran So Hard the Sun Went Down || Otis Taylor 9. Far Away || Jose Gonzales 10. Gun Street Girl || Tom Waits 11. Christ Condemned to Death || New York Hymns 12. If I Ever Leave This World Alive || Flogging Molly 13. Farthest Shore || Blitzen Trapper

This is outstanding.

polaroidsf: Top down. If I could live anywhere in the world it...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:39:18 +1000

polaroidsf:

Top down.

If I could live anywhere in the world it would be San Francisco, no question.

"Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool."

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 07:51:17 +1000

““Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.””

- Robert Brault (via creatingaquietmind)

We’re burning down the highway skylineOn the back of a hurricane...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:29:00 +1100

We’re burning down the highway skyline
On the back of a hurricane that started turning
When you were young

Photo

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:58:31 +1100

A Retraction by You

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 16:17:42 +1100

A retraction of everything I’ve said, of joylessness and unmade beds, of priority to autonomy, of the old world, the old shapes a body makes as it curls around itself to sleep.