think about donating your Christmas cheese wheel

Around this time of year I find it difficult to handle the complacency and abundance of wealth found in Australian society.

Here are some things to be thankful for:

- Militia aren't running our country.

- If you live in the city (which 89% of us do) you can be sure that there will be a selection of cheeses available at your closest supermarket.

- You can probably make a little cushion from your chin fat to take a nap on (67% of us are obese), and if you can't, you can develop one thanks of afore mentioned cheese abundance.

- You can get a job with some hard work. The highest our unemployment rate has ever been was 10.90% in 1992. Right now it's harder to get work in the US and the UK. The latest stats for Zimbabwe say 70% of its citizens don't have work. 

- Ok so rent prices might be a bit exorbitant in certain urban locations... but hey, we have infrastructure that hasn't been dilapidated by war. 

- Our racism is subliminal, not violent - except for when it bubbles up into sporadic spontaneous riots - meaning that people here can live by their diverse ideological and religious convictions without being publicly flogged or incarcerated or told what to wear, say, how to pray or how to eat. I can stand at Town Hall and hear the Hare Krsna's chanting on George St whilst Muslims hand out flyers and Falun Gong activists ask me to sign their petitions.

- If you need to go to the toilet, you can go to a toilet! You can extricate your excrement by pressing a little button. What's more, these miraculous sanitary water-powered shit-redistribution systems are available cost-free in public high pedestrian traffic locations.

- If you're thirsty in the shower you can take a sip and not die from cholera.

- We have a public welfare system that doesn't thrive on bribery.

How do you explain the privileges of a society to the children who have not seen their privilege? How did I ever learn to see my privilege?
I watched world news when I was growing up. Sometimes I would wish we had a junta or a revolution or some obvious human rights abuses so that there was some kind of motivation for young people to care about politics... Hardship motivates people to strive for better lives. Instead we have comfortable lives. Complacent lives.

Of course I wouldn't exchange the lucky fortune of living in this land for being thrown into war or famine or a typhoon, but I would change our education system so that it holds compassion as its core value.

Statistically accurate "Cheese Wheel of Bad Luck"

wherein "you" are represented by a tiny little wedge that has been extracted and "lots of other people" are stuck in the bad cheese.

Café

I got a new job the other day being a waitress in a café.
The customers come in pretty much one demographic and nearly all of them look like this:

They cluster in little immobile groups and croak and chirp for hours. I've been to this café with my own grandmother. That was the day she told me that her naked body looks like one of those flayed roast chickens that hang in butchery windows.

Before I left for work the other morning I was chock-a-block busy trying to not howl in the foetal position (had been circulating the lower pole of my dual-polar feeling disorder) but once I was given the task of feeding these shrunken pudgy white people I felt so much better. Probably because they say "thanks darlin'" or "thankyuh sweetie", and some of them tell me about shark nets and ask me where I live. An old guy was even quite angry, but I didn't mind because at least he felt something and said how he felt. The middle aged couples who come to roost at tables don't have such interpersonal skills. They nest amid a little bank up of paraphernalia they have bought as Christmas gifts. They concern themselves with a newspaper or staring.

On my lunch break, I noticed how the ground was constructed of tiny little pebbles all glued together and thought that was curious. I saw a tree branch waving in the reflection on my phone screen. Little bits of nature all abstracted were silently poking their nose into the artificial compound of the shopping mall in which the café is positioned.

So, even when I'm working cash in hand in a soulless temple to consumerism and slapping off nasty hormones to avoid becoming a bowl of tears, there are things to be grateful for. Older generations who have more manners than mine and weeny little rocks with polished noses.

Self-Care Methods when in a Pit of Pity/Existential Doubt/Chaos

- Carefully put your foot into the pit to see if you can feel the bottom. Too deep? Then don't invite your friends in, they may drown. If you can touch the bottom then the sadness ain't so bad and it could be quite relieving to take a paddle with friends (establish whether you are currently in a pit or puddle).

- Try and express gratitude, even if only to yourself, for the things in your life that are good e.g. you have two hands and running water.

- Pay attention to your body by bathing it or just sit for a while and think about how your body has been breathing for your whole life.

- Write out the gunk, it's like soul vomiting.

- Don't concern yourself with what others would think of your behaviour or emotions during this private exorcism, after-all it is private and doesn't need others to make it legitimate.

- If you can't see causes, don't go on a brain-mashing hunt. Maybe it's not always possible to think rationally about irrational feelings.

- If you are inclined to spend 24 hours in bed, don't. Take the lethargy outside and just sit in the weather, somewhere quiet.

Drawing

Slowly slowly slowly I have built an unwavering confidence in my art. I'm convinced that it's worthwhile.
My conviction is the result of a million failures. Every single drawing of mine is the carving away of unwanted lines, I draw and erase and redraw and erase. Every person I draw is loaded with the ghosts of many others, an evolving person who I've decided at some point to stick down on the spot. Every successful drawing is only the product of many failures. 

In a really lovely way you can't have one without the other. To be really good at something you also need to know what it feels, looks and sounds like to do poorly at it. So in a very grand way, the notion of talent is a farce. Talent is the accumulation of mediocrity. You won't become worse at something by doing it continually. It follows that I'm convinced that I do well, and only because I do [verb], continually.

Why bother doing well creatively? For most of my life that question underpinned my drawing practice. I couldn't rationalise the benefit of hunching over paper for hours. I was looking at my art as though it existed only for me, like an extension of my body that it wasn't anybody else's right to touch. Now I know that an artwork is comprised of at least 50% your brain, and without other people looking at it an artwork might as well be a rock. So now my drawings are like little half unwrapped gifts, things I want to give away and watch grow up at some distance. Little parcels of politics, commenting on this and that in witty, underhanded ways.

Lots of creativity theorists talk about the "zone". It's the psychological landing strip where you can spend five human hours watching a pencil land and take off and think without too many words. It's like pleasant anaesthetic, where everything beyond the white rectangle of paper becomes dull and fuzzy, and everything you do on the paper has your unadulterated attention. Anybody can get there.

Paper! Paper! burning white

Take my sacrificial rite!

A thousand drawings not so great

Consigned to this flat tepid fate

In these lines I'm poorly scrawling

There's a good one, and it's calling -

"Hi I'm here, come pull me out,

And quick you fumbling dawdling clout!"

Endless numbers counting endless days

Today eight years ago a silent thing happened and that thing was really an unthing, an undoing, it was a death and the person who died was my father.

Today I attended the last class of my degree. These are remarkable things, and that's why I'm marking them by writing, but I feel so ordinary.

I don't really believe that death is the end of someone's influence and I don't really believe that I'll stop learning. Some sort of passage has been marked by the arbitrary ascription of numbers to days, and without those numbers there would not be these anniversaries. I carry my fathers death everyday like I am a little holy shrine. More and more the things I do and say seem more and more like the things he did and said, which makes me feel like death is just a veiling, biology prevails.

Croc teeth

Being quite gay*, I have a pretty good gaydar.
I knew someone in my high school year was gay four years before she did from her body posture in class.

Being homo you also develop a pretty good homophobestrobe which detects the presence of fear inside other people (a bit like gaydar but uses electromagnetic pulse instead of radio waves).

I've been lucky enough to encounter homophobia from institutions and individuals, sometimes in the form of non-recognition, sometimes in the form of physical and verbal abuse, sometimes in the form of denial. Some people decide not to talk to me because I'm gay. Reciprocally, I decide not to talk to some people because I'm gay.

Why would a sane person walk onto the flabby tongue of an open-mouthed crocodile? I don't hide, I just choose not to let myself get mauled by people with sharp teeth. How do you see the dimensions of someone's teeth? Listen to their vocabulary. Listen to their ideas.

I am all for dentistry. People can get all kinds of work done, teeth filed down, braces, dentures, fillings... People change. And I know that opinions and values are social constructions that can be de-constructed, and I'm interested in reconstructing them by being rational e.g. "is it better to ignore something that exists or acknowledge something that exists?", "is violence an appropriate response to a non-violent phenomena?"

I find marginalised and repressed people often have a wicked sense of humour. You can either hang yourself or laugh at the fact that mainstream society, media and politics aren't talking about you when they say "family", "marriage" and even "love" because of something as inconsequential as your sexuality (love in advertising is heterosexual love). Either get hurt by it or hurt yourself laughing over it.

This leaves me in a problematic space. Being comfortable with yourself means you have nothing to prove, yet being a member of a minority group means constantly having to prove that your existence is legitimate.
Proving that you have the right to have nothing to prove... It's like undergoing a job interview for the position of Yourself.

              I believe I am the best applicant for being Myself.

                                                                                                                     Why do you believe that?  

             I've been Myself for 23 years.

                                                                                                                     How will you perform in that role?

            I won't perform.

                                                                                                                    Why not?

           It comes naturally to me.

                                                                                                                    Are you sure you're qualified?

*by quite gay I mean mostly, partially, occasionally, absolutely, annually, casually, semantically, linguistically,  literally, litigiously, strictly, spiritually, sporadically, superficially, religiously and not gay, because sexuality isn't a salami you can slice.

Sandwiches

Teaching is all about making sandwiches.

Whipping up a sambo is essentially the skill of telling it how it is in a digestible format. Slap praise on either side of some gristly criticism and your communication is flavoured with encouragement. I guess this is also called tact.

For someone who grew up with one parent imbued with the social talents of a snail and the other with the etiquette of a very vocal parrot, tact was one of those skills I didn't inherit. I cultivated it over 23 years of keen observation and trial and error.

The parrot half of my DNA still fluffs up in a rage at the idea of having to mediate the truth, and my snail side curls away at the thought of having to tell the truth. I've mostly rewritten all that programming and now I'm as diplomatic as a dachshund.


How does the teaching sandwich relate to the wider world beyond report writing and assessment feedback?
Try making a sandwich for your lover, your mother, your best friend. Sandwiches can be squeezed into letters, phone conversations, post-it notes, dinner conversations... Sandwiches can be about politics, culture, real estate. My favourite part about sandwiches is that you can make them cynical.

e.g.
"Dear Raine & Horne,

Thanks for managing our lease.

Please fix the blinds, let us repaint, fix the tap in the laundry, fit proper ventilation into our bathroom and buy us a new mailbox.

Once again, thanks for managing our lease.

Yours Sincerely,
__________"

Sleepless nights for limitless beings

Today someone asked me "where do you start and where do you end?"

How big am I? How old am I? Am I really only fifty-five kilograms?
I wasn't always this heavy.
I wasn't always this light.

But I always was, regardless of my dimensions. How old will I get before all traces of my existence are smudged into the surface texture of the universe? How soft is the transition? Aren't I really just the concentrated mass of the sexual prowess of my predecessors? Didn't I start whenever it was that whoever they were first fucked?

Just exactly who am I? How many pieces of me are there? Am I like potassium - present in different places at the same time? Where have my words, ideas, opinions already gone? What am I doing there? Having a holiday?

How much of me is there to go around? Am I a finite resource like this body? Or am I infinite like the architecture of thought? How many questions can I fit into my lifetime? Is that a sadistic question?

How am I going to get around? Should I be a teacher or a carpenter? A potter? An illustrator? Am I going to be generous? Considerate? Passionate? Compassionate?

How fast do I go? How fast should I go? Isn't it nonsensical to rage through life at break-neck speed? Isn't it best to live slowly? Won't time seem longer? Won't life seem longer?

Why aren't I tired?

Happy

Happiness isn't an outcome, it's a skill. You don't at some point reach happiness and you don't get happy by working yourself into the ground trying to achieve happiness.

You can't give happiness to someone. Happiness isn't a gift, it's part of your identity. Unlike limbs, transplanting a state of mind isn't possible. However, your happiness can help other people to recognise what happiness is, and start them on their own search for happiness.

I don't think happiness comes from ideas, the past, the future, money, food, sex, education, objects or power. In my experience happiness comes from working conscientiously and consistently, being flexible, making decisions, pro-actively caring about something larger than your own life and being part of a family.

               I am giving you happiness in a box!                                        Oh. What does it look like?       

                                                                                                                

              A lot of work, flexibility, altruism, an 

             ability to make your own choices... 

            I also put your whole family in there, 

           friends included, just the way they are!
           The whole kit and kaboodle!                                          

            

A poem on rage and confusion (perhaps stemming from the collective consciousness of Australian culture post 2013 national election?)

Well whaddaya know whaddaya know

There’s a face at the base of my big toe.

And I know I am not dreaming,

Cause that person’s face is screaming.

Yelling shrill and brittle and bright -

“RAGE! RAGE AGAINST THAT SOCK SO WHITE!”

"Broken and broken again on the sea, the moon so easily mends" - Chosu

I've been in a period of aloneness, but it hasn't been lonely.
You are so subtle that you can't be seen, heard or touched.
You are so present that a search for yourself leads away from your self.
You are so still that if you move to try and find yourself, you disturb your self.

I am talking about the self beyond your mind and heart. Beyond thoughts, beyond feelings. The quest for "self knowledge" isn't a quest at all. You need not look elsewhere. Wherever you go, there you are.

I want people to know that they are so much less than what they think they are. I want people to embrace the simplicity and peace of simply being - instead of going through the race of always becoming: becoming an adult, becoming an individual, becoming emancipated, becoming wealthy, becoming accepted... There are as many kinds of "becoming" as there are people. Becoming is literally always going to be coming. Living in a state of becoming is living in the future before it's present, and often living in disappointment and haste.

If you're always seeking to become, you can't really see yourself for what you are now.

And now, I see my self almost as a location I could call home, almost like a planet with gravitational pull, almost like a lover but with no separation, because the love is fulfilled. I love my self and my self loves me.

self portrait

God is design

God is the ball and socket joint in the knuckle of the middle finger of an aye aye: a freakishly flexible spindly finger used to procure juicy grubs tucked under the hard bark of Madagascan trees.

God is a double helix, or the surface area of a palm tree. God is a chemistry kit, a magical trick, in which 20 amino acids can brew the eyeball of a bull and your pubic hair and the smell of wet dog.
Such long recipes take millennia to write. God the witch whose cauldron is always boiling.

the enlivening stench of God.

Externalise

There's so much STUFF out there that it's become an essential part of living to make choices about the possession of stuff. In particular there is an obsession with using stuff to externalise your beliefs/values.

The symbolic value of stuff is supposed to say something about us, it's supposed to make a statement on our behalf... yet often this consumerist culture undermines it's own values. I fail to comprehend how an embroidered anarchy symbol could symbolise the act of undermining authority when it has come to a person by way of such highly regulated and ordered modes of transaction as international shipping and the simple, lawful rules of economic exchange. Diogenes was a little more true to anarchy, living in a pot and telling Alex the Great to sod off and get out of his sunshine, but eventually the significance of his life meant his final wishes for his body to be chucked in a ditch were overturned and he was given a funeral of pompous proportions.

What a nice example that irrespective of the weight of an individuals beliefs, they may weigh little more than a flea to someone else. That's why aggression over ideologies is so absurd. The argument "If you don't think what I think is important, I'm going to clout you at military magnitude" is about as comprehensible as this sentence: shoiu ajwerk fadijso kakalimohouni.

Being highly sensitive to visual datum I notice aggressive visual information with clarity. Aggressive means ready to confront. Abnormality and sexuality are confronting. People make themselves appear abnormal or sexually overbearing in order to express a belief, and it is my conjecture that this belief is still in it's pubescent form i.e. still being formed. I think often it's the manifestation of experimentation with a belief in being worthwhile. Surely something that's worthwhile catches ones attention?
Another way to view this: cheap things are advertised with much noise and movement in attempt to affirm their value, very expensive things are advertised subtly because their value is inherent; they are made from quality materials.

However when applying the analogy to humans it is not a discussion about quality, rather it's a question of perspective. I am in no way saying that some humans are made from inferior materials - I am saying that people experience the ability to see the material they are made from in varying degrees, and accordingly peoples abilities to externalise their beliefs are varied. Often peoples opinions, values or beliefs feel like jelly and look like smoke and it's not acceptable to do the jelly walk and float around, so some other image more readily recognisable is worn. Aside from all this, it is essential to know that worth is not inherent, that it's created, that humans are creative, and that ones sense of worthiness is just like lego - you can build it up yourself. And if you want to understand what your opinions, values and beliefs are make three lists: "opinions", "values", "beliefs" for each of these domains "love", "spaces", "work" (at least that way you cover your relationships, your home and your livelihood).

I reckon it is an essential process of divulging the chaff from the wheat, the process of attaching to clothing and hairstyles and attitudes... often at the tail end of adolescence they peel away, because we notice how uncomfortable that attachment is.
Although of course there are some people who are very comfortable with themselves and who possess an appreciation for visual culture, and who use abnormality or sexuality as a tool to spread awareness of non-hegemonic ideas. Think drag.

What if you aren't convinced that your opinions, values and beliefs are you? Afterall, they change. You weren't born with them and yet you were born a conscious being, so perhaps, below those highly subjective, ephemeral - and remember, essentially meaningless (don't forget Diogenes final wish!) behaviours and attitudes that you picked up somewhere along the way there is you: a piece of consciousness.

In that case - what's the most expedient method of expressing your self? How do you "look" like consciousness? What does that look like? Maybe it just looks like you, paying attention. Yet it seems more authentic to act consciously, than to just look conscious. I mean. Come on. My brother sleeps with his eyes open.

Toast etc.

Knowledge is like a public coin-op washing machine and we all put bits in and take bits out.
When I get a nice bit I wear it for a while and then like to put it back in, so writing like this is one way of putting knowledge back where I believe it should belong - to everyone.

One concept I picked up is the proposition that anger is caused by desire.

Abuse yields anger because your desire to be respected has been ignored.
Someone who wastes your time yields irritation (a seed of anger) because your desire to control time cannot be realised.
A news story about autocratic governance yields anger because you have a sweeping desire for equality.

So if desire can lead to anger should we try and stamp out desire? Surely not, because desire is what makes things move. You think that a plane moves because of aerodynamics and whatever other laws of physics are involved, but planes move because people buy plane tickets because people desire to go places, to work and earn money, to have a better life, to see people they love, to know the world. Desire moves.

In trying to curb anger, which is essentially self-destructive, it might be better to ask if the things you get angry about are reasonable. If you get angry about things you cannot change, use reason to come to acceptance. If you get angry about things you can change, define the desire which fuels your anger and follow the desire to make change.

Butter-side-down anger can be avoided by putting more bread in the toaster.

Ye gushing taps of life (and two instructional methods on how to stem ye algid blubbering spurts)

Some people get rid of their bad ju-ju by acquiring more stuff. It's a simple kind of logic: get more of the stuff you like, and then in comparison the stuff you don't like seems smaller. If the things you don't like were significant enough in the first place that you were compelled to bury them in possessions or relationships, they seem unlikely to diminish through neglect - and once those transitory things expire you're left with the same amount of badness that you had at the start.

The shower is perhaps the Jannah of the common household. The receptacle of purification, characterised by that feeling of comfort induced by a hail of scalding jets of water pelting your naked flesh. Nothing else so divine in the house. Suppose that whilst you are singing hymns of praise in the heavenly acoustics of the bathroom your shower is feeling a little too lukewarm, there are two options.

Some people turn the hot tap up.

Some people turn the cold tap down.

And so it is with other non-naked, non-bathroom related situations in life. You can either pretend to get rid of what you don't want by drowning it in more stuff (which expends more energy), or you can get rid of what you don't want by actually... getting rid of it.

This is just the first step in having some autonomy over what you want and need, but it's a really big step, like a desert steppe. Large quantities of courage and faith must be mustered to expunge some of the things you don't need which may at times include family, friends, lovers, beliefs and opinions, religions, addictions etc...

Extolment passing through lips

Of one on whom hot water drips

On the instinctual impulse to evade advice

When someone gives me good advice it's as though I'm being swaddled in a layer of bubble wrap, and the fear of being ossified in that restful, semi-transparent membrane horrifies me so, that my gut reaction is to thrash about and defy any well-intentioned guidance.

But often, for ettiquettes sake, I bow in thanks and hobble off to privately extricate myself out of their consultation and opinions.

Even when the advisor is experienced and speaks with generosity and listens with care, it's not possible to just hold out my arms and take the advice home and eat it like a takeaway meal.
No. Instead I need to go to the shops, buy the ingredients and try over and over to create that perfect flavour myself. 

Acquiescence is the softening of your will.

Urn of bubble wrap!

Enfeebling cocoon!

The final resting place of my initiative!

Watching

Hours of my life are siphoned into buses, my body fetched up and dispatched across the city, bobbing and jerking with inertia along the nonsensical, divergent and congested paths that are Sydney's ill-planned roads.

Did you know that all the country highways are traditional Aboriginal walking routes? Evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for their ease of access. Sydney roads by comparison are an artificial web cast across a landscape which I have always felt sighs underneath its itchy and tightly wrapped synthetic skin, that just continues to grow like bacteria. 

Bees plan their cities more intelligently. 

There is, on these meandering journeys, hugely romantic and aesthetically ingratiating treasure to be found. The combed current of a black head of hair heavily saturated in brilliantine, fluent Mandarin sounding like a sweet small bird piped from a four year old, impossibly thin white hairs protruding from a pink spherical mole on the neck of a sweating obese woman. These things are free for everyone to look, and you don't have to strain your eyes. Just calmly cast your gaze.

Yes, I am being effusive. What's to be expected? I'm 23, in love with lots of things.

Aquarium health

I love listening to people talk about what they do. If I could, I would spend all my time listening and asking questions.

My mental illness is one that is a bit green and gluggy. My heart clogs up with algae. Listening to other people is like putting a hose down a coronary artery and blasting the slime out. Listening leaves no space for introspection. 

My algal blooms aren't the kind of bouquet you want to give someone you love, they would be a weed. A man at an art show once said that weeds are just plants in the wrong places, that all weeds are native to some place. My mental illness is native to me, it evolved over the duration of my life as the plant which was best able to thrive under the environmental context of my childhood. Happiness was definitely going to wilt, the conditions weren't appropriate for happiness. 

That's why I have felt comfortable living for so long with a giant kelp infestation inside me. This is also the reason why other people find it so foreign, like an extraterrestrial life form. Of course it would be nice not to have this seaweed problem, to not come home to a thin velvety veneer of slime coating my vision or giant black scratchy kelp forests clogging my emotional life, but the truth remains that in actuality it isn't a problem, there is no blame and there is no cure. It's just the predomination of one species. I just need a more diverse ecosystem in my chest.

I find on the whole that there are hugely gratifying and worthwhile engagements with people that make me fall in love with listening and talking and lustily urge me to chase after communion. As my appetite for stories and people grows, my kelp infestation doesn't lessen, but I learn slowly how to introduce new species, ones which filter the environment and provide nutrients, maybe some little fish, a sea snail to clean the walls, a bêche de mere just for laughs.

Spell it out

I heard artist Jonathan Jones talk this afternoon, he seemed uncomfortable and embarrassed speaking to a group of people, but nonetheless he told stories which seemed to be already written in our brains. His stories were familiar, communal. He spells better with his artworks however.

I saw the film Ship of Theseus on Tuesday night as part of Sydney Film Festival. The writer/director gave a brief introduction to the film, and he spoke quietly, he said nearly nothing at all, except for phrases one learns by watching others who are more socially adept "thanks for making it out tonight guys". After which ensued a rich, long, living stream of beautifully articulated cinematography. Some people are very shy when it comes to vocalising their message. Some people just can't say what they mean, so instead meaning flops out of them in funny amorphous blobs which we call art.

Mmm blobby.

Fishslappin'

Being the soft creatures that we are, it can be difficult to withstand big hurts, physical and psychological.

When life gives you a fishslap in the face it can be quite the cold wet swot! I've noticed that for some people, seafood propelled injuries can have such a deep and lasting impact that they become highly sensitive to the smell of fish and nearly expect to have bream wallop their snouts.

I've noticed that even some time after having undergone a traumatic or unpleasant experience, when confronted by a wholly new problem in an entirely different context it is common to paste ones knowledge of the past onto to the current predicament. You see the head of a pig, yet expect the tail of a fish. Then you start to treat a pig like a fish and accidentally drown it.

I think we may all be guilty of such illogical behaviour at times.

Guess you've got to listen for the squeals and grunts.

Curious flavour.

Stories

History and myth articulate the human condition. We're all compelled by ethics, by adventure, by journeys... We're all cushioned in the grand narratives that seat us somewhere within humanity, goodness and evil constantly punch each others noses in pantomimes which play themselves out in literature and art. Stories about ourselves get formed out of ideas and comments from others, and the texture, size, mass and colour of your physical body also becomes a framework for a certain story about you. I begin to hear a story or write a story and somehow I end up believing it.

Stories are dangerous because they condense experience into some sort of language, they codify knowledge. They may be beautiful mirrors of life, but they are not life. Storytellers are sculptors who carve out a theory from the solid block of being. The stuff which was the negative space surrounding that theory gets thrown to the wayside, despite it being of the same substance as what is kept. In the end I wonder why the story itself isn't considered the off cut. 

Maybe it's the distance between stories and reality that allow us to feel comfortable. Without stories, maybe we could see reality without any filters. We're all authors, and I recall writing stories in my mind about things I don't really know just to make them familiar. Most often stories about people. If you parcel them up then you'll know how to unwrap them.

But when I stop telling myself stories, the world expands. 

I love ingesting and on occasion chiselling out stories, but what I love even more is letting the story die, like any other living thing in the creation, and watching that narrative as an arrow, which can be located within space and time, shooting in one direction towards reality. It has it's particular trajectory, but its path and the many diverging paths of stories all aim towards something so large that it is all pervasive.

Believing stories about yourself.

ALARM developed by Max Woods (English Second Language teacher at Freshwater Campus)

I have a brain that likes to pull things apart.
It's been a problem that my brain has this habit but sometimes goes about it with no method. It just likes ripping. My hands do the same thing with serviettes.

My brain does snufflings and tearings and gets its teeth in to pull the stuffing out of something and throw it in the air in tiny little cascading flufflets and at the end there is just messy fluffy stuff everywhere and it's just confusing and doesn't make sense so I just go away.

But I've been introduced to a method.
It's a method which isn't messy. It's a method used in schools to teach students how to learn.
The results thus far have produced more "a-ha!"s than "huh?"s.

It's called ALARM, which at first makes one think it could just as easily be called ANXIETY or PANIC... until you realise it stands for 'A Learning And Responding Matrix'.
It helps you know how to go about discovering knowledge and then how to 'respond'... or act on it. It gets used to write answers to essay questions e.g. "Analyse the nature of Israel's involvement in the conflict at the Gaza strip."

But to combat the spindly teeth in my brain that have a penchant for aimlessly chewing at problems in my life, I am using the matrix to answer questions like "What are the characteristics of Emma Barry and should they be cultivated or discarded?"

Once you have your question, you take apart each subject of the question (e.g. "good at listening", "afraid to speak her mind") and for each subject you:

1. Name and Define - "what is it?"
2. Describe - "what is it like?"
3. Explain - "to what purpose is it like that?"
4. Analyse - "how does it work?"
5. Interpret - "what effect does it have?"
6. Critically Analyse - "what are the positives and negatives?"
7. Evaluate - "use the above evidence to answer the question."


By evaluate, you have an answer that you can be sure has been held up to the light, sat upside-down, thrown down a well, gone through a goose and come out shining with the polish of ones own reason. It's not easy, especially with subjects like "is creative" and step 3. "to what purpose is it like that?"
But the question is important and deserves full investigation.

So I'm sitting down with my brain in a muzzle and it's feeling pretty civilised, knowledgeable and rational.

Prior habit and new method.

Etymology

We use words without remembering their power or their inferences. Language is a blanket and a single word is the point of contact between one warp and one weft thread: pick it up and the whole structure of language shifts with it. Words have lives, words are born of other words and grow fatter with the signification of their predecessors.

Why is it that there are a few people which conjure in me a sense that they are not 'human'? Their behaviour doesn't feel human. Human is from humus which means earth... meaning that we are earthly beings, opposed to Gods. The particular individuals I am thinking of act with the sort of influence and power that some people describe as Godly. They use the world around them like an offering, they want hymns of praise.

God has a few possible origins. Greek khein 'to pour', Old English ghut 'that which is invoked', Sanskrit huta 'invoked' (from the root gheu 'to invoke') and Proto-Indo-European gheu 'to pour, pour a libation'.
Invoked is related to vocare 'to call' or vox 'voice'.
So a God is something who you want to call, someone you would pour a drink for. Someone to beseech, to talk with, someone we entreat. I'm guessing then that God is pretty talkative, and the kind of dude who might know quite a bit about stuff - otherwise we wouldn't go offering him drinks and ringing him up so frequently.

These people who act like Gods do not have advice, they aren't the sort of people I would call on if I had a problem. They act with a sort of hollow power. False prophets. Power is the energy created by having knowledge. Being attractive is the effect of giving knowledge. These people don't have knowledge... they can't give knowledge.
So really they are powerless and ugly. They don't want people to know so they construct big peacock tails, don crowns and eat double cream without reserve... one thing they do know is the persuasive command of appearances.

Family

This is a promise to the future human beings I take under my care:

I will plan for you, you won't have been accidental.
I will always be honest with you.
I will always respect you.
I will make you a home and put these things inside it: books, artworks, plant life, animals, food from a garden, music from my mouth and also a stereo, bicycles, skipping ropes and balls, and the most important ingredient - people with big minds and knowledge of the world they can teach you, big hands that can hold you and discipline you, big hearts like colossal trees that house ecosystems of emotion with love at the top of the food chain, big ideas that exemplify passion and determination, big eyes that see you as an individual with your own ideas and desires.

I want to raise children in a community so that they don't feel trapped by two parents, so that the lessons they learn are diverse, so that there are more people around to torture them with tickling. I already know individuals whom I would be honoured to bless my progeny in the presence of.
I think childrearing will be the fullest dilation of my heart, a devotion that can't be reversed.
I want to help children learn about themselves and learn about myself in so doing.

From now on I am planning a life that I am going to share with a big family... children, a partner if I find one who wants to join me, friends and parents and anyone, any animal, who I meet who shares their heart with the same ease and consistency with which we give out carbon dioxide.

I want to bring people together in a big family who can talk and crawl and learn and fly and cry and think and  be human together.

Going out or coming in?

Think of the ventricles and arteries of your heart as a rotating door, through which you enter the world and the world enters you.

Negligent optimism

I told someone I've known for a long time but not seen for quite a while about my internal tectonic plate realignment procedure (it involves psychotherapy, allowing the past to pass, becoming comfortably alone, comfortably in company and defining and finding what I want) and she said:

"Remember that it could always be worse."

Whilst it seems like an optimistic phrase, it resonated in me as being a thoroughly apathetic approach.
I would like to gently dispute that everyone should always remember that it could always be better. Everyone should encourage themselves to be healthy and human to the finest of their capacities, and find methods and other people who can help them become a healthy human (don't ask me what that is yet).

Whilst it's true that everything could be worse, thanking the supreme that you haven't fallen down the stairs and broken both your legs or that your mother hasn't committed suicide or that you weren't born in a refugee camp in Mogadishu is a way of ignoring how your own life could be improved which stops you from becoming better and actually capable of helping people with broken legs or no government, no infrastructure, no education and no money.

The hierarchy of duty of care should start with your self and trickle outwards in all directions like a domino effect. How will I know how to care for someone else if I don't know how to care for myself?

Prior to internal tectonic plate realignment procedure

In love and in pain

Writing is like a lover in a dysfunctional relationship, who always turns her head away from you, who always contorts your meaning, who will never quite see you eye-to-eye. You're always trying to kiss her.

Magnetic repulsion between writer and writing

Dissolving

Even if it is just a psychosomatic result of sitting so still for so long that nerve endings fall asleep, the sensation of your body dissolving when meditating is euphoric and beautiful - and why not spend time beautifully?

Afterwards I asked myself what is that experience? And a zen sort of answer arose: inside, I am everything and nothing. It's that dissolving of a feverish mind and the apparent dissolving of a physical body which reveals that beyond both those things, a person can still exist... silent and at large, after having escaped those limits.

How can something be everything and nothing? If I am part of everything there is nothing to separate me. I am no thing if I am inside and inseparable from every thing. The social implications of this paradigm are greater empathy, greater generosity, less fear.

Physics knows we are recycled bits of stars! We're made from other things, our bodies decompose and become other things, so in a comfortingly concrete way we truly are part of everything, our bodies were spangling out in all kinds of directions, whizzing and burring and blooming into galaxies since the time that we call the start of time. And our bodies will go on, invisibly rolling and turning and shifting through  leagues of physical matter over millenia, I imagine a bit like a rat running under a doona cover: rippling along, disguised under the surface.

I know I have written about this many times, important things should be reiterated.

unzip your body                                     unzip your mind                             what's left behind?   

Turning

Once again for me things are slowly moving, things firmly established (memories, attitudes, perceptions) are slowly shifting like tectonic plates - I'm watching land buckle in some areas and oceans expand in other regions. Some parts of my life are under immense pressure and are grinding, crunching and crumbling, rumpling up into little mountain ranges that will need to be surveyed and traversed. Other parts - intellectual, emotional, spiritual - are fanning out into three dimensions and yearning to be plunged and understood. It's this knowing that I don't yet know the dimensions of my self which is humbling and painful too.

When this happens I start to write - hi!
It's not something that will ever stop happening. Life turns. This is the wheel creaking back into motion again.

I guess learning to turn with grace is the most important lesson at this interval. Learning to accept and move forward, learning the right pace, the right direction, the most adroit footwork: and tangoing with your own troubles, looking deep into troubles eyes, holding troubles clammy hands and getting to know trouble intimately. Trouble is like a friend who doesn't want to dance at a party, they'd rather you stand with them on the side, shoulders hunched and arms crossed, whilst everybody else thrashes and jerks and yodels with an untamed vigour and frothy-mouthed thirst for life. Trouble will hold you back. My troubles have held me back and sat me down and been smarmy and cynical about people with popping veins and sweaty foreheads.
I want popping veins and a sweaty forehead.

I don't want to seem too buoyant, but right this moment I feel hopeful. I feel that by turning and changing just as seasons turn, just as the Earth turns, just as a whirling dervish turns, I will find what I need and see 360 degrees of my situation as I go.

Incorrect example of productive turning.

Put the inside on the outside - is it good?

I think that song is from the Simpsons or some other delicious low grade popular social commentary text, and I believe it was a jingle in the cartoon for a chocolate bar... "oozy gooey chewy on the inside... crunchy munchy chocolate on the outside... you put the inside on the outside, is it good?" or something of a similar ilk.

Being part of the world means putting your inside on the outside.
Art has also for a long time been about putting the inside on the outside and then wondering whether it's good. To avoid having to wonder  whether what they're doing is good nowadays plenty of people just put the outside on the outside; they find something about the world and show it in a new light by making it ambiguous or concrete. Instead of being inventors they've turned to salespeople. Instead of having to wonder whether their insides are good or bad they can look at ideas and attitudes and occurrences in the world and say "this is bad, I'll show you how bad it is". Often in contemporary art people don't say "this is good, I'll show you how good it is", because faith isn't as eye catching as heresy. So I'm starting to see contemporary art as a locus where artists are less like people and more like agencies of consciousness - conduits of a collective vision. Instead of art being about art or artists, art is about us.

I feel that people not engaged with that contemporary commercial cult of art may often see artists as people with long feelings that unravel like some abstract line drawled across canvasses large enough to engulf a persons entire line of sight - lines potent with emotion, drawn out of them directly from the heart, down the left arm and through a paintbrush. Certainly those people do exist, and anyone can be that person. But the problem with putting the inside on the outside like that is that the need then arises to wonder whether it's good.

I guess I'm returning to a question I've already asked with an answer I've already found... Good and bad should be eliminated from vocabulary. Good and bad are too ethereal and have no human voice behind them. Wise and unwise are more relatable. I can imagine what a wise person does far more easily than imagine what a good person does.

I'm going to see art as wise and unwise.

Put the inside on the outside - is it good?

Places that need to be beautiful

Schools need to be beautiful.

People care more when they break a ming vase than when they break a mass produced cheap bowl that was cast from a mold.
Our schools need to be unique, expensive and well designed because otherwise they get vandalised and dilapidated, and because of the psychological complications that stem from being around ugliness. Places that have consciousness invested in them - often places of worship - are revered and maintained. Schools are our temples in which we pray for the future by doing charity work (let's face it - might as well be unpaid) so why don't we make them look holy?

With children, what you put in is what you get out - when you feed kids red icy-poles they turn feral.  If what you put in is what you get out, a human who ingests beautiful things through the eyes knows how to be beautiful (ordered, precise, considered, delicate, charming) more than someone who sees under fluorescent lighting and is caged inside of boxes made from board-formed concrete where shouting and door slams echo at an unbearably loud volume. 

The menage a trois

There seem to be two kinds of people: those who want to spend less time by themselves and those who want to spend more time by themselves. Recently I've been of the latter persuasion, and have caught myself wishing to be alone more often, to be less accountable to others, to just be allowed to not talk - maybe for a long time.

Last night as I lay in bed thinking about all the people I had to contact, all the issues I had to somehow resolve and the best strategies for neutralising them I felt the coarse wool of anxiety getting slowly wound around my heart by a pair of hands that pokes through my ribs (all calloused and spindly from ceaselessly working) and I thought to myself "If only I could just be alone!" and the only person who heard it was myself, meaning that I was alone, but had surrounded myself with other problems so much that I felt and believed that I was being crowded. The only person I cannot be away from is myself. I'm always here, I just often forget to say hi to myself, which is rude.

Here is a story I was told when I was little: there was a rich guy named Yajnyawalkya ("yudge-nya-wolk-ya") who was married to two wives, Katyayanee ("cutya-yaa-ne") and Maitreyee ("my-tray-yee"). Yajnyawalkya decided to leave his wealth and all his material goods and go into the forest, but before he left he asked the permission of his wives and told them that they were to share his wealth equally between them. Katyayanee gave her blessings and agreed to accept half the fortune and remain in her husbands home. Maitreyee was more curious, and asked what wealth existed in the forest that was more valuable than the wealth Yajnyawalkya had acquired economically and socially in the city.

Her curiosity led her to follow her husband into the forest, leaving behind her former life.
This is a story about you. The two wives inside you are your alternating tendencies of clinging onto possessions, comfort and familiarity and the tendency to let go, to renounce, to follow the unknown. When you feel stuck and bound to situations it is Katyayanee giving you a big sad hug, because she likes your company and would miss you dearly if you left. When you realise (as I did last night) that you are actually free to follow and abide with that silent self who leads you onwards, Maitrayee is putting on her sandals. But you don't have to go into the forest to be with yourself.

Mess

I appreciate spaces that are intelligently organised and beautifully presented.

So why is it that I don't frame any of my work? Why do I keep pairs of shoes I was given when I was 13? Why do I let books and paper and artworks commingle in stacks? Why do I stick halfbaked drawings up and let them congeal in my conscience for months until they're as dull and disinteresting as the colour of the walls (my walls are cream)? 

When it comes to university I can organise my ideas, when it comes to teaching I can organise materials, relationships, knowledge, spaces, when it comes to work I can organise time - why don't I carry it through into my bedroom? This space is the vessel that houses my history of interaction with the material world, and I treat it like a shoreline: leaving jetsam strewn around.

Essentially, realising my apathy has forced me to realise the root of my apathy: in a way I have felt worthless, and so I let myself have things messy and unkempt and old and worn out. And I think I pushed a crowbar into my cranium and that feeling of deficiency breeding in my brain leaked out and became an insensibility towards possessions and a desire for poverty of beauty.

I think in a way my father might have had a similar experience of manifesting his self worth in the material world. His personal possessions amounted to clothes and a mattress and later in life paper, ink and a drawing table. 

Another point of interest is that when I was small the people I loved the most were dirty and messy, and it's true that places of mess are the ones more inducing of fun - because you can't help but feel frigid inside a museum-house. I like the organic evolution of mess... the trickling of objects across space. The hints of chronology, the pleasure in archaeological discovery, the mapping out of actions. My grandpa was an artist and his loft was always shifting. I liked going to look at all the things up there, the different palettes encrusted with a variety of hued nuggets organised according to his decisions whilst painting, brushes of different thickness's: some sitting in clay pots, some fanned on a desk, one wet with mineral turpentine resting and oozing into a rag. 

My father was close friends with a man whose home was essentially the unfolding of an elemental and instinctive creativity advancing into three dimensions. Atop a mountain coated in forest, girded by giant creaking black bamboo sat a low and long living space. I couldn't tell you what it was all made of, what parts came first and how it expanded, but the main space was a wide, deep raised verandah and perhaps the roof was made from fabric. He lived alongside pythons who came to nest in the sheltered environment. There was musical gear and recording equipment set up on the verandah where I can remember I spent a long time playing keyboards under a large spherical objects (perhaps it was a globe) and maybe there were other hanging sculptures too. Our other family friends were always messy, my mothers close friend had hands that were always cracked and coated in glue from her artwork, her home was spread out into three little cottages and one bus. My dads other close friend really had no home, but had many beds, many rooms, many vehicles of all different sizes built for land and sea (but all shipwrecked), many books, many newspapers, many artworks, many weeds, one horse and rust on everything. And all these things were compiled into junk yards which are now only frequented by an adult with fond memories of childhood, waist high grass and big red kangaroos. I miss these people because they're all dead, so maybe my mess is in communication with the past.

A sense of chaos underpins those spaces.

Peeling skin

I love girls who stand up for themselves. I think I might be one, and I might just love myself for it. A little bit.

Imagine an apple. Imagine it's shiny taut dappled pink and red skin. Imagine that the flesh isn't floury and isn't tart - but sweet, crunchy, juicy. I think you might be salivating. 

Stop.

Humans have an innate way of twisting the universe to fit a human world view, to the point where we think that apples are for eating. The function of apples is to make more apples. We throw away apple seeds. What else do we throw away?

In the dark heart of apples are tiny magic stones. I am a tiny stone with magic properties right at the core, so when others confuse me for food it can be upsetting, disappointing, confusing, aggravating. A lot of people when they look at you see apple skin. Some people look through you and see the silent weight of potential. 

The outer part of me is a bit queer, in the homosexual way. It's a disgusting feeling having your skin peeled and flayed and devoured and your core thrown away by your family. My partner is one of those girls I love because she stands up for herself. And that's really hard to do when other people have misjudged your preferences in this material world as being the most defining aspect of your being, because the opinions of others - regardless of how self determined we are - shape us and can convince us.

Here is an invitation to all the people who have, are currently, and will at some point dispose of the innermost part of me whilst using my outer self to feed your ideas; to acknowledge and disregard the phenomena that is my sexuality because when you get distracted by that, you call me a "human doing". You reduce me to my actions.

Instead, call me a "human being", a thing that exists on a plane higher than mere action and decision.

Preserving a snake in a jar

In this society time is a snake who eats you, you're off to a painful start with teeth and it's all constriction and acid thereafter until death (what's more symbolic of our growing mistrust in the afterlife than snake defecation?) Time has got it's parts: you pass through ribs, through a small intestine, through a large intestine and you slowly break down over the duration of the journey. That's how white people see time, a winding living line that you pass through, marked by stages. On the whole, it's not a trustworthy beast. In the end it will destroy you.

I'd like to try and describe other ways to know time. I've caught glimpses of them, but it can be difficult to see time in a way that is incongruous to how you've been raised, in a snake. Some people don't measure time in increments.

The passing of time is meaningless if you are aware of what's happening now. You are always here now, except for in the times when your mind is not here, now, and is instead preoccupied thinking about the snakes teeth or the snakes anus. The past and the future are essentially lost on us, but we are constantly putting our minds in those dream worlds. If you pluck your head out of fearful contemplation of the snakes sphincter and open your eyes to focus on that which occurs in this very moment; time becomes less linear and you touch omnipresence and eternity. Because, after all, every thing that has existed and will exist can only exist the present moment, and there is no other time than right now. 

Priorities

Even when I have $7 in my bank account and no food in my fridge I am a happy person if I can talk with people I love and have a piece of paper and some ink.

Just a thought about writing

DE BEAUVOIR: Just  how can one tell what are the words whose association will act on the reader? Must one trust in the void? Take the plunge?
SARTRE: Yes, you chance it. After all, you have reasons for chancing it.

So, my reasons for taking chances with writing are related to two important lessons about human behaviour presented to me by one of my teachers at uni.
The first lesson is that politics is in everything, not only between nations but between two people, between two grasshoppers, between a can of tomatoes and a raw tomato. My can of Italian tomatoes flavoured with oregano travelled a long way, packed in and taped up aboard a boat. My can of tomatoes undoubtedly cost more economically and environmentally than my tomato I grew in my backyard. Tada: politics.

The other lesson is that conflict is notoriously present when interesting people get together to do something productive.
So long as I can find interesting ideas and characters, no matter if they are incomprehensibly unrelated, pushing them together in writing creates conflict, power struggles, a jarring dynamic, politics. It's the process of making a crude reflection of human behaviour, so that readers recognise humanity in the words and are, as Simone says "acted on" by literature.

My efforts in writing have been lax recently. Some time, brain willing, I will explode again.