His flesh became subject to hyperinflation. He ballooned, looking down all the while distressed at the spectacle of his own dynamic obesity. It was then that he realised that he *was* an economy. He had a value that was indexed on a sheet somewhere. No, not a sheet. Not even a bedsheet.

On a billion screens.

My father often comments that I always take photos, always compose them, in portrait format. Photos of landscapes.

how we stayed (without complaint)

he wanted to leave the mallworld so much.
but he wanted to buy things.

yes, the shopping mall! what an exquisite form of totalitarianism it is! here it is, cut down to (giant) size - everything you ever wanted, all in one, under one roof, roofed in by ducts.

ducting, ducting.

i am useless, am i not? downstairs, my mother and sister are putting together an aviary.

in a bird shop today (i hate birdshops) was a grey lop bunny. it licked my hands through the cage and I cried, couldn't help it.

i swim at least once a week. went this morning. i was so brain dead. i forgot my towel and dried off with my sweater. inside, it was not unlike a towel. i took off the handbrake without putting the car in park to start the engine properly, and went rolling. my poor friend. i cannot drive.

i read old writing, still.
i am inadequate, yes, but inadequate to what?

i searched the web for the words "i want to be shot in the head." it wasn't quite eye-opening.

The Arts in Australia, not even up there with a Mombasa dog sniffing its own arsehole. At least there was a point to that, or a point that could be implied into it.

The future?

A Westfields. Next to it, a development. A luxury development, quite possibly an empty one. Angry people trying to park. Inside the Westfields, retailers selling manufactured variety. The Young no longer need to trawl for amazing retro and vintage finds. Instead, the mainstream brands produce artificial fashion history, artificial bohemian diversity, and just as cheap as the op shops. Everyone needs to find the perfect brooch. They can then don the brooch, and wear it on the perfect modernvintagemadeinchina jacket to go shopping.

There will be one or two of the young who think they can be proud because they can say "This badge, this badge was my father's badge."

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."


--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," (Spring, 1940)

more and more girlcrushes.
oh katie sackhoff.
oh beautiful redhead girl with perfect teeth and perfect clear freckleskin telling me about the book with the bunny with three ears and the girl who scribbled herself out for falling in love with it, because she saw my drawing of a horse with a squid for a head and it reminded her.
and all of this in law class too.

i was lively this morning, in 8 am class, and residually all day. i wanted to dance.

laughing and talking. laughing and laughing and talking. there could be nothign else. for just a while.

last night i went to see Young Adam with Is. Valhalla. Strange intense vast empty dilapidation dank cinema smell bathrooms after. Film problematic, grew on me from halfway, very intense. Had to go back for jacket. Next "session" had gone in, consisted of one loner, in the shadowed black. I fumbled for the jacket in the dark empty seatrows, and he watched.

Izzy beautiful. George Eliot on "infantine blondness." Rosamund.

of course I am. I'm inspired. I shouldn't be worried about that.

I thought just now: the shadow like a long backslash
and later that backslash shadow, growing
and
crossing us, cancelling out

light casting shadows like symbols, shadows with hard edges like public signs: speed limits, prohibitions, slippery when wet. her kiss is always slippery.



I was talking to my sister about the bedspread on our bed. it was our parents at our bourne st place. they used to have the dark side up almost all the time, and sometimes my sister and i used to turn it over to the side we preferred, the less tasteful side, the white side with so many flowers, which appealed to our childish tastes, and it was like magic, like spreading out an instant garden, choosing it over that dark plum. the walls of that room were dark plum too.

i thought this evening as we lounged on it, it *is* beautiful. and that is taste. i could almost taste it with my eyes and my memory skin. and that is real taste.

then i thought of that hallway game: threshold, our father used to play. daddy long legs trapping you in the hall squealing hilarious. lo and behold there he was at the hall coming in with the dogs. i let him in. he seemed tired.

“in contemporary society, powerlessness is a condition of disabled consciousness and not only a situation of coercive deprivation”
Hutchinson

"order and structuration remain necessary projects"

remember how impressed i was by that!

such ravenous anxieties.

i fuss at a spot on my lip.

Here I am.

Oh, my little knife.

I can't explain the dream I just woke out of. I went and crawled up to the bedroom with Portrait of the Artist knowing I would fall asleep. And I did, thinly, into this alien intensity of a dream that seemed to come out of pure anxiety and yet did not seem to be anything I could have produced. Family members but not family members.

Lately. Well, I am not a diarist. Swimming. Reading (various: Kafka, Joyce, Eliot 'Landscapes', Gaskell, Baldwin, Jean Rhys, Rick Bass, revisiting, Bowles, revisiting...) Writing, finding old writing of mine. New computer - tranferring things. Longing constantly to sleep.

Swimming at Leicchardt. Marlborough Ancient History encounter. Nag's Head Scotsman tutorial. VSU Rally Resistance. Manly Rhys crisis. Video shop. Cheap CDs. The mornings at Circular Quay train station with the early gleaming pale beautiful fluid sun making the rest of the day liveable. Hating law school, pretending it isn't there or I'm not. Being in the city: horrible shops. No more shops no more shops.

Old Government House. The Botanical Gardens. Trees. Susannah Place.

Parents, parents.

STC. Distracted. Same day as Rhys.

We should all beat up our employees. We should all pretend to work, pretend merely, until demand exceeds supply a thousandfold and we starve to death under the cabbage trees.

the marvels of science and modern medicine have given us the ability to manufacture massive populations out of lives that never should have been fractal agglomerate and the net effect is not some greater good but only a more massive misery; death on a more apalling scale.