monday : 28 feb 2005

I have been mobilised, i.e. I spent the weekend with my new mobile phone. During the week it will be switched off most of the time to save battery power, but I I'll check for messages periodically when I'm carrying it. Also, I cannot work out predictive text – kind of makes me feel like a retard.

The novelty value was evanescent at best, although I used it on Friday night to take down the number of an English tourist called Claire, who started talking to me in Croft Institute. I rang the number on Saturday afternoon but the person who answered was not "Claire" and did not know a "Claire". I asked if she was at Croft the night before and she said she had spent all of Friday night at home. So much for that, huh! I suspect it was a joke because I thought I showed her the number after I'd typed it in, and she said it was right. Aren't there any normal single women in this city?!?

Time and motivation for updates has been scarce lately – the result of heavy socialising and the subsequent recovery time. Hey, anyone else enjoy last night's episode of CSI?

thursday : 24 feb 2005

7:29am. Holy crap...I just had the most amazing dream-filled night's slumber. I fell asleep with my headphones on at about 10:30pm and just stayed that way. The REM dreams felt as though I was watching a film – only fragments remain, of course, but I remember that they featured many locations, rigorous motion (running between bars and sliding along the polished floor in worn shoes, narrowly missing patrons, DJs and bar staff), lots of public transport, and a strong romantic element where this young woman kept chasing me, saying that she had grown tired of her current boyfriend, who was also present and didn't seem to mind her giving me attention. In one of those weird dream logic quirks, her eye colour changed from brown to pale blue.

12:34am. Reading, reading, reading. Today and tonight I read a long novelette by Harlan Ellison called 'All the Lies that Are My Life' from his 1980 collection Shatterday. After that I reread an old favourite entitled 'Eat Me' by Robert McCammon from The Book of the Dead anthology, followed by random selections from my own 1990s review fanzine. How the hell I will manage to retype 130,000 words onto this website is anyone's guess. Then again, those old issues feature some poor writing. Yes, even worse than what I produce now. Which reminds me, I have to hook up with one of my loyal readers: he is now a reggae DJ in Melbourne, believe it or not. He was a big horror fan back then at the tender age of 16 (!). I've just sent an e-mail to another reader and one-time contributor who lives in Mexico. Google supplied a good candidate so I'll see what happens. He used to draw a ragged underground gore comic called Hemofilia. As you do.

Seeing my artwork improve over the years was gratifying, though. By the time 1997 rolled around, I was poised to enter the semi-professional market, illustrating stories for big-name US publications like Deathrealm (who gave my zine a bad review, ha-ha) and Cemetery Dance. But it never happened. I have been flexing my artistic muscles of late, drawing timid doodles and other vague markings on sketch paper with a Biro pen. 2005 is the year, fucken oath!

tuesday : 22 feb 2005

Okey dokey, here is the first recap of last week's social event binge. There are no saucy tales or astounding anecdotes, just dry exposition I'm afraid. Background music might help.

Wednesday Night: $10 steak night at Blue Pols in Greville Street, Prahran. Very classy looking bar slash restaurant with subdued lighting, bulky furnishings, high ceilings, genuine black and white fine art photography on the walls, complete with descriptive plaques, and a large wooden floor that doubles as a dance area on clubbing nights. We sat in one of the booths – we being good myself, Michael from work, and two vivacious female acquaintances of Michael's, both of whom I knew. I kicked off with a Black Russian that we could smell as soon as it arrived. Slurp. The steaks here are pretty good value for ten bucks, though of course the owners make their money from bar takings on this slow mid-week night. Some of the conversation ventured into web journal territory, and those written by me and Belle de Jour in particular – you know, the usual "Why do you do it" line of questioning, which is always a challenge, especially when you're trying to cultivate a veneer of charm. One comment about a photograph of Cindy Crawford on the wall went, "She almost looks... intelligent". This was followed by laughter around the table.

monday : 21 feb 2005

I finally have a mobile phone, an old Nokia from an ex-flatmate. Correct, I did not buy it, but my soul is still damned and I shall urinate lava for all eternity. So what's the latest on the brain tumour risk?

sunday : 20 feb 2005

What a week on the social merry-go-round. I can't brain dump all of the details tonight because recovery is still in progress – maybe tomorrow. The dying hours of this evening need to be spent exercising, cleaning up my room, and dropping into a coma by midnight, although the coffee I drank earlier may stall that plan.

As I type this my PC here at home is still in a state of disembowelment. On Wednesday night after dinner in Prahran I decided to somehow fix the fan noise, which has been loud and gravelly for a year or more now. Evicting mountains of dust and squirting half a can of WD40 onto both internal fans made no real difference. I must have also unwittingly loosened one of the power links to the motherboard, because the hard disk refused to be recognised, i.e. it was dead, kaput. Phar Lap is in better shape. I discovered this interesting new development on Saturday, but had to shoot off to a late lunch that afternoon before I could do more than a basic investigation. Anyway, Euan fixed it today in four seconds flat. A few times during my tinkering the transformer dangled from its wires – this must have popped a connection loose, although this was the first thing that came to mind later when it failed to boot up, and yet it all 'looked' fine.

The strange thing was that in between finding the problem and having it fixed, I actually contemplated not getting a new PC or hard drive at all. Losing my C:\ files was no drama: all I really cared about was this website, and it was safe and sound on the web host's computer.

monday : 14 feb 2005

When the alarm bleated at 7:30am, I reset it for 8:25am and still woke up tired. No surprises there, dummy, given the vampiric hours you've been keeping lately. I was so groggy that I had forgotten it was St Valentine's day until my train arrived. Failing to find a seat next to someone single and attractive and awake, I eventually targeted an empty window spot that was still within line of sight of two bored-looking but classy female commuters. However, trying to look cool while folding yourself backwards into an awkward position as the train lurches forward takes years of practice. I accomplished that task well enough, but unfortunately the contents of the plastic bag I was carrying slid out onto the seat next to me, namely a hip flask of Smirnoff vodka (returning it to a friend at work) and a copy of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour (because she's a star).

Naturally everyone looked, and suddenly it was very quiet. My ears burned for 60 seconds, then I resumed reading the book and everyone went back to their inner monologues. Still, I felt no embarrassment holding the book up so that others could read the saucy title – it's good fun, and I always pull the same stunt with pulp horror novels and tattoo magazines. Just one of the fringe benefits of wearing a suit on public transport, I guess. Anyhow, by the time I had to get off, I could tell that one or two of my fellow passengers had memorised the title for later bookshop perusal at lunch time or Google scanning at work. Not an especially suave or cultured start to St Valentine's Day perhaps, but then again only someone who's never read Belle would say that.

Nothing even vaguely romantic happened today. Sigh. The question of my enduring single status, a favourite topic with one particular work colleague, was expected to come up on this occasion of commercialised cupidity. He didn't disappoint.

"How has your day been?" he asks.
"Same as usual, lots of support calls and all that. Just another Monday, isn't it?"
"And look at you. You're still single, no kids, lonely." He is a family man.
"Yeah well, you can't force these things. They call that rape."
"You will die alone, you know that?" At this point we are both holding back laughter, which makes this familiar exchange all the more hilarious.
"Hey, I try my best. I'm out on the town dressed to impress. Ain't nuthin gonna happen unless I'm mixing it up. Correct?"
"But you are too fussyyy." A gesture hammers the point home.
"Oh no, they are too fussy," I respond.
"No, you are."
"Okay, maybe we are all fussy, then," I say, but he looks unconvinced.
"You just need one nice girl, settle down and have kids."
Turning to leave I say, "Yeah well, I'll pick one up when I next go DVD shopping."

The train ride home featured an Indian bloke yabbering Hindi at 200 miles per hour to his animated friends, and a leathery bogan mother with three kids and bicycles in tow. She wore dark sunglasses and a black T-shirt that sported the quip, "Instant Arsehole: Just add Alcohol". Her kids were fond of ringing the bells on their bikes and the mother was fond of reprimanding them with a voice that could grate cheese. After 10 minutes of this triple aural assault, I blundered through the steel doors into the next carriage and went back to Belle's book. Ahhh, silencio...

Tonight I finished it off, 294 pages in two days. If only Belle had written Lord of the Rings...I might not be stuck in Rivendell like some Gondorian statue. (I realise that Ring lore was probably violated with that hurried simile, but in a fair world, such a mistake could only increase my chances of getting laid, surely.) The book itself is hard to judge after being familiar with her web journal. Some entries have been transcribed verbatim, while others were revised to sound more prosey. I expected that so it wasn't a problem. Recent entries concerning several kinky encounters are missing – that was disappointing because I was looking forward to more insights into that part of her psyche. Maybe there will be a second book after all? Gaps in the break up with The Boy are filled in, too. At any rate, for raw sexiness, the mainstream 'Eros' porn paperbacks are better value for money and have nicer covers, they're just not as funny. Oh yeah, one of the few comments I sent to her via e-mail made it into the text, although I won't say which one. Belle's book does deserve more attention than this quick summary, but it's after midnight once again, and my ties clash with orange skin.

sunday : 13 feb 2005

Been a while, huh. Still remember me? The corporate zombie, Your Humble Narrator, and alcoholic in residence if you believe one lurking reader who, upon eyeballing these pages at my suggestion "just for a laugh", implied rather heavily when I next saw her that my habitual turps drinking constituted alcoholism. Now, it was said in jest with a smirk, but I'm not as dumb as I look, and she is probably right in a technical sense. I like to drink when I socialise, and I socialise at least once a week. Guilty as charged, yer honour.

But it's also true that most of the anecdotes worth telling on this journal centre around social events and bar hopping misadventures, all of which may present a distorted view of reality. I once considered writing political and/or arts commentary, mixed with occasional crumbs of existentialism. However, (a) there were already enough web loggers doing this routine much more capably than I could, and (b) it would feel too much like editorialising. I have done quite enough reviewing over the last 15 years; writing about personal stuff is something different for me. Also, in general I agree with conventional Internet wisdom and feel that I don't have much to add to current debates about world leaders, public transport, and the price of butter. Being of the same generation as most Internet presences might have something to do with that, I suppose. Even my early fondness for Britney Spears, which would have marked me as a statistical anomaly in the great ocean of cyber opinion, has since withered to the accepted level of disdain and mockery. Anyway, I'm not even sure any of this makes much sense – as usual I am stringing these words together after midnight. Don't be surprised if I change it in the morning.

So, speaking of boozing, I have been out almost every night this week, either for a quiet brewski and pub meal with fellow desk jockey Michael, or attending a 30th birthday party. Said celebration was for another workmate Chris, and it happened at his house last night. Tim turned up at my place at 6:30pm to chill out and offer me a lift to Chris's house, which is a mere 20 minutes walk north from my place, but when you're carrying drinks and other paraphernalia in dressy clothes, it's usually best to secure transportation if possible. We headed off to the bottle shop an hour later, with me picking six different cans and bottles of pseudo-random temptations, virtually one from each fridge in the store. At $20.00 for the whole night it was excellent value; it can cost you more than that to sneeze in most venues.

Arriving 40 minutes late is just about the polite limit for suburban parties. I attempted to explain this to Michael at the pub on Thursday night, since he was planning the inner-city approach, meaning you add at least one hour to the advertised starting time before even daring to poke your nose through the door. Getting to Chris' party at 9:00pm would mean missing half the food, fun and frivolity. As it turned out, he got there at approximately 9:30pm. Old habits die hard! By that stage I had slurped half my stash of beer and spirits, eaten some delicious finger food, spoken to all of the guests I knew (Ah, Morpheus: we meet again) and met most of the others, drew a puppy dog on an Etch-a-Sketch for Ken's toddler, and basically warmed myself at the fireplace of high quality social contact.

monday : 7 feb 2005

I have a number of topics to catch up on but no time to do it in. Tonight I came home late after seeing a German film at the Lumiere. The rest of the week should allow more writing time – at least I've finished off the outstanding movie nanoreviews.

wednesday : 2 feb 2005

The journal update lull con­tinues as I finish off the Stanley Kubrick bio­graphy by Vincent LoBrutto. Although this tome was an enter­taining and inform­ative read, it was patently obvious that when Kubrick moved to England and became a recluse, the trail of bio­graphical bread crumbs all but vanished, forcing LoBrutto to focus on Kubrick's later film pro­ductions and therefore rehash material from other sources. For now I will heed the accepted wisdom and avoid Baxter's book, unless I can find the time to read/scan it for free in Borders.

Otherwise my life has been pretty subdued. After work the com­pulsion to crash out and vegetate is over­whelming – I even had a cat nap earlier while listening to headphoned music. So by the time I get a second wind (more like a hesitant breeze) at about 10:00pm, it's too late to make over­due phone calls, complete an effect­ive exer­cise routine, or compose lengthy mono­logues about daily happen­ings. At any rate, the February social roster is swelling up with numer­ous big-ticket events, along with the requisite weekday jetlag. I don't mind at all.

But on to more exciting news...I ate a pear tonight for the first time in my life. Not even a full pear, just half a one. Compared to the much sexier and luscious apple, the experi­ence of eating its frumpier cousin was mediocre at best. (After all, if the Serpent had tempted Adam with a pear and not an apple, the plot of the Bible would have been much different and perhaps a tad dull, with Adam and Eve sitting around doing bugger all.) A factoid from the dim recesses of my onboard RAM tells me that pears are supposed to be healthier for you than apples, though I forget why; I shall Google up the answer later. It could be the higher sugar content of apples, because for some crazy reason, my body chemistry has trouble processing the sweet­ness from, say, more than one apple in a 24 hour period. Ignoring this rule usually creates large pimples in random places, which is annoying because what sort of inhuman freak doesn't like munching on a shiny, crisp, juicy apple? Exactly.