Venom Distillery. Respect my hatred.

It's such a relief when one finally identifies another of life's missing pieces. Just to know which streets to walk down, and what to look for, to make things a bit better than they have been.

This week I keep being reminded of a much-derided quiet, comfortable aesthetic. Not pulsating energy, not blue notes, not ribaldry, not "cool", not whimsy - well, maybe just a sprinkle of whimsy. A fireplace and cups of tea, preferably in a Hobbit-hole, culminating in some giant trees and that ancient, breathtaking beauty.

I know it's probably a bit English or even a bit Anglican; and definitely a bit childish, but it's important not to let that get in the way of anything. But let's make it quite clear that I'm not talking about wine-tasting or anything like that. I'm not talking about upgrading my kitchen, or shopping at Jones the Pretentious-Yet-Sterile Grocer, or reading the books on display in the windows of either of Park Road's expensive bookshops (or almost any of the shelves in those shops). Clear your mind of whatever imitative post-retro-neo-modern-revival you've been subjected to - I'm talking about proper comfort, hard-won and with whatever warts or camp sensibilities come along with it.

So in the coming weeks, my hope is that you might find time to join me in Fellowship for a scone or two. If that doesn't sound adventurous enough, I can probably find you some marmalade and you may even spread it thick. In the meanwhile I shall be watching The Wind in the Willows (that new one, but I'd love to see the Terry Jones or the Gosgrove Hall if you have them to hand), listening to Joanna Newsom, and having wet dreams about Stephen Fry. Oh, yes indeed.

Sobriety destroys lives.

Mine, for example.

Imagine how much better this weekend would have been if I had been drunk for more of it. Imagine how much better this post would have been!

Oh, well. A man can dream.

Your fingerprints

The flesh around your bones

I'd like to know

Why all these things move me



A part of me would like to travel in your veins.

-- Air

Heavens preserve me in a jar of ethyl.

I can't be in love if it's plastic
to live on my own just seems tragic
but we'll raise our swords high when our day comes
you thought it was gold but it was bronze
so, get here in time when our day comes
you thought it was gold but it was bronze

Oh, Matt Berry... what will you bring us next?

.

"Who Do You Think You're Fooling Today?"

It is certainly your birthday
I have verified this information
Relayed via many individual energizers
Your days modulus 365 is zero.

Diverse rejoicements!

I've heard that sometimes, when facing a great challenge, the value of success itself is secondary to the experience gained along the way.

One would certainly hope that were true in this case, since the prize itself is lacklustre. But alas; all I can see myself gaining along the way is age, weight, debt, and a vast quantity of empty bottles.

A change of direction, then.

(Can anyone lend me a compass? Mine keeps getting unstuck from Magnetic North and homing in on its close rival, Magnetic Hades...)

When the day fails to hasten
When excitement just won't fasten
Arrange employment for a mason
Entertain yourself with arson.

(dedicated to ozireus)

Let me make something very clear, folks. Daylight Saving does NOT give us extra light at both ends of the day. You can NOT increase the number of hours of daylight in the day. It's patently impossible.

Thanks for clearing that up, Snake-Man Brisbane's own DST extremist, Joanne Jacobs.

While I'm touching on this controversial issue, I'd like to point out that I don't know any Queenslanders who actually go outside. Personally, I think in UTC - the time system for the Atomic Age!

No results found.

Did you mean:

banker
hanker
canker
wander

Isn't it interesting that you can make statistics say anything you want, except what you really need them to say: "Get a life, you number-crunching, bean-counting, tedious piece of shit."

Dear Lachlan,

I never meant to hurt you.
I'll find a new anaesthetic dealer.
And I'll sharpen the knife a bit better.
The dawn of a new man.

What's the collective noun for cocksuckers? Is it "Parliament"?

Hmm... "A Parliament of Cocksuckers."

It sounds right.

Let me take this opportunity to say a few words:

Primate!
Epic struggle!
Thundering velocipedes!
Melancholy!
Violent retribution!
Passion!
David Gwynne!
Eros!
Enlightenment!

So David Leviathan Gwynne tells me -- insists, right -- that if I stay up until midnight on Thursday, Theo de Raadt is going to drop by and give me a signed "Blobby the Binary-Only Closed-Source Driver Blob" T-shirt. Well, either Theo de Radiant is an hour late, or Gwynnie is a generous serving of liar with lashings of bastard.

Thing is, I wouldn't put it past either of those two cruel-hearted gargoyles. So anyway, that's why I'm going to be late for work. If any of you see Gwynnie, give him a kiss from me, eh? You know what I mean.

A complete stranger smiled at me today, even though it was my fault. I didn't provoke anyone else on my travels, but I got a few glares anyway, along with the standard blank stares.

So this trivial-but-rare event somehow made my awful week seem happier, if only for an inexplicable moment. I wish that one day I could affect somebody like that.

Thrandom.

Today, all I can think about is how much I want to see Darragh Murray blow up a hot water bottle using only his lungs.

Boring but peaceful in Sunday night's box. The pH is neutral like my own.

Monday morning will smell like bleach; exposed to its basicity my neutrality will be as acid. The corrosion will devour another week.

I was betrayed again today. By emotional attachment and finite patience, fueled as always by the source that powers all humankind: fear.

On a scale from "zero" to "the very worst" my transgression was trivial, and perhaps to a person borrowing my eyes it could even be understandable... but it still wasn't right.

I still can't untangle human decency from human ugliness, so instead I resolved to unfasten another notch of my humanity itself... expose it to a spark, and watch it burn away.

Simpler. More righteous. Less beautiful. Colder.

The most difficult thing about pissing in the office water-cooler is getting high enough.

You can go and get a chair to stand on, but it doesn't quite do it, so you really have to stretch.

Weekend, tally-ho!

You

Have

Got

What

You

Paid

For

If I ever do anything like buying property again, I'm getting one of those 1900 Premium Rate numbers.

That way when I get calls every second work-hour for a month, I can make up for the lost productivity with money from the phone number.

Besides, if people were paying by the second, they might think twice before making those awkward "just checking how you're going" calls that I never know quite how to terminate.

Usually when I get a call stating the obvious, there's this conspicuous silence screaming NULL down the line, so I panic and respond with some terrible piece of understatement: "Yes, I heard a rumour to that effect. It's... good." At this point, the caller decides I'm worryingly relaxed about the situation, and the conversation suffers an awkward death.

But at least once it's dead I can get on with some work.

I am the stallion, mang.

Sucks Week is barely halfway through, but I'm already in need of about 48 hours' solid sleep.

Five will do for now, though. And five is enough to fully qualify Thursday as a new day. A new story with new characters; reminiscent (but not a strictly faithful recreation) of the previous. Since I am now just seconds away from shutting my eyes, this entry is my final act before the deck is reshuffled. The end of a deceptively short era.

Perhaps the Thursday Successor will make more sense of all this. Particularly if he manages to unravel the clue I am leaving for him.

Being alive is like getting a really expensive car from a complete stranger on your birthday. The keys drop out of the sky, and you're too busy catching them involuntarily to find out why, before the explanation ducks around a busy street corner and is gone forever.

You can immediately see how immense and shiny your gift is, but it's utterly undeserved. It can provide indispensible utility, or you can drive it recklessly. You'll probably use it for both. But all the while you're barely able to control the thing, all those dashboard dials have no labels, and you have even less idea where to drive it.

There are sleeker, newer models on the road. Some are smoothly and expertly driven. Some have tried through endless upgrades or showy driving to join these groups, but they're not fooling anyone. Meanwhile, a large number make do with ancient sedans, Volkswagen beetles, motor-scooters, and humble bicycles; and they seem to be coping. Sometimes you think about all those suffering the rusty penny-farthings and wrecked tricyles, and you despair.

You don't really know where to take yours, so it's too hazardous and expensive and polluting to just keep driving, but you can never find a park. You shouldn't think about wrecking something so obviously immense and shiny... so what the hell are you doing?

I've got some rather upsetting news for all you homosexuals called "Steve" - the book of Genesis doesn't mention you at all. Not even once. It only mentions Eve.

It's the time of night for haunting. The hours between midnight and dawn, when I give the day the benefit of the doubt, and wait for a sign that it was not all in vain.

If all was well with the world, or I had at least made a step along the path to making it so, then my soul could rest and the haunting would be at an end. Until tomorrow night, I mean.

Obviously a curse like this leads to all sorts of problems. I think it dates back to university, when days and deadlines slipped past so easily unless one cultivated some really robust eccentricities.

... and fuck us for helping them.

I mean, honestly, how much more stupid could they possibly sound?

The Fountain of Youth is so full of 80's cartoons it is in danger of becoming clogged.

It's full of stars!

Yeah... go ahead.

Push me just a little further. Use up that last scrap of patience allocated to you. Hell, take another few from the allocations of my friends and family.

You know, that thing you're saying now is precisely what I just visualised you saying, just before I visualised setting fire to your clothes.

I can see a few moves ahead in your game, but what concerns me is... I can't see any moves ahead in mine.

I have many reasons to punch Lachlan Kuhn in the vagina.

If only we had warned him more sternly of the dangers of Bacon Starvation, he might still be around today.

Lachlan Kuhn and I have written some haiku, in the hope of provoking a deeper level of debate on the important issues of the week...


   Ian Rutherford
   Join the navy without pause
   Oh my god so hot

by David Young


   Joining the navy,
   Ian Rutherford and me,
   Nautical delight!

by Lachlan Kuhn

The introduction of women to the shoe marketplace has had a profound impact on the way we live today.

It is hard to overstate the vast wave of new opportunities that are available to us all in this Brave New World.

It has been described quite rightly as the crowning achievement in the history of scientific enquiry; and the episode which brought the horror and bloodshed of the Cold War to its final, peaceful close.

On the brightest and sunniest of days, a woman can purchase a shoe, and with this single individual action both the brightness and the sunniness - in the environment and within our hearts - are instantly increased by a factor of between 50 and 75 percent.

The same also applies for dull and rainy days.

Oh, yes. It's easy to take today's shoe marketplace for granted, but let us remember and celebrate the marvellous times in which we live!

I have heard it said many times lately: allowing women to own their own shoes has brought about a kind of nightmare scenario. The Western World has become a living hell from which death is the only escape. The deafening footsteps of these shoes, worn on the innumerable feet of the ever-marching Squads, have drowned out all other sounds in our once-proud cities.

Oh, Feminism. Did you not foresee this? How could you have been so disastrously naive?

You know what that means - this is a filler post.

A vain attempt to disguise the pathetic truth that the Jesus Heart thing really is the only thought I've had in over a month.

Despite this, a lot has happened: many horrible, stressful, disheartening things; and a long weekend in Sydney.

If you want to read about disheartening things, just visit a random LiveJournal (or read the more shameful entries on this one).

As for travel tales, mine are extremely pedestrian*. All I will say is that it was fascinating to see a big unfamiliar city with a long history (compared to that of Brisbane).

Now get back to work.


* Extremely pedestrian is also a pun. Being lost in that city for 4 days made my feet really sore.

It's never too late to raise your scalpel and cut into the tissue closest your heart,
delicately carve the outline of a doorway,
prise out layers and fold them back,
tidy the edges and seal them against further blood loss,
purchase and install a fine lock and keyhole for security,
and hand both copies of the key to Jesus Christ.

The pretty music just makes me want to cry.

What's the fucking point?

.

I work pretty hard to make myself this unhappy. I guess it should be satisfying to be good at what I do.

What happens when a human is exposed to 50 times the normal dose of non-sequitur?

Does he or she bleed pure randomness from his or her nose?

Let's find out, together.

If you toke, then play Chopin, you're criminally insane.

Over-cranked Chopin KILLS.

I won.

My morning in court ended with an order that Rental Hotline - that unreasonable and secretive bitch of a company - return $600 they demanded from Tanya, Anthony and I six months ago.

I didn't win back my $44 court fee, though (the only way you can demand costs with the Small Claims Tribunal). The Referee said he felt that the lessor (not the agents) would be responsible for that fee, and since I had taken the agents to court, I wasn't going to get it back. The catch there is that I have never been told who the lessor was.

That paradoxical splinter to my victory is still inflaming the sore. After I share the spoils with my housemates, I'll get back about $190. This amount, or even the full $600, is nowhere near worth the anger, stress, filing fee, four months of waiting, and 10 or 20 evenings spent on paperwork.

Or maybe those things are not the problem at all. Most of all, I need to shout at the fuckers who put me through all this. The lessor, the agents; I don't care, as long as I'm projecting my voice and describing genitalia, obscene sexual behaviours, and animals.

Oh well. It's over now, and gradually the stress will seep away. The next few days might even feel like a weekend. It's been an interesting and probably valuable learning experience. And one of these days, I'm going to use this paper trail to find that lessor, and I'll call him on the phone. Genitalia, sexual obscenity, animals.

I want Packets!! Lachlan! Try to make it happen!

A quick survey of the comments history of this journal has revealed that ratings go through the roof whenever I mention Patricia Khoo, David Gwynne, or erotic adventures with characters from The Young Ones.

In my next post I shall combine these elements to obtain The Most Successful Post Ever, tentatively titled: Loki Meets Rick and Neil At The Video Shop (Starring Patricia Khoo; Produced by Teh Kryz Films)

There are moments -- in my experience, only fleeting -- when you hear your heart beating and you feel a sudden acute awareness that if it stops beating, even for a moment, you're in some really serious trouble.

Your heart has had just one long work day, for all of your decades. It's never taken a sick day; it's never even stopped for a coffee break -- because in that time you'd be dead.

Some people are proud of computer uptimes, but even if you'd kept one running since the digital computer's inception, you'd still be getting thrashed by the uptimes of thousands of human beings. (And sleep is not downtime; just an interruption of a couple of services while most of them keep on running...)

The catch, of course, is that the core services can never be restarted after a short interruption. The machine itself degrades beyond repair in just a few minutes. Surprising, considering its robustness until that moment.

It's lucky you backed up all the important stuff, so you can start again on new hardware. You did back it up, right?