hot august wayne

This is Wayne.  Wayne was a good friend and a rare sort of being.  Impossibly intelligent and sardonic, and always all this with love.  He’s so fucking humble that he’s too modest to even say so.  This is how I want to remember him, and overwhelmingly, it is.  With good gratitude for the stuff that defined him, the big personality and the trustworthiness and the overflow of giving – interestingly, the stuff that cult leaders are made of.

brunswick street disgusts me more every day

Alright so I have no business going in there in the first place because I know how to combine my own herbs which I can purchase in bulk at very low cost into mixtures that satisfy my various desires.  But T2 has a wide range of tea-straining devices, and you think, ‘how bad can it be, it’s a tea shop’, but it’s really that bad.

Upon entry I was offered some tea from one of several plastic jugs which sat upon light boxes so as to emphasize their state-of-the-art design.  I declined, remarking that I was just looking for a teacup, which was also true, though that was only part of the mission I undertook when I walked through their doors.  The ‘sales assistant’, whose appearance I cannot describe as I could not bring myself to look at her long enough to retain a mental image, pointed in the direction she was walking and told me that if I’m looking for teacups, these are good teacups.  She did not know why they were good teacups, but she did know that they were in front of her and they were teacups, and so they must be good ones, ones that you could recommend to someone without even having to ask what exactly they were looking for in a teacup.  These teacups are good for everyone.

As it turned out there was nothing about these particular teacups which appealed to me, nor was there anything about any of the other teacups there which appealed to me.  And so I carried out the other half of my task in T2.  I procured two mesh globe tea strainers, one for me and one for a friend, and presented them to the girl at the counter whose face I do not remember.  (I do recall sensing, however, that a hair straightener had been in the vicinity of her head over the last five hours.  It’s just something you can feel about a person.)

‘Tea strainers!’ she remarked, amazed at my power of selection.  I made no response.  None was needed – she had already figured it all out.

‘Good for…brewing some tea’, she continued, and I nodded in agreement.  I wondered if they were trained to talk you through your purchase.  I hoped she would stop soon.

‘No tea to go with that today?’ she asked, as though perhaps I hadn’t noticed the wall displays stocked generously with little cubes of boxed & bagged teas (the packaging isn’t that good for the earth, but it keeps your tea like, really fresh, until you open it).  It was as though she was saddened by the image of me with my steaming mug of hot water and an empty globe mesh tea-strainer, having overlooked such an important variable in the production of a cup of tea.

‘No, thank you’.

‘You already have plenty at home, right?  Heaps.’

‘Yes please.’

‘Sooooooo did you want a little bag for carrying those?’

‘No, I think I can manage these just fine, thanks.’

‘Ok have a greaaat day, yeah?’

I have learned my lesson.

and so it is type-written

My digitised methods of ‘writing’ are challenged by this machine.  Analogue composition requires a deeper state of concentration and connectedness with the text as it moves from your snytactical locus through your body – spinal column to arms to fingers to depress the keys of tiny hammers which instantaneously solidify things you may wish you hadn’t said.  The faster you type the more smoothly the action is rendered, and in one of those rare situations the writing body tows the writing mind, which follows inchoate behind those patterns of strangely familiar motion.  There is no turning round at the dead end of incomplete thought, and so your well-intentioned lines of prose smash head-on into the wall and shatter into fragments of ‘poetry’.

I find that the language my body speaks takes a more arcane tone than the one I am used to having spoken by this modern mind.  I am blown away by the (inter)locutionary gap which must exist between us writing now and them writing then.  The relationship between the body and the text is directly addressed: who’s in charge here?

moving right along

There are going to be some changes around here.

I’ve got a lot of time on my hands these days.  I work two days a week and the rest of the time I do this other thing, living.  It’s very exhilarating.  There is very much to do in life as it turns out.  So much so that you can have five days to do it in and still be behind.  How exciting!

So I’ve been updating lots of things, making new things, refinishing tables, washing items of clothing by hand, and trying to balance out.  There’s a lot of me that got lost to the energy vortex of being someone’s full-time employee, lots of things I’ve been wanting to make but that just haven’t come to the surface, so now I get to just relax and wait for them to show up, and they do, well-dressed and very eager.

Negotiations are in process for the creation of my own domain (I’ve always wanted one), which would host my blog(s) and any other little bits I’d like to add.  This has been, and will continue to be, mainly a personal blog.  Food has been nagging at me to blog it for sometime, thus this little project.  I haven’t given out the url much, I’ll probably just do it here and there until the whole site is put together.  I don’t like giving out packages that aren’t neatly wrapped.  The food blog is very exciting for me, I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and I like getting to write so topically.

I also plan to start a sex blog.  Food and sex are my two topics, things I’d want to write about professionally, and I want to use these spaces as little writing exercises.  I also just like to talk about sex.  This is tricky territory because I want to be able to write about my experience working in the online sex industry whilst also establishing my sexuality outside of it whilst retaining some of my privacy and integrity.  I’d like an elevated level of discussion and I need to figure out how to ensure that I’ll get it.  This is something I might have to protect a lot more – I don’t moderate comments on any other blogs, I don’t make private or password-enabled posts, but this might be a place where I’ll need to do that.  I find that I am constantly negotiating just how much I want to reveal, and this is just another situation where I have to do that because I got naked on the internet and got myself some ‘fans’.

I’m also tweeting these days, because eventually I cave to most social media, and flickr is going to see a revival.  You’ve been looking at the same two photos of my cat in the sidebar for far too long.

Also there will be zines, there are two in the works at the moment.  One sex, one food, appropriately.

But most importantly, this:

Opinions?  I don’t have to choose between the two, I just don’t know whether to do it at all.

Meh.

as it turns out

Alain de Botton does not have a beard.  I found out this way and was quite surprised and a little disappointed.  In the lack of whiskers, not in the talk.