50% Off Christmas Cheer

Landfill county - and if you collect enough bags, you become queen.

Melbourne Central Boxing Day sale - 30th December.

Racks clustered with treacle clothes to be retired to forever bins or op-shops by next Christmas.

Idle minds in slow-moving bodies.

That looks nice.

That doesn't look nice but I'll buy it anyway - it is half-off, after all.

What is a 50% discount on something vastly overpriced?

Just... overpriced?

"Excuse me, miss, do you think I could have some change?" a native face drawls.

"Sorry man, I don't have money."

He slurs his pupils towards the two plump grocery bags beside me.

"Well, do you think I can borrow a lighter?"

I'm jotting in a notebook while waiting for a tram - a smoker would be getting in final puffs.

"Don't smoke."

He drifts on, ghost eyes already elsewhere.

Nowhere.

Across the road a man sleeps in diagonal - blue and grey sleeping bag cocoon with no beautiful butterfly coming.

Other men wear grizzled grins on their muzzles as they hold their dogs - 80c of coins starving the inside of a stained hat. One with a starry-inked face ponders his next marketing attempt - permanent marker poised over cardboard in his lap.

Still, the shoppers and tourists and well-to-do students, walk slow, clotting every street - often displeased that one person would need to slip by their 5-berth meander. How very dare I?

I walk fast. No patience for noise, litter, begging and lacklustre hedonism. But I stop to watch the dancing, the shouting, the cry for help from the dark bodies in bright clothes on the State Library's steps. Chants echo the sound-off on a megaphone. Banners scream their plea: No more rape as a weapon of war. No more. No more. Freedom now. Freedom now.

I want to sob. Instead I smile. People should know about this stuff. I know so little, but enough to be hurt by it. And I'm happy to see as many tall, determined men as round women in headscarves. They've fled dictatorships. Unspeakable horrors. And now someone in tepid Gucci accoutrement pauses to video the scene. How quaint!

I'm glad my tram comes, or I may go up and ask one of the protestors about their fight.

And if I do, I'll cry. My safe street filters will come off and empathy will render me socially unacceptable.

Much more de jour to pop your boutique bags down and record without expression.

And still, it's just another day in a city.

No-one's getting saved - they're getting spending.

Little Friends

The puppy toddled on the strip of grass - body light and feet small. A piece of KFC with shiny dark eyes - it ran at me, on its fabric leash.
It sniffed and licked my hand gently but with enthusiasm, and I greeted it before acknowledging its human.

And for 30 seconds, I felt all the cracks in my soul fill, and I was whole - vetted by a cavadoodle fried chicken angel.

Wooing Dreams

I dreamed all about being wooed and adored, and it felt like being a teenager, though I was never treated that way as a teen. I woke with a feeling maybe I am someone still worth chasing, and keeping once caught - and treating even better once caught. Known. Held. Embraced.

But then, it was just a dream. Those things fade - like the nocturnal sagas of murderous hands seeking you through an abandoned city, or panic nothing dreams of sleeping through your alarm. Dreams are just stories unconscious us tells waking us. Amusements or tortures.

But it was nice to wake and not feel born back into the world another day another unevenly-weighted thing upon it. Not waking sad feels like a challenge won, but it doesn't last long. The ways of the day change the narrative, and mood, and the dream is gone and you're the jiggly human meat man making decisions, worrying and seeking pleasure and relief from pain. Until these things tire you so much, and the hours later, you tumble horizontal, and dream again.

Tick the Box or Scan Invalid

Do you ever feel like there are 8 checkboxes for worthiness, and if you tick zero, you have no value?
You draw your own squares below, in purple pen, swirls and stars to dot the i's - other options, more values, rarer, wonderful things, but the computer can't read them.
So you break yourself to tick all 8, or even half, or even one, and if you succeed, you're depressed, anxious, lost, or burned out. And then the computer reminds you that you need to keep at least one neatly ticked to be valid.

But you can't. So you have no value. And then it's just you and the purple pen and the swirls and the stars.

Closed Mic

9th March, 2016 

I won the open mic competition!
Nah, I actually got snubbed. Fucking hard.
Harrrrrrrrrrd.
I never gave a shit about that silly competition, but I give a shit about being insulted.
Daddy didn't raise no fool, but clearly Mother did.

I say I won because of what happened.
I got up and started singing and every single pair of eyes in that room were on me. Every pair of eyes in the beer garden. That's rare. Everyone fell quieter. That was near impossible when I started last year. This time they were locked on me. And I let my voice soar out of my body like a winged thing, an old creature stretching wings, taking the air away from those below, rupturing and rapturing and roaring. I let myself feel the words. I let myself pause and breathe. I sang QUIET last - a dark, personal, tortured string of sounds and feelings, and everyone was with me. The applause was hard and sharp. I was where I was supposed to be.
The bitchfaces have melted.
The pub chatter has faded.
I finally have the voice I always wanted, and now I can give to other people, in loving little brutal doses.
A year ago, I couldn't hold up the falling sky. Tonight, I made it fall.

Thank you to my beautiful friends who came along. To have that little army of silent support there to the right of my vision was wonderful to me. You really can't know what it means.

x

Lady Cakes & Eat It

International Women's Day. Year 9. Lunchtime, double classroom booked out. Only Girls Allowed. And teachers of both genders. Two male teachers attend. They stand, jovially eat free cakes, and stare in decadent hunger at teenage girl legs.

This is my only knowledge of Women's Day.

Creeping Beauty

Nightmare girl

You're perfect to me
I wouldn't change a hair
On my pretty little head
So please
Don't do it to me
While I'm sleeping
Don't walk right through me
Creeping Beauty
Creeping Beauty

Queen of the night.

THE LEGS THAT TWITCHED

My leg muscles have been ravenously twitching for over 12 hours and it's official - I need to go in a bin.
I probably need thorough testing by a good specialist, but seeing as I haven't found one in a decade, I must go in a bin now.
Sleep may help, but you can't sleep when your legs are stockings filled with electronic pinballs and a huge cramp is only half a second's warning away.
I know I'm meant to be grateful for a lot of things. I should be happy to be alive and in a first world and have cool hair. But try enjoying a roadtrip in a car with the engine scraping the road. Try even getting from A to B. Try not panicking that mechanics shrug even though the car is filled with fumes that make you dizzy and sick.
I've mixed my metaphors again.

Anyway, come cut off my legs so I can sleep,  because you can feed them to your rescue dog as soon as the spasms stop - which could be after the first bite, who knows.

Algorithm Method - get fucked & die

What the hell is wrong with all the platforms?

YouTube removes your monetisation if you have fewer than 1000 subscribers or fewer than 4000 watch hours in a year.

The newer Instagram algorithms make you invisible unless you boost ($).

Facebook does the same.

Freelancing platforms now send harrassing emails every month saying they've stripped ANOTHER seller level status due to lack of sales (outside your control), making you lower on searches/directories, or even literally INVISIBLE.

This is like when there is a competition and the entries on the front page get seen most so they get voted highest and win.

No-one looks at page 7 of anything.

People rely on being seen, BY THEIR FOLLOWERS - PEOPLE WHO CHOOSE TO FOLLOW THEM. We are BOMBARDED by ads by the platforms, and they are mining our info, AND we are creating the content (that's not how entertainment platforms ever used to work). So none of it is free at all.

You can't even study SEO or learn how to do this stuff better. Hustle and clickbait and bullshit will become final tools of survival. Outside broadcast TV, and brick & mortar stores, this is how people's businesses are seen.

And what do the algorithms want?

These binary code beasts are demanding something but no-one is telling us what the fuck that is. You go from trying not to please people at the sacrifice of integrity and quality, to trying to please a fucking mathematical code invented by people trying to extract more money from toothless mouths.

If these platforms supported their freelancers and artists and business owners, hey, everyone would make money. Then the aforementioneds would HAVE income. You boost a post, do you know how many sales that converts to?

Shit, they lie and say you'll get 1400 views and then the report says it reached 728, would you like to boost again?

Oh, want to be seen on page 2 of Google? Better pay for that, motherfucker. Too bad if you make stuff to make people happy. To not be some slime-coated, tooth-whitened, collar-popping entrepreneur scumfuck out there pyramid-scheming innocents into soul death.

These algorithms decide who and what we see, and therefore who and what we care about, and our lives. Our life experiences. 
You didn't see that your friend's dad died. But you sure do know that that place has a watch sale on because you clicked an ad once a few years ago.

We are being trained to be hypervigilant over nothing. If it beeps, it needs feeding, of our attention. Phones are parasites - cleverly designed to prey on our evolution. We're not dumb for it. But we have to set a lot of tools and systems in place to fight it. 

Because in all these disruptive changes, that all these CEOs are smiling over and saying will make the platforms more individualised and user-friendly, not only are real people essentially having supermarkets built right in their shop entryway, but we are being told who we are and how to continue being like that.

It's death to some, and the stunting of growth to the rest.

You won't discover new. You'll just be forever faced with a snapshot of you a you you've long-since outgrown.

Ocka Musica

I had a terrible thought yesterday.

I woke up with one of my pop songs in my head, and it was playing in there all day, and at some point I was singing it while pulling clothes out of the washing machine, and I wondered... 'What if I sang it in an Australian accent?'

I know. Disgusting. It worked, but I felt so dirty. Courtney Barnett is like calcified duck poo gold-panning on my eardrums. I am happy to enunciate a lot of words Aus way inside my tracks, without thinking, but not okay with sounding like someone clangin' on at Centrelink about how the baby bonus ain't what it used to be.

Film pitch: 'Killing for Two'

A serial killer must seriously rethink her career and life-or-death choices when she finds out she's pregnant.

Carried by the Fever

I was thinking today about how we let perfectionism stop us from doing things, 'cos we're waiting until things are in a state that we can be proud of and we make something that can follow us around a long time. But then I looked at bands like The Mavis's - and they post photos of themselves from the nineties, like, oh my god, look at us, we were babies, look at our strange haircuts and clothes, and they went through many eras but they didn't let it stop them, that, you know, in 20 years time they were going to look back and go isn't that weird. They just went through with it anyway. Carried by the fever.

Penis Salesman

Should I just lie, when asked - "No, I'm not single"?
I don't want to lie. But answering "Yes" leaves me open to instant, underwhelming mating attempts from insidiously boring men.
When I tell them how much I fail to appreciate the gross forwardness of men at establishments shilling liquor, not only do they fail to get the hint, but they advise me on how to deal with it: tell the men outright I don't want to fuck them.
Even if they haven't hit on me.
Even if they're just being friendly.
I'm doled this advice too often.
This idea that I'm too attractive to be standing there alone and any man who approaches must be verbally warned that his penis has no presence in my body, existence, or future.
What the fuck.
I'm to assume all guys want to fuck me?
That my value to a male stranger is only sexual?
How fucking arrogant is that?
How fucking arrogant is it that when an interested man does talk to me and finds out I'm single, he assumes his attraction must mean I want him back.
Like some schlub who works little on his appearance walks up to me with 2 hours of make-up and thinks he's a prize.
No, they don't even think about what there is to offer, beyond alcohol. No good conversation, seldomly good looks or fitness, nothing. Just want. Sometimes they talk themselves up, shit like how they love to go down on chicks and can go for hours.
This is always a lie.
I've been told I make eye contact a lot and listen, and men only experience this from women with interested vaginas.
These dudes don't get that I grew up with 3 older bros and think more like them - I forget I'm female but get constantly reminded.
They also don't listen when I tell them I don't hang around guys who always remind me of my fucking gender.
When I'm playing music, I barely have a gender.
Instead of girls being expected to tell men to fuck off, or to let them down mid-one-way-flirt, or pre-emptively ward them off, and most likely leave them rejected and uninterested in any professional or personal relationship and potentially earning their spite, or worse... maybe guys shouldn't expect so much.
I know - dudes are evolved to be more optimistic and pushy about mating. You can learn about it in The Psychology of Attractiveness - studies have shown in.
Men have 400,000,000 sperm per ejaculation. Women have 13 eggs a year. Of course we are pickier. Of course we pick up on signals better - for benefit and safety.
But this idea that if we make ourselves pretty we must be up for it by whomever (dude the other night said "You're a knockout - of course every guy here wants to put his dick in you. I want to put my dick in you"), that we need to verbally deter - hiw about guys change their fucking shit. Listen. Watch. STOP FUCKING DRINKING
STOP FUCKING DRINKING
STOP FUCKING DRINKING
If you come off as a 1970s Aussie male chauvinist bordering on rapey vibes, you have no fucking right to go drinking in public. Esp. if you imagine booze helps you talk to women - talking to them like they're your bagsied fuckhole is not welcome. And then turning passive-aggressive? Nope. Nope nope.
I havr social anxiety. Pretty bad. It takes a lot to go out, especially alone. And then to be treated like garnished meat? Girfriends scowl at me, men either avoid me or become penis salesmen? What's the alternative - go without makeup or nice clothes and be looked at like I'm sick (I am, I hide that for survival).
I'm watching Mad Men and getting angry seeing the shit that was commonplace then is still standard now. Boys will be boys.
Will I ever meet a man? The only guys who hit on me are ones that I would never want, and refuse to see me for who I am, no matter how much I tell them who I really am.
Maybe I'm just destined to be a lone cat, slinking around different driveways, never with my own backyard.

Maybe I should wear a wedding ring. I'd rather men learn that single doesn't mean available, but I don't want to have to have a conversation about why no means no all the time. I don't want that job.

Germanic genital RANT

I am frequently amazed by confident drunk guys who nod and smile at everything you say and flush you with compliments in between telling you how you should think and act because you are wrong about basically everything. I'm sorry, but it's hard to have my entire personality mansplained by someone who keeps pointing their dick at me like a compass needle poking north. I can't be awe-inspiring one moment and literally the next an example of a misguided fool who hasn't read their non-existent book. Err on the side of caution - once I'm no longer a dazzling, manic, Germanic genital, those traits you disapprove of will be all there is, so back the fuck away. You can't spend a night making a woman feel physically uncomfortable then point out her traits that make you morally uncomfortable. You don't get to say what goes on a pizza you try to steal.

Millennial - NOT!

I have something bad to tell you guys.
Those of us born in the early '80s - we are MILLENNIALS.
Why did no-one tell me?!! I've never drawn on Groucho Mark eyebrows or hunted down gunt pants in a mothballed St. Vinnies - I don't feel okay with this classification!
And to make it worse, I graduated the exact year that it was generalised millennials would graduate - 2000.
I didn't surf the web until I was 13! Gen Z, aka, 'The Naturals' should be Millennials. We already got enough slop being called Gen Y.
Sure, I could ignore labels and go on living my life in my usual self-designed fashion, but my inner-contrarian rises up! Like a phoenix from the ashes of a thing that has ashes in it. Currently-known Millenials are wearing the same fashions we lived through in the '90s - this doesn't work! Cast wider this generation thigh gap! Keep your Flume chai latte vegan Tinder top-buns away from me. I'm going over here to yell at kids to stay off a lawn I'll never be able to afford thanks to the Baby Boomers.

Backyard Bandits VS Pub Snubs

I was thinking about how I always miss bands playing at parties. In sheds, backyards. I have a great memory of watching bands blasting a shed ceiling off under a cold inky ocean of stars in a NSW town populated with bored teens. Of a band in an unlikely yard in Albury, just behind Dean St. The air thrilled. People moved to the music. No-one got paid.

Not getting paid sucks.

But no-one gets paid now. Unless they do weddings or functions. And if you do get paid for a gig, it's so little all you can buy with it is a pair of sunnies from Chemist Warehouse and a drink. Many places don't pay at all. Then you're there, performing earnestly to people who aren't necessarily even listening, sipping rieslings, clattering knives on plates, smoking, laughing, scowling, maybe remembering a polite clap, or getting drunk and yell-talking and maybe spilling beer on you during some underevolved attempt at wooing of a human female. The venue makes money, the performer, not.

So, if no-one is making money, and a party provides fun and energy where a pub may only offer disillusionment and ill matching of musical mood to present ears, there should be more yard parties, yes?

I don't know people who have yard parties, but I've always wanted to play one. It'd be like busking, but more intimate and chaotic and safe. I like raves and festivals, but I don't dig the techno and wish more had live music, and that live music festivals and gigs could be happier and more colourful like raves. And every NYE I wish I was on a stage playing a metre from dancing people, howling in the new year. Drums pounding behind me. Whether in a venue, or a cleared shed.

Music for the people, with the people. I lived through the '90s but I crave like someone who has only seen it in films.

DRIVE by Lera Lynn & its memories

I love this song for several reasons.
It reminds me of Berlin, when it flooded my ears daily and I saw Lera sing, just a walk over the old gothic bridge that intersects with the Berlin Wall.
It reminds me of a hotel room bath I lay in at 3am in Stockholm Sweden, where I sipped a pink tea, let the cold of my feet restore to warmth after standing in the dark and wet for hours selling t-shirts and CDs to increasingly drunk Swedes, feeling the pain of my back and damaged rib from sliding down a staircase ease up, knowing I badly, badly needed to sleep, but also needing some alone time after an emotionally testing night and too much time on the road with another human.
It reminds me of a night in a small panel van flying along a freeway in outer-northern Melbourne, vision swiped with the lights of night, a man I loved beside me, and these sounds sailing through the dark with us.
Mostly - it's just an amazing song.

DRIVE

The Quick Kiss Good Day

Shuttled back into the badly-built mold box bedroom with my brother needing the lounge room floor, I found 3 hours of battered sleep as I remembered how badly these windows block sound - especially construction. As the big build nearby angle-grinds its way to completion, another was just demolished. I tried to convince myself the sounds could be part of dreams.
I woke with oedema eyes. You know - when someone has a visible allergic reaction, and the skin around their eyes is puffed with lymph fluid? I heard a click of the front door, and my brother quietly left the house.
I jumped out of bed, trotted out and and stuck a bleary, puffy, unslept face out into the hall.
"You going?"
"Yeah."
"Good bye. Good bye. Good bye. Good bye."
He toddled over and kissed me on the top of the head.
Okay, so he's not totally terrible after all.

Don't Sway My Way

That moment when a crazy/mentally disabled/drunk man staggers to a stop when he sees you, and sways while he debates whether to make an unwanted, semen-loaded cameo in your day simply because you are appealingly female and he is ready to mate now, please, but does a final side-to-side and meanders away, to your utter, and repetitive relief.

Supermarket Beating

What a weird day. Lightning strikes at a south-eastern sky, and a series of PT delays and misses saw me outside a supermarket witnessing a gym-bulked guy beating the shit out of a skinny black dude. I videoe'd it and have to email it to the cops.

 

Funnily, Google Maps asked if I want to add the video to the business's Google page :)

 

Not so funnily was how sick I felt afterwards as the adrenaline wore off, but hard to determine when you already have nausea from tonsillitis. I know I don't feel right after witnessing that. The staff interfered, one brutalised the victim with blows to the head (he still works there - I return his smiles with ice-carved eyes), but none came out to talk to the police. They stood inside. Not just that, one escorted the attacker out the back door while the victim staggered out the front. He was done for shoplifting, but his attackers were there buying Jim Beam.

 

It's sad how often I see this imbalance, this insanity. Even the cops didn't go after the guy who kneed him and kicked him - even after seeing my video. They handcuffed the droopy black guy. 

On the bench beside him - two Crunchies and a tin of meat.

Phoned-In Obsession

They say that in adulthood, you are well-served to look back at the things that you loved as a child. Your favourite book will tell you a lot about yourself - that one you carted around everywhere and insisted everyone read to you until it looked shaggier than a mange dog. We are still that person in a lot of ways.

I was just remembering my love of phones. I always wanted a phone. I was obsessed with how American girls on sitcoms got phones in their bedrooms. Hamburger and lip phones were coveted. I would get an old rotary phone and take it to school - not just primary but high school (different phones). I would be out at dinner with my parents and be pretending to take a call from my agent on my flip-cell in 1994. Once in high school my mum took my fake flip off me and started having phonesex with the guy I was 'talking to'. To this day you can bet your ass I would take a corded phone out in public just to confuse people. 

 

What is it with me and phones? I used to be allured by walkie-talkies and CBs too, which felt like secret worlds. Like electronic psychic power. Broadcasting, long before such a thing was ever handed off to us in the form of the internet.