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.