Reporting from a secure location

Hello dear people. I am in a house once again. It's in Cork, Ireland. And what have I been doing for the past few weeks? London-ing.
Lots of things happened to me in London. I did some work, but not as much as I wanted to do; I ran out of money again; I went to 1,000 galleries and museums and wandered down countless charming little streets with colourful shop fronts and cosy pubs; I went to the Borough market, repeatedly, and ate some of the best food I have ever tasted: meringues the size of a cat's head, superb cheese, mulled cider, apples that were more fragrant and delicate-tasting than any I've had before; I was mistaken for an Australian more times than I can count; I talked about New Zealand a lot, mostly to people who have never been there and have some seriously mistaken ideas about what it's like. Here is a typical conversation:

Other Person: So where you from?
I (wearily): New Zealand. (pause - have they heard of it before?) It's just below Aus...
OP: Ah, New Zealand! Beautiful country! You have a good life there!
I: Oh, have you been there?
OP: No, no. But I would like to, I would really like to. It's very warm, no?
I: Well, actually, we have a lot of micro climates and...
OP: Like Australia?
I: No, more like England actually. Where I live it's wet and cold.
OP: Oh... (puzzled) but you have kangaroos there, right? do you eat kangaroo meat?
I: I'm a vegetarian, and no, we have no kangaroos. Or koalas, or in fact any native mammals. Well there's a bat, but...
OP: Oh. (starting to doubt their knowledge of New Zealand a little) But you speak English there, right?
I: (my accent is that bad?) Yes...

Yes, no predatorial and/or scary animals, space, beautiful scenery and vegetation, space, good living standards, friendly population, large houses, social security, low crime rate. Some people can't believe that such a place exists. So when I've explained it all to them, they next question is inevitably:

OP: So why do you come here?

But the concept of cultural isolation is as difficult for them to grasp as the notion of having a city full of people living in comfortable detached houses with gardens. And from our perspective, this is kind of good. Keep it on the down low - because all the things that make Home such a great place to live stem solely from a low population density.
Here's some more London: Polish jazz quartet - Camden markets full of junk and fun - mummies at the British Museum - a roaring fire in the Tudor era kitchen at Hampton Court Palace - meeting up with Couch Surfers - Soho shops and cafes - rampant and terrifying consumerism on Oxford Street (two storey Disney shop, my god..) - Egyptian food on Edgware Road - working for a night at the Royal Ocean Racing Club, served ostrich and springbok meat..... stuff. London is a city of stuff, lots of it.
So now I am at my friend Leon's house in Cork, but Leon is not here. And very very soon, I will see all your lovely faces again. Make sure they're nicely washed 'n' smiley for it, yeah? Looking forward to it.

Big Black Smoke

'Current mission: not to die in a London gutter'. I put that on my Couch Surfing profile. Does it sound too desperate? Yes? That's because I am.
Owing to an unfortunate chain of events, which I probably should have seen coming, which I will not relate here - they involved lots of eye-rubbing, teeth-gritting, near-phone-smashing and heavy-calm-down-sighing - I found myself on Saturday nearly literally penniless in the sprawling oversized bacterial colony that is London. Thankfully I had money on my cellphone, the number of my mother's godmother and her family, and a day travelcard courtesy of a gentleman from (I think) Bulgaria. So I went to throw myself on the mercy of a family I had never met. It's times like these that you're glad that New Zealand still has some ties to the 'motherland'.
Audrey (mum's godmum, very old friend of Granny's) and her daughter Belinda, and her daughter Venetia, have been incredibly good to me. I'm still at their house, but anxious to move on and not impinge any further.
Miscellaneous trivia:
- I have been growing a wisdom tooth for the last few weeks, and recently it has started to feel rather intrusive in my already crowded jaw.
- I went to Camden Town today, and some supernatural being must have heard of my moneyless state, because I got a free haircut from a student hairdresser.
- The people in the hair place all spoke Spanish.
- In the first house/hostel I was in, I met a Canadian who'd spent the last 10 years in Barcelona, a Romanian ex-boxer, several Bulgarians, a Lithuanian, an Estonian, a man from Bangladesh whose family was paying for him to study in the UK, and several French guys who let me have some of their crepes with Nutella.

Tomorrow, everything should work out. My money should emerge from the depths of cyberspace, thereby eliminating the most pressing problem. And after that, the city will be mine.

Churches and chauvinism

This post is going to be a bit more arduous than normal, because this keyboard (in France now) has the a, z, q, w, m, ?, , ; . : / ( ) @ and ! in different locations. Why can there not be some kind of international Computer Keyboard Council that enforces uniformity in these matters?
But then, as much as it is irritating, these kinds of small differences constitute half the fun of travelling. You arrive in a new country, and you go to perform some kind of mundane task that is normally no cause for comment, and somehow the inhabitants of wherever you are have contrived to make this thing in some sense foreign. It's nice - this will sound incredibly naive perhaps - to discover that foreign countries are still very different, down to the details; that they are not Americanized tourist playgrounds which only retain their traditions and differences as some kind of quaint funfair for people to come look at. In Austria, we saw people wearing lederhosen in downtown Vienna - not because they were paid to, but because it's just what they like to wear.
So to update, we have just been in Italy, and now we are in France. I liked Italy, largely because Italy seemed to like me. People were mostly incredibly friendly and very patient with my limited and mangled Italian.
Which brings me to another tangent:
the language issue. We met a nice French Canadian guy in our Vicenza hostel, and we asked him which language he thought would be the best to learn. He replied, 'english'. But I can't help feeling a little rude when I go in to a shop and immediately ask if the assistant speaks English. Even if it is so widely spoken, it seems a little chauvinistic to be so monolingual.
Anyway, Italy: beautiful, crumbly, religious. Very religious. We went to a church to look at the architecture, and it was full of people praying and genuflecting. There was some kind of holy thing - I have no idea what, it looked like some kind of metal plate - that people were touching and praying over. It was all very hypnotic and intense, and more than a little disturbing.
It's interesting that the Italian churches that we went to were the first we've seen that actually had people praying in them - the first 'living' churches. Everywhere else, we saw buildings that you could say 'used to be' churches, but are now simply historical relics that attract tourists. The most extreme example was St. Vitus' cathdral in Prague: crowds of tourists waited outside for the mass to finish, a few harrassed-looking believers trickled out just before 12pm and then the place was instantly flooded with people taking pictures, wandering around listening to audio guides, following tour groups, speaking loudly.
Interesting, and a little sad. While it's reassuring to see that the Church is losing its hypnotic grip on the populace, the influx of tourists in many places seems to destroy the character of a beautiful sacred space. And I can only imagine what the remaining congregations of these famous churches feel about the whole thing.

Constants and variables

Some things are the same in every country. These things include:
ducks (apart from Viennese ducks - crazy creatures)
pigeons
dogs (apart from Viennese dogs - very well behaved and pocket sized)
arcane underground rail systems
Australian backpackers
fat and/or stupid and/or loud American tourists

Some things are completely different everywhere you go, and it is confusing, and I am getting fed up with it. These things include the following:
light switches and their locations
toilet flushes
toilet bowl shapes
taps, soap dispensers, hand dryers/towels, and sink plugs. A note about these: there seems to be a competition running between airlines, train services and fancy eateries to produce the most bewildering combination of the above, which more often than not leaves your humble narrator struggling for ten minutes to activate the correct sensors or turn the correct knobs to get the whole arrangement to do its thing. More than once I have given up and walked away with unwashed hands.
computer keyboards
shower heads
arcane underground rail systems
service customs
beer
coffee
tea

A vast, overwhelming part of me just wants things to be normal again. I want people to speak English to me and sound like I do and make the same jokes and know what Marmite is. I want to eat Marmite. God, I miss that stuff more than I ever thought possible.
I want to see my friends, and other assorted people of import... I feel weird without them, like a piece of algae that used to be attached to a rock but got ripped off by the current and is now floating around with lots of longs trailing bits dragging behind. That was an incredibly inelegant analogy, but nevertheless accurate.
But things are good in other departments. We went to the hot springs at Bad Blumau, Austria, to the spa complex designed by Hundertwasser, which was gorgeous. We stayed at a farmstay half an hour's walk from the spa, with the incredibly hospitable Helga - mother of six, as well as running the farm and guesthouse - who was a beautifully typical jolly Austrian farmer's wife.
We stayed with Juergen, our Couch Surfing host, in Vienna. Time flew by as we talked and talked and laughed with him, and he took me out to see the sights at night on his motorbike. The next time someone starts talking to me about motorbikes, I swear that I will not glaze over and politely change the subject, for now I understand the thrill and sense of freedom you can get on these machines.
Now we are in Munich. So far we have been subject to leery men on the street and unexpected costs at the hostel (not to mention the broken washing machine), but I have faith in the place. Hopefully not misplaced.
Auf Wiedersehen meine freunden! Until next time.

Berlin

When you travel by train, you get to see some amazing landscapes. Even better, when you get in to a city you get to see some wicked graffiti.
There is a lot of graffiti in Berlin. A lot of buildings with broken windows, empty lots, general decay and the accompanying flowering of underground life. Unfortunately I didn't really get to see alot of it when I was there.
For a start, I was there for three days, one of which I spent in my hostel bed with a dripping nose and sinuses that felt like barbed wire implanted under my skin. Discovering the best places for street art and the coolest venues and cafes that only the locals go to takes some dedicated wandering. Of course, I could have taken the 'Alternative City' tour. For 12 Euros, I would be shown, according to the brochure, 'streets, squats and subculture'. Tempting. This is what attracted me to Berlin in the first place. But it seemed like such a lazy option, and (this may sound silly, I don't care) ethically dicey. I wondered what I would feel like if someone took tour groups through all of my beloved spots in Wellington; I wondered what would happen to those spots if everyone knew about them. After all, isn't the point of underground culture that it's difficult to find and hard to gain entry to? Anyway,I reasoned, the tour would probably not be worth the money (over 20 NZ dollars).
The sights we ended up seeing were the Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam (a heavily gilded Roccoco-era palace, with expansive and well-kept gardens), an exhibition of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist paintings (I was so tired by this point that I skipped right past the room containing a work by Jackson Pollock without a glance back), an exhibition of Bauhaus works, the Brandenburg Gate, a wander past the Bundestag (parliament building), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Checkpoint Charlie, a former part of the Berlin wall.
The things we didn't see, which I am still agonising about: a Pierre et Gilles retrospective, the East Side gallery, Lego Land, and any nightclub, bar or gig.
Berlin has a strange relationship with its troubled past. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a sincere, profound experience, which manages to convey - as much as is possible in a work of art - some of the sadness, the immensity and the sheer heaviness of what happened in the Holocaust. But the same tour brochure that offered the 'Alternative City' tour made a tour of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp site sound like a funfair. They were also evidently making quite a lot of money off it, and off their Berlin wall tours, which to me feels a bit icky.
And in the Memorial for the Murdered Jews, people were playing hide and go seek (so did we. It was actually quite fun, and an ideal site for it). At Checkpoint Charlie, there is a museum - and a museum shop, presumably with fun souvenirs of Communist East Germany to take home to the rellies. There was a lunchbar across the road called Snack point Charlie.
Possibly my naive Antipodean eyes see things through a lens of too much idealism, but it seems like the pain, shame and tragedy of Germany's history is being exploited (by some) as a tourist attraction.
But maybe that's just how it goes in Berlin.

I"m writing from Prague, which is probably the most beautiful place we've been in yet. It also has the worst train station, which was practically Third World, and is the least tourist-friendly. And, like everywhere else, the hostel is full of Australians.

A bit more of Denmark

We stayed with Frede and his wife Angiuk for 3 or 4 days. Frede is a friend of my Dad's from about 40 years ago, and it's been about the same amount of time since they've seen or had contact with each other. As such, it was amazingly hospitable of them to invite us to stay with them, feed us amazing meals and not ask us to help clean up, show us round everywhere and (perhaps the most helpful thing of all) translate for us.
Angiuk is the first and probably the only native Greenlandic person I'll ever meet - unfortunately she couldn't speak a word of English, but she did show us many photos from her homeland, as well some traditional clothes made of seal skin and fur, figures carved of whale bone and walrus tusk and beautiful, colourful beadwork. I now know more than I ever thought there was to know about Greenland and its people - for instance, did you know that it's not necessary to tan seal leather in Greenland, because the air is so dry that it never decays? Also, did you know than untanned seal leather that has been kept in the damper climate of Denmark for several years and is starting to rot has just about the most disgusting odour you've ever inhaled?
I sure didn't.
In Denmark, we conquered: The Odense Domkirke (a really really old church), the Hans Christian Anderson Birthplace Museum, the Viking Ship museum in Roskilde (which has several preserved remains of Viking ships as well as modern day reconstructions, one of which has sailed to Ireland and back), the Roskilde Cathedral (where most of the Danish Royal family has been buried - most of the dead ones that is, haha, oh gosh that was terrible), and Rosenborg Slot (a palace in Copenhagen containing thousands upon thousands of Royal treasures in a Baroque-era interior).
My feet, they did hurt, and I did make this known to my august travelling companion, who was largely unsympathetic due to having contracted a flu, which was to fell me several days later in a hostel in Berlin. But that is another story.

Denmark is real!

No shit. I'm in it right now. There are strange letters on the keyboard, like æ and ø and å.
Glasgow and London and the Lakes District are also real. If you too have been to these places then you don't need my confirmation, but if you haven't then you can take my word as evidence.
We arrived in London after approximately 24 hours of torture under the guise of international air travel. In an eerie reprisal of that perennial Salientin-joke about Wee Hamish who did not stop crying fra' Aberdeen to Auckland, some children several rows behind us screamed the whole way from Singapore to Heathrow. I was welcomed in to London by the worst airport organisation I've yet seen and a terrible cup of tea from Starbucks. We made our way to Euston Station, where we sat on the grass and were stared at, as I tried to properly cognise the fact that I was actually in actual England and everything was twelve hours different and I was suddenly an outsider.
England is very old and very crowded and very manicured. All the gaps are filled in: hedges are clipped, trees have been planted, fences are painted. Nothing is wild except the weeds that grow to the sides of the train lines. We went for a walk when we got to the Lake District; the forest was a plantation and you could watch the 'Squirrel Camera' from the comfort of the cafe at the bottom of the hill (which, by the way, served some of the best hot chocolate I've ever had, an anomaly in this land of surly service and dishwater-strength coffee). And CCTV is absolutely everywhere.
Scotland is a bit rougher. In Glasgow people on the street sound like they are garlging ball bearings when they talk. Too many things have happened for me to bother retelling. Mum says to say that she is in love with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom you can Google search if you don't know who he is. I was briefly inspired to relocate to Glasgow University, and am still mulling this option over... Glasgow is dirty in the most innocent literal sense: buildings are covered with a century's worth of coal soot and car pollution. Everything is older, bigger, more beautiful, more awe-inspiring than I could have ever imagined, and by contrast I felt young, small, scruffy and naive.
And now, Denmark, which is even older and several degrees more foreign. The houses have thatched rooves and cars drive on the wrong side of the road and the language is completely different (as opposed to Glaswegian, which admittedly does have a lot in common with English). We are staying with Frede, an old friend of my Dad, in the house that has belonged to his family for a hundred years. Down the road - less than 50 metres - is the church and graveyard where his parents are buried. The town was founded some time in the 12th century.
And this is normal here.

Broken window theory

(In response to the blacking-out out of the Ian Curtis RIP tag on Wallace Street)

the walls are not enough for these vandals.
your wives will be next - you'll find them on the doorstep, sunny Sunday morning, face down and covered
in spray paint. clean up graffiti before it spreads
to your sleepy suburb, your front gate and your beloved spouse.

Someone broke a window. But before that,
someone's grandfather got the cane
for speaking his native tongue in a classroom, and it's too late to employ measures such as
litres
and litres
of thick black paint.

Experience Overseas

Us humans really aren't as good at perceiving time as we think we are. A year, ten years and five minutes all go by and they feel the same to us. We know that things have happened and time has passed but our minds can never quite seem to grasp the weight of it. Our memories stretch and compress the bits of our life that have already happened, until they are way out of proportion.
As for the future, we make plans and expect things but it's always like a slap in the face when they actually arrive. The future is like one of those colouring-in books we used to have as children, the ones where you just washed water over the lines with a brush and the colours would come out on the page, grey-tinged pastels on a newsprint background and cartoonishly thick black outlines. A pale, insubstantial and two dimensional image of what's to come.
So when you're leaving the country, you speak of 'it hitting you'. It hasn't hit me yet, and won't until I'm on the plane thousands of feet in the air, that I'm actually going to a real foreign country. And then another, and another. Am I excited? Sort of, but only in the distant future of next week will it hit me. And those foreign countries are just like the colouring-in books and my grasp on the future: exaggerated and slightly mythical, but as yet still very translucent.

I am going to blog my adventures and misadventures as much as possible, or as much as I can be bothered because I will probably have more interesting things to do on my journey. Please do watch this space and leave me comments so I feel vindicated in my ramblings. It's nice to know that people are listening.
And here is a list of fun synonyms for travel:
sojourn
pilgrimage
voyage
mission
expedition
tour
progress
migration

And here is some brief trip information:
With mother. Fly out of AK 19/9/09 to London, train to somewhere in the North nearish Carlisle. Friends and relatives. Glasgow. Art and buildings. Denmark. Dad's friend Fred. More art and buildings. Eurail pass! Germany. Berlin. Munich. Oktoberfest! Austria. Italy. France. Spain. France. Belgium? England. Mother leaves. Germany? England? Ireland? The world?
Home.

Oh, just some stuff, you know?

So..
Things have been happening. Things haven't been happening.
That's a weak start to a blog, but how else can I sum the past few weeks up?

It's like one of those parties, such as the 21st I was at a few weeks ago, where you keep running in to people you knew a few years ago in high school or something, and they all ask me,
How are things?
What have you been up to?

"Well, after high school I went straight in to Uni, and I was doing this that and the other subject and then I decided I needed a break and now I'm just living with my mum and working in a cafe and saving up money to take an overseas trip, yeah it's alright I guess, I'm enjoying myself."

Later in the night, befuddled by drink and half-familiar faces, the conversations veer towards the surreal and jocular. But my replies only grow more honest as the evening progresses. A casual observer, if they didn't know me, might think I'm taking the piss, such is my sincerity. I soon reach a sort of zenith of erudition. I offer long-winded answers that speak about the big picture and the meaning of it all, and am seriously in need of someone to shut me up:

"How am I? Man, I've been up and down and all over the fucking place. It's been a long three years, lots of shit has gone down, and you know, I really do think that life is a beautiful thing and we are lucky to be living it."

"What am I up to? Just kind of living, you know, getting up in the morning, some days I have work and others I don't, I spend quite a few days sitting on my arse and sometimes I do shit.. I keep myself busy. I could give you a blow-by-blow account of the average day in the life of me, but honestly every day is different and they're all the same and there really isn't much to tell. I'm not trying to blow you off... But really, I think that's the essence of what life is like - apologies for getting all deep and meaningful - but really life is just some stuff happening and bouncing off some other stuff happening and it all kind of comes together, and it's beautiful, and that's really what God is and beauty and music and it's everything -
you know?"

Eventually, the booze takes over good and proper:

What are you up to these days?
"What am I up to these days?? What is anyone up to? What are we doing here on this fucking universe, in this godforsaken arse end of a planet?"

How are you these days?
"Good."
(A broad, fuck-off grin)
(Nothing else)

--

Make the change today: Every time someone asks you how you are, give an honest answer. Even if the truth is unpleasant. It's rude, I believe, to fake positivity. Less rude to confess that you have mad period cramps, and you didn't get enough sleep last night, and you're worried about where your life is going and things are generally pear shaped.

--

Yeah. What was I talking about? Oh, it doesn't matter, I'm sure you can relate. No, that's right, I was making a weak start to a blog, and then I got carried away trying to fix it. Yes, and then I was saying, sometimes blogging is a bit like one of those parties, like the 21st I was at a few weeks ago, when you see all these people you used to know a few years ago...

Elsewhere in life, I have been reading On The Road, and I think it might be influencing me rather too much.

--

I hope this hasn't been too much of a limp cock of a blog entry.
I hope you are well, and all your friends and family too. No, really. I love you all. Cross my heart and hope to die.

I don't know how I can make you believe me on this one. I've been sarcastic for so long that I can't remember what sincerity sounds like.

Why Washing Dishes Is The Best Job You'll Ever Get

Dishwashing is hard, unpleasant work.
What's more, if you are a dishwasher, you are the only person who works entirely by themselves. You are the odd one out, with your stiff plastic apron, flecked with foam and pieces of food, sweating, pushing your damp hair out of your eyes and with no one to share the discomfort. Whereas a waiter has fellow waiters to chat to when there is no work to do.
(When you are a dishwasher, there is never no work to do).

What's more:
- Your area is the last area of the kitchen to be renovated and have the outdated or broken equipment replaced.
- You are paid less than some of the front of house or waiting staff, who only have to swan around with nice manners serving food and taking orders to earn their bread.
Whereas you must bend, lift, sweep, wipe, carry, and above all, scrub. Whereas you must battle with your instinct to take off the bloody apron and go and sit down somewhere with a hot beverage (and possibly never come back) every minute if not every second.

When you are a dishwasher, it is easy to feel sorry for yourself. Too sorry for yourself. Remind yourself: Not all of us are lucky enough to have jobs. Not all of us are lucky enough to live in countries where there is a set minimum wage. Be grateful for your $12.50 an hour. Not all of us work in places where we get fed.

(If you are a dishwasher, and you do not get fed at work, complain or quit. That shit is way out of line.)


Don't say dishwasher. Don't say dishie. Kitchen hand is what you should call yourself. Remind yourself: I am a kitchen hand. I am handy in the kitchen. I am useful. If I do not do my job, this place can not do business. I am essential, I am the central cog in the machine that keeps everyone else running. Deep down, people appreciate how useful I am, even though this may not be reflected in my wages or work environment.

Remind yourself:
When you wash dishes, your thoughts are your own. Treasure this. Any better-paid, better-respected position requires leasing not only your body but your soul.
That shit will kill you.
When you wash dishes, it is possible to reach a Zen-like state of detachment when all your movements are automated and your mind floats off to an altogether more pleasant location. You cannot do this if you are a waiter, or a chef, or the restaurant owner. When you wash dishes, you can think of art, music, love, hope, the end of the world, God, death, the future.
I admit that when I wash dishes, I tend to think a lot about dish washing.

The more pot you smoke, the easier this job becomes. This is a fact. It enhances the detachment/automation thing. It makes you care less. This is a good thing. The more you care about stuff, the angrier you will become. This applies not just to dishwashing, but to life; perhaps the former could be said to be a microcosm of the latter.

Dishwashing is easy. It involves next to no investment on your part in terms of
a) giving a shit
and b) bothering to learn anything new.
Treasure this also. The next job you have, if it is not another dishwashing one, will require you to focus, at most if not all times, and it will require you to at least pretend to care about something, and it may require you to learn difficult stuff. You may not even be paid for learning the difficult stuff. It may need to happen in your own time. You may even need to attend courses, which you may even have to pay for, possibly necessitating a student loan which will hang over your head and suck up your income for a large chunk of your life.

That shit is lame. Keep washing dishes.

Another thing:
Being a kitchen hand is obviously not a permanent state of affairs, not a career, and thus it gives you ample room to fantasise about your untapped potential. You are obviously capable of much more than washing dishes. In a better-paid, better-respected position, you may realise that in fact the extent of your talents was not quite as wide as you thought it was.

So long as you wash dishes, you can pretend that the next job you get is going to be better.

44 pianos

Check it out:
http://www.jonathancrayford.com/html/44pianos.html
Oh yes. 44 pianists playing 44 pianos at the same time.
As one of the musicians, it was an awesome experience. Hella intimidating - there were some seriously talented people there. But after I got over being scared of these people I realised what a cool thing it was that I was there too. So that was nice.

Of course, some of what was played was a total mush - 44 musicians who are used to playing solo, all in their own little worlds, no communication = shite. But then some of the recordings sound really amazing. And who but Jonathon Crayford would have the imagination, skill and daring to put it together? That man is the man.

Up Holloway Road

I have a new lover, and he lives in a fairy tale street. A stone cats perches on a letter box, gaze fixed, as real ones slink around below. Strange things are nailed to the walls and fences, there are swings in gardens and colourful paint jobs. Each step takes you further away from the grimness of the city and in to what might be an old shanty town, with whorehouses and saloons and humble cottages. Or maybe not; it could just as easily be goblins sewing tiny shoes behind the rickety wooden doors and weatherboards. Or maybe just hippies.

You get the feeling that you could wander up this street right to the end and never come back, you could be sucked in to one of the houses or in to a cave and who knows what might await you... or you could just climb in to your lover's bed and stay in its hazy, warm confines forever and ever.

Lack of enthusiasm

I am accused of a lack of enthusiasm at work.
Well, yes. I'm not enthusiastic about this job, or work in general. Isn't it enough that I do it? Is this not enough of a compromise? A concession to the capitalist system?
I have a love/hate relationship with work. When I had none, I longed to be useful to someone, anywhere. When I am working full time, I feel my life blood being leeched away from me in to my job, and resent its intrusion in to my otherwise pleasant existence.
During these periods I tell myself that if I spent an equivalent amount of time directly maintaining my existence - growing food, for example - then I would be happier. It's the fact that I'm a wage slave that I detest, not the fact that I have to work at all. Don't tell me you haven't had similar thoughts.

Lacking enthusiasm. This is true. I try not to, but occasionally I turn up late. I am not focussed, because I have other things to think about that are more interesting and, in my view, important. Sometimes I weigh up the options of going out and being tired at work the next day, or staying in and being energised, and I choose the former. I need to see people more than I need to do a good job.
Is this selfish? Perhaps it is. But perhaps it's just that my job entails more responsibility than it used to, and I'm not prepared for it - nor do I have enough passion for my job to let it affect my life above and beyond the hours I spend there. I'll give them the time and energy I'm paid for and not an iota more.

You never get burnt

I had a dream that I was Audrey Tatou in Priceless, climbing an impossibly steep hill in a dark tunnel, in impossibly high heels. I reached an opening in the side of the tunnel and was enticed through.
I was in a wide valley lit by late afternoon's golden light, covered in green pastures and dotted with the occasional animal. The only sign of human habitation was the shed through which I had apparently just come. Some pigs were nearby grazing. A girl was sitting on a fence and she said to me,
"You know, it's always sunny here but you never get burnt. I've been here for five years and I haven't got sunburnt once! Weird, eh."
I considered for a moment that I may have actually died and gone to heaven.
A passing hippy in an old station wagon drifted by, playing music on a zither, and the pigs, the girl, the hippy and I sang a strange and beautiful song. By the time the song was finished the valley was gone, the world was ordinary and I was embarrassed because I had just been singing to a couple of pigs, whom I now had to dice up and put in a bowl.

I woke up an hour earlier than normal, longing for that perfect valley, walked the dog, and posted this blog.

Search like a magpie, hoard like a dragon

Costume Cave sale haul:
3 pairs of colourful sandshoes
1 pair of tall purple lace up boots
1 pair of high heeled sandels
1 pair red knickerbockers
1 petticoat
1 baby pink full length jumpsuit
3 shirts - 1 stripey, 1 white and Victorian, 1 blue
1 purple jumper
1 green cardigan
1 hat I'll never wear
1 green, black and orange cocktail dress

I have been playing dress ups and wearing purple. I've never worn or liked purple before but I find myself suddenly attracted to it.
The sale was crowded and stuffy, full of clothes and people frantically flicking through the racks to get to the goodies before anyone else did. Lots of people I knew there, we had half-attentive catch ups as we hunted through the clothes. Sharon, the infamous proprietor, was almost wearing an old flannel shirt and khaki overalls, but the overalls were much too big and missing a strap - hence the 'almost'. I felt a bit greedy grabbing all 3 pairs of sandshoes - but I have been searching for a replacement for my beloved turquoise ones for several years now, so I snatched them while the going was good. Brightly coloured sandshoes are hard to find.

I'm not a consumerist I swear - but there's nothing like 15 items of clothing for $15 to make you feel satisfied inside.

Bullshit and the Emperor

Several people have told me that the naturally ideal size for a group or community is between 150-200 people. Any more and it gets hard to humanise everyone and any less and it gets claustrophobic. I think the people that told me this had reliable sources, like anthropological studies or something, or at least they told me they did. Anyway, what do you know, I have 195 friends on facebook and haven't added anyone for a while, so this proves the point beyond ANY doubt.

Someone I know - name no names - has 800 facebook friends. It kind of decreases the value of being one of them once you find that out.

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Man, you'd think in a small, friendly, underground artistic community where no one really gets paid much or enjoys any kind of fame to speak of - like one we've got in Wellington, for example - that there'd be less incidents of dickiness, arrogance, preciousness, exclusiveness, backstabbing, delusions of greatness, bullshit, blah and bullshit.
Isn't that shit supposed to be reserved for places where there's actually the potential to make lots of money and win bajillions of fans, rather than merely impress your mates and get a good review in the Capital Times?
Apparently not.
Just a general observation.
It gets a little nauseating after a while.

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Bonaparte - yes yes yes!

I mean we all knew that already, right, but I've just been watching some videos of his on the net and got reminded of it. Something strange going on with the politics of it, especially 'Anti Anti' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vkE5Xs5omA), it's almost weary, like we've been saying this shit for decades now and they're not listening and the message is getting a little hollow. Not to accuse him of being politically lightweight though, he seems to be using the politics of punk as a tool to make a deeper point.

At least I hope he is, it does seem a bit fluffy sometimes, and you do wonder - does this guy really give a shit, or is this just one more piece of decorative apathy? But if nothing else, Bonaparte captures the zeitgeist unnervingly well - when the world is crumbling, what else can you do but dance.

I was going to interview this cat when he was here a few months ago for Salient, or something along those lines. We were going to get on like a house on fire and get drunk together, and he'd invite me to come visit him in Berlin and introduce me to all his cool friends. But I never got round to it.

I really should be more proactive in abusing the power of the press to hang out with musicians I like.

I, hospo drone

Working full time. It feels like being sucked down a drainpipe, and as I look up I can see my part-time-working and unemployed friends still socialising, jamming, laughing and chatting away just like I used to, but they're getting more distant by the second as I spiral down in to drone land.

On the chance occasion that I manage to get out of my suburb and see my friends, I always seem to wind up talking about work. Sure, work is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as I find a million other things in this world - yet I can never seem to remember what those things are. I keep on forgetting that I even do stuff other than work, like play music or paint or write or talk to people. The person that was performing in a musical just over a month a go seems like a distant creature.
I am becoming boring.

There is one good thing: a night out is about ten times more fun when you only have one a fortnight.


The city is changing. Black Note, Espressoholic, Webb Street, Valve, The Cuba Street Carnival; these things are all gone, or not what they used to be. I feel somewhat indignant that no one thought to consult with me about taking away my haunts of the last couple of years. It's like someone is stealing my home. I feel cheated and I feel old. I even find myself grumbling about the latest facebook layout change.

Though, of course, things are changing constantly, every day, and it doesn't pay to attach yourself to anything; I know this. But without attachment how can you love? How can you even feel anything if you're not in some way dedicated to your life, or someone else, or some thing?

But about the city: I think this means it's time to leave. These things are really not so important as I make them out to be, it's just that they've swelled to occupy most of my current limited universe. My geographic world seems to define the limits of my mental world. I need more space.

Are you ever ashamed when you look back over a page of writing and all you can see are the short black dashes of the capital 'I's? I must make this interesting, talk about things other than myself - politics, the economy, human rights abuses, you. But really, self-reflection seems to lead to the most bloggable material; the prettiest sentences and most articulate musings. Maybe when I've analysed and exposed my soul sufficiently - if that should ever happen - I'll get round to writing something relevant to the rest of the world.