purpose

this is what kills me.

one of my earliest memories was sitting at the kitchen table doing a drawing, crayons and pencils, and a picture of rabbits playing tennis.

and halfway through, this chill went through me. why was was i doing this? what was the purpose, apart from the fun i was getting, of doing this drawing?  it would rot away with time - the acidic paper would fade (of course, not knowing much about acid in paper when i was 7, my understanding of exactly how and why it would rot was limited).. and even if someone did love it, or it did sell, or whatever, well... then what's the point?

this really only proves i was a fucked up kid.
but this still plagues me hideously. it's friday night, and i should be relaxing. instead, i am wracked with guilt, and want to do something 'Meaningful' with my night. and then, it turns into this nasty sort of pattern - what is meaningful? what is pleasure? what do i want to do? what book should i choose? what would be the purpose though, of reading it if i didn't write about it, or reflect on it, or discuss it, or at least feel like i had been enriched by it. and even, were i to do that, what meaning does that give me? 

essentially, i reduce it all back, and i come to a very nihilistic sort of place, where nothing ends up having any sort of meaning. 

and this is all because it's a friday night and i am trying to pick between reading Gunter Grass and a novel about a guy who really liked The Smiths as a teenager. OH or writing something about my teen novels. or working. or. or, or... or....... what the fuck?


this is why i have the tattoo on my arm. to remind me of the circles and the patterns and to remember that this nihilism is something that's haunted me for as long as i can recall, and that no matter where i go, nothing is just behind and in front of me, because nothing is all i can honestly believe in.

i should start writing again

or maybe it's time for a new blog. i dunno.

anyhow, regardless, i am pondering dinner.  right now, all i know for sure that i have at home is tomatoes, and some couscous. should i get additional vegetables?  capsicum would be pleasing with this.  but maybe beans? i like beans. and chili. from memory, i have some chilli. oh, and spring onions!  excellent.

there's a dinner.

wow.  amazing.  this is a spectacular return to blogging, elizabeth. you get a sticker of excellence.  well done indeed. well. done.

space

cut open a vein and let me see what is inside tonight.

and i don't mean this as more than a passing reference, a graze, maybe, to self mutilation. i am just talking about rawness, and falling, and trust, and opening your heart again with the simple ugly understanding that you will JUST lose them in time and it , maybe, all that you deserve.

i don't know. when i drink too much i end up just hating myself. i forget that. and when i wonder, or worry, if i am misplacing and that oh no, why the fuck would they care? then i am horrified and scared.  and i look impassive in the face of that because i guess that's how i survive this. i don't know.

i feel like my own ignorance is a catch phrase. and what are you DOING with your life and your brain and your heart and your purpose? i drink it away and i move day to day hand to mouth, gnaw to gnaw, whim to whim with no direction.  and i hate it, and i turn it inside and i hate myself for it. 

i forgot to get more pills and i feel an aching sickness in my stomach of effexor withdrawals.  oh GOD boy, why do you bother with me when you are beautiful and smart and have the whole world in your hands. you have had women so much more gaspingly wonderful than i. i am just some scruffy idiotic australian girl with nothing to say of worth. oh GOD why do you bother?  i would not bother with me. 


i need to drag myself back and sleep now. i sense the lights draining out of my heart and i sense a darkness fading in, and i need to pull back and fix this before i snap.

upper spine

is it trite to say how much i love yoga?  i love it. it's a form of meditation i don't find difficult - you slow the mind right down through holding the body, and knowing the body, and feeling the body.

what i love too is feeling the body get stronger week by week, and feeling an intimacy grow.  how was i not that intimate with my body? how did i get so distant from the flesh i inhabit? no, not inhabit. i don't inhabit my body, i am my body.  it is what it is that is me.


ooooh oooh morrissey does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body ... i dunno...

in which once again, the smiths prove to be the source of all wisdom about all things.  it is strange when certain poses push too far, or not far enough, or the more you learn about a pose, the way the feeling of going to it, and then holding it, and then exiting it shifts. even the really simple standing poses - the more i do them, the more aware i become of every inch of my body - down to my fingers being stretched properly - to muscle areas in my thighs and how they should be facing to best experience the asana.

i can feel it helping my posture. i have one vertebrae in my neck that juts out at an odd angle due to years and years of slouching and terrible posture.  through pulling it back, and trying to tighten the muscles around them, and through my teacher's explaining how we are supposed to work towards a shoulder stand, i can feel what muscles are fucked up.

and thus ends my yoga diatribe.

this is the advantage of keeping this as an exercise in exposure/narcissism/emotional-mental-verbal-defecation - i can blatter about without caring what impact this does, or doesn't make.

i suspect i need to start getting into work at a decent time. this is, i admit, more than fair enough.  i'm attempting to read more.  i am already becoming lax and indifferent towards my uni studies. wow. this time, it took me what? a week?  maybe i should read Is History Fiction? either that, or The Master of Go by Kawabata. last time i was in brisbane, i went on a terrible (read - exceptional) book spree, and spent a few hundred (ok, probably close to 400) on books.  am attempting to make the rule of Read Five For Each One i Buy. i find the Read Five for Each Binge I Have seems to work better.

tomorrow, sydney-town to see STEPHEN FRY oh JOY!LIF_IC_ATION!!!! 

neglected

conference in melbourne, tedious rashed affliction, uni work, etc etc.  this makes me tired, and takes away the things i feel like i could put in here.


i'd like to say that words were the best of me, but i don't know what best means.  i tend to think my bookshelf was/is; it's built and shaped and molded with just the right number of cracking fissures to make it charming, and enough solidity to keep it standing.  if i were to introduce myself somehow, i would do it with my books - sweeping arm around them, polishing them, leaving them glistening.  it's cleaner than i am, it's more of who i would like to be. there is an element of concealment i've never be able to manage.  a 'mystery', a sort of complexity, rather than a stripped heart on sleeve bluntness that i wield like a clumsy sword.

i am fantasising about making my apartment beautiful. i want to grow potatoes.  i know, they are cheap, but i would love to do it, dig them up and get the dirt under my nails.  there are little paper lights in the loungeroom, and i want to hang them from my walls.  i want them draped and sagging around the apartment.

there is a constant push pull inside of me. the gentleness i wish i could have, the slightness, the wider eyed beauty, the reaching out, and a butterfly sitting on my fingers and a pause, and a mysterious smile, and i remain like that, an enigma, cats resting on my lap, a puzzle to be solved,  and yet, and yet, i end up being this over inflated flesh to be taken at will that races off and feeds it to anyone.  and i don't know if i want to be either, or if i can be either.  i feel like the 'dance drink screw' refrain of common people in my head, dance drink screw, dance drink screw, round and around like horses on a carousel rising and falling.  and then i try and pull back to control it, because i just don't want to sleep alone anymore, and i want honeysuckle and free roaming bunnies, and drawings of botanical illustrations made into wall paper, and ahh shit i don't even believe in anymore.  and i'm afraid of the dark without you next to me, i thought, and then i opened my eyes, and i don't want to be a pretty girl, a maiden fair, because i an not a pretty girl, and i'll never be like that, no matter how many muscles i pull trying to fit into the sweet little floral dress.

i don't know. enacting whatever parody of self i want to take out to play confuses me. it's a game, a puzzle, and i have no sense of how to fit together some image that will move me anywhere, or if i should be 'genuine' or if it's even possible to be genuine.

if i could roll myself back to a point before i became, well, filthy, would i?  it's not that long ago really that i'd never taken drugs, or had sex outside of a loving relationship.  it's a matter of a few years that i pushed the skin i thought i was in out, and reformed myself into a parody of the narrow line i used to be.  and you can't quite go back. i can't sew the marriages back together, or pull memories from night after night after night in alleys and goonbags and up trees and down streets and in the rain, and i would not trade this filth for the world because i love it. it feeds me more than the cottage does, because it takes me away. 

in other news, i found exciting cider, that tastes like strawberry, and i have a blog about being a librarian that even i can't bring myself to read.

oh how we are hungry

we, or me, i don't know.

i like pushing things, this is what i do. this is how i do it. i don't know why i do, though, and it doesn't really matter.


i wonder what bridges i burn though, and even, if it matters anymore.  i feel more wide and open, but older and more tired at the same time.  but this is ok. and i am hungry.

i don't know what's happened to my words. i've been exhausted, and run dry. emptied out. i keep trying to fill and fill and fill, but is it empty still? i check the levels and oh, oh yes. it is.  again?  or not again. it is hard to see if i am walking in circles.

you always fall in love again.  but i get so tired of it, you know. it leads me on, my carrot slightly out of reach. i am a sucker, emotionally, for that flood, that movement of one soul into the next, blah blah, all words that have little to no meaning, but oh how i like it, you drug you. it's my way of being creative, because i feel like i cannot make anything other than other bodies work. ha, and i fail even, over and over, at the idea of finding that connection. i fail well. i'm hungry. 

pottering

i am reading the guardian, as i always do, in love with most of the articles. i adore that newspaper. whenever i feel low about the world, or the internet especially, i turn to the guardian to have some faith restored.

i am, Uncommonly, bored right now. unusually bored. infuriatingly bored.  sinking skin crawlingly bored. this is a symptom. i know this.  i know you well.

semester crawls on. one essay left, on the Dewey Decimal System. what sort of librarian cliche is that?  chew of my LEG for god's sake. i just want to TEAR things into shreds, it is like there are bugs crawling under my skin right now, that growling prowling scratching feeling of a cat left inside all day.

saw an amazing show monday night. laurie anderson. lou reed. meltbanana. boris. bardo pond. i could go on. the sound growled through my body and i felt alive and calm and taken down and under until i was re-written. it made me deplorably pleased.
only now, i want more of that sort of pleasure.  and it is so dry here, so dry and sandpaper-y and rough.  there's something to be said for 'making the best' but i just cannot keep making things up anymore. i am not a magician, and i am not out of this world. i want to be drunk on the earth, and clamber up church towers and i want to fall off things until i bleed it out, this desire, red into earth. not violently, just engulfing until i cannot breathe.