Right now, i am fruitlessly and half-heartedly scanning the internet for a good, sexist article to castrate for a women's studies assignment (yes, i do WS, fuck off. I'm no dismembering harpy, ok?)

So i was scouring a plethora of newspaper articles from this UK magazine called 'The Guardian', and one title caught my eye: 'Women: embrace your facial hair!'. Beneath was a black and white photograph of a bearded woman.

A partisan of the 'Hairy Awarey' campaign contributed this: "Now I am proud of my hairy lip. I sit playing with it when I am thinking, or watching TV."


"Del La Grace Volcano, formerly known as the lesbian photographer Della Grace, grew her goatee beard in the late 1990s to much media consternation."

and,

"Maybe it's because I am 40, and men look at me less, but I feel so much better now I am letting it all grow out."

HAHAHAHAHHA

yeah, no.

Mmmm. Basking. As though my pores are drinking up the sunshine. Common analogy, strange image. I have no idea how people can stand living in cold climates all year round. My mood pretty much follows the seasons: i'm cold and bitter in winter, warm and genial and lazy in summer. I think i'd become an evil yetti if there was no warm relief in the years cycle, hurling a sharpened ice-pick at whoever got on my nerves.

Oh! A honeyeater just swooped down and collected some straw from one of our hanging baskets! Springs a'comin!
..............................................................................

Some words you just have to say a certain way:

Snigger: pronounce 'schnigger'. Draw out the schh sound

Nerd: pronounce 'nyerd'. Purse your lips like a turtle while you say it and do your bug-eyed impression.

Excellent: Mr burns style.

Kraken: dramatic, Davy Jones style.

Flesh Computer

There are times when the power of the computer over my mind are undeniable. For a split-second i go to type in the 'search' function of my mind for certain notes written down tangible sheets of paper. Grotesquely, i had a dream about facebook. And it wasn't an interesting dream, with strange contortions of the cyber-landscape, or bizarre fusions of inside and outside the screen. No. It was excruciatingly mundane: just a vivid pulse of excitement encapsualted in a red banner at the left hand corner of the screen.

I read in an article somewhere that, with the advent of technology, a human's memory capacity is shrinking. With the ability to file away permanent notes on our supplementary brains, it becomes no longer necessary to imprint and solidify knowledge in our private brains. Technological repositories become a crutch, an extension, a safe. Learning becomes a more transcient process. You leak easier. And nowadays, that's ok, because the outlet's for topping up again are just so accessible.
I guess it was kind of the same phenomenon when literary rates exploded sometime in the 18th century, and the concurrent proliferation of the previously rare and sacred text. I mean, imagine the only channel of learning being sound! The spoken word; loaded but ephemeral, so susceptible to decay and deformation by its listeners. Except for the few prodigies, we don't have minds like tape-recorders. Our memories are not only imperfect, but recollection is contingent on a personal context that changes with time. So essentially, we can never articulate what 'was'.
Anyhoo, back to what i was saying. Imagine if you could only learn through listening. How high the value of knowledge and story would suddenly ascend! You'd savour every new tale that entered your ears like drops of honey that dissolved instantaneously into 'then', relish every image and avenue. Eagerly lap it up and encompass it, enfold it to yourself.
Perhaps we've lost some of that appreciation. Grown complacent. Look at the immediate world askance because of the assurance we can review it later through exterior channels.
I also think this habit grows with age. Everything was so much more vivid in childhood. Everything had a mood to it, a tone. It takes a bit more effort nowadays for me to feel a place or an object or a situation. I dunno. Maybe it's just me that's grown complacent. I'm such a generaliser. Projecting myself onto the world to spread the guilt.

Yoowwwwlll!! My hands are all weather-cracked. Tiny little lacerations have appeared all over as though some invisible miniature goblin has been slicing away with a fencing sword throughout the day.

Poor tiggs. He's just had his teeth cleaned at the vet. For obvious reasons (to avoid slightly more painful lacerations than mine) he had to be sedated. Now he's all dopey. His lazy eye is even more lazy than usual. They're so cute like that. Drugged up.

SNIGGER OF THE DAY

Milton Jones: "I was walking along the road today, and on the pavement i saw a small, dead, baby ghost. Although, thinking about it, it might have been a handkercheif."

Cringe

'So what do you think?'
'Mffffgrmm' i whimpered. With dismay, i realised from my expression in the glass how extraordinarly transparent i am. The face staring back at me was pallid, and bespoke of untold horrors. What vision had it been confronted with should should've made it so bloodless, so aghast? A vile serpent? A sour-skinned crone, gumless, with blood dripping from sagging lips? Had she looked into the eye of a basilisk itself?
It was as though the face of Eve had surfaced from the depths of ancestry, and wore on her descendnts face the very look that had appeared when she realised what paradise was left behind and saw instead the black mineshaft she had dropped into.(Metaphorically, mind).

Considering my first reply was somewhat lacking in eloquence (whilst nonetheless emotionally overt) i tried another on its tail.
'Yes, fine' I gibbered. No, this fringe cut doesn't look hideous. No, i don't feel like snatching your barber-ous instruments and doing a Sweeney Todd on you. No, i don't look like a toy doll with its feafully dead-straight fringe that bounces gently over its dead eyes. No, it doesn't look like this hairy waterfall is just a massive monobrow on my forehead, in grotesque ascent of its designated spot in the facial hierarchy.

'Yes?'
The unease which whined into his voice and was the anxious furrow in his brow was damning. He knew he had created a monster. In that moment, he had his own demons to face; a modern Frankenstein, who would no doubt screech as soon as the (in my mind) batwing doors had swung shut: 'WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!! Lord have mercy on my soul'. Complete with hand wringing, head-whacking and sobbing.

Cringe at the fringe.

AAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!!!!! HOW CAN THIS BE?? STPEHEN FRY WAS IN MELBOURNE AND SYDNEY AND I DID NOT KNOW?!!!

I should have been there. I should have been there. I should have been there as a presence on his periphery, always sensed, never seen, skirting the sidewalks, aggressively introducing kiddie nose to sidewalk as they can into my line of pursuit. Within a few days i would have acquired the art of the most infamous enigmatic spy ever to not be known. Even Fry, with the intellectual ability of a nation- no!- a nation is too full of morons, any wit is diluted by them- with the acumen of a, a, a, another Stephen Fry, would only be semi-aware of some thing there, but not there. And as he strolled around the eastern metropolis, admiring the sights, my inner-stalker would have been in such orgasmic revelry that when my instincts slipped in this blissful state and the police put me in irons, i wouldn't even notice.

Tragic. I don't think i will ever overcome this moment of tragic realisation.

Drama on the Bus

The bus ride. The brief space in one's day where one is assured of comfy mundanity. It feels like a commuter's god-given right, that stretch of blankness inside that mobile, pocket-sized and fluid community. A bus is a place where as soon as you sit down, you assume the mental faculties of that grimy, hideously upholstered bus seat. You become one; you and the bus-seat. A joining of arse and fabric, welded together until the fatal departure, the ominous 'DING!' a falsely cheery funeral knell. It malevolently mocks that wrenching apart of a newly created organism. *DING!*
And then SNAP, your consciousness rushes in you like a poltergeist possession, and you're let loose once again into the stream of daily existence.

How many bus rides have i had over this year? How many bus rides will i have over the rest of my life? How many hours spent in such peachy vacuousness?
Well, i've had a few to date anyway. All non-descript, as you expect.

Until yesterday.

The bus was trundling down the street down the same predictable route. I was in my happy place. My fellow commuters were presumably in theirs. Then, at the corner of my eye, i saw a white flash. THe bus screeched to a halt, flinging an old biddy at the front right out of her seat. The white thing on my periphery had been a car reversing like a rocket out of a driveway across the road. I looked over the edge of the bus out the window. There was a hairs breadth between the two vehicles. After a stunned pause, the white vehicle drove away from the scene. Inside the bus, there was a stunned pause. THen two passengers leaped off their seats and rushed over to the dumped granny, who was lying on the floor, stupefied. One of the helpers took complete control of the situation, whipping out orders right and left as though she had been a sergeant in her former life. The rest of us might have been statues, staring tensely at the traumatised lady. Throughout the whole of it, the busdriver sat in his cabin. I wondered briefly whether the government had us fooled, and that they were trying to cut expenses by replacing human drivers with automatons.

I'm not too sure, but i think i overhead a mutter that the woman had broken her arm. A nosebleed at least. Poor old biddy! Luckily, we werent' far from Charles Gardner Hospital. For whatever reason, the bus didn't take her there direclty, and an ambulance was called. The passengers were directed to file off from the crisis scene and we migrated over the adjacent oval to the nearest bus stop.

For sure, poor old biddy! But the episode was- who could deny it?- exciting! Should i be whipped for finding it so?