Category: Journal

Holding itself together is Life’s main job. We create ourselves out of the bits and pieces of stuff lying around and then spend the rest of our time desperately grabbing at the detritus of ourselves as time rapidly and indifferently happens and our bits and pieces crumble into dust and atoms that we can no […]

I need to find a way to capture some of this feeling before it dissolves in the atmosphere of the city. It’s flat, the outback. It reminds me of the way the world felt when I was a kid, yanno, big. Big like when you stand outside at night and stare into the universe. That […]

“Lawns are nature purged of sex and death.”  – Michael Pollan “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.” – Milan Kundera. When you are in a long-term relationship with someone, you become intimately acquainted with the things that make them angry. Wes could tell you just how much I loathe AstroTurf, you know, fake grass. […]

There have been a couple of times in my life where I have felt suicidal and though I’ve briefly mentioned it before, I don’t want to talk about it in detail so I am going to. When I was a teenager, I observed that my favourite artists were so often brutal, awkward and unattractive in […]

“Slow the fuck down you raging dickhead!” a red-faced, bald man screeches angrily at his bull terrier as it drags him towards the water. The water in question is Edwardes Lake, a brown, soupy, polluted puddle in a pretty little park in Reservoir. I’m here by accident. Today has been one of the days that […]

We’ve been slowly driving down a gravel road on the outside of the Gariwerd. We have come this way to see what will be the first indigenous Australian rock art I’ll have seen. As we pull into the car park for Bunjil’s Shelter I battle my habitual instinct to be comically irreverent and suppress the […]

Last week I got an official diagnosis of thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) from a physiotherapist specialising in shoulder therapy. I liked her, she came across as being that rare sort of fiercely intelligent person who is dedicated to truly understanding what they do. Her questions were thoughtful and relevant, and her explanations were frank and […]

(Note: This was written a few weeks back now.) ‘But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.’ ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale I equate […]

The earliest hours of the morning are when I miss you, when the city is dark, quiet and abandoned but for a few solitary wanderers, stumbling drunks and a woman quickly hustling home after popping into an all-night convenience store to pick up Panadol and tampons. As I unlock my car, the jingle of my […]

An elderly woman boards the train carrying several bags of groceries and a middle-aged man carries a toddler on with ease. Many commuters are hunched over their phones, typing and swiping for the duration of their journey while one teenage girl is standing, one hand raised up to grip the pole behind her, the other […]