an excerpt

I was inside, sitting amongst a stack of CD’s, deciding which one to put on next when James walked in. He stood reading, as visitors often did, the wall we had covered with lyrics. Black biro burned into the greying walls above a sofa bed that nearly every I knew had slept on. Most of it was in my handwriting, but almost unreadable, I had a habit of swirling most of my letters together, making giant loops with the y’s and g’s. People always tried to spot spelling mistakes, or parts of the songs we had misheard, but they were never right, we checked it about a hundred times. At other times they would bring us crumpled pieces of paper with lyrics jotted down for us to write there (which we did without discrimination) - and I was afraid it would grow, tree-like, branches heavy with sadness to take over the walls of the house.

'i carry your heart'

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-- e. e. cummings

Tired eyes and elaborate dreams.

1:33 am

I want something more.

More than work and drugs and sleep.

Something destructive, loving, surreal and explicit.

But what?

Sundays, lyrics, rhetoric and other such bollocks.

she was all right cause the sea was so airtight she broke away

she was all right but she can't come out tonight she broke away (Interpol - Stellar Was A Diver)

I hate Sundays. They are tepid days always fuelled with the faint feeling of impending homework or lately, riddled with hangovers. Today, I am in St. Kilda hoping that instead of smoking rollies and finishing the last night’s wine, covered in last night’s make-up, some sea air might convince me that Sunday’s aren’t entirely loathsome. I follow my nose to the beach, passed vegetarian restaurants, dimly lit bars and crab stalls until I catch it - that faint smell of salty air between a mixture of coffee and nicotine that hangs around the cafes invitingly. As I walk down a white-washed backstreet (I don’t know the area at all, I am literally chasing the smell) I see that first glimpse of the sea.

all this time you were chasing dreams,

without knowing what you wanted them to mean. (Jose Gonzalez - Cycling Trivialities)

What is it about the ocean that enthrals us humans so? The mystery of nature perhaps? The seemingly endlessness? To me the it is the day time equivalent of looking up at a starry night sky. (Though it often conjures up childhood nostalgia and the left-over guilt of skipping school to hang around with boys at the beach.) Looking at it gives you that terrible smallness that is so torturingly enjoyable, almost like an out of body experience or a shot of tequila.

we'll cut the whip and lose the anchor

as long as you jump the ride (Joan As Police Woman - The Ride)

All that beauty that we don’t understand at all. A feeling of shallow loneliness washes over me, thinking this, and I quickly change the music I’m listening to… something upbeat… ah, hip-hop.

don’t you go and let the world bring you down (Shapeshifter - Electric Dream)

I fear anything acoustic might Do Me In.

Now that I’m sitting, journal pressed against me, away from the wind, sun probably gleaming off my white forehead I dare to put on something melancholy.

but alas, I cannot swim

I'll live my life regretting that I never jumped in (Laura Marling - Alas, I Cannot Swim)

To maybe tap into some poignant, some trapped genius that may/may not be lurking in my lentil-burger-flavoured-breath. What is the best condition for us writers to write? Between the thirsty hours of midnight and day break? In this indulgent loneliness - when we seem compelled to act on some Sylvia Plath-like desire to drown ourselves? Should we be falling in or out of love? Should we have been neglected by our mothers and have a father complex? Should we have our tongues planted firmly in our cheeks? Should we be perpetually penniless and drunk forever? Or on some sort of Benzedrine high or look heroin chic? Writing is understanding, isn’t it? But I am twenty-one and have absolutely no clue to the workings of the human condition…

I know when you hear these sappy lines

You'll roll your eyes and say "nice try" (The Shins - Pressed in a Book)

Oh, sod all this, where did I leave that wine?

The Typewriter (a work in progress)

As a child I had a penchant for type-writers.

My mother kept one in the cold out-house that as children we were not allowed into, on account of my sister having fallen and cut her chin. Perhaps it was also to do with her dislike for anything eight-legged stealing it’s way into the house that instilled the fear in her warnings.

Unnoticed, however, I would visit that grey and enthralling machine nightly and return to smudge ink finger prints across walls in my bedroom.

love rhymes

"I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love." - Françoise Sagan

cycling trivialities?

Kissing to 'Flying Lotus'/Fresh Sheets/Winter Nights/Two Jobs/Skipping More Classes.

Do you ever have that moment when your life feels so surreal you put on headphones just to drown it all out?



all this time chasing dreams,
without knowing what you want each one to mean.

/

well you know before I met you I was doing fine.

they only want you when you're seventeen, when your 21, you're no fun.

My 21st 'dinner party' turned into a more-fucked-up-than-most Thursday at NEXT. We recovered slowly throughout the day only for me to pull 'a Hemingway' (read: shot an entire bottle of Southern Comfort, write madly by the Yarra at 4am, and attempt to sleep in my bathtub) Kirra decided to refer to herself as 'the reclining Buddah' and instructed us all to throw money at her. Twenty-ish people were crammed into my small (read: SMALL) aparment. The police came largely due to mine and Kirra's terrible singing. The weekend was not a boring one.

Maybe we should go out tonight?

where the heart is.

I miss ---

The sunshine coast.

Sleep. Awake. Eat. Repeate. Get drunk. Fall in love. Come up. Come down. Sleep. Cigarettes. Salad-bar. Fight & sleep. Cry. Get high. Retreat. Sleep. Pancakes and more cigarettes. Pack bag & cry. Escape. Get drunk. Get high. Repeate to sleep. Fall out of love.

"This is the final boarding call for flight DJ482..."

Be careful what you wish for.

I forgot how much worse unrequited love is than actually NOT being in love.

Think bitter almonds, benedrine and all that terrible writer shit.

- posted via drunken iPhone.

a rainy Sunday night

You know that terrible feeling you sometimes get, where you crave something you just can't put your finger on?
I want lust.
But instead, I will dance and drink and wake up pressed against a bed full of friends and strangers. My only memories a blur of car rides and dirty toliets and maybe I'll tell you all about it one night over a cup of coffee.




Remembering when you were mine
In a still suburban town
When every thursday I'd brave those mountain passes
And you'd skip your early classes
And we'd learn how our bodies worked. - Deathcab For Cutie

oh we are young
we are free
we keep our teeth nice and clean

bruised & tired, with just enough energy to go out and dance another night away.

One Year Without Light - an excerpt

“I know you will find some one to love you in ways I can’t.” It wasn’t exactly the words of Mr. Darcy, who she loved, whose male counterparts she idolised on the ancient television at the foot of her bed. But words spoken from the heart are often more simple, less eloquent than those we plan. They left me deflated, waiting for the next response from her, yet her freckled cheeks remained still. I left her there, sitting cross-legged. A stronger man would not have looked back, would not have hoped she would come running to my car, slide into the passenger seat and take my hand, the way she had after so many fights. Or drunk, slurring and hiccupping, reach across my thighs, and I would take back anything I had said to upset her wholeheartedly, not caring her makeup was smudging and her hair tangling in my palm. It was as if all the shouting, all the slammed doors could be summed up in one simple sentence. I felt those heavy words in my hands, weighed them a moment and drove home.

She hasn't been getting much sleep lately.

"Beyond Ink" - an excerpt

I THE DECLINE

She had become rather demented around the time her first novel was published. It was a dark, scathing tale about young women living in various poverty stricken conditions. It was hailed by critics, yet its apparent readership was limited to close friends of Madeline’s. Huddled in her loft apartment they lamented over the plights of the characters as if it were their own misery.
It was around this time that Madeline stopped paying her electricity bills. Friends who called often were only greeted by the constantly closed doors. No one had heard from her for several weeks. Not her mother, nor her sister, nor the married cartoonist for the New York Times with whom she was conducting an illicit affair. She had, in a sense, disappeared and no amount of phone calls, nor urging could woo her back. Her friends thought perhaps she was writing her much awaited sequel and as friends often do, soon lost interest in her.
No one remarked that since her book was printed there seemed a undefinable unease about her. No one recalled at the dinner parties where her whereabouts was often discussed quite rabidly, the glint of something-not-quite sane in her pale eyes, that she had lost weight. Or perhaps most disturbing and obvious of all, that her apartment had become filled with notes, taped over doorways, across each inch of her mirror and one solitary note wrapped tightly around her toothbrush. Perhaps they had not noticed, or did not want to.