"All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over and the lamps expire." (Robert E. Howard)

I know this is morbid but I have always been a bit fascinated by suicide notes.
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Yes, yes, that does sound a bit wrong but it’s a strangely rewarding feeling to read someone’s last words and wonder what they were thinking at the time.
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Captain L.E.G Oates’ famous remark, for instance, as he left Scott’s tent during the ill-fated Antarctic expedition, knowing he was slowing the others down and after having begged them to leave him behind, “I’m just going outside; I may be away some time” might be stretching the definition of a suicide note but it never fails to give me chills.
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French writer Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort’s - “And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead” - has always been a favourite for poignancy, while at the other end of the scale there is Hunter S Thompson (and you can insert your own ‘who went out with a bang’ joke here) whose note I find weirdly comforting:

“No more Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun for anybody. 67. You are getting greedy. Act your old age.
Relax. This won’t hurt.”

Meanwhile if you’re going to use your death to get back at someone who has treated you poorly you could do worse than cribbing from poet Sara Teasdale who left this stinging slap for the lover who’d left her:

“When I am dead, and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken hearted,
I shall not care,
For I shall have peace.
As leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough.
And I shall be more silent and cold hearted
Than you are now.”

Why yes I have just spoiled the end of Bladerunner for you, why do you ask?

So you decide who the bigger spanner in this scenario is.

Is it the dicksnap who thought it was a good idea to have my call to their mobile company greeted with a recorded voice so very intent on Keeping It Real?

Honestly, what marketing wankhead came up with the concept to humanise said recorded voice by giving her a name (“Lara”), forcing her to use colloquialisms (er white hot rage has erased the memory of what they were but they were there) and feigned sincerity (“He-ey, looks like we’re having technical difficulties. I’ll have to put you through to one of my colleagues. I’m really sorry about this”)?

I don’t particularly care if I’m talking to a robot. I don’t really care if I’m talking to a person. What I don’t want is some kind of patronising-as-fuck she-robot on the other end of the line, pretending to care about my problems. I just want a new phone.

So that’s spanner number one.

Spanner number two, sadly, is the human on the other end of the line who dialled the phone company’s number, talked to the she-robot, hung on the line, was transferred, was transferred again, hung on the line… and then remembered she’s not even with Vodafone. Nor has she ever been. Hmm.

Milestone time

Well I've had my eye on the counter for a bit, watching it slooowly inch towards 5000 and there you go: today it made it. Brilliant. I should celebrate with some kind of hi-larious blog but, um, I feel like death. I'm sorry... but thanks, dearest reader(s).

You might think there’s nothing worse than being betrayed by someone you love but you’d be wrong. There is. It’s called being both betrayed by someone you love - by which I mean those two adorable will-they-won’t-they-or-have-they-already film reviewers David and Margaret – and having to sit through two hours plus of slushy pretentious wank as a result.

Reviewing Into the Wild, the story of Chris McCandless (otherwise known as “Alexander Supertramp”) who flags off the lure of Harvard law, donates his college fund to Oxfam and takes off on a road trip that eventually leads him to Alaska, Margaret said the following:

“He’s written a beautiful screenplay and taken risks with the direction, which all pay off, and he’s elicited magnificent performances, especially from Emile Hirsch. It is so close to being a masterpiece…”

Well thanks, Margs, but I’ve been burnt before. No offence but around about the time you slammed Pulp Fiction and gave The Fast and the Furious four stars I started to tready warily around you, keeping my distance as I would from a well-intentioned but senile aunt trying to feed me buttons and telling me they’re boiled lollies.

Let the casting vote be Davids, sweet David, who likes complete cheese as much as he enjoys obscure Norwegian crap even David Lynch would dismiss as ‘weird’. This is what David said:

“(Sean Penn’s) a good director and this is a very good film. I was completely captured by this story, by this epic adventure…”

Well. Well, well, well. Welly, welly, welly… The thing is it is an epic adventure and it is a great story. It’s just an awful shame the movie sucks balls. Only Sean Penn, who takes himself about as seriously as the Holocaust, could distil a potentially beautiful story into a pile of clichés that beat the viewer over the head from the start and doesn’t let up until you’re lying on the floor among stale popcorn by the end, whimpering softly.

Granted Emile Hirsch, playing Chris, does a great job and looks sometimes quite breathtakingly hot while he does it and Hal Holbrook, playing a 90-year-old tearjerker, is indeed tearjerkingly efficient but a stubbled hottie and a red-eyed octogenarian does not a masterpiece make.

David and Margaret can expect their letters returned unopened and the photo collage David made of the three of us to be consigned to the bin. The dream is over.

But I can still enjoy my new flatscreen when the earth has died, right?

I don’t know if anyone has had read today’s Australian Financial Review (I’m thinking maybe not...) but something jumped right off the front page at me today. An article on Kyoto, greenhouse emissions blah blah (please don’t stop reading) cites an interim report from consultants Pricewaterhouse Coopers that says Australia could cut its emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 without damaging the economy.

Did you hear that all you stupid bints who go on about how much all this ‘saving the world’ malarkey is going to cost our lifestyle? And yes I am talking about someone in particular who is not a blog reader but who may or may not pay my wages so um, let me just keep right on going there...

Anyway this is pretty amazing stuff if it’s true and something I don’t think I’ve read anywhere else. One of the consultants said: “We are not going to bankrupt the economy, we are actually going to save some money.”

And this isn’t in Socialist Weekly or the short-lived by much-loved family newsletter I wrote and printed between the years of 1991 and 1992 – it’s the Fin flipping Review. Why are we not doing this already? Why did we not do this yesterday?

Another copy of Maurice, Kate? You shouldn't have... no you REALLY shouldn't have...

Is there anything more fun than buying books for other people?

I don't think even buying books for yourself is quite as enjoyable. This Christmas, just for a change, everyone is getting books, so I have spent long hours considering which books to give to which people and having a surprisingly brilliant time doing so.

Buying books for other people is really all about the delicate balance between buying someone What They Would Actually Like and What You Think They Should Be Reading. In the past I have tended towards the latter choice but that way lies danger, as I have discovered by bitter experience. So this year I think I have actually managed to buy people books they might like, books they could even read instead of just sticking in the bookshelf and (worst case scenario) possible regifting to others.

In the course of this endeavour I have discovered that, as with a lot of things, the joy of choosing a book for someone - weighing the volume in your hand, opening to the first page to read the first sentence they will met and the mental gymnastics of marrying the perfect book to the perfect person - is probably greater than the joy they will get from reading the book. In many cases, no doubt, I've failed completely to assess my friends and family's reading tastes and have bought them another doorstop.

Even so, walking out of the bookstore today, positively weighed down by books and with considerably less cash than I'd had an hour previously, I felt almost as excited as I used to as a kid on Christmas morning which, I think, is saying something.

My life is off the hook

I think I've lost my mobile again. Fuck it, I can't do this again: the replacement sim card, the new phone, more numbers I've lost, more messages I've missed and calls I couldn't answer. It's only been a couple of months since I lost the last one and I don't even know how I did it this time. I had the stupid thing when I left work on Friday, I didn't have it when I got home and now it's gone. The home phone is broken and I don't have anybody's number anyway. Fuck. This.

No, no Plathy, there's no place for you here...

Allow me to defend this post before I begin.

Hard as it may be for regular reader to believe I do try not to write self congratulatory blogs on here. If you’re one of my friends you get enough of that in person and if there’s anything more dull than reading about somebody else’s achievements it’s probably only listening to them spruik charities and post poetry.

But a kind-hearted friend of mine emailed me yesterday to ask why I was so “fucking miserable” and if I was okay. I appreciated the concern. I’m not that wildly brilliant, as it happens but, as I assured him, I’m not going to do a Sylvia Plath either. For a start my oven is electric. But it did make me think I might be inclined to posting a bit doom and gloom on here sometimes. Sooo I thought I’d share some good news. Even if it is good in a way that neither benefits nor interests anyone but me.

There you go, there’s my disclaimer and what an anticlimax to report that my good mood is only because I actually sniffed out a decent story today all on my lonesome. It’s not a big story at all, it’s not that exciting and no doubt it will be cut to a five centimetre brief on page 909 but I don’t care – for the first day in a while I don’t feel like an incompetent boob and for the second time in oooh a month my boss has actually gone for one of my lamearse ideas. Brilliant.

Oh I have the money, I just don't have the will to live after reading the post...

If you're running short on time and fear you might not be able to make it through this post make I make the following suggestion: find yourself a can of mace, spray yourself directly in the eyes and then slap yourself in the face. This will be about as enjoyable as reading the post and probably a bit quicker. Because, you see, I Have A Cause.

Today I saw Tim Costello, of World Vision Australia, speak. I wasn't much looking forward to it because it was a work schmoozefest and (as predicted) I was stuck next to a complete gimp and given a lamb chop to gnaw on, thanks to a small oversight on the veggo side of things. But as it turned out it was three hours well spent because Costello gave a great speech. There was nothing in there most of us haven't heard before - why the wealthy western world has a moral and economic obligation to help the third world, how simple such help could be, how ridiculous the choices are that we make when we choose a larger flat screen over helping to save someone's life - but he boiled it down in a nice way to the point that I felt like empty my wallet as well as being close to tears. (Although there is a chance the latter may have been the fact I was running on two hours sleep at the time).

He also used the phrase 'lottery of latitude' - a lottery all of us won because we weren't born in a third world country or into extreme poverty. It's a pretty obvious concept but it's also pretty amazing if you start thinking about the kind of life we could all be living (or not as the case may well be) if we were born in certian parts of Africa, Asia or South America.

Costello also drew a comparison between third world poverty and a beggar on the street. When you see a beggar, he said, I think you all feel something, some sort of tug on your conscience. Even if you keep walking and don't give him anything it has an effect on you. (Considering it was a business lunch I wasn't entirely sure he had the fat cats convinced but whatever). Why then? he asked, don't we feel the same way when we ignore third world poverty and turn away from people in just as much, if not far more, need? The answer is, of course, that it is because we can't see them but that's completely fucked really.

I tend to think of myself as a reasonably caring person - I give to this charity or that, I do tend to give beggars coins if I have them, I buy the bloody Big Issue and have conversations at dinner parties about gosh how darned awful some people have it. And all that means precisely fuck all. The reality is that I spend more money on books in a month than I do on charity. I probably spend more on stockings and I certainly spend more on mochas. Is a hot beverage more satisfying than helping to improve the life of someone I can't meet or speak to on the other side of the world? It's an absurd idea. But does it matter? Will it stop me from buying my morning mocha tomorrow? We shall see but I doubt it.

What it won't stop me doing, however, is signing up to World Vision and the entire purpose of this post is, obviously, to encourage you to do the same, or at least to do a bit of Christmas shopping on their website. Seriously, dudes, don't tell me you don't have the money.

NOTE: First poetry and now charity, Je-sus. Tell you what - donate to WV and I'll try to crack a joke sometimes. Or um, at least find a really, really hot picture of James Franco... sans pantaloons.

I remember the days when 'style' referred to your ability to pull off jaunty hat or wear fancy pants...

I have plenty of sympathy and little judgy-judgement for people who want to kill themselves. I would, of course, be devastated and furious if any of my loved ones did so (yeah that means you, you know who you are) without talking to me first but my view is that everyone’s life should be theirs to live or not as they choose. You know what’s not cool? Taking eight other people with you just to “go out in style” like the demented dicksnap who opened fire at an Omaha department store today. Jesus, man, if you don’t want to be here then fine – go for it – but there are plenty of people who still do.

Quotable Quotes: Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

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The woods around it have it - it is theirs,

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-minded to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less -

A blanket whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars - on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places

(Robert Frost)

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NOTE: I am sorry to go all your poetry on your arse - reading someone else's idea of a good poem is only a step up from reading their own shiteful poetry, in my opinion, but I'm just a bit too shattered to blog intelligibly and this is a very prettily sad poem. Plus it's Frost and I'm pretty sure it's illegal not to like him. Between now and next time I will try to think up an innane topic to write about or somebody new I can insult and then befriend...

Clackety clack clack

Everthing seems like a good idea when you don't have to actually, you know, do anything about it doesn't it? This includes simple pleasures like opening a bottle, those drunken conversations where you decide you're going to move to South America to raise sheep and tomorrow you'll nut out the details or the vow that, yes really, you're going to start running every day. It's a bit like Jerry Seinfeld's very amusing bit about Night Guy always screwing over Morning Guy by not giving a shit about the consequences.

Anyway all this is a long-winded way of saying I have a new stupid plan, which is that I'll do an hour of proper writing before work each day. Brilliant, right? Sounds so easy. So efficient. So hard-working. Well yes, yes and yes. Yet today is the first morning of this plan: I'm still half asleep, I'm completely groggy and, far from the sort of writing I had planned, I'm blogging. Hmm. I'm tempted to handball this one back to After Work girl...

London brawling

I am sometimes asked, though it is rarely couched in these terms, to shut the fuck up about London. That is to stop my eyes from coming over all dreamy whenever I think about moving back there or, perhaps, to better conceal my rage and jealousy when a beloved friend (*sniff* I miss you already) decides she is heading that way. But honestly, quite aside from the phsyicality of London how can anyone not want to live in a city where these kinds of debates go on in the pages of a daily newspaper. I don't know if anyone else has been reading the Martin-Amis-is-racist-oh-wait-no-he's-not-and-I-say-this-as-a-personal-friend rants going on in The Guardian but the latest installment is out and, as ever, it's fascinating. Read it and we can move there together. Call me, we'll talk about it, etc.

Yes even if I count Hungry Jacks...

The worst job I ever had was probably the job I never actually got.

For one long day many, many years ago I ‘worked’ (in the sense that I sweated blood and tears, not in the sense that I was paid for it) at a truly crappy souvenir store in the city. Don’t ask me why I wanted the job – I can only assume I had acquired a number of habits it was necessary to finance and time has blurred the memory of what those habits might have been.

Anyway the job interview turned into a day trial working behind the counter to “see how I handled it”. How I handled it was, by general consensus of the vaguely creepy couple who ran the place, pretty crappily. This was, perhaps, unsurprising given I’d never worked in retail, didn’t care much for customers and found the shop’s eccentric and frequently contradictory pricing system completely impenetrable. Plus, you know, you try giving a shit about poorly made tshirts with the Australian flag on them or crappy emu figurines that fall apart if you blink at them twice.

At the end of a soul-crushing day I went home (unpaid) feeling exhausted but mildly confident of having acquired gainful employment... only to receive a phone call that night telling me they didn’t think I had quite the right skill-set for the job. “However,” the store’s co-owner told me in a tone that suggested she had a nice boiled lolly for me if I could recite all the words to The Owl and the Pussycat, “we like you so if you want to come back tomorrow for another trial we could see how you go.”

I didn’t go back the next day but, ridiculously, I still feel a faint sense of was-I-really-that-shit embarrassment when I think about that crappy job and what might have been.

The point is, however, that there are a lot of truly bad jobs out there and thinking about them never fails to raise the spirits in a slightly sick schadenfreudey sort of way.

For those for whom my tale of exploitation and woe was not enough to perk you up The Idler, that most delightful of companion for those of us who prefer not to raise a sweat, has a nice little collection of reminiscences about the worst jobs people have had that makes good reading.

These jobs include weedbusting, washing up, and working in a syringe needle factory but also supposedly glamorous jobs like working on an animated movie (a nice reminder, if we need it, that just because a job looks good from the outside if it makes us miserable it is Not a Good Thing) and genrally is rather a good antidote for anyone who has had a crappy day.

For the record, today at least, that does not include me.

Suburban dilemma

As many of you know I have to move out of my beloved Northbridge apartment in about three weeks. As many of you also know I have been so unbelievably slack (and have also been a victim of circumstances outside my control, I assure you) getting it together that I have left it to the last possible moment to find a new place. Meaning I shall be homeless in oooh 15 days or so.

The circumstances-out-of-my-control bit is more or less to do with where I want to live. Which is to say I want to live in Northbridge and my would-be roomie not only does not but has rejected a perfectly wonderful place just down the road on the grounds that it does not accept pets and appparently he now requires a dog (the fact that the proposed dog would be called Jean Luc Picard is not quite enough to melt my icy heart). I love, love, living in the middle of the city, love the immediacy of everything, love the close proximity of my beloved Tarts and so on this one point I have been extremely firm. I may even have yelled, once or twice, that I was not ready to move to the fucking suburbs, buy a dog and spend my weekends at Bunnings.

And then my lovely parents not only go and drop a huge chunk of my future inheritance on a sweet-as little place in Shenton Park but offer to rent it to us at a knock-down fee and I'm presented with a dilemna. The house itself is lovely - it has a great bath and a great living area, both surely necessities - and is generally very cute and aesthetically appealing. Furthermore this means I won't actually be homeless and living out of a storage facility in the near future but will have a sweet-arse house in a matter of weeks and will have a pair of very understanding landlords who won't require a reference from that stupid bitch Pam at Property People with whom I once exchanged a flurry of furious emails and who probably still has a doll-sized version of me with a pin sticking out of its left eye socket sitting on her desk.

So taking the Shenton Park place and sucking up my inner-city ambitions (for the short term anyway) may seem like an obvious step but I'm conflicted. On the one hand part of me actually believes that moving to the suburbs is the death of hope and the start of a trajectory that ends with me in a cable knit sweater watching The Bill, but the other part of me remembers that a)I was once perfectly happy in Mount Hawthorn, b)Shenton Park is a perfectly lovely suburb as suburbs go and c)I do own a perfectably serviceable (suspect thumping noise aside) vehicle with which to leave the suburbs when I choose to do so.

So I seek your opinion, readers. Am I being a big girl's blouse about the entire thing? Is it actually possible to find an awesome Northbridge apartment in 15 days that is big enough to fit the biggest couch every known to mankind (and the Chesterfield)? Should I just suck it up and start working on the cable knit sweater set now?

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UPDATE: It has been brought home to me, ever so gently and kindly, that I am a bint who doesn't know how good she has it. This is true. Shenton Park is starting to sound rather appealing to me after all even if I don't get to live over the road from one crack den and two houses down from another. Sigh. Still, one can't have it all...

Saturday night pleasures

"My flocks feed not, my ewes breed not,
My rams speed not, all is amiss:
Love is denying, Faith is denying,
Heart' renying, causer of this."
(Richard Barnfield)

"And I'm a mean (motherflipper) now but I was once cool..."

Now I don’t want to excite you kids but The Jesus and Mary Chain are… coming to Perth. Oh yes they will join the Smashing Pumpkins, Duran Duran (Je-sus, really?), Queens of the Stone Age and a bunch of other groups (tragically, for Perth, this does not include French hotties Air) at the V Festival in April next year. Huzzah. Personally I wouldn’t really get out of bed for any of the other bands announced thus far and, if I’m honest, I sort of don’t like seeing bands outdoors and during the day because it’s hot and lame and drinking during the day is sort of sad, but I think I would be willing to fork out for a ticket just to see JaMC… and I’m just crossing my fingers for Belle and Sebastian to be (extremely unexpectedly) added to the line-up…

Now with half the self deprecation

I tend to be pretty down about work on this site but, dear reader(s) you shouldn’t think I’m ungrateful for having been given this opportunity. Yes it’s mildly terrifying, I’m frankly unsure if it will work out and I really do think my boss views me as a pleasant but completely incompetent boob… but today I got my new business cards identifying me as a reporter for the paper and I actually felt, well fuck it, life’s not that bad. Gosh I've turned into fricking Pollyanna,.

Ewww

In the course my unbelievably unsuccessful 'career' as a 'fiction writer' (and yes there are indeed more quotation marks required than I'm actually capable of putting in there) I have been required to write the odd sex scene, much as I might avoid it. I will spare you the gritty but I assure you they were brutal. So I should have more sympathy for Norman Mailer who has posthumously received the Bad Sex in Fiction Award today. And hey I'm not saying he didn't deserve it for this shocker...

"So Klara turned head to foot and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth and took his old battering ram into her lips."

...but I was gunning for Jeanette Winterson.

Unknown Pleasures

You know how sometimes you anticipate something so much that it's a complete anticlimax when you finally do it or, in the case of a movie, see it? Well frick that because I finally, finally saw the Ian Curtis biopic Control tonight and thought it was fricking brilliant. Sam Riley was so mesmerising and heartbreaking I feel like I could turn around and see it again. If you haven't seen it (and, er, I know there are many of you) I suggest you do so while you can. Quality.