With my shovel shaped hands (pt. two)

nightimes against my health
the whole ramshackle thing lies down my sleeve
spread out lazy and desperate
I am a poorly planned city versus all the other buildings
I throw my hands deep into the mud and it bubbles up to that bony part on my wrist
heaving it out up to my forearms and spreading it across the face of an innocent man
the waves never stop for my hand
these rainbows just seem to be following me everywhere
and I have no one who can wipe this muck off me; your hands are as dirty as mine.

Reveries of a solitary walker*

I heard somewhere off somebody that walking is a discipline and I thought it was true when I heard it but now I know it is even more true. I have tried to make a habit of walking at night for several reasons:

- it gives me time to think
- the sky at night with all the stars firing their lasers off is spellbinding
- so I don't end up on the Biggest Loser
- it makes me think that perhaps our world isn't as mean and nasty as the news and papers have us believe.
- perhaps I will make a new friend
- I can be an asshole and say things to complete strangers like: "beautiful night(?)" or "evening!"

The whole nightwalking thing also makes me wonder about how much I miss when I am inside. The world seems to sparkle at me when I walk and I don't go very far- maybe thirty or forty minutes- and yet I know that the outdoors is precious and special.

I wonder how someone like John Howard, who walks every morning, can emphasise all those buildings and numbers and business deals over the beauty of sunrise or the way the stars fall into the cracks of darkness. I enjoy the outside world far more than flashy, big television screens but I am a long way away from finding a rhythm to describe what God has done. My prayer is that my rhetoric rests in my heart and that the environment breaks through my ribs and out of my mouth.

If you have read this far: I like you, thankyou very much.

*This title is stolen from the book of the same name by Jean- Jaques Rousseau. Most of my ideas and much of my philosophy is based on his writing so you should check him out.

Community

There must be some point in which every thought you have ever had culminates into some overwhelming force that you can throw at people: this is how I imagine academics and authors: that they would just hurl massive oceans and powers at the general public for them to be hit like a cannonball into a crowd of people: the cannonball then opens up massive avenues in the crowd and the academic/ author strolls down waving and smiling: the people who have been hit with the cannonball all just lay around there wincing and say 'ow': I am one of those wincing at the whole author/ cannonball thing.

But seriously, what do you want? A nice house/ good family/ easy job (heck yes)/ no job? I don't know what I want, I just know it's the same thing that you want. I think I want a community to be a part of: a community that loves people, actually, really loves people and not what people can give them. So many 'communities' only grow out of a mutual need, for example, we all NEED to be real cool: right? right. So the whole idea of a scene (indie, electro, rock n' roll) fills that need but only by me leeching off you and you taking from me. I want a community that says: "I love you because for no good reason and you are really good at this and I will lift you up and put you above my own self even though I am incomplete and really need someone to tell me that I am okay just as much as you, but I love you so it doesn't matter".

I don't think that sort of selflessness can happen without Jesus. He is a pretty good guy like that I think Jesus just loves us for no reason except that he loves us. Maybe someone can disprove this to me but through all I have learned about Jesus and us humans it would seem he really would have no reason to care about us: but he does and he says crazy things that I hope to understand one day.

Nothing new, as usual

I'm pretty cynical about the whole thing. By the whole thing I guess I mean everything, the new Arcade Fire album, the last thing I wrote, your myspace profile, my sniffling nose, the idea of Christianity and the idea of life and friendship and working and all that stuff. But being cynical hasn't really gotten me anywhere at all. It has earned me a lot of awkward moments between people, I mean, who really likes that moment where someone says something sucks and the other thinks otherwise. Cynicism seems to sap us from being excited and sometimes being excited, even about the worst things is a great privilege.

The more and more cynical I get (I usually like to think the cleverer and cleverer I get) the less good the whole thing seems. By the whole thing I guess I mean everything, going out late at night, rain, sunny days, being able to work, hearing organs, my ipod; it is all so passe really. I think my spirit needs to be redeemed, so I can love again perhaps or just so I can enjoy the nothing that always happens a whole lot more than the everything. I just want to be simple and remember people and how special they are and love those in my life and those who pass me in the street or sit next to me on the train.

Being cynical will make you cool but it won't make you happy, it is almost like a ball and chain dragging you down and away from wondering. As you fall the list of things you can enjoy just decreases and decreases until nothing really means anything anymore except the most visceral of acts like sex and war and having a really high flying job and a huge television and all that really physical stuff. Stuff that is like an exclamation mark to everybody else; showing off and saying 'I get lots of sex' or 'I killed hundreds' or 'Have a look at the picture on this baby'. I think really that we want to impress people because we are lonely and we want them to say they love us and then know that we are good and worthwhile and important. And we do what the world says in advertisements because we all think that is what it takes for people to say that we are special and important, all the ads say that if we own this car we will have a feeling of power or a feeling of exclusivity. But companies discriminate; they want money and the poor don't have it and the poor suffer as being lesser humans and they probably feel like they can't be special or beautiful or important (but I don't know really because I am not poor).

Imagine if you were very rich and had a lot of friends and knew a lot of important people and then just chose to quit your very important job and go and wash homeless people in some warehouse in a forgotten part of town. Imagine how much of a demotion that would be, people would imagine you were crazy. You would probably lose of lot of your important friends and you might not be able to keep your large house, flashy car and Bang & Olufsen sound system. But I think that would change you inside, you would be telling these homeless people, these people worth nothing in dollar terms that they are more important than the men you danced with in the thousand floor buildings and more important than all those business deals and handshakes and contracts and clients and Italian furniture and feta cheese. I think these people, if they realised what you did for them would look at you with tears in their eyes and probably just hug you or collapse. I don't really know what they would do because I have never done it. But you might start loving things again like hearing a certain cracked voice sing a song or feeling the sun on your face or coming home to a bed that you have by grace. When we don't deserve anything everything is a gift and imagine if we lived Christmas everyday, that would be exciting.

I don't think this is a change or anything different for me. I still think I am being cynical of all the usual things like capitalism and materialism and the whole rat race. I am praying for something to change though; I am praying for the day when I can sit on a train of suits and shirts and somehow show them a love that they have not known. Not a denouncing, ugly, cynical young man who is disillusioned but a bright eyed, enthusiastic old man still closing his eyes and smiling into the blue skies and their ability to search out and illuminate the shadows.

Romance

I think being single would be difficult. Most of the time though I think being in a long term relationship is harder, I mean that is why most people aren't in them right? I don't really know if it is a question of 'the right person' but probably a question of romance. After five years I obviously am not the same person I was when I began dating Marianne but I am inescapably the same as well.

As a child I was terrified of the idea of having to be romantic. I imagined that the world was swarming with these suave, debonair men just sweeping women off their feet with roses, horses and piles and piles of clever, sophisticated words. "I don't even know how to be a man" I thought. I was scared to buy flowers and terrified of walking into a jewelry store lest I be arrested for being there. I realise now though that I had a really narrow picture of romance, and I probably still do. Romance stretches far beyond my capacity to do anything. Romance is me listening; it is me looking and admiring and having my breath taken away. True romantics are changed from the inside by the wonder of the whole world and then, as an act of gratitude, pour themselves out into their beloved. The more I sit in the silence and wonder of life asking God questions without answers the more patient and distant I become with every hard word and business deal. All the advertising, all the concrete in the world cannot blanket the gift we have been given.

I think G.K. Chesterton said that: "The world is in no need of wonders, what it needs is wonder". I love that. If you are reading this, stop. If you are still reading, stop. Go outside, lie down and cry at all the tragedy, laugh at all irony and sigh at all the beauty. If you had listened to what I said earlier though you would not have read this and the above part; you would already be breathing life and not wasting your time reading the musings of a confused child.

How to get more money in less time with less stress

Step one: The Realist / Wonder

I actually don't know the first thing about how to do anything with money. Except buy books; I am good at that. And if I did know anything about making money I think I would be out in the real world striding across concrete fumbling habitually with my ring and beaming my gaze across and through the horizon. Instead of the visceral world I would break upon the earth blazing in formulas and success- a beacon of truth of one sort or another. The numbers would fly through the air just waiting for that masterful hand to raid their providence. That masterful hand, of course, would be mine and I would not sit behind a computer after a day contemplating the futility of the rat race with good friends, great friends actually who, on a day overcast and ugly, all pretended that the sun was shining across a cloudless blue sky. With my money I could prove the unprovable: money = happiness. All good research only needs benefactors. I would be the Santa sack of the world: an endless, pouring, benevolent gesture capturing the imagination of a society obsessed with all my accomplishments.

Step two: The Emerging Megalomaniac

I know it sounds evil but so do you when you chime on and on about saving society from all its ills. I'm pretty sick of it really. Here is the point: you are so content and stuffed (see the Leunig cartoon of the same name for this reference) that you have nothing to bigger to do than place those contributing members of society below you in a hypocritical rave. All production adds value and morality unto society; whilst some production is misdirected Nietzsche's theory of eternal return sees that this fluff floats off and is forgotten as if it never existed. All other goodness of industry catapults down the snowy mountain picking up speed and weight and power and terrifying beauty until it imposes itself as a juggernaut against eternity itself. All this of course is the pathway of humanity so that if we are not unified underneath the glamour of purpose our forces become unstuck and like a snowball breaking against a cliff face we scatter the earth and fall white over the entire landscape. I believe that there exists a similar downfall: Babel, supposedly their cliff face was God.

Step three: What our forgetfulness breeds! (a lament)

When all falls at the feet of eternity in a great garbage heap of hopeless exhaustion we will finally see that all human endeavour was only for the purpose of not being bored. Our time is both short and neverending but we only count for one split second burning like a rocket through the hole of forever. Today you set the catapult in time against the rest of your soul's life outside of time. Our eyes burn with the fragility of this decaying, heaving, choking husk of life and then they tire out and grow dim and light becomes hard to see apart from where it is thrust against us in a haze of neon fantastic. The cities of our sprawling stacked atop one another weep and sweat at all of the misery they have seen. And if concrete could wail we would lose our ears to the din raining on us day and night. All of this, at our hands, we spent, we bred and we nurtured because we were bored. And now plunging our heads through the entirety of infinity we have so much time to think about all of the times we forgot to take time to plan for the time in which there would be no time but instead an endless supply of it (time, that is). I don't know about you but the thought of perpetually remembering how I wasted my life tearing down a planet in order to build a machine is a thought I cannot ignore.

Step four: Reducing Stress

While the principles of stress reduction run through all of the above principles in neat, discernible lines it is also necessary to allocate space specific to stress reduction techniques. The reduction of stress can only really be examined properly by first understanding what stress is and where it is birthed from. Stress is a culmination of mental, emotional and physical weights and may manifest itself in all three in any particular combination although increasingly today's society there tends to be an increasing emphasis on physical well being and emotional fitness over mental health. Consequently mental health in the Western world is losing grip (excuse the pun). Because of this phenomenon we will tackle some strategies for reducing mental stress and anxiety first.
Remember: it is all in your head. For mental stress nothing works better than an illusionary cure, also known as a placebo. Think of something that you can trust as really relieving stress and by simply believing that it works you will see your mental health climb like a monkey. Some ideas include: squishy, coloured stress balls, sleeping, insulting your boss in shrewd sarcastic ways, pirating music, buying things, sugar pills, heroin or cocaine (even crack cocaine will do although not if you are used to A- grade purity), exercising, biting your nails, screaming at your wife and children, combing your hair till it falls out, playing golf, blogging, crying in the dark, laughing loudly at unfunny jokes, wearing clothes, being naked, organising events for your company social that involve the harm of other employees (paintball etc.) or breathing correctly.

A spear, from inside directed outward and not the other way around

I stand in the middle of a large, flat plain. Hands by my side and eyes straight ahead. If you look closer though you will notice that tentacles rage out from inside me flailing in wild objection. That is the nature of my belief. Even my greatest composure cannot for all time betray the murder inside me and exiled on this plain my black arms cannot injure.

Before I arrived here I saw a crowd of one million men and women all suppressing themselves and going insane. Their evil nature overcame them and from the mass spewed ugly complacency and inurgency and all the things that constitute a wasting society. I fell to my knees and prayed, I said: "Lord, Lord, change me from inside and let me not strive with actions alone for I am futility and destitution wrapped up in skin and bones". And so I ran. Out of my home and my town into the land of nobody and of nothing all for nothing. I then felt that with all the running I will do in this lifetime that I will never get any closer than I have already; I will be no closer to the goal which is infinite and yet I will continue to move from my starting place. I am perpetually a beginner and confined to the realm of finitude acting upon the infinity that is weaving through my bones and bursting me outward at the seams.

We hear wonderful things when we listen. But that is hard to remember and even harder to do.

Fight! Fight! Win! Win! OR serve, serve, lose, lose

Just enrolled properly for uni and got my timetable and everything. How very exciting. Being my last year I am going to be swimming in education propaganda and probably drown because of it. My hope is that I can get out of education and into academia- hopefully philosophy or literature. It's not very interesting this whole thing but I am fairly tired and it can be so difficult trying to come up with something creative every day- particularly when you are feeling not so.

My humanities subject this semester is modernism which should prove to be interesting and Anthony Uhlmann is a good teacher. I could hijack the elective in some great protest of objective progress but I don't think they would tolerate that from a novice upstart. That sort of thing is more reserved for institutionalised intellectuals and raving madmen (Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault and Derrida). Besides we tried being unintentionally postmodern in our high school English when they asked us to write 'an essay' we literally wrote: 'an essay'. It was incredibly witty and clever at the time although we couldn't really express why.

I sat in church last night and thought about how I shouldn't be able to sit in church. How the church is a dynamic people and how we are the church. The guy up the front (it wasn't a church I attend on any regular basis) talked about how to respond to cults like Jehovah's Witnesses. It seemed very defensive to me and I just wondered what is it that we defend in Christianity? I don't think we really have to defend the Church or tradition or history, if anything, we should probably divest ourselves of history. Is it worth defending the influence of the Church today? I don't really think so. I mean Jesus had a tremendous influence although he did not pursue it. On the one hand I understand that the Church is defending freedom in the end. The freedom to believe and also defending a number of parts that culminate into the freedom that Jesus talked about. But on the other hand, freedom is never taken it only can be given (I think). A lot of people talk about how Jesus defeated sin on the cross and use a lot of war analogies but I think that it kind of strange that he died in order to do so.

I have never studied theology and I don't know anything about substitutionary atonement blah blah etc. but God did not take faithful people out of the world and grant them salvation instead he gave of himself in order to save all. I wish I saw the Church do the same thing. A lady the other day came into Word Bookstore unaware it was a Christian store and upon realising what it was shook her head at me and said how sad it was that religion and commerce cavorted in the same bed. I wanted to agree with her but I was powerless to do so.

Night time at home

I am hoping to throw away all my axes. I spent most of my teenage years building a beautiful, dazzling collection and grinding and grinding until they were sharp enough- for what?- for anything. The biggest problem is that I never had the guts to use them- like a nuclear superpower stocking weapons for that great war that would never happen we all imitate our surroundings. The political climate of fear flowed like a waterfall from on high and I would plan and plot my relationships. Plot against my friends and family that if ever that day would arise where nuclear (family) war would break out I would be prepared with an arsenal to rival the best.

How do I throw away such fear? For I am afraid, that much is true. Now I sit in silence at home throwing prayers skyward in a bid for two things: desire and love (and also patience). My whole being winces at the idea of more and more demands but I just need this much and then I will be set.

Oh, sweet Father, Father, Father. Now speak and I will listen.

A cake cut into halves into quarters

Last night I was Sal Paradise. I sat in the middle of a huge wine glass as the wine was poured from a cask toward me and life splashed and twirled and collapsed and dizzied itself around me. I was nearly drowned in the life that suffocated me- it was beautiful. The people swaggered and staggered spilling out 'hey baby's' and 'nice to see you's' laughing raucously destroying any air of 'I don't really know you'. They mixed and eddied and danced and fell and rose and got shot and stumbled over lounge seats waving cigarettes warning people. I sat there with legs crossed taking it all in, I smiled and smiled till my face stayed that way.

The music bound my ears and I bounced and nodded and closed my eyes and swayed and shook and took out all my inhibitions. The night stretched from my birth until eternity and we wrote poetry and forgot and walked up stairs and leaned against walls and let life overtake us as we ran at breakneck speed to keep up with it all. The Moroccan gentleman on the way home was dynamite. He spoke with a French accent and spewed crazy Australia better than Cronulla and Bondi and Manly combined. I was raptured by him; I wanted to go home and meet his family: 'how do you do?' bowing low and English- like. I wanted him to take me to Morocco and show me where to eat and walk through the deserts and rush through marketplaces knocking down fruit stands.

When I arrived home my heart was swimming and waterlogged. Both heavy and light and dancing and aching and stretched out over my bed I closed my eyes and fell asleep into yet another dream.

Hoppípolla: Sigur Rós

This video is for Marianne. I hope that if we do grow old together that we never stop having fun and that youth sits in us like a consistently exploding bomb.

Fly by mouth

OMG! A river! It fell from the sky!
The whole town was swallowed by it!
The virgins all drowned! (how sad, how sad)
The television stars all cried! (how true, how true)
Helicopters were crushed and crashed!
It was on the news, I saw it. (mutter, mutter, horrific, blah, blah)
I hear that it is now a serene countryside with cows and old fences and grasses and trees and farmers saying hello to neighbours and passers-by.
Oh what a tragedy! (what a waste)
We all wept for days and to celebrate our sorrow we bought new clothes (hooray, what did you get?)

Toward revolutions

Daniel lies on his back, eyes open to the ceiling, blurring his vision so that the cream canopy seeps down over the walls and the room melts into a haze of off- white. Today is another day. Not that day in which all things take place but a day in which all things are thrown aside. That day in which ideas come and go like visitors and where everything is fluid. The worst part is Daniel knows it. He can feel the aching complacency growing heavy and solidifying in his bones as though it were a natural process.

As the world is bathed in a creamy blur he has an idea. An idea for a piece. He will write out his frustration and his anxiety toward revolutions. A revolution against revolutions if you will. The usual questions assault his mind. Medium? Form? Language? It is probably not worth writing. He tracks the idea instead; where it came from and where it will stop:

'I heard a song yesterday, about being a revolution. It was disgusting and made me want to hurl rocks at young people. The revolution went something like this: I (the instigator of this new avant garde) am indefinable, I defy you to label me, to pigeon hole me. I am a million things at once, so much so that I cannot even give you a cohesive answer for my dynamism. Perhaps one word would suffice one word can sum up my brilliant, erratic, unpeggable character: I am a revolution.

'That is no revolution, a revolution stands and is a consistent torpedo through society. It runs a course that is predictable and steady but because of the wavering and crying and bending within the majority of culture a revolution stands out. The whole idea though kills me; I want to begin a revolution but it is beyond me if only an idea could be birthed by me and nurtured and grown into maturity by somebody else. I think that society has enough babies though. Perhaps that is why no- one can raise up mature ideas anymore. We have petulant children of thought exploding all over the earth in magazines, newspapers, televisions and movies. My thoughts are no better though. I have no firm missile to launch into the bowels of society and rupture a response. I simply just lay here and wrestle with myself and debate and whine about how I cannot pick up my stories where I leave them. Somebody else will have to do it.'

Daniel put his pad down on top of the alarm clock that would not ring and slid over the opposite side of his bed facing the wall. He let out a large sigh and let darkness cross his eyelids. His bedroom was neat. Across the side of the room, opposite his bed, was a large study desk which also doubled as a book shelf. Along it were volumes of poetry from the English greats as well as literature from contemporary writers whom he found amusing: Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Don Delilo, Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski. At the end of the room was a large window which overlooked the park behind his house. Just below the sill was a window seat covered in all sorts of accumulated boxes and unfinished projects. Spray cans, canvasses, large sheets of paper, art books, pens, paints and all sorts lay strewn about the neglected end of his room. Daniel would fall asleep for another two hours before waking up again. Upon which he would again sigh then throw together some clothes and go and drink bad coffee down the road. The coffee, set against his brain and coupled with the weight of complacency would drive him to head home and fall asleep again on the lounge. For now though, he is still thinking about how he will never fall back asleep in his single bed; he opens his eyes for a second and staring at the wall he forgets everything he ever thought about.

Imagining to be a writer

I am twenty one years old. I really do not know much about anything, I am not sure what I want to do and I have no idea where life is going to take me. I do know that I do not want to be enslaved to a full time job and all the pointlessness of the chase for wealth. Fulfillment lies beyond wealth and material satisfaction. It is as though sometimes I feel by sating our immediate desire for the material we deny any deeper reality and consequently let ourselves be short changed. We sell out. Selling out to what we can see, touch, hear, smell and taste is so easy though and often it is so good. It is only through desiring a deeper truth or a more satisfying experience that we can be led to that.

I deeply wish to be a writer. I have no idea what it takes and I have no idea if I am any good; I have never taken any writing courses or studied how to write but ideas and thoughts brim in me and I have nothing to do but scrawl them down in all their incomplete, incomprehensible gibberish. The question though that supersedes me being a writer is what is it that God wants? What is God's will for my life?

One thing, in relation to Christianity, that I often think about is my failure in prayer. I am hopeless at praying and I do not really know how it works. My ideal is obviously Jesus who healed sick people with just a word (and sometimes not even that). The first thing I should say is that I do not want to be some superpowerful healer dude who just walks around selling wellness. I want to know God so well that I know God's will so well that I can heal in a word, or so that I can walk in confidence in whatever I am doing knowing that God is laying the path before me, with me and behind me.

So while I have a desire to be a writer I have no idea whether or not it is within the will of God. And if you have made it this far please remember that I do not know what I am talking about but I am hoping to incite conversation (I love using incite there because it has such a violent tone as opposed to conversation). I am only twenty one years old. And I hope things work out.

Cava bien

At this riverbank the sun falls and old men in their dark worn trousers and pastel shirts with the first few buttons open to dark, leathery chests wail to each other. Tired and exhausted horns spread their wings and glide over the river and the whole world feels like a Polaroid of the past.
A young man with a bad case of heartache plays the tambourine and sings sorrow into the cupped ears of the fishermen. The grasses are still and orange is stretched over the sky as though a painter has streaked the canvas and created something accidentally beautiful. The smell of open air and running water and freedom break over the atmosphere and for the first time I run my hand across the top of the tall grass and know that I am not alone.
As the dark overtakes I slowly stand and begin to walk back listening to the beautiful chatter chatter of other languages. As I stumble back into town I pass the entirety of my wealth to the young man and his tambourine and crackly old gramophone and sore, bruised heart. He continues to wail and moan with eyes closed and it fills me with a great hope; the kind of hope that breaks on the shores of beaches or that grows toward the sky in rainforests or that cooks fish to perfection in the tired and warm glow of Sunday afternoon.

Inside

inside he bungled across deserts in a rusty suit of armour
outside it was incorrectly fitted and he often had to carry it

at night I stand face first into bushes and she walked on ahead
who knows what acrobatics the back of the back of her head is doing
the dolls teeter and squeeze me into cracks all Russian in their dress
it is hopeless really to think that I could run through this fun house

the sun melts his wax fortress of solitude and ragged and blind
and aching and his heart beating so fast that it may come outside
he walks across the room and drops a piece of paper that reads:

"if you stretched your hands upward, as if to the sky, you would be beautiful from your toes until your fingertips"

You are in a hurricane and you don't even know it or You write with too many brackets!

The circle was either a sun or a moon. I think each person in the circle thought they were a sun. Our writer's collective was like that. Every person there felt their own writing so much more powerfully than each others, apart from one girl, who barely read us anything. Whether she wrote or not at all we all silently wondered, I think. I mean, it wasn't like we discussed it, we all had our suspicions though (or perhaps it was just me). Writers (if what was collected in that large, echoing room every fortnight could be called that) are funny. So many seem to just manufacture depth and experiences from nothing. It seems all very deceptive; they come off sounding like authorities but to give these guys any grounding would see your life thrown into a hurricane.

Collectively through, through the lens of the entire history of the world: we were a tiny, tiny moon. We basked in reflected glory and shone down on everyone else; actually it was less shining and more gloating down on everyone else. Anyway, the point is we were not a sun. We did nothing new and spent most of the time suspecting each other of not fulfilling the quota that we would set each time we met (every fortnight if you weren't paying attention). So sitting in a ragged circle in a large, old classroom with wooden floors and stone walls (basically a machine for generating noise- squeaking chairs, a cough, the following 'excuse me', then of course the drone of the person telling their story which sounded as though it were spoken from a narrow hallway and bounced off every wall as it ran up to meet you, or the way I ten- pin bowl. We would reel off stories, mostly just written for each other, and suspect each other (silently of course) of plagiarism or perhaps just ponder exploding out of the group with delusions of grandeur.

I have really no way of finishing this expect to point out what I tried to do. Firstly, those who know me will know that this is all lies- I do not attend a 'writer's collective' but if I did I think I just convinced myself to leave. Secondly, being false, I tried to critique myself and you as the reader by having a go at writers and their crazy plans for world domination (or maybe me and my crazy plans for world domination). Thirdly, I tried to write in a lighter, more personal and ultimately more comedic tone. And lastly it was just practice and I had to come up with something...

I'd love to know what you think so send me a letter (a real letter, not one of these crazy e- letter things) at 17 Neirbo Ave Hurstville 2220. And please don't firebomb my house and for those actually considering writing a letter remember how hard it is and long it takes to walk to the post box, and you don't have any stamps anyway.

Potential

The things that everybody said rattled around in his head for every day that he did not fulfill his promise. They would bounce in between conscious thought and that hideous sneaking fear that something, anything is going to swallow you whole. Most of the time what everybody said would condense down into one word; like a sun dying and collapsing in on itself until it is no bigger than a basketball but weighing one million times more than he was capable of.

The biggest problem was that he did not know what to do with this curse (or blessing). On occasion he would wear it, a medal around his neck to convince others of the truth of the promise that he made to the world. Other times, the times it would crush him underneath, he would pray for it to be gone or for freedom from it.

He read a lot of books. He read a lot of great books by great, dead men (and some great, dead women). He was well aware that artistic brilliance shines through the worst times of ones life but he was always curious as to whether these great, dead men ever felt the weight of the promise they showed the world and whether they were ever paralysed by it. No doubt there were millions of artistic nobodies who fell by the wayside in the great march of lineal history. Who were paralysed by the weight of their own expectation. But they were nobodies and he would not be relegated to their ranks, a cast of billions, perhaps.

He stood at bus stops for hours hoping to wilt away into the scenery. He would stalk the streets at midnight hoping that someone would think him dangerous and cross the road to avoid him. He really just wanted to follow through though and actually steal from someone, give them something real to fear. He desired to be a rich man who threw plasma televisions from his fourth floor balcony and who still bought home brand groceries. It was the stereotype that fascinated him. He would deliberately conjure himself up to be an ironic stereotype that would give people reasons to say cliche things.

One day though, his parents died in a horrific car crash with an evil drunk driver who survived. He quit university, got a job managing a book store and spent his nights remembering the joyous weight that promise felt like; wondering if anyone would ever say it to him again.

Three styles, all done badly

I would be a person as well. Religious conviction has laid me low and transformed my opinion. I am the stereotype and not the archetype. It is strange how Christians are regarded as less human; as not having had to deal with life. In some ways I can see how this is right but in others I grow frustrated because my own wrestling with Christianity is not seen as legitimate within or without the Church. In this way I find the Church wildly ungracious and if it were not for Jesus I'd probably give the whole thing in.

Last night I drove an hour with my girlfriend to visit an old friend of mine. We had a great night together- eating dinner and telling stories and being together. For some reason there was never that awkward air that seems to attach itself to me and the way I relate with everybody else. We drove to dinner in the one car and put on Cansei De Ser Sexy's "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" and danced in true Sao Paulo style; it was wonderful.

On a completely different note I have now come to think that marketing is perhaps the most evil of all corporate devices. The whole machine of marketing is driven in order for people to be unhappy. In capitalism, in order to keep everybody busy, there is massive overproduction of goods; so, somehow those goods have to be used (at least for some time) and the only way to keep it true to capitalism is sell them. To sell them though you need to create a need- a market. This involves making people feel as though they are unsatisfied or unhappy with their lives without that product. As we weary on though our lives become more and more meaningless with our ever- increasing amount of stuff. Therefore whether marketing only creates need or creates and fulfills it, it only succeeds in propagating the unhappiness that is rife within the capitalism ethic of 'more'.