Yarra

Paid a visit to the confluence last evening; the water was slamming itself unusually hard over the weir like it couldn't wait to get the fuck out of Melbourne. HA! HA! Ha more fool it if that's what it thinks is going to happen, Melbourne is like The Doors now, don't you know that Mr Water? No one gets out of here alive. As we watched the water slam misguidedly away a soccer ball came to the edge and rolled over. It was a few minutes after sunset and I had a torch pointed at the ball, which seemed to be mostly dark with white patches (I don't know the technical name for what those bits on soccer balls are, and I don't want to know, it's of no interest to me & I'm confident I will never agayne have occasion to talk about the surfaces of soccer balls even if I live to be nine thousand years old) and the white patches were wet and they shone in the torchlight like big starey bunyip eyes. So when the ball sank into the rapids and bobbed up a couple of times before disappearing for good it was a bit creepy, although admittedly not as creepy as a very small cadre of anti-lockdown protesters going to the postapocalyptic abandoned shopping mall of Chadstone today and singing 1.5 choruses of You're The Voice to the police who I suppose promptly arrested them right there outside of Coles (open) and Angus & Coote Jewellers (closed). The Age contacted Glenn Wheatley for comment afterwards which was also a standout creepy event even for these unprecedentedly creepy times.

The Yarra Trail delivered like it always does. Jeez but it is good. The day was over and there's no moon right now so the only lights came from streetlights a little way off, sometimes filtered through peppercorn trees or reflecting softly off the planes of concrete bridges spanning the river gorge, or from coming and going bike lights, or from serene and romantic-looking lit windows in the tall apartment buildings overlooking the Abbotsford loop of the river. There were lots of birds, not many bats, far fewer walkers and riders than I thought there'd be, and one immensely cheering possum staggering about in a tree and shoving branches up and down. So what you get from the river in the dark is the essentials: its movement and its coolness and its smell, and most of all, the space it's cleared for itself.

A few weeks ago I walked a bit further along that bit of the river with a work colleague who's having a very bad time. Before that I think the last time I was there was a weekday maybe two days after I moved out, when I was very shaky and raw, as one is when one has just done that, and I rode alone around the capital city trail. I stopped at Dights for a while, maybe half an hour, hard to say how long. I'm sitting here remembering that day and that ride and recognising, indeed understanding, what was happening there. The trail is a circle, 30 km, almost flat, varied but always exquisitely beautiful, and for long stretches it's quite deserted even as it threads you between built-up areas and busy roads. I had never lived alone before my marriage ended. Lenny had not come with me to my new place, he would be coming to me in a day or two, but until then,  I'd temporarily left him, and the phase of my life defined by him, the house, the cat, everything domestic and personal bar a few possessions, and some level not consciously accessible to me I knew that being alone was something I had to go into blind, no map, no going back. Money poured through my fingers like water in moving out and the establishment of this rented flat; I got a promotion and pay rise in November last year but at the point when I moved out and for a long time after that I had to be very frugal. On the ride round the Yarra trail I picked foliage and flowers out of municipal plantings to put in a vase at 'home'. There are nineteen potted plants in this room now.

I've learned how to live alone, or how to live the version of alone which you have when your child lives with you half of the time. It is very much okay. Time alone is not down time or dead time between livelier experiences. Sometimes it's glum and sometimes it's strange, and sometimes when the setting and atmosphere is nice I wish wistfully for a companion to be there and share that enjoyment. Most days I also wish my cats could talk, they seem to think they can but they cannot, it is all lies or at least, misinformation. What do they think of me? I was with my dearest friend last night by the river; it was not complicated, not overloaded, peaceful, simple, right. 

This is Your Lighfe! Such a Boringkh Story

Since I began using a sleep tracker app I've paid more attention to what I can do that produces a sound, restorative sleep. The ridiculous disco lightbulb, if I set it to a low mild orange and read by that light, seems to really help, as does not going to sleep too early in the evening. A few simple observations like that, and here we are: sleeping half as much again as I was this time last year, and without the assistance of any kind of drug.

I recently signed up to participate in a study on how Covid affects our minds. For this I report my night dreams and daydreams (you have to set aside time to daydream) every day for at least a fortnight. It's a lot of work and my dreams, so far, are embarrassingly stupid. I am definitely dreaming more. This morning I was deep in a heavy dream when I woke. The pink blocks are dream state sleep and even for me this is a very dream-intensive night. 

I know I write this a lot but daily waking life is now so much like a dream, in so many respects, that I question whether isolating special states of mind and attending to those is not sort of missing the point. How dreadfully arrogant; I don't mean to say that those scientists designing and running their study don't know the nature of what they're investigating. It's just a question I ask here because I can.

In the supermarket yesterday afternoon I looked (again) at all the people walking round totally normally but wearing face masks. I look at this all the time on the street too, when I'm walking. The mask is the mark of calamity and everyone walks round with it on their faces as if nothing has happened. At this point I now feel cocooned inside / behind my own mask. I feel invisible, looking at other people. 

This morning brushing my teeth I thought (again) that the uncanniness of the virus is that spread itself across the whole world, inexorable, omnipotent, unified, microscopic, fragmented, mindless, and it made no concession to anything or anyone. It has total power to affect and change everything, and it has this absolute power without intelligence or consciousness. This is not frightening, but it is very strange. Possibly I only think this because I never bothered to get a scientific education.

David came over this morning and made pancakes for breakfast. This was delightful, and novel rather than strange. But the pancakes themselves were strange. I asked for mine to have a face on it and I definitely got what I asked for.

The torment of this work week and its too many meetings every day: four meetings today, on three different video call platforms, and three personal calls. A colleague is having a birthday tomorrow and, you know, I sincerely hope it's as happy as it can be - but I felt I couldn't come up with a pithily phrased piece of well-wishing to contribute to the collection which is going onto the 'card' that he will receive by email tomorrow. I should've just written 'I hope your birthday is as happy as can be'. Instead I Googled for a line and was punished / rewarded with a website of phrases plucked from the linguistic corpus of a parallel world I can almost imagine.

I had an idea for a sustained drawing project. People have suggested 'a children's book'. This is a book idea but not for children particularly. It's an album of pictures of the things Victorians have been fined for doing contrary to public health orders. Two women were eating ice cream in the street at 2am etc. For months we have been supplied with these little glowing wires of images of what's going on out there in the night and the distance. We are given these stories for political reasons and Victorians have been issued with more than ten million dollars worth of on the spot fines, but the stories themselves are so curious and evocative. A man went to Gruyere to buy a vintage car. A woman said she was going to work, but she was in her pyjamas and had two dogs in the back. I made a big list.

Then I set off for an aimless walk. After a bit I thought I might as well go to Piedimonte's, although to myself I kept saying it was Pellegrini's and this was exasperating, because I know perfectly well that it isn't. (I stood in front of closed-up Pellegrini's a few weeks ago, when I went into the city to give blood,  and stared into the dark while a friend on the phone told me she had found out she must have her breasts and ovaries cut away to avoid getting cancer.)

As I got closer to Pellegrini's I mean Piedimonte's I saw loads of posters on houses whinging about how Piedimonte's is going to be made taller, and I felt a disreputable, shabby, mean little stab of savage pleasure that the inmates of these lovely warm interesting tactile houses and streets are shameless and selfish enough to squander their complaining energy on complaining about the local shop instead of, oh, just about anything else 

On the walk home I started to read the newspaper on my phone and please, just join me for a moment in noticing how weird, how really really really weird, is this man who's convening some sort of retarded protest against Daniel Andrews.  Check him out.

I bought a bunch of poppies at the shops and I was so pleased, because I've wanted a bunch of poppies since July and I really thought I'd missed the season. But one of those flowers has a green hairy casing on the bud which is as long as my hand from the heel of my palm to the tip of my middle finger. It's a goddamn triffid!

Fore completeness' sake I had better note that a short while ago Chanticleer rolled onto his back and stretched his paws up past his ears and let out a deep full-throated uncatlike groan of a yawn, most unlike him really. I tried just now to reproduce the sound he made, in the interests of describing it more accurately to you, and I woke them both up, which is only fair since they wake me up every morning. 

I'm not going to say '2020' any more, because I have a feeling that this freakeigh kinda business is here to stay, in one form or another. Well, goodnight. I'm going to close my eyes now and listen deep with my heart to this record playing now, Pour Down Like Silver by Richard and Linda Thompson, the opposite of weird, clarity and sincerity of sound and purpose, and drift off to oblivion somewhere unmoored in the dark between 1975 and now

my maidenhair

 

The days and nights are getting warmer and windier and the air inside the flat is on balance probably not as dry as the air out on the balcony, so I've brought my maidenhair fern indoors till summer's over. It will be terrorised by the naughty brother, who one day when bored bit holes in all the leaves of my never-never plant and has ignored it ever since, and who chewed all the pups off my spider plant when I foolishly moved it down off the top of a high cupboard last week because it was flourishing so beautifully. But the poor fern can't stay outdoors. 

Lenny gave me this fern for my birthday last year and rightly or wrongly, probably the latter, I took it as a bit of a passive-aggressive gesture on the part of his father who of course assisted him with that purchase. So it has been a point of pride to make this plant thrive and flourish, and of course, they're extremely beautiful when they do. I am careful to make sure I help Lenny organise birthday and Christmas and Father's Day presents, not for Dorian's sake but because Lenny deserves the happiness of giving a gift to his parent. I had to take him to a shop and send him in by himself with money a couple of days before Mother's Day, and it was one of the sadder small moments of novice single parenting. I've done a full year of all those dates now and it's ok. 

The grittiest parts of the week of parenting/work/managing school/staying home 23 hours out of 24 are done, now. I always underestimate at the beginning of the week just how brutal it is going to be, which is probably a survival mechanism a bit like forgetting the pain of childbirth. Modifying my diet means that for every one of the 21 meals in a week at home that I plan, prepare, serve and clean up after, I need to make something different for Lenny than for me, so that has been a huge drag. I haven't lost any weight but I do feel hugely better without empty carbohydrates bloating up my system. I didn't want to feel even a hint of hunger while weaning myself off added sugar and bread and pasta and most fruit (but having all these on hand for Lenny to eat) because when I am hungry, or when I am unsettled by something going on int he work sphere (which happened about nine times a day this week), I find myself standing in the kitchen peeling a mandarine at best, making an unnecessary piece of toast at worst. So I haven't been hungry and I can definitely eat smaller amounts of nutrient-dense food next week without hunger or loss of energy. Actually I really love bread in all its better forms and would be very grieved to never again to go to A1 Bakery and inhale a freshly baked puffy floury spinach and sumac pie. This thing I'm doing is a diet although you are not meant to call it that, because diets are temporary and this is meant to be permanent lifestyle change. But here we are deep into a real shitty lifestyle change, this is a solid lockdown arse-to-couch situation; twelve weeks of dieting will hopefully put my body back to rights and also see me through to a time when I can resume most of my usual exercise and therefore go back to eating whatever the fuck I feel like eating, without paying for it in the form of waistbands that begin to dig into the nice soft flesh of my belly.

I was a bit mean to Lenny earlier this evening after he laughed and said something cheeky when I asked him to bring his own dinner things inside off the balcony. It's a bind really, I wait upon him hand and foot in terms of domestic labour (even though I know I shouldn't) and it is my highest priority in these months to make sure he's as happy as he can possibly be when he's in my presence, and all that takes a lot of strength; at the ragged end of a rough week which ended with a bang in a once-in-a-decade level of disconcerting work situation, I snapped at him, he withdrew, I felt angry at everything on my own for a while, then went and made it up with him. He accepts those overtures of repair very readily - seemingly much more readily than I was ever able to do. I trust that he has some resilience, founded on the steady and consistent experience of love and trust, to tide him over the moments when life isn't perfect. I give him 21 meals a week and only crack the shits at one of them, well, I can forgive myself for that.

This flat is really good but also I'm so incredibly tired of being in it always. Setting aside that stay in hospital in April, the last time I spent a night anywhere but here was when I went to Sydney for work in October or November last year, and before that the last place I spent a night somewhere not-here was the 27th of June which was the last time I slept at the old house. [edited to add: no I don't think this is right: I went to Lancefield for craft camp in September just before the cat circus moved in.]

Fat

Yesterday the premier explained what it was that he had had in mind for Victoria when he asked the Parliament to allow another six months' state of emergency. One thing you could never accuse him of (at the moment) is trying to please voters or anyone. He therefore must be telling the truth when he says he thinks he hasn't any choice but to do it this way. What's with Labor politicians, don't they ever learn? Look at Kevin Rudd. Do you want to end up all alone, like him?

The management of the pandemic in Victoria has suddenly become a political issue for me, following on from phases of ennui, equilibrium and acceptance, personal terror, grief, terror but existential, all the way back to the beginning and the almost overnight disappearance of my sense of reality. 

I've been watching with confusion and increasing disquiet as even the leftiest of my friends and acquaintances grow more and more quietly accepting and indeed supportive of increasingly authoritarian behaviour from the government (although they're happy to pour scorn on the police, and indeed the police are doing some really awful and ominous things - there are mobile surveillance units in Melbourne public parks ffs). The right to protest which was correctly recognised by the Left as a very important thing to protect, in May when the protests were about a progressive cause, is not regarded as worth speaking up for when the protestors are stupid and venal. Indeed it seems to be fine to see a stupid old person set upon and dragged away by ten armed cops. I am going to try to say something complicated now. The mostly very stupid, weak, confused and pathetic people who showed up at the lockdown protest on Saturday, with their incoherent and poorly designed signs bereft of the kind of witty yet sweary lines borne aloft by all the best people at all the best protests, their de trop crying and mumbling, their ridiculous conspiracy theories, those people are speaking the only language of dissent which our impoverished, unequal political culture has provided to them; they don't know how to radicalise when they have a grievance to express. But they have a legitimate grievance, and that they are protesting in kitsch doesn't make it any less genuine. Things are really bad in Victoria. 

In the public conversation about how the pandemic is being managed is a sense of there being two categories of potential damage, social / economic damage and health damage, presented by manichean conservatives as alternatives to be weighed and balanced, and by technocrats in government as a false dichotomy. Of course the real false dichotomy is between these positions. Both are correct. What is missing from the damage manifest is the harm being done to the institutions of democracy, something that should matter to both sides of politics much more than it seems to, albeit for different reasons. And you know what, when I hear the Chief Health Officer saying, and the Premier parroting him, that he doesn't take a political stance on the management of a public health crisis, that's when I reach for whatever is the peaceseeker equivalent of my revolver, and also it fucking shits me to tears.

Well, I'm dismayed by the government's apparent determination to drag out as long as possible their blunt-instrument approach to containing and stopping the spread of the virus, and next to the decline and fall of Australia's progressive instincts, and the fact that my poor son may well not go back to school till some time in 2021, what cheeses me off is that the pandemic is making me fat. I've gained 7kg since this time last year - a little bit of it in a totally fine exchange of fat for muscle over summer when I really began to get confident with and enjoy weight training, but most of it dismayingly in the other direction, since May, when I could not do a daily 20km bike commute and lift heavy things four days a week, and do yoga on other days, and when I walked a lot at work and didn't sit next to the fridge all day. 7kg is a lot and I really, really don't like it, so I've gone on a diet and I am determined to get rid of it all within three months. Fuck you, Daniel Andrews, you fucking feeder! 

A year ago: 

I wouldn't have a hope, right now, of getting that floral skirt on and as for the dress, which is a Prue Acton original actually dated 1970 on the label, the terylene is fragile and would shred if I even attempted to do up the zip. (The whole thing was utterly wasted on the man I went out with that evening, although it was completely my own fault for deluding myself that he was a passable human being - he wrote on his Tinder profile that he was only interested in 'slim women who can spell' - tosser) My point is, I looked good at that weight and I knew it and loved feeling so good in my own skin. It's not just the form and the shapes (I've always cared about my body inasmuch as it's necessary for hanging clothes off of) it's a feeling of vitality and lightness.  

For the first time in my life I've signed up to a weight loss program. This is an app based thing and it's $25 a week, and I've committed to twelve weeks. It just started today. Honestly I am struggling a little bit with the usual spiral of irritation with self at not being able to just not eat things I know I shouldn't, but whatever, it'll wear off. The approach to food is unremarkable, it's just no sugar or refined carbs, lots of protein, lots of vegetables and keeping a lid on complex carbohydrates, and general clean and sober living, and enough exercise to burn fat and keep insulin levels stable. I only started today so I have the beginnings of a sugar withdrawal headache, and I'll be tired and sleepy for a few days, but I already notice that I don't feel bloated from eating bread and pasta, both things that Leonard like and requires, and which I often eat for that reason without really wanting to.

Many if not most women in my social circle very much disapprove of weight loss talk, and a vocal minority are highly censorious about it because it is understood to be a tool of the patriarchy and expressive of hating fat and fat people. I am not up for having any sort of conversation on social media or anywhere else really about whether harbouring a desire to lose weight, and preferring the experience of living in my body when I'm thinner than I am now, is a failure of politics and ethics; it's my body, Iv'e only got the one, and that's that. So it's lucky I have this blog to whinge and complain on.

On another note I was scratching Chanticleer behind his ears and there was a horrible little bump / budding dreadlock growing on his head so I tried to wiggle it loose which he didn't like so he jumped down and ran away. 'I'm tryin' tae heal ye, ye daft wee cunt' I said to him but he paid no attention. Then a while later he got on the arm of the couch again and I scratched his head again to have another go at the nodule but it was completely gone! I assumed I'd done a better job than I realised the first time around and he'd finished it off by himself somehow. But then I looked again and it was not Chanticleer but Pompey. Whah whah whah whaaaaaaah 

What's new, pussycat

 As I explained a while back, to the nice lady who did an interview on me for her research investigating how Australians' uses of alcohol have changed during the pandemic, in the second half of last year I slowly acquired a collection of bottles of spirits. Ok, a bar. It was the indulgence of a bachelor pad fantasy. I did sometimes have people around and make drinks. It was fun. Nobody ever got properly drunk - I did get a bit drunk on my own once or twice in the hottest part of summer - but sociable drinking wasn't very enthusiastic, the people I like are just not that singlemindedly devoted to their own momentary and dubious pleasures that they can forget they have to do real things like go home and get up in the morning. But that hostess business is all over now, as I told the lady. Drinking alone in enforced isolation wouldn't be a slippery slope for me at this point but I don't want to have it become one. When the impulse to make a fancy cocktail arises I think Well is it worth the hangover and usually I think No not today it isn't. But not always. I don't fancy the idea of abstinence becoming a fetish. 

I would have participated in the research for nuthin as it provided me with the personal satisfaction of speaking at some length to the topic of my views about Clementine Ford, but nevertheless the researcher compensated me with a $100 Coles voucher of which I spent $70 on white rice and vegemite to feed my child, and the rest on a colour changing LED lightbulb. I inserted the lightbulb in the standard lamp next to my bed and consequently I've joined that ultra-ultra-elite club of people who can only turn their lights on and off by the incredibly convenient means of using an app on their phones.  

The next executive toy style indulgence (if executives were slack-jawed bozos who never left the house - and they are) I indulged myself in was a portable data projector to use with the very big blockout blind over the sliding door to the balcony. It cost a lot but I have not been spending money. It's really great. The cats seem to find it a lot to deal with especially when I put on nature documentaries (which I only do to annoy them I suppose they realise that), and to get away from the big screen (if not nature programs, then Peep Show or The Eagle Has Landed, between them those screen experiences pretty much cover all entertainment modalities) they go and lie like wet socks upon my bed in the purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue light.

Peep Show I just put on because it was there when I went to test screen mirroring with iView on my laptop and I haven't seen it for years & didn't expect a great deal. But it was so funny. 

I didn't sleep much last night and this evening my eyelids are heavy as lead. 

working from home

That 2020/2001 A Space/Isolation Odyssey video I linked to in my last post: I only watched it one time but I've thought of it most days. I even described it to my doctor, a bit trepidatiously because my experience with her is she just doesn't seem to have any consciousness of, like, the cornerstones of anglophone culture, but she surprised me by acknowledging awareness of the final sequence of 2001 (maybe they make them study it in psychoanalyst school? I wondered. They should). Anyway I still think the video, by a woman called Lydia Cambron, is benchmark-settingly rich thinking about the stay-at-home in isolation element of the pandemic experience.

 

I'm seeing my doctor twice a week, and when she recently took a week's holiday it was a relief for me to have a break too. Therapy has always been a strenuous undertaking but since roughly June it's been consistently hard to find something to talk about. It's not that my life is eventless, or that I don't get anything out of the opportunity to have that support - I'm not sure what it is exactly - it might be that I do more of the work on my own now, having internalised much of the thinking and the process activated between two people working together. Anyway I begin to feel that lengthening the time between sessions would be a good thing in many ways. What I have talked about with her, most the time since working from home, is work. Removing the exoskeleton of the workplace, the relationships, the routine, took away all the crutches (or 'supports', I suppose I should say) which masked and compensated for all my resistances to getting on with my work, I have had to face the labyrinth of knots which work has been for me ever since I began doing interesting jobs, and sink or swim. The doctor's help has kept megoing there, god knows what would've happened to me without it, marooned at home in a fortnightly cycle of permanent dreamstate one week, home schooling-driven bewilderment the other. 

Well, I am anxious to assure you that, while I kind of do feel like I'm sorting out a major conundrum in my life, in practice I am not there yet and just as unable as ever to be organised and methodical and calm about doing my work irrespective of whether i'm getting lots done or hardly any. Last Friday afternoon I volunteered to run this Friday afternoon's end of week quiz hour, I've been meaning all week to compile some very tough questions about the Shrine but I haven't done it yet so I have got to do it now. All I have thought of is one question, What is the finance officer's telephone extension? And something about the Duke of Gloucester (not a euphemism). 

I know this looks like a pretty good situation to have in your house but what you need to understand is that two hours ago Chanticleer jumped onto the back of the couch, as is his wont, and crouched there with his back to me. I reached around to give him a pat, as is my wont, but as I did so I caught a horrible smell of cat poo coming from his bum, and I lifted up his tail exactly as if it was the cast-iron handle of a quaint old-fashioned water pump at an outdoor folk museum about the glory days of white settlement, and there was a lump of poo dangling from the fluff near his bumhole. So I released the handle and got a tissue, yes, and sat down again and operated the handle again, but I was too slow, and then I had to chase him round for a bit. He likes being chased but he was looking at me confusedly as well. 'Ye've a lump o poo on yon wee arsehole laddie' I said to him. After a while I showed him the cat brush which always produces ecstasies of sort of perverted rolling around on the couch, which he did, so I grabbed the handle again and this time held on, he was struggling and crying out and hissing but I managed to grab the lump off his bottom and let him go before anything happened that we would both regret. It is sad to feel such a rush of savage triumph at having pulled a blob of catshit off your cat's bum, like it was winning Sale of the Century in the fast money round or going back in time and successfully warning John Lennon to stay out of Central Park on the evening of December 8, 1980.

I got up very early today and did some work on this drawing, 

Although having written a little bit about work, this is not work, it is definitely play, in the very best sense, it is such a joy, such a small inner adventure.

Well after that a gym class, then work and school all day blah blah blah, all of it in the living roon here with bouts of mooching round on the balcony and one cold hour of scrambling round in the park with Leonard before the storm hit the city. Now, though, NOW I shall compile le quiz and make it so fucking hard that when I read out the questions and nobody knows the answers, I shall remember this day and rue it, and I will wish I'd made the questions a bit easier. 

Then I'll go to bedgh.