I still spend an hour every morning coughing earnestly and can’t laugh without coughing. I thought I was trapped for life. So I hear you and I just want to say: nicotine cravings last four minutes in the body. The rest is mindgame. If you can ‘delay, drink water, do something else’ for four minutes […]

Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them […]

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What a strange feeling to watch Mitch Winehouse, father of the Amy who died young, telling the camera after her death how he felt it was not his place to save her. You can’t force treatment on somebody, he says, and shrugs. Meantime he is running the Amy Winehouse Foundation, his income derived from her […]

9

The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We […]

Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, […]

Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” […]

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What if the things we are most dependent on are insufficient substitutes for something else? Walking home from my first independent visit to the gym – no trainer – and feeling throughout my body how free and magnificent I felt, and noticing the autumnal leafy breezy feel of Brisbane’s deep winter and how the traffic […]

I feel so ashamed and disgusted and frightened at what’s happening in my country. The inhuman way the world’s oldest civilization are treated. The lack of generosity towards people needing help who arrive on our shores. The decision to dump dredging waste from the expansion of a coal port within the National Park created to […]

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Last night a lost soul brushed past me on the street and I could feel the black, sucking wind. She was very beautiful, extremely young, just-enormous eyes. Bare feet and ankles swollen like stumps. Bruises. Old bruises. She was leaving the curb as I reached it to cross the street, making a decision, counting out […]

A punker girl crossed the street under the shady trees, shouting at some invisible or internal enemy. She was dressed in black from boot to root, her ears infested with silver and bone. Parts of her bristled and other parts erupted with pus. She scraped a chair out at the cafe where we were reading […]

I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the […]

4

I wonder if the reason we are all so fascinated by vampires is that we *are* vampires, draining the blood from our land. Is that why we want to see this as desirable and glamorous? Is that why we long to confess?

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There are two sex shops nearby amid the shoes, discounted make up, flimsy summer dresses and cheap suits. Assuming they don’t sell sex itself any more than garage sales sell garages, I am guessing they sell implements. Outfits. Toys. Exciters & enhancers. I’ve never been much interested in football. If someone turns up at my […]