it's been a while since i wrote here. i built myself a diary and i have been keeping it all in there. i am back in tasmania with simon james, i played the "6A, awesome venue, great art!" fundraiser. the microphone zapped my lips and it was because i was playing bare foot in the dirt so i quit it with the microphone and did what i could. i released my first ever e.p. on simon's label today and simon paid me a meal for the "rights" to the record. i'm still exploring all this writing crud, so i thought the new "diary" could help. maybe make me better at telling people stuff, actually explaining things.

andrew harper showed a "experimental film" it was a reel of 8mm film that he had kept in a jar of piss for a year. it looked funny the way it was shaped and people kept yelling cool things like: "fuck andrew go see a doctor!" and "shhhhh! i'm trying to watch the piss!" the first time i met andrew he was shouting at people as they played about how good the last song was compared to the last last song. and simon was trying to tell me to play with phil elverum when i went to america cause he knew phil and could set it up and andrew set into the whole "k records faggot crew". "calvin johnson, what a pants man! more cock than music! fuck calvin johnson!" and tonight i stopped him from beating somebody up and when i said goodbye to him and thanked him for the show he bellowed "jesus, your a bit of nancy faggot, but youve got some fuckin fire in ya! tryin to stop me! heh heh!" i love andrew harper.

after i played people where coming up to talk to me alot, but eventually i got to sink back on this wall and go invisible in the dark and listen and pretend i was alone with the big sky, that was good. emma told me she hates my records because it makes her realise there is a completely secret part of me she can never get a hold of. she said she gets alone in the bush out past everyone is tasmania and it's really nice to hear my voice but it reminds her there is stuff she doesn't know. i wasn't sure what to say, i never know what to say to that stuff.

ghost patrol and miso had their beautiful split exhibition with acorn. acorn mailed ahead these intricate pencil tracings of some work he had done and got ghostpatrol and miso to ink them in, really amazing pictures of fat men with cardigan knit beards and girls riding chinese dragon monsters and witches and kids in christmas sweaters. ghostpatrol and miso's work was beautiful as always, my favourite was a little elephant stuck in a tree trying to get his tiny kite back and a picture of miso with a big stained glass pattern growing out of her back. they hung big fake octopus monsters from the cielings and had like a hundred tags hanging of the monsters and the tags where blank and there where cups of pens so you could draw on them. i drew some doctor doom and diamond pictures. i got drunk outside and got into a "cardboard box but it's really a boat too" race with ollie and andre nickey and sarah. then they trapped me in a box and i drank a bunch of beers in it while they pulled my arms out of the holes and drew all over them. i got ollie and ty into the "fortress of secret-tude" exhibition me and simon are holding in my back yard once he moves in. sarah will be in it too. we are building a fort in my backyard and piunning pictures all over the insides and we are hiding pictures in the trees and if you have the guts to climb the tree and get them then you get to keep them, no cost. otherwise we will be asking for whatever we want to ask for the other prices.

i haven't been able to write people personally lately. this is ok, it feels like i am exploring known facts instead of trying to feel connected with somebody. people always cause me pain. it makes feel tired and hard and dead inside when people i love tell me how they where hurt and it bores me and bothers me when people burn me and expect me to forget about it. i saw on the news bout a ten year old girl who was gang raped somewhere in queensland and the judge let the rapists off with 12 months probation, no jail time. it made me feel a billion years old. makes me wonder when everything will end and i can let it all go and forget about it. on the same night i saw a show about the genocides in darfur, a skinny black man was on the television saying the sudanese killed his wife and kids and they hate him, they want him to hate like they do, they want them to wish anger and death upon others, but he is strong because he will not, he is strong because he forgives them and wants only for it all too stop. i don't know what these things mean, but they are connected and related. they equal something and i don't know what it means, but i am scared and nervous about it.

it's about one in the morning, simon and i just finished the first brisbane show. we got all messed up on cask wine, vodka and whiskey, we have been that way for about 8 days now, i'm not sure why we are drinking so hard, but it's all working more or less. tonight simon was made to stop early, it's such a damn shame people don't get it or whatever. i know it's beautiful. shirtless and covered in bad wine i drummed my damn face off for girl mountain. i'll do it again until the end of everything.

simon is set to come and live with me, we are getting matching desks and we are going to make "science fiction monster comics" together and do alot of recording. we did a bunch of releasing stuff recently, we were drunk like morons in the labour party office using the free photocopy powers. we made a lyric and silly drawing split book.

now, writing a rough diary entry in front of you, thinking about a girl in tasmania. i was walking back to our house for the evening, holding her warm hand, looking at the grown up mountains and old logs and the way the sun was beginning to peek a bit over everything and i realized my luck of life ive lived and life i could have. some people still want to kill themselves, it comes and goes for me, but i am mostly greatful for everything. for all of it. the opening of mysterious ancient powers to keep me alive somehow.

tonight met three people, late to see me and here to see mostly me, so we took it to the front porch and i gave them some gifts for their effort and played some songs, in the end the boy of the three told me it was this diary here that inspired him to write again. mission accomplished (big muscle arms and pride to hard to explain). that's why i do this. i hope if you read this you live like your already dead. figure it out, you can't fear death, you can't prove life. all other things are silly, everything. from abortion to he-man, silly silly. live in a goofy silly flash, cause it's probably the best you'll get.

the girl who i have written of before, one of the girl's from the three, she said it was so touching when i did write about her, it was hard to keep down how good it all felt, i meant to stand with alot of reason and control, but i ended up screwing up my face and hugging all of them. my dumb ass lyrics and ideas made it through to somebody. that's all that matters.

send me hate mail, beat me up, ruin my shows, it's cool. i already accomplished enough.

i started to drink again, mom's got the illness, my tour looks cancelled and all kinds of regular bad emotions are coming and going on me. me and shaun and ty and some other kids went down to where the penguins roost by the saint kilda shore line, i had a nine dollar bottle of wine and i would take a sip and wince and the rotten fumes and the smell of it.

goddamn! i thought, this is going to cook my heart and turn me into a skeletor monster!

penguins are shiny animals, they came out from the rocks, they live in the cracks of the rocks the way i understand it, and they shined their white little bellies at us, you could tell they felt proud of them and i looked off at the bellies while we all talked silly dumb stuff. the penguin is a bird that swims, that is the kind of weirdness that only natural evolution would have the guts to try. i tried hard to drink my wine and i thought about natures guts.

rats where beginning to swim up on the dirt shore near us and i suddenly new that it was time to leave. rats always come before trouble. so we took back up towards the lights. lights around the bars, lights on the highway and they looked more like they were trying to fly away than light us up.

meanwhile i discovered that i didn't have much of a choice but to try and drink all my wine in one terrible pull, i put the bottle up and took alot of it on, but it got me in the end and i was bent over on the edge of the big wooden sea peir puking my guts out.

we crossed the street after i cleaned up and i saw a big horrible moving beast with alot of faces and hands, we where going right for it, with no real choice about it. i got into the people and the drinks. i started to steal beers and pizzas from drunks.
i met a hard up drunk in the bathrooms who stopped and asked with a scary lack of control "DO I LOOK DRUNK!?" "YES!" i screamed back, trying to look big and scare him too, then he said "YOU LOOK GOOD! YOU LOOK FAMOUS! LIKE THAT WEEZER GUY! WHO ARE YOU?" "I AM IMPORTANT, THAT'S A SURE THING, MY FLIGHT LEAVES FOR BEIRUT TOMORROW, WE HAVE 70 SHOWS IN 72 DAYS ALL OVER PARTS OF THE WORLD MOST PEOPLE DISMISS AS MYTHS, IF YOU BUY ME A BEER I WILL INTRODUCE YOU TOO MY BAND AND MY DRUG DEALER FRIENDS, THEY HAVE AMAZING WARMTH." i followed this man up the stairs and half way there my stomach shot through with a black hole of some kind. something was beginning to get to me, the kind of thing you keep to yourself because the pain is so heavy and rare that it would burn in a hole in people you thought you where close to. everything about the last few hours of the night was sad and hard and cold. i had "inside alone-ness" and "secret solitude".

i met a black german hip hop dancer who was trying to change the way we see movement and a skinny middle aged italian woman who designed clothes for rich men someplace in venice, i spoke to them and the black hole got bigger, i hid my face for a while in the bathrooms, i was drunk and out of my mind with a pain i couldn't understand. in a certain kind of light everyone becomes like werewolfs and swamp monsters, i could see the fangs and fur everywhere i looked.

i spoke loudly with alot of laughter all night, the laughter was fear and nerves caught up in my belly. i could see around me plain reasons for wanting to be alone, even in my lowest old sadness wanting to be alone was a mystery. but it came to me naturally all night, it came with the black hole and skinned me all over. i'm used to this feeling, i live with it and i don't know why. everytime it feels new but it's as old as hell. i can remember it from when i was a kid. i treat it like new, my pain and confusion needs to feel new and horrifying everytime, i can't lose that, it's too important. all of my best moves are made in pain and confusion. smooshed like a bastard between alone-ness and sadness and mystery i can see one thing for sure. like dare devil who lost his sight, but learned how to kill villians. it's a trade.

me and shaun started to hit on a jock on crack. we would squeeze his butt and he would spin like a mean bull fighter, but when he saw us he would split up in a smile and shuffle a little and put his arms around us. the night was emptying out now and the bouncers where getting violent, me and shaun led our man to the bar and he screamed: " SHOTS AND THEN BEER!" and threw bills at us, we grabbed what we could, hugged him and left like lightning bolts. into the car, into the house, into the bed, into the dream.

awake at six thirty in the morning at lauren's house, i drank a fat cold glass of pop and spoke with a beautiful pale girl named kaz, i wondered where her name came from but i had no time left to ask before i was into the bed and staring out a second story window into the early morning sky. i fell into a dream about being a dinosaur king, lonely and full of good leadership, i was in charge of the whole prehistoric desert, my name was "ODB: a Tribute" like a plastic dinosaur i carry with me from time to time.

i hope somebody knows the answer to these things, i hope the super powers that patrol the sky can see inside the bigger beasts and fools and lonely kids and say with a sureness "i know, i know, i know." because i can't see a damn thing here, i traded my eyes for better powers.

i can't speak to anyone tonight. i tried, i felt prehistoric and alone. i should be alone, i want solitude, i don't know what to say about other people. they come and go like thunderbolts and burn everything.

i dont feel like telling anybody anything.

i used to try and write more for words than meaning. both are dumb ideas and now i just write. take out the things you hate and keep moving, always move. standard is for people who slow down long enough to recognise it.

i am creating my own museum, i hate everybodies big history so much i'm going to make my own.

mean cobra museum of curious ideas.

the night is on again and it's time to start standing it, the beasts and bastards get up and they come looking for us, so goodnight and i'll see you when the light breaks, if theres any of you left.

my head is on fire, the rest of the world is very calm, i hate this tonight, i hate the sad world and what it has done to my small heart. don't answer the phone, don't watch tv, don't trust anybody, learn to live alone and away from everyone and you'll be ok, you'll make it through. through to what? there is no meaning, i'll stay here as long as i can, when i really lose my hold on being alive, i'll let go for good and i won't feel bad or look back at it and think sadly "godamn", when i do it right, i won't say anything. there won't be anything to say, and i will screw up my face in a silly way and i will be so glad to see it all go, so glad to end all of this caring for dumb stuff, be glad to finally let go of this strange hold i have on life.

this is a review i did for my friend richard's music blog, i love richard, one time betony drew a skull on his arm while me and chris ate the rest of their delicious expensive breakfasts.

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I met Grant Jonathon Gronewold in Sydney after he'd been travelling for at least 15 hours in a car with two other pals of mine. He'd consumed and indescribable amount of Coca Cola and was delirious from lack of sleep but he still lit up my living room with his excitable stories, bursting with childlike fervor, telling me about things that I hadn't heard but probably should have. Grant makes music under the name Fulton Girls Club. He also had two of the best ideas I've ever heard, but I can't tell you about them. This is the first of three posts about a few of his favourite songs, at the moment at least.

"Shoot my television walk out doors and explore with the innocence of kids aged four" - Edan

The song starts with a psyche jumble crash sound, like a mix of peddles and old samples and then from someplace mysterious and shadowy there is the "hey joe" bassline, this is the main rhythm keeper throughout the first sequence of the song. under Edan's vocals is a sweet vinyl crackle (snap and pop!) controlling and distorting them are delay and reverb, after the first three word cycles it all melts down slowly with a science fiction sounds flavour (out of the lab and the spaceshuttle and the forests of Shoalin and the dungeon of a mad genius in a rainbow coloured lab coat) and the sound moves in stealthy with a reverse drum beat, a slow build, rewinding a video tape, then DROP! Mr Lif hits it with hard horror images and in the background a crash pop bomb from the 60's (I hope, who can tell from time with all this wonderful chaos going on?), reverse the tape, play straight, keep it moving, Lif, don't touch that, the image is building and like Edan said earlier, it stretches like oxygen and infinity, I close my eyes and see a great kaleidescope vision, constellations, deep quantum theory, eerie calico colour schemes shoot out like laser beams and if you look quick! there is a shadow, like in the Wizard of Oz, and behind all the smoke and colours and mathematics we see the form of a skinny dude and wild hair-do, hands held out in front making complex incomprehensible movements, tying together theories and pictures with a funny concentration, the string is where the genius is though, Edan has a type of impossible string that can tie anything together, these ideas aren't new, these sounds aren't even new, but with Edan and his magnificent string, everything seems re-arranged in a new kind of vision, a new kind of cool. for the Saturday morning kid still yawning shaking off the dreams somebody is gonna try and tell him are stupid later in his life, the dreams about mad science and cartoons and infinity and doing something cause you think it's cool and not because somebody told you too, I wanna thank Edan and his "intense imagination" and his magnificent string.

"When God took a day off I had him laid off" - Mr. Lif

i made a girl who liked me leave me alone, so now i'm alone again. too sick for all of that closeness with somebody. i don't feel a part of anything tonight. i'm alone in the universe even if other people are thinking about me, and even if i think of them.

i worked on making this into a book tonight, i like the way it's looking, i am handwriting it, my hands are funny tools i think.

so little to tell everyone and i can't figure out how to do it anyways. music seems to be failing me in alot of big ways, after the big tour i might quit, but i have to go back and learn.

i saw my own self walking around at night and the sky looked like a picture someone had taken of ink and hung it over my head and i was connecting things, drawing thin cotton lines from one to another, making up constellations with powerlines and television ariels and black holes and small pockets of eternity.

we can all be funny little gods like in greek stories if we get away from eachother and go into the night, and if you see me while you are making up the diagrams for your own universe, pretend that you didn't and somehow, beautifully, or ideas will smoosh into one and create a galaxy that is always in a kind of flux and flow.

living quietly in the universe, changing little and being little and seeming invisible.

i remember big silos across the armington sky's eye, cornfields and frightened wooden fences on both sides of us, as we drove down and down, end up in a old basement with cardboard posters of judy garland, naked lightbubs that looked damn fine, like trapped lightning, the whole room covered in a funny kind of thunder. i remember sue with us, mom's skinny friend, she had some kind of cancer and a tall husband. when she smiled she looked like a happy skeleton.

later in other memories i remember a short boy with a shaved head who talked all the time and would always ask me if i was a mute or something and his house was covered in stinky clothes and broken stuff, his mom would spend hours colouring in spider man colouring books and singing along to these old records with songs like "love potion number nine" and "midnight train to georgia" and their house was a ugly style of white living in front of a big long old field that had a tiny forest between it, and the kid with no hair was building weapon's in the woods and killing little things with it, rats and stuff, we chased rats around with a hammer sometimes and played jokes on his sister, then one day during a black out we found him in his sisters bed, naked and kissing her, his dad beat him up and i don't remember going back after that. his mom used to get her hair done at some fancy house in the suburbs and the colour of the house was the colour of the birthday cake at the supermarket.

my mom needs some kind of operation and there gonna take parts out of her. i follow her around alot and sit in rooms with her and ride in cars with her and i mostly stay quiet, it's better that i don't say how i feel, it'd only make me embarrased and she might cry or something rotten like that. she's real nostalgic and nervous all the time, she tells me stories about arizona and other kids from arizona and lincoln, illinois. she tells me she loves me alot and her stomach hurts all the time.

two cornfields across from lincoln dairy queen, the state fair always happened, i don't remember dates or nothin, on the way i would bend over and see burned up worms, they get hot and stuck to the gravel and then they bloat up and pop. the dust at the fair made me cough alot and i used to steal things from the smaller kids around and watch the pigs get weighed and listen to them cough and grunt and squeal. they had one hundred foot slides and all kinds of candy and people giving away religious books. you could hear megaphones everywhere and i really liked all that screaming, i used to just walk around yelling and nobody could hear me because of all the megaphones.

i kissed my first girl when i was six, she was named tiara and she had nice clothes and brown skin.

jessie's older brother taught me how to say "suck my cock" in spanish and he would kill kittens and birds with a shovel all the time for fun. he used to smoosh a kitten and say fun fun fun, he said he learnt it from his dad. jessie's parents where junkies and all there ever was to eat at jessie's house was cornflakes. i remember going to his house all the time and it looked like a haunted house and smelt like trash and they were always watching the same superman movie, his parents i mean, they slept on the fold out couch and watched superman all the time. i thought they were dead once, but they moved. jessie's older brother taught us how to steal and break into houses and get into cars and let the brakes off.

sometimes i would hide in the weird alleyway behind our house all night because i thought the cops were looking for me and i would do drawings and hide them under a tree and practice writing letters to my mom about how i was innocent and the cops where liars.

i have been thinking alot about outer-space, my favourite thing to do is to cast my eyes at the clouds, cause at night they are a different kind of black, i like that because i didn't think black could be different from black.

i have alot of eerie old stories to tell and all, but how do i do it is the hitch. i hope that this is like a movie, really big and bright, like an arcade game or when you look at a lightbulb real hard and then close your eyes and it doesn't go away and it hurts your head.

my fear about death and god and people makes me think strong, lonely thoughts. i feel brave walking around in the dark when nobody is there. becoming less involved, attached, moving around the universe like a phantom or a silly ghost, a dumb kid in an ugly black chasm finally making it. making it to solitude and disconnection through movement. yeah, some kind of dream. some people write me and say they miss me, some strangers send me mail telling me i'm brave and beautiful and smart, some people hate me and make sure i know it, but when i climb out my window and look up at oblivion with all it's stars and planets and greek gods and modern myths, it all leaves me. and then once it's gone, like magic, ideas are everywhere, and they all belong to me, and i'm alone with them. no big dirty people, no stupid maps, you don't need a map when your making the world up right in front of you.

we moved around lincoln alot, i have memories of sleeping in cars and waking up under powerlines with lightning bolts moving around my head and barry taught me how to piss offa the roof at night when mom was asleep, i would climb out my window and piss a hundred feet down into the dirt, but i called it "pissing on hell" and then i'd howl like a coyote and crawl back through into my bed with the ninja turtle sheets. and i used to give my pancakes to the neighbourkid across the way, past the bushes where dustclouds always seemed to kick up and he would eat the pancakes even with the dirt in the syrup and later he got cancer or his mom did, but they were gone either way. when i remember him now in my mind he seems like a boy made out of dirt and wax and fly paper and made some twine, very un-permanent and ready to die.

some nights i would take alla my clothes outta the dresser and pile them on myself laying down cause i liked the weight on me, like when night came down it came down on me really and sometimes i would empty out my pillow case and go and steal the tin foil bases of these tiny white candles mom baught for 10 cents a peice and i would go and bury them out in the back yard which was mostly dirt and i'd draw complex maps, including ideas and instructions of what to do with them, the ideas always ended with running away to join the peoria freak circus, except there wasn't a freak circus in peoria, there wasn't anything in peoria, except tired, ugly dogs and old men and gymnasts and factories. except i bet there wasn't that either but that's how i remember it is all.

the snow was getting to where it looked like a water damaged picture of snow, white in the middle and bleeding out into everything else, and my voice starting hanging around in the air like it was part of the wether and i walked past all kinds of brick buildings and play grounds and highways and bars and alleys and hookers and drunks and christians and junkies and all. i snuck into a house and most of the windows where black completely and in one room there was highchairs and cribs, some of them real broken, all piled up in the middle of the floor, the walls where stained and peeling and black and grey and brown and mis-shaped. i stayed in there all day writing cuss words on the walls and crawling through the cabinets. there was alot of dust and grit and when i got home i had to wash my hands.

and then days later, maybe months, i never knew much about time, i was at paul's house and we pretended to assasinate his dad through the window in his back yard and then we climbed the side of his house and jerked open his bedroom window to read comics on the roof and assasinate people who walked by. and paul told me all kinds of stories about his older brother and how he could beat up an ox. and we went to his mom's house sometime later and stole half of her disney land money from a giant plastic pig she was keeping it in, and we bought alot of gum in a brown paper sack and chewed it like animals in his moms basement after we snuck in through the small window that was foggy and not clear to see out of and we listened to his brother's rap records and called our teaches bitches and faggots and motherfuckers and cocksuckers and assholes and we hid the rest of the gum under the heater to keep it away from his dumb family and went back a few days later to find it had melted from the heat.

in lincoln, illinois all the grown ups seemed to be drunks and when i remember them now they all seem like film characters or something, but sad and empty, easy to kill somehow.

a time later when i was re-arranging my room, putting books in piles according to colour, i decided that i would just pack up all the stuff i had and go and sleep in the forest with the cobras and the deer and the bear cubs and the wolves and the ox and just cut out a living as an animal too, killing fish and growing fur, but nothing ever came of it, i couldn't get out the door before i got caught by my aunt eedie, who had diabeties and was real loud and hoarse in her throat, she sounded like a hollywood banshee when she would get to hollerin at me about something like running away.

a persons ideas about time can make things seem short and sour, that's how it seems when i look back at all the howling and stomping and quiet and waiting and the illness and bad luck. god's dumb voodoo didn't work and in the end it all happened at once, everything just happened and now i am here, left alone in a room to think about the smog over new orleans and the magical properties of a rooster's claw and the mud by a riverbank where i caught a turtle. any of it, all of it. i wasn't born into feeling alone, but i learnt it quick enough.

me and the christian kids from next door made a fortress behind my grandmas house, i took comic books back there and used to tell the christian kids that i didn't need god cause i would bea the devil up if he ever came here and we had a neighbour with a dirt back yard and bastard dog who bit anybody it wanted and i used to make sport of jumping over the fence kicking it while it was asleep and then getting back over before i lost my ass to it. and her mom was fat and had alot of ugly boyfriends one used to be on her couch watching jerry springer all the time and she took me into this room of her house where they had a nintendo and the walls where piled up the sides with dirty clothes and porn magazines and trash all over and one time me and my cousin josh stood on top of grandmas car and yelled out that she had big fat titties and she went inside and then one of her mom's boyfriends came out after us, fat and stomping and shoutin so we let out into the corn field and threw things at him cause he was too fat to catch us.

it's a goddamned punch in the belly when somebody asks me simple questions these days, i gotta get outta here, i'm angry all the time.

staying still to watch things come and go, turn out the lights cause it's easier to invent things, shadows are only new animals that you haven't named yet, solitude is beautiful and so big and so lonely and lit up, but only lit up a little bit, even when someone comes to hold your hand and get nervous with you, it's hard.

walking around my back yard, thinking about the dirt and the big eternities at either end of my life and a girl i have a crush on, the other day alex made me smile and giggle because he made like he was trying to grab hold of the sky or claw it down over the steering wheel. what the hell am i supposed to do about all these ideas? is it right that i should feel rotten as hell if i can't explain it? these little thoughts, memories, these things that could happen anwywhere and do happen everywhere, they aren't special, words only bust them up, they make the hard stuff romantic, they make the sad stuff seem funny as hell or profound. it's the smallest parts of being alive that pull me apart, just when i am alone, ready to be alone and i think it is time to stop thinking about other people, it comes to pass that somebody likes me and they wanna spend nights with me sneaking around and laying low and writing in empty houses.

damn, i bet everyone you could name has sat alone in a room and wisht to think of nothing, wisht to want nothing, wisht to be nothing for hours or years only to get up and leave the house and realise that they were still something, to walk into a door and have people turn and look at him there, existing, standing there in perfect being, not see-thru, not made up and not nothing at all. this happens to me all the time and i am defined by the fact that i let myself be when i find out i still am. that's all it is that makes me who i am, the fact that i haven't stopped being him yet.

i can't wait until i am in a new country, alone, riding buses for a place to sleep, with nothing to lose, laughing at old thoughts of fireworks claustrophobically exploding in my dreams.

mom's sick, she's knows me, she knows i'm quiet when i'm hurt. i don't mind her dying, she has lived and seen things, but she's scared and i can tell and this hurts me. she's such a strong woman, she'll probably scare death off anyway.

whatever kind of horror there was i always learnt to live in front of it and i think i got that from my mother and mostly having no choice anyway.

short segments of my past come to me as if i lived in the desert, i think of this time and all things seem to be worn down and pale, like pictures of the parts of my life that i wore out. the sky and the mountains and the dust and the people in cheap clothes all look like postcards of themselves. this could have been anyones life. the strangers in supermarkets look like dressed up dinosaurs, howling and eating stupidly, like violent jerks, so sad and beat up. there are little plants everywhere, growing out of the desert, but they all die eventually. there are coke machines and candy bar wrappers and statues about history.

i remember parts of hospital, watery colours and my body was always hot and you learn to live waiting around for someone to tell you how you can live. people i didn't even like gave me toys and came to see me, but it's always felt private, alone in the company of many. other people have nothing to do with what i remember about hospital and nothing has changed, i rememer visits from months ago, trying not to fall asleep, trying to stay quiet all day to have the energy to see somebody, being quiet, being alone around other people again. watch the light ebb and flow around, fragment itself, get smaller and eventually go out, then do it again in a few hours. get quiet because i'm hurt. don't move, don't speak, sit and watch the light go out, have ideas, but don't write them down, just have them for as long as you can.

the things that gave me purpose and reason seem stupid. i'm alone and cold, all day i sat in an empty bath tub trying to read, but i kept falling asleep and the words seemed harder to read everytime i woke up. something about my bathtub makes me focus, but i felt so alone it was hard to think about other ideas.

it's all i can do to try and only exist sometimes.

indra told me a story about this house she lived in and the man who lived there before them fashioned opals and jewelry and all, but he killed himself and there was this box full of un-shaped jewels left in the house, but her parents or her grandmother, i can't say which, threw them out into the dirt and she used to dig them up all the time when she was younger. and i repeated in my head for a couple of blocks while we walked together "dust and diamonds." even though she told me they weren't diamonds, the way somebody remembers something is important, even if you just started remembering it.

i go for walks at night now, i make fog with my own breath and i pretend that i am the only one who ever got born sometimes, it's lonely, but only if i can't trick myself into thinking i'm the only person alive.

eternity is not knowing about time and not wanting to know.

two nights ago i walked all over, the world was being real eerie and since the moon was looking the way it was it was obvious that i had luck and all, so i snuck into this old dirt plot and burnt down building, just slipped through the fence and kicked the dirt around and made up names for the shapes the big black debris cast. i'm buying a flashlight and going looking more.

all day today i had the notion to let out and go hitchhiking, i thought about the stars obscured by new clouds and the trees to climb and the crushes to start and leave and thumbing through other peoples books, picking things out, like David W. walking around with a meat cleaver trying to rob folks and Charles Bukowski in a rain storm cursing big gods and all. if god is everywhere and everything then i am god and i am everywhere and everything, i never felt like i had met anybody new.

the first house i broke into had these piles of damp clothes in the basment, and we threw the silverware down the stairs and pissed on everything and stabbed the mattresses with knifes and kicked holes in the walls and used a hammer to break the toilet and then went running off into another night someplace, but the house stayed there.

i have been fixing to make a film. i wanna take a camera with me the next time i get hospitalized is all and then i can really show somebody how when they line the wheel chairs up against the wall at night that they really do look like horses in the stable, animals at rest. the wall is baby blue and scuffed up and it happens to backdrop alot of my dreams.

i haven't been able to imagine much but bisons in my dreams lately, a herd of them get spooked and make these monstrous dirt clouds and charge over cliffs, but you never see where they go after that. not in my dreams anyways, maybe somebody elses.

this is it for a while, i am ignoring the phone and trying to sleep in, i am stuck here. 27 days left until i can leave melbourne, maybe less if i get lucky. i try to sit in the middle of my room and listen for a few hours a day, i can feel my body giving out on me, i can feel time moving around me and away, right there in the middle of my room, in the small light that comes through my windows. i never wanted to get old anyways.

a new record soon, with drums on this one, noah is going to help me record and we'll do it on tam's kit. the songs are all still short but i only ever need what i already have anyways.

i layed down on my trampoline for a while tonight, i wrinkled my toes around the air and tried to connect the dots with the stars, but it's hard for me to do nothing, the hardest thing to do is just to exist. movement is all i have figured out, i can even really talk to people, i only figured out how to move yet.

i met indra today, and i won't pretend to myself that i didn't have a crush on her, she has been so kind to me and she's really very beautiful, but i couldn't talk to her, she made me feel silly, so i drank some coke and rolled around on the floor in front of the bands, and when it was my turn i played with a kick drum and got noah and tam to play drum sticks on the floor and i got everybody else to clap hands and i sang a song by alps. i played some new short songs, really short, maybe i have been listening to too much minutemen, but it felt good. "the only thing left to do when a bird stops singing is to ask: what do we do with the end of things?"

i started reading huckleberry finn, it reminds me of dirt and marbles alot.

the other night at four in the morning, i couldn't sit still, but i am so sick, i wanted to go out with a bag and hitch hike, maybe turn up on emmy's door or betony's yard, but not right away, after months of sleeping next to the highway, after being able to shake my hair and create terrible dust clouds, but the world will only welcome me for so long, if i keep moving will death get me?

christmas presents for disadvantaged kids in lincoln illinois, they gave us fifty bucks and let us pick something in walmart, mom handed me over to the charity worker, i liked his face, he had a beard. i ran around walmart and the colours and lights gave me a headache. i got a batmobile and alot of candy, then grandma took me to cody's house, he lived four blocks away from my grandma's house, his mom sat around laughing and getting drunk on a drink she called the white russian and she scared the hell out of me, her hair stuck out and she always smoked and her teeth looked like broken wood. and cody used to draw shit on his arms and legs, like skulls and swords and cuss words and try and convince everybody he got his dad to give him a tattoo, but he was really afraid of his dad, we used to stay in his room all night after his dad got home and try not to make any noise, in case he got angry.

further up the street from cody the concrete began to crack and a large peice of plain mud yard spread out behind one of the worst houses in the whole town, there was trash all over the porch and front yard and a big black car always parked in the drive way except at night. the kids who lived in that house got caught in school pissing in everybodies book bags and they were thrown out. and there was this girl who lived farther up in a two story house, it looked really nice from the outside, but two story houses impressed me when i was a kid, the girl had a tumor and stopped coming to class but before she did she started turning up with a bandage on her head that had a weird orange stain on it sometimes and she started to tell everybody her name again, even though we all knew her, so they made her go home and i don't remember seeing her again.

i'm so damn beat tonight, sat on the edge of my bed when i woke up and hung my head, i just couldn't keep it up. i got a letter from a girl in another state, said she cried when she read all this and wished i'd stayed to do my shows in brisbane, she's offered me a place to stay when i do come and told me i have to keep going for music's sake. i wisht i were kinder, had more to say to people, something.

the world can seem to be such a big , dumb, lonely animal sometimes. everybody i know is apart and alone and terrified at the same time in the same place. goddamn.

i remember a flood in our town, me and my brother road old mattresses and trash cans down the street with the current and there were scared cats and peoples mail all over the place, some kid had climb a tree and was throwing rocks at everything and cussing at everything. me and my brother were screaming like bastards and having so much fun that we cut our feet up real bad and didn't even know it, we went home after and tried not to step on any splinters in the front porch and mom made us sit in the tub while she scrubbed or toes and feet with soap and whiskey cause she was afraid we would get aids or lockjaw or something. tyler was so young i don't think he remembers.

theres thunder outside, the big black sky always knows how to show you that your so goddamned silly everytime. grace costello used to tell me she liked it when i wrote cause she was sure my letters to her would get printed one day, she started writing me in hospital and i think i was in love with here for a while, i still feel like i am when i see her, i'm just lonely and she's nice to me, theres no good in making it seem like more than that.

i drew a picture of a man wearing his beard for a dress on a peice of cardboard and slid it into this old frame, zac came over later and laughed at it and told me he liked it, it's about all i do that he likes. we drew a whole bunch of stupid shit in regan's building where he works, zac wrote "hoek + scout: these punks'll buy ANYTHING!" next to one of my drawings, i used to wanna be called scout if i were going to be a graffitti artist, but all i do is dumb pictures of weird things, i'm not dedicated to it so i don't wanna do it much at all. i drew a picture of a kid with diamonds for eyes and wrote next to him "everything looks expensive 'cause i got diamonds for eyes." i wanted to be called scout because to kill a mockingbird is such a good book and scout is the only one who sees it for what it really is in the end.

i'm gonna do a string of art shows in houses soon, i think we need to do that, i wonder how many good kids are making art and not showing it because they are afraid of even small galleries or the galleries are full. maybe just me.

i'm listening to ornette coleman, he won't go anywhere, me and ornette.

i cancelled my shows in new zealand today. i couldn't believe it, i was horrified by how badly things can go. the family needs money, i am sicker than i want to let myself know anyways. mom asked me to call a counsellor to try and get some money from a cystic fibrosis charity, i never had to ask for money before really, never from strangers. i guess mom always did that for me. i owe her alot.

i was walking around feeling so damn bad and defeated, i looked across the street and there were women in beautiful muslim get ups laughing in a foreign language and walking with kids, and i looked up over this old vacant building and the sky was laying itself out real nice for all of us. i tried to breath in and be greatful for the breathing i could do. i can barely handle myself when i have to cancel a show.

when i was younger i never understood that when you turned a tv off you missed the program, i thought it paused for you, i used to think everything waited for you.

the small town my cousins lived in, i remember kicking out church windows, killing birds, skinning deer with my uncle, fighting other kids, i remember when i first punched a kid, my hand hurt so damn much but my cousin was slapping my back like a bastard and yelling and calling the other kid a faggot. there was a tee pee in josh's room and drums in chris'. i used to want to have as much stuff as they had. we always lived in other peoples houses, stayed where we could and all. and my cousins had such a big damn house and my uncle used to say stuff like "i wanna make sure my boys get what i never had." i thought he was john wayne or something.

i hate staying still, movement is the only thing that works. all i do now is sleep and eat and work. i put everything into this. i can barely talk to people. i can't read anything, so i'm writing.

i remember lying to my mother, telling her that my father and i climbed mountains, i call him kieth, and that he slipped but i saved him, i told her he slipped and couldn't see, so i pulled out a big fan and blew the clouds away and pulled him up. it was the first time i realised that somebody could tell when i was lying. what had actually happened was kieth tried to take me bunjee jumping, but i got scared so we went to the hotel he was staying in and i made him watch me do back flips on the bed, then i slipped and fell on my neck and he was on the phone but he said "oh honey, are you ok?" i told him yeah, that i was strong and the bed was stupid and then i went to the bath room and cried and tried to move my neck. i can't remember how old i was and past the bathroom, i just remember that he always smoked cigars around me and the hotel was bright enough to give me headaches.

i also remember listening to the radio and sucking on a dry cigar in kieth's car on the way to visit his grandfather, and he pointed at smoke stacks and said "i work for them" and i said back to him "mom says that big smoke houses are killing me." and he just laughed, i thought he was laughing honestly, but i think now that he was real mad or something. and we got to his grandpa's house and mom told me later when i was older that his granddad was more or less his real dad, that he was a kid with a bad dad. he and i slept in a den in the basment, it was lined with christmas lights, it was cold with snow outside and all that other december stuff, we were on the edge of a forest someplace in tenessee and i met kieth's grandfather and he told kieth to make sure he didn't let my mom make me a sissy. we went hunting together and i got knocked on my ass when kieth let me fire a shotgun, i don't think i was older than 7. in the end we killed a deer and i felt good cause kieth let me bite another cigar once i shot it.

i remember spending most my time in the den looking at the dead bodies and naked african girls and cave drawings and baseball photos in all of kieth's copies of national geographic, i hid them as best i could if he saw me looking at them, i was embarrassed, i don't know why though.

in all of my memories it amazes me the things i forget, i know grandpa didn't live alone, but i couldn't remember anybody but kieth and me and only one time grandpa, standing by this old manual water pump that were all over my childhood, in the cold air his boots in the snow, looking like he only half of a grown up man. i thought he was going to fall over and disappear the whole time.

and i remember going to stay with kieth and his new wife, belinda, who hated me i think cause i was like a living symbol of kieth's first wife and all. and i told one of the neighbour kids that i was fucking kelly from the power rangers, but really i had a crush on my step sister who was 11. i was embarrassed of this too and when i was older i was riding in my uncles truck, this big old truck for hauling cargo, and i was with him and my cousins and i felt so damn close to them, so good about being there and unlce richard was telling us stories of the fighst he had gotten into when he was a teenager, so i said " i have a crush on my sister." and uncle richard was quiet for a few minutes and didn't look at me at all and said "that's disgusting." i kept anything i had to say to myself around uncle richard for as long as i can remember.

leaving belinda's trailer house in cold air, the kind that hurts to breathe and getting in the car, not knowing anything about what was happening and seeing from out of nowhere incredible light shapes, blinking and blazing and standing completely alone in all the dark. i kept hitting my head on the window to look closer and fogging the glass and writing my name in it and seeing my fingers and the letters of my name mixed with the amazing lights, i mean these lights were really something, i thought god had made them and when i asked i heard belinda say it was stupid, but kieth said "maybe", seeing my hand on top of those lights and my breath putting them out of focus and all, well i felt invincible i think.

it's lonely to travel, it's lonely to stay here. being alone is such a part of me now, how would i even begin to be kind again? the last time i layed across someones naked body in my bed was probably the last time for good. it seems like death, touring, writing, singing, panting, exploring, all of it owns me now. death doesn't scare me, i knew it was coming, but what will i do before i die? is this it? is it moving and recording? is there any thing left to tell anyway? anything worth recording? well fuck it, i used to try and write it down as it happened and in order, last night i tried to split it up and lay it out. fuck it all to hell, the way i think of it now is how your going to get it, shots of my childhood, peices of my worry, one mess for one kid to make. when i was a kid i used re-arrange everything around me all the time and none of it made sense and i haven't really changed. i'm tired of poetry, when something hurts i'll just say why. i wanna write plain so it's impossible to cover myself up.

i spent alot of time with zac, we argued, sometimes i can't tell when he's joking. he will say to me "yeah, sure you tour, but, i mean, it's not real, i mean, their not real gigs." and he says he's kidding, but sometimes i just can't tell. when i was young i was unsure of everything. i was sure of breaking things and being mean. i mean, i knew that you didn't hit girls and that god was good and that anything you did and got away with was alright, but now i'm set in alot of my ways, but still unsure of how to spend these last months. theres always room for questions, doesn't matter where you sit.

the french government have a linguistics department that ensures no one word has more than two meanings. i remember everything i ever did, it's all their, ive only got think on it and it comes back, but it looks like a picture of a tv screen when i remember it. it looks scratched and old and watery. these times i used to spin around and run really fast into a tiny forest just out of town that my dad would take me and tyler too, he wore a pantera t-shirt alot, and i would spin around and go and run around and pretend to hide from wolves.

all my memories about being a kid back in lincoln, they all smell like dirt. not in some metaphorical sense but actually sniffing dirt.

i saw a man on a tram today, his ears were scabbed all to hell and the dry blood just piled on the dry blood, he couldn't read any signs anymore and was confused at the broken ticket machine, what will happen to my body when it starts to go? i can already see my ribs and i'm whiter than a sheet.

the first time i went to sydney it was with alps of new south wales and shiver like timber, we were standing in line buying groceries for the second time and chris said "fuck buses, why don't you drive up with us." so i went three weeks early and lived on what i could. it was my job to stay up and keep chris and betony awake while they took their turns driving, in the process of this i made up hundreds of stories for betony, crazy things, one of them was about how my mom had gottaen drunk and passed out and it was christmas time so i took cookies and milk down near a river bed where i had been building a model north pole out of mud and twigs and i flooded it with milk then jumped up and down on it and tried to feed cookies to birds, everytime i finished a story i would say "that was a lie also, betony." and when chris was driving i just tried to listen and all, he had so much behind him it seemed just dumb not to listen.

chris and betony had been at my house for two days and i had a crush on betony and i felt like chris' baby brother. chris told me about his sick bones and how he didn't feel in love anymore, he didn't think love existed and he showed me all kinds of good music through the day and the night. there are images and sequences of them i remember like chris with ice cream down his beard and betony standing with me in the supermarket going "i really like supermarkets." and i think that's when i had a crush on her and naked little bushes on the side of the road in our high beams and chris driving past these dying old trees telling me " i sold everything i had and booked shows in europe and all over australia and did it completely myself and all these jerks around me could do was say "that's not punk, your using a keyboard." they still sit around preaching about DIY music bullshit and going to work at pizza hut." and getting drunk in adelaide and telling the drummer from japanther that i don't believe in revolutions and then dancing until i fell over coughing and the whole time it seemed like it was happening in a good light. like a light you see in a beautiful old film or something.

after our show at the afterdark we went searching through the dumpster's for food, we found all these potatoes and turkish bread and capsicum and when we got home we cut the rotten bits out of the capsicum and we cooked all of it up and had it for dinner for a while. we played a house show the next day at aaron wallace's house i stole some of aaron's books and sat on his porch and read them and he had ma barker playing on the stereo real loud, the light there in the garden was damp and heavy and i liked it alot. during chris' set the p.a. fucked up really bad so after song number two he flipped his little keyboard on top of his bigger one to create an enormous beating clang of all chords and he took the microphone and started beating this tom drum and screaming at the top of his lungs. half way through this he reached over to his amp that he takes everywhere and started creating different tones of feedback, then swtiching the tv on and pushing the volume to full he jams the mic into the speaker and all you hear is thick static wash. in one move chris un plugs everything and were all left with the tiny tv speakers and the tiny static. by the time everyone is clapping chris is packing up. he spent the rest of the night in aaron's room booking tours, doing an interview and avoiding everyone.

i remember really well, like i just walked out of it, chris leaving the house we had stayed at together. he packed all his stuff and i was playing a super hero video game and listening to the dead kennedys and we traded cds and hugged and i left chris standing on the porch, i don't think he was gone before i put his record on to listen, i listen to it nine times in a row and felt so damn sad that he was just standing around waiting to leave. i haven't seen him since, but i write him alot. if i wasn't so sick i feel like i'd probably be exactly where he is. i layed down on the couch and looked up at ricahard's wall, it had a quality about it, it made me feel real young again and completely confused, stuck in fuck off nowhere like it was my small town again and i was homeless, and all that confusion and sadness set a tone for my first time in sydney. sleeping on other peoples couches, eating their food, trying to be as nice as i could though i felt like hell. it was like i was a kid again, but when i was a kid i never noticed that sometimes i wasn't welcome.

the tour came apart in brisbane, in sydney everybody treated me good and i made enough money to do what i wanted. on my plane back an asian boy had brought all his belongings in a garbage bag and these two girls made fun of him (jerks) and there was a man with nerve damage and everytime he smiled he looked like a scared kid. one time at the end of the plane ride he was saying " ha ha, everybodies standing up but the door's not even open yet, it would be funny if they all fell over! ha ha ha." he looked about 50. when he said things that he thought was funny he would work it up at the end like there was a crazy punch line, but usually there wasn't and he was just laughing at everybody around him.

i stayed with Emmy. i felt like i could play hide and seek in her house for years and the game would get louder and sillier cause we would have so many places to hide. and she had such nice things all those records and that wim wenders film and so many books and zines. she had the fabulous diamonds seven inch with taht beautiful cover and the alps record about the dinosaurs and she showed me this revolutionary black drum and vocal group from the sixties called the lost poets. they had this great song called "white man's got a god complex" and their voices all picked up together and spoke with such familiarity. they were familiar with all of it and knew it better than you. going to other peoples houses always reminds me of how little i actually own, all ive got are a bunch of stolen books and some clothes.

when i got to shaun and rachel's house on day five they had made me a pizza and prepared me a bed, i liked it when rachel would hug shaun's shoulders or they would argue about who was going to do a favour for who, you could tell how much they loved eachother in their actions alone. i sat at their kitchen table and sewed cd cases together while we talked about ODB and small town violence. shaun grew up in a town like mine and we got along on that. they also had alot of beautiful stuff and rachel let me pick the music cause she said "it might be a while before your someplace that you can pick again." all night in their house while i stayed up writing you could hear people moving in other rooms. it reminded me of that truman capote book, other voices in other rooms, i haven't read it, but i always liked the title, it used to give me alot of ideas when i was younger.

the first time i met shaun he was on his way to maggotsville, which is a warehouse in sydney full of graffitti and anarchists and me and lachlan followed him to see the thaw and the subverts, the door girl let us in cheap cause we couldn't really pay and i also met shaun tenzenmen, he was handing out flyers for my gig that weekend and i said "oh hey, i am playing this!" and we started talking and then shaun number one heard me and went "oh your fulton girls club?" and we started talking about japanese pop and touring and then we all walked off to watch the thaw, who kind of destroyed me, they were amazing and since then i have wanted to play a gig with them, the drummer asked everybody to put their smokes out "cause we like our lungs" and these kids were running around chasing this dog and the younger girl came and stood next to the drum kit, so they gave her a stick and she thrashed a cymbal all threw their next song. it was the rythm the thaw had, i think it's a revolutionary thing to fuck with time signature, people sink into the beat and get comfortable to easy. when you move it around and fuck it up peoples thoughts come in bursts instead of drawls.

later i saw shaun at my gig at the pitz, another warehouse except at the pitz bands can live, practice, play and they show films their too, they are working on building a recording studio to record the shows and help bands out more, shaun got a little drunk and someone mentioned that i sounded like bright eyes and shaun said "what? if anything he sounds like jandek, or daniel johnston, except, you know... daniel johnston was like retarded." i still laugh about that alot to myself.

i feel like all these miles i'm seeing might make up for the years i'm gonna miss. today the cold light of living looks stupid and silly, i feel good.