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.