My baby's got a heart of stone, can't you people just leave her alone?

I feel great!
A long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven’t talked to you lately at all! Ah ah ah ah.

I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Preacher (such damn good writing) since I just picked up book 5, and there’s some good observation. I feel like this character called Cassidy, who manages to make pretty much everyone hate him for storming into cities and lives, living life too hard, and then leaving people in his wake. I love the idea of leaving people in a wake of character.
In related, but branching out thinking, one of the women who hates him takes this out by trying a Voodoo curse in which you fire an empty gun at a photograph of the person you want cursed. Now that I like. I wish I had an empty gun.

Why’d you wanna live here anyway? For the people and for the sky. What’s so special about our people? They live under your sky.

You try to tell her what to do, and all she does is stare at you. And her stare is louder than your voice.

Saint John of Capistrano is traditionally represented waving a flag with a Franciscan cross on, trampling a turban underfoot. His army delivered Europe from the Muslims. And he’s a saint. Just saying.

Let’s face the facts. People are not happy. People are only unhappy because they get satisfaction out of it. People are therefore happy. Which pisses them off so much. Self-determination REALLY fucks people up. I mean, it’s so perfectly fearfully explanatory. You have only got yourself to blame. Oh shit. Only one person, and that doesn’t satisfy any needs at all. But it empowers us terribly. It lays the future out in a broad empty sheet rippled but pure like desiccated coconut. It means we can change who we are, that our identities are nothing if not personal achievements of our faith in who we are. But it blames us, ties us to the one person we cannot possibly bear to blame, because we’re always right. We’re so damn perfect, we can’t have… we did didn’t we? We all put things however the fuck we like them, and then expect them to have been that way forever. But after all that, we’re still left with the horrible, beautiful, endless lesson, that we may. If we so choose. We could. We could anything. Those things that scare us? We did them. Those things that we miss, we did those too. We will hate and love ourselves for acres and lines into the eternal present, but it is now. Now we can do what will be now later, and only we can. ONLY US. Never complain unless you’re prepared for the other person to say the only person who can doing anything is you. Never apologize for a choice you made, but regret it by all means. It’s yourself you’re sorry too.

There is no place on Earth called “freedom”. That place does not exist, there is no city, no house, with an endless garden and a sign hanging on the door that says “over this threshold, you are only you. You are free”. If you like, you can build one in yourself. But it’s not a place, or a person. You cannot be free and be happy, because freedom is lonely. But you cannot be happy if you know you’re not free. And so can we find happiness in that eventual inevitable dissatisfaction? That’s just stupid. Tying yourself in possession to people and places should be a crime. It’s the antithesis of life, of human individuality. Of need, of hate and of being unimaginative. Yet, yet screaming Holly Golightly from place to bed is no freedom. That elusive momentary capture and squeeze, that emotion with no name, she is not freedom. She is a different dog with the same fleas. How many pursued men, criminals and death-fakers, who run from identity to new home, have ended it because running starts to feel a lot like staying in one place. That is not freedom. That isn’t what we want, what we’re looking for. And that certainly isn’t the top. SO WHAT THE FUCK IS FREEDOM?

When I find the place where I am needed, but free to give myself as I please, that is my home. When I find the person who does not need me, but will have me none the less, they may stay in my home for as long as they please. And when everyone I know and meet realizes that I do not demand from them, that they are not mine to need, but at the same time are assured I will always provide, that I am open and alive, that I do not the hold the world against me embraced merely live and love like a wind through and over it, when those that I love know for sure that I love them, in no need of reminder or return, when I stand and realize that there is only myself to blame for my actions, and only myself to rule my future, when I know that I need nobody, and yet love people none the less, and when they long for that need I am able to reassure them, when the world does not beg, but applauds when scraps are thrown un-called for, when I can find an island in the sea between forever locked and forever adrift, when I can be that island, then I will be free.

I am in this for you, and you are in it for me.

I took out some money, and you took out the trash. I asked you out on a date, but you said no, no, no. This feels like love but on crack.

Well isn’t it funny just when you think the world is drained, and this town too small, it all gets big and not that funny at all? It reminds us to be insular while we have the youth to excuse ourselves.
The problem with people who have something interesting to say, is that they so often are merely quoting. I would like to think that quoting and paraphrasing in conversation is like covering a song. Occasionally it’s a hallelujah, but more often that not it’s a smooth criminal.

Uh, I feel like I’m locked in a shop window, where a whole bunch of fat old women wander by and say “oh, and wouldye lookit thart” but nobody wants to buy. The price-tag is too high, and besides, the shop’s never open. Really, you’d have to break in and steal me.


Ernest Hemingway said that the best story he ever wrote were these six words:
“For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

Yeah. I didn’t get it for a long time, and when I realized what he meant I couldn’t stop crying. Out of sheer shock. I agree though, that’s probably one of the greatest stories ever told.


The first time I saw Saint Sebastian was in 1999, crabbing in the Mandurah estuary. I was crabbing that is, he was just sitting on the beach, all shot full of arrows so I knew it was him, seagulls picking at the wounds. I actually thought it was odd, that of all the places he could be he was in Mandurah, and it wasn’t even a very good night for crabs, they were tiny and argumentative. It’s not like he’s even a minor saint, he’s a big player, I thought he should have been on some throne of semi-precious gemstone, flying rocket-powered around the galactic clouds -- and then I have to go now, bailing a friend out of a sticky situation. I promise I’ll finish this story next blog post. It’s a really good one.

I think… I think too much, but I think, it’s all best summed up this week by Garth Ennis in ‘Preacher’ –

“Just shut the fuck up and hold me.”

Your Ballroom Days Are Over, Baby!

And time marches on. It becomes apparent that the times when I feel the most alone are when I’m surrounded by other people. They ground me, and I long to fly.

I have drank every day now for 14 days. It’s good to be an (un)responsible adult.

Italics start/don’t start here.

It is with some kind of jaded displeasure tonight that I swirl your eyes, dressed in silks and high heels you cunning bastards can drive the length of the Midwest and find no romance. I have no time for you.
So look at me you heathen fucks! Dear God, this, if anything, should mean you have time for me. Can’t you even break the dawning burns of your cliff-less lives for a second to tumble into the dirt?

*swig*

I can’t drive tonight, Brenda. I put the jeep in for service on Thursday and haven’t been under .05 since. I can’t remember the cause and effect… did I drink to avoid the car, or because I didn’t have the car to worry about. Why did I put the car in? Brenda, help me, I’ve fallen into myself. There’s me all down my shirt. How rancid.

*swig*

I’m walking along a median strip in the haze-fuelled heat of the day. There are no cars or people around, none at least that need me to see them. If a car drives down a road and no one’s around to see it, is it there? If a person lives their life and no one’s around to care, do they exist?

*swig, swig*


When I found out that she was pregnant I thought that there was only one possible option, and luckily so did she. Not so fortunately, our separate only options were different. I want to carry the baby for the full nine-month term, I said. You can’t have it in your dirty fucking use-less-erus. If I can’t carry it, you can’t either. I’ll suck the cunning lingerer out with my own God blessed lungs before I let my kid anywhere near that fucking groin of yours. I’ve passed out in it enough times to know the danger. She said something that I couldn’t quite make out, and some kind of argument ensued. I haven’t seen her since.

*sip*
Underneath our skin is more skin. And blue veins and tiny vessels and muscles that are repulsively ugly and slimy and stinky, yet very attractive when viewed through a distorted lens of skin, vessels, veins and culture. My friend Robin was killed in a 4-wheeled motorcycle accident when she was 14. She had the most beautiful muscles I’ve ever seen. Oh God, God… inside of me

*drain*

“There must be some kind of planet
For all the people who can’t manage.”
So in the end we all drive the key into the emergency stop. If only there was one! A set of brakes for the universe, that could just swirl it together when things got too crazy and all our Mutual Friends stopped calling. I tried to once. I swear I almost made it. Read on this website, with a long numeric url and a green background, that out on Highway 1 there’s a stretch of tarmac that splits 3 ways, not horizontally but vertically. One leads out to Adelaide, another to your home, and the third down to nothing; to the end of the world. So I jumped a road train in Kewdale and dug in at a roadhouse smelled like cooking oil and cheap cigarettes. I bought some of both, and tried to hike out to the black beyond where the key in my hand would ram into the earth and strike a thousand lightenings over the shit of the plains. And I got there. I got there on the darkest pitch of the lines and I found the keyhole that had no colours and wasn’t black… it was an emptiness, and a peeked through the keyhole at the beyond, where I should be, I screamed and shook and I burned and I lit the night on fire. The wheels that turn the stars snapped and bled streams of nothing across the finite. So I knew what I had to do. I took the key out of my pocket. But the key was my guts, my lungs, my heart, my dick, and the pocket was me, so I tore myself and rammed me through the earth, through the highway to a place where I was home… home… but I had taken the wrong road. I hadn’t found the end of the world, I hadn’t hit emergency stop… I just pretended that where I wanted to be was in the grand suction. I took the long straight road through the desert, and I ended up right back at home.

I am still here. Can you fucks just break into the sun and have time for me now? I am still here!