predator/fools.txt

File: fools.txt
Content: it's april 2004.  This is my remaining life. Bored yet?

Maybe you read this 'cos of morbid curiosity. Or maybe you're just into
the juicy goss I put in. I dunno. Anyway. It gratifies my ego, I like
having an audience which at least feigns interest (conway's apache logs
indicate that people download the stuff, but not that they bother to read
it). I even get feedback from time to time. Thanks for that too. It
encourages me to write more drool.

-------
April 1 or so.

Legal aid reckon the magistrate'll either throw this case out with no
conviction recorded or gimme a little fine and in any case its nothing to
worry about very much. In the former case, it sucks in some sense that
I'll finally be recorded in the immortal literature as a crim. In
perspective, well, no shit, Sherlock. You wouldn't worry about a fine for
tresso' when you've been tried and found wanting in the high court of
cellular biology, where juries, judges and justice hold no jurisdiction
and a misplaced base pair will dig your grave for you. But it's still a
fuckin' nuisance. I'm gonna have to iron a shirt and say Your Worship (not
my worship... if some git wants to tell me that I think he worships
himself, that's just fine with me).

It's years since i updated my CV and I kinda wouldn't be bothered unless
it might save me a few hundred bux in fines. Updating it was kind of
funny. The condensed, abridged, compressed, distilled summary of my life
fits, embarassingly, in a single page. Which in some senses is an
indictment in itself. But I did leave out a lot of stuff. I never really
gave a shit about CV enhancement, character refs and so on since I
concluded years ago CV's were so easily faked and were so... well,
self-aggrandising. And you learn shit-all from a CV compared to what you
learn from interacting with a person. Which is more interesting anyway.

I had a strange dream. Joss fed her hand, palm-up, <sploof> into my chest
under my left costal margin, under the rib, above the lung, the heart, and
popped it out again and (borrowing from Dave Goldstein a word which rolls
ever so delightfully off the tongue) _supraclavicularly_ curled her
fingers around that beautifully sculpted osseous strut extending from my
neck to my shoulder. I watched the fingers close around it. Which should
be impossible, I can't really see it from where my eyeballs are. No blood.
Stuck in me, up to the elbow, the dream ended. Beats the shit out of me
what this means, or even if it should mean anything. I have rivers of
random crap floating through my head when I dream and most of it makes no
sense.

Tools for the job. 
I accidentally busted the aerial off my ghastly Nokia wankerfone today and
found that an 8mm dia, 316 stainless 30mm hex bolt works pretty well as a
substitute though seems to work better when the 'fone's horizontal. I
dunno what its vSWR is but it can't be too bad. I remember the usual fix
to the broken-off aerial on the car bonnet was an inverted coathanger
stuck in the feed hole, and this is its cellphone equivalent. You read it
here first. Stand by. Someone will patent nuts and bolts.

The South African shagged me and fed me a huge slice of fried dead cow arse on
thursday and I later popped around to Toad Hall and found I couldn't fix
the brakes on Joss' bike 'cos there was a warped rim due to a missing
spoke which I didn't spot before. Fucked if I can find my spoke key. So
Joss isn't gonna ride with us on Sunday but maybe she wasn't up for the
ride anyway. She has an Allen key now, with which to tweak her own bike. I
know not of her inclination to use it.

It's April 3. Bill is rigid today. Hard, pressurised. Bill's size and
texture varies. My sister turns 31 tomorrow and I am not gonna go to the
dinner. Unless it rains in which case I'm not riding the push bike in it.

Joss appears to be way more stressed up than I thought. She worries me,
but I can't stop her worrying about all the stuff she apparently worries
about. I read her stuff when she offers it to me 'cos she has the guts to
print it out but otherwise I feel a bit ignorant about what's stewing in
her head and have trepidation about asking her. Please don't get
continuously smashed and become slurred, insensate, incommuncado like my
mum used to do, I want to suggest as gently as one could possibly suggest
it, but I have to trust her not to, and I will have no reproach for her if
she does - there's nothin' I can do about it 'cept watch. I'm glad she's
having at least some good fun, tho, in Cremmo she's found a seriously well
hung dude and loves it. The normal reaction you get from blokes about the
discovery that one of their favourite shags has found someone more amply
equipped than themselves is envy, but I reckon it's cool if they both have
a great time and anyway, since the advent of injection-moulded silicone,
size competitions have become sorta irrelevant - if you can manage to drag
it home you can buy a polysiloxane phallus with which you could
straightforwardly harpoon a whale. I'm happy with my rig and am happy that
other people are apparently happy with it too. And you can have too much
of a good thing. Allometry matters.

Oh, yeah. Joss. Joss seems sort of lost. Or on hold, or ... something. I
relate. There's a mixed load of feelings, that you're welcomed back but
you haven't quite left, when ya move back in with your olds. If real
estate in Sydney wasn't insanely overpriced ya wouldn't have to, you could
go become a slave to a bank and expect to pay the fuckin' mortgage (Fr:
death gamble) off before you died, and at least they hate everyone in an
equal, detached, nothin'personal kind of way when they come every month
for their scheduled suck on yer jugular. I was out for oh, shit, I dunno.
Ten years? Two at Kairawa, three at Wollongong Rd, one wwoofing, and about
four squatting various derilect buildings. The olds took me back into
their place, into the back room. I've fixed the place up a fair bit since
I got here and I'm currently deluded that they sort of like me around.
I've got it pretty easy now since the word's got around I have more or
less come home to... you know. Die.

In that sense, however, all of us here at 7 River st are. So there's
parity. Hang around this house and in ten years none of us will be here,
we are quite literally a dead set. Mum's barely able to stand up without
bracing her arms against a handy table or door jamb, dad's got a load of
symptoms as long as your arm, and me, well, you know about my particular
brand of mortality already. Dad can and very occasionally does whinge all
he likes about my being a long-haired leftie (I'm not a leftie but he
doesnt understand anarchosyndicalism) and that I should do something with
my life and it's caustic off a duck's back now, my life's pretty much over
so I don't have to justify what I do with it any more, but then, I never
did anyway. Joss, methinks, is doing the uncomfortable squirm of someone
who thinks she is hiding from her life under the gaze of people who think
she shouldn't be. I conjecture that I can spot this particular squirm
because I did it for about six months before The Day Everything Changed,
the Day of the Scan, the day after which a lot of previously important
stuff suddenly and surreptitiously ceased to matter a shit anymore. But I
often see things which aren't really there.

I sometimes don't chuck pills down my neck any more. Fuck it, I think to
myself. What's it matter. Feed Bill or don't feed Bill. It's all a meal
ticket to Bill. Bill's gonna eat me anyway. Bill me. Fill me. Kill me.


"There's no use hidin'. 
 The cells have begun dividin'." 

TISM - www.tism.wanker.com - Faulty Pressing Do Not Manufacture

Well. Yes.

I have cleaned some old things this week. I soaked the 1890's horsewhip in
neatsfoot oil (the real stinky 1960's stuff, not the boiled linseed they
sell as neatsfoot these days) for a couple of days and the room stinks of
it, sorta like sump oil but a bit more sulfuric and the leather gleams and
is supple, shiny. I think it's easier to crack, too. I also cleaned the
heirloom W.M. Cashmore for the second time in my life. I think I cleaned it
last when I'd turned 17, nearly half my life ago. It's a little bit
corroded in spots. The action works, everything clunks together precisely,
ka-thunk, just like it all did when it was manufactured in bloody
Birmingham a century ago. Fearsome, murderous firestick, it is
nevertheless the work of an artisan, little scrolly engravings adorn the
nitro-proof metal and the walnut stock. It's heavy and dense, in the way
that just about everything made in the last twenty years isn't. The
barrels (full and half choke respectively) are Damascus steel, and have
pleasing concentric coaxial patterns in them. It's sprung very heavily and
I can barely manage to cock the thing. When I do it makes the same sort of
low clunk as grandfather clocks do once per second. When the triggers
(there are two) are pulled, little puffs of oil vapour are punched into
the air where the pins would smack into the primers of any shells which
might be stuck in the breech. Kapow.

I've read about people wipin' themselves out with these. At the mo it's
the furthest thing from my mind, but that might change in a hurry. Aside
from Bill aching, for the time being, almost imperceptibly, nestled in the
hollow of my collarbone, he appears otherwise to be behaving, and life is
tooo fucking good. Out of plain curiosity I pressed the twin bores against
my neck (are you paying attention, Bill?), and extended my fingers down to
their far end and could easily reach the breech, 30 inches away. I guess
if short people wanted to blow their head off with it they'd need to
actuate it with their toe which would be awkward to fit in the trigger
guard. Not to mention bloody undignified. You gotta admit that, live or
dead you'd look like an complete 'tard with your big toe stuck in a
firearm. A lot of years ago I played a trombone but I hadn't really grown
to my current height, so when seated I developed this trick of pulling the
slide out to sixth position with my foot to get particular notes. Until I
found that they could usually be played in other positions anyway. Which
was good since I looked like less of a freak. I stopped playing for
humanitarian reasons once I got the trombone riff from Thomas Dolby's
`Hyperactive' down pat.

This is not the right tool for such a job. Not because it couldn't do it,
but such a task is a slur on this beautifully crafted, historical
instrument, its great age, its careful manufacture. It's not a stock
nickel rod turned on a lathe, stamped with a serial number and the sorts
of stupid modern warnings legally compelled to be stamped upon modern arms
[You may seriously injure or kill yourself with this device]. Besmirched
with a suicide it'd end up in a secured dumpster and be heated into slag
under the eyes of bored cops who are convinced they're doing this sort of
thing for our own protection (well, really, their protection from other
people). With their own 9mm Glocks at their side while they do it.

I saw a convex driveway mirror today with [Distorted Image] under it. Duh.
There's a sign in Darling St which says [HIGH PEDESTRIAN ACTIVITY] on it. 
The council appears to think all the bipeds strolling around the
kerbs are stoned or something. 

Nah. Fuck it. If you were to put modern ammo in this and fire it, it'd
peel open like a banana anyway. It could do the job I am contemplating
doing but in the same way as a chainsaw could cut butter. Wastefully, and
with needless splattering of butter all over the place.

I'da put a padlock for which I had no key, in the break hinge, if I
thought I was gonna use this thing for anything silly. But I have no need.
This thing'll sit in a box with its silica gel bag for another few
decades, bored out of its two-bit ferrous mechanical mind, patiently
waiting for something to blast. And don't get the idea this is the
riskiest thing I did all day. It isn't, by a long way. I always feel much
more threatened playing with live mains electrickery than I do with what
amounts to a couple of iron tubes packed with explosive and sealed at one
end. I slapped the 'probes on the power supply feed rails to see the
active and neutral rails weren't switched around. 239VAC on the brown
rail. They weren't. Good. I remember brown=active 'cos brown is the colour
of the electrical burns you'll get if you fuck with it. Great mnemonic....
really focuses the mind.

And there's plenty of lethal edged crap in the kitchen. And the toolshed.
The NSW government, in the guise of my old English teacher (currently the
NSW police minister) is banning edged weapons. Again. Machetes, like my
preferred tree-pruning instrument, will be outlawed. Like they matter at
all to a constable with a 9mm automatic. Could they please ban motorised
leaf-blowers? At least you can murder someone quietly with a machete. I
shave myself with an edged weapon. I suppose they'll be banned too.

My English teacher would be mortified by my syntactical ineptitude and
grammatical ghastliness, but would he feel that these mistakes were wholly
mine, or partly his? Would he learn that part of the fun of writing is the
gratuitous mess you can make on the sacred literary walls of lexical dogma
and etymological etiquette? Spel thingz howeva u lyke. 

To the terrified, everything is a weapon. The truly determined will drown
'emselves in the bath. 'Spose they'll ban water? Illegalise rain and the
delightful noise it makes on the roof and the leaves outside the window?
Of course. [For Your Security].

Oh. It rained of course. Lots. So I didn't ride the bike down at
Heathcote. Spent sunday at home fixing power supplies. Which leads me to
think about why I spend time fixing them. It has to do with their crappy
construction. There are ways to fix this. So I wrote about it. Mainly as a
way to avoid using antiword to convert some MS-WORD character reference
documents into postscript prior to dumping them on the laserjet, for this
court case.


<geek>

Supply.txt: this is a rant about power supplies, which came out of a
discussion on catgeek@cat.org.au, about ATX power supplies, circa March 2004
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

From predator@cat.org.au Sun Apr  4 15:30:17 2004
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 23:21:08 +1100 (EST)

-----------------------
Empowerment.

Lift the cowl off your computer and for a moment ignore the blinking,
spinning techno eye-candy. Look for the most boring thing you can see.
It's nestled in the top rear corner, attached to the chassis with four
philips/hex head machine screws. It's invariably the grey metal box which
via polychromatic spaghetti feeds current to your motherboard and all the
other devices. It's your switch-mode ATX power supply unit.

Who gives a damn about a PSU? You do. Especially if it breaks. The
contents of this metal box is all that stands between your expensive
hand-picked collection of high-performance semiconductors, and whatever
noisy quarter-kilovolt of oscillating crud the grid wants to toss at you.

I bet you've never looked inside it, have you? It's about time you did. If
you own an ATX supply and it's long out of warrantee you have nothing to
lose by doing so. Don't be ashamed if you've never looked - there's good
reason to stay out of it. PSU's wrangle with mains electricity, which can
kill you. However, if you unplug it, this problem goes away. Wait a while,
so the big electrolytic caps in the front end can discharge.

There are other reasons to look before you buy, and before you put an
unquantified PSU into service. If, as I do, you build machines which have
to stay on continuously for years, and are considering a PSU purchase, you
should ask your vendor to open the PSU before you buy it. They can always
put on another warrantee sticker later once you've had a look and learn
what they're selling you. If they won't open it, find a vendor who will.
It really does matter.

Why you care, is because you own componentry worth at least 10x the price
of the PSU to which it is connected, quite aside from the value of the
data stored thereon.

Contrary to the case warnings, there really ARE user-servicable parts
inside. Quality control stickers (QC-OK and similar) made by the billion
in China and stuck on everything from power supplies to underpants should
be ignored, and evidently some manufacturers spend more on case stickers
than they do on quality parts. Better to look inside and judge for yourself.

------------------
Crack it open.

The cowl of the generic PSU is held down with four small countersunk
philips head machine screws. Remove these, lift the cowl upwards and the
internals are exposed.

You'll see two sockets (mains in and mains out), a fan, and a circuit
board packed with ferrite energy storage tori, big electrolytic
capacitors, three-terminal regulators, heatsinks, small ICs, discrete
components and so on. 

-----------------------
Size matters. 

Unlike VLSI microprocessors, power supplies of a given wattage have not
shrunk significantly in the last ten years, for reasons related to how
much energy they're built to handle, which in turn governs the quantity of
bulk metal, semiconductor and insulation required to handle it. With more
ferrite, copper, solder and heatsinking inside, a good 300 watt supply
will weigh noticably more than an equivalently rated cheapie.

Look at the small 85 watt mini-ATX PSUs internal componentry, compared to
a 300 watt item for component size and rating comparison. Your PSU should
be running well within its capacity (about 70% of rated output is good),
not struggling at its limits. Allocate 10 watts per harddisk and at least
100 watts for a modern (read, 1GHz) CPU. Peripheral cards add to this
greed for power, GPUs especially. And then remember that what the rating
sticker says is not always what the the supply can deliver.


----------------------------
Things to look for.

- PCB *screwed* to chassis, not plastic-clipped, not stuck on with
  silicone/glue - screws ensure good grounding of the ground rails to the
  casing. I like my main earth rail bolted to the chassis, too.

- Electrolytic capacitors rated to 105 deg C, it'll say so on their case.
  Electrolytic capacitors by CHSSI, Luminous, Luxon, and JPCON had
  high failure rate problems in recent years but it is unlikely low ESR
  (extended series resistance) capacitors are used in generic switchmode
  supplies. 

- Grommets. These protect the cabling from abrasion during movement, where 
  it exits the PSU case. Cable ties and folded metal are the usual cut-corner. 
  
- No component gaps on the circuit board - no absent circuitry, all
  board positions full. A particularly incriminating shortcut is the
  substitution of a toroid choke with a component of rather less inductance 
  - a straight bit of wire. Good power supplies employ dedicated circuits
  for each rail, +12V, +3.3V, +5V, instead of several
  voltages derived from one regulator. 

- The Real Components. Look for a three-terminal monolithic
  half-rectifier bolted to the heatsink, and not two back-to-back axial
  power diodes soldered in their place, these don't cool as well as 
  equivalent-function regs due to poor contact patch between cylindrical
  body and flat heatsink, and relatively small x-section of conductor
  rails which are used as heatsinks in cost-cut supplies. 

- Circuitry to deal with power factor correction current (the PSU will
  consume some energy in transforming mains voltage into DC rails served
  up the way your PC likes 'em). You might find a passive PFCC AC input
  capacitor on the mains input feed. Better PSUs have active circuitry to
  manage PFCC. 

- Fuses, held in FUSE CLIPS. Yes, sometimes PSUs blow a fuse. They're
  usually soldered down because manufacturers don't expect you to replace a
  fuse, they assume whatever blows a fuse will render the rest of the  
  supply useless. Not always true. They also want you to buy a new supply
  rather than spend twenty cents on a replacement fuse, but you knew that.

- Chromed grilles, screwed in, not punched from the box sheetmetal. The
  grilles have less air resistance so collect less dust and airflow is
  better. Cooling is important.

- Adequately rated wires feeding mains from the IEC-III sockets to the
  PCB. A 300 Watt supply will be pulling more than one amp from its
  active mains rail. So the wires from the feed socket to the PCB should
  be rated to carry more than an ampere. You'd be dismayed at the flimsy
  wire sometimes used.

- Extruded, aluminium heatsinks with lots of fins, not the cheaper 
  punched tin plate ones (the latter exhibit lower thermal conductivity,
  more thermal mass). Black anodisation is a nice touch - it helps heat
  radiate off hot components to nearby chassis metalwork.

- thermal transfer grease and insulator pads between the heatsinks
  and the regulators. Be warned - don't touch the stuff - it might contain
  beryllium oxide.

- Non-flammable sealant goop. This is variously used to fix
  adjustment potentiometers to a set value, cover the vent ports on
  electrolytic capacitors, and support/separate tightly packed components.  
  Take a sliver, see what happens when you try to burn it with a cigarette
  lighter. If it burns it's OK as an insulator but a hazard if the supply
  fails. And, in my estimation, if they use cheap sealant, fail it might.

- Sockets. From IEC-III to the circuit board, and from the PCB to
  the fan. It's just a nice touch.

- Unscrew the PCB and look `under the rug' - at the circuit board artwork
  itself. Poor soldering, bridges between IC pads, tombstoning of
  SMD components, flux deposits left on the board, manual modifications 
  (performed by someone who has to do a thousand the same way per day and
  will invariably get some of them wrong), fractures on the PCB corners
  from damage in transit, these things are indicative of poor
  manufacture and handling.

- Listen to it when it's turned on. All you should hear is a fan. Stop
  the blades to silence the noise and no odd buzzes should be
  apparent from the board. Nor, for that matter, should there be any odd
  smells.

Most PSU's will fail on these some or all of these criteria. So you'll
have to take matters into your own hands to get a PSU which really does
what you want, and will do it well for a long time. Which brings us to
modifications.

-----------------------
Augmentation

- Money.

  Be prepared to pay extra if you spot a good PSU. This is not a mod, but
  it's a change in attitude which will pay off with less downtime. Beware.
  You can pay $160 for the exact same PSU at certain major supply houses, 
  as will cost you $50 at others. Shop around.


- Metal Oxide Varistors. 

These are a protective measure. They absorb most of the energy in a mains
spike, and I solder one each across active-earth and neutral-earth mains
rails. They explode when they do their job but are easy to replace and can
save your motherboard and peripherals. Some PSU circuits already have
these on board. 



- IEC-III socket inline LC noise filtering. 

Another protective measure, these sockets slot in where the plain plastic
recessed-male socket of the PSU was originally mounted. They are somewhat
longer than the socket they replace so care should be taken that the new
socket casing doesn't damage the rest of the circuit during modification.
Unsolder the original, solder in the replacement (don't swap the active
rail for neutral), close up and turn on. These are essentially LC
narrow bandpass filters and suppress everything either side of 50Hz, the
frequency at which mains is delivered.


- Always on. 

The only good thing about the previous power supply design, the AT series,
was that if fed mains, it powered up your machine. I want supplies on my
servers to always be on and not need human intervention. I strip a small
section of insulation off the green power-supply-on rail and couple it to
a black ground rail. PS_ON is thus always held low so the PSU can't be
turned off except by electrical shorts or removal of mains power (which is
great for remote reboots). Not all PSUs turn on automatically when this
has been performed, however. I usually remove the on/off switch too - I
yank the power cord if I want it turned off.



- Ball bearing fan. 

The failure of a $3 sleeve bearing fan in a stock $40 ATX PSU nearly ended
my dad's business - its seizure gradually cooked the backup harddisk (40Gb
maxtor in the top drive bay - convection cooling wasn't enough) and was in
process of toasting the motherboard.

By default I remove the typical sleeve-bearing fan, insert a 12V
ball-bearing fan and feed from the same rails as the original fan, or
insert 240V ball bearing fan, of the same dimensions, soldering the 240V
fan feeds onto the IEC-III incoming socket lugs. Be prepared for some
noise, these latter items move more hot air than an electioneering pollie.
A ballbearing fan usually lasts at least 25k hours depending on
environmental dust, and the quality of the lube used in the bearings,
which are sealed.

Some people run more than one fan in their PSU, usually on the outside.  
That's not a bad idea at all. Your PSU inhales pre-heated air from the
inside of your machine and will last longer with any airflow assistance
you might care to provide.


- absolutely reliable thermal overload cut-out. 

I find some ATX PSUs will still work while fan is siezed, the PCB is
charred, insulation is smouldering (you can smell it) and device is near
ignition point. In this mode they cook the computer from the top down...
glitches will originate in an overheated CPU (check in BIOS or use hand on
heatsink - careful, can be *very* hot) and the topmost devices start to
disappear from the OS's device list, because they're not information
devices any more - they're toast.

If a PSU gets really hot and out of expected operating temp range, the
semiconductors which do its logic and power regulation undergo
tolerance drift, which might mean off-spec voltages are fed to the
motherboard, beyond its ability to regulate them. Glitch time!

Most power supplies have a positive temperature co-efficient resistor, or
a thermistor, or something similar to drive logic for thermal shutdown.
However, in the event of overheating failures you can't expect the thermal
protection logic to work reliably, precisely because it's overheated too -
and if gets overheated the thermal protection logic obviously didn't work
in the first place. I rely instead on metallurgy and employ a thermal
fuse, rated to 79 degs Celsius, soldered (carefully - if you overheat it
during install it'll go open-circuit and be useless) in series with the
active rail. These are used in room heaters and can usually carry 10 amps
minimum. They are very reliable. Using silicone sealant for electrical
insulation with good thermal coupling, I mount it onto whatever heatsink
has the most components on it (note, PSU heatsinks are usually live).


- Real Silicone.

I have been known to replace the existing sections of generic goop with
silicone. Not the vinegar-flavoured, so-called acid cure variety - I use
methyl ethyl ketoxime cure exclusively. Silicone never burns and ketoxime
cure won't chemically react with the PCB tracks.

- Heatshrink 

I like to see this around components and mains-energised solder lugs. Not
necessary really but is a nice touch.


- Pots. 

Variable fan noise drives me nutz. I sometimes put a potentiometer
in series with the 12V fan feed and screw it down to a speed I find
quiet.



General design philosophy.
---------------------------
I observe *stupid* design errors in PSUs and if you do, you should think
about their probable consequences. 

I tossed an Osborne PSU (unknown OEM) wherein the main heatsink was
screwed to the chassis cowl and blocking the air vents. Unsurprisingly
this came to my attention after it had cooked itself to death.

I've seen three-terminal regs rivetted to heatsinks. I'd be suspicious
of a supply from a manufacturer too cheap to use real bolts.

I see PSUs in which light-gague fan feed wires gradually move around over
time and catch the fan blades. Good manufacturers sleeve their fan feeds
or cable tie them to something immobile.

The air vent grilles on the case, and the case metalwork itself, both
serve as earthed Faraday shielding which protects your motherboard from
introduction of spurious noise signals into its supply rails, from the
switching noise of the PSU. I don't mess with these, nor do I drill extra
holes.


- Burn-in.

People call me perverse but I keep chunks of obsolete hardware in part
because they serve as a useful, cheap and if necessary sacrificial testbed
for certain kinds of new components. Prior to installing it in production,
I like to run a new PSU at full crank for about a month, driving a pile of
failed ST-506 harddisks (the old, greedy, loud, 5.25 wide, double-height
ones) and an old motherboard stuffed full of whatever old peripheral cards
I can get. If the PSU is going to fail it will probably do it during that
time, and if this failure is damaging to peripherals well, it doesn't
matter. 

- Maintenance. 

Yes, power supplies accumulate dust. It might be worth cleaning them out
with a paint brush, or compressed air, every so often. Annually's good,
it's helpful to schedule it with other downtime, drive replacements,
motherboard upgrades, and so forth. Don't inhale the dust, it's variously
made of old cockroach faeces, photocopier toner, carpet fibres, pollen
grains, human skin flakes, fungal spores and other respiratory irritants.

So. Plugger-in, turn on. Suitably equipped, your PSU will run for years
and even die valiantly saving the rest of your machine in the event of
various mains supply misadventures.

Power on!


----------------------------

</geek>

I watched a videotape Dougo sent me from Melbourne - Five minutes of Fame.
There's a lot of footage of me on it I hadn't seen. One of the advantages
of my intrinsic media-slut propensity is that various bits of footage of
me in various incriminatory modes of trespass remain on tape where I can
look at myself, slightly less aged, over a period of years. Note that I
didn't say mature. But I get a bit wistful looking at it. Footage of the
final years of my life and I didn't know it. Not like anyone does for the
first few decades. Mullet didn't expect to die ten years ago either. I
wonder what he was thinking as he drifted into unconsciousness in the
frozen, arid, air-depleted icescape on Makalu? Well, nothing.
Frostbrain'll stop you thinking - crystallise your thoughts and the meat
you use to think with too.

I like that Channel V clip the best. With ... hmm. Who does that backing
track... Tricky?

"Who do you think you are. You're insignificant. A small piece." 

Yeah, I know already, fer fuck's sake. My life really is down the drain.
I can crap on about drains interminably. It's on TV so it must be true.

Arrr. Most of cat didn't show up at Black Rose Monday night. Just Hugh and
his fucked-up-hair dog Rupert, Neddie, Safa and myself. I dropped Neddie
back to his rental accom in Newtown (the bike always handles like a car
when it has a 100kg slab of Ned on the pillion seat - a smoother ride) and
then sucked caffeine at Cinque and watched the late-night freakshow trot
past the front window where I like to sit. Genia and Amber and KegRoll
(Arlene Textaqueen's younger sister) popped past and we hadda bit of a
chitchat. Which is another great thing about King St. Lots of people walk
past and if you keep your eye out you can have an impromptu chat to them.
Try that in Westfields. Then again, don't. Loiterers are a security risk,
right? Move along.


I popped over to XML's place. Smokering and Twitchin' Link were there. XML
is still not happy with her install so Puke-ohze went back on the machine
where knoppix went before. She wants to get on the net right now. Link and
Smokering work with Puke-Ohze all the time and neither of them could tell
it where to find its own drivers, either. We get up to stupid stuff.
Playing music on diving snorkels. Pouring cold water on each other's heads
unexpectedly. Putting our hands into the toaster for a dare (Russian
Toaster is a much simpler game than Russian Roulette and depends on you
not knowing wether or not the toaster is plugged into a live socket, which
as it happened I didn't - if this fact is ever published you can expect
toasters to be banned). Bashing each other up with bananas. Twitchin's fun
to watch, it's like he's got a bug in his servo' code someplace.
Tourettes. I edit it out of my awareness fairly quickly. He nicked off
later and Smokey and XML and I turned into something of a styrofoam
sandwich on the loungeroom beanbags. Arr. It was good. Shame about the
clothes.

Monday night, off in the rain again to Turella. Someone's done a kernel
transplant on Tarvat and I rebooted it at 2am so nobody'd notice the
downtime. Oh shit. Big mistake. Nobody tested this did they. So tarvat's
been down all day. I couldn't be arsed rebuilding it. Soz is gonna do it
tonight.


Tuesday. I got a recycled envelope in the post from Liela today. As in,
bits of cardboard held together with painter's edging tape. It bore a
'zine with no name but maybe it's called Thumb. It's Liela's hand in a
thumb's up jesture slapped down on the glass of a photocopier someplace in
San Francisco. Her nails are dirty, as I remember them when we squatted. A
fortune cookie insert fell out of it:

[You will overcome obstacles to achieve success]

Not this time. I'd be happy to overcome obstacles to merely achieve 
mediocrity again. 

I like that it's so unprocessed, grungy, fabricated of necessity and
whatever bits of paper happen to be there. How much information is there
that ya can't pack into a raw ascii screed like this one you're reading?
Heaps. Road maps from odd cities. Ticket stubs from Shannon airport.
Handwriting. Diary entries done on old impact typewriters with worn
ribbons with real errors xxxx'd over, typewriters are more honest that
way, and you can see which words are typed really hard by angry fingers.
Printouts from dotmatrix printers where the paper got slightly jammed and
the text is sort of curled down the page. Expired tickets from Deutsche
Rail. That there's no staples and it's held together by sticky tape. 35mm
film negatives. Slightly out of focus photographs, streakily xeroxed on a
photocopier which is just about running out of toner. I can make out,
faintly, the arch and delta patterns in her left thumbprint.  Leila woz
'ere. ASCII just doesn't cut it in some departments though it's my fave
tool. Leila's face loses a lot when translated from a photocopy of the
black and white, silver emulsion shot to its ASCII essence which looks
something like {:-)

I noticed something. Without even thinking about it I've started
opening doorknobs with the backs of my fingers, my fist closed. Dont wanna
leave fingerprints. Paranoid fuckhead.

Wednesday. No, Shit it's Judgement Day. Holy fucking thursday. Easter. I
forget these religious rituals so thoroughly I am usually surprised by
them twice, or I discover them postally later, which is when I realise
that Jesus's main legacy is that I've lost twice the usual number of
demerit points and pay twice the normal fine I'd get for speeding or
whatever infringement a given cop wants to serve on me. Jesus didn't die
to save you from your sins, all of you religious twits out there eating
yer theobromine Easter Eggs and getting alfoil stuck in your teeth.  
Jesus died to give the cops an excuse to raise revenue. This existance of
this fact makes cancer appear positively lucid and logical in comparison.

I am in court in 9 hours and I feel lucky that I am not going there on a
train with no return ticket for a custodial charge. I lined up a
caseworker at Justice Action, since most illustrious luminary
honourable learned worshipful magisterial magistrates like that their
miserable charges have been (my keys feel filthy typing this word)
_proactive_ about the penalty they are likely to encounter, it makes 'em
feel like I'm taking them seriously. So if I have to do community service,
I can do it there. Cookie works there. I can punch code for them instead
of harvesting empty drink bottles and used condoms on the side of the
tollways. My caseworker, Greg, has a zero haircut, wire-rimmed spectacles
like I have, and a long spent time in the slam for stabbing his wife to
death. I think from an experience point of view ya can't beat a convicted
killer for knowledge of the justice system. He's rather engaging.

I imagine it could go like this.

J "How do you plead?"
P "Verbally, your worship."
J "How do you plead?"
P "I can do it in writing if you like. Oh. Do you mean what do I plead?
   Well I did all the stuff in the charge sheet. It's there in writing."
J "Guilty or not guilty, you twit?"
P "Guilt ceased to mean anything to me years ago. I did what it says in the
   charge sheet. I acted in contravention of S4,1,a of the Inclosed Lands
   Protection Act 1901. Sentence me please."
J "$550 fine and fuck off out of here you pitiful long-haired wanker."

If I can get away without a contempt of court charge I'll be surprised and
happy.

I'll write again when I'm done with this stupid court shit. Bored yet?

------

Thursday. 

I found a tie. I parked somewhere with no time restrictions. Burwood court
has nice olivine/ sodium-feldspar granite tables and super-uncomfortable,
fuck your bum off, wire mesh chairs. They scan everyone who comes in the
door, except for the cops. The place stinks of cologne. Almost all the
people heard in these cases are blokes, young, muscly, with bowl haircuts.
Lebs and Tongans. Cookie came out to watch the case. It wasn't good to
hear on the morning that Legal Aid wasn't gonna represent me, cos it was a
non-custodial charge and all that shit.

Thanks for the advance warning that you were gonna drop me in it guyz.

Ours was the first case of the day. Purple Death Faerie had her own lawyer
from the SRC but he was a bit of a useless twerp. The maj' whinged to her
that she was 20 not 12. Lifting manhole covers and exploring tunnels is a
bit of an adventure... I don't think so, he said. He harped on that if
stupidity or foolishness were a barrier to her getting a section 10 she
wouldn't get one and that this lenience was extended once in a lifetime,
rah rah, patronising, pompous git. Getting into stride, I though. He let
her out with a six month good behaviour bond and she was ordered to pay
$61 court costs. I was relieved. I was gonna spring for her court costs
but she said she wanted to go in the drain. I listened to a bunch of other
cases. Wife bashers, car theives, dudes who decided to punch on with the
cops (well, that's how the cops put it) shoplifters. Poor magistrate Paul
Stanislaus Clorus (not the softest chap on the bench, I'm told), reduced
to presiding over such a sequence of minor drivel.

I read the sheet the cops provided about me. It has my real name listed
four times the same way, as my known aliases. It says I'm not
fingerprinted, which is bollocks. I bloody am. I'm gonna ask 'em to
destroy the fingerprinting entries. 

Cookie showed up. She, PDF and I chatted momentarily with her lawyer
before the session started. Purple Death Faerie was dealt with first and I
listened closely to the Maj's comments since I suspected he'd like to hear
them from me later. Cookie wrote that I should mention in my plea that I
endangered the cops, which turned out to be a good idea. When eventually
the laywers for other cases shut up (they call each other `my friend') and
pissed off out of the courtroom I was called. It went something like this:

M: <my real name>?
P: Your worship.
M: Stand over there near the mic. Is <my real name> your name?
P: It is my name your worship.
M: What matter are you here for?
P: Trespass, your worship, Inclosed Lands Protection Act 1901, sec 4 1 a.
M: Are the facts in this sheet accurate?

<could I be bothered at this point to argue? No.>

P: The sheet is accurate your worship.
M: Do you understand the charge?
P: I understand the charge your worship.
M: How do you plead?
P: I wish to enter a plea of guilty your worship. Here are some references 
   as to my character your worship.
M: Do you have anything else to say?
P: If the magnitude of stupidity of this sequence of events was apparent
   to me in advance I wouldn't be here. I've endangered myself, endangered
   the police, wasted their time, wasted your time and I think to say
   anything more at this point would just be an additional waste of your
   worship's time.

At this point I shut up. I swear, he leaned back in his chair and beamed
at me as if, finally, he'd met someone who understood what a
soul-destroying waste of his time his job was. An interminable parade of
drunks, thugs and petty crims throwing every excuse at him, all the same
shit he'd heard before. Finally someone wasn't gonna bullshit him.

M: Well that's an eloquent summary. I am familiar with the
details of this case from the hearing recently held for your
accomplice. She had youth on your side. You do not. I find it
inappropriate to impose a fine at this stage and require you to enter into
a good behaviour bond for six months. If you break the terms of the bond
you can be returned here for sentencing. You are free to go.

This took all of about four minutes and cost me $61. Roughly the same as a
blow job in 1970 and about as meaningful. I got my stuff off the Sherrifs
at the door and walked out at about midday.

Joss showed up, I spotted her as she walked past a net cafe in which I was
eating some lunch. We went down to the park on Burwood road and ate
something with artichoke hearts and substitute Hungarian sausage in it. I
dropped her back to Balmain after getting a bit lost on the way. 

I woke up friday and rode the suspension-seat treadly from Blakehurst to
Heathcote. This is my first serious ride since the big slash five months
ago. After 10km I was a bit chafed. I am not very fit but there was no gut
pain at all. Soz and Cookie showed up at the station and we rode down
Heathcote road to the service track. Cookie's left pedal siezed so we
gutted it on the roadside, and she ended up riding around on it with no
bearings or anything. We went from Heathcote road along the service track
to Woronora Dam, which was about 10km. The water board have sealed all the
gaps in the water pipeline so there were no handy pipeline leaks to drink
from but the creek water was potable and it was a clear, sunny day. Some
killer hills though. We reached the dam in the afternoon and checked out
the vast concrete monster and the 53 thousand billion gallons of water it
was reckoned to be holding back, before riding out again to the southern
freeway. It looks about 80% full but most of a dam's capacity is in its
upper layers. Soz and Cookie got the train back to Turella at Waterfall. I
rode back to Blakehurst, and was thoroughly fucked by the time I got
there, at the end of the roughly 45km haul. Was a time I'd eat 45km
without a thought. My knees and wrists hurt, my legs ached, my neck hurt
from holding my head up. I'm glad I'm going to Bathurst on a motorbike on
Sunday. 200km'd under my own steam would just about kill me.

I'm off to rebuild tarvat on another motherboard. Tomorrow I fix the
wiring in Lou's squat on Wilson St. A favour's a favour 'n all.

Double fucking demerit points. Thanks very much Christianity. Oh well. In
a parallel universe somplace people probably get double demerit points for
all of Ramadan.


------ 

It's friday 16th, it's been a long time from the (dumb) terminal. Sunday
arvo I rode the 'cycle out to Bathurst. Took three hours and I arrived in
the near-dark, and was very nearly despatched by a 'roo which decided to
jump into the space where my bike was going to be in half a second (at 90
kays an hour). I hit the anchors and swore and the thing happily sprung
along the road for a few more skips, its feet thumping and claws scuffing
on the bitumen, before bounding over a fence and off into the distance.
The back tyre smoked when I locked it up. 

I met Keith on the driveway at dusk and he told me where to drive.

Jude and Joss and Soph and I got a bit pissed. Smoked some cones. They
hadda leave the next day.

I've wandered about the place now where Joss spent some of her life
growing up. It's steep, and a bit denuded of trees. There's a power
transmission line snaking across the river gully at the bottom. Big veins
of quartz run along the property, striking North-South, I reckoned,
assuming west was where the sun set. Outcrops of basalt, clotted with
moss, jut out of the ground at funny angles in places. It is quiet and I
could hear the birds. The river is lined with willows and casuarinas with
bits of roofing iron wrapped around them in the direction of flow of the
water. There's roo, rabbit, horse and various other shit around the place.
Walnut trees in irrigated rows. Alpacas synchronously pointing their heads
at me in curiosity. A vinyard. 

A big colourbond shed full of farm machinery. I immediately felt at home
there amongst the faint smell of silicate dust and machine oil. Sheds have
a language of their own. They tell you a lot about who works there, and
how they run their lives. This one had bits of stuff nobody could bring
themselves to throw out, various old parts and offcuts and obsoleted,
forgotten crap, ferrochrome spider habitat, all centred around the
inevitable battered work bench (slapped together with nine-ply and offcuts
of perforated angle iron, dressed in a graffiti of saw cuts, chemical
burns, grease stains, random holes from nails and drills), the altar where
the arbeitenmensche worships the god of machinery at the sacred vise
(mounted to the bench with whatever that'llfuckin'do scavenged bolts and
nuts and bruised washers someone dug out of the driveway or pinched from a
condemned vehicle), scarred with weld spatter, half-mulched in plastic
sawdust and rusted, writhing drill turnings. Smashed bricks where heavy
things fell on the floor. Bent plastic bottles with coloured goop leaking
out of them. Tins caved in, labels falling off. A kitchen where nothing
rots, nothing needs washing, and you have to wear shoes for your own
protection.

I wandered around the land. It's dry. I spent time looking at the bits of
lustrous schist here and there. The borer holes in the straining posts.
The skirts of hex mesh under the gates. I stood under huge old twisty
trees for which I do not have the latin binomials. Was pricked by nettles
killed by drought. Looked at the size-specifically sorted pebbles the
local ants place on their anthills.

I feel like I have to do stuff on farms. Variously smacked things with a
block splitter, failed (with Keith) to repair one of their irrigation
lines, did some earthmoving, manually moved heavy chunks (well, up to
about 20kg) of basalt to form part of a retaining wall. Carole was
subsequently cranky at Keith and I for doing this 'cos she reckons this
exertion might have decapsulated the node in my neck. I reckon that's
bollocks, not in the sense that she's wrong, yeah, maybe it did. But we
can't prove it. And does it matter? It was gonna crack open eventually
anyway. Or fuck up entirely of its own accord. Next stop on the lymphatic
plumbing from this node is my superior vena cava, then my right cardiac
atrium, then out to my lungs so the blood can dump carbon dioxide and
snarf oxygen in that miraculous feat of surfactant-mediated gas exchange
we dismissively refer to as breathing. Lungs are full of oh-so-narrow
capillaries. Where erythrocytes have to deform in order to pass single
file. Metastatic cells get caught and proliferate in situ. Gradually
strangling me, alveolus by alveolus, lobe by lobe, lung by lung. Fuck.

Diagnosed a failed battery in a rechargable torch. Washed dishes. Drank
wine. Made tea the slow way on a slow-burning wood stove. Checked out the
voltage in the solar panel batteries and pondered the tracking mechanism
on the panels. Ate dinner with Joss' parents. Watched a wasp paralyze a
spider too big for the wasp to haul off. Breathed in the fragrant (acacia,
eucalypt) smoke from the wood stove. Gazed amazed at the countless
brilliant stars and magellanic clouds and satellites drifting across the
upper atmosphere while meteors incinerated themselves in it, scarring the
dark with their fleeting glare, and felt no less worthy a man for not
knowing the names of the stars, which are poor substitutes for knowing
about stellar nucleosynthesis and being amazed that it led to the
fabrication of the stuff I am made of, and that the stardust I'm made of
can lie there and contemplate its own origin. Let the horses out of the
botton paddock by accident (though the horses knew damned well what they
were doing). Ate rose hip. Smashed off chunks of basalt and granite
outcrops (no visible molybdenum disulfide in the latter sadly, though
there is at the road cuttings near Wallerawang), bringing sparks from the
pick. Chatted to, reacquainted myself with, hugged, cried and snotted on,
sucked used bong smoke from the lips of, tousled the hair of, remembered
the smell of, shagged, dreamed about, conjectured to myself that I still
really don't know very much about, Joss. What a grip she has on my teensy
little bwane. I can't help it very much. It shits me that I will have to
let her go along with everything bloody else. I might never really get to
know about her. She will reveal what she wants to in her own good time.
Other people can't be expected to run to Bill's schedule. Maybe I should
get used to that.

On Wednesday night I drank beer in the bath, shampooed my dusty, sweatty
mop. Sat in a lounge chair and listened to a tape of various old music
(the revolution will not be televised, or the television will not be
revolutionised, or something). Pecked at dinner, distractedly. Didn't
finish the flute of red plonk I poured for myself. Said very little. Went
upstairs and climbed into bed and drank my hot chocolate long after it got
cold.

I woke up on Thursday after not, as I had gleefully anticipated, sharing a
shag with Joss (I was not in the mood, at all. Bill scares me.) And to
make life that little bit extra more encouraging discovered that coughing
hurt, sneezing hurt, breathing in hard hurt, turning my head hurt more
than it did on Wednesday morning. I'm miles from my olds, miles from my
life, and that arsehole in my neck is on the warpath. Oh well, I did stick
a needle in him and suck some of his guts out a few months ago.

Joss dozed on thursday morning. I was making tea downstairs when the
thought started to consume my thinking.

I Must. 
Get out.
Of here.

I was leaving anyway but I felt like everything was so much more urgent. I
have to get out of here, I said to myself, surprisingly often. I'm turning
into a grumpy frustrated schedule nazi.

So I rode the 'bike down the dirt road (much faster than walking the 5
minute walk) and said goodbye to Joss' olds at Tanderra. Joss' mum stuck
enough dissolved selenite into me to get me classified as a mineralogical
deposit and I was halfway surprised I didn't start photoconducting in the
sunlight. She rang up her surgery, which is where I'm going after I type
this stuff.

She wants to gimme a draft copy of her coming book so I can proofread it.

Pred  : "You'd better type fast."
Carole: "I hear you, pred."

She does not type fast.

I went back to the small, smoky cottage and grabbed my stuff. Joss was
scribbling dilligently and closed the notebook before I got there.
I wouldn'ta looked anyhow. She left pages of stuff around the cottage for
three days and I didn't read them either.

The pack was on, the leathers sealed up. I had earplugs in my ears to stop
me getting additional tinitus from the impending scream of the fourstroke
engine half a meter below me, howling like a huge, angry blowie at 8000
revs. So she yelled at me that she loved me. 8-) I didn't hug her like it
was the last time I was gonna see her 'cos I didn't want to think it was
gonna be. As I write, knowing that Bill appears to have become rather more
proliferative, she's planning to be up there for anything from a week to a
month, I think this was maybe not such a good idea. But then I'd never get
off the property. If it had occurred to me at the time that we'd never
meet again, I wouldn't let my arms unlock. Someone'd have to cut me off
her. I dunno if I will meet her again. The Bill Army is getting
unpredictable.

Broken quartz crunched under the tyres as I braked to open the main gate.
It swung shut slowly, the rusty hinges squeaking as I pulled it closed.
The chain makes an interesting jingling noise when the latch falls upon
its bolt. I wondered if I would be here again. A younger me might have
floored it in the sandy driveway and showered the gate with the stuff but
that would have been a second wasted. I nudged it out to the tarmacadam
slowly and then, wheels on something solid, twisted the throttle and was
spat down the road like an orange pip. I love that it accelerated so
cleanly as I changed up through the gears. Go, go, go, feets, get me out
of here. Take me away from myself. The reassuringly mindless mechanical
hum of _going someplace_ sank into my bones as I fed my arse back on the
seat, leaned over the tank and fucked off down the road, my helmet making
random thwack noises as it became the last thing to go through the minds
of the morning's less fortunate airborne insects.



Beautiful day, beautiful ride, but I felt like shit all the way home,
shockwaves from potholes felt like punches in the guts. Turning my neck
hard right hurt. I had to laugh at a speed camera on a lonely straight
stretch of country road... neatly punctured, front, dead-centre, by a BIG
round hole from a ballsy firearm. I stopped to look at it, I'd reckon it
was hit by a .303 or something like that. 303's being what they are, one
round would be plenty. The projectile fragmented and peppered the back
wall of the box, too. Nice one, whoever put it there. I drove back to
Sydney, the speedo needle wobbling between 100-120 so I didn't really know
how fast I was going. I felt like shit when I got home and lay down. Why
does my guts hurt? Has one of Bill's messengers occluded something which
keeps my guts alive? Or did I just eat something dodgy?

I logged into cat and deleted 26 Mb of spam. R is in town for a chat
so I'll see her on Saturday. She seems to think I've got five years. Yeah,
right. This is characteristic of people when faced with nasty statistics.
I told her months ago that I had a 99% chance of being dead within five
years. Do people hear that and think that everyone in that cohort drop
dead exactly 1824 days from their diagnosis? No dude. The curve is not
flat then discontinuous and suddenly vertical at the sample point. There's
plenty of butchery all over the entire sample window. The window is
closing. On me. Eventually there Will be A Splatting Sound. Just remember
O for Oh, Dyin's.

I went to the Coopers Arms and chatted to Rumble and Graeme of that
mysterious shadowy high-tech organisation which only appears when you need
it - Rent-A-Geek. I haven't seen 'em for ages and come to think of it, if
this thing in my neck gets going, I'm not gonna see 'em again. I mentioned
to Gra what the situation was. He was a bit shocked. I gave him the usual
run about my life, which thank fuck I haven't pissed up the wall saving
for somewhere to live. I'd really be angsting about that if I had. Throw
the best 15 years of your life working for some bank only to have it all
pulled out from under you? Oh, puke.


"Fucking kids are whinging, they can't get a job
 the photocopy repairman is a smarmy smartarse knob
 I've been running this office for so long I can't recall.
 I've gone and pissed thirty years up against the wall.

 `Good morning Mr Jenkins' the office girls all say
 `Gentlemen' I tell the board `the agenda for today'
  I play the part so desperately 'cos the truth so appalls
  I've gone and pissed thirty years up against the wall.

  Off I go to the Men's room for the seventh time today.
  My bladder no longer hears me no matter what I say.
  I watch the tiles in front of me and wait for the trickle to fall.
  I've gone and pissed thirty years up against the fuckin' wall.

TISM - The Men's Room (www.tism.wanker.com)

So I diverted the conversation to something blokes like to talk about.
Beer. He's brewing lagers and ales with this wicked water-jacketted
cooling unit for psychrophile yeasts, convection fed, Peltier-cooled. Much
cheaper than a 'fridge. Arr. Remind me that I gave up beer for its carb
load, would you?


So I popped over to STUCCO and slapped in some network cards and crimped
some cable and drove home, feeling extremely like deep-fried dogshit. I
fell into bed, neck throbbing.


Friday I went to Balmain and, at Carole's suggestion had a sh'load of
ascorbic acid shoved up my arm (about 30g) from really big syringes. While
the gut pains stopped a day later, as I write on Sunday I can't say it's
made much difference to Bill, who remains perched like Prometheus' eagle
under my skin, choppin' away at my lifespan. The little molecular wheels
take time to grind, but grind they do.

I chatted to Jude and drank vanilla tea and Clocktower port for a while
after I re-spoked Joss' wheel and eventually dropped him back to Enmore.
Jude is Joss' younger brother and Soph's squeeze. Soph is small and skinny
but makes up for it with sheer joie de vivre, and when I appeared she
exuberantly took a running jump and landed on me, slinging her arms around
my aching neck and clamping her legs around my aching guts and I didn't
know wether to scream or throw up. I didn't do either, to my surprise, and
managed to ask her to climb down. She got the guiltys about it and I told
her to relax, she couldn't have known. If she was ten kilos heavier I'da
puked. Man. Everyone wants to hug me neck and I can't let 'em go near it.

An SMS came in from Cookie. JA were havin' a barbie, Douggie was there
(still walking around after a semi shoved his car up a rail embankment and
made him stave the dashboard in with his head), so could I come over? Yeah
man. They do great nosh.

So I got there and sat down and patted the rottie and chatted to people
about stuff generally. Like that stupid court case I was at last week.
Totally unimpressive to people who have done long ugly periods in the slam
for serious shit, but oh, I guess it was on-topic, at least. They reckon
good behaviour bonds extend to the border but not beyond. Yeehar. I can be
naughty in Melbourne 8-)

Ya know, I think getting a varicocele, then a redundant organ taken out,
were really the opening salvos, warning shots across the bow. You're gonna
be hit later, these said to me. Later is now. It's all different. Bill
variously aches, rages, and subsides. Bill launches his minions into my
fuel lines, my airways, my structural members, my signal systems, my
motors, hinges, cladding. They live off the land, making more of
themselves. Now I walk around telling myself, you're under attack, pal. I
feel like there's fuck-all I can do about it. I caught sight of my face in
a car window as I was walking the dog this arvo (she's so clean, so
fluffy, I stood naked in the shower last night and shampooed her and
brushed her and she shook her fleas off onto me where I can see and
crush'em between my nails) and I was scowling.  Gravitation doesn't quite
explain the rather disproportionate weight of the ten or twenty grams of
stuff nestled in the root of my left shoulder.

I wonder at times should I just shut the fuck up about what Bill's doing.
Partly to stop it chewing up other people's heads. But thinking about the
whole process of dying is interesting in that it gives me a sense of some
kind of control over the process, and I think it's important to give other
people time to get used to it too. Bill's my hasslebot, my personal cron
daemon. Do these things at these times: Relax. Be Afraid. Relax. Be
Afraid. Be happy. Be sad. Go to a doctor, be told nothing especially
helpful, go home. Be sad, sad, sad. Hold your head this way when you
sleep.

"Wake up! Time to die." 
- Roy Baty (R.Hauer) to Decker (H.Ford), Blade Runner

Would people be pissed off if I told them much later on, when I was closer
to checking out?

Cookie's on the same emotional rollercoaster as I am. She's watching me,
observing that when Bill says jump, I ask from which clifftop. I
gobbled some sausages at the JA barbecque and went off for a quiet chat
with her. She comes up with the best ideas at times. Typical. All the ways
I've been considering getting out of this forecast corporeal shipwreck
work great but are NO FUN. Cookie's pretty sad about all this stuff. She
said to me she spent ten years with a dude who asked her every other day
if she still liked him, and I've spent the last year warning her not to
fall in love with me. That was the deal. Good shags, good conversation.
Something tells me she's getting attached. Not a good time to do it,
really. Maybe she isn't. Maybe she is. I dunno. 


I've decided to start saying goodbye. Cookie and I shagged a couple of
damn good shags back at the 'factory. You don't think a shag'd stop me
talking, do you - who says men can't do more than one thing at a time?
Embedded in each other's bods, illuminated by the dim gloom of a small
electric light, I just had to smile at her and tell her it was a privilage
having known her and that she should never forget how cool she is. She
squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered a bit. Ahh, Cookie. Let me hold you.  
It is surprisingly easy to say this kind of goodbye. Maybe 'cos I don't
believe it myself yet. Like I am trying it out. Sometimes you can't find
the words for the things you really need to speak.



"Either way, I'm confused. You slow me down. What can I do.
There's one particular way I have to choose."

Split Enz - One step ahead. (Neil Finn) Waiata. 1980
 

Didn't Dorothy Parker ever hear about smack? Even if it does cause
cramp, you're not gonna feel it. And like you'd give a shit about its
illegality. I had to laugh about the bit in the Crimes Act (1901) where it
forbids suicide. Nobody ever stands trial for doing it right.


Desist.

Oceans barren,
forests dead.
Cities swollen,
Soil's fled.

Ozone's depleted,
rivers dry.
Planet defeated.
You might as well die.



I dunno why I never thought of it before. I've never used it. The prison
system is awash with the shit despite what Amanda Flintstone thinks. The
street price today is about $70 for a qtr gram, which is well more than a
quarter of a megabuck per kilo. Five migs will tell most of your pain to
fuck right off. 500 migs will kill most people. I'll need less if I'm
pissed 'cos ethanol is a synergistic CNS depressant. And I do rather like
old Mudgee Rummy tawny port. Plenty of that, please. I don't want some
do-gooder coming along with a suitcase full of opiate antagonist and
reviving my carcass. My supplier, who shall remain nameless, is
uncomfortable shouting me my death and wants cash from me in advance
before he supplies it. Fair enough.

Overdose is phonetically pleasing in the same way as are the words
overloads, overdrive, overthrows. It has a couple of problems. Fatuous
dickheads are glorified for using it to kill 'emselves, for a start,
though as ways to exit go, it's got a lot going for it. What really bugs
me is that the word overdose implies that you kind of fucked it up and
_accidentally_ fed yourself too much. Nobody ever uses it when someone
blows their brains out with a firearm, because it is so obviously silly to
claim that someone who does so dies of a lead overdose, though in some
senses this is exactly what they do. It's too obviously deliberate to
permit any of that comforting uncertainty that maybe they really wanted to
stay and they got out by accident. 

{In 1986, in my high school science class, Eddie O'Meagher put lead
nitrate in the science lab fish tank. The fish did in fact did indeed die
of a lead overdose... though I suspect maybe the nitrate ions got 'em
first. What impressed me was how old Faulksie figured out the identity of
the material Eddie used.}

That it is a dose chosen deliberately, calibrated to exceed by a large
amount my opiate receptor systems, should be made plain to those of you
who might think otherwise. I checked the literature before plonking my
money down.

So then it's just a question of verifying the purity, not 'cos it really
matters from a contamination point of view, I mean, that'd be like
complaining there's the wrong isotope of lead in your shotgun shells. I'd
filter it and verify it (finally, having studied crystallography will come
in handy), but I'll also use the melting point range for diacetylmorphine,
which for the pure stuff is pretty small, centred on 173 degs C, or
243-245 degs C for the water soluble monohydrate hydrochloride (which
people stick in a spoon and heat to dissolve with a bit of bicarb to raise
the pH, which although facilitating solubility ends up destroying some of
the active stuff) so I can learn if it can do what I need it to do. Bliss
me into oblivion. Smack's reputedly better than orgasms, but that's no
slur on orgasms; you'd expect that from a drug which binds to all your
opiate receptors. It occurs to me I can dispense with trying to cannulate
myself and just stick it in a lipid based pellet and shove it up my bum.
Like I'll give a damn if I die with a smelly finger. It might confuse the
coroner though. Tough.

Saturday night I was in bed and mum walked in and I told her instead of
explosives or ricin I'd probably use smack to shut myself down. She said
she'd like me around as long as possible. I said yeah, but that will
probably hurt like hell and involve pain and disablement and I'd be fucked
if I'd die in some goddamned hospital full of beeping machines and the
faint stinks of disintegrating old people and death and phenol failing to
mask both of them. I'd invite 'em along but they'd only try to stop me.
They're not ready and probably will never be ready. They want me to be
taken by something they can cleanly despise for doing it.

Then there's the question of what to do with me dear ol' carcass.

I think rather than paying to waste propane and be converted to air
pollution, or acquiring a box and chewing up landfill space at Woronora, I
think I'll donate my bod to a university anatomy department instead. One
good chop deserves another. I benefitted greatly from the chance to marvel
at the lone, pale, cold, acrid, but beautifully dissected biomechanical
chassis which used to be home to a sentient personality. Bodies log our
history; which muscles are developed, what creases line the face, where
the calluses have formed, where are the burns, scars, stretchmarks, moles,
tats, and so on, but there's so much data lost forever when the brain
dies. So I whizzed this off to Dan, prodigious reader of books and
USyd anatomy department geek.

>>>

From predator@cat.org.au Tue Apr 20 14:22:50 2004
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 13:12:41 +1000 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: Dan <zzzzzz@anatomy.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: experiments in oncology

> Hey, Pred, it really sucks that you've become experimental subject.

In some ways. But it is sort of OK in that I do have some say in the
experimental design. Like when to call it all off. Not a lot of rattus
norvegicus get that privelage.

<chop>

Dude. On a somewhat more macabre note, I think it'd be a waste of a
perfectly good carcass if I were converted to air pollution or stashed in
landfill. I can't donate me organs 'cos they'll have cryptic mets in them
by now. So, who do I ask about bequeathing my bod to say, the anatomy
department?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1971 model H.sapiens. One owner, in good condition, some scarring, one
missing kidney and one missing adrenal gland, classical metastatic
pathology. Some fillings. Approx 65kg. Male. Caucasian. 186cm long. Comes
with papers. May be GPL'd. Behaves well in formalin. Contact predator@cat.org.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

>>>

He came back saying yeah there's a cadaver program, he'd send me a brochure.

I loved reading Frank Netter's illustrated dissections. My bod has, on the
whole, been a truly delightful thing to live in. I can't really donate the
organs, I think. They're full of little precursors to tumors by now and
that's exactly the wrong sort of gift that keeps on giving. Transplant
recipients are usually pharmacologically immunosuppressed so as not to
reject the bits of someone else's guts which keep them alive, wouldn't
reject my tumors either. Which by the time I was in a position to donate
them would be full of cells selected for immunoevasion anyway. They're
gonna have a much harder time doing anything antisocial perfused with
formaldehyde. Come to think of it, so will I. I know what anatomists and
med students do with corpses in anatomy lab. I mean, come on, it's fun to
wiggle the fingers and watch the tendons move up and down. I reckon the
real fun is at the molecular level but you can't really see that at the
macroscopic scale. 

On sunday Charlie rang me (from fuckin' Canada!) and chatted about stuff.
He's depressed about Iraq, which is fair enough. He's doing an embedded
gnu/linux project. I'm sizing up the possibility of living in his house
for a while but I told him it's quite possible he'll have a corpse
stinking his house out. I know not when the axe will fall. He understands.
I might end up crawling around in the subfloor, since the wiring's fucked
up a lot.

Sunday night I nearly ruptured myself reading Dilbert: Highly Defective
People before going out to see "The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind"
which was great, great, great! I haven't had my plot-thread tracker
exercised so thoroughly for ages. And great concepts... reactive, sentient
nested memories! XML and I walked out of it, snogged in the park a bit and
walked back to her pad. We've both mowed off our hair.  We were on the bed
but then stood up and fucked some posters off the wall. I don't know how
she hung on. She left a bite in my right deltoideus I'm gonna be feeling
for weeks.

The price one pays for being promiscuous is that tactical rubber is de
rigeur. I haven't barebacked with anyone for nearly a year. I've been more
or less shagging the same bit of latex for a long time, backed by
different people's bodies. Ya really do lose a lot of the sensation. And
when yer not a rock-hard 20 year old, the mechanics become sort of tricky
on the second shag. I wrote about them to someone a few weeks before Nov
19, 2003, diagnosis day. It'd been edited a little bit but only the
original recipient will know where.


<geek, physiology>

Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 00:10:21 +1000 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au

Dude... if I really need to get off, I'll find a way. If I don't, so what?  
I have fun getting you off, and like that you do too. I long ago gave up
caring if I got off or not. There are loads of advantages to not
getting off... like, say, greater likelihood of getting off later 8-)

Warning: gruesome male anatomy/psychology lesson follows. 

I think it's not a reflection on you or anything, but rather on the nature
of male physiology. I think men are evolved to shoot first, ask questions
later, and if I don't get off straight away, as I sometimes do in morning
shags, I can maintain a useful prong for long enough to get you 
off, but that may change the physiological conditions required for me to
get off. Some women get off and dry out or get extremely sensitive (etc).

Speaking for my own rig, there's a narrow stimulatory window which one has
to be in to stay hard but _not_ shoot. If you dry out, or I leak lube too
much, I go from fucking you with a condom which stays still relative to my
dick, to fucking a condom which stays still relative to you, which doesn't
feel as good, so I go soft; not enough friction / too much lube (a
function of the lube already in the condom, the lube I leak {which comes
from the prostate gland} inside the condom, plus whatever lube you're
secreting or adding to the outer surface of the condom) means things go
soft too. And if everything's really great, I shoot and go soft.

If evolution gave a damn, men'd have *bones*.

The internal hydrostatic pressure in the corpus cavernosae (the technical
term for hardon shaft rigidity) varies in a complex way, a function of
penile diameter and the diameter of the rubber ring at the bottom of the
franger, what your and my pelvic floor musculature is doing, position,
insertion angle, how horny I am, synchrony of movement (if we move in the
same direction at the same time, hence end up *not* moving relative to
each other, which is effectively the same as being still) and to borrow
from engine terminology, the bore and stroke parameters. Hydrostatic
pressure determines how hard the shaft is, and thus wether or not you
(recipient) will be getting off with it. Few women seem to get off with a
soft cock.

The corpus spongiosum is the separate erectile compartment which makes the
penile *head* inflate; how inflated the head is determines how much
sensation it gets, and the more it gets, the less I last, since I'll
shoot. Its pressure is also a complex function, I can increase it partly
by perineal flexure, but not very well. The main difficulty one has as a
bloke is defeating its tendancy to be inflated all the time, leading to
short, fast shags which don't satisfy the recipient very much. Sometimes,
there's no other way (well, none which don't involve rather more invasive
practises such as prostate massage... uh, electric current, etc) for a
bloke to get off, tho. Some shags I have experienced had an additional
problem: I'd be stabbing myself in the eye of my dick with a cervix, which
wasn't fun for either of us, so I learned to keep the shaft pressure up
but the head pressure down. 

Other stuff influences my horniness parameter. Noise I
generate with matresses, blankets, headboards, etc is one. External noise
(from outside The Shack) is another, depending on wether it indicates
likely proximity of spectators. How ... hmmm... held(?), appreciated,
self-confident, pissed (as in beer) I feel, are others too. How much I
have to think about wether or not the franger is still intact (since when
the inside of the franger is well lubed and if you get dry, if I am still
hard, it will feel like it isn't there, which might well mean it's torn,
which means it needs to be checked) is also another distraction, but one
which needs control since you quite reasonably find accidental pregnancy a
bloody nuisance. Can't they use kevlar? Actually these frangers are pretty
good, I reckon. 

Given all of that, it's simpler if I worry about it than you worry about
it, since I'm in the uh, driver's seat. If I didn't worry about any of it
at all, I would be a wombat par excellence, eats roots shoots and leaves,
but that'd be less fun for you.

In the extreme dark, it is impossible to tell if a condom is concave up
(bad) or concave down (good) prior to putting it on. That is a significant
pest, since the time and thought one expends determining this correlates
closely with lost hardon pressure. Distractions, distractions!

On aim: penises are blinder than bats (bats at least can echolocate), and
when covered in latex, are totally useless for generating tactile
directional correction signals, so I am grateful for any aiming you happen
to provide, though it will be better if we agree on a common nomenclature.
When I hear "up", I think in the direction opposed to grativational down.
Because horniness reduces my higher brain function, I hear "left" and
assume it to mean "I should move towards my left." rather than doing the
transposition which would mean "I should move towards your left". If we
can figure this out you'll get much less random stabbing in the butt
cheek, thigh, etc, and I'll get to fuck you sooner. 8-)


</geek>

So much for the grisly technicalities of tactical rubberware.

(The recipient pointed out that the irresponsible wombat eats, seeds,
twigs, leaves).

Does it count that we exchanged bodily fluids 'cos we cried into each
other's eyes? Well, yep. Viri really don't last long in the nasty saline
lubricant of the eyeball, the environment is too different to what viri
have to tolerate in the genitals. No hair is good. If you haven't tried
it, do.



Monday 20th April.

I paid my court costs and went to the Auburn cop shop where I was told my
fingerprints will remain on the police database forever even though I have
no conviction recorded against me. Who says we don't live in a police
state? Oh well. I'll just have to stuff my fingerprints with superglue
before I commit any future crimes with my fingers. While I was finding out
that my fingerprints will be wasting police harddisk space for the next
few decades, the van parked next to my bike reversed into it so when I got
back to it, the machine was on its side and dribbling petrol onto the
bitumen. Dudes stupid enough to do this can, I expect, be assumed to be
stupid enough not to realise that a human being can pick up a dropped
motorcycle in a few seconds.

I went to Balmain and fell asleep on the couch and woke up just in time to
get another shload of ascorbate fed up me arm. Margo cannulates
brilliantly. As I write now I think Bill is calming down a bit. But I'm
gonna get a cervicothoracic CT anyway. See a bit better what he's doing.


My early birthday present, in one of mum's more brilliant suggestions, is
that I fly to Melbourne instead of motorcycle down there. I'll say yes.



April 20. I stuffed my bod in the CT scanner at Hurstville. Three times
they stuck me veins with a 19-gague needle but couldn't get any blood
so eventually they stuck me with a smaller 21-gague needle and that worked
ok. I'd be pissed off about this 'cos I have veins like garden hose,
but I have other things to angst about at the mo. I'm a bit of a
pincushion. Covered in bandaids. Whammo, in went that iopamidol, I've
grown to love its whooshy hot rush. The unfortunately named Dr Lazarus
wrote this about the scanned cervicothoracic images.


"There is an ill defined mass in the left supraclavicular fossa which
 measures approx 5 x 3cm in diameter. It extends superiorly for a distance
 of 10cm. The mass is enhancing heterogeneously and it contains several
 low density areas consistent with necrosis. 

 The mass is situated deep to the sternocliedomastoid muscle and
 superficial to the thyroid gland. It begins at the level of the superior
 pole of the thyroid on the left and extends inferiorly to the thoracic
 inlet and is compressing the left brachiocephalic vein. The left common
 carotid artery appears normal but the left jugular vein was not visualised
 and is either compressed or invaded. No other masses are detected within
 the neck.

 On mediastinal windows there is no definite hilar or mediastinal
 adenopathy. The pleura are normal. On lung windows there are no
 metastases. The left nephrectomy is noted. The cholecystectomy is
 noted. There are no obvious liver metastases."


Cholecystectomy?! I didn't think they took my gallbladder in November. 
Nah. She's gotta have that wrong. The pictures are interesting... I have
about fifteen bits of stainless wrapped in various places around the bits
of vasculature tied-off six months ago.
 
Bill's squishing my left brachiocephalic vein (which takes blood from my
left forearm and other things). So I'll be looking periodically at my arm
veins to see if the left ones stand out more than the right ones do.

Appparently, Bill's blocked my fucking left jugular vein. Grrr-reat.  I
sort of need that to work. Blow it open and the left half of my head
drains of blood and I die in minutes. I guess if he's invaded it they're
gonna have to chop it out. I'm not dead yet probably because there's
crossover venous drainage from the bottom of my skull, so the blood coming
out of the left side of my head, in which my thoughts were steeped only
moments before, is now being routed down the right side of my neck. I
didn't even notice.
 
Bill might have just as easily decided to invade my carotid artery which
feeds blood to the left side of my head and in doing so would cripple me,
if it happened quickly. I'm incubating my own guillotine. I'm gonna live
my remaining life half an inch from sudden death.

I feel like shit. I think I'm gonna go out to a sleazy pub and get pissed.

--

So I did. The Oxford has the highest concentration of seedy dudes of any
pub I can immediately mention. I must be getting old. I realised a second
after collecting my schooners of Old that I looked the topless barmaid in
the eyes when I ordered my beer, instead of at her breasts. Floody walked
in and we chatted. For the last time, I think. Yobs sank beer and smoked
cigs in the nonsmoking section and watched the horseraces on telly and
spoke very loudly. Floody and I fitted in pretty well. I like engineers 
like Floody. His final words to me included `Have a nice death.' and I 
appreciate that this is what he meant, rather than have an ugly, messy, 
painful, prolonged death. Death's just another optimisation problem to 
engineers. 

I got pissed enough that 200m down Canturbury road I decided I was unfit
to drive. So I stopped in at Cremmo's and slept on the couch. Their moggie
sat on my head. The place stank faintly of catshit. Its demolition will be
no sad loss. Someone should be shot for inventing a fire detector that
beeps every 22 seconds. The kitchen tap leaked continuously. Cremmo snored
prodigiously. I staggered out in the morning and paid for a nice 2nd hand
circular saw (a perhaps unfortunate description for a such a device, it
implies a bloodier history than it perhaps deserves).

Somethin' tells me by askin' Jude to ask Soph to back off me a bit I've
pissed Soph off and probably pissed Jude off. Soph was pretty full of
choof when I saw her. Didn't say a thing. Aw shit. What's happenin' to my
sense of perspective. Cancer's supposed to turn me into a corpse, but
there's nothing in the documentation that sez it'll turn me into an
arsehole in the process. Maybe I have a different sort of cancer to the
one they diagnosed, metastatic arsehole-oma?

Goddamnit. SU's chem databases won't let me look at molecular fragments,
just whole molecules. Damn damn damn. 

Word has reached me that diode is still offering people a look at the `get
fucked' emails I sent him. Hasn't he learned that this sort of behaviour
is bad form? 

---------

Thurs 22. Tomorrow I get on a flight to Melbourne. 

I brushed my teeth and notice Bill swelling prominently in my neck. I have
an odd shopping list. The first two are probably an avoidance payment, an
investment in the idea that it's worth fighting this disease, though part
of me is convinced this is bullshit, I have my marching orders. The
last two are more acknowledgement that I have to prepare.

selenocystiene 
B group vitamins
.5g smack
Barbarian Invasions

The latter was a movie. I wasn't ready to see it. Had some good bits
though.  Like when the chick was talking to the dying man's son and his
mobile phone rang. She snatched it from his grip and flung it in the
campfire. Bell Hooks is right. Phones aren't quite there. When they do get
there, as they appear to be doing with their graphical capability and
screens and stuff on modern fones, they'll be like being near someone who
interrupts all the time, you'll wanna punch them out.

-------------------------------------------------
From Bell Hooks: Interview with A. Juno
RE/search publications "Angry Women" (A. Juno, V. Vale)
(c) 1991 ISBN 0 940642-24-7

Hooks: "I struggle a great deal with the phone, because I think the
telephone is very dangerous to our lives in that it gives us such an
illusory sense that we are connecting. I always think about those
telephone commercials: "Reach out and touch someone!" and that becomes
such a false reality - even in my own life I have to remind myself that
talking to someone on the phone is NOT the same as having a conversation
where you can see them and smell them. I think that the phone has really
helped people become more privatised in that it gives them an illusion of
connection which denies looking at someone.

Telephone commercials can be "great" because they actually let us see that
person on the other end - see how they respond and give off this warmth
that is never really conveyed just through the phone, so that we're really
not just having a diminished experience of the non-person you don't really
see on the other end.

And it's hard to remember this - because we're seduced. I love
Baudrillard's book, Seduction, because he talks a lot about the way we're
seduced by "technologies of alienation". We know that all technologies are
not alienating, so I think its good to have a phrase like "technologies of
alienation" so that we can distinguish between those ways of transmitting
knowledge, information, etc and other ways of knowing that are more fully
meaningful to us.

AJ: "Don't you think that in our addictive culture, these seductions set
up addictions which can never be satisfied ? The telephone gives us this
impossible promise of connection; its "400" numbers promise a simulation
of friendship and community (like a long-distance nightclub) which can
never be fulfilled."

---------------------------------------

Beaudrillard, however, is full of shit and EO Wilson gives him both
barrels in his book Consilience. Go read it.


I said goodbye to Keogh. He kept me around, he admitted, for as long as
possible, which made me late. The view from the rooftop on College street
was very nice. 23 stories up. No handrail. I dunno what it is that I find
annoying about someone whom, on the occasion that I tell them I'm dying
and ain't seeing them again, tells me nothing new, nothing I consider of
any significance.  Maybe he did but the problem is that I find nothing
especially of significance any more. The grey curtain of apathy, my
ghostly shield which can protect me from anything, seems to be levitating
up around me, to envelope me, on its own invisible curtain rail.

I went down the huge staircase at Oatley and said goodbye to Deb. She made
me dinner. She's mid-thesis. Seeing her reminded me of the huge owl which
sat, hooting quietly, in our jacaranda tree in the back yard about a month
back. It looked down at me, blinking, as I looked up at it, for a long
time. It was a BIG owl. Spotted owl I think. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. She's busy
as hell, mid-thesis. Deb tells me I should fight it. Looks like at 34,
Mullet's gonna have lived for longer than I will. I finally got around to
loaning her Jared Diamond : Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, and
Guns Germs and Steel. She can take as long as she likes to read 'em.

Fight it. Whaddo I do, punch myself in the neck until I think Bill's
sufficiently broken that he'll leave me alone? Groan.

Joss finally emailed me about the messy puke tendancy associated with bulk
iv smack. She takes a long time to reply to my stuff. I dunno why yet.

I'm starting to think I should just shut the hell up about this damned
thing. It makes everyone sad. And I catch the sadness back off them.


I got home and was packing. I was putting some books back in the booshelf.
Mum, like she always does, decided to stand in the doorway. When I was
about to leave, I told her, calmly, firmly, not to stand in the
doorway cos I'd be walking through it in a moment. She walked backwards,
lost her footing on the same awkward doormat I'd complained two years ago
had injured my ankle, and fell, remarkably gracefully, sideways into a
nearby armchair. Very dramatic. Soon she was whinging about how painful
the fall was. I mentioned that I said two years ago the new doormats, with
their steep square edges, posed as much risk to her as they did to me and
that her response was that I should look where I was going. 

I log in and am writing a messy email to Joss. Time seems so short. I'm
sort of scrabbling for stuff to say. There's stuff i want to write, I
nearly had the right phrasing but arrrr.... Fuck. Mum's voice floats up
the corridor, asks am I there, I answer No, can I come in she asks and I
say, NO, she comes in anyway. She spends hours listening to the radio,
looking at the TV, speaking on the fone, mum wanders in at half-past
midnight, a time I choose precisely so everyone will not be disturbed if I
tie up the fone line, so they will not disturb me, with a fistful of
fifties (coincidentally exactly enough to buy a lethal load of smack and a
nice breakfast, but she doesn't know I've already paid) and tells me to
spend 'em in Melbourne. I told her I have enough money, get out of this
room, right now. Go. GO. Get out. Does she wait up purely to annoy me? To.
Slowly. Mumble. In. My. Ear. While. I. Am. Trying. To. Use. Some. Private.
Time. To. Do. Mail.? She wanders out mumbling some kind of comment about
how pleasant I am, fifties still in-hand.

I just decided to update my livejournal but attech have cut us off
again. Fuck. Ohwell. 

The GHz machine I'm putting together was riddled with dodgy CHSSI low-ESR
caps. I fired up the soldering iron and painstakingly replaced every
electrolytic cap on the board before setting it up for a week long test
run.

Meantime I left this at the end of the rant on the cat server.

----------------------------------------------------------
Still with us? Well. Ok. It's April 21. I go to Melbourne on the 23rd and
plan to come back on the 29th.
 
There's a bigger rant coming (fools.txt) but this one is the little crumb
you get to look at instead of a 404 message.

The meaty stuff is: My neck is getting shittier. Bill the Lump invaded my
left jugular vein about a week ago, blocking it. If he'd invaded the
carotid I'd be stroked out, a dribbling veggie. I'm reasonably freaked out
about this. The axe is falling. So I'm planning my end mode. I want
control over it.

If you have anything terribly important to ask me about anything now might
be good time. The chance might not remain. Heavy epistemological and
philosophical questions are OK as are others.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Someone asked me what is the meaning of life and how does she realise
it. I answered more or less that life was meaningless, but you could still
choose to dedicate your life to some purpose, and that how to
come up with the right purpose is to try lots of things. So if you never
find your purpose at least you've had a taste of lots of stuff. It was
more detailed than that.

I got out to the airport in a cab. They have posters at the security desks
which say [We take security jokes very seriously. Offenders will be
prosecuted.] No sense of humour.. this from an airline with a name that
sounds like a bad porno movie, Virgin Blue. I wandered around the
terminal. I am surprised to discover the existance of a book called "The
Day My Bum Went Psycho". I was blind and half-naked when I went through
the scanner cos almost everything I own has metal in it. At the top of the
escalators some bryllcreemed shills offered me an AMEX gold card and I
told them I would not be a long term customer. The coffee in the lounge
was very good. I walked out on the tarmac, last person to board the plane.
I sat in the absolutely rearmost port seat, next to a guy who builds
wheelchairs for a living, chatting with him was fascinating. He said if ya
wanted to make a lot of money, come up with a way to prevent bedsores.
Dudes who sit in chairs for years get pressure sores on their bums 'cos
they dont use the muscle. So ... they get their ischial tuberosities
(bones you sit on) surgically cut down (ow! Holy shit). How to fix that?
Oh, I dunno, I said, I don't suppose people have thought of implanting
ceramic encapsulated magnets in people's arse-bones and opposite polarity
ones in the chair. Might save a few newtons. Though as my fellow passenger
pointed out it would be a bugger if ... you know... your arse demagnetised
your credit cards. Electric zaps in the bum might keep the muscle mass up
and if you're a quaddie you won't feel it anyway. We had some pretty
macabre conversations about his clientele. A lot of them come into his
service 'cos they tried to kill themselves and fucked it up and he
ventured the opinion that CO was the way to go and emission controls on
modern cars didn't matter to the final outcome. He was a very interesting
guy to talk to. Motorcyclist too. Had his leg massively fucked up and kept
it by sheer good luck of having a cluey ambo spot that his femoral artery
was kinked.


The plane was late, 'cos Melbourne was pissing rain. Flying over Melbourne
everything was brown and dead. Immediately after we landed <thud> the
cabin filled with the acrid, hydrochloric stench of baby puke. I got off
the plane and Ed was there to meet me. He has no beard, which surprised
me. We chatted about stuff while we waited for the baggage to come back
from the aircraft. It did, rained upon. We strode out to the carpark and
drove down the Tulla' freeway to Victoria Ranges. We were a bit early. So
we popped up the road to a purveyor of advanced chicken substitute and
gutzed ourselves before going back and blazing away with some .357 magnum
handguns at paper targets for a while.

He mentioned a friend of his who turned out to have an astrocytoma and was
being irradiated for it for a while before it came back viciously. I said
at least with my disease, I don't have to microwave my head. I remember
we were laughing a lot about this particular phrasing, with the rainwater
sluicing down the bluestone gutters and cars whizzing by us. He reckons
insulin was muttered about as a way to cleanly go out. Good quality
control, I reckon it'd be reliable, drive you into hypoglycemia, boom.  
Pity you need a script.


I still have more horizontal wiggle in my grouping than vertical. My eye's
out but it was still pretty good shooting, lots of 8's, 9's and bullseyes.
They dont let people use 50-cal or .45 any more. I reckon I shot slightly
better than Ed but he was using double-action, whereas I cocked each round
myself. Cla-chick, BOOOM. Cla-chick, BOOOM. Lots of blast and flame. I
couldn't make out the numbers on the targets at 25m and was aiming by
interpolation. Fifty rounds. A truly desparate kamikazi would have capped
themselves right there, but I'm not. This is 'cos I feel like the
end-process is under control. Later my jacket stank of burnt gunpowder.

We drove out to Tooronga in the rain. Jane has grown a lot. She's a manga
chick. I had to laugh at reading Jhonen Vsquez's I FEEL SICK comic again
[Eat SHIT it's NEW!]. Her phrases are suffixed with terms like TradeMark,
Sigh, Snigger, when referring to just about everything, paragon of the
jaded teen. All the houses around Ed' place have been built in the last
few years... property boom. The place is crowded. To accommodate all this
the phone line is pair-gains, evil evil, evil. Telstra charge the
pair-gains user the same money for less bandwidth. SO modem linkages suck.
I'm typing on it now since I'm updating this bit of the file from
Melbourne.
 
I watched the Animatrix and Minority report and some manga anime of which
I made almost no sense at all. Mulholland drive made no sense at all
either. I come to Melbourne and whaddo I do?... watch telly when it
rains. We ate dinner at a teahouse in Box Hill. 1822 tea house, I think.
Yummie. No smokers. 

I logged in. Yeah. Joss expects I probably pissed Jude and Soph off. Ow.
Her emails aren't terse in a reassuring way. I dunno why yet.

Saturday I bought a bottle of Clock Tower. Good stuff. Ed and I
headded out to the Chamber but didnt go in, the vehicle tracks suggested
all the gear had been moved elsewhere. The barbecque was cancelled too. I
hadn't seen his wife Faye for years, she's been in a chair for about a
decade from MS. I'da capped myself if I knew that future awaited me, I
said to Ed. The clannies had moved to the abuttments of Bingle St Bridge
(we have keys to 'em). Syd clan was sleeping in the opposite end to the
one in which the parry was being held. MrI had managed to pinch
electrickery from the street lighting to power the lights and video
projector - the party was held in two rooms with a camera in one and a
projector in the other, which had the advantage that you could throw
things at, draw on, make rude shadows against, the projected image of the
Master of Ceremonies and they didn't know or feel a thing. The rooms were
carpetted and vaccuumed! There must have been oh, 70 people in attendance.
The confined rooms were full of assholes smoking (thought that paled into
insignificace against the choking billows of smoke from the fireworks
later) plus a bunch of other people. If you need an image of organised
crime, this ain't it.

Some people I'd not seen for many years were there under newly receded
hairlines or encased in flabbier bodies than I remember. Ug, Mira, Bob,
Wes The Source, Juxtapose from Ad-delayed. Prowler got gold, narrowly
beating Cro, bless him! I got a lot of votes for the gold, but it's not
because I've done anything. Through my alhocolic haze I realised I was
getting votes 'cos I am dying, which is an odd way to skew an election.
Dougo sold vegetarian saussages in the corner. I was given a [REAL CAVE
CLAN] t-shirt. Pipewalkers showed up and I introduced myself... it's odd
how these kids are barely into their twenties, and are already on five
year good behaviour bonds, and have seen my discreet little tag all over
Melbourne. Clocktower is a funny name for a drink which makes you lose
track of time. I gutzed it all. Dell-dint popped a goodly bud in my mouth
while I was well pissed and horizontal on some milk crates. When the
alcohol wore off the bud kicked in very well indeed. She gave me a bag of
'shrooms which I think would best be taken back to Sydney and cultivated
from spore.

Ya gotta love that. I staggered down to the other end of the bridge at
about 4am when the party died. I slept in the corner on a bit of carpet,
amidst some abandoned, slightly gritty pieces of pizza which i ate when i
woke up. I woke up and picked a chunk of glass out of my knee. There'da
been thirty people sleeping in there, packed like sardines. The clan awoke
and we hit somewhere in South Melbourne for breakfast. They hooned off the
explore the old Chevron and I got a train out to westgarth. They do a
great job hiding information about the trains on the platforms tho they
apparently use SMSs to inform commuters about the train times which is
pretty cool. R walked up the road to greet me. We watched some somber
9/11 videos and ate tomato soup before I plodded back to Clifton Hill
station via the Merri creek. The trains were stuffed. They put LED
displays inside the train but they dont tell you anything useful. [Welcome
to connex] over and over. It gets a bit thin when you've seen it a couple
of hundred times and the train doesnt go anyplace.

Another thought, as I type on Monday 26th. I brought a camera and have
hardly used it at all. It dawns on me that this is because I'm not gonna
be here to look at the photos I take. I can think of why other people'd
wanna look at my photos. What an indictment it is that the only thing
comeplling about my life is that I get a slightly nonmundane way out of
it.


Monday we saw the minesweeper at Williamstown (closed), went to Brunswick
street. We checked out the Polyester bookshop, and I'da blown a couple of
hundred bux in there but I didn't know if I was gonna live long enough to
read all the stuff I'd get. They have extremely rude postcards, they'd
never get through the post. 

It's been a scary couple of weeks. While at Polyester I got a copy of
Death, A User's Guide. Which isn't especially useful, I shouldda got a
copy of that book they had which was a compendium of the final
conversations between pilots, taken from black box flight recorders dug
out of various debris-strewn craters and mountainsides around the world. I
flicked through it. Some of these people were very, very fuckin' cool just
before they got plowed into the earth at 400km/h, in a way which I don't
think I would be. But maybe it's 'cos they didn't know they were about to
be mashed into cytosol paste. 

Didja ever see Event Horizon (it has Lawrence Fishburne in it, which makes
it worth seeing)? Check out the scene where the trauma specialist dude
finally discovers the bomb with four seconds left on the countdown
display. He gets the exactly right expression on his face, which documents
the simultaneous realisation that you're fucked and theres no time to do
anything about it, Kaboom.


"Why's this shit gotta happen to me?!" - crewman on outside of Lewis and
Clark when it blows up (this is actually a very funny scene), Event Horizon


Chatting to Ed was good. I have heavy conversations with certain people
from time to time and this was one of them. We sucked coffee from the only
two tall mugs in the shop. It struck me that I was sitting in front of a
dude nearly twice my age and by dying I was gonna miss out on my current
total lifespan's worth of additional life experience. I got half a
lifespan. I don't feel especially ripped off, 'cos I don't know precisely
what I'm gonna miss. Ed is cool. I like Ed 'cos he listens and has good
bandwidth and tends to be perceptive in interesting ways, giving him a
high clue density where it counts, and he's stashed a lot of life
experience in that head of his. I love it every time he says he became a
hippy and smoked a ton of dope and this cured his ambition. He's been a
shaping influence on my life. I never really had ambition, which is maybe
why I've not felt a particular need to smoke dope.

The leather shop up the road had interesting chain mail, floggers, gags,
surgical tools, speculums, spiky bits of leather. It's a kinky world, if
you can afford it.

Ed's learning Japanese which is absolutely fucking baroque, it's like
someone set out to come up with an indecipherable cryptosystemic alphabet
and this was the result. It can't handle consecutive consonants. Predator
in hiragani sounds something like Po re da to ru. Transistor sounds
something like To Ra Na Si To Ru. We ate out at a Chinese restaurant that
night and en-route found a nice microwave oven in a dumpster. On the way
home I amused myself yelling TO RA NA SI TO RU out the car window at
random passersby in Swinburne. 

I got an email from Fleischman, from whom I have not heard in oh, five
years. I'm, thinking of of using him as my control subject to see what
happens when I don't tell people I'm dying. 

I read a copy of Fight Club. It makes me wanna go and check out these
support groups people go to for their impending mortal disease. Just to
see how other people handle, or fail, to handle it. Further reading of
Death A Users Guide suggests it isn't much guidance, really. It
does list some ugly deaths in there. I'm getting out the easy way.


Tues: Melbourne Museum... they have millions of cool bugs, many of them
alive and fighting with each other behind glass. In the galleria is a blue
whale skeleton, stripped bare, the tonnage of massive bones hanging
motionless, speaking of an organism which was shaped to withstand massive
hydrostatic forces and swim with minimum effort through a dense medium.
They also have huuuuge dinosaur skeleta which are very impressive. Dead
things stay dead for a long time.
 
Walk through the forest section sometime later. Excellent little frogs
hide in places difficult to catch with the eye. It amuses me to think that
what we do to nonhuman sporting heros in Australia is send their skeletons
to Canberra, their viscera to New Zealand, and we stuff the rest and mount
it in a glass case in the museum at Melbourne. Can someone please do that
to oh, I dunno, Darryl Eastlake? He's not a sporting hero but he satisfies
the other criteria. And he's HUUUGE.

Tues arvo we went to check out the Chamber at Melbourne. A huge drain
room, under Prahran, where the Clannies has been held for the last ten
years. This is in several ways the spiritual home of the Clan. I've slept
here many nights. Some of my tags survive from 1991, but others have been
painted over. The Clan has a lossy memory in this regard. The graffiti is
good. On the high part of the wall there are painted six commemorative
white patches with names of dead Clan people in them. Mullet, Favero,
Aspro, Cougar. Mullet was the last to die, nearly ten years ago. I am
next. The sign which said "WARNING: This drain subject to Cave Clan" has
been pilfered.

Wed: CSIRAC!! Thanks Dave Dumant and R for twisting his arm. He met us
wednesday morning and took us to see the exhibit. Built in 1948. Fourth
programmable electronic computer in the world. 

When you are convinced, as I am, that biology is computational in nature,
then an exhibit like this becomes much more than a historical curiosity.
It's a monument to humanity's intellectual puberty, a milestone along the
path we slowly trod en-route to _knowing ourselves_. I have snippets in my
head from looking at it. There's lots of 19" rackmount chassis, corroded
metal. Needle gagues. Blinking lights (forever extinguished, it will never
be turned on again) for the many registers. Selenium plate rectifiers and
big fat transformers. Lots and lots of valves in octal mounting bases, all
cleaned and gleeeeaming. Mercury tube, delay line memory in a metal box.
Forced air cooling. Big fat old capacitors (printed circuits hadn't been
invented yet). Wirewound resistors with their ceramic packing falling off.
Punched tape feeds. Not a diode or a transistor anywhere. Six small CRO
screens. All components hand-soldered, the wires meticulously hand-routed.
I couldn't escape the feeling I was walking around inside a machine
different to other machines I've crawled through... crawl through engines,
printing presses, brick kilns, power station switchyards, production lines
for anything you care to name, they lack something, which is the reek of
engineering complexity only required for some kind of a brain, and I have
detected this reek in only one other place, which is a roomful of old
telephone exchange switchgear, with rows of delaminating relays. I touched
its chassis metal when nobody was looking, which was sort of naughty of
me. When you get close to it you can smell the sour tang of capacitor
electrolyte, the volatile monomers from the depolymerising insulation on
the wires, the faint tang of phenol seeping out of the valve bases. It's
mostly surrounded by thick glass, very clean, so when I went to look
closely at some parts of it my head went BOONK against the clear panes.
Runs at 0.5 milliMIPs. Ed used to program this thing and he's outlasted
it. It used shift registers and barrel rotators just like modern
CPU's. Pulled 20,000 watts. I am glad I have seen it. 

They had an inspirin selection of human anatomy bits in other exhibits,
too.

After seeing CSIRAC we went down to the Spotswood pumping station. Huge
old coalfired 3-stage condensing reciprocal steam engines, which pumped
Melburnian shit for decades, still stand majestically in the pumping
station, also gleeeeeaming as museum pieces do. Lots of other fun stuff
there, too... hand-pumpable compressors (white man's magic, Ed calls it),
weirdo optical illusion toys, really old pipes made of massive cast-iron
sections. I watched the kids running around in the playground. Spoke to Ed
on the acoustic dish - he's better at finding the focus then I am.

I said goodbye to Dougo. He said he never expected that the next name on
the wall in the Chamber might be mine. We both have grey hair. Odd
coincidence #47271, my parents' dog and his dog are both named Chloe. He
asked if I wanted to see an old flame of mine, Karla, but I said I dunno
what I'd say to her. I walked back to Ed's place from Dougo's, walking
past a traffic jam which stretched all the way from Tooronga to Glen Iris.


Based on how they checked me at Kingsford Smith I decided to gutz the
'shrooms before I went to Sydney, and take the spores north to
characterise whatever this stuff was. 

Thurs:

I didn't have any 2,4-paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde handy so I thought
fuck it, eat 'em and at midnight I ate the 'shrooms. I felt nothing. Maybe
I need more. Maybe they were bullshit shrooms with no active ingredient.
So I'll be probably moving a load of regular mushroom spores north for no
reason at all. Tosser.

Ed and Jane saw me off at Tulla'. I'm not especially good at goodbyes so I
sorta hugged 'em and scanned my ticket myself, turned to wave at 'em
over the crowd and disappeared down the corridor. 

I got back to Sydney, a load of spores stashed somewhere in my stuff, and
got a cab back home.

In the post came the bequeathal form, from the UNSW anatomy department, to
whom I also made enquiries about donating my body. It was clearly, and
plainly, addressed to me. Dad had opened it. For fuck's sake. Ten years
ago when I left home one of the reasons I did it was because he didn't pay
attention to the name on the envelopes which would arrive in the post, and
since we have the same first initial he ended up reading a lot of my
stuff. You know... letters from early flames, fines for dodging fares on
the train, that sort of shit. I suspect he won't do it again... but it's a
hard way to learn. He claims he didn't read it - but how would he know not
to read it if he hadn't read enough of it to know what it was about?  
He's bullshitting me. I think I'll send myself some mail, saying, don't
read my fuckin' mail, dad, until he gets the idea.

Natch, there's a catch. If I smack myself out, then the anatomy department
can't have the bod 'cos the coroner'll want to chop it up in a postmortem
exam 'cos it'll be a suspicious death. Fuck!! Does getting dead the way
I want have to be so fuckin' goddamned complicated? 

Joss, it turns out, is not quite free, even tho she's on the far side of
the planet to Azza. The 'net provides them with a way to engage in what I
deduce to be vicious flame wars, which must be sort of like duelling with
rocket launchers at fifteen million paces. I don't know which eastern
philosopher came up with the insight that you only truly know someone when
you fight them, but whoever it was left out that there are some lessons
which will kill you.


I got a strange email from a friend of Cookie's, who's survived cancer,
twice. The email which prompted it was even odder.

It's all about how I'm gonna have to find some reason to fight for my life.

"Life is full of problems, and here's the remedy-
 Denial works for me.
 There's a freight train coming, loaded with anxiety,
 you're tied to the tracks? Don't worry.
 Denial works for me.
 Flood, famine, pestilence, they're all yuckie.
 You can let Moses out to the promised land,
 Denial works for me. 
 Why put off till tomorrow, responsibilities?
 They'll just come back to haunt you -
 Ignore them totally."

TISM - Denial works for me - www.tism.wanker.com

Sez I'm intellectualizing it. Well, fuck me! FUCK! I didn't spend years
learning how all this shit works to just retreat into a happy,
emotionally-powered ignorance about it when it came into my life. I don't
maintain this expensive veneer of neocortex so that I can just turn it off
and default to gorilla mode when shit hits the fan. My thinking organ
tells me it's only a matter of time. 

I _know_ there isn't anything romantic about dying young or dying at all
you old prick, I want to say to the dude, but there's no point. Yeah, ok
so when the mets become uncontrollable, I'm getting out and a bunch of
people are gonna be pissed off that I decided not to hang around, in the
face of a protracted, stupid messy end. I can't even say sorry about that
with any conviction... you can't say sorry for something in advance of
going right ahead and doing it, with any honesty. Well, reader. Does it
make you uncomfortable that by deciding that my life is meaningless and
abandonable, I also imply that your life is meaningless and abandonable
too? I'm resigned BECAUSE that's the only way to maintain any control over
myself. I would go absolutely, stark raving, motherfucking, head banging,
shithouse-rat-in-a-washing-machine-on-spin-cycle berserk if I thought it'd
do the least amount of good. It won't do the least amount of good and in
fact will probably make a lot of mess. So I'm not. I'm not being brave; I
run from the cops, I hide from responsibility and I'd do both with this
disease but this is inside my goddamned body so there's no place to go and
no point trying to get there. Yelling at the doctors won't help. They've
heard all this stuff before. I'm not being brave. I'm just being. Let me
be.

"Life kills. Life kills.
 Life's a sentence.
 Read all about it."
-TISM (Life Kills) from the Hot Dogma album.

It's being claimed by someone close to me that I'm milkin' people for
sympathy. So I'll come clean. Yeah. Look. If sympathy came in casks I'd
steal a pallet of 'em, nah, fuck it, a railway car... wait, no, a crude
oil tanker... ar, what the heck if it's too big to land on earth, a small
moon full of it, and go get permanently wasted, swim in the stuff, snort
it, shoot it up, drown in it. Sympathy's a cheap drug, knock it if you
like but it's good for what it's good for. It deludes me into feeling like
I'm not doing this totally alone. Even if people can't, won't or don't
actually give a shit it helps maintain the illusion that some of them do.
I'll take three courses. And the garnish. It's wafer thin, Mr Creosote.
Fuck it. It's not great, it obviously doesn't fix anything. It obviously
won't cure me, and I am not asking it to cure me. It sort of keeps me a
bit sane, ya know?  Live for .... what, exactly? Go on. Somebody. Anybody.
Tell me why you think I should hang around. Think hard. If you have any
suggestions they had better be good, otherwise shuddup. I know the price
of being sorry for myself will be my life but I think that payment is
already a done deal so I might as well gulp it down wherever it's on-tap.


Live in me for a moment and talk to bill about it. Try and negotiate with
bill. See if bill gives a shit if I twiddle my emotional knob from despair
to elation, or go to the effort of chopping up one of his outposts only to
succumb to hundreds of others. Dylan Thomas, or whatever long-dead wanker
came up with it, might have you believe you should fight the fading of the
light (yeah man, like, my approach was always to bring a spare torch, see
my police service charge sheet) but there are times when it just makes
good sense to lie down, punch a cannula into yourself and die a
chilled-out, sensible death. Does it matter if chickens chicken out, or
cluck'n'scratch right to the end, in the chicken processing factory?
B'gerk bwaark cluck cluck POW. No, not a shit. Pass the drumsticks.

There are some lessons which will kill you.

[You may seriously injure or kill yourself with this device].

Grr. Grr. Grrrr. Who's. Mister. Fucking. Grumpy. Pants. Where's the
circular saw...?

------

The smack is proving harder to procure than I thought. I'm gonna try
another channel. 

It's May the first. I spent today chopping wood and walking the dog and
writing the remnants of this rant. The circular saw needed some work so I
did that, and chopped a lot of the wood I dragged home in the last few
months. The saw is really loud and sprays sawdust everywhere, a kilowatt
stashed in a disc of whirling wolfram carbide, a productive, controlled
catastrophe. It was good to sit in front of the fire. The room smells of
burnt tree now the fire has gone out.

The next rant's starting soon. To mark the day I'll call the next file
mayday.txt and it'll be out in June, if I can be fucked. I'll be 33 by
then if I make it there.

The whole sequence is:
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/consent.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutful.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutting.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutted.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/hunting.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/bill_me.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/getting_it.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/losing_it.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/ides.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/march.txt
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/foolish.txt (included in this file)
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/fools.txt (you're looking at it)

Geez I'm a gasbag.


Oh yeah, I scanned my MRI from november 2003, finally. Meet the father of
all my metastases:

http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/psycho_kidney_MRI.png

If you cant see it email me and I'll make it available as a jpeg at

http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/psycho_kidney_MRI.jpg



The next file will be:
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/mayday.txt (is yet to come)

Put yer winter woolies on. It's getting cold.


<predator>