2049 lines
108 KiB
Plaintext
2049 lines
108 KiB
Plaintext
File: March.txt
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Content: March 2004, as in, death march, which is what geeks call a
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project which grinds on painfully for ages until it is either released or
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axed.
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Look, I know you're reading this 'cos you want some more disaster porn
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about this tumor, and you want to read that on I dunno, it's eaten my left
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eyeball and now I'm walking around with a patch and, in the fashion of the
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bravely sufferin' crip, have bought a pirate hat, attached a stuffed
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parrot to my shoulder with velcro, and am swaggerin' around saying `Arrr,
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lost me'oy to a foul an' dread diseeze.' Nah. It's not that funny. It
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really is scary and really does suck. I write this stuff for a couple of
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reasons. Mainly to keep people in the loop without having to tell everyone
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a slightly discrepant version of the same events over and over. Slightly
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to keep myself aware that I'm a human being living a life and am not a
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self-documenting catalog for the pathology of a mortal disease process.
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Slightly so there's something of me contaminating the disk and mindspace
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of the future generations I will not hang around to be in. So much of the
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rants, I hope, will continue to be about stuff totally unrelated to the
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disease I now harbour. But don't worry, there's tech, sex, crime and
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death, anyway. Something to annoy everyone.
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D'ya notice, too, that sometimes I repeat stuff in the rants? That's how
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the chunk of jello-o in my head works. Things pop up over and over and get
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chewed, analyzed, experienced again. Yeah, ok, it makes for bad
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copy. Don't mistake me for someone who cares about that.
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Oh. Some of you are not geeks and find the chunks of tech stuff, such as
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the following, crashingly tedious. So when you encounter <geek>, search
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for the occurence of </geek> to skip forward to the non-geek stuff.
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I did a little more analysis of what the UNSW predator impersonator was up
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to on conway before I chopped him off at the knees.
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<geek>
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From predator@cat.org.au Thu Mar 4 17:44:39 2004
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Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 03:18:49 +1100 (EST)
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From: predator@cat.org.au
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To: zzzzzzzz@unsw.edu.au
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Subject: What was the cracker doing?
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Hi Geoff. Good to chat to you today.
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There is no evidence from my bash_history that there was anything really
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deliberately malicious that the chap was doing to cat.org.au. To my
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awareness he never did anything which was designed to hide log entries
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(hence we have a lot of them) or modify/delete files, add backdoors to
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daemons, install a rootkit, grab the password file, etc. There was some
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anomalous behaviour on conway (mainly lockouts and crashes, it had been up
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for at least a month prior to that) correlating with the unauthorised
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activity and possibly some lossage of stuff on /usr but that was all
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backed up on an unmounted spun-down harddisk. Still... this inconvenienced
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me and several other people.
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----------
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Auth.logs
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Here's some analysis of the auth.log on conway, for the day that I locked
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your cracker out of the machine here at Turella, conway.cat.org.au. He
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did, it appears, try and log in again several times after I changed the
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password.
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The auth.logs don't care about tty entries, since they're not invoked from
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the network, and are assumed to be authorised at a physical level (if you
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can get to a keyboard, you probably own the machine anyway.)
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These are the auth.log entries for the day I logged him out, with
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commentaries:
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root@conway:~# grep 129.94 /home/predator/auth.log | grep 129.94
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>Feb 26 00:26:39 conway sshd[27174]: Could not reverse map address
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>129.94.222.175.
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>Feb 26 00:26:41 conway sshd[27174]: Accepted password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2101
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That's the unauthorised chap logging in 15 minutes before I arrived
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locally at the server. I arrived about fifteen minutes later, at twenty
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minutes to one in the morning, initially logged in from tty4.
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It happens that when I'm in the same room, I normally log in to conway,
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from an adjacent machine, tarvat.cat.org.au (192.186.2.1) which is our
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NAT/firewall/router box. That I logged into conway at conway's terminal at
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all, was a consequence of conway's process allocation being so completely
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monopolised by the hajar executable, and the network bandwidth between
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conway and tarvat (10mbit/sec) being so saturated that ssh authentication
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was taking forever to complete, so I changed chairs, powered up conway's
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monitor and logged in there directly. I ran top -qi, and shortly after
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that point I kill -9'd ed the hajar executable (bringing loadavg back to
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something respectable - most of the utilisation LEDs on the DE-1600 hub
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then went dark - all of them were lit solid when I arrived).
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Then I ran w, looked at the originating IPs and then killed all of the
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bash shells from 129.94.222.175, which presumably killed the psyBNC mIRC
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proxy if it was running at all (maybe it never was invoked).
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I then logged in from several other virtual terminals on conway and tried
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and figure out where the heck this 129.94 machine was, hence this entry
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below. My account (predator) is superuser capable and any superuser
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privelages used via sudo are logged, such as the following entry from me
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on the morning:
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>Feb 26 00:41:25 conway sudo: predator : TTY=tty4 ; PWD=/home/predator ;
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>USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/traceroute 129.94.222.175
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Here below, in this entry, he tries to log in again. PuTTY.exe likes to
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try to reverse-lookup DNS entries first so the client can be
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name-identified before permitting access, but I think this doesn't happen
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because these UNSW numbers don't have assocated DNS entries anyplace.
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>Feb 26 02:34:15 conway sshd[3712]:
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>Could not reverse map address 129.94.222.175.
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>Feb 26 02:34:20 conway sshd[3712]: Failed password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2163
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He tries again about a minute later....
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>Feb 26 02:35:38 conway sshd[3712]: Failed password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2163
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Then again nine seconds later....
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>Feb 26 02:35:45 conway sshd[3712]: Failed password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2163
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I think at this point he's decided the PuTTY session is broken (and maybe
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his IRC proxy is not working anymore either) so he invokes PuTTY again,
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and the reverse DNS entry request fails again:
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>Feb 26 02:36:18 conway sshd[3798]: Could not reverse map address
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>129.94.222.175.
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>Feb 26 02:36:26 conway sshd[3798]: Failed password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2172
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... and he tries again, with a new session, nearly three minutes later....
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>Feb 26 02:39:28 conway sshd[3901]: Could not reverse map address
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>129.94.222.175.
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>Feb 26 02:39:35 conway sshd[3901]: Failed password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2188
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... and again 4 seconds later in the same session.
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>Feb 26 02:39:39 conway sshd[3901]: Failed password for predator from
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>129.94.222.175 port 2188
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I think he finally gets the idea that he's locked out after six attempts.
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There are no other entries from that machine.
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By 3:25am the email you got on Thurs 26th Feb was on its way to Graham
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Low. It was also posted to catgeek, a mailman list where the admin on
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cat.org.au post tech discussions to each other. One of the other root
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admin here, Andy, read the posting not long after, and did what I did -
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portscanned the machine in question:
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>Feb 26 03:47:43 conway sudo: andy : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/spare/backups ;
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>USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/nmap -sS 129.94.222.175
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That's everything of relevance to 129.94.222.175 from Feb 26's
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auth.logs.
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Earlier auth.logs contain the following:
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Feb 16 13:38:47 conway sshd[9054]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 4920
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Feb 16 13:54:50 conway sshd[10156]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 4986
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Feb 16 14:22:54 conway sshd[12410]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 1090
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Feb 16 14:26:05 conway sshd[12679]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 1131 ssh2
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Feb 16 14:30:19 conway sshd[13087]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 1132 ssh2
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(the fun probably starts below here...)
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Feb 18 13:15:45 conway sshd[18185]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.177 port 2018
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Feb 19 18:56:47 conway sshd[11154]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 4873
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Feb 20 16:10:20 conway sshd[13291]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 2362
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Feb 20 16:41:04 conway sshd[19611]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 2551
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Feb 21 13:29:33 conway sshd[10488]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 2912
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Then .... did nothing until the 26th as far as I can tell.
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------------------------
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conway syslogs
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I was wondering if some invokations of pine in my bash_history entries
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that day were invoked by him looking at emails he'd managed to send to
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himself (well, to me) but this appears to not be the case.
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The syslogs for the 23rd to the 26th (chop-off day) have four entries
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pertinent to 129.94 addresses:
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Feb 26 06:43:56 conway qmail: 1077738236.012945
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tcpserver: pid 6978 from 129.94.12.209
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Feb 26 06:44:25 conway qmail: 1077738265.105903
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tcpserver: pid 7007 from 129.94.12.209
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These above correlate with the two messages from Graham Low to you (Geoff)
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and I, which left UNSW timestamped at 06:41:53 AM and 06:42:23 am.
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Feb 23 17:06:27 conway qmail: 1077516387.618695
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tcpserver: pid 6274 from 129.94.12.209
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Feb 23 19:16:18 conway qmail: 1077524178.101642
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tcpserver: pid 14297 from 129.94.12.209
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These two also check out to emails I recieved from Graham which left UNSW
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timestamped at 17:04:36 and 19:14:18 on their respective days. Graham must
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be working long days!
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Again, the timestamps are accurate. These are out-of-normal-hours SMTP
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connections from notesmta.commerce.unsw.edu.au, and noteworthy because of
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their odd times, but otherwise check out.
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Other entries in earlier parts of the syslog correlate to other legitimate
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postings I recieved from Graham Low, Shane Stevens' cse account, late
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submissions from GENC5001 students Peter Koh and Kim Warner, and also a
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posting from Joe Wolfe in the UNSW physics department. So I suspect if
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your cracker has an 0wn3d email account anyplace in UNSW which he wanted
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to test, he didn't test it by sending things to predator@cat.org.au then
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deleting them.
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------------------------
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conway snort logs.
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The snort logs for conway.cat.org.au indicate nothing from 129.94.222.175
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for all of February. As far as snort is concerned, the chap had a legit
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passwd/account combo (mine) so was legitimately logging in.
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-----------------------
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Conway /var/log/messages
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is, with respect to 129.94 numbers, completely mundane but has a UNSW
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machine on an IP number I don't associate with UNSW.
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zgrep unsw messages.1.gz
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gets me this :
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life-x.life.unsw.edu.au 149.171.170.4
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Appears to be an alias to smtp3.unsw.edu.au
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1 tarvat (192.168.2.1) 0.447 ms 0.420 ms 0.321 ms
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2 tel140302-2.gw.connect.com.au (210.9.224.241) 557.850 ms 534.234 ms 400.477 ms
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3 bdr1.telenet.net.au (202.9.33.65) 329.817 ms 141.028 ms 62.680 ms
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4 gigabitethernet0-3-15.cor2.bri.connect.com.au (203.63.117.246) 60.696 ms 65.115 ms 108.969 ms
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5 gigabitethernet4-0-0.bdr1.bri.connect.com.au (203.63.11.81) 133.138 ms 105.336 ms 108.336 ms
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6 so-1-0-1.cre1.for.connect.com.au (202.10.4.45) 187.867 ms 65.373 ms 137.621 ms
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7 so-0-1-0.cre1.bri.connect.com.au (202.10.0.56) 44.293 ms 56.025 ms 39.347 ms
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8 so-2-1-1.cre1.syd.connect.com.au (202.10.0.33) 57.829 ms 59.814 ms 61.287 ms
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9 pos1-0.bdr4.syd.connect.com.au (202.10.4.62) 57.830 ms 60.106 ms 60.509 ms
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10 vlan219.52gdc76f02.optus.net.au (61.88.171.205) 58.332 ms 61.796 ms 55.901 ms
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11 gigeth3-0.ug1.optus.net.au (203.202.36.1) 61.948 ms 58.625 ms 60.303 ms
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12 gigeth1-0-0.sn2.optus.net.au (202.139.190.16) 59.773 ms 60.889 ms 56.782 ms
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13 * nsw-rno-dom.sn2.optus.net.au (202.139.18.114) 58.108 ms 53.548 ms
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14 203.15.123.177 (203.15.123.177) 54.050 ms 59.274 ms 52.545 ms
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15 gigxxx.unsw.edu.au (138.44.1.38) 56.228 ms 117.588 ms 54.973 ms
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16 129.94.255.182 (129.94.255.182) 53.398 ms 66.237 ms 53.127 ms
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17 life-x.life.unsw.edu.au (149.171.170.4) 54.120 ms 55.444 ms 59.328 ms
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(many) ports open on this machine are:
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21, 25, 80, 110, 119, 135 (filtered) 139 (filtered), 143, 161
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(filtered) 162 (filtered) 443, 445 (filtered) 563, 593 (filtered), 691,
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993, 995, 1379, 3389, 4444 (filtered), 6001, 6002, 6004, 8081, and 10000
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I don't know if this is of relevance.
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-----------------------
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The port 51 exploit:
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The C code which was compiled on conway and launched without authorization
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as an executable from my account is attached below. Output appeared to be
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sent to stderr (not a file). Targetted machines were:
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> 196 ./hajar 80.144.184.19 51&
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This appears to be a machine somewhere in Europe, on t-dialin.net, via
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sprintlink in Germany. It thinks it is called p5090b813.dip.t-dialin.net.
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That port is currently filtered, the service is la-maint
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> 255 ./hajar 202.159.50.17 51&
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This is a machine in Indonesia, probably several hops into indo.net.id;
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It thinks it is called mma-ip-017.indo.net.id
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Port 51 on that machine is currently closed.
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> 319 ./hajar 202.155.38.120 51&
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This looks to be an indosat.net machine reachable via INTER.NET's
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Indonesian satellite gateway. Port 51 on that machine is currently closed.
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> 364 ./hajar 203.173.147.137 51&
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This is a machine under the administration of ihug, Sydney.
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It thinks it is called p137-tnt8.syd.ihug.com.au
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It is also running la-maint in filtered mode, and is blocking ping probes.
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la-maint is apparently a logical address maintainer for IMP. I am not sure
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what the significance of this is, now how he chose his numbers.
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------------------
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Benchmarking the local load effects of running the attack:
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I just now un-froze hajar as he compiled it, and ran it thus:
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predator@conway:~/ $hajar 192.168.2.3 51
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It says:
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Pasukan..!!!! Tembaaaak 192.168.2.3 ke port 51
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If invoked with & at the end it will run in background. While hajar _is_
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running in background,
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predator@conway~:sudo lsof | grep hajar
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gets this:
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hajar 27794 predator cwd DIR 3,66 4096 327141 /home/predator/
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hajar 27794 predator rtd DIR 3,1 4096 2 /
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hajar 27794 predator txt REG 3,66 6762 327143 /home/predator/ /hajar
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hajar 27794 predator mem REG 3,1 92174 163078 /lib/ld-2.3.2.so
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hajar 27794 predator mem REG 3,1 1230864 166374 /lib/libc-2.3.2.so
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hajar 27794 predator 0u CHR 136,3 5 /dev/pts/3
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hajar 27794 predator 1u CHR 136,3 5 /dev/pts/3
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hajar 27794 predator 2u CHR 136,3 5 /dev/pts/3
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hajar 27794 predator 3u IPv4 7826995 UDP conway.cat.org.au:42043->conway.cat.org.au:51
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grep 27985 predator 1w REG 3,66 0 507774 /home/predator/hajar.lsof.txt
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The second last line is interesting and correlates with the output of
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trafshow (not shown here) while hajar runs in the background. It sends a
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LOT of UDP traffic at port 51 of the target machine from ports in the
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420xx range. It eats about 94% of the available CPU effort while it runs
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in order to do this.
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Here's the ifconfig stats - check the loop interface (the attack is
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launched over the loop interface during this investigation
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lo Link encap:Local Loopback
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inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
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UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
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RX packets:23776994 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
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TX packets:23776994 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
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collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
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RX bytes:2655499384 (2.4 GiB) TX bytes:2655499384 (2.4 GiB)
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Let's check them again exactly one minute later
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lo Link encap:Local Loopback
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inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
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UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
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RX packets:26533212 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
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TX packets:26533212 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
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collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
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RX bytes:2895290404 (2.6 GiB) TX bytes:2895290404 (2.6 GiB)
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So... conway's 94% busy running this script, and in 60 seconds has
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generated approx 640 megabytes of UDP packets containing whatever this
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script is attempting to do.
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Invoking it at our firewall just now:
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./hajar 192.168.2.1 51&
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reproduces the `All hub utilisation lights on' phenomenon which brought
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all this to my attention in the first place.
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No wonder conway wasn't paying attention to my attempts to log in!
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The other thing which he presumably intended to run was the psyBNC IRC
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proxy - probably in line with proxies he runs on Windows machines on
|
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campus.
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Here's the blurb, via Google.
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------------------
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------------------
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My comments in here like so.
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------------------
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------------------
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An Introduction to psyBNC 2.3.1
|
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<EFBFBD>2002,2003 jestrix - jestrix(at)jestrix(dot)net
|
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<chop>
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|
||
Introduction
|
||
|
||
If you know nothing about bncs, a bnc is short for a 'bouncer.' A bnc
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||
acts as a proxy for irc, allowing you to hide your real IP address and
|
||
use a vhost (vanity host - something like 'this.is.a.l33t.vhost.com').
|
||
What are the advantages of this? Well, mainly there's just one
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important one: It'll stop stupid packet kiddies from trying to knock
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you off the network. Everyone hates getting disconnected, and with a
|
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bnc on a decent shell, you should be pretty immune. Remember though:
|
||
the kiddies can still nuke you, but it is assumed that the shell
|
||
provider has a high-bandwidth line that allows it to withstand the
|
||
numerous packets. If your shell is on a 56.6, you'll still be screwed.
|
||
|
||
----------
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----------
|
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We're on a 512Mbit/sec incoming DSL link. So if someone was trying to
|
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knock this chap off we'd be fielding a lot of incoming packets!
|
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----------
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----------
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|
||
So... why psybnc? There are a variety of other open source bnc's
|
||
available for you to download, most notably EZBounce and plain-ol BNC.
|
||
Both of these do the exact same basic thing as psybnc: hide your real
|
||
host. But that's about where the similarity ends. I've been using psy
|
||
for a long time now, and I love with all the features that it offers.
|
||
To name a few:
|
||
<20> You'll always be connected to irc. Even when you close your irc
|
||
client, psy will maintain your connection. When you connect later,
|
||
you'll instantly be back on the channels you left. This also lets you
|
||
hold your nick (if you need that feature), or hold ops on a channel.
|
||
<20> psy hides your IP even in DCC sessions. In other bncs, a direct
|
||
client-client session is opened, thus revealing your IP. In psy, the
|
||
connection is bounced through the shell, and your IP remains your
|
||
dirty little secret ;)
|
||
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
Well, not if it's someone elses ;-)
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
|
||
|
||
<20> You can link multiple psy's together. This allows you to share
|
||
vhosts, and also create a small ircd, termed the 'internal' network on
|
||
the bncs.
|
||
<20> psyBNC now supports SSL. woohoo :)))
|
||
|
||
There are tons more features, but you can just download the source and
|
||
view the README.
|
||
|
||
Now... for the first part of this tutorial, the Basic section, I
|
||
assume you have little or no experience with shells/irc. For the
|
||
Intermediate section, though, I assume you can hold your own. For most
|
||
users, the Basic is as far as they need to go, but all the fun stuff
|
||
is a bit more complicated.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Configuring and Compiling
|
||
|
||
Hopefully you have already downloaded the source. If not, you can find
|
||
it here: http://www.psychoid.lam3rz.de. After you have downloaded
|
||
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
Yes, actually that's exactly where he downloaded it from. Maybe he read
|
||
this same tutorial?
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
|
||
|
||
that, fire up your favorite ftp client and upload it to the root
|
||
directory of your shell. You could also get the source by using lynx
|
||
or wget. Example wget command:
|
||
wget http://www.psychoid.lam3rz.de/psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
|
||
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
This is *precisely* the command he used.
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
|
||
The next step is to decompress this file (.tar.gz is kinda like a .zip
|
||
file for all you windoze ppl out there). To do this, type:
|
||
tar zxvf psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
|
||
|
||
Notice that it's case-sensitive. Everything in unix is case-sensitive.
|
||
Keep that in mind for everything in the future.
|
||
|
||
If you typed the correctly, you should have a psybnc directory on your
|
||
shell. Change to it and see what you have!
|
||
cd psybnc
|
||
ls -al
|
||
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
He did that too, same version and all!
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
|
||
|
||
Now, this next part is where it gets a bit harder. psyBNC includes a
|
||
GUI for configuring the bnc. However, this requires ncurses to be
|
||
installed on your shell, something a bunch of shells do not have. In
|
||
my experience, most flavors of linux have it installed, but some
|
||
others don't. So, give it a whirl. Type:
|
||
make menuconfig
|
||
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
We have ncurses but make menuconfig was the next thing he did.
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
If you get a GUI, congrats: the configuring process is much easier. If
|
||
not, well, welcome to my world ;) With menuconfig, the GUI is very
|
||
easy to follow: obviously an [X] denotes that the option is selected,
|
||
while [ ] indicates it's not.
|
||
|
||
For all those stuck doing it by hand, after each option I explain how
|
||
to set it. For all the compiling options, everything is placed in the
|
||
file config.h, which is found in the psybnc directory. Just open that
|
||
file with your favorite editor on the shell (I use and recommend pico
|
||
- You can edit the file by typing:
|
||
pico config.h
|
||
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
I think this never happened - so he did a standard psyBNC config.
|
||
Or maybe he gave up - it was all too hard. Our crontab is unaltered since
|
||
2002.
|
||
----------
|
||
----------
|
||
</geek>
|
||
|
||
So there.
|
||
|
||
Soz sez the C code above basically generates loads of crap and spews it at
|
||
the address in question - I figure these addresses are IP numbers of mIRC
|
||
users whom the cracker is trying to knock off their mIRC systems by, in
|
||
essence, DOS-ing them with a flood of digital garbage. He was gonna run
|
||
an mIRC proxy on our pipe so people could do the same to him and not knock
|
||
*him* off.
|
||
|
||
The uni is gonna go this chap for, amongst other things, copyright
|
||
infringement. I told 'em they'd have no chance with psyBNC since it's
|
||
GPL'd but tembak.c is probably copyrighted even though there's no
|
||
evidence about who wrote it.
|
||
|
||
Jerking off mIRC kiddies by running a DoS script on someone else's machine
|
||
is a fuckin' silly reason to get kicked out of uni and deported. The uni
|
||
is gearing up to nuke the dude so that his smouldering corpse can be held
|
||
up as a warning to the rest of the local pool of 'l33t k-r4d h4x0r d00dz.
|
||
|
||
|
||
----
|
||
|
||
Back to my life.
|
||
|
||
Friday Night Obtainium - a STUCCO resident left STUCCO and abandoned a
|
||
serious caving torch, which they've given to me 4V Exide Triclad battery
|
||
and a couple of helmet-mounted lights (halogen, dual-bulb incandescent).
|
||
Woohoo, the geniune MSA item! Shame I can't take this on the expo to the
|
||
uh, secret location, people'd think I nicked it from the site. It goes for
|
||
hours and is really really good - fullet pucking broof. Gotta cook up a 4V
|
||
supply for it tho. Need a circuit. I can probably snarf one from the tech
|
||
pages of national semidestructor.
|
||
|
||
|
||
The non expo - return of the diode. The biggest find in the history of the
|
||
clan has been found, a huge, vast, coal mine is being decommissioned in
|
||
Newcastle, but due to diode's pissing off the other people who were
|
||
organising the expedition, nobody turned up at the meeting point. I got an
|
||
SMS saying it was cancelled and acknowledged it, but had invested too much
|
||
time and effort in tweaking my sleep cycle, prepping my torches/batteries,
|
||
arranging food/water load to take with me for a far-north all-night
|
||
explorama, to not at least see if anyone missed the late cancel and showed
|
||
up at the meeting point. Damn. I got home that night and by the time I did
|
||
dad was recovering from an idiopathic episode of hypoglycemia. He's a well
|
||
controlled diabetic, but we're not sure what's doing this. Mum saved him
|
||
by stuffing him full of chocolate. Poor bugger, dad.
|
||
|
||
I dunno what diode's saying about me these days and don't much care, and
|
||
the clan listserv has become much nicer since I added the
|
||
low-frequency-of-occurence regexp trigraphs from his email url and name to
|
||
the killfile; I was catching everything he wrote on the Clan listserv and
|
||
routing it to /dev/null but I've changed the procmail config so that it
|
||
routes his stuff to a directory which I will maybe read later if I can be
|
||
fucked permitting a bunch o' what'll probably turn out to be pages and
|
||
pages of predictable, self-righteous abuse and intimations that my
|
||
personality executes on a skullful of metastatic tumor rather than the
|
||
usual neural net. Something about him has changed a lot in the last few
|
||
months.
|
||
|
||
Suburban drag.
|
||
The late-adolescent rev-head real estate agent trainee over the road who,
|
||
thinking that a sports exhaust will make his car faster or tougher or
|
||
something, is a nuisance to every house past which he drives his
|
||
bespoilered, mag-wheeled doof box. Now, normally I'd just torch the
|
||
vehicle but there's a catch. He lives over the road from the old's place,
|
||
and parks his car in *his* oldies house. They have two small four-legged
|
||
mobile transducers which basically exist to convert dog food energy to
|
||
sound on the approach of strangers or other dogs so I can't sneak in and
|
||
alter the large-diameter muffler which we all hear at 2:30am when he
|
||
drives home. This left two options both of which were unsatisfactory since
|
||
they'd lead to the replacement of the existing noisy muffler with another
|
||
just like it... either rip the thing off or spray into it some Space
|
||
Invader, which is an aerosol-delivered expanding foam wall cavity filler
|
||
which sets hard thereby blocking the fucking thing completely. But these
|
||
extremes lead to the replacement of the exhaust and we're back to
|
||
noiseville again. I have finally thought of the right acoustic dampening
|
||
material... steel wool. The car will perform exactly the same but just be
|
||
quieter if I stuff about $10 of steel wool into the muffler. I know where
|
||
I can do this - in the carpark at his place of employment. Excellent. If
|
||
he spots me, and complains, I'll own up, and mention that he's lucky I'm
|
||
not using Polyfilla. Or calcium perchlorate, which is freely available at
|
||
pool (water, not cueballs) shops in kg quantities and uh, decomposes
|
||
violently at exhaust temperatures.
|
||
|
||
|
||
"Fuck heaps of hot chicks." --Dougo
|
||
|
||
On sat7th, in the arvo it started pissing rain. In said rain I rode
|
||
(surfed? jet-ski'd?) around to Turella to loan Soz my motorcycle for use
|
||
in the Mardi Gras. Poor woman, it rained continuously for ages while they
|
||
hung around in wet carparks being marshalled, checked, registered etc
|
||
before the parade and her pillion wussed out. She came back a couple of
|
||
hours early, fed me some poached eggs on toast (yumee!) and I rode out to
|
||
the drain at Homebush (with a nice big dry warm room with lights too) to
|
||
check how flooded it gets during serious rain. It gets _seriously_
|
||
flooded. So I went back to Turella and while my socks dried out in the
|
||
stream of hot air venting from the fan exhaust at the back of the cat
|
||
webserver, slept in the cot with the cookie manufacturer, who shagged me
|
||
after feeding me chunks of cheese and chocolates and plying me with
|
||
flammable jamaican rum. I drove out into the rain the next morning at
|
||
11:30am and got to Strathie at noon, Zyn awaited and I had to tell her
|
||
that due to the idiotic rains the exploration wasn't happening, so she
|
||
hired a room and we went up and I uh, got out of my wet things, and
|
||
eventually, we shagged there, which was delightful, but ohhh, I'm feeling
|
||
my age... I have now lived to hear, at the ripe old age of nearly 33, the
|
||
phrase which falls, graceful as a pallet of tombstones upon every man upon
|
||
whom it is dropped even in jest... `What's the matter old man, can't get
|
||
it up?'
|
||
|
||
I can. It just takes more time than it used to. I'm not twenty and I
|
||
shagged someone 11 hours before and I'm not a sildenafil-augmented
|
||
life-support system for a hardon... though as far as career moves are
|
||
concerned it couldn't be that bad. Evolution wired men to get up, get in,
|
||
get off and get out, fast, which is no fun for the women. It's taken years
|
||
to reprogram the dick (and it's not very bright - like the old saying
|
||
goes, one eye and no brains) so that it stays up long enough for the
|
||
kindly recipient to seriously enjoy it, but it needs a general change in
|
||
attitude to achieve this control, and too much waiting kind of kills the
|
||
stab of urgency which drives men, or at least drives me. Ok, so (quoting
|
||
Greg Egan) I'm a pathetic hormone-driven wind-up toy. Ah, well, I can't
|
||
complain, we did have some good shaggin'. And they make great coffee down
|
||
at the Plaza.
|
||
|
||
No, She's right. Sometimes, it doesn't happen when I want it to. But let's
|
||
get it in perspective.
|
||
|
||
In one of the most wrenching conversations I've had all year, it turned
|
||
out, Zyn's been contemplating suicide, like I have. She's pretty sick.
|
||
I've felt now the mets which speckle her chest like shotgun pellet wounds
|
||
ever so slowly erupting from the inside out. She was, as the suicide
|
||
statistics suggest, gonna stuff herself full of paracetamol but I said
|
||
this'd just lead to her being found someplace sick as a dog and being
|
||
whizzed off to get her guts pumped out, and that if she was seriously
|
||
gonna do it she use CO or something fast, toxic as fuck and irreversible.
|
||
She sorta implied she wants me to help and found myself stuck for words -
|
||
I'm having enough trouble getting the gutz up to do myself. She also sort
|
||
of implied she wouldn't do it while she and I were in the loop, which
|
||
amounts to an unwanted, and sort of huge, responsibility for a life, a
|
||
responsibility which I don't want.
|
||
|
||
Her mum sez it'd be good if Zyn did kill herself, which doesn't sound
|
||
especially charitable.
|
||
|
||
-----
|
||
|
||
Sunday night I wrote amongst other things to the Dioscorean (a biochemist
|
||
friend of mine doing a PhD at Stanford in the US) the following stuff:
|
||
|
||
There's this advert pasted up in bus shelters and on billboards all over
|
||
Sydney at the mo. It's got this pair of female lips pointed at a telephone
|
||
handpiece, and in large letters down the bottom of the adverts it sez
|
||
|
||
"There's a new treatment for cancer. Talking."
|
||
|
||
I know this is bollocks simply because I talk so much that if it was true
|
||
I'd never get cancer in the first place. 8-)
|
||
|
||
I also know it's bollocks 'cos you can talk about it all you like and
|
||
it'll take you out regardless.
|
||
|
||
But I think my wry sense of humour causes me to want to go get
|
||
photographed in front of a billboard with this on it.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
I also mentioned i was smitten with her in 1998 but never said anything
|
||
'cos she was in the loop with someone else at the time. She's taking a
|
||
long time to reply to that.
|
||
|
||
|
||
-------------
|
||
|
||
Monday disappeared in a blur of trivia so mind-numbing I can't remember it
|
||
now, tho I did acquire another server chassis and photograph myself in
|
||
front of aforesaid billboard. My mum's dog is becoming adept at `walking'
|
||
my neighbour's rather more stupid dog, when I tie them at opposite ends of
|
||
the same lead. How good is that - one can benchmark one's dog by seeing
|
||
which one `wears the pants' in a two-dogs, one rope situation.
|
||
|
||
Tues 9 I saw Zyn at the uni and we chatted a lot, again.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Wed:
|
||
|
||
In the early hours, heavy of heart, I unsubscribed myself from the Clan
|
||
list, where Diode's been posting inaccurate calumnies which I cannot be
|
||
arsed defending myself against, since it'd just give him more things to
|
||
deny, obfuscate, or pretend to misunderstand. (Author's note: my
|
||
unsubscription provoked a lot of grumbling amongst the remaining list
|
||
users).
|
||
|
||
Marcin, at STUCCO, gets my climbing rack today. Partly sourced in Nepal,
|
||
and the rest largely originating in the remains of the late Mullet's old
|
||
rack, I climbed the delightful metaschists at Arapiles with it, and
|
||
various sandstone walls around Sydney, and also some perilous manky
|
||
conglomeratic garbage at the Grampians. I keep the karabiners, my rope,
|
||
slings and harness. I wrote to Joss there are many memories in those
|
||
battered chunks of alloy.... hexcentrics, chocks, old rigid-stemmed
|
||
Friends (what are now called self-loading cam devices). Having them in my
|
||
hands reminded me of the smells of eucalypt kino, the wet earthy smells of
|
||
disturbed moss and sun-baked rock one is enveloped in as one scales the
|
||
walls, with bleeding hands, aching arms, doing the calculus of survival as
|
||
one heads up a rockface.
|
||
|
||
In the eve I went down a drain at Rockdale, which starts under the Holden
|
||
dealership and ends adjacent to the railway. Nice shape changes and size
|
||
and materials variations (I've never seen a spiral white plastic tunnel
|
||
1.8m diameter!), and only a 10 min bike ride from Blakehurst! Four other
|
||
people came with me, their first formal expedition. It makes me happy to
|
||
see other people getting the same buzz out of drains that I get.
|
||
|
||
The cookie manufacturer thinks she has mononucleosis, which is to say,
|
||
EBV. I'm surprised she didn't get it already, years ago. I'da worried
|
||
about this but I got it in 1984 and one never loses it. EBV likes to make
|
||
you sick if you happen to be immunosuppressed, which is a bugger, 'cos in
|
||
the later stages of my remaining life either my tumors (in an effort to
|
||
hide themselves from immunosurveillance) or the cytotoxic drugs I might
|
||
use to try to kill them, will immunosuppress me. I'm not sure she does
|
||
have EBV, since some of the symptons are missing. Her doctor is really not
|
||
clued in with molecular data either.
|
||
|
||
Joss sent me an email saying she wanted to shag me the moment she got back
|
||
to her old's place upon arriving back in Sydney. This is, actually,
|
||
tactically messy since her place = her mum's place, and as far as I can
|
||
tell Joss' mum still thinks Joss is married to Azza in England, and as
|
||
far as I can tell as I write, so do I. I think it would be pushing the
|
||
limits of chutzpah to go to someone's house and shag their married
|
||
daughter about an hour after they'd got through customs. But I guess I
|
||
push these limits a lot already.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Thursday. 11th March. I thought it was wednesday all day until just now.
|
||
I've gotta change the chain on the motorcycle and get it re-registered.
|
||
I'm gonna ask for odd teeth on the back sprocket and evens on the front,
|
||
so the positional permutations are larger and the system will last longer
|
||
'cos wear will be spread across the whole drive train and not concentrated
|
||
on one point. Only weirdos, mechanics and pure mathematicians know this. I
|
||
am not a mechanic or pure mathematician.
|
||
|
||
I got an email from Joss about her uxorial status and what her oldies knew
|
||
of it - she has evidently mentioned to them that she and her UK hubby have
|
||
parted ways. It appears Joss wants to jump my dying bones when she gets
|
||
back, which apart from being a great thing, IS gonna scramble my heart a
|
||
bit - monday might well be a day smeared with carnal secreta, but will
|
||
definately be stained with salty lachrymation and the snot of emotional
|
||
turbulence from my position. I kind of expect she sees that a lot, I know
|
||
from first-hand experience how easy it is to become smitten with her.
|
||
She's as old now as I was when we were first together. We loved each other
|
||
for a while, a couple of years ago, and then she peeled herself away from
|
||
me to marry a bloke on the other side of the planet. It's her life, I told
|
||
myself, it's not my right to chain her to me, for the joss in a monogamous
|
||
cage is not the true joss. I missed her like hell but kept my trap pretty
|
||
well shut, and thought Azza had suddenly become the luckiest bloke on the
|
||
planet.
|
||
|
||
She popped back to Oz for a short visit last year. She was also sort of
|
||
angry last year at the whole sitch when she visited and I wouldn't shag
|
||
her 'cos she was married then. Don't get the idea I'm gonna crap on about
|
||
the self-righteousness of that decision, she still made me pointy, as she
|
||
does now, and I might have, but I was mainly just too burnt to get close
|
||
to her again only to know she was gonna get flung down another runway and
|
||
out of the country and outta my life again.
|
||
|
||
Pilot : Say, we just sucked a barely airborn humanoid into engine No.3!
|
||
Co-pilot: Oh, yeah. That'd be Icarus... shouldda got a real pilot's license.
|
||
|
||
|
||
--
|
||
All is fair in love and war _because_ from a gene's perspective love and
|
||
war are two sides of the same thing. Someone once said wars don't decide
|
||
who is right - they decide who is left.
|
||
|
||
So now she's coming back, and I never thought she would. But I'm
|
||
_truly_ruly_ dyin' anyway, what a fuck-off! She reckons she's coming back
|
||
because she loves me and I'm prepared to believe it, 'cos I'm moth to
|
||
flame with a gallon of AvGas and oh, I dunno, I do trust her, but the
|
||
egotistical suspicion lurks at the back o' my head that she has returned
|
||
here, instead of stayin' in England and hooking up with someone else
|
||
there, solely because my metastatic circumstances have forced _my_ hand.
|
||
Fuckin' cancer. Well. If carking it causes old dear friends to come back
|
||
to live near you, I guess you should be grateful to yer disease.
|
||
|
||
A cynical bit of calculus occurred to me a day ago. I'm living my
|
||
remaining life to the limit, and getting more shaggery than I ever thought
|
||
possible, and I think it's mainly 'cos I'm going around telling people I'm
|
||
dying. Doubts about this claim are instantly dispelled by the significant
|
||
scar up my frontal axis.
|
||
|
||
But suppose I wasn't legitimate... say, had paid to have installed a slash
|
||
up the middle to which I could append, and legitimate, stories of
|
||
impending mortality... and then after walking around for a couple of years
|
||
saying I had a biological Damoclesian sword growing within me, be
|
||
miraculously cured. It's a tactic I'm sure a bunch of men would have
|
||
figured out before I woke up to it.
|
||
|
||
I wonder to myself, what _is_ she doing in Oz again, why is she here? I'm
|
||
on the way outta this human condition, and to me she's another reason to
|
||
stay, another person to think about causing anguish to if I conclude it's
|
||
time to shut myself down. Ahh, but I'm gladder about her return than I'm
|
||
prepared to admit to myself here on the glowing green screen. I like her
|
||
enough to use her real name here. Names have been changed to protect the
|
||
identies of various people throughout these rants, but Joss, bein' a
|
||
smidge closer to my periosteum than most, cops the scourge of actual
|
||
identification. I dunno what this means, actually. I once painted her
|
||
under a psued' but I can't now.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Oh, to see the world portrayed in a domestic insect electrocutor... I
|
||
fixed the bug zapper last night, it developed a carbon bridge between the
|
||
grids (lowers the inter-grid voltage), so I chopped it out and replaced it
|
||
with a chunk o' silicone (do not test with shields off, HV will kill you).
|
||
It's actually something of an ecosystem to itself, a high voltage,
|
||
argon-lit charnel-house drawing in all aviators who can sense its
|
||
ultraviolet fluoro lure; the tiny, blasted, corpses oscillate at 50Hz in
|
||
the electric field which shocks them so violently the little scales on
|
||
their wings waft upward like dust with the blue smoke which used to be
|
||
their guts. I have looked at the insect zapper and my understanding has
|
||
been transformed - the truly clever spiders build their nests under the
|
||
electrified grid, so as to the reap the dead rain of barbecqued insectoid
|
||
manna which falls, smouldering, from the heavenly kilovolt-energised grids
|
||
above.
|
||
|
||
-------------------
|
||
|
||
March 12. Drivel. I put the dog in my backpack and motorcycled down to the
|
||
motorcycle shop for new brake shoes, chain, front'n'back sprockets.
|
||
Motorists behind me smiled at the doggie as she looked back at them,
|
||
peeking out from the lid of the pack. They put the axle bolt in backwards,
|
||
I noticed later, and they duly reinserted it the right way around when I
|
||
mentioned this to 'em, free of charge.
|
||
|
||
I came back later and brought the doggie home, to discover the
|
||
dumb-as-a-housebrick, noise-nuisance, beagle from next door in our back
|
||
yard. It was pretty cranky about something... it snarled as I went to pick
|
||
it up and return it over the fence, so I put my motorcyclin' gauntlets
|
||
back on and tried again, whereapon the fucker curled and sunk its teeth
|
||
through my shirtsleeve and into my left arm. I changed grip from
|
||
`considerate' to `arms extended, hands around its neck, and could care
|
||
less if animal is strangled' and dropped it, snarling, back over the
|
||
fence. Superficial wound, no anaerobics, so I've been lucky. Drowned the
|
||
bleeding skin in iodine. People asked me later if that was a love bite.
|
||
Which, if you think about it, is a pretty offensive question if I assume
|
||
people know the difference between the bite of a dog and a human, but
|
||
evidently people do not. No. I date within my own species, actually,
|
||
despite what previous dog-fucks-leg stories might suggest.
|
||
|
||
I nailed up the missing fence planks, said doggie perfectly friendly
|
||
again. I popped back over the fence and cleaned and realigned the coils on
|
||
the 2.4GHz helicals I'm gonna install at STUCCO. Lovely aerials.
|
||
|
||
I caught up with Lias at the Piccolo on Kellet St in the 'Cross. Fuckin'
|
||
smokers. He's the same as I remember him, thoughtful and wryly grim. Has
|
||
moved in with a woman in Bronte who is into _organic_ essential oils,
|
||
which she said in a way which I immediately knew meant she didn't know the
|
||
difference between an organic and inorganic material. Montmorillonite an
|
||
*aluminosilicate* dear, it contains no carbon, it has no metabolism, it's
|
||
not alive, it never was alive. It's not organic despite what the label
|
||
says. Lias is an OK dude. When the collapse comes, he's gonna be ready.
|
||
He's a funny chap actually... he's keeping himself healthy shoplifting
|
||
vitamins from supermarkets, the way he looks at it, it's pharmo
|
||
corporate-sponsored free health care. He's doing a tourist video about
|
||
hitching rides on express goods trains to Melbourne, the Lias way, which
|
||
consists of running as fast as ya can, grabbing on, slingin'a hammock
|
||
between two bulk freight carriages, then lying in it for eight hours and
|
||
watching from the train at 150km/h as it overtakes the cars on the
|
||
freeways adjacent.
|
||
|
||
*sigh*
|
||
|
||
Ya gotta laugh. I got some spam today. Subj: "Predator, start smoking
|
||
today!" Well, I did go to the Piccolo last night, which is (cough) a good
|
||
initial effort.
|
||
|
||
Sat 13... I got an SMS very early this morning, feen, millsy taff and me
|
||
are gonna do that fuckin' novocastrian anthracite mine, but on sat night,
|
||
which is when Zyn and I were gonna get a room and test the mattress. You
|
||
can guess which one I chose... and she's not very happy about being
|
||
gazumped.
|
||
|
||
|
||
I got a phone message from dad, some woman rang up, I had no idea where
|
||
the number was, googled the prefix and found ... Alstonville? Up near
|
||
Lismore. I rang it, got a voice message and Kath rang back... arr, she's
|
||
in Alstonville now?! Anyway, it turns out her boyfriend makes coffins for
|
||
a living and apparently there's laws that say you can't buy them in
|
||
advance! What a load of fuckoff! Well, I guess that's another project - I
|
||
can rob the funeral industry of about a grand if I build my own casket.
|
||
(Hmmm... that's why a circular saw will also be useful). I imagine there's
|
||
templates on the 'net for that. Or I could dive their dumpsters.
|
||
|
||
"Art is for the filthy rich and for their noble fucking minds
|
||
'cos they're they only ones with any fucking time
|
||
to go to all the galleries and all the restaurants to dine,
|
||
while all the grotty working class are workin' down the mines."
|
||
|
||
-TISM -The Art/Income Dialectic
|
||
|
||
|
||
5:10am Monday 15.. well, the mine was amazing. Difficult to access, and
|
||
with the usual Clan logistical fuckups and delays the six of us got into
|
||
it at 2:15 Sunday morning. The faintly sour tang of coal reminded Taff (a
|
||
Welshman) of the olfactory signature of his homeland. A LOOOONG way down a
|
||
steep incline cut into the stratigraphy, with a railway and a conveyor in
|
||
it, you eventually get to a fork which is one's main access. From there it
|
||
goes off in all directions for kilometres, through airlocks, blast doors,
|
||
past more railways, control rooms (lots of porn in the cupboards), meal
|
||
rooms, machinery stations full of various nonfunctional tools abused and
|
||
destroyed in imaginative ways, fuel depots, transformer stations, various
|
||
mobile, blast-proofed, diesel machinery built out of plate iron, solid
|
||
rubber, etc etc. We only explored a tiny bit of it. The walls are painted
|
||
white so you can spot spall in the gleaming anthracite, and the cielings
|
||
are bolted together with steel plates to stop the roof collapsing... this
|
||
hasn't worked everywhere. Hummming 'lectrical equipment is invariably
|
||
housed in metal boxes and blast-proofed. We were in a part of the Wzyee
|
||
seam then the Fzassifern seam, both of which were being longwall drift
|
||
mined by fifty-six tonne mining machines which mowed slices out of the
|
||
earth dozens of metres across and hundreds of metres along. Eventually the
|
||
coal gets tossed in a crusher and conveyer-belt transported to the Valez
|
||
Poynt power station. They're gonna mothball the mine now, backfill it with
|
||
nitrogen (reduces methane seep and prevents fires) turn off the pumps and
|
||
brick it off for ... well... who knows. Until it all floods? Subsides? How
|
||
many people never see these trapped layers of inky blackness which by some
|
||
strange quirk of mathematical cancellation, when burnt, repel the inky
|
||
blackness of night, keeps everyone's electrickal lights lit?
|
||
|
||
(Coal, by the way, is electrically conductive, so we were in a big long
|
||
complicated waveguide array... you could do some interesting RF
|
||
experiments there. Only geeks think about that sort of stuff.)
|
||
|
||
Undiscovered, we got out at 5:30am and went back to Sydney sans the
|
||
expected fines and gaol terms we would get if we were caught down
|
||
there. Very happy but very tired, I got home and collapsed into a dead
|
||
sleep.
|
||
|
||
I got just a bit of kip and awoke later, showered off myself the coal dust
|
||
which hadn't rubbed off on my bedclothes, and read Lehninger... in
|
||
1965 he wrote that proteins have more information content in
|
||
them than DNA does per unit length.. 1965!! WOW! I figured this out
|
||
for myself in 2002 so it's good to know I'm not a nutcase for thinking it.
|
||
|
||
Whizzed into Stucco to give 'em my RJ45 crimpers (they're very happy their
|
||
old harddisk works), had beer and a chat with Safa and the cookie
|
||
manufacturer (we have some very rude conversations, about topics ranging
|
||
from the fine art of vaginal fisting and how many people I am shagging and
|
||
wether or not particular DVD porn is any good), then went back to the
|
||
IceCream factory and built a machine for Garcondumonde who's an English
|
||
chap with some arm of the UK Indymedia crew. Then after harvesting some
|
||
uh, abandoned aluminium sheet (it had something about a 50 ZONE on it)
|
||
en-route to the parentals, built another machine into a chassis made of an
|
||
abandoned computer case, some aluminium chequerplate and an old steel No
|
||
Trespassing sign left to rust in the bushes on some land owned by the
|
||
Water Board.
|
||
|
||
<geek>
|
||
Bloody hell Adaptec SCSI BIOSes annoy the shit out of me. SCSI is great
|
||
but arrr, why does it have to take the boot process over by default...
|
||
can't it just be invoked by modprobe when I want it like the AHA152x on
|
||
the Dell Latitude P75 port replicator? Grrrr... NCR, who are usually a
|
||
bunch of fuckheads, got it totally right with their unobtrusive 53c8xx.
|
||
</geek>
|
||
|
||
Anyway, it's 5:30am now as I write. Joss has been sitting in a tube of
|
||
jet-propelled metal, moving at high velocity, couple of km above the
|
||
earth's surface for the last 20 hours or so. I'm gonna go out to Mos
|
||
Eisley, er.. Kingsford-Smith airport and greet her, with her Dad.
|
||
|
||
-----
|
||
|
||
Thurs 18: In background I'm ripping Asian Dub Foundation but that's cos I
|
||
said I'd dupe it for Nomes to get around this stupid copy control stuff,
|
||
not 'cos I especially like the music. The rant subsequently attempts to
|
||
compress a lot of stuff into a few lines and there's a lot of chronology
|
||
out-of-sequence errors 'cos everything's a bit of a blur.
|
||
|
||
I got out to the airport Monday morning through surprisingly early feral
|
||
traffic, and met Keith in the crowd at the international terminal.
|
||
Initially when I got there, lots of hotel dorks in suits stood around
|
||
holding up signs with names on them and I thought I'd stand in front of
|
||
'em for better crowd contrast (I wore a singlet and camo slacks and boots
|
||
and a black floppy velvet Dr Seuss hat) but this just resulted in a bunch
|
||
o' security boofheads discreetly appearing behind me. Keith and I nattered
|
||
about some emails of his which didn't make it to me, concerning CDMA
|
||
coding methods, and Joss walked down the corridor pushing a trolley full
|
||
o' junk and waving at us. It was very good to see her again with my own
|
||
four eyes, 'cos oh, ya know, I didn't think I ever would again.
|
||
|
||
We rolled out to the carpark and she got in the 4wd with her dad and they
|
||
drove off to Balmain as the dawn fractured the clouds. I snuck out of the
|
||
carpark through a gap in the bollards.
|
||
|
||
We met up at Darling St, met Jude and Sophie and Joss' mum and whoever
|
||
else was there, Joss and I just hugged a lot and chatted and ate some
|
||
food. I have vague, pleasantly confused, memories about her shagging me
|
||
stupid while both of us, either jetlagged or sleep deprived were in the
|
||
process of incompletely attempting to get some kip. I was pretty shattered
|
||
later in the arvo, and then we shagged again, which was unexpected and
|
||
delightful too. Words for it aren't gonna work so I'm leaving them out.
|
||
I'm still wrapping my head around it all now. I think these were the shags
|
||
ya have when you haven't had time to think about it all.
|
||
|
||
I'm not really sure but I think it was sometime on monday arvo that I did
|
||
the snot thing. I've not held anyone like I did and just seeped hot salt
|
||
out of my eyes, nakedly clinging to Joss, arms aching, and doing that
|
||
shaking and sobbing which happens when there's a couple of years of
|
||
i-missed-you and im-thrilled-to-see-you-again and
|
||
theres-so-much-we'll-never-say, and also a load of
|
||
oh-fuck-do-i-HAVE-to-die that needs to leak out of your head. Well, MY
|
||
head. I was too broken up to even think about a shag. She enveloped my
|
||
torso, warm and soft, reassuring, wrapped around me like an very old
|
||
cashmere jumper I liked to be in and wore until it wore out, I felt a lot
|
||
of emotions churning in my guts, the names for which I don't have. Pain
|
||
isn't one of them. Mainly relief, reassurance, a feeling of being ...
|
||
where I am meant to be.
|
||
|
||
For as long as I can remember, maybe I've never cried like that. I dripped
|
||
tears off my cheeks which landed on my chest and thighs and dick and on
|
||
Joss who also wore a lot of my teary snot after a while. I'm almost
|
||
getting snotty remembering it. I can't remember what I said and maybe if I
|
||
did I wouldn't have the guts to write it here.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Tues arvo I left Toad Hall and rode out to Parramatta. You can look up the
|
||
rest of the day's events in the NSW Police records.... it was totally
|
||
refuckingdiculous! Basically, Purple Death Faerie and I were spotted goin'
|
||
in the drainage grate by some cleaners, who called security, who called
|
||
the cops, who called progressively higher and higher level cops, who
|
||
probably called oh, I dunno, whatever god cops worship, and by the time
|
||
PDF and I got out of the drain (after spending about 2 and a half hours
|
||
wandering around and/or singing Tori Amos and Beach Boys in the delightful
|
||
echo chamber) there were about thirty cops waddling around the entry
|
||
grate. Some female constables picked us up off Hill Road 'cos we spotted
|
||
them near where we got in and decided to walk the long way around to avoid
|
||
'em (which obviously didn't work). I spun 'em some crap about having
|
||
dropped keys in the drain 'cos I was sort of embarassed telling a couple
|
||
of female cops I was angling for a shag in a drain, not 'cos I'm ashamed
|
||
to do that sorta stuff but 'cos, well, it's none of their business. They
|
||
stuck us in lockup vans (I've always wanted a ride in a police car ... and
|
||
I did it while not wearing a seatbelt either!), drove us around to
|
||
Faerie's van, let us get our IDs and searched it, then drove us around to
|
||
the drainage grate where we got in. They asked me out of the van where an
|
||
angry short cop (Taylor?) snarled at me, "What the fuck were you doing in
|
||
there?" I told him the truth, I was down there for a shag, didn't shag,
|
||
ended up wandering around and then sat in the room singing and talking. He
|
||
asked what I did for a job and I said I was a computer geek and I taught
|
||
people how to program at UNSW. He said I was listed in their cop database
|
||
as some kind of activist. I said I did some firewall stuff for TWS and FOE
|
||
and helped run an ISP called cat but I didn't go to demo's. He asked me if
|
||
I knew anything about something called the DSP and I said uh, digital
|
||
signal processors? and he yelled `Oh bullshit!' loudly and told me to get
|
||
in the fuckin' van. I found out later this was a reference to the
|
||
Democratic Socialist Party, whoever that is. They emptied my pockets on
|
||
the bonnet of the wagon and locked me in the back of it.
|
||
|
||
I waited in the van for about three hours while they arranged for an
|
||
explosives and firearms labrador to come and sniff me. When it got there
|
||
it exhibited absolutely no interest in sniffing me even when the handler
|
||
grabbed it by the scruff and shoved it at me. I watched through the steel
|
||
mesh as lots of cops waddled around talking on cellphones... dog handlers,
|
||
overall-clads, plainclothes detectives, uniformed dudes with various
|
||
quantities of braids'n'shit on their lapels, and super-duper-intendant
|
||
cops which were sent down from the district command. Some of them do this
|
||
muscle-strut walk which suggests there's a piece of LEGO or something
|
||
stuck under their armpits and between their butt cheeks but maybe this is
|
||
just the overalls or something. Why _so many_ cops I wondered to myself?
|
||
|
||
Eventually they took us to Auburn station where we found out we were under
|
||
arrest (when I asked). They didn't say what for. They took all our stuff
|
||
and put it in lockers, asked us a bunch o' stuff, then locked us in these
|
||
cramped little cells until the detectives got around to interviewing us.
|
||
|
||
So I didn't make it to Jude's 21st 'cos I was locked up in a brilliantly
|
||
fluoro-lit, somewhat chilly, perspex-walled fuckin' gaol cell too narrow
|
||
to lie down in without bending my knees, waiting to be fingerprinted and
|
||
photographed for trespassing in a tunnel. There were no signs saying we
|
||
shouldn't be there, and I broke no locks, scaled no fences, and I even
|
||
shut the grates once we'd been through. They let us go at about 1am. We
|
||
got all our stuff back. We ate chicken kebabs and read our bullshit charge
|
||
sheets, which are littered with typos and spellos (like I should talk) and
|
||
got a cab back to the Faerie van. We have to go to court on April 8th. PDF
|
||
was very, very cool about it, and displayed considerable savoir-faire in
|
||
the face of such police idiocy as, for example, their asking her to
|
||
remove her incredible mass of hair, wire, rope, braids, beads and drain
|
||
cobwebs from off of her skull.
|
||
|
||
Zyn's sending me SMSs which suggest she's feeling a certain amount of
|
||
neglect. I couldn't answer one of them for 9 hours cos I was in the slam
|
||
without a fone. SMSs are kinda dangerous, their forced brevity can impart
|
||
to a message a sort of brusque aspect it really doesn't intend.
|
||
|
||
I got an no-spaces SMS from Joss (you pack more data in that way, she
|
||
correctly points out) saying she hoped all was cool and I SMS'd her back
|
||
saying what happened but this was amusingly to her mother's cellphone.
|
||
Joss wrote a file to me later saying that she was worried about me
|
||
drowning or committing suicide.
|
||
|
||
Nope. I did chew the back of PDF's stubbly skull a bit (she likes it and
|
||
sez I chew her skull better than anyone else) and get yelled at by tubby
|
||
cops and have nine hours of my life flushed down the toilet while penal
|
||
paperwork (it sounds as masturbatory as it is) was done but no kinky
|
||
sex'n'death.
|
||
|
||
So I'm up on Section 4 (1) (a)of the Inclosed Lands Protection Act,
|
||
specifically the bit which sez I am a person who entered inclosed lands
|
||
without consent of the owner/occupier or person(s) apparently in charge of
|
||
those lands (which is why the detectives hammered that point in the
|
||
interview). For heaven's sake.. the olympic park authority maintains a
|
||
website saying `come and play in our park' . . . well, we *did*. Look what
|
||
it got us.
|
||
|
||
I checked it out on AUSTLII and if, as I suspect, they slap me with 10
|
||
penalty units, I'm up for a fine of $1100 bux and a criminal record. Which
|
||
will also probably result in the cancellation of my explosives license
|
||
(which might be a good thing, in some scenarios). Unless someone finds
|
||
some anti-terrorist legislation to exemplarily fry my arse in, in which
|
||
case I can expect to die of cancer in the slam once I'm convicted. Sux. Oh
|
||
well. I know I'm not gonna be in for an inordinately long time. Naaah.
|
||
They really know I'm not that risky, I keep telling myself - they let me
|
||
go with no bail.
|
||
|
||
{The Penalty Unit is an interesting monetary concept in itself. A house in
|
||
Sydney, at $360,000 for a cheap one, is worth 3272 penalty units of $110
|
||
each. You've gotta do a really long sentence in the office cubicle to earn
|
||
yourself a place to live in Sydney. That we have penalty units at all is
|
||
classic negative feedback, can't we have a judicial system which rewards
|
||
people when they do good stuff? More carrot, less stick?}
|
||
|
||
I guess all in all it's better than being mid-shag in a drainage tunnel
|
||
only to have a trigger-happy cop yelling at you at gunpoint, while his
|
||
snarling attack rottweiler bites yer balls off. It turned out the reason
|
||
the place got such a massive response was 1) a few daze ago some fuckheads
|
||
blew up a lot of bombs on trains in Spain and 2) the cops were holding
|
||
some sort of police anti-terrorist convention in the stadium above the
|
||
drain system we were exploring, in the wave of terrorist paranoia which
|
||
followed. So the huge response was a belated attempt to minimise the
|
||
quantity of egg on the face of whoever was doing the security logistics
|
||
for the conference, who must have looked like a bit of a dickhead if they
|
||
left a lot of police brass vulnerable to the drain explorative antics of a
|
||
two-legged tumor and a walking life-support system for a carnival of hair
|
||
extensions.
|
||
|
||
Come to think of it, if my name was Ahmed and I had brown hair and a tan
|
||
they'da probably just shot me on sight anyway.
|
||
|
||
Faerie drove back to Lidcombe where Kev greeted us on arrival. Kev appears
|
||
to be a complete space kadet. He's taken eight months to fail to fix PDF's
|
||
RAID array and is crashed, like her computer, in her place at the moment
|
||
cooking up an AVO against the mother of his child before she cooks up an
|
||
AVO against him. Happy days.... not. I think he's running more than a few
|
||
cycles/second short of a kilohertz.
|
||
|
||
Back at the oldie's place, I slept. Matresses are better than lino cell
|
||
floors and scratchy brown wool blankets. I woke up and walked the doggie
|
||
and liked a lot that I was able to walk around a free being. Not cancer
|
||
free, but free of the crushing, immobilising encumbrance of several
|
||
hundred tons of cop-infested ferrocement police station.
|
||
|
||
I drove to Mabel's to slap Knoppix on her poota but xmms wouldn't read the
|
||
damned files on her WinFAT98 partition. The two-day-old pizza in my pack
|
||
smelled funny and was getting a bit hairy, but went down very well and I'm
|
||
surprised it didn't make me sick later. With this stupid filesystem format
|
||
failure under my belt I went back to Joss' place. I had a shower and we
|
||
went down to Elko' park to the cliffside where the pred/joss thing started
|
||
in earnest, years ago, one night on the sandstone cliffside in November
|
||
2000.
|
||
|
||
I went around to Lias' on Wednesday night, he gutted a trevally and did a
|
||
damn good job on it with some ginger, garlic, lemon rind and pepper. His
|
||
girlfriend has finally got the idea that I'm seriously clued up about
|
||
extraction methods used to get the essential oils on her shelf and has
|
||
stopped throwing the word `organic' around with such casual abandon. Last
|
||
time she dropped it, it earned her a five-minute rant about C12/C14
|
||
isotope analysis and time-of-flight mass spectrometry as used to
|
||
determine the synthetic or biochemical origin of, say, a molecule of
|
||
vanilla - a rant which, delivered incorrectly, could bore a slab of
|
||
concrete to death. I do it right 'cos it's interesting and useful, I think
|
||
she *got it* - weigh the fragments and you can figure out if a plant made
|
||
the thing recently or if it originated in a petrochemical trap (all the
|
||
C14 has turned into C12 in ancient oil deposits) half a billion years old.
|
||
|
||
I went back to ToadHall and tried to get some kip. What I ended up doing
|
||
was lying there not knowing if I should or should not sleep, since my
|
||
clock was sort of askew from the previous night's fun in the cells and oh,
|
||
you know, ya lie next to naked women and sort of naturally want to
|
||
carnally disturb their slumber, but they might wanna sleep. I eventually
|
||
got up and inhaled Keith's textbook on communications satellite
|
||
engineering which was pretty interesting actually, I like the aerial
|
||
design and travelling wave tubes and some of the nice comms maths about
|
||
average error magnitudes and various other wacky things to do with orbital
|
||
stabilisation.
|
||
|
||
The odd thing was, in the morning dawn, Joss _asked me_ (she really
|
||
doesn't need to ask me, but she did anyway!) if it was ok if we didn't
|
||
shag for a while (a while, by the way, might mean anything from half an
|
||
hour, to forever, so I was sort of on tenterhooks). The ask was pretty
|
||
surprising, and part of me felt a bit stung about that and I reluctantly
|
||
(I have to own up to really enjoying sharing shags with Joss, and I kinda
|
||
wanted to know why she didn't want to shag me) said, yeah, it's ok, the
|
||
usual anticipatory early-morning half-hardon rapidly shrinkin' into my bod
|
||
and a faintly frustrated angst replacing it. The last thing I want is for
|
||
her not to be happy about shagging and guilt-trip her into doing it. Ah,
|
||
it's OK, she knows that one of the advantages of nonmonogamy is that we
|
||
can all get shags elsewhere, but I sorta, I dunno, I'm starting to lower
|
||
the shields a bit, which I had to put up when she skipped Oz a couple of
|
||
years ago, and feel a bit more exposed. I wasn't especially cool with it,
|
||
until she clued me into why she was making the request.
|
||
|
||
--
|
||
|
||
Joss is back. Joss is back. It keeps rattlin' around my head. I know that
|
||
other people will be walking around with Joss is Gone rattling around in
|
||
their heads. I remember what that soundtrack. It sucks. England will be
|
||
resonating with it.
|
||
|
||
I had faint suspicions she'd come back but I really didn't know. I sorta
|
||
hung onto them the way people hang onto a broken thing they don't know how
|
||
to fix, and which maybe nobody knows how to fix, but upon which they
|
||
can't bear to relinquish their grip.
|
||
|
||
But she did come back to Oz. Apparently, at least partly for me. I am
|
||
feeling pretty humbled by this, ya know, I wouldn't go OS for anyone,
|
||
including even for myself, even to save my own life. So ok, I'm cool with
|
||
it now, really.
|
||
|
||
I've asked Joss some pretty ugly questions. Like, did she want to feel the
|
||
lump in my neck (and her fingers recoiled from it when I put them upon
|
||
it). Like, does she have the guts to watch me die? I didn't have the guts
|
||
to ask her, or to impose on her, the wish that she be around when I'm
|
||
really about to hit the end. She's seen the slash now and I think it's
|
||
sunk in a bit more.
|
||
|
||
"Isolation, rows and rows of cars,
|
||
Isolation like, Jupiter and Mars
|
||
Staring faces, set in celluloid,
|
||
Welcome to the late show - starring Null and Void.
|
||
Complications. Things get in the way.
|
||
Sweet sensation, of knowing you are near and not too far.
|
||
You and I, You and I, You and I
|
||
Arrow through your heart
|
||
Catch a star.
|
||
|
||
-Men At Work (Business as Usual, 1981)
|
||
|
||
{Diamond never wrote very much about how his wife Nigella was handling his
|
||
impending death. I don't have a wife and nor does the concept appeal. But
|
||
oh, I dunno. As far as other people go in my life, she's pretty
|
||
significant. Maybe they had lots of conversations about his disease
|
||
progression but they were too raw to go in the book.}
|
||
|
||
It's messing her up more than it's messing me up, which is maybe because,
|
||
here, in my it-feels-normal body, thoughts running on a neural net
|
||
momentarily camped in the metabolic eye of the onco-illogical storm, is
|
||
able to delude itself about the severity of the maelstrom building up a
|
||
few membranes away. Taking Orson Wells entirely out of his War of the
|
||
Worlds context - everything seems so serene and tranquil. We were in the
|
||
Powerhouse museum and had spent a few hours rubberneckin' at fuckin' huge
|
||
centuries-old steam engines, trains, aircraft, pottery, adverts for the
|
||
Literary Machine, ancient bellemnoid fossils in the wall tiles, and
|
||
suchlike and I found her standing tearfully amongst the exhibit. She
|
||
didn't want to look at me. She was kissing me a lot. She feels this pain
|
||
throughout her, it radiates from her chest and perfuses her arms and legs.
|
||
I dunno if she deliberately chooses my left collarbone, like she's trying
|
||
to kiss me better. She'd watched me disappear out the end of a corridor
|
||
and had this flash, she said, about me leaving and her being alone. Read:
|
||
without me. Ok. But she'll never be alone. That doesn't mean I'm gonna
|
||
haunt her, cos I am not gonna be a ghost, since there's no such option and
|
||
that's sort of stalking anyway. No, I just mean, she's a cool, interesting
|
||
woman of considerable depth and complexity and these things are attractive
|
||
human characteristics, so she'll never be alone, really. I'm not the only
|
||
crazy fish in the sea.
|
||
|
||
I don't know what to make of her telling me she won't leave, since the
|
||
freedom to leave is one of the things which makes our relationship so
|
||
_visceral_ - nobody's chained down so people hang around ONLY because they
|
||
like to be there. When she decided to go OS I didn't try and stop her tho
|
||
it hurt like hell to know she might not ever come back. It was tolerable
|
||
because I thought she might, might, just maybe, come back, but then it
|
||
occurred to me that I would run away. To protect myself from being
|
||
reminded of her disappearance outta my life. Turns out, in some senses, I
|
||
am running away, but she's not even gonna have the comforting luxury of
|
||
holding onto the idea that I'm ever gonna come back to her. I feel like a
|
||
prick, in some ways, even if I'm blameless for the impending absence I'm
|
||
gonna cause. I can't really help being dead soon, medical blades drugs and
|
||
nukings notwithstanding. Soon is a relative and treacherous term.
|
||
|
||
Arr, hugs are reassuring but they can't fix this. Oncology aside,
|
||
everything else is inexorably going to shit too. I was standing with Joss
|
||
in the hall where the turbines used to be, where the mighty cylinders,
|
||
pistons, boilers, of Newcombe and Boulton/Watt engines, rotors and stator
|
||
armatures of Parsons generators, and all the rest of the exhibits, lay
|
||
silent, frozen iron at the end of its working life, and caught myself
|
||
thinking, so how are people gonna start these things again in the future
|
||
when all the easy coal has been won, when all the cheap oil has gone?
|
||
Here's the scoop, fresh off the icy presses of thermodynamics - they
|
||
ain't. That some of the exhibits were broken was kind of ironic. I often
|
||
get that feeling in museums and it follows me outside and I look at the
|
||
cars and the buildings and the people and everything else and imagine it
|
||
dead, fuel gone, lacking any of that cheap energy which enables them to do
|
||
what they do.
|
||
|
||
We left the Museum. En route we dropped in at Toad Hall and Joss
|
||
photocopied the bit of my charge sheet that says:
|
||
|
||
"Prisoner states that he has renal clear cell metastatic carcinoma and
|
||
believes he has only 1-2 years to live."
|
||
|
||
(they took a long time to spell that correctly) She's blu-tacked it to her
|
||
bedroom wall.
|
||
|
||
"Are you recieving treatment?" [N]
|
||
|
||
I remember the cops on the desk asking why not and my telling 'em it
|
||
doesn't matter a rat's arse what I do. Just another day of disasters and
|
||
ruined lives in cop-land, I guess.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Prisoner. Yeah man. I can laugh at that word 'cos it's really ironic to be
|
||
on death's row anyway regardless of what the dude in the magisterial wig
|
||
hands down on April 8th.
|
||
|
||
And it doesn't matter what I believe.
|
||
|
||
We dropped around to Soph's place in Enmore, where some acquaintances of
|
||
mine, monopod Cremmo and James and Pig are living while their landlord
|
||
decides wether or not to demolish their house. The crew had a good giggle
|
||
at my charge sheet. I hadda go off back to Blakehurst for dinner, and
|
||
before I'd togged back up in me leathers'n'shit Joss breathed into my ear
|
||
that she'd like to take me to bed... this not twelve hours after she told
|
||
me she'd prefer that we didn't shag for a while. I can't figure it out. I
|
||
put it down to Hungerford's Second Law. Heh. Within a couple of hours of
|
||
piss'n'porn she was putting the moves on Cremmo (the name doesn't sit
|
||
easily, he's certainly not the yobbo ocker the abbreviation implies) and
|
||
by weekend she'd jumped his ... well, I don't know exactly what. She isn't
|
||
sure if Cremmo'd be happy for me to know yet. She told me this over the
|
||
fone and I am proud that she feels comfortable enough to do so. As for her
|
||
shagging someone other than me, I love it and I'm thrilled for both of
|
||
'em. Catchin' up for lost time, go go go girrrl! If I was in the room I'd
|
||
probably be too busy cheerin' her on to join in.
|
||
|
||
I chewed up friday morning in a haze of paperwork re-registering the
|
||
'cycle. Bollocks. Roughly $1/day for a year and most of it's insurance and
|
||
tax.
|
||
|
||
|
||
I spent most of the fri arvo and the next day at Joss' place.
|
||
|
||
Since you're used to my mentioning it and expect me to tell you, yes, she
|
||
did. A few times. It was magnificently grrrreat. A bit new and weird too.
|
||
I taught her how to do some knots (fisherman's, prussik loops, knots in
|
||
layflat tape, and a gratuitously useless but decorative knot called the
|
||
Bannister knot which looks similar to the DNA double helix which is why I
|
||
learned, incidentally on the night I met Joss, how to tie it) and later
|
||
she *didn't* tie me up ;) You weren't expecting that were you? Oh well, I
|
||
relate... nor was I expecting to learn the truth of the old joke about you
|
||
only being a membrane away from a pound of shit when you're shagging.
|
||
Three membranes actually, one of them biological, two of them synthetic
|
||
polyisoprene a few microns thick. I ever so gently impaled her on my
|
||
thumb (thumbs are heavier boned than fingers, giving better support of
|
||
structural loads, I am kind of protective of my fingers) and watched her
|
||
thrash additionally as it moved against her arsehole. And now I know what
|
||
my knob feels like through someone's anterior rectal wall as I move my
|
||
cock in their cunt - which is a pretty odd thing to know, I think. All
|
||
this delightful perversion aside, the best invisible things about Joss are
|
||
her brains and her vocal cords, and what comes off them when she speaks.
|
||
She sings very well. It is very amusing to me when someone capable of such
|
||
considered replies, precise articulation and beautiful sentence structure
|
||
as she is, resorts to a gasp of Oh FUCK! Me, I get about half way through
|
||
mentioning that I'm gonna come before I get a stupid expression on my mug
|
||
and can't speak anymore. Something tells me learning Auslan to communicate
|
||
this with sign language isn't gonna help solve this moment of scrambled
|
||
speech particularly well if my thumb's out of sight up someone else's
|
||
arse. Maybe this is nature's way of telling me to shut the fuck up for
|
||
once in my life and just experience the moment.
|
||
|
||
"Animals will be animals." - Sophie
|
||
|
||
"The animals were animals. Sophie was correct." - pred to Sophie later.
|
||
|
||
I've spent a lot of time associating the smell of latex glove powder with
|
||
microbiology procedures... ethidium-bromide electrophoresis, polymerase
|
||
chain reaction, etc etc. It's never gonna remind me of that again.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Friday night I got the fuck-off-I'm-dying-and-you-treat-me-like-shit email
|
||
from Zyn which I was sort of half-expecting. She's right and I am pretty
|
||
remorseful about it. I have spread myself too thinly. I didn't expect her
|
||
to fall in love with me. I mean, having read all this stuff, ya wouldn't,
|
||
would ya?
|
||
|
||
On sat evening I dropped in on Smokering and he and I tossed around the
|
||
idea that there must be a stack o' dudes like he and I who are potentially
|
||
as dangerous as hell - 'poota geekin' gun-nut anarcho freaks who know how
|
||
to make bioweapons (if you ever drank my homebrew you'd know what I meant,
|
||
tho Wolfie has swilled this brew and lived to tell the tale) and screw
|
||
around with the 'net and fuck up critical infrastructure but just happen
|
||
to not be mentally predisposed to be such antisocial pests. And this stack
|
||
of dudes must drive the authorities wild precisely _because_ we don't do
|
||
anything which might provide them with a reason to exist. They seem not to
|
||
have discovered we're too disorganised to get out of bed most days, which
|
||
is why we love having the 'net so we can work from our rumpled, stained
|
||
mattresses.
|
||
|
||
Later Sat night, Mek's router has shat out, I suspect 'cos their linux
|
||
dude (Bear?) to whom I gave root access doesn't quite know what he's doing
|
||
with it (e-smith is a bit unusual). So I rebuilt it in another chassis.
|
||
Mega-body-piercer David mentioned, after falling asleep watching me
|
||
rebuild the router, that he got a message from two-i's Liisa that I should
|
||
come up to Lismore and say hi. Whoooa. She doesn't read minds, Matt musta
|
||
leaked the conversation to her. I'd imagine she's scoping me out for the
|
||
provision of a load of code with which to invoke a rug rat. Hey Matt, does
|
||
that make you a sperm broker? Aren't there laws against that sort of
|
||
thing?
|
||
|
||
This is far more of an acid test than perhaps you reading this rant might
|
||
realise. The only circumstances in which I'd invoke a rugrat is if I could
|
||
escape responsibility for its upbringing... maybe, in one kind of future,
|
||
the eyeballs pointed at this sentence will be those of you, my child, made
|
||
real through an act of data transmission from one consenting human to
|
||
another, though you're hypothetical as I write this. I have geared my
|
||
whole life around this donate'n'run strategem and have donated code
|
||
anonymously, previously, to who-the-hell-knows. Yeah I know that the
|
||
planet's way overstuffed. Yeah I know that the resources are running out
|
||
and no the world doesn't need another overworked underpaid single mother
|
||
with a child who won't have a dad. Well, kid. Make the best you can of
|
||
things now. Things are gonna get a fuckofalot harder in the future than I
|
||
had it. Get used to death. There's gonna be a lot more of it.
|
||
|
||
The worst time to get married is when you're in the fog of love and can't
|
||
see anything clearly. The worst time to reproduce is when you're not gonna
|
||
be around to help the rugrats grow up. Or maybe it isn't. I dunno. She's
|
||
up in Lismore, someplace. It's a 14 hour ride on a 'cycle and usually
|
||
takes me a day to recover from the physical punishment of being hammered
|
||
by potholes all the way up the bituminous goattrack that is the Pacific
|
||
Hwy. She'd like me to come up at the end of the month. Do you need proof
|
||
that I really think I'm convinced I'm dying? Watch this space for news of
|
||
Liisa's impregnation and then you'll know I'm convinced. But still, maybe
|
||
I won't. Or I will and I won't tell you. For all sorts of other reasons.
|
||
Like unbeknowst to me at this stage I don't know if the appearance of a
|
||
rugrat at this stage of my life would totally rejig my priorities and make
|
||
me move up there to be with the tot, watch it be born and grow up for a
|
||
while, while I get ready to die. Hey, that'd take care of the population
|
||
thing, it gets born, I die, total number unchanged. Unless I didn't die.
|
||
Nah. I think I can rely on the universe to be as merciless to planned
|
||
orphans as it is to their soon to be absent putative fathers.
|
||
|
||
I think there's gotta be a looong chat before the decision is made. I've
|
||
met her oldies, they're OK actually. I'd put them in the loop too if Liisa
|
||
asked me to. But I'd keep my mum out of it. I find her such a poisonous
|
||
influence that I would go to considerable lengths to keep her nose out of
|
||
the rugrat's life.
|
||
|
||
Joss reckons she'd like there to be a little me running around on the
|
||
planet after I am gone. I am sort of touched. Alive or dead - if my
|
||
tendancy for misanthropy is genetically inherited, it'll hate me anway.
|
||
Whadda I got to lose?
|
||
|
||
(Hey, kid, if you ever exist and get to read this - I understand if you
|
||
have the shits with my absence. In a lot of ways, so do I.)
|
||
|
||
Arrrgh. My last planned trip down to the Clannies in Melbourne (to see Ed
|
||
and the Melbourne Museum too) happens to occur on the same day as Tee and
|
||
Raffo's wedding, arrrshit! I can't believe it, there's *always* something
|
||
else on when the Clannies are on. AGAIN! Ar, fuck it. I'm riding to Melbo
|
||
and goin' to the drain party and saying goodbye to all my old drain
|
||
exploring acquaintances and fellow criminal trespassing miscreants, and
|
||
Ed, my old programming buddy who punched code for an old 1950's
|
||
valve-driven computer I want to see, which is in the museum. 10 hours and
|
||
I'll be there. No sweat. Sorry Raffo. See how many speeding tickets I can
|
||
clock up on one trip.
|
||
|
||
I feel my neck every so often, unconsciously. I catch myself at it
|
||
sometimes. Like now, 1:13 Monday 22 March. I get paranoid that Bill the
|
||
Metastasis has decapsulated and is spreadding tendrils throughout my neck,
|
||
with the intention of strangling my brain. Sorta like the taeleodactyl
|
||
facehugger from Alien. I hope my fingers are lying. Hokay, it was late Nov
|
||
when I got chopped open, so its been four months now. I am 1/6th of the
|
||
way through the window of time in which I have an eighty percent
|
||
probability of becoming dead. Last time I calculated this was four weeks
|
||
ago, three months post-slashorama, and I was 1/8th of the way through the
|
||
window of time. Decrement (subtract one from) the denominator (the number
|
||
on the bottom).
|
||
|
||
1/4 of the way through in another two months. (6 months of 24)
|
||
1/3 of the way through in another four months (8 months of 24)
|
||
1/2 way through in Nov 2004
|
||
|
||
...when you can't decrement any more without making it to unity, chop it
|
||
up finer and repeat... they do the same with screwthreads. Chop it up
|
||
finer.
|
||
|
||
|
||
13/24ths of the way through my 80%-probably-dead window, by the time the
|
||
letter Joss sent me with the John Diamond texts becomes correctly dated.
|
||
It was 23 Dec 2003 when she signed it 23 Dec 2004. I will be very happy if
|
||
I live to see the calendar on that day.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
Tuesday. Um. Shit. What day is it again. It's wednesday now as I slap the
|
||
keys. I get day-frame drag. I think I wandered around the NSW art gallery
|
||
with Joss but she was pretty knackered from a few late nights of gettin'
|
||
pissed shagged and stoned and so on. It might be indulgent of me to
|
||
suggest she's doing this load-o-sex-n-drugz just now to deal with the
|
||
emotional earthquakes. She's just left her hubby and changed country of
|
||
address, which are both pretty stressful things. If I'd done that, I'd get
|
||
wasted too. I know hugs are futile in the face of the future but for now
|
||
they work pretty well, and I'm happy for everyone to get whatever hugs
|
||
they might from whomever is prepared to give them.
|
||
|
||
Then again, maybe she just likes gettin' stoned and rat-arsed fer the
|
||
helluvit from time to time. Cool. Rip in girlie!
|
||
|
||
Joss lay down on a spotlit couch in one of the gallery rooms, and looked
|
||
like part of another exhibit, late 20thC, which the curators had
|
||
deliberately left there.
|
||
|
||
Wandering around the exhibit of art from the several Chinese dynasties I
|
||
felt for a moment that this stuff, from a culture several thousand years
|
||
old, might be the sort of stuff made in the future after the cheap oil is
|
||
gone. Ceramics, silks, carved wood. What struck me was not the artwork so
|
||
much but that there was such a materials difference. Outside the glass
|
||
(toughened, laminated) was the museum, with its polymer floors, electric
|
||
lights, smelted, electroplated metal bench frames, halocarbon air
|
||
conditioning, mobile phones, public address systems. Inside the glass sat
|
||
these *ancient* things. Silk... we only found out what it was, at a
|
||
molecular level, in the last 30 years. Glazes, I am not aware of the
|
||
Chinese having a periodic table to describe the metal oxides they painted
|
||
on their things. Old, old stuff. Beautifully hand-made. Fundamentally
|
||
primitive but ya gotta hand it to woven silk as a durable high-res data
|
||
storage medium.
|
||
|
||
We snogged a bit on the grass adjacent to the Cockle Bay wharf and
|
||
chatted. I can't spend the time required to write down what we chatted
|
||
about, here, and maybe if I could I wouldn't anyhow. I do like being with
|
||
Joss, we have good chats about heavy shit. It was tricky to get back to
|
||
the 'cycle 'cos the footpaths are sort of fucked about by a freeway
|
||
entrance, and as we walked I said I felt a smidge scared about her other
|
||
involvements since one of the last ones led her away from me for three
|
||
years. But I shouldn't let my fears stop her living her life, I think. I
|
||
dunno how I can write that sentence with the contextual backdrop for this
|
||
whole series of rants and keep a straight face. I am scared I am gonna die
|
||
and it IS at least partly fuckin' her life up. Ok, so you can't really
|
||
catch cancer - it's not a sexually transmitted disease (note: there are
|
||
sexually transmitted viral oncogenes, such as those in HPV, but cervical
|
||
cancer isn't transmissible itself even though its causative agent is) -
|
||
but like all of the fatal diseases which take a long time and rot you
|
||
hollow from the inside out, other people catch the ennui and fear, you
|
||
start to seep it into your surroundings, somehow, and even if ya don't
|
||
reek of the ammoniacal vapours characteristic of the nitrogen-lossy
|
||
metabolisms of the very old, they somehow _catch the vibe_ of impending
|
||
death anyway.
|
||
|
||
We slept in the separate bunks which used to be in Jude's room. I listened
|
||
to some Goldfrapp earlier, grindy synth and silky, searing vocals, a gift
|
||
to her from Pat, her sly shag in the UK. From whom she has now distanced
|
||
herself by about fifteen thousand k's, partly to be here with your
|
||
author, Mr Carkin-it. I often have bits of music pop out of my deep memory
|
||
into my live running consciousness and I suspect this album, Black Cherry,
|
||
will become the music which I remember Joss' return by... I took the case
|
||
home so I could rip it down to a fresh blank, and I forgot to put the
|
||
damned CD in the case first. Copyright infringement will have to wait. Is
|
||
the acquisition of a backing track to one's final months covered by Fair
|
||
Use? Sorry Alison, Sorry Will.
|
||
|
||
It transpires that Joss's mum is gutzin 200 mikes of Se/cysteine a day.
|
||
That's four times what I'm chucking down my neck and she isn't dying
|
||
(though this relationship is unlikely to be causative). She doesn't call
|
||
millionths of a gram _mikes_ either, like bored microbiologists and lapsed
|
||
chemists such as m'self tend to. She calls 'em something so alien-sounding
|
||
emceegees or something that sounds like the abbreviation for the cricket
|
||
ground in Melbourne. Her hope that I might not cark it is insidiously
|
||
infectious and I think based on ignorance of how tumors work. But maybe
|
||
she knows something I don't, I think to myself. She's popped out words
|
||
which I've never heard. And has probably not said everything she knows
|
||
about cancer anyway. She's seen a fuckofalot more than I have.
|
||
|
||
Ya know, it just dawned on me why a kid's perspective on things is so
|
||
different from an adult's. Kids have to live in a lot more future than
|
||
adults do. So adults live like kids and kids try to live like adults.
|
||
The dying live like there's no tomorrow because there might not be and the
|
||
living die slowly, aware of only a barely perceptible sagging, wrinkling,
|
||
fogginess of eye and dimming of wit, which they will have to endure for
|
||
another several years, at least.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Oh. Yeah. Today. I started Tuesday at cat.org.au provisioning (I did not
|
||
say `enterprise resource planning' which is IT-management-wankspeak for
|
||
`getting enough tech shit together to do what you need'), gathering parts
|
||
for the new server I'm building to replace Conway. It was late so I snuck
|
||
in to sleep in the cot with cookie manufacturer, and we shagged a happy
|
||
shag, and she's feeling a bit neglected too. She's considering jumpin'
|
||
another cat geek which I'm happy about but we both know she'd be dancing
|
||
in a minefield in the place into which she intends to jump. Arr. I slung
|
||
out to Randwick and 91-year-old Mary was very impressed that I'm gonna go
|
||
to court in a couple of weeks. She keeps falling over in the bathroom -
|
||
which is the room with the biggest number of hard smooth surfaces onto
|
||
which one can fall and hurt oneself. I suggested maybe the dudes who run
|
||
her death camp... er, nursing home... could perhaps install some neoprene
|
||
padding on the surfaces where she catches her head on the way down. I
|
||
think her gyro's busted and ain't gonna fix itself anytime soon so they
|
||
might as well pad the cell a bit.
|
||
|
||
Zyn had the claws out. Usual questions from the wounded, the convinced of
|
||
being spurned, dumped. Do you love me? When I told her I couldn't, and I
|
||
told her she was a hell of a lot of work and yeah I had spread myself too
|
||
thinly, she kept asking for a binary answer. I'm thinking, to myself, even
|
||
the detectives didn't want to pull my teeth out this hard, I want to use
|
||
an answer which will free me of this interrogation so I eventually told
|
||
her, no, which was partly a lie. She took it pretty well, considering.
|
||
Love's one of those things which, I think, if you feel you _have to ask_
|
||
about its possible absence, in the asking signifies you're never gonna
|
||
accept any other answer than the one which confirms your fears that it has
|
||
indeed gone. And if you ask it enough, it will fulfill your expectations
|
||
of its absence. But how's she gonna know that?
|
||
|
||
Amazingly she's still hot for a shag anyway. Oh well. Whaddya get when you
|
||
put two dying people together? Either sex or despair that they can't have
|
||
sex or didn't have sex. Nature of the animal, I think. She ripped me a CD
|
||
full of Bowie's greatest hits and I tried to play 'em this evening and
|
||
they're ghastly, aliasing errors and quantization noise all over 'em, from
|
||
the conversion back from lossy .mp3 files, I think. It was a present. She
|
||
threw it at me. I've had to tell her it was completely unlistenably
|
||
fucked.
|
||
|
||
|
||
My woo-hoo legal advice, in the form of Death's-Head-Lou (I squatted with
|
||
her a long time ago in Annandale, an act which, interestingly, would bust
|
||
me on the same charge as I face now) has appeared in my massive pile of
|
||
daily penis-enlargement email (I have gotta sit down and fix the
|
||
spamfilter config sometime), and they're thinking about how to get me a
|
||
`proved but no conviction' (Sec 556a, Sentencing Act). I have to prove
|
||
impoverishment so I can get legal aid... I have often wondered how to wave
|
||
fistfulls of money I don't have under the nose of people who will believe
|
||
it to be there nevertheless.
|
||
|
||
-----
|
||
|
||
Wed morning, 24th march. I'm writing this stuff and mum comes in and
|
||
starts to peer at the screen, asking me what this stuff is, so I shut the
|
||
terminal down. I hate it when people come and peer at the stuff I'm
|
||
writing. Then she claimed she couldn't see. Grrr.
|
||
|
||
The bike shop owner, with whom I have some rather raunchy conversation (he
|
||
serves, as local mech, the same function to blokes in this district as
|
||
hairdressers do for the ladies) wonders how I can be shagging five women.
|
||
Not in parallel, I told him. Zyn sent me an SMS that arvo saying that no,
|
||
we wouldn't get up to anything on thursday night. Do you hear the faint
|
||
sound of a cardiac muscle hitting a slab someplace? Yes. But only very
|
||
faintly.
|
||
|
||
Yer only as good as yer fans. I think these rants are being read by more
|
||
people than I know about. Some of them are being read by people who are in
|
||
my life and it's modifying what they're prepared to say/do around me 'cos
|
||
they don't want it captured in the document. Bits and pieces leak back.
|
||
Arrr, the perennial problem of audience/actor separation. As you gaze into
|
||
the 'net so it gazes into you... I have some idea who some of you are from
|
||
the IP numbers to which apache serves the files when you request them but
|
||
don't know all of them. If you're in my life and read this and want some
|
||
stuff not mentioned in the future just yell and I'll button my keyboard.
|
||
Watch a play and you become part of it, and it becomes part of you.
|
||
|
||
--------
|
||
|
||
Thurs. 25th.
|
||
|
||
Wed night I went to STUCCO to drop off the other half of the proposed
|
||
wireless link, then out to the old Waverley headquarters of the SES to
|
||
discuss rejuvenation of the disused Waterloo incinerator with legendary
|
||
architecture guru Col James and a bunch of artists and architecture
|
||
students who plan to live in the old, grey building (they've got a long,
|
||
long road to hoe with the council but it'd be really good to do if the
|
||
contamination isn't too bad) and later on out to Death's-Head Lou's
|
||
place... where I was fed, plied with tea and clued into how to deal with
|
||
the legal crap I face in a couple of weeks. Ya gotta love that. Ok, so we
|
||
plead guilty, the main thing is what sentence do we get, and how to
|
||
mitigate it. She's suggested that we might try for a section 10a dismissal
|
||
of the charge under the Crimes (sentencing procedures) Act 1999, and that
|
||
to do this Purple Death Faerie and I have to write some CVs and get some
|
||
character references. Lou wrote me something amazingly laudatory and sort
|
||
of spooky - it's the first time I've read about me from the outside world.
|
||
It's odd being called to account for how one lives one's life, by a bunch
|
||
o' people who wear funny wigs and gowns and stuff.
|
||
|
||
Friday I popped over to XML's place and we shagged delightful,
|
||
bloodsmeared shaggery while Knoppix3.2 installed itself on top of what
|
||
used to be the Windows98 partition... another tiny, tiny nail in
|
||
Microsoft's coffin, another user freed. Of course it found all the
|
||
hardware. She offloaded an ol' Pent-233MMX on me, which happily turned out
|
||
to work well enought to pass on immediately to Jude, whose machine is
|
||
keyboard-deaf. I took it 'round to toad hall, rode over the Glebe Island
|
||
Bridge with gleeful pleasure in the blue sky and glaring sun, cannibalised
|
||
the good bits off the dead one and put 'em in the working machine, and
|
||
started it up. Jude's slapped Debian 2.3 on it. I met up with Joss at
|
||
Gigglebyte at about 9, and bumped into Arno' who is well enmeshed in the
|
||
machine, at Canon; using his physical optics stuff which is good, but it
|
||
sounds, sadly, like he has no time to have fun any more. 8-( I saw lots of
|
||
people I'd not seen for some time... MrY with his nag co-efficient
|
||
somewhat reduced, Oppy (bless him, he didn't smoke near me!), Safa, Leah.
|
||
Joss caught up with some people who she hadn't seen for years either
|
||
(Leah, JJ) and also met the cookie manufacturer, though I wasn't watching
|
||
while this was happening.
|
||
|
||
We rode out to the teenage goth party at Enmore and, feelin' old and
|
||
boring, I kinda planted myself in a couch up the back someplace and
|
||
swilled light beer since I was expecting to ride the 'cycle back to the
|
||
parental pad (they'd nicked off the Victoria and left me to mind the dog).
|
||
The band (recycling rock'n'roll riffs) played on till 1am, the cops came
|
||
and told 'em they'd be fined two hundred bucks (this is uh, two penalty
|
||
units). James said we should pass the hat around, five bucks each from
|
||
forty people, easy. I didn't wanna get stoned either and most of the rooms
|
||
where people were gathered were thick with smoke. I ranted to Meg for a
|
||
while and I ended up half-asleep on a couch and eventually slept in
|
||
Cremmo's bed. I woke up at about 4am when Cremmo's jackhammer-grade
|
||
snoring really kicked in and I finally got up, stepped over Joss's
|
||
sleeping form (also snoring a bit) and Cremmo's cat (purr, purr, purrrrr,
|
||
perched on top of Joss, I now know what a purr modulated onto a snore
|
||
sounds like, and it's rather odd frankly) and across Cremmo's body as it
|
||
resonated to the music of his resonating turbinate bones, and crashed back
|
||
on the couch again, in the grey dawn light, after the quad turbofans of a
|
||
6:30am flight howled at us in their screechy avgas accent as they
|
||
crop-dusted us with an aerosol of half-burnt kerosene during final
|
||
approach to Mos Eisley. Soph asked me what I felt when I saw Joss with
|
||
another man and I sorta felt like I dodged the question a bit when I
|
||
answered that since I like her, it doesn't surprise me at all that other
|
||
men like her too. Joss knows of my fears that she will disappear again but
|
||
she also knows I don't want her to feel tied down to me. I think that her
|
||
shagging other people takes her shags away from me but I've got plenty so
|
||
I have no cause to complain. When Joss and I eventually returned to the
|
||
abandoned parental pad we were both stuffed, she slept but I'd been
|
||
awakened already so did some metalwork, walked the dog and discovered I
|
||
hadn't enrolled to vote in the local council election circuses. Later I
|
||
accidentally beat myself in the face with a horsewhip. It takes real
|
||
talent to be this unco-ordinated. Ow.
|
||
|
||
I fried up some eggs and mushrooms with rosemary and pepper and we gutzed
|
||
'em with plunged coffee over the SMH (olympic swimmer falls into pool...
|
||
oh, puhleeeze, honestly, who the fuck cares about that and what subtle
|
||
brain damage do they have?). We wandered around the bush tracks of my
|
||
adolescent exploration phase on saturday arvo, went down to Carss Park,
|
||
scaled the venerable fig, in the boughs of which I have sometimes sat and
|
||
prayed to gods who didn't even do me the courtesy of existing (for which,
|
||
of course, being nonexistant, they cannot be blamed). The tree has sat
|
||
there for decades gazing out on Kogarah Bay, gradually forcing its roots
|
||
down deep into the sandstone crag upon which it sits, windswept. Only in
|
||
recent years have I learnt what members of its species had to tell me
|
||
about life and how it works. There it sits, harvesting photons and air and
|
||
water and synthesising complex molecules with which to fabricate more of
|
||
itself, oblivious of what I think I know about it. People carve their
|
||
initials in it and it drowns the carvings in more bark. I love to look at
|
||
the starry night obscured by its fractally splattered foliage. The tree
|
||
will outlast me as it has thousands of others who never took the time to
|
||
sit in its branches with their beloveds, and will gaze uncaringly upon the
|
||
Princes Hwy when the sodium lamps on Tom Ugly's go out and the oilstained
|
||
concrete lanes finally fall silent and the remaining birdlife is finally
|
||
audible again.
|
||
|
||
We bumped into a previous neighbor of mine (his family dog is our family
|
||
dog's brother) and had a quick chat... he's getting married. I noticed
|
||
something later, sort of odd, I think about the compressed version of my
|
||
life I fed him. 1) I didn't mention I was dying and 2) the rest of the
|
||
stuff going on in my excuse for a life seemed strangely mundane and
|
||
uninteresting by comparison. The more life I stuff into my days the less
|
||
believable dying becomes and the bigger a fuckin' nuisance it will be. I
|
||
am sick of thinking about it.
|
||
|
||
Back in the premises Joss whipped something yummie up from some spuds and
|
||
tomatos and onions and we ate it sitting on the kitchen floor, raided the
|
||
leftover hash cookies and swilled'em down with some Shiraz and snogged, I
|
||
couldn't quite tell if the expression on her face was somehow tinged with
|
||
the barest hint of sadness, maybe I'm reading it in there, and gleefully
|
||
fucked, candlelit, to Goldfrapp cranked up fairly loud. I felt a bit like
|
||
a barnacle, clinging on tightly to ride out the storm above, she smashes
|
||
herself against my bony corners and bruises me where it isn't visible and
|
||
we eventually curled up against each other in a bedframe made of
|
||
fenceposts and offcut tree branches on a mattress designed to fit 1.5
|
||
people. The fleabitten doggie whined outside. I dunno what it is but I
|
||
didn't feel quite the searing bliss of our first encounters, and I suspect
|
||
it's my self-defense stuff at work. It is ingrained into my head that what
|
||
happened last time we were here was that she walked out of my life a week
|
||
later. Whinge whinge whinge.
|
||
|
||
[Goldfrapp is quite brilliant. If you liked all the instruments plugged in
|
||
by people like Jonah Lewie and Gary Numan and Depeche Mode in the 1980s,
|
||
and whatever waveforms fell out of Fairlights and Moogs and Arp Quadras
|
||
and other such ancient superpositional massagers of the basic sinewave, go
|
||
get Black Cherry and listen to it on a good hi-fi. The best instrument, of
|
||
the lot of 'em, and sadly irreproducible in mass quantities, is stuck in
|
||
Alison Goldfrapp's neck, just above her trachea. I'm gonna get me'old
|
||
electrostatic STAX headphones out and listen to it on those. I've not
|
||
heard anything this well produced since ZZTop's Afterburner album. And the
|
||
whole thing works well, the songs are in the right sequence, and dovetail
|
||
nicely.)]
|
||
|
||
It was great to wake up to her face. I slept in anyway. I found her later
|
||
in the back yard reading my copy of Milam's Crip Zen on a green blanket on
|
||
the grass at the back. I don't remember it exactly but as part of the Joss
|
||
hardware empowerment project I acquainted her with a half-dead, bad
|
||
tempered, two speed, only-starts-sometimes mains driven 700 watt hammer
|
||
drill I found in a drain about 15 years ago, she drilled some practise
|
||
holes in random chunks of hardwood and brick, got acquainted with the
|
||
chuck key (my drill happens to have two chucks, a small one nested in the
|
||
other larger one) and what various kinds of bits look like. I think she's
|
||
pondering the possibility of slapping a couple of dynabolts in someplace
|
||
now she's learnt, by playing with the bolt and thread on the one I gave
|
||
her, how it expands out against the hole in which it is placed.
|
||
|
||
No afternoon of tooling is complete without some sex toy repair, so she
|
||
and I did a rebuild on her butyl rubber whip/dildo (now held together with
|
||
nylon cable ties, PVC inner reinforcing and a metal washer to stop the
|
||
whip coming out of the cap end). Satisfied the flogger would flog again we
|
||
walked the dog during a mission to acquire some fresh Bay leaves since
|
||
we'd run out the day before. It turned out that we couldn't do our email
|
||
from the dialup link from robo to diesel, 'cos something about conway, or
|
||
was it tarvat, had cacked itself, so we both rode in to Catspace, she
|
||
flaked out on the sofa while I waved a (metaphorical) dead cat over
|
||
another dead cat (conway.cat). Conway came to life, oddly enough. Ok, so,
|
||
all the harddisks in there have cranked up seventeen thousand hours of
|
||
spin and seek, none of them are complaining that they're knackered yet tho
|
||
one of them has fixed oh, 55 million errors since it was first plugged in.
|
||
Amazing what you can hide with hardware error correction. Shame mine
|
||
didn't work, all the way down there in the nucleotides of my renal pelvis
|
||
where all this crap started.
|
||
|
||
Later we both went down to Mek, so she could see the crazy place and so I
|
||
had a chance to slap some more RAM in their router, which happens to be
|
||
ram-upgrade hostile. Joss was lookin' for a bicycle. David suggested we
|
||
scavenge one of the bicycles being discarded from mekanarchy. Joss and I
|
||
put an old 26"-wheel mountain-bike ruin in a bench vise, (she's getting
|
||
rapidly acquainted with shifting spanners and visegrips and how to use 'em
|
||
even on rusted chainring bolts), changed the pedals (she's gettin' the
|
||
idea about leverage and why to stick a length of pipe over a short tool)
|
||
and were just in the middle of getting the almost rusted solid
|
||
chain/derailleur to work again when who should appear but two-i's Liisa.
|
||
Her hair's grown again. She does look pretty skinny still.
|
||
|
||
I intro'd 'em both to each other. Liisa was gonna depart to Lismore again
|
||
and invited me to come up there in May. It occurred to Joss that Liisa
|
||
might not even know I'm carking, but I reckon she does. Liisa donated her
|
||
old mountain bike to Joss and then ran out of the factory to get ready to
|
||
drive to Lismore. Joss changed the tube on the back wheel, blew it up and
|
||
the bike was ready to roll. We stashed it at catgeek space and went back
|
||
to Chez Parental to get stoned on cookie manufacturer's remaining
|
||
hallucinogenic handiwork and wipe out the rest of the chardonnay I'd
|
||
nicked from a neglected corner of the 'fridge. Joss dances well to
|
||
Goldfrapp, it is rather dance-provoking in some parts of the album.
|
||
There's a yummie looped caterpillary sequence floating above the bass
|
||
track in the first song (Crystal Green), starting on the 11th bar, which
|
||
appears to be made of notes 1/16th of a bar long, and with freq on the
|
||
vertical looks something like this:
|
||
_ _
|
||
_ ____-___ ____ __
|
||
-
|
||
|
||
It has infected my acoustic memory and is looping in my head now.
|
||
|
||
We nicked off early Monday after forensic analysis of the place to avoid
|
||
the usual questioning from me ol' mum about who was here and doing what.
|
||
Before I went, on the ol' 10MHz CRO, I showed Joss the 100Hz waveform I
|
||
plugged into myself a couple of years ago. It feels a fuckofalot better
|
||
than it looks, glowing green on the 'scope graticule. She ain't gonna read
|
||
the article completely, I think. At some stage on the weekend she looked
|
||
at me and said it again, "I don't want you to die." I think I said
|
||
something about my not doing requests. Really, what the fuck _can_ I do?
|
||
Poor thing's stressing to bits and I don't want this sickness of mine to
|
||
provoke any pointless self-destructiveness in her. She doesn't care if
|
||
it's bad for her, gettin' ripped and pissed to make the pain of things
|
||
generally go away, and I'm not the only person she has to be upset about.
|
||
I'm prolly not going to live long enough to see her reach my current age
|
||
and I'd be immensely sad if this happened to be true 'cos she drowned
|
||
herself in the overproof ocean of a DIY cirrhosis kit, and not because of
|
||
the unpreventable foregone conclusion cruisin' around in my lymph.
|
||
|
||
|
||
I pulled Liisa's old mountain bike apart (why didnt the dude who invented
|
||
Quick Release axles get a nobel prize?), roped it to my pack and dropped
|
||
it over at Toad Hall on monday arvo. All normal motorcycle couriers are
|
||
wusses.
|
||
|
||
I was thinkin' about Raffo'n'Tee's wedding, or more accurately, my
|
||
decision not to attend it. I hope they're not gonna be offended too much.
|
||
There's other stuff going on in my head. I don't wanna show up there and
|
||
mention to all the people who will be there and whom I havent seen for
|
||
years, when they ask me how I'm going, that I am slowly falling victim to
|
||
an insidious bioweapon of my own creation... not that I think weddings,
|
||
marriage or any of that stuff are an especially good idea but I just don't
|
||
wanna cast the pall of death over their day, which will be enough of a
|
||
stress already with (plagiarising from Wolfie here) frothing wedding
|
||
nazis, and the usual logistical bullshit which accompanies weddings.
|
||
|
||
Anyway, yeah, I'm almost ashamed to say it (probably that's an artefact of
|
||
the upcoming court thing) but I like to go in drains and I'm doing what I
|
||
like these days. The Clan's played a bigger part in my life than the two
|
||
newlyweds have, oddly enough, and I haven't been to Melbourne for quite a
|
||
while. And oh, there's a bit of me which is highly aversive to enforced
|
||
good cheer such as accompanies weddings, christmas, and other such excuses
|
||
to be cheerful. The Clannies is not enforced good cheer at all. Fuck good
|
||
sentence structure, it's the how-ya-going-ya-old-fat-bastard gathering of
|
||
fourscore pissed criminal trespassers of various levels of ineptitude or
|
||
professionalism, two busloads of yelling yobs worth of flash-boiled
|
||
delirium, a condensate of crowbars and bolt cutters and manhole keys
|
||
forged in backyard sheds, the partygoers variously rained upon by showers
|
||
of beer and broken glass and breathing in other people's unavoidable bong
|
||
exhaust, the whole thing held in a vast subterranean concrete chamber
|
||
backlit by burning Otto garbage bins melting on lit pyres of decomissioned
|
||
Chep forklift pallets and the frightening crackling and blast of
|
||
clandestine explosives in confined spaces (brought especially from
|
||
Canberra) and decorated by random puddles of acrid steaming
|
||
saccharomycotic vomit, mixed with yelling and screaming and drugfucked
|
||
bodies sleeping on stolen rear car seats and rolls of old carpet on
|
||
concrete and crunchy 1980s old school rock'n'roll and every kind of
|
||
illuminant from burning sticks to current-controlled semiconductors and
|
||
spraycans and textas updating every available surface and people full of
|
||
serotonergic banned-pharma disco bikkies hurriedly fucking in the side
|
||
tunnels and most of Prahran's police (Uphold the Reich) gatecrashing it
|
||
later and taking names and confiscating cameras and thumping everyone with
|
||
batons, and sometimes the appearance of a few uninvited but not entirely
|
||
unexpected tons of swirling dogshit, oil, empty bottles of Evian and the
|
||
roaring stormwater which entrains it, trying nonchalantly to flush the
|
||
whole psychosis into the Yarra, and the experience of waking up in the
|
||
dark at one in the afternoon with your face half submerged in a puddle of
|
||
gutter runoff, a glass shard from a longneck stuck in your bum cheek, one
|
||
shoe missing, no torch, a fucker of a headache and no idea where you put
|
||
your keys or even where you live any more. Rrrroooow. Never mind the
|
||
pummelling of the 900km motorcycle ride down the deadly 'Hume to get
|
||
there.
|
||
|
||
My seat post has finally arrived, and I got it on the last day that the
|
||
bike shop traded. The cyclery at 613 Princes Hwy has been there for my
|
||
entire life. Now it's closing down. I learnt how to use a chain breaker
|
||
there, how to pack bearings with grease, how to tap a thread, rebuild a
|
||
coaster brake assembly, tension brake cables. I remember getting my ol'
|
||
Cannondale there, which was as close to an aircraft in handling as one
|
||
ever gets on two wheels, piloting it down a hill really did feel like
|
||
flying.
|
||
|
||
I remember now what it was I totally forgot to show Joss. The MRI's, the
|
||
CT scans, technological happy snaps, the Before-shots of my evisceration,
|
||
rah rah. I think this is a good thing. Though the fatality lurks, I'm
|
||
remembering, effortlessly, I'm not dead yet. Or maybe having Joss in my
|
||
immediate presence sorta makes me forget these things. Or maybe it's
|
||
something else I dunno about yet.
|
||
|
||
She's having thoughts about what happens when she shows up at my funeral
|
||
and there's all these women there, some of who know each other but most of
|
||
whom don't. It never occurred to me to be something to worry about. That I
|
||
never intro'd her to my olds, fer instance.
|
||
|
||
I'd hit Joss' eyeballs with more of my thoughts but I don't wanna eat all
|
||
her bandwidth. She needs solitude from time to time. I take this at face
|
||
value 'cos it's a reasonable thing to ask for and I know it's not a coded
|
||
way of saying she needs time to shag other people, 'cos I know that
|
||
already, and she knows that I know, and that's a reasonable ask too. It's
|
||
faintly maddening, but I get the clue. I live in my own brain all the
|
||
time, can't escape and it's noisy as hell in here, there's a zillion
|
||
processes all running in parallel, talking to each other across the fat
|
||
interhemispherical data pipe (hippocampus, 100 million axons carrying
|
||
neurological chit-chat from one side of my head to the other) and I'm used
|
||
to it, but it'd be easy to swamp her out with my blab or get too
|
||
interrogatory just 'cos well, I find her so innerestin'. I dump core data
|
||
here in the rants, and she reads 'em (well, parts of them) yet she keeps
|
||
her own stuff in notebooks and her laptop, places my eyeballs will never
|
||
go. I'm never gonna really know you, am I, I think to myself as I look at
|
||
her sometimes, and oh, I dunno, maybe such a wish is unreasonable and I
|
||
sorta reproach myself for my curiosity about her.
|
||
|
||
Cookie manufacturer (I think I should call her cookie now, manufacturer
|
||
takes too long to type) and I hooked up again on Tuesday night, after I
|
||
picked up a character reference from the Professor for whom I work from
|
||
time to time. She'd given up hope that we'd shag again, and was feeling
|
||
pretty neglected while Joss and I were chewing up a lot of time. I hadda
|
||
chat with her and told her I can't decide if I'm living or dying 'cos the
|
||
course of the disease is so distractingly uncertain. In a warped version
|
||
of Pascal's Wager we kinda concluded I have to get on with living since,
|
||
if I don't die (yeh, right, in yer dreeeeamz), then I won't be here five
|
||
years from now rueing that I just flung the last few years of my life
|
||
waiting for a death that didn't even do me the courtesy of being
|
||
punctual.
|
||
|
||
Arkie and Kat bumped into us while Cookie and I were eating in the front
|
||
window of Cinque and Arkie did me the usual arr, you'll fight it, denial
|
||
rant, and I really didn't want to get into the mol bio rant about the
|
||
nature of the disease 'cos I was sorta convinced I could argue all I liked
|
||
with Arkie about it but it wouldn't dent her impenetrable, ignorant
|
||
optimism about the pathology, and I just don't wanna allocate time
|
||
educating people about it any more. It sorta, you know... bores me.
|
||
There's nothin' new to say about it. And I was busy talking about other
|
||
stuff to Cookie. We went back to Turella and dispelled this crazy idea
|
||
that she got into her head that we'd never shag again. Twice.
|
||
|
||
So it's the last day of March. Dew condenses on the roof at night and fog
|
||
spills off the hillsides. I'm off to Legal Aid now to see what's gonna go
|
||
on in Burwood local court next week.
|
||
|
||
Dave Goldstein reckons the experimental treatment is still two months off.
|
||
This is how it goes with clinical trials, I know... dudes die while the
|
||
paperwork is done, while various genitals are massaged at the ethics
|
||
committee meetings, while experimental protocols are designed and
|
||
approved. I understand it and don't feel even faintly inclined to give a
|
||
millionth of a fuck about the delay. By surviving long enough to undergo
|
||
treatment you bias the sample somewhat anyway.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Tomorrow it's April Fools, and I'm feeling like foolery, so when you ask
|
||
Apache for another file look at it here:
|
||
|
||
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/foolish.txt
|
||
|
||
|
||
You have come to the end of the file. All 100kbyte of it. Holy shit.
|
||
Thanks for watching. Do not adjust your set. We will return to our
|
||
programmed irregularities shortly.
|
||
|
||
But don't take for granted that there'll be one. It's not cos I'm dead but
|
||
I'm just a bit tired of writing this stuff at times.
|