580 lines
33 KiB
Plaintext
580 lines
33 KiB
Plaintext
File: bill_me.txt
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Cont: More crap in the interminable saga of predator's near-life experience
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Dates: 22 Dec 2k3 -> Jan 6 2k4
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On account of Bill's appearance in my neck, I went along and saw Paul the
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oncologist again, this time without bringing Dad along since I expected
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he'd just fall alseep in the chair again. It was good just being there
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alone with the guy, so I could do a bit of a brain dump without having to
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care what dad thought. He hadda feel of Bill The Lump. I reek faintly of
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methylselenium and volatile sulfur compounds, since I'm stuffin' myself
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full of foods full of free-radical scavenging molecules, avoiding carbs,
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plus imbibing various transition metal trace elements, enzyme cofactors
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and B group vitamins. He reckons the changes I've made to my diet are
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mainly preventative rather than curative, tho the way I see it, any new
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tumor cell is another one which can be prevented, or persuaded not to
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propagate, if the surrounding biochemical circumstances are configured
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against it doing so. To my gobsmacked surprise he reckons we should leave
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this thing here in my neck unless it causes pain since its presence there
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is irrelevant to the progression of the disease. That is, do what you
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like, you're still fucked so leave it there. He'll cut it off if I say
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that it's painful. I want the fucker out before it does something bloody
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annoying like eat into the nerves which make my left arm work (ruining my
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clutch control, wanking technique, and typing speed - you the reader
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should be so lucky). He sent me off for a CT-scan so we can determine
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wether or not it has invaded anything nearby. Ho fucking ho.
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Now, my take is, either chop the fucker out as soon as poss, or, since
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it's so conveniently located where _I_ can get at it, try something whacky
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like inject into it small quantities of bacterial lipopolysaccharides to
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provoke a massive, feverish immune response like Coley used to do back in
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the 1920s before chemo' and radiotherapy appeared on the scene. It didn't
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succeed all the time, maybe 20% or so, and it was generally tried on
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inoperable tumors... If I can get my hands on the two relevant strains of
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microbes, I can culture them myself (I know sterile technique, have the
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glassware and my old centrifuge will be just fine for getting the pellet
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down) kill 'em in hot water, titrate their CFU density on a slide, and off
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we go. I'm gonna have to trawl around to find the relevant bugs, tho. One
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can't just walk into the university microbiology department these days and
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snare an Eppendorff with a frozen pellet of your bug of choice in 10%
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DMSO, and nor can one just waltz into Sigma-Aldrich-Fluka and buy a bunch
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o' growth medium. Everyone assumes microbiologists are terrorists.
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I popped along for my third CT-scan of the year. This was a 32-detector
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Toshiba item, with better resolution than the previous 8-detector GE
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instrument, but this time they weren't gonna ionise my dick - the
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objective of the visit was to cook my brain, neck and lungs. More
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sensitivity means they needed more radiation. Scans are a sort of
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self-fulfilling technology - if we keep this scanning up I will be mutated
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by radiation into the same sort of mutant blob I am attempting to locate
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using radiation in the first place. It took half an hour, a bit over half
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a grand, and I walked out with an envelope saying "To be opened only by
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referring doctor." Grrrr. How dare a patient directly acquire a clue about
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themselves?
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Christmas is usually insane and depressing even when you're not sick,
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since everything's dripping with *enforced good cheer*.
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"Shuddup. Be Happy. Obey All Orders Without Question.
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Shuddup. Consume. The Comforts You've Demanded Are Now Mandatory."
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-Jello Biafra, "A Message From Our Sponsors" - Terminal City Ricochet
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soundtrack.
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The usual diversions one might turn to on teev have been replaced by round
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the clock saturation christmasturbation (I do *so* love that word, it sums
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everything up so well!) and full-spectrum bandwidth bombing with cricket
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matches so stupefyingly pointless and boring that it is surely in the
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national interest for us to nuke the entirety of the commonwealth just to
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expunge the game from the surface of the planet. The roads are crawling
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with cops intent on, say, fining motorcyclists for not wearing seat belts,
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ha ha. And since the shops are shut, you can't even smack a load of
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consumer therapy up your arm when you're in need of it. Not that I am.
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Usually I spend the festy season avoiding the 'phone, and dicking around
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with various bits of hardware.
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Weapons-grade farts aside, the oldie's dog has proven itself most amusing,
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insofar as our new postie has failed to deliver letters to us on the
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grounds that he considers our remarkably docile pooch to be too savage to
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make it worth his risk putting his armload of mail through the gap in our
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fence. The dog normally races out, barking, and runs up and down the fence
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yappin' at the postal motorbike. She's doing this entirely for show, but
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the new postie hasn't been told. Oz Post officialdom came to investigate
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the savage dog claim. The mutt waddled out calmly, and when the postal
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investigators opened the gate, she gave 'em a polite lick, a bit of an
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inquisitive sniff and sat on her bum, looking upwards at them plaintively.
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We've stopped calling her doggo, and now refer to her as Savijdog. Poor
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postie.
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My apologies: I was gonna have some links in here to pictures of the
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scanned images of the tumor they chopped out of me, but that's not gonna
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happen anytime soon. After fighting with it for two days, I have given up
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getting the HP Scanjet 5100C to work with Debian/Knoppix 3.2... I've
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transplanted drives, installed the whole OS anew, installed more recent
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kernels, patched them with the horrible kludge-around required to
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implement SCSI over parallel ports, frigged around with the BIOS settings,
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apt-got more packages than is reasonable over this shite 56k modem link
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and I'm at that point I so often arrive at in a Linux install, which is
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defeated, resigned frustration. As far as Linux installs go, Knoppix is
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very fucking good. For the first time, I conclude it's not the OS's fault,
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or even mine - it's just that this particular scanner is a really, really
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stupid design, most uncharacteristic of Pewlett-Hackard. As shamefully
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wasteful as it is, I am gonna just drop the whole rig in the bin, victim
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of its own poor documentation and interface design kludginess. I'd go
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playing with a USB rig 'cept the interface stakes on this mobo are layed
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out incorrectly for every USB feed socket I've ever laid my hands on. And
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I don't have one handy either. I might have a PCI SCSI card lying around
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somewhere. Maybe I'll just go up to a net cafe and scan it in there, and
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fight with whatever broken ftp clients they force me to use.
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I've been playing with hardware of a transportational nature too. After I
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re-packed the pedal bearings with lithium grease and oiled the chain and
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derailleur, I took my old aluminium-framed pushie for a spin. Slowly. I
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shamefully bemoan the lack of raw acceleratory grunt and monster
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respiratory reserve upon which I used to unthinkingly call as a serious,
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kill'em'all, fuck-right-off urban commuting weapon nearly half a decade
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ago before I really became enslaved by the convenience of liquid
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hydrocarbons. In 1998 I was pushing 150km a week, keeping up with cars on
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arterial roads. I destroyed bottom brackets and pedal bearings with
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impunity... my lungs greedily gouged oxygen and nearby insects from the
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surrounding air, vast planes of dorsal meat plated my back, and my pelve
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was welded to a pair of sculpted, throbbing, half kilowatt Krebs cycle
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engines barely recognisable as legs. By comparison, at the moment I'm a
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weedy piece of desk-driving shit, and the muscular remnants of my arse
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exhibit all the athletic responsiveness of a scoop of icecream gone soft
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in the sun. So soft, in fact, I've gotta snare myself some seatpost
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suspension, I am tired of having the seat hammered up my bum every time I
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drop the back wheel into a pothole.
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It's actually been a pretty pleasant week, but it contained various
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stupidities. I angrily chopped a friend of ten years out of my life, after
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deciding he was being rather more interrogatory than he shoudda been. Ah,
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well, it isn't like I didn't warn him. It's intriguing - I am much more
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freely prepared to do this, these days, but even if awareness of my life
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expectancy hadn't suddenly dropped by three decades in the last month, I
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wasn't about to have anyone make unsolicited, unwarranted deductions about
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my shag life, crow about their success at it when they're wrong, and then
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keep at it when I tell 'em not to. I'll reveal what I will, which is quite
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a bit, but will not be interrogated, no matter how subtly. Nor will I have
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my crankiness about this specific incident written off as a background
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effect of my being suddenly aware of the foreshortening of my lifespan. If
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you're reading this, and you know who you are, you have a couple of years
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to think about it before I'll take you out of my killfile.
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Anyway.
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On the 'eve I had a delightful nosh'n'blab and a couple of beers with a
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couple of friends over at Maroubra, a stroll along the beach, with
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complementary perving upon the nearly naked bods of nearby women who got
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their gear off and ran into the freezing, pounding surf. Salt spray
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condensed on my specs, a cold wind raced off the choppy ocean and sucked
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all the heat out of me. We went back to my friends' share house and in
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don't-give-a-shit mode I ate lots of delightful foods dripping with carbs
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and sugars. I'm sure Bill grew a bit as a result, but arrr, fuck him.
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"That's WHAT he does. That's ALL he does." -Kyle Reese, referring to
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Terminator
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The Cookie Manufacturer and I rode back to the ice cream factory through
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suburbs largely depleted of traffic, and after killing dozens of midnight
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mozzies before they could drill us, shagged farewell shags since one of us
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was leaving the country for a month. Christmas only comes once a year, but
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I'm glad we don't. Off she goes, back to the land of the free where they
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imprison more people per capita than anywhere else on the planet, landing
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at an airport on the edge of a state run by precisely the same fuckin'
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Terminator that Kyle Reese was referring to above. Fucked if I'm ever
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gonna go to the US again, they fingerprint everyone who goes there now,
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which is a sure sign the place has turned into a police state the likes of
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which it specifically set out to avoid becoming, if their constitution is
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anything to go by.
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Goddamned mozzies have no decorum, I discovered in the morning there were
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several mozzie bites on my arse presumably installed while I was
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distracted by shagging from the task of smashing them into bloody mash
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against me.
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Christmas day was crushingly hot and murderously dry. I soaked my T-shirt,
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put my leather jacket on over the top of it, and motorcycled up to Palm
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Beach (maybe 60km north) in the hazy, shimmering thermal waste. When I
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started the bike, the fuel was *boiling* in the tank, toxic, flammable
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vapours hissed out of the fuel cap. The road was sticky - the kick stand
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had sunk slightly into the melting tarmac. I kept the visor down because
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otherwise the dry breeze sucked the moisture out of my eyes. The traffic
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was heavy, I saw several cars on the roadside with their owners gazing
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under the hoods. I had a pretty good run apart from encountering some
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homicidal tailgating clowns, who I motioned to pass me only to watch them
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tailgate the cars in front of me. Dickheads. Much of the way a
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motorcyclist stays alive out there is by reading people's roadcraft and
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vehicle damage status and assessing people's ability to fuck up in such a
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way as will fatally include oneself when one has not positioned oneself so
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as to avoid the wreckage. This defensive tacticality is habitual, these
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days, and its still worth the effort of keeping my eyes peeled.
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Reprogrammed to self-destruct from the nucleotides up, nonetheless I'm not
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driving around with a deathwish. The wet shirt under my jacket was bone
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dry by the time I got to Palm Beach. The place amazes me, it looks like a
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fuckin' four-wheel drive convention, huge Toorak tractors parked all over
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the place, obstructing the roads.
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It was good to see Lissie and Craig - my cousins. I watch their kids grow
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up at intervals of twelve months and there's something oddly satisfying
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about it even though as an adoptee I am biologically unrelated to them.
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Lissie and I have some pretty raucous, very enjoyable conversations. I ate
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a ton of seafood, configured Liam's evil X-box for him (Micro$oft:
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Enslaving Your Children), had a swim in their pebblecreted pool, and
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caught up with some of my proxy rellos. Their maniacal bad-attitude male
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pomeranian has literally arse-raped, disembowelled and scattered the
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pieces of every stuffed toy in the house, which makes me glad it's not a
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rottweiler. I took Liam's grandma Julie for a spin (admittedly, she had me
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at knifepoint) on the motorcycle which she thought was pretty cool, if a
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bit draughty on account of the aerodynamics of spread legs and a dress. It
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was great to catch up with them all. Half full of piss, I answered their
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questions about my cancer as best I could, which probably wasn't very
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well. Liam's only about three, and he reckons I have a nasty scratch up my
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front. Well, yeah, I do.
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I'd have hung around for longer but I had to meet an old friend on the
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19th floor in the offices of the NSW Minstry for Police. I locked him out
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of my life two years ago and I thought we were about ready to tolerate
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each other again. To look at him he hadn't aged a day, but I could see in
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his right eye a cloudiness that spoke of a cataract. Staring out the
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window at the nighttime view upon which the chrome-domed NSW police
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minister used to gaze, with our feet on the furniture, we caught up in the
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heat of a stuffy office with broken airconditioning. We would have got
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pissed but all the pubs on Oxford st were shut so we couldn't score any
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Guinness.
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We chatted up about a lot of stuff, but some fundamentally annoying things
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about him have not changed. He mentioned to me as news things I remembered
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him telling me two years ago. The percentage of his thought processes
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ripped directly from TV still exceeds the number of hits I want on my old
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news / useless bullshit filters. It's not gonna be a prolonged reunion.
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I rode home topless in the stinking nighttime heat.
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By the time I got there Dad had got his hands on the CT-scan report.
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To everyone's surprise, I have a brain, and to my surprise in particular,
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it appears to be normal. So are my lungs, though they're the lungs of a
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slack bastard who doesn't do enough exercise. The report is worded
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obscurely, almost defensively, as if they didn't trust me not to rip the
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envelope open a couple of days ago and come to my own conclusions from
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whatever the radiologists wrote. They report a large, hypodense mass,
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where I had told them it was. Well, surprise, surprise. It seems to have
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not invaded the surrounding bones or vasculature yet. They didn't say it
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_was_ a lymph node... its identity is referred to obliquely - `there is no
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other evidence of metastatic disease'. I feel like I have learned
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precisely two fifths of fuck-all about this lump. I'm from the school of
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though that sez, biopsy the bastard, stick some of it on a slide and
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identify its cellular morph. But maybe that'd rupture it, freeing whatever
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is contained in the putative node, to wreak invasive havoc on the rest of
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my neck.
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When I see Coz on the 5th, I'm gonna ask that he wield the tactical
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machete once more. Out, damned spot!
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27th Dec
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I got an SMS from a number I didn't recognise late on the 26th, and was
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invited out to a fuck-my-anticancer-diet dinner at an Italian restaurant
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in Newtown, by a mysterious brown woman of part South African extraction whom,
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when she wears her distinctly 1970's silver-rimmed Polaroid sunglasses and
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straw hat, bears a startling resemblance to a famous Chilean dictator. The
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nosh was great, inclusive of garlic bread with enough topping to change
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the refractive index of my exhaled breath after eating the stuff. We
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wandered down to her friend's place to play with a nice telescope (Saturn
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looks the best it has for thirty years just now, since its orbital
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inclination is at its maximum so the rings are obvious) but it was a
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cloudy night so we couldn't see the stars, and had to settle for perving
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into the neighbor's front windows and discovering the type and rating of
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various fluoroescent bulbs in the nearby streetlamps. And, later, snogging
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in the park at Camperdown. Next day I popped over to her place on the way
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to drop a packload of books in East Hills and spent rather longer there
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than I intended, for reasons which you could probably guess by now given
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the content of previous rants. Man... people go buy fibro houses in
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suburban wastelands and wonder why they're isolated, lonely
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and bored outta their minds when they're not out, busy working. To
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alleviate this, she's looking for some sort of long-term relationship but
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I told her I'm not really in a position to participate in such a thing.
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I'm happy to share a shag even if it is simply to relieve the solitude,
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which appears to be engineered into the very fabric of the suburb - I
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speak with authority when I say this place's groundwaters, secluded and
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swaddled in rusting cylindrical ferrocrete, are more interesting than its
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streetscapes. Regardless of how good such shaggery might be, it's a
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meaningless gesture against the brute fact that the whole district was
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designed to partition its inhabitants off from each other, to prevent the
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spontaneous growth of a community before it ever might take root. Nobody
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plays in the treeless parks, prowling cops hassle every cluster of kids
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which happens to condense anywhere, etc etc, and you can only hang around
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in the sprawling mall if you're spending money. Even the public seating,
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optimised for discomfort, is specifically manufactured to tell your bum to
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get lost after five minutes.
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28th Dec
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I finally caught up to a head torch modification project I've had in the
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works for at least two years. See conway.cat.org.au/~predator/whiteled.txt
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I thought for a moment during testing I'd fucked the MAX1698 chip (a truly
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incredible bit of DC-DC engineering!) which would have been an expensive
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exercise, but it turned out I'd just blown a Schottky catch diode (surface
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mount, B4H) which rectifies the N-channel FET output on the way to the LED
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array. I swapped it out for something slower, fatter and tougher from my
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parts bin... rated to 4A, 1kV. The SMD part which I had blown up was 1mm x
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2mm and the exact replacement would be an absolute pain in the arse to
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solder in, anyway - capillary action makes the fuckin' things stick to the
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point of the soldering iron, during which time they get fried and don't
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work any more.
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Pete and his f'yonce Louise (great... there's gonna be two people in the
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family named Lousie Maher now) popped in, which was a good excuse to stuff
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myself with all that shitty carbohydrate I've recently noticed how keenly
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I have missed. I might pop in and see them down in Wollongong when I am
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next doing a clandestine reconnoitre of the Port Kembla copper smelter. I
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miss good coffee - the vac-sealed Vittoria stuff, plunged through
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stainless mesh in gleamin' borosilicate.
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30th Dec.
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Long lost (well, about 12 years since we've seen him) cuz Tony showed up
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without warning. Great to see him and I would have chatted to him more
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except that I had pre-arranged to go waste some time with Keoh. Keoh's
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done a good job on the cubby at the back of the junkyard. Fuck alone knows
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how he acquired the very swish pair of cufflinks he gave me - embossed
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with the NSW police service emblem, and cloaked in the insignia of the
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Drug Squad. Very amusing, but they're illegal to wear if you're not a cop,
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and besides, wearing them could very well get me killed in some of the
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circles I move in.
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The Cat firewall (tarvat, so named since our previous fw was called
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avatar) has developed some odd glitchiness. Thinking it was thermally
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related I did a guts transplant (harddisk, display and network cards, this
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way we know there won't be any interrupt conflicts or failed module
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dependancies on bootup) into our hot standby box but I got the same error
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there.
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While I was furiously hammering this stuff to see if I could make it go,
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Coco comes into the geek room to slowly drone in my direction a stream of
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low information content small-talk. Coco is a pain in the arse who has
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disappeared from the Ice Cream factory for a month - his cat has remained,
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dropping cat turds in unexpected places and, if you ask me, considering
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itself very lucky not to have been found euthanased in a deep freeze
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somewhere. He says, how ya going, and without looking up I mention
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"frantically busy and unable to talk to you, sorry." "Ok, get fucked,
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then." He says. Yeah, never mind that I was genuinely frantically working
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on something important which lots of people depend upon, or that I gave
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the dude a key to my old squat when he was moaning about his impending
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homelessness last month, nor that I was fighting to get his net link
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working as I spoke. Sometimes I wonder if I should just give up
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volunteering and find some fool who's prepared to pay me to do what I do
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for fun anyway. Arrr. but then again, maybe I'm becoming a grumpy prick
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and he's just doing me the favour of telling me.
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It's amazing. After I blew Coco off, Len, David, and Rana blew in for a
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chat. I'm trying to track this bug down, and nyaargh there's all these
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people chewing on my brain while I'm tryin' to get this box workin'. Rana
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cooked me a delightful tofu/eggplant something-or-other. I eventually
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pinned it down to a bug in shorewall's IP-conntrack. The firewall's still
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knackered. Andy logged into it remotely later, and fucked it up even more,
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which is uncharacteristic. So I have to go out and torture it in person.
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Not tonight tho.
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New Years Eve.
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The oncologist rang up in the morning to tell me what I already knew about
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the CT-scan. Which was, more or less, nothing more than my fingers had
|
|
told me. I reckon I'll try and talk Cozzi into doing a fine needle biopsy
|
|
of this neck thing - if you have to accuse me of spending too much time in
|
|
front of microscope slides, go ahead, but I reckon there's a lot you can
|
|
tell from cell morphology which no CT scanner on the planet is gonna ever
|
|
reveal.
|
|
|
|
I rode up to North Head to a Cave Clan party in the abandoned gun turret
|
|
emplacements nestled in the saltbush on the sandstone flats above the huge
|
|
cliffs which rise, sheer, 70m out of the Pacific ocean. Fireworks exploded
|
|
on either side of me as I drove across the Harbour Bridge under police
|
|
escort at 20km an hour like all the other drivers, but I couldn't waste
|
|
attention on the pretty colours.
|
|
|
|
Fortunately there was a southerly breeze, since the biggest sewage
|
|
treatment plant in Sydney was only 200m north of us.
|
|
|
|
Like all Clan parties, it seriously rocked. Really, given such a high
|
|
concentration of worthwhile, kick-arse, criminally minded free spirits,
|
|
sex, drugs, wicked melancholy electro plus old school rock'n'roll, no door
|
|
charge (no doors either), no dress regs, and a site with a view the
|
|
government's been trying to sell to developers for bazillions of dollars,
|
|
where the fuck else would you bother to go on NYE? 'Oxide brought his
|
|
generator, Siolo his Linear Designs speakers and an amp' which could
|
|
easily incinerate both of them; to this seismic survey apparatus was
|
|
connected an .mp3 player which had about ten thousand ripped tunes in it.
|
|
Word's got around. ... diode announced some weeks ago to the Clan on my
|
|
behalf that I've been seriously sick of late, people were glad to see me -
|
|
I got an ear-smashing reception when I arrived, which was cheering.
|
|
|
|
As might be expected of a bunch of mortals in denial, we're a catalog of
|
|
sickies. Hatchet's kerosene habit has cost him a lung, curly-haired Pete's
|
|
liver's being eaten alive by Hep C, Oggie's MS is chewing him up slowly,
|
|
MrI was nearly felled by pericarditis, on it fuckin' goes. About fifty
|
|
people who are collectively a bigger law enforcement job creation scheme
|
|
than the entire district of Cabramatta showed up, ate, drank, smoked good
|
|
grass (for which I can vouch), danced like epileptics on nitrous, fucked
|
|
in the bushes (for which I can also vouch), detonated things of an
|
|
explosive nature, conjectured on what was _really_ in the tabs they'd
|
|
taken before they got there, sat and chatted by the fire which was perched
|
|
on the iron mountings where the army's coastal surveillance optics used to
|
|
be installed. I met some Adelaide clansmen who were amazed that I'd been
|
|
there and tagged up in the drains under their city, and who mistakenly
|
|
think I am some sort of god (Chinese Whispers effect, I guess). Feenie and
|
|
I compared scars - they used his tattoos to align the edges of the one in
|
|
his legs, but his sensory mapping is wrong now, he feels the back of his
|
|
leg on the front of his leg, or something like that. Marauder, grinning
|
|
fiendishly, his hair short and bleached white, looked terrifyingly similar
|
|
to Billy Idol except he's a metre too tall and six orders of magnitude
|
|
smarter.
|
|
|
|
We were too far away to see them but heard the muffled thumping of the
|
|
harbour fireworks at midnight. The klaxons, and roar of the blowers and
|
|
scrubbers of the sewage processing site kept us company throughout the
|
|
night... along with the blink-blink, blink of a lighthouse somewhere on
|
|
outer South Head. I got some shut-eye in nine dollars fifty worth of
|
|
fluorescent orange, half-deflated dinghy MrI had dragged out there and
|
|
failed to go to sleep in, but I managed, I guess because I was definately
|
|
more stoned than he was. Out of the corner of my eye, through heavy lids
|
|
(but not so heavy that they'd close properly) I watched uncaringly as some
|
|
smartarse got a photo of me crashed-out in the dinghy. I was not so stoned
|
|
that I couldn't perch myself cross-legged atop one of Silo's speakers and
|
|
gaze at the sunrise. The thumpin' bass signals deliciously jabbed up my
|
|
body, faster up my backbone.
|
|
|
|
A sax/synth track by KennyG (called Infinity, I think) came on while I sat
|
|
there gazing at the fiery pink beams radiating from gaps in the distant
|
|
clouds, and I had one of those little searing, teary moments where I
|
|
wondered if I'd see the next New Years. I gazed out to where the sky and
|
|
the ocean met indistinctly, and looked at the tiny boats tossed on the
|
|
endlessly repeated waves stretching from the gleaming white cliffs to the
|
|
horizon. The wind flogged my hair against my skin, I stank of cannabis,
|
|
campfire smoke, sex on crushed shrubbery, leather preservative and Talby's
|
|
(legitimate chocolate chip) cookies, and I didn't know wether to feel
|
|
defeated or exuberant. The dawn arrived and hurt my eyes which were
|
|
leaking already anyway. I climbed down and went to sleep against the
|
|
concrete footings of the makeshift fireplace and woke up a couple of hours
|
|
later with some wanker stickin' a camera in my face as - action shot - I
|
|
discovered I'd accidentally snorted a blowfly.
|
|
|
|
I dunno about you, but I think if you are ever called upon to justify your
|
|
life in terms of what you do on such an arbitrarily decreed day as New
|
|
Years, raising hell with a bunch of people you played a key role in
|
|
bringing together over ten years, and who are here because of something
|
|
you decided to write and make freely available to the public at large,
|
|
really beats the shit out of flocking with a nameless herd to watch
|
|
delightedly as the government sets fire to your sequestered tax dollars,
|
|
or sitting at home watching the Edinburgh fucking Tattoo on the telly.
|
|
|
|
|
|
On with the year then. The hardcore kamikazi kore of the Clan is off to go
|
|
abseiling or skateboarding without authorisation down 100m drops in 12m
|
|
diameter pipes in the upper reaches of the Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme
|
|
(empty since there's a drought on). Slightly drugfucked and wussy, I rode
|
|
back to Blakehurst and spent the day zonked out in bed, only emerging to
|
|
write this before the neurons responsible for remembering it commit
|
|
programmed suicide in disgust at what they remember. Five beers, a cone
|
|
and a root could only devastate me like this if I was in shit shape to
|
|
begin with.
|
|
|
|
T-6 days to biopsy. Listen, lumpy, we have ways of makin' you talk.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jan 3.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fuckin' PCI interrupt allocation... grr. Andy had logged in and fucked up
|
|
the gateway entries while he was remotely messing around tryin' to get the
|
|
firewall working, thereby locking himself out. He got shorewall working
|
|
again but there's a wrinkle... when I did the gutz-transplant from one
|
|
machine to another to check about the (I think) thermally related kernel
|
|
barf, I put the NICs back in their slots in a different order. Now, on my
|
|
planet, a card gets an interrupt on the basis of what it's set to ask for,
|
|
but this particular mobo assigns them partly on the basis of which card
|
|
asks for one first. The DMZ and LAN NICs were assigned opposite IRQs, were
|
|
thus initialised in a different order, and although cabled the same way as
|
|
before the rebuild, were in fact now assigned as different interfaces so
|
|
the original routing tables were now totally fucked up. I eventually
|
|
figured this out and now it works. If you ask me, ISA buses work better
|
|
just because you can have definitive control over them with bits of
|
|
fuckin' metal on the boards deciding how they behave instead of some wafty
|
|
dynamic interrupt assignment workaround implemented to circumvent the fact
|
|
that most computer hardware people appear to be unable to count to ten
|
|
more than once. It seems to work for the time being. Good.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The kind individual who offered to shag me came pretty close to making
|
|
good on her promise early this morning, after we ate some Thai and
|
|
demonstrated our recorder playing skills (or lack thereof) to each other
|
|
in the dark at Enmore Park, but she was leakin' erythron and not entirely
|
|
happy with shagging in that circumstance, so we just lay upon the futon,
|
|
clinging tightly to each other in the lavender scented sheets, being
|
|
occasionally inspected by her inquisitive dog (got a hardon you want to be
|
|
rid of? Try an unexpected canine nose in the eye, heh heh).
|
|
|
|
I grew up in the 1980s and was bombarded by the Grim Reaper ads in the
|
|
early 1990's, and have done enough pathology to scare anyone off getting
|
|
outta bed in the morning, yet I find myself strangely blithe of the
|
|
personal consequences of all this knowledge - e.g. being bled upon by
|
|
immunological strangers holds no terrors. I'm getting NRMA syndrome -
|
|
nothin' really matters anymore. It would nevertheless be rude of me to
|
|
become a viral vector in the final months of my life, a free software
|
|
conduit between people who know me, so I keep a few microns thickness of
|
|
polymerised isoprene handy. Arr.. I'd love to ride bareback, but it'd just
|
|
be irresponsible of me.
|
|
|
|
Something's changing. Contrary to my misanthropic default, I'm starting to
|
|
appreciate this whacky species of which I am a member. I am not sure why.
|
|
We're the same bunch o' treacherous creeps as we were before I got my
|
|
oncological marching orders from the rank and file of the human race, but
|
|
as I stand at the edge, it is hitting home that they're all I've got.
|
|
Maybe I've never seen it from the point of view of someone unaccustomed to
|
|
what appears to be the sudden availability of shags-on-tap, but I'm
|
|
becoming more hungry for company than shaggery. Maybe one appreciates more
|
|
the things one has irretrievably lost or thinks one is about to. I am
|
|
keenly aware what a privelage it is to hold these precious beings in my
|
|
grip, be cradled by them intimately, even if we do run the same
|
|
metabolisms as the thing which is trying to kill me, and I can't help
|
|
getting a bit furrowed of brow and teary eyed amidst it. I am gonna miss
|
|
them as I am dying. If this dopey disease can decide wether to take me out
|
|
or not.
|
|
|
|
Before taking life off you completely, cancer takes over your life in more
|
|
insidious ways than you realise (and in my case, chains me to the
|
|
keyboard, QED). I popped into Kogarah to return a book, and chatted to
|
|
Larry who is missing a lot of guts since he had colon cancer chopped out.
|
|
We concur that the worst thing about cancer is possibly that everyone else
|
|
who is aware of it can't have a conversation with oneself without talking
|
|
about it, so one ends up having permutations on the same conversation to
|
|
dozens of people before you get killed by it. It's sort of unavoidable, I
|
|
guess. It's not that we're not grateful for the concern, but as you the
|
|
long-suffering reader of these rants would surely agree it's just fuckin'
|
|
boring repeating the same stuff over and over again. So boring in fact I
|
|
want to get back to my mundane life of meaningless, anarchist
|
|
thermodynamic-eschatological drifting. Painting walls. Writing aleatory
|
|
crap. Uncaringly watching red traffic lights stay red for ages. Fuckin'
|
|
with computers and pondering on the computational nature of chemical
|
|
systems.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I ate breakfast at midday at the old Fish Cafe and couldn't help smile at
|
|
the parade of unconcerned locals walking past. If the place was any more
|
|
laid back you'd need velcro to stop your drinks sliding off the table.
|
|
Cool.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
-----
|
|
If, perhaps in a moment of masochism you want to look at the next file in
|
|
this series try
|
|
|
|
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/getting_it.txt
|
|
|
|
It might not be available yet.
|
|
|
|
<predator>
|
|
|