Asleep With the Lights On

Saw Porcupine Tree at the Palace Theater - well, the Metro - you can change an extensional meaning to anything you like, but it won't stop people calling it something else. Steven Wilson is like a almighty shredding monk from the Borough. Serene, yet volatile. The band played some almighty riffs, exciting the mostly metal-based crowd, fascinated by his work (presumably) he has done with Opeth and possibly OSI and Orphaned Land. ORWarrioR is hotly anticipated in my books!

Went out for Kount Kris™ Midnite Curry, which is delicious as always, as are the conversations. I think my studies on general semantics and such have really sort of coalesced now. I'm also quite proud of myself for lifting myself up and getting my journalism career up and running. (The interview with Dillinger Escape Plan went well, but I could barely understand anything he was saying!) I just gotta figure out my next move on this front though.

I was watching Season 2 of Man Stroke Woman the other day and it really struck me how deceptively simple the humor was. If you watch the clip below, its sort of like a long, drawn out train wreck: British style. One of the fundamental essences of British humor is faux pas and what would seem to be gross breaches of etiquette (Don't mention the war, Major) and another is laughing at another's misery. Listen to the dialog (I know - humor analyzed is no longer funny) and the sting in the tail, there's actually nothing really "funny" about it.

Breathing Room

Comrade Rudd addresses the intelligensia summoned to his Great Hall of the Working Family

Some thought I was glued to the TV for K-Rudd's 2020 summit, but I knew what it was all about before they even started talking. It wasn't about the ideas itself or the policies they would formulate: it was one huge meta-communicative statement about re-aligning all the semantic reactions formed in the Howard years back towards the dogma of the Labor party, namely the Labor Right.

It was essentially a ritualistic cleansing of the backward thinking that had permeated all facets of Australian politics and political economy, of which Third Way "Keatingite" economics must struggle amongst the tentacle-like restraints of economic rationalism. Not that Labor gives a shit about monetary and fiscal policy anyway - they deregulated most of that shit in the 80s, and is now just "conventional sense" in the bureaucracy in the strictest interpretation of the term.

How to act as a facilitator rather than a service provider is the biggest challenge for Rudd-baby to crack a nut and deliver his promised programs (some of which are completely retarded - universal enrollment of voters? And which privacy laws will you trample over to get that information?) without breaking his budget surplus. All of which will only cause an inflation of the utterances of "working families", elevating it to an even higher abstraction than it ever was previously.

Is this how it's supposed to be?

The map is not the territory.

It was so fucking simple. Everything is so fucking simple.

A Reverse Pittsburgh Syndrome

Note to self: must not ramble when interviewing rock stars. Here's a sample from my intriguing and enlightening interview with Bjorn "Speed" Strid of Soilwork:

Tom: So why the name "Speed" Strid?
Speed: Well, when we used to tape trade with my friend in high school, I used to like all of the speed metal bands above everything else. So my friend said "You only
like the fast stuff, so i'm going to call you 'Speed' from now on!"
Tom: That's really cool! In Australia, you're lucky if you get a nickname that means something or has anything to do with you.
Speed: How so?
Tom: Well, for instance, people will give you nicknames for no reason at all. For example, we call our friend Brad "The Admiral" and we have no idea why.
Speed: Interesting. You Aussies are crazy!

Apart from that sort of quirky awkward moment and some interruptions from his friend's dog, it went swimmingly! Can't wait to see him and his rock n' roll band on May 15!!!

A Tolerable Distance

Do, just don't think too much about it. Hmm, sounds reasonable. Thanks Rae.

Interviewing Soilwork tomorrow. This is like a dream come true. I should ask to do things more often. I should be so surprised at the outcome.

Hopefully, just hopefully, Saturday will be the last 21st Birthday I will ever attend, ever. I'm looking forward to it, no doubt. Sam and Carey are very dear friends of mine. But If I have to sit through another one...there will be hell to pay.

With any situation, there are pros and cons. I'm just trying to evaluate whether a Bachelors Degree in Political Science is worth finishing at this juncture. I want to finish, but I have very little motivation, especially when my extra-curricular activities are immediately more rewarding. We'll see.

What passes for commercial music these days shouldn't.

Ain't Nothin' Wrong

Hi, I'm Tom, I'm here to talk to you about death...

Seriously. After last night, deep in thought, withdrawn from the external world as if in a trance, I finally got to the root cause of my anxiety and neurosis. It's basically this - If I refuse to live, I can't die. Remove myself from the equation by making things as easy, comfortable and non-confrontational as possible and there's no way I'll snuff it whenever my time comes. No amount of reading has ever touched upon this before, although without it I probably would've never even bothered asking the question. And there's a hypothesis to go with it, which I have also tested, quite literally without my conscious knowledge.

About two years ago, I underwent a hernia operation. I had withdrawn from my friends, family, everyone. I even put my girlfriend at the time through absolute hell, and I regret that to this day. She deserved better. That aside, I harbored an irrational yet very "real" fear of death, even though the risk of the operation was minimal. I took that insignificant risk and magnified it to ludicrous proportions. I stopped living, so how could I die? Needless to say, I survived the treatment.

For weeks afterward, I was feeling fantastic. Despite sitting on a couch, immobile for 10 or so hours a day and eating mush, I was quite possibly having peak experiences listening to new records and watching old episodes of Black Books. It was bizzare. But why?

When I gained enough strength to walk again, I was talking to strangers fearlessly, taking risks i'd have otherwise shied away from and became the life of the party. I thought I'd cheated death somehow - that I'd slipped under the anaesthetic and woke up in some fantastic dimension where pain could not befall me and the rigors of life had been ground up and thrown away. I was peaceful, calm and loving. Then, as reality and irrationality caught up with me, I more or less returned to old habits again. Live inside a protective web of denial, forgetfulness and abstraction, and reality can't ever catch up with me.

Now I'm conscious of this fact, Its time for the heavy lifting to begin.

Crackling With Power Below

Where do I begin?

After a week that relentlessly dragged on, Catch and I took it upon ourselves to see the Bill Hicks "tribute" show, Slight Return at the Comedy Festival. Done with consuming the only food in town that should have been condemned by the Department of Human Services but wasn't, we strapped ourselves in for a night of intricately crafted mannerisms, vituperative angst and freewheeling social commentary, delivered in what was only thought to be the inimitable Hicks style. His arrogance wasn't misplaced, he was damn good at what he did. Catch and I decided to kick on to the Arthouse. However, we elected that $12 to see Fuck...I'm Dead wasn't worth the price of admission. So a short trip up to the Queensberry Hotel was in order.

After settling into a few beers, we ventured upstairs where a few patrons were sitting, seemingly minding their own business. We drank on, reminiscing and talking shit as we do. Then a few more people showed up. None took any notice of us. Then even more. Music started blaring. A couple had started to hand over presents to a certain individual...We had crashed someone's party by stealth. After quickly rectifying some irrational thoughts, I decided to make a night of it. Luckily, we introduced ourselves to some of the crowd, posturing ourselves as if we belonged to the fringes of some social group and eventually the Birthday Boy himself. (I even bought him a drink! His name was Tim.) I had to feign some memory of my high school days, as people I apparently shared four years of classes with recognized myself and Catch, surprised to see us at Tim's 21st.

Yeah, and so were we!

I'm discontinuing the "numbers game" after a rather in-depth and insightful conversation with Erin. BUT! Here's my final score:

23/0 (With 13 days remaining.)

Also: Get your hands on this week's copy of Buzz Magazine! Whoever wrote the article on the front page is a genius! (I hope I don't get sick...but I'm on my way, unfortunately.)

Leading You Astray

Take this sentence - "talk to your dog as if it were cheese." It came to me in a dream. You probably have experienced such things yourself. It appears as an essentially meaningless phrase. If you have no dog it becomes invalid. If you have never spoken to cheese before, it becomes invalid. Your mind cannot reconcile what is not there, or what has not been experienced. It can only give approximations, inferences, verisimilitudes, etc. Although we do this all the time. This is an example of a map without a territory. A lot of people I've talked to navigate territories with invalid maps. A conversation between an acquaintance of mine who had misread a verbal map I had given her long ago was re-read back to me, which I quickly realized did not reflect the territory.

This act and this act alone, cemented firmly in my understanding after months of searching and learning, the nature of the subjective experience and the consciousness of abstraction. I feel as if I am making remarkable epiphanies every day.


[12/0 of 100 - 16 Days Remaining]