Category: Journal

This past weekend I sat my arse on the coach and read comic books. When I was done with that, I watched some wrestling DVDs. And brother, let me tell, you it was a weekend of glorious brilliance the like I haven’t experienced lately. After two straight months where, more often than not, you’d find me on a plane or hanging out at a writers festival or otherwise engaged in day-job related hijinx, the realisation that I had not a goddamn thing that needed to be done was freeing. I mean, the travel, it defeated me. For years I’ve been talking with my friend Kevin about the debilitating effects of work travel, not quite getting his dislike of it, ’cause on the rare instances I’ve had to travel for work it’s either been a) rare, or b) not that far. I now feel like I need to buy Kevin several beers of apology ’cause I totally get it now. Even

1. There’s a page in an old notebook of mine, written way back when I was young and stupid, where I put forward the closest thing I had to a creative philosophy at eighteen: I do not believe in silence. When I was eighteen I wanted to write stories that had weight. I wanted to create something that could be used to bludgeon the world into submission. 2. Things I have written about: bad relationships; unicorns; punk rock; pro-wrestling; shaved heads; the veneer of love; envy; sexual ambiguity; writing; aliens; poetry; indecision; growing up on the Gold Coast; living in Brisbane; my hatred of certain dayjobs. It seems such a limited list, on the surface, but in many respects that list contains everything. 3. Yes, I was a pretentious kid. I’m also a pretentious adult. Pretension is an underrated survival trait in the arts, as is an enormous capacity for self-deception. 4. I remember one of my lecturers gendering writing

Has anyone attempted to send something to my post office via UPS in the last couple of months? I got a notification in the mail today saying they couldn’t deliver, and after phone calls we establish that  they now wouldn’t deliver the package because it’d been over a week since they dropped off the notification and it’s gone into some kind of lost property dead zone. “Please get the original sender to contact us with your correct address,” they said. Right. I have no fucking idea who the original sender is, or what they’re trying to send me. The only clue they can give me is the initials MPS. This doesn’t clear things up any. Putting this on the blog because, quite honestly, the mystery is driving me crazy and the alternative is finding my local UPS office and punching someone in the nose.

I have nothing to say this morning, and yet I feel like talking. It’s early. Early-ish. For certain values of early that mean my flatmate is actually surprised to see me up and about before midday on a midday morning. I’m kicking it in my study, just killing time before some writer-peeps hit Skype for a conference call, and there’s natural sunlight spilling in through the gauzy white curtain on the window and it’s the kind of day that feels very fresh and new and yet, somehow, slightly lived in and comfortable, like the day is just a pair of jeans that have long been broken in. I’m compiling a to-do list for my weekend. There’s going to be some writing. Occasionally I whistle a few bars of the songs that run through my head. For some reason, right now, I’m fixated on the Misfit’s Astro Zombies, which is far more cheerful than any song about zombie exterminating the human race ever should

One of the interesting things about moving house is the ability to discover things you thought you’d loss. Which is not, in fact, a sneaky way of announcing that I’m moving again – twice in a six-months span is quite enough for me, thanks – but among the various errands that have been run over the last couple of weeks is the clearing out of stuff left behind in my flatmate’s old place, on account of the fact that he’s finally sold it. Over the years I’ve come to accept that I’m quite terrible at moving house. I’ve done it quite a bit, and somehow I always manage to stop about 90% of the way through when the energy peters out just shy of unpacking the last few boxes. There’s always a handful of things that I basically move by taking empty boxes and throwing in a random assortment of stuff, and those boxes get moved from house to house without

Of course, by technical difficulties, we mean “Peter discovered his flatmate’s cache of Eureka DVDs and started playing Masters of Orion 2 again.” In the meantime, I’ll give you my mother’s response to my post about what I looked like when I was 5. Sadly, I think that’s the neatest my hair has ever been.

This scene is fiction. Probably. A little fiction never hurt anyone. You know that. There are two of them seated at the table, and he’s having a better time than his date. That shouldn’t really surprise you. Most times when you see a couple, you know one of them is fighting above their weight class. There’s no way it’s going to end well for those people; they’re the ones who are going to spend the night pounded into the mat. But for a while there they’re can dream. For a while they get to be a contender. “This feels weird,” he says. “Does this feel weird to you? It feels weird.” He’s sweating. Fidgeting. They haven’t even got around to entrees yet, but you want to applaud him for getting through ordering without fucking up. “I just don’t ordinarily do this,” he says. “Going out, I mean. Dating. It’s one of those things you see on the telly. A little