morning train ride

Blue sky morning. Sunlight paves the railway line, highlighting the journey. I've been travelling that same track for the last five years, but it never repeats itself. Every day, there is something new to feel and see. Seasonal vibrations, chimeric atmosphere, faces shuffled in an infinite deck of cards. 

I notice a tree branch for the first time, its unique, convoluted way of grasping for sunlight never apparent to me before. The train halts outside a block of abandoned industrial space. A glimmer-spray of fine glass fragments pulses in the early sun, scattering the bare concrete with fallen stardust. Amidst the glow, a lone brown pigeon forages for unseen flecks of food, pausing every few seconds to appraise its surroundings. 

Pinpoints of constancy also flow through the train ride. Ahead of me, a certain bald head I saw yesterday, exposed scalp shining beneath fluorescent lighting. The man in the tweed suit sits here also, with his cuff links and that 1960s spy look; long, prominent nose like the fictional submarine captain figured in a television series of my childhood. When he gets off the train, he will walk down North Terrace with his morning cigarette in one hand, brown leather brief case in the other, striding towards the university with a perfectly straight, composed and upright posture like gentlemen of old. 

The Nordic one is here too, thin yellow-blonde hair down to the tip of his shoulders, walking with the long, effortless strides of the tall. I rarely see his face, only that shock of blonde hair coming down over his collar; his patterned shirts and black slacks. But not the nerdy type. His walk is too self-assured, his hair too proud. 

Then there is the bearded old man in shorts, looking like a grumpy Santa Claus on vacation, beer belly accentuated by a tight cotton Bonds shirt, hairy legs bare down to a pair of grey socks which emerge from black shoes and extend up to his shins. He reads his books, bag on the floor between his feet. I wonder what he thinks about, what he has seen, where he is going and what tales he might have to tell. 

On the bus, there are regular characters, too. Shane is perhaps the most memorable: a big man with an intellectual disability who always makes it his duty to greet the passengers and introduce himself as he steps onboard. He has shaken my hand a few times, and kindly does the same to anyone he sits near enough to talk to. Occasionally, he will ask me what I had for lunch and happily tell me how much he is looking forward to having some Pepsi when he gets home. He seems a happier person than anyone riding the 174 bus to Paradise. 

Other regulars seem to leave only a few particular impressions behind in my mind: the woman with glowing chestnut hair, a red and white handbag, and beautiful coats (I would love to know where she shops); the greasy man with glasses and a red jumper; the girlish woman with pale hair and sad eyes; the immaculate blonde who reads fashion magazines at the bus stop; the young, anaemic-looking man in a long, black coat and green cargo pants. 

These are the regular characters of my daily travels. They are strangers to me, really, but I feel I know them somehow. We share the same spaces, pass through the same tracts. We are celestial bodies tracing an identical orbit, even if only for an hour each day. Their presence is a kind of compass; a comforting, interesting point of familiarity between the banal and the chaotic.

thought of the day: colours of the mind

If our minds were a thing you could see embodied in colour, they would be foregrounded by the movement of a restless, messy sea of blues and reds; the bruised and busy tones of turmoil. But if you look beyond it, you would see an eternal sky. Of our subconscious, quietly observing in the background, I see a kind of endless sunset that never changes. A sky that's always aflame with hues of burnt orange, shot through with a light bulb yellow glow.

the shape of a dwelling

“All living is dwelling, the shape of a dwelling. To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left. The traces of dwellings survive, as do the bones of people.”

(Illich, I. (1982). Gender. New York: Pantheon. p.119)

For some strange, wonderful reason, I was reminded tonight of a special time in my childhood. I would not have been more than ten years old, maybe younger. It was at a time when, ironically enough, things were materially most difficult; when my mum was getting us by with the patchwork of cash-in-hand cleaning gigs she was able to stitch together. But for all that it might be considered a 'shit-kicker' job, I still look back fondly on that handful of cleaning gigs mum had. In the school holidays or when my brother and I were off from school sick, we'd often come along to the places she cleaned. I knew even back then that to the occupants or patrons of those places, my mum was naught but an invisible hand that came through, made everything sparkle, but left no trace of itself in the act. The only way a cleaner is ever noticed is if they aren't doing their job. But to me, it was the occupants of the houses who were the mysterious and elusive presences. I never once knew them or met them, but the houses themselves were the outward reflection of each of their lives.  For a child, that was a wonderful, compelling kind of mystery. I can still clearly remember my wonder at trying to imagine the shape and form and lives of those people whose traces I saw in the dwellings around me. I wondered what they looked like and who they were; what lives they led and what made them happy. The question of home and its intimate relationship to identity is, by product of those earlier years of my life, never far from my mind.

the apostrophe is your friend

The apostrophe is your friend. It's wise to treat it kindly.

By all means, take your apostrophe to retro '80s parties. Just please don't invite it to those lame 80's ones. Share your DVDs with your apostrophe, but under no circumstances should you attempt to share your DVD's. The last time I checked, the DVD didn't own anything (and if it did, this would necessitate a whole new dimension of human rights discourse).* Would you say the same of Blu-rays? No, please don't tell me you would. "Blu-ray's on sale" certainly makes sense if you're talking about an old hick by the name of Blu-ray who happens to be going cheap. Otherwise, keep the apostrophe out of it. Seriously, just because you see the apostrophe in bed with the letter 's' in other situations (especially the 'X is' contraction), this doesn't mean you can generalise and go around thinking it's a universal, monogamous relationship. It most certainly doesn't apply to plurals. In fact, your friend the apostrophe is allergic to plurals in all but the narrowest of situations.

homelessness and civilisation

"Homelessness inspires not only the intellectual
realization that the machinery of the system has
failed somehow to produce the basic shelter everyone
needs, but even more the social realization that
the system has come up against some limits it
cannot exceed, has created a world it can no longer
control."
- Peter Marcuse (1988). "Neutralizing Homelessness", in Socialist Review, 18:69-96.

I am buzzing at the thrill of new ideas lately. Or at least, 'newish' to me. I’d never, until the last year or so for example, fully investigated Quinn’s ‘New Tribalism’; John Zerzan’s somewhat unrealistically radical critiques of symbolism and civilisation, and the anti-Malthus thesis of the ‘food race’. These ideas had, despite seven years of university study, remained completely outside my awareness. That is, until I was first introduced to the strange little book known as "Ishmael". It was brought to my attention a few years back, through the gift of an invitation by a friend. It was a simple call: to read a book that someone else recognised might speak to my own nameless sense of there being something kind of ‘wrong’ with the world (but not knowing exactly how this 'wrongness' might be understood or recovered from).


There truly are, as Michel Foucault wrote:

"More ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas...not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas...that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think."*

on admitting to intellectual infidelity

I'm a sociology grad student. It's highly improper to court the come-ons of sociobiology. And to some extent I completely understand all the proverbial hackle-raising. If taken to certain places, the theory does risk Social Darwinism. Some [mostly male] proponents have even attempted to justify fixed gender roles on supposed biological, evolutionary bases (to the point of, at one extreme, claiming that a certain violent, predatory behaviour is 'hard-wired' in men). But even I sometimes grow weary of the naysaying coming so often from the very bosoms - sociology and feminism - in which I nestle myself these days.


To be perfectly honest, I loathe the whole nature vs. nurture 'debate'. Mostly because it's yet another one of those typical binaries or dualisms that Western intellectual discourse still can't kick the habit of getting into. We have to be the most black-and-white, down-the-line, everything has only two sides kind of culture in the whole sweep of human history. And yet we keep thinking this is a reliable measure for understanding the world. Sigh. Enlightenment anachronisms die hard. Very hard.

books that demand to be read

We've all been asked countless times by friends and random somebodies what our favourite books might be. Every social networking site or blog inevitably includes 'favourite books' as a profile box to fill, and it's probably the only box I feel comfortable with filling. But for some reason, I can never seem to sum it up at that very moment when I need to be definitive. I always miss the most incredible books out of my pick, or get a heavy dose of brain fog when called upon to utter my favourite authors. So to that end, I thought I'd sit down and actually work out what books I really do care about. The books that, for me at least, demand to be read: