the future

I generally think in circles. I often eat in circles and dance in circles, too, but I don't think they're related. I think in circles because I start with a thought, then kinda move a bit sideways from that thought, then go up a bit, then a bit back toward the original thought but at the other end of the spectrum, then a bit sideways and down, then down and back to the first thought. So sometimes I think I might like some toast, then reason that I had a sandwich for lunch and more bread isn't an amazing idea, but then I think maybe I could still have something toasted, like a crumpet or an English muffin, but then I reason that they're both made from wheat too, so what I'll do instead is have a cup of tea, except, what goes nicely with tea? Toast.

As you can see, it's not very productive. It takes me a long time to come to any sort of conclusion about anything, I can rationalise til the cows come home and still not make a fucking decision. I get caught up in words and bullshit, basically. I think it's basically my brain's way of avoiding anything concrete - if I can talk around the issue, I never have to actually decide on it, hence I never get disappointed because nothing ever happens. What does this have to do with my fears? Well, apart from the fear that I will get stuck in one of these circles, one of these this-is-the-song-that-doesn't-end kinda groundhog day nasties that will destroy me and see me living out my days in a padded white cell with nothing to show for myself except gross long fingernails and halitosis - apart from that fear, I also use this line of circular thinking to explore my afeardies.

Today I got scared that I was just going to be a drama teacher forever. I got scared that my future as an artist was rapidly fading, I only had a few more years left as an 'emerging' writer (that word needs a blog all of its own). Then I thought I was a bit of a wanker for thinking that working with kids was somehow less than being an artist. As if being a teacher was just a cop-out. Then I got all angry and thought, Fuck, No, Teaching is noble and amazing and not everyone can do it, it's really fucking hard and important and if you're a good teacher you can change lives. Then I thought that if I was a good playwright I could change more lives, and a lot faster. If my plays are an hour and a half and 50 people see each show, and we do a 10 show season, and I do 3 shows a year, that's, 1500 people a year who get to see my plays, instead of 26 Year 8 girls who get me as a drama teacher. But then I thought why the fuck would I want to be a wanker playwright anyway, I don't need validation from a bunch of Melbournites in swanky jackets and rubber pants. But then again, their jackets ARE very swanky, and I like wine, and they like wine, and I like being able to look at their jackets whilst under the influence of wine. Then I decided that it was fine to be an artist and I could have fun and be stimulated by that, but that it might be a good idea just to have something else as a back up and it should be teaching beacuse I actually really love kids and love working with them doing theatre and drama. Then I got carried away with the thought of being a teacher and how wonderful it would be to have all these amazing talented young people that you could get excited about drama with. Then I got scared that I was just going to be a drama teacher for the rest of my life. Which brings us back to the beginning, a nice big circle.

I think I've decided that it's not that scary, being a drama teacher. It's best to just stop thinking about it and do the degree and at the end of it just go to bed for a very long time and not come out from under the doona for any reason other than to wee and collect more lollies. But then that's a very scary idea, too, isn't it, the idea that you can study at Uni for 6 years, be a fucking Master of Education (a master! a master!!!) and still live out your days surrounded by Crunchies, milk bottles and mohair blankets. That's all you amount to, a fat bastard who can't even afford Foxtel. Imagine not being able to have Foxtel and being a fat bastard. That's the most terrifying thing I think.

top 5

I just did one of those Facebook quiz things. Well, I did about 12. I did the 'Which Spice Girl are you?' and 'Which Buffy character are you?' and 'Which Australian playwright are you?' (the answers, in order, are Scary, Buffy and Ben Ellis). Then I came across one called '5 things that terrify me'. My friend did it and she chose some really good things, like things that normal people should be terrified of, like entropy and global warming (she also, like a normal person, is scared of murderers and, less interestingly, heights). This is by far the hardest survey I've had to do, mostly because it's not multiple choice (if your options for answers to the question 'What's your favourite colour' are a)hot pink; b)leopard print; or c)union jack, then you kinda know how things are gonna turn out). I tried to list my some of Top 5 Fears as 'third world debt' and something about the Sudan, but I just wasn't being honest. So instead I started with what you would expect, 'Killers watching me sleep through cracks in my windows or curtains'. Good start. Moved onto 'Pigman from Saw' (a little more specific, still working in the same 'killer' sort of vein). I struggled over the next few. Jazz was number 3 for a little while, but then I changed that to 'the darkness in men's hearts', but then I thought that was a little too narrow, so I changed that to 'the dark', because it's been around for a very long time, and I feel that it can probably stand in for a lot of things (ie. the dark in my heart, the dark in the corridor, the dark under the sink etc etc). Then I went with 'Being left behind by the boat when scuba diving', which may not seem like something that would scare someone who doesn't scuba dive, but really, it's a proper fear that I'm consumed by more often than I would like to admit. That one encompasses a lot of fears - fear of open water and fear of sharks being the main ones (fear of crocodiles an extension of this). It also touches on being alone, being lost, being preyed upon, being cold, being wet, being naked and wet, being naked and wet in public. 'White people' rounded out the top five, and I think this stands in for a lot of the 'proper' fears I have ie. that people hate gays, that there's third world debt, global warming, etc. White people aren't necessarily to blame for all those things, but they probably had a hand in most of them, and I guess by 'white people' I really mean, maybe, capitalism, America, John Howard, the 1950s. Those things are all pretty scary, I think, and they all have white people in common.

Lots of other people have since done the survey (Facebook seems to work like that), and it's interesting seeing patterns in answers. There's the normal stuff - birds, being eaten by birds, spiders, spiders crawling in your mouth while you're sleeping, spiders being on your body and you not knowing about it. The guy I'm working with reckons top of his list is the little things that look like Cheezels but are in fact polystyrene box packers. Someone else suggested that their top fear was 30 Rock being cancelled, or Tina Fey being a douche.

It's all very funny and scary, but it's not real fear, is it? None of the things on that list are PROPER fears. They're not fears I care to admit to. I'm pretty scared about cancer, for example, and that's not in there. It's not in there because I think it's actually too hard to be simultaneously scared of cancer killing your friends and also live your life. I find it easier to be scared of a fictional man in a pig suit. Which doesn't make any sense, really, except it does, because I know that whilst a fictional man in a pig suit can really only hurt me, other things can hurt other people. And at the end of the day, that's the most terrifying thing of all, the people you love being fucked around. Not to get all deep Debby on yo' asses, but that's just how I feel. So I guess maybe it does come down to 'being left behind by the boat while scuba diving' - you're the only one left, your friends and family all got eaten, and then the sharks went "nah, we're full, you can just sit there and think about what we've done, you can just swim about in everyone's blood and guts and know that we're just over here on the periphery, but we don't really want you right now".

Goddamn.

nighttime thunderstorm

My parents went away for a few days, so they dropped the dogs off here for us to babysit for two nights. Jesus. It's like having children! Babies, specifically. Mitch and Pip are beautiful, I love them to pieces, but they're not the easiest dogs to look after. Mitch - it's not really his fault. He's 15, his legs don't work so good, he's deaf and he has a psychotic (Pip) for a sister, and she spends most of her time stepping on his face, so its understandable that he gets grumpy and whiney and stares at you intently when you have nachos. Pip... well. She's psychotic. That's about it, really. You know it all.

The first night they were here they were both a little out of sorts. Mitch sucked it up, though, and went to bed quite happily (in my room, of course). Pip, on the other hand, would not settle at all. Running around, panting, barking, sniffing. I thought maybe she was restless to be outside, so I put her out, and then she started whimpering. She basically wants humans to move outside and live in the bushes. That way, she can have her cake and eat it too - lots of things to shit on and eat, plus people to play with. So I finally relented and stuck her on the bed with me. I've slept next to some pretty interesting people (well, not that many really) but having a 30kg Labrador next to you is like sleeping with Sadaam Hussein after a big night. The hair, the smells, the kicking, the licking, the sneezing, the dreaming, and BREATH. I don't think I got more than an hour's consecutive sleep the whole night. Needless to say I wasn't feeling too crash hot at Uni yesterday. So last night me and CK took Pip for a late-night walk down to the supermarket, gave her a chance to work off some steam before bed. She was much calmer, slept beside the bed and didn't disturb me til 7am when she wanted to go out for aforementioned shit and food. So you'd think, based on having two calm happy dogs asleep in my room, that I would've slept well, right? WRONG.

I have a giant poster of James Dean above my bed. Everyone knows that spiders like to hide behind posters. (But this is not a spider story). Everyone knows that spiders only creep out from behind those posters late at night, when it's all dark and quiet. Having a poster of that size (over 2 metres tall!) above my bed is a HUGE deal. Imagine how many Huntsman spiders could be under there? A whole NEST. They could be using Jimmy as a front, running all kinds of nasty illegal operations from under that things, all their little minions running around doing their nasty work for them. We are in Carlton, after all. So having the poster there has always made me a little nervous. But only because of the spiders. Never for the fear that it would fall on my head in the nighttime. Dear reader, this is exactly what happened last night. Giant James Dean fell right on my face. This doesn't sound particularly impressive or anything, but let me assure you, it was one of the most single frightening experiences I have ever had while sleeping. You ever accidentally kick the wall and wake yourself up? That's a bit scary. Your heart pounds for a second. That shit has NOTHING on the terror I felt last night. I thought the world was ending. I thought it had ended, in fact. I thought it was all over, the Germans had invaded, the Hellmouth had opened, the spiders were attacking - we're fucked. I woke up, of course, to the sound of it crashing down onto my head, but then was stuck underneath it, unable to tell what it was in my groggy sleep-state. It felt like a monster of the most hideous sort, flat and a bit shiny, papery-thin so it has no bones, just sucks out your life essence and leaves you a hollow husk, dead on the bed, not even dead but soulless and mindless and empty. Then I kinda came to a little bit, realised it was all ok, James must have fallen, it's just a poster, it's all ok, no Hellmouth.

Well.

Right at that minute - right when I've just decided that it's all going to be ok, that I'm a terrible over reactor and really need to get a life and stop being such a fucking pussy... right at that minute, Pip jumps onto the bed. Sleeping next to a 30kg Labrador with the breath from hell is bad enough. Having one you basically forgot was even there actually jump on you in the nighttime is... beyond words. Beyond. It was like being hit with a thousand bowling balls, scratched with a thousand knives, exposed to a thousand years of rotting fruit, swallowed by an otherworldly being and tossed around it its stomach with a bunch of other shit it ate.

At that point, I did a little wee in my pants, politely excused myself, and went to cry in the toilet.

no keyz!

I lost my house keys. Our crumbling Carlton terrace is one of those that cannot be vacated without using a key to lock the front door. Hence, I'm housebound until someone who DOES have a key, ie one of my housemouses, gets home and lets me out. It's been several hours, and even though it's pissing rain and hail outside and even though, really, I don't want to go outside (and wouldn't have any idea what I'd do once I got there), I feel completely claustrophobic. Being home alone is generally very very terrifying, I find. There's a lot of empty rooms, a lot of weapons, a lot of places to hide without being found. Terrifying. One of the big problems is that our couch faces away from the main corridor in the house. That is, when I'm watching TV, I can't see the door, hence I can't see any crazies as they come to kill me. Therefore my TV watching is severely disrupted. Most of the time I tough through it and watch back-to-back Buffy, but it rarely ends well. Most of the time it ends with me getting a knife from the kitchen and keeping it by my side just in case. Having the explain why I'm caressing a knife when the housies get home is another matter entirely.

I've been home quite a bit lately. This might not seem a bit deal, but I don't tend to spend a lot of time at my houses, usually. I spend more time at work or uni or in the toilet, important places. I've taken some time off work recently, though, in an effort to work on some writing commitments. I'm doing a whole lot of research for this new play I'm writing. It's a little bit about 1989, or at least the theme is 1989 - is that a theme? - so I've been looking at what people did and wore and saw and heard in 1989 and let me tell you, it weren't pretty. David Hasselhoff singing on the broken remains of the Berlin Wall to rapturous applause is, though hilarious, not the natural order of things. He is, however, wearing an amazing jacket - it lights up!! - so maybe it is inspiring after all. Other than that, I'm writing about post-apocalyptic (not really) brothers and an evil sister called Barnes, a bunch of craggy old European folk with funny names, and something with lots of talking animals and rhyme.

CK's home now, so it's time to venture out to find pizza and wine and bad DVDs.