WHAT DO ANIMALS THINK ABOUT?
“You scared?” she asked. “Scared of what?” “You know,” she said, “being this close.” “Why, because of the virus?” “Yes, because of the virus.” “A little bit.” Christie had just had her fingernails done up and we had been huddling in my car. The sun was — where was the sun? We didn’t know, we couldn’t see it, but there …
VEGAN THOUGHTS
I haven’t written in a while. This isn’t because I’ve been busy. It’s pretty much because I’ve been lazy. Sometimes I just lie on my couch, thinking about how rich I want to be, but then I become troubled by how much work it would require. Then I fall asleep and dream of strange things, like once, I dreamt I …
WHAT TO DO WHEN EVERYONE IS DOING BETTER THAN YOU
There will come a point in your life where everyone will be doing better than you. If you haven’t experienced it yet, then get excited! One day it will come unexpectedly in the mail, and you will feel like such, a, dick. This point in life may come quicker if you give up financial stability to pursue your dreams. I …
HOW TO BE HAPPY: THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE
Lately I’ve been trying, with much laziness and distraction, to conquer depression—to not only conquer it, but to brutally torture and murder it with repeated and frightening strikes of joy and laughter. One exercise I gathered from reading The 80/20 Principle was to think of the things that made me happy, and to spend more time and effort on those …
THIS STORY IS DEDICATED TO A MAN IN A COMA
Some time ago Christie’s step brother fell into a coma. Apparently he was having sex with his wife, and apparently all of a sudden he closed his eyes and didn’t open them again. Everyone prayed for him, and the next day, in hospital, he opened his eyes and acted as though nothing had ever happened. It’s a miracle! we exclaimed, …
THE OLD OLD HOUSE IN THE OLD OLD VILLAGE
Christie and I didn’t meet much when I went travelling, but once in a while she’d join me. She went with me to this old village. I had no idea how old it was, but everything about it seemed ancient: there was no electricity, there were no doors and all the houses looked like they were made of stone. But …
BUILDING YOUR CASTLE
I used to always fantasise about meeting a classy woman in a bar, overseas, while drinking a cocktail as some pianist played Fly Me To The Moon in the background. I pictured it being just like the movies: she’d be sitting across from me, and I’d glance up at her and say something witty, and she’d say something witty back, …
YOU’RE GETTING OLD AND THIS IS HOW YOU’LL DEAL WITH IT
It was with great disappointment that I found myself at peace. I hadn’t been clubbing in years, and I refused to go, so instead I drove Vail to the clubs and just sat in my car, in the Valley, on floor five of the parking lot or something, and making sure all my windows were closed I looked out towards …
BURNING ALL EX-GIRLFRIEND MEMORIES
I used to be a hoarder. I used to never want to let go of anything. Whenever time would try to drag something away from me, I’d pull onto it for my dear life. The other day, I decided to let that part of me go. Especially the part that clung onto old loves. I had too many memories of …
STRIPPING EVERYTHING AWAY
And my mind was muddled so I asked Christie to help me out. “Here,” she said, pointing to a spot next to her. I sat down. “Close your eyes.” I closed my eyes, and I waited, and just before I began to ask Christie what I was doing she put her hand on my lap. She told me to breathe …
THE LITTLE MAN WHO TELLS YOU THINGS
I was drinking Sapporro Beer with Christie in a hotel room. “You know, it’s fine to drink with someone you’re already with, but what annoys me is why we have to drink with people we’re interested in with the sole purpose of getting them drunk enough so we can get dirty with them. Why don’t we just say, up front, …
THE ANGEL WITH FOUR FACES
I wanted to write about angels but I couldn’t do it. Christie spent about two hours talking to me about angels. She spoke about the hierarchy of angels, how there’s the Seraphim, whose jobs are to continually worship God and who will only ever reveal themselves to humans if God is present, and then you get angels like the Cherubim, …
MADMAN IN THE MIRROR
The quality of my writing started to drop at the same time the quality of my life started to increase. I hadn’t had alcohol or drugs in months. I had found God. I was in a stable relationship. I regularly exercised. I took protein shakes. I hadn’t masturbated in over sixty days and whenever I caught myself in the mirror …
DELICIOUS TIM TAMS
As I parked my car and as the sky shut its light and as the world closed its door ever so slightly I found myself adrift, both internally and externally, whatever the hell that means. I was confused. No, I wasn’t confused, I was muddled. My mind was fog. I was walking in every shitty direction and ending up nowhere. …
ALIENS ARE IN THE AFTERLIFE
The most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life was a sunrise when I was eighteen years old. It was in Noosa, and it was four in the morning, and the sea looked like crumpled pastel crayons. The most beautiful song I’ve ever heard was a song whose title I’ll never know, whose tune I’ll never remember: all I’d told …
THE AFTERLIFE OF THE AFTERLIFE
“You know,” she smiled slightly, starting to say something but then stopping — her mind drifted somewhere, to some man or drama maybe. “You know what?” “The afterlife, eternity… like, even when people talk about afterlife and eternity. It scares me.” “It scares me too.” Vail exhaled smoke from her nostrils as she killed her cigarette. She texted someone something …
STRANGERS AND SUNSETS
“People are yearning to be spoken to. They put on these faces and they complain all the time, but in the end people are so desperate for a stranger to come up to them and speak to them.” “As long as the stranger is good looking and not a crazy homeless person, right?” Christie ignored this. We were driving, up …
BUSTY WOMEN WHO SWALLOW SWORDS
Christie and I watched LIMBO UNHINGED, this burlesque show in the Spiegeltent during the Brisbane Festival. What I remember most was Heather Holliday: this beautiful, curvy lady with lots of tattoos who put all sorts of things in her throat and pulled them back out. One of the first things she put down her throat was a sword of some …
THE PURPOSE OF VAIL
The scene started off like this: Vail and I were on Jude’s balcony, and the sun had been down for a while and Vail, wearing something black, was humming something I didn’t recognise. “It’s so, so easy to do what’s easy,” she said. “That’s why it’s called easy.” Vail said nothing to that. She looked out, at the traffic. I …
CRUMBLING APARTMENT WALLS
I wanted to tell her about a lot of things: how I wanted to kiss her in front of a zoo, how I hated the loneliness, how I wanted to face my fears yet flee for them – but I’d been told, repeatedly, that happiness could never be found by obsessing over oneself but that instead you had to give …
GOODBYE TIME
There are times when there’s nothing I want to write about. When there’s nothing much I really want to say. Time is so limited. It arrives, then it goes, and it arrives, and it goes – does it ever leave you feeling at peace? I suppose it does. There are times when time itself leaves me alone: it says to …
CHRISTIE’S LETTER
… Have you ever been completely loved before? Not the romantic kind of love, not the parental kind of love. I’m talking about the kind of love that’s complete. I know you don’t understand what I mean, and I don’t expect you to. Actually I do expect you to know what I mean, because I want you to experience it …
SUPER POWER MEDITATION
People try all sorts of things to get rid of their woes. Sometimes they try alcohol, sometimes they try meditation. “The worst form of meditation is masturbation meditation,” Jude told me. “You think that when you masturbate, you’ll be in a constant state of bliss, but you won’t be. Firstly you’ll always want to change the video you’re watching, …
THE LONELINESS
My loneliness can be an unforgiving piece of shit sometimes. I don’t want it to be there, but it lures me out when I don’t want to come out. It kisses me with its sour breath and proceeds straight to my heart, and it lingers there, and it gets comfortable there, and it calls it home and refuses to leave. …
I MET HANNAH AT A SOCIAL GATHERING
Hannah momentarily entered my life while Christie and I were not in good terms. I met her at a social gathering. “You know I researched scientology for an assignment once,” I told her. “I wanted to be like one of those clever types who make fun of odd belief systems. So I went to one of their presentations so that …
HAPPINESS, JOY, SMILES, LAUGHTER, WHATEVER
“What is happiness?” “Happiness is a BJ that never ends. Just constant swallowing.” “Happiness is being in bed.” “Happiness is having her back.” “Happiness is being with God.” “Happiness is being rich.” I was with about four people who were all discussing happiness. I remained quiet. Nothing I said or what anyone said mattered, really. To me, the definition of …
YOU NEED MORE MONEY
Sometimes I see the earth as this tiny marble occupied by these even tinier dots called people, and all these people are looking up at a giant sun made of money, and they’re all bowing to it, talking about it night and day, thinking about it night and day, and when they’re not talking or thinking about money night and …
MIRACLES IN WEST END
I had become a mess so Christie told me to visit a lady in West End who performs miracles. Apparently, she helped cure a lady of her cancer, she helped cure a friend of his chronic back pains, she returned joy to a broken person’s life. I went to the hall and sat down among a small group of others. …
SOMETHING IN YOUR STOMACH
Someone from work once gave me a moleskin, and for some time I just let it sit at the back of my car. “If you don’t want to write in it, why don’t you draw something in it?” Christie asked me from her hospital bed. “Yeah okay,” I complained. “Like drawing is so fucking easy.” She got mad, so I …
GUYS IN AN ALLEYWAY
Christie and I were walking along the city and this guy snatched her purse. “Let’s chase him!” she said and we ran and found him in an alleyway, where about five or six of his friends were waiting. “Let’s get out of here,” Christie said and we ran off. It was a quiet drive home. _ Book I’m reading: …
VALENTINE’S DAY LOVE
Christie told me that she fell in love with Barry Edgar about four years ago. He didn’t know that she’d fallen in love with him, and understandably so: she didn’t tell him and she didn’t change anything about the way she treated him. Barry Edgar was a waiter who once travelled to Europe. He also once travelled to India. He …
LOVE CHECKLIST
“Being in a relationship is an easy yet complicated process.” This is what Christie started our conversation with. “Really now.” “At first it’s easy because there’s no checklist yet. There are no rules – you’re soaked in this, this unshakeable high. But then, once you get comfortable with the other person, a checklist emerges, and all of a sudden you …
THE END OF EVERYTHING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD
Are there two Christians with the exact same ideals? Are there two atheists who believe in exactly the same things? I wonder how Jesus meditated. I wonder how he prayed and what he asked for on a daily basis. I wonder what Buddha would’ve looked like, if he would’ve been taller than me, and if he was bald and always …
DRINKING WINE ON A BALCONY BEFORE CHRISTMAS
“Have you ever spoken to God on Christmas?” This is what Christie asked me as we sat on my couch on my balcony. It was some time in the evening, and beyond us, beyond the railing, were buildings and trees and lights, and beyond that was the city, and beyond that was the universe, and beyond that was time, and …