Graphic content

I hate to be graphic, but if someone had been graphic with me like this years ago, so many things could have been different, so here it is.

I've still been running four or five times a week, and now kayaking on the off days, and after a couple of months of this I'm probably closest to 'fit' that I've ever been in my life. The corollary of this, which I guess I wasn't expecting quite so, well, practically, is that I'm much, much better at fucking now. I've never got any complaints in the past, and certainly drive has never been a problem, but the difference is (pardon the pun) fucking dramatic. Seriously. It has really sparked off a concern within me that the world is absolutely packed with people who aren't giving the loving their partners deserve.

It's funny, these unspoken but horribly useful truths. I guess most people have a vague idea, if someone mentions the topic, that if you're fit you're a better lay, but it's never an explicit part of the campaigns to try to make people fit, as far as I've seen.

My other favourite in that sense are anti-drug campaigns. They never mention the undeniable truth of how fucking good drugs are. They always concentrate on how bad drugs are, how using them is all pure lose, and then when a kid finally gets their nose into some drugs and spontaneously discovers how fucking awesome they are, of course they're going to go apeshit on this whole unexpected world of win. I can't help but believe that if these sorts of campaigns would be more effective if they could at least admit that drugs are jolly fun, but ultimately too dangerous to be worth all the fun, like being a pirate.

The tightening bonds of possessions

I have another kayak, which I think I'll call Sheila Rukh Khan, in honour of India's Oprah and of all the smashing Bollywood I watched on the plane ride over here, and the still-relevant Aussie slang for woman. Sheila Rukh Khan is, like Jemima, a Perception kayak, and roundabout the same 4.5 metre length, which is ideal for most purposes.

She goes like a siren and takes turns like a Nascar driver and I love her. I am sort of pissed though - she cost A$900, and came with a crap paddle, and I know that was a bargain because I looked high and low, and it was the best price I could find for a kayak like her. Jemima cost C$600, and came with a nice paddle, and a bilge pump, and a rescue rope, and FUCK ME, Australia is expensive. I am making sure I remember that, as I really want to avoid lifestyle inflation, and in this corporatist cultural wasteland blowing money is the main social activity.

Also, we're looking at buying a house here. We found one we like, and that we can afford (I think), and that we can make some rental income off of even if we decide we hate it here and leave again (increasingly unlikely - certainly for the next three years or so - provided I don't get sacked). Today I'm going to go see if we can even get a mortgage despite our somewhat irregular situation. I have a feeling as soon as those whacking great payments come off my salary every month, I'll stop having to struggle quite so much to remind myself Australia's FUCKING EXPENSIVE.

I will probably never make it past lower-middle management

Mostly because my whole modus operandi as a lower-middle manager is to

1) Tell people who are doing okay that they're doing okay
2) Tell people who are getting stressed to manage their workload better
3) Tell fucking cretins to TURN DOWN THE FUCKING SUCK

MOTHERFUCKER there are some cunting stupid morons out there.

On the plus side, yesterday I ran for 22 whole minutes without having to take a walk break, which I had always reckoned was physically impossible. I'm pleased because being able to run for 20 minutes without a break was the first non-orgasmic goal I'd set myself in physical terms I think ever in my life, and also because once I got to 15 minutes I started feeling like I could just keep running forever; I stopped because I knew it was a good idea to stop, not because I wanted to. It felt great.

Yah, so I didn't slow down once, unless you count an impromptu frolic with a cattledog who was also using the cricket pitch, who thought she could herd me until she realized she could play with me instead. Part of the reason I'm so conflicted about the dongo issue is that cattledogs were bred from dingos, and they're lovely, so Jeebus, man, just let those dogs fuck away.

Running outside has given me some interesting dog experiences. The sweetest was at the same cricket pitch, one just where the countryside begins next to the town, that I cycle to get to. I was biking away from it from an angle I don't usually take when suddenly a pack of baying dogs led by a giant staffie came roaring out of somebody's driveway. I stopped the bike and held out a hand to the staffie, who was obviously the boss, and who calmed down and shut up as she recognized me as a human instead of an evil, two-wheeled death machine that was coming to destroy her family and steal her food.

Once she looked reasonably calm I pushed off again and immediately the silly girl started howling her head off and chasing me once more. I stopped and held out my hand a second time; this time, when she sniffed it, I swear she looked sheepish, as though she was ashamed of having forgotten I was human, and trotted off with her head hung in shame. Staffies are very easily antropomorphized, I know, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

Fuckin' staffies, I love'em, if I didn't think breeding dogs was evil I'd totally beg the F-word to let us get one. I wish they were my work-underlings sometimes - not sure how good they'd be at industrial journalism, but at least when I scream at them to turn down the suck, they'd have the graciousness to look ashamed of themselves.

Jesus of the driveway

So we got rid of our rats by boarding up the holes they were coming in through. Easy. The thing is, the agency had already put down poison for them so yesterday we got the spectacle of one slowly expiring on our driveway, and I couldn't scrape together the balls to kill it and put it out of its misery. I couldn't stop thinking about it - how it would feel when it heard the birds, or smelt a cat walking by; how its little animal brain was dealing with the pain. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis to be quite straight with you - that something as precious as life is so easily taken away because one disease vector (us) didn't want another disease vector (the rat) to be alive anymore.

Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.

In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.

I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.

I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.

Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.

Free ballin'

Anyways, to carry on from yesterday's rant: Australia has a well-known problem with invasive species, and for a moment let's forget the dongo question and simply say that this problem includes legions of feral cats and dogs. When you've got few extant large native predators (even the local snakes aren't the kind you'd use as a metaphor for a good man's tackle; the amethystine python, the longest here, can stretch up to almost nine metres but it's not what you'd call girthy), this means you've got two new apex predators and that's serious. Feral cats and dogs are destructive, that's unarguable.

What is shocking and so very fucking Australian about the situation is that this destructive situation has resulted in a number of extreme, expensive, and morally questionable measures - dogless and catless communities or zones, catch-and-kill ranger policies, poisoning, trapping, etc. - but it has not resulted in any meaningful control of the pet breeding and sales industry, or even of a fuckin' subsidized desexing programme.

That's the 1) point - the first thing of the two I meant to list yesterday which has made it less likely we'll stay here. There is a real moral black hole in Australia, which allows what are essentially humanitarian and ethical issues - how do we deal with the impact of having released two new apex predators into the ecosystem? - to be dismissed by tough-sounding, politically appealing methods - we'll kill'em to keep the Aussie bush Aussie - when there is a less tough, cheaper, less bullshitty, way to deal with it that you'd need to do to let the first method be at all effective anyways - subsidize the desexing of companion animals so that the inevitable new rounds of abandonments don't simply fill up the vaccuum left by the catch-and-kill programmes.

You also see this sort of disgusting politicization of a humanitarian issue here very blatantly and disturbingly in all the party posturing over refugee claimants, but I'm angry enough over the strays today, so I won't get into it. Anyways I'm trying to make my peace with this first issue because I understand it's hardly unique to Australia.

Anyways, it seems that this lack of a subsidized desexing programme is due to a quite conscious effort to discourage one on the part of the AVA - see thier own statement about it. The lady at the shelter ascribed this to vets' desires to make sure their income streams and profit margins stay broad and it's hard for me to see that she's wrong. With all the assurance of an insane retard trying to fill in an oasis with gold bricks while he doesn't have enough money to irrigate his nearby farm, they claim with bare-faced cheek, in a country that carries out catch-and-kill programmes, that subsidized desexing programmes are too expensive and haven't worked anywhere they've been tried.

And no doubt they are believed, because of this really, REALLY Australian trait, which is quite unique, and the second thing that is making it less likely for us to live here permanently, and which I'll go on about tomorrow, having ranted all over the place once more today.

Positive Cattitude

We went for an interview at the local animal shelter this morning to see about fostering cats, which we will do, both to help deal with our rat problem and to be responsible citizens and, like Dot in Raising Arizona, so that I got something small enough to cuddle. The lady who worked there was one of the more passionate charity workers I've ever met and after five minutes I realized why: she's British.

Now I make my fun of the Inselaffen, and out of all of the Germanic countries Affen Insel is far and away the most banana-republicky. But one thing I will say for them: they are bloody marvellous with animals. I understand the notoriety attached to fox hunting, which is indeed repellent, but it's important to bear in mind that fox hunters and their advocates represent a tiny minority of the population, most of whose majority doesn't even like foxes much and yet still considers the practice fuckin' barbaric, to the point of having it criminalized.

Australia, however . . . well. There are lots of parallels between Australian culture and Inselaffen culture, probably far far more than your typical Australian would dream of admitting or even imagining, but a touching and laudable concern for animal welfare is not one of them. For me there are two fiscal/legal situations that illustrate this to a degree so disturbing and repellent that I understand I'm now less likely to stay in this country than I was before discovering them.

1). Australia, as is well-known, is rotten with invasive animals, including feral cats and dogs. It is a real ecological problem. My favourite associated ecological problem, though my personal opinion is that it's more of a thing than a problem, are all of the ethical and eugenetic issues swirling around dingos, in a way they don't swirl around canines in Canada.

Briefly, if a dog in the wilds of Canada runs into a wolf or coyote, there is the biological possibility of reproduction, as genetically speaking dogs, coyotes, and wolves are all a single canine species capable of making fertile babies. However, what is much more likely is that the dog will be eaten, and the odds of sexual congress are poor for that reason. And also poor because lady wolves and coyotes in our wintercentric land only hit oestrus seasonally, which cuts down on the scope for lovin' somewhat (though my understanding is that usually these sorts of interbreeds are boy wolves/coyotes/dingos doing it with a bitch - sort of a much more S&Mish version of Lady and the Tramp).

Here in Australia, however, if a feral dog and a dingo meet up, generally the feral dog will get eaten, but there is far more scope than there is with coyotes and wolves for sparks to fly and babies to get made, especially since both dogs and dingos hit oestrus many times over the year. After all dingos, in the final analysis, amount to multi-generational ferals; they were brought to the continent as domestics, and had no one to fuck but each other, that is, other feral domestics.

The issue here, though, is that dingos are a discrete group, with cultural meanings to the aboriginal people, and recognized as fundamentally separate from other feral domestic dogs even though every indication is that they were imported to Australia by aboriginal people as domestic dogs. So there is a broad feeling that when a dingo fucks a domestic dog and they make dongo or whatever babies, this is some sort of pollution of the dingo gene pool going on. This is a particularly Australian problem as in the rare instances where a coyote or a wolf fucks a dog and makes babies with it in Canada, there's little idea of some sort of pollution of the coyote or wolf gene pool, and several dog breeds popular in Canada are very, very wolfy in their provenance; my understanding is that hybridizing wolves and dogs there for commercial purposes is illegal but in those instances where a bitch gets herself fucked instead of eaten by a wolf her babies are in hot demand . . .

Oh, how I've blathered and haven't even yet got beyond the background exposition of the first point, which is actually about subsidizing desexing. More bitching about Australia tomorrow.

I'm afraid of the television

We're watching Twin Peaks again. Well, I'm watching it again, ten years or so after the fact, and the F-word is watching it for the first time, which is a shame, because last night we got to the episode where Agent Cooper finds out Who Killed Laura Palmer, and I'm fine with not watching anymore, but we must keep going so the F-word feels like he'll understand Fire Walk With Me, which I haven't seen yet and he has. Oh well. I really like Twin Peaks, though I didn't give a rat's ass about it when it was actually on television, and so the second half of the second season really, really disgusts me. It's like poor fan fiction. Everybody just checked out. Like the last two seasons of the Sopranos. The fucking well ran dry, but it's American television so you've gotta keep the fucking oasis open until all the camels are dead. Gah.

It does remind me, though, that I really like David Lynch, and what I really like about him: there's something emotionally honest about his sort of surrealism. I've only seen two or three of his movies but Inland Empire was just the best thing since sliced bread and watching the first season and a half of Twin Peaks reminded me of what I loved so much about it. More than any other filmmaker I can think of, David Lynch manages to communicate what I reckon is really most people's actual surrealistic state of mind - this sort of in-between, 1/10th in the world, 9/10ths completely preoccupied with a more-or-less playful three-way wrestling match between the shadow and persona and animus, each of which pick up bits and pieces of the physical reality surrounding them and/or the collective unconscious to hit each other with, like professional wrestlers with metal chairs.

Most filmmakers and certainly most television writers are so procedural and observational, and that's fine so far as it goes but I don't think it reflects anybody's real relationship with the world. When you get dumped, you don't just sit there crying while mood-appropriate music plays until you feel better; a million things buzz around in your brain around the sort of central emotion of "aw shit", and it is very complex and very different from everyone else's experience of that emotion in the details while being the same in the broad design, and frankly I think it's impossible to communicate or illustrate that while maintaining any sort of 'realism' because our brains are not realistic. Nonetheless, when you watch a normal movie or television show and someone gets dumped, all that happens to communicate the emotion to you is some person sits there crying while mood appropriate music plays until they feel better.

All of which, again, is fine so far as it goes, but considering how much television-type media a Western person watches from cradle-to-the-grave - considering that unless you're off your fucking head, you have to admit that most Western people under 35 have almost certainly learnt as much or more from television than from their parents about how the world is supposed to work - well, it concerns me. It concerns me that that sort of media isn't letting people know that it's okay, probably even good, when your emotions are complex and conflicted; when it isn't letting people know that emotional procedures don't exist, and that words like 'joy', 'grief', 'guilt', 'pride', 'love' and 'hate' aren't ends in themselves or self-contained or tidy, but just very simplistic shorthand for very rich and confusing experiences.

I guess I have two real fears about this: first, that we're raising generations of perfectly normal people who are going to confuse the complex emotions that they're feeling with some sort of mental illness, and second, that eventually perfectly normal people will simply stop experiencing emotions in such a complex way. The second is probably very unlikely but it's my greatest fear that doesn't involve having my fingernails ripped off and points upward on the physical discomfort scale for me and mine. The first is probably currently rolling out in a household near you.

The pleasures of the subtropics

Aw gross. There are fucking rats here. Up until last night I'd been holding out hope that somehow all those little turds that looked just like rat turds were actually from the tree frogs, and then I went into the kitchen and startled a great big fucking brown rat on the counter - agitated the poor thing so much that it fell off. Anyways, that tipped me off as to where they were coming in from, and hopefully how to keep them out.

We called the agency, who just sent round a guy to put down poison, which is gonna mean nothing but stink and, eventually, poison-immune rats. You simply cannot rely on a slow-acting oral poison to exterminate a community of animals whose life cycle is based on large litters and high mortality, evolution is working too fast. And frankly I don't want to exterminate the poor little assholes. They're cute. Aside from being revolting disease vectors, they're quite nice animals and they don't deserve to die, and if they are going to die, some animal should get lots of pleasure from killing them.

Our neighbours told us our predecessors dealt with the problem by keeping a carpet python. Those are supposed to often come up into the houses around here after the rats - theirs was a wild one they got a permit for, and they took it with them when they left. I sort of hope that a new one moves in (the locals have promised me that we'd only get carpet pythons in the house; the highly poisonous snakes hereabouts, the brown snakes, apparently "don't climb". Hmph. We'll hope for the best).

I think we'll deal with the problem by fostering cats. I miss Lexie fucking terribly but she is doing really well at Sugarplum's now, and it's agreed by all and sundry that it doesn't make sense to move her here. But I don't want to replace her, and the F-word doesn't want us to permanently take in a pet before we have some kids, so we are trying to get into a local cat-fostering programme.

The legends were true

Yesterday was Australia Day, which we celebrated in Byron Bay, which is an interesting place. I imagine it's a lot like Scarborough would have been in the 1950's, before cheap package holidays let the Inselaffen escape their grim and moldy land on their holidays, except with better drugs and more burnouts, and better music, and much more expensive, of course. Actually it's probably nothing like Scarborough was in the 1950's but I think it's no coincidence that here in Northern Rivers I'm homesick for just about everywhere I've ever thought of as home except for North Yorkshire. Topographically it is very evocative of Yorkshire here, but it's not ruined and economically bereft, and it's about 20 degrees warmer. And people's accents are a million times less awesome.

Anyways, we stuck to the beach and one or two places off the main tourist strips and went walking around, and heard some flamenco, and it was lovely, and I saw my first wild sea turtles, stingrays, and dolphins. The last especially were a revelation, as I've always suspected dolphins were actually imaginary, since all of my faith in their existence was based on hearsay. The ones we saw were a little reddish, which was a nice touch, and looked like they were having an awesome time. This was also the first time I really went into the ocean. It's the same ocean I sort of blame for M disappearing in a ridiculous anthropomorphisizing sort of way, and for heaven's sake it was on the other side of it, but I still have to explain to myself that it's not the ocean's fault, and that I'm not suddenly going to see him tumbled up on our coast here in the waves.

Having protested too much

The F-word is having some Pink Floyd moments these days, which I can stand better than his Frank Zappa moments, which he's not really allowed to have anymore now that I work at home, poor guy, although I will let him play the symphonic music, which I'll go into my office and drown out with J-Pop if I get annoyed. I'm not substantially a J-Pop fan but it turns out it's the antidote to Frank Zappa overexposure. Especially this version of "Ice Cream Meltin' Mellow", which is the first bit of music since I was young and depressed and enjoying Massive Attack which has made me want to visit the country the people who wrote it came from. I've also got a massive jones on for sushi (see past comments about the whiteness of this town, and the attendant shittiness of the cuisine) though I can probably take care of that just by going to some part of the nearby Queensland coast whereof Australians have spent the last 20 years being half-scandalized, half-titillated (and very open to being completely ripped off in speculative real estate 'investments' - this is the country for shysters, I tells ya) about the Japanese invasion.

Anyways, I don't mind the Pink Floyd much, because 30% of it is nice and the other 70% is funny, and if the whole thing hadn't been ruined for everybody by Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals I might even enjoy it. Also I've noticed that when the F-word has his Pink Floyd moments it's a pretty clear indication he's generally happy, and that's nice. We're both quite happy - my constant complaining is, well, constant, and even in heaven I'll probably be bitching about something. My idea of heaven is not absolutely mutually exclusive of looking down at earth and doing this sort of thing:



Things are generally pretty decent - the job is good and is paying for my Mandarin lessons, the F-word is painting and sculpting and getting up to such shenanigans like a lunatic, and it is awesome to have a house, even if I suspect there are rats in it, and I know there are great big tree frogs in it, because I'll have to catch them and let them out a few times a week so that we don't step on them whilst stumbling to the bathroom at night - the tree frogs being more of a feature really, because they are fricking beautiful. And L---'s fucking whiteness is getting easier to take because I have two trips to China planned before the trip to Canada this southern-hemisphere winter, and one of the trips to China will be to deepest-darkest-most-industrial China, which will be exciting and will no doubt provide some strange, strange food that I never would have thought of eating before.

Sitting naturally high on a well-saddled horse

I used to think that when it came to don't-do-drugs songs, it was pretty much equivalent to wear-a-condom songs - there was only one good one. That's right, "2 Become 1" totally gives me a lady-boner. I can't believe I miss the Spice Girls, but in these degenerate times, I do. Not only did they have personalities, if pre-fab ones; I just can't see any modern pre-fab nympho pop productions singing about putting on a condom, certainly not so convincingly.



But I understand I'm a bit gay for the Spice Girls, mostly because of listening to Spice on headphones at the dentists whilst tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide and getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and it just being superb. Of course the reefer is my true love even if we're taking a break - moving to a country where it's illegal again after it having been such a casual, simple thing in Europe has just made the whole thing sort of sad and pathetic somehow. But reefer aside, now that my non-reefer drug days are probably more or less behind me (at least until I spend my old age tripping my ovaries out) I have to say I think tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide whilst getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and listening to Spice was the best drug experience I've ever had, and I've had some really nice ones. I need to get my hands on some more nitrous oxide. I hear that's the first drug pain relief when you give birth . . . hmm . . . maybe time to ignore "2 Become 1"'s contraceptive message. People have kids for dumber reasons.



Anyways, speaking of drugs, Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)" is the don't-do-drugs song that I used to reckon was the only good one, though then the F-word started bringing all these great reggae albums home and I realized I was wrong. It's still fucking good though.

Rat-proof containers

Well, I guess in a sense it was inevitable but I still feel like a cretin for feeling it: I miss Brussels. It is a difficult emotion, because there's no doubt in my mind that in terms of people's comportment it really is the stupidest place on earth, but there are things I miss, and some of them are very big, like some sort of government accountability in terms of making sure the cost of living isn't unbearable, and some of them more localized - I'd punch myself in the face for just five minutes in Petits Riens, despite the trogladytic delivery service, and oh, how I miss MuziekPublique and other cheap cultural events . . .

So anyways, it's a difficult miss. I've never felt so conflicted in missing a thing that wasn't a noxious but lovely ex-boyfriend before. You know how it is, don't you all? There's that one, or possibly three or four but probably no more than that, ex-partner(s) who gave really magnificent head or fucked like a pro or could make you laugh until you peed yourself but was in other and ultimately much more important ways a fucking head case, who was borderline or else quite comfortably abusive. So that's how I'm feeling at the moment.

Partly this was brought on by a much more straightforward missing of Berlin and Barcelona and other places a helluvalot more easily accessible from Brussels than here. But I think much more so, it was brought on by realizing that life here is expensive to the degree that if I lose my job, we can't stay. It's as simple as that. We cannot afford any sort of decent life here without me making the absurd amounts of money I'm making, on top of the F-word's eventual re-entry into the workforce next month, and even so at the moment we can't afford to live anywhere decently sized where we don't have to put our fruit into a rat-proof container, and everything is just a non-stop gouge.

And for somebody who was planning to more or less stop working in two or three years, that's a fucking blow; and for someone who moved from Europe to this place on the understanding it was going to be easier to stop working here, that's a fucking fuck of a fucking blow.

Scarily good

Oh, fuck me. Building on the previous post about condensed milk in coffee. Last night our gas was cut off for various reasons, spoking out from the central point that Australia is rotten with fucking shysters. So anticipating I wouldn't be able to make coffee in the morning due to our stove being, usually thankfully, gas powered, I froze some leftover espresso so as to make some sort of iced coffee concoction today. This is what I made:

- three shots of frozen espresso
- two cups of milk
- three tablespoons of condensed milk

Blended.

I have a feeling - and I don't want to invite the wrath of the gods here as it's just a suspicion and as, frankly, drinking something this delicious is actually a deeply humbling experience - I have a feeling that I've discovered the nectar of nectar-and-ambrosia fame. Next time I'm going to try adding a banana and some chili pepper and that might be the ticket. I'll let you know in 30 years or so if I've aged at all.

But the simple recipe above resulted in something that I'm sure I've tasted before, and I even recall where, since it was pretty recent. It was at the Jurong bird park in Singapore, where the cafe (which was shockingly cheap considering that bird park is the international weirdo twitcher Mecca equivalent of Disneyland), served some shockingly cheap iced coffee concoction that I nearly didn't order because it said 'iced kopi' on the menu, and as I didn't know that 'kopi' was the Malay or whatever word for coffee at the time I was concerned it might be some sort of iced fish or iced root vegetable. Anyways, it was no ordinary iced coffee, and I loved it, and I couldn't work out how they'd done it, and the internet wouldn't tell me, and it turns out this was how - with milk and strong coffee and condensed milk.

Sigh. That makes me fucking happy.

Betterish

Feeling better today regarding the culture shock, if grudgingly so, as a friend here fixed up my bike in return for an evening's babysitting (his kids, not him), so I could go for a spin around the valley this evening. And it's beautiful. I'm willing to let the beauty work on my knots for a bit.

We looked at houses to buy this morning, which was pretty odd. I have some doubts about taking on that much debt. I mean it's a fuckload of debt. But barely a month in and we've already been subject to hankerchief-pankerchief from the mighty wank of an estate agents' that's handling the rental - some things are international I suppose, but it's nice to be able to write angry letters in my mother tongue again - and the way this town is, a huge mortgage will actually still be cheaper than the huge rent . . . anyways. I don't know. We don't have to make up our mind tomorrow and the agent we've got looking for us isn't one of those awful perky people so it's all fine.

Culture shocking

This weekend at a local market, I came across a book about Gaudi and burst into tears as I realized how fuckin' far away Barcelona is, and how unlike Barcelona L--- is. The nature is beautiful here, and as I learn to accept all of the creepy-crawlies, only getting more so. But down there in the market, which the city holds in the parking lot of a local shopping centre, I just felt so surrounded by civilized ugliness and people who don't give a fuck that their city is a million times uglier than Barcelona that I just got overwhelmed. I'm planning to see my family and friends in Canada soon and I'm not missing most of Europe, but these days missing Spain and Berlin is just fucking gutting me.

The culture shock has well and truly hit, as you can tell, and having expected it in the abstract doesn't feel like it was actually any sort of preparation for feeling it. Oh well. Still reasonably happy to be here and even if I wasn't I'd stick it out, if only to spite the people who reckoned I couldn't and that I'd be crawling back to the crowded, dirty, annoying, but beautiful cities of Europe within a year. And of course keeping the lines of communication with the F-word well and truly open about the mental turmoil. If I can't hack it here he's suggested we try one of the cities that aren't Sydney before calling it quits on the country, which is a reassuring fallback plan; Melbourne, during my brief visit there, resembled a much prettier and warmer Toronto, which was charming. Anyways.

In other and better news, jogging is still fun. The best thing about being a winded maggot is that once you get going the payoffs are so immediate and dramatic; scarcely two weeks in and my tummy is already clefting in two in the promise of a future six-pack (I really don't want one though, I reckon they're ugly on girls - on boys too for that matter except for the ectomorph, heroin-addict types I think are just fucking beautiful during the last five days of my menstrual cycle - thanks for fucking me up in pre-pubescence, early 90's grunge) and I have more energy generally, although I'm just jogging 15 minutes a day, and that still in reps.

And another good thing about being here: the sub-tropical climate is fucking beautiful. I love it. It's perfect for me - the humidity makes my hair and skin feel like they've been let out of jail, the temperature is perfect, and I can wear sarongs and mumus all the time. And enjoy smoothies every morning - finally the right climate for it - and I've figured out that if you put some hot chili flakes into the smoothie it makes it a good bit better.

So complaining, complaining, and complaining will continue, and I doubt I've shed my last tears over the prospect of not seeing the moon over Barcelona from the Guell Park for many more years, but life is still better than a kick in the tits.

You're the condensed milk in my coffee

Singapore gave me the best culinary week of my life; fuckin' beautiful memories, and a real motivation to keep my job so I can make more trips there on the company dime, and hopefully eat much, much more. Also would like to reserve the option of moving there for work if the F-word ever dumps me. Australia is good in many ways but if I can't have him I at least want fuckin' unlimited Asian food, and this place, as mentioned, is so. Goddamn. Caker.

(And Australians care about food the way cakers do, which is, they fuckin' don't. Their national dish is fuckin' 'meat' pies whose fillings are guaranteed to be at least 25% flesh, and if there's anything less fucking suitable for this climate than those disgusting little hockey pucks, it's roast lamb - the other national dish. And don't get me started on their fucking desserts; if all you saw of Australia was its dessert tray you'd reckon you were at a fuckin' church social in the Hebrides or one of the poorer parts of Scandinavia after the local Nokia factory packs up and moves to China. Well. Anyways. The Australian cities are apparently way better, with enough Asians and olive-skinned types in them to get to that critical mass where the food is really good, like in Toronto or Vancouver. But being babied and cosseted in Singapore after the annoyances of Brussels, etc., may have ruined me for any other urban conglomeration.)

Anyways again. Now is not the time to speculate on Plan Bs in the event the love of my life breaks my fuckin' heart and consigns me to a cold-hearted but pleasure-saturated life of lascivious gluttony, wherein I jog along the sterilised beach all morning so as to eat all afternoon and get a little work done in the evening in a country where almost everybody loves food as much or more than I do. Now is the time to tell you that one of the more tangible gifts Singapore gave me is putting condensed milk into my coffee - I thing I learned from the Vietnamese restaurant close to my boss's old office, Viet Express, which is one of only two restaurants I made two trips to during the week, it being so fucking good*.

The Spanish do something similar, I know, though I didn't try it when I was there - a cafe bonbon or bombom or however you say 'candy' in Spanish, which is half espresso, half condensed milk. At the Viet Express, they served a sort of strong, espresso-ground drip coffee, with a dose of condensed milk next to it - not quite half/half but almost. As for me, I just add a big oozing tablespoonful of condensed milk to the equivalent of three shots of espresso and that makes my afternoon fucking magnificent. The coffee gets exactly the right sweetness with an added caramel velvetiness. I recommend it strongly if you're a sugar-in-your-coffee sort of person.

*The other was the Thanying Restaurant, a fucking delectable Thai restaurant in Amara hotel which honestly - my family's finer efforts excepted - debatably served me the best food I've ever eaten. Ever. And I have eaten a lot of food. We took a business contact there for lunch and I nearly died of pleasure, so I took the F-word back in the evening. Going there also gave my boss the chance to deliver one of the funniest bits of attempted cultural education I'd heard since 2003: "Thai people are the nicest, warmest, gentlest people in the world, until they start hitting you."

The waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flavour

I don't know if I mentioned but a few months ago I dreamt there was a blight on garlic; that almost overnight, all of the fucking garlic in the world shrivelled up and rotted away, and the fucking day dawned bleakly on shops emptied of their fucking garlic. It was the closest I've ever come to encompassing an idea of Armageddon in my head, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Amageddon, and I actually woke up screaming. It was one of those nightmares where you wake up believing it's real, and you have to sort of come to realize how unlikely it is, how somehow the world is still turning around you, etc., so it must have been a dream . . . and then gradually calming down. Previous to that, I think I'd only had those sorts of nightmares about having murdered someone.

Anyways, the F-word and I had a good laugh about what fucked up priorities I have if I'm having a fucking brutal nightmare about something so unlikely. And then we moved to Australia, and the fucker started flooding, and the other day we went to a huge grocery store and THERE WAS NO FUCKING GARLIC. Nor was there any at the grocery store on the other side of the shopping centre*. It's because of the fucking floods. The farmers can't get the garlic dry enough to ship. And for the first time in my life I had a vision of what it's like when your nightmares come true, it was like a fucking slasher movie.

There's still no garlic if you're unlucky, because Australians are awfully rah-rah-rah in a hideously cringeworthy way about things being made in Australia (although all the garish nationalistic labelling on the products has those sorts of vague, Body-Shop-"Against Animal Testing" type compositions that mean nothing, like "Proudly Operated in Australia!", which could just mean that an Australian truck driver takes the product from the port to the supermarket), so the stores haven't just buckled and ordered it from China like everyone fuckin' should.

It is bloody horrible. Bloody horrible.

*Australians have two principal supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, basically indistinguishable in terms of prices and product range, which each occupy opposite sides of almost all the shopping centres, and are both fucking overpriced suck factories, and then they call this thing that walks, quacks and fucks like fuckin' cartel "choice".

Spending money

Uggggggh. I hate spending money, and we're spending so much of it getting set up here. It is fucking painful. The only way I can reconcile myself to it is by spending the bare minimum humanly possible to get exactly the things I want without going to Ikea, and it's at times like this I realize how important it is to have a life partner who has the same priorities as you beyond simply the lots-of-high-quality-orgasms (both cheapskates, both sybarites, both Ikeaphobes). We went into one store three times today, and went on a 40 minute drive in the pounding rain to pick up a Freecycle offering. All of the other men I've ever carnivally intercoursed with would have spasmed with impatience.

This is the first Ikea-free house I'll have lived in, by the way, since leaving my parents' home, which is still Ikea-free. I don't object to Ikea in principal if I think about it rationally, and considering how fucking expensive Australia is, it would probably make a lot of financial sense for us to go on an Ikea run. But I find it such a draining, miserable consumer experience to go there; I feel so anticipated somehow, which you'd think would be a good thing but somehow it isn't.

And less rationally and more emotionally, I do object to Ikea in principal. It's this sort of vision of a Soviet Russia without shortages . . . they might not be starving you, but they've still murdered all the mencheviks and are betraying and undermining international anarcho-syndicalists at every turn.

Not to mention they won't knock off $30 or $40 if you haggle. I've never considered myself a haggler but living in Australia now, it seems that I am. I never buy a big ticket item without asking for a discount because of some insignificant flaw, offering to pay in cash or asking for delivery to be chucked into the ticket price. So far it's worked, of course. It's like getting laid. Everybody wants to strike a deal, you just have to make it clear you're on the table. Or something.

But apparently, from discussions I've been having, women don't try to get prices down here. I hope the people who've been telling me that are wrong because that's crazy. But I've been told there's some sort of social conditioning going on involving a strong, strong desire not to seem like a cheapskate, and it just being sort of rude and forward to ask.

When we decided to come here, the F-word and I would warn each other often that moving back to an Anglo-Saxon country, we'd have to stop being rude Eur0-style cunts who drop their money on the counter, don't respect other people's personal space, and get pushy when they're crowded - you know - the normal social behavior of urban Europeans.

But one thing we're grateful for that we picked up in Europe, where it is a truth universally acknowledged and borne out in the unfriendly, unobsequious behaviour of salespeople, is an understanding that salespeople are not your friends and you don't have to pretend they are. They want you to pay a lot, and even to buy things you don't need; you want the opposite. Your relationship, by its very nature, is an oppositional one, and they are certainly haggling with you, if they're doing their job well.

I'm one of them now

If you had told me even a month ago, I wouldn't have believed it, and I probably would have thought you were a fucking wanker into the bargain, but I've started jogging and I fucking love it.

Starting the day with sexual congress, a nice latte, an eighth of a watermelon, a little porridge, and then a fucking jog of all things feels fucking magnificent. Even when it's muddy out. Especially when it's muddy out. I'm one of those fucking jogging wanking perverts now and it is so weird. Of all the things I never thought I'd get into, jogging was right up there with golden showers and accountancy.

There are a few things that pushed me into taking my first jog - ugh - so weird to even write it - but I don't care. The first is that Australia is, as I've pointed out before, fucking expensive. Basically everything is expensive here, and gym memberships are fucking ludicrous. Only a fucking sucker would pay for one, but Australia, as I've come to realize, is full to the fucking brim of fucking suckers.

Get an Australian going about how his or her country is going to the dogs - easily done - and they'll give you a fucking spiel alright, but it'll be about drunk Aborigines or evil Muslims or China taking over the world or some other frankly secondary sort of background thing like that, and not about how this fucking place is more expensive than fucking Switzerland, because these poor fucking suckers have swallowed everything their crooked press has given them with the alacrity of a hungry infant being spoonfed caramels. Anyways, I'm digressing. My point was actually that I refuse to pay the exorbitant fees Australian gyms charge. And it hasn't been timely to buy a kayak yet. So I jogged.

The second thing is that we were staying at a house with a dog and if there's anything dogs like better than rolling around in their own excrement, eating, and being cossetted, it's being taken for jogs. The first time I dipped my toe into the world of jogging, I took the resident dog, who nobody walks, with me, and every morning thereafter I had this slavering lunatic barking and running around in affectionate circles at me every time I went anywhere near her leash. It was really charming and made it a matter of course that I'd just keep going.

And that went on long enough that I'm now dogless but at the point where I feel sort of shitty all day if I don't get a jog in in the mornings, and really happy and rosy and whatnot if I do.

It's fucking shocking. I don't know how I feel exactly, just that I feel good. I think this is a microcosm of what it feels like to finally start fucking your own gender after a lifetime in the closet. Anyways.

Talking Australian Part 2; Intoning, subsection 1

Australian Question Intonation is something that I first experienced culturally second-hand via Brits who were addicted or overexposed to Home and Away and Neighbours, two examples of how similar nationalities almost always manage to produce their own special brands of fucking dime-store dreck which can travel to their sister nationalities.*

Many of the people I meet here are absolutely bemused by how much British people love their shitty soapies, but of course the British people who I spoke to about it aren't confused at all. Neighbours/Home and Away are full of images of warm beaches and sun and healthy young people who aren't in the early stages of rickets or scurvy - three things that are painfully lacking in British society. Those two shit-parades of drossy television between them have made the British media's endless quest to present Australia as a barren and miserable land full of nothing but floods, fires, and man-eating creatures (so pretty please don't move there because if you've got enough money for the ticket and visa Britain can't afford to lose you) more or less futile.

So the upshot is that I've been exposed to so many Brits who use the Question Intonation after overexposure to shitty Australian television, despite the finest efforts of Stephen Fry, that moving here didn't make me bat much of an eyelash; not to mention the Question Intonation was one of the few perversions of Australian speech the F-word maintained during our years with the European Savages, while he was teaching them English.

It is making me a touch twitchy though, for reasons that will be explained in a future post, when I've wrangled the carpet pythons out of our living room; they were driven there by the flood water. Sigh.



*Canadians foisted dramatic heart-wringers The Littlest Hobo/Degrassi Junior High onto the world; the US manages all those awesome blowdried daytime soaps with the devil and incest and amnesia and whatnot; the Brits play some sort of perverted voyeuristic class-fantasy game wherein they pretend to spectate the torrid, disgusting lives of blue-collar types in Manchester and London via Coronation Street and Eastenders.