Free Improv with Adelaide’s Hat

The hat in question is some kind mutant cross between a trilby and a homburg – and does not in fact belong to Adelaide at all. But it did inspire this little ditty, which was recorded chez Tammens. Featuring the man of the house on guitar, his best friend Ollie from Tassie on bass and pedal loops, the owner of the hat on laptop’d guitar and the girl who bought him the hat on contact mic, broken acoustic guitar and mortar and pestle.

A Laptop, A Bow, A Guitar

Huh? Why doesn’t it sound like this guy? Or this dude? Mind you, I was at one of those concerts. Can you guess which?

Ambient Jam

‘They’re devil worshippers…indulgent white kids…opening up black holes to other universes’ – Tina, the lady who lives in the warehouse where we recorded this…

…just a little ambient jam by Andre Peach and Nic Tammens.

Aleks and the Ramps Interview

Sometimes you can hear a whole lot about a band and then realize that you know nothing about their music. I’d heard a whole lot about Aleks and the Ramps’ live show – that they regularly come on stage in matching basketball uniforms, and that their sets include choreographed interpretative dance. They’ve even shot a “guerilla” music video for one of their songs at Charlton’s, an infamous karaoke bar in Melbourne which involved outlandish dance moves and frequent cuts to the bemused faces of Charlton’s regulars.

 

But with the release of their second album, Midnight Believer, Aleks is hoping that people will be talking about more than just their onstage antics – “as soon as you get known for something other than your music – and we became known as the basketball uniform band – then it’s a good time to stop!”

 

If anything, the band has mellowed out since their debut, Pisces vs Aquarius, which was almost schizophrenic in the abruptness of its changes. That’s one of the things Aleks was less than happy with on the last record – “we used to have no filtration process with our ideas – we’d just be like ‘well and then what happens?’”

 

The key to their sound – at times smooth and layered and at other times sharp and abrasive – lies in their musical process which brings together, rather than separates, the writing and recording phases. Aleks says that the process is one of “writing, recording, cutting and pasting and then shifting around.” And the live show isn’t separate either – songs are often demoed live before going back to Aleks shed for “the never ending overdub sessions”, which in turn affects how they play the track live – “[we realized” that maybe that guitar part isn’t as important as it used to be, because now there’s this new synth bit which we’ve learnt through doing the recording is more important.”

 

Not that the new album is a complete depature, “I do still like music that leaps from big to small, and goes places. But [instead we’re] trying to find where it’s fluid but still jarring – where it’s natural.”

 

As for their live show? They may have ditched the basketball uniforms but that doesn’t mean the gigs will be any less manic – “I just think that if you’re a band putting on a show, you should put on a show!”

Skipping Girl Vinegar

Named after the iconic neon sign in Richmond, Melbourne band Skipping Girl Vinegar have come out of a two year long recording process to release their debut album, Sift the Noise. Somewhere between old world folk and catchy melodic pop, SGV weren’t afraid to take their time, as Mark Lang, singer and guitarist explains. “We had this seasonal approach where if we were song writing, then all we did was song writing, and then all we did was pre-production and then all we did was recording.” He credits this slower approach as the reason why their record feels a little more thoughtful and measured than a lot of other debuts – it meant they didn’t “getting sidetracked on all the other stuff that you think you’re meant to be doing like organising gigs and all that.”

But as it turned out, it was this commitment to the music over building hype that brought them success – “because we actually just focussed on the music itself, it did a lot of the work for us…the girls gave a disc to Bob Evans after a gig and he really liked it and made us the main support, and then we got the Lemonheads and Something for Kate and all these massive bands we would have wet our pants over!”

 

Their commitment to song writing also carried over to the recording process, a majority of which was recorded in their bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens. For Mark, it was about creating a record with its own character, “a bit more low fi-ness to the sound…[for example] on “One Chance” [their first single] the kick is just me stomping in the kitchen, on the floor. I did that as a demo but then I really loved the sound because you can hear the rattling of the fridge when you listen really carefully!”

 

And while parts of their sound came about just as randomly – Mark found a banjo in Tasmania when they were writing the record and it slowly filtered into the song writing process – a lot of thought has been put into their Hammond heavy, tambourine shakin’ sing-a-longs. From start to finish, Mark reckons the album took four years – “it’s a long time and the only reason it stayed together was because my sister’s in the band and her childhood friend and my childhood friend, so we had a vision from the start and we knew we were on to something.”

PS:

Mark was actually an incredibly nice guy! He was quite interested in my own musical endeavours, and seemed genuinely interested in giving me advice – and offered me his email should I ever want to contact him…

Spillage, Finance and False Communality in Brunswick

I imagine that the reason people attend large events like warehouse parties or festivals is linked in some way to the idea of community. Particularly those events where the entertainment is a secondary concern – I buy my tickets to Meredith regardless of the line-up, and a lot of the people who showed up to the Spill Party knew few if any of the bands playing. Instead, we go to fulfil some need for a shared spirituality that might have been fulfilled in days gone by through attending your local Church, or, for a slightly different set of people, by going to the footy. For there is something inextricably desirable about the anonymity of the crowd – at least, when you feel that that crowd is representative of some Platonic conception of Yourself. Of course, there is nothing more frightening than being in a hostile crowd – but in that situation rather than anonymity you feel as if every facet of you screams out your difference, a difference that holds at least the potential of danger. But when the crowd is of You and Yours, then an entirely intoxicating sense of power is gained. And of course, that sense of power is not without its justification -if the story of Babel is meant to teach us the importance of humility, surely it also shows us just how strong we can be when we work together. And really, power is only a part of it – mostly it is just Ecstasy to find yourself with a thousand other people, singing along to the same tune. Rather than simple anonymity, the erasure of the Self is replaced with a communal Consciousness.

But the question is, can we attain this communal Consciousness through a simple transaction? To what extent am I participating in a communal event when I pay my $7 to go to a warehouse party for a few hours, before leaving and going home? A fair few things went awry that Saturday night in Brunswick, and large proportion of that was due to the fact that the night was essentially being run by 6 people. And so it goes that we pay someone to do security, run the bar, play their music, operate the sound…and you pay to get in. How much more communal (and smooth) might the night have been if a couple hundred people showed up during the week to help set up, and those same couple hundred people stayed for the party, and then later cleaned up? It’s idealistic, and hyprocritical – it’s not as if I only attend parties I help organise. But it’s a nice idea isn’t it?

I mean, what’s all the point of all this running around in circles if not to chase some tiny moment of outdated mysticism? Maybe we feel too connected already, constantly plugged in and tied down. Maybe that’s why rather than being interested in creating real communities we go to these things for a moment of true anonymity – a moment of such animalistic frenzy that we can’t even recognise ourselves anymore. So we pay our entry fee to disappear into the crowd for a few hours, before emerging in the too bright morning sun, blinking away guilty looks on our faces. And only feeling guilty because last night was like all the others.

Ten Pieces of Babel – Parts VI – X

VI

My parents arrived on a rag-tag armada two hundred years too late. People barked at them in the street when they first got to Australia. Once, while I was arguing about becoming a republic a red-haired woman said to me, foreigners shouldn’t get involved in our politics. Walking down Chapel Street on a late night out I always have to hazard the occasional wide-shouldered blonde haired footy player, ni hao, and a bow. What could I have said? Afterwards I would replay the moment over and over ceaselessly, searching for that one perfect comeback but of course I only managed to go to bed with his image in my mind while he probably stumbled on, forgetful and harmless, never to be troubled by the thought of me again.

But if I’m being honest with you, it’s all small change really. I was never beaten, and rarely overtly teased. My parents have made a life for themselves here, and then some. I am a child of privilege, even if that privilege has taken a more convoluted route than that of some others. Or perhaps that’s the problem. Others, with the same chances and the same privilege and the same education never stopped to ask why. It was a birthright. They could jump online and with a little bit of research, print out their history. Their Year 8 projects were easily completed, and then tacked on the wall without further thought. My history doesn’t exist anywhere except in your mind, and through you passed onto a handful of relatives. And it’s a history of hardship, hardship that I’ve never experienced so my history settles uneasily on my privileged shoulders.

You believe in God because you have suffered so much, while I believe in nothing because that’s the sum total of what I’ve experienced. Your century, just finished, was filled with big ideas and big failures. People talked about the great human project and wrecked entire countries trying to complete it. My century, just beginning, is more modest, and therefore more mundane. We make no great claims to change the world but instead plod along with it, hoping not to rock the boat. You underscore my insignificance with your smile, when you say that all in all, you consider yourself lucky to have witnessed such momentous changes in history first hand. I think back to all the televised images of horror and war I’ve seen, but I can’t tell the difference between the news and the movies.

VII

After sitting by the riverside for a while we wound our way up to Sacré Coeur from behind, so that the white cathedral only ever appeared every now and again, its glistening dome sitting like a cap above the apartment buildings. There were less tourists going this way – almost none in fact. Everyone else moved through Montmatre, passed the Moulin Rouge and the artists sitting by their easels, and onwards up that fabled hill, a journey that takes some time because with almost every second step an even more brilliant angle for a picture is revealed. But round the back, people went about their lives – a small Algerian restaurant was buzzing with familial laughter and a handful of boys were kicking a soccer ball around a dusty courtyard that substituted for a park.

Rounding a corner we were suddenly faced with a grey wall – some two hundred or so steep steps crowned by that dome that seemed to catch the sunlight like a prism. When we finally made it to the top of the stairs you waited a moment, and we could hear the gentle babble of the tourists all around us, and it seemed to me as if I could hear snatches of English. Some of it was, but a lot of it was incomprehensible when I listened more closely. You followed me as I walked around towards the front, but I left you behind as I took a couple of quick steps and then Paris stretched out before me, hazy beneath the evening sun. People were arrayed all along the hill, pointing fingers and staring up past me. The sun began to set and the babble was replaced by an awesome hush and the whir of cameras. It was then that I turned to follow the golden sun beams which lit up your face, a little out of breath but still smiling at me. Behind you the church blazed like a funeral pyre.

VIII

When eating pho you have to savour the first taste because it is always the richest, and the most complex. It is only in that first spoonful of soup, meat and noodles that you can really taste the subtleties of the herbs and the plum sauce and the chilli and the lemon, each individually and all at the same time. It’s getting late but the European summer still shimmers outside, and my body clock is so out of sync anyway that I’d probably eat breakfast if it was offered to me. But instead Ba Noi comes out with a great big bowl of pho, and places it with undue emphasis squarely in front of me. For a moment I sit there awkwardly, waiting for Ba Noi to go get the other bowls but she just hovers there, waiting. I ask you both if you’re eating but to my surprise you both shake your heads, still smiling and gesturing at me to begin. It’s not the first time that you mutter something about your health and some diet, pills and fish oil. Unbidden and unwelcome, a thought passes through my mind which I try to suppress but the damage is done – what if this is the last time that I see either of you? The steaming hot pho suddenly goes cold along with everything else in the room and I want to say something like, I hope a part of you survived the journey across the seas and is still within me. Your strong, wiry hands, or your quick, undulled eyes or even your steady smile which you level at me now, as if you know what I’m thinking. And of course, sticking to family tradition, I say nothing, instead slurping away at the pho while you both look on.

What drove me to the other side of the world? To see you or to see the monuments? What is here that I can’t get in Australia? I get a vague sense that this moment, sitting here, slowly eating Ba Noi’s pho, is as close as it’s going to get. And yet it’s not enough – I can feel a million things swirling around in our undercurrents, passing between the three of us in little rapids and eddys, but I don’t know how to tap into it. Like standing before the Eifel Tower I know that this is it, the furthest point you can get before you have to commit yourself wholly to get any further. Either way, here I am, looking for some history.

IX

If they tore something out of you, then they tore something out of me too. Like a gene passed on, a hollowness. After Dad dropped you off at the airport, he became a ghost. I would wander into the living room with my teddy tucked beneath my arm and find him in front of the TV, his head resting against the back of the sofa, eyes closed. Or else we had to play quietly, even though it was a warm Saturday afternoon, because Dad was napping. Why do we accept these silences in my family? Was it just callousness that I never asked?

I took the cowardly way out, by piecing things together, inferring facts and reading into the gaps. Sometimes the past is nothing more than a family tree, which you sent me a few years ago. None of the names meant anything to me, so instead of telling me who my family was, it just looked like a blank page, waiting to be filled in. A lot of it has been like that, an exercise in joining the dots. That Dad left for Australia while you were still in prison – I gathered that from adding up the dates. Does that explain why he drifts in and out, as if the camera can’t quite keep him in focus? Is it that simple?

Eventually my guesses lead me to where there are not dots at all, just the blank page and a heavy pen to trace imaginary histories with. The things that I don’t know at all. Like what your handwriting looks like. What your favourite meal is. Whether or not you resented us for being free. And how do you see me now, Australian-accented, , toying with socialism and no prospect of a Vietnamese bride – have I betrayed you? It’s these questions that I want to ask, but I can’t find the words, in any language. They would sound too strange spoken aloud. They’re the kind of things that are supposed to be learnt, not told.

X

Thanks to failure I know how to avoid where the bicycles have fallen. I like that phrase too. I’ll don my rucksack now and try to learn the same lessons, onto Barcelona, Milan, Prague and beyond. But when I come home what will I say? You can’t carry this kind of thing through Europe and back on the long-haul flight home. It’s unseemly to talk about the past and your father and your grandfather when all people want to hear is that I went up the Eifel Tower, that I went to that five storey club in Prague. Ba Noi forces a container of pastries into my hands, already full of passport and ticket and map but what choice do I have? As you watch me fumble with them you smile, once again. What happened to sorrow and despair and solitary confinement? Do you erase it all so easily with those dentures? I was once a committed Communist, you say, out of the blue. Is this your parting benediction? Go forth, be young? I came here to get something to live by, so I wouldn’t become a ghost. A little bit of family history to tie me down, stop me from floating away but now maybe the opposite is true – I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark and uncharted ocean and my feet are too heavy, my hands are tied and I’m struggling for breath. 

So I think it’s apt that as I shoulder my pack it’s weighed down with your gifts, which I carry like a burden. People rush about us but we remain still, just for a few moments, refusing to be swept along with the endless coming and going. Again, I can only offer you my silence, as Ba Noi clucks one last time about my height, about the weight of my bag, and have I got all my documents? And then just like that, without further ado, I surrender to the pull of the crowd and I leave you, ever smiling, with a sole arm raised in what I must convince myself is a blessing. 

Walking down the concourse towards the train, I want to be five or six again, too young to understand what separation is. With Ba Noi’s warm hand ruffling my hair and the certainty that whatever happened, it was Dad doing the driving, and all I had to do was sit and watch. Instead now I propel myself forwards, which is  another way of saying that I’m walking away from you, one foot in front of the other, into the bustle and chaos of a thousand other travellers amongst whom I become harder and harder to distinguish; surely by now your ageing eyes have lost me?

Ten Pieces of Babel – Parts I-V

I

But for the Grace of God, you said. It sounded even more foreign, because you said it in Vietnamese, the language I’d learnt to make foreign to myself after successive timeouts in kindergarten. We speak English here. But for the Grace of God, you said, I wouldn’t be alive to tell this to you. I think of incense, endlessly ringing bells. What has all that got to do with us?

II

It’s as if the years are just a figment of our collective imaginations. The kilometres too. The maths say that it’s been fourteen years since I last saw you. That I’ve travelled 18,000km to be here. But as you and Ba Noi cluck about my broken Vietnamese, gently chiding my absent parents for providing a wayward education, it doesn’t feel odd or strange. When I showed up in the foyer of your grey Parisian apartment block there wasn’t even a moment for me to register any of the things I thought I should register before Ba Noi engulfed me – despite being half my height. You stood two steps back, your face arranged in what is quickly becoming a very familiar smile. Your eyes twinkled and you told me that this was where I belong – eldest son of your eldest son, I had finally come home.

Home! Perched awkwardly on a chair made for smaller, better postured people, I can’t imagine anything less like home than your cramped apartment on the outskirts of this immense, strange city that makes Melbourne look like a backwater. There are so many things to take in, so many differences to register that it seems absurd that the first thing I notice is how little prominence you give to the television. It’s almost completely overwhelmed by the tall blue vase next to it, and just behind the little black box a brilliant watercolour landscape distracts even more. In muted greens and blues water buffalo and human smudges in little conical hats dot a washed out river scene. Tiny boats flicker against the fine green strokes of reeds and lilies. You catch me staring at the painting and still smiling you say that it was the very first thing you bought when you got to Paris. Something to keep you anchored, you say.

I can’t help but feel that it’s a subtle rebuke to my own freewheeling travelling. Why does everything in this apartment, right down to your smile, feel like that? I’m backpacking through Europe, a concept you don’t really understand. As Dad tells me, there’s nothing of the worldly vagabond in the Vietnamese. There weren’t equivalent Chinatowns scattered around the world fifty years ago. If the war hadn’t pushed your hand you would have stayed happily where you belonged. Which is evidence, if any were needed, that I’m more Australian than Vietnamese.

You offer me a small shot of cognac, grinning conspiratorially. The piano, tucked away behind a cupboard in the corner, hasn’t been played in years, you tell me. I know what’s coming next, and having nothing else to say, I slide onto the piano stool, in between the faded books and old rust-tinged photographs that seem to seep out of the very structure of this apartment. Surprisingly, my fingers know what to play – one of Beethoven’s easier sonatas. The piano is horribly out of tune, but it doesn’t seem to matter – you keep smiling and sipping at your cognac. Ba Noi comes in and tries to force feed me a gelatinous bright green cake that I’d only ever seen appear with the arrival of distant uncles. With pursed lips I try to fend her off but she won’t take no for an answer nor will she let me stop playing, so I launch into some Mozart with my mouth full and crumbs falling all over my stiff fingers. Outside the Parisian summer continues to bake, especially out here amongst the squat, whitewashed concrete slabs that make up the outer suburbs, the apartment blocks broken up by the very occasional dash of green. I think about the three gum trees you can see outside my bedroom window in Melbourne, how they shimmer and sashay in the breeze. Maybe the years and the kilometres are all too real, I realise. My fingers falter as the jet-lag begins to kick in.

It’s as if the world spins to bring us closer – only to turn again and draw us apart. You tell me that the years have made your suitcase too heavy. I like that phrase. I can imagine it, beaten and bent so out of shape that you have to sit on it to snap it shut and even then, a sleeve or a trouser hangs out. I desperately want to ask you about the contents of your suitcase, but something about the delicateness of everything arrayed so closely together on every possible surface catches my tongue – so I don’t ask any questions and instead continue working my stubborn fingers, moving onto an atonal take on Mendelssohn.

III

The heavy stones weigh on me impressively. I wonder if you replaced the stones of your cell with these ones – something else to weigh you down and keep you from floating away. Beneath the vaulted arch miraculous sunbeams filter through the stained glass.  We’ve traded my rusty piano tapping for the measured drone of the church organ, and instead of looking at your smile I watch the priest up the front absent-mindedly. People dab away at their foreheads with handkerchiefs and fan themselves with the hymns but you keep your suit jacket on, your eyes fixed on the altar while mine follow the swirling galaxies of dust above us. The incantations wash over me just as they do at home, only here I can’t mouth along.

In the stifling heat, my thoughts wander back to the facts offered to me in a handful of quiet, half-spoken asides by my Father, the facts that prompted me to make this family visit in the midst of my two month long party across Europe. The Communist Government imprisoned you for ten years without charge or trial, your sin, the fact that you were an intellectual and a lawyer, a possible dissident. I’ve got the entirety of the media coverage surrounding your imprisonment stored away under my desk – a single, short paragraph in an Amnesty International newsletter. About a year before you were released, I was born in Melbourne. After a brief attempt at a Vietnamese school I quickly lapsed and eventually began begging my Mum in my broad northern suburbs accent to join the local footy team. I don’t think your absence even really registered then. I certainly don’t remember asking where my grandparents were, and even if I had, could anyone have explained to me that you were in prison, and yet innocent? Surely only the guilty are punished? That’s what the lawyers on television said, and that’s why I went to law school. Because that’s what the law (and God – in our family the two are never far apart) is supposed to do. Be just.

But then, what crime did we commit, to be cursed with these tongues, so that you, my ancestor, can barely talk to me? I look at the altar. The Bible would have it that we were too ambitious, building a tower to heaven. Well then, what crime did you commit? What blasphemous ambition did you harbour that caused God to scatter your children across three continents? Or was God just so vindictive that he would see us dispersed across the earth, divided one against the other, before allowing us a place on his doorstep?

You kept your faith in His benevolence. But all the evidence seems to me to point the other way.

IV

Yesterday. I walked with you through the summer May. We picked our way through the narrow alleys and along the still warm cobblestones until we rounded the last block of apartments and there it was, a great spire of twisted metal reaching up to the heavens like an outstretched finger. After a moment you made as if to move on but I touched your shoulder. I couldn’t find the words in either French or Vietnamese to explain myself so I shrugged and turned around. You followed me, back through the twisting alleyways. The wide boulevards of Saigon are supposed to be echoes of these streets but as we walked to the riverside no two places could seem further apart. We watched the tourists bob along like flies on an ice cream stick above the filthy water.

Sometimes Mum goes back – going home, that’s what she calls it. But Dad can’t stand Saigon anymore. Everything and everyone tells us that things have changed – the Government is modernising, opening its doors to the tourist dollar. But the police on the street corners still wear the same uniforms and Dad tells me he can’t pass one of them without an awful dread passing over him, so we don’t go home anymore.

Now my friends fly over every summer. Attracted by the cheap tailor-made suits and the exotic foods sold out of flaky wooden carts. They sample the culture in the markets and become the white skinned, glowing guests of honour at random country weddings. They buy bootleg DVD’s and brave everything from stomach bugs to pickpockets. They come back with a scrapbook of photos and memories and stories to share my own cultural inheritance with me. They enthuse about the value of exiling yourself for a time, immersing yourself in another world. But the real exile is the one unable to return, like you. Sitting beside you, watching the tourists scurry from landmark to landmark, with our backs to the Eifel tower, I felt an immense dislocated homesickness. You pointed to the tents pitched along the bank of the river, and said that the homeless often come to live here in the summer.

V

I remember sitting in the back of the car as Dad drove you to the airport. I must have been five or six. I’d met you two weeks before for the first time, sitting in the front seat of Dad’s green hatchback as he pulled into the drive way of our rented beach house at Apollo Bay. I was in inside, on the top bunk of the bed I shared with my brother, which smelt clean and unlived as if no one had ever slept there before. I watched you as you got out of the car, as Dad fussed over you and Ba Noi, trying to open your doors and carry your luggage but you insisted.

Two weeks later I sat in the back seat and the car was uncomfortably silent. When I grew a little older I’d come to understand that as a family trait. Kind of like a family whistle. Silence best represents my relationship with Dad, and now also with you. Ba Noi, in the back with me, kept on stroking my head and smiling. The battered old hatchback rumbled along the freeway, and the airport came into sight.

I wish that there had been some kind of emotional scene at the Departure gate. That you had squatted down onto your haunches and placed a hand on my shoulder and offered some piece of advice. Or that you and Dad had hugged with tears in your eyes. But the truth is I don’t remember. I do remember standing by one of the windows, clutching my McDonald’s burger and watching the planes take off, and then Dad leading me away, over to the gate, where I said goodbye to you and Ba Noi in Vietnamese. Then you left, for fourteen years, and I got back into the car with Dad, in the front seat this time, and finished my burger.

Each year after that I spoke to you over the phone on your birthday. I had two lines, well rehearsed and committed to memory. I hope Grandfather is well, to which you would always reply yes. And then, happy birthday Grandfather. Sometimes the words came unstuck on my tongue, but you never failed to praise my Vietnamese.

Peach Contemplates Success

Success in those around you is such a always bittersweet. Of course, it is a delight to hear a friend’s music on the radio – Triple J no less! And to read Richard Kingsmill describe one of their tracks as ‘beautiful’, and to know that they have avid fans from as far away as Glasgow and so on…it gives you tingles thinking that this thing that you have loved for some time is now being discovered by other people, that other people now feel about your friend the way you feel about Cat Power or Sigur Ros. But then…there’s also a feeling akin to loss or melancholy. When you see a friend’s play performed, or their book published, when you hold their freshly pressed vinyl LP in your hands you can almost touch the sensation of passing opportunity…the success of others always reminds you of your own lack. It marks the passing of time like nothing else, because your choice is made starker with each growing success story. The exceptional people are all forging ahead, creating things and marking themselves with their industry in such a way that when people meet them they immediately think to themselves: here is a remarkable person. And surely every time you think that to yourself, the next thought must be: am I a remarkable person? And if you cannot bring yourself to say yes, then surely every friend who has the bad manners to suddenly overnight become a Remarkable Person serves as something rather insolent, and frightening?

And so it is with mixed feelings that you wake up one day and realise that you are surrounded by these Remarkable People. They are all, I think, driven by some sort of madness, probably the same sort. Of course their symptoms are different and some are truly mad, burning twice as fast and many times as bright but no matter whether the madness shows on the surface or not, we must realise that they are mad if only because they risk everything to be Remarkable…remarkableness of course being no guarantee of security, or happiness…

La La La La La

I think I work so well in the wee hours of the morning because I am a little delirious. Words flow a little easier and the usual inhibitions don’t seem to apply, or at least, not as much. I get to a point past 3am where I’m kind of buzzing, and I’m simultaneously light-headed and heavy eye-lidded. My brain seems to still be operating at its usual capacity, save for a propensity to miss spell a bit more and sometimes to just leave out words which I think to myself but forget to actually type. But I suppose that’s what the morning is for – proofreading over breakfast.

For some reason my mind enjoys being productive at the most inconvenient of times. I am always full of ideas and motivation to write stories in the middle of exam periods. In fact, at this very moment as I am supposed to be completing a four day take home exam, I feel the distinct urge to sit here and blog and to restart that story about the guy who goes to the shopping centre…and also whenever I get into bed, like, almost the precise second I turn off the light and my head hits the pillow, I have some brilliant (and some not so brilliant) idea. I’ve taken to keeping a notebook beside the bed but if I want to get to sleep I eventually have to either hope I remember the idea in the morning (which I always assure myself I will – how could I forget such a good idea? – but then I always forget anyway) or else scribble it in the dark, as turning on the light and putting on my glasses is sufficiently arduous that the adrenaline will keep me awake for another twenty minutes.

La la la…my computer makes the strangest sounds…whirr, whirr…takatipipatter…whirrrrrrrrrrrrr…brrbrrbeep!

I have also lately taken to freezing somewhat over assignments, at least during the day. Rather than being purely a laziness that means that I end up doing my assignments late into the morning, it is actually a paralysing blankness of the brain when I sit down to do an assignment during the day which means that I end up sitting at my computer at ungoldy hours.

La la la…whirrrrrrr…tapa…I wonder if my brain makes the same sounds, I just can’t hear them, because they come from between my ears…zurrrrrrr…zapzap…whirrrr…maybe I should start checking to see if the people around me are actually computers, I’ll just put my ear real close to their head and then I’ll hear…hrrrrrrrhrumphrrrrrr…zakatapa…grrgrrwhirrrrr… yes I wonder if I will find any robots amongst us…

Robots would be nice. I think I like robots. They get a raw deal in the media, and I’m not sure it’s entirely deserved. Have YOU ever met a homocidal robot? The only real ones I’ve ever seen are those ones that are programmed to play soccer or maybe walk a little bit, at best…

…la la la…Billie Jean is not my lover…the kid is not my son…that song has been stuck in my head all day…I hadn’t realised that MJ had actually written that song himself until I read the Billie Jean wikipedia page…

oh fiddlesticks. fiddle fi fiddle fum. no exam has been done. fiddle dum fiddle di, I wasted all my time making tea.

oh ah ah ah chu. god bless you. god bless america. indeed. maybe if I mention obama this blog will get some more readers. or at least, some readers. hello out there! is there anybody there?

…la la la…la la…singing and writing to myself, it seems…oh how embarrassment…diagnosis?

Delirium has set in, excessive use of ellipsis has been noted, computer has not made a sound for some time now…oh there it goes…whirrrrr…clickclick…oh ah I wish aliens would come and pick me up and perhaps do my exam for me and maybe take it easy with the anal probing…

WHIRRRRR…what’s wrong mr computer, have I left you on for too long? I’ve heard you can hallucinate from exhaustion…I’ll let you know if it works

AND on that note, it seems to be time to go. Adieu, mes cheres lecteurs! Adieu, adieu, adieu. A demain! Ou le prochain jour, ou encore le jour apres ca, and so and so forth.