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On Sunday 11 May All Buttons, Always will be revealed to the world at the Emerging Writer’s Festival Zine Fair! Come along to Fed Square between 12 and 5pm to check out all the zines on display. They’ll be more than 40 tables there, and you’ll get a chance to chat to all the zine makers yourself!
In the meantime, here’s a little something to keep you going ’til Sunday:
As they say, it’s a very modern city after all. It’s built with its back to the bay, straddling a toxic brown river. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen the bay, although every year people ride their bicycles around it. But like I said, it is very modern – people are always rushing about and if you’re not careful they’ll bump into you. We all seem to have insomnia so we arrive at work looking wearied and depleted so we drink coffee to stave off the crash. The dull buzzing is either in our heads or its the fluorescent lighting. It gives us migraines, so we always carry Panadol and Herron and Neurofin around with us.
Our trains and our elevators are silent, people don’t even see each other, bleary eyed and drained voices are barely functional in the mornings, let alone on the way home. And the longer the insomnia lasts, the more susceptible we are to narcolepsy. Construction workers have to be harnessed in case they micro sleep on top of half-built skyscrapers (none of our buildings are ever finished) and it is common place to avoid sleeping drivers on the freeway.
There is a black market in sleep. I don’t go there, I’d feel too guilty about sleeping with all the work that I have to do. But some people do, they pay a fortune for the sleep of poor rural people who come to the city to sell the only commodity they have left. I’ve heard that there is also a black market for dreams – but that they only way to get there is to dream of it. Sitting in my cubicle I often wonder if there is anyway out of this self sufficient labyrinth.
I’m handed one when I get a day off – one day I arrive at work and there is a letter sitting on my desk – my first day off in three years. I think about the black market, but I can’t justify spending that much money. Instead I wander up and down our very modern city, where everyone seems so busy. But for the life of me I can’t think of anything to do with my day off.
