how to capture the quality of experiences; the automatic flick of fingers over the keyboard as I log on. the rush of turning the corner of Pt Ormond and seeing the city laid out across the bay before me. the silkiness of wriggling my toes in my dog's coat. the smooth power of changing gears and taking off in a fast car. these are all things I do every day. but I can't capture them.

Did she give up? was there something so crushing that she retreated into regular rhythms and roads walked over and over again (see Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra By the River for some lovely use of walking patterns; also Paul Auster).
a child that died, maybe?
and the healing force of a particular place and routine may have brought her to be ready to walk on; this is the tragedy of growth and change; what supports us and helps us learn cannot come on to the next stage with us.
is he in that category? or is it just that he doesn't know if he wants to come onwards, and onwards in the direction she's chosen?

see, William Gibson understands writing.

I think I need to write a monster. they are fun. Gollum, dragons, that beasty thing out of Beowulf and his mum, who was worse. monsters are real, if we are.

(would love to link to all these writers and references, like a proper blogger, but you know that is not permitted. distraction, distraction)

eight minutes. if you had eight minutes to live, what would you do? it's not long enough to have sex, not good sex anyway. and what meal could you whip up in eight minutes?
if you knew the world was ending, but no one else did, this is what you'd do: you'd put the dog on his lead and walk outside as usual. you wouldn't wear a watch. you'd walk down the street in the normal fashion but this time, every speck of matter would burn into your mind like the outline of a body on a wall after a nuclear flash.
Dennis whatsit, the TV scriptwriter, gave a wonderful interview as he was dying. he saw the cherry blossoms as never before.
in a long life, 80 years, you feel there is plenty of time for all that. 80 years of ecstasy would be too much.
but you can have ecstasy just with your eyes and ears and divers other faculties. you can walk outside, look at a dog, a cat, a tree, a flower, or you can put a piece of music on or you can even eat a peach. and if you let yourself fall into it, if you tune into every pip of nervous messaging, you will be knocked over by just being alive.

maybe I'm not actually meant to enjoy it. maybe it's supposed to feel like someone's reaching inside my head and pulling out eels and bricks and beams of blinding light.
I'm not crazy, you know. all the time I am normal me and I function very well in polite society. but we can't have any of that here.
we can only have the teeth of the dragon forming words which form sentences which in theory do not have to ever end, and we have to do it all under the weight of Borges and the infinite combination of all the letters, which would make whatever I write meaningless.
if 1000 monkeys did write Shakespeare, would it mean less?
and if a computer recombining 26 characters and a handful of punctuation - its task made easier by Microsoft Dictionary, no doubt - can write what I'm writing now, well should I? because this is not for the readers, you know. I get quite enough of them at work and I don't intend to be a slut in my spare time as well. it's for me.

see, this is why this stuff scares me. the correct answer to the question below: death.

a blank page is pretty much as blank whether it's made of paper or bits.
and really, paper is infinite as this screen.
how will I know when I've filled the notebook?

time, of course, is linear. you can speed it up or compress it, but any reversal or going back is an illusion. you're simply using up more time on the same thing again. so you'd better be sure it's worth it.

but time and place have this in common; we privilege certain points within them. some memories glow and haunt, some places call to us and soothe us or exhilarate us. the best of all, of course, is when we can combine them all; memory of some moment in some place, being in that place again with that feeling renewed, and looking forward to more of the same. it makes us feel not only alive, but as if we have some meaning in the world, a connection to the secret geometries and harmonies that make those times and places good.

my goodness, do I smell a madeline baking?

yup. I'll have to type out all the guff that's in my notebook for any of this to make sense. and then I'll have to save each month to disc, as I do with my other blogs.not that one does not trust Blogger, of course. just backup, backup, backup. which is where this afternoon's session started. that slippery slope unwinding swing retrograde nostalgic backing up away from the future.

when you live in the country, the routines and rituals of travel mean more. your place is more fixed and destinations are fewer. you can't just pop out and wander around Brunswick St until you feel right about some cafe or shop and decide to linger and spend money. you have to know yourself and know the places and just go there.
the actual cost of travel is really no different to the cost in the city. you just know it more. there are not the diversions and amusements of town to take you away from yourself. decisions are decisions, not happy accidents.

goddam but it's hard to stick to the topic with the whole Web out there to look at - both my sites and others'. which is kind of the point, I guess.

these two people are at a crossroads on their single-lane road. it's a looping, recursive kind of crossroad, one that requires them to decide.

most crossroads, interfaces are simple; you can see the line you're crossing over, you step into the sea, you turn left or right. but meanwhile there is an infinite number of options rising and falling away. maybe the weight of all those choices is what brought this woman here to start with. but sometime she's going to have to start moving again, as staying still is as much of a choice as going.

all places are equal.

and you? I can't see you yet. you're male. this woman means something to you. but until you work out what, I can't decide whether you're coming or going down that road.

she reminds me of MJ, who must be about 45 now.
but she's taller; if I stood next to her I'd have to look up into her face.
her body looks as if she runs every day. there is no fat, not really, just firmness and the line of muscles running down her limbs. she is strong. she hates running.
the blonde hair is natural. therefore it's always dirty and does not so much bounce as roll when she turns her head. her nose is all wrong.

but you can't stop looking at her, even though she won't look at you.

how did she come to see it? was it a sudden revelation? a side turning she'd always wondered about that one day she went down, finding herself early for some more important errand? had she already been there once and did it prey on her mind, force her to go back and look?
or, more galling to you, did she seek it out? did she wake up one day and decide her mental map had too many grey spots; that she needed more?

another hour of handwritten stuff; a bit more rambling than this morning, and still not telling a story. but I don't think it matters. as long as I'm sitting in here exploring mind-stuff, I think the story will come along eventually. am going to squeeze another hour out of tomorrow; either first thing or early in the evening. A. is already showing signs of being miffed (I kind of asked him to leave after helping me with the modem) but it is just going to have to be that way.

not sure how the combined Web/notebook thing will work. it will jump around a lot, that's for sure.

she is undergoing a change, this woman, seeing a new landscape.

She doesn't answer. but she gets up and walks to the kitchen, walks down the hallway naked, the light catching on the drooping folds of her waist and hips. a car rushes past. the driver and the passenger didn't even notice the house, let alone her fuzzy blonde hair, thinning now at the temples, lying on her shoulders.

A match flares. A ring of blue flame under the kettle. She's making tea. You may as well not be there. She isn't ready to deal with the problem you represent right now. The dog lies in the corner of the kitchen on the dirty olive linoleum, front paws crossed, muzzle on paws, but awake, alert, watching her. His back legs twitch and shift. He's ready.

you can dive in or you can pull back and see the big picture. either way, what you are doing is looking for patterns, for a set of ropes you can negotiate above the pit of chaos.

my limit? my limit is currently two hours. then two hours more this afternoon. then I'll owe myself, what? 12 hours.
and I won't let my husband come in the room to vacuum, and I won't let him hug me when I pop out to the loo and wash my hands. because then I'd start talking to him, or putting dishes away. and there is no time for this stupid writing shit. and no one wants to read it and even my best stories no one has wanted to publish.
but I want it. and my heart has been knotted for many years now. there are things wrong in my gut and at 3 in the morning sometimes I ask myself what on earth I've been doing for the last 20 years.
the bug is blue.

dylan thomas; did he write when he was drunk? did he drink to drown out the words that were drowning him? the intense sharp pain of seeing a bobbing fishing boat, hearing the clip clop of hooves on the cobblestones and knowing them. really seeing, really hearing, having the sensations invade his little Welsh mind and refuse to get out.

you'd drink too if the whole world was pouring in through your eyes and ears. and that's before you get to the bit about the people. and the only way to get it out would be to keep shovelling the shit as fast as you could, into plays poems prose, speeches and declarations, arguments and whispered love, in which you'd try to make a little bubble with you and just this one person, hoping that this one person could be so much that there wouldn't be room for all the world, for which there wasn't room to begin with.
because once you start looking, you can't set limits.
I can't say "I'll write about a cat." because the cat sits on a mat and the mat is in a room and in the corner of a room there's an old man who is in love with a girl of 25 who took his child and went to Rome because she hated Australian bread and Australian women and she was afraid of all that Australian space out there.
and the man has a name and an unattractive half-shaven chin and he's dribbling for fuck's sake.

so I can't write about a cat unless I'm ready for it all.

the only James Joyce I've ever read was his early stuff, the ones where he wrote scathing descriptions of corrupt priests and sometimes even had a plot.

stream of consciousness; you can't really write it because it's a stream, and to write is to fix. but when I was a teenager I used to throw the words around more freely than I do now. it's the job, you know. the short words and shorter paragraphs, the lurking subeditor and the fucking readers.

words on a screen can go on foreever. they flow from my fingertips even when my eyes are closed, theough I"m not so sure abuot the spellign and why should I be?
the keyboard knows my fingers and each key has it's own sound my smallersest figner ont he left hand says "a", "a", "a".
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwzyzxxx

got the x wrong. my eyes are closed but my ears are open.
and I hear: cars sliding by. the hum of the pcthe tick of the clock which is always there, anywhere I go.your closck ticks as my clock ticks as we tock off one day.

so I've done an essay-muse and I've done a little place.

people. people scare me.

She's 47. It's her house. She's angry about something you've done. You don't know if you care or not because you haven't decided yet whether you love her or not. She doesn't care if you love her. Or, at least, she won't allow love as a mitigating circumstance, or a reason for making a kinder judgement.

she wakes up. The dog, a black and white thing that's always moving, twisting, turning and looking for sheep, sits at the door to her room and barks at her. you turn and walk back to the dark doorway of the house. the hallway is pitch black after the squinting brightness of the sun.

what do you say to her? "can I get you anything?" "good morning"? "I'm leaving now." "that bloody goat is out again"

whatever it is, she's not going to reply.

what kind of story would I like to read? is it the same as I'd like to write?
I guess in the end writing is about creating a version of the world; one that both transcends and uncovers the real world.
I'd like to have good characters, ones with real voice. and I'd like what they have to say to leave readers feeling they understand themselves better. but what would I know about readers? apart from being one myself?

this is something I've put off for too long. the funny thing is that once I'm doing it - and that means finding the topic etc first - it absorbs me like nothing else. even writing some stupid 15cm non-story for work does it. it's what I do. but too often, I don't.

typing really is less tiring than writing. but it doesn't seem to create the same flow; my main PC writing is bitsy stuff, so I think it makes it harder to start a thought and really follow it through.

what is it about people going about their busienss that fascinates me?

sometimes, when I'm in the right mood, I find it lovely just to see a woman carrying her shopping, an older gentleman shifting his way down the footpath with his cane, an underdressed girl waiting to cross at the pedestrian lights while young male drivers' heads snap sideways as they pass.

but other times I don't really like people at all. I don't like their noise and I don't like them getting in my way.

life as a silent movie?

I've turned the clock on the PC off. my alarm is set for 1pm, and that's all I need to know. clockwatching is not good for this kind of thing.

From the doorway of her house, you can see the road. It's framed by two trees; straight-trunked and spread-branched. It's a narrow strip of bitumen. When two cars meet, each must dip two wheels into the roadside dust, keeping two on the glittering tarmac. When they've passed, the dust hangs in the hot air, yellow and misty.
Walk out of the door, down the path and between the trees. Now the road is no longer a licorice-allsort chunk of black and yellow. It is a strap of blackness, pegged down on either side by regularly placed trees. Look left and see an exercise in perspective as the road dwindles to nowhere and everywhere.
look right and you're looking into a curving funhouse mirror; the road bends and buckles and collapses into the dimple of a valley.
Look ahead through the trees and the ploughed furrows of the field lead away over the field, confirming its flatness and squareness with their perfect parallels.
Turn. The house was behind you, but now, standing on the road, you can see it looking out at the road.
It too is regular, square, a dark central rectangle flanked by glossy rectangular windows. Each window has eight panes in white-painted frames.

She is in there, asleep.

It's 2.30 in the afternoon.

my first day for the year of actually sitting down and writing is having mixed results. I've handwritten seven pages of essay-style thinking about roads in an hour. but then my hand started to hurt. and I have an hour of my morning session left, so I'm on the PC trying to avoid reading blogs etc.
if I can't write in this time, I'm at least going to force myself to sit here.

la la la.

the road thing started with an attempt to describe something. maybe I'll do that again.

this is an infinite digital page
in which it is somewhat like life.
only life is less black on white and more kind of fuzzy round the edges.

image: of driving down a driveway to a house, or a small country lane, with the light filtered through overhanging trees. the trees are either regularly spaced (as in one of those sad Avenues of Honor) or random, when the trees are native. then, the air is eucalyptus-flavoured

rainbow weather; standing under a blue sky with light rain falling on my face.
the texture of grey clouds on the horizon.
look up the Age article about the seven seasons of the local Aboriginal people?
and the word for rain that falls but doesn't hit the ground.