how awful to be so alone.  how amazing that nine people who lived in the houses around him took the time to organise and attend a funeral.  how lucky i am to have people who love me.

we went to see buried child by sam shephard at belvoir last night.  very dense, harrowing, comic and enjoyable.  but it doesn’t put you in a particularly relaxed state.

after the show, we ran the gauntlet of the belvoir foyer. usually it’s not too bad, but last night there seemed to be familiar faces everywhere i turned.  an actor i worked with in first year.  a director whose show i stage managed.  a few friends from uni/theatre days.  an actor who had once been a good friend but disappeared and cut connections when he went interstate.

and i had nothing much to say.  i chatted to a couple of them, but that left mum standing to one side, uninvolved.  besides which, i wanted to absorb what i had just seen and not give the standard vox pop “it was fantastic!” so we made up some transparent excuse and ran away.

it’s not that those people aren’t perfectly nice.  most of them are.  but i don’t have anything they need.  in years past, perhaps my currencies were talent and ability.  i could write for them, direct for them, act for them, haul a show into a theatre for them.  but now that i appear to have relinquished all that, there isn’t a common point of reference.  in fact i’d be happy to work in theatre again, but only if it was something new.  not the same old unpaid stuff, masquerading as great avant garde artistes, “breaking down the barriers” and “pushing the boundaries” when we’re just a bunch of uni students pretending to do shakespeare.

besides which, i hate schmoozing.

i got up, had a blueberry bagel and read the icon section of the sydney morning herald.  i drove through the university of sydney to drop my mum in newtown, and had a profoundly calming feeling wash over me as i looked at the sea of purple jacarandas on carillon avenue. just as i thought of calling heath and seeing if he wanted a coffee he called me and we had a coffee in his lovely new house, then we walked around glebe markets.  i went home and had a delicious steak sandwich with the leftovers from last night’s dinner and read the metropolitan section of the sydney morning herald.  i went to paddington and had a drink with zoe and carol, good friends from adelaide who i haven’t seen for years.  i drove through town, got stuck in traffic because of the flocks of gay people carrying flags and dressed in uniform heading towards oxford street (the gay games started today). i came home and found messages from my friends on my blog.  i had a beck’s bier and am now going to go and watch MASH on dvd.

it’s been a good day.

a young guy just got hit by a car outside my window.  doesn’t seem to have been too much damage done, the car clipped his leg, and there was some sort of grazing to his ankle.  he was a tradesman with four other tradesmen to support him and the person who hit him was an older migrant woman with her husband whose english isn’t great.  so there has been a lot of screaming and shouting and now one of the guys is calling the cops after giving the woman a lesson on how to drive a car.

i live on a steep hill.  people drive very fast down and very fast up the hill and i’m constantly surprised that there aren’t more accidents, or at least side mirrors of parked cars being knocked off.  i hold my breath every time i see a kid crossing the road.

it seems to have quietened down.  it was a bit of a shock though.  i think i heard the woman’s scream more clearly than anything the guy said.  the tradesmen sound like they’re going back to work, the young guy’s limping around with a piece of pipe.

i don’t like the sounds of voices outside my window.  this is different, of course, as something actually happened, but often i can hear people talking in the late hours of the evening or walking up and down the hill.  it’s completely silent at night, so the smallest sound seems amplified.  it always sounds menacing for some reason.

one night there was a guy whose ex-girlfriend was living in the block of flats next door.  he spent at least an hour in a drunken stupor walking up and down the hill screaming obscenities at her, her current boyfriend, speculating on what it is they might be doing inside, and what he would do to them if he got in.  she screamed back occasionally.  eventually he gave up and walked somewhere else, but you could hear him shouting for at least another ten minutes, getting fainter and fainter.

it’s the sound of aggressive swearing i think.  it’s so hard and harsh.  you’d think i’d be used to the sound these days, but it’s all to do with the context.  when someone swears in casual conversation it can be slightly jarring, or completely bland, particularly if they swear as verbal punctuation (like someone saying, for example, “i went to the f-ing shops”...i mean, what did the shops do?).  but when someone is angry and aggressive the words take on a much more threatening tone.  which, i suppose, is the point.

here come the cops.  and an ambulance.  and everyone’s getting upset and the voices are getting heated again.  people will play to any audience.

well i do.

the other reason i am still up is that i have run out of book.  i finished lord of the rings, having bowed to the pressure of shame at not having ever read it before, and there isn’t anything to fill that uniquely shaped gap.  i kind of have to shake it off.  there are many books on my shelves that i could read.  across a wide range of genres.  the ones i feel i should get to relatively soon are:

ash by mary gentle
the crocodile fury by beth yahp
songs of the last chinese poet by ouyang yu
little, big by john crowley
prodigal summer by barbara kingsolver
bombardiers by po bronson
last of the savages by jay mcinerney

and those are only the ones i already own.  that’s not including the unbought books that i want to read.  of the above list, two are for my thesis (big guess which ones), two i’ve had for ages and just haven’t got around to it, one has been recommended by some very trustworthy friends but i feel guilty reading it when i should be working, and the last two belong to brett and i ‘borrowed’ them when he was still living in darlinghurst, which was quite some time ago.

sorry.

as to what i actually feel like reading, i want american gods by neil gaiman, all families are psychotic by douglas coupland, goodbye tsugumi by banana yoshimoto and probably something yummy by terry pratchett (he’s like comfort food, really).

i shall stop making lists now or i’ll start to evolve into amazon.com...