Bring the world fire.

I have been noticing a lot of haphazard thinking of late. I read the book Twilight by Stephanie Meyer to be able to take the piss out of its popularity and its target audience but found that task a few shades too easy. I then went about re-thinking the premise of the book as to justify its popularity. This led to me declaring it the greatest fictional work of a transsexual coming-of-age ever devised.

The original story is about a dumpy and aggressively dull teenage girl (Isabella) not doing very much until she strikes up a tedious romance with a vampire (Edward) who somehow is morally inclined to not take part in the single-one-thing that vampires do that makes them vampires - drink human blood - because like most teenagers, he sees a sense of superiority gained from the supposed discipline.
In short, two aggressively dull teenagers hang out, find that they share common interests in being emotionally underdeveloped (which is strange because the vampire is meant to be over a hundred years old) and then go to the prom together in the epilogue.

The emotions present themselves as if the characters wear their hearts on the sleeve but when the biggest problem encountered in the meat of the book is 'Bella gets lost in a town and instead of reacting like a human when she is lost and sees some local men, she looks down to avoid eye contact with the men, who are obviously up-to-no-good, runs away and gets more lost - then Edward picks her up in a Volvo' the emotions are somewhat laboured.

Bella has a Dad who is her opposite because she was raised by her mum but she has to live with him. This is a simple plot device to make the protagonist endearing in that it is supposed that one of the principle things about our middle-class humanity is that growing-up is slightly uncomfortable. If you start writing about seriously uncomfortable subjects then you would have to be appealing to the adult crowd or becoming a sordid exploitationist for young men to drool over.

She then meets a vampire but at first he's just a stand-offish shithead. She falls into a very shallow pool of love with him and recounts in quite un-erotic terms his smell, facial features, style of dress, manner of speaking and the colour of his eyes in-sequence once per-paragraph. If the majority of girls actually do this sort of thing when they meet someone who gives them a little attention then the world is doomed to syrup-smeared mediocrity.

If we re-imagine Bella as an effeminate man who has set out from her quietly admonishing yet emotionally attached mother to live with her quiet yet sympathetic father, to blossom into being as close to a woman as a man can be, then her dull life of meeting a pretty-boy and his pretty-family has a sheer subversiveness hidden in its popularity. The mundanity of the situations and townsfolk have a normalising affect on the greater American societies. Australia usually follows the United States in everything we do so we may see great strides in the negotiation of gender in the near future. The audacity of the work is unrivaled.

Opening Credits

My brother called me Friday morning. He sounded distressed and a bit distant. He said he was at the emergency room at Royal Darwin Hospital and he was on heavy painkillers. The bulging disc in his vertebrae was pinching the nerve and he was having trouble urinating. He wanted some headphones to listen to his ipod to pass the time. Waiting at R.D.H. to be treated can take up to six hours on a good day. I rode over to find him on his back in ICU. He told me he was going to have an operation that evening if possible. He had put off surgery for two years and it couldn't wait any longer.

I was meant to be at work at 1pm. I got to work at 1.30pm. I kept my phone on me if my brother needed anything. My mother called and said she was on the next plane to Darwin. The surgery was not minor. If there were 'complications' then my brother may not ever walk again. Any damage to the nerve could mean a life altering change.

I don't remember much of the remaining day. Everything that night felt meaningless. If anybody asked how I was doing, I would usually say 'fine' but at times couldn't help telling the person how worried I was. I must have seemed like I was from another planet. I tried not the think about it as I might have started hyperventilating and crying. My head hurt. I felt nauseous. I needed to get outside. What was I even doing at work?

I got back to the hospital at 10pm to find my brother in the Private Hospital waking up after the operation. There were no apparent complications. I talked to my brother for at least two hours as he awakened slowly. He had a little pump in his hand that injected some wonderful drug into his system that he was told by the doctor that he couldn't overdose on. He showed me the sinew that was scraped-out so the disc wouldn't bulge. Somehow his showing of the little white tangle floating in a jar didn't seem morbid at the time.

I have no idea why.

The twinkling cunts of my home town

There are very few people in the developed world's middle-class who would call themselves 'economically left-wing' while many remain 'socially left-wing'. What I have come to understand in my brief existence is that these terms for the middle-class are labels and that the label of 'socially left-wing' is empty jargon. Those who identify as socially conservative end up supporting economically conservative policy. Those who identify as socially permissive end up supporting economically conservative policy because it shows no threat to their status. My anger towards this comes from the political left not practicing what they preach but also for the political right for being outright bastards.

I live in Darwin, an ugly male dominated frontier town with no history past colonisation, mining, trade, and a couple of city leveling events (The bombing of Darwin by the Japanese forces in World War 2 and Cyclone Tracey) The weather here is arresting in the wet season and pleasant during the dry. Not many people live here permanently (probablyaround 100,000) and the population fluctuates up and down with the tourist season and the whims of the free-market. The most prominent demographic here is military personel and the other being people from down south who come to disconnect from their past.

There exist clear class lines in this town that notabley cut down racial lines. Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders form a sort of underclass for the most part. The most common thing for other classes to comment on Aboriginal existence is their smell. They also comment on their anti-social behaviour, their public drunkeness, their fighting, their loud voices or any other thing that can firmly place the Aboriginal underneath them. These people who are constantly under the disapproving gaze are only a small fraction of the the total Aboriginal population but damn them all to being filth in the eyes of the other Darwinites. Darwin is no abnormality by any stretch in Australia when it comes to racism. The only difference is that Aboriginal people weren't wiped out as in other southern states. The fact that the whites didn't kill all the blacks is something that gets on the nerves of all the local dipshits and most of the visiting ones too.

Darwin is above all things a mess.

A thought for the day

Niether political party will listen to academics for the simple fact that they are academics. Australians want politics and life to be dumbed-down and monotonous. We must try to fill the void until we can afford the next trip to see the ladyboys of Thailand and live again, individually, and as a nation.

As subtle as a sledgehammer

New York Times investigative journalist David Barstow won a pulitzer prize a few days ago for two pieces written in April and November of 2008. The articles were written on retired United States Generals supplying advice to major news networks and acting Generals while harbouring stakes in the fortunes of military manufacturing concerns. The news networks were found to be complicit in this scandal and have suppressed knowledge of Barstow winning and his findings. The Generals in question acted as pundits supplying information to major networks, the Pentagon and the American public.

Here are his two articles: 1 and 2

Starting out

I haven't started compiling work to go into this blog. To start out, here's a link