Right now it rains. I’m standing under the State Library portico, amongst the big Corinthian columns and the other bodies that are also avoiding the rain. Some of the bodies are vaping, shaking their umbrellas. In my bag I have a Labubu blind box that I’ve purchased as a nice gift for my friend Aiden’s birthday. I can’t wait to see which Labubu he gets. Labubu. It’s a thing right now. The rain is coming down, slanted at a 60° angle. A Caucasian lady in a Puma hoodie and black leggings screams at a seagull, charging at it in a very primal way while her son watches from a dry nook etched into the facade of the library. A quarter of the bodies’ heads turn towards her.

The CBD makes me feel actually insane. I spend an unreasonably large amount of time there and I’m extremely aware of how it affects me. It makes me feel microwaved. It’s too quiet and too loud. There’s too many people, and we don’t know each other. There’s always a poor guy arguing with himself on Swanston St, and everyone including me will ignore him. So many places are underground, which is supposed to be cool, but is actually annoying because I like windows, and the Sun shining through them. There are LEDs everywhere, screaming at me. The only patch of grass is outside the State Library and I’m shocked at its perseverance.

I don’t really trust scientists. Or, I don’t really care about science. Science doesn’t account for miracles, or gut feelings. It doesn’t like when you just believe. 

When I spend too much time on screens, I feel my gut churn. My gut churns. I get the churns. As if my stomach can’t take the amount of blue light I’m gobbling up.

I don’t listen to old music. Soz. We’ve evolved. We have Osamason now.

‘ ... in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships’ (Wallace, 2009).

Listening to Osamason makes me feel really good. He’s a rapper from Goose Creek, North Carolina. He’s only twenty-two but I revere him like the pope. He raps about lean and slime and freak hoes and flexing but honestly that’s not important, everyone raps about that stuff. It’s the way he’s doing it that’s special, it’s his delivery; Kurt Cobain, I believe, said something like ‘lyrics second, music first’, and Osamason has an extraterrestrial sense for the music. He gets on these schized-out, nasty, heroic beats, with chopped bass and frankly frightening—but also kind of cute?—melodies, and they’re ridiculous and confusing but my goat Osamason just floats on them, opting for a monotone drawl that somehow never feels lazy, but alive and expressive. It makes me feel something, something good, which is important. When Osa comes in on the song ‘HELLRAISER’ and says ‘I’m off the ketamine, my bitch got double D’s’ with that high-pitched, croaky inflection, I feel it. He’s a wandering preacher on a mission to make us feel as amazing as he does. And I do Lil o, I do, and I worry that your drug usage is a bit excessive, that your lifestyle isn’t sustainable, but maybe it’s absolutely fine and you’ll be making music forever, and if that’s the case I’ll always be listening, drowning out the noise with yours. Haha. Thanks, much love.  

I hate Israel so so so so so so so so so so much.

The tension of a digital clock just. It just. Kills me, bro.

I have an urge to hunt. Really wanna hunt right now. I was meant to butcher creatures but instead I receive them, like a toddler, in the neat form of a Simply Grill’d Burger. 

In Walkabout (1971) there’s this scene where David Gulpilil spears and bludgeons a real, wild kangaroo. While viewing the scene, some might have a gut reaction to call the RSPCA or something, feeling that it’s wrong, cruel. But I’m willing to bet that you’ll probably appreciate it, be mesmerised, like moi. It’s brutal, but done with grace and—if you can believe it—respect for the ‘roo. You can sense a genuine circle of life thing going on there, that it’s a natural and beautiful process, whereas with what was going on in Dominion (2018) I’m not so sure!

My cat wants to hunt, so I simulate it for her with a shoelace. She chases it, has a ball of a time. It does the job, I feel. We let her out into the courtyard, if she wants. There’s no grass, but there are plants. I kind of want to let her outside outside, but I’m worried she’ll get fleas, or be murdered. I think the courtyard does the job. It probably does the job. 

I spam my six free Hinge likes. I spam Jora applications.

Village life was probably lit. It was probably very easy and nice. Middle Ages village life. Had to have been easier than what we’ve got going on right now. Had to have been. One of those small little settlements with a forge, a bakery, a mayor, a real community there. What if I was a village blacksmith? Casting tools and horseshoes and other stuff for my needy hamlet? And what if everyone respected me, highly, like they did my blacksmith father, and his blacksmith father before him? And what if I had a sort-of-okay-looking wife? And what if we were in love or something? And what if she bore us twelve children that all wore overalls and worked on my estate and also my very successful forge? What if that happened? What if that actually happened? I think that would be quite nice.  

Strip of white in the middle of my tongue. My body is actively working against me. The 4pm Sun on the 200 bus towards Kew. I’ve just bodied a $6 bottle of pasteurised fruit juice. I’ve got Cheds from Foodworks. I’ve got an apple from Foodworks, I won’t eat it ‘til it’s washed—THOROUGHLY!!!!! Pesticides, all that anti-hormonal shit, I don’t want it. Why is everything trying to make me infertile. The sky is in a very biblical arrangement today. The Sun is surrounded by a carpet of grey clouds but there’s still a gap for it to shine through and bless us. Kind of epic. Kinda looks like this. Or this. It’s beautiful, the light, speckled over the gum trees. It’s healing me, I think. 

I look at Al Jazeera headlines.

I’d love to feel good all the time. But life is unfair and that’s not allowed. Life requires balance and I guess that means sometimes I have to feel not good. I’m usually the last to leave any gathering with friends; I believe that if I don’t go the fun times will last forever, and ever. And if it lasts forever I’ll feel good forever.

Well that never happens and it always ends.

Fugg this. Fock this. I’m sock of it. sck. ovit A;ll. 

I keep coming back to this video of this guy getting high on air duster (computer cleaner). It’s an abridged episode of the show Intervention, a show where they find heavy substance abusers, and mostly film them running around very high, causing havoc in their towns. Scattered throughout the fun stuff are talking heads of their family speculating on how they got to where they are, and then near the end they give the poor soul a surprise intervention. I’ve seen a fair few (abridged) eps but I keep coming back to Matthew. Matthew. Matthew (content warning: substance abuse) huffs air duster. I guess it’s sort of like doing nangs but ten times worse. It seems to be a cheap and crude and brutal and strange way to get high, and Matthew does it a lot. He’s been huffing ten cans a day for eighteen months. Ten cans, eighteen months. He looks horrible, and basically dead already. His brain is fucked and he’s made his family so incredibly stressed. He stays in his room, receptacles scattered everywhere, and yells crass things in a deep, distorted (due to the dust) voice to his family. He even has a kid who he doesn’t see, because of the cans and such. He says that the first time he used them he felt ‘really good, and euphoric’, and has never looked back. And it’s all he does, duster. Striving to feel good, all the time. Oh, Matthew. At the end of the episode, he goes to intervention and they tell him many things will occur if he does not go to rehab, they threaten familial estrangement, to cut off his money supply, to make him homeless, pretty much everything. But the cans are too strong, he goes: ‘no’. And it’s like jesus Matthew give the fucking canisters up! Which is easy to say, and I know it’s hard, but GOD. And he does take the help, eventually. And they show him, ninety days later, sober, clean-shaven and it is nice to see; but … to be honest he still sounds rough, and not really all there, and I watch it and I just want to reach out and say ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Matthew, that you got hooked on a strange and brutal drug. But I’m glad you’re feeling better. And I want you to know that if you were in my village this would’ve never ever happened to you. You wouldn’t even know what duster is.’

Sun: beaming. Argyle Square. A couple sits on the grass, a cool couple, with bleached hair and avant-garde tatts. Usually I would pray on their downfall, but right now I wish them the best. They are touching each other, tenderly. Leafless elms surround me—if I look up, I see the branches wobble and collide with each other, like cells under a microscope.

Every time the Sun’s out, and I’m in it, I’m alright. I just went to a lovely Sunday rally. I hate Israel so so so so so so so so so much but I love everyone who makes it to these things. I love the mothers who come with their babies in prams. I love the drummers. I love the people who bring their dogs dressed in keffiyehs. It’s a great feeling to be with people you align with, when there’s community. A big community in the city.

The Palestinians are the bravest people on earth. Israel has wiped out entire bloodlines; they’ve sniped children in the head. Massacred. Bombed it all. All of their land. Genocide, they’re committing genocide. The Palestinians are the bravest people on earth.

Hey Albo, Hey Penny Wong, Hey Josh Burns, you guys are all ACTUAL FUCKING SCUM. You are all actual complete and utter losers. You are all psychotic. You are all complicit in Israel’s actions. The Australian Government is absolutely complicit in Israel’s actions. Fuck all the Zionist freaks. In the midst of the IOF’s deranged and relentless bombing campaign we have seen who really has a moral backbone in this country. Nasser Mashni, Michael West, Fatima Payman, Antoinette Latouff—just some of the goats of Australia, actual heroes, who are dedicated to justice and exposing our nation’s lies and ties. They give me hope. Free Palestine. 

A cluster of dragonflies looks like digital snow as they prance around the she-oak and manana gum in the 4PM Sun. Fawkner Park. I’ve walked inside it to get a grip on this phenomenon, it looks like a flight path map; they’ve definitely got a whole parallel-to-the-ground/drone-like-thing going on but I’m in the swarm and I see that they’re a bit wobbly in flight, they flutter, they falter. They dance around me like a carousel. They’re weirdly silent. I hear cars. I hear children playing. Runners and dogs gasping for air; I’m an absolute freak, in the park, writing in a little notepad. And why is that? Because. Because. Because I feel better, feel saner. Yeah. Feeling very sane.

‘The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship (...) is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive’ (Wallace, 2009).

The 4PM Sun is gone, and trees wave together as an overcast sky slowly marches left.

I’m glad I’m not into duster and I’m glad Matthew is doing better.

A lone bunny flashes by. Blueeeee sky with fast clouds. Westerfolds Park. I’m In the middle of a knolly field, surrounded by scat and eucalyptus. Smell, yes, smell. Distinct chirps. Sky. 

I come upon a family of ‘roos. I’ll drop every one of them. Fuck these cunts. I’ll fuck them up. They’re lazing around, without a care in the world. Their feet are so L-shaped. Okay, they’re actually so cute. How could I ever hurt them? I could, easily could, and it’d be beautiful and I’d do it with a club or something, and it’d be beautiful and natural, but thank goodness for factory farming. I’m such a pussy. I’ve gotten quite close and the swole dad does not like it. He’s arking up. It’s alright, he’ll learn to love me.

I’m dumb. I believe I’ll be alright. I believe we might be okay. I believe in coincidences. I believe that nature is healing and fictional novels are useful. I believe that Aries is in the sky and that there are voices in the she-oaks. I believe in a lot of things, unfortunately. I gave up on logic: it didn’t help me, it just made me sad. Once I started believing in magic I felt much better.

The CBD isn’t that bad. It’s a playground. It’s lit up nicely. It’s wonderful that they’ve fit a patch of grass in such a densely-populated area. I love Chinatown. I love hanging out with my friends amongst the bluestone. I love all the people handing me pamphlets and Doordash vouchers, they care about me. I love the Eureka Tower. I love going on rooftop bars, and looking down, at all the lovely human beings.

I accept where I am. I am here, with Osamason, and leaves, at least. 

Perfect stock image clouds. Cumuli. There are two Asian (I’m not going to speculate on type of Asian) ladies making TikToks in front of a court of kangaroos. One of them is jumping in front of the ‘roos while the other films, and they do that a few times, the one jumping checking each take. It smells smoky. The ladies go back for more—they’re great and lovely and I love them. I’ve been taking videos, too. I wonder if that undercuts experiencing the miracle of nature, if I was on my phone a bit. Whatever. Wood ducks waddling, sticking their greedy beaks into metal bowls of water placed below a bubbler. The Sun is speckling through a Peruvian pepper tree. The wind is railing through a river red gum, railing through my notebook, through the wood ducks’ feathers and my hair, and I’m pretending I control it for a bit, the wind. I’m 23. I’m feeling fine and good. A kookaburra lands on the ground, kicking up dust. The clouds aren’t really cumuli, more like stratocumuli. They’re so HD and so huge and I feel like I can touch them. Silly wood ducks, living, and breathing. I don’t feel microwaved, I feel well behaved.