ridiculous

We all know moving house is stressful but it's now 3am and I have been entirely unable to sleep. The alarm is set for 5, when I plan to drive to Parkville with a carload of books and paintings etc to clear out the house enough for the removalists to come at 11 to get the big things, as they're known. I mean I will be able to come back, I guess, and sleep for a couple of hours but it would have been better if I'd been allowed by my 'overactive' (read: churning) brain to just sleep when necessary.

The dumb thing is I really can't stand sleeping and I don't have much sympathy for people who love it. So I am extra annoyed by the necessity of it. Jetlag's coming, too. 

NB still haven't got my replacement phone, though very glad btw that I got insurance

great time to be leaving albion

reborn

Hilariously, I am now liberated from my phone and it is as though I have been in a daze all this time. It's been about 30 hours since I last saw it and when I was out tonight at Open Studio (Alanna and band played their/our first show) I felt myself able to do all kinds of crazy new things like, for instance, look straight ahead for periods of time or have minor conversations and not feel I had to look occupied all the time. It's mental. Of course I was also very judgey when it came to all the people I saw around me, looking at their phones.

tangled hitchcockian web

Sometime yesterday evening between about 7pm and 10pm, I misplaced or lost (what's the difference) my phone, or, it was stolen, who knows. I only know I messaged Alanna at 6:55 to say I was about to arrive to take her to rehearsal, and then at rehearsal I was like 'where's my phone? it must be in my coat pocket' when I finally checked it wasn't and I was like 'it must be in the car' and if it is, I can't find it. Really odd, and I just don't know if it's been stolen (?!) or fell out of the car (is that even possible?), either way, Find My iPhone says it's offline now, which I suppose means all kinds of things. Surely it's in the car.

But this is where the fragility of my/one's daily life and identity comes into play. Because I want to be able to blog, I check my gmail on my phone, and leave the old email up on my laptop (this is confusing to read/explain, don't worry about it) and so when I wanted to check my gmail on my laptop I couldn't remember the password, because I keep passwords like that on my phone, and now my request to be allowed to view my gmail is under review by, I don't know, google. I am falling through the abyss like the beginning of Mad Men crossed with some scene I'm probably misremembering from The Matrix. 

It'll all sort out and I'll be back in the flimsy fabric of whatever we currently think of as reality, schmucks that we are.

painting i did

I finally finished this painting yesterday. All I did to finish it (it had been sitting around for six months incomplete) was the black outline, and it really worked well in my opinion. I mean insofar as it looks a bit like a children's book illustration from the early 1970s, which I guess is my wellspring.

unpickupable, that's what you are

I've got a cold and I feel poorly - particularly tough cough and tough because it just seems unfair after getting through the flu or something only a few weeks ago! Screw this.
So, today I'm on leave anyway, and I hung around the house mainly and spent quite a bit of time with these guys (that's Pompey on the left and Chanticleer on the right). I continue to marvel about how cuddly they have become from the angst-ridden wormy desperadoes of a few months ago. Pompey in particular is still pretty flighty and neither of them really like being picked up (but then, neither does Nancy. Maybe no cats really like it). But they are very happy cats now.
The unhappy one is Nancy who is cranky at them but maybe she'll come round.
Maybe.
I have wasted today basically, except I did take Barry and Ferdie for a walk but Ferdie blotted his copybook, LITERALLY by running away from me and disappearing completely. I found him in the street about five minutes later apparently eating a piece of bread.

I Shot the Sherriff

I have inherited a lot of cassettes from the redoubtable (whatever that literally means, it's one of those words like 'erstwhile') Michelle Cannane including one of ska/reggae classics which I have basically been playing non-stop in the car for weeks now. When I say non-stop I mean, when I am driving, when I am in the car, and when I am listening to a tape, not a podcast off my phone. Anyway, it's a great collection which resonates for me and makes me wonder things. I had the single of Eric Clapton's 'I Shot the Sheriff' in the mid-70s, I guess I knew (from reading the label) that it was written by Bob Marley but like a lot of things that were floating round the ether otherwise I both thought about it and didn't think about it. I think I found the caveat that the singer didn't shoot the deputy was the funny/intriguing part. The deputy is probably the more interesting figure in the whole story but we don't hear much about him (OR HER). The song on the tape by the way is, I have to assume, Bob Marley's version. (I could hold a lot of different thoughts about Eric Clapton at once when I was a kid. I think I knew he had made that racist speech around the time it happened, but it's hard to be certain about that now of course. I would never have been into the racism but the sheer hypocrisy of a man who had based his career on appropriation of black music lecturing a crowd on the benefits of keeping Britain white might have gone over my head a bit. Not sure. I soon came to despise Eric Clapton though but I still totally love Jack Bruce. Because I am a namby pamby my favourite Jack Bruce album is Harmony Row i.e. the completely most commercial one, though Songs for a Tailor has a special place in my heart, the copy I own I purchased second hand from Readings in Hawthorn (when it was on the eastern side of Glenferrie Road, know what I mean) and played the fucking thing to death, except not, because it still lives. I mean Jack had all the prowess of Eric but he could also, like, write amazing songs and was very adventurous in the way that Eric wasn't (band-hopping doesn't count as adventurous). Eric's name is also 'Eric' which means you can't take him seriously. 

The other songs on the reggae-ska tape are way cool too. It must date from the early 80s as a compilation, because it's full of tracks later made famous in the late 70s-early 80s ska revival like the song the Specials retitled 'A Message to You Rudy' and what I'm guessing is 'Moon Hop'. 

'SO YEAH'

I didn't...

keep reading the John Taylor book, although I kind of skimmed it to the end. I wanted to see whether he talked about the last ten or twenty years with as much detail as the first thirty (of his life) and yeah nah. I don't have any Duran Duran records. I find 'Planet Earth' a massively annoying song. I like 'Careless Memories'. I can't stand 'Girls on Film', but I do like 'A View to a Kill' and 'The Reflex', also 'Hungry Like a Wolf' in fact when I think about it it's really only the two above mentioned I really don't care for. I think I should invest in some albums, maybe Rio. I have a weird feeling I might have owned Rio for a while. I want the Power Station album too. I like the singles and maybe I would love some of the other tracks.

Meanwhile here is what I've been playing to the cats lately...

The second Utopia album called Utopia
The Red Crayola's Three Songs on a  Trip to the USA - always a huge hit around here
Al Stewart's Year of the Cat album - played that about four times this weekend
Both the Lilliput albums

TBH I think that's about it. I do have a sweet ass stereo system now so I really should play more stuff at home, but when there's no-one to annoy but cats, it feels a little empty.