File: March.txt
Content: March 2004, as in, death march, which is what geeks call a
project which grinds on painfully for ages until it is either released or
axed.
Look, I know you're reading this 'cos you want some more disaster porn
about this tumor, and you want to read that on I dunno, it's eaten my left
eyeball and now I'm walking around with a patch and, in the fashion of the
bravely sufferin' crip, have bought a pirate hat, attached a stuffed
parrot to my shoulder with velcro, and am swaggerin' around saying `Arrr,
lost me'oy to a foul an' dread diseeze.' Nah. It's not that funny. It
really is scary and really does suck. I write this stuff for a couple of
reasons. Mainly to keep people in the loop without having to tell everyone
a slightly discrepant version of the same events over and over. Slightly
to keep myself aware that I'm a human being living a life and am not a
self-documenting catalog for the pathology of a mortal disease process.
Slightly so there's something of me contaminating the disk and mindspace
of the future generations I will not hang around to be in. So much of the
rants, I hope, will continue to be about stuff totally unrelated to the
disease I now harbour. But don't worry, there's tech, sex, crime and
death, anyway. Something to annoy everyone.
D'ya notice, too, that sometimes I repeat stuff in the rants? That's how
the chunk of jello-o in my head works. Things pop up over and over and get
chewed, analyzed, experienced again. Yeah, ok, it makes for bad
copy. Don't mistake me for someone who cares about that.
Oh. Some of you are not geeks and find the chunks of tech stuff, such as
the following, crashingly tedious. So when you encounter , search
for the occurence of to skip forward to the non-geek stuff.
I did a little more analysis of what the UNSW predator impersonator was up
to on conway before I chopped him off at the knees.
From predator@cat.org.au Thu Mar 4 17:44:39 2004
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 03:18:49 +1100 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: zzzzzzzz@unsw.edu.au
Subject: What was the cracker doing?
Hi Geoff. Good to chat to you today.
There is no evidence from my bash_history that there was anything really
deliberately malicious that the chap was doing to cat.org.au. To my
awareness he never did anything which was designed to hide log entries
(hence we have a lot of them) or modify/delete files, add backdoors to
daemons, install a rootkit, grab the password file, etc. There was some
anomalous behaviour on conway (mainly lockouts and crashes, it had been up
for at least a month prior to that) correlating with the unauthorised
activity and possibly some lossage of stuff on /usr but that was all
backed up on an unmounted spun-down harddisk. Still... this inconvenienced
me and several other people.
----------
Auth.logs
Here's some analysis of the auth.log on conway, for the day that I locked
your cracker out of the machine here at Turella, conway.cat.org.au. He
did, it appears, try and log in again several times after I changed the
password.
The auth.logs don't care about tty entries, since they're not invoked from
the network, and are assumed to be authorised at a physical level (if you
can get to a keyboard, you probably own the machine anyway.)
These are the auth.log entries for the day I logged him out, with
commentaries:
root@conway:~# grep 129.94 /home/predator/auth.log | grep 129.94
>Feb 26 00:26:39 conway sshd[27174]: Could not reverse map address
>129.94.222.175.
>Feb 26 00:26:41 conway sshd[27174]: Accepted password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2101
That's the unauthorised chap logging in 15 minutes before I arrived
locally at the server. I arrived about fifteen minutes later, at twenty
minutes to one in the morning, initially logged in from tty4.
It happens that when I'm in the same room, I normally log in to conway,
from an adjacent machine, tarvat.cat.org.au (192.186.2.1) which is our
NAT/firewall/router box. That I logged into conway at conway's terminal at
all, was a consequence of conway's process allocation being so completely
monopolised by the hajar executable, and the network bandwidth between
conway and tarvat (10mbit/sec) being so saturated that ssh authentication
was taking forever to complete, so I changed chairs, powered up conway's
monitor and logged in there directly. I ran top -qi, and shortly after
that point I kill -9'd ed the hajar executable (bringing loadavg back to
something respectable - most of the utilisation LEDs on the DE-1600 hub
then went dark - all of them were lit solid when I arrived).
Then I ran w, looked at the originating IPs and then killed all of the
bash shells from 129.94.222.175, which presumably killed the psyBNC mIRC
proxy if it was running at all (maybe it never was invoked).
I then logged in from several other virtual terminals on conway and tried
and figure out where the heck this 129.94 machine was, hence this entry
below. My account (predator) is superuser capable and any superuser
privelages used via sudo are logged, such as the following entry from me
on the morning:
>Feb 26 00:41:25 conway sudo: predator : TTY=tty4 ; PWD=/home/predator ;
>USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/traceroute 129.94.222.175
Here below, in this entry, he tries to log in again. PuTTY.exe likes to
try to reverse-lookup DNS entries first so the client can be
name-identified before permitting access, but I think this doesn't happen
because these UNSW numbers don't have assocated DNS entries anyplace.
>Feb 26 02:34:15 conway sshd[3712]:
>Could not reverse map address 129.94.222.175.
>Feb 26 02:34:20 conway sshd[3712]: Failed password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2163
He tries again about a minute later....
>Feb 26 02:35:38 conway sshd[3712]: Failed password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2163
Then again nine seconds later....
>Feb 26 02:35:45 conway sshd[3712]: Failed password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2163
I think at this point he's decided the PuTTY session is broken (and maybe
his IRC proxy is not working anymore either) so he invokes PuTTY again,
and the reverse DNS entry request fails again:
>Feb 26 02:36:18 conway sshd[3798]: Could not reverse map address
>129.94.222.175.
>Feb 26 02:36:26 conway sshd[3798]: Failed password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2172
... and he tries again, with a new session, nearly three minutes later....
>Feb 26 02:39:28 conway sshd[3901]: Could not reverse map address
>129.94.222.175.
>Feb 26 02:39:35 conway sshd[3901]: Failed password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2188
... and again 4 seconds later in the same session.
>Feb 26 02:39:39 conway sshd[3901]: Failed password for predator from
>129.94.222.175 port 2188
I think he finally gets the idea that he's locked out after six attempts.
There are no other entries from that machine.
By 3:25am the email you got on Thurs 26th Feb was on its way to Graham
Low. It was also posted to catgeek, a mailman list where the admin on
cat.org.au post tech discussions to each other. One of the other root
admin here, Andy, read the posting not long after, and did what I did -
portscanned the machine in question:
>Feb 26 03:47:43 conway sudo: andy : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/spare/backups ;
>USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/nmap -sS 129.94.222.175
That's everything of relevance to 129.94.222.175 from Feb 26's
auth.logs.
Earlier auth.logs contain the following:
Feb 16 13:38:47 conway sshd[9054]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 4920
Feb 16 13:54:50 conway sshd[10156]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 4986
Feb 16 14:22:54 conway sshd[12410]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 1090
Feb 16 14:26:05 conway sshd[12679]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 1131 ssh2
Feb 16 14:30:19 conway sshd[13087]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.105 port 1132 ssh2
(the fun probably starts below here...)
Feb 18 13:15:45 conway sshd[18185]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.177 port 2018
Feb 19 18:56:47 conway sshd[11154]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 4873
Feb 20 16:10:20 conway sshd[13291]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 2362
Feb 20 16:41:04 conway sshd[19611]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 2551
Feb 21 13:29:33 conway sshd[10488]: Accepted password for predator from 129.94.222.175 port 2912
Then .... did nothing until the 26th as far as I can tell.
------------------------
conway syslogs
I was wondering if some invokations of pine in my bash_history entries
that day were invoked by him looking at emails he'd managed to send to
himself (well, to me) but this appears to not be the case.
The syslogs for the 23rd to the 26th (chop-off day) have four entries
pertinent to 129.94 addresses:
Feb 26 06:43:56 conway qmail: 1077738236.012945
tcpserver: pid 6978 from 129.94.12.209
Feb 26 06:44:25 conway qmail: 1077738265.105903
tcpserver: pid 7007 from 129.94.12.209
These above correlate with the two messages from Graham Low to you (Geoff)
and I, which left UNSW timestamped at 06:41:53 AM and 06:42:23 am.
Feb 23 17:06:27 conway qmail: 1077516387.618695
tcpserver: pid 6274 from 129.94.12.209
Feb 23 19:16:18 conway qmail: 1077524178.101642
tcpserver: pid 14297 from 129.94.12.209
These two also check out to emails I recieved from Graham which left UNSW
timestamped at 17:04:36 and 19:14:18 on their respective days. Graham must
be working long days!
Again, the timestamps are accurate. These are out-of-normal-hours SMTP
connections from notesmta.commerce.unsw.edu.au, and noteworthy because of
their odd times, but otherwise check out.
Other entries in earlier parts of the syslog correlate to other legitimate
postings I recieved from Graham Low, Shane Stevens' cse account, late
submissions from GENC5001 students Peter Koh and Kim Warner, and also a
posting from Joe Wolfe in the UNSW physics department. So I suspect if
your cracker has an 0wn3d email account anyplace in UNSW which he wanted
to test, he didn't test it by sending things to predator@cat.org.au then
deleting them.
------------------------
conway snort logs.
The snort logs for conway.cat.org.au indicate nothing from 129.94.222.175
for all of February. As far as snort is concerned, the chap had a legit
passwd/account combo (mine) so was legitimately logging in.
-----------------------
Conway /var/log/messages
is, with respect to 129.94 numbers, completely mundane but has a UNSW
machine on an IP number I don't associate with UNSW.
zgrep unsw messages.1.gz
gets me this :
life-x.life.unsw.edu.au 149.171.170.4
Appears to be an alias to smtp3.unsw.edu.au
1 tarvat (192.168.2.1) 0.447 ms 0.420 ms 0.321 ms
2 tel140302-2.gw.connect.com.au (210.9.224.241) 557.850 ms 534.234 ms 400.477 ms
3 bdr1.telenet.net.au (202.9.33.65) 329.817 ms 141.028 ms 62.680 ms
4 gigabitethernet0-3-15.cor2.bri.connect.com.au (203.63.117.246) 60.696 ms 65.115 ms 108.969 ms
5 gigabitethernet4-0-0.bdr1.bri.connect.com.au (203.63.11.81) 133.138 ms 105.336 ms 108.336 ms
6 so-1-0-1.cre1.for.connect.com.au (202.10.4.45) 187.867 ms 65.373 ms 137.621 ms
7 so-0-1-0.cre1.bri.connect.com.au (202.10.0.56) 44.293 ms 56.025 ms 39.347 ms
8 so-2-1-1.cre1.syd.connect.com.au (202.10.0.33) 57.829 ms 59.814 ms 61.287 ms
9 pos1-0.bdr4.syd.connect.com.au (202.10.4.62) 57.830 ms 60.106 ms 60.509 ms
10 vlan219.52gdc76f02.optus.net.au (61.88.171.205) 58.332 ms 61.796 ms 55.901 ms
11 gigeth3-0.ug1.optus.net.au (203.202.36.1) 61.948 ms 58.625 ms 60.303 ms
12 gigeth1-0-0.sn2.optus.net.au (202.139.190.16) 59.773 ms 60.889 ms 56.782 ms
13 * nsw-rno-dom.sn2.optus.net.au (202.139.18.114) 58.108 ms 53.548 ms
14 203.15.123.177 (203.15.123.177) 54.050 ms 59.274 ms 52.545 ms
15 gigxxx.unsw.edu.au (138.44.1.38) 56.228 ms 117.588 ms 54.973 ms
16 129.94.255.182 (129.94.255.182) 53.398 ms 66.237 ms 53.127 ms
17 life-x.life.unsw.edu.au (149.171.170.4) 54.120 ms 55.444 ms 59.328 ms
(many) ports open on this machine are:
21, 25, 80, 110, 119, 135 (filtered) 139 (filtered), 143, 161
(filtered) 162 (filtered) 443, 445 (filtered) 563, 593 (filtered), 691,
993, 995, 1379, 3389, 4444 (filtered), 6001, 6002, 6004, 8081, and 10000
I don't know if this is of relevance.
-----------------------
The port 51 exploit:
The C code which was compiled on conway and launched without authorization
as an executable from my account is attached below. Output appeared to be
sent to stderr (not a file). Targetted machines were:
> 196 ./hajar 80.144.184.19 51&
This appears to be a machine somewhere in Europe, on t-dialin.net, via
sprintlink in Germany. It thinks it is called p5090b813.dip.t-dialin.net.
That port is currently filtered, the service is la-maint
> 255 ./hajar 202.159.50.17 51&
This is a machine in Indonesia, probably several hops into indo.net.id;
It thinks it is called mma-ip-017.indo.net.id
Port 51 on that machine is currently closed.
> 319 ./hajar 202.155.38.120 51&
This looks to be an indosat.net machine reachable via INTER.NET's
Indonesian satellite gateway. Port 51 on that machine is currently closed.
> 364 ./hajar 203.173.147.137 51&
This is a machine under the administration of ihug, Sydney.
It thinks it is called p137-tnt8.syd.ihug.com.au
It is also running la-maint in filtered mode, and is blocking ping probes.
la-maint is apparently a logical address maintainer for IMP. I am not sure
what the significance of this is, now how he chose his numbers.
------------------
Benchmarking the local load effects of running the attack:
I just now un-froze hajar as he compiled it, and ran it thus:
predator@conway:~/ $hajar 192.168.2.3 51
It says:
Pasukan..!!!! Tembaaaak 192.168.2.3 ke port 51
If invoked with & at the end it will run in background. While hajar _is_
running in background,
predator@conway~:sudo lsof | grep hajar
gets this:
hajar 27794 predator cwd DIR 3,66 4096 327141 /home/predator/
hajar 27794 predator rtd DIR 3,1 4096 2 /
hajar 27794 predator txt REG 3,66 6762 327143 /home/predator/ /hajar
hajar 27794 predator mem REG 3,1 92174 163078 /lib/ld-2.3.2.so
hajar 27794 predator mem REG 3,1 1230864 166374 /lib/libc-2.3.2.so
hajar 27794 predator 0u CHR 136,3 5 /dev/pts/3
hajar 27794 predator 1u CHR 136,3 5 /dev/pts/3
hajar 27794 predator 2u CHR 136,3 5 /dev/pts/3
hajar 27794 predator 3u IPv4 7826995 UDP conway.cat.org.au:42043->conway.cat.org.au:51
grep 27985 predator 1w REG 3,66 0 507774 /home/predator/hajar.lsof.txt
The second last line is interesting and correlates with the output of
trafshow (not shown here) while hajar runs in the background. It sends a
LOT of UDP traffic at port 51 of the target machine from ports in the
420xx range. It eats about 94% of the available CPU effort while it runs
in order to do this.
Here's the ifconfig stats - check the loop interface (the attack is
launched over the loop interface during this investigation
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:23776994 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:23776994 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2655499384 (2.4 GiB) TX bytes:2655499384 (2.4 GiB)
Let's check them again exactly one minute later
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:26533212 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:26533212 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2895290404 (2.6 GiB) TX bytes:2895290404 (2.6 GiB)
So... conway's 94% busy running this script, and in 60 seconds has
generated approx 640 megabytes of UDP packets containing whatever this
script is attempting to do.
Invoking it at our firewall just now:
./hajar 192.168.2.1 51&
reproduces the `All hub utilisation lights on' phenomenon which brought
all this to my attention in the first place.
No wonder conway wasn't paying attention to my attempts to log in!
The other thing which he presumably intended to run was the psyBNC IRC
proxy - probably in line with proxies he runs on Windows machines on
campus.
Here's the blurb, via Google.
------------------
------------------
My comments in here like so.
------------------
------------------
An Introduction to psyBNC 2.3.1
©2002,2003 jestrix - jestrix(at)jestrix(dot)net
Introduction
If you know nothing about bncs, a bnc is short for a 'bouncer.' A bnc
acts as a proxy for irc, allowing you to hide your real IP address and
use a vhost (vanity host - something like 'this.is.a.l33t.vhost.com').
What are the advantages of this? Well, mainly there's just one
important one: It'll stop stupid packet kiddies from trying to knock
you off the network. Everyone hates getting disconnected, and with a
bnc on a decent shell, you should be pretty immune. Remember though:
the kiddies can still nuke you, but it is assumed that the shell
provider has a high-bandwidth line that allows it to withstand the
numerous packets. If your shell is on a 56.6, you'll still be screwed.
----------
----------
We're on a 512Mbit/sec incoming DSL link. So if someone was trying to
knock this chap off we'd be fielding a lot of incoming packets!
----------
----------
So... why psybnc? There are a variety of other open source bnc's
available for you to download, most notably EZBounce and plain-ol BNC.
Both of these do the exact same basic thing as psybnc: hide your real
host. But that's about where the similarity ends. I've been using psy
for a long time now, and I love with all the features that it offers.
To name a few:
· You'll always be connected to irc. Even when you close your irc
client, psy will maintain your connection. When you connect later,
you'll instantly be back on the channels you left. This also lets you
hold your nick (if you need that feature), or hold ops on a channel.
· psy hides your IP even in DCC sessions. In other bncs, a direct
client-client session is opened, thus revealing your IP. In psy, the
connection is bounced through the shell, and your IP remains your
dirty little secret ;)
----------
----------
Well, not if it's someone elses ;-)
----------
----------
· You can link multiple psy's together. This allows you to share
vhosts, and also create a small ircd, termed the 'internal' network on
the bncs.
· psyBNC now supports SSL. woohoo :)))
There are tons more features, but you can just download the source and
view the README.
Now... for the first part of this tutorial, the Basic section, I
assume you have little or no experience with shells/irc. For the
Intermediate section, though, I assume you can hold your own. For most
users, the Basic is as far as they need to go, but all the fun stuff
is a bit more complicated.
Configuring and Compiling
Hopefully you have already downloaded the source. If not, you can find
it here: http://www.psychoid.lam3rz.de. After you have downloaded
----------
----------
Yes, actually that's exactly where he downloaded it from. Maybe he read
this same tutorial?
----------
----------
that, fire up your favorite ftp client and upload it to the root
directory of your shell. You could also get the source by using lynx
or wget. Example wget command:
wget http://www.psychoid.lam3rz.de/psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
----------
----------
This is *precisely* the command he used.
----------
----------
The next step is to decompress this file (.tar.gz is kinda like a .zip
file for all you windoze ppl out there). To do this, type:
tar zxvf psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
Notice that it's case-sensitive. Everything in unix is case-sensitive.
Keep that in mind for everything in the future.
If you typed the correctly, you should have a psybnc directory on your
shell. Change to it and see what you have!
cd psybnc
ls -al
----------
----------
He did that too, same version and all!
----------
----------
Now, this next part is where it gets a bit harder. psyBNC includes a
GUI for configuring the bnc. However, this requires ncurses to be
installed on your shell, something a bunch of shells do not have. In
my experience, most flavors of linux have it installed, but some
others don't. So, give it a whirl. Type:
make menuconfig
----------
----------
We have ncurses but make menuconfig was the next thing he did.
----------
----------
If you get a GUI, congrats: the configuring process is much easier. If
not, well, welcome to my world ;) With menuconfig, the GUI is very
easy to follow: obviously an [X] denotes that the option is selected,
while [ ] indicates it's not.
For all those stuck doing it by hand, after each option I explain how
to set it. For all the compiling options, everything is placed in the
file config.h, which is found in the psybnc directory. Just open that
file with your favorite editor on the shell (I use and recommend pico
- You can edit the file by typing:
pico config.h
----------
----------
I think this never happened - so he did a standard psyBNC config.
Or maybe he gave up - it was all too hard. Our crontab is unaltered since
2002.
----------
----------
So there.
Soz sez the C code above basically generates loads of crap and spews it at
the address in question - I figure these addresses are IP numbers of mIRC
users whom the cracker is trying to knock off their mIRC systems by, in
essence, DOS-ing them with a flood of digital garbage. He was gonna run
an mIRC proxy on our pipe so people could do the same to him and not knock
*him* off.
The uni is gonna go this chap for, amongst other things, copyright
infringement. I told 'em they'd have no chance with psyBNC since it's
GPL'd but tembak.c is probably copyrighted even though there's no
evidence about who wrote it.
Jerking off mIRC kiddies by running a DoS script on someone else's machine
is a fuckin' silly reason to get kicked out of uni and deported. The uni
is gearing up to nuke the dude so that his smouldering corpse can be held
up as a warning to the rest of the local pool of 'l33t k-r4d h4x0r d00dz.
----
Back to my life.
Friday Night Obtainium - a STUCCO resident left STUCCO and abandoned a
serious caving torch, which they've given to me 4V Exide Triclad battery
and a couple of helmet-mounted lights (halogen, dual-bulb incandescent).
Woohoo, the geniune MSA item! Shame I can't take this on the expo to the
uh, secret location, people'd think I nicked it from the site. It goes for
hours and is really really good - fullet pucking broof. Gotta cook up a 4V
supply for it tho. Need a circuit. I can probably snarf one from the tech
pages of national semidestructor.
The non expo - return of the diode. The biggest find in the history of the
clan has been found, a huge, vast, coal mine is being decommissioned in
Newcastle, but due to diode's pissing off the other people who were
organising the expedition, nobody turned up at the meeting point. I got an
SMS saying it was cancelled and acknowledged it, but had invested too much
time and effort in tweaking my sleep cycle, prepping my torches/batteries,
arranging food/water load to take with me for a far-north all-night
explorama, to not at least see if anyone missed the late cancel and showed
up at the meeting point. Damn. I got home that night and by the time I did
dad was recovering from an idiopathic episode of hypoglycemia. He's a well
controlled diabetic, but we're not sure what's doing this. Mum saved him
by stuffing him full of chocolate. Poor bugger, dad.
I dunno what diode's saying about me these days and don't much care, and
the clan listserv has become much nicer since I added the
low-frequency-of-occurence regexp trigraphs from his email url and name to
the killfile; I was catching everything he wrote on the Clan listserv and
routing it to /dev/null but I've changed the procmail config so that it
routes his stuff to a directory which I will maybe read later if I can be
fucked permitting a bunch o' what'll probably turn out to be pages and
pages of predictable, self-righteous abuse and intimations that my
personality executes on a skullful of metastatic tumor rather than the
usual neural net. Something about him has changed a lot in the last few
months.
Suburban drag.
The late-adolescent rev-head real estate agent trainee over the road who,
thinking that a sports exhaust will make his car faster or tougher or
something, is a nuisance to every house past which he drives his
bespoilered, mag-wheeled doof box. Now, normally I'd just torch the
vehicle but there's a catch. He lives over the road from the old's place,
and parks his car in *his* oldies house. They have two small four-legged
mobile transducers which basically exist to convert dog food energy to
sound on the approach of strangers or other dogs so I can't sneak in and
alter the large-diameter muffler which we all hear at 2:30am when he
drives home. This left two options both of which were unsatisfactory since
they'd lead to the replacement of the existing noisy muffler with another
just like it... either rip the thing off or spray into it some Space
Invader, which is an aerosol-delivered expanding foam wall cavity filler
which sets hard thereby blocking the fucking thing completely. But these
extremes lead to the replacement of the exhaust and we're back to
noiseville again. I have finally thought of the right acoustic dampening
material... steel wool. The car will perform exactly the same but just be
quieter if I stuff about $10 of steel wool into the muffler. I know where
I can do this - in the carpark at his place of employment. Excellent. If
he spots me, and complains, I'll own up, and mention that he's lucky I'm
not using Polyfilla. Or calcium perchlorate, which is freely available at
pool (water, not cueballs) shops in kg quantities and uh, decomposes
violently at exhaust temperatures.
"Fuck heaps of hot chicks." --Dougo
On sat7th, in the arvo it started pissing rain. In said rain I rode
(surfed? jet-ski'd?) around to Turella to loan Soz my motorcycle for use
in the Mardi Gras. Poor woman, it rained continuously for ages while they
hung around in wet carparks being marshalled, checked, registered etc
before the parade and her pillion wussed out. She came back a couple of
hours early, fed me some poached eggs on toast (yumee!) and I rode out to
the drain at Homebush (with a nice big dry warm room with lights too) to
check how flooded it gets during serious rain. It gets _seriously_
flooded. So I went back to Turella and while my socks dried out in the
stream of hot air venting from the fan exhaust at the back of the cat
webserver, slept in the cot with the cookie manufacturer, who shagged me
after feeding me chunks of cheese and chocolates and plying me with
flammable jamaican rum. I drove out into the rain the next morning at
11:30am and got to Strathie at noon, Zyn awaited and I had to tell her
that due to the idiotic rains the exploration wasn't happening, so she
hired a room and we went up and I uh, got out of my wet things, and
eventually, we shagged there, which was delightful, but ohhh, I'm feeling
my age... I have now lived to hear, at the ripe old age of nearly 33, the
phrase which falls, graceful as a pallet of tombstones upon every man upon
whom it is dropped even in jest... `What's the matter old man, can't get
it up?'
I can. It just takes more time than it used to. I'm not twenty and I
shagged someone 11 hours before and I'm not a sildenafil-augmented
life-support system for a hardon... though as far as career moves are
concerned it couldn't be that bad. Evolution wired men to get up, get in,
get off and get out, fast, which is no fun for the women. It's taken years
to reprogram the dick (and it's not very bright - like the old saying
goes, one eye and no brains) so that it stays up long enough for the
kindly recipient to seriously enjoy it, but it needs a general change in
attitude to achieve this control, and too much waiting kind of kills the
stab of urgency which drives men, or at least drives me. Ok, so (quoting
Greg Egan) I'm a pathetic hormone-driven wind-up toy. Ah, well, I can't
complain, we did have some good shaggin'. And they make great coffee down
at the Plaza.
No, She's right. Sometimes, it doesn't happen when I want it to. But let's
get it in perspective.
In one of the most wrenching conversations I've had all year, it turned
out, Zyn's been contemplating suicide, like I have. She's pretty sick.
I've felt now the mets which speckle her chest like shotgun pellet wounds
ever so slowly erupting from the inside out. She was, as the suicide
statistics suggest, gonna stuff herself full of paracetamol but I said
this'd just lead to her being found someplace sick as a dog and being
whizzed off to get her guts pumped out, and that if she was seriously
gonna do it she use CO or something fast, toxic as fuck and irreversible.
She sorta implied she wants me to help and found myself stuck for words -
I'm having enough trouble getting the gutz up to do myself. She also sort
of implied she wouldn't do it while she and I were in the loop, which
amounts to an unwanted, and sort of huge, responsibility for a life, a
responsibility which I don't want.
Her mum sez it'd be good if Zyn did kill herself, which doesn't sound
especially charitable.
-----
Sunday night I wrote amongst other things to the Dioscorean (a biochemist
friend of mine doing a PhD at Stanford in the US) the following stuff:
There's this advert pasted up in bus shelters and on billboards all over
Sydney at the mo. It's got this pair of female lips pointed at a telephone
handpiece, and in large letters down the bottom of the adverts it sez
"There's a new treatment for cancer. Talking."
I know this is bollocks simply because I talk so much that if it was true
I'd never get cancer in the first place. 8-)
I also know it's bollocks 'cos you can talk about it all you like and
it'll take you out regardless.
But I think my wry sense of humour causes me to want to go get
photographed in front of a billboard with this on it.
---
I also mentioned i was smitten with her in 1998 but never said anything
'cos she was in the loop with someone else at the time. She's taking a
long time to reply to that.
-------------
Monday disappeared in a blur of trivia so mind-numbing I can't remember it
now, tho I did acquire another server chassis and photograph myself in
front of aforesaid billboard. My mum's dog is becoming adept at `walking'
my neighbour's rather more stupid dog, when I tie them at opposite ends of
the same lead. How good is that - one can benchmark one's dog by seeing
which one `wears the pants' in a two-dogs, one rope situation.
Tues 9 I saw Zyn at the uni and we chatted a lot, again.
Wed:
In the early hours, heavy of heart, I unsubscribed myself from the Clan
list, where Diode's been posting inaccurate calumnies which I cannot be
arsed defending myself against, since it'd just give him more things to
deny, obfuscate, or pretend to misunderstand. (Author's note: my
unsubscription provoked a lot of grumbling amongst the remaining list
users).
Marcin, at STUCCO, gets my climbing rack today. Partly sourced in Nepal,
and the rest largely originating in the remains of the late Mullet's old
rack, I climbed the delightful metaschists at Arapiles with it, and
various sandstone walls around Sydney, and also some perilous manky
conglomeratic garbage at the Grampians. I keep the karabiners, my rope,
slings and harness. I wrote to Joss there are many memories in those
battered chunks of alloy.... hexcentrics, chocks, old rigid-stemmed
Friends (what are now called self-loading cam devices). Having them in my
hands reminded me of the smells of eucalypt kino, the wet earthy smells of
disturbed moss and sun-baked rock one is enveloped in as one scales the
walls, with bleeding hands, aching arms, doing the calculus of survival as
one heads up a rockface.
In the eve I went down a drain at Rockdale, which starts under the Holden
dealership and ends adjacent to the railway. Nice shape changes and size
and materials variations (I've never seen a spiral white plastic tunnel
1.8m diameter!), and only a 10 min bike ride from Blakehurst! Four other
people came with me, their first formal expedition. It makes me happy to
see other people getting the same buzz out of drains that I get.
The cookie manufacturer thinks she has mononucleosis, which is to say,
EBV. I'm surprised she didn't get it already, years ago. I'da worried
about this but I got it in 1984 and one never loses it. EBV likes to make
you sick if you happen to be immunosuppressed, which is a bugger, 'cos in
the later stages of my remaining life either my tumors (in an effort to
hide themselves from immunosurveillance) or the cytotoxic drugs I might
use to try to kill them, will immunosuppress me. I'm not sure she does
have EBV, since some of the symptons are missing. Her doctor is really not
clued in with molecular data either.
Joss sent me an email saying she wanted to shag me the moment she got back
to her old's place upon arriving back in Sydney. This is, actually,
tactically messy since her place = her mum's place, and as far as I can
tell Joss' mum still thinks Joss is married to Azza in England, and as
far as I can tell as I write, so do I. I think it would be pushing the
limits of chutzpah to go to someone's house and shag their married
daughter about an hour after they'd got through customs. But I guess I
push these limits a lot already.
Thursday. 11th March. I thought it was wednesday all day until just now.
I've gotta change the chain on the motorcycle and get it re-registered.
I'm gonna ask for odd teeth on the back sprocket and evens on the front,
so the positional permutations are larger and the system will last longer
'cos wear will be spread across the whole drive train and not concentrated
on one point. Only weirdos, mechanics and pure mathematicians know this. I
am not a mechanic or pure mathematician.
I got an email from Joss about her uxorial status and what her oldies knew
of it - she has evidently mentioned to them that she and her UK hubby have
parted ways. It appears Joss wants to jump my dying bones when she gets
back, which apart from being a great thing, IS gonna scramble my heart a
bit - monday might well be a day smeared with carnal secreta, but will
definately be stained with salty lachrymation and the snot of emotional
turbulence from my position. I kind of expect she sees that a lot, I know
from first-hand experience how easy it is to become smitten with her.
She's as old now as I was when we were first together. We loved each other
for a while, a couple of years ago, and then she peeled herself away from
me to marry a bloke on the other side of the planet. It's her life, I told
myself, it's not my right to chain her to me, for the joss in a monogamous
cage is not the true joss. I missed her like hell but kept my trap pretty
well shut, and thought Azza had suddenly become the luckiest bloke on the
planet.
She popped back to Oz for a short visit last year. She was also sort of
angry last year at the whole sitch when she visited and I wouldn't shag
her 'cos she was married then. Don't get the idea I'm gonna crap on about
the self-righteousness of that decision, she still made me pointy, as she
does now, and I might have, but I was mainly just too burnt to get close
to her again only to know she was gonna get flung down another runway and
out of the country and outta my life again.
Pilot : Say, we just sucked a barely airborn humanoid into engine No.3!
Co-pilot: Oh, yeah. That'd be Icarus... shouldda got a real pilot's license.
--
All is fair in love and war _because_ from a gene's perspective love and
war are two sides of the same thing. Someone once said wars don't decide
who is right - they decide who is left.
So now she's coming back, and I never thought she would. But I'm
_truly_ruly_ dyin' anyway, what a fuck-off! She reckons she's coming back
because she loves me and I'm prepared to believe it, 'cos I'm moth to
flame with a gallon of AvGas and oh, I dunno, I do trust her, but the
egotistical suspicion lurks at the back o' my head that she has returned
here, instead of stayin' in England and hooking up with someone else
there, solely because my metastatic circumstances have forced _my_ hand.
Fuckin' cancer. Well. If carking it causes old dear friends to come back
to live near you, I guess you should be grateful to yer disease.
A cynical bit of calculus occurred to me a day ago. I'm living my
remaining life to the limit, and getting more shaggery than I ever thought
possible, and I think it's mainly 'cos I'm going around telling people I'm
dying. Doubts about this claim are instantly dispelled by the significant
scar up my frontal axis.
But suppose I wasn't legitimate... say, had paid to have installed a slash
up the middle to which I could append, and legitimate, stories of
impending mortality... and then after walking around for a couple of years
saying I had a biological Damoclesian sword growing within me, be
miraculously cured. It's a tactic I'm sure a bunch of men would have
figured out before I woke up to it.
I wonder to myself, what _is_ she doing in Oz again, why is she here? I'm
on the way outta this human condition, and to me she's another reason to
stay, another person to think about causing anguish to if I conclude it's
time to shut myself down. Ahh, but I'm gladder about her return than I'm
prepared to admit to myself here on the glowing green screen. I like her
enough to use her real name here. Names have been changed to protect the
identies of various people throughout these rants, but Joss, bein' a
smidge closer to my periosteum than most, cops the scourge of actual
identification. I dunno what this means, actually. I once painted her
under a psued' but I can't now.
Oh, to see the world portrayed in a domestic insect electrocutor... I
fixed the bug zapper last night, it developed a carbon bridge between the
grids (lowers the inter-grid voltage), so I chopped it out and replaced it
with a chunk o' silicone (do not test with shields off, HV will kill you).
It's actually something of an ecosystem to itself, a high voltage,
argon-lit charnel-house drawing in all aviators who can sense its
ultraviolet fluoro lure; the tiny, blasted, corpses oscillate at 50Hz in
the electric field which shocks them so violently the little scales on
their wings waft upward like dust with the blue smoke which used to be
their guts. I have looked at the insect zapper and my understanding has
been transformed - the truly clever spiders build their nests under the
electrified grid, so as to the reap the dead rain of barbecqued insectoid
manna which falls, smouldering, from the heavenly kilovolt-energised grids
above.
-------------------
March 12. Drivel. I put the dog in my backpack and motorcycled down to the
motorcycle shop for new brake shoes, chain, front'n'back sprockets.
Motorists behind me smiled at the doggie as she looked back at them,
peeking out from the lid of the pack. They put the axle bolt in backwards,
I noticed later, and they duly reinserted it the right way around when I
mentioned this to 'em, free of charge.
I came back later and brought the doggie home, to discover the
dumb-as-a-housebrick, noise-nuisance, beagle from next door in our back
yard. It was pretty cranky about something... it snarled as I went to pick
it up and return it over the fence, so I put my motorcyclin' gauntlets
back on and tried again, whereapon the fucker curled and sunk its teeth
through my shirtsleeve and into my left arm. I changed grip from
`considerate' to `arms extended, hands around its neck, and could care
less if animal is strangled' and dropped it, snarling, back over the
fence. Superficial wound, no anaerobics, so I've been lucky. Drowned the
bleeding skin in iodine. People asked me later if that was a love bite.
Which, if you think about it, is a pretty offensive question if I assume
people know the difference between the bite of a dog and a human, but
evidently people do not. No. I date within my own species, actually,
despite what previous dog-fucks-leg stories might suggest.
I nailed up the missing fence planks, said doggie perfectly friendly
again. I popped back over the fence and cleaned and realigned the coils on
the 2.4GHz helicals I'm gonna install at STUCCO. Lovely aerials.
I caught up with Lias at the Piccolo on Kellet St in the 'Cross. Fuckin'
smokers. He's the same as I remember him, thoughtful and wryly grim. Has
moved in with a woman in Bronte who is into _organic_ essential oils,
which she said in a way which I immediately knew meant she didn't know the
difference between an organic and inorganic material. Montmorillonite an
*aluminosilicate* dear, it contains no carbon, it has no metabolism, it's
not alive, it never was alive. It's not organic despite what the label
says. Lias is an OK dude. When the collapse comes, he's gonna be ready.
He's a funny chap actually... he's keeping himself healthy shoplifting
vitamins from supermarkets, the way he looks at it, it's pharmo
corporate-sponsored free health care. He's doing a tourist video about
hitching rides on express goods trains to Melbourne, the Lias way, which
consists of running as fast as ya can, grabbing on, slingin'a hammock
between two bulk freight carriages, then lying in it for eight hours and
watching from the train at 150km/h as it overtakes the cars on the
freeways adjacent.
*sigh*
Ya gotta laugh. I got some spam today. Subj: "Predator, start smoking
today!" Well, I did go to the Piccolo last night, which is (cough) a good
initial effort.
Sat 13... I got an SMS very early this morning, feen, millsy taff and me
are gonna do that fuckin' novocastrian anthracite mine, but on sat night,
which is when Zyn and I were gonna get a room and test the mattress. You
can guess which one I chose... and she's not very happy about being
gazumped.
I got a phone message from dad, some woman rang up, I had no idea where
the number was, googled the prefix and found ... Alstonville? Up near
Lismore. I rang it, got a voice message and Kath rang back... arr, she's
in Alstonville now?! Anyway, it turns out her boyfriend makes coffins for
a living and apparently there's laws that say you can't buy them in
advance! What a load of fuckoff! Well, I guess that's another project - I
can rob the funeral industry of about a grand if I build my own casket.
(Hmmm... that's why a circular saw will also be useful). I imagine there's
templates on the 'net for that. Or I could dive their dumpsters.
"Art is for the filthy rich and for their noble fucking minds
'cos they're they only ones with any fucking time
to go to all the galleries and all the restaurants to dine,
while all the grotty working class are workin' down the mines."
-TISM -The Art/Income Dialectic
5:10am Monday 15.. well, the mine was amazing. Difficult to access, and
with the usual Clan logistical fuckups and delays the six of us got into
it at 2:15 Sunday morning. The faintly sour tang of coal reminded Taff (a
Welshman) of the olfactory signature of his homeland. A LOOOONG way down a
steep incline cut into the stratigraphy, with a railway and a conveyor in
it, you eventually get to a fork which is one's main access. From there it
goes off in all directions for kilometres, through airlocks, blast doors,
past more railways, control rooms (lots of porn in the cupboards), meal
rooms, machinery stations full of various nonfunctional tools abused and
destroyed in imaginative ways, fuel depots, transformer stations, various
mobile, blast-proofed, diesel machinery built out of plate iron, solid
rubber, etc etc. We only explored a tiny bit of it. The walls are painted
white so you can spot spall in the gleaming anthracite, and the cielings
are bolted together with steel plates to stop the roof collapsing... this
hasn't worked everywhere. Hummming 'lectrical equipment is invariably
housed in metal boxes and blast-proofed. We were in a part of the Wzyee
seam then the Fzassifern seam, both of which were being longwall drift
mined by fifty-six tonne mining machines which mowed slices out of the
earth dozens of metres across and hundreds of metres along. Eventually the
coal gets tossed in a crusher and conveyer-belt transported to the Valez
Poynt power station. They're gonna mothball the mine now, backfill it with
nitrogen (reduces methane seep and prevents fires) turn off the pumps and
brick it off for ... well... who knows. Until it all floods? Subsides? How
many people never see these trapped layers of inky blackness which by some
strange quirk of mathematical cancellation, when burnt, repel the inky
blackness of night, keeps everyone's electrickal lights lit?
(Coal, by the way, is electrically conductive, so we were in a big long
complicated waveguide array... you could do some interesting RF
experiments there. Only geeks think about that sort of stuff.)
Undiscovered, we got out at 5:30am and went back to Sydney sans the
expected fines and gaol terms we would get if we were caught down
there. Very happy but very tired, I got home and collapsed into a dead
sleep.
I got just a bit of kip and awoke later, showered off myself the coal dust
which hadn't rubbed off on my bedclothes, and read Lehninger... in
1965 he wrote that proteins have more information content in
them than DNA does per unit length.. 1965!! WOW! I figured this out
for myself in 2002 so it's good to know I'm not a nutcase for thinking it.
Whizzed into Stucco to give 'em my RJ45 crimpers (they're very happy their
old harddisk works), had beer and a chat with Safa and the cookie
manufacturer (we have some very rude conversations, about topics ranging
from the fine art of vaginal fisting and how many people I am shagging and
wether or not particular DVD porn is any good), then went back to the
IceCream factory and built a machine for Garcondumonde who's an English
chap with some arm of the UK Indymedia crew. Then after harvesting some
uh, abandoned aluminium sheet (it had something about a 50 ZONE on it)
en-route to the parentals, built another machine into a chassis made of an
abandoned computer case, some aluminium chequerplate and an old steel No
Trespassing sign left to rust in the bushes on some land owned by the
Water Board.
Bloody hell Adaptec SCSI BIOSes annoy the shit out of me. SCSI is great
but arrr, why does it have to take the boot process over by default...
can't it just be invoked by modprobe when I want it like the AHA152x on
the Dell Latitude P75 port replicator? Grrrr... NCR, who are usually a
bunch of fuckheads, got it totally right with their unobtrusive 53c8xx.
Anyway, it's 5:30am now as I write. Joss has been sitting in a tube of
jet-propelled metal, moving at high velocity, couple of km above the
earth's surface for the last 20 hours or so. I'm gonna go out to Mos
Eisley, er.. Kingsford-Smith airport and greet her, with her Dad.
-----
Thurs 18: In background I'm ripping Asian Dub Foundation but that's cos I
said I'd dupe it for Nomes to get around this stupid copy control stuff,
not 'cos I especially like the music. The rant subsequently attempts to
compress a lot of stuff into a few lines and there's a lot of chronology
out-of-sequence errors 'cos everything's a bit of a blur.
I got out to the airport Monday morning through surprisingly early feral
traffic, and met Keith in the crowd at the international terminal.
Initially when I got there, lots of hotel dorks in suits stood around
holding up signs with names on them and I thought I'd stand in front of
'em for better crowd contrast (I wore a singlet and camo slacks and boots
and a black floppy velvet Dr Seuss hat) but this just resulted in a bunch
o' security boofheads discreetly appearing behind me. Keith and I nattered
about some emails of his which didn't make it to me, concerning CDMA
coding methods, and Joss walked down the corridor pushing a trolley full
o' junk and waving at us. It was very good to see her again with my own
four eyes, 'cos oh, ya know, I didn't think I ever would again.
We rolled out to the carpark and she got in the 4wd with her dad and they
drove off to Balmain as the dawn fractured the clouds. I snuck out of the
carpark through a gap in the bollards.
We met up at Darling St, met Jude and Sophie and Joss' mum and whoever
else was there, Joss and I just hugged a lot and chatted and ate some
food. I have vague, pleasantly confused, memories about her shagging me
stupid while both of us, either jetlagged or sleep deprived were in the
process of incompletely attempting to get some kip. I was pretty shattered
later in the arvo, and then we shagged again, which was unexpected and
delightful too. Words for it aren't gonna work so I'm leaving them out.
I'm still wrapping my head around it all now. I think these were the shags
ya have when you haven't had time to think about it all.
I'm not really sure but I think it was sometime on monday arvo that I did
the snot thing. I've not held anyone like I did and just seeped hot salt
out of my eyes, nakedly clinging to Joss, arms aching, and doing that
shaking and sobbing which happens when there's a couple of years of
i-missed-you and im-thrilled-to-see-you-again and
theres-so-much-we'll-never-say, and also a load of
oh-fuck-do-i-HAVE-to-die that needs to leak out of your head. Well, MY
head. I was too broken up to even think about a shag. She enveloped my
torso, warm and soft, reassuring, wrapped around me like an very old
cashmere jumper I liked to be in and wore until it wore out, I felt a lot
of emotions churning in my guts, the names for which I don't have. Pain
isn't one of them. Mainly relief, reassurance, a feeling of being ...
where I am meant to be.
For as long as I can remember, maybe I've never cried like that. I dripped
tears off my cheeks which landed on my chest and thighs and dick and on
Joss who also wore a lot of my teary snot after a while. I'm almost
getting snotty remembering it. I can't remember what I said and maybe if I
did I wouldn't have the guts to write it here.
Tues arvo I left Toad Hall and rode out to Parramatta. You can look up the
rest of the day's events in the NSW Police records.... it was totally
refuckingdiculous! Basically, Purple Death Faerie and I were spotted goin'
in the drainage grate by some cleaners, who called security, who called
the cops, who called progressively higher and higher level cops, who
probably called oh, I dunno, whatever god cops worship, and by the time
PDF and I got out of the drain (after spending about 2 and a half hours
wandering around and/or singing Tori Amos and Beach Boys in the delightful
echo chamber) there were about thirty cops waddling around the entry
grate. Some female constables picked us up off Hill Road 'cos we spotted
them near where we got in and decided to walk the long way around to avoid
'em (which obviously didn't work). I spun 'em some crap about having
dropped keys in the drain 'cos I was sort of embarassed telling a couple
of female cops I was angling for a shag in a drain, not 'cos I'm ashamed
to do that sorta stuff but 'cos, well, it's none of their business. They
stuck us in lockup vans (I've always wanted a ride in a police car ... and
I did it while not wearing a seatbelt either!), drove us around to
Faerie's van, let us get our IDs and searched it, then drove us around to
the drainage grate where we got in. They asked me out of the van where an
angry short cop (Taylor?) snarled at me, "What the fuck were you doing in
there?" I told him the truth, I was down there for a shag, didn't shag,
ended up wandering around and then sat in the room singing and talking. He
asked what I did for a job and I said I was a computer geek and I taught
people how to program at UNSW. He said I was listed in their cop database
as some kind of activist. I said I did some firewall stuff for TWS and FOE
and helped run an ISP called cat but I didn't go to demo's. He asked me if
I knew anything about something called the DSP and I said uh, digital
signal processors? and he yelled `Oh bullshit!' loudly and told me to get
in the fuckin' van. I found out later this was a reference to the
Democratic Socialist Party, whoever that is. They emptied my pockets on
the bonnet of the wagon and locked me in the back of it.
I waited in the van for about three hours while they arranged for an
explosives and firearms labrador to come and sniff me. When it got there
it exhibited absolutely no interest in sniffing me even when the handler
grabbed it by the scruff and shoved it at me. I watched through the steel
mesh as lots of cops waddled around talking on cellphones... dog handlers,
overall-clads, plainclothes detectives, uniformed dudes with various
quantities of braids'n'shit on their lapels, and super-duper-intendant
cops which were sent down from the district command. Some of them do this
muscle-strut walk which suggests there's a piece of LEGO or something
stuck under their armpits and between their butt cheeks but maybe this is
just the overalls or something. Why _so many_ cops I wondered to myself?
Eventually they took us to Auburn station where we found out we were under
arrest (when I asked). They didn't say what for. They took all our stuff
and put it in lockers, asked us a bunch o' stuff, then locked us in these
cramped little cells until the detectives got around to interviewing us.
So I didn't make it to Jude's 21st 'cos I was locked up in a brilliantly
fluoro-lit, somewhat chilly, perspex-walled fuckin' gaol cell too narrow
to lie down in without bending my knees, waiting to be fingerprinted and
photographed for trespassing in a tunnel. There were no signs saying we
shouldn't be there, and I broke no locks, scaled no fences, and I even
shut the grates once we'd been through. They let us go at about 1am. We
got all our stuff back. We ate chicken kebabs and read our bullshit charge
sheets, which are littered with typos and spellos (like I should talk) and
got a cab back to the Faerie van. We have to go to court on April 8th. PDF
was very, very cool about it, and displayed considerable savoir-faire in
the face of such police idiocy as, for example, their asking her to
remove her incredible mass of hair, wire, rope, braids, beads and drain
cobwebs from off of her skull.
Zyn's sending me SMSs which suggest she's feeling a certain amount of
neglect. I couldn't answer one of them for 9 hours cos I was in the slam
without a fone. SMSs are kinda dangerous, their forced brevity can impart
to a message a sort of brusque aspect it really doesn't intend.
I got an no-spaces SMS from Joss (you pack more data in that way, she
correctly points out) saying she hoped all was cool and I SMS'd her back
saying what happened but this was amusingly to her mother's cellphone.
Joss wrote a file to me later saying that she was worried about me
drowning or committing suicide.
Nope. I did chew the back of PDF's stubbly skull a bit (she likes it and
sez I chew her skull better than anyone else) and get yelled at by tubby
cops and have nine hours of my life flushed down the toilet while penal
paperwork (it sounds as masturbatory as it is) was done but no kinky
sex'n'death.
So I'm up on Section 4 (1) (a)of the Inclosed Lands Protection Act,
specifically the bit which sez I am a person who entered inclosed lands
without consent of the owner/occupier or person(s) apparently in charge of
those lands (which is why the detectives hammered that point in the
interview). For heaven's sake.. the olympic park authority maintains a
website saying `come and play in our park' . . . well, we *did*. Look what
it got us.
I checked it out on AUSTLII and if, as I suspect, they slap me with 10
penalty units, I'm up for a fine of $1100 bux and a criminal record. Which
will also probably result in the cancellation of my explosives license
(which might be a good thing, in some scenarios). Unless someone finds
some anti-terrorist legislation to exemplarily fry my arse in, in which
case I can expect to die of cancer in the slam once I'm convicted. Sux. Oh
well. I know I'm not gonna be in for an inordinately long time. Naaah.
They really know I'm not that risky, I keep telling myself - they let me
go with no bail.
{The Penalty Unit is an interesting monetary concept in itself. A house in
Sydney, at $360,000 for a cheap one, is worth 3272 penalty units of $110
each. You've gotta do a really long sentence in the office cubicle to earn
yourself a place to live in Sydney. That we have penalty units at all is
classic negative feedback, can't we have a judicial system which rewards
people when they do good stuff? More carrot, less stick?}
I guess all in all it's better than being mid-shag in a drainage tunnel
only to have a trigger-happy cop yelling at you at gunpoint, while his
snarling attack rottweiler bites yer balls off. It turned out the reason
the place got such a massive response was 1) a few daze ago some fuckheads
blew up a lot of bombs on trains in Spain and 2) the cops were holding
some sort of police anti-terrorist convention in the stadium above the
drain system we were exploring, in the wave of terrorist paranoia which
followed. So the huge response was a belated attempt to minimise the
quantity of egg on the face of whoever was doing the security logistics
for the conference, who must have looked like a bit of a dickhead if they
left a lot of police brass vulnerable to the drain explorative antics of a
two-legged tumor and a walking life-support system for a carnival of hair
extensions.
Come to think of it, if my name was Ahmed and I had brown hair and a tan
they'da probably just shot me on sight anyway.
Faerie drove back to Lidcombe where Kev greeted us on arrival. Kev appears
to be a complete space kadet. He's taken eight months to fail to fix PDF's
RAID array and is crashed, like her computer, in her place at the moment
cooking up an AVO against the mother of his child before she cooks up an
AVO against him. Happy days.... not. I think he's running more than a few
cycles/second short of a kilohertz.
Back at the oldie's place, I slept. Matresses are better than lino cell
floors and scratchy brown wool blankets. I woke up and walked the doggie
and liked a lot that I was able to walk around a free being. Not cancer
free, but free of the crushing, immobilising encumbrance of several
hundred tons of cop-infested ferrocement police station.
I drove to Mabel's to slap Knoppix on her poota but xmms wouldn't read the
damned files on her WinFAT98 partition. The two-day-old pizza in my pack
smelled funny and was getting a bit hairy, but went down very well and I'm
surprised it didn't make me sick later. With this stupid filesystem format
failure under my belt I went back to Joss' place. I had a shower and we
went down to Elko' park to the cliffside where the pred/joss thing started
in earnest, years ago, one night on the sandstone cliffside in November
2000.
I went around to Lias' on Wednesday night, he gutted a trevally and did a
damn good job on it with some ginger, garlic, lemon rind and pepper. His
girlfriend has finally got the idea that I'm seriously clued up about
extraction methods used to get the essential oils on her shelf and has
stopped throwing the word `organic' around with such casual abandon. Last
time she dropped it, it earned her a five-minute rant about C12/C14
isotope analysis and time-of-flight mass spectrometry as used to
determine the synthetic or biochemical origin of, say, a molecule of
vanilla - a rant which, delivered incorrectly, could bore a slab of
concrete to death. I do it right 'cos it's interesting and useful, I think
she *got it* - weigh the fragments and you can figure out if a plant made
the thing recently or if it originated in a petrochemical trap (all the
C14 has turned into C12 in ancient oil deposits) half a billion years old.
I went back to ToadHall and tried to get some kip. What I ended up doing
was lying there not knowing if I should or should not sleep, since my
clock was sort of askew from the previous night's fun in the cells and oh,
you know, ya lie next to naked women and sort of naturally want to
carnally disturb their slumber, but they might wanna sleep. I eventually
got up and inhaled Keith's textbook on communications satellite
engineering which was pretty interesting actually, I like the aerial
design and travelling wave tubes and some of the nice comms maths about
average error magnitudes and various other wacky things to do with orbital
stabilisation.
The odd thing was, in the morning dawn, Joss _asked me_ (she really
doesn't need to ask me, but she did anyway!) if it was ok if we didn't
shag for a while (a while, by the way, might mean anything from half an
hour, to forever, so I was sort of on tenterhooks). The ask was pretty
surprising, and part of me felt a bit stung about that and I reluctantly
(I have to own up to really enjoying sharing shags with Joss, and I kinda
wanted to know why she didn't want to shag me) said, yeah, it's ok, the
usual anticipatory early-morning half-hardon rapidly shrinkin' into my bod
and a faintly frustrated angst replacing it. The last thing I want is for
her not to be happy about shagging and guilt-trip her into doing it. Ah,
it's OK, she knows that one of the advantages of nonmonogamy is that we
can all get shags elsewhere, but I sorta, I dunno, I'm starting to lower
the shields a bit, which I had to put up when she skipped Oz a couple of
years ago, and feel a bit more exposed. I wasn't especially cool with it,
until she clued me into why she was making the request.
--
Joss is back. Joss is back. It keeps rattlin' around my head. I know that
other people will be walking around with Joss is Gone rattling around in
their heads. I remember what that soundtrack. It sucks. England will be
resonating with it.
I had faint suspicions she'd come back but I really didn't know. I sorta
hung onto them the way people hang onto a broken thing they don't know how
to fix, and which maybe nobody knows how to fix, but upon which they
can't bear to relinquish their grip.
But she did come back to Oz. Apparently, at least partly for me. I am
feeling pretty humbled by this, ya know, I wouldn't go OS for anyone,
including even for myself, even to save my own life. So ok, I'm cool with
it now, really.
I've asked Joss some pretty ugly questions. Like, did she want to feel the
lump in my neck (and her fingers recoiled from it when I put them upon
it). Like, does she have the guts to watch me die? I didn't have the guts
to ask her, or to impose on her, the wish that she be around when I'm
really about to hit the end. She's seen the slash now and I think it's
sunk in a bit more.
"Isolation, rows and rows of cars,
Isolation like, Jupiter and Mars
Staring faces, set in celluloid,
Welcome to the late show - starring Null and Void.
Complications. Things get in the way.
Sweet sensation, of knowing you are near and not too far.
You and I, You and I, You and I
Arrow through your heart
Catch a star.
-Men At Work (Business as Usual, 1981)
{Diamond never wrote very much about how his wife Nigella was handling his
impending death. I don't have a wife and nor does the concept appeal. But
oh, I dunno. As far as other people go in my life, she's pretty
significant. Maybe they had lots of conversations about his disease
progression but they were too raw to go in the book.}
It's messing her up more than it's messing me up, which is maybe because,
here, in my it-feels-normal body, thoughts running on a neural net
momentarily camped in the metabolic eye of the onco-illogical storm, is
able to delude itself about the severity of the maelstrom building up a
few membranes away. Taking Orson Wells entirely out of his War of the
Worlds context - everything seems so serene and tranquil. We were in the
Powerhouse museum and had spent a few hours rubberneckin' at fuckin' huge
centuries-old steam engines, trains, aircraft, pottery, adverts for the
Literary Machine, ancient bellemnoid fossils in the wall tiles, and
suchlike and I found her standing tearfully amongst the exhibit. She
didn't want to look at me. She was kissing me a lot. She feels this pain
throughout her, it radiates from her chest and perfuses her arms and legs.
I dunno if she deliberately chooses my left collarbone, like she's trying
to kiss me better. She'd watched me disappear out the end of a corridor
and had this flash, she said, about me leaving and her being alone. Read:
without me. Ok. But she'll never be alone. That doesn't mean I'm gonna
haunt her, cos I am not gonna be a ghost, since there's no such option and
that's sort of stalking anyway. No, I just mean, she's a cool, interesting
woman of considerable depth and complexity and these things are attractive
human characteristics, so she'll never be alone, really. I'm not the only
crazy fish in the sea.
I don't know what to make of her telling me she won't leave, since the
freedom to leave is one of the things which makes our relationship so
_visceral_ - nobody's chained down so people hang around ONLY because they
like to be there. When she decided to go OS I didn't try and stop her tho
it hurt like hell to know she might not ever come back. It was tolerable
because I thought she might, might, just maybe, come back, but then it
occurred to me that I would run away. To protect myself from being
reminded of her disappearance outta my life. Turns out, in some senses, I
am running away, but she's not even gonna have the comforting luxury of
holding onto the idea that I'm ever gonna come back to her. I feel like a
prick, in some ways, even if I'm blameless for the impending absence I'm
gonna cause. I can't really help being dead soon, medical blades drugs and
nukings notwithstanding. Soon is a relative and treacherous term.
Arr, hugs are reassuring but they can't fix this. Oncology aside,
everything else is inexorably going to shit too. I was standing with Joss
in the hall where the turbines used to be, where the mighty cylinders,
pistons, boilers, of Newcombe and Boulton/Watt engines, rotors and stator
armatures of Parsons generators, and all the rest of the exhibits, lay
silent, frozen iron at the end of its working life, and caught myself
thinking, so how are people gonna start these things again in the future
when all the easy coal has been won, when all the cheap oil has gone?
Here's the scoop, fresh off the icy presses of thermodynamics - they
ain't. That some of the exhibits were broken was kind of ironic. I often
get that feeling in museums and it follows me outside and I look at the
cars and the buildings and the people and everything else and imagine it
dead, fuel gone, lacking any of that cheap energy which enables them to do
what they do.
We left the Museum. En route we dropped in at Toad Hall and Joss
photocopied the bit of my charge sheet that says:
"Prisoner states that he has renal clear cell metastatic carcinoma and
believes he has only 1-2 years to live."
(they took a long time to spell that correctly) She's blu-tacked it to her
bedroom wall.
"Are you recieving treatment?" [N]
I remember the cops on the desk asking why not and my telling 'em it
doesn't matter a rat's arse what I do. Just another day of disasters and
ruined lives in cop-land, I guess.
Prisoner. Yeah man. I can laugh at that word 'cos it's really ironic to be
on death's row anyway regardless of what the dude in the magisterial wig
hands down on April 8th.
And it doesn't matter what I believe.
We dropped around to Soph's place in Enmore, where some acquaintances of
mine, monopod Cremmo and James and Pig are living while their landlord
decides wether or not to demolish their house. The crew had a good giggle
at my charge sheet. I hadda go off back to Blakehurst for dinner, and
before I'd togged back up in me leathers'n'shit Joss breathed into my ear
that she'd like to take me to bed... this not twelve hours after she told
me she'd prefer that we didn't shag for a while. I can't figure it out. I
put it down to Hungerford's Second Law. Heh. Within a couple of hours of
piss'n'porn she was putting the moves on Cremmo (the name doesn't sit
easily, he's certainly not the yobbo ocker the abbreviation implies) and
by weekend she'd jumped his ... well, I don't know exactly what. She isn't
sure if Cremmo'd be happy for me to know yet. She told me this over the
fone and I am proud that she feels comfortable enough to do so. As for her
shagging someone other than me, I love it and I'm thrilled for both of
'em. Catchin' up for lost time, go go go girrrl! If I was in the room I'd
probably be too busy cheerin' her on to join in.
I chewed up friday morning in a haze of paperwork re-registering the
'cycle. Bollocks. Roughly $1/day for a year and most of it's insurance and
tax.
I spent most of the fri arvo and the next day at Joss' place.
Since you're used to my mentioning it and expect me to tell you, yes, she
did. A few times. It was magnificently grrrreat. A bit new and weird too.
I taught her how to do some knots (fisherman's, prussik loops, knots in
layflat tape, and a gratuitously useless but decorative knot called the
Bannister knot which looks similar to the DNA double helix which is why I
learned, incidentally on the night I met Joss, how to tie it) and later
she *didn't* tie me up ;) You weren't expecting that were you? Oh well, I
relate... nor was I expecting to learn the truth of the old joke about you
only being a membrane away from a pound of shit when you're shagging.
Three membranes actually, one of them biological, two of them synthetic
polyisoprene a few microns thick. I ever so gently impaled her on my
thumb (thumbs are heavier boned than fingers, giving better support of
structural loads, I am kind of protective of my fingers) and watched her
thrash additionally as it moved against her arsehole. And now I know what
my knob feels like through someone's anterior rectal wall as I move my
cock in their cunt - which is a pretty odd thing to know, I think. All
this delightful perversion aside, the best invisible things about Joss are
her brains and her vocal cords, and what comes off them when she speaks.
She sings very well. It is very amusing to me when someone capable of such
considered replies, precise articulation and beautiful sentence structure
as she is, resorts to a gasp of Oh FUCK! Me, I get about half way through
mentioning that I'm gonna come before I get a stupid expression on my mug
and can't speak anymore. Something tells me learning Auslan to communicate
this with sign language isn't gonna help solve this moment of scrambled
speech particularly well if my thumb's out of sight up someone else's
arse. Maybe this is nature's way of telling me to shut the fuck up for
once in my life and just experience the moment.
"Animals will be animals." - Sophie
"The animals were animals. Sophie was correct." - pred to Sophie later.
I've spent a lot of time associating the smell of latex glove powder with
microbiology procedures... ethidium-bromide electrophoresis, polymerase
chain reaction, etc etc. It's never gonna remind me of that again.
Friday night I got the fuck-off-I'm-dying-and-you-treat-me-like-shit email
from Zyn which I was sort of half-expecting. She's right and I am pretty
remorseful about it. I have spread myself too thinly. I didn't expect her
to fall in love with me. I mean, having read all this stuff, ya wouldn't,
would ya?
On sat evening I dropped in on Smokering and he and I tossed around the
idea that there must be a stack o' dudes like he and I who are potentially
as dangerous as hell - 'poota geekin' gun-nut anarcho freaks who know how
to make bioweapons (if you ever drank my homebrew you'd know what I meant,
tho Wolfie has swilled this brew and lived to tell the tale) and screw
around with the 'net and fuck up critical infrastructure but just happen
to not be mentally predisposed to be such antisocial pests. And this stack
of dudes must drive the authorities wild precisely _because_ we don't do
anything which might provide them with a reason to exist. They seem not to
have discovered we're too disorganised to get out of bed most days, which
is why we love having the 'net so we can work from our rumpled, stained
mattresses.
Later Sat night, Mek's router has shat out, I suspect 'cos their linux
dude (Bear?) to whom I gave root access doesn't quite know what he's doing
with it (e-smith is a bit unusual). So I rebuilt it in another chassis.
Mega-body-piercer David mentioned, after falling asleep watching me
rebuild the router, that he got a message from two-i's Liisa that I should
come up to Lismore and say hi. Whoooa. She doesn't read minds, Matt musta
leaked the conversation to her. I'd imagine she's scoping me out for the
provision of a load of code with which to invoke a rug rat. Hey Matt, does
that make you a sperm broker? Aren't there laws against that sort of
thing?
This is far more of an acid test than perhaps you reading this rant might
realise. The only circumstances in which I'd invoke a rugrat is if I could
escape responsibility for its upbringing... maybe, in one kind of future,
the eyeballs pointed at this sentence will be those of you, my child, made
real through an act of data transmission from one consenting human to
another, though you're hypothetical as I write this. I have geared my
whole life around this donate'n'run strategem and have donated code
anonymously, previously, to who-the-hell-knows. Yeah I know that the
planet's way overstuffed. Yeah I know that the resources are running out
and no the world doesn't need another overworked underpaid single mother
with a child who won't have a dad. Well, kid. Make the best you can of
things now. Things are gonna get a fuckofalot harder in the future than I
had it. Get used to death. There's gonna be a lot more of it.
The worst time to get married is when you're in the fog of love and can't
see anything clearly. The worst time to reproduce is when you're not gonna
be around to help the rugrats grow up. Or maybe it isn't. I dunno. She's
up in Lismore, someplace. It's a 14 hour ride on a 'cycle and usually
takes me a day to recover from the physical punishment of being hammered
by potholes all the way up the bituminous goattrack that is the Pacific
Hwy. She'd like me to come up at the end of the month. Do you need proof
that I really think I'm convinced I'm dying? Watch this space for news of
Liisa's impregnation and then you'll know I'm convinced. But still, maybe
I won't. Or I will and I won't tell you. For all sorts of other reasons.
Like unbeknowst to me at this stage I don't know if the appearance of a
rugrat at this stage of my life would totally rejig my priorities and make
me move up there to be with the tot, watch it be born and grow up for a
while, while I get ready to die. Hey, that'd take care of the population
thing, it gets born, I die, total number unchanged. Unless I didn't die.
Nah. I think I can rely on the universe to be as merciless to planned
orphans as it is to their soon to be absent putative fathers.
I think there's gotta be a looong chat before the decision is made. I've
met her oldies, they're OK actually. I'd put them in the loop too if Liisa
asked me to. But I'd keep my mum out of it. I find her such a poisonous
influence that I would go to considerable lengths to keep her nose out of
the rugrat's life.
Joss reckons she'd like there to be a little me running around on the
planet after I am gone. I am sort of touched. Alive or dead - if my
tendancy for misanthropy is genetically inherited, it'll hate me anway.
Whadda I got to lose?
(Hey, kid, if you ever exist and get to read this - I understand if you
have the shits with my absence. In a lot of ways, so do I.)
Arrrgh. My last planned trip down to the Clannies in Melbourne (to see Ed
and the Melbourne Museum too) happens to occur on the same day as Tee and
Raffo's wedding, arrrshit! I can't believe it, there's *always* something
else on when the Clannies are on. AGAIN! Ar, fuck it. I'm riding to Melbo
and goin' to the drain party and saying goodbye to all my old drain
exploring acquaintances and fellow criminal trespassing miscreants, and
Ed, my old programming buddy who punched code for an old 1950's
valve-driven computer I want to see, which is in the museum. 10 hours and
I'll be there. No sweat. Sorry Raffo. See how many speeding tickets I can
clock up on one trip.
I feel my neck every so often, unconsciously. I catch myself at it
sometimes. Like now, 1:13 Monday 22 March. I get paranoid that Bill the
Metastasis has decapsulated and is spreadding tendrils throughout my neck,
with the intention of strangling my brain. Sorta like the taeleodactyl
facehugger from Alien. I hope my fingers are lying. Hokay, it was late Nov
when I got chopped open, so its been four months now. I am 1/6th of the
way through the window of time in which I have an eighty percent
probability of becoming dead. Last time I calculated this was four weeks
ago, three months post-slashorama, and I was 1/8th of the way through the
window of time. Decrement (subtract one from) the denominator (the number
on the bottom).
1/4 of the way through in another two months. (6 months of 24)
1/3 of the way through in another four months (8 months of 24)
1/2 way through in Nov 2004
...when you can't decrement any more without making it to unity, chop it
up finer and repeat... they do the same with screwthreads. Chop it up
finer.
13/24ths of the way through my 80%-probably-dead window, by the time the
letter Joss sent me with the John Diamond texts becomes correctly dated.
It was 23 Dec 2003 when she signed it 23 Dec 2004. I will be very happy if
I live to see the calendar on that day.
---
Tuesday. Um. Shit. What day is it again. It's wednesday now as I slap the
keys. I get day-frame drag. I think I wandered around the NSW art gallery
with Joss but she was pretty knackered from a few late nights of gettin'
pissed shagged and stoned and so on. It might be indulgent of me to
suggest she's doing this load-o-sex-n-drugz just now to deal with the
emotional earthquakes. She's just left her hubby and changed country of
address, which are both pretty stressful things. If I'd done that, I'd get
wasted too. I know hugs are futile in the face of the future but for now
they work pretty well, and I'm happy for everyone to get whatever hugs
they might from whomever is prepared to give them.
Then again, maybe she just likes gettin' stoned and rat-arsed fer the
helluvit from time to time. Cool. Rip in girlie!
Joss lay down on a spotlit couch in one of the gallery rooms, and looked
like part of another exhibit, late 20thC, which the curators had
deliberately left there.
Wandering around the exhibit of art from the several Chinese dynasties I
felt for a moment that this stuff, from a culture several thousand years
old, might be the sort of stuff made in the future after the cheap oil is
gone. Ceramics, silks, carved wood. What struck me was not the artwork so
much but that there was such a materials difference. Outside the glass
(toughened, laminated) was the museum, with its polymer floors, electric
lights, smelted, electroplated metal bench frames, halocarbon air
conditioning, mobile phones, public address systems. Inside the glass sat
these *ancient* things. Silk... we only found out what it was, at a
molecular level, in the last 30 years. Glazes, I am not aware of the
Chinese having a periodic table to describe the metal oxides they painted
on their things. Old, old stuff. Beautifully hand-made. Fundamentally
primitive but ya gotta hand it to woven silk as a durable high-res data
storage medium.
We snogged a bit on the grass adjacent to the Cockle Bay wharf and
chatted. I can't spend the time required to write down what we chatted
about, here, and maybe if I could I wouldn't anyhow. I do like being with
Joss, we have good chats about heavy shit. It was tricky to get back to
the 'cycle 'cos the footpaths are sort of fucked about by a freeway
entrance, and as we walked I said I felt a smidge scared about her other
involvements since one of the last ones led her away from me for three
years. But I shouldn't let my fears stop her living her life, I think. I
dunno how I can write that sentence with the contextual backdrop for this
whole series of rants and keep a straight face. I am scared I am gonna die
and it IS at least partly fuckin' her life up. Ok, so you can't really
catch cancer - it's not a sexually transmitted disease (note: there are
sexually transmitted viral oncogenes, such as those in HPV, but cervical
cancer isn't transmissible itself even though its causative agent is) -
but like all of the fatal diseases which take a long time and rot you
hollow from the inside out, other people catch the ennui and fear, you
start to seep it into your surroundings, somehow, and even if ya don't
reek of the ammoniacal vapours characteristic of the nitrogen-lossy
metabolisms of the very old, they somehow _catch the vibe_ of impending
death anyway.
We slept in the separate bunks which used to be in Jude's room. I listened
to some Goldfrapp earlier, grindy synth and silky, searing vocals, a gift
to her from Pat, her sly shag in the UK. From whom she has now distanced
herself by about fifteen thousand k's, partly to be here with your
author, Mr Carkin-it. I often have bits of music pop out of my deep memory
into my live running consciousness and I suspect this album, Black Cherry,
will become the music which I remember Joss' return by... I took the case
home so I could rip it down to a fresh blank, and I forgot to put the
damned CD in the case first. Copyright infringement will have to wait. Is
the acquisition of a backing track to one's final months covered by Fair
Use? Sorry Alison, Sorry Will.
It transpires that Joss's mum is gutzin 200 mikes of Se/cysteine a day.
That's four times what I'm chucking down my neck and she isn't dying
(though this relationship is unlikely to be causative). She doesn't call
millionths of a gram _mikes_ either, like bored microbiologists and lapsed
chemists such as m'self tend to. She calls 'em something so alien-sounding
emceegees or something that sounds like the abbreviation for the cricket
ground in Melbourne. Her hope that I might not cark it is insidiously
infectious and I think based on ignorance of how tumors work. But maybe
she knows something I don't, I think to myself. She's popped out words
which I've never heard. And has probably not said everything she knows
about cancer anyway. She's seen a fuckofalot more than I have.
Ya know, it just dawned on me why a kid's perspective on things is so
different from an adult's. Kids have to live in a lot more future than
adults do. So adults live like kids and kids try to live like adults.
The dying live like there's no tomorrow because there might not be and the
living die slowly, aware of only a barely perceptible sagging, wrinkling,
fogginess of eye and dimming of wit, which they will have to endure for
another several years, at least.
Oh. Yeah. Today. I started Tuesday at cat.org.au provisioning (I did not
say `enterprise resource planning' which is IT-management-wankspeak for
`getting enough tech shit together to do what you need'), gathering parts
for the new server I'm building to replace Conway. It was late so I snuck
in to sleep in the cot with cookie manufacturer, and we shagged a happy
shag, and she's feeling a bit neglected too. She's considering jumpin'
another cat geek which I'm happy about but we both know she'd be dancing
in a minefield in the place into which she intends to jump. Arr. I slung
out to Randwick and 91-year-old Mary was very impressed that I'm gonna go
to court in a couple of weeks. She keeps falling over in the bathroom -
which is the room with the biggest number of hard smooth surfaces onto
which one can fall and hurt oneself. I suggested maybe the dudes who run
her death camp... er, nursing home... could perhaps install some neoprene
padding on the surfaces where she catches her head on the way down. I
think her gyro's busted and ain't gonna fix itself anytime soon so they
might as well pad the cell a bit.
Zyn had the claws out. Usual questions from the wounded, the convinced of
being spurned, dumped. Do you love me? When I told her I couldn't, and I
told her she was a hell of a lot of work and yeah I had spread myself too
thinly, she kept asking for a binary answer. I'm thinking, to myself, even
the detectives didn't want to pull my teeth out this hard, I want to use
an answer which will free me of this interrogation so I eventually told
her, no, which was partly a lie. She took it pretty well, considering.
Love's one of those things which, I think, if you feel you _have to ask_
about its possible absence, in the asking signifies you're never gonna
accept any other answer than the one which confirms your fears that it has
indeed gone. And if you ask it enough, it will fulfill your expectations
of its absence. But how's she gonna know that?
Amazingly she's still hot for a shag anyway. Oh well. Whaddya get when you
put two dying people together? Either sex or despair that they can't have
sex or didn't have sex. Nature of the animal, I think. She ripped me a CD
full of Bowie's greatest hits and I tried to play 'em this evening and
they're ghastly, aliasing errors and quantization noise all over 'em, from
the conversion back from lossy .mp3 files, I think. It was a present. She
threw it at me. I've had to tell her it was completely unlistenably
fucked.
My woo-hoo legal advice, in the form of Death's-Head-Lou (I squatted with
her a long time ago in Annandale, an act which, interestingly, would bust
me on the same charge as I face now) has appeared in my massive pile of
daily penis-enlargement email (I have gotta sit down and fix the
spamfilter config sometime), and they're thinking about how to get me a
`proved but no conviction' (Sec 556a, Sentencing Act). I have to prove
impoverishment so I can get legal aid... I have often wondered how to wave
fistfulls of money I don't have under the nose of people who will believe
it to be there nevertheless.
-----
Wed morning, 24th march. I'm writing this stuff and mum comes in and
starts to peer at the screen, asking me what this stuff is, so I shut the
terminal down. I hate it when people come and peer at the stuff I'm
writing. Then she claimed she couldn't see. Grrr.
The bike shop owner, with whom I have some rather raunchy conversation (he
serves, as local mech, the same function to blokes in this district as
hairdressers do for the ladies) wonders how I can be shagging five women.
Not in parallel, I told him. Zyn sent me an SMS that arvo saying that no,
we wouldn't get up to anything on thursday night. Do you hear the faint
sound of a cardiac muscle hitting a slab someplace? Yes. But only very
faintly.
Yer only as good as yer fans. I think these rants are being read by more
people than I know about. Some of them are being read by people who are in
my life and it's modifying what they're prepared to say/do around me 'cos
they don't want it captured in the document. Bits and pieces leak back.
Arrr, the perennial problem of audience/actor separation. As you gaze into
the 'net so it gazes into you... I have some idea who some of you are from
the IP numbers to which apache serves the files when you request them but
don't know all of them. If you're in my life and read this and want some
stuff not mentioned in the future just yell and I'll button my keyboard.
Watch a play and you become part of it, and it becomes part of you.
--------
Thurs. 25th.
Wed night I went to STUCCO to drop off the other half of the proposed
wireless link, then out to the old Waverley headquarters of the SES to
discuss rejuvenation of the disused Waterloo incinerator with legendary
architecture guru Col James and a bunch of artists and architecture
students who plan to live in the old, grey building (they've got a long,
long road to hoe with the council but it'd be really good to do if the
contamination isn't too bad) and later on out to Death's-Head Lou's
place... where I was fed, plied with tea and clued into how to deal with
the legal crap I face in a couple of weeks. Ya gotta love that. Ok, so we
plead guilty, the main thing is what sentence do we get, and how to
mitigate it. She's suggested that we might try for a section 10a dismissal
of the charge under the Crimes (sentencing procedures) Act 1999, and that
to do this Purple Death Faerie and I have to write some CVs and get some
character references. Lou wrote me something amazingly laudatory and sort
of spooky - it's the first time I've read about me from the outside world.
It's odd being called to account for how one lives one's life, by a bunch
o' people who wear funny wigs and gowns and stuff.
Friday I popped over to XML's place and we shagged delightful,
bloodsmeared shaggery while Knoppix3.2 installed itself on top of what
used to be the Windows98 partition... another tiny, tiny nail in
Microsoft's coffin, another user freed. Of course it found all the
hardware. She offloaded an ol' Pent-233MMX on me, which happily turned out
to work well enought to pass on immediately to Jude, whose machine is
keyboard-deaf. I took it 'round to toad hall, rode over the Glebe Island
Bridge with gleeful pleasure in the blue sky and glaring sun, cannibalised
the good bits off the dead one and put 'em in the working machine, and
started it up. Jude's slapped Debian 2.3 on it. I met up with Joss at
Gigglebyte at about 9, and bumped into Arno' who is well enmeshed in the
machine, at Canon; using his physical optics stuff which is good, but it
sounds, sadly, like he has no time to have fun any more. 8-( I saw lots of
people I'd not seen for some time... MrY with his nag co-efficient
somewhat reduced, Oppy (bless him, he didn't smoke near me!), Safa, Leah.
Joss caught up with some people who she hadn't seen for years either
(Leah, JJ) and also met the cookie manufacturer, though I wasn't watching
while this was happening.
We rode out to the teenage goth party at Enmore and, feelin' old and
boring, I kinda planted myself in a couch up the back someplace and
swilled light beer since I was expecting to ride the 'cycle back to the
parental pad (they'd nicked off the Victoria and left me to mind the dog).
The band (recycling rock'n'roll riffs) played on till 1am, the cops came
and told 'em they'd be fined two hundred bucks (this is uh, two penalty
units). James said we should pass the hat around, five bucks each from
forty people, easy. I didn't wanna get stoned either and most of the rooms
where people were gathered were thick with smoke. I ranted to Meg for a
while and I ended up half-asleep on a couch and eventually slept in
Cremmo's bed. I woke up at about 4am when Cremmo's jackhammer-grade
snoring really kicked in and I finally got up, stepped over Joss's
sleeping form (also snoring a bit) and Cremmo's cat (purr, purr, purrrrr,
perched on top of Joss, I now know what a purr modulated onto a snore
sounds like, and it's rather odd frankly) and across Cremmo's body as it
resonated to the music of his resonating turbinate bones, and crashed back
on the couch again, in the grey dawn light, after the quad turbofans of a
6:30am flight howled at us in their screechy avgas accent as they
crop-dusted us with an aerosol of half-burnt kerosene during final
approach to Mos Eisley. Soph asked me what I felt when I saw Joss with
another man and I sorta felt like I dodged the question a bit when I
answered that since I like her, it doesn't surprise me at all that other
men like her too. Joss knows of my fears that she will disappear again but
she also knows I don't want her to feel tied down to me. I think that her
shagging other people takes her shags away from me but I've got plenty so
I have no cause to complain. When Joss and I eventually returned to the
abandoned parental pad we were both stuffed, she slept but I'd been
awakened already so did some metalwork, walked the dog and discovered I
hadn't enrolled to vote in the local council election circuses. Later I
accidentally beat myself in the face with a horsewhip. It takes real
talent to be this unco-ordinated. Ow.
I fried up some eggs and mushrooms with rosemary and pepper and we gutzed
'em with plunged coffee over the SMH (olympic swimmer falls into pool...
oh, puhleeeze, honestly, who the fuck cares about that and what subtle
brain damage do they have?). We wandered around the bush tracks of my
adolescent exploration phase on saturday arvo, went down to Carss Park,
scaled the venerable fig, in the boughs of which I have sometimes sat and
prayed to gods who didn't even do me the courtesy of existing (for which,
of course, being nonexistant, they cannot be blamed). The tree has sat
there for decades gazing out on Kogarah Bay, gradually forcing its roots
down deep into the sandstone crag upon which it sits, windswept. Only in
recent years have I learnt what members of its species had to tell me
about life and how it works. There it sits, harvesting photons and air and
water and synthesising complex molecules with which to fabricate more of
itself, oblivious of what I think I know about it. People carve their
initials in it and it drowns the carvings in more bark. I love to look at
the starry night obscured by its fractally splattered foliage. The tree
will outlast me as it has thousands of others who never took the time to
sit in its branches with their beloveds, and will gaze uncaringly upon the
Princes Hwy when the sodium lamps on Tom Ugly's go out and the oilstained
concrete lanes finally fall silent and the remaining birdlife is finally
audible again.
We bumped into a previous neighbor of mine (his family dog is our family
dog's brother) and had a quick chat... he's getting married. I noticed
something later, sort of odd, I think about the compressed version of my
life I fed him. 1) I didn't mention I was dying and 2) the rest of the
stuff going on in my excuse for a life seemed strangely mundane and
uninteresting by comparison. The more life I stuff into my days the less
believable dying becomes and the bigger a fuckin' nuisance it will be. I
am sick of thinking about it.
Back in the premises Joss whipped something yummie up from some spuds and
tomatos and onions and we ate it sitting on the kitchen floor, raided the
leftover hash cookies and swilled'em down with some Shiraz and snogged, I
couldn't quite tell if the expression on her face was somehow tinged with
the barest hint of sadness, maybe I'm reading it in there, and gleefully
fucked, candlelit, to Goldfrapp cranked up fairly loud. I felt a bit like
a barnacle, clinging on tightly to ride out the storm above, she smashes
herself against my bony corners and bruises me where it isn't visible and
we eventually curled up against each other in a bedframe made of
fenceposts and offcut tree branches on a mattress designed to fit 1.5
people. The fleabitten doggie whined outside. I dunno what it is but I
didn't feel quite the searing bliss of our first encounters, and I suspect
it's my self-defense stuff at work. It is ingrained into my head that what
happened last time we were here was that she walked out of my life a week
later. Whinge whinge whinge.
[Goldfrapp is quite brilliant. If you liked all the instruments plugged in
by people like Jonah Lewie and Gary Numan and Depeche Mode in the 1980s,
and whatever waveforms fell out of Fairlights and Moogs and Arp Quadras
and other such ancient superpositional massagers of the basic sinewave, go
get Black Cherry and listen to it on a good hi-fi. The best instrument, of
the lot of 'em, and sadly irreproducible in mass quantities, is stuck in
Alison Goldfrapp's neck, just above her trachea. I'm gonna get me'old
electrostatic STAX headphones out and listen to it on those. I've not
heard anything this well produced since ZZTop's Afterburner album. And the
whole thing works well, the songs are in the right sequence, and dovetail
nicely.)]
It was great to wake up to her face. I slept in anyway. I found her later
in the back yard reading my copy of Milam's Crip Zen on a green blanket on
the grass at the back. I don't remember it exactly but as part of the Joss
hardware empowerment project I acquainted her with a half-dead, bad
tempered, two speed, only-starts-sometimes mains driven 700 watt hammer
drill I found in a drain about 15 years ago, she drilled some practise
holes in random chunks of hardwood and brick, got acquainted with the
chuck key (my drill happens to have two chucks, a small one nested in the
other larger one) and what various kinds of bits look like. I think she's
pondering the possibility of slapping a couple of dynabolts in someplace
now she's learnt, by playing with the bolt and thread on the one I gave
her, how it expands out against the hole in which it is placed.
No afternoon of tooling is complete without some sex toy repair, so she
and I did a rebuild on her butyl rubber whip/dildo (now held together with
nylon cable ties, PVC inner reinforcing and a metal washer to stop the
whip coming out of the cap end). Satisfied the flogger would flog again we
walked the dog during a mission to acquire some fresh Bay leaves since
we'd run out the day before. It turned out that we couldn't do our email
from the dialup link from robo to diesel, 'cos something about conway, or
was it tarvat, had cacked itself, so we both rode in to Catspace, she
flaked out on the sofa while I waved a (metaphorical) dead cat over
another dead cat (conway.cat). Conway came to life, oddly enough. Ok, so,
all the harddisks in there have cranked up seventeen thousand hours of
spin and seek, none of them are complaining that they're knackered yet tho
one of them has fixed oh, 55 million errors since it was first plugged in.
Amazing what you can hide with hardware error correction. Shame mine
didn't work, all the way down there in the nucleotides of my renal pelvis
where all this crap started.
Later we both went down to Mek, so she could see the crazy place and so I
had a chance to slap some more RAM in their router, which happens to be
ram-upgrade hostile. Joss was lookin' for a bicycle. David suggested we
scavenge one of the bicycles being discarded from mekanarchy. Joss and I
put an old 26"-wheel mountain-bike ruin in a bench vise, (she's getting
rapidly acquainted with shifting spanners and visegrips and how to use 'em
even on rusted chainring bolts), changed the pedals (she's gettin' the
idea about leverage and why to stick a length of pipe over a short tool)
and were just in the middle of getting the almost rusted solid
chain/derailleur to work again when who should appear but two-i's Liisa.
Her hair's grown again. She does look pretty skinny still.
I intro'd 'em both to each other. Liisa was gonna depart to Lismore again
and invited me to come up there in May. It occurred to Joss that Liisa
might not even know I'm carking, but I reckon she does. Liisa donated her
old mountain bike to Joss and then ran out of the factory to get ready to
drive to Lismore. Joss changed the tube on the back wheel, blew it up and
the bike was ready to roll. We stashed it at catgeek space and went back
to Chez Parental to get stoned on cookie manufacturer's remaining
hallucinogenic handiwork and wipe out the rest of the chardonnay I'd
nicked from a neglected corner of the 'fridge. Joss dances well to
Goldfrapp, it is rather dance-provoking in some parts of the album.
There's a yummie looped caterpillary sequence floating above the bass
track in the first song (Crystal Green), starting on the 11th bar, which
appears to be made of notes 1/16th of a bar long, and with freq on the
vertical looks something like this:
_ _
_ ____-___ ____ __
-
It has infected my acoustic memory and is looping in my head now.
We nicked off early Monday after forensic analysis of the place to avoid
the usual questioning from me ol' mum about who was here and doing what.
Before I went, on the ol' 10MHz CRO, I showed Joss the 100Hz waveform I
plugged into myself a couple of years ago. It feels a fuckofalot better
than it looks, glowing green on the 'scope graticule. She ain't gonna read
the article completely, I think. At some stage on the weekend she looked
at me and said it again, "I don't want you to die." I think I said
something about my not doing requests. Really, what the fuck _can_ I do?
Poor thing's stressing to bits and I don't want this sickness of mine to
provoke any pointless self-destructiveness in her. She doesn't care if
it's bad for her, gettin' ripped and pissed to make the pain of things
generally go away, and I'm not the only person she has to be upset about.
I'm prolly not going to live long enough to see her reach my current age
and I'd be immensely sad if this happened to be true 'cos she drowned
herself in the overproof ocean of a DIY cirrhosis kit, and not because of
the unpreventable foregone conclusion cruisin' around in my lymph.
I pulled Liisa's old mountain bike apart (why didnt the dude who invented
Quick Release axles get a nobel prize?), roped it to my pack and dropped
it over at Toad Hall on monday arvo. All normal motorcycle couriers are
wusses.
I was thinkin' about Raffo'n'Tee's wedding, or more accurately, my
decision not to attend it. I hope they're not gonna be offended too much.
There's other stuff going on in my head. I don't wanna show up there and
mention to all the people who will be there and whom I havent seen for
years, when they ask me how I'm going, that I am slowly falling victim to
an insidious bioweapon of my own creation... not that I think weddings,
marriage or any of that stuff are an especially good idea but I just don't
wanna cast the pall of death over their day, which will be enough of a
stress already with (plagiarising from Wolfie here) frothing wedding
nazis, and the usual logistical bullshit which accompanies weddings.
Anyway, yeah, I'm almost ashamed to say it (probably that's an artefact of
the upcoming court thing) but I like to go in drains and I'm doing what I
like these days. The Clan's played a bigger part in my life than the two
newlyweds have, oddly enough, and I haven't been to Melbourne for quite a
while. And oh, there's a bit of me which is highly aversive to enforced
good cheer such as accompanies weddings, christmas, and other such excuses
to be cheerful. The Clannies is not enforced good cheer at all. Fuck good
sentence structure, it's the how-ya-going-ya-old-fat-bastard gathering of
fourscore pissed criminal trespassers of various levels of ineptitude or
professionalism, two busloads of yelling yobs worth of flash-boiled
delirium, a condensate of crowbars and bolt cutters and manhole keys
forged in backyard sheds, the partygoers variously rained upon by showers
of beer and broken glass and breathing in other people's unavoidable bong
exhaust, the whole thing held in a vast subterranean concrete chamber
backlit by burning Otto garbage bins melting on lit pyres of decomissioned
Chep forklift pallets and the frightening crackling and blast of
clandestine explosives in confined spaces (brought especially from
Canberra) and decorated by random puddles of acrid steaming
saccharomycotic vomit, mixed with yelling and screaming and drugfucked
bodies sleeping on stolen rear car seats and rolls of old carpet on
concrete and crunchy 1980s old school rock'n'roll and every kind of
illuminant from burning sticks to current-controlled semiconductors and
spraycans and textas updating every available surface and people full of
serotonergic banned-pharma disco bikkies hurriedly fucking in the side
tunnels and most of Prahran's police (Uphold the Reich) gatecrashing it
later and taking names and confiscating cameras and thumping everyone with
batons, and sometimes the appearance of a few uninvited but not entirely
unexpected tons of swirling dogshit, oil, empty bottles of Evian and the
roaring stormwater which entrains it, trying nonchalantly to flush the
whole psychosis into the Yarra, and the experience of waking up in the
dark at one in the afternoon with your face half submerged in a puddle of
gutter runoff, a glass shard from a longneck stuck in your bum cheek, one
shoe missing, no torch, a fucker of a headache and no idea where you put
your keys or even where you live any more. Rrrroooow. Never mind the
pummelling of the 900km motorcycle ride down the deadly 'Hume to get
there.
My seat post has finally arrived, and I got it on the last day that the
bike shop traded. The cyclery at 613 Princes Hwy has been there for my
entire life. Now it's closing down. I learnt how to use a chain breaker
there, how to pack bearings with grease, how to tap a thread, rebuild a
coaster brake assembly, tension brake cables. I remember getting my ol'
Cannondale there, which was as close to an aircraft in handling as one
ever gets on two wheels, piloting it down a hill really did feel like
flying.
I remember now what it was I totally forgot to show Joss. The MRI's, the
CT scans, technological happy snaps, the Before-shots of my evisceration,
rah rah. I think this is a good thing. Though the fatality lurks, I'm
remembering, effortlessly, I'm not dead yet. Or maybe having Joss in my
immediate presence sorta makes me forget these things. Or maybe it's
something else I dunno about yet.
She's having thoughts about what happens when she shows up at my funeral
and there's all these women there, some of who know each other but most of
whom don't. It never occurred to me to be something to worry about. That I
never intro'd her to my olds, fer instance.
I'd hit Joss' eyeballs with more of my thoughts but I don't wanna eat all
her bandwidth. She needs solitude from time to time. I take this at face
value 'cos it's a reasonable thing to ask for and I know it's not a coded
way of saying she needs time to shag other people, 'cos I know that
already, and she knows that I know, and that's a reasonable ask too. It's
faintly maddening, but I get the clue. I live in my own brain all the
time, can't escape and it's noisy as hell in here, there's a zillion
processes all running in parallel, talking to each other across the fat
interhemispherical data pipe (hippocampus, 100 million axons carrying
neurological chit-chat from one side of my head to the other) and I'm used
to it, but it'd be easy to swamp her out with my blab or get too
interrogatory just 'cos well, I find her so innerestin'. I dump core data
here in the rants, and she reads 'em (well, parts of them) yet she keeps
her own stuff in notebooks and her laptop, places my eyeballs will never
go. I'm never gonna really know you, am I, I think to myself as I look at
her sometimes, and oh, I dunno, maybe such a wish is unreasonable and I
sorta reproach myself for my curiosity about her.
Cookie manufacturer (I think I should call her cookie now, manufacturer
takes too long to type) and I hooked up again on Tuesday night, after I
picked up a character reference from the Professor for whom I work from
time to time. She'd given up hope that we'd shag again, and was feeling
pretty neglected while Joss and I were chewing up a lot of time. I hadda
chat with her and told her I can't decide if I'm living or dying 'cos the
course of the disease is so distractingly uncertain. In a warped version
of Pascal's Wager we kinda concluded I have to get on with living since,
if I don't die (yeh, right, in yer dreeeeamz), then I won't be here five
years from now rueing that I just flung the last few years of my life
waiting for a death that didn't even do me the courtesy of being
punctual.
Arkie and Kat bumped into us while Cookie and I were eating in the front
window of Cinque and Arkie did me the usual arr, you'll fight it, denial
rant, and I really didn't want to get into the mol bio rant about the
nature of the disease 'cos I was sorta convinced I could argue all I liked
with Arkie about it but it wouldn't dent her impenetrable, ignorant
optimism about the pathology, and I just don't wanna allocate time
educating people about it any more. It sorta, you know... bores me.
There's nothin' new to say about it. And I was busy talking about other
stuff to Cookie. We went back to Turella and dispelled this crazy idea
that she got into her head that we'd never shag again. Twice.
So it's the last day of March. Dew condenses on the roof at night and fog
spills off the hillsides. I'm off to Legal Aid now to see what's gonna go
on in Burwood local court next week.
Dave Goldstein reckons the experimental treatment is still two months off.
This is how it goes with clinical trials, I know... dudes die while the
paperwork is done, while various genitals are massaged at the ethics
committee meetings, while experimental protocols are designed and
approved. I understand it and don't feel even faintly inclined to give a
millionth of a fuck about the delay. By surviving long enough to undergo
treatment you bias the sample somewhat anyway.
Tomorrow it's April Fools, and I'm feeling like foolery, so when you ask
Apache for another file look at it here:
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/foolish.txt
You have come to the end of the file. All 100kbyte of it. Holy shit.
Thanks for watching. Do not adjust your set. We will return to our
programmed irregularities shortly.
But don't take for granted that there'll be one. It's not cos I'm dead but
I'm just a bit tired of writing this stuff at times.