Pretty rock gods Art of Fighting are playing Wednesday the 9th at the ANU Bar. I am so, so there, up the front, with my glasses and long scarf, staring at my shoes. I've loved Art of Fighting ever since I bought their first EP, The Very Strange Year, and sat for many an hour at my shitty web design job quietly melting with my headphones on. To be honest I didn't think Second Storey, their latest album, was all that good, but, meh.

If any of you want to ever be considered my friends ever again you're coming with me.

Tonight, while The Girl and I were on an essential Chicken Gourment run, I got to introduce an American woman to chicken salt. This might not sound like such a big thing, but for me it's the equivalent of finding out your former school bully is now a fat, ugly, bepimpled loser. This is because I got to be the clued-in native rather than the gormless foreigner asking, slackjawed, about the most obvious things.

Truth is, I still have sad little revenge fantasies about transplanting my friends from the 'States here. When I was over there I was so fucking clueless it's a wonder I ever found my way out of the house. The US and Australia seem similar enough, but try and navigate your way around a Safeway when you're the only Australian in town. For a very long time I could barely distinguish one coin from another, and would spend countless hours at cash registers painstakingly rifling through the contents of my wallet like a senile woman. I never did figure out where the different states and cities were. Portland could have been adjacent to Mexico for all I knew. Anyway, I never stopped feeling like a big 'ole burden in California. Which is why encountering Americans here is so exciting. I've lived in Canberra all my life. In many ways, the entire town feels like my living room. If I ever found myself wandering through Garema Place in my pyjamas I wouldn't be at all surprised. While they are confused, I am certain. I know all about chicken salt and lamingtons and the difference between a $5 and $10 dollar note and Summernats and pubs and how to order beer. I know that, often on a Saturday night, it's better to eschew the pubs and clubs altogether in favour of sitting on the canopy over Stage 88. I know you go to Essen to run into everyone you've ever met or spoken to, ever, and Toast to dance with cute, dorky goth girls, and Tilleys to get one's perve on. I know the Vinnies opposite the Belco Remand Centre is the best ever.

So, yeah. Americans, come here and hang out with me. I swear I'm less bug-eyed and nervous when I'm not in your country.

Right now - Learning to Love You More, which leads to the strange and haunting Miranda July, which leads to Joanie 4 Jackie. Then there's the new web-based journal Tom told me about, Mipoesias. Of course there's always A Photo A Day, As/Is, Baudrillard, Kristin Hersh, Vanilla Ice and the rediscovered restorative powers of vegemite toast.

So, yeah. If you were to crack open my head right now that's what you'd find.

The old women kept asking me if the seahorse was real. We got this big ol' seahorse in at work a couple of weeks back. Damn, she was one big seahorse. She was a real seahorse, too, alive and eating and everything. She spent most of her time coiled up down the back looking forlorn, but it was okay because a smaller, similarly yellow, seahorse would often attach to her tail and it looked like mummy-seahorse-and-baby-seahorse and that was really cute and entertained me during my many hours spent leaning against the counter watching the clock.

Anyway, these old women kept asking me if the seahorse was real, and I was all "of course it's real," and they were all "yeah? Prove it." The seahorse was up the front of the tank, sitting up on her coiled tail. She looked very majestic and very fake. I figured I'd reach in and touch her head and she'd charge away and flutter that fin on her back and the old ladies'd think it was very, very impressive, and I could pretend they were impressed with me and my seahorse-moving mojo. So I reached in, and touched the seahorse's head, and she didn't move, so I held the seahorse's head, and she bobbed up into my hand like a rubber toy. Oh dear.

Note to self: stop doing anything. Ever.

I got interviewed on the radio once about the stuff I write. What a humiliating experience that was. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a very impressive interview. It happened while I was in the 'States. I submitted a couple of pieces to the student literary magazine and some of them got published. Turns out, in American schools they have money to publish stuff. Anyway, one of my pieces caught the eye of this guy who did a poetry show on the college radio station. I'd seen him around campus a few times. He rather resembled a gangly cartoon turtle in a floppy hat. The interview was a nightmare. I came off as the prissy, pretentious, insecure shit I can be sometimes. I mentioned reading Foucault in high school, and while I did read Foucault in high school, it's a pretty stupid thing to mention.

That drifted into my head while I was meandering about the kitchen scraping cold, stiff rice noodles out of pans. I'm not good at talking about the stuff I write. Which is to say I don't really mind talking about the stuff I write, but it isn't good when it comes to actually writing things. That said, I've received some good advice lately from people I respect about this chapbook I'm trying to put together. There are a couple of drafts sitting around on my computer but I haven't done anything about it in months. I could say I don't know what's holding me back, but I know exactly what's holding me back. I'm waiting for someone to swoop down from the heavens and tell me exactly what to do - how to finish the layout, how to find printers, how to get in contact with publishers, find the right people. I haven't sat down to really write in months, partly because I don't have the time, and partly because I've hit a wall. I'm bored with writing the way I have been, which is to say I'm bored of writing for myself. Incidentally, the interneck totally counts as writing for myself. I think that's why this whole website thing has gone downhill. No one's said it, but my old stuff is way better than my new stuff (maybe, defeatingly enough, no one says it because no one's reading any more).

I talked to my friend Sam about this feeble stalemate. He essentially told me to shit or get off the pot. So I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to finish doing the dishes, then I'm going to make my bed, then I'm going to brush my teeth, then I'm going to read, then I'm going to sleep. Okay, so I don't know what I'm going to do.

The Baby Mac is better, by the way.

The Baby Mac is sick, again, so I've been without interneck for about a week. Which sucks, because this is shaping up to be a rather full-on week where I genuinely need to keep up with the email and whatnot. Le sigh. Highlights from my interneck-free week include -

• Strippers like woah. I saw such slick, hairless snatch, I did indeed. And not one fake silicone boob. It was a little uncomfortable, I won't lie, but the girls were really, really nice. I've come to realise, though, that I have no future as a baaadaaaaasss gangsta, because I really didn't want to spend my money on strippers when the Baby Mac's logic board needs replacing. Still, if you ever go to a strip club in the heart of Canberra's serial killer territory and see a fetching lass named Jade with wolves and naked chicks tattooed across her back, slip a fiver into her g-string and tell her Rachael says hi.
  
  
• My hands reeking of fungus after a few well-intentioned hours in the darkroom. The negatives are okay inasmuch as you can kind of see what I'd meant to photograph, but they were also crap and mottled and badly developed. I have four more rolls floating around, so we'll see if I get any better.
  
  
• The sad collision between a 5kg plate and my right big toe at the gym in what may be the most spastic gym-related injury ever. Some individual, to be known henceforth as Cuntflap, left the bench press loaded with 50kg in the form of a 20kg plate and a 5kg plate on each end of the bar. Out of anything, that's just bad manners. I have no issues lifting 20kg - hell, that's as much as a standard olympic bar weighs - but I do have issues remembering the smaller plate in front of the big one. Crash, splat, ow. I now have a delightful greenish bruise over my already decrepit right foot.
  
  
• O-week + a full week at work + impending Sydney trip = speed-freak crazy eyes.
  
  
• Eduardo, Hernandez and Manuel are no more. Actually, Manuel departed this world a few weeks ago when Tamson the Fish Murdering Cat knocked over his temporary coffee jar tank and ate him. After that, despite my best efforts, Hernandez succumbed to dropsy and Eduardo developed terrible fungus which consumed his fins and turned his beautiful blue body brown. Hernandez died, and Eduardo was put in the freezer. Damn. I have the worst luck with bettas. When I get the Baby Mac back I'll re-post my adventures from the last time someone left a betta in my care.
  
  
• Shauny has a wedding dress! Squee!
  

There is a collection of first year engineering students giggling next to me. They sound like a collection of hedge trimmers. I think it's time to leave.

Thanks to our schizophrenic router, which has just decided to connect me to this interweb thing, I am now able to peck away at yet another article from the warmth and safety of my bed. A good thing, given that Canberra has decided to segue into winter overnight. Jesus H. Christ, Canberra, what are you trying to do to us? Due to a hereditary quirk, whenever it begins to warm up in spring or cool down in autumn I must tell anyone who will listen that people will get sick. My mum did it, both of my dessicated, passive aggressive nannas did it, and now I must do it. Its true, whenever the weather changes people go down like... like... something easily-killed going down, like flies, only less cliche (cold... killing brain... only motor functions remain... and the part which enjoys reading 'Cosmopolitan.') I had to bite my tongue today to keep myself from pointing out to friends, wait staff, the guy at the service station, the oddly perplexed guy at Fletchers who sold me negative sleeves that, come next week, it'll be all sneezing and complaining.

Meanwhile, the Yong Fook is keeping me warm with tales of Japanese food. Go take a look.

I went to see Le Tigre over the weekend, and it did the soul some good, let me tell you. I was so close to the front I could see the outline of JD's strap on through her tasteful gold, lace-up pants, as well as the veins on Kathleen's neck standing out when she screamed. A night frolicking in Sydney did make Canberra look like a boring stink-hole, though. I keep looking for pits of sweating girly righteousness to fling myself into and coming up empty. Some lecherous people and I even tried to go to a strip club last night, but they were closed. Closed?! I thought denuded pudenda and immobile silicone boobies would be available every day of the week.

I really don't want to go to work today. It was crap yesterday, and this morning is grey and contemplative. Kristin Hersh is whispering from the stereo and I'm content to stay here clicking through my morning internet addiction (aphotoaday, McSweeney's, wired.com, dooce, Babette Wagenvoort, as/is) nursing my pre-cold gravelly throat. Ah well. Such things are not to be.