Think of us as cavemenpeople, it was important back then to think about past dangers in stressful situations, to remind of us of past mistakes and ensure they wouldn’t happen again – how sick you were when you ate those berries, how you nearly died trying to pat an antelope! Whatever! I know that in rush hour when I’m driving home I’m often plagued by other incidents where I nearly killed myself, or have nearly been killed by a reckless action.

So perhaps rather than punishing ourselves it is an automatic instinct. It explains why we focus on the negative rather than the positive. In our modern society, of language, communication, hierarchy and technology the moments of shame, frustration and despair take the shape of conversations and car accidents rather than bad berries and rampaging animals.

This also explains for me why pet dogs often also suffer anxiety, their daily moments become the reprimands, the long hours of being ignored, the frustration of not being able to go outside when they want to, or the neighbours cat teasing them. Their brains are plagued by new more emotional, less instinctual memories which are attached to guilt for not behaving well, sadness at not having their love returned, that type of thing, rather than what their brain is more properly built for, chasing birds, remembering the pain or fear when the bird turns out to be able to fight back!

Obviously I’m not a neurologist or psychologist. But the thought has helped me to calm down and listen to myself more, I worry less that I have a self esteem issue and am constantly punishing myself. I find less need to drown out all thoughts and I start to think it’s a normal protective reaction, instinct, don’t worry, just listen to the message.

But in a time of dramatic change in our world, where our communication system draws us ever closer and changes the way we behave, no new philosophies are being born. People talk of guarding privacy, and abandoning copyright, but these are political ideas which pale in comparison with the words of Jean Jacques-Rousseau who realised “man was born free and everywhere he is in chains”.

We don’t think anymore. We surf the net, we watch tv, we work, we sleep, we party. But we avoid the silence. We avoid the taunting voices in our heads which torment us with old conversations and moments of shame, anger, frustration. We deny totally the moments of happiness or joy. We don’t think, we don’t consider. ‘Sensitive’ is an insult. Sensitivity to the world, consideration of it and for it, is out of fashion. Silence is the enemy. Numbness is the aim.

When we can’t achieve the numbness, when the moments that haunt us seep in, we collapse under anxiety or depression, the ones that escape mental illness are the ones with the best systems of numbness. We’ve created so many inputs into our heads, from texting on our mobile phones to reading books in bed.

We shut each other out, sometimes I think this is a symptom of the post-war generations who could not speak to each other of their unfamiliar pains – abandonment, unspeakable horror, cruelty, addiction to adrenaline, boredom bordering on torpor – we keep a stiff upper lip and concentrate on our knitting, fixing the shed, having children, buying more dvds. But I think this has always gone on, just as war has, I suppose.

Our unspeakable tiny pains, which we know to be universal but feel completely unique to us in our own internal worlds, are nothing to the struggles of serfdom which kept the French in chains. We feel we are too comfortable to complain, we watch as the world changes around us, as power shifts further and further away from us and into the hands of media corporations. France would never have freed itself without the free press, the voices of dissent which spread their ideas throughout the nation culminating in society’s complete upheaval. Today our minds, our opinions are controlled by individual men bent on the accumulation and manipulation of power, the disempowerment of governments and independent media.

As an aside, the Howard government attacked our higher education; our ability to think and better ourselves. They attacked our free press and worked to empower the media monster which supported them. The current government has learnt the lesson of crossing the corporations, it lost its leader in a battle against the corporate giants. But we have food and water, rooves over our heads, electric blankets on our beds, DVD players and Foxtel. So we don’t feel justified enough to revolt. It took the theft of their rainwater for Bolivia to revolt. I wonder what it will take for us? I wonder who will be our philosophers?

Some stuff I thought of when I wrote this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/ < — the instigator
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:About < — an incredible tool
http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/presenter/about < — my hero of the hour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolations_of_Philosophy < — another instigator
http://www.theschooloflife.com/ < — an incubator of ideas
http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-ministry-of-food/about < — an initiator

PPS. I was talking today with Dad about how ingenious Britain was in world war two, like for D-Day they made fake tyre tracks and cardboard airplanes to make the Germans think they were somewhere they were not. This kind of ingenuity seems to have died off. I get tired of looking back and glorifying the old days when so little is being done today.

There’s this problem with blogs, where the relationship can become really one-sided, one person blogs all the time and you feel you know them, but of course they don’t even know you’re reading, let alone how you are – this is where the low-commitment of twitter comes in handy.

But there’s this other aspect of blogging where in fact the blogger (me) only tells extremely select things about themselves or always tries to sound cool or whatever, to the point where it becomes alienating or it just stops.

I said ‘no’ to a date the other week, a couple of them actually. This happens about once a year, some nice (or not-so-nice in some cases) guy asks me out… but it inevitably falls apart at the point where we must find a first date venue. A place that is neutral, a place we can both relax etc… Movies is my first date of choice, or a band if you have established that you both like said band.

Galleries are hard for me because I really can’t walk that long due to stupid foot. standing on the hard floors doesn’t work for me, seeing the art does though.

Gigs terrify me even if i’m with friends even if it’s a venue I know, even if I like the band. Even if I’ve been going to gigs regularly for months. I think it’s because it’s a room full of strangers which unfortunately you’re more likely to interact with somehow than say, a cinema audience. Awkward unintentional eye contact, being sized up as to how you fit in the scene, whether I know you, whether you should be there.. I’m sure most of it is in my head. But it has never gone away in the 18 years of gigging.

I think if I did other things, interacted with other groups at some point I’d get more offers for dates than the current annual offers. But I’ve not found a place i’m comfortable that also offers up lovely lads on a regular basis. it also seems to me that the higher density of lads, the less nice they are. eg. Footy bars… not the nicest lads. Librarian conferences, very nice lads, though few and far between.

But even when I’m asked, unless there’s that neutral space to just be, no pressure, relax.. I may as well just sew my lips shut. or not bother showing up. same difference.

And now we move on to the PRIVACY issues I do so love to jump on regularly… because personal dating sites make Facebook look like a bunch of happy-go-lucky linux developers. What I’m saying is, Dating sites are so evil they make facebook look like fluffy bunnies. And look at who owns these dating sites, and how many more are starting up even fairfax want their own dating site… why? because you will tell them everything about you that is real, and they will profile you and target you for advertising. they have no interest in your future happiness. You could get raped and dumped in a ditch for all they care. as long as they get your dating profile. and it’s a catch-22. classic. if i lie on the dating site then i wont get the man of my dreams, i’ll get some other weirdo. so i have to be completely honest and reveal my heart.

MARKETING COMPANY’S WET DREAM!

And speaking of Marketing companies… Hows about the Labour Party! OMG lets take all the rough edges, human emotions and personality out of our PMs shall we? You too can vote for a PR spokesman, oh no, wait… that’s PM Julia Gillard (the #gingeroverlord). Tony Abbott in comparison can be a complete git and actually SAY you can’t trust anything he say, and still come off the better candidate, because we can relate to him more as a member of the human race than the woman who compromises every one of her convictions at the drop of a hat, in a shiny white suit we’re praying she wont accidentally menstruate in.

On the upside there is a Green member for my electorate, so my voting decision has been made. I get to stick it up the government for sticking it up the Boat People, the Kyoto Protocol, and anyone who uses the internet.

But my preferences will still make sure Abbot goes down the toilet along with the silly bitch they put in my seat who nearly didn’t get the job because her party members didn’t want such an important seat going to a woman.

Bet those party members were sweating in their sleep when a woman became Prime Minister of Australia. Don’t let them fool you kiddies, they attack attack attack and say they don’t like Julia for saying she’s going to “get real” or whatever, but we all learnt this lesson from the Americans. Saying you’re not going to vote for Obama because he has a Muslim middle-name is NOT a convincing cover for that fact that you’re a xenophobic-bigoted-misogynistic-mother-fucker-of-a-lying asshole. Atleast half the shit that’s being thrown ad Gillard is because she’s a woman. Step back, take a look, open your fucking eyes.

And speaking of opening ones fucking eyes. You all know what a fan I am of the iPhone cancermaker, well that was before they made the new one out of an aluminium antenna which you have to touch (ruining reception, and probably amplifying cancer toward your brain) and extremely shatterable glass. I’m sorry it’s butt-fugly. I may have forgotten to mention this in my last post way back when, but by the time they proved that the bloody-thing works less for left-handers, I’d fucking had it. There’s actually a long list of things wrong with this phone. And the funniest bit is how iPhone5 is going to come out in a year or so and it’s magically going to look totally different, not that they’d ever admit they fucked up with this one, but you know, it’s not a mistake they’ll do twice. One would think… they did make the ultra pointless iPad…

Still not going to Android though, I’ll wait for a TRUE open source device such as Linux. Cory Doctorow leads the way here, we don’t want our future devices, which will eventually replace our PCs and laptops to be little boxes of advertising in our pockets. Our ‘cells’ as described by William Gibson back in the early 80s of cyberpunk, which would be little pod things which act as our gateway to the world, holding everything we are within them digitally – we don’t want these things controlled by a company which doesn’t let us put files on it, or our own games, or copies of comic books we got from friends. We want total control of these future PC’s we hold in our pockets. We don’t want their spyware, we don’t want them shooting ads through the air at us, we don’t want them to upgrade the OS every five minutes so we have to buy a new piece of plastic just to be able to load our address book before going senile. We would never let them take our PCs or our laptops, so why are we letting them take our phones???

I know iPhone is against everything i’ve just said here, I’m well aware of that. I was aware of it the moment the phone came out. But above and beyond any other phone on the market they understood User Interface. I don’t want to THINK how to write an SMS i just want to bleeding have it written and sent already. THAT they got right. for a PHONE they got it right… for a future PC/laptop replacement they got it ALL WRONG.

And I think that’s most of the rants I’ve been penting up.

But I’m glad… I am sick of waiting around, not knowing if I’m going to like the new phone, wondering if I should be shopping around for something else, wondering if the iPhone is going to fall short of my needs. But they’ve brought us:

• forward facing camera
• higher res camera with flash
• background pictures on home screen
• folders on main screen
• multi tasking apps
• battery power stated in percentage
• 5x zoom on camera

And that’s just the beginning. I’m sure there’ll be many more reveals as time goes on. Unfortunately they wont solve my number one annoyance – no Flash in Safari. It seems like a superfluous thing, but when i’m in Wellington next week wondering which bands to go see, i wont have a computer, I’ll just have my trusty iPhone cancermaker, and when I visit Myspace.com all the bands will be listed there, but I won’t be able to listen to a single song. Apple’s justification is that they want you to use iTUnes, but I’m sorry mate. I don’t think Flying Scribble or Paper Ghost are on iTunes.

well… i made an electronic organ today. I’m so proud of it! (well I was when I finished it and it finally WORKED! but since then i’ve been waiting for camera batteries to charge and the excitement has died down a tad). YOu get a bag full of chips and pins and diodes and resistors, you have to figure out what’s what (resistors are a bitch!) then solder each one onto a blank circuit board.. or two. And for a full hour it DIDN’T WORK! fuckety FUCK fuck…

The only thing I’ve soldered in the past is my guitar leads when they’ve split. doing circuit boards is a whole other experience… this is a kit i bought from an electronics store, and it took at least an hour of tracing what wasn’t working to fix all my crap soldering from the day before. Google helped me find awesome soldering advice making this morning’s work much more reliable. what would I have done pre-google? chuck it in the bin i suspect, with nothing to show for it but the smell of burnt hair which Karen smelt when she came over to visit last night.

So this is part of my latest craze project, I’ve gotten some experts from the UK to circuit bend a new 1980s casio MT-40 I’ve bought, and in the meantime I thought I could try bending some of the electronic toys i have lying around. I just needed to practice soldering a bit first, so I bought a couple of kits.

The idea is to get a more crunchy sound happening with my music which is a bit too acoustic and soft for me at the moment. And while i’ve been sick has been the perfect time to sit and do projects like clean out my hard drive and soldering. Now if only I can get my neighbour to stop banging around like a maniac, so I can get some rest.

This whole thing makes me feel like I should get a teeshirt to show off my geek powers! actually speaking of tee shirts I made a couple for the sci-fi convention next month which I am hitting with ma girls, I’ve always wanted to do a sci fi convention with girls. we’re all convention virgins. We’ve had teeshirts made… mine says K-9 shits ball-bearings which he does. Tom Baker said so. I also made one I used to want to wear till Tennant pissed me off. But Kerri wants it.

Hope you all have a lovely Easter break!

I know you’re never supposed to qualify what you’ve done, or apologise, but for me this blog is about pushing and improving, and seriously you wouldn’t have believed the trials I went to to get this thing done to some degree I’m happy with.

it really is such a drama, you write all these bits but they never come together. and when you DO finally write and record some music, you realise – as I have here – that it’s in the wrong bleeding key if you want to actually sing something to it. so you have to transpose it and make the whole thing sound tinnier than it was meant to.

then you can’t come up with a decent melody, or if you do, you can’t sing it because it’s so high. or even if you come up with lyrics and a melody and transpose the song, you can’t record the vocals properly to save yourself.

and when it’s all done you say “gee I think it should be faster, poppier, punchier, or something” but of course you only know that NOW when you’re finished, not at the beginning when you have no idea what it’s going to sound like. BLAH. I’m pretty happy with it. it’s still a bit close to me, and it’s a pity I can’t seem to record the vocals satisfyingly….

Look as a teenager I was brought up with this idea too; hate the system, hate the mindless corporate scum, they’re just drones. It’s depicted quite beautifully in John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm, and anyone who catches Tram 86 or 96 (i forget which) gets this diatribe spat at them by the abusive homeless guy that harrasses travellers each morning. But it occurs to me these days that this is a very 1950s anti-conformist attitude, it’s SO fucking out of date. Back then, the beatniks were rebelling against an emerging consumerist society a society that is fully developed today, a society we are trapped in. but the beatniks in their day, they still had church, neighbourhoods, and communities. We don’t.

Many of us, not all of us, but many of us depend on work for social contact, for some kind of connection with other human beings. You take work away from us, and we are completely isolated. We rarely talk about the small family units, the loss of the neighbourhoods, the dismantling of community services and the isolation of living in cities. This is not something that successful musicians understand because their job description requires that they are excellent social networkers, so they fit seamlessly into whatever community they need to, in order to be the artist they want to be. How many ‘drones’ are people who used to dream of a career as an artist of some kind, and had to give it up and find an actual way of sustaining themselves in this world? How many things that these artists and musicians depend on would no longer be there if us ‘drones’ abandoned our dronish ways and led our lives like butterflies?

I’m not a fan of schools and therapists molding people into little cog-like citizens that support a status quo. I’m not into popping out kids like ping pong balls. And i’m not a fan of the working hours required to make a living, the way that work, travel and needy children take up valuable thinking and creative time. There literally aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s an incredibly effective way to keep the populace from caring too much about things like art or politics or the direction we’re all going. Office work does stifle creativity, but don’t blame the worker for how the system works, we just try to fit in as best we can so that we survive and get whatever it is we need – security, family, space.

I’m not leaning on family, or my partner to slave away in The System while I fluff about. I’m not the artist who got half rent in our share house ‘because she couldn’t afford it otherwise’ while I paid 1.5 rent because i had a full time job in a fucking call centre. Why am I subsidising her? I’m a musician, I should be subsidising my own work, not her shitty attempts on a canvas. This happens all the time, you talk to the beatniks with their inability to process the idea of an office job and you find out how other people are subsidising their lifestyles. Lucky them. or… unscrupulous…

Today most of us spend more time with the people we work with than anyone else, and more workers than not are completely cut off from any form of solid community. We talk all the time about how workers will work 21 different careers in a lifetime, we don’t talk about that meaning they traverse 21 communities in a lifetime, never fully holding onto a single one. But these transient relationships offer support and encouragement that is all too rare in a modern lifestyle.

PS. i know i’ve been doing a lot of ‘hating’ on my blog here lately and it’s not always so palatable, and i can’t always put it in the context it deserves, often i’ll say i’m talking about ‘musicians’ but really i’m talking about the people who do what i’m talking about, which is not necessarily all musicians, nor exclusively musicians. I’m just processing, thinking critically about what i’m being fed by other people, by the media, using this blog to reinforce my own opinions. You’re not supposed to agree with all of it.

I spent the morning reading a Max Barry book called Company and listening to RRR. While I finally did the dishes, the lady on RRR was talking about ‘community’, that we should be talking to people behind counters about meaningful things, and we are allowed to have days where we just don’t want to talk to anyone. Community is a complex issue, I usually feel completely cut off from any form of community, it does bother me.

I started the day going to the local Readings to pick up Jennifer Government by Max Barry, I’d ordered it the Friday before at Borders after spending $60 (with 40% off) on three expensive books I could never otherwise afford, or justify.

I went to the post office and returned an expensive tee-shirt i’d ordered online which stained itself on the first wear. Bought from a local maker who only uses local materials, no slave labour etc. Hopefully she’ll send me another one, it was really nice.

I went to the little cabinet maker at Malvern Station but he was closed until next week. He is always closed when I visit, I have never been inside. I am becoming bitter.

I went to Greville street, couldn’t find anywhere to park, refused to pay meter parking at $2.30 an hour, two hour minimum, esp since i didn’t know how long i’d take. drove round and round and found a free 1 hour park.

Went to Revolver and ordered a glockenspiel, not a good one, not a bad one, have to wait for it to arrive. I’ve wanted one for a very long time. Ever since 1992 when I saw Laura MacFarlane of Ninety-nine on her knees in Polyester Records playing Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning on a Glock.

Went into Friends of Couture, all the clothes reminded me of the most vacuous Gen X friends I have. left feeling self righteous.

Went to Greville St Records, couldn’t find a cd i wanted, bought an Akira Kurosawa dvd, because i couldn’t leave without getting something and it looked good even if it was $35, disappointed Steve didn’t recognise me even if it had been 5 years since I’d visited, I’ve gone there since I was 16 for fucks’ sake.

I went to Greville St Books, Urata did recognise me, I didn’t think she would. I used to buy design books and Lemony Snickets, basically half my wage went there. We chatted for ages, I found some things I didn’t really need (T.S.Eliot and Dylan) and bought them to help her business and make me feel purposeful spending so much time in there.

I raced back to my car thinking I’d have a parking fine, I didn’t. I took my secret shortcut and parked outside Alternate Worlds, I stopped in at Fat Helen’s but almost I never buy anything there, I’m just reassured that it’s still there, unlike many of the nice stores from the past, unlike the Tote which is closing this weekend. The comic book store guy was significantly younger than me which was weird, but he gave me good advice. I bought two graphic novels, after literally going through every shelf in the store looking for something to get.

I walked up to Penny Syber’s secondhand book shop to tell her the book she recommended was awesome, but she wasn’t there, all her cats were curled up in the window in tiny boxes or between books on the register. like large furry coffee scrolls. I looked for a similar book but there wasn’t one, and she wasn’t there to help me. It’s not the same. People who say internet shopping rocks, may have forgotten how awesome it is to have record, comic and book store staff who know their shit so well and know your tastes so well, they can thrust things in your hands which you will form a life long bond with.

I jumped in the car it was time to get home, my new mattress would be delivered between 5 and 8pm. They came at 7:58 but took away my 18 yr old futon mattress as a favour, it’s like a chapter of my life i’m saying goodbye to.

I frequently buy something in a store I like, or something extra in a small but vital business I don’t want to close down. I feel guilty for spending the money and often the business owner probably is rolling in it and doesn’t need the money as much as I do. But life without these businesses would be a struggle of internet shopping and having to return every other purchase in the post.

And a final question, I got this idea from the radio…

What song do you NOT want to die to?
ie you’re walking along, iPod on shuffle
and a runaway street sweeper careens
round a corner and lands on you crushing
you to death.
and the last thing you hear in this world should NOT be…

So this summer I picked up the habit again, I went to Borders for the Boxing day sales and bought myself a full priced atlas with nice clear political maps and things and have been slowly teaching myself the capital cities of Europe… didn’t get too far.

Anyway each day for a week i’ve been testing myself on Traveller IQ and finally I completed the 12th level! So I must be improving… even if i’m only jabbing at countries and hoping I don’t get too many russian cities on the east coast!