Trysting Fields

Interlude: Possibly Too Much - Possibly Not Enough

Chez Hagakure Vodka, Juice & Soda Water Low-Key Dinner Party

With AG.

Interlude: Return Of Soybean

She's back. Again.

Nothing will ever be the same.

(NB The extent to which nothing is or is not ever the same in your specific experiential sphere may vary in accordance with a range of factors - some known, some unknown; some known to be unknown, others unknown as unknown. The degree of liability expressed or implied by the above statement can be estimated at approximately one [1] wad of NADA. Hooray for everything.)

(Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.)

Chez Hagakure Red Wine & Homebrew Quiet Night In

With Luke.

Interlude: Toots.

Interlude: Massacre.

Oy.

I regret burning W******. And I wish I could have been a better friend to Gab.

But what I feel really terrible about is taking J out for what should - by all rights - have been a night of awesomeness, and then exposing her to all that horror. Last fucking thing on earth that she needed.

EPIC FAIL.

Oh well.

ION: Still need a B#6.

Chez Hagakure G&T Sock Swap

With Liv.

(Previously; previously.)

Chez Hagakure Tea & Pizza Shapes Meet

Starring this chick.

(Previously; previously; previously; previously; previously; elsewhere.)

Chez Hagakure Bong Summit

Attending; presiding.

NBP!

LFN. :P!!

:)

xxx

(ION: \m/ (>.<) \m/)

TIA. (No, not that TIA.) (Necessarily.)

(LFN!!!)

(This post is dedicated to Mr R. Henley, who doesn't approve of this kind of thing. Appaz.)

Sitting Amongst The Wreckage

Watching Press Gang with Toots.

Teh life, it is good.

The housewarming afterparty was, as intended, a quiet affair. But it still went OFF. I blame this guy.

I have nothing else to declare except my ongoing, undying love for M2M. And that I have a new favourite word.

This is the first M2M video I ever saw, in 2002:

The final minute emerged randomly from under the end of something else I'd taped on purpose. I taped Video Hits all the way through for a month of Saturday mornings afterwards to catch it again. We had to do things like that in the dark days before YouTube and BitTorrent were invented.

Update - This footage is not particularly interesting content-wise, but I find Marit weirdly mesmerising in it:

I also like the bit where Marion asks Andrew G if he ate the worm.

Most Fucked Up Easter Ever (Y'know, In A Good Way)

So there I was, attending an uncivilised picnic in the park on Royal Parade, having a perfectly nice time & minding my own and a select handful of other peoples' business when who should call me completely out of nowhere on my - which is to say, someone else's - mobile telephony device but the J-meister.

(Previously.)

We hadn't spoken in the voice since November, when I drunkenly and unsolicitedly facilitated her and Henley's first ever verbal exchange. She's been in the country three weeks, apparently. Now she & the H-Dogg were in my hood. And they wanted to hang.

Headfuck!

The tone of her voice didn't make me feel like something she'd just scraped off her shoe, which was nice. So, throwing caution to the wind as I am wont to do on occasion, I went.

We met at Alia. We talked. We danced. A good time was had. It seems like we're all friends now. Which is totally what I wanted, although if you'd asked me twelve hours ago I'd have said this outcome seemed less likely than [insert comedy incredibly unlikely occurrence which in practice will never ever happen here]. They're totally coming to my housewarming and shit.

I don't know what else to say about all of this, but if ever something seemed blogworthy etc.

Hooray for drugs; hooray for Jebus.

Despite my cynicism regarding his religion(s), I am a fan of the man's work. That cunt was liable for nothing.

In Other News

I love my sister, so much.

Liv & Gab Done Got Blogs

Go read them. I got nothin'. Except an interminably unclearable email backlog. (Plus ca change etc.)

And, I guess, the news that after two years of global trekkage, an older, worldly-wiser Toots aka babysis is coming home today! To my home (ie Melbourne)!

Can you say "I'm fucking excited"? Coz I surely can.

Rainbow Serpent (Part 2)

Rainbow Serpent (Part 1)

So yes: about a month ago I accompanied my colleague and fellow Merrie Scrambler Major G to Rainbow Serpent. She'd scored a free ticket and needed a handbag company; we went halves.

It was incredibly excellent.

I captured a lot of media, and thankfully had the foresight to copy it off my phone before it died. Then my computer died. Etc blah blah.

Here at long last, etc.

To be continued.

Okay.

It's a bit hard to to know where to start.

*thinks*

So my computer's sound recording facilities had been playing up, right. Had been for a while. It was no good. I wanted to make an album.

Thus on the morning of January 15th, I called a taxi and took the old gel into town to be serviced. They told me it would take four days. It wound up taking three weeks. But they did it.

In the meantime, I got totally hacked. First teigan@gmail.com, then [mylegalname]@gmail.com, my blog and my Facebook accounts all stopped accepting their passwords across the final week of January.

On Friday the 8th of February, I got my computer back. On Saturday, I threw a party. This is where we came in.

Upon getting reputered, I created some special email accounts and conducted a few experiments. Via these I established to a high degree of likelihood that my hacker was good old Henley. Somewhat predictably, I lost my shit at him.

On Tuesday 12th, I attempted to boot my newly restored digital handmaiden only to discover that - four days after returning home to me - she had totally, totally died.

I was 'puterless once more.

Then the following night - Valentine's Eve, no less - none other than Henley's girlfriend, a former close associate of mine, claimed responsibility for the hacking via SMS.

Leave the poor petal alone, she said. He's innocent.

I was skeptical at first, but when she told me that teigan@gmail was wide open for resetting (Quick! Jump up and find an open internet cafe at 2am etc), I realised she was probably telling at least some weird Lady-J-since-she-turned-feral version of the truth.

Why had the former love of my life done this to me? She'd written to me at another account, she said - one of the ones she hadn't violated and locked me out of - explaining everything.

Only problem was, I had (of course) been changing all my passwords like a demon - without having gotten around to making a backup or a hard copy of any of them. From my computer. Which had since - you will recall - dropped totally, totally dead.

In other words I was now not only 'puterless and locked out of my hacked accounts, but 'puterless and locked out of all my internet accounts.

Then in the early hours of Sunday 17th, Wouters dropped my last remaining link to civilisation phone in a full glass of bourbon & coke.

Oy.

Various people have eased my journey through this Durdenesque ordeal, and thanks are due.

Mishuki of Hagakure 419 fame was good enough to let me use hir Facebook profile. My colleague in social research, fellow FB tragic and soon-to-be-housemate Celestine has been extremely generous with her 3G handset, enabling me to update my status in something akin to the style to which I've become compulsively accustomed. Thad gave me a safe-haven email account on his server. And last Tuesday, having learned that my dead six-year-old eMac would cost $700 to reanimate, my long-suffering parents offered to buy me a MacBook. Which was very nice of them.

I picked it up this morning. I'm using it now. It's lovely.

(I'd take a picture but since the destruction of my phone I've got no working digital camera, except the one inside said MacBook. And its eye is not prehensile. But here's a picture of the box:

)

And now I have my accounts back.

Things are gradually returning to some semblance of what passes for 'normal' on Planet Teigan.

*flops exhaustedly*

Apart from all of that, I have mostly been going out a lot - having, y'know, not a whole lot else to do - and taking quite a lot of acid.

It's been.. awesome, actually. Can't complain.

Oh, and I got engaged on Saturday night. I think. But that's a whole other story.

Welcome back, blog.

Coming soon: the long, long-delayed multimediatastic Rainbow Serpent post.

Party IV

Went off.

Oh, what a mess! Though. Liable for mess.

Also, someone stole my weed. I'm a bit unhappy about that. But that's what I get for leaving it unattended in the garden.

So it goes. It was all worth it. Hooray for parties.

Reputered.

At long freaking last.

In the meantime, my two primary gmail accounts, my Facebook account and my TypePad (blog) account were hacked & rendered inaccessible. Oy.

I've managed to resecure the blog account, at least, thanks to a friendly cookie which recognised my machine. Bless that cookie. No damage appears to have been inflicted. The only evidence of intrusion is that the answer to my secret security question ("What is your mother's maiden name?") has changed from "Symington" to "whore".

Charmed, I'm sure.

Cunts.

Here - nested all meta-style - is an earlier entry I scrawled freehand on Tuesday, and was planning to post at the 'ternet caff that evening but couldn't, because I'd been hacked:

Munted.

Is the word of the week. As in "Man, I got munted on Saturday night." And I did. I really did.

At 10pm I was summoned by Wouters to a party in the Brunswick area. I was only going to stay out for two hours or so on account of: (a) I was supposed to be working the following day -

(In other news: I started working at the doodle palace again last week; it's been almost as much of a shock to my system as Rainbow. But in a significantly less good way.)

- and (b) I didn't actually know the person who's party it was or anyone else who was going to be there. Or so I thought..

As it turned out.. ah, it's quite a funny story, but it's also a bit complex and at least four of my five remaining readers basically know it already.

Suffice to say a munting good time was had, this being only improved - and further enmunted - by the semi-random appearance of none other than the mysterious and extraordinary Thad at an advanced stage of the evening. (Update 8 Feb: I've encountered him twice more since then. I think he's stalking me. Or someone I know. But I don't mind at all.)

I didn't make it to work. I'm not sure how I made it home. I'm really not.

In other muntedness news, I'm having a party tomorrow night. It's going to be pretty good. If you are reading this and you know my street address, you can come.

Wither Reality Blogging

Feed my narcissism, you cunts.

Walking Home From Carling's House With Celestine

Wither Comments

Looking at old TF posts for the purposes of linking to them in more recent TF posts, I was struck by something: No fucker is commenting here any more. (Except Liv. And Li. And Wortwut. And the odd Neurocam random combing the archives.) (Gotta love those tenacious, cockroachlike Neurocam randoms.)

Where have you gone, beloved blog massive?

Do you not love me any more?

Is it because Lady J doesn't love me any more?

That's it, isn't it.

It is. Don't lie.

Actually, I don't think that's really it at all. It's all about me. (It is always all about me.)

To get perhaps ill-advisedly personal for a moment (Li will enjoy this):

Towards the end of 2005, I had Learned To Love Myself. Man. Really, truly had. It was nice. It had been a long time coming.

And I got lots of comments in those days. Because as we all know, if you love yourself - like, really, truly do - then everyone else will love you too. Everyone who matters, anyways.

LJ fell in love with me at around this time. And that was great. But then I think I became dependent on her loving me in order to love myself. So when she stopped, I kinda stopped as well. Et voila: blog comments? Thing of the past.

It's more complex than that, naturally. But it's One Way Of Looking At Things. Makes a lot of sense to me.

This is partly the reason people sing the blues when their partners leave them. It's partly that you just desperately miss having them around, course; it's partly the shattered dreams of future happiness; it's partly the sense that all this time and energy expended on getting to know this person really, really well and them getting to know you really, really well, and building trust and constructing a shared identity and blah blah blah has all gone totally to waste. It's partly because you feel like a part of your very soul has been ripped out, leaving a huge gaping hole in your psyche.

But it's also significantly because you've forgotten how to love yourself without someone else to back you up on it.

That's really, really bad though. You shouldn't need anyone else to love you. And the more you do, the less they will.

Am I wrong, non-existent blog readers?

It's one of those perverse inverse dynamics that The Universe is so fond of, for some sick twisted reason that I will never entirely understand [*] except maybe when I'm on nitrous oxide.

Ah, sweet nitrous oxide.

It will never leave me. Until they make it illegal.

(Why isn't it illegal? It's so good.)

[*] NB This is disingenuous; I do in fact understand perfectly. It's because people are attracted to power and personal power derives from self-sufficiency. But for the purposes of allowing this post to form a nice, natural arc, I had to pretend to be stupider than I really am. Funny how that happens sometimes.

Stuff I Did This Year

(Previously & previouslier.)

I missed most of 2007.

It started excellently, and ended okay. Adventures were had, things were discovered; it was not a total dead loss. But overall it will not be remembered as a banner year on Planet Teigan.

This year, amongst assorted other things (see archives), I:

• Misguidedly started a BA at Melbourne Uni for the second time, and then dropped out after a month for the second time.
• Got kinda down.
• Just about survived winter without going totally insane or throwing myself under a train.
• Gradually got better.
• Got totally ditched, in my absence, by the artist formerly known as Lady J after an extremely Significant & Intense 18-month relationship.
• Spent approximately 680 hours conducting telephone-based social research for money. (The weirdness, the horror, the tedium etc). (Also: The doodling.)
• Somewhat overambitiously applied & was interviewed for a BFA at one of the premier art schools in the country, despite having basically no traditional visual art-type skills or talent at all. Was not accepted.
• Spent what probably cumulatively amounts to several months on Facebook.
• Drank quite a lot.
• Various other things which are none of your damn business. Who the hell are you, anyway? Who are you really? etc

I Met Jesus On Christmas Eve

At an impromptu picnic on a hillside next to the Myer Music Bowl. Seriously.

He said his name was 'Gerling', but his true identity was unmistakeable.

Meredith (Part Two)

(Interlude: Fitsy.)

Meredith (Part One)

I went to the Meredith Festival on the weekend.

It was awse, and then some.

(From their Frequently Given Answers:

No, it is not possible to sneak in. Vicious dogs and armed mercenaries patrol the fences.

NB This is a total lie.)

(To be continued.)

Happy Birthday Again, Toots

(Previously.)

Actually, I get the feeling you'd deck me for calling you "toots". ("Mistress"?)

Even though I do not know you, etc.

Eating Tears etc

Who's Haus? Li's Haus. Etc.

Yeah, Y'know? It's Wednesday & I Needed Something To Post About etc

(It is All About The Blog[*].)

I was also feeling a bit stinky and jaded about people including but not limited to myself, and for both of these reasons it was all quite serendipitous and I-heart-the-universe that a much beloved friend chose yesterday to give me a semi-random present which - although a relatively small thing in itself - was both a :)-inducing gesture, and well-novel and blogworthy and shit.

It's a pocket edition of Twister in the form of a little plastic box, with the spinner on the front and the dots - which are about the size of fifty-cent coins - stashed in a sliding drawer underneath. It conveniently doubles as a keyring.

(Unfortunately I've now, almost immediately, gone and lost it. So I can't post a picture like I was planning to. I have to make do with words, which is unfortunate coz I'm kind of over them. But so it goes.)

It's not very practical. If you wanted to play, you'd also have to be carrying some kind of adhesive to fix the tiny dots in place on the ground, or wherever. It's hard to see the whole thing working out. But that doesn't matter.

Without wanting to go into benevolence overload and make everybody throw up: hooray for semi-random presents, and those rare people who bring us nothing but goodness generally. Yay for things that make us happy. Even if only passingly so in some cases.

Life is transitory. Yes it is.

In other news, my jury selection hearing today went well, in the sense that as chance would have it I was not selected to serve on an actual jury.

In a way I was disappointed; it might have been an interesting experience. But I can't really afford the time off work. Stupid needing money to live etc.

Now I am going to bed, because between one thing and another I'm so sleep deprived that I'm starting to hallucinate.

Good night.

[*] NB It's so not really All About The Blog[**].

[**] Although I do love my blog.

I'd Like To Thank The Academy

And also:

• Ms Emma S. White (so much)
• Ms Danielle "Macenaeas" Freakley (as well, but in a different way)
• Ms Jessica H. etc Kilby (as in "Jessica H. Kilby, what are you doing to me woman" etc)
• Mr Jaye de Koan nee ~ nee Eric Wouters (I don't know what it is that you do exactly - but you're really good at it, and you should definitely keep doing it. IMHO. PS Do not join the army.)
• The Artist Formerly Known As Robert Henley
• Nads
• Ms Megan Faith Motorscooting Evans

Honourable mentions:

• Semi / Robin
• Ads (see Jaye de Koan)
• Li (ditto)
• Ben (as well)
• Dozza
• Rick / American Guy
• Ev
• Jessica K. Reftel Evans
• Martha, somehow
• Dave, also
• Avery Cardoza (in some obscure way; we have at least three quite significant things in common, anyways)
• The Veronicas
• Els
• and, why not, Anna Pearson (we got messy together when she was just a little kiddy, apparently)

And last but not least, my mum. Thanks for having me, etc. I appreciate it.

And various other people.

You are all - in your assorted different ways - special to me, and I love yiz. For whatever it's worth.

That is all.

PS Interview went well.

Hooray For Drunkenness

Personality Test Redux

(Previously.)

This Month Has Been Totally Surreal

It's certainly been interesting.

Recent Voicemail

Random Brunswick Street Encounters, Part Deux & Other Assorted

(Previously.)

This afternoon a waifish aboriginal chick came up and asked me if I had any change. I said no, which was a lie but generally my policy in such situations.

She noticed I was wielding an unlit cigarette, and asked if I needed a light. Again, I said no (thanks). Which, conversely, I thought was true.

"You have a good day," she said nicely, and continued on her way.

I fished into my pocket for the lighter I thought I had, and realised I didn't actually have it.

So I chased after her and told her that I did, as it turned out, need a light after all.

"You looked like you didn't have one," she said with a quiet smile.

I gave her a dollar, and went to hand the lighter back.

"Nah, that's okay," she said. "I've got about six of them."

Maybe you had to be there.

My only regret concerning this encounter, which totally rebrightened my day -

(Said day having turned, from promising beginnings, to shitty slit-yer-wrists shit when it became apparent that I'd probably irretrievably lost my bag, containing my camera and my visual diary, in a taxi yesterday.

Which would have been really bad, and totally fucking sucked.

Turns out I'd left it at work the doodle palace. Phew.

But I digress.)

- was that I didn't ask her if she could assist me in my ongoing quest for time machine fuel.

(Note to blog readers: TIME MACHINE FUEL IS SOUGHT.)

In other news: please excuse the rambling, discombobulated nature of this post.

Two and a half hours sleep, see.

I had to be up at six this morning to receive some people who came to strip the asbestos from my bathroom.

(Now the bathroom looks like this:

)

And I didn't get to sleep until 3:30am, because some broad whose name I forget [*] was fucking hardcore with my head.

Although she denies doing it deliberately. And in any case, I'm really just fucking hardcore with my own head, and attributing said headfuckery to an external source.

Which is, ultimately, all that any of us are ever doing.

(It pays to remember this sometimes.)

I fully hardcore fall down go boom now.

[*] I think maybe her name is Audrey.

I remember, very early on in our acquaintance, suspecting that might be her name and addressing her as such.

"Who's Audrey?" she replied, all blinking wide-eyed incomprehension. Although in fact she knew damn well exactly who Audrey was. And she knew damn well that I knew that she knew. And that I knew that she knew that I knew that she knew. And in general, things were Known. You know how it goes, hypothetical blog reader.

In hindsight I might have imagined the blinking wide eyes.

Anyroad, I was well smitten and from that point on there was no turning back.

But that's a whole 'nother story for a whole 'nother time, if ever there was one.

In Other News: Hell Freezes Over

(It's okay - I'm just using him for my own shallow self-gratification Art.)

It's All About The Facebook Status Updates At The Moment

They're funny.

It's Time For A New Post

Today is the first day of spring. Happy spring!

My housemate of the past eleven months is moving out on Monday. Au revior, Jaye. My previous housemate Bentendo moved out around this time last year.

Time, eh.

Now I need a new one. But first the bathroom has to be renovated. The bath is sinking and tiles keep falling out of the wall. It's no good.

What else? Um, I've been selected for jury duty, which is weird. I didn't even realise we had jury duty in this country. I guess they have to get jurors from somewhere.

Watching The Lunar Eclipse

on the roof with Freakley.

Sat Waiting For The Tram On Brunny Street This Afternoon

A man in a panda suit and sunglasses came up to me. He asked if I minded sitting next to a panda. I said "no, not at all". He sat down.

I asked him if he'd always been a panda. "Yeah, pretty much." He seemed kind of irritated by the question, and uninterested in further exchange. So I didn't ask if I could take his picture, although I wanted to.

He probably gets sick of being treated like a freakshow.

It was good. Sitting next to him made me feel less self-conscious about wearing a shirt that's technically a blouse, which I was (and still am).

I Am Staying With Wortwut At The Moment

In Sydney. It's been nice. Flying home this afternoon.

Wortwut Is Staying With Me At The Moment

She is doing a show at West Space. If you are in Melbourne (or have the means to travel), you should come to her opening tomorrow night.

Then go to Freakley's on Friday.

I am. You should too.

From Our Woman In Costa Rica

Hard communique. ("A postcard", in the vernacular.)

Bless.

My Audacity Has Paid Off

I am delighted to announce that on the strength of my genius, I have been invited by the legendary Nada Awad to displace her sister as the second full-time member of Are You Hungry.

I would also like to announce that we will be embarking on a major European tour next month on the back of our award-winning and critically acclaimed quintuple platinum forthcoming album "Chicken Has Gonorrhea".

It's true! I really would like to announce that.