We went to a party. First of all we drove to 'Wayne and Gem's' house - they were having a going away party. I had the smart idea of desperately wanting to buy alcohol, even though it was after twelve. Why? Just to pass the time, to have something to do with my hands. I ended up having to buy it at the crown. The blonde, wispy straight guy in Star Mart wouldn't sell it to me because it was 12.08. I think I was trying to flirt with him. I was but it seems so automatic. I was wearing make-up. When I woke up the mascara had congealed and it felt like conjunctivitis, which I used to like having very much.

D. was complaining that he wanted to go home. I was being evasive. When we got back to Wayne and Gem's all the people from their house, 11, were waiting outside and we drove them to another party in the van. This seemed very boring to me. I wasn't drunk.

I started drinking. I could see this was going to be a problem. We were downstairs in a dirty basement with concrete pillars obscuring the view of the band. The Aesthetics played. When we arrived we were walking down the stairs and Gem was trying to attract Matt's attention by saying 'nice jersey.' He seemed to be trying to ignore her but finally he had to reply 'oh.' He was wearing a jersey that was slightly too big with an argyle pattern. Later when they were playing Gem called out 'nice jersey' between songs. Matt was as drunk as usual. At one time while his band was playing he was holding his guitar in one hand by the curved bit, and then he was gently whacking it against the pillar in time with his very simple 'rhythm section' - a bass player and a drummer who are good at not playing complicated stuff. He did a song something about vampires, and he did 'International Nickel' and he put down his guitar and he was doing that dance where you step from one side to the other, it was entertaining. Finally the band stopped and for about ten minutes he was refusing to leave and saying 'yeah, yeah, yeah' into the microphone and doing something with a foot pedal. Folina turned the light off him so it pointed to the side and pulled the microphone away from him. I didn't realise that her band was going to play.

Now I was drunk. When Matt finished playing he came over and I told him triumphant finale, he seemed pleased. We went upstairs and he said he wanted tea so I told the flatmates to make him tea. I led him into the kitchen by linking arms. D. and Folina came into the kitchen. The respective partners. People were talking and I was leaning against the doorway. Matt said to me something like 'It must be boring being more intelligent than other people.' I don't know why he brought that up, he wasn't being sarcastic, he was being nice. I said something like 'Oh, it's the bell curve.' The sentence seemed to take about 15 minutes to say. I thought it was the perfect response. Then Hamish and Liz turned up. They were standing in the kitchen doorway and instantly I started lecturing them, a state of affairs which unfortunately lasted for the rest of the night. Eventually I insisted that we all go to Fuel. Well, Fuel was Hamish's idea but I desperately wanted to drink more; obviously biologically, not intellectually.

At Fuel I soon tired of my shy, sober companions and went to the back of the bar to talk some Radio One DJ into giving me a free drink. The bartender. The bar was closed. This obstacle seemed like a pleasure to me at the time. I was filled with stupid strategy. I pretended to go away, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and sure enough when I came back he gave me a drink. It was dark and he was wearing a red t-shirt. I was pretending to like him, the familiar routine easily returned to - this pretence is easy when you're drunk because I suppose you do like everybody. Eamon, I probably asked him how to spell his name. I am very ashamed of myself. Now the others wanted to leave and we got back in the car. By then Liz and Hamish's presence and the slow progress of the van was making me panic and on Arthur Street I pretended to be sick so that they would get out, we were near their house anyway, and then I got home and was scared to go to sleep and thank God I don't have to drink, thank God, what am I thinking, that sort of loss of control is no pleasure to me at all. Also I'm 27 years old and I'm thinking I don't even want to feature in this mnemonic diary except as an eater of jelly babies.

28/4/01 I have been attending a therapy group. Pretty people . . . pretty websites . . . make me puke. In this group there is a fat boy with a hook nose who is quite stupid who never talks to anybody and he comes to the group to tell them that he's lonely but he says it straightforwardly without inflection in a kind of cheerful way. He studies accountancy and I bet he wants to be rich - things I detest but I love to see him and hear him talk. Nobody laughs at his jokes because he isn't used to talking to anybody and he forgot what is funny, and sometimes in the middle of a long drawn out speech he says something like, 'Well, that's because I've never had any friends, really . . .'

I went to see Gilbert working in Sanctuary. Three girls came in to buy things for a party with a monarch theme. They had Barbara Cartland books from the library and I don't even know what they bought but they were very vivacious and wore kooky clothes with bright colours but quite clean and neat, one girl boldly was asking me whether I knew who Barbara Cartland was and complaining that no-one else did and that it would ruin her costume. When I meet girls like that I wonder if their parents teach art at high school or maybe they even are artists, they've probably heard of outsider art and these free-speaking children are the fruition of their difficult struggle to leave behind their bourgeois world. This girl was blonde and wore lime green pants and a white shirt. None of them were pretty; I've only once met a pretty girl who was a loudmouth; but she was stupid so perhaps that's why.

The next customer was a girl called J. who Gilbert knows plus a friend with red hair who wore black pants and a black t-shirt. J. has a plump face, hair with long 'bangs' down to about her neck, and wears a grey trench coat over trousers and a shirt and a jersey. She bargained for a pair of sunglasses and a black coat, and a shirt. Gilbert was quite strict with the prices. J. complained that the pulp fiction should not have romance books mixed up with 60s pulp novels, and said that she considered herself quite an expert in the area, though she was being a little self-deprecating. Basically she was being very awkward. I could feel the liberation of being older. She hadn't seen the war of the worlds; in this windowless but warmly lit area at the back of the shop was a painting of one of the martian space craft about to step over some olde english houses on its long legs. This picture was terrifying to me because I remember the feeling of fear and exhaustion from hearing the radio play of the war of the worlds when i was young. So while everybody else was doing their thing in the shop I was also facing the sensation of morbidity the exhaustion of coping with death, which state of fears (i meant affairs) is quite normal for me and other people respectively I believe. Except for once Gilbert said to me 'when you can't sleep is it because you can't fall asleep, or you don't want to fall asleep?' so it's not true that . . .

last night we went to see LD50 play. The WHOLE NIGHT, every time I saw Matt he was in the middle of a group of people talking to each other, and he was talking but not to any of them. But thank god he always thinks the same way about things as me, except when he said S. was beautiful. But then he's very generous, I suppose.

22/4/01? Sunday We went to a garage sale at number five Oates Street - our near neighbours' house. It was sunny and very late in the afternoon. Theoretically a garage sale ought to have been over by that time but as we came to the address I realised it was the house of people that DZ knows - Tristan, who is in the band HDU - so it was likely that they would still be there and that in fact the garage sale might not have begun til late. There was a dress hanging at the bottom of the driveway like some people hang out balloons to show 'this is the house'; it must have been the girlfriend who I've heard people talking about, but I didn't see her when we went to the sale. The boy was there at the top of the driveway wearing shiny black metallic pants made from some kind of futuristic material, a black see through chinese top and a black singlet. He was unshaven and looked like my Eastern European friend Michal, who has light hair. I had a slight urge to do everything the opposite to him. He told Duane that Gavin was looking for him. There was lots of light and lots of trees and flowers. They didn't have any tables, everything was spread out over the ground. Mostly it was clothes and books. There were about 20 books, they were all very new paperbacks - they looked brand new. They were by authors popular with the young hip audience, such as Bret Easton Ellis, whoever wrote Story of a Geisha, there was a new looking copy of 'Go Ask Alice.' (Check it out - I actually wrote 'Go Ask Ellis' the first time.) I wanted to buy 'American Psycho' but it cost $10 and I can't afford to pay that much for entertainment.

Tristan was telling DZ they hadn't had many customers, because they missed the deadline for advertising in the paper the previous day. I saw an electric knife, which I have wanted to have for a long time for cutting bread, so I asked how much it would be. I think I was thinking about not wanting to be the same as the vendor. He said $20, which I knew and said was rather expensive for a garage sale, but then as I also said, I didn't mind paying a lot to someone I knew, and then frankly, which I didn't say, I also knew they were probably desperate for money, as all 'users' are, and this gave me a feeling of mild superiority I suppose, and therefore magnanimity. So I bought the knife. I was talking to Tristan for ages then, I can't remember what about; oh yeah, I told him where we lived and how I was afraid of my landlord, and he knew the guy, and he was kind of scoffing at me, and now I'm even more afraid because he might tell the landlord and then maybe he really will come and get me.

DZ wanted to leave, and as we were going down the driveway he said 'Sorry for not buying anything' to Tristan and I said, 'You don't have to apologise!' because that's how I would have felt if I was the vendor, but then I find money, buying and selling embarrassing and undignified, and who knows how a perfect stranger would feel about it? Anyway, DZ was annoyed that I said that, but he was glad that I bought the knife. I guess, in retrospect, it would have been weird if we'd left without buying anything, like we were stingy. The afternoon was warm and the trees over the driveway were making light and shade, and I knew that we were going home to a regular existence with regular bedtimes and food and plans and routines, and even if it is boring and there is some mutual contempt bundled in there somewhere it seemed like a paradise compared to what I knew life could be like.

20/04/01 I can't remember anything that happened today . . . last night we were in the service station and a Phillipino woman wearing white lacy clothes was asking my boyfriend for directions. 'Do you know where Storia Street is?' And my panicking boyfriend was saying 'No . . . no . . uh' so I finally leant across and yelled 'You know, Stuart Street.' So he tried to explain that we were on the street but she asked almost hysterically if we could show her to '318 Stuart Street.' I leaned across and yelled 'yes, yes' over my boyfriend's 'umm. . . ' so she started following us up the street in the dark but then for some reason she turned off at a large offramp and she would have been much more lost than ever that because it ended up at right angles and on a bridge over the street she wanted to be on.

We encountered the landlord again yesterday morning. We had been caught outside the old flat again, trying to start the volvo. I managed to start it and got away by driving along the curb but he caught DZ. I went back to get DZ, my heart was beating fast. In the argument the landlord said to DZ, 'You're an arsehole,' and DZ responded 'So are you.' When DZ drove away over the hill at the top of Stuart Street then got out of the car the landlord had followed him and swerved at him in his car. DZ went and confronted him when he stopped at the service station. The landlord argued that he hadn't done anything wrong because 'You were in my blind spot'.

I found DZ straight after this and we both drove to the scrap metal yard, where the Volvo sadly was taken for scrap.

18/04/01 DZ was putting the jumperleads onto the battery of the old Volvo which would only half start. The recently-escaped-from landlord pulled up so I had to tell D to GET INTO THE CAR! and we had to drive off from the curb with our tyres squealing (in our 'Townace' van) and the jumper leads hanging out of the window. That was the highlight of my day. Today it is grey. The hills are all obscured at the top by fat clouds. And they are quite low hills.

There was already a slight atmosphere of tension before the landlord getaway because Jane F. and Nigel and Violet were parked near us and yesterday morning when Violet had asked D. to get them some stuff he had surprisingly replied 'No. No No No No. Don't ask Jane Q. either. No.' And again today, we ran into them trying to do some stuff. So they were shown up a bit and the whole thing was a little awkward and tense and D. was in the strange situation of not being the naughty boy, and they were in the peculiar position of being the mischievous ones.

While D. was talking to them out of the car window about this 'adult' stuff I was trying to attract the attention of Jane's son Jack. Everything I said to him made him look as if he was going to burst into tears. He was wearing gumboots. The sky was grey. I held a plastic fake icecream out of the window to show him. He got into their car without saying anything.

I have a new house now. It makes me feel like bursting into tears. The first day we went there there was a boy/man of about 30 squatting outside the front door sorting through the mail. He didn't say hardly anything to us but we realised he was the landlord's brother. I thought he seemed like he was on tranquilizers and D. thought dope. We found out that he used to live in the house and the landlord also said to me that 'the people who used to live there left it a big mess and didn't mow the lawns for a year' - so she said that about her own brother but without saying it was him. And now D. said that the hole in my bedroom door looks like it was made by an axe and it does, it is a long, narrow break with a crack running up the length of the door. I don't know how to exorcise the mood of the previous residents.

13/04/01 Yesterday morning I finished 'Glamorama' by Bret Easton Ellis - I had impolitely read the last third of the book all morning while I was in the process of saying goodbye to DZ's mother, Gladys, even in the train station, because I was so eager to finish it, so that I could go on to my spooky next book, 'The Adversary' by Emmanuel Carrere. And then when I started reading that, I had to be impolite for the entire rest of the day for reasons explained below, so I even read it when I was 'visiting' Jane Quail and her boyfriend Richard's house, and they were watching 'Big Night.'

'The Adversary' is a true story about a French murderer, Romand. In his second year of medical school, he failed his exams, but instead of telling anyone, he pretended to pass and 'attended' medical school for the next eight years, 'graduating' and marrying one of the medical students, Florence. He then pretended for the next ten years to have a job at the WHO in Geneva. He really just went walking in the woods during the day or read newspapers, and he embezzled money off his family and his mistress to live on. When he was finally about to be found out, he murdered his wife and children, his parents, and tried to murder his mistress. Then he set fire to his house and took an overdose of sleeping pills, but not before waiting a day or so and taking the sleeping pills at the moment when he heard the fire engine arriving, and he went on lying and lying after he was caught . . . it is horrifying and the man who wrote 'The Adversary', Emmanuel Carrere, is a great, though not obvious, 'analyst.' In a subtle way, Carrere considers the effect of Romand's religion on Romand and his friends. He does not come to any conclusions, but nevertheless I knew that the author's approach and construction of the story would benefit me somehow (spiritually? morally?) so I read the whole horrible book as fast as I could.

Original Sample Entry

8/4/2001 Went out for lunch with Violet and Duane and their mother. We went to Nova, the art gallery cafe. violet was wearing a knitted red and white Nom-D top with green bands and a matching belt, a houndstooth skirt and brown 60s boots with an interesting buckle detail. DZ was wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt, cap and disgusting jeans that taper in at the bottom. Gladys was wearing black cross-over high heels and a dress and a cardigan. We were served by a Scandinavian girl.

An index to old kitty entries, my links page, and my ontological struggles. XX