‘And then I realised that none of the authors I loved wrote objectively at all; that in every case, they wrote as if to their journal, or to someone they were gossiping with; I had completely deceived myself, my memory had misled me, simply because I was so convinced by their ideas; but they would write things like ‘Oh I, I hated her so much,’ and ‘his goggling eyes stuck almost out of his face’,’

I don’t know why I was so worked up, but I couldn’t stand the thought of Gilbert speaking, and wanted to shout all the rest of the way down the street. The painfulness of my enthusiasm is almost intolerable for me, but what must it be like for someone else, who receives hardly any benefit from it? Anyhow I was barging right into Gilbert, and walking pressed against his arm, although I didn’t notice it, and then when I did it seemed like the correct relationship to bear towards him, as I didn’t want to risk for a single second that he would refuse me the time to speak, and perhaps if I didn’t move at all then he wouldn’t notice that we were walking down the street, that we were almost there, and that surely things should be drawing to a close . . . It pains me dreadfully that things must ‘draw to a close,’ that the car is about to pull up, that the journey is of a limited duration; at the exact moment when you have your victim entirely under your thumb, when there is nothing for the two of you to do but exist in limbo, only speaking to each other, without any opportunity to accomplish anything, because you are in between two places . . . I sense that my victim is looking forward to the end! (And some people choose to fly, enjoy flying, seek to make their journey shorter, even though they have a companion . . .)

MY ENTHUSIASM KNOWS NO BOUNDS . . .

When we finished watching Dr Katz my flatmates were saying that the credits went by too fast to see who starred in the show. So I said, ‘You can find out all that, and more, from the Dr Katz website.’ They didn’t seem very enthused so I started explaining all about how you could look up the comedians biographies and there was crossreferencing and . . . then they seemed enthusiastic and started saying ‘Oh really! Oh wow!’ So I was satisfied but maybe, maybe not even consciously, they were being enthusiastic to get me to shut up. POT SMOKERS.

20 May 2000 I can’t type - I cut the tip of my index finger off - so even though I have a lot to say, I can’t really be bothered . . . I cut the tip of my finger off, and my flatmates thought I was being a wimp but it was a lot, about half a centimetre, and so I stuck it back to my finger but I did it wrong and gauze got stuck in it and two days later I had to go to the doctors and then they pulled it off again because they said otherwise it would grow back crooked . . . I screamed when they did it, I wonder what the patients in the waiting room thought. Actually I didn’t scream, I said ‘oh, fuck’ really loudly and laughed.

A strange thing with a postal worker: the morning I realised my finger repair had gone wrong I was trying to take the plaster off and I started crying, not because it was hurting but because I was so confused about what to do, and D. was trying to help me and I was squealing because he was really toughly winding a piece of tape round my finger, which was infected, and like in a movie a postal worker popped up OUTSIDE THE WINDOW and said, ‘Does Maryann live here?’ and I said yes and I was crying and had just been screaming with pain and he smiled and passed the parcel in and left.

Last night we went to a show at the Crown featuring about 10 bands, organised by ‘this guy who writes a magazine called Urban Serpent - even though he lives in the Catlins.’ [Actually, this is not true, I now know. They live on fucking Arthur Street.]. We arrived at about 11, it’s cold down here now and it was raining. I’d bought some sparkling grape juice in a wine type bottle from Big Fresh. I was wearing a green boys high school shirt and a skirt, my finger was bandaged up, as the doctor pointed out ‘it looks like everyone’s cartoon idea of a thumb hit by a hammer.’ LD50 was playing; they were playing a catchy song - yes, it’s true, it has harmonies, they sounded cool - the chorus was ‘One Day We Will Be Free.’ Everyone has catchy songs - Matt has this one that goes ‘Ooh ooh ooh ooh’ and the other band I liked at the show, Elixir of Flux, do too - but I’m getting badly ahead of myself. I went away for a while and read ‘Thank you, Jeeves.’

When I got back Gilbert, Dean and Merrin were there, thank God. It was really dark; my God, on stage there was this band - quickly - who were a hippy girl with a belt of bullets banging a drum and doing interpretive dancing, a headbanging guy in a slayer shirt doing fast guitar solos, Dane, doing samples of spoken parts of Pink Floyd albums?, and a drummer sort of playing out of time? And Dean, through everyone’s shows, was heckling, saying ‘Satan!’ and ‘Dane!’ and ‘Keep Going!’ Gilbert told me, ‘Dean planned to get really drunk tonight and do some heckling.’ It was dark.

After a while ‘Elixir of Flux’ played. OK they need a Namer but they sounded great, a person with long red hair was playing the drums, and her boyfried singing and playing bass; they were like Spaceman 3/Snapper and they definitely had a good idea of how to make everything rhyme . . . I knew it would turn out that they were the organisers even though I’d never seen them before. So they live in the Catlins and both like the same kind of music . . . Perfect. [Lies all lies!]

Then the Aesthetics. The wierd thing about this show was that Matt’s drunkenness was really quickly superceded by this guy called ‘Johnno’ who was a skinny older punk who looked like an Egon Schiele painting and took his shirt off and played the harmonica through a microphone and even said ‘play the misfits.’ He reminded me of a fly. Matt briefly looked at him tiredly. Afterwards, Pat (the Aesthetics’ very good drummer) said ‘Oh, I couldn’t hear it, but he’s really good on the harmonica, isn’t he?’ Later I saw Johnno and Dean hugging.

Sometime after this, I asked the Caitlins people how to subscribe to their magazine, and they said: ‘E-mail TheUrbanSerpent@hotmail.com’ - they were standing together by the entrance to the mens toilets.

The 24 Hour Book Sale was on. It was 3 am. When I got there all the middle aged stall keepers were talking in that particularly bitter, defensive way NZ middle aged people do about how they’d ‘nearly made it now’ and ‘they don’t care, do they?’ etc . . . I just bought the regular stuff.

8 May The circle of my life is decreasing, or the paraphenalia is vanishing, or something. This is the conversation I had with my taxi driver on the way home. In the dark, drizzling.

'Oh, oh, it's here, I'm sorry I forgot to tell you.'

Suddenly brakes.

'Sorry, you're not a mind reader, are ya?'

'No, that I'm not.'

Money exchange.

'Do you want the twenty?'

'Thanks, that'd be good, save me giving you a handful of shrapnel.'

The dark. Everybody at home is stoned. At a party I reached behind a boy who had sat in front of my drink. In the dark, in a corner. He said, 'Oh, sorry.' I said, 'It's alright.'

I stay up all night. I go to sleep and wake up having an anxiety attack, thinking about bios and 386. 'But I don't care about programming languages, I like the mathematical side of it.' 'My life is just so aimless, it seems so mean to include someone else in it.' These are some of the things I have heard.

Fuck You, computer!!!! I triumph over you!! This weekend I have repaired three computers and stayed up all night to do it and I hate them, they are ridiculous things - although I don't know whether I'd hate them so much if you didn't have to install such cumbersome, flighty operating systems on them - and now I win, I defeat the computers, they suck, they lose, I win, me me me!!!!!

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