The Event / Calamity / In Memoriam

Hey there.
This is a proper plug for a collaborative blog / writing project we're doing here.

Five writers are writing five characters' experiences of a massive event as it takes place in Wellington. We're doing it in five parts. The 5-5-5 thing doesn't have a secret meaning. It's not a religious or conspiracy thing. It just happened that way.

The premise of the Event itself is pretty basic:

say it’s a regular day in wgtn & you’re
buying breakfast / coming down off acid / sleeping with your boss / looking after someone else’s children / twenty floors up / watching the same horrible movie again and again / meeting someone nice / drinking wine with teenagers / limping off home

& you happen to notice
people pushing down to the water / shapes moving under the surface / watching glassy-eyed / the bright sun / crowds / someone else’s children / pushing through them / & then as the customers turn nasty / broken glass / running feet / distant screams

& before you know it you’re
cast into the sea / thirsty / drowning / watching helpless / as their corpses rise / drinking & drinking / in the crowds below you / when the lights go out / when the ground shakes / the buildings sway / from the back of the police car / from your seat in the theatre / from under the table / water spattering / onto the asphalt / onto the tiles / mouths yawning / time frozen

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Meanwhile, calamity.
Fuckers have broken into the flat and stolen our laptops (& the digital camera we got from Alive and Doses, et al.)
So this is a transition moment, a point where Sleep Dep (& the rest of my writing) becomes temporarily less of a computer thing and more of a written on paper thing.
Which is a shame, because typing very fast is part of my creative process on this.

What this will mean: less photos on Sleep Dep, maybe less frequent entries, and maybe different sorts of writing due to GOD DAMN IT the inability to comprose the writing on a computer anymore.
Instead I have a powder blue notebook for Sleep Dep, and a little Pukka Pad in which to recreate Harrison Monsters.
It's not all bad. The powder blue notebook has an inscription from PETER CHRISTOPHERSON written on the back. It says: "All the best, S()*^D*^(O£!", or something to that effect, his signature is very messy.

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The worst part is all of the writing that's been lost. Most of the finished drafts are backed up on Gmail, thanks to my insecure need for the approval of my peers. But the fragments and half-written projects (amongst them many of my favourites) are gone.
A moment's silence for the lost story fragments:
- The Remains
- Resonant Object
- Nn Thom Nee Yah
- Dirty Things
- Satan
- The Birthday Film
- Something New
- Huss
- The Week Before the Formal
... & approximately 5,000 words of the Harrison Monsters
& God knows what other things I can't recall right now.

Lost story fragments, we lift our glasses to you.
May you drift and squiggle back off into the darkness from whence you came, content and at peace. I'll try to recreate you, but it will all come out different I'm sure.

Ah well.

Blog Entry

Ordinarily I wouldn't be making an entry about my personal life (at least in the present) or music or going to see bands etc, that's not the sort of blog this is.

Not really out to post photos of my friends or anything ("look, there's you! And there's ME!"). Go on rants about my political opinions. Talk about celebrities or thinkers I think are cool.

HOWEVER

Yes HOWEVER because through the good graces of a woman who is not actually named Quincey but for the purposes of this blog is, I am in possession of the following:



Probably this means little or nothing to you. YOU DAMNED FOOL! I forgive you.

This is like you getting to see one of YOUR bands, whatever they are for you, like the top two or three bands in your life. Jhonn Balance is unfortunately dead, so there's no more Coil, but Peter Christopherson made all the music anyway and this is him and I'm getting to see him.

And it just keeps coming:



The first ticket is a 12 hour horror movie marathon. Then Threshold Houseboys Choir. Then on Monday they're showing Suspiria. In a cinema! Amazing.

The movie tickets, I should say, were subsidised by the Film House membership I got as a going-away present from my job in New Zealand. So in something of an irony, working to promote the rights of women has given me a discount to see a film where women are stabbed, dissected, impaled by glass, hung from nooses, covered in maggots, cursed by surreal flashing lights, dropped into a room full of barbed wire, and then brought back to life to attack their friends.

If someone pitched me this weekend, and said: "all of this could be yours, but we'd have to pull one of your fingernails out with pliers", I would have said: "okay, do it." I would probably have asked for a shot of whiskey or something first. But going to these movies and this gig is better good than having a fingernail pulled out would be badly bad. Go Quincey.

Thank you for indulging me. Hopefully this does not constitute gloating. Probably not.

It probably doesn't mean a lot to you. There has been mention that recent Sleep Dep entries ("Sleep Dentries") have been gloomy and suggestive of a sad or depressed state of mind. Not so.

Here is a picture of a boarded up primary school near my office: