Flow

In the photos of my 21st birthday party there are two people who have died since, who we have mourned and turned into memories, but it's beautiful to find them there by chance, on the side of the dance floor that was happening in my kitchen, teetering on a chair in my old backyard, smoking a cigarette on that back deck, as alive and in the moment as all of us, before the selves we went on to become.

I stayed in tonight, away from the sharp edges of what my 'immediate queer family' has become, and spent it instead talking to my housemate about who we are, and who we were, and how we find ourselves these days. Raiding old photos and realizing that despite all the many, many things that have changed, I've still got the same goddamn haircut I had then.

I was 21 year old who knew who and what I was, and who and what I wanted in the world (I went after it in hot pursuit, and found it in sufficient quantities to keep me well occupied). A 22 year old who traveled to the United States in hot pursuit of the hot leatherdyke sex I was sure I would find (and did). A 23 year old back home again, in full-plume return, settling myself into a life here. A 24 year old who toned herself back from the mad keen femme princess archetype that had done me so well up til then, who stuck her hands in the dirt and discovered whole new meanings to the world. A 25 year old who learned how to ride a bike for the first time, who puts on these old pink outfits, these new pink boots, who still wants to be that way but is other ways as well, and can't quite figure out how to make it all fit.

I don't feel jaded or lost, but I feel in-between times. Energy comes at me and I have no way to catch it, so I let it slide by. I wonder at the difference between being something, and enjoying it sometimes (am I the 24/7 Daddy's girl I was then, or someone who likes that kind of play on occasion? Am I a Gardener, capitalized, or just someone who likes to garden? A Maker Of Things or a part-time dabbler in objects and how they fit together? A Femme, or a girl with a dress-up fetish?).

What interests me right now travels, so I find myself traveling. I have found magic on Lismore farms full of Sydney queers, in Sydney living rooms full of Brisbane & Melbourne imports, in Ballina brothels full of queers from the whole Eastern sea-board. I don't find it when I stay still, right now- there is magic here, in my house and my city, but it's not for me- this is someone else's golden moment, someone else's perfect place. So in some instances I close myself off, not joining in with the building of this time-and-place here (the regular bar with the regular people and the regular heartbreak), but throw myself into the creation of the time-and-place that is happening in the far reaches of my known world. I go up to the farm this weekend, maybe Broken Hill in September, and in between people from all the other cities will be here, and so far those have proven to the best times.

Like all the best drugs...

...she left me with one fucker of a comedown. The entire of July has felt like one endless eccy Tuesday. Once the sparkle has gone, and the fuzzy warm early-stage comedown has gone (the high has passed but everything is cotton-wool wrapped, and still somehow fine), and some time has passed, and then the serotonin crash hits like a freight train. I am some snarling, hissing, ungenerous beast I don't even recognize, fatalistic, jealous, cruel. Wildly catastrophising: this is how it is and ever shall be. Not for a moment, not for a day, not even for a weekend, but on and on and on. Lashing out at everything and everyone around me.

Standard break-up narratives don't even fit here, that's not what it's like: it's like coming down, hard, from a sublime high on the best drugs I've ever tried.

I escape into projects (frantically hammering out new objects: see, see I create, I make things, I am not so useless, not so worthless), the glow of new friendships, into dairy fantasies and up trees. I climbed right up the middle of the huge, tangled mandarin tree in the backyard today, over-stretched myself, braced against wobbling branches, took stupid risks directly over tetanus-guaranteed, rusty-nail wood scattered around the base. Shoved myself bodily through tangled twigs and spiders webs. For a heavy bag of fruit over my shoulder, for scratches on my hands and arms, for spiders in my hair, for being somewhere else for a moment.

I will go back to the farm for a while, undoubtedly (it's what I do when my head breaks, this year), and take pleasure in baby calf joy, warm animal-smells, learning to milk cows, learning to make cheese and growing strong on the pure luxury of as much raw, fresh milk as it's possible to drink in five days.

Eventually, eventually, I will stop being a Problem and become myself again. Not yet, but eventually.

Cinderella

I've noticed that the likelihood of me being up early in the morning after a huge, rowdy party, scrubbing and cleaning and rearranging, is directly related to how traumatic the party was for me. I cleaned the entire backyard and kitchen this morning before anyone else stirred- swept and everything. Last night was pretty fucking bad, then.

Hell, I've also noticed, is full of the happy smiling faces of new couples. It's your space, your safe space, with one of these ghastly sights beaming at you from every corner and room. It's having nowhere else to go, being forced to bite it back, to paste a grisly grin on in exchange, to endure. With no prospect of escape.

A weekend in trees

I spent a good half hour of Saturday halfway up a tree in the backyard picking mandarins- there are dozens of them left but after a while the appeal of seeing the world from inside leaves and branches was dulled by the spiders and twigs in my hair. Later I went to the Underbelly festival, then to a warehouse-warming, then to the Phoenix, then to Arq, then back to the Phoenix. At the very end of the night, as the sky turned grey and the club was emptied, I found fragments of twigs still in my hair, citrus-scented.

I went on an adventure, Sunday morning, went exploring in the cemetery with a lovely girl and a cup of tea. We climbed trees and spotted nests of native bees in hollow branches. She'd never climbed a tree before, she said, and I was forced to make some terrible cherry-popping jokes (there was even blood, a grazed finger, to complete the set-up). We woke my housemates up with a rousing early-morning trampoline-jumping session, giggling and ridiculous. I haven't had an adventure so random and sparkling in a long time.

Later Sunday, unslept and hazy, painted with grubby blotches of boot polish, I was a filthy council worker feeling up some pink-clad diner waitresses for a photo shoot. It was so much fun, the perfect balance of sleazy and silly. I had my genuinely filthy gardening gloves on, a bright yellow hardhat, something of a leer. Afterwards the power of diner-set suggestion sent us all hustling off to the burger shop for (vege-) burgers and fries, milkshakes even. There may have been a waitress-hustling re-enactment around the burger joint table.

Back to Underbelly, squinty-eyed with tiredness, drifting from the sweet little interactive parlour to the houseplant exhibition to the sawn-off nose of the bomber jet (my housemate was running video projections from inside it, resulting in a torrent of unstoppably awful cockpit jokes). It was so worth it, the whole festival, and I'm glad I went down both days. Just being in the CarriageWorks space makes my blood rush, I love the huge ceilings and the rusty, arched hallways, perfectly framing suspension work and giant insect cocoons.

Today was warm and sunny, and I've had a little bunch of jasmine tucked behind my ear scenting everything. I was in a tree again, for the third day in a row, harvesting bitter oranges from my friend's backyard for another go at marmalade making. Beer in the park, sighing at the wonder of warmth and the promise of spring, then home for lounge-room cinema and photo-sharing on the big screen. I am a little fragile, a little fuzzy around the edges still from such a big weekend, but it's been so beautiful. I had a moment, doing nothing special (waiting in the bathroom queue upstairs at the warehouse, maybe), where I realized that everything I am doing right now is everything I want to be doing. There is always room for improvement, of course (I'd do a lot for a yard full of sun instead of dank shade) but this is, perhaps, the best it's ever been.

Midwinter, going strong.

I haven't updated on my garden much recently- it's not so exciting, all deep-shade, dark & damp. When I do write about it I tend to write here. The solstice has passed though and the plants seem to have noticed- the snow peas are flowering, the silverbeet is sending out more leaves, and the mizuna has popped up out of nowhere and decided to make itself known. I pull greens and herbs out of the garden to cook with every week or so, and last night I harvested a good bunch of radishes for dinner, among them this lovely, evocatively-shaped radish. I can't decide what it reminds me of... whatever, it made a very nice tomato & radish salsa (mixed up with lime, coriander, onion & chili).

Making contact in karate is new, so new I've barely begun to dip my pinky finger into it (and am certainly still miles away from the women in the changerooms before I leave at the end of the night, strapping themselves into hard-core full-body armour). Most of my classes are kata, long formalised patterns of movement, and technique- the all-importance of form. But it's creeping in now, in tiny ways. I learned a sequence tonight that uses an elbow-lock. I used the elbow-lock against opponents, and it worked. The unfamiliar power of that is something else entirely. You mean my hand goes here, my elbow goes here, I twist, and- Oh. Look. There you go! (Here I am now above you, bending you double, all surprise at the power of leverage and joints). Later we pulled out sparring pads and punched and kicked into those rather than air- learning about why you throw a fist like that, where it lands, the significance of shoulders and wrists. Pushed our partners across the floor with kicks that went through and past them. I am awkward and clumsy with it but my partner and I flash fierce red-cheeked grins at each other over the sparring pad, growling encouragement with the force of a nicely-landed strike.

I was so afraid of this, denied that it would ever draw me in, thought I would be happy in the pursuit of perfect form forever. But contact, this thing about feeling my body strike out against something, about making it work, is addictive. I have a year or more before I'm one of those women with the mouth-guards, chest-plates, knee-pads, helmets, gloves and more- but I can't fucking wait.

July full-on

That winter social slump I referred to some time ago consisted, in it's entirety, of two slightly-quieter-than-usual weeks, and now we are BACK. Loud & party-proud. Going and going and going and... life in neon and glitter-ball tones, weekend lurching to weekend (with weeknight events to fill in the gaps), all the social whirl of summer only colder, and with coats.

It feels different this year, busy, vigorous, none of the pauses or hibernation-times of winters past (when I would prowl an empty Oxford St in search of fun, anticipating summer again). Is it me who's changed, or the world around me? Am I more plugged into things now than I used to be, or is there genuinely more on? I have heard other people mention it, this common note of exhaustion in their voices: "It just doesn't ever stop", so I think that it's not just me. I think that what it is, is a city experiencing something of a creative boom, but a city with a summer-time party-season so crammed full of long-established events that the only space for new energy to go is these winter weekends. From November, with Newtown Festival, to the very end of Mardi Gras in March there is no weekend and precious few weeknights for the emerging party-planner, festival-holder, event-organizer to colonize. So the bright new energy is coming forth now, filling up these empty pages on the social calender so effectively that our lives (we who are drawn to these things) are as busy in July as they were in January. We can barely pause amidst the relentless exhilaration to draw breath.

I am grateful for it, loving my life so full of bright colours and intense energy, but I wonder how long it's possible to go on and on without either choosing to stop, or being forced to.

The hours I spend at karate (two hours yesterday, weary and clumsy on only a few hours sleep) often feel like the only pause, the only space I have to breathe. There is a moment that comes maybe twenty minutes into a class where every distraction is shut out, where I am absolutely present. It's like switching off all the other channels in my brain so that this one alone floods me, clear and bright.

I have been injured this week: on Wednesday night I hauled myself out, sick and slightly bewildered already, to meet my friend at the pub so we could go dumpstering. In the course of our dumpster run she managed to drop the lid of the dumpster on my head, a massive, sudden weight. I remember bright exploding light, shock, numb confusion. Then pain, stumbling, and a whole lot of blood pouring out of my nose. That I lost no teeth and broke no bones was a miracle. I left a pool of blood gleaming on the road, but somehow as far as external injuries go I escaped with only grazes, some slight bruising and swelling. I feel like it's thrown me off all week, though, the shock of it. Facial trauma has a way of colouring everything, for days.

Today I have spent time with a friend, who wore a scarf I made her from fine red wool, a housemate, who carried a bag I made for her from bright ribboned yarn, and another housemate, who wore a long pointy hat I made for her from fuzzy stripes of colour-twined yarn. To make objects is one kind of joy, but to make objects that suit their recipient is another entirely. To see things I've made have places in people's lives, small and inconsequential but useful and present. So satisfying. And tonight, for me, I made a strap-on harness out of soft forest-green leather. It's surprisingly comfortable.

Bloodrunning

I drew blood last night: teeth-bared and grinning fiercely, leaning close in, craving the shove of needle entering flesh like I haven't in a very, very long time. I have pierced friends, as favours, and I have made beautiful designs in people's skin, but it's been a long (long) time since the smell of alcohol wipes, the beading of blood, the long rivers of sweat tracing down a naked torso (beautiful endurance sweat, belying what it takes to sit here in this chair and let these lovely ladies do these awful things to you) left me flustered, mouth-watering, snarling, hot, lustful and bloodlusting.

It's piercing as sex, penetrating this beautiful shell, the surge of pride in this sweet thing who grunts and groans with it but sits still, and takes it.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. Breathe all the way in- and- OUT., and Oh FUCK and then Oh... that's goood

Afterward we played a game of scalpel-traced tic-tac-toe on a lovely toned shoulder, completed with a slash right through the middle. I was playing 'crosses' and my downward strokes split skin, gaped it open. I made a fist of one black gloved hand and left it, knuckles down, on a spine- to dare her to remain steady as I cut. My co-conspirator (in white gloves and lustful grin) traced perfect circles, won the game, got to do the victory slash. Our victim bled, and was well pleased.

I am rediscovering old pleasures, these past few days, or rediscovering the pleasure in things I have been merely going through the motions of. Blood is not the only medium I have re-found my appreciation for, but oh, it made for a lovely little evening among friends.