tooth soup

photo credit: Lorrie McClanahan

cars.

Where I live, cars are a necessary evil. Perth is just too bloody spaced out to make do with public transport only, especially if you live where I live, which is around twenty five kilometres out from the city centre. Public transport is a giant pain in the arse to get anywhere from that far out, and if you do manage to hook yourself onto the flailing snake trial of the buses you’ll find that a commute that would normally take you twenty minutes plus the time it takes to find a parking spot (not a trivial task by any means) will now cost you an hour and a half, four transfers, and a small sacrifice of a pigeon between bricks.

Which is why, when my car decided to bypass that tired cliche of cars being able to engage brakes, I needed to buy a new car. This isn’t something I wanted to do. On the contrary, I’d much rather have spent the money travelling to see Todd marry his lovely girlfriend fiance, and then used whatever was left to do something bold. Or in bold. Whichever. Unfortunately, like I said, it’s impossible to get around ye olde citie wihout ye olde automobile. So after much umming and ahhing, and with some help from the old man, I settled on a 2004 Hyundai Accent. It has 80,000 kilometres on the clock, doesn’t leak, has brakes and a working handbrake, doesn’t chew through oil, and has a back windscreen wiper. It even has an aerial that wasn’t made out of a maimed coathanger. It is metallic-ey blu-ey grey-ey in colour, which grants it +10 stamina and +30 camouflage when in the rain.

On a related note, if anyone wants a pristine condition Nissan Pintara with full (un)service history, a theoretical braking system, and the best party trick involving chugging oil you’ll ever see, leave a comment down the bottom.

words.

And lots of them. Strangely enough, since I’ve started being really casual about writing I’ve probably written more per day on average than I have before. Okay, so the statistics may be skewed by the five thousand word monstrosity that I’ve unleashed on a few interested (and a few not-so-interested) readers, but I do think that just letting the impulse to write come and go is what works for me. I’ll have the most horribly compelling feelings to spew forth words at inconvenient times like Just About To Fall Asleep O’Clock, or I’m Driving And Don’t Have a Pen On Me P.M. (though that’s been remedied lately with the advent of a pocket notebook & pen in my pocket at all times), or the most dreaded There’s People Around And I Don’t Want To Have To Explain Myself:00.

Projects being worked on right now include the Caketrain fiction chapbook competition, the refurbishment and dusting of Soundzine, and actually turning this site into something interesting by gathering up a bunch of interesting people to write interesting things in a big ol’ feeder blog. Hopefully if I limit myself to those three I’ll have them all done by their respective due dates (being October, July 15th, and the end of July respectively).

bands.

Newly spinning:

Future of the Left – Curses!

Fucking amazing album featuring two of the members of Welsh band mclusky, you may have heard ‘Small bones, small bodies’ being spun on triple j lately at relatively high rotation (thanks purely to The Doctor, who loves them). The rest of the album took me a couple of runs to get into but once I did it took permanent pride of place in my car stereo.

The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible (I’m slow, so sue me)

You all already know how great this album is, so I’ll skip the retread.

The Music – Strength in Numbers

Haven’t listened to this more than a couple of times, but from initial impressions it’s not anything to be incredibly excited about. It’s like a new Disturbed album, or a sequel to an FPS; they’re all pressed from roughly the same mould and that mould is still enjoyable. It’s just not anything revolutionary.

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