Extract 6

Ants and Psychobabble:

The microworld of insects is a bit of an obsession for me. When I was a child, I would often spend hours on a Saturday or Sunday just staring at insects, particularly ants. I remember many a sunny day when I would go outside to be around my dad as he gardened, or washed the car, or did something in the garage, and just sit there on the driveway, in the baking heat, surveying the minuscule creatures.

The top section of our driveway, nearest the garage and our house, is a hard strip that has always been strewn with mottled leaves, little brown peduncles, invisibly bristled, painful yellow leaves and big, hard, furry flower buds. This arboreal detritus falls from two large trees that hang over and adumbrate (shade) the driveway. Strangely, until a few minutes ago, when I did some investigation in order to preclude descriptive error, I always thought this detritus came from just one tree. I now realise there is a simple reason for this error: when you look up from the top section of our driveway, you only see a complex 3-D network of polymorphous, tangled, unispecific branches. I know this network of branches to belong to the tree growing out of the garden bed adjacent to this top section of the driveway, approximately seven metres from the garage. I just tried to find the name of the species on Google by describing its appearance, but to no avail. Whatever it’s called, it has a hard, brown, relatively narrow, seemingly barkless trunk; dark green, ovate leaves; and big flowers which (as far as I’m aware) never blossom, instead just dropping their immature, hard, furry buds all over the driveway. Until just a few minutes ago, I always assumed that this tree was also responsible for both the invisible, bindi-like burrs that would penetrate into one’s sole and then lodge there, causing a nasty sting; and the club-like gumnuts and white-bellied leaves that also littered the drive. It turns out this was a false assumption. A combination of the internet and my own observations (more specifically, me deciding to look out onto the driveway through the window in my parents’ room) has led me to the conclusion that these other depositions come from the massive Turpentine tree whose trunk stands much farther away from the driveway, roughly aligned with the garage but a number of metres away, near the other edge of the garden bed and our isolated front lawn. One of the bigger arms of this immense and magnificent organism hangs over the driveway above the limbs of the smaller, aforedescribed tree. From below, this arrangement almost entirely disguises the driveway-hanging branches of the Turpentine, which explains my misconception.

While I’m on the subject, I should mention that we also have a massive and impressive Turpentine at the back of our house, behind our veranda, a few metres in front of the forest. The Syncarpia glomulifera is a very unusual and beautiful tree. A Hornsby Shire Council informational document I found on the internet testifies to this with its excellent description, resplendent with the lovely, Latinate language of botany: “A variable tree, often multi trunked from exposure to wildfire or if in proximity to closed forest a tall single trunked tree to over 25m, much taller outside of HSC (50m+). The trunk is covered in thick spongy bark in long fissured or stringy flaky strips extending to smaller branches. Foliage is dull green and very pale on the underside- white, often hairy, ovate to narrow-ovate, 7–11 cm long, 2.5–4.5 cm wide. Leaves are often parasitised by moth larvae giving a pimpled appearance. They are oppositely arranged in pairs and often crowed into whorls at the end of branchlets, thick and stiff in texture. Peak flowering reliably occurs in October inflorescences are arranged prominently in clustered heads at the ends of branches. Fruit are a woody aggregate persisting on the tree for several years.”

Below the layer of botanical degradables, the driveway is traversed by veins of some kind of hard, black sealant. I remember these veins were often filled with dirt and moss, and that ants had made many holes in this soft matter.

Ants are constantly moving. They are tiny little robot things that just scurry around like mad, constantly. Have you ever thought about an ant’s mind? How does it work? What’s it like to be an ant? How do they make decisions? I used to think these thoughts as I watched them scurrying and darting, dashing along the superhighways, or carrying little white particles into their holes, or just moving. They were always moving. Always guided by some sense we humans have no access to, and always with a purpose, whether it be some crumb or morsel, or the communication of a signal of danger. Have you ever noticed how quickly ants can transmit a signal of danger? One touches another and another touches another, and then there’s rapid cascade, and soon they’re all scurrying about like mad, all in a complete frenzy, a panic. All is chaos. The pattern of ants changes in an instant, a bit like when you rotate a toy kaleidoscope and the crystals instantaneously arrange themselves into a brilliant, architectonic form. It’s kind of beautiful the way the ant dynamics would so rapidly shift, though eerie.

Ant nests are arranged in really elaborate networks. I used to trace the paths of ants, and they would just lead you on endlessly. You’d never stop. From one ant hole to another, to another. You could follow the ants for metres and metres and metres if you wanted to. I did always want to. There was something so mesmerising about it.

One time, much more recently, when I was in year 11, I was with my family camping on this grassy, overly suburban-looking campsite at Yengo National Park. My half-nieces had been there, and I had spent much of the time playing with them. But I also did some fairly childish things myself. Indeed, since I had lots of downtime, I spent much of the trip staring at the multitudinous ants that covered the ground. At one point, I decided to see how far I could follow an ant on a journey, to see where it would finish up, whether at another ant hole or what. I remember just walking along as this one ant scurried through the grass, periodically disappearing from sight. It was hard to keep track of him, but I made sure to keep following at least some ant near him along the highway for as long as it would take me. The highway took me to one giant ant hill, then another, and soon I found myself wandering into the bush. Yet another hill appeared. The infinity of the network reminded me of the world wide web. It seemed as if all of these little ants in Australia might be connected. Of course, once I was in the bush, I had to stop following the highways, but it was a fascinating discovery. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the ants. So many ants! How could you fail to be entranced by all these tiny, complex, beguiling creatures all around you?

I think it’s fair to say that not many people are that interested in ants, or at staring at bugs in general. But I know for myself it’s a profound pleasure, if a frustrating one, because when I’m doing it I’m constantly aware of how nobody else understands the magic of staring at bugs. When I was a child, thankfully, I don’t think I was nearly so self-aware.

Seriously, though, how can you fail to be amazed by the exciting world happening around you on the level of the really small? There is an entire world going on there, entirely independent of you. Black ants, bull ants, Daddy Long Legs, Funnel-webs, cockroaches, worms, Christmas beetles, citrus bugs, slaters, snails. These are living things, and they’re wonderful to watch, dancing in their intricate ballet, caught up in their manic little lives, forever on the move. And always totally oblivious to you as you now bring down your giant hand and manipulate the world. Here’s a leaf, now it’s gone. Why don’t I try to pick you up onto this leaf? Climb onto it, you fool!  

Of course, as a child, I never did leave the world of the insects alone. It was never a passive experience, being with the ants or the bugs. Instead, it was a bit like playing with toys. I was their God, and I could do anything I wanted.

Regrettably, I remember being something of an Old Testament God.

One example of this was my behaviour towards the citrus bugs that used to live in our garden. Many years ago, we had an infestation of that species around the front of our house. They were these slender, pretty, red bugs that spent their time scuttling about and eating leaves. They also seemed to mate very often. The way they did this was to join up to one another via their bottom, thereby essentially making themselves an extra-long, bicorporeal chain, with heads at either end, a bit like Catdog. For some reason, I was obsessed not with killing these creatures, but splitting them. Every time I saw a couple, I would smite it. Over and over again. I was a divorce mogul, a magnate of misery. It gave me great pleasure. The power was really intoxicating.

At other times, my dad would be washing the car or otherwise using the hose, and there would be rivulets of water running down the driveway, collecting debris. I knew then that an enthralling spectacle was imminent. I’d watch as the ants were taken by the irresistible flood, swept up in its inexorable advance, carried rapidly down the driveway until the water hit an organic wall of some kind, maybe a clump of dirt and some leaves, or a gumnut, or whatever. I would often try to remove the obstacle, or try to direct the flow of the water in other ways. I can’t tell you how fun it was.

Another time, I remember attacking the veins of dirt into which the ant holes were drilled. I would dig at them with my fingernails, pulling up giant clumps of dirt, and just watch as the ants ran around in bewilderment and horror, their entire home obliterated, everything they had ever known gone.

When water was involved, I remember wondering if being in that flood was, for an ant, a little like being in a swimming pool for us. After all, the depth of the water seemed roughly commensurate. Obviously, though, unlike a human in a swimming pool, the ants were not having a good time. They always seemed to be in a state of terror. Indeed, it was like their entire life was terror, and I was just crouching above them, playing with their world, deified, magnificent, and yet myself also so small.

It’s hard really to capture how profound and epochal this all used to be for me, and seems to be now. It’s impossible to convey the silence and stillness of the experience, the serenity of it, the sense I always had when I was out with these insects that the world was just unfathomably immense and unfathomably wonderful – far greater than either of us could comprehend. Even just one individual session of doing this contained more wonder and mystery than anything that I could possibly articulate, and I have tried to summarise my entire life of staring at the miniature in a few pages! It’s almost heretical. And I keep resorting to the same literary technique here: long, sprawling, asyndetonic sentences interposed with short, fractured ones. I’ve found myself doing thing many times before when trying to sound really deep.  But none of this ever quite works. Words cannot capture the immensity of what I am trying to say. I guess it is more a feeling than anything – though even that doesn’t seem quite right. It seems to be one of those things that resists rational analysis, and probably couldn’t survive it. Indeed, the fundamental problem with trying to state any of this non-mystically is that the profundity immediately dissolves. It’s like the feeling or thought or enigmatic, ineffable thing – whatever it is – just kind of vanishes. But I will beat on now, with more mysticism.

Do you know the infinite time of childhood? How on certain days, everything seemed so still, how the world seemed so stable and static and fixed? How everything was so slow? Do you remember the indescribable boredom you felt? The sense that there would be time for everything? It was literal hours that I used to spend staring at the ants, hours would pass with the sun warming my back, my heart beating, my blood flowing, my synapses firing, my toes curling, my muscles stirring. The ants were moving all the time. Everything was alive. It seemed as if things would never end, like I would forever be the age I was then, like nothing ever changed except the insects on the ground and my body. It’s impossible to explain. I feel like this is psychobabble, and has to be psychobabble. But it feels really profound. I know other people know what I’m talking about, because people often try to say profound things about the weirdness of childhood from the benighted perspective of maturity, even if they so often fail and sound trite and cliché. And I don’t know how to do it. But I can see myself sitting there in the sun on an endless, turgid Sunday afternoon, and I can see the air around me flowing by my cheeks, and I can see the insects dancing in front of me, and there seems to be such a purity to me in that moment that I can’t explain, some kind of exquisite unself-consciousness as I gazed upon a beautiful thing, as the world spun round on its axis on some specific date, 60,000 years after my ancestors left Africa, 540 million years after the Cambrian explosion, 13.8 billion years after the start of the universe, and I had no sense of any of this, or anything at all, and all was just still.

A short story called "Writhing Alone in a Room with a Toothache"

Writhing Alone in a Room with a Toothache

He lay down on the mattress staring at the white ceiling. His new room for the whole next week. It would be a whole week in this place with the light streaming in through the pale curtains in this silent room with a funny smell. He reached out his hands above him and turned over his body and thought about the fact that he was reaching out his hands above him and turning over his body and how contrived all his behaviour was and thought about how he was goddamn doing that stupid thing he did all the fucking time which was fucking stare at ceilings and think and that it was fucking dumb because nobody else did that shit and Jesus Christ what the fuck why did he have to fucking stare at walls and think and thought about what David Foster Wallace would think of him and whether he would think they were kindred spirits because he was lying on a mattress thinking and moving around randomly and also because he had just downed a Codeine pill with a hand-cup of water from the sink which might like super fucking depressed or whatever and thought about how all his thoughts were just so fucking vacuous and thought about what David Foster Wallace would think about him and thought about how maybe that was what all people thought about pretty much most of the time and thought about how he’d thought about that like a million times before and thought about how he always had the same thoughts and what the fuck did anything mean and where did it lead and why the fuck did he think, honestly, he should go actually fucking do something, like write. Which is what he did, subsequently, and felt a bit better, and the throbbing pain in his tooth was subsiding then he sensed, though it could’ve been a placebo.   

A short story called "Digging in the Yard"

Digging in the Yard

He shoved the shovel into the rock-strewn soil until it was firmly embedded into the ground. He stomped on the top of the blade thrice, pushing the shovel as far as down in the earth as it would go. He levered the shovel upwards and lifted it out of the ground. Balancing the pile of dirt on the blade, he swung the shovel slowly towards the wheelbarrow. When he reached it, he flipped the shovel, and the dirt and rocks fell in with a hiss and a clunk.

He shoved the shovel in the soil again. As he tried to press it down, he discovered that the patch of soil was far more recalcitrant than the previous one. He felt a twinge in his back. He stomped on the blade and it did not budge, instead making the ugly scraping noise of metal on rock. A bead of sweat dripped from his brow. He chose a new patch and jammed his shovel into the soil. He tipped the shovelload into the wheelbarrow, and glanced down at his shirt: a wet patch had accumulated on the blue cotton. He swallowed a glob of dry saliva. 

As he stood, shovel in hand, next to the wheelbarrow, staring at the big dusty hole he had dug and then at the whole big dirt expanse that made up the property on one side of their house and realised how strange it was that just a few weeks ago the area had been as it had always been as long as he had lived there – a wide strip of weed-infested grass with little bamboo shoots sprouting up everywhere which threatened always to engulf the house and thus required regular maintenance – and realised how significant and poignant it felt that he had done so many things in the area and formed so many memories set in it, such as the memory of Harrison and him spending that one Sunday when Tom invited him over lopping down some big bamboo trees with a spade and maybe a mattock (they didn’t use the axes in the garage because Tom’s dad, characteristically, instructed them not to on account of his fear that they would injure ourselves), which was Harrison’s idea and Tom didn’t think would be fun because he just wanted to play PS2 or watch a movie or something, but did end up being fun as far as he could remember, because it sort of gave them a sense of masculine power or something, Tom noticed his legs felt heavy and tired. He walked over to the big rock on the edge of the big hole he was digging and sat down on it. His water bottle was standing in the shadow of the tree just to his right. He picked it up, unscrewed it and took a swig. The water was cool and refreshing.

Hard physical labour can be rewarding in a way that one does not ever experience in quotidian, urban life.

A short story called "My Friend the Solipsist"

My Friend the Solipsist

For moments at a time, he was convinced that his was the only consciousness in the universe, or whatever realm it was that they – or rather he – existed in because if his was the only consciousness who knew if there even was such a thing as a universe? Who knew what was real? Wasn’t what he was thinking right now unreal because nothing was real? What was logic? Logic wasn’t necessarily logical if nothing was real. What was real? What was language? How could anything he thought be trusted if nothing was real? How could you refute that nothing was real if nothing was real? You couldn’t, of course. But you also couldn’t refute nothing was real because, logically, he could be the only consciousness and everything could be a construct of a brain in a vat or a brain in a jar or actually any sort of thing could be producing the simulation, literally anything – there might be a whole other world somewhere else, above his consciousness, in which some thing, maybe some sort of monster, or some intangible essence, or just something that no human language or thought could possibly express was creating the vision, in fact anything might be creating this vision he saw, or maybe his own mind created the world unconsciously or maybe everything was just unreal and there was no way any logic or thought could even get close to understanding what was unreal about it because all he knew was the simulated world in which he lived – and what was a world anyway? That meant that really he had no idea about anything. Which again brought him back to how he couldn’t have no idea about anything anyway because how the hell could he trust logic or language or anything and how the hell could he trust not trusting logic of language or anything?

He would spend hours in a room staring face down at a lounge or sitting staring into the garden and just feel sick in the stomach and let his mind run wild with these terrible thoughts. And then he would finally come into contact with people that night when his parents came home from their jobs and there was no way he could ever express to them the terrible pain of sort of semi-believing or at least being unable to dismiss that, like, everything was just unreal, including them. That made him continue to feel sick in the stomach.

He tried to train himself not to ever think these thoughts but it was hard, particularly because he spent so much time alone.

A short story called "Quietly Exiting the Stage"

Quietly Exiting the Stage

So Michael was finally going to do it – he was finally going to end his life. And all that. He was sure. This was it. He was absolutely sure. He’d be stupid not to, really. That was the thing: as much as he could appreciate why living had the potential to be really fucking good and beautiful and all the rest of it, and while he did love nature and his mum and ice-cream and the films of the Coen brothers and the book Infinite Jest, and while he had a really good friend called Peter, while these were all the pros, he had also spent most of his life desperately unhappy, and it wasn’t going to get any better, and he was sick of it – he was sick of being tormented by anxiety and dread and paranoia, sick of being in a near permanent state of blackest despair. Plus David Foster Wallace himself committed suicide and he was really smart and clever and had good ideas, so how could it be irrational? But he didn’t need other people to verify his rationality anyway – that was dumb. That was irrational. Which was funny. Anyway the thing was that he didn’t even know why he was still weighing up the pros and cons of life vs death; he had been trying to systematically figure that out for the last year or so, and, as difficult as it was because his mind was pretty fucking recalcitrant – which was often something that made him wild with rage and then despair and sometimes made him want to bash his head against the wall, but only really in an abstract way – he was now pretty much adamant that death was the way more rational option.

 Which was why he was in the study of the family home, sat on the swivel chair, gripping a pen, staring at a blank sheet of lined paper in a plain A4 notebook, and thinking about what to write in his suicide note. He was also thinking about a lot of other things, such as the fact that he had only found this notebook just minutes before, in the study’s old, dark-wood cupboard. Like with most sights he’d seen in the last week – a week whose entirety was spent in the knowledge that he would kill himself today (he had set the date for his own demise precisely one week before it would occur because he thought it would be, like, most rational to be brutally practical and matter-of-fact about his suicide) – he had made a real effort to sort of appreciate the cupboard. As he stared at it closely and inhaled its musky smell, he had even whispered to himself the words, ‘The last time I will see this old, beautiful cupboard’, which imbued the moment with a great Hollywood poignancy and gravitas. Of course, he had also whispered that phrase (except with different words after “this”, based on what he was looking at) for all the other sights he had made an effort to appreciate that week, and the practice had been tinged with irony even when he first did it, about his bed (which he was sitting on at that time) because, you know, it was pathetically cliché and lame, and it was also untrue that it would be “the last time” in the case of the bed, plus the whole ritual devolved into facetiousness immediately anyway, because after saying it was “The last time [he would see] the bed”, he started saying the phrase about, like, everything around him that his eyes fixated on, including his own body parts: “The last time I will see my leg, the last time I will see that hair on my leg, the last time I will see my hamstring wobbling, the last time I will see the reflection of my face in the window.” This ridiculousness was somewhat amusing to him at the time and also quickly meant the whole ritual had turned into a full-blown joke, although not a really funny joke; he had soon stopped chuckling after he said the phrase because that had become contrived-seeming and weird. But after he said it for the last time, with regards to that cupboard (he knew it was the last time because after he did finish staring deeply into the grains of the cupboard’s wood and all the rest of it, he had sort of made a note-to-self in his head that it would definitely be the last time, he had emphasised internally that it would be the last time, which was also rather Hollywood and thus which he also kind of phrased ironically in his brain) he sort of wistfully blew some air out of his nose and smiled slightly.

Another thing he was thinking about was the fact that, at frequent points throughout the entire past week, he had imagined himself being watched and judged by someone, often a specific person – like his mum or dad or his now distant friend Lucy or Peter – or he had imagined being filmed, both things which very often happened when he was alone generally: a weird quirk of his mind which pretty much informed most of his solitary behaviour, and which, when analysed, sometimes made him want to do the same abstract head-against-wall bashing mentioned previously.

Of course, he didn’t really know why he was thinking about any of this stuff, because, really, he was writing a suicide note and he should have been concentrating on that. Not that that was easy, because how the hell was he meant to start? Should he try to make it a pithy heartfelt statement to his parents just explaining that he was committing suicide, or should it be some elaborate essay that was really well written and impressive and which, like, explained everything – explained pretty much all the stuff his parents didn’t know about him and pretty much why he was committing suicide and apologised for hurting them, and then maybe got all philosophical on the nature of suicide and its popular representation, as well as depression, and the medicalisation of depression, and then maybe had some stuff about mortality in general and the afterlife, like basically a really good, sophisticated meditation on matters of life and death? But surely that was just incredibly pretentious and he was just doing it to show off and it was also really narcissistic, plus he was going to die soon anyway so what the hell did it matter? But maybe that was the wrong attitude, because he should care about this sort of thing, because he wasn’t just a dumb nihilist or whatever, he wasn’t just some emo or whatever; he actually wasn’t just ending his life for nothing, he still thought there was value in the world and stuff.

Eventually, Michael decided that he was just going to start and carefully write whatever came to his mind.

Dear mum and dad and whoever else reads this,

I know it’s pretty cliché to write a suicide note, and pretty lame to begin your suicide note by pointing out how cliché that is, but I guess there are some things that I’d like to tell you before I hang myself, which I’m about to do. […]

When he was on his 12^th page, after a few hours solid writing, Michael’s dad walked in the front door and Michael aborted the suicide plan. 

A short story called "Inside the Room, Sitting in front of the Computer"

Inside the Room, Sitting in front of the Computer

He was looking at a desk, and on it was a laptop computer surrounded by books and folders and paper, and so it was very cluttered. His vision felt very cluttered. He thought about the fact that his vision is always cluttered and the fact that there is always something you don’t see, there’s so much going on in every shot and you don’t always see half of it and that’s really disappointing, maybe. Is it? There was also a lamp diagonally to his right, just in his peripheral vision, but as he thought about it he looked at it and it was quite big and it was very metallic – quite shiny – and there was light coming out of its bell-shaped end which shined on the wall, and now he was staring at the wall which, when you looked closely, had lots of lumps on it. A whole lot of lumps. Millions of them when he zoomed his gaze out and looked at the portrait above the computer. It was a woman. It was a very weird painting. Very unrealistic. There was no woman there though. Just a painting. Just some paint inside a frame in the vague appearance of a woman. What did it mean? What did it want, with its vacant, black-eyed stare? Nothing. It wanted nothing because it was a painting made of paint painted by a painter. It was just a whole lot of lumps like the wall. It was a solidified mess of paint. Paint that used to be drippy and liquid was now smeared all over the wall and was really lumpy and he was looking at it, and now he looked around the room conscious of the fact that he was looking at the wall, imagining what people would think of him looking at the wall, so now he was looking at the printer behind him, and the open door behind that which led into the hallway, which led into the rest of the house. That made him think of going to the kitchen to get something to eat, but he resisted the temptation. Even though he was very tempted. And although there was nothing there he wanted, and though he knew that very well because he checked only about half an hour ago (or something like that because time doesn’t seem linear on these sitting-alone days, it drags and accelerates and then just drags and it’s just you and your body and your mind ticking along and everything else is still) he still really wanted to go down there and find some sort of morsel. A biscuit maybe, or a banana, or a muesli bar. Or maybe he would make himself some cereal even though he had already had it this morning.

Maybe. That was the word of the day, he thought to himself, and he thought about the fact that he was really deep for thinking that. And he thought about what other people would think of him for thinking that, and he thought about some people that he knew and what he was going to say to them the next time he had a conversation with them. And he distracted himself with these thoughts, fleeting and flying around his head like flies. Everything was flying around inside his head like flies, there was so much in there, even though there wasn’t. Because he was thinking about the fact that there was so much flying around in his head as well as the fact that it was just a lump of pink stuff with electrical signals. And it was hard to fathom that, because then you’d be working out the fragility, the substance, the reality of something you were using to do that, and it didn’t really make much sense but neither did anything. But that was useful because he now felt like he’d reached a happy conclusion on his word of the day being Maybe. There was a lot of maybe today, as there was in every day, and he really liked the word Maybe. He said it aloud now because there was no one home and he liked talking to himself, weird as that may seem to the onlookers that he imagined watching him in some sort of third-person video. It was weird he thought now to think about that, considering the fact that no one was ever going to watch what he was doing right now – or care – and neither was he, but he would love to see himself in the third-person because he never got to do that, and all at once that thought made him realise that he was always going to see the world through a first-person perspective. That he was alone. That was weird. That he was never going to actually empathise with anyone, in the whole entire fucking world, because he couldn’t see the world as they did, and have the mind that they do, and think the things that they do, and have the first-person camera eyes seeing him as they do.

“Maybe” he whispered to the air inside the room as he took another look around, and again thought about the fact that he was taking another look around. “Maybe I think too much”, he said to no one. And no one was listening and again he was thinking and it was annoying. And just when his mind returned to the knowledge that he had to do more study for the exams; just when he realised that he would have to sit down and write for hours; just when he realised that there would be some really stressful exams in a few weeks; just when he realised that writing this story was stupid, he began to notice the clicking of his fingers on the keys on the keyboard of the laptop on which he was writing, and he began to think about the fact that the story he was writing was coming to a conclusion, and he began to wonder whether it was good, and it was a very uncertain thing, as was everything, and he was alone, and he was thinking about his friend who was going to read it and he was wondering whether he would like it, and now he thought it would be a good time to stop typing and after these next few words he does.

A Diary Entry/Short Story called "Out of Body Experience on the Train Home"

Out of Body Experience on Train Home

I had a weird train trip home today. It all seemed very slow and serene and, like, liquid. At one point, as I was reading a chapter of The Justice Game titled “Diana in the Dock: Does Privacy Matter?” and trying (indeed really struggling) to think about what Geoffrey Robertson was saying about freedom of speech and privacy and how they in a certain way compete and how freedom of speech seems to be something people in the modern era are constantly fighting for but privacy is kind of marginalised and how he personally thinks this is bad and that they both deserve equal respect, which I thought seemed I dunno kinda facile and vague, I must have fallen asleep. I can recall I had this really intense dream involving paper and hands (I think) and a really loud, aggressive sound. It was over quickly I think, maybe 30 seconds. When I woke up, for about a second I had no idea who I was or where I was or even what it would mean to have no idea who I was or where I was. I think I was just a body.

I only know this because immediately after I snapped into consciousness. I suddenly realised that the noise in the dream was the sound of the train bumpily going over the tracks and that the noise of the train travelling as I sat there wasn’t as loud as it was in the dream. I wondered whether the extra loudness was real coz we were going over an extra bumpy bit of track or something or whether my brain had just increased it for the dream. This all happened very quickly, of course. Simultaneously, I knew that a second had just gone by but I sort of hadn’t been in it: I felt that I had just experienced something profound. Non-existence? Simultaneously I tried to recall the dream, which I felt like I remembered, but as I did I realised I remembered only a vague impression. Simultaneously, I saw that I was on a train that was regularly, languidly rising and falling and that I was looking at the back of strangers’ heads nodding with the rhythm of the train and that that was weird. Simultaneously, I saw that there was sunlight streaming in from the right and that it was striking my school uniform-wearing body and that a black blazer was behind my head and that I was resting my black, scuffed shoes on my black bag which has a hole in the corner and

Suddenly, one part of my brain forced me to remember myself. I’m Tom Aitken, I’m 17, I’m in 6^th Form at Sydney Grammar School, I’m travelling home on the train earlier than normal because I had a period 7 free which was because it was an A day, and I have heaps of homework to do, so much fucking homework, and I must be really tired to fall asleep on the train and maybe I should try and get to bed early tonight except I probably won’t, maybe I should take a day off school tomorrow except that’s probably a bad idea and there is also the Term II concert, I’m doing it for guitar and sax, I feel like I should go to school for that, and I recently acquired a sty under my left eye and, wow, I almost forgot, I have heaps of social anxieties and things to worry about in life, and maybe I should write about this but no I shouldn’t.

Everything returned.