Saturday
November 15, 1997
St Kilda East

Soemtimes I feel like I can't even sing, I'm very scared for this world, I'm very scared for me, eviscerate your memory, here's the scene your'e in the backseat the windows wrap around to the sound of the travel and the engine all you hear is time stand still and travel.

I look at her and I see the beauty of the light of music.

I want to use the internet to find out song words for these rem songs. This one - 'You are the everything' and 'Hairshirt' have very specific connotations for me, often - no matter where I am they can bring me to tears. I sort of know why, but I don't want to know why. I don't know how to resolve the issues surrounding those times. In particular 'Hairshirt' makes sadness wash over me. wave after wave. Tear after tear. For a long time I couldn't cry, then I found this CD in a box somewhere and it unlocked all that. Now I find myself listening to it, to feel that pain again. when my days are hollow and empty and I am alone. The comfort of pain for something long past is easier to deal with than the reality of the pain I need to deal with today. Tomorrow and the next day.

I think of sand and of sea when I hear this song. I can hear the ocean. I can see the bright flashing sunlight. I taste the grit and the sand, and the salty brine of surf beaches.

I want so much to be an entity unto myself. Stong resolute and freestanding. Independent and self contained. Yet when I have to be that way, and it's put to the test I fail. I feel lonely and I want to reach out to people. But depending on them. Needing them. Hungering for them. It makes me angry and deflated to think that I can't do this myself. That I'm weak and desperate.

Al of Heinovision/Kingoftheska has closed his journal to casual readers - limited to those with passwords. I don't know how to ask for one. I miss him, he is hard on himself and brutal in his self assessment. But from him I have learned a lot. To not apologise and to just be. The pain of self is so raw and brutal that for those of us who feel it so acutely we can be brought undone by it.

I don't know how to just be. I don't know how to live without questioning everything. I don't know how to exist without asking why. Everything that I do is pared down to its most basic form, analysed and questioned. That which is extemporary, extraneous, superflous is cast off. In doing so I can be honest with myself and true. But I leave an exposed person, without the protections of layered consciousness and the padding of pretense and lies.

Does any of this make sense? I guess not.

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For my Listening Pleasure
R E M
Green