Wednesday, 29 March, 1995, 8:37am

Howdy S,

Did you take notice of the date and time, specifically the time, of this letter.  That’s right, I’m in early.  We just went off daylight savings, so it’s not really that great a sacrifice.  It does fill me with self-righteousness though, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling of moral superiority over my fellow works.  “Who, me? Oh yes, I was in early this morning.  No big deal, just dedicated to my job.”  The moral superiority thing has been happening all week actually.  You see, Monday the 27th of March was my one year splitsville anniversary with Leah.  That’s right, it’s one whole year that J’s been riding the Bus of Celibacy with Cliff Richard and Ita Buttrose. Stellar company indeed.  Yesiree, three hundred and sixty-five days, count ’em off. Twelve months.  Fifty-two weeks. no matter how you look at it, it’s a fucking long time between drinks.  Not that it bothers me mind you.  Oh no.  Ohhhhhh no no no no no no.  I like to think of myself as a sensory deprivation cosmonaut, hurtling through the deepest reaches of dullness to reach new plateaus of dreariness so that the drab people of the cosmos may one day find a new home, free at last from the oppression of being surrounded by people with lives .  (I have a lot of spare time to think this stuff up.)

Thursday, 30 March, 1995, 1:18pm

The Great Keying has commenced.  The “Who the Fuck Cares” tribes are returning their questionnaires, ripe with petty alterations and pedantic trifles to suck the very life-force from the marrow of my bones.  The horror……the horror……  This sort of automaton-like keying reduces me to talking about the most inconsequential inanities imaginable.  I actually took the time and trouble to remark to Simon that the questionnaire I was keying at that particular moment had an interesting file number, 606060. How could I possible have thought that that thought was even worth the very air I pushed through my vocal cords to make the sounds to convey the message?  Arrrrggghhhhh!!!  Tedium tedium tedium, what am I to do?  Why couldn’t I just be a surf bum and sit on sunny shores collecting my dole money and communing with the Sea Gods?  Damn this protestant work-ethic bullshit.  Work is not where happiness and fulfillment are to be found, that is one of the great Industrial Revolution myths.  Did you know that the hunter and gatherer, our subsistence forefathers, had a working week of only fifteen hours?  They spent the rest of the time enjoying themselves.  Fifteen fucking hours!!  I dunno about you Sis, but at school I was always led to believe that the hunter and gatherer spent every waking moment scrounging for food and scratching in the dirt like some bloody great hairy chicken.  There’s a conspiracy afoot to keep us from returning to good old subsistence living, and it’s perpetuated by lies hidden in our education like this. The hours in the working week keep creeping up and up.  Take a look at Japan, where a sixty-seven hour working week is nothing out of the ordinary.  Japan is like a social experiment in extrapolated capitalism conducted by a sociologist with his finger pressed permanently on the fast forward button.  It’s a sick, sick place.  The basic business philosophy of the last ten years or so has been to lay off twenty percent of the workforce, and work the remainder twice as hard for triple the profit.  I believe in the four day week.  Hard work is not our salvation.  I’m ranting aren’t it?

Will you please come over here and take the Rolling Stones back to England?  I am so sick of seeing their wizened little heads everywhere.  And what a nerve, charging over $90 a head for their concerts.  Who is paying that much to see a bunch of has-beens churning out clichés they begged borrowed and stole from the rich tradition of black American music history.  I’ll tell you who – fucking Baby-Boomers, affluent corporate slaves bewildered by change and in need of a nostalgia fix.  Let’s face it anyway, they haven’t done a decent album for twenty years.  Steel Wheels was about as invigorating as John Major on horse tranquilizers.  And it’s creepy knowing that Mick Jagger has fucked everyone in the band except Charlie Watts.  And he only missed Charlie because he’s always sitting down.

Ranting over, more keying to do, Oh god!

Later.

J