Monday, 24 April, 1995, 10:33am

S,

Howdy.  It’s a chilly Monday morning, and I feel about seventy.  I spent the weekend with Dad up at Nana and Pop’s.  It was OK, better than I expected actually.  The drive up with Dad on Saturday was torturous though.  He tried to put the guilts on me, it went like this;

“How long is it since you’ve seen Nana and Pop now J?”

“Ooh, I guess it’d be about three years, Dad.”

“Nooo, it’d be more than that.  It’d be five years.  Yep, five years.”

Extended silence.

A bit more extended silence……..     I think you get the picture Sis.  Then he pulled out the big guns.  He started to talk about the farm.  I thought I was going to leap out of the speeding car onto the tarmac.  Even losing a metre-and-a-half of skin on the road couldn’t be worse than Dad’s morose meditations on his erstwhile rural dream.  He said something about “that wog” who bought it off him being in trouble with the RSPCA vis-a-vis the condition of his cattle.  Anyway Dad threw in this gem – “So I went out there and had a word to him about feed and so on – but I don’t go there much. I can’t bear it.”  It was said in that quiet voice he reserves for moments of especial martyrdom.

I felt like saying “I know how you feel Dad, I couldn’t bear being their either.  Either could Mum, or S,” but I didn’t.

Things brightened up once we got to Nana and Pop’s.  It took me a while to re-tool my conversation, but they were sweet.  Nana cooked heaps of food, she said she heard I was vegetarian now so she had some tuna for me (yes I ate it), Pop belched loudly, Aunty Red chatted on, Unc was good and our cousin is a good kid, he’s nine now.  Dad, Unc, our cousin and I went outside to throw a ball around, and I am so sore today.  I haven’t thrown a ball for years.  The only thing I throw is pens around the office.  That’s why I feel about seventy today.  Everything hurts.  Pop gave me some beans to plant from his vegetable patch. I’ve got Seven Year Beans (they grow for seven years) and Percy Beans, so called because the man who gave them to Pop was called Percy.  He doesn’t actually know what sort of beans they are.  Groovy looking beans though.

Same day, 3:11pm

Hey , check out the X Files info sheets at the end of this letter. Caleb, one of the computer guys here at work, gave it to me earlier today.  He got it from the Internet.  Looking down the list, I think there are some episodes I haven’t even seen, let alone have on video tape.  Now that you’ve got a computer at home, you’ll have to let me know your email address, then there won’t be that five day delay between letters.  We’re on the internet now at work, but it hasn’t been put on everyone’s terminals yet.  I can’t wait, myself.  There’s a whole bunch of stuff  I wanna check out.  Some of it’s even legal.

Wednesday, 26 April, 1995, 11:39am

Had yesterday off for Anzac Day.  I spent the day in bed recovering from too much beer on Monday night.  Then I tended to man’s most basic needs – food, shelter and warmth.  I did my washing and dried it in front of the fire.  I’d been drinking the night before with office people.  I was poor, so I had to drink beer, which just doesn’t agree with me. I even played two games of pool and lost both.

We met some guy who is a friend of Nathan’s from work, whose name was Scott.  I didn’t like him from the moment I laid eyes on him.  He took offence too easily.  He was raving on and on about the Rolling Stones like they were the new messiahs.  He even credited them with bridging the racial gap (by nicking black music I suppose), so I felt impelled to tell him about Mick rogering everyone in the band.  Scott did not like that one little bit.  He demanded to know my sources, like you really look for the name of the journo who wrote the piece when the gossip is that juicy!  So I ignored him for the rest of the evening, and so I should have, we just couldn’t get rid of him.  We tried to dump him three times and he kept following us from one pub to another.

I think I might be rude to people more often, it was very exciting, empowering even.  I think the only thing which keeps me from being rude more often to people I despise is a fear of violence, because I don’t really care what they think of me, I just don’t want them to snot me one.  Perhaps I could re-invent myself as one of those “Straight-talkers” that seem to confound everyone with their honesty and forthrightness.  Yeah I could dig that.  If someone asks me how they look, I’ll tell ’em.  “You look like Russ Hinze squeezed into a purple sausage skin. You’re fat.” Oh, how dearly I would love that.  I wouldn’t have any friends, but I would feel liberated.  You know, thinking about it, I spend a lot of time being nice to people and perpetuating their time-sucking friendships with me, when I would really rather they just pissed off and left me alone.  Being nice to people is self destructive for me.  I need to tell these duds that I don’t like them, and I find their company boring and their conversations one-note. Yeah, I’m feeling fired up now, I wanna alienate the whole goddamn world!!!