Friday 14 July 1995 9:22am

Howdy Sis,

It’s Friday, and it’s warm, and I have a nice bouncy song from the radio reverberating around my echo-chamber skull.  I’m in a good mood.  Watched barely any TV last night, spent all of it on the couch reading a book on Japan that I borrowed from the library.  It gives a broad outline of the religions (their Shintoism is really cool – worship nature and ancestors, it’s the indigenous religion in Japan, it wasn’t imported. It sounds a bit like Druidism actually), their classes, customs, epochs, you know the sort of thing.  The reason for this sudden interest in Japan is so that I’ll have something to yak about if I ever actually come face to face with Chloe (she was in Japan recently).  You might call it calculated, sure.  I call it preparedness.  That sounds much nicer.  It was weird though, I haven’t had to, in effect, study anything for years.  It was almost nostalgic.  Maybe I should start studying again, not for a course of anything, just to become an unbearable know-it-all.  It’s gotta be more enriching than vegging in front of the TV. Once Leah does some more snooping for me, I’ll get some other books.  I’ve always wanted to be a fount of wisdom and esotery.  Maybe I should even stop drinking and slaughtering off those brain cells.  Perhaps I should embark on a new age of learning, sloughing my old skin of laziness and revealing delightful new scales of vigorous intellectual pursuit.  Or maybe I should just stick to pomposity, I do it so well.

Geez, Mum will be home in a few days.  I hope she hasn’t regained all that weight she lost before going.  She was on some apple cider vinegar diet or something.  I’ve actually been watching what I eat the past fortnight or so.  I don’t want to be a big ol’ Jabba the Hut, I need to be slim, lithe and sylvan if I’m gonna snare Chloe.  I want snake hips. There’s a lovely image for you. Sadly however, I don’t think I’m impressive and god-like. I just don’t have the disciplinary wherewith-all to drag myself from my sluggish, sedentary, couch-hogging, remote-control-fondling torpor. How do other people do it?  Are they fuelled by a vanity, the proportions of which I cannot comprehend?  Or is it really self-discipline, that bogey that so haunted my school career (along with that goddamned “potential” that dogged my every report-card).  Are you embarking on the kind of fitness regime that many new mothers submit to after their baby’s birth?  Do you feel the need to? I can picture you lifting bricks in the bedroom, huffing and hissing with each rep as Jack pleases with you “S, come to bed, it’s four in the morning and you’ve  done 400 reps on each arm” and you say “No brain, no pain, now hand me another scotch.” It’s a pretty picture innit?

‘Til later.

J

Photo taken by J. It appears to be a photo of his favourite things, his Chesterfield couch, his laptop, TV remote, Coke, Magnum ice-cream, Arnott’s BBQ Shapes and Salt and Vinegar Chips. I’m not sure when it was taken the back is stamped 05.11.01 which I think may be the date it was developed.