Wednesday, 26 July 1995 9:11am

Howdy S,

Another day.  Woke up late, no time to make my lunch.  Crept into my clothes, sleep unfurling smokily from my back as the tram sped me down Flemington Road.  And now here I am again, at this desk, blank as a soldier.  What difference does any of it make anyhow?  We’re all of us just big old sacks of blood waiting to burst.  That’s as evocative as I get first thing in the morning.

Did you ever notice how many of my letters start at 9:11am?  I never realized it until this morning.  By accident or design, it’s a neat idea.  This way, at eleven minutes past midnight every night, you know exactly what your brother is doing on the other side of the earth.  Geez, sentimental I know, but take away sentiment from the letter writer and what are you left with? – just the facts.

Same day, 4:26pm

Leah just rang, she finally got around to that snooping for me.  It’s off with Chloe.  Leah rang her and directly asked “So… how’s it going with Peter (that’s the fat-fella I wrote to you about) and Chloe replied “We’re thinking of moving in together.”  There it is. Stopped dead.  I’m kinda glad to tell you the truth, it’s been taken out of my hands.  It can now be closed, the files sealed and marked “Never to be opened”.  I now plan to make learning my mistress.  I’ll save up for another two years and then go back to uni, get some super degree and have super life all on my super own.

I’m wallowing in self-pity just a little.  It might have been nice.  It probably would’ve been awful, but it might’ve been nice.  Anyway, no time to brood.  I wish I was Phenylketonuric.  Phenylketonuric’s have this syndrome where if they eat any phenylalanine (the chemical your brain secretes when you’re in love, it produces that warm fuzzy feeling of pair bonding) it destroys the gland that makes it naturally and they can never fall in love like other people.  This has to be my favorite disease of all time.  Hell, that ain’t no disease, it’s a blessing!  Bitter, bitter, bitter.  Maybe I can survive on bitterness, save it up, screw it into a little ball and push it way down deep inside til it’s a hard shining and perfect diamond axis upon which my soul and entire being spins, like the Hindus’ believe that the earth rotates on a diamond.  Perhaps I’ll be fantastically motivated, like some West Point graduate who was beaten and savagely attacked in military school.  Maybe I could go and join the cast of Melrose Place as some freak of nature who doesn’t sleep with anyone, not even one cast member, so at the end they can all give me a chaste hug and say “Look, it’s OK, we understand, and we feel your pain.”  God, my living with a houseful of cats is a less ignominious fate I reckon.

At least the early demise of the Chloe “thing” has cleared the way for more money saving.  No distractions now.  Just gonna save and save.  No use doing anything, Mr Reaper comes for us all, and he doesn’t care if you’re single, married, successful, a failure, or anything.  The great leveller.  Don’t you ever feel like stuff is pointless ‘coz of the impermanence of it all?  I suppose having kids is one way to beat death, but I suspect that the cure might be worse than the disease.  Then again, if everything is pointless, why not do anything?  This is all a bit cerebral really, none of it is applicable to daily life, it’s just middle-class navel-gazing.  Fuck, that’s brought the tone of the letter down a touch hasn’t it?  I should go before I get too maudlin with my full belly and blazing heater edging me towards drowsiness.

I’ll write again next week.  Write me a letter dammit.  (I hope you realize I’m now gonna end every letter with that phrase until you come good and cough something up.)

Cheerio.  J

Sketch by J – this sketch is in J’s book for 2002 but I felt it went with this post – it strikes me as the Reaper waiting just around the corner.