Wednesday, 24 January 1996  12:30pm

Went and saw “Kids” last night with Brett and Lara. Wasn’t bad, though the tattooed twosome didn’t dig it much.  They hate anything American, and Brett is so rabidly anti-drugs that his view of the film was a bit blinkered I thought.  Not that I reckon it was a great piece of cinema or anything, but it had more value than those two could see.  Or that’s what I thought anyway.  The simple fact is that they wouldn’t agree with me, and they all must obey, S.  They all must obey!

After the movie Brett and Lara gave me a lift home (though we had to walk from Village cinemas in Bourke Street to opposite the Vic Markets where we got a free park, in positively murderous humidity), and we stopped in at Josh’s on the way.  Man their flat smells of cigarettes. It’s funny how some smokers don’t smell at all, and other reek.  Not that Josh smells, just his house. One of Josh’s creepy friends was there, I can’t remember his name, but Josh told me once that he’s got Lupus, you know, that butterfly disease?  They call it the butterfly disease because you get a rash on your face roughly the shape of a butterfly.  I think eventually you die from it, and I’m not sure how you get it, but I know he has it.  He’s creepy though, he never says anything.  Whenever I see him I get the feeling that he’s just sitting there, quietly dying.  (Shudder.)

Still reading Sartre’s “The Reprieve”.  I was reading it on the tram this morning, and there was a bit about one of Hitler’s speeches on the radio, a defacto declaration of war.  Then I started thinking about war and death and radio, and all those wasted lives.  Then I thought about Orson Welles’ radio play “The War of the Worlds”, and how when it was originally broadcast (just pre-WWII from memory), some dumb-ass Americans thought it was for real – a news broadcast of an actual alien invasion.  And how they barricaded their houses, shot their kids and then themselves, because they didn’t want the aliens gettin’ hold of them.  And I thought about the cancelled lives of the children that the murdered kids might have had, and how stupid they would feel, knowing their potential for existence was snuffed out by a fucking radio play.  And how dumb the parents would have felt, knowing in the afterlife that if they’d only hung on another hour or so, they would have found out the aliens lost the war and were killed by germs (like they wouldn’t have brought their ‘Intergalactic Glen 20’ with them!).  It’s funny the things that demand brain-time on the tram.