I want to eat mushrooms in butter, I want to pat my dog Bert, I want to read Australian poetry, I want to scream ‘GENITALIA!’

Make a roux. You know how to make a roux.

Add cheese, chicken, mushrooms, white wine, salt, pepper, pasta and dijon mustard.

Bake.

WOAH.

I don’t have the energy to write about scotch, sin, sweat, let alone perpetrate any acts involving them. My life consists of working in a meaningless position where I use the internet for currency conversion, blog lurking, recipe inspiration, emailing. Sometimes I eat rice cakes. Most of the time I eat a lot of confectionery and have dizzying highs and woeful Dan Brown lows. Perhaps not that low.

SEE MILK.

So. If the condition of your fingernails indicates the level of your self-esteem, does that mean that I think I’m chewed and ragged?

I spent a lot of time almost naked and alone today, thinking about a German wagenplatz, thousands of books, unfulfilled love affairs/events, fulfilled love, developed and developing wrinkles, faded memories of past glories, winning a spelling competition in grade four, being uncertain and quiet and still the same. I guess I’m angry that fifteen years went by so quickly.

I need to stop drinking. I love drinking and being drunk and feeling differently and remembering the names of a boy I went to primary school with who moved away and the other one who went to prison. I love forgetting sneers and panic attacks and financial responsibilities. I hate hangovers. I hate feeling poisoned.

How do you stop a panic attack that’s been happening for almost a decade? I’m in the ‘There’s seriously something wrong and something has been wrong for a while now’ part.

I feel crushingly overwhelmingly ecstatic most of the time. I forget about how dull work is because I have great friends there and having work is great blah blah recession blah. The two percent is dwelling on the fact that I don’t live near my family, that I don’t have the assets/financial maturity blah blah fucking blah of other people my age, that the ability to type quickly is of no benefit to the human race, that I don’t have any pets (I want a fucking pet), that I use profanity unnecessarily, that I can’t flykick bad habits, that I am not very independent or anxious to try new things, ET CETERA.

I’ve momentarily defeated myself so I’m going to relax/live/snuggle under the blankets with other people’s words and thoughts . You can too!- Esther

By Mat Jacobson (mat.jacobson# @ # wdc.greenpeace.org)

A long, long time ago, the Earth belonged to the creatures of the wood. By creatures of the wood I mean gnomes and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins, ogres, trolls and bogies, nymphs, sprites, and dryads. They tended it and took care of it, played in it, danced and sang in it, cared for wounded animals, worked out disputes between species, sat on mushrooms discussing matters of import and drinking Labrador tea, rode down streams on leaves and bark, and parachuted from trees with dandelion seeds. This was the world into which mankind was born. These early days, when man was but a newly arrived dinner guest who hadn’t yet taken over the entire house, are fairly well documented in the literature and folklore of the world, so there’s no need to go into it here. What I am interested in, and what I am asking you to be interested in, is the question, “Where did all the gnomes and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins, ogres, trolls and bogies, nymphs, sprites and dryads go?”

The friction between man and the wood creatures began with the discovery of agriculture. With the discovery of agriculture, civilization arose and spread. The forests were cleared to provide wood for shelter and fields for pasture and crops. Mankind had set up camp. No longer just a visitor in someone else’s world, he pushed the wild back from his newly built doorstep. At first this wasn’t a problem. There weren’t many people and everyone else felt that it was only fair to allot them their own little half acre to do with as they wished. Some of them even decided to help out. Gnomes moved into the barnhouses and helped out with the gardening chores. The devic spirits of the vegetables helped the humans better organize their crops and plan rotation, and taught them the correlation between planetary and lunar cycles and the agricultural year, plant radishes when the moon is in Cancer, harvest when the moon is in Taurus. Many trolls felt that the heaping piles of manure were a change for the better, and decided to stick around too

The rest of the wood creatures just backed off into the wood, occasionally playing mischievous tricks on the new settlers, like turning the milk sour, rearranging furniture tipping the cows, tickling people’s faces in their sleep, and occasionally stealing babies and leaving bundles of wood in their place.

But man’s dominion spread (and spread and spread and spread), and the forests got smaller and smaller and smaller. Things got real crowded in the woods, and things were getting worse in civilization. Most farmers weren’t listening to the devic spirits anymore. People found that they could increase their output by disregarding the needs of the Earth. They were raising productivity and killing the soil. Petrochemicals were just a step away. Most of the devic spirits and the gnomes fled. The trolls stayed. Today they live mostly under bridges and in the shallow, mucky ditches beneath the metal grating on farm roads that cows are afraid to cross. Be sure to honk your horn before driving over one of these. A troll may be hanging from the grate, swinging over its living room, as they are apt to do after rolling in muck and manure, If you don’t give a warning honk, you may run over its fingers, and it’s not a great idea to get either your name or your license plate number on a troll’s shit list.

Now there is little wild land left at all, and even that is shrinking at an unprecedented rate. There is simply not enough space for all the gnomes and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins, ogres, trolls and bogies, nymphs, sprites, and dryads.

So where are they?

Are they dead?

No.

So where did they go?

The answer is a bit surprising. They didn’t go anywhere. We did.

Early humans had an intuitive knowledge of their role in nature, just as bears and raccoons and mice and every other critter does. They understood, from the ways of the wild around them, that nothing ever comes from nowhere and nothing ever just disappears. Things change form. Death is necessary for life to continue. They offered up their kills as sacrifices to the gods of nature. They offered praise, prayer, sacrifice, and song to the spirits of the wild, to brother buffalo, brother deer, brother fish, and brother tree.

Now we know that everything that has ever existed continues to exist, in one form of another, and as far as we can tell, they were more aware of that back then than we are now. So the sacrifice, song, praise and prayer did not ensure the immortality of the slaughtered, either in body or in spirit. That was already taken care of. What it did ensure was the continuance of the connection between the spirit of the slaughterer and the spirit of the slaughtered. Killing is risky business. The membrane separating the internal from the external is not necessarily as thick or as dearly defined as we have come to believe. Every time we kill, we risk killing the reality of that thing inside ourselves as well as outside. We risk breaking the connections that lead in and out of the membrane. Taking life to feed life requires a keen understanding of the natural law of give and take. When we lost that understanding, gave up the songs, the sacrifice, the prayers, the praise, we lost the connection. Saying grace is not enough.

When we lose those connections, everything becomes dead - fish, rivers, frogs, mice, even each other. There is no way they can reach inside us any more. The five senses we are left with are not enough. We have given up those connections in exchange for the freedom to clearcut forests with skidders, turn cows into milk machines and chickens into egg factories. We can experiment on animals, club seals, wear mink coats, exterminate passenger pigeons, dodo birds, whales, bear, dolphin and condor. Not a twinge of guilt. The lines have been severed.

And we are all under the impression that it is the forests, the creatures, the spirits, and the wildlands that are disappearing from the universe and not us. Not so. Thinking that is like thinking that if you stand on the end of a limb and saw that limb from the tree, the tree will fall and you will remain standing. Bugs Bunny might be able to get away with that, but we can’t. When a marionette cuts its strings, the puppeteer doesn’t collapse to the ground. When a spider severs the lines that connect its web to the trees, the forest doesn’t fall away.

It is we who have fallen away from the real world into a world where we may carry out our twisted sterile dreams without threatening the Earth and its inhabitants. Ever wonder why the trees and stones and rivers and streams, the birds, the snakes, the bears and the frogs no longer talk to us as they did in the early tales of the Native Americans, the Hindus, the Africans, the Bible? It’s because we’re not around to talk to any more. Every clearcut, every vivisection, every mechanized slaughter of cow, pig, or chicken moves our dreamworld farther and farther from the tree, making a reunification, which is still possible, more and more difficult.

Somewhere not so far from here, in the real world, the ancient forests are still standing, the buffalo roam the prairies, the sky is full of condors, the deer and the antelope play, and dodo birds wander the sandy beaches, bumping into things.

Where there are still wildlands in our dreamworld, strong connections still exist. Bridges, tunnels, and portals. Occasionally a traveler will get lost in the wilderness and find himself in the real world, returning the next day to find that a hundred years have passed, or never returning at all.

There are more ephemeral connections as well - brooks and waterfalls where you can still hear voices from the other side, if you listen carefully enough. When they sit by these waters they hear loud clanking and screams. When they eat psilocybin everything stops glowing, and condos rise where forests stand. Our children can see their world in their dreams. Their children see ours in their nightmares.

And there is another connection. Sometimes agents from the other side infiltrate our world in an attempt to expedite the reunification. Believe it or not, they miss us over there. Sometimes - more often than you might think - they send souls over to our world to be born as human babies. Sort of like a socialist, communist, or anarchist entering the American political arena and running for office in an attempt to effect change from the inside. There are quite a lot of them actually - gnomes and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins, ogres, trolls and bogies, nymphs, sprites, and dryads - running around in human bodies, doing crazy things like writing on walls, working in co-ops, running inns in the mountains, talking to themselves in the streets, making pottery, illustrating children’s books, spiking trees and blowing up tractors. They are planting bio-dynamic gardens, sitting in the back yard naked, arguing with Satan. They are in asylums pumped full of thorazine, in the classroom on Ritalin and lithium. They live with Indians. They run recycling centers. They are starting revolutions, corrupting the young, inventing paranoid conspiracy theories, making up religions. They’re directing movies, gobbling acid, drinking heavily and writing poetry.

The transition from their world to ours is not an easy one. Intricate rituals and incantations are involved. The transition is not easy on the soul. A great deal is lost. They may have no idea who or what they are at first. They may or may not find out. They will know that they are not like everyone else. They will know that this world is not theirs. They will faintly remember something better, where things made sense and worked like they ought to, where love and magic had the power to heal.

They will know that what makes other people happy does not make them happy, and that what makes them happy makes them happier than anyone else alive.

They will see things others cannot see, hear things others cannot hear, feel things others cannot feel, and know things others do not know.

They will laugh a great deal or cry a great deal or both.

They will love humans individually, but have a hard time with humanity as a whole that may occasionally approach loathing.

They will have a handful of very close friends, and often be very lonely.

They will be unhappiest when forced to act like a human and do the things that humans do, want the things that humans want, or when they are convinced that they actually are one.

Things will not be easy for them. Because of their memories of the other side, the world will seem to them to be a wondrous calliope with just a few teeth missing on one of the cogs, and because of this tiny deficiency, the music is all off key, the horses are crashing into each other, and the children are frightened, bruised and crying.

The solutions will seem obvious and no one else will listen.

They will be repeatedly punished for shouting FIRE! in a crowded theater when the buildings are in flames no one else can see. They will get slapped on the wrist for pointing to the EXIT signs when everyone else is running around screaming and trampling each other.

They will be zealous, fanatical, and didactic about their beliefs. They will feel utterly confused.

They will have ecstatic visions and babble incoherently. They will be extremely articulate. They are prone to long periods of silence. They have no idea how to say what they really mean.

They will spend a lot of time with children and animals

They will become drunkards and dope fiends, organic gardeners, Essene soapmakers, carpenters, madmen, magicians, jugglers and clowns, lunatic physicists, painters and scribblers, travelers and wanderers.

They will dress in bright colors, frumpy sweaters, or all black.

They will smoke too much and drink too much. They will eat only macrobiotic foods. They will develop addictions to Mountain Dew.

They will often be accused of living in their own fantasy world.

They will make great lovers. Yeah, even the trolls.

They will spend too much time either making love or thinking about it.

They will speak to inanimate objects.

They will have much brighter eyes than everyone else.

They will expect their magic to work in this world and their love to heal, and they will be crushed by this world, and often they won’t expect it.

It will come close to killing them.

They will visit the places where the connections still exist: the waterfalls, the mountains, the ocean, the forests. They will draw on all the power they have, and sometimes, sometimes, the magic will work. And everything will be wondrously easy. The teeth will grow back on the calliope’s cog, the tune will right itself, the horses will bob gracefully up and down, around and around, and the children will giggle and sing with cotton candy stuck to their cheeks and noses.

They will spend their days trying to reconnect a branch that millions are still busy sawing away at. Often it will be more than they can bear.

While the rest of humanity is busy working on new and more efficient ways to lay waste to the Earth with the push of a button, they are saving it, a handful at a time.

They will share a common conviction that they are the only sane individuals in a world gone mad.

They’re right.

I could have done a lot worst than sit
In Skid Row drinkin wine

To know that nothing really matters after all
To know there’s no real difference
Between the rich and the poor
To know that eternity is neither drunk
nor sober, to know it young
and to be a poet

Coulda gone into business and ranted
And believed that God was concerned

Instead I squatted in lonesome alleys
And nobody saw me, just my bottle
And what they saw of it was empty

And I did it in cornfields & graveyards

To know that the dead don’t make noise
To know that the cornstalks talk (among
One another with raspy old arms)

Sitting in alleys diggin the neons
And watching cathedral custodians
Wring out their rags neath the church steps

Sitting and drinking wine
And in railyards being divine

To be a millionaire & yet prefer
Curlin up with a poorboy of tokay
In a warehouse door, facing long sunsets
On railroad fields of grass

To know that the sleepers in the river
Are dreaming vain dreams, to squat
In the night and know it well

To be dark solitary eye-nerve watcher
Of the world’s whirling diamond
- Jack Kerouac

I purchased chips from KFC last night, and I’m not going to go into detail about the rude fucking hipster with combover pushing in and then encouraging his love interest to do the same even though I was clearly there first. I mean they clearly needed their $20 meals. They fucking spent approximately $19 each. That seems so expensive.

I was looking at the pieces of chicken and I think I get what vegans and vegetarians and other non-meat devouring people mean when they say they feel disgusted by it. It was carcasses in eleven different herbs and spices.

Crunchy carcasses.

Wow. This is under my fucking skin.

“It’s amazing, once you start thinking about it, how many things we actually repress. Most of it has to do with language, things you can’t say, won’t say, etc. Then there are the cries of grief you can’t even explain, unutterable wails of despair that rise up in your throat only to be choked down again until you’re literally choking on unexpelled air, because we’re not supposed to be so emotional. There are sobs that turn into muffled shrieks as little gasps escape when you finally have to suck in a breath or implode. And all because dorm walls are too thin, and crying isn’t something we want to impose on others.

There are suppressed cries of shock, little gasps that could turn into full out yells and deep moans, if only our parents weren’t listening from the next room when we’re doing something we’re not supposed to. There are stories, endless stories, occasions when you want to break down and start pouring out how one time when you were little you stole a couple Skittles from the glass dish in the babysitter’s dining room and got yelled at and you couldn’t understand what you had done that was so wrong, what reached the level of putting your shoes on the couch in the untouchable front “living” room in the eyes of the woman who had control of your life for 4 hours of every day.

There are times when we want to rant endlessly about ex-first loves and how they were really assholes and treated us like shit but had just such a way of touching this certain spot, and there was that time when they went and got our laundry and an extra pillow and brought it upstairs and stood looking at us while we brushed our teeth as if we were just amazing, brushing our teeth like that, when brushing our teeth is normally such an unattractive activity.

We never get over those ex-first loves, because we don’t talk about it. We never get a really good cry over it to the point where we really get it all out, where we’re really done crying. We always get to the point where we say, well, ok, have to go eat dinner now so I better stop crying because it’s a little silly to be crying this much at 5:14 on a Monday evening anyway, and the sobs get put away, the air gets pushed back down into our lungs, and we move on. Or so it seems. The sobs never really leave. They’re still down in our throats, still completely unutterable, and every time we get a little push a little too close to the area where we store all those unused gasps of air, we get a little closer to the edge where we just lose it all and everything, every last unoxidated fermented breath we’ve been saving up for years and years just spills loose and gets vomited all over the floor in sounds so impossible they hurt.

That’s what we’re all waiting for. That final moment of release, like when you finally throw up after hours of nausea and regret and unpleasant hangover sensations. When you’re finally empty. This is why we’re so unstable. We’ve deemed it unattractive to puke, and we’re all carrying around untold years worth of bile. No pill is ever going to fix all that, no therapist can ever extract all the ugly sores, because the therapists want to make it go away. And the answer isn’t to make it go away but to embrace it, to fully fuck every last painful moment until you climax and it’s done. Not gone away, but sated, finally having gotten the attention it deserved. The air should be filled with noises.We shouldn’t have to hyperventilate.”

NIcolette Stewart of www.clickclackgorilla.com linked to this little splinter by Tara of http://georgegoesgreen.blogspot.com/

I’ve spent the last few hours with Click Clack Gorilla words. Several splinters.

I am reclining in my bed eating fettucine alfredo sauce, cracked pepper, broccoli with a plastic fork. I am drinking verdelho again but not to excess as I need to drive to a friend’s place to possibly drink to excess. Such simple pleasures! I like strolling about in my underwear. What else does one do in their underwear? I scuttle from room to room when naked. I stroll when in my underwear.

I am thinking about volunteering to do an ‘outreach’ type of course with DrugArm. I also want to volunteer for a soup kitchen and have the forms filled out but I get so nervous thinking about my, I don’t know, viability for such a pursuit.

Our place is so messy right now. Not unhygienic messy, but untidy. I don’t think that it really matters though. I remember growing up I was not allowed to even leave a towel on the floor. Maybe it stems from that. My mother is great though. I didn’t inherit the neatness gene from her.

I don’t think shaving cream is necessary for legs.

I am starting a liver cleansing diet on Tuesday. Mondays are too typical to start anything on. Poor Monday. So hated! So disliked! This liver cleansing diet should work out alright. There are a lot of recipes that I actually can see myself eating.

I would like to attend a cooking class soon. I like the appearance of:

French Provincial

Superfoods

Moroccan

Italian Classics

A Taste Of Spain

The Turkish Feast

Global Indian

Spanish Seafood.

I’d also love to attend a demonstration of martinis and canapes…but I think that is excessively priced.

Our place is vibrating again. Machinery, we aren’t friends.

I need to make an appointment for a voucher I got at Christmas that the boyfriend bought me. Eyelash tint, eyebrow wax, all of that business. Thank you G!

A winter solstice party is on tonight. I’m pretty excited!

This recipe is so easy I don’t think it even needs instructions but I will add some anyway.

500g chicken breast or thighs, your choice

600mL ready made pasta sauce

Balsamic vinegar

Kalamata olives

Some garlic

Fry chicken in some olive oil. Stir in pasta sauce. Simmer for half an hour. Alternatively make your own with crushed tomatoes, water, some stock, herbs, garlic.

Add olives.

Eat.

This is so incredibly easy and inexpensive to make. Serve with rice, couscous or pasta.

Looking up due to its beeping, a car with my mother’s frantically waving hand was seen. She shouted ‘Esther! It’s your mother!’ Why is this surprising? She lives 515 kilometres away. I was not expecting to see her zipping around the corner of my workplace. She is full of surprises.

Today I have looked up people I went to primary school with. One guy is a complete bogan. Perhaps I’m not far behind him. No wait, he really is a bogan. Like an out of hand Southern Cross tattoos, small goatee, speed induced thinness and user of the word ‘bub’ bogan. I am a terrible fucking snob.

Star Trek movie is fine but I can’t get into it.

I’m drinking Chapel Hill verdelho which is not a bad drop. I’m having a rest from semillion sauvignon blanc. Pretty short I’ll move to gin and/or tequila. It’s always been a pleasure indulging in some tequila mixed with lemon or lime and lemonade. Tequila shots are only done in Hollywood.

I’m going to make an owl out of vegetation tomorrow and make cloth pads and order some cheese making material. I really am!