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My main issue is that when I go back to skim over things I've written (which in years gone by was the main point of keeping a journal, other than using them to write your eventual memoirs which people might actually read before you die), I notice all the general mistakes, proofing errors, editing disasters, and downright clumsy language I've used.
The very instant you can pay someone to go through your online journal and proofread and edit everything like its a novel galley will be the very instant I... wait a second. What a brilliant fucking idea! No wonder everyone who's had that idea has paid someone to go through their online journal and subsequently publish a novel!
I think the thing that's been stopping me from going through all the detritus of the years has mainly been my upheld belief that pretty much everything you put on the internet is there to stay, for good or evil. Some years ago a friend of mine who used livejournal passed away and his journal is still up there for the world to see. Sometimes I check it out, I don't know where he's buried. In his journal another person (whom I didn't know very well) is referred to who is also gone from this planet.
Dostoyevsky knew the truth about mortality, which is that to be truly honoured and loved for who you are in life you have to be long gone from this rock. People despise their champions while they live, but honor martyrs and those they have slain. People are fucking goofy.
Moving on, I'm in Sydney and am sort of enjoying it. I say sort of because I'm not enjoying my time in the city very intensely. Someone decided to blow up a bin some time ago and now the council has removed all the bins from public places (there are still some but they're few and far between) because they're scared that terrorists are going to swim over from the middle east, set up sleeper cells in Sydney and turn this place into the new London, scared and disaffected from an undeclared offshore war with the IRA. The new bins they are putting in are totally over-engineered to withstand bomb blasts to about a few kilos of C4, which logically tells me this is why they're few and far between--they probably costs about 3 gazillon dollars and weigh 3 tonnes apiece. This fits in with the general ethos of inner-city Sydney, where everyone who's anyone wearing a stuffed shirt is a coked-up aggressive know-nothing with a superiority complex about the rest of Australia and the mistaken belief that this place on the arse end of nowhere (with a UV rating of about, oh, I don't know, Mercury or Venus, despite the cold) is somehow part of the northern hemispherical London, Paris, Milan, New York circuit. It is NOT. For one thing those cities are well established with things like bins, bicycle parking, sensible motorcycle laws and sidewalks that aren't completely caked with grime. Another thing is that Sydney is a city of only 3.5million people, and its amazing that any place this small could get like this although with proper Australian mismanagement I don't suppose I should be shocked. Australians never like fixing anything before its 'broken' so until people start actually dying from overexposure to sheer disgust its not likely to change.
What inner-city Sydney IS is a cesspool of idiots with varyingly interesting smells (grime, vomit, urine, and diesel mostly), walking so fast and so doubled over I worry some of them are on the verge of a debilitating brain aneurysm. Why are all these people in such a hurry? At any moment on their way to something which is most likely depressingly soul-destroying and almost as likely useless beyond belief? I would drag my feet. My guess is that in the early 1900's this city used to be a mecca of culture and art and our ruling class of stupid have let it turn into a giant over/underground shopping mall, interspersed with apartment buildings which look like shoeboxes (when the safety inspectors win the inevitable argument over anything which gets built here) or like shoeboxes full of glass which have been dropped from a great height (when the architects win). I actually stopped a couple of women looking intently at railings and staircases at a train station and asked them what they were noting down. They told me that practically everything would have to be ripped up and replaced because such things as the "luminance contrast of the stairs" was not sufficient for people to... I don't know, know they were stairs? I still am unconvinced that "luminance contrast" means anything very much, especially when applied to rather ubiquitous things like staircases. Perhaps the fact that they were shaped like stairs and people seemed to be walking up and down them rather than getting there and going "What the hell is this? An unexploded nuclear bomb?" had escaped them. It didn't escape my attention that while one of these safety inspector types was all too serious and enthusiastic about explaining to me why what they were doing was necessary, when I started engaging in less than subtle sarcasm I nearly made the strongly silent type laugh. Perhaps on the inside they share my dark belief that maybe we should take the warning signs down and let certain problems solve themselves.
The very instant you can pay someone to go through your online journal and proofread and edit everything like its a novel galley will be the very instant I... wait a second. What a brilliant fucking idea! No wonder everyone who's had that idea has paid someone to go through their online journal and subsequently publish a novel!
I think the thing that's been stopping me from going through all the detritus of the years has mainly been my upheld belief that pretty much everything you put on the internet is there to stay, for good or evil. Some years ago a friend of mine who used livejournal passed away and his journal is still up there for the world to see. Sometimes I check it out, I don't know where he's buried. In his journal another person (whom I didn't know very well) is referred to who is also gone from this planet.
Dostoyevsky knew the truth about mortality, which is that to be truly honoured and loved for who you are in life you have to be long gone from this rock. People despise their champions while they live, but honor martyrs and those they have slain. People are fucking goofy.
Moving on, I'm in Sydney and am sort of enjoying it. I say sort of because I'm not enjoying my time in the city very intensely. Someone decided to blow up a bin some time ago and now the council has removed all the bins from public places (there are still some but they're few and far between) because they're scared that terrorists are going to swim over from the middle east, set up sleeper cells in Sydney and turn this place into the new London, scared and disaffected from an undeclared offshore war with the IRA. The new bins they are putting in are totally over-engineered to withstand bomb blasts to about a few kilos of C4, which logically tells me this is why they're few and far between--they probably costs about 3 gazillon dollars and weigh 3 tonnes apiece. This fits in with the general ethos of inner-city Sydney, where everyone who's anyone wearing a stuffed shirt is a coked-up aggressive know-nothing with a superiority complex about the rest of Australia and the mistaken belief that this place on the arse end of nowhere (with a UV rating of about, oh, I don't know, Mercury or Venus, despite the cold) is somehow part of the northern hemispherical London, Paris, Milan, New York circuit. It is NOT. For one thing those cities are well established with things like bins, bicycle parking, sensible motorcycle laws and sidewalks that aren't completely caked with grime. Another thing is that Sydney is a city of only 3.5million people, and its amazing that any place this small could get like this although with proper Australian mismanagement I don't suppose I should be shocked. Australians never like fixing anything before its 'broken' so until people start actually dying from overexposure to sheer disgust its not likely to change.
What inner-city Sydney IS is a cesspool of idiots with varyingly interesting smells (grime, vomit, urine, and diesel mostly), walking so fast and so doubled over I worry some of them are on the verge of a debilitating brain aneurysm. Why are all these people in such a hurry? At any moment on their way to something which is most likely depressingly soul-destroying and almost as likely useless beyond belief? I would drag my feet. My guess is that in the early 1900's this city used to be a mecca of culture and art and our ruling class of stupid have let it turn into a giant over/underground shopping mall, interspersed with apartment buildings which look like shoeboxes (when the safety inspectors win the inevitable argument over anything which gets built here) or like shoeboxes full of glass which have been dropped from a great height (when the architects win). I actually stopped a couple of women looking intently at railings and staircases at a train station and asked them what they were noting down. They told me that practically everything would have to be ripped up and replaced because such things as the "luminance contrast of the stairs" was not sufficient for people to... I don't know, know they were stairs? I still am unconvinced that "luminance contrast" means anything very much, especially when applied to rather ubiquitous things like staircases. Perhaps the fact that they were shaped like stairs and people seemed to be walking up and down them rather than getting there and going "What the hell is this? An unexploded nuclear bomb?" had escaped them. It didn't escape my attention that while one of these safety inspector types was all too serious and enthusiastic about explaining to me why what they were doing was necessary, when I started engaging in less than subtle sarcasm I nearly made the strongly silent type laugh. Perhaps on the inside they share my dark belief that maybe we should take the warning signs down and let certain problems solve themselves.
