Flipping the bird at answers

I just woke up from a terrible dream, into a wakingness I resented because it was still 4 am and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep – I was suddenly too aware, not groggy like I’d just woken up, and immediately my mind started racing, and I felt compelled, as I have many mornings recently, to get up and overhaul SIB.

The dream ended with me pulling a dude out of the back of a van – my van, possibly, Delilah – his face hitting the dirt, and him standing up with a bloodied nose, then falling over, fainting.

I tried to wake him up, but he was out. There were other guys with us, all of whom were hating on me pretty bad, for yet other reasons prior, so one of them stormed up and shoved the guy, let’s call him Edwin, into a deep pit of about a foot of ice slurry and a range of beers, other drinks and soggy egg cartons.

I guess he did it to shock him awake, but Edwin immediately turned into a Nippy’s orange juice bottle, rendering him too far away for me to reach in and save him, the juice bottle, from drowning. The guy who threw him in there had longer arms than me – he reached in to, I thought, grab him, but came up with a Lipton Ice Tea. Then I woke up, terrified that if I stayed in the dream he would die, a juice bottle drowning in an ice slurry.

All this happened because I had done some shit to damage one of my friend’s fishing rods, so I spat the dummy and stopped drinking their beer, deciding to protect it, instead, from various other vultures who had appeared at a party earlier. We were on the west coast, so when my guarding started to piss everyone off (I had started guarding my friends from their own beer) I had said ‘Fuck it!’ and decided I would hitch back to Adelaide.

At that point I didn’t have Delilah there, but then I did, so I was driving along behind them for some reason, but steering over the front seat, from the non-existent back-left seat. Retarded, I know. Soon I was in their back seat, with no steering wheel now, but with pedals that weren’t working. I freaked out before we goddamn crashed, and told them to slow down and pull the fuck over.

So we all got out and they started hating on me some more, which is why I dragged Edwin face-first out of the back of Delilah.

Various things to note: I recently went fishing on the west coast, over New Year’s, without much tackle of my own, and without having paid cash up front for the supplies my friends had organised; I recently drank a Nippy’s orange juice and passed on Lipton Ice Tea for some obscure ginger beer I can’t remember; I have bloodied people’s noses before, and always felt terrible about it, aaaaaaages ago, back in nineteen tickety two.

So I’m overhauling this blog, by which I mean stripping it back and leaving it raw. For a while there I thought we could make it about youth literature: reviewing youth literature, as I define it (’literature created by youth, for whoever’); critiquing the publishing industry on ways it could nurture youth literature more; and generally trying to create a niche market of ideas about something we’re passionate about that doesn’t get much coverage elsewhere.

So I’m abandoning a niche – feel free to take up residence.

I’m doing this because basically it would have required: reading a lot of youth literature specifically to review it, a reading style I’ve had enough of for a while; bitching about the industry; and promoting the blog so the niche extended beyond my disparate network of friends and workmates.

All I want to do lately is read good writing, write good reading, and learn to meditate. Promoting a blog is not conducive to good meditation practice, especially if you can neither meditate your way out of your own wet mind nor plug your blog out of obscurity.

I’m going to leave it at that for now, and tinker with the meta data for a while before I go to the gym then try to get some more sleep, which I am sure I will fail at. I go to an EFM gym, which I highly recommend if you don’t like traditional gyms. I’ve got a post lined up explaining why I haven’t been around much lately, but I hate it when people open their three-monthly blog posts with ‘I’m a naughty blogger’, so I’ve wended it into a musing on an internet-doomsday book I’m reading at the moment. Sleep well.

Diddums!