Tune in, tune out. Change Channels

My neighbourhood is so suburban it feels like a dream or a symbol, like a place that could only exist as an ideal. It calms me to walk through the prozac streets, a holiday from my own tangled instability, watching the sun set as I replay my day, all jumbled and jump cut, through the projector in my head.


Today someone I worked with asked me why I haven't bought my own house yet.
I shrugged and walked away, feeling like I must have fallen asleep on the bus and woke up a long long way from home.


Nervous, jangled by a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes. Hemmed in by looming work deadlines, overdue house inspections, physical distance, routine... the alarm goes off, coffee, breakfast radio, coffee, work, drive time radio, beer. How did my life turn me into the sort of person that listens to breakfast radio every weekday morning whilst driving to work sipping on a styrofoam cup of takeaway coffee? Another bad dream perhaps? A symbol? An ideal? No, it's my life as it becomes a growing repertoire of cliches, a cancer that is strangling my time, a cancer running backwards forcing order onto chaos by rote.


Listening to a conversation between two students in class I overhead one of them say:

"If Aboriginals get money from the government just for being Aboriginal and spastics get money just for being spastic then do we give gays money because they're gay?"
No one seemed to be sure of the answer but they all thought her logic was reasonable.


Tune in, tune out. Change channels.


In two months I will be living in a trailer park, renting a $60/week cabin in the worst bad part of town... it's only temporary ( but how many times have I had to tell myself that?!!?!)... the inevitability of something so ridiculous makes everything that happens around me seem like a big joke.


Our school band playing a Beatles medley... badly... another fucking cliche, a brutal reminder of...


Tune in, tune out.

Switch off.