The Women of Troy and Public Transport

There's a boy on the train wearing a t-shirt that says: "drink sensibly, don't spill any". He gets off at Redfern trailing a suitcase on wheels. There are public transport patterns even though I'm a casual train catcher. Twice already this week I'm followed from Circular Quay to coffee by the same head-phoned boy. I'm hurrying down the Pier 6/7 stairs - all the while thinking what a great place for a sunset precinct cocktail function - in order to maintain a polite distance and not be overtaken. Whether I am behind or in front it's always me who is focused on maintaining distance. Surely someone so concentrating on public politeness is merely moments away from crazy. And what of being overtaken?

Way before that I'm careering through the opening night function catching my toenail on someone's walking stick and tearing it almost off. The toenail, not the walking stick. I'm telling Noonie about it after the fact and showing her the missing piece of toenail. We're just off King Street and laughing in Sunday sunshine until South King shade which is no laughing place. We're suspecting hypo-glaecemia until revived by vintage clothing.

The National are on my i-pod when I'm on the train and I think I would give almost anything to live a life like theirs. Does it feel multi-layered as you're living it? If you're even asking that question is it too late for the answer? Can you/one concentrate on being poetic or is that not the point? We're so disarming darling. Everything we did believe is diving (diving, diving, diving, diving) off the balcony.

Before careering I'm tense. I feel like I know too much but as it turns out not enough. I can feel it viscerally and I'm glad that that's my first experience but I want to know more. Melita as Cassandra and Helen. I do get Helen and mad, mad Marilyn Manson Cassandra, but only truly understand Robyn/Hecuba with her simultaneous bewilderment and profound, accepting understanding.

Afterwards we joke that Robyn needs to stand for PM in the next election and she could be Nevin 11. We're only half joking, but we know the idealist/perfectionist in her wouldn't be able to cope with ultimate pragmatism. Let alone Gillard Bishop hairstyles.

We drive home hunched with the unsung playwright in the back of the grey car with crunchy gears. I jump out at the 7-11 and concentrate on walking in a way to keep my shoes on my feet. I wanted to go in to the shop to buy the Sunday papers too but thought that it would be awkward, and it didn't matter anyway.

I wait at the lights by the hardware store at midnight and then in the privacy of Church Street I remove the shoes and focus on avoiding unseen pebbles for three blocks to the door step.

The National say: "showered and blue-blazered" and we know it's a criticism.

And my favourite Tom Wright office mini sign: "If you're open-minded anything can get in."

Email from Ashley: "a closed mouth gathers no feet".

Things Found

A lone potato by the dish rack. A single bean in a pot hanging above the stove. Forty two used glasses on the dining table, some still harbouring wine. The mangled lenseless frame of a pair of black Ray Bans climbing down from the external window sill. A glittered top hat partially squashed underneath the rear tyre of my car.

The Poetry of Banality

In an i-pod world everything has a sound track. A boy and a girl on bikes sweep soundlessly through the leafy campus at dusk as Kate Bush sings about a brown jug. I glance sideways during Love is a Battlefield and see a man blow drying a woman's hair as she sits under fluorescent light on an apartment balcony on St John's Road.

I'm on my way home to meet Ray Ellison the intercom man. There's a film and video artist talking on the radio. The interviewer asks him how he thinks of ideas and of course he can't say. Laughs. Eventually says he has a fascination with the poetry of banality. He has created a video installation which shows him repeatedly inflating and de-flating an air bed. He films cleaners and night workers through the windows of office buildings, cobbles together many of these films to fit the form of an actual multi-windowed building and then projects the film onto the real building. As part of the interview he gets to choose a song. It is I See Red by Split Enz. The interviewer asks why he chose that song. He says he sees red.

A boy on a bus asked Noonie if she was going to eat the flowers she was carrying. The tattoo does say perhaps.

Can we think of something more interesting than pitbulls and pigs wearing lipstick?

Overheard in Workshop: 9am Friday

Do you think that pigeons have a memory?