I have been away a long time but there has not been one word to write and hardly a word to utter. I have been unable to think of a solitary thing that I would like to share and that is probably all on account of me not trying. I did have an interesting conversation with an old friend last night about a lot of things in general and nothing at all in specific. In general she informed me that she has recently converted to anarchism but she couldn’t specifically tell me how or why. In g...

Ok. I’m broke. Interesting way of putting it – broke. Broken, poor, destitute (not that serious). I’ve had no money so long that it seems normal, like this is universal, like no one drives luxury cars or dresses in expensive foreign suits, doing all they can to not smell themselves, not touch themselves, put the fabric and fragrance in between, let it slip in the crack and protect you from you. Money is the ultimate holiday destination. That’s what it feels like when you have none. Y...

There she was, beaten. Knuckleduster beaten. Face all mashed up, hard to determine what she looked like before the assault, hard to measure what type of person before the act determined what we all think of her. I think she might have looked hard before the incident, but she looked harder after it. Someone said she looked like a “junkie”, as if that description made the whole thing acceptable, normal… with precedent, because such things are, of course, important. We would hate to see violenc...

To think. To taste and feel. All with your feet. And to fly, no matter how short and circular the distance, how futile the circumference. We love butterflies. We adore them in the way we love all things that are almost broken, that are absolutely beautiful. We symbolise them when there is no need, when their paper thin presence and luminous flutter means everything they can and should. It would be strange to know what they think of us, but looking into their compound eyes, fractured eyes, ...

So i am here. And it seems to be the simplest thing to say. Am. Here. And i suppose i could say that i am happy, but if you have read Mig's blog it might be possible for you to understand how complicated simplicity can be. I can grasp the physical location. That is simple enough. A measurable distance from home and family. The trees seem more alive here, as if the air is richer and the people less ambivalent. There are islands off the coast and it makes it seem like a myth, as if Odysseus ...

In a recent conversation with a friend, we were discussing why it is that blogs that seem to lean to the more frivolous and flippant consistently win out over the blogs that possess a certain density or majesty. Now we must keep in mind that those adjectives – frivolous, flippant and dense, majestic – are subjective to the extreme, shifting from reader to reader, perspective to perspective. The interpretations we bring to a piece change according to the time and place we read something as ...

Firstly, you’ll have to excuse the title. Knowing the limited readership of my blog, I wanted a title that might actually attract some of the more conservative of you here on JU. Secondly. What is the point of this article? Well it’s not really an article as such; it’s more of a curious exploration, an attempted mapping of JU’s conservative topography. I want to know what it is to be either conservative/right-wing. What beliefs and opinions are necessary, and to what extent is this politic...

Not more than 5 days ago my dear brother decided to give up the vile carcinogens that we affectionately know as cigarettes. In doing so he turned into a vile carcinogen himself. As a smoker he was a mildly amusing, go lucky young man, full of life and aplomb, talkative and amicable to all and sundry – even to those he didn’t much care for. After his hasty and obscurely caused decision to quit and the resulting cessation of the habit he has turned into a malevolent, and dare I say it, vi...

I sit out here within my resplendent garden, or should I make that necessary correction – not my garden, my parents garden, a garden of one generation; the burial place of a duck, dog and countless collections of memories that linger under the new growth of vegetation. I sit here and carefully place words upon the screen of this laptop, and yet, I am still being bitten by this cold, this chill wind that resembles too closely the sensation that often runs the gauntlet of my spine. It seems tha...

I had the misfortune of going to a shopping centre today. It was new and white, crazy angles and not-there-glass, blue lights along the railings of escalators and lowered false ceilings. It dazzled and awed. It took a long time to open. All those low bass rumblings and the whining drill sounds take fruition in this thing so clean and ordered. With the area cordoned off like it was and the muffled sounds booming late into the night, you would think they were creating gargantuan life, a mad sci...

What was it like growing up as a Catholic? I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there. Someone who wasn’t me was there, a chemo patient who doesn’t recall who he was before the uncomfortably nameable started cannibalising him. If you believe in a soul, this situation is a distinct possibility. If you believe in the ability or possibility of losing one, then it becomes a certainty. I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t left my soul at the atrium of a Church. I don’t believe in a diminished...

I never thought I would say this. I am sick to death of university. Sick to boredom, sick to anaemia, sick to wasting – sickly in every single way except in the way that could be diagnosed and classified, treated and cured. This is not to say that I am tired of knowledge, that I am exhausted with the art of accumulation. I am a prodigious collector of invisible things. An entomologist of transparent insects that are always interbreeding, always hidden and searched for in the darker and war...

Politics, it’s everywhere but we never see it, insidious bastard that it is. Is it another word for relationship? Are there things/objects involved? Manufacturing processes and plants, tanks and planes, roads and bridges, dollars and bonds. Is the art of politics about dominion over people or things? Is it the art of facilitating the relationships between people and people and things? I’m sure it’s all these things and I’m sure there is a political economic theory to explain each and ev...