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profile:

So, what's there to tell?

i'm a child of the sixties and a teenager of the eighties.

i first came into the 'alternative' scene in the mid-late 80s, when my sister introduced me to the Cure. One thing led to another and here i am a totally different person to who i was at high school. Thank god!

(In year 11, my English teacher asked us to give a talk on some social issue. i gave one on how young people shouldn't waste their time worrying about social issues but should concentrate on having fun, which is what life is all about. Thankfully i've grown up since, and i think the influence of the punk scene had a lot to do with that. But i digress..)

Today i'm involved with Amnesty International, which is my main way of making a difference to the fucked up world we're living in.

My two main goals in life are:

1. To leave this world in a better state than when i found it (or at least better for my having been born).

2. To enjoy life as much as possible and pursue the things i love to the fullest.

These two goals are often at odds, but i try to keep a balance between the two.

Balance is actually an important principle to me. The old Chinese yin/yang is probably the symbol which has the most meaning for me (for a long time, the only one that was symbolically significant enough to have tattooed onto my flesh), though not necessarily for the traditional masculine/feminine dichotomy that it originally meant. To me it symbolises the general need for balance, eg between chaos and order - too much order leads to fascism and repression, too much anarchy just leaves the powerful free to screw over the powerless. And so on.

i think the need for a balance is true of most things in life.

i spent a lot of time thinking what i might get for a second tattoo. i tend to want a design that means something important to me if i'm going to wear it on my skin for the rest of my life, not just a pretty picture. Something that does mean a lot to me is the idea of justice, not in a judicial sense and certainly not in the sense of retribution or payback. The justice i believe in is simply the opposite of, or even the absence of, injustice. But while looking for an image to symbolise that, something happened. It was September 2001, when terrorists crashed passenger planes full of frightened civilians into buildings and killed thousands of other frightened civilans. All around, cries went up demanding justice, meaning retribution, bloody and vengeful, while in other parts of the world people danced in the street to celebrate that justice had been delivered via those hijacked planes. While i knew that was not the justice i believed in, i also realised there was something even more important and valuable.. life itself.

But i digress..

What else do you want to know about me?

The love of my life is Elaine, my long time girlfriend, companion and source of strength.

We met in 1990 at the Sarah Sands hotel in Brunswick, at a Hard-ons gig. i'd been at a party at St Kilda beach drinking for most of the afternoon. i couldn't think of how to approach her, so i just walked over and said: "i'd really like to talk to you, but the music's too loud and i'm too drunk, so could i have your phone number?"

Five years later we were wed just after Beltane at the Montsalvat artists' retreat in Eltham.

Don't you just love those fairytale endings?

What else can i tell you?

i am a practising vegetarian, simply for the fact that i don't like the idea of little beasties being slaughtered for my own pleasure. There are plenty of other reasons for vegetarianism - humanitarian, environmental, health etc - that i won't go into because the arguments are covered extensively and better in many other places. Suffice it to say that i don't need to eat slaughtered animals to live, so i choose not to.

i'm trying to wean myself off leather products also, but for the moment i'm compromising by only buying second hand leather. It's still not right, but i look at it as being less harmful to buy a second hand jacket or pair of boots maybe once or twice a year than to buy and consume freshly slaughtered flesh on a daily basis. A cop out i know, but i never claim to be perfect.

i spend quite a bit of time reading and posting to usenet, my home newsgroup being aus.culture.gothic, and am probably becoming something of a net.addict in that respect. In fact, i spend so much time writing to the newsgroup that i never even get around to writing in my real diary (let alone keeping this page up to date). i'd better make sure i backup all my old usenet posts, as that's several years of my life in those ramblings.

A read of my writings and rants on the other pages here would probably shed more light on who i am and where i'm coming from than anything else i could write here, so you might as well go have a read of them..

 

home .. about me .. photo gallery .. drawings .. poetry(1990-1) .. poetry(1992-5) .. poetry(1996 +) .. writing .. rants .. links .. rings .. mail me