It's like the inside of my head is a television permanently switched on. All channels playing at once, including the zeroing hum of those stations off-air. My eyes are video recorders and everything goes in. The eggs and bunnies. The English players. The Epic of Gilgamesh. The erotics of learning. The Exterminating Angel. Real-time television. Lock and load. So I'm a victim of experience, I am everything I see and everything that's broadcast. I'm a witness so overwhelmed by information -- by evidence -- that I am immobilised. I don't live out the actions I receive, just convert them to nervous energy. The exquisite cross between the domestic and commercial. In my room I am the living dead. She keeps it quiet and that's not hard. She hadn't changed the sheets on her bed for almost two years. She is offering herself a living memorial of a carnal life so she won't forget. And somewhere between regulated childhood and adult responsibility had stopped cleaning her teeth at night. Not since that last boy escaped. Mornings were still regular -- to clear out the cocky's cage as her old grandad used to say. Not since that last boy escaped. Lock and load. So I'm a victim of experience, I am everything I see and everything that's broadcast. I'm a witness so overwhelmed by information -- by evidence -- that I am immobilised. I don't live out the actions I receive, just convert them to nervous energy. In my room I am the living dead. She keeps it quiet and that's not hard. One day soon, let's hope someone buys her some new sheets. She'll need them. She is the one with another nutty idea (although not all of her nuttiness is expressed in ideas). That a gay man is somehow the equivalent of a woman where a heterosexual man can never be. Her warped logic let her confide in him, even sleep with him for comfort, be with a man in a freer manner. The bedders come in and say your bed looks as if it hasn't been slept in --ÊI say, I'm just a good bed maker. They take umbrage, thinking I've slighted their skills. But somehow the other rituals slipped off the perch. Which I haven't-- slighted her, that is... but the noise is so intense that I doubt myself. I'm thinking of the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham and watching the Queen visiting an "outback Australian school". The locals are out in force, making her feel welcome. The kids ask questions. How many rooms does Buckingham Palace have? 600 -- but she hasn't seen them all. I kept Victor because he displayed more sense, is her response to the kid with bright teeth. I know when Perec's writing became part of me. I learn so much from Canetti. And The Reverend Gilbert White. But this was last week, or the week before. I'm getting a rerun. This happens. Like Gilligan's Island or The Time Tunnel. She's there for her people. Splendid. There's no use trying to place your hand, Syd Barrett says in the background. Or maybe nearby. He wanders the streets of Cambridge, a large bald man. His detractors call him fat. He bends over and looks at people between his legs, or so the myths go. I see him realtime. He's painting and destroying the works before they're completely dry. Creating and destroying with a sweep. It happens at once. The more information that comes in the more you realise how thin it all is. Not based on much really. Do I regret the loss of subjectivity? I fumble for the a-priori. What is it I'm doing here, so far from home. Home. Where the Queen of Australia has just been and the farms around Beverley are no more than survey marks, the mappings written where the officials don't think to look. Sometimes it's the bleeding obvious. Keep buying the morning and evening editions. The TV Times. I like your abstractions. I log on to check the weather over Sydney. Read the Cfax. I look to you to modulate. I lost sight of the truck as it stumbled towards the fox. I love it. I mean it just doesn't bear thinking about -- I love the fox. I might have asked. I mistreat my sources. I open a new document. I pack my Walter Benjamin. I pause and take stock. Lock and load. I pick one up and read it. Lock and load. I picture them snaking along the crests of the dunes. We are at war. We are dangerous. We are most of us sleepy. I re-read the story. I reckon. I know. The summer fades, though even now midday cauterises and a sunset is blown full pink. I re-read the story. I reckon. I know. And those vast flocks of white cockatoos sailing from widow maker to widow maker across the town. A single white beast causing farmers' trigger fingers to twitch. "And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg -- "Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods." A bedder asks about the place I was previously in. Expensive, I bet. Yes. The place across the road where lots of Indians live must be cheaper... I bet. I am mastered. I am more disturbed by it. The Queen doesn't own them anymore. They are not her subjects, unless they migrate to the United Kingdom. She's affable enough -- the bedder -- though what she says adds to the confusion. Like thinking about Virginia Wolf writing about class. I am mastered. I am more disturbed by it. The bourgeoisie call it "poetry in motion". Performance with Mick Jagger has come on. One of the BBCs. Can't tell which. Maybe, happening is the right word. Reception is as anachronistic as the pick-ups sailing out into the paddocks for the Beverly Annual Fox Hunt. Utes instead of horses, spotlights in place of hounds. Horns instead of... horns. Plenty of piss and a bloody good time had by all. There's a bounty on a fox scalp, or at least there was. I see the hollow points explode in a fox skull and things get a little frayed. This is ethics, I say. History is "the blooding". Television -- the moment -- almost denies history and yet feeds off it. The bedder agrees, and "confesses" her point might easily be interpreted as being racist. Lock and load. Wow, I didn't expect that, I say. Well, I've been round you blokes for thirty years now. I know what you'd like me to think. Most of you aren't too ethical when it comes down to it, one might add. I almost know. I'm back into the writing. I already do that. I'm doing it with a stranger. I always imagined. I am a writer. I am happy to inform you. I am in a Russian bar in New York City. I am obliging myself to dredge things up. Lock and load. I am overcome by it. I am primed. I am ready again after all of these years. I am still mannered by the medium. I am writing on behalf of the Customer Service department. I become Virginia Woolf. I begin a sequence. I begin to tell a fox's story. I believe. She likes landscape photography. I am mastered. I am more disturbed by it. She examines the contents of my bin like she's divining my excrement. I'll examine the sheets tomorrow and see if you really do need fresh ones. We change them once a week but if they still sparkle and the starch is working we'll let them go. The technique of playing double. The technology of break. The telemetry of everyday life. The thought from the outside. The three wise men in my daughter's nativity play. The two girls. The unconscious. The ups and downs of the curvature. The utility of language. I am mastered. I am more disturbed by it. In forests begin kangaroos. Lock and load. Fox skins stiff as card. And those big red creatures, two of them, stood to attention on the side of the road on the way home from the first night of dining. Upright like that they must have been eight foot tall. Maybe more. I've seen them time and time again, played over inside my head. So fast, bounding like dots, despite their size. This is quick. Speed. It's a rush. In his house he has these impossibly long tables: stretches of karri turned into tables for a ship, for the Captain's table. Apace, apace. Perec says: the fast surface is supposed to be empty unless you are eating quickly, but he keeps leaving post-it notes and unpaid bills and his lists of who to avoid in order to stay as happy as possible. The wait. The war machine rolling on, accelerating. The water glistening in the way you imagine it does in a dream, or when it moves rapidly towards steam. The whites of their eyes uneasy with the heat, with the whole shebang. The winding road between escarpment and water -- a single white beast causing farmers' trigger fingers to twitch. The world of worthy stories. I like your abstractions. I like the dog. I lose sight of the truck. I love it. I mean it just doesn't bear thinking about. I might have asked. I mistreat my sources. I open a new document. I pack my Walter Benjamin and my tenses. I pause and take stock. I pick one up and read it. I picture them snaking along the crests of the dunes. I re-read the story. I reckon. I know. I log on to check the weather over Sydney. I look to you to modulate. I imagine her saying this, of course she never would. She's too methodical and far too responsible. I don't own a television. There's not one in the room. She comments on this -- what do you do of an evening? The canals throwing up their Martian stuff. The cinematic apparatus. The conic root. The corpses of long since dried up felt pens. The crack up. The cubic space of the tooth. The desert now a world. The disorder that premises its orderings. The doctrine of 'national service'. The drama before the stock exchange closes for the day. The drive of sex and dust making me sneeze. Nothing, nothing at all. Just let the darkness rush loudly in -- a collision of colours and sound that amount to nothing, despite the exquisite cross between the domestic and commercial. The quick profits versus the harsh reality of it. This, the lyric urge: over and over. Nothing, nothing at all. Just let the darkness rush loudly in.