Visual Diary #12

The HIgh Priestess, The Big Ship, Schnauzer-Attack! Another Fitzroy terrace

Dear readers, apologies, yesterday’s was a blip. How are you going? I am still counting down Signs of Spring, buying myself flowers, going through boxes of stuff from two houses ago. I love that the days are getting longer and the mornings don’t feel quite so gothic. I am watching Such Brave Girls after Too Much and AJLT and down to the last two seasons of Skins, which is QUITE different to the first four. I like it less, but maybe it will grow on me. I am walking in green spaces and eating a lot of meals made with tinned chick-peas and halloumi. I am circling my books, like a dog trying to get comfortable. I got some way into Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, all the way through Rachel Cusk’s Parade. Next up is Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries.

Here are this week’s pictures.

I love the imagery and symbolism of tarot. After pulling much Tower, Death and Swords I was happy to get The High Priestess, so I have painted her here. She’s all about the waiting and the thin places, about honouring your intuition, feeling above thinking, collaboration over competition. “Now is the time to be still.” So, okay.

When all the emotion inside you has built to a solid wall you may find it advantageous to sit in your car and blast The Big Snip by Brian Eno and think about all the big ships that have moved through your life, or the one you are facing or wish you were on.

Scully at the dog park set upon by two schnauzers.

Four times a week I walk past a house I once lived in off Brunswick St. The lace curtain in the window is the same one as when it was my bedroom 30 years ago. I couldn’t remember the interior so I had a look at some photos online. Then it came back: peach walls, cream carpet, the weird atrium, chequered tiles in the kitchen. In this house my friend dyed my hair, rubbing my scalp too hard. She was an intense person who did everything intensely - my hair had never been such a vivid auburn! In this house I had a dinner party and made a pasta sauce with an abundance of capsicums. One of the guests, an ex’s ex, handed back the plate, said she was sorry but she couldn’t possibly eat anything with that much capsicum in it. Her words were like a slap - I was a sensitive creature, and capsicums were a recent discovery. I was growing them in white styrofoam tubs in the bluestone courtyard. But after that I went off them. This house was never right for me. The rent was too high and I didn’t really know my housemate. I feel we must have made the decision to live together on a drunken night at the pub. And then it was real, and then we were stuck. In that house I was trying to be an independent person in the world and I wasn’t very good at it.