Freedom

I used to be free.

I guess that doesn't sound remarkable. We're all free, right?

Apart from being wage-slaves, debt-slaves, rent-slaves, apart from the violent and coercive state enforcing its arbitrary laws regardless of our consent, apart from generations of trauma making us terrified of each other, terrified of our own bodies and most terrified of all of being powerful and free.

So, what if that fear were to disappear, would we then be free, or more free? No. Not theoretically at all. Only in practice. It is utterly meaningless unless it is in practice.

What is freedom in our culture? A furniture store. A word abused by the Bush regime to justify imperialistic violence. Not slavery. A feeling of exhilaration and excitement. Ability to travel easily.

Janis Joplin said, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

And I was free. I had no home. I had no money. I was young and wandering around the stolen continent.

I didn't need money.  I slept outside.  I made friends easily, they invited me into their homes. I always brought food with me to share; dumpster-dived, shop-lifted; rich, healthy, expensive food in abundance for everyone.

You should've seen my body.  I was toned, slim, lithe and strong. I was brown all over from always being naked and my hair was bleached by the sun and swept back by the salty ocean breeze.

I was fiercely intelligent and my thoughts were uncluttered, clear and focussed, communicative. I was intensely present, I fell in love easily and felt everything profoundly and momentarily.

I had nothing but the pack on my back. I had everything I needed and I took what I needed with skill and confidence. I was not careless, I placed respect where respect was due.

As I said, I was free.

What happened? How did I become a clothed and respectable man, with a smart phone and a tram card, my feet sweating in shoes all day, supporting multi-national corporations?

Why am I living in the city, where freedom is at best naïve, at worst a cynical tool of political manipulation?

Why did I give up my values?

The life I was living previously maybe wasn't as free as the one I just described, but it was free enough. I was living on a farm in far-north Aotearoa, atop a hill overlooking the ocean, the harbour and the sandhills across the harbour. I had my own house right by the bush, living with an elderly couple, dogs, pigs, chickens and horses, as well as many wild birds, possums, hedgehogs, rabbits and rats. I didn't pay rent, but helped out around the property.  I could collect food from the ocean, tend the garden and gather from the local fruit trees. I could swim naked, I could invite friends to visit and I could come and go as I pleased. I could hitchhike everywhere easily and in this way meet the locals.  I could write in peace, but didn't, friends wouldn't visit often enough, and I would have love affairs with unwilling German teenage wwoofers. I had all the time in the world to entertain and educate myself with all the cinema, literature and pornography I wanted. I was pretty much free, though unbearably lonely and bored.

But wasn't this the life we were all dreaming of and talking about on the road when we were truly free? When we were wandering around, homeless and empty-handed, always together and always following the sun, weren't we talking about getting our own land; a garden, a supportive local community, clean, stable and predictable? Isn't that what we all wanted?

So, I had an opportunity, I pursued it and I lived that life. I invited others to join me. Some people would stay a week, some longer, but mostly people would say they were coming and never come.

Maybe I should have stayed out there on the road, on the beach, and of course I would be up in far-north Queensland right now, following the sun and my fellow sexy vagabonds. I would find some beauty and I would pursue that beauty. Someone who will let me fall in love with him, someone who will selflessly offer me the opportunity to give him all my love and all the gifts of my love and will accept them graciously.

Actually, that's what happened. Up in far-north Queensland I fell in love with a wildman, a Brazilian, a qualified psychologist interested in the I Ching and the Mayan Calendar. He was my equal, we were born on the same day, one year apart, with only the South Pacific Ocean between our baby bodies. We met at a tribal anarchist freedom gathering in the wilderness and were startled to discover each other, we travelled together for one month and though the separation was painful, our time together was complete and totally satisfying.

You should've seen me, naked and free, living my values instead of just talking about them like we all do now.

I followed my friends' invitation to live with them in a house near Nimbin for a few months. A friend came to visit and brought some other men with him. One of them was just 18 years old, I was 27, and I saw something in him that moved me deeply. I saw, within a scared, slumped and mousy exterior, a being of beauty and luminosity, a huge heart, a latent absorbent intelligence, a young body of infinite potential. And most of all, he had come. He had abandoned his life in Melbourne to come to Nimbin and whether he knew it or not he had come to my house and looked into my eyes and begged me to set him free.

And thus, my life had focus and I had the freedom of something to give. The world was making demands of me that I was precisely and joyously able to fulfil.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I am sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to liberate them with the revolutionary and chaotic impact of my love and who are then too scared to engage with me, who pull back in fear at the moment where they lose control or feel something real.

This one wasn't afraid of me, he wasn't afraid of life. He was nothing and nobody, a blank slate, he was open, he was engaged, he was ignorant, credulous and willing to learn. He was willing to be transformed, he was willing to be shaped. He was free in a way you don't have any concept of.

And I was in love with him. And I had something that he thought was valuable. And I was totally willing to give him everything.

We lived together in a remote valley with 100 people for a month where it was warm all day and night. Most people preferred to wear clothes most of the time, but he and I were perpetually naked, free to be human, to sleep outside curled up together, to make love beside the fire and to dance. We danced like my ancestors haven't danced in thousands of years.

I'm often overwhelmed with the beauty in this world, but nothing and no one compares in the living memory of my huge, hot, blood-pumping heart than the beauty of that man at that moment at that gathering, leaping around naked, in love with every little window of opportunity, his body channelling such incomprehensible beauty that I perceived rays of light emanating from every pore on the surface of his skin.

You should have seen us dance.

Why was he able to dance with such delicacy and elegance?

Because he was given the opportunity, the environment allowed it. Not only did we enter a space where nature accepted and welcomed us, but we accepted and welcomed each other. We created a temporary family of 100 lost souls and we expressed ourselves cos we felt safe to do so. We were free.

We had to leave this temporary paradise where a chaotic perfection is so easy and go back out into this world. I wanted to give him everything I had to facilitate the freedom I now knew he was capable of. I wanted to love him with every atom of my flesh. I wanted to lay my body down on his earth so his roots could consume all my minerals. I wanted to sacrifice myself on the altar of his beauty so the scent of my burning flesh would waft up and satisfy the Yahweh in his sky. I wanted to possess him, contain him, consume him so his essence would remain in my body for eternity.

I wanted to keep him for myself and share him with the world, but most of all I wanted him to be free.

I had finally found something... but he wasn't something, he was a person, he is a person.

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Were we free together and therefore more free, or did I now have something I didn't want to lose?

I couldn't believe I deserved such a rare and precious jewel, but I knew what I wanted, and I invited him to travel with me.

He said yes.

And then somehow the world changed. Everything I had grown up with that I was supposed to care about, everything I had invested my passion into that failed to satisfy me, everything I had rejected and no longer cared about, all the freedom I had discovered with such grace and ease, that the world really had nothing for me, except the ambient beauty and joy of life itself, all that was gone because now I had found something real.

Many times I had walked out of the stupormarket with a bag full of groceries without paying. I didn't feel guilty. Ever. I rationalised that I am a terrestrial being and like all terrestrial beings I am free to take sustenance from my environment. I did not care at all for the morality that forbade it. I took these gifts out into the wilderness to share with my friends, my lovers and my tribe.

But when I invited this luminous being out into the wilderness with me, and when he came with the same ease that my stolen bag of groceries came, I felt anxious.

I knew that he really is my equal, he is a person, he came willingly and my love for him is pure, as much of a gift as his graciousness and beauty. But also I felt something irrational. I knew I didn't possess him, I knew I hadn't stolen him from the museum, I knew he wasn't a precious diamond that was too valuable for me to get away with, but still I felt that anxiety. I've gone too far. Surely I'm too free. Surely this must be illegal. Surely the authorities are going to come and find us and take him away from me. Surely he will leave me. Surely I don't deserve him.

Freedom camping, hitchhiking, fare evasion and shoplifting are illegal, but it had never bothered me before, and I had never attracted Police attention for these activities before, but now I allowed the paranoia to overcome me, that I couldn't possibly get away with this. And the Police and quasi-police did harass us occasionally, to little effect of course, but still I allowed it to destroy me. I welcomed self-destruction. I demanded and facilitated the emotional breakdown I needed to leave me empty-handed again.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I'm sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to penetrate them with my love and then they're too scared to feel something real.

But he wasn't scared, was he. He let me love him. He accepted every invitation I offered him and then I freaked out cos neither of us had any boundaries and I didn't know how to stop.

How could I give up the only thing in the world worthy of my attention and go back to being lonely and free? Force him to reject me? A nervous breakdown?

I don't know. I have a powerful rational mind but I am fundamentally an irrational animal. I created my own debilitating paranoia that caused me to leave the country. He offered me the necessary lie that he would follow me across the Tasman at a later date but of course he never did.

And then I stepped out of the unreality of the airport into another land, disappointingly familiar, but as tangibly real as the one I'd left. Actually, I was still strong, actually I was still calm and resourceful and I guess I was still free.

Or was I more free now; now that I had nothing more to lose again?

I had homes in which I was welcome, I had a book to write and I had my hilltop paradise to return to. But was I free?

I gave up my hilltop paradise to come to Melbourne, to wear shoes, to engage with money, to write and perform my way into the hearts of the gentle and sophisticated.

Am I less free in this racist Police state, under the cult of Capitalism, surrounded by pollution? Or are we all secretly free in this mess cos we can gather in rooms together, choose how we want to communicate and how we want to interact?

My beautiful friend and lover and companion does not emanate light from his pores or dance like that anymore. He lives in the city and he goes to university. He wears underwear and shoes. He is studying filmmaking cos he wants to express himself like he did when he danced naked by the fire under the full moon with our tribe in the valley.

He chose all this? Is he scared of feeling all that freedom and strength again? Was it too much? Does he have to transform his passion into two-dimensional images now cos it's too much to contain in a body that's not free enough to dance like that?

What about me, transforming the best communication I can contrive into words, into paper, into little sounds I make with my mouth? Do these mouth-sounds make me free? Is this my technique for alienating and abstracting the intensity of experience into a contained and knowable form? Or is this a deeper freedom?

Have I carefully compromised a few superfluous values to be able to create something that communicates with as many people as possible with my utmost integrity? Or am I just going to start getting old now, and slowly withdraw from the world, the freedom, still just an arm's reach away?

I am a delicate flower, rich in colour and scent, and when the light of the sun shines on my body I will open my petals and shine back with everything I possess.

I guess I'm as free as any plant, to fling my seeds across the landscape, to attract birds and bees to my fruits and my flowers. I'm this bursting lunatic, somehow restrained in a human body as long as entropy will allow my heat to be contained in this delicate physical dimension.

I reach out to you in the darkness of incarnation.

I'm so far from free it used to be terrifying.

Come save me from my isolation for a moment and I'll do the same for you. I guess we can't expect much more than that from each other, but that's enough for now.

Not damaged

I construct elaborate fantasies around sensitive men who have not consented to being cast in my lonely love stories.

I often destroy genuine connections with the unnecessary awkwardness of my impetuous imagination.

Sometimes when I agree to meet someone at a later date I place them in my masturbatory sexual fantasies and mysteriously, when the time comes, they are evasive and don't want to meet me anymore.  Apparently my ability to repel those I am attracted to with desperate intensity is telepathic and reaches across time and space.

I work so hard to be attractive and then spectacularly undermine my own efforts by being a fucking pervert.

I want nothing more than that which I know is impossible.  I want paradox manifest as flesh and I want that flesh warm and sweetly smelling like man.

I want everything I don't really want and I'm willing to sabotage it to save myself.

I'll sabotage everything I can experience, everything that is gifted to me lovingly, because there's nothing more unattractive than the neediness of another human being.

My mother knew I was a faggot when I was a toddler, finding me fast asleep in the wendy house at kindergarten where the girls had tucked me into bed.  Due to some facile religious idea she half-heartedly tried to discourage me from having sex with men, maybe knowing she would fail.

Less half-heartedly she told me about the man she fell in love with as a teenager and married, pregnant, at 18.  He was abusive and dismissive and didn't live up to the gentle archetype of her loving father.  She would tell me, "A man should never hit a woman.  A man should never touch a woman unless she wants him to." and all the weight of my mother's strength, and all my love and respect and admiration for her fell upon that phrase.  How could the strongest person in my world beg an abusive man not to leave her?

I was told that some men hurt children, doing nasty things that traumatise them for life.  So when I was eight years old and I was coerced by an older boy into touching each other's dicks, and when I played sexual role-play games with my older brother, I was convinced I had been "molested", and for ten full years I believed I was intrinsically damaged, that this damage defined me, and that I could not tell anyone.  I became good at secrets, I became good at shame.

The decade in which I kept this secret was the decade in which I realised that I am queer, alienating me from the primary institution of our culture, while my entire life revolved around the most homophobic environment I have experienced, high school.

Now I am proud to be a faggot and I'm living in Brunswick and what've I got to do but get laid and find love and build trust, right?

Do I even know what the object of all this unquenchable yearning is, beneath the images pornography have burned into my brain, beneath the infantile relationships modelled on Californian cultural propaganda, beneath the cultural norms and social institutions that I am totally incapable of participating in, that are built under the assumption that I don't exist?

I don't want to model my relationships on sitcoms and cartoons and when it comes down to it and I'm naked with another man I really don't feel like emulating that pornography that gets me off so easily when I'm alone.

These models are vapid and homogenous, they serve no purpose in my life.  I feel like a precarious line of text writing my way further and further out onto a blank sheet of paper, nothing to guide me and no one around.

My mother committed suicide within a month of my 21st birthday and so being an adult for me is to be without idols, without illusions and without role-models.

I know what's real when I experience it, I can feel it in my body, I know the difference.

But who's here to match me in my desire, who's here to confront me with my misapprehensions, who will be present with me in the shamelessness of my shame?

Will I be present when someone decides to love me?  Will I defy that love because I know I don't deserve it, or I deserve better, or cos they just want me for my companionship and my human warmth?

I can handle your pain cos your pain empowers me to help you; nothing brings me greater happiness than to see you flourishing.

Nothing generates more heat in my body than the proximity of your body.  This is physical.  I can't help it.

I am falling out of the sky right now and I just hope I land somewhere I am safe to rest a moment, cos this world we've made can be so hostile and dangerous, so gentle and accommodating.

Consent and Beyond

We are all as hysterical about sex as any religious fundamentalist, despite our superior ideologies. Yes, now we recognise the legitimacy of homosexuality and we recognise womens' right to their own bodies.

Now, as a culture, we possess the word “consent” against which we can place all sexual acts to judge their validity. “Consent” is an entirely new dimension in the development of human sexuality. Male ownership of female bodies, passed from father to husband at marriage, has not been the norm for most of human social life, though it has been the norm in our culture until the much more recent idea of marriage as a partnership. Surely there have been many permutations, all equally arbitrary but some more successful than others. Male sexual violence against women has been a trait of our culture that we have very recently recognised and begun to address.  It has been an entirely unsuccessful trait because human beings refuse to live in misery and violence and always, eventually, they stand up and defy the cultural institutions that their ancestors maintained.

The concept of “consent” is a significant and necessary step in the development of human sexuality. Sexuality is not a matter of individuals, it is not a matter of “preference”, it is not a form of self-expression. Sexuality is social, it is about how we relate to each other. Sexuality is one of the myriad ways in which we interact and experience the world as social beings. I reject the theory of individuality. The best that I can say about the idea of “individuality” is that it has been used to free us from the repression of theocracy and slavery. It is now a core ideology of Corporate America, with the holy text being the American Constitution, of the free market and of consumerism. “Individualism” has lead to urban alienation, segregating us with fences and walls into separate locked houses, separate bedrooms, separate beds. We are not individuals. We are a social species. We thrive and evolve socially. We build cities not to facilitate economic transactions, but to create diverse and complex communities. Within cities of millions of people we form tribes, tribes of bankers, tribes of artists, tribes of Christians, tribes that perhaps represent the size and interdependence of the tribes we have lived in for thousands of years, before evolution, before language, the continual successful tendency of human development.

We develop and maintain social and cultural practices that are successful and we (eventually) reject what does not work (or allow ourselves to be crushed by the consequences of our own cultural practises). This is why I believe that “consent” will survive. It is necessary. But it is new and it will evolve. While this concept slowly emerges from global culture, like a mushroom emerging from the rich filth of cow shit, we cling to and eventually release the arbitrary and destructive cultural divisions that have dysfunctionally brought us to this moment. We use the concept of consent to justify the trauma-induced boundaries and violences that we continue to perpetuate. We try to define in court whether consent was given. We deny sexuality to everyone below the age of 16, claiming they are unable to consent because they are somehow incomplete. We devise infinite ways of alienating ourselves from the fellow humans we are having sex with. We call it fucking and we do fuck. We learn how to fuck from pornography, which is readily available everywhere, with average degrading magazines available from every convenience store in the Capitalist world, portraying human bodies as objects to be fucked, orifices. Arbitrary standards of acceptability limit the depravity of these magazines while on the internet anything can be found, as depraved and dehumanising as you like. Arbitrary standards are impossible to enforce on the internet. However, in the cinema, on television, in the classroom and the library, where ideas are freely exchanged, there are no standards whatsoever; sexuality is simply not allowed to be discussed. Perhaps we have observed the change over the years in what can be discussed, but still, though we now discuss contraception, abortion, homosexuality and consent, we only accepts concepts into the discussion once they have been thoroughly defined and culturally-sanctioned. Anything that connects us with the complexity of the situation is confronting and therefore dangerous.  Ambiguity, above all else, is unacceptable.

Ambiguity is where we all live, however, and the culturally-sanctioned concepts that we slowly develop are necessary and positive, but they are too slow. We underestimate our own intelligence. We assume the mainstream media is indicative of the minds of many, whereas the mainstream media is constructed under the assumption that most people are stupid and can only understand well-defined simplistic superficial ideas. Television sitcoms play with sexuality without confronting it, dealing with pursuit, drama and innuendo but never following the couple into the bedroom. What could be more revealing than watching a couple take their clothes off, stand naked before one another, look into each others' eyes, kiss, breathe the same breath, touch and find a way of communicating, to devise together in that moment, silently, just the two of them, an entirely new language. Not a verbal language, but a physical language. Not a language of symbols and representation, but of direct communication, straight from one body of the human experience to another body of the human experience. Communication not veiled with language, not defined and understood through culture, not covered in clothes and concepts, but fully and undeniably experienced and shared. This is not experienced individually, this is a form of telepathy. Despite the widespread availability of pornography, this scene would not be allowed on television. In our hysterical fear of sexual violence we ban all public depictions of sexuality, not understanding nor seeking to understand what creates unity and what promotes separation.

When a human being sits upon another human being, when they are both naked, whether or not they are excited or scared, when they pause and look into each others' eyes, “consent” becomes confusingly ambiguous and centrally important. To say adolescents cannot give consent, to say “no means no” or “she said yes”, to project any mental concept onto the intensity and immediacy of that moment, is to deny that moment for you both. That moment should be shared and fully experienced and when this happens it can only transform our lives, our relationships and our approach to the world. When we sit on someone and we desire them we take full responsibility for every aspect of their being. We cannot separate our desire from theirs, we cannot separate our consent from theirs, we cannot make decisions based on irrelevant laws that we did not agree upon. We have to be there, we have to accept their frailty as much as our excitement, we have to accept that the ideas in our head that torment us with desire, guilt, fear and loneliness cannot be projected onto this sacred moment. We are here now, we are safe and warm in bed, we are naked, it is dark, we are together. We are human, fully and mutually, away from the prying eyes of culture, law and discourse. We cannot fuck someone, because we are merely stabbing ourself with the repetitive pain of past trauma.

Why do we define the sexuality of children from the sexuality of adults? We draw the arbitrary line at 16, while we know that adolescence draws the line at 13 or 14. What draws the line of adult sexuality if not puberty? I suggest trauma. Adults are damaged. Adults are damaged in various ways and in various degrees, but when it comes to sexuality it is almost universal. We know this and we know children are born innocent of this trauma. We want to protect them and yet we must be failing if we all enter adulthood traumatised by abuse or shame or silence or religion or pornography. How can it be almost universally agreed upon that adults should not have sex with children and yet entirely taboo to try to understand and confront why that might be? There is a fluid diversity of complexity between adulthood and childhood, between mutual consent and rape, “non-sexual” and “sexual” communication. Our definitions must enable us and not limit us. They must enable us to discuss and understand in thoughtful moments what we know to be true in passionate moments, when thought is not possible. We must recognise each other and accept each other, fully embrace each other, protect each other and therefore allow ourselves to become vulnerable. We must listen to each other when we say “yes” or “no”, we must notice when a look, a kiss or a frightened muscle tension is the only communication.

When we take responsibility for our own behaviour we take responsibility for each others' well-being. What may not be defined as “rape” may still leave our lover weak and vulnerable and we are responsible for them. We are linked to them in real ways that can be observed and experienced when we are connected to our own body and the bodies of our fellow humans. If we want to break ties with someone we have shared sexuality with for only a moment, we must communicate and understand what that means for each of us and for both of us. Mutual understanding is essential and mutual understanding is what sexuality is seeking to achieve. If the sex is merely functional, then mutual understanding must be a pre-requisite.

When we are fully human, when we are fully honest with each other, naked together and free from generations of trauma, sexuality is a fluid and normal part of life. It is intimate and it is ecstatic, but it is on a continuum. There is hugging, there is wrestling, there is playing and there is laughing. There is working together, there is eating together, there is childbirth and breastfeeding, there is conversation, quiet and intimate or public. There is kissing and touching that may or may not lead to orgasm. I feel safe because I am safe. How could I possibly want to hurt you? Every shared moment is as vitally delicate as making love and every interaction is an act of love. I feel desire welling up inside me when I talk to you and I know we will never have sex so I draw you into the love that my desire allows through this conversation that delights us both. We are both so precious and delicate and nothing is more important to me in my life, not money, not power, not real estate. Only the human beings I experience this world with are this precious to me, and every moment with them is sacred and delicious and I will protect you and honour you.

We become like animals, sex as easy and fundamental as food. We sleep in piles, snuggling up together like a litter of piglets. But we're too aware of ourselves and we're too aware of each other and we not only have love and desire and passion and this violence that we are exorcising from our bodies like trauma and eradicating from our culture like a toxic ideology, we have this thing we call “consent” that is so much more complex and ambiguous than we pretend, but that still we fundamentally understand. But first we have to face reality. First we engage with our own body as a conduit for the experience of being alive and present in the material world. We are present in the physical world through nothing other than our physical body and thus this is our only source of information. We use this body to navigate through the world in which we find ourselves. We discover the dimension that we could call “our environment” and we learn to interact with it, to communicate with it, to live in peace with it. We discover other beings just like us and we instantly realise that nothing is more compelling or more significant in our world than these other beings. They also experience this shared world through the conduits of their bodies and so we share our bodies and therefore enrich our lives. When we become confused in the cultural haze, we use “consent” as a guiding light, but beyond that there is the infinity that we experience outside of our bodies. Profoundly and unexpectedly, we discover that even in this infinity we are not alone, even in the dark warm silence of our bed we are together.

Relationships and shit

I am in love with someone who does not seem to be in love with me, so I attempting to transfer my love to another beautiful person in the vicinity. This so far has not been successful. This person has told me that he loves me too, but that he is not "in" love with me; therefore, it seems, he feels the need to treat me like I don't exist. Perhaps this is something to do with the presence of his girlfriend, who he loves but always seems miserable with. This situation of awkward desperation and pathetic desire is, I expect, rather normal. I hoped that I could tell the person lying beside me in bed that you are beautiful and I expect nothing from you that you are not willing to offer me, but this is not enough because there is expectation and hope everywhere; even in a love that appears to be airtight, this gas will seep in. I don't yet know why love must be so painful. I do however know that pure love really is unconditional and the object must really be accepted completely and nothing can be expected or desired of them. They must simply be loved.

The hero of my life

• I dreamed of being an actor, being famous, making an impact on the world. As I've grown older I've changed my thoughts about how I could best impact the world. Somewhere along the way I lost the lot. I lost that burden, the expectation and hope, the pain and the confidence, that drive for success and the certainty of belief. I lost everything but the memory of my dream and the abstract idea that perhaps the unfulfillment of this remembered dream is an indication of failure. But I'm 25 years old, how can I be a failure? I haven't hurt too many people; I'm happy. There's a gap where my ambition grew for years. There's a translucent, ethereal form in its place, more of a potentiality than a passion. It looks a little different and as I said it isn't quite manifest, but maybe it could be. Can I be bothered pursuing this dream, now that I've got all this peace and happiness? Perhaps I've got to do something with my life; I'm likely to last another 60 years with all this new-found healthiness. What do I do with it?

• Some believe the world will end on 2012-12-21, some believe Jesus Christ Himself could emerge from the clouds at any moment, specifically when no one's looking. Some believe we'll destroy the world ourselves with aggression or carbon. Some think China will shoot all our satellites out of the sky or the computers won't know what day it is and thus our complex network of technology will collapse, leading to chaos and desolation. Some believe reptilian aliens have already taken over our planet and imprisoned us mentally into a routine of production and consumption. Whatever happens, however the world may or may not or has ended, I don't mind. I won't regret anything, I won't feel fear any more than my body requires to protect me. I won't hide from the potential of a change that will revolutionise life as we know it and may unlock the power I hold in reserve within the depths of my illusory individuality. I don't regret life, nor do I resent reality. I am prepared for anything, even that which I may not be strong enough to survive.

• I've found desire to be very painful. What is more palpable and present than another human being? What is more beautiful and intense than desire for the entirety of another person? How can any achievement or possession compare to the desire for profound communion with that one specific other human being for whom your desire is focused? And when the desired person is finally in your arms, what comes after that? Perhaps this desired other human being must become an achievement or a possession. Perhaps there is some way of merging these two entities into a single organism. Perhaps it's too painful to stare into the eyes of the other and not coalesce. Perhaps separation is the only subsequent possibility. This suggests that perhaps there was another less painful way of accepting, incorporating and releasing this desire, a way without so much confusion and frustration, without banging heads into walls or collapsing in inebriation. Perhaps we're contained within the structure of our bodies until the next life, and then anything could happen.

• I have found a place from which anything is possible and anywhere is accessible. It is a new feeling, to know that the world is reachable, that no more than a day off the ground would take us anywhere. What do you do when you get to the point where you realise that internally and externally you are capable of anything you desire? With the simple requirement of actually wanting to do it, you can. There's no way of failing in this sense, because the achievement and the benefit is bound merely in the first step, in the attempt. Surely there can be no fear or apprehension beyond that first step; surely regret or failure are illusory once the foot has stepped, despite uncertainty and apathy. Surely the only worthwhile action in life is to risk. How can there be anything that's not worth the risk when we all know for certain that at any moment we could die, at some moment we will, and that we can't take anything with us into the complete unknown? I won't linger on the risks I face every day merely stepping outside.