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Real jobs are godawful. I worked harder before I had a real job and enjoyed it more as well. Close your eyes tightly, swallow some pixie dust and stay where you are ...

The zine isn't photocopied yet, but at least it isn't still hanging around the floor in bits and shreds like some monsterous manifestation of dandruff. (I wrote a post about it on Tuesday in this thread, but the computer wouldn't let it go through. My computer hates ezboard.) The online version is up. I'm working on issue 2 and reminding myself that I still have to tell people about issue 1. I hate publicity.

One of the women I worked with yesterday screws her face up and says, "Ee-eh?" almost every time I speak to her. She's either partly deaf or more than usually stupid. I'm trying to work it out. Deaf, I think. If she's not deaf then she must have a brain like that legendary goldfish that feels surprised afresh every three seconds when it catches sight of its plant.

It's half-past eight in the morning now and the sky outside my window is glare-blue. The weather is getting hotter. Yesterday on the way home I saw a starling trying to pick up a plastic shopping bag. First it carved tight circles in the air around the bag as if to unscrew it from the protective atmosphere, and then it darted in and took hold of the plastic in its beak. It was an aborted effort. The bag was so big next to the tiny starling that all the bird managed to do was twitch it a short way off the ground before it dropped. Shortly afterwards I saw a sulphur-crested cockatoo in a fir tree. Against the bright sky the green needles looked black and the white bird among them was like a burst of flourescence. Last week I came across a kookaburra being swooped by butcher birds who were trying to drive it out of their territory, but kookburras with their icepick beaks and wedge-shaped kingfisher heads are not afraid of butcher birds. It stayed where it was.

In a newsagency I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair and skimmed through an interview with Russell Crowe. The American reporter said that he heard a bird bark like a dog and Russell told him it was a kookaburra. I wonder if Crowe was bullshitting him on purpose. I've never heard any kookaburra that sounded like a dog. Do they sound like dogs to people who have never heard them before, I wonder, or is there a breed of kookaburra somewhere that sounds doglike? I keep thinking of all the people overseas who will read that and walk around for the rest of their lives thinking, "There is a kind of Australian bird called a kookaburra that barks." I wonder what skewed ideas I've picked up from magazines and newspapers without knowing it. I think I should stop reading newspapers. (The cover of Time this month shows a photograph of a naked man crouching against a concrete wall to illustrate their story about mental health problems in Asia. We're left to assume that the man is one of the mad, unwashed, uncared for, left in a bare room in an asylum where he will beat his head against the walls and not bother any of the lucky sane. Does he know that you can be dirty and sad and crazy and anonymous and also on the cover of Time?)