AAYL I declare the following truths at the age of 3

A lazy day spent waiting, always waiting. Another trawl through the archives. This entry impressed me. It's nothing magnificent in grammar or style. However, some of these memories I still have. Ok, caveat, all the memories I still have, but some of the memories I regularly think about. 

I was born in Albany. I was lucky to leave when I still had my youth. When I visit the town I can last about two days before I have to go again. Everything that follows originates from Albany. 

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Monday 14th of July

When I was three, maybe four I accidentally shut myself in the kitchen cupboard, early in the morning before anyone else in the house was awake. There was just enough space for me to be stuffed in between the door and the shelves. I remember thinking I was going to be stuck in there forever. That's my earliest memory. For a while I thought it was the image of a white cake with a big red five on it. One Christmas Eve, my family went out to visit relatives. When we came home the Christmas tree had twice as many presents underneath it. I was amazed that this had happened. It took me many years to realise that there could be more than one key to the front door and that somebody else besides from my parents would have access to it. I remember going with my brother to see my first film. The movie was Masters of the Universe. We were standing outside the cinema, which was actually the old town hall in Albany, and I couldn't get my head around the fact that it was a movie. I thought it was going to be a theater play. In year one, during recess, I saw a boy from my class clicking his fingers. I asked him how to do it, he told me to see another boy who would show me. That boy did and I haven't stopped since. One night a baby-sitter was looking me after. I was trying to rewind a tape to record The A-team. I kept getting angrier and angrier that in the brief moment that I pushed rewind the tape didn't instantly forward to the start. I know I liked The A-team very much but I can't remember one thing from it, not even Mr. T. One day the kid from across the road came over. Wivus, our Australian terrier, attacked him. I remember him walking on top of the fence, blood spurting from the kid's ankles onto the driveway as I ran alongside with the dog. When driving in town my mother and I pull up to a give-way sign. I'm scared stiff until the car starts again, worried that I might have to give away some of my stuff. When alone with my brother I'm completely in fear of him until Matthew finally leaves home. Wivus the dog dies of cancer, we're in the lounge room and everyone in the family is overcome with grief. Dad accuses me of feeling nothing because I’m not crying. I remember being very detached from this life as it unfurled around me.  

AAYL The Evil Overlord and the well-built demon.

Have you ever experienced a dream that felt as if it went forever? A dream epic in scope; with many different characters and plot twists and locales? Well, the following AAYL flashback is one of those said dreams, occurring in 2003.

Not much context involved here at all. I can still recall a few images of the dream itself. I also remember waking mid-dream, amazed at what I was experiencing, and forcing myself back to sleep so that the dream could continue. And continue it did. 

The old Angry angry young lady website also had a link to my email address, ostensibly for feedback. Rarely would a reader click the link. However, this time, a few days later, an email arrived in my inbox. No subject line, no name, just a generic 'from' email handle. The message contained a single line: 

'Interesting. But think about how style can help content and understanding'

I never replied back to that email. I never replied back to any email. 

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Sunday 13th of July

I've got a special number and it's the lucky thirteen. I've got a bunch of movies from the seventies and I'm about to be obscene. No- scratch that, twist it around, turn it down, run it into and under the ground. What, you're an army of amphibious clones? You ride a green Viking long boat with an ornate, arabesque golden prow. We may fight a little at first for control of your solitary island in a sea of blue and green, but soon you'll join us to lay siege to the gothic Lovecraftian castle. But that's another story, tenuously linked by an exposition of a brown, well-built demon hanging by wire in the symbol of a mock crucifixion. He groans once and dies, a hole exposes his skull that flops out into the great beyond. The castle is a maze, featuring levels upon levels of growing difficulty. Traps, magic and subterfuge abound here in this evil place my fellow amphibians, so step with every caution. It's a giant puzzle, we need to unearth the red dot. One of us is the new version of the well-built demon. That's a good question, I'm slightly uncertain as to why we need to storm this castle. I think we need to stop the Evil Overlord of this domain. Now, there are many, many levels, an infinite number almost. Yet for some reason we're only concerned with the three immediate levels, the bottom, the middle, the penultimate, the top. The bottom has the Dark Lord's army of disposable minions. This level is the stone maze, the puzzle we need to solve. The middle is a tiny square room with four red doors. The doors each open up into a hallway with another door. These doors open up into agoraphobia inducing areas, back lit by the great metal grids of the penultimate level. These locales house the Overlord's blind minotaurs. Wait! There's a false wall in the maze, it leads to another wall with a dark red dot. Don't kill the minotaurs we need to use their great strength somehow. The penultimate defies all human reasoning, nature and physics: it's a living nightmare. This area is guarded by the cenobites; they won't kill you, they'll torture your body and soul for all of eternity. The penultimate is a huge metal grid suspended in the air. Some of these grids are glass cages for the prisoners. Some of these grids are demon art-student mortuaries, where cenobites in training make art out of the lesser victims. The cenobites are incorporeal, invisible beings of shape shifting matter. They flow into the glass grids and impregnate the prisoner with their essence. The prisoner then explodes and the Cenobite contorts the internal organs, endoskeleton and veins into living malleable sculptures of flesh and bone. What could be possibly worse than the cenobites? One of us gets trapped in the glass prison, I think it's me. Or maybe somebody better, acting on my behalf. The cenobites float into the grid but they don't get me. They might deconstruct my body but he'll use my mind, this will be a metaphysical escape through the laws of grammar, time, space, and meta-narratives of web browsers. They create templates, each a trap to get wrong and leave me open to their world of pain, but he'll fulfill their every requirement and stipulation. It's no use, I'm free. Wait, are they guarding something we need to capture? I think I've been drugged, my mind won't remember what the artifact is. The brown demon, whoever that is again, will get caught after a noble fight against unbeatable odds. He will come face to face with the Overlord. Except the Man isn't a man, it's a room. It exists in the mind, it's a person's subconscious. The demon enters and is trapped. Images and situations and places and primary colours, especially beige, are conjured up in an attempt to drive you insane, brown demon. But the room, the mind, grows complacent, lazy and arrogant. When it thinks you have been exhausted, defeated by the interplay of disturbing visual images and ESP, the two red dots will be revealed to taunt you, Yes, the dots! I get it now. Amphibious brethren, what is left of us, we need to lure the minotaurs down to the lower level. Get them to strike out at us and at the very last moment, before they connect, leap out of the way and let them punch through the red dot. Damn! That didn't work. My god, of course! We need the brown demon to stand before the red dot. His skull and the red dot must be punctured simultaneously. The mix of blood and brown demon soul will send the puncturing object into another dimension, another world beyond our very reach. This is what the Overlord is guarding: his very self.