Well, the panicky delusions seem to have petered out. I’m no longer convinced that there are surveillance cameras in the apartment, or that I’m going to be arrested for some innocuous thing I wrote on this blog, or that my soul belongs to Satan.

But I have to admit, the experience shook me up, and I still don’t really know why it happened. Was it just one of the SFX of a nasty virus? A consequence of stress (largely self-imposed) and chronic insomnia, with the virus as the last straw? While I was in Australia I found out about a few things that run in my family, on both sides. Knowing what I know now, I think I’m lucky to be as hale in mind as I am.

A lot went on in my head. Went on intensely and mostly yuckily. I fell down a well. I thought about dying. Not with any real practical intent, but I found myself wishing that I didn’t have any loved ones so that I could do away with myself without upsetting anybody.

This was maybe the third time I’ve been down the well, although it was the first time the trip started with anxiety. Anyway, it was familiar enough that it was a bit like Groundhog Day. I recognised the bottom of the well, which actually isn’t a terribly bad place. It’s just a terminus. There’s a loss of personality. “Kirsten” fizzles out. The name is a luggage tag without a suitcase. Awareness remains, some habits stick around, but whatever is operating the organism feels like it’s accessing a backup copy of the personality over a lousy connection. Then “I” get very dopey, as if my skull were full of mud.

Then “I” fizzle back in. Same-same but different, as they say in Thailand. The differences might not be visible from the outside, but I can feel them. Some things carry on just as before, but other patterns of behaviour no longer feel natural, and I either have to act them out for continuity’s sake or drop them. It’s like a Windows upgrade. Some bugs will be fixed, but there’ll be new ones, and at least one silly new toolbar that only gets on the way.

I rarely dream that I’m someone else, but lately I’ve had a few dreams where I’m Dr Who and I’m fighting the Master. I figure it must be my brain trying to process the sense of being a contingent, flickering personality. I can’t work out what the Master represents. My dreaming brain likes to pun, so maybe he’s the “master” tape, something solid and permanent, which for some reason I feel threatened by.

Anyway, yes, sane. Coming off the boat, luggage in hand. Someone’s luggage, at any rate. Standing on dry land, my legs can still feel the motion of the water.

Presumably this sort of thing happens to other people too. So go on, tell me if this all sounds familiar. I like to know that my friends are all as sane as me!

Gillian Pollack has accepted my story (title in limbo) for “Baggage”, an anthology of speculative fiction about the cultural baggage of Australians. It was a hard one to write and I still have to do some work on it. I know I wasn’t the only contributor who found the topic a challenge. I think the story has the potential to be pretty good if I don’t fuck up the rewrite.

Fantasy Magazine has accepted “Saving the Gleeful Horse”, the story I wrote for Vera Nazarian’s auction, and I’ve finished the intros for DEAD GIRLS and ELDRITCH KID.

I’m reading Walter Benjamin and wondering what he’d be writing if he were alive today. I suspect he’d be working for Lonely Planet, sending reams of rumination to baffled editors. Sometimes their red pens would skip a beat and in the middle of a hotel review or a potted history of Canada there’d be left a lonely line about the sadness of a coppery afternoon on the outskirts of a port city or the estrangement of mass instincts from life.

While I was at home (I’ve been back in BKK a couple of days) my parents took me to a little shop in their town, a wonderful den selling vintage buttons, braid, beads, hatpins and other goodies from times past.

A little box on a shelf caught my eye. Dark blue, with dancing fairy silhouettes on the cover, I thought it was a whimsically-decorated matchbox until belatedly I read “perfume”. Feeling the weight of the bottle inside I opened it and to my surprise found that although all the alcohol had long evaporated away, there was a little residue of brown viscous oil left.

The box and the bottle:

I opened the lid and took a sniff and oh, my, it was gorgeous. Old-fashioned and incensey, with one slippered foot in the boudoir and one in the joss house. Ten bucks later the little treasure was in my purse.

My nose only knows what it likes, and I can’t pick out the smells in a perfume unless it’s something blindingly obvious like tuberose. This does remind me of aloeswood oil, but I’m probably wrong. Besides, it has an odd habit of smelling a bit different whenever I open the bottle. I looked for it online, hoping to get a description, but no luck. I don’t even know how old it is. The design of the box looks 1920s-30s to me, but it could be a retro design from a later decade, or just an old one that was never changed. And the manufacturer is, or was, Australian. Now that’s something to be nostalgic about.

Continuing the morbid themes…

Seen recently in the local newspaper, a 3-hour craft workshop: Make and Decorate Your Own Coffin.

With only three hours to complete the coffin, it would have to be a plywood job. Of course, for the decoratively inclined, plywood is a good option — pale and easy to draw on.

I daydreamed about how I would decorate mine. Maybe figures from the Commedia dell’Arte, to portray the idea that all the world’s a stage, and because it would be an excuse to indulge my fetish for masked characters; or porn, to amuse, mystify, scandalise or bore future archaeologists; or decoupage photos of some bodacious siren, so that people will think that was me; or a whole lot of sudoku squares, to give me something to do in the afterlife.

So, how would you decorate yours?