Dr Oliver Shaw

I got a new hat from the hippie store downtown, Main Street, Saint Kilda. It’s wild down there, it’s a hotspot for pretty much anyone, particularly the unkept, barefoot, nicotine junkies. It’s a good place, Main Street Saint Kilda. Anyway, I bought the hat, which I like, because it’s comfortable, keeps the sun from the eyes, and kind of hides them.

Here, around here, in St Kilda, much like all places I’ve been around in Australia, people observe you in public, I despise this act, and the only place it doesn’t happen is in the hotspot where the barefoot nicotine junkies hang out, which is why I like it there. Elsewhere: observed!

Always some motherfucker looking at me when I’m walkin by, probably the thing I hate most about this country, it makes me queezy and uneasy. These people don’t smile, they look dead in the expression, like they’ve become an old doormat. So now I have this hat, and I’m not trying to be hidden, I’m trying to not-see those observing eyes when I’m walking by. Because if I don’t see it, it didn’t happen, isn’t it.

Anyway, a picture of flowers because it’s endless, at least it seems, noticing the variety of flowers around places. There’s always some new ones to find, and I smile at these flowers, smile at all flowers. Being observed with a smile, to me, is all right. It’s being observed without a smile that’s disconcerting. It’s kind of like these lines in the book I’m reading at the moment, called Amrita by my favourite author, Banana Yoshimoto:

‘When someone’s cooped up inside the security of four walls, they begin to assimilate with the very house that they’re in–sort of like a piece of furniture. I see a lot of people like that around town. Even though they’re outside, when you look at their faces and clothing you see a plastic couch or tacky lampshade. The way they respond to the world, so void of expression, is slow and dimwitted. Seldom do they look a person in the face, as if they’ve lost contact with themselves as people, lost contact with the wild instincts they were born with’ (p95).

I guess you could say we’re all cooped up in the security of the virtual four walls of the internet on the mobile phone, maybe that’s why people look so dull outside, we’re observing each other as if we don’t exist. It’s strange but I can feel that and it feels very true, and it feels like a particular Australian thing, which is to say I haven’t noticed the same thing anywhere else, but probably it’s happening all over the place, just like Yoshimoto observed it in Japan.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore, for me, at least, because I have this little hat where I can’t quite see anyone when I’m walking, so I have no idea whether I’m being observed or not and it allows me to smile more freely when I walk, and, of course, I can still see all the flowers from this angle. A-ha!

New hat day. 17/01/25. Ciao.