Half The Moon Is Gone.

I'm sitting in a library. There's only old people here. The rest of the world is at home living their lives on their computers. What's going to happen to libraries, in the future?

When I was 21 I quit my ice-cream scooping job in the city and moved back home. My stepdad Jim and younger brother came one morning with a truck to move all my stuff but I'd gone to bed at 7am and didn't answer the door. They came back an hour later and I was frantically throwing shit into boxes. Hungover as hell, pretending I didn't hear the door. Jim knew but didn't get cranky. He never did. I brought with me a host of cockroaches that plagued their house for years because alcoholic stepdaughters are thoughtful like that.

Last week a motley crew of doctors found cancer in Jim's pancreas and liver. And abdomen. Blood clots on lungs and pneumonia. Finding cancer is sometimes like the worlds most fucked-up game of hide-and-seek. SURPRISE! We were in here all along! He has been in pain for months. His pain has escalated this week to the point of unbearable. The past few days we have had to be his advocates. Stuck in a stroke observation ward and badly needing to be transferred over to the cancer ward. Nurses were not equipped to deal with his unique case. My mother has a look in her eyes I haven't seen in many years. Everything's happening so fast and what's going to happen to the libraries?

Artwork in hospitals is as lame as ever. A deep-sea marlin, a landscape, and some kind of bullshit abstract. Seeing Jim in this much pain is hard to witness. Imagine being him. There should be more nice art. Someone should do something. I clopped over to the cancer ward in my Africa boots yesterday and cried to the head nurse for a spare bed. You know it's a hard day when you're begging to be let IN to a cancer ward. She asked me to sit. There was a commotion. I love commotions.

A cancer patient was going nuts, because her boyfriend had been busted shooting her up and was banned entry. She's a blonde skeleton, about to die, kicking up a stink, treating her mother terribly. Junkies get cancer too.

They still couldn't take Jim. Don't they understand what kind of guy he is? How hard he's worked? Send me somebody to blame, Universe. It feels nice when there's people to blame. I drove around town for heat packs while his biopsy got cancelled again and it's the end of the world as we know it but people still honk when I drive too slow.

Sometimes, the idiot driver in front of you is slow because she's lost and trying to find the right way back to the wrong ward. Sometimes you need to have more compassion, earth people.

I check twitter and want to tell everybody to get the hell off twitter and go out and do something constructive for the love of sweet Mary and Jesus.

People are grotesque. Cancer is the $2 shop chemicals, the vegetable section of your supermarket, the food dye in your cream bun. Cancer is the salt on your fries and the fake-leather tassels on your brand-new pair of whatever the fuck you just bought but didn't need while children die from hunger. Cancer is the smokestacks of China and the grease-traps of fast food.

We live in a dying world but there's still hope because libraries. The books are whispering to me like the wisha-washa of the Magic Faraway Tree.

Jim loves reading.

Last night they forgot to bring his dinner and his bin was overflowing so I changed it and vowed that it would be his last night in that ward. Directly out his window they are constructing a whole brand new cancer wing and I wanted to run and shout to the workers HURRY UP HURRY UP HURRY UP.

A few hours ago he was transferred to the soft, muted colours of the cancer ward. Cancer wards are where it's at, people. Leather couches and soft carpet. There's no money in stroke wards. One of the stroke guys was vomiting so loudly this morning that it sounded like he was having an orgasm and I kind of wished he was. THAT'S what the stroke unit needs .... blondes giving hand jobs.

We don't have to fight for pain relief anymore. He's finally going to receive the correct care. Much, much classier art in the cancer ward - framed photos of melancholy beach sunsets, brass plaques inscribed in memoriam. If I ever get cancer and die, my art is to be a huge inappropriate Norman Lindsay print that is directly representative of my life. With demons and nudity and fear and bacchanalia.

Doctors are talking about months.

So.

All PR people emailing me can stop now, thanks. All people questioning my integrity please take a ticket and have a seat, I'll be with you later. Anyone who wants to visit the hospital needs to check with us first. The person who emailed my mother yesterday: go fuck yourself, leave us alone, when you told my sister on your blog that "I'm done with her" it meant you were done with my whole family.

If any person in the whole world has a problem with this blog post then please fax 1800-BLOW-ME.

If anybody would like to help out, you can start by joining your local library, and buying wholesome vegetables. For yourselves.

If there's anybody left, I'd really appreciate a favour ... leave a comment for my mum. Lie to her, and tell her everything's going to be ok.

::

The day we found out last week, I had to usher my four-year old son Rocco back to mum and Jims house in the dark. Rocco is currently obsessed with the waxing and waning of the moon. How it can be a sliver one night, and full the next. We were walking along the pavement and he looked up.

MUM! HALF THE MOON IS GONE!

I didn't look up I just said I know, sweetheart.

I know.