I Completely Forgot About The Time I Met Mick Jagger.

I was searching for an end-of year song .. an anthem, if you will. A seasonal goodbye song to this tricky 2015 of ours. What a year .. it's certainly been a year to top off quite the succession of previous years.

There's a clearing in my forest which is not a euphemism. Is there a clearing in your forest too?

The beauty is, I haven't cleared it by myself. I've been incredibly fortunate and grateful and so fucking blessed to be held up by a lot of people who care about and loved me during this year, even when I wasn't exactly quite lovable at the time. I'm never been an easy person to be friends with or get close to. Going to ten schools and always being the new kid will shut a person down on the friendship front. To look around now, I have quite a few beautiful souls right there for me and have sat with me and packed up all my stuff and listening to me lose the plot. Horrendously, necessarily messy. These people know me and still want to be friends with me anyway. I emerged from a fifteen-year relationship blinking my eyes and was all, oh shit I should have invested more time and energy and love into my relationships with other people. Siri what is human connection? (I legit just asked Siri that and she helpfully came up with an employment agency in Perth.)

The past week I've been listening to a playlist over and over again and one of the songs is a Rolling Stones song. I met Mick Jagger once - he spoke to me, looked up and grinned. "No thanks darlin'." I could just end that story there to tease everybody and you'll never know what I asked him but I'll tell you ... I was sixteen years old just back from living in London and some friends and I were sitting in an outdoor restaurant in the sun down at Darling Harbour. There was nobody around, we'd just finished our meal, and who should sit down right next to us but Mick Jagger and a bodyguard. My friends lost their SHIT. Mick was waiting for Jerry to join him for lunch, but we were a big group of people and had all the chairs. So in succession, one by one, all of my friends went up and offered up Mick Jagger's bodyguard their chair, like it was jewels to Julius Caesar himself. I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd bowed their heads in reverance and gently backed away.

I watched in a kind of amusement - I've never been a huge Rolling Stones fan because U2 but it was pretty cool seeing this guy in the flesh. So anyway, all of these empty seats ended up surrounding Mick and his bodyguard. About twelve of them - just white plastic chairs. I wanted to give Mick my chair too - but to Mick, not to his bodyguard. I picked my chair up and walked the other way around this water fountain thing and I could see the look of annoyance on the bodyguards face because I was being a sneaky fuck to get to Mick unencumbered. Walked right up to him - it was ABSURD, he didn't need another chair, I knew he didn't need another chair and Mick knew I knew he didn't need another chair. He smiled so broadly at me before I even opened my mouth. Which I did, bold as fuck. (Ten different schools and always being the new kid will do that to you.)

"Mick, would you like my chair?"

And for a moment we just looked and smiled at each other.

"No thanks darlin'."

And I put it down in front of him anyway because his bodyguard got up to intervene in the chair situation and I said to Mick, "Ok no worries. See ya!" And he waved at me, as I walked off to my laughing friends, my heart so so fucked up and sad because my dad had just killed himself a few weeks beforehand.

So anyway - here's my end of year song. Mick sings it, it's called Let It Bleed. My friend Naomi's son smashed a glass and walked in it last week and she held his foot up because it was bleeding and she said she'd take a look at it after she'd waited for the blood to congeal.

Thank you to everybody who waited with me this year for my blood to congeal. Thank you for standing with my while I had to Let It Bleed. I'm a fierce and loyal friend and I'm here for you too. Because that's what friendship and love is. 43 years old and I'm still learning this shit.

Thank god I'm still learning this shit.

Scragglehead.

Most of the rumours people hear about me are probably true.

True ... I am an angry, self-obsessed, deeply flawed, blaming, regal, vengeful and vicious villainess. I put my hand up yes. Yes I did do those things this year Your Honour.

It's been a cracker of a year. And by "cracker" I mean hideously dark, destructive, hauntingly desperate and dangerous. Good things have happened too, but not that much. This year has been Everest except I didn't rest most of the time the only person I had to comfort me was me and I'm not great at comforting myself  Your Honour but I'm trying while I'm being tried.

Regret is such a fruitless feeling. There's nothing to be done with regret because what you regret has already been done. One photo sums me up perfectly this year and I've named her Scragglehead.

Scragglehead got lost and fucked up because she wanted to be lost and fucked up. Scraggle fell down so many times she just slept right there on the streets, stuck in a different dimension, wondering who she was and if she would ever make her way back. Scragglehead had scraggly hair didn't care. She finds it easy to write about herself in the third person because who wouldn't when you've done the things that Scragglehead has done?

Scragglehead got a little sick and quite tired and then sick and tired of the blame shame game. Yeah I admit it all, Your Honour but Your Honour, aren't we all dark and light? Yin and yang and all that bullshit that isn't actually bullshit. Which is yin and which is yang? Who's wrong and who's right? What's black and what's white and are there varying degrees of a kind of shaded muted grey within all of us because man I gotta tell ya, things went SOUTH this year Siri where is North and how can I find my way back again with no map and a bent compass hell-bent on destroying everything in its path like some kind of fucked up tornado volcano that burst on the earth scene back in 72. Still Alive like Pearl Jam ... hey was Pearl Jam named after pussy juice? I always wondered.

Anyway so here I yam. Fuck you, fuck off, come here, come back to me, sorry not sorry that I did those things and if I could actually time travel I'd go back and do things differently, not hurt people the way I have. (But I been hurt too, Scragglehead says. Look at what they did!) Fingerpointing at people fingerpointing at me and fingerprints leave marks you know. Bruises even. Did you know that there's no blue ink when you get arrested anymore it's all computer generated imaging now? Fancy. I'm so Fancy - everybody knows. If I could actually time travel I'd go back in time explicitly to do some things more, harder, better, with more venom. I'm not evil or even crazy. Just a woman with a Free Spirit, sorry about all the messy truth. Sorry about not being sorry yet and I don't know if I'll ever be sorry about some things so I guess I'll just gloss over that shit and half-heartedly pray about them anyway. A half-hearted prayer is probably worse than no prayer at all. I don't know.

I am a human being and living in a world with other human beings living. Scragglehead is a walking contradiction because she's so loving and kind and fierce as fuck but sometimes the fierce in her does not bode well. Fare well, 2015. You above all years have been by far my biggest and darkest teacher and hey there's still a week and a half of you left. Who gets to be in 2016? Who remains, to be seen?

So thank you and sorry and fuck you but please love me to all of the characters in my story this year. Life is just a succession of stories we tell ourselves. I'm writing my way out of a particularly repugnant chapter last paragraph full stop return return new chapter new title let's begin again like that song my brother used to sing Michael Finnegan. The wind came up and blew his whiskers in again so he had to begin again. Again.

We're all in a state of constant shifting flux. Nothing stays, nothing remains the same and when I get to use my powers for good I would except for those times I didn't.

I felt so sad that I even told Siri I felt really, really sad. All Siri said was "Eden, I'm not sure I can help you with that."

Fuck you, Siri you don't even know what sad is you're just a ... Siri what is a Siri? You don't know everything nobody does and nobody ever will. Every cell in my entire body right now has reached a kind of collective consciousness. About. Fucking. Time. I found a gangplank and a guillotine and a gun and a battering ram all in one. Mixing my metaphors. My washing machine broke. I lost power and the lights went out. There's endings in every beginning, beginnings in every ending, and Jesus fuck I made it through this alive unless I get hit by a bus and die before next week in which case the most important thing I ever have left to say at this juncture is I love my boys with my whole heart. Simple and excruciating as that. Sorry about all the mistakes you guys. Some mistakes are bigger than others - you'll see. And when you do I'll be there. I'm not going anywhere except back to myself. I'm here in the roll call of life PRESENT.

If you read between the lines of invisible ink you can see that I'm here. I'm home. I've never been home before. I like it. Home becomes me. I became my own home and I'm going to live in myself like I should have done all along but that's ok. I learnt shit along the way. Home is where the hard is, the art is, the heart is.

Ever seen a human heart in the flesh? Ugly as fuck. We all got ugly hearts, beating away like drums, calling us home.

I called myself home except my name is Eden not Scragglehead and one of these things is not like the other. Somebody sent me a gold compass with a brown leather strap. Somebody kissed me and meant it. Somebody betrayed me. Somebody saw me. We are all our stories and if you don't like the one you're in just write yourself into a new one.

Write yourself home.

The Spider And The Sex Doll.

What's a spider got to do with a sex-doll? I'll tell you what. It all happened yesterday.

Yesterday was a corker of emotions. In the late afternoon my friend Kelly came over and I was feeling too many feelings to even cry so she said right. Let's go for a walk. I told her I knew she was going to say that. We went for a walk together and I just listened to my thoughts and let them go after  they came into my brain. The walk was beautiful. Keep forgetting I live in a magical part of the world.

                                            Blue.

Got home, bid Kelly farewell, made some dinner. Read for a bit. Felt a bit lost. But that's ok .. these pesky feelings come and then we let them go. Then they're back and we let them go. Again and again until I'm all FUCK OFF HEAD I AM DOING THE BEST I CAN AND IF THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR OTHER PEOPLE THEN SO BE IT.

So, be it.

At about 10pm I wasn't tired so decided to put on a DVD - the last series of Game of Thrones which my cousin Marina lent me last week. I'd already lent Kelly Vikings to watch. We're all old-school, with our DVD's.

As I was lowering the blind in the living room I saw something out of the corner of my eye so big, and so dark, my heart just fell. Oh god no. Anything but that. Please please no.

APPARENTLY YES.

Yep. It's hard for me to even insert that photo into this post and I have to glaze my eyes over like a Krispy Kreme donut and not look at it because LOOK AT IT.

LOOK AT IT.

I freaked and ran into the kitchen, hyperventilating and shaking. I can do moths, cockroaches, bugs, snakes, polar bears. I've taken a piss in the middle of a safari park in Uganda on the lookout for lions just roaming around. I say hello to warthogs. I can do all of those things but I cannot. Do. Huntsman. Spiders.

There's a succession of reasons why. It all started with Raiders of the Lost Ark remember that scene with the guy with the spiders on his back? Traumatised for life. Then one day when I was about ten years old I was sitting on the toilet at home and there was this big hairy huntsman motherfucker about a metre away from my scared, quivering little face. I sat frozen for - ten minutes? Half an hour? It was so hairy and big and looking at me with all of its eyyeeessssssss.

It's a well-documented fact that I cannot with huntsmen. Cannot. When Cam was living with me we were standing outside talking in the driveway and for some reason the subject came to spiders and I said Cam, I really can't talk about it.

You know what my fucker brother said to me with an evil glint in his eye?

"Eed ... look around you. We're in the middle of bushland. Imagine the thousands of huntsmen spiders around you right now."

I ran inside screaming I HATE YOU CAAAAMMMMM and he just laughed so hard.

So last night it was 11pm and I started texting people who lived nearby. "Are you awake? There's a massive huntsman on the wall in my lounge room." A few people replied but most were asleep. My friend Naomi was no use, laughing at me via text. I told her she was dead to me.

So I did what everybody would do in this day and age and posted a video of the Spider Situation onto Facebook.

Terrifying. I was terrified. My mum is a night owl so I text her and she made me feel better and made me laugh and said she would drive here and kill it for me but it would take her three hours and it was almost midnight. I was a little bit hysterical. She suggested that maybe it was Cam coming back as a huntsman to teach me to finally deal with my huntsman phobia? God I love my mum.

There was no way I could go to sleep with that beast in here THE SPIDER IS CALLING .. FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

I was left with one option. One. So I did it. There was no other way, don't you see?

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

                                        Yep. 

I live very close to Katoomba Police station. I ran across asking them for help, said look I know it's ridiculous but I'm terrified and I understand if you can't do this but I'd really appreciate your help this spider is HUGE.

It took a while for them to get here. You know why? Because they had a call-out to remove a blow-up sex doll from nearby bushland. I said jeez guys, I hope you wore gloves. 

People were telling me on Facebook that huntsmen came in pairs which is a MYTH YOU GUYS STOP IT. But am I ever so glad that the police come in pairs because that policeman standing behind the spider-killing policeman was much needed backup in case the spider just randomly started to fly around the room which it easily could have done. It was like a genetically modified spider. Capable of anything. The policeman said it was the biggest huntsman he had ever seen. I was hiding in the kitchen while he swatted it and one of them said it was gone and I said WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S GONE and he said no, he meant it's gone - it's dead. Then he picked it up by one leg and it was as big as a baby calf carcass I'm telling you.

I could not thank them enough. They were even so kind as to take the entire dead spider out of the building. I couldn't have had that thing in my garbage bin because spider zombie.

It was so late I gave up on watching Game of Thrones and took myself to bed. Exhilarated, god I felt so much better. You know when you feel like shit and then some disaster occurs and then the disaster gets solved and you just feel incrementally better?

I laughed so hard. Until a moth flew into my face and I kept seeing dark spider shadows everywhere and I was worried that some kind of bug was in my bed with me. I had to put my hoodie over my head.

You know who would love this story? My brother. If he was still alive I would have called him up that late because he always called me up late and I would have said Cam, I just called the police to kill a huntsman.

This is exactly what he would have said without missing a beat because nothing I told him ever shocked him:

"Of course you did, Eed."

And I imagined his twinkly eyes shining bright at his dickhead sister. And it was good.

You're Free, Baby Baby.

These four guys look at everything as a whole. They care deeply about the world and the people in it.

U2 love hard and they give, always wanting their music to be useful. Tonight at the Paris concert Bono stood for Paris but he also stood for other countries that need solidarity as well.

"We stand together with the families who lost their loved ones in Paris. We stand together with families in Beirut and Istanbul. We stand together before those with false ideologies of the God they serve."

In this clip Bono recites his pure poetry lyrics of a song recently written .. hauntingly beautiful and apt.


There's a lot of musicians out there who bring meaning to our lives and the world. Humanity is crying out for that kind of music.

Especially now.

"Hey cunt, you deserve to be gangraped by a pair of aids infested niggers. Die, fucking bitch. Yours truly, Master gender, master race, white male."

I can't believe we still have to fight this shit. Actually - sadly, I can. But on the new frontier this time - online. This new-fangled updated super-improved super-dooper information superhighway.

Our lives and society and events and opinions get played out every day and night, 24/7, all over the world. This is how we live now. I'll keep this short and snappy because I have so much to do today I'm already overloaded overwhelmed but that's ok I got good people and strong Angels on my side.

All of this abusive and disgusting stuff went down this week concerning Clementine Ford so she wrote this: "Ruiner Of Men's Lives, Evil Incarnate." Take a little look at the comments. Bring a bucket for your vomit.

Online writer and commenter Kerri Sackville has been spurred into action oh she has amassed quite the army of shield maidens. This morning she wrote this today: "End Violence Against Women."

A short excerpt from Kerri's post: "Everyone gets abused online from time to time. Men also get abused online. But men are not threatened with sexual violence. Men are not threatened with harm towards their families. Men are not degraded and intimidated into silence .. and so I gathered some friends. I asked that we each tweet the names of the offenders listed on Clem's post, or at least the names of some of the worst offenders. I asked that we use the hashtag #endviolenceagainstwomen, and link to her post so people know what we are dealing with. Please note that we do not wish to abuse or threaten or slander these men. We are simply naming them as being the authors of abusive tweets."

Come join us if you feel inclined. Check out the hashtag #endviolenceagainstwomen ... it's time to start actioning. This is why I hate Wicked Camper Vans. This is why I hate porno mags on display at the newsagents so my boys can freely see them. This is why I hate so many things wrong with our highly-sexualised bullshit fucked up society that we live in. My incredible friend Paula Orbea always says: "The standard we all past is the standard we accept." I'm not accepting this shit. I believe this is important, vital, necessary, hand me my thesaurus for all the other words.

Come join us if you feel inclined. Start with checking out the hashtag #endviolenceagainstwomen Join us on your facebook pages, on your twitter, your Instagram, your websites. In the early nineties I read "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women" by Susan Faludi and the "The Beauty Myth" by Naomi Wolf. Both books shaped what I stand for today.

I stand today, start today. Like Kerri says, "You have to start somewhere. We are starting here. Today."

So let us start. Again, and again.

The Elephant and the Peg.

Ever wondered why circus elephants don't run away? I've never really questioned it. I don't go to circuses anymore because they're cruel, have always felt sad for the animals performing all these stupid tricks which always kind of made me feel uncomfortable. Can a kid sense sadness in animals?

In 1977 I was five years old on a catamaran in Fiji and caught my first fish. The excitement! The joy! And then .. that fish I caught? Quickly and unceremoniously unhooked, descaled, head chopped off, red blood spilling everywhere, oh. I was a fish murderer. I got so distraught my mum had to take me downstairs to lie down. There's a photo of me clutching my pink ted and a comic book, eyes still red. Every time I've fished since then I've always thrown it back. Sorry Jesus I highly disagree. (Even though I make a mean tuna casserole because I'm a complete hypocrite. And hoover down bacon and eggs, pushing the thoughts of piggeries and chicken prisons out of my head. I'm thinking the vegans are onto something.)

So circus elephants have this chain around their leg which is attached to a puny wooden peg in the ground. They can snap these pegs like toothpicks, these majestic 10-foot tall 5,00kg animals. They can escape to freedom anytime they want to but they don't. They don't even try. The world’s most powerful animal stays tied down by a small peg and a flimsy chain. Why in hell would it not realise its power to just walk off into the wilderness? Or at least the circus carpark?

When the elephants are babies, the "trainers" tie a chain around its leg which is tied to a metal stake hammered into the ground. The chain and peg are strong enough for the baby elephant so each time it tried to break away and yes it tried, all the time .. the metal chain would pull it back causing deep cuts into the skin of the elephant’s leg, making it bleed the same colour red of a small fish on a catamaran with its head cut off.  This wound would hurt the baby elephant even more. It would longingly watch the world pass it by in the distance. Yet every time it pulled harder it hurt and cut more and eventually, that baby elephant realised it could not escape. So it stopped trying.

A big circus elephant is tied by a chain around its leg and you know how an elephant never forgets? It clearly remembers the pain it felt as a baby so it doesn't try to break away. It stands still. Its knows its limitations and moves only as much as the chain allows. Doesn't matter that the metal stake has been replaced by a wooden peg. That gorgeous 100 kilo baby elephant is now a magnificent fully-grown powerhouse and because it believes it's trapped it stays trapped. For its entire life.

Anyway so we're humans beings yet we too may never forget the things that trap us, make it so easy to stay in places and situations encumbered, fearful. Prisoners only of our minds.

What if we can snap our pegs anytime we want to without looking back and sashay across the plains into the forest where the wild things go. We can do that. We can do that right now.

I did. It was terrifying - still is. Which is why I've called all my Power back, all the power I've given away to people during the course of my life. Why would I just give away my life-force? THAT is bonafide legit crazy.

So if you think you're trapped and stuck, you're not. Come join me. Even though I'm a human being I'm also a free elephant doing things only a free elephant does. Cruising round, trumpeting with my huge trunk, doing huge dumps in the forest wherever I please.

It's extraordinary ... who knew?