we finally have a date for the supreme court appeal – 8th march 2012.

that makes it over two years to get the case heard in the magistrates court and to appeal to the supreme.

i stopped painting to give the legal system the benefit of the tiniest doubt, to give it a chance to allow people the power to challenge corporate/capitalist advertising/bullshit, instead of assuming the legal system will always protect capitalist bullshit and capitalist pricks from all but the most verbalistic of challenges.

i may have further opportunities to appeal the decision that the supreme court comes to, but after two years of waiting, if the supreme court makes an unsatisfactory decision (i.e. doesn’t set a precedent that allows the removal of capitalist/corporate pollution from public space) then i will have officially lost patience with the legal system.

sometimes, with the highly unlikely possibility of a favourable decision, i feel a little foolish for ever thinking that the legal system could possibly allow what i want it to.

i feel that by showing the present laws and processes respect, i’ve only tied my own hands so that i can wait and watch the machinations of an insane (or at least extremely contradictory) kafkaesque system.

is there any good reason i had to suspend my actions to run a legal defence for them?€“ i thought i might have a marginally improved chance of success if i showed respect for the system by not ‘re-offending’ while the system was in progress, but i’m not even sure if that’s right, anyway, i feel like i have absolutely no chance of a win presently so it was really just a stupid waste of time.

i’ll keep ‘pleading’ (asserting) not guilty and run whatever arguments i can in the future but i’m going to resume acting in the way i consider to be right, immediately and permanently, after the supreme court decision.

i’ll make any further appeals that i can but i’m not going to sit around on the basis of some dodgy rationale for who knows how long,

2 years has been way too long, my patience is wearing thin.

i’ve almost cracked a couple of times and returned to paint because i have no will to keep living-along in this city like a good boy, but then i cool down and think i might as well wait for some reason – i think my growing impatience is a big part of the reason that i’ve decided this stupid stall is over after the stupid supreme court.

i have stalled many times since i began this shit when i was 21:

the first time i stalled was before i had been caught for any painting that i had done,€“ i stalled because very few people, if any, understood what i was doing or why, they seemed to think i was some sort of irrational, self-destructive idiot.

i stalled to think and write, because as a maths and science kid i didn’t have the language to explain what i was doing, i hadn’t been able to explain myself effectively to anyone and i think that and the general misunderstanding shook my self-confidence.

i made some progress, but ended up deciding that people don’t understand because of their own limitations, not because of the insufficiency of my explanations.

i came to believe that no matter how eloquent i could become i would still be completely unacceptable to the vast majority of people.

i decided that the understanding and acceptance of those around me, while desirable, was not essential — they might understand eventually, but i had to go ahead on my own understanding, even without the understanding of anyone else, for my own sake.

the second time i stalled was after being arrested and taken by the police to the royal melbourne hospital for a psychiatric assessment.

while the psychiatrist there said i was fit to interview, i felt i would continue to be regarded as insane (or at least somehow mentally ill) by the system and wanted to be declared ‘not bonkers’ by some state-credentialed folk before continuing — i thought that any alleged mental illness would be used to dismiss my protest, to not consider my actions as a legitimate response to this system.

i thought that if i jumped through hoops for the psychiatrists i was referred to by the hospital i would come out with a nice little ‘not bonkers, actually a great guy’ certificate that i could use in my defence, or i must have thought something similar to that.

i think i was afraid of being sent to a mental institution, getting e.c.t. or something, must have read too much orwell or something.

i also wanted to play along with the psychiatrists to satisfy my parents who wanted me to see someone, i was sure that psychiatry couldn’t help me, the most it could do was understand me and not hinder me, but i would have to do my time with them before i could say this from experience.

it took me over a year of subjecting myself to modern psychiatry (including taking the anti-depressants and anti-psychotics i was prescribed) to realise that as long as i continued to believe the things i believed almost every psychiatrist would seek to pathologise me.

i do not think it is some kind of deliberate conspiracy on the part of the capitalist system that almost every psychiatrist will say there is something wrong with me, it is simply because if any westerner was going to accept my basic principles, reasoning and conclusions as valid they would be bound to the same (or similarly ‘radical’ courses) of action, they couldn’t accept my actions without saying at the same time that what they are doing and have done is somehow wrong, or not as right as it could be, and no-one wants to believe that.

also no-one wants to have to do what i believe i have a duty to do,“ i know i certainly don’t.

maybe it’s something particularly hard for doctors to do, consider that perhaps their philosophies do contain significant logical inconsistencies and that they might not be as pure as the driven snow, considering society has told them for so long that they are ultra-intelligent, hard-working and super-good for society, with the constant helping people and all, nothing to do with egotism, social status or remuneration whatsoever.

my psychiatrist tried to tell me that he wanted to divert my course of action because it posed a risk to me and he was bound to be concerned about my welfare – i tried to ask him to imagine the whole worlds’ citizens as his patients, to care about them all equally, and ask him then what would it be appropriate to do? he didn’t respond to that, lacked insight, insisted i was mental.

not to say that i’m fucking perfect (i won’t dispute that i am fucked in many ways), i’m just assuming an arrogant, higher-ground attitude because it was theirs towards me that shat me so hard, plus i’m really bitter that they ruled me mentally ill (officially) and that was it, no chance of official rebuttal from ol’ crazy magee.

i had been naive and optimistic, thinking that surely the intelligent doctors of psychology would understand my motivations and rule them within the bounds of sanity.

after failing to secure the “not insane, great guy” certificate and after so much bullshit (i think they made me more mental) i thought i’d wasted enough time and i’d have to continue on without any assurance that psychiatrists wouldn’t be called on to fuck with me in the future.

the third time i stalled was after my first month-long stint in jail.

my parents were quite distressed when i was in jail, seeing their distress and knowing it was caused by the predictable (yet ridiculous) response to my actions was very difficult.

after about a week in jail the magistrate even organised a special mid-hearing, out-of-visiting-hours visit with my parents in an attempt to emotionally black-mail me into reversing my assertion that i would continue to paint billboards with my every free moment.

i apologised to my parents but told them i had to do what i thought was right (dad was mad, mum was sad, to understate things).

eventually, after roughly a month, i came to think i should stall, say ‘i’ll be good now’ and go back to uni to study arts, in the fields most directly associated with my lifestyle choices.

i felt i still wasn’t going to be taken seriously by anyone and that the protest would be more effective if i came back to it as an older, more emotionally stable, ‘responsible’ type with at least a uni degree.

i thought i’d be somewhat better at the ol’ mouth and pen wiggling by that point, which would surely help my cause.

for the years of my uni degree my parents would have a reprieve and could spend the time being able to tell people i was doing something socially acceptable and hoping that i would grow out of the drama-queen, direct-action nonsense i had previously engaged in.

under the influence of guilt i grossly over-estimated my patience and ability to put up with university bullshit.

not even a year into my course i found that i could not wait, everything was way too urgent and denying what i felt i really had to do while jumping through university’s stupid little hoops proved beyond me.

i thought i might be able to continue my university degree, but it would have to be put lower on the agenda, if i could do it from jail, i would, if not, oh well.

i began painting again, represented myself in court initially and was jailed a few times.

so it seems, unless my memory has failed me, that this stall is the fourth stall, and if you’ve read the other posts you’ll know about this one.

having met a legal aid lawyer i liked while in custody, and tiring of trying to speak to very rude and nasty magistrates, i got a proper legal representative who, after getting me bailed out in a supreme court bail appeal, formulated a human-rights based defence that i thought was surprisingly strong and worthwhile, so i decided to cut out the painting while waiting for the case to go through.

i think that this stall was also decided upon under the influence of guilt (clutching at straws that i would be able to satisfy myself without upsetting folk by getting flung in jail), as well as under the influence of the quite understandable aversion to being incarcerated that i have.

i thought i could continue on with the uni plan while waiting on the courts, but i was wrong again, it wasn’t only the wish to act that lead me away from uni, the place was infuriating in too many ways to begin to describe.

i told myself if i was going to give up uni, i had to give up drugs and alcohol too – i guess to convince myself i wasn’t just bailing out of uni because i was lazy and wanted to binge without interruption.

i had a lot of reasons to go straight, but i think giving up uni made it easier because it pissed me off so much it threatened to drive me to drink.

of course i can’t give up living in this infuriatingly fucked world which for so long drove me to drink, but excluding myself from as much horrible shit as i can on a day-to-day basis certainly helps.

anyway, the point of this catalogue of stalls is to say that after this supreme court appeal i can see no conceivable cause for stalling in the future, perhaps because i’ve used up all possible excuses.

unfortunately for me and my little penis, the future only holds being repeated dunked in the ol’ isolation/deprivation/violence-induced-stress tank until, of course, the corporate/capitalist media/advertising farce is made history, or i am made history, whatever comes first.

i’m sorry mum and dad… but now another part of me is wanting to retract that apology, i have to do what i think is right and i shouldn’t have to apologise for that“ if you don’t have the sensitivity to already be heart-broken by the human happenings on planet earth, the shock of being heart-broken now (and your misconception that i am to blame) is your own fault for failing to inculcate in yourself a compassionate global consciousness.

i apologise for the overly-harsh statements of that rather severe component of myself mum and dad (no i don’t).

okay, i’ll try this:

i feel empathy for you having to go through pain mum and dad, but pain is an unjustly distributed part of life, i refuse to accept the blame for your pain, furthermore on the grand scale of things it hardly warrants consideration in a calculation of how i should act (to risk the unnatural crime of not caring only for your family and those around you at any expense to distant others), if you have to apportion blame there are a million pricks you should blame before me, p.s. i love you and thank you for bringing me into this world even though it is a disgusting pile of shit and i don’t look forward to the rest of my life really.

ha ha, i’m so fucked, listen to me.

Categories: posts