I’m aware that my last post is hanging there (as it were) waiting for an answer. Will I or won’t I? I think my answer is yes. I think I’ll have them off. I’m going back to see Dr French next week. I intend to walk in to his consulting room in a decisive manner, one way or another. Will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I happened to see Dolly Parton on television for a few minutes yesterday with the sound off. I was working at National Radio News on the producer shift for the afternoon. We have two big tellies going all day, one on ABC News 24, the other on Sky. Younger journos can cope with audio from both on at the same time, plus the radio tuned to 2MCE. I can’t. My brain quickly reaches fugue state so I tend to turn a few things down or off. That’s how I happened to be watching Dolly Parton with the sound off. She wasn’t singing or entertaining – it was some sort of chat, being delivered from a standing position. The camera zoomed in, fascinated, at her giant bosom. Nothing prurient there. It’s what anyone would do. To have a closer look, to marvel. What is interesting is that Dolly Parton is no longer buxom in any other part of her anatomy. Her waist is terrifyingly tiny. There is no rib cage to support those enormous breasts. How does it all work? Actually, I’m wrong about that. The camera cut back to her face and that’s when I saw her lips – they, too, were buxom. With the sound on, she was probably being witty and fabulous. With it off, she was scary. Anyway, I have the right to look carefully at artificial breasts. I will probably have my own set, soon. They’ll be smaller, though. Smaller than the ones I have now.

Sorry to startle, but this is a serious question. I moved closer to making a decision today when I booked a Hertz hire car online. I chose a small hatchback, an economy car. I also discussed it with my friend Kirsty. We sat outside for a little while on the low brick wall attended by two Labradors. After these exertions, I took a nap. There is part of me (the part of me that can’t pass the couch without an overwhelming desire to sink into it) that wants to shut my eyes and wake up at some point in the future – next June, say. I used to be good at sleeping on long-haul flights without the aid of tablets or alcohol. I’d just coax myself into sleep and get rid of the hours. So I think I’d do quite well at sleeping until next June. If not continuous sleep, at least a sort of gliding in and out of sleep, getting up from time to time for another cup of tea, another magazine, another game of Solitaire on my iPhone, only to snuggle back down into the crochet rugs and shut my eyes. Should I chop my tits off? Let me go back to sleep.

There are arguments for and against the removal of my breasts. On Friday I’m going to drive the Hertz Rentacar to Sydney, to Castle Hill, to see a Dr French in his castle. He is going to show me before and after photographs of double mastectomies. There may even be some during shots. (Let me just have another little rest on the couch.)

In January I discovered I was the carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation, which gives me a sickening, overwhelming, possibility of breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer. This explains why a whole lot of female relatives on my father’s side have succumbed. I was told that ovarian cancer is almost impossible to check for, because by the time it reveals itself, things have generally gone too far. Therefore, said my fleet of doctors and advisers, it’s a no brainer. Your ovaries are ticking time bombs. They’ve got to go.

I had my ovaries out in June, throwing me into instant menopause alleviated by hormone replacement therapy, a process carrying its own bodily weirdnesses. But on the outside, I looked just the same as ever.

But breasts. You can see breasts.

To keep them on is to continue to carry around bodily tissue that is enormously susceptible to cancer. It’s something like 80 per cent for me, compared to about 11 per cent for women in the general population. The odds are not good. But unlike ovarian cancer, breast cancer is eminently treatable. It’s not necessarily a death sentence. I’d probably survive it.

And if I decide to keep my breasts, I can have free checks every six months for the very earliest little wisp or suggestion of cancer.

The thing is, it appears the breast cancer associated with BRCA1 isn’t like common-or-garden breast cancer. It’s a little more evil. So that if you have it at all, even if caught very early, they’ll give you chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is disgusting. It can leave its own trail of health problems. If I actually get breast cancer and go through chemotherapy, will I curse my earlier decision as I vomit and gag?

And what if I’m actually one of the twenty percent who was somehow marked out to defy the odds? What if I have my breasts removed for “nothing”?

I’m aware that these are the “problems” of a healthy person who has the enormous advantage, unlike my female relatives going back through the family tree, of being forewarned. If I actually had cancer, I know everything would look different. I’d do the chemo in a flash, knowing it could save my life. But as a healthy person who has been told it’s all up to me, I’m stuck here amongst all the pros and cons in a state of uncertainty.

I have a convoy in my head and a red dog in my heart. Let me explain. I know these people who’ve driven down to Canberra in their big rigs. I know them well, because I grew up with them. When I was a child, Dad drove a red truck all over the red dirt of the north west of Western Australia. I lived and played in the red dirt. We lived this life directly, without a narrative. What I mean is, we weren’t self-consciously part of any bigger story about life in the outback; we just happened to be there at the time. The dirt just happened to be red and the sky happened to be the biggest, bluest sky there is, climbing down to the biggest, bluest Indian ocean, complete with migrating humpback whales. Lobsters (we called them crays) sat idly on reefs waiting to be picked up and popped in a driftwood-fired billy boiling on the beach. At 17, I fled this idyll without a backward glance. But now, 30 years later, I go to a screening of Red Dog and just about die of the pain of nostalgia. When I was 14 I worked at the Ampol Roadhouse making beetroot-sodden burgers for truckies, and that’s where I found Sara Davidson’s Loose Change, on a wire rack of slightly racy novels about sex. In the book, Sara Davidson said some of her memories of the sixties made her writhe on the floor. As a 14 year old I was puzzled and slightly embarrassed about this. Watching Red Dog the other day, I got what she meant. If I hadn’t paid for my ticket I might have had to leave. It was so nostalgic I couldn’t stand it. It was writhe-on-the-floor nostalgic. Okay, so when the convoy hits Canberra my leftie feminist intellectual head says “#truckwits” like the other leftie Twitterers; but my heart is full of Red Dog.

This morning Merrill Findlay and I had a quick phone conversation about this. Merrill was in Carnarvon, my childhood town, in the early 1980s, after we’d left. She wrote a wonderful book about it. Now we both live here in the Central West, having lived for years in Sydney and Melbourne. Merrill’s creating a Song Cycle about the life of Kate Kelly, sister of Ned. There she is, in the bush, using some of the same material that we find in mainstream Aussie mythology (history, landscape) to create a new story that includes women, Chinese people, Aboriginal people, maybe some Afghan cameleers. Writing them into the story as if they were, preposterously, at the centre of it and not part of the colour around the edges. It has always felt impossible, reconciling these two parts of my life: the red heart and the critical mind. Maybe they can’t be reconciled; maybe an attitude of tolerance, an admission that we’re all here, criss-crossing this landscape, is as much as we can hope for.

This convoy… what’s it all about then? The men in the big rigs are at the centre of mythology but they’ve never been at the centre of power. That pisses them off. Somehow, someone is taking something from them: the big blue sky. City types are saying it’s no longer infinite; it’s full of carbon atoms and their trucks are to blame. I don’t know. I’m just dashing off these thoughts.

For a while now I’ve been wondering whether to jettison my last post – the one where I was stark raving mad about not getting a contract with a certain publisher* after a year and a half of dutifully drafting and redrafting and sending off to a certain editor*. But I’m going to leave my post where it is, along with the one before that, because that’s how I felt at the time. I was looking for companions in that particular form of rejection-madness and couldn’t find any. All I got was variations on “if at first you don’t succeed” and lists of all the writers who received so many rejection letters they could paper the walls. All of which could F off. I was disappointed.

Anyway, I’m writing a novel with a first-person narrator that happens to be a female pink and grey galah who has insightful observations about Australian identity and history. Through these observations and digressions we get the story of Mrs Johnson, who has an affair with the local dogger and her daughter, Stella, who thinks she’s the daughter of an astronaut but is actually the daughter of the dogger. And of Kevin Kelly, who is writing a love letter to right wing politician Pauline Hanson. What’s not to love about that? Anyway, in the end that certain publisher didn’t like it but I will go onwards, onwards, flying into the gum-scented morning, looking for another one.

PS Today’s Word of the Day on Artwiculate is jettison.

* Would like to name them but will not, because burning bridges is generally not a great idea.

I’ve just been to drop Steve off at work. Very few cars on the road, for some reason. Then I went to the vet. I sailed past it and then turned left into Stewart Street and left again into the vet, pointing the car the wrong way. Could have been a problem, if a car had come in the IN. But I got away with this manoeuvre. I was picking up tablets for the stiff and arthritic Taro the white Labrador. She is woofing outside. I need to get up and let her in. She will not always be with us. It’s just gone 9am, so that means there’s a new Word of the Day.

I let Taro in. I checked email. I looked up the WOTD.

The word of the day is Assonance. My tweet:

“Assonance can go the f*k to sleep. I’m more in tune with dissonance.”

When I saw today’s word I said “fuck off” to myself. I’m really, really dirty on the world today. Last night, as I tried to go to sleep, I went on a violent mental rampage. I’ve never done quite this thing before. I was willfully imagining stabbing at various human bodies – they were men, big ones, like footballers – with knives, hurling rocks at them, pushing them off cliffs. I was chanting “fuck off, fuck off, fuck off”. I am violently opposed to not getting a publishing  contract (the disgusting email came yesterday).

I woke at 3am with the grief.

After the vet, I went to get my coffee from Country Fruit. I was thinking about breakfast. There’s not much viable food in the house. I thought of buying nuts, an apple, plain yoghurt – things to make muesli with. It all felt too hard. It felt too hard to buy things other than coffee. So I went in and got the coffee. I stood there amongst all the bounty that is Country Fruit. The seafood behind the glass, including whiting. We used to catch whiting, in Carnarvon. When my sister Deb and I are waiting for something, we say we’re Whiting. There was a pile of dead whiting, silver skin, translucent flesh. And large, orange prawns. Two TV screens were going, one further back in the shop, one just above the counter where the woman was operating the coffee machine. There was a boy with long, styled hair (still trying to get used to young probably heterosexual men with styled hair) saying we should ban the burqua. He said if he couldn’t go to a servo with his face covered, why should anyone else? He is using Facebook to organise a demonstration. The ticker text across the bottom of the screen was saying – hopefully perhaps – that there could be a riot like the one at Cronulla. Lisa Wilkinson and Ita Buttrose were sitting there, poised to comment. Lisa Wilkinson started speaking. She was saying she grew up with a community of nuns at the end of the road so she was used to women in religious clothing.

Distracted by the screen, I barely registered the woman who took my money and gave the coffee.

Outside, there were ducks. There were a couple of ducks on George Street, small, vulnerable. One on the median strip, one on the footpath looking awfully like it wanted to cross. On the grass in Machattie Park, a whole flock of ducks. It was as though they were assembled for an event, a demonstration that might start a bit later.

Assonance is the word of the day; dissonance is more like it. I feel quite expletive about my rage. Quite willing to be loud and fast and furious and devil-may-care and the words I want to say over and over again are Fuck off or Go the fuck to sleep. As in, Go the fuck to sleep for ever.

Taro sighs.

I’m tired of everything being about death, illness, decline, loss, missing organs, the shutting down of possibility.

I’m tired of the endless self help CRAP – including from a friend who dropped in just now – about picking yourself up and dusting yourself off.

Grief doesn’t need a word – NOT A WORD – about how it will be all right in the end. It might or might not be all right in the end. Tragedy is always a distinct possibility. You can be the ant on the footpath, crushed under a careless shoe.* You can be swept away in a tsunami but not before you’re smashed horribly against a car and then a wall, dying in moments of sheer terror and horror. So fuck off with the perky stuff.