Step 1: start going through your stuff looking for things to pack or clear out.
Step 2: find the box you've stowed all of your old keepsakes in for the last 20 years or so.
Step 3: start going through it all with a ruthless intensity, reading over all the old essays you wrote, the birthday cards, the faxed greetings, the letters kept from people who's faces you can't remember and context you can no longer recall, the first love letter you ever received, all of the concert tickets and cinema stubs and photos and awards, the stories you wrote, the blog entries handwritten on cards and sick-bags on aeroplanes, the annuals and reminders of exploits and adventures that happened so long ago that you have to think to remember what the relevance or significance of it all was.
Step 4: as you go, throw everything you think you can throw away into a pile and watch it spill and fall across the floor in drifts of off-white paper, faded by age and neglect.
Step 5: get sentimental and go back through the pile and put half of it back in the fucking box.
Step 6: look down at the condensed paper and plastic that represents the years that came before and start despairing as to what you're going to do with it all since you simply can't throw it the hell away.
Step 7: start beating your head against the wall.
Step 8: go back to Step 7...
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Snippets #5: on disintegration...
a few years ago i started making a bit of a collage on the wall of my bedroom. it started as a couple of photos i'd printed out from a recent trip, then slowly grew as i added odds and ends i'd had lying around, or found along the way. when i moved i took a photo and recreated it in my new room, then promptly forgot about it. now i'm lying back in my room again, after getting back from Perth and it's been falling off the wall - one piece has curled up and lost half its blutack, others are hanging from a corner and others still have fallen completely behind the shelves.
that seems to be an apt metaphor for my life at the moment. i'm shattered. i'm glad to be back in canberra and all, but being back means that i have things to do. lots of them. far too many calls upon my time and energy, far too much to achieve and far too little energy to get it all done. right now is completely not the right time to call me and ask if i'm excited about flying around the world because right now i'd be just about as happy to add a smear of blood and brains to my collage - one final addition to my improv artwork. i'll feel better in the morning, i swear, but i have too much percolating around my brain to make any sense of it all and it's all falling apart.
tomorrow brings packing, after which i hope i'll feel better about it all. solid progress that i can see should make it all look a bit less daunting. the last week has reminded me how much i can cram into a day. knowing that the end is in sight - that all i have to do once i get to sydney is get on a fucking aeroplane, after which i'll have more or less all the time in the world... that's providing me with some peace. i just need to keep it all together until then. meanwhile, tomorrow i'm seeing a pretty little lass who likes to kiss me and i'm sure that'll perk me up no end... as long as i can get plenty done between now and then. one of the things i need to get done is sleep, and since that is the next thing on my Sisyphean task list i'm going to get right on it.
that seems to be an apt metaphor for my life at the moment. i'm shattered. i'm glad to be back in canberra and all, but being back means that i have things to do. lots of them. far too many calls upon my time and energy, far too much to achieve and far too little energy to get it all done. right now is completely not the right time to call me and ask if i'm excited about flying around the world because right now i'd be just about as happy to add a smear of blood and brains to my collage - one final addition to my improv artwork. i'll feel better in the morning, i swear, but i have too much percolating around my brain to make any sense of it all and it's all falling apart.
tomorrow brings packing, after which i hope i'll feel better about it all. solid progress that i can see should make it all look a bit less daunting. the last week has reminded me how much i can cram into a day. knowing that the end is in sight - that all i have to do once i get to sydney is get on a fucking aeroplane, after which i'll have more or less all the time in the world... that's providing me with some peace. i just need to keep it all together until then. meanwhile, tomorrow i'm seeing a pretty little lass who likes to kiss me and i'm sure that'll perk me up no end... as long as i can get plenty done between now and then. one of the things i need to get done is sleep, and since that is the next thing on my Sisyphean task list i'm going to get right on it.
Monday, September 29, 2008
6 days out of order and in a blur...
standing outside Perth Domestic Terminal on arrival i was just about ready to leave. ten-odd hours of transit from go to woah, standing in a town i recognised but no longer knew, the sense of rightness was completely missing.
walking back into the same airport 140 hours and 5 minutes later and things were... different. a nervous drive down barely-remembered streets, a visit to some old friends and a good night's sleep had put me in a better frame of mind. sepia-toned memories overlaid with the current actuality of the places in which i found myself, seeing people who are all but unchanged on the surface, but with new stories bubbling up from within. the eerie and disconcertingly familiar distilled into a comforting recognition and for once when i walked out of that town it felt like a departure rather than a harried escape.
"OH MY GOD you haven't changed a bit!!"
5 years... it can't have been 5 years... i was thinking. i recognised her instantly from outside the cafe where i stood in the rain, bright pink hair that last i remembered as black, and spiked up in devil horns now falling over her eyes as she sat looking at the newspaper. it's true thought - i hadn't seen Lil' Rach in 5 years, since not long before i first left the old town. every time i'd come through she'd been elsewhere. we hadn't even really spoken much over the years - half an hour's worth of conversation spread over a handfull of phone calls. i knew so little of her life in the meantime that i had no idea what was going to be said when i got there. the hug was instantaneous and i couldn't help but think how well she was looking - slimmer, happier, bright and shining like a star, and without thinking or planning or consideration it was as if we hadn't seen each other in 5 days, not years.
to be told that i was exactly as remembered was rather nice in a way. i looked in the mirror later that day and pondered my visage. less weight, more lines, a readier smile. my hair is more or less the same. i dress the same (although the quality has improved over the years, but the styles remain). but then it made me wonder whether i had actually changed over the years, or have i learned nothing from what has gone before? no, not really. still, i can't complain if i'm starting to look my age, rather than persistently older than advertised.
three hours i spend exchanging stories with Lil Rach. i even drove her to work so that she wouldn't have to waste the 45 minutes on buses and could spend it with me instead. we shared tales of love and loss, travel, time spent and places visited. she's been around the world, met a lad she can't live without and above all, been happy. a can-do attitude and an ability to make do. a refusal to see anything as a roadblock, and a conviction for streaking through New York city. we're both new people and it didn't matter, because we're both still the same in every way that matters. i'd have hung around all day if i'd not had so many places to be that day. i'd been on the go from 8AM, wasn't scheduled to stop until past 2 the next morning and this was my first appointment and it didn't stop coming, not for another 14 hours.
"I believe that if you're going to put something in your mouth it had better be worth it... in more ways than one..."
how on earth am i to describe Must to provide the appropriate amount of detail while at the same time reflecting the emotion of the experience? i could try to describe the food (wagyu beef shank ravioli with mushrooms and black truffle, chicken and lobster sausage with whole wheat and white-wine sauce, hand-made gnocchi with wagyu beef shank, bread flown in from france each day, a south-american slant to this month's wine selection in support of the tapas tasting menu they'd run earlier in the month... you get the idea), or the room (wall to wall wine-bottles, few of which you'd see gracing the shelves of a discount liquor store), or the wait-staff (the junior waiter we spoke to knew far more about wines than i did, and they still had a sommelier on the premises). what i think i'll brush on however, is that i have never in my life eaten food which left me in a post-orgasmic twitch after each bite. Ondine would later describe my response as "an uncertain combination of giggling and sobbing". i do know that at one point, after i'd mopped up my plate with the last of the bread and had started on her rotisseried pork and duck, seasonal vegetables and home-made polenta i hit my head on the wall when i bit into the crackling because i'd lost control of my neck.
in a word, the food was Perfect. everything. twelve inch stalks of asparagus? sweet from tip to tail, not woody in the slightest. each wine perfectly complementary. each ingredient perfectly proportioned. parmesan, rocket, balsamic and olive oil salad? perfect.
Ondine's a jewel, especially when it comes to food. put her in a town for a week or two and she'll be on first name basis with some of the chefs of the best restaurants within 20 kilometres of the city centre. give her a month and she'll have home and mobile numbers. she knows food both from an eating and a cooking perspective and she loves sharing the experience with people who appreciate it. i'm not entirely sure how i keep on her foodie-radar, bearing in mind how lazy i can get when it comes to putting effort into my eating. there have been far too many weeks where i've eaten naught but packet pasta and pizza. still, i DO like food, even if i don't always pursue it to the n'th degree at all times. Ondine does, and i get to enjoy her hard work, and she enjoys my enjoyment so everybody wins.
a couple of days after my first Must experience i was arriving for another breakfast/brunch rendezvous to find her sitting under a makeshift covered area behind a butcher's in Mt Lawley. she and a friend were at a gourmet market, top hat and long-coat, multiple petticoats, tea set and lace tablecloth. the admiring stares and comments had the two of them preening like cats and pleased as punch. a pate and sweetbreads platter, a board of cheeses you have to know exist before anyone will let you buy some, fresh bread and coffee from one of the better roasters in Perth. it almost made me forget the 4-5 hours of sleep i'd had the night before, not to mention the drive i'd undertaken using the best of Zen Navigation (turn when it feels like you should turn). delightful, civilised, and with a sandwich consisting of about a third of a roast lamb squeezed between two slices of slightly stale bread.
now i'm glad that i'm on an uncatered flight because i don't think i'm going to, in all conscience or concern for my waistline, eat again for the next 3 or 4 days. damn you Ondine, for ruining my waist-line. thank you for taking me to Must for the best meal and later the best Scotch i've ever tasted.
"You are correct - she IS ridiculously lonely... but then so am I.."
i'm seeing it more more, but last saturday night was a sledgehammer to the skull. it's occurred to me a number of times over the last few years, but looking around the Engagement Party and seeing all the people i knew who were married, engaged to be married, in long term relationships, children running around the room and the glimmer in people's eyes of more in the planning stages, the small couch-load of singletons felt awfully isolated. my sister got married a couple of years ago, not too long after her son was born (named for our grandfather). The Boy has been seeing the same girl from four years now and if she's put up with his shit with a smile for this long i can't see any particular risk of her leaving any time soon. they're a foregone conclusion as far as i'm concerned.
the same sort of thing is happening in Canberra and i can see how anyone long-term single hanging around the crew would be getting towards "sharpening your razor blades on your wrists" stage. i was starting to get a bit of the blues going myself, but then the pretty little thing i like to hug and kiss a lot was a long long way away. yes, she'll be even further away in a week and a half - thanks for reminding me. arsehole.
either way, i found it interesting to stand there surrounded by happy, smiling couples with a beer in hand, a "fuck you" smile and a big shit-eating grin on my face. it's lovely, though. Kandi and Mav are the couple you wish you and your partner were. they act like they just met and are still exploring the ins and outs of each other's genitalia despite having been going at it unchanged and unabated for six years now. they make single people jealous just by walking into the room and despite my comprehensive understanding that that sort of joined-at-the-hip, life-in-each-other's-pockets behavior would drive me to distraction and speeding fines, i can't help but be effected by it all.
nonetheless, it seems like almost everyone i know i perth is either happily in a long-term relationship, married or soon to be married, or desperately lonely and wishing they could join the club. given another couple of years and i have feeling that i'll be a member of an increasingly diminishing species, standing alone while the rest of them all stand together... that is, unless a certain little geek girl comes to her senses.
i keep referring to this as Canberra... mostly, i think, because i always assume that Perth is wherever i'm not. now i'm leaving Canberra too, and i honestly can't tell whether i'm coming or going anymore...
once again i'm on an aeroplane headed east. every time i've left Perth in the last 5 years i've felt like i was escaping back to the promised land - the land of Anywhere But There. i've always had a good time, but i've also been relieved to be getting out of there. now i'm tired and drained and with no regrets as to the way i spent my time over the last week, but i find myself missing it more the patchwork of rural western australia, then south australia, now victoria pass under my window and i wipe a small child of indiscriminate gender's drool off my arm. the ice glitters in my window, my isolation headphones seclude me from the jets and the hubbub of humanity and my head-space is so geographically disperse that i can't quite put a finger on where anything is. i'm liking the uncertainty of not being able to say where "home" is anymore. when the world around you is less than stable it gives you a chance to find out how good your own balance really is.
a good trip, all told, and for once i wish, in a small way, that it could have been longer. still, i'll be back sooner or later, of that i have no doubt.
walking back into the same airport 140 hours and 5 minutes later and things were... different. a nervous drive down barely-remembered streets, a visit to some old friends and a good night's sleep had put me in a better frame of mind. sepia-toned memories overlaid with the current actuality of the places in which i found myself, seeing people who are all but unchanged on the surface, but with new stories bubbling up from within. the eerie and disconcertingly familiar distilled into a comforting recognition and for once when i walked out of that town it felt like a departure rather than a harried escape.
"OH MY GOD you haven't changed a bit!!"
5 years... it can't have been 5 years... i was thinking. i recognised her instantly from outside the cafe where i stood in the rain, bright pink hair that last i remembered as black, and spiked up in devil horns now falling over her eyes as she sat looking at the newspaper. it's true thought - i hadn't seen Lil' Rach in 5 years, since not long before i first left the old town. every time i'd come through she'd been elsewhere. we hadn't even really spoken much over the years - half an hour's worth of conversation spread over a handfull of phone calls. i knew so little of her life in the meantime that i had no idea what was going to be said when i got there. the hug was instantaneous and i couldn't help but think how well she was looking - slimmer, happier, bright and shining like a star, and without thinking or planning or consideration it was as if we hadn't seen each other in 5 days, not years.
to be told that i was exactly as remembered was rather nice in a way. i looked in the mirror later that day and pondered my visage. less weight, more lines, a readier smile. my hair is more or less the same. i dress the same (although the quality has improved over the years, but the styles remain). but then it made me wonder whether i had actually changed over the years, or have i learned nothing from what has gone before? no, not really. still, i can't complain if i'm starting to look my age, rather than persistently older than advertised.
three hours i spend exchanging stories with Lil Rach. i even drove her to work so that she wouldn't have to waste the 45 minutes on buses and could spend it with me instead. we shared tales of love and loss, travel, time spent and places visited. she's been around the world, met a lad she can't live without and above all, been happy. a can-do attitude and an ability to make do. a refusal to see anything as a roadblock, and a conviction for streaking through New York city. we're both new people and it didn't matter, because we're both still the same in every way that matters. i'd have hung around all day if i'd not had so many places to be that day. i'd been on the go from 8AM, wasn't scheduled to stop until past 2 the next morning and this was my first appointment and it didn't stop coming, not for another 14 hours.
"I believe that if you're going to put something in your mouth it had better be worth it... in more ways than one..."
how on earth am i to describe Must to provide the appropriate amount of detail while at the same time reflecting the emotion of the experience? i could try to describe the food (wagyu beef shank ravioli with mushrooms and black truffle, chicken and lobster sausage with whole wheat and white-wine sauce, hand-made gnocchi with wagyu beef shank, bread flown in from france each day, a south-american slant to this month's wine selection in support of the tapas tasting menu they'd run earlier in the month... you get the idea), or the room (wall to wall wine-bottles, few of which you'd see gracing the shelves of a discount liquor store), or the wait-staff (the junior waiter we spoke to knew far more about wines than i did, and they still had a sommelier on the premises). what i think i'll brush on however, is that i have never in my life eaten food which left me in a post-orgasmic twitch after each bite. Ondine would later describe my response as "an uncertain combination of giggling and sobbing". i do know that at one point, after i'd mopped up my plate with the last of the bread and had started on her rotisseried pork and duck, seasonal vegetables and home-made polenta i hit my head on the wall when i bit into the crackling because i'd lost control of my neck.
in a word, the food was Perfect. everything. twelve inch stalks of asparagus? sweet from tip to tail, not woody in the slightest. each wine perfectly complementary. each ingredient perfectly proportioned. parmesan, rocket, balsamic and olive oil salad? perfect.
Ondine's a jewel, especially when it comes to food. put her in a town for a week or two and she'll be on first name basis with some of the chefs of the best restaurants within 20 kilometres of the city centre. give her a month and she'll have home and mobile numbers. she knows food both from an eating and a cooking perspective and she loves sharing the experience with people who appreciate it. i'm not entirely sure how i keep on her foodie-radar, bearing in mind how lazy i can get when it comes to putting effort into my eating. there have been far too many weeks where i've eaten naught but packet pasta and pizza. still, i DO like food, even if i don't always pursue it to the n'th degree at all times. Ondine does, and i get to enjoy her hard work, and she enjoys my enjoyment so everybody wins.
a couple of days after my first Must experience i was arriving for another breakfast/brunch rendezvous to find her sitting under a makeshift covered area behind a butcher's in Mt Lawley. she and a friend were at a gourmet market, top hat and long-coat, multiple petticoats, tea set and lace tablecloth. the admiring stares and comments had the two of them preening like cats and pleased as punch. a pate and sweetbreads platter, a board of cheeses you have to know exist before anyone will let you buy some, fresh bread and coffee from one of the better roasters in Perth. it almost made me forget the 4-5 hours of sleep i'd had the night before, not to mention the drive i'd undertaken using the best of Zen Navigation (turn when it feels like you should turn). delightful, civilised, and with a sandwich consisting of about a third of a roast lamb squeezed between two slices of slightly stale bread.
now i'm glad that i'm on an uncatered flight because i don't think i'm going to, in all conscience or concern for my waistline, eat again for the next 3 or 4 days. damn you Ondine, for ruining my waist-line. thank you for taking me to Must for the best meal and later the best Scotch i've ever tasted.
"You are correct - she IS ridiculously lonely... but then so am I.."
i'm seeing it more more, but last saturday night was a sledgehammer to the skull. it's occurred to me a number of times over the last few years, but looking around the Engagement Party and seeing all the people i knew who were married, engaged to be married, in long term relationships, children running around the room and the glimmer in people's eyes of more in the planning stages, the small couch-load of singletons felt awfully isolated. my sister got married a couple of years ago, not too long after her son was born (named for our grandfather). The Boy has been seeing the same girl from four years now and if she's put up with his shit with a smile for this long i can't see any particular risk of her leaving any time soon. they're a foregone conclusion as far as i'm concerned.
the same sort of thing is happening in Canberra and i can see how anyone long-term single hanging around the crew would be getting towards "sharpening your razor blades on your wrists" stage. i was starting to get a bit of the blues going myself, but then the pretty little thing i like to hug and kiss a lot was a long long way away. yes, she'll be even further away in a week and a half - thanks for reminding me. arsehole.
either way, i found it interesting to stand there surrounded by happy, smiling couples with a beer in hand, a "fuck you" smile and a big shit-eating grin on my face. it's lovely, though. Kandi and Mav are the couple you wish you and your partner were. they act like they just met and are still exploring the ins and outs of each other's genitalia despite having been going at it unchanged and unabated for six years now. they make single people jealous just by walking into the room and despite my comprehensive understanding that that sort of joined-at-the-hip, life-in-each-other's-pockets behavior would drive me to distraction and speeding fines, i can't help but be effected by it all.
nonetheless, it seems like almost everyone i know i perth is either happily in a long-term relationship, married or soon to be married, or desperately lonely and wishing they could join the club. given another couple of years and i have feeling that i'll be a member of an increasingly diminishing species, standing alone while the rest of them all stand together... that is, unless a certain little geek girl comes to her senses.
i keep referring to this as Canberra... mostly, i think, because i always assume that Perth is wherever i'm not. now i'm leaving Canberra too, and i honestly can't tell whether i'm coming or going anymore...
once again i'm on an aeroplane headed east. every time i've left Perth in the last 5 years i've felt like i was escaping back to the promised land - the land of Anywhere But There. i've always had a good time, but i've also been relieved to be getting out of there. now i'm tired and drained and with no regrets as to the way i spent my time over the last week, but i find myself missing it more the patchwork of rural western australia, then south australia, now victoria pass under my window and i wipe a small child of indiscriminate gender's drool off my arm. the ice glitters in my window, my isolation headphones seclude me from the jets and the hubbub of humanity and my head-space is so geographically disperse that i can't quite put a finger on where anything is. i'm liking the uncertainty of not being able to say where "home" is anymore. when the world around you is less than stable it gives you a chance to find out how good your own balance really is.
a good trip, all told, and for once i wish, in a small way, that it could have been longer. still, i'll be back sooner or later, of that i have no doubt.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
transitory relevations...
i'm in an odd situation right now. it's been slowly dawning on me an unrealised consequence of travel which is that when (as i am right now) you're in transit it's kinda hard to say that you really are where your GPS says that you are. you see, geopraphically i'm currently sitting in the VirginBlue Boarding Lounge 35 (a concrete-floored wasteland of ultra-ruggedised, easy-clean furniture and fittings, industrially designed to be comfortable to sit in for a as much as an hour but simultaneously impossible to sleep in unless you've OD'd on muscle-relaxants). realistically, on the other hand, i'm in the Transit No-Man's Land; a place where people are but no one lives. it's kinda like Tasmania, really. people come and go, but everything's temporary, transient. the people you meet here, they're your friend, your confidant, or maybe just a meat chicane you dodge around when they realise that they desperately needed to use the toilet they just walked past.
the guy sitting across from me at the moment, slicked back hair, sunglasses pushed up on his head, chiselled good looks and fashionable shoes, he's not real. the hairy guy in black sitting on the 1.5x4 metre strip of carpet conveniently located in front of the power point, me, no i'm not real either. everyone here has their coping mechanisms. there's the old lady just getting into her pulp-fiction novel. there's the family sitting on the carpet in Lounge 34 who are play cards with the kids. the Islander lad dawdling on the travellator because he's got nowhere to be for a couple of hours while grannies with zimmer-frames overtake him on the tiles. the opportunist who's plugged his ultra-portable into a handy powerpoint and looks around at the people walking by while he bashes at the keyboard because... well, he can touch-type. can't you? newsagents and book shops running a roaring trade in temporary print. news today, olds tomorrow - sell out today, get the shipment in then sell out to a wholly different bunch of transients tomorrow.
and a thiving ecosystem has sprung up to cater for all these neuvo riche, the grateful recipients of the modern era of inexpensive air-travel. anyone can go anywhere, so everyone does and airports rapidly reach a critical-mass of the number of aeroplanes that can use a runway through a day. efficiency and economy dictate that a seat on the flight unsold is a seat wasted, and so cross-matching databases are written to keep track of it all so that you can tell it that you need to get from Canberra to Perth and it'll suggest stopovers in everywhere from Adelaide to Sydney, discount the under-utilised routes and recommend the chicken so that the airports can move the absolute maximum number of people from where they are to where they need to be while balancing the load so that no one terminal explodes and goes splat.
of course, this means that there's no end of people who've just travelled 300km in the wrong direction so that they could save a buck. people who were happy to accept a 3 hour stopover so that they wouldn't have to fly on the red-eye and endure 5 hours in the air on a discount airline with overpriced stale sandwiches. people who'll seriously consider overcooked 10$ noodles from the foodcourt if it means not being tempted to eat the equally shitty, but even more expensive food on the plane. don't forget here that bored people in our consumerist, throw-away society are prone to shop:
"i'm just going to have a look in Witchery, dear."
you packed enough clothes to last a month and we're only away a fortnight... anyway, didn't you just go shopping on the weekend?
"oh, just go get some coffees. it's not as if we don't have time to kill and maybe i'll find something nice for that dinner out with your parents."
yes sweetie...
and so the cycle of unnecessary commerce continues and thrives, populating what one might consider a hostile environment with more and more plastic and plywood facades with smiling waitrons there to take your order for double-priced cappuchino and cake which you're only eating because it kills some time and inevitably leads to your undiagnosed diabetes causing a hyperglyceamic attack halfway across the Pacific.
oh, it's all entertaining. seriously, don't mind me. i'm just killing time. i have mental images of this place after the bombs hit and tribes of survivors take up residence in the Boarding Lounges. it'd make a great 4 hour Kevin Costner film - he could film it with Mel Gibson - where Grorg unites his tribe after a border-dispute and takes control of the 30-series lounges before waging war against the evil, brutal forces of Kerglit to avenge his girlfriend who was kidnapped to replenish breeding stocks depleted in the great salmonella epidemic of 2053 (result of the discovery of a batch of old fossilised KFC). the battle scene in the Food Court would be epic. and to make it better, it'd be filmed entirely in the re-de-re-de-reconstructed dead language of the Yidrikaanarin and despite being 4 hours where Costner and Gibson jerk each over off in the background while underpaid actors jump around in filthy high-vis clothes it'll still make a fucking mind, and the whole thing would come about because Gibson and Costner got stuck in transit for a couple of hours on their way somewhere equally pointless.
on the plus side, at least the airline hosties are quite attractive.
the guy sitting across from me at the moment, slicked back hair, sunglasses pushed up on his head, chiselled good looks and fashionable shoes, he's not real. the hairy guy in black sitting on the 1.5x4 metre strip of carpet conveniently located in front of the power point, me, no i'm not real either. everyone here has their coping mechanisms. there's the old lady just getting into her pulp-fiction novel. there's the family sitting on the carpet in Lounge 34 who are play cards with the kids. the Islander lad dawdling on the travellator because he's got nowhere to be for a couple of hours while grannies with zimmer-frames overtake him on the tiles. the opportunist who's plugged his ultra-portable into a handy powerpoint and looks around at the people walking by while he bashes at the keyboard because... well, he can touch-type. can't you? newsagents and book shops running a roaring trade in temporary print. news today, olds tomorrow - sell out today, get the shipment in then sell out to a wholly different bunch of transients tomorrow.
and a thiving ecosystem has sprung up to cater for all these neuvo riche, the grateful recipients of the modern era of inexpensive air-travel. anyone can go anywhere, so everyone does and airports rapidly reach a critical-mass of the number of aeroplanes that can use a runway through a day. efficiency and economy dictate that a seat on the flight unsold is a seat wasted, and so cross-matching databases are written to keep track of it all so that you can tell it that you need to get from Canberra to Perth and it'll suggest stopovers in everywhere from Adelaide to Sydney, discount the under-utilised routes and recommend the chicken so that the airports can move the absolute maximum number of people from where they are to where they need to be while balancing the load so that no one terminal explodes and goes splat.
of course, this means that there's no end of people who've just travelled 300km in the wrong direction so that they could save a buck. people who were happy to accept a 3 hour stopover so that they wouldn't have to fly on the red-eye and endure 5 hours in the air on a discount airline with overpriced stale sandwiches. people who'll seriously consider overcooked 10$ noodles from the foodcourt if it means not being tempted to eat the equally shitty, but even more expensive food on the plane. don't forget here that bored people in our consumerist, throw-away society are prone to shop:
"i'm just going to have a look in Witchery, dear."
you packed enough clothes to last a month and we're only away a fortnight... anyway, didn't you just go shopping on the weekend?
"oh, just go get some coffees. it's not as if we don't have time to kill and maybe i'll find something nice for that dinner out with your parents."
yes sweetie...
and so the cycle of unnecessary commerce continues and thrives, populating what one might consider a hostile environment with more and more plastic and plywood facades with smiling waitrons there to take your order for double-priced cappuchino and cake which you're only eating because it kills some time and inevitably leads to your undiagnosed diabetes causing a hyperglyceamic attack halfway across the Pacific.
oh, it's all entertaining. seriously, don't mind me. i'm just killing time. i have mental images of this place after the bombs hit and tribes of survivors take up residence in the Boarding Lounges. it'd make a great 4 hour Kevin Costner film - he could film it with Mel Gibson - where Grorg unites his tribe after a border-dispute and takes control of the 30-series lounges before waging war against the evil, brutal forces of Kerglit to avenge his girlfriend who was kidnapped to replenish breeding stocks depleted in the great salmonella epidemic of 2053 (result of the discovery of a batch of old fossilised KFC). the battle scene in the Food Court would be epic. and to make it better, it'd be filmed entirely in the re-de-re-de-reconstructed dead language of the Yidrikaanarin and despite being 4 hours where Costner and Gibson jerk each over off in the background while underpaid actors jump around in filthy high-vis clothes it'll still make a fucking mind, and the whole thing would come about because Gibson and Costner got stuck in transit for a couple of hours on their way somewhere equally pointless.
on the plus side, at least the airline hosties are quite attractive.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Snippets #4: on photons...
it's occurred to me over the last few months that my flatmates seem to be allergic to the dark. it's a character trait i've noticed here and there - i'll walk into the house and half the lights are on. they leave their bedroom light on despite the light switch being right on the door. hell, they'll even turn on the hall light even though the door to their room and the door to the living room are about a metre apart. maybe it just doesn't occur to them to turn them off? i don't know.
i'm in the opposite habit - i'm forever turning lights off around this place because... well, why have them on? the light i have in my room is a desk lamp with a CFL in it which is pointed directly at the wall. i read my book at night by the diffused light bouncing off the red feature wall and this serves me quite nicely. i rarely want for more than that. on the weekend i spent most of an evening in here with my young lass with just the LEDs in my laptop strobing along to the music playing in Winamp and this was more than we needed. if i need to visit the kitchen in the night there's usually a more than adequate amount of illumination from the LEDs on the various game consoles, or computers or just the moonlight coming in the back door.
i'm thinking that there's generally plenty of light around to get by if you know where to look. i know where everything is in the house and while i occasionally bump my knee into an errant chair, this is pretty rare. it's similarly rare that you'll find yourself in a place where there's no ambient light whatsoever but it seems that people have this need to banish the darkness. me, i think i prefer for it not to be so bright, and enjoy the ambiguity that the darkness brings and the interplay of light and shadow in my world. the idea of learning braille just so that i can read without having to turn on the light actually holds an odd fascination now i think about it...
i guess you could look at this as an allegory of some kind, but i'll leave those connections up to somebody else...
i'm in the opposite habit - i'm forever turning lights off around this place because... well, why have them on? the light i have in my room is a desk lamp with a CFL in it which is pointed directly at the wall. i read my book at night by the diffused light bouncing off the red feature wall and this serves me quite nicely. i rarely want for more than that. on the weekend i spent most of an evening in here with my young lass with just the LEDs in my laptop strobing along to the music playing in Winamp and this was more than we needed. if i need to visit the kitchen in the night there's usually a more than adequate amount of illumination from the LEDs on the various game consoles, or computers or just the moonlight coming in the back door.
i'm thinking that there's generally plenty of light around to get by if you know where to look. i know where everything is in the house and while i occasionally bump my knee into an errant chair, this is pretty rare. it's similarly rare that you'll find yourself in a place where there's no ambient light whatsoever but it seems that people have this need to banish the darkness. me, i think i prefer for it not to be so bright, and enjoy the ambiguity that the darkness brings and the interplay of light and shadow in my world. the idea of learning braille just so that i can read without having to turn on the light actually holds an odd fascination now i think about it...
i guess you could look at this as an allegory of some kind, but i'll leave those connections up to somebody else...
Monday, September 8, 2008
when you remember that you've forgotten to remember not to forget what you needed to remember...
i'd like to say that i've not much to speak of, but that would be a lie. the truth is that i've had far too much to say for me to filter the signal from the noise, leaving me incoherent and if there's one thing i hate it's using a lot of words to say nothing whatsoever.
today marks one month to the day - 30 days - that i have left in this country. it's all getting... a little insane. there's not so much a surplus of activity, just an increased buzz in the back of my head which i've managed to ignore for the most part. give me another two weeks and it'll be "bullet in the brain" levels, but i'll worry about that later. meanwhile, i still have a job to do, and cash to manage, and stuff to distribute. i now have solid homes for the shit i want to keep, and paying customers for the shit i don't. i've cemented my guarantee'd return to the job i've rather enjoyed for the last half a year. i've even managed to really find out who my friends are, and adequately wash my hands of the wastrels and hangers on i really have no time for anymore. of course, it's after all this has been accomplished that i met someone who seems to have emerged whole and fully formed from the pages of "Mr Raven Meets His Perfect Girl At The Worst Possible Time: A Cautionary Tale".
dear gods... this is the point where i curl up into a ball and rock backwards and forwards muttering "thisisn'thappeningthisisn'thappeningthisisn'thappening" over and over again. forget the cliche'd "where have you been all my life?", how about "where have you been this last year?" still, i choose to believe that timing is everything, and it's important for me to remember that the best things in my life have happened because i let go and rode the flow. trying to fight it has tended to get me dashed against jagged rocks, whereas letting the river take me over the waterfall tends to put me in entertaining situations. it helps that, the nearer i get to 30 (erm... i ask you: where the fuck did that come from?) the more i realise that Right The Fuck Now isn't actually as important as i used to think when i was approaching 20.
you know what they say about love being like a butterfly? sure - let it go, but any geek will tell you how cheap and easy it is to GPS tag things these days so unless that butterfly heads to the backwaters of China a resourceful geek can find it again, oh yes.
psycho-stalker instincts aside though, i've been enjoying having someone around who reminds me what it feels like to have energy and optimism and to live in the moment again. this year's been too much long-term plans and strategies, constantly focusing on events weeks and months in advance, so it's been great to exercise my right-here-and-now tactics. i'd forgotten how alive i felt back in the day when long-term meant working out what you were going to do on the weekend, or during semester-break. for nothing to matter past the coming weekend, or next Tuesday.
i'm not going to go into the rest because... well, i'm not in the mood to commit it to words right now. i'll leave it to say that she's been making me insanely happy (so much so that Shadow's been commenting on it whenever he sees me) and that the only thing keeping me from despairing at the thought of leaving is the though of coming back again.
at the day's end, the trajectory i'm on is climbing to a very definite apex and i know that i'll have a much better perspective on things when i can look down on it all and map it all out correctly. when all that i have is reduced to a couple of bags and wallet thick enough to bludgeon a fat man to death with. when, in exactly 30 days from right now, i'm sitting on an aeroplane over the Indian Ocean and Lou and i are rapidly getting drunker and drunker the further away we get from this place and these people. leaving all this is a delicious insanity - departing the party while everyone's still having a great time and throwing up on the back steps is still in someone's future rather than their messy, embarrassing past... and if the house is boarded up and the party's moved on when i get back then... well... fuck the lot of them. these are the risks we take that make life interesting.
today marks one month to the day - 30 days - that i have left in this country. it's all getting... a little insane. there's not so much a surplus of activity, just an increased buzz in the back of my head which i've managed to ignore for the most part. give me another two weeks and it'll be "bullet in the brain" levels, but i'll worry about that later. meanwhile, i still have a job to do, and cash to manage, and stuff to distribute. i now have solid homes for the shit i want to keep, and paying customers for the shit i don't. i've cemented my guarantee'd return to the job i've rather enjoyed for the last half a year. i've even managed to really find out who my friends are, and adequately wash my hands of the wastrels and hangers on i really have no time for anymore. of course, it's after all this has been accomplished that i met someone who seems to have emerged whole and fully formed from the pages of "Mr Raven Meets His Perfect Girl At The Worst Possible Time: A Cautionary Tale".
dear gods... this is the point where i curl up into a ball and rock backwards and forwards muttering "thisisn'thappeningthisisn'thappeningthisisn'thappening" over and over again. forget the cliche'd "where have you been all my life?", how about "where have you been this last year?" still, i choose to believe that timing is everything, and it's important for me to remember that the best things in my life have happened because i let go and rode the flow. trying to fight it has tended to get me dashed against jagged rocks, whereas letting the river take me over the waterfall tends to put me in entertaining situations. it helps that, the nearer i get to 30 (erm... i ask you: where the fuck did that come from?) the more i realise that Right The Fuck Now isn't actually as important as i used to think when i was approaching 20.
you know what they say about love being like a butterfly? sure - let it go, but any geek will tell you how cheap and easy it is to GPS tag things these days so unless that butterfly heads to the backwaters of China a resourceful geek can find it again, oh yes.
psycho-stalker instincts aside though, i've been enjoying having someone around who reminds me what it feels like to have energy and optimism and to live in the moment again. this year's been too much long-term plans and strategies, constantly focusing on events weeks and months in advance, so it's been great to exercise my right-here-and-now tactics. i'd forgotten how alive i felt back in the day when long-term meant working out what you were going to do on the weekend, or during semester-break. for nothing to matter past the coming weekend, or next Tuesday.
i'm not going to go into the rest because... well, i'm not in the mood to commit it to words right now. i'll leave it to say that she's been making me insanely happy (so much so that Shadow's been commenting on it whenever he sees me) and that the only thing keeping me from despairing at the thought of leaving is the though of coming back again.
at the day's end, the trajectory i'm on is climbing to a very definite apex and i know that i'll have a much better perspective on things when i can look down on it all and map it all out correctly. when all that i have is reduced to a couple of bags and wallet thick enough to bludgeon a fat man to death with. when, in exactly 30 days from right now, i'm sitting on an aeroplane over the Indian Ocean and Lou and i are rapidly getting drunker and drunker the further away we get from this place and these people. leaving all this is a delicious insanity - departing the party while everyone's still having a great time and throwing up on the back steps is still in someone's future rather than their messy, embarrassing past... and if the house is boarded up and the party's moved on when i get back then... well... fuck the lot of them. these are the risks we take that make life interesting.
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