i am a tourist...

i was lying in bed just now, about to switch my laptop off and check in for my nightly trip to la la land when i noticed on Spotify that MCG has been listening to Death Cab For Cutie again - a song i didn't instantly recognise, which made me curious so i clicked on it and let it play for a moment, streaming off that vast treasurehouse of knowledge that is the internet and washing over me like, waves in the way that Death Cab tends to, sweeping me out of my sleepy reverie and dumping my mind back in a place i've not been for some time.

sitting on a creaky wooden chair with an oversized mug of coffee at a table draped in a dirty cloth listening to the Transatlanticism album writing thousands of words that i'm about to cast dejectedly into the aether.

on the right hand side of a bus as it rolls its way out of Austria and into Italy while i sift through the dim recollections of the pub i was in three days ago and ignore the snoring tourists behind me.

sitting in a darkened cafe late at night with my 3rd mug of dirty flat white with canalphones blocking out the hum of the hipsters while 30 Seconds To Mars get existential in my ears and i try to put my thoughts into words and the words into order.

it is the nature of life that it exists only in flux. there is no such thing as a static existence and all good things must end eventually to make way for something else, but i can't help but feel like i managed to trade blue skies for pain, hot ashes for dreams, hot air for cool breeze. when i visualise my life of late in my minds' eye it resolves into an image of me trudging through mile after mile of wasteland, flat and featureless out to the sides with amazing scenes behind me and a haze of dim, ever-receding potential ahead of me. it's melodramatic and bullshit and this i know - i'm surrounded by people who are falling other each other to be near me but if i stop focussing they become ghosts in my foreground.

i wonder sometimes whether i'm trying to force myself into a mould that just doesn't fit. the permanent job, buying a house and settling into this fucking shithole of a town, trying to find peace in possessions and stability... and all i want to do is book a flight and jet off to Seattle, or Tokyo, or Helsinki. i search my unreliable memory, trying to rememeber the last time i felt as peaceful as when i'd just got back to Canberra after spending a year in the world, and i can't find it. i don't know if it's this city that i react so poorly to, or if i'm just trying to shoehorn a size 12 Life into a size 10 Compromise.

the last couple of months have been ok - the challenges of a new job and a happening social life have kept me distracted and inoculated, but i can feel myself slipping into a sullen malaise again where i can't help but flick this lighter on and off again, dreaming of watching it all burn so that i have the excuse to walk away and fuck off into the distance again. i find myself wringing the throttle of my bike like the neck of a wounded pheasant, pouring self-directed rage and impotent frustration through rubber tyres and into the pavement while i try to reconcile what i want to be doing with what i've somehow decided i will do instead.

so if distractions are becoming less and less effective, and i've failed to find an answer in 6 months, does that mean it's time to look somewhere else, from a different angle?

or maybe just broaden the scope...