Bridget's Guest Post: Resurrection + bridge = Happiness?

Musical accompaniment: Happiness: We're all in this together

Motherfucking... 

I sit at my desk at a client-site and find myself enthralled in some jargon-laden text from a document I've been thrown to translate into mortal comprehensibility so that "anyone" could read it when a looming presence at the edge of my vision is gesticulating the desire to be seen. I swivel, fingers still dancing across the keys, finishing the sentence that's dribbling out of my thoughts and smile to acknowledge that he’s got my eye. With the final clatter of keys, I strip off my headset, ready to plunge into the inevitable small talk. It's the usual dance of pleasantries that comprises some arrangement of the following: 

“What do you do? Who are you? I'm Peter. Hi.”

That initial exchange was brief, quickly fragmented by colleagues and the relentless routine of work. Yet, in the days that followed, our conversations meandered through shared interests and general banter. A business card, defiantly flouting WCAG standards, found its way into my hand, an artifact of our growing rapport, but secretly a way to give me his digits, drawing to a finale of "do you want to grab drinks/coffee sometime?"

3 days after that first “Hi,” and I'm spending the night outside, under a cafe table umbrella, rain drumming a chaotic symphony above. My curls fighting the straight form I fried them into whilst I try to decipher meaning from patchwork stories, heedful warnings and guarded disclaimers.  

It isn't the first time someone has caught my interest, but I know how to keep walking. I'm pretty sure that's what people are supposed to do?

As the evening draws to an end, he gets half-way through charting a course for a kiss when my hand shoots out, barricading the way. An impromptu checkpoint, halting the beat of feet along the path to my lips. I couldn't let him leave whilst I stood there frozen in nervous-lockdown. Nonetheless, seconds later I’m staring at the wet bitumen in front of my feet as I walk away and don't break my stride until I reach my car. 

"What the fucking fuck just happened," I think as, hands shaking, I drive home, pull in, get out, lock car and ride my autopilot-driven feet into my apprehensive- and sulking-dog-filled house, my hands empty my pockets, putting the contents into the dump-bowl. I reach the end of my newly-initiated runAway(); subroutine and I can't stop. Moving frantically to my room I get changed, hands shaking, heart pounding, seeking refuge under the covers, but my mind is in runaway mode, relentless, and sleep eludes me.

I am not OK, and few know that; I haven't been for 12 months, five years, eight years... Depending on which event becomes the reference point. 

In the eyes of phantom critics, this all may seem too hasty, a story accelerating ahead before the previous had ended. But those spectral naysayers don't truly exist beyond the confines of my thoughts. Adrenaline switched my head into the defiant state of alert, a stubborn 'screw you' to the idea of rest. My arms secured over my chest, fastening in my heart, curled in the fetal position, I seek an echo of security, a fragment of comfort. 

Trip Down Memory Fucking Lane welcomes you aboard flight FU23, a four and a half hour psychological, turbulent journey from the mirage of stability to the realisation of "fuck okay, that's actual trauma." We give zero shits whether you enjoy the trip, and your comfort is of no importance to our crew whatever. The in-flight entertainment will be your entire life and deepest secrets you kept even from yourself revealed to a psych who’ll provide no indication of how fucked up you really are. And Offer No Help. The meal service will commence shortly with overly salted 'healing' stew and followed by your choice of the bitterest coffee, or most traumatic tea. But until then, sit down, don't buckle up, you are in for a long trip and we don't care if you make it out safely. 

I didn't make it out safely, I still am dealing with the shockwaves from that conversation.

A week ago, I woke up in the way that was more "easing into the day with colours softly blending to create a sunrise on canvas" and less "I can't believe I have to face the horror of another fucking day". In my stirring, an arm rolls over my body pulling me closely to the heartbeat of its owner. 

You. 

Your rough fingers touch my skin and your embrace holds me as if I'm a rare and delicate treasure, with a gentle yet firm urgency, suggesting a deep fear of my slipping away, like a cherished keepsake that might vanish at any moment. Everything was alright, when you held me through the night, and I found myself thinking "isn't it nice to be held instead of clinging onto ghosts." 

Confronting my reflection, the moment of epiphany is palpable, no need for imagination. The last time I let my guard down, allowed my solitude and unreciprocated affections shift onto someone else, I paid a steep price. I had trusted and surrendered my body, only to be left with scars etched deep within my psyche. Now, as I ponder the possibility of setting aside the protective verses of the Psalm of Pete#23, there's a flicker of hope that history won't repeat itself. That this time, maybe, just maybe, I won't end up nursing fresh wounds in the seclusion of my mind. 

Nothing Lasts Forever, so should this even start? 

Finding oneself lost in the space between the familiar comfort of a dream once felt when last I felt truly safe, and the deep blue of my desire and love. In space no one can tread on your dreams. It's the friction of re-entry that burns, and only time will tell where my remains will fall. 

Is this what I get for wanting things? This life that's happened while I was busy making other plans? For things to be other than what they are, you have to give up the infinite possibilities of the deep, and allow yourself the chance to burn bright, knowing that every shooting star will inevitably burn out. But maybe this star will burn bright and long, and land with some remains of itself still intact?

Which is the way?

To experience life is to experience changes; I moved across the country only to find myself pursuing the dreams from a life before, but I insisted on running on the hedonic treadmill. Now I have a life, so it goes... 

I'm try’na wind back the clocks to before… to before I had all the things that I thought would fill up that hole, but the goal keeps receding.

Everything and everyone keeps receding, forever out of the reach of my arms. 

The thing is: I've been 'with' someone until recently, but I've been doing this life, my life, by myself, alone for some time. There's something about being close to someone who, really, remained kilometres away. It haunts you, that proximity interlaced with distance. 

Like the little conversations that happen when you *see* the same person; all the time spent on a patchworked background can't replace the connection missing from relaying stories through the impersonal screen of a handheld device. “Love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience”. But without that shared journey, I'm just a temporary companion, hitching a ride in the middle of their story. I'm there neither for the beginning nor the end, our paths diverging before they even know where they are going. It's an incomplete experience, certainly one that wasn’t shared.

The casual comfort that comes with the certainty of seeing someone again soon. Outside of the occasional visits and a fading echo of love - a love that I watched drive away with a resigned ease - it's been ages since I've felt comfortable enough to let go without clinging. I don't know what it feels like to be okay with ‘goodbye’. 

Comfort being the operative word; that concept which defies my brain. My narrator says that either something is wrong, or something will go wrong, regardless of engineering, logic, or design. Something was wrong; saying goodbye was a warm comfort.

The months leading up to that goodbye really rammed home how much I was already alone, living with an additional 'I' on my RACI that no longer needed to be there. 

Cooking is something that never tripped me up, it was always important - and we loved cooking, creating, making something, and we had joy in sharing. But how can you share food with someone 650 kilometers away? By informing. A meal that I would have taken joy from sharing, now pasted as a .jpg on Discord to be seen, 'thumbs-up' reacted, but not shared. 

So, I find myself 2 hours away from a beach, no bottle or paper in hand, laptop at my fingertips and a page full of ramblings. I ponder, what the fuck am I trying to say with all this rubbish?

I haven't decided whether to chase the shooting star or capitulate and sink into the deep blue. 

Can I keep pretending to be okay when the touch of a man who is dead inside is enough to make me melt into a puddle? Can I lie to myself when I Know The Storm Is Coming, and the smallest of downpours will turn that puddle into an ocean?

Emotions dictated that you face your fears, lower your fists, and find a Bridget to get over it. You won't need to re-learn "dating”. It will just fall.  

With or without help from the gods. 

Extraction by way of retraction...

Musical accompaniment: Jebediah - Please Leave 

The jets spooled up and started generating thrust as if driven by the same elastic band that was finally starting to snap me back to where I came from. 

Finally. 

The equilibrium moment in the bungie-jump into the hell of my past seemed to last a lifetime, but in a few weeks when some time has passed I know it will feel like the blink of an eye. Of the many things I've learned in the many days I've clung to the surface of this planet, it's that interminable and infinitesimal are just two words for the same quantum moment; which we use depends entirely upon our perspective from our relative position along the line prescribed by Time's Arrow. 

Sitting in this indifferently-comfortable Virgin Airlines-branded seat constructed in a factory I once watched roll past the window of a bus to Seattle, Washington, USA I give no fucks either way, but I'm glad for every second which passes, and the 236 metres it propels me further away from the place I left 234 days ago. Every moment of comfortable familiarity felt like a blanket weighted with glass beads, each one inscribed with a memory, and for every one that, upon inspection, played back a fond one there were three more filled with the screaming void of every mistake I'd ever made, everyone I'd ever hurt, and everything I've ever wanted to leave behind so I could be a better me, me-ified, me-born. 

I'm not sure what I've wanted more over the last 10 days; to go back, or just to not be there. As the days flowed past I started feeling like I was fading to match the scenery, each one harder and harder to handle. 

I acknowledge that I'm leaving not proud, not noble, not with my head held high. I'm just trying to slide thru with as little friction as possible, leaving as small a wake as I can manage, not even the hero of my own story, just a Boy who's Lost and wants to go Home, flying though the night towards the second airport from the right of the map, hoping to reach it by morning.  

I've no control in this moment, no agency, nothing to do but wait. I've no ruby slippers to click together and make a wish, just the second-hand ticking away on a ruby bearing'd movement, not counting up or down, but around and around and around, waiting until the ride the ticket I bought will take me back to where I'd rather be. 

I fucking hate Perth, not because there's anything inherently wrong with it (although there's plenty), but because of the who I remember being when the soles of my shoes meet the pavement of its cloyingly familiar streets, and the who I can't not be when I'm there. The weight of my own history rests heavily on my shoulders; have you ever tried to carry the weight of you and all of your past selves around? 

Fortunately, practical programming practice prescribes the use of pointer-variables, so post-compile they all precipitate to a particular point. For once metacursion has a practical application, at least where life-hacking Virgin Airline's baggage allowance is concerned. 

I have no idea how or where to finish this; finishing implies an 'end', and that's not what this feels like. 

Whilst every 4.24 seconds, and each kilometre that represents, is a relief, the weight on my mind is in no way diminished. The same elastic band which extracted me from my personal hell is nonetheless propelling me back into a battleground I not so much chose, as landed in. I won't pretend that I've the energy or strength to hit it running, but I will at least stick it, and make an impact. 

Sepia stained skies...

The duty that had dragged me back discharged, I waited until darkness and a cool breeze fell, and with both the mosquitos and Mother Dear having taken themselves to bed I finally let myself flow like the rest of the waste-water down to my old spot by the river. 

I'll no less pretend to having an unpleasant time over the last three days than I will having much to say to the old friends at Ricky's party yesterday. I've certainly had a busy schedule, but also a fairly relaxed one, with plenty of time to look at the scenery as I go from one place to the next. This evening's been the first really empty space I could slot myself into, so I have. I nearly wound up here that first night, but Binky was free and it was a good opportunity to get in some quality time. Friday was good, if somewhat over-inebriated fun, which left me a little the worse for wear, and late for the event on Saturday. I hadn't intended on making an entrance, but being 45min late to the party will do that. I'd telegraphed my attendance only slightly more loudly than I had my departure so there were a few looks of surprise when I walked prodigally through the door. 

"Yes, I'm still alive."
<No, I've barely given you a second thought since quite some time before I left.>
"Yes, my cat is still a douche-canoe."
<Oh, didn't you hear I have a cat? He moved into my carport last December and now he's stuck with me.>
"I'm finding Canberra exactly where I left it, but also strangely peaceful."
<I suppose you could call 7 months and 24 days worth of planning "sudden" when you didn't care enough to talk to me the entire time, and I didn't care enough to tell you.>
<Plus I fucking de-friended you, but I guess you didn't notice.>
"I'm pretty heavily booked for the next week, I'm afraid."
<You didn't have time for me last summer when I was being excluded from all the social events, so don't go getting your hopes up.>
"Still working with the same mob, they keep finding things for me to unfuck."
<You couldn't understand it a year ago, and it's only gotten weirder since then, so let's save some oxygen, shall we?>

Ian was there tho, as he'd been the night before, which was nice. 

Afterwards I went back to Ricky's and we settled down on the couch with pizza before she passed out 5 min into the second episode of Loki, then we watched the rest of it whilst she nursed her hangover this morning, went for brunch, and then passed out again for the middle hour of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. It was a pleasant time, all told. Just after 3PM I packed my bag, said goodbye to her dad for what may well (bearing in mind his health is anything but) be the last time, and hiked over to Gosnells Station to catch the train back up to Lathlain. 

Something that's been hitting me in the eyeballs everywhere I've gone over the last 77 hours has been just how flat, and brown, this place is. Not just the topography, but the houses as well. Half-built single-storey beige shoe-boxes rising out of grey sand under a washed-out sky the colour of dust and stagnation. I've become so used to looking out over verdant-green hills under vivid skies of blue and violet and rose-gold and peach. It's not that Canberra is 'new'; it's just 'now', but Perth has been feeling very 'old', and entirely 'then'. 

I've been trying to put my finger on why the word I keep coming back to is "peaceful", but the mercury bead refuses to stay on the page. My lifestyle's not changed all that much; I still spend most of my time alone, I just seem to be choosing that instead of the alternative being too hard do deal with. I walk more, but I'm still just walking to a workplace, or the grocery store. I still work, and work some more, then sit around watching the world grow dark chatting to people online, listening to music, and bashing words into this year's laptop. Perhaps it's as simple as the view; a wide, open expanse full of colour and movement feels a lot more free, but also connected, especially when compared to the white picket fence under the branches of the trees I let grow over the yard. More and more it seems that the barrier I used to keep the rest of the world out was just as much a cage I locked myself into, or the cast on a broken limb left on long after the bone had set and was now causing the muscles to atrophy. 

Even sitting here along the river with a cool breeze on the back of my neck... it's nice here, but the city lights which have provided a backdrop for so many hundreds of conversations seem so very far away and washed out right now. It's all so familiar, and all so the same, and for all that I'm sitting still and my phone's GPS is pinning me to this spot on the map, I feel like I'm so very far away and still accelerating. 

I'm here for another week, and whilst I did what I came here to do there's still plenty to get done, so no point in whinging about it. So much of my world exists in the place between my ears anyway, when I close my eyes... really, I could be anywhere. On the day I left I spoke about "accept[ing] the fall", so now must be time to accept the landing and that this is just where my feet need to be. 

Musical afterthought: Metric - Oh Please

The rest is on me. 

Just when I thought I was out...

Something's been gnawing at me for weeks, nibbles and nips at first, until a couple of hours and a flight ago I found myself sitting in Canberra Airport anxiously chewing a hole in my lip. I'm flying back to Perth for the first time since I left 10 days and 7 months ago and the order of my comings and goings reversed; apparently I'm having some difficulty with that. 

Of course, a Perth trip means Perth music. It seems like my decision to throw on Ian Kenny's side-project brought it to my attention. 

Musical accompaniment: Birds of Tokyo - Circles 

I've been looking forward to this trip for a while, since booking it in August, after finding out that Ricky would be handing in the last assignment for her Bachelor of Commerce the day before her birthday in July, after being interviewed as the Subject Matter Expert by the Project group in her Entrepreneurship unit, after feeding in hints and tips from my MBA-studies, all the way back to making encouraging, supportive noises all those years ago when she turned around one day and told me her employer would pay for a chunk of it. 

"But I'm not smart enough to go to uni!"
"Of course you are! Bunch of us did, and we were kids at the time. You're all grown up'n shit. You'll slay it."
"But..."
"I like big butts, but I don't see how that's relevant. That said, go get your dumbfuck-bogan arse enrolled!" 

OK, perhaps it was less sweary than that... no, that can't be right. Differently sweary? It was a long time ago. Long before I started encouraging her to see if her Public Service job would move her over to Canberra, which in turn was quite some time before I decided to move back here myself. 

Going back for the "End of Uni/Birthday" Party was a no-brainer, and I've squeezed a lot of meetings and appointments into the next 10 days. It promises to be a good trip. 

I've really not been looking forward to this fucking trip. I didn't want to book myself as Unavailable in the work calendar. I really didn't want to organise a cat-sitter, or pack my bag, or go to the airport. I want to be sitting on my balcony which, for all the noise of the traffic and Emergency Vehicle sirens only gets mostly drowned out by the music blaring from my headphones, is... quiet. The thing I do for a living has been more than chaotic enough, let alone what I carry around between my ears. Every day, whether literally or metaphorically, closing the door to my flat means I don't just get to block out the former, I get to sit above and look down on it, process and understand the latter, push music into my brain and flush the contents out through my fingers. 

Going back out into the world again means leaving my ivory tower; I'm not sure which is worse. 

Sitting in the Departure Lounge, it also occurred to me that I pissed off, or at least slighted, a bunch of people when I left. What if I run into them? No, I don't anticipate torches and pitchforks at the airport. No, I don't think they actually care, or even noticed. As I told faux-Bosslady the other day, "Never tell me not to be paranoid, paranoia is what keeps me and the people around me safe, because paranoia is what keeps me vigilant and the angles covered. And don't say what you're thinking, just don't. The least trustworthy thing that can come out of your mouth right now is 'you can trust me,' so don't say it." Running into someone I de-friended out of a sense of betrayal is an awkwardness I'd much rather not have to deal with, so I'd better make sure if I do I have some cutting one-liners ready to seal the deal and turn antipathy into actual animosity, right? It's much easier to avoid awkward conversations when they won't speak to you in the first place. 

That's a sane, sensible approach that any rationally well-adjusted grown up would take, right? 

Even in the absence of angry mobs, Perth is full of ghosts and echoes, and several hours later sitting in this cramped seat half-watching Sisu on the guy in the middle-seat's iPad, I'm realising just how little I want to go there. I'm an hour away from landing and I already want to leave, but perhaps that's just anxiety talking. I'd say something about rolling the dice and seeing if I feel better about things when I'm on the ground, but my Mother's picking me up from the airport, so those dice are more loaded than a Program Manager's schedule. 

I will, of course, stop complaining, politely ask the lovely Qantas hosties if I could trouble them for a straw, and suck it up. Whatever doesn't kill me just makes me more annoyed and cynical, after all, and will probably give me plenty to write about. 

Gaude, sciens te semper inexpletus...

The guitar-backed intro sounded nice, but it was the drum machine kicking in that gave me the "wide eyes" moment in Swing & A Miss. The same thing happened a few seconds into Get Well Soon, and I took a moment to sit there and marvel at how each note from every instrument stood apart even as they flowed together, thinking "Man, am I glad I ordered these new earbuds. They sound AMAZING." 

There's plenty of music on my phone I could have used for my first play-test of the new wireless earbuds that arrived today, but the next Oliver Tree song after the last one I'd been listening to seemed as good as any. I didn't need these; I'd justified them to myself through the aggravation I get every time I try using my last pair for phone calls (they were, and still are, incredibly well-reviewed for use in calls, but I found out after throwing my credit card across the counter that most reviewers' ears don't block the microphone ports like mine or all the other annoyed people on Reddit's do. Caveat emptor, I suppose). Justifying the OTHER pair I ordered at the same time was harder to do, and ultimately came down to throwing a #YOLO card down along with the one I use for company expenses. 

Because once all the hand-wringing around needing a hands-free solution that works properly, on-selling or just outright-gifting my hand-me-downs to other folks, tax deductions, and being up-to-date on current products and tech is out of the way, that's what it comes down to. Listening to music is one of my few untainted, guilt-free, not-also-bad-for-me-somehow joys in life and being able to hear it better makes (well, we all know "me happy" isn't the right phrase) that better. 

I ordered both pairs at the same time, in fact these were what I was about to hit the Pay button on when I decided to have a poke around the other stuff that store had on sale and stumbled across the over-ear cans which arrived a month ago. There was a delay on these, I found out days later, but the store was nice enough to split-ship which is why I've been enjoying the hell out of the other ones in the meantime. These things happen when you pre-order the new hotness, but that isn't to say that the wait hasn't been annoying in the way that anything sitting around unfinished annoys me. I came to the realisation a while ago that I'm hugely disinterested in Doing Things, I want them to be Done. 

I go to the cinema, or a concert, and all I can think about when the curtains rise is how I wish it was over. 
Hand me a cake mix and I'll cheerfully get on with mixing things and sticking them in the oven, but by the time it's out, cooled, and I've smeared the icing across the top I'm over it... 
Eating the damn thing is a chore, and I just want it gone. 

I wonder, as I explain this, if that will be what happens if I ever try dating again? Will I be able to enjoy the experience, or will I get to a point and want to scream "Well you're lovely, and this has been nice and all, but can we skip to the messy break-up so I can write a bunch of emo blog-posts about the experience, get over it and get back to being lonely again?" 

It's an easy mistake to make imagining that having this or achieving that will make you happy; when I have a house of my own, or that car I've always dreamed of, date the perfect girl, land that amazing job, or visit some exotic place... I don't want to sound like I'm bragging here, but I've had all of those things multiple times over, and even taking my neurodivergence into account I'm the walking antithesis of "happily ever after". 

I'm not even talking in a "casual nihilism" way, or a Marvin The "This Will All End In Tears" Android sort of way, simply that if you set your expectations on the literal interpretation of a narrative shortcut you deserve every bit of the ennui coming to you.
You can't achieve happiness through acquisition, because there will always be something else to acquire. 
You can't maintain happiness by having, because every thing you have will inform you of all the things you don't. 
You can't keep happy by living thru the things you did, because the person who did that died the instant it happened, and was then reborn as the person who remembered having done it, again, and again, until they were ultimately reborn as you, looking at a sepia-toned photo pinned to the wall of smiling people, one of whom you may once have been, off which is peeling a faded Dymo label which still faintly reads "Happier times..." 

But I just realised that all three Oliver Tree albums have played their way back to where I started and GODDAMN am I enjoying the shit out of listening to them through these mildly-extravagant (although purchased with a considerable discount) earbuds. This guy makes some incredibly catchy music with lyrics that rip your heart out thru the hole they punch in your gut, and man I gotta say, I've enjoyed every time I've listening to them, and I'm enjoying it even more now that I can hear every part of it. He may not be what I need to listen to tomorrow, but this is the soundtrack of my zeitgeist today and I'm grateful to have it. 

You could say that music is like a friend, or a cat who showed up in your carport and wouldn't leave. None of these things make me happy, but I'm glad I have them. 

Because that's the "Eureka!" moment; when you realise that it's not about having what you want because you can never have everything, and even if you could where would you put it? 

It's about wanting what you have; what you worked for, what you tripped over on YouTube, what you were born with, or what you built. Whether or not you want more, or bigger, or faster, or in different colours, is all irrelevant; if what you have doesn't spark joy, why have it at all when you just have to keep carrying it around? Marie Kondo that shit and just maybe you'll jettison your misery along with it, and if you divest yourself of everything and you're still miserable, then perhaps that's just something you are, and nothing to do with what you do or don't have. 

You may or may not be able to do anything about that; I'm still working that one out myself. What I do have is an empty table at the bar behind which I've left a card linked to my corporate expense account. Come have a seat and a drink on me, if you want. 

It would spark some joy for me if you did. 

Staring into space...

I hung up the phone and with robotic motion programmatically poured myself a drink. Looking up from the floor I realised I was still on my feet, my fall arrested by a hand gripping the counter, and I contemplated how out of sync my thoughts were from my memory whilst I stared into space. 

Musical accompaniment: Oliver Tree - All In All 

I picked up my glass and went back out to the balcony where I'd left my laptop, the ever-present view out over Black Mountain, and Beckett-in-exile (because he's declared a fatwa against the Spider Plant which Sandra left me as a housewarming present, and jihad goes both ways). Out here in the darkness of my apartment's Oort cloud I sat, bathed in the backlight of my personal and professional universe, whilst ice cubes died with a pop and a clink in the amber warmth enclosed by titanium-crystal glass. 

Conceding the battle against nihilism, I'd just ordered pizza delivery when the message came in: 

I dialled Pete's number as I went down the lift to take collection, and shoved what I received into the oven to keep it warm. By the time we hung up it had grown tepid, but that detracted nothing from the flavour; mass-produced pizzas are a dish best-served cold, furthermore it masks the taste of ashes when one finds themselves dining on them. 

My hand went from gripping the banister to the bench as I orbited in and out of the double-glazed door demarking the frigid outer-system and the overly-warm temperate zone nearer the fridge. These conversations have been happening more and more often; dirty snowballs shedding mass every time he chances his luck in hell in an attempt to leave a mark before he burns out and fades away. 

Staring out into the empty grey of an overcast sky the colour of a television tuned to a dying business-plan, I went looking for words to describe the texture and taste of the moment I had to tell my once-valued-client-now-dear-friend that he needed to take a knife to the throat of his dream.

 They were hard to find; the fault is, as always, my own. 

The 109th Rule of Acquisition dictates that "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack," but we forget sometimes that 'value' is subjective; all in all I've come to realise that it's what the client wants that's most important. If the Emperor can proudly parade down the promenade in the proverbial, perhaps we've a paradoxical exchange rate vis a vis pride? 

Gripping the handle of my balcony door for the penultimate time that evening I realised that the question "Is this the hill you want to die on?" is only 'rhetorical' when you're young. You don't perceive that you've passed perihelion until you've presented your pate to the prosecutor's proboscis, proclaiming: 
"Come at me bro!" 

I might be beyond help, but somewhere along the line I've dedicated my life to securing the hill upon which shines a light to guide those who want to help even though they feel helpless. I might not be able to do it for everyone, or even tell them how, but I want every one of my fellow travellers to be able to look up from the dark and empty places they must walk and know that it can be done. 

Thinking about the loneliness I could see in Pete's voice, white-knuckles gripping the wheel waiting for the kick from the wind he so desperately needs to shake his sails, I let go of the rail and went to stoke the beacon's fire. Whether it serves as a star to steer by, or a light on the horizon when his dreams fade to grey, the warmth of knowing he's not alone is the least I can give him. 

The Fall of the House of Jericho...

Musical accompaniment: 3TEETH - Drift

I wrote a thousand words, which I subsequently threw in the bin in disgust, trying to express what I realised I could, and should, have done in four: 

I'm sofa king tired. 

Over-thinking the cause of my writer's block, I realise that just like most of the problems I'm called upon to solve, I was beating around the bush when I should have just set it on fire. We've all fallen victim to the comparative fallacy tho, because whilst there are plenty of people who've walked harder roads, shouldered heavier loads, or pulled sharper needles from greater haystacks, the difference between perseverance and prolapse is the same regardless of whether you're a lion or a lamb; it's the weight of a single straw. 

It's no mystery why we downplay the weight we struggle to carry around - how many times have you staggered and reached out for help only to be told that other people are doing it harder? When everyone's expendable, woe betide the squeaky wheel; no one wants to get greased. 

So fuck that grinding noise, because I'm the King of So Far Tired. 

So come at me, bro, and I'll share with you the journey which brought me to this place. I'll go back and walk it through all over again with you. I'll carry what took years to accumulate all over again from the start, just so you can walk in my footsteps, and see how I did it. You can stand on my shoulders if that affords you a better perspective, and I'll carry you without a word of complaint. Then, when we find ourselves standing in the same places we do now, if you can still stand at all, and you want to tell me again how I just need to suck it up and find the strength to keep carrying it, even though it only gets heavier... 

Then I'll gift it to you; my past can be your present. You can have it all; my struggle and my crown, my weakness and my burden, my dignity and my pride; my empire of dirt. I'll take off my sandals and kneel in the dust of the holy ground before you. You can show me how weak I am, and how strong you are; you can show me how it's done. 

Because I'm burned out, and I'm bushed. 

and I'm So Fucking Tired. 

Who needs context when you have eloquence?

Obviously the solution is to ignore the problem...

I realised too late that I'd made eye contact with my worst fucking enemy, and the battle of wills was on. 

I've stared down CISO's. 
I've made corporate sociopaths blink. 
I've had colours-wearing Outlaw MC bikers pull along-side at the lights, nod, say "Nice bike, mate!" and let me go first. 
I can out-stare my cat, and he's a proper dyed-in-the-wool narcissist. 

This fucker's an indomitable son-of-a-bitch tho, and I've been off my game lately, so reaching for the "break glass" option I grabbed the present by the lapels and offered him the gift of "surprise!" by way of the time-honoured Liverpool Kiss. 

Bastard damn-near made me shatter the mirror with my forehead. 

Senses reeling, looking back in the glass, I took a moment to remember who I was, and that the horrible cunt I was staring at was me, and did a quick inventory whilst I took stock. 

A few weeks ago I closed off my second project (in the spare time left over from the one I was originally engaged to run), increasing my lead over any other Project Manager in the org for "Successfully Delivered Projects" to 2. 

Today I received the Purchase Order from my company's largest client confirming the next contract extension; the value beat my previous-best annual salary-equivalent rate by a good couple of thousand dollars, which was nice. It was only a 6 month contract tho, which is Fucking Ludicrous. 

Even more gratifyingly, when I caught up with Rick a couple of Sundays ago he observed that the walking I've been doing has been paying off because I was "looking pretty trim mate, way better than when I saw you last in Perth."
"Yeah? Nice of you to say, mate."
"Yeah, you fucking looked like shit, mate. Now you just look a bit like the north-end of a south-bound cow." 
"... Thanks?" 
"Hey," he said, tipping me last of his pint before tipping it down his throat, "reckon you must be doing something right." 

Although I'd be fucked if I can put my finger on what exactly. When people praise you for the matter-of-fact stuff like Doing The Job Properly and Taking It All The Way Through To The End, but are "meh" about your most challenging achievements like Getting Out Of Bed Every Day and Keeping Yourself Alive For The Last 1000 Days, sometimes it's like up is down and black is white. 

"Yeah, I'm so good at what I do that I keep getting told 'Nah, that'll never work' long after I handed over the As Built, and I'm pulling in cash hand-over-fist, but in more important news did I mention I slept six hours straight last night? I even managed to stop and eat lunch three days in a row! 
HOW GREAT IS THAT??" 

One of these days I'll accept that I'm an outlier and stop trying to sit in with the cool kids, but it's hard to not feel left out when they keep saying you're not right even after you've proven them wrong. 

Meanwhile, I'm finding myself in a state of gradually accumulating encumbermence, with my feet frozen to the ground on a cold white plane, with no reference point, and no light to guide me. I keep shaking off the snow falling on my shoulders, only to watch it fall in an ever-increasing mound around my ankles. I have four drafts in varying states of ideation; things I actually want... even feel I need to write, but no matter how much marble I carve off, the blocks stubbornly refuse to reveal the Davids inside. Every time I heft my hammer I make less and less of an impression, my chisels shattering like glass, whilst the flakes rise up towards my knees. Eventually you get so cold you stop shaking. 

The other day, after much ineffective faffing around the edges, I reached for my hammer and it refused to come to hand. 

Whinging about my inversely-proportional dysphoria when it comes to success earlier this evening at Amy, who seems to have distilled the concept of "uncomplicated pragmatic optimism" into a cocktail I've come to call Occam's Canadian, replied: 

"Just keep writing...
Ok I have to go hang upsidedown off a pole now! Cya!"

So I wrote this, which is what it is. 
Make of it what you will. 

The gap between When and Now...

Musical accompaniment: Sevendust - Waffle

Over the last week or two, after months of multi-threaded, nose-to-the-grindstone, eye-on-the-prize "Ideate -> Plan -> Execute", I've noticed that my mental To Do List has been gradually atrophying as tasks get competed, ticked off, and disappear with a cheerful *Pling!*. Somehow that cheerfulness has failed to infect my demeanour, but that's far from unexpected; I am after all, in the statistical context of the last decade, "a miserable cunt". Nonetheless, as the items on my list transition from 'Activity' to 'History', the one at the bottom remains stubbornly at "0% Complete". Every time I check it glares back mockingly: 

Title: Get a life

Deliverables: 

• Fucked if I know; 
• You're supposed to be The Smartest Motherfucker In The Room; and
• Sort yourself out, dumbfuck. 

It would seem my Executive Function Assistant is sick of my shit; I'd fire him, but can I really blame him? He's an arsehole, but I've got a point. 

"Life," said Allan Saunders, "is what happens to us while we are making other plans," which sounds like a whole-cloth-bullshit cop-out to me, cut from the same bolt as "one day I'm gonna...", "maybe next year when I get that promotion...", and "there but for the grace of God go I." 

Somewhere in the 00's I seized the opportunity presented by what I saw at the time as utter tragedy and in a barely-considered grief-driven moment of clarity I declared "well fuck you God, I thought we'd made a fucking deal, and whilst we're at: it fuck Grace, fuck me, and fuck the rest of you. Hold my... no fuck that as well," drained my pint, and as I started accelerating in a direction not so much forwards or backwards, but in no uncertain terms 'away', "I'm fucking going." 

A decade later I decided to run away again, from the circus this time, to go join 'the real world'. That worked out about as well as one would expect; it turns out Hollywood has been lying to us all this time and "what she's having" is just another little death wrapped in a different texture of misery, and if you order that you get it as well as the one you already have, not instead of, and twice as hard. 

"No more running away," I committed myself, and I'll be the first to admit that it was not an utter end-to-end catastrophe. I nailed my feet to the floor, built what I've been reliably informed was "a life" with someone, and it might have been more "Tyler & Marla" than "Ozzie & Harriet", but at least it wasn't "Sid & Nancy". For a while I got to eat in the warm, softly-lit restaurant full of happy-looking diners with the small-but-prominent sign on the door which reads "Solo diners will not be accommodated: We only accept parties of two or more," instead of gazing in longingly with eyes as hungry as my stomach, and as empty as my heart. 

It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't so imperfect that I didn't try again because surely I couldn't make the same mistakes twice. I was correct; I went on to make entirely different mistakes. 

"Life," I decided, "is what happens between crises," but as one crisis rolled into the next, and they began to overlap, I realised I was mistaken again because if you bite into any of them they all taste the same. 

Friday 28/07/2023 10:31

That sat in Drafts for two fucking months before I came back to it, distracted by one thing after another. It wasn't until I had another three stillborn thoughts racked up, each of which I wanted to avoid facing more than the last, that I came back to see if I could work out where I was going with it. 

My, don't I waffle on? 

Two days turned into two weeks turned into two months and I've no idea, so moving right along: All That Remains - Two Weeks

I was hoping that by re-reading, and correcting the typo's, whilst replaying the music I was listening to at the time I could reset to that mood and play it forward again, but things have moved on. I know I was building towards a "reframe"; I'd created the circumstance for re-creation, but instead of reinvention my resurrection seemed to be more of a restart, reset on the same set of rails which would see me running up that same road and down that same hill that I seem to push shit up again and again. 

But life moves on, and like tears in rain the moment seems to have been lost in time. 

Wherever I was, I'm certainly not there any more. A week or so ago the latest bubblegum crisis popped and kicked me out of "where am I going?" straight into the Go I was absolutely not Ready to. It's been another adrenaline- and amphetamine-fuelled surge of levers flipped, triggers pulled, and escape-hatches blown, with risks recalculated in real-time because who gives a fuck whether you're too cool to look at explosions, ain't nobody got time for that. 

I'll lament existential about my inability to affect meaningful change in my life when I have the luxury of shit being a whole lot less on fire, yo. 

But that's a story for tomorrow when I've reached the amorphous landmass marked on the map as Outrageous Fortune, not two months' worth of yesterdays ago when the opposition hadn't switched their slings and arrows for Pete-seeking missiles and started throwing them out of the pram along with the rest of their toys, forcing me to phase shift straight from walking Christ-like to running like hell on a sea of troubled water beneath which I can see dragons writhing through the blur of my feet on our outbound flight from Paradise Never Had. 

On an order of chaotic magnitude...

 Musical accompaniment: Sean Townsend - Chillswitch Engage

If you want to understand me, you need to understand how I see the world. 

Ever since I was aware enough of the concept of "self" as being distinct from "everything else", ever since I realised that for every action there was a reaction, ever since I understood just how little I understood, I've looked out into the world and seen patterns. 

Cause and effect. 
Problem, reaction, solution. 
If this, then that. 

Where most see the chaos of balls bouncing around the surface of a stained pool table after the break in a dingy pub on a Friday night, I see connected chains of one thing leading to the next, traceable, proportional, predictable, but guided by the analogue input of hands shaking from the weariness of a long week in the office and a jug and a half of Tooheys New; each and every interaction the product of force, momentum, torque, angle, material elasticity and plasticity, gravity, and friction. I realised that every event was traceable, that if you could witness everything that was occurring within the perspective light-cone of "here" and "now", and quantify the variables to sufficient granularity, you could see everything that had led to this moment, and everything which was about to occur, such that you could accurately call which balls would fall into which pocket and which would fly off the table and into that guy's pint of beer. 

Everything we call "chaos" is simply shorthand for "effects for which we cannot perceive the cause". 
When it goes against us, we call it "The Hands of Fate".
When it goes in our favour, we call it "The Grace of God". 

In my teens I read The Bible from the start and saw the hypocrisy inherent in that fiction sold as "The one, true, ineffable word of God", applied the logic that if I, who was imperfect, could easily detect the imperfection in what was purported to be "true", then "this-shit-don't-add-up" and "ineffable-be-fucked". If ever there was a God or Fate, there wasn't now. 

Because there is no God; there's only us. 

Everything we see, feel, hear, touch, perceive, and leads us to believe... it's all patterns we either can't detect or can't understand, the same as I've never really understood people because people were illogical and did irrational, stupid things, as if they couldn't comprehend all the things which seemed obvious, and made so much noise that they drowned out the beauty of the songs I heard everywhere I went to the point where I wouldn't leave the house without something in my ears to drown them out so that eventually I stopped being able to hear it myself. 

But whilst my ears were plugged, my eyes were open, and I watched, and I tested, and I tried, and I failed, and through it all my brain recorded, and I remembered, and eventually I became able to truly see, and in seeing I could verify what my ears could hear, and separate the noise from the signal. 

Even then I found people bewildering because whilst I could see the patterns in their behaviour I couldn't understand what it all meant and I kept getting it wrong again and again and it was all so confusing that I'd given up hope of ever being able to when a psychopath pointed out I was a sociopath so I can only apply the metric of my own experience because I can't empathy and that was OK and it didn't make me wrong but something in my head was broken but that didn't mean I was and I shouldn't keep trying to fix it because it couldn't be but I should keep trying to be better because I was so I did and I have and to this day I still am. 

As time went by, and my experiences piled up, the patterns I saw in the people I encountered resolved into meaning, defining more and more granularly, like a picture downloaded over a dialup internet connection in the last decade of last century. I integrated these patterns to create models, and by paying attention to the quaver in someone's voice and their 1000 yard stare in the video of a Teams meeting I could see the breaking of their heart and how close their resolve was to failing, because I've been in all three of those places, and applying that to the models I'd built for who, and what they are I could later say to them what the logic of cause and effect dictated they needed to hear because it's what I, if I were them, and they were me, and our roles reversed, would need to hear. 

It's all patterns, and whilst patterns can be expressed as maths I couldn't for the life of me explain even the smallest piece of it to you in less than a thousand words. The tragedy of all this is that whist my brain can calculate all of this adaptively, in real-time, I can't because I'm terrible at maths. 

But my heuristics are amazing. 

My brain is a computational engine which took over 40 years of data to train, but now that it's finally become useful it's also become ineffable, like God. 

But there is no God; there's only us. 

Each, and every one of us. 

That's how I see the world, and if that makes no sense to you, you are not alone; you've found yourself in a very select club in which I also count myself a member because whilst I wrote, and live this, I won't pretend to understand it. We are all lost, cast-away, confused, craving comfort; we are all alone, therefore you are amongst friends because we are all in the same place. 

Each, and every one of us. 

On knees that won't bend...

Musical accompaniment: Oliver Tree - Me, Myself & I

"You don't even have to write as or about yourself. What would you say if you were someone else?"
 - Penpal

He found himself stuck in a pause, trapped in the gap between moments, the weightlessness experienced at the apex between the pounding of running feet, the period between stumble and impact we call "falling", the quantum instant which connects two otherwise unrelated sentences; the semi-colons describing the triumvirate of "me; myself; and I". 

With the solid ground upon which he built his church turning to quicksand beneath his feet, he scrambled for purchase, reached out to connect himself with something real. 

"Thematically cliched as it may be in this context, but I love you, man." 

There was solace and camaraderie in that indescribable moment, and with a solid point-of-reference/star upon which to hitch his wagon he watched it all fall away. 

He took a breath, exhaled, tried to reorient. Up and Down are a subjective concept; when gravity fails both are as arbitrary as a description of the colour "blue" to someone who only sees the world in monochrome. All he knew was that he was the only common factor in everything he'd experienced, that if anyone should have known better it was him. 

He'd taken risks, he knew he took them; things had come out against him, and therefore he had no cause for complaint. 

That objective truth made his pain no less real. It was, and he accepted it, but whether he was rushing towards the ground or the ground rushed towards him was going to make no subjective difference to the bones which where about to get broken, or how much this was going to hurt. 

Oliver Tree - Hurt 

When you carry the weight of the heavens on your shoulders, you don't get to shrug. When he set out to prove a point, every motherfucker in the room wrong, and put them all to shame, he couldn't allow himself to. For that reason, if no other, when he took on that mantle of responsibility he girded his loins, gritted his teeth, locked his knees, and muttered: 

"Victory or death."

The weight building on the yoke he carried across his broad shoulders, slings and arrows pelting trapezius and laterals, and strength beginning to fail, over the course of his titanic struggle he realised that he was still standing not because he wouldn't falter, but because he wasn't able to. Arms locked and shoulders braced, legs tensed in position over knees which wouldn't so much refuse to bend as couldn't, he was committed. He'd always avoided commitment; there was always an out. He'd never found a hill he was willing to die on, needle he couldn't thread, or dead-end without a night-soil lane he couldn't parkour over the fence into and échapper down, with less shit on than behind him. 

But if he didn't stand for something, he stood for nothing, so with everything and nothing to prove, one more smouldering straw fell out of a brimstone-scented sky full of fire. Refusing to submit might be a parable of fortitude, but being unable to is an unspeakable hell. As the weight increased straw-by-smouldering-straw, each a feather tilting the scales against his heart, and as much as he wanted to beg to falter, his knees refused. So it was he began to splinter, stress-fractures cutting towards his core, parts of himself falling away, falling into dust. 

As pieces of himself elided, evaporating into nothing before they could encounter the ground, he wished he could bend like a willow rather than shattering like an oak, but the weight of what he carried around shattered his spine and he crumbled. In the end, of all the things to fall to earth it was the burden he carried that impacted last, crushing the smouldering embers that used to be his self. 

Oliver Tree - Jerk

Looking up from the Pensieve Pool of blended selves and shared experience, I considered the convergent threads I could no longer separate one from the other, prismatic colours separated and converging, each distinct but irrevocably integrated; inseparable. 

What would I say if I was someone else?
What would he say if he was me? 
What would we say if we were everything, we were nothing, and we were one? 

Sandra used to say "Remember who you are," again and again, and at the time it gave me strength. 

I rather wish Ian could hear it the same way I did. 

I feel like he could use that right now. 

Drowning in silence...

Musical accompaniment: BMTH - Drown 

My dive computer reads 30m below the surface of the Andaman Sea, my knees kicking up clouds of silt as they hit the bottom, and I can't breathe. 

I've just back-rolled off a dinghy in tandem with Matthias, a synchronicity perfected through dozens of buddied dives, dozens of kilometres off the coast of Khao Lak, Thailand, and fallen headfirst into the peaceful silence of the blue. As the bottom rises up toward me I take a breath to add buoyancy to my torso, throw my hands out in an aqua-brake, tuck knees to my chest and flip over my centre-of-mass to settle neatly at the bottom and wait whilst the group reassembles. The cold, dry, decompressing air tickles my throat and I choke on a cough, then another, and another. Biting down on the mouthpiece I realise that no matter how hard I draw down I can't seem to fill my lungs with air. 

I breathe in as deep as I can, fighting the pressure constricting my chest, and it's not enough. 

I'm breathing hard, struggling to bring my heart-rate under control as my pulse thuds deafeningly in my ears. 

I'm hyperventilating. 

I'm about to drown. 

The Divemaster sees the torrent of bubbles streaming out of my reg's and comes over, thumb and index finger circled to ask if I'm OK. 

I don't have to answer with the knife-across-throat gesture; the torrent of bubbles falling upwards and the look in my eyes is enough to tell him I'm having trouble breathing, beginning to panic. 

He grabs me by the buoyancy vest, a hand hovering over my regs to make sure I don't try to spit them out, makes eye contact and reinforces it with two fingers back and forth between his and mine to say "look at me", reaches for my inflator and pumps air in to bring us safely back to the surface. 

I go limp and let him guide us, close my eyes, try to still my mind, and focus on pulling and pushing air slower and slower. 

He's the Divemaster, in charge of the dive, but I'm also a Divemaster - I might have a hundred dives to his thousand, but this is shameful. 

I shouldn't be doing this, but it's happening now for the second time this trip. 

It's 2018, and it's 5 years ago, and it's 5 months ago, and it's 5 yesterdays ago, and it's right now, and it was one of the last times I've gone in the water. 

I look up from my laptop and look out over Turner, 30m above Northbourne Ave, and pull cold, moist air into my lungs. 

It's not enough, but I hold it, stare into the darkness where I know the horizon to be, breathe out, then in. 

I remind myself there's not 30m of suffocating water above my head, or 4 atmospheres of pressure constricting my chest. 

I remind myself my buoyancy vest isn't too tight and I can breathe normally. 

I remind myself I'm not about to drown. 

The cars move north and south along the road beneath me, brightly coloured and auto-luminescent, moving in schools, scattered occasionally by the passing of a red-liveried barracuda; an apex-predator running along steel rails aping a living torpedo which glints like a steel rail in the depths. The sounds come into my ears as if through water, muffled by Active Noise Cancellation. 

The music stopped a while ago and I hadn't noticed. 

With a two-fingered hand gesture I switch screens, and press play on another song. 

sleepmakeswaves - What We Cannot Speak Of Must Be Passed Over In Silence

There are red-and-blue lights flashing silently on the road up Black Mountain under the watchful eye of Minas Telstra, which sits austerely white against the darkened sky atop a darker peak over the lights of the CSIRO laboratories which, in turn, float over the inky black of ANU in energy-saving mode. Someone's evening has reached a premature and unpleasant turn whilst my own continues anticlimactically thanks to an iterative descendent of Mr Dolby's miraculous invention for silencing unwanted noise. I find myself wondering why, if sleep makes waves, the opposite can't reliably be true. 

If the best bed one can sleep on is peace I must have bought my mattress from the wrong store because pocket coils and memory foam have left me wound up like an over-torqued spring in a two-bob watch, trapped in pockets of memory when, at 3 in the morning, I emerge foaming at the mouth from the suffocating wine-dark sea of slumber. 

I took today off work, not because I had anything fun planned, but because I've been feeling more burned out than the ashen dust brushed into Cinderella's pan-of-Peter, used-up and later dispersed to fertilise the beds from which will later bloom flowers destined to decorate the passage-way down which she'll run into the night, pursued by anxiety, a prince, and a hard deadline, shedding impractical footwear in her panicked rush towards her carbon-neutral, if magically-costly, carriage. The plans I had for my expensively-purchased day were similarly, baroquely grand: 

Go out for brunch; and

Get my hair cut. 

Sitting in the chair with a stomach full of Egg & Bacon Roll, I realised I'd slumped forward when the heavily-tattooed barber with gentle hands says, "You look tired, bro." 

"Yeah, it's been a long..." selecting an order of magnitude more-or-less at random, "couple of months." 

He grunts sympathetically, and rubs something soothing into the freshly-shaved sides of my head. 

If youth is wasted on the young, then logically life is wasted on the living; I, who is certainly not the former, and arguably not the latter, am struggling to not become a waste of oxygen. Whether I'm succeeding would best be determined by consulting with the trees; I can only hope that by the time they cast their unhasty judgement my ashes have fed the soil in which they breathe sufficiently that they will stroke their beards, and judge me favourably. 

Perhaps, some day, when I sink into the depths of endless, silent sleep, as unavoidable it will be then as it's been elusive now, and I provide my final service to this world by creating a space where more beautiful things can grow, I'll finally find peace. 

Chase the sunset...

Musical accompaniment: Mr.Kitty - After Dark 

The sky over Black Mountain was a lithium fire with the Telstra Tower at its core as I crested the last rise on Kings Hwy before its descent into Queanbeyan, and for a moment I thought what a shame it was I hadn't got around to reconnecting the cameras so that moment might have been recorded. Remembering that I'd left Captain's Flat maybe 18 minutes beforehand, and another word for "record" in these circumstances can be "evidence", I decided it was for the best. I could have pulled over and pulled my phone out of my pocket, but why spoil the moment by actually dropping below the speed limit? 

I took a mental snapshot instead, and shared it with my Penpal (with whom I trade such photos on occasion out of thematic amusement) in spirit if not in deed, before indicating around a slow-moving SUV, clicked back up to 6th gear, and tucked back in behind the screen to coast the downhill descent. 

I've been meaning to go for a decent fang since I got back; there've been plenty of "not here to fuck spiders, let alone waste time" runs, but no decent excuses to work through the rev range and get my knee out terrorising a few apexes whilst spraying an atomised mist of ablated rubber. There are roads around Perth where you can get in a bit of a fang, but the ones that aren't a mission to get to are few, far between, depressingly short, and too well-known by Mr Plod. Canberra's diminutive size, situation amongst all these hills and valleys, and its connections to a plethora of country towns, means it's blessed with access to hundreds of kilometres of tarmac seemingly built for technical riding. Bringing the 'busa with me was a no-brainer, and sitting on my balcony enjoying my (barely) morning coffee I realised I had absolutely nothing better to do so it was time to adjust my suspension, throw some lube on the chain, switch the pillion seat for the aerodynamic hump, and get amongst it. 

Plus, I hadn't managed to make the trip to check out Sandra and Timo's new place in Captain's Flat, so I pinged her. 

"Pondering going for a fang this afternoon. Should I burn some rubber in your direction?"
"Sure."

I wouldn't usually spend an hour travelling each way for a cup of tea and a scone, which goes to show how far my priorities have skewed in the wrong direction; the last time I lived here Rick and I would think nothing of riding an hour out to Bungendore via Queanbeyan for a pie and an iced coffee, then looping back up the northern route along Macs Reef Road. These days I need an excuse, but as with so many things I've needed over the years that's something I know I can rely on Sandra to provide. Of course I delayed my homeward departure half an hour or so beyond what would be considered sensible, which is how I found myself chasing the sunset along Captain's Flat Road through the deepening twilight at speeds well above where the average Cessna would even consider stalling. 

It's times like that I feel ashamed of myself for keeping my beloved Hayabusa caged like a songbird in cities with all the straight lines, 90degree turns, and lumbering four-wheeled bovinity. Exiting the roundabout for the 43km run down Captain's Flat Rd earlier this afternoon I'd dropped into a racing crouch with the visor of my helmet a hands' span from the tip of the screen, relaxed my right wrist, told it "OK, you set the pace," and as we slipped into jinba ittai-sync we opened our throat, unleashed legs of cast-aluminium, sunk claws into the horizon and with an internal-combustion roar dragged it towards us. 

Heading back a few hours later I said "It's getting dark and there'll be roo's out so let's take it easy," and dragging my wrist downwards in response it whispered: 
"No." 
"You sure?" 
The answer came in a wave of need that was part hunger, part lust, and as the needles climbed the dials in my lower peripheral our intake screamed "GO!!!!!!!" 

So we went, devouring the road in pursuit of the setting sun. 

Musical improvement: Mr.Kitty - After Dark (Iam Ian Remix) 

But hey, who's on trial?

Musical accompaniment: Interpol - Evil

Skye and Marcia sat up and looked at their wrists, tapped their Smart Watches in perfect synchronicity, pushed their empty glasses towards my 3/5 finished pint, and reached for their handbags; two luminary geniuses in their fields with 1.9 PhD's and change between them heading off to meet up with a group of people who's education equates to a formidable Peer-Review Board and engage in a passtime which renders me dumber than a Remedial Phys Ed Teacher's Conference. 

"You sure you don't want to come?" Skye asked, knowing the answer, but demonstrating that intellect is no excuse for discourtesy. 
"Is it going to be louder than this?" I enquired, gesturing to the pub filled with treble-heavy 90's Pop-Rock clattering off all the hard-surfaces at a not-quite-but-almost uncomfortable volume. 
"Much!" Marcia confirmed, almost as gleefully bright as her lipstick-red peaked-lapel velvet coat. 
"Nah, reckon I'll just finish my pint and head home, but thanks. Say hi to folks for me tho.
Enjoy your karaoke." 

I sat, looked at my phone, swiped away the screen-full of notifications I gave negative-fucks about, necked the rest of my Strong Scottish Ale remembering wryly that it was called "There Can Be Only One". Pulling on my long coat against the biting cold I knew would be waiting outside, I paid the bar tab and stepped out into the street. I plugged my pair of 6mm drivers into my ears, activated the full-bore ANC isolation, and as the voice prompt confirmed "Connected!" pressed play on my phone as I walked south thru Dickson, and the head-drilling bassline started beating my brain whilst my shoes beat the pavement. I'd caught the light-rail up after knocking off work, but it was early and I was in no rush. Walking home instead of catching public transport was a habit I formed in London to save a quid and spend some time. Half a lifetime and some solid career-decisions later and I'm far from being short of a buck (or quid, baht, dollar, or rupiah for that matter), but the counterpoint to that sort of success is a dearth of moments where you're in one place and find yourself in absolutely no rush to get to the next, so I decided to walk home. 

It was only 3.2km, and "I'm sure I need the exercise," I told myself, so I cruised down Challis St, turned right on Morphett, flipping a mental double-deuce at the Emergency Services Depot from which Ambulances and Fire Trucks emerge a couple of times a night to race down Northbourne emitting an eardrum-piercing wail on their way to saving the life of some unfortunate arsehole who has the audacity to be having The Worst Night Of Their Lives At A Moment Which Mildly Inconveniences Me as I passed. Turning south onto Northbourne Ave and the home-stretch it's represented for significant portions of my life, my left hand reached up to skip track back for the third time. 

 Musical accompaniment: Interpol - Evil

In front of me lay a linear path stretching to a vanishing point convergence; the way forward was clear, all I had to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other, wash, rinse, repeat, and: 

Treading down that well-lit corridor, I saw streets and driveways diverging left and right, begging to be explored, luring me away from my south-bound trajectory with a siren-song of
"Stop! Go back! You are going the wrong way!" 
"Your North Star is behind you!" 
"The Princess is in another Castle!" 

As my footsteps syncopated with the drum beat of the song's 5th and 6th repetitions and the bass drilled deeper into my consciousness, my mind's eye explored those divergent branches sign-posted "If only I'd..." and "There but for the grace of God go I...", traced them each and all to their ultimate conclusion, saw their outcomes, and in third-eye hindsight saw myself staggered under the weight of opportunities-missed and paradise-lost to faceplant in the frigid cold of despair, again and again. 

But in the wake of time's arrow my feet maintained their rhythmic cadence, the eyes I hide behind lenses which allow me to see clearly fixed forward, whilst Interpol sang their song of Evil out of the chunks of rare-earth metals and plastic which isolate my auditory sensorium from the noise and chaos of the world around me. 

And I left my selves behind. 

Perhaps they'll report back one day with fantastic tales of their adventures chasing white rabbits through memory's wonderland, but I'll not hold my breath; as fascinating as it might be to see how my other halves might have lived, I'm content to live without the knowledge of their experiences in the dead-ends they find themselves trapped in after eating variously-coloured cupcakes with "Love me", "Try me", "Be me" printed in psychedelic-flavoured icing. Every choice I've had I've made with the best information, consideration, and intention I had available at the time, and the only way things could have turned out different would have been for me to have known things I couldn't possibly have then. If I were to pursue those possibilities I could spend the rest of my life experiencing pasts I know I'd never have chosen which, I thought, would be a bit of a waste. The twists and turns are all in the future. As we go it straightens out, creating a direct line in our wake leading from where we are all the way back to where we started. 

I wasn't sure whether I found that comforting or not, but keeping your eyes forward certainly helps avoid tripping over the eScooter that's toppled over in front of the Rex. 

Approaching the lights of Girrawheen St the graffiti'd hoarding gave way to the darkened open space of Haig Park, and my feet diverted to the desire-lines they knew instinctively must be there because this is Canberra, and at a visceral level we know each other in a way only old lovers can, so with a conviction shared only by true romantics and madmen my feet know that where they seek a path they'll find one. By the time we emerged from the still darkness of the trees into the bright lights and brighter young things of Lonsdale St I'd lost count of how many times that same song had played, but some hours later when my earphones ran out of juice my music player app counted 111, so it was obviously fewer than that. 

I needed to replenish my supply of beer; I knew this because my feet knew this, and I've learned not to second-guess my feet because those bastards know what's what; they have, after all, always taken me where I needed to be. 

A brief transaction later and they deposited me into the 6th floor shoebox filled with hungry meows and ghosts that I now call Home. None of those were here when I arrived; I brought all of them with with me; some of them I've carried and kept fed since before I left the first time. 

We are, after all, all the things we can't leave behind, and I've carefully packed all the baggage I can't bring myself to let go of again and again so I can beat myself with them no matter where I go. It's weightless; they add nothing to my carry-on allowance, but somehow no matter how little the scales at the airport tip my pockets are always filled with painful angst, because better to keep carrying them around than forget and replace them with more of the same mistakes. 

It would take a life span with no cell mate to find the long way back, eventually I'll learn to look the other way. 

But hey, who's on trial? 

Sandra...

Once upon a time I was sitting in the passenger seat of Sandra's Supercharged Holden Calais and whilst cruising up Flemmington Rd past EPIC I turned to her and asked, "So hey, you and me. How 'bout it?" 

She looked at me with less surprise than someone who didn't know us might expect, laughed and replied, "Nah, wouldn't want to spoil the friendship!" 

"Yeah, fair enough," I shrugged, "figured it was worth asking. You ever change your mind, let me know. So what do you want to do this afternoon? Catch a film or something?"

She never did, which everyone agrees was for the best, and we've been the closest of friends ever after. 

The End. 

Except the story doesn't end there any more than that being where it started. If you want to define nearly two decades of friendship based on as many seconds that probably does the job well enough, so by all means fuck back off to "20 Second Movie Reviews" and feed your short attention span. The real story is like an iceberg - whilst everyone's distracted by the polar bear clinging on for dear life, underneath the surface it's all sea lion-on-penguin carnage whilst the iceberg desperately tries to keep that wayward polar bear from drowning. 

Trying to understand a friendship like Sandra and mine from the highlight-reel is like thinking you've got a good grasp on Fight Club after watching the Trailer; Jack doesn't get Marla at the end, but they do start what comes next together, and just like Marla Singer, Sandra aka Sandra J--- N----- met me at a very strange time of my life. 

I vividly remember the moment she walked into my life, and the back-room of The Civic Hotel, dressed- and dolled-up in a way which nailed the inflection-point of "out to impress" and "but not trying too hard" so perfectly that the only thing more frictionless than her smile was the chocolate wheel spinning to the rattling sound of heads swivelling on creaking necks to see if it landed on "You're A Winner!" or "Better Luck Next Life". I distinctly remember hearing the thud of her Blind Date for the evening Garrick's jaw hitting the floor, which conveniently ensured my inner monologue muttering "Goddamn..." went unheard. 

An hour or so later, after she and Skye (who had helped me broker the event) trounced us at pool at least twice, I turned to him and murmured "If you don't make a move by the end of the next game, I'm going to," which he did, shortly after which the chocolate wheel stopped on the Glittery Gold "Grand Prize" segment. It rested there for the next year or so until eventually she reached up and tipped it over into Monkey-Poo Brown "REJECTED!", but that's not my story to tell. 

By the time that ended, Skye and I had bounced off each other's atmospheres which put me on a collision-course with Amanda, but with interconnected friendship networks, Garrick moving into my share-house, and the general Brownian-motion of social networks when you're in your 20's, there was plenty of opportunity for us to become friends independently of anything else, and that we did. 

It was years later, after Garrick and my friendship dissolved over an altercation at a party where I shirtfronted him for his bullshit behaviour (and in doing prevented his being mauled by two defensive Staffies and a back-yard full of people who were about to beat him down far less gently than I was offering to), and my relationship with Amanda evaporated like dew in the light of dawn in spring, that I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of her Calais, wondering. 

We'd never both been single at the same time, and the usual trigger points for such things had come and gone. We were deep in what you might call "The Friend Zone" for reasons more defined by "the way these things happen" than anything else, but we were tighter than a wog's wallet, and thicker than thieves, and I'd never forgotten that moment I'd first laid eyes on her, or that no threat I ever offered Garrick had been anything less than sincere. 

Sandra could hoist the engine out of a Barina, strip it, replace the gaskets, and have it back on the road in a weekend; she could strip the pride off a bloke half-again her size and bury him in shame in a heartbeat. She'd had more different jobs than I could count, could apply herself seemingly to anything and master it; for all that she'd refer to herself as a dumb under-educated country girl, she could catch up to all the undergrad degrees in the room, and keep up, all whilst pulling out tree stumps, quoting the CWA Cookbook, volunteering for NSW RFS, and pulling a mean burn-out. Here I was sitting across from a girl who could emasculate a backyard full of blokey-blokes by simply being herself and the only reason she didn't run the grill was because she knew how much I enjoyed searing meat, so she let me. 

All of that aside, "She's pretty, and I'm pretty funny," I thought, "and she's awesome, and I tell awesome stories, and she seems to like me, and I'd really like to know." We got along so effortlessly, smoother than cruising in a long-wheelbase tourer riding on well-balanced suspension. "That's what love's all about, isn't it?" 

I was right, but not in the way I was thinking at the time. 

So I asked, the wheel landed on a Warm Amber segment marked "Yeah, nah, but" and we carried on our merry way rejoicing. 

OK, I'll admit I was disappointed, but I refused to let that get in the way, let alone show, and the rejoicing followed in due course so for the purpose of selective-narrative let's just accept it as so. 

A year or so later I was in London having what would best be described as "a pretty hard time", and Sandra was the one who'd Skype me in the depths of my night whilst halo'd in afternoon sunshine from her front verandah and talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!". She was the one who told me: 

"remember this, one of the most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"
the zen art of looking for answers that you know don't exist... 

When I gave up and came home, she had a room set up for me with my own bed made and ready for me to fall into, and a set of keys waiting in the letterbox to let myself in after Scott picked me up from the airport. Sitting across from him at the table I recognised from the background of all those Skype calls I watched her come running up the path in her Independent Property Group pant-suit, sandy-blonde curls bouncing cherubic in the afternoon sun so her feet seemed to barely touch the ground, and the moment she threw herself into my arms I knew I was Home. 

Then she went inside and put the kettle on. 

Interlude:
Ricky: "How's your Sandra post going?"
"I wasn't going to do this in chronological order - with Smeghead I bounced around a lot.
Still, tears aside, I'm liking how this is flowing.
LOL..
'tears'
'flowing'
Sometimes I'm so sharp I cut myself."

A couple of months later her share-house in Garran dissolved and I followed her to Allison's place in Amaroo. In 2009 it seemed the edge of the world; Forde was a Display Village and Bonner the glint in an urban-planner's eye, but Buckingham Palace was home on the other side of Horse Park Drive from the dream of First Home Owner's Grants clad in bucolic pasture. The Mums ruled by fiat, with a Hoover-branded Sceptre held in bright-yellow cleaning glove-clad fists, but whilst I was woken every Saturday morning by the beating of a vacuum-head against my bedroom door my world was was filled with the cooing of a Laughing Turtledove, a kettle never far from boiling, and (when I felt motivated) the smell of fresh-baked scones. 
We had a freeloader who's name became FUCK YA! in my memory after Sandra tore strips off her one night (Allison and I hid in the corridor throughout prevaricating whether to intercede or break out the Corpse Disposal Kit). 
FUCK YA! departed shortly thereafter in Absolutely Not Suspicious Circumstances, to be replaced by Skye. 
The Porkening and The Porkening II: I Porked Them Good will forever go down in legend; not just because I cook a mean pork-roast, but because they resulted in 15 Minutes Of Silence. 
It was a good life, but as with all good things... 

I met Emma on a trip to Perth, and after an intense long-distance romance wrought of loneliness and a desperation for connection I found myself driving across the Nullarbor with Scott in the passenger seat of my tetris-packed Audi and Sandra waving tearfully from the doorstep of Buckingham Palace in my rear-view mirror. 

Musical interlude: Gotye - Save Me

Years later Emma was a traumatic memory, Jenna was my here-and-now, and my phone rang with Sandra's name on the Caller ID. 

"What are you doing on September 9th?" 
I think for a moment before answering, "Drinking Hefeweizen Dunkel in Berlin."
"What?"
"Hey, you asked, and on that day I'll be in Berlin so statistically... Why? You didn't go and do something silly like booking your wedding without checking with me first or something did you?"
"... HOW THE FUCK AM I GOING TO GET MARRIED WITHOUT YOU GIVING A SPEECH AND INSULTING EVERYONE?
"And, yes.
"BASTARD!" 
What can I say? I have something of a reputation. 
"OK, let me think... actually, I have an idea."
"Oh?" 
"Leave it with me."

I hang up, and call Scott. 

"Dude!" 
"Dude, so I got a call from Sandra..."
"Yeah? So you going to get back for the wedding?" 
"Yeah about that," I explain the scheduling conflict, "but I got an idea. I was thinking: how about I write something and get you to read it?"
"Yeah I can do that. We've got time. Get it over to me, we'll workshop it, make it happen."
"Yeah, about that. I was thinking, y'know, for comedic value, maximum impact, what if I put something together and send it over to a 3rd party and they hand it to you in a sealed envelope and you open it 'The Winner Is...'-style on stage and you read it sight-unseen." 
"You... but... what... dammit! How do I let you talk me into this shit?"
"Because you know it'll be awesome, man. It always is."
"... fucking..."
"Leave it with me." 

8 months later, after hours of writing all of that and more into the script, editing, rehearsing on passing strangers who knew none of these people, pouring more than a decade of adoration onto the page, agonising, culling, adding, removing, then editing some more, performing it again and again until I wasn't just sure it sounded right, but that it would sound like it was me saying it when read by Scott, Allison handed Scott a sealed envelope in front of nearly 100 people. He opened it, and proceeded to read, whilst in Germany I drank Hefeweizen Dunkel and waited for scantily-clad himbo-assassins from the Firefighters Calendar to descend and turn me into a greasy red smear on the Fredrichschain pavement because from the far side of the globe I had managed to Rickroll a wedding (for the second time) by proxy so adeptly that even the proxy didn't see it coming (although Skye, I'm told, caught it 5 or 10 seconds out). 

"Has it happened? How did it go?" I messaged, anxious to know how much longer I had to kiss my girlfriend goodbye. 
"Yes, and Sandra says 'You're an unbelievable bastard', and 'she loves you'."
"I love her too."

To this day, the feeling remains mutual ever after. 

Cold comfort..

Musical accompaniment: The Presets - Feel Alone/Girl and the Sea

One of the surprise benefits of the apartment I moved into has been how warm it's been. It might have been -1'C when I was walking home from the pub the other night, but with winter nearly a fortnight old I'm still yet to start layering the blankets, let alone turn the heating on. This is great because it means I'm not spending a whole lot of money on power, but it also means that I'm still not getting out anywhere near as much as I'd intended to. 

I'd such high hopes coming home to the 'berra - "new view, new you," and all that. Six storeys up certainly provides for a great view, but it seems I packed the same old me along with my CD collection, and my new ~600m altitude (above sea level. It's only 30m above the pavement) is certainly higher than my old place I've been finding that hope, like the warmth of the afternoon sun, is fading. The jokes I made about how I could "be a miserable, lonely workaholic anywhere" were a little too easy to fall back on. 

Perhaps I'm being overly critical - I AM being more sociable than I was in Perth after all. Over the long-weekend just gone I managed to get out and spend time with different people every day out of the last four which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a big step up if you're keeping score. You can't say I'm not trying, but it all feels so much like tyres spinning on an icy uphill slope. I may have turned a corner when I decided to acknowledge that I didn't want to be lonely any more, but for all that I can see for miles the horizon is featureless; I have no idea which way to go. 

It seems that "deciding to not be lonely" was the easy bit. 
Doing something about that requires "deciding to not be miserable" which is, for me at least, a whole other thing. 

I'm taking some comfort from the little wins tho, like managing to "not have so much stuff". It's been a long time since I felt the urge to fill the empty spaces with things for the sake of it, but I was still regularly guilty of letting myself sprawl. So far I've managed to (mostly) fit the stuff I have into the space I have available, and my pad has a pleasantly "lived-in clutter", but apart from tripping and falling into Revolution CD the other week I've been distinctly disinterested in acquiring more things. The space vacated by 'things' has been gradually filling with 'thoughts', and whilst ideas and memories can be heavy, and only get heavier, and sometimes it feels you've not the strength to carry them around, they take up very little space; they may unpack to cover a continent, but they always condense back into the volume defined by my skull so I don't even need a suitcase to carry my baggage around. 

Perhaps I was misguided when I decided I needed to learn how to dating, and instead just need to learn how to be better company for myself. Now if only I could learn how to be less of a dickhead... 

Hostage negotiations ("We do not negotiate with terrorists")...

 Musical starting point: 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐒𝐌 - "God Of War" 

I found myself thinking a week or three ago, "Y'know what, fuck this. I don't need this fucking job." I paused in that moment, calculated, and realised "Oh no. I actually do. Fuck..."

"Nobody puts Baby in a corner," and nobody puts Pete in a box. If you want to get shit done, you airdrop Pete where he can see the horizon, say "the arses in need of kicking are thattaway," and the only thing that will slow me down will be needing to change boots. Where things go south is when people fuck up my target acquisition; if my arsehole-detector senses you're full of shit, there's a very real chance I'll ignore the fleeing posterior(s) in front of me and wind up coming back at you boot-first. 

And there's nothing that blips my "arsehole" radar quite like hypocrisy. 

Let me be clear that I don't enjoy thinking like this. I was brought up to turn the other cheek, see the other side, seek peace; "I cherish peace with all my heart", but just like Chris "Peacemaker" Smith, deep down underscoring everything people tried to layer over the top, and whilst I WANT to do good and bring positive things to the world, I can't be so naïve to believe the way to do this is to be a lamb, or even a lion. I died a thousand deaths before being reborn for war. Sometimes the hero the world needs is *a horrible cunt. 

I just try to hold that in reserve, because the way I see it that's the differentiator between *"I can be" and *"I am". 

But if you wanna dance motherfucker, let's dance. 

So if you take a Weapon of Mass Disruption and box it in don't be the last thing it sees when the lid closes unless you want to bump yourself up the target priority list, and absolutely do NOT be the first thing it sees when it claws its way out. 

I'd run away, but i can't. Half a million dollars of personal debt says I'm a hostage to this fucking job. Note the word "personal", because we're not in Professional any more, Toto. Whilst the Seven P's of Project Management ("Proper Preparation & Planning Prevent Piss-Poor Performance") should be a solid baseline for risk-management, you can't control all the variables and every once in a while you find yourself executing the best of strategies, falling to earth out of an aeroplane which just exploded, held aloft on a parachute that's on fire, and the Rock upon which you built your plans is far less Gibraltar than it is Fraggle. 

Now imagine how pissed off you'd be in that situation, crank that up to 11, multiply by Ezekiel 25:17, and you have a rough idea about the Old Testament-level shitstorm falling from heaven at terminal velocity on butterfly-wings of flame that I currently personify. 

Is this a boot you see before you, its heel towards your face?
You're damned fucking right it is, and you'll need more than some Spray & Wipe and Pontius Pilot-style hand-wringing to rub out this damned spot. 

Parkway Drive - Swing
If you think Stockholm Syndrome will save you, you obviously misunderstood the EULA:
"This machine was born for battle
This contract paid for war."

And if it's war they want... 

So let me save you the effort of looking up the definition of "nemesis":
Oxford: "a downfall caused by an inescapable agent."
Merriam Webster: "one that punishes or avenges: a formidable and usually victorious rival or opponent."
Guy Ritchie (via Brick Top): "A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent. Personified in this case by an 'orrible cunt... me."

Think I'm being melodramiatic?
Well fuck you. 
Fuck him. 
Fuck her. 
Fuck all of you. 
And fuck your little dog, too.
This is my bread and butter you're fucking with, and it's my hard-sold trust that got broke. 

The first part of that demands a response at the very least. 
The second determines what "Arsehole Tax" multiplier gets applied to the line item on my invoice. 

Break the rules and I could call the umpire, but he's a toothless muppet so fuck that guy as well; I'll change the fucking game. We might have been playing a gentlemanly game of Chess before, but now it's Doom, motherfucker.
Mick Gordon - The Only Thing They Fear Is You

"Obviously, this has nothing to do with classical music whatsoever, and who cares, right? Like, this music is to evoke the sheer brutality, and the raw power, that you possess, against every single one of the enemies that you'll fight, and every single one of Hell's creations against you. And it's so empowering, and dominant, and forceful, and it just punches you right in the freaking face, and there's so much, like just raw strength I hear from this that's just incredible." 
"It just feels like raw destruction... There's this super-intense animalist essence to this... It feels like the chainsaw just slicking through enemies left and right. It's really evocative, like The World On Fire... and you coming in there being the only person that can do anything to save the planet... you're also an incredible bad-ass who's not scared of anything... there's that real sense of 'I'm going to take your business and you're going to be fodder beneath my feet'."
Opera Singer Reacts: The Only Thing They Fear is You)