Full circle...

I'm screaming. 

I'm in Aldi Belconnen doing a decent-sized grocery shop somewhere with free parking so I could use the car and not be limited to what I can carry on my back and loading up my basket with "what the fuck do people even eat anyway" and turning a corner past the bulk nuts I'm suddenly transported to Aldi Belmont and after everything I've gone through and done and packed and given up and unpacked and lost and fought and won and suffered and achieved I'm still in the same place I left and nothing's different because every Aldi and every where is exactly the same and everything is different but nothing has changed and I'm screaming because I've not stopped moving for two months now and I've gone so far but I've still not moved a fucking inch. 

Momentum carried my right foot to the floor, and the left one after it, and the moment passed, but in the back of my head the screaming continues. 

Now I'm sitting here on my balcony writing this, so obviously I made it out and home safely, so you can take that finger off the panic button; I'm fine. 

But I'm Not OK. 

I've been sick for a week - the system collapse I knew would happen took longer than I expected, but at the end of the moment the pendulum only pauses; everything has its price, and the loan shark will always have his pound of flesh. 

Repeat after me: I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 

Since my stuff arrived a fortnight ago I've been battling sequential grid-lock. Unpacking boxes means finding places to put things, but those places have been filled with or blocked by boxes. I replaced the sagging mattress that came with the place without delay and have managed to sleep more than a few hours at a stretch, but getting rid of it was problematic. Setting up my desk meant getting the dining table out of the way. Making any progress whatever has been hard, and through it all I keep being confronted by an empty fridge I can't seem to make it to the shops enough to fill. and a cat who insists on tearing the shit out of my furniture instead of the scratching post I got him, wants feeding every 13 seconds (or hours? I can't tell), and holy shit didn't I clear that litter box out just the other day? How has he filled it already? Or maybe that was a week ago? Fuck me why didn't I leave him in Perth? 

I can't deal with this. 
I don't get to not deal with this. 
Fuck. 

And then there's The Office. 

I didn't talk about this before I left - these emails have been a lovely exercise in escapism; getting to create this selective perspective for you to read has meant getting to exist in it myself, at least until I wake up again the morning after hitting Send. Your own work-life hasn't sounded particularly rosy... actually not a single time you've mentioned it ever; adding my growing unease to that would bring no joy to either of us, but we're past the point where I can ignore it. Big Bossman is losing it - he's well past erratic and is now thrashing around so violently we're past "damage control" and into the point where the rest of us are starting to crack. 

I have suspicions and conjecture around what's happening in his world (although my predictive model is getting pretty refined), but one thing I do know is that he's freaking out, his instincts are flawed, and the steps he's taking in response are so badly in the wrong direction that he's starting to tear down the foundations that support him to the point where both the Bossladies who interviewed you had to threaten to resign to prevent him making a Very Bad Choice. 

I've shoulder-barged my way into that alliance; I have, and can have, no authority; I'm both a subordinate and a scumbag-contractor, but we all know that I'm the closest they have to a peer and an ally. They need to let me help carry the strain because things are already borderline unsurvivable. If they work with me we might make it through with minimal collateral damage. If not, the action I suspect I'll need to take will be cataclysmic. In the last 8 days I've had to smack down the Smartest Motherfucker In The Room, the Big Bad Scary Bossman, twice, successfully both times. 
Yes, whilst sick. 

There are two more brewing, either of which I'll win, but the chances of survival depend entirely on his remembering that I'm the only way he'll actually achieve his goals, and not just squash me like a bug. The odds are not in my favour, but you know that I will, without hesitation, spend any and every capital I have accumulated in the pursuit of maximisation of (my chosen) value. 

And, y'know, it's just a job, right? Except I took on a considerable amount of debt and risk to do this. The "Emperor Went Mad and Now Wears No Clothes" scenario was not on my radar when I pulled the trigger, couldn't possibly have been (although if my growing suspicion is correct and I find that Bosslady was hiding the possibility from me proves correct... I'm not one for threats, but remember that everything has its price), but if I had a clue then I might not have traded mind-numbing exile for half a million dollars of debt. 

So the view I'm staring at over the glow of my laptop screen is currently bringing me increasingly cold comfort. I'm exhausted, on edge, I can be calm, or focused, but not both at the same time, my manoeuvring thrusters are shot, and I'm a whisker off bingo-fuel, but my nose is pointed down the throat of the beast, I have ammunition and fumes enough for one last world-shattering salvo as I make my final burn, and my fist is hovering over the glass-covered button labelled

"Bop in case of Blitzkrieg".

Now I exist in the weightless moment of calm stillness between the rise of my fist and the hammer's fall; the lambs might not have stopped screaming, but at least I have. 

Smeghead...

A long time ago in a high school far far away, a not-yet bearded nerdboi and an obnoxious little shit became friends. 

Actually, "friends" is too strong a term. Let me reframe. 

Once upon a time in a misogyny-and-homophobia incubatorCatholic All Boys School run by soon-to-be-convicted-paedophilesThe Christian Brothers which smelled of anxious conformity, unwashed socks, burgeoning testosterone, furtive (occasionally mutual, I'm told) masturbation, and a less-than-subtle undertone of Lord of the Flies, a small group of outcasts accumulated. We were nicknamed "The Cool Gang", and somewhere along the line I became its leader... in that the rest of the group could generally be found on the opposite side of me from the bullies. One of that group was a weedy lad named Leith C****** R****** who never missed the opportunity to tell you about how he was in the Air Force Cadets and reminded me of Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf, so I took to calling him Smeghead. 

For the longest time I thought he was pretty fucking annoying, but The Cool Gang never excluded a member because "safety in numbers", and... well there wasn't really anywhere downstream for someone to go. We were the outliers; we played Chess, or Suicide Chess, or Magic: The Gathering, or D&D, or Lacrosse, were hyper-clever, or functionally retarded, on weird scholarships for Academic Achievement or Organ Playing (the one with pipes and a keyboard, not another masturbation reference), the awkward, the uncoordinated, the Mad Scientists (one guy made his own taser out of 9V batteries and copper wire coils in ~year 9), the Terminally Inept, the hadn't-hit-growth-spurts-yet, the already-6-foot-tall-at-14. We, the unco, the nerdy, who fit in with none of the cliques, collected in one corner of the playground near the Library, and kept each other company (and occasionally from being beaten up by the rugby playing jocks). 

I never really liked him all that much in high school; I mostly thought of him as an annoying hanger-on, and I remember mostly just putting up with him because he was just this-side of being irritating enough to punch. Still, he invited me to his birthday party out of the blue one year, and we bonded over our mutual love of Pink Floyd (I later gave him the Super-Audio CD High Bitrate Remastered edition of the Wish You Were Here Album for his 20th or 21st birthday). 

He was one of the two who dragged me off the last of the bullies I beat up in Year 10, and made an effort to keep in contact as we were winding up Year 12; somehow when the rest of them fell away he remained. 

He'd come to my parties.
We'd go body-surfing for fitness and fun (and a bit of a perv) in the summer.
He worked at the local Sizzler, so I'd go out for a cheap feed.
We both go into wine wankery - he worked for Sandalford Estate for a bit, and I worked for Saracen (plus I'm a wanker). 

Whilst our adventures weren't by any means the Stuff of Legend (the escapades I collaborated on with Sharpie, the Silent Bob to my Jay, transcended fame into infamy), a bond was formed which survived his finishing uni and heading over to ADFA, various postings, and long stretches of distance and time. 

I visited him in Brisbane because fuck-it-why-not, when he was posted at RAAF Amberley (I vaguely remember being driven up to Sunshine Coast to fix his nan's computer as being an excuse?), then again to stand as his Best Man when he married Esther.
We hung out in Canberra when they were posted back here between my returning from London and moving back to Perth.
I visited him again in the Blue Mountains when I was in Sydney for orientation day at AGSM (before I restarted my MBA with Ducere).
I missed his mum Rhonda's funeral because of time-frames and covid restrictions.
I managed to procure two high-end monitors for his twin sons at the behest of his dad Cameron during the peak of hardware shortages and had them drop-shipped to Canberra just in time for Xmas in 2021, which I sold him for Cost-Price+A-Mars-Bar (literally rounded up by $1 to $300 per unit when the market price was $450).
But I was here in Canberra in July of last year when Cameron passed away after a long battle with cancer. 

The night before his wedding we stayed in a hotel in the Brisbane CBD (he and Esther were living together by then, so this meant they could at least pretend to observe some of the tradition) and decided to eat at the nearby Sizzler for "old time's sake" (and because we thought it was hilarious, and because neither of us was particularly rolling in cash), then his "buck's party" involved us sitting around the dingy hotel room we were stating in, sharing the best whisky I could afford. 

So when he messaged me saying Cameron had gone I threw my phone over my shoulder in the middle of the discussion I was having about IT Security Policy, finished whiteboarding the gap-analysis we were doing, picked it up again to reply "well shit." and went looking for an appropriate bottle. 

It took a few stops to find, but whilst showing Ian around we found ourselves in Manuka and I ducked us into the Vintage Cellars wherein I found what I was looking for. 

I've been fond of Oban whisky for ages, since I found it on special and decided to try it. It used to be my "keep some in the cupboard for a special occasion, or Tuesday (whichever comes first)" until the price started creeping up. I was exchanging bottles with a client in Melbourne for a while - he sent one when I told him I'd got my marks and had officially passed my MBA - I knocked off work early, poured a glass, plonked a couple of ice cubes in it, and took a photo from my infamous Friday chair of it alongside an empty glass with the bottle in the background. He sent one back a short time later, of the same arrangement on his balcony; one glass with whisky, and the other empty but for a couple of ice cubes. Pete's a good client, and a great guy. 

This was a Limited Edition called The Tale of Twin Foxes, which sat nicely with me in the context of me and Smeghead, particularly the blurb at the bottom of the box: 

Sweet, for how life is supposed to be.
Salt, for tears at a funeral.
Smoke, for a cremation. 

It was special because it was a Limited Edition, but at $200 it was also modest because that was Cameron; I thought he'd have approved of the effort and consideration, but also that I didn't go all overboard over it (Smeghead agreed). 

So the day after I watched a short-but-sweet ceremony over Zoom as a grid of people I didn't know sat alone with their grief and cried on webcams and Cameron went up in smoke to the sound of On The Turning Away, I Ubered out to Moncrief and cracked open the bottle. 

It was a pleasant evening - we spoke very little of the day before, or Cameron, although Smeghead did say at one point, with a wry smile, how amused he was that the song his casually racist dad had picked was a song admonishing racism. 

When I left there was just a small bit left in the bottle - enough for one more stiff pour. I have no idea whether it's still there on his shelf, but I rather hope not; I prefer to imagine that later, either after I left that night or one shortly after, he found a quiet moment to himself and put his own full-stop at the end of that sentence. 

A while later I checked in to see how things were going. He and his sister Cara were doing the "you take it"/"no you take it" thing with Cameron's possessions, and neither of them had need or room for his Rather Nice Bose Sound System. I, an audio-snob, made a joke about giving it a good home, and he, knowing that both these things were true, said "Done." In a later call he mentioned that they couldn't find it, and I promptly forgot all about it. 

Last week, having spent my first Friday in town with my Penpal, I pinged my once-Air Force Cadet-now-Wing Commander friend to see if he was free to join me for my second, and when he arrived he'd brought it with him; it had been boxed up in some out-of-the-way place, and he'd put it aside. I was touched, and a little ashamed - I recently upgraded my stereo and wondered if I'd be able to show it the love he deserved, but I accepted it with gratitude, and we sat out on the balcony as the sun set catching up on the last 8 months' worth of stories, and some from much much longer ago (when you've known someone for a lifetime-and-a-half there are plenty of them to remind each other of). 

Last night I set the Bose up in my bedroom; there weren't enough power points in any convenient part of the living room. Cabling it together, re-tuning it for the room, and with the only source I had cables to connect to it being my laptop, positioned it alongside, cued up Wish You Were Here so the album cover was visible on the screen, hit play, and settled on my bed to listen to it, snapping a photo on my phone which I sent to Smeghead without caption or comment: 

This morning he replied with a Thumbs Up emoji, which was all that really needed be said.