Provenance...

 When Boldilocks arrived I took him for a walk around Braddon and Civic; he'd been on the road for four-hours-and-change, getting the city you're visiting under your feet is a great way to unclench after a long drive, and as comfortable as the 6th-floor office I call 'Home' might be there'd be plenty of time to drink in the view. Hitting Northbourne Ave we started catching up on what we've been up to since last he graced my presence in April because whilst we're in semi-regular contact and we've heard it all before, it's important not to underestimate how much better it is to hear someone's stories transmitted directly from voice-box to tympanic membrane through the vibration of Nitrogen/Oxygen/Argon than when there's an electronic intermediary, and how much easier it is to read the mind of the man who's been your friend for longer than you care to calculate, even if you still think of him as the Padawan who could never get his timesheets submitted reliably, from the twitch of the muscles in his face than the pattern of white-and-black pixels preceding a blinking cursor on the LED screen of this year's laptop. 

Turning left onto Elouera St, I started pointing out The Sights: 

"There's Bent Spoke; there are two main micro-breweries in Canberra, the other's Capital, but Bent Spoke's my 'local'. This is where Ian and I were sinking pints when I realised I'd decided I was going to move back." 

"Check out the Rainbow round-a-bout ahead - they made it even-more-inclusive a year or so ago by cutting a quarter off the Pride Flag-ring and replacing it with the Trans/Ace/fucked-if-I-know colours."
"..."
"Yeah I lose track, but it's not for us, is it? Nice that everyone gets to feel 'seen' tho, yeah?"

The story I heard was that the rainbow had been painted on the road of the Lonsdale/Elouera roundabout for Pride one year, and when a bunch of wowsers complained the Road Transport Authority at ACT Government went and made it permanent to spite them. It may be apocryphal, but my theory is that if I click my heels together and tell it enough it will become 'true'. 

"Look left? Up there is the bottlo from the 'Deadman' post where I trip because a pretty girl smiled at me."
"Blackhearts & Sparrows?"
"That's the one. We'll cruise past there later. Hang a right..." 

"Hey, remember in 'Going nowhere fast' and I talk about walking past a gym full of people running on the spot, and what both of us are doing is pointless but at least they're honest about it? 
"That's it, right there." 
"Huh. Yeah?" 
"And in the 'chaotic magnitude' post and I talk about a 'pool table in a dingy pub on a Friday night'?" 
I point over at The Civic Hotel, "that's the pub." 

I haven't been back there in years, but I've heard that they refurbished recently and replaced the pool tables in the back-room with a dining area; I could go and confirm, but I have so many fond memories of those days I'd rather keep them intact than replace them with whatever's now 'true'. 

"Oh hey, and in the 'Resurrection Deluge' when I land back here and talk about making three trips to Coles in two days, and 'keeping my feet between my face and the pavement'?" 
"Yeah?" 
"Well," I point my face south-and-east across Cooyong St, "there's the Coles," then down at my feet, "and there's the pavement." 

We cruised through Garema Place to see the Dodgy Sheep and the weird Whispering Wall thing, although the Doug Anthony All Stars plaque turned out to be covered by the astroturf at the pro-Palestine Protest. Back at my place later, the Show & Tell continued: 

"Oh! There on the wall? That's my half of the Art Project!"
"Shit, I spotted that earlier! What happened to the other half?"
"Wound up on the wall in Penpal's daughter's room, she said."
"..."
"Yeah, kinda weird, but apparently she took a shine to it and there was a vacant hook." 

"Oh! Check this out!" I say, handing him a mug with stylised technicolour double-helixes on each side. 
"What's this?"
I pull the business card out of it and show it to him, "that's Occam's Canadan Amy - she gave it to me when I saw her last in Perth." 
"Oh..."
"Yeah, she's real - that's her biz."

"Check this out," I drag him around to the desk-side of the display cabinet in the middle of the room, "see the little plushie octopus in the top-left corner?" 
"Holding a little hand-drawn card?"
"That's the one. After she read the 'It's not you... it's me' post, Bridget asked me if the 'tiny octopus' bit at the beginning was a secret reference to 'giant pacific octopus' by Enter Shikari. 
"It wasn't, but it's become a bit of a thing. 
"She's taken to keeping the side-pockets of her backpack stocked with little plushies from Ikea, gives them out to random strangers at the lights when she's riding her bike, asked if I wanted one. She had a turtle, an orca, or... so I picked that one; thought it was adorb's."
"She really is."
"Shush, you. 
"It's one of two things in this cabinet which faces towards my desk. Can you spot the other one?"
"Behold," he reads, "My field of fucks; and see that it is barren." 
"That's the one.
"Sandra cross-stitched it, mailed it to me years ago, so I found a frame and it used to hang from a vacant hook in my old office." 
"THAT Sandra?"
"The one and only." 

"But hey, speaking of ocean-critters, check this out," I duck to the fridge and grab a stainless-steel flask. 
"The water bottle from 'The thing I do for a living'? That's it."
"Damn..." he said, weighing it in his hand as moisture began condensing on the surface. 
"Yeah, funny thing; turns out I also snagged a tshirt on that trip," I say, waving it at him, "so it WASN'T the only memento I took away. 
"Ain't ret-con'ing the post tho, just sayin'."
"Nah, why ruin it?"
"Exactly. I like that bit - it was punchy." 

We pour a couple of glasses from the bottle of Chivas Regal he'd picked up from the First Choice across the road on Mort St on our way back, and I chuckle to myself as I remember the flight back from my last trip to Perth as we head out to the balcony: 

"That's The Seat I sit in when I'm writing, and over in the corner is the one I bought from a thrift store for 5$. Don't sit in it; it really is falling apart. 
"But seriously, check out the view. 
"There's Black Mountain and Minas Telstra, which is right up there as far as 'iconic Canberra' goes. 
"Over there's ANU, and the CSIRO Lab's."
"From 'Drowning in silence'."
"Yeah. Same dive trip." 
"Shit," he muttered, looking at the flask he was still holding. 
Looking to the right as he leaned against the balustrade, "oh... those traffic lights... but in the fog?"
"Yeah, from 'It's not you... it's me'. Really did happen just as I was writing that bit and it was too perfect not to include."
"Shit, man. 
"It's...
"It's a lot more 'real', standing here, y'know?"
I nod, staring into space. 
"It is real. 
"All of it. 
"The narrative might be selective at times, but not one word of it's a lie. 
"But hey," I look over and proffer my glass, "thank you for the part you've played in making it happen. 
"Throwing me music to listen to, the sanity-checks, the peer-reviews." 
Our glasses meet in the middle with a <clink>, "and hey, thanks for coming to visit." 

The cost of doing business... (Part I: Perihelion)

 Musical accompaniment: Enter Shikari - The Last Garrison

I used to think I was playing the lead in my own story, and... you never know I may even have been right, but as the days roll by I find myself haunted by the idea that I've quietly transitioned to playing a walk-on role in other people's. It's easy to mistake the part we play for 'titular' when it's really 'supporting' after all; our perspective of the events we participate in is recorded from our own (statistically) binocular PoV, so when you're focused on wearing down your teeth chewing the scenery it's easy to forget the BLOCKCAP advice the Director included in the footnotes on every page of the script you skimmed, which read: 

REMEMBER: NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU.

I've been wading through the endless-seaming river of my professional life with my feet in two very different streams of consciousness. On one side I've been working hard to keep my existing clients happy, or in the case of Marine#2 frantically keeping them from getting too pissed off (they eventually signed off on the VOIP solution I sold them, and everything that could possibly go wrong subsequently has). On the other has been an ongoing struggle to convince someone in Canberra to let me solve big problems for them for big money. Whilst time-consuming, neither of those activities have come close to utilising the complete range of my skillset, so in the middle of the two there's been a lot of room to put some of the other tools I keep handy to use. Some days it's felt like I've brought more of those resources to bear, and exerted more effort, for other people's benefit than my own. I could pretend to a perspective of Zen selflessness and talk about that being OK because we all know there's only one of me, and I am Nothing, but then I'd be skipping everything in the other half of the story to create a false-perception of depth. Whilst spending the coin of my knowledge and experience brings me nothing but joy, I can't actually say that with a straight face because each of those coins is two-sided, and on the other defaced side there's an aspect of me which still yearns for recognition. Every bit of credit I have to spend cost me a piece of myself to acquire; whether the currency was opportunity, or my finite energy, an eigth of a pound of flesh, or one irrecoverable moment of my time, I paid a price for everything I have and there's a bit of me that wants something in return. 

But who the fuck am I to ask for it, when everything I built myself from was given to me by someone else? When your boot is sitting next to the thimble, roadster, and terrier on Go with an empty board in front of you and a pair of dice in your hand, the play money you start with had to come from somewhere. 

As we walk our own lonely Road of Bones, the only road that we have ever known, it's too easy to forget that we walk on the the clean-pecked scapulas and clavicles of giants to whom we can never repay the favour; we owe it to the next set of calloused feet to make sure that when we fall ours rest as tall as Phlebas, and provides a higher perspective. 

Backing track: AViVA - Sacrifice

My phone rang a couple of weeks ago at 12:47PM with the name of my 2023 Padawan on the screen. The time of day told me something was up, but that wasn't the half of it: 

She was calling me. 
On the phone. 
Laika's a member of the emergent generation for whom a "phone" is a pocket-sized internet portal, who consider the bit where it can be made to ring because someone wants to talk to you using their voice an insufferable affront to social decency. 

I remember being taught how to use a rotary-dial phone, the numbers you entered sequentially came printed on a kilo of dead-tree each year, or were written down carefully by hand in an alphabetised notebook, and calling across the country was an expensive extravagance.
Now we call numbers we can't remember and talk to people we'll never meet on the far-side of the globe for the fun of it, and for free. 
Yeah, I know, I'm old; Laika's young enough to be my daughter. 

And she was calling me. 
On the phone. 
"What the fuck?" I thought, "what's gone wrong...?" 

Turns out the answer to that was 'plenty' but that's not my story to tell, it's just the one she called to tell me.
But she wasn't calling me because she wanted to ask for help, she was calling because she needed to tell someone who'd get it without needing to have 'it' explained.
She needed a friend who'd answer the phone when it rang, who wouldn't judge her for what she told them, who'd help if they could without being asked. 

I plead guilty on both charges, Your Honour. 
I do what I can, and there are a lot of things I can do. 
I throw myself on the mercy of the court. 

I've been taking on Padawans for a long time now, and it's a thing I can say, without prejudice, that I take pride from. I can't tell you when I started exactly, but it's a truth universally acknowledged, that a no-longer-young professional in possession of a good knowledge of The Job, must want to show the colleagues more junior to them how better it might be done. One day you turn around and realise that the earnest kid you're performance managing isn't just taking your workplace lessons to heart, they've started emulating you in their personal life as well, and if that doesn't leave a mark like Bruce Lee kicking you in the face whilst wearing sneakers with "RESPONSIBILITY" moulded into the sole, you don't have one. 

Call it a messiah complex, call it inferred generational debt, or my nascent paternal instinct, call it what you will. I decided a long time ago that I was never having children of my own; I've been told countless times that I'd come to regret my decision "one day", but just like 'tomorrow' and Godot that day has remained stubbornly on the other side of the horizon, and never seems to arrive. I'm fairly certain I was born to be an uncle - all care and no responsibility, gone the moment a nappy needs changing, and long before bedtime. The thing we all need to remember is that no one is born knowing everything they need to know. Some people are preternaturally quick on the uptake (which comes with its own dumpstats) but for the rest of us, unless we're just going to repeat the same old mistakes we need to learn from someone else. There are many from whom I learned, and there are a growing, happy few who've learned from me. 

I have exemplary credentials, I'll have you know; I've made a LOT of mistakes. 

Being an 'uncle' means getting to choose your level of involvement; when you should stay, and when you should go. 'Deadbeat dads' notwithstanding, parenthood is a "Hotel California"-style life-choice, and I've stubbornly refused to relinquish my right to leave the moment I decide to check out. If you think that sounds selfish and irresponsible, I'll say to you the same thing I said to my father when he denounced me for refusing to sacrifice my existential autonomy in the name of progenitating grandchildren to carry on his name: 

"Yeah, nah, go fuck yourself." 
I know what I'm good at, and there's a lot of good I can do. 
But playing the role of "consistently positive role-model" ain't one of them. 

I hold parents to a pretty high standard; my father never met it, and I'm far-too-much my father's son. "Mother," according to Thackeray, "is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children," but it's also true that fathers are their own flavour of role models, so if your father bails what does that tell you? "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you." 

Not being that guy is not the worst thing that can happen. 

I was never going to be anyone's 'forever-father', but 'dad-for-a-day' is something I can pick up and run with. It's the sort of relationship no one asks for directly, and no one accepts, because you fall in and out of it naturally. There's no application process, and no one gets an invitation to apply, although there've been exceptions... 

Like the conversation I had with young Andy, who looked at me in awe when I was talking one day about some difficult shit I'd been dealing with at work. 
"I just... you have now idea how badly I want to be like you."
"Seriously dude? You... do you have any idea? 
"I..." quoted Perry Cox, "only barely want to be like me?" 

Adoration may taste like heaven, but that moment was one I didn't want to drink; it tasted like acetone, and as I fled for the nearest horizon so fast my boots barely touched the ground I felt quite alone. 

Laika took what was offered, and that seems to have been enough, because she picked it up and ran, leaving me right where I belong; alone in the dust of her wake. 

Does that sound like a tragedy? It's not. 
Because it ain't over yet. 
If you haven't worked it out, 
Let me tell you what: 
Watching them de-rez into a b1t on the horizon
Is the p0int. 

Continued in Part II: Transit...

Spaceballs... I mean Phase Shifting: The T-Shirt...

 A couple of years ago I made some art, and turned it into a blog post. 
Yesterday I took a blog post, and turned it into art. 

Sorta. 

I could weave a story about receiving a promotion code from Sticker Mule, who I use for my stickers, for a cheap custom t-shirt, thinking it would be funny to make the hypothetical shirt I mentioned in the last post into something real, sitting around with my laptop fiddling with clipart in Publisher, then enlisting Bridget's help to generate vector-images which would scale nicely but that would be... wait, no, there it is. 

That's the story. 

This, on the other hand, is the mockup: 

Beyond the references to the Looking back/out/forward... post there are a bunch of my usual tropes baked in as "easter eggs" - 3's, cycles, 42, and so on; those little things which amuse me. Plus, for AUD$14 (including GST and delivery) I can now say "my blog has merch," which I can't help but find sublimely ridiculous, because I have zero interest in selling any. 

Here's the high-resolution design for your pleasure and/or derision: 

Looking back/out/forward...

 Musical accompaniment: Enter Shikari - Stop the Clocks 

Existing in three places at once is a strange way to live. It's as if you've one foot in the grave, the other in the cradle, and somewhere in the middle your nuts are hanging over a pool full of piranhas. It feels like you're living in a dream; not the one where you're giving a speech in front of the whole school and suddenly realise you forgot to put on pants, and not the one where you show up to a job interview and suddenly realise your cock is hanging out, not even the one where you're trying to coordinate your own going-away party but the gearbox just fell out of your bike and you have to crawl through the garbage-pile under the mechanics-shop you were stopped at because fuck-knows-why to collect all the cogs and bearings from amongst the rusty old Holden-branded Kingswood parts then ride back to the party with it all piled up on the end-cover sitting on your tank because apparently your bike is magic and who the fuck even needs gears anyway because you need to sort out the people who showed up to help load the shipping container with all your possessions and your bike and its gearbox and your little dog too before the train leaves and there's no time to waste and no time to lose because Gillian Anderson is the Conductor and she's looking at her fob-watch with a look on her face which you know means the train's leaving with or without you the moment the low-nitrile glove she's pulling on goes *snap* and don't even start because she's done with you and your shit. 

I may be feeling a little exposed right now. 

"I don't remember my dreams particularly often," I said, "and when I do they just leave me confused," 
and you said "that makes two of us." 

It seems like I'm living in sequential deja vu, like I'm Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, because all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again, and maybe I died, and maybe I survived the explosion, and maybe I'm an angel, and you just know that whether the showrunners throw in a kludgey ret-con, or just leave it mysteeeeeerious, you're going to feel unfulfilled when the credits roll regardless. 

Either way, I keep finding myself looking back at the ghost of Younger Pete when he was going through an earlier iteration of the same shit, thinking about what I'd tell myself if I could: 

"A'ight shithead, for starters don't date her. That was tragic," I tell myself. 
"I get to date *HER*? She sounds amazing!" 
"Oh, yeah, she is, but it all ends in tears." 
"How so? Does she screw us over or something?" 
"No, see... look... don't get me wrong, but you're a dick. You just don't know it yet."
"..." 
"It's all on you, but you learn from it eventually, if that helps any?" 
"So what you're saying is if I just don't be a shit-heel I get to be with the dream-babe?" 
"No, see... look... it's the fucking up that you learn from, right? 
"Plus she goes on to be with someone great, and they wind up really happy." 
"So you're saying I *should* date her, because it works out better for everyone?
"Or for her, at least." 
"..." 
"Sounds to me like it's going to be worth it, and you're still a dick, just sayin'." 
"No! I mean... true... but... OK, now I'm proper confused," 
and he said "that makes two of us." 

There's a tap on my shoulder, and the clocks stop. 

"A'ight shithead..." 
"Jesus wept, this is starting to feel like some Xmas Carol-shit right here."
"Fuck you, you insufferable twat-nozzle. Listen well, because there's shit I need me to know..." 
"What, like how to avoid some horrible thing I'll only learn from by doing, fucking up, and won't get to be you if I don't?"
"..." 
"Been there, tried that, bought the t-shirt, remember?" I tell myself, pointing to the shirt I'm wearing which reads 'I TRIED TO VIOLATE CAUSALITY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY PARADOX'. 
"You forgot the black eye." 
"What blac...?" 

<SUCKERPUNCH> 

"Not as smart as you thought you were, huh?"
"Yeah yeah fine, you smug-faced cock-womble, you got me," I reply from the floor, chuckle, and continue, "man, I've always wanted to do that. 
"So glad I get to. 
"Can't fucking wait, not gonna lie." 
"..." 
"This is bullshit tho, we both know it. You KNOW you only got to be better than you were because I fuck up again. You were there, you saw it. 
"We're too fucking arrogant; the only way we learn is from our own mistakes. 
"Speaking of which: back atcha, cunt," I say, jabbing two fingers hard into my already-swollen eye whilst I watch myself grimace through the other. 

"Go fuck yourself; I'm doing the best I can." 

I look myself in the eye and say, "that makes two of us." 

Rituals...

Backing track: Marshmello - Alone 

 When I flew in to Perth in June, Ricky picked me up from the airport late in the evening and ran me out to my mother's house, then hung around for an hour or so before leaving me to get far-too-little sleep.
When I left, Ian picked me up after work and we went to The Kewdale Tavern for dinner before he dropped me off for my redeye-horror flight back. 
The next morning, after transiting through Melbourne, Bridget picked me up bleary-eyed on her way to work and took me home, where I collapsed into bed and slept for most of the day. 

When I flew into Perth a fortnight ago, Ricky picked me up from the airport and drove us out to Alfred's Kitchen to get a late-night feed and hang around the fire for an hour or so before running me out to my mother's house to sleep far-too-little.
On my way back, Ian came out to pick me up after work, and took me to The Kewdale Tavern for dinner before dropping me off for my cushy Business Class redeye flight out.
I was just as bleary-eyed when Bridget picked me up to take me home, then worked from my desk for the rest of the day when I crashed out in my own bed and slept through the day. 

The first two times I went back to Perth after Leaving For Good, I wrote trilogies of blog posts about my sense of dysphoria as I went; one on the flight over, one whilst there, the last on the flight back.
This time I seem to have managed to leave that dysphoria behind, so I talked about that, and the Joy Of Work instead, and when I settled into my extravagantly-comfortable paid-for-with-Points fully-reclining seat I realised there was nothing I felt the need to say, so enjoyed a glass of Chivas Regal while I read my book then found some sleep, and let the third trilogy end at two parts. 

Backing track: Pendulum - Not Alone (Calvin Harris cover) 

I can't help but notice patterns, and I'm instinctively inclined towards building seamless systems that work smoothly. I might walk a path that's chaotic, but I have routines which ensure that every time I walk out the door I'm prepared, with all of my tools exactly where I expect to find them when the next wave hits; book-ending the chaos with order helps me stay in control, and means I never leave my phone charger in the hotel room when I check out. 

My mission over the last few months has been to break the patterns I've found myself trapped in so that I can walk a new, different path, without leaving Beckett waterlogged and glowering at me from the gutter where I emptied my bath of self-pity. Mostly, I seem to be succeeding. 

"I enjoyed your last post," Ian told me over Beef Brisket Rendang and Chicken Korma, "it's a departure from your recent milieu, but the character is still recognisably 'you'. 'A day in the life' is an established literary mode and you do it well. How you banged that out while travelling and staving off sleep deprivation is impressive." 

I might be making an effort to reinvent and resurrect, but I *am* still Me; Me with my penchant for three's, and my cyclical narrative-style. Breaking the cycle of misery and cutting out the things that make you miserable doesn't necessarily mean making wholesale changes like throwing out the bathwater, and your furbaby along with it. It can be as simple as changing your approach in smol ways, like limiting your lists to two things instead of three, and using fewer semi-colons.

You can, and should, take a knife to anything that stands between you and where you need to be; yesterday's Sacred Cow is today's graven image.

You can, and should, hold on to the rituals you take comfort from when you kick yourself out your Comfort(ably Numb)-zone; we may have put down childish things when we became a 'man', but we still observe the Sabbath and keep it holy. 

The space you carve out between the two can become room for a New Covenant you make with yourself to be a You that's better, maybe even one that's more whole. 

No matter what tho, always leave room for another Special at your Favourite Burger Joint On The Planet, or this week's Brisket Special at the Conveniently Out-of-the-way Gastropub, so that when the opportunity arises you can enjoy them with your sweetest friends, who'll love you no matter what you become. 

The Thing I Do For A Living...

 Backing track: flor - Slow Motion

It's still dark outside when I roll over on Thursday morning and check my phone to find out it's 4:17AM. I've been asleep for three and a half hours, and I don't need to be up for at least two more, so after a quick bladder-drain I roll back into the unfamiliar bed I just woke up in to see if I can find them. Just like my cat in similar situations they seem to have slipped into the gloom with no intention of being found, but a short while later I hear my mother going about her morning routine in the kitchen, so I get up to say hello. Ricky picked me up from the airport when I landed just before Mother Dear's bedtime last night, so she was asleep and the house still when I crept in silently and sent myself to bed after a late dinner at Alfred's Kitchen. My maternal obligation discharged, she takes herself off to the "food rescue" charity where she volunteers a couple of times a week, and I shake myself to the shower to sluice off the film of fatigue I brought back from dreamland, pull on my corporate uniform, and sit down with my laptop and a coffee to prep for the day. 

I've a full schedule ahead of me; Andrew the Shipwright booked at least the first half of my day the moment he knew I'd be in town, and there's easily three more hours I need to spend at Marine#2. I check my email, and the tracking on the hardware shipment which I need to arrive in Mandurah by Monday to find it's expected today, so Marine#4 receive an "everything's falling into place" email to read over their tea and toast. Correspondence clear, I stow my laptop alongside the backup I carry everywhere when I'm on a work trip, check that my tools are in their relevant pockets, shoulder my backpack, push flor through my earphones, and hit the street. Mother Dear needs her car today, and Bibra Lake is not what you'd call "easily accessible from here" by public transport, so the company credit card will be taking a couple of Uber-sized hits today. That coffee barely scratched the surface of my sleep deprivation and I'm going to need caffeine today like a bee-sting victim needs epinephrine because caffeine is life, so I head towards the nearby servo. I could get the Uber-driver to stop enroute, but it's barely 6:31AM and there's no point arriving much before 8:00AM, so I might as well walk. 

The air has a cool crispness as I hi-ho, hi-ho my way north through Lathlain, and we both seem oddly cheerful. By the time I walk through the doors of the BP on Archer St I've received an affable nod from the lantern-jawed jogger with a distinctly military bearing I pass on Goddard St, a smile from the middle-aged anglo lady walking a pair of excitable pitbulls on Custance St when I go wide to stay outside their leash-radius, which is almost as embarrassed as the grinning indigenous driver's teeth are white when he waves me past after I go to give way to him just before Roberts Rd. 

By 7:47AM I'm climbing out of a Mazda CX-50 after a pleasant chat with my Nepalese driver and a smooth run down Leach Hwy just in time to catch Andrew the Shipwright pulling up on his pushbike. I reach into my backpack, crack open the first of my cache of glistening energy drinks, follow him inside, and get to work. 

First order of business is a restructure of Marine#1's Sharepoint Document Library. I've been gently nagging them for months to separate the more sensitive documents out of the "all access" library and into the Management Team location I set up with more appropriate RBAC's, and it's finally become a priority to them. A week ago I received an email from Andrew at 6:56PM his time, and I called him straight away. 

"You need this looked at now, or tee'ing it up for when I'm in town next week?" 
"God no. What is it, 9 o'clock over there? Just getting it on your radar." 
"10. Daylight Savings kicked in on the weekend." 
"Fucking hell, you're worse than I am..." 

I checked the Dynamic Groups and metadata filters before I flew out, so all it takes is triggering a Sync on Andrew the Shipwright's desktop, and showing him how to do a back-end Move in his browser. I'll set up an auto-sync Policy in Intune in a few days once I'm sure he's not going to rearrange again, but I like to run checks and maintenance on the PC fleet by hand every once in a while because it gives me the opportunity to check in with the staff, so I go desk-to-desk. I find that a lot of feedback and niggles they wouldn't ordinarily think to mention fall out when I take over their machine to give it a shake-down and get them chatting. It might sound inefficient for a half-hour task to take two, but in that time I've sorted out an audio driver problem, found a misconfiguration causing people's Word and Excel to save in ODF instead of the standard XML format, fixed the Bookkeeper's printer connection and shown her how to cache her Remote Access login, cut the Service Manager over from Remote Desktop to the more streamlined RemoteApp experience, and discovered two more members of the Management Team than we'd thought there were at 8:26AM. 

I cruise back to the Bossman's office and debrief him whilst I check over the old PC that used to run the camera control software for his timelapse solution, declare that 12 years is long enough to keep a Lenovo SFF with 8GB of RAM and a 2nd Gen Intel Core i5 CPU in service, and strip the hard disk out for separate disposal to the rest of the machine. I prefer Dell equipment for their warranty, build-quality, and overall value, but I'll be the first to agree that Lenovo build their kit as robust as Russians build assault rifles. This was a good use for a machine that had got too slow for production work, and while a Raspberry Pi could have done it just as well he didn't have one of those lying around. It's spent at least the last 6 years of its longer-than-average service life connected to a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, the pair to which was plugged into an old Canon EOS 1300D DSLR he'd mounted to a bracket overlooking the workshop which pumps out 25 twin-engine catamarans a year. The software running on the PC triggered the camera to take a photo twice a day, 5 days a week, saving it into a folder sync'd to its own Sharepoint Library that he shares with clients so they can watch their half-million dollar boats being built in real-time. At the end of the build those photos get rolled into a minute-long video, burned to a DVD with the stills, the media archived, and the process starts all over again. When I was here back in June I put my head together with the guys who manage Marine#1's security system, and set up a PoC using one of those cameras instead. There are a lot of benefits to using a security camera for this; weatherproofing copes with the the paint, resin, and solvent fumes much better than the delicate seals in a DSLR, and the polymer dust from sanding back the hull gets into everything. The workshop has a set of industrial-strength extraction fans at the rear, and they've sealed every gap with caulk to keep the entire two-story space at negative-pressure, preventing it from becoming a toxic OHS nightmare. The door to the break-room is chocked open so they can come and go, and the constant breeze flowing through it keeps dust from getting into everyone's toasties. Andrew's a remarkably clever guy, and it shows in situations like this. Even so, that old Canon was caked with white dust, and the lens constantly needed cleaning. It also needed separate power, plus the software was flakier than a fish & chip shop's specials and needed a regular kick to keep running. Security cameras are designed to take a pounding, and with PoE they only need one cable to run. A couple of months ago the security guys fitted a Pan-Tilt-Zoom model, and I wrote a script to make it point to different parts of the workshop in sequence, capturing a still at each, so now there are five timelapse sets being generated each day rather than one. It's been running without a hitch ever since, the DSLR is sitting on a shelf behind the infamous laser-cutter, and the time has finally come for the old Lenovo to go to its ultimate reward in Silicon Heaven where all the calculators go, and the iron shall lie down with the lamp. 

The SFF chassis becomes a riser for the App Server to get it off the floor, and I hand the mechanical 500GB SATA drive over to the Field Mechanics so they can give it a viking funeral. 

I'm rolling the cables up to throw in the spares cupboard at 11:34AM when Andrew the Shipwright's new iPhone 16 Pro lands on the desk I'm sitting under along with his old 14; he needed a handset for a new hire, but why should the FNG get the new hotness when the Bossman's still sporting a two-generation old model? The automated Intune deployment I built a while back didn't quite accommodate some of his customisations, and he was getting a login loop in Authenticator. I'd finished wiping, reprovisioning, and reconfig'ing the 14 by the time I worked out Authenticator on the 16 Pro was trying to retrieve the now-deleted auth token from the 14, and I need to hop into his Entra account to remove the surplus Authentication Method; I'm a little ashamed with myself for how long it took to work out, but by this point I've been on the job longer than I slept last night and it hadn't quite ticked over midday. 

I've handed the Bossman his phone back and set the new mechanic's one on the charge when my own phone rings, so I step out for a break and have a chat with the pimp I've been dealing with lately. I put in an application for a chunky-looking role a few weeks ago; one of the larger federal departments looking for an ITSM Transformation Manager to review and rebuild their IT Service Delivery structure and practice from the inside-out. She tells me they'd pulled it from BuyICT, which is why I've not heard anything since, and have just put it back up again with small changes to the requirements. The response I wrote up previously is still applicable so at least won't need a redo, but she suggests we shave $5/hour off my original asking rate before resubmitting to keep things competitive. That's still $15/hour more than the base-rate I quote for gig-work, and this is a multi-year full-time contract, so I rubber-stamp it and kept moving. 

On the way back up I stop by the comm's rack to pull the hard drive out of the Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE; I'd run a parallel PoC for the timelapse solution using an old Unifi Protect camera I had lying around, but as nice as the apps and management options are it's not a use-case which Unifi developed it for, so it hadn't been effective. I'd disabled the service and purged the drive earlier in the morning and prefer not to leave loose-ends, so I pull my screwdriver out to gank the 500GB SSD for re-use elsewhere. While I'm pottering around in the rack tidying up a few errant cables and checking the stock of spares I have stashed the mechanics are cruising through to grab their lunch, and I receive a steady stream of "how you doin' Pete?" and "heeeey, you're back!" as they go by. Spending a solid week and a half in and amongst them in June made me a familiar face, and they like me because the shit I build makes their lives a LOT easier, I always ask before borrowing tools, and put them back where I found them. Just as I'm finishing up Lukey comes by to ask for advice on recovering space on his home computer; it sounds like the main drive is full of old iTunes cache and backups, so I tell him how to move that all to the secondary disk, and make sure he has my email address in case that's not enough. He leaves with a grin, I close the rack back up, and head back upstairs at 12:29PM. 

I've just sat down to check some emails, and I'm half-way through letting Marine#4 know that the delivery has arrived at the workshop next to theirs when The Fucking EFTPOS Tech finally shows his face. They've been out to install the new payment terminal twice already, for an hour or more each time, without managing to get their shit in one sock; I'd dealt with two different gormless muppets over the phone, and had to talk the Parts Manager through getting his desktop back up and running when the last one broke his network settings on his way out the door, knocking him offline. They called to schedule the third-time's-a-charm appointment the day after I'd let Andrew know I was coming, so he set it up for the day he knew I'd be paying him a visit. I've been waiting all day for this, oh yes, so I snap my laptop closed, leave it on the charge, put on my best devilish grin, and apparate downstairs in a puff of brimstone to play Deeply Scary Technomage. 

I've just finished sending that email to Marine#4 at 1:07PM when Andrew steps back into his mezzanine office. 

"Oh, there you are. I thought the EFTPOS guy was showing up?" 
"Yep. Been, gone." 
"That was quick. Took him an hour to give up last time. What went wrong?"
"Nothing. It's in. Working, sorted." 
"..." 
"Wanna guess how long it took?" 
"... go on," he replied, a predatory grin touching the corner of his mouth. 
"10 minutes." 
"Nah, really? What'd you do!?" 
"Got him to plug it in, install his software, and growled at him whenever he tried to change anything else. Worked first time." 
"You gotta be kidding me..." 
"Yeah, if they'd just done what they were told the first time you'd have had it up and running weeks ago. They have a bullshit SOP they're made to follow, but they're still a pack of fucking clowns. 
"Oh, and I had to re-cable the damn thing afterwards. He left the power cord dangling right next to the network cable the Service Manager's doggo chewed on, so I bound it up with the rest. Pulled that out while I was at it," I say, pointing to the spool of frayed Cat-6 on the desk next to me. 
"Well we all know you're good at cleaning up after clowns, but what a three-ring shitshow. Thank fuck you were here, hey? I knew you'd sort it out."
"Hey man, it's what I do..." 

Backing track: The Presets - Promises

I still have a pile of odds and ends to do when I say my goodbyes and head over to Marine#2, but it's all mop-up and improvements I can do remotely so I load my backpack up and hit the road at 2:46PM. It's about a 15min walk, so decided to save $10 and take the opportunity to check in on Bridget who, with the 3 hour time difference now daylight savings has kicked in, should be home from work by now. It was forecast to hit 28 degrees in Perth today. Even with my hat on my nose picks up a rosy glow form the sun, and when I walk through the double-door into Marine#2's showroom at 3:02PM my feet and head are heavy with weariness, and I've worked up a sweat. 

I took these guys on four and a half years ago now. I'd been engaged by Marine#1 six-or-12 months earlier to migrate them from the cut-down implementation of Microsoft 365 which Crazy Domains peddles to people who don't know any better over to the real deal, with all the bells and whistles. A while later when Luke and Chris were complaining to Andrew about Krusty The Clown, their current IT Support, he told them, or so I heard from Chris some time later, "there's this guy Pete... he'll confuse the shit out of you, but he's real' fucking good. He'll get you sorted out." 

They sent me an email a couple of days later, I booked in a time to pay them a visit, and proceeded to spend most of the next year rebuilding their entire IT system from the ground up. Ever since I've come and gone like I'm one of team because for all intents and purposes I am, only on an at-call basis. It's been the same over at Marine#1, then Marine#3, and the way things are shaping up by the end of next week that will include Marine#4 as well. I've grown hugely fond of my salt-of-the-earth "boat folk" and their no-bullshit attitude. They just want their shit to work, aren't afraid to adjust if there's a better way to do things, and are happy to pay reasonably to make it happen. Over the years I've learned to flow in and around them like water, eroding the rough edges that used to get in their way. 

I've barely walked through the door when I'm marching back out of it again with the key to their PO Box in my hand, because AusPost decided that near enough was good enough, and left the RAM I'd ordered for them there instead of taking it all the way to the end. The first time I walked in those doors whilst on the clock I spent an afternoon going over the kit they were working with to see just how bad it could be, and it was pretty fucking bad. Krusty The Clown had a seriously dated concept for setting up an effective user environment; the under-spec'd Intel NUC's he'd sold them might have been OK if the Remote Desktop he was hosting had been decently resourced, wasn't piped down a VPN, then squeezed through an internet connection which was the digital equivalent of two rusty cans and a wet piece of string. There were more bottlenecks in his setup than the recycling bin after an undergrad end-of-semester party. I sat Luke and Chris down and laid out a plan to get some decent hardware on their desks, their email and file-sharing shifted to Microsoft 365, and a streamlined version of their Application Server migrated to some hardware we'd host onsite, staged out over the following year to make it easier to budget. We ordered a mix of laptops and desktops, enough to replace half their fleet, but with the prices of hardware at the peak of covid more inflated than a party clown's trousers I ordered them with smaller batteries and less RAM than I would have liked with a view to upgrading them in a year or two when things were cheaper. It turned out to be a solid play because they've run just fine, for much longer than I'd expected, and what would have cost an extra $200/unit in 2020 wound up coming to just over $100 for all three in 2024. 

Back in the showroom surrounded by Garmin sonars and Yamaha outboards, I go to fill up my water bottle only to find it's not in my backpack. I give Andrew a quick call and confirm that I have indeed left the stainless steel keepsake from my last ever dive trip on the desk I'd been using in his office. It's 3:38PM, I've at least two hours of work to do at Marine#2, and he's going the wrong way after he knocks off to drop past, so I'm going to have to come back another day. It's just a water bottle, but it's the only memento I took away from that trip that wasn't bad memories. I'm swearing at myself as I get on with popping the baseplates off and slotting the extra memory modules into the space I'd made sure would be ready to accept them when I designed these builds 50 months ago, clear the BIOS warning saying that the amount of memory has changed, run hardware checks, Disk Cleanup, driver and Windows updates, and hand them back to their users one-by-one. I've just started on the third-and-final when the Marine#1 Parts Manager comes through the door waving my Big Blue Dive Khao Lak flask overhead; Andrew wasn't going this way, but it turns out the Parts Manager was. 

"Marine#1 will be getting some freebies on their next hardware order," I tell myself. 
To the Parts Manager I say, "Thank you fucking legend!" 

The last thing on my run-sheet is a meeting with Luke, but he's in full-steam sales-pitch with a couple of customers weighing up engine options for the custom cruiser they're having built down the road. I squeeze in a check of the air filters on the server and comm's rack, both of which are clean, then settle in checking over a PC nearby where I can listen in. I've never had the chance to watch the man work, and it's fascinating. People browsing trailer-boats and accessories are all about the lifestyle; the tradies and professionals know what they want, so they're in and out, if they bother coming in at all. The sales patter switches between power-to-displacement ratios, the best moorings off Rottnest, digital-vs-analog autopilot profiles, and what fish are biting this month, delivered with a smooth professionally-approachable tone. The only way that man could have been more in his element would have needed us to be a couple of nautical miles west of Port Coogee Marina with his face full of spray blowing off the afternoon swell. Sadly I have a VOIP system to sell him, so our feet need to stay dry. 

He ushers his customers out the door at 5:00PM on the dot with the lure of freshly caught dhufish and maori wrasse dangling in front of them, and sits down to talk price and feature comparisons between the lacklustre system he's been receiving woeful support on and the locally-owned alternative I Partnered with a couple of years ago. Irritatingly, whilst the one he's got might be average, it's not SO BAD he can ignore the cost, and as feature-rich as my Partner's product is it's also 20% more expensive. It's a good conversation; I like being kept on my toes, although by 5:48PM I'm less "float like a butterfly" than "sink like an anchor". I plead exhaustion, a need to check bundling options, and promise to go haggle some more with the vendor. By 6:04PM I'm on the footpath out front helping lock up the gates whilst on the phone with my contact Enrico, who also happens to be their CEO. It's another 34min before I have a bundle to quote, clear my other missed calls, and finally hail an Uber to get me out of Bibra Lake where the light is fading and I'm increasingly being swarmed by flying ants. 

I have a pleasant ride in the back of the Mitsubishi Outlander, and an equally pleasant chat with its driver on my way to Bull Creek where I've completely misremembered the number of Binky's house. I've been visiting her there on-and-off for over half my life, and it's been 25 years since I had to know it, which is coincidentally the number of minutes the ride lasts. I knock on her door to find it unlocked and ajar so I let myself in at 7:14PM, landing next to my backpack on the floor of her living room with matching thuds. I take a moment to switch gears, say hello to her folks, pick myself back up, and load up to head out for dinner. 

We decide to go for steak, and both wind up getting the ribs special instead, but that's fine; it would be pretty boring if things always went according to plan. 

It's 11:17PM when I climb out of Binky's Infiniti Q60 in front of Mother Dear's house and walk down the long driveway with my silhouette cast in its headlights. I have 9.5 billable hours' worth of notes to write up and invoice, 3 unread emails which hit my inbox during dinner, and 2 quotes to do- or re-up, but none of that is getting done tonight. I've no site-work booked for Friday, so those are all problems for Future-Pete. Tomorrow's work will be completely different from today's, just like today bore absolutely no resemblance to yesterday, which is exactly how I like it. When I tell people with regular jobs, who go to work each day and do the same thing again and again, about what I do for a living they look at me like I'm mad, but the Andrews, Lukes, and Enricos, the Petes, Occam's Canadian Amys, and Sandras, anyone who's picked their own ball up to see how far they can run, they get it: 

When you love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life. 
And if we didn't love what we do, we'd all go do something else. 
Because we could do that if we wanted, but we don't so we do this instead. 

The house is dark and still when I roll over to put my Kobo down and pick up my phone to set an alarm, and see it's 1:05AM. Friday has already started; the first problem to tackle today is going to be getting some sleep. 

Vapour trails...

 I've developed what I can't think of a better word for than a habit, it seems. There's a case to be made for suggesting that if "once is happenstance," "twice is coincidence," and "three times is enemy action," I could try framing my sense of unease around that, but I'm not feeling particularly combative, let alone under-fire, so that isn't sitting comfortably with me any more than I (or the fidgety young man sitting next to me) seem to be able to get comfortable in the chair I'll be sitting in for the next three-and-a-half hours. 

I'm on my way to Perth again, and we all know what that means... 

Perth music: Bend The Sky - Navigator

This is my third trip back in slightly less than a year, and by this point in the 7ish-hour "Canberra -> Somewhere -> The Most Isolated Regional Capital In The World" route I've been had to resort to using because Australia can't seem to grok the concept of "healthy competition in the airline market" is where I find I'm struggling to focus on whatever book I'm reading (The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, because I ran out of Culture novels and I very much owe it to Ian to read something he suggested and provide an asked-for opinion for a change), pull my laptop out, and give voice to the discomfort, dysphoria, and dread that place evokes in me. This flight I find myself staring at the screen of my laptop (as is the young man sitting to my right, I can see out of the corner of my eye. Don't use too many of the words you read here around your mum, kid. She'll thrash the fucking shit out of you, I swear) and... I got nothing. I'm scratching my head as to why, to be honest: 

Perhaps I've used up all of my wellspring of corrosive vitriol and smouldering rage? 
No, that can't be right; we might be cruising ~10km above the ground, but this is far from heaven. 
Could it be that after ~10,000 words of increasingly wanktastic self-paced catharsis my spleen is finally vented?
No way to prove or disprove that one, really; it's a scenario that's never been observed in nature.
Maybe I'm finally over hating on that ~100km-long skidmark of a town smeared along left-hand side of the map like a crusty old pair of y-fronts clinging to the arse-end of the country badly in need of a soak in sulfuric acid and ritual cremation, where the only redeemable examples of humanity dream desperately of getting out or, when precluded from doing so by fate or poor life-choices, conspire to lure me back... 

Ah Darkness, my old friend, there you are. Funny how when you lose something it always turns up in the last place you look, don't you find that? 

Sincerest apologies to Andrew the Shipwright tho; it's going to take more than a couple of new clients to entice me off my balcony for more than a week or two, but that doesn't mean I appreciate the effort any less, or that I'm suggesting he stop. 

I'd make a joke about how "better men than him have tried", but that would imply that there's an intersection of those two sets of people, and bearing in mind how vanishingly small the first group is the resulting venn diagram would be comically difficult to represent in any meaningfully proportionate way. Andrew the Shipwright didn't introduce me to the new client I picked up recently, who's new site spin-up was (only just) big enough a job to make it worth contributing to the world's carbon dioxide burden, but he DID recommend me to Marine#2, who in turn introduced me to Marine#3 and now #4;  unlike blame and effluent, thanks flow uphill. It's been quite a while since I landed a new client, in fact I've not added anyone regular to my invoice-cycle since quite a while before The Job That Brought Me Back To Canberra. Adding complement to amelioration, this one came to me on reputation; they saw what I'd done with Marine#2 and said "we'll have what they're having", so like a double entendre I'm going to give it to them. 

The west isn't my only prospect for amusement or a paycheck tho, thank fuck. I have what has every semblance of momentum building on the "fixing big problems for big money" front back home, and meetings booked for when I get back. I also have Bridget picking me up from the airport to look forward to, which is nice. No, we didn't get back together; why try to resurrect something it turns out was better off dead when you can climb aboard the bloated corpse, stick a pole with a sheet tied to it up its arse, and sail away on a wave of mutilation? Breaking up seems to be just what our relationship needed, so we're going with whatever-the-fuck-this-is because what the fuck even are labels anyway? 

Funny ol' language, English. On one hand we have words like "expiate" for a concept which seems more-than-adequately serviced in the lexicon. On the other we have this word "relationship" which we use to refer to interpersonal arrangements involving romance, lust, or (occasionally) love, but fundamentally describes any ongoing interaction between two or more people. It's all a bit confusing when you thi... 

Or maybe I'm just over-thinking something which is really, fiendishly, diabolically straight-forward; so remarkably and elegantly simple that we go and make it complicated because we can't see it without thinking "that can't be all there is to it, surely," so we miss what's right on front of us. I've been missing it myself until now, because I only just realised that both uses of the word "relationship" are actually the same, and all this time I've been using it right entirely by accident. 

How about that? 

But here I go getting all meta again. What can I say? It's a long flight, I get bored easily, and it amuses me, so don't expect an apology; I'd have thought that after all we've gone through together you'd have a pretty good understanding of who and what I am; what else did you think I use the meta for? 

Does this sound OK to you?

 Musical accompaniment: Enter Shikari - Bull (feat. Cody Frost) 

I hit Publish on the last post, changed to a different song mostly at random, got half-way through it, switched tabs back and clicked on New Post. Before I switched tracks my private music streaming server told me me I'd listened to Drive by Incubus 27 times. 
Ride by Twenty One Pilots said 81. 
Bull currently says 2, which will shortly increment to 3. 

I can't help but feel that writing about writing is taking my literary onanism to the next level, like I'm reaching into the 5th dimension to give myself a reach-around which can only result in a stickily-slippery slope leading to a poly-dimensional circle-jerk, and once I start I'm going down. 

If you google "write what you know quote" you'll discover that it's attributed to Mark Twain, and that the next two pages of links will be to people raining written hate about it, which just goes to show how right Clint Mansell et al were when they re-named their band Pop Will Eat Itself. 

I think I'll listen to Ich Bin Ein Auslander next. 

I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but I'm on a roll now so I might as well get a grip. This hobby, which has arguably become my most important emotional/creative outlet, has been all about writing as a means for working things out. It never ceases to amaze me how often I start out writing down something which popped into my head not knowing what I'm going to say next, but by the time I'm done I know something I didn't when started; I wrote it and now I know, but I wrote it so how could I not have known from the start? No one knows how the snake came to suck down its own teil, but it's rolling down the road so I might as well grab it with both hands and hold tight, climb onboard, and see where it takes me. 

When I finished the journey of insploration which became It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me... my private music streaming server told me I'd listened to Midwest Indigo by Twenty One Pilots 204 times. 
Jailbreak by Enter Shikari said 139. 
Bull currently says 22, and counting. 

Music has always been an important part of my writing; I can't tell you what other people's processes look like, but I can count the number of times something happened and I thought "y'know, I should write about that," then did, on one hand. On any given day my brain is a bubbling stew of troubled thoughts boiling in a cauldron over a gas-burning fire fed with a frenetic stream of thoughts which are being thrown over the shoulder of a sous-chef coming down off a week-long cocaine binge toiling away with a look of desperation who gave up on trying to supervise the manic-depressive prep-cooks dual-wielding at the chopping boards after that time he scored a bad batch of acid with a delivery of fish-heads and now can't quite tell whether they're actually the dangerously underqualified ex-convicts he hired or a pack of meth-addicted squirrels packed into questionably-stained chef's whites so now he's just winging it and praying that when he counts his fingers at the end of his shift he'll still have the same seven he used to roll up the fortnight-old specials menu through which he snorted the coffee-vendor's nose-candy lined up on the maitre-d's notepad. 

Calling it a "chaotic hot mess" would be a polite understatement. 

I can stare into the turmoil for hours without a coherent thought, but when I filter it through the lens of Devin Townsend Project, or Metric, or Pink Floyd, or Stone Temple Pilots, or Reel Big Fish, or Fear Factory, or Blink-182, or The Cure, or Scroobius Pip, or TISM, a pattern will emerge in the china shop of my mind's eye that's clearer than a carefully polished mirror, and brighter than a teacher's pet on the first day of class. 

On knees that won't bend... would have been stillborn without Oliver Tree's Me, Myself & I putting the idea of duality into my head. 
Drowning in silence... would have been a whiny lament about feeling overwhelmed without Drown by BMTH reminding me of an event from my last dive-trip. 
Hostage negotiations only happened because WARGASM's God of War (not to mention Mick Gordon's genius work on the Doom Eternal soundtrack) gave me a way to take the terror of an unhinged narcissist threatening my livelihood and turning it into self-righteous rage. 

A lot of my ideas emerge from the texture of what I hear, and I use it to add subtext what what I say. What that looks like and how it feels depends a lot on what I'm listening to, or what word-or-sentiment-association makes me think of at the time; the soundtrack of my zeitgeist is nothing if not mercurial. 

Without Midway Indigo and Jailbreak, It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me... would have just been goth poetry. 

When I realised that I was planning out a piece I was desperate to ensure people understood, I looked for people I know enjoy reading my shit, and would be good "every-man" reference-points. Boldilocks and Occam's Canadian Amy were kind enough to volunteer, and over a couple of multi-hour phone calls we went over Stop; Continue... twice, in line-by-line detail. The first time I had them tell me what they heard, then the second I told them what I was saying, and over rest of each conversation we talked about how I could make sure the two lined up as close as possible. The most surprising thing I found out wasn't how often they don't listen to the links I include, which are so pivotal to my process, but how little that actually mattered. 

See, when I'm putting these things together, a lot of the tone comes from the music I was listening to when the idea popped into my head. To keep it consistent I wind up listening to the same one on repeat for as long as it takes me to push that idea out of my head through my fingers. When your mind is huge, but the conduit you have for it to flow though is small, it means listening to the same thing A Lot. Key words and phrases from the songs will get fed through my brain and out of my fingers to connect what I'm hearing with what I'm saying, and wrap the two experiences around each other. Sometimes the songs will be the a voice you hear the words in, sometimes it's far more subtle than that: 

We all read different things in a story, just like everyone hears different things from a song, which is why I made a point of not using my usual "Musical accompaniment" trope in "It's not you (...) it's me...". Instead, I threw together the "Trailer" posts from my conversations with Boldilocks, an idea inspired by my reference to the Fight Club trailer way back in Sandra... I was pulling a lot of references from that, with her steering me away from the ledge at the start, then returning to that ledge alone at the end; having a "Trailer" which had no immediate bearing to what was going to happen in the Main Feature was just too cute to not use. Using music in the Trailers which didn't show up in film was an idea that was hanging my head from the 300 reference I made in Stop; Continue... because it had always stuck with me how perfect Just Like You Imagined was in the trailer for that film, but wasn't on the soundtrack. I was a way of providing the intended soundscape, but at a remove so that the text would stand on its own, and have confidence that it would work because my sample-group had been doing that anyway. 

More directly, I used the Trailers to send two messages: 

#1: I was going to take you on a journey, and hit you right where you live by kicking you repeatedly in the amygdala; and 
#2: I was absolutely not going to leave you with a positive spin at the end. There was going to be no affirmation, no silver lining, and certainly no hope; the "good guy" gets shot in the face and dies meaninglessly in a car park. 

Yeah, I know it's contrived, but it's my arty and I'll wank if I want to. 

Midwest Indigo is a sad song with a bouncy tune, which I used in the first half to give it a whimsical tone whilst I bounced the narrative around. Key lines like "reaching out on my way home, you can be so cold, I'll try again" and "you make me sad and second-guess myself" speak to how inaccessible I've been over the last few years (but keep trying), and forebode the crisis-of-confidence which comes later. In the second half the repeated line "now I'm lying wide awake" provided an allusion to my long-running insomnia, the long nights I've spend sitting on my balcony writing, and just how aware I've been of the state of my mental health. When I pivot to running down that hill I used its frantic pace (163 BPM to Midwest Indigo's 116) to accentuate the elation of "inhuman success", then make 9 months of downfall feel like free-fall. When it all draws to an end your heart-rate is elevated, in direct contrast with the quiet stillness of my fog-draped balcony, and the only way you can see is down. The photo is absolutely real, taken as I was writing that section, as if the weather had decided it wanted a walk-in role; who was I to deny it? 

But underneath all of that, when you're reading how I let myself get beaten down, in the background you can hear (if you're listening) Rou from Enter Shikari saying 

So, yeah, question everything
Including your own beliefs
And especially your own beliefs about yourself
Inside of you, there's a revolution
Waiting to happen if you pick the lock of your cell block
And just breathe, breathe

and the repeated chant

I hope I leave hope intact
I hope I leave hope intact

Because, you see, whilst every word I wrote was true, I was lying to you, and I was wide awake when I did it, but you'd only know that if you were listening. No word I wrote broke the promise I made when I told you it was going to be miserable, full of gallows-humour, and I wouldn't be leaving you with a glimmer of hope, but underneath I had other things in mind. I didn't know I was going to finish it with a Pandora's Box reference until I'd written the final word, and my finger was hovering over the bottom right-hand corner of my keyboard. In that pause, a number of ideas connected, I saw what I was about to do, and in an action which was more Muninn than Huginn, I hit backspace four times, rewrote that word with a capital-S, and my ring-finger moved up a row to end it with a semi-colon. 

I looked at the bottom of the page and breathed out "Oh Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck..."

Tab-switching back to my private music streaming server, it tells me I've listened to Midwest Indigo by Twenty One Pilots 212 times. 
Jailbreak by Enter Shikari says 166. 
Bull us up to 39, although by the time I'm done editing this all of those numbers will be larger. 

But that's a story I'll Continue another day; there's no point being a prisoner to the past, or letting The Room in your mind be a prison cell. 

Jailbreak just ticked over to 167; don't repeat these words after me, let's sing it Together...  

JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! 

Going nowhere fast...

 Musical accompaniment: Twenty One Pilots - Ride 

The gusting wind is making the 'busa rock against my outrigger-leg as we wait patiently for the lights to change, less like the rocking of a dinghy afloat a rolling swell than having very large man nodding along to a slow reggae groove whilst leaning against our right-hand fairing. The light changing from red to green sets in motion a choreographed set of movements with twenty one years of practice behind them; my right hand starts to squeeze just as the tension in our left starts to release, the outrigger pushes off, retracts, and stows itself away securely, then knees press into the tank to push our butt back to the rear-edge of the seat. Ready for take-off, there's a moment when we're sitting perfectly still on a pair of contact-patches no larger than a pair of outstretched palms, balanced on little more than intent, a prayer-given-wings, and the confidence that by the time physics stops being distracted by our sleight-of-hand acceleration and angular momentum will have kicked in. 

Two seconds later we're travelling at a speed that will see us a kilometre down the road a minute from now, my helmet is tucked behind the screen, and the buffeting is gone; with a drag coefficient resting half-way between a Porsche 911 Carrera and an Airbus A330, and a displacement an order of magnitude smaller than either, the 'busa doesn't cut through the wind like a hot knife through butter so much as slip past with a series of polite "excuse I", "don't mind me", and "thank you ever so kindly"s the rest of the way up Northbourne Ave. Leaning on the edge of the knife-edge of rubber on the left edge of the tyres we carve a line along the grippy tarmac between the slippery white lines of the pedestrian crossing onto Barton Hwy, straighten up again, turn our tail to the wind, and present it our posterior. 

Extroverting my introspection has provided me with a peculiar perspective over the past few weeks; just like someone standing in the Emergency Stopping Lane on Barton Hwy might have seen a horse-and-rider glide past in a blur of poetic motion and dopplering exhaust, had they launched a drone and set it to keep pace to starboard that same horse and his boy would have looked utterly motionless whilst the world slid past in a blur. Look at the footage closely tho, and you'll see that my feet are resting on the pegs whereas it's the wheels that are spinning. The 'busa is doing all the work; I'm just along for the ride. 

Another day, another dichotomy. 

The "Terminal Semicolon" series started as a random accident I precipitated, crossed with a random thought I had, influenced by a random episode of Red Dwarf I'd made Bridget watch so she'd get the reference I make to a joke I heard once but no one seems to remember any more. By the end I'd spent 8400 words of which only 10 were "fuck", laid two and thirty years of my historic self-hood bare, and catharted like a motherfucker. I didn't set out to pick up all the threads I'd left hanging from writing about "where I was" and weave them together to explain "what I was going through all that time" when I jotted down some notes one night about an accident caused by peripheral neuropathy borne of chronic illness any more than had I instead folded them into a thousand cranes and woken the next day to find out that the tornado created when they flapped their wings had flung an under-educated girl in an indigo-checked dress, and the house she lived in, from mid-west America on a Technicolor(TM) adventure, crushing Elon Musk to death in the process. 

Either way, when it was done I looked at the result and muttered "Oh Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck..." under my breath because I'd taken the last two years of chaos and turned them into something beautiful. I started the recently-ended phase of my life by saying "resurrection [...] is never gentle, let alone kind. You have to die before you can be reborn after all", and I keep saying that sometimes you need to destroy what's in the way so you can rebuild something better. "If you want a thing done well," Napoleon is credited as having said, "do it yourself." 

Especially when the only thing standing in your way is your self. 

I put more effort into creating It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me... than I have into anything I've ever written; the Sandra biopic, the speech I wrote for her wedding, and Sunset & Twilight: Art made with Lasers & Maths are the only things which have come close, but all of those were ultimately for other people; this one I wrote to share, so you could see and (I hope) understand, but I didn't write it for you. I wanted to cook something of myself up, create and make-real something delightful out of a very harrowing time of my life which you could swallow, and digest, and take away with you, so that later when I'm pouring you a digestif with one hand and offering a bowl of antacids with the other, I can look you in the eye and know that you're seeing me. 

Or not. 

Maybe you'll just get reflux, make your excuses, and leave before dessert. 
Maybe you'll not show up in the first place, and I'll find myself dining alone with the void filling the chair you were supposed to be sitting in. 

(In the interest of civility, I think I'll call her "Jeremy"; that seems a cromulent name for a complete lack of substance.)

Maybe I'll get to enjoy the whole bottle of armagnac to myself (Jeremy said I could have hers; she has to drive), and eat leftovers for the rest of the week. 

Either way, I'm going to help myself to seconds. 

Backing track: Incubus - Drive 

I've been trying to reconcile the ridiculous number of things I seem to do in my day with the absolute lack of anything I seem to get done; after a while the expenses keep piling up and there's only so much you can sneak into your "Consulting Fees" and "Meeting Expenses" accounts before your accountant starts asking pointy questions because "Blackhearts & Sparrows" appears to be a bottle shop. I guess this is what you get for engaging an accountant who's good at her job, has a finely-tuned nose for bullshit, and shared a house with you back in your late-20's, but I digress. I feel like those pitiful plebs I keep seeing through the window of the gym on Lonsdale St running on treadmills when I'm walking to-and-from the local Coles with another backpack-full of the pre-packaged chemical energy I feed my failing meatsack to ensure it fails a little more slowly. I keep telling myself "at least when I put one foot in front of the other I'm a step further forward than I was before, so I'm better-off than those cunts," but it's a lie and I know it. If anything, they're more honest about it because whilst we're both going nowhere fast, at least they're not pretending; our pursuits might be equally pointless, but how much more authentic does it get than merging mouth with money, and paying for the privilege of proving it? 

I do know one thing they don't tho, because I know that what both of us are doing is futile, and the whole thing is fucking absurd. 

OK, that's two things, but who's counting? 

In the beginning, a less-hirsuite-than-average ape somewhere in what we now call Africa who'd never heard of pants looked up in wonder at the glorious firmament of the heavens above, and thought "What the fuck?" 
Some time later, another ape who'd realised that pants were a pretty solid concept looked outside themselves and thought "Why the fuck?" 
By the time pants were considered prosaic, a German ape with a Niet mousta-zsche looked down at the world around them and thought "What's the fucking point?" 
A hundred years later moustaches were out of vogue, pants had been around so long they'd started getting shorter, and a French ape who was born in Africa stood between another bunch of apes with a ball and the net they were trying to kick it into in a pair of shorts, looked inwards and Camus'd to the realisation that "... there isn't one. How fucking funny is that?" 

I used to identify as a Nihilist because in the cold, hard light of maths, there always seemed to be a divide-by-zero; it makes no difference no matter what you do. Everyone who won, and everyone who tried, and everyone who failed, and everyone who didn't, all wind up dead. Nothing we do matters, and everything we were and everything we did turns to dust in the end, so what the actual fuck is the point? Regardless, I kept moving because doing something has always felt a whole lot better than doing nothing, and given the alternative I've had nothing better to do. After a while I realised I'd been missing the punchline that whole time, because I keep forgetting that I'm terrible at maths. 

Our whole short lives we keep trying to square the circle that we know, no matter how sophisticated our calculated reasoning evolves, will always show up on the right-hand side of the ultimate equal-sign. We know, because we can prove it, but we keep trying because we need it to not be true, but that's because we've only been paying attention to the first half of the story. 

"In the setup [...] you tell a story and there's an assumption made by the listener, and what they'll find is that rug will be whipped out from under them and the assumption they made was erroneous, suddenly revealing a fact that was previously concealed, and they realise they've made a mistake."
- Jimmy Carr

I find it all existentially hilarious that we know it's pointless, but we keep trying to find a way to say it ain't so. It's all so fucking ridiculous, but that's the actual point because life is also sublime; 

It's all a fucking joke. 

So when I walk past with a wry smile on my face, it's not because I'm judging the lycra-clad ape in the window because whist paying a bunch of money to run on the spot is ludicrous, ultimately the only thing dividing us is a pane of glass and logically, if: 

I:\> $you = 0
I:\> $me = 0
I:\> $you -eq $me
True

I, riding the superposition of these perspectives, have been doing my best not to look to windward because the gusts are coming from behind me, the hurdles I might trip over are in front, and I'm trying to get my feet back where they belong between my face and the pavement. 

Besides, Phlebas is dead, and beyond caring. 

Regular service will Continue shortly; a context-free poetic interlude...

Don't do that.
Don't look to play the part you think is expected of you,
Or feeds the perception of a desire for versimillitude.
Don't play the part you think was written for you,
Or which you've been told you're expected to play.
The world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players;
It's true.
But the best part you can play is:
The one you wrote for you. 

It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me...

"You need to remember that this isn't a failure," Sandra said a couple of Fridays ago. 

This was obviously important - that was at least the third time she'd said it. 

"It's not that things went badly, or anyone did anything wrong, just sometimes things don't work out, and that's OK. It's not like it was bad; I think it's been really good for you, it just ran its course which is sad. 
"But it's definitely not a failure." 

That made four. 

It wasn't until three days later that I noticed just how much she'd stressed that particular point; it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to say and I was in complete agreement, so like a tiny octopus pretending to be seaweed, in the flow of conversation it slipped past me until some time later when I took my mask off and realised it was clinging on to my brainstem just a little too tenaciously. Floating in the current, I inspected my little stowaway whilst it regarded me with nonchalant insouciance in return, and thought: 

"Wait-a-minnit..." 

Subtlety isn't what you'd call Sandra's "strong suit"; she usually plays clubs, hearts, and spades, exclusively in that order, but like a diamond in the rough and empty places you must walk she occasionally trips you up, because whilst what you've been putting down had all the appearance of having passed over and through her, when you turn your inner eye to see its path you find she's standing right behind you staring back with the hint of a smirk in her bright blue eyes, having picked it up, got a firm grip, and wound it up like a cosh to whack you upside the head before stabbing you with it right between the fourth and fifth ribs, leaving you to suffocate in your own bullshit in the shallow ditch she dug right in front of your feet when you were too busy studying your own navel from the inside out. 

It took me longer than it should have to register how hard she was steering me away from the ledge I've desperately needed a win to pull me back from; if I'd realised just how much the stench of failure had been carried on my breath with every word that's come out of my mouth this year I'd have brushed my teeth more, or at least switched brands of mouthwash. Sandra could see the sand my house was built on crumbling away beneath my toes, God-bless her cotton socks, which is handy because I was distracted at the time being broken up with by Bridget, my fascinating Redheaded Distraction. 

"If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

A couple of months ago Bridget and I were out running errands, and I was being a bit vague:

"You've been pretty 'absent' lately."
"Yeah. Everything's been a bit... grey. I'm sorry, it's kinda hard to describe better than that."
"Hmm," she considered, "maybe you should try writing about it?" 

I'd barely written anything more substantial than a fart in a wetsuit since last year, and when I had managed to James more than a few hundred reJoyce-ful words together it had been like pulling my own teeth. Nonetheless, I gummed on it, and put some thought into how to describe Depression without it turning into "goth poetry". In the peaceful time I spent packing away the suddenly-surplus second place-setting at my breakfast table for the move back to 1 Pacifica Via, Solitudo, I came up with a metaphor I've come to call The Room. 

Imagine finding yourself trapped outside a Room with no walls, which is so completely full of Nothing that there's no room in it for you. The Room is so full of Nothing that it's become condensed, compacted, and concrete; a diamond-perfect lattice of pure atomic Nothing. It's a Void so Perfect you can't even call it a vacuum; it's the Antithesis of Anything, its surface so smooth it has no friction, so clear that at first glance it seems you can see completely through it, completely without mass, but so dense it bends light. The Perfect Void draws you in until you're smeared across the boundary of the Room, so completely you're not so much outside as you are a thin smear around it. For all that you're indelibly adhered to The Room, you find you're still able to move freely, in fact you can go anywhere you want, but no matter where you go or how fast you run, it's right there. You try to tell people about the Void in the Room you've found somehow embedded within your Self, which you've no choice but carry around if you're to do anything at all, but no matter how heavy it is no one can see, touch, or feel its weight, so most of them don't even believe it exists. Even if they do, no one can help you carry it because the Perfect Void in the wall-less Room that you can't enter, but can never leave, exists entirely within the boundary of your own skull, and every time you stare into it you find you're staring back at yourself. 

I remember the moment, if not the day, when I discovered that the background-state in the back of my head had a name, and was neither epidemic, or pandemic, but endemic to me. The High School I went to published a Creative Writing Anthology each year, and I used to write little stories, ideas that popped into my head, so I submitted a couple of pieces because "why not?", before promptly forgetting all about it. I was pretty chuffed when they were included and had a bit of a proud moment taking an early-print copy home to show my folks my name right there in black-and-white on Page 13. Over the following days teachers who's classes I'd never been in, or with whom I'd never really got along, started coming up to me in the school-yard reading from a script so consistent it was like I was hearing it in gestalt: 

"Hi Peter, how are you doing? Are you OK?" 
"Yes, sir. Why wouldn't I be?" 
"That's good. It's just... we'd hate for you to... go anywhere... without telling us."
"Erm... k?" 
"You know you can always come and talk to us if you want... if you need to." 
"O...K, sir. Thank you, sir. I'll be sure to do that, sir?" 

"What was that about," Eugene asked in hushed tones as soon as they were out of earshot, "did you get in trouble for something?"
"No, didn't even tell me to pull my socks up or tighten my tie like he usually does. "
"But you ripped the elastic and cut off your top button so they wouldn't stay up..."
"Exactly! He seemed worried I was going on a trip or something."
"Weird. Oh well, Magic at lunch? I've rebuilt my Green Weenie Deck with extra Saprolings." 
"Fuck yeah, but me and that Black Deck James loaned me are still going to pwn you!" 

Years later I flicked through that cheap, spiral-bound collection of photo-copied stories and teenage-poetry and re-read the piece I'd dreamed up one night, written from the perspective of the voice in someone's head whispering a song of worthlessness and failure in the quiet stillness of the night until the protagonist put a gun to their head and painted the wall with their brain, and as the 90's-era environmentally-unfriendly light-source warmed up to incandescence, I had my light-bulb moment, realising: 

"Oooooh, THAT's what that was all about!" 

I was 15 when I wrote that, 16 when I was being buttonholed in the schoolyard by a conga-line of button-down, oxford-cloth, private-boy's-school teachers doing their best to balance their nascent SNAG-training with the ingrained toxic-machismo of their own "boys don't cry" upbringing, confused as anyone else who didn't get the memo because it had never occurred to me that there might just be some other way to be, and the way I was wasn't normal. 

But "normal" was an undiscovered country that I'd read about in a book once, but never met anyone from; what perspective could I possibly have had at that point? Just look at my friends: 

Matt was zany and Singaporean, and always wrote the scenarios for our D&D games. 
Adam was a Christian-pacifist marshmallow, who never said boo to anyone. 
Mott was Singaporean and weird, but amazing at maths. 
James could build a Magic: The Gathering deck out of spare parts that could win tournaments, but was so dyslexic he could barely write a coherent sentence. 
Smeghead was an obnoxious little shit, but so loyal you felt like a country he'd fight wars for. 
Stubbsie could have run Pheidippides into the ground, and done a victory-lap besides, so long as someone was there to tie his shoe laces for him and tell him when to stop. 
Eugene was a an overweight Burmese guy who badly wished he was black. 
And then there was me, with a face the bullies broke their fists punching, great grades, a rage Smeghead and Adam could barely drag me back from, a brain full of knowledge, and a black sense of humour. 

"Why can't you be normal?" Gary, and Arno, and Michael would yell at me, fists flying. 
"What the fuck even is 'normal'?" I'd ask myself while returning their punches in kind, threefold. It was a name I knew, but didn't feel like I had a use for. 

The way I felt, how I'd lived for as long as I'd known, that clinging little stowaway I'd always carried around, the country who's citizenship I held, had a name I was only just beginning to discover, and that was Depression. 

I got bullied a lot in the first half of High School. The teachers coming up to me wearing masks of concern were the same ones who'd been unconcerned when I was having my ankles kicked whilst marching between classes, getting shoved around playing sport, and taunted in the same schoolyard we were now standing in. Some of them had even reprimanded me for "taking matters into my own hands" when kick came to shove and I felt like all I could do to make it stop was punch on. Appealing to authority only achieved additional aggravated aggression, but breaking my hand beating some bozo's bonce was a small price to pay if it meant they left me the fuck alone. 

By that point, Authority had become the name for people who protected my oppressors; no wonder I've always had a problem with it. 
By that point my hand had healed with a bend in the metacarpus connecting my left-pinky to my wrist to serve as a permanent reminder for the cost of standing up for myself. 
By that point I'd taken the fight back to all of them, one at a time at first, eventually moving up to groups of as many as four at a time, and I hadn't always won the battles but they left me and the boys around me alone, which was what mattered. 

I wasn't to know it at the time, but by then the war was over; I never had to fight again all the way through to graduation. 

But I was always ready to. 

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj 

Bridget and I had a good run, all told. We met at just the right time, when I was starting to look outside myself for a whole I could be part of, and she was ending it with a partner who didn't made her feel whole. We had a lovely time, and there was love there for a time, but for all the fizz and zing we've enjoyed over the last half a year there's a hole in her mind that no one else can fill, and a hole in mine which I haven't been able to stop tonguing enough to let heal. We've been good for each other; we're both better than we were when we met. We've both been valued; we've proven to each other that we both have value. We're both desirable; there's been no shortage of reciprocal desire. We're neither of us whole tho; there are gaping holes in each of us that no other person can possibly close. Neither of us is so much insufficient as we are incomplete, and whilst I've found contentment in adequate sufficiency she wanted more; how could I blame her? She's suffered from her own depression, and it shows in all the gleaming seams where she's kintsugi'd herself back together. I started out broken, it seems, filling the empty spaces with Nothing so neatly there's no seam to denote where one ends and the other begins, leaving nowhere to find purchase. When Bridget broke she stuck the pieces back together with gold, becoming more beautiful, and she'll do so again; when I fell apart I wrapped myself in another layer of nacre, becoming colder, but even less accessible, and even harder to hold on to. 

When she put the idea into my head a couple of months ago that I really should write about my Depression she was right, although I suspect not quite in the way she was thinking at the time. I've not been writing much this year partly because putting time into her meant I've not had so much time for that, but hugely because when I've reached out for a thread to pull on, unravel, and weave into something my hand came back with Nothing worth saying. More importantly tho, you need to understand that under and behind and inside everything I've said here over the last couple of years, something horrible has been growing; something that seems to always have been there, which I keep fed and watered and carry with me everywhere I go. 

All I've ever really written about has been my Depression; how my world looks through it, the texture and smell of it, how events feed and shape it, and every once in a while the moments of respite I get from it, I just don't make it the topic. I gloss over it with a pop song, a Shakespeare reference, and a self-deprecating joke. 

I am Pagliacci The Clown. 

I hide it behind a smile, wrap it in a metaphor, or blend it in with anger; but it's been getting harder, and colder, and heavier, and I'm running out of strength to keep carrying it around the way I have been, so I decided to try something different, bite down, eschew misdirection, and see if I can spit it out directly. 

"The person who is breathing is me." 
― Rita Farr in Doom Patrol 

Sandra was right to worry that I might see this as yet another failure; my confidence has been shaken so hard this year it's shattered, my self-worth sifting right to the bottom of the rubble like sand under the coarser stones of doubt, defeat, and dread, so who can blame her? She knew we were on the rocks, so it didn't come as a surprise when one of us stopped and shook other out of their shoe. She was there, at the other end of the phone, for the three years I was single before I managed to work up the courage to try "being with someone" again, and how determined I was after Jenna, and Kat, to not make the the same mistakes again. She must have been terrified to think what failing again would do to me after the year-and-change since I moved back to Canberra. 

One of the things I've been comfortably sure of is that I'm fucking good at the thing I do for a living, so when I fenced off the shelves in my mental library labelled "306.7: Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love" behind barbed wire and warning signs saying "DANGER! MINE FIELD! DO NOT ENTER", that was what I poured my energy into. Picking up The Job That Brought Me Back To Canberra in early 2022 was the culmination of years of practice, and by that time in the year where we all go and wake up Billy from Greenday I'd not just done a good job, I'd done one everyone had believed was Impossible until I did it. The sensation of knowing, not just believing, but knowing with absolute proof to back it up, that you're as good as you'd always thought you could be isn't just incredible, it's louder than words. 
My self-image lined up perfectly with my self-in-the-world. 
Me-cursive; Me-sync; I was Me all the way down. 
The last of the marble had fallen away, and looking back at me in the mirror was David; I was taller than Goliath, and carved from stone, and for the first time I could remember I felt Absolutely Real. 

Sounds like a pretty happy place to be, right? 

See, about that... 

Nearly a decade ago I was looking over a pile of brightly-coloured glossy images of my brain with my neurologist, talking about my relationship issues, and he made a contemplative noise as his pen traced circles around a darker-than-normal patch somewhere between my ears. 

"So... when you're cuddling up on the couch, or post-coitus... how do you feel?"
I thought about it for a moment, and replied, "Uncomfortable? My back will be hurting, or I'll need to move to get circulation back in my leg, or I can't reach my phone to check something.
"Why?" 
"Not warm and fuzzy? Relaxed?"
"No. I mean... it's nice, and she likes it, but I get fidgety pretty fast.
"Why?" 
"Well there's reduced blood flow in your hypothalamus, and what you've been describing suggests you may not be producing normal levels of Oxytocin. I'm thinking we could try a supplement and see what effect that has."
"You want to experiment on my brain?" 
"Oh! It's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter, there's no risk...!"
"Nah, you misunderstand. I'm all about the scientific method and better living thru chemistry. You got a hypothesis about my hypothalamus?
"Let's do science." 

A week later I and I'm sitting in same chair again. 

"So how did you feel?" 
"No different, really. I felt nothing. What was I supposed to feel?" 
"Warm fuzzies? Better sense of connection? Some people say they feel 'euphoric'. Did you feel good at all?"
"No, I didn't get any of that. I kinda just got the dumb." 
"..."
"I could pay attention to the conversation, but I couldn't keep track of any background thoughts. Someone would mention something that would remind me of something else, but I couldn't think of what that was, and a moment later I'd have lost what it was they said in the first place. I was fine with a sequential train-of-thought, but only one, not the three conversation forks and three unrelated background processes I'd usually be tracking, certainly nothing abstract or inductive.
"I just felt... dumb, stupid." 
"Did you feel relaxed at all?"
"I guess, kinda? 
"I mean... 
"I was calm... 
"But I knew part of me was missing. 
"And I knew it was there but I couldn't find it. 
"And I was kinda freaking out about it to be honest. 
"But I couldn't listen to the part of me that was screaming and the conversation at the same time. 
"So I couldn't quite get to panicking about it." 
By the time I stopped talking John's eyes were wide, his hands planted firmly flat on his desk. He slowly leaned back in his seat, breathed in, then out again, and said, "That sounds... unpleasant. Did you try it again?" 
"Yeah, little bit.
"And no.
"Whatever that place was, I'd rather not go there again if that's OK?"
"No. 
"No, I don't think I'd ask you to do that, no." 

So apparently the "love hormone" that gives people feelings of trust, emotional attachment, safety, all those things we think of as "happy", doesn't work on me. I don't know what I'm missing, if that helps. I don't get to feel happy, but it looks good on other people so I can still get a vicarious Dopamine hit by doing it to them. Other people can't simultaneously keep track of multiply-nested loops in two conversations, rehearse the agenda for tomorrow's meetings, and compose an email to their mother, all whilst playing DJ for Headcheese Radio's Silent Disco, so it's a bit like "swings & roundabouts", right? 

Just like Popeye The Sailor Man, I am what I am. I don't need to be happy, I just need a win every once in a while. 

When I closed that project off I was at the top of my game, and on top of the world, in a remarkably unique way; usually reaching the peak means climbing over a bunch of other people to get there because being the best means there are a pile of people you're better than. I took nothing away from anyone when I took "no one can do that" and added "except me" to the end, except for the haters who just wanted "that" to fail and... well, fuck those guys. Fuck them right in the ear. I've no interest in competing for a place in the hierarchy; stack-ranking is a demonstrably false economy because almost everyone in a team has something to offer, and if they won't join the team they can get the fuck out of my way. All I ask is a tall problem, and a Purchase Order to Invoice against, and that was exactly the reward offered me, so I kicked my wheels into gear, and with a song in my ears I wound my old life up, spread wings like sails, left Perth in the dust of my wake, and shook my arse back to Canberra. 

It's important to remember something tho: I didn't succeed just because I had a unicorn skillset, although that was a critical factor. I didn't do it alone either, because whilst the haters were legion, I joined a team who were working towards the same goal. I made it happen because I marshalled the forces, set up the field, muttered "Victory or death", and went to war. 
It was a war I fought with everything and nothing to prove, and everything and nothing to lose.
It was a war I fought because that was the only way to get it done. 
But it was a war I never got to stop fighting. 

I was a wreck when I stepped off that flight, held together by duct-tape, determination, and the dearest of friends. Less than a month later I was battling locative dissonance, and it was becoming obvious that my war wasn't over. At the time, I said: 

"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'."
― Thursday, April 20, 2023 - Full Circle...

I'm neurochemically disinclined when it comes to trusting people, so when the Big Bad Bossman turned out to be a hypocritical narcissist arsehole, and the estimable Bosslady quit the field in a final, desperate act of self-preservation, it ripped a hole in me that only Nothing could fill, not because my hard-earned trust was betrayed, but because I ignored the warning signs and walked brazenly into the minefield like an over-confident fool. Even at the top of my game I zigged when I should have zagged, fell for the neon-signposted Samaritan Snare, and got trapped in my very own Kobayashi Maru. The man I thought was a visionary turned out to be a manipulative, gas-lighting bully. I still remember the evening he "fired" me, then threatened to fire my whole team, because I disagreed with him. I was leaning against a desk so I'd only be an inch or two taller than him instead of six, when he declared: 

"You know, I used to have Big Four consultants doing the job your team's supposed to do and they got results," omitting, conveniently, that these were the same people who couldn't do what I'd done for him the year before. 
"Fine," he announced, slapping the desk he was standing next to for emphasis, "on your own head be it," and as he turned to walk away declared, "I'll make some calls tomorrow." 

He got two steps whilst I sat there, silent and still, before he turned and circled back. The argument carried on for another three-quarters of an hour. 

Finding out I couldn't trust the Bossman was one thing, but then I don't really trust anyone. I build a model for who and what they are based on the patterns in their behaviour, and use that model to calculate whether they're a risk or an asset. It didn't matter that he was the most dangerous type of gaslighter; one who absolutely believes, and has always believed, what he's saying even when it contradicts what he said last week, all whilst holding a Master's Degree in Cognitive Dissonance. I was David, and the only person who could actually deliver what he was trying to achieve, and I have a long history of standing up to bullies, and I thought I could handle it. I was wrong, and realising I couldn't trust my own judgement cracked the bedrock. After that it was all downhill. 

By July I'd burned through all of the confidence which had made me believe that I could do the Impossible, and had earned the opportunity to keep doing it forevermore, and was burning through my belief in myself. I was alone at home, and alone in the office, undermined by spies and derision. I have the most amazing friends, so loyal they make you feel like a country they'd go to war for, but I felt so incredibly, indescribably alone, just me and Nothing else; alone-liness and war without end. 

Colleagues who'd worked with me as allies stopped responding to my requests. 
Meetings would be organised about the projects I was working on, and I'd not be invited. 
Projects I'd been told I'd be in charge of were quietly assigned to other Managers.
Approvals I requested so I could proceed with the work I'd been assigned would be ignored, whilst the Approver's complaints about my lack of progress escalated. 
I was systematically side-lined, and isolated, and had my support cut out from under me.
I was set up to fail. 
Throughout, I continued making what small progress I could manage because what else could I do?  There was a job to do which I knew I could, even if I was losing belief that I'd be allowed to do so. 
In the midst of all of this my contract actually got extended, and for why? All I've ever been able to think of is that he was happy to spend over a hundred thousand dollars of someone else's money just so he could keep beating me until I broke. 

To my shame, I took it; I'd taken on a lot of debt to take that plunge back to this side of the country, so I couldn't afford not to. I retain some small pride from how long it took, and how much it cost him. 

I remember, sitting here in a chair that will never fit as well as the one I built out of rubbish from the kerbside then left behind when I left Perth, feeling the pressure crushing my chest like I was drowning all over again, and how badly I just wanted it to end. 

I re-read my own words in the quiet stillness of the night, with a glass of wine, or whisky, or worse, and my noise-cancelling headphones sealing away my ears, and every time the memory it evokes leaves me drowning in tears whilst I sit here and try to just breathe. 

Breathe. 

The post I put out recently called Stop; Continue... started months ago, early in the autumn-before-the-winter-which-is-now-almost-over when you could still sit outside a Canberra pub with an old friend in your shirtsleeves without freezing. Most of these are written the same night as the idea which inspires them pops into my head, but when I was finishing the Perthistential Crisis series in November it was getting harder and harder to draw another bucket from that well. By April all that came up was dust, but I'd still try dipping my quill in it every once in a while nonetheless. I was scratching at it one night, making more mess than sense, when Bridget came round and let herself in with the keycard I'd given her and asked what I was working on, so I let her read the draft. When she got to the part about hands reaching out to help she stopped, looked up from my laptop, and declared: 

"That's bullshit." 
"What is?"
"No one's helped you. No one's done a fucking thing," and I burst into tears. 
She held me whilst I wept for somewhere between an hour and 10 minutes and made sure my laptop didn't skitter and dance on the tiles of my balcony, until eventually I looked up and replied:

 "I need that to not be true." 

So when I finally came back to it, I rewrote it again and again until what I said was. 

"It's always darkest just before the dawn."
― Now That's Bullshit

By the time Bridget turned to me and said "I think we need to talk," a few weeks later, half a year had gone by since I'd finally fucked up and given him the excuse he'd been waiting for to terminate me with prejudice, ending 2023 with a bang that sounded more like a whimper, leaving me a man who felt Nothing but hollow. I left the stage gracefully, in disgrace, and ever since have been trying, and failing, to find a way to capitalise on a stale memory of success that's long-since faded to grey. The achievement I thought I'd build an empire from was gone, eroded to dust, leaving me behind with a cart I built out of Nothing to carry all my failure in because there was so much of it I couldn't hold it any more, and that was all I had left to offer her. That confidence which felt indomitable back then is so far gone I almost can't remember what having it felt like, but I remember a time when I did. Years ago Sandra would talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!" 

But I'm not sure if I can; I don't recognise myself in the mirror any more. 
It's just me in a staring contest with the ledge, each daring the other to jump first. 
I don't think I can win. 

Back when I had a Penpal, in the series of letters which slowly segued sideways from sharing with an ersatz-sibling into screaming into the abyss, she wrote to me: 

"I don’t know how to do much in my own best interests. It’s too heavy and I haven’t the strength to drag it around. But it only gets heavier. It seems so petulant to sit in front of the answer and believe that there is a forcefield preventing me from simply reaching out and even acknowledging it is there. I’d seemingly rather sit in the shadow and stare at the key that opens the door, and grieve for the loss of motivation to grab it. What madness. I acknowledge this feeling you are having, of knowing just what you should do and feeling powerless to actually do it. To endure the continuing pain, and for what? The fleeting glory of inhuman success? The complexity of unjustified fear. Is it the deepness of feeling that if discarded leaves a void of any meaningful (painful) biofeedback?" 
― Monday 5 Dec 2022, 9:38AM - RE: Struggling

That verisimilitude, that connection of minds-which-are-alike, that tipped-hat acknowledgement that "I see what you did there" resonated with me at the time, and has echoed ever since, such that I've made a point of re-using, re-hashing, and re-mixing those words and that sentiment, in homage and thanks, at every opportunity. Sometimes it's the smallest thing people put down that you pick up and run with. Even something so small and fragile as inch can be the the only thing in the world worth having; an inch can take you for miles. An inch can be all it takes to trip you tho, and my feet are no longer between my face and the pavement. 

Now I'm sitting here on my ledge in a chair I bought at a thrift store for $5 that's falling apart beneath me staring into space, the battery light on my laptop is flashing with a rapid cadence, and the fog that's fallen, like the ashes of the bridges I burned on the trip I took to get here, has turned everything a bit grey. My own fall has come and gone, but still beckons nonetheless, and even with Sandra's voice echoing in my ears I'm wondering who I am not to accept it. 

Somehow it feels like everything has now come full circle, because my mouth is so full of dust I can't scream any more, but that's OK even if I'm not, because I've Nothing left to say. 

I just want it to Stop;