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?
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