This is what you wanted, you dickhead...

 Jumping at every *ding* your mobile makes and jumping into your inbox to find another Very Important piece of spam or bill is no way to live. There are a couple of emails I'm waiting on, and it feels like life is on hold until they arrive. My brain is full of plans that are made and queued up, waiting for that whistle to sound so I can pull the trigger and send them all over the top. 

It's a far cry from where I was a year ago, when things were unexciting, but ran seemingly on rails. One foot went in front of the other, jobs got done, invoices issued, the sun rose and fell in rhythmic cadence, and time passed barely leaving a mark. 
Or a year before that, when the breeze carried the whisper of pages turning towards the final chapter of books I was thoroughly sick of reading, the night air smelled of rubble settling after the implosion of Happily Ever After, and each breath out of my lungs exhaled the smoke of burned offerings to burdens unshouldered blending with the funeral-pyres of stillborn hope. 

I managed to get through nearly two years of Not Wanting Things; someone told me once "the secret of zen is to want what you have", although I've never been able to find a citation. Regardless, I had an empty house, a job to do, things to fix, and that was enough. Then one day I followed a white rabbit into a hole full of wonderful problems to solve, impossibly broken dreams to fix, and gordian knots to untangle. Somewhere along the line I started having fun cutting through the labyrinthine webs that seemed to completely bamboozle everyone around me, as if my mind was a razer in a drawer full of butter-knives; more fun that I could remember ever having had before. 

"If you want to make God laugh," Woody Allen said, "tell him your plans." 
Pete Townsend, on the other hand, said "We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans."
I took inspiration from Plato, and thought "Well I am a fool, but I know I am a fool and that makes makes me smarter than you, so I'll make no plans at all and stay the fuck out of God's way." 

Of course, in my smugness I forgot the that Philip J. Fry was wiser than all of us, because "time makes fools of us all." 

“There is an art," it says in the second of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books, "or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." 

So in my hubris, and my "Life, the Universe, and Everything" Year I tripped, mistook falling for flight, and somewhere in that mad tumble I started Wanting Things again. 

The problem with Wanting Things is when you start achieving them. One minute you're a machete carving through chocolate soldiers melting in the sun, the next it's gone dark, you're cold, surrounded by intimidating-looking shadows, and you realise the brown stuff you're covered in doesn't smell much like chocolate. You got everything you never dreamed you'd be allowed to want, let alone have, and instead of satisfaction you just feel like shit. 

That's what you get for Wanting Things. 

The trap I blundered into, and what annoys me most, was allowing myself to hope. I thought I'd inoculated myself against that insidious traitor of an emotion; "If I don't have a life, I don't have to live," I thought, "then I can have nothing, and want what I have. Simples." In one pithy, self-satisfied gesture I'd outsmarted Dostoyevsky, out-humbled Buddah, and walked away throwing an over-the-shoulder double-deuce to God whilst Nietzsche sat stunned in my wake muttering "Verdammt, das ist nihilistisch." 

The ground was already rushing up towards me at what I would have noticed was an alarming rate, if only I'd been paying attention, when I returned to the stage for an encore. The other day I twisted my brain into the necessary shape so I could write something hopeful. A gift, in my own peculiar way; a bit of fun for the Penpal of whom I've become quite fond. If I'd not been so busily patting myself on the back for bending Plato over I'd have been watching it for Aristotle's revenge; nature abhors a vacuum, and for all that I'd constructed an edifice of emptiness, entropy will get you in the end. 

It's impossible to feed an intelligent system new information without indelibly changing it. Like when IBM fed Watson the Urban Dictionary to help it communicate more fluently, there's no way to remove the influence on your thought patterns. Unlike IBM, I can't just revert to a previous snapshot and clear my input cache. The worst thing is realising that even if I could, the origin of my downfall occurred long-before, and all the Cooking Wine in Alkaline Trio won't wipe the slate clean. I wrote it down, I made it true, I burst my own bubble, and collapsed my own wave function. 

I have only myself to blame. 

So here I sit in my inbox staring up guiltily up at the look of despair on my face, somehow surprised that I was the void all along, whilst we both wait for our respective emails to arrive to tell us whether we're alive or dead. 

I am, it seems, Schrödinger's Dickhead... 

you know know this won't be perfect, even when it's feeling right...

by the time i staggered in the door i was destroyed, demolished and drained. Lou was already in bed doing her guppy impersonation - lying back with her mouth open- the song on my PSD was on its 9th repitition and the clothes i'd put on over 17 hours ago felt like they were hanging off me, as if i'd somehow shrunk over the course of the day and could no longer fill them. my head was full of beers and distant thoughts as i tripped towards my bed and got undressed, hanging my work-gear in the cupboard so that the creases could fall out over the weekend. i changed into an old pair of tracksuit pants and a tshirt and felt no better for it, the drawstring was the only thing holding the pants over my hips, the shirt feeling two sizes too big, the song coming through my earphones on its 10th time past. i headed down to the kitchen and got a drink of water before slumping into a chair while it played through to number 11. eventually i headed upstairs and fell into bed, staring at the wall in the diffused light of my bedside lamp.

i'd spent an hour sitting in Piccadilly Circus drunkenly talking philosophy with Laura, the Canadian. we'd left the pub and wandered semi-aimlessly through the amusement-park currently in Leicester Square after i'd decided that it was time to leave lest i drink any more. i needed to sober up before i lost all coherence and possibly said something i'd rather not, and we wound up sitting on the some steps overlooking the madness of people coming and going and taking photos, the manic exuberance of people out on the town on a Friday night while we exchanged stories. somehow i'd started discussing my view of the world while she picked holes in it, keeping me on my toes. earlier in the evening we'd tested our abilities at profiling by explaining how the other had come to be the way they were and seemed surprisingly accurate, and this spurred an explaination which went on longer than i'd anticipated but which was none-the-less entertaining. come midnight she made her move, catching the tube home and i walked down to my usual bus stop past Trafalgar Square, turning my PSD on and starting the song by Inhale Exhale that had become stuck in my head the night before, feeling satisfied but somewhat depressed.

Lou took her leave at the pub, pissed as a fart, but fizzing with happy energy having organised a date for Sunday. Laura had showed up well after the three of us had got established with a table and some chairs, and i switched seats with Lou because she and Daniel were talking loudly and excitedly, leaving Laura out of the conversation. dividing the four of us into two pairs, Laura and i watched them as they moved closer and closer over the course of a bottle of wine, their body-language screaming of potential while we sunk pints and critiqued. i explained how i'd set the wheels in motion with a couple of choice comments here and there earlier in the evening and then left them to themselves and we chatted and watched them in our peripheral vision, running a constant commentary while they flirted, keeping each other appraised as to their progress since subtlety robbed us both of a decent view. she asked why i'd set this up and i explained that Lou needed to have some fun, so i'd kicked them off when i saw that they were attracted although i knew that i'd wear it from her later. we tried to predict the outcome while they danced around each other and i used the analogy that in particle physics you can either know the location of a particle or its direction, not both at once - a simplication of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. she argued this, more because she felt that it was required than because she disagreed, accusing me of having an unhealthy interest in semi-irrelevant minutia. me, i was of the opinion that it was the perfect way to describe our observations of what was happening on the other side of the table. as the bottle neared its end Lou and Dan disappeared for the toilets in a suspicious fashion, whereupon i attempted, in an increasingly drunken state to explain Schrodinger's Paradox, that while the situation is not observed it exists in a state of neither zero nor one, but that the observation of said inadvertantly changes its state from indefinite to definite. by request, i changed the cat to a rat, but pushed the point. Daniel reappeared shortly thereafter, and when he sat back down i said to him:
Schrodinger's cat is dead.
he replied after a pause, saying "Schrodinger's cat is alive!" and i gave him a high-five while Laura looked confused. Lou reappeared and proved his position by kissing him, and i turned to Laura looking more than slightly smug. Daniel left shortly thereafter to meet up with some people at Ministry of Sound and when i got back from the toilet Lou was in full form - a wingman with an itchy trigger, explaining at great length how Laura should sleep with me because i was desperate and apparently deserving of a sympathy fuck. i sat back and watched while this went on, generally feeling uncomfortable, and Lou finished her drink and announced that she was heading home, seemingly of the idea that if she left us to it we'd get on in the same way she and Daniel had. i tried to disuade her, saying that if she waited a minute or 5 i'd finish my drink and accompany with her but she was adamant and bolted for the door. Laura asked if i wanted to follow, but Lou knew at least 2 ways home so i figured she'd be fine. she obviously thought she was doing me a favour and i wasn't in the mood to deal with her any more - my patience had finally worn thin. Laura turned to me and said

"I see what you mean about you wearing it..."

Daniel and i had arrived at the pub after finishing up our afternoon of job-hunting at Bite. i'd organised an after-work drinks meetup on the Facebook group in the Bear & Staff downstairs, with the promise that i'd go a round for whoever was there when i showed up, starting at 6PM. getting there a little before 5 meant that my round consisted of me and Daniel. cunning plan, or selfish subterfuge? regardless, he was feeling a bit sick so i got him a Guinness citing the health benefits and after loitering around we managed to score a table before finding out that we couldn't get any food downstairs and headed up for the dining area where we ate fish and chips and discussed Australian politics for an hour before heading downstairs, running into Lou as she arrived. a pint of Guinness and a plate of great fish and chips had perked him up and out of his flu. we miraculously found a table without trying this time, and while Lou went off to get a drink i explained to Daniel briefly that she was still pining over her ex, but looking for distraction. we sat, sinking drinks and chatting until Laura found us, grabbing a beer and taking the seat next to Lou, opposite Daniel.

i knocked off work at 1:30, as instructed. i've taken a temp role providing IT support for a small Islamic Investment Bank during the xmas-holidays, but they only wanted me there from 8:30AM until 1:30. having nothing better to do and no desire to head home before being at the pub by 6, i headed into Leicester Square so that i could kill the rest of the day updating my CV and applying for a few more jobs. Daniel was already there - a British/Australian lad i'd met a week or so beforehand who, like i, had grown up in Perth. i'd shown him around a little and we were getting along nicely so on Tuesday i'd suggested that we grab some beers at the pub on Friday. i published my plans on the Facebook group i've been meeting up with since i'd promised to organise an event or two. there was very little happening on the job boards, so not long before 5 we headed down and grabbed a couple of pints. he had to head off to get to a gig at Ministry of Sound at 9:30, but we had plenty of time for a few drinks beforehand. Lou was due to meet us up at 6, with the likelihood of some of the Facebook crowd showing up as well, so we stood around near the bar and waited for someone to vacate a table...

unexpected use for a shopping centre...

this evening's mission was to go out into the world and find some peace in a chaotic plavce, which is why this is a delayed telecast. lacking the desire to pay for two sets of broadband, i'm not exactly mobile-data enabled. still, the local shopping centre is warm and has a surfeit of available beverage.

it's also a great test of how versatile the Eee is out in the world. i've been carrying it around while i wander the shops for the last hour and i can't say i noticed it overly much.

unfortunately, even with repetitive noise in my ears i'm finding it hard to turn off the situational awareness. if i can type without looking then why not look around at the people wandering back and forth on the other side of my little table? oh well. if i can't focus on that then i guess i'll talk about other things.

this has been a busy week in many ways. not in as much as running around and doing stuff, more in the things that just Happened. i've spent most of my evenings at home, but somehow they didn't seem slow and dull. maybe it's how busy i've been at work - filling in my less frenetic moments with extra-curricular activities until i got to the point today where i just had to get out of there to get some peace. it used to be that i went to work and put my home life away for a while. now, through the joys of task atomisation and multi-threading i'm finding the holes in my activities and filling them with little parts of other activities. an email gets written sentence by sentence over the course of 15 minutes while i wait for scripts to run. i speak with someone on the phone while my coffee cools, or while i wait for my other line to ring, and most of my brain's spare runtime has been taken up by a girl.

another girl - the banes of my existence, the faces of my insanity, the one species that can completely and utterly throw me off my spin. with a mind that i've toiled long and hard to make bulletproof they're my achilles heel. i hate them, and i love them all the same.

another girl - right before i leave the motherfucking country. right when i had everything worked out and sorted. i love my life so much that one day i'm going to have to engrave the phrase down the barrel of a gun and fucking felate it. no, scratch that. it sounds too bitter, and i'm in too good a mood to be bitter about anything much at the moment.

once upon a time, Shaalwyd told me in a moment of depression that "you have a history of meeting beautiful, brilliant women who light up your life for as long as they stay in it," which was exactly what i needed to hear at the time. years later it's always stuck with me and i try to remember that when i'm feeling down and time and again it's come true.

you gotta love Shaalwyd. which reminds me that i really need to call her and say hello.

and with that, i think i'm going to have to pack up my toy and stop attracting stares. things to be, places to do... wait... no, i was right the first time. i'm sure i'll get a chance to upload this at some point. until then you can rest assured that between writing this and posting it i'll have been having fun, even if that fun is enjoyed at license-losing speeds. joy, in whatever form it takes, is something i'm still learning to accept but as with all things it's one step at a time that will lead me to understanding.

still not sure where i left my brain...

this has been one of Those weekends. the sort where you get to the end and ask yourself

"wait, no, was that only 3 days?"

yes, we had a long-weekend here in Canberra. let's move on, ok? i'd like to get some sleep tonight, and i'm going to get it, oh yes.

this weekend i have been busy. i have been pleasantly surprised, knocked off my feet, slammed into things and spent an alarming amount of time skidding sideways. i have, at various times, drunk too much, eaten too little, thought too often and planned too rarely. i have oscillated between being completely and totally gobsmacked and having my mouth run on hyperspeed. i have watched hours disappear in moments and moments stretch to days.

and that was just sunday. confused? get used to it. i've been living here for years. i'll put it to you like this:

life just got interesting again and managed to leap from inspired boredom to off the fucking scale in the space of... oh, 80 hours (and remember here that i had to have slept for SOME of that), and once more i've landed myself in a fantastically awesome situation which none-the-less beggars belief. it's been the sort of story you hear in the pub about the friend of a friend of a friend and has been so obviously embellished that you never can be quite sure as to which parts are truth and which apocryphal. alright, maybe i exaggerate. or do i? the lines in my head between "normal" and "alternative" have been blurring here and there over the years to the point where i wonder at the quality of my own perspective. i've been to some weird and wonderful psychological and social places in my time and to this day i get confronted by situations i'd never expected to find myself in. makes you wonder a little what this same situation would have been like for someone who conformed to the "normal" box... but then if i were normal i wouldn't have wound up in this situation.

would have sucked to have been me in that case...

here's a couple of non-chronological vignettes for you to sip on for a moment:

consider the dichotomy that it is to be considered poor form to accidentally slide a roofless sports car out sideways at over 120kph in close proximity to a 25-30metre drop-off down a series of 40kph-rated S-bends while listening to trance remixes of the music from a game released in 1994, an hour or so into a first date. except for when you manage to save it.

consider my surprise that the appropriate answer to the question "So are you going to get around to kissing me any time soon?" IS IN FACT "Whenever you're ready...". i was as shocked as anyone else, i assure you. similarly, i can assure you that i didn't get to finish my sentence.

consider how convenient it is that when you lapse into a state of mild-shock with large portions of your psyche dribbling out of your ear that it is entirely possible that your date and your most recent Ghost Of Girlfriends-Past will choose to be politely unaware of your obvious discomfort and continue on with their Perfectly Polite Conversation across you, and that if you have the incredibly great fortune to be interrupted you should thank whomever it was from the bottom of what's left of your heart after it's mangled remains have been recovered from being Specifically Not Fought Over.

consider, however, that regardless of the internal system damage incurred, it's worth it to sit by the ring and watch a Kitten-who-thinks-they're-a-Tiger actually meet a real one who's sitting back in self-assured confidence wearing an incredulous expression which screams "you reckon, do you?" on all frequencies outside the audible.

oh dear, you know, if i didn't already live here i'd never recommend moving into My Head. the decontamination fee would be far higher than the purchase price. why did you think it was so cheap in the first place?

i really wish that last night's sleep had gone better. after a huge day that never seemed to end but was nonetheless over too quickly, you'd have thought that i'd have slept the sleep of the righteous... or at least the dead. instead, 6 and a half hours later i was awakened to a phone call and was soon on the move again. i've not been properly right all day and running on the secretions of the adrenal medulla and the fruit of the coffea tree. tomorrow i need to be at work and at least nominally alert which is, of course, why i'm lying around blathering on a blog at a quarter to one in the fucking morning. hey - i never said i was SENSIBLE about any of this. if i were SENSIBLE i'd have run for the fucking hills ages ago.

fuck sensible. sideways into the deep end is far more fun... and my how deep the water is.

i'm rather looking forward to my ride to work tomorrow. i think i'm going to need the concentration i only ever really get at extreme lean and foolishly high speed swerving between traffic to get my mind in order again after the last few days. or maybe the hard-reboot of pharmaceutically-induced sleep. i'll work it all out later when thinking isn't so difficult.