On knees that won't bend...

Musical accompaniment: Oliver Tree - Me, Myself & I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver Tree - Hurt 

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

"Victory or death."

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

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

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

Oliver Tree - Jerk

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

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

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

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

I feel like he could use that right now. 

Cold comfort..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gap between When and Now...

Musical accompaniment: Sevendust - Waffle

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

Title: Get a life

Deliverables: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 28/07/2023 10:31

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

My, don't I waffle on? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

the end may be just another beginning, but it is an end nonetheless...

i like drama. i like to put on a show. our lives are so pregnant with opportunities for joy and action squandered out of poor timing, misspent chances and down-right lack of vision that if i can bring everyone together with a word, who am i not to? we all want to feel that we're part of something bigger than we are, but which we still own a part of. with this is mind, i was was still overwealmed by the response i got when i posted the following on Facebook on Friday morning:

"Peter Raven just bought a house."

over the next few hours my phone beeped almost constantly. i'm amazed the battery didn't go flat. 2 days later, the counter has stopped at 49 likes, 34 comments. that doesn't count the phone calls and SMS's that have come through since, either. now, i have a rule that i don't allow my Facebook Friends list to rise above 200. my theory is that i'm unlikely to actually care about any more than that, so each time i get up there i cull a few of the people i no longer talk to. this means that at least a quarter of the people on my friends list have commented on that, even if just to post the word "Congratulations!" - an overwhealming outcry of wellwishing. the sheer volume of it all became quite confusing after a while. why? why the sudden outpouring of emotion?

it's taken the last couple of days for it all to sink in. no, i'm no excited... not in the way that most people think about it, anyway. after 2 years, i've reached the point i was aiming for (overshot the mark, as it happens), gone forth and found somewhere that suits, negotiated and agreed to buy it. it's... the next step, and far from the last, in a journey i started when i got back to Australia from Europe nearly 3 years ago now. i planned it, took some detours on the way, and now after accumulating the resources i needed i've finally picked up the enormous hammer i built for myself and used it to make one of my problems go away. i'll admit it's fun though - the amount of cash i've put together is fairly staggering... from my perspective anyway, and getting to finally use it is immensely satisfying. the budget i'm working with just for improvements and fitout is enough to make me shudder. i could travel around the world for 4 or 5 months with that portion alone. the deposit i'm laying down would keep my feet from touching the ground for easily a year.

i think this is a crucial element of why everyone's so excited - i've been extremely fortunate that i've been able to do this. i have an above-average income and i've been living rent-free with my Parentals for the last two years which has saved me thousands. it's been becoming increasingly hard for people to actually buy a house without pushing themselves into a massive hole of debt, especially single people. i know a lot of people who are paying off mortgages at the moment and more who are working up the funds to be able to, but i also know plenty who just can't, and will be stuck renting for the foreseeable future.

then of course there's the social pressure in our society that to be a proper and valuable member of society you need to get a job buy a house and have a bunch of kids. ignoring that i'll never actually achieve all three of those standards, achieving this is something that brings hope to everyone you - the thought that if one of your peers can achieve what you want to do, so can you.

lastly, and the easiest thing to forget, is that i've been talking about this for years now. i've celebrated my milestones on the path in little ways, kept myself going with the constant mantra of "no, i'm saving to buy a house". now i've done it, of course those near to me are going to celebrate it with me. its been such an fundamental part of my life for so long that's taken so much of my dedication, and my desire to move on to the next phase has been so strong that it's natural that they'll cheer me along. that's what friends do, and that's one of the reasons why mine are awesome. we support each other and through communal effort we ease the burden for everyone.

so here we are - one long wait is finally over. the situation has been carefully structured and balanced. i've bought a place that's on the cheaper end of the spectrum that i can afford easily - to the point where my repayments will be only barely more than the potential rental income. i need to live in the place for at least a year to qualify for the $7000 First Homeowners' Grant, but after that i should be in a position where i can rent it out for roughly what the repayments will cost, which effectively means that i can ignore it and let it pay for itself. once that happens... i'm free. free to travel the world, work as a professional diver, or simply wander, with only the obligations i choose.

and for once, just for a moment i'm allowing myself to feel like it might just be all downhill from here...

i am a tourist...

i was lying in bed just now, about to switch my laptop off and check in for my nightly trip to la la land when i noticed on Spotify that MCG has been listening to Death Cab For Cutie again - a song i didn't instantly recognise, which made me curious so i clicked on it and let it play for a moment, streaming off that vast treasurehouse of knowledge that is the internet and washing over me like, waves in the way that Death Cab tends to, sweeping me out of my sleepy reverie and dumping my mind back in a place i've not been for some time.

sitting on a creaky wooden chair with an oversized mug of coffee at a table draped in a dirty cloth listening to the Transatlanticism album writing thousands of words that i'm about to cast dejectedly into the aether.

on the right hand side of a bus as it rolls its way out of Austria and into Italy while i sift through the dim recollections of the pub i was in three days ago and ignore the snoring tourists behind me.

sitting in a darkened cafe late at night with my 3rd mug of dirty flat white with canalphones blocking out the hum of the hipsters while 30 Seconds To Mars get existential in my ears and i try to put my thoughts into words and the words into order.

it is the nature of life that it exists only in flux. there is no such thing as a static existence and all good things must end eventually to make way for something else, but i can't help but feel like i managed to trade blue skies for pain, hot ashes for dreams, hot air for cool breeze. when i visualise my life of late in my minds' eye it resolves into an image of me trudging through mile after mile of wasteland, flat and featureless out to the sides with amazing scenes behind me and a haze of dim, ever-receding potential ahead of me. it's melodramatic and bullshit and this i know - i'm surrounded by people who are falling other each other to be near me but if i stop focussing they become ghosts in my foreground.

i wonder sometimes whether i'm trying to force myself into a mould that just doesn't fit. the permanent job, buying a house and settling into this fucking shithole of a town, trying to find peace in possessions and stability... and all i want to do is book a flight and jet off to Seattle, or Tokyo, or Helsinki. i search my unreliable memory, trying to rememeber the last time i felt as peaceful as when i'd just got back to Canberra after spending a year in the world, and i can't find it. i don't know if it's this city that i react so poorly to, or if i'm just trying to shoehorn a size 12 Life into a size 10 Compromise.

the last couple of months have been ok - the challenges of a new job and a happening social life have kept me distracted and inoculated, but i can feel myself slipping into a sullen malaise again where i can't help but flick this lighter on and off again, dreaming of watching it all burn so that i have the excuse to walk away and fuck off into the distance again. i find myself wringing the throttle of my bike like the neck of a wounded pheasant, pouring self-directed rage and impotent frustration through rubber tyres and into the pavement while i try to reconcile what i want to be doing with what i've somehow decided i will do instead.

so if distractions are becoming less and less effective, and i've failed to find an answer in 6 months, does that mean it's time to look somewhere else, from a different angle?

or maybe just broaden the scope...

calm blue ocean...

i've been listening to a lot of Instrumental Post-Rock of late; sleepmakeswaves and God Is An Astronaut mostly. on one hand it's hauntingly beautiful, on the other it's a multi-layered Wall of Noise, drifting keyboard progressions leading into complementary guitar rhythms, Pink Floyd Meddle-era bass intro folding smoothly and seamlessly into a growing string riff via a crunch-guitar transition stolen from The Butterfly Effect. head-filling but not head-drilling, it's a soundscape that sits nicely in the realm where it takes you away but doesn't overwhelm. unconstrained, but naturally restrained. it's fucking genius.

it also matches the mood i've been in lately. over the last few months i've noticed that i've been calming down a lot. not so much more focused, but more relaxed about the world and my place in it, watching as the seeds i've planted over the last few months have sprouted and grown. in an odd sort of way it's very much as if, having lined up my trajectory and performed the pre-flight checks the only thing remaining has been to throw myself off the platform and fall on target and the trick to hurting yourself as little as possible in these situations is, as always, to Accept The Fall. i can never stress this enough - most people, when falling, never get past the flailing "Denial" phase of the whole thing. you can't "Plead" with it and getting "Angry" about it will not help you. waving your arms around is a recipe for a broken wrist. please go straight to "Acceptance", do not collect $200. the outcome of this scenario is inevitable - you will hit the ground and it will hurt, so do what you can to make sure that you land in such a way as to spread the force over as much of yourself as possible and that your impact point is something other than your hand or head. this goes for life as well - sometimes things just get fucked up and there's nothing you can do about it. Accept The Fall and focus on what you can do to effect positive change to the situation.

and so it has been - after floundering around looking for a path, i backed the fuck off, accepted my situation for what it was and moved forward. in a lot of ways it was a lot like Giving Up all over again - giving up on the things that i simply couldn't have, giving up on what wasn't achievable, picked from the remaining options a path with the best available outcomes and then went out looking for ways to colour it Awesome.

and so it has been and so it has continued.

i'm currently on the way home again, Thailand, and then Singapore falling behind at the end of a trail of jet exhaust. it's been, for the most part, a pleasant and entertaining trip. overly-tiring, and the weather caused a few issues in the second half of the proceedings, but that's not why i'm looking forward to getting home. for once, what's going on at home is more interesting than what i can be doing in other parts of the world. two years i've been sitting around getting the deposit for my home loan together and it's sitting in my savings account right now, earning roughly $10 in interest each and every day. it will have accumulated around $210 while i've been on this trip, and it's burning a hole in my pocket. i'm sick of waiting - i want to get this mission underway. before i can get properly cracking, i also have a new job to start. for Job #18 i had a couple of different offers to juggle - both with pro's and con's. it was a hard decision - join a hungry little start-up and build a new division of the company for them from the ground up with serious rewards for achievement, or hook in with a more established firm, build and head up their brand-new Perth Office. after much deliberation and soul-searching i accepted the latter - the rewards were less, but so were the risks. it was a strategic decision because i think it'll put me in a better position a year or so from now, with the added bonus that the first thing i need to do on my first day on the job is to fly to Melbourne and meet the new boss, so around 33 hours after getting back to Perth from my holiday, i'll be heading out again with a freshly packed bag.

as much as i'd like to be chilling out at home for the next few days, i'm pretty stoked about this little turn of events. i've been meaning to get over to Melbourne for about a year now and i keep not making it. i was supposed to go in January but i wasn't in the mood so i went to Vanuatu instead. i was arranging to head across over Easter, but Canberra sung to me and i answered with peace in my head and joy in my heart. now i get to go for free without expending any leave - net-worth to me: ~$1000. boojah.

it's odd, really. it's been years since Real Life was particularly interesting to me. it's been like a more epic version of "Live for the weekend" - i've been living for the next trip, the next adventure, counting the dead time in between as "Preparation", or "Resource Acquisition". now Real Life has become so interesting that all i could think about for the last few days of this trip was getting back to it. like i said: odd. i am, however, calm about the whole thing. i can see my path laid out ahead of me and i know what i need to achieve to get where i'm going.

usually the calmest i get is when i'm on the back of my motorcycle at 100kph+, or neutrally buoyant down around 12m under the surface of the ocean. there's nothing i've found that's quite like the razor-sharp sense of purpose i feel from going really fast, or the cool serenity of cruising through an underwater garden and then, later, bobbing around on the surface like a cork, BCD inflated with my fins waving in the air waiting for the boat to arrive and pick me up. it's lovely - like a post-coital cigarette (cigarettes being a pleasure that i have not enjoyed in 4 months now as it happens).

this isn't that, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's overall a pleasant place to be. i just need to get Melbourne out of the way (and the requisite running around that being there will entail - obligations and visitations to discharge) and then... then i get to start a whole new adventure. we'll just have to see how this Real Life thing pans out...

some things i learned this weekend...

just being in a different place can give you a different perspective on things. your location forces you to look at your life from a different angle, even if that just means fitting more of it into your field of view. sometimes it's just a matter of talking to different people. folks who live in Canberra have a subtly different way of thinking to people who live in Perth, to people who live in Melbourne, to people who live in Los Angeles. people who've BEEN to all these places have a different perspective still; all men may be created equal, but that doesn't mean that they're equivalent, after all. then there are the flashes of inspiration that come seemingly from nowhere. last Wednesday i was on the way to Canberra, sitting in Sydney Airport waiting for my connection, having an email conversation with Dr K and something in the phrasing of what she said said brought me to a realisation that bore no relevance whatsoever to the conversation. it was the first thing i learned this weekend.

1) Friends vs Family

for years it's bugged me, that quiet, niggling thought, a reaction i have that just doesn't make sense, the reasons behind which you can't fathom, that makes no sense but is, regardless, true. reading through an email where i was discussing Work/Life Balance, it struck me like a hollow-point bullet; entering quietly through my eyes and ballooning inside my head:

i have Friends in Perth, but my Family is in Canberra.

this statement requires some explanation because i'm using words emotively rather than factually and to properly understand it you have to understand a critical part of my thought process. it's all about Choice.

since about a year after moving to Canberra i've thought of it as Home. it took a while before it took the mantle away from Perth, which is where i grew up and to this day i've spent more of my life, but by that time i'd built a comprehensive life there - work, love, friends, a feeling of sanctuary. it's been a long time now since i really felt comfortable in the town i grew up in. too many bad memories, too many reminders of old failures. whenever i went back i wanted to get out again, and it helps that Canberra's always been good to me - every time i've come back it's given me what i needed. the sensation of reassurance this understanding provides is perplexing, yet palpable - knowing that when things go bad you can always Go Home.

the most important thing though, i think, is that it's the town i chose. you don't tend to have a choice about where you grow up; what city, what house, the people you hang out with at school. you might feel comfort in the old family home, but i've always found that the place i think back to is the place i lived when i moved away from my Parental Units. the same goes for the car i inherited from my Old Man - that was just a car. it's the one i went out, found and bought for myself that i think back to fondly.

so it goes for the Town i Chose.

this extends to biology as well. you hear phrases again and again about how blood is thicker than water, that it's always family who'll stand by you and so on... but then, i look at my Great Aunt who tried to screw her siblings out of thousands of dollars of their inheritance, i think of the friend who was interfered with as a child by her grandfather. hell how about, Joseph Fucking Fritzl? (if you don't know who that is/was, look him up because i don't care to go into it) Cane was Abel's brother, but that didn't prevent the Bible's first murder, so how much of a difference does it make, really? don't misunderstand me: i love my brother, for example, but that's because i like who he is, and i really do question how much the bond we've developed over the history we've shared has to do with our genetic similarity. isn't it more important that people stand by you because they choose to, love you because they want to, rather than because they feel obligated to?

this isn't to say that i don't have close and valuable friendships in Perth, or that i don't care about my Parentals and so on, but the distinction explains too well why i've felt and reacted the way i have all these years.

this explains perfectly why i feel such an emotional connection with Canberra that i just don't do with Perth. i used to go back to Perth to see people and always be relieved to get back Home afterwards. it explains a lot about why, when coming back into the country after living in the UK, it never even occurred to me that i'd go anywhere other then Canberra, why it's where i head whenever i need to rebalance myself and get back on track.

2) i'm Unlikely To Be Moving Back Any Time Soon (not for another 18 months, anyway)

for the first 48 hours after i got back Home on Wednesday afternoon the phrase (or variants thereof) i heard the most was "So when are you coming back?", and the answer i found myself parroting was along the lines of i'm not sure, but it's unlikely to be soon.

unfortunately, while there are a number of good reasons to uplift and move back, none of them are adequately compelling to counteract the reasons i left. it's true that i took a Leap of Faith in LFV, but that wasn't the only reason i picked up and moved to Perth nearly two years ago, and while LFV has been removed from the picture those reasons haven't gone away.

for starters, the social background radiation in Canberra was beginning to fall below acceptably comfortable levels. i need a decent amount of social activity to avoid getting bored and i'm never happy when i'm bored. my old crew had been quietly partnering off settling down and spawning descendants for a few years before i got back from London, but it was especially pronounced when i hit the ground again. it's not just kids that had people dropping off the social scene. back in the day when we used to go to the pub every Thursday, Friday, Saturday... Tuesday (and likely meeting up for a BBQ and more beers on a Sunday as well) we were all in our early-mid 20's. we had junior roles in our careers, working regulation hours where overtime was something to be remarked upon. we had the manic energy of being young, dumb, and full of enthusiasm for staying out late and drinking too much. spin forward to the present and we're in our early 30's. not only are we older and don't have the energy we used to, but none of us can quite bounce back from the hangovers like once we could, so we don't go out on the piss anywhere near as often as once we did. add to that the career progression that has us in more senior roles, sometimes middle-management and where once we'd work the basic 7.5 hours a day, many of us are working extra jobs, or regularly pulling 9-10 hour days, often running around after kids as well. the facts of life are that other things take priority.

take Phrancq and El Hools - they're out the door by 7AM. El Hools drops Phrancq off in Woden, then their son in the Deep South, before heading back to Civic to work her 8 hour day. When she's done she does it all in reverse. they generally don't get back home until just before 7PM, at which point they need to feed everyone, put Master Bruce to bed and sneak an hour of cleaning, TV or, just maybe, Quiet Time in before they pass out in preparation for doing it all again. they really don't have the time (or on the rare occasion they do, the energy) to come out to the pub on a Saturday, let alone a Thursday, and i really don't blame them. they explained this to me as a reason why they weren't going to join in the choir of people singing for my return. how could they ask me to come back when they might have the conjunction of time and energy to hang out (maybe) once every couple of weeks?

i don't know that i can properly express the admiration i feel towards them for looking at it from that perspective.

it's not all doom and gloom - Dr K was having the same problem as me when i came through town for a visit around this time last year, and seems to have succeeded in rebuilding her social life where i failed, but then this was made a whole lot easier by being happily married. i know from experience how much of your life is happily subsumed by having someone special in your life, and it really makes up the difference between feeling lonely when you don't get out more than a couple of times a week, and a couple of times a month.

Perth is just that more active. being 4 times the population helps a lot. the weather, too. as much as i hate the heat and incessant, oppressive sunshine, it's a lot easier to be social when the entire town doesn't go into Winter hibernation for 4-6 months of the year. the settling-down trend seems to be coming later, or at least striking differently, there, as well. possibly it's just that there are more people who are single floating around. either way, i have more opportunities to get out and be around people where i am than where i was.

the last piece of this particular puzzle is that leaving now doesn't fit with my ethos of Going Places For A Reason. if i left Perth now it would be because it pisses me off, but it's not so abominable that i'm going to go through the effort of packing and moving again just because. it's odd, really. packing and moving there seemed like no effort whatsoever when the motivation was right. perhaps it was the thought of what i was going to have when i got there that made every box i loaded into my car lighter, every hour of driving pass so easily, the goodbyes taste less of sadness. the idea of doing it again in the other direction just doesn't seem worth it. i don't have that beacon on the horizon beckoning me on.

it also helps that where i'm working is really quite a good place to be. the specifics of my role aren't the most exciting, but the conditions are good, the location is convenient and my boss is stellar. i'm currently contracted until the end of April there and while they haven't specifically agreed to the salary i've told them it will take to keep me, they've also not declined it. i made the decision a while ago that if they give me the cash i can get elsewhere i'll take the Perm and stick around for a while. if, on the other hand, the stars fail to align i'll throw my fate to the four winds, apply for jobs in four different cities and go to whichever offers me one first. that at least gives me an excuse to move on. the job i do is important to me; it needs to be something i enjoy and it's been a while since i've been as content in a workplace as i am at this one. leaving it without a good reason would be a crying shame, if for no other reason than that it may be a long time before i find somewhere else as good and having been as miserable as i have in some previous jobs, a place that's survivable is more valuable than water in a desert.

so i'll see what happens in the next couple of weeks and reassess from there.

3) So It Looks Like I'll Be Buying A House In Perth

signing up for a Perm with the mob i'm currently working for effectively signs me up to stay where i am for the foreseeable future... which for me means the next year. it may be considered sad, but for me the idea of "short-to-medium term" means 3-6 months. "long term" means this time next year. the future is too cloudy beyond that for me to predict. it's an artifact of the agile lifestyle i've led for the last four years now that i value having the ability to grasp opportunities out of the air and run with them too much to let myself get into a position where i'm too tied down to react. there's one and only one exception i can think of to this rule and whoever she is, she'll have to be fucking amazing.

that said, for the last two years i've been saving cash, slowly, but surely, with the aim towards buying a house. this may sound like a contradiction of what i just said a couple of centimetres above, but the distinction is an important part of the strategic plan i've been weaving since coming back from London.

i love Traveling and i love being able to do Cool Shit. these things are important to me - they mean that i have stories to tell from where i've been while i plan where i'm going next. it makes me feel like i'm actually doing something that i value with my life. the problem with that lifestyle is that i still need to have somewhere i can recover and and rebuild in between missions. four years ago i wouldn't have an issue with that being somewhere i rented, but one of the plans i had with LFV was that we'd get a place together when we could and start building a life. that meant that i needed to start saving in a serious way so that we'd have the cash to do so. spin forward a year or so and we'd gone our separate ways, but that didn't make the cash sitting in my Long Term Savings Account any less substantial and after the effort and sacrifice i'd gone through to put it together, i wasn't going to waste the opportunity it presented. i still have the chance to set up the base of operations i'd dreamed about when coming back from London, or at very least an investment into a potential property empire. housing is expensive to buy in Australia, but not as much as it is to rent, making a property you can rent out to be a very valuable commodity indeed.

so i've kept putting cash aside, spending a little bit here and there in ways that amuse me (flights, books, petrol and booze, for the most part) and after two years i'm sneezing-distance from having enough to start thinking about going shopping. you need a 20% deposit in this country to avoid paying a slew of penalty fees and insurances and i'm so close i can smell it. this is a good thing because i really do need to move out of my Parentals' house.

i moved back in with the folks when i moved back to Perth. this made sense - things were still uncertain, and the situation wasn't yet right to get a place with LFV, and anything i spent on rent was money not saved towards buying a house. my Old Man has been badgering me ever since i first move out of home at the wise and cynical age of 18 to move back in and save my money, and finally the situation was appropriate to do so. that was nearly two years ago and it's getting about time to move on. they need the rear end of their house back and i need some space of my own to do what i want to do and start playing with projects that need more room than i have available at the moment. i could have kicked this off six months ago and i'd still be OK financially, but the more of a deposit i have available the lower my repayments will be, so the more i'll be able to pay down the mortgage and the easier it'll be for me to get out and still do Cool Shit. all this planning, all this preparation, all of this in accordance with the strategy i laid out years ago. the tactics have changed a few times and the colour is a different shade but the basic shape and structure remain the same. being agile means being able to respond to changes in the situation so you can still get a result that works for you, even if it's not exactly what you originally wanted... most likely because you don't really want it any more.

so if i the circumstances of my life have put me in Perth at the time when i have the facility to buy myself a place of my own, then in Perth it shall be. i only need to stay in it for a year, remember. while the First Home-Owner's Grant the Australian Government so generously provides to help people buy their first place requires you to stay in it for the first 12 months after that there's nothing to stop me from leaving, renting it out and (if i'm lucky and i've paid the mortgage down sufficiently in that time) be making enough rental income to cover the majority of the mortgage repayments.

or so the theory goes.

one more year in Perth - enough time to find somewhere to which i have a good reason to go... and you never know what might happen in a year. i may have even found a good reason to stay.

4) If A Change Is As Good As A Holiday, Then The Reverse Is Also True

as recently as three weeks ago i was a miserable bastard. after the failure of one job and two relationships i'd invested a lot of my hopes and energy into, i was a wreck and the road to recovery was months-long. i'm not sure whether it was booking in my holiday that improved my mood so dramatically, of it it just happened to coincide. if nothing else, one thing that's certain is that the Me that i finally found that i could like after years of self-loathing, the one with the easy smile and the quick joke, the plans and the ideas, the care and the attention, the inspiration and the motivation, the clever analysis and the insightful remark, was back. he woke up again somewhere between meeting the Wifey at the airport and sitting around drinking tea with Shadow, dusted himself off, took the helm and without blinking we were flying again.

there are times when you need to reassess your life, work out what it is you're doing wrong and fix it, and then there are those where you need to wake the fuck up and get back on track. i can't claim absolute certainty at this stage, but my instincts tell me that i'm finally on the right track... at least for now (and right now is what's most important for the time being. i'll worry about tomorrow more when i'm sure i can survive today). i'm always tracking the horizon for the next opportunity, and i don't set anything in stone until i absolutely have to. this might sound like i lack conviction or that i can never make up my mind, but it works for me. if there's nothing else i need to remember, it's that while what's Right for the person sitting opposite me can be as different as we ourselves, the reflection they cast back at me can be as important as the air we breathe, and the best people in your life love you enough to look beyond their own prejudice and preference to What's Best for You when you ask their advice.

and so i can once again finally look to the horizon and move forward, sure of my footing and the path ahead... and if it can survive the return to Real Life and the month that lies between where i am now and the next Cool Thing i have planned then i may finally have recovered from 2011 and all that occurred therein. you just need to remember sometimes that if your Family will always stand by you, then the ones who always stand by you must be your Family.

wipe the slate clean?

i was chatting with ML earlier this evening when a thought rose out of the murky morass of the back of my mind, took on form and solidified into a shape that i could inspect from all angles - a singular, made thing, wrought in whole-cloth from the ethereal fabric from which thoughts are born. this happens some times to us all - ideas that you know have been floating around in the back of your mind for weeks, months; concepts unconceived, craving creation and calling to come clear of cloudy concealment. you know it's been there, it's influenced all the thoughts around it, but like undetectable dark-matter it hides in plain sight, appearing when ready as if they've sprung fully formed from your mind.

why NOT move to another city, delete all the numbers from my phone, close my Facebook account and start a new one. discard all the trappings of the life i've built over the last decade or more and start completely anew.

ML seemed a little shocked at the idea:

"Sounds rather nihilistic. And you're not even German."
erm... we HAVE met, right?
"Starting a new FB account just seems rather extreme. What's wrong with just trimming the dead weight?"
i'm moving in the direction of being in the mood for extreme

the thing is that i went through and trimmed the "dead weight" a few weeks ago. removed the people i never speak to, or who never speak to me, or who i added because they asked me, all glassy eyed and desperate for connection in a hostel somewhere and who'd never notice their friends list drop from 483 to 482. i cut LFV because while i'm glad she's happy in her life, i don't want to have to see it, and because i don't didn't want to be broadcasting my general anguish knowing that she'd be watching. i cut out the people who i think i'll be better off without, and those who'll be better off without me. the thing is that when something weighs nothing, how can it be "dead" weight? what burden do you bear in having an extra dozen, score, century of friends?  it turns out that it weighs more than you realise.

to properly explain that, i need to explain a little of my life in the last month or so. back when i was at university, if i was looking for someone to hang out with i'd paint a map in my head of the Greater Perth Area and scan through it, marking the location of the people i knew, working out who was geographically convenient for whatever it was that i wanted to do. then i'd go through my phone to see if there was anyone else i hadn't already thought of who might go for a midnight drive. then i'd make some calls. now i lie in bed with Facebook, Gtalk and sometimes Skype open and see who's online. if they're online, i figure, they're home, and relying on people happening to be online adds a element of serendipity that pleases me greatly. oftentimes i don't get any bite, but every once in a while the stars will align and i'll wind up having a really pleasant evening, often bearing no resemblance to my design. how is this relevant? well, the more people you have linked across our various social media sites, the more chances that someone'll pop up online and be there to answer your hail. 200 people makes for 200 chances, which any serial roulette player will tell you beats 100.

to see how this can be a problem, you need to think of your social connections as possessions, and remember your Fight Club; because the things you own end up owning you. when you already have 100 people you can call on, why would you go out and meet anyone else? i've had a very similar mentality to that since i moved back to this gods-forsaken sandpit; i figured that i had enough friends to be going on with and precious enough time for those i had. when LFV and i went our separate ways and i suddenly got a whole lot more time on my hands i realised that if i were to say fuck off, i've got enough friends i'd have been lying. sure, i know a lot of people, but only a limited number of these are what you'd call "socially available". let's face it - i'm closer to 40 now than i am to 20, and when you find yourself at this age still living the life of an upwardly-mobile bachelor you begin to notice that an awful lot of your friends are getting married and having kids (in no particular order these days) and that suddenly the list of people who are up and want to go grab a coffee at 11PM, or head to the pub on a thursday night, or sit around gass-bagging for an evening is getting shorter and shorter... but they're your friends, right? you don't stop liking them because their priorities have changed, so you call them up every once in a while, they come up in your browsings for companionship, and you take it with grace when they turn you down for the 8th time in a row because... hey - it's no slight against you that they're busy, right?

it takes a special change of outlook to realise that you need to get out and meet some new people. it's not any reflection on the friends you've had for years, but they're moving in their direction and you in yours and you have needs they can't fulfil any more. with this in mind, a few weeks ago i got back onto Meetup.com (where i met such infamous souls as Adnan, The Canadian, Stiltwalking Jacq and Nick The Playwright back in my London days) and had a look at what people where doing in Perth. next thing i know, i'm hanging out with a bunch of Ducati riders, wasting large amounts of fuel, riding around the place for no better reason than that it gives us all an excuse to get out of the house and hang out with some different people. they're completely unconnected with my existing circles of friends (although for how long that lasts is another question) and while on the surface of things we have nothing more in common than motorcycle ownership, they're a pleasant crew. so if i can forsake my Perth crew and start building a new one, why not go to the extreme and take the Scorched Earth approach?

first things first, you'd need to honestly and fully cut all ties with your past life. a name change would help. a different country would be even better. moving to a different city, where you knew no one or next to no one, would be the least you'd have to do. the phone number you've had for 13 years? change it. email addresses need to go. no forwarding addresses for your snail-mail - people will try to find you and you can't just make it hard for them. you have to make it impossible. then, when you get to where you're going, you need to start anew. it takes years to build a proper social network from scratch. i know. i've done it from a single link. the thing is that the first one is the hardest.

then there's the betrayal. what i'm proposing here involves writing off everyone you've ever cared about, or (and this is arguably more important) has cared about you. imagine if someone you knew just disappeared off the face of the planet without a word, their phone number suddenly silent, their email addresses bouncing back,  Return To Sender on all post and no one you know the wiser? is social suicide any less selfish than the mortal version? and do you want that on your conscience?

the thing is that i'm tempted. we all have our Weapons Of Last Resort, and i can't help but think that if the reasonable and rational approaches haven't worked and i've tried everything else i could think of, that if not now then when? with the mood i've been in for the last few months, i've felt very much like i wanted to watch it all burn down around me then sit an enjoy the quiet stillness of the falling ashes. the feeling of wanting everyone else around to share and understand the fury and misery that you've tasted in every thought through every waking moment. the apex of the mentality that says "if i ain't happy, ain't nobody happy". when you can't help that every time something good happens to someone you know that it's somehow intended as a personal insult.

because maybe, just maybe, when you can see yourself turning into so much of a cunt that it's time to withdraw gracefully and silently, just to spare them from it and use the time you've sentenced yourself to as an opportunity to sort your shit out and get your head on straight so that by the time you do meet new people to hang out with you'll be ready to be civil.

for now it's just a thought that i'll be turning over in my hands for the next little while before i throw it at the wall and see whether it sticks...

holding patterns...

motivation is such a tenuous, yet powerful thing. of late i've had little of it, and none of it's come from me. i've got out of bed in the morning, gone to work. on the weekends i've managed to shake myself into motion because i know that beyond the veil of my bedroom door there is coffee. i get up for the coffee - a ritual habit that gives me some structure to the days that are actually my own. pull on some clothes, stagger into the kitchen, fill the kettle with 500ml of water and set it to boil while i add two dessert spoons of instant brown grit into one of my tall, elegant white mugs and add two tablets of artificial sweetener. the water's generally boiled by the time i've put the makings away. pour. add milk. take it out the front and look at it steam while i have a cigarette i don't really taste and read the morning's news on my phone. it's not much, but it makes me get up, move, survey the day before me, the world around me and their combined potential for myriad wonders.

it's easier during the week. from 8:30AM until 5:00PM my time is not my own and for the time being i'm happy enough for it to be that way. 5 days a week i don't have to think about what's to come next, and i'm usually so exhausted by the end of the day that it doesn't bother me that i don't really do much with myself in the evenings. talk to people online, read the news, watch whatever tv show i've been downloading of late, play a video game, read my book, sleep. wash, rinse, repeat. same shit, different day. it's easier than facing the grim reality of being completely and totally fucking clueless. tonight i spend half an hour playing with a toy aeroplane, transforming it into a robot and back again, just because it took my mind off how much precious time i've been wasting going nowhere.

for the last couple of years, now, i've been waiting for whatever's to happen next. 2 years ago yesterday i landed in Canberra with a couple of bags, a hard drive full of photos and a head full of memories with people to see and a life to rebuild, and proceeded to get on with the business of doing those things that people do - work the week, save a bit of cash each fortnight, go for drinks on Friday, then through random circumstance i met the Green Faerie and suddenly had something to Work Towards.
for three months i was in Canberra and she was in Perth, but that was ok because i knew exactly when and how i'd be fixing this problem. the rest was just patience and logistics, and these are things i've had a lot of practice at.

so the day came and so did i, across the continent to the Old Country and the reunion was sweetness and light but the warm, happy glow of Arriving faded over time, as it inevitably does, and once again i settled in to Wait. Wait for her to get things sorted so that she could move on with her life. Wait for me to get the finances together so that i could have the cash to help us start building a life. Waiting for this, Waiting for that. we'd agreed that plan towards buying a property each with the general view towards renting out one and living in the other, which meant that i needed to rebuild the slush fund i spent through in Europe and to achieve this i needed to earn it, save it, then earn some more. and Wait. so i put my other plans aside for the time being so that i could focus on this goal for the time being which wasn't a horrible thing - i had a girl to love and share my time with and beyond that i'd lost track of what other aspirations i might have had along the way. my 5 Year Plan finally came to fruition 6 months before the delivery date - i finally got the Team Leader job i'd been working towards for years, and after a brief celebration i looked forward looking for the next set of goalposts and saw... nothing, so i Waited, figuring that something would show up soon enough.

spin forwards a year and the Faerie and i went our separate ways amicably after agreeing that some differences of opinion are just too profound to ignore or gloss over, and i found myself still sitting in the wilderness with a blank horizon in front of me. having a high-pressure job meant that my career was happily looking after itself, and having the Faerie around meant that i could keep myself busy helping her to achieve her goals while i waited for the time to come to kick off the next stage of mine. now i didn't even have that to occupy myself with - just time on my hands and a lack of motivation. i'd started learning guitar before i left Canberra and continued when i got here, but it's sat in its case for over a year now untouched. i'd started learning German at about the same time, but apart from a few choice words i've not progressed at all. i've really done nothing that i'd consider of any value in all that time - flying around and around in circles looking for a place to land. i'd had a good enough time of it all - i went to the US for Shadow and The Boss's reWedding. i went to Cairns with Matthias (see Berlin: Don't Mention The War) and dived on the Great Barrier Reef. i flung my poi around at the Southbound Festival surrounded by half-naked women dressed as faeries... but i don't feel like i've progressed at all. all i really have to show for it is an amusing photo collection and a Big Fucking Stack of Cash.

a couple of amusing statistics, because numbers amuse me sometimes - if i were to convert it all into Australian Dollar coins and stack them all one atop the other the pile would be roughly as tall as the third highest skyscraper in Perth and weigh 5 and a half times more than me which, if dropped into a swimming pool, would displace 63 litres of water.

it's a fair whack of cash.

and as you'd expect, the having of it provides me with absolutely no joy whatsoever. the important thing is that it's a moderately large hammer with which i can make certain problems go away. if i want to take a week off work and head back to Cairns, for example, i can. my car needs new tyres? sorted. i want to take a friend out to dinner and they don't have any cash until payday? not even a concern.

so i have to ask - what the fuck is the point of having it if i have no fucking clue what the hell do do with it? the Responsible Adult i'm supposed to be by now says i should stick with the plan and Buy A House - that HAS been the goal all this time... but bearing in mind how trapped and tied down i've been feeling for so long now, do i really want to shackle myself to this place for another however many years? i've been feeling the wanderlust building for a while now there is a serious temptation to go and chase the Sunshine. of course, that raises yet more questions. it seems that for the last few years i've followed, rather than led. i followed the Faerie across the country, then followed Matthias to go diving after following Shadow to America, so i wonder whether i really want to hand the steering over to someone else again but... i also don't have a fucking clue what the hell i want to do with myself and i have to admit that this has led me to some extraordinarily interesting places over the last couple of years. if i'd not wound up in Australia's Sandpit pursuing a girl with big brown eyes i'd not have reconnected with Matti again, and i'd not have wound up in Cairns, let alone been invited back.

i wonder if i'm looking at this wrong - am i really relinquishing control, or am i diverting in order to fly alongside a while? and do i really give a fuck, as long as it keeps my life Interesting? because i have to admit that Give A Fuck is a resource that i have in incredibly short supply. for better or worse, i've still not done anything i couldn't walk away from and i can't contemplate doing any different now. i seem allergic to permanence, addicted to transience. i think i'm just about ready to accept that as being part of who i am, rather than something i need to fix.  now i just need to find the motivation to actually do something rather than just Waiting for it to happen...

you have to look after you (because no one'll do it for you)...

the rain's hitting my face through the open visor of my helmet as i ride off down Wanneroo Road, heading for home. i'm 20k over the limit. 30. the bike's barely awake under me, engine loping along as i cruise through suburbia. i've just done my Good Deed for the Day - gone to help someone who needed it. i don't owe him anything, but it was the Right Thing To Do. i should feel good right now... that self-satisfied feeling of knowing you did the Right Thing for the Right Reasons, but i don't. i'm not sure if i feel anything at all. i know, academically, that the air is fresh and clean, but it doesn't buoy my soul like i know it should. i know, logically, that i'm passing the cars around me, but i'm not noticing them. if i check my memory i know that i indicated, changed lanes and overtook, but it doesn't feel like me that did it all. there's music in my ears - i know this to be true. i can hear every word Scroobius Pip says, but i'm not comprehending. i'm insulated, floating in a silent ocean of mental fatigue over a featureless bottom of anger and i'm not sure if i can feel anything at all. just the pinpricks of the rain hitting my face, evaporating almost before they've landed.

i hit Ocean Reef Road and catch a lucky green on the Freeway onramp and hang off for a fast-left and fire through it and let the bike wake up a bit, hitting a dollar-fifty before i've even thought about it before dropping back to a gentle dollar-twenty cruise for the 30km run to the city. meanwhile, i'm sixteen days ago and 3472km away, standing on a beach near Cape Tribulation with a pretty girl under my arm. then i didn't have a care in the world. now i just don't care.

the job i took back in February, i still have. it's been touch and go a lot of the time but every time i've felt like i was ready to pull the pin, toss the grenade and walk away from the impending explosion i've held fire for one reason or another. i've been holding off, for the most part, because i want to have a job with some longevity on my CV. a career of short roles is starting to look bad, despite the solid and steady progression. it helps that my staff have been, for the most part, brilliant. a pleasure to work with. a reason to get up and go to work in the morning. unfortunately the joy ends there and i'm getting sick of being the umbrella that holds off the shitstorm of abuse from above. i can keep it up for a while yet, but how much longer remains to be seen.

i'm 2 weeks ago, enjoying One More Day in the warmth of the Sunshine before heading to Cairns Airport and saying goodbye.
i'm 4 weeks ago, spending my evenings talking online with someone i met only briefly, but who wants to know me better. 
i'm 17 months ago, arriving in Perth after 3 days of driving with Shadow across the country to be greeted with tears and kisses.
i'm 2 years ago standing outside Canberra Airport, feeling like i'm Home for the first time in forever.

chasing a feeling, more than a place. a need to feel something beyond numb and angry, weary and betrayed. to feel like i'm in control again, however transitory and self-delusional it might be. soon i'll make my move - when the stars align and the way forward is clear. in the meantime i'll be making my plans and watching the signs, waiting until the time's right to set myself Free again...

16 jobs in 9 years...

i'm what you might refer to as a "Career Contractor". i started my first one about an hour after completing my final tutorial for uni in October 2002 and I've been going on like that ever since. one month here, a fortnight there, 6 months somewhere else. the longest i've stayed in any one place, employment-wise, was just under 3 and a half years when i worked for a Large Federal Department. that was 4 separate contracts and three distinct job titles. the shortest was 6 days, working for Gatehouse Bank in London. i worked for Celine (part of the Louis Vuitton Fashion Group at the time) for just a touch longer. i've had a couple of Permanent jobs over the years, but they've never lasted and for one reason or another i've always wound up back in the contracting space.

for those who don't follow the varieties of employment arrangements, a "contract" differs from a "permanent" job more or less as follows:

- you're generally employed to provide a specific service, generally for a specific time frame. the idea is that you can bring someone in to fill a gap, say, cover for someone going on Long Service or Maternity Leave. they sit in the seat while they're needed then they're gone when they're not.
- you don't receive paid holidays, sick leave or anything else. if you're crook and can't come in, you don't get paid.
- you generally get paid more. a contractor needs to cover their own superannuation/pension out of the fee they receive, as well as cover themselves for any leave they want to take. the value of this comes to around 11% above the standard permanent salary, although individual contract rates can differ from this vastly. when pricing myself, i always bear that in mind and make sure that my requested rate takes this into account (i usually ask for 20% more than the perm expectation so that they can bargain me down a little without cutting into my income)
- at the end of your term there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll be extended in the role. your employer can opt to let the contract end, at which point you're back on the meat market.

so there's risk and reward. if you want to work extra hours, come in when you're sick and not take holidays you can earn a tidy packet as a contractor. if you're happy to bounce between jobs and be constantly updating your resume then life can be good and interesting, and if you like having a variety of work to do in different places then it can be really rewarding. i'm fairly good at saving some money for a rainy day, which means that i've been able to take holidays when i want. when i can manage it, i avoid taking sick days and if i can leave my holidays for the "between gigs" times then i'm able to put a fair amount of cash aside quite quickly when i've had to. you can cut and run pretty easily when a job turns out to be crap, and when things time out well sometimes you can find something to fill in a couple of months while you're waiting for something else - a better job that won't be starting for a while, or say, a move across the country. it also means that i've been able to keep my skills updated regularly and keep my resume full of buzzwords that keep new employers happy, so you could say that it's worked out quite nicely. it's a mercenary life - fighting with pimps to make sure you get the money you're worth and they don't screw you on their cut (pimps take a cut of your hourly rate, and if they can up their cut by dropping yours they will), making sure you've always got enough cash coming through in case you go through a dry spell between jobs, or so you can afford to take a holiday every once in a while so that you don't burn out. each contract that comes through has to offer just a little bit more than the last - you're often asked what you were paid in the last job when people judge your "worth". you could have all the skills on the chart, but if you were getting paid half the rate they expect in the last job then you'll be undervalued and there'll be a doubt that you're good enough for the better roles. you're CONSTANTLY chasing an extra couple of dollars at renewals. it may not be about the money, but if you have the same skills as someone who earned $60/hour in their last job and you were earning $40, they're far more likely to get through than you are.

that said, after eight and a half years of this, i'm getting pretty tired. i can write up selection criteria while configuring a new Windows server. my resume gets updated at least every six months, and that means i need to update Linkedin.com and iprofile.com.au every time as well. i keep a folder in my email full of email conversations with various recruitment agents in the towns i want to work (i still get emails from pimps in Melbourne after i briefly looked at working there, not to mention the ones in Canberra who haven't worked out that i live in Perth now. when i went to London i left my phone with my mother for her to look after and she'd get a couple of calls a month from people in various parts of Australia seeing if i was available). networking is a huge part of the game. the problem is that it's tiring. it's semi-constant effort. even when you're in a job you're still keeping in touch with your contacts, seeing what's out there, lining up the next gig. then, each time you leave a job, there are the goodbyes, farewell drinks, collecting email addresses from people who you'll probably never see again, a weekend or maybe a week's break before you're finding your way to a new office, trying to remember the names of your new colleagues and working out who to avoid, who's arse to kiss and who'll be signing your timesheet.

i just got job #16 after three, hour-and-a-half-plus interviews. i was on the market for just over 2 weeks and in that time i interviewed for three jobs, discussed half a dozen more and was offered two (i'd like to thank the Western Australian Skills Shortage). it's another perm. as i mentioned earlier, i've never had a lot of luck with perms. the first one i had was for a Large American-Based Multinational IT Integrator and the corporate culture was horrible. i nearly left on the first day and i only hung around for 5 months because it took 3 months to get the clearance required for my next job (the Large Federal Department). the next perm was almost as disastrous and i left after 9 months with my confidence shot to hell. i moved from there to another perm with a company which folded just in time for me to head off to London. now i'm leaving at the end of a 6 month contract with another Large American-Based Multinational IT Integrator that's left me demotivated and frustrated and walking into a small company that's only been around for 4 years. why these guys?

well, for a start it's because it's a Team Lead job. i've been chasing TL work for the last year or so now. not exclusively by any means - i'm certainly not desirable enough that i've been able to pick and choose to that extent, but nonetheless it's been on my radar. secondly, i'm getting sick of working for big, faceless IT departments. the jobs i've enjoyed the most have been for the small mobs - the ones where i can remember the names of everyone in the department at the very least. it means that i'm less likely to get pigeonholed in one particular aspect of the role, and i get more of a challenge. lastly, the guy who owns the company is the guy who spent the best part of 5 hours interviewing me and... i like the guy. i like his way of doing business, and i like the direction he intends for his baby. i'll be Employee #10, but this means i'm getting in early in the company's life so there's the potential for me to move smoothly up the hierarchy as the company grows if i can perform. it's SO much easier to gain seniority if you're managing all the new hires than starting at the bottom of a large company and working your way up. this isn't the 50's anymore. you don't start as a clerk in your 20's and work your way up to middle management in the same company before you retire at 65. it's a whole new corporate world these days. there's a joke that goes around IT departments:

How do you get a promotion in IT?
You quit and find another job.

It's sad, but true. with the Baby Boomers hogging all the management jobs and living an extra 20 years than their parents we Gen-X/Y's can't afford to sit around waiting. you look for a hole in another organisation and compete to fill it. OR, of course, you find a small company and try to get in early, and somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy. i like that idea and this has the potential to be a serious career move which is extraordinarily attractive at the moment.

oh, and it helps that he offered me enough cash that i won't be taking too much of a pay cut from what i've been on for the last six months because at the end of the day, career or no, i'm still a fucking mercenary.

the Peter Raven Self Improvement Project....

it occurred to me about six months ago that apart from learning new skills for work and wandering around Europe i hadn't actually picked up any new skills since... um... shit, you know, i can't remember the last new skill i learned, you know? riding a motorcycle? what was fucking forever ago!

a while, anyway.

now, i work in the tumultuous world of Information Technology, where a new product is released onto the market on average once every five minutes globally, where Sun and Adobe insist on updating their Java and Flash platforms any time one of the developers farts (if the number of notifications i get to update is any indication), Apple release yet another piece of unreasonably popular bling every 12 months and Moore's Law has continued to hold true since 1965. it's a good world to live in - i get paid a frankly mind-boggling sum to play with gadgets and boss electrons around, but the amount of reading you need to do - reviews, manuals, whitepapers, etc - is pretty daunting. you're not going to keep up with it all unless you put the effort in. on top of that, there's the constant upgrade path - Windows 3.11 led to 95 led to 98 led to (the living abortion that was) Me led to 2000 to XP to (Me's spiritual successor) Vista and now on to 7. meanwhile, Windows in the server and corporate-space, NT grew up to 4.0 before converging with 2000, then on to 2003 and the stunningly originally-named 2008. on any given Tuesday i'm likely to need to know whether or not i can install Windows 2000 Server on this particular piece of kit, or whether i'll need to use Windows 2000 Advanced Server instead. can i install this app on the Windows 2003 Standard R2 x64 server, or will we want to deploy a VM running the x86 version instead? it's a lot to keep track of, memorise and use, and so by the time i head home i tend to want to do Something Completely Fucking Different like video games, drinking and having sex with women - you know, those good, wholesome pursuits of any lad in their mid-to-late 20's.

then i bogged off overseas and had several months of bumming around with less of the work and and a whole lot of fuck-all to do and i realised that playing video games got a bit old after a while, drinking was expensive and having sex with women... let's just not go there (because i hardly did). hell - apart from this little body of wordage i was a consumer - recipient of a torrent of input, and outputting little more than photos and the occasional whine of "woe is me, i can't get a job and beer is expensive".

getting back i had a number of grand designs, and one of these was that in 2010 i going to learn stuff again, namely another language and a musical instrument. i'd enjoyed French and German while i was travelling, and after digging through my fileserver again i realised i had a whole series of German lessons on it so that sorted that. Shadow's brother is a mad guitar fanatic and was overjoyed to take on the task of helping me learn, so that too was sorted. since then i've managed to get through the first 6 (of 30) German lessons (they're listen-and-repeat and go for half an hour. i do them when i have the opportunity) and i'm Making Progress with the acoustic Mal lent me to practice on.

it's been good fun - especially since i take almost any opportunity to use the German i've been learning on people, and the first time i cranked out a vaguely recognisable version of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd... damn it was a satisfying feeling. it's also reminded me of the joy of learning - for the last few years all the new stuff i was filling my head with was either a) work-related or b) history of the places i was visiting. half of my down-time over the years has been spent doing techie stuff anyway - it's not unusual for me to work 9 hours, then go home and spend another 3 stripping down laptops, refurbishing and rebuilding them. having something unrelated is helping to bend my brain in new directions. sure, sometimes i have to force myself to flick to the next lesson on my Personal Sanity Device when i'm on a decently-long drive (which now lives in my car rather than in my pocket, but that's how live works sometimes) or pulling up some Tab on my file server and actually pick up the damn guitar but... i'm having fun, and having fun being an active participant rather than a passive one like i would be if i were reading a book or watching a movie.

i'd like to think that i'll managed to have a decent grounding in German and be able to play a few tunes decently well by years'-end, but fuck it - i'll not be disappointed if i can't as long as i keep having fun in the meantime... and if this gets me back in the habit of learning new things... well, all the better, really!

say something, anything...

i'm suffering from the oddest variety of writer's block at the moment. i know exactly what i want to talk about during the day, but when i get to the part of the day where i have the time to actually apply brain to keyboard i think i'd rather say fuck it and sleep. this is getting a bit bothersome, so instead i'm just going to throw things down as dot points so that i can at least get SOMETHING written down:

• my job is vaguely entertaining. it's also occasionally frustrating, but the joy of getting paid on a weekly basis is that before you know it you're receiving a hit cash injection, which makes is a lot easier to maintian your motivation.
  
• Matt's & Julia's wedding went smashingly well (see earlier post). i woke up with a massive hangover the next day, although that had nothing to do with the wedding: afterwards Sandra and Alison invited Skye over and we sat up until disgustingly late getting through 6 bottle of champers. after which things got somewhat messy.
  
• yesterday evening E and i celebrated our 400th email. i don't even want to know what the tally of SMS's and phone-call minutes would add up to. i'd question the figures, but Exchange logs don't lie...
  
• speaking of which, i'm seriously looking forward to the Easter long-long-weekend which i happen to know is 16 days away, not that i'm counting. at all. in any way shape or form. i mean... 400 isn't THAT many, right? it's only 100/week...
• after enjoying not having a backlog of broken tech to fix, i seem to have found myself with 2 laptops and a mobile phone to repair. i'm not sure how i accumulate these things, but what the hell? it'd be nice if i could earn money from this sort of thi... oh yeah, that's right: i do. a LOT. moo hoo ha ha!
  
• i mean, we mostly email while at work, so that makes it 10 each way, each day. it's not THAT much. and Shadow: that's enough out of you, sunshine!
  
• my poor Audi's had a hard time, having been mishandled by the fucktards at Goodyear in Phillip. seriously - how hard can it be to tighten the nuts on a fucking wheel when you put it back on? it can't be too much to expect, surely. their incompetence was a contributing factor in me running off the road in the wet the other weekend. i'm just lucky i didn't do any serious damage to mein Deutsch auto, although i did have the boys down Canberra VW Centre in Belconnen check it over. THEY at least do good work.
  
• my guitar lessons are going vaguely well. i realised the other day that i can actually play most of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd - slowly, off-tune, but recognisably so. now if only i could engage my brain sufficiently to sit through Lesson 6 my German lessons...
  
• i'm fucking tired and never getting enough sleep. i'm yet to find a good solution for this - even when i have a nice quiet night in at home there's always something to do, someone to call, something to read...
  

and on that note i'm going to try to do something about that last point.

mi vida loca...

ok, so things got crazy. er. crazier. i know my life is fairly well known for being more than moderately fucked up at the best of times, but this is getting ridiculous. 3 weeks ago i got on a plane for Perth - i spoke of this. i was unenthused. 2 weeks later i was back in Canberra wondering why i'd returned. the original plan was to hang around a week then fly out again, get back to the real world and bed in for the long haul. 4 days after landing i was quietly cruising the job ad's scoping out what Server Engineer jobs were available back out west. i'd been sitting around late on Saturday night having a conversation that went along the lines of:

"So... when do you leave?"
well, i WAS looking at getting out this thursday.
"Really? Well I've got Thursday through Monday off work..."
is that so? well i've not booked my flights yet...

so i hung around. sound familiar? all i can say is that it's nice having a flexible schedule. by the end of the following week i had 2 job interviews lined up in Canberra for the following Wednesday so i bit the bullet and booked flights for Tuesday. 8 hours of transit on Tuesday. 2 interviews Wednesday. 2 job offers Thursday. 1 contract signed on Friday and i started a 4 month contract on Monday at a frankly ridiculous pay rate. it ends on 30/June and has no possibility of extension, but that's ok since it's entirely likely that i'll be on the next flight out west.

yes. that crazy.

so what happened in Perth? i'd planned on having a quiet time, bum around, see people when i felt like it but otherwise take a chill pill and Wait Awhile. maybe get in a dive off Rottnest. it never works out that way though and i wound up being busy as busy as busy. seriously, next time i'll drop the pretense of relaxing and stock up on caffeine in advance... except that next time i'm likely to be be hanging around considerably longer than a week or two.

things seem to be dropping into place - as i've said far too many times over the last month or so: we have convergence. i was in Perth at just the right time to be in just the right place and meet just the right person. i came back to Canberra and walked into a job that fit in with my plans perfectly: enough time in Canberra to get everything done that needs to be done, that'll pay enough for me to put together another nest-egg and will finish early enough to have the time to score a short contract in Perth before i jet off for a while in September. it's like i've been saying for years now - when things are meant to happen they just work, and for the last few weeks it's all been effortless. i wasn't feeling settled in Canberra and suddenly that's a good thing. i was getting itchy feet and now i've got a reason to scratch them. the reasons i left Perth all those years ago have crumbled into dust and scattered in the wind (although they still don't have deregulated trading hours. fucking parochial bastards) and if it's too irritating there there's already a Get Out Of Jail Free card being waved in my face with the potential of leading me to Melbourne. or just back to Canberra. it's not like i'm short on options. i could see if i could wrangle another jaunt in London if it came down to it.

yes. that crazy.

it's funny... or at least, i've been laughing. i couldn't have planned anything this much fun and for once my gypsy lifestyle has worked in my favor. the sad thing is that no matter what i do i'll be breaking someone's heart. i stay in Canberra, people in Perth try to convince me to come back. i move to Perth and people in Canberra are going to make sad-faces at me. i figure that if i'm going to upset people no matter what i do i might at least make myself happy. it's either that or fuck everyone off and go somewhere completely different, make new friends in Vancouver or wherever and proceed to break THEIR hearts when i eventually get antsy and fuck off into the distance again.

i don't really want to do that. one day i'll settle down and stop wandering... but i get the feeling that it'll be something that just happens rather than something i plan. i'll turn around one day and realise that i've been in the same job for a couple of years, living in the same house in the same city and find that the biggest surprise will be that i'll have absolutely no desire to move on again. in the meantime i'll be taking the opportunities that present themselves - there's nothing to stop me paying the rent on my room in the sharehouse and bogging off until further notice...

if only because i have nothing better to do...

every time i get on a plane, ever since i first traveled on my own and not under the watchful eye of the generic parental units, i walk down the gangway and as i step through the heavy door i extend the index- and middle-fingers of my right hand together, kiss them and press them against the fuselage as i pass through. every time i get off again i repeat the procedure with my left hand. the hand isn't important per se - it's just that this is the bit i can easily reach. the funny thing is that no flight attendant have ever commented to me about it, or even visibly noticed - not even on Virgin Blue flights where the hosties seem to get paid to have a little bit more personality.

beforehand i tend to wind up sitting in the departure lounge staring out the window, invariably eyeing off the plane that's about to take me wherever it is i'm going. once i get there i'm off without a backward glance, but before the flight? this is when i got time to kill. the problem is that i have a fairly good brain for mechanics, so i wind up appreciating the engineering that goes into these beasts of burden and invariably this means pondering what can go wrong. things like a hydraulic hose on the landing gear that was missed by maintenance which bursts when the gear retracts, preventing the gear from deploying for landing. or microfractures in the engine mounts that cause one of them to shear mid-flight "Donnie Darko"-style, causing the plane to spiral out of control. a calculation error in the GPS that makes the plane think it's higher than it should be and auto-correct into the wrong airspace. don't get me wrong - i've no fear of flying whatsoever, and the closest to fear i've ever come to when flying was the last time i flew into Melbourne: i was on the Red Eye Horror out of Perth and was so exhausted when i left that i passed out within a minute or two of the seatbelt light turning off, pillow between my skull and bulkhead, snoring away until i woke with a start to howling engines and a bump. i stared out the window in confusion thinking we were crashing and wondering why it was light outside, freaking out quietly until my brain engaged, i realised that i'd slept through the entire flight and we'd just fucking landed. we're not going to crash today either. i know this because of the pure and simple knowledge that this is not in fact a good day to die. that day will inevitably come, but my headbones tell me that it isn't today and i trust my headbones.

i remember when Going Somewhere was a major production - organise for this or that to be done, lock the bike up secure and out of sight, secure the car. organise with the housemates, emergency contact details, promises that i'll call mum (or the girlfriend when i have one - it's funny how often some of them wind up sounding like my mum...) AS SOON AS I LAND. have days planned out in advance, who i'll see, where i'll be, what i'm going to do. sometimes it's been a logistical nightmare, so complicated i've had to map it all out on a spreadsheet, printed calendars from Outlook complete with phone numbers in case i'm delayed and projected travel times so that i can be at each appointment on time and not miss anyone out.

i'm chockers for thursday, but i've got coffee at The Moon in Northbridge from 8:30 until 10:30 tonight with Potato Paul and if you can make it to that i'll have time for you... yeah... no, he's cool... no, i can't really push back any further, i'm meeting my brother for our annual drunken midnight stroll through Lathlain... wait... no, how about tomorrow night? we'll do a run to Alfred's Kitchen... i'll pick you up on the way through at 11, k? right. gotta go, i need to get to Spearwood now...

compared to usual, this trip to Perth has been almost lackadaisical in its planning... or lack thereof. i booked this flight yesterday at about midday. i still haven't got around to booking the flight home, in part by design but for the most part out of sheer laziness and apathy. i've got a few things on for the next couple of days i've not set too much in stone. i have my entire schedule in my head and it's not because i've got a better memory, it's just that i've kept it simple and open. my friends seem to be well trained - i advertised on my Facebook status

Peter Raven is preparing for another Tour of Duty in the battlefields of Perth...

and had a pile of people list out what times on what days they're free. it's no help for them to ask me when i want to do stuff - if they tell me when they're free i can make it all mesh... 90% of the time, anyway.

i'm not even sure why i'm going. the official reason is that i have a couple of weeks before i start work, so i might as well. Binky seems to think i'm coming over to be her savior or something. mum's convinced i'm coming to help keep her sane when my grandmother comes to visit. i'm not even really in the fucking mood. as Little Andrew was driving me to the airport (he picked me up from home and then ferried me to coffee so we could at least keep that appointment - part of the reason i booked QF719 (the 7:30PM direct flight over) was because i knew i'd be able to go to my weekly coffee at Essen beforehand) i could have sworn i told him screw it dude, i just ran out of "Give A Fuck". hang a right up Majura and make for Horse Park Drive, yeah? but either he missed it or i had a momentary disconnect between brain and mouth and it didn't make it out. i jumped out at the dropoff, thanked him and waited while he tore off in his beat up little Corolla and nothing more was said about the incident which obviously hadn't happened in the first place.

i DID need to get out of Canberra for a while - that much is for sure. i very nearly wound up hopping a flight on Delta to San Francisco, then continuing on around the bay to Santa Cruz so i could spend a week cluttering up MCG's couch (i may get around to talking about my second meeting with MCG (see Paris: unexpected delays may occur in transit...) in Copenhagen someday, but for the time being it will have to remain shrouded in mystery) but she wound up being ridiculously busy and not really in the position to entertain so the plan got the coathanger-treatment and i moved on to reconceive a better one. i pondered fucking off to Cairns or something and going diving, but being between jobs i'm watching the cash a fair bit and trying to reserve as much as possible so i can rejoin the 2 Wheel brigade as soon as humanly possible. my Old Man's bike's been sitting idle, on the other hand, and my old kit is sitting in my luggage down in the hold. parenthetically, i should probably add that my old helmet, jacket and gloves take up something in the order of 50% of the volume of the contents in that bag. if not for the fucking lid i'd be backpacking it. i pulled it out of the cupboard today, pulling on my old cordura jacket (the leather one being WAY too heavy for air travel), summer gloves and helmet and suited up for the first time in nearly a year and a half, re-adjusting everything to accommodate my considerably less rotund frame and caught myself looking at my gloved hands as i flexed my fingers and gripped the imaginary handlebars in front of me, revelling in the feeling of... rightness... or was it righteousness? i need to get another bike, and soon.

Perth's about the same cost to get to (or cheaper) as Cairns from Canberra, but it's a fuckload cheaper proposition when most of the fun i have there is social and most of my expenditure consists of beer and petrol. that, and i might be able to get a dive off Rottnest if i play my cards right.

either way, i've been somewhat unenthused... no, that's a lie. i've been struggling to give a fuck, which is strange because a week ago i was ready and rearing to go. then the afternoon rolled around on Monday and i lost the will to do much more than stare listlessly at the clouds on the horizon while i sat on the back slab drinking coffee, remembering when i was out amongst it... just... as much as i was missing being out in the world the actual impetus to get out of my chair and out of that fucking town had left me, every idea i had screamed "EFFORT!" and the needle on my "Give A Fuck-o-meter" started straining against the peg marked "Sie keine haben".

i struggled through last week, battling falling energy levels and high blood sugar. a week of fasting, careful eating, a trip to the quack and large quantities of prescription pharmaceuticals later and my sugars were dropping again, i was sleeping properly and i was moving around again, but somehow i lost the drive and i lost the care. still, i managed to pull my credit card and book the flight, i even managed to get on the fucking plane, so i can't be doing too poorly, right?

i don't know... i've been running on autopilot a lot lately. i have a sudden flurry of activity where i analyse every nuance of a conversation, then switch into Spinal mode where i do and say whatever first comes to mind and that seems to work just as well. i just roll with the punches and let my subconscious be my guide, living life like the drunk guy in a movie who's staggering down the street and seems to miraculously miss every banana peel, broken paver and pile of dog shit along the way, notices a dollar coin on the ground and when he bends to pick it up ducks his head just in time to miss being hit by an errant beer bottle. it seems like i've dodged a few bullets in the last little while, not because i have particularly good reactions, but because i just happened to get distracted by something shiny and not be standing where the bullet wanted to go. how does this relate to fucking off to Perth? fuck knows. being a Man Without A Plan isn't too bad a thing when you get in the groove and Mass Effect 2 on my Alienware laptop distracts me nicely from the the complete lack of and idea what the fuck i'm doing, as well as my inability to reliably line up a date for saturday night. i'm onto my 4th cup of the gritty brown whore's afterbirth-in-a cup that Qantas insists on calling coffee and i'll be landing in an hour or so now and i'll sort it out when i get there. might as well make the most of it. i'm either going to Perth because i have to be there or i have to be away from Canberra - which it is i'm far from caring about right now...