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...

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...

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...

6 days out of order and in a blur...

standing outside Perth Domestic Terminal on arrival i was just about ready to leave. ten-odd hours of transit from go to woah, standing in a town i recognised but no longer knew, the sense of rightness was completely missing.

walking back into the same airport 140 hours and 5 minutes later and things were... different. a nervous drive down barely-remembered streets, a visit to some old friends and a good night's sleep had put me in a better frame of mind. sepia-toned memories overlaid with the current actuality of the places in which i found myself, seeing people who are all but unchanged on the surface, but with new stories bubbling up from within. the eerie and disconcertingly familiar distilled into a comforting recognition and for once when i walked out of that town it felt like a departure rather than a harried escape.

"OH MY GOD you haven't changed a bit!!"
5 years... it can't have been 5 years... i was thinking. i recognised her instantly from outside the cafe where i stood in the rain, bright pink hair that last i remembered as black, and spiked up in devil horns now falling over her eyes as she sat looking at the newspaper. it's true thought - i hadn't seen Lil' Rach in 5 years, since not long before i first left the old town. every time i'd come through she'd been elsewhere. we hadn't even really spoken much over the years - half an hour's worth of conversation spread over a handfull of phone calls. i knew so little of her life in the meantime that i had no idea what was going to be said when i got there. the hug was instantaneous and i couldn't help but think how well she was looking - slimmer, happier, bright and shining like a star, and without thinking or planning or consideration it was as if we hadn't seen each other in 5 days, not years.

to be told that i was exactly as remembered was rather nice in a way. i looked in the mirror later that day and pondered my visage. less weight, more lines, a readier smile. my hair is more or less the same. i dress the same (although the quality has improved over the years, but the styles remain). but then it made me wonder whether i had actually changed over the years, or have i learned nothing from what has gone before? no, not really. still, i can't complain if i'm starting to look my age, rather than persistently older than advertised.

three hours i spend exchanging stories with Lil Rach. i even drove her to work so that she wouldn't have to waste the 45 minutes on buses and could spend it with me instead. we shared tales of love and loss, travel, time spent and places visited. she's been around the world, met a lad she can't live without and above all, been happy. a can-do attitude and an ability to make do. a refusal to see anything as a roadblock, and a conviction for streaking through New York city. we're both new people and it didn't matter, because we're both still the same in every way that matters. i'd have hung around all day if i'd not had so many places to be that day. i'd been on the go from 8AM, wasn't scheduled to stop until past 2 the next morning and this was my first appointment and it didn't stop coming, not for another 14 hours.

"I believe that if you're going to put something in your mouth it had better be worth it... in more ways than one..."
how on earth am i to describe Must to provide the appropriate amount of detail while at the same time reflecting the emotion of the experience? i could try to describe the food (wagyu beef shank ravioli with mushrooms and black truffle, chicken and lobster sausage with whole wheat and white-wine sauce, hand-made gnocchi with wagyu beef shank, bread flown in from france each day, a south-american slant to this month's wine selection in support of the tapas tasting menu they'd run earlier in the month... you get the idea), or the room (wall to wall wine-bottles, few of which you'd see gracing the shelves of a discount liquor store), or the wait-staff (the junior waiter we spoke to knew far more about wines than i did, and they still had a sommelier on the premises). what i think i'll brush on however, is that i have never in my life eaten food which left me in a post-orgasmic twitch after each bite. Ondine would later describe my response as "an uncertain combination of giggling and sobbing". i do know that at one point, after i'd mopped up my plate with the last of the bread and had started on her rotisseried pork and duck, seasonal vegetables and home-made polenta i hit my head on the wall when i bit into the crackling because i'd lost control of my neck.

in a word, the food was Perfect. everything. twelve inch stalks of asparagus? sweet from tip to tail, not woody in the slightest. each wine perfectly complementary. each ingredient perfectly proportioned. parmesan, rocket, balsamic and olive oil salad? perfect.

Ondine's a jewel, especially when it comes to food. put her in a town for a week or two and she'll be on first name basis with some of the chefs of the best restaurants within 20 kilometres of the city centre. give her a month and she'll have home and mobile numbers. she knows food both from an eating and a cooking perspective and she loves sharing the experience with people who appreciate it. i'm not entirely sure how i keep on her foodie-radar, bearing in mind how lazy i can get when it comes to putting effort into my eating. there have been far too many weeks where i've eaten naught but packet pasta and pizza. still, i DO like food, even if i don't always pursue it to the n'th degree at all times. Ondine does, and i get to enjoy her hard work, and she enjoys my enjoyment so everybody wins.

a couple of days after my first Must experience i was arriving for another breakfast/brunch rendezvous to find her sitting under a makeshift covered area behind a butcher's in Mt Lawley. she and a friend were at a gourmet market, top hat and long-coat, multiple petticoats, tea set and lace tablecloth. the admiring stares and comments had the two of them preening like cats and pleased as punch. a pate and sweetbreads platter, a board of cheeses you have to know exist before anyone will let you buy some, fresh bread and coffee from one of the better roasters in Perth. it almost made me forget the 4-5 hours of sleep i'd had the night before, not to mention the drive i'd undertaken using the best of Zen Navigation (turn when it feels like you should turn). delightful, civilised, and with a sandwich consisting of about a third of a roast lamb squeezed between two slices of slightly stale bread.

now i'm glad that i'm on an uncatered flight because i don't think i'm going to, in all conscience or concern for my waistline, eat again for the next 3 or 4 days. damn you Ondine, for ruining my waist-line. thank you for taking me to Must for the best meal and later the best Scotch i've ever tasted.

"You are correct - she IS ridiculously lonely... but then so am I.."
i'm seeing it more more, but last saturday night was a sledgehammer to the skull. it's occurred to me a number of times over the last few years, but looking around the Engagement Party and seeing all the people i knew who were married, engaged to be married, in long term relationships, children running around the room and the glimmer in people's eyes of more in the planning stages, the small couch-load of singletons felt awfully isolated. my sister got married a couple of years ago, not too long after her son was born (named for our grandfather). The Boy has been seeing the same girl from four years now and if she's put up with his shit with a smile for this long i can't see any particular risk of her leaving any time soon. they're a foregone conclusion as far as i'm concerned.

the same sort of thing is happening in Canberra and i can see how anyone long-term single hanging around the crew would be getting towards "sharpening your razor blades on your wrists" stage. i was starting to get a bit of the blues going myself, but then the pretty little thing i like to hug and kiss a lot was a long long way away. yes, she'll be even further away in a week and a half - thanks for reminding me. arsehole.

either way, i found it interesting to stand there surrounded by happy, smiling couples with a beer in hand, a "fuck you" smile and a big shit-eating grin on my face. it's lovely, though. Kandi and Mav are the couple you wish you and your partner were. they act like they just met and are still exploring the ins and outs of each other's genitalia despite having been going at it unchanged and unabated for six years now. they make single people jealous just by walking into the room and despite my comprehensive understanding that that sort of joined-at-the-hip, life-in-each-other's-pockets behavior would drive me to distraction and speeding fines, i can't help but be effected by it all.

nonetheless, it seems like almost everyone i know i perth is either happily in a long-term relationship, married or soon to be married, or desperately lonely and wishing they could join the club. given another couple of years and i have feeling that i'll be a member of an increasingly diminishing species, standing alone while the rest of them all stand together... that is, unless a certain little geek girl comes to her senses.

i keep referring to this as Canberra... mostly, i think, because i always assume that Perth is wherever i'm not. now i'm leaving Canberra too, and i honestly can't tell whether i'm coming or going anymore...
once again i'm on an aeroplane headed east. every time i've left Perth in the last 5 years i've felt like i was escaping back to the promised land - the land of Anywhere But There. i've always had a good time, but i've also been relieved to be getting out of there. now i'm tired and drained and with no regrets as to the way i spent my time over the last week, but i find myself missing it more the patchwork of rural western australia, then south australia, now victoria pass under my window and i wipe a small child of indiscriminate gender's drool off my arm. the ice glitters in my window, my isolation headphones seclude me from the jets and the hubbub of humanity and my head-space is so geographically disperse that i can't quite put a finger on where anything is. i'm liking the uncertainty of not being able to say where "home" is anymore. when the world around you is less than stable it gives you a chance to find out how good your own balance really is.

a good trip, all told, and for once i wish, in a small way, that it could have been longer. still, i'll be back sooner or later, of that i have no doubt.

transitory relevations...

i'm in an odd situation right now. it's been slowly dawning on me an unrealised consequence of travel which is that when (as i am right now) you're in transit it's kinda hard to say that you really are where your GPS says that you are. you see, geopraphically i'm currently sitting in the VirginBlue Boarding Lounge 35 (a concrete-floored wasteland of ultra-ruggedised, easy-clean furniture and fittings, industrially designed to be comfortable to sit in for a as much as an hour but simultaneously impossible to sleep in unless you've OD'd on muscle-relaxants). realistically, on the other hand, i'm in the Transit No-Man's Land; a place where people are but no one lives. it's kinda like Tasmania, really. people come and go, but everything's temporary, transient. the people you meet here, they're your friend, your confidant, or maybe just a meat chicane you dodge around when they realise that they desperately needed to use the toilet they just walked past.

the guy sitting across from me at the moment, slicked back hair, sunglasses pushed up on his head, chiselled good looks and fashionable shoes, he's not real. the hairy guy in black sitting on the 1.5x4 metre strip of carpet conveniently located in front of the power point, me, no i'm not real either. everyone here has their coping mechanisms. there's the old lady just getting into her pulp-fiction novel. there's the family sitting on the carpet in Lounge 34 who are play cards with the kids. the Islander lad dawdling on the travellator because he's got nowhere to be for a couple of hours while grannies with zimmer-frames overtake him on the tiles. the opportunist who's plugged his ultra-portable into a handy powerpoint and looks around at the people walking by while he bashes at the keyboard because... well, he can touch-type. can't you? newsagents and book shops running a roaring trade in temporary print. news today, olds tomorrow - sell out today, get the shipment in then sell out to a wholly different bunch of transients tomorrow.

and a thiving ecosystem has sprung up to cater for all these neuvo riche, the grateful recipients of the modern era of inexpensive air-travel. anyone can go anywhere, so everyone does and airports rapidly reach a critical-mass of the number of aeroplanes that can use a runway through a day. efficiency and economy dictate that a seat on the flight unsold is a seat wasted, and so cross-matching databases are written to keep track of it all so that you can tell it that you need to get from Canberra to Perth and it'll suggest stopovers in everywhere from Adelaide to Sydney, discount the under-utilised routes and recommend the chicken so that the airports can move the absolute maximum number of people from where they are to where they need to be while balancing the load so that no one terminal explodes and goes splat.

of course, this means that there's no end of people who've just travelled 300km in the wrong direction so that they could save a buck. people who were happy to accept a 3 hour stopover so that they wouldn't have to fly on the red-eye and endure 5 hours in the air on a discount airline with overpriced stale sandwiches. people who'll seriously consider overcooked 10$ noodles from the foodcourt if it means not being tempted to eat the equally shitty, but even more expensive food on the plane. don't forget here that bored people in our consumerist, throw-away society are prone to shop:

"i'm just going to have a look in Witchery, dear."
you packed enough clothes to last a month and we're only away a fortnight... anyway, didn't you just go shopping on the weekend?
"oh, just go get some coffees. it's not as if we don't have time to kill and maybe i'll find something nice for that dinner out with your parents."
yes sweetie...

and so the cycle of unnecessary commerce continues and thrives, populating what one might consider a hostile environment with more and more plastic and plywood facades with smiling waitrons there to take your order for double-priced cappuchino and cake which you're only eating because it kills some time and inevitably leads to your undiagnosed diabetes causing a hyperglyceamic attack halfway across the Pacific.

oh, it's all entertaining. seriously, don't mind me. i'm just killing time. i have mental images of this place after the bombs hit and tribes of survivors take up residence in the Boarding Lounges. it'd make a great 4 hour Kevin Costner film - he could film it with Mel Gibson - where Grorg unites his tribe after a border-dispute and takes control of the 30-series lounges before waging war against the evil, brutal forces of Kerglit to avenge his girlfriend who was kidnapped to replenish breeding stocks depleted in the great salmonella epidemic of 2053 (result of the discovery of a batch of old fossilised KFC). the battle scene in the Food Court would be epic. and to make it better, it'd be filmed entirely in the re-de-re-de-reconstructed dead language of the Yidrikaanarin and despite being 4 hours where Costner and Gibson jerk each over off in the background while underpaid actors jump around in filthy high-vis clothes it'll still make a fucking mind, and the whole thing would come about because Gibson and Costner got stuck in transit for a couple of hours on their way somewhere equally pointless.

on the plus side, at least the airline hosties are quite attractive.