Rituals...

Backing track: Marshmello - Alone 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Thing I Do For A Living...

 Backing track: flor - Slow Motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backing track: The Presets - Promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sepia stained skies...

The duty that had dragged me back discharged, I waited until darkness and a cool breeze fell, and with both the mosquitos and Mother Dear having taken themselves to bed I finally let myself flow like the rest of the waste-water down to my old spot by the river. 

I'll no less pretend to having an unpleasant time over the last three days than I will having much to say to the old friends at Ricky's party yesterday. I've certainly had a busy schedule, but also a fairly relaxed one, with plenty of time to look at the scenery as I go from one place to the next. This evening's been the first really empty space I could slot myself into, so I have. I nearly wound up here that first night, but Binky was free and it was a good opportunity to get in some quality time. Friday was good, if somewhat over-inebriated fun, which left me a little the worse for wear, and late for the event on Saturday. I hadn't intended on making an entrance, but being 45min late to the party will do that. I'd telegraphed my attendance only slightly more loudly than I had my departure so there were a few looks of surprise when I walked prodigally through the door. 

"Yes, I'm still alive."
<No, I've barely given you a second thought since quite some time before I left.>
"Yes, my cat is still a douche-canoe."
<Oh, didn't you hear I have a cat? He moved into my carport last December and now he's stuck with me.>
"I'm finding Canberra exactly where I left it, but also strangely peaceful."
<I suppose you could call 7 months and 24 days worth of planning "sudden" when you didn't care enough to talk to me the entire time, and I didn't care enough to tell you.>
<Plus I fucking de-friended you, but I guess you didn't notice.>
"I'm pretty heavily booked for the next week, I'm afraid."
<You didn't have time for me last summer when I was being excluded from all the social events, so don't go getting your hopes up.>
"Still working with the same mob, they keep finding things for me to unfuck."
<You couldn't understand it a year ago, and it's only gotten weirder since then, so let's save some oxygen, shall we?>

Ian was there tho, as he'd been the night before, which was nice. 

Afterwards I went back to Ricky's and we settled down on the couch with pizza before she passed out 5 min into the second episode of Loki, then we watched the rest of it whilst she nursed her hangover this morning, went for brunch, and then passed out again for the middle hour of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. It was a pleasant time, all told. Just after 3PM I packed my bag, said goodbye to her dad for what may well (bearing in mind his health is anything but) be the last time, and hiked over to Gosnells Station to catch the train back up to Lathlain. 

Something that's been hitting me in the eyeballs everywhere I've gone over the last 77 hours has been just how flat, and brown, this place is. Not just the topography, but the houses as well. Half-built single-storey beige shoe-boxes rising out of grey sand under a washed-out sky the colour of dust and stagnation. I've become so used to looking out over verdant-green hills under vivid skies of blue and violet and rose-gold and peach. It's not that Canberra is 'new'; it's just 'now', but Perth has been feeling very 'old', and entirely 'then'. 

I've been trying to put my finger on why the word I keep coming back to is "peaceful", but the mercury bead refuses to stay on the page. My lifestyle's not changed all that much; I still spend most of my time alone, I just seem to be choosing that instead of the alternative being too hard do deal with. I walk more, but I'm still just walking to a workplace, or the grocery store. I still work, and work some more, then sit around watching the world grow dark chatting to people online, listening to music, and bashing words into this year's laptop. Perhaps it's as simple as the view; a wide, open expanse full of colour and movement feels a lot more free, but also connected, especially when compared to the white picket fence under the branches of the trees I let grow over the yard. More and more it seems that the barrier I used to keep the rest of the world out was just as much a cage I locked myself into, or the cast on a broken limb left on long after the bone had set and was now causing the muscles to atrophy. 

Even sitting here along the river with a cool breeze on the back of my neck... it's nice here, but the city lights which have provided a backdrop for so many hundreds of conversations seem so very far away and washed out right now. It's all so familiar, and all so the same, and for all that I'm sitting still and my phone's GPS is pinning me to this spot on the map, I feel like I'm so very far away and still accelerating. 

I'm here for another week, and whilst I did what I came here to do there's still plenty to get done, so no point in whinging about it. So much of my world exists in the place between my ears anyway, when I close my eyes... really, I could be anywhere. On the day I left I spoke about "accept[ing] the fall", so now must be time to accept the landing and that this is just where my feet need to be. 

Musical afterthought: Metric - Oh Please

The rest is on me. 

Just when I thought I was out...

Something's been gnawing at me for weeks, nibbles and nips at first, until a couple of hours and a flight ago I found myself sitting in Canberra Airport anxiously chewing a hole in my lip. I'm flying back to Perth for the first time since I left 10 days and 7 months ago and the order of my comings and goings reversed; apparently I'm having some difficulty with that. 

Of course, a Perth trip means Perth music. It seems like my decision to throw on Ian Kenny's side-project brought it to my attention. 

Musical accompaniment: Birds of Tokyo - Circles 

I've been looking forward to this trip for a while, since booking it in August, after finding out that Ricky would be handing in the last assignment for her Bachelor of Commerce the day before her birthday in July, after being interviewed as the Subject Matter Expert by the Project group in her Entrepreneurship unit, after feeding in hints and tips from my MBA-studies, all the way back to making encouraging, supportive noises all those years ago when she turned around one day and told me her employer would pay for a chunk of it. 

"But I'm not smart enough to go to uni!"
"Of course you are! Bunch of us did, and we were kids at the time. You're all grown up'n shit. You'll slay it."
"But..."
"I like big butts, but I don't see how that's relevant. That said, go get your dumbfuck-bogan arse enrolled!" 

OK, perhaps it was less sweary than that... no, that can't be right. Differently sweary? It was a long time ago. Long before I started encouraging her to see if her Public Service job would move her over to Canberra, which in turn was quite some time before I decided to move back here myself. 

Going back for the "End of Uni/Birthday" Party was a no-brainer, and I've squeezed a lot of meetings and appointments into the next 10 days. It promises to be a good trip. 

I've really not been looking forward to this fucking trip. I didn't want to book myself as Unavailable in the work calendar. I really didn't want to organise a cat-sitter, or pack my bag, or go to the airport. I want to be sitting on my balcony which, for all the noise of the traffic and Emergency Vehicle sirens only gets mostly drowned out by the music blaring from my headphones, is... quiet. The thing I get paid to do has been more than chaotic enough, let alone what I carry around between my ears. Every day, whether literally or metaphorically, closing the door to my flat means I don't just get to block out the former, I get to sit above and look down on it, process and understand the latter, push music into my brain and flush the contents out through my fingers. 

Going back out into the world again means leaving my ivory tower; I'm not sure which is worse. 

Sitting in the Departure Lounge, it also occurred to me that I pissed off, or at least slighted, a bunch of people when I left. What if I run into them? No, I don't anticipate torches and pitchforks at the airport. No, I don't think they actually care, or even noticed. As I told faux-Bosslady the other day, "Never tell me not to be paranoid, paranoia is what keeps me and the people around me safe, because paranoia is what keeps me vigilant and the angles covered. And don't say what you're thinking, just don't. The least trustworthy thing that can come out of your mouth right now is 'you can trust me,' so don't say it." Running into someone I de-friended out of a sense of betrayal is an awkwardness I'd much rather not have to deal with, so I'd better make sure if I do I have some cutting one-liners ready to seal the deal and turn antipathy into actual animosity, right? It's much easier to avoid awkward conversations when they won't speak to you in the first place. 

That's a sane, sensible approach that any rationally well-adjusted grown up would take, right? 

Even in the absence of angry mobs, Perth is full of ghosts and echoes, and several hours later sitting in this cramped seat half-watching Sisu on the guy in the middle-seat's iPad, I'm realising just how little I want to go there. I'm an hour away from landing and I already want to leave, but perhaps that's just anxiety talking. I'd say something about rolling the dice and seeing if I feel better about things when I'm on the ground, but my Mother's picking me up from the airport, so those dice are more loaded than a Program Manager's schedule. 

I will, of course, stop complaining, politely ask the lovely Qantas hosties if I could trouble them for a straw, and suck it up. Whatever doesn't kill me just makes me more annoyed and cynical, after all, and will probably give me plenty to write about. 

"Flying Dutchman"-level ghosting...

 I hadn't decided whether this was going on the blog or not - I figured I'd work that out when I finished it. I wanted it out of my head tho, so sent it to my Penpal('s email address which has been my "grief toilet" for some time, and whilst she's not replied in a while I was also asked not to stop so I intend to continue dumping this shit into it until that changes or the address gives me splash-backs). 

I was listening to this when I sent the following message to Ian, and the combination made me realise that more words needed to be generated: 

Twenty One Pilots - Trees (Vessel Album version)

"For those who are keeping score, it's now been 2 weeks since I sent Jenna that 'fuck you and the rest of the money you owe me' email. 
"I can't say I really expected one, but at this point I reckon that ship has sailed and it's a 'Flying Dutchman'-level ghosting.
"Or, as Jeff Murdock in Coupling would have said:
"'Result!''" 
 - 11/09/2023, 20:33

Edit: Fri, 15 Sept 20:38
I wrote (most of) this on Monday night, and was in such a mess I'm pretty sure the last 500ish words are garbage and need to be rewritten. I say this here, because I'm about to read it through and attempt to do that now, and that means cranking the same tunes on repeat whilst I do to get myself back in the same headspace that had me quietly weeping through the early hours of Tuesday morning. Depending on what I find, further annotations may be included. Or not. I'll work that out when I get there. 

I also cc'd Ian when my finger stabbed the blue button marked "Send", because Ian'ing is a virtue. 

 And on that note (the first of which I believe is a D5#), here I go....  

---

Three months ago I was checking my bank accounts and updating my spreadsheets and made a decision - I have one I keep for my rental property (created a decade ago when I first started renting my spare rooms to keep track of income and expenses, making tax time easier), and others for my "loan shark" activities. I have a history of bailing people out of debt, starting with Kat (long before our getting together was even vaguely a consideration, mind you), followed by Jenna a year after she moved in with me, and then Sandra. I had a quarter of a million dollars of inheritance, I knew people who were paying ruinous amounts of interest on barely-serviceable debt, and buying debt is a time-honoured wog tradition. A lot of people I've known over the years rate high on executive dysfunction, and banks and credit-providers are geared specifically to take advantage of people who blank out when the numbers which describe their problems are too big to face. If I could offer half the rate whilst still making a profit it wasn't just ethically positive, it was mutually beneficial. 

I solve problems for a living, and have demonstrated that I can consistently polish a turd. An easy win-win is, for me, a no-brainer, and as Scott once (or twice, has) said to me: 

"If you lend someone $50 and you never see them again, it was money well spent." 

That probably wasn't meant to extend three orders of magnitude, but "in for a penny, in for a pound", right? Whether "Sterling" or "of flesh" is just a question of currency. 

Kat I floated $10k not long after I started getting to know her, when Jenna and I were still "fresh", so she could clear credit card debt accrued from a trip to the Worldcon Sci Fi Convention in London with her immediate ex. For a couple of years she made her payments, and I kept my spreadsheet updated. When we'd go hang out by the river we'd invariably stop at the servo for Iced Coffee, or grab a bite to eat at the nearby Hungry Jack's, or she'd be short on cigarettes, and I'd usually play the "I know how much debt you're in" card, and cover it. Much later when we were together, and she received her own inheritance from her mother's estate, she cleared the slate, and I told her that I'd been consciously using the interest she was paying to cover dinner. 

She was SO PISSED OFF at me she wouldn't speak to me for quite some time afterwards, but that was fine because she was kissing me so hard my lips bled. 

I floated Sandra $50k when she started up The Blind Dove Cafe, which was just off the intersection of Flemington Rd and Nullarbor Ave in Franklin, ACT. The best offer she had from a bank was 50% of the equity at 13.5% interest (which she couldn't get near because they had no equity worth mentioning), so I offered her the lot at 10%. She sent me her Business Case, I sent her contract documents; she sent them back signed and witnessed, I sent her a bunch of cash. I might have loved her to bits (and still do), but it was "business", and we treated it as such. I still paid my coffee and lunch tab when I came to visit and set up shop in the corner to work remotely on a couple of my trips over, just like anyone else. 

They extended it another $20k to invest in a grease trap (which never got installed, but the timing coincided with the end of the apartment construction boom, and the ensuing drop-off in trade, so they needed it to keep afloat). When they were on the verge of going under in 2019 I offered (and they accepted) a "repayment holiday" (including interest) for 3 months over summer, which kept them going for another year. Later when they wound the Dove down during covid and still owed me a sizeable chunk of cash, I dropped the interest rate to match what I was paying on my mortgage (~4ish%), then extended it another $24k so they could replace their dying Suzuki Vitara with a Subaru VX - I called it "protecting my investment", with a side of "I'm no worse off, but you're much better, plus fuck the banks in the ear with a tuning fork". After picking up the work which ultimately brought me back to Canberra and was able to slam enough cash into my offset account that it zero'd the remaining mortgage, I gave her a call: 

"So hey, about your loan, I need to do a review on your rate."
"Oh? Yeah, you said that might need to happen. Couldn't expect it to stay so low forever I guess. Can you do up the doc's and send me the updated amortisation schedule please?"
"Of course - it's already in your inbox. Can you give it a glance and make sure you're OK with it?"
"Yeah, I guess? Might take me a minute...?"
"No stress. I'll wait."

Sandra's laptop was 6 years old at that point, and so shit even I couldn't get it running well, but I was in no rush. 

"OK. Got your email. Schedule looks reasonable, we can manage the fortnightly OK, might even be able to get ahead on it."
"All good with me - long as you're comfortable with it. Interest rate OK tho?" 
"Oh, I hadn't spotted that, let me loo...
"WHAT TH...?
"1%?
"THE FUCK?
"Did you forget to add a zero?"
"Nah, <I explained my own debt position> and you always insisted I had to be making some money off it, so went with that.
"You alright with it tho?
"I can drop it down to like... a half or something?"
"<insert swearing, recriminations, what sounded like tears, suggestions of my having been born outside of wedlock, and other vitriol>... You're amazing. Thank you. Are you sure...? Oh my god thank you."
"Don't stress. Just... don't go missing a payment or I'll send Scotty 'round for Timo's kneecaps. I know where you live 'n' shit..." 

Just before I moved over in March and they were buying their place in Captain's Flat they had $4ish-k left, and were close to the line on their loan approval. They were running thru my broker/mate/client FinBro, and we had a chat about it - he wanted me to draft a letter saying what the initial value was, what repayments had been, how much they'd paid, and (most importantly) that they'd finished paying it all off.

"Of course, no worries," I told him, and gave him shit for being surprised when I had it to him in under 20min. 

I mean... this is why you keep a tracking spreadsheet, right? 

So I gave Sandra another call to let her know: 

"Oh, thanks, yeah, you said that might need to happen. Once we've settled and the loan's all secure we'll get back on the repayments and sort the rest out. Might be a bit less than before, but we'll do the best we can."
"Yeah, about that. I kinda did sign a document saying you were already square, and looking at my spreadsheets I've made a bunch more out of you than what's outstanding, so... yeah, I reckon I've made enough at this point, so 'happy birthday' or fuckever." 
"..."
"You ain't getting a fucking housewarming present tho. Just sayin'..."
"<further vitriol, empty promises of repercussions next time she saw me, suggestions of my possessing far more warmth and greater depth than can be empirically proven>," but did you know money CAN, in fact, buy you love? 
"Eh. I never sent you a wedding present either, unless you want to count Rickrolling you in the speech I con'd Scott into reading, so don't mention it. 
No, seriously, don't mention it, You'll ruin my reputation.*"
"Reputation as a big softie, you mean?" 
"Sure, whatever, it's your fucking birthday, now fuck off and go deal with buying a house.
"Congratulations. 
"And when you bend Timo over the lounge later, make sure he calls you 'Pete'."

* 

Musical accompaniment: Lauren Marie - Trees (Twenty One Pilots Cover) 

In the month-or-so gap between when she cheated** on me, and our first anniversary. Jenna finally told me about her debt. There was a Car Loan, plus a Personal Loan, and then there were the two credit cards she'd maxed out; one of her mechanisms for coping with depression after escaping her abusive ex was to shout rounds at overly fancy bars for her broke friends, and fly others over from Melbourne to visit her. Her debt was structured so poorly that most of her income was spent servicing the interest without actually touching the principal. 

** It's complicated - there'd been an "in principle" discussion about such things a while before, and I made it clear that as far as I was concerned she'd not done anything wrong. I guess you could say I was something of a crimeless-victim, but none of that made the feeling of being stabbed in the gut any less real, and it took some time to process afterwards. 

I wasn't upset about the existence of debt, but I was apoplectic-near-speechless that she'd taken a year to tell me about it, for a number of reasons: 

 - For a start, Jenna and I actually "dated", as in "went out on dates" both in our early courtship and throughout, and with both of us having decently-paying jobs we'd go to Nice Although Not Necessarily Extravagant Places with the agreement that we'd alternate; I got the first, she the second, and so on. I wouldn't have flinched at covering the tab if I knew she was in the hole, or at very least dropped the "fancy" a couple of notches. I can enjoy an evening with a beautiful, fascinating girl over fish & chips and a lukewarm bag of goon sitting on a rug in the park, after all. I was pissed off that she let me unwittingly help dig her deeper into that hole; I felt unconsentingly complicit in a circumstance I could have circumvented.
- I was pissed off that this brilliant, talented girl who was so passionate about what she did, who I'd spent a year falling for, after which I was Absolutely Not Bored, who after all these years of so-near-but-so-far, I could actually see myself building A Life with, could "lie-of-omission" to me for so long.
- I was pissed off that she'd hidden it so well that I hadn't caught on. 

and... 

- After all those years of subsistence-living, dating PYT's who Never Quite Fit or Just Couldn't Keep Up (not to mention Emma's Gaslight Sonata), after I'd Wandered The World Having Adventures, then scrimped and saved my way to Home Ownership, I'd embarked on this amazing new Adventure called Settling Down. I was prepared to do it on my own, but I wanted to do it with Someone, An Equal, who had dreams as bold and vivid as mine, who was a partner-not-a-dependent, where neither of us needed the other to achieve what we wanted, but could work together to Build Something Better.
- But more than anything else, I wanted to Do It With Her. 

Suddenly our "partnership of equals" wasn't, and our equal footing was separated by a divide measuring forty-seven thousand dollars. She may not have been dependent, but she certainly wasn't going to be able to contribute equally. This dream I'd allowed myself to have of having Someone To Build With had turned into Someone I'd Need To Carry, or for whom everything we did would mean delaying her own financial equilibrium, let alone actualisation. 

For the second time in a couple of months I left her place feeling gutted, needing time to process. 

I nearly walked; I'd been in a facsimile of "here" before and I'd sworn on my pinkie "Never Again"; Emma had strung me along for a year before revealing that we had life-goals which were Poles Apart: 

"Don't you want to create a new person who's half you and half me, and loves us unconditionally?"
"THE FUCK NO! HOLY FUCK! WHAT FUCKING DRUGS ARE YOU ON? HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE SOMETHING THAT WAS HALF ME COULD POSSIBLY BE LIKE THAT? HOW THE FUCK NAIVE ARE YOU, HAVE YOU FUCKING MET ME??? I'M A FUCKING SOCIOPATH!!!"
"...But... It's what I want more than anything."
"And it's the thing I want so little that maybe, just maybe, if I had three lives, I'd almost consider doing it in one***." 

*** Reference to a line from Melbourne by The Whitlams: 

She found some guy on OKCupid or EHarmony or something and had a kid not long afterwards. From what I saw when I went stalking on Facebook he seemed a nice enough bloke, the kid was pretty adorable, and she looked happy. Maybe she even is, and good for her if so. I hope she's having a nice life. 

Now Jenna had done the same thing in her own way; we'd Made Plans, Created Dreams, Ideated A Life Together, and there I was calculating how little of that was now actually possible in the cold blue-shifted light when "the world is our oyster" contracts because "shit's expensive, yo". 

We'd planned the home we'd build together; her bookshelf-walled Library with the comfy chairs where we could read together just inside of arms-reach, with conveniently-placed side-tables for our cups of tea; my tech-dungeon with the gaming rigs we'd use to go on endless Borderlands runs together; the dinners we'd cook together in the open-plan kitchen, and the spaces around the dining table we'd set aside for her cats so they could be near the people who'd come round to share it with us... 

... until suddenly I found myself staring at the compromises we'd need to make if I wanted to get close to achieving a low-budget version of that using my income alone, but as much as I care more for the home than the house, it wasn't something we could do 'together' any more. 

We'd talked for days about the travel I'd done, and she wanted to do, and where the two of us were going to go; she wanted to go to Iceland for her 30th - we'd talked about it at length. Her Geologist-Lady-Boner for the place was immense, throbbing, and so wonderous to behold you couldn't help but want to touch it. It was the perfect blend of her professional passion, and my passion for travel, a place she wanted to go, and a place I'd never been; it was a few years away so it was absolutely doable... 

... until suddenly it wasn't... at least not in a way that would be 'ours'. 

After taking a week to clear my head and recalculate the vectors, in the end, for better or worse, I stayed, but I issued an ultimatum: she had a month to Get Her Shit In One Sock, and get her debt restructured. I promised to help if she asked, but unless she did I'd not push, prod, poke, or pester, in fact I'd posit not one unprompted word. A fortnight later, give-or-take, she asked me to come to Westpac and hold her hand whilst she signed the papers on her Debt Consolidation Loan, which of course I ditched work to attend. Leaving the bank with a debt she could actually service, we agreed to some new ground-rules for our dates, and hit what I guess you'd call a "Restart" button; of course, I took her out to dinner to celebrate. 

A year later my paternal grandmother had passed away, a quarter of a million dollars had landed in my bank account, and suddenly I was sneezing-distance from being able to pay off my modest little duplex. I had no intention of doing that tho, because it was far too small for the two of us and her three cats, so we'd been house hunting (I started off looking at places two streets over on Mars St on a whim because of her love-affair with that planet; she'd done her Geology Honours Project on mineral surveys of NASA's proposed landing sites for the Curiosity Rover, using their satellite data. She loves Mars like I love the idea of sitting in a pub until the end of my days with people paying my bar tab in return for solving their problems, or being able to instantly teleport so I can be in Paris for breakfast on a whim). 

A year after we'd moved into the place I moved out of in March to come back to Canberra, I finally asked how her loan was going. She made mumbling noises about how little progress is made in the first year or so because compound interest and blah-blah-what-the-fuckever; I made the <yeah-yeah, blah-blah, skip to the end> hand gesture, "I fucking know how loans work. Second mortgage and shit? What's the damage look like?"
She looked it up, told me the number.
"Hmm...k, what was your interest rate again? Like... 12%?"
She gave another number, slightly less than that.
"Aight, well I've got some cash left after paying the deposit on this place. Can you hit Westpac up for a payout figure? I want to buy your loan - I can halve your interest rate and still be ahead on what I'd pull leaving it in the offset, and we'd have you clear like 2 years sooner." 

Skipping past the protest, my accepting when she declined, then a day or three later confirming that the offer was still, in fact, on the table when she asked, confirming that I was actually sure, in fact I had a boilerplate Contract drawn up ready to go, and that it was in my own best interest across at least three different metrics, I bought her debt. 

The girls at Westpac, she told me later, were so enviously approving they waived the Break Fee for her. 

A couple of years later we went to Iceland. We couldn't time things to be there on her birthday, sadly, because she wasn't going to have quite enough leave accrued in time, plus the 30th of June is Ruinously Expensive since it's the height of Peak Season; we were there for mine tho, so I shared it with her. Standing on the frigid Reykjavik foreshore after dinner on the night of the day I turned 36, arms wrapped around her in the heavy coats we'd picked up in Berlin, she leaned her head back against my chest whilst we watched the Aurora Borealis flutter and dance in the solar wind across a silent sky, and that awe-struck moment was neither hers, no mine; it was ours. 

She absolutely couldn't afford that trip, but she paid for her Her Stuff, and I paid for mine. She was still deep in debt at the time, so her half of the Shared Expenses (flights, accommodation, so on) I paid for and added to her tab. That way it was, at least nominally, over a relevant time-frame, still "our" trip. 

This, from earlier that year, was on me: 

She left out of her description that the band was an alloy comprised of 95% Platinum and 5% Iridium, included in the design in part because neither of us are into gold, but more importantly because Iridium isn't a naturally occurring element on Earth; the only Iridium on Earth comes from meteorites which have fallen from space. Because (a lot of things, but this is pithy): 

"We are all stardust."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

Six-and-a-quarter years ago, after she handballed me to Kat, there was a period of discord - despite their instigating the exchange of these Damaged Goods, they each decided that they'd been somehow slighted by the other, and I went from having a girlfriend-and-a-friend to having a girlfriend-and-an-ex-I'd-have-liked-to-have-been-friends-with-if-shit-hadn't-got-weird. Jenna and I kept in touch sporadically, and I watched her burn through a couple of boyfriends as she went; her most recent (to my count) ex and I get along pretty well, amusingly. Somehow, despite her having instigated and encouraged it, as recently as the last time we exchanged screams she still holds that against me. 

Two-and-a-half years ago we reconnected in the aftermath of Kat's departure. It took some effort to drag her out of the rabbit-hole she'd crawled down after ending things with J------ (the younger, chubbier, lawyerier version of me), but she got me in a way no one had done before and regardless of anything else, I Missed My Friend. She was on the rocks with S---- (the younger, less-refined, redheaded, dreadlocked version of me), and wound up ditching him after setting us up to become mates. The friendship got worked on... or at least fed with wedges and watered by an impressive number of pints which I snuck into my corporate "Client/Partner Meeting Expenses" Account because we'd mentioned "computers" in the conversation at some point Mr Taxman, I swear. 

A year ago we had a falling out, which is a polite way of saying "I came one slow-breath from kicking her out of my car on the side of Roe Hwy without slowing down from the 100kph speed limit whilst driving her drunk-arse home". I'd bought her ticket to come to the Monolith gig and see a bunch of bands I'd got her into, and a couple we'd come to love together. I wasn't in much of a mood to drink, so I offered to drive her, Ricky, and Priya, and was taking her to her boyfriend-after-the-boyfriend-after-the-boyfriend-after-me's place so he wouldn't have to drag his exhausted arse out of bed and come collect her from mine. I was in a REALLY bad headspace, skirting burnout having not long returned from my month in Canberra after delivering The Impossible Project, still missing Kat to bits after not-quite-two years, and coming up on four years working non-stop, finishing my MBA, and recovering from a-bike-accident-and-two-surgeries without a break. I was so on-edge that I recoiled whenever we made contact. Eventually she tried resting her head on my shoulder and I teleported six inches, pulling myself into the smallest ball I could and had to reject her when she reached out, invading my personal space with her hand this time (in a way which I know was meant to be comforting but was anything but), asking if I was OK. 

But we all know the answer to that question, because I'm not now, and certainly wasn't then; my equilibrium has been delicate to say the least, and that sort of "companionable contact" has become the opposite of comforting, so I spoke honestly, and told her: 

"No. Please don't touch me." 

It was a lovely day tho - Ricky has loved Karnivool to death since long before we crossed paths, Priya's all over Perth Prog like a Malaysian girl on a Laksa, and Jenna... let's just say that there was nothing played on stage that day that either of us wasn't absolutely into, and very little we hadn't listened to in one of the other's car at some point. It had been a really, uncynically, lovely day: 

The gig over, having dragged Jenna's drunk arse off some hapless bloke who was less interested in the mineral assets her mining-magnate boss controls than the ones she presents far more tangibly, then carrying Ricky's joyously sozzled one across the car park, and pouring them both into the FrogRocket whilst P performed a supportive shepherding role, and my own arse ensconced in the heated driver's seat, Jenna took One Of [Her] Turns. It was all of those nights when she had one too many and flipped from "the one person so empathic she guided my drunken arse, who hadn't realised he was grieving, out our front door early on a Saturday morning after watching my favourite Trek film (The Undiscovered Country) and sat me down in the driveway of the house (which, for all that it was legally 'mine', was emotionally 'ours') so I could look up at the stars whilst tears rolled down my face, weeping on her shoulder, because Leonard Nimoy had died, and my template for existing in a world of raging emotions I had no idea how to deal with and fought constantly to control along with him" to full-on just-like-the-bad-old-days dissociative. 

I won't relate her tirade - explaining the multiple layers of context would take more words than I have energy to spend, it's getting late, I'm tired, and my cheeks keep getting wet from that last anecdote. I've been gaslit by professionals, but Jenna's a far more dangerous flavour of crazy; when she flips, she believes in her pocket-universe one-hundred-and-crazy percent. When you've been told your perceptions are wrong for so long, by so many people, you find you're never quite sure; when one day you find that singular point in the heavens which stays still when the whole world around you is spinning, that one Star which always points North, the Legrange Point where your fingers touch becomes an axis around which you can calculate every vector, and any moment. When your reference point inverts gravity and polarity without warning, utterly convinced that what you thought was black is actually white, and that this up was never down, where else can you possibly find yourself but in freefall? It took a long time for me to learn to trust my senses when my source-of-truth started screaming otherwise and my inner-ear couldn't tell the difference. 

That night I took control of my breathing, and Set The FrogRocket's cruise-Control to the Heart of the Speed Limit, let the white stitching on the steering wheel serve as my reference to "up", and the red line in front of the X-Wing on my GPS point the way forward. 

I kept my tongue clamped between my teeth as she escalated, pausing when I dropped Priya off, and Ricky passed out peacefully in the back seat.
I chewed my lip whilst she berated me for abandoning her for the year she wouldn't respond to my increasingly urgent pings asking "R U OK???"
I finally broke composure when she started attacking Ian; because by that point my tongue was swollen, my lips were bleeding, and enough was enough (and no one insults my Ian but me). 

The rest of the trip played out to the soundtrack of a dissociative's lament, a whining turbocharger, a sociopath's repudiation, a squealing of tyres pushed beyond their grip-rating, a rev-limiter protesting its artificial limitation, ending with a handbrake-turn and a 

"Get the fuck out."

A furious foot introducing pedal to metal, a couple of high-speed turns, and a full-throttle thrash down the ramp back onto Roe Hwy later, Ricky opened her eyes in my rear-view mirror: 

"Your ex be cray-cray."
"Ricky, you know I love you'n'shit, right, but Shut The Fuck Up."
"You know I'm right."
"Ain't sayin' you're wrong, but you can still Shut The Fuck Up. Now go the fuck to sleep. Also, I love you."
"I love you tzzzzzzzz...." 

(Finally getting to the first thing I wrote when I started relating this story) A month and a half ago I (realised how much context this statement was going to need to make sense, and have spent the last 6+ hours listening to versions of the same song whilst I fill it in, followed by 2 x 4 hour editing sessions making sure it all made sense) was in the fourth hour of a Teams call with Ian, helping him with his second MBA unit because he and Jenny broke up recently and "helping a fellow traveller on their own MBA Journey" is a Fantastic Way For Us Both To Not Deal With That, and the topic of The Last Time I Saw Or Exchanged Words With Jenna (or Priya, for that matter) came up. A high-speed debrief on "Leadership through motivation", psychoanalysing his South African colleague, and a bottle-and-a-half of wine" are my excuses for not remembering what he told me Jenna had said-or-done immediately following our breakup six-and-change years earlier, motivating me to declare: 

"Seriously? You know what... seriously, fuck that bitch. Fuck that lying fucking dissociative fucking pity-whore..."
"<Ian'ing ensues>"
"Nah, fuck you Mr Empathy Man; empathise with this, motherfucker: you know that bitch still owes me money? You know how I wiped Sanda's slate a while back? I was going to do the same thing for Jenna at the same point, but... nah man, fuck that, and fuck her. She can wait another month. Shit just cost her a thousand dollars."
"<Ian'ing intensifies>"
"Nah, this shit ain't your fault. Thank you for telling me. You're a better friend than either of us deserve, but <waving both middle fingers at the webcam> now I'm fucking pissed." 

Two weeks ago I sent the following email to Jenna, BCC'ing Ian so there'd be a witness: 

Subject: "Loan cancellation"

"Jenna, 

Looking at my spreadsheet there's ~$3k left on your tab, but I just bumped up my rate to [my main client] and I'm sick of people owing me money so I'm calling it. Happy Birthday (or whatever occasion you prefer). 

Have a nice life. 

Regards, 

Peter." 

Six and a half hours ago I pinged Ian again: 

Thing is... I still love her, and I miss her to death, I desperately hope she gets better, and I sincerely wish her the nicest possible life. 

I won't pretend she didn't hurt me, but for all that I try to be the Ian'er man, I'm still bleeding where she pricked me, and I know I'll never be Ian enough to not twist the knife when, from hell's heart, I stabbingly take my revenge; cold as the stars which shone down uncaring whilst I sat with her in our driveway, or the tears which fell in the quiet stillness of that night just as they do now; for all that I'm relieved to have received silence as a reply, there remains a smouldering ember in my cold and otherwise-empty heart that still remembers the warmth of the arms wrapped around me whilst I grieved, and mine around her as we stared in awe, and desperately wants to see a reply in my inbox, even if all it said was: 

"Hello." 

Sandra...

Once upon a time I was sitting in the passenger seat of Sandra's Supercharged Holden Calais and whilst cruising up Flemmington Rd past EPIC I turned to her and asked, "So hey, you and me. How 'bout it?" 

She looked at me with less surprise than someone who didn't know us might expect, laughed and replied, "Nah, wouldn't want to spoil the friendship!" 

"Yeah, fair enough," I shrugged, "figured it was worth asking. You ever change your mind, let me know. So what do you want to do this afternoon? Catch a film or something?"

She never did, which everyone agrees was for the best, and we've been the closest of friends ever after. 

The End. 

Except the story doesn't end there any more than that being where it started. If you want to define nearly two decades of friendship based on as many seconds that probably does the job well enough, so by all means fuck back off to "20 Second Movie Reviews" and feed your short attention span. The real story is like an iceberg - whilst everyone's distracted by the polar bear clinging on for dear life, underneath the surface it's all sea lion-on-penguin carnage whilst the iceberg desperately tries to keep that wayward polar bear from drowning. 

Trying to understand a friendship like Sandra and mine from the highlight-reel is like thinking you've got a good grasp on Fight Club after watching the Trailer; Jack doesn't get Marla at the end, but they do start what comes next together, and just like Marla Singer, Sandra aka Sandra J--- N----- met me at a very strange time of my life. 

I vividly remember the moment she walked into my life, and the back-room of The Civic Hotel, dressed- and dolled-up in a way which nailed the inflection-point of "out to impress" and "but not trying too hard" so perfectly that the only thing more frictionless than her smile was the chocolate wheel spinning to the rattling sound of heads swivelling on creaking necks to see if it landed on "You're A Winner!" or "Better Luck Next Life". I distinctly remember hearing the thud of her Blind Date for the evening Garrick's jaw hitting the floor, which conveniently ensured my inner monologue muttering "Goddamn..." went unheard. 

An hour or so later, after she and Skye (who had helped me broker the event) trounced us at pool at least twice, I turned to him and murmured "If you don't make a move by the end of the next game, I'm going to," which he did, shortly after which the chocolate wheel stopped on the Glittery Gold "Grand Prize" segment. It rested there for the next year or so until eventually she reached up and tipped it over into Monkey-Poo Brown "REJECTED!", but that's not my story to tell. 

By the time that ended, Skye and I had bounced off each other's atmospheres which put me on a collision-course with Amanda, but with interconnected friendship networks, Garrick moving into my share-house, and the general Brownian-motion of social networks when you're in your 20's, there was plenty of opportunity for us to become friends independently of anything else, and that we did. 

It was years later, after Garrick and my friendship dissolved over an altercation at a party where I shirtfronted him for his bullshit behaviour (and in doing prevented his being mauled by two defensive Staffies and a back-yard full of people who were about to beat him down far less gently than I was offering to), and my relationship with Amanda evaporated like dew in the light of dawn in spring, that I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of her Calais, wondering. 

We'd never both been single at the same time, and the usual trigger points for such things had come and gone. We were deep in what you might call "The Friend Zone" for reasons more defined by "the way these things happen" than anything else, but we were tighter than a wog's wallet, and thicker than thieves, and I'd never forgotten that moment I'd first laid eyes on her, or that no threat I ever offered Garrick had been anything less than sincere. 

Sandra could hoist the engine out of a Barina, strip it, replace the gaskets, and have it back on the road in a weekend; she could strip the pride off a bloke half-again her size and bury him in shame in a heartbeat. She'd had more different jobs than I could count, could apply herself seemingly to anything and master it; for all that she'd refer to herself as a dumb under-educated country girl, she could catch up to all the undergrad degrees in the room, and keep up, all whilst pulling out tree stumps, quoting the CWA Cookbook, volunteering for NSW RFS, and pulling a mean burn-out. Here I was sitting across from a girl who could emasculate a backyard full of blokey-blokes by simply being herself and the only reason she didn't run the grill was because she knew how much I enjoyed searing meat, so she let me. 

All of that aside, "She's pretty, and I'm pretty funny," I thought, "and she's awesome, and I tell awesome stories, and she seems to like me, and I'd really like to know." We got along so effortlessly, smoother than cruising in a long-wheelbase tourer riding on well-balanced suspension. "That's what love's all about, isn't it?" 

I was right, but not in the way I was thinking at the time. 

So I asked, the wheel landed on a Warm Amber segment marked "Yeah, nah, but" and we carried on our merry way rejoicing. 

OK, I'll admit I was disappointed, but I refused to let that get in the way, let alone show, and the rejoicing followed in due course so for the purpose of selective-narrative let's just accept it as so. 

A year or so later I was in London having what would best be described as "a pretty hard time", and Sandra was the one who'd Skype me in the depths of my night whilst halo'd in afternoon sunshine from her front verandah and talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!". She was the one who told me: 

"remember this, one of the most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"
the zen art of looking for answers that you know don't exist... 

When I gave up and came home, she had a room set up for me with my own bed made and ready for me to fall into, and a set of keys waiting in the letterbox to let myself in after Scott picked me up from the airport. Sitting across from him at the table I recognised from the background of all those Skype calls I watched her come running up the path in her Independent Property Group pant-suit, sandy-blonde curls bouncing cherubic in the afternoon sun so her feet seemed to barely touch the ground, and the moment she threw herself into my arms I knew I was Home. 

Then she went inside and put the kettle on. 

Interlude:
Ricky: "How's your Sandra post going?"
"I wasn't going to do this in chronological order - with Smeghead I bounced around a lot.
Still, tears aside, I'm liking how this is flowing.
LOL..
'tears'
'flowing'
Sometimes I'm so sharp I cut myself."

A couple of months later her share-house in Garran dissolved and I followed her to Allison's place in Amaroo. In 2009 it seemed the edge of the world; Forde was a Display Village and Bonner the glint in an urban-planner's eye, but Buckingham Palace was home on the other side of Horse Park Drive from the dream of First Home Owner's Grants clad in bucolic pasture. The Mums ruled by fiat, with a Hoover-branded Sceptre held in bright-yellow cleaning glove-clad fists, but whilst I was woken every Saturday morning by the beating of a vacuum-head against my bedroom door my world was was filled with the cooing of a Laughing Turtledove, a kettle never far from boiling, and (when I felt motivated) the smell of fresh-baked scones. 
We had a freeloader who's name became FUCK YA! in my memory after Sandra tore strips off her one night (Allison and I hid in the corridor throughout prevaricating whether to intercede or break out the Corpse Disposal Kit). 
FUCK YA! departed shortly thereafter in Absolutely Not Suspicious Circumstances, to be replaced by Skye. 
The Porkening and The Porkening II: I Porked Them Good will forever go down in legend; not just because I cook a mean pork-roast, but because they resulted in 15 Minutes Of Silence. 
It was a good life, but as with all good things... 

I met Emma on a trip to Perth, and after an intense long-distance romance wrought of loneliness and a desperation for connection I found myself driving across the Nullarbor with Scott in the passenger seat of my tetris-packed Audi and Sandra waving tearfully from the doorstep of Buckingham Palace in my rear-view mirror. 

Musical interlude: Gotye - Save Me

Years later Emma was a traumatic memory, Jenna was my here-and-now, and my phone rang with Sandra's name on the Caller ID. 

"What are you doing on September 9th?" 
I think for a moment before answering, "Drinking Hefeweizen Dunkel in Berlin."
"What?"
"Hey, you asked, and on that day I'll be in Berlin so statistically... Why? You didn't go and do something silly like booking your wedding without checking with me first or something did you?"
"... HOW THE FUCK AM I GOING TO GET MARRIED WITHOUT YOU GIVING A SPEECH AND INSULTING EVERYONE?
"And, yes.
"Bastard!" 
What can I say? I have something of a reputation. 
"OK, let me think... actually, I have an idea."
"Oh?" 
"Leave it with me."

I hang up, and call Scott. 

"Dude!" 
"Dude, so I got a call from Sandra..."
"Yeah? So you going to get back for the wedding?" 
"Yeah about that," I explain the scheduling conflict, "but I got an idea. I was thinking: how about I write something and get you to read it?"
"Yeah I can do that. We've got time. Get it over to me, we'll workshop it, make it happen."
"Yeah, about that. I was thinking, y'know, for comedic value, maximum impact, what if I put something together and send it over to a 3rd party and they hand it to you in a sealed envelope and you open it 'The Winner Is...'-style on stage and you read it sight-unseen." 
"You... but... what... dammit! How do I let you talk me into this shit?"
"Because you know it'll be awesome, man. It always is."
"... fucking..."
"Leave it with me." 

8 months later, after hours of writing all of that and more into the script, editing, rehearsing on passing strangers who knew none of these people, pouring more than a decade of adoration onto the page, agonising, culling, adding, removing, then editing some more, performing it again and again until I wasn't just sure it sounded right, but that it would sound like it was me saying it when read by Scott, Allison handed Scott a sealed envelope in front of nearly 100 people. He opened it, and proceeded to read, whilst in Germany I drank Hefeweizen Dunkel and waited for scantily-clad himbo-assassins from the Firefighters Calendar to descend and turn me into a greasy red smear on the Fredrichschain pavement because from the far side of the globe I had managed to Rickroll a wedding (for the second time) by proxy so adeptly that even the proxy didn't see it coming (although Skye, I'm told, caught it 5 or 10 seconds out). 

"Has it happened? How did it go?" I messaged, anxious to know how much longer I had to kiss my girlfriend goodbye. 
"Yes, and Sandra says 'You're an unbelievable bastard', and 'she loves you'."
"I love her too."

To this day, the feeling remains mutual ever after. 

Deadman + Change = Resurrection?

Musical accompaniment: Karnivool - Deadman 

Motherfucking... 

I walk into the bottlo over on Lonsdale St earlier this evening and find my eyes drawn to a pretty girl enjoying a wine tasting in the entryway. We make eye contact, and she she smiles at me.
I head down to the back and spend some time picking out a couple of stouts for my Friday Night anaesthesia.
The same thing happens as I approach the counter; she catches my eye, and catches my look, and smiles.
Somehow my usually iron-clad self-control slips and I find myself glancing over my shoulder as I'm leaving (he who hesitates is lost), only to receive another smile.
I actually trip over the threshold; I'm certain she saw that, but I catch my balance, keep moving, and escape into the street. 

3 heartbeats later and I'm standing outside, one door down, lighting a cigarette whilst typing the above into my phone in a message to Ricky. 

"I keep walking, right?
I'm pretty sure that's what I'm supposed to do."

I get through half my cigarette before my feet start to move, but they beat a path the long-way home which leads me past the bottlo again. If she left whilst I was standing here I'll never know; a runaway truck or blaring police siren wouldn't have compelled me to look up from the glowing screen in my hand whilst I stood there frozen in nervous-lockdown. Nonetheless, I stare at the pavement in front of my feet as I walk past the window and don't break stride through two left-hand turns onto Mort St. 

"I love that you tripped over from her smile," she later replied. 

"Oh fucking fuck what the fuck I'm fucked," I think as, hands shaking, I tag through the Get Smart doors, up the elevator, and ride my autopilot-driven feet into my anxiety- and meowing-cat-filled apartment, my hands empty my pockets, putting the contents into their specified places and empty the beer out of my backpack into the fridge. I reach the end of my pre-programmed takeMeHome(); subroutine and they stop, leaving me standing, shaking, my heart pounding, just past the kitchenette, completely at a loss for what to do next. 

I am not OK, but we knew that; I haven't been for two and a half years. 

Some might suggest that this is a step in the right direction, but none of those sons of bitches were there to tell me how to proceed. My legs were locked in their full-upright position, my belt of self-control fastened, my pocket-lint stowed and secured, but in my inner-sensorium my head was wedged between my knees in the brace position kissing my arse goodbye. 

Fucking Deal With It Airlines welcomes you aboard flight FU42 from A Fragile Illusion, Peace to Life Sucks, Wear A Hat. We give zero fucks whether you enjoy the trip and your comfort is of no importance to our crew whatever. The in-flight entertainment will be Your Most Embarrassing Memories played on high rotation broken at random intervals by irrelevant announcements, self-flagellation, and abnegation of whatever self-respect you still have remaining. The meal service will commence shortly offering a choice of Shit Sandwich and Humble Pie, but until then sit back, suck it up, and stop being a little bitch. 

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in a way which was less "gradual emergence into the dawn of a new day", more "traumatically breaking through the surface of a suffocating and bottomless well of oblivion". In my flailing, I rolled over and my hand landed on a soft, rumbling ball of need called Beckett. Stiff, arthritic fingers melted into his plush furry back, so I pulled him to my chest like a drowning man clutching a squirmy pool noodle and just before he nope'd the fuck out to sing his song of hunger from the bedroom doorway I found myself thinking "man, wouldn't it be nice to wake up and throw my arm over someone who nuzzled me back?" 

Staring at the ceiling with what I can only imagine was a haunted look in my eyes, and the second verse of "My food bowl is empty and I'll love you right up until it's not" by Beckett Meow-riner & The Obligate Carnivores filtering through the earplugs I habitually sleep with, I realised I was at the end of the peace offered by the Psalm of Pete #23: 

Solitude is my shepherd; I shall not want for more. It maketh me to lie down in green pastures: it leadeth me beside the still waters.
It restoreth my soul: it leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for its own sake. 
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Loneliness art with me; thy cold and thy emptiness they comfort me.
They preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: they anointest my head with melancholy; my cup runneth over. 
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of mine self-sufficiency for ever.  

Nothing Lasts Forever; all this shall pass.
Finding oneself Lost, Weightless In Space can be a comfort, gazing unblinking at the Embroidered Cloths of the Cosmos laid out before you promising depthless wonder; in space, no one can tread on your dreams.
It's the friction of re-entry that burns. 

This is what you get for wanting things; for things to be other than what they are, you have to give up the static crystalline cold, and allow yourself to burn bright, knowing that every shooting star will inevitably burn out. To have one, you must accept the other. 

This is the way. 

To experience life is to experience Change; I moved across the country and managed to not move a fucking inch, but I insisted on living so I had to have a life. In making that choice I broke my stalemate with Dostoyevsky, Buddah, and God, and they ganged up to ensure I paid the price of my hubris. Even Nietzsche put the boot in with a chuckling "Du dachtest du wärst schlau, doch du bist ein Dummkopf," echoing derisively and hollowly across the void. 

The thing is, for all that I've been quite merrily self-sufficient, doing it for myself, alone, has been starting to get to me in all sorts of little ways. 

Like the little conversations you have when you see the same person all the time; you tell your stories in real-time, as they happen, rather than having to stitch together a patchwork-background giving context to the latest event or minutia. It's the part of a shared journey no one really talks about, the comfortable familiarity which creates a texture to a friendship akin to that je ne sais quoi which makes a 'house' a 'home'. I have my substitutes - people I call regularly, send emails to, or chat with online, but it's an incomplete experience; so many 'start's, and 'end's, but lacking that plush hollow halo of 'middle'. 

Or the casual affection that comes as part of a shared bond. Outside of the occasional obligatory hug it's so long since I've been touched I've become... actually uncomfortable with the idea. I almost can't remember what it feels like, but I remember a time when I did. 

Comfort being the operative word; that concept which defies design. logic, or engineering, which I can neither completely comprehend, nor consciously create, corporeal only when I close my eyes, confounds capture, and collapses under consideration. Coming to Canberra was cold comfort indeed. 

Emphasis on the word "cold". 

The move over from Perth really rammed home how much doing everything alone has been wearing on me, too. There were plenty of people who helped along the way, but there were a lot of things I couldn't outsource. For weeks on end I was packing, organising, working, and still having to keep myself and Beckett alive. If I didn't do it, it didn't get done, which is a problem when you're so exhausted you just want to curl up into a ball but you haven't quite got to sorting out inconsequential stuff like... y'know, food. There's nothing like being part of a team, and humans have come to thrive specifically because we form communities; a community of one can survive, but for all that I may be singularly competent even I am not so arrogant to believe that I, alone, can thrive. 

The hardest part for me tho, the hurdle I always struggle to overcome, is knowing that whilst I can be self-reliant and self-motivated, I'm rarely motivated by my self. Cooking's one of those things that trips me up every time - I love cooking, creating, making something delightful, but I'll almost never do it for myself. Most days food is a chore for which I must cease more meaningful activity to laboriously consume a balanced variety of substances which provide my failing meatsack with the chemical energy to ensure that it fails a little more slowly. I swear, if there was a Bachelor Chow Food Pellet I could get on a subscription... but for all its efficiency it would be a miserable existence, because food is a joy; I just take no joy from it unless it's shared. 

So I find myself sitting on the beach with the waves lapping at my ankles, holding a bottle in one hand and a scrap of paper on which I might write a message in the other pondering what, if I were to write one, it might say. 

I haven't decided whether to offer resistance, or capitulate and go with the flow; can I keep pretending to be an island when the smile of a pretty girl is enough to make me stumble in the street? Can I lie to myself when I know that the climate is changing, the seas are rising, and the gentlest of storms will wash that island away? 

Logic dictates that I face the facts, punch myself in mine, build a bridge, and get over it. I'm going to have to re-learn how to "dating". 

Gods, all of you, help me; Gods help us all. 

Everything comes down to this...

 ("Sunset & Twilight: Art made with Lasers & Maths: Epilogue Part 2" & "The Resurrection Deluge Part 5" & "Metacursion II")

Musical accompaniment (convergent song title only partially coincidental):
Gary Numan - Everything Comes Down To This 

The night before Becky came round, at one minute to midnight, Scott dropped me at my new not-yet-feeling-like-home apartment. I set up the litter tray (which was used immediately) and laid out some food (which was immediately nom'd) for Beckett, emptied my backpack and hit the pavement heading through Braddon for Coles. Sandra had stocked the fridge and cupboard with thoughtful supplies, but I needed... I wasn't sure what else, and wouldn't until I browsed the aisles, but mostly needed to get out and feel the city under my shoes. I was shaking just slightly when I boarded Qantas 737-800 'Bungendore', exhausted and drained after cutting the last part of my departure so close I was surprised the next day when I still needed to shave. 

As I plodded, stumbled even, down Lonsdale St I felt my fatigue, fading, falling through the veil of my world, a blanket of despair through which somehow I kept walking. 

"I live here now. I'm home," I thought, "and now I can never go home. Where the fuck am I? What the fuck have I done?" 

Throughout last year's trips back and forth, I'd taken strange solace in existing in both places but living in neither. Wherever I was I wanted to be in the other, wherever I went I was Going Home. My inability to find comfort became excusable because comfort was always on the other side of the looking glass. Now my super-position was collapsing, and as the world around me began condensing into something concrete and Real, it felt like I myself was becoming less so. 

As the terror took hold and the tears rolled invisibly behind my face I convinced myself that I really just needed to eat something substantial and drink a bunch of water, and walked on. 

I went to work the next day, and through the motions. It wasn't a productive day, but was never expected to have been. I pinged Penpal, feeling that a switch to SMS was acceptable, and confirmed that the Presentation was still on (it was), and skived off early to run some errands on the way home. The painter needed paying, and had discounted a good 20% for cash which needed acquiring. I needed pillows (the one I'd brought in my luggage got me through the first night, but too much longer and my neck would begin to protest) for a start, a better solution for Beckett's litter tray than a cardboard box was required, and now the cheese-and-crackers comfort food I'd picked up the night before were to be the evening's hospitality platter, the lack of a chopping board (or knife) was going to be a problem. 

Arriving back with a heavy backpack, and two heavy latex pillow under my arms I met Painter Jack out front of the building and handed over his shiny ducats, thanked him for the good work, ran around replacing now-stinky litter box, high-speed tidied to make the place presentable, and realised something was missing. For starters, I only had the one bottle of wine (and the dessert wine, but that barely counts) and no idea if she liked red. A backup would be good (after all, whatever doesn't get drunk that night I'd go through later), but something else was missing - the cheese plate felt incomplete, needed some light sweetness to offset the rest. 

Apples. 

Shit. 

Upending my pack and shouldering it again, I dropped through the a-little-bit-fancy bottle shop on Lonsdale St, bent the shopkeep's ear a bit and left with a locally-made Barbera (somewhat esoteric in Australia because there are few climates which suit it and I'd only ever come across it once because my winery-client happens to grow it, but it's a light, bright, fruit-driven red which would go perfectly with what I'd prepared) and a lightly-oaked Chardonnay for the white-option. I haven't had an excuse to play my wine-wanker card in longer than I could remember, and I left Blackhearts & Sparrows with something of a spring in my step. Leaving Coles for the 3rd time in two days I cranked back to the flat again, rapid-fire setup up the Friday photo I'd been planning since December: 

(which caused me to receive a confused/concerned ping from Sandra: 

Because that was the first of two reveals I had planned for tonight and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to squeeze them both in. 

Out of the bathroom, into a clean shirt, and no longer smelling like I'd power-walked a good 6km with a heavy pack, I started preparing the cheese-board as the seconds ticked down. 

A few weeks ago I'd sent Becky an email ("Ricky..." Mon, 27 Feb, 03:20) which, after two weeks she hadn't responded to. She usually replies within a week and a half, generally on a Monday morning, so this was out of character enough that I sent out an "R U OK?" follow-up ("Heartbeat check" Mon, 6 Mar, 20:49). I hadn't told her that I had my landing date booked yet, and *really* wanted to, but had reached my self-imposed "don't spam the poor girl" limit, so I broke my own rules and included it in the message. In one of the flurry of responses she mentioned how pleased she'd been to be invited to "an actual grown-up event" ("Resurrection" Thu, 16 Mar, 14:16), and as I cut up Truffled Brie, Wensleydale-mixed-with-Cranberries, and fresh green apples I found myself existentially satisfied with how nicely this complemented the concept; because what could be more pleasantly "grown-up" than warming my new apartment with some nice wine and cheese? 

I'd just finished applying a bandaid to where I'd stabbed my hand, so my heart didn't quite leap when my phone pinged to say she'd arrived, but I was still relieved that I'd cleaned the blood up (and not got it all over the sliced apple) when I ushered her in to meet Beckett and my pretty blue wall. 

Although it did sing just quietly when she squee'd over the view, which we sat down to enjoy, drinking good wine from shitty high-ball glasses, burying ourselves in conversation which flowed deep, rich, and smooth like honey over glass; the moment I greeted her at the door on Mort St it didn't seem so much to 'start' as 'continue'. It seems impossible to be this comfortable with someone you've laid eyes on precisely twice before; it's as if we shared a past-lifetime in each other's company, have only just found each other again now half-way through our next, and are just catching up on the things we missed. 

You'd think that in the three months I'd been ticking along with my Art Project I'd have come up with a stylishly elaborate method of doing The Reveal, but moving into this little apartment the day before defeated me. There was nothing I could come up with which wasn't going to give it away from the start, so I'd decided to go with simple and just hid them in the wardrobe of my room so that with everyone comfortably settled in I pulled the trigger by gesturing towards the Telstra Tower and saying "OK, do me a favour and keep looking that way," before ducking inside and coming out with Sunset, leaning it against the balustrade angled (I hoped) so she could see herself in it. 

If she'd been anxious up until that point she'd hidden it well, but to describe her reaction... 

Well she didn't hurl it off the balcony (2-3% probability). 

And she didn't respond with a "Well... that's nice?" (2-5% probability). 

But... 

If you've ever seen a water balloon popping in slow motion, you might have an idea; a cascade of reactions which happen so quickly they're almost simultaneous. 

The tension on the rubber causes it to snap back on itself along the surface of the water no-longer-contained by it. 

During this process, the water's surface tension holds most of the way through, but the violence of the balloon's retreat tears droplets away from the main body, flinging them perpendicular to the angle of the rubber's retraction; to wit, spraying outwards. 

The main ball of water, now subject to both gravity and air pressure, shatters as it falls in a gushing splash. 

Or one might say: 'sploosh'. 

So I got to watch her face contort as she tried to process a paragraph's worth of thoughts and emotions simultaneously. 

Words like "what", "but", "WHAT", "how...", "oh", and "wow" pinging off in all directions. 

Gradually she put her thoughts in order, and a wave of warm, glowing second-hand amazement washed over me. 

Through all this, I just sat there and grinned. 

As she started getting her oscillations under control, but before she could quite get her feet under herself, I told her to "keep looking that way" again, darted back inside to get Twilight, grab my phone and, after a month of waiting, finally got to hit "Send". Placing Twilight down next to Sunset I got to watch the whole process again twice as fast, and with twice the magnitude. 

Once again, I sat, grinned, and waited. 

"There's more tho." 

"Huh...?"

"Check your email."

"Wha... now?"

"Yeah. Now." 

"But... what the... how???" 

"Magic."

I asked her to read it, and read it now - I'd wondered whether she might take the opportunity to have me read it to her (33-49% probability); actually hear one of my emails in my own voice, but she buried her head into it quicker than a 6yo left unattended near a chocolate fountain, and devoured it just as greedily; the speed she read it was ferocious - so quick I couldn't keep up (my eyes can't focus quickly, and I only skim when I'm looking for something. Speed reading is something I can only do in quick bursts and it exhausts me; I can see keywords, or detail, but not both at the same time) I completely missed the mark where I'd planned to hand her my laptop to coincide with the suggestion to "switch to a larger screen" and caught it far too late to score that particular point. I hadn't considered this delivery method when I wrote that - I hadn't even expected to be here to deliver it. It was going to be something I sent once I knew the mirror had been delivered or handed over (if I used a proxy). 

Far-too-quickly she handed me back my laptop and picked up Sunset to look at it more closely. 

Whether because she smashed through it, was overwhelmed by the whole experience, or was just too subtle (I hadn't noticed it myself until the 3rd editing read, and I wrote the fucking thing), she missed the final twist (20-40% probability). I zoomed in on the last paragraph and had her re-read it, then prompted "now look in the mirror", then watched as, reflected in Sunset, the sun came out and lit up my balcony. After months of planning, construction, thousands and thousands of words, running around, and only barely scraping things together in time, I made a pretty girl smile at herself in the mirror. 

Finally my Project had created Art, and the clock struck midnight. 

Becky hugged Sunset for a long time after that. As if it was something magical, ethereal, which would evaporate or somehow disappear if she lost contact with it. 

I wonder, now, what she was thinking. I was too caught up in relief that it had gone so well. I suspect that if I'd asked at the time the answer would have amounted to "Glow," but now there's been time to settle and for the thoughts to coalesce it occurs to me that I should ask her. On the plus side, now that I'm so much closer the opportunity shouldn't be too far away. Likewise, opportunities to make her smile; as epically entertaining as "Sunset & Twilight" has been, I do rather hope it doesn't always take this much fucking effort. 

Although every once in a while...

But now the Pete-pocalypse Clock is moving into unfamiliar territory. That moment was the culmination of everything I had in the pipeline. It isn't to say that there was nothing but a balcony swan-dive in my future, just that with how much strain the move has placed me under I just haven't had space for "next". There is, nonetheless, plenty to do. 

Moving back to The 'berra has been all about creating space; removing the clutter, junk and weeds so that there's room for something new to grow. It isn't about who I want to be - when I came here first, half-a-lifetime ago, all I wanted was to not be who I was. Now I've seen what I CAN be; this time is about creating the freedom and space to be The Best Me. Not Peak-Pete, but Pete-fected, Pete-volution; 

Pete-surection. 

I died, I think, a long time ago. Two and a quarter years in limbo waiting to find a way to be reborn, for a life into which I could resurrect. 

Before she left, Becky put Sunset down facing Twilight, creating the infinite hallway effect. I'd just been saying that if I'd PLANNED to have two I'd have put the words on opposite sides, mirroring-the-mirrors. In that moment she showed me how I'd been wrong - I'd never actually tried facing them towards each other. I had, after all, had them in my possession for only a couple of cumulative hours, but it stuck me as almost shameful that after all I'd thought and planned, I'd never considered doing that. 

I looked into the mirrors and saw the words reflected back and forth into infinity, saw the unplanned perfection that to her was inherent; it took her to show me what I'd missed. 

Looking over as she takes the first hesitant steps towards a resurrection of her own ("Resurrection" Thu, 16 Mar, 14:16) I'm starting to suspect that despite her doubts and unbelief, the only way either of us is going to make it through will be with each other's help.  

Even if it means I need to drag her along with me.