Spaceballs... I mean Phase Shifting: The T-Shirt...

 A couple of years ago I made some art, and turned it into a blog post. 
Yesterday I took a blog post, and turned it into art. 

Sorta. 

I could weave a story about receiving a promotion code from Sticker Mule, who I use for my stickers, for a cheap custom t-shirt, thinking it would be funny to make the hypothetical shirt I mentioned in the last post into something real, sitting around with my laptop fiddling with clipart in Publisher, then enlisting Bridget's help to generate vector-images which would scale nicely but that would be... wait, no, there it is. 

That's the story. 

This, on the other hand, is the mockup: 

Beyond the references to the Looking back/out/forward... post there are a bunch of my usual tropes baked in as "easter eggs" - 3's, cycles, 42, and so on; those little things which amuse me. Plus, for AUD$14 (including GST and delivery) I can now say "my blog has merch," which I can't help but find sublimely ridiculous, because I have zero interest in selling any. 

Here's the high-resolution design for your pleasure and/or derision: 

Above all, be kind...

I keep tripping on a tight-rope, slipping across a knife-edge, straddling the fence between resilience and rage. Sometimes I have the luxury of choosing which side I come down on. Others... I find myself blessed with all the self-awareness retrospection allows, whilst also cursed with none of the control it should afford. 

Welcome to the Hotel Post-Burnout: you can check out any time you like, but you don't get to choose when you leave. 

In the end, choice was a luxury I chose to forego - I couldn't leave of my own volition because golden handcuffs kept my fingers off the trigger I couldn't afford to pull, and we should always remember Rule of Acquisition #109: "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack," so I white-knuckled it and held on until I tripped, and fell, and made them sack me. It may have taken a score of them to take me down, but they only had to score once. 

Musical accompaniment: I don't know, have some Pendulum or some shit... 
It doesn't matter. 

Everyone, at least once in their lives, goes from being top-dog to finding themselves at the bottom of the dog-pile with a sack over their head, living through their own extraordinary-rendition of It Sucks To Be Me. Having a ticket that's been punched so many times it's holier than a stigmata extravaganza is supposed to be an exhibition of experience, but the only thing I'm experiencing is another broken nose, a bruised ego, and the taste of blood on my lips; it doesn't matter how much of it's mine and how much came out of the knuckles split on my backpfeifengesicht, the bitterness is overwhelming. 

The worst part of Burnout isn't the trauma, or the exhaustion, or the PTSD you'll relive endlessly should you survive it, it's how much it overwhelms your self, and by extension your interactions with the world around you. You don't notice just how short your tether has become until the third or fourth lap of the dog park chasing a ball you can never catch. Suddenly you realise you've just snapped at something which would otherwise have passed over and through you, and the frayed mid-point of the leash you thought would keep yourself in check is lying in the dust of whatever you just destroyed. If you're lucky you get to go back and apologise, or bury it and rise above, but when you completely and properly fuck it up it will be you lying in the shallow grave with your face against the floor staring mutely up whilst the soil, shovel- after shovel-full, removes the sky, and with it all hope, from view. 

And if that day ever comes I hope I'll accept it with good grace, rather than flail, and twitch, and dance the Tyburn Jig; for all the pride to be gained from staring death in the eye, there's dignity in accepting the sack which prevents the hounds baying for your blood from seeing it, or your tears, shed. 

But as we walk toward the gallows there's still room for grace and dignity, because there's no dignity in punching downwards just because you've been beaten down, and there's no grace to be found in being cruel just because others have shown cruelty to you. Whatever befell, or was done to you, you can never presume that the same, or worse, hasn't befallen the person you're staring at. If that is true, then assuming that the next stranger irresponsible enough to incur your irritation is incipient of your ire indicates you're an idiot. We all have our crosses to bear; relegating someone else's so as to elevate your own is ridiculous when the result remains redundant, regardless. 

So really, when the result is the same, there's no recourse but to be kind.

There are plenty of people deserving of your cruelty, but I doubt they're people who'll ever meet; the dumb-fuck at the mechanics or the checkout-chick at Woolworths are unlikely to be amongst them; the girl or boy chasing a shooting star they spotted as it fell from the heavens even less so, so forgive them; and if that girl or boy happens to be staring back at you from the mirror, consider what you might say if you were them, and they were you, and your roles reversed, and ask yourself: 

What would I say if I were kind?

Then maybe, just maybe, say that. 

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. 

"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." 

Who needs context when you have eloquence?

Obviously the solution is to ignore the problem...

I realised too late that I'd made eye contact with my worst fucking enemy, and the battle of wills was on. 

I've stared down CISO's. 
I've made corporate sociopaths blink. 
I've had colours-wearing Outlaw MC bikers pull along-side at the lights, nod, say "Nice bike, mate!" and let me go first. 
I can out-stare my cat, and he's a proper dyed-in-the-wool narcissist. 

This fucker's an indomitable son-of-a-bitch tho, and I've been off my game lately, so reaching for the "break glass" option I grabbed the present by the lapels and offered him the gift of "surprise!" by way of the time-honoured Liverpool Kiss. 

Bastard damn-near made me shatter the mirror with my forehead. 

Senses reeling, looking back in the glass, I took a moment to remember who I was, and that the horrible cunt I was staring at was me, and did a quick inventory whilst I took stock. 

A few weeks ago I closed off my second project (in the spare time left over from the one I was originally engaged to run), increasing my lead over any other Project Manager in the org for "Successfully Delivered Projects" to 2. 

Today I received the Purchase Order from my company's largest client confirming the next contract extension; the value beat my previous-best annual salary-equivalent rate by a good couple of thousand dollars, which was nice. It was only a 6 month contract tho, which is Fucking Ludicrous. 

Even more gratifyingly, when I caught up with Rick a couple of Sundays ago he observed that the walking I've been doing has been paying off because I was "looking pretty trim mate, way better than when I saw you last in Perth."
"Yeah? Nice of you to say, mate."
"Yeah, you fucking looked like shit, mate. Now you just look a bit like the north-end of a south-bound cow." 
"... Thanks?" 
"Hey," he said, tipping me last of his pint before tipping it down his throat, "reckon you must be doing something right." 

Although I'd be fucked if I can put my finger on what exactly. When people praise you for the matter-of-fact stuff like Doing The Job Properly and Taking It All The Way Through To The End, but are "meh" about your most challenging achievements like Getting Out Of Bed Every Day and Keeping Yourself Alive For The Last 1000 Days, sometimes it's like up is down and black is white. 

"Yeah, I'm so good at what I do that I keep getting told 'Nah, that'll never work' long after I handed over the As Built, and I'm pulling in cash hand-over-fist, but in more important news did I mention I slept six hours straight last night? I even managed to stop and eat lunch three days in a row! 
HOW GREAT IS THAT??" 

One of these days I'll accept that I'm an outlier and stop trying to sit in with the cool kids, but it's hard to not feel left out when they keep saying you're not right even after you've proven them wrong. 

Meanwhile, I'm finding myself in a state of gradually accumulating encumbermence, with my feet frozen to the ground on a cold white plane, with no reference point, and no light to guide me. I keep shaking off the snow falling on my shoulders, only to watch it fall in an ever-increasing mound around my ankles. I have four drafts in varying states of ideation; things I actually want... even feel I need to write, but no matter how much marble I carve off, the blocks stubbornly refuse to reveal the Davids inside. Every time I heft my hammer I make less and less of an impression, my chisels shattering like glass, whilst the flakes rise up towards my knees. Eventually you get so cold you stop shaking. 

The other day, after much ineffective faffing around the edges, I reached for my hammer and it refused to come to hand. 

Whinging about my inversely-proportional dysphoria when it comes to success earlier this evening at Amy, who seems to have distilled the concept of "uncomplicated pragmatic optimism" into a cocktail I've come to call Occam's Canadian, replied: 

"Just keep writing...
Ok I have to go hang upsidedown off a pole now! Cya!"

So I wrote this, which is what it is. 
Make of it what you will. 

Hostage negotiations ("We do not negotiate with terrorists")...

 Musical starting point: 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐒𝐌 - "God Of War" 

I found myself thinking a week or three ago, "Y'know what, fuck this. I don't need this fucking job." I paused in that moment, calculated, and realised "Oh no. I actually do. Fuck..."

"Nobody puts Baby in a corner," and nobody puts Pete in a box. If you want to get shit done, you airdrop Pete where he can see the horizon, say "the arses in need of kicking are thattaway," and the only thing that will slow me down will be needing to change boots. Where things go south is when people fuck up my target acquisition; if my arsehole-detector senses you're full of shit, there's a very real chance I'll ignore the fleeing posterior(s) in front of me and wind up coming back at you boot-first. 

And there's nothing that blips my "arsehole" radar quite like hypocrisy. 

Let me be clear that I don't enjoy thinking like this. I was brought up to turn the other cheek, see the other side, seek peace; "I cherish peace with all my heart", but just like Chris "Peacemaker" Smith, deep down underscoring everything people tried to layer over the top, and whilst I WANT to do good and bring positive things to the world, I can't be so naïve to believe the way to do this is to be a lamb, or even a lion. I died a thousand deaths before being reborn for war. Sometimes the hero the world needs is *a horrible cunt. 

I just try to hold that in reserve, because the way I see it that's the differentiator between *"I can be" and *"I am". 

But if you wanna dance motherfucker, let's dance. 

So if you take a Weapon of Mass Disruption and box it in don't be the last thing it sees when the lid closes unless you want to bump yourself up the target priority list, and absolutely do NOT be the first thing it sees when it claws its way out. 

I'd run away, but i can't. Half a million dollars of personal debt says I'm a hostage to this fucking job. Note the word "personal", because we're not in Professional any more, Toto. Whilst the Seven P's of Project Management ("Proper Preparation & Planning Prevent Piss-Poor Performance") should be a solid baseline for risk-management, you can't control all the variables and every once in a while you find yourself executing the best of strategies, falling to earth out of an aeroplane which just exploded, held aloft on a parachute that's on fire, and the Rock upon which you built your plans is far less Gibraltar than it is Fraggle. 

Now imagine how pissed off you'd be in that situation, crank that up to 11, multiply by Ezekiel 25:17, and you have a rough idea about the Old Testament-level shitstorm falling from heaven at terminal velocity on butterfly-wings of flame that I currently personify. 

Is this a boot you see before you, its heel towards your face?
You're damned fucking right it is, and you'll need more than some Spray & Wipe and Pontius Pilot-style hand-wringing to rub out this damned spot. 

Parkway Drive - Swing
If you think Stockholm Syndrome will save you, you obviously misunderstood the EULA:
"This machine was born for battle
This contract paid for war."

And if it's war they want... 

So let me save you the effort of looking up the definition of "nemesis":
Oxford: "a downfall caused by an inescapable agent."
Merriam Webster: "one that punishes or avenges: a formidable and usually victorious rival or opponent."
Guy Ritchie (via Brick Top): "A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent. Personified in this case by an 'orrible cunt... me."

Think I'm being melodramiatic?
Well fuck you. 
Fuck him. 
Fuck her. 
Fuck all of you. 
And fuck your little dog, too.
This is my bread and butter you're fucking with, and it's my hard-sold trust that got broke. 

The first part of that demands a response at the very least. 
The second determines what "Arsehole Tax" multiplier gets applied to the line item on my invoice. 

Break the rules and I could call the umpire, but he's a toothless muppet so fuck that guy as well; I'll change the fucking game. We might have been playing a gentlemanly game of Chess before, but now it's Doom, motherfucker.
Mick Gordon - The Only Thing They Fear Is You

"Obviously, this has nothing to do with classical music whatsoever, and who cares, right? Like, this music is to evoke the sheer brutality, and the raw power, that you possess, against every single one of the enemies that you'll fight, and every single one of Hell's creations against you. And it's so empowering, and dominant, and forceful, and it just punches you right in the freaking face, and there's so much, like just raw strength I hear from this that's just incredible." 
"It just feels like raw destruction... There's this super-intense animalist essence to this... It feels like the chainsaw just slicking through enemies left and right. It's really evocative, like The World On Fire... and you coming in there being the only person that can do anything to save the planet... you're also an incredible bad-ass who's not scared of anything... there's that real sense of 'I'm going to take your business and you're going to be fodder beneath my feet'."
Opera Singer Reacts: The Only Thing They Fear is You)