Chase the sunset...

Musical accompaniment: Mr.Kitty - After Dark 

The sky over Black Mountain was a lithium fire with the Telstra Tower at its core as I crested the last rise on Kings Hwy before its descent into Queanbeyan, and for a moment I thought what a shame it was I hadn't got around to reconnecting the cameras so that moment might have been recorded. Remembering that I'd left Captain's Flat maybe 18 minutes beforehand, and another word for "record" in these circumstances can be "evidence", I decided it was for the best. I could have pulled over and pulled my phone out of my pocket, but why spoil the moment by actually dropping below the speed limit? 

I took a mental snapshot instead, and shared it with my Penpal (with whom I trade such photos on occasion out of thematic amusement) in spirit if not in deed, before indicating around a slow-moving SUV, clicked back up to 6th gear, and tucked back in behind the screen to coast the downhill descent. 

I've been meaning to go for a decent fang since I got back; there've been plenty of "not here to fuck spiders, let alone waste time" runs, but no decent excuses to work through the rev range and get my knee out terrorising a few apexes whilst spraying an atomised mist of ablated rubber. There are roads around Perth where you can get in a bit of a fang, but the ones that aren't a mission to get to are few, far between, depressingly short, and too well-known by Mr Plod. Canberra's diminutive size, situation amongst all these hills and valleys, and its connections to a plethora of country towns, means it's blessed with access to hundreds of kilometres of tarmac seemingly built for technical riding. Bringing the 'busa with me was a no-brainer, and sitting on my balcony enjoying my (barely) morning coffee I realised I had absolutely nothing better to do so it was time to adjust my suspension, throw some lube on the chain, switch the pillion seat for the aerodynamic hump, and get amongst it. 

Plus, I hadn't managed to make the trip to check out Sandra and Timo's new place in Captain's Flat, so I pinged her. 

"Pondering going for a fang this afternoon. Should I burn some rubber in your direction?"
"Sure."

I wouldn't usually spend an hour travelling each way for a cup of tea and a scone, which goes to show how far my priorities have skewed in the wrong direction; the last time I lived here Rick and I would think nothing of riding an hour out to Bungendore via Queanbeyan for a pie and an iced coffee, then looping back up the northern route along Macs Reef Road. These days I need an excuse, but as with so many things I've needed over the years that's something I know I can rely on Sandra to provide. Of course I delayed my homeward departure half an hour or so beyond what would be considered sensible, which is how I found myself chasing the sunset along Captain's Flat Road through the deepening twilight at speeds well above where the average Cessna would even consider stalling. 

It's times like that I feel ashamed of myself for keeping my beloved Hayabusa caged like a songbird in cities with all the straight lines, 90degree turns, and lumbering four-wheeled bovinity. Exiting the roundabout for the 43km run down Captain's Flat Rd earlier this afternoon I'd dropped into a racing crouch with the visor of my helmet a hands' span from the tip of the screen, relaxed my right wrist, told it "OK, you set the pace," and as we slipped into jinba ittai-sync we opened our throat, unleashed legs of cast-aluminium, sunk claws into the horizon and with an internal-combustion roar dragged it towards us. 

Heading back a few hours later I said "It's getting dark and there'll be roo's out so let's take it easy," and dragging my wrist downwards in response it whispered: 
"No." 
"You sure?" 
The answer came in a wave of need that was part hunger, part lust, and as the needles climbed on the dials in my lower peripheral our intake screamed "GO!!!!!!!" 

So we went, devouring the road in pursuit of the setting sun. 

Musical improvement: Mr.Kitty - After Dark (Iam Ian Remix) 

But hey, who's on trial?

Musical accompaniment: Interpol - Evil

Skye and Marcia sat up and looked at their wrists, tapped their Smart Watches in perfect synchronicity, pushed their empty glasses towards my 3/5 finished pint, and reached for their handbags; two luminary geniuses in their fields with 1.9 PhD's and change between them heading off to meet up with a group of people who's education equates to a formidable Peer-Review Board and engage in a passtime which renders me dumber than a Remedial Phys Ed Teacher's Conference. 

"You sure you don't want to come?" Skye asked, knowing the answer, but demonstrating that intellect is no excuse for discourtesy. 
"Is it going to be louder than this?" I enquired, gesturing to the pub filled with treble-heavy 90's Pop-Rock clattering off all the hard-surfaces at a not-quite-but-almost uncomfortable volume. 
"Much!" Marcia confirmed, almost as gleefully bright as her lipstick-red peaked-lapel velvet coat. 
"Nah, reckon I'll just finish my pint and head home, but thanks. Say hi to folks for me tho.
Enjoy your karaoke." 

I sat, looked at my phone, swiped away the screen-full of notifications I gave negative-fucks about, necked the rest of my Strong Scottish Ale remembering wryly that it was called "There Can Be Only One". Pulling on my long coat against the biting cold I knew would be waiting outside, I paid the bar tab and stepped out into the street. I plugged my pair of 6mm drivers into my ears, activated the full-bore ANC isolation, and as the voice prompt confirmed "Connected!" pressed play on my phone as I walked south thru Dickson, and the head-drilling bassline started beating my brain whilst my shoes beat the pavement. I'd caught the light-rail up after knocking off work, but it was early and I was in no rush. Walking home instead of catching public transport was a habit I formed in London to save a quid and spend some time. Half a lifetime and some solid career-decisions later and I'm far from being short of a buck (or quid, baht, dollar, or rupiah for that matter), but the counterpoint to that sort of success is a dearth of moments where you're in one place and find yourself in absolutely no rush to get to the next, so I decided to walk home. 

It was only 3.2km, and "I'm sure I need the exercise," I told myself, so I cruised down Challis St, turned right on Morphett, flipping a mental double-deuce at the Emergency Services Depot from which Ambulances and Fire Trucks emerge a couple of times a night to race down Northbourne emitting an eardrum-piercing wail on their way to saving the life of some unfortunate arsehole who has the audacity to be having The Worst Night Of Their Lives At A Moment Which Mildly Inconveniences Me as I passed. Turning south onto Northbourne Ave and the home-stretch it's represented for significant portions of my life, my left hand reached up to skip track back for the third time. 

 Musical accompaniment: Interpol - Evil

In front of me lay a linear path stretching to a vanishing point convergence; the way forward was clear, all I had to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other, wash, rinse, repeat, and: 

Treading down that well-lit corridor, I saw streets and driveways diverging left and right, begging to be explored, luring me away from my south-bound trajectory with a siren-song of
"Stop! Go back! You are going the wrong way!" 
"Your North Star is behind you!" 
"The Princess is in another Castle!" 

As my footsteps syncopated with the drum beat of the song's 5th and 6th repetitions and the bass drilled deeper into my consciousness, my mind's eye explored those divergent branches sign-posted "If only I'd..." and "There but for the grace of God go I...", traced them each and all to their ultimate conclusion, saw their outcomes, and in third-eye hindsight saw myself staggered under the weight of opportunities-missed and paradise-lost to faceplant in the frigid cold of despair, again and again. 

But in the wake of time's arrow my feet maintained their rhythmic cadence, the eyes I hide behind lenses which allow me to see clearly fixed forward, whilst Interpol sang their song of Evil out of the chunks of rare-earth metals and plastic which isolate my auditory sensorium from the noise and chaos of the world around me. 

And I left my selves behind. 

Perhaps they'll report back one day with fantastic tales of their adventures chasing white rabbits through memory's wonderland, but I'll not hold my breath; as fascinating as it might be to see how my other halves might have lived, I'm content to live without the knowledge of their experiences in the dead-ends they find themselves trapped in after eating variously-coloured cupcakes with "Love me", "Try me", "Be me" printed in psychedelic-flavoured icing. Every choice I've had I've made with the best information, consideration, and intention I had available at the time, and the only way things could have turned out different would have been for me to have known things I couldn't possibly have then. If I were to pursue those possibilities I could spend the rest of my life experiencing pasts I know I'd never have chosen which, I thought, would be a bit of a waste. The twists and turns are all in the future. As we go it straightens out, creating a direct line in our wake leading from where we are all the way back to where we started. 

I wasn't sure whether I found that comforting or not, but keeping your eyes forward certainly helps avoid tripping over the eScooter that's toppled over in front of the Rex. 

Approaching the lights of Girrawheen St the graffiti'd hoarding gave way to the darkened open space of Haig Park, and my feet diverted to the desire-lines they knew instinctively must be there because this is Canberra, and at a visceral level we know each other in a way only old lovers can, so with a conviction shared only by true romantics and madmen my feet know that where they seek a path they'll find one. By the time we emerged from the still darkness of the trees into the bright lights and brighter young things of Lonsdale St I'd lost count of how many times that same song had played, but some hours later when my earphones ran out of juice my music player app counted 111, so it was obviously fewer than that. 

I needed to replenish my supply of beer; I knew this because my feet knew this, and I've learned not to second-guess my feet because those bastards know what's what; they have, after all, always taken me where I needed to be. 

A brief transaction later and they deposited me into the 6th floor shoebox filled with hungry meows and ghosts that I now call Home. None of those were here when I arrived; I brought all of them with with me; some of them I've carried and kept fed since before I left the first time. 

We are, after all, all the things we can't leave behind, and I've carefully packed all the baggage I can't bring myself to let go of again and again so I can beat myself with them no matter where I go. It's weightless; they add nothing to my carry-on allowance, but somehow no matter how little the scales at the airport tip my pockets are always filled with painful angst, because better to keep carrying them around than forget and replace them with more of the same mistakes. 

It would take a life span with no cell mate to find the long way back, eventually I'll learn to look the other way. 

But hey, who's on trial? 

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. 

Cold comfort..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

The gap between When and Now...

Musical accompaniment: Sevendust - Waffle

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

Title: Get a life

Deliverables: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 28/07/2023 10:31

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

My, don't I waffle on? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Convergent catalysing co-evolution...

Musical accompaniment: Blink-182 - Here's Your Letter

Beckett has learned to be circumspect. Getting kicked because I have a habit of having ANC earbuds in, not turning the lights on at night, and his having a need to lead the parade despite having no idea where it's headed, not to mention my sight not being as good as his will do that to you, which is why he was to the left of my trajectory as I passed, meowing at me. 

This time the noise in my ears had paused which meant the noise in my head was building back to crescendo, so he got picked up and cuddled because... 

What the fuck do you take me for? I might be a sociopath, but he's cute, his belly is soft, and for all that I built my church on the rock of logic, I'm not made of stone. 

Holding him to my chin in repose whilst his rumbling purr transmitted through my mandible it struck me how we, Beckett and I, had learned to communicate despite neither of us being capable of vocalising, let alone understanding, each other's language. That language isn't exactly what one would call "complex" or "highly nuanced". Mostly it consists of various iterations of: 

At its deepest and most existential, our communication has reached an equivalent intellectual and metaphysical level of my ultimate- and penultimate-ex's: 

and: 

Sticking my Jabra earbuds in my ears this morning and poking the button marked "Just pick up where you fucking left off seriously just make me less miserable what the fuck please?" which my phone handily abbreviates to the single, sardonic word "Play", I hit the pavement and the song which started, obvously following after the one after the one which had ended when I last stopped listening, kicked off with Mark Hoppus' unmistakable bass-riffs and vocals.  

The 95.45:1 ratio of relevant/irrelevant lines caught me in the amygdala and I filed it away under "shit to deal with more when you're drunk because in vino veritas, and you're way too sober to deal with this shit". 

Turns out that time was 12 hours, a day in the office on a random-but-not-inconsequential-for-that-Wednesday, and a bottle of discount Shiraz later, because i've taken to indulging in the habit I tried to detox myself from in my early 20's of "listening to the same song on repeat to keep me in that moment". 

I remember a completely-deserved breakup after which I listened to "Unsent Letter" by Machine Gun Felatio for a day and a half, to the point where my Aspgers housemate decided it was worth asking "R U OK?"
I remember being in London and listening to 'Cosmonaut" by At The Drive-In and "It's Myself vs Being A Man" by Inhale Exhale back and forth until one day became indistinguishable from the next. 

I remember listening to "Me, Myself, and I" by Oliver Tree again and again to help me concentrate on capturing the conceptual-synchronicity of convergent-experience of "Ian vs Being Myself" after a 2:39-hour phone call during which he told me his partner of 8ish years had dumped him. 

"Aw fuck, I mean... Jenny's nothing if not Mercurial, but.... shit. man." 

<insert some ultra-noble. self-effacing, sincerely-Ian shit right here> 

"Man, there's a blog-post in this somewhere... hang about, I'm gonna go find it." 

A little while later: 

Because if you want to declare yourself "The Smartest Motherfucker In The Room", it's a double-down. If something goes against you, regardless of what, it can never be anyone else's fault, it's mine. 

Yes, my self-reflection is self-defeating. 

Thanks for noticing! 
Your noticing has been noticed and referred to our #FuckedIfIveAFuck & #AlsoYou'reACunt Departments! 
Have a Luminescent Day! 

Now go fuck yourself in the optic nerve with a pool-cue! 

Fuck, (this isn't how I wanted it to go but) I can't let this kill me, let go
I need some more time to fix this..."

Fuck, if only I could say that without invoking TS "He Wanker" Elliot I'm sure I'd be fine. Thus spake Zarascoundrel. 

Full circle...

I'm screaming. 

I'm in Aldi Belconnen doing a decent-sized grocery shop somewhere with free parking so I could use the car and not be limited to what I can carry on my back and loading up my basket with "what the fuck do people even eat anyway" and turning a corner past the bulk nuts I'm suddenly transported to Aldi Belmont and after everything I've gone through and done and packed and given up and unpacked and lost and fought and won and suffered and achieved I'm still in the same place I left and nothing's different because every Aldi and every where is exactly the same and everything is different but nothing has changed and I'm screaming because I've not stopped moving for two months now and I've gone so far but I've still not moved a fucking inch. 

Momentum carried my right foot to the floor, and the left one after it, and the moment passed, but in the back of my head the screaming continues. 

Now I'm sitting here on my balcony writing this, so obviously I made it out and home safely, so you can take that finger off the panic button; I'm fine. 

But I'm Not OK. 

I've been sick for a week - the system collapse I knew would happen took longer than I expected, but at the end of the moment the pendulum only pauses; everything has its price, and the loan shark will always have his pound of flesh. 

Repeat after me: I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 

Since my stuff arrived a fortnight ago I've been battling sequential grid-lock. Unpacking boxes means finding places to put things, but those places have been filled with or blocked by boxes. I replaced the sagging mattress that came with the place without delay and have managed to sleep more than a few hours at a stretch, but getting rid of it was problematic. Setting up my desk meant getting the dining table out of the way. Making any progress whatever has been hard, and through it all I keep being confronted by an empty fridge I can't seem to make it to the shops enough to fill. and a cat who insists on tearing the shit out of my furniture instead of the scratching post I got him, wants feeding every 13 seconds (or hours? I can't tell), and holy shit didn't I clear that litter box out just the other day? How has he filled it already? Or maybe that was a week ago? Fuck me why didn't I leave him in Perth? 

I can't deal with this. 
I don't get to not deal with this. 
Fuck. 

And then there's The Office. 

I didn't talk about this before I left - these emails have been a lovely exercise in escapism; getting to create this selective perspective for you to read has meant getting to exist in it myself, at least until I wake up again the morning after hitting Send. Your own work-life hasn't sounded particularly rosy... actually not a single time you've mentioned it ever; adding my growing unease to that would bring no joy to either of us, but we're past the point where I can ignore it. Big Bossman is losing it - he's well past erratic and is now thrashing around so violently we're past "damage control" and into the point where the rest of us are starting to crack. 

I have suspicions and conjecture around what's happening in his world (although my predictive model is getting pretty refined), but one thing I do know is that he's freaking out, his instincts are flawed, and the steps he's taking in response are so badly in the wrong direction that he's starting to tear down the foundations that support him to the point where both the Bossladies who interviewed you had to threaten to resign to prevent him making a Very Bad Choice. 

I've shoulder-barged my way into that alliance; I have, and can have, no authority; I'm both a subordinate and a scumbag-contractor, but we all know that I'm the closest they have to a peer and an ally. They need to let me help carry the strain because things are already borderline unsurvivable. If they work with me we might make it through with minimal collateral damage. If not, the action I suspect I'll need to take will be cataclysmic. In the last 8 days I've had to smack down the Smartest Motherfucker In The Room, the Big Bad Scary Bossman, twice, successfully both times. 
Yes, whilst sick. 

There are two more brewing, either of which I'll win, but the chances of survival depend entirely on his remembering that I'm the only way he'll actually achieve his goals, and not just squash me like a bug. The odds are not in my favour, but you know that I will, without hesitation, spend any and every capital I have accumulated in the pursuit of maximisation of (my chosen) value. 

And, y'know, it's just a job, right? Except I took on a considerable amount of debt and risk to do this. The "Emperor Went Mad and Now Wears No Clothes" scenario was not on my radar when I pulled the trigger, couldn't possibly have been (although if my growing suspicion is correct and I find that Bosslady was hiding the possibility from me proves correct... I'm not one for threats, but remember that everything has its price), but if I had a clue then I might not have traded mind-numbing exile for half a million dollars of debt. 

So the view I'm staring at over the glow of my laptop screen is currently bringing me increasingly cold comfort. I'm exhausted, on edge, I can be calm, or focused, but not both at the same time, my manoeuvring thrusters are shot, and I'm a whisker off bingo-fuel, but my nose is pointed down the throat of the beast, I have ammunition and fumes enough for one last world-shattering salvo as I make my final burn, and my fist is hovering over the glass-covered button labelled

"Bop in case of Blitzkrieg".

Now I exist in the weightless moment of calm stillness between the rise of my fist and the hammer's fall; the lambs might not have stopped screaming, but at least I have. 

Smeghead...

A long time ago in a high school far far away, a not-yet bearded nerdboi and an obnoxious little shit became friends. 

Actually, "friends" is too strong a term. Let me reframe. 

Once upon a time in a misogyny-and-homophobia incubatorCatholic All Boys School run by soon-to-be-convicted-paedophilesThe Christian Brothers which smelled of anxious conformity, unwashed socks, burgeoning testosterone, furtive (occasionally mutual, I'm told) masturbation, and a less-than-subtle undertone of Lord of the Flies, a small group of outcasts accumulated. We were nicknamed "The Cool Gang", and somewhere along the line I became its leader... in that the rest of the group could generally be found on the opposite side of me from the bullies. One of that group was a weedy lad named Leith C****** R****** who never missed the opportunity to tell you about how he was in the Air Force Cadets and reminded me of Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf, so I took to calling him Smeghead. 

For the longest time I thought he was pretty fucking annoying, but The Cool Gang never excluded a member because "safety in numbers", and... well there wasn't really anywhere downstream for someone to go. We were the outliers; we played Chess, or Suicide Chess, or Magic: The Gathering, or D&D, or Lacrosse, were hyper-clever, or functionally retarded, on weird scholarships for Academic Achievement or Organ Playing (the one with pipes and a keyboard, not another masturbation reference), the awkward, the uncoordinated, the Mad Scientists (one guy made his own taser out of 9V batteries and copper wire coils in ~year 9), the Terminally Inept, the hadn't-hit-growth-spurts-yet, the already-6-foot-tall-at-14. We, the unco, the nerdy, who fit in with none of the cliques, collected in one corner of the playground near the Library, and kept each other company (and occasionally from being beaten up by the rugby playing jocks). 

I never really liked him all that much in high school; I mostly thought of him as an annoying hanger-on, and I remember mostly just putting up with him because he was just this-side of being irritating enough to punch. Still, he invited me to his birthday party out of the blue one year, and we bonded over our mutual love of Pink Floyd (I later gave him the Super-Audio CD High Bitrate Remastered edition of the Wish You Were Here Album for his 20th or 21st birthday). 

He was one of the two who dragged me off the last of the bullies I beat up in Year 10, and made an effort to keep in contact as we were winding up Year 12; somehow when the rest of them fell away he remained. 

He'd come to my parties.
We'd go body-surfing for fitness and fun (and a bit of a perv) in the summer.
He worked at the local Sizzler, so I'd go out for a cheap feed.
We both go into wine wankery - he worked for Sandalford Estate for a bit, and I worked for Saracen (plus I'm a wanker). 

Whilst our adventures weren't by any means the Stuff of Legend (the escapades I collaborated on with Sharpie, the Silent Bob to my Jay, transcended fame into infamy), a bond was formed which survived his finishing uni and heading over to ADFA, various postings, and long stretches of distance and time. 

I visited him in Brisbane because fuck-it-why-not, when he was posted at RAAF Amberley (I vaguely remember being driven up to Sunshine Coast to fix his nan's computer as being an excuse?), then again to stand as his Best Man when he married Esther.
We hung out in Canberra when they were posted back here between my returning from London and moving back to Perth.
I visited him again in the Blue Mountains when I was in Sydney for orientation day at AGSM (before I restarted my MBA with Ducere).
I missed his mum Rhonda's funeral because of time-frames and covid restrictions.
I managed to procure two high-end monitors for his twin sons at the behest of his dad Cameron during the peak of hardware shortages and had them drop-shipped to Canberra just in time for Xmas in 2021, which I sold him for Cost-Price+A-Mars-Bar (literally rounded up by $1 to $300 per unit when the market price was $450).
But I was here in Canberra in July of last year when Cameron passed away after a long battle with cancer. 

The night before his wedding we stayed in a hotel in the Brisbane CBD (he and Esther were living together by then, so this meant they could at least pretend to observe some of the tradition) and decided to eat at the nearby Sizzler for "old time's sake" (and because we thought it was hilarious, and because neither of us was particularly rolling in cash), then his "buck's party" involved us sitting around the dingy hotel room we were stating in, sharing the best whisky I could afford. 

So when he messaged me saying Cameron had gone I threw my phone over my shoulder in the middle of the discussion I was having about IT Security Policy, finished whiteboarding the gap-analysis we were doing, picked it up again to reply "well shit." and went looking for an appropriate bottle. 

It took a few stops to find, but whilst showing Ian around we found ourselves in Manuka and I ducked us into the Vintage Cellars wherein I found what I was looking for. 

I've been fond of Oban whisky for ages, since I found it on special and decided to try it. It used to be my "keep some in the cupboard for a special occasion, or Tuesday (whichever comes first)" until the price started creeping up. I was exchanging bottles with a client in Melbourne for a while - he sent one when I told him I'd got my marks and had officially passed my MBA - I knocked off work early, poured a glass, plonked a couple of ice cubes in it, and took a photo from my infamous Friday chair of it alongside an empty glass with the bottle in the background. He sent one back a short time later, of the same arrangement on his balcony; one glass with whisky, and the other empty but for a couple of ice cubes. Pete's a good client, and a great guy. 

This was a Limited Edition called The Tale of Twin Foxes, which sat nicely with me in the context of me and Smeghead, particularly the blurb at the bottom of the box: 

Sweet, for how life is supposed to be.
Salt, for tears at a funeral.
Smoke, for a cremation. 

It was special because it was a Limited Edition, but at $200 it was also modest because that was Cameron; I thought he'd have approved of the effort and consideration, but also that I didn't go all overboard over it (Smeghead agreed). 

So the day after I watched a short-but-sweet ceremony over Zoom as a grid of people I didn't know sat alone with their grief and cried on webcams and Cameron went up in smoke to the sound of On The Turning Away, I Ubered out to Moncrief and cracked open the bottle. 

It was a pleasant evening - we spoke very little of the day before, or Cameron, although Smeghead did say at one point, with a wry smile, how amused he was that the song his casually racist dad had picked was a song admonishing racism. 

When I left there was just a small bit left in the bottle - enough for one more stiff pour. I have no idea whether it's still there on his shelf, but I rather hope not; I prefer to imagine that later, either after I left that night or one shortly after, he found a quiet moment to himself and put his own full-stop at the end of that sentence. 

A while later I checked in to see how things were going. He and his sister Cara were doing the "you take it"/"no you take it" thing with Cameron's possessions, and neither of them had need or room for his Rather Nice Bose Sound System. I, an audio-snob, made a joke about giving it a good home, and he, knowing that both these things were true, said "Done." In a later call he mentioned that they couldn't find it, and I promptly forgot all about it. 

Last week, having spent my first Friday in town with my Penpal, I pinged my once-Air Force Cadet-now-Wing Commander friend to see if he was free to join me for my second, and when he arrived he'd brought it with him; it had been boxed up in some out-of-the-way place, and he'd put it aside. I was touched, and a little ashamed - I recently upgraded my stereo and wondered if I'd be able to show it the love he deserved, but I accepted it with gratitude, and we sat out on the balcony as the sun set catching up on the last 8 months' worth of stories, and some from much much longer ago (when you've known someone for a lifetime-and-a-half there are plenty of them to remind each other of). 

Last night I set the Bose up in my bedroom; there weren't enough power points in any convenient part of the living room. Cabling it together, re-tuning it for the room, and with the only source I had cables to connect to it being my laptop, positioned it alongside, cued up Wish You Were Here so the album cover was visible on the screen, hit play, and settled on my bed to listen to it, snapping a photo on my phone which I sent to Smeghead without caption or comment: 

This morning he replied with a Thumbs Up emoji, which was all that really needed be said. 

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. 

Sunset & Twilight: Art made with Lasers & Maths: Epilogue Part 1

 If the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, how does it end? 

The same, of course. Not one more, and not one less. 

Sitting here is this perished-and-peeling bereft-of-soul mass-produced chair on the balcony outside my room-with-a-view across from its now-cold sibling which you vacated just a short-but-somehow-achingly-long while ago, I find myself once more with a surfeit of time to think. 

But since time is something I feel I have an abundance of, whereas sleep has been something in deficit, I will claim just a little more for one at the expense of the other and leave you in suspense. For once you are both the subject, article, indeed both the BDO and its recipient in this narrative, I can think of nothing more perfect than to capture the thread of catharsis-interruptus, roll it in a ball, and dangle it tantalisingly just out of reach whilst you gaze back across an intangible border thinking: 

"Please sir, I want some more," (I prithee, more).