Going nowhere fast...

 Musical accompaniment: Twenty One Pilots - Ride 

The gusting wind is making the 'busa rock against my outrigger-leg as we wait patiently for the lights to change, less like the rocking of a dinghy afloat a rolling swell than having very large man nodding along to a slow reggae groove whilst leaning against our right-hand fairing. The light changing from red to green sets in motion a choreographed set of movements with twenty one years of practice behind them; my right hand starts to squeeze just as the tension in our left starts to release, the outrigger pushes off, retracts, and stows itself away securely, then knees press into the tank to push our butt back to the rear-edge of the seat. Ready for take-off, there's a moment when we're sitting perfectly still on a pair of contact-patches no larger than a pair of outstretched palms, balanced on little more than intent, a prayer-given-wings, and the confidence that by the time physics stops being distracted by our sleight-of-hand acceleration and angular momentum will have kicked in. 

Two seconds later we're travelling at a speed that will see us a kilometre down the road a minute from now, my helmet is tucked behind the screen, and the buffeting is gone; with a drag coefficient resting half-way between a Porsche 911 Carrera and an Airbus A330, and a displacement an order of magnitude smaller than either, the 'busa doesn't cut through the wind like a hot knife through butter so much as slip past with a series of polite "excuse I", "don't mind me", and "thank you ever so kindly"s the rest of the way up Northbourne Ave. Leaning on the edge of the knife-edge of rubber on the left edge of the tyres we carve a line along the grippy tarmac between the slippery white lines of the pedestrian crossing onto Barton Hwy, straighten up again, turn our tail to the wind, and present it our posterior. 

Extroverting my introspection has provided me with a peculiar perspective over the past few weeks; just like someone standing in the Emergency Stopping Lane on Barton Hwy might have seen a horse-and-rider glide past in a blur of poetic motion and dopplering exhaust, had they launched a drone and set it to keep pace to starboard that same horse and his boy would have looked utterly motionless whilst the world slid past in a blur. Look at the footage closely tho, and you'll see that my feet are resting on the pegs whereas it's the wheels that are spinning. The 'busa is doing all the work; I'm just along for the ride. 

Another day, another dichotomy. 

The "Terminal Semicolon" series started as a random accident I precipitated, crossed with a random thought I had, influenced by a random episode of Red Dwarf I'd made Bridget watch so she'd get the reference I make to a joke I heard once but no one seems to remember any more. By the end I'd spent 8400 words of which only 10 were "fuck", laid two and thirty years of my historic self-hood bare, and catharted like a motherfucker. I didn't set out to pick up all the threads I'd left hanging from writing about "where I was" and weave them together to explain "what I was going through all that time" when I jotted down some notes one night about an accident caused by peripheral neuropathy borne of chronic illness any more than had I instead folded them into a thousand cranes and woken the next day to find out that the tornado created when they flapped their wings had flung an under-educated girl in an indigo-checked dress, and the house she lived in, from mid-west America on a Technicolor(TM) adventure, crushing Elon Musk to death in the process. 

Either way, when it was done I looked at the result and muttered "Oh Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck..." under my breath because I'd taken the last two years of chaos and turned them into something beautiful. I started the recently-ended phase of my life by saying "resurrection [...] is never gentle, let alone kind. You have to die before you can be reborn after all", and I keep saying that sometimes you need to destroy what's in the way so you can rebuild something better. "If you want a thing done well," Napoleon is credited as having said, "do it yourself." 

Especially when the only thing standing in your way is your self. 

I put more effort into creating It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me... than I have into anything I've ever written; the Sandra biopic, the speech I wrote for her wedding, and Sunset & Twilight: Art made with Lasers & Maths are the only things which have come close, but all of those were ultimately for other people; this one I wrote to share, so you could see and (I hope) understand, but I didn't write it for you. I wanted to cook something of myself up, create and make-real something delightful out of a very harrowing time of my life which you could swallow, and digest, and take away with you, so that later when I'm pouring you a digestif with one hand and offering a bowl of antacids with the other, I can look you in the eye and know that you're seeing me. 

Or not. 

Maybe you'll just get reflux, make your excuses, and leave before dessert. 
Maybe you'll not show up in the first place, and I'll find myself dining alone with the void filling the chair you were supposed to be sitting in. 

(In the interest of civility, I think I'll call her "Jeremy"; that seems a cromulent name for a complete lack of substance.)

Maybe I'll get to enjoy the whole bottle of armagnac to myself (Jeremy said I could have hers; she has to drive), and eat leftovers for the rest of the week. 

Either way, I'm going to help myself to seconds. 

Backing track: Incubus - Drive 

I've been trying to reconcile the ridiculous number of things I seem to do in my day with the absolute lack of anything I seem to get done; after a while the expenses keep piling up and there's only so much you can sneak into your "Consulting Fees" and "Meeting Expenses" accounts before your accountant starts asking pointy questions because "Blackhearts & Sparrows" appears to be a bottle shop. I guess this is what you get for engaging an accountant who's good at her job, has a finely-tuned nose for bullshit, and shared a house with you back in your late-20's, but I digress. I feel like those pitiful plebs I keep seeing through the window of the gym on Lonsdale St running on treadmills when I'm walking to-and-from the local Coles with another backpack-full of the pre-packaged chemical energy I feed my failing meatsack to ensure it fails a little more slowly. I keep telling myself "at least when I put one foot in front of the other I'm a step further forward than I was before, so I'm better-off than those cunts," but it's a lie and I know it. If anything, they're more honest about it because whilst we're both going nowhere fast, at least they're not pretending; our pursuits might be equally pointless, but how much more authentic does it get than merging mouth with money, and paying for the privilege of proving it? 

I do know one thing they don't tho, because I know that what both of us are doing is futile, and the whole thing is fucking absurd. 

OK, that's two things, but who's counting? 

In the beginning, a less-hirsuite-than-average ape somewhere in what we now call Africa who'd never heard of pants looked up in wonder at the glorious firmament of the heavens above, and thought "What the fuck?" 
Some time later, another ape who'd realised that pants were a pretty solid concept looked outside themselves and thought "Why the fuck?" 
By the time pants were considered prosaic, a German ape with a Niet mousta-zsche looked down at the world around them and thought "What's the fucking point?" 
A hundred years later moustaches were out of vogue, pants had been around so long they'd started getting shorter, and a French ape who was born in Africa stood between another bunch of apes with a ball and the net they were trying to kick it into in a pair of shorts, looked inwards and Camus'd to the realisation that "... there isn't one. How fucking funny is that?" 

I used to identify as a Nihilist because in the cold, hard light of maths, there always seemed to be a divide-by-zero; it makes no difference no matter what you do. Everyone who won, and everyone who tried, and everyone who failed, and everyone who didn't, all wind up dead. Nothing we do matters, and everything we were and everything we did turns to dust in the end, so what the actual fuck is the point? Regardless, I kept moving because doing something has always felt a whole lot better than doing nothing, and given the alternative I've had nothing better to do. After a while I realised I'd been missing the punchline that whole time, because I keep forgetting that I'm terrible at maths. 

Our whole short lives we keep trying to square the circle that we know, no matter how sophisticated our calculated reasoning evolves, will always show up on the right-hand side of the ultimate equal-sign. We know, because we can prove it, but we keep trying because we need it to not be true, but that's because we've only been paying attention to the first half of the story. 

"In the setup [...] you tell a story and there's an assumption made by the listener, and what they'll find is that rug will be whipped out from under them and the assumption they made was erroneous, suddenly revealing a fact that was previously concealed, and they realise they've made a mistake."
- Jimmy Carr

I find it all existentially hilarious that we know it's pointless, but we keep trying to find a way to say it ain't so. It's all so fucking ridiculous, but that's the actual point because life is also sublime; 

It's all a fucking joke. 

So when I walk past with a wry smile on my face, it's not because I'm judging the lycra-clad ape in the window because whist paying a bunch of money to run on the spot is ludicrous, ultimately the only thing dividing us is a pane of glass and logically, if: 

I:\> $you = 0
I:\> $me = 0
I:\> $you -eq $me
True

I, riding the superposition of these perspectives, have been doing my best not to look to windward because the gusts are coming from behind me, the hurdles I might trip over are in front, and I'm trying to get my feet back where they belong between my face and the pavement. 

Besides, Phlebas is dead, and beyond caring. 

Regular service will Continue shortly; a context-free poetic interlude...

Don't do that.
Don't look to play the part you think is expected of you,
Or feeds the perception of a desire for versimillitude.
Don't play the part you think was written for you,
Or which you've been told you're expected to play.
The world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players;
It's true.
But the best part you can play is:
The one you wrote for you. 

It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me...

"You need to remember that this isn't a failure," Sandra said a couple of Fridays ago. 

This was obviously important - that was at least the third time she'd said it. 

"It's not that things went badly, or anyone did anything wrong, just sometimes things don't work out, and that's OK. It's not like it was bad; I think it's been really good for you, it just ran its course which is sad. 
"But it's definitely not a failure." 

That made four. 

It wasn't until three days later that I noticed just how much she'd stressed that particular point; it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to say and I was in complete agreement, so like a tiny octopus pretending to be seaweed, in the flow of conversation it slipped past me until some time later when I took my mask off and realised it was clinging on to my brainstem just a little too tenaciously. Floating in the current, I inspected my little stowaway whilst it regarded me with nonchalant insouciance in return, and thought: 

"Wait-a-minnit..." 

Subtlety isn't what you'd call Sandra's "strong suit"; she usually plays clubs, hearts, and spades, exclusively in that order, but like a diamond in the rough and empty places you must walk she occasionally trips you up, because whilst what you've been putting down had all the appearance of having passed over and through her, when you turn your inner eye to see its path you find she's standing right behind you staring back with the hint of a smirk in her bright blue eyes, having picked it up, got a firm grip, and wound it up like a cosh to whack you upside the head before stabbing you with it right between the fourth and fifth ribs, leaving you to suffocate in your own bullshit in the shallow ditch she dug right in front of your feet when you were too busy studying your own navel from the inside out. 

It took me longer than it should have to register how hard she was steering me away from the ledge I've desperately needed a win to pull me back from; if I'd realised just how much the stench of failure had been carried on my breath with every word that's come out of my mouth this year I'd have brushed my teeth more, or at least switched brands of mouthwash. Sandra could see the sand my house was built on crumbling away beneath my toes, God-bless her cotton socks, which is handy because I was distracted at the time being broken up with by Bridget, my fascinating Redheaded Distraction. 

"If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

A couple of months ago Bridget and I were out running errands, and I was being a bit vague:

"You've been pretty 'absent' lately."
"Yeah. Everything's been a bit... grey. I'm sorry, it's kinda hard to describe better than that."
"Hmm," she considered, "maybe you should try writing about it?" 

I'd barely written anything more substantial than a fart in a wetsuit since last year, and when I had managed to James more than a few hundred reJoyce-ful words together it had been like pulling my own teeth. Nonetheless, I gummed on it, and put some thought into how to describe Depression without it turning into "goth poetry". In the peaceful time I spent packing away the suddenly-surplus second place-setting at my breakfast table for the move back to 1 Pacifica Via, Solitudo, I came up with a metaphor I've come to call The Room. 

Imagine finding yourself trapped outside a Room with no walls, which is so completely full of Nothing that there's no room in it for you. The Room is so full of Nothing that it's become condensed, compacted, and concrete; a diamond-perfect lattice of pure atomic Nothing. It's a Void so Perfect you can't even call it a vacuum; it's the Antithesis of Anything, its surface so smooth it has no friction, so clear that at first glance it seems you can see completely through it, completely without mass, but so dense it bends light. The Perfect Void draws you in until you're smeared across the boundary of the Room, so completely you're not so much outside as you are a thin smear around it. For all that you're indelibly adhered to The Room, you find you're still able to move freely, in fact you can go anywhere you want, but no matter where you go or how fast you run, it's right there. You try to tell people about the Void in the Room you've found somehow embedded within your Self, which you've no choice but carry around if you're to do anything at all, but no matter how heavy it is no one can see, touch, or feel its weight, so most of them don't even believe it exists. Even if they do, no one can help you carry it because the Perfect Void in the wall-less Room that you can't enter, but can never leave, exists entirely within the boundary of your own skull, and every time you stare into it you find you're staring back at yourself. 

I remember the moment, if not the day, when I discovered that the background-state in the back of my head had a name, and was neither epidemic, or pandemic, but endemic to me. The High School I went to published a Creative Writing Anthology each year, and I used to write little stories, ideas that popped into my head, so I submitted a couple of pieces because "why not?", before promptly forgetting all about it. I was pretty chuffed when they were included and had a bit of a proud moment taking an early-print copy home to show my folks my name right there in black-and-white on Page 13. Over the following days teachers who's classes I'd never been in, or with whom I'd never really got along, started coming up to me in the school-yard reading from a script so consistent it was like I was hearing it in gestalt: 

"Hi Peter, how are you doing? Are you OK?" 
"Yes, sir. Why wouldn't I be?" 
"That's good. It's just... we'd hate for you to... go anywhere... without telling us."
"Erm... k?" 
"You know you can always come and talk to us if you want... if you need to." 
"O...K, sir. Thank you, sir. I'll be sure to do that, sir?" 

"What was that about," Eugene asked in hushed tones as soon as they were out of earshot, "did you get in trouble for something?"
"No, didn't even tell me to pull my socks up or tighten my tie like he usually does. "
"But you ripped the elastic and cut off your top button so they wouldn't stay up..."
"Exactly! He seemed worried I was going on a trip or something."
"Weird. Oh well, Magic at lunch? I've rebuilt my Green Weenie Deck with extra Saprolings." 
"Fuck yeah, but me and that Black Deck James loaned me are still going to pwn you!" 

Years later I flicked through that cheap, spiral-bound collection of photo-copied stories and teenage-poetry and re-read the piece I'd dreamed up one night, written from the perspective of the voice in someone's head whispering a song of worthlessness and failure in the quiet stillness of the night until the protagonist put a gun to their head and painted the wall with their brain, and as the 90's-era environmentally-unfriendly light-source warmed up to incandescence, I had my light-bulb moment, realising: 

"Oooooh, THAT's what that was all about!" 

I was 15 when I wrote that, 16 when I was being buttonholed in the schoolyard by a conga-line of button-down, oxford-cloth, private-boy's-school teachers doing their best to balance their nascent SNAG-training with the ingrained toxic-machismo of their own "boys don't cry" upbringing, confused as anyone else who didn't get the memo because it had never occurred to me that there might just be some other way to be, and the way I was wasn't normal. 

But "normal" was an undiscovered country that I'd read about in a book once, but never met anyone from; what perspective could I possibly have had at that point? Just look at my friends: 

Matt was zany and Singaporean, and always wrote the scenarios for our D&D games. 
Adam was a Christian-pacifist marshmallow, who never said boo to anyone. 
Mott was Singaporean and weird, but amazing at maths. 
James could build a Magic: The Gathering deck out of spare parts that could win tournaments, but was so dyslexic he could barely write a coherent sentence. 
Smeghead was an obnoxious little shit, but so loyal you felt like a country he'd fight wars for. 
Stubbsie could have run Pheidippides into the ground, and done a victory-lap besides, so long as someone was there to tie his shoe laces for him and tell him when to stop. 
Eugene was a an overweight Burmese guy who badly wished he was black. 
And then there was me, with a face the bullies broke their fists punching, great grades, a rage Smeghead and Adam could barely drag me back from, a brain full of knowledge, and a black sense of humour. 

"Why can't you be normal?" Gary, and Arno, and Michael would yell at me, fists flying. 
"What the fuck even is 'normal'?" I'd ask myself while returning their punches in kind, threefold. It was a name I knew, but didn't feel like I had a use for. 

The way I felt, how I'd lived for as long as I'd known, that clinging little stowaway I'd always carried around, the country who's citizenship I held, had a name I was only just beginning to discover, and that was Depression. 

I got bullied a lot in the first half of High School. The teachers coming up to me wearing masks of concern were the same ones who'd been unconcerned when I was having my ankles kicked whilst marching between classes, getting shoved around playing sport, and taunted in the same schoolyard we were now standing in. Some of them had even reprimanded me for "taking matters into my own hands" when kick came to shove and I felt like all I could do to make it stop was punch on. Appealing to authority only achieved additional aggravated aggression, but breaking my hand beating some bozo's bonce was a small price to pay if it meant they left me the fuck alone. 

By that point, Authority had become the name for people who protected my oppressors; no wonder I've always had a problem with it. 
By that point my hand had healed with a bend in the metacarpus connecting my left-pinky to my wrist to serve as a permanent reminder for the cost of standing up for myself. 
By that point I'd taken the fight back to all of them, one at a time at first, eventually moving up to groups of as many as four at a time, and I hadn't always won the battles but they left me and the boys around me alone, which was what mattered. 

I wasn't to know it at the time, but by then the war was over; I never had to fight again all the way through to graduation. 

But I was always ready to. 

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj 

Bridget and I had a good run, all told. We met at just the right time, when I was starting to look outside myself for a whole I could be part of, and she was ending it with a partner who didn't made her feel whole. We had a lovely time, and there was love there for a time, but for all the fizz and zing we've enjoyed over the last half a year there's a hole in her mind that no one else can fill, and a hole in mine which I haven't been able to stop tonguing enough to let heal. We've been good for each other; we're both better than we were when we met. We've both been valued; we've proven to each other that we both have value. We're both desirable; there's been no shortage of reciprocal desire. We're neither of us whole tho; there are gaping holes in each of us that no other person can possibly close. Neither of us is so much insufficient as we are incomplete, and whilst I've found contentment in adequate sufficiency she wanted more; how could I blame her? She's suffered from her own depression, and it shows in all the gleaming seams where she's kintsugi'd herself back together. I started out broken, it seems, filling the empty spaces with Nothing so neatly there's no seam to denote where one ends and the other begins, leaving nowhere to find purchase. When Bridget broke she stuck the pieces back together with gold, becoming more beautiful, and she'll do so again; when I fell apart I wrapped myself in another layer of nacre, becoming colder, but even less accessible, and even harder to hold on to. 

When she put the idea into my head a couple of months ago that I really should write about my Depression she was right, although I suspect not quite in the way she was thinking at the time. I've not been writing much this year partly because putting time into her meant I've not had so much time for that, but hugely because when I've reached out for a thread to pull on, unravel, and weave into something my hand came back with Nothing worth saying. More importantly tho, you need to understand that under and behind and inside everything I've said here over the last couple of years, something horrible has been growing; something that seems to always have been there, which I keep fed and watered and carry with me everywhere I go. 

All I've ever really written about has been my Depression; how my world looks through it, the texture and smell of it, how events feed and shape it, and every once in a while the moments of respite I get from it, I just don't make it the topic. I gloss over it with a pop song, a Shakespeare reference, and a self-deprecating joke. 

I am Pagliacci The Clown. 

I hide it behind a smile, wrap it in a metaphor, or blend it in with anger; but it's been getting harder, and colder, and heavier, and I'm running out of strength to keep carrying it around the way I have been, so I decided to try something different, bite down, eschew misdirection, and see if I can spit it out directly. 

"The person who is breathing is me." 
― Rita Farr in Doom Patrol 

Sandra was right to worry that I might see this as yet another failure; my confidence has been shaken so hard this year it's shattered, my self-worth sifting right to the bottom of the rubble like sand under the coarser stones of doubt, defeat, and dread, so who can blame her? She knew we were on the rocks, so it didn't come as a surprise when one of us stopped and shook other out of their shoe. She was there, at the other end of the phone, for the three years I was single before I managed to work up the courage to try "being with someone" again, and how determined I was after Jenna, and Kat, to not make the the same mistakes again. She must have been terrified to think what failing again would do to me after the year-and-change since I moved back to Canberra. 

One of the things I've been comfortably sure of is that I'm fucking good at the thing I do for a living, so when I fenced off the shelves in my mental library labelled "306.7: Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love" behind barbed wire and warning signs saying "DANGER! MINE FIELD! DO NOT ENTER", that was what I poured my energy into. Picking up The Job That Brought Me Back To Canberra in early 2022 was the culmination of years of practice, and by that time in the year where we all go and wake up Billy from Greenday I'd not just done a good job, I'd done one everyone had believed was Impossible until I did it. The sensation of knowing, not just believing, but knowing with absolute proof to back it up, that you're as good as you'd always thought you could be isn't just incredible, it's louder than words. 
My self-image lined up perfectly with my self-in-the-world. 
Me-cursive; Me-sync; I was Me all the way down. 
The last of the marble had fallen away, and looking back at me in the mirror was David; I was taller than Goliath, and carved from stone, and for the first time I could remember I felt Absolutely Real. 

Sounds like a pretty happy place to be, right? 

See, about that... 

Nearly a decade ago I was looking over a pile of brightly-coloured glossy images of my brain with my neurologist, talking about my relationship issues, and he made a contemplative noise as his pen traced circles around a darker-than-normal patch somewhere between my ears. 

"So... when you're cuddling up on the couch, or post-coitus... how do you feel?"
I thought about it for a moment, and replied, "Uncomfortable? My back will be hurting, or I'll need to move to get circulation back in my leg, or I can't reach my phone to check something.
"Why?" 
"Not warm and fuzzy? Relaxed?"
"No. I mean... it's nice, and she likes it, but I get fidgety pretty fast.
"Why?" 
"Well there's reduced blood flow in your hypothalamus, and what you've been describing suggests you may not be producing normal levels of Oxytocin. I'm thinking we could try a supplement and see what effect that has."
"You want to experiment on my brain?" 
"Oh! It's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter, there's no risk...!"
"Nah, you misunderstand. I'm all about the scientific method and better living thru chemistry. You got a hypothesis about my hypothalamus?
"Let's do science." 

A week later I and I'm sitting in same chair again. 

"So how did you feel?" 
"No different, really. I felt nothing. What was I supposed to feel?" 
"Warm fuzzies? Better sense of connection? Some people say they feel 'euphoric'. Did you feel good at all?"
"No, I didn't get any of that. I kinda just got the dumb." 
"..."
"I could pay attention to the conversation, but I couldn't keep track of any background thoughts. Someone would mention something that would remind me of something else, but I couldn't think of what that was, and a moment later I'd have lost what it was they said in the first place. I was fine with a sequential train-of-thought, but only one, not the three conversation forks and three unrelated background processes I'd usually be tracking, certainly nothing abstract or inductive.
"I just felt... dumb, stupid." 
"Did you feel relaxed at all?"
"I guess, kinda? 
"I mean... 
"I was calm... 
"But I knew part of me was missing. 
"And I knew it was there but I couldn't find it. 
"And I was kinda freaking out about it to be honest. 
"But I couldn't listen to the part of me that was screaming and the conversation at the same time. 
"So I couldn't quite get to panicking about it." 
By the time I stopped talking John's eyes were wide, his hands planted firmly flat on his desk. He slowly leaned back in his seat, breathed in, then out again, and said, "That sounds... unpleasant. Did you try it again?" 
"Yeah, little bit.
"And no.
"Whatever that place was, I'd rather not go there again if that's OK?"
"No. 
"No, I don't think I'd ask you to do that, no." 

So apparently the "love hormone" that gives people feelings of trust, emotional attachment, safety, all those things we think of as "happy", doesn't work on me. I don't know what I'm missing, if that helps. I don't get to feel happy, but it looks good on other people so I can still get a vicarious Dopamine hit by doing it to them. Other people can't simultaneously keep track of multiply-nested loops in two conversations, rehearse the agenda for tomorrow's meetings, and compose an email to their mother, all whilst playing DJ for Headcheese Radio's Silent Disco, so it's a bit like "swings & roundabouts", right? 

Just like Popeye The Sailor Man, I am what I am. I don't need to be happy, I just need a win every once in a while. 

When I closed that project off I was at the top of my game, and on top of the world, in a remarkably unique way; usually reaching the peak means climbing over a bunch of other people to get there because being the best means there are a pile of people you're better than. I took nothing away from anyone when I took "no one can do that" and added "except me" to the end, except for the haters who just wanted "that" to fail and... well, fuck those guys. Fuck them right in the ear. I've no interest in competing for a place in the hierarchy; stack-ranking is a demonstrably false economy because almost everyone in a team has something to offer, and if they won't join the team they can get the fuck out of my way. All I ask is a tall problem, and a Purchase Order to Invoice against, and that was exactly the reward offered me, so I kicked my wheels into gear, and with a song in my ears I wound my old life up, spread wings like sails, left Perth in the dust of my wake, and shook my arse back to Canberra. 

It's important to remember something tho: I didn't succeed just because I had a unicorn skillset, although that was a critical factor. I didn't do it alone either, because whilst the haters were legion, I joined a team who were working towards the same goal. I made it happen because I marshalled the forces, set up the field, muttered "Victory or death", and went to war. 
It was a war I fought with everything and nothing to prove, and everything and nothing to lose.
It was a war I fought because that was the only way to get it done. 
But it was a war I never got to stop fighting. 

I was a wreck when I stepped off that flight, held together by duct-tape, determination, and the dearest of friends. Less than a month later I was battling locative dissonance, and it was becoming obvious that my war wasn't over. At the time, I said: 

"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'."
― Thursday, April 20, 2023 - Full Circle...

I'm neurochemically disinclined when it comes to trusting people, so when the Big Bad Bossman turned out to be a hypocritical narcissist arsehole, and the estimable Bosslady quit the field in a final, desperate act of self-preservation, it ripped a hole in me that only Nothing could fill, not because my hard-earned trust was betrayed, but because I ignored the warning signs and walked brazenly into the minefield like an over-confident fool. Even at the top of my game I zigged when I should have zagged, fell for the neon-signposted Samaritan Snare, and got trapped in my very own Kobayashi Maru. The man I thought was a visionary turned out to be a manipulative, gas-lighting bully. I still remember the evening he "fired" me, then threatened to fire my whole team, because I disagreed with him. I was leaning against a desk so I'd only be an inch or two taller than him instead of six, when he declared: 

"You know, I used to have Big Four consultants doing the job your team's supposed to do and they got results," omitting, conveniently, that these were the same people who couldn't do what I'd done for him the year before. 
"Fine," he announced, slapping the desk he was standing next to for emphasis, "on your own head be it," and as he turned to walk away declared, "I'll make some calls tomorrow." 

He got two steps whilst I sat there, silent and still, before he turned and circled back. The argument carried on for another three-quarters of an hour. 

Finding out I couldn't trust the Bossman was one thing, but then I don't really trust anyone. I build a model for who and what they are based on the patterns in their behaviour, and use that model to calculate whether they're a risk or an asset. It didn't matter that he was the most dangerous type of gaslighter; one who absolutely believes, and has always believed, what he's saying even when it contradicts what he said last week, all whilst holding a Master's Degree in Cognitive Dissonance. I was David, and the only person who could actually deliver what he was trying to achieve, and I have a long history of standing up to bullies, and I thought I could handle it. I was wrong, and realising I couldn't trust my own judgement cracked the bedrock. After that it was all downhill. 

By July I'd burned through all of the confidence which had made me believe that I could do the Impossible, and had earned the opportunity to keep doing it forevermore, and was burning through my belief in myself. I was alone at home, and alone in the office, undermined by spies and derision. I have the most amazing friends, so loyal they make you feel like a country they'd go to war for, but I felt so incredibly, indescribably alone, just me and Nothing else; alone-liness and war without end. 

Colleagues who'd worked with me as allies stopped responding to my requests. 
Meetings would be organised about the projects I was working on, and I'd not be invited. 
Projects I'd been told I'd be in charge of were quietly assigned to other Managers.
Approvals I requested so I could proceed with the work I'd been assigned would be ignored, whilst the Approver's complaints about my lack of progress escalated. 
I was systematically side-lined, and isolated, and had my support cut out from under me.
I was set up to fail. 
Throughout, I continued making what small progress I could manage because what else could I do?  There was a job to do which I knew I could, even if I was losing belief that I'd be allowed to do so. 
In the midst of all of this my contract actually got extended, and for why? All I've ever been able to think of is that he was happy to spend over a hundred thousand dollars of someone else's money just so he could keep beating me until I broke. 

To my shame, I took it; I'd taken on a lot of debt to take that plunge back to this side of the country, so I couldn't afford not to. I retain some small pride from how long it took, and how much it cost him. 

I remember, sitting here in a chair that will never fit as well as the one I built out of rubbish from the kerbside then left behind when I left Perth, feeling the pressure crushing my chest like I was drowning all over again, and how badly I just wanted it to end. 

I re-read my own words in the quiet stillness of the night, with a glass of wine, or whisky, or worse, and my noise-cancelling headphones sealing away my ears, and every time the memory it evokes leaves me drowning in tears whilst I sit here and try to just breathe. 

Breathe. 

The post I put out recently called Stop; Continue... started months ago, early in the autumn-before-the-winter-which-is-now-almost-over when you could still sit outside a Canberra pub with an old friend in your shirtsleeves without freezing. Most of these are written the same night as the idea which inspires them pops into my head, but when I was finishing the Perthistential Crisis series in November it was getting harder and harder to draw another bucket from that well. By April all that came up was dust, but I'd still try dipping my quill in it every once in a while nonetheless. I was scratching at it one night, making more mess than sense, when Bridget came round and let herself in with the keycard I'd given her and asked what I was working on, so I let her read the draft. When she got to the part about hands reaching out to help she stopped, looked up from my laptop, and declared: 

"That's bullshit." 
"What is?"
"No one's helped you. No one's done a fucking thing," and I burst into tears. 
She held me whilst I wept for somewhere between an hour and 10 minutes and made sure my laptop didn't skitter and dance on the tiles of my balcony, until eventually I looked up and replied:

 "I need that to not be true." 

So when I finally came back to it, I rewrote it again and again until what I said was. 

"It's always darkest just before the dawn."
― Now That's Bullshit

By the time Bridget turned to me and said "I think we need to talk," a few weeks later, half a year had gone by since I'd finally fucked up and given him the excuse he'd been waiting for to terminate me with prejudice, ending 2023 with a bang that sounded more like a whimper, leaving me a man who felt Nothing but hollow. I left the stage gracefully, in disgrace, and ever since have been trying, and failing, to find a way to capitalise on a stale memory of success that's long-since faded to grey. The achievement I thought I'd build an empire from was gone, eroded to dust, leaving me behind with a cart I built out of Nothing to carry all my failure in because there was so much of it I couldn't hold it any more, and that was all I had left to offer her. That confidence which felt indomitable back then is so far gone I almost can't remember what having it felt like, but I remember a time when I did. Years ago Sandra would talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!" 

But I'm not sure if I can; I don't recognise myself in the mirror any more. 
It's just me in a staring contest with the ledge, each daring the other to jump first. 
I don't think I can win. 

Back when I had a Penpal, in the series of letters which slowly segued sideways from sharing with an ersatz-sibling into screaming into the abyss, she wrote to me: 

"I don’t know how to do much in my own best interests. It’s too heavy and I haven’t the strength to drag it around. But it only gets heavier. It seems so petulant to sit in front of the answer and believe that there is a forcefield preventing me from simply reaching out and even acknowledging it is there. I’d seemingly rather sit in the shadow and stare at the key that opens the door, and grieve for the loss of motivation to grab it. What madness. I acknowledge this feeling you are having, of knowing just what you should do and feeling powerless to actually do it. To endure the continuing pain, and for what? The fleeting glory of inhuman success? The complexity of unjustified fear. Is it the deepness of feeling that if discarded leaves a void of any meaningful (painful) biofeedback?" 
― Monday 5 Dec 2022, 9:38AM - RE: Struggling

That verisimilitude, that connection of minds-which-are-alike, that tipped-hat acknowledgement that "I see what you did there" resonated with me at the time, and has echoed ever since, such that I've made a point of re-using, re-hashing, and re-mixing those words and that sentiment, in homage and thanks, at every opportunity. Sometimes it's the smallest thing people put down that you pick up and run with. Even something so small and fragile as inch can be the the only thing in the world worth having; an inch can take you for miles. An inch can be all it takes to trip you tho, and my feet are no longer between my face and the pavement. 

Now I'm sitting here on my ledge in a chair I bought at a thrift store for $5 that's falling apart beneath me staring into space, the battery light on my laptop is flashing with a rapid cadence, and the fog that's fallen, like the ashes of the bridges I burned on the trip I took to get here, has turned everything a bit grey. My own fall has come and gone, but still beckons nonetheless, and even with Sandra's voice echoing in my ears I'm wondering who I am not to accept it. 

Somehow it feels like everything has now come full circle, because my mouth is so full of dust I can't scream any more, but that's OK even if I'm not, because I've Nothing left to say. 

I just want it to Stop; 

Trailer #2: It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me...

Backing track: Enter Shikari - Jailbreak 

 "You know with how with most of these I don't really tell you what's actually going on, but you can get a pretty good idea what I'm going thru...?" 
"That sounds pretty accurate."
"... and mostly it's pretty miserable, and full of gallows-humour, but I'll almost always throw in a glimmer of hope?"
"Not so sure about that last one," Boldilocks demurred after a brief pause. 
"Y'know, stuff like 'I keep reminding myself', or 'I keep fixing it in my head', that sort of thing." 
"Oh, yeah, I get you. Yeah, that tracks." 
"Right. 

Well this ain't that kind of movie." 

Trailer #1: It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me...

Backing track: Twenty One Pilots - Midwest Indigo

 "OK, so on a scale of 1 to "oof" how do you rate this bit?"
"Geez..." Bolidlocks calculated, "about a 7 or an 8. Yeah, an 8."
"Yeah? Huh, alright, what about this one?" 
"About a 5 or a 6."
"Really? Odd. When Ian sent me thru his review-notes that was the one that he found worthy of note. They're both gut-punch moments, but what was it about the earlier one that landed for you?"
"See, you've always been someone I've had a great deal of respect for, even admired..."
"OK, so first thing: thank you. 
"And second thing: Thank You. 
"But third: so when you read the 'in failure what the fuck worth have I?' bit..."
"Yeah."
"Shit man, that must have really hit you where you live."
"Yeah." 

"Shit.
"Yeah, OK.

"Fuck."

Stop; continue...

Backing track: Enter Shikari - It Hurts 

"It's called a changeover," Jack says in Fight Club. "The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea." 

That works way better in a film where the viewer's point of reference is purely visual; did the protagonist's hair just get longer? Are the characters wearing heavier clothes, indicating that glorious summer has clouded into discontented winter? It's easier to obfuscate the passage of time when there's no timestamp shining the objective light of truth against the veneer of subjective artifice. 

Blogging does ruin the literary construct so, what is one to do?
Swallow a teaspoon of concrete and harden the fuck up, that's what. 

Summer and autumn passed by with the flicker of pages turning past that subtle break where the author spent thousands of words to say nothing of consequence, and the editor said "Yeah, nah, skip to the fucking point." None of which is to say that my adventures over the last six months have been inconsequential; the gulf between experiencing and annunciating them has been a wine-dark sea of troubles filled with slings and arrows which threaten to blot out the sun, and whether the dragons they contain number one or 300 is a story I'll feed piecemeal or à la carte when the maître d' is back from his piss-break and I've finished enjoying my soup. I've continued to fight, because given the options I've had no choice but to keep doing so, but as piss-poor as the effort may have been we've fought in the shade. 

I've not been fighting alone tho, because the operative word is 'we', not 'I'. When the going got tough I didn't get going, I certainly didn't go climbing any mountains; I hit the Big Red Button marked Stop, and phoned a friend (or six); for all that I may be singularly competent even I am not so arrogant to believe that I can survive alone. I'd like to say that I never have been, but I'd be lying if I did; younger-Pete was a dumbfuck, and he's learned a lot since between 20 years and 20 minutes ago. He learned a lifetime and an hour ago that the difference between valour and shame is knowing when to stop and ask for help. If a prayer is a wish intended to be fulfilled by a higher power, then who on heaven or earth could rate higher than the gestalt of those few, those happy few, with and unto whom I've shed blood? In this capitalistic age of quid pro quo, could you imagine that anyone might deign answer the call of he who once was favoured, but now cast down, because in failure what the fuck worth have I? 

Backing track: We Came As Romans - Learning To Survive

In desperation, and dying hope, I reached out anyway. Much to my chagrin I was wrong; there were more hands reaching back offering help and solace than I could possibly grasp; my cup runneth over. 

I didn't build a bridge and get over it; to my shame one was built for me, and I couldn't.
For all that I may have fallen from grace; hands reached out to catch me before I hit bottom, and I still did. 

Their reach may have exceeded their grasp, but that's not the point; what mattered to me was that they tried. After all, I'm the one who was falling. 

Back in January, I got the arse from the Job That Brought Me Back To Canberra. I've not been subtle about the bullshitfuckery, or the stress, riding that Gravy Train turned out to be; I expended thousands of obfuscated words on the subject over the last twelve months. I reached out and touched the butt, swallowed the hook, was towed by the line, and got dragged down by the sinker; over the months that followed I realised I'd been drawn to the light, but was still in the cold, doing my best to Just Keep Swimming even while I was Drowning in Silence. 

I fucked up; I thought I could be a lamplighter and illuminate the path for those who were to follow. 

I fucked up; I imagined others would see the truth and follow my example. 

I fucked up again and again; I was the dumbfuck who set himself on fire for no one's benefit, let alone his own. 

The fault, as always, is my own, and owning it isn't a choice I have the luxury of avoiding so how could I ever try to do so? Everything I have was begged-for, borrowed, or stolen; my time and my mistakes are the only things I can truly claim to own. 

Yet the bridges I burned still light the way. It's called a changeover; you have to come to a stop before you can continue. 

Backing track: Twenty One Pilots - At The Risk Of Feeling Dumb

Back in February I was on a call with Andrew The Shipwright and mentioned that I was going to have to actually bill him for my time, rather than what I could be bothered to invoice: 

"Mate, you looked after me when things went to shit a couple of years back, I can't tell you how much I've appreciated what you've done for us since.
"Look, I should tell you: I reached out to a local mob who specialise in Apple stuff recently; I hope you're not offended, you always said you didn't really do Apple, and you've been pretty busy over the last couple of years..."
"No, of course, no issue. Are they sorting you out?"
"That's the thing, they've not responded, and it sounds like you're going to have some some time on your hands and honestly I'd much rather pay you to do it..." 
"Man, I really appreciate that. I won't pretend I know how to do what you're asking, but I've poked similar shit recently and I can work it out. I don't know how long that'll take, but give me a few days. If they don't get back to you before I do I'll absolutely make it work for you, and you know you'll only get billed for what's productive." 

I spent a week of research and prototyping, trying things out, wiping it, then doing it better. I bought a second-hand iPhone 11 off my 2022 Padawan to test with, another week getting it right, and after a fortnight of full-time effort I pinged him: 

"Did that local mob get back to you?"
"Nope."
"OK, cool. So here's the product, and here's where I've documented the process on your Sharepoint. It turns what used to take ~4 hours into 15-20min." 
"Shit, really? Damn! How long did it take, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Better if you don't," I said, "I've invoiced you for 10 hours, plus 2 for the documentation and process workflow. Working it out is on me. 
"BTW, the system I used also works for Windows MDM, and I reckon I can set up the same sort of automation in another 5 hours." 
"Shit really? Damn! What are you waiting for? Fucking do it!"

So I did. 

A couple of months later Andrew needed a server, and a new network, and a partridge in a pear tree, so I spec'd and sold it to him. Quotes approved, orders placed, deliveries pending, Andrew called me: 

"So would you come back to Perth to get this all installed or...?"
"Look, I've got my Remote Hands Partner who can get the critical onsite stuff done, but there's enough to do I was thinking it'd be worth hopping on a 'plane. Not something I could justify billing you for, but there's enough meat in this job I was thinking I just might." 
"I was thinking too, I reckon it'd be totally worth having you on-site to make sure it gets done right, and I've got a couple of million Qantas Frequent Flyer Points I could throw into the mix..."

So I went. 

In the 10 days I spent in Perth I built his new server, rebuilt his network, replaced his internet service, and a dozen things besides. Half-way through I handed him a brand-new iPhone, sat him down in front of the process I'd written up, and got him to test it out. 

10 minutes later, sprawled on the concrete next to the rack I was re-cabling, I heard him giggle maniacally. 

"Everything OK?"
"This... this used to take me a day to do, and I'd always miss something. Now... now it just fucking works!" 
"That IS what you pay me for. So the doco makes sense then?" 

He just giggled some more, handed me his personal iPhone and said, "can we get mine done next?"

So we did. 

Andrew's a Great Guy. 
He introduced me to the client who kept me in beer & skittles through the "Covid Years". 
He let me use his Laser Cutter to create my Art Project. 
He dragged my burned and broke arse out of the fire when it seemed I'd burned all my bridges behind me. 

Whether or not I might have paid it forward, he's gone out of his way to pay it back. 

And, to my shame, he's not the only one. 

Musical aftermath: Electric Six - Improper Dancing 

So here we are, at the punctuated moment that isn't the full-stop at the end of a sentence, so much as the pause connecting one with the next, and allows time to catch one's breath; expressing to the audience that "[this] story isn't over." 

That moment in one's story that screams "STOP!", but implies 

"CONTINUE!"

A List(er)ing Dwarf on the Rim(mer) of Red-shift...

Musical accompaniment: YUNGBLUD - Happier (feat. Oli Sykes Of Bring Me The Horizon) 

I smashed my ash tray the other day. I try to not break things by accident; if I'm going to destroy something I prefer it to be on purpose. That night I reached out, fumbled, knocked it off the edge of the table and heard it shatter on the tiles. 

What a silly, pointless thing, to hear porcelain skitter and dance across the hard surface of my balcony; what a stupid fucking waste. 

In the back of my head, under his breath, Paranoia muttered "Just like the rest of your life, innit mate? What a worthless excuse you turned out to be," whilst herring rained from the sky. 
"Heeeeey," Confidence bellowed, "don't listen to him! Didn't you just re-create the tech platforms for a pair of businesses? Set them up for more than they could dream, you did. What did Andrew The Shipwright call you? A Wizard. A WIZARD!" 
"But what does he have to show? Some smartest geezer in the room you turned out to be..." 

I did build a setup so cool that random passers-by stopped and said 'Holy shit, that's amazing,' whilst pulling enough revenue to keep my payroll covered thru the next couple of months... 
Wait, wasn't that the Mayor of Warsaw who just exploded? 

"Call that a reprieve? Re-privy, I say. Your career's in the toilet. Don't go trying to change the subject. What? Just trying to be friendly..."
"Nobody cares what you have to say! I certainly don't, and neither does the Wizard of Tech, amirite Tech-Wiz?" 
"Wiz'ing it up against the wall is what he's doing. Look at 'im, he's all pale and trembly. Look how your hands are shaking and keep dropping things. I bet you've got a terminal disease, always happens to people who least expect it, don't you find that?" 

The bickering voices in the back of my mind's fever-dream go back and forth pointlessly, two fragments of the same shattered psyche skittering and dancing across the hard surface of my broken reality; the mind is such a terrible thing to waste. 

I keep fixing it in my head that my life isn't actually broken, and nervous tremors not-withstanding, nothing happens entirely by accident. I might not be confident of my purpose, but I'm not paranoid enough to forget how necessary it can be to destroy what's in the way of creating a new, deep space to get lost in. 

Ian...

Musical introduction: dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip - Stunner

"OK, look. 
"'You're good at this 'empathy' shit, right?
"So I want you to put yourself in the position of this guy I know."

"Alright."

"He's been dumped out of the blue, he's trying to be a good guy about it.
"He knows she's got her own shit going on, but so does he. 
"He's feeling lost, he's feeling alone. 
"He's trying to be noble, but this is hurting. 
"What would you say... 
"Fucking... 
"Can you please for fuck's sake let yourself be angry and stop trying to take care of everyone around you?" 

"I appreciate what you're trying to say and I'll absolutely take that on-board because there's a ring of truth to it and I'll certainly consider applying self-care but..."

"FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER FUCKING FUCK!" I growled, waving both middle-fingers at my webcam. 

Because no matter how much I might try to apply ethical frameworks to the world around me, Ian is the best of all of us; if you ever want to know what hill I will willingly die on tomorrow, look to windward and see where Ian is standing now. 

Because no matter how sick I am of how that guy always makes me look bad by comparison, I hope he never stops. 

Where for most people I have anecdotes to illustrate a narrative, for Ian I have only sentiment.
Where for most people I use allegory to illuminate, Ian has always been luminary.
Where for most people I try to set an example by which to lead, Ian is someone I try to exemplify so that one day he may lead us all. 

Hoobastank - Born To Lead

Not that he ever would, because whilst he'd appreciate the sentiment he'd assure you that there are other luminaries who can bring a more expansive skill-set to bear on that particular requirement and, as flattered as he is to be considered, he's comfortable engaging in a supporting role and would hate to tread on the toes of others who... 

would walk the fuck over him because their hubris was greater than his humility.  

But if there was anyone's army I'd volunteer to lead simply because I know he'd never ask, it would be Ian's. 

The story of how Ian and my lives intersected is as annoying to attempt to retell as it is to remember; we met at a party, and the rest is a history which I'm long past caring about. Regardless, I owe a debt of gratitude to Jenna for the part she played in bringing us together. Sifting my memory, a better one works its way to the surface: 

Back in October last year, Ian pinged me randomly with a link to the Good Things Festival saying, "BTW, this festival is on in Sydney the day after my conference. I suppose I may as well." 
"Hook me up, I'll meet you there. 
"I said that BEFORE I looked down and saw Enter Shikari, Hanabie... JEBEDIAH???
"DAFUQWAT?"
"Leave it with me," he replied, stealing one of my favourite lines. 
"FUCK YOU!
"Oh gods, I'm defensive. 
"How are you better at my catch-phrases than I am? So naturally?" 

He chose, wisely, not to respond, but a couple of days later a ticket landed offhandedly in my inbox by way of reply. 

After PayID'ing him, we caught up in Perth a couple of weeks later (see #perthistential crisis), and when I got back to Canberra I booked seats on the Murray's service to-and-from Sydney, as well as a place to stay so I wouldn't have to try driving there and back the same day. Then, in early December I headed up and managed to catch the tail-end of Enter Shikari, then all of Hanabie, at one end of the event before meeting him up during Sepultura at the other. As I made my way over I happened to be passing the main stage where Slowly Slowly were playing their one song I knew, a cover of a Blink 182 song I've always felt sentimental for, so I stopped and listened; leaning against the fence around a lighting rig with a stupid grin lighting up my face, it was a perfect fucking moment. 

Shortly afterwards I was sitting under the shade of one of the few trees inside the perimeter at Centennial Park, listening to Corey Taylor belt out Before I Forget, filling my sweetest friend in on the fascinating Redheaded Distraction (aka Bridget) I'd met shortly after I saw him last: 

Storytime continued as we shifted back to the left to fulfil my teenage dream of seeing Jebediah live, interrupted whenever "18-year old Pete" had a happy. 

It was a fucking sweet day out, so good even having to evacuate three songs into Fallout Boy's headline performance thanks to an incoming thunderstorm, whilst lightning cracked overhead, and getting drenched to the bone during the downpour which followed couldn't dampen my fondness; but it was nowhere near as sweet as the sorrow I felt saying goodnight later at Sydney Central Station. 

Loyalty can't exist without trust.
Trust can be earned or broken, never bought or sold; somehow I, wherefore I know not, came to find myself in possession of Ian's.
How could I not repay that non-performatively, and in kind, when undeserving as I might be he has been nothing but? 

Rare indeed are people whom I consider a peer, let alone an equal; Ian is one of the rarest kind, who'll ask "How the fuck are you, man?" before I can. 

Where most Aussie Blokes sling shit at each other as a sign of affection, we sling compliments. 
Where most men joust with their phallus, we join the dots with our pens.  
Where most would pontificate, Ian's a man who's sentiment is all-but-silent but speaks Louder Than Words. 

 - 06/01/2024, 00:52

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. 

Bridget's Guest Post: Resurrection + bridge = Happiness?

Musical accompaniment: Happiness: We're all in this together

Motherfucking... 

I sit at my desk at a client-site and find myself enthralled in some jargon-laden text from a document I've been thrown to translate into mortal comprehensibility so that "anyone" could read it when a looming presence at the edge of my vision is gesticulating the desire to be seen. I swivel, fingers still dancing across the keys, finishing the sentence that's dribbling out of my thoughts and smile to acknowledge that he’s got my eye. With the final clatter of keys, I strip off my headset, ready to plunge into the inevitable small talk. It's the usual dance of pleasantries that comprises some arrangement of the following: 

“What do you do? Who are you? I'm Peter. Hi.”

That initial exchange was brief, quickly fragmented by colleagues and the relentless routine of work. Yet, in the days that followed, our conversations meandered through shared interests and general banter. A business card, defiantly flouting WCAG standards, found its way into my hand, an artifact of our growing rapport, but secretly a way to give me his digits, drawing to a finale of "do you want to grab drinks/coffee sometime?"

3 days after that first “Hi,” and I'm spending the night outside, under a cafe table umbrella, rain drumming a chaotic symphony above. My curls fighting the straight form I fried them into whilst I try to decipher meaning from patchwork stories, heedful warnings and guarded disclaimers.  

It isn't the first time someone has caught my interest, but I know how to keep walking. I'm pretty sure that's what people are supposed to do?

As the evening draws to an end, he gets half-way through charting a course for a kiss when my hand shoots out, barricading the way. An impromptu checkpoint, halting the beat of feet along the path to my lips. I couldn't let him leave whilst I stood there frozen in nervous-lockdown. Nonetheless, seconds later I’m staring at the wet bitumen in front of my feet as I walk away and don't break my stride until I reach my car. 

"What the fucking fuck just happened," I think as, hands shaking, I drive home, pull in, get out, lock car and ride my autopilot-driven feet into my apprehensive- and sulking-dog-filled house, my hands empty my pockets, putting the contents into the dump-bowl. I reach the end of my newly-initiated runAway(); subroutine and I can't stop. Moving frantically to my room I get changed, hands shaking, heart pounding, seeking refuge under the covers, but my mind is in runaway mode, relentless, and sleep eludes me.

I am not OK, and few know that; I haven't been for 12 months, five years, eight years... Depending on which event becomes the reference point. 

In the eyes of phantom critics, this all may seem too hasty, a story accelerating ahead before the previous had ended. But those spectral naysayers don't truly exist beyond the confines of my thoughts. Adrenaline switched my head into the defiant state of alert, a stubborn 'screw you' to the idea of rest. My arms secured over my chest, fastening in my heart, curled in the fetal position, I seek an echo of security, a fragment of comfort. 

Trip Down Memory Fucking Lane welcomes you aboard flight FU23, a four and a half hour psychological, turbulent journey from the mirage of stability to the realisation of "fuck okay, that's actual trauma." We give zero shits whether you enjoy the trip, and your comfort is of no importance to our crew whatever. The in-flight entertainment will be your entire life and deepest secrets you kept even from yourself revealed to a psych who’ll provide no indication of how fucked up you really are. And Offer No Help. The meal service will commence shortly with overly salted 'healing' stew and followed by your choice of the bitterest coffee, or most traumatic tea. But until then, sit down, don't buckle up, you are in for a long trip and we don't care if you make it out safely. 

I didn't make it out safely, I still am dealing with the shockwaves from that conversation.

A week ago, I woke up in the way that was more "easing into the day with colours softly blending to create a sunrise on canvas" and less "I can't believe I have to face the horror of another fucking day". In my stirring, an arm rolls over my body pulling me closely to the heartbeat of its owner. 

You. 

Your rough fingers touch my skin and your embrace holds me as if I'm a rare and delicate treasure, with a gentle yet firm urgency, suggesting a deep fear of my slipping away, like a cherished keepsake that might vanish at any moment. Everything was alright, when you held me through the night, and I found myself thinking "isn't it nice to be held instead of clinging onto ghosts." 

Confronting my reflection, the moment of epiphany is palpable, no need for imagination. The last time I let my guard down, allowed my solitude and unreciprocated affections shift onto someone else, I paid a steep price. I had trusted and surrendered my body, only to be left with scars etched deep within my psyche. Now, as I ponder the possibility of setting aside the protective verses of the Psalm of Pete#23, there's a flicker of hope that history won't repeat itself. That this time, maybe, just maybe, I won't end up nursing fresh wounds in the seclusion of my mind. 

Nothing Lasts Forever, so should this even start? 

Finding oneself lost in the space between the familiar comfort of a dream once felt when last I felt truly safe, and the deep blue of my desire and love. In space no one can tread on your dreams. It's the friction of re-entry that burns, and only time will tell where my remains will fall. 

Is this what I get for wanting things? This life that's happened while I was busy making other plans? For things to be other than what they are, you have to give up the infinite possibilities of the deep, and allow yourself the chance to burn bright, knowing that every shooting star will inevitably burn out. But maybe this star will burn bright and long, and land with some remains of itself still intact?

Which is the way?

To experience life is to experience changes; I moved across the country only to find myself pursuing the dreams from a life before, but I insisted on running on the hedonic treadmill. Now I have a life, so it goes... 

I'm try’na wind back the clocks to before… to before I had all the things that I thought would fill up that hole, but the goal keeps receding.

Everything and everyone keeps receding, forever out of the reach of my arms. 

The thing is: I've been 'with' someone until recently, but I've been doing this life, my life, by myself, alone for some time. There's something about being close to someone who, really, remained kilometres away. It haunts you, that proximity interlaced with distance. 

Like the little conversations that happen when you *see* the same person; all the time spent on a patchworked background can't replace the connection missing from relaying stories through the impersonal screen of a handheld device. “Love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience”. But without that shared journey, I'm just a temporary companion, hitching a ride in the middle of their story. I'm there neither for the beginning nor the end, our paths diverging before they even know where they are going. It's an incomplete experience, certainly one that wasn’t shared.

The casual comfort that comes with the certainty of seeing someone again soon. Outside of the occasional visits and a fading echo of love - a love that I watched drive away with a resigned ease - it's been ages since I've felt comfortable enough to let go without clinging. I don't know what it feels like to be okay with ‘goodbye’. 

Comfort being the operative word; that concept which defies my brain. My narrator says that either something is wrong, or something will go wrong, regardless of engineering, logic, or design. Something was wrong; saying goodbye was a warm comfort.

The months leading up to that goodbye really rammed home how much I was already alone, living with an additional 'I' on my RACI that no longer needed to be there. 

Cooking is something that never tripped me up, it was always important - and we loved cooking, creating, making something, and we had joy in sharing. But how can you share food with someone 650 kilometers away? By informing. A meal that I would have taken joy from sharing, now pasted as a .jpg on Discord to be seen, 'thumbs-up' reacted, but not shared. 

So, I find myself 2 hours away from a beach, no bottle or paper in hand, laptop at my fingertips and a page full of ramblings. I ponder, what the fuck am I trying to say with all this rubbish?

I haven't decided whether to chase the shooting star or capitulate and sink into the deep blue. 

Can I keep pretending to be okay when the touch of a man who is dead inside is enough to make me melt into a puddle? Can I lie to myself when I Know The Storm Is Coming, and the smallest of downpours will turn that puddle into an ocean?

Emotions dictated that you face your fears, lower your fists, and find a Bridget to get over it. You won't need to re-learn "dating”. It will just fall.  

With or without help from the gods. 

Extraction by way of retraction...

Musical accompaniment: Jebediah - Please Leave 

The jets spooled up and started generating thrust as if driven by the same elastic band that was finally starting to snap me back to where I came from. 

Finally. 

The equilibrium moment in the bungie-jump into the hell of my past seemed to last a lifetime, but in a few weeks when some time has passed I know it will feel like the blink of an eye. Of the many things I've learned in the many days I've clung to the surface of this planet, it's that interminable and infinitesimal are just two words for the same quantum moment; which we use depends entirely upon our perspective from our relative position along the line prescribed by Time's Arrow. 

Sitting in this indifferently-comfortable Virgin Airlines-branded seat constructed in a factory I once watched roll past the window of a bus to Seattle, Washington, USA I give no fucks either way, but I'm glad for every second which passes, and the 236 metres it propels me further away from the place I left 234 days ago. Every moment of comfortable familiarity felt like a blanket weighted with glass beads, each one inscribed with a memory, and for every one that, upon inspection, played back a fond one there were three more filled with the screaming void of every mistake I'd ever made, everyone I'd ever hurt, and everything I've ever wanted to leave behind so I could be a better me, me-ified, me-born. 

I'm not sure what I've wanted more over the last 10 days; to go back, or just to not be there. As the days flowed past I started feeling like I was fading to match the scenery, each one harder and harder to handle. 

I acknowledge that I'm leaving not proud, not noble, not with my head held high. I'm just trying to slide thru with as little friction as possible, leaving as small a wake as I can manage, not even the hero of my own story, just a Boy who's Lost and wants to go Home, flying though the night towards the second airport from the right of the map, hoping to reach it by morning.  

I've no control in this moment, no agency, nothing to do but wait. I've no ruby slippers to click together and make a wish, just the second-hand ticking away on a ruby bearing'd movement, not counting up or down, but around and around and around, waiting until the ride the ticket I bought will take me back to where I'd rather be. 

I fucking hate Perth, not because there's anything inherently wrong with it (although there's plenty), but because of the who I remember being when the soles of my shoes meet the pavement of its cloyingly familiar streets, and the who I can't not be when I'm there. The weight of my own history rests heavily on my shoulders; have you ever tried to carry the weight of you and all of your past selves around? 

Fortunately, practical programming practice prescribes the use of pointer-variables, so post-compile they all precipitate to a particular point. For once metacursion has a practical application, at least where life-hacking Virgin Airline's baggage allowance is concerned. 

I have no idea how or where to finish this; finishing implies an 'end', and that's not what this feels like. 

Whilst every 4.24 seconds, and each kilometre that represents, is a relief, the weight on my mind is in no way diminished. The same elastic band which extracted me from my personal hell is nonetheless propelling me back into a battleground I not so much chose, as landed in. I won't pretend that I've the energy or strength to hit it running, but I will at least stick it, and make an impact. 

Sepia stained skies...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musical afterthought: Metric - Oh Please

The rest is on me. 

Just when I thought I was out...

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

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

Musical accompaniment: Birds of Tokyo - Circles 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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