Saturday, 29 October 2011

Airports and Roundabouts


There are a lot of beautiful things in the world and many many mundane ones. Inanimate things. Areas. Spaces. Structures that give you no thought but to negotiate your way past without hitting them.

It's a case of airports and roundabouts.

Thing is that if you stall long enough to have to think about them, they are magic in their own way.

The modern roundabout is simple and highly effective. It is a control structure that regulates traffic with easy rules and without bringing everyone to a stand still. There is immense beauty in its simplicity. Simple rules of uni-directional flow and everyone knowing who gives way to who.

Next time you meet a roundabout, absorb the structure and give way to the right.


Then there are airports. You enter through some sliding doors and check luggage and print tickets and clear security and drink bad coffee. Around you, large canisters full of highly explosive jet fuel hit the ground and leave it at extreme speed. A bunch of people in a tower sew their paths, as thousands of people arrive and depart on their way to another identical depot.

At the most, you walk a hundred meters to a gate and wait in managed silence for your horseless, groundless, floating carriage to arrive. Then you climb aboard a vehicle with a hundred strangers to share air and bad food, while you achieve uplift and cut what was months of travel in to an annoying several hours.

People talk of smart phones, mapping the genome and coloured contact lenses and they are fabulous. There are also things we take for granted that if you stop and think of, you will release that we live in the future.

Friday, 28 October 2011

He doubts my source


Today he told me on the phone that pain only initiates the art and that my beautiful words then flow afterwards.

He is wrong.

When a passionate emotion owns me (beit pain or lust or love or hate or exhaustion), it drives every word I write. There is no eloquence in starting a sentence with it and ending it with another.

It is his way of living with the bump in joy he causes me. Bump down. Bump up. All cause.

I write it. I feel it as I write. It is good.

If you read this and feel the ride then say. Tell him, he is wrong.

Monday, 24 October 2011

Fatalism and Free Spirits


Last week left me with many thoughts after a 3 hour conversation with an old acquaintance. It is not a conversation that I see being repeated but it was an awakening moment.

This person kept telling me that he is a free spirit. That he deals with the here and now and does not plan for things to come or worry about things that have passed. I listened carefully and with interest because even though I am quite random at times, my view of life and destiny are quite separate from his.

He spoke of life happening and just taking it as it comes. I cringed.

I have heard this cry from many people. They are usually stuck in a rut of some sort. They are uneducated; unable to turn the tide that carries them in to and out of situations of life; and they are happy in their silent surrender.

There is peace and happiness in accepting your lot in life but I believe there is meaning and adventure in owning each turn you choose to make and driving out a life based on choice and consequence.

Life is not something that happens to a person. Happiness does not choose or unchoose you. It is not written by a deity with all knowledge, all sight and all presence. For me, I am lucid. I am conscious. I am the person who decides what happens to me.

Maybe, I am not a free spirit who can just sail along on the crest of existence, only breathing and sleeping and eating and... well, all those basic things. There has to be more and I make it so.

The second that I lie down and believe that the outcome is determined before I took the steps towards it, is the day that I will give up.

The free spirit thing is fine as long as they are not actually a fatalist that has signed a contract with lazy and opted for letting life happen to them.

Thursday, 20 October 2011

Absense


I stopped writing when I found you.

It took a long time to work out why I stopped writing. It wasn't you. Don't flatter yourself. My drivers are intrinsic.

It was the lack of pain.

The pain gave me a certain kind of agony that no one else can know but someone who knows exactly how to explain their feelings. If you have the words to describe it then you should be able to solve it. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Sometimes seeing something with clarity only means that you can watch in instant replay, the person who stabs your naked body repeatedly while you float above it feeling the knife as it slices your soul. Bleeding nothing but the essence of who you are.

Pain leads to art. Pain leads to music... paintings... drawings... words of whim... words of wisdom. Pain is truth. Truth is pain. There is nothing more honest that the rare raw bruised feeling that life leaves you with after you've stood and fought or loved or represented and then lost.

A friend once told me that there is no losing in life. That life is not a competition. Any true perfectionist will explain to you that losing is a game against yourself. It is the motivation to be more than you are and then the inability to reach an _apparently_ unattainable goal. Try tell the perfectionist that they can not reach that apple and they will make you sit in a comfortable chair as they prove you wrong.

The words come from the tearing of your being. They are the beauty you can only show when the lights are out, the vodka has been poured and the world has forgotten you.

Tuesday, 18 October 2011

Friday, 14 October 2011

My head is stuck in the clouds

I met him again. He's stuck in my head. My head is stuck in the clouds. It's one of those never-gonna-happen situations. That doesn't seem to kill it. It just is what it is. Over-thinking it will make it more than what it is or ever will be. Breathe. Live it. Let it happen. Then let it die.

Monday, 10 October 2011

Memories in red and green

I married in dappled sunlight under the trees of a rainforest next to an emerald green river, surrounded by everyone I loved. I wore red.

She rises up like the tide


This weekend past, was a lot like those weekends I remember when I was a teeny bopper. It started with a fabulous night out with my girlfriends. We drank bubbly, met two new girls to add to our crew and then danced until our feet hurt and our eyes went all blinky. Then we went to a mates where we cooked frozen chips and covered them in MSG loaded chicken salt (with some Seth Arfikan) name.

The rest has been a slow blur of chained naps, necromancy via fiction, teddy bears with 20's headbands and constant grazing.

Tomorrow, it's back to work with early breakfast meetings to head off project dramas and then on to writing code and getting stuff done.

There is only one thing I need to get life to the point where I am 100% satisfied with it - physical health and that starts Tuesday with my new personal trainer. Apparently, his name is Dorian. I can only imagine he is super fit and hides a painting at home of an ugly fat man. Oscar Wilde would be happy with that scenario.

Maybe happiness is just being who you want to be.

Sunday, 2 October 2011

Now you're just somebody that I used to know


There is a song bouncing off the walls at the moment by Gotye called Somebody that I used to know. My need to listen to it over and over again comes late at night at that time when it takes clenching teeth to keep my eyes open.

I was sitting at my work desk on the 22nd of September wondering what I'd forgotten to do. Did I miss someone's birthday? Did I have an appointment for a pedi or a massage? Was there a bill due?

I forgot it again. Even after toughening myself up a couple of weeks in advance for what would have been my fifth wedding anniversary or our 14th year together, I still forgot.

Right now, that seems to be a good thing but I can't lie. When I did remember, it ached. Ached through my entire body. Skin, organs, limbs and the split ends lying on the floor of my hairdresser's floor.

There may always be a pain there... where he used to be. Even now he's just somebody that I used to know.

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