What You've Got

When The Love Gets Too Old

Johnny Depp is back in the courts fighting his ex-wife Amber Heard. I don't really keep track of it but the headlines have a way of dancing into view. Based on what I'm reading Amber seems like a real piece of work but also, Johnny was a fool to believe this nut job woman was the right woman for him. On one level, I sort of sympathise because if you're a guy, you kind of let things just happen and trust in yourself to make things right. It's only natural - the extent you can believe in a natural with this kind of thing. 

One of my friends Quincy is getting a divorce. It's suddenly blown up this past week and his wife is talking lawyers and getting papers drawn up. It doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. Maybe there was a fundamental difference in not just outlook but beliefs as well. It's been crazy with the pandemic and maybe they spent too much time in each other's company and they're both sick of one another. That's not exactly surprising. Fortunately they don't have kids so it's not like they've got that to fight over.

His ex-wife-to-be Rhonda seems pretty relaxed about it all, now that she's getting a divorce. Maybe she's been feeling like this was a long time coming. It's hard to say. Quincy is complaining that she's making him out to be the bad person and that's why they're getting a divorce. Knowing the arguments they've had in the last few years, I can't say that Quincy is without some modicum of guilt in the way things have transpired. They're being mean to one another because they're unhappy with the way things are. What can they do if counselling hasn't worked?

Oh yes, the counselling. Quincy has described it as an opportunity for Rhonda and the counsellor to gang up on him every session. 

"Every session! Like I'm some kind of abusive psycho villain!"

The thing is, Quincy will be out in the wide world in no time, probably looking to hook up with somebody. It's probably for the best anyway because he'd always grumble about how they missed their boat for having kids and all they had to look forward to was old age with cats. Maybe he'll manage to find a woman who can give him kids, even at this stage of his life. I myself would not want to do that, but he actually sounds game. 

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Dinosaur Remains On The Moon

Speaking Of Dinosaurs...

I've had COVID-19. No it wasn't my very own personal extinction event because here I am typing this stuff. 

Anyway, as I started to recover bit by bit, I had this hazy bit of time where I could sit upright but do not much more than watch stuff. And I would be like that only because after 3 days of laying flat on my back in bed, my whole back got sore. So it was better to sit up at the computer and watch something - and that is how I came to watch the entire 3 episodes of 'The Beatles: Get Back'. 

I'll try and write more about it in the coming days but the short version is it's like wading through unedited footage in parts, even though Peter Jackson cut it down from something like 60 hours of raw footage. Because it was Peter Jackson, it could only come down to 8 hours something, which seems to be the duration to which Jackson makes his magnum opuses. 

Do I love it? Parts of it, yes. Do I hate it? Maybe the parts where they interminably work out material and then go in disjointed jams on covers. It's clearly about the extending and exploring the process The Beatles had in creating their material, but at the same time it could've been a punchy 3 hours and we'd be no less enlightened to the vibe. The most moving bit is the rooftop concert because suddenly they come into focus under the glare of the public, and they play really tight after spending 8 hours of the documentary not really getting it together. 

Anyway, I'll write more on it in another entry. For now, I just feel like I've seen the very dinosaur remains on the moon as postulated. 

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Cosmic Orphans

Sunken Dreams In The Black Sea 

The amazing news of the last day or two is how the Russians had to concede they lost their flagship, the Moskva. At first they said they had a fire near the armoury and the ammunition blew up. Then it came up that the Ukrainians managed to successfully launch a missile at the ship and this had caused major damage. The Russians flatly denied it had been attacked, but conceded it had been sunk later on. Which is to say, they were happy to admit they were incompetent over admitting that they had in fact lost their flagship to a country with no significant navy. Their flagship went down without exchanging fire with any other ship, its demise resembling more of a gangland hit than say, Battle of Trafalgar. 

And now the Black Sea Fleet is down to 10 ships. For some reason I thought of Admiral Nikoai Nebogatov. The Russians really suck at this war thing. 

Panspermia

We are all cosmic orphans, if you believe the theory of panspermia. 

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Social Media Turned Us Into Rats

Hungry Rats At That

It's true. Social media turns us into hungry rats. Especially if you pay attention to who is disliking what or how a post is getting responses. Influencers might be the worst variety of social media junky one could become. 

The fractious nature of public discourse following the events of 2016 sort of paints a picture where a whole bunch of us who are on social media are in turn incredibly vulnerable to being manipulated by bad faith actors. When you look at the fact that Facebook essentially allowed itself to be the implement of choice for an outfit like Cambridge Analytica (special emphasis on the Anal there), who were in turn paid by Vladimir Putin to fuck with the UK vote on Brexit and the US Presidential election which led to the Trump Administration, tells you enough about how little social media companies think of the average punter. In some ways they don't even care about the politics or how they look in light of all this as long as Congress can be talked out of regulating social media as a media industry. 

So that's on one side, and here we are tapping on our bloody mobile phone apps liking and laughing and whatever else responses they give, and handing over gobs and gobs of data - and all the while our brains are impoverished by the cumulative experience of just being on social media. It really isn't a fair exchange. They sort of have you over a barrel in the sense that, with some people, social media is the only way with which to keep in touch. It's a frightening world that we've allowed ourselves to build. The conscious architect really balls-ed up that one. 

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Grieving Stages

When My Friend Went Wonky

You don't really notice your friends sliding down into alcoholism. You notice them drinking heavier than at other times, or you might notice them drinking at odd hours that most people would not. Sometimes you might notice they're mixing their alcohol with meds and that might be disturbing. 

By the time my friend was identified with having full-on alcoholism and alcohol dependency, he was well and truly too deep into it. The diagnosis as such came years and years too late. I blamed myself for not saying earlier that their drinking was a problem - but then it would have fallen on deaf ears. Once somebody is deep into that vortex, the last thing they listen to is their friend saying maybe they should lay off the turps. And so you tend to lose your friends to their addiction, even if you want to lend them a hand. I imagine people who lose their friends and family to other things like opioids would be much worse. Interventions don't help because they're addicted to opium and that's the toughest thing out there. 

In the end you lose them and you go through the grieving stages to come to terms with the loss - even if they didn't exactly die. They might still be alive, but you nonetheless journey through the grieving stages. I can be disconcerting as you negotiate your anger and resentment as well as attempts to negotiate with the reality. It really is no fun at all. 

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Is Our Galaxy In A Bubble?

We're Most Certainly In A Housing Bubble, Though 

Well, everything looks to be in a bubble on some level. One of the more encouraging things during all the lockdowns was how science kept progressing. One had to be surprised at how quickly they put together effective vaccines against the original strain. It's a shame the Omicron variant sort of watered down the effectiveness of the vaccines, but it was pretty amazing all the same. If this whole thing had happened a decade earlier, I doubt we would have been able to work fro him so effectively, and we sure wouldn't have been able to come out of the lockdowns with a modicum of confidence without the vaccines. 

In light of that, you take note that maybe the very galaxy we live in, is inside some kind of bubble. The information seems to be a metaphor for our state of being in lockdown. 

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20th Century Rocket Boy

Getting Away With Mass Murder

The news out of Ukraine regarding the reclaimed township of Bucha is beyond the pale.  

In response Russia has claimed is that it's all fake news and we should be examining our own conscience. That one's pretty laughable because I living in country that tears itself apart over whether one its great war heroes might in fact be a psychopathic war criminal. Next to what Russia has been doing in Ukraine, it's arguable our conscience is white as bleached toilet paper before use compared to the shit they're carrying around in their lives in the Russian leadership.

So Joe Biden has since again labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal - and by modern definitions, he would most certainly fit the accusation. The thing is, he's also hiding behind a wall of nukes in one of the most paranoid dictatorships on par with the one in Pyongyang. 

The thing is, we can accuse Putin of war criminality all we like. If we can't bring him to justice, it's all kind of pointless. There are clear signs we still have to negotiate with this sociopath if we want to get to peace, and he's going to push every lever and button to get what he wants to let us get to that peace. Even when we get the peace we want, we would not be able to bring him to justice as things stand. 

So what good is any of it? It just goes to prove that the notion of war criminality is the justice of victors. If you can do it and win, you will get away with it as surely as Vladimir Putin will. 

It's a sucky kind of world, but them's the breaks. 

When The Lights Go Out

Somewhere in the pandemic, Chuck Yeager passed away. He was 97 and its wasn't from COVID-19 so it's not like he was cut down before his time. It was a full and eventful life with plenty of achievements. Frankly, I was a little surprised he was still around even for most of 2020. 

There's still the weird romanticism for the early pioneers of space. It is kind of cool to be a test pilot that straps into a rocket plane and breaks the sound barrier. It's a weirdly optimistic moment in history, even as the Cold War hangs nuclear weapons over everybody's heads. If you want nihilism, there was plenty of that to go around in the 1980s, but a generation before that, there was still this buzz for the technological achievements and accomplishments of these figures. Chuck Yeager was somebody you learned about in books, if nothing else to get to put a name and a face on the Bell X-1.

And just like that with his passing another piece of 20th century sort of fades out of view. We're already 1/5th of the way into the 21st Century, and in several years' time it would be a quarter of the way in. The 20th Century fades from the rear view every day, but it seems worthwhile to remember the old excitement of that glistening age of early rocketry. It was a very different kind of ball game to Elon Musk and Space X. 

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Running With Scissors

Once Upon A Time in Sydney... 

Back in the 1980s when we didn't have anything like the internet, we really had to make our own entertainment. This is why we formed bands or formed up in groups to go watch movies together or played Dungeons and Dragons. It's what we did in those days and it wasn't even particularly cool.  

We were probably an earnest, callow bunch in most respects, and we seemed to do a lot of driving around at night.  Looking back on it, it seems incredibly dumb but also quite energetic. We were full of beans and we'd drive around, just cruising and talking about things - deep and meaningful things as we used to call them - and generally kill time waiting to be entertained in some way. I think about it now and most of my memories of those times are night time jams and conversations and games and pizza parlours. 

Phil, who is a respected doctor now, used to have this Alfa Sud. He knew how to drive it too because he grew up in one of those wealthy families that let their kids race go-karts so he had this racer's instinct for taking corners hard. I remember sitting in the passenger seat as he drove me home in the middle of the night with nobody else on the road, the Alfa Sud engine roaring through the leafy 'burbs. It was pretty anti-social when I think about it now; but also a kind of quintessential Gen-X experience.  

Phil looks after dying people now in palliative care. He sure doesn't drive like that today. 

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Making Meat On Mars

Perils Of Space Colonisation

The lockdown thing was very much like living in your very own Biosphere 2 experiment. And pretty much true to form we mostly stayed in with the occasional 'cheat' moment where we gave ourselves excuses to go to the shops. Otherwise, there was a lot of Doomscrolling headlines. Put it down to the pandemic and watching markets go haywire. 

I think I also watched a lot of 'The Expanse'. That's a show that really makes you reconsider whether you really want to go outing deep space just to make a mundane living. I mean, being an astronaut's only great if you get the celebrity, as amply demonstrated by the Mercury Seven in 'The Right Stuff'. By the time everybody is in space doing that space suit EVA thing and living on microwaved meal packs, there's not going to be anywhere near the glamour going around - but the food is likely going to really suck. 

In light of that you have to feel for the future space explorers eating stuff that tastes totally disconnected from what food is on their native planet. Meat, would be an absolute luxury unless you had the technology to weave it out of simple carbon compounds. Sure enough if you Doom Scroll long enough you can find this story about an Israeli outfit trying to synthesis meat, in preparation for the day colonists will be on Mars. They've even done early tests in space. 

It's amazing what can be done when people put their minds to it.  

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Kingston Biscuits

Changing Jobs

Yeah so thing thing happened and I'm going to go work over at UTS from tomorrow. Still a bit stunned that it happened, but that's the nature of life. Everything has a way of changing on you. 

It was a bit weird working in Chatswood. It made me feel like I hadn't really traveled far in my life since leaving High School. Being back in Chatswood for work took me back to when I had jobs there as a teenager. It's all a bit confronting when it's like that. So now I'm graduating Chatswood all over again and going to a university campus again. 

Maybe life is just cyclical. Maybe I'm getting a second chance. Maybe it's just all coincidence. 

Screw You, Arnott's

Back in the day, I knew this lovely girl (no irony, she really was lovely). She was from the lower North Shore, had gone to good schools, and had a good thinking head on her shoulders. She was an astute observer and had funny takes on things. One of them was that the Kingston biscuit was the North Shore Girl's ultimate biscuit. She reasoned, it's because it has a little bit of everything, and so it is like a good investment; it seems like it pays the biggest dividend. North Shore Girls being North Shore Girls, cannot resist this as a value proposition - according to her. 

First it had the chocolate cream, and anything chocolate is better value than vanilla. Then there were the actual biscuits that had the coconut flakes subtly mixed in with a rough rolled oat and butter - much like little Anzac biscuits. You couldn't fault it for all round flavour value. It's not over-invested in one direction or another. The fine sense of balance made it much better than say, the orange cream thing in the Arnott's assorted pack tray. (I myself am quite okay with the orange cream thing, but others it turns out loathe it).

Somehow this notion of a perfectly balanced biscuit as a metaphor for what North Shore Girls like, stuck in my mind for years and years. 

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We All Want Heaven

... But Nobody Wants To Die

Sometimes you know what you want but you know it's going to be the death of you. Sometime you love somebody that in most ways would drive you around the bend. If you could just have that thing even if it costs you the earth - but are you really willing to go there? Do you want to go there? How deep is that desire? 

The weird thing I found out is that we actually run on desire most of our lives until the desire dries out and crumbles. Nietzsche said Desire desiccates into Will. It might if you have a lot of time in front of you at the height of your middle age. 

When you get a little older, it doesn't feel that way. Something goes missing in your body or brain, I don't know which. The engine of desire seems to shut off and you stop giving a shit. The thing that drove you for decades suddenly vacates the driver's seat of your mind. You're left with this shell of older yourself wondering how to keep everything going. You're doing something you never thought you wanted to do; or working in a place that gives you nothing but cognitive dissonance. The world changes on you and your mindset can't keep up. You're not conservative but people tell you you're old fashioned. 

And you think to yourself, "I am no bleeding cocktail." 

Maybe you reply with your best Don Draper impersonation: "really?"

So what do you do about it? You have yourself a nice little mid-life crisis and try and figure out ways to ward off the sense of mortality. Buy a red sports car, dump the wife for a younger blonde. Have a second family. Spend more time at the beach or a casino, or even a casino-by-the-beach if you could find one. At least that's the theory. My version of it is to embrace the cognitive dissonance and write a song about it. 

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T01-700D

"What Did You Do During the Pandemic?" 

First of all I did a lot of remixing and re-mastering of stuff that happened during the late iComp era. That's basically stuff from 2012-2016 or so. But I also recorded  bunch of new songs and that's now out as an album 'Cosmic Orphans'. All in all I think I recorded or re-mixed and then re-mastered somewhere around 50 tracks. It's a lot to have swimming around in your head over 18-24 months. I've only recently started to divest my brain out of those 50 tracks. I really can't tell you what exactly I did during the lockdowns but I tell you what, I did a lot of these tracks, getting them ready for release. It was pretty gruelling in parts, and the time went flying by.

I guess it's good to keep yourself busy. You end up outputting a lot of work. It's not exactly the kind of luxury you expect, but it worked out quite alright.  

I also did a lot of Doom Scrolling during the various lockdowns in the last 24 months. If you are already a news junky, Doom Scrolling is just a natural extension of the thing you did when there was print newspapers and news channels worth watching. 

One of the news items was how astronomers had found this planet that seems habitable by human standards. The only problem is that it's so damn faraway. The great irony during lockdown was to know you couldn't really go anywhere and these scientists were worrying about how to get to this faraway planet. I guess that's life - irony abounds if you just look. 

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You Came Into My Life Too Late

The Luck of Bad Timings

It's like you're at the European roulette table. '0' hasn't come up for like 50 spins. So it's time to place bets on '0'. And it doesn't come up for another 40 spins. What do you do? You double up and keep putting on '0' of course. And you eventually make your money back and come out ahead just a little bit. 2 spins later '0' hits again but you didn't have anything on it because you were looking to see how the luck was going to pan out for 3 spins. At that point you should walk away.  

Sometimes you run into people at the wrong point of your life. That's just the way it goes sometimes. They might have been the love of your life but you're already with somebody going down a different path. What are you going to do?Throw away something perfectly good just to see if the new thing is more exciting? Or you might meet somebody as they're leaving a company as you walk in, or you're leaving university as they come in. These things happen. If you believe in fate, you'd better believe that fate has a cruel sense of humour. Personally, I find it better not to believe in fate at all. 

Whatever the situation, you will always hear that nagging voice in your head asking "what if...?" Considering the kinds of punts one is willing to take at the gambling table, it doesn't seem far-fetched that one might want to bet one's life on the next piece of ass that comes along. Frankly, that kind of lightness of character - that's kind of how you fuck up your own life. If you want to be lucky you've got to know when you're already being lucky. 

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I Tried To Leave You Behind

Apropos Of Nothing...

 I'm getting into my classical music collection lately. I've not really given these CDs a spin in the last few years or so, partly because I'm always looking for new stuff and they get buried behind my newer purchases. And the funny thing about one's music sitting on the shelf is that it's simply a case of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. You're constantly listening to what's at the front and not at the back of shelves. Anyway, what with the pandemic going on, I've decided to re-import all my CDs into my mac as Apple Lossless files - a task that's simply been overdue for years but rivalled in tedium only by playing monopoly and sitting in casinos without gambling. Bye-bye 192kbps, and all that. Theoretically, I shouldn't even need my discs after I've imported them because I'd have them as lossless files sitting at my fingertips on my computer. I should just be able to pack the damn things away and stick them in storage. 

...And I just can't. I've been pondering why that might be the case. I think it's because I am despite my own protestations and denials, just another one of those people who are way too in love with their record spines and CD spines. You see, it's like my autobiography writ large on those spines. The where and when of purchasing some stupid album that was hard to find; The time I was in city 'x' and I happened to come across 'y'; the tortuous quest to find a copy of 'z'. Those kinds of mini-narratives tied in with a weird sense of identity tangled up with an emotional attachment makes it really hard to just say, "you know what? These can go in plastic tubs and sit-in storage now."

So that's pretty much the lot of a media hoarder. 

I don't own valuable stuff. I don't have any gems, jewellery or exotic coins or for that matter bars of gold. I don't own memorabilia and collectibles - I've just got music and movies. Even my sort-of-dress-watch isn't really all that valuable in the watch stakes. A watch repairer tried to sell me a beautiful replacement band once. I had to say no because the band was 5 times what I paid for my watch. I don't even own memorabilia discs like signed copies of CDs and LPs. I just have the regular music stuff, and that's what I can't really leave behind - but collectively I like them. It's a big chunk of my life. How'bout you?

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When I Walk Out Of Here

Terrible Bosses

The late Sam de Brito had a complaint against the ALP's swap of leaders from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard. It was often cited that Kevin Rudd was a terrible boss. De Brito wrote in his column we've all had terrible bosses and we've still turned up to work. What excuse has an elected body got in refusing to work for a terrible boss elected by the very people of the land, really? 

Of course it has transpired since then that both sides of politics have seen fit to swap out the leader at semi-regular intervals since the Rudd removal. None of these Prime Ministers have served out a full term and Scomo might be the first one to do so since John Howard. That's a long time between stability - not that stability is any good if the leadership is as rotten as the current Coalition.

This is something you pick up in life along the way but terrible bosses are par for the course. You can do worse than a terrible boss, and that might be a criminal boss. All the same, barring the criminal boss type, chances are most people have a terrible boss. This is because nothing brings out the asshole in somebody than the entitlements of leadership, When I was younger, I found myself at the outpost of a Japanese corporate behemoth. I had a boss to whom I reported, who was a certifiable asshole, but his boss on top of that was an alarmingly incompetent man. This boss was terrible because he was functionally paralysed when it came to making decisions. It was alarming how he was willing to let things just happen by not making a decision. This was because to him, making the wrong decision was worse than the consequences of not making any decisions. It was excruciating to sit through one of those glum meetings the Japanese companies have, waiting for him to make a decision - any damn decision - and not getting anything conclusive out of him beyond an uncomfortable cough-grunt-throat-clearing-noise.

It took me a while to understand that most terrible bosses don't know they're terrible. Some of them are misguided in thinking that they're great bosses. Your average boss, like your average anything, is terrible at their job. This is mostly due to the Peter Principle where people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. Another element that can go into the mix is that your average boss has no empathy. The empathy deficit is usually the blindspot through which all their interpersonal disasters come marching in. Woe betide us if they happen to be disorganised or lazy or not good at solving problems for themselves. It's a lot easier to be a terrible boss than a good one. There's a reason Captain Kirk with all his faults is considered a good captain. It was a show written by ex-navy people who had seen terrible captains. We might laugh at Captain Kirk, but golly there are probably much worse captains in real life commanding real navy ships of the line. 

But even allowing for all that, the little tyrant I worked for, was a particularly terrible, awful, crappy boss from infantile-boss-hell that inspired half an album's worth of songs why I wanted to stop working for him. 

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I Can See A Better Tomorrow

Maybe A Little Optimism

This lockdown in Sydney is dragging on. As much as I don't quite mind pottering around the house Working on tracks, the general absence of fresh stimulus beyond the available news, TV and the MLB season is getting me down. Sometime around early December they think we'll be back to pretending things are normal. Maybe they really would be like the old normal except Anti-vaxxers will get the Delta strain and drop off and die - and maybe to be a little uncharitable, it's one of those Darwin Award moments when people who can't adapt to the new environment are surely going to face a very Darwinian selection pressure.

I do wonder about that. I have a colleague at my day job who is a nice dude but he's a conspiracy theorist and Anti-vaxxer nut-job. He hates the lockdown but he refuses to get any of the vaccines because he thinks they kill people. I've had to explain to him how vaccines work, how these vaccines work differently, and how much research has gone into them prior to the pandemic to allow them to simply come up with these in a matter of months, and how statistically speaking, one would be much safer to just take the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. No dice. He wants to go without any vaccines. 

Even the medical officer in the office has explained to him the risks and as far as I can tell he's not taken on board any of the medical officer's advice. It's a bit perplexing as well as disturbing - I don't want him to die. But if he were to get sick badly, I would get to say "told ya' so" upon his recovery. Naturally I feel very conflicted about that, and admittedly, that's not how one wants things to turn out. 

Still, I get the optimism going around. 4 months of lockdown this time around has been bleak. It's like we're all in our own Biosphere 2 experiment where we hole up pretending we're on an extended expedition to Mars, and just like with the Biosphere 2 crew we allow ourselves to cheat and so we go out once a week for groceries. But then the whole world seems less tangible when you're living like this. When we first went into any kind of lockdown in March 2020, nobody had the vaccine. Now we're reaching the point where firmly over 50% of people have had 2 doses and over 75% have had at least 1. Things have changed significantly in 18 months. We now have a fighting chance against this lousy pandemic. If we can just get out of here, like in the Paul McCartney song, we might feel anything is possible. Maybe we should be just a little more optimistic.

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This Miserable House

Misery Loves Company, That's Why We Have Relationships

Maybe that's not quite true, but you do see quite a number of people who are together and you have no idea how their dynamic works for them. 

I used to know this girl who went through life hating on just about everything. She was a pretty redhead with curls, well-liked, and even quite popular amongst her peers; but if you caught her in private she would share with you the most vile gossip, and let her contempt flow. Even as a third year university student going through my own emotional chaos on campus, I found it a bit much how she would dissect the foibles of the people around her. It was merciless and two-faced, and in part hid a deep anguish.  

Anyway, it turned out she had a very troubled upbringing up in a provincial centre and had problems adjusting to Sydney. Her mother had told her to aim high, while her estranged father had told her she wouldn't ever amount to anything. Deep underneath all the eviscerating critique was this general sense of dissonance with dissatisfaction and annoyance at life together with a singular wish to tear everything down. She was bitter but funny, or perhaps she was just funny because she was so bitter.  As a friend, she was a mean teaser and prankster. 

The thing is we hung out because we were both miserable. I was kind of used to it - it as in being miserable, so I hardly noticed the depth of her misery. I'd had a run of girlfriends who had a way of making me feel miserable, so I thought it was normal. Misery had become second nature to me. Some would say it was my first nature. And the one thing through all that which has stuck with me to this day is that miserable people can be very funny but they have a way of making everyday life seem really trying. 

It's not like everyday life should be trying as a university student, but that's the nature of misery - it inflicts a sense of grave dissatisfaction on those around the miserable. It was a strained friendship though a bizarre round of varsity parties and drinks. We talked, she held court, we laughed, she got drunk and nasty - but we'd do it all again within days. Eventually at the end of Trinity semester in her second year, she abruptly quit university and went home to her provincial town without an explanation. 

Just once - about a month after her sudden departure - she sent an ironic postcard from her home town. It read "everywhere I go, there's me. And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's me." 

There was no return address. 

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Ain't No Use

When Things Fall Apart

I knew this guy Ron who broke up with his wife. It was a very bad breakup - the kind that involved being blindsided by betrayals and much backstabbing. It poisoned his circle of friends because his wife had run off with his best friend. In the aftermath his now ex-friend and ex-wife spread gossip about him and it left you wondering how Ron could be so blind to have chosen these people to be in his life to begin with. 

Ron was a nice guy but he was a terrible judge of character. That sounds incredibly old fashioned to say so, but you had to look where he was in the wake of that messy split. And yet because Ron was an oddly cheerful guy, he somehow internalised all of it like it was his fault that these people were pushed into doing these terrible things to him because he had been an awful person to them. That led to some bizarre conversations. Nonetheless, Rob was clearly the aggrieved party. He just didn't want to be that. That's some complicated mental gymnastics to arrive there.  

For my part, when break ups happen I tend to be a lot more definitive about who did what and who was to blame. I kind of feel people should take ownership of stuff they do that hurts other people. Doing terrible things to another person is one thing, but pretending you didn't do them or shifting that blame on to the victim makes things worse. People do as they must do. If you have to get out of a situation then, that's what you have to do. If you have to have an affair; if you have to betray the confidence of somebody in order to do something; if you have to fuck up somebody's life to just do your thing; these are the kinds of things you have to own. You did this because you wanted to, and it was shitty a thing to do but you did it anyway. You have to own that shit. Otherwise you are not a proper adult. 

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Too Many Words

We've Said Too Much Already

When Pharmakeus was fresh out of University with his Arts degree, he used to pontificate a lot on a whole bunch of subjects. He would talk at great length about the ins and out of Post Modernism as it was unfolding, or how fractals defined the very shape of life, the universe and everything. He was full of this kind of intellectual excitement. One day as we sat in a park bench he made the joke that a person only had a certain words in the that they could utter in a lifetime. His girlfriend of that time quipped "I'd better prepare your funeral for tonight then?" 

He didn't die that night - in fact he is still alive and well. Yet these days he communicates in brusque utterances of monosyllabic grunts. Maybe he did run out of words. 

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What Am I Doing?

A Spotty Record 

I don't know about life, but certainly work, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. 

It's hard to get everything in a job. The kinds of casual jobs I had in my teens were relatively low pressure but low pay. It was interesting when I worked at the music shop in Chatswood, but that paid very little. It paid a little better to move tubs of groceries around the parcel pickup service at Grace Brothers. The bosses were kind of dumb and the work itself was unrelenting tedium, but it paid something. Coming out of my teens and in my early 20s, I lucked out and got to work at the ABC. The ABC was great - I had a great boss and the boss above her was great. There was a bit of pressure and responsibility, and there were lots of interesting bits of gear with which to play. And you learned a lot just being there. After that job I went back to study and when I came out the other end, we were slap bang in Paul Keating's recession-that-we-had-to-have. So I was back to being more, in-and-out-of unemployment for some time. After a series of interesting gigs I landed a steady job making educational videos. It was interesting work and my colleagues were great but my boss was grumpy and the pay was low. I was sort of okay with my boss but then he hired an EP specifically to bully me - he told me so - so that was pretty bad. But then the EP quit once I told the whole office about that situation. After which my boss sold the company and retired early. I've often thought he probably did that just to see the back of me.

After that I ended up at a production house making corporates. It didn't pay well, the work was soul destroying and my colleagues were shit. Just seriously smug, petty, shitty people. The experience kind of burned a hole in my soul. After going freelance and bumming around again going gig-to-gig, I ended up working for an events production company with that little tyrant. The work was okay considering it wasn't my area, the pay was okay, job security was not, and I kind of knew it was going to blow up one day - not because I hated the job or anything, but because the emotional immaturity of the little tyrant made it inevitable that everybody ended on bad terms with him and left. It was just a matter of time. Considering all that, I think I lasted a good little while there. The life lesson there is that I don't have issues working with assholes, but assholes are always going to be assholes. I can control how I feel about working for assholes, but I can't control asshole bosses. 

All this is to day it's hard to get much work satisfaction when you don't work in your area; and it's hard to get a lot of money when you do work in your area and like doing what you do, because they know it, and low ball you. As a result I've decided I can handle boredom but not stress, especially if I'm not going to work in my area. Chances are if you do something boring, it will pay a bit better than if you do something interesting.  

 What you're doing then, is making rent. 

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