life

Five hundred

There were three things I remember most clearly on that trip. The first, most often recounted, was the isolated spot just off the beach, north of Noosa Heads, under gum trees and a few steps from the water. This was where the campfire was set. Fish were sought just past the breaking waves – glistening silver whiting, and a disconcerted crab, soon released. I have been fishing twice, neither successfully nor willingly, so I rejoined the group at the fire, where scone dough was wrapped onto the ends of sticks and offered to the glowing embers.

The second was Dubliners, by James Joyce, hidden among the most generic selection of holiday reading. I’d never read Dubliners or Joyce before. Amazing.

The third was the card game, five hundred, which you taught us. You must have been in your twenties at that point. As tall as anyone, if not a little taller still. A bushy beard in fiery red to match your hair. I don’t know how much enjoyment you got from playing cards with your teenage cousins. I do know the enjoyment you gifted us, treating every hesitant play as a thoughtful masterstroke. Teaching us the joy of the game, not just the rules. Patient and generous with your time. Quick to smile, quick to laugh.

That is forever how I will remember you.

life

Dead blogs are insects in amber

I should blog more because my old blogs make me cringe but they also make me remember time and place. I should blog purely for myself, because I’m the main visitor and I should respect my audience.

Not for the nepenthe of nostalgia, where past sorrows and longings are dulled and the mists of time lend a forgiving rose-coloured glow that suffuses everything. But to try to hold in my head all the ways that I have been, to try to understand my own journey. To respect my past self despite his shortcomings, for I have my own, and hindsight is not wisdom.

life

Adopted

I’ve got this excellent idea for a decades-spanning prank to pull on future children. The idea is that you raise your children while giving little clues along the way that they were adopted. Eventually you admit to them that they are adopted while they are still quite young, and you raise them in a loving fashion “just like their birth parents would have”. As the years go past, they are happy but they always have this unfulfilled curiosity about their real parents.

Eventually they leave home and in their adult life they begin to research their birth parents. They get in contact with the adoption agency and the agency tells them that their birth parents are willing to meet with them.

They set up the meeting and when they arrive, you’re there waiting for them, and you fall to your knees and cry out:

“I CAN’T KEEP THE TRUTH FROM YOU ANY LONGER… YOU’RE NOT ADOPTED!”

life

Migraines

I’ve been getting migraines more frequently. The doctor was perfectly charming. I’m afraid to fill the prescriptions because they sound so strong. Take one per day and no other pills of any kind. Spray into your nose and don’t operate heavy machinery. I don’t want to mess with my brain. But Philip K. Dick did all his best work on amphetamines. Maybe I’m taking the wrong path. I had a dream last night. I was back at school and everything was simple. I was sitting next to a girl with dark hair and dark eyes who’s never really left my mind . She smiled at me. Everything was going fine until she leaned on my shoulder and I began to suspect that I was asleep. Sure enough, she kissed my mouth softly and the rest of the class went on writing. When I woke it was so vivid that I wanted to call her, but with a few minutes of daylight, it crossed my mind that she was seeing someone. I hope she’s happy. I wonder sometimes if she works too hard to ever really know. Or maybe she’s just been dodging me all these years and has a fulfilling life; I can’t rule it out. I wonder if I linger in her the way she lingers in me. I wonder what traces I’ve left in other people. I can understand that – the amphetamines – writing it all in a crazy burst. I ’ve written too many fragments. Eventually I start wondering if I should knit them all together just to give some false sense of accomplishment. Anne McCaffrey wrote Restoree in her Latin class but her bio doesn’t say how much Latin she did.

life

Meaningful.

Willingly or unwillingly, we are in an indifferent universe where the majority of influences on our lives are not only out of our control but were entirely arbitrary based on the circumstances of our births and the lives of our parents. We still have ultimate freedom, the freedom of a card player: to fold, or to play the cards we’ve received. As Camus said, suicide is the central problem in philosophy. But a game of cards can be won or lost; a life can only be lived, and the terms of that life are yours to define. We recognise that meaning is a value we assign to words and hang on objects; we should feel no despair in realising the profound meaningless of reality, because it is precisely that meaninglessness which affords us the freedom to define ourselves. It is in interpreting that we exist. Humans are a creative race, and creating meaning is the first of our great projects to create ourselves and our place in the vast indifferent universe. Humans were telling stories before they were building cities, before they were sowing fields.

Meaning is not inherent, but you can spend your time however you want. It’s what you choose to do and what you choose not to do that defines you. We are always making these choices.

life

I knew that this day was coming, but that doesn’t make it any easier now that it’s here

Ze Frank finished The Show today.

It is very difficult to explain how this feels to someone who didn’t watch it.

One person on the forums said it was like all of us had been dating him. For 3 – 5 minutes a day we would listen and he would talk. He’d tell us his thoughts, his hopes, his fears. Things that inspired him and things that annoyed him. How he felt about people in Starbucks knowing it was his birthday. How he felt when random crap got him down.

The other amazing part of it was the community. Being a sports racer, being a fabuloso. Knowing that there are people out there who have been touched the same way you have. Knowing that the community would do things for its members, like when a guy went across continental USA using only sports racers for transport. Playing collaborative chess with all sorts of people and learning more about chess than I could digest. Playing in the ORG, ‘you are not alone’. Avoiding being a hard charger. Remembering the initial drive to show Ze to as many people as possible.

Wanting to find other sports racers in the future, just to share that feeling again.

Not wanting to let it go.

Thankyou, Ze.

life

No Effort

There always seems to be such a very big gap between the things that I daydream about and my everyday life. I do not have any real fear of the future, or of change, or of dying without achieving anything by which society will supposedly measure what sort of a person I was. My fears swirl around living a life in which my dreams are more pleasant than my reality. Where the what-ifs and the might-have-beens take up more space in my memory than the things I did. So I am afraid of dreaming about things that might never happen. Things like being an author, since it is so easy to imagine never ending up as an author. In some ways the issue is that all I’d have to do is do nothing and my life would end up living itself and being empty and meaningless.

I also wish I could fly.

life

Rain Thoughts

It’s raining outside, so heavily it feels like the sheer force of it will batter the house apart.

Maybe it will! That would be exciting for a little while, then after that it’d be cold and wet and somewhat depressing.

I feel like I need to come up with something profound, because if I don’t, but I write something anyway, it will just end up being angst-ridden crap.

Well, watching a rainbow through the broken ceiling would be pretty cool.