Dreams, fights, explosions, mince

So once again I find myself contributing the blogosphere. Sitting up in my room in this pink shack. At some point tonight I’d like to go downstairs to punch and lift and stuff that guys my age do to mitigate instinctive tendencies toward aggression. Which reminds me of a recurring dream I’ll get to in a bit. Anyway, I’m blogging instead of going downstairs right now. In order to exit the house and go downstairs I have to run the gauntlet of three women cooking mince and their associated revelry. It’s not something I feel like facing at this juncture.

It’s just the cooking mince really. Man, even when I ate meat as a kid, I still found that smell pretty oppressive. As a child I’d note the swarms of blowflies crowding the kitchen screens when mince cooking was in progress, and wonder wtf the deal was.

We were meant to eat it.

Hello to you Cara, if you are reading!

Back to the aggression thing. Me and my brocousin have tried to commit as far as possible to remembering and writing down dreams upon waking of a morning. The goal is lucid dreaming. I haven’t come close to achieving that so far, but I sometimes remember to write down the dreams. And I’ve begun to notice some recurring themes emerging. The most obvious is the last three nights or so, and generally fairly often throughout the last few weeks, my dreams have roughly culminated in me beating the absolute shit out of someone. I didn’t think I was a real angry guy – ever since the jobquit and subsequent summer of fun, I’ve been chilled as. Yet here I am in my dreams, pounding and kicking people till they’re on the ground, and continuing to give them a good thrashing until others drag me away.

I used to always dream of running, sometimes away from danger or annoyance, but just as often for the sheer thrill. I never dream I’m running from people anymore. They run from me.

I’ve watched a couple of violent films lately. That could be to blame. Due to the fact I stopped playing violent games years ago, and don’t watch any TV or many movies, I’m not as desensitised to violence as most. So when I AM confronted with it, it’s pretty significant.

I also dreamt the world ended a few weeks ago. I wrote it all out, remembering it in fairly intricate detail, right up to and including explosions ripping across the land, being engulfed in flames and lava and my limbs going in different directions. I posted it here briefly, then decided it too horrific and promptly pulled it down. It remains in the vault with the other weirdness.
(#)
My dreams are often apocalyptic, but they’ve never been as horrendous as the afore-mentioned one. I woke up paralysed with shock. Took me a few days to get over. Thankfully no more have come.

The last few dreams have been boring as hell, probably due to not doing too much interesting most days.

I was going to talk about how I got a job, and nearly collapsed my lung and couldn’t bodyboard for a month, and how I went with my first ride on a small inflatable object towed by a sports boat at about forty knots.

That might wait till next time, got to go get some exercise before I fall asleep.

Ten percent less?

In the last few months, I’m guessing you’ve come across an advertising campaign such as this one:

http://evolve.ergon.com.au/10Less.aspx

I think it’s rather misleading when the privatised energy industry runs ads encouraging domestic consumers to cut their usage. Come again? Do they expect me to believe that they genuinely want to see a ten percent reduction in residential usage? Surely that would mean a ten percent reduction in profits in that sector as well. That’s got to be a massive amount of cash. I honestly doubt any company in western society would *actually* want or expect this to come true.

In my view it’s just a PR exercise. In this post-Inconvenient Truth world, corporations of all kinds have scrambled to incorporate feel-good green symbolism into their reams of sanitised, unrealistic policy.

I have a hunch they know people won’t voluntarily cut their energy consumption by anywhere near enough to have any impact on climate change or their profits.

It peeves me a little that while industry, transportation and agriculture spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on extraordinary levels, energy retailers get all patronising and tell residential consumers to cut their usage. I’d wager industrial and commercial usage of electricity would outstrip residential by quite a margin. This business of turning off lights when you’re not in the room is fair enough, but it’s unrealistic to believe it’s going to make a difference to the big picture. Unless of course it’s just one mini component of a giant, well executed scheme to bring shit under control and avert oblivion. Which, unlike many of my peers, I reckon would be pretty achievable if people hardened the f*ck up and accepted that a pay-to-pollute scheme would discourage pollution and encourage investment in clean, renewable technology.

“But my bill will go up, aye?”

“I dig coal out of the ground, I expected to have a job forever. Now you wanna put me out of a job. You greenie sons of bitches”

If that’s your attitude, learn to swim.

Anyway. Speaking of feel good symbolism, the idea of a few thousand residents turning off the lights in their home for one hour, on one day out of three hundred and sixty-five is patently ridiculous. Even on a symbolic level.

Yup, its that time of year again.When I first heard of Earth Hour, I was initially quite skeptical of the concept.

Surely I could be forgiven for that though. Pretty sure that the coal fired power station is going to continue consuming just as much coal, and polluting just as much for the entire duration of the “earth hour”. They can’t just turn em on and off, it takes hours to get them on and offline.

So what the hell does this achieve? Well today I read this article, and it made me a little less cynical:

“THE NSW Government has backed calls for Earth Hour to be viewed as a referendum on greenhouse gas cuts and be taken into account at an international climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, this year”

The idea that millions of individuals can gain the attention of populist governments and instigate a real, an actual shift in paradigm and pave the way for a brighter, more sensible future is incredibly appealing to me. I might be idealistic, but it’s better than the alternative..

Queensland election 2009

……CHOOSE…….

The Borg [in full intellectual stride.] Or  Bligh [I'm scared too.]

Apparently there’s an election in a week. Quick! Decide!

I’m actually happy with the way it’s gone down because the biggest problem I have with elections is the incredibly drawn-out campaign process. What a waste of time and resources.

As for my weapon of choice, Borg/Bligh, I can’t bring myself to vote for either.

Like many other Queenslanders I’m a little disgruntled with the sitting government. They’ve proven a special kind of ineptitude I assumed only possible under the administration of a bunch of .. monkeys? Five year olds? No, that would be unfair to the animals and kids. Health scandal, power station scandal, grand plans for gross environmental vandalism, not to mention exorbitant spending on patronising PR campaign after patronising PR campaign.

So yeah, I’m pretty pissed. I’d like to get some revenge at the polls, however it involves me voting for this guy

The Borg actually seems like an okay guy. It’s more his cronies and their collective ideology that bothers me. The Liberal and National parties in Queensland have such a ridiculous history, and even though they’ve had over a decade to think about why everyone hated them, I’m pretty sure they haven’t evolved sufficiently to be a viable alternative government in modern Australia.

I would like to give the Borg the vote just because he tries so hard, and face it, he’s hilarious. But if, in the incredible scenario where the LNP somehow pulls off a win next week, they won’t deserve it. It won’t be anything to do with them or their policies. It’ll be how much Labor sucks and how sick we all are of seeing Bligh in that hard hat.

Ah well, 1 the greens, blank the rest.

Less general exuberance?

So I just read through my old blog, and I’ve come to realise I sound a lot less interesting and generally post a lot less than I did a couple of years ago.

I don’t think that in actuality I do less interesting stuff these days. It’s more a case of me finally maturing a little and being less inclined to embellish upon so many inane details of my life.

Please enjoy the following snippet from the mind of Dirk, aged twenty.

Easter weekend:

Was spent in a somewhat obscure fashion, although these kind of situations are seemingly unavoidable for me.
In the preceeding weeks it had been decided that me and my girlfriend would camp a few nights down at Inskip and just chill out. In typical bogan male fashion I somehow ended up inviting my best mate and brother along.
Toine, in turn, invited his mate.
So before gf knew it, there were going to be four skylarking, boozing, fire lighting yahoo’s accompanying her instead of the originally planned one.
Fast foward a week and some annoying shit was happening, I forget what, but it ended with me deciding I wanted less people on the camping trip. That night I broke the news to poor old Toine that he wouldn’t be permitted to join us.
Fast foward another week and girlfriend and I are fighting about something silly. It ended up with me driving off to an undecided location. I decided I was going to leave for camping without her and she could join me after she had finished up with her fancy COCKtail party.

Picture 11pm on easter Friday. Dirk messaging his mate Waity with “so, you ready to leave for camping? now i mean”
30 seconds later Waity responding with “give me 20 mins”
A few mins later another message from Waity “Wife says I can’t leave till the morning. How’s 3am for you?”
I messaged him back with “3am it is”

I decided to drive back to the girlfriend’s house to apologise for being a jerk. I still wasn’t in the best moods so I decided that it was a great time to get Hungry Jacks drive-thru.

Let it be known I am normally very against things like this, but you have to understand I wasn’t thinking straight at the time.
I didn’t have a clue what to do, where to drive, or what to say. After a couple of wrong turns I eventually pointed the suby into the mouth of the drive thru lane.

I ordered successfully into the speaker, which I am sure was strategically hidden in the bushes to ensure it’s sudden emitting of noise scared the absolute piss out of any sod unfamiliar with the procedure. Like myself.

I had instructed the girl to supply me with a vegan friendly meal of any description along with the largest sized softdrink syrup they could muster. To “empty a bottle of cheap shit vodka into”.

She refused to supply me with the softdrink syrup so I didn’t end up getting my wish of mixing the raw stuff directly with the vodka. But no matter. I was eagerly awaiting my vegan meal.
Further she made sure I specifically stipulated exactly the menu items I wanted. Apparently not allowed to be left to her own device.
It ended up that the only item suitable was the vegie baguette, and some chips. Supposedly cooked in canola. Most likely cooked along with “nuggets” and other awful, awful shit but I wasn’t in the mood to care.

Around five minutes later the girl came back to the ordering window, a stricken look on her face but with my paper bag, already stained with grease. I distinctly heard my stomache scream some extrordinary expletive at me as I handed over my $10 note in return for the demon food. The deal was done, I knocked into low first and chirped all four wheels.

Back at the house I switched on the footy and opened the bag. I applied vodka to the large coke in copious amounts. I ate the damn baguette and the damn chips and I felt shit and bloated and drunk. Three cheers for living like a regular shmoe!!

God help you all.

Forgive me for my arrogance but seriously, am I one of the few people who gives two shits about themselves and the environment? I mean, Hungry Jacks [aka burger king] is one of the big 5 prince of bastardry companies screwing the environment to provide a cheap, greasy foodstuff to drooling masses. But it’s all McShit. If the food was really awesome it could go at least some way towards justifying so much evil involved in its production. But no, it really is rubbish. It’s horrid. So why?

Calm, Bruce.

…

So, later that night girly arrived home and we exchanged apologies and all was very well.

I awoke later at 3am to my vege baguette sending me a little bill for its services.
I decided not to attempt sleep any further as I considered that my wellbeing for the day to be already unsalvageable. I opted instead to message Waity and suggest we leave then and there. Waity happened to be awake because he has the most hardcore insomnia out of anyone I know. Myself included. 10mins later I was at his place and soon we were on the road, in the dark, to a campsite we hadn’t booked, in the high season.

Driving through to the other side of town, I spotted a dark, hunched shadow shuffling along the footpath. For some reason I instantly knew it was Tom, who some might recognise from this blog as my mate who is passionate about his death metal and anti religious stance. I did a uturn and went back to chat, as I was pretty sure noone was in a big hurry at that time of day.
Turned out he was walking home from the local nightclub. His first words were:

“Man I am so pissed. Fuck man I’m drunk. Hehehehe.”
“FUCKING CHRISTIANS.”
“So, where are you guys heading, how are you man”

He went on to rant a little further on how much christian people pissed him off, until I informed him that waity, sitting next to me, was in fact a reasonably comitted christian who attented church weekly. We all shared a moment of discomfort and embarassment before we all laughed it off. Thats what I love about all my mates – everyone different and eccentric, but all top people who need not be feared or disliked. Waity puts up with me saying “christ” a lot and my outspoken pro sex-before-marriage stance. Tom puts up with me being vegan and not appreciating death metal properly. They forgive me for it and respect me for the dude I am. And for that I am grateful.

ANYWAY.

We soon left tom to catch a taxi home/beat up priests, and continued on our little journey.

An hour or so later we pulled into the Rainbow Beach township, and after a brief stop for Waity to buy a pie, continued up to Inskip.
..Where we were reminded of our shitty planning ability. It was even worse than when I’d been in new years 2005/2006, when stories of riots had reached the state media. Sedans lined the roadside, and all other space was taken by four wheel drives/caravans/dogs/insane easter campers.

Inskip really is a playground for inner city bogans boasting a beautiful beach but nothing else in the way of natural beauty, and for that you do have to hand it to the EPA. To encourage them all to cram into an area which was once sand mined, let them light fires, let them take their dogs and shit everywhere and generally fuck the place up. Distract the stampeding troglodytes from the places worth saving like parts of Fraser and countless other gorgeous national parks. Respect.

Anyway, once again, I digress.

Basically anyone down there would have noticed the suby with the loud exhaust and piloted by the little bogan and his big mate rock up, drive up the beach, around the campsites, wake everyone up to the beautiful dawn, then leave as quickly as they had arrived.

The place was full to overflowing, not an inch of spare ground.

A brief enquiry at the local IGA back in town confirmed it: “Sorry, no more permits. EPA has limited numbers this year”

About time this was enforced too. Once again, utmost respect to EPA for doing a good job and keeping a few shreds of common sense in the management of the area.

Waity and I didn’t care. We were in high spirits. The easter weekend had just begun, it was early morning, we had half a tank of fuel still, and plenty of excuses to just drive around and chill.

Me, Waity and the girls spent the rest of the day at his place with a campfire and the food we had packed for camping. It was a great weekend. All’s well that ends well.

There you go. 1437 words to describe that I’d pissed off my girl, got drunk, ate a burger, then gone skylarking with my mate.

I really don’t like the attitude I apparently had to my girlfriend either. In reality I think we only fought that once. I sounded like somewhat of a dickhead. I doubt that would really have been the case.

Me posting less is really a testament to a conscious decision on my part to not have such a big mouth. Both through my own discoveries and in my reading, I’ve come to realise that those of us who constantly blab about themselves cheapen their words and bore their peers.

Ironically, over the past four months or so I’ve done some things that would, to my twenty year old self at least, be considered rather momentus. I haven’t written great diatribes on them simply because I no longer want to be captain big mouth embellisher. It’s not a cool look.

That said, I still love writing, though I still am not nearly as decent at it as I’d like to be. I think I should post more and I will.

I’m striving to be more concise with my writing, as a result of influences of such excellent writers as Jack Kerouac and Nick Hornby. I want to be more punchy and get across what I want to say, rather than meander about with grand, floury prose.

I don’t think I’ll be delving into the vault and handing out personal dirt on such a grand scale. I doubt anyone cares. I get a lot less worked up about stuff these days. Especially the small stuff.

I’ve come to like that people don’t know quite what I’m up to. The plan’s in the pipeline, the execution of which is proceeding as I have foreseen. And that’s all you need to know

Open letter to my local constabulary

Dear Inspektor Ricarto

It has come to my attention you disagree with me parking my falcon sedan on the footpath outside my inner-suburban home.

While I’m willing to accept your patchy enforcement of this particular by-law, I can’t help but wonder why you would choose to target my vehicle at half five, Monday afternoon, when for the duration of each and every week day the entire street becomes inundated with train commuters who ham-fistedly arrange their stupid jalopies up and down its entire length. Seems they have some aversion to using the QR carpark across from the station.

Yknow why I parked on my footpath? Because the rest of the street was crowded up with the afore-mentioned vehicles.

Congratulations on a job well done.

It’s not me. It’s you.

Dear Lily

You’re not that witty.
And you’re not that hot.

And in other, non-political news..

Unemployment FTW.

Not strictly true I know. While I have no income, I won’t win shit. Well I will – till the funding runs out.

Something happened the other day. Something unprecedented, and it rattled me for a few days.

I’ll back up slightly.

So it was October 08. Our hero was a proud employee of Sensis1234, going hard, going home. Earning his keep, and, surprisingly, doing quite a decent job of it. As we all know from earlier in this blog, he then resigned from employment, to the distress of his superiors. The money stopped flowing in, but our hero didn’t care. After spending the year quitting *everything*, he was ready to venture out into the world, like some modern day Don Quixote.

The first month he spent adjusting to the freedom. He approached everything with a professional, detached demeanour, the kind ironed into the soul through two years shift work with only as many weeks vacation. It was hard to loosen up.

The second month, he began to relax a little. He stopped waking up at 7am, regardless of when he went to bed the night before. He stopped driving everywhere at 100, regardless of the speed limit. The work and small town-induced inward focus evaporated and left a twenty two year old dude running amok in a world with much possibility.

Summer took hold and the rest is history. Three months later, left with a fantastic blur of salty water, cheap wine, expensive beer, beautiful friends, hysterical laughter and aching muscles, our hero contemplates the summer of 08-09, in all it’s glory. What a summer it was. It was all I dared to hope for and more.

People laugh when I base stories around the seasons, but the weather outside is a huge influence on the inside. Of me I mean. I remember how I felt last winter, in those couple of weeks where it was bitterly cold and I’d become afflicted by some vicious strain of the influenza. I thought I might die. Winter’s the most challenging season, you have to retain your focus, keep your health afloat, and keep busting away at whatever it is that you’re doing – learning, work, etc. I got distracted last winter by girls [not the good kind, the ones who leave you an emotional husk], work [not the good kind, the stupid money-earning kind], and festivals [once again, all festivals leave you as a husk. The good kind of husk. PHEW], and got sick as hell as punishment. Spring came and I commenced the big rebuild. Took me months to fix it up. I managed to right everything by Summer, and was rewarded with a magical period.  Autumn is the laid-back comedown, and can [going on past experience] feel as good as summer. If you do it right. And so the cycle continues.

I find myself sliding down the back of February, straight into a unemployed, underachieving quagmire. The underachiever part doesn’t phase me too much, I mean, it’s what I’ve always been. Throughout the past six years I’ve taken great pleasure in throwing away opportunity after opportunity, assuming that one day, something will knock that doesn’t piss me off on at least one level. It hasn’t yet.

But for quite some time now, the focus has remained on mid year entry to university. The program I’m most likely to hoe into is a Bachelor of Environmental Management. An excellent mix of technical know-how and creative input. Plus the fact that tree-hugging is suddenly flavour of the month. That amuses me to no end, but that’s another story.

Of course, this leaves the fact that I’m gainfully unemployed. I’ve had next to no income for the past  three months and if the economy hadn’t imploded I wouldn’t be quite so concerned. But I am. Concerned.

I’m concerned because of this. You know how, out of every twelve months or so, you always have that couple where it all turns to shit. Material stuff like your car buggering up in a myriad of ways, the washing machine failing spectacularly, you noticing all your clothes are shit and if you did you get a job interview, you wouldn’t be allowed past security? Also stuff like one suddenly being afflicted with a stabbing pain in the chest, to the extent which, even after one shells out for parts to fix the car, one cannot install them due to being incapacitated.

Waity can’t relate. I was moaning to him, saying something close to the above paragraph, and his response was “You mean to say you have ten months of the year where everything’s not going wrong?”

Anyway I find myself neck deep in all these problems and more. All these things require moneyspend to fix. As you can imagine, due to the behemoth money crisis, I’m not comfortable on dishing out great wads of the slush fund right now. I can get by without fixing all this stuff, but it does begin to become annoying, weighing down my once carefree summer minset.

And so, this brings us back to me being rattled. Subsequent to the global economy imploding spectacularly and all my material shit failing, I’d decided it’d be smart to secure some sort of employment.

I applied for a run of the mill call centre job, at Sunsuper. Just  inbound work, plenty of money, 9-5 weekdays. Sounded boring but sufficient.

I put on my best shirt, updated my resume, and found myself in the foyer of a major corporate office tower in Creek street at nine in the morning on a Tuesday.

Then something happened. I became painfully aware of my surroundings. I was walking irght into a professional beehive of an office, dudemen and women, cruising about every which way. I boarded the elevator and found myself surrounded by some guys from, judging by their booming conversation, an accounting firm. And I got an insight into their working lives that disturbed me to the core.

I was one of these guys when I worked full time, back in the day. I thought nothing of it. But since not working I’ve rediscovered life. They’re so obviously bound by their shitty job in everything they do. And it’s just that, a shitty job. Noone cares about it, not even them, but they have to care. And I used to be like them. Until I threw it all away. During the ensuing three months of joblessness I’ve realised what I want to do, I’ve become a nicer person to be around. I even learnt to play the guitar somewhere in there. What in the name of hell was I doing going back to the same shit?

I was jolted out of my contemplation by the elevator doors opening, depositing me on the nineteenth floor of the recruiting office. I walked in to the group interview, a room bursting with the latest victims of the financial crisis doombear. Go getters with way more experience than me. And they were also without a rather significant handicap that I’d suddenly developed in the elevator.

This shit isn’t my world any more, I realised. And the rest is history. I was way too much myself in the interview. Suddenly I couldn’t turn it on anymore. I couldn’t say the right things and act the right way. I sat too slouched in my chair, I poured myself water before it was polite to. I contradicted the interviewer. I made a smartarse remark when a woman with a clipboard entered the room to take notes of our interaction with other interviewees in the group exercise. Three hours later I left the building with a growing uncertainty.

And I got rejected.

Sounds a bit bratty maybe, but I’ve never been rejected for a job before. It saddened and annoyed me, and left me not knowing what the hell to do.

I ended up realising this is the way it should be. This is the path I’ve started down and I’m going to complete the goddamn mission. I’m giving uni the best shot possible.

And as for employment in the mean time? I’ve got another interview in the city tomorrow. I’ll wake up, put on my nice black shirt, and smile. But I’m not going to be anyone other than Dirk anymore.

Dunno what to think

In this difficult age we live in…

I’ve become this odd mix of mean-spirited scepticism and idealistic optimism.

Take for example, the Victorian bushfire crisis. I mean, it’s a really terrible thing, right. As the reports of the death toll rolled in I felt that pang in the pit of my stomach same as everyone else. The whole debacle disturbs me but I’m dealing with it.

What I can’t figure out how to deal with is the subsequent outpouring of dollars, grief, facebook groups, and capitalist grandstanding.

I can’t figure out if things like “SHOPT AT COLES THIS FRIDAY, THEY’RE DONATING ALL THEIR PROFITS TO BUSHFIRE VICTIMS” are examples of the goodness of humanity, or examples of overcapitalisation and herd mentality. In any case, a day’s profit has to be a fair bit of money.

I’m not sure what to think about this. I mean it’s obviously a clever opportunistic piece of viral marketing. But is that all it is? Or is there some honest human empathy seeping through there somewhere. Am I just being mean-spirited and cynical if I decide not to participate because I believe it’s just another monopolistic corporation lunging for the spotlight?

I tend to think I am. We live in a capitalist democracy after all. The money, power and leverage is in the corporations. Even if Coles is only doing it for the image mileage, a few million bucks are still going to go to some people who need it more than Coles shareholders. So maybe I will do my shopping tonight instead of Monday. Not that I’ve got any money. That’s another story.

Someone else who wants to gain some mileage out of this tragedy is the Prime Minister.

Rudd wants the government to give people money. As a kid I used to dream about situations like this. Then my parents would explain to me, no, that’s not how it works.

I’ve found a lot of those sorts of situations arising in the last couple of years though. Thing’s I never thought were possible or logical. But I guess, as a planet we’ve found ourselves in a rather unprecedented shit storm.

Anyway, back to Rudd and his deep pockets. Turnbull has already realised that the only way he’s going to get noticed is if he stands directly in the path of the Rudd money train. You have to give it to the man – he’s got balls.

It almost looked like it was going to work out for Turnbull.

Then came the fires, and a kind of situation which must lead any opposition leader to drop the C-bomb behind closed doors.

In the wake of this latest crisis, K-Rudd has pledged uncapped funding for those in need – but only of course if the Turnbull and his merry band allow stimulus II through the senate.

Brilliant [albeit cynical] strategy from Rudd. I’m with Turnbull on this one though – there’s totally no need to tie disaster relief for bushfire victims to the economic stimulus package. Turnbull has chastised Rudd for playing politics and he’s absolutely right. He’s suggested separate legislation be pushed through to get the money to victims, so the stimulus debate can continue uncompromised.

Makes sense. But I doubt anyone will listen.

Of course, Labor can get the package through, but only with the help of the Greens, an independent, and that dickhead Fielding.

Independent Nick Xenophon is against the one-off payments because he thinks people will blow them on the pokies.

This might surprise some, but I’m not with Xenophon’s infamous pokies stance. I know, generally I embrace most left-wing crusades against evil, but honestly, the government can’t legislate against everything that’s bad for us. Also, as my friend pointed out, gambling is one of the most taxed ways you can fritter away money. So even if Xenophon’s right and people do drop it all into the pokies, at least forty percent or whatever will goes back to the government. To me that’s no worse than people blowing cash on Chinese junk they don’t need like big TV’s and digital photo frames. Whoops. Cynicism.

It must also be said of Xenophon, that he also demanded that more stimulus funding be earmarked for various projects designed to rescue the Murray-Darling river system. He reasons that that the river system feeding two capital cities and the biggest agricultural region in the country is worth shelling out to save. And he’s right. Golf clap for Nick.

Meanwhile I agree with everything Bob Brown says. One day I will shake that man’s hand, one day.

Happy New Year!

God I love New Years celebrations. I spent mine with my cousins camping in a nice part of Inskip [because I'm obsessive compulsive and go the SAME place every time. But hey, once you're onto a good thing..] doing all the things us vegan bums usually do..

Five days actually we camped. By the end I looked like some awesome wildman. The dutch genes in me have ensured that my skin has tanned a deep brown. My hair on the other hand is lighter than ever.

So the last post was apathy. How am I feeling now then? Subsequent to an excellent December, relaxing, refreshing Christmas week, and then, making a big call here, then the best new years ever.

To add to this symphony of stuff going on, I recently took it upon myself to leave Maryborough for Brisbane. I now live in a nice house with two cool chicks, we have a deck in the treetops, a yard, and I have my own spice rack. So good.

A slight drawback of this move has been the fact that there are *so* many things I have needed to purchase to get myself established. And about the same amount still to go.. This wouldn’t be such a big issue, except for the fact that I’m not a real happy shopper. I still have to purchase a desk and bookshelf. Also a guitarFUCK a train just choo’d outside.

..that’s the other thing. The white noise of the city. To me it’s not white noise. I come from a property where, if you hear a car, it’s on your property and action is required. Last night at about midnight a bunch of noisy drunk kids walked past. I reacted like a Vietnam veteran, I was bolt upright ready for action.

I’m gradually getting used to it. Helps that I have cool housemates, and the house itself is nice as.

Now I just have to get a job…. I have similiar dilemmas to you Casey..

Share trading will tide me over a bit longer, but the car has done a shitload of k’s over the summer and needs some love. Plus guitars, rent, bills, all cost money. Maybe I’ll go some sort of parttime fandango. Maybe. Who knows. Stuff work for now.

Running. Goddamn I love it. Running and eating healthy food have ensured good health through fairly challenging times in terms of stuff happening. I ran 7km yesterday, weird that I lived through it given I haven’t run this summer. I guess the serious amount of boarding I’ve been doing must have really helped.

Anyway that’s it for my rambling post. Maybe a coherent one next time

Apathy

Yup. So I’ve been off work for a month and a half now. Every now and again I consider the future, the year ahead. And I just can’t make myself care. Don’t get me wrong now, this isn’t your standard angsty twenty two year old guy whinging about his life. I’m taking apathy to the point where I’m aware of it, and am fully embracing it.

When I handed in my resignation I felt like the world as at my feet. Solid references from team leader and centre manager, a convincing demeanour, plus I look legitimately awesome in a suit. Various ambitious ideas were floating around my mind for the first few weeks.

It’s all evaporated in the summer heat.

As it stands I fill my days with music, working out, reveling in summer heat, spending hours on the board down at Rainbow till I’m in pain, laying about, reading a bit [not much], .. that’s it I’m pretty sure.

It’s seriously all I do. Well.

A few weeks ago I *did* spend a few days camping at Broken Head, a few clicks south of Byron, and it was awesome. Until it rained for two days and I got the flu and associated fever induced night of delirium. Sent some weird texts to Triple J that night. Got up in the morning, still delirious, packed entire sodden camp into car and drove six hours home. Got two speeding fines. Was worth it to get home an hour and a half early and sleep in my queen sized bed.

There’s so much beach down there. From Broken Head you can run all the way to Byron along the beach. So many k’s of just beach. You can always find a spot where there’s noone else for miles, if thats what you’re after. The surf there was kind of angry. Huge, fast, furious waves. On a undersized body board without flippers one struggles to make it out past the breakers. I managed just once, after a herculean effort. Once floating around a hundred metres offshore with longboarders, I realised the stupidity of my situation. I did ok considering, however I’m now reserved to call myself a bodyboarder until I have a vest and some flippers. And maybe a bigger board.

The waves at Rainbow have a tamer, warmer, more familiar feel. Although in reality they’ve been just as fierce. I carve them baby.

Ramble.

Boredom has also introduced me to guitar. I picked it up two days ago and since then have been finding it hard to put it down. It’s good to have another interest.

So in conclusion, for once, the future is of no concern to me. With the pursuits that currently fill my days, I’m not exactly going to “get somewhere” any time soon. But on the flipside, I’m pretty sure I can’t go wrong either. Maybe in January I will start caring again. For now it’s play all day and sleep soundly at night.