Festivus

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, nonaddictive, gender neutral celebration of the solstice holiday, practised with the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or the choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that Australia is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed,color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms:
This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal.
It is freelytransferable with no alteration to the original greeting.
It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her / himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.
This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings, for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Note: No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons have been electromagnetically relocated.

You Know You're A Queenslander (Pt 2)

When...
* You can identify the type of ant that bit you based on the flavour of pain, the duration of the pain and the size of the scar it may leave.

* You pause in the mowing to find some longer pants to wear to protect yourself from the blowback, only to realise you own only one pair of jeans and one goodset of tracky pants and both are too hot. You continue mowing in cutoff shorts and thongs.

* Someone says "it is the Sprit of Christmas" and you think of Bundaberg Rum.

*sigh*

Ok, so I gave up on Nano this year. I don't feel good about it. Lesson learnt.
Actually lesson not learnt - I already knew I needed to say no to a lot more things and I didn't! That large part of me that lives in De Nial thought I could take it all on and get it all done and, as usual, it was wrong.
Is misplaced optimism a sin or just a character flaw?

Week Two - Epic Fail

I've never had such a bad Week Two of Nano. Zero count days at this point is utterly demoralising. There's reasons/excuses (colitis, work going spazz, etc) but 'failing' at Nano simply points out how I've allowed work-related concerns to colonise my effective energy. Again.
Another great exaple of an opportunity to learn from my mistakes.

Onward and upward.

NANO 2010

Nanowrimo for 2010 has kicked off!* Woot! I'm the least prepared i have ever, ever been!! Woot! I have written my first 2500 words or so and still have no idea what's going on or if i will basically scrap that stuff and turn into another direction. I have been looking forward to this since December last year. There's something about the frivolous abandonment of setting off on this adventure that is charming and fun. I also discovered last year that committing to this made many other things take off as well, an unexpected turbo-charge that I am hoping for again this year but trying not to expect.

I know I won't be so perky in a week and half when I'm super-tired and blocked blocked blocked, but that's next week's problem!

(* Apologies for all the exclamation marks in this post)

Time turns Away from Us

"Give up the wish for a better past"
is the illuminated sign in the churchyard on the corner. It's a bit of an odd thing to say at first pass, but as I thought about it and also about the way that my 3 hours a night for projects seemed to completely evaporate this week, it started to gel into something quite profound. Something that made echos around how slowly life comes together when we're living it but how quickly things seem to have passed when we look back.

I'd like to learn from my Mistakes

Here's a hot tip for beginners - don't keep using earbuds that have deteriorated to the point that there's exposed wires. I shouldn't have to say it - but there it is.

The Morning After

Since the Fat Quarter Challenge was accepted, there's been a frenzy of lists - ideas, schedules, possible shops and cafes this is a good excuse to visit, and most ironically, a list of all the other projects that really ought to be completed before this one is undertaken... such as the scarf Mellie ordered for her birthday - only one third completed. But, I hope you'll agree, looking slightly fabulous (the photo uploader thing didn't work - nearly got it! sorry).


This project is working excellently to take my mind off the impending horridness of Post Peak Oil* or whatever we're calling the trainwreck in slow-mo that is rolling down the mountain of non-renewable resource gluttony towards us. Kewl. Mission, pretty much, accomplished.
Bring on the Craft.


*"Impending" in the sense that it is the future at some point. However I don't (and no-one really does) know when exactly which is strangely what I find most stressful about the situation.

Craft-tastic! Challenge!

As a way of re-invigorating my creative (bunny ears required?) life, I've chosen a fairly random challenge and recruited a few fellow travellers to join me in participating.
Actually I've tried on two fronts and 1 sunk like a proverbial (Nanowrimo not in flavour this year, tho I'm still in for it) and t'other is a little more accessible.

It is the Inaugural Trash City Fat Quarter Challenge 2011.

Oh baby.

What is a fat quarter? It is a piece of fabric. Still interested and willing to risk learning about quilting? Then read on, but over here. The project will be due sometime in April 2011, all those details are yet to be clarified by the organising society.

That's all for now, but expect updates and hi-larious anecdotes about paper-pieced hexagons, and even, possibly, photos. Yeah, watch my comfort zone blow right out.
Woot.

Very Busy Dog

I once saw a doco on tv in which Grandmaster Flash said
"A dawg that chases it's tail is a very busy dawg."

I can not for the life of me remember anything else about that doco, but really - with a gem like that does it matter?

Panopticon Blues

Wristwatches and schedules and tiny little boxes cut dreams into segments, and some things don't keep living when you cleaver them up into teensy pieces. Try it if you don't believe me. I suggest not with your own pet.

The Doubtful has had all clock readouts gaffed over and we're all the better for it. I prefer to not know what day it is, anywhere. Your timezone is your problem dude, don't lay that trip on me. Of course in my trade we're largely casual about many of those things people have gotten into the habit of thinking of as immutable (psst guys, we made it up and all agreed not to tell - don't you remember?). Occasionally we get all precise and specific. Sometimes bizniz must be clandestine and this requires some snappy moves to a sharp beat. Usually we cruise in rasta zen mode and this is the eternal perfect antidote to the lingering sweaty nightmares from my time in the panopticon.

The Invisible World

The Doubtful has been in dry dock so I went crewing on a couple of other ships. Let's face it, sitting around planet side is not a strength I have nor really wish to cultivate.

It is always interesting to see how other systems handle the same things your own do but in bizarrely different ways - and of course that sometimes they don't. My ideas of critical functions and basic comforts that are just so obvious as to not be worth a mention are simply not shared by others. Whoa! I was away just long enough for it to all be an entertaining curiosity and working holiday rather than a horribly jarring experience.

So here I am, back in the same patched chair that has a little bit of stuffing coming out of the broken seam at the back, and thinking about something a wise man told me this week...

The freedom to reinterpret the world, to abandon a story of desperation for one of possibility and hope, is basic to the worldview of magic. It’s a freedom that today’s progressive community might find it useful to embrace as well.
...
It’s not just that change has to be thinkable before it’s possible, though this is true and important; it’s also that imagination can change the world by itself.

... and realising that so many things that have meaning are actually almost entirely held within ourselves. On a personal level, in our communities, our nations or ships. All of it can be reinterpreted according to our will, or the will of our enemies, or the will of the readers of the future to name just three obvious ones. In a world-view where 'reality' is this fluid, what can we hold on to? And let's not pretend that feeble humans do not feel safer holding onto things!

I've noticed that we hold onto habits and the familiar. Broken chairs, unsubstanitated opinions even our expectations and hopes sometimes are just placeholders for the meaning we really yearn for and that maybe we could finally discover if we accepted this secret. We are free to reinterpret the world.
Crazy. Could it work?

Morning Planetside

Do you ever dream of birds, of warm currents that lift and caress? Do you dream of eternal sunsets and wondrous, unknowable patterns? Do you aspire to lift and see more? I'm held here by the miracle of gravity, part of this web.

That's the urge of sap rising, of rich complex earth smells.

Smother

There's plenty of space out here in, um, space. But no matter how far away you are from the cities or worlds of the Culture, somehow, your mother can find you, and in just seconds say exactly the thing that will just most piss you off.

That's the super-power of blood relations. They accumulate a lifetime of misunderstandings, judgements and irritations that can be channelled directly into your reptilian brain, bypassing all higher-control functions.

Gotta love 'em.

"What's that?! Sorry, you're dropping out - there's a lot of solar flares in this quadrant..."

Stuff Dead People Like

Do you think that would make for a good blog? It could be pretty involved, or maybe just really really short.

Do you think opinions would differ on whether being dead was basically pretty good, or ultimately suckful? By persons who are deceased obviously - not by us living types.

If all life and matter is really energy vibrating at different speeds and levels, then surely blogging - or interacting with the cybersphere (or WTF we're calling this space these days) would be the first place we could make "contact with those who have crossed over" in a way that does not require any human third party. Actually, it should be "receive contact" as we'll need them to set up some kind of Ghost account. Gmail of a new kind.

Pros:
* Either no longer conscious of human depravity and suffering or all-knowing
* Can understand all languages, see through all politicians and finally be certain of something
* Re-incarnated as cool person/animal
* No need for money, haircuts or bowel bacteria
* one-way ticket

Cons:
* Sensual /worldly pleasures a thing of the past
* Can't take advantage of perspective/situation to improve plight of loved ones
* No afterlife of any kind and so souls/consciousness disappear right on the moment of death, making this blog concept N/A
* Whatever the next realm/stage is, it is too awesome to be bothered remembering to try and tell us about it - everyone just scoots on over/up and gets on with it
* one-way ticket


Probably a bit of a shit idea, but I do wonder...

Detoxification

Re-initiating the sugar/fructose detoxification process after dismal failure two weeks-ish ago. I've spent the intervening period clearing out the various storage facilities and carefully re-stocking, along with practising the "It's not being deprived it is being healthy" mantra which doesn't yet feel or sound sincere.

Aiming to stick to it for a month and trusting that it comes with the benefits as advertised on the packet.

Day 2: Basically holding my breath.

Ordinary Days

There's been no news. Sometimes, hurtling through space has big stretches of time where Just not Much Happens. I look out a window. I wait. I read something and have a snooze. I talk to the cargo. I wonder if I could have done things differently. Such is life.

Sirocco Stream

It's been a good run lately, I've been doing this for a while now and so I've picked up a few tricks from the old timers.
We're flowing with the solar winds for the next three cycles, a lovely extra kick-along, and it has put us into the path of the mild and loose social connections that natural nomads make. The bodegas in the port worlds are just that tiny bit more full with the more colourful and experienced characters. There's a light camaraderie that I had grown out of hoping to find, and here it is, under the current and seeping into my world.

I'm carrying settlers at the moment, their enthusiastic hopefulness and optimism is catching. I find that I am happy for no reason.

Sunshine Skins

We picked up a fresh cargo the other day - mandarins and oranges. I took a crate as part payment and gorged myself on the first day and pulped and froze what I couldn't eat, because I remember the last time I took on board this stuff.

At first I had been delighted to have the fragrant crates in the hold, I love how they seem to store the sun in their skins, but quickly enough I couldn't get them offloaded soon enough. It is easy to forget that ripe means fresh. Which means "consume very soon". That's why jams and pickles used to be so big, because those gorgeous full globes will go off, and once they start it is a race to decay. Skin fungus, fermentation, even in the cold, even leaving the hold to get close to space cold - they'll turn fast.

We're landing in just hours now, and I know that the people here will go crazy for this delivery. There'll be enough good stuff in amongst it all to make it a lucrative run, and I've got enough snap-frozen pulp to keep scurvy away for a long while.

Soup

What a revelation is can be when something lost and forgotten is found and valued again.
Rediscover homemade vegetable soup. Add an extra potato.

How delicious! Nutritious! Frugal Friendly!

I am the envy of the communal dining area.

The Gods of Space

The Gods of Space are an interesting pantheon.
Eventually, of course, we'll forget that we created them and they'll become some weird kind of dogmatic religion for our post-human offspring. Whatever they'll mutate into by then, I doubt they'll be calling themselves 'human'.
Human started seeming a little grubby and somehow a bit unsanitary by the mid 21^st. All that blood and integrated systems and redundant genes. So our post-quantum, post-lunar, post-post generations will likely shun us as thoroughly as we do the drab and unknown millions of the first dozen millennia of pre-history humanity.
Humpf.
Where was I?

Peversity

"The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul's very life."

John Updike (1965) Assorted Prose

Ah, Freecell

My communications network failed over the weekend although at the time I thought it might have been just my handset. It was pretty inconvenient, no one could reach me and I had to find a payphone and queue with the unwashed to put strange coins into a machine and then strain to hear my loved one down a scratchy stinky line.

Rerouting comms worked until the network was back up, but what struck me about the incident was the irony that my only concern had been the prospect of losing my Freecell Challenge stats.
That's right, solitaire on my phone. 811 games so far with 798 wins (1.61% losses) and I'm heading to 1000 to see if it clocks, and to get my losses to less than 1%.

I do have better things to do with my time, but it is so easy to do this in all those little gaps (queues! Dr's waiting rooms! During the ads!) and then next thing you know, just one game before bed. It is a slippery slope. Obsessed? Nah, I could give up any time.

Hasty Packing

I dreamt again of an enforced and urgent pack.

This time I was at work, although I was packing the bedroom from my first share house/squat, and the items were random, drawn from a broad range of my strange visual storeroom. I had a small, brown, late 70s style carryall - about the size of a contemporary average handbag and I was attempting to shovel only the most vital aspects of my life into it.
This is one of my few recurring dream themes. Due to some (always unknown) crisis there's only a short time to grab only what I can carry. It is what lead to my "interest" in evacuation preparedness and that did seem to alleviate the dreams for a long time. The new element last night was the ring of eager and aggressive scavengers, swooping in to scoop up anything I hesitated over or looked uncertain about. It certainly refreshed the normal baseline level of panic that this dream always comes with.

Time to update the evac 'go bag' and then spend some couch time untangling my head.

A Different Kind of Year

This message is the 365^th.
A year's worth of messages - possibly making this blog one year old or maybe a decade old (in blog time). It is a cute milestone. Part of me thinks I should take a photo of it. What an atavistic impulse.

So many things are on autopilot now that I sometimes wonder if the ship gets as bored as I do. We're scheduled for a refueling and cargo transfer stop at the 711116 hub soon. I'm checking the mirror to make sure I'm presentable, but I can't remember if I'm meant to have hair or not. The transmission lag means it is not worth checking the feeds yet either.

Last time I got a case of the jitters and scurried back to the ship after about 4 hours. It was just too weird to be around people and eating food other than Stilton. Oh yeah, the mouse, a slow set of moves got it convinced that the ship was longer and wider than it really is, and using the only remaining advantage of opposable thumbs, I waited and waited and waited until it went into an airlock looking for the promised land, and I blew the hatch manually.

Likewise I then performed a hard start of the command systems, so at least I'm nominally back in control, but of course all of the tweaked settings and preferences and other niceties are missing. It just doesn't seem like home. It feels like my home was stolen and replaced with an exact replica, but all an inch to the left. I could just run a back-up, but now I'm looking out the window and wondering if I should just build them all up fresh. Maybe I'd like things to be different, but am just in the habit of *thinking* that I like them a certain way... like the hair thing, I'll wait and bit longer and see.

Are you Paranoid Enough?

What does it take to survive?
Do you have to be willing to eat spiders just in case there's nothing else around later and look for hidden spy cameras as you go about your day to day?
I'm not up for that.

Why should I strive to propagate my genes at the expense of yours? I'm sure yours will suit the vasty unknown future just as well. Possibly better. Probably not as well as spiders or cephalopods, but we can't all be superior species now can we?

Good luck.
I'm making a cup of tea. Would you like one?

Danger or Reward

Browsing fruitlessly in a newsagency for something fresh or stimulating that was worth the cover price, I came across a small article in a mag called "Ultra" (what? I don't know) that said that the entire self-help industry is pretty much based on a pointless belief - that poeple can be motivated by rational reasons and good information. Rather, it posited, humans are much simpler. There are only two things that will cut through our dislike of change. Danger or Reward.

Our long slow generations of survival before the internet taught us to be conservative, to fear change, and all the chirpy infomercials about abercisers and healthy eathing in the world won't save us from eating ourselves to death. The only think that reaches the far depths of our processing units is to put it into much simpler terms. DANGER or REWARD.

That is a model I might be able to do something with.

Plea from a Hostage

I have not been able to post for some time as a mouse is terrorising us. I have snuck this missive out in the rubbish collection. If he finds out that I am in communication with the outside world, the retribution will be harsh. I haven't much time, nor space to write. I am scratching this into an old cat thigh bone that the mouse has tired of, using a broken knitting needle. All I will say for now is this: Help.
Please help me.
The ships controls are re-routed to the mouse den and the only food being replicated by the machines is Stilton. I hate Stilton, and I'm getting very podgy. I don't know where we're heading, but I doubt I will make the annual convention this year. Lock into my signal if you can. Track us. This mouse must be stopped.

Scale Free

This morning I went to an art/science workshop called "Scale Free Networks" where we used massively magnified slides to assemble and then interpret images and make collaborative artworks, and then spent about 45 minutes tooling around looking at random stuff (ribbon, stone, sponge, fungus, coin, moth wing etc) under stereo microscopes (20x and 40x magnification). The workship was led by an artist and a scientist (molecular biology) and they shared with us a very little about the history of microscopes and then some images, and we talked also about the freedom of working collaboratively across disciplines. It was all too short (2 hours) and stimulating to mix up the nuanced and emotive values of art with the tools and language of science.

I love the way so many things in nature - shapes but also really relationships scale up and down. Everyone has their own experiences of this - from the coastlines of Norway designed by Slartibartfast to the edges of grilled cheese, to the way skin peels when it is sun burnt and the spreading silt echos on a flood plain, veins in our arms and nerves in our eyes, or the gorgeous aching arch of a solar flare or a Lilly's gentle pitch to sensuous tip. Those of course are shapes, but they're relational in time and space - as we are.

The way we trust, or dance around trust, the way we share, or close down and step away, the way we cluster as individuals (and relate to ourselves) or with others - intimate groups on specific lines of interest or in masses - for the kick that comes from tens of thousands cheering together - be it at the ritual of a ball through posts or for the frisson of balls on balls. Highly codified clothing or no clothing at all. Meaning held in the action translated through the lenses of our own experiences. In art as in science so many things are taken as truth that would be so much more useful to our understanding of each other more broadly if they were understood as multiple frames of position and preference.

"Lost my muchness indeed!"

Sedition in the Dark

It is deeply unAustralian to dislike hot weather, be largely disinterested in sport and be underwhelmed by the idea of mowing in middle of the day, but nonetheless, here I am. Your personal representative of that irritating single digit demographic of population that insists on watching SBS, reading books without pictures and not eating meat. Frankly, under Howard the sedition laws were getting very close to netting us pale non-sporties and veggos. I don't think any of those "patriot act" style laws have been revoked, but I'm pretty confident they haven't continued to expand. (Of course, they may have. My deliberate ignorance of news means that I remain unaware of what new evils the blandly congenial face of our Current PM hides).

I used to find the idea of sedition very interesting. As I understand it (ie, vague guessing rather than any looking up of definitions, or actual research. I like to start off with a kind-of gestalt feel and spiral my way towards accuracy. Lends slightly more to poetry if there's any in the offing than just diving in to the dictionary. But I digress.) sedition is kinda like mutiny, but on land. Or the idea of mutiny. Of course learning about Pirates has shown me a few more things about mutiny too. Sometimes 'mutiny' was a fairly straightforward commercial decision where a strongly held difference in acquisitional strategies and philosophies of plunder led to simple (ie bloodless) partings where the pirates' fleet (yes, they often had small convoys and even fleets) would experience a re-distribution of crew and a ship or two would peel away and head to fresh horizons. Seems reasonable. In other times, most notably in the above-board commercial world and the navy, mutiny was the last line of defence against a Captain gone buttfuck crazy - wigging out all over the place and homicidal on an unsustainable trajectory. Of course, Captains get to write the Ship's Log, so later on it could be hard to get the dead to speak in one's defence if the Captain had a lucid moment with quill before the parting of ways.

So anyway, why might this be interesting? It seemed to me that crumbly empires get more concerned with what you might be thinking than what you're actually doing. Critical thought can become a crime. Frank conversation about how things could practically be different can become a crime. Not a misdemeanour, not a concern, not a 'no scones for you naughty thing!' but a crime.

A much greater thinker than I, George Orwell, has of course covered this ground superbly, in his seminal work of paranoia "1984". I recommend it to myself for a re-read and to you dear reader for your own edification (read it here for free).

I'm not up to Orwell. I'm just saying that for some reason a few years back, we started making it explicit that thinking was problematic to the Australian way of life. That was interesting because it seemed so quaintly old-school and utterly, utterly pointless. Then it wasn't interesting at all for a long time, just another example of how shitty life can be, and keeping that list is a really dull hobby. I let it go.

Then last weekend I watched "Death Race" and it set me to thinking (as incredibly brutal, masochistic, post-collapse action films often do) about what we like to think of as "fiction" and therefore entertaining, and who we think are suitable people to fill the roles of villains. Not many people saw Death Race, despite Jason Statham in the lead and Ian "Swearengen" McShane in support so let me break it down for you... and bear with me as the plot does not hang together in the film so this will not sound very cogent*.

An ex-con who happens to also be an ex-car racing guy's wife is brutally murdered and he is framed for it so that he can go to the commercially run jail where they RACE (a la Running Man) in a competition to THE DEATH to win their freedom. BTW the race of fortified and armed cars is telecast live and viewing is by subscription, thereby earning the prison mega-bucks.

Ok. Nothing new there. Literally (it is a remake of a '76 film). I won't distract our conversation by going into the gender stuff (other than to say it is tediously predictable - the wife is a corpse before she gets 2 full lines out, the uber-evil Warden is a post-menopausal corporate witch drone, and then there's 3 or 4 bootylicious and interchangable sets of tits and arses to dress the cars up. Sorry "navigators" from the women's prison.) That was a long set-up for a short pay-off. The fiction here (can you spot it?) that makes all of this allowable - is that "in the future, prisons will be run for (dramatic pause) profit!" (GASP OF SHOCK) Only in that kind of hideously peverted world would something so craven come about.

But of course this fiction is a fiction.

Prisons the world over, and here in Australia, are run by contractors to lesser or greater degrees already. Some in the States are already "purpose built facilities" completely funded by commercial interests. Running a prison is like removing garbage - one of those services that the community expects gets handled, but actually as long as the name and the signage is ok, really don't care who exactly is taking care of that business, and it's a growth industry. It's the Indian call-centre approach to staffing and funding. A hollow-core world, and, most importantly to this discussion, it is old hat. Maybe in 76 it seemed a wild idea, great for some future world (Mad Max-esque - if you will. Actually Mad Max came out in 79 - but you get my drift.) and certainly when Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead came out in 88 it was a chilling commentary on a system running loose and note - even the title tied it in to the concepts that prisoners were people, with rights (BTW Nick Cave co-wrote this, and had an acting role in it. Keyword: BLEAK. It is not a popcorn and beer type film - unlike Death Race which is clearly made to be consumed as Entertainment "Ghosts..." feels like a nightmare documentary ). But I digress.

To bring this back to sedition, it seems we have eaten our own tail. If sedition is a crime of thought in which criticism of the ruling system is entertained, what is it called when telling the truth about the ruling system is seen as distasteful or undesirable enough that we maintain a consensus reality that these unpalatable truths remain fictions?

How close are we to a situation where, on the books at least, speaking aloud a truth becomes a crime?

Close enough, I'd say, that someone will be able to furnish an example in Australia of where this is already the case. Or proposed to be the case. Probably in that that bundle of ridiculous on-line measures. Anyway. There it is. I don't really know what to do with that line of thought. It begs for action of some kind. But what?

In a hollow-core world where do you toss the molotov?

* WARNING - PLOT SPOILER. You and I know that it is unlikly that you're going to:
a. Watch this film, eva.
b. Not see this twist coming, and
c. Have the pleasure of watching massively overclocked cars race around almost endlessly brutally killing 'people' ruined by this brief synopsis. Basically this is a film that delivers on the core promise of the title. "Death Race" That's what they were selling and that's what they made. No nancy-pantsing around.

A Steady Hand on the Tiller

You know it, I know it. No one wants to talk about it. The Rut.

Sometimes the structures we put into place to support us and assist us get too familiar, too well known, and without realising it we've entered a rut. A rut is a worn path, a line of travel that is heavily used and heads in the direction you want to go and it actually eases passage in that way because it is worn smooth of little lumps and bumps. Of course if you decide that it is no longer the desired direction of travel and that your destination lies on another path ... well getting out of a deep rut can be difficult - even hazardous. If you don't have the right skills you can tip yourself over and even break something needful, maybe an axle.

Usually we aren't at risk from this extreme type of response, a little wiggle or a holiday, or a mix-around of the dressings we give our days is enough to freshen-up the experience. Other times, the realisation of a rut can seem like a life sentence and must be escaped immediately, AT ONCE and in this moment of panic hazardous and momentous shifts can be attempted, but rarely pulled off.

I've had a few weeks to walk barefoot in the cold waters of strange oceans and have a think about the rutness of things in comparison to the other way we often phrase the same situation - "plain sailing". As with so many things It is a question of perspective. Am I in a rut or am I experiencing plain sailing? It is only a rut if I wish to change direction and find it hard, but sometimes I know that I change direction just to check that I still can. Conundrum.

The unexpected beauty of Hobart (where I am on holiday very briefly) has been in the maritime history, flavour and lifestyle of the city. Although I can get motion sickness from watching others sway on the spot, I've been out on boats of all sizes and shapes on this trip. One of the subtle things I've noticed is how the metaphoric language of the sea can give a fluid and hopeful nuance to the expression of emotional states. Even the doldrums can't last forever (if they could ever happen in this wide river harbour in the lee of Mt Wellington). So direction of travel can be seen in the context of navigation and the avoidance of known obstacles. A route that takes you through known reefs and shoals is not quicker, no matter how much shorter. Perhaps this is a more helpful way to consider the apparent problem of a rut. A rut, by definition, is a path avoiding known obstacles. It is a navigational shorthand.

The trick, I think, might be in remembering that there is no such thing as automatic pilot. It is a real hand on the tiller of our life. It is our own hand, and it must be our own mind that charts the course and evaluates the hazards. If smooth sailing and known obstacles are what can be handled by the limitations of your craft and your desired destination than you are in harmony with your journey. If not, well maybe it is time to look again at the stars and the edges of the charts and plot for a different kind of experience, but plot my friends, don't panic.

An Offshore Wind

There's whitecaps on the harbour and a dead seal on the shore,
all the yearning of the ages won't bring you back for more.
Its sweet to think of love, sometimes wrong to trust to faith,
for nothing comes from nothing when hearts have come up poor.

You trumped me on the western docks, you shamed me in the morn.
I saw all sins through your pure eyes and drifted, lost, forlorn.
When does your view turn inward? Do you see what's going on?
Grant absolution early and I'll sing you a true song.

Us troubadours are restless, always strumming for a feed.
I miss you in the mornings and have lost you in the night.
We tell the truth in verses if you give is what we need.
So hum a little for me and with luck I'll get it right.

Twenty Ten Commencement

Brave new decade! I like the way it is two lots of tens. Sometime this decade our new century will begin to find the form it will be remembered for. We've pretty much wrapped up the 20^th now. What do you think the highlights will be summarised as?
Electricity?
Communications technologies?
Peak Oil?
Massive Proliferation in pointless music genres?
Coffee snobbery?
The only century in which computers weren't sentient?

Perhaps all of the above and more.

I'm not really fussed. I'm looking forward now. Things I'd like out of our new century include but are not limited to:
* Global ecological democracy - let's even things up, we're all on this globe together.
* Spontaneous intellectual uplift of all persons. Ever wake up and think something like "I'd like to be calmer, happier, better read, more forgiving, more grateful, less angry, capable of cooking a nutritious meal, kissed more often and so on."? I think it would be great if each person had one or more of those thoughts and did something positive and generative towards obtaining that state this century. Imagine what the cumulative effect might be. Of course, we might then need to hand out more condoms, but there's nothing too wrong with that problem.
* More great music. Nothing crazy there - just really like it. How can that be bad?
* Quantum travel/communications/ Fabrication - I just have a feeling that entanglement is going to rock our world/s.
* First contact with sentient aliens (preferably in a manner that doesn't result in the genocide of humans, but I would kind of understand if it did).
* Free chocolate days to celebrate the happy chemicals that make being human so much fun.

So welcome to Twenty Ten and here's cheers to easing into the 21^st century!