The Best Laid Plans

If you make plans, please stick to them.
If you promise someone you'll see them definitely, undoubtedly, without reservations next week, please do it.
Don't think it's not worth the time, or you can't be bothered!
Because I for one, am totally sick to death of "maybes", "we'll see what happens'", and just generally people not putting in any effort to see anybody else, except perhaps their chosen few.
All it leaves is a barren wasteland of empty words!

A Roof and Four Walls

I moved out of my house.

I don't know how long it's been now, but it's been a while.

The move hasn't really had that big an effect on me, but the things I've found that are hard to ignore are the memories I've still held from the 13 years i spent there. My entire conscious childhood, actually. It's a pretty big thought to think 49a Douglas Haig St was the place that built the "adult" that I am now, that was the nucleus of my home life.

There's a whole host of memories attached to the place, and stories that can come from everything, but a choice selection I've decided on exhibiting in narrative form on visual stimuli.

I'll include a caption for some pictures, basically.

This is the dusty, moist, dark, musty, semi-underground, illegal-to-live-in-due-to-its-incredibly-low-ceiling study-cum-bedroom "dungeon" that my brother first owned, before passing onto my sister, who in turn she passed onto me. The damp and dusty environment I'm sure contributed to many a sickness, but this room was cherished by the owner and treated with reverence by its heirs.

This is the rumpus room, which invariably was never empty. Home to my sister at various times, myself, visitors; in its later years used simply as a rumpus room. Just outside the doors, my sister would sit and smoke and talk on the phone at any hour of the night. Many times I would accompany her and sit quietly, while she voiced her angsts, not quite understanding it all.

This is the little bridge over our garden. This is where, our younger years, my sister and I would rig up my tricycle with a towel in the back bucket, and we'd ride tandem down the slope, annoying my mother while greatly enjoying ourselves.

The bridge leads to the carport, and onto the street, the forum and meeting place for the residents of Lower Douglas Haig.

This is the upstairs hallway. Host to many an indoor cricket and rugby game with Morgan, its high-powered halogen lamps made play possible at any time of night or day. Yes, it is extremely narrow, but we compromised.

This is my backyard.

This is the grass my father could never get to grow; this is the Taiwanese Cherry tree family and visitors alike marvelled at once a year, with its bright pink flowers.

This is the pool, the centre of many summers.

This is Bowser's domain, where he lay in the sun, and hunted for possums, with occasional success;

This is the huge towering gum tree, over which I pondered many a time when it would fall over and die, pulled out of its lofty home in the skies by wind, or old age. It never did. It outlasted us. It'll probably outlast me.

But it won't outlast my memories.

Traditional Life

Back in September 2007, I was over in Slovakia.

It was time for my brother's wedding.

It turned out to be a really enjoyable time.

Bojnice was a really beautiful place, and just going out and exploring the quiet streets and the atmosphere is something I've never experienced anywhere in Australia before.

The trip was also a real eye-opener for me, I saw things I didn't believe possible. We travelled to a secluded valley in the shadow of great rising slopes, and there a village concealed in the crevice between two peaks.


As I watched from the window of our rented chalet local villagers washing their clothes in the stream running through the base of the valley, and the aged men tending to their meagre front gardens, a thought occurred to me that this was scene had probably barely changed in 500, 800, 1000 years. A millenium!

Wars had been and gone, the Final Frontier breached, governments formed, peaked, collapsed, The Velvet Revolution occurred, The Berlin Wall was torn down, Socialism was removed, and these people hadn't moved. Everyday their world continued on all the same, regardless of the rest of the globe.

It was refreshing to think that they didn't know what the rest of the world was doing, and even more, they didn't care. Their world consisted of the same processes, year after year, generation after generation.

To me, this was a confronting reality. So many things in life were now deemed to be unimportant by this new perspective. These people were "simple" but they weren't unhappy - they had no reason to be so. Is there really a convincing argument as to why modern life is better?

Life in this modern context is just more packed of things that distract us from what is inescapable. Life is more complex than ever before, but these few dozen villagers showed that it can be enjoyed at a wholly base level, and that these "advances" may not be they're all cracked up to be. I guess, I took away that life should be enjoyed for what it is, rather than what you can pack into it. It's both more wholistic and simple than what we make it.

Weather

You know time goes by fast like rain

It swallows your every sound

From whisper to icy howl

Good luck trying to be someone

If you make it then you’ve won

You’ll grow up to be someone

Storm In a Teacup

It begins with a weird, warped, front to back invention.
Off-kilter, stark, love? A call to arms, eventually.
The venture begins with a touch of magic in worrying times.
Machines spin in a dark factory. Untangling, disassembling.
A pause, for a brief moment only.
Muses, thoughts echo; a contemplation. Voices listen, then reply.
Glittering, a complex, turning less dense but not a moment's peace.
Dozing beneath the shade of palms.
Spiralling, calyptic, hypnotic, metronomic, then something else.
Xylophonic, patterns, a knife through it all.
Digging underground, earth, a vein of hidden gold.
Resurfacing again;
Now to the skies, soaring high, clouds and birds surround.
Settling down now, a lullaby, time for sleep. Godnat.

Workers

I wanna hear drones, and my heart's a drone.