I’ve sacrificed a bit of route fidelity for the sake of visibility and being able to get everything on one map, but this is the gist of it, starting from Perth and moving in a clockwise direction. The pieces are coming together more and more as lift-off approaches and with any luck I’ll actually be prepared by the time I’m meant to be leaving, which is…. in about 134 hours time.
Yikes.
I have been laying low lately. And when I say lately, I mean for the better part of this year. As much as this may amuse some of you (Hi, Mum), part of it is due to modesty. Actually, modesty’s not the right word, maybe ‘fear’ is more appropriate. Basically I’ve been trying to keep various aspects of my activities quiet so that in the event that a great deal of planning and effort comes crashing down in a spectacular ball of flames, I can pretend it had nothing to do with me and walk away whistling in an entirely un-suspicious fashion. The whole thing is still up in the air at the moment, and it’ll be anywhere from another 3 weeks to another 4-5 months before I know whether this airships’s gonna fly or not, but I’ll keep you posted (if in an avoidant, skewiff fashion).
On a more concrete note, I can tell you that one of my plans is coming along nicely, and that is to head off on a national tour in fifty days time. I’ve got 6 weeks off from work and one motorcycle with which to fill it. I’m not certain about the formation of that last sentence, but you get where I’m coming from, right? I’m going to be headed out of town to the North until I hit ocean, then turning right and heading East until it happens again. At that point I’ll start heading South, cross a small bit of ocean in order to watch some bike racing for a few days, then return to the mainland for a few days of local shenanigans before starting to head back West again. It’s gonna be awesome. Well, either awesome or incredibly boring and painful, but part of the allure is finding out. Tragically I do have to board an aircraft at one point during the trip in order to come briefly home for a number of matrimonial proceedings (none of which have any legal implications for me personally). I say tragically in reference to the air travel, not the celebrations, those should be delightful, I’m just not the biggest fan of travelling by plane.
Between now and departure I have a fairly hefty list of to-do items to get through though. With any luck I’ll get most of them sorted early on so that I don’t end up running around frantically in the few days prior to departure with a crazed look in my eyes, but inevitably I’ll run into some drama or other. I also plan to wake up on time this year on the day I intend to leave. Hopefully that should help.
I probably couldn’t count the number of things I’ve written here about not writing unless I took my shoes and socks off. Still, it’s something that I think about from time to time. While I could rationalise that nothing overwhelming has been happening in my life of late that would warrant writing about, often what I write isn’t so much about events but about what I’ve been thinking and how I’ve interpreted things. The curious part of this is that I certainly haven’t stopped thinking. I can say that I definitely continue to ponder and cogitate with great frequency. The thoughts are still there, it’s just that I haven’t been writing them down for some reason which I can’t seem to put my proverbial finger on.
One possibility that’s been floating about in the back of my mind is the fear of persecution. While there’s an XKCD strip that succinctly (if with colourful language) describes my idealistic sentiments on the nature of self-publishing on the internet, there’s only so much effort I can put into keeping myself from reality, and the reality is that it doesn’t take much to turn something I’ve put down in words into a gallows from which to hang me. It’s the kind of thing that concerns me more as I end up further and further down this path of being a ‘professional’. While I intentionally barely talk about my work these days, it only takes one remark out of context for an employer to decide that some loose interpretation of my words doesn’t align or comply with their corporate vision, mission statement, magic 8-ball or what have you. These things occur to me. I like the idea of a place where one isn’t considered guilty until proven guilty, but I’ve yet to come across one.
I hate being sick. It just gets in the way of everything. It interferes with my plans. Plans for eating, sleeping, exercising, reading, working, socialising, thinking clearly, they all go down the tube. The fact that I have this free time off work but can’t do anything with it would almost be frustrating if I weren’t so preoccupied with being stiff, sore and generally achy. There’s nothing much else to be done but to curl up in bed and wait for my immune system to do it’s thing at a microscopic level.
Bah, humbug.
Things could be an awful lot worse, it’s just that it’s been a while since I’ve had my host body properly hijacked by some low-level life form so I’m more grumpy about it than usual. I also want to do some serious pondering about life direction (career direction more specifically) and it’s hard to do when my head is all cloudy and I don’t feel like getting out of bed, let alone doing anything productive. It’s hard to get inspired to change your life when all you really want is some soup. Soup. Now there’s a good idea. But hopefully this is the lower point of whatever this sickness is, and I can start working myself back towards normal function, for there is much that I would like to do.
I was standing in the shower thinking about how easy my life is right now (don’t worry, I have plans afoot to make things much more difficult for myself), and it occurred to me how abstracted from a hunter-gatherer reality almost everything that I do is. I tried to picture myself explaining to some guy who lives in a tree on some savannah what it is I do all day, not even getting into the odd mechanics of modern life where I pay for goods and services by handing someone my flat bit of plastic and letting them hold it for a minute, the result of which is that somewhere in the world an electronic representation of a number changes.
The most peculiar thing I may have to explain however, might be the concept of exercise. I am picturing a conversation where I explain that I was running two nights ago. Not from anything, not to avoid being caught somewhere or eaten by something larger than I am, and not to get to a destination. In fact, I was running in a big circle so that I could get back to where I started from. Sometimes, I count how long it takes me to run in a circle, and I try to get back where I started from sooner than last time. Occasionally I’ll get on a special machine where I can run as fast as I want to, and I don’t go anywhere!
Sometimes I climb stairs or hills when I don’t need to get to the top, and when I get there, I come right back down again.
Other days, I pick up heavy things and put them back down again. I do this a lot of times from the same place. Sometimes I’ll stand or lie down in a funny way to make it harder for me to lift the heavy things, or I put them on the end of a stick, then I lift the stick up instead. Once I’m done, I put the heavy things back exactly where they came from. If I don’t, the other people who lift the heavy things would get angry with me.
But why? Why would you do these things, I picture the guy asking me.
Well, where I live, we have so much food that I do all this exercise so that at the end of each day I’ve used up all the food I’ve eaten, and it’s like I never ate anything at all. Sometimes if I run on the spot enough and lift enough heavy things, it’s like I’ve un-eaten some food. I also sweat a lot, so I generally drink a lot of clean water afterwards and then wash myself in it so that I don’t feel so hot and sticky.
I expect that this is the point where the fellow would holler something in a language I don’t understand, and I would either be burnt at the stake, or the local doctor would start drilling holes in my head to let the crazy out.
Things have been a bit roughly shod lately, and while basic cognitive operations resumed regular service as of around this time last week, there’s still a lot of wanderers upstairs bumping into walls and looking uncertain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m outwardly pretty functional. I’m doing my typical kicking of asses and taking of names at work, which is nice, but I just feel… aloof. It’s kind of cool to be technically competent in your field, there’s definitely a sense of satisfaction to it. And while I know that I don’t know everything about my work, I know enough conceptually and have enough well-worn mental schema to be able to deal with most anything that I come across day to day. The satisfaction comes and goes however. Some days I think that being able to do what I do is fantastic, other days I find it meaningless and intellectually unfulfilling. I could probably say the same for most vocations I’ve undertaken though.
I apologise for the state of my writing at the moment, I’m long out of practice. Articulating complex thoughts has been troublesome all-round this week actually, I’ve found my mouth frequently exceeding my brain’s capability to keep up during conversations, none of which has put me into any precarious situations, but I’ve regularly had to use humour to sketch over the fact that my tongue seems to be stumbling awkwardly over my lips.
All told, my current list of complaints are mostly self-directed. Right now I don’t feel as mentally sharp as I usually like to think I am. This might be related to my trying to force a few overly large thoughts through an otherwise occupied mind and the subsequent slowing and blockages that entails, but with any luck I’ll be able to detach my brain from the running gear over Easter and let it spin freely for a while. Hopefully that’ll help.
Like a lot of people, I find it really easy to start something, but the act of actually getting around to doing the tough bits towards the end often kicks my apathy into gear, particularly when it comes to things like documenting my trips. I wrote practically nothing about my jaunt to Malaysia, and far less than I could have about the time I spent in England, so I thought that this time, having finished riding across the country and back on my bike, I would coax myself into doing things properly by committing not to write any other blog material until I had finished writing up my trip notes into proper journal entries. In one respect; that I finished my writing, this was a success. However it also meant that I did no other writing of substance for the subsequent 13 months or so while I procrastinated about getting on with the job.
The business and other madness of life that went on in the meantime certainly didn’t help, but obviously the tactic I employed didn’t have quite the type of effect that I had hoped for.
On the bright side, I’m aiming to get back into writing more habitually now that it’s all done, and with any luck I’ll be able to pick up where I left off in terms of contemplation, articulation, and other forms of glorified navel-gazing.
Awoke, secured pants, had breakfast.
Said goodbye to Mum & Dad, departed Australind.
Arrived home, moved luggage inside house.
Showered, continued sleeping commitments.
Being less than 750 kilometres from home, and knowing that this means the number of riding hours between where we stood and a decent shower and a good night’s sleep was down into single digits, the younger of my compatriots and I had arranged to prep up early and head towards home in a straight and boring direction with the intention of getting back in time for a late lunch. We said goodbye to our two accomplices on the way out of the hotel carpark, and then made a number of directional adjustments trying to get out of Esperance.
Once we were moving, the miles ticked over quickly. We slowed down to have a quick glimpse at the salt lakes, but otherwise we were making good time.
As we popped out the Western side of Collie, we ran into a dense cloud of hanging smoke. Workers were standing around in their high-visibility vests waving their lollipop signs instructing us to slow down, as there were burn-offs going on for most of the way down the hill. This made things more painfully slow than usual, since we were getting so close, and since the road downhill from Collie is such a nice bit of tar to travel along at pace.
As we reached the bottom of the hill and rolled up the highway junction, some manner of airborne carnivore attempted to burrow a hole through my neck with whatever kind of teeth, stingers or pincers these things get around with nowadays, but thankfully it gave up shortly after and left me with a relatively intact upper body and a lop-sidedly swollen neck. But putting aside my being devoured alive, I parted ways with my last remaining buddy as she headed towards her place and I headed towards my parents house to confirm to my Mother that I had indeed survived the trip.
While I was only about 180km from my starting point, I decided to stay the night at my folks’ place to regale them with the more sanitary exploits of the last 2 weeks of my life, shower, eat, and sleep in well after the sun was up. I got a message from my friend shortly after I finished showering to let me know she’d made it home intact, and with my responsibilities complete, I promptly disposed of any conscious thought and made good friends with the nearest mattress.
