Entries from May 2007 ↓

My to-do list is enormous. Foreboding. Overwhelming. But for the first time in a long time I feel like I know exactly where I am. I know that’s not quite as inspiring as knowing where you’re headed or what you’ve got in store, but it’s something. While my list of things to accomplish appears quite intimidating, they’re all fairly real tasks. Hopefully once I’ve eliminated enough of them, the whirlwind in my head might clear just a touch so I might see just what is going on. For there are other less real concerns that I need attend to in time.

I cut the engine, and I am silent in the dark. Amber light streaks coldly through the window, and as Freddie Mercury serenades Somebody to Love, I sit, stare fixed on the lamp post. The chorus builds for the climax. My eyes spring back into focus and I admire the shadows falling on my arm. But slowly, oh so slowly, my gaze peters off into oblivion once more. I brush the backs of my fingers against the stubble grown from my cheek. Somebody to love. Eyes wander and my fist snaps around the ticket on the dash, and spiralling it flutters into the depths of the passenger footwell. The ignition sounds shut with a click, the radio joins me in my pause. We two share the moment. We are silent, in the dark.

And alone.

As of about mid-last week, I got the all clear from the bone specialist to start using my right hand again as normal, at least as far as I can tolerate the pain and excepting contact sports. So three and a half months on and I’m starting to feel more like a functional human being again. Unfortunately I still haven’t managed to get out riding yet. After a fair bit of tinkering, cleaning and fitting spares, the bike looks like a bike and runs, but there’s a problem with the clutch it seems, and so I believe I’ll have to pay someone who knows about such things to investigate further. Come Monday it’ll have been four months since the crash.

On the subject of Monday, I’m finally going to be a contributing part of the economy again when I rock up to work as an Education Assistant (newspeak for Babysitter) at one of the High Schools in Perth. This also means moving back to the city, for which I’m thankful. I love my folks, and Bunbury is swell, but I miss my friends and the opportunities for mischief that living in smogville affords me. I don’t have any permanent lodgings arranged at this stage, but hopefully I should be able to get myself bound to an oppressive rental agreement in a reasonably timely fashion, and it’s all down hill from there.

So hopefully I’ll start to have a few more worthy anecdotes to relay in the coming weeks. If things don’t go my way tomorrow morning during a tooth extraction, maybe even sooner than that.

The teaching thing is still on the horizon, as I’ve slowly been hacking away at the requirements for completing my course. If all goes well in the next few weeks, I should have completed my year-long Dip Ed over a modest five semesters. Arbitrary structured education just isn’t my thing, so it would seem.

Looking down the cue, it’s a straight enough deal. Red ball eight inches from centre pocket, cue ball about two feet away. Clear shot, no obstacles. There’s the satisfying sound of thwack, click, thump - but I was hoping for a plonk. I can’t seem to peg what it is, but I just haven’t been able to make a shot on this table. The last one had a roll to the far right pocket and the lights had shorted out, but at least I knew what was going on. Now I’m clueless and about three balls away from a pants-ing.

I go for another swig of my drink and scout my eyes across the dance floor where a couple of dozen ladies from various decades past flash about in a haze and a blur. A girl eyes back at me and lends me a sultry smile. I flash a grin in kind, but I’ve got other things on my mind, most prominently trying to forget as much of Spiderman 3 as I can before it starts to decay in my mind.

Giving up on skill, I resort to the hard-as-you-can school of pool shots. Balls scatter everywhere, one bouncing gently into a pocket next to my leg. Hallelujah. Tom gives me a series of hand signals to suggest that particular shot may not have been my intention, as is our only method of communication when affronted by the thousand decibel butchering of Summer of ‘69 coming from the stage nearby. A game or two later and we take our leave of the place, taking in a brief tour of the street circus of Saturday night.

There are still things on my mind that I’d rather weren’t, but sometimes you don’t get as much say in the matter as you’d like. I shut off the car in the driveway, emotions undercover still jumping between bitterness, anger, frustration, defeat and anything between. It’s been days now and I tire of the way that it clings to my mind like it was the roof of my mouth.

Such sticky matters are always the same, you can never scratch them out as they stand. You need another lump of stick for it to grab to, then you can throw the whole thing out. Of course there’s no guarantees with such sticking things, but sometimes you’ve little other choice.

this is what you want
this is what you get

Sometimes you work your way towards knowledge. Most of the time this involves a lot of work. You have to read, learn, contemplate, experience, review, consider, test, develop, question and so on until you have refined your ideas and thoughts into a pristine object carved by hand from a stone of thought.

But other times, knowledge falls into your lap. You might just be sitting there watching Chow Yun Fat shoot up a car wash on film when your friend drops a little black book into your lap that he was given by an old man at a second hand book store, where you trace through the pages until a passage grabs you by the throat and belts you across the face with enough resolve to send your mind into a frenzy.

Narcissus fell in love with his image, taking it to be another.

To undistort herself, she finds Jack to distort her distorted image in his distorting mirror
She hopes that his distortion of her distortion may undistort her image without her having to distort herself.
Knots, R.D. Laing (1970)

I was struck by several other passages in the little black book, but none so sternly as this one.