dwightus.com

thoughts on self and change

I seem to have a plethora of journal entries which begin with some variation on the theme of neglecting my writing, and this one appears to have been subject to the same fate. Upon reflection, I could make up a large number of what would generally be considered quite reasonable excuses for not having spent time writing, but the underlying truth is that I simply haven’t been making the time. There’s half of a quote scribbled on the back of a dirty napkin floating around in the back of mind which says something about not being able to find time to do things, and that you must make time for them. I’m sure it sounds much better in well polished prose with a Victorian accent, but having neither on hand, I’ll make do with the medium I have.

I’ve been thinking about change again. It seems to be another one of my recurring themes. So much about me changes in a year, some of it relevant, some of it not. It’s reasonably unusual that some deeper part of me that I value as part of my self-image will change, but a lot still changes below the surface. Just over a year ago, I was a high school science teacher, my staple diet consisted of an iced coffee and muffin for breakfast, picked up from the servo at the first corner on the way to work after hitting the snooze button too many times, followed by a pie and orange juice (or another iced coffee) for lunch and more than likely Red Rooster, McDonald’s or Nando’s for dinner. Now I’m almost entirely off iced coffee after discovering it seemed to be the primary source of my eczema related miseries, and I get up on time and have cereal every day. Yesterday I got up at 6am to go to the gym before work at my new office. The concept of even going to the Gym would’ve confounded me a year ago, let alone getting out of bed to do so. I’m eating better, I floss, I rarely drink coffee after midnight any more… I’m sure some of these probably relate to the fact that I also get proper sleep these days as well.

The introduction to this paragraph has been rewritten so that three sections in a row didn’t start with “I”. What a self-centred little bugger. I guess it’s my blog after all, but there I go again. Anyhow… It’s been a while since I really tried to plan anything particularly far ahead of me in the future. I mean of course I have vague conceptions floating around in my head like everyone else about which of several paths I might end up taking with my work and my time and so on, but that’s just what they were – vague. Hazy. When I start to bring them into focus and to try and ground them to the earth, new little worries sprout up all around them, all wanting to know what will happen to this idea when I change in the future. Will I still want this later on? Will I get bored reading these things? Will I still like who I am at the end of all this? Some of these questions are easier to answer than others, but when it comes to what I will be like, how I will feel and what I will want when I come out the other side… these are all answers I find quite hard to figure out.

Sometimes you change (or someone else does) and you start to drift apart. Of course sometimes it’s simply because you’re far apart or flapping about frantically or what have you, but sometimes it’s because things you and another person liked about each other start to change, or the liking itself changed. Good friendships seem not to care very much about such things, you tend to adapt, to change, and to know that the person is worth more than the sum of their parts or their attributes. Just because you’re not so big into country music anymore doesn’t mean Johnny Cash is suddenly not worth talking to. And typically the pair of you change, and you appreciate each other for your new ways as well as your old ones. It seems to be when you try and keep a relationship just the way it is when the pair of you are changing that things will tend to go awry.

What does this all mean? I don’t know. Or maybe I do and I’m in denial. It’s hard to say.

The mixtape of waxing lyrical

I could make you happy and all, if you weren’t already.

A few weeks ago I was riding shotgun in my girlfriends car on the way home from a trip down south and the radio was whiling the long weekend away by counting down the top three hundred rock songs as voted by you, the listeners on our website and I was posed the question of what the best rock song of all time was.

I ended up siding with the fairly safe selection of Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, but then more personal favourites started to pop up in the corners of my mind and I began to ponder the idea of a mix tape.

Some time later I began spending the odd hour here and there tracking through the five thousand or so songs on my playlist these days, trying to pick out favourites, and I ended up with a set. Unfortunately a lot of songs I love dearly got the chop, and due to the unwavering demands of the ancient art of the mixtape, adjustments had to be made for flow and balance. What I ended up with is one CD’s worth of material which I would refer to as some of my favourite lyrical material.

I think all these songs are worth hearing, and their lyrics really gel with me. These should not be confused with songs which inspire spontaneous maximum-volume karaoke renditions and personal significance, but I love each of these songs in a special way. They’re the kinds of songs that I will shut my mouth for because I don’t want to miss a single word (with one or two exceptions).

So without further rambling, let alone ado, here they are.

The mixtape of waxing lyrical

1. 3 Libras – A Perfect Circle (3:39)
2. Shimmer – Fuel (3:34)
3. Last Goodbye – Jeff Buckley (4:35)
4. Silent All These Years – Tori Amos (4:11)
5. The Freshmen – The Verve Pipe (4:29)
6. Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd (5:16)
7. Champagne Supernova – Oasis (7:27)
8. Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards – Billy Bragg (4:35)
9. Under Pressure – Queen feat. David Bowie (4:01)
10. Hurt – Johnny Cash (3:38)
11. Call Me Call Me – Steve Conte & The Seatbelts (4:42)
12. Drops of Jupiter – Train (4:19)
13. ! (the song formerly known as) – Regurgitator (3:28)
14. Walk Away – Ben Harper (3:49)
15. One Headlight – The Wallflowers (5:13)
16. Untouchable Face – Ani DiFranco (4:37)
17. Bring Me The Disco King (loner mix) – David Bowie feat. Maynard James Keenan (6:08)

Just typing that out I can already feel myself wanting to tear it to bits and start again. This one’s too pop-ish, that one doesn’t fit, those don’t belong together at all… but you have to stop at some point, and that’s the point I stopped at on Sunday night.

Even at the time I was shocked by the lack of some of my favourite bands and tunes, but as I am flawed, so surely are my tastes and my selections. And so I give you this mix tape like putting the pen down on an exam, with hesitance, but with the knowledge that I believe I have done just enough to be judged worthy.

Oh yeah, the radio station’s top all time rock song was Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams, so I feel better about my selections already.

form of function

As a bit of self-congratulation for getting a new job, I’ve decided to buy myself a new razor seeing as how my current one has mutated in function quite significantly over the past couple of years. While initially the shaving operation involved the cutting and trimming of facial hair, the process has now migrated to the method of simply removing the part of my face which the hair was attached to. While technically still effective as a hair removal method (and as a method of waking oneself up in the morning), a new device should be able to accomplish the task much faster and with significantly less bloodshed, both of which are appealing bonuses from my position in the relationship.

acceptance and persistence

I’m standing in the kitchen considering my options while I sample another one of the individual Hersheys chocolates that my housemate brought back from her trip to Phuket. There are several different types in the bowl which seem to be named after affectionate exchanges, but I can never pick the hugs from the kisses. All I know is that I tend to favour the darker ones, as my housemate thinks that they may be inclined to give her nightmares. She’s told me of them several times quite vividly, but all of the details escape me bar the feeling that I was glad they weren’t mine.

Having gorged myself on several sweets by this time, the urge to brew a coffee overpowers me. Putting the kettle on I can already picture my fate. The taste of chocolate makes my mouth cry out for the company of coffee, but I know that as soon as the warmth runs over my chocolate covered tastebuds, they will crave for more chocolate. It is a vicious cycle, and I am powerless against its will.

While I wait for the water to boil I try to tidy up a bit, and having just finished a book of short stories by Chekov, I place it neatly on the shelf between Camus and Conrad. A tiny ripple of thought bubbles up in my head, and I feel glad that I’m slowly chipping away at the mountain of books that I hope to read. They are surely greater in number than the days that I have left to walk the Earth, but I hope to keep up my efforts none the less.

The kettle boils over, and I resign myself to my chocolaty fate.

augustian

With the ocean of clear blue sky out today, I had the idea that it would be a fine day to l down to the quays and relax outside with a good cup of the black stuff. Clearly it was a stroke of brilliance, as the notion had spread to every mind in sight of the same sky, and while unfortunately the promise of good coffee had to be displaced for the mediocre, selecting a shady tree under which to find some solitude in the crowd did not present any such troubles.

Everything here seems so normal but so unnatural. All is usual, gulls squawk, children squeal, teenagers sun themselves and flirt mercilessly with each other, older men, faces ravaged by the years and sun console themselves with the nearest draught on tap, and the coffee shop chalk board quotes Frost at me in the guise of bohemian philosophy to suggest that the beans ground and filtered here somehow exude more life and soul than the cheaper, faster brew served all hours through the McDonald’s drive-thru across the way.

It all provides such a broad distraction, but the feeling persists that at any given moment, should a mild gust of wind wash by, the four walls of this cardboard cutout reality would come tumbling down around me. Nothing holds me to this place. At least not while my coffee is served in paper cups.

The Aging Problem (we didn’t address it)

I’ve always had this sense that I’m growing old too fast, that time is passing me by at a rate out of my control. Sometimes it leads me to believe that I’m older than I really am and the “get off my lawn” in me comes out until something or someone brings me crashing back down from my naivety in what is often quite humbling or embarrassing circumstances.

But now it’s starting to show. And I don’t mean in the corny sense of creaking bones and making groaning noises whenever you get in or out of your seat.

My locks are taking leave of me.

This is something kind of difficult for me to accept. Two years ago I had two feet of out-of-control red hair bursting from my head like a wild mane, but now my hair is shorter cut and the quiet thinning and recession of the hairs atop my head give me a very solemn pause. It’s somewhat confronting. There is no way to deny the physical, my body is aging, decaying. I had a basic urge to fight back, to revolt. I fossicked through the back of my mind for the names of hair replacement therapy centres passed onto me through the television on the lips of muscle-bound early thirties coming fresh out of the surf or with some blonde pet draped around them underarm. But that’s not my answer. It’s a futile attempt to hide from time, from nature, to fight the future. If this is what the ravages of time have in store for me, then I have only to accept it. Just like a scar or mended bone, the tone of skin and shape of face that I was born into, this is my lot, and I will learn to love it, and in part because of its flaws, not in spite of them.

There is no fighting change, and my body grounds me in that more than most things. Sometimes I feel I have to run twice as fast just to stay where I am, that I’m constantly having to try harder to keep as fit as I once kept by simply rolling out of bed each day (and sometimes not).

My fear of age is of finding myself too late for something, late for living, for being alive. That is where my concern is born from. But I’ve never heard the starters gun, nor had sight of the finish line. So while I remain aloof of this tracks destination, to struggle against moving from this station, in body, mind or any other measure seems the eternal errand of fools.

transcription

You might notice that some of my posts now start to appear pre-dated. The reason for this is my starting to write on dead tree to help me keep up the practice, then transcribing them to digital at a later date. This will be the first, hopefully of many.

This evening saw the salvation of my mortal soul as I teetered on the brink of the fall to hell. A special hell, reserved for pretentious bastards who would pay $32 for a notebook. I spent a minute with it in my hands, a plain ruled Moleskine, so very neat and perfect for its purpose. The display stand was merely feet from the cashier and I was beginning to bond with the idea of a glorified book with a lacky-band stuck to it, when it dawned on me that I could feed myself for half a week on the cost. So instead I picked up this 192 page exercise book from Woolworths at the princely sum of one dollar and twelve cents, and jammed it in the shopping basket between the sausages and orange juice I was now able to feast on thanks to my thriftiness in other matters.

I’ve been down on myself a lot lately for failing to write, so I’m toying with a new approach. When I was teaching and studying, spending all day with chalk or pen in hand, sitting down to braindump through a keyboard was a welcome and therapeutic relief, but now as I spend my working hours pounding out notes in front of the dull glow of the computer screen, sitting down to type in my own time seems somewhat forced and cumbersome, so I have devised the idea of fleshing out my cognitions to paper through pen to give it a degree of freshness or relief for me, to help avoid the feeling of it being a chore.

Hopefully once I manage to get myself back into the swing and groove of writing again and bridging the divide between print and thought, I’ll once again be able to form more clear thoughts, more flowing prose, more… well, basically less rubbishing on about the minutia of my life and writing something actually worth spilling ink for.

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep to task and avoid filling the pages of this log with my constant to-do lists, reminders to pick up groceries and fanciful cost plans for my latest daydream on how to spend the upcoming weeks lottery jackpot.

Here’s to the start of a new habit.

speaking of blunt

In the past weeks, strike that, these past months, I have not been writing. It isn’t the case that I’ve been writing elsewhere, or been unable to upload, I haven’t even been involved in another bone-shattering launch from a moving motorcycle. I have simply not been writing, which to be frank, is completely rubbish. I can hardly expect to keep myself sharp, let alone hone my skills to improve if I don’t put in the time at the slate.

Of course not all of my material is quality output. There have been many occasions where I have gone back and looked at something that I’ve published on the web, only to find myself shuddering at the naivety or ignorance of some statement I’ve made, wincing at the self-important posturing mingled with self-righteous ranting and raving. It is essential that I am my own most vile critic, otherwise I will not be able to grow. I don’t pretend that I am no longer guilty of the same sins that I have just condemned in myself, but I strive to improve, if only by modest degrees.

I also need to tidy up this whole page quite desperately, as it currently looks atrocious. The layout and theme needs some substantial renovation and I need to rewrite the paths to most of my images since I decided to finally let the renewal expire for the swiss domain name I registered years ago. I guess some gags really do get old.

nightshift

It’s been a while now since I’ve posted, but it’s not the only thing that’s been suffering these past few months. Since I’ve started working shift I’ve barely seen anything of my friends, I only see my girlfriend from time to time, I can’t commit to anything that’s on at the same time every week, generally things are a mess. My life has been pancaked (in the flipping sense). It’s not been all bad of course, I get plenty of time to relax (unfortunately most of it is spent alone) and I can’t remember a time where I’ve digested anywhere near as many books as I have this year. Tonight I’ve been swapping between sections of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and some short stories by Cory Doctorow, which has been working out well because Camus is pretty heavy and the dude uses some cracker words.

I’m still trying to work out what I’m doing with myself (as usual), but I’m quite confident that it isn’t this.

captain obvious

After a bit of a chat with a friend of mine the other day it became abundantly clear to me that my blog serves no real purpose, so to speak. It has no truly useful content that might contribute to the progress of humankind, nor does it particularly assist or inform. Unless of course you are seaching for information regarding the lack of flamingo salesmen in my neighbourhood, which in fact, I can’t help you with either.

Such musings brought me back to the idea that I don’t serve any particularly useful purpose either. This is a somewhat sobering if not depressing thought, but something which is not necessarily there just to point out my failings. My hope is that it might inspire me to better things, or assist me with clarity in those things which I already do. Hopefully I will be able to find something to throw myself into with a greater cause than greed or vanity.

This is my quandary.