Writer
This is too hilarious not to publish. I am journalling with an AI this week, which is a completely unexpected and bamboozling situation but has actually been great fun and incredibly helpful for some things I’m dealing with. The only reason I am journalling with an AI is because it did a difficult people search …
Continue reading “REJECTION LETTER FROM THE ANAESTHETIC MONTHLY”
I’m rewatching the initial episodes of Pluribus while waiting for new ones to come out, specifically to savour the film-making and storytelling now I already know what happens in each episode.
Pluribus is the antithesis of modern American drama. It is film-making with space to breathe and room to think, without rushing through the shots or clobbering you with sound. It’s the epitome of “show, don’t tell” with long stretches where you are invited to observe the characters and scenery in silence and come to your own conclusions…
The writing has been on the wall for generations, and in each generation, voices were lifted in an attempt to direct the attention of the general public and those in power to the consequences of continuing to ignore the writing on the wall.
The Romantic poets saw and felt the horrors of early-stage Industrialisation and its dysfunctional social order because they had hearts and their eyes were not blinded by the contemplation of money and profit. They lifted up their voices in lament, as did some of their visual artist colleagues, like J. M. W. Turner, and poets coming after, including Walt Whitman and e. e. cummings.
Charles Dickens lifted up his voice at the cut-throat cruelty of his own society, which was at that point also busy colonising the rest of the world, exporting its cruelty abroad. His Magwitch speaks for all abused children, trampled citizens, and hunted men in history…
May 25, 2023 NUYTS WILDERNESS WALK/THOMPSON COVE Finally, exactly two months after my birthday, we had the time, headspace and energy to do the Nuyts Wilderness Walk that was my birthday hike choice for this year. We had done a gorgeous reconnaissance hike in preparation for it a couple of months back, and it was …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2023 Volume 5”
This letter to you all has become somewhat longer than intended, so I have inserted topical music clips to listen to if you’d like a break or for related contemplations anytime. You will need your favourite beverage and a comfortable place to read.
In the 12 years since moving off-grid to protect remnant woodland/heathland and run a smallholding, I have listened to countless podcasts on all sorts of subjects. One long-standing regular programme is about people born into a fundamentalist religion growing up, encountering different world views, and having faith crises – where everything they ever believed is necessarily up for grabs.
Typically it is a very painful process, involving feelings of betrayal and an erosion of trust in a person’s community and in the wisdom of their elders and experts. While many find it a relief to let go of their religion’s unfair ideas and bigotry, a critical re-evaluation of an inherited belief in endless life, eternal love and eventual justice is far more difficult…
Do you ever wake up on a day off without having a clue that you’re about to have an unforgettable day in an ancient ecosystem?
There are sadly so few areas left in the world like this. We are such a terribly destructive culture. 250 years ago Australia was still unmarred by European civilisation and its large-scale annihilation of native ecosystems and cultures. Many people don’t think it’s even a problem. It’s not helped by the fact that Australia, like the US, has a highly urbanised population. Most Westerners essentially grow up in captivity and have little exposure to or understanding of natural ecosystems. I met kids in socially disadvantaged parts of London who had never seen a tree that hadn’t been planted by humans, and who didn’t even have an interest in such things. I went on bush camp with privileged high schoolers from Sydney’s Northern Beaches who screamed when they saw insects and who immediately got out their pocket wet wipes when they got a bit of mud on their legs when we went hiking. They were ecstatic to get back to the shopping complexes that were their natural habitat. People can live and die entirely swallowed up in dystopia, so far from their roots as biological beings that they may as well live on a space station…
A Perth radio station called 6UVS-FM played alternative music, and had this request show. People who grew up in the age of music-on-tap won’t be able to fully appreciate the lure of those erstwhile request shows – back then, you were so much at the mercy of what people happened to play on the radio, and what you could afford to buy with your meagre kid budget. So request shows gave you a chance to hear again what you couldn’t afford. But 6UVS-FM also had a twist to their request show: You could call in and request that they destroy a particular record on air. This was in the dying days of vinyl, which makes such a pleasing, visceral crunch when destroyed. CDs just can’t compete here! There were a lot of requests for the destruction of Wham! records…
Ever heard of mansplaining? The most outstanding example I’ve personally experienced in recent years was when I called up our local volunteer fire chief because we had a peat fire, and requested the fire truck to put it out. We both volunteer at the bushfire brigade, but the chief has to sign off on equipment …
The problem is that we’re not doing enough meaningful interaction — and that our social groups have become too large for our brains. We’re evolutionarily set up for small-tribe living, and we’re actually living in complex societies with millions of people in them now. It’s impossible to have working relationships with a million other people — your brain can handle interacting regularly with a “tribe” of maybe 100-200 people in a meaningful way, at a stretch. More than that, and it gets stressful. In cities, people tend to avoid each other; and one of our modern dilemmas is that we’re the loneliest we’ve ever been, even though surrounded by an ocean of other humans — too many humans.
And many of us aren’t connecting with each other as much as we were necessarily connecting when we were hunter-gatherers, or even agricultural villagers. In recent decades, with increasing job insecurity in the West and many people forced to up and move many times to pursue the next job, we’re getting socially dislocated many times over, and a good support network necessarily becomes harder to maintain.
People who are into sports or religion generally get little plug-in communities when they relocate; but if you’re not into those things, or you’re introverted, or have social anxieties, or your daytime job puts a hundred people into your face every day and you can’t face going to choir group or Scottish Highland dancing or the photography club or whatever else you might be interested in on a weeknight after that because all you want to do is be on your own and read a book, then you may end up having few social contacts that aren’t around your work…
The aliens decide that Wednesday morning is a good time to visit Roger’s house, since it coincides with his regular slot of life modelling for the community fine arts group. Besides, it’s likely he will follow it up as usual with lunch out and then the weekly Wednesday afternoon meeting of the local branch of the International Society for Echinoderm Appreciation, which holds regular coastal excursions in good weather, and aquarium workshops in inclement weather. This gives our aliens plenty of time for another little field trip.
Beaming in, they find themselves in the living room: Sofas, coffee table, bookshelves, comfortable armchairs – one of them with a book on the armrest and an ottoman drawn up. On closer examination, the book turns out to be a heavily annotated copy of Lol Tolhurst’s autobiography – lots of underlining, question marks, sets of multiple exclamation marks, additional information, cartoons of pigs with wings, and recurring doodles of an enigmatic figure with black spiky hair.
This is very interesting, but not the main thing they have come to see, for these aliens are music enthusiasts through and through, and have already had a great time with Reeves’ guitar collection and Jason’s drum kit. They look for and rapidly locate Roger’s music room, ooohing and aaahing over the grand piano, the Medieval pipe organ and the quality range of electronic keyboards assembled.
Our aliens discover that keyboards suit their anatomical idiosyncrasies far better than guitars do (though not quite as well as drums)…
FOR DAVID GULPILIL, SUNSMART AND THE EARTH, WITH LOVE AND THANKS Written December 6 – 16, 2021 This is still being revised because it’s so difficult to find the words and tie everything together, but I thought I’d put this out in the open now. A week ago a longtime friend died on the same …
Continue reading “The Kingfisher, the Horse, and being on Country”
A wonderful friend I’d known for decades died this year. This is for her, and her life partner. August 31, 2021 FOR ALICE AND ROB, WITH LOVE AND THANKS What’s on my mind this morning is that a dear long-time friend’s time is running out. She is in a coma and not expected to live …
Well, after Exploring “Join The Dots” I needed another project, so I decided to continue open-journalling while trawling through The Cure’s back catalogue. Technically, Join The Dots is part of the back catalogue, but the thread is already very long and its title too specific to just keep writing away there instead.
I decided that I really needed one large container for writing anything subsequent about my tour of this band’s music, rather than small buckets for each individual album / song / etc. I’m interested in writing about interrelationships between things. To compartmentalise into tiny topics feeds the kind of disconnected thinking and tunnel vision that’s become so prevalent in society. We’re losing sight of the bigger picture. We need to be able to stretch our minds without being afraid we are going “off topic” – so that we can freely explore the nature of things, rather than dealing piecemeal with small and artificially separated facets of reality…
Blues gig last night! Long-anticipated, a real Chicago Blues band, in our little town on the South Coast of Western Australia. The warm-up act was a local guy called Moondog who’s been couch-surfing in the US for months every year, for the last ten years. He was very competent with his guitar, harmonica and stomp …
It started with the re-organisation of the local supermarket, which we used to frequent weekly prior to our tree change, and are now going to fortnightly at most, for items we don’t yet grow ourselves and can’t obtain directly from other local smallholders, the local butcher, or the bulk supplier who stocks local stoneground wholemeal …
This is a copy of the start of a thread I began at a music forum. I think mental/emotional health needs to be more talked about in our public spaces and in our personal circles, and since the general press isn’t stepping up, it’s going to have to be websites, blogs, forums, and independent publications making it happen. Links to my own favourite online resources will be posted after the excerpt from this thread…
To Isaac Newton, with love. 😉 Just a little aside about falling off horses. Using Newtonian physics, we can break down the fall into a horizontal component and a vertical component. Horizontally, the rider continues in the direction taken at parting from the horse. In the absence of atmospheric friction and gravity, the rider would …
A little rural drama as related to a friend. It’s a good time to sit down and write to you. We had a leaking Flickmixer in the kitchen for more than three years and no plumber wanted to travel out that far, and the plumbing qualified dairy farmer genuinely had no time because they’re like …
It’s fantastic that someone has finally had the courage and the tenacity to write a novel addressing the Mother of all elephants in the room: Human ecological overshoot – a combination of out-of-control human numbers and out-of-control consumption that are rapidly wiping out the biosphere and turning this small blue planet into a toxic dump. …
It still hasn’t sunk in. Matilda died this afternoon. Just like that. We were out hiking and nearly at the turn-around point two hours from the car, when there was a repeat of what happened on our Peaceful Bay walk two months ago – on the lead, and next thing she’s gone SPROING like a …
Excerpt from a letter written to a friend struggling with the kind of childhood background that sets people up for continued unhappiness via the curse of the repetition compulsion. Publishing it here because many could benefit from thinking about this pattern, for their own life or to help others recognise it. It’s worthwhile looking up …
This article appeared in Grass Roots No.281 February/March 2024 How would you like a clean, organised shed with dust and rodent proof storage cupboards that cost next to nothing and repurpose items otherwise sent to landfill? Our farm shed has over the past month received a make-over that has transformed it from a rat-infested, dirty, …
Continue reading “The Ultimate Organised Shed…Repurposing Old Fridges!”
This is a spin-off from an online music journal I kept for a few years, in which I mused about life and the universe while exploring the back catalogue of a band I had never liked until discovering belatedly that they had a serious, dark side. The main themes in this anecdotal piece are dating …
A small reflection to start, on living in this universe. Albany to Perth via Lake Towerrinning, Darkan, Williams When you get out of the car to take pictures of rural countryside, there is another recurring theme – litter. Wherever Homo colossus goes, a trail of pollution is left behind. You’d think it would be a …