It turns out, though, that it will take some significant brain-shifting for me to feel comfortable with (or even capable of) that kind of thing. I'm not even sure it's an effort I want to make. I used to write things that I couldn't talk about, but these days I'm both better at talking and head over heels in love with Real Conversations. I'd much rather converse with you specifically than plaster myself all over a public space and hope that you notice.¹

That being said, last year was a fairly extraordinary time for me, and I would be sorry to leave it entirely unremarked.

I moved cities once and moved house three times, the last time to move in with the most awesome housemate imaginable. I got a job, then got the same job in a different city, and I got good at it quickly. I ended a relationship (one of the most sorely testing experiences of my life so far²), met wonderful new people, and worked on reconnecting with wonderful old people (with varying degrees of success). I was sick for the entire year, and I stopped holding my breath and hoping to be well again soon.

I listened to the Mountain Goats excessively enough that even I feel faintly embarassed about it, while struggling to be interested in new music and seeing almost nothing live. I set myself a goal of reading 52 books in the year, reached it quite early, and then burned out spectacularly.³ I played a few excellent computer games and saw a few excellent films, which rekindled my dormant interest in both.

Most importantly, though, I did a lot of thinking. And I do mean a lot.⁴

The relationship saga taught me a whole lot.⁵ I learned that it really does take two to tango; more specifically, the effectiveness and quality of any communication is always going to be partially out of my control no matter how good a communicator I become. I learned that sometimes disengaging completely is the best (and even only) sane option, even (or especially) when it means letting what feel like hurtful untruths go unchallenged. I learned that sometimes you just have to let people do whatever they have to do, and get on with what you have to do.

Incidentally, what is with the romanticisation of terrible, passive-aggressive, co-dependent behaviour in popular culture? Oh, things are terrible, there is no reason to think they will improve (especially since we are not doing anything to change anything), I don't even like you very much a lot of the time, but ~it's love~ so we should stay together? Fuck that noise.⁶

The phenomenal thing was the depth and breadth of thinking about relationships that got triggered. I am capable of some pretty determined and sustained introspection, and my lack of spoons meant I had plenty of time to spend with myself. One of the more significant revelations was that I have always been at my happiest when single.

That says a few things to me, but they all fall under the umbrella of "Hey! I think you've been doing it wrong!" I am, after all, the common factor in all my relationship and non-relationship periods. So I gave myself some mandatory time off to think about it all: a year of being absolutely not allowed "relationship stuff", to be extended or not depending on how much I could figure out in that much time.⁷

It has been brilliant. Having that explicit rule has not only given me the mental and emotional space to re-evaluate what I want in relationships and how I should approach them, it has also made me feel much freer to interact with people in whatever way feels most natural.⁸ I am still not sure what will happen when my year is up, but I am confident that whatever it is will be good for me.

Other things that I spent lots of time thinking about last year include: post-ironic appreciation; a large set of ethics- and 'ism'-related stuff; identity; mortality; and, most of all, sincerity and the pursuit of happiness.

By the end of 2009 I felt happier and more like myself than since ... well ... ever. Certainly since long enough ago that whoever I was then doesn't really count as the same person.

2010 so far has only continued this trend. People continue to be awesome. I have rediscovered music (recorded and live) in a big way. Urges to write more and take more pictures and travel more and have more conversations and cook more new foods are gnawing pleasantly at me, and I am even okay with not having the energy to act on most of them.

It is good to be alive.

1. It's not immediately clear how my desire to keep writing this blog fits in here, but I think it has something to do with a distinction between conversations and pieces of writing. Maybe I'm trying to practice "doing writing" more. Goodness knows I could do with the practice.
2. Ambiguous, perhaps, but either reading is true enough.
3. I haven't finished reading a book for a few months now.
4. Here's where this veers into "my life and how I feel about it". Awkwardness to 11!
5. Some of it was stuff I already knew, intellectually, but was yet to really know on an emotional level.
6. I never quite know what to do when something I would never say perfectly encapsulates what I want to say. In this case, as you can see, I went with it and then siphoned off my discomfort into a footnote.
7. Of course, I have a relationship of sorts with everyone I interact with, but I think we all know what I'm talking about here.
8. The reasons for this are, I think, a little too complex and personal for this post, but I can elaborate if requested.

I suspect that I started calling to social activities "adventures" to take the edge off the stress of organising them. I am not a take-charge-and-organise person by nature; I have a strong preference for being a follower, or at most proposing amendments to plans that are mostly complete. In the last several years, however, circumstances have tended to demand that I either step up and organise things myself or accept that I will not see most of my friends.¹

At any rate, my socially-retarded self² of a few years ago quailed at the thought of asking questions like "would you like to come out for dinner?" of anyone but very close friends, but could manage suggesting a "food adventure" to just about anybody. As the trend caught on it became even easier, because "adventure" was a generally understood and accepted social shorthand. I don't need to use the term this way nowadays, but it was really useful at the time.

One of the things I liked (and like) most about adventures is the implication that anything is possible. (A few years ago I went on innumerable supermarket adventures, which were always much more fun than simply going to the supermarket.) There is also a sense that very little planning or responsibility has to be involved, and that any participants in an adventure are prepared to simply see what happens. If I "organise" an adventure these days it is usually an attempt to welcome disparate people to join me in doing something fun, without feeling like I have to be personally responsible for each person having an excellent time and everyone present getting along really well.³

In the last eighteen months or so,⁴ adventures have taken on an additional, personal meaning for me. Because my activities have been quite severely curtailed, many of the everyday things that used to be a matter of routine have become more difficult, sometimes assuming epic proportions. That could have left me feeling overwhelmed by unmanageable tasks (and sometimes, to be honest, it does), but my self-imposed conditioning means I can see just about anything I do as an adventure of sorts. And that makes life seem pretty okay, even when it isn't.

1. More recently my health has prevented me from either organising many events or accepting many invitations, so my intention is not to make pointed remarks. At least, not about the current situation.
2. I mean this quite literally. There were a lot of things that I just did not know how to do. Fortunately, I don't think my social retardation was of a kind to make me That Guy™ at parties; it just made me feel very awkward and stressed out about things.
3. This does not usually work, but I live in hope.
4. Actually, on closer inspection it's more like twenty-one months. Hrm.

I'll come back to that.

There don't seem to be any particularly nasty -isms that one falls prey to by ragging on hipsters,² and as they are such an easy target I find myself doing so quite frequently. And why not? Such studied coolness, rooted only in the performance of being cool, cannot be anything but ludicrous in my eyes. Hipsterism is the subcultural equivalent of celebrities who are only famous for being famous.³

Last Friday I went to a funeral. I arrived early and alone, and found myself intimidated by the clusters of people standing around outside. "A hipster funeral?" I thought, although maybe that was some kind of emotional self-defence and I'm pretty sure it was in poor taste. It didn't help that they seemed to consider themselves at an everyday social event when all my instincts were demanding sombre looks and hushed tones.⁴

I find myself unable to write much about the funeral itself or my personal experience just yet; by maintaining a strict emotional distance from it I carry on with the ten thousand things that keep my days ticking over, but the cost of that is an inability to express what I would like to express. It will come in time. (Unless it doesn't.)

What I am coming around to, in my distractable and roundabout way, is that seeing all those hipsters stick together in their grief, including young men who cried and hugged each other without irony or awkwardness, reminded me that phoney affectations and asymmetrical haircuts often just camouflage human beings who think about things and care for each other. And a lot of things that are often seen as important - even essential or "identity"-defining - turn out to be pretty irrelevant when something happens that really matters.

Over the last week or so I have been gently coaxing my desire for music back out into the open. Old favourites have proven to be poor bait, laden as they are with history that I am trying to leave alone. The occasional mood-encapsulating song has only led back into silence instead of the usual daisy-chain of associations. Today, though, I have found my way thanks to a sunshiney, shoegazey, post-punk/dream-pop band called Moscow Olympics (Myspace), who have come out of nowhere to lend me some much-needed momentum.

It is easier to be sad with a soundtrack, and also easier to be happy. It is easier to be anything at all.

1. That is, listening to album after album for as much of my waking day as is physically possible.
2. The hipster concept in general, rather than specific individuals, although being only human I do stray from the righteous path on occasion.
3. That being said, I recently saw Paris Hilton in a TV pilot. She sent herself up marvellously and was extremely funny. Let that me a lesson to me.
4. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that I have no problem whatsoever with people reacting to events in whatever manner comes naturally to them. But faced with jarring behaviour in trying times, my gut rebels.

On Tuesday morning we were greeted by the most scorching incarnation yet of the Blue Screen of Death. My goodness, it was hot in the tent. I rewarded myself for my clever escape by buying a delicious mushroom burger for breakfast.¹

Today's early-in-the-morning gap-filling artist was Grace Barber, from the Seychelles via Perth. Playing what she described as a combination of reggae and African island rhythms, she apologised for her hayfever-stricken voice (although I didn't notice anything amiss) and had a fake horn section (a Korg synth). I have no real literacy or even frame of reference when it comes to this kind of music,² but I liked this.

Brothers The Kin followed, as did their not-inconsiderable following; people were standing in the aisles before the set even started. I have to admit to being a little dubious - a couple of pretty boys with lots of teenage girls clamouring to see them? Chances were good that this would not be my kind of thing at all.

But then they started singing. At first I didn't even realise they were both singing (the joy of singing in unison with relatives), and their voices were very beautiful. Sometimes the performance was marred a little by the younger brother's tendency to be a diva, or the overshadowing of a melody line by vocal gymnastics, but their musicianship and showmanship made what would otherwise have been a neutral experience very enjoyable.

Particularly notable was the comparison of audience members to cows (clustered under the one available tree - it was a hot, hot day) and some impressive audience participation.

I find Kevin Mitchell's decision to perform as Bob Evans a little bizarre. His "solo" performance here, backed up as it was by several other musicians, came across not so much as "Kevin Mitchell performs country music solo", more as "Kevin Mitchell wants a grown-up band now". For all his rock-star antics and aviator sunglasses, this was pretty middle-of-the-road stuff.

Few of the new-to-me artists I saw at Woodford had been talked up as much as Doch. Perhaps it was unfortunate that they were the third or fourth group that I'd seen with a trumpet and Eastern European influences; perhaps the blame lies with the sound engineers at The Grande, who once again let muddy, bass-heavy sounds assault my ears, or perhaps I was just getting burnt out by days of Woodford and no longer properly receptive to new music. Everyone else absolutely loved this show, so I am confident in saying that the problem lay with me.

My favourite thing about this set was the pillar of rising gravel dust kicked up by the dancing people and illuminated by the beam of sunlight that came in through a gap in the top of the tent. My least favourite thing was the air-ukelele that the bandleader appeared to be playing with his trumpet.

Arriving (extremely) early for the next heat of the band competition, I was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of another Hey Rosetta! set. This time complete with violinist, they put on as great a show as before: the cellist's bow was worn ragged and at one point he ran around the stage waving a tambourine, the electric violin added a wonderful dimension to the sound, and my notes indicate that at one point I was moved to write down "hee hee skinny white boy arse dance".

Afterwards the members of Hey Rosetta! were signing copies of their CDs at the merch tent, and despite my general lack of interest in such things I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to them. There was quite a clump of fangirls centred around the singer, leaving the more interesting end of the band (mmm, bass and cello) vulnerable to my conversational attack. So I chatted a bit to Romesh and Josh (ooo, first name basis), found them to be friendly and interesting and somewhat shellshocked by the transition between Canadian winter and Queensland summer, and promised to try to send them audience members for their Melbourne show.

During this time I also noticed that the guitarist is Very Tall. Goodness gracious!

I don't have any notes from the band competition heat from that day, but I remember even now how impressed I was. The competition was a perfect illustration of why I value creativity within constraints so highly; give people something to bump up against and all of their energies are concentrated into a smaller space, so that (unless they get the sulks about the constraints and don't try) the result has a focus and quality that's often missing otherwise.

After wandering around aimlessly for a bit I claimed a spot on the hill to watch Dougie MacLean. Something of a Scottish folk legend, he had the sort of unassuming air that tends to win me over. Another victim of the extraordinary heat, he apologised for displaying his Scottish legs and suggested that it would be a "short" concert.³ I wasn't paying a great deal of attention during his set, but nice folk songs and a Scottish accent meant he couldn't go too far wrong in my book.

Ducking into the Empire tent, I saw the last part of The Grimstones, a charming, dark little fairytale about a family of monsters and freaks. The marionettes reminded me quite strongly of Tim Burton fare like and , and the musical accompaniment did nothing to dispel that impression. I liked that they had two narrators, one speaking and one signing; unfortunately, the nature of the venue meant that it was quite difficult to see what was happening on stage most of the time.

Next came the performance I was actually at the Empire to see: with Miss K. Sadly, this turned out to be a nasty, homophobic piece of cabaret trash instead of the boundary-pushing queer cabaret I had somehow been led to expect. I left very quickly indeed.

As a result, I had some extra time on my hands and didn't feel the need to collapse into sleep just yet, so I trekked up to the Amphitheatre (my one and only visit for the festival), where Augie March would be playing later. As luck would have it, this meant that I saw The Boat People finishing up, playing the one song of theirs I knew: "Awkward Orchid Orchard".⁴ A lovely little song, and a nice little band, the kind of thing that makes me wish Triple J didn't play so much junk nowadays so that I could keep listening and hearing good stuff.

Ah, Augie March. Since I have paid no attention to them at all, but some of the songs from that album put down particularly strong roots in a tumultuous period in my life. Seeing Augie March live tends to mean a pleasant mass of unfamiliar but listenable sound seeded with wonderful nostalgia bombs.

I lay on the hill and let the bombs fall where they would.

1. OM NOM NOM.
2. I have been reflecting recently that all of the music I like is exceedingly white. I usually stand still at concerts, too.
3. Cue groans from the audience
4. That song also happens to have one of my favourite music videos of recent times.

I am, however, still sick. I'm also working now, albeit less than full-time, and having to budget my energy fairly ruthlessly as a result.

Rewarding as it is to write in this blog, if I devote sufficient energy to it I am left with almost nothing for physical activity (extremely important), social interaction (ditto), and keeping my physical environment under control (very important if you are me, which I am).

So there won't be new posts here for a while. I'll get back to it when things pick up. Which will happen, because I'll be doing those important things that help with that kind of thing.

Woodford is about 80km NNW of Brisbane. The plan was to catch a train to Caboolture, then a bus straight to the festival. Nice and simple. Of course, the completely unannounced trackworks at Petrie (which is between Brisbane and Caboolture) occasioned a trip to the station office to find out what was going on, followed by an impressive (if I do say so myself) sprint up and down stairs to get back on the right platform before the train left, and then a transfer to an extra bus (which was, naturally, filled with cranky people who didn't want to have to catch an extra bus). I amused myself by playing "Guess which people on the bus are going to Woodford" and looking at things out of the window, which included:

• A sign saying "HORSE POO $3".
• A place named Burpengary. (Australian place names are so awesome.)
• A town that looked like the area full of shopping malls that I went to in Buffalo, NY to get my PowerBook's power cable replaced.

Eventually, we got to Woodford. Much queueing ensued, followed by an introduction to our home away from home for the next week, in Tent City. There's a lot to be said for paying to stay in a tent that someone else puts up and takes down, with access to facilities including free drinking water² and the aforementioned showers in trucks. Especially when one does not actually own a tent. I didn't take a picture of the tent, which was remiss of me, but I did hang some elephants outside it.

My first impression of the festival site itself was of stalls. Lots and lots of stalls. Most of them sold clothes and accessories (especially hats), although there were also several stalls selling amazing musical instruments and, of course, an abundance of food vendors. Thanks to the expected density of the hippie population there was an abundance of vegetarian options, albeit with surprisingly slim pickings for vegans.

But I wasn't there to spend money and get more stuff. I was there to see bands! And to take pictures of them, although that was for my own record and enjoyment rather than artistic or technical merit (as will quickly become apparent) and I certainly didn't bother about getting up to the front of the stage to do it.

The first band of the festival for me was The Barons of Tang, who describe themselves as sounding like "gypsy deathcore & dirt fever in a dirty bar on the wrong side of town drinking Shlivovitz at 2am discussing the difference between grindcore and techcore." I would probably describe them as Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra, if Martin Martini led a bunch of young punks who would rather howl and grimace than pretend to any kind of sophistication, however twisted. Two drummers/percussionists, tuba and double bass, accordion, reeds and the occasional fiddle played by the guitarist all contributed to an exuberant cacophony that got the crowd dancing (and even my staid foot tapping). A rollicking good time was had by all!

Matt Kelly and the Keepers were supposed to be next, but apparently Matt Kelly had spontaneously combusted or something as they were a no-show. Not too heartbreaking, as I was only planning to see them in the absence of anything more enticing. Much more disappointing was the actual appearance of Hawksley Workman some time later.

This guy made a bad impression on me as soon as he walked on stage, with his ironically hip flat cap, untied tie, waistcoat and smugness. Actually, that's not quite true: he made a bad impression on me when his bio somewhere called him "one of the hardest-working musicians" in something something, and his festival bio said that "averaging two albums a year, he traverses genres fearlessly". Reading that, I suspected that he had delusions of awesomeness while actually being very generic and derivative, and I fled his stage after a couple of songs that sounded like he thought he was Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and three other similarly iconic artists all rolled into one and some horribly pretentious waffle³. I honestly just could not sit through any more of it.

There was a silver lining, though: I ended up at a different stage where a group called Melodics were playing. I hadn't planned to see them at the festival, as nothing I read about them interested me much, but they put on a good show. Australian hip-hop with synths and saxophone and enough originality and verve to distance them completely from the sort of hip-hop made by urban white kids in Australia who want to be gangstas. I was especially impressed by the saxophone solos and the vocals, with a special mention of the clever fellow who played sax and synths simultaneously.

The final act of the night was Newfoundland's Hey Rosetta!, who I thought were very endearing as well as being really rather good. They were all young and indie-beardy apart from the frontman who was young and unbeardy (their female violinist was absent, having missed a flight), so that I initially thought he was a roadie because he didn't match. Hee hee.. They also had a rather tall guitarist.

Combining fairly standard pop-rock instrumentation (guitars, bass, drums, vocals, occasional keys) with strings (cello, and the missing violin), Hey Rosetta! deliver a punchy, dense sound that is vaguely reminiscent of early Travis⁴ , Coldplay and Muse (I would have been really, really into this band in the late nineties) while still being original and complex enough for me to make an exception to my rule about bands with exclamation marks in their names. Their live performance was superb, and I will not be surprised if I hear a lot more about them in the future.

On Day Zero I also had one of my favourite Woodford moments: looking across the pond at the big circus tent, all lit up for night-time, and listening to the frogs.

1. Thanks to my protracted attempt to navigate the (awful) section of the website where one could attempt to create a schedule, I had discovered secret performances of some bands I wanted to see. Then I used iCal to actually create a schedule in a non-insane manner. Take that, terrible website!
2. The only way to get drinking water on the festival site was to pay for it.
3. Quoted verbatim from my notebook: oh god seriously a story about going to the desert and going off all chemicals and something about a coyote oh god oh god
4. This may only be because vocalist Tim Baker sounds strangely like Fran Healy

I spent less time taking pictures than I expected to, and still ended up with just under five hundred to sort through upon my (triumphant) return. I discovered lots of amazing new bands (and several that were not so amazing), as well as rediscovering my folkier inclinations. I bought a tin whistle and turned up to a "Lean to play tin whistle" workshop, only to discover that I could have given a better "Learn to play tin whistle" workshop and I was better off learning tunes and twiddles myself; I also went to two workshops where various feel-good strategies and hippie nonsense¹ got people out of their shells and singing, in the process partially overcoming whatever ridiculous block was causing me to bleat timidly rather than sing in the presence of others.

I didn't go to any "Radiance Workshops" or indulge in any of the other hippie nonsense² on offer, or attend much in the way of spoken word and film events. Instead, I spent almost the entire time marching around in the dust from one sweltering tent to the next, then squiggling illegible things in my little notebook about whatever exciting discovery was on stage this time. There was festival food, and getting scorched out of the tent by eight in the morning, and two thunderstorms, and wearing an awesome hat, and drinking five litres of water a day. It was great.

Miscellaneous highlights included:

• Showers and toilets in a truck!
• Having my reliance on intuition vindicated yet again, chiefly by the Barons of Tang, David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band, and Rosie Burgess.
• A surprising abundance of cellos, saxophones, and Scottish accents.
• The Great Band Competition, in which complete strangers were flung together to form bands in under 24 hours.
• The ilovemushrooms stall.
• New hippie pants (which fit! and are long enough! Miracle of miracles!) and a T-shirt that looks like a band T-shirt but secretly has an environmental slogan on it.
• The overheard exclamation of a shocked hipster girl: "No-one wears makeup here!"
• Enjoying and appreciating genres of music that I wouldn't usually come across, let alone sit and listen to for forty minutes.
• Wah pedals combined with acoustic guitars and electric violins.
• The best vibe of any festival - or, come to that, any place with lots of people - I've been to.

Lowlights were few and far between, but included:

• Pompous know-it-alls (especially the ones who were actually completely wrong).
• People who clap along OUT OF TIME.
• Terrible, terrible sound engineering at one of the biggest stages.
• Pretentious people who dance half-heartedly while looking sidelong at everyone else who's dancing, because it's all about looking cool and not about actually wanting to dance.³
• A lack of awesome breakfast food.
• Sitting in plastic chairs for a week.
• Band fatigue,⁴ which started to set in on the last day.

Coming back to the real world has been strange, although the time out from my daily routine has helped to solidify my resolve, in a way. No New Year's Resolutions for me this year; instead, a focus on pursuing and cultivating the things I value, and on leaving the path of least resistance. It always happens that a change of environment and time spent doing things on my own bring my ideals closer, where I can actually see them. The challenge, I suppose, is in keeping hold of that along with the regular everyday demands of regular everyday existence.

Some Tales of Woodford, complete with photos, will appear over the next little while, but I intend to take my time about it.

1. The good kind.
2. The bad kind.
3. Give me dancing hippies over dancing hipsters any day.
4. Oh look, it's yet another band that uses the word "gypsy" in describing itself. Oh look, it's yet another band who grew up listening to You Am I.

So, 2008. What a year.

It started with all the momentum of the extraordinary December that preceded it - still on a roll from arriving back home to find that I suddenly appreciated an Australian summer, then lucking into a job and a place to live with perplexing rapidity, all while coming to terms with the fact that an entirely unlooked-for relationship had shown up and looked to be making itself at home. January saw me making a silly amount of money by doing simple things well, going to see live music¹, even joining a band again. Everything was coming up me.

And then I got sick.

Weeks and months of 2008 blurred into an indistinct mess of exhaustion and waiting. Work, fitness, social life, creative pursuits, in fact almost everything I valued fell victim to the sudden collapse of my physical and mental capacities. Never before had I been forced to confront such limitations; all of my previous failures can, in the end, be attributed to apathy and weakness of will. Now, though, pushing myself meant being practically bedridden for days at a time. Various doctors ordered various tests, ruled out a handful of possibilities, and then handballed the case onto someone else, often necessitating several weeks of impotent waiting. Friendships suffered, inevitably;² isolation set in. It was not a good time.

However: I came to truly appreciate a dimension of friendship that transcends having shared history or emotional parallels or thinking the same things are stupid, a dimension that tends to be invisible until hardship strikes. There are a few people who stood by me in my uselessness this year, keeping the lines of communication open despite the cantankerous alignment of the planets, for which I am more grateful than I can say. It wasn't always the people I would have picked out of a line-up, and I suspect that some of those who kept the suckage at bearable levels weren't even aware of the good they were doing.

Mid-year, with little improvement in sight health-wise, I moved out of the share house I was in and then up to Brisbane. My communication with people in general had pretty much shrivelled up and dropped off by this point, so not only did my departure appear abrupt, I didn't even feel comfortable explaining it to those who asked. Not my finest moment, and in some ways I was vindictively happy to be leaving the city that I felt had let me down so badly,³ although there were pangs every time somebody said they would miss me (and every time some bodies didn't say it).

There followed some new challenges: adjusting to new living arrangements in a new city, while too unwell to get out there and stamp my stamp on this new life; reconciling homesickness with the desire to start afresh; getting better. That last, at least, is a struggle I am winning - looking back, the second half of the year looks like a long, slow climb upward, with the only serious dip being the entire month I lost to the aftermath of moving house again at the end of October. While I'm still not going to be capable of walking from Berlin to Postdam⁴ again any time soon, and it takes me hours to hack together a long piece of writing, things are looking up.

For all that it was miserable and pointless, it was impossible to come through this year without learning a lot. When all you can manage is introspection, for days on end, you discover how much time there is in a day, and how much it's possible to introspect without running out of navel to gaze at. I realised how many basic things I had always taken for granted, how little I missed some things that I had thought essential, how much I missed some other things that had always seemed fairly inconsequential. I guess you could say that I had no choice but to spend a lot of time nose to nose with myself, and there are no distractions or excuses in the world that can withstand such prolonged scrutiny. I'm really onto myself now (a mixed blessing, and no mistake).

A visit to Melbourne at the start of December was a wonderful chance to reconnect with people and places, and reminded me that for all its faults Melbourne still feels like home. Seeing the Mountain Goats for the first time⁵ was the highlight that really pulled everything together for me, though, and I returned to Brisbane newly energised and determined. On a mission from God, as Elwood Blues would have it.

I will not take good fortune for granted, ever again. And I am no longer prepared to sit around spinning my wheels, idly thinking about the wonderful things I want to do instead of freaking doing them. Heck, no. I am going to crack the bones of life and suck out the marrow. And if I don't? I'll have only myself to blame. I'm cool with that.

1. Including The National twice in two days, and getting to thank Matt Berninger personally after the second show. What a weekend that was.
2. I had sown the seeds of my own doom, never knowing it at the time.
3. It's easy to blame circumstances on anything but themselves.
4. Or Hampton to North Coburg. Ah, memories.
5. Or, to be more accurate, encountering John Darnielle in person for the first time.

When I come to visit, I'm surrounded by all my old made-up constellations as I wait to fall asleep.

1. A thing about my family that remained fairly constant over the years is the periodic switching of bedrooms. Perhaps my frequent furniture-rearranging impulses have this at their root.

What I've been doing:

• Watching Battlestar Galactica (and being both intrigued and infuriated by it).
• Suddenly wanting some books about 20th century history to read (hello, library card).
• Having ideas that are easy to have when you aren't in a position to implement them. (Will they last until I get my mojo back?)
• Playing UnAngband (a surprisingly awesome hybrid of Nethack and Angband).
• Letting several posts simmer quietly on various back burners.
• Observing the gradual disappearance of my willingness to make pointless noise.
• Hatching plots.

I've been doing other things as well, of course, but you get the idea.

1. There just aren't elegant electronic equivalents for a lot of phrases, are there.