Surviving By Increments

Given that the cool change is on its way (Avalon went from 46° to 34°!) this isn't exactly a timely post, but my brain hasn't been great in the heat. Or my computer. 

4 days of 41°+ heat. There are apparently no crops that can survive 7 consecutive days of 40°, which is a terrifyingly close reality. Apart from being very happy to be at work and hanging out in air conditioned public spaces, here's how I managed to not faint in public. 

I freaking love this parasol. Hand-painted bamboo and paper, it's light and beautiful. Bit too delicate to be open in any wind, but my goshness. It made all the difference. My aversion to direct sun on my head is akin to that of vampires. Dark hair and sun just means a head so hot I nearly burn myself scratching. Simply not having the sun on my head made the outside air far less strenuous. Umbrellas, the opaque kind, will do just as well. 

This plain little fan I bought in a temple market in Tokyo for 500¥, about $5, back in 2007. It has travelled with me ever since. When sitting in a crowded train, standing in a queue moving a touch too slow, it has been a blessing. Can't prove a negative, but I know it has been the difference between fainting or not multiple times, this morning included. Thank you little paper fan! You can usually get fans in discount shops, or Chinese grocers. 

Drinking water is a big help, but when you're sweating buckets, not quite enough. I carry a sachet of powerade around, and it has been a big help. Pity it tastes yuck, even when super weak. 

Conversely, if you don't have the cash for sports drinks, soy sauce hits the spot. No really. I ended up necking a fish yesterday. A bit intense on the tastebuds, but I instantly felt better. 

I've seen reports that the cool change had hit Geelong. The Melbourne cool change is a wonderfully traceable phenomenon. Keep an ear out. You'll be able to hear the cheers. 

Jettisoning Dreams

It was the standard package; end of the world and you and a handful of randoms are trying to outrun the symptoms of that ending. In this case the continuing rising water. A train exploding. Too many of you in a small car trying to motor up a steep hill. 

(There is always some exhibit, some animal enclosure, that pauses the apocalypse. This time you found a dinosaur pen, and stood watching the dinosaurs, forgetting the rising water and the marauders entirely as those giants stomped about before you. The cage was far too small. They simply paced.)

Codeine to nix the pain and let you sleep sketched the details of this dream with more clarity than is usual, and you remember a flag. Made by your group of survivors to signify that not all was lost, you were a new nation and would rebuild civilisation. You, as a species, were undefeated. 

The flag was the Australian flag, but rendered red, white and black. This, it was explained, was to show that regardless of skin colour — black/white — we all bleed red, we are all the same. 

A nice gesture, you thought, except that it simplifies the idea of race to being only that of skin colour, which is insulting, and then presents that concept as a binary. Black or white, with black standing in for brown, yellow and red, so in fact being all colours not white, and white. 

After that you leave the group, and after stealing dolls, fighting rabbits and walking alone in the bush, you wake up. 

I read about, listen to and occasionally even engage in the discourse on racism in western societies regularly, and have done so for years. I'm all for replacing the current structures that govern our thinking. 

And yet, despite this, when unconscious and building a nation for the ground up, that flag is what my brain produced. What I created. Even as I analyzed and dismantled it. Nice try. But no. 

This is how deep racism runs. 

In me. And definitely in you. 

The Year of Solar Slingshots

I started 2013 on the other side of the world (in the dark, in the misery, with an angry bird and cheeky lover), and after five new lands I came home. I can say that now, with certainty. Home. Then followed the joy of sinking into and being subsumed by all that we left behind and still love. Months of simply enjoying being here with these people. 

Restless heart returned. An impatience and need to know there is an adventure confirmed in the future, and that I only need make my way the ought this ordinary 9-5 day, and the next and the next and it will become the present. Financial limitations beset us. There is naught to do but be patient. 

Rather than face the continual appointments and stress of WorkCover I went parttime. It feels like a good balance has been struck in terms of pain management and time and money (but still those limitations chafe). Yet it is not an extra day off, even though I may think of it as such. Too often it is literally consumed by sleep, desperately needed and unstoppable. My limits are greater than my capabilities. 

I come to realize the limits of my vocational experience, and the limits that imposes on all my future decisions. I feel trapped. In my body. In my job. Resentment blossoms. 

My lover struggles with the job market, and it grinds us both down. The karmic balance is whiplash; the day before Christmas he is offered his dream job, with great pay, and we both stare at each other in bewildered delight. It is hard to believe. Such wonderous things don't seem our lot, perhaps because we burn up our wonder in with each other. 

He will move to Sydney.  I will follow, somehow. Time spend by the sea seems a dream. There is your adventure, Tessa. A city you don't know awaits. 

I still haven't written anything. 

My family is the happiest I've ever known it to be. My friends are beset by monsters, but they prevail. I've spent more than a year living with my lover, and despite seeing him every day I am still excited to come home to him, the sound of his voice on the phone is like a drop of gold ink in the water of my being. We are unstoppable. 

There is a lot to work on. I thought we were landing, but as it turns out, we're still in orbit. May this never change. 

Still, there is a blight creeping out from the core. There is always a war. 

The sun keeps rising, and I keep breathing, and these terrible, wonderful things keep dragging me on. 

The Starbucks Throwback Machine

I've time to spend before an appointment, cannot remember which of the cafés around don't do annoyingly bitter chai lattés and without feeling to much guilt head to the nearest Starbucks. They are globally reliable in the chai latté department, which I have researched and tested myself. 

It's Melbourne. It's winter. 

And as soon as I walk through those doors the smell of hot milk and waiting coffee,  and barista patter and easy music echoing from tiles and couches, these things dive into my memories and I'm standing in New York, Krakow, Prague, Nuremberg, Manchester, Glasgow, Inverness. I'm standing in transit lounges in countries I never properly entered. I'm standing in a country that is not my home. 

Newness is one of the biggest motivators for travel.  Learn. Experience. Try. This can be fatiguing, day after day. Sometimes you don't want an adventure; sometimes you just want a cup of tea. 

An evil corporate hegemony it may be, but a familiar sanctuary when nothing else is, it also is. 

That brief nostalgic thrill made my heart skip. A remembered swell of relief on entering. The smallest and briefest of time machines. 

"Nevertheless, there has perhaps never been a bird that flies as correctly as an aeroplane; yet all birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found."

-- Page 15, Under the Glacier, Halldór Laxness

12 hours in Sweden

Café Dox is hidden beneath the Old Town in Stockholm. The open space is cluttered with couches and armchairs, and punctuated by the fluted and fat stone pillars supporting the streets and buildings above. A cozy cave with chandeliers and blankets to ward off the creeping cold. Goulash, tea, and a respite from walking on ice.

The snow held the plane an extra ten mounted in the sky. Out the window the propeller broke glittering lines of ice. Snow on the ground, runway, trucks, terminals. We slept on benches we battled for.

A floor to ceiling window four storeys high let us watch the snow fall, silent and slow, all night.

Field Notes of the Wondernaut Inaugural

1. Sir Tessa, first and only member of the Society of Homeless Wondernauts, roamed directionless through the vaults and cabinets of the British Empire's junk room. The vases and sculptures had never breathed. She sought something should could feel, and trusted her heart, a weary and much battered curl of whimsy, would tell her when she had found it.

2. In the Middle East there can be found colour, and in these carpets, oldest in the world and downtrodden by duty, there was once breath. Sir Tessa is not sure. Her heart is not sure. Both tremble in stillness. Light may come. Light may be certain. She waits.

3. The carpet is exhausted. The light falls upon and is locked in the warp and weft 400 years hungry. The longing is plaintive; give me your dust and footprints, give me the paths you follow in life. Invisible barriers keep the wondernaut from pressing her forehead to the carpet.

4. Colour brilliant and faded. All breathed once. The love of artisans and masters. And yet, Sir Tessa, the first, only and lonesome member of the Society of Homeless Wondernauts, is moved by none of these exquisite objects. She wonders, standing before the trophies of the Renaissance, if she has lost her hunter's instinct.

5. The wondernaut spins lost through treasures endless, and although she does not know what she is looking for, her heart pauses at the word 'glass'.

6. Glass catches light and throws it playfully. Perception and perspective curve nervous and uncertain. The colours have never breathed, and yet sing with the voice of all colours. Amid beauty transparent Sir Tessa hooks an inquisitive finger and when the tray of broken shards presents itself, there is a glimmer, a quiet unfurling in her heart.

7. Beautiful like breaking glass.

8. Still these objects leave the wondernaut barren.



(She wants a garden of stubborn little herbs and unfriendly flowers. She wants ordinary moths to sit motionless upon the wall. She wants mud on her boots and wind in her ears. She wants to be surprised.)

9. Sir Tessa, first, only and unchallenged member of the Society of Homeless Wondernauts, returns to her berth.

10. And wonders.

Aural Transport

The table is tiny, an old sewing table still with wheel and pedals so I cannot get my legs beneath. The restaurant, 'U dwau Maryí', has only the one patron.

These windows look on the Vltava as it wends through old town Cesky Krumlov. Dark. Freezing. Raining.

This particular peace, breadth of river, infinite rush of water, throws me back to Nikko in Japan, a mere day after the typhoon, lying on the tatami mats and listening to a different breadth of river, a different endless rush of water.

And yet, the same.

Vltava by sirtessa

"...(and seemed to confirm Chamfort's dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead)..."

— The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

The Responsible Adult

That's the mark of a true adult; total responsibility for self. It is a mostly exhausting process, sadly, and much of the time the rewards feel few and far between.

This isn't a reward as such. Traipsing about the world is an incredible luxury. Awareness of this cannot and should not be undone, and the opportunity not taken for granted.

At the same time, the only person responsible for me is me. I make my own decisions, pick my consequences and get to choose which regret to live with.

Tessa, come Boxing Day you will have been traveling for 2 months, the longest you've ever gone, and there is no known end to this. You were not at full capacity when you left home, and haven't operated on such for too long. To this journey you've assigned some purpose. There is something you need to prove, but what, and to who, you do not know.

You are not as strong as you think you are. It is okay to admit that.

While in Berlin, I give you permission to do nothing. Go out and tourist your little butt off if you want, or stay in the hostel dozing on the couch between cups of tea and look only out the window.

Ask nothing of yourself. Test nothing. Challenge nothing. Be nothing.

And maybe we'll get through this.

Dear Winston-Salem,

Footpaths. They're a thing.

Regards,
Sir Tessa

Postcards!

If you would like a postcard from far away, send me your postal address using the shoutout on the right. Strangers welcome!

these skies

If only I lived up high, somewhere distant from the ground, with a balcony, or better, access to the roof, so I could stand on the edge with my face to the wind a bellow like a magnificent bull triumphant in the arena, raise my fists and be the eye of the tornado this ferocious wonder spins around me.

HOLY CAVERNOUS CLAMS, BATMAN

NEXT WEEK IS MY LAST WEEK AT WORK.

YES. I ONLY JUST REALISED THIS.

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File under "do not lose": Love Letters

Beautiful Tessa,

Your deftness with words and how you craft feelings and visions with them leaves me awed and enraptured... pretty much alllll the time. I love your seething rage and your immaculate imitation of cat bum and the cheeky cheeky glint in your eyes. When you smile and when you laugh, you actually glow. That light warms everyone around you. You have a natural beauty and grace about you, a ravishing dark haired vision that my eyes enjoy alighting upon as often as they can manage (I AM NOT ALONE IN THINKING THIS, RAOWR). Your advice and thoughts cut to the core, yet are not of a typical approach... lateral thinking is a rare trait, so admirable.. you are bold, daring... and you blow me away with every twist and side-eye you slip in. And you have slipped in under my skin, in between my heart and my lungs - your warm, slender self - as you have slid in to a precious soft space in all of us. Anyone would be OBNOXOUSLY lucky to know you and call you their friend, confidant, collusionist, co en-cheekenator.

<3

Steady rain. A magnificent day to be a snail. They're all out basking on the paths and in the puddles. I think for some it is "Snail's First Rainfall". The walk to the station was somewhat treacherous. Concentration on where I put my feet. Couple of magpies hanging out on the platform, indifferent to the wet and feathers well bedraggled. Swishing their beaks in the collected rain for a drink and singing a melodic 'fuck off' when I watched too long.

"Just like that — Just time — Just time — Don't care myself if the whole fucking shit house goes up in chunks — I've sat out novas before — I was born in a nova."

— The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs

Is thus thang orn?

Google has FINALLY released an iPhone app for Blogger. About time! I'm posting from it right now!

This would be a more exciting statement if I were not sitting in front of my computer. Concentrate on the possibilities instead. Autocorrect will rescind- Ha! See? Autocorrect will REACH a whole new audience!

FYI:

Gallop = halloo
Hawthorn = hawt

Now here is a picture of scotch belly.