So my head kind of exploded on Saturday night...

Saturday night I was back in Port Macquarie - my home stomping ground - for a mate's 21st. I left the shindig at something-past-one and drove the last half hour back to my folks place, turning the Saturday night mix down that was playing on Triple J.

For a while I tried the silence out. Tried listening to the engine and somehow feeling disappointed that I couldn't. I wasn't driving the Swift; I'd borrowed Mum's car and its quiet hum wasn't enough to sate my mind which had ticked into the treacherous late-night mindset. There was no-one else in the car, so I kind of just started talking out loud. I do this from time to time; it was like painting pictures in my head with words. It's like...like my head was suddenly full of words and I could only say one of them at a time; there was no real plan for the speech or the rambling, it really just happened. And then I got home and realised that I could barely remember any of it. Panicking, I picked up a pen and began scribbling, sitting on the edge of my bed at 2 in the morning, trying to get as much of it down as possible. I think I got about 60% of the original ramble, plus some extra that came as part of the refinement process of having it sit in your head and then try to write it out.

Anyway. I thought the blog would be an appropriate place to put it all.

Begin with sitting, at 2am with a bowl of icecream and a glass of sherry, trying to remember the brain explosion I had on the way home.
Man, I should start recording these things.
Like an angel. An angel made of light to outshine those who Weep. Weeping angel. An angel made of light, with broken wings and scarred hands and memories of life that never was. A voice, but no tongue to speak with, and a song but no lungs. Memories of all that never was, floating between the cracks of what never existed.

Floating amid a sea of stars, adrift in the black void. A hundred million tiny points of light your reference point. You know the way home; you always have. You just have no interest in the known - not tonight. Tonight you long to feel the roar of the Tempest; its sonorus melody to toss you deep into the depths of all you cannot understand. Why? Why seek out the unknowable when all you understand is within your reach; your grasp? You long to be swept away, to feel insignificant behind the raw fury of something you could never hope to control, not even in a million lifetimes of understanding or memory of money. Money? Pah. Value condescends itself on you, bringing assumptions, assertions, ascertations. You forget all too soon of the Great Fear and desert the skyscrapers of wonder and challenge and hope for the apartment blocks of mediocrity and despair.

You clamour and you whisper, to have within yourself value found, but you price yourself as worthless. You desire an open mind, but you only want to spend your time with those who say exactly the same things as you. You forsook the great argument for massing around a tiny one, a tiny thought. You came upon the thought by someone else, but you did not stop to examine it; to think it over. It was never questioned by you. Instead, you swallowed it whole along with the rest; regurgitating it on command like a courting parrot whenever another walked by. Open your eyes. Your voice; your hands; your mind: they were meant for so much more than the incessant babble and wind of the mundane; of this slow crawl through a half-remembered existence.

Break. Break even. Break even on your oath. Come clean with the promise you made, written in flesh and blood between you and the Speaker. The Speaker; the Singer: the one whose voice echoes through space and time and history and mind, like a song you've always known the tune to but never understood the lyric of. You tried to emulate Him once; you screamed into the void of blackest night, but no echo responded. How could it? The expanse stretched above your head; an infinite black dome, spattered with stars like a child with a messy fountain pen.

And by then I had hit my semi-colon usage limit for the day and passed out at 3am.

Halfway to Life, the Universe and Everything

So.

This, I have noted, is the season of life where almost more of my friends are married now than not. This can be slightly understandable in some circumstances. I mean, some of the friends got married to each other.

But yes. We enter our early twenties and the season of 'weddings and twenty-firsts'.

When most of your friends are at least a year older than yourself, the process gets accelerated a bit. I've been witnessing frequent matrimonies for the last four years or so.

ANYWAY.

I'm not talking about Weddings yet. But Twenty-Firsts, yes. Sounds good.

It's forty-five minutes to midnight, and I've made it back from the trek out to a mate's property for his 21st celebration. Ate a lot of food and enjoyed pleasurable company. And caught frogs, and tried to avoid the mud. Only one of that second set of statements was true.

[it was the one about the mud. SO MUCH MUD.]

And then I drive home in Dad's car because mine is missing most of the doors at the moment (maintenance). Dad's car which has no functioning stereo because it locked up after Jack ran the car flat. This is not the point.

The point is that I spent about equal parts of time, driving silently because I had to concentrate and avoid the potholes, talking to myself and singing as loud as I could because I was driving through the middle of nowhere.

Am I tone-deaf? Partly. Yes.

Can I do anything about it? Not really. But this way was alright. There was the curved road, damp under the recent rains, and the soft glow of Navi the GPS and me bellowing out Florence + the Machine lyrics like it was kareoke and I was intoxicated.

I wasn't intoxicated. I was trying to think of an allusion that involved little inhibition. Because it was me and about 800kg of car.

And when you drive at night, with no stereo, you start thinking lots. Some of it is trying to tell yourself that the bark hanging of those powerlines is not a body. Some of it is trying to rationalise other parts of life in general. Some of the bits are devoted to whatever you just experienced.

Turns out I was musing over what I'd just experienced. And realised where it was in relation to myself.

I do a lot of comparison. I think it's a firstborn thing. You and Second spend a lot of time trying to be noticed by the parents more; the firstborn because you have to do all the trailblazing, and people expect you to be awesome and successful, and the secondborn trying to top that with something else.

Jack does it with personality. He's the people person at a party. I'm the person that chills over next to the guacamole. Guacamole girl. Until it comes to making something cool that might explode. I can do that too.

But.

I've never been able to pick up a proper job. At the moment I'm still trying to plug these painted shoes I'm working on. And they do look cool. I'm just not very good at marketing.
I've had work patternmaking before; once. I had a second one lined up for the beginning of last year, when I had almost a week between landing in Sydney from London and then moving to Newcastle. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that that one fell through. I had the guy adding more and more and more things to the order. Which was insane.
The rest of the time it's been deskwork, cleaning or popcorn. None of which are very fulfilling.

I'm hoping to find employment when I head home again. Maybe. Maybe I'll just get swamped again and spend my days hunched over a computer, sniggering at Red vs. Blue shorts. It seems to be one of the few things I'm good at.
Getting paid to do some art; that would be nice. Being able to sell my art would be nicer.
Ah well, artists aren't usually famous until they're dead. Unless they are Picasso. But Picasso was a genius.

pfft. Yep. Not famous 'til dead.
I guess that shouldn't be long on a student's diet.

...


this is a really positive blog post, eh? I'm sorry if it was not to your liking. It's probably the rum talking.
Well.

Rum can't talk.

It's probably the removal of inhibitions. Which I'm attributing to the rum.

Now, back to the best idea I had while driving. Go and find my old Hanson CDs. And listen to all of them.

90's boy bands with bad hair, here we come.