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.

Living with your eyes shut

Dreams are weird, okay?

I frequent various blog-type websites, and whenever I hear something about dreams pop up, tend to click on it for the heck of it. Want to know what they reveal?

Absolutely nothing.

There's arguments ranging from dreams being a replay of the day's events to it even being some kind of portent of the future. I'll hang onto the latter because I know that that one happens to be true. It's happened before. In the case of the former, I shake my head.

Because I'm pretty sure that nothing was said about The Fridge yesterday to make me believe that for some reason I was driving it again last night.

Now, The Fridge was the second Tarago our family had. We're onto the third now, and sold the car a little while after I began driving. This means that the first car I actually drove was the '88 Tarago. I called it a fridge for a reason. It looked something like this.

The main difference being that ours was white, and had hubcaps with a Holden badge on them. Note the enormous forty centimetres of crumple zone. The car was a sod, but it was enough for Dad to teach me the concept of a gearbox.

Wait.

Now I know where it came into conversation yesterday.

I had been telling Prue about how I had 'chucked a doughie' before. [Read: donuts.] It was probably our second or third outing to the industrial area down the road. It's basically a really big loop, with a grass-topped middle-bit where people park their cars.

It was the end of my lesson, and there were no cars parked on the grass. So Dad had me mount the kerb and tear up the grass in an effort to learn about the tachometer. It succeeded, sort of. And just for the record, it is possible in an old Tarago, whose poor handling is only exceeded by its descendants, which for some odd reason feel like I'm driving a blimp.

But go figure. I drive an old sports car from the eighties with sports suspension and no understanding of concepts like 'electric windows', 'central locking' or 'power steering'. But I love that car to bits.

Hmmm.

Well, writing as I am thinking is fun. What else can I tell you about the Fridge?

It looked like a fridge. It certainly had the handling of one. Oh. It was nearly impossible to lock.

We had some weird system that used its sliding windows to unlock the car. Because the sliding door couldn't lock unless it was closed or something.

This fact seems inconsequential. But it is important. It was important last night because I had to lock the car and couldn't. Damn theta waves.

And Zombies. If I have a nightmare, I can guarantee that if I have a nightmare, it will have zombies. Sometimes they are your stock-standard shufflers. Sometimes they are the rage-virus type (watching even parts of 28 weeks later was a bad idea). Sometimes they decide to get steamy with some other type of villain, producing such odd offspring that in all seriousness, I found myself fleeing zombie daleks. Whose weakness was orange juice.

And then we wake up and examine the facts in rational daylight and laugh. What? Zombie Daleks? Come on.

They were terrifying while I was asleep, honest.

So sometimes. Wait. Most of the time. Dreams might have some tie with whatever happened during the day. Most of the time it makes no sense because it gets mashed into other things that happened during the day or you're all running away from Zombie Daleks while looking for the Maccas orange juice because it's the most acidic and therefore super effective.

Half of the time you've discovered something amazing and then you wake up disappointed because it doesn't exist. Half of the time you wake up relieved that it doesn't, usually because whatever it was came at some great cost, or you accidentally hit someone with it and that made no sense either, because the person was in Switzerland at the time.

Maybe I'm the only one that this happens to. Hmm. No. Surely not.

And then, there's the one percent of dreams that you wake from where you not only remember what went down with perfect clarity, but they were completely brilliant in more than just the one sense. Because there was enough of a mashup of everything that you couldn't trace the original source. And because it would make a pretty good story.

I've had this happen a grand total of three times. One of those became the basis for my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or simply NaNo) project. It was fun.

Could it have been a portent? I guess.
I mean, not in the 'you are going to use this time travel device to stop a gang leader from committing terrorist acts', but in the 'you are going to write a story about a guy who uses this time travel device to stop a gang leader from committing terrorist acts'

The novel was called 'Shift'. Incidentally, it was also the reason why there was no new material posted to the blog during November and early December. I've got excuses for the other months I've been away too, honest.

I guess to a degree, I enjoy dreaming. Sometimes. It makes sense at the time, and then refuses to gel correctly with reality upon waking. Sometimes you wake up completely bewildered. Terrified.

And then your mind wipes itself and you go back to doing real life stuff. Weird.

Source

Transit #3 - Race the Dawn

So. Time to write the post-reflection-thing for the transit project.

Those who watch release dates may have noticed that this post is notoriously close to the previous one. This is because I took the photos for technical research and didn't write about it until later. Much later.

Moving along.

The trip itself actually underwent a lot more than what I thought it would in terms of logistics and last-minute changes; we had a deadline to meet on the day we got home - this suddenly changed from 4pm to 12:30pm and things quickly got interesting, considering that the trip was going to take roughly 12 hours no matter what.

It was decided on our last day that we would bend spacetime and Try Something Different.

Leave at midnight. Drive through the night and the early morning and race the dawn to get home in time to meet the requirements set by the deadline-setter. And not stop.

Things happened accordingly. That night my siblings, my aunt and I spent half an hour in the drive-thru at Dirtybird (KFC) waiting on 'Krusher' milkshake things, watched RED and went back to sleep for a couple of hours before heading out at 12:30am.

Things became rather blurry from there. I remember being particularly cranky at the deadline-setter and trying to take photos in the dark that weren't working. There were blurry blurry photographs, and I watched through the haze of 3am as we pounded through the kilometres methodically.

We passed the Pine Plantation Somewhere North Of Brisbane, the Brisbane Interstatey Bit, the Caboolture Stop and various other spots as I faded in and out of consciousness. I remember also being rather cranky because of the severe decrease in optimal photo-taking-time.

There were brief stops every now and then as Mum and Dad changed drivers, usually on the side of the massive roads we were so used to going down.

The overall feeling was actually quite odd - as though I had gone back to being a very small child, disorientated but not making a whole lot of noise because the car was moving and we were going places. The car changed in vibe from the compressed hive of activity it is in the daylight into the sleeper cabin Tiarne and I walked into on the midnight train last year - slightly creepy in its silentness.

Either way, we were going places.

We stopped in at Ballina to refuel; I was awake again and mildly confused by the bright lights of the fuel station. Confined to the backseat, I took photos where I could.

I didn't like many of them.

The sky was becoming light; it was about the hour of five-ish and we pulled into a Macdonalds for 'Breakfast'. My siblings shuffled out, swaying like zombies as we surveyed the fluorescent glow of the fast-food giant and for some reason, all ordered the same meal.

I wandered outside again to make the most of the one stop; taking photos where I could, trying to come up with inspiration in the carpark of Chew and Spew. It was Interesting, to say the least. We got some good shots in.

We followed rule #1 of the Traveller and clambered back into the car as the first real rays of sunlight began to hit the clouds above us. I grabbed a couple more snaps and we were off again.

It was on our way out of Ballina that the sun began to rise properly over the cane fields I am so used to seeing on this trip; the camera had the ISO turned down a notch or two and I started shooting the sunrise in between cursing the sudden clumps of tree that photobombed the fiery sky.

A while after this, it began to rain. Heavily. The car slowed in pace and the wipers went up to level three. The music on Mum's ipod had looped through the car stereo for about the third time and I remember trying to block the sound with my pillow, thinking, "But I don't wanna listen to Mac Powell,"

Either way, by this time the sibs were still doing the sleep thing. Try taking photos that tell a story of transit in the car with your family when they're mostly asleep.

Or just start experimenting with whatever happens to be in your laptop bag. Even if it is the laptop.

                                      

                                      

                                      

The last of the journey back consisted of listening to a Doctor Who audiobook and the taking of motion-type photos. You know, the ones where just one object is in focus and the rest of it is blurred? I started tracking trees as we passed through the ghost road, and as we neared our street, finally, Prue seemed to be in the mood for taking photos. We got about three with the llama and then landed, wearily, at our house.

The car was unpacked, and six bodies in various states of beings shuffled indoors. It felt to be somewhere between 4 and 6pm.

It was 10:30. AM.

I had some good photos. The questions remaining were, are there enough? and are they up to scratch?

I figured that leaving them for a while and coming back when I wasn't so full of angst and overtiredness would be helpful. When my brain wasn't being overly critical or something.

Guess I'll wait just a little longer.

In closing, I guess that one of the coolest things about the end of the trip was taking this photo before we unpacked the car. Because it really did look like a tetris screen/this sketch I drew of Dad's carpacking skills.

P.S. If this sounds like one long negative rant, that's probably because I have issues. In reality, there were a few things that threw exactly what I had initially expected out of whack. As mentioned in Transit #2, I rolled with the punches and drew amusement from whinging about it later. One of my endearing characteristics I guess.

Adventures in Newcastle. Part One.

Tonight’s post has two bits. But they both relate back to my recent becoming-a-Novocastrian. Enjoy.

The trip down

We were supposed to leave at ten that morning, but running on true Hazelgrove time meant that we didn’t get away until after lunch. Dad was still busy working on the Suzuki, and I was doing some last minute boxing. At about 11am Dad pulls me outside for the most intense ten minute car-mechanic-intro I think most people could experience. It is one of those little things that I wish I could do – like speaking Japanese or being able to build small explosives – be a bit of a closet mechanic. There’s something cool about grease-marked hands and the feeling of working with your hands.

My session went something along the lines of

“Radiator. Pressurised. You have a butterfly’s chance in hell of getting it open when the engine is hot, so don’t try. Coolant goes in there - it’s green.

Oil. Dipstick. Don’t get oil on the engine when you pull the dipstick out it’s bad this is the full line don’t let it get below halfway down the indicator tare the stick before you measure.

This is the lock for the bonnet; make sure you can open it without looking at it.

Coolant overflow. Window-water. Check everything once a week. Engine gets over halfway on the temp gauge that is bad. Come around the back spare tyre….”

From there I was suddenly engaged in the act of removing the rear left tyre using the other definite piece of anti-darking-metal in the car. I quite like my tyre iron. It has an ‘I’m serious’ feel to it. It doesn’t have a name yet. 

Anyhow, changing the tyre probably would have been more fun if I hadn’t had the sun heating up my unprotected shoulders and back. I could feel the heat, and almost expected to hear the sizzling of pork-like-meat as I knelt by the jack and tyre.

The last lesson I had with the car before bailing back inside to continue streamlining the crapola I was bringing with me was how the steering lock worked. Dad explained the purpose of the oddly-shaped piece of steel and how to operate it and why I should definitely not put with the end on the right side of the car because that would damage the window.

Once again, the anti-darking-metal-topic crossed my mind, and I’ve got no idea as to whether the idea manifested itself there and then or formed over the space of this week. Either way, my blue steering lock is now called Appropriation.

I'll give you a photo of it tomorrow. If I remember.

(By the way, if all this is refusing to make sense I would suggest looking for a trilogy of books by Scott Westerfield. It’s called The Midnighters and the main enemies hate steel, groups of thirteen and new things.)

So. Fast-forward to leaving time; Prue has located a mixed CD that I think I burnt in 2004 or 2005. Either way, it’s old and there is an embarrassing amount of bad music on it. 

Jack had located the gorilla costume he’d purchased online which had arrived on Friday and he put it on, in spite of the oppressive heat outside. Laughter ensued. 

There’s just something that I think is about full-body-animal suits. It’s like they have some sort of power because other people cannot see your face = anonymous = act stupid. Well, more outlandish than normal, at the very least. Ten minutes of side-splitting, tear-generating laughter and I ducked inside for the last, almost-most-important-thing-to-do-before-travelling.

Sunscreen.

To put it this way, the dear Swift had the window tint peel off about six years ago. It is a two-door car, and it predates air conditioner, so the only form of ventilation is the window. Open window. Sun. Lots of it.

Equals sunscreen. Lots of that too.

Prue and I headed up the party, with Dad in behind driving the Tarago. We weren’t even halfway to the stop when I began to feel the sensation of burning flesh, so by the time we pulled over at Coolongolook, my left arm was roughly the same colour as….as…..well, go and look for some pencils. Coloured ones will be of more use. Look for the one called ‘Vermillion’. Got it? I was that colour.

We pulled out a towel and I draped it over my shoulders in the hopes of delaying skin-cancer by approximately two hours.

It was on the next leg that more things happened. Dad started to film us driving, and Prue pulled out her camera to take the odd photo of the two of us. I drove.

Me trying not to laugh.

I think she was secretly very pleased about wearing my top-hat the whole way.

Or not so secretly.

Dad continued behind us into Newcastle, which was one of the single most scary things I have ever done. City driving + cars + cars + cars + directions + big intersections + red lights + cars = lots of stress.

There was also the 'green apples' tree that Dad had hung in the car. It was incredibly pungent. The car continues to reek of 'green apples' in an eerily similar fashion to as it had about ten years ago when Dad first bought the car and had 'green apple' in a spritzing bottle. It's still in the laundrey somewhere, harbouring memories of what 'green apple' should smell like. I think.

The end of this part of the story I guess was that we did get to Russell’s in one piece. Prue and Dad and I started unpacking stuff until Dad went to go buy food. The bottom line?  We were all knackered, and probably the simplest pleasure we derived from that evening was sticking our legs in the pool at 10pm. 

That’s right. I’ve now got immediate access to a pool. Be jealous.

Dad and Prue left at about 11:30pm and I headed inside. It was so hot; that was one of my primary impressions. Russell, the landlord, found a louver fan and I slept with it pointed at my head.

Bec arrived the next day with her family, whereupon a similar process was repeated, albeit with slightly less drama, and they arrived at three. PM.