Mentalechoes

The old photograph collection I have from the years of my 30’s has been buried in the back of a cupboard at the back of my flat for a time longer than I can remember. They never came out at all in the last few years, and I’d really forgotten that the albums filled with at a thousand glossy paper memories existed until this weekend when I undertook a massive flat wide clean up. As I pulled the volumes out of the dark and into the light of day I flipped through the pages all filled back to back with frozen moments and brought forward to consciousness a flood of experiences I had given up.

It was a profound feeling; surreal in the blur of emotions that whirred through heart with each turn of the plastic holders. I looked at the pictures of the younger me, surrounded by the younger people I knew, some of them still in my life, others gone like last summers sun shine, and remembered.

I was a different person back then, happier, more carefree, yet always intense and chasing something deeper and constantly moving. Many of the pictures showed me now what I had failed to see back then too; that there were people with a deep feeling for me, that went beyond what words they would say.

Looking back I could see me then and look at a person that was free from the realities that were to come, but also see a person who constantly doubted everything that he saw around him and felt like he had to push forward onto something else that he could barely understand; a future free from doubt.

It led to this place here and now.

I guess the thing for me is that the photos showed that the people we are and were are not separate, but the same, we simply choose to forget or ignore those sides of ourselves that time moves into the background, but they are not ever truly lost. Our essential self can always change and modify as we grow with time, but we never have to leave behind the best parts of ourselves that we want the most. It seems as we get older the pressure of life always makes us feel that things get harder, but I think that’s just how we interpret changing responsibilities, and that our position becomes one where more is at stake with each decision we take.

Looking through those pics I was reminded of some important things, and for me at least, it has made a positive change in remembering the good things about the life I was given. And also, to do something I’ve forgotten to do that is important.

The next 10 years deserves those lessons.

Andy.

In the years that have passed living here in Europe there was an inexorable motion that I’ve only recently become aware of, you start off as a foreigner and then end up something else, something in between. It’s something every foreigner is aware of, no matter how long they live in an adopted country, you will never be from that country or that culture, you are part of a class that always sits on the fringes of integration. For some expats the separation is more pronounced, the colour of your skin for instance, for many it’s the heavily accented way they will always speak the language. Some are lucky and can overcome these physical traits and move closer to the heart of a culture, but in most cases the best you can achieve is three steps on the inside ring.

There is a time of change though for those expats that stay somewhere beyond the first couple of years, and really start to grows roots into the place they’ve chosen as home. You start to blend in, and feel yourself becoming part of the place, a blanket of comfort covers your day to day existence, and you feel easy. But, you never are allowed to forget that you don’t come from this place. It is not your culture and it never will be.

I read a book many years written by a man called John Fowles called, The Magus. It’s about the dramatic life experience of a young English man who takes a teaching position on one of the Greek islands. The story is quite involved so I won’t relate it here, suffice to say that for anyone that has spent any time of their life as an expatriate, they should read it for empathy that is inside. Fowles said through his protagonist that once a person takes themselves out of their own environment and moves away, they will recreate that environment where ever they are. And so home becomes a space between a set of walls that imitates their cultural identity, independent of the country they are in.

It’s an interesting concept when you really start to think about it.

Andy.

I’ve been away home now around 13 years. It almost seems like another life time when I try to remember what it was like. Home for me was Brisbane, that nice big country town about two thirds of the way down the east coast of Australia. Lovely place really, but at the time it seemed very small, and I couldn’t wait to get out.

The first move I made was London, where I spent just under two years living and using as a base before moving to Amsterdam, where I’ve been ever since. I remember those first two years as a very big time of discovery, both personally and geographically. I roamed England and other parts of the world out of an obsession and love for travelling.

My move to Amsterdam though became something more than just a travel trip, it was a move to a place that I would settle and call home. I grew to love the city and it’s people and the lifestyle that I had here. Each year I would say to myself I would only stay here a year, and then at the end of the year I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. And now after a decade I feel more Amsterdams than I do Australian.

It’s funny though, I haven’t lost the accent from Australia at all. None of us really do I think, once you have it, it stays with you for life, like a criminal record that never goes away, not even after 200 years of colonial rule. But after that there isn’t much inside of me that’s still dinky-di true blue Oz. Most of my core attitudes have changed, and the association I had with the community of people from there is feeling very thin.

After a time you start to ask yourself, who am I?

Ten years ago if someone had of asked me, would there ever come a time when I wouldn’t feel like an Australian, I would have said they were fucking crazy. After all, I was an Australian’s Australian; I loved my Friday night (Rugby League) footy on TV, and honest Aussie rock. I loved driving down the South Coast road to Brunswick Heads to the Stone Ground Pie Factory and chowing down on a meat pie with peas or three. But now, ever so slowly, everything seems to have changed, and after so long away, I no longer feel like the Australian I was before.

Andy.

The internet is here to stay, and that means so are MMO’s (MMORPG’s, MUSH’s, MUD’s, and any other M*&^’s you can think of). You’d think then that with the internet being as mainstream as electricity and shampoo that everyone would know about MMO’s. Right?!

Wrong!

Just the other day I was chatting with a really close friend – who just happens to be a girl, but which shouldn’t be an indicator that I’m about to say something sexist – about World of Warcraft. I was telling her that my troll hunter spoke with a Caribbean accent and had three fingers, which for some reason caused her to break out into hysterical laughter. I was a bit baffled by this to be honest, because my troll hunter (who just celebrated his 5th birthday yesterday – yes WoW turned 5) has always had an accent that makes women melt, and only three fingers ever since he was born (generated).

So I took it upon myself to educate the young lady about the vast and untameable virtual worlds that occupy vast spaces on the internet. Their history spanning back to the dawn of the network digital age, and their breadth extending across the globe to all corners of the real world. MMO’s were the first addiction digital addiction of the true gamer geek, and shall be the last. They shall stand the test of time and always be with us. You could almost argue that MMO’s are the one true purpose of the internet. After all, the perpetuation of MMO’s has spurred the development of virtual realities; virtual realities are the purpose of the internet. Worlds within worlds; realities within realities; mirror images of mirrors.

Very eloquent stuff, but she didn’t get any of it. In fact she started yawning at the half way point, and then got up and walked away at the end. Needless to say it totally went over her head, and she forgot about my troll, his accent, and how many fingers he had, like so much useless yesterdays news.

Really it showed me that being a gamer geek is really like having a special set of genes that make you that kind of person, just like for being tall, or asian, or a midget. If you have the gamer gene, you’ll get it. If you don’t, then about all you’ll get is bored, and frustrated at the weird person who won’t shut up about his troll.

Which makes me wonder why some geneticist doesn’t go look for it, and then offer it in a box of pills for money.

“Do you suck at gaming? Need to impress a boyfriend who leads a double life as a troll? Then buy IGOTGAME capsules and show them you’re not a totally pussy!”

I should do marketing for a job!

Andy.

These days I’m becoming increasingly more frustrated with email as a communication tool. My inbox and related subfolders are absolutely FULL of stuff that isn’t spam, but which I’m starting to consider spam. Things like emails from social networks that you might have signed up for long ago but don’t use anymore, and no matter how many times you try to unsubscribe they still email you, and I still don’t mark them as spam. Then there is the torrent of emails coming in from all the social networks and various entertainment, online shopping, reference, ridiculous, why-was-that-interesting sites that I registered to over the course of the past five years. All their marketing shit comes in, and my filters just can’t keep up, so consequently it ends up in my inbox. It’s not really spam because they’re online services I do technically use, and some of them I even willingly signed on for newsletter updates, but it just never ends.

Now the few emails I get from friends, who have all moved over to Facebook and Twitter for keeping in touch and sending out updates, all get lost in this other stream of spam-but-not-spam. I could spend the next two weeks diligently putting in new filters to move all the crap stuff to folders where I won’t have to look at it, but then now matter how diligent I am, it’s really fighting a losing a battle; or trying to empty water from a boat that’s leaking like a sieve.

What to do?

I’m considering giving up on email entirely. After all, nearly all of the friends that I communicate with have moved to either Twitter or Facebook. The ones that don’t write regularly (some of them with the frequency of a corpse) still use email. I could cut my losses and just never talk to these people again, but then, I do like some of these people quite a lot and it would be a terrible thing – much like clubbing a baby seal to death – to just abandon them because they don’t fit my communication profile anymore.

Having said that, my gmail account, which is a clearing house for around 15 different email addresses is just one big junk box with a sparse few emails that I think are worthwhile and make me happy to read. It’s insane that in this day and age of putting a robot tractor thingy on Mars that I can’t filter my email and make it work for me like it did 8 years ago. It seems the older email gets the more frustrating it gets, the more I wish I didn’t have to use it at all. I’ve been on Wave now for a couple of weeks and while it shows promise, it’s definitely not there yet for a communication tool, and when it is it will probably suffer from the same problem as email now.

No, this problem won’t go away until it’s solved; a lot like testicular cancer, and just about as painful. Maybe I too should make the jump completely over the fence to the Twitter/FB groupies and give up email altogether. I bet if I did that, then in a week I wouldn’t even miss email. Or maybe notice that I miss email. That seems just as likely. Maybe this isn’t even my problem to solve as I didn’t invent email, I just use it. Somebody else should be held accountable.

Well whoever is to blame, the fact remains that I hate email, and I the only reason I use it is because of hangers-on types that insist still on using it. So while I will continue to use email so as to not alienate them, doesn’t mean I like the sound of fingernails being dragged down the blackboard.

Andy.

I can’t work out if the fast moving weather outside is being influenced by my mood, or if my mood is being influenced by the fast moving weather. Every 20 minutes a cycle repeats itself starting with overcast rain that gives way to sunlight that returns to overcast rain. This reflects my own mood perfectly, so I feel a synergy with the wind, rain and sunlight that’s outside my computer room window.

I am reminded now more than any other time of my life how strong winds can mark the onset of storms that can be tragic and beautiful at the same time. However after a period of turmoil calm will always be returned.

Andy.

Sometimes it’s easy to lose yourself in the repetition of life; the comfortable turn of day-by-day existence for months on end that almost makes you feel like time is standing still. It’s like a cocoon that can give you an embrace of safety that on an unconscious level most of us want. You can almost believe that things won’t change.

Almost.

For me the slow turning of the season into autumn is a reminder of not only the quiet persistence of nature, but the nature of change.

Gradual and inevitable.

We may not notice the slow change of a life heavily sedated in repetition, but like the seasons that roll into each other with graceful obviousness, change does indeed come.

Sometimes it’s easy to hold onto the illusion that things will never change, and end up taking for granted all those things in life that should remain precious. I think we do this as a consequence of having memories that fade away over time;  no tumultuous emotional experience will remain so, with each turn of a day, a little bit of the pain is lost. And then one day you wake up and find out there is no pain, and there is almost no recollection.

And it’s not wrong, it’s simply the nature of change.

Andy.

I’ve never gotten along with my father; we’ve never understood each other and we’ve always been very different people. When I was 13 he left, and thus ended the time when we would be in each others lives on a day to day basis. He tried his best to maintain some semblance of parental control by enforcing a set of rules on my sister and I from outside our house, but as the first couple years passed and we got used to him not being there, his authoritarian grip quickly loosened, and eventually was removed.  From then on my father became someone that I was related to, but not someone I would know anymore than an acquaintance.

However the older I get in this age of my life, the more I come to realise the things that he had to face and better understand what kind of choices he had in front of him. I still find that I don’t agree with the things that he did, but at least I feel I can appreciate what his circumstances were and how he could have taken the forks in the road that he did. I also feel I understand why he had such problems relating to his own father, and why they spent nearly a decade not talking to each other.

Funny how history repeats itself.

Andy.

Tonight I was watching that movie Lesbian Vampire Killers, which just happens to be at the top of my favourite comedy films of the month list. If you haven’t seen it I would recommend getting a hold of the DVD and rounding up some friends and beers, and get ready to laugh your collective arses off for 2 hours. Personally if I was you, I’d ignore the fact that it got 5 odd out of 10 on IMDB, that’s just totally shit for what it is. That’s one of those bizarre anomalies of statistics that you can’t explain but they just happen sometimes, like the English cricket team winning The Ashes once every 20 years.

Watching this film totally reminded me what it is that I really want to do with my life, and that’s write! Everything else seems to be so much a life support for my life, but what I really live for is writing. The irony is I always put my writing behind everything else because it just doesn’t seem as important as all the stuff that pays me money and keeps me in a lifestyle that I’ve become accustomed to.

I’ve heard that writers have to suffer for their art, so maybe I need to do some decent starving and living on the borderline of poverty to have that right proper grungy lifestyle that gets you taken seriously.

Maybe!

I just don’t think I could go there now. My Bukowski days while not over, are really getting more spaced out, with lots of recovery time in between binges.

I guess I’ll put this one in the “long term goal” bucket, and throw it five years into the future to pick up then.

Andy.

Feeling tired today, didn’t sleep at all last night. I hate it when insomnia takes you the moment you crawl into bed. Going to be a long day today.

The whole working for my own startup is starting to kick in, this morning being Monday I didn’t even think once about how shit it is that a new week has started. This is much better than that forced servitude feeling that seems to be the norm for a standard nine-to-five job. If we don’t succeed in anything else, it will have been worth it for the enjoyment alone.

Lunch soon. Then I think I’m going to sleep on the office couch for a bit.

Andy.