Mentalechoes

Well there’s been nary a moment to even sit down and scratch myself over the last two weeks. Time has become a premium and there is barely enough of it to go around even the essential activies, let alone for anything else.

True to my word (for once), I am working my ass off right now to get my new literary site up and running. So far it’s all been technical work; building a new server which is going to be the permanent new home of the site; installing and configuring the operating system, including the blog software that will be used. The next week or so will be spent coding up the front end of the site to make it easy to display writers profiles and direct readers to their blogs; all in a very sexy layout that screams, cool-as-fuck.

It’s so much frigging work though. And with my obsessive personality, I’ve lept onto this project almost to the exclusion of everything else. Even writing here. Which reminds me, I have to learn to moderate myself at times like these. Going hell for leather on something isn’t always the best approach. As they say, slow and steady wins the race; the hare generally ends up road kill because he thought he could outrun everything, including a full loaded high speed road train… which as it turns out, he couldn’t!

So anyway, it’s late, and I’m going to bed. Got to get some rest before my day job starts, and I have to face another 8 hours doing work that lines someone elses pockets. At least now however, I have a consolation, I have my own projects coming along nicely where the rewards will be all mine, be they emotional, spiritual or financial.

Amen to that!

Padwanna!

You must have noticed how the best ideas are always the one that fall right out of the sky and just smack you on the head when least expect it! Noone ever seems to find really good ideas when they are deliberately looking for them, which is why it feels so damn good when something big does turn up… like a lost scratchy ticket that has just won 1000 bucks in the your currency of your current country of residence.

I just happened to be browsing around on the internet (just for something different) on Sunday, when I came across this physics community of bloggers who had this pretty cool little site put together. More or less it was five physicists who wrote about physics stuff and their lives in the world of physics academia. Well the content I found wasn’t really to my taste – because I couldn’t understand a fucking word of it – but the whole blog community thing I thought was brilliant. And then it struck me; why the hell don’t I get one of those going!

BING!!

And there it was! My big idea that I had been wishing and waiting for had just dropped on my head. So I quickly wrote to a friend of mine in Brisvegas, none of than Red Light Pete, a man worshipped by the girls around discount corner, and admired by his peers for his keen wit and sharp eye for the chicks. Him and I go way back, and on top of that, the bloke can really write up a good story. So I quickly wrote him an email to gave him the hard sell on “the next big thing” for us to do. He soon sent me back a reply saying he was in. And thus my new venture sprang it’s first little stalk from the seed.

Very soon I hope to have one of the finest literary sites on the internet, comprising a series of blogs all under the one website that should attract a large and diverse audience of contemporary literature lovers. Tonight I began with the hard work of putting all the technical peices together, which is going to take some time, but hopefully not forever. The idea is not for it to be just another series of personal blogs, but for this to be a platform for serious writers to flex their creative muscles and present contemporary stories of life in the new millenium. Much like individual chapters out of a Bukowski, Burmingham or Hunter S Thompson novel.

I gotta say, I’m very excited. If this turns out half as well as I am hoping, then it’s going to be something pretty wicked indeed!

Of course I’ll be keeping you my faithful readers posted, as I’m sure if you like the trash I write, then you’re going to love this new lifestyle site with five debaucherous writers all making a mockery of political correctness.

Padwanna!

Two Chinese Boys

Who said you never got anything cultural from my blog?! (I think I did a while ago to a friend, so I’m trying to fix that).

Enjoy a cool new videoclip for a crappy old song!

I’ve got just under 5 months till my birthday, and I have this burning need to acheive something big before then. I feel like I just can’t have another year go by where all I did was struggle through and not do anything meaningful, creative, or purposeful. It seems like that’s all I’ve been doing the last few years, just struggling through trying to get a firm foothold on day to day life.

To actually be able to do something in these next five months is going to require some fundamental change in the way I go about my week. I’m going to have to institute some kind structured way of working, and unlearn the bad habits of procrastinating and time wasting. Something that after many years of practice I’ve nearly perfected.

I spend a lot of time reading about the work practices and habits of successful people, in the hope that I can learn something that will make me the same way. However we have a saying from home that goes; you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink! I feel a bit like the horse right now. Doesn’t matter how much I read about other people, I still don’t seem to be emulating the things they do.

So I once again come back to this same point that I was at a few months ago, where I ask myself if I have any ambition or not? If I do, I’ll be able to work out a way to acheive the things I want, if not… well maybe I can become an alcoholic writer like Bukowski and make money off a debaucherious lifestyle. Which sounds like it might be something in itself if you think about it.

Hmmm… maybe I’m further along with this whole acheivement thing than I first thought!

Padwanna!

Ask A Ninja: Question 22

How to give excuses like a real ninja!

Seriously funny, and perhaps very useful when you least expect it!

Padwanna!

Finally my mojo has returned. The listless days of wandering aimlessly throughout the week without feeling motivated for anything have passed. I made it back to gym today, with a new routine and everything, specifically designed to be shorter, and prevent tearing of major muscle groups. It went amazingly well, and I really enjoyed being back after what feels like a holiday break. I even look like I’ve been away on holiday, because I weigh 3 kilograms more now than when I stopped. Ah well, I have been living the good life and enjoying pizzas every second day to save on washing up in my own kitchen.

One of the important things to know in life I think, is when it’s time to take a break and hang up the old routine for a while. After all, we all get tired and stale from time to time and we need to recognise that and learn to give ourselves a break. Sometimes, more is less, and you gain the most by doing nothing. Mind you, you can have too much of a good nothing. So you also need to learn when to get off your arse again!

Yes, life can be very cryptic at times. If we had all the answers, then what need would we have for wise people, and gurus in temples preaching free love for happiness?!

Padwanna!

This morning, as usual, I got the line 51 metro from Henk Sneevlietweg heading in the direction of Gein to go to work. As unluck would have it today it was one of those super shitty old metros that have hard plastic moulded seats and and a subtle air of stale piss about them. There’s only a handful of these still in service; tired old beat up things they are just waiting for the day they can be decommisioned and then sold to some Eastern European country to begin life anew – after a small interior renovation effort – as Western European luxury mass transport for people who still ride around in the back of horse carts. So anyway as I was sitting there reading away at the last part of John Birmingham’s, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, I started thinking this guy and I must have crossed paths at some point in our lives in Bris-vegas. I mean, John and I are about the same age, roughly. He’s only a couple of years older than I am, so we would have been share flatting around the same time that he was “researching” for his novels.

The funny thing is, Bris-vegas while actually being the capital city of the fine state of Queensland, is really more of a big country town. People tend to know each other and more often than not when you were at a party somewhere, or slumming it on someones living room floor for a while, you would find a connection with at least a couple of the other people there based on a common friend in a shared flat. So it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that John and I had actually had a few bongs together one night at some hippy trash joint, or at the very least would know friends of friends of each other.

The really funny part about reading his book is that I recognise the characters of his story in friends I lived with when I was there. To me, TTBF wasn’t just a pulp fiction novel salted with true events, but an fairly poignant account of what it was like to live outside of mainstream society in Brissy. After all, if it’s one thing Bris-vegas is very tolerant of, it’s total fucking idiots. For some reason, it just doesn’t matter if you’re the bottom crud of the gene pool in that city, you’ll do just fine! You’ll be able to find yourself a niche and be very comfortable as long as you keep your head down just far enough to avoid arousing the suspicions of the many finely corrupt law men and women who just love to fuck losers and plain stupidity over. But that aside, Bris-vegas was an excellent city for socialising with different groups of people, because there wasn’t that many places to go. I mean if you live in Sydney or Melbourne you get spoiled for choice; more bars, clubs and underground venues than you poke a willy at in a month of Sundays. Bris-vegas on the other hand was smaller in stature and so the places to go for the various subcultures was boiled down to handful (at best). However, those places were pretty hardcore, and could be guaranteed of a dedicated following. I still have memories of the Hellfire club in Fortitude Valley, watching some hairy bastard who was chained to a rack on a wall getting whipped by a fat pig of a domanatrix whilst trying desperately to come to terms with the hideous images on the edges of my vision brought on by terribly strong acid. Certainly these images were not suitable for children, and barely so for mentally vulnerable, chemically intoxicated state government employees. Yet that’s what made it so much fun! In Bris-vegas, in a place like that, noone would care that some guy in candystriped flares was disco dancing in front of a freaky whipping to a remix of Soft Cell’s, Tainted Love with wildness in his eyes. Hell no! In fact, it was almost expected that such individuals would be present, otherwise the overall entertainment value of the night would be vastly reduced. The only golden rule was don’t become a party casuality. You could get as messy as you liked, but just don’t lose it. If you lost it, the bouncers would rid you of your embarassment and potentially libelous medical state by chucking you out the back entrance with a bit of a belting as a wake up call.

So I’m really thinking that maybe I should drop JB a line and see if we don’t just happen to know each other by happenstance from some night somewhere or other. For all I know, we probably had the same acid dealer, which would explain why his pages talking about nights out with Flinthart make so much sense to me. (Yeah you’ll just need to read the book).

You just never know, do you! *grin*

Padwanna!