Mentalechoes

Hmmm… what to write tonight? The thoughts went through my head in a big jumbled mess, not much in the way of cohesion or anything remotely interesting. I struggled to come up with a plot or storyline that wasn’t related to my breakup in some form or another. After all I mused, a writer has to come up with new ideas if they are going to give their audience something fresh to mull over.

So I sat in front of the screen with a very serious look on my face, desperately trying to pull some creativity out of my arse. What would Hunter S do? What would John Birmingham do? I wondered if my heroes ever had this problem. It’s almost impotency for a writer when they can’t find something to write about. Creativity is so closely linked with our mojo, that it can be seriously ego damaging when the words won’t come. Now would be the time for a shot of hard liquor, or some hard drugs, I said to myself! Strong drink always gives a stiff jolt to get kickstarted, except that my heart wasn’t in it, besides which I promised someone that I wouldn’t do that anymore.

Then I remembered the news story I read early on in the day about a 35 year old woman in New South Wales who got arrested for fucking a horse! For a moment I felt sorry for the poor lady. Whatever problems I was having, they weren’t bad enough to make me want to crawl under a foor legged farm animal and spear myself with it’s 5 foot sex organ. I started to try to think of what would make me do that, and nothing came to mind. My sympathy for her quickly turned into total bewilderment. Why on earth would anyone fuck a horse? Hmmm… In the end I thought it best not to go there just in case I came up with something, after all there are worse things than not knowing!

Okay, so if I couldn’t talk about the horse fucking incident in Lismore, I had to come up with something else. But what?! I looked vainly around the room for some help or inspiration. At the corner of my table there were four books on screenwriting/screenplay development, a copy of American Psycho, and a new press version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There was also a cdrom labelled ‘VERY NASTY PORN’! Yes, this might prove interesting, a little voice inside my head said to me. All in the interests of literature mind you, I wasn’t going to watch it for myself, only because I badly needed some inspiration! I didn’t hear anything from my conservative conscience, so I figured my justification was fair enough. Well either that, or he just wanted to see exactly what was on the VERY NASTY PORN disc as much as what me and the devil on my shoulder did. All three of us went silent with anticipation as we put the disc in the drive.

A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) checksum error occurred…

You have to be kidding! I’m a good person, I pay my taxes, I support greenpeace, why is this happening to me?! God was being very cruel indeed. I told him that the people that would really suffer would be my readers. Because instead of inspired writing I was going to have to fall back on ranting, something I seem to be doing more and more often these days.

So I decided that the only to do was put fingers to keys and get something out. In the end, maybe someone would get a laugh out of it, and I could desperately use putting a smile on someones face. I’m kind of stuck in that grey zone where everything is overlayed with a sepia tone effect where the colour is all washed out. I feel like I’m like that too. Looking into a mirror I see this face staring back at me, but the eyes, they look different, and I get the feeling I don’t recognise them.

Do we see the world the way it is, or is the world different for all of us because we all wear our own lenses of perception that colour the world the way we subconsciously want? I asked myself that question, but I only got silence for an answer. I told myself maybe I’ll get answer tomorrow, so, just like Grandma Death I’ll wait, and come back then.

Padwanna!

As I’ve come to realise in my breakup life (both past and present), it’s the OHHH part of ‘letting go’ that can be the hardest thing to emotionally deal with. By OH, I mean things like…

OH my god, is it really over….
OH I still love you…
OH I miss you so much…
OH fuck this hurts…
OH who is going to keep the friends?…

This stuff is all part of the early, Letting GOHHH! Fortunately for me being the well internetted guy that I am, I turned to the web for some soothing advice to take the knife edge off my first week of being single. After all, it’s well documented that new singles turn to the web for support, cybersex and online arranged fuckbuddys to help them begin the healing process. So I put some phrase into google like ‘breakup letting go dealing with it’, or some other jumble of pity words that could have been on the board of a lonely hearts club scrabble game, and the first thing that came back was a link on how to save your relationship. Not just that, but it was garaunteed, no matter what the problem was; infidelity, terminal disease, Dr Phil addiction. You only had to pay US$29.95 and your partner would be yours again, even if she hated your guts and had hired a contract killer to have you assassinated in a painful and gruesome way. Whats more, the streaming media advertisement was a nice blond chick with a hot body, lying on a bed in a black cocktail dress seductively purring that if you paid now, you would receive at no extra charge the ‘Making It Work’ handbook, so that once you were back together you would stay that way. Just to ram the message home and rub salt in my wound, they had nice pictures of ‘real couples’ that had suffered the most horrendous breakups and were now back together. Over my shoulder I could hear the voice of reason saying to me in a loud voice, “get off this fucking site and find some porn, this is complete crap”.

I then put an episode from Series 3 of the L Word on, because there is a lot of wisdom in that show. It’s not just a show about lesbians with lesbian sex scenes, there’s also lots of lessons about how to deal with breakups, because most of the show is about chicks getting together and chicks breaking up. So I put on the one where Dana has just left Alice, and Alice is not dealing with it at all. In some strange, seeing how badly Alice was coping made me feel better because at least I am not a total wreck, and I could see that things could be worse. After a while I turned it off because I just couldn’t stand all the drama the chicks were going through. Jezuz, who needs to see how crappy a breakup can get on television when you’re going through of your own?!

It’s funny how life can go. You can go a year without anything happening, and then all of a sudden in the space of one week, everything changes. And really, the only thing you can do, is just deal with it. It’s all about how you accept a new situation that makes the difference in how well you begin moving on.

Padwanna.

My horoscope for today said – A moment of introspection leads you to a stunning insight. It’s the start of something new in your life. Once you get used to the idea of change, you’ll find that all the elements start falling into place.

It’s almost too good to be true. This is exactly what I have been waiting for! But I haven’t had any stunning insights yet. I wonder if this is meant to be something that will happen later on in the afternoon, or maybe early on in the evening. Sometime when I least expect it.

Stunning insights are funny like that, they normally occur when you least expect it. Like this morning when I was watching BBC World having breakfast, I had the stunning insight that the kid that played the son of the crazy pilot who blows himself up to destroy the aliens in Independance Day, is also Frank the giant bunny rabbit in Donnie Darko. It totally just popped into my head as I was watching something about Senegalese boat people migrating to Europe.

So now I’m going to be sitting around in expectation of a big insight for the rest of the day, which will be the start of something new that will make me rich and famous beyond my wildest dreams. I just hope the astrology people got the signs right on this one, otherwise it’s going to be a bit of a let down.

Padwanna!

Things had been flat all week for me. Hardly surprising given the circumstances, so when my venezualan soul brother Balduino called me up on thursday asking if I was free to meet him today for a few hours, I very vocally told him that I was, and said lets make an afternoon of it. And so we did, starting at two o’clock at the Blue Teahouse in the Vondelpark, the center park of Amsterdam city.

It was a cold afternoon when I pulled my bike up to the iron gate entrance of the place, maybe 8 or 9 degrees by the feel of it. I could see the man himself sitting on a seat outside as I locked up The Shark (my fireapple-red bike so named in honour of Hunter S’s fireapple-red convertable that he drives on his first visit to Vegas in, Fear and Loathing). He was wearing a long jumper and one of those jackets that looks like the sleeves have been cut off or stolen. A strange choice I thought considering the time of year and weather conditions. As I walked over to the table, he looked up and saw me and his face lit up in a big smile, and he said, “Mi Amigo… Hola my friend, it very very good to see you”, in that big spanish accent he has. We embraced, and then he wanted me to sit down as he went and got us both coffees. “So… what fucking shit are you in now”? He asked me with that big grin on his face as he took a sip of espresso. And that’s how we started.

The next few hours we sat and talked about the last two months of life, his and mine in very personal and intimate detail. He’s a unique friend like that, it’s very rare for guys to discuss details of our lives intimately with other guys. Most guys don’t have the capacity for sensitivity that is necessary for deep talking, but he is someone that does. I think it has to have something to do with him being an artist. Artists tend to be very sensitive people who embrace human emotion rather than shy away from it. This also gives Balduino an almost healing quality to his presence, as he has a way of saying the things to you that most need to hear at that time. In a big way he grounds my life here, because his experiences are so similiar to mine day to day, and he sees the city and its people in a lot the same way. It helps knowing that I’m not the only foreign square peg struggling like hell to make it through the round dutch hole!

We cafe crawled for about six hours (I think it was). Each place we went to people would come up to him like he was a local television soap celebrity and say how wonderful it was to see him again, and asked how was he doing. At one point I started wondering if he might not have actually been a television soap celebrity because it seemed impossible to me otherwise how else he would be known by so many people. Seriously I think that it has to have something to do with his spanish accent. It does mesmorise people like some sort of cheap circus show act. He speaks dutch now, and quite clearly his mind control powers have increased considerably now he can talk to the locals in their native tongue. So I vowed that I would go back to studying dutch and spanish, in the hope that I too could one day exert the same kind of jedi like influence over the people around me that he does.

As the evening deepened, and the weather grew colder – making Balduino shake as hypothermia started kicking in – we made our goodbyes and I headed for home. I felt good after our afternoon together, and more importantly good in myself for the time we spent together. It reaffirmed within me that not everything in my life has changed, and that there will always be that guy there when I need a friend.

A good way to start the next week.

Padwanna!

There’s a tune that I listen to these days, that is one of the most beautiful peices of music that I have heard in a long long time, called Kissing Air, by Future Funk Squad. No matter what kind of mood I am; be it happy, sad, fucked off, whatever, it always brings me around to a state of joy and comfort with the world. Right now, more than any other time I can think of in my life, music is something that brings meaning to my life, and helps keep me balanced when everything else seems to be swinging like a pendulum between various states of disorder.

I talked about this a while ago here, about how music is something that is necessary in my life now. I don’t just listen to music for enjoyment, I use it as a meditation to focus my mind and put my heart in touch with my head. It’s amazing how those two entities can be so out of touch with each other, and cause you so much confusion and lead you to misguided action. There are times when they are so far apart, that you wonder whether or not you will ever feel whole.

Is this a product of our modern life? We seem to have a society where youth, sex and power are worshipped, and our relationship to others and the outside world is all very superficial. Maybe it’s just now, when I am more sensitive to everything around me beacause of my breakup, that I see things in life in a way that I didn’t before. Breakups are like that, they have a way of ripping the perceptive lenses off your eyes that you used to wear all the time and you didn’t even know.

When I am moving around outside nowadays, I always have my little sony flash walkman with me, so I can listen to music and create a little bubble of calm around me. In this way, I am able to keep my mind centered and relaxed. One day I hope I can find a way to achieve this state permanently.

Padwanna!

The most insidious influence on the young is not violence, drugs, tobacco, drink or sexual perversion, but our pursuit of the trivial and our tolerance of the third rate. Eric Anderson

Every so often I go through these periods where I want to become a millionaire. I’ve got a head for crazy money making schemes, which I tell to the friends that will listen to them. Admittedly there aren’t many because most people can only take so much ranting of wild half-arsed ideas from an overexcited loon. The funny thing is that some of them weren’t half bad. Like my idea for a titty website called chernobylbigboobs.com that featured girls with radioactively enhanced breasts (meaning really really big) would have been a total winner. For sure at least a couple-a-hundred horny guys would have signed up to it just because of the intriguing – and catchy – name alone. Okay, in a quiet moment of personal reflection, I will admit that this is also a lame stupid half-arsed idea, but you can’t really criticise my enthusiasm; the way I see it, that’s the most important thing.

Which leads me to a serious thought of sorts. In life, it’s not really the people with the best education, or the best backgrounds, or the best looks, or the best clothes, or even the ones that work the hardest that make it big and enjoy consumate success. It’s the people that have the best enthusiasm and the brightest vision that do. I have seen this countless times in my life, from the people that I have met who live that kind of lifestyle. And there was something else that I saw one day that showed me this. About two years ago I was sitting at home watching BBC World when a half an hour show came on about the Forbes richest 10 people in the world. As you would expect the first one was Bill Gates, and the second was that guy who owns Ikea (who would have believed crappy furniture could make so much money). Then there was the guy who started ebay, and then there was this guy who I totally would not have expected. I can’t remember his name, but he started out his young life as a street theatre performer, you know, one of those folks that does a show out on in open that has a crowd woo-ing and gasping and laughing at his act. Well this guy was passionate about entertaining people, and so he turned his one man show slowly over the years into bigger and better shows in bigger and better venues, until at the time I saw him on BBC World, he owned the largest entertainment group in the world. They had a five minute interview with him, and what really impressed me was that not once did he even mention money, not even when he was asked about it. He spent the whole time talking about how happy he was to have realised his dream of making millions of people feel entertained. There was a real WOW factor about this man, he wasn’t someone that woke up each day and thought it was like the day before. No, he was a special someone that got out of bed really looking forward to making it a great day, and making great things happen.

For me, this is really how you make something of your life, but for so many of us (including myself) we get caught up in the day to day routine of everything and we sort of get pulled into the middle of mediocrity and stay there. It’s not like we lose our enthusiasm for life and the things we want to do, it’s just it gets put aside as we spend energy on other things like getting the bills paid at the end of the month and keeping ourselves going to jobs that are less than fabulous. This is where kids have totally got it better than adults, they truly get excited at everything. Everything is something to get excited about, and consequently you see them really enjoying even the most mundane activities. In that way, kids really show us the way forward.

I’ve always been a kid at heart and someone who really loses himself easily in crazy things. I never really saw it before, but perhaps it’s this easy enthusiasm for life that is really the one thing that will see me elevate myself out of this ordinary life I’m in, to the life I want where I’m swimming in money!

Padwanna!

I’ve just finished watching a teevee show on the life and works of Hunter S. Thompson, one of the great contemporary writers of his time. I’ve always been fascinated by Hunter S ever since dirty Pete loaned me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when we were living in share house called the Milton Hilton back in Brisbane. It was like no other book I had ever read and it had a profound affect on my sense of culture and literature from that time forward. In fact my Amsterdamage reality blog cum online book-by-chapters is massively influenced by this man and this book. (To be released in a matter of days now – though I know you might find it hard to believe).

I always imagined that Hunter S was a guy that lived life in a contentious way, never compromising his freedoms for the sake of conformity. In fact one of the things they said about Hunter on the teevee was that he exercised his freedoms; freedom of speech; freedom to drink; freedom travel and do what you want, much more than the ordinary citizens around him. But in fact, a lot of what he did was as much for show to keep up the public image he had created over the years, as it was his every day persona. That came as a real surprise to me because I never would have expected that someone who was an anarchist would play up to the media for self-aggrandizement. That was also the way it was for drugs and alcohol for him too. Back in his early days he genius was undeniable, the bender days and nights he would have gave him the canvas on which he would write his most powerful stories. But later in life, the guy would deliberately get loaded just to try to write stuff that would measure up to these. The more he did this though, the less relevant his work became until at the end of his life, he wasn’t doing anything of any relevance at all. And then at 67 he shot himself and brought an end to it all. By then he was more or less crippled and his mind was going from the 40 years of daily abuse.

It made think really about my own writing, and how sometimes I would drink when I was at the keyboard to try to get in the writing mood and get hugely creative. It’s one of those things that you do thinking that if you’re loosened up a bit, the ideas and words will flow easier. Hell, Bukowski used to drink a 5th of bourbon each night he wrote and pound out 10 pages of novel. As romantic as it sounds, there is a price to be paid for living like this. Their minds and bodies broke down towards the end, and they ended up losing the edge and not being able to write at all. That’s the shame of it all, to loose the very thing that gives your life meaning. Hunter S was a tortured soul, who never learned or wanted to control his darker side. I couldn’t help but see the irony in this as the narrator told told a story that would also describe a recurring theme going on in my life right now, so this small parable was particularly poignant.

And so after the show finished I was left with a feeling that there are choices we creative types need to make in the pursuit of the great masterpeice that lurks inside of us, waiting to be given life on a page. You can either turn yourself over to your obsession and burn yourself up in the fire as a sacrifice, or you can keep a check on that intensity and see yourself go the distance. Admitedly to do the later may mean you won’t hit the same peak, but you will actually get to keep going longer.

In the end, it’s all about choices!

Padwanna!

So my London jaunt finally finished when I touched down at Schiphol Airport on a windy and rainy Sunday night a couple of days ago. It was strange day for me, because I was returning from the surreal experience of an extended weeks reality break liberally sprinkled with booze and party favours, back to an emotional storm of my own making. It wasn’t with any sense of joy that I walked out the plane, but rather with a sense of impending doom. In that single night all of my close relationships were broken, and the lifestyle that I had was dramatically changed.

I see this now as a time of change! But unlike other times of change, I see this as a time to make things better, rather than going down a bad road that is hard to return from.

There is little more I want to say about this I think. For there is only the time in front of us that is important, what has happened in the past is only relevant from a perspective that it is the teacher that teaches us our life lessons. Truly what we must do is make sure that we take those things which are important to heart and know them for what we do every second in front of us. That’s how you live, a good life!

So for now, a chapter has ended and new beginning is being written. I wonder what it will be filled with?!

Padwanna!

Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.
Jane Austin

I’d decided that I had become decidely morose in the time before my birthday, seeing only the grey empty sky of winter descending upon the landscape around me, filling me with a listless feeling that was becoming very demotivating. Strangely enough – or not – everyone around me at this time seemed to be going through the same thing. It was either something in the water, or something with the weather, or a government conspiracy. I wasn’t sure which, but I knew it was time to cut and run for a while, and head to London to see the boys; I figured a change of scenery could only be a good thing at this point.

There is something special about London town. From the moment you arrive you can feel it, this is a city that likes to live life large, and live it fast. It’s all about having as much fun as you can afford while avoiding becoming a party casuality, because noone likes the guy who can’t hold his beer! It was exactly what I needed; that and some friends who weren’t part of my day to day Amsterdam world. In that way I could really get some distance between me and the soap opera reality that I felt like I was stuck in.

Whatever my expectations were, being here is a whole lot better. There is an excitement that is always part of this city for me. London feels larger than life when you rediscover it after a time away. It’s pure opulence, and debuachery, and hustle and bustle all rolled into a big pill that hurts to swallow, but makes you feel so good after you do. I’ve spent most of the week so far being out with different groups of people, reviving old friendships with close and not-so-close friends. I’d forgotten how good it was to spend time with the Aussie London boys too. Pete’s place where I’m staying is just one big boys entertainment center; cable TV, computer games, more dvd’s than a rental store, and lots of music!

So it’s while I’ve been on the underground travelling between places that I’ve done most of my thinking about what I’m doing and why I feel so lethargic at home. And I think I’ve worked out what it is, but Pete’s just come home, so I guess I’ll pick this story up tomorrow!

Padwanna!