So here I was sitting in front of the TV looking for inspiration for tonights little masterpeice; hoping that some topic would fall from on high and get me started. My new employer graciously gave me a mac laptop with a wireless network connection, unshackling me from the confines of my little office, and giving me the freedom to sit anywhere, so now I write from my couch, which is about 3 meters away from my office. Sure it's not far, but it's the novelty that really matters. On TV was that NCIS show, which a dutch friend of mine raves about, he reckons it's the best thing since TimTams, so when I saw it on during the channel flip I figured I'd give it one eye worth of watching.

It's pretty amazing how shit it really was. I mean, I'm fairly liberal with my concept of entertainment nowadays when it comes to TV. I watch so little of it as I have a whole bunch of other stuff I do to amuse myself, that when I do actually watch something it's normally just so I can veg out and let my brain go into neutral. It goes without saying that you have suspend belief in reality in TV, but for fucks sake, I didn't just get asked to suspend belief in NCIS, but kick it in the balls, set it on fire and throw it out the window. At one point I started wondering if I was watching some show about a parallel universe where they had computers and the internet, but it was all built by morons instead of geniuses.

I spent most of the time slagging off the show; the characters; the storyline; what they wore; and of course anything at all they did with the internet and computers. The chick I was watching it with at some point turned around and asked if I could please shut the fuck up so she could at least see the end without my ranting in the foreground. The ending was complete shit – of course – and totally unbelievable in the real world. As the credits rolled at the end though, I realised that whole shittiness of the show had actually been enterntainment in itself, and I was totally engaged as a viewer for the whole time I was on the couch.

Maybe this is how entertainment has evolved; TV has come full circle and instead of us wanting well thought out good shows, we really just want stuff that we can slag off and jeer at how bad it is. Thus making us feel like we've seen something worthwhile and engaged our brains at the same time. Perhaps this could be a new carreer, since I am sure I can write TV as bad as anybody out there today.

Padwanna! 

Lifes on the up and up; I've quit smoking, made it passed my probation period at the new job and been given a permanent contract, and turned over a new leaf when it comes to doing gear as part of the usual weekend blowout. I'm feeling pretty good, even though I'm not really looking it. One of the problems giving up smoking is that craving to snack constantly. As much as what you used to smoke, and then a bit more. So my once slim stomach has been reshaping itself to resemble a spare tyre from an SUV, but that's okay, it's winter, I spend my days wearing two layers of shirts under a long sleeved jumper. Everybody looks slim this way.

So with everything so good, why is there still this feeling of wanting to pack up and move to some small corner of the world and give all this excitement away? I've spent my whole life running away from a life ordinary and dull as fuck, so what's with the big urge now to head to the nearest deserted beach and spend the rest of my life doing fuck all? I don't know really. I don't have any answers for that. I'm just wondering if it will pass.

Well either way, I still have to get up tomorrow morning and go about my day, so there's no point in daydreaming too much about founding my own hippie community on a Thai beach. Though I reckon that's definitely something worth doing at some point. Only, I think I'd make sure there were no guns or crazed meglomaniac English chicks around to hijack my doped out little group of lost travellers. If it's one thing I learned from that movie, it's that rampaging chicks and guns will fuck up a good thing faster than bad acid will turn your couch into a blue monster that will try to devour you whole.

Trust me!

Padwanna!

Sundays over, and I'm suddenly struck by this feeling of overwhelming lethargy; partys over, and real life is about to begin again. It feels like a year has gone by so quick when you're at the end of it, but at the same time, when you're looking down the road at the beginning of a year ahead, it does seem like an awfully long horizon.

Maybe I could take another week off and spend some time doing bugger all. Then again, I could probably take this year off and do bugger all as well. I like the comfortable feeling of doing bugger all, and last year there was almost no time for being comfortable, or for doing bugger all. All of a sudden I feel like I've become that guy in that movie Office Space.

I wonder if I'm going to be able to pull it together by tomorrow morning? I guess I'll know in about 10 hours.

Padwanna!

So this is it, 10 hours to go and counting to the end of 2007. I can’t help but get nostalgic for all that is, all that was, and all that will go down in my history as, the year 2007. A year always seems to be such a long time at the beginning, and to have been such a short time when you’re at the end. But looking back on a whole year, even in the most sedate life, you will always find happiness, sadness, pain and growth making landmarks across that journey of 365 days.

Perhaps more so for 2008 than in years gone by, I have a real feeling of expectation and hope. But from the look of the peoplescape around me, those who I talk and listen to share that same sense. It’s funny really, it’s almost like, the stars are aligning and some sort of positive force is at work in the world.

Well I’ve resisted the temptation to dive into my particular dreams and ambitions. Plenty of time for that later as January unfolds properly. But perhaps to say, that the thing that is different about 2008 is the confidence that anything is acheivable.

So, here’s to a wicked 2007 new years eve, and a toast, to the start of 2008! May it be all we hope for!

Padwanna!

Sleep deprivation.

I feel like I'm constantly sleep deprived.

I'm so fucking tired, yet I can't sleep. Didn't somebody write a song about that? For some reason I only seem to sleep 4 hours a night, even though I'm in bed for at least 7. I usually wake up a couple of hours after I lie down and lay there semi-awake-semi-asleep for some time until I drop off. I started exercising again too so I could get my body tired so I would fall asleep easier and stay asleep. So far, it's not working.

I've started getting nightmares again. It's nothing new for me to have nightmares, I've lived with them all my life, but the intensity and reality of my nightmares is increasing. They're becoming more real, and there are times when I know I'm asleep in a nightmare and I try to throw myself awake so I can escape the desperate fear that grips my psyche when my mind is in another state.

Does a dream become reality when the dreamer believes it is so? I mean, what if a dream becomes so real that the dreamer can no longer distinguish between the reality he left and the reality he is in, can a new reality be created, like a shell around the old one?

If you think about this for too long, it all starts getting very matrix-ish; you start to question just what reality is, and how we know and understand and interpret what it is. Who's to say dreams aren't as real as the waking world; you're just not permitted to stay there long enough to personalise it and make it feel like home.

I once read a philosopher in the UK – I forget his name now – saying that the more people that believed in a reality, the more real and encompassing it became. Because of this "universal law", Middle Earth did actually exist as it was born out of all the people who had read the books (the movies were not around back then) and given themselves over to the power of their belief.

Perhaps that's all reality is in the end; just an image we sustain in our heads that we believe in! Perhaps the reason the world can seem so fucked up at times is because we all believe in the really bad stuff collectively as a human consciousness whole.

I can see there is a lot of energy in a thought, which is why we should be more careful with how we shape them.

Padwanna!

There was a storm here last night. It was quite fierce. The sound of the wind gusting up against the window woke me up in the early hours of the morning. There is something about the chaos of a storm that resonates deep inside of me, making me feel comfortable with the raging environment only meters outside of my touch.  In some ways, I always feel a little disappointed when the force of a good storm is spent, and the sun begins to peak out of cracks in the lightening clouds. Even nature can’t keep up the intensity for long periods of time, without wearing itself out.

Padwanna!

Well today is my birthday, the last year of my 30's has begun. I feel like it's a time of change for me this year more than any other, simply because I feel different this year; more calm, and more self assured. It hasn't come easy, but I look back on my decade of being 30 something and realise that it's been one hell of a wild ride. Noone could ask for more of an experience than what I've had, and I doubt there is any other experience I would have wanted to have had instead.

Clint Eastwood once said that a man finally matures at 40. I actually can see now that he was right, which makes me feel really sorry for women, because they have to wait until their men have grey hair before he stops acting like a child. In that way I think women are stronger than men are as they have to put up with so much more childish shit from the person they share a bed with.

So it's been a good day for me, I've talked to friends back home as well as here close to me. I've eaten loads of my favourite Tim Tam chocolate biscuits that my uber good friend Lena sent me via special delivery from Coles New World, Nerang. And I've enjoyed some simple pleasures that make me happy, like movies and writing.

It's a good day today.

I always wonder too what the next year will bring. Looking back some pretty cool, and trippy things happened the last 365 days. I never would have guessed that such things could have even happened at all. It's that mystery in our lives that makes each day truly exciting; never knowing what can happen, and then something totally unexpected comes along. I guess this is why life is so hard to give up; we never get tired of the mystery. My grandmother is in her late 80's and she still talks with the enthusiasm of a young girl when she recounts the days since our last talk on skype.

I've got only one resolution this year; say goodbye to my 30's in a year of style! After all, the memory has got to last me the rest of my life!

Padwanna 

When I was 13 years old I organised a Guiness Book of Records attempt on the worlds longest time playing tennis (yes there is such a thing) at my junior high schools tennis courts. I got 3 friends together, sponsorship from a local sports store, and about 200 balls, in a determined effort to make it into that big history book. On a saturday morning we started, it all seemed like it was going to be easy, but then after about 14 hours, with all my friends passing out, and a tropical storm setting in, I decided to call it quits. Looking back now, I feel to some extent I was justified in throwing in the towel, after all, the whole situation was going to shit pretty rapidly when the rain started hammering down and one of the mothers took one of the mates home. As far as I could figure at the time, without the same 4 people on the court, we weren't elligible to beat the record, which sort of defeated the whole point of being there in the first place. It's interesting to taste public shame at that age; the local newspaper ran an article on us around page 17, which told the world that although we tried hard, we didn't make it to fame in glory, but instead went home. I often look back and wonder if maybe I had've broken that record, would my life be different now? Would I actually be someone who could follow through with all the things I start, and not just be a perpetual starter non-finisher? Would I be famous and rich? Who will ever know; if only there really was a What-if machine!

Two weekends ago, I ran the dam to dam short marathon of 16 kilometers. While I didn't actually place in the top 3, I did manage to finish it, and finish 7 minutes faster than my time 2 years ago. It was all in all an astounding effort considering my whole training regime came down to 8 runs, and a diet of Burger King, takeaway pizza, and weekend binges on class A narcotics and alcohol. This is why I consider crossing the finish line with my heart still beating to be such a praise worthy thing. I did pass one poor bastard at the 11 kilometer mark who was prostrate on the ground with heat stroke. I wanted to pass out, but not actually wanting to face the public shame of failure again in my life (at least not in my office), I pushed myself past the point of collapse and made it to the end. Actually doing this gave me a renewed sense of self acheivement; maybe I could finish something that I started and reach some goal.

It's easy to be cynical in our lives and just give up on trying. A lof the time we don't even make a conscious choice to give up, we just reach a point in our lives where we realise we don't make an effort anymore, and the time we gave up was a long time ago, and we didn't even realise it. I think they call it a rut, but when a rut becomes your lifestyle, that's when you know something has to change.

I'm kind of hoping now that finishing this goddamn race of pain, and starting soon this new job that there is a new time of life starting. One where finishing is as much a part of life as what starting is. Because you just don't go anywhere if you end up stopping all the time 3 steps away from where you began.

Padwanna. 

I've come to the realisation that it's not just drugs and alcohol that I'm addicted to, but pretty much everything that can be addictive. I've known for a while that I have an addictive – possibly… most likely obsessive – personality; at least since I was 16 when I recorded the techno background music to the Commodore 64 game Crystal Hammer onto a 90 minute cassette tape and played it on loop for 2 weeks straight. But I never believed that I was someone who was really an addict. The true realisation that I just might actually be an addictive personality didn't fully hit me until last week during very ordinary circumstances.

I'd come home after another useless day at the office, to my flat where the kitchen was still a mess from a poker game I'd hosted a night before. It was a scheduled gym workout day, so I began my routine of getting my gym gear together. The thing was I was feeling a bit hungry as well and I thought that I would chow down on a small energy snack to give me a bit of a boost for the weights effort ahead. When I went into the kitchen I saw the leftover packet of pringles sitting on the kitchen table. I think they were sour cream and onion, and I remember saying to myself, I'll just have a couple as I'll burn them off anyway and they're really tasty as they're my favourite ones. Well I popped the top, and then as the marketing advertisement warned me, I just couldn't stop. I turned into a pringles crack whore, and I ate the whole pack in one sitting in about 20 minutes. After the first couple I could feel the personality change come over me, but I felt powerless to stop it, and I just sat there, in front of the computer eating them until the last one was finished. I felt guilty because of all the calories I'd just consumed, but as I dusted pringles powder off my hands, I also felt satisfied in a dirty way. 

Wikipedia defines addiction as: An addiction is a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity. The term is often reserved for drug addictions but it is sometimes applied to other compulsions, such as problem gambling, pornography, compulsive overeating, and hyperreligiosity^.

I read that list of possible addictions and realised that of the four they mention, I had a penchant for two; online pornography and overeating, but mainly restricted to pringles. At 86 kilos for a 185 centimeter body frame, I'm not overweight, but they didn't say you had to be as a compulsive overeater, I guess you just had to eat a lot (of pringles). I spoke with a friend of mine about it and he said I was just a normal bloke, and that definition only applied to 12 year olds still living at home with their parents. What single late 30-something bloke doesn't overeat in front of the computer while looking at porn? Nobody! That's who! Not even the fit gay blokes I saw at gym, since I've heard from gay friends of mine that a lot of them are bulimic and throw up after a Ben and Jerry's pigout. Which they would probably do watching gay porn, instead of the regular german gang bang, and midget fucking stuff all the rest of us normal guys watch.

So in the end, I kind of come to terms with being addicted to everything, and swinging like a pendulum between my favourite addiction one week to something else the next. I figure that as long as I rotate my addictions then I should be okay; drugs and alcohol one week, exercise the next, chocolate and porn the week after that, online chatting the week after that, and so on and so forth through my personal list of guilty pleasures. Luckily living in Amsterdam makes this a lifestyle that doesn't make you a menace to society in the eyes of the mainstream. Rather I'm just some kind of aging new age bohemian, exploring a free existence. I hold down a steady job, so the city doesn't care. God bless the city calvanist founders for making us all equal in the eyes of the Lord, as long as we have money and can pay our way!

Padwanna!

I still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test

Changes – David Bowie.

For the last two days my little flat on the outskirts of the center of Amsterdam has been getting a facelift. I've had tradesman in the place for the last two days filling in cracks and painting the walls of the living room, dinning room and the hallway to repair the damage caused by a monumental building fuck-up on the ground floor. It's taken over one year in the courts to get two days worth of work done! I'm still trying to work out if there is anything slower than a first world legal system, but apart from a paralytically drunk, physically crippled sloth, nothing comes to mind. I shouldn't complain though because the end result is pretty fantastic. Gone is the garish purple and maroon that made my place look indistinguishable from an inner city squat, in it's place is a luscious light sandy beach cream colour that looks both stylish and mainstream; something I never quite thought was possible.

It comes at a good time too. It seems life is undergoing many changes as well; the exterior change reflects the interior change relecting the exterior change. It's all very zen, or at least I hope it is and I'm not just finding meaning in nothing. The physical act of changing your living space is always a time of personal growth. Generally we only undertake ch-ch-ch-ch- changes when we have sufferred some sort of trauma (emotional or physical, or both) that takes away the meaning of our lives. It's the reason why some couples go years without doing anything with a flat, and then if they break up, within a very short period of time the whole place is worked over to be something completely new and original and most importantly, without memories of a painful past.

I guess that's what today was for me; a time of putting to bed some of the memories of the past. Nothing will stay in the same place, and so with even the walls being different, I won't recognise it now as a place where there are a lot of memories. Some things are painful to remember still.

I went one step further in my personal ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, it wasn't just my living space that was altered, but myself as well. I'm not talking about in some existential way, no I went and got another tattoo which I had put on my left forearm, top and bottom. It's has a Pali inscription running up the inside of my arm which is the sixth level in the attainment of enlightenment which translates to – in English – "Impossible to conquer"! It's a very personal message to myself; nothing can break you, nothing can beat you; nobody will ever stop you. I'd forgotten these things a while ago, and I think my life suffered for it. It's hard to say how, but it has, even if I still coming to grips with what it is. The tattoo is now my constant reminder that, no matter what, we each have the capacity to overcome any obstacles in our lives, and that the only person who can break us, is ourselves. A shame it doesn't work for taking pain away. But I suppose without out, how would we grow?!

So the rest of the week I will continue to put the living room and dining room back together in a new way, not seen before, and at the same time, watch my arm heal. As they both settle and become more comfortable, I hope through a process of osmosis that feeling will find its way into my life.

Padwanna