Wandering Allowed

Audit #51

2010-07-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago now - thank you - and as is my custom, I found myself doing an audit of the year just gone, and what I've experienced, for better or worse, since the last time I blew out the candles...it gets easier as you get older - who can be fagged putting 51 candles on a cake, really? By the time you've got the last ones lit, the first ones are already puddles of hot wax all over the icing, you've got through half a box of matches and suffered half a dozen burns to your fingers and forearms...at most, at this age, you'll get but a motley handful, representing 'many'…either that, or those candles shaped like numbers...get 'em lit, get 'em blown out, and let's eat the damn cake, that's my motto...

The day in question itself doesn't seem worth making so much of a fuss about these days...I agree with Dave Barry that there is an age past which your birthday is of no real interest to anyone else. That age is twelve. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy celebrating my anniversary, another year still out here swinging, a nice excuse to spoil myself a little, maybe receive a gift or a card, a call or an email, maybe go for a spin on the bike, have a beer or two, go out for dinner somewhere...I like birthdays - specifically, I like my birthdays…I do take pleasure when my kids have birthdays, to see them reach different milestones and reflect on what I was doing at their age…interestingly, I never find myself wondering what they'll be doing at my age, I have no mental picture at all…I do know how well they can each think for themselves and stand on their own two feet, and that makes them pretty well equipped to toddle around the planet, using their powers for good and not evil....unlike when they were younger…

Having a mid-year birthday also gives me a chance to look at life outside the distractions of the festive season, and reflect on how things have changed over twelve months...it always surprises me when I stop and sit down and actually think of everything that can happen in a year, and the first year of my 50s has been as interesting as any, with some unusual twists...

Fifty-one is pretty much one of those nothing birthdays...'fifty something'...the big five-oh is a year behind, and whether you saw that birthday as a milestone or a millstone, you've had a year to get a grip on yourself again...I love being in my fifties, to be honest...it's like some kind of sign that you've paid at least a few dues and satisfied one or two rites of passage...it's like making Sergeant in the Army - unless you're a complete wanker, people will give you some credibility from the get go until you prove yourself otherwise, on the premise that you must know something to have got to this point...that's the way it seems to be panning out so far, anyway...

The most striking thing about this most recent birthday is that I celebrated it in the same house for the third year in a row...I've lived in this cool little cedar shingle house, here in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, for two and a half years now...which, in and of itself, wouldn't be much of a big deal for most people...but it's the second longest I've lived anywhere since I left home in the mid 70s...I officially moved out in '78, but I'd not slept there more than two or three times a week on average since I got my first car in '76...that was what struck me, I think - I knew I'd moved around a lot, but when I started thinking about actual numbers it was like seeing my lifelong dissatisfaction with standing still in a new light...well over thirty years, and two and a half years is the second longest I've lived anywhere…the longest, for the record, was 8 years, in my 'first home'…and, since you've got me started, here's a tip from one who knows - anyone who tells you that "you can't go wrong with bricks and mortar" or "God's not making any more land" is a thief, a rogue and a lying scoundrel, and you can tell them so from me…it did turn out to be a pretty good place to live and get a toehold on being a real grownup, but it cost me a helluva sight more than renting would have done…however, I digress…

Anyone who's known me for any length of time knows that I disappear for periods of time varying from a few hours to several years, often without much trace...so, it all begs the question as to why I'm still here, and why haven't I been scratching my fingertips bloody against the inside of the door? Well, I'm glad you asked…

I think that living in a new country goes a long way, especially one where there is so much to see and do...if you can't find something you like in America, there really is something wrong with you...I've always been irresistibly drawn by America, even as a small child in England...when I read Eric Clapton's story of having won a book about America as a child and being fascinated, I understood him completely...I passed through the USA once or twice before I moved here, and so far I haven't regretted it...I have finally shed the constant feeling that I was living inside a movie, which characterized my first two years here...now, I think I can safely say that America has become as much Home as anywhere else has ever been...I've almost completed my two year conditional residency, and by Thanksgiving I should have my unconditional Permanent Resident card, valid for the next 10 years...all of which have lead some to ask, yet again, whether I have finally got wandering out of my system and s-s-s-s...koff, choke...s-s-settl....ack...'settled down'....eeurgh....well, no....

I've been extraordinarily fortunate to have been able to structure my life so that I can pretty much go anywhere I want, whenever I want...somewhere, I must have done a something or two right to have attracted karma this good…and, whether I choose to meander around within a hundred miles from home, or head off and cover a couple States, or whether I choose to stay home and plant roses, knowing that I can is pretty much all of the battle for me...I need to be able to far more often than I need to actually do...and here, with hundreds of icons to visit within a 3 or 4 day road trip, I'm not going to run out of new things to see for a few years to come yet.

I wasn't sure when, or if, this time would come, but I think I can finally say that, for now, I am sick to death of flying...I am very well aware that an extraordinary number of people - including my callow young self of twenty or thirty years ago - would love to be able to say "I'm sick of flying", so I'm cognizant of trying not to sound like some spoiled wanker...different people like different things, and I love to travel...I was given a questionnaire once that asked me where my idea of Shangri La was, my ultimate place to live, and I had to answer "Anywhere but here...wherever 'here' is"....I scraped, begged and borrowed to see as much of the world as I could as often as I could, and I think I can say that every penny was well spent...but I really have had enough, for now, of planes and airports...this decade, I think, will be a time for seeing things at ground level. Stopping more frequently, and for longer. And now, I'm not only taking the time to smell the roses, for the first time I'm getting pretty good at growing them.

I finally have the motorcycle I've dreamed of since I was a kid...it was always more an idea than a detailed picture, but a motorbike that would, like a magic carpet or Forrest Gump's shoes, take me anywhere...I like travelling by train, by car, truck, horse and cart, and I've covered an awful lot of ground over the years by foot - but I've found that unusually interesting things do seem to happen when you head out on a motorcycle for the day...for me, it always seems like a step of faith right from the word go, of confidence in oneself, to head out on the road on such a flimsy, basic piece of machinery...you can't even sleep in them (or even under them in any sensible fashion) if they break down...and, of course, there is the ever present but rarely spoken about overwhelming likelihood of death if you are ever unfortunate enough to become separated from your machine under trying circumstances...I can't help but think that it breeds something of a devil-may-care attitude among motorcyclists, but I couldn't say for sure…

This year, 2010, also saw the decision to work on the house and property until it's as finished as we're prepared to make it, rather than me chase minimum wage work and then pay someone else three times as much to do all the reno work for me…and I would have to be facing starvation before I'd consider getting back on the hamster wheel and having another real job...it was becoming increasingly clear that the house was never going to be finished by working on it part-time on weekends, particularly given that the weather here doesn't lend itself well to outdoor activities for a goodly part of the year...and so, instructive and entertaining as they were, paying hobbies such as tending bar, flipping burgers and taking other people's motorcycles apart were put away and I have thrown myself at the garden like a bull at a locomotive...

I've had the notion for a very long time that if I were to find the right house and take the time to work on it, fix and mend and trim and paint, there was a pretty good chance that what I'd add to the value of the property would be enough to compensate me for the time involved, and quite possibly more than I could make working for someone else…now, fortunately, I'm married to someone who agrees with me…

I used to hate gardening with a passion, especially as a renter, and it didn't improve much for the first several years after I bought my first home, way back in the late 80s...I can't help thinking that, again, the reason I enjoy it so much these days is because I don't have to...and, as time's passed, the blackberry bushes have been finally poisoned and machetted into a fragmented underground guerrilla force, lessons have been learned and relearned, the right tools and equipment slowly accumulated, and I have carte blanche to do pretty much exactly what I want to with the place, within a reasonable budget...fortunately, we had a huge variety of decent looking plants laying dormant under all that blackberry vine, and it seemed as if a succession of owners over a long time had pretty much planted whatever they thought was a good idea...none of it seemed to be where it wanted to be, it sure wasn't where I thought it should be, and so most of the work so far has been weeding, trimming, cutting back and transplanting, and there's also been a surprising number of rocks, on and beneath the surface...not completely unlike the rest of my life in some ways...I'm told they come from Montana, courtesy of a glacial event a few years back, and their smoothness does seem to reflect a long journey sans moss...it's become my habit to ring the base of every plant with the stones that were dug up when it was planted, and nice, now, to be able to sit on the front lawn or the back deck and not see only more work to do wherever you look...I've found that as long as you keep meandering in the right general direction, you eventually tend to get where you were supposed to be going, whether you wanted to or not...

It's funny what happens when you're left to your own devices for any real length of time...what defaults bob to the surface, what things we remember from the past, which are our reliefs and which our regrets...looking back, I seem to have been drawn to getting simple things done well, and doing as much as I can of things I like doing...it surprises me more than somewhat how often, in years past, I continued to do things I didn't really like much at all, and kept company with people I liked not really that much at all, and wondered why I was unhappy as often as I was...seems ridiculously simple when you actually write it down, but it clearly seemed the thing to do at the time...

This has, as it turns out, been a good year for simplifying...I read recently that if you find yourself frequently losing track of time, it's a sign that you're in synch with the rhythm of nature, and there seems to be some truth in that...since I've been able to stop worrying about alarm clocks, and spending long periods of time each day, regardless of the weather, walking around my garden, our garden, seeing what's come into bloom, where the rainwater is backing up, which plants are thriving where I've placed them and which are going to need moving again, and how many new blackberry shoots have sprung up...well, time just seems to get away from me...I'm a Northern Hemisphere kid by birth, and the longer I live here again, the more in tune I feel with the rhythm of the seasons, the ridiculously late-lit summer evenings, the rain and the eternal greenery...I am grateful that I got to grow up in Australia, and that I raised my own kids there...but, 'up here', there is something familiar at a very primitive level...

Last month also marked a year since I stopped smoking cigarettes after 35 years...that's given me a whole new outlook on life, primarily that it looks like I'll have one for quite a while longer than I had anticipated...you never know, I may yet live to see grandchildren...I'm reading again and, as you've noted, writing...all of a sudden, after decades of chasing my tail and wanting and doing and getting and listing and planning.....all of a sudden, it seems, life has slowed down...I sleep undisturbed all night, for the first time in years, and I wake up happy for the first time in longer.

My extensive t-shirt collection is, at last, to be made into a quilt...I'm still mustering at the moment, and hope to have a head count by the end of the week, but I'm thinking it will be at least 3 or 4 dozen accumulated over 30 years, mostly souvenirs of places I've been, some I've pretty much worn to death and some maybe a handful of times - sometimes I liked the shirt, just not on me...I wear very few of them much anymore, and when I do they often get stained or damaged, so it's time to swap them out for half a dozen plain Carhartt's heavy duty work t-shirts, and a couple of old favorites that I'd rather wear out than hang onto…they go with the canvas dungarees that I've bought to replace my jeans, with enough pockets to carry my specs case, wallet, bandana, padlock, cell phone, Maglite torch and a partridge in a pear tree…

So, all in all, I'd have to say that this 51st year, and the start of my 52nd, are panning out pretty well so far...I'm well in practice for retirement to gradually become more full time, and have become reacquainted with living within my means...repairing clothes instead of replacing them, buying quality and making it last, using hand tools again in lieu of motor driven ones where it's practical, building and repairing things myself whenever I possibly can…it takes a little longer, but time is one thing I am close to having enough of if I play my cards right…turning up is a lot of it, turning up and doing a little more every day, and putting one foot in front of the other....it's funny how the older I get, the older my ideas get...

Drop in anytime…if the bike's in the garage, it means I'm in the garden...

I'm taking my days back.

2010-05-18T18:17:00.003-07:00

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO

http://www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5

I'm done with Facebook. It's starting to feel like walking down a street where everyone is walking around their house naked, with a megaphone in their hand and all the windows open.

I don't like what Facebook is doing to the way people interact with each other. In a manner that text messaging barely hinted at, our interpersonal communication is being butchered. We discard sentences for garbled abbreviations and word limits, and wax at length about things that, until recently, we found boring when we did them ourselves. Now we spend significant amounts of our day listening to other people, many of whom we barely know, talk about them.

Mostly, I don't like what it's done to the way I communicate. I've fallen for it. Instead of getting out and doing things, I'm spending far too much of my life trolling Facebook to see who's said what, who's commented on their comments, who's commented on my comments about their comments...and much of it is worth neither saying nor hearing. In what seems like only months, we have fallen far too easily into a pattern of the electronic equivalent of talking for the joy of hearing the sound of our own voice...remember when that used to be a bad thing? When we would put at least some thought into making what we said interesting, witty, intelligent...now, in a practice that completely overshadows the fast, exciting sport of train spotting, we have people on pages like The Onion who simply want to be the first person to type 'First' in the comments...that has to be one of the saddest fads I've ever seen.

I'm done with vaguebooking attention seekers. " X doesn't think she can take it any longer", "Y is NOT happy", "there's no turning back now..."....and then their friends, often the same old handful, swallow the bait and confirm that self-pity and vague hinting at your emotional distress is still a valid strategy for getting your ego stroked...what is this, 9th Grade again? This is from people in their forties and fifties, for crying out loud....just because I'm continually trying to learn new ways to use technology to improve my quality of life, doesn't mean I have to revert to the emotional maturity of the target age group. I love technology, it allows me to do things I never dreamed of. It also provides the perfect megaphone for drama queens. I learned this lesson two years ago when I resigned from a couple of email discussion groups. Time to learn it again.

I'm going to start putting my life back the way it was before we all started washing our underwear at the same trough. I'm leaving the page up while I consider the alternatives. I won't be spending time on Facebook anymore. Enough's enough, and I have other things to do, and better ways to stay in touch. I'm sick of the digital diarrhea, this white noise of so much boring detail of other people's lives...I may love you like a Tasmanian sister, but I really don't care that much that you're tired and it's time for bed, I really don't care what you had for breakfast - at least, I never used to....can you imagine, 5 years ago, hitting speed dial on your phone to fifty or a hundred friends to let them know you're off to bed? And the reason I've been guilty of the same thing is because, like the proverbial boiling frog, I've come to accept the banal, creeping dullness of this minutae, this reduction of life to detail that would embarrass the Seinfeld scriptwriters...I'm no longer sure I believe that this continual living out loud is taking us anywhere good...'slide nights' used to be considered by many the ultimate symbol of suburban mind-numbing boredom - now we do it for recreation...in a darkened room by ourselves, watching other people's slides...

This isn't normal. We didn't used to do this. This isn't how grownups behave. Looking through other people's stuff when they're not home, poking in drawers and cupboards because we can, because they forgot to reset the 'Everyone' default on every single one of their Facebook photo albums individually, and leaving post-its all over the place saying "I was here"...if you can remember someone's name, anyone, doesn't matter how long ago you knew them, if you have enough time, you'll find their page if they have one...where they live, who they're friends with, anything they've taken pictures of, what colour socks they wear on Thursdays...we used to read novels and watch films about the great lengths that spies and private detectives had to go to when they went snooping for this sort of stuff, we used to value our privacy.

Minding your own business used to be the norm. Now it's a dying art.

Big Day Out

2010-05-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

I had the itch Friday morning, but they were still talking hail...by noon, I'd got sick of walking out into the garden and trying to stare down the clouds so I figured I'd just head in the general direction of the coast and see how far I could get before this unnatural Northern Hemisphere weather turned me around...I had some friends heading out to the clamming shack, which was 125 miles away according to Mapquest...one of the disadvantages of moving to a country where they use a different measurement system is that after a while, you forget to convert the numbers and end up thinking 125 'things' isn't all that far....by the time I got to the clamming shack, after what one of my associates in Australia would have called "an enthusiast's ride" - I'm told the bridge across the Columbia at Astoria, Oregon is 4 miles long, and when the temperature is below 50f and falling, it feels like it - I took my time to warm up and accept a gracious demand to join the crew for dinner...by 9pm the first two were asleep, and by 10 o'clock my reprobate friend and I were home from the bar and I was buried into a recliner rocker, covered in blankets and dreaming of tropical beaches where long bridges over cold rivers are merely tales to frighten small children...

I woke at 0530, I often don't sleep well when I'm travelling and I've been travelling for a while...I laid out all my riding gear near the front door the night before, and managed to haul it all out onto the front step without making too much noise...the downside of having parked the bike right next to the sliding door behind which everyone else was still sleeping was having to push it further than I'd ordinarily be happy to push 700 pounds of greasy metal across patchy sand and dead grass before I could start the thing. With hindsight this, coupled with only having had one meal and several beers since dinnertime on Thursday, was probably responsible for me deciding to sit down for a while to let the spinning stop, then remove the numerous layers of animal hide and go back to bed for an hour....by 7:30am, I'm motoring south, back towards the river, and feeling as good as I always do when I do this, even in the wind, the dark and the rain...

They get deer around here, and by the time I reach the bridge I decide that being paranoid about deer is preferable, even if only marginally, to being paranoid about elk so I decide to meander home on 'the Washington side'....plus, I really can't seem to generate a lot of interest for riding back across that bridge, given that it's around 10 degrees colder than it was when I rode over it heading this way....the Washington side is longer in time and miles but pretty and with less traffic....I pass two other bikes heading back the way I came and we wave...I wave at everyone, it's an inclusive pursuit, or at least it is for me...and if some other crazy bastard is out there in the post-dawn dreariness that most people, including me, would generally prefer to sleep through, then we have more than enough in common to wave at each other...

Twenty miles from the Interstate, I realise my boots are slowly filling with water...the jacket and pants are holding up reasonably well, but it's been too long a while since the boots saw enough polish...add it to next week's list...leather is great for preventing road rash and pretty damn good at keeping out the cold, and it's Old School which is good enough for me in the absence of a better alternative - but it's crap in the rain after any more than about half an hour...at this point I'm two hours into it, and now it's just a matter of reeling in the miles until the home stretch...

Stanley and I hit I-5 liked a raped ape on rails...whatever the hell one of them looks like, it's quick...this is a 'Sport model', and like 'Sport models' across every motorcycle brand across the planet, they are designed, in the words of the old Moto-Guzzi owner's manual, "to be ridden in a sportsmanlike manner"....which is the major part of why I bought this particular model bike, a Harley FXDX T-Sport, known by some, apparently, as the D-T....the rain is still on and off and there's still enough water on the road to make it worth staying switched-on for, but the Saturday morning traffic has dried out the highway a lot more than the backroads, and in no time we're up to 90 without even thinking about it, and then a sudden volley of red lights half a mile ahead means the lanes are diverging and I drop back under 70 and stay there while the cages jockey for position...

Once thick cowhide gets wet it pretty much stays wet, sometimes literally for days, and after a while the wicking of moisture by the wind is enough to start tapping at your core temperature...it's the same dilemma of whether or not to run to shelter in a rainstorm...for the record, I walk through rain at a casual pace and have no idea whether or not it helps or hinders getting rained on - it's that running away from water just seems so....undignified....it's a different dilemma when the wind has successfully located every existing pinhole in your clothing, and riding faster gets you there sooner but you get colder a lot more quickly...I realise that I forgot to stop for coffee or something to eat, and I've now had one small meal in almost 48 hours, 5 hours sleep sitting up in a chair, and it seems to be getting colder...when you're tired, hungry and alone it always feels like it's getting colder....I'm less than an hour from home now, so it's not much more than an inconvenience unless I break down, and it's good to learn where the gaps in my clothing are, this close to home...

It's always a guessing game, what to wear to go riding, and everyone regularly gets it wrong and ends up sweating buckets in black leather jackets on Fall days that turn into Indian Summer and just as often, like me, are dressed fine for the cold, and maybe a few 15 or 20 minute showers, but not for hours of steady rain...check and test, check and test....I'll be better prepared next week when I've got a couple of longer trips in mind, and getting too cold can mean the abrupt end of a ride or, worse I guess, a long horrible slow end to the ride. As it is, I'm cold but I'm further from misery than I am from home.

And then as I'm leaning hard into a long left hander sweeping through the Washington firs, The Sun comes out and suddenly God is in Heaven and all's right with the world again...the sun on one's face is one of hte biggest morale boosters in history, and it is all I can do to restrain myself from bursting into song...I burst into song anyway...I often think of Wagner when I'm riding (Da dudda da dah dah, dudder da dah dah, DUDDER DA DAHH DAH, dutter da daaaahhhh...who says German lyrics are difficult to learn?)...especially on the big six- and eight-laners with the 75mph speed limits, where you can open up a little, get creative, and you make that last lane change and suddenly you're in that big open space between the herds....flying along with the nearest other vehicle hundreds of yards ahead or behind, with the sun beating down....it's about as close as I get to prayer....

I hit the driveway just after 10:30, and there's no negatives to be told other than "I realised I need a flannel shirt"...the coffee's hot, the toast is brown and after a hot shower and a pair of dry socks it's already time to start sharpening the story of the day I rode for three hours in the rain to have breakfast...bon appetit.

It can't be just me

2010-01-25T23:11:00.000-08:00

It started with the petitions. And the facebook groups. Save The Whales. Stop Uranium Mining. Save The South African Police Child Abuse Unit. The last one got me curious, so I checked snopes, and confirmed my suspicion that so many of these feel-good-but-make-no-damn-difference campaigns are worse than useless, and frequently completely redundant, even if the cause is in fact more than an urban myth.

This bra colour campaign got me thinking - although not what the creators or participants of this campaign had in mind. I've been doing a slow burn since yesterday morning when this campaign started, and when I read AllFacebook's claim this morning about a men's underwear campaign, due to the 'incredible success' of yesterdays bra campaign, something snapped, pardon the pun.

This note is not a criticism of any of my facebook friends who participated yesterday. Seriously, I don't want anyone to think that this is a personal attack, it's not. It's that I'm fuming at what looks tome like a damaging campaign. It's a criticism of the people who create the false impression that this kind of simplistic activity, in and of itself, will actually do any good. In my view, breast cancer is decades past needing awareness - I doubt there are many people left who can see a pink ribbon bumper sticker without knowing what it's for. My argument is that, unlike other more rare conditions, no-one is unaware of breast cancer. Let's take awareness as a given, and then take the subsequent steps that move the world closer to prevention and cure.

As an aside, breast cancer kills one tenth as many as heart disease. A tenth. How many of you would have guessed that? Why do you think that is that you didn't realise that? Maybe because tits are more appealing than internal organs, in the way that everyone abhors dolphins and whales being killed for food, but couldn't care less about calves. It tells me that breast cancer 'awareness' campaigns are not only superfluous, but they are diverting energy and awareness from something that is 10 times more likely to kill you. That figure again - ten times. Which disease do you think should have 10 times the recognition of the other? What colour is the ribbon for heart disease? There isn't one - but more than one of you stopped and thought about it, wondered what it was...and there isn't one, what does that tell you?....or a snappy slogan, like the one for the last breast cancer awareness campaign a few months ago, "Save Second Base" (now *that* is a great campaign to raise MONEY - not awareness - for research and prevention programs...I would pay twenty bucks for a t-shirt with that slogan and an appropriate picture...yep, it's crass, but if you have the income to donate twenty bucks to every single worthy charity, you must be Donald Trump...if you want me to spend my limited cash on your passion rather than mine, you have to really stand out from the crowd)...where's the snappy slogan for heart disease? Even the Heartsmart logo on packaged food looks like it's been made redundant because the Heart Foundation accepts cash for endorsement and has lowered the bar below useful as a result...

I have had several friends die of cancer, and more that have survived after having major surgery. Three have had mastectomies. A close friend is, as I write, in hospital recovering from an operation to remove a large tumour from their bowel. I have a dog in this fight. I want to see a cure. I think that campaigns like this take us further away from a cure, by making ineffective lip-service too easy, without the mandatory follow-on link from 2-second status update to parting with cold hard cash, or booking the overdue mammogram...I can recall at least four breast cancer awareness campaigns in the last 12 months...there is a 'turn facebook pink' campaign underway as I write...

The attached article is AllFacebook's self-congratulatory message; the following two are my responses. It has occurred to me that having now spent an entire week dealing with a painful shoulder injury, primarily by taking as much hydrocodone as the doc will give me, that there's an outside chance that I am currently less than my usual light-hearted and effervescent self, and there may be a possibility that I have got it wr...wr-r-r-r....wr-r-r-r-o...less correct than I usually am...I'm interested in what my 76 closest and most trusted friends think...for the record, I draw the line at being lynched...

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Facebook Boxers Campaign Attempts To Duplicate Success Of Bra Color Campaign
Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 11th, 2010 10:35 AM
Share78 3 Comments »
After the incredible success of the Facebook bra color campaign, guys are now being encouraged to post the types of underwear they are using in order to spread awareness about prostate cancer. It’s not exactly a new concept. Within minutes of women posting their bra colors, many guys began posting the colors of their underwear in order to “raise awareness about testicular cancer”. It’s clear though that this was just an attempt to have some fun with the existing breast cancer campaign.

The following message was being sent out to male users over the past 24 hours:
“Some fun is going on,which is also raising awareness of Prostate Cancer Just write “briefs” , “boxers,” “jocks,” or “commando” in your status. Just the word, nothing else. It will be cool to see if this will spread Prostate cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the men describe their shorts in their status.”
We’re copying a worldwide effort started by Breast Cancer activists, who are updating their facebook status with their bra color. In the spirit of emulation being a sincere form of flattery, why not?
So will the campaign for men to post their underwear gain as much traction? Personally I think breasts always generate more buzz, however I’ve had numerous male friends post their underwear color and pattern to their status. It’s a catchy idea and it’s extremely simple. I’ve seen numerous conversations spawned as a result of a user posting only a color and a wink. Last week’s bra color campaign is ongoing and now there is a movement for men to do the same.
Following every successful vial Facebook campaign there are always loads of copycats, although most, if not all, fail to gain a similar traction as the initial campaign. For now we’ll have to wait and see if the prostate cancer (or testicular cancer) campaigns generate similar traction. Whether or not they do, having a little bit of fun to generate cancer awareness is never a bad thing!

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Jack Butler:
An incredible success? By what measure? Thousands of women writing one word then going back to sleep on the issue? An awareness campaign that holds back what it is that we're supposed to be aware of? Where the posters get pissy because 'men' let the secret out of the bag? Did you, 'AllFacebook', read the comments on your own post? Where there is no process by which to donate, or make any kind of contribution? Yes, we are aware that breast cancer exists, that news has been out for a while now. To be effective, campaigns need to offer more than for people to post cute, cryptic one-word status updates and do nothing else.

Show me the money - how did the fight against breast cancer benefit from this banal idea?

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Jack Butler:
Mark, you miss the point; awareness is a first step, and conditions like mesothelioma and benign intercranial hypertension (an FB friend posted a link today, she has a friend who has it) need more of it. People are already well aware of breast cancer. I had a 36 yo friend die of it. She didn't die because there weren't enough people who'd heard of it. She died, as so many others do, because she had an incompetent oncologist, and because research is so dependent on big pharmacy that they withhold information from each other to secure the funds they need. Because people think writing 'RED' in their FB status bar is all they need to do. As Randy points out, "this should save a lot of lives... not really sure how.. but we can feel like we are doing something"...and, having done little more than encourage all their male FB friends to stare at their boobs while they wonder whether you're still wearing the Lilac one, they feel so good about having 'helped', that they do nothing more. No donation, no buying a t-shirt, no offering to volunteer at a cancer ward, reading books to people too whacked on morphine to read for themselves. Sorry, that's just too hard, isn't it? Try the 'turn FB pink' campaign. That looks like a real campaign. It might make a difference. The bra and boxer ideas do more harm than good, by salving people's conscience without them actually having to do anything.

Read these: http://tinyurl.com/yeusctk

and

http://tinyurl.com/y8o7fey

then get back to me.

I'd like to see a cure for breast cancer. I'd like to see a cure for all cancers. Campaigns like this distract energy from things that might achieve that. Without a link or even yet another breast examination chart (is there *anyone* that doesn't know how to do this, after twenty or thirty years of 'awareness' campaigns?) This campaign is great, I have dozens of very pleasant mental images I wouldn't otherwise have had. Given I was already aware that breast cancer existed and regular self examination *may* help (last I heard they're now rethinking the usefulness of mammograms), the campaign achieved very little else....

This was a facebook traffic generator, nothing else.

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YOU ARE HERE ->

2010-01-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

Welcome, or welcome back. I've been away.

There's often no better time to spring clean your life than the start of a new time period in your life. I generally don't save changes until 'the Spirit moves me' because my Spirit is a lazy bastard and notoriously unreliable, but I often find that my passing of a milestone inspires me to action. The end of the first decade of the Third Millenium is a milestone that everyone seems to be happy to see pass. I'll probably write more on that later. I might also re-post some of my older stuff, either in it's original format or polished up a little.

This is to confirm that if you navigated here from somewhere else that you're in the right place, and that the blog is still current. It's just lay fallow while I wrote a novel for National Novel Writing Month, and then had a great holiday season. I love living in America. Anyway. Wander about. Make yourself at home. Have a look through the library. Feel free to comment.

STUFF THE ROAD TAUGHT ME

2009-10-23T18:52:00.001-07:00

1. PATIENCE

It doesn't matter whether you're waiting for a flooded river to go down or an airline check-in clerk to hand over your boarding pass, getting angry doesn't usually help. It takes just as long, the only difference is you get to be angry while you wait. And everyone else thinks you're a jerk. Jerks don't usually get upgrades. Most things take longer than you expect.

2. MAPS

You can't be lost if you don't care where you are. For the other times, there are maps.

An outdated map is a false friend…but sometimes it's better than nothing. I once drove around England and Scotland for 9 days using only the thumbnail sketches in a very small Holiday Inn Locations brochure…it worked pretty okay, really, although London was a challenge…

Any journey requires 3 things - a here, a there and a way of identifying the terrain between them. Pinning down the direction part often requires a separate, known 'there' as a reference point, usually 'North' although it can be something familiar to just you and one or two special others - "the old Johnson place" or "the restaurant where we met"….whether you need to find a waterhole or you need to turn left at the third traffic light after the cathedral will dictate which maps you're going to need for today…

Unless I'm on an easy journey that I know well (and sometimes even then), I generally use at least three maps at once -

· the Big Map that shows the major highways and town names, so you can get an idea of the big picture, the whole trip laid out from beginning to end…it shows major changes in direction, when mountains turn to deserts, swampland to coast…you can't see much detail mile by mile, but you know what the real signposts are…

· Today's Map, the detailed one, that shows the names of streets, where the rest areas and car parks are, how you get down to the marina or to the tourist info centre from here…

· the directions I printed off Mapquest…discovery is romantic and wonderful and all that, but as a rule I'm happy to follow generations of navigators before me and learn from the work of others…can you imagine if the great sailors of the Middle Ages, Drake, Magellan, Columbus and the rest had Mapquest? Making - and stealing - maps was big business, the espionage war of its day…put it this way - if someone has been there before me, I want to hear what he's got to say about the trip.

Between them I can usually get where I'm going…although you never know when things are going to change…which brings us back to patience, really….

SAFE MOVEMENT ACROSS TERRAIN

Navigate carefully and methodically. It is always better to take a more measured pace and hit your mark, or close to it, the first time. Rushing gets you tired. Rushing gets you lost. Lost stops being fun when you run out of water. More about that under Leaders, below. Keep the big map in mind, but notice the details of what's around you…are you now walking slightly uphill? What does the map say? Is that a dry creek bed or a fire trail? If we do get lost, where is the biggest landmark around from here - a mountain, a big river or a paved road, something you can't possibly miss. You need these landmarks. Something that is so big you can't miss it, no matter which direction you approach it from…a place to get your bearings, find other reference points, re-orientate your map to the terrain, and take off on the new bearing…sometimes it's worth getting lost just enough to recognise what 'close' looks like and whether it's close enough…

It's also worthwhile relating map to ground on a regular basis. I've seen people walk blindly along a trail, fixated on the map and never learning how to discern the signs all around…the signs of life…the things you only really understand by experiencing in the flesh…warmth, colour, depth….

And remember - it's the terrain that changes. What used to be a river is now just a dry gully. The art deco cinema and roller skating rink is now an office block. Get your bearings. Adjust the map. Take notes. Take pictures. Remind yourself to remember how this smelt. You might not be back this way again for a while….somewhere like it maybe…

A SPECIAL CASE: THE LONDON UNDERGROUND

Here's a tip for the travel novice - you cannot navigate your way around London using a map of The Underground. Trust me on this one. Designed in 1931 by railway employee Harry Beck, the 'tube map' is probably the most famous map that completely ignores scale and physical location in the real world. It is truly fiendish in its simplicity and it works brilliantly…as long as you already knew exactly where you were and exactly where you want to go - on a real map …it is possible (I know, I've done it) to travel halfway across London using several intersecting and overlapping different lines, and emerge into the sunlight to find that you're less than a hundred yards from where you started…which only goes to show you, again, that maps are just tools, just pictures of one person's vision of the journey ahead…

3. LEADERS

I was on a one day management course and the ice-breaking discussion was 'Define Leadership'. After a lot of bollocks backward and forward, the presenter gave the best definition of 'Leader' that I've ever heard - "someone who has followers"….that's not as obvious as it sounds…I think it was back around the early 1990's when every guru was banging on about leadership as distinct from management, and how every corporation had a desperate shortage of the former and a glut of the latter, soft, fat, pasty managers with pastel coloured short-sleeved shirts with outdated ties that were cheap when new…the new would-be CEO needed to be a Leader….military parallels were drawn, sweeping away any doubt that there was little difference between overseeing the landings at Normandy and running a supermarket…

I think much that was good got lost during those years, along with an awful lot of people who followed the self-styled leaders. I saw the Peter Principle in action for years, the theory that people will tend to rise to their level of incompetence and stay there…I watched the meteoric rise of men and women who could not have led hungry wolves to meat, but they could lie brilliantly on their applications for promotion…no-one ever checked with the followers or, for that matter, whether in fact there ever were any followers…

The point of all of which is that I have learned from being on the road that I don't like groups, I don't trust groups, I don't want to be in a group, and I sure don't want to be told what to do and where to go by some control freak with an overactive alpha complex…does that pretty much make it clear? One of the big reasons I don't like groups is that they tend to draw wannabe leaders like dung draws flies…

There are times when urgency is a factor. No argument. On rare occasions, perhaps only a handful of times in an individual's life, someone has to take control of a situation. Someone has to say "This way" with the authority that people know somehow not to question. I get that. I love that whole 'leader born under fire' bullshit. But. It's rare. The circumstances that require it, and the presence of an individual with the cajones to make it happen, both rare. And unless my life is in danger I really don't like being told what to do. Say please, and say it with a smile. Please. . .

Which brings me back to groups. There is some safety in groups. Some. And sometimes a group just makes a bigger target, especially if they're not being led right.

From what I've seen, I'm better off on my own. I don't aspire to leadership, I really don't. I have enough trouble getting my sad self through the day, I just don't have the time or the inclination to make other people's decisions for them. But, trouble notwithstanding, no-one knows how to get me through the day better than I do. I've had more practice than anyone else, for a start.

Once you've seen your fill of the big ticket milestones, remember that the really interesting stuff is in the backstreets. I missed the Roman arena in Amman but I drank coffee you could stand a spoon up in and smoked untipped Camels and a hookah with a young Greek guy in a little cafe overlooking the arena and I had a lot more fun doing that…it's surprising who you meet when you're not really looking for company…and be very careful of the person who wants you to follow them, it's not unknown for them to have an ulterior motive…I know, shocking, isn't it?

4. LEAVE CACHES BESIDE THE PATH

You can't carry everything. Packing well is an art, but even the most dithering eventually appreciate that what you want to take you have to carry. Some things you have to leave behind, and if you know that you're going to be traversing the same road for a while it's not a bad idea to organise supply drops at certain points.

Some things you can post ahead to yourself before you leave, to be collected at post offices and hotels. There's a lot of stuff you can pick up on the road…just remember to pay the price for quality when it comes to things you need all the time. When the storm sets in, it's always comforting to know your umbrella won't leak.

If you don't stay in touch with people you meet on the road, leave on good terms as much as you can…you never know when you might run into them again, and it's surprising how the journey can change people for the better…

It's important to learn when to let go...and having said that, I must say that I try not to burn bridges behind me until I have no choice, and it has been my experience that stuff you've accumulated on previous trips can really come in handy…however, in the interests of full disclosure, it is now a decade or more that I have carried one of those inflatable u-shaped neck pillows for use on planes and so on…you've all seen them...this navy blue plush-finish blob has accompanied me around the world at least twice, it even has its own little carry case…and I've never used it, not once ever…I blew it up the day I received it as a gift, tried it on, then deflated it and put it in my 'carry on' rucksack…where it sits from one hemisphere to the next, just in case….it's funny the useless things we carry around with us for years, don't you think? We secretly know we're never going to need it, but we're just not ready to let it go…lucky a neck pillow doesn't take up much room.

CACHE BOOKS FOR OTHERS

You can't carry a library. Read the travel guides and the cheap airport paperbacks and then leave them on the train, in a bar or on the bookshelf at the guest house…knowledge hoarded is knowledge squandered, and it's one way you can pay something forward, something nice…

5. PLANS

Planning can be a fun game when you're stuck somewhere that you can't get a ticket out of and you need to kill time…there is a very old saying that if you want to make the gods laugh just tell them your plans…refer earlier under Patience…

A journey has to blend the pre-arranged and the ad-hoc, and everyone has their own idea of the perfect balance…if you know you're going to be in a certain place at a certain time, there can be advantages in making arrangements before you get there. Book the hotel, it's almost always cheaper over the net. Have someone meet you when you arrive. Cultivate contacts, talk to friends who've been there.

Group people usually don't travel much out of their own familiar territory…when they do, they like other people to have organised everything for them, when, where, how long…jolly good luck to them, I say, and I mean that…having life packaged for you can be a real help at times, and not everyone has the experience or the ability to do for themselves…although it can be surprising how interesting life can be when you set aside some time to just wander around…I found a brilliant old oak-lined pub down a cobbled side street in Dublin, only because I wasn't in a rush and wasn't paying too much attention to the detail map, just meandering in a general direction…almost all of the best experiences of my life have been just down a side street that was off the usual map…

6. VILLAGES

Everyone needs to come back in to the village sooner or later. Even the most hardened nomads and outlaws need a solid base from time to time, protection from weather and other predators, a place to relax for a time, barter, repair the wear and tear, drink fresh water, trade stories, and get ready for the next leg of the journey. It is my belief that environments shape the communities that dwell in them…the natural surrounds shape the city, the village, the family as the soil, rainfall and sunshine shape the plants…and their individual fruits…their values, their compassion, their art, what they do to survive, to celebrate, to give thanks, how they live and how they die… which is the reason it pays to choose your village carefully…some places just don't take kindly to strangers…doesn't matter how long you stay there, it will never feel like home…and there's other places at other times when you feel like you just fit right in. They're the places worth coming back to. Where your accounts are all paid up and there's a coffee cup in the cupboard with your name on it.

7. ATTACHMENTS

Goodbyes suck, and there's no getting away from them, not ever. During the course of a life, everyone's going to get through a bewildering array of parents, neighbour kids, siblings, school friends, goldfish, team mates, parents of friends, dogs, cats, rabbits and guinea pigs, college friends, workmates, lovers, haters, spouses, kids, friends of kids, store owners, the guys at the bar….they all come and go as we move on through, it's just how it is…

I refuse to hold life at arm's length because I'll miss it when it's gone. I'm not generally what I'd call a people person by nature. I don't hate people, I just find a lot of them annoying after a while. How long usually depends a lot on the person. Some people are great. I love some people. I love the contribution that some people have made to my life. It's inspired me to help other people from time to time. I like to think that I've made a positive change in the life of everyone I've ever met - although it has to be said that I'm sure I've improved some people's lives by removing myself from it…

I can't go through life refusing to get close to people, or let them get close to me…I don't think that would be much of a life, not for me…and I can't spend my whole time 'missing' people and sobbing in airports either…so I've learned, as best I can, to know, to like and love, and to let go…I try and make the most of people while they're here, because no-one's going to be here forever…I have some great friends that I've never met, and there's a reasonable chance I never will…there's some people I couldn't imagine ever seeing enough of then whose names I can barely remember now…

That's one thing I've learned from the road. All things pass. Eventually, all things pass. You'll be surprised what you miss most.

ONLY USERS LOSE DRUGS

2009-10-10T20:47:00.001-07:00

"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water." W.C. Fields

As an Army Reservist, for 9 months of the year for almost 10 years I used to parade almost every Tuesday night, one or two weekends a month, and at least two 16 day courses a year...I was a Medic, as well as being a qualified Infantry Rifleman and an Armoured Corps AFV Commander, and I tried to get in at least one course a year plying my trade, usually as medical support for recruit courses, and a second course to increase my qualifications for more interesting roles...

Sometimes I could get into the Army mentality and sometimes I found it a little bit harder...on the courses when I could just put on my green skin, 'switch on Army', turn off my creative brain and just do what I was told, I generally had a lot of fun...you know, keeping in mind that we were all being trained to kill people in really quite disturbing ways and all that....but anyone that knows me knows that if there's one thing that fires me up it's incompetence hiding behind rank...so, there were some courses when I'd just feel compelled to liven things up...

Every military training course I ever attended incorporated a lecture on the Army's policy on drugs...as you can imagine, psychoactive drugs are heavily frowned upon when using high-powered large calibre automatic weapons...these are the ultimate power tool...back around the early 1990s I was attending a course for Reservist Corporals to become eligible for promotion to Sergeant...

It was about day 3, and already we're suffering from sleep deprivation... up at 5:30am for PT, and we're showered, fed and in the classroom by 7:30, lectures well into the evening and you're up until past midnight practicing drill and weapons lessons out on the parade ground, writing up lesson plans, spit polishing boots and ironing uniforms...we are Corporals training to be Sergeants and we have an example to set to other soldiers on base, so our dress and bearing must be impeccable... and in my view, it's at times like this that one must have a sense of humour...and, well, sometimes I just get bored, y'know?....

This guy, a career MP, is a Warrant Officer, which means he has come up through the ranks of enlisted men...he's done the hard yards...and he is about to deliver the classic, textbook anti-drugs lecture straight from the Manual...

"The Army has a no-drugs policy" A selective no-drugs policy...

"If you are caught using drugs or in possession of drugs while on Army property you will be liable to penalties both civil and military that may include imprisonment" This guy has creases ironed into his forearms...he hates having to deal with Reservists who are dope smoking anti-war tree-huggers when they're not in uniform...waste of time and money...

"If you experience stress, do not turn to drugs, do as I do and go to the boozer for a few beers" This guy is a caricature and doesn't even know it...

"There are many reasons why someone would want to take drugs. Can anyone tell me what one of them might be. Yes, Corporal" Indicating me

"Well personally sir, I've always believed it's part of man's inherent need to alter his consciousness..."

The silence kind of hangs there. Like a weapon. The WO has me pinned into my seat with one of those cold, emotionless unblinking stares that leaves me in no doubt that he could quite happily slit my throat and then go inside and eat dinner with the same knife....

"What the fuck does that mean, smartarse?"

"People take drugs because it makes them feel good, sir"

"Good answer. Why didn't you say that in the first place? Yes, Corporal Bloggs.....""

You see, this is why the war on drugs was doomed from the start. Drug use is in our nature. The only people really speaking out against drugs are the ones that have either successfully recovered from their habit of choice, or like the MP have never tried 'em, don't like 'em on principle, and will not accept that a few beers after work every day will screw their minds and bodies up at least as bad as most of the alternatives... who knows what the answer is, but the bottom line is that people take drugs, from aspirin to crack, because it makes them feel good...

A few years ago a Close Personal Friend was visiting Amsterdam, a place he'd wanted to visit for years to see what the fuss was all about...after the routine hotel transfer, a quick shower and change, and he's out checking out the famous cafes...one in particular quickly becomes a favourite, good strong coffee, a wide selection of herbal teas and cool drinks, and a nice line in locally grown hydroponic pot and Nepalese hash...it also has a number of nice al fresco tables on the cobbled footpath next to the canal, where one can sip herbal tea and take a nice scone with strawberry jam and whipped cream, as the 60-something English couple are doing...or, like the young Italian guys are doing, roll 3 and 5 paper joints from the large pile of pot in the middle of the table...by Day 2, CPF has settled into a comfortable daily routine; a quick shower and down to the cafe for breakfast; one tourist expedition - Anne Frank's house, a cruise along the canals, whatever, take a few photos; and then just a general dazed meander around the streets....it really is just the way he'd pictured it two or three decades before...

Of course, there's always the things that many innocents abroad don't expect...petty crime thrives in crowds, the pickpockets, the scam artists and hustlers...and organised crime thrives in places where people would really rather not have their wife, mother, neighbour or boss find out they've been...they pay big, they pay cash, they don't ask for receipts or anything else that might reveal they've been there...the red light districts, where prostitutes, cops, crooks and all the other night people love to hang out, nightclubs, strip bars, brothels, casinos...on the first trip into the back of the coffee shop by the canal, where The Reason Other Than Coffee is kept...there's a standup menu for a variety of types of bud on one side and hash on the other, prices by the gram...the shop dude takes out a large wooden cutting block and a very big and what looks like a very sharp knife, cuts an appropriate sized piece from the brick of hashish, slips it on the scales and gives you the price...he won't roll it for you, but there are booths off to the side, painted matt black with bright blacklights to roll by, and ashtrays...be their guest...

If it fails to cross your mind whose guest you are, and who you would be upsetting if your behaviour failed to respect the establishment, there are two large red and white stickers on the wall behind the counter; "Support Your Local Red And White" and "This Business Supports The Big Red Machine". Hells Angels. These guys are big here, in what has become the major conduit for all manner of pharmaceutical mood enhancers, in the middle of a river of cash and blood....you'll find them all over the world, old neighbourhoods, often revived ex-commercial districts, hip urban cafes by day....darker things come out at night...

In his afternoon meandering, CPF happens across an unexpected bonus - The Mushroom Shop...it's been years, seriously years...the shop is very small, but clean and tidy inside...among the usual paraphernalia is a small glass fronted refrigerator, filled with plastic takeaway containers as you'd find in a Chinese restaurant...except these have a range of magic mushrooms, each with a short summary of what effects one can expect from each..."bright colours", "enhanced sense of euphoria", "for experienced users only".....he opts for possible mild hallucinations and bright colours....

An hour later, he has survived the onset, unfamiliar after so many years of abstinence, traffic, other pedestrians and having been attacked by a mime....I hate mimes, I don't know about you....I hate street theatre generally, anything where you're likely to get singled out for comment or dragged into the performance...an interesting feature of the cafes around the Rembrandtplein is that all the chairs are facing the street...it works well, there's always something to see in the middle of the square...

A pair of buskers sets up on the footpath, a young white guy with a scruffy afro and a tie-dyed t-shirt on a guitar and a blonde female singer...a midget blond....bright platinum blonde hair, a yellow croptop and fluoro purple spandex capri pants, and she is belting out the tunes for all she's worth, "ROLLIN' ! ROLLIN' ! ROLLIN' ON A RIVERRR..."....he's transfixed....,his travelling companion nudges his arm and says "They're great, aren't they?"....to which CPF replies "Oh thank Christ you can see them too...."

It's fun. However you slice it, people do it because it makes them feel better. I have no idea what the answer is, but the cure of prohibition seems worse than the disease.

GLOBAL ALTRUISM THROUGH CREATIVE SELF INDULGENCE

2009-10-03T15:24:00.001-07:00

...being part of an occasional series in which I cast a light on behaviour ordinarily considered by casual observers to be anti-social, when in fact these behaviours, seen in the correct way, can be recognised as beneficial for the entire Societe de Humanitie Masse...what I do, I do for the good of humanity...

Self indulgence, I have often noted, is seriously underrated. Not just as a selfish, personal pursuit, but as a contribution to the greater good.

Sharon and Kenneth Holley have opened a bookshop, apparently it's the first African-American bookshop in Buffalo, NY. The thing that interests me is how Sharon got involved in this project. She likes comics. That's pretty much it. "I had a real extensive comic collection", she says...one thing lead to another, and now she owns a bookshop. It got me thinking. Lately I've been noticing people who seem to have led happier lives for having primarily done what they want as often as possible...

Doing what you want as often as possible. It sounds pretty obvious when you just write it down. Thing is, a lot of us really don't do an awful lot of what we want. I'd posit that the response of many to the idea of doing what we want would be that we simply can't - and where would the world be if we all did what we wanted. I'm starting to wonder.

We do a lot of things that are about making money, having a certain standard of living, impressing The Collective Other that we are fit for their company. There's probably nothing wrong with that. My own philosophy has always been that what we have to do for money should be balanced by what we like to do. What we would do if we won the lottery. I could count on one hand the times when I've thought that, if I won the lottery, I would keep working at whatever I was doing at the time. I've often wondered if it's possible for the average member of humanity to ever make a good living from what they like to do when they don't have to. I've known a lot of tradesmen and professionals who are highly regarded in their field. Almost without exception, the primary reason they do the job they do is because they realised that they have an aptitude for it and it pays enough to finance their chosen lifestyle. They enjoy the kudos, they enjoy the money, and it is generally a pretty good feeling to know that you're considered highly by your peers...and they'd quit tomorrow if they won the lottery. Engineers who spend all weekend sailing, motorcycling bank managers, the plumber who loves working in his garden.

I had a mate once who was an amateur member of a national sporting team. Once a month, she'd be flown across the country to train with the elite in her sport. Two or three times a year she would be flown overseas for a week or two to play other countries. Pretty impressive stuff. I asked her once if her mother used to shout at her to "put that bloody ball away and come and do your homework". It seemed strange to me that she had earned a college degree and worked hard in a male dominated industry and gained a secure, well paid job - and yet the most amazing thing about her life came out of what she loves to do when she's at home, what she's done whenever she can get the chance.

The Piano Man, Billy Joel, was asked what made him decide to become a musician, and he replied that he didn't know how not to be a musician. He maintained that if you have to force yourself to play scales, or practice this week's piece, you're not really a musician at heart. I thought of my brother, who started learning guitar the same time I did, when we were kids back in the seventies...the guitar never really set me on fire, but Bro couldn't put the thing down...every morning, he'd tune the thing before he went to the bathroom...when he got home from school, the first thing he'd do was pick up the guitar and play...for hours....

I don't know if too many other people are like this, but I find it hard to practice something I'm crap at...it's a major gateway moment for me early on in the piece when I find that things aren't going as easily as I'd pictured them in my mind...and whether the skill I want to learn is important enough to me to struggle through the fumbling early stages of a skill to get to at least a base level of competence....or, of course, whether I like doing it, even badly...

I also think of the school swimming champion, whose dad had faithfully taken him from a relatively early age down to the pool at 5:30am to swim laps with the club...the kid seemed to have a natural aptitude for it, and with a lot of encouragement and support from dad, he won a lot of medals and trophies...around 16 years old, dad tells the kid that with the last two years of school coming up, the kid can decide for himself at what level he will compete in swimming the following year. The kid says "Thank God. If I never see another swimming pool for the rest of my life, I'll die happy." Best I know, the kid never endured that black lane line or the smell of chlorine again. It doesn't matter how much fun it looks to other people, I guess - if it's your thing, you'll do whatever you can to get your taste of it regardless of the circumstances. If it's not your thing, you can learn to be competent at it, in a lot of cases we can learn to be pretty good at it...but...we do our best work, we create ART when we do that which we love, and love that which we do....

So, speaking of creating art, among the many activities for which I don't need my arm twisted, two of my absolute favourites are riding motorcycles and drinking beer. Yep, a surprise, I know. I don't do either particularly well, but I'm generally happy in my incompetence and even on the occasions I don't perform well, I often end up with a story to tell. It lead to my last two jobs. True story. I took to frequenting one of the local taverns when I landed in this neighbourhood, as one does who wishes to be recognised as a valued member of the local community. I'd often ride down on the bike or stop in on the way home from a ride around the twisty mountain roads. It's a conversation opener, especially with other people having a similar interest. One day, out of the blue, the bar owner offers me a job bartending, just filling in during the day on slow Sundays. Interestingly, the offer came at a time when a little extra money came in handy but synchronicity is a whole other subject for another day...

I had just enough bartending experience to get by, and overall I had a great time. I got to hang out at the bar with my mates all day, and the only downside was that I couldn't drink with them until my shift was done. The fact that I used to park the bike out front didn't hurt, either...people who knew me would know I was working and drop in; people who didn't know me saw the bike and thought they'd drop in and see if they wanted to get to know me. For someone who had a tenuous grip on what they were doing when they started, I did good business and averaged 20% in tips...made a bunch of money and had fun doing it - and it just fell out of the sky as a consequence of barhopping. I really think the Universe is trying to tell me something here.

Look, this might be blindingly obvious to everyone but me. Maybe I have been slow to notice, I don't know. Maybe I have too much time on my hands these days, but just recently it's surprised me how often I meet people who have made a life of doing what they enjoy most. It's not about financial reward or a lavish lifestyle, although several have been smart enough to combine fun and money...although I wonder whether, say, Tiger can still enjoy a quick back 9 and a few beers on a sunny afternoon at the clubhouse with his mates from across the road... and, after all, there are only just so many paying gigs for mediocre guitarists and trainspotters.

It's more about seeing what it is in life that you get most pleasure from doing - and then organise the rest of your life to give you the greatest amount of time that you can doing that. More people seem to have started believing that's possible. Follow your Bliss. I think there's worse ways to be.

Sportsters: turning riders into mechanics since 1957

2009-10-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

I always wanted a Harley, since I was about 11 or 12 years old. Apart from a very short, sweet sojourn with a Shovelhead in the seventies, I rode more affordable Japanese bikes for close to 30 years....and I promised myself that one day, when I had the time, I would get one and learn how to repair and maintain it myself. The time came last year.

I've been tackling repair and maintenance matters as they come up. I've been learning a lot. I'm proud of the fact that, with very little experience, less aptitude and cheap supermarket quality tools as a base set, I've been able to get and keep my bike running better than it was when I bought it. We're getting to know each other.

One of the best resources I have is an internet forum for Sportster owners, I've had some good advice from them. I like to repay the favour by documenting my misadventures, which might stop someone else encountering the problems that I have. This is what I sent them today. Even if you don't know a wrench from a spanner, you should get the gist of it.

+++

I recently flattened two batteries in a week and after a bit of poking and prodding, I was told that my stator was No Longer Serviceable. Flushed with my successful elimination of gas cap rattle and replacement of rocker cover gaskets last season, I thought it would be a good idea to tackle the replacement myself and get to know the innards of my bike a little better while I was at it. And give you something to read about if, like here, the weather has turned inhospitable.

It was easier than I thought. Tracking backwards and forwards to the auto parts store to buy tools (a multi-meter, large 1/2" drive sockets, 3 separate sets of snap-ring pliers, red loctite, and a few other odds and sods) took more than its fair share of time, but between the HD shop manual, the Haynes manual and the odd website printout, I got it stripped down pretty easy for a novice Harley mechanic.

Thanks to all on the XL-List who offered advice last week about the chipped rotor magnets - I gave the rotor a wipe-over with petrol and a rag and reinstalled it after I installed the new stator, went for a run around the block in increasing circles, stopping to check the battery charge level. Ended up knocking out a brisk 25 miles around the local back roads before the rain hit...so far, the battery is holding it's charge, I'm still trying to figure out how to use my new multi-meter, and once the worst of this rain clears I'll take him out for a spin around the mountain, about 160 miles, and see if anything rattles loose. Once you've taken a primary cover off, it's not hard to see what interesting damage you'd cause if something - like a magnet - went flying about inside there....is this why some people favour open primaries?

Some things I learned, that might be useful to other wannabe mechanics and might save as many trips to the parts/tool store:

a $50 bike/atv lift from your local auto parts store is a good investment if you're going to be doing big, time consuming jobs like this. This job would have been a real pita if I'd had to do it with the bike on the side stand.
when you remove the primary cover, you'll be surprised at how much tranny fluid is left in the primary case after having drained it....quite surprised....rags and sand will soak up a fair bit, but not a bad idea to have a suitably sized container underneath the bike when you loosen that last bolt....
I have learned that kitty-litter is a must-have in the amateur mechanics garage...it costs about twelve bucks for a bucket load that should be a few years supply....soaks up relatively large quantities of petrol, motor oil and transmission fluid in a short period of time.
in order to remove the nuts securing the rotor/front sprocket and the clutch basket/rear sprocket, you need to stop the shafts rotating. If I hadn't just told you that, you'd realise it pretty quick. It's not immediately obvious how to stop the shafts rotating. Or, really, obvious after quite a while spent staring at it. Time to consult the oracle.
as an aside, both these nuts are torqued on there pretty well, and as you will learn when you re-assemble they have been secured with red loctite. You can pretty much guarantee you're going to need a long breaker bar. I use my big torque wrench - it puts 'em on, I figure it must be close to perfect for taking them off.
all that you'll get from the HD manual, with understated simplicity, is "Remove the engine sprocket nut"...well, it's the 'How' that we're really looking for, so no real help there. I've worked out that these guys really just don't want you working on one of *their motorcycles unless you're suitably qualified. HD manuals are a necessary evil, in my view, but a Haynes manual to supplement it has been worth every penny of the $25 I spent on it. Anyway, the HD manual does refer to a special tool, a Sprocket Locking Link (Part #HD-38362), but there is no immediately obvious picture or description of the tool or how it is used. Back to the drawing board.
the Haynes manual suggests reinstalling the gear shifter, putting the bike in gear, and applying the rear brake with the back tyre on the ground, which will lock the engine while you loosen the nut.....this is a cruel hoax....I reinstalled the lever and shifted up into second gear; sat on the bike which was still upright on the bike lift, braced the rear wheel with a wooden block, then put my right foot on the brake while holding the 2' torque wrench and socket on the engine sprocket nut with my left hand while controlling the bars with my right hand and trying to stop the bike falling off the jack with my left foot while holding the socket onto the nut with my left knee.........
in anticipation that you will attempt this and fail, Haynes have a contingency plan: remove the sparkplugs, find TDC compression, back off 1/8 of a turn then fill the compression chamber with thin nylon cord, inserted into the spark-plug hole. Once full, you can then easily rotate the nut with the piston jammed up against the nylon cord.
you can't really imagine what it's like to feed 48 feet of thin nylon cord an inch at a time into a spark-plug hole, it's one of those things you have to experience for yourself. I experienced it for myself five times. I'm no quitter. A little more each time, but never quite enough to stop the piston moving through its arc. If there is a trick to this, I didn't get it. I did get a smile at Haynes advising "Be sure the end of the cord is still outside of the engine" before turning the nut. I don't know about you, but I get an instantaneous mental picture of a guy who has just watched his compression chamber swallow the last inch of the retrievable end of a large ball of twine....enough people must have done it to make it important to issue the warning....
enough messing around with manuals, time to CONSULT THE XL-List ARCHIVES! Not more than a few minutes later, a 4" brass door hinge (#HD-38362) is installed between the two sprockets, and the nut is off.
the nuts are different sizes. The one for the engine sprocket and the one for the clutch sprocket. You'd think they would be the same size, really, they're only a few inches apart in there. Not many people have a 1 1/8" socket in their 42-piece Bi-Mart socket set. I didn't. They cost six bucks each. So, I'd glanced quickly at the two nuts on the way out the door to the parts store and figured they would be the same size, but I've never really been good at that stuff. Anyway, once you get the front sprocket nut off, you quickly realise that you need a 1 3/16" socket to remove the clutch basket nut.
it's left hand drive, that's why the 4" hinge works both ways.
the nuts are recessed, so I couldn't measure them accurately with a ruler before I went to the parts store. I ended up getting a piece of stiff cardboard and slowly cutting it down until it was exactly the same width as the nut, then measured the card. I doubt I invented this idea, but it worked for me both times and saved me from buying the wrong size sockets.
you have to route the plug end of the lead from the stator through the side of the primary case and across the top alongside the starter then down through the inside of the cam cover and along the right lower frame rail to plug into the regulator on the front downtube, well...all I can say is that it's easier said than done...I tried tying a long piece of thin nylon cord (I had a bunch just lying around the garage) to the old plug, and pulling it back through the primary so I could pull the new lead & plug back through with the cord (another Haynes suggestion). This didn't work well. The old plug just kept getting caught somewhere up underneath where I couldn't see or feel. Even when I jacked the bike up and lay underneath with a flashlight, I couldn't see what the problem was. I ended up cutting the wire off the old stator just past the sealing plug, then braided the wires around the plug from the new stator, wrapped it tight with a lot of electrical tape until it resembled a small torpedo, then drenched it in WD-40...and pulled the old plug down and through the front, pulling the new plug behind it. Messy but effective.
when you're almost done replacing everything, there's a point at which you'll encounter an internal spring retaining clip that holds the adjusting screw assembly in place. You'll know the one I'm talking about when you find it. It was pretty easy to get out, using a screwdriver as a lever. It's a little harder to get back in. If you don't own a pair of proper spring clip pliers, may I suggest you purchase some...and pay the extra couple of dollars to get robust, good quality ones...on the third trip back to Schuck's, I got the big, one piece pliers - I could not, for the life of me, get those spindly removable tips to withstand the spring tension without bending or breaking....
now I come to think of it, the cost of the new tools was more than the cost of the new part....although I believe I saved several hundred bucks by doing the job myself.
don't forget to refill the primary when you're done. A long skinny funnel (I use an empty Bloody Mary Mix bottle) is a help. I'd only changed the primary fluid a few hundred miles ago, so I saved it and reused that. I note that this means that the primary now has 4 ounces less than it had in it before, the 4 'secret' ounces from the primary going on the garage floor, so for the sake of $5 or $6 I'll trundle down to the dealer tomorrow and buy a quart, which will be enough to top it up and have enough left to do a complete change next season.

I get the impression that having to replace a stator isn't uncommon. It's a bit of a time consuming pain in the arse to do, but well worth the effort. Thanks again to the list, without whom I'd be super-gluing magnets back together and waiting for the special tool to arrive in the mail.

Jack the nomad
2001 XLH1200, tax paid

NOMAD'S PEA & HAM SOUP

2009-09-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

I was talking with my son about stew the other day. Where he is, spring is just starting after a long, wet Australian winter, and here in America we're starting to see Autumn...I can't recall if I've mentioned it, but I like the Autumn here, the sting gone out of the sun, long enough days and pleasant evenings, just before the leaves start to turn...then we get a real winter, snow and all...comfort food season...

Anyway, I like stews...sometimes they started off as soups, they might officially be called soups, but really what I cook are all probably more like stews, given my own criteria that if it has more lumps than juice, it's stew....I started making them way back in the dark ages (before microwave ovens ) when I'd be home alone on school holidays mid year and needed something simple, cheap and easy but good for you.....no, it would be too obvious...

As the years have passed, I developed a few favourites that have stood the test of time...my philosophy from the word go has always been that nothing should take longer to prepare (ie, peeling and chopping) than it does to eat...I clean as I go, I love being able to see something all the way to "Simmer for a really long time" and have a clean kitchen...time to sit on your arse with a pint and smell the food cooking....

My young bloke asked me to send him the recipe for my pea and ham soup, which was an after-rugby Saturday lunchtime staple...for 6 or 7 years I took him to junior rugby on Saturday mornings all season, and then it was home to my place for a hot shower and a bowl of stew...always served with a buttered crusty roll, with real butter...and pints of Guinness, if that's to your taste...red wine goes well too, a nice heavy shiraz or a cab sav that you can chew and then spit out the skins....but I like it with Guinness best...

Meals can be something special. A lot of my best memories are based around food, with good wine and good friends...and it's been nice while I type this out for a son who's all the way around the world, to find myself smiling and thinking about all those Saturdays standing in the sun and the wind and the rain, steam on our breath, waiting all match for that one blindside pass to the wing and the winning try in the corner....then home and hot showers, rolls, Guinness and a couple of bowls of steaming pea and ham soup....life doesn't get much better than that, so I thought I'd share.

Good eatin'

NOMAD'S PEA AND HAM SOUP

Ingredients:

500 - 750g 'boiling bacon', diced or 1 - 2 bacon hocks or a bag of bacon bones

1 bag dry green boiling peas or split peas

3 - 4 medium potatoes, white or yellow brushed, diced big

1 large sweet yellow onion, diced big enough

3 - 4 cloves garlic peeled & crushed, or equivalent...the stuff in jars is alright and it keeps forever. Avoid the powder.

1 tsp salt

Worcestershire sauce to taste

Tabasco to taste

4 - 5 litres water

Method:

Put all ingredients in large pot.

Bring to boil.

Reduce heat to low.

Simmer for 3 -4 hours until it tastes good

Tip: If using bacon hocks, take out the skin once it peels away from the bone. Otherwise, it's like leaving the teabag in the cup. Except it's fat. Throw it away.

RETIREMENT ISN'T WORKING

2009-09-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

"The work is hard
The pay is small
So take your time
And sod them all"
- engraved on a china plate on my father's wall

Work was pretty much always a means to an end for me. That end was generally money, although I've been known to take jobs because of their location, to get experience at something so I could get a job doing something else and, on rare occasions, because I enjoyed the work. But mostly it was money and what money could buy, and work was the unpleasant crap you had to do to get the money. If you were lucky enough to be bright or talented, you could make more money for each hour, but I never really could think of a job that sounded like it would be better than sitting on a tropical beach somewhere, with blond chicks in bikinis bringing me champagne on ice......sorry, where was I?

I remember dreaming of retirement when I was still in high school. I read stories of men who started out selling oranges from a barrow at 13 and ended up being billionaire owners of supermarket chains...I heard of people retiring at 35, of people becoming millionaires in their twenties.

I was pretty good at mental arithmetic as a kid. I knew how much a million dollars was. In cash, it's a thousand dollars a week for twenty years. And they say you can't retire on that? Try me...

Success seemed like a natural progression for me. I'd known I was smarter than the average bear from an early age. I didn't feel particularly gifted, and I was crap at anything that involved hand-eye co-ordination or any activity associated with the generation of sweat. But I can't recall a time in my early years when I didn't take it for granted that I would attend University and roll into some very well paid job that allowed me to live the life of luxury to which I'd quickly become accustomed. The dreams of an eleven year old kid...the downside was that no-one - at least no-one I was prepared to listen to - wised me up that work was involved. I knew I had talent. I knew I was bright. The education systems in two different English-speaking countries taught me to be brilliant at passing exams. Once, on a good day, I scored 148 on an official IQ test. Ask me to catch a fish or change the tube on a bicycle and I'd have floundered.

My own belief in my ability was sufficiently confirmed by secondary education, however, and I had that mental picture of the hammock on the beach and the champagne....I would have taken up smoking just so I could light a cigar with a $50 note...

School was mundane, I was smart enough to be able to cruise and still get decent grades...through high school, I had a different dream every week of what I wanted to do when I finished school for good...travelling loomed large as an idea, but what to do to pay for it was a blank wall...when I'd started high school, guys leaving the senior years were still getting drafted to go to Vietnam; by 1975 and my senior years, the war was over, conscription was over, the best of the hippie era was still hanging around, the sexual revolution had switched from free love to porn and swinging in the suburbs, and pot and acid were making way for speed and coke.....there was a darker edge to the world after the innocence and naivete of the 60s, and Life was just starting to open up for a kid in his mid-teens....ambition? ask me later....a lot later.....to cut a long story short, I cruised all the way to a bare fall-over-the-line pass in my University entry exams, gave away the whole idea of higher education as a bad one, and took a job loading clay sewer pipes on and off trucks... I learned to drive a car, a motorbike, forklift and four ton truck within a year and a half...for over 30 years now, I've looked back on that time, that job, as a watershed... one of those Sliding Doors moments when the path I could have taken took a sharp turn into a whole different life...by the time came around to try the Uni exams again, I was too used to the freedom and to the money.

Well, for a kid who had always been soft and clumsy I took to manual labour like a man possessed...after 3 months, I took up rugby union and played my first senior game the day before my 18th birthday...on the way out to my first game, I asked a mate what a 'second row forward' was supposed to do - "Do what the older blokes tell ya. And if you see a bloke from the other side with the ball, knock him over and kick shit out of him until he lets it go"...I played two seasons, ended up playing men's A Grade alongside ex-internationals, and that was the only rule I ever knew...

The die was cast...I was born-again blue-collar...I worked semi-skilled physical jobs for another 5 years, until my first child announced her impending arrival a few months hence. I dusted off my brain, and went back to being paid for what I knew rather than for what I did...in what could be seen as synchronicity, I got my old bosses job at the sewer pipe yard....less than a year later, I'd moved to the Big City and got me a collar and tie job, and notched the hamster wheel into 4th gear....

I've changed jobs a lot. Regardless of what field it is, as soon as I reach a level of competence that I think is sufficient, the interest factor starts to plummet...in my experience, we learn 80% of all we need to know pretty damn quick if we put the effort in...and in the vast majority of cases, in my book, 80% is plenty good enough to get the job done.

I've never aimed for 100%, not that I can remember...I recognised a long time ago that if Perfect was my bench mark in life, I'd spend a lot of that life being frustrated, angry and disappointed....at University, a 70% mark on a paper will get you a Distinction; 80% gets you a High Distinction...it's the professorial equivalent of awarding a gold star or an elephant stamp on the back of your hand...for all that I've read that adults and kids learn differently, I disagree - you stick 30 adults in a class room and they will revert to acting like school kids before lunchtime on Day One...I digress...so, if I get a 90% for anything in life, I think I'm doing extra-ordinarily well. To me 90% is more than most of us are capable of achieving on a regular basis, even on an occasional basis to be quite honest; frankly, there are times when you'd be happy if you could get staff to turn up....so, from where I'm sitting, once we have achieved 80% of our ability to do a job perfectly, it will take 4 times more effort from here on in to learn and develop that last 20%, and I often question the opportunity cost of being an expert....being an expert isn't something I think I've ever aspired to (although I guess I've had some expertise thrust upon me....but that's a whole other story...)....bottom line, when I get to 80% of my potential in a particular job, that's as close as I need to be, I'm competent, and from here on in every day is going to be pretty much the same....in other words, it's time to move on to something else I know nothing about, yet...that's just me...

It's only been recently that I've been turning my head to this all over again...after a few decades of personal finances booming and busting and booming again, back a couple of years ago I made The Big Decision, the one where I finally put my money where my mouth was and got off the hamster wheel..my kids were grown, owning my own home again wasn't that important to me...so, for those who came in late, I put everything I needed into a backpack, boxed a few sentimental favourites, sold everything else, gave away what I couldn't sell, and flew away...

These days, I have everything I need and I don't need much...I have enough put away so I don't have to sit in the dark eating dog food when I'm in my 80s, but that's a few years off yet....my home renovation skills allow me a roof over my head and all the food I need....but I could do with some pocket money, you know? And there's the rub - after so many years of resenting work as an intrusion on my time, looking forward to an early retirement or at least semi-retirement, and being able to do a lot more of what I want, more often - I'm finding that I enjoy life more when I've got something to do, a reason to get out of bed every so often, a challenge to put myself to and maybe learn something, something new...

I find that I enjoy making things more than I used to....I take my time more, and try and do it right the first time...it's for me now, and I have the time....I've never enjoyed gardening so much...I've never enjoyed gardening, really....and after years of believing that I had the mechanical aptitude of a goldfish, I am actually cultivating the ability to take things apart, fix or replace the broken bits, and put them back together again...I've been riding motorbikes since the mid 70s, mostly Hondas and Kawasakis....I would have been happy to learn how to fix them, but they just never really broke down....hmm...well, last year I bought a Harley Davidson, and things have changed a bit...I've done more motorcycle mechanics in the last 14 or 15 months than in the previous 35 years put together. And I love it. "Sportsters - turning riders into mechanics since 1957" Harleys are very simple to work on. They have to be.

It's something special to take a broken motorcycle, work out what's wrong with it, take it apart and put it back together - and then demonstrate your confidence in your work by taking it down the street for a ride that's fast enough to kill you if you forgot to tighten up something important....it's been a late addition to my enjoyment of motorcycling, but not too late to be put to good measure...

You'll see that at the time of posting, I'm currently wading through 'Shop Class As Soulcraft' by Matt Crawford...his writing style isn't grabbing me, but he and I are on the same wavelength - life is about more than just what's in your mind. There are few things more deeply satisfying than the physical creation of something, whether it be a quilt, a basket full of fresh vegetables, or an armchair...it's a feeling that our high paid desk jobs lack....there's a lot of things I could turn my hand to right now, and I'm as sure as I can be that I could go back to my old life and pretty much pick up where I left off....but I can't think of any good reasons to do that....give me a job that doesn't take up all my time, and pays me enough to pay for gas and put a bit aside for parts, coffee and hotel rooms....preferably a job that, at the end of the day, I can look at something and think "I made that".

Yes, that would do nicely.

FORREST'S FEATHER, A NERVOUS NOMAD AND THE RESURRECTION OF A WORK ETHIC

2009-09-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

People ask me how on earth I ended up here, in the big timber country of North America. My son, who is living in New York, has the same experience, he can't understand why people ask "What the hell are you doing in Brooklyn?" Locations that he and I find incredibly exotic, foreign and interesting are seen by many locals as a place for coming from rather than going to...we had a 3-way 'conversation' on instant messenger the other night, he, his brother and me...across a 15 hour time difference, it was a lot of fun...and significant for me to see how well they'd learned from some of my mistakes at their age...I was in my forties before I was as well travelled as they are in their early twenties....all of which has had me thinking over the last few days, how different my life is now in every way from where I came from, from where I was five years ago....how grateful I am to have stepped out of the mainstream, where I had never really felt very comfortable, and made a life of being a wandering sage....if I could only play the lute, I'd have it made...

It's about five years since I stopped planning and started throwing the dice. In 2004 I had a remarkable job for a while, one of those rare jobs where you looked forward to getting to work every day...conducting a review of emergency preparedness for a major metropolitan area...it was fascinating, and I spent my days interviewing emergency service managers and local heads of government and industry, attending local planning sessions and an interesting anti-terrorist exercise at an abandoned factory complex...not many people get to see that kind of thing...and I realised quite suddenly that this job had fallen completely unheralded into my lap...the position hadn't previously existed, and I barely knew that the field existed...and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the best things that had happened to me over the previous year or two had all just fallen from the sky - often in spite of my planning rather than because of it...I have generally been against the whole idea of Fate and Destiny most of my life, but I started reading more about astrology, synchronicity, Wicca, chance, witchcraft, chaos, spirit guides, shamanism and Norse mythology, to name a few...anything that had a take on what, if anything, effects the path we end up on - and whether or not we can or should try and influence what the Universe has in mind...assuming it does...it's an argument that's easy to get lost in...I think...

I moved from the city to the Australian Outback for a while....after 35 years living in Australia, I got to see for the first time remote Aboriginal Communities across the Top End, from Broome to the Rock....very few white Australians have or will ever see a desert Community, and few want to... to a big-city white boy like me, it was like landing on Mars...I fell in love with the country and a whole new world started opening up....the money was pretty good too, and there was nothing much to spend it on...the idea of stepping further out into the void was becoming more attractive...

I started opening up to the idea that somehow, something had been presenting me with the same sorts of opportunities over and over again...and that although I couldn't see where it might lead, I did have the strong feeling that it had all been, and still is, leading somewhere...and although I don't appear to have any better idea now than I did then, it's an interesting life, notwithstanding that it's not a particularly secure one...in a way akin to quitting smoking, I just decided to forget to worry...so far, it seems to be working...for the most part...

I love the movie 'Forrest Gump', I must have watched it dozens of times....I love the symbology of the white feather, drifting in and out of all sorts of situations, lighter than a duck on a pond, unawed by the immediacy of the moment and unencumbered by plans, present but unaffected....simply, like Forrest himself, floating on the current...it all seemed very Zen to me at the time, and it's become a practice that's served me well...

I look at anchors differently now. I used to imagine a house, in the middle of nowhere, with a verandah all the way around...large Balinese day beds overlooking a body of water - lake, river, even the ocean. I'm not that fussed...peace and quiet and lots of trees...when I think it through, though, as I've said more than once to Fred, if I won the lottery all that would really change for me would be the view...sure, I'd love to see the view from the balcony of a stone cottage overlooking the Mediterranean, but I can guarantee that sooner or later someone would ask "You could live in America, why do you want to live here ?"....hey, don't get me wrong...if you were thinking of naming me in your estate, well, I won't knock it back...but money doesn't always buy you much security, not really....I always feel sorry for the poor buggers who invest their retirement savings in one basket and lose the lot...or those who wait until their sixties to travel and find they're too frail...for five years now, I've spent every penny I've earned....with the exception of my bike, I can still fit everything I need in my backpack, Matilda...yes, I know it's corny and predictable, but it was that or a volleyball called Wilson.... she's a redhead, for the record...

I don't believe in sitting on the couch, bitching about how crap your life is, how no-one could possibly understand how bad you've got it. After the first time - and even then, only if you're buying the drinks - no-one really wants to hear it. I am particularly annoyed by those who see the gate of the cage open before them yet refuse to walk free...I have nothing personal against those more settled, the Cains of the world, to each their own...but, to me, no matter what it is in life, like it, learn from it, learn to like it, or change it...don't whine about what you've chosen...at some level, we have to take responsibility for the particular type of harm of which we choose to put ourselves in the way...

So, this past couple of days I've been getting rattled - I've had a relatively small but clear reminder that, as a direct result of casting in my lot with chance, I'm no longer the master of my own destiny...and it's easy to forget why and how I signed up for this nomadic gig in the first place...a short-term, part-time job that I have been enjoying immensely, has just come to an end, albeit not unexpectedly...a manual arts job that was a great learning experience in a field I want to learn more about...I made a few dollars to buy the odd trinket and I got to make and repair things with my hands, an endeavour I've rarely shown a lot of aptitude for, but to which I'm becoming more and more attached...and it's come to an end, now, and the ground under my feet feels less steady...

I don't need much money these days, I'm cheaper to keep than I've ever been...and the weird thing is, despite my long bouts with ergophobia, I've realised that I actually do enjoy having work to do, regardless of how much I need money...that's something I didn't expect...a great deal of the work I've done in the course of my life has been a means to an end, and I've never had the same job for more than a couple of years...when others around me aspired to promotion, I aspired to win the lottery...and now, all of a sudden, I'm unemployed again, my nest egg is still a few years away, and the cash in my wallet will only last so long....

That lurch in the deck every so often almost always leads to bigger and better things, but it can be scary at the time...the less trodden path means less help, and very little certainty....this morning, the first of September, I sat with my coffee and my treasured old 49ers coffee mug - a favourite portable anchor - looking out my freshly painted window at the gentle sunlight drying this morning's light rain, relishing the onset of Autumn, a season barely noticed in Australia...I have two full northern Autumns behind me now, and I'm more prepared...the house and the garden are better prepared to withstand the cold and wet, and they look like someone cares about them now...there's a different feeling in the air...and I stop and think about my job having ended, and that I'm going to have to be a little more careful with what money I have left...I think about getting into it tomorrow and getting my bike ready for one more long ride before the cold gets crazy.....and I think about an ordinary English kid who lived in Australia for most of his life and wonder how on Earth he ended up here in America, looking forward to the Autumn...and I smile and wonder what's going to happen next...no doubt the Universe really is unfolding as it should...

TRAINING THE BLACK DOG

2009-08-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking of some of the techniques that I've come up with to help me identify when I'm heading for a bad day, and how I try and turn them back. They may or may not work for you, hopefully they'll give you food for thought.

· Remember the acronym HALT

o everything seems darker when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. When you are all four, it does take a conscious effort to keep the negative thoughts at bay.

· Negative self talk

o stamp on this as soon as you realise you're doing it. It helps no-one to continually call themselves names, or dwell on their negative qualities: and the reality is that most negative self talk is garbage, it's simply not true. We have all made mistakes, we have all done things we regret, but that doesn't mean that doing bad things is our natural state. Depression, or The Black Dog as Winston Churchill used to call his, is a liar and a thief, and it tries to convince you that one mistake is evidence of a lifelong course of conduct. It also conveniently disregards all the good things we've done. Whenever I catch myself indulging in negative self talk (and it is an indulgence, and one that you can't afford), I say to myself - and sometimes out loud when I'm alone - "NO I'M NOT! I'M A GOOD PERSON WHO TRIES HARD!"

o negative self-talk is insidious and spiteful and you deserve better. Stop it in its tracks each and every time you realise that you're doing it. Concentrate on the donut, not the hole.

· Illogical anger

o it is always a flag for me when I start getting pissed off for completely irrational reasons, like getting angry at inanimate objects. I sometimes amaze myself at the venom I can muster for an object which, in some dark recess of my noggin, appears to have manifested the ability to make cunning plans to deliberately piss me off. It's an indication of how ridiculous our logic can become when we find ourselves tempted to break things because they won't do what we want them to. I seem to find that this applies equally to complex machines like computers and dvd players as it does to hammers. Those damn hammers. I know they're doing it deliberately to piss me off and make me look bad. Who would have thought that wood and metal could be so devious.

· Denial of your good qualities

o I know I'm heading into a bad place when I start to think or say "I've never been anywhere or done anything"...yep, it is not unknown for me to look back on my half century and start beating myself up because I haven't achieved as much as Brad Pitt or the Dalai Lama...it takes little effort - none, really - to identify people who seem to have done more than we have...although, surprisingly, that black dog tries to block us from remembering the 80% of the world's population that cannot even dream of the wonderful and interesting things that we have been able to achieve...and we conveniently neglect to make the same connection regarding our relevant worth when the object of our envy falls spectacularly from grace.

o Churchill slipped heavily into depression in the 1950s. I once saw an interview with a friend of his who used to drop in and say howdy, and when he asked Churchill why he was so down, Churchill replied that he had wasted his life and had never achieved very much. When the friend reminded him that he had saved England from invasion and was instrumental in the Allied victory in WWII, Churchill replied "Anyone could have done that". When you find yourself denying, internally or aloud, that you are a good person, stand up and take action - it's the black dog whispering lies in your ear.

· Avoiding solutions

o there's a great dialogue in the book The Road Less Travelled between the author, Scott Peck, who was an Army psychiatrist, and a sergeant with a drinking problem that's damaging his career. In essence, Peck asks the sergeant why he drinks so much, even though it's getting him in trouble; the guy replies that there is nothing else to do in Okinawa, where he's stationed. Peck then lists one thing after another that the guy could do instead of drink, and every time the sergeant comes up with an excuse why they aren't doable, all of which are bogus. Recognise when you're doing this, and cut it off at the pass.

· Don't forget the physical. Mental, emotional and spiritual issues can be complex and longstanding, and can take quite some time to sort out. When it comes to putting yourself back in the driver's seat of your own life, the quickest and simplest way to regain a feeling of control is to do something physical. That can be as simple as making yourself a cup of tea or having a shower. Sometimes you have to eat the chocolate elephant one small mouthful at a time.

· Believe in a higher power. Whether you believe in the christian God, or mother nature or destiny or the spirits of your viking ancestors, it is always a comfort to believe that there is a metaphysical force at work in your life that has your best interests at heart. None of us - religious visions, near death experiences or watching City Of Angels on acid notwithstanding - can know for sure what is really going on behind the scenes while we are living this mortal life - that's just simply not how it works...when it comes down to it, the detail doesn't really matter. Something, or perhaps several somethings, is looking after us personally and is trying to help us get along. I no longer believe as I once did that Jesus is the one and only answer, no offence intended...but whatever name or form you want to give He/She/It/Them, I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson - "For all that I have seen, I trust the Creator for all that I have not seen"...and churches can be really cool places to just sit and think things through, they often have a good, safe feeling to them. And they're usually cool inside on hot days. Maybe that's no co-incidence.

The Free Man

2009-07-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking. He can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool…but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”

- G.K.CHESTERTON

"The only pleasure I get in life" : Mid Life Re-assessment Of Priorities #257

2009-07-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

After 36 years, 328 500 cigarettes and over $90 000, I stopped smoking 3 weeks ago today and haven't looked back. I've had a love-hate relationship with cigarettes for most of my life, quit 3 times for over a year and just kept going back to 'em...last time I quit would have been over a decade ago now, and I've probably got through several hundred dollars in patches, lozenges and gum since then, all to no avail and within hours I've been smoking again. I've said for years that i love smoking, that if it didn't kill you I'd smoke a hundred a day. I think I meant it at the time. I switched to rolling my own back in '02 when I was low on money, and that helped...I smoked less, spent less, and enjoyed it more...but as the years kept rolling by, as years are wont to do, I wasn't quite as sure as I'd been in the past that I could "quit whenever I wanted to"...

I've been pretty happy about turning 50...for me, it's a lot like a badge of rank, you've paid some dues, you've earned some scars and rited a few passages, and unless you're real lazy or completely brain-dead, there's half a chance that you may have picked up a little wisdom along the way....I had seen 50 coming for a while, and it just didn't phase me - I'd thought a few years ago that it might - the closer it got, the more it looked like a reasonable impersonation of a rare kind of watershed....time to step over a line or two and set myself up to enjoy the hell out of the next few decades.

I thought a lot about what I wanted to give myself for my birthday, what I really wanted to mark the occasion...some were semi-reasonable, others were "If I won the lottery" stuff...I chose Life...yeah, it sounds corny, but it was the answer that just jumped out in front of the headlights and wouldn't get out of the way...

It occurred to me that I don't have much of a Bucket List, really, not any more...ticked all the standard family/mortgage/career boxes, several times over, got the three greatest kids in the world to show for it....and been lucky enough to get a lot of the other stuff done, too....I've been accused of having a mid-life crisis since I was in my late twenties...it's not a term that works for me...none of the stuff I've done over the last 25 years has been done with a crisis mentality, not from where I've been standing - it just took me a little longer getting around to some things than others, that's all there's been to it...the bikes, the tattoos, the travelling, the ending and beginning of relationships, sex, drugs, rock n' roll...shit, I've been doing all that stuff pretty much consistently since the '70s....there's a few places in the world I'd still like to see, with Nepal, Africa and South America at the top of the list...they cost more money than I have right now, so travel for the next couple of years looks like being road trips around the US, Canada and Mexico on the Harley....one of these days, I'll get around to learning the guitar or the harmonica....probably....I wouldn't mind brushing up my French and German, maybe a little more Thai....it would be nice to be at basic conversational level in something other than my native tongue...now I live in America maybe I should learn Spanish....I wouldn't mind taking up tai chi again, it's been a while and the local high school has classes.....but overall, I've pretty much done everything I have dreamed of since I was old enough to realise that you can make your own dreams come true...from here on in, it's all gravy, really....

Before I left Australia in early 2007, I packed my most important treasures in cardboard boxes and left them with my long-suffering daughter to keep an eye on until I sent for them, if and when I ever settled down in one place...I had them sea-mailed here to the States earlier this year, and the last one arrived in mid June...in among the usual detritus that I'd forgotten I had, was a book that a friend sent me when they moved across continents themselves, 3 1/2 years ago...the book was Allen Carr's 'Easy Way To Stop Smoking'...I'd been meaning to get around to reading it, and it was weird that I had chosen, out of all the dozens of books I sold or gave away back in 2007, to keep this one....

'Giving up smoking' hasn't really been very high on the To-Do list for the last 10 years, although it's been there....for as long as I can remember, I've thought that 70 wasn't a bad age to live to...besides being our biblically allotted three-score-and-ten, I figure if you haven't got it done by 70, you probably ain't going to....and the idea of being old and infirm doesn't really do it for me, regardless of how many more years I'm around, I don't want to be sick...so, I figured on maybe making 75 tops, which is why when I hit 50 I saw it as being the 2/3 waypoint, which made it an even bigger milestone....and I think that's when I realised that if the home stretch in front of me offers as much chaos and opportunity as the last quarter century has, I'd really better think of getting back in shape a bit....it's just time, you know?

I started the book before I finished unpacking. I loved that the first instruction was NOT to quit smoking while reading the book. Big fat bonus, I put my feet up and smoked like a chimney the rest of the evening. I had a whole box of Nicorettes, half an old pack of lozenges, and a handful of old nicotine patches lying around the house, so I figured WTF?, I might as well read the book and think about quitting in the next week or two....well, I'm not going to pre-empt the book, but if you're really thinking of not smoking again for the rest of your lucky days, well, all I can say is that this book had me stopped in the day and a half it took me to read it....for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to think of a whole bunch of stuff I'm going to be able to do that I know I couldn't do if I kept smoking....

Anyway, it's time for lunch...I bought a thick cut piece of sirloin, which I've just fried up with some onions and eggs, and I'm gonna wash the whole thing down with the 6-pack of Heineken I grabbed at the supermarket this morning....I've heard it's bad for you to make too many lifestyle changes at once, and I'm taking that advice seriously....

Bad Ju-ju and a eulogy for Billy Mays

2009-06-29T22:11:00.000-07:00

June and July have never been simple or easy for me. I've had more relationship break-ups, major house moves and general common-or-garden kerfuffles in the middle of the year, in both Hemispheres, than at any other time. Might be part of the reason I like Christmas so much...

Well, blow me down, what a hell of a month this one's been...the ground was laid back around March (yeah, I shoulda bewared the Ides, but I didn't bother to read the instructions until the thing started vibrating unnaturally, it could have happened to anyone), when we firmed up the dates for the long awaited visit of #1 Son...as fathers and sons go, we've had our share of moments, good and bad, and were both looking forward to a few weeks together with hope and happiness and some butterflies that all would go well...

...so, to cut a long story down to a hanging point, we had a ball; as road trips go (and I've had a few) this was senfuckingsational and so say all of us...and two days short of June, he'd gone off to the very same Big Apple of which I'd told him stories at my knee in decades past...and lo, the Sun penetrated further into the constellation of Gemini and the celestial bucket poured forth...

In the last 30-odd days or so:

· #1 son has moved on to NYC, hostelled in The Village and Harlem, started work, got an apartment in Brooklyn, and we've talked lots...this is all a Very Good Thing;

· I quit work on June 1st, because, well, it was time for me to move on from that job;

· I've re-arranged half the furniture in the house and created an office and a craft room out of 'spare rooms';

· with the help of a mate, I've finished painting the craft room and close to all the outside of the house - we sanded the window frames today, tomorrow we paint them and a job that's been 2 years in the making is finally come to its fruition;

· I got too close to a mate's dogs playing, and was lucky not to lose a finger tip...and for the first time since I packed it, the Travel First Aid kit suddenly paid for itself...the infection is under control, and despite being denied the sutures it deserved, the wound is slowly healing...man, have you ever seen hydrogen peroxide sizzle like that?;

· the strawberries, raspberries and lettuces in my first vegetable garden since the early 90s became, as the actress said to the Archbishop, good enough to eat;

· I got the Green Man tattoo that I've been considering since last Northern Fall, courtesy of my three kids clubbing together for my 50th birthday (it's all about the pain - the ink is just a souvenir);

· my boxes of Stuff that I packed back in 2007 finally arrived in staggered formation after 3 months At Sea, creating a feeling of numerous Christmases come at once and, it must be said, something of a Wherethefuckdoweputallthisshitordowecallitstuff moment that was ultimately resolved with the help of a receptive attic;

· my parents each turned 71 (Happy Birthday again!!!);

· I stopped smoking after 35 years at two packs a day;

· I've made contact with a dozen or more mates from High School that I haven't seen or heard from since 1976, it's been a hoot and it's wonderful to hear of all that everyone has been up to and no real surprise that there's a lot that hasn't changed;

· made some friends and let some go, sat, thought, stood up, spun round, fell over, got up again, made some plans, forgot a few others, welcomed the summer, took a gorgeous feral kitty and her 3 babies to the Humane Society's 'no kill' shelter (give it a rest, you'll have people thinking I've gone soft), and a bunch of other shit, big and small, that have slipped my chaotic mind for now, and...

Some icons died, all in the space of a few days...he may not be as well remembered outside the USA, but Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's sidekick on The Tonight Show, was not unknown to night owls and cultural anthropologists elsewhere in the world...I remember McMahon, America's answer to Bert Newton. RIP to him and the variety show concept that gave a lot of fun to a lot of people over the years, and of which he was a pioneer...

Farrah's death was not completely unexpected but sad as hell...I was 16 when her red bathing suit poster came out, and the things I didn't do to that woman in my dreams aren't worth relating in this august forum...she was 29 at the time and, thankfully for her fledging marriage to Lee Majors, blissfully unaware of my spotty adolescent yet hopefully enticing fantasies...Farrah Fawcett Majors was an icon of health, hair, teeth and sexuality, a postmodern Marilyn who helped define the Seventies and pave the way for the shoulder padded, coke fuelled decade to come...talking of which...

Michael I'm Bad Jackson...Michael Jackson was my age...unlike many of his more recent fans, I watched him singing 'ABC' in 1970, at the age of 11, and thought "what's he got that I haven't?"....you know, apart from talent and personality...I am often fascinated by power and fame, although I don't covet them - too much like hard work, in my opinion - and Michael Jackson was one of those artists, like Prince and a few others, of whom I could recognise their talent even though I really thought their music was shit...and, as with the Bee Gees, became a falsetto parody of their early work and a stark reminder of the dark side of The Dream...I'm with Ron White - I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't have let my kids sleep over at Neverland...and I am also sorry for the bugger, y'know? I'd occasionally trade my life, but not for his...Michael Jackson made Elvis look functional, and outlived him by 8 years...maybe we should be grateful that The King was spared that fate.

Then, yesterday, there was the unexpected death of Billy Mays. What can you say about Billy Mays? I hated his ads with a passion. Upon breaching America's shores in 2007, there was much of this fascinating nation to which I was unused...infomercials weren't one of them...I hate the self-styled 'pitch men' with a dark and violent passion...in Australia, I often satisfied my homicidal inclination toward "Television direct-response advertisement salesmen " by imagining Gerry Harvey, Big Kev and numerous other nails-down-the-chalk-board spruikers duct taped in a cellar and played, over and over and over and over, their own ads and finally let loose on each other....waterboarding is a very conspicuous demonstration that the CIA lacks imagination...

So, again, what does one do when someone at whom one has screamed "Fuck Off !!" and been restrained from throwing the remote through the screen for but one bright shining moment of blessed relief from "and wait!! there's more!!".....what do you do when he dies, the same age as you?.....this wasn't a guy who had incredible musical talent beaten out of him at a young age; wasn't a drop-dead gorgeous big-haired model whose time had come and got their lucky break on an international blockbusting TV series; and didn't die being remembered as the cosy, familiar old sidekick face of an American television legend for more than a generation....

I read one of the first press releases of Billy Mays' death, and someone was quoted as saying that Billy had a big heart and had helped a lot of people realise their dreams. I don't doubt it. No, seriously. Like many of us, I had a rush of blood to the head in the 70s and 80s, an era when Dale Carnegie had been reincarnated by corporate America, guys like Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins were killing the pig, and JR Ewing personified the credo that if money couldn't make you happy, well, it could sure as hell give you the power to get back at everyone who ever pissed you off...on my path to being the next billionaire, to cut a long story short, I tried my hand as an Amway distributor, worked for a long time in sales, I sank a year's pay into a business idea that was doomed to failure, and generally made my own costly sacrifice to Greed...I may arguably be a better man because of my failure to realise those dreams, sorry, goals, but I sure didn't plan it that way ...Billy Mays left Pittsburgh and started hawking TV specials on the Atlantic City Boardwalks in his early 20s...if you've ever done any kind of cold selling, you know how hard a gig that is...

The past day or so I've been thinking a bit...about kids from hard-doer towns like Pittsburgh and Port Kembla and Newcastle Upon Tyne that bust their arse to make the most of the hand they're dealt, rather than sit on it and whine..Billy Mays had recently been filming a series called Pitch Men, a show I have seen advertised and for which I was torn between a bizarre compulsion to watch and a parallel need to stick matchsticks under my fingernails...this, from an interview just before he died:

"My hope and wish is that they get a peek into Billy Mays's life and they see that he's not just a guy who shouts," he said. "I'm not just a 'yell and sell.' I want the world to know that I'm a very generous guy. I'm a very humble guy. And I work hard."

I disliked his work with a passion. But I wish, for his sake, he'd got the chance to have his wish. RIP Billy Mays, you mad bugger. I'll take both harps and the steak knives, thanks.

The sound of one hand painting

2009-06-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've got a bit to get done around Chateau Quarterdane. The northern winter took me by surprise last year. I knew that painting outside was ill advised over a certain temperature, the paint starts to turn very gluggy at about 90f....I was not aware that you could not paint outside when it falls below 50f, or 10c. Several home projects that I would have enjoyed leisurely completing during the several months of Summer, Still Summer, Indian Summer and Cooler But Still Really Quite Pleasant Autumn in Australia were hacked down in their prime by an American winter that exceeded my expectations. To cut a long story short (never my forte - I am generally considered incapable of shouting "Fire!" without a 15 minute prologue), I got half the house painted last September....you can see the punchline coming, can't you?....see, the house was a rather unattractive shade of light blue, and even given the unlikely possibility that the colour was once attractive when it was fresh, it had become about as fresh as my breath on a Saturday morning...

I tried. No, really, I thought I had at least another month up my sleeve. There was no perceived need to rush this particular project toward the top of the mounting To-Do List.

By October, it was so cold that I couldn't look out of the window without putting on my red long johns....for 7 months, the temp did not get above 50.....for 4 of those 7 months, the garden was under snow......lovely, picturesque, iconic, don't get me wrong - my American friends actually threatened me with physical violence if I didn't shut up about "how cool is snow!!??!!".....I guess they've seen a bit more of it than I have.....the half of the outside of the house that I'd painted green looked great, but even I could not deny that the other half that was still a shabby faded blue just detracted from the whole effect I'd been aiming for, you know? Especially given that I'd started at the back of the house, and half of the front of the house was green and half was blue. The neighbours fucking love me.....

So. A new week, a new plan. I'm pumped, I'm, like, READY man, you know what I'm saying?!? Hoo-ah! Git R' Done! Yesterday we - my mate Pug and I - hooked in all day, threw several gallons of green paint at the front of the house, including the little known North Face, and called it good. Today was gutters and downpipes day. I was up and about at 5:30 and raring to get into it....my attitude has always been that when you ask a mate to give you a hand with a project around the house, you make sure you're out of bed, dressed and into it before they arrive, you work harder than everyone else, take shorter breaks and you don't call it quits until they look like they've had enough....maybe that's just me...a shower and two cups of strong coffee later, and I've emptied the dishwasher, done two loads of washing, and I'm twitching to get to the hardware store to purr chase a couple gallons of white satin exterior....I kill time by doing a grocery run, dropping into the Post Office to collect a parcel.......and it's still only 7:35, 25 minutes until the hardware store opens.....by 8:30, I'm home with the paint, seen Fred off to work, and I'm into it...Pug pulls up 15 minutes later, and the job's on....

Today was one of those days when you get it done and you're knackered but you look at what you've got done and it's all worth it. The house looks really good, better than it has in years. Working on the outside of your house is, well, there's not much like it....sunshine, fresh air, a cruisy 70f/20c, and mind numbing repetition....I had a few things on my mind this morning....I have no idea what they were, now, I can say that whatever it was doesn't seem anywhere near as important now as it did this morning.....hours on end of doing a pretty good impersonation of Daniel-san, up-down, paint the fence.....the hours and the cares melt away.....the 3rd beer has gone down well, and it really is time for a shower and an early-for-me night....tomorrow it's window frames and eaves.....world hunger? Iran? Too easy, I'll have a solution by teatime tomorrow...watch this space....

It's the little differences

2009-06-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

I am the only Australian American I know. I've lived here in the States, in an iconic blue collar neighbourhood in the Pacific North West, for over a year and a half now and I've only heard one other Australian accent, other than that of my two grown sons who have passed through on their way to and from. They tell me that my neighbourhood used to be a small country town, a separate identity all it's own. Nowadays, it's considered a suburb of the City that sits about a half hour drive away, the last outpost of a now seamless amalgam of urban sprawl. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with urban sprawl, I guess, people have to live somewhere and there's more and more of 'em as time goes by. You've probably noticed.

Some countries are completely different than you're used to from the word go...the food's different, the climate, the language, the physical appearance of the people, the fact that you get 500 of their currency to 1 of yours...you expect that when you go there, these are often precisely the reasons why you do go there. Besides being cheap. Moving from Australia to America, however, is like stepping through a portal into a parallel Universe. The big stuff is obvious. There are more pines and firs here and less eucalypts. The weather's the opposite way round. When it's night time here, it's summer there. You get the picture. These are the big things you know and expect before you get here, especially if you are among the select few of the world's population who watch American television. People drive on the other side of the road although, interestingly, that's the easy part - it's remembering which side of the car to walk to with the keys in your hand, that takes a while. The little things.

There is also much that is similar. Thanks to the wonder of cross-cultural exchange, the food is often identical. A Big Mac is the same in San Francisco as it is in Sydney, or Newcastle Upon Tyne for that matter. There is now at least one American googling Newcastle Upon Tyne to see if it's in Australia. Everyone can mimic an American accent, we've all grown up hearing them in songs, on TV and in the movies.

The area where I live now reminds me a lot of Wollongong (which is in Australia...), where I spent much of my adolescence. Stunning natural scenery, lots of trees and water, and a big factory right in the middle of it. The folks here are cut from a similar cloth, primarily denim and flannel. People live in houses, and mow their lawns on Saturday morning. They work at the mill, or drive trucks, and as a general rule they drink beer. Domestic. They're not prejudiced, but they know a lot of people who are. Overall, I like it. The rules are pretty easy to remember, life is reasonably simple and fairly routine, and airs and graces aren't well tolerated. To a large extent, what you see is what you get and 'the way we do things around here' isn't likely to change a lot anytime soon. Fit in or fuck off. I know those rules.

It's the little differences that throw ya. Supermarkets. It's not that American supermarkets have more variety per se, they just have a different kind of variety. They have cupholders in the trolleys. Stuff has different names. We all know that tomatoes are known as tomatoes here, and many know that capsicums are called bell peppers, and that petrol is gas. Although I'm not sure what they call gas here, I haven't needed to buy any yet. I'm thinking I'll just buy an empty cylinder one day, walk into a gas station and say "fill this up". Thongs are underwear, not footwear. Swedes are rutabagas, polony is baloney, firewood is bought by the cord, whipper snippers are weed whackers and they don't put beetroot on their hamburgers. Myabe that's because here, it's called 'sliced pickled beets'. That's a particularly big mouthful, pardon the pun, if you don't want any - "Gimme a burger, love, without the sliced pickled beets" When you order coffee, they ask if you want cream, even though I've only ever been given milk. The carton is labelled 'Milk', but there's no point ordering your coffee without milk, they don't have any, you have to have it without cream. In an event somewhat parallel with transfiguration, if you want the same white stuff that came out of the carton labelled 'Milk' for your cereal, rather than being cream as it was for your coffee, it is now, mercifully, milk again.

In Australia, there's a bunch of different brands of tomato sauce, more brands than you can poke a stick at. And, until very recently, there was only one brand of barbecue sauce, in a brown squeeze bottle with a yellow lid. I can never remember the brand name, but why would you? It's the only show in town. No-one eats it. In America, there's more brands of barbecue sauce than there is barbecues. Barbecue sauce with Guinness, with Jim Beam, with Jack Daniel's (several types), there's half an aisle devoted to the stuff. If I ate barbecue sauce at every meal, it would take until the end of my days to work my way through the entire selection. However, there are but two types of tomato ketchup - Heinz, and the generic Safeway brand, and they get about two square feet of shelf space. No matter, really, as best I can tell I'm the only person in Town that eats it. I get funny looks when I put it on burgers. Here, they have mayonnaise and mustard on their burgers. Yes, both of them. On a hamburger. You ever seen the Arnie movie, Total Recall? Remember that scene where the fat guy in glasses is trying to convince Arnie that 'all this is a dream, and what gives him away is that lone bead of sweat that runs down his temple, and that's when Arnie realises that he's not dreaming and the world really is turned on its ear? That's what it feels like to watch someone put mayonnaise and mustard on a hamburger.

It's not called tomato sauce here, either. Tomato sauce here comes in cans and it's used for cooking. It looks like something that's half-way between tomato paste and tomato soup. I have no idea why, nor what it's for. I have hitherto been unaware of a deficit in my culinary resources that could not be satisfied with either canned tomatoes themselves, or tomato paste. Or, at a pinch, tomato ketchup. That's it. No wonder meat pies aren't popular here. Whoever heard of putting barbecue sauce on a meat pie, I ask you?

On the rare ocassion I've found lamb here, it's been pushing $20 a kilo. In Australia, they give the stuff away. I buy lean beef here for $4.50 a kilo. Sausages in America cost more than lean steak. A parallel Universe, I tell ya. Pork is the other red meat here, and it's as cheap as steak. I'm told you can buy lamb in other parts of the country at lamb prices, but I haven't seen much of that yet. I think it might be an urban myth.

Eating out is a whole new experience. America is the only country that refers to the main courses as an entree. The first time I ate at a restaurant here, I checked out the entrees and thought Jesus, how big are the mains? It's a French word. It means entry. I've eaten at French Restaurants, in France. And an entree is a small meal to prepare one for the main course. They invented the word. Okay, they kinda invented the word. How and why America came to confuse the word 'entree' with a term appropriate for a 3lb lump of dead cow, swimming in mashed potatoes and gravy, is probably lost in the mists of time. The best explanation I've heard so far is that Americans are all about getting to the dessert, and the main meal is simply an entree to dessert. Not bad off the top of his head, but I'm not buying it. Americans get into trouble when they try and mess with other languages.

This is the only country I have ever visited - and this is a long way from my first rodeo - where people have routinely asked me if they have an accent to me. What the...? I was stunned the first time anyone asked me that. Um - so how else would I have picked that you're an American, I'm wondering? People remark on my Australian accent, often. A rare few try and mimic it. Here's a tip. If you are American, do not try and mimic an Australian accent. Or any other accent, for that matter. It is not a part of your individual or your national skill set. I don't care how much you liked Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin. Leave it out. You know how when someone foolishly remarks that they can speak a foreign language, there is almost always someone who wants them to "say something in Lithuanian". Again, America is the only country in the world where I've been asked to say something in my Australian accent. I believe I could make money standing on a street corner in the City, with a tin cup in front of me, reading the Yellow Pages. That might be my next travel-fund booster, I think.

Americans are extraordinarily polite, much to the surprise of just about anyone who visits here. When I first passed through, close on 20 years ago now, I expected everyone to be armed and paranoid. I guess they may well have been both, but I loved how polite and helpful everyone was. Ask someone for directions, and they all but put you in their car and drive you there. I've been called 'sir' more times in the past 18 months than I have in the previous 40-odd years living in Australia. Not surprising really, I guess, having spent most of my adult life wondering whether it's possible for an entire nation to be suffering Tourette's Syndrome. It's not that I want people to call me sir, it's just noticeably different than being called a bastard.

It surprises me how much it surprises Americans that I actually like it here, I think it's a good place to live. I'm told that it's not the country it used to be, the price of everything has gone to hell ('gas' hit an unbelievable $1 a litre last year - a little over half the price that the rest of the western world has been paying for years - and the nation almost ground to a halt) and that all their freedoms have been eroded. I tell them they need to get out more. Australians accepted Random Breath Testing without much more than a murmur. I've told my American mates about RBT, and most have recoiled in horror. More than one has made comparisons with Nazi Germany. It is, apparently, everyone's inalienable right (albeit illegal) to drive home tanked, as long as the lights are all working and you're driving within the speed limit and in a straight line. Pretty much everyone I talk to is aghast that the police could just pull your car over at random, even if you haven't been doing anything demonstrably wrong, solely for the purpose of checking to see if you've been drinking. They really do take this personal freedom stuff seriously here.

I love America. It's a strange place. The people look the same. They speak the same language (albeit with no accent), and live similar lives. It's the small differences. More to follow.

The Green Man and others...

2009-06-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

I don't recall ever hearing of the Green Man until the end of last year when I bought a namesake candle at our favourite 'woo-woo' store in Town....I read the label - death, rebirth, seasons, all that - and it nipped me.....I don't attribute magical qualities to candle burning as Fred, my quasi-wiccan wife, does, but I do find it useful for helping me hold a thought or belief or concept at the front of my brain while the candle's burning....

The latest quarter century has arrived for me, and even for an optimist it seems likely that life is now well and truly into the second half....yeeee haaa.....I'm more than mildly surprised that I've made 50 after all the things I've done to my body over the years....so it seemed fitting to use this anniversary as a watershed between the never-time-to-scratch-your-ass years from 25 to 50, and the more leisurely pace to which I'd like to become accustomed....AND the whole concept of the Green Man fits well with my hodge-podge of Buddhist, Taoist, Christian and Neo-Pagan beliefs, not to mention the tribal polytheistic religions of the tribal Aborigines I lived among for a couple of years....

A side consequence, or benefit depending on your viewpoint, of the last few years has been the opportunity to make a clean break from my Life So Far. It's not everyone who gets a clean slate, who has the chance to leave everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world in fact.....hard to believe that 5 years ago, I was depressed more often than not, too many square pegs in round holes....these days, I have a lot of people tell me how calm and relaxed I am, that nothing seems to get to me.....I could point them at a few people from my past who would assume they must be talking about a different person....selling up everything you own and stepping off into space isn't for everyone, but I'm confirming for myself that the more I trust the Universe/Big Giant Head, the more consistently It provides.....something always comes up....always...

Fred insists that I have the best acquisition karma she's ever seen, and over the last few years (and probably before, without my having eyes to see it at the time) every time something has come along to knock me over, there's been something at hand to set me back on the path....given my high levels of fat and alcohol consumption and the fact I smoke too much, it's hard to believe that I haven't had a sick day in years....someone or something is looking out for me, if only I could more consciously manifest what I can do for the Universe in reciprocation.....I imagine It will be in touch when It feels the need, although it's been somewhat busy with the Global Economic Crisis and an unseasonal run of civil unrest and armed conflict......I'll try and keep myself out of mischief in the meantime.....

Although I'm currently doing an impersonation of 'settled', I've still got my nomad on....I love America, always have, and living here is still an exotic adventure for me.....if you have been born and raised in the Village it's not really very exciting to be a minimum wage bartender there....but when you've left all that's familiar in the Bush to travel several times around the world and back, winding up working as a barman in a Village in the Pacific North West is pretty quirky, in my view....

But, now it's dice-rolling time again.....the bar job is behind me, getting the house and garden beaten into bloody submission in the next week or two is in front of me, as is a new riding season on the Harley....it's shaping up to be a good summer.....and another very interesting quarter century.....

Jack the nomad