22 Dreams

I just read an Augusten Burroughs short story. In it he depicts a childhood obsession with his heartbeat. He accounts for all the fears and dreads of the possibility of it stopping beating, and with that, an acute continuous awareness of its presence in his body as something vital yet seemingly fallible, ready to cease beating at any given moment. I couldn't believe I was reading this; I went through precisely the same thing when I was 8-9 years old. I remember nights when it was just me and dad. Mum was at work. It was all weird because we sat in front of the TV in that dank living room and dad never talked to me. All I could do was muster up a fast heart-beat and fill my eight year old mind with worries and neurosis that have taken a lifetime thus far to gently dissipate, waft away, like spots of crude oil drifting away atop the vast ocean. I could never talk about this stuff to anyone back then. I vividly recall worrying about my heart and making myself anxious about t...

I bought an i-Pod recently. I've discovered it to be a most useful toy. It's fun to be able to listen to music in the car shuffled, so that you hear songs out of context with each other. Somehow you tend to listen better to each song, hear it fresh and new, and not take it so much for granted as you do when you're listening to it as part of an album. Besides, you get to hear songs you haven't heard in ages, songs from albums that you don't usually think to bung into your stereo, and that can be delightful to the musical senses! On the flight home from Cairns, as I was gazing down 10,000 metres onto the Queensland hinterland, I had the headphones of my i-Pod firmly entrenched into my ears. Only I didn't shuffle the songs this time, instead I was moved to listen to the Beatles' Abbey Road . As all my close friends would testify I'm a beatlemaniac if ever there was one. The Beatles are in my blood, so much so that I don't really need to listen to...

Saturday, 27 June Life becomes complex as you merge into the wet tropical regions of the earth. Ecosystems become more elaborate within the soup of year-round heat and humidity. The fauna becomes even more plentiful. The fish, the birds, the butterflies become even more fantastically exotic and delightful to the human eye. I saw some lovely tropical fish off Green Island yesterday. There was this blue/purple fish that was just amazing, miraculous in its supernal sheen of striking blue. There were fish with stripes of colour combinations, some even resembling tigers. The beauty of these fish exuded a great innocence. I realised yet again in viewing these fishies that the earth is abundant with life and all of this life is true, is sacred, and that human endeavours are of no greater value, instead they have merely ruined the earth. Today I stepped out onto the Daintree Forest in tropical Far North Queensland. I say I stepped “onto” it because I didn’t really touch it, I floated ...

Tues, 30 June Early this afternoon, on my way back from Palm Cove on the northern beaches of Cairns, the bus drove past the rainforest sky-shuttle entry. I’d known of the sky shuttle, it’s one of the tourist things that people do here, but I wasn’t interested enough to partake in that. It’s just that next to the skyshuttle sign was an Aboriginal theme park sign, and lo and behold the bus drove on past the entry to this theme park as it turned back onto the highway and made its way south back to central Cairns. I was a little miffed by this. I hadn’t heard or read of this park at all. No-one had discussed this or offered it up as a possible tour option, although I hadn’t asked for it to be fair. I do wish I had heard about this park as it’s someplace I really would have wanted to go. I love hearing and reading of Aboriginal culture and it would have been great to participate in learning of Aboriginal life in this area of Australia pre-white settlement. I’d love there to be a boo...